[...] />
Enlightenment as cultural European phenomenon versus a scientific British one
(the theatrical function of natural philosophy in the England Enlightenment)
the function of natural philosopher in 18th century was to use experimental science machines to turn inert matter into active power, light/fire/heat/etc. to lecture an wealthy and polite fee-paying audience, in order to save them from irrationality, that inside all matter there is life and power, and that life was divine.
(however all this was all swept away in the industrial revelation)
William Herschel, an amateur natural philosopher discovering Uranus 1781
(Enlightenment was all about people changing their disciplines)
project of constructing a new theory of heavens
...................................
*i can't give you a direct grasp but i hope i can give slowly accuracy
*the ‘details’ of grasping
(zoom in the ‘grasp’)
from contingencies to certainties
i spend so much time with painting and computers, which were about compositions and hacks
i think there are few fields/figurations/skills we need to get good at: rhetoric, biology, aesthetics
...................................
trope - something other than its literal form
adding an adjective or replacing a name, (one-way movements?) -- let me tell you the story of:
*knowledge --to--> expressed knowledge
*knowledge --to--> knowing
*reality --to--> manifest realities
*real --to--> real enough
*islamic --to--> islamicate (“islamic” has always been a ‘range’ rather than a ‘binary switch’. things become more or less “islamic” in popular/proper belief)
*nature --to--> visual nature
*culture/civilization --to--> collective (emphasizing operation of gathering or composing and heterogeneity of the assembled)
*muslim countries --to--> muslim majority countries
*understanding --to--> better understanding
*what does X mean --to--> what does X mean for you
*body --to--> lived body
*body --to--> lived image
*language --to--> specialized languages
*world --to--> built world / thought world / described world / descripted world
*producing knowledge --to--> participating in knowledge projects
*to explain --to--> to explain in terms of...
*place/location --to--> neighborhood (ask ‘why this neighborhood?’ instead of place)
ajayeb helps me to work on:
-history
-poetics
-animality --> inhabiting material and semiotic positions --> how to find a descriptive act that is not in terms of the impressions it makes on our senses? / this is about the places things take and occupy in our phenomenal world. / it is difficult to discuss the night-sky without first breaking it up into constellations. (Matthew Ca[...]
(1)[...notes/midday review.txt]%1[...] they make us. what would be an idea of the ‘worst tool’ you can work with? poetics for me? [to write-about =/= to write-with the Book of Wonders. to use a language-tool that produces the most ambiguities and most misunderstandings, but that is the only way, there is no tool that can prommis clarity. evey tool produces its own ‘clear'--for someone, for some purpose. these makings are all tool-specific: 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 impl[...]
(2)[...notes/midday review.txt]%1.2[...]o add-on the super-ego for her concern of social justice?)
so, does complaint prevent the arrival of change or make way for new forms of sociality?
“I can't complain.” --> (a blockbuster;) those in stubborn destitution ----that there is no address in the era of the becoming anonymous of God. ‘Who would pick up your call?’
however, “the friend, whether ghostly, futural, or closely bound in time, receives the brunt of the complaint” --friends structurally listens to disappointed expectation, disappointed worldliness
what-should-have-been
On what approved contingencies, contractual loopholes, or transferential coordinates could I possibly befriend another?
metaphysical heritage of friendship (... reconfigured personhood)
(how can I do things without being a psycho about it?)
(How do I know by which politics of friendship, grid or writing practice I am being called up?)
a vocabulary existed to designate, approximate certain routines
R_dzvJYDZXM
CrGJIS3quYY
(30.03.2017) Rabih Mroue and Hito Steyerl duo: concern for injustice and conservative justice call disguised under an elaborated and augmented complaint (in the aesthetic terms of contemporary art market), non-researchers of their subjects and topics, they have no ‘topic’ only ‘resource’ (in the making of their own myth of the figure of artist,) [=/= when something becomes a topic for you, it bounds you to the unsettling commitments of curiosity and research and hard work.]
-in their notion of “Artist in the Reign of Terror” they ask disturbingly “but many individuals have died and it means nothing?!” with a sneer (artwork as puzkhand پوزخند --> @Ali )
[**“sneer” is a contemptuous or mocking smile, remark, or tone, coming from a family of sarcastic tropes of complaint and ironizated complaining]
-their art-work finds and flourishes in a terrain of terror. in their nonspeculative work there is no “but, what if” or “but, not yet” and therefore no ‘becomings’
-for Hito and Rabih: zeitgenössisch (contemporary) = grausam (atrocious)
-they dichotomize (fact/fiction, real/unreal, etc.), rather than allowing a novel and interesting question to be raised
-what is the state of unknown in one's practice? rather than being a news agency
[negativity?]--> your bad feelings --> غر ghor complaint --(turn it into)--> critique --(start doing)--> research --(get)--> diploma --(turn it into)--> phd --(make your)--> department of studies --(into)--> craft tradition
[you don't have to start with negativity!]
[you don't need to end in your own myth tradition!]
...................................
@Anouk (@her “breathing archive”): (Lev Manovich's) relationship between ‘interface’ and ‘database,’ ‘perceptable’ to ‘information’. [Database as Symbolic Form: [...]
(3)[...notes/midday review.txt]%4.7[...]an i (or should i) not know these problematics in advance?
the bow and arrow --|)-> ♥ in my apass endweek (as sound object) was a relic of our shared physical energetic space, the nondiscursive --> how to keep it inarticulate?
•a way to record space, which is always social =/= silenced with no agency of the recorder (the “quiet recorder”)
•also a playful respective reading of La Guin, (something that may seem a misunderstanding of her carrier bag theory)
•carving out a practice agility area
...................................
the question ‘what does X mean?’ is always ‘what does X mean for you?’
...................................
i am following the movement of certain words here
spam =/= internet
spam operates on/with patterns of literacy or an existing (in)sufficiencies in known categories of cognitive biases that people have
...................................
[title]
“it's your turn now to play”
...................................
(@Luisa on space,) (question of:) producing (your) presence
material-discursive --> semiotic-psychosis --> her Wortsalad
(Bocola > Kohut > Mondrian's bipolar structure:)
creation of universal beauty / aesthetic expression of oneself
(=?=> transcend the framework of artistic production)
exhibitionist pole of the self / idealized pole of the self
the grandiose self / the idealized structures
worldviews / self-images
what is the (diametric, dialectical) internal drama of her thinking and work?
(what are?) Luisa's overarching, idealized conception that lays claim to the validity of her values and standards as applied not only to herself and environment but to the entire universe: (question of structure)
•(pre-babylonian) universal abstractionism --> embodied knowledge
•fluid equilibrium --> movement of Being
[is this a romantic structural attitude?]
-and how is she confronted with cosmos prior to her inscriptions? (question of realism)
-what is (the mystery of) a ‘being through interpretation’ for her? (question of performativity)
[realistic:] to take possession of essential aspects of the external reality (~-> recreate them in the imagination) [--> empirical?]
[structural:] to experience the external reality as parts of an interconnected and comprehensive whole
[idealistic/symbolist:] to connect the (inner) particular to the general
[romantic:] to make (inner) invisible visible
sublimated gratification of instincts, ambitions and ideals, (homogeneous) gestalt and expression of the self, narcissistic equilibrium, test its viability, haptic art,
“invisible reality and the aesthetics of universality” or a mean by which universal is recognized*
timelessness, wholesomeness, indivisibility, aesthetic standards
-pictoria[...]
(4)[...notes/midday review.txt]%6.3[...] />
what is the (diametric, dialectical) internal drama of her thinking and work?
(what are?) Luisa's overarching, idealized conception that lays claim to the validity of her values and standards as applied not only to herself and environment but to the entire universe: (question of structure)
•(pre-babylonian) universal abstractionism --> embodied knowledge
•fluid equilibrium --> movement of Being
[is this a romantic structural attitude?]
-and how is she confronted with cosmos prior to her inscriptions? (question of realism)
-what is (the mystery of) a ‘being through interpretation’ for her? (question of performativity)
[realistic:] to take possession of essential aspects of the external reality (~-> recreate them in the imagination) [--> empirical?]
[structural:] to experience the external reality as parts of an interconnected and comprehensive whole
[idealistic/symbolist:] to connect the (inner) particular to the general
[romantic:] to make (inner) invisible visible
sublimated gratification of instincts, ambitions and ideals, (homogeneous) gestalt and expression of the self, narcissistic equilibrium, test its viability, haptic art,
“invisible reality and the aesthetics of universality” or a mean by which universal is recognized*
timelessness, wholesomeness, indivisibility, aesthetic standards
-pictorial thinking, movement thinking, affectual thinking, {--> all issued by the notion of “pure” and “purity”? tendency toward idealization? utopian?}
movement (the act) =/= mobility (the possibility)
(is Luisa interested in?) the immanent laws and essential unity of all being
...step to complete nonobjectivity
...objects with their expression of plasticity
-what is the symbolic term in her work?
she said: “space is literal.” --> the wholesome is proclaimed in the artistic act itself (and not as metaphor) --> experienced directly =/= imagined
--> احشايى the viscera (ahsha), visceral theory: affect and embodiment, transmissible physical charges, porous bodies,
@Luisa
kP_AfO7Ms4I
how to create a condition in which she can herself later give access to her thinking and making?
1- propose a curatorial gesture of an assembly: Luisa, Mondrian, Zen master, Malevich; with Bocola and Ahmed;
2- to open an investigation of affective economies for her: abstraction, constructivism, idealism, figurative empathy, symbolism, longing,
3-
4-
(psychoanalysis [@Luisa] allows us to see that) *emotionality involves movement*
associations whereby “feeling” take us across different levels of signification, not all of which can be admitted in the present. (+Ahmed)
-emotions move back and forth (past associations, repression traces on present) and sideways (sticky associat[...]
(5)[...notes/midday review.txt]%6.3[...]iry,” so to say, and at the same time resist to be faithful to standard accounts of what counts as a “serious knowledge claim.” So it includes a lot of messy thinking-feeling, embodied practices, affects, poeticity, semi-scientific work, magic, data collection, mutative interpretative reading, forgetting things, detours, rituals, dead-ends, writing under the influence of scarce foreign obscure philosophies, literary drugs, and boldly using metaphors from different disciplines of “study” that one can find. So, on the one hand, it is a term, invented to indicate a “fluid modern personality” within a turn in humanity studies that opens up to ‘what an artist already knows’ or ‘what an artist is allowed not to know’ within their specific historically situated set of tools. And, on the other hand, it indicates an important shift in the education of art, in which the attitude of the artist changes: instead of making things into a “resource” for artistic creation, rather making things into a “topic.” That means a whole new set of relationalities and new forms of attention need to be learned and cultivated, which were historically often absent in the education of art.
-i want to bring a circus inside {--> within}
-my business still with aesthetics (my own image) (narcissistic stuff...)
-to show up as a guy, castrated and very advanced (--> you can only come up castrated unless you are extremely advanced, #harem stuff)
-i am trying to come forward with all the rigor and rhetorics available to me
the death score
Leo correcting his proper name in my mouth. (signature: master of your name --> master of your house)
Leo named his future projection: “Empathoscene”
[sometimes your name is the first doorkeeper (as in Kafka'a Turhüter)]
Eszter's ‘what is there as an obstacle to the freedom of man (?)’ (question marked by me)
--> the spatial gesture of the ‘stop’ (#Selma)
Maarten's version of confusion (stated by himself) is due to that: the messianic horizon is essentially confusing (?)
his autopoiesis and cognitions
Nicolas's notion of “leaking” has to do with marginal non-textual non-accounted-for moments that bleed in absolute non-contractual and non-appropriable event? (the so-called moment when we show things to each other)
•his ‘climate of creativity'~~~_[what does ‘criticism’ mean for him?]
•when he says “gesture,” is he accessing ‘gesture’ having an uncalculable semiotic value =/= ‘performance’ that can be measured in economical terms? [but, what kind of consequential work is gesture doing?]
(Nicolas's order of inquiry and discovery)
(--> what is at stake is how do you locate the effects of your work. for Nicolas it is locate at the “sides” [which is already problematically prepositioned outside of him] --Ahmed--> ab object can be affective by virtue of its own *locat[...]
(7)[...notes/midday review.txt]%6.8[...]s 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 developed in Derrida's Grammatology with the new paradigm of plasticity, her interest in relation between form, materiality and meaning) / “Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing” (28 pages)
[week 4] 20th century sciences and philosophies, the notion of fabrication of concepts:
•Xin Wei --> Whitehead / “Whitehead's Poetical Mathematics” (19 pages)
[week 5] on articulation:
•Deleuze and Guattari / “A Thousand Plateaus” (chapter 3: Double Articulation, 32 pages)
[week 6] feminist and women studies, scene of writing:
•aesthetic tentacularity: Lindsay Kelley & Eva Hayward / “Carnal Light”
[week 7] digital media:
•Flusser on hypertext / “Does Writing Have a Future” (chapter: Supertext, 6 pages)
•Bolter / “Writing Space” (chapter 3 Writing as Technology, 13 pages)
...................................
#workshop little fables of practice, second day storytelling
(proposed initially to Lili:) #imagine and describe an alien world where its populace don't practice ‘knowing’
with this practice we get into questions of (--without directly addressing/announcing them we will provoke a better understanding of what we might think of them:)
•knowing --> (the inseparability of) knowing, being, and doing
•the ‘suppos’ of the supposed to know
•rhetorics, and intrinsicality (“on the inside”)
•response --> (‘knowing’ =) differential accountability =/= differential responsiveness
•environment
•description (discursive significance)
•world, and sense-making
•geometry (and -metry)
•(intelligibility and) materiality enacted --> question of discourse
•epistemology
•conceptions of space and time
•reflection (as a pervasive trope of knowing) [mirroring, imitation, reflection, tropes of “sameness"]
•material discursive evolving
•mattering; matter and intelligibility, episteme and techne, macro and micro,
•
the workshop is in a way about the trope of knowing, ontology of knowing
(ways of) knowing entangled with mode of being
(with which creature?) matter's dynamism is intrinsic to its biodynamic w[...]
(8)[...notes/midday review.txt]%7.7[...]d and exceeded -- sudden and lingering intensity of things) (which darvaze/دروازه/gate we can't and which سوراخ سوزن / surakh-e suzan / hole of needle we pass through)
[i am having always multiple books open, at least two, is that how connection occur for me? #simultaneity]
(Stewart) “I remember childhood as a collection of arresting images”
that hinge on sensory details and open onto luminous scenes of affect [--> Feherlofia/Fehérlófia 1981, Son of the White Horse film. (we must resist calling this film “psychedelic”)
“[...]family as a viscerality through screen images of”
...sudden, repetitive eruption of images of alcoholism, accidents, violence, cancers
*technologies of family, church, law, and nation* (lay confident claim to affect as a capturable content of known and expected “feelings,” but affect itself--that which surges into view along the jumpy border of the actual and the virtual--is their raw material and their only renewable resource. Stewart)
(a sidestep? what) brings an uncanny, alien presence into the field of vision
*an object insists on being seen* (through the tricks of trauma, through the seductions of compulsive beauty,, , ) ~~--> aesthetic event of the senses [@Hoda]
spectacular graphics of disaster
watching: inhabiting the power of the tuned-in spectator; becoming an active participant in [TV's] logic of image (production and) recognition
--✕--> catharsis of mean-spirited
--✕--> festering (cherkin چرکین) alienation
--*--> vitality of the game itself
the image on the screen <--(game)--> the walking simulacrum of social life
the loop of the citizen as consumer
***Mimesis in a State of Shock*** @Hoda
-the link between shock and a cushioned recluse is direct, seductive, and mimetic
“When affect makes its jump between the visible thing, the idea, and the social sensibility, it can leave in its wake uncanny connections between otherwise disparate states of arrest, like shock and recluse گوشه نشينی” (Stewart)
@Hoda: affect jumps into view as the shock of an unassimilated trauma
cocoon room
holing up in your living room ==> “out there” ==> search for the arresting presence
spectrality and concrete substance
(?when am i) “relaxing” the jumpy move of affect
*Stewart's “jump of affect”
tactile image --(satisfies)--> move of affect --(actualizes)--> something tempting/haunting
-affecting presence at rest
-[in glamour magazines] models frozen in time and space stare back at you in a scene that stages the jump from fantasy to actual body/image and back
-jump from ideal to matter to ideal
-what to wear as the magic of affect itself
cop[...]
(9)[...notes/midday review.txt]%8.8[...]om ==> “out there” ==> search for the arresting presence
spectrality and concrete substance
(?when am i) “relaxing” the jumpy move of affect
*Stewart's “jump of affect”
tactile image --(satisfies)--> move of affect --(actualizes)--> something tempting/haunting
-affecting presence at rest
-[in glamour magazines] models frozen in time and space stare back at you in a scene that stages the jump from fantasy to actual body/image and back
-jump from ideal to matter to ideal
-what to wear as the magic of affect itself
copy ~= contact
movies, ads, malls, car phones, daydreams,
modernity's mimetic machine
(“middle class” [or what people thinking as “Iranians"] is not just a “norm” it is a) *womblike space of affect* (where sentimentality and interiority becomes tactile, where ideals and materiality grow to excess,) (imploding under the weight of its own literal embodiment,,,)
-(it is an affective space) where the hegemonic claim *to channel trauma into beauty* is actualized:
•sensible, solid accumulation, family values, colorful decor, techno-gadgets, daily lottery,
•constant stimulation of the senses (--> synaesthetic images, sounds, touches, and smells)
•circuitry of circulation itself
تأثر ta'asor, نتیجهی عواطف natije-y avatef
affect (~= vitality/hope) ~/= (nightmare image of) soical entropy
the big, beautiful, basic, intensely sensate commodity-to-live-in
in Iran:
•(the ‘public space’ or) “outside” ==> a “wilding” scene of crime, chaos, drug-addled monsters, danger, disease, and decay
•“inside” --overflowing-with--> scenes of aesthetic connection
}--> anxiety is the ground over which they (both) march
(modernist) image-affect of the new and clean and up-to-date
<br />
the feeling of being in the middle of something big and inevitable, watching it unfold
#my dreams
the labor of looking
“Movies made for women imagine a picture--perfect scene of an Inside--a Home filled with tangible objects that Mean or a Self filled with the intricate dramas of dreams launched, wounded, and finally satisfied or left behind. Affect itself is laid out on the carpet like a beautiful fetish that it is okay to love.”
(the #telegram is littered with image-written signs of personal/public disaster)
the surge of affect toward the scene of abjection --> abjection itself is felt as a contagion --> Navid's comments turned into stickers
-fascination of catastrophe
-something pleads to be touched
-the act of looking at the telegram's forward: my desire is your desire and we are all together in the mass desire
-images on telegram offer affects to mime, lines of vitality to follow,[...]
(10)[...notes/midday review.txt]%8.9[...]matter to ideal
-what to wear as the magic of affect itself
copy ~= contact
movies, ads, malls, car phones, daydreams,
modernity's mimetic machine
(“middle class” [or what people thinking as “Iranians"] is not just a “norm” it is a) *womblike space of affect* (where sentimentality and interiority becomes tactile, where ideals and materiality grow to excess,) (imploding under the weight of its own literal embodiment,,,)
-(it is an affective space) where the hegemonic claim *to channel trauma into beauty* is actualized:
•sensible, solid accumulation, family values, colorful decor, techno-gadgets, daily lottery,
•constant stimulation of the senses (--> synaesthetic images, sounds, touches, and smells)
•circuitry of circulation itself
تأثر ta'asor, نتیجهی عواطف natije-y avatef
affect (~= vitality/hope) ~/= (nightmare image of) soical entropy
the big, beautiful, basic, intensely sensate commodity-to-live-in
in Iran:
•(the ‘public space’ or) “outside” ==> a “wilding” scene of crime, chaos, drug-addled monsters, danger, disease, and decay
•“inside” --overflowing-with--> scenes of aesthetic connection
}--> anxiety is the ground over which they (both) march
(modernist) image-affect of the new and clean and up-to-date
the feeling of being in the middle of something big and inevitable, watching it unfold
#my dreams
the labor of looking
“Movies made for women imagine a picture--perfect scene of an Inside--a Home filled with tangible objects that Mean or a Self filled with the intricate dramas of dreams launched, wounded, and finally satisfied or left behind. Affect itself is laid out on the carpet like a beautiful fetish that it is okay to love.”
(the #telegram is littered with image-written signs of personal/public disaster)
the surge of affect toward the scene of abjection --> abjection itself is felt as a contagion --> Navid's comments turned into stickers
-fascination of catastrophe
-something pleads to be touched
-the act of looking at the telegram's forward: my desire is your desire and we are all together in the mass desire
-images on telegram offer affects to mime, lines of vitality to follow, intimate secrets to plumb, tips to imbibe for safety or good health or the search for things new and vibrant with collective envy
-browsing telegram, we're trudging the rough terrain of bodies, sensuous accumulation, impact
“Sometimes when you hear someone scream it goes in one ear and out the other. Sometimes it passes right into the middle of your brain and gets stuck there.”
(cryptic and as) crystal clear as a scream
[a question or something else] lodged [...]
(11)[...notes/midday review.txt]%8.9[...]ible objects that Mean or a Self filled with the intricate dramas of dreams launched, wounded, and finally satisfied or left behind. Affect itself is laid out on the carpet like a beautiful fetish that it is okay to love.”
(the #telegram is littered with image-written signs of personal/public disaster)
the surge of affect toward the scene of abjection --> abjection itself is felt as a contagion --> Navid's comments turned into stickers
-fascination of catastrophe
-something pleads to be touched
-the act of looking at the telegram's forward: my desire is your desire and we are all together in the mass desire
-images on telegram offer affects to mime, lines of vitality to follow, intimate secrets to plumb, tips to imbibe for safety or good health or the search for things new and vibrant with collective envy
-browsing telegram, we're trudging the rough terrain of bodies, sensuous accumulation, impact
“Sometimes when you hear someone scream it goes in one ear and out the other. Sometimes it passes right into the middle of your brain and gets stuck there.”
(cryptic and as) crystal clear as a scream
[a question or something else] lodged in a tactile sensate anxiety --> aesthetic scene (of the senses) --> scene --> shape
(anxiety has to do with the sensate and tactile and opens onto asthetic)
(some do this all the time [unknown shock of anxiety in the morning]:) morning --> mourning --> sudden dread and start scanning () () [], (trauma as an) everyday walking path
traumatic realism: a figuring that, like traumatic memory, fails to represent the inflicting force as an object in a symbolic order and therefore feels compelled to literally re-present it over and over, *miming the original haunting impact.* (Stewart > Hal Foster)
-the subject surging to bear an affect, surging toward an actualization, passionate connection of the subject who goes with the flow in an intoxicated moment (=/= sober distance)
(Hoda's impact of) shocked subjectivity (--> the real understood as traumatic) --> conjure up memories of death --?--> communal grieving
{referential vs. simulacral readings @Hoda, Marialena (‘referential object for’ / ‘empathetic object in’ /or ‘criticality of’ [<-- i don't agree with these clear cuts of ”/"]; what is “the reality of suffering and death” (or “reality and suffering of death”) for Hoda? (Xiri's interest in her) object's “total integration” into the political economy}
(Stewart's) signs of the senses
satisfaction in the making of sign-shrine
(question of satisfaction at Hoda:) satisfaction as a force, and end, in itself spoken through the bright, blunt, sensate aesthetics of the sign
-something slashes [= a wound made by cutting] at itself and spits at the world (/ politics of slashing --> poetics of slashing / the young girls who “cut” themselves s[...]
(12)[...notes/midday review.txt]%9[...] morning --> mourning --> sudden dread and start scanning () () [], (trauma as an) everyday walking path
traumatic realism: a figuring that, like traumatic memory, fails to represent the inflicting force as an object in a symbolic order and therefore feels compelled to literally re-present it over and over, *miming the original haunting impact.* (Stewart > Hal Foster)
-the subject surging to bear an affect, surging toward an actualization, passionate connection of the subject who goes with the flow in an intoxicated moment (=/= sober distance)
(Hoda's impact of) shocked subjectivity (--> the real understood as traumatic) --> conjure up memories of death --?--> communal grieving
{referential vs. simulacral readings @Hoda, Marialena (‘referential object for’ / ‘empathetic object in’ /or ‘criticality of’ [<-- i don't agree with these clear cuts of ”/"]; what is “the reality of suffering and death” (or “reality and suffering of death”) for Hoda? (Xiri's interest in her) object's “total integration” into the political economy}
(Stewart's) signs of the senses
satisfaction in the making of sign-shrine
(question of satisfaction at Hoda:) satisfaction as a force, and end, in itself spoken through the bright, blunt, sensate aesthetics of the sign
-something slashes [= a wound made by cutting] at itself and spits at the world (/ politics of slashing --> poetics of slashing / the young girls who “cut” themselves so they can feel alive or, literally “come to their senses”) -- dramas of surge and arrest --> They do not ask for interpretation or construct the subject who would assign them a meaning, [they refuse] reference to “underlying systems” of signification that make them readable as texts
-something refuses to disappear
-(Hoda's land is) the land of sheer circulations --> (the question of) equilibriums --> how can she with her audience (let's say “we”) enter the unnatural calm of another form of arrest? to feel the scene resist synaesthesia
a state of the senses making contact with pen and paper (and matches)
(my enduring love of watching images, my) optical eye
“[...] young embodiments of a modern middle-ground-in-the-making came face-to-face with an otherness that compelled a closer look” --> violently affective contact
surged toward the scene of their confident excitement
impact ==> the social
#storytelling, compelled to repeat the event as the sentience of it still reverberated in their senses
a grounded writing, that sends people bouncing, takes place as a threshold, hits the senses as a set of provocations, or presents as *a problematic sensed in circuits of reaction already set in motion* @apass
(working with Stewart) writing affect #workshop
a practice of writing ourselves into our worlds as *emergent and disparate ensembles* -[...]
(13)[...notes/midday review.txt]%9[...]ow do forms of writing change cultural theory?
•What questions do forms of writing raise about subjects and objects, forms of attention, the possibility of thinking through description?
•How do you describe a scene, a character, an event, a situation, a collective sensibility, a difference, a world?
•What does it mean to add density and texture to description?
...................................
armies of metaphors and metonymies that are to justify war
...................................
“there is something quite special about the recently discovered entities such as climate. these entities cause us to reflect on our very place on Earth and in the cosmos” ==> hyperobjects (“seem to force something on us”) --> i say every object does that, and it is not recent: ajayeb al makhlughat is about the description of that force
hyperobjects Morton
-an object that is “hyper” in relation to some other entity
-they are viscous: they “stick” to beings that are involved with them
-they are “nonlocal” : local manifestation of hyperobject =/= hyperobject
-they exhibit their effects interobjectively : they can be detected in a space that consists of interrelationships between aesthetic properties of objects\
=/= apocalyptic environmentalism
=/= the possibility of transcendental leaps “outside” physical reality
=/= that we are “embedded” in a “lifeworld”
high-dimrnsional phase space
invisible to humans for stretches of time
[*]hypocrisy <== the conditions of the impossibility of a [*]metalanguage= account for things while remaining uncontaminated by them, (~= an “outside”)
--> (Lacanian truth:) “there is no metalanguage” =/= postmodernism's “everything is a metaphor” =/= some metaphors are better than others ~= *there is nowhere to stand outside of things*
the time of hyperobjects is a time of hypocrisy =/= cynicism
[*]weakness <== the gap between phenomenon and thing
[*]lameness <== the fact that all entities are fragile
imagination as:
•Hume: a bundling of associations
•Kant: the possibility for synthetic judgments a priori
•object-oriented ontology: immanence of thinking to the physical, radically displacing the human by insisting that my being is not everything it is cracked up to be--the being of a paper cup is as profound as mine
which hyperobject you are caught in?
image of writing --> shy, retiring octopuses that squirt out a dissembling (mask, cloak, vortäuschen) ink as they withdraw into the ontological shadow
figure of *mill* (the characters and technologies and ideas of the ages mill around in a state of a mild, semiblissful confusion) =/= Eszter's vortex
my intimate impressions “personal" = footprints of hyperobjects[...]
(14)[...notes/midday review.txt]%9.2[...]r Renaissance, or “change in living conditions” as a substitute for Holocaust
acronyms, abbreviations:
dialoc دیالوک --> decrease in appropriate levels of concern
tomas توماس --> terrain of media and the sociopolitical realm
cohhatg کوهاج --> coincidence of human history and terrestrial geology
hhatg حج --> human history and terrestrial geology
pb پی بی --> philosophy's bandwidth
sdwa صدوا --> substances decorated with accidents -->
ldwa لدوا --> lumps decorated with accidents --> featureless lumps, and those things have accidental properties, like cupcakes decorated with colored sprinkles (arayesh آرایش) }--> this thinking still continues, despite the fact that ‘thought has already made it irrelevant’ --> thamii تامی, (for example birds for Attar are merely decorative features of Attar's social, psychic, and philosophical space)
soth صوث --> speculating outside of the human
sim سیم --> small island of meaning
etimom اتیموم --> everything is made of mind
hhbn هبن --> hand-holding benevolent narrator (-which is vanished)
(auto) cad کد --> (automatic) comforting aesthetic distances
iockat --> intentional objects commonly known as thoughts
atot آتو --> (you only ever perceive your particular) anthropomorphic translations of things
ejich جیش --> exhilarating jump into cognitive hyperspace --> displacement that Copernicus or Derrida does
foe --> fantasies of embeddedness [<-- phenomenology <== grounding of Kant (begining in 1900)]
avaa اوا --> a vertiginous antiliteral abyss
iwen --> intimacy with existing nonhumans
mok --> mathematization of knowing (--> Descartes, Newton) ==> hiding philosophical and ideological decisions made in acts of knowing =/= ontology (as a vital and contested political terrain)
icad --> ideology of “the consumer” and its “demands” (that capital then “meets”) --> adventure of modernity
fvod --> from the viewpoint of “objective” description (a bad way of explicating the objects that are already here)
toc --> troops of critique
towwk توک --> ‘technology of what we know’ (techniques that decide the differences between ‘what we know’ and ‘what is’. Morton's hyperobject is a towwk)
usoc --> uncanny strangeness of existence (work of Heidegger)
lawot --> (something is) ‘laying around in the workshop of thinking’ (let's reuse what appears to be broken lawot)
visist = visit + resist
correlationism: the notion that philosophy can only talk within a narrow bandwidth, restricted to the human-world correlate : meaning is only possible between a human mind and ‘what it thinks' = its “objects” (flimsy شل و ول and tenuous ر[...]
(15)[...notes/midday review.txt]%9.3[...]omething strange about the objects: no matter how many times you turned around a cion, you never saw the other side as the other side --> the #coin had a dark side that was seemingly irreducible
Morton's (technology of what we know) hyperobject is his sense of an asymmetry between the infinite powers of cognition and the infinite bening of things, yet he doesn't evoke descriptive practices, which could be helpfull--he is missing something, here: “the gap between phenomenon and thing yawns open, disturbing my sense of presence and being in the world.”
“[...] i cannot locate the gap between phenomenon and thing anywhere in my given, phenomenal, experiential, or indeed scientific space” --> Xiri's problem
he disagrees with: (from Plato up until Hume and Kant) that there is some kind of dotted line somewhere on a thing, saying “cut here” --so he concludes: “things are themselves, but we can't point to them directly.” =/= nonrepresentational theory, Stewart is much more useful. we can see Morton's taste for (a masculine) sublime in modeling his hyperobjects
flat ontology: there is hardly any difference between a person and a pincushion. and relationships between them, including causal ones, must be vicarious (نيابتى) and hence aesthetic in nature
(no) realism that only bases its findings on “ontic” data
scientific discoveries are necessarily based on a decision about what real things are
*disaster [ontologic] taking place against a stable background [ontic]*
causality after Hume and Kant : causality as a feature of phenomena, rather than things in themselves ==> humans are not totally in charge of assigning significance and value to events that can be statistically measured
entities that become visible through post-Humean and post-Kantian statistical causality --> anthropogenic global warming
causal factoid
humiliators [there is no center and we don't inhabit it]:
•Copernicus
•Darwin
•Freud (displacing the human from the very center of psychic activity)
•Marx (displacing human social life with economic organization)
•Heidegger
•Derrida (displacing the human from the center of meaning-making)
•Nietzsche
•Deleuze and Guattari
•
~= there is no edge =/= (film Lucy or Neil Tyson series suggesting that) there is an edge (of time to see everything perfectly), in some (privilaged) transcendental sphere of pure freedom, Lucy's chair literally sitting a VIP box beyond the edge --> anthropocentrism: the idea of a privilaged transcendental sphere
Kant --> (although we are limited in finitude) our transcendental faculties are at least metaphorically floating in space beyond the edge of the universe --> #milieu #tasavof #sufism
...هزار و یک hezaro yek
universe of trillions of finitud[...]
(16)[...notes/midday review.txt]%9.4[...]ial <== (human) ‘thought’ is given a unique ability to negate and transcend immediate experience
(claims that the human doesn't exist ==>) elevating the strucure of human ‘thought’ to the ontological pinnacle سرمنزل
everything (such as modernity) banks on a certain forms of ontology and epistemology to secure its coordinates
speculative realism, a rogue machinery
saving power:
•expecting an eschatological solution from the sky
•a revolution in consciousness
•a people's army seizing control of the state
•
obsessive robots (that hold open the sliding doors of history just as they appear to be snapping shut, imprisoning us in modernity forever)
*distance*: (the schizophrenic defense, “object in mirror,”) a psychic and ideological construct designed to protect me from the nearness of things
-the concept of ‘nature’ is (such) an “object in mirror” (#amazon project)
بنداز دور mythical land away --> a dis-dimension called ‘away’ (door دور) in iran (door andakhtan دور انداختن)
(there is no away on this surface we are in) --> throw away: an optical effect : there is no loger distances our image from us in a nice, aesthetically manageable way, but sticks to us --> we are glued to our phenomenological situation (--> entanglement of equipment and quanta =/= three pigs)
a threatening proximity
“i do not feel ‘at home’ in the biosphere” (yet it surrounds them and penetrates them) --> most humans feel that way. how one's entire physical being is caught in its meshwork of narezayati نارضایتی
(physical existence carrying with it) a trace of unreality --> آمدنم بهر چه بود : “i am not sure where i am anymore. i am at home in feeling not at home.”
one's normal sense of time as a container
Ehsan's ghost/sheikh film --> demonic in that through them causalities flow like electricity
ambient, latin ‘ambo’ means ‘on both sides’
the old art theories that separated sweetness and power collapse
sweetness, it turns out, just is power: the most powerful thing
weather as monster
baby learns to distinguish between the vomit and the non-vomit, and comes to know the non-vomit as self
(a society in which) growing scientific *awareness of rish* ==changes==> the nature of democracy
back-to-nature festivals
nihilistic princes of darkness
...................................
my work is *to mix stories*
everyday engagements with other kinds of creatures (in my case: ajayeb) ==> opens new kinds of possibilities for relating and understanding
cosmoecology: multiple beings (gods, jinns, animals, humans, living, dead, etc.) e[...]
(17)[...notes/midday review.txt]%9.5[...]e hurt ==> “the other was bad” (is not the conclusion that is helpfull or capable of giving an opening, and it ends badly)
=/= people make mistakes
roshd رشد =/= pishraft پیشرفت
roshd --> shodan, becoming
pishraft --> to gain, progress,
selfishness =?=> being nice
khod khahi خود خواهی ==> nagozashtan-e tasvir/tasavor bad dar digari ["this is me, not you!"]
selfish = good at communication (do taraf-e miz khub harf zadan), bad at relating (nazdik shodan)
shakhsiat farasu-negar (cannot see themselves; ~=? selfish personality) =/= narcissistic pesonality (they have better chances for healing --> small doses of narcissism is necessity for self-interogation and integrated ego formation[?])
*anger is cheating*
(behavior hal, negah be mozu-ha --> bazi بازی, hoghe حقه [transvaluated into innocence])
farar az ta'rif-haye ejtemayi فرار از تعریفهای اجتمایی ~-> farar az ejtema فرار از اجتماع
paying attention to others doesn't mean that you are understanding them (in the case of lonliness)
[title]
thousend and one questions
dark answers
why aesthetics of cooking and feeding new in art doesn't work in iran?
negah dogane نگاه دوگانه
[duality] dual perspective: if it is not X then it is Y (=/= X)
...................................
savad سواد = list, siahe, سیاهه, marginal note
...................................
being ambivalent (disinterest): (masking anxiety and insecuruty,) gaurding oneself against disapointment, defensive alufeness
ethos of “resistence” --> moral authority --> moral supeiority movement
narcissism (of the artist) as part of a process (of building something creative)
•interiorizing things [is part of narcissism]
•thinking about things and self's prob◦thinking about things and self's problems --> writer's memoir
low self esteem ==> building up
...................................
“nothing is more important in the world than the old ones” [?!]
liberation =/= freedom
•when it comes to liberation (those liberating actions that someone does, ex: women scarf in Iran, etc.), as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else, you just support it
liberation has to do a lot with style, or changing of style
•freesom is totally another thing, much more complicated, sometimes is in the opposite direction of liberation
(i think i might be committed to the freedom of Iranians, not their liberation...)
takhlie ehsas (feelings) =/= takhlie hayajan (emotions ~-> behaiviour)
تعميم
generalization ta'mim --> sign of depression
or --Borges--> a way of abstracttion by forgeting (certain) differences = thinking
[...]
(18)[...notes/midday review.txt]%10.1[...]
2- every drive involves the subject in repetition
3- every drive is an attempt to go beyond the pleasure principle, to the realm of excess *jouissance*(: enjoyment experienced as suffering @Sana)]
(death drive =/= dying)*
with death drive we are at the dimension of the undead (spectral undeadness is the domain of the drive) --> “horrible fate of being caught in the endless repetitive cycle of wandering around in guilt and pain”
(Lacan:) deep inside they desire to return to the preoedipal fusion with the mother's breast (--?--> to ‘touch’ without love, ‘will’ without desire)
‘death drive’ belongs to the suicidal tendency of (symbolic order of) narcissism : (turning ‘libido’ into a) representation of indestructible life
(in the neurotic's fantasy of the subject with death drive) there is no connection with object <== object is defined as the Other's demand --> they have to ‘fuck’ them
-accourding to Zizek: there is only one drive: death drive, which is such sexualized
Freud: “civilization = a reaction formation” (an effort to counter death drive)
...................................
pedagogies of affect and/or feeling --> @Hoda
understanding, curating, and fomenting public feelings
political/aesthetic imaginaries
bache
بچه: (in Rumi) object sexy-erfani ابژه سکسی عرفانی
(iranians?) mix =/= tangle (?noniranians)
motley
miscellaneous
lecture consisting of haphazard patchwork of sections
a jester is usually dressed in motley
mexican garden: a model of motley and devotion, of rapt attention to the birds it draws
what was the imaginary homeland (=/= remembered homeland) for Iranians?
“here, forms and shapes revel themselves through patient inquiry and the luxury of enough carried water to let you trace them.”
[...]
(19)[...notes/midday review.txt]%10.6[...]he *quality of an access to part of a world* =/= decontextualization]--so--> i say we need ‘concepts’ and not ‘philosophy’:
*philosophy (as practiced by M&M and Alex): claiming the nature of reality
*concept: a figure you make in order to do a limited situated work
“conceptualization = fortification” استحکامات
(to fortify one's own work with concepts ==> settlement)
Manning's affinity with infinitly, more, and multi --> what is their rigor is doing for them? commits them to the nonhabitual. (resisting to name their habits, depriving them of thier habitual labors) [=/= my work on descriptive practices]
-i want to know about their empirical tools that make translation-work visible (==> decomposition), not their conceptual descriptions [=/= textured description with thick details <== i really think the devil is in the details!! }--> art of noticing things]
-i want to know how Manning is compromised into desiring what she is doing. [compromise: being exposed or made liable to danger, suspicion, or disrepute. --the way she told the story of her practice had a difficult sense of success in it, of being cool and correct at every turn, uncompromised. (<-- why is this a turn-off for me?)]
for aesthetic, political, ethical reasons i want Manning to address in their work:
•the question of apparatus --> working within an apparatus of thinking in order to get somewhere in a sustained way. i want them to name their apparatus of literary production. how they engage with the interface, data-set, grammar, and literacy of their reservoir.
•the question of infrastructure --> how they balance the possible and the acceptable, the balance of action, tools, and the built environment
•the question of technology --> how they take apart the tool from its context of involvements and referentialities
•the question of political orientation --> how they have accepted the democratization of knowledge and multiculturalism (the idea of “knowledge for everyone” [--> there is a very thin line between the impulse to democratize and commodify knowledge]; --could multiculturalism be radical capitalism in action?! ...faking diversity to build more diverse companies <-- “lip service”: to just say something but not actually do it)
[--> the hegemony and horror of “different experience” of the so-called different cultures (a form of racism?)]
[multiculturalism =/= trans-species]
[multiculturalism =/= eurasia]
[--> the hegemony and horror of “the completely different” (==>? deskilled society)]
Manning: “in senseLab we work with the people who don't use language, don't write, etc.” (<-- what does that legitimates, conceals, or smuggles? what sorts of hierarchies and ideologies of status emerge out of that?)
-as the philosopher of nonintentionality how did she responded (paranoically?) to our intents when questions[...]
(20)[...notes/midday review.txt]%10.9[...]or smuggles? what sorts of hierarchies and ideologies of status emerge out of that?)
-as the philosopher of nonintentionality how did she responded (paranoically?) to our intents when questions where asked?
-as the philosopher of discord how did she responded to disagreement?
(?how do you tell the tale of) *your adventures سلوک and achievements کرامت* (karamat va soluk)
(why self-promoting is such a turn-off? it makes the listener into someone to convince or win over into the Förderung of the speaker. [with Campbell:] self-marketing creates a ‘perverse knowledge’ about the work of the speaker, that means you give information about ‘healthy’ parts of your practice, your achievements and moral/material awards, with the assumption that the listener is going to make a good decision about the ‘halo effects’ of the speaker, but in fact you are made ‘brand literate’)
or [it is seems elementary but neccesory to ask Manning:] what is the difference between advertisement and knowledge?
there are innumerable ways to adapt to the world without creating a philosophical understanding of the world
(Manning) “we feel the force of form. this kind of beauty has nothing to do with an external aesthetic judgment.” (--> how the personal judgment is not worthy of philo when a tsunami is coming or one is on the way of being gang raped?)
during the workshop Manning remains the center of command. she constantly “knows” (better). and she insists that through letting go of our critical thinking the participants can understand her notions ==>? how can she not build disciples?!
on production
replacing the name of ‘production’ with ‘but we must leave a trace’ (which exactly do let the notion of production sneak back in under an other name)
(Manning on p.16 5th paragraph is an example of an) unaccountable unsituated abstract claim of reality:
•unaccountable --> where do you stand saying this?
•unsituated --> for whom is this good?
•abstract --> how you are saying it?
the notion of “care for the event”
=/= perspectives
=/= subjects
=/= persons
“occasion itself creates its subjects” (<-- you are a subject inside the occasion, how can you stand out and say that?)
(Manning) creating a concept of care =/= care as actually practiced in different parts of the world by people
(what is the politics of not caring?)
Manning's rhetoric of reasoning: ‘virtuous’
telling soft wisdom tale with an emotional twist at the end and how she did the right thing and came out clean and cool --> rectitude
her text has become all about the achievements of senseLab with a cover of high philosophical abstract conceptualization (~= fortification)
=/= taking *risk* (=/= adventure) of talking about the real probl[...]
(21)[...notes/midday review.txt]%11[...]he eye.” the motto of transformation in secular capitalism, sang by Jane Fonda and Transformer Optimus Prime
...................................
researcher's questions
in your obscure (elaborate and awkward) meditations, (?can we ask:) what is sacrificed, what is recooked, canibalized, chewed over, and eventually buried? in which economy of pleasure and pain is this mobilized? which harmful (or hedonistic) sensualism is deployed? which hallucinating enfant is writing? which raw material is being transformed into the gold of humanity?
-the question of will: which world is murdered and repopulated by the act of (your) will alone?
a research method of starting a conversation, for apass
*take me to you reader* --> bring me to the subject who you think is reading you, receiving your work in some sort,
...................................
few things (that i hate hysterically) that i think i urgently need (and any artist) to have a very good grasp of (within modern capital economy):
•marketing (--> integrated storytelling)
•fashion (--> manipulative regimes of time and place)
•journalism (explanatory technologies of news and opinion, vox, kurzgesagt, corporate media, immersive journalism, forensic aesthetics)
•politics (=/= political science): achieving and exercising positions of governance that have control over communities
•hollywood/comics (*corporate-produced fiction* --> business-decisions connecting cross-overs; ideas of: customer and merchandise)
i can't shake off the idea that behind every marketing strategy there i a predatory behavior concealed
***there is nothing quite so humiliating and disempowering as trying to prove the truth***
‘trying to prove the truth’ is the worst position you can find yourself in and it means you are fucked. because you are doing it to empower yourself in the face of a biger power that lies and claims you. the conditions that had let that happen are the question, not the truth of the matter --> that is why i find journalism most of the time useless
impossibility of having an interview with iranians (myself included): [<==? chaotic subjectivity]
deflection --> dodging: not giving meaningful answers : gradations of non-answers you are receiving
taking a keyword, repeating it, sounds like answering the question, introducing a nonsequitur to trip up the host
==> more confused & less informed
...................................
