[...]some degree of advancement in one's abilities and skills of writingreading, that means the reader already enjoys an ongoing well-articulated interest before coming to a particular sitting with a piece of writing, and this means the rhetorical reader's encounter with the text is highly situated and is not a blind date. in this case reading is a radical meaning-making practice full of adventures and preparations, drawings and graphs, diffractions and detours, connections and risks of (mis)understanding in certain ways. this ‘reading’ looks very much ‘writing’ alike.
-the reading becomes *rereading past writing*, re(past)ed(writ)ing, a reading that has writen itself in palimpsestic lines. in a Derridean sense: (one is equiped with the question) “what is writing itself (in this text)”?
-two speculative spheres meet in rhetorical reading: one of the text and one of the reader, but they have to ‘stick’ to one another, the stickiness of your reading matters in consequential ways. this is against the idea that we read and each understand personally whatever.
•my second issue with ‘close reading’: there is no correlation between the speed of reading and comprehension/apprehension

*reading practices*
ontology usually decides what reading is --> *book-binding is reading. editorial compositional reformating and remodeling of the space of the text is reading.

(Stewartian) reading that happens in the writing: you can't do any kind of exegesis of the reading تفسير, rather: *you have to become related to the reading in what you are writing*


in research:
•skills of reading and writing
•(more abstract) skills of conceptualizing and analysing

@apass: begin with the generation of research question ==> importance of language
(you flag the importance of language whenever research is marked by question. “?” is a linguistic construct)

•the skill/craft is to select a research question that works better for certain descriptive purposes (than does previous tools)
•(realism:) research question <==outcome== different concerns and emphases

rigor of conceptualization : quality of an access to part of a world “out there”

research method:
•“mapping into knowledge” : co-fabrication between the researcher and the diverse others engaged in the process --> (problem of) ‘positionality ==> data’ (the idea that the researcher produces knowledge or “facts”)
◦positionality ==?==> politically correct jargon in artistic research environment [has positionality backfired into a language of trying to change a public opinion in your favour?]

‘fantasy of the unproblematic mode’

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

regarding biographical work according to Pierre, ok i am working even on the border of solipsism
what i am doing is not autopoiesis (self-making, m[...]

[...]---a sy.


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

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

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

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



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

-“marvels of affinity” is the key to reality, revealing how things are, what is known, and how to behave.

cosmogony (keyhan-zayi کیهان زایی‌)--how the universe became a moral system

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

[modes of existence]

science studies --> science
what was science before science studies? it was engaged in a sort of stupefaction that prevented meaningful study.

we do not take the fight against X [...]

[...] consists of three elements: marvels, species diversity, and institutions. Marvels refer to that presence of the unexpected that one always encounters sooner or later in nature, particularly when the terrain reflects something about the mind that implies a common structure. His second element, species diversity, coincides with one of the major moral issues of our time--the extinction of species and reduction of biodiversity.

-“marvels of affinity” is the key to reality, revealing how things are, what is known, and how to behave.

cosmogony (keyhan-zayi کیهان زایی‌)--how the universe became a moral system

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

[modes of existence]

science studies --> science
what was science before science studies? it was engaged in a sort of stupefaction that prevented meaningful study.

we do not take the fight against X (religion, fetish, etc.) for the truth about X.



/>
[Avital]

i am adding “mama's boy” (bache-nane بچه ننه) to my short bio (nothing is added by “me,” everything is told to me.)


thanks to all the people who have given me their ‘sides’ (didn't necessorily confronted me)


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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

[...]

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

[Avital]

i am adding “mama's boy” (bache-nane بچه ننه) to my short bio (nothing is added by “me,” everything is told to me.)


thanks to all the people who have given me their ‘sides’ (didn't necessorily confronted me)


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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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


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


increasing technicization of critical language


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

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

[Stengers]

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

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

[...]

