[...]l world)
•using the notion of delinking (reminded by Juan) with my research on the Book of Wonders. going from parable-thinking --to--> religious-thinking --to--> poststructuralist-thinking --to--> poetic-thinking --to--> riddle-thinking --to--> biological-thinking --to--> deconstructionist-thinking --to--> ...
•this other universe is always at the beyond--the other cosmos is a lure (?)
•all cages have wheels
•boat, as an image for both construction and destruction
•i don't need to be alone in destroying the boat
•how to move the boat =/= destination




possible workshops for Einat's project:
•moonwalk dance
•database programing --> how to live well with databases, not waging a quixotic war on database designers. we must learn how to read and understand database early in elementary school. databases are fundamental parts of our political social ethical cultural processes...
•regular expression --> how computer programming reads and patterns text
•text-based internet --> cyberfeminism
•intervention in the digital hegemonies (digital ==> cultural ==> material) (changes to the built digital environments, possiblities of reconfiguration --> production of space, articulations about ‘us’)
•what does it mean to look at a code? (a critical introduction to computer programming for artists)
•How to implement a programming language in (JavaScript?)--parsing, regexps, (http://lisperator.net/)
•teaching German with Holderlin's “Andenken” poem
•to create a *feast* (to celebrate is to become free of the habitual, becoming inhabitual. celebration is the tensional coming together of the unlikes --> through which human beings and gods could meet and greet. The festiveness that the celebration encourages constitutes the original Greeting. [Avital])


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

what i have beeing trying to mean by saying that i have been dependent on others to create spaces that a telling can happen, is actually a fundamnetal ellement of storytelling: the ***community. i need and depend on community in my tellings. (this has noting to do with the imperative of “communication” or having a “message”)
(is it what Stengers calls to promote an “oikos”?)


[Stengers]
“the *predominance* of the *concern for relevance* (-rabt-) builds up memory and experience”

political ecology : there is NO knowledge that is (both) relevant and detached
political ecology : relevance + attachment = knowledge

art of staging = designing a scene

[the House TV series, the issue of the protagonist is] the distinguish between the figure of the expert and the figure of the diplomat.
*expert: ones whose practice is not threatend by the issue under discussion --> knowledge = relevance
*diplomat: ones who provide a voice for those whose pract[...]

[...]le is, more than anything else, the interpretation and practice of responsibility-our exposure to calls, others, and the names with which we are constituted and which put us in question.” (Keenan)

...practical effectivity of literature


•(for Annabel Patterson:) fable accomplishes a speculative Aufhebung : “[...]the role of metaphor is to mediate between human consciousness and human survival, [and here] the mind recognizes rock bottom, the irreducibly material, by rejoining the animals, one of whom is the human body”
•(for Louis Marin:) fable: uncertain model of praxis
•(for Hegel: Aesop was a “misshapen humpbacked slave” and his) fable = witty, witzig =/= spirit, depth, insight, vision, poetry, philosophy
•(for Lacoue-Labarthe:) fable: a name for the mutual implication and asymmetrical interference of literature with philosophy --> the suspension of the self-evidence of the categories “literature” and “philosophy” in order to use each to put the identity of the other into question. [to think the world as fable. Is it possible?]
•(for Keenan:) fable superimposes the relation of an address to the other in its singularity and in its anonymity (responsibility for the other) onto the traditional predicament of an articulation between the order of knowledge or cognition and that of action, ethico-political or otherwise --> *responsibility in Western philosophical tradition: an address to an other*


...the rhetorical event of a comparison

#[the theater of example]

the threat of example's excess

fables of responsibility ==securing==> *the morality of the subject who means* (who can they finally be submitted to the logic of an *evaluative destination*)

(Derrida's) mode of enunciation and the literary vehicle entrusted with its exemplification :
*[...]it is sufficient to introduce, into the fold of speech acts, a few wolves of the type (“undecidability” or “unconscious”) for the shepherd to lose track of his sheep: one is no longer certain where to find the identity of the “speaker” or the “hearer,” ... where to find the identity of an intention.*
--?--> wolf in sheep's clothing [--> also the problem/fantasy of the “integration” project (as the space of ethics and politics)~~>(“Appearances are deceptive” ==> exclusion of the parasite + identification of subjects as the task of responsibility); -what would mean for the German shepherd to lose track of his sheeps? (to go from) the fable of *the oriented sheepfold* --to--> the fable of *losing count*]
-the vexed relation between sheep and wolf, slave and master


(my work is all about: can we please look at) some *other* “interior of the system”
(system never has only one interior [=/= conspiracy: system's singular interiority])


•literature's (ir)responsibility to philosophy
•art's (ir)resp[...]

[...]t about taking account of how the specific prosthetic embodiment of the technologically enhanced visualizing apparatus matters to practices of knowing
-(Haraway's) move from *optics* [a politics of positioning, in Situated Knowledges] to *diffraction* [an optical metaphor for the effort to make a difference in the world, in Modest_Witness]


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

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


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

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


#workshop reading SK (for apass)
Which version of “realism” are you talking about? Recollecting truth and objectivity are activated whenever a ‘point of view’ is produced among other metaphors that we use in our practice and thinking in techno-scientific societies. In this group reading session we are going to study one of the most stubborn and pervasive phantasms in art and sciences, the figure of objectivity, with the Donna Haraway's 1988 essay ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’. This reading focuses on politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating in our power-sensitive conversations, and what does it mean to become accountable and responsible for one's own noninnocent translations. We begin with her essay on the 2nd of February and talk about each of our practices in particular continuing on the 9th.


she wants to re-figure, not disavow, objectivity

“story-tellers exploring what it means to be embodied in high-tech worlds” =/= technophobia

technophilia is narcissistic : the notion that man invented himself and that man is involved in some kind of narrative of technological escalation whereby the objectification of human intentionality in the world has finally surpassed itself, and man has achieved self-objectification in a machine that will finally name him obsolescence as he is and destroy him in a technological apocalypse figured by the computer. (Haraway) [we need better dog [...]

[...]not placed somewhere in me, it is always an articulated matter of ‘with’ or in interaction with, it is a sym, changes before i can grasp, knowing is done always with a figure or a thing, it includes all sorts of optics and technologies, (affect theory, media theory, epistemology,)
2- the response to the second question is also not clear, i am not sure what i am told, i don't remember or hear, what i am told is infolded in what i know, (when i started with my islam lecture series i was testing the waters of these two questions and the possibility of staying with them without freaking out of ambiguity or ploting an answer)
3--> #cat's cradle


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

varzidan, varz, varzide, ورزیده

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

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

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


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

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

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

i am following the movement of certain words here

spam =/= i[...]

[...]erent practices with ecstasy we are outside ourselves. (in religion that is precisely where the ‘inside’ is located)
-permanent or structural ecstasy is clearly political
-ecstasy is disruptive

how much should I be invested or interested as a friend for your happiness and wellbeing?
•fellow-feeling
•sympathy (is expressed by:) returning feeling with like feeling

Sina: if a thinking makes you sad, that thinking is probably wrong?

within the rhetoric of integration a usual terrifying point is in which the duty of the migrant is to attach to a different, happier object
the future of reattachment --> Hoda
-in this integrative narrative, I have to be careful with assumptions that good feelings are open and bad feelings are closed

bad feelings are seen as orientated toward the past =/= my work on past


she said “here is the English-one” meaning the English translation of her poem
--> in the last five years i have been rifting between the difficult space between “here the Farsi-one” and “here the English-one”

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

#semester, seminar study the “scene of writing”
keywords: deconstruction, fabrication, articulation, plasticity

[week 1,2,3] encounters between psychoanalysis, deconstruction, writing, concepts of language:
•Derrida --> Freud / “Freud & the Scene of Writing” (43 pages)
•Fleming --> Derrida / “Cultural Graphology Writing After Derrida” (first chapter: The Psychopathology of Writing, 29 pages)
•the schemas of text and the trace, Malabou on plasticity [=/= elasticity] (change of the paradigm of writing as developed in Derrida's Grammatology with the new paradigm of plasticity, her interest in relation between form, materiality and meaning) / “Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing” (28 pages)

[week 4] 20th century sciences and philosophies, the notion of fabrication of concepts:
•Xin Wei --> Whitehead / “Whitehead's Poetical Mathematics” (19 pages)

[week 5] on articulation:
•Deleuze and Guattari / “A Thousand Plateaus” (chapter 3: Double Articulation, 32 pages)

[week 6] feminist and women studies, scene of writing:
•aesthetic tentacularity: Lindsay Kelley & Eva Hayward / “Carnal Light”

[week 7] digital media:
•Flusser on hypertext / “Does Writing Have a Future” (chapter: Supertext, 6 pages)
•Bolter / “Writing Space” (chapter 3 Writing as Technology, 13 pages)


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

#workshop little fables of practice, second day storytelling
(proposed initially to Lili:) #imagine and describe an alien world where its populace don't practice ‘knowing’
with this practice we get into questions of (--without directly addressing/announcing them we will provoke a better understanding of what w[...]

[...] seen as orientated toward the past =/= my work on past


she said “here is the English-one” meaning the English translation of her poem
--> in the last five years i have been rifting between the difficult space between “here the Farsi-one” and “here the English-one”

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

#semester, seminar study the “scene of writing”
keywords: deconstruction, fabrication, articulation, plasticity

[week 1,2,3] encounters between psychoanalysis, deconstruction, writing, concepts of language:
•Derrida --> Freud / “Freud & the Scene of Writing” (43 pages)
•Fleming --> Derrida / “Cultural Graphology Writing After Derrida” (first chapter: The Psychopathology of Writing, 29 pages)
•the schemas of text and the trace, Malabou on plasticity [=/= elasticity] (change of the paradigm of writing as developed in Derrida's Grammatology with the new paradigm of plasticity, her interest in relation between form, materiality and meaning) / “Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing” (28 pages)

[week 4] 20th century sciences and philosophies, the notion of fabrication of concepts:
•Xin Wei --> Whitehead / “Whitehead's Poetical Mathematics” (19 pages)

[week 5] on articulation:
•Deleuze and Guattari / “A Thousand Plateaus” (chapter 3: Double Articulation, 32 pages)

[week 6] feminist and women studies, scene of writing:
•aesthetic tentacularity: Lindsay Kelley & Eva Hayward / “Carnal Light”

[week 7] digital media:
•Flusser on hypertext / “Does Writing Have a Future” (chapter: Supertext, 6 pages)
•Bolter / “Writing Space” (chapter 3 Writing as Technology, 13 pages)


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

#workshop little fables of practice, second day storytelling
(proposed initially to Lili:) #imagine and describe an alien world where its populace don't practice ‘knowing'r /> with this practice we get into questions of (--without directly addressing/announcing them we will provoke a better understanding of what we might think of them:)
•knowing --> (the inseparability of) knowing, being, and doing
•the ‘suppos’ of the supposed to know
•rhetorics, and intrinsicality (“on the inside”)
•response --> (‘knowing’ =) differential accountability =/= differential responsiveness
•environment
•description (discursive significance)
•world, and sense-making
•geometry (and -metry)
•(intelligibility and) materiality enacted --> question of discourse
•epistemology
•conceptions of space and time
•reflection (as a pervasive trope of knowing) [mirroring, imitation, reflection, tropes of “sameness"]
•material discursive evolving
•mattering; matter and intelligibility, episteme and techne, macro and micro,
•

the workshop is in a way about[...]

[...]nd intrinsicality (“on the inside”)
•response --> (‘knowing’ =) differential accountability =/= differential responsiveness
•environment
•description (discursive significance)
•world, and sense-making
•geometry (and -metry)
•(intelligibility and) materiality enacted --> question of discourse
•epistemology
•conceptions of space and time
•reflection (as a pervasive trope of knowing) [mirroring, imitation, reflection, tropes of “sameness"]
•material discursive evolving
•mattering; matter and intelligibility, episteme and techne, macro and micro,
•

the workshop is in a way about the trope of knowing, ontology of knowing

(ways of) knowing entangled with mode of being
(with which creature?) matter's dynamism is intrinsic to its biodynamic way of being (--Barad--> for brittlestar everything is intrinsic)
(creatures that) constantly changing its geometry and its topology --> ongoing reworking of bodily boundaries
(our, and an alien critter's “it”’s) discoursive practices: boundary-drawing practices by which it differentiates between “itself” and the “environment” ==> making sense of its world [--> that is why i am interested in the (better?) articulation of “differences” (= boundary-making practices, our “differential productions”) that we are making, as a way of getting into eachother discourses ~~and--> (its) ongoing materialization --> *differential materialization* (is discursive; Barad)]
•patterns of difference
•I am against the ‘frictionless narrative space’ (in the absence of the dominant story) where “everything” (therefore nothing) is possible

(the workshop engages in thinking) intertwined practices of knowing and being
[this practice of storytelling might be relevant for those invested in questions of: knowledge production, speculative theory, situated bodies critique, situated knowledges critique, being ‘of’ the world,]
-to think creatures/beings that have evolved in intra-action with their environment
-to question and examine the ontological issues: the locus of knowledge is presumed never to be too far removed from the human. in the workshop we reimagine the locus of knowledge in other location that nonhuman might occupy
==> a better account for the *ontology of knowing* =/= merely ‘welcome’ dispossessed Others (women, slaves, children, animals, and other exiles from the land of knowers) into the fold of knowers [no! no!]
•to challange “I think therefore I am”: the idea that the “world” is an idea that exists in the human mind --> knowledge making is a not mediated activity =/= (Barad's) “direct material engagement”
•(the workshop begins with a position that believes:) knowing is a distributed practice that includes the larger material arrangement [then isn't the practice of writing insufficient?]


after the firs[...]