#project Puchberg landscape Austria
shifting baseline syndrome: reshaping the landscape and forgetting what was before ==>{ (new) reality = shaped and ruined landscapes
(Emirates was for me such reality of shaped ruin)
admiring one landscape and its biological entanglements (Puchberg Austrian meadows, with it cows and horses, place of beauty and leisure) ==entails=[...]
(22)[...notes/midday review.txt]%11.2[...]d practices of divination and the ‘conjuring’ of value and capital from what in many cases are immaterial voids
unmasking of its practices (~= faith + skepticism) ==> state power
mutant forms of technological self-subjugation
(Weber's) magic: coercive proceduralism --> managerial practices that characterise biopolitics
[*]census taking: pre-determined categories (like race, nationality, gender and political persuasion) are set out as objectively existing taxonomies (+ ‘data’ manually gathered from individuals to ‘fit’ those categories) and thus summon [a term with magical implications purposefully employed here] a population into being
-McClanahan
census ==> statistics: factish object: hybrid and unstable (possibly inaccurate) yet fetishised and faith-based technologies that possess the ability to transform (the individual parts of social and cultural groups into a sacred somatic whole [~ people/nation])--> biopolitics
-can art succeed in transforming such a ‘whole’ into free and autonomous individual beings?
references to panopticon society
(?which camera angles suggest) naturalization of surveillance culture
[title]
*observational aesthetic* <== convergences of contemporary art and anthropology
...................................
[ajayeb -->] concept or theory --> (a training in) absorption + attention + framing =/= truth effect
[title]
Whatever Professor
[why apass asked me to do their website's] indexing: (a shrewd and thoughtful creativity in) the first interpretation of a content's body =/= presuming a standard taxonomic form
==>
•surprises
•styles of critical thought generates power in twists of voice and craft
•
allows one please to demonstrate the wonder
“We ask our readers to perform the jamb when language overruns the mental breathing that reading entails.” (Lepselter)
•or, nothing disappears --> You breathe the air you're given. (“I felt ripples from a rape in the seventeenth century, behind a barn somewhere in Romania, where generations later my bitter grandmother disparaged her children without knowing why.”)
•or, words sediment next to something laid low
•or, (index as in) to point sideways --> shifter's only meaning is the object it happens to point to
•drawing figures, hooks, asterisks
•or, placing what's structural, technical, transferential, pulped, leaking, intense
{things: an integrated thin layer to epitomize and abstract in new ways how people are hooked up with their technologies; parsing and criss-crossing some of the built-in categories and new needs of the people who are using it;}
things that do the reading, editing, assembling
*every edit ==> (set off a cascade of:)
•word falls
•R[...]
(23)[...notes/midday review.txt]%11.8[...] and saved) --> to exist
(what art suffers now, that i should directly address the modern subject, and other mode of subjectivity or other kinds of addressee and addressing is brutally criticized and irrelativized)
-(love's type of address:) addressed to us ==> make us exist --> a person
(existing as person is the only way? no no no!) -- the emergence of persons is a local and historical phenomenon that we simply cannot extend to all collectives
(how to extricate ourselves properly from the) notions of Nature, Matter, Object, and Subject
to get around two major *obstacles: (the prevailing notions of) Society and (especially of) Economy (=/=? modes of existence's system of coordinates)
the same beings that made the author of ajayeb speak, got my/our ancestors excited,
*technology: that which we emphasize whenever we pay attention to the unexpected detours {the hiatus of the detour, the zigzag of invention, ruse, trajectory obtained by a certain type of discontinuity} by which existents have to pass in order to subsist. (=/= technological domain technical objects, material world, socio-technical networks,) (~ technically)
-fictional beings adds additional variety to technical beings --> aestheticization of techniques: obsolescence, ruin, adjustment, efficiency
-we must extend ‘fictional beings’ far beyond the narrow domain of art and culture, is to give a whole new meaning to the expression “material culture.”
-1- Technique's zigzagging motion assumes a know-how, a judgment, a constantly reprised evaluation of formidably demanding specifications;
-2- Technical beings leave behind them complex frameworks and combinations of associations which appear difficult to understand once left to themselves, without the folding motion and the detours which enabled them;
-3- relative fragility of technical beings: it establishes combinations and bridges between completely heterogeneous types of beings
*fiction: ...beings be grasped according to a particular relationship between materials and figures which cannot be detached without those two layers losing their specific form of objectivity. {fictionally : materials <--> figures}
fiction objects: everything that folds technical beings --> to derive from them a new type of *alteration* --(generates)--> another world (a world which has the particularity of not being able to be detached in any way from the materials [from which it appears to detach itself.])
*fictional beings:
-they extract materials from forms, figures or small worlds that can neither be detached from these materials nor reduced to them.
-khosh-yomn خوش یمن and shoom شوم (felicity and infelicity) --> pretense (vanemud وانمود); they depend on the always fragile maintenance of the relation between material and form
-*specifications* of “fictional beings” (that leaves[...]
(24)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%13.3[...]n end to alienation {~=?=> the condition of possibility for totalitarianism} [Fynsk]
the illusion (and comfort) of noncastration
...................................
duty of deconstruction: the practice of non-avoidance
(duty =/= your nature)--> the duty of being unwelcomed
vomiting ~= healing
*after the 18th century (seems) all art (artists) wants to be:
•in the privileged place of nonrepresentational work. trying its self with the sublime, that which disturbs and devastates being
•performative = being + doing ~= becoming what it is
() parentheses:
•parental parenthetical remarks
•grammatically set to emphasize --> belonging to the secondary
•whispering ~ “this isn't much, but let me insert, inject”
•disavowal of the text
•denial
•confession
•pumping the text to its opposite meaning
•turns everything around --> a noble feeling
•
(Avital > Nietzsche:) destruction: commitment to futurity
affirms life, clears out the nonsense
=/= devastation: destruction without future
-if you are stuck with monumental history, and if you are burdened, carrying too much baggage (historically, aesthetically) ==> you are weighted down and cannot move forward
the image of hybrid being in ajayebnameh, half animal half human, is being both wild and tamed, vahshi-ram وحشی رام
...................................
(the word) wonder, it worlds.
...................................
work in ajayeb is about the phenomenon of understanding that is to be found in modes of experience that lie outside the universal claims of modern scientific method (--the experiences of art, of philosophy, and of history itself.)
in the hermeneutic universe i am building, Iran is made of China is made of India is made of Afghanistan is made of Iraq is made of Greece is made of ...
(can I say that my work has been all about Iran-centrism?)
gaps in cultural space that epistemology has not filled
hermeneutics =/=? epistemology
history of truth
*making an ecological landscape of ajayeb cosmology, that means making visible the connection between beings and contact zones among animate and inanimate and nonhuman:
diamond <--> snake
fire <--> speech
fire <--> animals
wind <--> future
cow <--> angel
water <--> light
darvishi درویشی <--> Div دیو
earth <--> Bahman بهمن
mars <--> wolf, pig
moon <--> effect of Gabriel's wings
earth <--> woman/enmity/illusio
mountain <--> ganj گنج
jinn جن <--> climate
Div <--> stone
climate <--> ghiamat قیامت
khidr خضر <--> life/death giving
(ajayeb-e [...]
(25)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%15[...] and fragility--our shared fate with our neighbors.
[The ajayeb's beings and their neighbors]
...................................
[instead of the struggle against sin (~=? christianity) or the struggle against suffering (~=? Buddhism),] the struggle between (different) sins
...................................
(the reading of ajayeb portraits) the global [and therefore *ethical] consciousness (at the end of 12th century middle-south asia, “the east”)
...................................
[Martha Kenney]
(how not) render ‘wonder’ a strictly historical object(?)
[as basis for building a contemporary ethics]
(wonder is ajib عجیب)
just-so story
in science and philosophy, a just-so story, also called an ad hoc fallacy, is an unverifiable and unfalsifiable narrative explanation for a cultural practice, a biological trait, or behavior of humans or other animals. (wikipedia)
etiological myths
etiology: the study of causation, or origination
the politics technology and the politics of storytelling.
[...] Narratives, along with literary devices, tropes, figures, images and the aesthetics of language, inhabit and inform even our most reliable knowledge-making practices.
storytelling as one of the consequential material practices
[storytelling is material practice]
[where there is a situated perspectives there is storytelling]
it is “practicing generous reading”
and “technique of refiguration” --> create alternative forms of knowledge
[figuration ~ storytelling apparatuses]
(Haraway, Primate Vision)
•“Attention to narrative is not instead of attention to science, ...”
•[there is no way that we can] escape the particular pleasures and dangers embedded in the story-laden sciences.
•[what are the things that] could only be explained by cultural, not scientific, genealogies [?] --> ideological apparition[s]
•Something new was required to account for change; the logic informed a kind of paternal creation myth [........] unchanging “matrix” for the generative principle of change. (In Zihlman's story logic, both gathering and hunting emerged as repatternings, not opposites, in changed conditions of constraint and opportunity. Narratives of both gathering and hunting ways of life produced genders and citizens.)
•tool-weapon equation in masculinist scientific narratives
as careful scrutiny of wonders and marvels becomes a mainstay in European intellectual life, 17th century natural philosophers began to understand *wonder, *curiosity, and *attention as cloesly aligned and mutually defining.
epistemological beast fable
unnatural history
knowledge-making practic[...]
(26)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%16.1[...]e--from a kind of bacterium whose relatives we despise.”
re-thinking consciousness
(Kenney) Margulis's speculations: they mattered, they worlded, they gathered
(Williamson:) larvae and adult insects of the same species do not have a common ancestor(!)
(how ?, the capacity for) drastic morphological change --> what would it be like to emerge as a moth with a new body, a new sensorium, with your caterpillar-self only a genomic memory?
reincarnation from one species to another
(need less?) just-so stories --> facts to live with
(need more?) what-if stories --> speculations to savor --(gives taste to)--> *paradigms* --> incommensurable ways of seeing the world and practicing science in it (Kohn) --> seeds for sowing worlds (Haraway) ~--> possibilities for thinking life***
(Kenney's proposal of) “bureau of what-if stories”
(--> Fables of Attention - Wonder in Feminist Theory and Scientific Practice 2013)
(Margulis's) holobiont: multicellular eukaryotes plus their colonies of persistent symbionts
ajayeb's craft and undisciplined tradition can be called empirical, it is an example of an archival research (done by historian.) i wan to highlight the aesthetic quality of this activity.
*aesthetics: how elements are arranged together, how they are composed, how they are brought into relation in the space of a text (Kenney > Latour, Stengers, Bellacasa) (--> La Guin's bag, bundle) }--> rigs
**aesthetics are political because they do consequential relational work**
novels, poetry, feminist theory, speculative fiction, bestiary list categories--these genres of composition *gather together* and *stage* their “matters of care” in ways that perform relations between things and teach their readers to inhabit sometimes unfamiliar, agential world. they are practices of sf worlding.
fiction ==> attitude --> holds things
(emphasis on) worlds that come together through dispersal (vofur وفور), induction (makesh مکش), volatility (farar فرّار), toxicity, drift,
the power that comes with ‘other’ (time/place of) styles of composing
(*bestiary is agential world*, that's why it is so interesting when you are available to it as a child. i am drawn to it --> agency bestiary sets to betray the anthropocentric binary: “active human =/= passive nature”)
(how to tell?) faithful and fantastic stories ==> better companion species
*a shift in humanities scholarship
(feminist science studies, the post humanities, the ecological humanities, animal studies, queer theory,) humanities scholars have represented their matters of care with an aesthetic (and therefore political) commitment to narrating stories with an emphasis on the relationality among agencies, forces, phenomena, and entities usually kept separate, in the backgroun[...]
(27)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%16.7[...]-> La Guin's bag, bundle) }--> rigs
**aesthetics are political because they do consequential relational work**
novels, poetry, feminist theory, speculative fiction, bestiary list categories--these genres of composition *gather together* and *stage* their “matters of care” in ways that perform relations between things and teach their readers to inhabit sometimes unfamiliar, agential world. they are practices of sf worlding.
fiction ==> attitude --> holds things
(emphasis on) worlds that come together through dispersal (vofur وفور), induction (makesh مکش), volatility (farar فرّار), toxicity, drift,
the power that comes with ‘other’ (time/place of) styles of composing
(*bestiary is agential world*, that's why it is so interesting when you are available to it as a child. i am drawn to it --> agency bestiary sets to betray the anthropocentric binary: “active human =/= passive nature”)
(how to tell?) faithful and fantastic stories ==> better companion species
*a shift in humanities scholarship
(feminist science studies, the post humanities, the ecological humanities, animal studies, queer theory,) humanities scholars have represented their matters of care with an aesthetic (and therefore political) commitment to narrating stories with an emphasis on the relationality among agencies, forces, phenomena, and entities usually kept separate, in the background, or out of the story altogether (lde a Bellacasa)
--> redistribution of agencies
political stake ==> aesthetic tactics
poet laureates of queer animacies
“malek-o-sho'ara-e atefiate mahsus-e edrakat-e zende” (ملک الشعرا عاطفیات محسوس ادراکات زنده)
(animacy: Usually, animacy has to do with how alive or how sentient a noun is. In general, personal pronouns have the highest animacy, the first-person being the highest among them. Other humans follow them, and animals, plants, natural forces such as winds, concrete things, and abstract things follow in this order; however, according to the spiritual beliefs of the people whose language possesses an animacy hierarchy, deities, spirits, or certain types of animal or plant may be ranked very highly in the hierarchy.)
**animacy stories --> multitude of agencies
(what are the contemporary ajayeb animacy stories?
(neo-Darwinian's) standard evolutionary accounts of encounter between species (in terms of “sexual deception”) ==> individuation, competition, efficiency --> capitalist and military values (, economic tropes)
==> disenchanted “ecologies, populated by blind, reactive automations”
evolutionary stories =/= involutionary stories --> organisms become *involved* with one another's lives
(involution, pich-dar پیچدار, act or an instance of enfolding or entangling, an inward curvat[...]
(30)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%16.8[...]e definite response-abilities that are strengthened in such stories (La Guin > Haraway > Kenney)
bottomless story ==> response-ability (an enabling of responsiveness within particular relatings--Schrader 2010)
not only human call & not only human respond --> the world is full of “propositions” (waiting to be registered by interested bodies) [yes we need to produce ‘interested bodies']
“fables of response-ability draw our attention to who is interested and who is made articulate in the apparatuses and ecologies we live inside.” (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 (“mat[...]
(32)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%17[...]n 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 tell enchanted stories --> <== we must struggle against the fear of being tricked ***
-this fear of being tricked ==> Descartes’ beast-machine hypothesis (against nonhuman agency) : the clockwork animal and gods; a site where animality and technicity were collapsed and both were rendered as deceptive.
-Descartes’ beast-machine anxieties are sti[...]
(33)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%17[...]<--> 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 tell enchanted stories --> <== we must struggle against the fear of being tricked ***
-this fear of being tricked ==> Descartes’ beast-machine hypothesis (against nonhuman agency) : the clockwork animal and gods; a site where animality and technicity were collapsed and both were rendered as deceptive.
-Descartes’ beast-machine anxieties are still with us. (being duped by the) trickster agencies of animal-like automata--animals, spirits, and technologies have dubious agencies.
(my work on ajayeb hopefully,) is about cultivating wild facts, to be at risk with our craft, creating beautiful objects that give charismatic form to their matters of care
i don't know in advance, how stories and words will flow through us --> i have to learn pragmatic experimentation with magic, words and ideas: [#ppp]
•poetry --> to do with the art of language
•poiesis --> process of creation
•poetics --> questions of composition and form
}--(attention to)--> form + composition + influence
“i am rubied by your attention”
(ruby: yaghute sorkh یاقوت سرخ) ~-> to describe the effect of an encounter between two
...shifting verbs to nouns and nouns to verb }--> practical
*relational properties of language:
•viscosity (chasbandegi چسبندگی)
•conductivity
•velocity
(=/= daunting)
-collective
-[...]
(36)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%17[...] about authenticity (fixity and normativity) than about *textures of spacetime* (prefixial movements)?
[harkate johari حرکت جوهری ~/=? harkate pishvandi حرکت پیشوندی]._/'--> Sadra
(Susan Stryker warns) that transsexuals, in their capacity to be monstrous, arise, like Frankenstein's creature, from the operating tables of their (re)birth as “something more, and something other” than their medical service providers may have intended or imagined
more & other =/= with & of
*gender: sociopoliical taxomomizing ontologically distinct form (entwined) with enfleshed mattering
*animality: sensuous materialities, composites of affects and percepts, specificities but remain thresholds of emergence, individuation that prompt sensuous intra- and interchange ==> provocations
(Weaver, Kelley, Weinstein, Hayward, Kier, Franklin:) animal difference announces a radically singular Other marked by sexual differences
“trans-infused apprehensions and engagements with the expansive world of possibility opened up by non-anthropocentric perspectives.”
trans* + animal --> (alternative ways of envisioning) futures of:
•embodiment
•aesthetics
•biopolitics
•climates
•ethics
we have to negotiate the [contaminated concept of] human --(to deal with)--> the persistence of humanism in structures of thought
critical animal studies has(?) the transformative power to interrupt humanism and its sexually differentiated legacy by challenging the boundaries between, and existence of, differentiated, essential kinds.
robust, nondualistic theories of human/animal
Critical Life Studies
•*species panic* (<-- the concept of the homosexual panic defense) {androids: species + trans embodiment}--> **genuine animals** transitivity: “shifting positions on a series of spectrums, where human, animal, and machine bleed into one another” [Huebert]--{"it”: exclusive right of gendered pronouns--"it” ascribed to artificial animals and androids --> the distinction between “genuine” and “inauthentic”; “it” leaves us in a perpetual species panic}
•*animal symbolic* --> origin of the construction of the human located in sexual difference [Nurka]
it seems with ‘human’ one always spring inexorably back to sex --> sexual difference and its origins in the problematic of difference
-individuating difference ==>? prepositional singularities--the potentialities to differ that are not yet stabilized into the categories of an individual
[Nurka > Colebrook] concept of “transitive indifference” transforms the self/other pairing beyond the demands of recognition and relation --> (all-too-often) animal difference serves to secure human sameness [=/= ouroboros abyssal beastliness] --> ontological difference serves only[...]
(37)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%19[...]tasies (--Chen)
•
...................................
(Mehran Rad) on description of spring
kofr کفر <--> “nature” (tabi'at طبيعت) <---> bahar بهار <--> bot-khane بت خانه
Manuchehri: نوبهار آمد و آورد گل و یاسمنا باغ همچون تبت و راغ بسان عدنا http://ganjoor.net/manoochehri/divanm/ghaside-ghete/sh1/
Hafez: کنون که در چمن آمد گل از عدم به وجود بنفشه در قدم او نهاد سر به سجود http://ganjoor.net/hafez/ghazal/sh219/
=/= durdastha دوردستها, beyonds
donya دنیا <--> gozar گذر
-->? materialist
Nezami:
بهاری داری ازوی بر خور امروز که هر فصلی نخواهد بود نوروز
گلی کو را نبوید آدمی زاد چو هنگام خزان آید برد باد
(ruse, san'at صنعت -->) hile حیله =/= sho'bade شعبده (shab-bazi شب بازی, neyrang نیرنگ,)
lahn-haye jahan
لحنهای جهان
...................................
(feral?) table of contents
how we know that contents are tabled at all? --> inheritances of taxonomy, natural philosophies aesthetics: tamed facts
#Rigs, my ajayeb diagrams
...................................
ajayeb's histories (~ ajayeb's historically situated relational worldings) =/= societies of individuals in human-only histories (~ Euclidean figures and stories of Man)
(which network is?) a netbag for collecting up what is crucial for ongoing
ajayeb's technotheocratic geoengineering [, it “fixes” some common imaginations the “affairs of life,” and not specifically the “afterlife,” (within the {terminology ~} figural-conceptual powers of syms and material-semiotic time-space of the Indo-Greco-Arab-Turko-Persian terra taxa)]
•periods of time
•“known” life
-known” life
•abode (budgah بودگاه, Wohnplatz)
•donya دنيا
-stories that focus on composition rather than intrusion
-stories that focus on ongoingness rather than game-over
(Haraway > Stengers > Latour > Margulis) Gaia, to name complex nonlinear couplings between processes that compose and sustain entwined but nonadditive subsystems 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
[...]
(38)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%19.3[...]hat sustains or preserves the connection between ideas, values, and objects
{ affects as contagious =/= (inside/outside) “outside in” model of emotions (for axample, when we say: atmosphere “getting into the individual”)-->[part of the intellectual history of (crowd) psychology and the sociology of emotions] }--> affect becomes an object only given the contingency of how we are affected
“what we will receive as an impression will depend on our affective situation” --> Julia's post-Lacanian feedback: bodies never arrive neutral
*everything depends on the angle of our arrival* (<-- my point in lecture-performances) ~-> **pedagogic encounter is full of angles** (--> is that why i am becoming increasingly pedagogic?)
(by distinguishing between “did/how it work for you” and “did/how it work for the artist” -->) *internal communication =/= external communication* [what goes on inside the text on the level of fictional mediation is not to be confused with the non-fictional realm inhabited by the reader nor by the author]
(we are facing the right way -->) *aligned =/= alienated* (<-- we are out of line with an affective economy)
***(then how to) share an orientation [, also refuse to share an orientation toward certain things]
[an aesthetic question which is moral. how two of my teachers, Julia and Phil, did this?]
to get along =? to share direction
politics of good feelings
(slide between) affective and moral economies
*how feelings participate in making things (good) <--✕--> germanicity
how bodies turn toward things
[*]affect-->{
•messiness of the experiential
•unfolding of bodies into the worlds
•drama of contingency
“hap” -->{
•happening --> chance
•happiness --> stickiness
}--> contingency of what happens as something good --> *worldy question of happenings*
=/= (21st century) hard work, Aufgabe, happiness as an effect of what you do
happiness is
•intentional: directed toward objects --> phenomenological sense
•affective: contanct with objects
happiness puts us into intimate contact with things, [...] even if that something does not present itself as an object of consciousness (Ahmed) --> *coming and going of objects*
“to be affected by something is to evaluate that thing”
#my Rigs? simulate a course of action of description
•near the object?
•near sphere (<== happiness)
•core sphere
•orientation
--> practical action
•course of action
we come to have our likes, which might even establish what we are like. the bodily horizon could be redescribed as a horizon of likes. to have our likes means *certain things are gathered around us*
[what about “beyond”? =/= near-sphere Zolmat]
[...]
(39)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20.5[...]nsory 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
{elements, scenes, encounters, }--they-->{sediment, accrue, circulate, unfold, go flat, }-->{saturate a situation, fly under radar, p[...]
(40)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%21.3[...]010) 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
{elements, scenes, encounters, }--they-->{sediment, accrue, circulate, unfold, go flat, }-->{saturate a situation, fly under radar, pull into alignment, fall out of sync, }--> “a regional aesthetic hardens into iconic scenes of living”
calling to eachother in an intimacy of jokes about the things that can happen in their world
voice:
•the tone
•the timing
•the accent
•the phrasing
•the level of force
•the purposefulness of the way that voice lives in light, with trees, in the potentiality of a laugh
•
consistency of a laugh or an edge
***when the muteness of things metamorphose[...]
(41)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%21.3[...]lds (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
{elements, scenes, encounters, }--they-->{sediment, accrue, circulate, unfold, go flat, }-->{saturate a situation, fly under radar, pull into alignment, fall out of sync, }--> “a regional aesthetic hardens into iconic scenes of living”
calling to eachother in an intimacy of jokes about the things that can happen in their world
voice:
•the tone
•the timing
•the accent
•the phrasing
•the level of force
•the purposefulness of the way that voice lives in light, with trees, in the potentiality of a laugh
•
consistency of a laugh or an edge
***when the muteness of things metamorphoses into an aesthetic phenomenon*** --> singularities incite it
(an actual physical shadow of a state of being)
sing of something amiss:
•depression
•withdrawal
•indifference
•dysfunction
(my mother in Tehran:) a curtained house reduce the gestural economy of seeing and being seen to an occluded vision in which objects are dark, shadowy outlines with black cores, like a world seen through a ripe cataract آب مروارید -->(the house video project i did ‘city of domes’ 2008 http://www.sinaseifee.com/Cathedral.html was actually about that kind of attunement in my mother's house. i was committed to the description of interiority; my allegiance was inward. watchful consciousness in which one witnesses the procession of inner events of light perception <== a sense of lack. sensous grounding of the inner life)
window: a method of worlding in itself, a node of lines of sociality and mood
curtained house --> sign of something amiss (depression, withdrawal, indifference, dysfunction) but “the actual physical shadow of a state of being that broke the circuit of a *gestural economy of se[...]
(42)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%21.3[...]◦the accent
•the phrasing
•the level of force
•the purposefulness of the way that voice lives in light, with trees, in the potentiality of a laugh
•
consistency of a laugh or an edge
***when the muteness of things metamorphoses into an aesthetic phenomenon*** --> singularities incite it
(an actual physical shadow of a state of being)
sing of something amiss:
•depression
•withdrawal
•indifference
•dysfunction
(my mother in Tehran:) a curtained house reduce the gestural economy of seeing and being seen to an occluded vision in which objects are dark, shadowy outlines with black cores, like a world seen through a ripe cataract آب مروارید -->(the house video project i did ‘city of domes’ 2008 http://www.sinaseifee.com/Cathedral.html was actually about that kind of attunement in my mother's house. i was committed to the description of interiority; my allegiance was inward. watchful consciousness in which one witnesses the procession of inner events of light perception <== a sense of lack. sensous grounding of the inner life)
window: a method of worlding in itself, a node of lines of sociality and mood
curtained house --> sign of something amiss (depression, withdrawal, indifference, dysfunction) but “the actual physical shadow of a state of being that broke the circuit of a *gestural economy of seeing and being seen*”
in the maner of my mother: you don't warm up to stranger, you know who you are talking to, you watch what is going on, you help those in the circle
(Stewart describing how in her town) lamps were strongly favored over overhead lighting, lending texture and specifity to the scenes
a pause at a window --> to check in with the unfolding and pleating of a world pulled in and out through the glass <-- this is not just a practice of looking but a mood*, ruminative or touched, for good or [...]
(43)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%21.4[...]
Taussig's “I Swear I saw This” is the stuff of ajayeb. he wrote a book about a drawing he made in his notebook when he saw what might have been a woman leaning over what looked like a man lying down at the enterence to a freeway tunnel in Medellin in 2006 --> ajayeb is also about writing about what ‘might’ be or have been.
**a mediation on writing and drawing in a horrible world**
#my drawings in my notebook/papers in our apass meetings
-a hand that draws a scence also draws itself into its corporality, conjuring it in the manner of
-a line records as for what it leads the doodler to see
-“a autobiographical record of a discovery of an event” --> a trace and suspension of a wobbly emergence of alertness (to what my friend might have said) ---> these are lived abstractions
possible paradigms for the convergence of emergence:
•affinity --> Leo
•complexity --> Eszter
•(auto)poiesis --> Hoda
•perception as action --> Elen
•speculative realism --> Zoumana
•radical virtualization --> Aela
--> we are all somehow busy (in apass) with reorienting to the creativity of thought-action crossings
life is germinaly جرثومهای aesthetic, and the aesthetic anywhere is already political* --> Kenney
[title]
ajayeb's stories of natural and dreamed up things
the immaterial matterings of supra-personal imaginal real of ajayeb forms
(different names for the same thing:)
•forms of emergent in the conduct of life (Nietzsche, Foucault attending to the intimate relations between knowledge and power)
•worlding, the mirror play of materiality and its poetic composition (Heidegger)
•planes of expressivity reaching a point of recognition or force (Deleuze and Guattari)
•the shimmer (Barthes)
•rhythm in itself (Lefebvre)
•structures of feeling into political theory (Raymond Williams)
•forms emergent in the conduct of life are immaterial matterings --> *the contact aesthetics* of natural and dreamed up things throwing themselves together (Stewart)
ajayeb is a literally unblievable image, a sociality, a muscle, a world thrown together in a sensory refrain witnessed by a present subject; collective dreamed up nature and historical presents ripe with rhythms and speeds, with streams of matter and thought; ajayeb is a capacious assemblage
ajayeb stories are:
•material-sensory arc of history
•series of absent/present (moments) sensed through forms and events
lostness or reslessness of drifters
fantasies of potential “home”
(a plce of) abjection of state neglect ==> production of future
(Stewart's) the middle-class mobile citizenship and the proper traveling subject
J[...]
(44)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%21.9[...]br />
possible paradigms for the convergence of emergence:
•affinity --> Leo
•complexity --> Eszter
•(auto)poiesis --> Hoda
•perception as action --> Elen
•speculative realism --> Zoumana
•radical virtualization --> Aela
--> we are all somehow busy (in apass) with reorienting to the creativity of thought-action crossings
life is germinaly جرثومهای aesthetic, and the aesthetic anywhere is already political* --> Kenney
[title]
ajayeb's stories of natural and dreamed up things
the immaterial matterings of supra-personal imaginal real of ajayeb forms
(different names for the same thing:)
•forms of emergent in the conduct of life (Nietzsche, Foucault attending to the intimate relations between knowledge and power)
•worlding, the mirror play of materiality and its poetic composition (Heidegger)
•planes of expressivity reaching a point of recognition or force (Deleuze and Guattari)
•the shimmer (Barthes)
•rhythm in itself (Lefebvre)
•structures of feeling into political theory (Raymond Williams)
•forms emergent in the conduct of life are immaterial matterings --> *the contact aesthetics* of natural and dreamed up things throwing themselves together (Stewart)
ajayeb is a literally unblievable image, a sociality, a muscle, a world thrown together in a sensory refrain witnessed by a present subject; collective dreamed up nature and historical presents ripe with rhythms and speeds, with streams of matter and thought; ajayeb is a capacious assemblage
ajayeb stories are:
•material-sensory arc of history
•series of absent/present (moments) sensed through forms and events
lostness or reslessness of drifters
fantasies of potential “home”
(a plce of) abjection of state neglect ==> production of future
(Stewart's) the middle-class mobile citizenship and the proper traveling subject
Janina's “i don't know” s
a material semiosis of choices
what are ajayeb promises?
wtinessings, encounters, timeouts, fantasy, distraction,
a 19th century elite tradition of secular pilgrimage to the sacred
pursuit of see-it-yourselfness
a spectacular form of amnesia *
(the joints of my pop-up book) spin around fantastic axes
Stewart: “the state of public transportation in the U.S. is an event in the worlding of bodies in motion”
-a landscape abuzz with connectivity
shape-shifter jumping between composition and concrete
my apass project:
(sharing with you) the pleasure of recognizing a described world (in ajayeb)***
(i can sense the [...]
(46)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%21.9[...]◦fictocriticism (fiction + theory + criticism; a name for those “critical” inventions which belong to literature while deforming its limits)
•sensory ethnography (ethnographic engagement based on curiosity and attachment) --> drawing
--> paths lit up in a rhythm interrupted
(as an aritist) you can make anything of anything, the questions is, what is it, what is it doing, what is in this consistency of rhythm?}
[*]social: comprised of entities that are both present and absent (==> ajayeb), atmospheres, affects, virtual memories, hauntings, and that these are themselves moments of endurance (or not?), instants of the holding together of the disparate itself
(Stewart > Doel)
[!* Stewart describing the color] *red: “it moves through streams and tendrils into an associational register of connections and differences, materials and noumena وجود مجرد, the coagulation دلمه شدن and diffusions of lines of influence and bits of matter.”
(in my visual art studies we were given redness as a symbolic element in a representational order and a matter-of-fact) =/= state-of-sensory-alert, redness as an actual composition spun into representations, objects, and states of sensory alert
“[...] a germinal aesthetic. a tendril of practices and sensibilities gathered into an energetics of form
•black sky and ocean --> limit, outline, elemental flux, matter waiting formlessly
•white ice and snow --> stasis, shape and form, a blankness that challenges composition, the transitoriness
•red --> the feebly real, the long, low-frequency wave-lenght of the dying stars, the past, the effort to fix dead reality in a cast *
•green --> plants that glare with a harsh reality, the violence at the heart of the world we inhabite
•blue --> a limited, temporary success in fixing experience in a pattern
•
a landscape animated by the primariness of color =/= Molenbeek
american indians became “red” through a complex semiotics of encounters with colonists
...who knows what kinds of desires, fears and dead ends
(pay attention to Stewart list making narrative:)
events, sites, actors, stakes, consequences, properties, competences, modalities, attunements, velocities
... a world ==> ephemeral sparks ==> an atmosphere ==pulled==> qualities of sociality, personality and language out of people [--> ajayeb] ==created==> spaces of care, territoriality, order, horror
the stark mantras of representational critique: that the play of abstract categories (real/fabricated, nature/human habitat, wild/tame, red/white, high/low, etc.) bloodlessly determine worlds or adequately describe them ==> { everything is political = to always know what the political is }--> ‘political’ : something that exists in the big picture of broader significance, somet[...]
(47)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%22.3[...]ions the analyst brings to them
(if) ontology: what is ==> alterity: part of what others say ‘what is’ that does not make sense to us
(the danger of) a new metaontological orthodoxy becoming a immutable metaphysic
archeological alterity: things that do not make sense ontologically (escape traditional frameworks)
archeology's new kind of reflexivity
•openness
•wonder: an intentional naivete, naive empiricism (==> sustain altering + enabling meaning, to be besieged & committed to ---> go to Cinderella =/= moving beyond)
•emphasis on descriptive =/= theoretical
•attentiveness to our embodied responses
(a question of critical ontology in archeology -->) how are we to mobilize & manifest (describe & transform) the new past from things? [<-- my question in my research on ajayeb]
•how i am subjectively involved in the past we investigate
•how i am objectively part of those pasts
the all encompassing (nonlinear) descriptive writings of ancient and antiquarian travelers --> what is encountered imposes itself ==force==> a choice ==> description
kinetic activity + the experience of being in the field
aesthetic attentiveness of bestiaries
pragmatic use of the word ontology in archeology --signal--> the potential world-shifting nature of what is being studied
to be ontological = entirety of the analytical apparatus and what is being studied should be included in the analysis
(caught up in the process:) the object of study + analytical scaffolding + method + analyst
the degree to which an approach is willing to do ontology to itself (investigate its own ontological assumptions)
metaphysical archeology + ontological anthropology --> perspective on reality
(assign things to preexisting conceptual structures =/=) looking for ways things can have an impact on your thinking, concepts, ontology ==> unlocking what is most “of the past” about things
...................................
Alberti
Ingold
correspondence: (a pre-conceptual practice -->) epistemological intimacy in the practices of art, science, and anthropology
•a way to understand one's own research process
(archeology: a science of correspondence)
Alberti suggesting to separate arts and crafts (for analytical purposes)
artwork: non-conceptual outcomes of practice
artwork & archeological things --share--> ontological problem of how to make something new [~ *sensations/past never before experienced/thought*] out of (circumscribed body of) materials
archeological things carry both sensation & *residue of concepts* with them (~~> artistic research =/= artworks)
==> resurrect the c[...]
(48)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.3[...]/>
(we need more) art: careful accumulation of skills
21st century historiographic trends in art
artists increasingly *deploy simulacra of archeological practices and motifs* in their work
art practiced as craft (but not all the time) ==allow==> knowledge grow from the insight of being in the folding of life [of infantile grandious fantasy, as well] ~=? anthropology
producing contemporary ruins to draw attention to *the work of the present in the production of the past*
*artists take archeology as muse*
(through borrowing from archeology artists)
•create a kind of intellectual framing
•incorporate archival research
•themes of memory and entropy
•question of absence
•
prosaic nature of archeological research
production of the finds
the way Dion distorts archeological work (allegorizing archeological practice) --Alberti-->
•consequence of sleight of hand
•he is dibbling at, performing being an archeologist
•‘play at’ archeology
=/= Simon Callery
Alberti > Russell
transform archeology from metaphor to allegory --play--> archeology-as-aesthetics through performance [--> risk of undermining and reinforcing art as a subjective practice concerned with only aesthetics and affective]
craft: a model for careful practices and knowing the world =/= artwork: a model for how to break out of disciplinary frames and how to think of the ontology of archeological things [--> what Sennett calls epistemic breaking]
questions for the art:
•what effect is produced?
•how does this effect wrench from its materiality what has not been perceived or sensed before?
--> for archeology same question, from the material that remain from the past in the present
(the traditional task of art:)
•defamiliarization: to estrange our common consciousness and sensations of the world
•place of immanence: to project the coming of something materially new that is latent in our current reality. to *treat facts as events* that are about to come into being
•art is non-conceptual : impacting the nervous system without conceptual mediation --> sensations are monumentalized in the artwork for the future
•
...to treat the material of the past as anticipating something new
(my research and work on bestiary:)
•how can we produce new works that challenge us to think and experience archeological things (ajayeb) in new ways without resort to explanation or interpretation through a process of disarticulation, repurposing, and disruption of archeological artworks with a political intent in mind? (interpretive framework)
•how to allow ajayeb to continue to operate effectively on us?
both affective[...]
(49)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.5[...]rgies, etc.), various surfaces, degrees of busyness and calm --> how to look at this kind of work?
(we don't need anymore art like this: as if they have been made on secret, and *their radicalism lends them a sort of urgency* [<-- no no!], a perpetual quality of surprise)
-my imaginal portals: to invoke an inviting world of associations, a scented cool, ~ an indirect way of naming (=/= to program language : reducing language to a debasing perceptual shorthand)
-proposing ‘it is’ by placing another beside it, cultivating opposition and tension
“something understood” --> left open, undefined, ...
(Elen's “je suis” [Ich bin] in her images and...)
(with the help of Janina, we are) madly in love with the surface of the world
@Marialena; transmembering power of the sea, nautical daryayi دريايي، مربوط به دریانوردی، ملوانی
saying what ‘you’ see & saying why you ‘see’
the more accurate and sensory the apparent evocation of things, the more we have the sense of someone there doing the looking (<-- USA spectacle knows this)
X in Y's translation
“a fish never makes an aesthetic mistake” --> it sends us hurrying to every visual image of fish we can think of, to see if it could be true*
(a good) description: an evocation of the sensory world also suggests the limitations of such evoking, maintaining a sort of open space
in which meaning isn't closed or completed, but remains instead generative
a title sometimes does the useful work of placing us specifically, so that the body of the poem can turn its attention to the heart of the matter
(it is surprising how strongly the) naming of particulars ==(bring color into)==> poem's (or text's) perceptual web
distortion's power to suggest but not define linkage
•the use of ‘like’ --> would draw a firm line between the two elements
•not using ‘like’ --> no firm gesture of equivalence ==> we confront a metaphor that is far more alive in its associations, far more ambiguous, and more crucial --> both an evocation of alienation and a recognition of communality --tonally--> composed of *equal portions of sorrow and wonder* --> forcing us *to remain in the position of interpreter* of something that is perpetually open =/= direct statement
Blake (and Attar?) wouldn't be the great poet he is if he could allow his bloom to be entirely symbol
--> a bloom attached to the speaker, a memeber of Lord Death's troops, an assistant to the disruptive powers of the night
=/= transcendence
crucible بوته اهنگرى, this nere-archaic word with its connotations of flame and molten metal, magical heat and transformation
sunflower: the cry of the det[...]
(51)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%24.9[...]ocation of sense perception (--> a technique that Adventure Times TV series uses)
...................................
Foucault [_bestiary of the imagination]
...precisely because it puts them into categories of their own, the Chinese encyclopedia localizes their [fantastic entities, fabulous animals, polymorphous and demoniacal faces, creatures breathing fire,,] powers of contagion
encyclopedia ==> quality of monstrosity does not affect any real body (=/= lurk)
animals in the non-place of language, meeting in the immaterial sound of the voice pronouncing their enumeration
“Absurdity destroys the ‘and’ of the enumeration by making impossible the ‘in’ where the things enumerated would be divided up.”
the ‘operating table’
a table --> a tabula, “that enables thought to operate upon the entities of our world, to put them in order, to divide them into classes, to group them according to names that designate their similarities and their differences--the table upon which, since the beginning of time, language has intersected space.” (Foucault, The Order of Things)
...................................
*questionable interpretations
#attention
([art/]aesthetics of noticing)--> appreciation of multispecies landscape, making living ecologies
which sectors/fields of art require artist to go out and notice things?
(engage with which) details of the world --> breaking common sense
our mamalian bias:
•predetermined body shape and size
•run toward death (pre-programmed death =/= history) ==> makes us think in terms of set-life courses
}==> allow us to imagine a standard individual outside of history
(Tsing's) history: overlapping tracks and traces and many trajectories of world-making, human and not human
irreversible time ==> indeterminacy (of history) --> new alliances --> the ability of assemblages to produce historical changes in our common world
what needs to be stated
what needs to be produced
context-dependent --?--> the way things are
architecture of podium <--✕--> labor-process of the actual speaker
how talks are *actually* produced
in your material practices
hybrid in digital manual tactile operations of speaking
noticing ants, spiders, little traps, species cohabiting, mutual coproduction of economics, ecology, labor-studies, house-hold studies, ajayeb-studies, and understanding of the orders of the natural and human world
(Gordon allowing) *algorithms to become stories*
(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-ha[...]
(52)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%25.4[...]tacular, and violent events =/= (Shapiro's sublimity:) *profundity and density of widespread, private, indistinct, chronic, and fragmented phenomena*
chemical sublime = انباشت استدلالهای جسمانی accrual of bodily reasoning
irritations --> agitations ==> attenuate the effects of vast toxic infrastructure
(masco nuclear) sublime ==translate==> resounding ethical call
chemical sublime ==> ?
...industry's mobilization of law, science, capital
Shapiro: we must look at how the sublime has brokered relations between exposure and the status quo since at least down of the enlightenment
(quintessential of enlightenment project) Kant's sublime: the immensity/might first overwhelms our imaginative capacity (or indicating the fragility of human body yielding a sense of helplessness and distress) then this feeling is countered and ultimately overcome by reassuring one's self of power of the mind ==> reason sets humanity apart and above the physical world
[*]sublime: *internal turmoil and sensuous displeasure is elevated into the delight and superiority of reason* --> humanity's continued progressing
(Shapiro + Gene Ray: ideological function of the aesthetic category of the) sublime within Kant's critical system is anxiously bound up with deep *metaphysical optimism*
formulation of sublime:
•form (space, time, and intensity) of exposure
•the relation between the supersensible (mind) and the sensible (matter)
•orientational movement (from without to within or vice versa)
•political reckoning
*bodily reasoning =/= object (of sublime) held at a distance
*sublimation of toxicity =/= mental mastery (over perceived threats)
*amplify =/= extinguish (the tensions, agitations, dissident potentiality of large-scale hazards)
*coalescing of underrecognized disturbances =/= compensation
*beginning of a confrontation =/= resolution
foil of human triumph: “transforming the worst into the best” <-- not possible anymore
...~->? potentiality of living otherwise (---> go to Tsing's contaminated diversity, Chen's queer toxicity)
...in these spaces where *enduring and knowing* are coterminous, the feeling of a living dead seeped into the margins of life for those with even minimal symptoms
(chemical phenomenology)
molecular cohabitants who physically hold our world together also encourage our unravelling*** [Shapiro] becoming a pupil of the air [Sloterdijk] is to attune to the aerostolized material culture and more-than-human semiotics [Kohn] within which one is immersed
***
chemical sublime (does not merely refigure a form of sublime in philosophical discourse but) poses an alternative **schema of eventfulness** (or call to action)
[...]
(53)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.1[...] simulacra that precede and envelope it]
...................................
(?we need) political metamorphosis
the tensions between:
[*]artist's “special task” (to oppose intellectual divisions) {(art of) forming, inventing, fabricating concepts (<== Deleuze and Guattari), (a “task” that) proceeds with a plane of immanence (or consistency) ~= self-referential (=/= referential) --> syntagmatic (word associations)}
and: [*]the increasing difficulty to ask questions (as a result of the constant increase in the specialization of 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
[...]