[...]all its related adjectives: neutrality, perspective, universality, disembodiment (for certain race and sex), etc.
-metaphors create perspectives [the view that looks at blind men looking at the elephant]
-situatedness is different than ‘positionality’: a way of systematic error correction
-(resolving) specificity of vision --> scientific objectivity (is achievable)
-Haraway expresses her informed dissatisfaction with (the metaphysical substrate that supports) ‘social constrctivism’ and ‘traditional realism’ --> representationalist belief in the power of the words to mirror preexisting phenomena. they both believe that scientific knowledge (in its representational formats: theoretical concepts, graphs, particle tracks, photographic images, etc.) mediates our access to the material world, whether it represents “nature” or “objects” of science both groups are subscribed to representationalism.
focus on the nature and production of scientific knowledge --(shift to science studies)--> dynamics of the actual practice of science }--> on ongoing pattern of situated activity

-(disembodied scietific) objectivity: that only certain people are allowed to have no body (Gender, race, etc.) and that high science in practice is not acting on textbook objectivity at all.

absent referents, deferred signifieds, split subjects, and the endless play of signifier

Haraway is feeling nervous with two views on objectivity:
(1)the ‘social constructionist’ view on this: getting to know the world ‘effectively’ by practicing the sciences --> knowledge is knowledge-game (on an agonistic power field) ==> science is rhetoric : artifacts and facts are parts of the powerful art of rhetoric ~=  practice is persuasion. {this view will use the nasty tools of semiology and deconstruction to insist on the rhetorical nature of truth.} --> Haraway calls this ‘The imagery of force fields’ (also an imagery of high-tech military fields and of automated academic battlefields) {will to power} (for Luiza)
epistemological electroshock therapy
(feminists protecting their) sense of collective historical subjectivity and agency and our “embodied” accounts of the truth --> these are just excuse not to learn
(2)Humanistic Marxism (structuring theory about the domination of nature in the self-construction of man) ([young Marx, influenced by Feuerbach =/= Hegelian idealism, saying that:] man's essential nature is that of a free producer, freely reproducing their own conditions of life [--however--> under capitalism individuals are alienated from their productive activity, etc.])

--> “chance for life”

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

money in capitalism ~= reductionism in science

...when we are talking about genes, social classes, elementary particles,[...]

[...]’ supposition of an art teacher who knows, who have something more than they have in themselves, that initiates the teaching and learning process rather than the art knowledge actually possessed by the teacher” (Hetrick). (is it the architectural gesture--the center--that produces the recognition of the teacher situated as “teacher”?) *“the spell of transference.” / at some point some gesture is taken by the student as a sign of hidden knowledge and intention ==> transference establishing itself; (how education [and love?] without transference looks like? --> Julia Scher, ‘post-Lacanian’ means that you don't ‘transfer’ to the art-work nor artist?) #harem
parent --> teacher }==> what the student may desire to become (be recognized as)

according to Lacan there is no Pir (~ [often iconoclast] leader, guide, mentor, expert, knowing-hero, enlightener, rescuer knowing more, knowledgeable pedagogue/leader “helping students find themselves,” [--> my failed transference with Saeed])

-->? Discourse of the University* : (systematic) “knowledge” replaces the nonsensical master signifier in the dominant commanding position; in this case the sujet supposé savoir dependent upon the related knowledge of the Other, or the source of “the field” (journals, textbooks, etc.) ==> (arbiter of) truth --> *to transmit knowledge that is already given*
[account of knowledge as a symbolic and social network, master signifier, subject positions,]

in placing the ‘text’ in the position of a knowing expert who has the answers Lili (unconsciously) idealizes her texts, and of course when her ‘texts’ fail to satisfy that desire she demands ‘knowing’ from them in terms of cynicism: the feeling or state of being annoyed and irritated by them. this is a structural space of ‘demand’ in her. for me what is at stake is the complex nature of encounter between Lili and text which takes place in an artificial space--a symbolic space--that is at the same time the place of real investments of her desires.

@Lili; is she (like the rest of us humans) looking for an active, predatory art?--> if non-communicative non-predatory non-kinetic [a common issue with the students of choreography and dance in general] art exists on this planet, then we kave to learn “a whole new set of techniques.” [La Guin])
--the meter of ‘time,’ that essential element, matrix and measure of all kown human-animal art. what if there are other metric systems? art not as an action, but a reaction? not a communication, but a reception? {---> go to my master studies Diploma on passivity in performance art}

registers of ‘complaining’ in Lili's discourse. she is a bit like Faust groaning, habe nun akhhhhh Philosophie and so on. [Ach of Sprache] (that they have done all the work, they know everything, yet know not enough of what really counts [that is the incalculable] and cannot be satisfied by mere knowledge available to them. nor can[...]

