[...]strumentalization?

categories of killable--the question of how we kill

the question of one's-own-old-hat

regarding what you are against: we might find ourselves properly addressing a particular issue but having no ability to make political connection, to think beyond the categories
*thinking: a materialist practice with other thinkers--done best as storytelling

for me politics is that to be able to locate ways of life that deserves work, that which deserve opposition, that which deserve our curiosity


disembodiment is a technologically produced effect--many people are very skillful in creating that effect --> effects that are also affect/affectional

(Haraway on writing the cyborg manifesto) SK
the physiological state of neutrality is an affective state
(the notion that violent and passion counts as affect and neutrality is without affect is chemically bizarre) -- neuro-chemistry of a certain kind of self-collection
refusing the division between material and immaterial
to call information-world immaterial is wrong
(this is the base of my work related to Haraway)
in the case of vision: the material and the semiotic always implode [the apparatus and the flesh] --> the effect of *disembodiment is a technologically produced effect* (that is also always affectional) (we have to get good at producing it)
[...so she was among (1983 Marxist) feminists (and the figure of cyborg is already in circulation for her--about the questions of reproduction technologies related to the situation of women) without biological education--not only that, many of her feminist allies thought of biology as the enemy [--> antinatural rejection of the sciences in feminist the agreement “that ‘nature’ is our enemy and that we must control our ‘natural’ bodies --> escalating logic of counterdomination] so her manifesto is all about that. biology is (a rich fabulous practice and) never innocent, and it is something that ‘we mean’. in the sense of ‘what do you mean?!'] [we are always telling knowledge stories that we need --> noninnocent]

(something is) boring =?=> (something is) wrong

why do i joke? it has to do with storytelling.
anything anybody tells me i tend to believe--what i learn from whores

working within an apparatus of thinking in order to get somewhere in a sustained way and not to drift into associations as fast as... -->
i can't finish the sentence until i can pay attention to what interrupts it. and if i syntactically require to come to the end of sentence, syntactically commits me to a position i don't hold. the technical requirement of clarity (and coherence--must learn how to do it). my storytelling is about how not to reach the end of sentence. (that Peter noted as suspension)

['thinking pushed into syntax’ --> my work lecture-performances are [...]

[...]mation-world immaterial is wrong
(this is the base of my work related to Haraway)
in the case of vision: the material and the semiotic always implode [the apparatus and the flesh] --> the effect of *disembodiment is a technologically produced effect* (that is also always affectional) (we have to get good at producing it)
[...so she was among (1983 Marxist) feminists (and the figure of cyborg is already in circulation for her--about the questions of reproduction technologies related to the situation of women) without biological education--not only that, many of her feminist allies thought of biology as the enemy [--> antinatural rejection of the sciences in feminist the agreement “that ‘nature’ is our enemy and that we must control our ‘natural’ bodies --> escalating logic of counterdomination] so her manifesto is all about that. biology is (a rich fabulous practice and) never innocent, and it is something that ‘we mean’. in the sense of ‘what do you mean?!'] [we are always telling knowledge stories that we need --> noninnocent]

(something is) boring =?=> (something is) wrong

why do i joke? it has to do with storytelling.
anything anybody tells me i tend to believe--what i learn from whores

working within an apparatus of thinking in order to get somewhere in a sustained way and not to drift into associations as fast as... -->
i can't finish the sentence until i can pay attention to what interrupts it. and if i syntactically require to come to the end of sentence, syntactically commits me to a position i don't hold. the technical requirement of clarity (and coherence--must learn how to do it). my storytelling is about how not to reach the end of sentence. (that Peter noted as suspension)

['thinking pushed into syntax’ --> my work lecture-performances are about a thinking excessing out of syntax. not all argumentation is made in syntax(= how a sentence must end), and turn it into a skill of nonsyntactical pragmatic language craft tradition, advocating the *exceedingly agential* world ~= there is always ‘a whole lot is going on']

the iterative and fractal quality of sentences
partial connections (of distinct entities) ~= analogy
analogy allows one part contaminate systematically another part and vice versa

(Haraway on feminism)
feminist theory is especially good in getting at in particular ways doctrines of nature's work to enforce ways of life on women, on people of color, on the enslaved, on those who do not possess the qualities of mind and self-possession, on those who are on the marked categories to the unmarked. the feminist have been particularly good at getting how genre works. gender, in this regard. [...] --> that female by nature is committed to the species and the male by nature committed to transcendence.
[our inherited binaries -->] formulations of nature: executive/non-executive organs, immanen[...]

[...]nsive work of theory]


(to talk about...) as an abstraction of seriousness
*if one is really serious about the kinds of interupted and entangled abstractions it is no longer good enough to do it from the Greeks-on*
(not scolding post-colonial but actually) not to let philosophy or science or any other rest of it any longer be that unmarked set of categories
*situated ground: that we know something*
(not to let:) ‘not to know something’ (about living and arriving at the time of human-induced mass-extermination and mass-genocide) as the only way of being a serious person ~ extinguish abstractions in order to act
[learning from Haraway + Latour:] ‘to take something seriousness’ is not to run off and explain it by something else, is to be at risk to it's ‘thisness,’ to be available to it, to be undone and redone at encounter ~-> specualtive thought
(always asking) what other abstractions are to think with?
[my interest in the past -->] your head screwed backward, not so much looking for relevant novelty [and not in search for meaning] (not so of past but also) not quite so enamored of the new and of the creative
-extinctions are happening at extraordinary rate that are difficult to deal with the perceptual apparatuses of the bipedal hominid [for example sayinig ‘everything is collapsing’ is one of those categories, collapsology takes world's doom as a priori]
•knowledge =? production of novelty, product of novelty [that you need is not at all novelty for someone else]
•knowledge =? reduction of memory, production of memory
•knowledge =? cat's cradling each other
*what constitute flourishing?* [@collapsology =/= one is seduced, curious, interested, and intrigued ‘to what is going on there?']
[species are often] risks for your ongoingness
(work of) [*]hope: care not being possible out of the place of sheer joy

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

my issues with the commons
i have a problem with the conceptual and material apparatus called ‘resource’ that the commons takes uninterrogated. (and there is no way out of it because commons must take ‘a’ definition of resource for granted--and that makes it too easy to deconstruct). and it is too embedded within a political framework and vocabulary. and political is the most difficult syntax to start with, which won't allow it to access other literacies.
in this way the commons alone cannot properly address issues such as pollution, extinction, human-animal problems, rhetoric, inheritance, logic, alienation, and so on, that need multidisciplinary thinking.

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

•what is ‘feeling’ for Lili
•the issue of ‘similarity’ for Luiza
•zones of connectivity and presubjective singularities for Xiri. (what is even better than justice? kindness?)
(Xiri's use of the implicit element of ‘surprise,’ she is trying to comm[...]

[...] else, is to be at risk to it's ‘thisness,’ to be available to it, to be undone and redone at encounter ~-> specualtive thought
(always asking) what other abstractions are to think with?
[my interest in the past -->] your head screwed backward, not so much looking for relevant novelty [and not in search for meaning] (not so of past but also) not quite so enamored of the new and of the creative
-extinctions are happening at extraordinary rate that are difficult to deal with the perceptual apparatuses of the bipedal hominid [for example sayinig ‘everything is collapsing’ is one of those categories, collapsology takes world's doom as a priori]
•knowledge =? production of novelty, product of novelty [that you need is not at all novelty for someone else]
•knowledge =? reduction of memory, production of memory
•knowledge =? cat's cradling each other
*what constitute flourishing?* [@collapsology =/= one is seduced, curious, interested, and intrigued ‘to what is going on there?']
[species are often] risks for your ongoingness
(work of) [*]hope: care not being possible out of the place of sheer joy

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

my issues with the commons
i have a problem with the conceptual and material apparatus called ‘resource’ that the commons takes uninterrogated. (and there is no way out of it because commons must take ‘a’ definition of resource for granted--and that makes it too easy to deconstruct). and it is too embedded within a political framework and vocabulary. and political is the most difficult syntax to start with, which won't allow it to access other literacies.
in this way the commons alone cannot properly address issues such as pollution, extinction, human-animal problems, rhetoric, inheritance, logic, alienation, and so on, that need multidisciplinary thinking.

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

•what is ‘feeling’ for Lili
•the issue of ‘similarity’ for Luiza
•zones of connectivity and presubjective singularities for Xiri. (what is even better than justice? kindness?)
(Xiri's use of the implicit element of ‘surprise,’ she is trying to communicate the ‘importance’ of her contents.) (trauma-story almost always silences other stories. -- she is compelled by her own storytelling --> baring witness to the injustice therefore resisting it.) --when the victimized personal veils the larger context of evil, the illusion of the true perpetrators - which is around you. (she stated the danger which is all around us.)
-the issue of immediacy for Xiri
-‘you can only heal what you have wounded’ (Wagner's Parsifal “only the weapon that made it will ever cure the wound.”)--what does this mean for our caring activities? @Sina: is this what you mean by western modern rationalization, and that is why you are thinking within the western/eastern philosophies, is the modern tools the antidote to themselves? (this is to[...]

[...]"tool ==> man”
•
fables popular in apass:
•“a work [of art] should speak for itself”
•“the very last stage of the creative process is purely intuitive” --> when people say they stop “reading” or “knowing” when they want to create artwork
•“look really hard inside yourself for what you really want”
•“you are an agent of change” that means art or thinking or being ought to be operative, active, transformative, (even destructive) and that is “political” [--> this fable in found in language; ---> go to Barthes’ fable of the woodcutter]
•




no need for “conflict” nor “hero”
(in the way we give feedback, relate, narrate, story, and tell eachother our matters of care and concern, and where we create zones of attachment; both in your “art work” and the mundane everyday of ‘getting on together’ --> interrupting one's own framework)

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

#workshop, on question, feedback method, to improve the questions we ask each other
-what are the questions (i could ask) that make you the most articulate?
-the question that asks what are the good questions that offer an interesting becoming for those to whom the question is addressed
-to ask: does this apparatus has stakes in docility or availability?
-more interesting questions ==enable==> more articulated answers ==> more articulated identities
-asking (questions) (is not about ‘you want to know,’) is about constructing interest ==> chance of interesting answers
-asking about the differential productions,  “=/=” or “=” or “==>” in each other practices. these assessments are propositional and poetic remarks, guessing the artificialities that we live with, not finding of matters of fact
◦asking about particularizations (تخصیص) and generalizations (تعمیم)

**literature begins, Blanchot writes, “at the moment when literature becomes a question”** (this is completely different than asking or question-marking in literature) [...] this question “is posed to language by language that has become literature” (the question that the meaning of the text asks is the question asked by literature; [of course at the moment of reading]) [then what is a text before becoming a question? complaining? revolution?]--%(negation wishes to realize itself.)

--> Rorty's critique of Descartes's way of asking questions

we have to be careful with our practice of questioning, because we often end up privileging a group of people by attributing it to “higher” levels cognition and of being “critically” in the world (=/= animal, nonpeople, other people with other ways of being in/with the apperceptive world that don't use the technology of questioning, as it is crafted historically and naturalized in the west for the univerasal method of ‘knowing more’)

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

#workshop, reading group
[...]

[...]

“truth” is veild, according to middle east (truth <----> pardeh پرده)
begining with the Greeks’ notion of basanos, relating truth to torture, a strictly constellated confluence of acts equally troubling to Aristotle and Aristophanes.

•pardeh-dari پرده دری, hajeb حاجب (after neghabat نقابت is hejabat حجابت [Beyhaghi]) (Nezami in Leili-o-majnun: haft arus-e noh emari bar dargah-e to be pardeh-dari (هفت عروس نو عماری بر درگه تو به پرده داری) --?--> angelology) =/=? hayula(ism) هیولی


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

hermeneutics regarding Jurisprudence (feghh فقه) and theology depend on the exegesis of written texts. in both cases the process of understanding is an act of application(?)

interpretation/hermenutice =/= commons/collectivsm
(ta'vil bayad dar jahate axe harkate jami va moshtarek bashad)

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

(Kohn) to “provincialize” (rustayi روستایی, bastani باستانی?) language in order to make room for another kind of thought--a kind of thought that is more capacious, one that holds and sustains the human.

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

my point in animals without narrative is that the apparatus that is working for Attar in his representation of birds is the same as the narrative tool in the so-called wildlife documentary series which produces nature----a sy.


transcend is about traveling from trope to truth (obur az majaz be haghighat عبور از مجاز به حقیقت,) from virtual to concret. but that is too easily reversible. my point is to stop this transference and interrogate the trope itself. my work in amazon book is about this ‘majaz’ (مجاز), an interface that we are inhabiting.

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

the main (and only?) question in my work/performance/lecture is ‘when’ the gift will/have pass(ed) on.
--> holding on to, preparing, strategizing, spontaneity, and so on

-my texture aversion and preference in soft/hard fabric of language and material tonality? --> the “inanimate affections” (that give us pleasure in life) --> we often give each other soft gifts as a way to care for one another (@Janina)
*radical affection does not require intentional politics* (Chen)



[Shepard 2004] Stanner (W. E. H. Stanner, White Man Got No Dreaming) describes how the universe became a moral system and consists of three elements: marvels, species diversity, and institutions. Marvels refer to that presence of the unexpected that one always encounters sooner or later in nature, particularly when the terrain reflects something about the mind that implies a common structure. His second element, species diversity, coincides with one of the major moral issues of our time--the extinction of species and reduction of biodiversity.

-“marvels of affinity[...]