(54)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.2[...] inquiry) ~=?! clinical studies of nervous illness in the 19th century --> conceptual scaffolding of the emergent science*:
•fascination with the secondary visible effects of primary invisible forces
•long-term labor of social interpretation that required the mutation of old categories and the creation of new ones
==> “witch = misdiagnosed”
epilepsy, the sacred disease, erroneously perceived as resulting from hostile magic
=/= hysteria (hold a special place in the moral imaginary)
the special susceptibility of women to witchcraft mirrored the “feminine weakness” associated with the hysteric, exacerbated by low social status
-in countless accounts of possession, we find descriptions of demons speaking through the mouths of girls
[Baxstrom + Meyers =/= Federici's flat analysis of witch hunt as the tool of subjugation of the local population or of woman by men]
tableau vivant --into--> tableau clinique --into--> tableau critique
hysterical reliving of the original symptom --> reframed trauma: an attempt to suspend the two temporalities (real and reimagined) in the same image
@Hoda
one element of fascination with hysteria was its “look” --> hysteria's aesthetic link to forms of possession
possession --> aneasthesias, amnesias, subconscious acts, somnambulisms, fixed ideas
a scaffolding: conceptually arranged chasm between outer and inner states ==>
•exorcists building on the techniques of inquisitors and witch hunters --> possession acts as the bridge across this chasm
•neurologists and psychologists construct the same
--✕--> (Malinowski's) anthropologists: fieldworkers as truth-tellers returning from the dark corners of the real (the witches are no longer explicitly the target of the inquiry)
Häxan's real object: the specter of sheer nonsense
hunt (even in objective scientific mastery) --> fueled by a desire operationalized in a method of being close enough to something to sense it
...................................
(?every time we have to) show how *the word (that we are using) relates to meaning*
Christensen makes every effort to craft a witch that is real to us : ontological fluidity of a cinematic image ==> “Häxan = word + image + thing”
metoposcopy: the expression of reasoning was to be found on the face, (dating back to Girolamo Cardano and the Renaissance) the operation of reason as the weaving together of images in the mind --> a proto-cinematic theory of the relation between image and thought if ever there was one
•respectable scholar indexes himself through his sources
•authoritarian first-person tenor --> instrumentally impersonal tenor
•establishing the X as a chapter within a much longer constellation of practices, discourses, traditions, and institutions
<[...]
(56)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.6[...] with emptiness) --> to give something i ‘would’ have? --> (giving that which is not a property, not even one's self,) to give behind or beyond any subject, any self? --> *the giving of the fact that i cannot possess myself* ==> ‘to give' = 'to give up’
***love: to share the impossibility of being a self***
----> (Nancy's) ‘body’ (of political thought): not as an organicity, but of community as the living to share precisely an impossibility of being-in-common (=/= ontologize the community, after the death of God, Rousseau: community of mankind as the foundation of politics --> “man” comes from the “contract” and not reverse)
----> “giving” the (Derridean) ‘gift’ cannot succeed if the giver knows about his/her gift; *unpresentable*
--✕--> politics and the political always implies fulfillment, law, closed space, *closure*
(Pir's) heaven of value
(Bergson's) supplementary soul
there is a nihilistic way in which we destroy
“everything is political” =/= everything is directly ontologically political ==> totalitarianism: everything belongs to law --> make law about anything (--> Plato's political theology: thought is founded on something; - @Varinia, “management of justice”)
national aestheticism
over-educated ~=? brainwashed
[in my lectures i am trying to teach something (Heidegger, Sa'di, etc.) in ‘a certain way,’ and that ‘certain way’ touches me and i hope touches my audience, even if one don't understand much of it at the time of lecture. i am trying to think by the outside, what comes from outside, being touched by it. right now in apass this outside consists of my (living) peers, getting their quantity of imposed ideas and try to work with that. to ‘take part']
...................................
(how?) the exposure of violence becomes the origin of violence (@Mona)
...................................
a preoccupation (of someone/yours) --into--> analytical solution/terms (for example ‘aesthetics’ and ‘gender’ for Strathern)
gift (produced to be seen) --> moments of performance --> *creating a context of display*
[*]gift: participate in and generate internal relations <--> commodities: participate in and generate external relations
you gain prestige in what you give
*there is a lot of ambiguity about what can be seen and what cannot be seen* (<-- this must be understood for any one who is invested in ‘showing’)
***--> the alternation between what you conceal and what you reveal (is[?] at the heart of thinking about creativity, about reproduction, about the perpetuation of society, about the perpetuation of relations)
exchange wealth between two clan groups
wealth
•has an aesthetic form
•has to be grown as well as exchanged
•must be accumulated privately and secretly<[...]
(57)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%33.9[...]> politics and the political always implies fulfillment, law, closed space, *closure*
(Pir's) heaven of value
(Bergson's) supplementary soul
there is a nihilistic way in which we destroy
“everything is political” =/= everything is directly ontologically political ==> totalitarianism: everything belongs to law --> make law about anything (--> Plato's political theology: thought is founded on something; - @Varinia, “management of justice”)
national aestheticism
over-educated ~=? brainwashed
[in my lectures i am trying to teach something (Heidegger, Sa'di, etc.) in ‘a certain way,’ and that ‘certain way’ touches me and i hope touches my audience, even if one don't understand much of it at the time of lecture. i am trying to think by the outside, what comes from outside, being touched by it. right now in apass this outside consists of my (living) peers, getting their quantity of imposed ideas and try to work with that. to ‘take part']
...................................
(how?) the exposure of violence becomes the origin of violence (@Mona)
...................................
a preoccupation (of someone/yours) --into--> analytical solution/terms (for example ‘aesthetics’ and ‘gender’ for Strathern)
gift (produced to be seen) --> moments of performance --> *creating a context of display*
[*]gift: participate in and generate internal relations <--> commodities: participate in and generate external relations
you gain prestige in what you give
*there is a lot of ambiguity about what can be seen and what cannot be seen* (<-- this must be understood for any one who is invested in ‘showing’)
***--> the alternation between what you conceal and what you reveal (is[?] at the heart of thinking about creativity, about reproduction, about the perpetuation of society, about the perpetuation of relations)
exchange wealth between two clan groups
wealth
•has an aesthetic form
•has to be grown as well as exchanged
•must be accumulated privately and secretly
•must be revealed at the *moment of transfer*
•has to take a proper form ~ recognized by others as appropriate
[*]aesthetic = a proper form (at the moment of revelation) that other people have to respond
(--✕--> european notion of aesthetic = eliciting a sense of appreciation of beauty)
(my sister's wedding had/created) an appropriate form
**** exchange situations [shows, exhibitions, events, weddings, etc.] has to appear in a certain form, otherwise people will not recognize it, otherwise they fail to impress people ****
@Foad
-what are Tehran's contemporary contexts in which we can see exchanges working?
younger people are impressing o[...]
(58)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%33.9[...] i am trying to think by the outside, what comes from outside, being touched by it. right now in apass this outside consists of my (living) peers, getting their quantity of imposed ideas and try to work with that. to ‘take part']
...................................
(how?) the exposure of violence becomes the origin of violence (@Mona)
...................................
a preoccupation (of someone/yours) --into--> analytical solution/terms (for example ‘aesthetics’ and ‘gender’ for Strathern)
gift (produced to be seen) --> moments of performance --> *creating a context of display*
[*]gift: participate in and generate internal relations <--> commodities: participate in and generate external relations
you gain prestige in what you give
*there is a lot of ambiguity about what can be seen and what cannot be seen* (<-- this must be understood for any one who is invested in ‘showing’)
***--> the alternation between what you conceal and what you reveal (is[?] at the heart of thinking about creativity, about reproduction, about the perpetuation of society, about the perpetuation of relations)
exchange wealth between two clan groups
wealth
•has an aesthetic form
•has to be grown as well as exchanged
•must be accumulated privately and secretly
•must be revealed at the *moment of transfer*
•has to take a proper form ~ recognized by others as appropriate
[*]aesthetic = a proper form (at the moment of revelation) that other people have to respond
(--✕--> european notion of aesthetic = eliciting a sense of appreciation of beauty)
(my sister's wedding had/created) an appropriate form
**** exchange situations [shows, exhibitions, events, weddings, etc.] has to appear in a certain form, otherwise people will not recognize it, otherwise they fail to impress people ****
@Foad
-what are Tehran's contemporary contexts in which we can see exchanges working?
younger people are impressing one another in terms of consuming or participation in sports, or mobile phones, or whatever --> they create different kinds of relations (#telegram iran?)
(how among my freinds we impress one another?)
younger people, invest value in different things from what older people do
money does not have anything else but number
things that shine, things that glisten, things that sparkle --> a sense in which these objects *give off a presence* [@Janina] and people are affected by this
*quality of shininess* indicates the successful intervention of ancestral spirits --> a spiritual condition (acquainted with health)
they must display to be regarded as worthwhile
with mobile phones: what is going on here, what is their value,[...]
(59)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%34[...]the precarious, accidental, contingent, expedient, striving, dynamic status of life in a messy, complicated, resistant, brute world of materiality, a world regulated by the exigencies, the forces, of space and time” + the conditions under which bodies are encultured, psychologized, given identity, historical location, and agency
*(you can) speak (back) to postmodernism (or democracy etc.), rather than simply speak on (your relationship to) it*
...................................
Hayward on the role of embodiment in visual cultures + meaning of animals in representation
*to envision animal* = to visualize, to experience, to figure, to image, kinds of species, discourses, representations, institutions, histories, epistemologies + to “imagine possible” a set of material and ethical relationships between species
envisioning:
•a mode of seeing and embodying, of immersing and inhabiting, and of storytelling and theorizing in a techno-scientific world of “eye machine”
•a range of practices for situating the “self” (that tender thing in postmodernity) in places and spaces grown thick with entanglements and consequences; a form both of “to face” and “to perceive”
aesthetic conceptions of beauty and/or ambiguity coupled with biological epistemology and phenomenology of the organisms --in--> in Jean Painleve, Genevieve Hamon, Leni Riefenstahl, David Powell ==construct==> a host of hybridized and enmeshed “encounters”
biosemiotics
zoosemiotics
-humanist fascist aesthetic --> desires to memorialize “beautiful and unpolluted” coral communities
-promise of immediate and luminous experience of “jellyfish otherness”
-systems (of power?) that constitutively produce animal and human actors
human-animal + nonhuman-animal + apparatuses --> co-constitutive in the process of trying to know something about whale ecology
(Hayward > Whitehead:) concrescence: “we” (con prefix) ere- (create) scence (sense, or the “scene,” that which is seen), the present is given by a consense of subjective forms. We are multiple individuals, but there are also multiple individual agents of consciousness operant in the construction of the given.
-literal materialization of a dynamic produced
photograph (only one part, a kind of lively limb, of the relay):
(ajayeb style -->) a bumptious and lively event of the processes of whale studies and whales themselves =/= a still record of a whale “that had been there”
the image: a kind of connective tissue, soliciting one's senses
solar light --> brushed up against, even touched, the whale --> translated through the camera --> into film --> into chemical bathes --> into photo-paper --> through my eye as a research assistant
}==> ‘photograph: material, immanent, interconnec[...]
(62)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%34.9[...]rough the camera --> into film --> into chemical bathes --> into photo-paper --> through my eye as a research assistant
}==> ‘photograph: material, immanent, interconnected’ ==> somatic intelligibility (embodiment) to my own somatic intelligence ~ enacted an encounter between the senses (subjective feelings) and their sense (objective knowledges)
a mutual embodiment <-- shared in the event of the photographic space
experience of these photographs [whale or telegram animal video]: an instance of *sensuous knowledge* --> way we are in some carnal modality able to touch and be touched by the substance of images (to feel a visual atmosphere envelop us)
(Grosz's) [*]perception: flesh's reversibility ~ the flesh touching, seeing, perceiving itself, one fold (provisionally) catching the other in its own selfembrace
human/animal and technological sensorium
-Hayward asking how coral communities create representational ruptures in photographs
-Sina asking how telegram virtual communities create representational ruptures in the real of human-animal of Tehran, how the enfleshed animal mobile phone photograph touch us
}--> liveliness of humananimal encounters [the way in which my aesthetic and ethical senses merge with animals in the flesh]
-how people get along in concrete, metamorphic, phantasmatic ways
**sensible and sensual ensembles of materialized capacities and activities that literally and metaphorically make sense of, and to, ourselves and other animals**
(Ihde >) [*]phenomenology: a philosophical style that emphasizes a certain interpretation of human experience and that, in particular, concerns perception and bodily activity --Hayward--> a theoretical practice grounded on the carnal, fleshy, material foundations of subjectivity as it engages and is transformed by and in the world
we attend to: content + form + context
invertebrates, product of displacement and comparison, a ruinous verb turned noun turned classification --Hayward--> foregrounding and rethinking the syntax, optics, and heterogeneity of vertebrate and invertebrate relationality
accountability and responsibility in the enmeshment of knowing, doing, seeing, and being
(we need less philosophizing and more) *envisioning: an enactment of dynamic en-figurings that imperil boundaries that clearly differentiate self and other without the loss of historical, cultural, and species specificity*
...................................
☾
light has illuminated western stories
•God said, let there be light: and there was light
•solar radiance --> refracted planetary atmosphere --> earth's watery matter --> lively forms
•life shaped by ice (Meloy)
•life shaped by dark (Mohaghegh)
•life shaped by animal (Sina)
•life shaped by lig[...]
(64)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%35[...]s of animals are counterparts of lived environments’ : ***animal body: inverted map of its environment*** (mediated by its capacity to interpret habitat through bodily sensation) [Uexküll using music to define the laws of nature: “life = musical response,” effects of *animal capitalism*]
to travel through stages of evolution of the consumer product ~=> becoming a new harmony (<-- using jellyfish as advertising in posthuman consumerism)
-(Lingis -->) [*]sensation: ملقمه amalgamations made of movements and affects that shape the energetic relay between subjects and objects,, an intensity --that--> pressures us --feel--> our cohabitation --in--> a sensible environment --that--> opens outward (=/= simulation of our sensorys or nervous systems) ==> subject is *involved* into the sensuousness of being : *excitation of affect and desire within a sensuous environment ==generate==> substance of self*
•percepts oringinating in environmental harmonization
tranimals invoke the social, affective, sensorial response-abilities of becoming and eating [<-- Hayward's affirmative poetics of trans- --✕--> Stewart's much more complex pattern of description]
-my art work has been more about intensity + techne (= baroque?), than aesthetics ==> ([{when i make images} sharing] our) subjugation to sensation
( sensibility [ ... ) sensuousness ]
|
affect <-- sensation --> affect
affect affect
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) ca[...]
(65)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%35.3[...] those messages become mis/translated into sense and sensation
•transmitted information reformatted and transformed through devices, forces, and processes, and then broadcast to other sensorial subjects... (---> go to my ajayeb-e pit story)
#telegram's zoological corruption =/= State, science
matter owes a debt to its own means of revelation: light
(Hayward's) [*]captivation: extraction of rhythm, pulse, color, texture ==> resonate for alternative purposes buth within the conditions of the frame
the (zoo's or aquarium's) display: motabolizes, creates, releases sensation into the world ==> environment of intense involvement --> familiar orderings are affectively transposed, altered, refigured
jellies --> surrealist white shapes
i am not sure -->
(Desmond's) identification: the beautification of ‘drifters'[spending most of their time motionless with their tentacles extended over ten feet, netting the waters for food] makes cross-species identification impossible --> [*]identification: seeing familiarity in other organisms = a map for empathy and critical engagement* (=/= objectification of radically different organisms) : “transmutation of non-identification into aestheticization” ==> observer gawks بى خيال نگاه کردن and marvels at dissimilarity ==> making difference a marketable feature [--> ajayeb stuff]
=/= Hayward --> [*]identification: misalignment of empathy with the possibility of familiarity --relying-on--> extending empathy across similarity to dissimilarity : *the organism can only receive the benefits of empathy if we can identify with it* (=/= Seymour's wildboyz)
politics of erasure =/= empathy
telegram ajayeb channel =/= idealized visual pathways (save, preserve, conserve vanishing wildlife, while ignoring the idealization of nature)
aquarium (as boundary object) ==> borders of nature and culture (that functions as public spectacle, public enlightenment, and conquest) =/= telegram
-if not the ‘oppressed other’ then what kind of actor is ‘you,’ ‘them,’ or ‘me’?
Ponyo --> low-oxygen environment in which fish die but jellies thrive
distracting --> diffracted ethics --Haraway--> (as a metaphor to talk about) history of interaction, interference, reinforcement, difference =/= reflection or reflexivity: displacing the same elsewhere (in traditions of representation, searching for the authentic really real)
*diffraction: (depending on the phase differences and the amplitude of the light waves) elements of composite light (white light) are reinforced, weakened, or eliminated by each other alternately*
•scales of butterfly wings and fishes...
•modification of the form of a word to express the different grammatical relations into which it may enter
•to put concerns, entities, relationshi[...]
(66)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%35.7[...]s ‘you,’ ‘them,’ or ‘me’?
Ponyo --> low-oxygen environment in which fish die but jellies thrive
distracting --> diffracted ethics --Haraway--> (as a metaphor to talk about) history of interaction, interference, reinforcement, difference =/= reflection or reflexivity: displacing the same elsewhere (in traditions of representation, searching for the authentic really real)
*diffraction: (depending on the phase differences and the amplitude of the light waves) elements of composite light (white light) are reinforced, weakened, or eliminated by each other alternately*
•scales of butterfly wings and fishes...
•modification of the form of a word to express the different grammatical relations into which it may enter
•to put concerns, entities, relationships, and actions into process [-to put your found object into process of interference]
•[*]diffraction: mapping of interference ==Haraway==> where the *effects of* differences appear =/= differences appear
meaning + matter + action (always live together)
telegram animal carousel: nonhuman-animal-machine
my room/bedroom (~-> Cinderella's attic, architecture of containment)
overlapping perceptual worlds
synaesthetic force of perceiving and feeling, processing and mattering --> transposing of senses
immersion
kinesthesia
numerous haptic registers
we are transsensual
[*]sensation: the vibratory force in all organisms that seduces, sexulizes, entices, and mesmerizes the body
vibrate
oscillate
wave
aquarium ==> new sensations: deep-sea drifting and shimmering for upright opaque hominids --> that are sent further adrift through experience in yet unknown expressions
[*]ecology: ambivalent powerful elusive ways of composing through histories of interation, relationality, interconnection, and materiality
relational matter =/= matter of who has agency
Hayward's [and my] attention and sensuous reach are solicited by the ctenophores in the display, a display that instrumentalizes the jellies diffracting cilia and solicits my senses
-jellies participation in worldhood (further becomings)?
immersed in deep marine technoscience worlds...
...................................
Marx: human begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence ==> they produce their actual material life
--Haraway--> Marx understood relational sensuousness, and he thought deeply about the metabolism between human beings and the rest of the world enacted in living labor --> the humanist teleology of that labor: making of man himself
horses
oxen
police dogs
rescue dogs
messenger pigeons
De[...]
(67)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%35.8[...]gurations: (cascading provocations) suggesting questions without answering them, to break from an interpretive paradigm that demands solution-making over and against problem-generating
native
a zoological term
Derrida's blackness (skin color): unsovereign and stateless, criminal and beast
(promise of love -->) relinquishing the body to [*]flesh: pre-discoursive material, a zone of non-personhood, a state of anjection (<-- according to Hayward)
anatomo-political)
soma-politics of the body (of the racial-colonial category of the human)
carno-political question of flesh (under the regime of racial capitalism) --> human/animal divide
•animals in the afterlife of slavery are rendered as flesh (under the regime carno-political regimes of racial capitalist valuation) [<-- Hayward's misrecognition of contemporary society as “regime"]
genre of animal
Gossett + Hayward's argument --> the psychic life of zoophobia and zoophilia are tied up with negrophobia and negrophilia ~= species divides (human/animal) are technologies of race (human/black)
maroon: escaped cattle
typography: domain of style, of appearance, of aesthetic
glyph “*”
asterisk
a diminutive star
limb-y reach
a grasping
erring on the side of over-population, over-use, excessiveness
“*” can denote a database search or censorship
designate multiplication
a disclaimer
mark genetic identity
pseudonyms that have been changed
* --> *the star of life*
xenogenesis --> proliferating difference (genesis) built through pessimism (xeno)
Sun Ra (in Space is the Place ~= earth is “nowhere,” no longer a place [+ Octavia, Delany]) signaled the failed projects of planetary humanist and earthly liberalism, inviting blacks living in Oakland to leave the gratuitous violence of the world
afro-futurism is about the impossible, the unbearable, the failure of the world <--> afro-pessimism (blackness as loss, as nothingness)
(mode of imagination:) “anti-black racism ==> radical politics of abolition”
==> “being (white) is made possible thourgh and with black bodies cannibalized by a racial capitalism and its scientific jaws” [<-- Hayward's politically correct and simple fantasy about good and bad]
...................................
*body* --> sociohistorical construct & constrain
=/=
*embodiment* --> sense of being bodily (pain, ...) [<-- my focus has been on this one more than the other] --> **never embody ironically!** (<-- maybe irony is OK in visual or written medium?)
•embodiment goes beyond body (my body is still my body but also not)
•to pose
•to transpose
in my work, i transpose: walk through readings (=/= transform: perf[...]
(68)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%37.9[...]
which ritual laments are available for massive ecological shifts
...the death of others
...scene of loss (~/= milieu)
}<--Singh-- virtue, piety, self-fashioning do not help to work through this (@apass)
devastation ==> cohabitation (of species that were apart before)
Kelile and Demne --> agonistics can be comic (even if repercussions of tragic) --> mood of violence
“everything has to die”
question of routinized ritual or commercial production of killable bodies and of things ceasing to matter
animals don't die in villages, they could only be killed
anthropology of ethics
what is to kill?
what is to kill well?
what is to ber killed?
what is to be killable?
can we speak of a quality of death?
(Veena, Cavell, Harraway's) ‘companion’ is not a resolution to ethical quandaries of human-animal relations
culpability of homicide <--> veneration of sacrifice
life =/= zoo =/= bios
...................................
retro: (a postmodern sensibility firmly rooted in the present) appropriating [use + exploit, pick + mix] the aesthetics (aspects) of the past while not longing for its return =/= nostalgia: a mode of resistance against the present
retro: a mode of reading, an attitude towards the past without emotional attachment
ironic consumption...
... =/= how adults might perceive the political context
dissident discourse
(audience looking for) counter regime messages
*nostalgia + nationalism within a postcolonial Europe*
Europe's repressed imperial history --> longing for the divided Europe of the Cold War --> postsocialist nostalgia (in television [--> cultural memory])
past: retro comedy
comedy: retrospective representation
(comedy does not?) antagonize its audience ~= build a memory conflict
[*]comedy: strive for reconciliation (by focusing on the everyday life of its colorful characters)
the good soldier Svejk --> good-natured side of czech national identity
self-congratulatory narrative <-- (when you think you are always) morally on the right side
@apass
(tv series) forging resistance-based (national or individual) memory
the way in which a society understands its own past --> through culture (not a matter for politicians and legislative measures alone) that particular narratives about the past are kept alive and help to structure understandings of the present
...................................
strolling: walking in the city --> sense of belonging to the city
walking in 19th century (starting with England) --> something fo[...]
(69)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%38.8[...] mode of operation is in reruns, recombinations, circulating formats and generic adaptations that constantly interweave national, regional and global scales ~= digital social media
(Imre > Boyer) to trace nostalgia back to the intellectual origins of European cultural nationalisms
...diverse and contradictory sentiments that make us see European cultures conjoined in mutual relationships of dependence, rather than separation
(Imre -->) *nostalgia as something by definition national at its core*
nostalgia --foreground--> coexistence of different temporalities in the present
postsocialist nostalgia in Romania is similar in structure to late socialist nostalgia of the 1980s in Hungary
manage feelings of dislocation ==> longing for national homes
~~--> preference for literature and high art as expressions of what has been identified as cultural nationalism (“national tradition = tradition invested in high art”) + perceived illegitimacy of popular cultural production and consumption (concealed by the allegedly rebellious “dissident” status of intellectuals) ==organize==> the contents of collective memory
Imre --> racialized underpinnings of allegedly “pure” aesthetic judgments
inherently nostalgic and pre-modern postsocialist population <==> Western Europe as the epicentre of progressive scientific modernity
television's capacity for personalization and narrativization
*demiworld of popular culture*
television’s dominant position within the domestic environment and its special appeal to an emotionally available female or feminine consumer --> television: the mass medium of the socialist period --pose--> the danger of a passive mindless consumption of formulaic narratives (a danger that has been ascribed to women’s inferior psychosocial needs and tastes =/= cerebral modernist masculinity of art) ---> go to Baxstrom's realizing the witch
Western European cultural nationalisms
the notion of nostalgic and premodern postsocialist population ==> Western Europe as the epicentre of progressive scientific modernity
West’s fanning of East European nostalgia --> a post-imperial symptom = (expression of a growing Western European awareness that) modernity is plurinodal rather than centred in European metropolitan headquarters
(postimperial European dimension of) *cultural nationalism <~÷+-> nostalgia*
...utopian national rebirth scenarios for a united Germany --> (promoted by intellectual artists) the bad idea that suppression of German nationalism ==open==> influx of American audio-visual culture (that muat be resisted in order to preserve and nourish German culture in its purest literary manifestation)
= logocentric return to the ethos of German Romanticism [Kulturnation -[...]
(70)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%39.1[...]emotion onto news narratives
2. act as objective witnesses able to produce truthful accounts
(more and more i feel the iranians need for ‘activism =/= jurnalism’ --> what one wants to happen =/= understanding what is happening)--> epistemology [the question of how one makes sense of one's practices --> in the case of Syria (also Iran): *affective proximity to violence* ==> sense]
...negotiating the distance of mediation when viewers and producers in the Global North are witnessing the suffering of others
(in Iran) activism + art = the human body as tool, medium, symbol, metaphor
[*]affect: circulation + stickiness of emotion (onto and between bodies, texts, objects, experiences) (Ahmed)
journalism = represent + narrate
(the ‘trick’ of) relying on the *outsourcing of emotional labour* to non-journalists (by:)
•having them express their emotions
•having the journalist describe them
(Ghazzi conceptualising the emotional field in journalism -->) ***unequal power relations ==> emotioal labor***
proximity (--> what i heard so much when i went back to iran: to ke inja insti nemiduni تو که اینجا نیستی نمیدونی)
*aesthetic of authenticity* in news reports (<-- mobile phones)
political economy of foreign reporting
politics of hope (with an ambition to inspire all Syrians to rebel)
...emotional attachment to political goals
*revolution: the event that changes people's lives and in relation to which they locate themselves politically
•conflict in Syria began as an uprising, it ended up an international war, which in 2020 appears to have mostly concluded in the favour of the regime =/= revolution
•the word “revolution” means something else to activists in Syria (how the meanings projected on the term changed in accordance to circumstances)
◦(most of the time, artists and activists) ****use a word to galvanise their emotions and bodies**** and inspired them to take actions they would not have imagined to pursue [use of words --> what people hope =/= descriptive]
◦word (for example “revolution”): a marker of an *inward-looking description* of belonging to a broad political community defined by opposition
•“the revolution” --> affectively consumed the pursuit of truth
•an identity-marker (based on a political orientation) --> an inward-looking signifier to mark who one is + what political community they belong to [--> a politics of what one had wanted =/= describe what one observes]
•(revolution:) personified and humanised as a well-meaning political agent (that sometimes strays from its goals by committing errors)
•motivating people to get involved in activism
•
(Said's Orientalism -->) subaltern others (are typically considered) living within a constant state o[...]
(71)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%39.4[...]mpartmenship. fire is an elementary radical reaction to closeness. the third person. pure manifestation.
every mountain range have personalities. rock is arrange by evolution. it tells you about itself when you feel it firm in your hand pressing to your ear, asking thousands of questions, exploring with imagination. stone is not a social creature, maybe that's why we listen to them. fires are social beings, death sentences.
their society and ecology
reaching access to the literacy of fire-work
...................................
(...) --> the black-box --> ka'ba --> an intermediate mechanism to reach beyond the door-knob --> dark medium of worship --> the jinn --> ontology of the envelopment --> an interiority that is exterior --> talking-fire --> mediums of the beyond --> put your ‘thing’ in the fire --> going through the fire --> test some fossils --> ice age --> databases that survive --> promises of futurity --> tech --> black-box is always about the-envelope and the-beyond --> going back to the cave --> monotheism invented darkness (praying in the dark marked singulaity of worship as the begining of subjectivity) --> there is a sudden big shift from telling-stone to talking-fire (introducing the spectacularization of truth-event, where risky aesthetic of fire coded as masculine is traded for a mutuality of slower wilderness a more feminine trope. the telling-stone proposes a totally different ecological model than the survivorship narratives encoded in the trial of the talking-fire. truth became untouchable visual spectacle that can burn and annihilate charging off the haptic closeness of the stone to the ear. truth became the matter of untouchable, visual. the angry truth god came with the fire both as tool of worship and punish (human taking lessens and used fire to discipline the forces of nature) --> the darkness that enveloped the worship, made the absence of light crucial for constructing interiority [note: before going to light-fire the worshipers must wash themselves in Vozu, in Namaz the worshpers wash themselvs before going to the darkness of prayers---is this water that we make vozu the same as ‘abe heyvan’? before going into the hyper space, the ritual plays a key role and a key hole. like all hyper spaces that forwards you yo the beyond the box as well is about deliverence (to the lover?): (for the sake of) salvation ‘rastgari’ is about delivering ‘you’ (--> Ma'ad --> masaleye “enteghal” [be alame digar] [dar tarikh falsafeye eslami irani ---> go to footnote in Motakhabat 2nd volume page44]) --> for *Rumi people is firewood, hizom, inflammables; fire is the present tense, its light is about the future and its ashes about the past: we like ash to perform our archiological readings of old fires and we like its light becsuse it helps us to push through and constatly make-imagine-lighten the future, i this model the present is untouchable.] --> the beyond is beginning to loosen its materiality --> accumulati[...]
(72)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%40[...]e 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)
(-in my amazon book i am pointing out: Esthetic distancing also made possible the landscape arts and connoisseurship and commercialization as scenery painting, tourism, and recreation. To the credit of the Greeks, they resisted converting the landscape into scenery and wilderness into an aesthetic experience.)
we are not directed towards a measured location, (as his-story tries to make belief)
“After you die, others live.” (Sina)
old world's arboreal simians, monkeys
Anthropos
cultures of Pleistocene
-Pleistocene was the time of glaciation and ice. Much of the world's temperate zones were alternately covered by glaciers during cool periods and uncovered during the warmer interglacial periods when the glaciers retreated. it is when the evolution and expansion of Homo sapiens and by the close of the Pleistocene, humans had spread through most of the world.
Agonic / Hedonic --> my Köln group, agonistic doctrine challenges that mode of personality
ontogenesis---extended in human (the specialized and scheduled development of physical and psychological traits that appear, disappear, or stagnate during the life cycle of the individual.) --> Neoteny (a “state of newness"--a retardation of certain parts of the maturing process.) preprograms life stages, so that our becoming is a lifelong process.
-developement of the self in terms of harmonious relations to other species and nunhumans.
-ontogenetic agenda --- (The agenda is a given; the support depends on a social readiness to nurture, itself a product of successful ontogeny of an older generation.)
-many myths correspond to the ontogenesis. in Ontogeny, timing is everything---narrative.
-aspect of the ontogenetic self---(the modern world has lost the ways to guide the) new person emerging at each stage
[from kinfolk complexity and elderhood to medically sustained old age] -[...]
(73)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%40.2[...]isagreement]
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 moment in Shahnameh highlighting this narative---can we look at the story of Siyavash, his fire-trial, against Sudabeh? Siyavash raised by masculine figure Rostam cannot love the feminine processes of Sudabeh, (she wants him, in an experimental [sex] erotic participation, her attempt at melting his moral ice[...]
(74)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%40.5[...]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 moment in Shahnameh highlighting this narative---can we look at the story of Siyavash, his fire-trial, against Sudabeh? Siyavash raised by masculine figure Rostam cannot love the feminine processes of Sudabeh, (she wants him, in an experimental [sex] erotic participation, her attempt at melting his moral ice, which we later find out fire cannot melt***) to break the fabric of obligation (his intense commitment to the father-king combination) =/= tribalism, betraying the patriarchal arrest (the myth of a single god/father and patriarchal faithfulness - *the myth of the strong personality*) ==> Siyavash--patriarcal type of guy who doesn't know how to greet her snaky figure politly--excuses himself of a vital encounter and sustains an ascetic subtraction, and lets Ferdosi--alwayes on God-Fire's side--execute Sudabeh through the bad boy Rostam hyper-masculinity itself. Siyavash/Rostam is utterly non-queer, Siyavash: Rostam's pet project, domesticated, passes the exam. Sudabeh is shocked and screwed-over by the narrative and spectacularisation of the fire's truth-event in an “enactment” plotted by Ferdosi--she is done, she doens't have a deal with fire. She is accused of being Eros, of being garrulous, of wasting words with lunatic prodigality, the chattering, ran[...]
(75)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%40.6[...]the forever unfinished and eroticized nature of human symbolization
gaia <== narrative integration of cosmology and morality (<-- can we do without it?)
eukaryote made from prokaryotes and of the mesocosmic level of animal and plant bod-ies made from reproducing eukaryotes
(three billion years ago, the oldest type of sex on the planet:)
bacterial omnisexuality --> promiscuous: not delimiting sexual exchanges with species barriers (+ it needs intermediaries such as plasmids or viruses to do so)
--> lateral transfer
omnisexuality: a means of genetically “locking” together once-diverse groups (of prokaryotes)
bacterial crowding ==> life on earth
endosymbiosis: one organism swallow another without digesting it ==> origin of new species [<=/= gradual accumulation of mutations]
cancer <== rampant multiplication of the occasionally vampiric mitochondria
bacteria's bodies are so genetically open, that the very concept of species falsjfies their character as a unique life form
Sagan
this zoological “I” [is open to radical revision?]
model of zoocentrism: encased self
(?what are ajayeb) bestiary's aesthetic model of a difference (=/=? zoocentric model)
--Burgess--> interference patterns generated by a series of symbiotically living form ==> artist
as an organism's connections to the external envimnment grow, that environment becomes its body [=/= Sina]
snail
snail whose house is carried on his back, the “case” of the “self” has been moved, through an incorporation of what once would have been called inanimate matters--organically worked and reworked
-subjective identities always already und ergoing active (de)composition
-(relations of) physiological identity and psychological subjectivity link up
Sagan trying to relativize that zoocentric bedrock of “self”
...................................
political chimeras
chiefs’ talk
fluent in a verbal genre
formalized speeches directed either to leaders of other groups (Southern Amazon in multiethnic and multilingual system of Upper Xingu) or to their own people, depending on the context in which they are delivered
--Guerreiro--> both the chief and his audience are symbolically constructed as “paradoxical” subjects characterized by contradictory predicates
•*how uncertainty can enact an exchange of perspectives* (through which the identities of the group and the chief are produced)
(from a gift-theory perspective) chief: donator of goods and words, and a receiver of spouses <-- unilateral direction ==> “chieftaincy کدخدايى: a place of nonexchange” [~ signs are deprived of their circulation value + reciprocity is denied under the demand that soc[...]
(76)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%44[...]ion, mobilizes its invisible parts, by purely optical means or by a set of inferences
-chimerical image associates, in a single visual form, indexes from different beings (a bird and a human being, a serpent and a jaguar, a wolf and a sea lion etc.), provoking a projection by the eye, which gives rise to an image implying at the same time the presence of these different beings
-evokes something that is implicit or absent to the observer
-chimerical images present a specific link between iconic representation (by imitation and convention) and indexical indication (visual, tactile or other) of a presence whose mode of existence, especially mental, is not realized materially
--> game between:
•perception & projection
•iconic representation & indexical indication
==> intensification (of the efficacy of chimeric images) : “capture the eye = capture the imagination” + demand that by projection [the observer] mentally “complete” the image
indexical signs have a causal contiguity (spatiotemporal contiguity) with what they signify
ritual action and artistic creation --Severi--> synesthetic
(my lecture-performances? ~ chimeric image of chiefs’ talk [khotbe خطبه fluent at combining different aesthetic resources] -->) linguistic + extralinguistic media in ritual performance (working/producing visual + mental images)
--> combining of indexical signs in communication acts ==> poetry of identities-in-motion (capable of projecting complex images of a nonvisual kind)
[*]image: an abstract portrait of identity fashioned out of cumulating patterns of congruence across all manner of indexical signs--including visual ones--that addressees and audiences can imaginatively experience, like a hologram
(Silverstein > Guerreiro)
~~--> ***relation between poetics and the production of identities***
chimerical representation: an art of ambiguity
(Strau(Strauss's Amazonian ethnology -->) dualism in perpetual disequilibrium: centripetal forces of centralization + centrifugal forces of dispersion
@apass ==> “societies against the state”
complex relations between hierarchy and counterhierarchy
(--> Renan's notion of monologue)
[Clastres's model rooted in Western language ideology looking at Amerindian language:]
metahistorical bond between *power & speech* cannot be conceived of separately
•state societies --> the word is a ‘right’ to power (that may be used to command)
•societies against the state --> the word is a ‘duty’ of the chief (an indigenous leader must be capable of offering society the words that it ‘demands’)
◾Amerindian chief: a voice preaching in the wilderness (literally says nothing, a repetition of “edifying discourse”) <-- his speech is not spoken in order to be listened to (~ ritualized act [=/= act of communication]) ==> chief's spee[...]
(77)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%44.1[...]nded to mean something
-what was the pragmatic conditions that define the kind of ‘language game’ Ali was playing?
[*]formalization: reduction of combinatory and creative possibilities of language by the use of formulas, archaic vocabulary, syntactic and stylistic patterns {--> distancing the
discourse from its semantic content ==> attention to its context and performance ==> effects}
ritual action --Severi--> reflexivity: definition of its own meaning and effectiveness within the context of ritual communication
(@apass's) performative and poetic structure
[Guerreiro -->] chief = consanguine kin ابى & potentially dangerous enemy [---> go to transference]
(chief's fellows's both as children & prey)
ritual speech ==> ***complex enunciator*** [~= #feedback]
ambiguity of duality of gestural and verbal [==> exchange of perspectives (=/= exchange of words)] --?--> paradoxical construction of identities
+
chimerical representation --> presence of counterparts (of percepted fragmentary signs) to its audience
beautiful and strong body
serene and generous behavior
linguistic abilities (“made to discourse”)
(we are living with) mythical, aesthetic, and ritual elaboration
guiding them with “good speech”
pleasing them by sponsoring rituals
welcome messengers (“made in order to greet messengers”)
relational and possessive
(possessed form of) asymmetrical relationship between a denominated (individualized) person and an undifferentiated collective
agglutinate
enunciated in the same tone with no pauses to breath
+
expletive ah
+
set of particles
+
deictic ige (evidential [devaluating?] particle that indicates proximity, presence, or existence, fixed to the copula --> piece of advice?)
expletive and particles with no lexical element --> self-derogatory forms of speech (the “humbling effect”)
it's common for men to emit long high-pitched and melodic screams as soon as they wake up ==> to wake the whole village up with joy
present is nothing more than an impoverished form of a previous age idealized as grandiose <-- (chief) to “work on his children” like an ancestor, he must state that he could never do so
*parallelism*
enchainment of repeated verses and themes ==> the shaman is symbolically identified as a paradoxical character (human & nonhuman, here & there, in the present time & in the mythic time)
--> transfer properties from one being to another
(formal =/=) ‘performative parallelism’ between the actual chief and those before him ==> attenuate past & present
-he speaks about ancestors, as an ancestor (using their language), and on ancestors’ behalf (since they are gone)
(ant[...]
(78)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%44.2[...]>
expletive and particles with no lexical element --> self-derogatory forms of speech (the “humbling effect”)
it's common for men to emit long high-pitched and melodic screams as soon as they wake up ==> to wake the whole village up with joy
present is nothing more than an impoverished form of a previous age idealized as grandiose <-- (chief) to “work on his children” like an ancestor, he must state that he could never do so
*parallelism*
enchainment of repeated verses and themes ==> the shaman is symbolically identified as a paradoxical character (human & nonhuman, here & there, in the present time & in the mythic time)
--> transfer properties from one being to another
(formal =/=) ‘performative parallelism’ between the actual chief and those before him ==> attenuate past & present
-he speaks about ancestors, as an ancestor (using their language), and on ancestors’ behalf (since they are gone)
(antonymic affirmation of) “past =/= present” ~=> shame in the listeners ==> act as the ancient chiefs’ own children
--Austin--> illocutionary force ==gives==> capacity to perform an act in saying something
*hyperbole (contrast) ==> the audience could be aesthetically and morally compelled
to act in some way (perlocutionary acts)
that which had once been human (--> mythical human origin of the plant corn)
chief is weakened ==> people tend to be more egoistic --> “go crazy” + forget about their relatives = (the first step in) producing a witch
(Pir ~= chief's) foundations of kinship = thinking about kin =/= forgetting kin :
•generating and raising children
•producing food
•avoiding witchcraft
==> fabrication of a collective body of kin
imperfections of the present + ideal of social life ==encourage==> people to behave like kin (<-- needs to be actively produced)
[we have to be carefull in art with performances of] words hold within them the positive moral and creative element of power; and contain meaningfulness, value, artistry and affective mass (--> carrying the weight of an order without appearing as 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 --> gene[...]
(79)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%44.3[...]life and culture in general.)
Representation is a distinctive manner of imagining the real, and is a fundamental phenomenon upon which all culture rests.
Henri Lefebvre distinguishes Representations of space and Representational spaces . ... Representational spaces are “directly lived” through associated images and symbols which overlay physical space, making symbolic use of its objects.
the conceiving mind over the perceiving body (vision/touch)
touching was considered “a cruder scanning at close range,” and seeing “a more subtle touching at a distance.”
for Berkeley there is no such thing as visual perception of depth, and Condillac's statue effectively masters space with the help of movement and touch. The notion of vision as [Ouch is adequate to a field of knowledge whose contents are organized as stable positions within an extensive terrain.
•a technological gaze
•way of seeing (Derridean deconstructed)
•high-tech images
•artifact (cultural artifact, social)
•image of the or a body and its environment
•impossible subject-positioning, the codification of flesh, a visualization of scientific narratives and the aestheticization of information, all of which tell us about a longer line of cultural fantasies about information, code and technology. (Norah Campbell)
•Everything said is said by an observe (Maturana and Varela)
•framing the world
•virtual gaze (Baudrillard)
•achieve absolute vision, while seeing nothing.
•very much as real; human and technological, both
•i say this as someone who thinks that we are part of this digital world, but we are not necessarily subject to its terms
•splicing of direct and tactile human perception of reality with another reality, one that is mediated and technical
•the naration is not pure nor whole (why cyborg?)
•place of visibility (/ field of articulability)
•it is an aesthetic dream, dream of ismorphism between the discursive object and the visible object
•exteriorization of the body (relation between face / hand / tool )
•The “exact meeting place” of form, matter, tool, and hand is the touch(Henri Focillon)
•
////////////////////////
In this interconnection of embodied being and environing world, what happens in the interface is what is important.
--Don Ihde, Bodies in Technology
At first glance, strapped to the body of critters such as green turtles in Shark Bay, off Western Australia, humpback whales in the waters off southeast Alaska, and emperor penguins in Antarctica, a nifty miniature video camera is the central protagonist. Since the first overwrought seventeenth-century European discussions about the camera lucida and camera obscura, within technoculture the camera (the technological e[...]
(80)[...otes on kinect performance.txt]%45.8[...]notion of vision as [Ouch is adequate to a field of knowledge whose contents are organized as stable positions within an extensive terrain.
•a technological gaze
•way of seeing (Derridean deconstructed)
•high-tech images
•artifact (cultural artifact, social)
•image of the or a body and its environment
•impossible subject-positioning, the codification of flesh, a visualization of scientific narratives and the aestheticization of information, all of which tell us about a longer line of cultural fantasies about information, code and technology. (Norah Campbell)
•Everything said is said by an observe (Maturana and Varela)
•framing the world
•virtual gaze (Baudrillard)
•achieve absolute vision, while seeing nothing.
•very much as real; human and technological, both
•i say this as someone who thinks that we are part of this digital world, but we are not necessarily subject to its terms
•splicing of direct and tactile human perception of reality with another reality, one that is mediated and technical
•the naration is not pure nor whole (why cyborg?)
•place of visibility (/ field of articulability)
•it is an aesthetic dream, dream of ismorphism between the discursive object and the visible object
•exteriorization of the body (relation between face / hand / tool )
•The “exact meeting place” of form, matter, tool, and hand is the touch(Henri Focillon)
•
////////////////////////
In this interconnection of embodied being and environing world, what happens in the interface is what is important.
