[...]? my hypertext? a mouth full? --this specific type of stories are dangerously worlders, usually handed to the unquestioned mechanics of universalized taxonomy and 17th century rigs: encyclopedic homogeneous tables. they are the stuff of ajayeb]
(mispronounced by Ekaterina > captured by Hoda > found object by Sina)
stories that collect other stories:
1- archive ~--> sortability
2- translation ~--> linearity
==> universality (that both these stories claim)
(my work on hypertext apass ajayeb graph rigs, is to deal within these conditions of storying. my shift of interest)
...................................
(“dealing” @Luiza:)
(or in Lili's term “..a way to tackle issues”)
[with Avital]
*modalities of dealing-with:
-parasitism
-(under the spell) drugs =/= struggle (according to Marxian protocol: one is drugged and disabled [Date-rape-drug as an incapacitating agent] and neutralized by state apparatus, drugs are administrated and spend in all sorts of insidious ways.)
on the discourse of stupidity: Marx (in writing to Engels says that he) believed that proletariat are stupid. Marx's insight to replace the other drugs that have put so many into a stupor. people with Religion are not around, they are praying somewhere to some hallucination [this is Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, and others in 20th century] --> ideological stuporous drugs, ‘everyone is stoned on something’ =/= alert and lucid. [highly problematic!]
-this is about a body recognizing its ‘enemy’ (the figure of enemy for every and each of us and the way we “recognize” it, as historical bodies and minds inheriting the boys of 20th century.) ---- the state of the struggle depends on certain metaphorologies on ‘clean’ that are problematic and phantasmatic and on the loose. --> [the issue is that there is no “clean body”.] how to do dirty work? (--> for ‘morality’ and ‘clean’ go to Freud on the origin on morality: morality began as we stopped sniffing our asses and stood erect, nose in the air, away from the dirt [that we are] --> morality's phobic appropriations and designations, [Lacan: from the genital order to the sublime; az kun be fayakon از کون به فیکون %--> #ouroboros #serpent], [so when we stood up, stood erect, our genitals became center, exposing ourselves to the other, sexually centered exposure], [], [],)
-Marxian: language/tool/art as a virus that infiltrates ideological structures
-Lacoue-Labarthe: in 20th century there are three fundamental modalities of “dealing-with,” three modes of relatedness to our concerns, our anxieties, our worries, our work, our projects [three major motifs for the thinkers that continue to provoke our thoughts]: (1) *struggle* that would be the Marxian motor, the modality in terms of concern for social justice. [Delanda on Marx --> a model of synthesis: a conflict of opposites] (2) *mission* as introduced and lun[...]
(1)[...notes/midday review.txt]%4.3[...]ng (not writing down)
writing is an experience of metamorphic transformation
to discover how to be compromised by ajayeb Nameh
the ways we can be lured into desiring and trusting it
how the assemblages of ajayeb generate metamorphic transformations in our capacity to affect and be affected? --> to feel, think, and imagine
...................................
[Serres]
ajayeb, a time when transport and itinerary were only myth
...................................
[Anand]
the sanctity and blessing of Muslim saints was integrally linked to local ecology and topography
that sanctification of birds and stones alerts us to an Indic and Islamic vision of humans in which we are not separated from and hierarchically superior to nature. Rather, the boundaries that separate stones, animals, humans and gods are porous as well as being non-hierarchical--making possible a “lateral” moral aspiration, where birds and stones can be moral exemplars for humans.
The interlinked sacrality of both ecology and cosmology, of ‘kudrat’ (~ power of nature?) is common to both Hindus and Muslims. ‘Kudrat’ is thus the cosmological aspect of north India's Invisible Religion.
There is a long Islamic tradition of seeing Nature as full of the signs (ayat آیات) of the work and presence of God. The Qur'anic verse “Withersoever you turn, there is the Face of God ( Qur'an 2: 115)” has traditionally been interpreted by the Sufis as meaning that the “order of nature is nothing but the Divine Reality manifesting itself on the plane of phenomenal existence (Nasr 1996, 62).”
description of the garden ---- [accounts of the heaven are filled with descriptions of springs and wells, tanks and streams, gardens and trees and flowers] --> recreating of heaven on earth was tight with natural and animal life forms
where a text or these texts (ajayeb's text and world) is *acclaimed*? today and before, by who? Indo-Pakistan sub-continent? South-Asia? Indo-Iranian regions?
***([who were the] agents through which ‘natural’ responses [to its impulses] are said to operate[?])
the hierarchy of created things [...]
apex in the righteous man, reaches down into the abyss of the inanimate by many gradations (Benjamin 1969b, 104)
“undiminished contact with the creatural, even with its petrified, inanimate, lowliest stratum, that of the stone… (Hannsen 2000, 150)”. The righteous man's justice consists of his attentiveness to nature, of his giving a hearing to all created things, of understanding the language of even of inert, petrified stones. But the righteous man, in Benjamin's imagination, remains a man. What would he make of Patthar Baba, the stone turned to saint? (Anand)
(our sense of) our own ecological peril and fragility--our shared fate with ou[...]
(2)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%16.1[...]pecific: making dichotomies, making similarities, making diferences, stc.]
•how far your research can host an encounter with alterity? and how this encounter can help you undo your prommises of communication, positionality, and conceptual buildings? weave new worldling entanglements with the problem--not to solve it, but stay with it. dissolve essential differences between dichitomies such as: knowledge and expression (or ‘knowledge’ and the ‘communication of knowledge’), experimental and ethical, joke and seriousness, interiority and exteriority, mysterious and clear, uncovering and veiling. produce creative impossibilities that do not resolve to bionary answers easily, that unstable possitionality for good, that open for forms of consiounesses to experience thoughts which differ from itself. to think and entertain both particularities and generalities (of logic, ethics, politics, aesthetics, etc.) encounter can be both infinitly singular and general. that is a form of suggestive work that can deal with the specific as well. (think about ‘chicken’ as an anstract idea in our semiotic world and as an individual being in our material world)
•using the notion of delinking (reminded by Juan) with my research on the Book of Wonders. going from parable-thinking --to--> religious-thinking --to--> poststructuralist-thinking --to--> poetic-thinking --to--> riddle-thinking --to--> biological-thinking --to--> deconstructionist-thinking --to--> ...
•this other universe is always at the beyond--the other cosmos is a lure (?)
•all cages have wheels
•boat, as an image for both construction and destruction
•i don't need to be alone in destroying the boat
•how to move the boat =/= destination
possible workshops for Einat's project:
•moonwalk dance
•database programing --> how to live well with databases, not waging a quixotic war on database designers. we must learn how to read and understand database early in elementary school. databases are fundamental parts of our political social ethical cultural processes...
•regular expression --> how computer programming reads and patterns text
•text-based internet --> cyberfeminism
•intervention in the digital hegemonies (digital ==> cultural ==> material) (changes to the built digital environments, possiblities of reconfiguration --> production of space, articulations about ‘us’)
•what does it mean to look at a code? (a critical introduction to computer programming for artists)
•How to implement a programming language in (JavaScript?)--parsing, regexps, (http://lisperator.net/)
•teaching German with Holderlin's “Andenken” poem
•to create a *feast* (to celebrate is to become free of the habitual, becoming inhabitual. celebration is the tensional coming together of the unlikes --> through which human beings and gods could meet and greet. The festiveness that the c[...]
(3)[...notes/midday review.txt]%1.2[...] --> the “inanimate affections” (that give us pleasure in life) --> we often give each other soft gifts as a way to care for one another (@Janina)
*radical affection does not require intentional politics* (Chen)
[Shepard 2004] Stanner (W. E. H. Stanner, White Man Got No Dreaming) describes how the universe became a moral system and consists of three elements: marvels, species diversity, and institutions. Marvels refer to that presence of the unexpected that one always encounters sooner or later in nature, particularly when the terrain reflects something about the mind that implies a common structure. His second element, species diversity, coincides with one of the major moral issues of our time--the extinction of species and reduction of biodiversity.
-“marvels of affinity” is the key to reality, revealing how things are, what is known, and how to behave.
cosmogony (keyhan-zayi کیهان زایی)--how the universe became a moral system
...................................
[modes of existence]
science studies --> science
what was science before science studies? it was engaged in a sort of stupefaction that prevented meaningful study.
we do not take the fight against X (religion, fetish, etc.) for the truth about X.
...................................
[Avital]
i am adding “mama's boy” (bache-nane بچه ننه) to my short bio (nothing is added by “me,” everything is told to me.)
thanks to all the people who have given me their ‘sides’ (didn't necessorily confronted me)
(book, ketabat کتابت)
to do something to resignify and breakup the serenity and the serene closure of the book, as the universiy values it and seals it
-what deals does it seal?
-the commitment to breaking up the book and its metaphysically laden pitch for closural sovereignty.
-linguistic pollutants<br />
-dirty talks
#as a mode of writing, make a folding (fractal) book, style of children books, for ajayeb
(what would this structure mean? and how is that expandable?)
#making a cheap horror short-film from one of the ajayebs
#write a X-man short story in Tehran context with iranian everyday characters
•jurassic park --> ajayeb al makhlughat عجایب المخلوقات (horror, sublime, shivering water)
•nonapocalyptic stories and the otherworldly hauntingly familiar in the lost faces of forest (called Tehran?)
(accourding to Egyptian 1550 BCE,) book: a loose collection of magic spells intended to assist a dead person's journey through underworld, and into the afterlife and written by many priests
-are lists the origin of writing? (...way before the installation of the modern scriptural apparatus)
theory-minded academics have rigorously repudiated----or forgott[...]
(4)[...notes/midday review.txt]%2.2[...]egation (of the other)
“nothing resembles the virtue as a great crime.”
(Blanchot > Sade)
Blanchot's interpretation of the Terror + French Revolution (<== Hegel)
revolution --> freedom (formerly situated in a divine sphere) operates from a purely immanent perspective
the idea of efficacy of the freedom --> destroys what is given radically --✕--> old regimes
--(understood absolutely)--> Saint-Just and Robespierre demanded that the new French citizens lived out their pure freedom in a radical way
break free from:
•(highly personal) pleasures
•(highly personal) affairs
•
Blanchot + Sade --> *one cannot use one's freedom to establish a new political order*
freedom not contaminated by a particular creation --> Reign of Terror = (a horrible state of) “between” the overthrow of the old & the establishment of the new regime
(~~> contemporary Iran's political state's endless resistance)
•endless resistance =/= enduring constitution (~= institution)
•negation =/= affirmation
Sade's three different forms of inconvenience:
1. cruel tableaux vivants --> emotional inconvenience
2. contradictory unreasonableness (for example “religion should be abolished ==> a republican man to be a good husband and father” + “family should be destroyed, all women belong to all men”) --> intellectual inconvenience
3. (grotesque goal of) Sade aims at describing the whole of reality (seeking to say the last word about reality, *to say everything*) --Blanchot--> *the fury of writing* or *the revolt of writing* (Sade = abundant prolific excessive writer, *writing in an exuberant way* [while in prison for 32 years]) --> anesthetic inconvenience
Blanchot's Sade = ideal writer
•we should not understand Sade's oeuvre in an intellectual way (there is no message or insight)
◦disappearance of meaning in the materiality of language -->{death of content ==Saussure==> ‘the signifier'}--> reading Sade = accessing the rough meaningless materiality of language itself
•we should not understood Sade's content as a reflection of an authentic self (un moi profond) --> Sade as a person disappears into the background
◦we should not understood his writing as an instrument he uses to express content --> ‘language = an independent reality’ (=/= Sade as a master of language)
(Hegel and) Sartre --> literary works must be engaged and should express the author's involvement with reality
(for Sartre:) writer: someone who thinks about the
current course of the world and who wants to change the world with his literature
--> “language = a loaded gun” (literature should be understood by reference to the message)
=/= Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jean Ricardou, Eugène Ionesco
=/= Sade > Blanchot: writing need to bring the reader in touchwith the materi[...]
(5)[...notes/midday review.txt]%2.9[...]an calmly observe, examine and explore together.
-to be lucid about your own part taking in narcissistic economy
*mimesis*: those things we are still stuck in in very covert and unavowed ways ~-> ‘destiny’ (a term i use when i mean mimesis for us [-a disease that shows symptoms characteristic of another disease])
(i am not pessimistic at all) i have just a catastrophic intuition that informs my grammar =/= mimetic hell
...................................
*complaint (blocks ‘becoming’?)
-so if i am used to complaint in all sorts and forms and shapes, what do i do if not complaining? that means i need to start learning new techniques of being in the world.
-complain, forms of protest, grievance, <--(contamination)--> lament (sug سوگ, zaje ضجه)
-dispositions of Beschwerde
-which minorities are associated with bitching and moaning? (naleh va shekayat ناله و شکایت, ghor غرولند, غر) (a feminine accent?!)
-it is often said that “children should stop complaining”
“stop complaining” ?!! [~~> pointed to or relevant for Lili also]
***complaint : the disenfranchised (az hagh mahrum shodeh از حق محروم شده) language of muted rage***
what is (let's) bitching together?
is religion one long complaint? (--'reformation’ as a cover-up)
the “i prefer,” non-need, non-preference
*forms of relatedness--in certain societies the opening self of sociality consists in complaining. (starter-utterances; social encounter involves nagging about your friends, parents, lovers, etc.) --making friends is via complaining. (this is about the conditions of Mitsein, being-with) {non-affirmation ~/=? complaint; we mistake so easily non-affirmation with complaining. (is this Lili's take? her complaints about the insufficiencies of being.)} --> is complaint parasitized by calls for retribution?
Klage (complaint) --to--> Anklage (accusation)
*complaint remains a repetitive fixation that feeds rather than exhausting its course (/Avital, aw9Cv_wQ4CQ) -- it does not finish itself off, or move up the ladder of transformation [important for Sana], actually increases pain --> so, (according to the analyst:) complain is jacking up one's suffering (the Analytiker can't take it anymore)
Avital > Kittler: the Ach of Sprache, (in our historical language usage:) literature or language as complaint. sigh in literature (also pointed out by Lili)
--the modern techo-monster Faust opens with the complain
**what is then a proper address?
...the wish for more
-do machines complaint or lament?
@Luiza; (one of sub-phenomenon of utterance) *blush* registers a complaint(?)
(--> to be noted that certain white skin-colors considered racistly “capable” of displaying moral anxiety.)
-a level of affect and meaning that remains at the loss of words, between shame and excitement, confession and disavow[...]
(6)[...notes/midday review.txt]%4.5[...]h it
...when the world and the instrument interact
descriptions of the affordances of indissoluble instrument / world complexes are at stake
then how can we think magic/knowledge/science without instrumentalization (‘something in order to’)?
the notion of ‘world’ and ‘worlding’ in other Hollywood sci-fi franchises, and the way a world (for example survival in Mars in ‘The Martian,’ surviving “outer space” in ‘Gravity,’ “pure wonder” and “abyssal unknown” in many Icarusian space exploration moves and movies, the deprived Earth in ‘Interstellar,’ and so on) is rendered dead or dangerous or prosperous, ideologies of anthropocentric extensionalism.
(this directly concerns my ajayeb apass research about the past, because hollywood constantly making science fictions about the past.)
[as much as Matt Damon is schizo-constructing a social environment (on “dead” Mars trying to contact “home”), Cinderella's schizo-affective relation with the talking animals is doing the same: talking back to a world that talks to her, where Matt is only able to talk to home station. I think we have better chances with Cinderella's kind of split personality.]
Modernity --> “Project of Enlightenment” : religion =/= metaphysics --> science + morality + art --> objective science + universal morality + law ----{each with its own “inner logic"}
(Luhmann; transition to modern:) stratified and hierarchical organization --to--> “functionally differentiated” organization
(project of modernity requires) a universally assumed but nowhere concretely localizable lifeworld*** (=/=? situated knowledges)
modern person : the self-fulfilling and self-justifying observing subject
...................................
(Freud's) ego: the record of abandoned object cathexes
(cathexes ~= electrical charge; the libidinal energy invested in some idea or person or object)<br />
...................................
(15.02.2017) three objects from apass:
-complaint
-evidence
-monologue
...................................
on futurity; in SF capital (Mark Fisher) the information (somewhere between cybernetic futurism and “New Economy”) is a direct generator of economic value ==> ‘the information about the future’ circulates as as increasingly important commodity* (Eshun)
SF: engineering feedback between its preferred future and its becoming present --✕--> future --> manufacturing tools capable of intervention (=/=? disruption; the Sun Ra, character in the movie The Place is The Space, disrupts when he enters the youth club.)
@Ale --her--> predatory features/futures : (a space for researching[?] dimensions of) anticipatory designs, projects of emulation, manipulation, parasitism, interpellation into a bright corporate tomorrow <== faces smiling at screens (-->? a bitter joke)[...]
(7)[...notes/midday review.txt]%5.1[...] />
(inheriting something =/=? being heir to something)
the scientist inside me begs me to narrow my temporal scale, choose an epoch, let's say middle ages, choose a century let's say 15th, choose a year, choose a day, a moment, a micro-second slice of the cake of the milieu that you are interested in, the instance in the bazar with Halaj in the sun and so on.
(my old school) obligatory knowledge <-- salon of scietific entertainment
}-> (is about creating) proper witness***
the tropes i am building in my current research, do they help build a better Iran? and how?
interms of:
•an ongoingness
•a commitment to a recent future thinking
‘homo-’: stuff of the soil, that figures of bright and sunny image of the same
#rigs and syms*
•games
•technological designs
•plots
•mechanisms
•sfs
•jokes
•jests
•
[title]
>
critical bestiaries
critique-bestiary
belonging = achievement (dastavard دستاورد) + violence (khoshunat خشونت)
...the ways we renounce the world through the use of the word “real” and “really”
(Stengers:) weaving: not secular nor religious, not traditional nor modern, is sensuous
#[nodes and notes]
the emptyland, terrestrial life, ‘per-’ instead of ‘her’ or ‘his’
-the way i started with Haraway was through the way i read her notion of ‘critter,’ juju (جوجو) in Farsi, jako junevar (جک جونور), little life animators often easy and ok to kill, a term in farsi for kids that worlds for them in particular ways
bio (“qualified life”) =/= zoe, juju, “bare life” (Agamben): that which is killable --?!--> that which must be transformed
[stories of originary exclusion and composition of body]
...................................
the form and funnd function are having too tight fit. no no no!
(cities) being inclusive but not integrative
(setar different technique of vibrato and measure for instance in Saba and Ghavami, which part of the finger or body, one works in certain way for one and not for the other musician --> the explicit unpacking of the activity : what was formerly tacit [zemni, khamush, =/= habit] becomes dredged into explicit [=/= expressive] consciousness, precisely because there is a resistance, that there is something not right for the musician ==> reconsidering, reexploring --> the technique then again disappears into the tacit realm --> technique becomes variegated)
**tacit --> explicit (~= that which becomes available for reconsideration)**
when one masters a skill it is about being equipped to address a whole new set of problems
{expertise/mastery: problem solving}=/={craft: problem finding}--> when other things become problematic---the condition (in the [...]
(8)[...notes/midday review.txt]%6[...]r />
objects, the author of emotions
(how) emotions align subjects
_“surfacing” of individual_
(Ahmed suggests that) emotions are not simply “within” nor “without” but that they create the very effect of the surfaces or boundaries of bodies and worlds.
narrative = production of the ordinary
•(which crimes against persons become crimes against place? -‘us’-)
•“body of the nation”
•scene of “our injury” (--> also in Iran: “our” historical injury)
•(the fucking) right to defense --> ‘home’ itself becomes to be mobilized as a defense against terror, becomes transformed into the symbolic space of the nation #[example of when the approach (to/by objects) itself becomes a fetish object*] --> “staying at home”: a form of mobilization [---> go to three little pigs] ---- “the constitution of open cultures involves the projection of what is closed onto others, and hence the concealment of what is closed and contained ‘at home’” (Ahmed ♥) {ouvrir le fermé, fermé le ouvert}
•alert citizens, amre be ma'ruf va nahye az monkar امر به معروف و نهی از منک --> meta-ontology of tosiye توصیه
•suspicious others
•saving women from religious fundamentalism
•negativity of latent (could-be-ness ==> opens up the power to detain, police pishgiri پلیس پیشگیری)
origins of bad feeling
threat to violate the pure bodies [vulnerable and damaged bodies of the white woman and child]
*affect is economic* --> it circulates between signifiers in relationships of difference and displacement --> they align subjects --> effect of collective --> (in Ahemd's economical model of emotions) they work to bind subjects together : the nonresidence of emotions is what makes them “binding” --> her notion of economy =/= {inside/outside model --> positive residence of emotions: “I have an emotion” or “something makes me feel a certain way"}--> “fear does not come from within the subject, nor does it reside in its object”
-([@Hoda's take on witness] alignment of the individual with the collective:) the accumulation of affective value shapes the surfaces of bodies and worlds; affect generates the surfaces of collective bodies (<==allows== not to locate affect in a subject or object) ~~--> [to initiate with Hoda an examination of the) *mobility of bodies of subjects* (in the West or her regions =/= question of the mediatization of her emotional experiences}
*emotions ‘involve’ subjects and objects*
what constructs emotions as positive or negative residence?
[*]psychoanalysis: a theory of the subject as lacking positive residence
(this ‘lack’ is commonly articulated as the “unconscious”: in Freudian terms, where an affective impulse is perceived but misconstructed, and which becomes attached to another idea. [can i s[...]
(9)[...notes/midday review.txt]%6.5[...] 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 schemas of text and the trace, Malabou on plasticity [=/= elasticity] (change of the paradigm of writing as deve[...]
(10)[...notes/midday review.txt]%7.7[...]tructure of your cells, you don't know where it comes from:) “root sense that the world is not dead” --> a sense that things are moving and alive and future-full
•its people who feel despair (...emphasize the futurelessness of it all)
*!!!--> we (also) need sensibilities that are angrey at each other
(aligned with Haraway) my position has been that: we don't choose our sensibilities, we wake up and figure out what they are
(Haraway take on the ways we) may enginner as a species now (tech, syntax, etc.)
to refuse the story of the apocalypse + (still) recognizing the depth of the trouble
--> Freud's thanatos غريزه مرگ, a death instinct, (it is a deep, instinctual lure:) *a perverse pleasure in believing in inevitable failure*
*transference is descriptively very apt for what goes on in artistic moves [<-- to be careful of]
**to risk a feeling of (despair, of...)
the ways some of us risk things intellectually and emotionally different than each other
prima donna: doing whatever one does without any particular effort to nuance anything
*multiple impossibilities
learning from religion, the ways of which the name of God has become an impossible category. both catholics and muslim shia (#islam) are wellprepared for feeling this way, some kind of recognition of impossible thing. let's take that “being good at recognizing and affirming impossible things” and bring it to the name of women. that means as soon as you name what you mean by ‘women,’ you have told some kind of really impossible lie.
(how my muslim trained sensibilities are working and mattering in my ajayeb research? ways to respond to *the deadliness and the irreplaceable liveliness of religion* [کشندگی و سرزندگی یکتای مذهب], a semiotics with implosion of sign and flesh)--> (i am so happy that) i cannot not know what it is like to be in a believing community (a faith-based community)***
...out of your own particular little historical traditions
*because my research is about ajayeb it can never only be about ajayeb*
you can't do feminist theory without paying attention to the details of women lives
your mode of attention to women in the world ==(shapes)==> your mode of attention to:
•the way databases get set up
•the ways interdisciplinarities get crafted
•how you think about tools and genomics
my main point of my project has been about getting better at how to inherit your histories without trashing them*** (even figuring out how to inherit a history that you don't want to inherit)
(Islam, shyness, kindness, ajayeb, Iran, stuttering, being all too ready to find complexities, )
•to become relaxed about predigested version of ‘[...]
(11)[...notes/midday review.txt]%8.4[...]r />
to refuse the story of the apocalypse + (still) recognizing the depth of the trouble
--> Freud's thanatos غريزه مرگ, a death instinct, (it is a deep, instinctual lure:) *a perverse pleasure in believing in inevitable failure*
*transference is descriptively very apt for what goes on in artistic moves [<-- to be careful of]
**to risk a feeling of (despair, of...)
the ways some of us risk things intellectually and emotionally different than each other
prima donna: doing whatever one does without any particular effort to nuance anything
*multiple impossibilities
learning from religion, the ways of which the name of God has become an impossible category. both catholics and muslim shia (#islam) are wellprepared for feeling this way, some kind of recognition of impossible thing. let's take that “being good at recognizing and affirming impossible things” and bring it to the name of women. that means as soon as you name what you mean by ‘women,’ you have told some kind of really impossible lie.
(how my muslim trained sensibilities are working and mattering in my ajayeb research? ways to respond to *the deadliness and the irreplaceable liveliness of religion* [کشندگی و سرزندگی یکتای مذهب], a semiotics with implosion of sign and flesh)--> (i am so happy that) i cannot not know what it is like to be in a believing community (a faith-based community)***
...out of your own particular little historical traditions
*because my research is about ajayeb it can never only be about ajayeb*
you can't do feminist theory without paying attention to the details of women lives
your mode of attention to women in the world ==(shapes)==> your mode of attention to:
•the way databases get set up
•the ways interdisciplinarities get crafted
•how you think about tools and genomics
my main point of my project has been about getting better at how to inherit your histories without trashing them*** (even figuring out how to inherit a history that you don't want to inherit)
(Islam, shyness, kindness, ajayeb, Iran, stuttering, being all too ready to find complexities, )
•to become relaxed about predigested version of ‘this is what ajayeb is about’ (or Tasavof, etc.) --> ‘what is going on there’ (in ajayeb) is so built-in to ideologies of many kinds (of progress, deep ecology, of history, and so on)
•to build a little taxonomy (in apass)
•working to give up the series of self-certainties around secularism ==> giving ways to talk to the religious ones : getting to grasp what the world looks like in faith-based communities (=/= check-list of dogma)
•category thinking: get into differential liveliness (with all sorts of inequalities:) *who gets parsed how* [#archive, #artic[...]
(12)[...notes/midday review.txt]%8.4[...]t is like to be in a believing community (a faith-based community)***
...out of your own particular little historical traditions
*because my research is about ajayeb it can never only be about ajayeb*
you can't do feminist theory without paying attention to the details of women lives
your mode of attention to women in the world ==(shapes)==> your mode of attention to:
•the way databases get set up
•the ways interdisciplinarities get crafted
•how you think about tools and genomics
my main point of my project has been about getting better at how to inherit your histories without trashing them*** (even figuring out how to inherit a history that you don't want to inherit)
(Islam, shyness, kindness, ajayeb, Iran, stuttering, being all too ready to find complexities, )
•to become relaxed about predigested version of ‘this is what ajayeb is about’ (or Tasavof, etc.) --> ‘what is going on there’ (in ajayeb) is so built-in to ideologies of many kinds (of progress, deep ecology, of history, and so on)
•to build a little taxonomy (in apass)
•working to give up the series of self-certainties around secularism ==> giving ways to talk to the religious ones : getting to grasp what the world looks like in faith-based communities (=/= check-list of dogma)
•category thinking: get into differential liveliness (with all sorts of inequalities:) *who gets parsed how* [#archive, #articulation, #storytelling] (and thinking about what it means to take up these relationships in cultures saturated with science and technology)
Xiri was doing her research with categories of victim and opressor, and now they suddenly disappeared from her work. that category change or vocabulary change was suspiciously effortless
*remembering is an extremely creative practice (-note to Hoda-)
memories are like ecotone کناربوم (transition area between two adjacent ecosystems)
#(very important concept partly shaped by practices of Darwin into our lives:) “collect” --> lies (necessary?)
the frenzy of the 1700 of surveying nature and collecting speciment ==> bioinfomatic
‘collect’ promises nontransformation
--> metaphors of archive, information-intense ways of thinking about life on earth
*“demonstration” coined by science
...................................
(with Scout Calvert) the ways the digital apparatuses are working, and the kinds of tensions and creativities between the cyber infrastructures and the other kinds informational management discourses displace other book discourses *** --> categories explode in library practice
[Calvert donig brilliant discourse analysis of library sciences --> has direct impact on practices of reading#, different kinds of knowers]
techno-biblio-capital: techno-capital and [...]
(13)[...notes/midday review.txt]%8.5[...](particular exceptional individual) can change it all
...................................
(from being an artist to artist researcher)
to articulate and demonstrate with brilliance ‘what you know’ --to--> to be able to exquisitely explain ‘how you know what you know’ [--?--> *metacognition: thinking about one's own thinking = reflection (thinking about
what we know) + self-regulation (managing how we go about learning)]
-metacognitives kills: to get good at recognizing flaws or gaps in one's own thinking + articulate thought processes + revise efforts
*classroom = mirror* (process of stepping back to see what you are doing)
(useful for artists) sciences of understanding:
•anthropology
•psychology
my whole work is about two things now:
•to think cumulatively (=/= epistemic breaks) --> more you know more your are interested in
•to think by layering (=/= singleness of partisan meaning) --> what you do is based on previous work
my research in storytelling:(from premodern) *describe the world* [bestiaries] --to--> (modern necessity to) *calculate the world* [recognizing a calculated world --how--> *secularization of interest* (in monsters, religious iconography, etc.)
adventure time tv series
educational model for children how to become post industrial liberal subjects --> adventure of imperialist mentality
the choreography of flexibility and solidity
Finn is the body from nowhere by example, he goes to dimensions of fire, ice, dream, etc. and his ontology of knowledge and identity remains intact (he grows up like a good old cowboy) =/= you look at the land from the ice and you don't see the same reality if you look at it from the fire realm. ice/gas/water, you are always looking at it from somewhere. Harraway named it “situated knowledges”. and it seems these locations are not free floating and not available for everyone. some are more attached or stucked to particular positions, some less, they are “marked” as Harraway put it.
anti-knowledge disposition of sex-education tv seriese
verybody is self-educating in the story
all positivity is created by ‘bravery,’ not their ‘knowledge’
nobody knows anything or can know anythingbravery has replaced faith ()
•Otis's knowledge: psychology is debunked
•Maeve's knowledge: existentialism is irrelevant
if in art we have affinities with unknowing and we are comfortable with misunderstanding and partial comprehensions --then--> let's use that to direct our readerly activities to texts that are difficult and different to us --> this is why I don't accept it when artists in research environment withdraw from reading certain positions by saying “this text is too academic.”
what is the state of art after Goy[...]
(14)[...notes/midday review.txt]%12.4[...] conceptual systems, and that we can therefore engage in meta-theorizing based on that knowledge
Delanda: I am not convinced that avoiding dualities is the key to a new way of thinking (particularly if one simply adds new ones: modernism-postmodernism, rhizome-tree, power-resistance).
reified generalities that do not really exist: The Market, The State, and The People.
The duality emerges when one ignores the zone of overlap and reifies the averages.
...................................
[in ajayebnameh عجایب نامه...] to map the morphogenetic changes of the real
... bewildering heterogeneity of registers in ajayebnameh عجایب نامه
... treating entities trafficking in the futures
active capacities of description
this is not a project of repopulating the social sciences with nonhuman beings
the symbolic function of language is about detecting salient features of the world that can be organized in contrastive sets
(can we think not in contrasts?)
this is not about trying to think like X, that would be transposition of a relational experience at another scale
(non-religious semiotic model)
bodily disposition ==(produces)==> perspective ==(produces)==> self
the beings in ajayeb (عجایب) are ‘alive’ because of their ability to ‘do things’ in the ways they come to represent and interpret through me
recruiting scores of new actants so as to render the theater of worldly interactions more complex and interesting
what is the sociocultural world we construct?
dream images, vivid mythical scenes,
form travels/passes through us
...................................
[Latour modes of existence]
(to distinguish types of)
incompatible truths
“truth"--is the expression of an encounter with forms of existence
to understand the others in the absence of a description of ourselves
(what is realistic?)
to direct attention towards the beings about which humans are interrogating themselves
عجایب ajayeb is a ‘network’ more than anything else, in it “God” has no special privilege, is not located in addition to or beyond other beings
we are seeking to redefine the paths of beings that are unique to ajayeb without giving them substance and without jumping immediately into transcendence. (using Latour words) [transcendence is never gradual, in the places i come from, it is always a shock, happening, a truth-event]
-each word (God, Angle, Jinn جن, fog, etc.) brought into its own network,
-what are contrasts and of category mistakes particular to each
-and their crossings----and what is the voca[...]
(15)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%13.1[...]cal scenes,
form travels/passes through us
...................................
[Latour modes of existence]
(to distinguish types of)
incompatible truths
“truth"--is the expression of an encounter with forms of existence
to understand the others in the absence of a description of ourselves
(what is realistic?)
to direct attention towards the beings about which humans are interrogating themselves
عجایب ajayeb is a ‘network’ more than anything else, in it “God” has no special privilege, is not located in addition to or beyond other beings
we are seeking to redefine the paths of beings that are unique to ajayeb without giving them substance and without jumping immediately into transcendence. (using Latour words) [transcendence is never gradual, in the places i come from, it is always a shock, happening, a truth-event]
-each word (God, Angle, Jinn جن, fog, etc.) brought into its own network,
-what are contrasts and of category mistakes particular to each
-and their crossings----and what is the vocabulary specific to each crossing
the network of associations necessary for the exercise of religion without bracketing off its ontological requirements.
explanatory rage (tavahoshe roshangari توحش روشنگری) --✕--> networks necessary for religious meaning
(the aim is) deploying the network (of ajayeb)
it is about grasping ajayeb's beings not as substances but as *trajectories*--and give them a more precise *direction.*
what is important in working these modes what kinds of possibilities are “afforded” to the investigator, myself. what kind of actor am i?
(specifications of the type of beings that the mode leaves in its wake)
**other beings necessary for its existence**
(my personal/public question, what other beings are necessary for my existence? and therefore for your existence as well.) ----> the heterogeneity of the actors needed for the pursuit of any course of action
*metamorphosis (a mode of existence first detected in psychogenesis?) what we encounter whenever we address the manner in which existents are transformed or transform in order to subsist (zist زیست)
-defined by a certain kind of continuity and obtained by a certain type of discontinuity
-metamorphosis is about crisis, possession, alienation,
-metamorphosis sharply contrasts *cure* (~= ritual)
-allowing for installing unconscious (states,) crush, posses, bewitch, kill,
-beings with specific properties that are invisible, changeable, powerful, favorable, unfavorable
-exploration of transformations
-cosmological specialties
-seniority and extension of metamorphosical beings (of elaborations carried out by all groups in m[...]
(16)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%13.2[...]/>
“europe" = the modernist great narrative --or--> produce an alternative great narrative of what european cultures (and natures) have been
}--✕--> *contrasting *traits* (that have been elaborated in the course of european history)
“here is my *treasure*, here is my *heart*, if you deprive us of one of these contrasts, we are no longer humans”
to be sensitive to different original origins (=/= eurocentrism)
[different origins that speak also truthfully]
(Olearius drama:) dramatic encounter between the (early) anthropologist's gaze and the various cultures (and natures) he have discovered
...painful 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 technolo[...]
(18)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%13.6[...]d 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)
science ~/= concrete, worldly, matter-of-fact, present-at-hand, domain of knowledge (<-- political activism has to work with that kind of knowledge)
what use is it to save your soul, if you forfeit the world? --> sci-fi's real frontier & Noah's project
the transcendence and transubstantiation of science
when nature enters, religion has to leave. in two equally fatal exit strategies:
•to limit itself to the inner sanctum of the soul
•to flee into the supernatural --> that religion will try in vain to imitate scientific instruments (<-- The Magicians TV series) + misinterpreted science [==> taking Bible as if it were geology book (<-- look at the rising Hollywood films that scientifize th[...]
(19)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%13.6[...]or 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 *that which has to be fully renewed* --> alternative, dream of a different world
[=/= to grasp this world (and only this world) otherwise]
...................................
look at spec over the spectacular
(in ajayeb)
i can't give you a dialectical conclusion
maybe a mouth-full
...................................
[Paul Shepard]
our perception of animals as the language of nature in Thinking Animals and The Others; the “natural” way of childrearing in Nature and Madness; and the bear as a dominant sacred animal connecting people ceremonially to the earth in The Sacred Paw.
Octavio Paz reminds us: “The past reappears because it is a hidden present. I am speaking of the real past, which is not the same as ‘what took place.’ . . . What took place is indeed the past, yet there is something that . . . takes place but does not wholly recede into the past, a constantly returning present.”
...................................
[Corbin]
[...]
(30)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%13.8[...]of ta'ajob is moved otherwise
تعجب در باب امر قدسی ta'ajob dar bab-e amr-e ghodsi, wonder in the matters of divine
...................................
Heidegger: die Wissenschaft denkt nicht
Derrida: links science to mourning and memory
Lacan: science is always there, ready to erupt, amaze or blow you away.
Husserl was perhaps the one most freaked out by the historical split (between science and philosophy--and art?)
...a matter of technological selfunderstanding,
...nor do I insist on sustaining the pathos that propels the images...
ethical and political issues are increasingly seem to have more to do with testing than questioning, hesitation, certainty
There is a test ... it claims and so it stands. There is the other test that crashes against walls, collapses certitudes, and lives by failure-lives by dying or, at least destroying.
>
The one register of testing offers results-certitudes-by which to calculate and count on the *other.*
the culture of Versuch, test or trial
(farhange kushesh, ghasd, sue ghasd, va emtehan)
(measuring and) testing that support, among so many others, political, religious, and educational institutions
testing has everything to do with the way the policing of political sites and bodies takes place, in modernity and with our experience of reality in general.
testing ~=/?==><--> the real
(elliptical circuit established between test & real)
Freud was working on to tests which are lost now: Aktualitätsprüfung to distinguish between reality and immediacy
Lacan has linked testing to the subject's creation of a first “outside"----a space that is no longer the same as “reality”
the way the state takes possession of the body presumptively on drugs.
-in this way, drugs are seen as eccentric: what is outside, or moves outside the center, can center it, they are animated by an outside already inside
-how drugs are isolating or how they establish community (of those who are somehow together or with nonpresence.) anything that refigures individuality or collectivity that brings you together with the other and absolutly keeps you apart from the other
drug: Dionysian frenzy, aspirin, religion, dirty language,
-I am sorry I have no drugs to offer you today!
-not everyone in civic societies has the privilege of getting high and mind-altering (that which supposedly suggests vulnerability,) running arround drunk staggering and out-of-it, they will be beaten the hell out of it, they have to be sober, on alert and self-protective
your pee belongs to the state----new civic readability
{four bodies don't belong to themselves: children, addicts, outlaws, and ghosts, are all busted by the state or certain [...]
(32)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%14.7[...]such, test or trial
(farhange kushesh, ghasd, sue ghasd, va emtehan)
(measuring and) testing that support, among so many others, political, religious, and educational institutions
testing has everything to do with the way the policing of political sites and bodies takes place, in modernity and with our experience of reality in general.
testing ~=/?==><--> the real
(elliptical circuit established between test & real)
Freud was working on to tests which are lost now: Aktualitätsprüfung to distinguish between reality and immediacy
Lacan has linked testing to the subject's creation of a first “outside"----a space that is no longer the same as “reality”
the way the state takes possession of the body presumptively on drugs.
-in this way, drugs are seen as eccentric: what is outside, or moves outside the center, can center it, they are animated by an outside already inside
/>
-how drugs are isolating or how they establish community (of those who are somehow together or with nonpresence.) anything that refigures individuality or collectivity that brings you together with the other and absolutly keeps you apart from the other
drug: Dionysian frenzy, aspirin, religion, dirty language,
-I am sorry I have no drugs to offer you today!
-not everyone in civic societies has the privilege of getting high and mind-altering (that which supposedly suggests vulnerability,) running arround drunk staggering and out-of-it, they will be beaten the hell out of it, they have to be sober, on alert and self-protective
your pee belongs to the state----new civic readability
{four bodies don't belong to themselves: children, addicts, outlaws, and ghosts, are all busted by the state or certain legislated majority}
destructive (and artistic) modes of production.
test, does it have an essence? Is it Is it pure relationality?
Avital's “speculative telephonics”
Heidegger: sign = cutting edge, Zeichen --Holderlin--> “we're cutting out” =/= (Avital:) schizo knows how to disconnect, how to depart, how to cut the shit
the place where a call can break into a body[=? orificial openings of a subject]
emergency verification: we are still trying to cut into the emergency line (that we are on) after the crashing down of the transcendental signifier
in the (technologically enabled) disappearance of long-distance what happens to the ‘elsewhere’ calling to the schizobody?
how our pretechnological ears were (trained) before the telephone?
the “call” comes from me and from beyond and over me.
Telephonics coils itself around a concept of “being there” supported by the recognition that contact has been broken. Still, the break is never clean, just as contact[...]
(33)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%14.7[...]fe animal on the plate, the chicken has become killable first through linguistic interpretive representation network of semiotic relations. so my question in the birds performance was that how the excess of meaning is related in actuality to the removal of corporeality in Attar's non-birdness Simurgh (سیمرغ) till the chicken in khoresh-e morgh (خورشت مرغ).
...................................
[Scott Gilbert]
(all organic beings have been formed on two general laws, according to Darwin:)
(1) unity of type and (2) conditions of existence --> inorganic? fire?
natural selection --> adaptation --> conditions of existence
embryonic homologies --> unity of type
==> “descent with modification” (or decent modifications)
[(embryology =/=) ‘fire’ could transform matters, “change” their class, their type and its unity --> “parvaneh sho!” (پروانه شو) Rumi مولوی wants embryology undermined?]
construct phylogenies
(phylogeny : branching out evolutionarily)
‘Haeckel claimed that Darwin's ideas included the progressive development of species. “Development and progress” was what characterized evolution. The explicit association of evolution with particular political, religious, and racial views became the hallmark of Haeckel's career. Haeckel proposed a causal parallelism between the embryological development and phylogeny. His “Biogenetic Law” that “Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny” was based on the idea that the successive (and to him, progressive) origin of new species was based on the same laws as the successive and progressive origin of new embryonic structures. Just as the earlier stages of human development developed into the later stages, so earlier species evolved into the later ones. Natural selection would eventually get rid of the earlier species. (In the Welträtsel, Haeckel [1899] would also proclaim that the more evolved humans [i.e., the Aryans] would out-compete and eliminate the more primitive races.) To Haeckel, the evolution of the animal kingdom was the same as individual development not only because the laws behind each were the same but also because the entire animal kingdom was an individual. Here, he was harking back to the views of the Naturphilosophen of the previous century. In other words, the development of advanced species was seen to pass through stages represented by adult organisms of more primitive species.’ (The morphogenesis of evolutionary developmental biology)
inter-cellular digestion
•the evolution of new features was based on changes in developmental stages, not in adult astages (--> that's why the developmental stage is so important, because mutations happen --> work with children)
Ontogeny or morphogenesis: organism's developmental lifespan
Phylogeny: evolutionary historical heritable traits
ontogeny ==> phylogeny
“ontogeny does n[...]
(34)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%15.8[...]side.” (Kenney)*****
what is a narrative good for if it doesn't improve the quality of companionship (between human and nonhuman)? if it doesn't generate new sensitivities and enable different patterns of responsiveness?
stories of relationship ==> enlarge our thinking [=/= raising awareness]
these stories cannot known in advance --> note on fable #workshop, when you are excited about an assigned reading in a specific way only to find out that the participants connect or disconnect to something i don't notice
*wonder, a mode of attention to:
•the perpetual newness of the present (Irigaray)
•the other-worldliness of the past (Bynum)
•the aesthetics and politics of sf worlding that generate sensitivities for worlds-to-come (Stengers/Haraway)
latent possible worlds:
* could-have-beens
* almost-weres
* yet-to-comes
*ornamentation --> (inducing) wonder + (connection with) divine
-rich ornamentation --> honor something with our time, care, and attention
-‘encoding’ a writing requires time and attention, decryption ==> value and meaning
mystery of the undecipherable ==> occult knowledge {in a book that enrolls and transforms religious motifs, the experience of reading (or rather not reading) ...evokes the power of occult knowledge, the power of that which is hidden. (Kenney)}
occult knowledge <--> mystery <--> enchantment <--> ornamentation <--> illumination (=/= elucidate, tozihe shafaf توضیح شفاف) <--> wonder
***bibliographic aesthetics are arts of enchantment, vectors for the transmission of value and meaning***
why think and write with the aesthetic?
book as an object? writing as a practice? reading as world-making?***
(to feel) the effect of (our own) language
art: “ontological theater” (=/=? ‘linguistic turn’ {--> Marialena's remark on The Pillow Book, that the film don't care about what is being written. she is a child of the linguistic turn?})
(=/= “return to reality” : “the ontological turn”)
(=/= language as “a necessary evil,” aesthetics characterized as the main instrument of ideological mystification)
~ learn to trust objects figured in unfamiliar ways* (, my bow and arrow?)
[both Haraway (“material-semiotic”) and Barad (“material-discursive”) are working against this kind of split between language and reality, both in the level of analysis (of one's object) and composition (of one's book)]
**where do our power come from if not from evidence?** (@Seba)
--> the *specter of deception* (it happened when i used aesthetics in my questions in my excursion at Vladimir's block, my peers thinking “what if we are beguiled?” --> the suspicious refrains of “trust no one”) =/= “attentive wondering care” (Bynum)
*** to te[...]
(35)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%17[...]oax ==> compels us to do work that is sober and bound closer to reality
the bifurcation of childhood and adulthood gets in the way of thinking
-the child/adult divide as an “achievement” of the Vicorian Era
the context of my ajayeb:
“The Science War”
epistemological differences between sciences
...................................
[Lorraine J. Daston]
the evolving collective sensibility of naturalists
objective order and subjective sensibility
...celestial apparitions, monsters,
how wonder and wonders fortified princely power, rewove the texture of scientific experience, and shaped the sensibility of intellectuals
(webs of cultural significance, material practices, and theoretical derivations)
(cultivate a distinctive scientific self wherein knowing and knower converge) Galison
...................................
*passion maintains a path between (--corporal impressions and movements toward an object):
philosophers <----> physicists
metaphysical research <----> cosmological research
transcendental <----> empirical
architecture of ideality : (sociofamilial) stratification of desire --> ideal ego ==> religiosity, slogans, publicity, terror, --✕--> roots {vegetal, earthly, ideal, heavenly,)
[Irigaray]
(@Ali , what is the source of movement? what is the motivating force behind mobility if not wonder?---in all dimensions)
(both active & passive) wonder ==> move
the “man” (in Nietzsche and Heidegger) thinks he is at the end of his growth, has completed a cycle
“can we look at, contemplate, wonder at the machine from a place where it does not see us?” *** --> the issue is how to be able to wonder at the face of something/somebody that is looking (back) at us. ,,,(@Lili)
surprise: not yet assimilated or disassimilated to known
energy tied to the dimension of the story =/= mobilization of new energies --> (still) blind to their horizon, or qualities
*desire: vectorialization of space and time (=/= Deleuze and Guattari notion of desire) --> movement toward, (not yet qualified)
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:[...]
(36)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%17.1[...]ttps://culanth.org/curated_collections/19-everyday-islam/discussions/20-interview-with-naveeda-khan-about-of-children-and-jinn]
...................................
