[...](patriarchy, eugenics, colonialism, racism embedded behind the public face of conservation, education, biopolitical establishment)

biology = politics (by other means)

cyborg
•has no original eden it was banished from
•has no dust it can return to
==Haraway==> situated partial knowledges


gendering the laboratory ==>
•modest witness
•new forms of gender (male virility,)


touching the elephant and knowing
touching different part of the world
touching a human body and guessing at the riddle

by touching the different parts => some are running, rotting, flickering, etc.

for doing anatomy you need a corpse (that means you already rule out things such as eating)

archeological anthropology
human-animal stories
hunting each other / together
domestication

Tsing

the greedy beast within us

collaborative garden (feed together)

descriptive practices of poetics and natural history


mission of all atlases to characterize (not simply inventory) phenomena
(to characterize, not invent; mixed in ajayebnameh عجایب‌المخلوقات / عجایب نامه?!)

atlases habituate the eye, they are perforce visual
(what ajayebnameh habituates? not the eye?)

to explicate rival cosmologies

one problem of atlases is that they have to decide what nature is
they all have to solve the problem of choice


atlases of characteristic images presented individual cases as exemplary and illustrative of broader classes and casual processes (but not ajayebnameh عجایب نامه, aj bring precise individual instances in its unique stories)


atlas(es) of(/for) the eye

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

< />


[the identity of objects:]

Manuel Delanda: Any materialist philosophy must take as its point of departure the existence of a material world that is independent of our minds. But then it confronts the problem of the origin of the enduring identity of the inhabitants of that world: if the mind is not what gives identity to mountains and rivers, plants and animals, then what does? An old answer is “essences,” the answer given by Aristotle. But if one rejects essentialism then there is no choice but to answer the question like this: all objective entities are products of a historical process, that is, their identity is synthesized or produced as part of cosmological, geological, biological, or social history. This need for a concept of “synthesis” or of “production” is what attracted Marx to Hegelian dialectics since it provided him with a model of synthesis: a conflict of opposites or the negation of the negation. Deleuze and Guattari, on the ot[...]

[...]. macro, inorganic vs. organic vs. social, realism vs. social constructivism, etcetera.) and argue in favor of a new ontology according to which “mechanisms are largely causal, but they do not necessarily involve linear causality”



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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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



... bewildering heterogeneity of registers in ajayebnameh عجایب نامه

... treating entities trafficking in the futures

active capacities of description

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

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

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

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

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

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


what is the sociocultural world we construct?


dream images, vivid mythical scenes,


form travels/passes through us

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

[Latour modes of existence]

(to distinguish types of)
incompatible truths

“truth"--is the expression of an encounter with forms of existence

to understand the others in the absence of a description of ourselves
(what is realistic?)

to direct attention towards the beings about which huma[...]

[...]inds us: “The past reappears because it is a hidden present. I am speaking of the real past, which is not the same as ‘what took place.’ . . . What took place is indeed the past, yet there is something that . . . takes place but does not wholly recede into the past, a constantly returning present.”

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

[Corbin]

it is so dangerous to say any thinker, writer, artist, or phiosopher ‘was of his/her own time.’ nobody has ever been in their own time, never. we are constantly out of time.

things occur in Malakut, not in the time of this world.
it is a matter of interior history, exoteric in the etymological sense of the word, subtle history whose events do not take place in the exterior world of objects, but in the subtle world of lived states, events in the Malakut, in the world of the ‘Soul,’ in the ‘Heaven’ or the ‘Hell’ which man carries within himself.
(and this is precisely what is ‘changing someone's story’ is about. ‘let me change the rhythm of your story. let me change your history.’ ~= storytelling)
this history----interior wild facts----intermingles with his wills, and objectives itself in the web of exterior facts. these are events of ajayebnameh, Shahname شاهنامه, Qur'an قرآن, Grail Cycle and so on, the events of this history (inspire parables? and) make up sacred history (tarikh-e ghodsi تاریخ قدسی‌) =/= empirical historicity
*the question always remains:
-what *is of this world?
-what is the organ of perception?
-does oneself need to ‘belong’ to this sacred history in order to come to pass (in the Malakut ملکوت)? (being born in it, etc.)