--Don Ihde, Bodies in Technology
At first glance, strapped to the body of critters such as green turtles in Shark Bay, off Western Australia, humpback whales in the waters off southeast Alaska, and emperor penguins in Antarctica, a nifty miniature video camera is the central protagonist. Since the first overwrought seventeenth-century European discussions about the camera lucida and camera obscura, within technoculture the camera (the technological eye)seems to be the central object of both philosophical pretension and selfcertainty, on the one hand, and cultural skepticism and the authenticitydestroying powers of the artificial, on the other hand. The camera--that vault or arched chamber, that judge's chamber--moved from elite Latin to the vulgar, democratic idiom in the nineteenth century only as a consequence of a new technology called photography, or “light-writing.” A camera became a black-box with which to register pictures of the outside world in a representational, mentalist, and sunny semiotic economy, an analogy to the seeing eye in brainy, knowing man, for whom body and mind are suspicious strangers, if also near neighbors in the head. Nonetheless, no matter how gussied up with digitalized optical powers, the c[...]
(81)[...otes on kinect performance.txt]%45.9[...]. what threads of meaning are taken apart by pulling on the thread of self reflection and self vision, what will gets account as nature for whom and when. the animal that is in charge of her own image is the representation of the universala man.
Appearance of eukaryotic cells around 2 billion years ago is probably the most significant event in the history of life on earth. It gave the creatures with DNA two important things: a nucleus that contained all the genetic materials and an interface to communicate with the world outside of the cell--a complex membrane--to talk with the materials alien to itself. Interface is a critical point of intersection between different life worlds, fields, or levels of organization. They are the areas in which social friction can be experienced and where diffusion of new technology is leading to structural discontinuities (which can be either positive or negative), the interface is where they will occur. The argent issue of interfaces in social interaction and flow between human animal, nonhumans, and computers is today becoming a zone of transition of ephemeral technologies, physical contact, socio-political boundaries, and metaphor-representation.
Since antiquity, representation has been the foundational concept of aesthetics and semiotics. In the modern era, it has also become a crucial concept in political theory. In a discussion of law and ethnography, Clifford Geertz calls into question the Western distinction between matters of fact and matters of value. “Facts and law we have perhaps everywhere; their polarization we perhaps have not.” Geertz's hermeneutic approach leads him to focus on the relation between the grounding of norms and the representation of fact. Therefore, he concludes, representation is a distinctive manner of imagining the real, and is a fundamental phenomenon upon which all culture rests.
The performance-talk is divided into three tangled narratives, one the social mode of traveling that includes the child--the opposite of the lonely masculine traveler--based on the real experience and a personal story in a trip to Amazon in Colombia with Karin Demuth and her three years old boy--Hanno--, second a multi-headed reading of technologies of interfacing within computer culture and the worlds of other species, the meaning of inter-facing with the other, and third a visual representation of the highly technical images recorded by Kinect infrared 3D-scanner/motion-detector. The result of the visualization is a heavily glitchy image, which aims in the performance to link the spatial practice to the perceived and the representational spaces to the lived. Affirming the “unnaturalness” of the image makes it a transposition of universal means of communication--the language--that would like to provide a direct, unmediated, and accurate representation of the jungle.
The performance is an engagement with the notion of companion species elaborated by Donna Haraway, in[...]
(82)[...otes on kinect performance.txt]%46[...]er species, the meaning of inter-facing with the other, and third a visual representation of the highly technical images recorded by Kinect infrared 3D-scanner/motion-detector. The result of the visualization is a heavily glitchy image, which aims in the performance to link the spatial practice to the perceived and the representational spaces to the lived. Affirming the “unnaturalness” of the image makes it a transposition of universal means of communication--the language--that would like to provide a direct, unmediated, and accurate representation of the jungle.
The performance is an engagement with the notion of companion species elaborated by Donna Haraway, in an experience of walking in a tropical jungle with a computer in one hand and in the other hand the hand of the human child. The work deals with questions of the other-space that is mentally filled with projections and projects. The recording of the walking in the rain forest --as spatial and sensual experience-- is thus dematerialized and has acquired a digital character. The dense and hot environment of the Amazon is replaced by an abstract graphic structure, thus bringing a new understanding of the locality of the walk. The noise and the randomness of the technical coloring the surface of the jungle provoke an aesthetic fascination, and an appropriation of the imposible image of the forest.
Traveling to the Amazon to experience its radical Otherness is a European tradition. It unintentional affirms the ideology of a “state of nature” that is prior to culture.
Lacan: i am led to regard the function of the mirror stage as a particular case of the function of the imago, which is to establish a relation between the organism and its reality - or, as they say, between the Innenwelt and the Umwelt.
This developement is experienced as temporal dialectic that decisively projects the function of the individual into history. the mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation - and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body image to a form of its totality that i shall call orthhopaedic - and, lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject's entire mental development. thus, to break out of the circle of the Innenwelt into the Umwelt generates the inexhaustible quadrature of the ego's verifications.
Electronic Reserve Text: from Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, New York: W. W. Norton, 1977.
The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience
Delivered at the 16th International Congress of Psychoanalysis, Zurich, July 17, 1949
...................................
Flusser, Gestures - beyond machines (reading)
[...]
(83)[...otes on kinect performance.txt]%46.1[...] verifications.
Electronic Reserve Text: from Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, New York: W. W. Norton, 1977.
The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience
Delivered at the 16th International Congress of Psychoanalysis, Zurich, July 17, 1949
...................................
Flusser, Gestures - beyond machines (reading)
the project investigates the way in which Seifee as an artist engages tactics of fieldwork, embodiment and materiality (in a manner that reveals or instigates processes of knowing).
(In this moment of increasing standardization and specialization regarding how people learn, art is a space for innovative thinking and experimentation outside given frameworks.)
...our ability to share the experience of the habits of the world that we discover. (Kohn)
...................................
Campbell on Harman's philosophy
(problem of) object-oriented ontology as social theory [insights of object-orientation mechanically applied to the social by Harman, “immaterialism"]
•innovative adaptation of phenomenology
•critique of how objects have been failed by philosophy
•insistence upon an aesthetic attitude of investigation
--but-->
•object-oriented social theory lacks the rigor and imaginative potential to envision the ontology of the social
•the way object-oriented ontology is stuck in a no-man's-land of not-quite-nonhuman-not-quite-human
•as ooo enters social theory it commits a performative fallacy --> missing the fundamental starting point of social theory: ***objects come into the social world as expressions of (negotiated, perceptual, political, agentic) value*** [social theory is fundamentally predicated on the socius --> social theory is about the association between things =/= homogenous things]
}=/= Campbell's *posthuman relationism*: another form that better understands the abyssal point between the non-human and the human
(2007 conference) speculative realism {antipathy to “human-centred” intellectual traditions} ~=> object-oriented ontology
(objectivity =/= obliqtivity)
Harman's immaterialism: realism without materialism : objects can only ever be captured obliquely
object-oriented ontology's development:
•characterised by a consistent lament for how post-Kantian philosophy in general (Continental philosophy in particular) has abandoned hope of describing objects as objects
•the real: absolute autonomy of objects (withdraw from subjects)
◦objects: sleeping giants holding their forces in reserve
•prefer the excess of the aesthetic over the reduction by the scientific (materialism's tendency to reduce objects to a primary substratum ==> rendering them susceptible to mathematical capture) --Campbell--> *aesthetic foundation[...]
(84)[...otes on kinect performance.txt]%46.2[...]d ontology is stuck in a no-man's-land of not-quite-nonhuman-not-quite-human
•as ooo enters social theory it commits a performative fallacy --> missing the fundamental starting point of social theory: ***objects come into the social world as expressions of (negotiated, perceptual, political, agentic) value*** [social theory is fundamentally predicated on the socius --> social theory is about the association between things =/= homogenous things]
}=/= Campbell's *posthuman relationism*: another form that better understands the abyssal point between the non-human and the human
(2007 conference) speculative realism {antipathy to “human-centred” intellectual traditions} ~=> object-oriented ontology
(objectivity =/= obliqtivity)
Harman's immaterialism: realism without materialism : objects can only ever be captured obliquely
object-oriented ontology's development:
•characterised by a consistent lament for how post-Kantian philosophy in general (Continental philosophy in particular) has abandoned hope of describing objects as objects
•the real: absolute autonomy of objects (withdraw from subjects)
◦objects: sleeping giants holding their forces in reserve
•prefer the excess of the aesthetic over the reduction by the scientific (materialism's tendency to reduce objects to a primary substratum ==> rendering them susceptible to mathematical capture) --Campbell--> *aesthetic foundationalism* [==engender==> an attitudinal response to objects] (@apass, this is also a problem in artistic research):
◦aesthetic appreciation above the reduction of the phenomenon achieved by science --> “art (art criticism) is a style that gets us closer to the nature of objects” (+ bad example of Clement Greenberg)
◦(to make the invisible deep conditions of objects perceivable) prioritize *allusive style* above *literal description*
•claims to post-phenomenological sovereignty
•over-mining approach to knowledge production =/= objects's surplus of reality
◦methodological approach which encounters objects as objects (=/= actor network theory's manner of focusing upon an object's effects) [+ bad example of Dutch East India Company]--Campbell--> object-oriented social theory produces a rudimentary narrative with no discernible innovation on the level of:
◾objects --> the actors are recognisable companies, personalities, infrastructures
◾relations --> the major symbiotic moments are legal contracts, infrastructure and formative moments in a human's life
◾time --> there is standard chronology from birth to death, with emphasis on human-centric causes and effects
•“social theory = a mode of knowledge production” (=/= a decontextualised reflection of the world) ==> withdrawal: a psychological alibi, an aesthetic (=/= cognitive concept) ==stimulate==> an attitudinal response: humility [+ passivity?] in the face[...]
(85)[...otes on kinect performance.txt]%46.2[...]rtistic research):
◦aesthetic appreciation above the reduction of the phenomenon achieved by science --> “art (art criticism) is a style that gets us closer to the nature of objects” (+ bad example of Clement Greenberg)
◦(to make the invisible deep conditions of objects perceivable) prioritize *allusive style* above *literal description*
•claims to post-phenomenological sovereignty
•over-mining approach to knowledge production =/= objects's surplus of reality
◦methodological approach which encounters objects as objects (=/= actor network theory's manner of focusing upon an object's effects) [+ bad example of Dutch East India Company]--Campbell--> object-oriented social theory produces a rudimentary narrative with no discernible innovation on the level of:
◾objects --> the actors are recognisable companies, personalities, infrastructures
◾relations --> the major symbiotic moments are legal contracts, infrastructure and formative moments in a human's life
◾time --> there is standard chronology from birth to death, with emphasis on human-centric causes and effects
•“social theory = a mode of knowledge production” (=/= a decontextualised reflection of the world) ==> withdrawal: a psychological alibi, an aesthetic (=/= cognitive concept) ==stimulate==> an attitudinal response: humility [+ passivity?] in the face of overwhelming non-human existence [~ appeal ==produce==> a paternalistic-arrogant-instrumentalist attitude to the nonhuman =/= *appeal ==foster==> responsibility* (a norrnativity that withdrawal cannot) ---> go to Haraway + Campbell]
}=/= posthuman relationism: realists who draw on contemporary advances in disciplines like geology, biology, mathematics and neurology to make the case that non-human reality is not a sub-set of human reality -->
•commitment to an object-oriented realism (~= Harman)
•occupy an *anthropic* event horizon: their social analyses occur in the shifting, impossible ground hetween the human and the nonhuman (=/= Harman)
•dialectic of object **withdrawal + appeal** (=/= Harman's object withdrawal) ~ ***interaction between objective withdrawal & subjective appeal***
(Moss) earth as making an appeal --Freud--> a demand for work
“when the attention of an experienced person is drawn to the child's state by this path of discharge, [the path of discharge] ... acquires a secondary function of the highest importance, that of cornmunicalion
--> initial helplessness of human beings is the primal source of all moral motives
(child's) creaming and kicking --> appeal (made by the earth) is a combination of demand + accusation
contemporary social theorists are turning towards objects
<==Bennett== object produce a ‘gestalt shift’ in perception
}==Tsing==> (amounts to) a political act <== (turning towards objects) requires us:
•to re-divide the w[...]
(88)[...otes on kinect performance.txt]%46.3[...]benefit from a perspective which acknowledges this ideology of humanism?
the term posthuman has been used to describe anything which extends human capcity --ironically--> something as ubiquitous banal ancient and human as *tool-use* could itself be described as posthuman (Hayles, Stiegler, Wills) ==> **posthuman is as ancient as the human itself** }--> [*]posthuman: (a radical recognition that) technological = *originary logic* + *ethical sensibility* (= a stepping-out [=/= coming-after] of the enclosure of what is only important and necessary to the human)
•a concept that draws attention to the cracks that have always existed in the water-light descriptions of the human
•the ethical and radical realisation that the human only comes into existence by the work of (organic + technological) nonhuman others
cyborg --> associated with liberatory modes of identity
**technology deconstructs everyday human experience of agency, free will, choice, self** @apass
21st century --> technology is the center of critical thought about culture and nature (--> that is why it became organically part of my ajayeb research)--> *to think about technology in a manner which reflects its ubiquity, its deeper symbolic and aesthetic dimensions, the way in which it can radically chnage humanness and human-centered approaches
(humanistic epistemology ==>) mode of the human:
1. information processor
2. cognitive subject
3. cultural subject
posthuman mode:
1. to widen the temporal range of research (deep future, deep past)
2. take the form of an ethical inquiry (where the human is no longer the center of the world)
3. to think about the ontology of technology
4. the relationship of the human and the nonhuman (sustainability)
20th century --> gene
21st century --> posthuman (postgenetic metaphors)
robotic revolution + biotechnology revolution > agricultural revolution + industrial revolution + information revolution
(consumer research started to develop an outlook that) things are just as complex and social as people
•brand: entities that talk to and interact with other brands, entities that form relationships with humans
(lives that seem to exist in on the edges of simple humanist life:)
•*massive* life of market
•*excessive* life of the brnad image
•*virtual* life of Facebook
•
consumer research focuses on the ontological and epistemological givens of only the consumer
(Turkle theorizing) how consumers change through their relationship with the nonhuman
•children view certain objects in the world around them as having degrees of aliveness
•children who have grown up with computers do not experience a dichotomy between biological and computatinoal pr[...]
(89)[...otes on kinect performance.txt]%46.7[...]logy solutions
technology has co-evolved with being throughout billions of years --Hayles--> (myriad profound subtle ways) to make nature
--paradox--> *it is “human nature” to use technology + technology changes “human nature”*
--Campbell--> ***while not everything is technical, everything is technological***
*posthuman stance (strategically oriented towards deep future, pays attention to the lives of nonhuman others) gets ontological with technology*
...................................
McQuire
defining the technological --activate--> the border between nature & culture = (the heart of) what it means to be human
...................................
[title]
system attic
...................................
(in my work with apass digital designs, i have been trying to negotiate with the notion of)
*technological gaze*
what new modes of subjectivity are filtered through technological gaze?
(?how) high-tech images are cultural artifacts
technological gaze's method to put its meaning together:
1. impossible subject-positioning
2. codification of flesh
3. visualization of scientific narrative
4. aestheticization of information
(Maturana + Varela) everything said is said by an observer =/= philosopher
marketing communication theory
[*]gaze: (a technical term for) the ways we visually consume images of people and places + the ways images are constructed to entertain & encourage certain ways of seeing
•(using psychoanalysis) Mulvey's gaze: the way in which the camera acts as the eyes and ears of the spectator, presenting ways of framing the world (power-laden + not neutral position) ==> certain understanding of the world is assumed
•Shroeder --> gaze signifies a psychological relationship of power --> the gazer is superior to the object of the gaze [---> go to zoo]
how “human” ways of experiencing the world are gradually being integrated with non-human, technological ways of perceiving and understanding reality:
•Baudrillard --> virtual gaze
•Virilio --> automation of perception (war weaponry --> the idea that in west we have technologies so advanced we achieve absolute vision)
•Balsamo --> cosmetic surgery (~= new visualization technologies) ==> new forms of dominance [---> go to Kardashians TV shows], *replacing the male gaze with a normative disembodied technical gaze
•Haraway --> technocratic gaze
•Strafford --> (starting in enlightenment) *automated spectralization* (in visual presentation of the world) --> the intention and purpose of the gaze became medicalized and technologized [---> go to cartography]
•
}--> (from technoscience to feminism) theorists have noticed a *splicing* of direct and tactile human per[...]
(90)[...otes on kinect performance.txt]%47[...]organisms
when visuality is looked at in a haptic modality (the tentacular face for example), vision can be figured as touch, not distance. negatively curving in loops and frills, not surveying(/surviving) from above.
...................................
when a depiction (poetic, visual, etc.) is dangerously ambiguous?
are we really immersed in data realities? and that really means we are losing the sight on experiences fetched by our bodies?
co-existing and contradictory incomplete models that ground us in our critically limited existence. what does beyond the (techno-cartographic-episto-cogno-histo-) map's horizon means for this situated “us”?
...................................
(Amanda Boezkes)
the ontological purification apparatus
we are now on an idea of the earth in so to calibrate our sensorial systems to adjust to human-born unpredictabilities that override and neutralize long-standing histories of local knowledge.
how an ecological perspective can be incorporated into vision -- become a visuality? -- mobilization of visuality
how an artwork may account for the ways ecological change registers in vision?
geo-aesthetics
information is not energy-specific (Gibson)
theory of affordance : information pick-up process --> threshold between the sense-system of organism and the invariance of the environment
an experience of an observer that is not a property of the observer, it is invariant and relational.
that is, it acknowledges that objective information about an environmental system can be obtained both in spite and because of perceptual change. in this respect an indigenous knowledge is not simply an order of cultural perspective, they are rather a form of objective testimony, by the people who are attuned to the environment's invariant structure. they are not simply a traditional or local “point of view.”
in this sense what kind of info is the image of Kinect about the environment? it is not objective info nor culture, what is it? personal testimony? descriptions of a technological reading?!
affordance, as a concept, allows complexity and refusal to reduce environments, objects, and actions to the basic function they may have to the perceiver in her/his/its world -- it permits a level (horizon) of consciousness of the world beyond function.
how a beetle may rest on the retina of bird's eye like pieces of puzzle fitting together
facts of environment
to what extent can an ecological perception become virtualized, represented, and returned to vision as a condition, or style of being? that is how to take conscientious of the ecological beings that we are in any project? -- that is attuning vision to an ecological reality
E. h. Gombrich understood the percep[...]
(91)[...notes/notes.txt]%47.8[...].
how a beetle may rest on the retina of bird's eye like pieces of puzzle fitting together
facts of environment
to what extent can an ecological perception become virtualized, represented, and returned to vision as a condition, or style of being? that is how to take conscientious of the ecological beings that we are in any project? -- that is attuning vision to an ecological reality
E. h. Gombrich understood the perception of art as a process of cultivating the visual skills of recognition in the eye itself
historical ways of seeing
any skill we have in spite of environmental variances, is operating from visual schema that are geared to trigger pattern recognition, (art?)
visuality vs vision
the caricaturist does not teach us how to see, but rather instantiates a new code of recognition. a visuality is nested into vision; vision is reciprocally primed to recognize a visuality ***
visuality involves more than pattern recognition
perception is not the tool by which we experience art, but its very content and substance. john Onians concludes that “each painting forms its own ‘eye’.”
what kind of eye the art (of my Kinect) cultivates? (a techno-aesthetic eye?) (the diagrammatic eye?) (referring to the diagram project “sadistic statistics”)
the ways we see ...ly (historically, ecologically, evolutionary, technologically,) more part and parcel of the visuality of the anthropocene
the neuro-aesthetic eye
to “read” environment in terms of info pick-up and accommodation
to simply perceive as we do
but to parlay (double up) our perceptual system into a modality of processing, response, and responsiveness
(the aesthetics of) the visual brain is the contact (not contract) between the individual and the ecosystem
modulation of ethos in landscape?
Kinect is nt is not bringing a knowledge that is neurobiologically imperceptible to the naked eye nor is it technologically making a worldview accessible.
“it is low tech”, its images are born of partial recognition, attunement, and attention
low-tech works may be critical for developing a visuality that is not yet integral to or explicit within new media, visualising the specifically neurological dimension of ecologicity and mobilizing vision as a perceiving organ to cultivate this self-awareness.
...................................
(McKenzie Wark)
climate science, a key science of our time, rests on an apparatus of very powerful computers and communication vectors, which overcome the “friction”, as Paul Edwards calls it, between data and communication. it brings together global data according to global standards, mathematical models of physics of climate drawn from fluid dynamics, and massive computational p[...]
(92)[...notes/notes.txt]%47.9[...]also become forms of thought
the optical mind
the radical change in the conditions of visuality has brought about a new subject position or point of view, announce by the trajectories of:
1. antihumanism (between impressionism and cubism)
2. posthumanism (between cubism and experimental film)
3. non-grounded form of vision (from experimental film to digital media)
this regime of visuality implies: automatization, tautological vision, and signs leading to other signs
resulted to => the proliferation of images also implying the cancellation of vision
“vision cancelled”
linearity of the Renaissance perspective plan created the illusion of a view to the outside world, analogous to a window.
cubism: showing a perpetual present in a parallel temporality.
perspectival multiplicity became embedded in the picture plane.
invented a discontinuous space, making identity and difference relative (questioning the classical metaphysics), by subverting the relations between subject and object.
does my Kinect pictural model employs the architectural space? is camera architectural?
in experimental film, duration became a key component of aesthetic experience, analogous to human consciousness, a prosthetic vision
identity and difference, rejection of a priori space
how to release the subject from human coordinates? what are references to human coordinates? screen's rectangular frame?
the machine (optical perception) delivers a posthuman, prosthetic enhancement of vision, which announces, first the incipient (initial) normalization of perception as augmented reality and data visualization
displacement of the subjective center of operations
epitomize
subvert
fragmentation brought by mechanization, has an alienating character
its impossibility to give back an image or serve a reflective mirror
it is indifferent to “me”
the exhaustive visualization and documentation of wildlife is effectively concealing its ongoing extinction (one of the reasons i am not using the zeiss-lens-camera recordings)
(for Susan Sontag) taking photographs [...] is a way of certifying experience, also a way of refusing it - by limiting experience to a search for the photographic, by converting experience to a souvenir. [...] the very activity of taking pictures [...] assuages (erleichtern) general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated (worsened) by travel.
cognitive activity
giving form to experience, also transforming things into signs, welding image and discourse
the contemporary experience is also made of sharing/tweeting/liking images
the contemporary political economy: communicative capitalism derives[...]
(95)[...notes/notes.txt]%48[...]/>
“picture does not make an image” (Serge Daney, before and after image)
image against vision
life persists irrationality, not given form by imagination, ceasing to cohere into a higher truth. (Fox, cold world)
...................................
(Ada Smailbegovic)
nature of things (2013, Sina + Elisa)
related to temporalities and velocities (plant politics of movement)
the video registers different rhythms and textures of change in the event of weather
methodological impulse to draw on descriptive practices of natural history
attuning to particulate differences that compose change
the temporal dimension of human “umwelt” is tuned into a limited set of rhythms and durations. therefore many of the temporalities that are relevant for developing a politics of time (such as longe duration of geological time) may not be directly available to human sensorium.
not just something that it is difficult to sense, but temporality as a compound entity of other variables. (temperature, etc.)
binding times together
an alternative perspective on (anthropocene) temporality involves developing a poetics of description as a mode of affective and aesthetic amplification
=> developing an experimental poetics of technology as a mode of aesthetic amplification towards a less perspectival visuality -- the writing tends to operate in a more tentacular mode of perception --> sweating on every negative space
+++ sweating again was crucial in our sensorial (and therefore cognitive) relation when we were in Amazon. Kinect and sweating both propose modes of perception other than perspectival shadow casting system of vision.
(organic or inorganic/technological?) processes that constitute the planet/plant
=> intimacy with the organic/inorganic/technological processes that constitute the planet
(my work is to create or find out) poetics and the methodologies that register the bite and indexes its significance
(+ bite of the critter on my skins)
(Chakrabarty in The climate of history:) “man's environment did change but changed so slowly as to make the history of man's relation to his environment almost timeless and thus not a subject of historiography at all”
the collapse of this age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history
plant writing
formulate transitional categories that would be responsive to differentiated modes of activity attuned to the difficulties of depicting natural phenomena that are continuously in flux.
reader of the meteorological registers
envision the temporal flux
the shifting edges (of the Kinect building generics)
(Kinect image) as architectural form composed of different (transitional) materially instan[...]
(96)[...notes/notes.txt]%48.1[...]e pursuit of freedom
politics: the most common shape that freedom takes in human societies.
politics has never been based on reason alone. (it seems politics is something that is out of control)
(Maslin, Global warming) [Global warming] requires nations and regions to plan for the next 50 years, something that most societies are unable to do because of the very short-term nature of politics.
Anthropocene was neither an ancient nor an inevitable happening
the crisis of climate change calls for thinking simultaneously on both registers, to mix together the immiscible chronologies of capital and species history.
as Gadamer pointed out, Dilthey saw “the individual's private world of experience as the starting point for an expansion that, in a living transposition, fills out the narrowness and fortuitousness of his private experience with the infinity of what is available by re-experiencing the historical world."
>
...................................
(Peter Galison, in Image of Objectivity)
“let nature speak for itself” (!) a new brand of scientific objectivity that emerged in the 19th century => restrain themselves from imposing their hopes, expectations, generalization, aesthetics, even ordinary language on the image of nature. (the image of nature has never been objective)
the present usage of objectivity can be applied to everything from empirical reliability to procedural correctness to emotional detachment
each component of objectivity opposes a distinct form of subjectivity; each is defined by censuring some (by no means all) aspects of the personal.
personal idiosyncrasies
this ideal of objectivity attempts to eliminate the mediating presence of the observer
the phenomena never sleep and neither should the observer
heroic self-discipline
profoundly moralized vision
and like almost all forms of moral virtuosity it preaches asceticism
human worker whose attention wandered, whose pace slackened, whose hand trembled
the self-recording instrument promised to replace the weary artist
machines offered freedom from will
being true to nature:
-in its method (mechanical)
-in its moral (restrained)
-in its metaphysics (individualised)
early alternative approaches to creating picture that were true to nature, but not objective in the mechanical sense
atlases habituate the eye, they are perforce visual
(contrast to the scientific visual forms of photography where one is on the right place at the right time with the right equipment) the Kinect's total randomness
one problem of atlases is that they have to decide what nature is
they all have to solve the problem of choice: w[...]
(98)[...notes/notes.txt]%48.6[...]bserver
heroic self-discipline
profoundly moralized vision
and like almost all forms of moral virtuosity it preaches asceticism
human worker whose attention wandered, whose pace slackened, whose hand trembled
the self-recording instrument promised to replace the weary artist
machines offered freedom from will
being true to nature:
-in its method (mechanical)
-in its moral (restrained)
-in its metaphysics (individualised)
early alternative approaches to creating picture that were true to nature, but not objective in the mechanical sense
atlases habituate the eye, they are perforce visual
(contrast to the scientific visual forms of photography where one is on the right place at the right time with the right equipment) the Kinect's total randomness
one problem of atlases is that they have to decide what nature is
they all have to solve the problem of choice: which objects should be presented and from which viewpoint (Kinect choosing mechanism and arbitrariness?) (can we not choose what nature is when we are at it? and when we are at nature?)
rejection of aesthetics (but what seduction exactly betrays? or what does it make accurate?)
average (is truth to nature?)
asceticism of noninterventionist objectivity
“straight photography” is above all a signature of a particular scene, a specific and localized representation only awkwardly adaptable to a mosaic composition from different individuals (Zeiss-lens-camera images)
how scientists deployed mechanical means to police the artist
(for Martin Kusch - objectivity and historiography) truth-to-nature had its rationale in enlightenment sensationalist psychology, with its conception of the self as fragmented, passive, and excessively receptive.
--> to be true to nature was actively to select and interpret sensations and in that way bring them under epistemic control.
--> representation in nanofacture, image is used to actually engineer the whole thing. making and seeing coincide.
eliminating judgment
the device would remove the process of abstraction from the artist's pen
what characterized the creation of late 19th century pictorial objectivity was self-surveillance
(note of Geppetto, Younus, Pinocchio)
personal equation: a systematic error correction
to produce reliable images
While in the early nineteenth century, the burden of representation was supposed to lie in the picture itself, now it fell to the audience. The psychology of pattern recognition in the audience had replaced the metaphysical claims of the author. Mistrusting themselves, they a[...]
(99)[...notes/notes.txt]%48.7[...] note)
in X-ray, the encryption of information takes place in the technology itself
photographs did not carry a transparent meaning
once so policed, and presumably only then, could the photographic process be elevated to a special epistemic status, putting it in a category of its own
in contrast to drawings, photograms were tarnished by the crudeness imposed by the limited palette of the color raster. Given the choice, the author clearly favored the crude but mechanical photographic process. Accuracy had to be sacrificed on the altar of objectivity. (is Kinect pure mechanical? why i have been insisting to remove my hands?! why i was craving for objectivity?)
=> to leave imperfections in the photograph as a literal mark of objectivity
testimony to objectivity
rejection of subjective temptation
sophistication could corrupt an individual? (you can be accurate but not sophisticated) (not cleaning up the image of plates)
The moral narrative surrounding this mechanical construction of pictorial objectivity took many forms. As we have argued, pictures (properly constructed) served as talismanic guards against frauds and system builders, aesthetes and idealizers.
extending the mystique of the visual to the dense symbolic presentation of functions and graphs
inscription instruments
(Marey, method grafique) “the graphical method translates all these changes in the activity of forces into an arresting form that one could call the language of the phenomena themselves, as it is superior to all other modes of expression.”
graphical representation could cut across the artificial boundaries of natural language to reveal nature to all people,
they were the words of nature itself
the search for this rendition of objective representation was a moral as much as technical, quest.
morality of self-restraint
(for the scientific atlas makers of the later nineteenth century,) the machine aided where the will failed. (at once a powerful and polyvalent symbol,) the machine was fundamental to the very idea of mechanical objectivity.
the machine, in the form of new scientific instruments, embodied a positive ideal of the observer: patient, indefatigable, ever alert, probing beyond the limits of the human senses. (what other relationships exist with the machine? other than this self-disciplined observer)
(rhetoric of) wonder-working machine
the machine, (now in the form of techniques of mechanical reproduction,) held out the promise of images uncontaminated by interpretation.
...the scientists’ continuing claim to such judgment-free representation is testimony to the intensity of their longing for the perfect ‘pure’ image. in this [...]
(100)[...notes/notes.txt]%48.8[...]>
(Tomaz Mastnak)
Botanical decolonization
planting and displanting of humans and plants are elements of the same multispecies colonial endeavor
native plants as a discursive field
complex and unmarked ways that plants have been sorted out as ‘native’ or ‘nonnative’
(as a measure of perfection and ‘civility’) gardening was also the key to the survival of colonies
(for Bacon) ‘plantation’ meant in the first place to ‘Plant in’ people
‘plantation in a pure soile’ (founding a colony)
once we see colonialism as the literal planting and displanting of peoples, animals, and plants--as inscribing a domination into blood and soil founded in the fantasy of molding ecosystems with godlike arrogance--it becomes clear how colonialism ushered in the anthropocene
native plants, by implication, were uncultivated. in the imperial imaginary this distinction between cultivated and native plants was isomorphic with people as well.
‘nature’, like the uncultivated native, was to be dominated by ‘culture’. such ‘government of nature’ found its metropolitan manifestation in botanic gardens. (species collected for scientific reasons, for aesthetic and ideological benefit)
government of nature
invasive animals
the real issue is that we still live in a colonial environment. we live with the legacy of botanical colonization without even knowing it. this legacy is not mere background to social and political life.
Nazis’ attempted eradication of Impatiens parviflora from their own native forests (Gröning and Wolschke-Bulmahn, 1992)
the idea of “borrowing freely from all the world's styles and floras” erases the violent colonial encounter of displacing by replacing it with the figure of the undocumented immigrant
..charging native plant enthusiasts and invasion biologists and managers with xenophobia...
(Davis et al, 2011 article published in journal Nature, title:) “Don't judge species on their origins”, is a misleading phrase; at issue is judging species not on their origins, but on their emplacement.
(Yanagisako and Delaney, 1995) “people think and act in the intersections of discourses”
but not every domain intersects in every instance, and the character of an ‘intersection’ is historically specific. it is a truism to claim that ‘like humans, plants and animal travel’ (Raffles, 2011, page 12). What Raffles fails to address is crucial: how, exactly, do those plants travel? to treat the ‘remaking’ of surroundings as a neutral, benign category, served from the colonial history of globalization, is problematic at best.
treating plants metaphorically only as immigrants, but never as settlers, paradoxically divides human from nature. it elides the[...]
(101)[...notes/notes.txt]%49[...]ion of meaning
how can i tear you from your vows, and not myself use vows?
The faiths that are sworn (before every exchange or change)
a word for a woman bound by another sacred word --> breaking your oaths---in the age of ... (message to the tribalist, the son)
Don Juan: yesterday you gave me your word to come to dine with me.
A beautiful woman: yes where must i go?
Don Juan: give me your hand.
a madman /
outside the law of reason, a dog /
outside the law of man, a devil /
outside the law of god, a...
The hypocrite pays in appearance
devil dubing/subtitling the society of reasonable men
..mad dogs
law directs the circulation of goods. What does it mean for an object oriented thought?
Law directs the circulation of goods, women, promise; of representations, insults, jests
i, as the text of sina, will show you that...
An ordering relation is irreflexive, antisymmetric, and transitive
sequential to consequential
(the concern of narrative)
order of reason (one order among many other sequences)
reason has immense consequences, so does aesthetics
betterable better : finding a stronger one---Kelileh Demneh
the case is of a maximum
the tree of the “better”
a whole forest hidden by a single tree
‘possibility’ is always the higher point on the tree
if you kill me now, my time freezes and its order disappears.
(said sheep to the wolf)
relative relations and absolute limit; he is the master of future
where do you come from? : this is of your clan : irreversible genealogical tree : complete model of kinship (for the ordered structure)
the idea of non-destruction is strange in nature, as if there is a notion of construction in nature, establishes a responsibility.
Care, claims to have suffer
at the end; you are the cause, i am the effect.
Perfect, is free of the psychologism of hypocrisy
•hypocrisy comes from the word to judge
stable structures and dialectical processes are inseparable
(each choice associated with a location on the tree)
(best) reason always permits a winning game (?)
might into right and obedience into duty, that is transforming force into factual necessity, by the stronger. Obedience into law. This is Rousseau
means to have access to the inaccessible
the exact sciences the optimal relationship from subject to object, conceived since the classical ages
A slave who, while sleeping, dreams that he is free
(put to the order of slave, a slave presenting a project to his master)
leipniz and Descartes, posit a maximum and minimum strategy in an [...]
(102)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%49.8[...] />
product of furnace, the cold product of fusion
old-style riddle
navigate between two pronouns
...................................
properly formed cluster (of letters) = standardization
standard compromises the non-essential, or inessential, those without meaning
what is a logician interested in?
Form --> pathology
misguided sciences
if static is accidental, background noise is essential to communication
pathology
spocken: stammering, mispronounciation, regiomil accents, dysphonia, cacophony
technical: background noise, jamming, static, cut-off, hyteresis, various interruptions
to communicate oraly (in performance work with Ali ) is to risk losing meaning in noise.
A successful communication is the exclusion of the third man, the demon, the interference.
Mathematics has triumphed so well over noise
the (un)logical beginning of logic
to render a form independent of its empirical realization --> universal
drawing a square on sand, i evoke an idea, i eliminate the empirical, dematerialise reasoning
(what is rematerialised reasoning? aesthetic form..?)
the inevitable fact of the historical existence of mathematics
(math's historicity)
(a different word for every yesterday)
...................................
... one had a discourse which often concluded either with the cosmos in general or with the organic life in particular.
19th century
negentropic islands in entropic sea, pockets of order in rising entropy, crystal depositions sunk in ashes, diamond in the rough
organism = meaning + direction
organism combines memory, invariance, plan, message, loss, redundancy, etc
it is old, mortal, and transmiter of new cycle
تو نیکی میکن و در دجله انداز
to niki mikono dar dejle andaz...
(organism?) is a quasi stable turbulence that a flow produces, the eddy closed upon itself for an instance, which finds its balance in the middle of the current and appears to move upstream, but is in fact undone by the flow and re-formed else where.
Man is one at high temperatures
from the information point of view there is a tremendous background noise
the noise of a complex to which a receptor is linked
this unconsciousness
(no one can call that) information is fortunate
there must be noise in pleasure and information in pain (?!)
---hmmm we can't know this properly?
Find in ajayeb, operating functions:
transformations,
fixations,
energy displacements,
movements of observer,
ambiguity functions,
freudia[...]
(103)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%50.2[...]ly an accident of stable Venus, a temporary relief outside the assembled convention. Mars passes, badly connected.”
Mars is only in transit
a penis captive
(like Lucretius, do I need to distinguish, in ajayeb) the conjunctional, contractual, stable links, (and projections of the constitution of political order?)
what are ajayeb's unstable historical contracts? --> historical contingencies --?-- “there would be nothing without the existence of the former, which quickly disappears around them”
that which disappears from definition, reappears metaphorically
the small amount of linkage between events
(with translation we might ask: with/by what are you translating? --> input and output of the translation cannot be known in advance)
ataraxia: the absence of trouble, peace of the garden (=/= soul made of atoms, unstable) a moral state ==> a physical state
(=/= aporia)
•not perturbed,
•the term was also used to describe the ideal mental state for soldiers entering battle. [-->? the image of the ideal soldier: Keanu Reeves kind of coolness in The Matrix film, (the machines are made in the image of the emotional ones.) at the end of the first film, we have an aesthetics (of indifferent and silent:) transcendence + perfect warrior], [another theory is that the freedom from emotional attachment was developed since early middle ages for merchants in order to (in a meddieval sense) *trade* =/= melancholic introspective contemplative efforts of faith]
------[apatheia: eradicating the tendency to react emotionally or egotistically to external events, ~ equanimity, =/= indifference*@Sven; (metriopatheia: men between the excess and deficiency of emotions;) a form of response to the world? ]
@Sven:
•interdifference [open systems between or among (in)differences?] --> interindifference --> entering differences, enter in diff
•intradifference [closed system inside or within (in)differences?]
Nature is rivers and whirl winds
streaming of mortality
Greek preference of ‘fall’ over ‘transition’:
things arrive and occur and only crumble and disintegrate for a unique figurative case*
symptom, a natural object, materialism
{the intersection of independent causal chains ==> river rise of chance occurrence}
@Seba's new planet story workshop & @Sana: what generate things, spinning the wheel, streaming flow, cascades (global fluidity of local solids,) *principles of heat* (that make worlds and bodies,) the *state of disequilibrium* (of the world [for Seba] & of the soul [for Sana])
***what is the name of disturbance?
(i have been proposing Sana to mix physics and psychology)
what are moral mortals linked to?
anguish and anxiety (in the absence of God, after the death of God)
[...]
(104)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%51.1[...] whether collective or individual, is the invention of a drug, or of a rhetoric of drugs, be it aphrodisiac or not.
In talk, i respond to the how of a poem or text dictating a kind of addictive reading or desire in the reader.
The project of a text, the project of a theory
according to Freud, when the work of mourning is completed the ego becomes free and uninhabited again. Funeral speeches and related writings, are possibilities that structures the movement of identification. Mourning is the interiorization of the dead other, also its contrary. Politics is figured as first and foremost an organization of the time and space of mourning.
After him, it is all war and crumbling.
We know better than ever today that the dead must be able to work. And to cause to work, perhaps more than ever.
The meaning of meaning [...]
...................................
[*]deconstruction: a sort of strategic device + opening onto its own abyss (one of the most influential approaches to texts) =/= method
Campbell --> Derridean deconstruction is visual
Derrida's thinking helps us take images seriously (as philosophical artefacts)
•organizational image: the aesthetic ambassador for the organization (it visualizes + gives aesthetic value to it)
•advertisement: preeminent image of production and consumption of the global economy
image = logocentric vision --need--> problematizing =/= solutionizing
-is there a spirit of critique that is not liberatory in purpose?
Derridean deconstruction: a critical approach --draw--> attention to the operations of method itself (=/= method):
[~? feedback types:]
1. interventionist --advocate--> different/contradictory readings (of images)
2. radical --interest--> roots of meaning-making activity
3. liberatory --seek--> evoke justice (forcing an image to account for itself)
4. ethical --concern--> what is overlooked
5. innovative (productive) --promote--> non-traditional ways of reading (of interpretting, of finding meaning)
intellectual climate in 1960s ==>
•Derrida's deconstruction --> bringing Saussure's own work to its own radical paradoxical conclusion
•Foucault's archeological approach [question the idea that human is an a priori --> how humans have been diagnosed in psychiatry and (ab)normalized in criminal and sexual *discourses* ==produce==> reality effects at the level of body]
•Barthes's semiology =/= the idea that the author is the single and authoritative source of meaning
Derrida's list of concepts:
differance
retrait
revenant
dissemination
deconstruction
hymen
invagination
archiécriture
supplement
khora
pharmakon
scrypt
parerg[...]
(105)[...notes/Derrida old notes.txt]%51.6[...]d thinking
(Maulwurf,) shit on your head, shit is the origin of all gifts, when a child offers his first donation, “look what I have produced!” I honor you with this Kacke.
--> http://www.sinaseifee.com/VomkleinenMaulwurf.html
how can we bring the variety of animals into the singular butterfly metaphor? (Attar's bird's butterfly effect)
Schmetterling! (parvaneh - پروانه)
(‘schmettern’ in German: v. smash, shatter, slam; blare, fanfare, bellow, roar) --- in schmettern you already have the ‘smashing,’ the butterfly smashing in the windshield, by that we are in the land of technology.
Schmetterlinghaus? (The Imperial Butterfly House in Vienna)
خرمن پروانه
Schmetterling is also a German (Reich Air Ministry) air-to-air missile project developed during the WWII, which is detonated by acoustic and photoelectric proximity fuses (Abstandszünder)
(Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh)
time, space, being, death, subversion, pain, transcendence, victory, blood, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno, Benjamin, Baudrillard,
•poetic violence, obscure elsewhere,
•imaginative reservoir.
•political, poetic, spiritual, or aesthetic 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 ratio[...]
(107)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%52.4[...]t, 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 damage and derangement?” “why light lanterns to behold the corpse?” “or extend our focus on them?” (I am using Mohaghegh's words,) the extremist (or other aesthetic-philosophical strands of extremisms) would tell us not to look away, for the thought and expression have taken the shape of a ‘meteorological device,’ forecasting seasons (of storm)...
(you take the mithridatic venom to) cross into the next level of temporal experience
he makes “engravings of the atrocity”
(حکاکی از) سبعیت
a fanatical response to the storm
a charismatic authority undertakes a poetic articulation
or a poetic articulation becomes committed to an ideological program
[Iran Iraq war]
mysticism, a protocol of extremity, geared towards the immensification of narrow vision
gigantic singularity
itself the house of many paradoxes: that of wisdom and rage, that of boundlessness and confinement, that of precision and enormity, nature and technology (apprentices to a lesser artisan-metallurgist god interested only in functional architecture and instrumentalized objects), betrayal and devotion,
mysticism is one of postmodern ‘mask,’ there are many others (the chaos-mask / face?, etc.)
one of many existential prototypes, subjectivity constellations, etc.
sliding between hostile and relaxed patterns of ...
with a sixth sense for disappearance
gained attunement to nothing
what are the athleticism of this stillness?
the turn in the thought of the mystic to externalize that same meditative daze!
what if an enthusiasm took hold to transfer this personal, self-contained oblivion onto a universal plane?
a single mood-shift: interiority feels the need[...]
(108)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%52.6[...]appearance
gained attunement to nothing
what are the athleticism of this stillness?
the turn in the thought of the mystic to externalize that same meditative daze!
what if an enthusiasm took hold to transfer this personal, self-contained oblivion onto a universal plane?
a single mood-shift: interiority feels the need to stretch out into exteriority.
without the logic of judgment
(in the aftermath of the 2th century) many visionaries of western thought (--postmoderns--) have emphasized a (desperate) need to inject ambiguity and doubt into our collective imagination
where is absolutism in San'an?
own descent (Abstieg) into paranoia
when in master-disciple relationship one is asked/taught not only read the works of past visionaries: rather to entertain the same mania, drunkenness, cruelty, or absorb temperament that engendered the very materialization of that text.
[Attar asking us to entertain the same mania when reading Tazkirat al-Awliya?]
...lending cryptic terminologies and cosmic ideas
to become an echo of a profound legacy
we ask again: which phantom-sphere is more interesting? more aesthetically and philosophically attractive in its contours, appearances, and orchestrations?
which archive remains in fire throughout?
-which (archival?) constructs promise to survive us?