(what i am reading in ajayeb)_with Naveeda: “Muslim cosmology and eschatology hold promoise of ecological thought, providing an unexpectedly materialist perspective on our creaturely interconnectedness.”
[ajayeb (and telegram) is full of] gestures of incorporating repugnant [offensive to the mind] others---that one sees reflections on divine creation qua [als] creaturliness
thoroughly disabused
aufklären آگاهیدن آگاییدن
expound تفسیر
incentive مشوق, فتنه انگيز
litany مناجات وعبادت تهليل دار
showmanship (نمايشگرى?)
effektvolle Darstellung, Schauspielproduktion
queasy به طور تهوع آوری لطیف مزاج
(a gedture of) ludic [playfull, spielerisch] transcendence of [the] present
obdurate سرسخت
-showing unfeeling resistance to tender feelings-
(picture of the world as) pristine nature طبیعت بکر being destroyed by humans (--> narcissistic?)
=/= view of theology/religion on ecology
=/= (stories of humans and dogs:) shared creatureliness and companionship entailing a turn to cofeasting on the flesh of the world --> mutual fate
does islamic theology (in both elite and popular belief) offers us a way toward *sensing our embeddedness in this world* ?
-might ajayeb (creationist?) narratives be generative of interconnections between humans and other animals within the predominant muslim context?
-why climate science doesn't/hasn't effect a meaningful engagement with the world? --> an image of thought that is not interiorized***
(Strauss: *thought is always in the world.* being in the world subsumes realms of both abstractness and concreteness) -->[a tradition of thought that produces (& works with): “Abstraktheit =/= Greifbarkeit"]
***how ajayeb naratives provided the filaments of (muslim) ecological thought as a perspective on our interconnectedness and mutual entanglements? [Naveeda, Anand, ]
(wanting a) most perfect creation (to leave the best part to the end*) ==> God created humans last of all ==> consigned humans to a state of *belatedness to the world*
(unapologetically) anthropocentric: *making the human drama the most important one to watch*
acts of worship (that bears witness to):
•regularity in nature
•one's own nature
(agian) Khidr, the prophet in green, who is associated with hermeticism and also has a presence [...] as a way to suggest a subterranean connection between [...] textual tradition and the everyday lives of riparian (رود کنارى) Muslims [...]
riparian context ساحل کنار ,[...]
(37)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%17.3[...] the many existence of dogs
--> dogs’ quality of aliveness; being more or less useless other than the occasional and fitful دمدمى protection of households that made them serve as the singular sign of life, a trace of God's surplus creativity. (Naveeda's work in chauras)
one's future animal self
(هشتاد ساله) octogenarian mindful of life's finitude
-what do you say/do when your feet is one on the land breaking beneath and the other in the afterlife?
-polysemy of imagery and wordss
“earth breaks so much” --> ?>
suggesting a چاره (chareh)
inflection of chareh and fetrat
چاره ی فطرت
***ajayeb's heterogeneously muslim spaces
•traces of Hindu, Chinese, Greek interest and thought
•occasion for cross-species sentience (Naveeda's beautiful research in chars)
visiting of shobhe to the town
(shobhe gave the town a visit)
شبهه
شبح شبهه
bringing bits and pieces of songs from many places... over their cell phones... being well versed in the different types of music to be able to tell the songs apart...
(Sven, )
attention to the physical surround of the religious consciousness rather than to the inner workings of their body
.
آخرت
آخرش
smells, rotting bodies, eroding bodies, soil composition, etc.
(to imagine dogs and humans coexisting as) competting possibilities within unformed matter* [=/=? companion species]
dwindling quality of life (and diminished humanity)
(Anand, van Dooren, Naveeda wondering) how in certain geographies disappearance of species seems not to give the people a moment's pause
* what_ gives a pause ?
*species self-perpetuation is sometimes with:
•biological reproduction
•becoming
•transfiguration
•rebirth
•symbolic dispersal
•resynthesis
•
sunnat to kill (فى نفسه intrinsically evil) snakes (=/= jinn snake in Anand research/stories of saint animals)
straw, chaff, rice, wheat, lentils,
ماشوره، کاه، بوريا
سبوس
گندم
عدس
the gift of death for the animals:
•عید Eid, God in sacrifice, release from hardship and burden; blithe disposal of animal; euthanize
•چشمزخم evil eye or witchcraft as the cause of animal's death, if they are lost through illness, theft, or accident
bonanza
anthrax
euthanize
inoculate
cagey
•canny حيله گر کمرو
•showing self-interest and shrewdness in dealing with others
•characterized by great cautious and wariness
•reluctant to give in[...]
(38)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%17.5[...]as a partially cohering systemic whole
planet-transforming, historically situated, new-enough, worlding relations
(systematic stories are linked) metabolisms, articulations, coproductions
(they must also be) relational, sympoietic, consequential
myth-systems (are set-ups)
(a deadly one: “Man + Tool ==> history”)
names =/= faces (~ morphs of the same)
a thousand names of something else
(what Haraway is naming with) compound-eyed insectile and many-armed optics
winged domains
bird-bodies
(Haraway's spider and) my ajayeb's snake: tasks of thinking, figuring, and storytelling
--✕--> heady facial representation; [Luisa also dislikes this]
•figure of snake (circular serpent) is ajayeb Persian sf worlding, has ties with the Greek Chthonis (“of the earth,”) is at the same time the image of the continuity of life and the abyssal moral (eating your end, no gag reflex)-->{Gildas Hamel: “the abyssal and elemental forces before they were astralized by chief gods and their tame committees"}
“many critters acoss taxa” (juju جوجو + rade رده)
(I dispute Haraway's notion of “sacred.” popular religion is at many times populated by earthly figures alongside many astralized destructive finitudes.)
Haraway's urgently needed Chthulucene story
[Miyazaki's] biodiverse terra [God flips out] into something very slimy, like any overstressed complex adaptive system at the end of its abilities to absorb insult after insult. (Haraway's wording)
(yes yes we are all ultimately connected to one another,) but the specificity and proximity of connections matters
(Haraway + Latour's) ‘things’ are:
1- collection of entities
2- hard to classify, unsortable, (and probably with bad smell)
Anthropos =/= rich generative home of a multispecies Earth
“looks up at what he sees.”
...................................
ʿAjā'ib al-makhlūqāt wa gharā'ib al-mawjūdāt
Ajayeb al-makhlughat wa gharayeb al-mojudat (عجائب المخلوقات ,عجایب المخلوقات) in short: Ajayeb, is a suggestive cognitive work, full of strange linguistic pollutants, interesting agencies and animations, and like most of the medieval sciences and knowledge systems that were busy with the transformation of agencies it collapses “lists” and “narratives.” In Ajayeb each animal is a consensual hallucination device (~ each animal is a way of knowing the world); some pre-organic, inter-corporal species, with trans-ontological intentionalities.
...................................
infrastructure: piled-upon assemblages within which there are many discontinuities but also connections, some deliberative, some inadvertent. (Katie King)
--> “flexible knowledges[...]
(39)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%19.4[...]gh
(Damrosch:) the performance of the sign thus entailed a doubly negative aspect: in the person exhibiting it, a conviction of fulfilling a divine mandate in opposition to personal self-interest; and in those who witnessed it, an offense to ordinary social standards that actually served to authenticate it.
*the function of the sign was to bear prophetic witness rather than to get practical results; it fulfilled its purpose simply by being performed*
#shath, shathiat ==> tazkirat, --->{ what the saints of Tasavof (reported by Attar-{his “virtual witnessing” of “awliya” اولیا as a “realized"}, Quakers [as illegal nonconformist sect]) put together was their own writing technology infrastructure** ==> **routinization of charisma** <-- organizational structure ["advices and queries” نفحات الانس nafahat ~-> rationalized systematic intellectualizations]}
pattern of suffering that the believer literally and personally relives
(is Tasavof developed Christian modality of sacrifice? is *passivity imported from elsewhere in Islam*?)
a protagonist, like San'an, like an actor in a mystery play, enacting in a deliberately challenging form, internalized and lived as a potent sign
(Bechwith:) rendered performance of religious materials both practically impossible and conceptually unthinkable
+ exercises their discipline of the senses and the imagination
*undisciplined loss of control in enthusiasm and in this extravagant example*
(stories of) a small group of powerful and vocal actors
***to attend to the local practices of inclusion and exclusion through which some speak and others are spoken for, some act and others are acted upon***
(#ontology)
gentlemanly practices --> (ask) what that legitimacy consisted in and how far it extended?
(wellborn connoisseurs of the new science)
leave the work tacit, and it fades into the wallpaper
•(Leigh Star's) ethnography of infrastructure
•(Bowker's) infra-structural inversion
•(Katie King's) ecology of writing technologies: massive, large-scale infrastructure in dynamic motion, bits changing at differential rates across time, made up of layered sub-systems complexity interconnected and animated by distributed agencies, including people, skills, devices and social powers.
the translation between ([my] deliberately) presentist (meta-)language (of cybernetic systems) and various local languages helps *to rescale particular objects of study*
(my research: “social studies of”) studying animal subjectivity --(changes the way)--> studying infrastructures --requires--> one to think (explicitly) about scale and range --> boundaries/connections between one system and another --(what counts as)--> working sub-systems and various essential forms of “black-boxing” (that describe and use these infrastructures)
[...]
(40)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20.1[...]rs, an interested London bookseller became a significant actor in cultural events.
nominal agency
actual person
principle architect
systems move in space, time, and process
some archaeological structures (that one uncover) are stable, some in motion, some evolving, some decaying --> *“there is no way of ever getting access to the past except through classification systems of one sort or another”* (at best) the past could be reordered to better reflect multiple constituencies now and then. (Bowker + Leigh Star)
(my ajayeb research: “epistemic virtues” [or powers] of the 12th century encyclopedic wonder-books,) “epistemological decorum” --> (to capture) “truth-making practices in action” (Shapin)
==> (my commitment to ajayeb:) engendering reflection on the nature of and function of categorization itself
a wonderful bit of meta-language
The Exhausted Receiver
Margaret Cavendish description of a new world, called the Blazing World, her own brand of natural philosophy under the guise of a romance... science for ladies{
1- enthusiasm ==> new science
2- study of natural philosophy ==> cardinal virtues of ladies, modesty and religious reverence
3- leisure activity, appropriate pasttime
*she participated in discussions central to her life and times* (am i participating in discussions central to my life and times?!)
Cavendish self-consciously produced herself as a fantastic and singular... (--> is that what i wish to produce?)
-Cavendish strangely shared with Quaker women an experimental life of proliferating genders, of dress, of personhood, og agency, of writing, of personae, but not of this *enabling collectivity*
hermaphroditical view of things: partly artificial, partly natural
status of clothing as a signifier of identity [<-- not always]
crossdressing (#ing (#my sticker period)
[modest witness] (--> Haraway's literal and figurative queering of categories)
the rhetoric of the modest witness --> the naked way of writing, undorned, factual, compelling: “naked writing” [crafted in the context of being virtually present at a demonstration, the ‘practice of credible witnessing’ (==> “truth”) in technoscience] was a proper reference point for feminist examination of objectivity and its relationship to a science founded in exclusion of women. the new man of science had to be chaste, modest, heterosexual man who desires yet eschews a sexually dangerous yet chaste and modest woman --> *female modesty was of the body; the new masculine virtue had to be of the mind* [women's presence turns out to disrupt the experiment (of the scientist or sufi) altogether] (“[...]best of women, pious, chaste, modest, and compassionate, are rendered unfit for science by the very qualities that make them the best of women”)
(Ha[...]
(41)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20.3[...]ir پیر / Sheikh شیخ
Parsa پارسا / Zahed زاهد
Parishan پریشان / Tafraghe تفرقه
moshtaghe bandegi مشتاق بندگی
(~? the advanced level of) ‘wannabe slave’
...................................
the dangerous suffixial worlders, prehensile adjective-builder, natural-inhabitant-makers of “-ian” or “-i” or “-isch” to the name of a nation/country ==> Iranian, Afgani, etc. --> makes subjects
in the case of the podcast https://soundcloud.com/norient/afghanistan-sucht-seine-musikalische-identitat-podcast listen to the way the story of the Afgani music is told by norient (“music in the globe”, “multi-modally”) --> articulation of western human rights & disarticulation of other ecology of stories
=/= Charles Amirkhanian radio programm Ode to Gravity
...................................
the protector of spiders who dies by the bite of a spider
-susceptible bodies entagled in networks of care, life and death, that are not always harmonious to popular narratives of nonviolence
...................................
ajayeb: mythoepic literature in translation from a Middle Persian corpus
-when i say ‘Middle Persian corpus’ what i actually mean is a shared world of ritual, religion, and mythology between Iranian, Urdu, Turkish, Zoroastrianism in Iran and Vedic Hinduism in India, Indo-European inheritance in ancient Iranian culture, South-Southeast Asian literatures, translations and transcreations (and transliteration) of stories (prose, poetry, drama, epic, jokes, parables, figures [that are not always part of the canon], the irreverent بى ادب, ) in Indian and Southeast Asian contexts,
my project is about learning the ‘how’ of cultivating the ability to fruitfully approach texts from different cultures and pasts
-(to study) the radical poetic force of the Persian texts--in ajayeb
-to become enhanced and enchanted in skills of reading wider ranges of linguistic registers
-to open up an approach to a dauntingly complex region of islamicated thought (not the ideological enterprise of “Islam”, which is usually badly politicized in the historical memory of the West. we could get interested in the economics of corruption and technologies of rule, the evolution of government bureaucracies and classificatory schemes, anti-colonial critique,)
ajayeb is on the side of counter-classical traditions of standard Muslem-ness, and its less elite histories and cultural forms,
(intellectual identity:)
cross-dresser of the order
autodidact odds
sufis, merchants, nomads, poets, pilgrims, smugglers, laborers,
religious identity, religious knowledge, religious violence,
medieval persian mysticism:
•oral, temporal nature of speech
•speaking I to the unknown and unknowable Other
•the discourse of love
•apophatic discours[...]
(42)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%21[...] Iranian culture, South-Southeast Asian literatures, translations and transcreations (and transliteration) of stories (prose, poetry, drama, epic, jokes, parables, figures [that are not always part of the canon], the irreverent بى ادب, ) in Indian and Southeast Asian contexts,
my project is about learning the ‘how’ of cultivating the ability to fruitfully approach texts from different cultures and pasts
-(to study) the radical poetic force of the Persian texts--in ajayeb
-to become enhanced and enchanted in skills of reading wider ranges of linguistic registers
-to open up an approach to a dauntingly complex region of islamicated thought (not the ideological enterprise of “Islam”, which is usually badly politicized in the historical memory of the West. we could get interested in the economics of corruption and technologies of rule, the evolution of government bureaucracies and classificatory schemes, anti-colonial critique,)
ajayeb is on the side of counter-classical traditions of standard Muslem-ness, and its less elite histories and cultural forms,
(intellectual identity:)
cross-dresser of the order
autodidact odds
sufis, merchants, nomads, poets, pilgrims, smugglers, laborers,
religious identity, religious knowledge, religious violence,
medieval persian mysticism:
•oral, temporal nature of speech
•speaking I to the unknown and unknowable Other
•the discourse of love
•apophatic discourse -->? politically subversive
•linguistic fragmentation, edges of meaning
•
...................................
dense and textured stories
(generativity is fueled by) densely felt textures
worlding of the place:
•the material, sensory labor of attending to an emergent and enduring hum
•the force of things amassed of phantom limbs
•actual residue of people “making something of things”
direct materiality of people's shared sense = attending to what is happening
a racist violence in the dark
a space of condensed displacement
watching things arrive in the company of others
*nameable clarities:
•family
•friendship
•love
•collapse
•laughing
•telling stories
•violence
•place
•
--> all atmospherics*** : forms of attending to what's happening, sensing out, accreting attachments and detachments, differences and indifferences, losses and proliferating possibilities. [Stewart]
(Stewart's) curious pause to wonder *what analytic objects matter* in the singularity of a situation and what forms of writing and thinking might approach them****
-experimenting with forms of theory and writing that are responsive to the moving objects they are trying to trace or highlight or escape, or wha[...]
(43)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%21[...] play itself like a musical instrument in this world's compositions.” [@Luisa, Sven, Foad]
(i lack certain learnings in sensory labor of attuning as a zerang زرنگ person)
(do i also have) the habit of a worlding
trying to find the rhythm of a new bodily life
find lines of attachment
***to become describable as a body (by learning how to affect and to be affected in this world such as it is)***
(in my work on ajayeb i am becoming more and more committed to learn ways of) having stories meant to pull me into the sentience of the world i am in --> give it density, texture*
Stewart (2010) is writing an ajayebnameh of her mother in cancer, stepson becoming a homeless, and her hometown
______________
[*]regionality دهاتی ,داهاتی
-an event that jumps from landscape to bodies and back (Stewart)
--"here"-->{the blue law, the seasons, the color red, place names اسم خیابان [*the past snaps into the present with the recognition of the street names], bodily resonances, materialities bundled together like a sac of leaves, sharp-edged collectivities like race, ethnicity, class, gender, generation and religion, }--> “one ventures from home”
-a thing hollowed out by its labyrinth of edges; incessant interlinking
-a contact aesthetics
-a virtual mapping of things in a state of potential (Thrift)
-a sheer recognition of a sheer recognition: “we are from around here"-->{as *active survivors of the unexpected encounter and knowing readers of emergent situations*} (Roazan)
-turns spaces into animate envelopes that produce worlds (Sloterdijk)
-a form of worlding--an intimate, compositional process of dwelling that bears, gestures, gestates آبستن, worlds (Heidegger)
-the labored viscerality احشايى of being ‘in’ whatever's happening renders choices, aesthetics, surfaces and materialities *a part of something* (Stewart) ~~apass--> the sentience, of a worlding (lightened by soft scenes of the human condition [played out in:
•forms of pleasure @Sina
•weakness @Maarten
•fun @Elen
•humor @Eszter
•acquiescence رضايت ,تن در دادن @Leo
•self-deprecation اظهاربيميلى @Lili
•the intimacy of قبيح دانستن deprecating others @Xiri
•a bad but human habit @Aela
•some wicked little sorcery @קݙ
•])
-
-an attunement that takes form
-a milieu in which the mouth relaxes into a town accent (نواحی?)
-a disorientation in the face of what lies beyond (Janina)
-a love affair with light and color (Foad)
-uncurtained windows (my mother)
-
-
-->{
•one recognizable entity with qualities
•lived modalities
•a history of its social production and uses
[...]
(46)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%21.3[...]ble and sometimes politically reprehensible سزاوار سرزنش forms of hybrid histories
(Katie King's flexible knowledges:) layers of locals and globals
my aim in my research is creating *struggle for understanding* [= many communities involved in reading, writing, interpreting,] --> ***we are all members in these communities struggling for understanding***
Urton paying attention to decompiling intermediaty positions between so-calles reading and writing --> string records --> numerical accounts or maps or... ==> histories and narratives
my research on ajayeb in apass as a practice is about *disassembling and reordering classifications we use to access pasts*
the excursion i did in Vladmir's block was somehow about examining sites of implicitly or explicitly knowledge production in commercialized forms
museum, TV documentry as a metaphor {a richly contaminated set of crafty metaphors and realities} and narrative frame, a momentary melding of pastpresents in imaginative reenactment --> economic globalization figuring in artistic/academic capitalism
(--> ajayeb is also of this kind,) *site of heritage* culture as promoting particular versions of history, nation, science, art, and religion*** --> (the excursion made me) with ajayeb to be careful with ‘the commerce with global knowledge production’ --(what is at stake)--> structure of pasts, peoples, and sensation
*heritage culture ==(impress)==> public histories* --> appropriation of national and personal identities; today (specially in university) no one is “immune from governing pressures of heritage culture or the impression of corporate management assumptions, styles, funding requirements, and money-making imperatives in enterprise culture” (Katie King > Morley & Robins) [i can imagine apass is struggling with this specially in Brussels]
(@Vera's position as a museum tour guide, exploitations of the interpreter/reenactors, who are promised semiprofessional recognition within social historical practice but instead end up as engineers of a “feel good” atmosphere for tourism)
(Katie King > Slaughter & Leslie) *global market:
•fields “close to the market” --(reguire)--> proucts
•fields “peripheral to the market” --(are pushed to)--> pedagogy and public service
(sometimes virtually indistinguishable:) impulse to democratize ~=? commodify knowledge
-they model for museum goers as:
◦reenactors
◦shadows
◦witnesses
◦a play at being “there”:
◾on set
◾on site
◾in that past
◾in a past:
◽mentally enacting
◽reenacting
◽experimenting
◽speculating
◽trying to find evidence for various pastpresents
TV camera: like a historical source, arbitrarily selects what it chooses to show, never lies and never understands (Kop[...]
(47)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%24[...]/>
(the technological enablement of some) *disciplines of attention*
“we are al lichen”: we are all ecosystem composite critters
ants, combining two kinds of noise, half-hazard patterns of interaction
half-hazard contact
half-hazard context
}==> it works (=/= perfection, precision/efficiency of clockwork)
#some Baradian models of intra-action in popular cinema:
•(intra-action received and wielded through discipleship and pre-programmed talent:) The Force in Starwars. [the story don't allow any other story of The Force and its contingencies other that good and evil tool-use of it]
•(intra-action resisted by individual subjectification:) the shadowy monster from the Upside Down in The Stranger Things, possessing the character. [the story is based on non-intra-active models and mode of being in the world of multispecies in multi-dimensions, it wants clear boundried subjects encapsulated by psychological ego and self-possession persons, ideas of identity and power --> life insurance system]
•(intra-action resisted by the political modern concrete individualism:) relationship with the phantom of state in The Handmaid's Tale. [overlapping a flat image of totalitarian society into religion]
...................................
technosphere: (conceptualized as) an unintended muddle of multispecies relationships emerging from contaminated landscapes, dumps
--reconsider-with-> feral technologies: novel and weedy capacities for materially significant change
invasive artificial intelligence
anthropocene: a multidimensional puzzle structured around complexities and ruptures --> when ways of being & ways of belonging can no longer be studied exclusively
(human-nonhuman-machine)
•who orders the technosphere?
•who inhabits the technosphere?
•
...................................
“unmediated experience” --(signals a danger)--> naive realism (+ its polar opposite: naive subjectivism)
soup operatic
operatic (--> opera)
aporetic (--> aporia)
operative (--> secret agent)
...................................
‘learning’ in biology: (how to overcome X that) its ancestors would have not met
--> stories of ‘trial-and-error’ in animals
the idea of having ‘varying technique’ (closer to human) in regard to biological stasis
how the idea of ‘intelligence’ in animals is construted according to venture capitalism predatory preferences
...................................
mileu --> part of the history of the idea of animal
the living being and its environment, Canguilhem
[mileu: in French “middle,” in the midst of, medium, between, ... set, circle]
(the notion of) *environment* [relentlessly universal and required] --for--> capturing both th[...]
(48)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%25.5[...]--> analyzable in terms of any explanatory system of functional states, or intentional states
Blade Runner's notion of “soul”: ascribed to robots or automata that behave like people though they experience nothing
physicalism: phenomenological features must themselves be given a physical account
...if one travels too far down the phylogenetic tree, people gradually shed their faith that there is experience at all
anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat
anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited whale
anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited snake
anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited jinn
--> knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life
Nagel asking: we must consider whether any method will permit us to extrapolate استقراء to the inner life of the bat from our own case, and if not, what alternative methods there may be for understanding the notion
“our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited” --> Nagel's view remains secular and in the bounds of his disciplinary field. (religious studies, theology, animal subjectivity studies, art of description, they can be helpful to describe things not in terms of the impressions they make on our senses)
-Nagel is trying with the wrong language at bats: “does it make sense to ask what my experiences are ‘really’ like as opposed to how they appear to me? [...] objective processes can have a subjective nature.”
what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves =/= what it is like for a bat to be a bat
schematic conceptions of Eszter
(old model of understanding:)
* --> stimulus (things sparkling) --> perception (hiting the senses) --> apprehension (mind aware without judgement) --> comprehension (psychological judgement about the manner of situation) --> knowing ==> world of doing, in which “action” is: expected (mother attending the child, free liberating the prisoners), commanded (soldier's hierarchy, job's duty), solved (engineer puzzling out a problem)
the things apprehended from a particular point of view (particular visual phenomenology) are not connected to that point
Neobeobachtungen
moshahedat مشاهدت
نگاه جدید
*essence 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
[...]
(49)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%26.8[...] the knowledges --> science) {propositions in discursive systems, (a “task” that) proceeds with a plane of reference --> paradigmatic (a worldview) ==>? to *confront chaos* ~= to provide chaos with reference points [<-- artists need to learn this]}****
(my work in lecture-performance: to provide chaos with reference points)
Barad, Stengers, <== stable foundations of physics had broken up and it is time for science to become philosophical
science becomes philosophical philosophy becomes artistic art becomes anthropological anthropology becomes poetic poetry becomes biological biology becomes archaeological archaeology becomes speculative speculation becomes scientific science becomes aesthetic aesthetics becomes adventurous adventure becomes rigorous rigor becomes Iranian Iran becomes German Germany becomes Arabic Arab becomes Egyptian Egypt becomes animalistic animal becomes fabulous fable becomes political politics becomes...
...................................
(Baxstrom + Meyers highlight a productive gap between intent & outcome in) Christensen making a case of witchcraft (in his pioneering, bizarre, and lavish project of Häxan):
•misidentified nervous disease
•incompatibility of superstition and religious fanaticism with modernity and science
•bringing “errors of belief” in the 15th and 16th centuries into our view
living cinematic tableau, Häxan's excess =/= socially constrained thinking, discursive mode of analysis
Christensen's thesis concerned/gripped with abnormalities, events, and causes ==provide==> diagnosis
(like Favret-Saada) he was an un-witcher at once caught & catching
witch =? epiphenomenon
(to bring the ajayeb to life “objectively” is nonsense)
[Häxan = spectacle + argument ==> *to make nature speak*] drove efforts to locate & combat witches, and it served to shape similar aporias between *sense & distance* imbricated in:
•the invention of modern hysteria in the 19th century
•the “discovery” of the “native's point of view” by anthropologists in the early 20th century
for Christensen: “witchcraft = unrecognized manifestations of clinical hysteria and psychosis”
excessiveness of Häxan's reenactment --> construct the witch's material, invisible, mobile force
(Häxan's objectivity) had no expectation that the real will simply “speak for itself”
Häxan's reception in the 1920s --> to energize a negative, conceptually dogmatic discourse that formed and hardened cinematic taxonomies [particularly the division between “documentary” (nonfiction) and “feature” (fictional) films]
experimentation + evidence making
sexual intercourse, cannibalism, cauldron --solemnize--> pact with the devil
evidentiary thinking
elaborated visualization of the wit[...]
(50)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.3[...]her magic, assault of farm animals, sickness, unexplained death, etc.)
saturn's mythological violence <--> satan
the idea that saturn serves as patron to social outliers: the poor, elderly, disabled, criminals, jews, cannibals, magicians, witches
(early modern period -->) **satan = the principal authority of the natural world**, “master of the knowledge of natural properties and the techniques of their instrumentalization” =/= techniques of the healer =/= empirical instruments
(de Certeau observed that) every exercise of trained judgment is authorized through the [*]dark: ratifying force of theology
**dark forces --ratify--> all forms of natural expertise**
mastery of nonsense --driving--> confirming the suspicion of witchcraft = a form of non-knowledge ==opens==> a gap in knowing (specifically, ‘who’)
line of accusation that was quite common in the early modern period --> “the desperate search for the cause of what was other wise an unexplained illness or misfortune was frequently the catalyst for specific witchcraft accusations between friends, acquaintances, and often between family members themselves”
16th century --> this violence now bore the sanction of both secular and religious institutions (<== peasant complaints of maleficium زيان <== human beings have been suffering misfortune, illness, and death long before the power of the witch was felt during this time)
Dominican order --> aggressively promoting the cult of the virgin, to the status of the “perfect” woman {elevating the status of sexual neurosis to a virtue} =/= lustful credulous nature of common women (who were often associated with the temptations of Eve)
*conflicted status of women*
•in Häxan --through--> sternly patrilineal visual motifs (condescension + bemusement --> frail + hysterical)
•in ajayeb bestiary -->
(Häxan's) witch hunters act in accordance with their own procedures for investigating truth and falsehood and not simply out of malice, fear, or stupidity
the inquisitor priest/friar (within the realm of their own assumptions about the world) were dedicated to investigating and verifying the claims [of the accused witch) =/= (mainstream depiction of inquisitors as) gullible, fanatical, overtly misogynistic
(during the witch craze) **desire to believe =/= simple belief**
despite the unbelievable scope of demonic power, the inquisitors must believe that what the young maiden is reporting is possible
****important changes in the legal systems in europe well into the 14th century: proffering a formal indictment against another individual required the plaintiff to submit to an accusatory form of criminal procedure. (derived from Roman law) this procedure presumed such offenses as *matters between the accused and accuser* ==> the idea th[...]
(51)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%30.3[...] unbelievable scope of demonic power, the inquisitors must believe that what the young maiden is reporting is possible
****important changes in the legal systems in europe well into the 14th century: proffering a formal indictment against another individual required the plaintiff to submit to an accusatory form of criminal procedure. (derived from Roman law) this procedure presumed such offenses as *matters between the accused and accuser* ==> the idea that “crime” was a matter between society and the accused did not exist (--> the presentday distinction between criminal and civil complaints meaningless)
raising a formal complaint required:
•the accuser to furnish proof of the allegation
•to submit to severe penalties agreed in advance if the judge was unconvinced of the complaint's merit
*it was complex, expensive, and very risky to enter into this formal framework in order to address disputes or everyday injustices* ==> most ordinary people did not do so, choosing instead to pursue local and less formal modes of redress
15th and 16th century --> this procedure changed dramatically (with the emergence of the 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 interl[...]
(52)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%30.4[...]ils* (in their own expressions)
acknowledging satan's unquestioned power <--doubt--> truth-value of statements made by unlearned witnesses
*possession* (confessions of another sort)
confessions that were not ‘procured’ [ritualized torture of the witch trial to generate evidence] but rather ‘volunteered’ and ‘enacted’ (without the aid of inquisitor)
<== individual turmoil (=/= juridical manipulation)
==> medicalization (of the invisible forces) --> (a new mode) *didactic & forensic*
17th century --> a shift in the empirical approach to invisible forces
clinical hysteria --> fascination with a power that (by definition) destabilizes binaries such as inner/outer
@Pierre, apass? #feedback
****symptomology: discovering without learning****
--> physicians in relation to haunted nun, mobilized by attention, considers the deployment of a knowledge in the new and visible form of an appearing [of the other's nonsenses (~ artwork --> the object of feedback: an inconsistent invisible object of inquiry renamed and reimagined by the feedback)]
Charcot [in his storied career of the father of modern neurology] dealing with relations between religious ecstasy, magic, witchcraft, and “nervous disease” <-- great doctor's decision to compile <-- discernible
•weyer --> appealed to people's better nature and reason
•Bourneville --> appealed to an appraisal of history in service of a project on modernity
}--> to demonstrate the precariousness of interpretation & the consequences of ignorance
}--> (errors of) demonologists and exorcists rooted in (what was characterized as) the mistaken conceptualization of their object of investigation
now antiquated *forms of inquiry* --> 16th century's witch-hunting and exorcism of spirits ~/= 19th century's clinical studies of nervous illness <-- conceptual scaffolding of the emergent science (by Charcot and his students) --> *visible effects of primary invisible forces* involved a *long term labor of social interpretation* that required the mutation of old categories and the creation of new ones...
}==> (19th century's new definition of the) witch: misdiagnosed hysterics of the middle ages <--{ susceptibility of women to witchcraft <== “feminine weakness” }
physical signs of witchcraft recorded centuries earlier --> detailed indexing of symptoms such as:
•religious ferver and stigmatization
•psychosomatic indicators such as blue edema or swelling with local cyanosis and hypothermia and autographic skin (that would appear intensely red after touch)
primitive practices ==> the word “medicine” (derived from the name Medea: the mother of witchcraft)
•epilepsy --> the sacred disease ([perceived] to result from hostile magic --rethought--> to result in terms of[...]
(53)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%31[...]modern neurology] dealing with relations between religious ecstasy, magic, witchcraft, and “nervous disease” <-- great doctor's decision to compile <-- discernible
•weyer --> appealed to people's better nature and reason
•Bourneville --> appealed to an appraisal of history in service of a project on modernity
}--> to demonstrate the precariousness of interpretation & the consequences of ignorance
}--> (errors of) demonologists and exorcists rooted in (what was characterized as) the mistaken conceptualization of their object of investigation
now antiquated *forms of inquiry* --> 16th century's witch-hunting and exorcism of spirits ~/= 19th century's clinical studies of nervous illness <-- conceptual scaffolding of the emergent science (by Charcot and his students) --> *visible effects of primary invisible forces* involved a *long term labor of social interpretation* that required the mutation of old categories and the creation of new ones...
}==> (19th century's new definition of the) witch: misdiagnosed hysterics of the middle ages <--{ susceptibility of women to witchcraft <== “feminine weakness” }
physical signs of witchcraft recorded centuries earlier --> detailed indexing of symptoms such as:
•religious ferver and stigmatization
•psychosomatic indicators such as blue edema or swelling with local cyanosis and hypothermia and autographic skin (that would appear intensely red after touch)
primitive practices ==> the word “medicine” (derived from the name Medea: the mother of witchcraft)
•epilepsy --> the sacred disease ([perceived] to result from hostile magic --rethought--> to result in terms of individual physiological disorder)
•hysteria [from the greek “uterus"] --> hold a special place in the moral imaginary
indigent madwoman: in the 17th century nearly 10000 women (destitute women, the insane, “idiots,” epileptics, and Parisian society's “least favored classes” [---> go to Foucault]) were kept in La Force prison, a second Bastille, in Paris
=/= the nuns and devoted female members of the church, who raised special concern when they were “possessed” by unexplained forces of demonic or neurologic origin
***(Ulrich Baer > Baxstrom:) Charcot ==> transformation of *tableau vivant* --to--> *tableau clinique* : a hysterical reliving of the original symptom and reframed trauma that attempted to suspend the two temporalities (real + imagined) in the same image***
[Sina ==> --to--> *tableau critique* : ??]
--> Freud and Breuer's efforts (in “reliving” with hypnosis) to isolate the mechanisms of hysteria
Acta Sanctorum [---> go to Attar's tazkirat ~ hagiography]
countless early descriptions of entities speaking through the mouths of girls and of the manifestation of “external signs” in the possessed @Bryana
(associated w[...]
(54)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%31.1[...]>
my work has been against the notion of “nature = a hierarchical totality”
emancipation =/= attachment =/= intimacy
*environment: what appeared when unwanted consequences came back to haunt the originators of collective modernizing actions
*environmentalism: when the unwanted consequences are suddenly considered to be a monstrosity (#apocalyptic) ==> abstain & repent --> Leo:
environmentalist logic: “precaution = abstention”
‘global warming’ is an unintended consequence (like anything in earth) <-- narrative of attachment =/= an scandal, end of the world (<-- apocalyptic narrative of emancipation, modernist myth of mastery)
pristine nature =/= our nature ~= national park: a rural ecosystem complete with post offices, well-tended roads, highly subsidized cows, and handsome villages
(Latour giving the example of theology:) ‘mastery ==> attachment’ : “the christian God gets folded into, involved with, implicated with, and incarnated into his creation.” =/= a master who is freed from dependents
}--Latour--> dominion means attachment
...................................
Mi You
modernization process of European societies ==> secularity ==> “religion = only one option among other ways of self-fulfilment and human flourishing”
*self-sufficient humanism has never existed on the same scale before in European societies before the Enlightenment*
...................................
#writing for mini-series bestiaries
inspired by the https://www.instagram.com/ajayebedidani/
1. https://www.instagram.com/p/CPYnbZnH2w3/ short episode at night in country X there is a talking apple that speeks in unknown language. character acting, location garden, animation, play with mixed CG architecture
2.
...................................
borderline animals --in--> medieval bestiary
*alegorical world* --> eastern fables + easter & western animal lore + christian Physiologus [not ancient sciences?!] ~=> bestiary
Physiologus, bestiary --> popular source for sermon writers [<-- relevance for lecture performance]
[email to Mona]
bebin man ye chizi cherto pert sareham kardam. in gharare bere tu catalog alan
*working title for the lecture at Mona's project “Rat Race”:
The Pray and The Visible -- An animal escape case
*short description:
the lecture-performance approaches the idea of the animals’ “friendship” in a historical and speculative look at the anthropomorphic geography of fables from middle-south Asian bestiary till pettube.com uploads.
...................................
...political satire
Obeyd Zakani - mush o gorbe
some of us are woman, child, animal
(coded as a girl)
[...]
(55)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%32[...]one another
urban design is a craft in peril (dar khatar)
•too much urban design ==> homogeneous and rigid
•modern built forms ==> only a faint imprint of personal and shared experience
Sennett --> (better understanding of) ‘material craftsmanship + social cooperation’ ==> cities better made
‘homo faber project’: the ancient idea of Man as his or her own maker, man as a maker of life through concrete practices
•limits on desire and will
•the experience of other people's needs (which cannot be reconciled with our own)
+ to recognize and honour what lies beyond us (and before us)
social relations & physical environment
issues of practical skill, tool, meaning, value
***the rebellious child (in me)
United States has become an intensely tribal society
*tribalism* [= adverse to getting along with those who differ, solidarity with others like yourself, & “thinking you know what other people are like without knowing them"], in the form of nationalism, destroyed Europe during the first half of the 20th century
--✕--> complex societies:
•workers flowing across borders
•different ethnicities, races and religions
•diverging ways of sexual and family life
“The ‘self’ is a composite of sentiments, affiliations and behaviours which seldom fit neatly together; any call for tribal unity will reduce this personal complexity.”
-Sennett
(for Aristotle:) city = synoikismos(= coming together of people from diverse family tribes--each *oikos* having its own history, allegiances, property, family gods)
[some my german friends are making us all poor in not recognizing this, that similar people cannot bring a city into existence. city obliges people to think about and deal with others who have different
loyalties to (linguistic differences). Germany, lacking direct experience of others, because of lesser colonial encounters in its history, falls back on fearful fantasies with the new refugees coming. integration, a bad response to the problems of living with difference]
(Robert Putnam:) people who live in homogeneous local communities appear more sociably inclined towards and curious about others in the larger world : first- hand experience does not weaken stereotypes
-the case of Brussels: withdraw from neighbours who differ --> to hibernate
attitudes
actual behaviour
[*]cooperation: an exchange in which the participants benefit from the encounter
can be informal as well as formal: experience of mutual pleasure in a bar exchange gossip
difficult kind of cooperation: join people who:
•have separate or conflicting interests
•do not feel good about each other
•are unequal
•do not understand one another
•(different[...]
(56)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%33.8[...]of Brussels: withdraw from neighbours who differ --> to hibernate
attitudes
actual behaviour
[*]cooperation: an exchange in which the participants benefit from the encounter
can be informal as well as formal: experience of mutual pleasure in a bar exchange gossip
difficult kind of cooperation: join people who:
•have separate or conflicting interests
•do not feel good about each other
•are unequal
•do not understand one another
•(different faith communities)
}==> responsiveness as an ethical disposition
rituals of civility
as small as ‘please’ and ‘thank you,’ put abstract notions of mutual respect into practice
in the spirit of generosity, let's not write off the banker (or the Mullah) as a human being --> instead of “fuck you” how do we respond to our differences in a difficult social environment such as contemporary Iran --> what skills are needed for this hard cooperation? --Sennett--> dialogic
...................................
what remains from christianity after its self-deconstruction? (Nancy)
(what theology doesn't know about itself?) recovered from the repressive power of religion
Nancy's “shattered love” is the stuff of Hafez
#love (and greeting?) doesn't belong to the realm of giveable things
Lacan's definition of love consists in giving what one does not have, (filling emptiness with emptiness) --> to give something i ‘would’ have? --> (giving that which is not a property, not even one's self,) to give behind or beyond any subject, any self? --> *the giving of the fact that i cannot possess myself* ==> ‘to give' = 'to give up’
***love: to share the impossibility of being a self***
----> (Nancy's) ‘body’ (of political thought): not as an organicity, but of community as the living to share precisely an impossibility of being-in-common (=/= ontologize the community, after the death of God, Rousseau: community of mankind as the foundation of politics --> “man” comes from the “contract” and not reverse)
----> “giving” the (Derridean) ‘gift’ cannot succeed if the giver knows about his/her gift; *unpresentable*
--✕--> politics and the political always implies fulfillment, law, closed space, *closure*
(Pir's) heaven of value
(Bergson's) supplementary soul
there is a nihilistic way in which we destroy
“everything is political” =/= everything is directly ontologically political ==> totalitarianism: everything belongs to law --> make law about anything (--> Plato's political theology: thought is founded on something; - @Varinia, “management of justice”)
national aestheticism
over-educated ~=? brainwashed
[in my lectures i am trying to teach something (Heidegger, Sa'di, etc.) in ‘a cert[...]
(57)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%33.9[...]actice within the politics and epistemology of war crimes investigations
*cultural turn towards testimony* --> the speech of the witness
[?we are in the] era of the witness --> legitimized and validated victims
dramatic and emotional
trial: form of historical and political pedagogy
not merely to convict the accused but to “reach the hearts of men”
political agency of witnesses (survivors)
narrative in war crime investigations --> document ~= witness --> forensic approach
human remains are the kind of objects from which the trace of the subject cannot be fully removed
exhumation
examination
...................................
Mona is actually concerned with the separation of the spheres of ethics and knowledge
strength <--> “Gewalt” <--> valere <--> Vale <--> value*
vergüenza, a collective sentiment, of one's own dignity and self-esteem, shame
vergüenza ajena --> fremdschämen --> (one of the essential features of aidos/aidôs [αἰδώς]) the Greek personification of modesty
“bashfulness,” “diffidence,”
“respectful,” “reserved,” “revered,” --> vereor (or vereri): in religion, “to fear,” “to revere,” حرمت “to have respect or scruple for.” Vereor belongs to a family of words that derive from the Indo-European root ᵒswer-, meaning “pay attention,” like the Greek horan [ὁϱᾶν] (to look, pay attention, see)
one must take the path in exactly the opposite direction
(let's not be) persons con vergüenza : persons of honor, persons of their word. It is not so much that they keep their promises, but that they are bound by the word that they have given --> they commit to cumplire: “to carry out,” “to accomplish a mission,” [=/= “leaving your post,” Kafka]
vergüenza =/= to attack the community }-->? khashm خشم indignation: rupture of an implicit contract based on norms and conventions
the sentiment (and performance of Tarof in a weird way, and) of verguenza construct relations of social solidarity, the tie --> to give structure to the relationship to the gods (as well as that between persons) --> *aidos* becomes constitutive of shame civilization (that continues to mutate)
shame, sham, to “cover up” shameful parts
aischune[=/= *aidos* (==> *kleos* “fame”) defines the Homeric hero, aidos precisely identifies the definitive requirement of the hero, his “regard” for his philoi (φίλοι royal friend/advisor of the king) and his genos (γένος, social group claiming common descent)]: to dishonor [=/= beauty, in Plato] }--> to disfigure; tied to the body, and in the case of the female body --> blush, as in the sensitive plant
aidos (~= moderation [provoked by the regard and expectations of the other]) =/= *excess* [--> in my lectures i us[...]
(58)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%34.6[...] affect affect affect
affect ::{~body~}::
sensation --distribute--> affects & percepts (across bodies)
excitation (unleashes bodily organization at the site of contact) = zone of an *expressed threshold* =/= zone of contact
multispecies materialities --Grosz--> life folds over itself to embrace its contact with materiality
rabbit mammalizes light
glow: a dynamizing force ==> making matter more
Hayward: through [Alba's] glow, her artfulness, we are reminded that species are not just relationships, nor are species ever directly in relationship with other species, we are resonances and dissonances of intensification, energetic cadences of one another--a sensorial ensemble [<-- what marketing would say about this?]
space between scientific experimentation (biocultural) & domestic cohabitation (composition #Cinderella, pet) --evoke--> invisible labour of jellyfish, research on the proliferation and patterns of cancer cells and the sensation of somalumenality [Hayward's Alba]
(Anker > Hayward:) the chimera must be understood in a social context: these beasts have always reflected the social, scientific and religious circumstances <-- my project in zoological vandalism
(Hayward's neologism --> posthumanist repositioning of visuality) carnophallogocentric visual appetite
...glow (intensifying vision) drifts through the bodies of consumers
eating (ingesting and killing of) jellyfish usually takes the form of dried crisps sprinkled into salads and Chinese food
Cinderella's techne --> companion
Crusoe's techne --> human
-fictional kitchen where Cinderella works (and is not a master of)
[learning from] Cinderella (her room has been undone and remade by cohabitation with birds, mice, evil mother --> changing the self and adapting) ==> ontology: a practice of co-constitutive awareness
Alba --engineered--> to glow
pig --engineered--> to become sausage
...................................
Seymour
bad affect
(bad environmentalism's) respond to mainstream environmentalism + questioning its broader ideals of nature
=/= conventional environmental affect
both identify & respond to the aforementioned absurdities and ironies, through absurdity and irony + related affects and sensibilities:
•irreverence بى ادبى
•ambivalence
•camp
•frivolity هرزه
•indecorum بى نزاکتى
•awkwardness
•sardonicism زهر خنده
•perversity
•playfulness
•glee شاد شاد
affects and sensibilities typically associated with environmentalism:
•gloom
•doom
[...]
(59)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%35.4[...]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 the morning greeting ceremony
limits of endurance
i feld that i, because of my specific superiority as a member of Homo sapiens, together with my intensive technical training, was entitled to *pride of place* =/= being under observation
Mowat's humour =/= Derrida not laughing at his own worries (concerned with: what distinguish animals from man is their “being naked without knowing it”)
•naked body is a pretext, a pre-text for more philosophy
•Derrida is talking to his colleagues (the very people who are **seeking grandiose difference** <-- also artists) =/= a difference that happens to him
•(my problem with the old tiring trend in philosophy [after encounter with Manning]:) looking for locus of things [a generality] : talk about ‘the figure of the cat' = the allegory for all the cats on the earth (~ the felines that traverses our myths and religions, literature and fables)
***what the cat might actually be doing***
(this is my relation to description, what is the world, that cat, the demon, the mice up to? and use my best imaginative crafts and precise descriptive acts, the answers are many. that is not about definition or defining ‘what is’ the cat that visits me or the spider in my room. i only try to well define concepts and not subjects. my style of presenting my research on ajayeb bestiary: narrating the contingency of the differences that happened and mattered to me in particular =/= philosophy)
wolves (=/= nomadic roamer) have strong feelings of property rights and they ritually and regnd regularly mark their boundaries
what am i allowed to do with my body when i am with animals?
(Despret + Strum + Mowat) using one's body to make the animal respond (--> does this make sense with humans? in apass for example --?--> use your body to make them respond =/= react)
--Haraway--> a “good” (actually bad) scientist = learning to be invisible, like a rock to be unavailable, as if data-collecting humankind were not present, seeing the scene of nature close up through a peep-hole, remove from the subject animals’ social environment
•(ignoring animal social cues) imagining the baboons as seeing somebody off-category, not something --> to be a *nonentity* (tolerated but unobtrusive!!)
