[...]my second issue with ‘close reading’: there is no correlation between the speed of reading and comprehension/apprehension
*reading practices*
ontology usually decides what reading is --> *book-binding is reading. editorial compositional reformating and remodeling of the space of the text is reading.
(Stewartian) reading that happens in the writing: you can't do any kind of exegesis of the reading تفسير, rather: *you have to become related to the reading in what you are writing*
in research:
•skills of reading and writing
•(more abstract) skills of conceptualizing and analysing
@apass: begin with the generation of research question ==> importance of language
(you flag the importance of language whenever research is marked by question. “?” is a linguistic construct)
•the skill/craft is to select a research question that works better for certain descriptive purposes (than does previous tools)
•(realism:) research question <==outcome== different concerns and emphases
rigor of conceptualization : quality of an access to part of a world “out there”
research method:
•“mapping into knowledge” : co-fabrication between the researcher and the diverse others engaged in the process --> (problem of) ‘positionality ==> data’ (the idea that the researcher produces knowledge or “facts”)
◦positionality ==?==> politically correct jargon in artistic research environment [has positionality backfired into a language of trying to change a public opinion in your favour?]
‘fantasy of the unproblematic mode’
...................................
regarding biographical work according to Pierre, ok i am working even on the border of solipsism
what i am doing is not autopoiesis (self-making, making a poem out of yourself) rather sympoiesis (with-making, with people from different worlds and pasts)
trying to contain every available mode of interpretation in my work
(collecting all the modes of interpretation)
(for the psychoanalyst as writer,) the *unconscious functions as a *trope
unconscious ~=? trope
*my actual interest is in “the place of study”
which is embodied by its participants, is shared and full of stories that hold foster curiosity and learning. a place where hybrid agents of interpretation are alive and at work, partly technological partly human partly animal shared knowing processes.
-one of our strongest ethical obligations is curiosity
...................................
[Nietzsche]
(in writing) if i could choose i would promote something that comes close to the texture of the softening that opens and glides, allowing for sudden shocks and slippages.
the personality needs to be able to flow in order to move past [...]
(1)[...notes/midday review.txt]%1.9[...]ice?)
so, does complaint prevent the arrival of change or make way for new forms of sociality?
“I can't complain.” --> (a blockbuster;) those in stubborn destitution ----that there is no address in the era of the becoming anonymous of God. ‘Who would pick up your call?’
however, “the friend, whether ghostly, futural, or closely bound in time, receives the brunt of the complaint” --friends structurally listens to disappointed expectation, disappointed worldliness
what-should-have-been
On what approved contingencies, contractual loopholes, or transferential coordinates could I possibly befriend another?
metaphysical heritage of friendship (... reconfigured personhood)
(how can I do things without being a psycho about it?)
(How do I know by which politics of friendship, grid or writing practice I am being called up?)
a vocabulary existed to designate, approximate certain routines
R_dzvJYDZXM
CrGJIS3quYY
(30.03.2017) Rabih Mroue and Hito Steyerl duo: concern for injustice and conservative justice call disguised under an elaborated and augmented complaint (in the aesthetic terms of contemporary art market), non-researchers of their subjects and topics, they have no ‘topic’ only ‘resource’ (in the making of their own myth of the figure of artist,) [=/= when something becomes a topic for you, it bounds you to the unsettling commitments of curiosity and research and hard work.]
-in their notion of “Artist in the Reign of Terror” they ask disturbingly “but many individuals have died and it means nothing?!” with a sneer (artwork as puzkhand پوزخند --> @Ali )
[**“sneer” is a contemptuous or mocking smile, remark, or tone, coming from a family of sarcastic tropes of complaint and ironizated complaining]
-their art-work finds and flourishes in a terrain of terror. in their nonspeculative work there is no “but, what if” or “but, not yet” and therefore no ‘becomings’
-for Hito and Rabih: zeitgenössisch (contemporary) = grausam (atrocious)
-they dichotomize (fact/fiction, real/unreal, etc.), rather than allowing a novel and interesting question to be raised
-what is the state of unknown in one's practice? rather than being a news agency
[negativity?]--> your bad feelings --> غر ghor complaint --(turn it into)--> critique --(start doing)--> research --(get)--> diploma --(turn it into)--> phd --(make your)--> department of studies --(into)--> craft tradition
[you don't have to start with negativity!]
[you don't need to end in your own myth tradition!]
...................................
@Anouk (@her “breathing archive”): (Lev Manovich's) relationship between ‘interface’ and ‘database,’ ‘perceptable’ to ‘information’. [Database as Symbolic Form: http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i290-1/s04/read[...]
(3)[...notes/midday review.txt]%4.7[...]/>
note to self: not to throw away the contaminated concept that we have, (for example ‘human intentionality,’ ‘human rights,’ etc) *but to hold on (while knowing how contaminated it is) to any concept (which are always unsettled) until it gets a particular (situated) job done
(which job i am try to get done with my good and bad concepts?)
where are we headed with our syntax?
“-scene” : the ‘now’ of the species [--> pleistocene image] also, a sharp change in the graph/diagram [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Extinction_intensity.svg]
Sa'di, thinking not with the capital T, rather with the flower, with the cut tail of the animaux
competency + competency (of different animal, human, machine, pigeon, etc) [=/= subtraction, taboo, obligation --> deficiency*]
(additive competencies)
“excess” is the name of the world
there is always more that we don't know; what yet has to come; the world is constantly doing stuff; (--✕--> accelerate manifesto, apocalyptic narratives)
(i am drawn to and by excess, and i am engaged in it: in my lectures, talkings, writings, and I take it up also visually in my drawings. my ajayeb hypertext search is contingent and opportunistic, and its searches are non-systematic)
in apass what my project is all about: *loving to tell you about what i am reading* (why it seams too difficult, 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)
[...]
(4)[...notes/midday review.txt]%5.9[...]-> being sober(?!), anthropos becoming, human nature, common sense, empiricism and interpretation are at stake here]
-[another thing was the label of “animal” that was passed around as a form of mock, instead of provocations for more conversation, I was stupefied. --how can we go on together and not render each other commitments nonsense?]
“point of view” is an important metaphor
#in my work in apass i am working on descriptive practices [poetics of animal description, histories of nonhuman inscription, etc.] to learn to name latent (and therefore emergent) ontologies, to name ‘what we are doing in new ways,’ which are hard to name. (also refusing not to name the violences of others and yourself. to reckon the nature and scope of the erasures we do in our works.) % why do you think that is important?
#and my shift of attention to peer's works is about that: our domain of practices must make claim on each other <== we inhabit differences together (--> attention and work on:) ‘local category abstractions’ (how do we talk and make each other feel our subjects of interest in apass for example) --> (the cumulative, associated and sensed) routines, gestures, and (inter)surfaces of our everyday life in apass, as a group of researchers, that don't necessarily align ==> worlding comes from these things.
[attunement =/= argument]
the name of the world is “detail”
***translation (essentailly imperfect) is the very condition of signification --> trope is the very condition of language
...................................
don't be docile bodies or innocent bystander, do what you have to do to constitute your courage
all i am saying is that: it is not clear what the destiny of art (or of anything) is
...................................
perhaps what i am trying to learn--with apass, ajayeb, writing, harem, etc--is to ask what do i need--which skills, abilities, or literacies--to become equipped to share the experience of the habits of the world (of ajayeb) that i am discovering
...................................
Luisa: “the visual (side)effects of a ‘not being supported’”
effect --> object --> suport --> object2 --> suport3 --> suport4 --> ...
(at one point Marialena pulling away a support box ==> Luisa's cry sound side-effect of a ‘not being supported’)
•?how is it done for her: construction of indifferent objects
•which import function is materializing her ‘objects’? [public import]
I want my friends to become marvelous thinkers makers, I want them to ask interesting questions
Esta: “when we enter the presentation we are researchers, we are not friends” [--> “neutrality” of encounter]
(but i want to explore new places in my work with the people who care for you)
(is this at all possible? to enter with friends a non-friend zon[...]
(5)[...notes/midday review.txt]%7[...]
***translation (essentailly imperfect) is the very condition of signification --> trope is the very condition of language
...................................
don't be docile bodies or innocent bystander, do what you have to do to constitute your courage
all i am saying is that: it is not clear what the destiny of art (or of anything) is
...................................
perhaps what i am trying to learn--with apass, ajayeb, writing, harem, etc--is to ask what do i need--which skills, abilities, or literacies--to become equipped to share the experience of the habits of the world (of ajayeb) that i am discovering
...................................
Luisa: “the visual (side)effects of a ‘not being supported’”
effect --> object --> suport --> object2 --> suport3 --> suport4 --> ...
(at one point Marialena pulling away a support box ==> Luisa's cry sound side-effect of a ‘not being supported’)
•?how is it done for her: construction of indifferent objects
•which import function is materializing her ‘objects’? [public import]
I want my friends to become marvelous thinkers makers, I want them to ask interesting questions
Esta: “when we enter the presentation we are researchers, we are not friends” [--> “neutrality” of encounter]
(but i want to explore new places in my work with the people who care for you)
(is this at all possible? to enter with friends a non-friend zone?)
inclusion =/= involvement
(inclusion usually mistaken as literally for physical inclusion)
How Kobe's work can move from a “case-finder agency” to a consequential work? [--> storytellings for making consequential meanings*] that means: what does it mean to live in the consequences of the relations one is enacting?
(when I look at my friends and peers in apass, I can see and feel the knowledges they inhabit in their bodies and the living effects of their languages. I re-figurally feel the figures they embody and their objects whether they assist or resist states of transformation.)
ephemeral things become food
...................................
Esta, risking one's life
@Hoda, Xiri,
the idea of “express its inner experience”
simulation of
Xiri's sense of entitlement to accusation
@Leo, fiction of sharing
‘something tangible, like a meal’
something phantasmatically hooked up to libidinal openness, like a drug
@Elen, DUI: driving under influence, what are we on when they were driving her cars
DUI has become the pharmecy take on drugs to take away and winning the drug war
movement under influence, MUI
legelized use of motor activity
driving while impaired/driving while intoxicated (DWI)
drink-driving (UK)
driving risky[...]
(6)[...notes/midday review.txt]%7[...]at of apass?
in the spectrum of ‘auto-ism’ (not the pathological term for developmental disorder) ['auto-’: from Greek αὐτo-, “self"] ‘being socially inept, being with oneself,’ we can also locate ‘allism’ ['allo’: from Greek ἄλλος, állos, “other”, “else"] --> allistic: ‘to be skilled at being with the different other (assumed human)’
...................................
eurocentric =/= european
•i actually love “european.” i learn from it all the time. how does the world looks like from here.
•but eurocentrism is horrible. they assume an origin and displace it to any place/time --> it happens when a philosopher tries to be anti-western but assuming the same origins of thinking for everybody else and not taking the time to become interested in the (non)thinking forms of noneuropeans
...................................
#workshop on 3D animation all on Nude Descending a Staircase
inspired by minute 16 of “Pink Slime Caesar Shift” (2018)
“there is much more to you that meet the eye.” the motto of transformation in secular capitalism, sang by Jane Fonda and Transformer Optimus Prime
...................................
researcher's questions
in your obscure (elaborate and awkward) meditations, (?can we ask:) what is sacrificed, what is recooked, canibalized, chewed over, and eventually buried? in which economy of pleasure and pain is this mobilized? which harmful (or hedonistic) sensualism is deployed? which hallucinating enfant is writing? which raw material is being transformed into the gold of humanity?
-the question of will: which world is murdered and repopulated by the act of (your) will alone?
a research method of starting a conversation, for apass
*take me to you reader* --> bring me to the subject who you think is reading you, receiving your work in some sort,
r />
few things (that i hate hysterically) that i think i urgently need (and any artist) to have a very good grasp of (within modern capital economy):
•marketing (--> integrated storytelling)
•fashion (--> manipulative regimes of time and place)
•journalism (explanatory technologies of news and opinion, vox, kurzgesagt, corporate media, immersive journalism, forensic aesthetics)
•politics (=/= political science): achieving and exercising positions of governance that have control over communities
•hollywood/comics (*corporate-produced fiction* --> business-decisions connecting cross-overs; ideas of: customer and merchandise)
i can't shake off the idea that behind every marketing strategy there i a predatory behavior concealed
***there is nothing quite so humiliating and disempowering as trying to prove the truth***
‘trying to prove the truth’ is the worst[...]
(7)[...notes/midday review.txt]%11.2[...]e process over a definitive image, concept or object. It tends to value what is invisible: a group dynamic, a social situation, a change of energy, a raised consciousness.
hit-and-miss field trips
the more one becomes involved, the harder it is to be objective – especially when a central component of a project concerns the formation of personal relationships
comfortable outsider status: impotent but secure in one's own critical superiority
...................................
only working with (that seems to be) your idea
(the problem of) being always so deliberate and cautious
...................................
Hillman
like the conver of his book (myth of analysis), an internal drama externalized materialized in the media, sci-fi fabulations of violence and war (such as Game of Thrones) are perhaps projects that also craft and give form to what is inside: dragon, torture, journey, landscape, getting caught, etc.
what are art's investments in psychology today?
all (including artists) must envision suffering and illness as something “wrong” =/= the fantasies, feelings, and behavior arising from the imaginal part of ourselves are *archetypal* in their sickness and thus *natural* --> (those odd irrationalities) ***are required for life***
--> then what is there to analyze? (<-- relevant question for apass)
“unconscious” and “psychodynamics” are *fantasies that could be replaced with better ones*
(Hillman's archetypal psychology) **asks the psyche to move with its sickness into life**
(to discover) a sense of soul in the sufferings of Psychopathology : ***something lives in me that is not of my own doing*** (--> demon, psychic force,,,) to take soul with one wherever one goes and to react to life in terms of this soul
symbolic meanings, insights, eros, body, craziness, the *lower aspects of the gods* --> the freedom to imagine and to feel psychic reality
“inner reality” --> called up by ego ==> individuality = to be peculiar, to be peculiarly what one is, with one's own odd patterns of archetypal responses
♥***we are never only persons; we are always also Mothers and Giants and Victims and Heroes and Sleeping Beauties*** (<-- what i am learning from psychoanalysis)
the mythic appears within the language, observation, and theories even of science
recent attempts to move out of analysis: (@Aela)
•group therapy
•sensitivity training (--> apass)
•love-ins
•blowing-the-mind with drugs
•
[*]analysis (is too potent) is too much a part of this century's self conception --requirement--> of ego psychology
([apollonic aim of enlightening consciousness -->] enlightened *egoization* of the psyche =/= *a darker and softer kind of li[...]
(8)[...notes/midday review.txt]%11.5[...] craft and give form to what is inside: dragon, torture, journey, landscape, getting caught, etc.
what are art's investments in psychology today?
all (including artists) must envision suffering and illness as something “wrong” =/= the fantasies, feelings, and behavior arising from the imaginal part of ourselves are *archetypal* in their sickness and thus *natural* --> (those odd irrationalities) ***are required for life***
--> then what is there to analyze? (<-- relevant question for apass)
“unconscious” and “psychodynamics” are *fantasies that could be replaced with better ones*
(Hillman's archetypal psychology) **asks the psyche to move with its sickness into life**
(to discover) a sense of soul in the sufferings of Psychopathology : ***something lives in me that is not of my own doing*** (--> demon, psychic force,,,) to take soul with one wherever one goes and to react to life in terms of this soul
symbolic meanings, insights, eros, body, craziness, the *lower aspects of the gods* --> the freedom to imagine and to feel psychic reality
“inner reality” --> called up by ego ==> individuality = to be peculiar, to be peculiarly what one is, with one's own odd patterns of archetypal responses
♥***we are never only persons; we are always also Mothers and Giants and Victims and Heroes and Sleeping Beauties*** (<-- what i am learning from psychoanalysis)
the mythic appears within the language, observation, and theories even of science
recent attempts to move out of analysis: (@Aela)
•group therapy
•sensitivity training (--> apass)
•love-ins
•blowing-the-mind with drugs
•
[*]analysis (is too potent) is too much a part of this century's self conception --requirement--> of ego psychology
([apollonic aim of enlightening consciousness -->] enlightened *egoization* of the f the psyche =/= *a darker and softer kind of life* ~-> end of neurosis, end of analysis, end of consciousness...) analysis --in-20th-century--> rediscovering the soul and reawakening its imagination
(rethought -->) [*]analysis: essentially as imaginative activity (or an activity of the imaginal realm) as it plays through all of life --> [the idea of one's “fable” ~] ***what is the fantasy he has of what he does?***
analysis is an *enactment*
enactment necessitates *myth*: a tale about its ritual
mysogyny <-- manifestation of the western, protestant, scientific, apollonic ego
****Hillman (penetrating the analysis in accordance with mythical perspective):
*transference --> erotic*
*unconscious --> imaginal*
*neurosis --> dionysian*
-what are the manifestations of ego in ajayeb?
-please let's have a darker kind of light...
(Keats:) world = the vale [...]
(10)[...notes/midday review.txt]%11.5[...]nd softer kind of life* ~-> end of neurosis, end of analysis, end of consciousness...) analysis --in-20th-century--> rediscovering the soul and reawakening its imagination
(rethought -->) [*]analysis: essentially as imaginative activity (or an activity of the imaginal realm) as it plays through all of life --> [the idea of one's “fable” ~] ***what is the fantasy he has of what he does?***
analysis is an *enactment*
enactment necessitates *myth*: a tale about its ritual
mysogyny <-- manifestation of the western, protestant, scientific, apollonic ego
****Hillman (penetrating the analysis in accordance with mythical perspective):
*transference --> erotic*
*unconscious --> imaginal*
*neurosis --> dionysian*
-what are the manifestations of ego in ajayeb?
-please let's have a darker kind of light...
(Keats:) world = the vale of soul-making }==> you'll find out the use of the world
(Hillman:) psychoanalysis: something one learns through “analysis” --> processes of the mind, heart, and soul (that were not included in the field of psychology in the past century)
(Jung:) depth psychology: an ontology of the soul based on archetypes
(a -logy that allows the) soul's speculative function
Hillman proposing a deep uncertainty concerning the root metaphor, the true myth of the work (of analysis)
mystes
epoptes (an initiate in the Eleusinian mysteries; one who has attended the epopteia)
shaman
an initiator
guru of the body*
root metaphor of psychology (?)
(until 1700: pattern = patron) --Hillman--> to discover this pattern [the general myth of our field] = to search for our patron: the father who creates and is the creative principle in us
[because] [we are uncertain of what we are:] we are uncertain of our author, from whom would come both our authority and our authenticity
tracing things back --> preserves of the mother-childhood and family (dominanting psychology) --> we come to her: ***materialism = maternalism (in acceptable disguise)***
...................................
(with the critical bestiaries magazine idea) is my work about defining a new mode of cultural discourse?
...................................
-philosophy (like mathematics) is a priori disciplines (or has an a priori methodology) at its core
-the posibility of *true answers* for “artistic questions”(?) --? can anybody outside your field be made to care whether you're right?
a priori =/= contingent
higher-order truths of...
self-supporting community of experts (= trap)
“philosophy is garbage, but the history of garbage is scholarship” -Burton Dreben
...................................
[...]
(11)[...notes/midday review.txt]%11.6[...]ecomes the starting point for a new release of the energy it liberates***(!?)
...................................
Zoological Vandalism: Chimeric Pragmatism in Animal-Filled Media
Zolmat and the Black Box as Media Beyond
Primordial House and Suffering Landscape
Changing Inside”, a multi-media performance and intervention with Mia Habib and Jassem Hindi
Four Oriental Cartography of the East
About Dense Properties
...................................
shift in our idea of nature not any more a source of *fecundity: how we relate abundance in nature to the way we live ourselves
we have to fight to keep things democratic (itself a privileged idea) and not autocratic when it comes to climate change
in Frozen II animated movie, Elsa build her way out of climate (magic = technology)
to make a debate point =/= trying to answer your question
(Hegel) negative values are much more clearer than affirmative values
the dangerous and dominant belief that whatever problems we face in this society the misfits (particular exceptional individual) can change it all
...................................
(from being an artist to artist researcher)
to articulate and demonstrate with brilliance ‘what you know’ --to--> to be able to exquisitely explain ‘how you know what you know’ [--?--> *metacognition: thinking about one's own thinking = reflection (thinking about
what we know) + self-regulation (managing how we go about learning)]
-metacognitives kills: to get good at recognizing flaws or gaps in one's own thinking + articulate thought processes + revise efforts
*classroom = mirror* (process of stepping back to see what you are doing)
(useful for artists) sciences of understanding:
•anthropology
•psychology
my whole work is about two things now:
•to think cumulatively (=/= epistemic breaks) --> more you know more your are interested in
•to think by layering (=/= singleness of partisan meaning) --> what you do is based on previous work
my research in storytelling:(from premodern) *describe the world* [bestiaries] --to--> (modern necessity to) *calculate the world* [recognizing a calculated world --how--> *secularization of interest* (in monsters, religious iconography, etc.)
adventure time tv series
educational model for children how to become post industrial liberal subjects --> adventure of imperialist mentality
the choreography of flexibility and solidity
Finn is the body from nowhere by example, he goes to dimensions of fire, ice, dream, etc. and his ontology of knowledge and identity remains intact (he grows up like a good old cowboy) =/= you look at the land from the ice and you don't see the same reality if you look at[...]
(12)[...notes/midday review.txt]%12.3[...] />
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
•has no original eden it was banished from
•has no dust it can return to
==Haraway==> situated partial knowledges
gendering the laboratory ==>
•modest witness
•new forms of gender (male virility,)
touching the elephant and knowing
touching different part of the world
touching a human body and guessing at the riddle
by touching the different parts => some are running, rotting, flickering, etc.
for doing anatomy you need a corpse (that means you already rule out things such as eating)
archeological anthropology
human-animal stories
hunting each other / together
domestication
Tsing
the greedy beast within us
collaborative garden (feed together)
descriptive practices of poetics and natural history
mission of all atlases to characterize (not simply inventory) phenomena
(to characterize, not invent; mixed in ajayebnameh عجایبالمخلوقات / عجایب نامه?!)
atlases habituate the eye, they are perforce visual
(what ajayebnameh habituates? not the eye?)
to explicate rival cosmologies
one problem of atlases is that they have to decide what nature is
they all have to solve the problem of choice
atlases of characteristic images presented individual cases as exemplary and illustrative of broader classes and casual processes (but not ajayebnameh عجایب نامه, aj bring precise individual instances in its unique stories)
atlas(es) of(/for) the eye
...................................
[the identity of objects:]
Manuel Delanda: Any materialist philosophy must take as its point of departure the existence of a material world that is independent of our minds. But then it confronts the problem of the origin of the enduring identity of the inhabitants of that world: if the mind is not what gives identity to mountains and rivers, plants and animals, then what does? An old answer is “essences,” the answer given by Aristotle. But if one rejects essentialism then there is no choice but to answer the que[...]
(13)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%12.8[...]eep 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 engages with, accepts and activly transforms what becomes a part of its world, translates an extension of this world and therefore an extension of its subjectivity as “parrot-with-human”
-when an animal escapes me, in fact it is making a form of the “judgement of relation” that animals make about humans
[*]anonymity: (a certain manners of presenting oneself,) that unquestioned condition of research that translates a certain type of relationship and a certain manner of defining those whom one addresses
I am against “feel [...]
(14)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%18[...]elf 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 engages with, accepts and activly transforms what becomes a part of its world, translates an extension of this world and therefore an extension of its subjectivity as “parrot-with-human”
-when an animal escapes me, in fact it is making a form of the “judgement of relation” that animals make about humans
[*]anonymity: (a certain manners of presenting oneself,) that unquestioned condition of research that translates 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 pe[...]
(15)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%18[...]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 agency)
(*)matter: substance in its intra-active becoming
(*)performativity: iterative intra-activity
“I'm trying to complicate the locatability of human identity as a here and now, as an enclosed and finished product[/project]” ~ “perspective essentialism”
...nature performs itself differently
(Kirby)
[Barad:] **onto-epistem-ology**: the study of practices of knowing in being
“epistemology =/= ontology” is a reverberation of a metaphysics that assumes (inherent differences:) “human =/= nonhuman,” “subject =/= object,” “mind =/= body,” “matter =/= discourse”...
...................................
what kind of alphabetico-numerical forefinger can i build that can press a schizophrenic partial systematizing of ajayeb?
...................................
so much (in Iran's literature) still awaits reflection and comprehension (-without comprehensiveness please!)
...................................
...archeology of dying in our civilization
(archeology of our dying civilization)
...................................
Aristotle's narrative: catharsis of emotions --> first arousing pity and fear and then clearing them away
theories of narrative:
•formalist theories (Russian)
•dialogical theories (Bakhtinian)
•New Critical theories
•Chicago school, or neo-Aristotlian theories
•psychoanalytic theories (Freud, Kenneth Burke, Lacan, N. Abraham)
•hermeneutic and phenomenological theories
•structuralist, semiotic, and tropological theories
•Marxist and sociological theories
•reader-response theories
•poststructuralist and deconstructionist theories (Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man)
•feminist theories (Martha Kenney, Haraway, Stengers, Hayward)
•
•
structuralist: that there are typical formal elements or “deep structures” to narratives --> complex performative dimension between the telling of stories and what is told in them
(Paul de Man:) “The paradigm for all texts consists of a figure (or a system of figures) and its deconstruction. But since this model cannot be closed off by a final reading, it engenders, in its turn, a supplementary figural superposition which narrates the unreadability of the prior narration.”
the analytic experience has a narrative character? psychoanalytic dialogue ‘uncovers’ a certain kind of narrative discontinuity maintained in the analysand's efforts
--> meaningful narrative sequences,
and, recaptured memory : a rhetorical product
...................................
-the [...]
(16)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%18.7[...]ssivity of a mood, a tone of voice
•do they lighten things or load them down?
...a composition made explicit in the figure of *the active survivor* and *the knowing reader of impacts* --> a watchfulness-turned-impulse that ends not on meaning but in the haptic, multi-angled, sensorimotor qualities of a world's unimaginable detail
(@Varinia) qualities sensorimotor interactions with environments that are not reducible either to thoughts and imaginings:
•*richness: a scene spied provides infinite detail beyond what you can invent --> #excess
•*bodiliness: the motions of the body affect sensory input
•*insubordinateness: the world has a life of its own; things moved by themselves
•*grabbiness: sensory impacts matter apart from their cognition
--> having a phenomenal experience is having skills with these qualities** [@Hoda]
an ecology of potentialy marked by violence and care
...................................