[...]an 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 first round we can ask: what do you need (un)know to write/think that story? or, what do you need to forget/unlearn in order to be able to think/imagine that world?

another round of the workshop could be: #imagine and describe an alien world where there is no ‘mediation’ or activities that are not ‘mediated’

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

because of working on ajayeb, i am becoming a “definitionist,” or “definitionologist” (not in the classical sense of concept theory)
a definition i give is a local abstraction, even when it is making boundaries for a dispersed or global concept, it is still a situated knowledge. that means it might be categorical but not applicable outside this particulare niche of space and time, whether it is in a bar in a conversation with Eszter or when accessed in my hypertext

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

committed to the imperative of the Rig, things not to do in the pop-up book:
•use as ironic: incongruity in expectations of what is ment and what it will mean in advance
•use to symbolize: as a way of not dealing with sujet supposé savoir
•use of anamorphic gaze: a non-diffractive optical system
--> to be careful (or keep in check) with sequential palindromic notion of pop-up book, to deal with the parsable seesaw motif inherit in the pop-up book Blickmaschin
•use hylomorphic: assumes form is inscribed onto passive matter (by an agent with a design in mind)
•

(relevance should be worked) non-ironic non-symbolic non-anamorphic non-palindromic non-hylomorphic (?)

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

towards writing the end of apass dossier
•practices: workshops, (bow and arrow,) ajayeb.net, rigs --> pop-up book, notes, routines, excess,
•trajectory: bibliography, wonder, ongoingness, ontology,
•productions: study as artwork, reading as artwork, bottom-top approach to writing,
•findings: every research practice: must include “body image”, must include “the image of creativity” especially if you are iranian, must employ ontological attention to differential productions, must rework decompose redefine its root-metaphors, must give extensive equipment list, must trace its social connections in a wider ecology of practices, must include a critique of technology,
•moments of composition: a scene animated by some quality, or... taking place as accidents (or not)

key literature, magic wands:
1st stage:
•Richard Sennett: Flesh and Stonne --> learning about body image
•Manuel Delanda: A 1000 Years of Nonlinear Histor[...]

[...] more) competent and confident in (some) scientific literacy and in (some of) the skills of the arts and literature --> ?

after apass: apass was a safe-enough space for my inventive processes, to make interesting mistakes, but do i need a real scholarly undertaking with ajayeb?
i had a lousy education, don't know still how to write well and coherently and sustain a project. i don't have the skills to pull off my research as a phd, as a scholar. i need someone to work with me line-by-line. i need to go people who have serious educations in my subject, and ask them questions, and read.
and i am missing that kind of connectivity that your writing being read performs. do i need an atmosphere in which my kind of writerly activities are honored and foregrounded, and expected?

can my ajayeb beome a real scholarly project with seriously labor-intensive student work?


hostility =/= indigestibility {they cannot recognize it, it is something else}--> it is not personal, but a historical state of a discourse, and the nature of the kinds of possibilities that being opened up or closed


(in apass) all of us fail each other in different ways all the time*

we can barely read each other's works/books. but we do, and we struggle with each other's works/books


(in apass i am catching my self giving “advice” to others---risk of the advice:) violation of their integrity

*taxonomy: (constantly morphing) tools, they work and get worked, *they are part of situated conversations* (~ “theory conversations” Katie King < Haraway)
(=/= some kind of enemy that you never do)


***almost everybody is organically part of more than one conversation at a time*** (Haraway)
(this is so important to recognize specially in collaborative research environments such as apass)


(in political movement:) working to a kind of clarity of ideological position ==> to do certain kinds of things (that are harder to do if you don't have them [those ideological positions] in the world) --> they are used as *tools* to produce what got called *political correctness* --> always producing those who count and those who don't count*
=/=? feminist movement = ***a kind of vulnerability to not being who you thought you were*** : openness to risk, less of a defensiveness, less of an attack mentality, not shaping each other up into vanguards پيشقراول --> (towards thinking) differential/oppositional consciousness (=/= father, single kind of creators)


“you can know if you are wrong in rather interesting, situated ways”
@Leo
@Maarten


[*]"was”: (so important for iranians [#past]) a geographical place, a place:
•of pain
•of fantasy
•of hope
•of possibility
•of defeat
•of breaking and building
(--[...]