--> [*]distance: a cognitive and relational perspective {what kind of distance, aesop fables, Kelile Demne, or ajayeb takes or keeps?}
--> learn to be [*]polite: (in the ethical, political, and epistemological senses of the word) to re[...]
(60)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%36.8[...] mapping of senses, to change something into another form (+ its foreclosures, refusals, limits) = expressive excitation, provocation of difference that cannot be resolved by penetration or collapsed selves =/= interpenetration
border crossing: forces and excitations of location, of neighborhood
sensation: a composite of affects and percepts
personal =/= individual
Hayward's story is shaped by repression : a wish to be seen as she wants to be seen =/= Sina
story: act of violence and deception
medicalized legacy of transsexual's self-narrativizing --> synchronous field of wrong body-ness ==> account
accurate accounting =/= describe transitional sensations
described: formalistically detailed transpositional
post-animal: the afterward of the animal is meat
bumptious coherence of bodies
(neighborhoods) designed to make some vulnerable while others safe
percussed by bullets or by traffic
*threat as invitation*
جراحی زیبایی who alter themselves through surgeries and hormonoes *to feel themselves differently*
(shia in iran is islam after a cosmetic surgery to feel their religion differently)
*changing sex is about changing senses and species* @Foad
depending on my needs, i pretend not to understand
instrumentalization of animal life
surgically changing body
technique of eschew اجتناب
eschewing a nature or culture distinction
sex in pieces
spheres of imagination
[my work:] transhistorical diagnosis: reading in pieces neighborhoods of imagination (opposed to what is available)
#sleep-walking
web-building beasts (spiders) [webbing =/=? weaving: a feminine trope?] }--> expression of the body
my fleshy referent 🕷
over-reaching subjects
*spider's web ==propose==> home and territory are of and with the body*
spiders are scenes of arachnophobia and revultion
extending bodily substance through sexual transition
(arrangment of) sensorial milieu of the self + profusion of the world
(trope for fear as emancipation)
an urban designer
weaver of cityscapes
[*]web: skeletalization of the surface, extension of the surface affects of the spider, dynamic threshold of sensibility --Hayward--> (the body is strengthed) react through a spatial and temporal generativity --> body: inter- and intra-threadings of many sensuous vectors that relay like the spider in its web ~= cities, web-builders
*center of her web = her touch world*
-moves quickly, even uncannily, there/then not, sill/in motion, unsettling/reassuring (seems to trap only dust)
*lived-web = optic skin, a resounding connective tissue
[...]
(61)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%38[...]itality?***
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?
-what is the mood sounding the sacrificial death? (veneration?)
animal sacrifice has a long history in textual and oral forms of Hinduism (as do arguments against it)
آرامش قصاب
butcher's easy hospitality
slow time of sadism
#story
tribe of bonded laborer decide not to sacrifice animals. “what is the use of someone's untimely death causing another?” (and because goats are expensive nowadays). one summer all the brothers get together and call the deity. he possessed my father's brother's son. we said: “baba, we won't give you a goat. eat us if you must.” the spirit began to get angry. he said if i accept this for you, then others will do the same. (after negotiation) he accepted only from one person and not others. the issue is still unresolved.
religiously infused conscience
banality of secular cruelty
long-standing intimacy between violence and the sacred
#story
Nitin is jinn and no jinn wants to marry their daughter to someone who sells chicken for a living. Nitin has debilitating nightmares about dying chickens.
•poultry industry
•cage-free farming
(there is no “irreducible” ontological gap, disjuncture of temporality, ontological untranslatability, between:)
time of history/capital ~= time of the gods/ritual
both ritual and capital --involve--> exchange relations ==> unpredictable forms of movement (across domains)
•(show of being halal) recitation of kalma with the first bird and the last, assuming comprehensive coverage for the ones who fall between
•Skylard slaughterhouse building hospitals and temples
--> emotional, ritual, commercial traffic across sacred and profane
consumption of neighboring species
*cruelty as play*
(a less cultivated form of pleaser?)
deadended bird
ceased-but-not-killed mouse
not dead, not killed, but not quite a being either
the power to turn animals into things, as of they were never anything else
recognition of playful actually --Singh--> ethics of immanent obligation
([*]collaboration: interrupt each other's train of thought)
(dramatization of) agonistic intimacy : a relationship of proximity and violence between neighboring social groups (the body of neighboring species)
--Taussig--> ritual viol[...]
(62)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%38.6[...]ugh rope to carry too. so the rope is never enough, the linear connection, the closed chain of links, but the throwing stone can risk a disjunction between that mother->king->prisoner->darkness)
--> sending a guy into the pit is not typical for the cultures of Pleistocene: (using linear connection, darkness ~= unkown, and so on)
[Shepard] Prehistoric humans were autochthonous, that is, “native to their place.” (related to the earthly stone =/= fire that perpetually evacuates) (it is not that of the introvert stone and the extrovert fire, but the opposite, stone was social and fire allied interiority, it sent/banished the subject to the land of the mediated, ‘from now on you are coming from mediation.’ (Where the subject comes from? it comes from the mediation.) --> use me --> industrialize with me --> technologize with me --> stone-tech are 1.5 million years earlier than fire-tech --> with stone you can't reach the sky but by controlling combustion you can go up ==> alienation as the touchstone of humankind --> then comes the “reflective consciousness” of humankind --> and later the invention of the very strange object: the mirror [---> go to amazon#2DifficultForests] ==> a change in the “structure of existence” --> then the idea of “selftranscendence” by monotheist religions --> adventures of power and ideology --> then a very bad idea called “history” was introduced---an active, psychological force that separates humankind from the rest of nature because of its disregard for the deep connections to the past.[Shepard 2004] --- Lévi-Strauss points out, historical thought is analytical and concerned with continuity and “closing gaps and dissolving differences” to the point that it “transcends original discontinuity.”)
[in east mirror was never used as mean to self reflect, rather it was weaponized agains evil, although this evil was female and men used mirror to defeat it. unlike the western thought since the greeks in the Narcissus story where mirror is the foundation of self-absorbance and knowledge and madness, the easterns since they did not posses the same brand of selfhood they found mirror strange and uttelized it in curious ways, another optical problem ---> go to mirror and the laughing snake - mar-e ghahghahezan, img]
...through the speaking fire, events “on earth” were finished except for a final judgment by fire --> invention of sin, spiritual existence : selftranscendence. anthropoce separating themselves from earth and its processes
-‘essence’, ‘appearance’, and ‘change’ became sources of anxiety
-other forms of life are now irrelevant to humans
-from now on “you cannot be two things, in two places, or in two times, at once.” , no more overlapping identity ==> alienation from (the domains of) nonhuman life
-the “Persian” new mind, (intanced by fire,) divided the world into material creation and infinite spirit that would shape the philosophy of the civilized world. (Shepard 2004)
[...]
(63)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%40.1[...]'dud,’ smoke as your ancestery. a telling-smoke was your inheritence, your grandpa. same in Latin: ‘focus’ means both fire-place and ancestral
ether --> azar --> atash
fire = (institutional?)-order ~ justice = law =/= nondialectic
the order of fire =/= agonism [positivly channeled disagreement]
the order of fire is a materialist conception of history, that fire eventually purifies and leave no reason but the reason of harmonious ~= consensus, the ubiquitous Übereinstimmung of fire
athletisism of Shahnameh and fire-trial (contest oriented toward victory of defeat; transcendence, truth, and growth are generated from the outcome of the contest;) is exactly the cancelation of an agonistic notion of defeat (in Shahnameh: dishonor = defeat --> the defeated = the monster, the ‘Div’)
‘agon’ in Latin literaly means arena of competition, the scene of contest--meydan? what would be (the instrumental) relation to the mode of destruction in Shahnameh's kind of fire?
Indo-Iranian register of fire worship (around 1500 BC)
-fire burns (ever) upwards
(Sadeh festival, Shahnameh, Iran)
-Sadeh: fire-related festivals celebrated throughout Greater Iran and date back to when Zoroastrianism was still the predominant religion of the region. (Wikipedia)
Lindsey Collins [on intersection of illness and landscape]
wilderness therapy (in cancer activism)
a feminist and still-growing therapeutic model, slow wilderness, in which risk is made manageable and contained, and fast and risky aesthetics, coded as masculine, are traded for ecofeminist tropes of mutuality, nurturing, and femininity
-recovery climbers actively make permeable bodies ==> ecologies
“recovery climbs = embodied practices of resilience + interrelation” =/= survivorship narrative
(for Woolf) illness: emergence of new landscape (you discover “wastes and deserts” and “obdurate oaks,” more so than a mere subtraction from or attenuation of life)
fire's dictatorship in Siyavash story, a fire's aspect as instituted social order
*trial by fire
trial by mountain [~= rock] (slow wilderness) -- suffering and healing in difficult landscapes (Lindsey Collins - phd) -->{climbing mountain peaks and summits figures as a journey similar to a struggle with disease --- wilderness therapy creates what she calls a **slow wilderness,** in which risk is made manageable and contained, and fast and risky aesthetics, coded as masculine, are traded for ecofeminist tropes of mutuality, nurturing, and femininity. -- it is about making permeable bodies (+and landscapes through their interactions.) --- climb: embodied practices of resilience and interrelation ==> a different ecological model: working with the limits and obstacles that illness brings =/= repudiating illness in favor of ***survivorship narratives***} --> there is a mom[...]
(64)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%40.5[...]nside its fanned shell, a sea scallop can tell which way is up.
crane your neck. worm your way. wolf it down. monkey with things. outfox your foe. quit badgering your tax attorney.
take notes on the deagness of coral, the pea-size heart of a bat. be meticulous. we will need these things so that we may speak.
the human mind is the child of primate evolution and our complex fluid interactions with environment and one another. animals have enrished this social intelligence. they give concrete expression to thoughts and images. they carry the outside world to our inner one and back again. they helped language flower into metaphor, symbol, and ritual. we once sang and danced them, made music from their skin, sinew, and bone. their stories came off our tongues. we ate them. they ate us.
close attention to mollusks and frigate birds and wolves makes us aware ont only of our own human identity but also of how much more there is, an assertion of our imperfect hunger for mystery. ‘without mystery life shrinks,’ wrote biologist Edward O. Wilson. ‘the completely known is a numbing void to all active minds.’”
(Meloy, Eating Stone p142-143)
...................................
Jacobsen on ancient mesopotamian
*religion = response*
[*]numinous: a unique experience of *confrontation with power* not of this world, confrontation with a ‘wholly other’
--> terrifying, demonic dread, awe, sublime majesty, fascinating, demanding unconditional allegiance, etc.
*positive human response [in thought (myth, theology) + in action (culd, worship)] ==> religion*
metaphor: human psychological reaction to the experience [of numinous] by means of analogy
-in metaphors all that is shared by the worshipers of an individual culture or cultural period in their common response to the numinous is summed and crystallized
-choice of central metaphor: wants to recapture and transmit, the primary meaning on which it builds, which underlines and determines the *total character of its response* = the total character of its religion
-major religious metaphors of the ancient mesopotamians have a double nature as pointing beyond themselves to things not of this world & yet being and remaining very much of the world
in attempting to interpret religious metaphors, one must seek to bring out as fully as possible its *powers to suggest and recall* the numinous
-to one generations is fresh and powerful may be to another seem old and trite
suggestiveness =/= representaive of its period --> literalness: attention to human purposes and values ==> [flase] sense that all has been explained and understood
human's recognition of dependency upon power not of this world --> religious expressino = transcendent hope and trust (=/= Nietzsche)
*(mesopotamian) numinous = immanence (in feature of confronta[...]
(65)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%41.8[...]r />
•choose
“No god went by, why are my muscles paralyzed” (Gilgamesh) --> ‘god = paralyzing fear’
uncannily good luck
sudden realization of having come to harm
numinous power experienced in sudden illness
*no allegiance was invented* ==> no cult developed
they are gloomy, their shadow dark,
no light is in their bodies,
ever they slink along covertly,
walk not upright,
from their claws drips bitter gall,
their footprints are (full of) evil venom.
(from [more primitive?]) dread --to--> fascination
the shivers and chills (of death)
that fritter the sun of things,
spawn of the god of heavens,
spawned on an evil spirit,
the death warrants, beloved sons of the storm god,
born of the queen of the netherworld,
who were torn out of heaven and hurled from the earth as castoffs,
are creatures of hell, all
we are not determined, we are engendered
numinous as immanent --> external habituation: inviting (or magically enforcing) the presence of the power within
efforts of such habituation:
•cult dramatic
•fashioning or appropriate divine images
•religious literature
•temples
*cult drama: the form fills with its content*
literally re-present god, presenting his external form, (bring about the god's presence through ritual representation of him) --> beneficent results for the community [--> still works today]
•sacred marriage
•yearly lamentations
•battle drama (primeval contest for world order against the forces of chaos)
fashioning of images (of the god) --> to achive lasting presence
poetry: means of invoking the presence of powers [--> we are doing this still?! bad poetry]
creative power of the word underlines all mesopotamian (religious) literature
◾works of praise
•works of lament (specialized lamentation-priest @Sana, Ali )
*lament: influencing and swaying the divine heart by reminding the god of past happiness, rather than by magically recreating that past*
(mesopotamian:) *temple = house*
(implication between) the divine owner and his house --> emotional closeness of a human owner and his home + the *closeness of essence* (of being) --amounting--> to embodiment =/= habituation
--> house = temple = representation of the power that is meant to fill it
(similar to human dwelling) ***house = temple = the place where the owner could be found (or felt)***
--> that god (the owner) was present and available
the god's retainers --> because the temple was god's home, was not only near and approachable, he was involved with the fortunes of the community and commited ti maintaining it --> *mesopotamian temple was profoundly awesome* (it carried aw[...]
(71)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%42[...]ter the sun of things,
spawn of the god of heavens,
spawned on an evil spirit,
the death warrants, beloved sons of the storm god,
born of the queen of the netherworld,
who were torn out of heaven and hurled from the earth as castoffs,
are creatures of hell, all
we are not determined, we are engendered
numinous as immanent --> external habituation: inviting (or magically enforcing) the presence of the power within
efforts of such habituation:
•cult dramatic
•fashioning or appropriate divine images
•religious literature
•temples
*cult drama: the form fills with its content*
literally re-present god, presenting his external form, (bring about the god's presence through ritual representation of him) --> beneficent results for the community [--> still works today]
•sacred marriage
•yearly lamentations
•battle drama (primeval contest for world order against the forces of chaos)
fashioning of images (of the god) --> to achive lasting presence
poetry: means of invoking the presence of powers [--> we are doing this still?! bad poetry]
creative power of the word underlines all mesopotamian (religious) literature
•works of praise
•works of lament (specialized lamentation-priest @Sana, Ali )
*lament: influencing and swaying the divine heart by reminding the god of past happiness, rather than by magically recreating that past*
(mesopotamian:) *temple = house*
(implication between) the divine owner and his house --> emotional closeness of a human owner and his home + the *closeness of essence* (of being) --amounting--> to embodiment =/= habituation
--> house = temple = representation of the power that is meant to fill it
(similar to human dwelling) ***house = temple = the place where the owner could be found (or felt)***
--> that god (the owner) was present and available
the god's retainers --> because the temple was god's home, was not only near and approachable, he was involved with the fortunes of the community and commited ti maintaining it --> *mesopotamian temple was profoundly awesome* (it carried awesome aura, awesome or angry nimbus هاله)
-the temple was covered with loveliness
-the god's private apartment shrouded in darkness : the dark room (no eye is to see)
--> specific closeness of essence + the power inhabiting it
authoritative revelation
know what was “the proper thing”
house mountain
house rising sun
house causing light
he who issues forth from the thriving...
ancient =? ancient to us ~=? ancient to them
there is no living cultural tradition that connects us with mesopotamia
immediate unanalyzed total reactions (?)
[...]
(72)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%42[...]man dwelling) ***house = temple = the place where the owner could be found (or felt)***
--> that god (the owner) was present and available
the god's retainers --> because the temple was god's home, was not only near and approachable, he was involved with the fortunes of the community and commited ti maintaining it --> *mesopotamian temple was profoundly awesome* (it carried awesome aura, awesome or angry nimbus هاله)
-the temple was covered with loveliness
-the god's private apartment shrouded in darkness : the dark room (no eye is to see)
--> specific closeness of essence + the power inhabiting it
authoritative revelation
know what was “the proper thing”
house mountain
house rising sun
house causing light
he who issues forth from the thriving...
ancient =? ancient to us ~=? ancient to them
there is no living cultural tradition that 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[...]
(73)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%42.1[...] weather was kindled by reports reaching Europe from the East and West Indies about hitherto unknown meteorological phenomena عجایب
orderly majesty of God ==> encyclopedism about the universe + an analogue of a memory system
Jean Bodin
firm believer in and opponent of demonic magic
theater of the whole nature universe naturae theatrum
reason of wind (ratio ventorum):
•sun
•impulse (impulsus) of the angels or demons
sphere of sacrobosco
De sphaera mundi
(On the Sphere of the World, pre-Copernican astronomy)
...our sublunar world
gunpowder theory of thunder ⛈
compact earthly matter from underground whose expansion with expansion so fast that it moves large masses of air, like “salniter in fire or gunpowder which has caught fire”
visualization
making air visible
inverted glass experiment
linking thermal expansion & contraction of pure air to wind formation (Cardano)
(under the influence of) celestial fire ==> air (could become alive and active) acquiring motive force
on the transmutations of air
(typical of 16th century) steering the religious significance of the study of nature
spirit: a cosmic subtle substance, both recipient + vehicle of celestial influences ==allow==> elements to transmute into each other (+ meteorological phenomena)
(Drebbel’s favourite cosmic spirit:) fire = clearest of all elements ad top of the hierarchical order of elements (fire, air, water, earth), clarifying the other elements [such as Siavash]
(for Della Porta:) meteorological phenomena = transmutations of the air (in literal sense)
air becoming thinner or thicker ==rise==> winds, thunder, clouds, rain, snow, linking heaven + earth + bringing life to all animated creatures
(Della Porta conceived of) d of) wind in vitalistic terms
...winds rising up from the mouth of the retort (boiling water)
how heat endowed air with motive force
(Drebbel presenting to the public) perpetuum mobile : expansion and contraction of air (which he claimed) demonstrated the force behind all movement and life
weatherglass (+ aeolipila) --demonstrated--> ****highly nontrivial natural phenomena**** (transformation of energy from heat into mechanical motion)
(ajayeb’s) theory about the origins of the wind
Galileo --> earth's rotation ==> (<--evidence--) wind
Bacon --> exhalations together with air [rarefaction and expansion of air / exhalation drawn up by sun] ==> wind
Fludd (meteorological cosmica) --> wind: principal meteorological phenomenon (princeps meteororum) and closest to God
“wind is an aerial spirit, of middle consistence, inspired or animated by the breath of Iehova, which he extracts from [...]
(74)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%42.5[...]eous
*genes tease out a form out of an active flesh
(genes ~) replicators began not only merely to exist, but to construct for themselves containers, vehicles for their continues existence.
-how these “replicators” created constructs out of flesh and bone ---> then how did ‘self’ emerged in this?
(layers)
genotype .../.../.../.../... phenotype
| | |
info coded | self organizing | adaptive traits
into genes | processes (stable) | of a plant / animal
human gene is variable du to: {1-ecosystem 2-taboos}
(ancient) migrations : vehicle for the mechanism of evolution that today is producing the greatest evolutionary effect, allowing the incorporation of new genes into established gene pools, enhancing intrapopulation and reducing interpopulation variability.
[leas normative and binding] to other cultures <-- culture --> to the same culture [central to society]
strata = reproductive niche
(niche : adjusted timing and quality)
hierarchy building = {-homogenization (by a sorting process) -consolidation (through coding into legal, religious, and other formal regulations)}
limits of bounded rationality (عقل معاش aghle ma'ash?)
(Bounded rationality is the idea that in decision-making, rationality of individuals is limited by the information they have, the cognitive limitations of their minds, and the finite amount of time they have to make a decision.)
--> for example soil loss, due to careless exploitation of the forests’ resources has been a constant threat to urban centers throughout history. most urban civilization were able to pass their genes for only seventy generations before they ran out of soil ---> although some material and energy flows can be “socialized” (submitted to cultural control), in practice many are not.
(my interest and work on hayula is about:) the creative morphologies that have always resided outside the (west versus east) homoestatic text of the self and other
...................................
contemporary US film bestiary <==
•EC comics --> popular weird fantasy, horror science fiction
•creepy magazine
•the twilight zone --> horror, science fiction, suspense, comedy
•film noir --> flawed character hero <== german expressinonist cinematography
•cryptozoology (adventure)
...................................
division's of life
-monolithic notion of the mind has been challanged by psychology and phenomenology
biology has been previously essentially zoocentric --> monolithic notion of the body --> medically proper animal body =/= if we zoom in the living canvas[...]
(75)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%43.7[...] such) =/= authoritarian discourse
@Inga
--> ***a brief moment, a world where the difference between chiefs (leader-like speaker, am i like that in my performance lectures?) and nonchiefs (listeners, his children) can be effective***
xxxxxx
...................................
theory (is either): *powerful* (accounting for a limited number of features valid for a great number of cases) {extensionally oriented, for example comparative or statistical analysis} =/= *expressive* (accounting for a great number of features belonging to a limited number of cases) {intentionally oriented, for example clinical case studies}
extensional --> generalizing
‘ethnography ==> reduction of complexity’ =/= complexity is precisely what characterizes ethnography
counterintuitive ==give==> representation its psychological salience
the experience of dreaming is full of counterintuitive representations (rapidly forgotten)
counterintuitive context of ritual communication --> successful propagation of a representation (memorable)
for example recitation of shamanistic chants --construct--> an acoustic mask =/= convey meaningful message
for religion (and marketing?) culturally successful representation : *a counterintuitive representation formulated within counterintuitive conditions of communication*
}--Severi--> we need a more expressive theory of cultural propagation (<-- my try in telegram bestiary text)
doctrinal (semantic memory) and imagistic (episodic memory) religious modes
(how to better be understand the contemporary art's drive to) *ritual communication* --> performed through both action & speech
•the context: establishment of a particular form of interaction (from a series of contradictory connotations, being two things at the same time --> symbolic transformation) ==construct==> a special identity of the participants
--> xxxx جمع گرایانه syncretistic movement @apass (used as an instrument of resistance?)
messianism = intense propagation + paradoxical identification
--> convert entire populations in a short amount of time
pragmatics of communication --> appearance of a paradoxical “I” personified by the prophet
(warrior shaman messiah's) contradictory self-definition ==able==> enunciate paradoxical statements
--Severi--> to be faithful to the local tradition
Appache --> opposition to Christianity take the firm of conceptualizing Christianity as a different religion
•absorbing but not understanding the elements (of Christian religion) ~= being impressed by story {<-- i do this in my artistic work but i don't ask for devotion or trust}
--> using typical imagistic methods, ritual of dance
the old man Arnold
[...]
(76)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%44.4[...]hin counterintuitive conditions of communication*
}--Severi--> we need a more expressive theory of cultural propagation (<-- my try in telegram bestiary text)
doctrinal (semantic memory) and imagistic (episodic memory) religious modes
(how to better be understand the contemporary art's drive to) *ritual communication* --> performed through both action & speech
•the context: establishment of a particular form of interaction (from a series of contradictory connotations, being two things at the same time --> symbolic transformation) ==construct==> a special identity of the participants
--> xxxx جمع گرایانه syncretistic movement @apass (used as an instrument of resistance?)
messianism = intense propagation + paradoxical identification
--> convert entire populations in a short amount of time
pragmatics of communication --> appearance of a paradoxical “I” personified by the prophet
(warrior shaman messiah's) contradictory self-definition ==able==> enunciate paradoxical statements
--Severi--> to be faithful to the local tradition
Appache --> opposition to Christianity take the firm of conceptualizing Christianity as a different religion
•absorbing but not understanding the elements (of Christian religion) ~= being impressed by story {<-- i do this in my artistic work but i don't ask for devotion or trust}
--> using typical imagistic methods, ritual of dance
the old man Arnold
chant (ritual symbolism) -->
•treat illness
•accompany rite of passage
•impart magical powers
-
(amerindian) shamanism --> establishes a metaphorical link, a set of analogies ~= mystical relationships between ritual objects and living being [--> construct its own truthuniverse, supernatural dimension thought of a possible world]
bleeding pearl
parallelism : (a technique of) threading verbal images together
[Severi's early interpretation of] tradition (would need to) preserve the text + instructions to use --by--> verbalizing them (store them in the chant)
Kuna --> description of the position of the speaker (“shaman is now seated there and is saying...”) characterizes the special kind of communication (appropriate for ritual changing)
shaman: novel sort of enunciator (lending his voice to other invisible beings --> plural and contradictory identity)
acoustic mask: a reflexive means to define the ritual identity of the speaker
reflexive application of parallelism
(@Isabel, how to make community without becoming a cult?)
use snake --> capture the imagination of the followers ==> authority
imagistic (iconic mode, sequence of acid) + doctrinal (discursive mode, text, prayer) = pragmatics context [...]
(78)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%44.4[...]/>
(amerindian) shamanism --> establishes a metaphorical link, a set of analogies ~= mystical relationships between ritual objects and living being [--> construct its own truthuniverse, supernatural dimension thought of a possible world]
bleeding pearl
parallelism : (a technique of) threading verbal images together
[Severi's early interpretation of] tradition (would need to) preserve the text + instructions to use --by--> verbalizing them (store them in the chant)
Kuna --> description of the position of the speaker (“shaman is now seated there and is saying...”) characterizes the special kind of communication (appropriate for ritual changing)
shaman: novel sort of enunciator (lending his voice to other invisible beings --> plural and contradictory identity)
acoustic mask: a reflexive means to define the ritual identity of the speaker
reflexive application of parallelism
(@Isabel, how to make community without becoming a cult?)
use snake --> capture the imagination of the followers ==> authority
imagistic (iconic mode, sequence of acid) + doctrinal (discursive mode, text, prayer) = pragmatics context of enunciation ==> messianistic religion
both paradoxical & parallelistic
new ways to be faithful...
...................................
exhibition-making and preventive conservation --> inspection and exposition <-- (different understandings and use of) *touch = curatorial*
professionalisation of curating
short-term education
cultural exchange
@apass feedback: (terrain of) peer engagement --> understanding each other’s practices
education, research, literacy, management, networking, custodianship, audience development
research (overdue) relationship with intelligence --✕--> **research: adventurventure of charismas**
...to be migratory (in thought, praxis, community)
...subjectivities without a heritage in criticality and art
constraint: a source of self-abundance --Renan--> suffering and risk = opportunities to hybridize with life
curating:
•nutrition and extension
•analysis and transplantation
•=/= content historicization
•=/= data
extraterritoriality
being collocated in all the whispers of the world
wild pollination
artificial breeding
Renan: Institutional work carried by a freelancer, a private individual or a civil servant can improve the publicness of art. It gives confidence to the work of art in public service. This institutionality creates new tasks in art that can be sustained by other practitioners.
@apass
...................................
publication of the miracle
[the miraculous [...]
(80)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%44.5[...]h
Ute Hörner
Peter Friedrich Stephan
////////////////////
i am using these spaces basically as their potential for being a host for something else, rather than pointing their pure site specificity.
my work has worked (for me?) whenever it was an intervention to/for its objecthood as a being-in-art-form or for my own fantasies. the problem/matter of exhibition.
the theoretical work would base on reading shyness as for a philosophical opening for the practical part of the diploma that comes afterward. By this way of writing i operate myself, breaking free from the process of offering philosophical evidence.
•Maulwurfe in the Moschee (shit on the head looks like Turban(!), about action and taking the action and getting the call, over doing of anything, revenge program, revelation to other's transmission, talking about shit in a mosque, etc.)
•king lear in the Hochzeitssalon (space for speech act, ritual, marriage of daughters, etc.)
•islam intro in the Biologie Zentrum Uni Köln (hygiene in islam, work on memory relation to research, reciting Koran brings the dead as witness, etc.)
////////////////////
shyness is prescribed for woman, it exists in religion as a female virtue
thinking in yoga posing (thinking, thanking), the thanking pose and the always thinking pose in yoga.
intervention is not always attacking the other-as-stupid, but rather how do you perform your intervention in that sense that is that YOU are stupid before the other
the moment of madness in encountering art, understanding has to go through that madness
i am going to have a smooth transition from my amazon project to my diplom, via animal talk?
--> ‘face’ in performance. (read Haraway, Levinas, Derrida)
face is linked to sensibility and vision in an intimate way. something that resists categorization, containment or comprehension, infinitely foreign. it is not the biological face. it is the idea of infinity within oneself. this idea of infinity which the face encapsulates is for Levinas the key means by which thought is brought into relation with what goes beyond its capacity. and this is crucial in art and specifically in performance art for encountering something such as face, face of the performer or the face of the work. the face is perceived as something that resists possession or utilization. the face promotes a discourse when it invites me. (ranting against sober means of communication). the face to face situation founds language.
presence of the face coming from beyond the world , but committing me to human fraternity (Gemeinschaft) does not overwhelm me as a numinous essence arousing fear and trembling. to be in relationship while absolving oneself from this relation is ‘to speak’. the face always speaks directly and absolutely to me.
many[...]
(81)[...notes/notes Personen.txt]%44.7[...]ven substantive remains such as buildings and historical sites must be ‘read,’ i.e. located in a context of verbal recognition and placement, before they assume real presence.
...................................
(notes - december 15, 2011)
•Robots making Robots
•what a robot wants (and how it wants it)
•cataloging computer generated stones smoke
•digital to digital convertor
•physical interaction (between a user and a media object, pressing a button, choosing a link, moving the body) versus psychological interaction (the psychological processes of filling-in, hypothesis forming, recall and identification, which are required for us to comprehend any text or image at all)
•Mechanical Monsters
•blown away roof
•Technology: the new nature
•-error and - horror(-terror)
•edge of the earth
•gold and dream, gold price and power law
•the story of the viewer
◦fact and perspective (elucidation)
•love at first sight (digital)
•continual production of the new is what allows things to stay the same, (logic of the same)
•noise story
•the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium (McLuhan)
•The mediation of religion through buildings
•start with metaphor and end with algebra
•a “model” is a system of objects (any kind of objects) that make all of the sentences in a theory true , where a “theory” is a list of sentences in a language.
•metaphors somehow mobilize the difference between the two domains
•arena of alienation
•Cut the Noise
•mirrors with (/without) memories
•substitutability
•optical appearances (mind ~ eye)
•Dioptrics (science of refraction), catoptrics (reflection),
•that could not be spoken of or represented, because it was empty of discourse and thus of meaning.
•innocence of the eye
•Poor Unfortunfortunate Souls
•being useful, like a prison guard
•autopoetic (complex self-referential systems)
•to take up the motives from the external world
•will-less perception, “the pure eye of genius”
•bringing from the artificial world to the art world
•object oriented programming / subject oriented
•Observer, system and environment
•a system (designed) with a purpose of itself
•magnifying or light-collecting optical device
•social selfish
•un-computational
•gray area
•self-identity is bad visual system
•Vision requires instruments of vision; an optics is a politics of positioning. Instruments of vision mediate standpoints;
•Identity, including self-identity, does not produce science; critical positioning does, that is, objectivity
•docile body
•technological visioning (vector of secret texts, books within books, ancient curses, digital dreams, and medi[...]
(82)[...notes/notes Personen.txt]%45.7[...] what is the forest made of is the matter of negotiation (between the different kinds of beings who think differently about the forest)
in order not to neutralise the forest to culture (cultural history as an explanatory priority to the historically contingent circumstances) we can propose two questions of older critique of perspectival perception:
1. that the body accounts for perspective (?)
2. representation is exclusively mental (?)
of course both questions are phenomenological positions, but that does not mean that we no longer need representation to understand relationality. (Konh words)
needing or not needing representation to understand relationality
...................................
(Latour)
not a philosophical argument, but a cabinet of curiosities assembled by “friends of interpretable objects”
... not an encyclopedic undertaking ... we have chosen only those sites, objects, and situations where there is ambiguity, a hesitation, an iconoclash on how to interpret image-making and image-breaking. (going to sites or objects where there is ambiguity, hesitation)
(the exhibition is not about recollecting truth or objectivity)
christian religious paintings that do not try to show anything but, on the contrary, to obscure the vision.
redirecting the attention away from the image to the prototype (Platonism run mad?) -- redirecting of attention to another image
are we really going to spend another century naively re-destroying and deconstructing images that are so intelligently and subtly destroyed already?
do we really have to spend another century alternating violently between constructivism and realism, between artificiality and authenticity?
science deserves better than naive worship and naive contempt. its regime of invisibility is uplifting as that of religion and art. the subtlety of its traces requires a new form of care and attention.
(we need new forms of attention)
the more artifactual the inscription, the better its ability to connect, to ally with others, to generate even better objectivity (Kinect?)
Kinect recordings as ethnography?
how to escape from the tyranny of “simply objective”, “purely representative” quasi-scientific illustrations? Freeing one's gaze from this dual obligation accounts....
religious icons and their obsession for real presence
they have never been about presenting something other than absence
scientific imagery
no isolated scientific image has any mimetic power; there is nothing less representational, less figurative, than the pictures produced by science, which are nonetheless said to give us the best grasp of the visible world.
...................................
is Aruz (عروض) interface?[...]
(83)[...notes/notes.txt]%48.4[...]tation to understand relationality
...................................
(Latour)
not a philosophical argument, but a cabinet of curiosities assembled by “friends of interpretable objects”
... not an encyclopedic undertaking ... we have chosen only those sites, objects, and situations where there is ambiguity, a hesitation, an iconoclash on how to interpret image-making and image-breaking. (going to sites or objects where there is ambiguity, hesitation)
(the exhibition is not about recollecting truth or objectivity)
christian religious paintings that do not try to show anything but, on the contrary, to obscure the vision.
redirecting the attention away from the image to the prototype (Platonism run mad?) -- redirecting of attention to another image
are we really going to spend another century naively re-destroying and deconstructing images that are so intelligently and subtly destroyed already?
do we really have to spend another century alternating violently between constructivism and realism, between artificiality and authenticity?
science deserves better than naive worship and naive contempt. its regime of invisibility is uplifting as that of religion and art. the subtlety of its traces requires a new form of care and attention.
(we need new forms of attention)
the more artifactual the inscription, the better its ability to connect, to ally with others, to generate even better objectivity (Kinect?)
Kinect recordings as ethnography?
how to escape from the tyranny of “simply objective”, “purely representative” quasi-scientific illustrations? Freeing one's gaze from this dual obligation accounts....
religious icons and their obsession for real presence
they have never been about presenting something other than absence
scientific imagery
no isolated scientific image has any mimetic power; there is nothing less representational, less figurative, than the pictures produced by science, which are nonetheless said to give us the best grasp of the visible world.
...................................
is Aruz (عروض) interface? surface/face and meaning/inhalt/content dualism in Tasavof, Rumi breakings of Aruz. Tsavof believes that only through appearance one can get into the depth
science, religion, and politics all three take for granted an image of nature.
...................................
(Peter Galison, in iconoclash)
wanting to know with eyes-open
it was by way of intuition “that the mathematical world remains In contact with the real world; and even though pure mathematics could do without it, it is always necessary to come back to intuition to bridge the abyss which separates symbol from reality.”
[...]
(84)[...notes/notes.txt]%48.4[...]ition is not about recollecting truth or objectivity)
christian religious paintings that do not try to show anything but, on the contrary, to obscure the vision.
redirecting the attention away from the image to the prototype (Platonism run mad?) -- redirecting of attention to another image
are we really going to spend another century naively re-destroying and deconstructing images that are so intelligently and subtly destroyed already?
do we really have to spend another century alternating violently between constructivism and realism, between artificiality and authenticity?
science deserves better than naive worship and naive contempt. its regime of invisibility is uplifting as that of religion and art. the subtlety of its traces requires a new form of care and attention.
(we need new forms of attention)
the more artifactual the inscription, the better its ability to connect, to ally with others, to generate even better objectivity (Kinect?)
Kinect recordings as ethnography?
how to escape from the tyranny of “simply objective”, “purely representative” quasi-scientific illustrations? Freeing one's gaze from this dual obligation accounts....
religious icons and their obsession for real presence
they have never been about presenting something other than absence
scientific imagery
no isolated scientific image has any mimetic power; there is nothing less representational, less figurative, than the pictures produced by science, which are nonetheless said to give us the best grasp of the visible world.
...................................
is Aruz (عروض) interface? surface/face and meaning/inhalt/content dualism in Tasavof, Rumi breakings of Aruz. Tsavof believes that only through appearance one can get into the depth
science, religion, and politics all three take for granted an image of nature.
...................................
(Peter Galison, in iconoclash)
wanting to know with eyes-open
it was by way of intuition “that the mathematical world remains In contact with the real world; and even though pure mathematics could do without it, it is always necessary to come back to intuition to bridge the abyss which separates symbol from reality.”
...................................
(Dipesh Chakrabarty)
(history of nature?) the nature of history as a form of knowledge
(Croce essay 1893 history subsumed under the concept of art) Croce drew on the writings of Ernst Mach and Henri Poincare to argue that “the concepts of the natural sciences are human constructs elaborated for human purposes.” “when we peer into nature, we find only ourselves” we do not “understand ourselves best as part of the natural world” (is that not the image of Narcissu[...]
(85)[...notes/notes.txt]%48.4[...]han naive worship and naive contempt. its regime of invisibility is uplifting as that of religion and art. the subtlety of its traces requires a new form of care and attention.
(we need new forms of attention)
the more artifactual the inscription, the better its ability to connect, to ally with others, to generate even better objectivity (Kinect?)
Kinect recordings as ethnography?
how to escape from the tyranny of “simply objective”, “purely representative” quasi-scientific illustrations? Freeing one's gaze from this dual obligation accounts....
religious icons and their obsession for real presence
they have never been about presenting something other than absence
scientific imagery
no isolated scientific image has any mimetic power; there is nothing less representational, less figurative, than the pictures produced by science, which are nonetheless said to give us the best grasp of the visible world.
...................................
is Aruz (عروض) interface? surface/face and meaning/inhalt/content dualism in Tasavof, Rumi breakings of Aruz. Tsavof believes that only through appearance one can get into the depth
science, religion, and politics all three take for granted an image of nature.
...................................
(Peter Galison, in iconoclash)
wanting to know with eyes-open
it was by way of intuition “that the mathematical world remains In contact with the real world; and even though pure mathematics could do without it, it is always necessary to come back to intuition to bridge the abyss which separates symbol from reality.”
...................................
(Dipesh Chakrabarty)
(history of nature?) the nature of history as a form of knowledge
(Croce essay 1893 history subsumed under the concept of art) Croce drew on the writings of Ernst Mach and Henri Poincare to argue that “the concepts of the natural sciences are human constructs elaborated for human purposes.” “when we peer into nature, we find only ourselves” we do not “understand ourselves best as part of the natural world” (is that not the image of Narcissus who looks into the nature and can only see himself--nature observation as mirror stage)
so as Roberts puts it “Croce proclaimed that there is no world but the human world, then took over the central doctrine of Vico that we can know the human world because we have made it.”
Croce's idealism “does not mean that rocks, for example, ‘don't exist’ without human beings to think about them. apart from human concern and language, they neither exist nor do not exist, since ‘exist’ is a human concept that has meaning only within a context of human concerns and purposes” (not saying human symbolic system of thought)
man environment did change b[...]
(86)[...notes/notes.txt]%48.5[...]t the evil eye is precisely so powerful and real because of its ability to name the uncanny event of encounter. “Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic.”[12]
[Serres]
does experimentation, in art science, excludes subjectivity? More the importance of experiment on self. Returning the aim back to knowledge, instead of the division of knowledge. Our subjectivity is not an illusion to be overcomed, but that is another part of reality.
Displacement on the space of myth. Myth informs science.
To know is to navigate between local fragments of space , to reject techniques of classification and separation, to implement a philosophy of transport to counter the dogmatism of united and systematic knowledge.
...the itinerary traces the transmission, transformation, and multiplication of messages through diverse spaces of communication.
The spatial language of the writing of the world, geography, language of paths, movements, marks the moment of passage towards a new epistemology.
World is the space of your inscription, scientists. To read and to journey are the one and same act.
Fantastic flow of myth. The sacred and the religious words are spoken at the same time and in the same breath as those of science and of journeys.
Two speakers, united against the phenomenon of interference and confusion. Who's stake is in interrupting communication? The above interlocutors are on the same side, far from the dialogical game.
Demin includes himself in the circuit, blurs the message, renders it unintelligible, and exactly by that assures transmission. Parasite produces by the way of disorder a more complex order.
..penetrative grasp of a text, discovery and recreative apprehension of it life-forms, is impossible to paraphrase or systematize.
..temporal and local settings of one's text. (to master it?)
to read X, is literally, to ‘prepare’ to read X
in certain civilizations there comes epochs in which syntax stiffens...
Changing landscape of fact
unexamined smiles
worn tropes
words, the guardians of meanings, are not immortal.
Metaphysical scandal
note on history: past is a language construct, that the past tense of the verb is the sole guarantor of history.
Dialectics as a method of intellectual chase.
Who first told a joke?
Certain languages are inhospitable to new metaphors.
Language-act
to read: is to restore all that one can of the immediacies of value and intent in which speech actually occurs.
my original repetition
we re-enact in our educated consciousness
in what sense does unperformed music exist?
The same ground, when using the ‘speculative instruments’, the critic, editor, actor[...]
(87)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%49.3[...]ial 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 might collectively agree about noise and interference.
•mode of communication, meaning-making, language, transference, transformation,
•what is the intersection of our repertoire? (in apass, particularly; each of our mimetic preoccupations, dynamics of our violences, our mathematical sites, drawings on sand, modifiers, etc.)
==> dialogue
mathematics: (presents itself as) a communication maximally purged of noise
HRN: human relation-noise
=/= geometry
die agonal
to which degrees my work on ajayeb aligns or depends on the “new language” of the inexhaustible discourse of mathematics as inherented from the Greek geometry into the modern culture?
What are the inaugural [...]
(88)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%51.2[...]
the full and compact nature, version of ajayeb
my work in apass is on a theory of transformation among languages (not about the best point of view =/=> system integrated =/=> trajectories calculated):
•ajayeb's natural language
•system language of differential logic
•english grammar and syntax
•organic and intersubjective space of my peers
•old farsi
•animal
•
“speak of” science
“speak about” science
“speak” science
“speak” metaphysics
speaking the language of dynamics
what is still at stake in science: the description of a world of processes
...................................
Lezra
In the European imaginary, the public struggle over the “better” word makes the city (the polis) @apass
Derrida calls for patience, take care read on slowly. Kafka: all human errors are impatience. Radical patience, is the necessity to differ, but also to rush in precipitately, one has to make decisions: absolute urgency.
Literature for derrida, reading in my works, is indissociably bound up with questions of politics, democracy and responsibility, religion, nationality and nationalism, identity and law.
E m foster, how can i tell what i think, till i see what i say.
What one finds repeatedly in derrida's work is the uncanny effect by which one is invited to sense the unfolding of all his thinking starting out from anywhere, from any idea, any word, any thought that happen to be at issue. Deconstruction is the name for this?
Derrida proceeds with patience and pleasure, to describe what is going on in a particular text or situation.
Every reading is difficult, Shakespeare, maulwürfe, mathematics. The difficulty of reading is in transforming the ways we are obliged to think about those texts.
The transformation is crucially always already in the texts he reads. Describing what happens when reading a passage of anything. Everything is in Shakespeare, in Plato, in Kafka. The relation between description and transformation is uncanny.
To talk about the logics of supplement is another way of attending the deconstructive effects of the and. To put into effect new discourses, new acts. This description and transformation is deconstruction, is more than a language and no more than a language.
There are always differences, tensions, paradoxes in the text, between what a text says and what a text does.
Derrida always begins (wherever he happens to find himself) in a specific context, which is to say in trying to engage with a specific text or scene of reading.
(Writing is) is winking at someone (you like) while listening to my favorite music.
A writing that is not structurally reada[...]
(90)[...notes/Derrida old notes.txt]%51.4[...]tic sources of inspiration.
•the rebel factor
resistance-fight / ideological dictator
artist-forerunner / experimental thinker
constellation of desire
ambush of destruction =>
...internalization of toxicity
to assimilate the poisonous
mithridatic (“mehr-dad” معجون مهرداد)
what is the dominant information in San'an world?
(ideological and) literary apparatus
issues of belonging and desertion
to endure the direct
epistemic fear
I suggest we go through the rhetorical treatises of Middle East political past century
(mystic war:)
the decadent view of the obliterated
(swallowing partial glances of the)
“extinction of society”
drinking it
these signals of vanishing are forms of training?
a formula of continuation?
ancient models of defense****
مکانیزم دفاعی
other mature forms of defenses:
•sublimation
•projection: a characteristic that one perceives in oneself but seems unacceptable is instead attributed to another person, denial in attribution [still popular Feuerbach's idea of “religion = projection”, “God = outward projection of a human's inward nature” informing secular anthropological explanation] نسبت دادن احساس خود به دیگری
◦it changes the reality (for the person who projects)
◦it operates unconsciously (the person won't accept that they project)
•rationalization: irrationalities are explained in a seemingly rational or logical manner and are made consciously tolerable, ad hoc hypothesis: to save it from being falsified [<== introspection illusion: cognitive bias of the origins of one's own state]
•fantasy
•denial
•reaction formation: responses to internal threats and anxieties, anxiety is mastered by exaggeration of the directly opposing tendency. phobia is always reaction formation: the person wants what he fears. [solicitude (may be a reaction formation) against cruelty, pacifism against sadism, etc.] when *instincts (and their derivatives) are arranged as pairs of opposites* (life/death, construction/destruction, action/passivity, dominance/submission); techniques: exaggeration, compulsiveness, inflexibility: “reactive love protests too much.” “the lady doth protest too much, methinks.” (it cannot adapt itself to changing circumstances as genuine emotions do)
◦intellectualization {memory of event --> intellectualization ==> conscious analysis of non-anxiety provoking information about an event}
◦dissociation
◦displacement: means of dream-distortion, ego relocates anxiety somewhere else, transference of emotions/wishes
◾sublimation والایش [a form of displacement]: long-term conversion of the initial (negative) impulse, (alchymic[...]
(91)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%52.4[...]y be a reaction formation) against cruelty, pacifism against sadism, etc.] when *instincts (and their derivatives) are arranged as pairs of opposites* (life/death, construction/destruction, action/passivity, dominance/submission); techniques: exaggeration, compulsiveness, inflexibility: “reactive love protests too much.” “the lady doth protest too much, methinks.” (it cannot adapt itself to changing circumstances as genuine emotions do)
◦intellectualization {memory of event --> intellectualization ==> conscious analysis of non-anxiety provoking information about an event}
◦dissociation
◦displacement: means of dream-distortion, ego relocates anxiety somewhere else, transference of emotions/wishes
◾sublimation والایش [a form of displacement]: long-term conversion of the initial (negative) impulse, (alchymical in Jung) transformation of shit into gold. [in Freud: ‘sublimation = plasticity of the sexual instincts’ ~/= in Lacan: ‘sublimation = (usually cosmic?) process of creation in ex nihilo style’ : an object (manufactured or not) defined in relation to the emptiness of Das Ding (empty canvas) --> sublimation ~ dismissal/Verwerfung: obsessional relational behaviour attributed to the avoidance of the primordial emptiness (of Das Ding) ==>? religion/art...