[Alberti]
we might:
•provide a better understanding
•provoke novel realities/ontologoes (to emerge from material)
•provoke an understanding in the context of the everyday
*(Latour, Whitehead, Law:) archeological entity = ontological entity (by nature) }==> productive of reality
to focus on practices in which all possible elements of the process must be understood as active and creative (--> # equipment list)
*“to take seriously" = to accept at a fundamental level the truth of a claim and to doggedly follow its consequences
(form an ontological and conceptual perspective)
(--> dogs follow consequences)
(indigenous thought is treated as a theoretical discourse on the nature of reality =/= an interesting interpretation of it)--> to take seriously the indigenous metaphysics of multinaturalism [or ajayeb] as a philosophical intervention : to trace out its effects on [our] concepts
multiculturalism: a single objective universe and many cultural interpretations of it
multinaturalism: multiple universes and a single mode of interpretation (Viveiros de Castro)
==> perspective =/= a different “point of view” on (the same way of knowing or seeing) qualitatively different worlds }-->* situated knowledges, #elephant parable
no: no --> de-historicizing effects of imposing psycho-cognitive shamanic models of art
no --> purely cognitive significance (of...)
*miniature: a ritual activity, a grave offering, a sympathetic magic, a capture of the power of the original
--> common stories about how miniatures can be interpreted in archaeology
(ontological research approach)_
scale is utterly important because “careful attention to alternative ontologies of scale introduces new interoretive possibilities for...[...]
(18)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%22.4[...]
(building toward a) taxonomy of past ontologies --✕--> ontological critique
(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 w[...]
(19)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.2[...]t = 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
}--> where new animists turn to animism for a source of analogies, critical ontology turns to animism for a source of theory
perspectivism: multiple natures (worlds) + singular culture (way of knowing those worlds) [~ working from *commonality* rather than *alterity*] --> a theoretical bomb =/= analogies based on ethnographic content
spirits experienced as diminutive yet brilliantly decorated or huge and grotesque
the more intense ==> the more body it is
(the promise of thinking thro[...]
(20)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.2[...]ce 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
}--> where new animists turn to animism for a source of analogies, critical ontology turns to animism for a source of theory
perspectivism: multiple natures (worlds) + singular culture (way of knowing those worlds) [~ working from *commonality* rather than *alterity*] --> a theoretical bomb =/= analogies based on ethnographic content
spirits experienced as diminutive yet brilliantly decorated or huge and grotesque
the more intense ==> the more body it is
(the promise of thinking through) [*]thing: a nonspecified ontological category that can be “filled” through ethnographic observation that is designed to allow ontological alterity to inform its content
recursive anthropology --> alterity: a function of the divergence between ethnographic materials and the assumptions the analyst brings to them
(if) ontology: what is ==> alterity: part of what others say ‘what is’ that does not make sense to us
(the danger of) a new metaontological orthodoxy becoming a immutable metaphysic
archeological alterity: things that do not make sense ontologically (escape traditional frameworks)
archeology's new kind of reflexivity
•openness
•wonder: an intentional naivete, naive empiricism (==> sustain altering + enabling meaning, to be besieged & committed to ---> go to Cinderella =/= moving beyond)
•emphasis on descriptive =/= theoretical
•attentiveness to our embodied responses
(a question of critical ontolog[...]
(24)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.3[...]logy as a critical question productive of conceptual engagement
•work of archeologists who theorize and practice archeology on the basis of indigenous theories
}--> where new animists turn to animism for a source of analogies, critical ontology turns to animism for a source of theory
perspectivism: multiple natures (worlds) + singular culture (way of knowing those worlds) [~ working from *commonality* rather than *alterity*] --> a theoretical bomb =/= analogies based on ethnographic content
spirits experienced as diminutive yet brilliantly decorated or huge and grotesque
the more intense ==> the more body it is
(the promise of thinking through) [*]thing: a nonspecified ontological category that can be “filled” through ethnographic observation that is designed to allow ontological alterity to inform its content
recursive anthropology --> alterity: a function of the divergence between ethnographic materials and the assumptions the analyst brings to them
(if) ontology: what is ==> alterity: part of what others say ‘what is’ that does not make sense to us
(the danger of) a new metaontological orthodoxy becoming a immutable metaphysic
archeological alterity: things that do not make sense ontologically (escape traditional frameworks)
archeology's new kind of reflexivity
•openness
•wonder: an intentional naivete, naive empiricism (==> sustain altering + enabling meaning, to be besieged & committed to ---> go to Cinderella =/= moving beyond)
•emphasis on descriptive =/= theoretical
•attentiveness to our embodied responses
(a question of critical ontology in archeology -->) how are we to mobilize & manifest (describe & transform) the new past from things? [<-- my question in my research on ajayeb]
•how i am subjectively involved in the past we investigate
◾how i am objectively part of those pasts
the all encompassing (nonlinear) descriptive writings of ancient and antiquarian travelers --> what is encountered imposes itself ==force==> a choice ==> description
kinetic activity + the experience of being in the field
aesthetic attentiveness of bestiaries
pragmatic use of the word ontology in archeology --signal--> the potential world-shifting nature of what is being studied
to be ontological = entirety of the analytical apparatus and what is being studied should be included in the analysis
(caught up in the process:) the object of study + analytical scaffolding + method + analyst
the degree to which an approach is willing to do ontology to itself (investigate its own ontological assumptions)
metaphysical archeology + ontological anthropology --> perspective on reality
(assign t[...]
(26)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.3[...]ers say ‘what is’ that does not make sense to us
(the danger of) a new metaontological orthodoxy becoming a immutable metaphysic
archeological alterity: things that do not make sense ontologically (escape traditional frameworks)
archeology's new kind of reflexivity
•openness
•wonder: an intentional naivete, naive empiricism (==> sustain altering + enabling meaning, to be besieged & committed to ---> go to Cinderella =/= moving beyond)
•emphasis on descriptive =/= theoretical
•attentiveness to our embodied responses
(a question of critical ontology in archeology -->) how are we to mobilize & manifest (describe & transform) the new past from things? [<-- my question in my research on ajayeb]
•how i am subjectively involved in the past we investigate
•how i am objectively part of those pasts
the all encompassing (nonlinear) descriptive writings of ancient and antiquarian travelers --> what is encountered imposes itself ==force==> a choice ==> description
kinetic activity + the experience of being in the field
aesthetic attentiveness of bestiaries
pragmatic use of the word ontology in archeology --signal--> the potential world-shifting nature of what is being studied
to be ontological = entirety of the analytical apparatus and what is being studied should be included in the analysis
(caught up in the process:) the object of study + analytical scaffolding + method + analyst
the degree to which an approach is willing to do ontology to itself (investigate its own ontological assumptions)
metaphysical archeology + ontological anthropology --> perspective on reality
(assign things to preexisting conceptual structures =/=) looking for ways things can have an impact on your thinking, concepts, ontology ==> unlocking what is most “of the past” about things
...................................
Alberti
Ingold
correspondence: (a pre-conceptual practice -->) epistemological intimacy in the practices of art, science, and anthropology
•a way to understand one's own research process
(archeology: a science of correspondence)
Alberti suggesting to separate arts and crafts (for analytical purposes)
artwork: non-conceptual outcomes of practice
artwork & archeological things --share--> ontological problem of how to make something new [~ *sensations/past never before experienced/thought*] out of (circumscribed body of) materials
archeological things carry both sensation & *residue of concepts* with them (~~> artistic research =/= artworks)
==> resurrect the conceptual potential immanent to the specific arrangement of materials (and their temporary for[...]
(29)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.3[...]mposes 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?*
(---> go to metaphor)
scientific interpretation and explanation of the past <-~ archeology
{my work: speculative interpretation and explanation of the past [--> prefigure new becomings + intensification and unleashing of ‘i am part of what 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
[...]
(31)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.4[...]lational 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 epistemic breaking]
questions for the art:
•what effect is produced?
•how does this effect wrench from its materiality what has not been perceived or sensed before?
--> for [...]
(40)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.5[...]cing art as a subjective practice concerned with only aesthetics and affective]
craft: a model for careful practices and knowing the world =/= artwork: a model for how to break out of disciplinary frames and how to think of the ontology of archeological things [--> what Sennett calls epistemic breaking]
questions for the art:
•what effect is produced?
•how does this effect wrench from its materiality what has not been perceived or sensed before?
--> for archeology same question, from the material that remain from the past in the present
(the traditional task of art:)
•defamiliarization: to estrange our common consciousness and sensations of the world
•place of immanence: to project the coming of something materially new that is latent in our current reality. to *treat facts as events* that are about to come into being
•art is non-conceptual : impacting the nervous system without conceptual mediation --> sensations are monumentalized in the artwork for the future
•
...to treat the material of the past as anticipating something new
(my research and work on bestiary:)
•how can we produce new works that challenge us to think and experience archeological things (ajayeb) in new ways without resort to explanation or interpretation through a process of disarticulation, repurposing, and disruption of archeological artworks with a political intent in mind? (interpretive framework)
•how to allow ajayeb to continue to operate effectively on us?
both affective and historical force (of ajayeb)
art engenders material becomings (classical definition)
art engenders imaginative becomings
learning from archeology: to be pre-conceptual : the process of craft, to grasp how concepts make their way into things
undisciplinary space (instead of transdisciplinary)
disarticulation: repurposing and disruption of archeological artworks with a political intent in mind
--> cannot escape the anecdotal when it comes to interpretation --> artifacts (for example a neolithic Balkon clay figurine) become symbols for social position ~= allegorizing (=/= speculation)
historical energy (force) of things = something of the past that endures in them
(old and unhelpful definition of) art: impacting nervous system without conceptual mediation (directly impact living bodies) --engender--> material becomings ["art = giving birth"]
--Alberti--> art (and anthropology) need the pre-conceptual: the process of craft (to grasp how concepts make their way into things)
[*]concept: fragment of past world
maker + material ==emerge==> concept
-in artistic research @apass are we dealing with the simulacra of knowledge?
underst[...]
(52)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.5[...]e potters (and artists) who made the ceramics as crafters = understanding them as *intimately connected with a particular world* <-- knowledge of which came through skilled material practice
#feedback
-how does it apply to digital relations?
•practiced caressing of hand over clay forms (~ handling, nurturance) ==> zoomorphic, anthropomorphic bodies (Ingold call it anthropogenic)
•digital interface CG ==> ?
•
-how to read or confront ajayeb bestiary artifacts and think of them as *taking on something of the pre-conceptual labour that went into them*? --> (?how can it) provoke an art-like response [<=~ sleepwalking: no ontological difference between then and now ==> you are confronted with a raw material of affect and concept =/= past artifacts as vehicle for complex belief systems] }==drive==>
•new sensorial experience
•new conceptual work
---> go to description, Stewart
coalescing of language & concept & ...
[*]drawing: (the effect of being) harassed by reality
to be harassed by ajayeb past people animals (struggling in their reality)
---> go to haunted, possession
[*]art: risk of something new
archeology --> intimate knowledge of materials (--> appealing to art, crafter attune to their material)
my lecture-performances = exploring how to make my knowledge present (to myself so it has a chance to be reconsidered) and how things (ajayeb past bestiary telegram animal) affect me and to *allow them to engender their own concepts and meanings*
...................................
(modern western) human: composed of cultural clothing that hides and controls an essentially animal nature =/= (amazonian) animals have a human sociocultural inner aspect that is “disguised” by an ostensibly bestial bodily form -->{ [subjective particularity of spirit and meaning ==>]*multinatural =/= multicultural*[<== objective universality of body and substance] }
-Viveiros de Castro's dichotomous argument leaves out other modes of knowing, those that i care and haunt for (and i am claimed by them) in specific mystic muslim theology and eastern bestiary (---> go to Marks)
Amerindian “people” : spiritual unity and a corporeal diversity
possessing a soul ==> having a point of view ==> being a subject
==> event = action
(action =/= expression of intentional states)
[*]object: incompletely interpreted subject
“a muddy waterhole is seen by tapirs as a great ceremonial house”
(objectivist epistemology's) ‘to know' = to desubjectify, to make explicit the subject's partial presence in the object =/= (Amerindian shamanism epistemology's) ‘to know' = to personify, something that is always a someone
-the problem is that only[...]
(56)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.6[...]er writing
delight ==make==> impression
*noticing* and *coming back* to familiar places is the beginning of appreciation for multispecies interactions
Tehran expansive and overlapping geographies resist common models (which divide the world into “them” and “us”)
lichen: an association of a fungus and an alga or cyanobacteria, where the non-fungal partner fuels lichen metabolism through photosynthesis
assumptions of human constancy --> autocratic military ideology =/= historically webbed interspecies dependence -=> a different cultural research trajectory
(to understand more about) domestication: web of entanglements
=/= neoliberal hard-line [human =/= wild] understanding of “domestication = human control” (ignoring that such relations might change humans too, ignoring the complex relations of interdependency) <== ideological commitment to human mastery (--> Sana's political commitment to liberalism) }==> (fantasies of) *the wild species self-making* =/= fantasies of control
==> life imprisonment and genetic standardization of domestic animals, wild species are ‘preserved’ in gene banks while their multispecies landscape are destroyed
i want Sana to become a researcher able to know something more about the cultural construction of gender, species, and binds--rather than “freeing” women from their gender, dogs from humans, slaves from masters--which will lead only to the constitution of autocratic liberalism made in the image of human free will and guardianship, another master program...
!?how can i say “let's stay in the prison and study” ...well, maybe i can't
#harem, the question of women confinement (usually at the center of a beautiful dream of order and plenty)
-how can i start and cultivate affection and appreciation for interspecies relations in Tehran today? (--> ways and methods)
-how with my chaotic and extremist iranian freedom-fighter friends we could become allies? (--> network)
-what is my evidences, examples, samples of the lived experience in Tehran? (--> data, stories that stick)
a dichotomy of analysis:
•species found inside human body --> discourse of cohabitation and interdependency
•species found outside human body --> discourse of human impact, management, and control
Engels's just-so story of private property: origin of property was in herds ==> male control of reproduction in human families
cereal domesticated human
in the near east a shift towards gathering multiple small-grain grasses is associated with the 10000 years before domestication
focus on landscape --to--> focus on crops
across Eurasia the rise of state (and their specialised civilization) is associated with the spread of intensive cereal agriculture
(Tsing > Connor)
a political configurat[...]
(57)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%26.4[...]es not stave off fear
•anxiety does not stave off trauma
reflective interpretation
narrativized interpretation
abstract interpretation
dissociation (in spirit possession) ==> (allows other individuals to witness) the loss of consciousness ==> memory traces of history become legible
(change the focus in trauma studies, a reorientation of perspective:)
missed encounter (~ wound) --to--> poorly anticipated encounter (~ accident)
(Caruth's argument:) **[*]trauma: a discourse that opens up ethical possibilities with its demand for a recognition of the need for historicization (of the relationship between destruction and survival)**
****(Morris as an anthropologist call for analysis of the accidental -->) to better comprehend *how history exceeds individual intentions* + how particular conceptions of history may enable more consequential action on the part of historical agents****
==> (to move from) affective symptoms of an overwhelming experience [@Hoda] --to--> the question of effectivity beyond representation
--> to construe an ethical relation to history--in terms of open relation to futurity [=/= an (impossible) mastery of the past]
every artist researcher should investigate:
•how anxiety is informing you
•how trauma is informing you
the question of the political understood as: (@Femke, OSP)
•the question of contingent factors
•the question of unexpected exposures
•the question of (relatively) unconscious processes
(and not of control)
neoliberal economic logics --> image of massness (=/= consciousness of one's collective interests) ==> condition the possibility of social action (movements characterized by a schema in which exposure to events leads to politicization) <-- an older genre of politicization narrative [~ individuals describe their encounter with social injustice, extreme poverty, or excessive violence and then recount a growing consciousness of the structures that produced them, #Robin Hood]
inadvertent and even accidental convergences ==?==> political movements in Southeast Asia (throughout the late 1980s and 1990s) --> (students who participated in antigovernment protests in Rangoon/Yangon in the late 1980) described their entry into the political sphere (less exposed to the object of social injustice, not in terms of an originally shared project, not a shared analysis, but rather) as the result of a situational convergence (from which an ideological project had yet to be fabricated)
(to understand) your relationship to the political as *subjection to force* (and hence) ~=> *the violation of subjectivity* (=/= acceding to a fuller subjectivity)
they were just there (summoned to events the nature of which they did not know in advance) --> *ephemeral mobilization*:
•by anonymous cal[...]
(58)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%27.9[...]ll simply “speak for itself”
Häxan's reception in the 1920s --> to energize a negative, conceptually dogmatic discourse that formed and hardened cinematic taxonomies [particularly the division between “documentary” (nonfiction) and “feature” (fictional) films]
experimentation + evidence making
sexual intercourse, cannibalism, cauldron --solemnize--> pact with the devil
evidentiary thinking
elaborated visualization of the witch stereotype
--> complex nature of *sensual explorations of the flesh* through masochism and exorcism
demonic influence
genres of transfiguration and metamorphosis
Christensen shows how those who were once identified as witches are now the objects of medical and social concern in modern life --> shows the potency of her various forms over time
--> Baxstrom + Meyers
(my work on ajayeb is based on that) [there is a largely] unacknowledged historical tendency and predisposition within the human sciences with roots in much older practices of:
•defining social facts
•discovery, interpretation, production of the real itself
[such as bestiary]
method that allows the researcher to sense
interpret and master forces that appear to be nonsensical (yet held to be present: held to be essential to the reality of everyday social life) --> an epistemological concern
privileged space of the irrational in medical discourses in 19th century: (Jonathan Strauss -->) irrationality (nonsense) was a legitimizing force for medicine in that the very incomprehensibility of the mad created a mysterious and extra-social language that the rising medical profession could adapt to its own purposes
“nonsense” of “the native” [--> my start-up engine in Islam lecture series, a privileged site of mysterious incomprehensibility allowed me to to form the methodological basis for a fieldwork for unknown forces of irrational life in distant societies...]
*anthropology: (a distinct human science from the desire to credibly) master nonsense*
(Baxstrom + Meyers)
anthropologists claiming to have assumed the “point of view” of another (~ fieldworker must achieve the cultivated sensed point of view of another) --> distillation of method & disposition (?) <-- when confronted with the question “who are you?” and “what do you do?”
(according to Malinowski: this) privileged relation to the unknown must emerge through the ability to test what is asserted to be real --> a series of subjective trials subsumed within the rubric of “fieldwork”
*presumptions:
•experiential disposition of the analyst ==> understanding of a phenomenon other wise held to be imaginary and fictional
•witnessing and testimony ==> evidence as to the reality beyond the direct experience of the researcher
<[...]
(59)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.3[...]incomprehensibility of the mad created a mysterious and extra-social language that the rising medical profession could adapt to its own purposes
“nonsense” of “the native” [--> my start-up engine in Islam lecture series, a privileged site of mysterious incomprehensibility allowed me to to form the methodological basis for a fieldwork for unknown forces of irrational life in distant societies...]
*anthropology: (a distinct human science from the desire to credibly) master nonsense*
(Baxstrom + Meyers)
anthropologists claiming to have assumed the “point of view” of another (~ fieldworker must achieve the cultivated sensed point of view of another) --> distillation of method & disposition (?) <-- when confronted with the question “who are you?” and “what do you do?”
(according to Malinowski: this) privileged relation to the unknown must emerge through the ability to test what is asserted to be real --> a series of subjective trials subsumed within the rubric of “fieldwork”
*presumptions:
•experiential disposition of the analyst ==> understanding of a phenomenon other wise held to be imaginary and fictional
•witnessing and testimony ==> evidence as to the reality beyond the direct experience of the researcher
([Malinowski updated and secularized a much older epistemology of] Luther:) faith = a commitment to the representation of a truth --> Western Christianity's own efforts to discern truth and the nature of the world
proliferation of witches in 15th century Europe
reassuring relief for the pious believer: force Satan (and his followers) from the shadows through an interpretive expertise over the concrete secondary manifestations of God's reality --✕--> (most had no luxury to imagine) *the embrace of life that the devil urges in binary opposition to that of the good*
--> Devil interfering with the most intimate communications with the Divine
-how does one really know who is speaking when prayer is returned?
[for] the demonologists of the 15th and 16th century --> “God must exist because Satan is right in front of me!” : reality of witches ==> Satan
Institoris, Sprenger, Johannes Nider,
the name of the witch ~=> sacrilegious and inhuman deeds (subject to verification)
*inquisitors believed that what was reported to them was possible* (still they desired proof) <== interweaving of learned demonology into the fabric of a dominant theology (<-- sovereignty of God ratified primarily through the worldly evidence of Satan) + invisibility of the spiritual world was expressed as an essential given
{for the inquisitor (witch hunter) it was never enough to simply “believe” <==> a narrative must be produced that at least partially satisfied the demands of evidence}--> *interrogation under torture = an experimental form of knowing in crisis*
truth[...]
(60)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.4[...]rovide that proof
***interrogation under torture = an experimental form of knowing in crisis*** [#styles of knowing]
confession -->{ *status of witnessing = a form of truth* }~-> Boyle's New Experiments 1660 revolutionized practical experimental procedures in the laboratory (for gernerations to come...)
•experiments such as the trial by water demonstrates a deep (if not misguided) *appreciation of cause-and-effect relations* relative to the invisible forces at work in the natural world (=/= indifference to the truth, retreat into superstition) ~=> rendering of such procedures in expressive works of *art* (indispensable to nascent protoscience --today--> an essential element of science's ability to express truth)
_+***'`~~/!=-~>
***the logic of gathering evidence***
(fundamental assumption of anthropology:)
[asserted by Levy-Bruhl:] ontological difference between the nonsensical world of “primitives” and the science of Western research ==> *“natives” could not (or would not) produce a “proper” explanation of the forces around them or their own beliefs and motivations in relation to these forces* (==> testimony + experience became essential tools for ethnographers)
--> ***encounter between researcher and subject*** [was never that of good faith intercultural sharing] ==constituted==> a series of severe tests (by which the researcher could gather necessary empirical evidence in order to make a felicitous truth statement regarding what was “really” at play)
}--> the nonsense to be mastered shifted from the demonic (~ incredible forces at play for the inquisitor ديوى) --to--> ديوانه the misguided tall tales fo the native
---->{this is relevant for artistic research environment, encounter/friction between different styles of knowing
#feedback: mastering the nonsense of the other artist-researcher
@apass, research presentation: misguided tall tales artists tell themselves}
[#feedback as passion]
Avital --> a passion or experience without mastery, without subjectivity, testimony, as passion, always renders itself vulnerable to doubt
([?can we think of] artistic feedback as a) *scene of ethnographic encounter* --> a kind of *antagonistic trial* (whereby the ghosts and gods of the natives are forced out of the shadows and made concretely apparent to the senses of the ethnographer)
--> (in this context) fieldwork ==> knowledge of hauntings + other nonsense that is itself haunted ~-> what gives testimony its power of fact {--Derrida--> if testimony truly resolves as certainty or mere information, it would lose its function as testimony --> testimony must allow itself to be haunted}--> [*]testimony: visualization of what cannot normally be seen
[my misunderstanding of ethnography ==> my approach to giving and receiving feedback --> the workshop i gave ‘little fables of practice'] *(your) ‘[...]
(61)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%30.9[...]styles of knowing
#feedback: mastering the nonsense of the other artist-researcher
@apass, research presentation: misguided tall tales artists tell themselves}
[#feedback as passion]
Avital --> a passion or experience without mastery, without subjectivity, testimony, as passion, always renders itself vulnerable to doubt
([?can we think of] artistic feedback as a) *scene of ethnographic encounter* --> a kind of *antagonistic trial* (whereby the ghosts and gods of the natives are forced out of the shadows and made concretely apparent to the senses of the ethnographer)
--> (in this context) fieldwork ==> knowledge of hauntings + other nonsense that is itself haunted ~-> what gives testimony its power of fact {--Derrida--> if testimony truly resolves as certainty or mere information, it would lose its function as testimony --> testimony must allow itself to be haunted}--> [*]testimony: visualization of what cannot normally be seen
>
[my misunderstanding of ethnography ==> my approach to giving and receiving feedback --> the workshop i gave ‘little fables of practice'] *(your) ‘fact’ must allow itself to be parasitized by precisely what it excludes from its inner depths, of being a fable*
the picture of researcher's humanity (@Sana):
•researcher = detective, examining magistrate دادرس
•crime = fact
•guilty = interlocutor (in reality they guide you into [often organized] labyrinths)
•inquest = strategic operation
**the imaginative results of “I witnessing”**
@apass [what we do mainly is] witnessing eachother's works and mode of existence
+ paradoxical necessity of an expressive element
testimony + experimental results + expert inquisitorial interpretation ==> (an early versoin of) ‘case study’ ==> formation of ‘general law’
*inquisitorial strategies* (developed in the human sciences from the 19th centuryentury onward): جزء به کل ”(close analysis of) salient individual cases ==> hidden tendencies visible” [--> and is abused in storytelling]
[in both science and art] seeking to move away from *reliance on metaphysics* to a *reliance on verifiable details* (in their own expressions)
acknowledging satan's unquestioned power <--doubt--> truth-value of statements made by unlearned witnesses
*possession* (confessions of another sort)
confessions that were not ‘procured’ [ritualized torture of the witch trial to generate evidence] but rather ‘volunteered’ and ‘enacted’ (without the aid of inquisitor)
<== individual turmoil (=/= juridical manipulation)
==> medicalization (of the invisible forces) --> (a new mode) *didactic & forensic*
17th century --> a shift in the empirical approach to invisible forces
clinical hysteria --> fascination with a power that (by definitio[...]
(64)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%31[...]er forces openly acknowledged to be invisible and insensible in themselves***
•the exorcists (building upon the techniques of inquisitors and witch-hunters) take on possession acted as the *bridge across this abyss*
•the neurologists and psychologists draw unknowable forces out of the inner voids via the *symptom* --Malinowski--> witches, spirits, demons acting as middlemen and guids (=/= explicit target of inquiry) in the field of worker's journey to the dark cornerss of the real
----> (Baxstrom's anthropological insight is useful in artistic feedback, for) in apass: (we use exorcist technique + clinical symptomology) to bridge across the abyss between the artwork and artist (~ the enunciation and enunciator) --Sina--> ‘enunciation is the guide to an enunciator’ #feedback
Levy-Bruhl's haughty binarized “us and them” (his focus on “the primitive” as a category of social analysis and his insistence upon an unbridgeable epistemic gap) --> darker history of human sciences: an embarrassing historical curiosity... *an unsunstainable position* --Baxstrom--> Levy-Bruhl lost his position in th canon because the logic of his arguments regarding the forces that shaped the life-worlds of non-western people denied the possibility of a field researcher's being able to assume the *point of view* of the native in the bold manner that Malinowski declared was not only possible but actually the highest aspiration for anthropology [--> also the aspiration for critical feedback?]