[...]nto differential liveliness (with all sorts of inequalities:) *who gets parsed how* [#archive, #articulation, #storytelling] (and thinking about what it means to take up these relationships in cultures saturated with science and technology)


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


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


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

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

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

[...]itality --> immanent intensity or force ~ affect

#my coin: two-sidedness of things, virtual meeting actual, seeping edge of potentiality

common sensate affect --> shock --> “continuous trembling that haunts the stable gaze” --> images and sensibilities that constantly exceed (reason, order, and common sense) #telegram

Affect, is about something is happening, something capable of impact
•sometging half noted out of the corner of the eye
•something in the commonsense world
•
(that which escapes/exceeds enclosure) --> it can be put into words[?] --> to become a figure of vitality and even freedom[?]*** @Iranians

[i welcome the reprieve (rokhsat, رخصت, a temporary relief) from] symbolic gridlock

“affect gathers its force to make image touch matter” --> image's power is the power of synaesthesia =/= collection of named “feelings” (invented in discourses of morals, ideals, and known subjectivities)

(let's study how [in Iran] raw materials are formed and exceeded -- sudden and lingering intensity of things) (which darvaze/دروازه/gate we can't and which سوراخ سوزن / surakh-e suzan / hole of needle we pass through)
[i am having always multiple books open, at least two, is that how connection occur for me? #simultaneity]


(Stewart) “I remember childhood as a collection of arresting images”
that hinge on sensory details and open onto luminous scenes of affect [--> Feherlofia/Fehérlófia 1981, Son of the White Horse film. (we must resist calling this film “psychedelic”)

“[...]family as a viscerality through screen images of”

...sudden, repetitive eruption of images of alcoholism, accidents, violence, cancers

*technologies of family, church, law, and nation* (lay confident claim to affect as a capturable content of known and expected “feelings,” but affect itself--that which surges into view along the jumpy border of the actual and the virtual--is their raw material and their only renewable resource. Stewart)

(a sidestep? what) brings an uncanny, alien presence into the field of vision

*an object insists on being seen* (through the tricks of trauma, through the seductions of compulsive beauty,, , ) ~~--> aesthetic event of the senses [@Hoda]

spectacular graphics of disaster

watching: inhabiting the power of the tuned-in spectator; becoming an active participant in [TV's] logic of image (production and) recognition

--✕--> catharsis of mean-spirited
--✕--> festering (cherkin چرکین) alienation
--*--> vitality of the game itself

the image on the screen <--(game)--> the walking simulacrum of social life

the loop of the citizen as consumer

***Mimesis in a State of Shock*** @Hoda
-the link between shock and a[...]

[...]s or her spontaneous feelings

•old world of patience [<== lack of knowledge, sabr konim bebinim chi mishe]
•new [industrial capital] world of opportunity --> proactive (even before action; causing something to happen; world, you set it out;)




my problem with celebrity is problem with the victorious cause, when an other has hardened into an iconic position, and has become inauthentic with oneself


IHOTcgKYWXg 21:25
hoghe bazi حقه بازی babel
eye = pit of babel چاه بابل, because Harut and Marut, two great magicians where thrown down in a pit under the tower of babel, and the eye have the two in them --> the capacity to bewitch you if you look into them too long


vafa وفا = mardi مردی
three things doesn't do vafa (loyal): horse, sword, women
asb, shamshir, zan (اسب، شمشیر، زن)

death:
جان jan --> father (aflak افلاک)
کالبد تیره kalbod tire corpse --> mother (like earth, every hand can make her fruit, and bi-vafa بی‌وفا, liabl)


put into words: have I been destroyed?