[what was your fetish again? what was your Qibla قبله? what would be...]

platonic ideals, periodization of sacred history

ملا صدرا Mullah Sadra revolutionized the metaphysics of being, in reversing the order of priority of essence (mahiat ماهیت). he gives priority to existence (vojud وجود) : that means, it is the act and mode of existing that determine the nature of essence. the act of existing is in effect capable of multitude of degrees of intensification or of degradation.

(عجایبِ ajayeb-e) man: human-faced demon (ajene ensan-nama اجنه انسان‌نما) / ... / ... / sublime state of perfect Man
-and body passing through a multitude of states : Hayula هیولا? / ... / jesm (جسم corruptible worldly body) / ... / divine body (jesm-e elahi جسم الهی)

Mullah Sadra is the philosopher of metamorphoses and palingenesis (estehaleh-ha استحاله‌ها & rastakhiz-ha رستاخیز‌ها)
*phenomenology of the act of existing*


there was a time (12th century--my favorite) when Avicenna ابن سینا was translated into Latin (in Toledo,) a moment when our cultures in [...]

[...]o the vague differences between another two magical canvases / magnetic disks: Plane of Destiny (lohe mahfuz لوح محفوظ) and Plane of Memory (lohe hafez لوح حافظ), while listening to the virtual narratives of Ghahveh-Khane theater. Which creatures have you encountered, in your travels, that bypass human installations (of memory)?

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Avital]

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


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

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

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

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

what is being guaranteed if not the ability itself to guarantee

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

the metaphysical fantasy of completion.

colonization of discourse with rigor

The discipline of programming leads to a shift in perspective on traditional issues. It invites--or rather requires--one to adopt what [Da[...]

[...]n the “actors,” all kinds of actors, become the real masters. As this happens, another human type is disadvantaged more and more and finally made impossible; (Nietzsche)

flora and fauna

this is not the scientist obsessed with an idée fixe--but one capable of uprooting and going

...invites ambivalence
...dreaming of immense edifices and the permanence promised by contracts written in stone

register(s) of understanding


A new fold in metaphysics, testing--that is, the types of relatedness that fall under this term--asserts another logic of truth.

A kind of questioning, a structure of incessant research, perhaps a modality of being, testing scans the walls of experience, measuring, probing, determining the “what is” of the lived world.

i marvel at...


wonders of...
marvels of...
unheards of...
mazhar ol-ajayeb مظهر العجایب<br /> Motehayeran-e متحیران, Tahayor تحیر ~=? to wonder
dar ahval-e... در احوال
dar khavas-e... در خواص
navader-e... نوادر
sefat-e... صفات


ta'ajob تعجب =/=? heyrat حیرت
the mode of attention in ajayebnameh is tuned by ta'ajob (wonder) away from Iranian mystic preferences over transfixation and rapture (heyrat)
which literary or (not)knowing positions are installed in these two (observational?) stations?
the subject of ta'ajob is moved otherwise
تعجب در باب امر قدسی‌ ta'ajob dar bab-e amr-e ghodsi, wonder in the matters of divine

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

Heidegger: die Wissenschaft denkt nicht
Derrida: links science to mourning and memory
Lacan: science is always there, ready to erupt, amaze or blow you away.


Husserl was perhaps the one most freaked out by the historical split (between science and philosophy--and artphy--and art?)


...a matter of technological selfunderstanding,

...nor do I insist on sustaining the pathos that propels the images...

ethical and political issues are increasingly seem to have more to do with testing than questioning, hesitation, certainty

There is a test ... it claims and so it stands. There is the other test that crashes against walls, collapses certitudes, and lives by failure-lives by dying or, at least destroying.


The one register of testing offers results-certitudes-by which to calculate and count on the *other.*

the culture of Versuch, test or trial
(farhange kushesh, ghasd, sue ghasd, va emtehan)

(measuring and) testing that support, among so many others, political, religious, and educational institutions

testing has everything to do with the way the policing of political sites and bodies takes place, in modernity and wi[...]

[...]castration

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

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?)

ga/> 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 chah) عجایب چاه
wonders of pits --> wonders of moon (Moghana مقنع, bringing a moon out of a pit, mah-e nakhshab ماه[...]