(counterepistemological) Levy-Bruhl =/= Malinowski --> ([*]feedback: an art of engagement informed by critical relatedness and) **anthropological expertise grounded in the careful cultivation of a *sympathetic knowledge of the other* as a way of empirically knowing that other** : *method of sympathetic association*
in apass --> the laboratory of the times located in the person of the researcher himself
grounded Levy-Bruhl's science in the real <== he rejected a focus on a knowable singular subject in favor of a science based on the ability to detect and interpret the invisible forces that worked to produce a particular “mentality” [of the artist in the case of bad feedback]
(Levy-Bruhl's mistake:) systematic interrogation and illumination of mobile invisible forces that produced beings wholly unlike us =/={ method of sympathetic association --> participant observation: the felicity of evidence produced through the qualitative experiential methodological instruments [--> comes to define the modes of critical relatedness in apass]
(since 15th century) investigators ==> staking one's claim to the real on the mastery of those forces that relentlessly elude a plain direct visibility or sensibility ~~--> human sciences
*we still hunt ghosts, fueled by a desire operationalized in a method of being close enough to something to sense it, because our form[...]
(66)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%31.2[...]across the abyss between the artwork and artist (~ the enunciation and enunciator) --Sina--> ‘enunciation is the guide to an enunciator’ #feedback
Levy-Bruhl's haughty binarized “us and them” (his focus on “the primitive” as a category of social analysis and his insistence upon an unbridgeable epistemic gap) --> darker history of human sciences: an embarrassing historical curiosity... *an unsunstainable position* --Baxstrom--> Levy-Bruhl lost his position in th canon because the logic of his arguments regarding the forces that shaped the life-worlds of non-western people denied the possibility of a field researcher's being able to assume the *point of view* of the native in the bold manner that Malinowski declared was not only possible but actually the highest aspiration for anthropology [--> also the aspiration for critical feedback?]
(counterepistemological) Levy-Bruhl =/= Malinowski --> ([*]feedback: an art of engagement informed by critical relatedness and) **anthropological expertise grounded in the careful cultivation of a *sympathetic knowledge of the other* as a way of empirically knowing that other** : *method of sympathetic association*
in apass --> the laboratory of the times located in the person of the researcher himself
grounded Levy-Bruhl's science in the real <== he rejected a focus on a knowable singular subject in favor of a science based on the ability to detect and interpret the invisible forces that worked to produce a particular “mentality” [of the artist in the case of bad feedback]
(Levy-Bruhl's mistake:) systematic interrogation and illumination of mobile invisible forces that produced beings wholly unlike us =/={ method of sympathetic association --> participant observation: the felicity of evidence produced through the qualitative experiential methodological instruments [--> comes to define the modes of critical relatedness in apass]
(since 15th century) investigators ==> staking one's claim to the real on the mastery of those forces that relentlessly elude a plain direct visibility or sensibility ~~--> human sciences
*we still hunt ghosts, fueled by a desire operationalized in a method of being close enough to something to sense it, because our form of mastery demands a closeness to things unseen, unprovable, indeed ‘nonsensical,’ yet unquestionably ‘there’* -Baxstrom
...................................
Despret on Derrida's animal
the act of being seen by an animal ==> Derrida groups together on the end hand “scientists and philosophers =/= prophets and poets”
{ Bateson, Goodall, Bekoff, Smuts, and many others have met the gaze of the living diverse animals and in response undone an redone themselves & their sciences =/= Derrida }--Haraway--> why did Derrida leave unexamined the practices of communication outside the writing technologies he [...]
(67)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%31.2[...]rawayian) re-member: enact the past, collect and compose ~/= (Despretian) to inherit: giving oneself an account of a certain task, which is more than just remembering
[storymaking] *to make a story = to reconstruct, to fabulate, to offer other presents and futures to the past* [~/= Sina: to fabulate = to give other pasts to the present and future]
how to ask the question of work properly?
you have to consider animals as other than victims, natural and cultural idiots that *need to be liberated* despite themselves --> ‘liberating the world of animals' = 'freeing the human world of the presence of animals’ [---> go to fabulation of animal human in the movie How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World]
=/= telegram's animals
*humans and animals must (not just considered together but) always be imagined together*
ceasing to consider “animal = victim” ==> (?how in telegram media) animals involve themselves (since they are not natural and cultural idiots), just as human (breeders) are not “exploiting,” but giving, receiving, exchanging, raising, and growing with, their animals
when Despret is putting the question of “do animals work?” to breeders, it is a real experiment : to explore the researcher's propositions with the breeders --> to make them hesitate (~ is about *what does it mean to speculate in such a way?*) [=/= means of knowing through information (to gather data or opinions) : “what do breeders think of X?"]
Despret’ amazing rigour --> the only place that the question (considering whether animals do work) can be brought forward is the place where only the meaning associated with exploitation can matter (in places where both humans and animals are greatly mistreated)
-place where the evidence of such work is found, are places where animals are industrially “produced” --> their behaviors appear very definitely as belonging to a work relationship
director of animal resources --> (in such frame) animal: occupy the place of an obscure underclass, malleable, serviceable, and disposable in the end
moder feeder operations --Porcher--> animals sometimes wanted to help
asking the breeders: could you help us learn how to ask our question so that it has a chance of making sense to other people? ==> they also could explore the *manner in which we were obligated to formulate our questions*
(Harawayiean) responsibility: a relationship crafted into intra-action through which entities, subjects, and objects, come into being
lead cow (the one who trusts the breeder, and one the herd trusts, usually is in the front) =/= dominant cow (in the hierarchy of the herd, is found in the middle of the herd)
a theme in animal technicians
paying attention to animals = being able to feel the limits that animals ask us to take into account (mo[...]
(68)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%36[...]en everything happens as it should, we don't see the work*** (=/= notion of work in art)
@apass
(when they do what has to be done in response to an order, cow's) obedience looks “mechanical” (~/=? Cinderella's obedience [?not in a mechanical age])
[=/= art's work <== conflict that disturb this order of things]
(the fieldwork of Despret helping me to realize that) *the moments without conflict* are not something merely natural, self-evident, or mechanical --> they require from the cows (or someone whose work is invisible) the activity of pacification, in which they make compromises (groom each other, exchange gestures of politeness, etc.)
•dogs and horses who are asked to serve as therapeutic assistants for humans: these animals often have a passive air and seem to simply be letting things happen --> *their cooperation is based on a remarkable ability to hold themselves back* [<-- i saw this, in a theater piece for blind, i was sitting next to two assistant dogs, and could feel strongly their efforts to sit motionless in the dark within the crowds] ~~--> but non of this is perceived...
only by observing the many ways that cows can resist the breeders, doing something other than what is expected of them ==> the researcher could see how they are actively invested in the work : when the cows show that they are unwilling to do what is wanted ==> their “good will” appeared (the effect of their willingness)
•this is an interested problem @apass, the notion of asking participants to participate in an “active” way =/= animal work }--> “working well for an artist = violating normative organization (recommendations, regulations, procedures, codes, specifications)" = تمرد tamarod recalcitrance: practical or collective intelligence appearing when intentional mistakes are made, or when feigned misunderstanding leads to active disobedience*****
Vicki Hearne + Despret
why dogs often drop the stick they fetch a couple of feet in front of you. it is a way for the dog to give to the human a sense of the limits to the authority that she is ready to concede, with an almost mathematical precision, reminding us that not everything goes without saying ♥
‘communication with animals = being together engaged in work’ :
•learning patience in regard to them
•respecting them as they are ==imply==> you know them & recognise them
•
@Leo
we are required to think about people and animals as **connected in a single experience** (in which they jointly constitute their identities) #chimera
==> (obligates us to consider) the manner in which they keep faith with each other --> they respond to each other through the consequences of their action & their responses are part of the consequences (=/= act based on shared assumptions)
{being a victim ==imply==> passivity + all its consequence[...]
(69)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%36.1[...]pret--> Lorenz aimed at elucidating ‘meaning’ in and through the relationships he sustained with the animals he was studying ==>
•he understood for a little goose what mother is/means by letting his own body be caught in that meaning of mother
•he achieved what ‘companionship’ is/means for a jackdaw through being fed and playing with, and flying lessons
•
--> ***what matters in the animal's world = what bears meaning from their point of view***
presence
*if the scientists body is evoked, it is never for itself nor is it named as such --> when seeking the body, we are offered a surprisingly abstract concept: “presence” (under the guise of “presence of the observer”) =/= body
-the presence has no skin, it does not sweat, nor does it eat, sleep, dream, fear --> [*]presence: the perceived body which never acknowledges itself as a body (there is no presence that could be unperceived in one way or in an other) = disembodied body <== *science: the cognitive activity par excellence*
•obliterates the actual presence of the observer --understood--> (in terms of a) convenient and non-problematized split “presence =/= absence”
•(?if these attempts succeed in) reducing the reactivity of the animal to the researcher =/= wildboyz
}--> ‘not having a body' = a mean to preclude (to prevent or to avoid) **the always possible reciprocity of the encounter** [--> aliens are watching us!]
}--> ‘having a body’ discloses and renders perceptible (it is the actual condition of) the very existence of reciprocity of the encounter
how scientists (and artists) construe their presence in the field
*the will to be there without being there*
the problematic “animals react =/= animal don't react”
(also in art -->) ***the regime of distrust of influence*** [--> fable of ‘artist's original interiority']
-*- what does ‘meaningful’ means? -*-
scientists aim to find new methods to focus on those behaviors that are most meaningful to the animals themselves
•Shirly Strum --> I tried to let the baboons themselves “tell” me what was ‘important’ (-how a tree can tell you what is important to them?) -with the baboonss: nothing made them believe that she could be a baboon, so she decided after a while that she could try to urinate while staying among the baboons ==> surprise (=/= trying not to disturb the baboons with her body) --> her body (style, gender, smell, look, anime, etc.) made her enter into relationships with the animals in a new mode, **as a living person (like them) she creates with them an embodied proximity** (==> embodied affinities) [<-- Jassem is very good at it. this happens as well in apass research environment between artists]
---> go to Cinderella taking shower with her birds in the attic {urine, noise, surprise}
•Mark Bekoff --> empathy: possibility of shari[...]
(70)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%36.5[...]
scientist work [observing, collecting events, meeting them, writing about, inscribing them into theories --> explain why they do what they do] ==> *makes their animals more real*
--Despret--> a praxiographic account [~= feedback] (paying attention to the way scientists embody their work) ==> *make scientists more real*
(for apass) we need praxiography =/= philosophy or theory [of artistic research]
Sina's note taking in apass --> how *practices at some point become words*
#feedback in apass ==make==> artists and their work more real
feedback ==> interpretive version --> coexistence of the various versions of a multiple object (<-- this is localized or *situated* : it happens “there” and nowhere else)
work of observation in apass:
•conceptualizations of short-term social exchanges
•conceptualizations of agency-structure dynamics
•getting closer to the everyday activities of those speaking
•(context driven?) forms of analysis
•methodological repertoire
•note: composites of linguistic repertoires that are embedded in meanings (is part of what happens in apass, not after what happens.) --> a form of digestion***
*praxiography: forms of analysis produced by practice researchers, a type of ethnographic method that converses with multiplicity (--> following a trail, walking a path =/= map out a field ~= philosophy of artistic research), doctors [analyst] and patients [analysand, artist] ascribe meaning in different ways --Annemarie--> yet they perform or enact reality together --> they *do the reality of a disease [problem, artwork]*
++{Annemarie uses the term “enact” to show that objects (such as body and disease) exist as articulations of the practices that produce them (~= Butler's performance), enacting (not explained by what went before, present remains unstable, patterns and routines and surprises) =/= making (‘causes’ lie when ‘making’ happened)}
[*]theory: conversations about the realities our words help to explore (=/= seeking to fix concepts)
in knowledge practice realities are various brought into being (+ limits of that adaptability) --> *ontology:
--anthropology--> people order “reality” seriously differently
--biomedical--> why, when, where is this truth realized? what does it depend on? what are its alternatives? --> *ontology does not precede knowledge practices* (various practices are closely linked ==> ontologies are linked [for example a patient who talks to a doctor in a consulting room may receive a clinical diagnosis, while laboratory measurements ‘do’ her disease in a different way. or in artistic research environments such as apass.])
(Annemarie's) praxiography --> asking what are the techniques that make things (their empirical, epistemological found objects) visible, audible, tangible, knowable (for this artist in front of me #feedback @apass)**
[...]
(71)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%36.9[...]Cinderella's empathy: make one think with & with the body
--Despret--> *empathy becomes a scientific tool* that need to be shaped, forged, refined, embodied, a tool that attunes bodies
[*]care: it matters for them that it matters for their animals (***what matters for the other person becomes your matters***)
how to act in a polite manner in a baboon's world? (or in an artist's world, when we give feedbacks)
{seeing like a baboon =/= acting like a baboon = corresponding with a baboon}--> *they transform themselves in order to create partial connections* (James’ “acting as if”) =/= performative
•to act with the baboons (learn how a tree gives you dirty looks, how it resists the proposition of your presence)
•Lorenz's “becoming with”
•Despret's “the miracle of the attunement”
embodied communication --> responsible relation --> constructing the possibility of engagement
[*]responsible: the one who constructs him/herself in order to be available to a respond
--Despret--> (to imagine that we can actually) correspond through the choreographic language of our bodies
“traying to get knowledge" = knowing for the sake of knowing }<-- 19th century adventure hunter archeologist imperialism
***(for James) [*]emotion: what makes us feel (=/= what is felt), an experience of making available ==> an occasion for others : ****emotions ==> dispose our bodies**** (+ our bodies dispose our emotions) @Chloe
-if we want to feel an emotion, we can dispose our body to produce it (<-- this was my method in my early performances in 2014)
Lorenz, Strum, Smuts, Despret
learn to become what it becames when it acts ‘as if’ --> *stakes of reliable knowledge : to thing with*
...................................
Baxstrom --> anthropology of the anthropologist
Despret --> ethology of the ethologist
اشعیا Isaiah provides a vivid imaginary of multispecies bonds and flourishing: the wold will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them
*nonhuman animals are as much subjects of history as humans are*
-why do we listen to prohpets?
quasi-theological and anthropocentric notions such as that of the great chain of being
(the importance of) changing ourselves as humans ==> change animals
•how changing human habits also gives other animals a chance to change theirs?
[*]ethology: a practice of habits involving distance, knowing activity, politeness, milieu, alliance
(i am interested in women) not because of gender [= identity politics, political correctness], but because of *their practice and the question they pursue*
what parrots talk about
talking birds and primates as sub[...]
(72)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%37[...]als
•how changing human habits also gives other animals a chance to change theirs?
[*]ethology: a practice of habits involving distance, knowing activity, politeness, milieu, alliance
(i am interested in women) not because of gender [= identity politics, political correctness], but because of *their practice and the question they pursue*
what parrots talk about
talking birds and primates as subjective interlocutors who can become persons in the exchanges allowed by language
*they never posed the question of knowing what a raven could, through this somewhat maniacal behavior, teach them about what interested it*
-(curious) being always teach you what that being is interested in
very bottom of the ladder of choices...
for Tehran:
1. memory studies
2. kalagh shenasi (raven studies) کلاغ شناسی
ravens, evidently, do not want to obey any of the rules that make research possible: the incivility that excommunicated them from the laboratoies of the behaviorists having already been stigmatized from the time of the Flood (in Noah's ark)
ravens are by all account unreliable <-- calling into question the intelligence of their researchers, the pertinence of their models, and the solidity of their dispositives
---> go to Kelile Demne
*the ravens literally recruit their researcher*
to [*]recruit: they will reveal to him the resolution of an enigma the difficulty and the interest of which would be in accord with what makes them impossible to study
(from) season --to--> season
(from) enigma --to--> findings
(from) hypothesis --to--> tests
suspense and sudden turns ==> transform all that we know about ravens
the ravens present a behavior that has no sense from the point of view of evolution
the “guilty” of the story are given from the beginning
---> go to [Daston's] historian of science (always knew how the story ended): imagine you are the kind of a person who cheats when reading mystery novels, and you read the last page first to know who did it, and then when you read the rest of mystery story, you know everything is building towards this climax, you read it in a very different way than the person who has to retrace all that have been implanted in your way by the author to throw you off the scent of the real villain {==> you lose the past in the image of the present}
+ scientist (who wish to have a) story about *why we believe what we believe now and why it is right* [knowing that everything we know now will be overturned if not now later]--> pathos and progress of science {==> negates science's enormous creativity and capacity for renovation}
-*Foucault showed how many more objects [sexuality, etc.] have histories (that we thought they don't, that they are constant for all humanity fo[...]
(73)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%37.1[...] ignore others, and you will multiply the copies of yourself* --> *your animal will be similar to others and all the variations be nothing but details of the same motive* [=/= Cinderella]}
how does the motive make the “crime” an achievement for the raven?
how (to accord) this achievement (with that which) translate to (the raven's everyday) survival?
(register of) negotiations of interest and stakes ~/= (politeness of) “getting to know” by posing the question, in terms of achievement, what it is that interests the raven
--> to elucidate (not just what and how, but) why the raven does what it does
•the ravens will not show you straightforwardly what counts for them --> you have to create situations that permit the ravens to help you decide (among all the contesting fictions) the right fiction [#artistic feedback as fictioning]
dance of hesitation
(a cadaver لاشه, once a preditor, waiting for an imprudent raven) to reverse the situation: to convert the bird into a little more of itself
==> salutary egoism: it would be better to be with many others in the case of this type of error
organization
cooperation
i find, you open
*work of the researcher = leading the ravens to take a position in relation to his fictions and hypothesis* (resisting those that don't explain, clarifying those that do) --Despret--> **the researcher must create a dispositive that confers on the ravens “the power not to submit to his interpretations”** <-- politeness of “getting to know” {"getting to know you” does not necessarily turn on an attentive benevolence but on the art of finding the forces, and exchanging them, in an exercise of [*]rivalry: (constituted by) a clever mixture of complicity & opposition}
test of the intelligence and cunning (of each other)
(in the case of ravens [and #feedback in art])
theoretically --> we understand nothing
practically --> we have to learn their tricks to be able to approach them
**a matter of finding the procedures that attest to the pertinence of explanations** (=/= a matter of explaining/understanding them)
enigma --{(like good detective stories) inscribes the protagonists in a relation of}--> rivalry هم اورى : if you want to understand them you must try to be as smart and cunning than they are (not letting oneself be duped by appearances)
politeness --> suspicion ~= respect (‘re-spectare’ to look twice)
•confidence without verification offers little guarantee as to its robustness
we want to witness in a reliable manner = we want that which we learn from the ravens is to be treated with confidence = we want to define ourselves as authorized by them to speak in their names = we want to (required to) offer them the opportunity to show what they can do (with the *great fl[...]
(75)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%37.3[...]cally --> we have to learn their tricks to be able to approach them
**a matter of finding the procedures that attest to the pertinence of explanations** (=/= a matter of explaining/understanding them)
enigma --{(like good detective stories) inscribes the protagonists in a relation of}--> rivalry هم اورى : if you want to understand them you must try to be as smart and cunning than they are (not letting oneself be duped by appearances)
politeness --> suspicion ~= respect (‘re-spectare’ to look twice)
•confidence without verification offers little guarantee as to its robustness
we want to witness in a reliable manner = we want that which we learn from the ravens is to be treated with confidence = we want to define ourselves as authorized by them to speak in their names = we want to (required to) offer them the opportunity to show what they can do (with the *great flexibility of our interpretation*)
/>
[*]trap
(enigma of the apparently inexplicable behavior) --> *how to ask the ravens, with the same politeness, to take a position in relations to all the possible conjectures of the investigation?* how to ask them to teach us the good explanation, the right motive? ==> the researcher will have to learn the ***art of the trap and the net*** = the art of the lure and the trick = ***the art of learning from those whose enigma you are trying to solve*** (and have no intention of helping you) --> ‘how that which counts can count for them’
•*the art of metis / cunning intelligence* : the particular form of intelligence that the greeks (learning from hunters and fishermen) cultivated = intuition شهود + cunning مکر + perspicacity فراست + dissimulation فریب + improvisation بدیهه + vigilant attention هوشيار + sense of timeliness بجا (<-- this type of “getting to know” was constituted exaclty to be found in a domain where human intelligence is conss constantly at grips with the land or sea animals in an are where humans saw their intelligence and techniques transform in learning from animals**** [-how to prolong the possibility of this transformation?]) <-- *it is the only way of getting to know that can hope to address intelligent highly flexible* (Despret > Heinrish) = ravens who require of those who want to know them the same flexibility and the same intelligence
}-->[reading ajayeb bestiary as enigma; Bambi's mother studies; little mermaid; (using Despret's ethological research to think about) art of feedback ~= getting to know you =/= audience engagement]
strange politeness
art of cunning (lures + manipulation) --> enticing ravens
*seeing without being seen*
obliging them : luring them to actualize the choices : ***creating situations as if they were natural*** (so as to let the birds do the talking)
(it is a matter of) rendering them more robust [giving them the occ[...]
(77)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%37.3[...]ity فراست + dissimulation فریب + improvisation بدیهه + vigilant attention هوشيار + sense of timeliness بجا (<-- this type of “getting to know” was constituted exaclty to be found in a domain where human intelligence is constantly at grips with the land or sea animals in an are where humans saw their intelligence and techniques transform in learning from animals**** [-how to prolong the possibility of this transformation?]) <-- *it is the only way of getting to know that can hope to address intelligent highly flexible* (Despret > Heinrish) = ravens who require of those who want to know them the same flexibility and the same intelligence
}-->[reading ajayeb bestiary as enigma; Bambi's mother studies; little mermaid; (using Despret's ethological research to think about) art of feedback ~= getting to know you =/= audience engagement]
strange politeness
art of cunning (lures + manipulation) --> enticing ravens
*seeing without being seen*
obliging them : luring them to actualize the choices : ***creating situations as if they were natural*** (so as to let the birds do the talking)
(it is a matter of) rendering them more robust [giving them the occasion to resists, of giving them *the power to send the researcher/storyteller to work* =/= to disarticulate (what Ferdosi does in Shahnameh to the Div)]
to find an enticement that interests them ~= to let himself be recruited by them
[from Latin “cresc-” grow, rise ==> crescent, crew, decrease, crescendo, recruit]
to trust them = to act like them
@apass feedback (differential knowledge that is created because of not trusting)
the lure could be used to respond to this question: the ravens fall for the trick
...not only do the ravens not respond to questions but they pose new ones
-how could we ask them (the ravens, trees, etc.) to verify our hypothesis (about them)?
*he has no answers =/= he has nine hypothesis*
biological detective stories
curiosity (for the things you discover that you don't know) <== the more you know
more cunning
more imagination
more activities
--to--> obligate ravens to choose between hypothesis
{ Heinrish: “It is still dark, and I'm already being awakened by raven calls! Several birds are flying over Kaflunk making short, high-pitched calls that are unlike the usual quorks. These calls convey excitement. The birds are flying to a kill! I feel it. Even I can understand, and I too am recruited” }--Despret--> ***if this recruitment by nonhumans was able to acquire such an efficacy, it is because the human was transformed by those whose enigma he was trying to understand*** [=/= animal rights activist ==> evidence arrive in the form of a weakened raven that has to be saved]
***letting himself be drawn in[...]
(78)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%37.4[...]tended, can feel [...] I also feel I can detect a raven's surprise, happiness, bravado, and self-aggrandizement
(recognizing one another ==>) to go by way of what the ravens demand --Cinderella--> *progress often depends more on how well one follows the situation than on how well one controls* (especially when control is difficult)
•one must learn to ask them to give evidence differently and to try to understand *how a raven ponders a question*
and now, when everything is suddenly new, this bird acts as if nothing is out of the ordinary! [...] I can only guess that they see it not as an absolute but as departures from the accepted. when everything is different, then comparisons cease, and almost anything can be accepted -Heinrish
(--> integration)
tame
questions that the other ones do not allow to be asked
tamed and be tamed to better find out what matters from a raven's point of view
>
gain the trust to respond to the demands of the politeness of *getting to know*
•the dispositive of taming then proves to be a privileged access of “getting to know” : it actualizes competences that have less chance of occuring in usual conditions (those of the birds and those of the researcher) ==> transforms habits (those of the birds and those of the one who investigate them)
aviary مرغدانی
the most adventurous & the most curious ==> the most attached to the researcher (to Cinderella) ==> hierarchy takes shape as a function of bravery [=/= bravery of adventure in the shape of radical detachment and fluidity]
(when) *investigator becomes biographer* (==> the story changes)
(how when why) the fact of recruiting must be linked to demonstrations of bravery
position in the hierarchy
manner of recruiting
shyness: dancing a little dance of hesitation
(Despret's account of how Heinrish succeeded in) recruiting the ravens around his problem <~~~~> *he sufficiently recruited himself to invent pertinent ways of addressing them* ==> the models are now commensurate متناسب with their unpredictability
@apass
Heinrish becomes their expert and their reliable spokesperson ==> (like Pierre) he could now convince and interest his colleagues in terms that count for them (==> enroll other researchers to pose other questions) ==> he could bear witness for them
=/= Hitchcock's the birds --> nature turned to horror, based on in Germany in mid-1990s fifty ravens invaded the idyllie Swabian Alps region... ==> their killing would be necessary
(chain of recruitment:) the German ravens had in thier turn succeeded in recruiting the representative of the american ravens, and Heinrish was able to recruit ecologists, who in their turn mobilized experts and politicians, who themselves modified the habits of the owners[...]