[...]yeb*


you can't do feminist theory without paying attention to the details of women lives
your mode of attention to women in the world ==(shapes)==> your mode of attention to:
•the way databases get set up
•the ways interdisciplinarities get crafted
•how you think about tools and genomics


my main point of my project has been about getting better at how to inherit your histories without trashing them*** (even figuring out how to inherit a history that you don't want to inherit)
(Islam, shyness, kindness, ajayeb, Iran, stuttering, being all too ready to find complexities, )
•to become relaxed about predigested version of ‘this is what ajayeb is about’ (or Tasavof, etc.) --> ‘what is going on there’ (in ajayeb) is so built-in to ideologies of many kinds (of progress, deep ecology, of history, and so on)
•to build a little taxonomy (in apass)
•working to give up the series of self-certainties around secularism ==> giving ways to talk to the religious ones : getting to grasp what the world looks like in faith-based communities (=/= check-list of dogma)
•category thinking: get into differential liveliness (with all sorts of inequalities:) *who gets parsed how* [#archive, #articulation, #storytelling] (and thinking about what it means to take up these relationships in cultures saturated with science and technology)


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


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


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

*“demonstration” coined by science

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

(with Scout Calvert) the ways the digital apparatuses are working, and the kinds of tensions and creativities between the cyber infrastructures and the other kinds informational management discourses displace other book discourses *** --> categories explode in library practice
[Calvert donig brilliant discourse analysis of library sciences --> has direct impact on practices of reading#, different kinds of knowers]
techno-biblio-capital: techno-capital and library practices embedded in each other -->{ [*]technology: assemblages of people, computers, software, discourses, techniques and workarounds that make them function; [*]capital: a social arrangement in which buyers of labor power are entitled to [...]

[...] of broader classes and casual processes (but not ajayebnameh عجایب نامه, aj bring precise individual instances in its unique stories)


atlas(es) of(/for) the eye

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

[the identity of objects:]

Manuel Delanda: Any materialist philosophy must take as its point of departure the existence of a material world that is independent of our minds. But then it confronts the problem of the origin of the enduring identity of the inhabitants of that world: if the mind is not what gives identity to mountains and rivers, plants and animals, then what does? An old answer is “essences,” the answer given by Aristotle. But if one rejects essentialism then there is no choice but to answer the question like this: all objective entities are products of a historical process, that is, their identity is synthesized or produced as part of cosmological, geological, biological, or social history. This need for a concept of “synthesis” or of “production” is what attracted Marx to Hegelian dialectics since it provided him with a model of synthesis: a conflict of opposites or the negation of the negation. Deleuze and Guattari, on the other hand, replace that model of synthesis with what they call a “double articulation”: first, the raw materials that will make up a new entity must be selected and pre-processed; second, they must be consolidated into a whole with properties of its own. A rock like limestone or sandstone, for example, is first articulated though a process of sedimentation (the slow gathering and sorting of the pebbles that are the component parts of the rock). Then it is articulated a second time as the accumulated sediment is glued together by a process of cementation. They use Hjemslev's terms “content” and “expression” as the names for the two articulations, but this is not meant to suggest that the articulations are in any way linguistic in origin. On the contrary: the sounds, words, and grammatical patterns of a language are materials that accumulate or sediment historically, then they are consolidated by another process, like the standardization of a dialect by a Royal Academy and its official dictionaries, grammars, and rules of pronunciation.

(synthetic =/=? analytic; [a problematic distinction!] the logical particle “un-” in “no unmarried man is married”) (analytic =/=? contingent)
(Kantian?!) ‘a priori and synthetic’ ==> ‘a posteriori analytic’

[singular entities:]

The question of the “individuation of trajectories” is about mathematical models (which to me are the secret of the success of science) but you are correct that it goes beyond that. All entities synthesized historically are individual entities: individual plants and animals; individual species and ecosystems; individual mountains, planets, solar systems, et cetera. Here “individual” means simply “singular or unique,” that is, not a particular member[...]

[...]s not what gives identity to mountains and rivers, plants and animals, then what does? An old answer is “essences,” the answer given by Aristotle. But if one rejects essentialism then there is no choice but to answer the question like this: all objective entities are products of a historical process, that is, their identity is synthesized or produced as part of cosmological, geological, biological, or social history. This need for a concept of “synthesis” or of “production” is what attracted Marx to Hegelian dialectics since it provided him with a model of synthesis: a conflict of opposites or the negation of the negation. Deleuze and Guattari, on the other hand, replace that model of synthesis with what they call a “double articulation”: first, the raw materials that will make up a new entity must be selected and pre-processed; second, they must be consolidated into a whole with properties of its own. A rock like limestone or sandstone, for example, is first articulated though a process of sedimentation (the slow gathering and sorting of the pebbles that are the component parts of the rock). Then it is articulated a second time as the accumulated sediment is glued together by a process of cementation. They use Hjemslev's terms “content” and “expression” as the names for the two articulations, but this is not meant to suggest that the articulations are in any way linguistic in origin. On the contrary: the sounds, words, and grammatical patterns of a language are materials that accumulate or sediment historically, then they are consolidated by another process, like the standardization of a dialect by a Royal Academy and its official dictionaries, grammars, and rules of pronunciation.

(synthetic =/=? analytic; [a problematic distinction!] the logical particle “un-” in “no unmarried man is married”) (analytic =/=? contingent)
(Kantian?!) ‘a priori and synthetic’ ==> ‘a posteriori analytic’

[singular entities:]

The question of the “individuation of trajectories” is about mathematical models (which to me are the secret of the success of science) but you are correct that it goes beyond that. All entities synthesized historically are individual entities: individual plants and animals; individual species and ecosystems; individual mountains, planets, solar systems, et cetera. Here “individual” means simply “singular or unique,” that is, not a particular member of a general category, but a unique entity that may compose larger individual entities through a relation of part-to-whole, like individual pebbles composing a larger individual rock. A materialist ontology of individual entities is implicit in Deleuze and Guattari and Braudel, so we must give them credit for that, then move on and invent the rest.


..rethinking of the disciplinary boundaries (without using labels such as interdisciplinarity, etc.)



we must take in mind that materialism is good to be enriche[...]

[...]licit in Deleuze and Guattari and Braudel, so we must give them credit for that, then move on and invent the rest.


..rethinking of the disciplinary boundaries (without using labels such as interdisciplinarity, etc.)



we must take in mind that materialism is good to be enriched, but, materialism is not an ‘a priori’!

in my research in apass on ajayeb عجایب‌, can be theoretical yet anti-methodological?



...Marx is his interest in the oppressed, that is, his anti-Aristotlianism that allows us to conceptualize the self-organizing power of “matter” without the “meaning” that should overcode it.

Delanda: The political economy of Marx is entirely a priori.
[--Laclau--> essentialist conception of both society and social agency in Marxism <== holistic approache : a “founding totality” (expressed at the surface of social life) which presents itself as an intelligible object of ‘knowledge’ (in Marxism notion of ‘ideology’) =/= {relational character of any (social) identity + infinite play of differences}= discourse --> ‘the social’ always exceeds the limits of the attempts to constitute ‘society’;
& (in advanced capitalist societies:) identity = the unstable articulation of constantly changing positionalities, ‘social agent = decentered subject’ --> how can we, then, say the subjects misrecognize themselves in this kaleidoscopic movement of differences? =/= (Marxism's notion of) ‘false consciousness’; can we do without (the concept of) ‘misrecognition’?
--> (Laclau suggests) the ideological* (~=? will to totality):
•misrecognition of a positive essence = ultimate suture (بخيه bakhie)
•nonrecognition of any positivity =/= ultimate suture
(society institutes itself <==) closure: nonrecognition of the infinite play of differences }--> ‘ideological ==> social’ ~(the social is impossible without some fixation of meaning) : “utopia is the essence of any communication and social practice” --!,]
[--Delanda--> (the mode of ‘downward thinking’ when we think in terms of) ideology (~ the established relations of a particular society constitutes people's identities) ~= intrinsic: the identity is created by relations {the fantasy of ‘seamless totality'} =/= (Deleuzian) extrinsic: the relations are real but don't determine identities]

what are artists (particular <-=> general) propositions (Angebot)?
•proposition: a declarative that can be right or wrong =/= a sentence, grammatical entities
•exposition: a systematic interpretation/explanation of a specific topic
•disposition: an affective orientation, knowledge attitude
[Marx's ruthlessness: criticism must not be afraid of its own conclusions]


what are the sources of “value” in ajayeb?
(sun, photosynthetic, micro-organisms, etc.)
fermentation, photosynthesis, respiration
[...]

[...]/>  -khosh-yomn خوش یمن and shoom شوم (felicity and infelicity) --> pretense (vanemud وانمود); they depend on the always fragile maintenance of the relation between material and form
 -*specifications* of “fictional beings” (that leaves in its wake) ==> worlds (unlike fic all other modes fold for their own use by managing to extract from materials)

All continuations of a “course of action” suppose a discontinuity that must be overcome in order to define a trajectory. ==> gap, break

the mini-transcendence required for any definition of the being-as-other

(haven't we managed?) to allow several modes of existence to run, flow, pass, each one appearing indeed to possess its own conditions of truth and falsity and its own mode of subsistence

‘libido sciendi’: to recognize the branching that allows us to stop confusing the chains of reference it has to establish in order to ensure knowledge with the leaps that things have to make to maintain themselves in existence

*“beings of law,” : those beings that wake a judge up at night and force him to ask himself “Did I make the right decision?”


(feeling smashed by) ‘the task of mimicking the world’


*articulation* is an ontological property of the universe; a being is articulated (rather than being a silent presence, made immediate, persistent, given duration without existence).
-It is the articulation of beings that enables us to talk about them and to judge, that is to say, to monitor the risks they take in being “permitted by” and “promised to”. (modes of existence)
translation, discrepancy, displacement, interpolation,
(problem with “statement” [=/=? articulation] is that it must correspond to a ‘state of affairs’ [~=? politics])
==> to free science from: completeness, comprehensiveness, formality, expressibility, inscriptibility. (Vollständigkeit, Verständlichkeit, Formalität, Ausdrücklichkeit, Unbeschreiblichkeit.) [what is a science that is not describable? ~-> Sohrevardi {forms of enunciation}--> how to specify the Sohrevardi's felicity (sa'adat سعادت) conditions (of enunciation)? ---- (his) “equipped knowledge” (=/=? situated knowledge), awkward distributions, etc.] #(this is all about me trying to learn how to make room...)
knowledge moves around everywhere without our knowing how
“waiting to be known”


*translation =/= {transportation without deformation ~= description}
every transfer is translation
(political:) transfers of necessity
following the thread of modes
translation =/= displacement: merely a change of place
translation refuses the choice between being and non-being and rejects the principle of non-contradiction by which a thing cannot be, in the same respect, both itself and another.
translation: to be at the same time and in the same respect on[...]

[...]deaths, earth related passings
main actor: Malek al-mot (ملک الموت Angel of death)
ashabe kahf (اصحاب کهف), ashabe raghim (اصحاب رقیم) --> immortality

(ajayeb-e kuh) عجایب کوه
om-ol-jebal (ام الجبال), ghaf (قاف): mother of mountains, all mountains link to her, earth
ecologically significant --> holders of water and Ganj (گنج), nailed the earth, they are your cradles
az ganj be ganj (فرستم به گنج تو از گنج خویش, Ferdosi)


*Ghiamat and Climate

[Haraway]
the metaphysical problem of (our) scale
(what are the scales in ajayeb? what is people in ajayeb? what it means to be animal? and what is their scale?)
ecologies that have many scales (in temporality and physicality): river scale, mountain scale, molecular times, Jinn's time, Ghiamat times, sense scale, ...

the ajayeb's model is (always?) the global scale?
--> how can i seek and describe multiple situated worldings and multiple sorts of translations to engage ajayeb's globalism? (using Haraway's word on Tsing)
-attention to friction ==> (ethnographic accounts of) global interconnection

(some metaphors:) metabolisms, articulations, coproductions (*? of ajayeb's histories)
relational, sympoietic, consequential,
in ajayeb, what is cosmic, what is terran, what is cursed, *?

in ajayeb:
•what are the figures of finitude, destruction, astralized hearing, enactments of generation, the figures that take action, take heart?
•what are the chthonic entities? {the finite complex material systems that can break down =/= stories that personify (Mother Earth) are *misplaced concreteness*. [(i am against) personified =/= figurative (which i love. figures can be tentacular, patterns, processes, stories.) what Foad would say?]}
•what are the gorgeous, luring, dangerous precarities (of the terra)?
•what are (its specific) art science worldings?