#workshop on Iranian elementary and post-elementary school books with adult artists


parde پرده ~= tasvir تصویر

damagh-sh دماغش
dar akhar -sh

حکمت مبتنی بر امور بین‌الذهانی
(hekmat mobtani bar omur-e) beyn-ol-azhajni = common sense


[title]
ajayeb:
کاتب وحی kateb-e vahy
کاتب وحش kateb-e vahsh

کتاب وحی
کتاب وحش


pragmatism --> مصلحت maslahat (chi bayad goft) ==> alternative truth
less concerned with “reality” or good and bad


#project: an experiential field inquiry on how people think about randomness in Tehran.
what was the last little thing or a historical epoch-shaping event that they concider as random?

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

(in apass we use constantly) ghias قیاس, and not esteghra استقرا (inductive reasoning)
•استقرا inductive reasoning: X ~=> Y (can be strong or weak) --> epistemic uncertainty (generalizing or extrapolating from specific cases to general rules) [this is related to ‘hypothesis formation' = use of specific observations to make generalizations --(?being replaced by)--> discovery-based sciences, in which ‘hypothesis formation' = data-mining, analysis of (large volumes of) experimental data with the goal of finding new patterns or correlations, and further: machine learning and automated theorem proving }--replacing--> (ajayeb's kind of) “natural history” emerged in 16th century (<== describing and classifying plants, animals, minerals) which is becoming more about popular audiences]
•deductive reasonin[...]

[...]n at all time to the ‘more’ and ‘multi’?” <-- and they provide an elusive non-definition of the term, impossible to pin down. because accourding to Manning when you pin down an idea/practice by its definition it becomes “fixed,” and fixity is categorically bad at all times <-- there is a desire to create a hygienic concept immune to corruption and hierarchy. Manning is alert to certain hierarchies ==> not acknowledging other hierarchies that precisely emerge out of that (--> preserve the ‘health’ of the idea of anarchive. [<-- maybe we need to let concepts rot? --> decompose])
Manning's elusiveness: (i have become hyper-conscious about qualities that endow infinite freedom of thought to human subjects...)
•elusive thought طفره (=/= volatile فرار) --> Spiderman's mode of freedom (-you can never catch him + infinite flexibility + ) (the effect of Spiderman on himself is that his moves are “amazing”)
•elusive thought ~->? mystical
•elusive thought =/= modest thought limited by curiosity
•
“hierarchy as the bad object” ==>
•to escape thinking about your own agency (for example what your name and reputation does? what are the precise responsible consequences of your particular position? your position involves not only the book you write or the argument you make, it involves also your name and reputation, the currency of your gender, your mode of charisma and authority, your affective techniques, your network enacted, and so on.)
•to escape naming the engineering talents and skills that are necessary to assemble (for example the senseLab website)
•to escape epistemological commitment (the question of: **how is my vocabulary crafted for whom?**)
•
it is not clear (but i can maybe guess about it, Manning's commitments are):
•(learning from Haraway:) what they have witnessed [hierarchies? ==commit==> anti-archive]
•(learning from Despret:) which bodies they care for [the autists? ==commit==> elusive creativity]
•(learning from Kenney:) where are their alliances پیوستگیها [with multiculturalism? ==commit==> democracy's logos of difference]
•(learning from Verran:) how their equipments are crafted [by processual metaphysics? ==commit==> infinity]
•(learning from Stewart:) how their rigor is built [by conceptual description? ==commit==> non-habituality]

(because of her immense intelligence she cannot be normal, but that doesn't mean she can prescribe normativity, and issue a command [in terms of the “de-” or “anti-“] or order a claim of reality [in terms of “an-” or “ab-“])

-Manning's “philosophy of event” (=/= multispecies ethnography, i prefer working with the animal idea, because there is no way you can make philosophy out of animal, they always relentlessly contingent and historically materially specific)

-Manning's notion of impersonality ==> ‘people are exchangble’ + ‘the[...]