(79)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%37.5[...]o know” : it actualizes competences that have less chance of occuring in usual conditions (those of the birds and those of the researcher) ==> transforms habits (those of the birds and those of the one who investigate them)
aviary مرغدانی
the most adventurous & the most curious ==> the most attached to the researcher (to Cinderella) ==> hierarchy takes shape as a function of bravery [=/= bravery of adventure in the shape of radical detachment and fluidity]
(when) *investigator becomes biographer* (==> the story changes)
(how when why) the fact of recruiting must be linked to demonstrations of bravery
position in the hierarchy
manner of recruiting
shyness: dancing a little dance of hesitation
(Despret's account of how Heinrish succeeded in) recruiting the ravens around his problem <~~~~> *he sufficiently recruited himself to invent pertinent ways of addressing them* ==> the models are now commensurate متناسب with their unpredictability
@apass
Heinrish becomes their expert and their reliable spokesperson ==> (like Pierre) he could now convince and interest his colleagues in terms that count for them (==> enroll other researchers to pose other questions) ==> he could bear witness for them
=/= Hitchcock's the birds --> nature turned to horror, based on in Germany in mid-1990s fifty ravens invaded the idyllie Swabian Alps region... ==> their killing would be necessary
(chain of recruitment:) the German ravens had in thier turn succeeded in recruiting the representative of the american ravens, and Heinrish was able to recruit ecologists, who in their turn mobilized experts and politicians, who themselves modified the habits of the owners of the cows and sheep... [---> go to Tsing's coalescence]
***amazing interspecific recruitment***
Sina --telegram--> visual animal --inventing--> hallucinating --spoiled--> dissociated
Goda --Boicic--> wounded dog --saving--> mothering --> traumatized (left alone)
wolf observers
Heinrish's colleagues who study wolves in Yellowstone Natural Park
the peaceful cohabitation between the wolves and ravens
in Yellowstone when the ravens are in the presence of wolves, do not demonstrate any timidity and do not hesitate a second before eating --> the wolves allow ravens to conquer their fear --> wolves changed the constrains that hold sway over the habits of the ravens
the ravens of much more alert and vigilant than the wolves (the birds serve the wolves as extra eyes and ears)
the prophecy translated in terms of recruitment --Despret--> who could have thought, if not no doubt a descendant of La Fontaine, that it is the ravens who protect the wolves and permit then to eat with their eyes closed? ♥
...................................
[...]
(81)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%37.5[...]ence of an artifact ==> the possibility of taking into account the fact that the animal would have a point of view on the situation
(to take measure of) what one's anxiety prompts (in the course of research):
•expanding the imagination
•paralyzing the imagination ==> injection of more control
sciences that mobilize the beings that respond to it
each experiment indicates not only the manner in which the animals generally experience the procedures --but--> the way in which each of the animals lives them as a function of the perception that it has of them, as a function of what it expects
(Despret affirming that) there is no *artifact* unless there is *generalization*
*the time of the experimental dispositive* is not the same since it is set within a provisional and short time (five days if testing, corresponding to the work week) while *the time of the farm* is a time of accumulated memories and experience
-the memory of the food eaten before
#Cinderella
it expects something else <== what one gives it is not the sole cause involved
animals certainly respond to a question, but it is not the one we pose to them
*the researchers compartmentalize the research; the animals to not stop prompting them to decompartmentalize it* ♥
(always) the artifact --constitutes--> the object of critique
animals do not judge an *abstract situation*, but a situation offered to them *as it is offered* to them
(Cinderella's) reciprocal habituation --> animal itself actively takes the questions and the presence of the researcher into consideration
to negate the condition of research --> exchange judgment and opinions (+ mutually affect one another)
why is ‘interest’ a bad motive, in this frame?
-because the animal must be interested in other things besides the human being, it must continue to live its life as a goat or a sheep --✕--> “the good animal: the animal responds to her observer”
...................................
Singh + Dave --> ordinary affects of killing (animal) --> anthropology of ethics =/= Agamben's killablity (linked with sovereignty): routinized emotionally indifferent production of bare life (capacity to decide which bodies can be killed, without the killing counting either as homicide or as a sacrifice)
normative moral claims
(Laidlaw, Foucault) ethical life: reflexive practice of freedom --humanistic-->
•traditions of virtuous conduct
•changing practices of self-fashioning
•affective dispositions: compassion, devotion
•(altruistic question of) how ought to one live?
=/=
what is the mode of a killing?
what is the mood accompanying that killing?
+ ethical repercussions (if any) there of, ev[...]
(82)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%38.5[...]bral modernist masculinity of art) ---> go to Baxstrom's realizing the witch
Western European cultural nationalisms
the notion of nostalgic and premodern postsocialist population ==> Western Europe as the epicentre of progressive scientific modernity
West’s fanning of East European nostalgia --> a post-imperial symptom = (expression of a growing Western European awareness that) modernity is plurinodal rather than centred in European metropolitan headquarters
(postimperial European dimension of) *cultural nationalism <~÷+-> nostalgia*
...utopian national rebirth scenarios for a united Germany --> (promoted by intellectual artists) the bad idea that suppression of German nationalism ==open==> influx of American audio-visual culture (that muat be resisted in order to preserve and nourish German culture in its purest literary manifestation)
= logocentric return to the ethos of German Romanticism [Kulturnation --> certain cultural identity --> cliche-ridden elitist racist implications] + new nationalism =/= results of Western integration over the last forty years
aspirational narrative (of nation...)
postimperial power dynamic:
•western researcher --> has the political capital to afford studying popular media
•eastern researcher --> has to faithfully fulfill the role to represent their national culture (elite achievement)
(Bourdon >Imre) the most obvious European commonality --> **a focus on high culture**
national specificities of memory systems developed around television
nostalgia machine
•Putin --> TV programming to a literary Soviet heritage
•Hungarian FIDESZ --> children’s channel of socialist children’s programmes
•showcase oeuvre of popular performers from the past
•rerunning vintage highbrow content: old films, television series and documentaries
•popular music's capacity to call up depoliticized affective memories
•commercials (--trigger--> postsocialist nostalgia)
•
}--> depoliticized reminiscences ==> an image of (socialist) sociality as a natural connecting glue among citizens gathered around the warm glow of their favourite singers and cabaret actors
FIDESZ = alarming racism + anti-Semitism + drastic neoliberal economic restructuring --> television = interfaces of official state nationalism + commercial purposes of a nostalgia industry
(ghost of dictators in) humorous commercial context:
•Tito in post-Yugoslav republic commercials (as anti-capitalist and anti-commercialist hero)
•Ceausescu in commercials in Romania (old footage of him walking his dog in car tires ads)
•
}--Imre--> (blending) *top-down history lessons* + the work of *popular memory* ==> punctuate contemporary continuities wi[...]
(84)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%39.1[...]ing the direction in which a ship would travel under the influence of the wind blowing (at the specific point of the sea...) -~-~-> direction of a virtual invisible motive force
...................................
(?) people rely on singular ontology and multiple epistemologies
interpretation =? appropriation of other's existential labor (~/= culture)
Alberti's pot: instantiations of a concept of a world that is chronically unstable
(cranial modification, tattooing, treatment of the dead --manage-->) the inherent instability of bodies
•one's perspective is intimately connected to the body one is
}<-- did Alberti say all these things from the pots? no.
in Ingold: the indigenous people are presented as having some kind of privileged access to the workings of the world due to their close relationship to the land
ethics of theory
accounts of non-western
in our reconstruction of the past
usage glossed as a heuristic: an interpretive tool
Alberti --> claims to universality in our theories of matter rely on falsification through assimilation other people's theories of matter
==renforce==> (archeology) academy as an alibi for neocolonialism
(we should stop) searching for the answer to our relationship with the physical world [ontology of everything <-- this is my problem with philosophy] =/= ***accept a role as the point of articulation among sources of theories of matter, tangible evidence of alternative ontologies, communities past and present***
problems:
•*the elision of ontological claims by epistemological claims* : necessity of a singular ontology (as a guarantor in theories) even while a diversity of epistemologies are recognized and accepted (and when we pluralize “ontologies”)
•to use ethnographic accounts at the level of analogy (<-- i do this all the time)
•privileging of others (of their accounts of the world) --> for example in Ingold =/= attempting to *gain purchase on other people's world* --> for example Viveiros de Castro's concern is ontological (dialogical) =/= epistemological (monological)
*epistemologies masquerading as ontologies*(?)
•pluralizing the terms [ontologies, knowledges, epistemologies, etc.] --> (sending out the message that) we are good relativists --✕-->? actually allowing alternative theories of reality
([i have talked about this problem elsewhere -->] ontologies are relegated into) hierarchical epistemologies:
•anthropology --> they look at cultures --access--> ontology (nature of things) [==> “culture = ontology"]
•native ontology --> they look at matter: indifferent unchanging universal substance --produce--> epistemology [disguised as ontology] (worldview, perspectives)
}==> **our incommensurability is und[...]
(86)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%42.6[...]=/= epistemological (monological)
*epistemologies masquerading as ontologies*(?)
•pluralizing the terms [ontologies, knowledges, epistemologies, etc.] --> (sending out the message that) we are good relativists --✕-->? actually allowing alternative theories of reality
([i have talked about this problem elsewhere -->] ontologies are relegated into) hierarchical epistemologies:
•anthropology --> they look at cultures --access--> ontology (nature of things) [==> “culture = ontology"]
•native ontology --> they look at matter: indifferent unchanging universal substance --produce--> epistemology [disguised as ontology] (worldview, perspectives)
}==> **our incommensurability is understood only at the level of epistemological difference**
-when i was iran, we were interested in the western ontologies, their universal theories of matter. people didn't recognize western philosophy as a cultural perspective or different epistemology, but as ontology. this is relation unfortunately is not reciprocal ---> go to Star Trek
-when you read other people's theories of matter, you don't do epistemological inquiry (~= anthropology)
***foreclosed =/= privileged***
tendencies in archeological theorizing:
1. *foreclosure: other peoples’ worlds are avoided, delegated to non-theory, to exotic finger-painting on the surface of matter (=/= what general theories are made of) --> appropriated through absent presence
2. *privileging: other people's worlds are privileged, given serious consideration (alterity is initially embraced) --> appropriated through assimilation
◦in a grand synthesizing theory of matter (~ an enframing mechanism that holds the other enframings within a space of intelligibility) the ethnographic material serves a buttressing tole: indigenous theories resurface as heuristics of analogies for specific cases
ethnographic information is crucial to recognizing the alterity of the past
(Alberti concerned with) how the indigene occupies textual space in Ingold: indigenous words appear in key moments in Ingold's text to seal an argument, or provoke an idea (at the level of analogy)
--Bakhtin--> monologism disguised as dialogism : a single voice playing many parts
analogical thinking:
--Thomas--> (interpretive) open ourselves to the difference of the past
--Alberti--> (appropriative) relies on representationalist logic; using analogies interpretively to the types of past we construct
(Viveires's) *controlled equivocation*
we compare mistaken assumptions on both sides
***interpretation =/= multivocality (polyphony)***
@apass: what other textual strategies can we develop other than polyphonic (multiculturalism at the level of text)?
[!we should say no to] general thing theory : t[...]
(87)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%42.7[...]ted and technical
•the naration is not pure nor whole (why cyborg?)
•place of visibility (/ field of articulability)
•it is an aesthetic dream, dream of ismorphism between the discursive object and the visible object
•exteriorization of the body (relation between face / hand / tool )
•The “exact meeting place” of form, matter, tool, and hand is the touch(Henri Focillon)
•
////////////////////////
In this interconnection of embodied being and environing world, what happens in the interface is what is important.
--Don Ihde, Bodies in Technology
At first glance, strapped to the body of critters such as green turtles in Shark Bay, off Western Australia, humpback whales in the waters off southeast Alaska, and emperor penguins in Antarctica, a nifty miniature video camera is the central protagonist. Since the first overwrought seventeenth-century European discussions about the camera lucida and camera obscura, within technoculture the camera (the technological eye)seems to be the central object of both philosophical pretension and selfcertainty, on the one hand, and cultural skepticism and the authenticitydestroying powers of the artificial, on the other hand. The camera--that vault or arched chamber, that judge's chamber--moved from elite Latin to the vulgar, democratic idiom in the nineteenth century only as a consequence of a new technology called photography, or “light-writing.” A camera became a black-box with which to register pictures of the outside world in a representational, mentalist, and sunny semiotic economy, an analogy to the seeing eye in brainy, knowing man, for whom body and mind are suspicious strangers, if also near neighbors in the head. Nonetheless, no matter how gussied up with digitalized optical powers, the camera has never lost its job to function as a judge's chamber, in camera, within which the facts of the world--indeed, the critters of the world--are assayed by the standard of the visually convincing and, at least as important, the visually new and exciting.
... first we have to plough through some very predictable semiotic road blocks that try to limit us to a cartoonish epistemology about visual self-evidence and the lifeworlds of human-animal-technology compounds.
Gilbert stresses that nothing makes itself in the biological world, but rather reciprocal induction within and between always-in-process critters ramifies through space and time on both large and small scales in cascades of inter- and intra-action. In embryology, Gilbert calls this “interspecies epigenesis."43 Gilbert writes: “I think that the ideas that Lynn [Margulis] and I have are very similar; it's just that she was focusing on adults and I want to extend the concept (as I think the science allows it to be fully extended) to embryos. I believe that the embryonic co-construction of the physical bodies has many more implications beca[...]
(88)[...otes on kinect performance.txt]%45.9[...]bject-makers
*strangeness (of nonhuman life) [acts as a guide] --> mobilising new prepositions of connection ==> to think differently about the social ==> new conceptions of society (as planetmate, messmate, natureculture, mindbody, thing-power, odd kin, etc.)
parallels drawn between theories of evolution & theories of social change:
•Gould --> concept of punctuated equilibrium
•Serres --> ontology of the social as parasitism
•Hayles --> translation of epigenesis and technogenesis
•
{phenomenon of serial endosymbiosis theory <-- social theorists deploy this in the search for accounts of how change and creativity originate}--> (bio-econornic context) *symbiosis* has long been recognised as a theory which demonstrates the co-constitution of the social and the biological
=/= Darwinian story of: small variations, random mutation, long time scales, natural selection, fitness and incremental development:
•complexity derived by brute mechanical climbing from the base already built by the efforts of earlier climbing
•unit of change: the gene, or individual organism, the zoocentric, ‘big like us’ epistemic culture of both science and social science (=/= weird worldings of protists, archea, eukaryotes [Wertheim])
bacteriology ==> new organisms were often stemmed from profound and prolonged symbiotic relationships that have proven difficult to analyse =/= discrete
•traits are inherited outside of sexual dissemination (digestion, infection, donation, other complex forms of partnerning) --> consortia: amorphous symbiotic complexes (metabolic energetic networks) =/= organism: anatomically bounded objects (systems of information and exchange)
}==Margulis==> focus on how perceptual, political, social and scientific conditions precede objects: *objects = boundary-work*
--> differential speeds of change (sudden and unlikely mixes + slow and causal)
--> deconstruction of individuality
(co-constitutive bio-econornic-political-social context:)
**ideological contest between individualism and collectivism in political economy <==> intellectual development of symbiosis theory**
•socialist and anarchist concept of mutuellisme in the mid 1800
•Hobbesian-Malthusian-Darwinian bio-economic concept of struggle for existence in zero-sum games of all-against-all
•Kropotkin's symbiosis as evidence for the benefit of global cooperation towards the common good, the division of labour, protection of elements and interdependent organisation
•evolutionary theory used to champion individualism and the social policies of laissez faire
Campbell --> what Harman misses is the elementary starting point for sociologies of science: *that social science translates science* just as science translates “reality”
serial endosymbiosis theory ==>
1. no theory of so[...]
(89)[...otes on kinect performance.txt]%46.4[...]of the brnad image
•*virtual* life of Facebook
•
consumer research focuses on the ontological and epistemological givens of only the consumer
(Turkle theorizing) how consumers change through their relationship with the nonhuman
•children view certain objects in the world around them as having degrees of aliveness
•children who have grown up with computers do not experience a dichotomy between biological and computatinoal processes
•playing with a toy like transformers, the toy shifs from being machines to being robots to being animals --learning--> fluid boundaries between mechanism and flesh
•(the ontological stickiness of the) [*]computer: a mind that is not yet a mind, inanimate yet interactive, it does not think yet neither is it external to thought
(Menser + Aronowitz) television: a complex object constituted by and related to many fields (solid-state physics, politics, etc.)
Latour...
}--> (such way of theorizing ==> precondition of) an era where radically mew technologies produce entities as indefinable complex global (as the Human Genome project) biofuel supply-chains or climate change models [--> also cryptocurrencies, blockchain]
}--Campbell--> consumer researchers are creating new concepts and figurations in order to expand the borders of waht constitutes life [for example “living-product” metaphor]
(the problem of the) [ontological division of] consumer =/= world of objects ==> (ideological move -->) privileges human : it is understood by the human, because the human (the only source of analytical attention) is the only thing doing the consuming, having the experience, making the meaning
figuration: new ways of taking account of the world =/= anthropomorphism
--Haraway--> practices that create *knots* of material-semiotic actors {<-- art does that? art's sometimes unreal figurations =/= **interpretative consumer research makes the most realistic figurations of this century**}@Chloe2
the metaphors of our time:
•becoming (=/= being) <-- a shift towards a *process metaphysics*
•
(Parsons + Maclaren)
items of disposal (do not fail to exists, but rather they) are *moved along* to other spaces or politics and become other things
•becoming a precious antique
•becoming a water blockage
•becoming a source of marine death
•becoming a materially precious thing (in another part of the world)
•
--> **how things actually move, how they transition between many states**
--> *object = data about the object =/= tangible thing* <-- (transition) from thinking of object as the primary reality --to--> perceicing the object as data in computatinoal environments
==?==> (change of the nature of object ==>) radical shift in theorizing consumer behavior
posthumanism<[...]
(90)[...otes on kinect performance.txt]%46.8[...]ssitates the material variety of horse in the ancient Iranian culture?)
--starving bands of Amazonian Indians may lavish on their condition more verb tenses than could Plato.
Is my language, or lack of speaking certain languages, a powerful obstacle to the material and social progress of me?
--withering inward by language barriers. Linguistically atomized
interaction of physical and spiritual agencies...
The nominalist mechanism of creation: each time man spoke he re-enacted, he mimed.
(...the early forms and feelings of consciousness in human ancestral pasts)
my reading or performance includes scrutinising configuration of letters and inverting words.
Bad translations communicate too much, limited to what is non-essential in the fabric of the original, missing the bond of meaning.
If translation is a form, then the condition of translatability must be ontologically necessary to certain works.
Metaphysics of translation
translation is profoundly philosophic, ethical, and magical. It imports source of life. Alchemy, must retain a vital strangeness and ‘otherness’.
My translation, an interlinear version of the script, a virtual archetype of translation
obsessive awareness of the opaqueness of language, Kafka's continuous parable on the impossibility of genuine human communication. The impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing in German, of writing differently.
Presence of interpreters in the building site, Kafka, literature house
in Kafka, great wall = mosaic law ?
Only if men could use language without perusing meaning to the forbidden edge of the absolute.
Alpha & Aleph
...is certain to encompass ‘some terrible meaning’ in one of its secret languages
‘a poetic vocabulary of concepts’
‘connections or affinities’
pursuit of an inter-lingua for philosophic discourse
not to contemplate a mechanical transcription of the original
history, the mother of truth.
To define history not as an inquiry into reality, but as it's origin.
Menard, William James
translator's ‘mysterious duty’
if needed, i am anyone
language mysticism studies
...primitive seek expression through ‘imaginative universals’, this rapidly acquired a ‘infinite particularity’
it is only by means of essentially poetic recreation or translation of a given language-world that the new science of myth and history can hope to retrace the growths of consciousness
in apass, inventing a science of myth and history, towards a general theory of significant sign.
Corruption of language and decline of body politics?
Can we correlate the Persian syntax with the[...]
(91)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%49.7[...]eaking
crisis and recast, questions of archive
Luisa, Foad
(the space of the relation between) experience & abstract --> between sense & purity
(an inquiry line for Luisa: try to figure out the status of pure [which is impure? when history changes])
my allegorical covers
meaning of:
•non-disproportion
•nonviolence
Socrates: you are in crisis because you are ignorant of geometry
even: same
odd: other
برهان خلف borhane kholf, irrationality of the absurd
the irrational is mimetic
=======================
“before-after” temporality narrative
Serres's fabulous work on the effects of the style in science
--> styles profile from (a sort of) stability *** -they inspire disciplines and furtilize fields of research, they seizes what is at stake in sciences
who believes that the passage from local to global is always possible?!
Lucretius answer is immediately “no”
in apass each of us is somehow busy with the critique of unidimensional platitude characteristics of our milieus. / Is that the global notion in our researches?
I want to take it up, maybe fulfill, and modify the project sketched out in ajayeb al makhlughat 10 centuries ago.
#my reading act with ajayeb is like the practice of pencil monoprint on paper on a relief surface. The patterns of reading emerge as the pencil moves gently across the paper, pressing down or not. The paper, pencil, pressure, movement, the object behind, the touch of three elements, interactive interfacial patterns of readingwriting with ajayeb's textual corpus*
” [...] the industrialized world is frequently condemned to considering the concrete universe as its representation.”
Stengers + Prigogine
(?what do we have that helps us give up the idea of a) rational nature of the real
observation ==> generalization
measurement ==> precision
which precisions can be achieved by other than measurement?
How not to travel through the universe like free and self-determined gods? (#magicians)
Stengers > Leibniz @Luisa: “movement is produced within a full world, an interdependent world in which nothing can happen that has not been made possible by the state of the set of bodies according to a harmony that determines and checks at every moment the unfolding of the different movements.”
the full and compact nature, version of ajayeb
my work in apass is on a theory of transformation among languages (not about the best point of view =/=> system integrated =/=> trajectories calculated):
•ajayeb's natural language
•system language of differential logic
•english grammar and synta[...]
(92)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%51.3[...]) =/= method
Campbell --> Derridean deconstruction is visual
Derrida's thinking helps us take images seriously (as philosophical artefacts)
•organizational image: the aesthetic ambassador for the organization (it visualizes + gives aesthetic value to it)
•advertisement: preeminent image of production and consumption of the global economy
image = logocentric vision --need--> problematizing =/= solutionizing
-is there a spirit of critique that is not liberatory in purpose?
Derridean deconstruction: a critical approach --draw--> attention to the operations of method itself (=/= method):
[~? feedback types:]
1. interventionist --advocate--> different/contradictory readings (of images)
2. radical --interest--> roots of meaning-making activity
3. liberatory --seek--> evoke justice (forcing an image to account for itself)
4. ethical --concern--> what is overlooked
>
5. innovative (productive) --promote--> non-traditional ways of reading (of interpretting, of finding meaning)
intellectual climate in 1960s ==>
•Derrida's deconstruction --> bringing Saussure's own work to its own radical paradoxical conclusion
•Foucault's archeological approach [question the idea that human is an a priori --> how humans have been diagnosed in psychiatry and (ab)normalized in criminal and sexual *discourses* ==produce==> reality effects at the level of body]
•Barthes's semiology =/= the idea that the author is the single and authoritative source of meaning
Derrida's list of concepts:
differance
retrait
revenant
dissemination
deconstruction
hymen
invagination
archiécriture
supplement
khora
pharmakon
scrypt
parergon
subjectile
}--> levers applying torque گشتاور and displacement in the textual machinery
deconstruction
==> counter-intuitive analyses
--> presupposes a detailed knowledge of construction (one must become intimate with the ways something is assembled) [=/= cart blanche for meaning]
--> (Jassem's style of) reading otherwise: passing the classical discipline (=/= abandon, jettison it) to explore what it omits, forgets, excludes, expels, marginalizes, dismisses, ignores, scorns, slights, takes too lightly, waves off, not serious enough
•anthropcentric truth: a truth that appears to human beings
•instrumental truth: a truth aimed at getting things done (making things work)
•teleological truth: a truth which closes debate and fastens meaning
[*]visual = a form of control (<--Campbell-- this aspect makes it central to organizational analyses) <==
1. *visual organizes reality by claiming status as the preeminent form of representation* (vision is the dominant tyrann[...]
(93)[...notes/Derrida old notes.txt]%51.7[...]od or menace?
...as declaimer of my own stifled, tongue
my performance, corresponding to my level of literacy, and a private thesaurus, part of my subconscious and personal memories, and using the singular and irreducibly specific ensemble of somatic and psychological identity.
the ideal of a totally personal voice, of a unique ‘fit’ between an individual's expressive means and his world-image, perused by the poets.
this is not a formal hard-edged linguistic relegation, rather a metaphysical speculation
*note to self: my interest in the ʿAjā'ib al-makhlūqāt (جائب المخلوقات وغرائب الموجودات) is due to the traces it provides into verbal literacy, a living vulgar language of mix, rather than a dead structure such as Manṭiq-uṭ-Ṭayr (منطق الطیر) of Attar.
Cultures (during Attar's?) seem to expend on their vocabulary and syntax acquisitive energies and ostentations entirely lacking in their material lives.
[very interesting point by Serres regarding the language of mysticism, Attar and others.]
my translation of Attar, an interlinear version of the script, a virtual archetype of translation
think about the presence of interpreters in the building site -- Kafka's literature house
Only if men could use language without perusing meaning to the forbidden edge of the absolute.
‘a poetic vocabulary of concepts’
‘connections or affinities’
pursuit of an inter-lingua for philosophic discourse
as you can see in this writing, I am practicing loosening the tight axiom of relation of A<-->B, something other than the predecessor-successor or cause-effect pair (--> this order of structure is coming from Greek geometric,) I am trying an unordered order-of-reason that is more reflexive, symmetric, and intransitive. (the construction of the text represents each chain incomplete and displaced--Attar knows)
towards a general theory of significant sign
Can we correlate the Persian syntax with the metaphysical ambience, internal divisions, and lyric bias of Persian people?
the language-matrix
language, informed by energies proper to itself, more comprehensive and timeless than any who makes use of it...
discourse (die Rede) would not be muffled by the ground---we walk erect [Serres]
jede Sprache ist ein Versuch---*trial
(Humboldt)
different languages penetrate to different depths
--> (every try is a) starting over with *accuracy
ok, we are starting with language from scratch, here
Literaturhaus, house has always been a metaphor for consciousness
how Attar can become inte[...]
(94)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%53.9[...]stice, and stayed in the Qibla---after it opened.
The punishment be upon him in arboreal (baumig, gro?artig), period.
The master grew suddenly old. “With my *disciples” said he.
Go now! The early Going.
****It soon turned out to be ‘devised.’
Authentic disciple of four hundred men, were regressed on a journey with him; Would go to the ends of the Ka'ba (کعبه).
Time, variable, filter -- they go from head to foot.
It turned out to be an awesome perspective—a girl sitting on the landscape. (This is Tarsaa - ترسا).
**christian girl and with spiritual attributes.**
In Ra hundred knowledge Allah spirit. The sphere of Jamal Hassan Tower. It was sunny but she envied sun-shots. Yellow coy lovers in him. Here, heart of the hair of a dead lover, around her hair gripping the imagination. Here, pomegranate lives on the beast that pees in Ra.
Saba (صبا) did her hair because he did Moshkin (مشکین). (He didn't have time to do the hair? --but the wind fucked up my hair.)
Leaving it wrinkled up a trait. Both eyes was intrigued lovers. Both eyebrows to arch, was good. Comments on Valentine's Day because he flocked. John, the coquetry, with his arch ‘flocked,’ was closed on May—eyebrow arched. Kurdish, she collected hundreds of human lives that would follow the twists of hair.