-things that run on hollow spectacles of meanings and simulations of depth
-adapting old tales to new territories of experience
an apocalyptic significance in the master-disciple relationship
(topology of communication/education)
(mysticism) an excursion into the otherworldly (or the eternal)
lending cryptic terminologies and cosmic ideas a palpable and resurgent quality.
THE pursuit: to become the echo of a profound legacy
the question is not the legitimate/authentic knowledges versus superstitious/mythic doctrines, rather: which phantom-sphere is more arresting? which archive remains in fire throughout?
modern-individuality versus the magnetic power of the sectarian voice..
counter-veiling definitions of freedom: the freedom of infinite mediocritized choices versus the freedom to choose the all-engulfing one thing.
these preferences: on some remote place of calculation or in terms of immediate force?
(this talk might be) a critical rant
(eastern thirds:)
the voice of a strange immunity
sacred crimes
one is hard pressed to find a truth that does not have a dead body
never-ending allegory of loss and primal innocence
irrational desire of a no-man's land of an eternal immaturity
[...]
(109)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%52.6[...])
warehouse of the irrational, a cellar-arena of provocation and unrest
I don't have an eloquent language--I am not in the house of language, but Attar is
transmutative
depthforming
sudden exposure to exile space
a postcultural interaction (?) --with no proximity to the past or known present
(am I trying to create proximity to history in my lectures versus my non-proximity in earlier visual works such as “vagabond” 2011 Tehran)
is that to adopt an ******existence without context******?
(in lectures, am I un-separating myself from my own history?)
*reverie (=the mind flees across secluded planes)
exile space =~ refuge, solitude, immobility =? nondialectics
[on Vagabond] --> http://www.sinaseifee.com/Vagabond.html
-domination of the partially unseen in my own film, ‘vagabond’
-did I believe that only the buried dimension is sovereign?
-continuously interlacing experiences of solitude and immobility
-minimalist side of mysticism --> stillness is a catalyst for acceleration?
-nomadic dispositions
-suspended (=the chasm of self-consciousness)
-
aesthetic tactility over aesthetic fantasy
where is the cinematic-mystical ritual happening?
profound separation 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 wi[...]
(110)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%52.9[...]an ID = master*
(self-possession is supposed a primordial property)
-the question is how let yourself be invested with alterity, without becoming a seed of transcendence? (San'an let himself but then fails in the second part) by ‘seed of transcendence’ I mean making a symbol that is of a symbol (the basis of power---state?) ---> is this how San'an's symbolism can be recruited by Iranian war lords?
San'an in the story is shamanistically de-subjectified (by becoming the pig, etc.) instead of becoming hyper-subjectified (game-animal) [something that Abu-Saeed Abu-Al-Kheir almost achieve it?] **a game-animal is for example when dogs go after a dear in the forest, the dear is in this case a game-animal. the San'an's pigsty is not that, he doesn't become wolf or dear or Jinn for that matter!
if I where Tarsaa I would ask San'an to become the Jinn instead of pig.
(Tarsaa is sighted by him initially on her balcony)
balcony's architectural register
San'an might have been fallen in love with the balcony, not the girl!
(we see proof of this later when he goes “down” on her)
“hu hu I found a torture device” says San'an when he sees the girl-balcony assemblage
Tarsaa's morphology--different in every aesthetic moment, a dynamic entity
[person of flesh, thing of illusio, category of mechanism,
ترسا or ترسنده =~ child-being, نصرانی =~ the-other]
Tarsaa is a defferent kind of mediatized body, not that of woman on the television, which produces a wasted body in front of the TV
what kind of hostility is she performing -or making available?
she doesn't accept his marriage proposal
is there a woman hidden under the concept of Tarsaa?
which toxicities or horrors the-woman-of-the-house in the story of San'an conceals precisely with the figure of Tarsaa?
*****Tarsaa doesn't have a father.
[...]
(112)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%53.4[...]onysian epitom for material and performance studies
demaps
eccentric center of/for epitomized material studies
ecfem
cologne center for social research
ccsr
ecotone
epitom
parc
performance and research center
cream
center for research in epistemology and matter
...................................
***sharjah project***
[general approach of the project:]
this proposal gathers literary forces from the speculative insights of Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh (on ‘radical modes of resistance’) and Edouard Glissant (on ‘modest modes of resistance’) in order to perform a ‘slider’ between hostile and relaxed patterns of “contact” and “nothingness” that has been rotating throughout the past century in the Middle East. the performance of a knowledge-zoom in the hypnotic effects, nondialogue, nonnarrative, and radical exile spaces that have emerged in eastern postmodernism to reverse and supersede the question of modernity.
by traversing the domains of revolutionary ideology, avant-garde literature, new-wave cinema, extremist thought, and protests from the limitless imaginative reservoir of their political, poetic, spiritual, and aesthetic predecessors--this projects examines a Middle Eastern navigation of identity (via the concept of the ‘mask’) and its particular modest/hostile modes of resistance (via the concept of the ‘text’). visiting sites such as: subversive epitomes of charismatic authority undertaking a poetic articulation, when chaotic imagination makes contact with nothingness, the will to chaos, and inscription of fatality in literature-as-moral-transaction.
[pressure points:]
mobile within a speculative/suggestive milieu, this project is interested in examining literary sites such as Kelile-o Demne's communal forms of fragile human cohabitation (11th century political/bestial fable), Rumi's simulation of nonexistence (13th century production of schizo-darvish), Hafez's engineering metaphor-factory (14th century imaginal faculty of extreme presence), Hedayat's Buf Koor the Shelley's Frankenstein's monster favorate book (20th century forms of renunciation), Amir Naderi and Forough Farrokhzad films (20th century strategies of withdrawal), Jala Al Ahmad and Ali Shariati writings (20th century fatal concepts of the outside), [list to be modified]
[background:]
this form of half-digestive omnivorous work is situated in a larger trajectory of creative investigations, which i have been busy with under “storytelling,” are dealing with the questions of conditions in which non-antagonistic critical encounters between ordered conventions of knowing and chaotic textuality/imagination is possible. to take the mind where it does not belong. to the rogue arsenals of middle eastern reservoir of imagination and its locatable mimi[...]
(113)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%55.2[...]t, Jassem and Foad, are invested in those notions in their practice. Foad Farahani's poem “farar” enacting contemporary artistic formations and past-compound-mask, and Jassem Hindi transnational poetic agency, are both artists with acute appetite for chaotic imagination. Their instinct for the fusion of nothingness and excess, appearance and disappearance, creation and destruction, is at once carved and unpacked in the literary-poetic mosaics of their work: Foad's use of middle-persian mystic sensibilities and Jassem's combination of intensive encounter with the poetics of apocalypse and acid textuality.
My work has been about: learning/training in the crafts of noticing little traps of semiotic and material trans-species cohabiting, mutual coproduction of economics, ecology, affect-studies, metaphysical household studies, and understanding of the orders of the natural and human world, in the particular history/story of the East. in my projects i take history as the overlapping tracks and traces and many tranjectories of world-making, human and nonhuman. the textual performance of this project is in the effects of my research and practice with the questions of globalism and inheritance: difficult translational spaces, communicative nonunderstanding, relational aesthetics, and the differential sites of reading. and i use performative lectures: a material practice, hybrid in digital manual tactile operations of speaking.
...................................
“Four Masks of an Eastern Postmodernism”
insurgent, poet, mystic, sectarian
| | | |
chaos, violence, illusion, silence
•(sectarianism) apocalyptic writing
•(poetic) will to chaos
•(mystic) exile space
•(insurgent's) otherless subjectivity
یاغی
شاعر
نوچه
زاهد
[performative methodology]
for the collaborative part of sharjah project, i like to propose four “masks” (or “rotational avatars”) of subjective anarchy, that are few among many existential prototypes and subjectivity constellations of eastern postmodernism, as collaborative sites of encounter with four (or less and not necessarily individual) artists/participants.
•collaborators’ masks: chaos, violence, illusion, silence / (yaghi یاغی, sha'er شاعر, noche نوچه, zahed زاهد)--each endeavoring to discern the ontological possibilities and aesthetic imaginations of four theoretically-worked dispositions that Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh puts forward: insurgent, poetic, mystical, sectarian modes of consciousness, operating within multiple terrains of human and inhuman experiences of the middle east.
--> masks (the above mentioned four masks are accompanied by four “performative epitomes”): the exile, the animal, the shadow, the machine, (the monster, the thing, the contagion, the mirror image)
[...]
(114)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%55.3[...]ult translational spaces, communicative nonunderstanding, relational aesthetics, and the differential sites of reading. and i use performative lectures: a material practice, hybrid in digital manual tactile operations of speaking.
...................................
“Four Masks of an Eastern Postmodernism”
insurgent, poet, mystic, sectarian
| | | |
chaos, violence, illusion, silence
•(sectarianism) apocalyptic writing
•(poetic) will to chaos
•(mystic) exile space
•(insurgent's) otherless subjectivity
یاغی
شاعر
نوچه
زاهد
[performative methodology]
for the collaborative part of sharjah project, i like to propose four “masks” (or “rotational avatars”) of subjective anarchy, that are few among many existential prototypes and subjectivity constellations of eastern postmodernism, as collaborative sites of encounter with four (or less and not necessarily individual) artists/participants.
•collaborators’ masks: chaos, violence, illusion, silence / (yaghi یاغی, sha'er شاعر, noche نوچه, zahed زاهد)--each endeavoring to discern the ontological possibilities and aesthetic imaginations of four theoretically-worked dispositions that Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh puts forward: insurgent, poetic, mystical, sectarian modes of consciousness, operating within multiple terrains of human and inhuman experiences of the middle east.
--> masks (the above mentioned four masks are accompanied by four “performative epitomes”): the exile, the animal, the shadow, the machine, (the monster, the thing, the contagion, the mirror image)
...................................
installation:
speculative objects (~/= anthropological objects) --to--> quasi objects
between research, social critique, speculative theory, and artistic production --> politics of representation
...................................
[*]insurgent:
resistance to modernism, and revolutionary agency
<== exhaustive disintegration of belief-structures in modernity
otherless individuation
eternal war
killer's freedom
(affective) overreaction
[*]poet:
will to chaos (--a type of consciousness that perceive the catastrophic-apocalyptic hint at each turn)
<== cataclysmic time of modernism (<-- great social disorder: prison, exile, censorship, etc. [==> Hedayat, Shamlu, Forough, Nima's tone of aggression --> a proto-sectarian space: secret societies, iconoclastic trajectories, *the compartmentalized and esoteric iranian avant-garde with aesthetic devices of: unity, isolation, subversion])
fugitive postmodern map of escape from the grasp of the experience of the modernist phenomenon
|
responses to historical events of atrocity and transition
mystical, cri[...]
(115)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%55.3[...]sciousness, operating within multiple terrains of human and inhuman experiences of the middle east.
--> masks (the above mentioned four masks are accompanied by four “performative epitomes”): the exile, the animal, the shadow, the machine, (the monster, the thing, the contagion, the mirror image)
...................................
installation:
speculative objects (~/= anthropological objects) --to--> quasi objects
between research, social critique, speculative theory, and artistic production --> politics of representation
...................................
[*]insurgent:
resistance to modernism, and revolutionary agency
<== exhaustive disintegration of belief-structures in modernity
otherless individuation
eternal war
killer's freedom
(affective) overreaction
[*]poet:
will to chaos (--a type of consciousness that perceive the catastrophic-apocalyptic hint at each turn)
<== cataclysmic time of modernism (<-- great social disorder: prison, exile, censorship, etc. [==> Hedayat, Shamlu, Forough, Nima's tone of aggression --> a proto-sectarian space: secret societies, iconoclastic trajectories, *the compartmentalized and esoteric iranian avant-garde with aesthetic devices of: unity, isolation, subversion])
fugitive postmodern map of escape from the grasp of the experience of the modernist phenomenon
|
responses to historical events of atrocity and transition
mystical, criminal, mercenary, revolutionary edifice
amorphous, obscure, versatile (thinker/writers)
conceptual axes/archetypes of: power, hostility, banishment, solitude, desire, sacrifice
[*]mystic:
sunken tranquility, relaxed self-annihilation, ascetic renunciation of material (=/= postmodernism's obsession with speed, with narcissistic technologies, hyper-materialism)
neomystial trajectories of new-wave iranian cinema filmic style --> hypnotic effect =/= audition, dialogue, narrative
& exile space
[*]sectarian:
will to extremity
(apocalyptic writing)
breakaway modality
نوچه پروری noche-parvary's effective radars and tactics of attunement, detection, narration
(annihilatic temptation to) convert the text into a closed circle
(sect's threats of) forbidden power, moral ambiguity, collective density(/destiny)
...................................
[this project works with:]
[]
contributions/responses of:
•radical leaders (Jala Al Ahmad, Ali Shariati, Khomeini) --> ideological suspicion towards models of machinism and cosmopolitanism in the modern age
•intellectual forerunners (--> sectarian)
•literary icons (textual innovations of Hedayat, Shamlu, Akhavan, Baraheni) --> *poetic violence* and its apocalyptic tendencies --> that the declared [...]
(116)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%55.4[...]ectarian <--> full charismatic authority -->? morshed (=/= “pseudo-autonomous passivity”)
مرشد --> with its own matrix of study: hypnotic exchange [it requires ecstatic projection, not scholarly detachment]
ISIS --> scaffoldings of invisible subjugations, highly performative site
***how does one make the memory [--> Hoda], the shadow [--> Ehsan], the ancestor [--> Sina] speak across generations?***
the riotous, the militant, the deranged --> they have suspicions ~=> ?
(sectarian mode of) *reading: to entertain the same mania, drunkenness, cruelty, or absurd temperament that engendered the very materialization of that text ==> apocalyptic significance (~ master-disciple relationship)--San'an--> an excursion into the otherworldly
-cryptic terminologies
-cosmic ideas
--> ‘knowing’ becomes a high-stake transaction, one's own identity, future, and self-consciousness hangs in the balance (--> i can recognize this extremism in myself)
(an issue with iranian artists:) the pursuit to become the echo of a profound legacy***(!!)
***echo becoming*** --> (Mohaghegh's tone:) in an epoch that runs entirely on hollow spectacles of meaning and simulations of depth <-- aesthetic
(since declared by Western theory itself, and i agree too?) it is obsolete to speak of “legitimate/authentic knowledges =/= mythic doctrines” }==> the question then becomes:
*which phantom-sphere is more arresting, more aesthetically philosophically attractive?* (--> phantomology, Avital) ~/?= *which archive remains on fire throughout?* (--> the concern of many of my peers in apass. why archive has become a predominant topic and practice: lack of master signifier ==> archiving as one remaining meaningful thing to do, that there is nothing meaningful to be done [<-- that is my source of disagreement with archive-discourse, because it matters that there is something to be done now])
(taking) high doses of impulse and reason
**adapting old tales to new territories of experience** (<-- we need to permanently work this, read it, and so on)
exceedingly well-versed fever-dreams of Rumi
his intellectual-bodily gesture
its innovative proportions
his typology of communication/education (in Majales-e Sab'e مجالس سبعه)
remote plane of calculation
•magnetic power of the sectarian voice (=/= “the weak cult of modern inevitability” ==> a formula of alienation, insularity انزوا, indifference)
•freedom to choose the all-engulfing one thing (--> ISIS) =/= countervailing definitions of freedom: the freedom of infinite mediocritized choices (--> consumerism)
(Elen's struggle to gauge her place in the existential game)
my critical rant
*build the raft* <-- a poetic st[...]
(117)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%55.7[...]ity
...to believe in an outsider subjectivity capable of ahistorical imagination
(inflated dispositions of) triumphalism and alarmist nightmare
communist (Marxist silhouette) and liberatory combatants of the 20th century, intellectuals persecuted and exiled in the course of anti-fascist struggles, freedom-fighters of the anti-colonial/anti-imperialist wars --> nostalgic portrait of the contemporary militant
(Nietzsche, Kafka, Bataille, Foucault, Artaud, Baudrillard, Serres, D+G, etc.) continental thinkers architects of masks:
•the overhuman (--> Nietzsche)
•the supplicant
•the deviant (or barbarian --> Foucault)
•the body-without-organs (--> D+G)
•the criminal
•the schizoid
•the headless monstrosity (--> Bataille)
[(an exilic) postcolonial intelligentsia]
---{Nietzsche and Artaud's familiar persuasive authority, similar exuberant phraseology, and motifs in extremis --> ‘cruelty,’ Artaud wanted to “reject form and incite chaos.” antipsychological violent physical determination (a cruel yet necessary act upon the spectator) to shatter the false reality (theatre/art as a place where the spectator/actor is *exposed* [=/= “protected"]) =/= (aesthetic) distance (---> go to ‘distance matters’); this is the paradigm in iran's theatre and performance scene, where the audience are to be engulfed and physically affected by the show, ‘to be trapped and powerless’ as a theatrical value is an Artaudian tradition.
-delirium: he wanted to deliberately become/stay mad [--> Jassem, Sana's methodology, the state of horrible energy] in order to heal/strengthened
-ecstatic loss of the self, hermetic elements in his works, and the idea of the “complete actor,” whirlpool of feelings and lunatic expressions, counter-force from the act of gesture, (and from his teacher Dullin) emphasis on mime, gymnastics, improvisation, voice production, and various exercises intended to heighten sensory perception, all reminds me of my own theatre training with Reza in jome class.}
(demonizing) the vital concept of the outside(r)
untrustworthy epistemic climate --> patterns of smoothness/coarseness
militant negotiations of desire
(Dabashi's vertical-horizontal colonialism:)
the third world subject:
1- marginalized by enlightenment discourse
2- materialy exploited under global division of labor
}-->{
alienated by:
1- (horizontally) the epistemic violence of colonialism
2- (vertically) foreign colonial state + indigenous comprador elite (واسطهها و دلالان سرمایهداران خارجی در کشورهای آسیا و آفریقا و آمریکای لاتین)
2- (vertically) subsequent oppression and exploitation of anti-colonial regime
3- (horizontally) global division of labor[...]
(119)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%55.9[...]> the real is traumatic (& sublime?, =/=? media,,) @Hoda}
*cultural extinction*
urgency is (always?) neurotic
(?who and when sends) neurotic demand for an unmediated cognitive intimation
(Khomeini's) omat امت diesenfranchised populace
عناصر گول خورده perceptual perversion
•Khomeini <-- Marcuse (one-dimensional society, that promote a false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood)
•Khomeini <-- Chomsky (how superficial happiness can function as a detraction from the adverse effects of an alienated condition) [<-- Marxist tradition of the “serious” (=/= unreflective state) @Foad, “let everybody be crazed about professional sports or sex scandals or the personalities and their problems --> *consumption becomes ritualized*]
•Shariati <-- Jameson (theory of the “ever-new but always-the-same” within the theatrical operation of political economy)
•Al Ahmad <-- Adorno (skeptical prophecy)
•
}==> principle of utopian potentiality
centers of corruption
pleasure-houses
makeup
games
alcoholic beverages
luxury goods
Marxist tradition:
the underground aesthetic is quickly transfigured into a mainstream aesthetic --always--> in the hands of an authoritarian elite (<-- in apass with Leo we were talking about this)
جنبش mass aesthetic fears becoming official سازمانی
...based on exposing the damage of the global-becoming-local
Al Ahmad traces this “transnational hypnosis” to economic origin (<-- Ali )
(Mohaghegh's judgment on iranian anticolonial ideology:) its ineptitude Ungeeignetheit in realizing the myriad variances that render any medium riddled with paradoxes--derives itself from its concurrent inability to observe the possibility for different subject-positions within the third world
omnipresent deception of modernity
(aesthetic radicalism [ X ) political resistance]
“X” --> limited anticolonialism
(Mohaghegh on)
-Mehrjui's The Cow, offers a moving allegorical journey into the psychic turbulence of a peasant confronted with the obliteration of his premodern world (and thus becomes his lost animal)
-Naderi's Man with a Gun, depicts the material avarice that has overtaken local configurations in the wake of nascent capitalist formations to such a drastic extent that it gives rise to a well-digger's being cheated of his life savings
-Kimiai's The Deers, ...
}--> strong consonance with the anticolonial ideologues (examined thus far)
...caught up in your prose
on Sa'edi’ short story “Dandil” [--> grotesque cultural disaffection of the masses within Sa'edi's Dandil]
-depicting the horrors of daily life within a semicolon[...]
(120)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%56.7[...] scandals or the personalities and their problems --> *consumption becomes ritualized*]
•Shariati <-- Jameson (theory of the “ever-new but always-the-same” within the theatrical operation of political economy)
•Al Ahmad <-- Adorno (skeptical prophecy)
•
}==> principle of utopian potentiality
centers of corruption
pleasure-houses
makeup
games
alcoholic beverages
luxury goods
Marxist tradition:
the underground aesthetic is quickly transfigured into a mainstream aesthetic --always--> in the hands of an authoritarian elite (<-- in apass with Leo we were talking about this)
جنبش mass aesthetic fears becoming official سازمانی
...based on exposing the damage of the global-becoming-local
Al Ahmad traces this “transnational hypnosis” to economic origin (<-- Ali )
(Mohaghegh's judgment on iranian anticolonial ideology:) its ineptitude Ungeeignetheit in realizing the myriad variances that render any medium riddled with paradoxes--derives itself from its concurrent inability to observe the possibility for different subject-positions within the third world
omnipresent deception of modernity
(aesthetic radicalism [ X ) political resistance]
“X” --> limited anticolonialism
(Mohaghegh on)
-Mehrjui's The Cow, offers a moving allegorical journey into the psychic turbulence of a peasant confronted with the obliteration of his premodern world (and thus becomes his lost animal)
-Naderi's Man with a Gun, depicts the material avarice that has overtaken local configurations in the wake of nascent capitalist formations to such a drastic extent that it gives rise to a well-digger's being cheated of his life savings
-Kimiai's The Deers, ...
}--> strong consonance with the anticolonial ideologues (examined thus far)
...caught up in your prose
on Sa'edi’ short story “Dandil” [--> grotesque cultural disaffection of the masses within Sa'edi's Dandil]
-depicting the horrors of daily life within a semicolonized atmosphere of a red-light district of a northern Iranian city
-there is an imagery of closure and suffocation
(Sa'edi revealing:) the material despair of a colonial condition leading (in high speed) to the entropy of cultural-individual ethics
under the overwhelming weight of tangible misery
--cognize--> the immediate material urgency of the third world subject
(Dandilian gathering around to watch the taking of the picture -->) the third world subject has assumed the schizophrenic role of a voyeur himself, spectating his own literal-symbolic rape but not fully understanding it as such, while the real agent of power remains camouflaged in semi-invisibility
(Mohaghegh:) the ideological content of Dandil stands the notion that the [...]
(123)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%56.7[...]erican officer leaves the next morning with a mocking laughter and he refuses to play and the Dandilians can't do anything)--> the civilizational dichotomy remains intact in spite of the horrifying events that have transpired, with the trafficked deflowered child serving as a metaphor for the cultural-political mistreatment of the third world under colonial rule
on Akhavan's “Adamak” (“Stick-Figure”) [--> historical treachery committed within Akhavan's nostalgic Stick-Figure]
demonization of the television's arrival
-television as a “magical box” an artificial phenomenon that “entrances” its audience
again the idea of authenticity is largely emphasized here, as the television is perceived as a “foreign” entity and therefore an enemy to the millennial history of the province
new medium =/= indigenous modes of communication/expression (of which the roving storyteller is the ultimate instantiation)
(poignancy of the) poet's anthropomorphic profile of the new technologically oriented media
-Akhavan's representation symbolizes the storyteller himself, lamenting his own erasure from the moment of the now (or it is his prophecy for the imminent destruction of the new media in the coming islamic regime?)
--> aesthetic testament to the possibility for a third world revolutionary imagination to emerge from the ruins of the colonial era [, *from the ruins of the empire*]
--> representing the third world as in a state of complete existential-cultural atrophy (tahlil تحليل رفتن) @Hoda
**anticolonial literature reaffirms the all-encompassing grasp of modernity over peripheral subjectivity [--> marginal leader (Mamitua Saber's Marginal Leadership in a Culture Contact Situation)]
(Mohaghegh > Huyssen on Baudrillard:)
Baudrillard's notion of the *silent mass* of the spectators disables any analysis of *heterogeneous subject position in the act of reception* @Laura
any economic or institutional analysis of apparatuses of image production is rendered obsolete by Baudrillard's notion of an almost self-generating and monolithic machinary of image production [...] (<-- Laura should be very aware of this)
Baudrillard's society of simulation does not allow for such distinctions ... simulation, after all, may simply be the latest version of the ideology of the end of ideology
}--> part of the theoretical 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. i[...]
(124)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%56.9[...]تن) @Hoda
**anticolonial literature reaffirms the all-encompassing grasp of modernity over peripheral subjectivity [--> marginal leader (Mamitua Saber's Marginal Leadership in a Culture Contact Situation)]
(Mohaghegh > Huyssen on Baudrillard:)
Baudrillard's notion of the *silent mass* of the spectators disables any analysis of *heterogeneous subject position in the act of reception* @Laura
any economic or institutional analysis of apparatuses of image production is rendered obsolete by Baudrillard's notion of an almost self-generating and monolithic machinary of image production [...] (<-- Laura should be very aware of this)
Baudrillard's society of simulation does not allow for such distinctions ... simulation, after all, may simply be the latest version of the ideology of the end of ideology
}--> part of the theoretical 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!\
[...]
(125)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%56.9[...]mlu responding to an islamic revolutionary ideology that had enlisted its own alchemy of proclamation, lethal consortiums of drives that fuse the most savage, the most medieval, the most modern, and the most postmodern]
•being coming completely seized beneath the density of revelatory vision
•the ultra-alertness and insomnia of pure anticipation : a calculus of assurance that ‘they are coming’ --> omen
Pasdaran: the unpredictable and insatiate arc of extremity of a paramilitart coalition
=/=
SAVAK: formulaic technocracy of a scientific approach to persecution, extraction, and confession
Pahlavi monarchy: the administrator of urban violence was part amateur, part pseudo-scholar, part civil servant, part serial killer
=/=
Ayatollah theodracy: the administrator of urban violence was part vigilante, part crusader, part cult member, part thug
--> poet must epitomize the last unequivocal administrator of urban violence
does writing have a redemptive (=/=? reparative) function?
the author would necessarily venture to rescue something profound (from the state of dejection)
poet's keyword: *conflagration* حريق, fire --> a middle eastern aesthetics
most iranian writers of the new poetry movement have eviscerated, melted, flooded, iced over, or burned down a city at some point in their artistic career (--> Shamlu's Yal-o Ejdeha یل و اژدها)
cumulative angers
towards a harmful eloquence شيوايى --> Shamlu
pay attention to the hyper-subjective positioning (=/= hospitality, cosmopolitanism, transindivualism) of the “I” of the iranian poet:
*Akhavan: “It is I, your nightly guest, a forlorn gypsy. It is I, an afflicted stone that has been kicked around. It is I, the lowly insult of creation, an untuned melody.”
منم من، میهمان هر شبت، لولی وش مغموم / منم من، سنگ تیپاخورده ی رنجور / منم، دشنام پست آفرینش، نغمه ی ناجور
*Baraheni: “I am the rotten well of history ... Throw your matches down so that I can set the whole world aflame. I am an underground man. My fire alone shall appear on the face of the earth.”
*Shamlu: “It is time that I spit out the entirety of my damnation in an endless uproar / I am the first and last dawn / I am Abel standing on the platform of contempt / I am the honor of the universe, having lashed myself and endured it / Such that the black fire of my agony / shames even Hell for its insignificant holdings.”
--> with the maladjusted eyes if the iranian poet... we are at a far distance from western thought, one that seeks a renovated cosmopolitanism as remedy to the injustices of the citysc[...]
(126)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%57.3[...]br />
*Shamlu: “It is time that I spit out the entirety of my damnation in an endless uproar / I am the first and last dawn / I am Abel standing on the platform of contempt / I am the honor of the universe, having lashed myself and endured it / Such that the black fire of my agony / shames even Hell for its insignificant holdings.”
--> with the maladjusted eyes if the iranian poet... we are at a far distance from western thought, one that seeks a renovated cosmopolitanism as remedy to the injustices of the cityscape in modernity
Mohaghegh's style of writing [when he talks about Hedayat and iranian avant-garde chaotic atmosphere --> (at once) binds and separates the East-West axis] --he--> abandoning transcendent abstractions and restoring it to the language of annihilative venture
*chaos as mask*
chaos = (one of many) eastern poetic mask
chaotic experience (in the service of a lasting nonstate) =/= essence, Being, structure, historical definitions, temporal-spatial specificity
Mohaghegh puts Hedayat's inventiveness in traction with continental philosophy:
•Schopenhauer: existence = reckless collision of transience and nonsensibility <== *dramatic dissociation of the aesthetic from the historical* (<-- Sana's current stance, for Sana the world is will and representation):
history: will's vicious reign over existence
art: space of escape (from the profanity of history, a rare fleeting opportunity to reimagine existence as it potentially could have been but never will be (~=? fiction --> is that why science fiction for iranians does not have the same signification?) [=/= redemptive corrective to the barbarism of the will, =/= weapon by which one might attempt to overthrew the will]
•Hegel: (paradigm of a) complete collapse of subjectivity with history. reason is sovereign of the world
*Dasein: work within the preconceived framework (barrierarriers) of historical consciousness in order to modify its stance within the world
•Marx: the intention of restoring humanity to its actual historicity, positivism + humanism, epochal advancement, *dialectical materialism*: placing subjectivity in a state of subservience to a larger “historical reality”
•Althusser --> *interpellation: power first manifactures a conception of the self that it can later subjugate through the surveillance techniques of the institution
*subjectivity exists solely within the revolutionary progression of the prevailing modes of production*
•Adorno: the discourse of individuality within modernity operates as an accomplice to techniques of reification and the overall obfuscation of the culture industry ~= *assimilation/execution of myth by instrumental reason* -->{ art can be understood only by its laws of movement, not according to any set of invariants ~ antinomy: art is defined by relation to what it is not (separating itself[...]
(127)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%57.4[...]n the decisive act of interpretation, one through which the ideological saturation of society finds itself unmasked and history is restored to its contestatory complexitoes**
•Sartre: existential liberation + historical “engagement” + artistic subjectivity --> writing = a praxis-based motioning toward futurity [~=? accelerationism]
Adorno/Sartre --> ***واجب indispensable search for a writing act tied to revolutionary desire, negational change, futural hope, pseudosalvatinoal intentionality*** [=/= Hedayat, Nietzsche]
==> invalidating mimesis as a legitimate conceptual category (!?*)
through an account of self and world as *mythopoetic entities* (~= willed immateriality) --> *chaos-consciousness* (interlacing experience + thought + desire) effectively disbands the Marxian hierarchy of true and false consciousness by virtue of its dissolution of all paradigms of historical “reality”
nowhere-zone between desolation and the everything --> experiential anarchy ==> the poet/artist (~= X-Men: Apocalypse film supervillain character watching the news of last millennia on TV) stands as the incarnation of history's redemption, saving it from itself, and therein bringing into perfect totality the fusion of the self, the aesthetic, and historical Being
historicity of the object
historicity of the subject
critical reason =/= instrumental reason
‘aesthetic depiction of reality =/= objective truth of its operation’ --> journalism
(“[*]artist: a creativity independent and existentially self-sufficient entity standing somewhere beyond the matrices of historical circumstance” =/=) Adorno:
1. artwork can struggle to engage directly with the moment ==> find itself invariably entrapped by the artificial presentations and camouflages of the obscenity it challenges ==> “permit the monstrosity of modern society to emerge in full clarity from the phenomena masking it” [--> an epic ==> freezing the dialectic in a rigid back-and-forth of monolithic polarizations and exaggerated narratives of good and evil]
2. delusion of art's distance from the everyday [--> to resurrect the archaic phantom of sovereignty amid a world of unavoidable mechanistic interconnections]
}==> artwork attests to a *fictive template of freedom* clinging to the *delusion of its righteous self-determination* ==> ***a mimetic intercourse between art and historical life*** [<-- this is most desired from artists today]
Adorno's premises (--> “progress”):
•unabashed use of the universalizing abstraction of “humanity”
•detrimental reconfirmation of a world-historical process inagurated by the alliance of enlightenment epistemology and the commodity form
}==> Adorno's paranoiac tone (of infection, contamination, threat) ==> rhetoric of false and true consciousness ==> proclivity (تمايل طبيعى به چيز بد) for perpet[...]
(128)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%57.5[...] perpetual judgment and truth-seeking
--(enlightenment pathology)--> grand theories of degradation and decline about whenever Adorno delves into critique of the world [--> habit of most of my friends and artists...] ==> (purist theology of negation) ***reverse-messianicism*** (~= “he can do nothing” هیچ کاری نمیشه کرد، همیشه همینجوری بوده)
}=/= chaotic engagement (with the questions of art, history, self)
Adorno's dedication to the Marxian perception of historical Being as an intrinsically teleological functioning ==> his intense cynicism
=/= Schopenhauer's pessimism
=/= Nietzschean intervention of *treating history as metaphorical illusion*, [*]history: a hallow significatory edifice that nevertheless manufactures meaning, directionality, and causality (for an otherwise anarchic world) --> iranian chaoticism [and why Nietzsche is so widely read in Iran], for Nietzschean: “art [--> eruptive potentiality of the will to truth] =/= history [--> desolation of the will to power]” --> the disparity between art and historical reality becomes the very source of chaos-consciousness saliency
ferocious risk of greatness & the asphyxiating decadence of mediocrity
(Ali's) peotic-becoming aestheticized existence
irresolute =/= reactive =/= dismissive
continental philosophy's approach to the associations of three spheres: history[==>], art, subjectivity --✕--> chaotic nonstate: clash between a hypersubjectivized aesthetic & the barriers of historical Being (--> annihilation of both “I” and the historical)
Benjamin's subjectivity must defend itself against the profane rotations of the historical (--> apocalyptic battle)
Benjaminian “angel of history” ravaged of its innocence at the hands of progress and then restored by overriding strength of the historical materialist:
demonization of the monstrosity of the historical + celebratory poeticization of the subject
=/= Nietzsche and Hedayat's subjectivity [should] not to be held in a “derivative placement =/= the here and now” (one must imagine beyond طالع بینی <-- شخصیت فراسو نگر) --> (card reading) one must place under scrutiny the commensurate manner in which the historical is navigated, orchestrated, and then overcome [=/= alibi for some alternative discourse of literary-philosophical humanism or aesthetic transcendence]
[?what is Adrijana's card reading relation to] the desire to divorce history from any potential taxonomy of meaning or intelligibility --Hedayat--> “one is confined in a proud, deceptive consciousness... that rests upon the merciless, the insatiable, the murderous, in the indifference of his ignorance--hanging in dreams”
the poem i wrote in 2010 “our metaphor” https://archive.org/details/ourmetaphor is an example of (my Nietzschean and Hedayatian influence, to address) the indetermin[...]
(130)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%57.6[...]s saliency
ferocious risk of greatness & the asphyxiating decadence of mediocrity
(Ali's) peotic-becoming aestheticized existence
irresolute =/= reactive =/= dismissive
continental philosophy's approach to the associations of three spheres: history[==>], art, subjectivity --✕--> chaotic nonstate: clash between a hypersubjectivized aesthetic & the barriers of historical Being (--> annihilation of both “I” and the historical)
Benjamin's subjectivity must defend itself against the profane rotations of the historical (--> apocalyptic battle)
Benjaminian “angel of history” ravaged of its innocence at the hands of progress and then restored by overriding strength of the historical materialist:
demonization of the monstrosity of the historical + celebratory poeticization of the subject
=/= Nietzsche and Hedayat's subjectivity [should] not to be held in a “derivative placement =/= the here and now” (one must imagine beyond طالع بینی <-- شخصیت فراسو نگر) --> (card reading) one must place under scrutiny the commensurate manner in which the historical is navigated, orchestrated, and then overcome [=/= alibi for some alternative discourse of literary-philosophical humanism or aesthetic transcendence]
[?what is Adrijana's card reading relation to] the desire to divorce history from any potential taxonomy of meaning or intelligibility --Hedayat--> “one is confined in a proud, deceptive consciousness... that rests upon the merciless, the insatiable, the murderous, in the indifference of his ignorance--hanging in dreams”
the poem i wrote in 2010 “our metaphor” https://archive.org/details/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 enforc[...]
(132)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%57.7[...]h interpretation draws the text closer to (the hour of a) collapse
*contact with nothingness*
inscription of fatality
conceptual matrix of fatality:
•extremity --> breaking points
•excess --> an effusion, an unforming
•exhaustion (=/= fatigue)
the avatar of ecstasy
veiled secrecy of affirmation
}--> *archetype of cruelty*
--> [to speak of] (chaotic text as) *alchemy*: corrupt the order of things, become reborn in a polluted sensibility
(is this what i do?)
chaotic text must fashion a generative prism, unnatural admixtures, *contaminated alliances*
[let's] *unload texts toward corrosive depths [...] where they run their acids across one another* --> my work
transition from theory --to--> theft
transition from (the profession of the) reader --to--> smuggler
(strands of thought ranging:)
from cruelty --to--> fatality
from alchemy --to--> piracy
chaos --> anarchic potential, disquieting worlds
(Mohaghegh asking:)
*is chaos an affirmative or nihilistic experience of the world?
*is chaos primarily creative or destructive?
*is the expressive act (aesthetic or philosophical) a chaotic state?
*(east's) horizon fastened to the exteriority of Western thought*
experiential elsewhere
the so-called [*]cultural difference: an old game of declaring the world's disjointment
==> many people (including myself) ***to perceive their intellectual and poetic exercises as in partial alignment with the creative possibilities of their culture***
*partial cultural alignment* --> german discourse on integration
[chaos] manifesting and fading within countless spheres of speculation:
•Benjamin's temporal arabesque
•schizoid desire-production of Deleuzian nomadology
•Artaud's hysterical demand (-demand is always hysteric)
•fable of “chaos outside the system” (Schlegel's concept)
•active presence of an inhuman turn in Camus
•Serres's ‘genesis’ a quasi-mystical force of an immemorial nature
•Mohaghegh's ‘chaotic’ marks (no resurrection of a primitive world but rather) an extravagant departure from the history of being, an expressive wire being shaped as we speak
[*topologies of imagination / mode of consciousness / their specific poetic-philosophical mind:]
Europe/West --> possessive (when it is colonialist)
Europe/West --> schizophrenic
Sout East --> nomadic
Middle East --> chaotic
*chaotic writing*
(artistic research writing as it is practiced in apass [--> *closure of a whole system*] =/=) a *writing-toward-chaos* (--> Hoda =/= closure ~? catharsis تزکیه غیر روحانی)
the protocols of understanding are challen[...]
(133)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%58.5[...]
[*]text:
•mimetic transposition of the ideal
•reflexive treatment of the world
the invention of transparent**
[who invented transparency?]
deception --?--> suggestion of the world as unreal [==>?! pragmatism]
lucid interchange of untruths
existential distortion
San'an + moridan (مریدان) --> authority of authenticity
annihilated consciousness of the disciple (morid)
(volatility of) lived dreamscapes <-- (always) staged imaginary
(illusions go on unarrested)
Hoda's visual techniques (in video) ~ her special effects (--> launches what?):
*unreality of the emergent world* (+ production of emergent illusion)
•hazing of self and world
•curved mirroring
•shape-shifting
•aerial, apparitional,
•فرّار evasive and amorphous
-=> seamless apparition
--> ***eradicated storytelling*** + “I” as a spectral outcast of consciousness
*Hoda works on the unsaid (--> the imperceptible)
*Sina works on the incomprehensible (-->? the incidental)
Hoda's insurgent imagination in her cinematic techniques (part of the intellectual-aesthetic facet of middle eastern subjectivity):
•into a terrain of necessary ambiguity
•demanding an interpretive participation of a disturbed audience
--> (Benjaminian) “public is an examiner but an absent-minded one”
(how can Hoda in her medium of film create points of departure from insurgent imagination? she constantly reconsitutes the insurgent imagination *یاغی yaghi* --> one of the most important postmodern masks of iranian contemporary art)
(Elen? no longer convinced of her own entitlement to a reality principle)
the imaginary and symbolic functions of the penis --> Elen has to study ‘phallus’
Lacan's phallus is a (privileged) signifier of lack and sexual difference --> both of them are initiator for Elen's performance in the first week of apass 2018
phallus anchors the chain of signification (the imaginary, the symbolic and the real) for her
is it about an Oedipus complex? in all her work she is identify with the imaginary phallus. (her staged “flaw” in doing so is camouflaging an Oedipus complex?)
==>? Elen: will to possession
who possesses a penis? --> masturbatory jouissance
*the one who possesses the phallus = the one desired* [~ phallus = desire ‘of’ the other =/= desiring the other]. phallus is the signifier of jouissance within Elen's performance
Elen's retribution of the boy who symbolically ‘have’ the phallus --> (we are back to) castration
**Elen's true woman-power lies with giving up her phallic identification. (the image of innovation in her work: she is still busy with ‘inovative creativity,’ inherently a phallic function). this i[...]
(134)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%58.8[...]s = desire ‘of’ the other =/= desiring the other]. phallus is the signifier of jouissance within Elen's performance
Elen's retribution of the boy who symbolically ‘have’ the phallus --> (we are back to) castration
**Elen's true woman-power lies with giving up her phallic identification. (the image of innovation in her work: she is still busy with ‘inovative creativity,’ inherently a phallic function). this is a hope, the symbolic phallus ins her work (and in anyone's work) is often in the place of *the lack of the signifier in the Other* (that can never be filled?)
infantile sexuality
jouissance: enjoyment from indirect pleasure (for example enjoyment of organizing pleasure)
Lacan --> pleasure makes us guilty + without guilt there is no pleasure
*chaotic topology of imagination*( --> more like a pile of sugar =/= Freudian topology of consciousness/unconsciousness)--> erasing the boundary between interiority and exteriority
--> (once-unitary) subject ==> an oblique network }--> that is us, iranians
--> schizoid view of nomadological thought
separate methodologies of blurring and fragmentation:
1- shadow
2- mirror image
Hedayat's shadow (his palpable aesthetic-existential operation--in The Blind Owl) [=/= Kafka's metamorphoses]: skeletal transfiguration of a conceivably human form into a *shadow collectivity* [=/= camouflage]
anticipation of oblivion
Hoda, Foad,
(maybe interesting for Hoda:) bitching ~= concerted methodology of confrontation and provocation
to write on chaos
to write as chaos
to write chaos***
[an iranian topology of imagination:]
subjectivity --> deception
literature --> rage
chaos --> annihilation
deserter
textual encounter --> the method by which a chaotic imaginary is uncovered and set loose:
1. lure consciousness into desertion
2. perceive textual artifacts as forces of immanent contagion
3. identify the text as a carrier of shadow-becoming
4. text conceive the setting of inhuman
deserter (position) --> unearthing --> chaotic imagination
...a fractal exteriority that alters and generates vivid, intensified hierarchies of instinct, desire, and knowing*
*exhaustion
damaged allegory of man
*evacuation --> surrender to fugitive trajectory
takes place on amorphous dust
wrenched
shadow-scapes
enterence <--> ejection
•misadventurism of the wanderer
•rogue thought
influx
disintegration
fever
velocity
the deserter mind is made to synchronize the internalization of waste and unrest and to ravage itself
<[...]
(135)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%58.9[...]ocity --> alliance)
slave (captivity, labor, devotion, service, worship --> bondage)
--or--> l.a.b. stands for: laboratory, alliance, bondage {bondage should be part of every (artistic or knowledge-intensive) practice}
the question/problem of: incompatibility of past and present, there and here
object of event or journey (expedition, venture,)
story of the “archive of...” : collection of savored differences
the unreal is not always imaginative or speculative
it is sometimes:
a drive (suffering, passion,)
a password (encryption)
a device (machine, guide,)
accidental and chosen
the character’s wisdom, impulse, cunning, courage (endangerment), innocence (purity), violence (rage, atrocity)
intelligence: diabolical perception
...................................
(to achieve) the perfect secret: a secret that when revealed remains a secret (a riddle, a puzzle ~= monster: confrontation of the raw unnamable)
future liar --> to resurrect (in the form of fable or rumor):
•fake archive (=/= real witness)
•buried forged artifacts in some gamble
•
--> future out of sync (hyperbolic commons) ==> (an aesthetic of) temporal deviation [=/= messianic time of revolution, historical time of modernity, chronological time of capitalism,] --> (the task of) **thinking untimely**:
•forgetting
•erasure
•recreative
(Artaud's vampiric schizophrenic untimeliness...)