**penis sublimates into seriousness**, adolescence into poetry, emotions into mystical art into dominance,,,]
◦repression/suppression: subduing in the unconscious (under the influence of the superego?)
•withdrawal
•regression: a way of relating to the world that was formerly effective (to recapture some childhood satisfaction)
•
•pathological defense mechanism: delusional projection, denial, distortion, extreme projection, splitting
•immature defense mechanism: acting out, fantasy, idealization, passive-aggression, projection, projective identification, somatization
•neurotic defense mechanism: displacement, dissociation, hypochondriasis, isolation, rationalization, reaction formation, regression, repression, undoing
•mature defense mechanism: altruism, anticipation, humour, identification, intellectualization, introjection, sublimation, suppression
•other defensive mechanisms: compartmentalization, defensive pessimism, exaggeration, minimisation, postponement of affect
*it is job of defense mechanism to distort, transform, or falsify the perceived reality* --> to help deal with the id or superego, reducing anxiety
ego: part of our psyche that is reality based
[title]
methinks
...the absence of mercy
complain =~ elegy =~ prayer (---> desire to future)
(elegy assumes that there is something in the information that makes a difference and not in the receiver of info.)
(question to an Iranian friend:) “why must we fasten our gaze to the objects of dama[...]
(92)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%52.5[...]from the networks of social reality
the subjects betrays its own history
interrupting the transmission of the episteme
the result of mystic disjointment => a renovated perception of all activity as self-forsaking (Tark-e Nafs? ترک نفس), (such that all locations appear scorched in turn)
stab-through and un-brace one once was
San'an's mechanistic commitments, he need to first book out of a place in order to write text, or to book himself in again
the San'an's poem's ‘Will' = instinct for abandonment and anonymity
is this instinct predicting what Attar will write? or explains *why he writes?
[writing as an act of memory and perform?]
the mystic event is predicted by an instinct for abandonment and anonymity,
at the same time it mutates the urban environment in which it stage its runaways line.
the cityscape is cast into the frenetic rush of this disavowal, to the extent that it becomes the equivalent of the desert
what are the indentitarian qualifiers that San'an wants or needs to chain-break?
to be honest, Attar's San'an's poetry, is living by a roaming assemblage of assertions. [he wrote his poem in a time when the highly religious Sheikhs would go to monasteries and get drunk with the non-Muslims, getting high with the nonhuman. it is Seljuq (سلجوق) time, medieval Turko-Persian. The Seljuqs were educated in the service of Muslim courts as slaves or mercenaries. The dynasty brought with itself a sense of revival. Under the Seljuqs, New-Persian became the language for historical recording. Attar (عطار) means herbalist, druggist, perfumist or alchemist, and during his lifetime in Persia, much of medicine and drugs were based on herbs. Therefore, by profession he was similar to a modern-day town doctor and pharmacist. Rose oil means ‘attar’. Attar died a violent death in the massacre which the Mongols inflicted on Nishapur in April 1221.]
-in his Birds epic, he is bringing an instinct coalition that translates all movement into a devouring collectivity --> the logic of their fading (--of the birds) is the same explosively that that fuels their inception, (why the birds must gather in the first place?!)
once-mystical and now-postmodern tribalism (?)
(“I” threatens the nomadic workings of the pack event)
[there is a pack-event in the San'an's students]
self = migratory sensibility of a subjectivity adrift
the exile does not need to exist / the community is desperate to exist (which is why it degenerates into totalitarian declarations--do the San'an's students have that?)
is Attar, in his poetry, obsessed with constructing mythologies of presence (and being represented)? (when he repeatedly tries to synthesize an “authentic” discipleship, ﻣﺮﯾﺪى, Anhängerschaft?, for the San'an's “teachings”) --whereas the exi[...]
(93)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%52.9[...]going into vicious levels of self-consciousness
between all the lines of statement that Attar constructs, what is being suggested in his music or words?
San'an, taken by otherworldly crafts that signal him to become (gracefully) transfixed
‘naaareh’ - نعره
far cry from the mystic's encounter with divinity
disavowal of (an explicit) narrative (trajectory)
[sunken tranquility, relaxed self-annihilation, ascetic renunciation of material] *mystic* =/= or? =~ *postmodern* [obsession with speed, with narcissistic technologies, hyper-materialistic]
is there in postmodernism then an alternative version of mystical experience?
...
feeling like a foreign body, until you find a job?! (Attari as a job)
let's jam on this
this story is prior to psychoanalysis (?)
positionality, placements, displacements
a system that doesn't have access to its own knowledge
historical struggle for the definition of the real
I can't keep clean boundaries
rituals (of promise and contract), (things that) must address anxiety --?--> a religious stamp
what is the San'an text promising the Other? (like every text does, every utterance)
what it cannot *not do?
my childish playful inventiveness and its relationship to weakness.
so I come up week, saying ‘let us do this or that,’ but that is a will to power (?)
we are here to understand the appropriation of meaning.
what does or does not belong to the protocols of reading, etc.
(think in terms of de-appropriation, which entails a form of rigorous hesitation when assuming responsibility for the work or thought of another) is that what I am practicing encountering the work of Attar? as an ally or ancestor or an unknown sidetrack of writing
different modalities of love and loving
I guess what I wanted to ask you is your love
I have been teaching Islam to you?! in a shattered and transgressive way
of course this not teach-according-to-definition
of course every demand is the demand for love
the SM-inserts in San'an story
he is asked to perform some serious Sado-Masochist interactions with nonhuman animals, his favorite book, and Tarsaa as stage-manager
we are left with the task of reading the enigma of something that no longer is. if things ‘were’ we wouldn't need to be thinking, reading, running after them.
(I am reading the enigma of something that no longer is)
precisely Bayazid defines Tasawwuf/Tasavof as something that ‘was’ and had no name and today ‘is not’ and has name.
I am taking in terms of constructions a[...]
(94)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%53[...] not teach-according-to-definition
of course every demand is the demand for love
the SM-inserts in San'an story
he is asked to perform some serious Sado-Masochist interactions with nonhuman animals, his favorite book, and Tarsaa as stage-manager
we are left with the task of reading the enigma of something that no longer is. if things ‘were’ we wouldn't need to be thinking, reading, running after them.
(I am reading the enigma of something that no longer is)
precisely Bayazid defines Tasawwuf/Tasavof as something that ‘was’ and had no name and today ‘is not’ and has name.
I am taking in terms of constructions and phantasms
everything that comes at you, which is persecutory, is absorbed. that being able to crucified by the other.
doesn't have an experience to fire aggression
is it possible to be kind in a non-manipulative non-cognitive or non-calculative way?
San'an was booked “elsewhere,” he had a transcendental hearing, he had to take a call
[we should here study a ‘hauntology'---the science of morning-disorder. all prophets have it also]. haunt---the figure is neither present nor absent --> (and “real” presence has always been the religion's obsession)
از شبح به شیخ
از صنع به صنعان
صنع = fake, صانع fabricated, made-up, technological, dead, etc.
صنم = idol
صنع = eidolon
-(eídōlon, “figure, representation”), from εἶδος? (eîdos, “sight”), from εἴδω? (eídō, “I see”)
-a phantom, a ghost or elusive entity (=/=? haecceity)
-‘you still see them'---is this an origin of metaphysic?
-eidolon is the image in water, apparition, ‘surat,’ a double / technical. idea comes from the word “to see” in Greek verbs, linked to the notion of ‘eidolon’ is the ‘visible image’ (in ancient optics and thand theories of perception) [the visible image is what appears to operate San'an's dream]
-why eidolon has the tendency to become an idol that talks back? (San'an practically encounters an eidolon and converts it to an idol. what Tarsaa asks San'an to worship is the confirmation of what sheikh has already done.)
-what is the secret of the vitality of the image that bewitches San'an? why dream/images, works of metaphors have lives of their own and cannot be explained as epistemological windows onto reality?
-San'an is first captive of apparition (صورت), then captive of meaning (معنی)
-originality of the site is abolished by technological register of the ‘sent,’ (the telephonic cyber-space) of the eidolon =?=> displacement (-how San'an loses a sense of place first in order to move)
[in the beginning of Miyazaki's 2013 The Wind Rises 風立ちぬ, a boy, vivid dreaming, meets an Italian aerospace engineer, who is shocked when he hears [...]
(95)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%53.1[...]rt that will love her.
if you are the women, you must have four cards:
1. false prostrates before idols
2. burn into Qur'an
3. see drinking-alcohol
4. observe the faith
(Sheikh's speech got possession of alcohol)
And the other three? I do not know.
What is this that you said to The Other/Girl?---Hands should be washed of parcels of Islam?
He did not paint his sweetheart. He does not love a flavor more than her's. Sheikh said to him that “if I command petty lives the circle of hair on throat...” Said, “Rise and come and drink wine!” Like to drink wine?--Come in roaring!
They took Sheikh to the late magi (a pre-Zoroastrian form of priesthood) as disciples came in screaming...
“Fire!” “Love him!” “Take the water!” etc.
(Tarsaa takes over this time, and did not mind a bit of intelligence, off the tail.)
Following his assistant, drinking, and the use of their work---because there was a wine, love, and sweetheart---it was one hundred thousand. Sheikh saw tooth as the opponent. Pomegranate Sheikh see his smiling trick, fire of passion in his life. Flood bloody hand. The will of the winds and writing.
The circle of her hair in his ears.
Notes of proximity hundred ballads in religion.
Professor was too much memorizing the Qur'an. He went on to claim he was bragging--recalled from *memory--the reasons that wine pumped away, Khomr (خمر), whatever that means. Clean slate blasted his conscience--Love the Beast! The general went to be cleared.
Sheikh, because he was drunk, not forced to love, he was a passionate kind of sea of life.
I saw these in the hands of the drunk fetish.
-Because of the Sheikh, hearts and hands could eat*
Until then that suddenly he asked her neck --> “Oh man! Claimed in love, not meaningful, only if you love walking on hard assets, religion bending the hair of assets, such Zolf (زلف) does not walk in disbelievers. Love do not come lightly.”
Bless was not compatible with Love. Love makes retention (حافظه) blasphemy.
“If you follow me, you're unbeliever. With my hand on my neck. Will not hang around here, you follow?!”
Sheikh's love have happened to have no enoughs. It happens to be the heart of neglect.
He was drunk at the time. A breath of her head did not exist intoxicated. The foot and the hand could not implement themselves and exposed him: a person—he was a christian.
(Operating harvest, very old, bewildered as Sheikh's compass.)
(The old and young love. Who can be present?)
-----It followed the devastation of lost and drunk. Drunk, and was gone because of lost love. I call that skilled impatient. What do you want me to say?! The pagan consciousness burn the Qur'an's idol, drunk drunk!?
Said his girl “this time, my man! Previously you were raw in love, with wishing patrols; now baked well as a goat, done!”
[...]
(96)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%54.6[...]e in roaring!
They took Sheikh to the late magi (a pre-Zoroastrian form of priesthood) as disciples came in screaming...
“Fire!” “Love him!” “Take the water!” etc.
(Tarsaa takes over this time, and did not mind a bit of intelligence, off the tail.)
Following his assistant, drinking, and the use of their work---because there was a wine, love, and sweetheart---it was one hundred thousand. Sheikh saw tooth as the opponent. Pomegranate Sheikh see his smiling trick, fire of passion in his life. Flood bloody hand. The will of the winds and writing.
The circle of her hair in his ears.
Notes of proximity hundred ballads in religion.
Professor was too much memorizing the Qur'an. He went on to claim he was bragging--recalled from *memory--the reasons that wine pumped away, Khomr (خمر), whatever that means. Clean slate blasted his conscience--Love the Beast! The general went to be cleared.
Sheikh, because he was drunk, not forced to love, he was a passionate kind of sea of life.
I saw these in the hands of the drunk fetish.
-Because of the Sheikh, hearts and hands could eat*
Until then that suddenly he asked her neck --> “Oh man! Claimed in love, not meaningful, only if you love walking on hard assets, religion bending the hair of assets, such Zolf (زلف) does not walk in disbelievers. Love do not come lightly.”
Bless was not compatible with Love. Love makes retention (حافظه) blasphemy.
“If you follow me, you're unbeliever. With my hand on my neck. Will not hang around here, you follow?!”
Sheikh's love have happened to have no enoughs. It happens to be the heart of neglect.
He was drunk at the time. A breath of her head did not exist intoxicated. The foot and the hand could not implement themselves and exposed him: a person—he was a christian.
(Operating harvest, very old, bewildered as Sheikh's compass.)
(The old and young love. Who can be present?)
-----It followed the devastation of lost and drunk. Drunk, and was gone because of lost love. I call that skilled impatient. What do you want me to say?! The pagan consciousness burn the Qur'an's idol, drunk drunk!?
Said his girl “this time, my man! Previously you were raw in love, with wishing patrols; now baked well as a goat, done!”
The news came close to christians, that ‘Sheikh took his soul!’ may he rest in peace.
*The late Sheikh* was drunk-around and was then said to be around the squares. Fire knocked at the door and was working on. ***Heart released the religion itself.*** Ka'ba not to mentioned to the Sheikh; (after several years of good faith.) christian girl will love his work.
It was not conscious pagan.
So looked drunk, drunk worshiped idols. Enough! Center of Khomr! People who leave the religion---without doubt this is the mother of all vices. Sheikh said that “the girl remained a sweetheart. All that [...]
(97)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%54.6[...]assets, such Zolf (زلف) does not walk in disbelievers. Love do not come lightly.”
Bless was not compatible with Love. Love makes retention (حافظه) blasphemy.
“If you follow me, you're unbeliever. With my hand on my neck. Will not hang around here, you follow?!”
Sheikh's love have happened to have no enoughs. It happens to be the heart of neglect.
He was drunk at the time. A breath of her head did not exist intoxicated. The foot and the hand could not implement themselves and exposed him: a person—he was a christian.
(Operating harvest, very old, bewildered as Sheikh's compass.)
(The old and young love. Who can be present?)
-----It followed the devastation of lost and drunk. Drunk, and was gone because of lost love. I call that skilled impatient. What do you want me to say?! The pagan consciousness burn the Qur'an's idol, drunk drunk!?
Said his girl “this time, my man! Previously you were raw in love, with wishing patrols; now baked well as a goat, done!”
The news came close to christians, that ‘Sheikh took his soul!’ may he rest in peace.
*The late Sheikh* was drunk-around and was then said to be around the squares. Fire knocked at the door and was working on. ***Heart released the religion itself.*** Ka'ba not to mentioned to the Sheikh; (after several years of good faith.) christian girl will love his work.
It was not conscious pagan.
So looked drunk, drunk worshiped idols. Enough! Center of Khomr! People who leave the religion---without doubt this is the mother of all vices. Sheikh said that “the girl remained a sweetheart. All that has been said and what remains, Khomr ate!” Worship the idol of love! I saw one inch of love, and so Sheikh (would be exposed.)
Nearness was struggling to open the year Secret sea wave was in my heart.
Chest particle seek love from ambush.
Ka'ba gave birth to Don Juan's love: prominent wander unseen love. <br />
It was all a bit too much.
Who are you going to get me?
Contact your building, because it is the principle.
I was connected to hope.
Contact finds The Familiar.
*Find a burn in The Separation!
Open the old! Girl said, “Heyyy ‘captured,’ my cabin is expensive and very poor for you! Gold and silver should know about me. When the wireless gold separates the fibers of the head, the sun shall be a person. Wait and be a Man!”
Sheikh said, “A tall cypress wire! To the head! Testament has no good. But you do not have one beautiful Negar (نگار). Finally, keep hands off these practices. Each tail of another type of tail. It had your blood without you. I was working on you. It was intercepted. ...were in love with each: Infidelity and Islam and loss and profit. You wait a few days. You did not like that with me. The friends turned against me, enemies of my soul. ‘He is such and such,’ because I am. Die was not me and not die, because I [...]
(98)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%54.6[...]on the path of forbidding the working-man, (both Betty and nose pig hundred thousand,) catch pigs!
Idols burning The ‘Why’ of Love.
Sheikh shows notorious love.
...also unable so, center of John unable to stay down. Because it caught him, of his help. He fled as ‘The Bad.’
In sadness he took over the territory. (Was helping Among the chest.) Sheikh was already at work, loose: “Today we are going to open the Ka'ba.”
What is the command that must be said in secret?
•Or all the time, because you're christians.
“We, scandal of his altar. We, dislike such you, alone. Around us you are like barbarism. You also fail to your vision.” Saddle earth, early escape without you.
We stayed at the Ka'ba's sit.
Sheikh's speech of my life was filled with pain. “Want to go anywhere soon?” asked me, “I'm late, girl!” John increases all my fears.
(Both were inspired by my grief. )
Friends return, to what it will be. If they ask of us, right. From wandering to where is commonplace. Blood filled his eyes and mouth full of venom. Remained in the mouth of the dragon. Reza does not have any infidel in the world.
Ironically, old Islam is christian in her hair away.
He was a master of reason and religion.
His hair became ring in his throat.
“If someone is blaming me, tell him ‘Falls in this period are far. In such period, note the dead!’”
No one is safe from deception and danger, the pigs!
Insomuch that cried The Fellowship of Sadness!, the pain of living-shit shift dead.
Eventually they opened the Ka'ba.
John remained in the burning.
Their Sheikh in Rome alone. (Data for the christian faith.)
Then, the astonisheds with life, each one is hiding in the corner.
To assist Ka'ba, Sheikh hit it in the chest.
Devotion was in the hands of the thumb.
Enough was enough. @“You were not aware of the sheikh?! Sheikh's Ka'ba was (because of) the trip! As a disciple of Sheikh you return instead?!”
@“But Sheikh's deserted house was empty!” Open disciple of Sheikh asked.
Open the Sheikh all the time!
@“What happened to him was the center of a tiger. How much weight she came to head him? christians ‘hair to hair’ is the way of faith in him. *Love loses hair and tattoos forever. (Overall: the arrest of his obedience.) Pork watches him around the middle of the frame, although much on religion pursued our sheikh, ancient knowledge is anew.”
When disciples heard these stories, they surprised. And moan broke out on their gold.
@The disciple said “In loyalty neither male nor female, disabled men have a hundred thousand sweetheart and one day to work. If you were his friends, to Sheikh, why did not help him advanced?!”
Shame wind, was the last of this assistance.
“Could be Right and Loyal? Since its establishment are around the Sheikh[...]
(100)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%54.7[...]/>
Ironically, old Islam is christian in her hair away.
He was a master of reason and religion.
His hair became ring in his throat.
“If someone is blaming me, tell him ‘Falls in this period are far. In such period, note the dead!’”
No one is safe from deception and danger, the pigs!
Insomuch that cried The Fellowship of Sadness!, the pain of living-shit shift dead.
Eventually they opened the Ka'ba.
John remained in the burning.
Their Sheikh in Rome alone. (Data for the christian faith.)
Then, the astonisheds with life, each one is hiding in the corner.
To assist Ka'ba, Sheikh hit it in the chest.
Devotion was in the hands of the thumb.
Enough was enough. @“You were not aware of the sheikh?! Sheikh's Ka'ba was (because of) the trip! As a disciple of Sheikh you return instead?!”
@“But Sheikh's deserted house was empty!” Open disciple of Sheikh asked.
Open the Sheikh all the time!
@“What happened to him was the center of a tiger. How much weight she came to head him? christians ‘hair to hair’ is the way of faith in him. *Love loses hair and tattoos forever. (Overall: the arrest of his obedience.) Pork watches him around the middle of the frame, although much on religion pursued our sheikh, ancient knowledge is anew.”
When disciples heard these stories, they surprised. And moan broke out on their gold.
@The disciple said “In loyalty neither male nor female, disabled men have a hundred thousand sweetheart and one day to work. If you were his friends, to Sheikh, why did not help him advanced?!”
Shame wind, was the last of this assistance.
“Could be Right and Loyal? Since its establishment are around the Sheikh's hand, around should be a closed sentence.
Should not be deliberately cut. Tarsaa was the sentence.
This is not to help and agree! You hypocrites!
Each is sweetheart to his sweetheart.
If pagan man should become the failure, can be sweetheart in the hundreds of thousands.
As was Sheikh whale on the palate, including the Name and Shame---Love the bad name of the base user! @They said an inch longer, “Previously we mentioned many times with him, Its determination to have me with him, the joys and sorrows of our soul. Sell and buy piety scandal! Boy, abolish religion and christians!
Late Sheikh worked on that vision.
He opened one by one, got centered. Because seeing Sheikh's benefit was our help, Sheikh send us return soon. We all looked back on his sentence.” Mystery story...
@After, said it disciple to companions, “If you were to work on further---but not the right place for you---in-presence is your head-to-your-feet. The right to petition, to have in advance.
Any one of the range of the Other is elevated.
When The Right restlessly see you---Sheikh's extradition.
If you avoid the Sheikh himself, what was[...]
(101)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%54.8[...] christians ‘hair to hair’ is the way of faith in him. *Love loses hair and tattoos forever. (Overall: the arrest of his obedience.) Pork watches him around the middle of the frame, although much on religion pursued our sheikh, ancient knowledge is anew.”
When disciples heard these stories, they surprised. And moan broke out on their gold.
@The disciple said “In loyalty neither male nor female, disabled men have a hundred thousand sweetheart and one day to work. If you were his friends, to Sheikh, why did not help him advanced?!”
Shame wind, was the last of this assistance.
“Could be Right and Loyal? Since its establishment are around the Sheikh's hand, around should be a closed sentence.
Should not be deliberately cut. Tarsaa was the sentence.
This is not to help and agree! You hypocrites!
Each is sweetheart to his sweetheart.
If pagan man should become the failure, can be sweetheart in the hundreds of thousands.
As was Sheikh whale on the palate, including the Name and Shame---Love the bad name of the base user! @They said an inch longer, “Previously we mentioned many times with him, Its determination to have me with him, the joys and sorrows of our soul. Sell and buy piety scandal! Boy, abolish religion and christians!
Late Sheikh worked on that vision.
He opened one by one, got centered. Because seeing Sheikh's benefit was our help, Sheikh send us return soon. We all looked back on his sentence.” Mystery story...
@After, said it disciple to companions, “If you were to work on further---but not the right place for you---in-presence is your head-to-your-feet. The right to petition, to have in advance.
Any one of the range of the Other is elevated.
When The Right restlessly see you---Sheikh's extradition.
If you avoid the Sheikh himself, what was ‘open’ from The-Right?”
When they heard spokens, of their frustration, a ton of pre-heads.
@He said, “now what profit from this shame?! There is work, soon rise up!” @“It should be our Right's portals. Pour soil in our petitions. We wear the shirt, all the papers. -In the end we all to our Sheikh.”
Including the Arabs, were leaving hidden day and night, on the right of every one hundred thousand.
Sometimes the pleading shit works lamentation.
As the half-witted shepherd days, anyone official, not eating, not sleeping at night, including the half-witted.
Night's half-witted days neither bread nor water.
The people cry out “Clean!” Ferris was the hard-knock fusion. (Clan's ups and downs.) Including: wore the black of mourning.
And there, before finally boiled down the line, in pray: throw shooting target!
Half-witted henchmen cleaning after opening night,
(have gone behind his back privately.)
Wind dawn, musk times earnings.
Was discovered--on the manifes[...]
(102)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%54.8[...] the head to the ground.
Sometimes when the cloud bloody tears, when John's sweet fire curtains burned the shit. The regret in his body burned blood.
Secrets of the Qur'an's wisdom, were washed from head to head, including throwing remember, of ignorance and misery.
To his own, wept in prostration. Also had goals for blood-stained eyes. Embarrassment was lost in sweat.
Left in grief and joy, before he went wandering all;
The following day, thanks to John reject all,
Sheikh said that, “Having a secret, may be open before the sun is out. Infidelity arose from the meeting of Ra and faith, Roman pagan God-worship, sea wave suddenly passed out.
You want to work the intercession of the Apostle? This time thanks to the world.”
What a sugar right now! God's grace in the sea, the sun shall obviously know he will turn black. Repentance knows that with several of sin, ignite the fire of his repentance.
Must also include his burns.
I make story short, its place: Sheikh will open robe.
•Went with his companions toward the Hejaz.
Saw it after, the christian girl, to sleep: in the sun beside him---the language: “Then walk with Sheikh's center after this time. That is his religion, her soil. Off Evil!
Cleared that is him.
He was in you---no tropes. In fact, I intercepted him open. The released body, to drive his way. Because it was the way you view the way.
That is, along being with his ‘interceptor,’ be more of these ‘intercepted.’”
Because the christian girl was sleeping, she felt the light of the sun.
What a pain in her heart arose!- and the pain of loving it. Fire.
Hands on his heart, the heart of hand, her restless soul did not know what was inside her eggs.
Failed and the absence of a tail, see herself in the wonders of the universe.
Where a world that way, one must be dumb, the way of no tongue. It took all cute -and cheerfulness, like of a rain, collapsed.
Bellowed garment gave run-out.
The soil over the blood ran.
With the painful and incapacitating person, followed the Sheikh and his disciples running.
Also ran bleeding cloud.
Following the footsteps of the running, him in the desert and plains, from which must be passed by.
Welcomed helpless and confused. Welcomed her rubbing face in the dirt.
Said, “O God, work! Private parts of any work left.
I ran man's way because of you. You on me, that I was never aware.
The boiling sea. I did not take my poor. Dean agreed, stuck my hands. Nobody does not help us.”
Sheikh was told from within of that girl christian, “Not familiar with our port, she fell this time on our way.
Go back before it pop idol! And tune up your paid companion.”
Sheikh while returning like wind, opened disciples’ salt---including the head of what was open.
[...]
(103)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%55[...] last governor, heard tasteful faith in the heart.
She was restless taste faith.
“My patience was Sheikh's vault.” Said, “I do not have any patience at parting.
Saddle go full family. Sheikh, Hajj, Pilgrimage, world, I will be as brief as speech, my poor... rather than an adversarial amnesty and not...”
This said in the hands of John, and was half dead. Her sun was hidden under cloud. Sweet life of girl parted, hesitated.
She followed a drop in the ocean.
The sea was actually open.
Including the world, it goes like the wind. He went and we all go.
Saddle such fall much in the way of love. This person is conscious, knows that love. Anything said may be intercepted.
Mercy, despair, deceit, and securely.
This can hear the secrets of the soul, Nasibat (نصیبت) cannot be won without balls. This is certainly the heart and soul, must be heard. Water
and mud reliance should not be heard. War was the heart and soul of
each tail hard. Dirge in that mourning was hard.
...................................
=================
...................................
his mental hygiene, through strange theological appartouses, is not standing intrusions and pollutants of the middle ages trans-religiousity and cross-boundry encounters between the dislikes and those who differ in sexuality.
his hygiene is polluted
but in a peotic reappropriative act of Attar this will operate in another iteration to produce a more radical transcendence; still again a vital encounter with religious pollution is avoided
[my teacher and prosecutor --> malamat, San'an students]
...................................
[title]
main title:
“Four Eastern Cartographies of Entrapment”
video:
“Writing on Chaos - A Terminal Intimacy”
performance:
“The Reward of The Victim - Towards Poetic Extremism”
image assemblage wallpaper:
“Bad Temper - Apocalyptic Climates of Endangered Subjectivity”
delve
delvi
delphi
dilated
dionysian ecotone for performance
defp
dionysian epitom studies 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 pro[...]
(104)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%55.1[...]retical apparatus of *anticolonial ideology*
one immediate danger of this approach is that it recklessly dismisses anything associated with the other side of the binary (of West/East, self/other, first-world/third-world, modern/premodern, etc.) ==> overlook the subversive utility and democratic accessibility of certain technological innovation --> evident in Shariati's ultra-atavistic endorsement for an aesthetic tradition: “intrusion of the machine into the humna-half may go so far as to paralyze man; it destroys creativity. imagine a type-written page that can be imposed upon millions of people, while before the advent of the typewriter everyone was free to use his creativity to the utmost in calligraphy” --Mohaghegh--> it is not reflecting on the historical reality that the exercise of calligraphy was always linked to a feudalist class structure, and often exclusively to the confines of the palace court, whereas the printed word open to a more widespread audience independent of material status
--> anticolonial ideology ==>
•carries out the presupposed will of modernity by homogenizing its very own constituency, diminishing any possibility for individual initiative or insubordination
•precludes the advent of outsider radicalism independent of some religio-civilizational confrontation with modernity
--> “there can be only one diagnosis ==> only one elixir” ==> produce an antidote that is equally colossal in scope, shape, and execution
}==> ***the local is no longer accepted by anticolonial ideology as a worthwhile site of contestation***
}--> (Sa'edi + Akhavan + ...) ~=> *messianic defender* of the national history : the sole harbinger جلودار of a *return to the real* ☠ [=/= cheerleader]
_,-+-._
.-’ ‘’-._
/ \
‘ ~. \
/ ~`’ ) .=” , )
| I ( ~ (
\ ‘"” `=' +
`.,_ `”;:L0Ve’ *’
`~'~.’ )_Y_0_U!\
*disease becomes temporary cure* (--> practiced by Al Ahmad, Shariati, artists [as irony and with the always problematic conception of the “masses” توده مردم mardom]:)
“[let's] re-employ the same reactionary elements in order to stir the masses, to restore awareness, and to fight superstition”
[still very common within critically-minded humanist social science schollar artists is the tendency to use critical theory (as diverse as it is) *to interrogate reality*
for us ([left inheritance] as postcolonialist, feminist, or biopolitician) the modus operandi of critical theory is to derealize, is to say: “this is an expression of paar.” “this is discursive formation.” “this is material assembly of objects.” ~= (an attempt to say) “this isn't real.” <-- this has been essentially a really powerful force and set of political strategies of the left [...]
(106)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%57[...]/ourmetaphor is an example of (my Nietzschean and Hedayatian influence, to address) the indeterminacy and illogic necessarily associated with a chaotic world
(for Nietzsche:) positivism = historical subjectivity's fictive interiority --leads--> decadence of a will to truth, attributing to events a rational look by fixing them within universalizing patterns of signification
Nietzsche: “it is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations” =/= fraud of the historical ==>
•Platonic idealism
•messianic grandiosity of the Hegelian world-historical process
•
•*rational historicism: a discursive phenomenon indispensably linked to enlightenment epistemology and its overriding drive for world-mastery*
}=/= explosiveness of a chaotic universe + experiential immediacy of this creative-destructive effusion نشد
Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy (seemingly) a study of the pre-Socratic culture of Dionysian ecstasy --but--> a self-projected hallucination of antiquity ==> *theme of history as subjective dreamscape* (--> my way of working historical ajayeb is Nietzschean[?])
-in Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche wages an archaeological assault against the composition and enforcement of moral and metaphysical (from religion to law, discussion of the ascetic ideal and the origin of ressentiment and slave morality)
misunderstanding of “the will”
Nietzsche's skepticism (is his a priori) --> the link between chaos and a certain poetic evocation
*monumental*: seeking out heroic episodes from the the past as examples of imminent قريب الوقوع greatness within the present and future (resurrecting examples of nobility) <-- an ethos behind which large-scale causes are mobilized (+ antiquarian ~=) [*]archive: a harmless reverence for that which has elapsed, leading largely to a compulsive preservation of faded events for no other purpose than that of ensuring their permanence in memory
=/= [*]critical: the courage for insurgency and disavowal of historical legacy*** ==> realization of an alternative counterfuture in the present
“He is blind to everything behind him, new sounds are muffled and meaningless though his perceptions were never so intimately felt in all their color, light and music, and he seems to grasp them with his five senses together . . . His whole case is most indefensible; it is narrow, ungrateful to the past, blind to danger, deaf to warnings, a small living eddy in a dead sea of night and forgetfulness. And yet this condition, unhistorical and antihistorical throughout, is the cradle not only of unjust action, but of every just and justifiable action in the world.” --> sounds like one of my masks “the sleep-walker”
in Hedayat
nihilistic absurdist approach to both metaphysics and society
distancing himself from the symbolics of divine authority
forsaking empty promises of metaphysical [...]
(107)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%57.7[...] profane occurence and encourage the contamination of language and sign
into the stint of atrocity
to go barefoot and dismembered
sectarian appears before the maker:
in blemished and tattered from
(to prove hardship)
xxxxx 254
...................................
one must fear those who say “we”
Mohaghegh's writing reminds of Avital
...following it into its lower webs of imagination
sect: an insider-outsider formation
*the sect redefines*
life, secrecy, ritual, fanaticism, martyrdom
(in a fragmented age -->) sectarianism = apocalyptic writing + insurgent practice ["+” : a lethal combination] ==> ***an abstract idea + its immediate execution (within the world)*** ["+” : collapsing the boundary between the emergence of the two]
**(its other names:)
•underground movements
•secret societies
•forbidden associations
•cult gathering
•*artistic circles*
•urgan gangs
•rebel cadres کادر
•terrorist units
•
**(its forms:) they banish themselves and plan their hostile-ecstatic return to the surface:
•revolutionary
•criminal
•religious
•mystical
•magical
•military
•*avant-garde*
•
**(its conceptual coridors:) each fuses the minimal (elitism) and the excessive (universality):
•delirium
•murdur
•hallucination
•whispering
•doom
•
}<=~ ***the self-chosen against the world***
(“we” is the electric compartment of the sect. the sectarian channels the alarming vibration of the “we"--the one who becomes many)
*evil: a force of liberation, beauty, complexity
Ali's microhostilities (on me, the way he tells)
*guided by dislike*
(*terminal Intimacy*: definite concept of friendship:) “they will all die for one another" = "they will all kill one another”
“the sect occasionally allows the opening of the closed circle, reforming as a stright line that penetrates the world of others” --> (a phantom) *imperative to entirity*
sectarian language: the author cages the reader (in each verse)
sectarian animism ==> paranoiac dialogues:
•language of things (communication with the inanimate)
•concert with sacred beasts (oracle, snakes, animal spirits, etc. **the uncooperative figures of nature**)
•warnings of extraterrestriality (those of faraway sentience)
•murmurings of superstition (man, fate, chance, fifth column[= the group who undermine a larger group from within])
hiding as mission --> dissimulation & hollowing
sectarian lives by code, but cannot be deciphered or analyzed* --methodological--> leaves one undetected (--> assa[...]
(108)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%58.1[...]ntial (for the sake of context)
poetic (for the sake of message)
emotive (for the sake of addresser)
conative (for the sake of addressee)
pathic (for the sake of interaction)
metalingual (for the sake of itself)
...................................
-the concept of “wearing” from Alberti (prehispanic South America)
-the concept of “mask” from Mohaghegh (postmodern Middle East)
-the concept of “style” from Archer (post-industrial Britain)
[these theories are very helpful for me and import-rich for reimagining subjectivity. Alberti committed to anthropology, Mohaghegh to the philosophical, Archer to sociology]
...................................
slave: a person attached by law and by custom to the identity of another individual --> ‘social death’ of slavery (as legal nonperson ==> alienation) [in academic literature comparative study of slavery], slavery as a substitute for death in war
--shift--> (the concept that) slaves might influence the tastes, the language, the actions, and even the ideas of their masters
acknowledgement of presence =/= significance in relation to history
(A. Lee on) the African dimension of the genesis of the Babi religion
((oral sources for) the recovery of) subaltern histories in Iran [erased from historical memory]
--> deep resentment of “the presence in Iran of an ‘Other’ that does not conform to the imagined Iranian Self”
unblemished national selfhood
purity fetishism of... <== *purity deeply rooted in religion* [?]
...................................
(issues) politics of liberation:
•that liberal democracy requires common basis for culture and society
•identity politics:
◦“the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else's oppression” (Eisenstein)
◦invites people to stay in, to look inward, to obsess over the body and the self, to surround themselves with a moral forcefield to protect their worldview
◦a particular identity is opposing all people who belong to a particular identity
◦naming and claiming lived experience, and the authority arising from that
◦[no more?] sexual orientation (that it is now only about disrupting the mainstream)
◦(in the context of cultural negotiations) *strategic essentialism*: (despise strong differences in members of) minorities to temporarily “essentialize” themselves (forward their group identity) in a simplified way to achieve certain goals, to use hegemonic discourses to reform the understanding of “universal” goals
◦class-based politics are identity politics
◦to bring people together based on a shared aspect of their identity --> fail to examine differences among themselves
*solidarity does not r[...]
(109)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%59.8[...]ial killings]
teratological and semi-demonological turn
interjecting thingness, fiendishness, and monstrosity into our midst
night: indefinite definite ~=> nihilistic force of closure
(from) orthodoxy --to--> dramaturgy
(Mohaghegh's theory of) fanatical sovereignty in pagan thought --> ultimate keeping & violation of the law ~= obsessive form & apocalyptic formlessness
(reconciling) *the toxic dialectics of presence & absence* behind every theo-political order : gods walk among us in immanent ambush, hiding in night's open view (of many faces, masks, tongues, robes, tastes, proportions, and gestures), adopt infinite visages, apparels, pseudonyms, and dialects [=/= monochrome trappings of daily identity]
Ahriman =/= fire-god
omnimalevolent side
first destructive spirit
twins of the primeval choice
==> crises of perception
dwelling in non-being
shape-stealer
self-cutting (cooking of his own paranormal tissue)
earthly creation = ruse, net, and temporary prison (a decorative window-dressing to lure the false god away)
a sunless place
mortal transactions (of civilizational, philosophical, religious, and moral trials)
night-raid
nocturnal fierceness
asceticism of the warrior
asceticism of the night-watchman
(Goda riding with the) exponential disinformation of legend
learn to talk with night <-- not indicative of a knowing subject
--> to become both hypnotized & hypnotic whisper
language of mood (subtle movements of):
•temperature drops
•intermittent gusts of air and wind
•snapping of tree branches
•shooting comets of sky
Bronze Age eschatologies
queen of riddles
cosmic idolater
her language never argues, only propositions
dark thoughts
evanescing moon
...guerilla leader who fled into the mountains and froze to death beneath the night sky
thoughts of
•obvious separation (from family, lovers)
•potential victory and loss (fatalistic struggle)
•futility of human experience amid insects and animals creeping in his midst (transfigured)
*night <--tied--> wondering*
*night <--tied--> uprising*
*night <--tied--> possession + dispossession*
*night <--tied--> countdown* شمارش معکوس
*night <--tied--> disappearance*
*night <--tied--> abdication*
*night <--tied--> dismay* جبن
*night <--tied--> obscenity* جبن
***night --to--> bring the mind elsewhere***
Mirza Kuchak Khan
Jangali
...once the leader of the jungle movement; now the jungle will confiscate him
[...]
(111)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%60.6[...]cts of kindness to one another…all in honour of their two strange visitors (with whom we read that everyone has grown enamoured). They even build a stone monument in veneration to these silent newcomers. But then one morning the blondes do not materialize, as a violent coup is underway that sets the district on fire with bombs and missiles; amid the fighting, our narrator is flung against a wall, his life then saved by one of the blondes (their statue since demolished), and awakens in a mental asylum railing about the speechless aliens who rescued him (and the others)—only to find that no one has any memory of such beings or any trust in his recol- lections of them; he later finds himself strapped with a detonative suicide vest (the final light-bracketed image).
...................................
Morton on Weber --> sociology is itself (the logistics of) disenchanted in exploring disenchantment
charisma-based society ~=> disenchanted bureaucratic society
charisma: (paranormal) force field that surrounds and penetrate us with *healing + destructive* consequences
(<-- this is super ok as long as that force field is not curated by wannabe spiritual philosopher human)
bestiary: paranormal excluded by religion
agricultural societies monopolized charisma (--> king) --> logistical functioning of the world of agriculture ==> global warming
neolithic privatization of enchantment ==> monotheism
Holocene --> strategy of survival at any cost
(Morton echoing the cliche of artists wanna do magic:) “art is demonic”: it emanates (not designed) from beyond sense that the artist is not in charge of, dangerous causative flicker
~ ‘art = charisma’ [= cause & effect]
--Morton--> (bad idea of) art ==> charismatic causality
force-like animal magnetism
magic = causality + illusion
appearance and essence are two different sides of Mobius strip
(pre-neolithic -->) *we live in a world of tricksters* (raindrops are tricksters,,,)
incomprehensible charisma of kitsch
(the objects in my room contain a palpable enjoyment that is without me, found objects that spray charismatic causality [without devotion or trust])
...................................
(Zizek's) Lacan four discourses via porn actress facial stages:
1- ecstatic state --> overwhelmed
2- serious --> hard work, instrumental control
3- boredom --> ignorance, indifference
4- mocking --> is this all you can do, smile
...................................
body...
how to feed it
when to fast
how to soothe
moisturize
let go
heal
you can't grasp your body once and for all --> one can only bear witness and offer testimony (<--Avital-- this is why writing is so[...]
(112)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%60.7[...], that we can take charge and act up and affirm our bodies, our selves, that we can now stop being victims and relinquish passivity.
torturer <--> healer
...................................
شطح shath: literary technique (san'at adabi صنعت ادبی)
(jCzF0RD-a_M)
shath: contradictory speech (kofr + iman)
del-bari (dressing up and going out[?]) =/= gush be harf kasi dadan (listening)
گوش به حرف کسی دادن =/= دلبری
خجسته khojaste: thinking all the time that everyone is saying hello to you
Hafez = connected pockets of meaning =/= Ferdosi's organized pockets of meaning =/= bestiary's listed pockets of meaning
...................................
indian ocean diaspora
indian ocean slave trade ==> atlantic slave trade and the new-world diaspora
Lee --> influence of African and afro-iranian people on other iranians and on persian society and culture
Ziba Khanum (d. 1932 Yazd)
the life of one enslaved African woman who lived in iran
(recovering what can be recovered of their industrial lives)
iranian history --> issues of:
•race
•gender
•religion
•elite social and economic networks
•nature of slavery
•value of subaltern history
the idea of (academioc study of) history: study of structures, institutions, abstractions ==> generalizing categories (such as slavery, freedom, modernization, etc.) =/= (biographical turn) towards biography of one woman
****(biography ~~>) *personal experience* =/= (category of) slavery: an abstraction that bunches together and confuses historical instances of displacement, isolation, dependence, unfree labor****
(--Cinderella-->)
personal experience =/= displacement
personal experience =/= isolation
personal experience =/= dependence
personal experience =/= unfree labor
19th century iran (--> estimations:)
•one/two million slaves exported into persian gulf (to Bandar Abbas in iran) from east-african/indian-ocean trade
•two-thirds of the slaves were african woman and girls, almost always destined for residence in wealthy households (as domestic servants and concubines)
1868 census conducted in Tehran: 2.6% of the civilian population of the city was designates as african slaves and/or “household servants”
categories of slave/servant in shii iran:
•nokar نوکر male servantkh
•khedmatkar خدمتکار female servant
•kaniz siah کنیز سیاه female black slave/servant
•khajeh خواجه male black slave/servant
•gholam siah غلام سیاه male black slave/servant
issues of:
•race
•religion
•assimilation --> *enslaved africans were not gi[...]
(113)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%61.1[...]graphy of one woman
****(biography ~~>) *personal experience* =/= (category of) slavery: an abstraction that bunches together and confuses historical instances of displacement, isolation, dependence, unfree labor****
(--Cinderella-->)
personal experience =/= displacement
personal experience =/= isolation
personal experience =/= dependence
personal experience =/= unfree labor
19th century iran (--> estimations:)
•one/two million slaves exported into persian gulf (to Bandar Abbas in iran) from east-african/indian-ocean trade
•two-thirds of the slaves were african woman and girls, almost always destined for residence in wealthy households (as domestic servants and concubines)
1868 census conducted in Tehran: 2.6% of the civilian population of the city was designates as african slaves and/or “household servants”
categories of slave/servant in shii iran:
•nokar نوکر male servantkh
•khedmatkar خدمتکار female servant
•kaniz siah کنیز سیاه female black slave/servant
•khajeh خواجه male black slave/servant
•gholam siah غلام سیاه male black slave/servant
issues of:
•race
•religion
•assimilation --> *enslaved africans were not given (arabic) muslim names, but were assigned persian names as part of the process of assimilation into persian households* [Dade: persian for nanny, nursemaid]
Ziba Khanum
she is remembered by her great-grandchildren as their earliest ancestor
her descendants relate different stories of her origin as part of family lore
she was purchased in Zanzibar, others suggest Mombasa (--> as commodities slaves were classified by country of origin: habashis were regarded as the most beautiful, intelligent, expensive slaves, followed by bambasis, then nubis and zanjis [these term refere to the ports])<br />
modern rationalization for Ziba's sexual relationshipto Haji Muhammad Ali:
•Haji took her a concubine wuth the permission of his wife
•because his wife was sick and could no longer serve him
•master married Ziba after his wife's death
there were no barriers (either legal, religious, moral) to a master taking a slave as his concubine
both *slavery* and *concubinage* were recognize and regulated by islamic law (shari'a)
umm-walad ام ولد mother of the son --> slave woman کنیز impregnated by her owner, thereby bearing a child
--Lee-> slave woman might, under these circmustances, have a strong incentive to bear a child by her master, in order to move toward the center of her master's household, to protect herself from sale, to free her child and herself, and to inherit part of the master's wealth (through her offspring) <-- the sexual aspects of the relationship were considered incidental ضمنی an[...]
(114)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%61.1[...]dmatkar خدمتکار female servant
•kaniz siah کنیز سیاه female black slave/servant
•khajeh خواجه male black slave/servant
•gholam siah غلام سیاه male black slave/servant
issues of:
•race
•religion
•assimilation --> *enslaved africans were not given (arabic) muslim names, but were assigned persian names as part of the process of assimilation into persian households* [Dade: persian for nanny, nursemaid]
Ziba Khanum
she is remembered by her great-grandchildren as their earliest ancestor
her descendants relate different stories of her origin as part of family lore
she was purchased in Zanzibar, others suggest Mombasa (--> as commodities slaves were classified by country of origin: habashis were regarded as the most beautiful, intelligent, expensive slaves, followed by bambasis, then nubis and zanjis [these term refere to the ports])
modern rationalization for Ziba's sexual relationshipto Haji Muhammad Ali:
•Haji took her a concubine wuth the permission of his wife
•because his wife was sick and could no longer serve him
•master married Ziba after his wife's death
there were no barriers (either legal, religious, moral) to a master taking a slave as his concubine
both *slavery* and *concubinage* were recognize and regulated by islamic law (shari'a)
umm-walad ام ولد mother of the son --> slave woman کنیز impregnated by her owner, thereby bearing a child
--Lee-> slave woman might, under these circmustances, have a strong incentive to bear a child by her master, in order to move toward the center of her master's household, to protect herself from sale, to free her child and herself, and to inherit part of the master's wealth (through her offspring) <-- the sexual aspects of the relationship were considered incidental ضمنی and carried no moral stigma or social shame [=/= children born to slave fathers were slaves]
gathering of men (were held regularly) as social occasions for business, entertainment, smoke opium, etc.
clandestine conversations were not unusual
shari'a was interpreted and administrated by shii clerics in Yazd, and there was always room for manipulation of the law
Ziba Khanum's situation illustrates the problem of applying western legal categories of “slave” and “free” to the lived experience of enslaved women in iran
(her legal status as a free woman had little consequence <-- she remained dependent of the family and lived in their household)
***limited value of “slave =/= free” --Lee--> when applied to the study of muslim world***
modern state ==> “slave =/= free” (presupposing a secular state that is able to guarantee the lives and properties of individuals who can claim its protection) }<-- societies that are constr[...]