LOL, it was thirsty. Feed the hungry world!
“N has thousands of labels,” said he, because of the lack of his mouth. That said, if it was not any of her mouth.
Such eye needle-like mouth around the midst of package. Simin (سیمین) was well on his chin. (It was like Jesus in his speech.)
Joseph chewed hundreds of thousands of heart with blood. First in what he overthrew: Hair jewel in the sun.
Burqa (برقع) on the black poetry---Tarsaa took her Burqa off ==> Laden Sheikh's fire broke out, because of the Burqa and the following.
Then a hundred dead in their hair.
Although the Sheikh was far in advance, (Betty will love this:)
•Loss of the hands and feet
•Loss of fire, place, and left (=/= right)
All his heads were destroyed. He was melancholy because of the smoke from the fire. Love that girl! -looting her life.
**Hair on his faith (as disbelief.)
Sheikh's faith and christian purchase!? God bless scandal! Loving that christian girl is going to be difficult.
When the disciples saw this meadow--including the works of Kafdast (کفدست) that they knew--head-to-head were astonished at his job. *They were toppled and stranded*
Gave him very good advice, no treatment.
Love turbulent was keyboard command. Aroma therapy to treat pain?! It was still day to night long.
From eye view, his mouth remained open, because of dark night in black poetry, because it was hidden under the sin of unbelief.
Each LED erupted the night. Old moons came out of it. His l[...]
(95)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%54.2[...]r />
speculative objects (~/= anthropological objects) --to--> quasi objects
between research, social critique, speculative theory, and artistic production --> politics of representation
...................................
[*]insurgent:
resistance to modernism, and revolutionary agency
<== exhaustive disintegration of belief-structures in modernity
otherless individuation
eternal war
killer's freedom
(affective) overreaction
[*]poet:
will to chaos (--a type of consciousness that perceive the catastrophic-apocalyptic hint at each turn)
<== cataclysmic time of modernism (<-- great social disorder: prison, exile, censorship, etc. [==> Hedayat, Shamlu, Forough, Nima's tone of aggression --> a proto-sectarian space: secret societies, iconoclastic trajectories, *the compartmentalized and esoteric iranian avant-garde with aesthetic devices of: unity, isolation, subversion])
fugitive postmodern map of escape from the grasp of the experience of the modernist phenomenon
|
responses to historical events of atrocity and transition
mystical, criminal, mercenary, revolutionary edifice
amorphous, obscure, versatile (thinker/writers)
conceptual axes/archetypes of: power, hostility, banishment, solitude, desire, sacrifice
[*]mystic:
sunken tranquility, relaxed self-annihilation, ascetic renunciation of material (=/= postmodernism's obsession with speed, with narcissistic technologies, hyper-materialism)
neomystial trajectories of new-wave iranian cinema filmic style --> hypnotic effect =/= audition, dialogue, narrative
& exile space
[*]sectarian:
will to extremity
(apocalyptic writing)
breakaway modality
نوچه پروری noche-parvary's effective radars and tactics of attunement, detection, narration
(annihilatic temptation to) convert the text into a closed circle
(sect's threats of) forbidden power, moral ambiguity, collective density(/destiny)
...................................
[this project works with:]
[]
contributions/responses of:
•radical leaders (Jala Al Ahmad, Ali Shariati, Khomeini) --> ideological suspicion towards models of machinism and cosmopolitanism in the modern age
•intellectual forerunners (--> sectarian)
•literary icons (textual innovations of Hedayat, Shamlu, Akhavan, Baraheni) --> *poetic violence* and its apocalyptic tendencies --> that the declared east is plunged into a catastrophic epoch ==freed==> a “will to chaos”
•artistic visionaries (Naderi, Forough, iranian new-wave cinema neomystical) --> strategies of withdrawal, aims of disappearance, situated in obscure elsewheres of auditory and visual landscape
}--> #ideology #literature #mysticism #sectarianism
(from the middle eastern f[...]
(96)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%55.4[...]rd world vanguard characterize itself in the heart of major historical tremors:) [listen to their *tone of aggression*:]
Nima: “with my poetry i have driven people into a great conflict; good or bad, they have fallen in confusion; i myself am sitting in a corner, watching them: i have flooded the nest of ants”
Forough: “all those who are involved in creative work have as their motive ... a sort of need to confront and struggle with annihilation”
Shamlu: “the children of the depths,” “the children of the storm,” “the horsemen,” “the bold ones,”
--> definition of the poetic world as a protosectarian space
رابطه مریدی مرادی
دار و دسته
قبيله
(Ali, to a subculture of) persecuted and endangered
==> peripheral narative (marginal leadership) become a force of intrigue and seduction (among iranian youth)
-how did poetry respond to historical events of atrocity and transition
-did the poets understand themselves as resembling a mystical, criminal, mercenary, or revolutionary edifice?
amorphous, obscure, versatile (thinkers and writers launching an intellectual-existential offensive against the disenchantment of the modern age)
along archetypes:
•power
•hostility
•banishment
•solitude
•desire
•sacrifice
contradictory experiences of the modern cityscape of the middle east --> at once a site of:
•autocracy and insurgency
•concealment and detection
•connectivity and alienation
•integration and crumbling
•gesticulation and idleness
Setareh's topics:
experiences of upheaval, hysteria, sabotage, collective suffering
--> Sana's topics:
existential-spatial understanding of questions of cruelty, betrayal, torment, annihilation
(poets finding themselves consumed with) the distinctive emergence of “the martyr”:
[-]Akhavan writing/witnessing at the time of reterritorialization of urban space during Mossadegh era: the subdivision of streets, districts, and neighborhoods into dueling sectors of power and resistance.
Akhavan's lament in “Winter”
disenchantment, bitterness, semiotic disorientation
touch = final sensory prism
Akhavan's task: to protect the domain of radical individuality (==> Ali's subjectivity)
(Mohaghegh asking:) *is the artist charge a mere diguise of influence and supermacy?* or **is the firmness of its articulation sanctioned by some dominant elsewhere or otherworldliness?**
*does the poetic consciousness believe itself of an elite unknown rank (against the monolith)?
sociopolitical discourses either bore or aggravate Akhavan --only--> (transient historical specificity of) *turmoil demands poet's greater urgency*
(the poet has earned the station to say) “no[...]
(97)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%57.2[...] ==> (a more) apocalyptic response ==> to became available
[--> to deal with sense as a predicate مسند or a property دارايى =/=? to deal with sense as an event]
community
(on Eastern postmodern gathering)
(alternative categories that express the potential for “relationality”: assemblage, alignment, circle, swarm, etc. that are based on multiple vantages of intersection and divergence =/=) *community*:
•tends to evoke an essentialist claim
•there is typically some centralized discourse of unity, some absolute principle that binds everyone
•functions as self-enclosed and exclusionary phenomenon
•breeds insularity and protectionism
=/= vulnerable, permeable, susceptible to transformation
=/= riot crowd (open fever and pulsation always searching out new formulations, *new exteriorities* to traverse ==> remains restless, agitated, insatiate)
•community eventually ofers abstract representation of their lived experience (**becoming symbolic**) =/= riot crowd remains material, visceral, a carnavalesque sensation, and therefore formless [--> Elen's response to apass offered “community"]
(with the intention of it lasting, *nothing deserves to stay “as is”* [?!])
*stale archetypes of the collective knowing subject (“they”)*
problem with ‘periphery’
***deadly and deathly delusion that there is a “within”***
-the periphery in its own removed site it circumscribes a sacred boundary
--> exilic consciousness
-interior sense of belonging: remaining an outsider event --> using treachery for the sake of vitality [~~>? Elen's *playful betrayal* (in apass environment) to emerge (and inflect) herself at will]
what makes the exile (=/= the knowing subject) more fascinating is that *it does not need to exist* (--> the ‘need to exist’ lies at the root of the knowing subject's violence)
the community is desperate to exist ==degenerates==> into totalitarian declaration of its rights; obsessed with constructing mythologies of presence (and being represented)
=/= the exile (the animal, the child, the shadow, the monster, the machine, the thing, the contagion) carries none of the anxiety of ontological authenticity. they come and go, as impersonal, nameless, metamorphosing creatures, never too long in the same place, always with some *new game* or *secret to pursue*
communities --> distinctly humanist : importing a kind of micro-universality --> ladem with oppressive suggestions of an inborn ethical obligation (originally from the enlightenment) ==became==> source of judgment ==> taxonomies of power ==> disenchantment, alienation, genocidal playback
Mohaghegh suggests the always social logic of community formation is toxic, “the death sentence to its mutability and actual freedom” --> to avoid the “trappings of a social framework, with its false codifications o[...]
(98)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%58.3[...]middle eastern elsewhere is not yet openly acknowledged by literature
-borderline illegible narratives
-emergent textualities
(my allegiance is with Mohaghegh's allegiance with) badlands of postcolonial site and its rogue arsenals [...] ==allows==> a fugitive, errant trajectory
(i have been tracing the locatable mimicries of middle east)
***chaotic textuality <--> <==> conflict***
actualization of a *will to cruelty*
to performance a fatal experience of the text
(literature as question =/=) literature as moral transaction [<-- chaos reminds us] --> Ali, Shabnam, Hoda, --Sina--> let's enjoy the pleasure of watching the text die* (_to rid literature of its survival instinct)
literature as a space of unbearable vulnerability --> perpetual sabotage --> each idea, each interpretation draws the text closer to (the hour of a) collapse
*contact with nothingness*
inscription of fatality
conceptual matrix of fatality:
•extremity --> breaking points
•excess --> an effusion, an unforming
•exhaustion (=/= fatigue)
the avatar of ecstasy
veiled secrecy of affirmation
}--> *archetype of cruelty*
--> [to speak of] (chaotic text as) *alchemy*: corrupt the order of things, become reborn in a polluted sensibility
(is this what i do?)
chaotic text must fashion a generative prism, unnatural admixtures, *contaminated alliances*
[let's] *unload texts toward corrosive depths [...] where they run their acids across one another* --> my work
transition from theory --to--> theft
transition from (the profession of the) reader --to--> smuggler
(strands of thought ranging:)
from cruelty --to--> fatality
from alchemy --to--> piracy
chaos --> anarchic potential, disquieting worlds
(Mohaghegh asking:)
*is chaos an affirmative or nihilistic experience of the world?
*is chaos primarily creative or destructive?
*is the expressive act (aesthetic or philosophical) a chaotic state?
*(east's) horizon fastened to the exteriority of Western thought*
experiential elsewhere
the so-called [*]cultural difference: an old game of declaring the world's disjointment
==> many people (including myself) ***to perceive their intellectual and poetic exercises as in partial alignment with the creative possibilities of their culture***
*partial cultural alignment* --> german discourse on integration
[chaos] manifesting and fading within countless spheres of speculation:
•Benjamin's temporal arabesque
•schizoid desire-production of Deleuzian nomadology
•Artaud's hysterical demand (-demand is always hysteric)
•fable of [...]
(99)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%58.4[...]ative way]
loving relatedness --> responding to the wholeness of the other person (relating to a small child or to a psychiatrically ill adult, and so on)
}--> (which is fundamentally) a parental disposition [and the offspring might represent a miscarriage of the parent's wish]
-the problem is that you cannot always know the precise ego-capacities of the other person
-your interventions could be ill-timed or ill-attuned ==> disintegrating effect
questions regarding the processes of feedbacking in apass: to help the other person (not to become aware of truth about themselves or their work, rather) to construct figures about themselves and their relationships with others, figures which could provide the basis for rapid ego-growth and personality-integration. but sometimes it is too fast, the ego regresses, and it becomes an experience of developing psychosis
pathological defense:
•delusions
- hallucinations
•depersonalization
•
skilfully dosed and skilfully timed increments in psychotherapeutic participation [such as premature interpretations demanded usually in feedback sessions] ==> opposite effects (rather than an integrating effect upon the artist researcher)
the schizophrenic patient's individuality resides partly in his symptoms
(Searles > Szalita-Pemow)
?gratifications in the ‘crazy’ symbiotic mode of relatedness (despite the anxiety- and frustration-engendering aspects that it offers)
earlier struggle between child and parent to drive each other crazy --> evolving transference of the patient-therapist relationship --> to crack each other
the economy *feelings of confusion and unreality* for iranians, in public political realm of state and individual symbiosis, as well as intersubjective early childhood and parent symbiosis --> the ways it enters cultural imaginary and artistic expressiveness --> *how and why iranian artists often try to make their audience crazy* [-and myself included, check Sina lecture's chaotic verbalizations of delusional materials --> jouissance of disorganization]
-(in my lectures) am i externalizing my psychosis? [~ romantic]
(mother repeatedly commanding the child ‘Now, think!’ [~ to perceive the secret] ==>) threatened, mistrustful, isolated self ==> finding hidden meanings + sarcastic response [~=> unnerving the other]
small children exposed to unfamiliar and complex situations ==> often experience of ‘you are crazy!’
modern culture of obsessive-compulsive character traits as orderliness, competitiveness, intellectualization ==> obsessive-compulsive type of basic personality structure (is made very common among artists, people who are busy one way or another with analysis and psyche of the other) ==> **reaction formation** (which is one of the m[...]
(100)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%59.6[...]>
نوآوری innovation ==> “جهان خود” (your world) [~ آفرینش هنری، سبک خود، etc.]
=/= نحو: پیوند ارگانیک با جهان دیگران
=/= ابداع: poiesis
(we are interested in strange because we are strange ourselves?)
غریب با غریب الف گیرد (؟)
| |
خود ذکر غریب
شعر - شرع - عرش
| | |
؟ قانون جهان منظم
ajayeb (شگفتی رویداد نامتعارف) ==> تبدیل شدن سوژه به ابژه tabdil shodan-e suje be obje
Kelile Demne (indian style) --> story within story
=/=
Attar's Tazkirat al-Awliya --> list
نوشتم باد، آنچه دید.
...از بهر حق عداوت کرد(ن)
غیب --> غریب --> غرایب --> عجایب --> نامه
نفاق =/=؟ contradiction
| |
(در خود) (split)
...................................
amoral, amorphous or polymorphous
to reside under the mark of ambiguity
[to be careful with the figure of trickster -->] trickster represents an archetype of transformation (rebirth?) and a symbol of life, [with] humor, irony (and self-irony), as well as the confrontation between the comic and the tragic --> situates the trickster between the *world's balance and unbalance*
(migration or) migrant: (~= fugitive:) individuals who are reborn existentially precisely through the act of the escape, in order to trick their persecutors ==> survive
[=/= the juggler: Nicolas]
Mohaghegh's proposal: *to lie our way into the lie*
-how and where is my unreal located in my work on bestiaries?
past --> forsaken ancients
outside --> time of disappearance
seduction: immersion in style
in style
our guardian: the thief
(learning from Mohaghegh and Cinderella to be/operate for each other) between:
orchestrator (influence, innovation, experimentation --> laboratory)
partner (equivalence, benefit, reciprocity --> alliance)
slave (captivity, labor, devotion, service, worship --> bondage)
--or--> l.a.b. stands for: laboratory, alliance, bondage {bondage should be part of every (artistic or knowledge-intensive) practice}
the question/problem of: incompatibility of past and present, there and here
object of event or journey (expedition, venture,)
story of the “archive of...” : collection of savored differences
the unreal is not always imaginative or speculative
it is sometimes:
a drive (suffering, passion,)
a password (encryption)
a device (machine, guide,)
accidental and chosen
the character’s wisdo[...]
(101)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%59.9[...]◾futurity (remote: “could see farther than all the gods”) --> temporal
somnolence خواب و بيدارى
==> branches of nonsense pervade (disbanding of the herd)
(cypress سرو) tree
inspector of cosmological space
in theo-terrestrial plane:
1. alluvion: the wash or flow of water against a shore --> inundation
2. alluvium: a deposit of clay, silt, sand, and gravel left by flowing streams in a river valley or delta --> detritus [residuum alone is left to control the universe?]
Ishtar
guardian of prostitutes
surrounded in myth by death and disaster
goddess of contradictory connotations and forces (fair play & enmity, etc,)
Lillith (derived from the Akkadian lilitu: evening creature, specter, or monster)
kidnapping sleeping children
(according to the Babylonian cosmology) night requires (non-identitarian) gods capable of abomination (backstabing)
-recognized by their tangible outlines as actual constellations in the night sky
-related to the more expansive domains of animality, vehicles, and objects
-emanate from a perceptual faculty closer to the child's imagination of cloud-shapes (=/= archetypal meaning)
Tiamat
primordial goddess of the salt sea, darkness, chaos, and creation
from the time of permanent nightfall
a destroyer-deity and yet whose sliced body parts form the heavens and earth
represented as unconscious, reckless annihilation and yet also holding diabolical intelligence
bathed in eternal blackness and yet known as “the glistening one”
Girra
dystopian potentials of technological invention
figure of wicked logos (undoing words)
(leader of the terrible)
non-metaphysical and equally nonhumanist devotion to the artificer (apparatus)
cosmic ballistics: scientific field of mechanics concerned with the launching, propulsion, flight, and effect of projectiles (trajectory and impact)
nocturnality and contagion
snakes and dragons of constellations
paradox (the beast)
instrumentality (the builder)
unleashing (the despoiler)
death-spell
نابودی gesture of *extispicy: ancient Mesopotamian practice of reading animal organs (often a sheep's liver) spattered upon a wall's surface
-a discipline involved less with knowing than with watching
The Egyptian Book of the Dead
philosophy of night, dusk, shadow
egyptian night-deities
-with astounding narrative-theoretical flexibility
-some slither, hunch, fly, or remain seated
-not residing on Olympian heights but rather in the subterranean below
star-covered nude woman
cow arching over the e[...]
(102)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%60.4[...]>
social constructivism approach:
•emotional experience is not precultural but preeminently cultural --> Lutz
anthropological approach l:
•metaphors/words for different emotions --Kovecses--> individuals choose to conceptualize their emotions differently within the constraints impressed on them by in universal physiology {*force: the primary emotional metaphor*}
•body-based constructivism
(William Reddy >) emotive: (for example saying “i am happy.”) performative (effects change) + constative (describes the world)
•emotive utterance --> getting through of something nonverbal into verbal --> failure of representation --> a person
}--Elias-->
•logocentric concept of emotive <-- comes from speech act theory (there is no evidence that thinking and saying out loud “i am happy” have the same effects, or forcing one self to smile)
•there is no reason to consider one action more or less descriptive than performative than the other [--Sina--> my whole work has been about arguing the performativity of descriptive acts, there are no descriptions that do not generate emotions]
•lack of methodological distinction between (anthropological) fieldwork [: subject is changed by the presence of researcher] =/= historical research
•problem of synchrony in “emotive” <-- ignoring memory, aspiration (on the list of the emotional actor)
emotional states can be evoked or avoided(?)
conditions can be manipulated with the goal of shaping emotions in the future
emotion and its affects
•emotion --> medicated and sustained
•affect (a very recent idea) --> ephemeral instantaneously rises and dissipates (leaving residual effects)
}<-- a heuristic device (difference) to highlight different kinds of experiences, their perception and impact
affect is under inquiry in understand:
•customer culture
•entertainment industry
•
•(individual located in larger communities)
[*]affect: embodied thought : culturally and corporealy informed cognition = thoughts + apprehension “i am involved”
[emotion = i am involved]
(Elias) arguments in favor of affect (affect-culture):
1. (help us to understand) relationship between *(human) bodies, nature, action*
2. explains cooperative living, sacrifice, generosity, attachment, affection (better than theories that focus on economics, politics, power)
3. critical apparatus for gaining knowledge from human interaction and social movements --understand--> future
(concept of) affect --> productive way of understanding human attitude and behavior
_____________
affect theory
•(Spinoza ==>) Deleuze's ethnology of bodily capacities ==> Massumi
•(Darwin --?-->) Tomkins's psychobiology and differential affect ==> Sedgwick
Tomkins
[...]
(103)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%61.8[...] blankly records an arresting image, young embodiments of a mainstream in the making come face to face with an otherness that compels a closer look. the order of representation gives way to a more violently affective contact”
Stewart
force of things --> what counts as an event
a politics of being/feeling conected
a politics of ways of watching
a politics of waiting for something to happen
a politics of difference (of habit and dull routine)
childhood coming back [to you] as shocks of beauty
graphic stories prompted by the seemingly simple work of remembering:
•kinship ties
•married names
•stories of alcoholism
•stories of accidents
•stories of violence
•stories of cancers
[*]potential: fleeting and amorphous, it lives as a residue or resonance in an emergent assemblage of disparate forms and realms of life; a thing immanent to fragments of sensory experience and dreams of presence --engenders--> attachments or system of investment...
(people are) collecting found objects snatched off the literal or metaphorical side of the road
...................................
Yazid: the archetypal tyrant of islamic memory
...a shift from thinking of Urdu as exclusively Muslim to thinking of Muslims as the custodians of a shared heritage that Hindus have forgotten, but have the potential to reclaim
-Anand --> how do we understand the islamicness of urdu poetry?
spread of [...] poetry far beyond the bounds of exclusively muslim identity
sufism as an everyday mode of speaking of and speaking to the self (not as an esoteric practice, or as institutionally bounded)
-it gives you a language to explore their interiority
-(traditions of self-scrutiny and self-reflection,) a poetry of self-knowledge + rebellion against social convention [+ frenzied violence (vahshat) --> Majnun: an intellectual articulation, literary elaboration, and social proliferation of the “mazhab of love” a dominant strand of sufi theology, ethics, and political thought in the Balkans to Bengal complex]
earlier mode of understanding X as irreligious
discourses that recognize X as islamic
Anand --> *indic nature of islam*
-islam is indexed within the lives of non-Muslim Indians through a form of stranger hospitality
many, besides muslims, have ongoing relations to islamic sacred objects
•embrace of the divine
•efflorescence of relations with nonhumans (snakes and cats)
(Naveeda on) Anand's mournful tone --> forces of restoration = forces of destruction
importance of shadows for an understanding of sensory experience, aesthetics, and divine order
(Naveeda asks for an) alternative approach to the islamic tra[...]
(104)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%64.1[...]stem
(i have become hypersensitive to:) progressivist telling of the history of the earth =/= strangely synchronic world where there is no effective arrow of time
[*]synchronization: the work that it takes to bring the various bits of the world into a single archival framework*** (with their metaphors and strategies) ==permit==> cohabitation of discipliness --> **synchronization of the social and natural worlds to the same temporality**
(synchronization is always at work and is technologically determined)
--> conjuring of the social and natural world into forms that render themselves amenable to recording ==> (imperial records) archiving changes the world & creates a record of it --Derrida--> sequential & jussive (imperative)
+ scientific work epitomized the developement and rigorous application of these procedures (---> go to Serres's origin of geometry and greek empire)
***synchronization brings material forms (commodity flow, train travel) together and when geological and historical time are mapped into the same time --> metaphorical & ideological & material interact (==> emerging powerful possibilities) [--> in art we also do a lot of syncing and synchronization (<-- this is perhaps what Pierre meant by saying that researchers are creating their own science)]
time management, a central issue in industrialization
Babbage: clock = regulator of time
industrial world-knowledge ==> importance of the division of the history of the earth into equal periods of time
information drive (a drive *to save as little information as possible about something*)
(Latour's) oligopticon: special places where the micro-structures of macro-phenomena are crafted, local activities become a “bigger” issue (such as parliaments, courtrooms, offices), where different strands of “macro-social” phenomena are weaved
-they see much too little, but what they see, they see it well (=/= total surveillance of panopticon)
watch (from 1800 to 1820 at least 100000 clocks and watches were produced every year)
“clockwork ocean” with waves and cycles of salinity as “balance wheels”
(Bowker > Graham Burnett > Fontaine Maury)
}==> imposing a **temporally mediated qualitative difference between the creator and created** (instantiated on the factory floor and in nature) --> creators stood outside regular space and time (=/= situated knowledges)
(19th century) scientific work = imposition of a representative framework of regular space and time on social and natural time
(science was and still is) making society confirm to the same spatiotemporal representational framework it was/is “discovering” in nature (---> go to the #scientification of christian genesis in Nolan's Noah film)
*imposition of a regular spatiotemporal representational framework* = (Bowker's) [*]convergen[...]
(105)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%68.3[...] the Book of Nature
information and database theory (in genomics --> a core science of our time)
archive ==(is central to ‘thinking about’ & ‘writing down’ of)==> objects being studied
information explosion of the early 19th century + new ways of describing the past
“locality of each geologist will be the terrestrial globe” (--> locality of Olearius)
heroic age --> everyone constructed complete systems (that are thrown up and down in cataclysmic succession [!]) [--> question of artistic research]
...relics of the animate creation of former ages [--> science special effects, museum of continuity,]
[title]
indifinite space as filled with worlds...
colossi
earthquakes
floods
storms
tranquil variations
“second nature”:
•(from) past
•analytical constructs of extended present
[title]
***an irregular past and a totalizing memory***
(‘chaos’ characterized of/for archive ==> human nature)
moral duty as humans [!!**] --> to recognize stasis at the heart of disorder **** (--> an ancient fable, archetype) *apperceive[~ perceive in terms of a past experience, accumulative perception] synchrony in the midst of diachrony[~ look for historical changes/roots in languages]* + to sync ([*]synchronization: to bring social and natural time into a unified form <--through-- production and storage of records)
@Marialena
the metronomic story
the mnemonic story
***spatializing time***
(for humanity) going out in space, to India, to the Orient, or within France to Brittany or the Pyrennees, was going backward in time (~ mapping technique ==> position of “humanity” out there nowhere --> anomalous, moral, short term [--> “impact” of Star Trek crew(~ a cult of people who have unlocked the secret of life and the universe) on the worlds they visit])
==> faceless scientist working in a vast and effective machine (--> Haraway talks about the same)
new memory practices
•***lie at the heart of our ways of knowing (both ourselves and the world)***
•they skew our available ontological space
it seems our contemporary memory practice is highly prosaic [~ german?] (=/= baroque)
[***mythological dimensions of new memory practices:] (*there is a compelling connection between the information revolution as an economic fact and as a statement about the nature of universe:)
19th century rationalization + bureaucracy (==> dramatic new information-processing and communication technologies) ==> today's institutions = **to oppose entropy** @apass
DNA ~= global economy --> nature of existence & new technology synchronized
(--> a history of scien[...]
(106)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%69[...]educed to singular, stable, self-contained devices [~ Star Wars] =/= assemblages
[dichotomy of “enforcement =/= destruction” Star Wars either or: if you are not destroying it you are enforcing it]
problems that cannot be conceptualized in terms of measures and endpoints, or which involve holistic, qualitative solutions, will be at a disadvantage for selection
(Cowan shows) the developement of new household tachnologies did not free women from the domestic shpere. rather, it allowed women to enter the paid labor force while leaving the gendered division of labor in the home untouched.