(Sina + Mohaghegh's) *existential radicalism*
night: underground of time
where other things can happen
a phenomena where people encounter mercilessly anonymous indifferent impersonal inhuman nature of the universe
(Mohaghegh's work on the renditions of nocturnality)
(carnaval's) multiple forms [prototype after prototype] --> formfullness =/= (deconstruction's) formlessness
...................................
ordering ==> violence, exclusion, injustice, sacrifice =/= ~=> residue (of ordering --Serres--> its excluded inessential, peripheral, parasitic) *thermal exciter*
•the anthologizing, selecting, and ordering act @Marialena
•with the discourse of parasite we are at including and inclusion
now our relationship to knowledge is to be more extravagant and parasitic =/= economic and fast
every time we write (sometimes referring the reader to the dictionary) we are also reviving language
...................................
criminal's relation to the dark (fugitive, dealer, prowler ولگرد) =/= wanderer's relation to the dark (nomad, sojourner, sleepwalker)
Mohaghegh --on--> sub-identities whose survival relies upon a certain exact mastery of night's formulas + learning its conceptual-experiential relations to: t[...]
(136)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%60[...]value to history
*we must listen for the african voice in iran even when it cannot be heard*
siah siyah سیاه: afro-iranian children (descendants of african woman slaves served as domestic servants and concubines) who remained in iran, married local people, and could live normal lives as iranians (although they might be identified as black)
==> *some percentage of the iranian population is of african descent (especially among the wealthy clases who could afford slaves) <-- this heritage has never hardened into a clear ratial category within the society*
we must regard them 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 socie 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*<[...]
(137)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%61.3[...]aracters ~?/= 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 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
[...]
(138)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%61.4[...]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
•icon
•talisman
•objects imbued with religious function
•token of aspiration
•instrument of aspiration (or other emotions)
•explicit reminder (of good behavior)
•gesture towards a better future : wish images
•
seeing = embodied act (---> go to Gossip Girl)
•(individuals make complicated interpretive choices concerning) what to look at & what they have seen
•*we feel through, about, from the visual* ~= visuality is embodied ~= visuality is multisensory + emotional
•Merleau-Ponty --> prereflective bodily consciousness: ‘body = instrument of comprehension’ (all material and other objects are woven into the body's fabric) --example--> blind man's stick
•[Groz --> phantom limb]
(Asad > Elias) power of things is their ability to act within a network enabling conditions (physical + mental --> feeling, remembering, hoping) -->{capacity of objects ==> society and politics become vitally material}
(the idea of power:) objects have agency in the complex web of interactions that joins them to other [--> object having itinerary] =/= objects have abilities or sentience that they use autonomously [--> object having life]
}--Elias--> critique of the idea of scopic regime
Elias furnishing the minimum information necessary to create an informed context (to frame of discussion) =/= give comprehensive history (about iran, pakistan, or turkey)
objects --> *affecting presence* (objects elicit affects)[...]
(147)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%61.6[...]between skepticism and the ordinary is revealed in the present work on several sites, as in the panic rumors that circulate and produce the picture of the other as phantasmal from whom all human subjectivity has been evacuated, or when violence in the register of literary is seen as transfiguring life into something else, call it a form of death, or of making oneself, as it were, into a ghost”
[violence ==> ghosts]
skeptical problematic --> shifting potency of words : energies that words may gather, and the ways these energies may give or deny life
speech =/= voice
==> ***silence is not necessarily life-denying or that it necessarily indicates a lack or an inability to mourn***
[victims of violence telling stories]
words imbued with spectral quality (yet animated by some other voice)
there is a deep moral energy in the *refusal to represent some violations of the human body* [=/= forensic architecture project's imperative of detailed representation of violation, explicit acknowledging traumatic memory]
--> ***living with poisonous knowledge*** (a different acknowledgement of traumatic memory) --> absorption exercises of remaking a world
--{on ‘forensic architecture’ (an aesthetics developed by Weizman): Keenan asks: if the excruciating citizon videos (showing police violence for instance) could not convince a jury how can forms of aesthetic critique based on research and visual evidence [= post-conceptual art] be anymore effective on the general poblic? (<== ‘evidence =/= proof’)
-age of testimony (-public truth-)
-citizon photo journalism --> “witnessing ~= action”
-the appearance of nonhuman objects as evidence (in forums and courts) as records of imperssions [sense perception] --> object = sensor (waiting to be interpreted by justice-seekers) ~-> ***proxy for an absent victim***
[*]forensic: process of making claims of what the evidence is “saying” [--> what is made evident remains in dispute]
“forensic production of evidence (in art) ~= radical rejection of representation” --> *adjudication of information* @Ali
(Keenan:) ideological and formal continuities that run from the geometrically precise drawing of human cargo slave ships [==> public delegitimization ==> collapse of slavery], or infrared images of boats carrying humans across the mediterranean today.
(artist's claim of) “the failure to see” (or “how could they not see the injustice”) (==> “I make them see” ~ violence of slowing down brutality videos, zooming, saturating, freeze-framing, obssesing with the visual details, etc.) --✕--> what we “see” is structured by other factors (race, etc.)
-recourse اعاده
(we can always do aggressive) counter reading --> counter forensic: the technical rhetorical work making evidence speek : “voice + image = task of persuasion” --claiming--> public truth and rights
•(Thral[...]
(148)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%63.7[...]
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 array of texts and conversations from contemporary to colonial records to hadith to eighteenth-century poetry
question of coherence = question of finding a grammar
difficult intellectual commitment to both contingency and coherence
(you can witnessed in Tehran a lot of anti-patriarchal, anti-hierarchical, and anti-identitarian)
[our challenge:] *to make ourselves literate* able to read what is currently illegible to us
Kant's notion of hospitality = translation of the sanskrit upanishads into[...]
(150)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%64.1[...]s magnitude, the stream that flowed from it looked calm and holy
not twinkling
no scintillation
no nictitation
disturbed their pure and lambent gleam
...................................
night dreams (after WIELS's exhibition)
starting with the story of the jinn studying origin of species --> bestiaries
mix of reports from Hedayat'neyrangestan + Shamlu's ketab kuche + Marzolph's topology of persian folklore iranian stories + ajayeb stories --to--> ?
...................................
jin lamp
tree
scared face
book Skala:
royal fairy tales
baba jaga kostliva noha / bony legs
the first worm
death skeleton afraid of itself, of its own image
self-reflective
you are following, while being followed, and the one who follows you is being followed...
pop-up book
•endless doors (on top of each other)
•rotation: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMR4VTo8s/
•rotation: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMR4Vp8Yb/
•https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMR4Vw7qk/
•https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMR4VttgH/
•moon https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMR4VV2CC/
•Philippines --> aesthetics of poverty [culture of material poverty --> poverty as scenic design and working philosophy] (==> the imperative to eliminate nonessentials =/= my philosophy)
•Iran --> aesthetics of ?
•(?what is) Instagram or TikTok people's appreciation of beauty =/= aesthetics of poverty's coupling expression with survival and change
the idea that becoming sensitive to the aesthetic qualities of local materials ==> increasing one's power of expression
theater director = aesthetic coordinator = sensitivity + selectivity
scenography in artistic research
my early interest in stage design {~ use of backdrops in capturing the essence of a play or story --> a way to *establish setting* [=/= scene] --> sense of (not necessarily authentic) history, calling for the patina of history} ==> my recent scenic paintings --present--> *visual stream of consciousness* ~= diorama ~= to capture the essence of a practice interest optic episteme (--> establish a setting to get caught lured)
(in my work: assumption of)
symbolic use of visual elements --> collective consciousness + revitalized forms ==> vision of a larger culture : capturing a gestalt = everyone can understand
Shake, Rattle and Roll
romance, light sex, and comedy segments---laced in horror
(Tolentino)
horror genre
==> big young stars performing non-iconic roles
~= (analogue of [collective]) anxiety (of nation?) : making-do processes and mechanisms of ordinary people + imperative of profit and state formation
--> how (mis)governance get to be represented + how citizenry i[...]
(151)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%64.6[...]eda 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<br />
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 = exp[...]
(156)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%64.8[...](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 --> for a Muslim an “ought to be” stands in the forefront inflecting the present well before any final end
human-God copartnership --imply--> advancement of the self as the object of striving {the self arcs towards God and partners with God in order to advance}==> change in the world
“the finite ego must be distinct, though not isolated, from the infinite”
(Iqbal)
>
Iqbal's striving:
•the end of one's striving is one's *next self*
•nonprogressive: one's next self could lay ahead, alongside of one, or in one's past
•not to part with their finitude too quickly (no fana dar hagh)
Iqbal's pholosophy -->? aesthetics of the self (~ creation of personality)
--(preoccupied 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
[...]
(157)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%65.1[...]any forms of the art of memory:
•order (Anordnung) and salience (Hervorspringen)
•expressivity (and power)
•encoding (Verschlüsselung) and evocation (Herbeirufen)
possible course between the twin rocks of writing: “social” and “arbitrary”
at the end it is the mental operation
(techniques of thought)
the image plays a central role in the construction of relations between (visual) themes and particularity of words, which in turn help organize narratives
...................................
these all were technical or formal questions so far
memory is a way consistency maintains itself
civil society is afraid of personal recollections and perverse databases, digital collections
is khm’s archive a state sponsored memorialization, monuments of a consistent history? (that assumes a sublime ending?)
the immemorial (in memorial)
have a strong philosophy of technology with this project
there is never merely a technological question, always already ontological
who wants to remember, solidify, and memorialize?
and for whom?
building a technological temple of memory, khm aesthetic narrative of its own history?
(first there is one big account of property that all these fragmented histories of numerous people who worked in khm are singed under one signature, of khm)
should we disavow any notion of “spirit” in khm?
we must agree that khm's render of its own history is pure aesthetic what so ever.
we must remain committed to the experimental, when dealing with archival domains in the school of media art where experimentation was in its original conception and foundational roots (as Zielinski expresses in one interview: “+25 KHM: Siegfried Zielinski” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3JQ3aTwu2s)
arte
DAS>
DAS KURZFILM-MAGAZIN
KURZSCHLUSS
Siegfried Zielinski im Interview
http://cinema.arte.tv/de/artikel/siegfried-zielinski-im-interview
hybrid objects?
is the logistic characteristic of digital data inconsistent with the hybrid objects of art?
Forms of thought, from what Lévi-Strauss called the “systematization [of] what is immediately presented to the senses,”
(Jakobson)
transmutation: cognition involved by the form of translation
data ontology
what is the point of view of rationality in this for us?
(what is the point of view in witchcraft? knowledge is a performative recipe)
what is the point in point of view?
...................................
(Jorge Luis Borges - ‘Funes the Memorious’ in ‘Labyrinths: selected stories & other writings’ 1964)
in Borges story, Funes, the character unable to [...]
(158)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%66.1[...]to look at this”?
questions of: essence (in art), subjectivity production, protection,
with Vincent
(?what was the) notion of “everything is kept here” in his work
(?why and how) his storytelling was all about design --> his stories of responsibility and factuality
how and why in our artistic practices, production of responsibility and factuality is hold in the terms and services of design and designer that is busy with building enhanced and efficient communication networks historically rooted in the geometries of modernist project?
(?what is the artist's) busy-ness with design --> related to the fathers of correction (?) and proper address
who (and why) wants to look at which past with lenses and geometries of the violent grids of the forefathers of modernist design?
--> ontology of document: an artifact with a specific layout and design
design has to do with the proper address (?) which is (always) about the proper witness (?)
(in the case of Vincent) do you agree with the amerindian know-how that “a good designer is a dead designer”?
(?what was the) proper affect of history (that his work was creating)
through the aesthetic of old and antique video projectors his colonialism belonged properly to the past --> (question of) the production of the proper witness
the architecture and flag of BOZAR plus his notion of design, are they interesting and necessary ways of forming kinship and properly distanced history?
Vincent “knew” his distance to the past (--> do you smell a problem?)
in which clock he is looking at time? which time machine he is handed to or placed in? who/what is making his time model?
also, which segment of your practice is temporalized? this means also which part of your practice stands out of time?
with Olga
regards of the question “what are an artwork's boundaries?” and it's intersections with documents, lists, and reports
for Olga:
document = evidence
research = mourning
(mourning as the passionate and demonstrative activity of expressing the state of loss or deprivation of a certain object for a certain subject, and demand for its revival or memorialization)
what is the feeling of the document?
*document is a story that (usually) silences other stories*
where our powers to provoke care (could/should) come from (if not from document/evidence)?
is document (in its form and feeling) the best way we have at our disposal to provoke the care of the generations? ...to mark each other with the mark of the care?
putting the narrative into proper sleep
casting the names
-artist has turned herself into a mnemonic device --> suggesting “amnesia” as her context
-artist[...]
(160)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%70.4[...]a of ‘literal remembrance’ in her performance, re-membering, literally bringing back the “members” of the Kurt Jooss company into the present of her audiences
-the problem with her remembrance is that “there is something that is important to remember” regardless of the person/subject who remembers
indisputability of the Green Table for Olga
the artist has chosen to protect The Green Table's meaning and message (due to her political and ethical commitments [for world peace?]) in a sense her subject of research remains unresearched, her values unevaluated, her moral settlements settled
how can she become interested in decomposing her research-bodies of The Green Table?
can we remain critically ethically responsible in thinking about the “meaning and message” of our subject of study and still be able to decompose it in interesting serious ways? (yes yes)
questions of: thinking, reminding, remaining,
/>
Sofia's documentation
she asks “what is document today?”
-what was document yesterday (that is not anymore today)?
-how the agency and meaning of docu is (or is not) mutating in time?*
-what is beyond the question of documentation and preservation? --> *durational aesthetics*
-is document a limited way of asking questions about what we do and our relationship with time and duration? [you never know what the present brings into the future.]
what art cannot say that document can? “truth”?
when truth was invented where was document standing?
is document today a mere effect of technologies of inscribing?
why we are not talking about “file”?
(---> go to the ontology of evidence and files in X-Files TV series)
is ‘file’ the bedrock of reading today?
document assumes, constructs and promises its own labor of reading
? document is that which reads as referent, truthful, eful, evident, economic value, , ,
Femke, with multiple understanders of the blended, blending world
the question of the metaphors of the body
manuality
manual understanders
for her “the point of origin” is at stake? --> the “ground” is at once desired and disarticulated for the sake of an idea of situatedness --> politics of positioning
placement, world, Dasein, fall
in CG bodies are articulated in differential vectors, not “grounds” --> does she want to ground the body?
she was mobilizing the metaphors of: body, ground, falling
how is she falling? in which historically contingent practices of grounding is she grounded, building her discourse?
ontology of the variable --> (question of the) figure of variation
her work with the partners of crime, getting in the front line and frontiers of CG working and practical metaphors
[...]
(161)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%70.5[...]cation, semiotics, animation, new media, children television, system collaborations
--play--> restructure and intermesh, are recruited in nationalisms, economies, political life
}--Katie--> ***what sorts of politics might allow us to scope and scale among these, to “play” with our own consciousness?***
culture industries
questions
-what does it take to be an intellectual actor across knowledge worlds & a trustworthy member of only some? @Jassem
-[what is] to practice knowledge beyond your control? @Lili
-[what is] to sift among 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 gi[...]
(162)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%71.8[...]ive can never efface what it attempts to contradict
a call for judgment hides in the defensive gesture
criminality: departure from (or failure) to recognize a law
new violence
•violence against the sovereignty of local subjects
•violence against an internationalized regime that increasingly claimed exclusive sovereignty for itself
...................................
ethnography of capitalist crisis (a project on:)
•the politics of [*]transparency: the ideological pointing stick by which the market has appropriated for itself the function of regulating the state (where it was the function of the state to regulate the market)
•how capitalism ([Morris] in Thailand) disguises itself as mere monetization
•how money's total and totalizing meditations have come to be experienced in the contrary idioms of immediacy and eternal present-being
•
([i am] learning with Morris) ethnography of crisis
-how capitalism in Thailand disguises itself as mere monetization
-how money's (total and totalizing) mediations have come to 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 [...]
(163)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%72.8[...]
Briet's rules for determining when an object has become a document:
1. there is materiality
2. there is intentionality
3. the objects have to be processed (they have to be made into documents)
4. there is a phenomenological position (the object is perceived to be a document)
indexicality: *the quality of having been placed in an organized, meaningful relationship with other evidence --> gives an object its documentary status* [<-- for who and why is this useful?]
modernist mentality:
•scientific management
•standardization
•bibliographic control
--as--> complementary and mutually reinforcing bases for achieving progress
spiritual movement of anthroposophy --> cognitive aspects of the medium of the message
==> document: repository of an expressed thought + spiritual character
1963
document: micro-thought on a flat surface (fit for physical handling, transport across space, and preservation through time)
cultural anthropology --> “material culture” --> onject as document
artifacts contribute important evidence in the documentation and interpretation of experience
artistic research = aesthetic object + signifying object
semiotics
information sciences
Barthes --> object-as-sign
there is always a meaning which overflows the object's use
text: patterns of social phenomena not made of words or numerals
[signs have to be treated a something invented]
*social construction of meaning* ==> viewer's perception of the significance and evidential مدرکى character of documents ==> “relevance” is now considered to be situational and ascribed by the viewer (in digital)
}<== the property of being a sign is not a natural property <== ***property is given to objects***
Wikipedia: all signifying objects (points to) ~~> forensic aesthetic: all evidence = signifying فوری (easy + immediate) =/= aesthetic object فرار (volatile)
object in evidence --> offer it as evidence by the way it is arranged, indexed, presented
its manner --> in arranging material so that someone may be able to make use of it as new evidence for some purpose (=/= finding material that already is in evidence)
what is a digital document?
--Buckland--> becomes more problematic, unless we remember the path of reasoning underlying the largely forgotten discussions of Otlet's objects and Briet's antelope
**documenting the antelope** =/= ajayeb
antelope: Ethiopian word for the elusive unicorn
...................................
Calvert
technobibliocapital
librarians cannot hope to really change how people seek knowledge in libraries (they are not *information awareness offi[...]
(164)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%73.8[...]ss
spiritual movement of anthroposophy --> cognitive aspects of the medium of the message
==> document: repository of an expressed thought + spiritual character
1963
document: micro-thought on a flat surface (fit for physical handling, transport across space, and preservation through time)
cultural anthropology --> “material culture” --> onject as document
artifacts contribute important evidence in the documentation and interpretation of experience
artistic research = aesthetic object + signifying object
semiotics
information sciences
Barthes --> object-as-sign
there is always a meaning which overflows the object's use
text: patterns of social phenomena not made of words or numerals
[signs have to be treated a something invented]
*social construction of meaning* ==> viewer's perception of the significance and evidential مدرکى character of documents ==> “relevance” is now considered to be situational and ascribed by the viewer (in digital)
}<== the property of being a sign is not a natural property <== ***property is given to objects***
Wikipedia: all signifying objects (points to) ~~> forensic aesthetic: all evidence = signifying فوری (easy + immediate) =/= aesthetic object فرار (volatile)
object in evidence --> offer it as evidence by the way it is arranged, indexed, presented
its manner --> in arranging material so that someone may be able to make use of it as new evidence for some purpose (=/= finding material that already is in evidence)
what is a digital document?
--Buckland--> becomes more problematic, unless we remember the path of reasoning underlying the largely forgotten discussions of Otlet's objects and Briet's antelope
**documenting the antelope** =/= ajayeb
antelope: Ethiopian word for the elusive unicorn
...................................
Calvert
technobibliocapital
librarians cannot hope to really change how people seek knowledge in libraries (they are not *information awareness office* ~= news agency)
will to knowledge --manifest--> in a massive electronic data processing project
[*]library science: a set of practices for producing knowledge in subjects --> *producing subjects through knowledge production*
patron: certain kinds of subjects (=/= citizen), consumers with an abiding market rationality and an interest in individualist private space
enmeshed in practices of classification, circulation, collection
technology + libraries + capital
•capital: social, political, economic, and other relationships crystallized in things, including books and libraries
•biblio: libraries, books, knowledge
•techno: technologies (bo[...]
(165)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%73.8[...] 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 century has demanded that individuals define and shape themselves in terms of a capacity for “paying attention”*** --> disengagement from a broader field of attraction for the sake of isolating or focusing on a reduced number of stimuli
{ our lives = disconnected patchwork of stats }<== dense and powerful remaking of human subjectivity in the West over the last 150 years
the so-called crisis of subject disintegration is diagnosed as a deficiency of “attention”
attentive norms and practices ==> modern distraction
imperative of concentrated attentiveness within the disciplinary organization of labor, education, and mass consumption
+
ideal of sustained attentiveness as a constitutive element of a creative and free subjectivity
a cultivated individual gazing (~ Jassem) on a great work of art or nature
+
a factory worker concentrating on the performance of some repetitive task
--> institutional constructions of a productive and manageable subjectivity + purified aesthetic perception
["+” : inseparability]
==> experience of subjective autonomy (for example in Jassem)
+ ambivalent limits and failures of an attentive individual
19th century emergence of new technological forms of spectacle and recording
...set of terms and positions that cannot be construed simply as questions of opacity
vision is not an autonomous and self-justifying problem
(we have to rework the) forces of specialization and separation that allowed the notion of visuality to become the intellectually available concept that it is today
(we should do that with all our ready at hand concepts)
what is the genealogy of attention in Persian subjectivity?
•an embodied subject is both the location of operations of power and the potential for resistance
•vision is only one part of a body capable of evading institutional capture
social economic representational shifts and practices
visual/auditory culture
...richer and more historically determined notions of “embodiment”
spectator culture is not founded on the necessity of making a subject ‘see’ (Crary)
rather, individuals are isolated, separated, and inhabit time as disempowered.
counter-forms of attention are constituted as other temporalities and states (--> my lectures, reverie)
for Crary, “perception”: a way of indicating a subject definable in terms of more than the single-sense modality of sight
•fundamental absence at the heart of seeing
•impossibility of t[...]
(167)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%74.8[...]temporalities and states (--> my lectures, reverie)
for Crary, “perception”: a way of indicating a subject definable in terms of more than the single-sense modality of sight
•fundamental absence at the heart of seeing
•impossibility of the perception of presence
•impossibility of an unmediated visual access to a plentitude of being
•
historical obliteration of the possibility of thinking the idea of presence in perception
*attention: simulation of presence, a pragmatic substitute in the face of its impossibility
atemporal nature of perception
? direct perceptual access to self-presdenceex
(newly) designated “pathologies” of attention and creative, intensive states of deep absorption and daydreaming
(subjective conception of vision ==>) *attention: the means by which an individual observer can transcend those subjective limitations and make perception ‘its own’ [&] the means by which a perceiver becomes open to control and annexation by external agencies***
interrelated problem of perception and modernization
Crary's development of the issue of attention is to question the relevance of isolating an aesthetically determined contemplation or absorption
general problem of perceptual synthesis and disintegrative possibilities of attention
optical verisimilitude
attention --> tension --> possibly of a fixation, of holding something in wonder or contemplation, in which the attentive subject is both immobile and ungrounded
how can something originate in its opposite?
Nietzsche
sudden emergence of model of subjective vision (in the 19th century)
complex and contingent physiological makeup of the observer ==> vision is rendered faulty, even arbitrary
reality maintenance
aftershocks of apperception
failure of a capacity for synthesis of conscious thought (named dissociation) became linked in the 19th century with pathological psychosis
this label (of pathological disintegration) was evidence of a shift in the relation of the subject to a visual field
*synthesis
•for Bergson: bind with creative forces of memory
•for Dilthey: creative forms of fusion specific to human imagination
•for Nietzsche: endlessly creative and metamorphic and not constitutive of truth
the rise of psychological explanation within epistemology
Kant saw perception crowding in upon the soul
for Külpe attention was the very condition of thinking, consciousness not in the mercy of external impressions
the importance of attention to the conception of subjective time in Augustine and Husserl
(curiosity triggered by) wonder for Descarte[...]
(168)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%74.9[...]courses relating to the perceptual experience of a subject in time --> forms of exteriority in modernity's account of perception
eschatological dream of 19th century : “to make this knowledge of man exist so that man could be liberated by it from his alienation, liberated from all the determinations of which he was not the master” --> one made of man an object of knowledge so that man could become subject of his own liberty and of his own existence
-Foucault
exercise of a sovereign and attentive will [we see this in Olearius] --> claiming subject's self-possession --> conscious organizer of that perceptible world --> master
(Nietzsche:) “i am free” ==> “he must obey” }--> the inward certainty that obedience will be rendered -->{ *exclusively: (the unconditional evaluation that) ‘this and nothing else is necessary now’
co-presence of the world (can never be guaranteed [by scientific psychology])
<== attentiveness is continuous with distraction, reverie, dissociation, trance,
@apass, work on attention is so interesting because it is part of the history of modality of contemplation about processes and activities of the body
the neo-Kantian legacy of a disinterested aesthetic perception --desire--> to escape bodily time (and its vagaries)
•(Hume's) artist: someone in whom “nature has forgotten to attach their faculty for perception to their faculty for action” (<-- sounds familiar? “free” artistic perception)
•(for Roger Fry:) “imaginative life” is about contemplation disconnected from the possibility of action (=/= instinctive reactions to sensible objects and their accompanying emotions ~= animal)}--> a bad fable
modernist art: *timeless perception* [formal conditions of the possibility of vision, pure form operates as a principle of structure, Krauss outlines how temporality is excluded] =/= mundane or quotidian forms of seeing or listening [the object bounded by its contours, spurred/hated by modernism]
whenever we try to look at or listen to one thing for too long the attention (containing within itself the conditions for its own disintegration) inevitably reaches a threshold at which it breaks down[<-- a game i used to play as a child, playing with attention and distraction, mutating myself into a state of trance or autohypnosis, absorbed, diverted, nebulous =/= socially adaptive subject] --> *perceptual identity* (of its object) begins to deteriorate (& paralysis of will?) [_that is why in spectacle visual regimes the duration of perception must be regulated in short intervals]
attention is thermodynamic : a given force could assume more than ine form
partial sleep <--> abnormal fixation
(i am cautious at every turn to capture my own) *experience of distraction* is part of ajayeb studies. because it has to do with modes of attention and it[...]
(169)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%75.3[...]r />
attention is thermodynamic : a given force could assume more than ine form
partial sleep <--> abnormal fixation
(i am cautious at every turn to capture my own) *experience of distraction* is part of ajayeb studies. because it has to do with modes of attention and its persian history
perception is a dream
(an account of) [*]modernity: a process of fragmentation and destruction in which premodern forms of wholeness and integrity were irretrievably broken up or degraded through technological, urban, and economic reorganization
==> a “decay” in the capacity for perception [<-- to be careful in working for ajayeb not to romanticize (elitist and regressive fantasy of communal relations in) premodern modalities of looking/listening as richer, deeper, or more valuable :
modern urban life as “swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli” =/= premodern's “slower, more habitual, more smoothly flowing rhythm of the sensory-mental phase"]
(sensory mental schema)
understanding of distraction within a larger deterioration of experience
-distraction (not as a product of decay or anthropy, rather) as a mean to overcome bankruptcy of bourgeois aesthetic (late 19th century):
•Benjamin: absorbed contemplation purified of the excess stimuli of modernity
•Adorno: distraction as regression: perception that is “arrested in the infantile stage” =/= “deep concentration”
•Rilke: authentic attention as precious and rare survival of the lost ideal of artistic absorption in work now exiled to the margins of mechanized and routinized world
•Rodin: gazing of the handworker
-
}--> “reception in a state of distraction”, (<== absorption is psychologically grounded perception) =/= Crary arguing that attention and distraction ceaselessly flowing into one another on the same continuum (of social field)
<br />
[tales of understanding]-*
•what are the cognites of ‘contemplation’ (in german or farsi)?
the theological resonances of this latinate word --> contemplation: viewing/considering with continued attention; going into the temple, into the sphere of the holy, into the deep roots of things, into their creative ground
(to oppose) contemporary modes of distraction
modern forms of interiority, absorption, psychic isolation
Riegl's dream of a world in which art would be inseparable from an imaginary democratic harmony of individual and community (=/= harem)
collective attention (central attentive mass audience, 1900) : cinema
rational attention: attention linked to thought, one's telescope on object
(for Nietzsche:) attention: possibility of an absorption ==> forgetting --> life-affirmative }--> “focusing on the present moment”
final virtue of [...]
(170)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%75.4[...]iquity
(for Nietsche:) decadence: perpetual adaptability of spectacular culture ~= (one loses one's power of) resistance against stimuli [--> this is Ali ]
=/= existing capacities for action and living
(obsolescence, not the business of the poet. Mallarme)
(the question of resistance is weak. we must ask what are the emergent forms of life caused by that? --> might be interesting for Hoda)
(apass's own hoped-for ritual civic theater of the future)*
attention sustained and enhanced by the regular introduction of novelty [...] means of simulating experiences of singularity and identity in the face of the processes of exchangeablity and equivalence
-Guy Debord
for the hysteric: objects are too present --> excess of presence make representation impossible
(for Deleuze history of painting has been about warding off hysteria*)
organization of perceptual binding and synthesis (taking place while Monet was working)
determined by
different libidinal setup
other category of perceptual dispersion
potential site of fixation
Freud (+ Klinger) --> inseparability of attention from dream process & aesthetic production
(Freud is testing) psychical energy = mobile attention
***observer = a kinetic seeing body set in movement*** (to glide along undeterminated social and durational trajectories)
place: that ordinary anxiety, the expectancy, the sublimated precariousness of a modernizing urban world in which the individual is adrift on a smoothed-out surface devoid of any markers
*origins of aesthetic sentiments*
of skating --> movement of the body pleasurable to self and associated with the consciousness of gracefulnes, as in skating: movement of a kind that bring many muscles into harmonious action and strain none
(Spencer, Principles of Psychology)
*the facts of the case
Sachverhalten
the detective, collector, consumer, and the fetishist (are same figures)
--> idea fixe
--> pathological disorders of attentiveness
[according to Freud] when attention isolates a particular content from a larger cognitive field, the act of dissociation can be the initiation of a productive process
[---> go to Sherlock Holmes]
Weltpanorama
a 19th century attraction: sweeping *comprehensive view*
stereoscopic peep show
a consumer would pay to observe a mechanized series of photographic images
Fuhrmann + Daguerre: illusory three-dimensional scenes whose reality-effects were augmented by concealed lighting and translucent painting
Kaiserpanorama <-- (a site [in which the *automation of perception* occurs] among many of) industrialization of visual consumption
~ a spac[...]
(171)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%76.4[...]l system of images) to an interplay of forces and motor reactions (in which representation is irrelevant)
[this is inseparable from the larger project of scientific amelioration of collective emotional hygiene of the 19th century]
--> *sensation: part of a sequence of events (in which the end point is not an inner state, such as: knowledge, cognition, perception, rather:) it is that which culminates in movement
some of the 1850s rationalizing ambitions (of widespread philosophical and scientific conceptualization of a fundamental relation between sensation and motor behaviour) indirectly informs Seurat's work --proposing-->{ sensory stimuli ==> motor expression (in the perceiver) }--> (the question of) **human response based on bypassing of conscious thought altogether**
(very important for iranian artists: the question of the *rational mind of an observer* and intellectual construction directed to that --> status of a conscious observer)
-producing effects involuntary in the observer
-(Foad and Sina engaging with an) exclusively optical consciousness of the individual human subject [--> can we go beyond that? to which philosophical sensual ethics of bodily awareness Foad and Sina are optically bind to? which anti-optical aesthetic positions are available to us?]
•Foad's neoimpressionist: implication of total organic resonance ==>{ from organic activity of perception --to--> transforming physical existence }
•Sina's Einfuhlung: mode of intense perceptual absorption in which lines and forms are experienced as catalysts for vitalization of the imagination
Seurat --> dream of a fully unalienated instinctual aesthetic gratification --through--> quantifiable and manageable economy of excitation (within an organized and controllable body)
biological romanticism
anxiety of overstimulation --> power of suggestion
attention --> Nietzsche's che's reality of drives --> Freud's libidinal body (=/= physiological body) --> *drives (=/= instincts) not tied to specific conditions of satisfaction, are subsumed to an open-ended ‘plasticity’ (susceptible to substitution)
drive constantly misses its aim
(for Seurat, Fere, Nietzsche:)
art = physics (=/= semiology) : the question of meaning in art was not about representation but a relation of forces --> for Seurat color was not something accessible as a sign to a sovereign gaze but was an interpretation made by the body
(both Seurat [in his painting] and Nietzsche [in will to power] have felt that there was) an extreme calm in certain *sensations of rapture* ~ extra retardation of the feeling of time and space --> the classical style is essentially a representation of this calm, simplification, abbreviation, concentration }--> (?Sina's paintings) logical and geometrical simplification <== enhancement of strength*!
[...]
(173)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%76.9[...]nd controllable body)
biological romanticism
anxiety of overstimulation --> power of suggestion
attention --> Nietzsche's reality of drives --> Freud's libidinal body (=/= physiological body) --> *drives (=/= instincts) not tied to specific conditions of satisfaction, are subsumed to an open-ended ‘plasticity’ (susceptible to substitution)
drive constantly misses its aim
(for Seurat, Fere, Nietzsche:)
art = physics (=/= semiology) : the question of meaning in art was not about representation but a relation of forces --> for Seurat color was not something accessible as a sign to a sovereign gaze but was an interpretation made by the body
(both Seurat [in his painting] and Nietzsche [in will to power] have felt that there was) an extreme calm in certain *sensations of rapture* ~ extra retardation of the feeling of time and space --> the classical style is essentially a representation of this calm, simplification, abbreviation, concentration }--> (?Sina's paintings) logical and geometrical simplification <== enhancement of strength*!
a lot of artists are still busy with:
stimulus-response mechanisms
**techniques for the external management of aesthetic response** --> quantifiable emotional engineering
@Eszter directly
(the origins of this discourse lies in 19th century automatic behaviour and nervous response, nature of mass subjectivity and desire for social integration, and since Seurat in visual art)
[*]spectator: a being that is acted apon
(does the artist want the spectator “obey” a predetermined program of effects? specially in theater... even if we say this subject [hypothetical individual observer] is a creative inventive affirmative body --still--> presupposing **a subject that is a unity with a conscious will to be overcome** ~-> method)
putting a little onlooker at the bottom of my paintings -->? potential objects of techniques for the control and management of perception and attention
(what are Foad's such objects?)
}--> the question of *how a sensory world is dismantled, synthesized, and represented (~ my paintings) is inseparable from the problem of how a world of objects, individuals, and social relations (~ my performances) organizes itself*
what concerns Seurat (in different terms of color image or human figures) is a ***tension between cohesion and disintegration*** (--> that has been also my constant aesthetic concern)
--this is evident in my work:
[*my paintings busy with] questions of how diverse stimuli become tentatively “bound” into a coherent constellation
[*my performances busy with] questions of how contents referring to a social world are fused or integrated into a network of relations
(in my work) experimenting with:
•the unity of subjective experience (myself perfor[...]
(175)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%76.9[...]ernal management of aesthetic response** --> quantifiable emotional engineering
@Eszter directly
(the origins of this discourse lies in 19th century automatic behaviour and nervous response, nature of mass subjectivity and desire for social integration, and since Seurat in visual art)
[*]spectator: a being that is acted apon
(does the artist want the spectator “obey” a predetermined program of effects? specially in theater... even if we say this subject [hypothetical individual observer] is a creative inventive affirmative body --still--> presupposing **a subject that is a unity with a conscious will to be overcome** ~-> method)
putting a little onlooker at the bottom of my paintings -->? potential objects of techniques for the control and management of perception and attention
(what are Foad's such objects?)
}--> the question of *how a sensory world is dismantled, synthesized, and represented (~ my paintings) is inseparable from the problem of how a world of objects, individuals, and social relations (~ my performances) organizes itself*
what concerns Seurat (in different terms of color image or human figures) is a ***tension between cohesion and disintegration*** (--> that has been also my constant aesthetic concern)
--this is evident in my work:
[*my paintings busy with] questions of how diverse stimuli become tentatively “bound” into a coherent constellation
[*my performances busy with] questions of how contents referring to a social world are fused or integrated into a network of relations
(in my work) experimenting with:
•the unity of subjective experience (myself performing under influence, mad lectures, excessive synthesis, pathological and disruptive storytelling)
•integrity of social institution and processes (the loci and conditions of us coming together, space of art)
=/= social tranquility --> economic productivity
=/= social fantasy of “solidarity” --> health and functional unity, individuals transformed into “social beings”
in a way most of us artists unconsciously in some way in an utopian projection of a sensory wholeness and fulfillment
(dream of) fabricators of powerful imaginary social figurations
Durkheim and Seurat's question of social & sensory: from what viewpoints significant manifestation of organization become apprehensible
my paintings
•(unstatistical) distribution of isolated and categorized units <== additive principle 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]) -->? wantin[...]
(176)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%77[...]of knowledge: *punctuality* [---> go to apass psychological optics and image of knowledge incorporated in presentation of projects, #workshop on topology] --> the separation of the perceptual screen from that of the “real” world
[*]grid: (19th century) emblem of the infrastructure of vision --> becoming an increasingly insistent and visible feature of neo-impressionist painting
(~/= Crary is hesitant to characterize Seurat's flatness structurally as grid)
-tabular field with rows and columns making impossible a point to point (= punctual) relation between spectator and image
(Martin Jay:) two scopic regimes:
•metric and homogenous tableau loosely synonymous with classical space
•decentered and destabilized perceptual regime with its mobile and embodied observer
the evocation of a scenographic setup in Seurat (Parade de cirque) is a veil over the desiccated, nonhomogenous, and additive construction of the work
frontality and unity of framing (of “primitive” cinema...)
[?do we need to] (in an illusionist mode) satisfy the principle of unitary organization of the scenic space
(how should you be concerned with [public record] of your intellectual and aesthetic formations?)
Seurat's Parade de cirque =/= Leonardo's Last Supper
(Seurat broke free from Leonardo, and i should from Seurat)
both of these paintings are concerned with the revelation of a mystery:
•Leonardo: the mystery of Christian sacrifice as it coincides with a lucid apprehension of infinite extension
•Seurat: the “mystery” of the disenchanted and quantitative order of capitalist exchange (and its overturning of homogeneity and legibility of space)
witness to:
-holy communion -Leonardo
-rituals intrinsic to modernity -Seurat
in terms of orthogonal illustrated in Leonardo is precs precisely what Seurat dismantles in Parade de Cirque
the question of value
movement of abstract quantities
(transactional dimensions of Seurat's work)
lost transparency:
how the use of money within modernity transformed the social character of exchange ***from something interpersonal to an anonymous transaction*** at the distance (--> Reza's hold-up of values, the dream of interpersonal transaction and resistance of anonymity and distance)
[the problem that all artists have with money --Simmel-->] *a priori equivalence of price (for all commodities) ==> eliminate:
•deliberations and examinations of the buyer
•effects and elucidations of the seller
==> quick and indifferent economic transaction
“selling tickets”: accumulated social experience of separation = *depersonalized exchange* (--> that which many artists are dealing with as a problem)
--Gouz--> [*]capitalism: *disaffection of[...]
(177)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%77.2[...]xual virtuoso
performing music --> suggestion of collective participation --evoke--> harmonic relationships and premodern mysteries [implicit in music and geometrical forms (even as they are collapsed into modern abstraction and the image of a fully administrated world)]
@Ali, KHM sound department
...remnant of what once might have the living Dionysian reality (of the antique chorus)
*score* (coming from the boredom of a third-rate military music band after 1850 in Europe) aligned with the rationalizing imperatives of industrial production: hierarchically ranked states *executing an external algorithm* ~= partition: allocating its parts
[*]score: the image of programmed labor in our society (@Lilia) --> logic of combination
-in apass i have been fighting against artists ambivalent characterization of themselves. i want my peers particular figuration of measurement, quantities, and ratios of their diagnosis of crisis of value and of devaluation of life and the world (when they perceive as such... negation and inversion)
(Aristotle's metaphysics ==>) Pythagorian: art = harmony = analogy between opposites
~~--> **social project of reconciliation through the use of aesthetic forms** (from the 4th century and still popular today)--> “training of the people begins with the senses” : music and rhythm from which came healing of human temperaments and passions
Pythagoranism: number =/= infinite
•infinite = void of knowledge, limitless and undetermined
•number = rational limit and determination
Pythagorean =/= premodern mystic values
*some of the great disenchanters at the origin of modern western science are deeply Pythagorean:
***number is the essence of reality ==today==> “nature must be studied quantitatively” (=/= ajayeb's quality of descriptive nature of the world)
...and appeal to mathematics in artmaking still comes from the hope of establishing clear and distinct ideas, which as such are necessarily true
Pythagorean primal cosmogenic principle: breath --> repression's binary rhythm of inhaling and exhaling, the mutual interaction of contraries (like sex) : the original generative force
(the union of the limited and the unlimited) --> still operating today in the year 2018
theories of dynamogeny on iranian traditional music radif, that certain musical proportions poses cheerful or bitter qualities, influence the person's emotional state
to transcend from quantitative number of dastgah --to--> a mysterious qualitative dimension of pardeh
(Crary's) Seurat's anarchism: (painting of the) world of mere empirical relations, cut off from the infinite (loss of the vanishing point) and from the light of either sun or moon (gaslight illuminates the scene)
Leo's primitive communism
[...]
(178)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%77.5[...]ntury invention), inflection of mind and body to one another through a kind of twisting or inversion --> rethinking relations of the inside and the outside of the subject psychical interior and corporeal exterior)
-sides of the mobius strip are not fundamental identities, the drift from one to the other side is uncontrollable
currents
and surfaces of this body
is coalescence of energy into phantasms
deceptive semblance
of a theater of representation
Ali's speech (and Jassem): تاثیر گذاشتن (making what one knows into an effect on audience)
=/=
Sina's speech: به صورت موضوع درآوردن
(making what one guesses into a subject of discussion to be rethought)
irreducible composite of properties belonging to the observer
perspective: transforming psychophysiological space into mathematical space ==> sum of all parts of space and its contents are absorbed into a single ‘quantum continuum’
-Panofsky perspective as symbolic
analysis of sensation
“one coherent mass of sensations”
(Mach's legitimate and functional) scientific impressionism
*modernization (and rationalization) of perceptual (and aesthetic) response* <-- preoccupation of Seurat, Eisenstein, Moholy-Nagy, Schoenberg
(Crary > Chastel > Seurat's method was) a research into archetypal forms (lines, colors, directions) which answered to a double and deliberately compound ambition, at once *****archaic regression and scientific reduction***** [<-- this describe my work!] the artist/painter's operations set up a meeting point between *an ancient hieratic art and the rationalized discipline of the future* [= my work on ajayeb] --> culturally reactionary component of my projects, progressive and regressive at once, (past and future)
=/= Meyer Schapiro's Seurat: an enlightened politically progressive artisan-artist embracing science and technological paradigms in the interests of *forging an image of a nonhierarchical social world* [<-- an uncritical stance towards “science” and “technology,” approaching “the rationality of method” (in Seurat) as a final locus of meaning =/= the site of powerful and unresolved contradictions]****
-can our modern practices be constituted without reinventing its relations to the ancient?
troublesome ambivalence of Pythagoreanism: part of an animistic premodern magical world view yet deeply embedded in the essential assumption of modernity that all of nature is understandable in terms of numbers (-Bloch, modernism: quantitative side with metaphysics proper strictly scientific =/= figural-qualitative symbolic side)
... --> Seurat's unresolvable problem: to think simultaneously the idea of universality in terms of aesthetic absolute and the inescapable universality of modern exchange and calculation
--> (Norman Br[...]
(179)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%77.8[...]ssion and scientific reduction***** [<-- this describe my work!] the artist/painter's operations set up a meeting point between *an ancient hieratic art and the rationalized discipline of the future* [= my work on ajayeb] --> culturally reactionary component of my projects, progressive and regressive at once, (past and future)
=/= Meyer Schapiro's Seurat: an enlightened politically progressive artisan-artist embracing science and technological paradigms in the interests of *forging an image of a nonhierarchical social world* [<-- an uncritical stance towards “science” and “technology,” approaching “the rationality of method” (in Seurat) as a final locus of meaning =/= the site of powerful and unresolved contradictions]****
-can our modern practices be constituted without reinventing its relations to the ancient?
troublesome ambivalence of Pythagoreanism: part of an animistic premodern magical world view yet deeply embedded in the essential assumption of modernity that all of nature is understandable in terms of numbers (-Bloch, modernism: quantitative side with metaphysics proper strictly scientific =/= figural-qualitative symbolic side)
... --> Seurat's unresolvable problem: to think simultaneously the idea of universality in terms of aesthetic absolute and the inescapable universality of modern exchange and calculation
--> (Norman Brown:) the money complex, archaic or modern, is inseparable from symbolism, and *symbolism is (not the mark of rationality, as Simmel thought, but) the mark of sacred* @Luiza's diagrams [--> this is important for apass, “aesthetic experience occurs within, not above, the opposition of the symbolic and the economy, and within the lived conflict between self-activity and reification” -Brenkman]
==> undialectical disjunction of sacred and secular
silent reflective monk
mechanical assemblage of never quite integrated elements
Seurat's texture of work <== an intuition of the loss of art's immediacy --> shift of (what might have been) contemplation into mere attentiveness
(Crary) Seurat concretizes the *modern dilemma of the disappearance of aura*
...bringing into the work the forms of rationalization that eradicated aura in the first place --> appearance is privileged over essence, and technological rationality is deployed in the service of appearance
negotiating rapture
(ajayeb ~/=?) to produce a dialectic image: to criticize modernity (~ foregrounding of the aura) through an act of memory, and at the same time, to criticize archaism (~ nostalgia for the aura) through an act of essentially modern invention (substitution and designification)
color...
how forms of ‘synthesis’ (optical mixture, purely additive and accumulative functions of industrialized procedures) produce ‘qualitative’ change (pre-bourgeois non-quantitative connection to [...]