[...]Stewart)
-“real and virtual worlds, future and past worlds, fictional and theoretical worlds, always happening and happening and happening” (Kenney)


talking is also thinking


speculative valences (zarfiat ظرفیت) of wonder --> (through wonder, which) response-abilities are activated (?)

ajayeb is crafted responsive stories about life --> question of responsibility --> what kind of responsibilities are activated in the SF worlding (including reading it now) of ajayeb?


(work on ajayeb is about a practice of [writing] history as) *worlding the past*, to take the alterity of the past seriously and to be moved by textual encounter
-how can we not be subsumed by the sameness of the here-and-now? (collapsing of difference into sameness)
(my work on ajayeb is about) learning to tell better stories about the past*
*writing ~= (wonder:) a careful attention to differences in the practice of worlding the past. (demanding like a cat walking on our keyboard, interrupting you [Kenney])

(digital reading practices of) data mining =/= reading for the reactions of an implicit reader --> what the scholar of ajayeb (in the medieval) might have felt?


ajayebnameh is grounded in the history and materiality of scientific practices:
“Nature is neither knowable ...nor unknowable ...Nature is that about which ‘relevant knowledge’ may be produced. If we pay due attention to it, we can learn, discern relations, and multiply entities and ratios.” (Stengers 2011)

eliminativism: the belief that one story or one set of practices (usually called rational or scientific) can explain nature.

a materialist understanding of ajayeb demands an interpretive adventure of how, with matter (in Stengersian way), we get sensitivity, life, memory, consciousness, passions and thought... =/= inert or mechanistic notion of matter

which metaphors stage nature as “witty agent and actor”?

speculative commitment --> learn how to relate differently ~-> (help us) name what we are doing in new and useful ways**** (Verran)
the egg from outside it doesn't seem to be doing anything --> to give the egg the power to challenge (our) well-defined categories
-how can we relate to the egg without breaking it? (ontological + ethical) --> *pragmatism*: an art of consequences, an art of paying attention =/= the logic of the omelet justifying cracked eggs


ajayeb is all about the ***staging of nature***
{Latour:} reductionism offer an enormously ‘useful’ handle to allow scientists to insert their instrumentarium, their paradigms and produce a long series of practical effects.
(efficient handles =/= staging of nature)

we must learn to tell trickster stories {a speculative sense that activates possibilities for thinking, feeling, and knowing wit[...]

[...]ng in the house;]
-my father disappearing into violent, abandoning drinking


every person is a nexus of compositional moments
a worlding taking place in difference


!♥ Stewart talking about her stepson becoming a homeless
“People like to simplify the situation of homelessness as if it is a self-evident process of abject poverty without a safety net or as if it's just a matter of personal blame or failure. But it is also an attunement to a singular world's texture and shine. The body has to learn to play itself like a musical instrument in this world's compositions.” [@Luisa, Sven, Foad]

(i lack certain learnings in sensory labor of attuning as a zerang زرنگ person)


(do i also have) the habit of a worlding

trying to find the rhythm of a new bodily life

find lines of attachment

***to become describable as a body (by learning how to affect and to be affected in this world such as it is)***

(in my work on ajayeb i am becoming more and more committed to learn ways of) having stories meant to pull me into the sentience of the world i am in --> give it density, texture*


Stewart (2010) is writing an ajayebnameh of her mother in cancer, stepson becoming a homeless, and her hometown

______________


[*]regionality دهاتی ,داهاتی
-an event that jumps from landscape to bodies and back (Stewart)
--"here"-->{the blue law, the seasons, the color red, place names اسم خیابان [*the past snaps into the present with the recognition of the street names], bodily resonances, materialities bundled together like a sac of leaves, sharp-edged collectivities like race, ethnicity, class, gender, generation and religion, }--> “one ventures from home”
-a thing hollowed out by its labyrinth of edges; incessant interlinking
-a contact aesth[...]