*those creatures across taxa (taxon, categorical classification, taxonomic group)
taxonomic conveniences


[with Haraway]

what is the optics of ajayeb?
[that is entertaining being reductive for a moment, but that is productive]
(to help with that, the optics of the anthropocene is the image of the earth from space, Gaia?)
-a cybernetic, systems-theoretic entity, studied in different scales
-various reports (on the state, fictioning the state of the earth?)
-a global kind of system knowledge
-a giant database ----> do i need to formulate my project into a technological practice?

what is the smallest unit of interest in the ajayeb cosmology?

the practices of relocating germplasms, including people in form of slaves, all over the earth in order to produce surplus that is transported elsewhe[...]

[...]b body to allow a ajayeb world to affect me

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

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

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


historical specificity(s) of animal-human relationship



(worst-)translated science

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

[Haraway, Queering the non/human]

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

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

secular semiotics (never nourished us?)

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

...patterning, consequences, and the possibility of response.
queer, off-category, sf worlding
(what are the SF worldings of ajayeb?--SF as building alternative ontologies. finding absent but possible presents--whether presented as elsewheres or other times. “[...]an elsewhere from which different [...] articulations of naturecultures and alterity could be explored.”)

“The one who would be normal, in a category of his own” --> ends badly

(human scientist's) deadly one-way test: unable to recognize the presence of the trapped one --> (for him) no one is at home in the categorically Other


[Seed Bag]

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

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

Homebody / traveler

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

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

[Barad]

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

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

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

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



*measurement
** the nature of nature depends on the apparatus that measure it
***--> which measurements are at use in ajayeb?[...]

[...] is a property of the ‘phenomenon’ : ***the inseparability of “observed object” and “agencies of observation”***
--> simultaneous indeterminacy of “position” and “momentum” [*momentum*: material arrangement involving movable parts] [--> deconstructing the material exclusion of “position” and “momentum"]

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

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

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

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

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

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

(*)discourse: that which constrains and enables what can be said, practices that define what counts as meaningful (statement)***
(learning from Foucault, discursive practices are the local sociohistorical [=/= transcendental, phenomenological, ideational] material conditions that enable and constrain disciplinary knowledge practices) *actual historically situated social conditions:
•speaking
•writing
•thinking
•calculating
•measuring
•filtering
•concentrating
•
--> statements + subjects emerge from a field of possibilities =/= statement as utterance of (originating) consciousness of a unified subject

(*)discursive practi[...]

[...] “nonhumans”; @Varinia)
==> meaning (=/= ideational, andisheyi اندیشه‌ای‌) --> specific material (re)configuring of the world

(*)discourse: that which constrains and enables what can be said, practices that define what counts as meaningful (statement)***
(learning from Foucault, discursive practices are the local sociohistorical [=/= transcendental, phenomenological, ideational] material conditions that enable and constrain disciplinary knowledge practices) *actual historically situated social conditions:
•speaking
•writing
•thinking
•calculating
•measuring
•filtering
•concentrating
•
--> statements + subjects emerge from a field of possibilities =/= statement as utterance of (originating) consciousness of a unified subject

(*)discursive practices: specific material (re)configurings of the world ==> local determinations of boundaries, properties, and meanings are differentially enacted

(*)meaning: ongoing performance of the world in its differential intelligibility (=/= a property of individual/groups of words)

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

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

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

(*)agency: changes in the apparatuses of bodily production***
enactment of iter[...]

[...]esthetics: tamed facts
#Rigs, my ajayeb diagrams

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

ajayeb's histories (~ ajayeb's historically situated relational worldings) =/= societies of individuals in human-only histories (~ Euclidean figures and stories of Man)

(which network is?) a netbag for collecting up what is crucial for ongoing

ajayeb's technotheocratic geoengineering [, it “fixes” some common imaginations the “affairs of life,” and not specifically the “afterlife,” (within the {terminology ~} figural-conceptual powers of syms and material-semiotic time-space of the Indo-Greco-Arab-Turko-Persian terra taxa)]
•periods of time
•“known” life
•abode (budgah بودگاه, Wohnplatz)
•donya دنيا


-stories that focus on composition rather than intrusion
-stories that focus on ongoingness rather than game-over

(Haraway > Stengers > Latour > Margulis) Gaia, to name complex nonlinear couplings between processes that compose and sustain entwined but nonadditive subsystems as a partially cohering systemic whole

planet-transforming, historically situated, new-enough, worlding relations

(systematic stories are linked) metabolisms, articulations, coproductions
(they must also be) relational, sympoietic, consequential


myth-systems (are set-ups)
(a deadly one: “Man + Tool ==> history”)


names =/= faces (~ morphs of the same)

a thousand names of something else

(what Haraway is naming with) compound-eyed insectile and many-armed optics

winged domains
bird-bodies

(Haraway's spider and) my ajayeb's snake: tasks of thinking, figuring, and storytelling
--✕--> heady facial representation; [Luisa also dislikes this]
•figure of snake (circular serpent) is ajayeb Persian sf worlding, has ties with the Greek Chthonis (“of the earth,”) is at the same time the image of the continuity of life and the abyssal moral (eating your end, no gag reflex)-->{Gildas Hamel: “the abyssal and elemental forces before they were astralized by chief gods and their tame committees"}

“many critters acoss taxa” (juju جوجو + rade رده)

(I dispute Haraway's notion of “sacred.” popular religion is at many times populated by earthly figures alongside many astralized destructive finitudes.)

Haraway's urgently needed Chthulucene story


[Miyazaki's] biodiverse terra [God flips out] into something very slimy, like any overstressed complex adaptive system at the end of its abilities to absorb insult after insult. (Haraway's wording)

(yes yes we are all ultimately connected to one another,) but the specificity and proximity of connections matters

(Haraway + Latour's) ‘things’ are:
1- collection of entities
[...]

[...]ning for preoedipal (~= precastrated) body, and her (erroneous) localization of it on the motorbike)
Grosz: “It is only through controlled use of the phantom that the artificial limb can (gradually) take the place of the lost limb”
#body image]


ecologies of reflection and diffraction --> resolution of nature

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

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

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

[*]intelligibility: an ontological performance of the world in its ongoing articulation
not a specifically human capacity, intelligibility does not require an (usually human) inttelective agent

the problem with design is that designers (as well as scientists and engineers) are busy with building ‘enhanced communication networks’ and principles of ‘usefulness’, in the way they relate to the “forms” of nature

*connections and commitments (come together)*

the copyright symbol © should be a sign not of the right to c[...]

[...]xtremely creative (& imaginative) practice
•
--> ongoing, open-ended articulation of the world (<-- my work on ajayeb)
--> these are the diffraction patterns in ajayeb that are (artistically, politically, ethnically) significant for me (?)
--> these are instances of resistance against biomimesis in ajayeb (?) [biomimesis is involved with mirroring, imitation, or reflection, and other tropes of “sameness"] =/= trans-materialities of the creatures of the world, they transgress the sacrosanct divides between techne and episteme

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

[*]intelligibility: an ontological performance of the world in its ongoing articulation
not a specifically human capacity, intelligibility does not require an (usually human) inttelective agent

the problem with design is that designers (as well as scientists and engineers) are busy with building ‘enhanced communication networks’ and principles of ‘usefulness’, in the way they relate to the “forms” of nature

*connections and commitments (come together)*

the copyright symbol © should be a sign not of the right to copy but, if anything, of the responsibilities entailed in producing differential materialization (for whom and at what costs?)*
Barad ♥


(brittlestar, the plant in my room, ajayeb's creatures,) ...their being is a flexible distributed growing and regenerating multi-oriented shape-shifting topologically variant dynamical system of diffraction gratings

(rhetoric of) re-veiling, which provokes the seeming need for a revealing of nature


entanglement --> inseparability --> spatially separated particles in an entangled state do not have separate identities

there is no epmirical evidence of such a disjunction ontologies at a particular scale, “micro-world” and “macro-world”

who insists on “quarantining quantum queerness”?
quarantining scale and time
quarantining Sadra to “his” time, or ajayeb to an older another temporality, and therefore irrelevant for us “today”

[*]scale: intra-actively (re)configured in the ongoing intra-active becoming on space-time-mattering

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

Khezr and San'an, the most repeated points of reference in tasa[...]

[...]le and time
quarantining Sadra to “his” time, or ajayeb to an older another temporality, and therefore irrelevant for us “today”

[*]scale: intra-actively (re)configured in the ongoing intra-active becoming on space-time-mattering

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

Khezr and San'an, the most repeated points of reference in tasavof
like you, Hafez, full of struggle, sensation, love,

our resistance and breakdance

(Mehran Rad:) Hafez preferences on Farsi over Arabic:
Deir دیر / Some'e صومعه
Pir پیر / Sheikh شیخ
Parsa پارسا / Zahed زاهد
Parishan پریشان / Tafraghe تفرقه


moshtaghe bandegi مشتاق بندگی
(~? the advanced level of) ‘wannabe slave’

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

the dangerous suffixial worlders, prehensile adjective-builder, natural-inhabitant-makers of “-ian” or “-i” or “-isch” to the name of a nation/country ==> Iranian, Afgani, etc. --> makes subjects
in the case of the podcast https://soundcloud.com/norient/afghanistan-sucht-seine-musikalische-identitat-podcast listen to the way the story of the Afgani music is told by norient (“music in the globe”, “multi-modally”) --> articulation of western human rights & disarticulation of other ecology of stories
=/= Charles Amirkhanian radio programm Ode to Gravity

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

the protector of spiders who dies by the bite of a spider
-susceptible bodies entagled in networks of care, life and death, that are not always harmonious to popular narratives of nonviolence


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

ajayeb: mythoepic literature in translation from a Middle Persian corpus
-when i say ‘Middle Persian corpus’ what i actually mean is a shared world of ritual, religion, and mythology between Iranian, Urdu, Turkish, Zoroastrianism in Iran and Vedic Hinduism in India, Indo-European inheritance in ancient Iranian culture, South-Southeast Asian literatures, translations and transcreations (and transliteration) of stories (prose, poetry, drama, epic, jokes, parables, figures [that are not always part of the canon], the irreverent بى ادب, ) in Indian and Southeast Asian contexts,

my project is about learning the ‘how’ of cultivating the ability to fruitfully approach texts from different cultures and pasts
-(to study) the radical poetic force of the Persian texts--in ajayeb
-to become enhanced and enchanted in skills of reading wider ranges of linguistic registers
-to open up an approach to a dauntingly complex region of islamicated thought (not the ideological enterprise of “Islam”, which is usually badly politicized in the historical memory of the West. we could get interested in the economics of corruption and technologies of rule, the evolution of government bureaucracies and classificatory schemes, anti-colonial cri[...]

[...]reconstruct the ontologies of past societies [<~~ my work on ajayeb]

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


influence of the animal turn in archaeology
nonanthropocentric zoological studies

(nomenological explorations of animal representations in Attar and tasavof)

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

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

investigations of personhood

(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 t[...]

[...]--> 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 who theorize and practice archeology on the basis of in[...]

[...]del 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?


understanding the potters (and artists) who made the ceramics as crafters = understanding them as *intimately connected wit[...]

[...]tions 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?


understanding the 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 betwe[...]

[...]ts ~ small stories, little niches with ghostly contours (like a car's tire) ~ things growing in abundant]
•**bodies tumbled into bodies** (“monsters” <== assets and wastes (animal entanglement with the burning man) <-- bad symbiosis)
* unspectacular afterlife of discarded things * (debris of capitalist waste)
•weaving magical figures, conjuring fictions
•constant speculation, that are fed and touched, reparative and tender
•textured, formful, colorful
*lure: things that evoke or capture feelings and responses ==> to lure out relational responses

desire (superposition)
--> optics: (a form of distance) [--> Sina's stories ~ superposition [different scales] of dispersed times [~ unruly temporalities], multiple practice of knowing smallbig spacetime mattering]
•**positions tumbled into positions** (tumbled into politics: some instruments of seeing producing perspectives are more guilty than others)
* (disembodied) multiple practices of knowing --> landscapes: arrangement of life and afterlife, space that grows from ‘endings’ <== ‘death of’(s) ~~> contaminated (stories/diversities)
--> diagram: http://ajayeb.net/?q=rationalizable
(Sina performing) diffractive optics of knowing ==> ongoing articulation [=/= perspective]


•i shouldn't be talking, opening this
|
•remembrance --> Bambi's mother studies {what if remembering is something totally different than “lost member"}
|
•fox story --> animal trap:
◦perception {rhetorical perception, evil perception, etc.}
◦lure 🌀 can't stop following, trap: nearby-ness, becoming bodily, engaged in perspectival game and will ==> fox's relation to the forest [he is suspicious and rend =/= *lured into desiring & trusting* : we bring our lures and needs towards each other, (sometimes it is) critique is an art that tangles with what you are proposing, like fox in a lure (octopus is much better with lures than fox)]
◾propositions
◾abstractions --> (i love) ideas: to animate humans, erotic lure for soul ==> *metamorphic attention*
|
•omen --> potent sign of alarm
|
•evil {category crossing monsters [~= ajayeb's context of evil], force of liberation, beauty, complexity}
|
•Ursula's sea (from little mermaid):
◦the way she says “yes” {multisensorial call “yes” and “more"}
◦her laughter {develish perception, perceptual joke, joy of corrupting her morality [~ her heroism: who the hero is and how to live happily ever after]}
◦fish-story --> aqua culture
|
•Ursula La Guin --> Urashima story
|
•finish with evil laughter


(follow the departure from ‘evil’ to ‘misunderstanding’ or ‘perspective’ in Disney's animated movies)


[according to *creation ancestral dreamings*(~ founding ancestors):] shape-shifter (are not [...]