(115)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%61.2[...]rt of the master's wealth (through her offspring) <-- the sexual aspects of the relationship were considered incidental ضمنی and carried no moral stigma or social shame [=/= children born to slave fathers were slaves]
gathering of men (were held regularly) as social occasions for business, entertainment, smoke opium, etc.
clandestine conversations were not unusual
shari'a was interpreted and administrated by shii clerics in Yazd, and there was always room for manipulation of the law
Ziba Khanum's situation illustrates the problem of applying western legal categories of “slave” and “free” to the lived experience of enslaved women in iran
(her legal status as a free woman had little consequence <-- she remained dependent of the family and lived in their household)
***limited value of “slave =/= free” --Lee--> when applied to the study of muslim world***
modern state ==> “slave =/= free” (presupposing a secular state that is able to guarantee the lives and properties of individuals who can claim its protection) }<-- societies that are constructed around the ideas of:
rights, citizenship, secular state =/=
| | |
kinship, belonging, religious authority, hierarchies of dependence (<-- middle east)
19th century iran --> there was no ideal within the society of freedom from relationships (of kinship, household, belonging, community solidarity, wealthy patron)--with--> implications of dependence, obedience, obligation
•any such freedom would have left an individual *isolated* and *vulnerable*
****
all enslaved persons (and akk other persons) in 19th century iran necessarily were *embedded in muslim households* and moved along a continuum of whatever situation of power, respect, wealth, independence they might be able to *negotiate*
#Cinderella
****
women --> at the margins of wealth and power --> slave women most especailly (they moved toward the center by:)
1. performed valuable domestic duties
2. became the master's regular sexual partner
3. bore the master child
the goal of most women (slave or not) om 19th century iran --> to negotiate the most respected position (within the family that they found themselves attached to) <-- **the defining factor was gender, rather than slavery**
for example Ziba Khanum's free life after the death of her master was determined by *gender* more than her previous *slave status* or by *perceptions of race*
babi movement in 1844 iran
baha'i teachings of detachment and resignation in the face of adversity
Ghulam Ali by the end of hi life was the largest landowner in the vity and extremely influential in politics and business affairs [he had three kaniz: Fezzeh (silver), Zaffaron (saffron), Shireen (sweet)]
[...]
(116)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%61.2[...]hem as actors *even when we cannot see their choices*
...................................
childhood Elias chap1
[*]childhood: idealized romantic construct, with denied legal rights, reflection of adults about themselves:
•nostalgia for an individual and collective past
•
=/= children vacillate between innocence & awareness, morality & immorality, cruelty & kindness, foolishness & wisdom, , , **children act as sophisticated consumers**
--Elias--> ***children make emotional, political, consumerist choices***
how adults construct childhood --> ***aesthetic social imagination***
how adults imagine children (in idealized forms ==> evocation of emotions) ==> give meaning to (individual and) collective realities
childhood --> worry + obligation =/= adulthood --> ease + freedom
(my childhood is sometimes remembered by me so different than of my friends --> makes the universal media objects specifically precious: cartoons that were watched by us across border and time ---> go to Sina's Children's Media Watch List childrensmedia.net)
imagine children -->
•nature of emotions
•relationship to religion
•relationship to society
◦articulation of attitude towards society
•constructing concept of:
◦individual
◦community
◦nation
◦gender
◦age
Elias's notion of emotion --> a broad category to index concepts of morally, ethics, politics, aspirational acts,
(everything depends on the ways we remember our [emotional experience of] childhood)
(memory = salad of) fragments of memory + emotions from our experience + emotions experienced by others + what we have been told by others about our childhood
common theory --> age between two and eleven children are most sensitive to external factors ==> most vulnerable to advertising
*age seven*
children are increasingly controlled by symbolic relationships and images (+ make judgment about things)
*under five*
{human characters ~?/= animated characters}--> belief in imaginary characters and monsters, management of emotions
*age two*
(end of) two --> children begin pretending (until age of five)
*over four*
idiosyncratic system of thinking about causality (extraordinary plays larger role than adults)
create and identify emotions in visual images
fantasizing =/= fantastical thinking
(for children) wishing = mental + magical + it exists in relatio to skill [---> go to Cinderella, waiting]
Elias's study of children images (visual material featuring children) in Persianate cultures (turkey, pakistan, iran) --> (role of) ***childhood/children = [...]
(117)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%61.4[...] />
(memory = salad of) fragments of memory + emotions from our experience + emotions experienced by others + what we have been told by others about our childhood
common theory --> age between two and eleven children are most sensitive to external factors ==> most vulnerable to advertising
*age seven*
children are increasingly controlled by symbolic relationships and images (+ make judgment about things)
*under five*
{human characters ~?/= animated characters}--> belief in imaginary characters and monsters, management of emotions
*age two*
(end of) two --> children begin pretending (until age of five)
*over four*
idiosyncratic system of thinking about causality (extraordinary plays larger role than adults)
create and identify emotions in visual images
fantasizing =/= fantastical thinking
(for children) wishing = mental + magical + it exists in relatio to skill [---> go to Cinderella, waiting]
Elias's study of children images (visual material featuring children) in Persianate cultures (turkey, pakistan, iran) --> (role of) ***childhood/children = location of enacted emotion***
childhood + religion + visual culture <-- implementation of ideology in society
turkey, pakistan, iran:
•strongly ideological (like other states)
•multiethnic
•shaped by encounter with colonial empire
•strategic (=/= cultural) engagement with (west) global powers
•belief in the existence of charismatic religious authority
•belief in barkat برکت
Iran special relation to *religious visual art*
(Elias's) aesthetic: social imagination, creating reaction without words (= showing)
=/= telling
=/= nonutilitarian form of contemplation of art
=/= cognitive
Western mid 18th century philosophy ==> “aesthetics”
lower cognitive faculties
experience of sensate body
how the world strikes the body
emotional and affective response
modern aesthetics --> contemplation of beauty (superior to idleness and boredom <-- some sort of failure of moral vigilance)
“art = description of beauty”
==> Kant: aesthetics = sublime beauty (=/= quotidien)
}--> (fable of) the idea that **beauty engenders virtue** --> the beauty must be formal
(social system --> people) interacting with visual objects
making consumer choices [--(is not always)-->] interacting with visual objects in ways that further ideological formations
*religious reaction to sensory inputs are aesthetic* <-- they anticipate knowledge to be revealed in the future =/= rest contemplatively in the present
*religious gaze = apocalyptic glance*
=/= Kantian aesthetics (noninstrumental form[...]
(118)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%61.4[...]r />
•multiethnic
•shaped by encounter with colonial empire
•strategic (=/= cultural) engagement with (west) global powers
•belief in the existence of charismatic religious authority
•belief in barkat برکت
Iran special relation to *religious visual art*
(Elias's) aesthetic: social imagination, creating reaction without words (= showing)
=/= telling
=/= nonutilitarian form of contemplation of art
=/= cognitive
Western mid 18th century philosophy ==> “aesthetics”
lower cognitive faculties
experience of sensate body
how the world strikes the body
emotional and affective response
modern aesthetics --> contemplation of beauty (superior to idleness and boredom <-- some sort of failure of moral vigilance)
“art = description of beauty”
==> Kant: aesthetics = sublime beauty (=/= quotidien)
}--> (fable of) the idea that **beauty engenders virtue** --> the beauty must be formal
(social system --> people) interacting with visual objects
making consumer choices [--(is not always)-->] interacting with visual objects in ways that further ideological formations
*religious reaction to sensory inputs are aesthetic* <-- they anticipate knowledge to be revealed in the future =/= rest contemplatively in the present
*religious gaze = apocalyptic glance*
=/= Kantian aesthetics (noninstrumental form of enjoyment)
Plato + Aristoteles ==> premodern islamic thinkers --> “beauty = virtue” (harmony of physical and moral)
(problem with) philosophical aesthetics of disinterested contemplations --Elias-->
•ignores majority of human experience
•(favors) apophatic (transcendent + ineffable غیر قابل توصیف) =/= cataphatic (immanent + experiential)
unstable & somatic ways we respond to (and seek out) everyday images
evocative & powerful (<--Sina-- nonartisitic images)
(art or not art) ***aesthetic response***
[*]children's media: aesthetic social imagination
(moral components of:)
cruelty, hurt, disgust, disdain
kindness, happiness, admiration, love
physical, material, somatic relation to the ethereal, metaphysical, intellectual
(?how can we) confidently treat “images = sources of socioculturel information”
(from) Islamic culture --to--> cultures associated with isalm
strong opposition to representational religious art <-- modern Islamic societies --> unproblematic accepting of representational religious materials intended for children
didactic islamic visual media:
•(Kuwait) the 99 --> heroes for each name of the God
•(Pakistan, India, Afghanistan) burqa avenger --> burqa clad supe[...]
(121)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%61.5[...]ealed in the future =/= rest contemplatively in the present
*religious gaze = apocalyptic glance*
=/= Kantian aesthetics (noninstrumental form of enjoyment)
Plato + Aristoteles ==> premodern islamic thinkers --> “beauty = virtue” (harmony of physical and moral)
(problem with) philosophical aesthetics of disinterested contemplations --Elias-->
•ignores majority of human experience
•(favors) apophatic (transcendent + ineffable غیر قابل توصیف) =/= cataphatic (immanent + experiential)
unstable & somatic ways we respond to (and seek out) everyday images
evocative & powerful (<--Sina-- nonartisitic images)
(art or not art) ***aesthetic response***
[*]children's media: aesthetic social imagination
(moral components of:)
cruelty, hurt, disgust, disdain
kindness, happiness, admiration, love
physical, material, somatic relation to the ethereal, metaphysical, intellectual
(?how can we) confidently treat “images = sources of socioculturel information”
(from) Islamic culture --to--> cultures associated with isalm
strong opposition to representational religious art <-- modern Islamic societies --> unproblematic accepting of representational religious materials intended for children
didactic islamic visual media:
•(Kuwait) the 99 --> heroes for each name of the God
•(Pakistan, India, Afghanistan) burqa avenger --> burqa clad superhero against a corrupt view of traditional religion, using veil as costume
•(Pakistan) Ferozsons publisher
•Uysal press
•Timas press (Cem Kiziltug)
•
age-graded sequences of children's religious books --> progressively decreasing use of images
questions (> Elias:)
•are there culturally specific ways of seeing --answer--> yes
•does religion requires its own categories for understanding visuality and sensory systems? --> *religion is a problematic category* <== inherently unstable {religion referring simultaneously to systematic ideological systems, atomized and multivalent beliefs, range of individual and cultural practices}--> constant flux + relative to each other =/= religion: discrete phenomena
•scholars who argue for a transcendental quality to religion
•Durkheim + Weber --> religious = behavioral
•Otto --> location of religion: a fascinating incomprehensible force outside of the human person
•Eliade --> essential unity of the religious (~= commensurate human behavior)
•Elias --> manifestation of belief and ideology in visual written emotive forms --functionalist--> [*]religion = visual art
visual material --serve-->
•aesthetic
•generator of meaning
•generator of affirmation شعاری<[...]
(123)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%61.5[...]omena* and their *affective consequences* (manifested on individuals and human societies)
}<-- this plagues visial material cultural studies
(Gell's notion of) abduction: a form of reasoning to abduce a possible (=/= actual) agent or effect
abductive reasoning (=/= deduction, communication, translation)
--> ***to analyze and experiment in the lack of data or causal relationships*** (which happens most of the time)
(i have been using the term speculation as synonym for abduction)
abduction = informed abduction : you need as much contextually relevant information as possible
(learning from Elias)
•specificity of emotions and affects <-- much more interesting
•specificity of objects or people
[*]emotion: object of (unintentional) human manufacture ==> location of human meaning & motivation
...................................
childhood Elias chap2
philosophical notions of selfhood in late antiquity (= islam + europe) ==> study of emotions & feelings
Platonic + Aristotelian : “emotion = ambivalent urges need to be disciplined and harnessed through some process of education” ==> islamic ideas of body & mind
favorite emotion (~ religious expression + motivator) in islam [+ sufism]: love & virtue [--✕--> my interest in hate & monster]
it was only one and half a century ago that William James argued that human mental states were incapable inseparable from our bodily forms (=/= “mind =/= body”)
modern theories of emotion:
•universalism <-- sentimental desire to believe in the essential community of all human beings + appeal of neuroscientific inquiries into the biological bases of emotions + certain linguistics theories [--> for example (the fable of universal emotion) *fear in the face of the enemy* transcends time and space]
•social constructivism <-- 80s sociology and cultural studies
using clinical data for humanistic arguments <-- problematic and unpersuasive
*******generation of new knowledge --approached-->
humanistic method (also applies to art?) --> authoritative: establishing control over the previous scholarship in the field + incremental advancement to collective knowledge
(*written as eureka moments of the revelation of knowledge* --> book: definitive work that closes discussion)
=/=
scientific method --> testing hypothesis, expecting one's own hypothesis to be proven wrong or incomplete in a very short time
(*written as progress reports on findings in ongoing research* --> article)
}--> this makes it dangerous for humanity scholars to take advantage of scientific research
[*]emotion
cognitive psychology --> humanistic + social-scientific theories of emotions --promoting--> (fables of)
•universal basic emotions: happine[...]
(137)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%61.7[...]from guilt to) shame: deprives one from agency and responsibility
=/= muslim-majority society (use of shame in critical ways)
**performative ~=/& constructed nature of emotions**
-in my youth in iran (middle class) the context of singing together آواز in small gatherings was a context of expressing emotions within groups (a form of *networked living*) that give voice to specific emotion (grief, sadness, love, heartache, etc.)
[i always felt outside of it]
public expression of feelings --associate--> weakness & sexuality
==> everyday life denial of emotions (of jealousy, desire, heartache)
(sociologically)
*something is performed = something cannot be addressed informally* }<-- for example emotions
sharm
sharmamdegi
haya
aberu
gheirat
nang
namus
--> emotion words for honor and shame (shared between pakistan and iran, used with meanings that overlap and inconsistent)
honor selfsubsistent male
honor related to women
notions of virtue
notions of shyness
gheirat غیرت : an emotional alarm system [for one's personal image (aberu آبرو), family, religion, country]
gheirat specifies one's appropriate reactions to the particular acts of the other --> in the form of emotions: anger, hatred, jealousy
(Elias’ problematic and useful definition of) [*]affect: perceivable measurable describable effect of emotional events and experiences, what is felt + what is emoted at an individual and collective level, (enacted + perceived) ‘happening’ of the human experience (=/= undefined protoevent)
affect: a way in which one knows an experience is occurring + a way in which one reacts to an experience ==shape==> future human experience
1. enactment (performativity) of emotion is inseparable from its experience
2. emotions, enjoying words, emotion events cannot be comprehended apart from the sociopolitical context in which they occur (emotion act ~/?= emotion evoked)
somatic activity (crying) ==make==> emotions (sadness)
(in islam) happiness <--> virtue
(robust genre of literature) marvels and bestiary --> wonder at natural & manufactured wonders of the world (pyramids ~= mortality) “==encourage==>” contemplation of God's creative powers
(in sufism) tension between good and bad feelings (ugly, outlaw emotions...) ==> progress (spiritual advancement)
--> (sufi) scandalous behavior: performative form of cultivating negative emotions in oneself and others
emotional regime
ecological phenomenology
emotional habitus
habitus = [*]mood: collective feeling --Bourdieu--> *making and using moods have to be integral part of (the goal of) any sociopolitical process* (@Foad, @Sina)
[...]
(138)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%62.2[...]rocess* (@Foad, @Sina)
(**collective action if impossible if people are not in the mood**)
*educational material (~= ideological material) : integrated attitude toward the world*
regulatory forces of society construct (=/= control) behavior
[two feelings: you are *constructed* but still might find yourself with agency =/= you are original (essential, special) and might find yourself *controlled* by forces of society <-- bad idea for political engagement]
**politics --> a sphere that is deeply imbricated in the visual regimes of societies** (--> for me that is why visual arts are so important: politics is always visual)
**politics --> affect can explain the processes that are inexplicable through other functional explanations + affect exists as an object of power (political formations are reactive to and formed by affect)
(Naveeda Khan)
Jinns and children
a place for a child to build conviviality / continuity with a creature made of smokeless fire
(the girl) she charts through a modality of “hearing”
..that which defines the normative, the duties, and responsibilities that accompany observance of a religious tradition.
different intensities by which the normative is reiterated
Jinns are also known to eavesdrop (esteragh-e sam’) on the angels in the lower reaches of heaven to acquire limited knowledge of the future
the little mischievous spirits (nafs) that make up a self
**wonders of children
children are born free of sin and have the ability to communicate without reason (aghl) and therefore carry the threat of being easily led astray
8 year-old Maryam, channeling communication between the jinn and her family
a time that she would look into the palms of her hand (to see what the jinn would have her see)
she instructed the jinn that he could enter her father's body, with his permission, jinn wanted to taste human food
her father and brothers would listen carefully to her descriptions
(authoritative figure of the father becomes the pupil of his little daughter hearing her words of advice)--alterity
“in the middle east, the child is seen as the crucial generational link in the family unit, the key to its continuation, the living person that ties the present to the past and to the future” (Ferena 1005)
“in the indian case ...the child is seen as already being full person in domains to which the mother does not have access” (Veena Das 1989)
...healer or magician may utilize a child to bring into presence or communicate with the spiritual being
(***the presence of child in Ma'rekeh-Giri معرکه گیری?***)
...................................
[...]
(139)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%62.3[...]
...enmeshed within a certain unintentional malevolence existing alongside generosity.
-malevolence is something that holds out the possibility of harm rather than actively intending it
-generosity is the willingness to concede to others rather than a nobility of character
(also the dilemma of introducing the jinn to your child)
“exposing” his children to their disruptive yet generative powers
‘exposure of children to evil’
the innate resource of children
(for Zezru) the children are pure, they represent non-evil. they belong to shades. their innocence does not imply a state of passivity.
what regions of experience and expression the child has access to?
innate resources of children
Reynolds
children’s own resources are bolstered by the protection afforded by living and dead kin
a parent (or guardian), cannot know in advance what regions of experience and expression the child has access to or what he or she is capable of
in Islam: children are considered to have a certain strength and prescience that makes them effective as conduits to the world of spirits =/= innocent creatures to be protected
•children are free of religious obligations up to the age when they are seen as maturing
•protected by countercharms and exorcism only to an extent
a certain unintentional malevolence existing alongside generosity
[*]malevolence: something that holds out the possibility of harm (=/= actively intending harm)
[*]generosity: the willingness to concede to others (=/= a nobility of character)
religious differences --materialized-->
•as a malevolent witch
•in a father’s potentially malevolent instrumentalization of his daughter (bringing the jinn home)
parsayi پارسایی
*pious self = composition of a series of *presubjective singularities* (standing alongside one another [within a milieu comprising other such series/seriousnesses])
=/= self-contradictory subject arching toward resolution
=/= norm-bearing subject that has achieved coherence
(*presubjective singularities*)
let's explore how a self moves alone this series of singularities, what brings about movement, and where may it be tending [wohin]
---Naveeda--> presubjective singularities: different versions of oneself that are not sharply distinguished from one another but are nonetheless distinct
[*]subjectivity: whatever you do set yourself apart from others
Maryam's father, has moved from a version of himself that he knew to other versions of himself of which he did not have prior knowledge
his movement was toward the jinn and then away from them. so not in the series that constituted ‘him’, but also moved toward the series constituting the ji[...]
(140)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%62.4[...]d, and the unborn who subsist alongside the living
*threshold:
•to denote points of passage accross phases of life
•refering to varying degrees of intensity (that may continue after death)--> as a spirit/jinn is preserved or recedes, through possession or in visions or memories, enduring in potentially multiple dimensions
*a memory, a dream, even a hallucination is also a threshold of life*
agency of spirits [jinn, abstract spirit of modernity, secular education, Thakur Baba, , ,] = *a threshold of life* (with its own immanent forms of movement and flux)
[-]lets not call it “disenchantment” or mere nostalgia, but *a shift in the quality of life* --> ethnographic investigation can be a form of heightened attentiveness (to varying thresholds of life [to the intensities of Ehsan's ghost-girl, to the cannibal mice, Tehran's earthquake synthesis of affect, , ,]--(these [Tehran's range of moods and intensities] are)--> waxing and waning گامهای ماه *intensities immanent to a milieu; affecting our ideas of ethics and politics)
the social =? “our” version of the transcendent/immanent metaphysical
how many dimensions is “our” metaphysical composed of (in Tehran)?
(Durkheim starts:) religion = an engagement with a vital animating principle, “a kind of anonymous and impersonal force [...] none possesses it entirely and all share in it”
-spirits, demons, jinns, gods of every rank are the *concrete forms* that capture this energy, this *potentiality*
(later Durkheim reduces this remarkable promising formulation in his signiture from the metaphysical: “the moral authority of society”, ‘religion ==> solidarity انسجام’ }=/= innumerable anthropologists have shown how religion does not necessarily “reawaken solidarity”)
(instead of “the social” lets get interested in more than one dimension of life, lets think, with Singh and Deleuze, of) *vast continuum of human and nonhuman life*
“Baba, I have been troubled for years. What can I do to please my ancestral spirits?”
Beyzai analyzes deities and myths in Iran, negating any potential for spiriual movement between rival groups, even in what is clearly *a form of religious life moving across*
Beyzai preoccupation with defeat doesn't allow him to attend to ‘forms of religious life moving across’
•bottom-up thesis of oppositional negation and from its “top-down” opposite
=/= the idea of spiritual conversation
imitation of [upper caste,,,] values
[***]the fatality of these ideas of negation and of imitation is that they obscure the possibility of a spiritual inheritence that may be shared and contested in ways that create the possibility of a *cohabited future between neighbors and rivals* (Singh)
yes yes the history might be made through bloody contradictions, and yet, we cannot be as Magi,[...]
(142)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%63[...]nsities immanent to a milieu; affecting our ideas of ethics and politics)
the social =? “our” version of the transcendent/immanent metaphysical
how many dimensions is “our” metaphysical composed of (in Tehran)?
(Durkheim starts:) religion = an engagement with a vital animating principle, “a kind of anonymous and impersonal force [...] none possesses it entirely and all share in it”
-spirits, demons, jinns, gods of every rank are the *concrete forms* that capture this energy, this *potentiality*
(later Durkheim reduces this remarkable promising formulation in his signiture from the metaphysical: “the moral authority of society”, ‘religion ==> solidarity انسجام’ }=/= innumerable anthropologists have shown how religion does not necessarily “reawaken solidarity”)
(instead of “the social” lets get interested in more than one dimension of life, lets think, with Singh and Deleuze, of) *vast continuum of human and nonhuman life*
“Baba, I have been troubled for years. What can I do to please my ancestral spirits?”
Beyzai analyzes deities and myths in Iran, negating any potential for spiriual movement between rival groups, even in what is clearly *a form of religious life moving across*
Beyzai preoccupation with defeat doesn't allow him to attend to ‘forms of religious life moving across’
•bottom-up thesis of oppositional negation and from its “top-down” opposite
=/= the idea of spiritual conversation
imitation of [upper caste,,,] values
[***]the fatality of these ideas of negation and of imitation is that they obscure the possibility of a spiritual inheritence that may be shared and contested in ways that create the possibility of a *cohabited future between neighbors and rivals* (Singh)
yes yes the history might be made through bloody contradictions, and yet, we cannot be as Magi, waiting for the big drama to unfold --(we can do better)--> a signature capacity of ethnographic attentiveness in an affirmative lineage of thought --(not to deny contradiction)--> to be able to sense **varying intensities of conflict and cohabitation**
(play and war may both be latent in the give and take of everyday life, and the difference may not always be clear-cut)
نیرومندی و کثرت اهالی و تعارضات کشمکش و جماع
(how?) (to be able to) sense varying intensities [کیفیتی با شدت و سختی و حجم ~= انقباض ,در هم کشیدگی + شتافتن ,گرفته شدن + فراهم آمدن ,گرفتگی ,ترنجیدگی] of conflict and cohabitation[: my sister thinks of this term as family in small scale]
--> differential [داراى ضريب متغير، افتراقی، تشخیص دهنده the result of differentiation =/= different تمایز] intensities
bawdy مستهجن
[...]
(145)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%63[...]nking 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 lead to self-rule
[bare life =? life without a way of life --✕--> there is no life without a way of life]
(Singh:) someone's life cut off from their source of vitality
a local body of thought (jinn, etc.)
...................................
(Anand asking) what does it means to live in a city of jinns?
the jinn:
•serves as witnesses of times long gone
•figures of authority whose shrine blesses remembered forms of urban religious life
•forgotten by the amnesia of the postcolonial state
[...]
(147)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%63.3[...]d 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 lead to self-rule
[bare life =? life without a way of life --✕--> there is no life without a way of life]
(Singh:) someone's life cut off from their source of vitality
a local body of thought (jinn, etc.)
...................................
(Anand asking) what does it means to live in a city of jinns?
the jinn:
•serves as witnesses of times long gone
•figures of authority whose shrine blesses remembered forms of urban religious life
•forgotten by the amnesia of the postcolonial state
•rendered unislamic by the selective amnesia of revivalist tradition
jinn --> revive that old orientalist trope, constituted not only by bazzar, mosque, and hammam, but also of the antinomian potentials that have long been part of the Islamic tradition
...................................
vita
lives of saints
تذکرة الاولیا Tazkirat al-Awliya
concerned with canonization, education, and collective recollection of contemplative life
(vita as a biological genre recounting the lives of holly men and women in several religious trads traditions: Bhaktamala, Theravada buddhism, Therigata, etc.)
Singh asking: how would we narrate a scholarly life? (and i add to that: who could be oulia اولیا Arahant [further ones] today? queer or nonhuman)
*participated in the world historical “isms” (--> ajayeb)
--Singh--> narrating a conceptual life, vita
*uncertainties of reception* (in Attar's Tazkirat al-Awliya)
singularity of trajectory of Attar's saints =/= my random sampling of themes
anthropology: to write about anything that exists or imagined
can we talk affirmatively of a postmodern ethnography of ajayeb? =/= “totalizing vision” of culture
recovery of a human voice as a moral imperative (--> Hoda)
(?your history as a) telos of increasingly self-awareness
-Derrida's philosophical style tending to negative transcendence (différance: an absence that transcends ‘a’ and ‘not a’)
-[...]
(149)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%63.4[...] disregard for sovereign authority (حاکم hakem, hakemiat) --> a different form of power that one let's to lead to self-rule
[bare life =? life without a way of life --✕--> there is no life without a way of life]
(Singh:) someone's life cut off from their source of vitality
a local body of thought (jinn, etc.)
...................................
(Anand asking) what does it means to live in a city of jinns?
the jinn:
•serves as witnesses of times long gone
•figures of authority whose shrine blesses remembered forms of urban religious life
•forgotten by the amnesia of the postcolonial state
•rendered unislamic by the selective amnesia of revivalist tradition
jinn --> revive that old orientalist trope, constituted not only by bazzar, mosque, and hammam, but also of the antinomian potentials that have long been part of the Islamic tradition
...................................
vita
lives of saints
تذکرة الاولیا Tazkirat al-Awliya
concerned with canonization, education, and collective recollection of contemplative life
(vita as a biological genre recounting the lives of holly men and women in several religious traditions: Bhaktamala, Theravada buddhism, Therigata, etc.)
Singh asking: how would we narrate a scholarly life? (and i add to that: who could be oulia اولیا Arahant [further ones] today? queer or nonhuman)
*participated in the world historical “isms” (--> ajayeb)
--Singh--> narrating a conceptual life, vita
*uncertainties of reception* (in Attar's Tazkirat al-Awliya)
singularity of trajectory of Attar's saints =/= my random sampling of themes
anthropology: to write about anything that exists or imagined
can we talk affirmatively of a postmodern ethnography of ajayeb? =/= “totalizing vision” of culture
recovery of a human voice as a moral imperative (--> Hoda)
(?your history as a) telos of increasingly self-awareness
-Derrida's philosophical style tending to negative transcendence (différance: an absence that transcends ‘a’ and ‘not a’)
-Deleuze's tradition of affirmative immanence
(Singh > Deleuze > Strauss:) structure is composed of “pre-individual singularities” ~ nomadic distribution of potential --immanent--> contradictions, accidents, mutations
pure/impure
suspicious/inauspicious
life/death
heretic --> reorder and obliterate the partitioning of categories that compose the structural order of religion [--> Veena on Sikhism and Hinduism: symbolism of Sikhism understood in relation to Hinduism structural order, annihilating the categorical prioritise (intellectual and social) of the medieval world. Sikhism rejecting the opposition between categories of: the ru[...]
(150)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%63.4[...]fe? (and i add to that: who could be oulia اولیا Arahant [further ones] today? queer or nonhuman)
*participated in the world historical “isms” (--> ajayeb)
--Singh--> narrating a conceptual life, vita
*uncertainties of reception* (in Attar's Tazkirat al-Awliya)
singularity of trajectory of Attar's saints =/= my random sampling of themes
anthropology: to write about anything that exists or imagined
can we talk affirmatively of a postmodern ethnography of ajayeb? =/= “totalizing vision” of culture
recovery of a human voice as a moral imperative (--> Hoda)
(?your history as a) telos of increasingly self-awareness
-Derrida's philosophical style tending to negative transcendence (différance: an absence that transcends ‘a’ and ‘not a’)
-Deleuze's tradition of affirmative immanence
(Singh > Deleuze > Strauss:) structure is composed of “pre-individual singularities” ~ nomadic distribution of potential --immanent--> contradictions, accidents, mutations
pure/impure
suspicious/inauspicious
life/death
heretic --> reorder and obliterate the partitioning of categories that compose the structural order of religion [--> Veena on Sikhism and Hinduism: symbolism of Sikhism understood in relation to Hinduism structural order, annihilating the categorical prioritise (intellectual and social) of the medieval world. Sikhism rejecting the opposition between categories of: the rulers, the caste system, and the orders of renunciation --> investment of the virtues of all three *in a single body of faith* and conduct]
heterodox sects
rebellious thinkers
--> negation of the organizing conceptual order
(social and) ritual order generates its own forms of instability
...ambivalences of key concepts ==bring==> “play” to the structure, for good and ill ~ liminality
(Veena's) liminial situation: a form of instability where the individual experiences his social world as separated from the cosmic --> death: disarticulation --> must be undone by inhabiting the liminality : ritually rejoining the flow of life
similarities of ritual mourner and ascetic: transcending the categories of the social and the cosmic
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 encount[...]
(151)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%63.4[...]n
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 --> 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
[...]
(152)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%63.6[...]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 kind of silence, the refusal to let toxicity circulate, involves everyday spiritual exercises in *digesting the poison in the acts of attending to the ordinary* --> survivors affirming the possibility of life by removing it from the circulation of words gone wild... (--Hoda's lullabies songs of private injuries?)
-silence is never simply a silence
-to be able to affirm certain kinds of silence (is key to a political anthropology)
different rhyth[...]
(153)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%63.9[...]of sensory experience and dreams of presence --engenders--> attachments or system of investment...
(people are) collecting found objects snatched off the literal or metaphorical side of the road
...................................
Yazid: the archetypal tyrant of islamic memory
...a shift from thinking of Urdu as exclusively Muslim to thinking of Muslims as the custodians of a shared heritage that Hindus have forgotten, but have the potential to reclaim
-Anand --> how do we understand the islamicness of urdu poetry?
spread of [...] poetry far beyond the bounds of exclusively muslim identity
sufism as an everyday mode of speaking of and speaking to the self (not as an esoteric practice, or as institutionally bounded)
-it gives you a language to explore their interiority
-(traditions of self-scrutiny and self-reflection,) a poetry of self-knowledge + rebellion against social convention [+ frenzied violence (vahshat) --> Majnun: an intellectual articulation, literary elaboration, and social proliferation of the “mazhab of love” a dominant strand of sufi theology, ethics, and political thought in the Balkans to Bengal complex]
earlier mode of understanding X as irreligious
discourses that recognize X as islamic
Anand --> *indic nature of islam*
-islam is indexed within the lives of non-Muslim Indians through a form of stranger hospitality
many, besides muslims, have ongoing relations to islamic sacred objects
•embrace of the divine
•efflorescence of relations with nonhumans (snakes and cats)
(Naveeda on) Anand's mournful tone --> forces of restoration = forces of destruction
importance 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 ar[...]
(154)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%64.1[...] 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
conditions of neoliberal global capitalism
[we have to see] disenchantment, necessarily open-ended and incomplete =/= self-consciously formulated projects of re-enchantment
[i have to be carefull with my] allusive evocation of the passing of secularity into obsolescence
my work with computre programming and database --> practices of calculability: a hallmark of the secularization thesis
subtraction stories: accounts o[...]
(155)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%64.2[...]ossibilities 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
conditions of neoliberal global capitalism
[we have to see] disenchantment, necessarily open-ended and incomplete =/= self-consciously formulated projects of re-enchantment
[i have to be carefull with my] allusive evocation of the passing of secularity into obsolescence
my work with computre programming and database --> practices of calculability: a hallmark of the secularization thesis
>
subtraction stories: accounts of the emergence of modernity-secularity as merely the falling away of extraneous elements (leaving a core of foundational human experience and its self-understanding)
(Mufti > Asad --clarifying--> the ways in which) ***the very category of religious experience as a distinct and delimited domain of social and cultural life emerges out of transitions to modernity***
islamism: a return of islam, either uncontaminated by, or having shaken itself free of, the liberal thought and practice of the modern west
jargon of authenticity: (a form of thinking, to understand crisis in terms of) loss and attempted recuperation of past social and cultural forms
emergent postsecular common sense ==>{islamist practices = an expression of religious consciousness =/= the inroads of secularism ~= Western imperialism}
(?what is made to disappear from view altogether in) conceptualizing the interaction ction of secular and religious imaginations and spaces in modern Muslim societies
[*]enlightenment: an encompassing logic of bourgeois modernity, within and against which different social groups struggle in widely different ways (it is not something to be selected or rejected at the great salad bar of modern life)
*dialectical perception* --> revivalist claims (of whatever) are products of the very cultural logics they disavow and disown
==Mufti==> *islamist thought and practice cannot sustain their claim to be uncontaminated by the modern imperial process*
precolonial poetic traditions in the persianate sphere (influenced by persian)
...................................
systematic observation of the moon and its light ==drive==> development of science
studying soft moonlight =/= short-lived and blinding sensation of a flash of lightning
moon:
bound[...]
(158)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%64.3[...] the postcolonial world
conditions of neoliberal global capitalism
[we have to see] disenchantment, necessarily open-ended and incomplete =/= self-consciously formulated projects of re-enchantment
[i have to be carefull with my] allusive evocation of the passing of secularity into obsolescence
my work with computre programming and database --> practices of calculability: a hallmark of the secularization thesis
subtraction stories: accounts of the emergence of modernity-secularity as merely the falling away of extraneous elements (leaving a core of foundational human experience and its self-understanding)
(Mufti > Asad --clarifying--> the ways in which) ***the very category of religious experience as a distinct and delimited domain of social and cultural life emerges out of transitions to modernity***
islamism: a return of islam, either uncontaminated by, or having shaken itself free of, the liberal thought and practice of the modern west
jargon of authenticity: (a form of thinking, to understand crisis in terms of) loss and attempted recuperation of past social and cultural forms
emergent postsecular common sense ==>{islamist practices = an expression of religious consciousness =/= the inroads of secularism ~= Western imperialism}
(?what is made to disappear from view altogether in) conceptualizing the interaction of secular and religious imaginations and spaces in modern Muslim societies
[*]enlightenment: an encompassing logic of bourgeois modernity, within and against which different social groups struggle in widely different ways (it is not something to be selected or rejected at the great salad bar of modern life)
*dialectical perception* --> revivalist claims (of whatever) are products of the very cultural logics they disavow and disown
==Mufti==> *islamist thought and practice cannot sustain their claim to be uncontaminated by the modern imperial process*
precolonial poetic traditions in the persianate sphere (influenced by persian)
...................................
systematic observation of the moon and its light ==drive==> development of science
studying soft moonlight =/= short-lived and blinding sensation of a flash of lightning
moon:
boundary of the terrestrial domain
bediator between this world and the next
moonlight ==>
•reflections about the interstellar order of space
•boundaries of terrestrial captivity زندان تن
•*semi-clear blurred shadows that suggest a strange and nonhuman world*
moon changes constantly --> mood changes to the moon [luna in Latin --> laune in german: launisch moody = to be ruled by changeable moods, lunatism = a form of sleep-walking by moonlight or possessed by [...]
(159)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%64.3[...]hilippines: from Marcos dictatorship --to--> neoliberalism: privatized, deregulated, commercialized, marketized public services
•Crane using psychoanalytical tropes --> horror = everyday terror
[*]horror: excessive communication
•Creed using trope of monstrous-feminine --> horror = gestalten deeds in adjection and castration
•Lim --> *horror = temporal critique* {fantastic local horror =/= historical time, supernaturalism, occult modes of thinking encoded in fantastic narratives}
[Bergson > Lim > Tolentino:] horror --> heterogeneous temporality, heteroglossia: multiple tongues, to disengage in certain (nation) formations
horrific real
translation of historical terror in filmic horror
historical real + filmic mobilization --render--> real as porous & artificial
horror --Tolentino--> transhistorical (transgressional) continuity of the project of desire & pleasure
--> masochistic viewing experience + trajectory of critique
(during Marcos order in Philippines -->) horror genre talks about the popular dialectics of the known & unknown, moral & immoral, inclusion & exclusion, defeat & triumph, struggle & redemption, normal & abnormal, reality & alternative realities, religious & secular
•horror provides a cultural trope for the imagination of the nation
anxious state in horror films --represent--> anxious state in ... (nation-formation, citizenship, etc.) --> irony: (the anxious state) it is not what it is
----> [*]viewing: a sadomasochistic act [you know it is frightful (or garbage) yet enjoy viewing (in KHM we called it hate-watching)] --> pervers pleasure ==> individual and social categories to remain constantly in a flux
intensification of anxiety ~=> carnavalesque moment of drawing pleasure
(in the film) history of a chosen local
logic of absence --> prohibitive history of violence + excess
ritual of horrific foregrounding
scene + coherence of meaning
*horror is performative : it needs to be restaged in order to be evocative of meaning*
sexualization of women integral to the genre of horror [aimed at its male audience, similar to Charmed]:
•sexy female leading role (in love triangle)
•man --> representing evil and underworld
•man --> representing true love (engaged in a battle for love + choice of the young woman, sexualized in the male contest)
•female viacera sucker --> female creatures need to show hidden skin [popular sex-oriented star --to--> female monstrous figure --allow--> display of prohibited body parts + heteronormative desire]
(female star rendered both strong and weak)
1. exposing and defying the horror figure (first)
2. embodying the horrific abject subject (second)
in the narrative of horror
•the moral forthrightness that makes[...]
(161)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%64.7[...]>
heterosexual desire
nostalgia for truth
==provide==> template for cultural idiomatic imagination
historical experience --> futile & enunciated through the orality of retelling (+ being capable of retelling)
historical justice has not been served in actual social reality ==> the horror scene bears the constant threat and possibility of repeating itself on the future
...................................
#idea
namaz gestures as alchemical ruse to open portals, kill enemies, transmute objects, and other specs
...................................
Naveeda chapter 1 mosque
mosque =/= shell for prayers
•monumental structures built by the state
old mosque: part of complex devoted to
•learning
•dispensing justice
•channeling charity
oft repeated statement: Pakistan is a mosque [~= one has to learn to inhabit this place, aquire the right etiquette in sharing it] (--> what it means to be Muslim in Pakistan)
•a place of assembly?
•a sacred place?
qabza, ghabze قبضه, violent seizure, forcible possession
(depending on who you ask -->) Pakistan under ghabze by:
•the state
•venal religious figures
•unscrupulous lay muslims
•sectarian groups
•
“narratives of loss --> investment on self-betterment* (+ bettering of one's community) ~= striving
emergence of new independent mosques --> new property arrangements (+ admin + funding) --> growth of civil institutions
city bureaucracy of Islamabad ==Hull==> *uncivil politics* (سیاست غیرمدنی =/= civil society)
(like Tehran) Lahore = urban fabric palimpsest of:
•different eras of history
•political leadership
•social composition
•aesthetic styles
•modalities of social engineering
=/= dissolving the past into hypermodern
*postcolonial ~=> sectarian politics*
local mosque-related politics
سیاست محلی مسجدی
demographic change + population growth + strengthening of sectarian politics = ?
به طور قانونی غیرقانونی
legally illegal mosques
(illegal structures on land legally put aside for this purpose)
presence of bureaucrats within mosques in south Asia (since 19th century)
creating an ideal state by means of the mosque
loud zekr ذکر
mosque: (bearing) traces of the changing fortunes of its worshippers
qabza =/= voice: an individual's singular words and gestures arising from her embodiment *of hey maslak مسلک*
...civil servents
cultivating a modernist
cosmopolitan air
and their educated well-traveled
nuclear [...]
(162)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%64.8[...]mosques
(illegal structures on land legally put aside for this purpose)
presence of bureaucrats within mosques in south Asia (since 19th century)
creating an ideal state by means of the mosque
loud zekr ذکر
mosque: (bearing) traces of the changing fortunes of its worshippers
qabza =/= voice: an individual's singular words and gestures arising from her embodiment *of hey maslak مسلک*
...civil servents
cultivating a modernist
cosmopolitan air
and their educated well-traveled
nuclear families
congregation (جماعت =/=? collective, community)
communal exchange
learning
contemplation
mosque employee hierarchy:
1. khatib خطیب the person who gives sermons during Friday prayers
2. imam امام the person who leads the give obligatory prayers during the day expect Friday
3. ghari قاری the person who had received enough training to render a pepper recitation of the quran
4. moazen موذن there person who gives the call to prayers, also responsible for cleaning the mosque
ghabze of mosque = expression of ambition (to found religious space) to forge the model Muslim community (beyond daily needs of worship)
***legal exercices & bureaucratic forms = a mode of experimentation*** (in being good [Muslim, intrinsic to Pakistan])
--> to enable civil relation (learning from Naveeda and Femke)
Islam is only one element of a complex weave of politics (involving local leadership, emergent communities of dissent and activism against an indifferent state)
flagging a social problem =/= filling a complaint
jahalat جهالت (=/= common sense + education + good breading)
resentment of uneducated
not class-coded?
--> character (determined by)
•nobility of birth =/= lowly birth
•enlightenment of education =/= ignorant
--Naveeda--> ‘maslak differences ~= grist for the art of war’
rumored
engineered
unfolding
sectarian geography of the city
mobilized in the form of bored policemen
prophet's era intermingled with Pakistan present
masjed zarar
gabze (mosque seizure قبضه مسجد) --explicit--> desire to stake a claim on a new nation-state (Pakistan) = expression of striving:
•tie religious/moral development to the nation-state development
•tie religious/moral development to the imagination of an earlier era of Islam
*expression of striving* in art: opening an art space, studio, school, or an institute (=/= create an institution as a conceptual gesture)
--> tie your development to the nation-state development and to an imagination (o[...]
(163)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%64.9[...] to forge the model Muslim community (beyond daily needs of worship)
***legal exercices & bureaucratic forms = a mode of experimentation*** (in being good [Muslim, intrinsic to Pakistan])
--> to enable civil relation (learning from Naveeda and Femke)
Islam is only one element of a complex weave of politics (involving local leadership, emergent communities of dissent and activism against an indifferent state)
flagging a social problem =/= filling a complaint
jahalat جهالت (=/= common sense + education + good breading)
resentment of uneducated
not class-coded?
--> character (determined by)
•nobility of birth =/= lowly birth
•enlightenment of education =/= ignorant
--Naveeda--> ‘maslak differences ~= grist for the art of war’
rumored
engineered
unfolding
sectarian geography of the city
mobilized in the form of bored policemen
prophet's era intermingled with Pakistan present
masjed zarar
gabze (mosque seizure قبضه مسجد) --explicit--> desire to stake a claim on a new nation-state (Pakistan) = expression of striving:
•tie religious/moral development to the nation-state development
•tie religious/moral development to the imagination of an earlier era of Islam
*expression of striving* in art: opening an art space, studio, school, or an institute (=/= create an institution as a conceptual gesture)
--> tie your development to the nation-state development and to an imagination (of change?)
•anything could be believed about a certain imam
•when someone (or group) attack you, they transform from human to animal
--> skeptical turn towards the world
neighborhood = ties + tensions
...................................
Naveeda chapter 2 Iqbal
Naveeda's ethnographic example of a scene of aspiration:
•librarians sit around a table (in a public library) engaged in a heated religious argument that threatens to spill into accusations of blasphemy
•Lahoris resolve to build mosques for their neighborhoods only to preside over the dissolution of their communities in their fights over the mosques
<-- sites of dissonance + aspiration
aspiration --> efforts at being Muslim (in the ways one knows or attached to) marked by a striving to an as-yet-unattained self without presuming that this next self is the final one
<-- tendency (=/= social program)
(=/= see these examples as the lack of consensus in Islam)
Iqbal --Naveeda--> theory of creative workings of time
Naveeda constructing a Pakistani Iqbal
Iqbal presence within:
•everyday acts of striving to be Muslim
•state exertion (official rhetoric)
•p[...]
(164)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%64.9[...]for the art of war’
rumored
engineered
unfolding
sectarian geography of the city
mobilized in the form of bored policemen
prophet's era intermingled with Pakistan present
masjed zarar
gabze (mosque seizure قبضه مسجد) --explicit--> desire to stake a claim on a new nation-state (Pakistan) = expression of striving:
•tie religious/moral development to the nation-state development
•tie religious/moral development to the imagination of an earlier era of Islam
*expression of striving* in art: opening an art space, studio, school, or an institute (=/= create an institution as a conceptual gesture)
--> tie your development to the nation-state development and to an imagination (of change?)
•anything could be believed about a certain imam
•when someone (or group) attack you, they transform from human to animal
--> skeptical turn towards the world
neighborhood = ties + tensions
...................................