[...]heir ‘sides’ (didn't necessorily confronted me)


(book, ketabat کتابت)
to do something to resignify and breakup the serenity and the serene closure of the book, as the universiy values it and seals it
-what deals does it seal?
-the commitment to breaking up the book and its metaphysically laden pitch for closural sovereignty.
-linguistic pollutants
-dirty talks

#as a mode of writing, make a folding (fractal) book, style of children books, for ajayeb
(what would this structure mean? and how is that expandable?)

#making a cheap horror short-film from one of the ajayebs

#write a X-man short story in Tehran context with iranian everyday characters
•jurassic park --> ajayeb al makhlughat عجایب المخلوقات (horror, sublime, shivering water)
•nonapocalyptic stories and the otherworldly hauntingly familiar in the lost faces of forest (called Tehran?)

(accourding to Egyptian 1550 BCE,) book: a loose collection of magic spells intended to assist a dead person's journey through underworld, and into the afterlife and written by many priests
-are lists the origin of writing? (...way before the installation of the modern scriptural apparatus)



theory-minded academics have rigorously repudiated----or forgotten poetry. ----> poetic deprogrammmg

cohabitation of two sovereign linguistic attitudes----the grammars and behaviors that we associate with figures of literary performance and philosophical positing

18th century
rise of increasingly more mathematical and symbolic logics
more literary types of discursive formations,


Wordsworth, Rilke, and Keats disavowing Paul de Man?!
Freud without Goethe or Schiller?!
Benjamin off Baudelaire?!
Derrida deprived of Mallarme, Ponge, or Celan?!
Heidegger abandoned by Trakl or Hl or Holderlin?!


increasing technicization of critical language


colloquy, soliloquy
they are called to witness distinct regions of being ==> assuming the destiny of difference
% denken und dichten is at stake in the *theory of mourning

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

[Stengers]

the storyteller : “some people love to divide and classify, while others are bridge-makers--weaving relations that **turn a divide into a living contrast**, one whose power is to affect, to produce thinking and feeling”

(regarding my footnote fetish) ... because writing such footnotes implies *feeling the text* as an *animating power*

philosophy =? a form of textual animation {--> approaching the work of ajayeb}

to turn the [ajayeb] (animist) modes of experience (existence), awareness, and knowledge into living contrasts (intensely powerful bridge-making tools)
[...]

[...] /> (feminists protecting their) sense of collective historical subjectivity and agency and our “embodied” accounts of the truth --> these are just excuse not to learn
(2)Humanistic Marxism (structuring theory about the domination of nature in the self-construction of man) ([young Marx, influenced by Feuerbach =/= Hegelian idealism, saying that:] man's essential nature is that of a free producer, freely reproducing their own conditions of life [--however--> under capitalism individuals are alienated from their productive activity, etc.])

--> “chance for life”

science: Global System, universal knowledge --> translation, convertibility, mobility
of meanings, and universality

money in capitalism ~= reductionism in science

...when we are talking about genes, social classes, elementary particles, genders, races, or texts

*vision: a sensory system that has been used leap out of the marked body ==> a gaze from nowhere
-“Vision is always a question of the power to see--and perhaps of the violence implicit in our visualizing practices”
-also, the visual metaphor allows one to go beyond fixed appearances, which are only the end products. The metaphor invites us to investigate the varied apparatuses of visual production (including: the prosthetic technologies interfaced with our biological eyes and brains.)

unmarked body: the power to see and not be seen
objectivity in scientific and technological, late-industrial, militarized, racist, and male-dominant societies

(she asks for:)
“So, I think my problem, and “our” problem, is how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own “semiotic technologies” for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a “real” world, one that can be partially shared and that is friendly to earthwide projects of finite freedom, adequate material abundance, modest meaning in suffering, and limited happiness.”

Haraway asks for an embodied objectivity that is able of accommodating *paradoxes* --> ‘situated knowledges’
-what does she mean when she says “All components of the desire are paradoxical and dangerous, and their combination is both contradictory and necessary.”

(instruments of visualization in multinationalist, postmodernist culture:) disembodiment : to distance to know
the visualizing technologies (--> my amazon project)

a perverse vision that has produced ‘techno-monsters’ (what does she mean by that?)
--> second birthing? transcendence?
[the frankenstein's techno-monsters, is modeled after who? and who is modeled after it? wondrously, murderously walking around...]
(‘second-birthing’: one of the deadly stories of killing: in the first-birthing we have merely birth to the [...]

[...]he world. We just live here and try to strike up noninnocent conversations by means of our prosthetic devices, including our visualization technologies.”

in the rich feminist practice in science (more than anywhere else) passive categories of objects of knowledge are “activated”

The biological female peopling : When female “sex” has been so thoroughly retheorized and revisualized that it emerges as practically indistinguishable from “mind,” --> the ‘difference’ is theorized biologically as situational, not intrinsic, (at every level from gene to foraging pattern, thereby fundamentally changing the biological politics of the body.)
-(example: Emily Martin)


points in SK:
1-finite partial perspectives
2-split and contradictory self
3-objectivity (--> positioned rationality, object of knowledge as an actor, mutual and usually *unequal* structuring, it is about taking risks)


how and why Haraway as a feminist fights for a better Primatology?


(Barad on) Situated Knowledges: are not merely about knowing/seeing from somewhere (as in having a perspective) but about taking account of how the specific prosthetic embodiment of the technologically enhanced visualizing apparatus matters to practices of knowing
-(Haraway's) move from *optics* [a politics of positioning, in Situated Knowledges] to *diffraction* [an optical metaphor for the effort to make a difference in the world, in Modest_Witness]


Katie King: “apparatus of literary production”: a matrix from which “literature” is born.
...the “facticity” of biological discourse that is absent from literary discourse and its knowledge claims. ----> Are biological bodies “produced” or “generated” in the same strong sense as poems? (biological body ~= poem)
“material-semiotic actor”: the object of knowledge as an active, meaning-generating part of apparatus of bodily production

bodies as objects of knowledge are material-semiotic generative nodes.
“objects” do not preexist as such --> Their boundaries materialize in social interaction. Boundaries are drawn by mapping practices.


world =/= mother/matter/mutter
world ~= coyote (a figure of the always problematic, always potent tie between meaning and bodies. world as coding trickster.)

(feminism) movement rooted in specification and articulation (of [different kinds of] ‘elsewhere’) =/= (assumption of the right or ability to) identities and representation (of identities)


#workshop reading SK (for apass)
Which version of “realism” are you talking about? Recollecting truth and objectivity are activated whenever a ‘point of view’ is produced among other metaphors that we use in our practice and thinking in techno-scientific societies. In this group reading session we are going to study one of the most stubborn and [...]

[...]ther occupies the failiour of the good-enough mother?
what constitutes the ‘site’ for her mother?

(how her) characters keep running into eachother in a universe of recursive connection (?)



**stories that collect stories** [~= archive? my hypertext? a mouth full? --this specific type of stories are dangerously worlders, usually handed to the unquestioned mechanics of universalized taxonomy and 17th century rigs: encyclopedic homogeneous tables. they are the stuff of ajayeb]
(mispronounced by Ekaterina > captured by Hoda > found object by Sina)

stories that collect other stories:
1- archive ~--> sortability
2- translation ~-->  linearity
==> universality (that both these stories claim)
(my work on hypertext apass ajayeb graph rigs, is to deal within these conditions of storying. my shift of interest)

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

(“dealing” @Luiza:)
(or in Lili's term “..a way to tackle issues”)

[with Avital]
*modalities of dealing-with:
-parasitism
-(under the spell) drugs =/= struggle (according to Marxian protocol: one is drugged and disabled [Date-rape-drug as an incapacitating agent] and neutralized by state apparatus, drugs are administrated and spend in all sorts of insidious ways.)
on the discourse of stupidity: Marx (in writing to Engels says that he) believed that proletariat are stupid. Marx's insight to replace the other drugs that have put so many into a stupor. people with Religion are not around, they are praying somewhere to some hallucination [this is Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, and others in 20th century] --> ideological stuporous drugs, ‘everyone is stoned on something’ =/= alert and lucid. [highly problematic!]
-this is about a body recognizing its ‘enemy’ (the figure of enemy for every and each of us and the way we “recognize” it, as historical bodies and minds inheriting the boys of 20th century.) ---- the state of the struggle depends on certain metaphorologies on ‘clean’ that are problematic and phantasmatic and on the loose. --> [the issue is that there is no “clean body”.] how to do dirty work? (--> for ‘morality’ and ‘clean’ go to Freud on the origin on morality: morality began as we stopped sniffing our asses and stood erect, nose in the air, away from the dirt [that we are] --> morality's phobic appropriations and designations, [Lacan: from the genital order to the sublime; az kun be fayakon از کون به فیکون %--> #ouroboros #serpent], [so when we stood up, stood erect, our genitals became center, exposing ourselves to the other, sexually centered exposure], [], [],)
-Marxian: language/tool/art as a virus that infiltrates ideological structures
-Lacoue-Labarthe: in 20th century there are three fundamental modalities of “dealing-with,” three modes of relatedness to our concerns, our anxieties, our worries, our work, our projects[...]

[...] comparative thinking for storytelling) (work with Avital?):
•پیر Pir / sujet supposé savoir (--✕-->? پیر فلک Pir-e falak in Hafez)
•غر Ghor / complaint (--> shekayat شکایت, and then, khamush خموش in Hafez)
•تعارف Tarof / greeting
•transcend <--> darajat درجات‌ (-> Attar)
•super-ego <--> Div-mardom دیو مردم (-> Nezami)
•NatureZolmat (ظلمت --> ajayeb)
•آبرو Aberu / economy of value
•طی‌الارض tey-ol-arz / body scale, intensity and excess
•نگرانی negarani <--> practices of care




on Aberu, I became interested due to my lack of Aberu in presentationl quality and its abundance in other area's of my psychosomatic becoming.
Aberu traverses, calls itself in, animates, and exists for later visits.
-when you are devalued by the marked of bi-aberu, you are less tied to the strictures of shame, and ‘your behavior’ becomes performance material

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

agency =? boresh برش, jahd جهد (in Farsi), “agential cut enacts a local causal structure” (Barad)

agency of ‘hemat’ همّت
hemate shahi همّت شاهی, lavazeme hemat لوازم همّت --> apparatus
sufi's hemat ~= magic

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

@Seba after accelerate manifesto reading: (what is and how can we not pivot on our work) the measure of the meaningfulness of action. (Seba's notion of losing hope is because he put himself unconsciously in a cost-benefit analysis? “what is the effect of my actions?”) [in practice it is difficult to embody speculative thinking. we are still in the space of thinking in terms of the probable.]
to do hope-work is about ‘not talking (too much) about the future’ =/= commitment in terms of probabilities, refusal to treat your subjects as if they were objects of management --> let's set aside our own hopes, and work to honour the **hopefulness of others** (Deborah Rose)

“And hope is here, all around us. Creatures want to live.” (not in the “future”)

the accelerationists putting things in their cascade of failures, (everything sinks effortlessly into it,) and creating a vanishing point in terms of a western saturated temporality. for them the present is the time of announcing the news of salvation or apocalypse, and has no thickness. (the desire) to step out of history, and is made void in the process of realization, the idea that “everything is possible.” they experience their freedom as universal freedom * (noted by Blanchot.) [--> the problem with all male action heroes...]

(is this a kind of “game-over” discourse?)

*time (thinking with Haraway)
the sequential palindromic time (in Western-related cultures) [جناس قلب palindrome: from the Greek roots palin “again” and dromos “way, direction”; a word, phrase, number,[...]

[...]ficult, complicated and impossible to understand!?)
-“to provides a feast of reading pleasures”

holding each other's unasked-for patterns (@Luisa)
taking up each other patterns [which are sometimes obvious, sometimes cryptic]
(what is the other name of the practices of “string figures” in Iran? -->[stars, facts, fabulations, “far”s, patternings,]--> all cosmopolitical, composes the “we”)

•a “we” compositional
•an “ajayeb” compositional
•

anthropocene system thinking
•feedback loops
•thermodynamics & 18th century mathematics (=/= hyperbolic mathematics in ‘crochet’ --> excess of surface, --> story of interface)
•comparative interpretive thinking (a dominant western model of knowledge production--which i am using!)
•modern synthesis: restrictive system theories within evolutionary theories
•systems idea
•
*“The global scale takes precedence--because it is the scale of the model.”* Tsing

[title]
Bilingual Stories for Ajayeb NatureCultures
(...stories ‘for’ =/= ...stories ‘of’)

does Brexit and Trumplandia changes the landscape of English use as a language?

the image of pedagogy : semiotic apparatus (& technological) (--> the ritual of Simpson strangling Bart)


(why am i cultivating the) *non-inventive imagination* (and its antimetabole [or chiasmus, chiastic patterns of antithesis]: non-imaginitive invention)
often we find ourselves inventing everything (in political animation) =/= to figure out what are we attached to

(inheriting something =/=? being heir to something)

the scientist inside me begs me to narrow my temporal scale, choose an epoch, let's say middle ages, choose a century let's say 15th, choose a year, choose a day, a moment, a micro-second slice of the cake of the milieu that you are interested in, the instance in the bazar with Halaj in the sun and so on.

(my old school) obligatory knowledge <-- salon of scietific entertainment
}-> (is about creating) proper witness***

the tropes i am building in my current research, do they help build a better Iran? and how?
interms of:
•an ongoingness
•a commitment to a recent future thinking

‘homo-’: stuff of the soil, that figures of bright and sunny image of the same

#rigs and syms*
•games
•technological designs
•plots
•mechanisms
•sfs
•jokes
•jests
•

[title]
critical bestiaries
critique-bestiary

belonging = achievement (dastavard دستاورد) + violence (khoshunat خشونت)

...the ways we renounce the world through the use of the word “real” and “really”

(Stengers:) weaving: not secular nor religious, not traditional nor mo[...]