[...] />
(i am still at the title:) in your efforts to make ‘body without organ’ (the emergent, non-hierarchical, inclusive, flexible, smart, liquid good object) you might end up creating ‘organ without body’ (monstrous, hierarchical, authoritative, soulless, archaic bad object)

functional specificity of organs =/= to release the decoded and deterritorialized flows of [*]desire: a process of production without reference to any exterior agency (--although--> ‘fascism = desire’)]

an example of body without organ is the ‘ocean’ for Marialena
(for Marialena) ocean [~=? fluid women] (an unstratificated, non-coded flow, sex organs sprout everywhere, no organ is constant as regards either function or position) =/= (male fantasies of) armored body

(Deleuze and Guattari suggest) dismantling of the organism (~ molar organic body) ==>
•hypochondriac body (suffering from imaginary symptoms)
•paranoid body
•schizo body
/> •drugged body
•masochist body <-- my favourite
•
}--> these are all about the body from the point of view of its *potential* [=/=? method]
}--> we are at (an anthropological / psychoanalytic discourse of) excess and transgression --Artaud-->{ organs: functional articulations forced on the body }==> separation, determination, representation

body without organ =/= body image http://ajayeb.net/?q=body+image

-what feminist theory has to say about that? --Irigaray--> is not the body without organs women's own historical condition?
...the machinic, the inorganic, as well as the notions of loss of self, dispersion, and fluidity are all too familiar to women
(and to non-western subjects, i would say. Tasavof has been advocating body without organ within the context of mysticism in Iran)

are Deleuze and Guattari “cyberpunks, constructing fictions of terminal identity in the nearly familiar language of a techno-surreasurrealism”? ~-> (to dissolve the body ==>) will to regain the world <~~--> [death of the auratic object ==> subject: a condemned and useless vestige alongside the simulacra that precede and envelope it]

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

(?we need) political metamorphosis

the tensions between:
[*]artist's “special task” (to oppose intellectual divisions) {(art of) forming, inventing, fabricating concepts (<== Deleuze and Guattari), (a “task” that) proceeds with a plane of immanence (or consistency) ~= self-referential (=/= referential) --> syntagmatic (word associations)}
and: [*]the increasing difficulty to ask questions (as a result of the constant increase in the specialization of the knowledges --> science) {propositions in discursive systems, (a “task” that) proceeds with a plane of reference --> paradigmatic (a worldview) ==>? to *confront chaos* ~= to provide chaos with reference points [<-- artists need to learn this]}****

(my wo[...]

[...]esume work with Mona?)

Holderlin's intervention/question: we arrive at the truth, Das Wahre emerges, the moment closing in on us, when we have to say goodby

in an Iranian modality the farewell is the loci of truth, (locus: a place or metaphysical locality collecting the center of activity)

(the so-called) poet's radical exposures



is violence in farsi: ‘azar’ آزار? (how would that change instead of ‘khoshunat’ خشونت?)
kam-azari کم آزاری, bi-azari بی‌ آزاری (possible?)

eshgh عشق ~= bi-niazi بی‌ نیازی

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

demography of violence and nonviolence

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

(Freud <--) *liability* (--> Levinas)
not yet guilty, an almost predisposition, an almost inclination toward being guilty, an openness to being guilty (-->? Seba's notion of ‘Schuld’ [~= debt, the obligation to pay or do something]) ~-> super-egoic formation (~=? that which we call “raising awareness”)
Trauma is structuring***
(to be noted that the concern of super-egoic formation rests on the structuring of ‘demand,’ which is not the being of ‘question’ that it wants to be. question is risky and consequential of new articulation)

[disposition: vaz’ وضع, halat حالت, mezaj مزاج, seresht سرشت, khu خو, khim خیم, saz ساز,]
[predisposition: este'dad استعداد, amadegi آمادگی, meyl-e ghabli میل قبلی; a liability or tendency to suffer from a particular condition]

super-ego [that part of you that exercises authority, “I am gonna make you swallow this” --> jouissance] ~=? Div-mardom دیو مردم (paternal correctional voice, “don't drink!” --> Nezami) =/= Div (says “benush!” بنوش)

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

(with Haraway;) the relation between what counts as nature and what counts as culture (in Tehran)--judging whether a behavior is the stuff of genes or rearing
the domestic animal is the epoch-changing tool --> (free) wolf/dog (servant) ==> civilization

what are the things we hate in the name of Wilderness (~=> “fall” into culture)

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

[lecture at apass, 10.03.2017]

i follow the scribbles of jamming and jam session

welcome to this metaphysical place

like you, i am also sometimes in heaven, sometimes in hell, in no-land, nowhere, elsewhere, in Belgium; also interested deeply in what signals my and our arrival in the metaphysical entity of Belgium. like Christian, as i am fantasizing his excursion that i missed, we went out and walked back into the city, studying what really signals our arrival, when and how and where on the body we feel that we are there. and my guess is that it is always technological. but in an another universe your arrival might be registered by greeting. and in an Iranian [...]

[...]meshment of knowing, doing, seeing, and being

(we need less philosophizing and more) *envisioning: an enactment of dynamic en-figurings that imperil boundaries that clearly differentiate self and other without the loss of historical, cultural, and species specificity*

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

☾
light has illuminated western stories
•God said, let there be light: and there was light
•solar radiance --> refracted planetary atmosphere --> earth's watery matter --> lively forms

•life shaped by ice (Meloy)
•life shaped by dark (Mohaghegh)
•life shaped by animal (Sina)
•life shaped by light (Hayward) --> the invisible medium that makes a knowable world visible; *seeing light: a trope for making visible in a comprehensive form (such that they are real)*

1. *philosophy is photology* : language of philosophy is constituted by metaphors of light
2. sunlight metaphorizes into transcendent light : a heavenly light promising liberation from the flesh


transgenic technologies ==>
jellyfish + GFP (green fluorescent protein)
rhesus monkey
glowing kittens
transgenic pigs
(...animal examples of chimeric and impure)--Hayward--> articulation of carnal interdependence across species boundaries

bacteria, yeast, fungi, plant, fly, human cell

chimeric borderlands of GFP and transgenics
pushing against the perceptual and affective registers of laboratory walls embodied selves, eating practices, living conditions

bio-capitalism
animal industry

(Hayward on) carnality and radiance of naturecultures
(welcoming a) multidisciplinary table of where light is being eaten


visuality as corporality
light = meat

(Latin word) lumen: light, lantern, lamp, clairity, understanding, the central cavity of a hollow structure in an organism or cell

*somalumenal: how might luminosity, effulgence and illumination be about embodiment or corporality? light transubstantiated into flesh and matter (=/= body transcended by the thrills of enlightenment and radiance)*


(my work on telegram bestiary:) *post-animal studies*

[*]tranimal: a synecdochically imagined correspondence written as a portmanteau word --> changes in our understanding of bodily transformation, somatic and sensual synthesis that manifests synecdochically (a figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole or the whole for a part) =/= metaphorically
[Cinderella is synecdochic]

*trans-
ongoing labor of cross-species agents
energetic and material crossings that disrupt bifurcated categories

(Haraway + Hayward) metaplasm قلب حروف: a change in a word (by adding, comitting or transposing its letters, syllables or sounds) that can signify a mi[...]

[...] --> 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)**


‘empathy’ is a word that is often recruited when bodies are involved --> resonances with troublesome romantic meanings (magic, fold knowledge)
embodied empathy shifts its meaning from one situation to another --> different meanings ==> different outcomes
[*]empathy: the process by which one delegates to one's body a question, or a problem, that matters and that involves other beings’ bodies --> bodies are articulating and become articulated in the askin[...]

[...]ance through sexual transition
(arrangment of) sensorial milieu of the self + profusion of the world
(trope for fear as emancipation)
an urban designer
weaver of cityscapes
[*]web: skeletalization of the surface, extension of the surface affects of the spider, dynamic threshold of sensibility --Hayward--> (the body is strengthed) react through a spatial and temporal generativity --> body: inter- and intra-threadings of many sensuous vectors that relay like the spider in its web ~= cities, web-builders
*center of her web = her touch world*
-moves quickly, even uncannily, there/then not, sill/in motion, unsettling/reassuring (seems to trap only dust)
*lived-web = optic skin, a resounding connective tissue
(spider's capacities to) create, syncopate, improvise
(spider and me in the appartment) we resonate in relation to our different movements and processes

[*]trap: a mouth, a mode of utterance, the “O” curve of lips and throat that sounds out and names the apprehension of being embodied
--> ***positionality ~/= situatedness = to be trapped*** (to speak and receive ranges of sensuous input from one's environment) --> *our bodies are not endlessly available to intentionality*

[*]articulation: speaking oneself into culture and history, but also creating a site, a gap, making room in cultural and political fabrications, and finding a tempo, a beat


•utopic inclusion (sexual, national, racial)
•*sexuality imagined as political promise* (radical force of nonnormative sexuality) [=/= (for Freud) sex is regressive]
•trans: energetic and fantastic space between objects

(racial, economic) **divisions = dependencies**

(Lyotard: we must) construct the anatomy of polymorphous perversion, unfold the immense membrane of libidinal body =/= system of parts

irreverent intimacies


thresholding: an intensity that must be exceeded for reaction to occur
“here is my home, i am freshly aware that my body is a threshold, an entry between rooms”

limits (of my body) = energized zones


sadomasochism stitches


*carnal improvisation* <-- paradigm of performance art in europe (---> go to karaoke in KHM, role of my body as medium in the circuit of transmissions, poetically imagine the shape of a new pattern)


pastpresent: an always present past in the present

*patterns longer than lived experience*

[*]history: libidinal tracings, erotogenic intensities, psychical cartographies


{ porosity = poiesis }--> collapse the boundary between the embodied self + its world + others ==> consitute a specific place


•puberty = the fantasy that this disfiguration will make me more myself
•teenager = you spend hours before the refra[...]

[...]--> fixated on the anticolonial moment ==> perpetuate a sense of victimhood }--> to mask authoritarianism

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


***memory narrative***


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

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


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

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


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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

globalization = attitude حالت =/= meaning[...]

[...]e form-giving imagination reads details and meaning into a form beyond what is given in simple observation* --> the numinous power in thunderstorm developed from the dark thundercloud into an enormous black eagle, but since the mighty roar of the thunder could not well be imagined as issuing from other than a lion's maw, this bird was given a lion's head

**form-giving imagination**
rings the changes on a basic meaningful form in a whole series of variations, each expressing the underlying numinous content in different ways
-series of suggestive variant images all expressive of its power to wax, to produce and yield


lord: a charismatic leader magically responsible for producing fertility and plenty for his subjects
...situationally determined nonhuman forms --✕--> victory of human form over nonhuman forms slowly and with difficulty (with the begining of third millennium from early Dynastic onward)


intransitive: fulfilled in the specific situation or phenomenon and did not reach out beyond it (~ characteristic boundness to some phenomena)
(ancient mesopotamian saw) numinous as immanent ==> name that power and attribut form to it in terms of the phenomena


[Jacobsen's well articulation to pose a question -->] *the characteristic of mesopotamian boundness to the externals of situation in which the numinous was encountered...* ==>
•intransitiveness
•differentiation ==> pluralistic aspect (--> polytheism) --> divine aspects that it recognized

plurality ==> ability to:
•distinguish
•evaluate
•choose

“No god went by, why are my muscles paralyzed” (Gilgamesh) --> ‘god = paralyzing fear’
uncannily good luck
sudden realization of having come to harm
numinous power experienced in sudden illness
*no allegiance was invented* ==> no cult developed

they are gloomy, their shadow dark,
no light is in their bodies,
ever they slink along covertly,
walk not upright,
from their claws drips bitter gall,
their footprints are (full of) evil venom.

(from [more primitive?]) dread --to--> fascination

the shivers and chills (of death)
that fritter the sun of things,
spawn of the god of heavens,
spawned on an evil spirit,
the death warrants, beloved sons of the storm god,
born of the queen of the netherworld,
who were torn out of heaven and hurled from the earth as castoffs,
are creatures of hell, all

we are not determined, we are engendered


numinous as immanent --> external habituation: inviting (or magically enforcing) the presence of the power within

efforts of such habituation:
•cult dramatic
•fashioning or appropriate divine images
•religious literature
•temples
[...]

[...]> (?) 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 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 epist[...]

[...]nguages

‘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 metaphysical ambience, internal divisions, and lyric bias of Persian people?

A pivot point must inform and relate

...the shaping agencies of intellect.
Speech is poiesis and human linguistic articulation is centrally creative.

The language-matrix

language, informed by energies proper to itself, more comprehensive and timeless than any who makes use of it...