(makes me throw up -->) large literature of self-determination theory (~ showing people are more creative and happy when their work allows them to be autonomous, related, and competent) + reward systems cultivating competitive environments
[*]autonomy: self-willing, volitional, being an agent in the action =/= being a “pawn”
spheres where processes and outcomes have been the name of the game (in feminized fields of education and librarianship)
labs (such as laser developement) that require collaboration with other labs
trading zones: a metaphor for understanding how cooperation between researchers enables new scientific paradigms --> Galison
*the development of this or that research looks like a continuous trajectory, but the trajectory was actually discontinuous and ruptured. that fact that we have invented or discovered something makes that developement seem inevitable, but things could always have turned out some other way* --> Cowan > Calvert
competition is not a guarantor of innovation, our cultural belief in it can obscure other explanations for innovation --> for example (Wylie showing:) (archaeology's enshrined belief that) male-centered hunting activities dominated prehistoric caloric intakes ==✕==> other hypotheses for the transition to agriculture --✕--> women's leading role in the development of agriculture--arguably the most significant innovation in human history--could finally be detected
[bids for status by denying the feminized and second class aspects of library work] --> ***the labor of care is at the core of library work*** --> *teaching, like technology, is always a relationship, and that relationship is undergrided by the labor of care* (--> affective labor is literally vital to the successful delivery of other kinds of services)***
the ways women are called on to manage their and other's feelings <--✕--> technology is positioned in out culture as rational and precise and therefore (masculine and) unemotional [--> look at the film Lucy]
successful education and mentorship depend on this skill, which, like household labor, is difficult to account for in “competitive” economic analysis
**articulation work**
the labor necessary to make tec[...]
(107)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%69.4[...] deny multivocality, hide the residuum produced, and exclude hybridity
--> (pulling the carpet of familiarity out from under users:)
to replace ‘familiar generic conventions’ (~ universal) --replace-with--> a “universal of local application” (~= residuum)
(we rely on) [*]words: value-laden components of language that also serve as categories and moor لنگر us in the symbolic, to effect the transformations of the collections
labels ~-/==> power and oppression epistemologies <== *organizing logics* (that remain invisible when when we change the words or subsitute new sets of categories)--> that is why i am reluctant with only changing the metadata @Pierre: using metadata to manipulate the organizing apparatus ==> versions of residuality (?)
...................................
[working on apass milieu data model, summer2018]
c.r.i. (“collective research interface”)
--?--> a pathological collage
discrete object (of problem [who, when, how,]) interface
--> refering to something outside c.r.i. (outside the digital model)
face (slider) --> object monster
(?what is lost at) linking the symbolic space of data-model to the qualities of the researches of participants [which are relational, procedural, and emotional]
s.s.s. (scroller, slider, still-life)
discourse =/= valorizing information
Pierre's fables:
•“nonviolent way”
•“not by chance ...”
*Apologue*
research --> data flow
sieve --> nodes in/of residual
internal categories:
•stickiness
•zoom
•cheat
•persistence
•repetition
•(vulgar)
•
}==> topology:
1. ramp
2. nest
3. skew
ramp: sequential, one dimensional, ‘sliders’
nest: fractal quality, JSON, hierarchical tree, ‘comments’
skew: verb act, streching, ‘2D field picker’
(slider: marking everything)
semantic in flux + persistence
object repository + identifiers
feedback --> quasi object --> structured knower --> data
#workshop in apass 2018 Summer
...a series of data models that was produced during a three days work session in a.pass May 2018.
The aim was to create a “filter" for the artistic research projects of each participants, in order to train in making meta-linguistic abstractions (on a given computer hardware) to construct a “thing” that enables describing the problem of Building Abstractions with Data, to increase/enhance the expressive/descriptive power of the languages we use. It addresses the question of machine/human readability in the digital imperative of computational world we are inhabiting, with the particular case of a.pass artistic research environments for advanced p[...]
(108)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%69.9[...]
(representation of data and control over data:)
*modular: localized part of the system that are produced by the perception of the system
*objective: viewing a large system as a collection of distinct objects. concerned with how a computational object can change and yet maintain its identity
*streamous: information that flow in the system. its evaluation is delayed. infinite list
*metadata: machine-readable persistence statements
*digital interface: discrete object of your “research problem” that refers to something outside the cri (outside the digital model)
*topology: a (proposed) body-plan to investigate questions of *connectivity* and *boundaries*, in order to find out what remains invariant as a result of transformation. this will direct us to propose (well-intended but not tested) *transversal objects*.
to be able to propose: in the culture of each pad+participant+research what connects and joins, what delinks and disconnects.
PRACTICAL:
we want to find out how cri's “filter” translates its politics into metadata
and
what happens in linking the symbolic space of data-model to the (relational, procedural, emotional) qualities of the researches of participants
we will work on the block's opening week feedbacks and process them in this diagram:
feedback --> quasi object --> structured knower --> data
(or technically:)
semantic in flux --> persistence statements --> object repository --> identifiers
(Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are spent on the creation of “quasi objects”)
i propose some (well-intended but not tested) internal categories:
•stickiness
•zoom
•cheat
•persistence
•repetition
•vulgar
(i will describe them later)
and these categories produce three topologies:
1. ramp<br />
2. nest
3. skew
(this is a maneuver to replace the question of ‘strategy’ to ‘topology’, the first act of making quasi-objects)
ramp: sequential, one dimensional, ‘sliders’
nest: fractal, serializable, arborescent, ‘comments’
skew: verb-active, streching, ‘2D field color picker pointer’
each is “queryable” in different ways and propose different difficulties
each of them addapted from an existing technologies (range sliders, commenting, color pickers)
each embeds one of: colors, doings, values
slider: marking everything with decimals
comments: hypertextualizing
field picker: spreading
}--> they are all milieu-makers
ramp --> arc of necessity
nest --> mosaic divisions
skew --> chromatic/luminous effect (of mixture)
and also:
•to address (in a longer term) how apass performs analysis and prioritization of it[...]
(109)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%70[...]zation)
what is the feeling of the document?
*document is a story that (usually) silences other stories*
where our powers to provoke care (could/should) come from (if not from document/evidence)?
is document (in its form and feeling) the best way we have at our disposal to provoke the care of the generations? ...to mark each other with the mark of the care?
putting the narrative into proper sleep
casting the names
-artist has turned herself into a mnemonic device --> suggesting “amnesia” as her context
-artist has become a reminder and (therefore) her audiences have become memorizers
(question of) memory and remembering --> the idea of ‘literal remembrance’ in her performance, re-membering, literally bringing back the “members” of the Kurt Jooss company into the present of her audiences
-the problem with her remembrance is that “there is something that is important to remember" regardless of the person/subject who remembers
indisputability of the Green Table for Olga
the artist has chosen to protect The Green Table's meaning and message (due to her political and ethical commitments [for world peace?]) in a sense her subject of research remains unresearched, her values unevaluated, her moral settlements settled
how can she become interested in decomposing her research-bodies of The Green Table?
can we remain critically ethically responsible in thinking about the “meaning and message” of our subject of study and still be able to decompose it in interesting serious ways? (yes yes)
questions of: thinking, reminding, remaining,
Sofia's documentation
she asks “what is document today?”
-what was document yesterday (that is not anymore today)?
-how the agency and meaning of docu is (or is not) mutating in time?*
-what is beyond the question of documentation and preservation? --> *durational aesthetics*
-is document a limited way of asking questions about what we do and our relationship with time and duration? [you never know what the present brings into the future.]
what art cannot say that document can? “truth”?
when truth was invented where was document standing?
is document today a mere effect of technologies of inscribing?
why we are not talking about “file”?
(---> go to the ontology of evidence and files in X-Files TV series)
is ‘file’ the bedrock of reading today?
document assumes, constructs and promises its own labor of reading
? document is that which reads as referent, truthful, evident, economic value, , ,
Femke, with multiple understanders of the blended, blending world
the question of the metaphors of the body
manuality
manual understanders
[...]
(110)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%70.5[...]riable --> (question of the) figure of variation
her work with the partners of crime, getting in the front line and frontiers of CG working and practical metaphors
...................................
Sofia's textual machine, switching between binary values of faire contract --> staying with the polar syntax of ‘you’ and ‘them’
-how the rotating axis of her machine is able of creating breaks in the syntax of the contract?
-(for her machine: “understanding = an act of application”) --> how new forms of *understanding* could change the ways we might achieve fair societies? and not merely changing the order of sentence to visualize and objectification of unfairness and precariousness of the employment economy, in the exegesis of the writen contract. what would it mean to install an understander (taking a risk), for Sofia, and not a reversal syntaxer (making aware)?
-employer and the employee as different “species” with their different “natural” tendencies to fuck with one another? --> zero-sum game
-the question of symbiotic relatedness (--> psychoanalysis) =/=? contractual relatedness
...................................
to emphasis on the contingent and the contextual
the process of becoming researcher (of science and technology studies : inquiry into the politics and practices of knowledge-making)
vignette (sketch, a brief literary description, narrate scenes from familiar activities)
the question is not ‘how can we care more?’ (as predetermined set of affective practices) rather: **what happens to our work when we pay attention to moments where the question of ‘how to care?’ is insistent but not easily answerable** (‘care’ as an analytic or provocation)
-Kenney
...................................
Manoto TV station program “sher yadet nare” شعر یادت نره respond to the questions of translation (from the UK produced program “Don't Forget the Lyrics” into an Iranian contemporary popular media culture) and memory practices (archival memory act performance pop quiz show mixed with consumer culture TV broadcasting)
...................................
*cognitive companions* (--> coordinating multiple agencies characteristically)
-tiny clay token sheep were enclosed in clay envelopes with markings indicating what was inside (*molding and inscribing clay* was the favored sensory technology for making in Mesopotamia 5000 years ago)
•maybe your makings involves “true writing” that companions preferentially with language
•maybe your makings involves spinning plant and animal fiber and feeling, tying, and untying knots
•processual affirmative re-writings
•systeming meditations
•context-sensitive pushback
•operational closure (of a system)
•fluctuation, entrainment, blocked synchrony
•
[K[...]
(111)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%70.6[...]onal death: the moment of death as decisive accounting for an individual self
purgatory: in-between time and space
afterlife --> the concept of the (embodied) human person
somatomorphic: separated soul imagined as bodily
ordinary piety -->
•significance of physical death
•spiritual value of somatic phenomena (namely suffering)
the sense of an ending hovers over all spiritual writing in the middle ages
eschatology of:
1. resurrection: a sense of last things that focuses significance in the moment at the end of time when the physical body is reconstituted and judged
[<-- arise from traditions with a much less immanent sense of “last things"]
--emphasis-->
◦time end
◦person embodied
◦humanity collective
2. immortality: the experience of personal death is the moment of judgement
3. apocalypse --> (coerces) **what matters is the here and now** <-- implying a political payoff
==> inflect and deepen the literature (description of plague, visions of heaven and hell)
}--> three eschatology differ:
•what is the person fundamentally
•fate collective or individual
•how and whether time marches
•where the end is located
•
medical eschatology
eschatology (in the west) is perhaps the most paradoxical (and inconsistent) aspect of religiosity
(traditions in which) earthly experience is a moment in an eternal dreaming
Islam, Judaism, Christianity are brooded over by the sense [*]last things: a sense of the end [soon or distant, individual or collective] contradicts itself (explodes itself) <== *it looks for a moment that gives significance to the course of time by finally denying (erasing, ending) that to which it offers significance* }<--- western european middle ages utilizes and deepens this multifold and contradictory tradition (=/= deny, impoverish)
(three types of awareness:)
1- significance of dying and afterlife --> space time of personal collective destiny
2- apocalyptic time -->
3- eschatological imagination -->
purgation
purgatory time
•do pottery while you are in purgatory
•learn ice-skating while you are waiting in zamharir
•
{personal drama of death <--> progressive unfolding of collective history}--> ultimate disposition for individual soul and body ~~> the notion of ***bliss after torment***
torment: individual glimpse of the end
Augustine --> the imperfect but not reprobate
suffering: means of salvation (of we join the agony of Chris on the cross)
pain in this life : inevitable accompaniment to the corrupt body whose weakness and rottenness are indication of the approach of death
an era of exile[...]
(112)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%74.4[...]itutional mastery + precariousness and malleability of (what had been thought of as) consciousness
hypnosis adjacent to attention?! intense refocusing and narrowing of attention + inhibition of motor responses
focalization: concentrating one's attention on some specific object
sustained looking at a single point (i used to do as a child) ==> dramatic reorganization of consciousness
Crary in his book, Suspension of Perception, shows how high science and peripheral pseudoscience never had clear-cut distinctions in the 19th century. that there were a complex and shifting relation of mutual exchange between the “luminous” physics with a huge range of other “darker” ideas about ‘action in a distance’ enacted in spiritism
@Zoumana
hypnosis & suggestion --> automatic processes (inferior, more instinctual, continuous with animality), “mental decapitation” =/= ration elicit patient with conscious participating will power [--> Star Wars will of the weaker and less independent, powerful natures exercise over weaker ones, jedi --> strance states (of the weaker ones): being instrument of undisguised power --Stengers--> deviant types of behavioural control]
(hypnosis still being researched on but) ideologically could not be acknowledged as a constitutive part of human sciences
==> (stigmata of critical position [@Ali; follow it in Marxism]:)
volitional human action modified by external forces
Ali's tacit appeal to state secret, military secret --> importance of low-level effects of suggestion and influence in contemporary global culture (Ali's interest)
the role ‘suggestion’ plays in a society of communication --> the effects of:
•fashion
•mimesis
•mass psychology
•media-related contagions
+ influences of all kind ==> “oblige” us
}--> the assumption that attention can be controlled for specific ends
(over a hundred years) underpinning institutional strategies has been the position that *human subjects have determinate psychological capacities and functions that might be susceptible to technological management*
attention has been both: strategy of control & locus of resistance and drift
(by the end of 20th century) the attentive subject is part of an ‘internalization’ of disciplinary imperative --> individuals are made more directly responsible for their own efficient or profitable utilization
Foucault's society of discipline
Guy Debord's society of spectacle
(Guy Debord's) *spectacle: a development of a technology of separation*, [multiple strategies of isolation] --> (capitalism's restructuring of) society without community
+
(Foucault's) [production of] docile bodies ~{ body = political force }
+
(<== Weber's) inner isolation of individual [[...]
(113)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%75.7[...]bject psychical interior and corporeal exterior)
-sides of the mobius strip are not fundamental identities, the drift from one to the other side is uncontrollable
currents
and surfaces of this body
is coalescence of energy into phantasms
deceptive semblance
of a theater of representation
Ali's speech (and Jassem): تاثیر گذاشتن (making what one knows into an effect on audience)
=/=
Sina's speech: به صورت موضوع درآوردن
(making what one guesses into a subject of discussion to be rethought)
irreducible composite of properties belonging to the observer
perspective: transforming psychophysiological space into mathematical space ==> sum of all parts of space and its contents are absorbed into a single ‘quantum continuum’
-Panofsky perspective as symbolic
analysis of sensation
“one coherent mass of sensations”
(Mach's legitimate and functional) scientific impressionism
*modernization (and rationalization) of perceptual (and aesthetic) response* <-- preoccupation of Seurat, Eisenstein, Moholy-Nagy, Schoenberg
(Crary > Chastel > Seurat's method was) a research into archetypal forms (lines, colors, directions) which answered to a double and deliberately compound ambition, at once *****archaic regression and scientific reduction***** [<-- this describe my work!] the artist/painter's operations set up a meeting point between *an ancient hieratic art and the rationalized discipline of the future* [= my work on ajayeb] --> culturally reactionary component of my projects, progressive and regressive at once, (past and future)
=/= Meyer Schapiro's Seurat: an enlightened politically progressive artisan-artist embracing science and technological paradigms in the interests of *forging an image of a nonhierarchical social world* [<-- an uncritical stance towards “scie “science” and “technology,” approaching “the rationality of method” (in Seurat) as a final locus of meaning =/= the site of powerful and unresolved contradictions]****
-can our modern practices be constituted without reinventing its relations to the ancient?
troublesome ambivalence of Pythagoreanism: part of an animistic premodern magical world view yet deeply embedded in the essential assumption of modernity that all of nature is understandable in terms of numbers (-Bloch, modernism: quantitative side with metaphysics proper strictly scientific =/= figural-qualitative symbolic side)
... --> Seurat's unresolvable problem: to think simultaneously the idea of universality in terms of aesthetic absolute and the inescapable universality of modern exchange and calculation
--> (Norman Brown:) the money complex, archaic or modern, is inseparable from symbolism, and *symbolism is (not the mark of rationality, as Simmel thought, but) the mark of sacr[...]
(114)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%77.8[...]re the exchanges that take place between the State and reason
modern state reason --> “the more you obey, the more you will be master” (for you will be only obeying pure reason) --> philosophy assigned itself the role of ground
common sense: the unity of all faculties at center
(in the archaic model imperial State:) poet = image trainer =/= (toady's) artist: (Deleuzian) *private thinker* (making counterthought, destroy images) =/= public professor
-problem with private thinker is that it exaggerates interiority when it is a question of outside thought --> the question of how **to place the thought in an immediate relation with the outside, with the forces of the outside** (to make thought a war machine?)
(Alex in search of) maxim =/= aphorism (always awaits its meaning from a new external force, a final force that utilizes it) <-- my interest
(?which) image inspired by State apparatus
[*]method: the striated space of the cogitatio universalis ==> path (=/= bridge)
thought ~= vampire (has no image)
(in the smooth space of Zen) the arrow does not go from one point to another but is taken up at any point, to be sent to any other point, and tends to permute with the archer and the target (#my bow and arrow --> it takes no aim but hopes the arrow will stick somewhere)
-whenever a “thinker” shoots an arrow, there is a man of the State, a shadow or an image of a man of the State, that counsels and admonishes him, and wants to assign him a target or aim (#my bow and arrow joke @apass)
pathetic texts: thought becomes pathos (=/= logos =/= mythos)
(a lot of poetry today is like this:)
(an antidialogue between brother and sister:) one *speaks before knowing* while the other *relays before having understood*
--> the necessity of not having control over language ~ (Chloe:) the necessity of being a foreigner in one's own tongue
--> “bring something incomprehensible into the world” --> in the form of exteriority
--> the becoming woman of the thinker ~ the becoming thought of the woman
--> (Chloe =) the Gemüt [feeling, heart, soul, mind] that refuses to be controlled ==forms==> a war machine : a thought grappling with exterior forces instead of being gathered up in an interior form
--> operating by relay =/= forming an image @Rob--> a thought that appeals to government ministry
--> event-thought =/= subject-thought
--> problem-thought =/= essence-thought, theorem
striating of mental space =/= Sina's textures and lectures
@Pierre: is horizon a striation?
Deleuze and Guattari: a horizonless milieu --> smooth space
the true name of race: bastard, mixed-blood
-a race is defined not by its purity but rather by the impurity conferred upon it by a system of domination
[...]
(115)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%80.3[...]ization: (the capacity of a field) to generate patterns spontaneously
topological reading is a christian tradition, theory, and practice of interpreting the figurative meaning of the Bible. It is part of Biblical exegesis.
According to ideas developed by the Church Fathers, the literal meaning, or God-intended meaning of the words of the Bible, may be either figurative or non-figurative; for instance, in the Song of Songs (also called Canticles or Song of Solomon), the inspired meaning is always figurative. The typical meaning is the inspired meaning of words referring to persons, things, and actions of the Old Testament which are inspired types of persons, things, and actions of the New Testament.
The early uses of allegory and topology were very close. Later a clearer distinction was made between the allegorical mystical, and tropological moral, styles of interpretation
...................................
(Mitchell:) vision has played the role of the sovereign sense since God looked at his own creation and saw it was good, or perhaps even earlier when he began the act of creation with the division of light from the darkness.
...................................
(Corbin)
Platonic archetypes in terms of Zoroastrian angelology
psalms and invocations to the beings of light
the celestial physics, which limits the number of Intelligences
victoriality
Sovereignty of Light, heralded by Zarathustra زرتشت
(arch)angelic vectors
to grasp the notion of ishraq (eshragh اشراق), the structure of the world that it governs, and the form of spirituality that it determines.
ishragh is at the same time both the ‘illumination’ and the ‘reflection’ (zuhur ظهور) of being
appearance = unveiling
Thus, just as in the sensible world the term signifies the splee splendor of the morning, the first radiance of the star, in the intelligible Heaven of the soul it signifies the epiphanic moment of knowledge.
the Presence of the philosopher at the mutational appearance of the intelligible Lights
“estrangement from their bodies” was for them a philosophical question
(for hayula proj.:)
primordial Flame which is their source, and which Sohrevardi claims to have seen in a vision that revealed to him the authentic ‘Oriental source’. This is the ‘Light of Glory’ that the Avesta names as the Xvarnah (khurrah in Persian, or in the Parsi form fan, farrah فره). Its function is primordial in Mazdean (مزدایی) cosmology and anthropology. It is the effulgent majesty of the beings of light, and it is also the energy which conjoins the being of each being, its vital Fire, its ‘personal angel’ and its destiny...
... the ‘negative’ intelligible dimensions of the ‘longitudin[...]
(116)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%82.9[...]/>
primordial Flame which is their source, and which Sohrevardi claims to have seen in a vision that revealed to him the authentic ‘Oriental source’. This is the ‘Light of Glory’ that the Avesta names as the Xvarnah (khurrah in Persian, or in the Parsi form fan, farrah فره). Its function is primordial in Mazdean (مزدایی) cosmology and anthropology. It is the effulgent majesty of the beings of light, and it is also the energy which conjoins the being of each being, its vital Fire, its ‘personal angel’ and its destiny...
... the ‘negative’ intelligible dimensions of the ‘longitudinal Order’ (dependence, passive illumination, love as indigence)
produce the Heaven of the Fixed Stars which accords with them. The innumerable stellar individuations of this Heaven {as in the Avicennan schema, each celestial orb is celestial in relation to the Intelligence from which it emanates) are so many emanations which materialize, in a still wholly subtle celestial matter, that part of non-being which conceals--if one thinks of it hypothetically as isolated from its Principle--their being that emanates from the Light of Lights.
... from this second order of Archangels there emanates a new Order of Lights, through the intermediary of which the Archangelarchetypes govern and rule over the Species, at least in the case of the higher Species. These are the Angel-Souls, the ‘Animae caelestes’ and ‘Animae humanae’ of Avicenna's angelology.
...................................
transcend the ‘two-dimensional’ space {of the necessary and the possible) of Avicenna's theory of the hierarchical Intelligences.
Intimated beyond the heaven of the Fixed Stars of Peripatetic or Ptolemaic astrology lie innumerable marvelous universes.
In opposition to what was to happen in the West, where the development of astronomy eliminated angelology, here it is angelology which takes astronomy beyond the classical schema within which it was confined.
...there proceeds eternally the universe of the Primordial Ruling Lights
... which marks the boundary between the celestial world and the material world of becoming. It is the Heaven of the Fixed Stars which now symbolizes the boundary between the angelic universe of Light and Spirit (Ruh-abad روح آباد) and the dark, material universe of the ‘barzakh’ (برزخ).
The characteristic term barzakh, when used in eschatology, means the intermediate, and when used in cosmology, it means the inter-world {the ‘mundus imaginalis’). In Sohrevardi's philosophy of the Ishraq it assumes a more general meaning: it designates in general everything that is body, everything that is a ‘screen’ and an ‘interval’, and which of itself is Night and Darkness.
That concept, therefore, that the word barzakh connotes is fundamental to Sohrevardi's system of physics. The barzakh is pure Darkness; it could exist as such even if[...]
(117)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%83[...]gues that the imagination effectively the indipendent real of images
فتوحات fotuhat --?--> illuminations
the imagination realm exercises its ruling property over every thing and non-thing. it gives form to absolute nonexistence , to the impossible, to the necessary, and to possibility. it makes existence nonexistence existent. (Ibn Arabi < Marks)
majmu al bahrain مجموع البحرین, confluence of two oceans, to set two oceans in motion that flow side by side together, with a barzakh between
--> #my بحرین theory, wave surface theory of language
(to be careful with the figure of) wave --> questioning the textual case while then morphing into the unreadablity of its own answer
Giovanni Pico de Mirandola: phantasy can strive to draw the senses to things celestial ... but if, yeslding to the senses, phantasy shall decline to apply itself to the business of virtue, so great is its power that it afflicts the body and beclouds the mind, and finally brings it about that man divests himself of humanity
(@Aela?)
imagination according to:
Kant + Hume combining and synthesizing agent
-what new materialism has to say about the imaginal?
Jungian archetype --> extra-individual, suprasensory world
Frankfurt school + Althusser saw collective unconscious as fascistic
*(my) material practices of unlearning:
•pretending i don't know --> enactment / acting
•(to try) forgetting --> clearance / erasure
•sleep-walking --> closing the eyes of certain perceptive stories, and become available to another
•the “let's not assume...” --> “in advance” of a the assumption
•
contemporary Western thought, tired of the sovereign subject, is trying to conceive of an extra-subjective reality that binds individuals ethically to others and to history --> this is totally a[...]
(118)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%83.8[...]ation
•thinking about possibilities for how (ethnographic/research) material can be analyzed, argued, collected, or presented, and needed to be something other than a verbal description
•using pechakucha presentation style (20 slides, 20 seconds each, a constraint intended to keep the students on their toes and to prevent dwelling on any single point for too long)
•presentation could tell us as much about how the group worked as much as what they specifically worked on
developing various ways in which stakeholders (traditionally have little or no part in the production of ethnography/research: readers, informants, the public) can be brought into the process of crafting and meaningfully manipulating research/ethnographic materials
slider --> to “mix” and “remix” (ethnographic) data
to fit their contingencies
to leave open agendas that might be brought to the data
to create an infrastructure that allows to experience first-hand the theoretical constructs one uses in text
https://ethnocharrette.wordpress.com/
#research group workshop reading, charrette method
take Nicholas Shapiro's “Attuning to the Chemosphere”
•to redesign pedagogical practices for training researchers
•collaborative initiatives in which research designs could be analyzed, experimented with, and transformed.
...................................