[...]rst question has no clear answer, what i know is not placed somewhere in me, it is always an articulated matter of ‘with’ or in interaction with, it is a sym, changes before i can grasp, knowing is done always with a figure or a thing, it includes all sorts of optics and technologies, (affect theory, media theory, epistemology,)
2- the response to the second question is also not clear, i am not sure what i am told, i don't remember or hear, what i am told is infolded in what i know, (when i started with my islam lecture series i was testing the waters of these two questions and the possibility of staying with them without freaking out of ambiguity or ploting an answer)
3--> #cat's cradle


#on hypertext note:
i am becoming skilled at looking at my notes:
{(1) what are the *skills necessary* [=/= tabula rasa (of the reader, of the audience) of the communo-capitalism's standard of “user-interface"--the strange idea that the interaction and reading doesn't need or must not need learned-efforts or skills, that it should be “easy” and “effortless” --> fallacy of the unskilled listener.] to engage, interact, and get involved with the interface, data-set, grammar, and literacy of (my) reservoir? }--> ** let's ask that question with every apparatus that engages us into desire, movement, articulation, ...
skills --> to become ‘literate’ in this particular way --> situated knowledge includes this situated literacy and skills of reading particular to the object of “text” (in that case how do i address my interest in the pervert reader? the skills of the unlearning*)
the skills necessary for my work to work comes with time, attention, and desire ~-=>? #harem (=/= ladies room)
--> (2) this skills of (my) reservoir, what set of questions or problems equip me to address?

varzidan, varz, varzide, ورزیده

Sennett's love for his subjects is extraordinary (=/= iconoclasm, futurism) and it influences me deeply, his voice and care when he opens his reflection, findings, etc.

ok, again, the ‘skill’ question:
•1--> what are the set of skills needed for my work?
•2--> which problematics these skills equip me to address?
•3--> can i (or should i) not know these problematics in advance?

the bow and arrow --|)-> ♥ in my apass endweek (as sound object) was a relic of our shared physical energetic space, the nondiscursive --> how to keep it inarticulate?
•a way to record space, which is always social =/= silenced with no agency of the recorder (the “quiet recorder”)
•also a playful respective reading of La Guin, (something that may seem a misunderstanding of her carrier bag theory)
•carving out a practice agility area


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

the question ‘what does X mean?’ is always ‘what does X mean for you?’

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

i am following the move[...]

[...]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 *location* [...] and the *timing* of its appearence)
[the ‘image of the rigid’ in his presentation]

Kristien's chart:
questions <--> symptoms
answers <--> openings
past <--> diary

for Lilia: apparatus = score
for Eszter: apparatus = preparation {--?--> everything depends on the ways we prepare}
for Sina: apparatus = (chaotic/strange) attractor
for Hoda: apparatus = negative feelings
for
for
(other non-Agambenian notions of apparatus: Katie King's, Barad's, Wark's)
[Agamben still thinks of structure in Euclidian terms, pre-chaos theory and fractal geometry of (non)equilibrium. thermal chaos and dynamic system theory has changed the ways we think about global/local stabilities, discontinuities and noise. sympoiesis is another one.]
-with ‘apparatus’ what is at stake: flow of energy, order, waste, transformation,

Vladimir's tether on disambiguity

Elen, adding her own wheels to the flow(s)
and putting a stick/spoke in a rolling wheel (of others?) [her saboteur trends, چوب لای چرخ (=/=? kharab-kari خراب کاری), what is chub lay-e charkh for her? vandalizing the discourse of others]
-the famous vandal of wikipedia with the recursive name “-on wheels” (Willy on Wheels, adding “on wheels” to the title of every single page, using the move function of Wikipedia: renaming the existing title ==> moved to another namespace, without changing the base title)
-like myself, her saboteurs are critically not symbolic nor ontic, rather sometimes epistemic, or better, ontologic: they don't vandalize the “thing” itself, but the “nature of the properties” that constructs that thing for us
-rocket sculture (what does it mean for her?)


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

[the question of inevitability of anthropical view]
there is no final answ[...]

[...]as artwork, bottom-top approach to writing,
•findings: every research practice: must include “body image”, must include “the image of creativity” especially if you are iranian, must employ ontological attention to differential productions, must rework decompose redefine its root-metaphors, must give extensive equipment list, must trace its social connections in a wider ecology of practices, must include a critique of technology,
•moments of composition: a scene animated by some quality, or... taking place as accidents (or not)

key literature, magic wands:
1st stage:
•Richard Sennett: Flesh and Stonne --> learning about body image
•Manuel Delanda: A 1000 Years of Nonlinear History --> learning about material histories
•Eduardo Kohn: How Forests Thinks --> learning about semiotics
•Timothy Morton: Sublime Objects --> learning about ontology
•Avital Ronnel: (lectures and articles) --> learning about poetics
> •Donna Haraway: (lectures and articles) --> learning about rhetorics
2nd stage:
•Martha Kenney: Fables of Attention --> *rationality: mixture of the highly rational and the highly fantastic
•Karen Barad: Posthumanist Performativity, Invertebrate Visions --> learning about apparatus
•Eva Hayward: visualizing apparatuses --> her interest in optics, in the optics in which marine invertebrates and people come together through visualizing apparatuses
•Vinciane Despret: The Becomings of Subjectivity in Animal Worlds --> learning about anthropo-zoo-genetics
•Kathleen Stewart: nonrepresentational theory --> other ways of description
•Katie King: technologies of writing --> a better thinking of locals and globals
•

(curiosity ==>) having to figure out how to do something that i don't already know how to do:
•ongoingness of collective practices of knowledge and concern
•talking about (what is going on with) ajayeb
•paying attention to differential ontologies
•the stuff that happens through face-to-face colleagueship
•to be in productive alliance
•


unalianated critical work = art



Seifee wants to say something
something wants to say Seifee?


i like us to be skilled at
•objective perception
•5 minute perception
•rigorously passionate perception
•rhetorical perception
•sacred perception
•devilish perception
•queer non-perception
•having a taste for iranian stuff perception
•
--> polyskilled web of friends



#Bambi's mother studies:
•other stories possibility, past and history, performative approach to film
•politics of memory, and affect
•patterns of remembrance =/= event recall
•

three childhood memories, stories, from element[...]

[...]o be in productive alliance
•


unalianated critical work = art



Seifee wants to say something
something wants to say Seifee?


i like us to be skilled at
•objective perception
•5 minute perception
•rigorously passionate perception
•rhetorical perception
•sacred perception
•devilish perception
•queer non-perception
•having a taste for iranian stuff perception
•
--> polyskilled web of friends



#Bambi's mother studies:
•other stories possibility, past and history, performative approach to film
•politics of memory, and affect
•patterns of remembrance =/= event recall
•

three childhood memories, stories, from elementary school:
•the mime of “you think (too much)”
•the weird pro hit on the coming ball
•peeping into the toilet
◾

my childhood recognizing:
•filaments (hypha, hyphae, تار) of spider webs
•patterns of ants
•motion color blurings --> that present is “physical if the eye is quick enough” (Stevens)
•

the ways i was engaged as a child in scope-apparatus, micro-macro scales


what other stories, remembrances of the past are possible?
-different apparatuses of attention, reconstruction, and storytelling, that are equipped to hold diffractive patterns of ‘that which comes to mind’


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

can we care for “iranians” without “for iran”?
(i can't care less about Iran)

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

perhaps artistic research is all about playing cat's cradle (=/= autism) : (you have all sorts of limbs, even phantom limbs) you must learn sustaining the rhythm of accepting and giving, (collaborative) patterning (that requires passion and action) [this is one skill tkill that matters a lot, what i have been trying to teach myself above anything else in the last years] [i am playing that game with Haraway, joining her (and others) in thick, collaborative patterning; generous knottings; thickening the knots, relaying a mutated and resituated pattern for the next play]
•getting the knot, proposing another
•you must learn how to hold still
◦(more and more) in different material and conceptual grains of detail and resolution
•the most important thing in research practices is this patterning, networks reenacted (Katie King)
(Lili's kiss project was about that, blocked intersubjectivity, a matter of “learning to be affected”; can i say that Lili's issue is with the lack of [psychological, or psychic] dialogue? a language that no longer carries metaphor displaces the metaphorical drive: acting out the soul's metaphor in direct [nonverbal] action. the breath in Lili's work, is the same in her suffocated kiss and scre[...]

[...]giving ways to talk to the religious ones : getting to grasp what the world looks like in faith-based communities (=/= check-list of dogma)
•category thinking: get into differential liveliness (with all sorts of inequalities:) *who gets parsed how* [#archive, #articulation, #storytelling] (and thinking about what it means to take up these relationships in cultures saturated with science and technology)


Xiri was doing her research with categories of victim and opressor, and now they suddenly disappeared from her work. that category change or vocabulary change was suspiciously effortless


*remembering is an extremely creative practice (-note to Hoda-)
memories are like ecotone کناربوم (transition area between two adjacent ecosystems)


#(very important concept partly shaped by practices of Darwin into our lives:) “collect” --> lies (necessary?)
the frenzy of the 1700 of surveying nature and collecting speciment ==> bioinfomatic
‘collect’ promises nontransformation
--> metaphors of archive, information-intense ways of thinking about life on earth

*“demonstration” coined by science

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

(with Scout Calvert) the ways the digital apparatuses are working, and the kinds of tensions and creativities between the cyber infrastructures and the other kinds informational management discourses displace other book discourses *** --> categories explode in library practice
[Calvert donig brilliant discourse analysis of library sciences --> has direct impact on practices of reading#, different kinds of knowers]
techno-biblio-capital: techno-capital and library practices embedded in each other -->{ [*]technology: assemblages of people, computers, software, discourses, techniques and workarounds that make them function; [*]capital: a social arrangement in which buyers of labor power are entitled to profits and the sellers of labor power to wages and all the effects entailed in that arrangement; [*]techno-capital: techniques, discourse and technologies used to naturalize and derive capital from information and information technologies}
*curiosity = a small and local kind of *freedom[= agency within constrain ==enabling==> skillful meanings], curiosity resists control and has the power to defeat one's favourite self-certainties, can also be commodified for consumer culture specializing in providing private pleasure,
techno-capital objectivism: (neutrality of) collection developemnt and format choices --> power-sensitive judgments
“we will engineer ourselves out of that” --> naive technological optimism; *the technological question is cruicial to questions of power and knowledge*
-library science tends to position library as power-neutral spaces
-(Foucault: resistence to power is always present)
“freedom to” is always disciplinary (because there is always a particular [...]

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

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

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

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


now-but-not-then quality of continuities


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


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


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

Haraway's problem with veganism's moral, wholistic, complex claim that they make on us (also a necessary kind of contemporary witness): that people's practices with animals as food and fiber and work animals, turning into nothing but museum pieces at best. vegans deadly imagination sometimes don't get what they kill: most kinds of animals that have long histories in close association with people.

there is no relationship to this world that does not involve extensive killig (Haraway)


up-to-the-minute technologies

compli[...]

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


now-but-not-then quality of continuities


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


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


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

Haraway's problem with veganism's moral, wholistic, complex claim that they make on us (also a necessary kind of contemporary witness): that people's practices with animals as food and fiber and work animals, turning into nothing but museum pieces at best. vegans deadly imagination sometimes don't get what they kill: most kinds of animals that have long histories in close association with people.

there is no relationship to this world that does not involve extensive killig (Haraway)


up-to-the-minute technologies

complicated issues around security apparatuses and different national struggles

histories of dispossession and genocide


“do you believe?" = "do you believe in a list of dogma?”
totally wrong question: do you believe in God?


[should i go to Berlin after apass?] a parochial person دهاتی (in the pressure of the seriously elite places): you could be here, you could succeed here, but never belong here


Haraway's ‘literal’ makings:
•“companion” is about whom you are at table literally*
•to be homo sapiens is to be in multispecies interdependencies literally*


my issue with the image of the free floating meaning network popular in artists’ thinking: yes meanings foreground and background. they swirl, but they don't swirl at random

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

MOU (memorandum of understanding)-->{@Esta + Zoumana + Hoda
*memorandum: memo, reminder, note, تذکره --?--> passport : آنچه موجب یادآوری شود --> آنچه موجب دخول شود
a legal document describing an agreement between parties less formal than a contract
[1994 U.S.-North Korea nuclear pact, the MOU between Bush and Kerry for 2004 debates,]

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

batlagh باتلاق



it is (perhaps the most) important to help transform (your or my) ‘wounded-child’ to ‘wonder-child’ (--> @Hoda)
[the image of the wonder-child in all my workings]***

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

•accumulative: gradual increase as a whole, someone/something doing the accumulating, emp[...]