There is a phenomenon of linguistic Entfremdung inseparable from the creative genius of the word. (Humboldt)

...conjectures with prophetic brilliance

discourse (Rede) would not be muffled by the ground---we walk erect

jede Sprache ist ein Versuch---trial
(Humboldt)
different languages penetrate to different depths

Literaturehaus, hause has always been a metaphor for consciousness

cryptotypr : categories of semantic organization
which translates the underlying metaphysics of a language into its overt or surface grammar.

...understanding of those deep-seated dynamics of meaning, of chosen and significant form, (that make up a culture)

it is exceedingly difficult for an outsider to, operating inevitably within the world-frame of his own tongue, to penetrate to the active symbolic depths of a foreign tongue.
---we reach for the bottom and stir up further darkness.

..a careful philosophically and poetically disciplined observation

beautifully logical (discrimination) about: causation, action, result
dynamic or energetic quality, directness of experience.
(these words for Shabnam?)
...all matters of the function of thinking
(why do i want to bring to her, to Shabnam, the quintessence of the rational?)

‘the inner music of meaning’

the german tenderness
germ[...]

[...]ry of confrontation with solid objects, compact volumes, objective indefinite unknowns.

recognizing the object by its shadow => geometry* (-- transparency and emptiness. the world they constitute is thoroughly knowable)
or
i allow a kernel of shadow within the object --> history of science: the solid always envelopes something that can be rendered explicit***

radical negation of interior shadows

pyramid is itself fire, sun passes through it


Plato kills the hen that laid the golden eggs
“the future of the square and the diagonal is decided as much on the sand where we describe them through the language that names them as it is decided in the sky of ideas.”
the realism of transparent idealities is still immersed in a philosophy of representation.
Iconography is replaced by scenography

the shadowless theatre
the inevitable realism is (still) an idealism

> without shadow ~= without secret

kernel of an implicit science: what are the relationships of a technique, (with) of a myth, (with) of a communication.. ?

The idealities implicit in technology --> mobilized in representation
(--> dramatized by myth) : obscure articulation of rigorous knowledge (--> totality of human activity)

the birth of beauty never stops
.
.the eternal geometer

(mathematical science's) sudden fits

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

on defeat:
the original power: ‘victorious’ [--> mastery is (so far presented as) victorious]
=/= a song to the pleasures of life, a guilt-free knowledge
-choosing between springtime or plague
[--> “phenomenology of defeat"]


-(can we) be and think (, stay, come from, or arrive) on the side of the *retreat* (whether strategic or historically mandated) ? (@Leo)
retreat --> (re)trace ...{is about the traces of things that are left that need to be read, condition of research practice, but never coming with a full-on truth-telling logos, rather stay in the twilight(ment) and not the blinding sun of an enlightenment}--> learning from Derrida and Avital
-when things start getting internalized --> ‘depressive position’ --> you can manage your relations to the ‘good object’ --> integration [=/~-> the twin-other: melancholia] [=/= when everyone is out to get you --> schizophrenic paranoid position]
...dealing with what we are left with, the reminiscence, die Reste, and so on
(Rousseauian, Heidegger also,) there is too much action, let's back off, let's retreat, let's listen to what the retreat is...
-retreat not as a military tactic, which means you are doing it in order to win something

---->[the story of writing]
within the artist world [artist as a creative being who inscribe on the world and in the world] (including apas[...]

[...] of reality (the world) and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author). Rather, an assemblage establishes connections between certain multiplicities drawn from each of these orders, so that a book has no sequel nor the world as its object nor one or several authors as its subject.”
(Deleuze - Rhizome)

...consists not in an argument, but in the ecstatic elaboration of a metaphor, a web of interconnected concepts, the development of a new vocabulary without a pause for explanation or so much as a simple definition.

“...a mapping rather than a tracing”

“What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious”

“It fosters connections between fields, the removal of blockages... “
(removing some blockages of meaning-lock in San'an)


my lecture, emphasizes the rhizomatic to foster imaginative work that challenges typical critical forms.

not to overlook the working of matters, and the exteriority of their relations.

(in a book, a lecture, etc.) there are lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification.



(what are Attar's Sheikh's actual authority as a teacher?)
(George Makdisi: “Madrasa and University in the Middle Ages”)
[...] “Perhaps the most fundamental difference between the two systems is embodied in their systems of certification; namely, in medieval Europe, the licentia docendi, or license to teach; in medieval Islam, the ijazah, or authorization. In Europe, the license to teach was a license to teach a certain field of knowledge. It was conferred by the licensed masters acting as a corporation, with the consent of a Church authority, in Paris, by the Chancellor of the Cathedral Chapter... Certification in the Muslim East remained a personal matter between the master and the student. The master conferred it on an individual for a particular work, or works.” [...]

feeling cool and correct
(in) a parasitical golden age

what is “education” in a mystical world (or actually a mystical world-view)
how can be undermined or rewired, (“teaching” without education)


magical idealism

from Delphi-magiscism to the San'an

(does San'an actually wants to go to Greece?! but went to Italy?)
اقصای روم


the space we are founding ourselves in is not neutral, not innocent, not un-signed
it is paid for, has a certain architecture, (phallic work)

the intellectual mask...



semiotic of learning and thinking


(Maulwurf,)[...]

[...]imisation, postponement of affect

*it is job of defense mechanism to distort, transform, or falsify the perceived reality* --> to help deal with the id or superego, reducing anxiety


ego: part of our psyche that is reality based



[title]
methinks

...the absence of mercy

complain =~ elegy =~ prayer (---> desire to future)
(elegy assumes that there is something in the information that makes a difference and not in the receiver of info.)

(question to an Iranian friend:) “why must we fasten our gaze to the objects of damage and derangement?” “why light lanterns to behold the corpse?” “or extend our focus on them?” (I am using Mohaghegh's words,) the extremist (or other aesthetic-philosophical strands of extremisms) would tell us not to look away, for the thought and expression have taken the shape of a ‘meteorological device,’ forecasting seasons (of storm)...

(you take the mithridatic venom to) cross into the next level of temporal experience

he makes “engravings of the atrocity”
(حکاکی از) سبعیت

a fanatical response to the storm


a charismatic authority undertakes a poetic articulation
or a poetic articulation becomes committed to an ideological program
[Iran Iraq war]


mysticism, a protocol of extremity, geared towards the immensification of narrow vision
gigantic singularity
itself the house of many paradoxes: that of wisdom and rage, that of boundlessness and confinement, that of precision and enormity, nature and technology (apprentices to a lesser artisan-metallurgist god interested only in functional architecture and instrumentalized objects), betrayal and devotion,
mysticism is one of postmodern ‘mask,’ there are many others (the chaos-mask / face?, etc.)
one of many existential prototypes, subjectivity constellations, etc.

sliding between hostile and relaxed patterns of ...

with a sixth sense for disappearance
gained attunement to nothing
what are the athleticism of this stillness?

the turn in the thought of the mystic to externalize that same meditative daze!
what if an enthusiasm took hold to transfer this personal, self-contained oblivion onto a universal plane?
a single mood-shift: interiority feels the need to stretch out into exteriority.
without the logic of judgment


(in the aftermath of the 2th century) many visionaries of western thought (--postmoderns--) have emphasized a (desperate) need to inject ambiguity and doubt into our collective imagination



where is absolutism in San'an?

own descent (Abstieg) into paranoia

when in master-disciple relationship one is asked/taught not only read the works of past visio[...]

[...] center

cream
center for research in epistemology and matter

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

***sharjah project***

[general approach of the project:]

this proposal gathers literary forces from the speculative insights of Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh (on ‘radical modes of resistance’) and Edouard Glissant (on ‘modest modes of resistance’) in order to perform a ‘slider’ between hostile and relaxed patterns of “contact” and “nothingness” that has been rotating throughout the past century in the Middle East. the performance of a knowledge-zoom in the hypnotic effects, nondialogue, nonnarrative, and radical exile spaces that have emerged in eastern postmodernism to reverse and supersede the question of modernity.

by traversing the domains of revolutionary ideology, avant-garde literature, new-wave cinema, extremist thought, and protests from the limitless imaginative reservoir of their political, poetic, spiritual, and aesthetic predecessors--this projects examines a Middle Eastern navigation of identity (via the concept of the ‘mask’) and its particular modest/hostile modes of resistance (via the concept of the ‘text’). visiting sites such as: subversive epitomes of charismatic authority undertaking a poetic articulation, when chaotic imagination makes contact with nothingness, the will to chaos, and inscription of fatality in literature-as-moral-transaction.


[pressure points:]

mobile within a speculative/suggestive milieu, this project is interested in examining literary sites such as Kelile-o Demne's communal forms of fragile human cohabitation (11th century political/bestial fable), Rumi's simulation of nonexistence (13th century production of schizo-darvish), Hafez's engineering metaphor-factory (14th century imaginal faculty of extreme presence), Hedayat's Buf Koor the Shelley's Frankenstein's monster favorate book (20th century forms of renunciation), Amir Naderi and Forough Farrokhzad films (20th century strategies of withdrawal), Jala Al Ahmad and Ali Shariati writings (20th century fatal concepts of the outside), [list to be modified]


[background:]

this form of half-digestive omnivorous work is situated in a larger trajectory of creative investigations, which i have been busy with under “storytelling,” are dealing with the questions of conditions in which non-antagonistic critical encounters between ordered conventions of knowing and chaotic textuality/imagination is possible. to take the mind where it does not belong. to the rogue arsenals of middle eastern reservoir of imagination and its locatable mimicries. to its repetitive scaffoldings, fugitive trajectories, its performances of fatal experience of the text. to unload its corrosive textualities and let them run their acids across one another. this project is interested in both the unleashing and the pleasure of watching the text die.
[...]

[...]wer
•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 more of this” (“it's enough”) ~ an *order*  [=/= wisdom, sage, diplomatic response of an interlocutor, truth-telling, equal dialogue, negotiation]
poet's expertise and sensitivity: the storyteller's intimate relation to impermanence and destruction (--> Ali, Sana, Hoda, Setareh)

[-]Baraheni's depiction of the spatial domination of the city by Pahlavi regime from 1952 to 1979 --> SAVAK responded to and fueled a striking development in the political consciousness of the urban centers ==> labyrinthine evolution of the rebel form
hie poem “An Epic in Reverse” (Akhavanian reversal) neighborhoods of stigma, filth, and backwardness --> hybrid of animality and criminality
(Mohaghegh asking:) what is the author's recourse once stranded behind those iron bars, and now acquainted with the gleaming tools and instruments of the guards and royal executioners? for Baraheni, the answer seems to rest within a literary turn toward the arsenal of vulgarity, where language is forced to howl and curse again, to match the shock treatment and flagellation (شلاق shalagh) ==>
1. to unveil the degradation and depravity of power, to show it as unbeautiful and disgusting in its most bude form
2. to wage some reciprocal hate against power, to maximize the rawness of what is happening[...]

[...] world appears as a whole, or womb (a cosmological projection)
•Lacan: foreclosure, Verwerfung (=/= repression [==> neurosis]): the exclusion of the father, (the fundamental signifier of the Name-of-the-Father is the object of foreclosure) ==> a hole in the symbolic order --but--> sooner or later foreclosed Name-of-the-Father reappears in the real and the subject is unable to assimilate it : *collision with the inassimilable signifier* ==> entry into psychosis ~=> delusion ~-> paranoia

(Heidegger + Manning + Alex's register of good thinking: “doing philosophy is better than knowing philosophy” ...)
[*]'to do philosophy’ --> imaginary register --> knowledge of the ego*
[*]'to know philosophy’ --> symbolic register --> knowledge of the subject*
(in Lacan) connaissance (Knowledge) belongs to the imaginary register =/= savoir (knowing) belongs to the symbolic register (--> you can track down the egocentrism of the philosopher:)
[*]connaissance (Knowledge)-->{self-knowledge of the subject in the imaginary order. based on misrecognition, a fantasy of self-mastery and unity, constitutive of the ego. it has the same structure as paranoia (involving the delusion of absolute knowledge and mastery)}
=/=
[*]savoir (knowing)-->{articulation of signifiers in the subject's symbolic universe, the signifying chain}

i use (sometimes associative) speech in collective research life as a progressive revelation of symbolic knowledge to the subject, where knowledge is the jouissance of the Other =/= “absolute knowledge”

[what ever we say about the symbolic is utterly important: because from the anthropological work of Strauss on the exchange of gifts that regulate kinship relations, emergence of symbolic structures was conceptualized as an essential feature of the human transition from nature to culture, to Saussure's theory of the sign: exchanges of signifiers, to Lacanian psychoanalysis: the impose of symbolic structures on sexuality]


defense: reaction of the ego to certain interior stimuli (and not the external) <-- Freud
(in Lacan:) *defense: permanent symbolic structures of subjectivity =/= *resistance: transitory imaginary responses to intrusions of the symbolic (on the side of the object)

the neurotic and the pervert defend themselves in their *desire* =/= psychotic defends himself in their *projection*

“to desire” is a defense mechanism (against going beyond a certain limit in jouissance?)

(>this is all about) the psychotic relation to reality and the relation of the subject to his speech


*unreal is transparent (for the paranoid)*
-hermeneutics of suspicion (<-- Nietzsche's perspectivism: all texts are but autobiographic memoirs)


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

[Searles]

schizophrenic individual is struggling with the question, not so much[...]