“may all your problems be technical” (said by Jim Gray oft-quoted U.S. computer scientist)
=/= understanding what to build, for whom, for what purposes, and how their usage of the technologies will evolve over time
...................................
many artists today work within the regime of the stereotype, manipulating mass-cultural imagery ==> hidden ideological agendas are exposed [supposedly]
(artist's view:) “stereotype = something arbitrarily imposed upon the social field” therefore something relatively easy to depose [<-- they can't be more wronge]
(artist's self-grandious fantasy is that) “they pose a threat to those in power”
juxtapose
superimpose
interpose
==>
expose
oppose
depose
an artist like Kruger --> gesture (and not action) --Owens--> *stereotype's transformation of action into gesture*
positionality inscribed in language by the personal pronouns ‘I/we’ and ‘you’ --> manifesting the subject positions of partners in a conversation
(the third-person pronoun is a ‘non-person’ designating an objective existence, and not a subject position)
-linguistic class of deixis: here, now, this, that [--> carnal discourse]
-linguistic class of deictic: I, you [--> directly to the addressee: acquires body, weight, gravity]
she addresses ‘me’ ==> double address : oscillate between the personal and the imper[...]
(119)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%87.1[...]echanical metaphors --provide--> foundation of moving bodies
prosthetic technology (like the *magic lantern*)
***technology of theory***
rigging and the question of morphological correspondence (homology: systematic similarity) --> isomorphic systems of relations
•isomorphic: 1-1 mapping, structure-preserving mapping --✕--> breakable objects
homology: principle of rigging, essentially the same (parts might have different shapes and be employed for different purposes) --> geometrical similarity --> ‘abstraction: materials of organization’ [position + structure] (Geoffroy > Hubert)
~~✕--> Deleuze and Guattari's body without organs [anatomical: pure plane of immanence (~ *rig = abstract animal*)]
--> (thinkers of) *organic folding* + *comparative biological intuition* --> *science of form*
•analogue: a part or organ in one animal that has the same function as another part or organ in a different animal (--> rig is the analogue of the animal's body)
•homotypy (homotype: serially repeated parts) --> Goethe
homology: a morphological correspondence determined primarily by relative position and connection ~= rigging
--Darwin--> material ancestors (replaced metaphysical archetypes)
philosophical anatomy <~~?--> rigging
•dialectics is the search for rational laws which are active in nature
•discontent with merely empiricism
•transcendental (philosopher) ==> morphologist
rigging: (step away form ordinary perception and) building internal homologies (=/= external ressemblance)
==> comprehensible order (--> systematic animation)
~=> complexities and accidents (are also part of it)
--> rational morphology
--> mathematization of space [--> analytic geometry (not necessarily Euclidean or rigid bodies, but also curved spaces, n-dimensional spaces, particle spaces, volumetric space, phase space, etc.) (looking at the animal) ==> abstract, proliferation of types --> rig] {--Lefebvre--> social critique of abstract space --> rigged}
-the way i learned 3D animation, the space of the software was a n-dimensional spaces (X, Y, Z, time, texture, audio, constraining, etc.)
automaton
a bit of machinery exhibiting somewhat complex behavior --rigging--> programming movement ==produce==> a working simulacrum of a living organism
•(in the days of magic) “name of god” was the rig for golem [?]
•(in the time of Newton) automaton: clockwork music box
•(in 19th century) automaton: glorified heat engine
•(in 20th century) intelligent building [~= rig]
•(perhaps rigging is our age's) desire to produce and study automata [~= computational mechanization, kinematic model]
(abstractly) automaton: a set of physically unspecified states, input, output, and operational rules
[...]
(120)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%89.2[...]
dashtan = motevaghef kardan
afzudan = toghyan kardan
TRAVEL*
-Adam Olearius (ambassador, translator, Russian+Persian)
-Sa'di (poet, traveler, theorist of love and friendship, )
-Sana+Sina (artist, researcher, translator, )
world? what is late today? trans-late: beyond being late --> travel and arriving late
travel, trans, transportation, poetry, disruption in travel, traumatic travel, log,
traumatic travel:
poetic source/act
related to refuging
voyage
exploration
investigate poetry and travel in the 12th century and 16th century and 21st century encounter
translational worlding between German Iranian cross-cultural speculative narratives that we fabulate with artistic and research methodologies
trajectory, destined beings, translations, transportation, routs, paths, maps,
transportation systn system
translation system
error in destination(?) [ontology of ‘error’ in 12th, 16th, 21st]
mutation in the garden(?)
technological system of destiny -?-> Sa'di
the flow of energy and material : dejle-biaban continuity
which agential force or travel agency Sa'di or Olearius or Sana or Sina is enrolled or registered in, that it sends them off to far distances?
pure political plays?
the question of ambassadorship
ambassadorial activities of Sana and Sina
the question of diplomacy
ambassador: storytelling, acting,
comparative thinking, comparative research, comparative translational methodology : *self in world* tech., lit., dis.,
which technologies (of composing, of writing, of figuring) are installed for Sa'di in the 12th century and for Adam Olearius in the 16th century that allows them to imagine and engage in/with what we call today *mondial*?
(Sa'di + [...]
(121)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%89.7[...]act zone” shifts the center of gravity and the point of view
...the space and time where subjects previously separated by geography and history are co-present, the point at which their trajectories now intersect
a “contact” perspective emphasizes how subjects get constituted in and by their relations to each other
* travelers and travelees *
in terms of co-presence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, and often within radically asymmetrical relations of power
***strategies of innocence*** (constructed in relation to older imperial rhetorics of conquest)
--> main protagonist of the anti-conquest is a figure (Pratt sometimes calls) the “seeing-man”: (an admittedly unfriendly label for) the white male subject of European landscape discourse--he whose imperial eyes passively look out and possess
the idioms of travel and exploration
two processes in Northern Europe (“planetary consciousness”):
•the emergence of natural history as a structure of knowledge
•the turn toward interior exploration
+
•Bourgeois forms of subjectivity consolidated themselves
•new territorial phase of capitalism propelled by searches for raw materials began
•coastal trade extended inland
•
ways of reading and focusing rhetorical analysis
...................................
[Brancaforte]
word + image
art + science
visual + discursive
the reality that he [Olearius] has experienced
Conley: “the mass of textual material that accompanies single-sheet or atlas maps tends to reveal its ideological perspective in the gaps between a silent, spatial, schematic rendering of an area (in visual form) and a voluble [por harf پرحرف], copious, emphatic, printed discourse that strives to tell of the invisible history that the image cannot put into words”
questions of
•authorship
•political power
•intellectual influence
Meerwunder, exotic curiosities from the sea
“we were about a gun-shot's distance”
in the age of incipient European colonialist expansion
a truly Baroque (bestseller) work, Vermehrte Newe Beschreibung der Muscowitischen and Persischen Reyse
(in terms of Oriental drama)
erudition (fazl فضل) + adventure }-> in narrative
•it is Adventure Time
proto-ethnography
acquire eyewitness information about a relatively unknown part of the world
-(with Olearius's style we can hear) ethnography's mantra: “writing from the ground” --> attention to the shakenness of difference (encountered or imagined) [Stewart bringing my attention to the writing affect:] “ground” sends people bouncing, tak[...]
(122)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%90.9[...]t:
•the ontological status of their ‘objects’ (of enquiry)
•the epistemological status of their knowledge claims
--Campbell--> we need to “go ontological” about consumption, global warming, (hyperobjects)
hyperobjects:
•viscous (literally real, and you cannot throw it away)
•non-local
•larger on the inside than they are on the outside
•they call for forms ofjustice, ethics, politics and reason that are beyond humanist economies of identification and representation
social constructivism ==> everyone's interpretation of the real is legitimate [equal status of interpretation] =/= (Meillassoux's) speculative realism
understand the world at the level of the hyperobject <== we are creating (consumer) objects that are massive in scale and temporality
inter-generational justice (imagining till your grandchildren)
service-dominant logic (of consumer research) =/= object oriented (more than humanist/naturalist trophies)
service: that intangible value extracted from stuff by humans --to--> the increasing ability to separate, transport, and exchange information, apart from embodiment in goods and people
Meillassoux's arche fossil ~=? jinn
witnesses of the universe before humans
objects withdraw infinitely from humans
universal quality of all objects: *reserve*
==> (narcissistic) philosophy of a uniquely lonely human fate [--> popular contemporary depiction of human with one foot in animality and the other in consciousness]
----> then how *withdrawal* (should) play out in social theory?
Lingis's ‘imperative’: worlds are filled up with imperatives (human and nonhuman) that summon us --> enmeshed pre-cognitive, atavistic, technological, embodied modes in which we respond to the world --> how this does not get recuperated into the existing models of sociology
[flipside of withdrawal:] to think of capital: an extraordinarily force overthrowing any imagination of an alternative --> there is no possibility of ‘intervention' in Capital ==> ‘accelerationism’: an inside-out radicalism, believing in unleashing productive forces of human wrought to continue its dynamism : “the only way out is to plunge further in”
Campbell: ‘withdrawal from capital' = passing through the eye of the needle
[that which is expressed in philosophy, political economy, science and science fiction, and in transhumanist, lifehacker, accelerationist movements:] *flight from consumption*
}--✕--> Campbell's *speculative consumption*
what if consumption has something relational about it?
(we must become interested in consumption @apass, Pierre, Foad, constantvzw)
*non-correlationist marketing theory* [=/= correlationism: humans doing things in the world to in[...]
(123)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%94.7[...]h drive]
(we need دورویی) two-faced {<-- I think artists from Iran and former Soviet Union countries with *double consciousness* تجربه چندگانگی تجربه دوگانگی are good at *hopeless optimism* خوش بین ناامید}
1. acknowledge the unbounded unthinkabile incalculable nature of this new reality
2. a chance to experiment with organizational forms of justice, ethics, politics, reason (that are without precedent)
{(examining growing boundaries of) climate change ==> increasing category expansion ==> epistemologies cannot encompass climage change reality}--Campbell--> (we are) afforded a chance to ontologize it
speculative realism: a mode of commitment to a non-correlated reality --Campbell--> an organizational strategy ==> a mood --> bleak optimism
unthinkability: refusal to let framing occur
...................................
how mythology is being used in consumer research
[...]
[Tillotson and Martin offering various myth typologies to support theorists in evaluation of myth theories and appropriate integration of theoretical advancements in the field of consumer culture theory:] --> how consumer researchers have sailed though every discipline--from psychology, sociology, anthropology and cultural studies, to literary criticism, history and political economy...
myth has been understood in consumer research from five perspective:
•symbolic
•functionalist
•semiotic
•structuralist
•critical theory
•monomythic
Weber{ modern bureaucratization and intellectualization ==> disenchantment of the world }--> modern experience = rationalization and mythological mysticism ==> marketplace, *no institution has been more willing and able to respond to this (Weberian) desire for enchantment than the modern marketplace* ~=> ***normative prive preference for enchantment = consumption***
--problem--> *the market remains firmly in charge of myth of consumption, its rewards and its consequences* : marketplace mythology has increasingly become an all-encompassing construct of assorted descriptions and theoretical advancements including the sacred, extraordinary, symbolic and transcendental
myth: a way of organizing perceptions of realities
consumer culture theory
{[Mead & Blumer's] symbolic perspective of myth: how symbols are adorned with meaning and that affect social interaction --> symbolic myth research: verbal/nonverbal forms of communication, with an emphasis on how people behave in day-to-day circumstances in the context of socio-historical structure and ideological of their environment ==> “mythology = narrative” }=/= Joseph Campbell: “interaction with the symbolic ==> mythology”
•Freud's use of mythic stories as metaphors in psychoanalysis [...]
(124)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%95.7[...]nchantment of the world }--> modern experience = rationalization and mythological mysticism ==> marketplace, *no institution has been more willing and able to respond to this (Weberian) desire for enchantment than the modern marketplace* ~=> ***normative preference for enchantment = consumption***
--problem--> *the market remains firmly in charge of myth of consumption, its rewards and its consequences* : marketplace mythology has increasingly become an all-encompassing construct of assorted descriptions and theoretical advancements including the sacred, extraordinary, symbolic and transcendental
myth: a way of organizing perceptions of realities
consumer culture theory
{[Mead & Blumer's] symbolic perspective of myth: how symbols are adorned with meaning and that affect social interaction --> symbolic myth research: verbal/nonverbal forms of communication, with an emphasis on how people behave in day-to-day circumstances in the context of socio-historical structure and ideological of their environment ==> “mythology = narrative” }=/= Joseph Campbell: “interaction with the symbolic ==> mythology”
•Freud's use of mythic stories as metaphors in psychoanalysis ==> (early) symbolic perspective
•Jung's archetype: embodiment beliefs/images ==collectively==> myth and religion }==> “mythology = extension of the collective unconscious into society”
•Blumer's social life: construction built up by the actor (=/= relationship of structures directing human life); ability to act toward oneself, ability to internally define themselves as objects [self with goal] as the symbols of their own actions
--McAdams--> personal myth: narrative storyline as a means to organize meaning in their lives --in--> context <==forms== historical, religious and state-influenced belief systems, culturally specific themes and ideology
}--> identity and society --responsible-for--> life story --negotiated--> personal myth as interpretive strategy
}==> concepts of ‘consumption’ and ‘identity’ in consumer culture theory
identity work =/= personal myth
[Velliquette + Murray + Creyer:] example of tattoo culture: private and public burrs physically with the attachment of personal meaning to physical marking of the skin and symbolically through the personal stories attached to public brands --> *individuals attach meaning to consumption* <== negotiating the cultural tensions <==throu== perception of self contrasted with the influence of institutional structures (race, class, gender, age) and ideological pressure }==> “meaning = dialectic of object and consumer”
•(Jung's archetype ==>) Joseph Campbell's monomyth: universally applicable narrative of mythology (like in Hollywood films about the hero's rites of passage --> experience of life in accordance with the phenomena of time)
myths/dreams find expression in symbolic form --> “partic[...]
(125)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%95.7[...]nscious into society”
•Blumer's social life: construction built up by the actor (=/= relationship of structures directing human life); ability to act toward oneself, ability to internally define themselves as objects [self with goal] as the symbols of their own actions
--McAdams--> personal myth: narrative storyline as a means to organize meaning in their lives --in--> context <==forms== historical, religious and state-influenced belief systems, culturally specific themes and ideology
}--> identity and society --responsible-for--> life story --negotiated--> personal myth as interpretive strategy
}==> concepts of ‘consumption’ and ‘identity’ in consumer culture theory
identity work =/= personal myth
[Velliquette + Murray + Creyer:] example of tattoo culture: private and public burrs physically with the attachment of personal meaning to physical marking of the skin and symbolically through the personal stories attached to public brands --> *individuals attach meaning to consumption* <== negotiating the cultural tensions <==throu== perception of self contrasted with the influence of institutional structures (race, class, gender, age) and ideological pressure }==> “meaning = dialectic of object and consumer”
•(Jung's archetype ==>) Joseph Campbell's monomyth: universally applicable narrative of mythology (like in Hollywood films about the hero's rites of passage --> experience of life in accordance with the phenomena of time)
myths/dreams find expression in symbolic form --> “participating in ritual == engaging myth”
}--> **consumer research as hero's journey** : Consumer Behavior Odyssey's travelling across America in a motorhome to learn about self, the world, and other people [@Jassme and Mia] --> transcendental knowledge of the American consumer ==> academic literature
(consumer Odyssey found that) ‘the journey’ holds a sacred status that transforms knowledge generation into new mythological epistemologies and opens up new doors to understanding (of consumption)
&
‘extraordinary experiences as rites of passage’ [--example: white water river rafting --> (emergent themes of) personal growth, communitas harmony with nature translated to other consumer experiences]
‘rites of passage’ [~= ‘monomyth']:
•separation [~= departure]
•transition [~= initiation]
•reintegration [~= return]
(river rafting ~=) ritual ~= enactment of myth
}--(Arnould & Price)--> narrative of service embodies the initiation of the journey
‘extraordinary experience' = event & *enchanted temporal period*
liminality: the threshold of a ritual where ambiguity and disorientation occurs before the ritual has been completed [Van Gennep, Turner]
[Dobscha and Foxman:] how a joyous activity is actually stressful and invokes *transcendent experiences of a mythic journey* --> ‘call to adventu[...]
(126)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%95.8[...]br />
...................................
(with Annemarie's help @apass)
*sources of knowledge =/= styles of knowing* ==> tensions
judgment: an occasion to apply one's own standards =/= observation: a mean to get to know somebody else's standards
difference
which differences exactly?
what are their interferences and their diffractions?
--> the surprises that come with finding “variations”
(stories about)
vessels & fluids
pain & technicians
patients & doctors
techniques & technologies
(bracketing the practices =/=) foregrounding the practices --> objects come into being and disappear with the practices in which they are manipulated ==> reality multiplies
=/= single passive object in the middle waiting to be seen from the point of view of seemingly endless series of perspectives (SK the elephant parable)
philosophy used to approach knowledge in an epistemological way (~ preconditions for acquiring true knowledge = Alex's question “what is artistic research”) =/= (Annemarie's) *knowledge = a matter of manipulation (=/= reference)* ==> ethnographic interest in knowledge practices (--to--> “what are artist researchers doing?”)
xxxxxxxx
...................................
#project: to create a multidisciplinary knowledge program around the relationship between art, marketing and [?], highlighting the imbricated فلس فلس nature of [?] as tangible resources and knowledge
...................................
#project index Tehran theory: to think ethnographically about non-unilateral and non-static picture of aspiration in the context of contemporary Tehran eco-techno-culture
•archive question
•contemporary media technology
•data/knowledge organization
•infrastructure
•epistemology
•Tehran techno-culture multispecies ethnography
•mini worlds
•*how people imagine a better life?* --> (to think non-unilateral and non-static) *picture of aspiration* (in the context of contemporary Tehran)
•imitations of forms
•http://ajayeb.net/?q=sensibilities+hitting+people
•start as collaborative online platform for writings/projects about Tehran emerging ecologies:
◦mice موش
◦mobile phones موبایل
◦monsters هیولا
◦heavens مثل
◦
•on Tehran trees:
◦on anthropogenic landscapes of Tehran
◦descriptive methods for the study of social relation and histories
◦learning (directly) about worldly objects of Tehran ==> take part in the kinds of creative play that are the hallmark of the research --> draws readers outside common-sense assumptions
◾(to enable a) technologically-augmented ecosystem
◾(to enable a) translocal exchange
◦{ [?not to] tokeniza[...]
(127)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%97.1[...]◾monsters هیولا
◦heavens مثل
◦
•on Tehran trees:
◦on anthropogenic landscapes of Tehran
◦descriptive methods for the study of social relation and histories
◦learning (directly) about worldly objects of Tehran ==> take part in the kinds of creative play that are the hallmark of the research --> draws readers outside common-sense assumptions
◾(to enable a) technologically-augmented ecosystem
◾(to enable a) translocal exchange
◦{ [?not to] tokenization and verification of natural assets --> augment & utilize --?--> provoking our relation to nature, hybrid ecosystems in the technosphere }<-- question of governance
◾to explore ways for nonhumans as agents to act with the same importance of humans in/with the world via technology
◦resocializing value (less anthropocentric) --> social impact + environmental impact
◦less inalienable circulation of *cultural intelligence* (and value) among less individualized (connected networks of wider) social agents
◦critical questions + cross-pollinate
...................................
(inconsistency of) *physiological chaos* of the World War I --> how physicians and medical researchers (early 20th century medical science) responded to it? --> (a new web of concepts:) *semiotics of injuries and behaviors* (--> that became essential for thinking about integration and collapse in economics, social organization, psychoanalysis, symbolic representation, and international politic)
--> attuned to, to anticipate, to outdo, *specific conditions of the lived body in
states of extreme exertion*:
•in a conceptual-historical and anthropological fashion
•stage thought and experimentation
•to recalibrate their thinking
}--> logic of integration (a problematic systematization) ==> *registers of the individual and the social*
linked to each other:
integration در شکم چيزى جا دادن, collapse, self-preservation, crisis, catastrophe, witnessing, evidence, unknowing
early 20th century medical science ==> شکننده a body that is *brittle because integrated* & *integrated because brittle*
wartime and postwar therapeutics ==> conceptions of the body
Geroulanos and Meyers (=/= Foucauldian) show “how particular kinds of injury emerged during World War I, and how such injuries found their place in the bodies and lifeworlds of wounded soldiers and doctors, and in the thinking and actions of theorists and policy makers.” (ethnography of the interwar period)
=/= proposing a counter-body or counter epistemology or resistance knowledge
“in this world, we do not play chess with eternal figures like the king and the fool; the figures are what the successive configurations of the chessboard make of them.” -Veyne
([...]
(128)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%97.2[...]uch that they underwrite my acts of consumption” -Hayles
•*cognition = a product* that emerges between the self and its environment (and does not take place exclusively on the brain) --stages--> cognition as a process
4.
complexification of life
complex (feedback loops, emergence, bifurcation) =/= complicated: accurately analysable system having a large number of component and perform sophisticated tasks
•most of the most valuable products today have virtual components (software, money, etc.) that would be unrecognizable 25 years ago
5.
automation of life
(fundamental legal principle of) ius gentium: all humans are the same in so far as they are rational human beings in possession of free will =/= 21st century neuroscientific research
}--Libet--> “free won't” : the mind exists in a climate which says yes, but it can say no
agency is outsourced to systems that increasingly invisiblize from everyday life (software deciding mortgage, Facebook suggest friend, turning car into a moving computer)
dystopian imaginary of Black Mirror TV series --> these developments are a tyrannical force that undermine an a priori and fundamental humanness
--Campbell--> consumer researcher's results will be powerful counter-balances to the often too blindly utopian and dystopian accounts of the future
...................................
[*]advertising: (ubiquitous and contentious) symptom of organization[= corporate entity and/or common practice]
aesthetic ambassador of the organization
--(a way through which)--> **anyone outside the organization mythologizes an imaginary inside**
(its) media:
•***indirect messages of public relations that are embedded deep in the heart of non-advertising genres***
•bombastic and direct appeal of made-for-cinema advertisement and corporate communication
•
how advertising used to be scorned as a practice and profession --> gained responsibility in American culture:
-1 advertising became instrumental in enlisting soldiers during world war I ==> lending it a moral force which served more noble purposes besides commerce
-2 it was elevated through its incorporation into education (first in Harvard University 1924)
-3 it becames adept at referencing styles and commissioning work from the realm of high culture
}--now--> advertising does not just produce culture, but ***culture produces advertising***
(one of the central questions of advertising in contemporary times has been the extent to which) *advertising enframes everything within its discourse and logic*
--Campbell--> ****if advertising is everything, what is it not?**** [@apass] <-- this is a crucial question about advertising and it is part of a larger global crucial devate about the commodification of life and previously inalienable aspects the[...]
(129)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%97.8[...]and intensities the other apass participants get caught up in, attached to, inhabit, to catch you in your acts,
(why knowing together?) **worlds come together through collective action and how they attract, repel, enroll, animate, and incite (tahrik تحریک, eghva اغوا) us. [...] worlds are “lived [compositions] with tempos, sensory knowledge, orientations, transmutations, habits, rogue force fields.” (Stewart)
-(engaging) in a form of critique that detour into descriptive eddies (گرداب کوچک مخالف) and attach to trajectories
-(through this i am making myself interested in) what (theoretical, philosophical, artistic,) storytelling, as one ***consequential practice*** among many, make possible in the collective task of building and sustaining livable worlds ----> taking texts as worlds, taking people as worlds
-(when talking about your project) you are teaching me what makes you move. --> that means i need to learn how to be affected differently (other than my own projects terms) in order to affect (others) differently [# my bow and arrow intervention] ---- to give intense attention to your gestures (expressing desires, expectations, affects) and to respond to them in remarkable way.
critical hedonism (Archer)
--> refusal of the “embodied anxiety”
affective economies (Ahmed)
--> which affective economies animate our own bodies as scholars/artist/... and as people
(asking) is this practice good for the subjects involved?
--> we create (involuntary) differences, the question is, is the world enriched by these differences? (by Sina, Xiri, Aela, etc.)
-(also be careful with) “differences as raw material” in a “delocalized cultural capitalism (geopolitics of knowledge)” --(Renan in conversation with Peran)--> “internal colonialism,” “local difference as an object of study and raw material,” and “cooptation of imagination in the networks of information-connection.”
-(looking for other metaphors of) alignments =/= operational references to co-production
(Marti Peran) “The surplus of images has reached the maximum degree of pollution. In turn, the planetary connection ensures the exchange of images regardless of the visual regimes from which they come from. Images no longer speak anywhere. In this situation, the political task is to return to the linguistic battlefield. It won't be possible to do things differently if we do not start talking differently. The most urgent imperative is a language inventiveness.”
(atomism)
-constant and precarious self-management of molecular projects in a horizon-less future
-artists in the operation of self-making ourselves
#the image i made for Sohrevardi; allegory of Sohrevardi; the image's discursive architecture and its diverse inventiveness; (being careful with being) seductive in staging diversity; [...]
(130)[...notes/midday review.txt]%3[...]t-thought disorder (=/= form of thought)
*the disease of cognitive abnormality : abnormal sequential thinking*
*tangential thinking*
•disorganised thinking ==> disorganised speech
•mood disorders
•dementia
•mania
•clanging (situationally inappropriate association of words based upon sound rather than concepts)
•echolalia (unsolicited repetition of vocalizations made by another person)
•[*]tangentiality: deviation from relevancy; wandering train of thought, lack of focus, never returning to the initial topic --> *topic maintenance*
◦self-centered social responses
◦attention to one's own speech is overcome during the occurrence of cognition ==> evasive vocalized content
(language use”)
referential (for the sake of context)
poetic (for the sake of message)
emotive (for the sake of addresser)
conative (for the sake of addressee)
pathic (for the sake of interaction)
metalingual (for the sake of itself)
...................................
-the concept of “wearing” from Alberti (prehispanic South America)
-the concept of “mask” from Mohaghegh (postmodern Middle East)
-the concept of “style” from Archer (post-industrial Britain)
[these theories are very helpful for me and import-rich for reimagining subjectivity. Alberti committed to anthropology, Mohaghegh to the philosophical, Archer to sociology]
...................................
slave: a person attached by law and by custom to the identity of another individual --> ‘social death’ of slavery (as legal nonperson ==> alienation) [in academic literature comparative study of slavery], slavery as a substitute for death in war
--shift--> (the concept that) slaves might influence the tastes, the language, the actions, and even the ideas of their masters
acknowledgement of presence =/= significance in relation to history
(A. Lee on) the African dimension of the genesis of the Babi religion
((oral sources for) the recovery of) subaltern histories in Iran [erased from historical memory]
--> deep resentment of “the presence in Iran of an ‘Other’ that does not conform to the imagined Iranian Self”
unblemished national selfhood
purity fetishism of... <== *purity deeply rooted in religion* [?]