(180)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%77.8[...]of a 19th century fantasy of the recuperation of tragedy and myth ~ the dream that culture could make whole what capitalism has broken --Crary+Lacoue-Labarthe--> [disturbing conviction/dream:] in an age where transcendence is undone, (the vacations of) art can recover an ancient destination and establish the type of mythological figure (in which humanity or a people could recognize itself)
-verisimilitude: the quality of seeming to be true, gloss, semblance
composite imaginary of the 19th century
______________
crowd
theater
phantasmagoria
Crary --> Seurat's Parade de Cirque = disclosure of *the absence at the heart of modern spectacle and perception*
vivid opening into a light-filled action-filled arena
@apass, a common way of criticism:
•*evoke, then withhold*
(fir example: evoke ‘entertainment commodity’ but withhold it. Laura, Ale ,)
•*invest, and dismantle* (we are invested in what we dismantle)
•*desolation of older scenes of representation* @Sina
Crary on Seurat Cirque --> investigation of the conditions under which a subject could be activated as an attentive perceiver
(forensic aesthetics --> conditions under which a subject could be arrested as a witness)
(Sina ajayeb bestiary --> conditions under which a subject could be contested as a knowing agent)
“frame: an isolating agent” (<== Wagner ~ to make an *autonomous and luminous field of attraction* with a deliberately ambiguous spatial identity)
--> explicit renunciation of the classical (and early modern) status of the image
=/= as a windowlike plane intersecting a cone of vision
=/= as a flat plane covered with colored patches
(Seurat's optics:) ***images apparitional value*** <== effect of image's detachment from a broader visual field (=/= diaroma and stereoscop)
--> 19th century optical experiences that severed the image from any continuous or intelligible relation to the position of the observing objects
(=/= Wagnerian aesthetics)
--> *collective visual experience* ~~--> precinematic forms of moving images
(@apass: hand drawing is not about being “trapped in older artisanal modes of production” --?--> “performance =/= projection”)
to assess (the relationships between):
•your own technological products
•makeup of your audience
•economical realities of the marketplace
}==> inventor of 19th century (Raynaud, Edison, )
--> modify your machines in terms of:
•performance
•shifting audience needs (and possibilities)
phantasmagoric: occultation of production by means of the outward appearance of the product (creating an experience for a solitary and immobile spectator)
(spectral) atopic image: literally not there<[...]
(182)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%78.4[...]cism:
•*evoke, then withhold*
(fir example: evoke ‘entertainment commodity’ but withhold it. Laura, Ale ,)
•*invest, and dismantle* (we are invested in what we dismantle)
•*desolation of older scenes of representation* @Sina
Crary on Seurat Cirque --> investigation of the conditions under which a subject could be activated as an attentive perceiver
(forensic aesthetics --> conditions under which a subject could be arrested as a witness)
(Sina ajayeb bestiary --> conditions under which a subject could be contested as a knowing agent)
“frame: an isolating agent” (<== Wagner ~ to make an *autonomous and luminous field of attraction* with a deliberately ambiguous spatial identity)
--> explicit renunciation of the classical (and early modern) status of the image
=/= as a windowlike plane intersecting a cone of vision
=/= as a flat plane covered with colored patches
(Seurat's optics:) ***images apparitional value*** <== effect of image's detachment from a broader visual field (=/= diaroma and stereoscop)
--> 19th century optical experiences that severed the image from any continuous or intelligible relation to the position of the observing objects
(=/= Wagnerian aesthetics)
--> *collective visual experience* ~~--> precinematic forms of moving images
(@apass: hand drawing is not about being “trapped in older artisanal modes of production” --?--> “performance =/= projection”)
to assess (the relationships between):
•your own technological products
•makeup of your audience
•economical realities of the marketplace
}==> inventor of 19th century (Raynaud, Edison, )
--> modify your machines in terms of:
•performance
•shifting audience needs (and possibilities)
phantasmagoric: occultation of production by means of the outward appearance of the product (creating an experience for a solitary and immobile spectator)
(spectral) atopic image: literally not there
shimmering --> effect of detachment from the environment
Reynaud's projected moving images --> elastic and reversible temporalities (that had little to do with Lumieres's “real time”)
Cheret's posters (joyful modern women, advertisement for cosmetics, lighting fixtures, department stores, ballets, and so on) --> a technology of attention + a specific ornamental representation of commodity culture
(--> practical functionings of consumption culture in the 1870s) @OSP
*Cheret's “personal style” in graphic design = an abstract luster جلوه a decorative formula that could be applied promiscuously to any possible object of consumption* =/= Seurat's dream of universal style
****rich textures of entertainment and visual spectacle****
-which range of optical apparatuses are available for publ[...]
(183)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%78.4[...]stence of radically heterogenous and temporally dispersed elements*
...a subjective immobilization
seeking to enter into the world's ceaseless movement of destabilization (=/= holding together the content) ==> a more intensive recreation of a subjective interface with the world (=/= reverie, disassociation)
}-->
•every object's identity is swallowed up in difference
•*vision: veritable theater of metamorphosis and permutations*
(Cezanne reexamining the composition of the visual world ==>)
fanatical attentiveness to the data of sense ==> dissolution of unity, destabilization of objects onto flux, dispersion, displaced the body to the world, into a stream of change, of time, *undoing the immediacy of the world* [<-- my reexamination of the composition of the epistemological world of fables in West Asia, my work's relationship with knowledge is like that. to gain control of myself in the midst of moving concepts, the circulation of concerns, jumble of paths and knots, whirlpool of velocities, and recourse to my capacity for forgetting...]
perceptual consistency is a phantom
(Lucretius:) [*]world: infinite Cascades of self-differentiation
-the question is: how to make aesthetic constructions [the task of the artist] (if the world is so fragile)?
-how to go back and forth between attention and reverie?
perplexity of the eye (related to a deeper and metaphysical perplexity)
an imageless vision
...a mind for which no visible form is visible enough
the fixed and monocular eye has been posed (in recent theatrical writing) as the formative element of classical system of representation **functioning to arrest duration and change in order to achieve a conceptual matey mastery of phenomena** {==> zoocentric animal anatomy =/= ajayeb}
--✕--> (Crary's suggestion that) ***the fixed immobile eye is what annihilates the “naturalness” of the world*** (disclosing the provisional and fluid nature of visual experience) =/= mobile glancing eye is what preserves the preconstructed character of the world
•moving eye --> habitually familiarly caresses objects (extracting previously established relations among them)
•fixed eye --> (immobile eye triggers a ferment of activity ==>) trance and perceptual disintegration --> dissolving the physiognomy of the everyday world [~=>? bestiary's perceptual uncanniness]
fixed truth-taking stare ==> perceptual uncanniness
the idea of un undistorted original perception ==> objects in some accessable state available for objective comparison and evaluation
fixation sets the world in motion
visual field begin vibration and oscillating
chromatic instability
the physiological apparatus (our bodies) incapable of stability =/= the aim of stabilizing the worl[...]
(184)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%78.9[...]consciousness and the stored stimuli of wishes, memories, anticipations}
(mid 1890s) Bergson + Freud ==> sustained and original consideration of the anti-optical functioning of subjectivity perceptual experience as a nondirectional, acentric, multitemporal event
--> empathic decentering of the observer
+ (widespread) practical and discursive remaking of the observer as subject, vision is no longer a distinct and isolable phenomenon
Freud --> psyche = a perpetually available innocence + infinite reserve of traces
*perception arouse interest on the account of their possible connection with the object wished for* : ‘perception = question of internal excitation’
Cezanne --(in Pineapple and Rocks)--> coexistence (continuity) of:
•an attentiveness that is bound (cathected) onto established (facilitated) patterns [= one's own history + its fixation]
•a perception of animality and novelty [= relaxation of grip, musical, (Deleuze and Guattari's) *antimemory* =/= atemporal forgetting]
vertigo: auto-movement of chaos
“Cezanne's work = model of a nonhuman perception” : (reading of Cezanne as) austere project of formal rigor, performed on some remote plane of aesthetic production; an enterprise tragically detached from an engagement with the social contradiction of his time =/= (Crary's reading of) Cezanne coinciding historically with new perceptual technologies --> new metaphoric possibilities
accumulated experience --basis--> radical depersonalization --intuit--> creative forces of chaos (in your own provence)
**Cezanne's imaginative refiguration of himself as machine = translate automatically** ==> release from grounded condition of human perception : to become an apparatus = implacability apprehend a world outside of the terms (that the artist wants out) ==> novelty (~= to overcome the gravity of one's own interiority) --Cezanne--> primordial image (of irreducible formlessness, of ***world in process without horizon***, without position, of slowly vibrating colors...) [<-- *apparatus becoming* is now the cliche of contemporary artist]
glow of a geological dawn
archaic + inert
Precambrian
deterritorializing processes of capitalism (+ its imperatives of perpetual renovation) --> (its compatible) uprooted nonorientable subject
nature experienced as vibrations, animations, chromatic reverberation (+ seeking a “logic” to clarify its unfolding)
hideous sign of progress (for Cezanne: electric light, cinema, )
artistic modernism <==Adorno== (the fact that) the most advanced procedures of material production and organization are not limited to the sphere in which they originate (---> go to incarnation)
demotivated subjectivity
wants something that is neither optical nor mechanical nor intellectual ==> [...]
(185)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%79.5[...]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 century) morose and elegiac discourse about the disenchantment of the world
...................................
pessimism ~= realism
(optimism ~= idealism)
...................................
(to move from) eternal truths --to--> eternal archives
(an aesthetic:) archival monuments
despite computer's hype and undeniable capacity and flexibility of computerize databases, the practices of collecting, inventorying, describing, image-making, collating, and publishing have remaining stable since the monumental projects of 19th century: corpus inscriptionum latinarum, carte du ciel, botanical gardens, etc. --> archival projects
...................................
popular and learned interest in monsters
(in the 16th century & 17th century Baconian scientific programm:) treatments of nature and natural history must have included (with rigorous selection) monsters (~ aberrations in the natural order: new, raew, rare, and unusual nature, both exotic & domestic)
[*]nature: an ingenious craftsman --> [*]monster: nature's most artful work (--> they bridged the natural & the artificial)
•corresponded to the activities 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 [...]
(186)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%81.4[...]xtual travel
Batori
consumer capitalism ==Jameson==> erase/lack of history ==> nostalgic revisitation of the past
traumatic events of the past --> self-critical memory-culture --> (in Dark TV series) German national self-understanding [visiting Third Reich + Nietzschean eternal return + wormhole = floating state of identity <-- this is the achievement of the Dark TV series: selling the German nation to their international audience as a commodity]
Dark TV series = national narratives + global postmodern visual practices
space: gray
force: violence
interrelation: neglect
(Dark's stylistic) labyrinthine time-memory mosaic (protagonists meeting with their elder/younger selves, memory images, time travel etc.) --> locate the spectator ==> viewer is encouraged to find a way out of the labyrinth [~=> care for the German characters with their double burden (Nazi + GDR) of traumatic recollections ~=> a positive affirmative identity for contemporary Germany (~~> nationalism =/= sense of existential homelessness)]
}--> *TV series becomes a form of memory* (protagonist = German nation)
(serial poetic of) cliff-hanger structure
maintaining an (absolute) aesthetic continuity
{time: liquid realm =/= history: fixed realm}<--Dark-- protagonists must face when looking for their own identity
new German Cinema (Berlin School) --> ghostliness, constant travel, national division, alienation, rootlessness, inbetween-identity of the protagonists, stuckness in time =/= Heimat: the idea of stable secured community
...................................
labyrinth is architecture at it's best?
space as a limit and space as an environment
the relation of ornament to void space (background)
entering the space (pointing, direction) versus filling the space
in purely perceptual terms, all that is seen is the surface, but as an idea the building involves the whole of its inner, hidden structure; hence not only what is seen, but what alse is known appears.
concept of transparency: is a charachteristic feature of intellectual realism. in a drawing, transparency means the demonstration of knowledge about -or disclosure of- that which is inside, behind and under visible surfaces. (stimulant to the imagination of grave robbers)
is labyrinth or architecture a visual system (window etc.) or a spatial construction (direction, distinction etc.)? when we look at it in this text with the object of cloud...
labyrinth ~=? architecture's ornamental activity
[*]ornament: epression of an excessive force of form, the blossoming of a force that has nothing more to achieve --> fecundity
-ornament shifts among different planes at different speeds ==illusion==> movement and depth
lab[...]
(187)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%82.7[...]on from alien forms =/= essential secret in history
positivism (esbat-gara اثبات گرا) =/= speculation
transhistorical claims about Islamic art--its ahistorical approach to Islam can contribute to Orientalism, (Nasr's spirituality) =/= to situate Islamic art within the history of ideas of its period, portrayal of a cultural worldview when they succeed (Marks)
Interpreting a cultural artifact for what it might have meant for the people of a past time is always an imposition--(to give preference to certain meanings at the expense of others)
(Marks’) existential phenomenology : one's own experience, sensory and mental, is used as a basis for analysis (to investigate), but does not assume this experience can be generalized.
code: a writing that is executable : a writing whose very nature is to carry out an action
“We are at a point where the Islamic heritage latent in Western modernism can usefully inform efforts to make information culture meaningful and responsive” -Marks
(Marks notion of) “Islamic art” --> unity (tohid توحید) of sorts --> unity of the code ==> multiplicity or infinity --> unfolding: {directional (vector) & performative} --[D+G]--> (aesthetics of aniconism:) ‘abstract line’ & ‘haptic space’ ==> embodied perception ~=>? permeable, phenomenological, “nomadic,” contemplative subjectivity
“networks are the haptic space of our age”
qualities of latency
(in secular contexts) calligraphy, letters and words start to look like bodies
(Shii's favorite:) image latent in text --> foliated Kufic, shekaste nasta'ligh (شکسته نستعلیق), etc.
--> relationships are hidden, latent, and interpretable [--> veil]
•figures arise from text-based, nonfigurative works
•textuality and figurality
...................................
*relevance is hylomorphic, it imposes meaning from the outside
•to represent the nation / to critique the nation
•to self-orientalize / to critique orientalism
•to tell stories that everyone can relate to
•to be expressive / to be conceptual
•
hylomorphic nature
in which ‘matter’ and ‘form’ meld physically in myriad ways yet remain distinct linguistic categories
anamorphic: pertaining to a kind of distorting optical system, anamorphic lense, anamorphic gaze
(تغيير شکل دهنده) a notion of knowledge inquiry
...................................
Marks’ take on Sadra's triadic ontology of sensible, imaginal عالم خیال, and intelligible realms
+cognitive trinity of:
•mental intuition
•bodily knowledge
•spiritual knowledge
------> different human faculties perceive each real:
•sense perception --> external particulars: the sensible[...]
(188)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%83.5[...] part of rational dialogue
--✕--> other ways of bringing the unthought [beyond] into the thinkable }--> tasavof
--✕--> other ways of bringing the far into the wondrous (~ the active imaginal) ==> as a basis for practical concepts }--> ajayeb
}--> beyond the official discourse
a time-specific (contingent) truth that intensifies as more people engage with it
[like all the concepts and metaphors we are working and patterning in apass]
...................................
Malabou's plasticity (<--✕-- différance)
the subject is plastic (~= malleable, =/= elastic), it never springs back into its original form, it can explode
[we are now dealing with a (highly adaptable, flexible, and disciplined) rational autonomous subject in a post-industrial and global world]
neuronal subject
mojud-e dahri-e ma'ghul
...................................
[...] اسم اعظمِ
esme a'zam
reality has an autor --> author always has a proper name
Alice (in wonderland): words can have many meanings
Haraway: the question is: which one (of many meanings) is to be {the master (meaning)}--> problem of art criticism in iran --> *let's resource aesthetics* / in iran we need more “making-with” and “make-kin” rather than “criticize” or “grounding” (of criticism) or...
[*]master: one with power to dispose something, male head of house, conqueror, a man skilled in something --> *one holding this title*
-->[*]to author: to have the power to originate, to name [#Beyzai seeking to produce natural iranian knowledge] (Sohrevardi who learned to write and speak, also must decipher a text, the book of nature, authored legitimately by islamicated inheritances...)
-Haraway discussing women's travail to construct a voice, to have authority, to author a text, to tell a story
-modes of telling (that we adopt in our attempt to produce authority)
(اسم اعظم esme a'zam -->) knowers--on top --> (usual tricks) to recede while substituting a fetish (of self) --✕--> subject and object can cohabit without the master-slave domination
sexist science
?am i laying: a foundation for an epistemological [...]
?do iranians need this:
•theories which are the heritage of Greek science (and of the scientific revolution of the 17th century)
•an epistemology (informing our inquiries) be a family member to existing theories (of representation and philosophical-realism [that which Holakouee promotes for “modern” iranian]) (--> to avoid the problem of epistemological anarchism: an epistemology that justifies not taking a stand on the nature of things is of little use to women trying **to build a shared politics** [Mehdi is angry at the sculpture community because they embody that failure])
•(to adopt) a radical form of [...]
(189)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%84.1[...]he (dis)embodied habituations of the hacker? ==> philosophy of action : how 3D work as an (dis)embodied artifact change our relation to the world? or, which world is experienced as perceived through embodied artifact of the 3D?
•representations of the location
•question of orientation
--> epistemological studies of scientific instrumentation
(Feenberg, passivity missing in Ihde)
(my own interest in shyness and the) passive dimensions of body--lived experience of being the object of action***
Feenberg (reflecting on medical situations forward:) we live our body not only as actors in the world, but also as beings who invite action on our bodies by others
dependent body --> highly technologized experience
instrumentalized status of modernism, in which the ‘dependent body’ belongs to childhood
purified “humans” : the subject distinguished from its instrumentalities
sex: construction of the dependent subjectivized bodies
(Sartre & Merleau-Ponty:) person becomes a thing in the world of the other
lived-body =/= body [--> also the concern of Irigaray and Butler]
(this is Husserl's Körper and Leib)
~ machine-infused neuro-physical body
◦kinaesthetic sensations
◦presentational sensations
◦“internal” perception
◦“subject” -body
◦organ of perception / organ of action /
--> (identity of the ego -->) the (existentialist visualist and strange) idea of: “I am my body"--body in terms of “I can” ==> self-movement
(intra-action =/= that sensations are freestanding complexes and internally differentiated entities that can be identified and studied “before” the action)
*perception (is an act:) “animating” the data of sensation (?)
the extended body signifies itself through [=/= acts through] the technical mediation
the impersonal and atomizing (commonplace) associations with the notion of disembodiment --> the idea that in online involvement relations are abridged and trivialized, that there is a lack of commitment and risk, and moral engagement is impossible, and so on.
*what would be a situated account of the (lived-)body in CG?
“the ringing of the cell phone that embarrasses us in the middle of a lecture” --> extended body
plasticity and polymorphism of our bodies (online) [Ihde]
programmers working in other programmers’ works (--not imaginative engagement with the other, rather) --through--> interfaces and folds in interpretation {tutorial voices, screen videos, scripts, help files, layers of codes and tools on each other, nested folders on one's own computer, named categories by oneself, horde of text files and renders, etc}--> these are (en-/de-)crypting extended bodies constructed of language
subjectively constructed phenomenon of the communed fold interpreted : the[...]
(190)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%85.3[...] are involved in --(this commitment)--> involves them in both the task and its ongoing material consequence
skilled practices situated as the mediator between one realm and the other =/= (in Amazonia) where natural and cultural processes are not distinguished in the same way, skill is conceived far more broadly and is not an exclusively human capacity
(for Kuna) [*]skill: a mark of the maker's openness to alterity, learned in dreams from animals that lost the ability to perform those activities in mythic times, it not only acts upon surfaces or moulds forms; it also transfers qualities
skill matters (=/= gauge of technical action applied to raw material--like the case of The Magicians)
hackers and potters
(potters’ identities were vulnerable, how about hackers after a millennium?)
CG artist's intervensions in 3D materials (concidered active)
(we are living in) an inconstant world in which materials (including computers?) were lively and equally capable of subjectivity
(conventionally conceived) polygon modeling: reproducing, or representing a mental image of a completed body-pot
*?how CG artist can learn, like La Candelaria potters ****to take part in an aesthetics of care that is also a response to the threat of the inconstancy of all forms****, responding to perturbations in the movement of materials, to include knowledge of its inconstancy and of materials always capable of subjectivity
(this is significant for my research on ajayeb, due to the ways iranian culture is attracted to the image, and my self to CG and digital form making)
my relationship with the digital (articulated with Alberti:) that body-polys (body-pots) are ambivalent responses to the threat of inconstancy in a world wherein forms (like statues of myrtle) were only ever apparent --> each making of a body-poly (or pot) is a performance and an improvisation, unscripted and therefore cab go wronge
[Alberti + Budden + Sofaer + Ingold + Hallam]
3D model = partial subject
...................................
in Maya particles are as little ping-pong balls --✕--> relativity theory destroyed the idea of consistent objects
--> extreme forms of realism
Hitchcock's vertigo effect --> a tool i built years ago: https://www.highend3d.com/maya/script/vertigotool-for-maya
simultaneously zooming and pulling away : we apear to be in the same place, yet the place seems to distort beyond our control ==reestablishing==> the way we experience “here”
the vertigo tool doens't do away with human experience, it drastically modifies it in a dizzing manner
--> a dangerous knowledge zoom lens tool, a vertiginous antirealist/antiliteral abyss (=/=? irony device ==> presenting us with intimacy with existing nonhumans)
...................................
[...]
(191)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%86.3[...]s-crossing of one another's desires and the ‘significances’ we ascribe to such satisfying predictability
textile screens
textile’s discursive usefulness: its ability to support and exploit the image of our “alternative” identities
(Lacan's) objet petit a : prediscursive, meaningless thing’
textiles (and the clothing shaped from them) are not “convenient things” that help curtail or discipline our desires (by properly veiling them), rather, they are the very object cause of our desire
capturing and suspending our desires in fabricated flights of fancy =/= a sieve (alak) to pass through onto places unknown/unknowable
embodied politics of impropriety
rethinking how ‘the body’ is typically interpolated, along temporal lines
the medium of the textile (--> fashion's main medium --> thread of sexual difference running through this fabric)
...styles that are not pre- or over-determined by a dualistic form of sexual difference
sartorial scheme
abstracting the concept of ‘the body’
attire
(more) body's social ranges of movement
(more) flexible corporeal aesthetics and articulations
{Edie's odd,protracted sleeves of her dress in Warhol's ICA exhibition 1965} the surreal transformation of a woman's arm into a pachyderm's long, wily, and authority-defying appendage...
the conventional and deeply gendered notion that fashion is “[ephemeral], frivolous, relegated to the domain of the feminine and the body, as opposed to art, which [is] deemed [eternal,] masculine and placed in the sphere of the mind and psyche” (Archer > Geczy and Karaminas)
and--> intertwining of fashion and art has long been regarded as absolutely key to the production of the modern social fabric--intended (like the warp and weft of a textile) to remain discreet, always perpendicular
modern aesthetic theory --> contradictory structure of difference of “fashion =/= art” : “fashion design = art's constitutive other” (= that mode of creative production that is beholden to the market and to the manufactured whims of the embodied, consumer passions =/={ art's singularity, extraordinariness, [Nietzschean ethics of] standing alone ==> timeless or universal knowledge =/= ‘everyday culture'})
radical beauty of the quotidian
mundane material culture is repeatedly *elevated* and “translated” into art --> “losing its place within lived reality ==> to become critically meaningful” =/= (Gernreich's) art and fashion critically transformed so that they run parallel and start to resonate with one another
(for Benjamin) translation [~= criticism]: allowing (translatior's) language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue [=/= preserves the state in which ([...]
(192)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%86.6[...]br />
rethinking how ‘the body’ is typically interpolated, along temporal lines
the medium of the textile (--> fashion's main medium --> thread of sexual difference running through this fabric)
...styles that are not pre- or over-determined by a dualistic form of sexual difference
sartorial scheme
abstracting the concept of ‘the body’
attire
(more) body's social ranges of movement
(more) flexible corporeal aesthetics and articulations
{Edie's odd,protracted sleeves of her dress in Warhol's ICA exhibition 1965} the surreal transformation of a woman's arm into a pachyderm's long, wily, and authority-defying appendage...
the conventional and deeply gendered notion that fashion is “[ephemeral], frivolous, relegated to the domain of the feminine and the body, as opposed to art, which [is] deemed [eternal,] masculine and placed in the sphere of the mind and psyche” (Archer > Geczy and Karaminas)
and--> intertwining of fashion and art has long been regarded as absolutely key to the production of the modern social fabric--intended (like the warp and weft of a textile) to remain discreet, always perpendicular
modern aesthetic theory --> contradictory structure of difference of “fashion =/= art” : “fashion design = art's constitutive other” (= that mode of creative production that is beholden to the market and to the manufactured whims of the embodied, consumer passions =/={ art's singularity, extraordinariness, [Nietzschean ethics of] standing alone ==> timeless or universal knowledge =/= ‘everyday culture'})
radical beauty of the quotidian
mundane material culture is repeatedly *elevated* and “translated” into art --> “losing its place within lived reality ==> to become critically meaningful” =/= (Gernreich's) art and fashion critically transformed so that they run parallel and start to resonate with one another
(for Benjamin) translation [~= criticism]: allowing (translatior's) language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue [=/= preserves the state in which (translatior's own) language happens to be]
-to transform “the original” text/thing through the medium of the other, echoes that are produced in the space that opens up between an “original” and “secondary” text --> [*]translation: inconsequentiality of original/secondary separation
--Gernreich--> to make clothes in-between art and fashion (now and the future, the self and the other)
it-girl
Beatlesque escape
new paths that young people are charting requires clothes
(Archer is making me interested in fashion by helping me go through the) economic and scopophilic grains of the fashion industry
the idea of the ‘new look’ absolutely dominating the fashion scene during the m[...]
(193)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%86.6[...].] Meanwhile ‘Man’ is temporarily bereaved. But they will find a new way. ***And the new way will have important consequences for clothes*** -Gernreich
capitalize: transformation of unexpected --into--> simple --into--> expectable --into--> convention/style
images of hyper-sexualized damsels laid amidst tall grasses (most controversial 19th or 20th century figurations of women) --> [that is not enough--it falls short in showing] the way that these suits clearly encourage their wearers to close their eyes and explore the kinky pleasure found specifically in the way PVC peels from your flesh in one long slurp
plastics don't have the same ‘memory’ as textiles
they don't hold onto the past
they won't stay obediently folded like a cotton calico
vinyl swimsuit
*these designs proliferated a multi-faceted understanding of one's own skin*
-exposed skin feels so starkly and qualitatively different than a torso left to sweat it out under a nearly non-porous plasticine cloth
xxxx
...................................
(we are in) style wars***
critical considerations of style --> think across subjectivities & cultural practices
*aesthetics of mending*
mend: replacing a part or putting together what is torn or broken
(--> regarding ajayeb, reparative, refigurative reading of the past, mending of *those thing that seem beyond repair* --> important for Tehran's landscape of affect and aspiration)
Archer: how arrangement of masculinity (~= acts of violence and wounding) might be *styled otherwise*
literal fashion victim of war hero
“every man” will put himself on the line, and earn his masculinity via rituals, narratives, and professions that are predicted on brutality--and that he will do this without grievance or hesitation
to be a man under such conditions, is to enter into a deeply gendered dialectic forged through acts of wounding and care that demand “men” to hurt, and “women” to do the work of mending
...the ways modern gender binaries synthesize sexual difference
business of state violence: accepting the notion that our identities are forged through obligatory acts of barbarism
how each of us work to fix identities
to do the maintenance work that modernity requires each of us
relic enduring centuries --> cultural need to materially substantiate the distance that lies between proper and improper forms of masculinity (dandy and war hero)
*routine and spectacular acts of wounding that gender identities presuppose*
--also--> attest to the critical will to desire different forms of masculinity
(artifacts preserved in climate controlled bubbles survive time to tell many stories)
conspicuous ornaments of lege[...]
(194)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%86.9[...]of the pattern’ is traditionally tasked with managing”
[*]gender: semiotic apparatus; representation of a relation (that of belonging to a class, a group, a category -de Lauretis), gender assigns to one entity (an individual) a position within a class ==> a position vis-a-vis other preconstituted classes
flooding the visual field ==> refuse to lend themselves to the task of figuring things out ‘what is this?’
(let's suspend) act of perceiving oneselffrom a particular, fixed place in order to open up onto a sense of imagination [<-- identity, identification, positionality]
*discourse of desir* --Lyotard--> desire does not speak; it does violence to the order of the utterance
(?am i using the queer strategy of) **pattern-jamming** ==> nonbinary variance =/= proliferation of tick-boxes (identity politics)
•modes of ornamentation
•systems of organization
patterns --> repetitions ==> naturalize the appearances of certain recurrences in life ==> stabilize (our notions)
[*]pattern: an essential forecasting tool, (through pattern's) rhythms we come to place bets on our future [like the sun's cycle], maps of those terrains where belief most directly meets desire, where aesthetics meets significance
stripes --> capacity to serve as “a tool for setting things in order” (--Pastoureau--> between the lines a tangle of uncanny specters lurk)
-stripe's ability (not simply to signify but) to formalize or figure the abnormal within medieval visual and material culture [a culture accustomed to transmitting visual messages along very different frequencies: an image was created by superimposing successive levels, and, to read it well, it was necessary to begin with the bottom level and, passing through all the intermediary layers, end with the top on] (-what is noise for medieval visual culture?)
-with the stripe: the structure is the figure ==> force certain bodies into genuine non-place --> fields of actual nonsense
-(modern stripe's clarity is a case of) how ideologically saturated, or unnatural, the act of looking is
-(genealogy of stripe --> historical processes:) *yesterday's noise --into--> today's signal*
***power is formally established and formally critiqued through the adaption or the obliteration of patterns*** ==> *pattern manipulation* so strategically necessary [@Laura, Elen] --> (Archer's) call to:
•to take advantage of those aesthetic practices that can direct attention away from a pattern's typical symbolic function (*or responsibilities to secure meaning and certain attending forms of power*)
•to aestheticize the pattern's capacity to function performatively (as a kind of critical figure that is always already inserted within the discourse of everyday life)
[in apass (we have to mark) how and where the negative knowledge about the reliability of lin[...]
(195)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%87.5[...]ns where belief most directly meets desire, where aesthetics meets significance
stripes --> capacity to serve as “a tool for setting things in order” (--Pastoureau--> between the lines a tangle of uncanny specters lurk)
-stripe's ability (not simply to signify but) to formalize or figure the abnormal within medieval visual and material culture [a culture accustomed to transmitting visual messages along very different frequencies: an image was created by superimposing successive levels, and, to read it well, it was necessary to begin with the bottom level and, passing through all the intermediary layers, end with the top on] (-what is noise for medieval visual culture?)
-with the stripe: the structure is the figure ==> force certain bodies into genuine non-place --> fields of actual nonsense
-(modern stripe's clarity is a case of) how ideologically saturated, or unnatural, the act of looking is
-(genealogy of stripe --> historical processes:) *yesterday's noise --into--> today's signal*
***power is formally established and formally critiqued through the adaption or the obliteration of patterns*** ==> *pattern manipulation* so strategically necessary [@Laura, Elen] --> (Archer's) call to:
•to take advantage of those aesthetic practices that can direct attention away from a pattern's typical symbolic function (*or responsibilities to secure meaning and certain attending forms of power*)
•to aestheticize the pattern's capacity to function performatively (as a kind of critical figure that is always already inserted within the discourse of everyday life)
[in apass (we have to mark) how and where the negative knowledge about the reliability of linguistic utterance is made available (#feedback)]
(de Man:) the figural dimension of a text “gives the language considerable freedom from referential restraint, but it also makes it epistemologically highly suspect and volatile, since its use can no longer be said to be determined by considerations of truth and falsehood, good and evil, beauty and ugliness, or pleasure and pain”
(?how in our feedbacking instead of linguistic we can be able to) manipulating the figure of the pattern --> (in apass we are constantly busy with) a way to critically and actively resist ideology (of block curator, Vladimir's settlement's ‘order of thing,’ the institution, etc.) or to critically gesture toward and theorize the possibility of “another way”
the *genital panic* (forever lodged within the heart of discourses on sexual or gendered difference...)
(to examine) the varied ways that pattern is used to put one in one's place
Nicki Green, Yayoi Kusama, Adriana Varejao, Yinka Shonibare, Craig Calderwood
spaces that lie between the patterned (behaviors...)
[@Leo, heard so many times:] clear (but melancholic) call for the rearticulation of our desire[...]
(196)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%87.5[...]ignificant one in the child's erotic life -->) mother's phallus: that which endows her with power and authority
fetish --> a way of both preserving his belief in the missing maternal phallus and at the same time accepting her castration and the possibility of his own
disavowal =/= repression (--> neurosis) =/= negation (denial) =/= repudiation (foreclosure --> psychosis)
negation: a provisional lifting of repression (not through acceptance, the repressed contents are verbally and affectively negated) --> affirmation: the process of registering or fixing a drive to an ideational content (signifying the former by the latter), both the condition of signification and of repression
...................................
Grosz on Deleuze and Guattari
problem with “becoming woman”
the process of becoming-X [marginal, woman, non-western, etc.] means nothing as a strategy if one is already X =/= question of difference, specificity
*desire
*machinic functions
*assemblages
*rhizomatics
*cartography
*intensities
*speed
*planes
appropriation (recuperation) of the positions and struggles of X ==risks==> depoliticizing aestheticizing struggles and political challenges crucial to the survival and self-definition of X
problem with becoming
(Deleuze and Guattari are invested in a) romantic elevation of models of psychosis, schizophrenia, and madness ==>
•ignore the very real pain and torment of individuals
•raise pathology to an unlivable, unviable ideal for others
our reservations and suspicions (in apass when we face each other)
Deleuzian rhizomatics & feminist theory --> reversal of Platonism: “ideal =/= real” (opposition integral to Western thought)
rhizomatics, cartography, schizoanalysis (deconstruction, grammatology) ==> clear the ground of metaphysical concepts ==> (others) may be able to devise their own knowledges
four “illusions” of representation:
•identity
•opposition
•analogy
•resemblance
}--✕--> becoming (beyond the logic and confines of being)
}--✕--> multiplicity [defined by the outside] (beyond doubling or multicentering of proliferating subjects)
Deleuzian-Foucauldian understanding of politics theorizes in a clearer and more direct form than *rival (alternative) political philosophies* (including Marxism, socialism, liberalism, and anarchism), the kinds of theoretical and political struggles in which feminists are involved
[*]body: a discontinuous, nontotalized series of processes, organs, flows, energies, corporeal substances and events, intensities, and durations --link--> organs + biological processes + material objects + social practices
[Spinoza's rare affirmativ[...]
(198)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%88.4[...]
the ways Olearius remains non-Iranian all the way
...................................
Conley's notion of “Haptic Eye” (in line with Marks)
dilate the way (here?), we can't elsewhere
the lines that Olearius draws have their origin in their process, in the line, and in the support that line receives,
the drawing that causes the line
the hand that sees
a hand that perceives
the reciprocity between seeing and drawing is that which metabolizes Olearius --(the interchangeability of the visual and verbal)--> “simultaneous process of subjectivation and objectivation” (of sensation)
study of the Persian object
gradually discovering what is in the image
to the image
(already knowing what it is)
how the screen/surface inflicting things far and near
(an) art of viewing
how the eye and the object of my vision constitute each other
optical visuality
erotically charged moment
--> the distanced is sensed
*world laid bare
lay: to place down in a position of rest, or in a horizontal position
bare: naked, open
a political aesthetic: a seeing hand relates to prehension (Greifen) of the world at large, the world at its imagined totality, *a world in which any ocular grasp is utopian* (and is always politically invested)
celestial sphere
|
terrestrial sphere
|
the insular eye
...................................
[a map] it tells a story, an itinerary [...] it whets the imagination. It propels narrative but also, dividing our attention, prompts reverie and causes our eyes to look both inward, at our own geographies, and outward, to rove about the frame and to engage, however we wish, the space[...]
(طرز بیان tarz-e bayan) idiolect of the geographer and cartographer
is composed of signs that do not transcribe speech. Riddled with speech and writing
a “map” that plots and colonizes the imagination of the public it is said to “invent” and, as a result, to seek to control.
an image that locates and patterns the imagination of its spectators
When it takes hold, [a map] encourages its public to think of the world in concert with its own articulation of space.
(the advent of bird-eye-view culture)
A map underlines what a film [or text] is and what it does, but it also opens a rift or brings into view a site where a critical and productively interpretive relation with the film [or text] can begin.
*locational imaging*
As the person who gazes upon a map works through a welter of impressions about the geographical information it puts forward—along with his or her own fantasies and pieces of past or an[...]
(199)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%90[...]e ties to fast cartography to expansion and conquest, allegorical propaganda of cartographer's presence)
living conditions of vocal exchange
visible coordinates that enclose, frame, quantify
a process of discovery --that--> maps its movement as it goes
-making a fetish of progress and accuracy
-vital, narcissistic illusion that the world begins with our birth and expands through our perception of it
isolario: illustrating the islands of the world, a genre
“national” subjects attached to the geographies that they are both mapping and describing
graphic construction of the self
Olearius's globe of Gottorf (=/= Morton's hyperobject): the effect of totality, of having engineered a world through its own labors. [Ptolemaic-Aristotlian machinery of the spheres, which hold the fixed stars in place, stars in a trace on the relatively stable horizon of earth and sky (in which meteor deviation from this harmonious arrangement or celestial machinery was considered disastrous)]
**self become autonomous <== fixed to an illusion of a geographic truth, it can be detached from the coordinates that mark its point of view, its history, its formation, and the aesthetics (and politics) of its signature. [and with Sana, through Sa'di, we start with this position, rehearsing criticism studies in terms of the birth of the subject and of subjectivity in early modern Europe]
terrae incognitae: the unknown, graphically inscribed, and to be conquered
“nomination is a mode of symbolic appropriation that furnishes virgin territories with a memory, with a gridding that dispossesses space of its alterity and that makes of it an object of discovery subjected to the constraints of linguistic reference, that intends that at every identifiable site there correspond a name” (Conley > Christian Jacob > Mallarme)
lodged in the corporal space of an image of “man”
spectral presence of death
navel: construed to be a site where the relation of the unknown has its first noticeable, physical trace, [...] the site of a ruptured attachment
-as an embodiment of the relation to the unknown
-the subject desires to give birth to himself or herself
artificial self-birthing and self-monumentalization
--> creation of a universe of wise (hakimane حکیمانه)
it is so strange in Olearius: the process of detachment that constitutes every subject's psychogenesis inspires a geographic desire (to retrace one's tenuous “roots,” which are woven through the visible register of language, the audible areas of images...) -- with Conley
Olearius's being: at one with the local, national, global, and cosmic space in which he or she visualizes an origin associated with a site of birth --> womb: the reassuring rectitu[...]
(200)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%90.3[...] channel of a ‘polar relation with the unknown,’ according to mappings that envisage the progression of a deferred knowledge) [Conley > Rosolato --> technologies that construct early modern space (--also with Olearius)]
...to produce a great geography of introspection
cosmic and affective space
illusion of a universe of infinite curvature
*the impossible “point of view” given to the observer of early world maps*
map =/=? mystical narrative --?--> depends on an itinerary through space and language
mysticism
only adjectival forms of the term had occurred (in Renaissance and before), suggesting that the nonsubstantive status of mystical activities made them more ‘real’ than we might believe ** (de Certeau)
the development of atlas-structures and of two-dimensional --> attenuation (taz'if تضعيف) of the mixture of scientific and mystical dimensions
incunabulum --> Cartesian method
from a half-named sense of the unknown --to--> a clearly articulated relation with the unknown****
[*]perspectival object: the positioning and mapping of the self in and about the world in its ongoing construction of psychogenesis + aesthetics + history of perspective + clinical practice*--> a series of junctures between a viewer and what he or she sees, projects, fantasizes, and remembers
--> body's location in the world ***
excess of mastery
absolute quest of power
*to make meaning enigmatic(?)
with Sana, we are engaged in an anti-globe making, a transitional object rather than a ‘glory globe,’ “a field of diagonical or interdiscursive ‘play’ between impressions and memories”
in our exhibition, we are working the gridded/allegorized cartographic discourse/consciousness through appeal to spatial rhetoric
(reworking) the new form of a self-produced “geod “geography” of writing (emerging in 16th century)
-we are perhaps inclined with the figure of Rhizome (from Deleuze and Guattari), the unifying lines and connections that produce an image of...
[in a fairly common obsession, amateurs of maps ofen seek to find the names of the places where they were born or raised. but when Sana's father wanted to erase his name from the map Sana made with his itineraries we betrayed this originary site]
-schizoanalytic cartographies, Guattari on: conditions of enunciation, structures of individual and collective subjectivity)
-we say (in our work with Olearius): reading can be an actively vagrant, nomadic examination of ideological materials
...an attempt to create in an ever recurring, mobile, and modular structures that endow themselves with renewed form
*the cartographic project invents a relation with the past
[*]projective identification: an illusion that te[...]
(201)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%90.5[...]subjects and objects, forms of attention, the possibility of thinking through description? How do you describe a scene, a character, an event, a situation, a collective sensibility, a difference, a world? What does it mean to add density and texture to ethnographic description? What can ethnography do?
•attuned to the *forms and forces* unfolding in scenes and encounters --> *apparatus of conceptualization* [pulled into (a tricky) alignment with (your field's) immanent concerns and with the concerns of the worlds.] your (anthropological) objects have to “be walked around,” “approached from precise angles,” and seen as “states of being,” emergent, or suspended in potentiality, or collapsing, or residual, roosting on live matter. *culture ~= [*]the cultural: “a resonant and magnetizing field that registered in people and things living through events and conditions.” we try to describe sensibilities hitting people and traversing [...] things:
◦bodies of thought
◦assemblages of infrastructures and institutions
◦new ecologies
◦the rhythms of a daily living
◦the strangely connective tissue (produced by handheld devices and social media)
}--> to compose a register of the lived affects of the things that took place in a social-aesthetic-material-political worlding [=/= “to track the predetermined effects of abstractable logics and structures."] ***singularities*** take place as a series of precisions (across sociality, materiality, infrastructure, etc.) they are “events of,” emerged in the lived problematics of a present ==> they could be brought to bear, deployed, maneuvered, suffered, or played with. [*]affects: “registering of life as an assemblage of elements thrown, in the course of events, into a contact aesthetic” [=/= the side effects of systems, codes, or imaginaries (located in an elsewhere)]
•return (anthropology) to sense and sensation (<== affect) (Olearius missed this, the “world” is proposed to him anchored in the consciousness of [his] humanist subject or its categories of thought. he misses Iran as a world charged with affect, which is a prolific, mixed-use contact zone in an ongoing state of transition that leaves [Iranian] people “improvising with already-felts” [~=? Golestan Sa'di]) -- affect added an affirmative critique that registers surprise at what and how things happen.
[*]affective subject: “a person who waits in the company of others for things to arrive, one who learns to sense out what's coming and what forms it might take, one who aims to notice what crystallizes and how things ricochet and rebound in a social-natural-aesthetic ecology of compositions and thresholds of expressivity.” --> “For the affective subject, there is always the weight of the world in what can be hoped for and what must be feared, in what flourishes and what matters.”
[*]Life: “an experiment of being in a world, of finding ways to be in circuits of force and form, an aspiratio[...]
(202)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%91[...]ermined effects of abstractable logics and structures."] ***singularities*** take place as a series of precisions (across sociality, materiality, infrastructure, etc.) they are “events of,” emerged in the lived problematics of a present ==> they could be brought to bear, deployed, maneuvered, suffered, or played with. [*]affects: “registering of life as an assemblage of elements thrown, in the course of events, into a contact aesthetic” [=/= the side effects of systems, codes, or imaginaries (located in an elsewhere)]
•return (anthropology) to sense and sensation (<== affect) (Olearius missed this, the “world” is proposed to him anchored in the consciousness of [his] humanist subject or its categories of thought. he misses Iran as a world charged with affect, which is a prolific, mixed-use contact zone in an ongoing state of transition that leaves [Iranian] people “improvising with already-felts” [~=? Golestan Sa'di]) -- affect added an affirmative critique that registers surprise at what and how things happen.