[...]
Instructions of Shuruppak
“In those days, in those far remote times, in those nights, in those faraway nights, in those years, in those far remote years.”



daftare bimani دفتر بیمعنی
hezar nokte هزار نکته



i can only stutter and telegraph you mutilated message
also i offer the hermeneutic of frustration so that we don't feel we have mastered or understood necessarily



janebe hagh ra gereftan جانب حق را گرفتن ==> hagh-be-janebi حق‌به‌جانبی


safineye nadan سفینه نادن
safineye nadani سفینه نادانی

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

Bettina's self almost entirely to be construed within the order of the will


(Hillman:) Eros is always curiously weaker than the problem it must deal with. --> logos is biger than its problem



1. revolution: changing/disturbing the value system
2. reform: changing/disturbing the social norm (hanjar هنجار) --> eslahat اصلاحات
3. invention/noavari: changing/disturbing the system/institution/sazman
4. coup d'état: changing/disturbing the people/apparatus


(amal bar asase:) sonat: gozashte, diruz, anja, anha
گذشته
دیروز


phd: طرح مساله tarh-e masale --> everything depends on the ways you pattern a niche, a site of strings that you and your collieges are cought long enough

•using texture, form, color
•using embodiments
•using optics (in knowing) --> some sort of distance, disembodied seeing --> abstraction, figure,




carnal intellectuality
(intellectual carnality)

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

locating ‘shur’ شور del-shur دل شوره (also shuridegi شوریدگی) to the place of theof the unkown other
so when one has fearful fantacies about others in foreign lands they are in ‘shur’ for them



(psychologically tethered phantasy of the “independent person”:)

**oral fixation [everything depends on the duration of breast-feeding during the development of libido]:
in Iranians: over-fed (more than 12 months) ==> dependency, needing stimulant
in Balkan: insufficiently fed ==> طلبکار و ناراضی talabkar narazi dissatisfied and manipulative (in need of oral stimulant for example sarcasm) [*narazi <~~--> tavagho’ توقع*]
(--> early experiences of love bound up with various kinds of suffering, and later in adulthood one will look for familiar forms of suffering)
•oral fixation: everything related to pleasure + pain + security + sex are all bound together and located in the mouth

**anal fixation [bowel and bladder control --> focus of the libido: conflict of to p[...]

[...]d not ‘philosophy’:
*philosophy (as practiced by M&M and Alex): claiming the nature of reality
*concept: a figure you make in order to do a limited situated work

“conceptualization = fortification” استحکامات
(to fortify one's own work with concepts ==> settlement)

Manning's affinity with infinitly, more, and multi --> what is their rigor is doing for them? commits them to the nonhabitual. (resisting to name their habits, depriving them of thier habitual labors) [=/= my work on descriptive practices]

-i want to know about their empirical tools that make translation-work visible (==> decomposition), not their conceptual descriptions [=/= textured description with thick details <== i really think the devil is in the details!! }--> art of noticing things]
-i want to know how Manning is compromised into desiring what she is doing. [compromise: being exposed or made liable to danger, suspicion, or disrepute. --the way she told the story of her practice had a difficult sense of success in it, of being cool and correct at every turn, uncompromised. (<-- why is this a turn-off for me?)]

for aesthetic, political, ethical reasons i want Manning to address in their work:
•the question of apparatus --> working within an apparatus of thinking in order to get somewhere in a sustained way. i want them to name their apparatus of literary production. how they engage with the interface, data-set, grammar, and literacy of their reservoir.
•the question of infrastructure --> how they balance the possible and the acceptable, the balance of action, tools, and the built environment
•the question of technology --> how they take apart the tool from its context of involvements and referentialities
•the question of political orientation --> how they have accepted the democratization of knowledge and multiculturalism (the idea of “knowledge for everyone” [--> there is a very thin line between the impulse to democratize and commodify knowledge]; --could multiculturalism be radical capitalism in action?! ...faking diversity to build more diverse companies <-- “lip service”: to just say something but not actually do it)
[--> the hegemony and horror of “different experience” of the so-called different cultures (a form of racism?)]
[multiculturalism =/= trans-species]
[multiculturalism =/= eurasia]
[--> the hegemony and horror of “the completely different” (==>? deskilled society)]

Manning: “in senseLab we work with the people who don't use language, don't write, etc.” (<-- what does that legitimates, conceals, or smuggles? what sorts of hierarchies and ideologies of status emerge out of that?)

-as the philosopher of nonintentionality how did she responded (paranoically?) to our intents when questions where asked?
-as the philosopher of discord how did she responded to disagreement?

[...]

[...] />


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

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

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



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

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

#cat's cradle

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

paying attention to nature like a child <-- Haraway

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

language --> material-semiotic flesh

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

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


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

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

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

technology: a form of life
language: a form of life

create a critique
create a difference (however small, partial, modest, without narrative, without guarantee)

oneiros
oneiric


technical axis  |__
                        /   mythical axis
    textual axis


a cosmos furnished in _ian style
•Aristotelian style: actors are self-moving modular single-substance subjects with adhering accidents ==Haraway==> all else is ground, resource, matrix, screen, secret to be revealed, fair game to be hunted by the hero (<-- our video games are designed in this style)
•

others with reduced powers of self-direction: women, people of color, the sick, nonhuman nature --> need to be *patient*

(metaphysical fatigue)

***patience =/= passivity***

self-invisible transcendent subjects out on a noble journey to report on embodied nature

the problem of (pre-discursive:) believing that nature and society are really fundamentally there
--> conjuring tricks of establishing categorical purity (of nature, of culture, of nonhuman, of human)


(Haraway's three webs of discourse:)
1. cultural studies: a set of discourses about the (irreducible specificity of) apparatus of bodily/cultural production (=/= comparative culture stu[...]

[...]te a critique
create a difference (however small, partial, modest, without narrative, without guarantee)

oneiros
oneiric


technical axis  |__
                        /   mythical axis
    textual axis


a cosmos furnished in _ian style
•Aristotelian style: actors are self-moving modular single-substance subjects with adhering accidents ==Haraway==> all else is ground, resource, matrix, screen, secret to be revealed, fair game to be hunted by the hero (<-- our video games are designed in this style)
•

others with reduced powers of self-direction: women, people of color, the sick, nonhuman nature --> need to be *patient*

(metaphysical fatigue)

***patience =/= passivity***

self-invisible transcendent subjects out on a noble journey to report on embodied nature

the problem of (pre-discursive:) believing that nature and society are really fundamentally there
--> conjuring tricks of establishing categorical purity (of nature, of culture, of nonhuman, of human)


(Haraway's three webs of discourse:)
1. cultural studies: a set of discourses about the (irreducible specificity of) apparatus of bodily/cultural production (=/= comparative culture studies)
2. feminist theory/project: view from the marked bodies (in stories, discourses, practices), where *the description of the situation is never self-evident* + need for an elsewhere
3. science studies: technologies for establishing matters of facts, ‘technoscience =/= science and technology’, artifacts with politics, science as practice + culture


can't cradle
one person can build up a large repertoire of string figures on a single pair of hands --> the figures can be passed back and forth on the hands of several players
--> *embodied analytical skils* [<-- my goal im apass]
--> making + passing on cultural interesting patterns
=/= making a tangled mess
=/= theory of everything (--> for example string theory, stc.)
=/= war game ==>{models of knowledge building, tropes for one's own practice}
=/= trials of strength passing as critical theory (~ heroic, agonistic encounters)

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

Delamont & Williams --> (Haraway's) thread metaphor ~= *metamethod*

(from) [analytical] tangled yarn ball --to--> [activist] can't cradle

Galison's intercalation [molecular interweaving] --> exposing an overt technology (the radar wants to be seen as both winner of war + advancing pure physics)
~/=
Haraway's weaving [textile dissection] --> exposing a covert technology (patriarchy, eugenics, colonialism, racism embedded behind the public face of conservation, education, biopolitical establishment)

biology = politics (by other means)

cyborg
[...]

[...]mical reaction

using hallucinogenic to cure autism (!?)
bacterial --> social

“individual" = an island to be colonized (by bacteria), [we are] a niche (upon niche (upon niche)) for bacteria

immunall agencise are not (has never been) defensive, they selectively inclusive, they facilitate symbiosis, allowing the possibility of microbes become part of the body

co-metabolism
host-diet

four major symbiosis (symbiotic things) that ruled the planet:
1. rhizobacteria/legumes for nitrogen fixation
2. mycorrhizal interaction with plant roots and seeds
3. endophytic fungal protection against dessication
4. coral reefs and tidal seagrass ecosystems sustain oceanic biodiversity
}--containing--> smaller symbiotic webs we call “organism” <==[product of]== (ancient symbiosis we call) “cells + (ancient symbiosis we call) “genomes”



ritual defense of a dissertation, matter of opponent

a medical theater of dissection, laid out on table with the working-class barber-surgeons laying bare structures for the disquisition (tafahos تفحص) of the professor --> (the ways we are in this) *multi-imaginative theater* (~ congnitive emotional apparatus) --> infectious joy, the situatedness of the joy is infectious

we (should always) work in the context of joy
lost for details (for the fleshiness of ‘this’), not as a general principal or an example for something else

*the tale of detail* --> a small detail that wrenches the self into something that was not before
(the tale of understanding)

Gilbert's bio-sym-poetic joy --> knowledge-making

(Gilbert's) genomic fragment in the picture of mutual-benefit life --?--> metropolitan life insurance company
[--> *apparatuses of thinking* have thick trading zones between ecology and economics up to and including today, that is the mutal adaptation in real world, producing problems for us]

(how we go?) from one life-table to another life-table
(for example from mathematics of life insurance to population biology ~=> co-developement of disciplines; 19th century laboratories + practices of political economy;)
[matters of historical, economical, manegerial, capital, ]


(protestants that were never burnt enough)


we (always) remain in contamination [never in innocence --> be attentive to the tropes and will to innocence in each other act text]


in our questioning and studies we (must) remain enmeshed, in a historical conjunction, in a situated way of being “this way” and not “that way”

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

[Stengers]

[a kind of] writing (not writing down)

writing is an experience of metamorphic transformation

to discov[...]

[...]corrhizal interaction with plant roots and seeds
3. endophytic fungal protection against dessication
4. coral reefs and tidal seagrass ecosystems sustain oceanic biodiversity
}--containing--> smaller symbiotic webs we call “organism” <==[product of]== (ancient symbiosis we call) “cells + (ancient symbiosis we call) “genomes”



ritual defense of a dissertation, matter of opponent

a medical theater of dissection, laid out on table with the working-class barber-surgeons laying bare structures for the disquisition (tafahos تفحص) of the professor --> (the ways we are in this) *multi-imaginative theater* (~ congnitive emotional apparatus) --> infectious joy, the situatedness of the joy is infectious

we (should always) work in the context of joy
lost for details (for the fleshiness of ‘this’), not as a general principal or an example for something else

*the tale of detail* --> a small detail that wrenches the self into something that was not before
(the tale of understanding)

Gilbert's bio-sym-poetic joy --> knowledge-making

(Gilbert's) genomic fragment in the picture of mutual-benefit life --?--> metropolitan life insurance company
[--> *apparatuses of thinking* have thick trading zones between ecology and economics up to and including today, that is the mutal adaptation in real world, producing problems for us]

(how we go?) from one life-table to another life-table
(for example from mathematics of life insurance to population biology ~=> co-developement of disciplines; 19th century laboratories + practices of political economy;)
[matters of historical, economical, manegerial, capital, ]


(protestants that were never burnt enough)


we (always) remain in contamination [never in innocence --> be attentive to the tropes and will to innocence in each other act text]


in our questioning and studies we (must) remain enmeshed, in a historical conjunction, in a situated way of being “this way” and not “that way”

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

[Stengers]

[a kind of] writing (not writing down)

writing is an experience of metamorphic transformation

to discover how to be compromised by ajayeb Nameh
the ways we can be lured into desiring and trusting it

how the assemblages of ajayeb generate metamorphic transformations in our capacity to affect and be affected? --> to feel, think, and imagine

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

[Serres]

ajayeb, a time when transport and itinerary were only myth

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

[Anand]

the sanctity and blessing of Muslim saints was integrally linked to local ecology and topography

that sanctifi[...]

[...]2th 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 practices of other times and places

tracing the web of horror and delight

Serres reminds us the beast fable tradition is as much about biomimicry as anthropomorphizing.

finding ways of “going-on together” (Verran)

“by experience and by affinity, some of us begin not with Pasteur, but with the monster, the outcast” (S. Leigh Star)

(ajayeb's) (politics of) administering discrete objects ----(numbe[...]

[...]mits them to. [this also my question in iranian mystic mix,] rather the difference will be to notice as difficulty in translation.” (Verran)

(for me working on ajayeb is) **lingering in the space of difficult translations**
==> making recourse (motevasel shodan be متوسل شدن به) to a *world of common referents* (space, time, and matter)

[to continue thinking with Verran] on *durations*, *extensions*, and *resistances* (in ajayeb's case)
these three foundation objects need not to be saddled with the history of Western metaphysics and do noy require that common ground be located only in Western territory. “Therefore they offer more promise for cross-cultural translation than the more conceptually nimble [tardast تردست, zerang زرنگ -- like the CEN or google] space, time, and matter. Newborn and awkward to our ears, these strange terms announce themselves as translation tools.” (Kenney)


(thinking with Kenney / Verran:)
workflow on ajayeb:
1- tracing social connections (for which subjects is this useful? which ecology of practices?)
2- making equipment list (materials and methods, an expanded and complicated version of equipment-list, providing accounts of the material-discursive apparatuses that are materializing my empirical objects, =/= exercise in representation or audit hesab-rasi حساب رسی)
3- narrating the relation (re-materializing my found empirical objects, re-enacting the objects)


interpretive cosmology

(ajayeb's objects,) “They represent different storytelling practices that contribute to different kinds of worldings.” [...] (through my engagement,) “They stimulate more compositions and decompositions--stories that narrate different beings and different doings, none of which can claim final ontological authority, but that each to different (ontic) work” (hopefully!)
-worlding: a choreography that generates ontol ontologies (Thompson) --&--> there is no self without a world (Carson)
-not as a voyeur or anthropologist, but breathe in the density and composition of their atmospheres
(people = worlds)

ontic (hasti mojud-shenakhti هستی‌ موجود شناختی‌): “factual” existence as =/= metaphysical ontologic existence)

[ontological interferences in ontic--{regular existence, difference in little beings} for example, ontic is when we ask what time it is, and the answer is on the clock. (snafu is ontic, aporia ontological*) when the ontic is disrupted ==> you have a “day off,” all sort of things can invade and open up, demons come out, there is a suspension of ontic time, a (Heideggerian) holiday]

(Verran) [number are] “always ready to actively re-exist when we do the right actions and say the right words.” (can i do that with ajayeb's objects? how?)
“The moon rose above the river” (en) <--> “upward behind the onstreaming [...]