[...]ct of miniaturization
*anthropocentrism of the scale of the human --> default ontological scale, self-evident human-sized body (-->?! the little bike i gave Elen, did i propose that kind of critique?)
-which organs are emphasized in iranian miniature?
(organs of knowledge: eyes, ears, mouths, skin)
-properties of materials and their relationship to form only ever emerge relationally }--> how can i construct an approach for iranian miniatur, or radif in these terms
◦countors --> decomposes to the shape of horses
◦gold
◦fields
 --> and these forms emerged for people *who knew how to see it*
iranians experienced everything about the world as ‘...’ ? (جای خالی را پر کنید) --*-- the growth of children in an unreliable world نگرانی (#modalities of negarani)
inconstant and unreliable, continually threatening to transform ==> ontology involving matter =? metaphysics

(the drama of) finding the correct scale


***(Bailey > Alberti:) (“paradox of multiple worlds”:) when “other worlds” are precisely what is expected by an audience for whom the world is inherently unstable *** [<-- this is an iranian mode: loving outsiders, construct metaphysics, proliferating ajayebnameh, make belief in images, make thinking about kharej خارج, loving America, etc.]
}--> this was also why i couldn't think with Pierre's “other future” proposal; i am already living it


Alberti asks: will an ontological shift in scale reveal new ways of cenceptualizing the miniatures (the patterns)?

in Miyazaki the figure's size are part of an instantiation of scale rather than respond to an imposed scale
a scale must grow indiginously


Amazonian soul <~~--> harkat johari <~~--> tey-ol-arz طی‌الارض --> teleportation and tazkie nafs ?!
-designating a condition of transformability: all bodies contain the potential to transform into other bodies --> intrinsic capacity to be something else --> harkat johari حرکت جوهری
*tey-ol-arz --> intrinsic capacity to be somewhere else; [is tey-ol-arz in tasavof also about scale, body? (intensive difference) (condition of transformability is articulated in tey-ol-arz in terms of geo-temporal scale shift...)--> a moment of indiscernibility between “here” and “there” --> a super-divided being (intensive multiplicity) --> *(a specific form emerges:) a dynamic and intensive corporeality* (--> excessive intensity of all spirits) --> my argument is that tasavof is not the negation of body in favor of soul --> the key is not size or time but intensity or excess ==> to think tey-ol-arz: to think in many kinds of times, flesh, vulnerability, etc.]
tey-ol-arz metaphysics is based on the idea of a radical and infinite superposition of states: insides and outsides ~= heres and theres : are figures and ground to each other (--> #beyond)
[...]

[...]eless concentration
-entirely occupied
lyric moment is isolate =/= (parts of a) narrative are contiguous
(according to the lyric -->) consciousness or immortality is without date(?)

moment dilates as it is described
creating an alternate sense of duration


the surface of language
the complexity and interest of the surface

thickness means we have to *labor to enunciate* them -- is a way of mirroring the physicality of the world

seamlessness ==> our attention is suspended

(a poem/writing) shift time ==> put us inside a scene

...slip the confines of the body

poem's leap toward transcendence

people slip out of the story they are living all the time (@iranians)
(daily life is full of small moments of:)
•rupture
•disappearance
•interiority

because of her [Bishop's poem The Fish] act of description ==> her encounter with otherness restructures her sense of the world ***
(for Bishop) animal presence engenders an experience of joy
(the animal presence provokes, engenders what in Attar?)


-our speech rushes in where there are no words

ajayebnameh --> our acts of description --> bridges to animal life and evidence of our distance from them


descriptions (actually?) describe the consciousness
various and lusterous enough (to reflect back the complexities of the) self that is doing the looking

description: a mode of thinking
=/= that would make a claim about what reality is }--> that is why i can't read theoretical philosophy about the “real” or “being” anymore (of Simondon for instance), the lack of *description of the speaker's world* in his work [--✕--> every leaf is made up of a complex interaction of shades] --> (is this because i studied drawing?): people who have studied drawing know that *you have little idea what is in front of you* (in the visual landscape)
***what philosophy does to your mode of perception?

‘chain of definitions,’ a catalog of names --?--> a mode of *litany* [مناجات وعبادت تهليل دار (تحلیل دار), colloquy with God (--> #prayer, modes of consciousness and rhetorics used to commune with the divine =/=? “building a tower in order to thunder back at the old thunderer” -Doty)] (--> this has been my mode of consciousness in my lectures)--> a way of accumulating terms of praise (can also easily grow numbing)
*accumulation of descriptive phrases*: a dynamic, forward-moving thing, one that includes evidence of struggle -->[*connection lies behind the “catalog of inadequate terms”*]
(one effect of my quirky talks is as if we have) climbed a ladder of phrases
...struggle to reconcile the delights of earth with the demands of heaven* [_i am keeping in touch with a way of talking (d[...]