[*]affective subject: “a person who waits in the company of others for things to arrive, one who learns to sense out what's coming and what forms it might take, one who aims to notice what crystallizes and how things ricochet and rebound in a social-natural-aesthetic ecology of compositions and thresholds of expressivity.” --> “For the affective subject, there is always the weight of the world in what can be hoped for and what must be feared, in what flourishes and what matters.”
[*]Life: “an experiment of being in a world, of finding ways to be in circuits of force and form, an aspiration to get something out of the alchemical transmogrifications of things that twist off on trajectories far beyond humanist models of suffering or the usual hyperlegible registers of normativity and the state.” --> “[Life] takes place in the inhuman gestures of demons and angels, in the struggles of addicts and the rage of racists, in the endurance of the unbelievably injured or the oddly still curious.” (Stewart)
•a world deliteralized (with no endemic divide between a naturalized given order and the exceptionalism of event)
•things, to become recognizable as something to be in or near, or else to oppose and resist
•(affect --Deleuze-->) differential ontology: the prolific generativity of difference and connection taking place in a field of possibilities. affect studies now hitting:
◦anthropology
◦new materialism
◦object-oriented ontology
◦naturecultures
◦multispecies work
◦science studies
◦new ecologies
--> “the generativity and volatility of life as such, to its capacity to actively shift or harden into forms of peace or violence, pleasure and pain, collectivities and chaos.”
[...] it looks for ways to describe what precedes and exceeds the categorical in the labors of living through historical presents.
[...] affect-inflected [study[...]
(204)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%91[...]/>
Toor suggesting in her analysis a healthy dose of skepticism towards projects that present the ‘Muslim world’ --and asking how (in a Foucauldian sense) is ‘Islam'[~ the idea that something stable and immutable called ‘Islam’ exists anywhere] being deployed, by whom, and for what purpose? “Is it being used as an ideological tool, does it serve as a spiritual haven, or is it invoked as an identitarian response to the ravages of a globalized world?” (Toor)
(unpack we must)
***to unpack different islams (for different actors who deploy it)
‘islam’ certainly cannot be unproblematically deployed as the explanatory ‘variable’
Toor in her example cases showing that the ‘islam connection,’ when it is there, is varied, complex, and sometimes contradictory (=/= mainstream discourse on Islam)
(i want Hoda to make her categorical labor harder, i want her to make historically and socially contextual analysis, not just take shortcuts towards generalization predetermined by a priori categories (of Iran, Islam, women), rather to begin with the empirical reality)
...................................
a new legible object of analysis (in writing culture): qualities, trajectories, aesthetics ==> writing became tactile and compositional, an attunement, a response, “a vigilant protection of a worlding” (Stewart)
*writing = a way of thinking*
[*]precarity: register of the singularity of emergent phenomena, the way that they accrete, accrue and wear out
(=/= recognizing self-identical objects, metaculturally marked)
forms of perceiving (seeing, thinking) are themselves emergent
a writing that hones attention to the way that a thing (like precarity, etc.) starts to take form as:
•a composition
•a recognition
•a sensibility
•some collection of:
•materialities
•laws
•movements
obvious: totalizing dramatizations of the thing in itself
precarity can take the form of:
•fraility (living in it and through it)
•a sea change
•a darkening atmosphere
•a hard fall
•the barely perceptible sense of a reprieve
•
ordinary things (=/= melodrama) they matter because they shimmer precariously
...seasons magnetized to tones of voice and a quality of light
place (=/= immpasive corporeality) : affective charges:
•a mantel of redemption
•a glacier of impatience
•a high desert of anxiety dissected by fault lines of rage
}--performed--> in **little scenes of recognition** (--> “visceral complicity of those laying claim to a composed tactility[...]” =/= naturalized order per se)
(Tehran's?) drawn curtains: physical shadow of a state of hardening, a rotting from the inside out
(...curtained people, th[...]
(205)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%93[...]s (*abstract criteria*)
•baroque complexity --favor--> swarming individuals metaphor (population of individuals in turbulent motion) --> delineate emergent wholes (*situational criteria*)
◦conceptual problem of baroque: there may be higher level order, but what is it?
◾(it is not) stable patterns of communication (<== if patterns exists they are short-lived, individuals take part in several wholes rather than in one)
body = turbulent phenomena par excellence
*****
--Deleuze--> the very idea of “concept” is different in baroque thinking : [*]concept = an allegory, a narrative =/= a symbol of the cosmos <-- romantic idea of concept: a cosmological order that is grasped by the thinking subject
the uncertainty (of the world) in the baroque case is ontological [=/= epistemological --> uncertainty is an effect of not knowing enough]
...................................
(i say in iran, instead of public jurnalism we need more) *public anthropology*
...................................
(Stenger > Stewart > vivid pragmatics ~=)
(McCormack > Stewart > radical) [*]empiricism: if you walk in the woods --encounter--> the unthinkable profusion of forms --> material-aesthetic registers of (mobile & immobile flickering of) is and was (=/= sensory details described)
•[*]description: accidental glimpse of what matters + what shifts its matter in a moment of recognizable though unnamed and partial significance
tonal differences
a spark of color
a modulation in tempo
half-patterned expressivity
--of--> a scene teemingly differentiated and marked by thresholds of matter
when a tree is “charged and transfigured” by a violent sunset
Stewart + Dillard
a thing becomes a call to word
(Harman:) objects themselves, like voices or forms of writing, have style
Stewart > Dillard's causal logic of bizarre but categorical predation:
a small frog perched precariously on a lily pad in a pond, its back end already strangely slumped in the water. Then it suddenly deflates
its skin “ruck, and rumple, and fall’ and then “formless as a pricked balloon, lay in floating folds like blight scum on top of the water”
--suggest--> its style
=/= exempla of a generality
=/= embodiments of something
*points of precision* in moments, scenes, forms, and states of matter
an image synesthetically remembered --> engineered bridges of the purely social or thee purely natural imagine a flatly describable world composed of fully present states of being
...the wind forms blades in the sea like lines on a page
description: an approach to an ungraspable thing --> deliteralizing
remainders
(distributed gap between residents’ reports and police dete[...]
(206)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%93.8[...]ees
•a strange noise was wind in the trees
•a report of a man licking the locks on doorways of apartments on North Pleasant Street (--> suggestion of this licking everywhere remained)
•a blood-soaked glove on the ground outside the DB Mart was a pink glove (-- establish--> pattern of possible hands in roads)
-
--Stewart--> **an staging ground for people's perceptive** --> **attention to the weird possibilities emergent in the ordinary**
==> *mysterious patterns with precise details* [= ajayeb] --> (bring into relief) a background, a zone, a worlding in which things become perceptible (in a weirdly realist way)
[explanation =/=] stranger faithfulness to the spirit of the unnamed thing they witnessed ==> moved to make a report (something is a little off)
(if there is grounding it is grounding in) world's variegated poesis --> ([*]description:) to make room ([for its] emergence --into--> theory)
A walker with a routine gets used to the little apparitions of something throwing together in his or her vicinity
(questions of points of contact:) what to do with your eyes?
([against?] positionality of) writing from the ground
(memory of a city:) a contact aesthetic of histories and rogue trajectories set in motion by every object encountered
harshly half-formed world
germinal aesthetics
channels of autonomous objects lay down stakes and swerve at points of contact with the itineraries of other things ==create==> a distributed zone of *robust realism*
the real (of X): transversal arrays of qualities or activities (like musical refrains) give order to materials and situations, human bodies and brains included, as actions undertaken act-back to shape muscles and hone senses
(to sharpen) realist attention to things
[*]life: ontological entertainment
< />
unfulfilled systems littered the kitchen
tangent to an elsewhere
gleamingly restored eighteenth-century perfections <-- Cinderella's mansion
...of autonomous objects lying around...
a zone of randomly abandoned X
against the background of nothing
visceral avoidance
pretty and fresh as blueberry pie
townies (how i am not a townie where i live)
•townie: loyalty to the expressivity of things
sociality of a wedding party (filled with roles and dressings)
crazy ricochet..
perfectly ordinary...
...long-ago layered over the wood (necrotic غانقرايايا)
“expressivity sliced through matter, word, and action, locking them together in a harshly half-formed world”
writing Cinderella diaries --> questions of realism
•what kind of real we enter?
•her realism (bring her) --into--> a rough contact with objects human and n[...]
(207)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%93.9[...]le of approach (a surprise contact, an opening onto some world's cocomposition, momentary flourishing of some capacity) [=/= a meaning]
shaken profusion in things =/= rush evaluative critique
so ordinary and problematic
so the idea of writing about “clean” started being interested in this website: https://www.politicalconcepts.org, and the desire to write a political entry point for them on the idea of clean in the 20th century
also after i moved to Brussels May 2016, the affect of dirty
to have a little talk or jam on the notion of “clean” and “clean body”
i have been scribbling on its metaphorology for a while, thinking with it about the 20th century political thinking, institutional thinking, criminology, xenophobia, morality, and many other things. it is a key term for me.
•difference and indifference regarding the foreign body and urbanism
•clean's stakes in architecture, toilet, the primordial element of architecture
•the clean body in Marx and its geneology in the left
•origins of morality in Freud
•xenophobia in crosscultural histories, Islam on hygiene and kofr's dirt
•Nazism and racial cleansing --> aesthetics & politics
•Victorian sanitation, sanitas
•pollution
•anality
•animality --> domestic life (Tehran, Brussels, Cologne,)
•metaphorology of ‘fesad’
•loose analogies of clean/dirt
•pure bodies (being threatened by violation of impurities)
•
readings:
-Koolhaas, toilet
-Sennett, Flesh and Stone
-Ashenburg, Dirt on Clean
-Serres, Malfeasance
-Ahmed, pure bodies
-Vom kleinen Maulwurf
-
in terrestrial ecosystems:
detritus
dead particulate organic material (as opposed to dissolved organic material). It typically includes the bodies or fragments of dead organisms as well as fecal material
typically colonized by communities of microorganisms which act to decompose (or remineralize) the material
...................................
(in clinic)
each method enacts an object of its own =/= approaching a single object in different ways
in 19th century Western philosophy, ontology was coined as a powerful word for the given and fixed collection of what there is
(Annemarie Mol)
ontologies ==> there is no longer a singular “it” to look at from different sides
ontologies are not exclusive, they allow for interferences, partial connections, sharing practices =/= mono-realist singularities
[*]politics: (is not one of otherness,) it is about fights; not between people (a politics of who) but between versions of reality (a politics of what)
the value of “what is,” what [...]
(209)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%94[...]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 and Ozanne:) meanings people attribute to social structures change more slowly than the structures themselves --> reality[= the meanings given to social structure and the objective structures] is contradictory <== *inconsistency between subject and object* (~ societies both create reality and are shaped by it)
}--> consumers as the oppressed class in postindustrial society
Thompson: natural health myth (based on ‘cultural creatives’: dominant consumer segment of natural medicine):
•*romantic ideology derived from technologies’ ill effects on humanity and nature --> nature is mythologized as a state of harmony, science and technology as forbidden knowledge
•*gnostic myth emerged from a desire of consumers to bridge technology and spirituality --> “the immune system is metaphorically rendered as a mysterious immaterial force, constituted by intricate mind-body connections and ephemeral energistic forces, which can be brought to practical ends through quasi-magical practices of holistic healing” [Thompson 2004]
}--> advertisers exploit these tensions as conflicting ideologies converge with reality
brand ==> a point of difference + oppositional meanings --> [for example the attraction of the coffee shops that don't personify the Starbucks hegemony ~] anti-hegemonic consumers hold strong preferences for decor that symbolises the counter-culture
(Thompson + Barthes ==> Kristensen, Boye, Askegaard:) how communities develop conceptualizations of r[...]
(210)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%96[...]br />
with Ereshefsky
how to do scientific metaphysics?
•conduct piecewise and local metaphysics (not universalist metaphysics, not science fiction)
•balance naturalism and normativity
◦naturalism --> learn about different scientific practices that have different aims
◦normativity --> evaluate how well those practices achieve those (epistemic and pragmatic) aims
•
...................................
filial piety --> family formation + consumption behaviours (in Asian context)
(public policymakers and) social marketers addressing family dissatisfaction
understanding family identity has important implications for consumption --western-->
•how meal consumption helps to maintain family bonds
•how home-made meals are useful in constructing and communicating family identity (@apass, Leo, Sarah, food-ing, ‘formulations of family identity ~=!? collective’)
/>
•how families preserve identity through the transfer of inalienable possessions
•how families navigate complex consumption choices such as involving parenthood
•
...................................
(Campbell + Saren -->) [*]posthumanism: an aesthetic (not just an epistemology) that blends:
1. the primitive
2. technology
3. horror
[*]metamorphosis: (an engine that encourages the viewer) to recognize life not as being, but as perpetual becoming =/= (liberatory promises of) ‘flow’
(each articulating opposing fantasies of posthumanism:)
morphing =/= mutating
primal technology
proto-atavism نياکان گرايى --> ***multiple paradigms of life exist on the peripheries of humanist life***
Campbell --> a posthuman biology (an ethical imperative that in a technological age, that life is not just life)
Golem --> perennialennial horror in western imagination
Jewish psalms of the 6th century
formation of life (golmi: unformed limb) <==emanate== mother's womb & nonhuman earth itself
--exemplifies--> how *western humanist versions of technology tend to create a master-servant dialectic* (master-slave) and anything that threatens this divide invokes horror
(roots embedded in the Romantic tradition:)
•“frankenfood” (mash up original and unexpected food combinations, genetically modified crops)
•genetic engineering technologies
•“revenge of nature”
•“nature out of control” leitmotif
•
*since antiquity (in the west) technology has been simultaneously imbued with magic and rationality, evil and redemption, trickery and transparency [---> go to Baxstrom + Meyers Realizing The Witch]
Descartes: the philosopher who provided the western imagination with the most enduring model of the human --> preoccupation with mechanism as so[...]
(211)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%96.1[...] psalms of the 6th century
formation of life (golmi: unformed limb) <==emanate== mother's womb & nonhuman earth itself
--exemplifies--> how *western humanist versions of technology tend to create a master-servant dialectic* (master-slave) and anything that threatens this divide invokes horror
(roots embedded in the Romantic tradition:)
•“frankenfood” (mash up original and unexpected food combinations, genetically modified crops)
•genetic engineering technologies
•“revenge of nature”
•“nature out of control” leitmotif
•
*since antiquity (in the west) technology has been simultaneously imbued with magic and rationality, evil and redemption, trickery and transparency [---> go to Baxstrom + Meyers Realizing The Witch]
Descartes: the philosopher who provided the western imagination with the most enduring model of the human --> preoccupation with mechanism as something that pervaded machines, bodies and animals but never the non-material, spiritual realm of the mind
*eschatological significance attached to technology*
schizoid stance, alternating between the technophobic and the technophilic (--> expressed in avant-garde): Dadaism, Futurism, Cubism, constructivism)
•technocs aestheticized and fetishized: world expos such as the Crystal Palace, garden cities, the cite industrielle, Citta Nuova, the Werknund, etc.
•military machinery of first world war which alienated human life while at the same time making the human inhuman
*technology as revold*
imagined as rebellious and repellent
(human civilization) haunted by the temptation of a reverse evolution which coexists in it with the potential for progress
--> *techno-anxiety: potential infallibility of the technological
(teratology, wider context of studies on monsters)
logic of contemporary technoculture --trope-->
•primitive
•technologyr />
•horror
(Campbell drawing from a larger) intertextual repertoire consisting of advertising, film, and other images in visual culture
--> aesthetic conflation of the primitive, technology, and horror points to three new concepts:
•metamorphing: {<<--** exactly my problem with Manning's process philosophy}
◦(a logic of) ***identity as constant becoming***
◦***emphasis on flow*** (as a necessary way to understand process)
•primal technology =/= (humanist and pervasive) concept of technology as modern, progressive, clean, nonalive
•proto-atavism: evolutionary traits from the future can exist in the present (=/= atavism: evolutionary traits from the past can exist in the present) []
==> type of posthuman biology conception of life
(let's have atavism instead of activism)
Campbell --> *critique the almost universal celebration of flow in contemporary philosophical thought* {<--[...]
(212)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%96.2[...]st enduring model of the human --> preoccupation with mechanism as something that pervaded machines, bodies and animals but never the non-material, spiritual realm of the mind
*eschatological significance attached to technology*
schizoid stance, alternating between the technophobic and the technophilic (--> expressed in avant-garde): Dadaism, Futurism, Cubism, constructivism)
•technocs aestheticized and fetishized: world expos such as the Crystal Palace, garden cities, the cite industrielle, Citta Nuova, the Werknund, etc.
•military machinery of first world war which alienated human life while at the same time making the human inhuman
*technology as revold*
imagined as rebellious and repellent
(human civilization) haunted by the temptation of a reverse evolution which coexists in it with the potential for progress
--> *techno-anxiety: potential infallibility of the technological
(teratology, wider context of studies on monsters)
logic of contemporary technoculture --trope-->
•primitive
•technology
•horror
(Campbell drawing from a larger) intertextual repertoire consisting of advertising, film, and other images in visual culture
--> aesthetic conflation of the primitive, technology, and horror points to three new concepts:
•metamorphing: {<<--** exactly my problem with Manning's process philosophy}
◦(a logic of) ***identity as constant becoming***
◦***emphasis on flow*** (as a necessary way to understand process)
•primal technology =/= (humanist and pervasive) concept of technology as modern, progressive, clean, nonalive
•proto-atavism: evolutionary traits from the future can exist in the present (=/= atavism: evolutionary traits from the past can exist in the present) []
==> type of posthuman biology conception of life
(let's have atavism instead of activism)
Campbell --> *critique the almost universal celebration of flow in contemporary philosophical thought* {<-- yes yes! thank you! ♥}
primitive: a site of primordial simplicity ~= originary unity }<== history of technology <--(told from a western lens)-- gradual progression and sophistication of the technical (for example Black Panther film)
-the presence or absence of specific technologies has often been read as a marker of cultural ‘backwardness’ <== “technology = something that comes from the West (rich-world technologies) and does something to other people in other places such as the “third world” (a well-intentioned framework that denies both agency and contemporaneity to the ‘other’ --> for example Eliasson's Little Sun)
technological progress is not a force unique to modern ‘civilized’ society; it is intimately bound with art and antiquity
•Heidegger (seeks the origin of technology in ancient Greece) --> techn[...]
(213)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%96.2[...]ary unity }<== history of technology <--(told from a western lens)-- gradual progression and sophistication of the technical (for example Black Panther film)
-the presence or absence of specific technologies has often been read as a marker of cultural ‘backwardness’ <== “technology = something that comes from the West (rich-world technologies) and does something to other people in other places such as the “third world” (a well-intentioned framework that denies both agency and contemporaneity to the ‘other’ --> for example Eliasson's Little Sun)
technological progress is not a force unique to modern ‘civilized’ society; it is intimately bound with art and antiquity
•Heidegger (seeks the origin of technology in ancient Greece) --> technology referred to the ways in which realities are brought into the world, a mode of unconcealing reality (hervorbringen) [=/= mere means or instrument]
+ every unconcealment of reality is also by necessity a concealment of another reality
*poiesis: bring hither out of concealment forth into unconcealment* --> techne = tech + art
paleolithic hunters (so-called primitive societies) have been shown to have been affluent and technologically advanced
technological primitivism, as aesthetic in subcultures of high-technology, incorporating into their philosophies icons of: shamanism, esotericism, hermeticism, the occult, mythology
=/= my ajayeb.net
horror in commercial images (Campbell's investigation =/= fear appeals that act to discourage or warn)
horror (like primitive) is a historically specific form =/= an eternal constant (~ whay is horrific today might be completely unhorrific tomorrow --> for example ajayeb's horror)
horror = science fiction + primitivism
liberatory/avant-garde horror
female-as-victim
female-as-horror
--> apparatus of phallogocentrism
--Campbell--> *horror works to produce figures that contain within them an overflow of contradictory signs*
20th century high-tech machines induce horror : depiction of *technology out of control* inducing horror in the humanist consciousness (for example Black Mirror TV series)
(both primitive & technical) borderline figures of contemporary culture: replicants, androgynes, zombies, androids, posthumans, avatars, clones, undead
}--> *almost-not-quite ontologies* <-- displacing the unitary subject of classical humanism <== {new processes and quasi objects} <==create== ***{globalization, questions of history, social change, political movements, collapse of communism, fundamentalism, feminism, post-communist nationalism, global immigration flows, transnational projects such as human genome, digital human}***
•mothers
•machine: the scientific, political and discursive field of technology
•monster: emblematizes the history and philosophy of the biolog[...]
(214)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%96.3[...]copy
1- Greek and Roman --> race of monsters: ethnic entity horrific & fantastic
2- baroque and enlightenment --> began to produce a scientific, wondrous, fantastic, rare, entertaining --(such as: madmen and dwarfs and other marvels participated in the life of his or her town and enjoys certain privileges [...] jesters and fools can transgress social conventions and do things that “normal” human beings cannot afford -Braidotti)
3- genetic turning point in the post-nuclear era --> cybernetic teratology: effects of toxicity and environmental pollution ==> new monsters [--> Tsing]
experience of the world of high-technology
artifacts of visual culture, (TV advertisements) dealing with the tropes of the primitive, technology, horror:
(these artifacts connote دلالت ضمنى long histories of techno-mytho-political dramas)
•Audi spider; where Audi is likened to a preditor, ensnaring, devouring its rivals; Vorsprung durch Technik written in gothic-style jagged, suspended cobwebs {<-- Ridley Scott's alien's technology as dirty; a lair swathed in a thick cobweb-like substance --> *technology as life* <== the dirt and dampness of *dirty technology* suggest an animate, sweating, breathing life-force [~ an aesthetic]} --> horror <== damp dark leaking space containing moulding cocoons of spider --Campbell--> motivation, goals or logic of this life form cannot be recovered within the economy of the human (=/= clean cold untouched technological artefact)
◦***technology covered in its own dirt --implies--> life --implies--> disorganization --implies--> disintegration of borders between ‘us’ (bounded) and ‘them’ (unbounded) --implies--> loss of control
◦ajayeb-e spider // links the world (of primitive + high-technology), its metamorphosis into automobile ==> its multiple and contradictory genealogy; sight of spider --Freud--> induce crisis of neurotic anxiety (arguing that this fear comes from an unconscious association of the spider with the image of the phallic mother and the web --> threatens to engulf us --> mpnstrous feminine, Ridley Scott's alien = technologized embodiment of the phallic mother)
◾ancient activity of weaving [computer emerges out of the history of weaving; the first computers were based on the logic of the loom, quintessence of women's work (Plant, Babbage, Campbell)] --> *contemporary technoculture is an era of insectophilia* (love of insects and arachnids, spiders ants bees worms etc.)<== these insects embody the logic of high-technology which values decenterdness, microprocessing, and swarm intelligence. colonies, swarms, teems ==acts==> *metaphor & epistemology & ontology* to understand decenterdness, rhizomaticity, distribution and microprocessing ==> *insect aesthetic* [#use the term collapse as marketing storytelling, divided entities now mixed with eachother to induce mixed feelings in the audience --> chimera in advertisement]<[...]
(215)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%96.5[...]logical artefact)
◦***technology covered in its own dirt --implies--> life --implies--> disorganization --implies--> disintegration of borders between ‘us’ (bounded) and ‘them’ (unbounded) --implies--> loss of control
◦ajayeb-e spider // links the world (of primitive + high-technology), its metamorphosis into automobile ==> its multiple and contradictory genealogy; sight of spider --Freud--> induce crisis of neurotic anxiety (arguing that this fear comes from an unconscious association of the spider with the image of the phallic mother and the web --> threatens to engulf us --> mpnstrous feminine, Ridley Scott's alien = technologized embodiment of the phallic mother)
◾ancient activity of weaving [computer emerges out of the history of weaving; the first computers were based on the logic of the loom, quintessence of women's work (Plant, Babbage, Campbell)] --> *contemporary technoculture is an era of insectophilia* (love of insects and arachnids, spiders ants bees worms etc.)<== these insects embody the logic of high-technology which values decenterdness, microprocessing, and swarm intelligence. colonies, swarms, teems ==acts==> *metaphor & epistemology & ontology* to understand decenterdness, rhizomaticity, distribution and microprocessing ==> *insect aesthetic* [#use the term collapse as marketing storytelling, divided entities now mixed with eachother to induce mixed feelings in the audience --> chimera in advertisement]
◽matrix, from the latin ‘mater' = womb, the term matrix possessing the potential to nurture & to trap (---> go to Matrix film series)
◽Arachne: a younge woman, was so skilful at weaving that she was rash enough to challenge the goddess Athene to a contest. she was transformed into a spider and was doomed to weave forever
•Nike mutant foot; to convey the feeling that running with these shoes is like running in bare feet (--> chimera?); the mutant foot evokes a worn and labored transition from human to posthuman which leaves behind traces of pain; ‘foot of the future’ contains within it the supplement of its embodied visceral human existence, a potent reminder of the human within the posthuman. Nike mutant foot *suffers from origin horror* (= no secure telos of origin which can link back to a primary source of either technology or organicism) we cannot trace it back to an originary ideal category of existence ==> it horrifies
•Nissan pathfinder; shape-shifting technology, moves between the animal and technical --> *automobile metamorphoses without any trace of its metamorphosis* (it bears no marks, scatches, dents, damage); mighty industrialized rendering (transformers film series) --> (an X-Men fantasy:) a future world of *ontological mobility* : entities are not fixed, their morphing into other entities is not painful, but a natural instantaneous reaction to their environment [=/= ajayeb]
•BBC digital faces; a giant disembodied head that roams across hilly countr[...]
(216)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%96.6[...]s and flux considered liberatory)
--> a logic of quick-change (embedded in entertainment and computer industries)
high-technology embodiments:
•cyborg
•foetus
•ecosystem
•database
•genome
•cellular automata
•insects
•
morphing =/= mutating: the visceral, painful, embodied experience that results from ontological boundary clashes
mutating into otherness =/= morphing into otherness
(pain of the flow -->) ***mutation is a concept that stops the flow***
(utopian:) technological imaginary portraying a simple and painless ascent into a silicon existence
chimera: (a term biotechnological discourse uses to refer to) the evolution of elements that do not belong together
[in greek mythology, a savage beast part lion part goat part snake =/= natural order]
•(Iron Man's definition of) technology: an instrument which accords the human with a gradual ascend towards increasing civilization, linear progress and power over her or his environment
•(Black Mirror's definition of) technology: paradoxical scene, a primal instinctual force
(my ajayeb =/=) technological primitivism: (aesthetic that is produced by) the ways “primitive” icons are used in discourses of high technology
technological merges into the mythological
ancient merges with the modern
•eXistenZ film 1999, a high-tech-primitive blend of amphibian eggs and synthetic DNA
portrayal of a symbolically resonant ancient life-source + form of a technical life-source
(Campbell suggesting) atavism: how supposedly primitive evolutionary traits which had disappeared generations ago reappear in contemporary human or animal life
-traits of a former time but still exist in the present
*proto-atavism: (exhibiting of) future evolutionary traits in the present ==> collapsing the quality of linear time [~=? my sleep-walking] (=/= human approaching a state of technological perfection through an orderly ascent of increasing complexity and sophistication)
--> technological progress = nonlinear, punctuated, multiple [<-- used in marketing today]
proto-atavism --argument--> that multiple paradigms of life exist on the peripheries of humanist life ==Campbell==> (how) *human life: a cacophony of co-existing interacting states of past present future existences with no recourse to a single reassuring origin* (=/= singular progression)
(like animal rumors in old bestiaries ajayeb in a story-starated world) found telegram videos and internet pic used in my image assemblages --> (found images which make it difficult to trace their lineage) in an image-starated world ==construct==> ambivalent visual representations that do not have a signifier in an external “real” world (Baudrillard's rhetoric simulacrum: an objec[...]
(217)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%96.7[...]plex (feedback loops, emergence, bifurcation) =/= complicated: accurately analysable system having a large number of component and perform sophisticated tasks
•most of the most valuable products today have virtual components (software, money, etc.) that would be unrecognizable 25 years ago
5.
automation of life
(fundamental legal principle of) ius gentium: all humans are the same in so far as they are rational human beings in possession of free will =/= 21st century neuroscientific research
}--Libet--> “free won't” : the mind exists in a climate which says yes, but it can say no
agency is outsourced to systems that increasingly invisiblize from everyday life (software deciding mortgage, Facebook suggest friend, turning car into a moving computer)
dystopian imaginary of Black Mirror TV series --> these developments are a tyrannical force that undermine an a priori and fundamental humanness
--Campbell--> consumer researcher's results will be powerful counter-balances to the often too blindly utopian and dystopian accounts of the future
...................................
[*]advertising: (ubiquitous and contentious) symptom of organization[= corporate entity and/or common practice]
aesthetic ambassador of the organization
--(a way through which)--> **anyone outside the organization mythologizes an imaginary inside**
(its) media:
•***indirect messages of public relations that are embedded deep in the heart of non-advertising genres***
•bombastic and direct appeal of made-for-cinema advertisement and corporate communication
•
how advertising used to be scorned as a practice and profession --> gained responsibility in American culture:
-1 advertising became instrumental in enlisting soldiers during world war I ==> lending it a moral force which served more noble purposes besides commerce
-2 it was elevated through its incorporation into education (first in Harvard University 1924)
-3 it becames adept at referencing styles and commissioning work from the realm of high culture
}--now--> advertising does not just produce culture, but ***culture produces advertising***
(one of the central questions of advertising in contemporary times has been the extent to which) *advertising enframes everything within its discourse and logic*
--Campbell--> ****if advertising is everything, what is it not?**** [@apass] <-- this is a crucial question about advertising and it is part of a larger global crucial devate about the commodification of life and previously inalienable aspects thereof
scientific advertising ---> go to Haraway
advertising:
1. fascinates us
2. it works
an average person in the western world is exposed to 3000 advertisements per day
everyday, it transforms me from this world to [...]
(218)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%97.8[...]more synapses for interprting face
depiction of female body
male body
sex in advertising
racial marked body
(boring questions:)
•whether advertising reflects the world or shape it
•how signs reproduce, create, normalize or subvert the often unequal power structures that exist between male and female bodies
--> **despite potential ambiguity in images we as visual consumers are always presented with a “preferred reading”** @Pierre, Goda --> “image is controlled by discursive limits” (--Sina--> fable of ‘subtlest ideological weapon of advertising’) --Campbell--> paradox of identity construction: the consuming subject chooses among a limited repertoire of “iterated” or preexisting identities provided by marketing and adertising, steering viewers in preferred directions [<-- a fable]
[*]coopt: advertising pretends to acknowledge a competing discourse or ideology, but only pays lip service to it, ignoring its real radical challenge
the idea of advertising: a system that instils (القا، کم کم تزریق کردن) products and services with cultural and social values that are not intrinsic to them [~ magic]
--> highly visible display of ruling-class interests
*advertising = capitalism + aesthetics*
advertising: the pre-eminent way in which the interest of the powerful minority maintain the docility, alienation, or servitude of the majority (--> Goda's understanding of pop culture)
[*]magic: conjure an object from its immediate material rootedness and animate it with a much more potent energy ==> erase human experience of the monotony of consumption with its transient satisfactions and reinvigorate it anew with fresh promise-claims
for example advertisement for mobile phone = *suggestion* (about a certain design aesthetic + a certain tole in professional life + a certain sexual appeal + a certain social network) =/= *announcement* (about a technical device)
(announcement =/= suggestion: the act of advertising)
}--1--> the idea that advertising's signs = carefully constructed highly selective and distortive ways of seeing [=/= simple reflections of the state of the world] ==(Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Klein, Curtis, Jhally, @apass, Pierre)==>
•false consciousness
•commodity fetishism
•docility
•passivity
•manipulation of unconscious desire
•environmental degradation
}--2--> the idea that signs actually achieve their aims (through mortise and framing work, cropping, reification, interpellation, cooption, the gaze, face-ism, individuation) --> [Althusser's] interpellation: process by which we are called or hailed into subjecthood through practices imposed onto us from outside interests, subjects are created through material practices (going to church and kneeling down to pray precedes my subjecthood as a spiritual person)
•recruitment adverti[...]
(219)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%98.1[...]subtlest ideological weapon of advertising’) --Campbell--> paradox of identity construction: the consuming subject chooses among a limited repertoire of “iterated” or preexisting identities provided by marketing and adertising, steering viewers in preferred directions [<-- a fable]
[*]coopt: advertising pretends to acknowledge a competing discourse or ideology, but only pays lip service to it, ignoring its real radical challenge
the idea of advertising: a system that instils (القا، کم کم تزریق کردن) products and services with cultural and social values that are not intrinsic to them [~ magic]
--> highly visible display of ruling-class interests
*advertising = capitalism + aesthetics*
advertising: the pre-eminent way in which the interest of the powerful minority maintain the docility, alienation, or servitude of the majority (--> Goda's understanding of pop culture)
[*]magic: conjure an object from its immediate material rootedness and animate it with a much more potent energy ==> erase human experience of the monotony of consumption with its transient satisfactions and reinvigorate it anew with fresh promise-claims
for example advertisement for mobile phone = *suggestion* (about a certain design aesthetic + a certain tole in professional life + a certain sexual appeal + a certain social network) =/= *announcement* (about a technical device)
(announcement =/= suggestion: the act of advertising)
}--1--> the idea that advertising's signs = carefully constructed highly selective and distortive ways of seeing [=/= simple reflections of the state of the world] ==(Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Klein, Curtis, Jhally, @apass, Pierre)==>
•false consciousness
•commodity fetishism
•docility
•passivity
•manipulation of unconscious desire
•environmental degradation
}--2--> the idea that signs actually achieve their aims (through mortise and framing work, cropping, reification, interpellation, cooption, the gaze, face-ism, individuation) --> [Althusser's] interpellation: process by which we are called or hailed into subjecthood through practices imposed onto us from outside interests, subjects are created through material practices (going to church and kneeling down to pray precedes my subjecthood as a spiritual person)
•recruitment advertisement: interpellative genre par excellence ~ through the practice of response we enter into the predefined parameters of relation with the organization {Microsoft's “we want you!” --> 1: act of defining the subject: one who is special, unique, an individual among the masses. 2: collective pronoun: “we” serves to close the subject and the organization within a circuit of common purpose. 3: what is missing: a concrete visualization of working life in the organization, an absence which allows the reader to project his/her own fantasy onto space : ‘infantilize t[...]
(220)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%98.2[...] circuit of common purpose. 3: what is missing: a concrete visualization of working life in the organization, an absence which allows the reader to project his/her own fantasy onto space : ‘infantilize the organization ==> empower the subject’ --represent--> an imaginary relationship =/= real conditions of our existence}
}--✕--> (Campbell) ****images are ontologically cryptic**** : we conceive images to be both agentic & passive, residing in and affecting many spheres simultaneously
•image: visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse, bodies, figurality, exist within a distinctive socio-legal environment --> **multiple ontologies [Ihde's multistable] move images beyond simple categories of analysis (<-- that is why i am still a visual artist, @Pierre)
***images are extra-organizational entities*** (they are designed by organization but become) *quixotic* and *uncontrollable*
*fable of complex: there is something about the image that is beyond analytic investigation (--Mitchell--> every image theorist seems to find some residue (surplus value) that goes beyond communication, signification, persuassion (there is an extra in images) --> images are complex {
1. they are constantly mutating in meaning and significance
2. they cross aesthetic borders and are not confinable to a particular domain (image = aesthetic + political + social)
3. they act on all domains recursively --impossible--> how the aesthetic life of images affects the political life of images }--Mitchell--> *image as species* (co-evolutionary entities, quasi life-form depend on a host organism) ==>
◦something not fully under human control
◦spread through the host organicism
◦some die some become pandemic
aesthetic --affect--> politic --affect--> aesthetic --affect--> politic
#workshop make an ad for apass
advertising trend
1. information: (from) traditional forms of print & television --to--> intensification and hybridization in oblique ways + through new media (adver-gaming, twitter-piccing, virtual-worlding, Corridor Crew's product placement)
2. persuasion: [as a rhetorical force] (from) information-heavy selling --to--> dramatic persuasion
3. entertainment: communication through entertainment =/= information, persuasion
•(from) staging products in films --to--> embedding of brands so deeply into the fabric of the film's narrative as object-actors that propel the plot
(Corridor Crew's unobtrusive embedding of branded goods and services in storytelling, hybrid both staging and embedding)
brand --> creativity of consumers to create artistic output in the form of art (Star Wars world, Marina Abramovic) --advertising--> rhetorical purpose: *entertain* =/= inform (announcement), persuade, *warn*[old original function of advertising]
*to warn = to inform* [<-- 15th century advert[...]
(221)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%98.3[...]br />
[in 20th century (task of)] advertising: to render the invisible [qualities, such as: complexity, network, information,,,] into compelling visualities (--into--> public imagination)
•(in organizational discourse) complexity: (--articulate-->) unpredictable, multi-layered, decentered, emergent, globalized (world of Homeland TV series, of apass, of ERG's website: technological + adaptable + multi-layered)
*success <== visualize the complexity of their products* [in the case of ERG: student's knowledge and the institution of university]
(Goldman's landscape of Capital -->) corporate advertising:
•visually depicts the phenomenon of globalization
•affect the cultural imaginary
•shape political sensibilities (with respect to life in high-tech globalism)
amorphous phenomena (that require high-stakes visualization):
•counter-terrorism
•climate change
•
[*]advertising: an institution that organizes meaning, a visual sign system (as powerful as other systems that organize meaning: medicine, law, education,,,) [~/= apass]
--> *a form of literacy* = can be learned + lexicon + grammer (that can be fruitfully investigated)
*advertising = capitalism + aesthetic* ==Campbell==> research in advertising one of the most important research priorities in any discipline today (@apass)
...................................
***marketing = the ultimate social practice of postmodernity***
marketing practices
promotional campaigns
consumption culture
postmodernity: a phenomena specific to the cultural history of western europe and north america --impact--> globe
--Lyotard--> incredulity toward *metanarratives: unified idea systems
--Jameson--> consumer society (marked by:)
◦pastiche: an attitude of a certain detachment (on the part of the individual) where all stylistic expressions of parody, nostalgia, and other illustrated feeling lack emotional depth and commitment
◦schizophrenia: disjointedness and discontinuity of the individual's personal identity and experience in life
--Angus--> infinite delay of *modernity: improving human lives by controlling nature
--Wilson--> expression of incoherence of contemporary urban life
postmodernity =/= authority, unity, continuity, purpose, commitment
= “modernity: era of scientific ideology ==> disillusionment, disintegration, anxiety”
--> hedonism
--> tolerance (recognition) of difference
--> metanarrative = story (that people construct to tell themselves) =Foucault= regimes of truth
=/= conformity
examples of modern metanarratives:
•bourgeois (capitalist) ideology
•marxism
}--✕--> *market = new metanarrative in postmodernity*
postmodern condition:
[...]
(226)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%98.4[...]ed or disavowed content in X
symptomatic analysis --of--> (content of) antibacterial advertisement --laden--> with libidinal intensity or *visual pleasure* (= an image that is visually intense)
**consumption can be read like dreams** (a text that says more than it consciously expresses) --reveal--> repressed material (disavowed fantasies about: purity, gender, race, family, class, disease, displacement, sublimation, etc.)
◦what fantasy is upheld by presenting repressed material as bacteria (or artwork)?
--> reading against the grain of the text (Jamesonian)
--> advertising images can be read like symptoms of repressed libidinal desire
-i did symptomatic reading of Olearius (but not of ajayeb nameh?)
1- accelerating pace of industrial production
2- population growth
}==> first full flourishing of *mass consumption*
*[*]marketing: a sphere of cultural production where image conventions co-evolve with non-marketing imnages as an intertextual constantly reciprocal environment*
1. cuteness
little monsters
infant-like
with freakishly funny features
playground of bacterial frolic
cuteness
a minor aesthetic category (in comparison to its more spectacular counterparts: sublime, beautiful)
(it is minor because it is ambiguous)
•positive affects:
◦desire to protect
◦desire to touch
•negative affects:
◦helplessness
◦pitifulness
◦excessive availability
•secondary relations:
◦resentment at being emotionally manipulated
◦contempt for the weakness of cute --accompany--> desire to:
◾touch
◾clasp
◾dominate
◾destroy
◾
}--> *cute: a site of visual intensity that is both pleasurable & disgusting*
****three objects that are most often rendered cute in consumer aesthetics:
1- women
2- technology
3- children
}<-- (in psychoanalytic terms) inherently dangerous ==> in need of control****
Campbell > why is it useful to see bacteria as cute?
***cuteness as a deep link to violence***
[*]cuteness: aestheticization of powerlessness --> a necessary step in permitting its extinction [to make everybody like unto little children is not such a bad way of disposing of them]
•representing the Other (the enemy) as despicable --> powerful effect
•representing the Other as domesticated + infantalized:
◦demonstrates the sublime Otherness of bacteria
◦we are relieved of guilt <== the bacteria is rendered beneath the threshold of ethical consideration
2. overpopulation
cramming of many life forms into tiny spaces ~= (literally) an uncanny microcosm of the imagined and feared socio-economic order
[...]
(227)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%99.3[...]ic reading of Olearius (but not of ajayeb nameh?)
1- accelerating pace of industrial production
2- population growth
}==> first full flourishing of *mass consumption*
*[*]marketing: a sphere of cultural production where image conventions co-evolve with non-marketing imnages as an intertextual constantly reciprocal environment*
1. cuteness
little monsters
infant-like
with freakishly funny features
playground of bacterial frolic
cuteness
a minor aesthetic category (in comparison to its more spectacular counterparts: sublime, beautiful)
(it is minor because it is ambiguous)
•positive affects:
◦desire to protect
◦desire to touch
•negative affects:
◦helplessness
◦pitifulness
◦excessive availability
•secondary relations:
◦resentment at being emotionally manipulated
◦contempt for the weakness of cute --accompany--> desire to:
◾touch
◾clasp
◾dominate
◾destroy
◾
}--> *cute: a site of visual intensity that is both pleasurable & disgusting*
****three objects that are most often rendered cute in consumer aesthetics:
1- women
2- technology
3- children
}<-- (in psychoanalytic terms) inherently dangerous ==> in need of control****
Campbell > why is it useful to see bacteria as cute?
***cuteness as a deep link to violence***
[*]cuteness: aestheticization of powerlessness --> a necessary step in permitting its extinction [to make everybody like unto little children is not such a bad way of disposing of them]
•representing the Other (the enemy) as despicable --> powerful effect
•representing the Other as domesticated + infantalized:
◦demonstrates the sublime Otherness of bacteria
◦we are relieved of guilt <== the bacteria is rendered beneath the threshold of ethical consideration
2. overpopulation
cramming of many life forms into tiny spaces ~= (literally) an uncanny microcosm of the imagined and feared socio-economic order
***new technologies to visualize the world ==produce==> new imaginateis of life itself*** [<-- my research on bestiaries]
microscope (19th century) --> microbial visuality --Latour--> new modes of interacting with and ingesting/consuming the world
bacteriology as a discipline emerged at the same time as the (so-called) transformation “from industrial capitalism --to--> market society”
•overpopulation
•bacterial proliferation
--> a trope in visualizing contemporary bacteria
bacteria live in obscene proximity to each other --> *bacterial intimacy =/= individualizing force of modernity*
the fantasy of there is some sort of “away” which c[...]
(228)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%99.3[...]>
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
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[...]
(230)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%99.9[...] 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 ordinary folks
•Buddah --> worshipped nature and produced a totally authoritarian system of thought (as[...]
(231)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%72.5[...]could only occur indirectly**
index: exercising a real physiological force over the attention -- mesmerized into its particular object of sense.
= *everything that focuses the attention*, (everything that startles us into an index)
--> make something conceptually present which is perceptually absent
installed economy of attraction(/distraction) [in European cities, and its deviation in Tehran differences]
fashion works to bind attention onto its own pseudo-unity
against the living, fashion asserts the rights of corpse and the sex appeal of the inorganic
(Benjamin)
--> death drive
(supreme cult of the commodity:) fashion: a blossoming forth into a luminous apparition of the new
[==>? withdrawal from fashion = a strategy of freedom]
Adorno: in the age of growing powerlessness of subjective spirit vis a vis social objectivity, fashion registers the alien excess of objectivity in subjective spirit, which is painful yet all the same a corrective of the illusion that subjective spirit exist purely within itself. against its detractors, fashion's most powerful response is that it participates in the individual's impulse, which 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 ca[...]
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