[...]es, delimiting territory but also sensing zones, places, and coherences.”

criticism = speculative fantasy

undoing the eye's property of vision (Kelley and Hayward)


([my account of] ajayeb's stories are) moral tales that model an ecological attention to relationality, vulnerability, and resilience ==> living well in a world contaminated (by all sorts of linguistic and chemical animacies)


*traumatic hope*
(Sedgwick: the reparatively positioned reader tries to recognize the fragments and part-objects she encounters or creates ~= what i am doing)

why tell stories like this, when there are only more and more openings and no bottom lines? --> because there are quite 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 o 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 ar[...]

[...]ons and betrayals of meaning”* ==> understanding itself is compromised
[*]ajayeb: a non-stop betrayal of translations (of perspectives) and continuous redressal of meanings (of things)

“as if” has to do with misunderstanding

“meanings are constructed in a constant movement of ‘attunement,’ which makes them emerge.”
(Despret, animal breeding practices)

(my work on ajayeb is also much about) *language-learning* [...]in its pragmatic function: it is an effective means of acting and of making others act


keep your end up


[*]type: identifying language use with modes of existence [Wittgenstein's mistake] (maybe useful to reanimate the question of ‘becoming’ for Marialena)
the mode of existence of lions is subordinated to that of an essence “lioness,” guaranteed by the identity of the species and the stability of its repertoire of behavior ==> a burdensome conception of the naturalness of animals
***the question is not what ‘is’ a lion, but “how does one become a lion,” not only in lion community and species, but also in the work of scientists, constructing what it is to be a lion.
--> this is about becoming: of that of which the animal is rendered capable by the apparatuses that interrogate it

how can what I say about lions or baboons (or oceans or jinns) be authorized by them?


[*]we: constituted by the assemblage of different (animal-, nonhuman-, machine-, human-)beings equipped with an apparatus aimed at making them talk well --{by taking an interest in what constitutes the appropriateness of a material apparatus that transforms those it interrogates}--> fully agreeing to situate oneself in a regime of transformations and accomplishments =={that mingle with and give form to}==> *desires*
-researcher's desire is one the modes of their efficacity
-“our” problems are not a priori

a “we”:
+ “know full well”
+ “are different”
+ “who work”

rhetorics of pronouns, acts of crude generalizations: something is being specified and something generalized. [@Xiri's “I am the one who... your...” the specificity and generality of “I” and of “you” in her text. how the difference of “you” and “I” was envisaged in her poem?-->{I, the effected by =/= you, the haver} how can this I/you impose itself not as the effect of a strong-arm tactic? =/=? I want to find out how to live together; refuse to deepen the contrast between “us” and “them"] [in Xiri's poem: who/what makes her pronouns?] [to address people ‘as’ refugees, subjugated, poor, or victim, to recognize them by these identities, only repeats the process of exclusion(?) could be experienced as disabling.]


*/ generalization is constructed bit by bit

(that which constitutes) an expression of the parrot's opinion in relevance to what it is asked, the fact that it eng[...]

[...]anslates a certain type of relationship and a certain manner of defining those whom one addresses

I am against “feel free to say what you want” because it means actually what you say will have no consequences ==> (radical) asymmetry of expertises:
•researcher-author --> knows better
•social actor --> interchangeable holders of opinions


“scientist”: that who “knows better”
(if the fish cannot become a scientist, then I also don't want to --> let's change how one becomes a “fish” or a “scientist”)


(Laleh) could ask her subjects: “so, in your opinion, ‘as a child,’ how do you think I should construct my question so that it has a chance of being understood and of being interesting?”
•the question, that was my responsibility, that of difference, formulated in different ways
•“they” [your “subjects"] might unproot your question, displace it, modify its ambit (hoze حوزه), and when they find the right way of formulating it, they answer*

[*]asking ~= constructing interest ~=> (a chance of) interesting answers
•ask your subjects to construct interest
•the appropriateness of question
•problems are only interesting if they interest (?)
•(all) apparatuses create subjectivities


to attend to animal “paying attention” --> good translators of intentions
(how did I become interested in this?)


in farms, “talk is incessant. And because there is talk, there is talking back.”

talking back and forth --> exchange judgments about intentions --> adjusting the intentionalities (between human and animal; relevant also for Varinia's dog relation [--> ‘I know that you know what I intend to do']--)--> language as a mean for creating an overlapping awareness between two speakers (Despret, Hearne, Sennett) =/= language “populates” each of the beings present with perspectival propositions, which are so many propositions of intentionality:
•one makes say (@Sven)
•one makes ask
•one puts oneself ‘in’ the place of
•one doesn't interpret
•one experiments
•
--> these are perhaps non-immediate form of knowledge
--> these practices inscribe the animal and human in the world of “speaking” [@Marialena]
--> these are “perspectives” that “populate” our world

(each) [*]perspective is made up of translation of intentions*
(animal breeders are perspectivists)


situations of the exchange ~= situations of subjectivity --> adopting perspectives (--> <--) judge intentions }--> ‘response’

[*]intersubjectivity: accepting the proposal of subjectivity; becoming what the other suggests; acting in the manner in which the other addresses you [--> my apass bow and arrow, was about this suggestivity]

the apparatus of question (that you suggest,) activates some[...]

[...]tions --> adjusting the intentionalities (between human and animal; relevant also for Varinia's dog relation [--> ‘I know that you know what I intend to do']--)--> language as a mean for creating an overlapping awareness between two speakers (Despret, Hearne, Sennett) =/= language “populates” each of the beings present with perspectival propositions, which are so many propositions of intentionality:
•one makes say (@Sven)
•one makes ask
•one puts oneself ‘in’ the place of
•one doesn't interpret
•one experiments
•
--> these are perhaps non-immediate form of knowledge
--> these practices inscribe the animal and human in the world of “speaking” [@Marialena]
--> these are “perspectives” that “populate” our world

(each) [*]perspective is made up of translation of intentions*
(animal breeders are perspectivists)


situations of the exchange ~= situations of subjectivity --> adopting perspectives (--> <--) judge intentions }--> ‘response’

[*]intersubjectivity: accepting the proposal of subjectivity; becoming what the other suggests; acting in the manner in which the other addresses you [--> my apass bow and arrow, was about this suggestivity]

the apparatus of question (that you suggest,) activates some modes of existence rather than others

...shared perspectives, shared intelligences and intentions, resemblances, inversions and exchanges of properties (between humans and animals)

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

my practice and work on ajayeb is grounded in the history and materiality of scientific practices

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

(ajayeb's) particular and exceptional nature

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

(Despret)

“anthropo-zoo-genetic” : a practice that constructs animals and human

(how can i design an apparatus for ajayeb) to perform availability?
(build) questions that construe and construct signs that ‘make a world’ for the animal (entity of the ajayeb)
-how can i offer possible interesting becoming to the animals of ajayeb, in offering a way for them to articulate the system, (not to make a system that articulates them)

(in experimenting with ajayeb) how can i involve my body, involve my knowledge, involve my responsibility, involve my future?
-how to let them adopt me?
-to produce an ajayeb body to allow a ajayeb world to affect me

the world of ajayeb is a richly articulated world =/= a world of enthusiastic automata (one who is only moved by itself) observing strange and mute creatures

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

[Mersad al-ebad] tabaye-i طبایعی (materialist)


historical specificity(s) of animal-human relationship



(worst-)translated science

[...]

[...] “speaking” [@Marialena]
--> these are “perspectives” that “populate” our world

(each) [*]perspective is made up of translation of intentions*
(animal breeders are perspectivists)


situations of the exchange ~= situations of subjectivity --> adopting perspectives (--> <--) judge intentions }--> ‘response’

[*]intersubjectivity: accepting the proposal of subjectivity; becoming what the other suggests; acting in the manner in which the other addresses you [--> my apass bow and arrow, was about this suggestivity]

the apparatus of question (that you suggest,) activates some modes of existence rather than others

...shared perspectives, shared intelligences and intentions, resemblances, inversions and exchanges of properties (between humans and animals)

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

my practice and work on ajayeb is grounded in the history and materiality of scientific practices

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

(ajayeb's) particular and exceptional nature

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

(Despret)

“anthropo-zoo-genetic” : a practice that constructs animals and human

(how can i design an apparatus for ajayeb) to perform availability?
(build) questions that construe and construct signs that ‘make a world’ for the animal (entity of the ajayeb)
-how can i offer possible interesting becoming to the animals of ajayeb, in offering a way for them to articulate the system, (not to make a system that articulates them)

(in experimenting with ajayeb) how can i involve my body, involve my knowledge, involve my responsibility, involve my future?
-how to let them adopt me?
-to produce an ajayeb body to allow a ajayeb world to affect me

the world of ajayeb is a richly articulated world =/= a world of enthusiastic automata (one who is only moved by itself) observing strange and mute creatures

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

[Mersad al-ebad] tabaye-i طبایعی (materialist)


historical specificity(s) of animal-human relationship



(worst-)translated science

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

[Haraway, Queering the non/human]

‘companion’ [she starts by showing the danger of the term like any other term]

reducing type is among other things at the heart of racism
types: colonised, enslaved, non-citizen, animal, refugee, [etc.], typological female reduced to her reproductive function,

secular semiotics (never nourished us?)

queering: the job of undoing ‘normal’ categories, [sorting operations]

...patterning, consequences, and the possibility of response.
queer, off-category, sf worlding
(what are the SF worldings of ajayeb?--SF as building alternative ontologie[...]

[...] />
[Seed Bag]

...the problem of destruction and wounded flourishing--not simply survival--in exile, diaspora, abduction, and transportation--the earthly gift-burden of the descendents of slaves, refugees, immigrants, travelers, and of the indigenous too.

(In the feminist SF mode,) matter is never “mere” medium to the “informing” seed;

Homebody / traveler

...disruptive details of good stories that don't know how to finish

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

[Barad]

[...] remembering is not a replay of a string of moments, but an enlivening and reconfiguring of past and future that is larger than any individual. [...] The past is never finished. It cannot be wrapped up like a package, or a scrapbook, or an acknowledgment; we never leave it and it never leaves us behind.

Barad's mother's question: “what good is there in offering recognition that can't be recognized?”

[...] there is only the ongoing practice of being open and *alive to each(other)* meeting

“How to disrupt patterns of thinking that see the past as finished and the future as not ours or only ours?”



*measurement
** the nature of nature depends on the apparatus that measure it
***--> which measurements are at use in ajayeb?
(what constitutes a measurement for what?)

the strangest idea: that we have access to cultural representations and their content (that we lack toward the things represented) (=/= “agential realist ontology” barad-posthumanist.pdf) [Foucault's “words and things” is the name of the game] [--> @Aela, perhaps we can begin with a different starting point, other than the old idea of “humanity's own captivity within language--the starting place of the metaphysics of representation,” perhaps it would be better to begin with a different metaphysics... -->{the term ‘metaphysics’ (far from being the deep origin of high philosophy) actually comes originally from (the writings of) Aristotle on physics, rearranged three centuries after his death by Andronicus of Rhodes}]

materiality itself is always already figured within a linguistic domain as its condition of possibility(?(!))
[ (?(!)) : a contingent question pregnant with wonder]
[my starting point in my lecture/performance is with the concern (warned by Nietzsche) that language is being granted too much power, tendency to take grammar too seriously : allowing linguistic structure to shape or determine our understanding {--> rigs}
believing that ‘subject’ + ‘predicate structure of language’ (~ grammatical categories) --reflects--> (a prior ontological reality of) substance and attribute (~ underlying structure of the world) (=/= *contingency *rhetoric);, --> still in the 16th century europe (pointed by Foucault) language was simply “one of the figurations of the world” =/= “language as medium"]
[...]

[...]◾theorization of human as either pure cause or pure effect


*any entity's ontology (its cast identity) is always open for future's reworkings* (Barad)


adding a Greek fused syntactical molding to the individual, ‘trans-’ is not enough, we have to make the postulation of individuality unthinkable, and that needs work
{how to make things unthinkable? not available to think with. what should be an “unthinkable” theory of relations?}

(Descartes's epistemology --> representationalist structure of words, knowers, and things)--> transparency of measurement (transparency of language) =/= Bohr's epistemological framework (after his empirical findings of an inherent discontinuity in measurement ----%> wave-particle duality paradox) ~-> Barad's “causal relationship between specific exclusionary practices embodied as specific material configurations of the world [~= discursive practices, (con)figurations rather than “words"] and specific material phenomena [~= relations rather than “things"]”

(*)position (~ specific physical arguments, [=/= well-defined abstract concepts, inherit attribute of independently existing objects]---> go to critique of ‘positionality’)
“position” only has meaning when a rigid apparatus with fixed parts is used (for example a ruler is nailed to a fixed table in the laboratory ==> establishing a fixed frame of reference for specifying “position.”) --> any measurement of “position” using this apparatus cannot be attributed to some abstract independently existing “object” but rather is a property of the ‘phenomenon’ : ***the inseparability of “observed object” and “agencies of observation”***
--> simultaneous indeterminacy of “position” and “momentum” [*momentum*: material arrangement involving movable parts] [--> deconstructing the material exclusion of “position” and “momentum"]

(*)phenomena: primary epistemological unit, the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting “components” (Barad); ontologically primitive relations; relations without preexisting ‘relata’(~= mutual ontological dependencies =/= independent entities)
•(specific) intra-action ==> relata-within-phenomena
•(specific) agential intra-action ==> boundaries and properties of components of phenomena become determinate }~= phenomena
(*)apparatus = phenomena [=/= inscription devices, scientific instruments set in place before the action, machines that mediate the dialectic of resistance and accommodation, neutral probes of natural world, structures that deterministically impose some particular outcome,]
-apparatus: “dynamic (re)configurings of the world, specific agential practices/intra-actions/performances through which specific exclusionary boundaries are enacted”
(perpetually) open to:
•rearrangements
•rearticulations
•(and other) reworkings (--> [in my amazon project:] getting the instrumentati[...]