[...]ing mischief they cause can turn deadly
violently jerks the body of the medium around
occasionally threatening or attacking onlookers

“keep filming” one of the old women whispers behind me --> i do what i am told = i do exactly what i want to do

anthropologist = i cannot directly “see” the demon or the spirit [~ what i am told to see, @apass #feedback], but i am convinced that they are there


(ajayeb --?-->) older practices of defining social facts and the discovery, interpretation, and definition of the read ==> (roots of the predisposition of research:) to sense, interpret, and eventually master forces that appear to be nonsensical and yet are held to be essential to the reality of everyday social life

[mad:] the notion of *irrational* as a privileged space in medical discourses (in France in the 19th century) ==> a mysterious and extra-social language that the rising medical profession could adapt to its own purposes

“nonsense” of the “native”

(Baxstrom's work on witch craze [in 16th century] --arguing-->) the problem of establishing proof in reference to the invisible forces has durably shaped our modes of investigating human social and cultural life

[ajayebnameh =/=]
social or cultural anthropology in the 21st century = (human sciences’ contemporary equivalent of the) *old efforts to master the invisible* -->{test ==> felicitous information as to the “true” nature of obscure forces and their operations within empirical real-world contexts}

[ajayeb: (part of the histories of)] systematic, empirical investigation of strange events, singularities, miracles, and other types of staple phenomena ~~--> scientific method and the forms of knowledge that emerged as the foundation of an ensemble of *sciences proper to humans* --> yet has been unable to expel (the unprovable forces) considering the origins and forms of human diversity

[*]anthropology: the desire to credibly master nonsense

[with ajayeb studies i am learing to be] able to argue for a world below the threshold of perception (of medicine, biology, physics --> defined their relation to the nonsensical via a *visibility to come* ==> [embodied in new technologies:] photograph, microscope, telescope)

Deleuze --> when writing of communication between heterogeneous systems --> [we must pay attention to] what is this agent, this force which ensures communication? (<-- role of difference and resemblance)

forensic anthropology

[title]
imaging and imagining technologies


the confusion of the empirical (knowledge traversed by our everyday observations, sensations, passions) and the transcendental (construction of an ideal knower, now it is the queer) in apass

figure of man foundational to the human sciences [did not exist in classical thought ~[...]

[...]dibly master nonsense

[with ajayeb studies i am learing to be] able to argue for a world below the threshold of perception (of medicine, biology, physics --> defined their relation to the nonsensical via a *visibility to come* ==> [embodied in new technologies:] photograph, microscope, telescope)

Deleuze --> when writing of communication between heterogeneous systems --> [we must pay attention to] what is this agent, this force which ensures communication? (<-- role of difference and resemblance)

forensic anthropology

[title]
imaging and imagining technologies


the confusion of the empirical (knowledge traversed by our everyday observations, sensations, passions) and the transcendental (construction of an ideal knower, now it is the queer) in apass

figure of man foundational to the human sciences [did not exist in classical thought ~ ajayeb] --move-to--> empirically institute the experience, witnessing, and testimony of an individual human subject = *the central linking relay between evidence, judgement, and the real* --> the ability of a human being alone to serve as the sole source of evidence in an investigation of “the real” (#feedback) [=/= Gilgamesh]
(in Qazwini's ajayebnameh the testimony of an individual human subject is ambiguous)

(Baxstrom + Foucault) *insist on rooting our form of knowledge in the figure of the human being and the human being alone --yet--> our gaze is continually drawn to a host of beings and phenomena (the witch, the spirit, the shaman, etc.) that cannot properly be enfolded back within this figure*


fabled definition (@apass relationship with defining)

fable of anthropology (a disposition with regard of the interlocutor other as truly “other”) -->
“This goal is, briefly, to grasp the native's point of view, his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world. We have to study man, and we must study what concerns him most intimately, that is, the hold which life has on him. In each culture, the values are slightly different; people aspire after different aims, follow different impulses, yearn after a different form of happiness. In each culture, we find different institutions in which man pursues his life-interest, different customs by which he satisfies his aspirations, different codes of law and morality which reward his virtues or punish his defections. To study the institutions, customs, and codes or to study the behavior and mentality without the subjective desire of feeling by what these people live, of realising the substance of their happiness—is, in my opinion, to miss the greatest reward which we can hope to obtain from the study of man.” -George Stocking


...the field-worker must, under the signature of science, achieve the cultivated, sensed point of view of the other
@apass #feedback (a privileged relation with [...]