[...]*

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

childhood Elias chap1

[*]childhood: idealized romantic construct, with denied legal rights, reflection of adults about themselves:
•nostalgia for an individual and collective past
•
=/= children vacillate between innocence & awareness, morality & immorality, cruelty & kindness, foolishness & wisdom, , , **children act as sophisticated consumers**
--Elias--> ***children make emotional, political, consumerist choices***

how adults construct childhood --> ***aesthetic social imagination***

how adults imagine children (in idealized forms ==> evocation of emotions) ==> give meaning to (individual and) collective realities

childhood --> worry + obligation =/= adulthood --> ease + freedom

(my childhood is sometimes remembered by me so different than of my friends --> makes the universal media objects specifically precious: cartoons that were watched by us across border and time ---> go to Sina's Children's Media Watch List childrensmedia.net)

imagine children -->
•nature of emotions
•relationship to religion
•relationship to society
◦articulation of attitude towards society
•constructing concept of:
◦individual
◦community
◦nation
◦gender
◦age

Elias's notion of emotion --> a broad category to index concepts of morally, ethics, politics, aspirational acts,

(everything depends on the ways we remember our [emotional experience of] childhood)

(memory = salad of) fragments of memory + emotions from our experience + emotions experienced by others + what we have been told by others about our childhood


common theory --> age between two and eleven children are most sensitive to external factors ==> most vulnerable to advertising

*age seven*
children are increasingly controlled by symbolic relationships and images (+ make judgment about things)

*under five*
{human characters ~?/= animated characters}--> belief in imaginary characters and monsters, management of emotions

*age two*
(end of) two --> children begin pretending (until age of five)

*over four*
idiosyncratic system of thinking about causality (extraordinary plays larger role than adults)


create and identify emotions in visual images

fantasizing =/= fantastical thinking

(for children) wishing = mental + magical + it exists in relatio to skill [---> go to Cinderella, waiting]


Elias's study of children images (visual material featuring children) in Persianate cultures (turkey, pakistan, iran) --> (role of) ***childhood/children = location of enacted emotion***
childhood + religion [...]

[...]leuze's tradition of affirmative immanence

(Singh > Deleuze > Strauss:) structure is composed of “pre-individual singularities” ~ nomadic distribution of potential --immanent--> contradictions, accidents, mutations

pure/impure
suspicious/inauspicious
life/death

heretic --> reorder and obliterate the partitioning of categories that compose the structural order of religion [--> Veena on Sikhism and Hinduism: symbolism of Sikhism understood in relation to Hinduism structural order, annihilating the categorical prioritise (intellectual and social) of the medieval world. Sikhism rejecting the opposition between categories of: the rulers, the caste system, and the orders of renunciation --> investment of the virtues of all three *in a single body of faith* and conduct]

heterodox sects
rebellious thinkers
--> negation of the organizing conceptual order

(social and) ritual order generates its own forms of instability

...ambivalences of key concepts ==bring==> “play” to the structure, for good and ill ~ liminality

(Veena's) liminial situation: a form of instability where the individual experiences his social world as separated from the cosmic --> death: disarticulation --> must be undone by inhabiting the liminality : ritually rejoining the flow of life

similarities of ritual mourner and ascetic: transcending the categories of the social and the cosmic

incorporation of the liminal undead (preta) with ritually incorporated ancestors (pitri) [job of the mourner]

(crucial task of the) ritual: conveying the dead from the threshold of liminality into an ancestral flow of life

emphasis on the system is (always?) at the cost of the event
(eternal investment of the artists in foregrounding of the event rather than the structure --> rapture with structure as caste, tradition, state, norm, system, etc. at the cost of missing the practical kinship transcribed into the social contract, leadership, and laws of encounter)

***modernity is composed (neither by continuities nor rupture then, but) by transfigurations***
(Singh + Veena)

critical event
critical structure

[*]event: institute a new modality of historical action which is not inscribed in the inventory of that situation
(for Furet: French revolution is an event par excellence) --Veena--> event: moments when new modes of action come into being which which redefines traditional categories (such as: codes of purity and honor, the meaning of martyrdom, construction of a heroic life, etc.)

foregrounding the event as analytic category (without disappearing the question of structure):
-sati of Roop Kanvar
-Sikh militancy
-collective violence during the partition of India and Pakistan

not only the state (tries to instit[...]

[...]ories 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 tradition besides the trope of light --Anand--> imagining a lived islam from the perspective of shadows

shadows as the (relational and individual) self
*ruin: draw visitors by making itself the inner rendered as the outer --> a traversal of one's inner self, otherwise hidden to oneself



perspective from the shadow --allows--> to think about tradition paradoxically (about *affective inheritances* in the constitution, transmission, and transformations of the islamic tradition)

Anand --> ****islam as identity =/= islam as inheritance****
islam as inheritance --Spadola--> like a river (#meander)

Anand --> *how older forms of knowing and being coexist and are constantly in conversation and contes[...]

[...]ical conundrums (through words and practice)** [same in artists as well?]


perceived eagerness for debate among lay muslims --> (anxiety over) disputation ==>
•indulgence in abstract thinking
•undermine the tenacity of individual faith
•reduce the hold of the daily obligations of ritual worship
•lead to a diminishing attachment to worldly life or stakes in the social


Veena, Cavell > skepticism:
•philosophical efforts at securing one's knowledge of the world unmediated by sense experience (<-- classical)
•human disappointment with our earthly condition of being distinct and separate from others (<-- social)
•efforts to secure unmediated knowledge of others (<-- social)
•

[Veena (giving historicity and ethnigraphic precision)-->] skepticism ==>
•renders other vulnerable to suspicion
•unsettle social relations
•produce the conditions of possibility for suffering and violence


skepticism <--> aspiration

aspiration =/= clear vision of ends

Pakistan:
•idemtifies itself as an ideological state (Islam) [==Naveeda==> (the possibility of) some experimentation within its apparatus : ***articulation and dispersal of ideology is not linear or cumulative*** it flows in directions other than from the top down]
•inherits the colonial administrative structure + imperatives of government (postcolonial state)

(Sina -->) to be ideological about X : driven to ascertain and adjudicate the others relation to X
(certainly as an achievement)

in islamic ideological states (like Pakistan and Iran) you are allowed to experiment on what is it to be a Muslim
(+ skepticism with respect to those who strive)
•skepticism transforms into an *impersonal force* (that can emerge anywhere and strike anyone) [<-- disembodied aspect of skepticism]


discourse of spiritual diagnosis
(takes place through an evaluation of one's physiology)

Deleuze's symptomatology: a creative act bringing about a change in health + affirmation of a way of life
•striving --> good health

Iqbal --> attentiveness to thr physiological as a means to gauge whether one's spirituality is on the right track
•with Bergson --> concern for the futurity of Islam
•with Nietzsche --> concern for the spiritual health
◦Nietzsche: physician of culture, (understood as political act) “striving and self-diagnosis ==> implicates the individual in the world ==> produce charges in the world”


Naveeda's ethnography method of interviewing:
1. locate traces of X in (context:)
◦everyday life
◦public culture
◦
3. see how this tendency crystallizes
◦at particular points
◦within particular persons
◦within par[...]

[...]mes not codable into discrete units of work practice to be carried out on specific occasions

in my hypertext writing, am i trying to enable myself to talk about my work in a language that computers could understand?

(do we need?) to get at (and maintain?) the deep structure of the one's situation
--> transformational grammar
--> bring intuitive decision-making to a conscious level

# the issue of the validity or not of ajayeb's knowledge is entirely orthogonal to my purpose. I am producing an anatomy of what it has meant in the case of bestiary writing to create such a science

(my issue with) [*]strategy: a way of managing a past that threatens to grow out of control

(in working with bestiaries my research question:) what could provide for a good ordering of memory?

-(which professions act as) distributed memory system (for who?)
-(what blocks between) internal memory and external memory --> the time needed to work complex representations

(we are trying to) situate our activity visibly within an informational[?*] world ==> to be factored
*in an informational world: accountability = measurable, finite, packaged, <--✕--> (other modes of) invisible and articulation work

...when technicians/artists seeking new ways of writing (scientific/poetic) papers so that their work gets acknowledged ==(and yet)==> the nature of their (scientific/artistic) truth is not impeached***
--> and sometimes we restructure our work so that (organizational, informational or truth-related) challenges will not be necessary ----> (at the end of the day there will be [always?] an) information infrastructure for the kind of work which contains an account of your activity ==> “informational panoptica” (Bowker)

the classification systems we are giving to embed in the tools and reports we give in apass

(in apass problematically we are asked to) copy the transparency of our activity from one representational space (internal memory, nomenclature, past events, paper) to another (computerized record, giving a talk, time-framing) (=/= contingency) ==> an ecology of attention : ***what can be forgotten and what should be remembered*** ==> development of (information) infrastructure
what is remembered in the formal information systems ==> ontology of that system

...recorded on a form; and forms necessarily impose/naturalize classification systems (through the form's speed, rhythm, dimension, and how its specifications are implemented) ***
(how am i working this in my pop-up book and hypertex? --> classification scheme of relevant events for my research)
*informational space is (sufficiently well) pre-structured ==> some things/details can be assumed or are dropped out of the representational space
-in my pop-up book i am encoding a kind of memory in an organizational file ==>[...]

[...]technically superior standards winning [DOS, VHS, A4, etc.]
standards --> *aspect of acting in the world* ==> classifications

what are (or have been) the behind the scenes, boring, background processes of the “real” work of ajayeb (and any past and practical politics of knowledge production)? (==> becoming interested in a wider scope of reading: rhetorics, semiotics, objectivity, analysis, architecture,)
•historically creation of the infrastructure
•ubiquity and webbed saturation of classifying and standardizing
•materially textured (layered, tangled)
•their negotiated nature

*distribution of memory (and distribution of representation):
X --> historical contingencies --> a narrative --> practical politics --> standard narrative --> universal category --> erases its own narratological past, (employed internally+externally) deletion of modalities in the development of (scientific) texts; [a modality can be deleted in a number of different ways: [*] it might be distributed (held in another part of the organization than in that which produces the text), [*] built into the infrastructure (the work environment is changed such that the modality is never encountered), etc. =/= #accountability] ==> fact (+ single articulation, only one plot of data) --> mobilizing a set of black-boxes-->{Xiri's “queers,” Eszter's “participants,”: what goes inside these black-boxes and how they look like, is seen as irrelevant for them. [--> translating from the context of storage to the present situation (one might store a fact for reason X but recall it for reason Y) Latour + Bowker]}
X --> indeterminacy & multiplicity --> conflict --> negotiations --> standard

where to make the cuts in the system, for example, down to what level of detail one specifies a description of work, of an illness, of a setting, [of an animal, of a queerness, of a subjectivity, and so on.]

residual categories {rest, others, miscellaneous,} are ubiquitous

what are the mismatches between subsystems in ajayeb and Qur'an?
--> “cumulative mess trajectory” (Strauss) --> when the trajectories become so tangled that you can't return and the interactions multiply

we are riding on metaphores to move in a densely classified world

“There is no way of ever getting access to the past except through classification systems of one sort or another - formal or informal, hierarchical or not” Bowker
•“in the 14th century” --> segmentation of time, system of calendar
•“Iranian” --> discourse of national genius only arose in the 19th century
•“revolution” --> our current conception of ‘revolution’ is marked by the historiographical work of Karl Marx
•(historiographical traditions)

compare first lines of Halaj's biography in Attar and Wikipedia:
•آن فی الله فی سبیل الله آن شیر بیشه تحق[...]

[...]atterns

*process of language: from optimal to obligatory*
(in respect of history: obligatory meanings of Attar, and so on)
--> in my work this flow is reversed: from obligatory (meanings of Attar or ajayeb) to optimal. that is perhaps why sometimes people say that they don't understand me or that I am wonge.
-memory is the matter of statistical fact: (core) meaning ~= “selection”

***the fate of my contribution depends on and is determined by my position in the communicative network


pidgin دست وپا شکسته ومخلوط : creative adaptations
ajayeb.net is a pidgin?
*pidginization: any process of reduction or simplification of linguistic resources {"=/=”, “=”, “==>”, “-->"}

my ajayeb writing:
step 1: redundent simplification of linguistic resources [--> creoles نژاد مخلوط: that segment of a continuum of variation which exhibits the maximum divergence from the standard but which is still connected to other portions of the meshwork (Farsi+English)]
step 2: reenriching itself with features eliminated during step 1 ~ recomplexification of creoles }==(how?!)==>
step 3: diversifying the number and type of uses it can be put to

double articulation: a sorting operation that yields a homogeneous distribution of elements and a consolidation operation that defines more or less permanent structural linkages between sorted materials.
if and when the materials on which a sorting device operates acquire the ability to replicate with variation, a new abstract machine emerges, in the form of a blind probe head capable of exploring a space of possible forms


ajayeb's (specialist) jargon <-- what intensified them? --> ? tech, colonialism, schooling,


what i am trying to do with ajayeb, in making this hypertext, is to connect its syntactical constructions to fresh reservoirs of linguistic resources ***

with ajayeb.net i am learning to resist the hierarchical weight of “received pronunciations” and official criteria of correctness of “ajayeb”

my Rigs, equipped with “knobs”: controlling parameters whose intensity defines the dynamical state of the structure-generating process


my work on ajayeb is an inquiry (or critique) in the ways we represent the world to ourselves [--> organizing objective referents and label-concepts] <--> a homogenizing social critique?