[...]cific physical arguments, [=/= well-defined abstract concepts, inherit attribute of independently existing objects]---> go to critique of ‘positionality’)
“position” only has meaning when a rigid apparatus with fixed parts is used (for example a ruler is nailed to a fixed table in the laboratory ==> establishing a fixed frame of reference for specifying “position.”) --> any measurement of “position” using this apparatus cannot be attributed to some abstract independently existing “object” but rather is a property of the ‘phenomenon’ : ***the inseparability of “observed object” and “agencies of observation”***
--> simultaneous indeterminacy of “position” and “momentum” [*momentum*: material arrangement involving movable parts] [--> deconstructing the material exclusion of “position” and “momentum"]

(*)phenomena: primary epistemological unit, the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting “components” (Barad); ontologically primitive relations; relations without preexisting ‘relata’(~= mutual ontological dependencies =/= independent entities)
•(specific) intra-action ==> relata-within-phenomena
•(specific) agential intra-action ==> boundaries and properties of components of phenomena become determinate }~= phenomena
(*)apparatus = phenomena [=/= inscription devices, scientific instruments set in place before the action, machines that mediate the dialectic of resistance and accommodation, neutral probes of natural world, structures that deterministically impose some particular outcome,]
-apparatus: “dynamic (re)configurings of the world, specific agential practices/intra-actions/performances through which specific exclusionary boundaries are enacted”
(perpetually) open to:
•rearrangements
•rearticulations
•(and other) reworkings (--> [in my amazon project:] getting the instrumentation to work in a particular way for a particular purpose)

(boundaries are always ‘enacted,’ not ‘made’)

(*)reality: “things"-in-phenomena, ongoing ebb and flow of agency *****
-shifting boundaries and properties that stabilize and destabilize

(*)world: a dynamic process of intra-activity in the “ongoing reconfiguring of locally determinate causal structures” [~= contingency] with determinate boundaries, properties, meanings, and patterns of marks on bodies *****

(*)universe: agential intra-activity in its becoming

(*)word: material-discursive practices ==> boundaries are constituted (for example the differential constitution of “humans” and “nonhumans”; @Varinia)
==> meaning (=/= ideational, andisheyi اندیشه‌ای‌) --> specific material (re)configuring of the world

(*)discourse: that which constrains and enables what can be said, practices that define what counts as meaningful (statement)***
(learning from Foucault, discursive practices are the local sociohistor[...]

[...]eaning: ongoing performance of the world in its differential intelligibility (=/= a property of individual/groups of words)

**local causal structures --> one component {effect} is marked by another component {cause} (in their ‘differential articulation’ [~= intelligibility]) }--> in science this is called “measurement”

(question at Juan's work on clay:) (what could challenge?) the representationalism's construal of matter as a passive blank site awaiting the active inscription of culture (<~=> the relationship between materiality and discourse positioned as one absolute exteriority) ~~--> Butler's incomplete reworking of “causality” ==> her (anthropocentric, ensan ashrafe makhlughat انسان اشرف مخلوقات) theory of materiality is limited to an account of the materialization of human body --> the construction of the contours of the human body
(Butler: performativity understood as iterative citationality)
(intelligibility is not always a human-based affair)

(question of ‘agency’ and ‘causality’ at Sana and Hoda:) what possibilities exist (for agency) for intervening in the world of becoming?
@Hoda: there is no geometrical relation of absolute exteriority between (nor an idealistic collapse of) a “causal apparatus” and a “body effected” ----> ****an ongoing topological dynamics that enfolds the spacetime manifold upon itself**** <== apparatuses of bodily production are also part of the phenomena they produce
}--> **future is radically open at every turn** (Barad) [@Hoda --> her notion of overdetermination (جبر jabr?) --> what if she use “constraint” instead of “determinist”? esrar/ezterar ]--> enactment of a causal structure : particular possibilities for acting exist at every moment
-a term for Hoda: “causally deterministic power structures”

(*)agency: changes in the apparatuses of bodily production***
enactment of iterative changes to particular practices through the dynamics of intra-activity

(*)objectivity: being accountable to marks on bodies (=/= exteriority)
agential separability ==> objectivity
(Barad, Haraway, Kirby, Rouse, Bohr:) there is no such (“knower”) exterior observational point
@Laleh: we are not observers outside the world, not simply located at particular places ‘in’ the world (--> positionality)

(question at Aela:) the geometry of absolute interiority --> reduction of effect to its cause, nature ontologically distinct from culture
(that there is no preexistent nature)
(Aela's interest in?) spatiality: (characteristics of enclosures <-- concerned with shapes and sizes) ‘geometry’ =/= ‘topology’ (investigates questions of *connectivity* and *boundaries*)

***it is the very existence of ‘finitude’ that gets defined as ‘matter’

narcissistic bedtime stories... (positioning of materiality as either a given or a mere effect of human age[...]

[...]ive) multispecies art project? studying Indo-Arab-Iranian illuminated manuscripts as to be reading a paper in ecology or molecular biology or art.

unlike Alex Arteaga's question of “inevitable altruism” {started from “conscious human subjects” and ended there} (in his talk 30.05.2017 apass,) I would insist on giving an account of the metaphors of ‘self’ in the history of body and mind (that matters to ‘you’) [my findings of self: maginc lantern, iceberg's tip (==> unconsciousness), wasteland/wilderness, greedy beast within, ... {--> these are all (classical) basis for “higher” cognitive capacities}] [also I am against Alex's notion of “destablizing stabilities as the task of artistic research.” I choose to refuse to put what is in flux against what is stable or attempting to stabilize. (I am in alignment with Katie King sharpening for me that) we constantly share our stage, settings, performances, sensoria, reenactments among agencies and species, creating varying stabilities, some fragile, some robust]
*account--synonymous with: description, information, list, reason, record, statement, story, sum, tale
-a contractual relationship
-giving an itemized account of recent transactions and resulting balance (of your metaphors = material-discursive apparatuses that are materializing your found empirical objects)
-accountability is always also about remaking those relations that produced your objects
-detailed explanation of money held in trust, to count, enumerate* -->{telling =? enumerating}
counting your senses
*accountability is about your ‘import’ functions (like in a programming language when you import a library of functions)
 --> count: an agent of sorting that separates units or groups of a collection --> list, listed --> to have importance and worth ~-> country ---{? unexpected countries}
 --0--> ‘count’ is also a word technologically tethered, origin of computing


(Kirksey > Leigh Star) to begin with the question, ‘cui bono?’ (for whose benefit?) =/= to begin with a celebration of the fact of human/nonhuman mingling

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

my Rigs diagrams are ‘swarms’? -a multitude of different creative agents
ajayeb.net (how can it be:) not a website but a “para-site”
•am i creating an ego (for ajayeb) in my ajayeb.net? if yes, that would be interesting how?

topos/topic of hypertext, spatial character of electronic writing
topic [from Greek ‘topos’: a place, in ancient rhetoric used to refer to commonplaces, conventional units, or methods of thought] exist in a writing space that is not only a visual surface but also a data structure in the computer --> Hypertext: “is not the writing of a place, but rather a writing with places, spatially realized topics.” (Bolter < Hubert)
-in my hypertext, which writing materials, cognitive mappings, itineraries of reading, textual stability, loops and re[...]

[...]supposition
“sex has emerged as a salient attribute of the pot's character as a pot”

when zoomorphic figures are present...

ajayeb's zoomorphic figures with their salient attributes are not “purposed” necessarily being to encode their belief-system onto objects that we may read today--like story-board--but rather to make interventions into the world of human-nonhuman relations. to either assist or resist such transformations
[terms sharpened with Alberti + Katie King]


museum studies


(Hayward:) freedom --> initiative in shaping a narrative, a visible body, where one is able to engage and resist [@Xiri] --> contradicts itself because one is really not free from the policing of the physical body --> coming into a [...] body (==> reality and disillusion in public spaces) -->{ narrative, flesh, is filled with memory, emotions, and complexity [@Hoda]
*crafting a space for existence may involve:
> •unfolding history
•mapping normative processes
•immersing a “body” in vulnerability (*)


deploy =/= unveiling
sort out =/= debunking هدايت


glocalizing


Katie King reading Hayward: [...] assembling apparatuses for enfolding visions of instrumental, subjective and cognitive technologies among ciliated (مودار, ریشه‌دار) bodies

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

technologies of the literal

grain of analysis, timescale, noting/creating hybrid objects of study
[comparing the incomparable --> lumping --then--> splitting]

***starting off a research project which eventually hopes to have something to say about that hybrid “thing”*** ...with some despised members of a particular time period (--> switching those who count as major or minor characters), promises to make it possible to build in *a range of genders (not just two), a range of writing technologhnologies, a range of self-effacing acts, and a range of publics*, while working from a particular place and time

***there are many different interests creating the pasts***, the possible worlds...


(Leigh Star > Katie King > Sina) “comparing the incomparable”

here i am trying an outline of my interrelated research practices in a preliminary character, the intersection of which I am just at the beginning to understand


ajayeb: writing technologies of the 12th century Iran

plain style

soing naked as a sign

dress and address

ecology of writing technologies


(Katie King:) writing technologies: ideologies layered in time and space * under which writing has been divided [also cannot be divided] from other generations of cultural meaning

myriad hybrid forms, commingling in material and ideological proliferations
(wit[...]

[...]o 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]

[*]orientation: registers the proximity of objects as well as shape what is proximate to the body

(Robin:) happiness does not have an object
(Freud:) anxiety does not have an object
=/= (Ahmed:) correspondence between objects and feelings is not any simple ~~--> proximity, “unattributed happiness”


[...] <-- ( us )"subject” --> ( ♥ )"object”

things --move--> us --make--> things ~~> ...
>
@Arjang, how happiness is displaced by the how of its arrival
(happiness can often recede or become anxious, when the feeling becomes an object of thought)

what it means for happiness to be thought in these terms (as an end for its own sake)
what it means for apparatus to be thought in these terms (of Agamben)
what it means for ocean to be thought in these terms (of Marialena)


in Islam, how does the good life get imagined through the proximity of objects?

[*]taste: “manifest preferences”: “practical affirmation of an inevitable difference” (Bourdieu)

history becomes second-nature ==> affects become literal ==> (we assume we experience delight because) “it” is delightful

(often with animals) the affective differentiation ==(basis of)==> (an essentially) moral economy


cheerfulness is the most communicative of emotions (♥ Ahmed)

(Ahmed's take on) loving (happily): knowing the peculiarity of a loved other's likes and dislikes, an intimacy with what the other likes and is given --> on conditions that such likes do not take us outside a *shared horizon*


***who/what introduces what feelings to whom?***

‘question of power' = do you go along with it?

sometimes the Iranian orientation is toward maximal comfort of the others
(maintaining) ‘comfort' = (your or some) bodies “go along with it”


bond-->{ affect ==> we search for an object }


...certain objects already circulate as socila goods before we “happen” upon them --> we do not just find happy objects anywhere (--> how happy objects are found in Tasavof? located, lost, transported, sold, advertised, criticized, etc.) *happy objects point us somewhere, a “where” from which we expect so much (--> happy objects of Tasavof [or HOT] {Qur'an, khezr, woman, poetry, .../ قرآن / خض[...]

[...](a concept every theorist/artist should take seriously), in Descartes: used as an illustration of the deception to which the inner senses are prone.
“fossil images,” persistence of pathological excitation to the peripheral nerves. (the condition of ‘amputees’ for the one who re-members and builds archives for his phantasmatically lost limb) *imaginary loss of a penis* --> a “tool” for a recovery of what was “always already” missing --> Freud: libidinal memorial to the lost limb (@Elen's kind of mourning for preoedipal (~= precastrated) body, and her (erroneous) localization of it on the motorbike)
Grosz: “It is only through controlled use of the phantom that the artificial limb can (gradually) take the place of the lost limb”
#body image]


ecologies of reflection and diffraction --> resolution of nature

[*]diffraction: an effect that limits the ability of a lens (or a system of lenses) *to resolve an image*
•(to evolve a creative tension,) a trade-off, between the resolution of detail and diffraction effects, between geometrical and physical optics

ajayeb's ecologies mixed (less of) reflection and (much more of) diffraction, are taken from a yet not detachments of the experience of phenomena and the apparatuses of its description, of percepts and affects
#my findings of composites of ajayeb:
•animals varying number of legs --?--> animal + movement
•fantastic creatures --?--> animal + environment + affect
•fable poetics --?--> animal + apparatus of description
•tentative citationality [other name of “rumor”?] --?--> nonhuman + human relational histories
•remembering is an extremely creative (& imaginative) practice
•
--> ongoing, open-ended articulation of the world (<-- my work on ajayeb)
--> these are the diffraction patterns in ajayeb that are (artistically, politically, ethnically) significant for me (?)
--> these are instances of resistance against biomimesis in ajayeb (?) [biomimesis is involved with mirroring, imitation, or reflection, and other tropes of “sameness"] =/= trans-materialities of the creatures of the world, they transgress the sacrosanct divides between techne and episteme

(many creatures of our shared world have) evolved in intra-action with their environment, and old bestiaries, such as ajayeb, critically inhabit a mode of description and affect situated within the intra-activity of technologies of writing and perception
•the creatures of the mud know better not to get caught up in a “geometrical optics of knowing”
we are seeking a different genus of knowing =/= mediating machine, inscription devices, lenses, panopticons, and various other epistemological tools that many science studies and cultural studies scholars fancy. (is that also what Marialena fancies? her list of tools)

[*]intelligibility: an ontological performance of the wor[...]