[...]else" = a commitment (that transforms ways of thinking and ways of feeling) [=/= Holakouee's روشنگری enlightened secularism]

the deceased:
•they invite themselves into dreams
•****they make presence of presence felt**** --> through stratagem (ruse of genre, skill in devising plans or schemes)
•they play on coincidences --> (as far as they are connected) anything can be used to make a sign <== **they are opportunists of enigma**
•they thwart all attempts to give meaning to the action
•they do have regularity ==> (it is possible to constitute) *a science of the deceased* [that fits them, one that describe them, that can interpret in the sense of guiding a reply to what they want or request] --> the deceased have:
◦an ecology: milieu is a cruicial issue for them (we sometimes witness real extinction in highly unfavorable niches)
◦an [*]ethology: (a practical science of) ***what beings do and get others to do*** = (a practical science of) **what they are capable of doing** (==> the facts that it describes should only be described using the infinitve) [Despret > Deleuze > Spinoza =/= classical ethology = behavioral biology: studies primarily specific instincts and invariants]

}<--Deleuze-- [ajayebnameh عجایب نامه:] *a practical science of the manners of being* interested in what the thing or the animal can do --> (the bestiary ajayeb's authors) made a kind of register of the powers of the animal (powers of the world) : an *alimentary regime* that is about the modes of existence (including inanimate things: the diamond, what can it do? what tests is it capable? what does it support? we define things by what they can do ==> it opens up forms of experimentation = my ajayeb, Cinderella diaries, Telegram bestiary, Despret's ethology) [=/= interested in what is called the animal classification, one will define the animal above all, whenever possible, by its essence (by what it is)]
--Latour--> reinstituting nature, *one does not learn from beings turned into zombies* (deanimated) ==> (ethology is required to) address an animal defined as non-indifferent: an animal for which the way it is addressed matters
--Despret--> [*]ethology: a practical science of the modes of interrogating and experimenting with ways of being = ****a practical science of the modes of attention**** (that are required by the ways of being of those it aims to study)

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

working on:
•[with Despret and Katie] How my “special things” belong also to others, and how in this belonging i can unlearn something about my things, call it heritage
•in my own performances, the proposal that “story” and “medium” do not need to fit... is also why my lectures don't produce similar joinings (for the audience)


every phenomena is at the same time experienced, resisted, measured, enunciated, performe[...]

[...]ntury --increase--> interest in systematic explanation of meteorological phenomena

#workshop on wind poetry
epic battle, systems moving air, agency,

feature of Renaissance thought --> the idea of *a middle instance (neither fully corporal nor fully incorporeal) intervening between matter and soul* [+ fire as intermediator] ~ spiritus, pneum, quintessence ~ fire or air

...in schematic abstract structure of body-spirit-soul, spirit is somewhere in between

spirit: air-like substance
air: preferred vehicle of spirit (conveyed the breath if life + *used by demonic spirits as a means to produce material effects*)

*spirit: celestial origin to the “innate heat” (calidum innatum) of living creatures

effects of solar heat on air : act of vitalization

pneuma of the stoics + astral body of Neoplatonic philosophy + medical spirits of Galenic medicine }==>
•Renaissance
/> •(christian notion of) Holy Ghost
•the idea of close connection between wind and divine power (in Bible)

(in alchemical view) spirits were somehow connected ti air <== quintessences were often separated from raw substances in the form of vapours


ajayebnameh ~= natural magic
*kinds of natural motions*
1. avoidance of avacum: from the form of a portion of air, when it does not want to be either expanded further or separated (from other matter). horror vacui --kinetic--> motion was regarded as due to a property of a specific part of the machine
2. resistance to excessive compression: the form of basic matter should not become less that what is right for it
3. the tendency of heavy things to descend and of light things to rise

air = vital spirit that joins things together, resounding spirit if the world instrument