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

what is gained and what is lost when “tidying up the archive” ?

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

[Yates]

in the ages before printing a trained memory was vitally important; and the manipulation of images in memory must always to some extent involve the psyche as a whole

** mnemotechnical side of the art is always present **

Mnemosyne, said the[...]

[...] 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 technologies fit together seamlessly --> Leigh Star
(my work begins in) information systems may leave gaps in work processes that require real-time adjustments, or ‘articulation work,’ to complete the processes
(my research: through ajayeb i have been busy with learning to “make friends” with both technologies and theories)

every system is an assemblage --> Calvert applying Haraway's insight and think of technologies as significant prostheses ==> [*]librarianship: a work that (primarily) hooks up people with their technologies

librarians articulate technologies --> they help people adapt technologies

librarian's articulation work is both technological and affective =/= competitive


(in techno-capital) supressing labor costs ==> deskilling

deskilling and de-professionalization under the intertwined guises of competitiveness and innovation

an example of deskilling:
-Haraway: “to be feminized means to be made extremely vulnerable; able to be disassembled, reassembled, exploited as a reserve labor force, seen less as workers than as servers; subjected to time arrangements on and off the paid job that make a mockery of a limited work day; leading to an existence that always borders on being obscene, out of place, and reducible to sex. deskilling is an old strategy newly applicable to formerly privileged workers.”

education has been difficult to comodify, and remains labor intensive =/= innovations in online education ==> creating inroads in the deskilling and commodification of teaching labor:
•c[...]

[...]ip, 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 technologies fit together seamlessly --> Leigh Star
(my work begins in) information systems may leave gaps in work processes that require real-time adjustments, or ‘articulation work,’ to complete the processes
(my research: through ajayeb i have been busy with learning to “make friends” with both technologies and theories)

every system is an assemblage --> Calvert applying Haraway's insight and think of technologies as significant prostheses ==> [*]librarianship: a work that (primarily) hooks up people with their technologies

librarians articulate technologies --> they help people adapt technologies

librarian's articulation work is both technological and affective =/= competitive


(in techno-capital) supressing labor costs ==> deskilling

deskilling and de-professionalization under the intertwined guises of competitiveness and innovation

an example of deskilling:
-Haraway: “to be feminized means to be made extremely vulnerable; able to be disassembled, reassembled, exploited as a reserve labor force, seen less as workers than as servers; subjected to time arrangements on and off the paid job that make a mockery of a limited work day; leading to an existence that always borders on being obscene, out of place, and reducible to sex. deskilling is an old strategy newly applicable to formerly privileged workers.”

education has been difficult to comodify, and remains labor intensive =/= innovations in online education ==> creating inroads in the deskilling and commodification of teaching labor:
•course curriculum --> course content
•teaching --> delivery
*video technologies + internet ==> face-to-face interpersonal relating to be captured and reused --> new depths of commodification
*internet technologies can be used to provide rigorous, asynchronous learning and mentorship, or they can be used to decrease labor costs, but they cannot do much of both simultaneously(? --> question @apass)


Calvert: [...however,] for competition--[or any good/bad object we are working on] to be a useful strategy, it has to happen in a larger context of cooperation and collaboration
(for example the notion of “future” has to happen in a larger context in which different futurities for [...]

[...]> 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 performance studies.
•interested in computational literacy (including data-collection, librarianship) as part of our *diversity-work* and our *articulation-work*
•interested in different languages (english, computer, non-sign languages, etc.) refers to different value systems and to different lived experience
•interested in the *labor of knowledge-work* (in collective digital flesh life)
•interested in shifts in topology (the ongoing reworking of bodily boundaries of each of our research practices)
•


TERMINOLOGY:

*articulation-work: the labor necessary to make technologies fit together seamlessly

*diversity-work: a kind of work in which we learn about the damage we cause, and of how “causes” are understood as “damage”

*librarianship: a work that hooks up people with their technologies

*data abstraction: a *technique of isolating* (the parts of your mini-language that deal with) how data/info objects are ‘represented’ from (the parts of your mini-language that deal with) how data/info objects are ‘used’ (---> i addressed this in my fable workshop in a totally different epistemology)

*model: your object decomposed into *computational compound objects* (each with their own time-varying local state variables)

(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

[...]

[...]s it mean to say to any particular group of people that we do not end at our skin?!***
what sort of boundary object is this “skin”?

(Keeling > Katie) a book is a wormhole --into--> transdisciplinary universe
*lyricism of surplus*
“the end of the world... work with me”

agencies of valorization (of pricing, of valuing, of mobilizing labor) : political economy of acquiring body parts from the skin's edge

*agencies of capital: worldly processes of economic systems articulating and distributed among, but not reproducing the powers of the state, or of community, family, or nation*

+ other agencies:
•sensory-motor apparatus and affectivities
•thinkings and memory-images distributed across people and media

(sometimes) layered double-bind systems ==> numbing out

queerly valorized --Keeling-->
if Pam Grier is a locus of desire for both heterosexual males and for lesbians such as Lesbian Avengers’ lesbian prtygoers, then her presence on The L Word [TV series] is another way the series seeks to bring these populations together in a shared project of value production


phenomena: topological reconfigurings/entanglements/relationalities/(re)articulations
ongoing reconfis of world ==> = agency =/= attribute

national agendas for innovation and economic positioning

which surplus populations will be enrolled into which kinds of institutions for knowledge work becomes an element of global academic restructuring
restructuring: politicizing funding + ...

intellectual double bind of having:
1. to address many diverging audiences simultaneously under the threat of survival
2. to author knowledges as merely one of multiple agencies with very limited control
==> *posthumanities*

(partial and highly distributed) authorial and receptive agencies --require--> affective labors -->
•sifting among authoritative and alternative knowledges
•clarifying affiliations
•inspiring trust

(Ahmed's material feminism) @apass
whose material was this?
which generations of feminisms were implicated?
which details were necessary to name others carefully?
what contexts were backdrops for which founding gestures?
affective labor (in apass): frustration, forgetting, unfairness, intensity, ethics, hope, carring attention to detail

[let's not] be quite so willing to deposit our hope in the category of “the new”


objects become sticky
objects become full of affective value

critique
(in apass i have been experimenting with the) effects of reducing complexity
(i am aware of both) the hard work of elegance in explanation & of essentialism in critique
-strategic openings and closings of “black-boxes” (full of memory)<[...]

[...]story, brings with it a great many dangers
architecture (never touches the object) is enchanted with object discourse
...all of us have been asked to “instrumentalize” architectural [or art] theory according to a particular building
material given a structure

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

Q & A ?, interactivity, swarovski party, servants and robots interacting with foreign bodies --> feeling at home? excited... --> disco without bouncers and borders without border check, spaces you can seamlessly in and out, labyrinthine

i am generating some vocabularies
parsite and parasitical, not all of them are predatory like the wolf



(Karen Barad)
With all mirroring practices, biomimcry has built-in optics on the geometry of distance from what which is other.


(Irigaray)
surprise (to be new): not yet assimilated or disassimilated as known
our attention to that which is not yet (en)coded

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

(something to consider, regarding the pigs and wolf story, also an interest for performances that happen in closed space;) there is a standard account that says ‘interiors’ and ‘interiority’ are linked, that the articulation of interior physical space enabled the development of certain kind of (initially bourgeois European) sense of subjective life--as something sheltered and enclosed.
=/= interiority (subjectivity) is linked to the exterior [Sennett]

O-- still in the 15th century (when sex and sleeping was not veiled under curtains) there was no correlation between the notion of privacy and the interior
O-- in the mid 18th century (among European bourgeoisie) a new ideal of domesticity appeared which dictates a new interior space --> separate room separate functions, segregation of domestic activities
O-- Rousseau: in the shelter of private domestic space subjectivity is set free (--> a different kind of subjectivity (one which guards the self, something to be protected from the outside) is enabled by the development of the division of labor in interior space) [this is not merely architectural, it is also something about the clothing people wore: wearing different clothes in family or in the realm of strangers. houses became warmer]

(Simmel's) “urban subjectivity”: street physical over-stimulation ==> wearing a mask, you show nothing to people, you are not there. and behind this mask there is the feelings you are having, and these sensations behind the mask are your subjectivity.
it is a reaction to being exposed to difference and complexity
the subject is divided: neutral on the outside / stimulated in the inside

(i don't want to become a camera)
observe (without interacting)
observational cruising
[the standard account:] interiority ~= reflexive detachment, reflexive withdraw

[...]

[...]ns and examinations of the buyer
•effects and elucidations of the seller
==> quick and indifferent economic transaction

“selling tickets”: accumulated social experience of separation = *depersonalized exchange* (--> that which many artists are dealing with as a problem)
--Gouz--> [*]capitalism: *disaffection of value* (the libidinal, the intersubjective, the semantic are completely divorced from the economic relation ==> economic sector =/= semantic affective investment)

Seurat's meditation on the emptiness of a modern relation of display and consumption

cost of admission at two different rates:
-Leonardo: head of Jesus at the vanishing point of the window opening onto infinite celestial space (--> regime of signs that possess intrinsic value =/=)
-Seurat: price tag, grid space (--> regime of signs that are symbols of value)


[*]scenic: determined by the position of an (depicted) observer


ubiquity of the subjective experience of “shopping” & its construction as spectacle

‘price tag’: (one of the vanishing points of modernity,) the draining away of the illusion of reference or stability

Poe's stranger itinerary, a paradigmatic articulation of modern loneliness
“at no moment did he see that i watched him. he entered shop after shop, priced nothing, spoke no word, and look at the object with a vacant stare.”

process of circulation and convertibility
simulation inherent in the literal spectacle inseparable from the “semblance”(~ price tag)

(Marx:) ‘price tag’: the symbol of itself
“only fleeting, a reality destined constantly to disappear, to be suspended, not to be count as a definitive realization but always only as an intermediate, mediating realization. [...] it exists, therefore, in so far as it remains in this constant movement [...] its reality is not that it is the price but that it represents it, is its representative--the materially present representative of the price, this of itself, and as such, of the exchange value of commodities.”


(we should ask the question of “symbolism” at each age again and differently)


(Brian Rotman:) an isomorphism (emerged in renaissance) between:
•vanishing point in visual representation
•use of zero in computation
•abstract money in economic exchange

[*]vanishing point: a figure of the coincidence of the transcendent & the empirical
[Panofsky: perspective as symbolic form: perspective in transforming the ‘ousia’ (reality) into ‘phainomenon’ (appearance), seams to reduce the divine to a mere subject matter for human consciousness; but for that very reason, conversely, it'd expands human consciousness into a vessel for the divine]
--> an infinity not only prefigured in god, but indeed actually embodied in empirical reality [...]

[...] from that disjunct texture (artwork, chaotic syntax of dreams, indecipherable present,) some interpretive clarity (feedback)

Freud + Cezzaine --> design a countermodel of attentiveness that surmounts an ***inhibition of the peripheral*** (=/= notion of selection ~=> finding out what one already knows)

****diffuse attention =/= critical attention**** (a faculty in which the observer is led to reject some of the ideas that occur to him after perceiving them)


(at the turn of the century) experience: compulsory consumption of information


(from) the experience of deindividualtion (in piazza) --to--> a more controllable form of loneliness (bedroom)


[this] plural hybrid space of Roman square (Crary on Freud's representation) ~= a spectacle society : a patchwork of fluctuating effects in which individuals and groups continually reconstitute themselves (either creativity or reactively) =/= (Guy Debord's) seamless regime of separation, ominous collective mobilization

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

Deleuze and Guattari's Varuna and Mitra --> lacking a mythology of conflict (=/= Singh's analysis)
forming a milieu of interiority --> double articulation that makes the State apparatus into a stratum

State's operates by:
•seizes (immediate, magical capture)
•binds (preventing all combat --> presupposing a juridical integration of war)

“chess (pieces are coded) = a game of State”
chess: an institutionalized, regulated, coded war, pure strategy =/= Go: pure semiology
(what is game's form of interiority)

nonsubjectified machine assemblage

...returning from the outside with that inconceivable thing, an army

magical-despotic State (@Eszter)


Genghis Khan didn't understand the phenomenon of the city --> war machine: a pure form of exteriority

magic violence
military institution

Deleuze and Guattari: State has no war machine of its own; it can only appropriate one in the form of a military institution

machine: ontology of production

State thinkers:
•Goethe
•Hegel
•Euclid (finding a foundation for the enterprise) --> logos: the law over the nomos (from Proto-Indo-European nem-: distribute)-->{Euclidian space: a sufficient number of dimensions, by which one reintroduces parallelism between two vectors, treating multiplicity as though it were immersed in this homogeneous and striated space of reproduction}
•Archimedes (an operative projective descriptive geometry)
•Durkheim --> to give the republic a secular model of thought
•
•

political differentiation ==> State ~= distinct organs of power (=/= chief رئیس قبیله) ==!?==> economic development

(Laur[...]