[...]-> de-historicizing effects of imposing psycho-cognitive shamanic models of art
no --> purely cognitive significance (of...)


*miniature: a ritual activity, a grave offering, a sympathetic magic, a capture of the power of the original
--> common stories about how miniatures can be interpreted in archaeology


(ontological research approach)_
scale is utterly important because “careful attention to alternative ontologies of scale introduces new interoretive possibilities for...” (Alberti)

*ontology: the sense of a real, solid world
for example the question of “the substance of the world”, everyone has answered that already (reiterating that which makes sense) ==> concept of real --(invent)--> *cosmology (<-- this is not a relativizing gesture) ==(force)==> production of new concepts and materialities
@Eszter: importance of asking the right questions: unless we do, the answers make no difference (Grosz)


scopes and scales ()--> “dimensionally manifold weave of knowledge worlds” (Haraway + Katie) are at stake in:
•science display
•TV series
•ajayeb
•pet video
•emergent transdisciplinary scholarship
•transmedia commercial apparatuses
•
*with reading/enacting ajayeb what is at stake is the “effectivities in realizing knowledge stories” --> epistemological affects


[*]scale
•operates through intensity and not size
•emergent and performative (Jones), (juxtapositions of) scales ==> “interesting psychological and phenomenological effects”
•a flat approach to scale does not separate the social and material, or the micro from the macro ==> [*]size: (emerges as a possibility, as) one means of enacting the potential of another scale; accidental effect of intensity: materialization of intensity and excess ==> humanity***
•is about intensity and excess --> potential for visibility/invisibility and proximity to the original condition of undifferentiated, intensive difference (~=? hayula; perfect formless form)***; intensive different “h” of hayula هیولا...
◦ه
◦‍ه‍
◦‍ه
◦ه‍


Alberti argues for a form of ontological symmetry between the theory we bring to bear on our evidence and the way that material acts as evidence (@Seba)


*[mesopotamia] chronically unstable bodies
a corpus of zoo-anthropo-biomorphic artifacts and traps
anthropomorphism manifest in distorted corporeal forms and appendages ضميمه

all sorts of dualism are at work in the archaeological imaginary of the region from Amazon to the Andes

marking a body =/= representation of that act

Alberti's arguments”
•the fantastic forms, bulges, protuberances برامدگى, and other modifications of bodies and pots express a ge[...]

[...]e vicinity of people can be subjectivized or personified through exchange and shared affects** --> an argument for ajayeb


‘to know a thing' = 'to subjectivize it’ : to add the maximum amount of intentionality to them (--> #equip them to talk well)


pots made to:
•to communicate (to an audience)
•to establish (relationships)
•to persuade (others of their point of view)

de-subjectivization: sometimes (objects) left deliberately partially subjectivized, semi-potent in their potential to know and be known

the intensely subjectivized pots --> *impede activity and enable knowledge*

•convince
•avtivate
-
•persuade
•communicate
•establish

eyes wide open: inability to see the invisible

*to see is to be seen*

buried pots, relational bodies firmly in place, teaches the dead to see properly, to maintain a perspective (Albeti)


[title]
(with Alberti) trap-thinking for ajayeb storytelling --> to make capable of knowing different things, invoking, quoting, reciting, citing, exicing, inciting different kinds of knowledge [cit- : to call, start] --> mobilizing #citational apparatuses --> they enter into a ‘type’ of relation particular to each


[*]traps(/pots): bodies fully engage in perspectival communication and battles of will, variously constructed and provided with affects and capacities, capable of knowing different things and of inciting different kinds of knowledge through the types of relations they entered into


______________


archaeological material ~= myrtle (=/= marble)


[*]ontology: a theory and experience of what exists


*hylomorphic model of production (underlined by the substance ontology) ~= marble
=/= myrtle
=/= ajayeb's inscribings
a making which assumes that form is inscribed onto passive matter
that pots accrue (انباشتن منتج) meaning through their processes of manufacture and role in social relations
~ form is brought to matter by an agent with a design in mind (Ingold) --> a concept of material culture in which “brute matter” is shaped by cultural agency
traces of action --> skilled means of representing a mental image
~= ‘design’ (as conventionally conceived) : to ‘project’ future states


[*]perspectivist theory: the conception according to which the universe is inhabited by different sorts of persons, human and nonhuman, which apprehend reality from distinct points of view (Viveiros de Castro)
-it suggests that there is no interior space to the body, only superposition of body and soul: the human form is, as it were, the body within the body, the naked primordial body [hayula]--the soul of the body --> infinite superposition of [...]

[...]g ==dynamics==> intra-action {phenomenon = experiment + measuring device + techician + previous results + setting + ...})
•DeLanda's assemblage (how humans and nonhumans produced communities that changed in composition and through time... =/= linguistic model of context)
•

**relational ontology : stronger your “allies” are, the more reality you can claim** [= (Latour's notion of) truth]

[critique of human exceptionalism ==>] open ontology --> contingent categories: phenomena and assemblages are temporary, contingent, and unbounded

flat ontology: one made exclusively of unique, singular individuals, differing in spatio-temporal scale but not in ontological status --symmetry--> *to get at differences without determining what they are in advance* (<-- useful for ajayeb studies)
•archaeological types/objects: reified sets of relations
•job of the archaeologists: establish alternative taxonomies of being

ruin memories

nonrepresentational =/={"world of ideas =/= world of things” ~= the ideas must correspond to a truth demonstrable in the world of things}

(Lucas's) materialization: we can still say things about the past with great certainty

theories + apparatuses + material remains

ontological realism --claim--> objectivity and truth may be contingent but are nonetheless demonstrable and robust

archaeologist ontological approach: working on “material pasts in the present” ~= ‘how past actually gathers in the present’ =/= “material record = fragmentary evidence of history”
•(material's temporary sensitivity ==>) [*]residue: the idea of memory objects, material entities in which the memory of a moment in time is recorded

(it is precisely the) past --endures-in--> assemblage


interpretive endeavors <--characterize-- extension of the meaning of the social
•ontology as a new i new interpretive tool
•additive (=/= reconstructive)

Alberti's approach (in ontological equivalence of bodies and pots in anthropomorphic ceramics from northwest Argentina...):
social ontology --> reconstruct the ontologies of past societies [<~~ my work on ajayeb]

ontological archaeology's background in feminism, queer, and phenomenological
approaches ==> interest in the body


influence of the animal turn in archaeology
nonanthropocentric zoological studies

(nomenological explorations of animal representations in Attar and tasavof)

what kinds of beings existed within the social universe of pre-Columbian Andean peoples

(renovated concept of) animism: ethnographic meta-analogy for past ontologies --> models of relationality for archaeologists to interpret material patterning in the archaeological record

investigations of personhood

[...]

[...]
(Alberti >) Viveiros de Castro's project: to systemize amerindian thought into a metaphysics such that it can have a reciprocal effect on anthropological thought and “naturalist” or Western metaphysics



ontological realism ==>{

new language attempt to imagine the complex topology of relational realities:
•Latour --> network: things exists as a consequence of the strength of their articulation
•Ingold --> meshwork =/= Aristotelian hylomorphism
•Barad --> entanglement = Quantum physics + queer theory ==> properties belong to the phenomena in question =/= inherent to things
•DeLanda --> assemblage: how humans + nonhumans produced communities that changed in composition and through time in neolithic and bronze age

assemblage --replace--> context

assemblage = phenomena --> temporary, contingent, unbounded

Latourian critique of categories =/= beyond human correlationalism

pluralizing ontology ==> charges of relativism <-- ‘objective knowledge =/= contingent foundations’ }--> nonrepresentational approach =/= over interpretation, abstraction

archeology operates by seeking strong and effective articulations between theories, apparatuses, material remains

ontological realism (=/= naturalism, constructivist) --> objectivity and truth are contingent, but also demonstrable and robust
@Chloe


material record: an expression of **how past gathers in the present** (=/= fragmentary evidence of history <-- forensic approach)

past continuously unfolding and therefore changing


Alberi --> (social) ontology: a new interpretive tool
additive work (=/= reconstructive)

archeological accounts of other's ontologies

animal turn in archeology --> nonanthropocentric zoological studies
Willerselv
Viveiros de Castro

Amazona --> animism (more than any other anthropological material) has provided modes of relationality to archeologists to interpret material patterning in archeological records --> [*]animism: an ethnographic meta-analogy for past ontologies
•blurring between nature and culture
•relationship with other-than-human agencies (animal, spirit, artifact)
==✕==> ontological critique

Viveiros de Castro --> systemize amerindian thought into a metaphysics ==> to have an reciprocal effect on anthropological thought (western naturalist metaphysics)

reference to a “common world”

new animism ==> ontology becomes another name for culture

Alebrti outlining:
•anthropological project that considers ontology as a critical question productive of conceptual engagement
•work of archeologists who theorize and practice archeology on the basis of indigenous theories
}--> wher[...]

[...]physic

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 conceptual potential immanent to the specific arrangement of materials (and their temporary forms)

(ontological dilemma [of both art and archeology]:) *how to anticipate the coming into being of something sensed but as yet not thought?*[...]

[...]at i seek to understand’ (= my subjectivity)] =/= lock the past into predictability}
•my ‘things’ in ajayeb are to an extent ‘archeological things’

contemporary science --gives--> ontologically relational world (<-- to be acknowledged by art and archeology)

archeology --Alberti--> fostering **a particular sensibility to what is of the past in things**

anthropology: the art of inquiry
(something you can learn from)

[*]archeological sensibility: a pervasive set of attitudes towards traces and remains, towards memory, time and temporality, the fabric of history
-Shanks

craft --Ingold--> knowledge grow from the crucible of our practical and observational engagement with being and things
(Aristotlean poiesis ~~-->) [*]craft: slow and intimate knowledgeable work (of how we get along with the world; that cultivates in oneself the skill for discerning the *meanings that are already there*) --> ontological paring of conceptual language & physical condition
==> meaning and concepts are drawn out of objects (not given to them)


•Haraway --> companion species = biologist + creatures
•Barad --> concepts are literally embodied by the differing physical apparatuses
•


(we need more) art: careful accumulation of skills


21st century historiographic trends in art

artists increasingly *deploy simulacra of archeological practices and motifs* in their work


art practiced as craft (but not all the time) ==allow==> knowledge grow from the insight of being in the folding of life [of infantile grandious fantasy, as well] ~=? anthropology

producing contemporary ruins to draw attention to *the work of the present in the production of the past*

*artists take archeology as muse*
(through borrowing from archeology artists)
•create a kind of intellectual framing
•incorporate archival research
•themes of memory and entropy
•question of absence
•


prosaic nature of archeological research
production of the finds


the way Dion distorts archeological work (allegorizing archeological practice) --Alberti-->
•consequence of sleight of hand
•he is dibbling at, performing being an archeologist
•‘play at’ archeology
=/= Simon Callery

Alberti > Russell
transform archeology from metaphor to allegory --play--> archeology-as-aesthetics through performance [--> risk of undermining and reinforcing art as a subjective practice concerned with only aesthetics and affective]


craft: a model for careful practices and knowing the world =/= artwork: a model for how to break out of disciplinary frames and how to think of the ontology of archeological things [--> what Sennett calls e[...]

[...]on between the cat and the fox, who are forming a cunning and successful participatory alliance to trick Pinocchio: the hybrid-robot who doesn't understand his own potentialities and wants to be so-called human, the animal-betrayer. the fact that he can be tricked by the cat/fox is what making him human.
•and Geppetto, oh my god, (he is Yunnos/Jonah?) working on a project inside the fish, colloquial activity and asceticism registered with the fish interiority. Geppetto-pop is refound or saved? by the non-truth seeking robot! --> breaking his self-surveillance as a characterization of pictorial objectivism, a form of moral self-control of natural-philosophical style.
•i rather go with the animal style, the con of Gorb-e nar-e & Rubah-e makar گربه نره و روباه مکار they are opaque and transparent at the same time
•the signifying animal, machine, and human in Pinocchio story is ridiculous!
•towards responding to “opacity” (opacity is complicated philosophical ethical issue regarding animality and humanity) --> refraction. with opacity what is at stake is our “material understanding of our connection with other animals” (Marks, touch 39)


(we are talking about) Fables of Animal Subjectivity [Kenney]

apparatuses of subject formation

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

THE prey and THE visible (both are categories of forest life survival stories. also have high stakes in iranian culture, thought, and philosophy)
--> what is important for a living self?