Naveeda chapter 2 Iqbal
Naveeda's ethnographic example of a scene of aspiration:
•librarians sit around a table (in a public library) engaged in a heated religious argument that threatens to spill into accusations of blasphemy
•Lahoris resolve to build mosques for their neighborhoods only to preside over the dissolution of their communities in their fights over the mosques
<-- sites of dissonance + aspiration
aspiration --> efforts at being Muslim (in the ways one knows or attached to) marked by a striving to an as-yet-unattained self without presuming that this next self is the final one
<-- tendency (=/= social program)
(=/= see these examples as the lack of consensus in Islam)
Iqbal --Naveeda--> theory of creative workings of time
Naveeda constructing a Pakistani Iqbal
Iqbal presence within:
•everyday acts of striving to be Muslim
•state exertion (official rhetoric)
•public culture of Lahore
**synthetic mode of thought**
--> how South Asian intellectuals created zones of thought by assimilating the work of thinkers from different times and parts of the world to their own ==> (develop and sustain a) *cosmopolitanism* [that exceed the limits places on imagination by colonialism, nationalism]
(--in--> both locatedness and translocal ambitions --understand-->) *the openness and connectivity that characterizes the socal*
Iqbal's mode of self-experimentation: he put himself in relation to dynamic individuals and emergent movements and institutions to see how they sat with him and he with them
--Naveeda--> *experimentation does not require the creation of the new* but rather new ways of inhabiting the fundamentals (of religion in Iqbal's case) --toward--[...]
(166)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%65[...]rked by a striving to an as-yet-unattained self without presuming that this next self is the final one
<-- tendency (=/= social program)
(=/= see these examples as the lack of consensus in Islam)
Iqbal --Naveeda--> theory of creative workings of time
Naveeda constructing a Pakistani Iqbal
Iqbal presence within:
•everyday acts of striving to be Muslim
•state exertion (official rhetoric)
•public culture of Lahore
**synthetic mode of thought**
--> how South Asian intellectuals created zones of thought by assimilating the work of thinkers from different times and parts of the world to their own ==> (develop and sustain a) *cosmopolitanism* [that exceed the limits places on imagination by colonialism, nationalism]
(--in--> both locatedness and translocal ambitions --understand-->) *the openness and connectivity that characterizes the socal*
Iqbal's mode of self-experimentation: he put himself in relation to dynamic individuals and emergent movements and institutions to see how they sat with him and he with them
--Naveeda--> *experimentation does not require the creation of the new* but rather new ways of inhabiting the fundamentals (of religion in Iqbal's case) --toward--> producing the readiness for change
-attitudes of toleration comes with belief in dogma
Mohammad
the prophet's return is creative : insert himself into the sweep of time with a view to control the forces of history ==> create a new world of ideals
*prophetic consciousness: a mode of economizing individual thought and choice by providing readymade judgment, choices, ways of action
Islam is strongly informed by *teleology: final causes and ends
•(a tradition of) biding worshippers to act in this world with the knowledge of brevity of earthly existence (and the certainty that they will meet their maker)
--> perception of time
Bergson --> enabling change in the human perception of time so that humans could see how their present was charged with open-ended potential
(1934:)
•duration: reality of time as a dynamic continuity
•intuition: imaginative means by which humans could perceive duration
(picture of) life = vital impulse through matter
--> (positive account of) evolution: continual discharge of creative ideas (and tendencies) moving through a world of matter
[*]metaphysics: a technique to avoid “false problems”
Bergson's understanding of intellect: denying humans the experience of time as duration ==> Iqbal
how Iqbal rendered (Bergson's) vitalist philosophy (which denied teleology) acceptable to Islam (which strongly is based on teleology):
the idea of a forward-looking aspect to the intelligence permeanting life --> [...]
(167)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%65[...]pied with)--> *muslims crafting and tethering their subjectivity to the commentary world*
Iqbal's self-seeking individuals : actualize qualities attribited to God [(impersonal qualities:) majesty, beauty, grace] (to the best of one's ability) --Naveeda--> (individual impersonality) ***individuality marked by a certain impersonality*** : the more impersonal the qualify that is manifested the more unique one is
=/= [*]modern identity : right-bearing citizen in nation-state, a subject distinguished by the peculiarities of his or her own way of life or point of view or a specific interiority
#integration
=/= Cinderella's (aim and process of) individuation --Sina--> impersonal individuality
[Cinderella's shekayat شکایت]
Iqbal's nonintuitive pairings (=/= contradictions):
•experimentation / convection
•fidelity to one's past / seeking one's future
•prophetic guidance / human freedom
•reason / revelation
•teleology / open future
•duration / transcendence
•freedom / finitude
•individuality / impersonality
<-- elements are drawn to each other, mutual attraction (that does not detract from the plenitude of each)
(Sir Sayyid:) “religion = revelation + reason” --Iqbal--> affirmative picture of existence after revelation had ceased
Muslim thinking in need of biological renewal ==Iqbal==> revolutionary Muslim thinking
}--> a theory of human perception + intelligence + their place within the larger picture of natural evolution
-in order ot make islam political they have to reject the supernatural (miracles, keramat, etc.) ---> go to Corbin's critique
*striving to overcome the (so-called) sickness of modernity* --> (now in Europe artists want to become -->) *physician of moral community* (hakim al umat)
habits of Allah
•miracle
•
•
Iqbal --> the question is not of evidence (whether miracles did not did not happen), rather: whether belief in miracles is usefully to a community : miracles ==> intensify sense of supernatural ==> hold together --> society with *ideal nationality* (not territorial nationality)
}--Naveeda--> (Iqbal is saying that) just as Muslims needed to understand the capaciousness of nature (to be able to engage and value human striving), so too did they need to accord existence to the supernatural <-- quality of striving
Maududi's picture of aspiration
modern Muslim citizenry <--Maududi-- should be created by the state (the idea that state must mould every aspect of human life on consonance with its moral norms and program of social reform ==> *true Islam =/= muslim Islam*
~= Islam is perfect, muslims not
•Asad --> muslim self-transformation (self-directed changed) ==> perfect form of islam
•Maudu[...]
(168)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%65.1[...] = a horizon of aspiration through a register of justice
munir report
semitic theory of state (Jewish, Christian, or Islamic): the object of human life is to prepare ourselves for the next life --> strive for human conduct which ensure for a person better status in the next world
*state --> act upon Muslim bodies to secure their afterlife* (by means of prayers and good work)
}--> define a Muslim:
1. identify the material body upon which am Islamic state is compelled to act (to ensure its afterlife)
2. to protect non-Muslims from the state
3. to protect the state from non-Muslims (kofar)
(for me there is a big difference between:)
•islam: achievement of the Arabian nomads (that make the musulman of today live in the past)
•islam: a tradition of intellectual imagination of those who were conquered
Pakistan 1972 constitution --(for the purpose of the constitution of the law)--> non-muslim: a person who does not believe in the absolute and unqualified finality of prophethood of Muhammad, the last of the prophets or claims to be a prophet, in any sense of the word or of any description whatsoever, after Muhammad or recognizes such a claimant as a prophet or a religious reformer
something akin to copyright (trademark law) --> disable non-Muslims from encroaching upon Muslim rights over their tradition (undertaking muslim modes of worship: use of honorific titles and modes of address specific to the prophetic community, building mosques, calling azan, citing from Quran or hadis, etc.)
khatam anbia --> khatm: seal --> aspects of Islam as sealed off and exclusive to muslims
(Pakistan supprim court's affective legal feedback loop) copyrighting islam = affirmation of Muslim nature <--Naveeda-- *a horizon of striving*
}<-- an example of (Iqbalian) reason + revelation
institutionalizing blindness
Iqbal on ahmadies:
•Tipu sultan collapse by the British 1799 = mark of political and psychological subjugation of Muslims --Iqbal--> Ahmadiyya messianic movement = subjugated people explaining to themselves their state of decline (negative enlightenment)
•tolerance = indifference
striving =/= progress
...................................
Naveeda chapter 4 jinn
strident --> engaging speech with vivid imagery
differential --> differing knowledge to proper authority
lack of consensus on what X is (among its varient constituents) ==> (problem of) loss of tolerance
(for example Pakistan:)
contradictions between commitments to:
•existing hierarchies
•tribal ties
•universalistic religion (whose version of community transcends those ties)
(Naveeda) thinking of the potential lines of movement among[...]
(169)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%65.3[...]the prophetic community, building mosques, calling azan, citing from Quran or hadis, etc.)
khatam anbia --> khatm: seal --> aspects of Islam as sealed off and exclusive to muslims
(Pakistan supprim court's affective legal feedback loop) copyrighting islam = affirmation of Muslim nature <--Naveeda-- *a horizon of striving*
}<-- an example of (Iqbalian) reason + revelation
institutionalizing blindness
Iqbal on ahmadies:
•Tipu sultan collapse by the British 1799 = mark of political and psychological subjugation of Muslims --Iqbal--> Ahmadiyya messianic movement = subjugated people explaining to themselves their state of decline (negative enlightenment)
•tolerance = indifference
striving =/= progress
...................................
Naveeda chapter 4 jinn
strident --> engaging speech with vivid imagery
differential --> differing knowledge to proper authority
lack of consensus on what X is (among its varient constituents) ==> (problem of) loss of tolerance
(for example Pakistan:)
contradictions between commitments to:
•existing hierarchies
•tribal ties
•universalistic religion (whose version of community transcends those ties)
(Naveeda) thinking of the potential lines of movement among entrenched differences, cited texts, and possible positions generated by selves encountering others in the world
intensities that burn within you + openness to conversation
attention to time --Naveeda--> draw a consistent picture of an Islam with open future
disputation = a form of experimentation: doing and undoing of known forms (in the spirit of striving) [=/= experimentation: innovation in self-making, or social arrangements]
@apass
disputation: a form of interaction (with risks and ill effects [risk of alienation, estrangement of others])
--> [*]becoming: coming to terms with the trajectories and crystalization of tendencies within the transcriptions of the state and in public culture --> **excavating the resources (that this way of being Muslim) give to itself to reflect upon and evaluate (--> renew its inheritance of Islam)
•approaching history from the perspective of plenitude
•approaching history from the perspective of lack
(upsurge of excitement accompanying the creation of Pakistan --Smith--> a tendency [=/= social movement for example reform or piety with identifiable advocacies and trajectories] called) [*]aspiration: sustaining the striving towards an ideal final form (a state, society, self, etc.) =/= achieving
the aspiration of making Pakistan --> to aspire an islamic state ~~Smith--> muslim way of saying that Pakistan should build for itself a good society
--Naveeda--> demand fo[...]
(170)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%65.3[...]/>
•approaching history from the perspective of plenitude
•approaching history from the perspective of lack
(upsurge of excitement accompanying the creation of Pakistan --Smith--> a tendency [=/= social movement for example reform or piety with identifiable advocacies and trajectories] called) [*]aspiration: sustaining the striving towards an ideal final form (a state, society, self, etc.) =/= achieving
the aspiration of making Pakistan --> to aspire an islamic state ~~Smith--> muslim way of saying that Pakistan should build for itself a good society
--Naveeda--> demand for a state = demand for a society ~= demand for a self
how to read Pakistan's historical records shaped by the *aspiration to strive as Muslims*?
to effect experimentation <==
•disputation (jadal)
•argument (bahs)
•disputation (monazereh)
•debate + polemic
•building mosques
◦
tradition and ethics of debate and disputation
Carl Schmitt --> political theology
*politics discovers its modernity by repressing the theological foundations of its concept and practice*
theology was always about worldly politics <--> religious transcendence }==> run analysis both ways:
•transcendental coming into play (in some instances)
•worldly life coming into play (in some instances) [immanent quality]
--Singh--> self-making & self-perfecting
}--Naveeda--> religious argumentation : expressive of ongoing striving
**one works on oneself by revisiting and reinhabiting theological conundrums (through words and practice)** [same in artists as well?]
perceived eagerness for debate among lay muslims --> (anxiety over) disputation ==>
•indulgence in abstract thinking
•undermine the tenacity of individual faith
•reduce the hold of the daily obligations of ritual worship
•lead to a diminishing attachment to worldly life or stakes in the social
Veena, Cavell > skepticism:
•philosophical efforts at securing one's knowledge of the world unmediated by sense experience (<-- classical)
•human disappointment with our earthly condition of being distinct and separate from others (<-- social)
•efforts to secure unmediated knowledge of others (<-- social)
•
[Veena (giving historicity and ethnigraphic precision)-->] skepticism ==>
•renders other vulnerable to suspicion
•unsettle social relations
•produce the conditions of possibility for suffering and violence
skepticism <--> aspiration
aspiration =/= clear vision of ends
Pakistan:
•idemtifies itself as an ideological state (Islam) [==Naveeda==> (the possibility of) some experimentation within its apparatus [...]
(171)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%65.4[...]>
•with Bergson --> concern for the futurity of Islam
•with Nietzsche --> concern for the spiritual health
◦Nietzsche: physician of culture, (understood as political act) “striving and self-diagnosis ==> implicates the individual in the world ==> produce charges in the world”
Naveeda's ethnography method of interviewing:
1. locate traces of X in (context:)
◦everyday life
◦public culture
◦
3. see how this tendency crystallizes
◦at particular points
◦within particular persons
◦within particular texts
◦
5. study this crystallization
◦comes to be overlaid
◦expressed through lived experiences
◦be productive of
◾further movements of the tendency
◾countertendencies
◾its dissipation
◦
jinn <--> striving
Naveeda shiwsyin her research a single worshiper's choice of striving: relay upon a jinn for guidance on better ways to be a Muslim
*striving --> put collectivity (for example family) in jeopardy*
*@apass
...................................
(state pronouncements of) correct way to [?how to] *attach to the prophet*
becoming a knowledgeable religious disputant
Naveeda > Iqbal > the weary self that could not be roused to piety by religious zeal strikes a posture as much of resignation to sin by a nonpracticing Muslim as of a certain pride of withholding oneself from conformism.
--> of one goes to prayer in a mosque it is by one's own choice
...to dismiss differences = the political expression of the petit bourgeoisie
Iqbal's disapproval of guidance --variance--> (Sahib) seeking guidance from a jinn for pious pursuits
singularity of Sahib's efforts at improving himself as a Muslim --> (Iqbalian aspiration) posture of the nonconformist
state's fears that the milieu was pervaded by non-Muslim others posting as Muslims --jinn--> [made vivid] *skeptical experience of everyday life as a place of illusion and trance* (go to --> my work on Relaxing Horror Tales for Children and Adults)
bedat بدعت
accretion of customs in the form of innovation
jinn
-what nature of influences jinn introduce into human lives?
•library of religious commentary
•prophetic tales
•magicians’ manuals
•folklore
•ethnography
•
--> characterization of jinn
human ~= jinm --> endowed with passion, rational faculties, responsibility for their actions, etc. they eat, grow, procreate, die
constantly evolving relationship between humans and jinns
from pre-islamic --to--> Islamic
both good & bad ascribed to jinn's constitution --to--> to be much more unequivocally associated with evil
t[...]
(173)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%65.5[...]>
(state pronouncements of) correct way to [?how to] *attach to the prophet*
becoming a knowledgeable religious disputant
Naveeda > Iqbal > the weary self that could not be roused to piety by religious zeal strikes a posture as much of resignation to sin by a nonpracticing Muslim as of a certain pride of withholding oneself from conformism.
--> of one goes to prayer in a mosque it is by one's own choice
...to dismiss differences = the political expression of the petit bourgeoisie
Iqbal's disapproval of guidance --variance--> (Sahib) seeking guidance from a jinn for pious pursuits
singularity of Sahib's efforts at improving himself as a Muslim --> (Iqbalian aspiration) posture of the nonconformist
state's fears that the milieu was pervaded by non-Muslim others posting as Muslims --jinn--> [made vivid] *skeptical experience of everyday life as a place of illusion and trance* (go to --> my work on Relaxing Horror Tales for Children and Adults)
bedat بدعت
accretion of customs in the form of innovation
jinn
-what nature of influences jinn introduce into human lives?
•library of religious commentary
•prophetic tales
•magicians’ manuals
•folklore
•ethnography
•
--> characterization of jinn
human ~= jinm --> endowed with passion, rational faculties, responsibility for their actions, etc. they eat, grow, procreate, die
constantly evolving relationship between humans and jinns
from pre-islamic --to--> Islamic
both good & bad ascribed to jinn's constitution --to--> to be much more unequivocally associated with evil
the little mischievous nafs نفس that make up a self --> Muslim interiority (projects?)
...in the belief of jinns:
•complex arrangement of cultural memory
•political strategy
•mental illness
•individual subjectivity
•
--✕--> *Naveeda taking the existence of jinn for granted ==> (her effort) to learn more about the family that adopted them and their efforts at striving*
*taking the existence of X for granted ==to==> learn about the people who adopted X*
“Muslim children - how bring them up?” vol 3
(in Islam) child: bring without aghl عقل + ability to communicate with divine beings, without sin
--> always under the threat of being easily led astray
eight-year-old Maryam
-attuned to ways in which this world and the jinn world were mirrored and intertwined
-would look into the palm of her hand to see what the jinn would have her to see
-relayed the requests of human world to the jinn
-bringing forth advice, instruction, expression of desire (from the jinn)
relatio[...]
(175)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%65.6[...]at was changing beyond her control
(Naveeda asks) was Sulayman (the jinn) about the inability to acknowledge friendship over time?
...................................
Naveeda chapter 5 mulla
graffiti --> awareness of X at the level of gesture and affect
participation in change
(Agamben -->) [*]gesture: inhabiting of potentiality
Naveeda four scenes of aspiration:
1. librarians engaged in argumentation over the nature of the prophet's body after his death --gesture--> argumentation
2. neighborhoods embroiled in fights over mosques in attempting to prescribe the rightful atmosphere for prayer --gesture--> seizure
3. the state drawn into theological disputation and legal experimentation over how over should attach oneself to the prophet --gesture--> legal experimentation
4. a pious man trying to seek guidance on how to be Muslim from an invisible being (jinn) --gesture--> search for guidance
}--affect--> accompanied by intensity of seriousness, sincerity, excitement, disappointment, sense of loss
}--commitment--> friendship, neighborliness, familial ties
large arsenal of off-color jokes about specialist fogures of all religious traditions in the popular culture of the subcontinent...
•horror stories
•psychological profile of mullas
•weekly skewing of mullas
•mulla jokes
•cartoons
•
political commentary <--> criticism
--> mulla was to blame for everything that was perceived to be wrong (in Pakistan) --> *pervasive skepticism* [also in Iran]
skepticism shadows striving (?)
the other of the striving muslim in Pakistan:
•shadowi Shia
•deceiving Ahmadi
•bad-tempered mulla بدمزاج
mulla:
•Iqbal --> ossification of the institution of ulama
•Pakistani state --> ossification of commentary upon Islamic texts
...everyday assertion that one's religiousity is superior to others
mulla = full-fledged maleficent persona
skepticism of daily existence
1. ...(they become skeptical) about his rationality and grounds for his beliefs
2. ...(at some point) anything could be said or believed about him
3. ...(he felt like) everyone around him had turned to animals
4. ...(he presumed) everyday life was one of illusion and appearances [go to --> kelile demne این همه سودا است، مجاز]
}--> actualize the potential for *skepticism that existed in the social fabric*
=/= chance encounter
=/= pervasive condition
figure of the mulla [~= collective fear + revulsion] --traverse--> the fragmented public culture of the city
[*]ulama: guardian, transmitter, interpreter of shari'a
+ specif[...]
(176)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%65.8[...]experimentation over how over should attach oneself to the prophet --gesture--> legal experimentation
4. a pious man trying to seek guidance on how to be Muslim from an invisible being (jinn) --gesture--> search for guidance
}--affect--> accompanied by intensity of seriousness, sincerity, excitement, disappointment, sense of loss
}--commitment--> friendship, neighborliness, familial ties
large arsenal of off-color jokes about specialist fogures of all religious traditions in the popular culture of the subcontinent...
•horror stories
•psychological profile of mullas
•weekly skewing of mullas
•mulla jokes
•cartoons
•
political commentary <--> criticism
--> mulla was to blame for everything that was perceived to be wrong (in Pakistan) --> *pervasive skepticism* [also in Iran]
skepticism shadows striving (?)
the other of the striving muslim in Pakistan:
◾shadowi Shia
•deceiving Ahmadi
•bad-tempered mulla بدمزاج
mulla:
•Iqbal --> ossification of the institution of ulama
•Pakistani state --> ossification of commentary upon Islamic texts
...everyday assertion that one's religiousity is superior to others
mulla = full-fledged maleficent persona
skepticism of daily existence
1. ...(they become skeptical) about his rationality and grounds for his beliefs
2. ...(at some point) anything could be said or believed about him
3. ...(he felt like) everyone around him had turned to animals
4. ...(he presumed) everyday life was one of illusion and appearances [go to --> kelile demne این همه سودا است، مجاز]
}--> actualize the potential for *skepticism that existed in the social fabric*
=/= chance encounter
=/= pervasive condition
figure of the mulhe mulla [~= collective fear + revulsion] --traverse--> the fragmented public culture of the city
[*]ulama: guardian, transmitter, interpreter of shari'a
+ specific claims of knowledge upon:
1. تفسیر tafsir (commentary upon the Quran)
2. فقه figh (jurisprudence)
3. حدیث hadis (sayings of the prophet)
4. کلام kalam (speculative theology)
+ (in Pakistan) personnel in mosque:
1. امام imam
2. خطیب khatib (Frida sermon)
3. قاری ghari
4. موذن muezzin
mulla --derogatory--> one who is overzealous in upholding the letter of the shari'a
(+ additional connotation:)
•ignorant master [go to --> mulla nasruddin: religious master who gets by in life through hypocrisy and cunning + outsmarting those of noble birth and high cultivation]
•gabza agent (seizure of property)
•sodomizer (one who rapes men)
•a naive fool out of step[...]
(177)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%65.8[...]hey become skeptical) about his rationality and grounds for his beliefs
2. ...(at some point) anything could be said or believed about him
3. ...(he felt like) everyone around him had turned to animals
4. ...(he presumed) everyday life was one of illusion and appearances [go to --> kelile demne این همه سودا است، مجاز]
}--> actualize the potential for *skepticism that existed in the social fabric*
=/= chance encounter
=/= pervasive condition
figure of the mulla [~= collective fear + revulsion] --traverse--> the fragmented public culture of the city
[*]ulama: guardian, transmitter, interpreter of shari'a
+ specific claims of knowledge upon:
1. تفسیر tafsir (commentary upon the Quran)
2. فقه figh (jurisprudence)
3. حدیث hadis (sayings of the prophet)
4. کلام kalam (speculative theology)
+ (in Pakistan) personnel in mosque:
>
1. امام imam
2. خطیب khatib (Frida sermon)
3. قاری ghari
4. موذن muezzin
mulla --derogatory--> one who is overzealous in upholding the letter of the shari'a
(+ additional connotation:)
•ignorant master [go to --> mulla nasruddin: religious master who gets by in life through hypocrisy and cunning + outsmarting those of noble birth and high cultivation]
•gabza agent (seizure of property)
•sodomizer (one who rapes men)
•a naive fool out of step with his time
•
colonial politics in south Asia --> British colonial administration in India see ulama as outdated, deliberately obscurantist, jahel ==> negative stereotype ----> post-colonial period
mullaism:
•Pakistani state --> fossilized state of knowledge on Islam
•Iqbal --> mullaism =/= freedom of ijtihad
(Talal Asad -->) Islamic diskursive tradition is grounded in *argument that anticipates resistance* in the form of doubt, indifference, or lack of understanding ==> it employs the force of reason to bring forth the *willing performance of a practice*
}==produce==> domain of orthodoxy (+ relations of power)
(for Naveeda) anxiety or skepticism ~= sign of aspiration for striving
labbaik: i am here (to follow your orders)
theatrical unteality
...animus lies in the world
[later he] identitues this animus with thr workings of iblis (satan)
...this is a city of whispers [waswasen], a city of mad possession [shar], a city of deviation [ilhad], a city of anxiety [tazadzud], a city of dispersion [intishar]
the ability to smell oneself --> to experience oneself as other
how public culture can ability skepticism as a pervasive condition
mulla jokes --> horror stories = fear + revulsion
(Freudi[...]
(178)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%65.9[...]>
how apass as an organizations is coding for artistic research within the framework of their memory systems?
“There is no room on the [filling] form to write an essay on race identity politics.”
do we need to develop and standardize my discipline-specific nomenclature (in our research microworld) in order to name without ambiguity? --> redefinition of disciplinary boundaries --> shaping of your work so that its future practice converges on potential memory
we murder, they note
they draw from their secret[s]
infrastructure-thinking: Ajayeb Network-Making Minimum Data Set
in ajayeb's literature the very information infrastructure itself (should let be or) is in flux ==> discourses make strange connections between themselves
-in ajayeb the infrastructure assumes the position of every node --> reworked in my #Rigs
“...we are afloat in a sea of multiple, fractured causalities each demanding their own classification systems--and their own apparatus of record collection.” (Bowker)
classification (systems): a warrant and a tool for forgetting, and operating the distribution of this forgetting (in space of scientific memory.)
it tells you what to forget (for example the religious and metaphysical,) and how to forget it
[the formation (training) of artists covers up the formation (production) of artistic knowledge]
-the social story of science is excluded from the organization of the sciences, and held outside of it =/= situated knowledge
-a natural hierarchy of sciences is offered: every discipline needs to remember only a given set of facts --> each type of memory which has been distributed in space will also be sequenced in time (http://ajayeb.net/?q=imperative+of+knowing) [for example mathematics --> physics --> chemistry --> biology --> sociology] ==> formal memory system
the problem of the detective is that for him only those facts are relevant that hand him the solution of crime (~-> goal-oriented individual disposition) =/= chasing rabbits
-the detective (has to) classify away traces: the systematic and deliberate forgetting of some actions in order to better remember others
-what makes a difference?
-in sorting animals which past knowledges (--> ajayeb) are deliberatly forgotten in order to remember them as incorporated into an information infrastructure called ‘species’? -->! the classified are remembered (in the technoscience world)
(what is the) complex ecology of memory practices (particular within apass?)
•Hoda --> politics of remembrance
•Zoumana --> situated perspective
•Sina --> narratable past
•Marialena --> type of language
•S
today, 18.07.2017, the ajayeb's knowledge can be stored and expressed in a quite restricted range of genres called myth, ancient, imaginary,
__________[...]
(179)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%66.8[...]ng forms of evidence requiring tools you do not have? @Lilia
-[what is] to be required to rank, evaluate, assess results of rules you have not played out (yet)? @Sana
Katie > Bateson's *double bind*
--clue--> meanings and causes of schizophrenia (--> may speak to various conditions of biosocial systems today)
(questions at using the word schizophrenia:)
-what of the sexism of those laying blame on the “schizophrenogenic mother”?
-what of the possiblity of gathering evidence for the effects of expressed emotion in family systems of those with possibly linked to bipolar disorder? (--> that is my problem with Eleanor's stuttering as aesthetics)
double bind: (super confusining) transactions, entire system of layered contradictions mobilized over a range of communication channels
•somthing is prohibited, punished (at one level of meaning or abstraction *within a particular communicating channel*)
•something else is required (at another level) that is impossible to effect if the prohibition is honored
}--> [this] happens over and over again ==until==> such *double bind patterning = (becomes experienced as) “reality”*
***they all deal with (some edges of) double bind:
•religious practices
•entertainment
•game design
•learning
•
intolerable conditions ==> creativities
(when crucial context markers distinguishing [one from another] become unrecognizable, contradictory, or fraudulant ==>) “abusive practices ~= challenging practices”
--> (terror & possibility are on the edge in double bind experience =) ***transcontextual confusion*** (<-- requres transcontextual gifts one may or may not have...) @apass #feedback: urgent appropriate response
--Bateson--> double bind patterning = intense:
•contradictory (two order of messages each of which denies the other)
•unvoiced (making explicit checks of context impossible, inappropriate, meaningless)
“(there is nothing to determine) whether a give individual shall become a clown, a poet, a schizophrenic, or a combination of these” --> we deal with a genus of syndromes (most of which are not conventionally regarded as pathological) [~= art work]#feedback
•those life is enriched by transcontextual gifts (--> Elen)
•those who are impoverished by transcontextual confusions (--> Ali)
}--> for both there is a “double take”
a falling leaf or the greeting of a friend is not “just that and nothing more”
(taking from Bateson, Katie -->) play with this range of terror and possibility --(with + through)--> (individual & biosocial) *consciousness: reflection + recursion* (at the edge of apprehension) = environments of being : context, pattern, layers of abstraction, storytelling all have material effects and provide *materials for agency*
[...]
(180)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%71.8[...]to as “history” is now perceived as having broken down into an infinity of “histories” that can no longer be (re)combined into a single narrative governed by a central theme
(today:) history = a kind of writing
•progress: *something qualitatively different from what precedes it* (a forward movement in history) --✕--> [now:] welf established technique (of such masters as Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Lyotard and Baudrillard:) to deconstruct rational metaphysics in order to open it, to rewrite it and thus to lay the foundation, in terms of a Marxian-inspired historicism, of new truths for a postmodernist thought
•(Vattimo's use of) nihilism as weapon to attack notions of ‘truth’ and ‘reason’ (in western metaphysics) ==>
◦‘logic = (just another kind of) rhetoric’
◦‘truth = will to power (by those who claim to be seeking truth over those who are being addressed by them)’
◦‘science and technology = dominating metaphysical systems’
--X--> (eliminated any) possibility of a dialogue with cultures that are truly other as the rational metaphysics of science and technology
(the idea of) plurality of cultures and discourses must become a basic premise of postmodernist thought ==> widespread and widely pluralistic religious revival [+ excessive indulgence in relativism]
(the meaning of) morality and principles of justice in a postmodern world: [democracy's western ethos:]
•recognition of human needs
•courage
•solidarity
•justice
•prudence
•(virtue of) participating in rational discourse
(Sardar's reading:)
•stating the obvious with a sense of grand discovery is an essential postmodern disease
•what modern science and technology, free market economy and multinational corporations are doing in the name of freedom, justice and fairness
--> despite wonderful sentiments, and all the arguments for justice and equify, we end up with more of the same
(problem of the East with) modernity: a European cultural construct based on specific historical legacy and condition, and its basic goal has always been to shape science, politics, arts, morality and the world according to its own image and inner logic
+
much of postmodernist thought is a sitnilar European construct and continues the old programme in a renewed attempt to justify neomarxism or new brands of liberal humanism
-what is a a genuine, radical departure from postmodernism?
religiosity: that which transcends the world (can be expressed in Fascism, Communism, Nationalism, Scientism, Aestheticism, Nuclearism, or in several other secular religions)
[*]secularism: a dishonest kind of religiosity***
(mark of out time:) *necessity of recovering our sense of oneness with nature* <-- our total alienation
[?my artistic research is the very[...]
(181)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%72.5[...]ious revival [+ excessive indulgence in relativism]
(the meaning of) morality and principles of justice in a postmodern world: [democracy's western ethos:]
•recognition of human needs
•courage
•solidarity
•justice
•prudence
•(virtue of) participating in rational discourse
(Sardar's reading:)
•stating the obvious with a sense of grand discovery is an essential postmodern disease
•what modern science and technology, free market economy and multinational corporations are doing in the name of freedom, justice and fairness
--> despite wonderful sentiments, and all the arguments for justice and equify, we end up with more of the same
(problem of the East with) modernity: a European cultural construct based on specific historical legacy and condition, and its basic goal has always been to shape science, politics, arts, morality and the world according to its own image and inner logic
+
much of postmodernist thought is a sitnilar European construct and continues the old programme in a renewed attempt to justify neomarxism or new brands of liberal humanism
-what is a a genuine, radical departure from postmodernism?
religiosity: that which transcends the world (can be expressed in Fascism, Communism, Nationalism, Scientism, Aestheticism, Nuclearism, or in several other secular religions)
[*]secularism: a dishonest kind of religiosity***
(mark of out time:) *necessity of recovering our sense of oneness with nature* <-- our total alienation
[?my artistic research is the very expression of] (Griffin's) postmodernism : a new relationship with the past (and the future) <-- postmodernism acknowledges, appreciates and wants to learn from the wisdom of traditional societies ~= neoconservative religious fundamentalism =/= constructive nihilism
[the strive for a new 'enchanted science’ (=/= sacred science) that] overcomes the separation between truth and virtue, value and fact, ethics and practical necessity
(Falk's) Disneyland postmodernism:
•abstract affirmation of a holistic harmonious future
•homogenized uniformity (based on a colonizing logic and westernization of the globe)
•reinterpret science and natural reality as confirmatory of a spiritual grounding for human
•holistic possibilities of encompassing conflict
•***postmodernism as an expression of the privileged status of the West***
*greek gnosis is the Terminator in its guise of mystic* (which provided the Enlightenment with its springboard and modernity with its mission to subjugate non-western cultures)
arrogance and authoritarianism are intrinsic in both Greek rationalist and mystical thoughts:
•Socrates --> worshipped reason and was an arrogant and obnoxious man who enjoyed ridiculing[...]
(182)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%72.5[...] be experienced in the contrary idioms of immediacy (and eternal present-being)
-rhetorics of transparency and visibility (conceived in aesthetic domains)
(narcissistic act of) teletechnic encompassment
*spirit mediumship*
[auratic threshold of representation]
(the nationally renowned spirit medium) Chuchad, flamboyant media savvy
daguerreotypy: a demonic receiving device that had the capacity to retain and thereby diminish the photographed subject's substance
(in Thai) kaan thaay [taking, wasting] ruup [picture]
•Thai word for photography
•concomitant transformation and discharge
--✕--> spirit practices were brought into conversation with the mass media
•conceptualized largely in terms of atavism and/or residue (repressed orgiastic impulse buried)
•(located on the periphery of) the *nation's geo-body* [=/= state's formed public]
(from the perspective of rationalist Buddhist orthodoxy [and in the case of iranian superstitions, Holakouee خرافه khorafe] -->) mediumship: (imagined as) a temporal interruption of the nation's modernity
communist occult practices
emasculating magic
phantasmatic triad of nation, religion, monarch
mediums = state's other
[today]
•identification between the local and the global (facilitated by transnational communication systems) compete with those of the nationalism
•*market-based discourses of civic politics in the anticipation of being seen from afar by a multinational media audience*
•
mediumship reborn as...
•circulating along with its own images
•part of an endlessly proliferating series (=/= double of a lost original) in which it merely seeks to be legible as an image of its displaced self
[a figure many artists today want to be: spirit] *medium* (profession of epiphanic discovery) --transmitting--> paranoiac messages --prophesying--> boundary penetration (originated with the state)
(revolution reduced to) the status of mise-en-scene
bourgeois democracy
market-based discourses of civic politics
simulacral space of the new mediascape
(Chuchad's promise of authenticity -->) violent authenticity of an exposure in which mediumship's representations would be renounced --> *techniques of the performance themselves become the object of performative inscription*
history of religious legitimacies
populist conservative monk --> religious sermon in the format of emphatically dialogic, using vernacular forms and local dialects to disseminate [--> content remaines deeply orthodox in its valorization of the foundational texts + its ritualist inscription]
+
medium's anti-ontological discovery
~=>
either there is nothing to transmit or ther[...]
(186)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%72.8[...]gion, monarch
mediums = state's other
[today]
•identification between the local and the global (facilitated by transnational communication systems) compete with those of the nationalism
•*market-based discourses of civic politics in the anticipation of being seen from afar by a multinational media audience*
•
mediumship reborn as...
•circulating along with its own images
•part of an endlessly proliferating series (=/= double of a lost original) in which it merely seeks to be legible as an image of its displaced self
[a figure many artists today want to be: spirit] *medium* (profession of epiphanic discovery) --transmitting--> paranoiac messages --prophesying--> boundary penetration (originated with the state)
(revolution reduced to) the status of mise-en-scene
bourgeois democracy
market-based discourses of civic politics
simulacral space of the new mediascape
(Chuchad's promise of authenticity -->) violent authenticity of an exposure in which mediumship's representations would be renounced --> *techniques of the performance themselves become the object of performative inscription*
history of religious legitimacies
populist conservative monk --> religious sermon in the format of emphatically dialogic, using vernacular forms and local dialects to disseminate [--> content remaines deeply orthodox in its valorization of the foundational texts + its ritualist inscription]
+
medium's anti-ontological discovery
~=>
either there is nothing to transmit or there is no means of transmission = silence or white noise
Phra Phyom --> embodiment of fame itself, a bastardized auratic presence that is always arriving (~ imminent without specification)
-what drew these people to this performance?
(seeking the) ambivalent pleasure (not without violence) of having a secret unmasked
acolyte
to ensure a line of vision between the medium and his audience
broadcasting device = recording device
authorship --(displaced by)--> a logic of *tracking of traces without a subject* (<-- reduction of representation and inscription)
modern mediumship ~= [*]automatic writing: (most associated with surrealism, in Western contexts) the writer seeks to merely transmit his or her unconscious thoughts and, in the process, to disavow the notion of authorial agency... [it marks a more general transitional moment in the history of representation --Morris-->] ***the production of meaning ceases to be a function of writing --> actuality or facticity becomes the primary object of inscription***)
confessional performances
denunciation of possession performance
untranslatable utterances [**increasing performance of untranslatability, glosso[...]
(187)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%72.9[...]iumship's (enthralling) dramaturgy of disclosure
(Morris asking) what else is transparency in the massified world? a mediation so total that it has become invisible (?)
...................................
•to challange them
•to break with their own gesture
•to inherit from them
*Socrates --> alleged epistemo-sociological enquiry ([the tradition of] asking people what they know and how they think) --Savransky--> (hallmark of social sciences today:) *ethics of estrangement*: ‘becoming estranged’ from the realm of appearances made available by direct experience in order to ‘gain access’ to a realm of facts and causes**** ==Whitehead==> *bifurcation of nature*: a mode of understanding whereby experience only discloses that which is apparent, whereas the ‘relevant’ factors in the process of knowing the world must always lie, and be sought, somewhere else
*=/= Alice in 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 *kn[...]
(189)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%73.2[...]pology --> the theory of the person
?how eschatological attitudes changed over time + how they hovered over human experience
millenarian expectation
?how year 1000 was perceived
•preoccupation with the time of Christ second coming
•natural and political disasters and upheavals --sign--> denouncement of sacred history
medieval = fear + passion (+ expectation) ==> eschatological imagination
escapology: significance of immanent (catastrophic) future history
calculations of the end
demand for reform
monastic analysis
discourse against an identifiable moment of apocalypse
•antichrist
•whore of Babylon
•angelic pope
unfolding end of history [humbling of the mighty] + justice for the inarticulate (oppressed) [exhalation of the meek]
apocalyptic speculation about the enclosed unclean people of Gog and Magog
mystical response
spasmodic irrationality
the fate of the individual at the moment of “personal death” --> guilt culture (fear of damnation ==> life = ritual preparations for dying)
deathbed demons
hell in art
religious anxiety
mechanism of social control
(from) collective --to--> individual
(from) temporal --to--> atemporal or beyond time
(from) stress on spirit --to--> sense of embodied or reembodied self
(shift from) tamed death: a death expected and prepared for, experienced in community --to--> personal death: the moment of death as decisive accounting for an individual self
purgatory: in-between time and space
afterlife --> the concept of the (embodied) human person
somatomorphic: separated soul imagined as bodily
ordinary piety -->
•significance of physical death
•spiritual value of somatic phenomena (namely suffering)
the sense of an ending hovers over all spiritual writing in the middle ages
eschatology of:
1. resurrection: a sense of last things that focuses significance in the moment at the end of time when the physical body is reconstituted and judged
[<-- arise from traditions with a much less immanent sense of “last things"]
--emphasis-->
◦time end
◦person embodied
◦humanity collective
2. immortality: the experience of personal death is the moment of judgement
3. apocalypse --> (coerces) **what matters is the here and now** <-- implying a political payoff
==> inflect and deepen the literature (description of plague, visions of heaven and hell)
}--> three eschatology differ:
•what is the person fundamentally
•fate collective or individual
•how and whether time marches
•where the end is located
•
[...]
(190)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%74.3[...]erson
somatomorphic: separated soul imagined as bodily
ordinary piety -->
•significance of physical death
•spiritual value of somatic phenomena (namely suffering)
the sense of an ending hovers over all spiritual writing in the middle ages
eschatology of:
1. resurrection: a sense of last things that focuses significance in the moment at the end of time when the physical body is reconstituted and judged
[<-- arise from traditions with a much less immanent sense of “last things"]
--emphasis-->
◦time end
◦person embodied
◦humanity collective
2. immortality: the experience of personal death is the moment of judgement
3. apocalypse --> (coerces) **what matters is the here and now** <-- implying a political payoff
==> inflect and deepen the literature (description of plague, visions of heaven and hell)
}--> three eschatology differ:
- what is the person fundamentally
•fate collective or individual
•how and whether time marches
•where the end is located
•
medical eschatology
eschatology (in the west) is perhaps the most paradoxical (and inconsistent) aspect of religiosity
(traditions in which) earthly experience is a moment in an eternal dreaming
Islam, Judaism, Christianity are brooded over by the sense [*]last things: a sense of the end [soon or distant, individual or collective] contradicts itself (explodes itself) <== *it looks for a moment that gives significance to the course of time by finally denying (erasing, ending) that to which it offers significance* }<--- western european middle ages utilizes and deepens this multifold and contradictory tradition (=/= deny, impoverish)
(three types of awareness:)
1- significance of dying and afterlife --> space time of personal collective destiny
2- apocalyptic time -->
3- eschatological imagination -->
purgation
purgatory time
•do pottery while you are in purgatory
•learn ice-skating while you are waiting in zamharir
•
{personal drama of death <--> progressive unfolding of collective history}--> ultimate disposition for individual soul and body ~~> the notion of ***bliss after torment***
torment: individual glimpse of the end
Augustine --> the imperfect but not reprobate
suffering: means of salvation (of we join the agony of Chris on the cross)
pain in this life : inevitable accompaniment to the corrupt body whose weakness and rottenness are indication of the approach of death
an era of exile --promise--> a new exodus from human failure and corruption
[title]
beautitude
Bernard's heaven
painted embodiedness of the blessed (<-[...]
(191)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%74.4[...]space or distributed communication networks are missing
-a public space that is officially organized
*parks: open space that are reserved for the public: “where informal economy wants to be but is banned”
*public space: (@Selma on st.open project)
(21st century) modern thought <-- *two traditions of thinking about public realm:
1- as a dialogical condition (of exchange, of political engagement) --> Arendt & Habermas; --->{a communicative immaterial space} : “more talk ==> more agreement, common understanding” ---[dialogic & immaterial]
2- as a space of spectacle --> (goes back to 19th century) Baudelaire's ‘individual passers-by’ watching something on the fold (--> [old Greek idea of spectacle:] “unfolding of narrative.” a bad idea of ‘how people should be physically in space’ for example, a landscape architect that creates a scenography in a park ==> a witness in a scene, watching as spectator from out of a situated identity in the world), (not so new) urban sensibility and urban subject matter; criticized by Guy Debord; --->{a theater with performers and spectators, a very physical understanding of public space, ---[dramatic & material]}
3- inclusive =/= integrative
many of the differences (culture, class, religion, etc) that cities contain can't be reconciled ---> how can I talk to you and not pressing a point of integration, rather inclusion? (where people feel provoked to integrate, integrieren, an inherently passive condition)
-always more parallel activities that don't form a spectacle only but are also productive
---[inclusive & synchronous]
***(in the public realm:) integration <~-> spectacle
public spaces must be much smaller =/= gigantism of dramatized power of the politics in large scale public places
small ==> intensity (--> this i learned from Julia as well, create small spaces to show our art-works to each other, the intensity of that moment generative of desire)
(most public spaces have been designed by powers that want to use the very size of the public space as way to *dramatizing their own power*)
•public space inspired by power
•public space inspired by wealth
•
the “stop” as an architectural project itself (@Selma)
we argue, in our project st.open, that there should be many activities going on at once in public space, that public space should be synchronous, productive as well as spectacular
...................................
*the way we concentrate has a deeply historical character*
Crary
looking at opera or television or driving,
we are in a dimension of contemporary experience that requires that we effectively cancel out or exclude from consciousness much of our immediate environment
Crary: how western modernity since the 19th [...]
(192)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%74.7[...]ich is saturated with history. (“Aesthetic Theory” p316)
(?what are my time's) rhythms of attentiveness
*mask: a means of mental survival
mask (of masculinity) --> the ability to keep a secret --> *all secrets are (at the end) sexual*
[]should our artistic practices comment 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 t[...]
(193)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%76.4[...]ith:
•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
anomie (used to be) a celebrated passage is when the individual worker is no longer the living cell moved by continual contact with neighboring cells (=/= now in late liberal capitalism anomie is the mode of labor)
anomie (in thermodynamic framework) describes a statistical distribution of elements in which insufficient contact or adjacency prevents the flow of messages our information within the system as a whole. systemwide increase of local zones of dissociation and disintegration <-- Durkheim
(Durkheim was writing at the time of) crisis of socia[...]
(194)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%77[...]ment 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
anomie (used to be) a celebrated passage is when the individual worker is no longer the living cell moved by continual contact with neighboring cells (=/= now in late liberal capitalism anomie is the mode of labor)
anomie (in thermodynamic framework) describes a statistical distribution of elements in which insufficient contact or adjacency prevents the flow of messages our information within the system as a whole. systemwide increase of local zones of dissociation and disintegration <-- Durkheim
(Durkheim was writing at the time of) crisis of social cohesion within a transitional period ==> a systematic response was being shaped (foreshadowed in several of Seurat's major works) -*-*-*--> the making of a society whose effective unity was founded on the ubiquity of *spectacular consumption through mass media and technologies of illusion*
if *religion* was the key “collective representation” (in Durkheim premodern mechanical solidarity) --> *spectacle* was to become the primary simulation of cohesion and unification within 20th century modernity****
--> (Debord:) capitalism's solidarity: unity of subjects in their very separatedness
(Crary >) Seurat's entire visual output: [systematic movement between:]
•large engineered representation of social collectivities (~ crowds)
•images of isolation and separation
“[...]the unity of his optical aggregates was always an ephemeral subjective construction that never objectively modified the abstract and segmented status of his dots, so his assembling of provisional social aggregates never alters the obdurately insular character of their individual human character.”
Seurat stakes out a darker and more skeptical position than Durkheim about the possibility of *positive knowledge of “social reality”* --> his works are determined by a sense of **impalpability and evanescence of the social itself**
(what is my “sociology” in my works?)
{ great social catastrophes of the 19th century + accumulated bourgeois anxiety over the disorders of revolution (1848 and 1871) }==> (emergence of French 1890s of) “science” of sociology
let's stop mourning about the earlier model of political theater being displaced by by the modernized forms of spectacle (--> my critic on Kurzgesagt is outdated?)
(for Seurat:) *art work = solicitation of attention*
play of attraction and absence (in Sina and Foad's work):
a v[...]
(195)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%77.1[...]of absolute authenticity around every object or relation) to determine the universal structure of (the authenticity of) subjective lifeworld [unable to go beyond ‘pre-cinematographic conditions’ (~ movement thought only from the anchorage of a static “pose”)]
--Varela--> Husserl's (+ MerleauPonty) turn towards experience (the “things themselves”) was entirely theatrical : lacked any pragmatic dimension [---> go to Despret, Stewart]
what Cezanne did seek to “suspend” (to forget)?