Paraceksian theory of aerial niter
(an active principle) aerial version of en of earthly gunpowder - responsible for life, combustion, thunder, lightning, (some) illnesses
--> connecting the activity of air + life + weather phenomena

wind: (***in its irreducible qualitative variety***) expression of cosmic spirit + محرک باعث a motive force to be accurately estimated

منجنیق ~= geometry هندسه *pneumatic engineering* : distinction between moving and moved components ==evoke==> motive forces
elaborated pneumatic machines
mechanical clocks
tension of strings

*wind ==> celestial influences*
(Cardano regarded) expansion and contraction of air as symmetrical phenomena, both consisting a source of motive forces
-in the universe the element air had the function of receiving and conveying fiery celestial influences on earth providing health and wellbeing fir living creatures

Telesion (1509-1588)
soul and spirit identified with each other as a v[...]

[...]rritorial
3. numerical

number ==> lineage

spatium (differentiated space with depth and levels) =/= extensio (immanent center, divisible homologous parts, and symmetrical and reversible relations)


[title]
numbering of numbers

census
taxation
election

(Deleuze and Guattari are wrong about numbers serving to gain mastery over matter --✕--> Verran's work on number in Africa)

State = a teritorial principle (of deterritorialization that links the number to metric magnitudes) --D+G--> “we don't believe that the conditions of independence or autonomy of the number can be found in the State (--> Deleuze and Guattari leftist tendency to purity the State)

(operating war machine -->) numbering number : autonomous arithmetic organization

*numbers appear as soon as one distribute something in space =/= distribution of space (that is more the State's business)*
independence of the number in relation to space --> concrete nature of smooth space
--> number: a means of moving =/= means of counting

*middle ages curse sheets and taxa:
•geometry of smooth space
•a minor, operative geometry
=? [*]ajayebnameh: geometry of the trait between the rumers of the world, senses, and writing

vector --> directional number =/= dimentional number =/=? metric number

directions are everywhere

rhythmic =/= harmonic (--> setar / is my whole work about harmonic? horror-nic)

order of displacement

concentration-camp society: ‘people = deterritorialized numbers’ (--> fantasy of full despotism in The Handmaid's Tale)

**the question is not one of good or bad but of specificity** (<-- when i say who what artists say could have a chance of being disputed)

complex = articulated

the Roman legion was a number made up of numbers, articulated in such a way that the segments become mobile, and the figures geometrical, changing, transformational


logistics: the art of external relations

Genghis Khan --> composition of the steppe
Moses --> composition of the desert


nomads as child stealers


(commissars, diplomats, spies, strategists, logisticians) cannot be explained away as a “whim of the sultan”

special numerical body

slave-infidel-foreigner is the one who becomes a soldier and believer while remaining deterritorialized in relation to the lineages and the State --> نظام‌الملک سیاست‌نامه

*nomads have no history, they only have geometry*

Iron Man's technological definition: “weapon (destroying people) =/= tool (producing goods)”

weapon --> projection, anything that throws or is thrown
@Pierre *the n[...]

[...]l CG 3D modeling], experiencing, learning, taking into oneself, consuming****

“we, when we take the deeds [of others] for imitation, ought to make the lofty things hidden and humble ones manifest” (like the shape of the seal: sculpted inward is appeared concave when printed) --> mimesis

*the encounter is made possible because an ontological similarity to that other is built into the experiencing self*

golden goblet 🏆
we consume, absorb, incorporate the drink (~= imitate the virtues) =/= we give back (~= we wonder at) the goblet, we wonder at what we cannot in any sense incorporate, or consume, or encompass in our mental categories --> we wonder at mystery, at paradox, at admirabiles mixturae <==Bernard== three hybrids:
1- mixture of God and man
2- mixture of woman and virgin
3- mixture of belief and falsity (in our hearts)


(Attar seductively drawn to the wonderful deformed beauty of saints of early sufism)