(bab-e) hekayat-e dusti-e kabutar o zagh o mush o bakhe o aahu o ...
بابِ / حکایت دوستی کبوتر و زاغ و موش و باخه و آهو و ...
[everyone?]
[the story of the friendship of these animals; the quality, properties, and pitfalls of relation]
•what is (re)activating the *imaginary friend*? (is it really fully on shut-down?) ---> trap to abstract thought? ---> this ‘abstract thought’ is dangerous for “sadness” to get lost in it, but it is amazing for “joy”
•how much we need sadness?

why jackal is so persistent and play-full (full of “plays”) in Kelile o Demne's bestiary?


bird people
,
fox people

,


arbab-e اربابِ --> dar bab-e در بابِ
(let's do this conversion, we are not “arbab”/master of the story nor ethics or anything else, we like to create “dar bab-e”: doors/openings into different possible path ways)
(it is about teller not fully understanding the story)



‘shekar’ [شکار prey] and ‘ashkar’ [آشکار visible], two entities in play, like the game of stone-paper-scissors, a link in our shared literature that relates the perceptible to the subject of hunt. in a discourse of friendship and enmity, the visible anticipating itself as target for violence, becomes meaningful when we approach it i[...]

[...]ia-Pakistan Partition)

-cultural understanding of sex as especially polluting for a woman

disclosure or a coming to know that a close relative had a hidden history tied to large historical event --> announcing an “otherness” to a close relative with whom one had inhabited a life.

Partition ==> distortion of everyday language itself and its bodying forth
bodily nature of language
poetry suffused with exquisite portraits of grief
the sense that kinship relations themselves have become lethal

(journalism's) trap of knowledge/ignorance (ruth/falsity) binary [asking for formal solutions to problems of indeterminacy because of the finitude of knowing subjects or veiling of objects] =/= (Veena trying to) attend to regions of knowledge that can turn us to change the questions we ask

(inordinate) knowledge is contended with locally, diurnally, repeatedly

Veena asking how is this knowledge [catastrophic event secrete knowledge in the everyday] endured or contested; concealed or revealed; and what are *rhythms* of these movements?

*inordinate knowledge*
-as citizens, how do we deal with the knowledge that torture is regularly practiced as part of the security apparatus of many democracies?
-what responsibility do we bear for these practices that are before our eyes--that we cannot but help know?
-As relational beings how do we reveal the extent of sexual violence or violent histories of our families to our children and to our grandchildren?

(?to make) responses in terms of the cultural repertoire of one's own society relating to the care of the dead

the necessity of embracing a mismatch between harm and healing, between not knowing and shading your eyes from what you cannot but help know [-acceptance of a certain degree of ignorance as essential for life]

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

r />

Ahmed, Sedgwick+Frank @apass
installation of an automatic “anti-” (for example antibiologism, as the unshifting tenet of ‘theory’ --> *routinized antiessentialism*) ==> loss of conceptual access to an entire thought-realm***

immersed in a precritical understanding of the body
the idea of biological construction having been rendered either unintelligible or naive (in feminism --> an avowed interest in the body + a persistent distaste for biological detail)

interested in antiracism and politics of globalization --✕--> crucial dimension of research: body <== “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 [...]

[...]ntation

*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, 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 fol[...]

[...] updated for a technoscientific postmodernity and anticipating a sci-fi futurity


exhibits as idealizations
the aquarium visitor is entertained into caring about environmental ethics and marine biology. enacting a moral imperative to protect local ecosystems, the aquarium is a savoir --> the parochial becomes the new cosmopolitan

technology + artistry + biology

playing with scale, volume, space
refractive technology:
•produces the visceral and optical experience of immersion...
•makes us profoundly aware of our bodies in space
•producing a disorienting visuality
*refracted vision = textured light*

refraction = corporal جسمى + carnal (جسمانى marked by the appetites and passions of the body) ==> effective stimulation


osmotic space
amniotic
eroded
bad boundaries
concretions
immersive medusa or jellies transducingly
snaky tresses of the mythical gorgon
more-ness of sensation
destroyed, transformed, conserved

jelly scatters
diffracting cilia and fluible mesoglea
metamorphosing diffraction patterns


multiple sensory registers temper the apparatus of seeing: sound, tactility, movement, proximity

immersion ==convey==> the experience of being totally inside a world, a state of mind, cultural and historical forms, and intellectual rumination =/= unreality or reality
==> cohabitation =/= representation

tactile visuality
fingery eyes
relies on textured proximity rather than objective distance
the visual apparatus is the touching body

[*]art: sensual movement of perceptual information (across media and bodies)

transduction:
(at an energetic transduction site: one form of organized energy asymmetrically converted into another kind of energy)
◾transmission of messages through various media and the ways 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'[s[...]

[...]ientists)
+
(Haraway ==>) *bodies are “made” by scientific practices [<-- that is why the question of science is important for whoever dealing or working with the body]
+
(Annemarie ==>) bobies (that are made) are enacted multiples (in medical practice)
+
(Despret -->) how bodies are undoing and redoing themselves through different scientific practices with animals? = *how are bodies growing multiples in diverse practices?* + (its corollary) *how do each of these practices (+ animals they are addressing) enact each of these bodies?*



Mowat's *modest embodiment* ==Despret==> partial affinities [=/= seeing like a wolf or mouse] ==> feeling or being like a wolf or mouse = ****to be taken in a radically non-psychological sense**** (--> Cinderella's non-psychological relation to her birds and mice =/= contemporary western psychological subjects)
---> go to wildboyz, Cinderella under a mouse regimen
-using his body as an experimental tool --> eating a wolf's diet (=/= empathy, romantic dream of being a wolf)
submit his own body to mouse diet
one uses one's own body to meet the needs of another
Mowat used his own body as a means of generating scientific proof, and turned it into an apparatus for validity [--> how do we apply or misapply our body in artistic environment for generating truth and validity? to be careful with the context of generalization]
([artist's and] scientist's) body: a technical device, the witness
(companion story -->) ***to embody the way other beings solve their survival problems***

“the business of curling up to start with, and spinning around after each nap” (was vital to success with a dozing wolf) --> Cinderella's choreography of the morning greeting ceremony

limits of endurance


i feld that i, because of my specific superiority as a member of Homo sapiens, together with my intensive technical training, was entitled to *pride of place* =/= being under observation

Mowat's humour =/= Derrida not laughing at his own worries (concerned with: what distinguish animals from man is their “being naked without knowing it”)
•naked body is a pretext, a pre-text for more philosophy
•Derrida is talking to his colleagues (the very people who are **seeking grandiose difference** <-- also artists) =/= a difference that happens to him
•(my problem with the old tiring trend in philosophy [after encounter with Manning]:) looking for locus of things [a generality] : talk about ‘the figure of the cat' = the allegory for all the cats on the earth (~ the felines that traverses our myths and religions, literature and fables)

***what the cat might actually be doing***
(this is my relation to description, what is the world, that cat, the demon, the mice up to? and use my best imaginative crafts and precise descriptive acts, the answe[...]

[...]h that of “neutralize” --> (Watson, scientist) removed the rat's eyes, olfactory bulb, and whikers, which are essential to the sense of touch in rats, before throwing it into the exploration of the maze...
--Despret--> if the world had probably lost all meaning for this de-sensed rat, the rat itself had lost all meaning for its experimenter (if it ever had one for him)
-this is the goal of the procedure: search out the lowest common denominator, the left-over, the automation, the behavior that from one species to another will render all organisms commensurable تناسب پذير [<-- no!!!!]

the tacit assumption that an animal could ever enter into a relationship with an object is false <--Uexküll-- (to have in mind) to study the most different kinds of animals in their relations to a maze


her attic, Cinderella in the universe of meanings

an epistemological problem --> it is not straightforward to enter into the subjective universe of an animal in interrogating it through an experimental dispositive thought up by a human

[dispositif: referring to machines and devices. as philosophical concept that has been drawn upon by Deleuze, Foucault, Althusser, Agamben, and many others, has been rendered as “apparatus”, social apparatus]

maze --> what this particular experimental dispositive can mean for a rat? how can this *traversing* come to be, from the point of view of the rat (Uexküll calls “familiar path”)? how rats in pretending to respond to the questions of the behaviorists respond in fact to another question?
-behaviorist's question: what is the abstract relation of a being, whatever it may be (that which the behaviorists call an organism) to a natural object?

why do rats always touch the walls as they go along them? --Cinderella-->
•they are haptophiles, they like to touch
•they inscribe the course of their route in their bodies in the form of lines, curves, and turns, or even roughness, textures, sensations of cold or humidity
•letting itself be marked by the space
--Despret--> what do we know about what the body of a rat can sense?

***(from) the why of caused --to--> entering into the regime of meanings***

the rat does not respond to the question of learning, he responds to the question of *an architecture that constitute the world for him*

(how?) the “animal's own world” can (with difficulty) include the human observer as an observer

...the maze can authorize neither the question of the “familiar path” nor that of the meaning of the wall


artifactual: the situation where the being who is interrogated responds to a different question than the one the scientist poses to her

hypothesis of the existence of an artifact ==> the possibility of taking into account the fact that the animal would have a point of view[...]

[...] />
victimhood
•Hindu nationalism --> reformulated history from a focus on colonialism and postcolonial nation-building into a narrative of victimhood that blames historic Muslim invasions for the decline of Hindu civilisation and nationhood
•China --> reformulated its school history textbooks to stress victimhood and humiliation through the idea of China's “100 years of humiliation” in reference to Western and Japanese invasions
•United States --> nationalism often takes the shape of antipathy to government that is enmeshed with an ideology of liberal individualism
•
}--> ***logic of empowerment*** (--permeate--> economies of visibility)


***memory narrative***


iran --> shohada شهدا martyrs of iran-iraq war --> after the war became the picture of collective victimhood (“heroes = us”)

Erdogan's speech
“we have been tested by fire” (--?--> Siavash's fire trial is populist?)
~= “we have been tested by enemy”
~= “evil forces”


(from) populism --to--> neofascism
(from) generic rhetoric of an unidentified enemy --to--> articulation of an identifiable foe (who is met with political violence)

authoritarian state apparatus [= political system + culture + institutions + ?] --allow--> smoother way of operationalisation of narratives (about the dangers of adversaries)
-exactly what kind of state apparatus we have in iran?


historical victimhood --> resurgent populist discourse
•people have been enduring victimhood for too long
•fateful junctures throughout history
•authentic great path
•urgency of message
•

animating rhetoric with self-victimhood ==produce==> divisions (men =/= women, us =/= enemy, etc.)



exclusionary politics <-- homogeneous community (=/= alien intrusion, outside forces, immigrants, minorities, etc.)

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

Kundera
is humor modern?
*humor is not ancient* (?!)
“whatever humor touches it ambiguites”
humor = ambiguitor

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

globalization =/= cold war
globalization =/= enlightenment (“universal humanism + rationalized tech ==> freedom for all”)

cold war = a meaningfull relation between ideology & power [==give==> orientation + identity --> normative approach to global phenomena]
geopolitc + ideologic borders
=/=
globalization --> completly different political behaivor (definitions of national goals, friend and enemy, etc.) --> pluralist democracy (differences + contrasts) =/= social democracy (erasing differences)

globalization = attitude حالت =/= meaning
[cold war: “world ~= (a sort of) problem” --> behaviors had] meaning ==> (base for) power
[...]

[...]To see from below (or the perspective of the mathematics, Kinect, hacker?) is neither easily learned nor unproblematic

ways of being nowhere while claiming to see comprehensively (i did not claim any of these - i didn't try even. i was there traveling with relation to my co-travelers and a technology relation) my issue with the images is their generality and perhaps that is their unlocatablilty. but to situate my knowledge and myself i am not solely depending on the image rhetoric. i was committed to mobile positioning, and that is critical.


mediate vision

knowledge potent for constructing worlds
trying to be less organized by axes of domination

Science has been utopian and visionary from the start? that is one reason ‘we’ need it.

my eye were crafted by the blood of mosquitoes...

translations and exchanges, material and semiotic
what has the property of systematicity in my Amazon?
orientations and responsibility in material semiotic fields of meaning.

is Here, Kinect's vision not immediately a very powerful metaphor or technology (for political epistemological clarification)?

The visual metaphor invites us to investigate the varied apparatuses of visual production, including the prosthetic technologies interfaced with our biological eyes and brains.

should i have an argue for (politics and) epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating?

view from a structuring and structured body

we love stuttering, and the partly understood

Translation is always interpretative, critical, and partial

Amazon (location) resists (the politics of) closure

logic of culture (nature made flexible)

science coded body
black coded body
colonised coded body
coded as self sufficient (when?)



the project and me are not boundary object (i am not tarzan)

suppress the lost text of aristotle on the rhetoric of humor


how can something work and not work?!

mathematical competition


what is the other story (of forest, journey, etc.) that i want urgently tell?
or the rhythm of what story i want to change?

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


In 1905 the French neurologists G. Deny and P. Camus recounted the case of Madame I who had lost body awareness. She described her “general insensibility” as follows: “I'm no longer aware of myself as I used to be. I can no longer feel my arms, my legs, my head, and my hair. I have to touch myself constantly in order to know how I am. I have the feeling that my entire body is changed, even at times that it no longer exists. I touch an object, but it is not I who am touc[...]

[...]of seed-dispersing plants millions years ago (what about abiotic? Kinect)

one of issues related with rate/speed is synchronicity

the effects of biotechnically / bioculturaly situated people

Amazon's nature in opposition to slave gardens (slave plantation systems with factory machine) (along with imperial botanical gardens)
for travel and propagation of...
moving material semiotic
part-time 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 be[...]