(sensitivity to) perceptual experiences that had been ignored, marginalized, or incompatible (==> unarticulated)--within--> organization of knowledge about vision
}==> (Cezanne's) “attention to anomalous* --> ***engage a discordant exterior*** (that takes a hold on your recognizable world) [<-- our heritage in art]
Cezanne: “perception = process of its formation” : confronting and inhabiting the instability of perception =/= recording the evanescent appearances of the world
(Cezanne + Manet's discovery:) looking at one thing
=X=> fuller and more inclusive grasp of its presence (~ rich immediacy)
==> perceptual disintegration and loss, breakdown as intelligible form ==> invention and discovery of previously unknown religions and organizations of forces
dissolution inherent in attentiveness ==support==> (Cezanne's) radical desymbolization of the world + perpetually modulating set of relations between the exterior and sensations
Cezanne attentive to:
•activity of the eye
•visual sensation
•myriad intricacies of subjective vision
•(physiological) limitations of sensory experience
•the body (its pulsation, temporalities, intersection of that body with a world of transitions, of events, of becomings)
•discontinuous 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 experi[...]
(196)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%78.8[...] />
diffusion of prestige
(Deleuze and Guattari:)
types/organs that center around organs of power:
•rhizome
•=/= aborescent
family (aborescent type that centers around organs of power --structuring--> centralized societies) =/= pack (bands, rhizome)
State =/= perpetual blackmail by abandonment or betrayal (--> Iran)
==>{
•large-scale projects
•constitution of surpluses
•organization of the corresponding public functions
•on-the-spot emergence (--> kinda magical, and monstrous, miraculous)
war machine: a counter-State mechanism
realized completely in: the “barbaric” assemblages of nomadic warriors (=/= “savages” assemblages of primitive societies)
-problem: it cannot relay
Deleuze and Guattari ask: so, why did the State triumph?
the fable of Urstaat: the State clearly dates back to the most remote ages of humanity
law of the State --> interior and exterior, Sovereignty only reigns over what it is capable of internalizing, of appropriating locally
=/= the rights of segmentary societies
_~*neoprimitivism*~_
polymorphous war machine
commercial circuit...
religious creation...
(Deleuze and Guattari's) space:
*smooth:
•vectorial ↗️⤴️↘️↞
•projective 📹
•topological 🐍 (=/= geometrical)
•
--> *space is occupied without being counted*
=/=
*striated:
•metric -|-|-|-|-
-
--> *space of counted without being occupied*
“minor science” (in which, model are:)
1. hydraulic =/= hylomorphic
2. of becoming and heterogeneity
3. goes from a curvilinear declination to the formation of spirals and vortices on an inclined plane (=/= from straight line to its parallels) --> vortical
4. *****problematic(==> event --to go from a problem to the accidents that both condition and resolve it ==> [all kinds of] deformations, transmutations, passages to the limit, each figure designates an “event”) =/= theorematic(==> essence --theorematic: to go by specific differences from a genus to its species, or by deduction from a stable essence to the properties deriving from it) [--> make your model problematic, not affirmed by theoretical bullshit! --> my performances are about trying to find a way of not being theorematic while doing theory]***** (and they say ‘problematic’ the problem it is not an “obstacle”)
=/= “royal science”: reducing the “problem-element” and subordinate it to the “theorem-element.” State needs to subordinate hydraulic force ==> prevent turbulence (--✕--> Middle East =? distributed turbulence across a smooth space [<-- fucked up], [in smooth space:] vortical movement that can rise up at any point)
•civil
•static
•ordinal[...]
(197)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%80[...]iated?
pigs --> pragmatism or expertise
-the pigs story might not predict the coming of the nomad wolf, but it constitutes the principles of architecture for which an incoming is striated. striated space is the result of the pigs story
عرفان همیشه بیابانی است؟
does mysticism always requires deprivation of life? mysticism ~=? symbolism
[*]godzilla: dramatization of where the mountain recedes, of the earth deterritorializing itself ==> providing the nomad with a territory
*vectors of deterritorialization and local operations* that:
•wolf adds to the forest
•godzilla adds to Tokio
•
#video concept
in tiktok comedy style, a group of iranians (talking Farsi, all acted by one person?) are personifying a govermental response to a godzilla who is roaming in the city.
localized =/= delimited
[the spot where the forest recedes] or the desert advances
گرگ در جنگل / آل در بیابان
.... .\ ____ _
... \_____
. .... \ __ __
.... . \ ____
. ...\ _ ___ _
assigned direction =/= direction of the crossing
(for Deleuze and Guattari) religion: a technique of converting the absolute, making the absolute appear in a particular place --> the sacred place of religion is fundamentally a center that repels the *obscure nomos*[= Bayazid بایزید]
vagabond monotheism
Sascha's relation to the absolute through the space of the machine
electrically tampered ~= electrically tamed
از چادر نشین به هجرت reterritorialization of the spiritual ==> همدستی مهاجر با چادر نشین ==> war machine
/*[khawarij خوارج during the first fitna فتنه اول --> arbitration =/= war machine in which anyone can be Imam]
...when religion becomes a war machine (==> absolute deterritorialization) --> Isis
...a society reduced to the military enterprise --> Avengers
...gravitational verticals --> forest
...generalized parallels --> agriculture
three little pigs can be nomads? --> creating the house and then leave it (as an empty stronghold)
animal raising for the most part outside the control of sedentaries
orient: absence of State-form (!)
various components plied by escape vectors ==> despotic formation (in orient)
oriental State (sheltered in striated space) =/= nomad war machine
revolution --western--> transformation of the State
revolution --eastern--> abolition of the State
the empires of the orient, africa, america run against wide-open smooth spaces that penetrate them and maintain gaps between their component (*the nomos does not become countryside*,[...]
(198)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%80.4[...]deo concept
in tiktok comedy style, a group of iranians (talking Farsi, all acted by one person?) are personifying a govermental response to a godzilla who is roaming in the city.
localized =/= delimited
[the spot where the forest recedes] or the desert advances
گرگ در جنگل / آل در بیابان
.... .\ ____ _
... \_____
. .... \ __ __
.... . \ ____
. ...\ _ ___ _
assigned direction =/= direction of the crossing
(for Deleuze and Guattari) religion: a technique of converting the absolute, making the absolute appear in a particular place --> the sacred place of religion is fundamentally a center that repels the *obscure nomos*[= Bayazid بایزید]
vagabond monotheism
Sascha's relation to the absolute through the space of the machine
electrically tampered ~= electrically tamed
از چادر نشین به هجرت reterritorialization of the spiritual ==> همدستی مهاجر با چادر نشین ==> war machine
/*[khawarij خوارج during the first fitna فتنه اول --> arbitration =/= war machine in which anyone can be Imam]
...when religion becomes a war machine (==> absolute deterritorialization) --> Isis
...a society reduced to the military enterprise --> Avengers
...gravitational verticals --> forest
...generalized parallels --> agriculture
three little pigs can be nomads? --> creating the house and then leave it (as an empty stronghold)
animal raising for the most part outside the control of sedentaries
orient: absence of State-form (!)
various components plied by escape vectors ==> despotic formation (in orient)
oriental State (sheltered in striated space) =/= nomad war machine
revolution --western--> transformation of the Sttransformation of the State
revolution --eastern--> abolition of the State
the empires of the orient, africa, america run against wide-open smooth spaces that penetrate them and maintain gaps between their component (*the nomos does not become countryside*, the countryside does not communicate with the town, large-scale animal raising is the affair of the nomads, etc.) =/= Black Panther's fantasy of the african State
psychoanalysis of the dream of the State ? and its relation to its reality
(to establish) a zone of rights over an entire exterior --> rage & innocence
Neon Genesis Evangelion anime series --> war machine striated final merged in a cyber-flux with its human counterpart --> nature dominated (battle to occupy the smooth space)
[what now people want in Iran: not the smooth space a deterritorializing State, rather:]
capture of flows
(need for) fixed paths
well-defined directi[...]
(200)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%80.4[...]order of cosmological unities of gravitation
•
which nature? --> any order of nature can be countered with examples of another order equally natural }--Daston--> [*]nature: repository (or wunderkammer) of all imaginable orders****
terror + randomness --> most effective weapon of dictators (you never know when it strikes again)
-horror of Kafka's bureaucracy: negation of regularity, destruction of order, institutionalized anarchy
-one of the most dehumanizing experiences: being completely subject to the will of another (~ slavery) [--> this is the most pleasurable experience in sex and sado masochism]
•nature never insults (its inhumanity)
•nature provides the raw material for meaning <-- *because we are embodied organisms we must incarnate our orders* (~ we must find a way to display them to ourselves)
•animals can feel terror, but only humans can feel horror: the emotion that registers a deep disruption of an order (no matter what kind, a two-headed baby [natural monster] or a mother who kills her two babies [moral monster])
...................................
[title]
itchy eyes
...................................
16th and 17th centuries
times of extraordinary religious, economic, and intellectual upheaval (Europe was deluged by novelties of all kinds: birds of paradise, armadillos, anomalies: solar eclipse, comet, narwhal tusk, etc.)
(Daston >) Bacon [standing on an extremely unstable scientific ground] used monsters and marvels (as a sort of intellectual hygiene) to jolt people out of their assumptions about the natural world
=/= Aristotelian natural philosophy
--> anomaly took center stage of scientific explanations ~= art's investment in the exceptional
==> curiosity becomes a virtue =/= vice
•nature is allowed to joke
•nature has the freedom to experiment =/= God
--> ended by:
•18th century's *division of labor*
•19th century's *institution of science*
(two-headed cat's) deformations --> terrifying + electrifying
[*]bestiary = Telegram media from God:
•sign of end
•sign of fecundity, creativity, variety of nature
.../horror/wonder/horror/wonder/horror/wonder/...
“everyone was trafficking in marvels in the 17th century”
Daston
... --> premodern sci --> age of wonder --> modern science --> ...
cabinets of curiosity
(Daston's) chambers of wonders
•to overwhelm you
•to impress the ambassador
for Aristotle, philosophy starts with wonder, but you make it disappear as soon as possible (“wonder = sign of ignorance” of the unlettered and illiterate)
genre of natural history involving the marvels of insects --> domesticate the emotion of wonder for things we can explain
Daston =/= (early 20th [...]
(201)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%81.3[...]ivities of nature =/= types of subject matter, methods of investigation
•interest in irregularities (=/= end of 17th century interest in nature's uniformity and order)
•
Lazarus exhibition, the parasitic twin (the italian conjoined twins who toured freak shows in 17th century europe)
(Daston --> a case study of) the changing relationship between popular & learned culture
legal status of monsters
infanticide in antiquity
earlier tradition of interest in monster:
•Aristotle --> Albertus Magnus
•divine sign --> Cicero, Augustine, Isidore of Sevill
•cosmographical & anthropologic --> Solinus
monsters in a context of a whole natural phenomen (bestiary):
earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions, celestial apparitions, strange rains (of blood), stones, and miscellanea
(monsters --> shift from) signs of God's wrat --to--> signs of nature's fertility
(by the end of 17th century) --to--> comparative anatomy and embryology (teratology)
(from) اعجوبه prodigy --to--> examples of medical pathology
*peasant and professional had participated to a significant extent in a shared culture of intellectual and religious interest* --✕-->{
(literate culture evolved far more rapidly ==> sharpening of social boundaries of)
city dwellers =/= peasants
urban literate elite =/= unlettered day laboure
--> for the educated layman: (religious associations of) monsters = another manifestation of popular ignorance and superstition --fostering--> uncritical wonder =/= sober investigation of natural cause
prodigy --> contrary to nature --> attributable directly to God (divine displeasure)
-the sunne shal suddenly shine againe in the night, and the moone thre times a day. blood shal drop out of the wood, and the stone shal give his voyce [...] There shalbe a confusion in many places, and the fyre shal oft breake forthe, and the wilde beastes shal change their places, and menstruous women shal beare monstres[...]
•monstrum = prodigium ==> monstrat [monstro: i wonder --> i indict --> i teach, demonstrate] = god's will
•apocalyptic association --> world reformation, the overthrow of the wicked --> vindication of god's elect
(bestiaries were a lot commentaries)
various bestial parts...
bestial vices and errors (of...)
ephemeral literature
displayed and recited publicly
characteristically illustrated
appeal through spoken word & image to the illiterate
Pierre Boaistuau [<== Peucer, Lycosthenes, Swiss surgeon Jakob Rueff, naturalist Konrad Gesner, Pierre Belon]
histoire tragique
histoire prodigieuse (monster literature, bestiary?)
•two-headed woman seen in Bavaria in 1541
•three-legged Siames[...]
(202)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%81.4[...]shal suddenly shine againe in the night, and the moone thre times a day. blood shal drop out of the wood, and the stone shal give his voyce [...] There shalbe a confusion in many places, and the fyre shal oft breake forthe, and the wilde beastes shal change their places, and menstruous women shal beare monstres[...]
•monstrum = prodigium ==> monstrat [monstro: i wonder --> i indict --> i teach, demonstrate] = god's will
•apocalyptic association --> world reformation, the overthrow of the wicked --> vindication of god's elect
(bestiaries were a lot commentaries)
various bestial parts...
bestial vices and errors (of...)
ephemeral literature
displayed and recited publicly
characteristically illustrated
appeal through spoken word & image to the illiterate
Pierre Boaistuau [<== Peucer, Lycosthenes, Swiss surgeon Jakob Rueff, naturalist Konrad Gesner, Pierre Belon]
/>
histoire tragique
histoire prodigieuse (monster literature, bestiary?)
•two-headed woman seen in Bavaria in 1541
•three-legged Siamese twins from 1552
•calf without forelegs reported in 1556
•celebrated monster of Cracow
•
ghoulish tone, religious didacticism, erudite آموزنده, monsters as polemical weapons
“nature's wonder?” --> to “discovre the secret judgment and scourge of the ire of God”
The Scripture sayth, before the ende
Of all thinges shall appeare,
God will wounders straunge thinges send,
As some is sene this yeare.
The selye infantes, voyde of shape,
The calues and pygges so straunge,
With other mo of suche mishape,
Declareth this worldes chaunge.
...monsters began to lose their religious resonance
it was unlawful to “delight” in the undesirable
portentous meaning of monster
(from) fear --to--> del-> delight
(from) prodigy --to--> wonder
(from) sermon --to--> table-talk
(from) horrible, terrible, effrayable, espouventable --to--> strange, wonderful, merveilleux (marvelous جالب)
(from) final cause --to--> proximate cause (physical explanations and the natural order)
}==> nature began to assume the role of an autonomous entity with a will (and sense of humour of her own) ~~> natural wonder
wonder literature ([lavishly illustrated bestiary, cosmography, travel literature, geological curiosa, herbal and astrological lore,] of later 16th and 17th century Daston) --> secularization of an interest in (monsters as) prodigies
--part-of--> the great body of common culture
--affinity--> popular 16th century genre of diverses lefons (selections from famous authors)
catalogues of strange instances or hidden properties of animals, vegetables and mineral
(middle class culture in elizabetha[...]
(204)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%81.5[...]
(bestiaries were a lot commentaries)
various bestial parts...
bestial vices and errors (of...)
ephemeral literature
displayed and recited publicly
characteristically illustrated
appeal through spoken word & image to the illiterate
Pierre Boaistuau [<== Peucer, Lycosthenes, Swiss surgeon Jakob Rueff, naturalist Konrad Gesner, Pierre Belon]
histoire tragique
histoire prodigieuse (monster literature, bestiary?)
•two-headed woman seen in Bavaria in 1541
•three-legged Siamese twins from 1552
•calf without forelegs reported in 1556
•celebrated monster of Cracow
•
ghoulish tone, religious didacticism, erudite آموزنده, monsters as polemical weapons
“nature's wonder?” --> to “discovre the secret judgment and scourge of the ire of God”
The Scripture sayth, before the ende
Of all thinges shall appeare,
>
God will wounders straunge thinges send,
As some is sene this yeare.
The selye infantes, voyde of shape,
The calues and pygges so straunge,
With other mo of suche mishape,
Declareth this worldes chaunge.
...monsters began to lose their religious resonance
it was unlawful to “delight” in the undesirable
portentous meaning of monster
(from) fear --to--> delight
(from) prodigy --to--> wonder
(from) sermon --to--> table-talk
(from) horrible, terrible, effrayable, espouventable --to--> strange, wonderful, merveilleux (marvelous جالب)
(from) final cause --to--> proximate cause (physical explanations and the natural order)
}==> nature began to assume the role of an autonomous entity with a will (and sense of humour of her own) ~~> natural wonder
wonder literature ([lavishly illustrated bestiary, cosmography, travel literature, geological curio curiosa, herbal and astrological lore,] of later 16th and 17th century Daston) --> secularization of an interest in (monsters as) prodigies
--part-of--> the great body of common culture
--affinity--> popular 16th century genre of diverses lefons (selections from famous authors)
catalogues of strange instances or hidden properties of animals, vegetables and mineral
(middle class culture in elizabethan england)
prodigies denuded of their supernatural aura & (presented) to surprise and entertain the reader =/= to acquaint the reader with imminent apocalypse and judgeme
Certaine Secrete Wonders of Nature
portentous events بد شگون
(crocodiles) to be granted honorary monstrous status by virtue of their rarit
many will reade them [monsters], heare them and haue profit by them, that otherwise whould neuer haue knowen them. For many (I suppose) will buye this Booke for the thing[...]
(205)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%81.5[...]us races (men with a single giant foot, or huge ears, or their faces on their chests, giants and dwarfs)
medically oriented monster literature
[Daston:] Pare was forced to eliminate a section on lesbianism, with a graphic description of the female genitals, before including Des monstres in later editions of his collected work
A Helpe to Memorie and Discourse (of Wonders, Foreign and Domestic)
*the passages and occurrences of the world* #ajayeb
•the creatures thereof
•the casualties therein
little-known properties of... (wine and water, fish, dogs, cuckolds, hunchbacks and monsters)
popular ignorance
solitary efforts of the professional scholar
culture of the educated layman (lawyer, businessman, government official, and their wives and daughters)
[change in sensibility (&-=>? change in interpretation)]
beginning of the withdrawal of the educated classes from more popular culture
@Goda
monsters (familiar canon of prodigies) became a subject of great fashion and not vulgar
(Daston tracing how) “in the wonder literature, then, monsters--along with the rest of the canon of prodigies--began to cast off their religious associations. this trend was accompanied by a movement to emphasize natural causes over supernatural ones.”
Pare represented [the causes of monstrous births] an elaboration on the natural explanations offered by Aristotle and writers in the Aristotelian tradition (too much or too little seed, maternal imagination, a narrow womb, a traumatic pregnancy, hereditary disease, bestiality and so on) + a new causal category: artifice (to include fakes and children mutilated by their parents to enhance their take as beggars)
shift in *causal thinking* --> (expanded the power of) maternal imagination covering eventuality ==> a new way of talking about nature
{(from) in the prodigy literature nature was effectively transparent (a veil through which God's purposes could be discerned)}--to--> nature gained a new autonomy ( fertility of invention =/= wrath) --> *nature personified* (the artisan) [Pare: “chambermaid to our great God"], monsters were treated as jokes or “sports” (lusus) of a personified nature
transcorporeal fields of sensoriality =/= boundedness of isolated bodies and things
nonanthropocentric zoological studies
Bacon's (tripartite division of) natural history:
1. *natural: the study of nature “in course”, or natural history
2. *preternatural: the study of nature “erring”, or the “history of marvels” --> a coherent category (=/= miscellaneous collection of phenomen)
3. *artificial: the study of nature “wrought, or the history of arts
nature's aberrations for the finest examples of her workmanship
nature imagery of the [...]
(206)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%81.6[...]those objects (which seem to it rare and extraordinary)
◦*begining of the tendency to reduce emotion to physiology*
◦Charles Le Brun's drawings of the passions
◦Darwin's wonder: a reaction ==> making the animal see and breathe better in crisis ==> increased its chances of survival (...raised eyebrows, opened and protruding lips, a hand held up, palm out with fingers open)
◦early modern physiology --> wonder: (~ startled response,) paradigmatic emotion
4- (the horrible) philosophical understanding of wonder: ignorance rationalized or erased by knowledge
a wondering desire that collects and appropriates what it endeavors to know or project its self onto an imagined other --> a passion that reduces to a startle response at the unfamiliar
}=/= historian (and teacher [and performance-lecturer]) vacation (or responsibility) --> (we must aspire to) imagine the kind of nonappropriative perspectival *intensely cognitive* response
/>
middle ages (how they characterize their difference:)
1. theological-philosophical understanding of wonder <== university intellectuals {
◦admiratio =/= scientia ==> knowledge
◦admiratio ~= diversitas (diversity) =/= solitum (the usual, the general)
2. religious discourse about wonder <-- sermons, hagiography, devotional writing, enormously popular genre of *saint's lives* (tazkirat تذکره نویسی) {
◦admiratio =/= imitatio (imitation جعلى) [the readers were urged to wonder at and not immitate the power and extravagant asceticism of holy men and women (in Attar?)]
◾admiratio ~= paradox (coincidence of opposites) [one finds mira (wondrous) again and again in the texts alongside mixta (mixed, composite things, chimera)]
◦admiratio ~/= curiositas (curiosity کنجکاوی)
◦admiratio ~/= disputatio (disputatiousness ستيزه جويى)
3. literature of entertainment: travel accounts, history writinwriting, collection of odd stories called by one author
◦admirari (to wonder at) =/= rimari (to pay into)
◦(collected stories ==> amuse, instruct, move their aristocratic listeners -->) wonder =/= inductio exemplorum (generalizing)
12th 14th centuries
(twin authorities for middle ages) Aristotle + Augustine ==> tradition of understanding wonder as perspectival & psychological ==> theological-philosophical discourse
•Augustine: marvel =/= what we know of nature (=/= nature) --> *lodge the wonderful-ness of things (not in our reaction to them but) in their ontological status*
•Anselm of Canterbury: marvelous =/= natural =/= artificial (voluntary, made by humans)
}--> miracles are objectively wonderful (because produced by God's power alone)
[1]
early middle ages latin texts --> mirabilia (wonder) ~= miracula (miracle)
13th century --> mirabilia (wonder) =/= miracula (miracle) ==ont[...]
(207)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%81.9[...]uch in knowledge as in encounter with majesty, *wonder: the best way to grab the attention of the soul
◦
}--Bynum--> distinguishing ‘miracle =/= marvel’ ontologically =/= psychologically, perspectivally (or attributing marvels to natural causes) --✕--> eclipse of wonder
wonder as a response was not devalued or dismissed (even in a philosophical and theological tradition that de-wondered anomalies by insisting on an increasingly ordered world, whose laws were decipherable by the wise)
[2]
in the discourse of the homiletic موعظه and hagiographical تاريخ انبياء (tazkirat) --> wonder =/= imitable قابل تقلید (--✕--> the known, the knowable, the usual)
“non imitandum sed admirandum” (not to be immitated but to be marveled at)
heroes and martyrs =/= ordinary faithful
--> (Attar [master of rhetorics] in تذکرة الاولیا uses) a kind of *humility topos* intended to express an author's conviction that the miracle-working charisma of a saint was far beyond the capacity of author and reader alike (channel the attention of the faithful... towards the emulation of ordinary virtues: to control credulity ساده لوحی, extravagant asceticism, straining after flamboyant religiosity)
}--> nonappropriative nature of wonder
Bernard of Clairvaux (medieval piety)
(rhetoric of) wonder =/= curiosity
praying to the affairs of others
praying to the secrets of the universe
wonderful deformed beauty (of Romanesque sculpture)
--> ****imitatio (جعل) = appropriation = being in society with [---> go to drawing mimetics, literal CG 3D modeling], experiencing, learning, taking into oneself, consuming****
“we, when we take the deeds [of others] for imitation, ought to make the lofty things hidden and humble ones manifest” (like the shape of the seal: sculpted inward is appeared concave when printed) --> mim[...]
(208)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%82.1[...]contains all the richness and variety of the world of sense in a subtle state; it is a world of subsistent and autonomous Forms and Images, the threshold of the malakut {ملکوت}. In it are to be found the mystical cities of Jabalqa جابلقا, Jabarsa جابرسا and Hurqalya هورقلیا.
It appears that Sohrevardi was indeed the first to elaborate the ontology of the inter-world, and the theme once introduced was taken up and expanded by all the mystics and gnostics of Islam.
stories:
The action of these Recitals, in fact, takes place in the ‘alame mesal’ [عالم مثال]. In them, the mystic relates the drama of his personal history on the level of a supra-sensible world, the world of the events of the soul, because the writer, in configurating his own symbols, spontaneously discovers the meaning of the symbols of the divine revelations.
We are not concerned with a series of ‘allegories’ but with the secret hierohistory, invisible to the external senses, which unfolds in the world of the malakut, and with which external and fleeting events symbolize.
سهروردی Sohrevardi's noble venture is not an ‘insurrection’ to islam an external and literalist religion, rather view that sees the integral Islam is spiritual, then Sohrevardi lies at the summit of this spirituality and is nourished by it.
crypto-Shiism شیعه
prophetic philosophy
...................................
Between a scientific treatise, a fable and philosophical discourse, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis imagines a pitch-dark world of an animal living as deep as possible down in the abyss in order to disclose a way of living opposed to the luminous one of the human being.
...................................
analogy of the cave
man with the x-ray vision
...................................
nowhere prosperous<br />
ruinous prosperous
accidental intellects (subjects, qualities, quantities,)
light, self, presence, knowledge
One night darkness had settled in sky and a darkness that and held the hand of the brother of non-existence had been catered around the lower world.
After sleep came upon me, disappointment resulted.
I was holding a candle.
has two doors, one to the city and the other one to the desert. I went and closed the door
tailors of divine words
I then saw an eleven-layered pot thrown into the desert with some water in it and in the water were some pebbles around which here were a few animals.
The heavenly spheres were absolutely round and a straight line could not have been [drawn] between them. Those eleven levels were colorless and due to their extreme fineness, what was in them could not be veiled.
...................................
[...]
(209)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%83.1[...]sensible world of matter
•imagination --> internal particulars: the imaginal
•intellect --> universals: the intelligible
}--> with Avital i am learning technically (in language) to stay in a state of contamination (and their rewiring) of these faculties --> not to disavow the eching lines of my inherited tradition (“-->” + “~~>”)
◦sense perception ~~> universals
◦imagination ~~> external particulars
◦intellect ~~> internal particulars
◦...
*the islamic imaginal realm is (an audiovisual intangible) supra-individual and more real than matter*
Sadra argues that the imaginal realm subsists in the soul, mediating between the senses and the intelligence; it explains how extrapersonal, supra-sensory realities present themselves to imaginative perception --> نجمالدین کبری Najmuddin Kubra expert on visual metaphysics
تجربه شهودی
خيال و شهود
مراتب تجلّی
[*]imaginal realm: a radically pro-image concept
=/= Platonic denunciation of images (as misleading and false)
=/= Byzantine iconoclasm
=/= islamic aniconism
=/= 20th century culture of media critique
=/= iconoclasm of contemporary religious fanatics
=/= fantasies
=/= surrealism
suprasensory imaginal realm of sufism
history of imagination
world philosophy abounds with theories of the imagination
ancient Greek idea of how the imagination can make contact with a supra-individual reality --{followed & developed}--> Neoplatonist (understading of the imagination as) receptive of divine images
=/= memory images
=/= fantasmatic images --> phantasia --{i am wotking against the idea of “fantastic beast” ~-> phantasmata: post-sensory images combined in mind, independently of sense impressions ==> memory, dreams, and sensory illusion}
=/= imaginal images
هیولا hayula: the base, corporeal world
sensory-imaginal-intelligible
•a bottom-up theory of the imagination --> active intellect in the human
•a top-down theory of imagination --> pre-existing divine mind
i disagree with Marks that the (islamicated) imagination was a means to connect to a divine reality, higher truth. in ajayeb we encounter and abundance of descriptive environmental materialities.
Avital studies the interferences of:
1- the lower, sensory imagination
2- the higher, intellective imagination (that receives inspiration from above; #prophets)
ajayeb: synthesized Greek philosophy + Qur'anic thought + popular material body belief
( material body [ X ) immaterial intellect ]
“X” : imaginal مثل: (audio-visual glimpses of divine reality)
•accounts of afterlife --> gardens
•accounts of apocal[...]
(210)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%83.6[...]of central premises of post-Enlightenment, liberal, and socialist European thought
(how?) approach anew the codes addressing human life and significance
new nonhumanist atheism came to be expressed at different times in existentialist, hyper-ethical, or cynical terms, in nondoctrinaire socialist, reactionary, ultramodernist, or even downright antipolitical principles
(shift away from classical atheism and humanism <==) three movements:
1. an *atheism that would not be humanist* : an atheism mistrustful of secular دنيوى, egalitarian تساوى, and transformative commitments
2. a *negative philosophical anthropology*
3. *critiques of humanism*
(1)
(traditionally) atheism = secularism + humanism
absence of god in 19th century thinkers Feuerbach, Comte, Marx, Proudhon:
--> possibility of a good life and proper society
•Feuerbach's anthropotheism: “god = projection of human nature onto the heavens,” nothing more than man's representation of his own essence --> the task of the modern era was the realization and humanization of god : (transformation and dissolution of) theology --into--> anthropology
•Comte: positivist project for science and knowledge --> religion of humanity, explicitly religious atheism
•Proudhon: humanisme
{liberalism: humanism, and idealism had become moral and political expectations of the secular education projects}--> [*]humanism: what could reach, reveal, and cultivate the *proper and ethical* humanum of man ==> [*]man: irreducible, perfectible bearer and guarantor of dignity, equality, and freedom
Levinas's ‘an atheism that is not humanist’: the exaltation of an obedience and a faithfulness that are not obedience or faithfulness to anyone
opening up an apocalyptic imagination
destroying the cultural optimism that had marked the turn of the twentieth century
ground for ethics, knowledge, and hope
(Kojeve, Bataille, reconceiving) atheism: a way out of any and all ideological systems
theological questions + mistrust of political hopes
to replace god with a political messianism, nation or state,
“disenchantment of the world = death knell for man” (?)
nonhumanist atheism: determined opposition to foundational concepts of man, knowledge, and truth (=/= critically rethinking problems of anthropotheism, of transcendence, of finitude)
critique of idealism = critique of transcendence
1920s: atheist humanism = idealist arguments about the capacity of the human mind (to transcend and objectively pattern the things that compose the world around it)
might and violence of ideologies relied on definitions of humanity (that made this violence not only plausible and rational, but almost necessary --> communism and colonialism)
Sartre's postwar m[...]
(211)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%84.6[...]/>
Foucault's concluding chapter to The Order of Things
Derrida's The Ends of Man
(existentialist entrapment of man in his world, #alienation)
(in Being and Time) Heidegger's Dasein ==>
•stripping man's shared element down to its being-there
•subsumes and displaces the humanity of man
•rejection of the I as an absolute, independent subject that approaches a world largely separate from it
--> from ontic determination --to--> ontico-ontological determination [of human]
*the humanity of Dasein remains and must be understood as derivative of both its ontic and ontological status
metaphysical presupposition (that he cannot claim to be capable of fully describing or understanding natur) -->
(human approached and understood only in terms of) *results* or *side-effects* (of language, existence, history, phenomena):
•in phenomena: man finds himself thrown in the world of phenomena and life; he is not grounded in some transcendental fashion (Heidegger, Kojeve, Malraux, Sartre, Beaufret)
•in language: he is an interpreter of signs and symbols that form part of greater systems independent of his individual will
•in history: he is constructed and operates within cultural, religious, and philosophical limits imposed on him
•
[and] these systems are not consequences of man's creative activity, desire, or will
they are domains in which he finds himself
}--> *the human in man comes to mean less and less* ==> *we can only know what his approach to others (and other things) can reveal*
emergence of the new nonhumanist atheism + the negative philosophical anthropology --> French antihumanism's assault on:
•contemporary humanisms
•the legacies and utopian hopes of the Enlightenment
•liberal-bourgeois thinking grounded in human rights and individual autonomy
•Marxist humanism with its critique of liberalism and its expectations of a superior
humanity
•(human perfection & social harmony)
(Geroulanos's account of primary constellations of) humanism:
•christian humanism
•Renaissance educational humanism (founded on a return to ancient Greek models)
•Humboldt's reconceptualization of Renaissance humanism (in 19th century Germany)
•Enlightenment humanism (from Montesquieu through Rousseau and Condorcet)
•19th century liberal humanism (frequently based on natural law, autonomy over one's own body and mind, and human rights)
•socialist humanisms (with its commitment to contractarian social theory)
Encyclopedie's attack on theological knowledge
19th century construction of modern humanism (sociopolitical goals of a “human nature”) --> left-leaning, often democratic, (but certainly) utopian sociopolitical mentality
[*]ideology: a thinking th[...]
(213)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%84.8[...]ignity of man
}--Geroulanos--> structure of a *rejection of mainstream thought and policy* for not taking into account (and hence devaluing) the goals of one's anthropo-theologico-political commitment
wreckage of WWII ==> man could not find meaning either in faith or in his own knowledge and construction of the world
_...dive into the depths of human solitude and suffering
(like existentialism and the Western Marxist tradition,) human rights came to operate as a “humanism from below” =/= generic and top-down humanisms (~ monopoly of violence that states held over their individual subjects)
(Geroulanos not arguing that antihumanism was the driving force or the secret heart of intellectual movements and philosophies, nor claiming that it was a single movement, concept, idea, or trend; rather) antihumanism is what emerged from, shaped, and configured a major matrix of concerns
problem with secular humanist utopias --> forging of a ‘new man’ through the mobilization of a specific a priori definition of man required (both):
•man's divinization خداسازى
•man's purge پاکسازى
essentialist definitions of man ==> biologistic, scientistic, political, religious, moralist projects ==>
•lay claim on universality
•prioritize themselves over any such universality
ideologies continue to disguise a *politics of the will* as a universalism
antihumanism = antiredemptive, antimoralist, antimessianist worldview
+ proliferation of tropes --> dooming contemporary man to an existence without meaning or future:
•last man (Nietzsche, Camus, Blanchot)
•death of Man (Malraux, Kojeve, Blanchot, Foucault)
•devirilization of man (Kojeve, Bataille, Queneau)
•terror (Marlaux, Bataille, Kojeve, Merleau-Ponty)
•
Kojeve and Jean Wahl --> antifoundational realism --> new anthropology
antihumanism
a precondition of thought
a fluid matrix of ideas
a philosophical attitude
...................................
Malraux's (literary-metaphysical pursuits [echoes Nietzsche + intellectual Left]) heritage to us (to artists): the alternative to bourgeois individualism [can be achieved] through commitment to a justice based on a quasi-Marxist notion of human dignity --> the *uprooted, cultured, and powerless individual* who struggled against the nation-driven, science-executed destruction wrought by (arid and morally bankrupt) modern warfare [---> go to forensic architecture, apass] --> (the idea that death of man can be averted through) ***a recognition of the heroism of the resistance*** + turn to human creativity
how i have used a non-western voice (“i am from outside the west”) to provide for myself an escape from political categorization + claiming the knowledge of an insider and enj[...]
(214)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%84.9[...]gical mediation) =/= the process of genetic manipulation
=/= Heidegger's technology: a metaphysically totalizing context (<-- every technology ended up with exactly the same output or analysis)
Ihde =/= utopian & dystopian views of technology
...to understand yourself to be thinking and acting ‘in the midst of’ the pervasive technoscientific character of life (@CG hacker)
Ihde --> ***technologies and humans constitute themselves interactively***
*technological mediation: heterogeneous relationships between individual human beings and the world + artifacts used for mediations =/= ideals of efficiency and clear communication
“breakdown ==> new gestalt” : something that had usually taken for granted, which then under breakdown conditions, now gets revealed in a new way (revelatory function)
=/= Ihde's *variational practice* : variations ==forefront==> new gestalts
(our) world = powerful effective & failing technology
we =/= tragic hero (+ broken hammer) or Enlightenment scientist (+ laboratory)
matrix --> female
those that move in the matrix --> formative male principle
(Foucault's) episteme: social-moral-religious stability
Latour
modernity <== settlement: (a clear and sharp distinction) society =/= nature --obscure--> the proliferation of hybrids: entities that are both cultural & natural (for example material technologies are both “real” & “constructed”)
Ihde --> technologies are in *mediating positions*
interrelational relativistic ontologies : there is interaction and mutual “non-neutral” and “noninnocent” productive and emergent shaping between humans + technologies + animals --> knowledge is “situated” and particular, not “transcendentally” true ==> putative symmetry between the human & nonhuman
bestiality (interrelational, sin?) is embedded in what has to appear to us today as an antiquated or surpassed stability
•(Merleau-Ponty + Ihde) embodiment is the location of all intelligent behavior [situated + embodied]
•(Pickering) cybernetic (self-organizing set) is the location of all intelligent behavior [situated]
---> go to Galison's Einstein
(the old notion that) ***phenomenology is primarily descriptive =/= prescriptive
[ethicalization of knowledge, in Iran, in artists reading choices based on gender, etc. turning research into applied ethics]
•contemporary ethics of a cosmopolitan pluricultural tolerant sort
•absolutisms of politically incarnated groups had to transform absolute beliefs into “private” ones (taken off the streets and battlegrounds) <--now-- returning!
****technologies are multistable: having unpredictable side-effects and embeddable in differe[...]
(215)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%88.6[...]ynamic space where the “I” or the “self” sees itself engaged in a public space (of kin, of others, of economic and political forces)]
the theatrical arts: spoken work + visual spectacle --> rise of opera
[--> rise of natural history]
observers of the differences between their civilization and that of the Persians, their standards of measure were those of the West:
Xenophon
Herodotus
Quintus Curtius Rufus
Strabo
Pausanias
Ammianus Marcellinus
Barnabas Brissonius
Pietro Bizzarri
Johannes de Laet
Thomas Herbert
Hans Schiltberger
Hans Christoph von Teufel
Stefan Kakasch
Anthony Jenkinson
Anthony and Robert Sherley
Thomas Coryat
Pietro della Valle
Garcai de Silva y Figueroa
Jean Babtiste Tavernier
Raphael du Mans
Olearius (1636)
Engelbert Kaempfer
a Greek invented dichotomy:
(Greek) small democracies =/= (Persian) powerful empire
modestia (cult of the simple and good) =/= superbid (pride)
law =/= monarch
‘conflict’ is a theme
Europe/Persia reasons for contact according to Cambridge History of Iran:
1- religious incentive (moharek محرک)
2- both against the Ottoman Turks
3- commercial incentive
4- travelers passed through Persia
Duke Frederick's commercial venture that would put the tiny territory on the map, as it were, and eliminate all its debts [...] with Adam Olearius chosen to chronicle the mission as its official secretary
“Duke's stated aim in sending the embassy to Persia was to establish a trade route with Persia and obtain exclusive rights to export silk from the area, thus squeezing out the other European competition, especially the Dutch”
his methodology
(Olearius's citational mobilization) a typical Baroque writer, he cites classical and Renaissance sources copiously and compares them to each other, thus paying homage to the scholarly tradition
•list the main features of a subject under discussion
•quote classical and contemporary authorities --> elicit different opinions
•
*correction of faulty source material imperative*
Harvey's new theory of the circulation of blood
Olearius:
•seasickness could be caused by motion of the waves
•“monsters” living along the Siberian coast are wrong
•
Olearius's methodology is that of a comparatist
he juxtaposes (the customs and social structures of the people he meets with those of his native land)
Olearius's trip ==> production of (superior maps)
Olearius ==> maps
Qazwini ==> lists
Sa'di ==> de-vice
Olearius's The Vermehrte Newe Beschreibung includes large, detailed, fold-out maps descri[...]
(216)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%91.2[...]
‘flaming hearts’ symbolizing “their” union
symbolism (of the frontispiece tries to) contain the subject matter (of the text that follows)
the triumph of death (but with a happy end for the deceased) # Adventure Time
“that which i wish for is not mortal” (Duke's motto)
“virtue lives on after the funeral rites”
his home, name, heraldry, figure, allows the viewer to grasp the entire span of the deceased's life (and death) *at a single glance*
horn of plenty
cupid is astride (with a leg on each side of)
astrilized
*winged sphere*
winged fame trumpets the deceased's accomplishments
christian mastery over the infidel--who is blinded to the true faith
a group of international admirers
**methods used in Europe to disseminate information about foreign people** during the early modern era:
•Flugblatt (broad-sheet or broadside, 14th century), a medium directed at the illiterate classes (that needed visual cue) [included: news about battles, astrological prediction, sighting of comet, birth of a monstrous creature (animal or human), execution of a famous criminal, tales of witches, devils, religious or political propaganda]
Flugblatt counterparts:
◦Flugshrift (flying writ, flying pamphlet), popularized by Martin Luther, four pages with woodcut gracing, for audience with ability and leisure to read longer tracts
•illustrated costume book. with Mannerist strapwork, grotesque, garlands, allegorical personifications; in scenes representing the original reason why humans need to wear clothing
•(Norbert when he uses “we” in his language) --> *author*: active, nude, individual with his scissors, not dressed for battle, who will actively clothe the other figures ... [in frontispiece to Hans Weigel's Trachtenbuch the personifications of the non-Europeans are all prepared for battle] (male warriors in female continents [continents are usually represented by female figures, derived from biblical and classical sources such as Roman coins]) {Amerindian's headdress once was removed from its original ethnographic context, “decontextualized,” and then “recontextualized in a different setting --> europeans might have thought that it was a skirt. the reverse is the story of shalite شلیته?}
mid 16th century also saw the development of the periodical newssheet (adapted from broadside)
consisting of image and text--work together in order to provide meaning for the design --> view needed to combine ==> a composing/composer subjectivity
allegorical putti (symbolizing industry)
inscription at their feet
flora beside each of them
Olearius's frontispiece for Orientalischen Reise:
•mixture of realistic and fantastic
•illusionistic cloths denote a process not only of uncov[...]
(217)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%91.6[...]s his observation into his *magnum opus*, the traveler account (just as God writes in “das grosse Wunderbuch die Welt”)
=/= my amazon project
textual proclamation of the author's faith
Olearius's translation of the sufi lore collected by the celebrated Persian poet Sa'di, in a condensed visual form, (acknowledged later by Goethe) with the help of Hakwirdi
Brancaforte: Golestan speaks to an audience that has recently suffered from the ravages of war (or predicting it?!)
-Golestan (“valley of roses”) written soon after the bloodbath is therefore a document of its time composed by a man of reason who always stresses the practical [praised by Olearius as a “lustiger Kopff” (funloving spirit)]--appealing to a classical authority
-blending personal experience, humorous insights, and aphorisms (of an ethical/didactic nature)
-Muhammadian like the manner of Virgil-->{the past as legacy, disposing with the divine mechanism, purchase Virgil's tomb and worshipped it, poetry as a tool of divination, embodiment of experience, pastoral and erotic, attraction toward people of any gender, agriculture as man's struggle against a hostile natural world, way of a comparison with foreign marvels,}
religious relativism in Olearius's orientalism --> in deference to his christian audience and as a dependent of the Gottorf court--he disparages islam (verführischer Glauben, seductive belief)
-he is also a forerunner to the comparative religious studies (when he uses the word “Gott/God” rather than the name “Allah”)
-manipulating Hakwirdi's voice in the propagandistic confrontation between the great religions --> Olearius speaking for his persian friend: who feels the customs of his homeland do not measure up to those of his adopted country [like Norbert!]
‘other's blindness’: (a *textual disclaimer* of) the other who exists in spiritual and religious darkness =/= pictorial depiction
(in Persianischer Rosenthal the entire) ***enterprise of translation*** (from Farsi to German) is cloaked in highly metaphoric language, charged with fostering the development of the german language + nationalized sentiment, “our German language that used to lie beneath the dust of contempt now shines forth once again” (<-- i meet this all the time when i was living and working in Germany)
“Die Persianer” in Olearius is an ambiguous term, it could stand for either Sa'di or the text of the Golestan, or Hakwirdi, but this “Persians” is to be “let inside, wearing a German coat,” Olearius's body is charged with teaching “the Persian to speak German” (--> integration)
other translations of Golestan:
•Andre du Ryer
•Johan Ochsenbach
•Georg Gentius
*Golestan
taut and well-translated epigrams
end-rhyme poems
a ‘treasury’ of rhetorical and poetical motifs
a voluminous index[...]
(218)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%91.7[...]ssentially different) --> attending an object as:
•story
•diagram
•
...................................
intermingling the sexuality and materiality of bodies with the transcendental concepts and questions of spirituality and religion
to re-insert the body back into religious imagery
queer religious imagery
culture-jam
weaving their desire and bodies back into an exclusionary narrative
(un)critical faith
sexuality, gender, and bodily regulation in ...
deep inextricability of religious and secular discourses in constructing the body, as well as the ways in which such discourses alone can never tell the complete story of gendered and sexual bodies and practices (Wetzel)
...................................
Saadia Toor
() within the neo-Orientalist discourse [~= liberal modernity as embodied by ‘the West’ and Barbarism as connoted by Islam] ‘the Muslim’ enemy is today configured as both misogynyst and homophobic (with an essentialized Islam comfortably posited as the roots of illiberalism[= presented as the mark and the evidence of Islam's radical alterity from Western civilization])==> “civilizing missions” [such as my orientation course (as an ideological cover) in Germany] + [Hoda's bottom-lined subjugated self puts her on such “mission” (‘to rescue women’ and) ends any discussion with her (about women, or Islam)] }==> essentialized and monolithic (and flattened) ‘Islam’ emptied of history, diversity, complexity, and dissent نفاق -- devoid of any internal complexity and in fact incapable of effecting change from within
[--> critical use of #islamicated instead of “islamic"]
organic intellectuals (of the empire)
(authentic) native informants
brave and courageous ‘victims’ of Islam
•Rushdie one of the strongest voices[...]
(222)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%92.7[...]br />
•Rushdie one of the strongest voices within the clash of civilizations framework, in popular support for the Global War on Terror
•Manji's narrow polemic and cultivating a persona (of young smart queer woman) ==> new Orientalism
•Hirsi Ali an authentic ‘victim’ (“I used to be a Muslim; I know what I am talking about” -saying things that liberal ‘politically correct’ discourse will not allow Whites/non-Muslims/Westerners to say)
}--> ideology of Empire --> [a neo-colonial project:] discursive construction of an essentialized Islam
a range of “misogynist cultural” practices:
•FGM (female genital mutilation)
•honor killings
•the ‘cult of virginity’
--> they all predate islam and are common to Animists and Christians of the sub-Saharan region as well as Ethiopian Jews
liberal rhetoric of saving Muslim women
when some illustratives are pitched as a sensitive response to racist Islamophobia, but taking part in the mainstream discourse on Islam and homosexuality
‘Islamic-ness’ of the subject-matter
(the strange idea) that all Muslim countries are Islamic
part fiction, part ideological label, part minimal designation of a religion called islam (or “west”)
-How really useful is “Islam” as a concept for understanding Morocco and Saudi Arabia and Syria and Indonesia (or Iran)? [Said asks]
return them to the ‘chardivari’
(Toor's notion of) ‘patriarchal opportunism’ : “whereby patriarchal structures from families to nation-states strategically select elements from an ideological ‘toolbox’ in their attempt to gain support for the sexual regulation of women.”