[...]vice to recreate and study and understand being, is devided or made-up? the presebce of the notion of movement in it and essence. what is movement and apparition?
[we can have a workshop that teaches houdini just through movement. or a non-movement approuch to 3D making.]


nonrepresentational maya
epistemology and cognitive approuch to space and matter

ontology of matter in maya

worlding in autodesk industry (look at the trailers, tutorials, and so on.)
historical view?


i see maya and other 3D apps as visualization technologies enlisted as metaphors by Haraway and as languages that actively intertwine in the production of literary value


friction, forms of masks (shaders?), and play, and the dance of Dis-tanz
the separations and partings
nearness


transforming and transformative agencies

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

“matter refers to the materiality/materialization of phenomena” (Barad)
-let's look at my 3D-related practices again and investigate their ontological implications and rework how matter is defined, [matter, force, interdependency, appearance,,, phenomena, meaning,] Delanda-[intensification, articulation, flow-of,]


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

#Femke workshop: on rigging and skinning, writing stories cultivating creation and creatures before their enrollment in George Lucas film, speculating on the inorganic skeletal animacies

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

(Brey > Ihde:) [technology:] a special class of artifacts (for example telescopes, probes, hearing aids, etc) that are capable of engaging in ‘symbiotic’ relationships with the human body. [...] means through which the environment is experienced and acted on.


essential ambiguity of technology / of material human-technology relations

hermeneutic fluency (and the special enigma) of the connection between text and world

*bird's-eye=?/!~navigational~/?=.'<-phenomenological
[...in front of the open (blank) page (of the book) (we teach children to take the) position of the industrialist, the urban planner, or the Cartesian philosopher --> outside the page is outside and inside the page is inside ]@Eunkyung's scriptural enterprise --> Derridean proper space of writing
-the panopticon as observing instrument for human sciences is embeded in the page of the book we open. part of this tradition =/= first person shooter

(Ihde on) game-bodies: (on multistability -->) ‘modes of navigation’ [macro phenomenological conditions, modeling observational possibilities, ]:
[1]- third person (pretended) overhead view looking down a map-like world and plotting your course, one says “I go to X.” he calls it “the reading position” (usually a western navigator) --> using instrumental mediations to translate this ([...]

[...]ich the neighboring points only matter to eachother. mesh is the result of the study of topology in mathematical notions of space and structure, with demands of an industry interested in the representation of surface. mesh is interested by creatures that have a skin, and have stakes in tactility?)
Rig is that constructed logic or grammar that allows mesh deformation in one way and not another. made of enfolded layers of code and constraint


story of the bone
the flow of matter and energy, flow of intensification between sortal processes, organisms, and minerals.


this is about how matter is defined, in everyday CG work


how certain kinetic skeletal rigs naturalize the relationships between volume and surface and skeleton --> which is always symbolic

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

notes by other participants of the workshop:
http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/possiblebodies.sina.workshop

some post-workshop notes:

questions of:
•causality: how Rig-thinking can help to have a better understanding of causal relationships between the ‘moved’ and ‘mover’?
•control: how can we have a more interesting ontology of constraints that allows more interesting articulations of control---(that one-way flow of influence between the soft and the rigid)?
•process and becoming: how the technological nature of the Rig and its relations with the image of the organism in CG can be Rigged for a different articulation of the lived-body? and to which extend the Rig can be helpfull to think about the becoming of the beings-of-the-CG (that means: hacker + 3D model)?
•identity: How within an industry such as Pixar, deeply invested in what is a feeling and affectious living characher, a whole new set of technologies and ontologies must be made and destroyed, learned and unlearned, for a different question of identity: what is a living thing? how Rig matter in a won a world that is made of Rigs that make Rigs for beings to articulate themselves in, through, and with them? inventing and being invented by them
•model: animation = life; asking what brings us to life, makes us alive? (what we animate and what animates us)
•reading and space of the text: the practice we did with pop-up-book making, a joint page of a book when opened wide, the meaning and influence of the reading animates itself like a Rig, coming into movement, flow and inflow as the result of the muscular skeletal gesture of a “reader” who has two hands: mechanical animacies of the act of reading set in time and space by the “writer”
•which rigs rig rigs? (with Strathernian rhetorics) ---- Rig-making practices are ontological technological choreographies that (in the case of CG) make mesh matter*-----they are involved in ‘making mesh flesh’


[14.05.2017]

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

rig: a higher[...]

[...]fferent spatial synthesis in terms of a different linguistic ontology?
[b + a = ba] =/= [آ + ب ~=> با] {a different effect}
•interface question
•phenomenological question
•in Farsi the joint attachments undergo transfiguration, different viscous relational property, adhesion refigured

what would be an interesting interface question posed to each of the 3D softwares?

one language ---{Bauhaus? De Stijl? nasta'ligh نستعلیق?}--to--> another language

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

painfully queer


*questions for my ajayeb's Rigs and pop-up book:
my rigs and pop-up book are descriptive concepts, that means: they obtain their meaning by reference to a particular physical apparatus ==>? a constructed cut between the object and the agencies of observation
•pop-up book: an instrument with fixed parts ==> concept of “position”
•Rigs on the other hand tries not to exclude other concepts such as “momentum” from having meaning
--> ajayeb's variables require an instrument with moveable parts for their definition (?)
*exclusions (= physical & conceptual constraints) are co-constitutive*
*objectivity (= possibility of unambiguous communication, boundry articulations) --> reference must be made to bodies in order for concepts to have meaning (?)*
•my Rigs and books are about how discursive practices are related to material phenomena

(*)reading: “text” is the interface between the matrialization of “reality” and subjectivation of “reader” --> inseparability of language and reality in ajayeb
(“We are suspended in language in such a way that we cannot say what is up and what is down, The word ‘reality’ is also a word, a word which we must learn to use correctly.” Petersen < Barad)

ajayeb's iterative processes of materialization

عجایب نامه =/= imagined and idealized human-independent reality
ajayeb's stories of historically nunhuman people

in ajayeb's descriptive intra-actions with reality, humans and language are part of the configuaration or ongoing reconfiguring of the world, that is phenomena


we cannot so easily answer where the apparatus “ends”

•(but again, how can I answer) which ontological practices are embodied (or embeded) in (the productive and constraining dimension of regulatory) apparatuses of my ajayeb? (rigs, hypertext, pop-up, etc.)
•(resisting the anti-metaphysics legacy) how can I keep insisting on accountability for the particular exclusions that are enacted in (my) ajayeb and taking up the responsibility to perpetually contest and rework the boundries (of my objectivities)?


(*)effect: marks left on the agencies of observation


enacted =/= having
(agency is the matter of enactment not something that one ‘has’)

(*)d[...]

[...]way that we cannot say what is up and what is down, The word ‘reality’ is also a word, a word which we must learn to use correctly.” Petersen < Barad)

ajayeb's iterative processes of materialization

عجایب نامه =/= imagined and idealized human-independent reality
ajayeb's stories of historically nunhuman people

in ajayeb's descriptive intra-actions with reality, humans and language are part of the configuaration or ongoing reconfiguring of the world, that is phenomena


we cannot so easily answer where the apparatus “ends”

•(but again, how can I answer) which ontological practices are embodied (or embeded) in (the productive and constraining dimension of regulatory) apparatuses of my ajayeb? (rigs, hypertext, pop-up, etc.)
•(resisting the anti-metaphysics legacy) how can I keep insisting on accountability for the particular exclusions that are enacted in (my) ajayeb and taking up the responsibility to perpetually contest and rework the boundries (of my objectivities)?


(*)effect: marks left on the agencies of observation


enacted =/= having
(agency is the matter of enactment not something that one ‘has’)

(*)disarticulation: the question of who/what gets to be imagined (and in which way)


(Barad's sentences are long in a way for the reader to feel all those particular words in one breath)


(in medical practices) the machine becomes the interface between the objectification of the spacific body under experience (for example the fetus) and subjectivation of the technician, physicianm engineer, and scientist.

...some ontologies:
•classical realist: posit some fixed notion of being that is prior to signification
•Kantian transcendentalism: being completely inaccessible to language
•linguistic monism: being completely of language
•Baradian agential realism: phenomena are constitutive of reality


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

kinetic, energies expressed in variables


integrated definitions:
•movements of an isolated body
•in detachment with the rest of the world
•linear function of time
•all energy is kinetic
•value of “potential energy” is zero


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

metallurgy concerns matter in movement

matter-flow

what about the 3D hacker? what is in flow?

form is ever-emergent =/= pre-determined -->? default


[Alberti on northwest Argentina first millennium ceramic vessels:] potters’ bodies were shaped irrevocably by their skilled practice
objects they made were never complete ==> they were aligned with others’ concerns ==> they were drawn into potters’ social identities --> into the category of potter
[...]

[...]ne another's desires and the ‘significances’ we ascribe to such satisfying predictability


textile screens

textile’s discursive usefulness: its ability to support and exploit the image of our “alternative” identities

(Lacan's) objet petit a : prediscursive, meaningless thing’


textiles (and the clothing shaped from them) are not “convenient things” that help curtail or discipline our desires (by properly veiling them), rather, they are the very object cause of our desire

capturing and suspending our desires in fabricated flights of fancy =/= a sieve (alak) to pass through onto places unknown/unknowable



embodied politics of impropriety

rethinking how ‘the body’ is typically interpolated, along temporal lines

the medium of the textile (--> fashion's main medium --> thread of sexual difference running through this fabric)

...styles that are not pre- or over-determined by a dualistic form of sexual difference

sartorial scheme

abstracting the concept of ‘the body’

attire

(more) body's social ranges of movement
(more) flexible corporeal aesthetics and articulations


{Edie's odd,protracted sleeves of her dress in Warhol's ICA exhibition 1965} the surreal transformation of a woman's arm into a pachyderm's long, wily, and authority-defying appendage...


the conventional and deeply gendered notion that fashion is “[ephemeral], frivolous, relegated to the domain of the feminine and the body, as opposed to art, which [is] deemed [eternal,] masculine and placed in the sphere of the mind and psyche” (Archer > Geczy and Karaminas)

and--> intertwining of fashion and art has long been regarded as absolutely key to the production of the modern social fabric--intended (like the warp and weft of a textile) to remain discreet, always perpendicular

modern aesthetic theory --> contradictory structure of difference of “fashion =/= art” : “fashion design = art's constitutive other” (= that mode of creative production that is beholden to the market and to the manufactured whims of the embodied, consumer passions =/={ art's singularity, extraordinariness, [Nietzschean ethics of] standing alone ==> timeless or universal knowledge =/= ‘everyday culture'})

radical beauty of the quotidian

mundane material culture is repeatedly *elevated* and “translated” into art --> “losing its place within lived reality ==> to become critically meaningful” =/= (Gernreich's) art and fashion critically transformed so that they run parallel and start to resonate with one another

(for Benjamin) translation [~= criticism]: allowing (translatior's) language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue [=/= preserves the state in which (translatior's own) l[...]

[...]e to mark) how and where the negative knowledge about the reliability of linguistic utterance is made available (#feedback)]
(de Man:) the figural dimension of a text “gives the language considerable freedom from referential restraint, but it also makes it epistemologically highly suspect and volatile, since its use can no longer be said to be determined by considerations of truth and falsehood, good and evil, beauty and ugliness, or pleasure and pain”

(?how in our feedbacking instead of linguistic we can be able to) manipulating the figure of the pattern --> (in apass we are constantly busy with) a way to critically and actively resist ideology (of block curator, Vladimir's settlement's ‘order of thing,’ the institution, etc.) or to critically gesture toward and theorize the possibility of “another way”

the *genital panic* (forever lodged within the heart of discourses on sexual or gendered difference...)

(to examine) the varied ways that pattern is used to put one in one's place
Nicki Green, Yayoi Kusama, Adriana Varejao, Yinka Shonibare, Craig Calderwood



spaces that lie between the patterned (behaviors...)

[@Leo, heard so many times:] clear (but melancholic) call for the rearticulation of our desires outside capitalist logics of (re)production

using the trope of pattern to deconstruct the politics of desire

“conflict” is something that is desired(?)
queer desires might make something different of conflict(?)

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

phantom limb Grosz

(Nietzsche: entire evolution of) spirit = a question of the body (developement of a higher body) --> *the organic rising to yet higher levels*

body image:
(psychoanalytic conception of subjectivity -->) ‘mind’ & ‘body’ & ‘body image’
--> physical systems to the subject's access to bodily mobility
•cortical homunculus --> Freud
•imaginary anatomy --> Lacan
}--> genesis and functioning of the ego
[are my image assemblages about changing the body image?]

==> biology and neurophysiology are dependent on *physical processes* of transcription and signification

Grosz on the status of the body as a problematic and uncontainable term in biology and psychology

•(Egyptian) “ka" = soul: a copy of the human body (that is more ethereal and less dense than the physical body)
•Cartesian notion of soul (or mind): a ghostlike icon of the subject
•Aristotle's pneuma: finer or more subtle body than the coarsely material/materialistic body
•Christian notion of soul: the possibility of resurrection ==> privileged and formative link between *morphology of the soul* & *morphology of the body*


(Ambroise Pare:) mortification: ***continuity and consentime[...]