[title]
failed exorcism


[3]
(Bynum providing a) medieval theory of wonder in the *literature of enlightenment*:
history writing
travel accounts
story collection
عجایب‌المخلوقات ajayebnameh: the encyclopedic tradition of the ancient world known as *paradoxology: collection of oddities (monsters, hybrids, distant races, marvelous lands, [telegram beasts, instagram animals]) + antique notions of portents or omen: unusual events that foreshadowed the (usually catastrophic) future + accompanied by a vague sense of dread [it gives you goosebumps]
+ (Ehsan master of) [*]fabulae: (story) told without claims to their ontological status =/= historia
}==> theory of wonder: [@apass]
1. *response to facticity*
2. *response to the singular*
3. *is deeply perspectival*

•William of Newburgh --> (some sort of) probatio (testing, evidence) --base--> rimari (probe, pry into فضولی، با اهرم بلند کردن) =/= admirari (to wonder at)
•Gervais of Tilbury --> facts ==induce==> marvel ~= res gestae (deeds or historical accounts) =/= stories (fabulae, lies) [~= *you cannot be amazed by what you don't believe* (stories of ghosts, vampires, migration of quail, flight of squirrels, etc.)]
•John of Salisbury --> *marvellous singularity* (collection of advice for courtiers and princes) ~ wonder: response to majesty (hidden wisdom, significance) =/= generalizing = moralizing (inductio exemplorum, citing of instructive general causes --> forensic)
•

credible deeply unusual singular event ==> admiratio

[*]perspectival: reaction of a particular “us” to an “other” that is “other” only relative to the particular “us” (<-- this is why ajayebnameh is interesting)
•James of Vitry --> ***cyclopses who all have one eye marvel as much at those who have two eyes as we marv[...]

[...] the (usually catastrophic) future + accompanied by a vague sense of dread [it gives you goosebumps]
+ (Ehsan master of) [*]fabulae: (story) told without claims to their ontological status =/= historia
}==> theory of wonder: [@apass]
1. *response to facticity*
2. *response to the singular*
3. *is deeply perspectival*

•William of Newburgh --> (some sort of) probatio (testing, evidence) --base--> rimari (probe, pry into فضولی، با اهرم بلند کردن) =/= admirari (to wonder at)
•Gervais of Tilbury --> facts ==induce==> marvel ~= res gestae (deeds or historical accounts) =/= stories (fabulae, lies) [~= *you cannot be amazed by what you don't believe* (stories of ghosts, vampires, migration of quail, flight of squirrels, etc.)]
•John of Salisbury --> *marvellous singularity* (collection of advice for courtiers and princes) ~ wonder: response to majesty (hidden wisdom, significance) =/= generalizing = moralizing (inductio exemplorum, citing of instructive general causes --> forensic)
•

credible deeply unusual singular event ==> admiratio

[*]perspectival: reaction of a particular “us” to an “other” that is “other” only relative to the particular “us” (<-- this is why ajayebnameh is interesting)
•James of Vitry --> ***cyclopses who all have one eye marvel as much at those who have two eyes as we marvel at them*** (1200)
•Gosswin of Metz & John Mandeville --> turning such perspectivalism into gently ironic comments on themselves
•William of Rubruck --> barefoot travel through harsh terrain and climate required by Franciscan asceticism seems as monstrous a practice in the East as certain Eastern customs appear when reported “back home”
•



**(how? can we simply?) study medieval emotion** =/= wonder stated by historians, travelers, theologians, philosophers, preachers, devotional writers

*traces of emotion* that survive are mediated through texts, pictures, artifacts --Bynum--> we are not entitled either to assume a sort of Darwinian universal emotion, or to think that emotion-behavior is culturally constructed (as to exist only where we find words for it)

***texts may give us access to reactions less through adjectives attached to nouns*** (by calling something “wonderful” or “dreadful” =/= indicating the responses of an implicit reader/viewer)
•a keyword search for “anger” will tend to turn up set pieces on how to control it --> discussions of where it is not
•reactions such as wonder, delight, or terror (do not simply occur) they are *evoked*, sometimes even *staged* --> we can explore what evoked them

finding wonder-words =/= finding wonder (complex semantic field)

wonder-reaction:
•terror
•disgust
•solemn astonishment
•playful delight

in medieval accounts wonder o[...]