Toor showing how impossible it is to think of ‘Islam’ as being the source of Muslim women's problems:
•(an ordinary story) runaway marriage --to--> a battle for the consolidation of class and patriarchal power played on a national stage; a case (of Saima) abounding in the established and familiar postcolonial binaries of East/West, tradition/modernity, public/private, sacred/profane
*class struggle is itself always already a gendered process, both discursively and materially*
clash between different and competing patriarchies or patriarchal arrangements --> the status of women within kin-networks --> the role of marriage in consolidating class power ==hence==> the rhetoric of marriage as something too important to be left to the men and women concerned (in Pakistan: ‘marriages = cementing relations between men’) --> “controlling female sexuality across class lines” [--> a very specific anxiety over female (sexual) agency* + complexities of patriarchy within Pakistani society] }--> “Among other things, they demonstrate that ‘Islam'--whether as a basis for individual/national identity, as a religious and cultural system, or as a set of injunctions encoded in t[...]
(226)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%92.8[...] families to nation-states strategically select elements from an ideological ‘toolbox’ in their attempt to gain support for the sexual regulation of women.”
Toor showing how impossible it is to think of ‘Islam’ as being the source of Muslim women's problems:
•(an ordinary story) runaway marriage --to--> a battle for the consolidation of class and patriarchal power played on a national stage; a case (of Saima) abounding in the established and familiar postcolonial binaries of East/West, tradition/modernity, public/private, sacred/profane
*class struggle is itself always already a gendered process, both discursively and materially*
clash between different and competing patriarchies or patriarchal arrangements --> the status of women within kin-networks --> the role of marriage in consolidating class power ==hence==> the rhetoric of marriage as something too important to be left to the men and women concerned (in Pakistan: ‘marriages = cementing relations between men’) --> “controlling female sexuality across class lines” [--> a very specific anxiety over female (sexual) agency* + complexities of patriarchy within Pakistani society] }--> “Among other things, they demonstrate that ‘Islam'--whether as a basis for individual/national identity, as a religious and cultural system, or as a set of injunctions encoded in theological and juridical textual sources--is always/already an internally contested discourse rather than a monolithic and internally coherent thing.”
(--> understanding of) the ways in which ‘the law’ itself is constructed and operationalized; delightful colonial legacy called the “Family Laws” (part of the penal codes of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh);
•zina (zena, illicit sex, adultery, premarital sex) --> far from being an expression of religious piety at the familial or state level, the zina law is wielded as a potent weapon of control and extortion by families of ‘disobedient’ women + the rights that the moral authority of Islam grants the women against their families }=/= the manner in which the mainstream media in the West constructs the role of Islam in the lives of Muslim women (~ everything to do with Muslims is explained by ‘Islam’) =/= Khan's research on incarcerated women leads her to conclude that poverty is an important causal factor in the imprisonment of women under the charge of zina in Pakistan (structural adjustment policies imposed on Pakistan by the World Bank and IMF from the 1980s on) --> larger global political and economic processes
•a transgender couple charged with perjury under the Pakistan Penal Code, and not under ‘Islamic law.’ Supreme Court would rule in their favor, the judgment drew on the presence of the figure of Hermaphrodite in Ancient Greece to Islam + discussed with sympathy by mainstream media + well-organized and politically savvy hijra community in Pakista
}--> @Hoda, since she is interested in women's status under purportedly Islam[...]
(227)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%92.8[...]y, public/private, sacred/profane
*class struggle is itself always already a gendered process, both discursively and materially*
clash between different and competing patriarchies or patriarchal arrangements --> the status of women within kin-networks --> the role of marriage in consolidating class power ==hence==> the rhetoric of marriage as something too important to be left to the men and women concerned (in Pakistan: ‘marriages = cementing relations between men’) --> “controlling female sexuality across class lines” [--> a very specific anxiety over female (sexual) agency* + complexities of patriarchy within Pakistani society] }--> “Among other things, they demonstrate that ‘Islam'--whether as a basis for individual/national identity, as a religious and cultural system, or as a set of injunctions encoded in theological and juridical textual sources--is always/already an internally contested discourse rather than a monolithic and internally coherent thing.”
(--> understanding of) the ways in which ‘the law’ itself is constructed and operationalized; delightful colonial legacy called the “Family Laws” (part of the penal codes of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh);
•zina (zena, illicit sex, adultery, premarital sex) --> far from being an expression of religious piety at the familial or state level, the zina law is wielded as a potent weapon of control and extortion by families of ‘disobedient’ women + the rights that the moral authority of Islam grants the women against their families }=/= the manner in which the mainstream media in the West constructs the role of Islam in the lives of Muslim women (~ everything to do with Muslims is explained by ‘Islam’) =/= Khan's research on incarcerated women leads her to conclude that poverty is an important causal factor in the imprisonment of women under the charge of zina in Pakistan (structural adjustment policies imposed on Pakistan by the World Bank and IMF from the 1980s on) --> larger global political and economic processes
•a transgender couple charged with perjury under the Pakistan Penal Code, and not under ‘Islamic law.’ Supreme Court would rule in their favor, the judgment drew on the presence of the figure of Hermaphrodite in Ancient Greece to Islam + discussed with sympathy by mainstream media + well-organized and politically savvy hijra community in Pakista
}--> @Hoda, since she is interested in women's status under purportedly Islamic regimes
}==> Islam is not the overarching motor within purportedly Muslim societies that mainstream discourse would have us believe
(Rastegar > Toor:) “it is typical of much human rights discourse in the Third World to focus on [...] practices of regulating women's bodies, especially those identified with Islamic law, while ignoring socioeconomic concern.” @Hoda
Toor's two distinctions [=/= collapsing all forms of ‘Islamization’ resulting in a serious misunderstanding of the social proce[...]
(228)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%92.8[...]he act of fieldwork
good faith analysis : stories that are explicit about the double vision through foregrounding within the story a figure that enables *switching*
•stories that never intervene in a way that was imagined (before the study was carried out)
(Strathern's) [*]partiality = incomplete + committed : a description is always part of a whole, which can never be known as a totality, and it is political (biased)
lecture performance ~= brining the effect of a story to life as generalization --> infra-ontological + epistemological work
...................................
Kwa
[*]holism: the ideal of integrating all the workings of nature into one whole
1950s --> a special relationship between the holism and the computer (the idea that if the assumption of holism is fed into a computer model, the computer faithfully reproduces it)
early 20th century --> notions of the complex unity of (living) systems ==> romantic conceptions of nature
*complexity = romantic holism =/= reductionist*
romantic tradition of complexity : to see an underlying unity in a world of heterogeneous objects and phenomena (Rousseau, Cuvier, last two thousands years, [is religion romantic?])
romantic scientist's moderate version of Kant's Copernican Revolution:
•Rousseau
•Humboldt --> ***to arrange the facts, not successively on the order in which they have presented themselves, but according to the relations which they have between themselves*** [~~> a sort of paranoia]
◦the idea that to see that Humboldt was able to see takes a “sensitive observer”
•Whitehead --> physical systems with endurance as the measure of their stability
•Tansley --> ecosystem ~= superorganism
•
=/= baroque (--Kwa--> neobaroque):
•Leibniz --> every bit of matter can be conceived as a garden full of plants : each drop of its bodily fluid is also such a garden ==> ***it is the direction of looking that matters *** (mode of attention)
•Deleuze
•Whitehead
•Darwin
•Benjamin
•
bestiary = baroque + romantic
*romantic complexity (looks up) =/= baroque complexity (looks down)*
•looking up: integrate individuals (who appear to be a heterogeneous lot) at the phenomenological level to a single entity at a higher level of organization --> (plants and animals, individuals) are*functionality integrated* [<-- my problem with the notion of community]
◦looking up to the world of platonic forms <-- a process of abstraction
•looking down: a table of companions --> (plants and animals, individuals) are *cooperating*
(romantic conceptions of) society as organism =/= (baroque conception of) organism as society
(historic) baroque
-grand style of 17th century
-([...]
(229)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%93.5[...] the condition of) ‘territory’: contexts that engender more or less conservative orientations of assemblages toward fixity
(Sina emphasized that assemblages are also characterized by the condition of) ‘abstraction’: the unique character of how an assemblage mobilizes new compositions of material and expressive thing
}--> relational territories of heterogeneous stuff territorialized [by value] and abstracted [by price]
can we trace consumption as it unfolds?
-family assemblages are characterized as collections of distinct but related units, things that are never the same twice, but somehow hold together and maintain coherent pathways through time
(Price and Epp)
-(for people who move often) ‘home’: something that needs to be continually recreated by combining all sorts of elements in imaginative ways--home is a hybrid (=/= simply there waiting for them)
an “I love you” --enter--> assemblages in manners that catalyse (or inhibit) ongoing hybrid relations
levels of analysis is always unexpected [=/= purification]
modern separation between ‘believing in unicorns’ and ‘managing environmental disasters’ [~/=? ajayeb] ~ modern separations/boundaries: science/mythology/politics/religion/leisure (<--Latour/Haraway-- this is a problem) ==> ***purify components of our cultures***
‘program of intervention’: a purposeful attempt to construct realities by enlisting various allies : intermediaries establishing alliances between products, institutions, celebrities and consumers in ways that improve sales and mobilize stable relationships --> institutions attempt to strategically shape assemblages
(Law, Moor, Araujo, Ruiz)
marketers may try to establish stable brand images by mobilising networks of celebrities, scientists, consumption communities and various media outlets --but--> are contested, there is no ‘lead actor’ in assemblages
[*]marketing: iterative attempts to weave together networks of products, services or brands with heterogeneous allies in order to extend the usefulness of a particular market offering across wider consumption assemblages in time and space
-marketers think in terms of catalyzing interactions and consistencies amongst stubborn, messy and dynamic assemblages of spaces, representations, things and consumers
knowing: an intervention in the world
(Bettany)
[*]ethnography: stories that have in them a capacity to represent the world in ways that are generative for the people and practices that the stories are about @constantvzw
(Winthereik and Verran)
in the case of data streaming: what are the people, objects, texts and practices that constitute processes of assembling?
-in our research let's not prioritize either people or things in advance ==> unexpected sources of influence in markets and consumer cultures @Fo[...]
(230)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%94.3[...] I turn the engine of a car and ignite the 165 million-year-old microscopic fossil faunae, connecting me to the 35 billion ancient barrels that are drilled, fracked, refined, and transported every single year. Climate change is in the 100 trillion objects that are in, that are the Earth, traversing the stomach lining of the Burmese python and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, which churns a quarter of the planet’s heat flux. Climate change is the daily operations of simplification, extraction, purification, replication, and acceleration--all of which are needed to create the philosophy of ‘progress’ that is embodied by nearly every human in this world.” -Campbell
= *a context which will last for thousands of years and will be the fundamental starting point of every action, every thought, every expression of organization*
==> irreversible *death of difference* (biodiversity), end of “human project” (--✕--> despondency دلسردى)
creative foreclosure of the old World
preparing for an end without apocalypse @Jassem
(we need to) experiment with (organizational forms of) justice, ethics, politics, reason**
Holocene ==> fundamental modes through which we organize still today:
•births of language and religion
•concept of resources and exchange
•invention of all known technology
•development of agriculture
•development of domestication
•development of urbanization
Campbell's posthuman
•computation of life
•laboratorization of life (simple categories of liveness and deadness over the last 30 years)
•miniturization of life
•complexification of life
•automation of life
relation: smallest possible unit of analysis, extremely prosaic and mundane ==> world
theorizing in the way of relation (as in feminist science, actor-network theory, or nonrepresentational theory) ==Haraway==> engendering a more humble, more modest attitude in the human observer --✕--> Meillassoux's non-relational theory
(since Kand) western philosophy has been epistemological [~ investigating human relationship to things =/= ontological]
--> correlations (between thinking and being), we turn things into affordances when we think about them --> correlationism: we only have access to the correlation between thinking (thing-for-us) and being (thing-in-itself) ==> ‘all knowledge is relative’ [=/= realism]
Meillassoux's absolutes:
•there might be something outside thought
lack of a necessary ultimate cause or meaning (facticity) --Meillassoux--> fundarnental source of being (ontological contingency ~ “facticity itself is necessary”) : no ‘higher’ or ‘supreme’ force or reason (metaphysical, physical, spiritual) is guiding it [~ total ontological absence of a necessity] ==> *contingency* is absolutely necessary in the universe<[...]
(231)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%94.5[...]ronment which ultimately bestows life }--> framed as an existential threat ==> (question what it means to be) an ecologically interdependent species with moral agency @Chloe2
eschatological cliche --> “existentially significant activities are no longer possible ==> the loss of meaning” (=/= Cinderella)
[*]frame, framing: enfold audiences into an enclosure that is conceptually accessible
for example
•*ecological modernization* : a frame for climate change that seems to enclose the grreatest number of diverse stakeholders --- uses carbon as a way to engage diverse stakeholders, a centrifugal locus that is calculable, non-political, scientific ==> presents opportunities for innovation }--Campbell--> short-term strategy: a reification process that transforms climate change into “the carbon problem” ==> production of carbon markets that ironically serve as creative new modes of accumulation <-- reifies ecological maladaptation
•*catastrophic framing* of climate change --> backfires, moomerang effects, causing audiences to disbelieve the entire message
•*frame-bridging* --> when two issues ostensibly different are linked in complementariness in the same sphere as the concept in question (for example emphasizing the religious and moral dimensions of climate change ==> environment central to faith
•*emotional framing* --> we are suffering from a deficiency of *emotional knowledge* about climate change (=/= deficit of information) ==> locus of problem moves to the psychological affective realm ==> elevation of the problem to an existential threat or trauma --> (climate change becomes a factor in *identity formation*) we become more ecological in our cognition behaviour, affect
◦managers in organizations perform complex ‘affect-based’ work to translate the broader social emotions of climate change into the *local emotional landscape* ==establish==> new norms ==> alter the emotional salience of climate change (in the workplace) [<-- 26/06/2021 this has become the dominant framing in artistic research environments @apass, Pierre, Chloe2]
*(successful) frames: work through the integration of the phenomenon into a reality that is manageable* (=/= Campbell)
focus on the sustainability of discourses that are imaginable and thinkable and connectable with people's existing world =/= focus on the reality of the moving target
‘climate change’ politically more palatable مطبوع به ذائقه than ‘global warming’ in conservative circles
discursive evolution of climate change:
•1932 --> externality --> economics
•1960 --> wicked problem --> policy studies, public management
•1980 --> threat --> public media
•1988 --> global warming --> physical chemistry
•2000 --> contested debate --> science
•1968 --> tragedy of the commons --> ecological philosophy
◦collective acti[...]
(232)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%95.1[...]en thinking & being, a means to temper the real, to constrain it such that is becomes thinkable to human categories (yoke thinking & being together : we cannot think the unthought without relating it to existing correlates) }--Meillassoux--> never able to get out of the relation being thought and being to distinguish between an object & properties belonging to the subjective access to the object --> bad idea of epistemology ==> recuperates climate change within categories that make it seam manageable =/= (Campbell claiming) *climage change : ontological world* ==> it is everywhere and nowhere, present at all levels and yet absent as a distinct “thing” we can point to
Meillassoux --> how difficult it is to think anything without in some way introducing a qualification that one cannot know it without rendering it “for-us” though our framing = *it cannot be known absolutely*
(problem of access:) anti-realism within continental tradition of philosophy ==> the idea that reality is inaccessible in-itself =/= Meillassoux's attempt to ***fuse reality with speculation in a logical manner***
to deploy speculative leap to defuse the problem of access --> *weird realism* to avoid the paths of analytic thought, positivism, scientism (~?!=> religion, faith, conspiracy theory, paranoia, ,,)
correlationism ==> despite repeatedly showing that it creates massive sudden fluctuating geologic singularities, climate change is still folded back into known organizational coordinates
}--> *interactional openness* (+ temporal boundedness) (@apass) ==> negotiation complexity, high technical policy instrument, multiplication of actors, multiplication of negotiation tracks
}==> *solutions shift from a field-endogenous catalyst of institutional change --to--> a mechanism of field maintenance*
}--Campbell--> framing of climate change ==dictate==> the organizational structure to address it ==> misrecognize what it is
=/= ***a world [=/= a problem] ==generates==> problems (that no current organizational form can address)***
correlationism (--> prevailing belief that human reason cannot attain certainty in metaphysical, religious, moral matters) ==Meillassoux==> fear of dogma/absolute (deep-seated desire to be non-dogmatic) ==> *knowledge becomes a matter of belief* ==>{ reason undergoes a process of religionizing : ‘reason = a means to buttress claims based on faith’ =/= aiming to capture absolute knowledge itself, condemning irrational claims upon it }==> ***discourage hierarchies of reason (always to slightly disblieve waht we believe) [<-- happens in apass!]
speculative realism ==>
1. *organizational research* (@Chloe2) in the future must be deidicated to finding the right categories to account for a new worl (and not for a superwicked problem)
2. enables us to approach climate change from the *widest rational angle*
3.[...]
(233)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%95.4[...]anti-realism within continental tradition of philosophy ==> the idea that reality is inaccessible in-itself =/= Meillassoux's attempt to ***fuse reality with speculation in a logical manner***
to deploy speculative leap to defuse the problem of access --> *weird realism* to avoid the paths of analytic thought, positivism, scientism (~?!=> religion, faith, conspiracy theory, paranoia, ,,)
correlationism ==> despite repeatedly showing that it creates massive sudden fluctuating geologic singularities, climate change is still folded back into known organizational coordinates
}--> *interactional openness* (+ temporal boundedness) (@apass) ==> negotiation complexity, high technical policy instrument, multiplication of actors, multiplication of negotiation tracks
}==> *solutions shift from a field-endogenous catalyst of institutional change --to--> a mechanism of field maintenance*
}--Campbell--> framing of climate change ==dictate==> the organizational structure to address it ==> misrecognize what it is
=/= ***a world [=/= a problem] ==generates==> problems (that no current organizational form can address)***
correlationism (--> prevailing belief that human reason cannot attain certainty in metaphysical, religious, moral matters) ==Meillassoux==> fear of dogma/absolute (deep-seated desire to be non-dogmatic) ==> *knowledge becomes a matter of belief* ==>{ reason undergoes a process of religionizing : ‘reason = a means to buttress claims based on faith’ =/= aiming to capture absolute knowledge itself, condemning irrational claims upon it }==> ***discourage hierarchies of reason (always to slightly disblieve waht we believe) [<-- happens in apass!]
speculative realism ==>
1. *organizational research* (@Chloe2) in the future must be deidicated to finding the right categories to account for a new worl (and not for a superwicked problem)
2. enables us to approach climate change from the *widest rational angle*
3. (‘climate change = world’ ==>) we can begin to theorize the escalation and absolutization of ethics that is necessary to authentically occupy it --Campbell--> bleak optimism: acceptance of ecological collapse + begin the necessary work to organize within the new world of climate change (@Inga)
dialectical process of critique and reassessment <-- absorbed by organizations
•strategic agenda
•framed as an opportunity
•how climate change is always conceived as something “outside” that needs to be internalized by the organization
(Campbell thinking with Meillassoux) laws of nature changing (~ *forms of emergence without precedent* [three cases/advents --> *radical discontinuities rupture the fabric of what has come before*]):
**world of material =/= world of life =/= world of thought**
1. matter: reducible to what can be theorized in physico-mathematic[...]
(234)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%95.4[...]ns, etc. (--> cannot be reduced to material processes)
3. thought: understood as a capacity to arrive at the ‘intelligible content’ bearers of eternity (--> cannot be reduced to life processes)
}--> ****n the transition from non-life to life : the laws of biological life were not contained in the pre-life world --> they emerged ex nihilo (they were not immanent in [nor emerged from] the previous laws)****
--> (Meillassoux:) reality can generate advents on its own =/= the idea of vitalism: the idea that reality contains a hidden organization guided by transcendent intervention
to think of an ontological core for climate change where it is regarded as a world (in the Meillassouxian sense) --> situate climate change as a discontinuity --> *new world will create novelty in organization that exceeds thinkability today*
(from the position of speculative realism) what is important is (the “=/=” of) ‘holocene =/= anthropocene’ (and not the anthropocene)
•what did the world look like at the beginning of holocene?
holocene ==created==> epistemological categories that lasted thousands of years and became the most fundamental modes through which we understand & organize:
◦birth of language
◦birth of religion
◦concept of resources
◦concept of exchange
◦concept of exchange
◦invention of all known technology
◦development of agriculture
◦domestication
◦urbanization
==(by this metric)==> ‘climate change = world’ marks the end of organization as we can think it 😱
(let's widen rationality rather than abandoning it)
speculative realism --Campbell--> (a strategy for thinking at the) widest rational angle
example of speculative realism --> Meillassoux's spectral dilemma: [theist] resurrection of the dead (to provide justice for unjust deaths) + [atheist] inexistence of God (to absolve God of past injustices ~ meaningless deaths) ==> it is possible that God might emerge in the future --> complete justice has an ontological & real basis }-->
•the possibility of living according to *absolutizating thoughts* (one of Meillassoux's main tactics is to raise the stakes extremely high to show that *ethical commitments are either absolute or not* [--Campbell--> to speak in absolutizating ways about climate change]) (=/= focus on rthical dilemmas as epistemological conundrums and escalation of ethics to the status of a universal absence of justice ==> despondency + cynicism)
(the problem of) critical philosophy wants to avoid dogmatism, but it also incubates dogmatism because in abandoning any ratinoal access to the absolute (they want to be devoid of the slightest pretension to rationality) it renders this space accessible only by dogmatic faith and irrationality
--> (an unintentional and undesirable by-product of healthy scientific scept[...]
(236)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%95.5[...] and mythological mysticism ==> marketplace, *no institution has been more willing and able to respond to this (Weberian) desire for enchantment than the modern marketplace* ~=> ***normative preference for enchantment = consumption***
--problem--> *the market remains firmly in charge of myth of consumption, its rewards and its consequences* : marketplace mythology has increasingly become an all-encompassing construct of assorted descriptions and theoretical advancements including the sacred, extraordinary, symbolic and transcendental
myth: a way of organizing perceptions of realities
consumer culture theory
{[Mead & Blumer's] symbolic perspective of myth: how symbols are adorned with meaning and that affect social interaction --> symbolic myth research: verbal/nonverbal forms of communication, with an emphasis on how people behave in day-to-day circumstances in the context of socio-historical structure and ideological of their environment ==> “mythology = narrative” }=/= Joseph Campbell: “interaction with the symbolic ==> mythology”
•Freud's use of mythic stories as metaphors in psychoanalysis ==> (early) symbolic perspective
•Jung's archetype: embodiment beliefs/images ==collectively==> myth and religion }==> “mythology = extension of the collective unconscious into society”
•Blumer's social life: construction built up by the actor (=/= relationship of structures directing human life); ability to act toward oneself, ability to internally define themselves as objects [self with goal] as the symbols of their own actions
--McAdams--> personal myth: narrative storyline as a means to organize meaning in their lives --in--> context <==forms== historical, religious and state-influenced belief systems, culturally specific themes and ideology
}--> identity and society --responsible-for--> life story --negotiated--> personal myth as interpretive strategy
}==> concepts of ‘consumption’ and ‘identity’ in consumer culture theory
identity work =/= personal myth
[Velliquette + Murray + Creyer:] example of tattoo culture: private and public burrs physically with the attachment of personal meaning to physical marking of the skin and symbolically through the personal stories attached to public brands --> *individuals attach meaning to consumption* <== negotiating the cultural tensions <==throu== perception of self contrasted with the influence of institutional structures (race, class, gender, age) and ideological pressure }==> “meaning = dialectic of object and consumer”
•(Jung's archetype ==>) Joseph Campbell's monomyth: universally applicable narrative of mythology (like in Hollywood films about the hero's rites of passage --> experience of life in accordance with the phenomena of time)
myths/dreams find expression in symbolic form --> “participating in ritual == engaging myth”
}--> **consumer research a[...]
(237)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%95.7[...]dom and independence of rancher life =/= commercial ranching’ ==> mythically relieve anxiety
2. ‘ove and respect for nature =/= need for food and control over nature’
3. ‘community =/= competitive realities of ranching life’
4. mythologising ‘family unification =/= male domination and female subordination’
[symbolic perspective of mythology ==>] “narrative performance = ideology --> allowing people to act without logic, facts or values through illusion or myth” --> mythology: a storyline crafted by the process of individuals’ incorporation of symbolic resources provided through the marketplace, which then must be negotiated between the cultural contradictions and sphere of the dominant and public viewpoints
functionalism: each part of society is dependent on other parts of society ==> social cohesion
~ “whatever is happening in society is what is supposed to happen” --> “myth: a collective representation that empowers and supports social solidarity”
•Durkheim: “knowledge is socially constructed and the world exists through collected representations”
“personal desire =/= community obligation ==> mythology”
•Eliade: “myth = an account of a creation,” of that which ‘really’ happened --> religion
}--(Belk, Wallendorf, Sherry)--> sacred and profane consumption
•sacred consumption inherent in material objects that embody myth helps to develop social cohesion.
sonsumers resist commodification of cultural resources that in Eliade's view are the embodiment of myth
*consumers’ sacred creation*
[example: temporary consumption community Burning Man: synthesis of community and markets through the exchange of goods and creative acts of art and performance --> community narratives embodying mythological creativity as art and performance ‘construct a temporary cohesiveness']
functionalist perspective of social cohesion: “consumption = means of consumer conformity to culture” --> (cohesion perspective:) ***a positive feeling through the appropriation of creative agency and resistance to challenge the unreflexive consumption at the heart of the marketplace myth***
Barthes ==>
•critical theory: “myth = naturalising socially constructed and historical discourse” ~ dominant societal actors oppress subordinates by normalising markers of segregation and subordination --> the concern is to take the side of the oppressed's language and *emancipation*[= demythologising (dominant ideology)] <== Marx's ‘false consciousness’ (for example capitalist ideology conceals and naturalizes managerial power and implicit subordination of workers) --> either side of a power duality can become valorised
•Hegel: “mythology = ideology aesthetically expressed for easy adoption by society” --> “ideology = an imaginary map”; political breakdowns ==> ideologies become apparent (independent of mythology)
-(Murray a[...]
(239)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%96[...]ally legitimate place with pluralistic inter-institutional structures driven by economic liberalism, subsequently confirmed by the participation of civil society*
...a practice of dialogue between art and development, across geographies: banking on the coalition of ethno-nationalism and globalization, and promoting “indigenous” forms of capitalism, while avoiding the optics of exoticization }==>
•divides and controls localities
•contextual differences are distributed as needs and urgencies
•juridico-engineering structures (symbolized progress)
•cultural 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 mean[...]
(240)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%97[...]br />
--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 status
self-medication and vitamins become the occupation of every singularity
drugs explore fractal interiorities (=/= seeking an exterior transcendental dimension)
renunciation چشم پوشی، ترک، کناره گیری، قطع علاقه
(addict = nonrenouncer)
virtual reality
cyberprojections
(Dasein's) dependency: a state in which anxiety is still bound
*mimetic poisoning* (of pharmacodependency associated with literature, as sedative, as cure, as escape, etc.) --?--> relationship to law
(our French heritage --> Flaubert: “a thinker should have neither religion nor fatherland nor even any social conviction”) *thinking = radically rupturing*
drugs forced decision upon the subject --> de Quincey
opium: the transparency upon which one could review the internal conflict of freedom (+ encounters the abyss of destructive jouissance)
war against pain
higher forms of drug
*(like any good parasite) drugs travel both inside and out of the boundaries of a narcissistically defended politics* ==producing==> a lexicon of body control and a private property of self
drug's virtual and fugitive[...]
(241)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%97.4[...]he 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 status
self-medication and vitamins become the occupation of every singularity
drugs explore fractal interiorities (=/= seeking an exterior transcendental dimension)
renunciation چشم پوشی، ترک، کناره گیری، قطع علاقه
(addict = nonrenouncer)
virtual reality
cyberprojections
(Dasein's) dependency: a state in which anxiety is still bound
*mimetic poisoning* (of pharmacodependency associated with literature, as sedative, as cure, as escape, etc.) --?--> relationship to law
(our French heritage --> Flaubert: “a thinker should have neither religion nor fatherland nor even any social conviction”) *thinking = radically rupturing*
drugs forced decision upon the subject --> de Quincey
opium: the transparency upon which one could review the internal conflict of freedom (+ encounters the abyss of destructive jouissance)
war against pain
higher forms of drug
*(like any good parasite) drugs travel both inside and out of the boundaries of a narcissistically defended politics* ==producing==> a lexicon of body control and a private property of self
drug's virtual and fugitive patterns
they have a secret communications network with the inthe internalized order
Madame Bovary = clinic of phantasms
everything said about technology can be applied to drugs: acceleration, speed, inertia, the third interval
drug/medicine ==>
•deaden the pain
•separate from a poisonous maternal flux
...
•hallucinated plenitude
•pure communication ~= transcendental telepathy
(have in mind that) any substance can function as a drug
“It wasn't clear then whether the body was private property or not, whether the authorities could legislate zoning ordinances, or whether pleasure and liberty were values freely exercised upon a coded body.”
-Avital
my work over the etymology of the signifier --> moon index
(i shoot up trash fiction)
(Freud) *pain is imperious* متکبر
(failing) to meet the requirements of an authentic alterity
(we [...]
(242)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%97.4[...]l: tiny units, vectors, colors, forms (within the visual plane)
2. mid-level: human-level characteristics of gender, hairstyle, posture, facial expression, buildings, rhetorical devices in the image (such as metaphor and troping)
3. meta-level: narrative structure, mythic in nature, to see embodied in the properties and dynamics of the image the macro properties and fynamics of social world (<-- business of semiotic)
Barthes --> (new medium of) photographic advertisement = a codified structure =/= a transparent reflection of the world
-*Barthes reading of Citroen DS car
impossible newness
it appears at first sight as a superlative object صفت عالی
object which appear at first sight as completely finished present to us at once a perfection and an absence of origin, closure and a brilliance, *a transformation of life into matter*, a silence that belongs to the realm of fairy tales
*smoothness is not a property of material, but a social value*
-Christ's robe was seamless, science fiction, made of unbroken metal, phenomenology of assembling, hold together by sole virtue of their wondrous shape ==> the idea of benign nature
}--learn--> (to make) lines of connection: visual convention + religious painting, science fiction film, politics of nature (constructed over the past 2000 years of western culture) [<-- to understand this in your own work #feedback @apass]
-*Haraway
neutral images of (high-tech) science --> stock of Renaissance visual analogues ==> legitimate lineage + origin story (for technical revolutions)
(Barthes > Campbell) **what sign constructions do westerners use to tell the story of how technology comes to be present in the world?**
-*Campbell reading of Simens’ ad “builing blocks” (2005)
Simens products float into space, as naturally and as pure white snowflake falling to the earth
absence of labor ==herald==> a universe of self-organizing invisible agency
“technology = invisible force that is lighter than air, rearranging itself into whatever seems to be needed” (=/= fashioned, melted, hammered , soldered and generally forced into the natural order)
==> the agency that organizes is non-pollutant, non-disruptive, non-energetic
(from) cacophonous --to--> harmonious [<-- technology seeks its home]
sky above, supra-structure =/= [*]infrastructure: structure from below
--Simens--> [*]technology: apotheosized (تکريم) by extending its self-organizing capabilities, lending it a divinity which is universal, inevitable, natural and just (Simens’ ad ==> Iron Man image)
supra-structure --> new / Star Trek
|
infrastructure --> old / planets they visit
the human body: the most depicted object in advertising
--> research tradition:
hum[...]
(243)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%98.1[...]in a series of independent, separate, unconnected acts --each--> require a different product
+ fleeting moments of exciting scenes and images
(postmodern) transcendence of the (modernist) necessity to *understand connections*
***artists of all kinds are increasingly assuming the role of marketing institutions***
the consumers (of postmodernity) are encouraged to play the game of *image-switching* (caring mother, efficient manager, elegant partner, gourmet homemaker --each--> require a different style {labeled as consumer liberation}) =/= central character
[---> go to Deleuze and Guattari's schizophrenia of late capitalism]
disconnected from authentic self ==> (enormous potential for) creativity in manufactured representations
~~--> market becomes a pastiche
postsuburban transformation
complex interaction of high-technology production + socio-spatial configuration + spectacular shopping environment = ubiquitous shopping malls (--acquired--> postmodern theatrical character, fragmented experience of all cultures)
unrestricted ability to use signifiers [?pushed back by some emerging sensibilities of cultural appropriation, political correctness, gender policing, religious, etc.]
--> marketing competition rests on the creation of images (meanings) removed from any history, context, origin =/= excellence and sophistication in form and technique
[---> go to contemporary artists anti-excellence attitude and the celebration of failure and failing]
--> **each instance of communication becomes a spectacle**
purposefully decontextualized + rendered free floating ==> marketable product
(surrealist artists made use of this --now--> shop window designer)
Duchamp, Rauschenberg, Warhol (ready-made)
***themes of postmodern culture:
irreverence
nonconformity
noncommitment
detachment
difference
fragmentation
(paradoxically) what seems to be difference at the level of symbolic culture stems from an underlying uniformity <-- ***heterogeneity has its origins in homogeneity*** : cultures where market and marketing are less developed exhibit greater variance in both the quality and kinds of life patterns
literacy:
•in modernity --> to read + discover connections among seemingly unrelated objects ==> understanding
•in postmodernity --> watching : recognizing images (exposing oneself to innumerable images and recognize what they stand for ~ attach meaning to them) <-- this is what i did in my telegram bestiary text!
literacy in consumption culture ~/=? established nortons of education
3- [*]reversal of production & consumption
•modernist: value is created in production (meaningful) and destroyed in consumption (profane)
•postmodern: production cont[...]
(244)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%98.6[...], seeking to strike at the enemy and cause harm to itself
life has become a complex of protective systems that in turn attack us --Derrida--> democracy: an autoimmune system
how autoimmune systems can be interrupted?
biophilic fantasies of bacteria as *messmates*
*when we worry about bacteria, we worry about others*
*to have contact with society is an unavoidable, necessary, disquisting, all-embracing gift*
(in West and elsewhere) individuals who identify their fellow citizens as undesirable obstacles to their freedom, health, wealth --> antibacterial brands
(in Germany) integration --> overdeveloped sense of our own immunity
...................................
[Mary Douglas]
bring bewitched (in Sudan, Azande) ~= finding oneself the victim of embezzlement اختلاس (for modern person)
=/= fear (category of horror)
dirt = disorder
eliminating dirt is a positive effort to organize the environment (--> we are not removing something) --> creative movement
cleaning: to relate form to function, to make unity of experience
~~> part of the project of religion (atonement)
pollution:
1. instrumental --> change someone's behavior
2. expressive --> (a general view of) social order
pollution --> claim & counter-claim to status
sex pollution <--> body pollution
sexual danger --> symbole of relation between parts of society (hierarchy, collaboration, distinctiveness of social units)
expressive oversystematizing --> (sometimes) necessary to interpret beliefs
cosmologies with pollution symbol
reflection on dirt = reflection on relation of order to disorder, being to non-being, form to formlessness, life to death
rules of purity ~= comparative religion
(primitive:) sacredness ~= uncleanness
[an idea of] sanctity = (a little more than) prohibition }--> to protect profanity from divinity
hindu --> relative notion of pollution
cow dung is relatively pure to a Brahman priest, impure to a god
*respect <--> pollution*
•khak-e pa خاک پا (feet's dirt)
•dirt/dust as cleansing agent
•
Frazer > Robertson Smith (old testament scholar)
taboo: restriction of man's arbitrary use of natural things + supernatural penalty (--inspire--> fear + precaution) ==> rules of uncleanliness
uncleanliness -->
•supernatural danger
•spiritual state of unworthiness (christianity)
•
i have a savage explanation...
*separation*
clean = set apart = holy
“primitive =/= advanced” :
**h[...]
(245)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%99.7[...]
...................................
[Mary Douglas]
bring bewitched (in Sudan, Azande) ~= finding oneself the victim of embezzlement اختلاس (for modern person)
=/= fear (category of horror)
dirt = disorder
eliminating dirt is a positive effort to organize the environment (--> we are not removing something) --> creative movement
cleaning: to relate form to function, to make unity of experience
~~> part of the project of religion (atonement)
pollution:
1. instrumental --> change someone's behavior
2. expressive --> (a general view of) social order
pollution --> claim & counter-claim to status
sex pollution <--> body pollution
sexual danger --> symbole of relation between parts of society (hierarchy, collaboration, distinctiveness of social units)
expressive oversystematizing --> (sometimes) necessary to interpret beliefs
cosmologies with pollution symbol
reflection on dirt = reflection on relation of order to disorder, being to non-being, form to formlessness, life to death
rules of purity ~= comparative religion
(primitive:) sacredness ~= uncleanness
[an idea of] sanctity = (a little more than) prohibition }--> to protect profanity from divinity
hindu --> relative notion of pollution
cow dung is relatively pure to a Brahman priest, impure to a god
*respect <--> pollution*
•khak-e pa خاک پا (feet's dirt)
•dirt/dust as cleansing agent
•
Frazer > Robertson Smith (old testament scholar)
taboo: restriction of man's arbitrary use of natural things + supernatural penalty (--inspire--> fear + precaution) ==> rules of uncleanliness
uncleanliness -->
- supernatural danger
•spiritual state of unworthiness (christianity)
•
i have a savage explanation...
*separation*
clean = set apart = holy
“primitive =/= advanced” :
**hyper attention to the material circumstances of an act** =/= christian (rules of holiness --> motive & disposition of agent is important)
contact with corpse
contact with blood
theology: god man relationship ==> assert (a definition of) nature of human
*most thinking men in the second part of 19th century were amateur anthropologists*
--> confused dialogue between anthropology & theology
(Tylor:) the theory of progression: “civilization = gradual progress from an original state similar to that of savagery” --> the idea of general continuity of human culture [---> go to integration]
“man = long process of (cultural) evolution”
what we d[...]
(246)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%99.8[...]n*
clean = set apart = holy
“primitive =/= advanced” :
**hyper attention to the material circumstances of an act** =/= christian (rules of holiness --> motive & disposition of agent is important)
contact with corpse
contact with blood
theology: god man relationship ==> assert (a definition of) nature of human
*most thinking men in the second part of 19th century were amateur anthropologists*
--> confused dialogue between anthropology & theology
(Tylor:) the theory of progression: “civilization = gradual progress from an original state similar to that of savagery” --> the idea of general continuity of human culture [---> go to integration]
“man = long process of (cultural) evolution”
what we do & believe is fossil (petrified appendages)
•Tylor --interest--> what quaint relics can tell us about the past ==found==> folklore
•Smith --interest--> common elements in modern and primitive experience ==found==> social anthropology
Green
theory of moral progress
existence and recognition of specific duties
self-sacrifice
reverence
man = unrealized ideal of a best (God)
*religion <--> ethical values of community life* (=/= speculative thought, exotic mythology, arbitrary relationship of an individual person to supernatural power...)
...
(moralizing human society = community)
(intellectual asset)
Durkheim
fictive abstract nature of religious entities [with no material reference] (==> fluid liable contagious sacred ==> rituals of separation & demarcation)
•gold and purple style of writing (Golden Bough)
•“ethical meaning =/= magical meaning”
non-sacred magic =/=? sacred
magical belief <--> primitive hygiene
two assumptions of English nineteen century thought:
1. ethical refinement is a mark of advanced civilization
2. magic had nothing to do with morals or religion
}==Frazer==> assigned evolutionary assumptions to human culture three stages of development -->{ “magic: primitive science” --to--> “religion: priestly & political fraud” --to--> “science” }<-- Hegelian dialectic
}--✕--> wisdom and philosophic depth of primitive cultures
Babylonian + Assyrian --> “sin = material impurity” --> blood: sin-remover
(during Homer) Greek thought --> relatively free of ritual pollution
pollution concepts emerge later (expressed in classical drama)
clean and polluted --> man's destiny
(it seemed always we had a clean future)
the bad idea of *medical approach to symbolism*
comparative religion =/= medical materialism
(for example Jewish and Islamic avoidance of eating pork is expla[...]
(247)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%99.8[...]elieve is fossil (petrified appendages)
•Tylor --interest--> what quaint relics can tell us about the past ==found==> folklore
•Smith --interest--> common elements in modern and primitive experience ==found==> social anthropology
Green
theory of moral progress
existence and recognition of specific duties
self-sacrifice
reverence
man = unrealized ideal of a best (God)
*religion <--> ethical values of community life* (=/= speculative thought, exotic mythology, arbitrary relationship of an individual person to supernatural power...)
...
(moralizing human society = community)
(intellectual asset)
Durkheim
fictive abstract nature of religious entities [with no material reference] (==> fluid liable contagious sacred ==> rituals of separation & demarcation)
•gold and purple style of writing (Golden Bough)
•“ethical meaning =/= magical meaning”
non-sacred magic =/=? sacred
magical belief <--> primitive hygiene
two assumptions of English nineteen century thought:
1. ethical refinement is a mark of advanced civilization
2. magic had nothing to do with morals or religion
}==Frazer==> assigned evolutionary assumptions to human culture three stages of development -->{ “magic: primitive science” --to--> “religion: priestly & political fraud” --to--> “science” }<-- Hegelian dialectic
}--✕--> wisdom and philosophic depth of primitive cultures
Babylonian + Assyrian --> “sin = material impurity” --> blood: sin-remover
(during Homer) Greek thought --> relatively free of ritual pollution
pollution concepts emerge later (expressed in classical drama)
clean and polluted --> man's destiny
(it seemed always we had a clean future)
the bad idea of *medical dical approach to symbolism*
comparative religion =/= medical materialism
(for example Jewish and Islamic avoidance of eating pork is explained as due to the dangers of eating pork in hot climate)
*hygienic basis* of (some) ancient rites
Moses's dietary rules ~~✕~~> enlightened public health administrator
Yoruba (cult of smallpox diety)
left hand to handle dirt
right hand to eat
(source of impurity -->) all bodily emissions ~/= eating <-- a person is in the middle state of purity
india --> ground does not act as a conductor
iran --> ground acts as a conductor
ritual pollution
ideas of dirt --Douglas-->(also) express symbolic system
European ideas of defilement:
1. dirt avoidance is a matter of hygiene or aesthetics (not religion)
2. the idea of dirt is dominated by a knowledge of pathogenic organisms ([...]
(249)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%99.8[...] />
fictive abstract nature of religious entities [with no material reference] (==> fluid liable contagious sacred ==> rituals of separation & demarcation)
•gold and purple style of writing (Golden Bough)
•“ethical meaning =/= magical meaning”
non-sacred magic =/=? sacred
magical belief <--> primitive hygiene
two assumptions of English nineteen century thought:
1. ethical refinement is a mark of advanced civilization
2. magic had nothing to do with morals or religion
}==Frazer==> assigned evolutionary assumptions to human culture three stages of development -->{ “magic: primitive science” --to--> “religion: priestly & political fraud” --to--> “science” }<-- Hegelian dialectic
}--✕--> wisdom and philosophic depth of primitive cultures
Babylonian + Assyrian --> “sin = material impurity” --> blood: sin-remover
(during Homer) Greek thought --> relatively free of ritual pollution
pollution concepts emerge later (expressed in classical drama)
clean and polluted --> man's destiny
(it seemed always we had a clean future)
the bad idea of *medical approach to symbolism*
comparative religion =/= medical materialism
(for example Jewish and Islamic avoidance of eating pork is explained as due to the dangers of eating pork in hot climate)
*hygienic basis* of (some) ancient rites
Moses's dietary rules ~~✕~~> enlightened public health administrator
Yoruba (cult of smallpox diety)
left hand to handle dirt
right hand to eat
(source of impurity -->) all bodily emissions ~/= eating <-- a person is in the middle state of purity
india --> ground does not act as a conductor
iran --> ground acts as a conductor
ritual pollution
ideas of dirt --Douglas-->(also) express symbolic system
European ideas of defilement:
1. dirt avoidance is a matter of hygiene or aesthetics (not religion)
2. the idea of dirt is dominated by a knowledge of pathogenic organisms (<== 19th century discovery of bacteria)
(context of) pathogemicity
(old definition of) [*]dirt: matter out of place
}==>
1. *where there is dirt there is system* (dirt is not an isolated event) -->{ systemic ordering & clarification of matter ==byproduct==> dirt }--> symbolism (symbolic system of purity)
2.
ominous compendium (a garbage collector)
schema: pattern-making tendency of perception
a filtering mechanism which at first only lets in sensations we know how to use
rituals of separation ==> boundaries, margins, internal links --> total structure of thought ==> pollution ideas
book of Leviticus
[...]
(251)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%99.9[...]>
Babylonian + Assyrian --> “sin = material impurity” --> blood: sin-remover
(during Homer) Greek thought --> relatively free of ritual pollution
pollution concepts emerge later (expressed in classical drama)
clean and polluted --> man's destiny
(it seemed always we had a clean future)
the bad idea of *medical approach to symbolism*
comparative religion =/= medical materialism
(for example Jewish and Islamic avoidance of eating pork is explained as due to the dangers of eating pork in hot climate)
*hygienic basis* of (some) ancient rites
Moses's dietary rules ~~✕~~> enlightened public health administrator
Yoruba (cult of smallpox diety)
left hand to handle dirt
right hand to eat
(source of impurity -->) all bodily emissions ~/= eating <-- a person is in the middle state of purity
india --> ground does not act as a conductor
iran --> ground acts as a conductor
ritual pollution
ideas of dirt --Douglas-->(also) express symbolic system
European ideas of defilement:
1. dirt avoidance is a matter of hygiene or aesthetics (not religion)
2. the idea of dirt is dominated by a knowledge of pathogenic organisms (<== 19th century discovery of bacteria)
(context of) pathogemicity
(old definition of) [*]dirt: matter out of place
}==>
1. *where there is dirt there is system* (dirt is not an isolated event) -->{ systemic ordering & clarification of matter ==byproduct==> dirt }--> symbolism (symbolic system of purity)
2.
ominous compendium (a garbage collector)
schema: pattern-making tendency of perception
a filtering mechanism which at first only lets in sensations we know how to use
rituals of separatioaration ==> boundaries, margins, internal links --> total structure of thought ==> pollution ideas
book of Leviticus
list of abomination:
•clean: frog,
•dirty: camel, hare, rock badger, some locusts, mouse, hippopotamus,
•?: chameleon, mole, crocodile,
eatable:
any animal with hoof
cloven-footed
chews the cud (partly digested food return to mouth for further chewing)
don't eat:
raven after their kind (in agreement with one's nature)
night hawk after their kind
the little owl, the great owl, the water hen
stork after their kind
hoopoe and bat
all winged insects are unclean for you
all clean winged things you may eat
everything in the water that has not fins and scales is an abomination to you
whoever touches their carcass shall be unclean until the evening
__they are unclean to you__[...]
(252)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%99.9- 🔎
desimulate, tower of Babel, Nietsche, nameable country, religion sacrifice, science experimentation, anecdotic, my talks are paining a picture rather that constructing a detailed theory, biography advertized, Persian Adjectives, contagiousness of images, Lady of Late, what does it mean to become a speaker? who can we hear better? child, Iranian Quality keyfiat-e irani, khun-e shahid