...................................
(issues) politics of liberation:
•that liberal democracy requires common basis for culture and society
•identity politics:
◦“the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else's oppression” (Eisenstein)
◦invites people to stay in, to look inward, to obsess over the body and the self, to surround themselves with a moral forcefield to protect their worldv[...]
(131)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%59.7[...]s) are ambivalent responses to the threat of inconstancy in a world wherein forms (like statues of myrtle) were only ever apparent --> each making of a body-poly (or pot) is a performance and an improvisation, unscripted and therefore cab go wronge
[Alberti + Budden + Sofaer + Ingold + Hallam]
3D model = partial subject
...................................
in Maya particles are as little ping-pong balls --✕--> relativity theory destroyed the idea of consistent objects
--> extreme forms of realism
Hitchcock's vertigo effect --> a tool i built years ago: https://www.highend3d.com/maya/script/vertigotool-for-maya
simultaneously zooming and pulling away : we apear to be in the same place, yet the place seems to distort beyond our control ==reestablishing==> the way we experience “here”
the vertigo tool doens't do away with human experience, it drastically modifies it in a dizzing manner
--> a dangerous knowledge zoom lens tool, a vertiginous antirealist/antiliteral abyss (=/=? irony device ==> presenting us with intimacy with existing nonhumans)
...................................
#veil
@Janina
@Ale
Nicole Archer: ‘textile’: a material formed at the intersections of desire and modern politics
•textile's ‘textility' = texture
•textile's ‘textuality' = readability
to be prepared to address relations consistencies ==> (hope to) meaningfully reform them
*(Archer lingering in the textile's volatile gum) to develop forms of critique that can account for the peculiar textiles ‘we’ are currently wrapped-up in* [globalized economies, militarized laboratories, etc. (BioSteel and so on)]
text +/& textile
•in metaphor: the social fabric, the Internet, the Fold, etc.
•in myth: Arachne's textiles, or Penelope's epic loom
}--✕-->? to account for neo-liberal and transgenic subjects
(traditionally:) textile (racialized and gendered, as “woman's work”) “=/=” text
*fabric conditions and binds our desires and bodies ---@Janina
(Archer >) Gernreich exposed how the fashion system instrumentalized the body's desire to move” while inscribing it within the time-signatures of modern capitalism
uniform = contemporary fashion's other
digi-camo (redesigned and digitally remixed camouflage fatigues worn by the US military)
desire for “freedom” and for alternative temporalities + desire for discipline and physical restraint
}--> *tight spaces our desires are prone to work themselves into*
textures and taxonomies of fashion and uniformity
Abu Ghraib --> (in the pursuit of a) perverse desire for justice (a desire that many feel is best met in the violent erasure of certain subjects)
[...]
(133)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%86.4[...]stically modifies it in a dizzing manner
--> a dangerous knowledge zoom lens tool, a vertiginous antirealist/antiliteral abyss (=/=? irony device ==> presenting us with intimacy with existing nonhumans)
...................................
#veil
@Janina
@Ale
Nicole Archer: ‘textile’: a material formed at the intersections of desire and modern politics
•textile's ‘textility' = texture
•textile's ‘textuality' = readability
to be prepared to address relations consistencies ==> (hope to) meaningfully reform them
*(Archer lingering in the textile's volatile gum) to develop forms of critique that can account for the peculiar textiles ‘we’ are currently wrapped-up in* [globalized economies, militarized laboratories, etc. (BioSteel and so on)]
text +/& textile
•in metaphor: the social fabric, the Internet, the Fold, etc.
•in myth: Arachne's textiles, or Penelope's epic loom
}--✕-->? to account for neo-liberal and transgenic subjects
(traditionally:) textile (racialized and gendered, as “woman's work”) “=/=” text
*fabric conditions and binds our desires and bodies ---@Janina
(Archer >) Gernreich exposed how the fashion system instrumentalized the body's desire to move” while inscribing it within the time-signatures of modern capitalism
uniform = contemporary fashion's other
digi-camo (redesigned and digitally remixed camouflage fatigues worn by the US military)
desire for “freedom” and for alternative temporalities + desire for discipline and physical restraint
}--> *tight spaces our desires are prone to work themselves into*
textures and taxonomies of fashion and uniformity
Abu Ghraib --> (in the pursuit of a) perverse desire for justice (a desire that many feel is best met in the violent erasure of certain subjects)
(let's) stop pretending that “we” weren't already caught-up in the messy circuits of desire
“[...]Freud's figure of the woman who has nothing better to do than but braid her pubic hair into a futile simulation of the phallus, and who (interestingly enough) accidentally invents weaving as an outcome of this inherently fetishistic gesture” (Archer > Barthes > Freud)
Gernreich working with “the future” as a medium and not as a destination***
-he was keen to work with fashion as a ‘time-based medium’(~ deliver us onto alternative temporalities)
[*]fashion: a distinctly modern clothing regime engineered to materially manipulate “the past” so it may serve as a springboard into “the time to come”, an attempt to create the perfect tension between “right now” and “back then” ==> (fashion serving as one of modern culture's main engines catapults the wearers) towards a time a[...]
(135)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%86.4[...]
(traditionally:) textile (racialized and gendered, as “woman's work”) “=/=” text
*fabric conditions and binds our desires and bodies ---@Janina
(Archer >) Gernreich exposed how the fashion system instrumentalized the body's desire to move” while inscribing it within the time-signatures of modern capitalism
uniform = contemporary fashion's other
digi-camo (redesigned and digitally remixed camouflage fatigues worn by the US military)
desire for “freedom” and for alternative temporalities + desire for discipline and physical restraint
}--> *tight spaces our desires are prone to work themselves into*
textures and taxonomies of fashion and uniformity
Abu Ghraib --> (in the pursuit of a) perverse desire for justice (a desire that many feel is best met in the violent erasure of certain subjects)
(let's) stop pretending that “we” weren't already caught-up in the messy circuits of desire
“[...]Freud's figure of the woman who has nothing better to do than but braid her pubic hair into a futile simulation of the phallus, and who (interestingly enough) accidentally invents weaving as an outcome of this inherently fetishistic gesture” (Archer > Barthes > Freud)
Gernreich working with “the future” as a medium and not as a destination***
-he was keen to work with fashion as a ‘time-based medium’(~ deliver us onto alternative temporalities)
[*]fashion: a distinctly modern clothing regime engineered to materially manipulate “the past” so it may serve as a springboard into “the time to come”, an attempt to create the perfect tension between “right now” and “back then” ==> (fashion serving as one of modern culture's main engines catapults the wearers) towards a time and place where present-day problems can no longer reach them and unknown pleasures are made manifest & continually converting the erratic power of our desires into a kind of motion that can be effectively capitalized upon
(brackets and bracelets)
...momentary and marvelous sensations of free fall (by way of design)
Janina's wardrobe malfunctions
*the fine line between sexual liberation and sexual exploitation (in Space 1999 and Star Trek uniforms)*
(Archer:) “Star Trek's futuristic costumes assert their ‘other-worldliness’ by emphatically exposing as much of a woman's body as possible to a relatively prudish American public during the peak of the sexual revolution. Theiss’ garments were literally devised to slip back into the legacies of shame that had heretofore defined the origin of sexual difference and the litany of unequal gender relations that followed.”
() the artist and his muse (typically gendered image of the fashion designer and his model) --> based on the classical notion of an unhampered and naturally feminine gro[...]
(136)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%86.4[...]etter to do than but braid her pubic hair into a futile simulation of the phallus, and who (interestingly enough) accidentally invents weaving as an outcome of this inherently fetishistic gesture” (Archer > Barthes > Freud)
Gernreich working with “the future” as a medium and not as a destination***
-he was keen to work with fashion as a ‘time-based medium’(~ deliver us onto alternative temporalities)
[*]fashion: a distinctly modern clothing regime engineered to materially manipulate “the past” so it may serve as a springboard into “the time to come”, an attempt to create the perfect tension between “right now” and “back then” ==> (fashion serving as one of modern culture's main engines catapults the wearers) towards a time and place where present-day problems can no longer reach them and unknown pleasures are made manifest & continually converting the erratic power of our desires into a kind of motion that can be effectively capitalized upon
(brackets and bracelets)
...momentary and marvelous sensations of free fall (by way of design)
Janina's wardrobe malfunctions
*the fine line between sexual liberation and sexual exploitation (in Space 1999 and Star Trek uniforms)*
(Archer:) “Star Trek's futuristic costumes assert their ‘other-worldliness’ by emphatically exposing as much of a woman's body as possible to a relatively prudish American public during the peak of the sexual revolution. Theiss’ garments were literally devised to slip back into the legacies of shame that had heretofore defined the origin of sexual difference and the litany of unequal gender relations that followed.”
() the artist and his muse (typically gendered image of the fashion designer and his model) --> based on the classical notion of an unhampered and naturally feminine ground of conception =/= masculine drive to be “creative” : (old notion that) “woman is the origin ==> it is up to man (Gernreich) to be original” --> to refashion feminine mater-iality into more meaningful forms
easily inscribed and veiled shame of nudity
*hyper-exposure* and *self-consciousness* (aimed at the shame ‘we,’ who live within ‘the cultures of the textile,’ are possessed by)
...deep-seated knowledge that the textile leaves us continually and hopelessly exposed
*our need to be forever wrapped-up in the text/ile* : endlessly bound by the perpendicular, criss-crossing of one another's desires and the ‘significances’ we ascribe to such satisfying predictability
textile screens
textile’s discursive usefulness: its ability to support and exploit the image of our “alternative” identities
(Lacan's) objet petit a : prediscursive, meaningless thing’
textiles (and the clothing shaped from them) are not “convenient things” that help curtail or[...]
(137)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%86.5[...]them), rather, they are the very object cause of our desire
capturing and suspending our desires in fabricated flights of fancy =/= a sieve (alak) to pass through onto places unknown/unknowable
embodied politics of impropriety
rethinking how ‘the body’ is typically interpolated, along temporal lines
the medium of the textile (--> fashion's main medium --> thread of sexual difference running through this fabric)
...styles that are not pre- or over-determined by a dualistic form of sexual difference
sartorial scheme
abstracting the concept of ‘the body’
attire
(more) body's social ranges of movement
(more) flexible corporeal aesthetics and articulations
{Edie's odd,protracted sleeves of her dress in Warhol's ICA exhibition 1965} the surreal transformation of a woman's arm into a pachyderm's long, wily, and authority-defying appendage...
the conventional and deeply gendered notion that fashion is “[ephemeral], frivolous, relegated to the domain of the feminine and the body, as opposed to art, which [is] deemed [eternal,] masculine and placed in the sphere of the mind and psyche” (Archer > Geczy and Karaminas)
and--> intertwining of fashion and art has long been regarded as absolutely key to the production of the modern social fabric--intended (like the warp and weft of a textile) to remain discreet, always perpendicular
modern aesthetic theory --> contradictory structure of difference of “fashion =/= art” : “fashion design = art's constitutive other” (= that mode of creative production that is beholden to the market and to the manufactured whims of the embodied, consumer passions =/={ art's singularity, extraordinariness, [Nietzschean ethics of] standing alone ==> timeless or universal knowledge =/= ‘everyday culture'})
radical beauty of the quotidian
mundane material culture is repeatedly *elevated* and “translated” into art --> “losing its place within lived reality ==> to become critically meaningful” =/= (Gernreich's) art and fashion critically transformed so that they run parallel and start to resonate with one another
(for Benjamin) translation [~= criticism]: allowing (translatior's) language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue [=/= preserves the state in which (translatior's own) language happens to be]
-to transform “the original” text/thing through the medium of the other, echoes that are produced in the space that opens up between an “original” and “secondary” text --> [*]translation: inconsequentiality of original/secondary separation
--Gernreich--> to make clothes in-between art and fashion (now and the future, the self and the other)
it-girl
Beatlesque escape
new paths that young people [...]
(138)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%86.6[...] market and to the manufactured whims of the embodied, consumer passions =/={ art's singularity, extraordinariness, [Nietzschean ethics of] standing alone ==> timeless or universal knowledge =/= ‘everyday culture'})
radical beauty of the quotidian
mundane material culture is repeatedly *elevated* and “translated” into art --> “losing its place within lived reality ==> to become critically meaningful” =/= (Gernreich's) art and fashion critically transformed so that they run parallel and start to resonate with one another
(for Benjamin) translation [~= criticism]: allowing (translatior's) language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue [=/= preserves the state in which (translatior's own) language happens to be]
-to transform “the original” text/thing through the medium of the other, echoes that are produced in the space that opens up between an “original” and “secondary” text --> [*]translation: inconsequentiality of original/secondary separation
--Gernreich--> to make clothes in-between art and fashion (now and the future, the self and the other)
it-girl
Beatlesque escape
new paths that young people are charting requires clothes
(Archer is making me interested in fashion by helping me go through the) economic and scopophilic grains of the fashion industry
the idea of the ‘new look’ absolutely dominating the fashion scene during the mid 21st century
‘new look’ fashion strictly obeying the laws and divisions of optically delineated Cartesian space, and its attending epistemo-ontologies and political economies (-Archer: the proportions of Dior's famous silhouette absolutely required that one always take a well-heeled “step-back” in order to comprehend themselves in a mirror, a camera lens, or even a street window) --> (offering consumers new manners in which) to dress, but also **to see and to understand themselves and their potentiality**
[myself, like many critical artists of my generation, we glean (harvest خوشه چينى) the occurrence of ideological violence]
relaxed clothing shapes
affordable
easy-to-care-for
mix-and-match fabrics
hyper-modern color combinations and patterns
couture خياط زنانه
animosity, bad blood, animus's system, the system is made
perennial enfant terrible
(the naked constant prince)
social change <== **fashion must (and will) go out of fashion**
Gernreich's economic critique of the fashion system --?-->{ disregard of the wearer's comfort which is an obvious feature of all civilized woman's apparel ==> conspicuously figured the middle-class woman caught-up in the middle of the fashion system as being utterly passive and woefully unimaginative -->
•seeing woman's fashionable transfiguration only in te[...]
(139)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%86.6[...]preciate the pleasures that fashionable styles offer their wearers in spite of the physical and social restrictions they impose
}--> parochial economic critique (operating in a wholly rational realm) =/= (Elizabeth Wilson:) how these ‘transforming actions’ might do violence to these orders --Archer--> **how the powerful and highly volatile work of desire unfolds within the fashion system**
***oppression =/= passivity***
Gernreich --> fashion ‘works’ not simply by way of its significant expense, but rather at *the expense of signification*
{ fashion = fantasy }==> fashion offers our desires a medium through which:
•to formally manipulate the discourse of the body
•to violently threaten the rational ordering of its meaning
•to from which to produce pleasures that exceed satisfaction or sense
•to operate on the text/ile in ways that are non-linguistic (within waking life)
Lyotard's “the dream-work does not think, but ‘manhandles’ the text and operates on the text as if it were a material” =/= Lacan's “the unconscious is structured like a language”
Lyotard on Freud's assumption and insistence that the textures of a text affect its meaning --> Lacan's failure (as analyst and philosopher) in not being able to appreciate how fantasy (~ the forms of desire ~? fashion) pits the materiality of signifiers against what they try to signify
“if desire is the mobile element (here the wind, elsewhere water) that crumples the text, can it also be the fixative which keeps certain parts of it readable? I know of only one notion which can satisfy these conflicting demands: the notion of form, of fantasy”
(my struggle with my colleagues) not to confuse fashion [or any object] for “an object that the subject imagines and aims at” instead of recognizing fashion as “a sequence in which the subject has their own part to play and in which permutat[...]
(141)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%86.7[...]ualized damsels laid amidst tall grasses (most controversial 19th or 20th century figurations of women) --> [that is not enough--it falls short in showing] the way that these suits clearly encourage their wearers to close their eyes and explore the kinky pleasure found specifically in the way PVC peels from your flesh in one long slurp
plastics don't have the same ‘memory’ as textiles
they don't hold onto the past
they won't stay obediently folded like a cotton calico
vinyl swimsuit
*these designs proliferated a multi-faceted understanding of one's own skin*
-exposed skin feels so starkly and qualitatively different than a torso left to sweat it out under a nearly non-porous plasticine cloth
xxxx
...................................
(we are in) style wars***
critical considerations of style --> think across subjectivities & cultural practices
*aesthetics of mending*
mend: replacing a part or putting together what is torn or broken
(--> regarding ajayeb, reparative, refigurative reading of the past, mending of *those thing that seem beyond repair* --> important for Tehran's landscape of affect and aspiration)
Archer: how arrangement of masculinity (~= acts of violence and wounding) might be *styled otherwise*
literal fashion victim of war hero
“every man” will put himself on the line, and earn his masculinity via rituals, narratives, and professions that are predicted on brutality--and that he will do this without grievance or hesitation
to be a man under such conditions, is to enter into a deeply gendered dialectic forged through acts of wounding and care that demand “men” to hurt, and “women” to do the work of mending
...the ways modern gender binaries synthesize sexual difference
business of state violence: accepting the notion that our identities are forged through obligatory acts of barbarism
how each of us work to fix identities
to do the maintenance work that modernity requires each of us
relic enduring centuries --> cultural need to materially substantiate the distance that lies between proper and improper forms of masculinity (dandy and war hero)
*routine and spectacular acts of wounding that gender identities presuppose*
--also--> attest to the critical will to desire different forms of masculinity
(artifacts preserved in climate controlled bubbles survive time to tell many stories)
conspicuous ornaments of legend
masculinities (and femininities) secured through woundings
(the work of) the maintenance of a particular form of gossip
towel
complex figuration of gendered social relations
which relics in contemporary Iran are emblema[...]
(142)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%86.9[...]olence: accepting the notion that our identities are forged through obligatory acts of barbarism
how each of us work to fix identities
to do the maintenance work that modernity requires each of us
relic enduring centuries --> cultural need to materially substantiate the distance that lies between proper and improper forms of masculinity (dandy and war hero)
*routine and spectacular acts of wounding that gender identities presuppose*
--also--> attest to the critical will to desire different forms of masculinity
(artifacts preserved in climate controlled bubbles survive time to tell many stories)
conspicuous ornaments of legend
masculinities (and femininities) secured through woundings
(the work of) the maintenance of a particular form of gossip
towel
complex figuration of gendered social relations
which relics in contemporary Iran are emblematic of how and why the gender binary is imperative?
...relentless and futile acts of tearing and repairing
*we need to imagine how to restyle the relation between wounding and care so we can start to transform the fabric of our society*
(Archer)
@Sina: deconstructing the work of mending ajayeb
[stitches] pierces the substrate it is repairing, performing a modest violence upon what is to be mended, and reminding each of us of our sensitivity, vulnerability, and mortality
(Mark Newport)
linger in the cut produced by the suture (=/= patch over the proper wound)
(what kind of mending dares us?) to consider different, less clear-cut paths of relation and being (--✕--> masculinity's wounded duty)
Freud's fold of castration anxiety, fetishism, and Oedipus complex unfold in feminized form of labor to stitch and sew, to mark the wounds that “men must suffer” --> fashion material ritual, transforming and ideologically reinforcing femininity
...................................
(Janina's distinctive sartorial sensibilities)
(The Flash TV series charachers, each a free-agent entrepreneur, the personification of neoliberal agency)
-performing the affective venture and glamour labor, characteristic of the cultural industries today, (embodying the) hypermediated brand intrusion and suffusion
-using your own self-consciously branded personae to stand out in a cluttered field of visual noise
“famous for being famous” --> the fable of “that which captures our gaze, does not capture our respect”
-fame is built out of material human bodies moving through physical space, engaging and interacting with other material human bodies. it is forged in a social somewhere.
...photographed on the right sidewalks at the right times by the right photographers
[...]
(143)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%87[...]n) evil eye --> arrest movement and literally kill life
(psychological concept of) sature (to join two lips of a wound): pseudo-identification of an initial moment of seeing and a terminal moment of arrest --Owens--> *medusa effect*: imaginary identification of the seer and seen (immediacy, capture, stereotype)
Lacan placing the moment of arrest prior to the moment of seeing --> what happens when we look at a picture : first an arrested gesture (a picture) then the act of seeing (completing the picture)
[*]to pose: to present onself to the gaze of the other as if one were already frozen (immobilized, suspended, a picture), **mimicing the immobilizing power of the gaze** --Owens--> pose forces the gaze to surrender
***to pose = to pose a threat*** ~ apotrope
artist reflects the stereotype back on its self --> to defeat an apotrope with an apotrope
is Kruger different than politically motivated artists (consciousness-raising)?
--Owens--> Kruger stages the techniques of stereotype (that interpolate her/him as subjects)
-is the viewer led or allowed to reject her work's address? ==?==> gesture of refusal --or?-- mobilization of the spectator
...................................
Archer (philosopher of wardrobes, patterns and textility) on Owens's medusa effect ~~✕--> Calderwood's drawings *messy material semiotic* (figures that forcefully demand one's attention) --> queer pleasure to be caught in their dense but finely rendered patterns
-following the phallic loops & yonic openings (that obscure any semblance of a singular true body)
apotropaic stockings
جوراب زنانه بلاگردان
Kruger & Calderwood --Archer--> searing critique of gender identity and the ways that gendered stereotypes capture the body within a tight weave of politics and ideology
[*]medusa effect: a critical gesture located when the swipe of Perseus's sword just reaches the Gorgon's perfectly posed neck ==possibility==> infinite outcomes
-a transitory but potent act of resistance (lies between identify and difference)
Kruger's feminist-inflected pronoun --> refigure the personal pronoun's normal operative function ==> viewers dislodge themselves from the law of the letter ==expose==> language of gendered oppression's limits
find a way of articulating oneself beyond pronoun's strict logics (--> alternative subject position) =/= Calderwood --> *contingency of seeing* : “manipulating the intensity of certain optical patterns in order to scramble--or dazzle--those fields of vision that the ‘apparatus of the pattern’ is traditionally tasked with managing”
[*]gender: semiotic apparatus; representation of a relation (that of belonging to a class, a group, a category -de Lauretis), gender assigns to one entity (an individual) a position within a class ==> a position vis-[...]
(144)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%87.4[...]our future [like the sun's cycle], maps of those terrains where belief most directly meets desire, where aesthetics meets significance
stripes --> capacity to serve as “a tool for setting things in order” (--Pastoureau--> between the lines a tangle of uncanny specters lurk)
-stripe's ability (not simply to signify but) to formalize or figure the abnormal within medieval visual and material culture [a culture accustomed to transmitting visual messages along very different frequencies: an image was created by superimposing successive levels, and, to read it well, it was necessary to begin with the bottom level and, passing through all the intermediary layers, end with the top on] (-what is noise for medieval visual culture?)
-with the stripe: the structure is the figure ==> force certain bodies into genuine non-place --> fields of actual nonsense
-(modern stripe's clarity is a case of) how ideologically saturated, or unnatural, the act of looking is
-(genealogy of stripe --> historical processes:) *yesterday's noise --into--> today's signal*
***power is formally established and formally critiqued through the adaption or the obliteration of patterns*** ==> *pattern manipulation* so strategically necessary [@Laura, Elen] --> (Archer's) call to:
•to take advantage of those aesthetic practices that can direct attention away from a pattern's typical symbolic function (*or responsibilities to secure meaning and certain attending forms of power*)
•to aestheticize the pattern's capacity to function performatively (as a kind of critical figure that is always already inserted within the discourse of everyday life)
[in apass (we have to mark) how and where the negative knowledge about the reliability of linguistic utterance is made available (#feedback)]
(de Man:) the figural dimension of a text “gives the language considerable freedom from referential restraint, but it also makes it epistemologemologically highly suspect and volatile, since its use can no longer be said to be determined by considerations of truth and falsehood, good and evil, beauty and ugliness, or pleasure and pain”
(?how in our feedbacking instead of linguistic we can be able to) manipulating the figure of the pattern --> (in apass we are constantly busy with) a way to critically and actively resist ideology (of block curator, Vladimir's settlement's ‘order of thing,’ the institution, etc.) or to critically gesture toward and theorize the possibility of “another way”
the *genital panic* (forever lodged within the heart of discourses on sexual or gendered difference...)
(to examine) the varied ways that pattern is used to put one in one's place
Nicki Green, Yayoi Kusama, Adriana Varejao, Yinka Shonibare, Craig Calderwood
spaces that lie between the patterned (behaviors...)
[@Leo, heard so many times:] clear (b[...]
(146)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%87.5[...]s, and durations --link--> organs + biological processes + material objects + social practices
[Spinoza's rare affirmative understanding of] body: (is analyzed and assessed more) in terms of *what it can do*, the things it can perform, the linkages it establishes, the transformations it undergoes, the machinic connections it forms with other bodies (=/= a locus for a conscious subject, as an organically determined object, by their genus and species, by their organs and functions)
from Plato to Lacan --> desire: negative, abyssal, a lack at the level of ontology itself (an effect of frustration) [desire is frustrated by the real]
=/= Spinoza Nietzsche Deleuze --> desire: immanent, positive and productive, ***desire is a relation of effectuation, not of satisfaction*** [desire is productive of reality] --> aleatory, bricolage
Spinoza's ethics: capacity for action and passion, increase or decrease one's capacities and strengths <-- good & bad
=/= Levinasian ethics (modeled on a subject-to-subject, self-to-other relation)
(psychoanalysis) *partial objects: organs, processes, and flows, which show no respect for the autonomy of the subject*
...................................
(Archer > Saint Lauren:) “fashion fades, style is eternal" = 'notions of style <--> notions of history’ ={"to have style" = to have the means of inserting oneself into history / “to lack style" = to risk oblivion}
Archer --> how critical considerations of style can offer opportunities to think across sets of subjectivities and cultural practices that are often disassociated or pitted against one another
erotic stylization of deadly force --(Archer asks)--> why is it stylish for one to be attracted to the kind of power that “the uniform” signifies?
how styles (sartorial, campy, grotesque) serve as a serious index of our collective complicity in the ongoing production of state violence?
...................................
Chen on animacy
animacy --> how matter that is considered insensate, immobile, deathly (or otherwise “wrong”) animates cultural life in important ways
[*]animacy: a quality of agency, awareness, mobility, liveness
--linguistics--> grammatical effects of the sentience or liveness of nouns
change of animacy ==> violates a cross-linguistic preference among speakers
(for example “the hikers that rocks crush” --> rock: the source of causality)
animacy
filled with life, disposed, inclined, animare to breathe, to quicken
anima, air, breath, life, soul, mind (mental impulse)
--connected--> animals
animosity --> animating spirit or temper of a hostile character
animating principle [--> rigging]
...................................
Ihde: playing[...]
(147)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%88.5