[...]
the ‘project’ as a privileged vehicle of utopian experimentation at a time when a leftist project seemed to have vanished from the political imaginary (in Europe)

*changing identity of the audience across the 20th century* (Bishop & Crary on this topic)

*artistic models of democracy* --tenuous?--> actual forms of democracy

to refute the commodity-object in favour of an elusive experience

(Bishop:) today's participatory art is often at pains to emphasise process over a definitive image, concept or object. It tends to value what is invisible: a group dynamic, a social situation, a change of energy, a raised consciousness.

hit-and-miss field trips

the more one becomes involved, the harder it is to be objective – especially when a central component of a project concerns the formation of personal relationships

comfortable outsider status: impotent but secure in one's own critical superiority

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

only working with (that seems to be) your idea

(the problem of) being always so deliberate and cautious

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

Hillman

like the conver of his book (myth of analysis), an internal drama externalized materialized in the media, sci-fi fabulations of violence and war (such as Game of Thrones) are perhaps projects that also craft and give form to what is inside: dragon, torture, journey, landscape, getting caught, etc.

what are art's investments in psychology today?

all (including artists) must envision suffering and illness as something “wrong” =/= the fantasies, feelings, and behavior arising from the imaginal part of ourselves are *archetypal* in their sickness and thus *natural* --> (those odd irrationalities) ***are required for life***
--> then what is there to analyze? (<-- relevant question for apass)

“unconscious” and “psychodynamics” are *fantasies that could be replaced with better ones*

(Hillman's archetypal psychology) **asks the psyche to move with its sickness into life**

(to discover) a sense of soul in the sufferings of Psychopathology : ***something lives in me that is not of my own doing*** (--> demon, psychic force,,,) to take soul with one wherever one goes and to react to life in terms of this soul

symbolic meanings, insights, eros, body, craziness, the *lower aspects of the gods* --> the freedom to imagine and to feel psychic reality

“inner reality” --> called up by ego ==> individuality = to be peculiar, to be peculiarly what one is, with one's own odd patterns of archetypal responses

♥***we are never only persons; we are always also Mothers and Giants and Victims and Heroes and Sleeping Beauties*** (<-- what i am learning from psychoanalysis)

the mythic a[...]

[...]that anthropology is able to escape)
(i am talking about a semiotics that is not obsessed with the search for “structure”)
{ (fictional beings ~=>) semiotic ~=? ontology }--> science of “sense” (=/= science of “signs”)
-the world itself is articulated
{ the study of sense =?=> extrication from language }--> this bifurcation (enshe'ab), as old as philosophy itself, used the discovery of “reference” as an opportunity to expel the referent to a position outside language.


(Aristotle's narrative : “the imitation of an action” -->) Ricoeur's three types of *mimesis:
1. prefiguration ()
2. configuration (kingdom of the “as if”)
3. refiguration (integration of the imaginative or “fictive” or “as if” into actual) of the field of action;

‘reading’ is configuration (Ricoeurian)

•use of symbols : being able to grasp one thing as standing for something else;
•narrative: competency in the temporal structures governing the syntagmatic order of “followability”


...empirical means to locate the boundaries of capitalism

(to enclose something -->) ontology of the Accounts Book --> Attar's Tazkirat al-Awliya's story of the boy, bird, butcher, accounts book, and the theme of repayment, quittance.
to place everything it does not take into account outside the enclosure and everything it does take into account and that properly belongs to him inside
--> origins of property

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

growing interest in *ecology* ==> growing interest in *theology* (--> granted a new relevant)

(Latour's notion of) ecotheology [~= ajayeb]


(how not to consider your self secretly--even under the self-reflectivity--as) the chosen people

renegotiation of values and features:
(if) recently european stopped having been modern ==> the ‘others’ have also stopped having been ‘other’

*the planet will no longer be modernized* (Latour shouting)

geopolitics of difference

“europe" = the modernist great narrative --or--> produce an alternative great narrative of what european cultures (and natures) have been
}--✕--> *contrasting *traits* (that have been elaborated in the course of european history)


“here is my *treasure*, here is my *heart*, if you deprive us of one of these contrasts, we are no longer humans”

to be sensitive to different original origins (=/= eurocentrism)
[different origins that speak also truthfully]

(Olearius drama:) dramatic encounter between the (early) anthropologist's gaze and the various cultures (and natures) he have discovered
...painful history of the anthropologist's gaze


[*]value: what one is ready to die for / what makes life not worth living if one is deprived of it
[...]

[...]ng of science scientifically ==> a scientific ‘worldview’ is deployed
speaking of religion religiously ==> a vague assemblage of pious moral vacuities is taken as an ‘alternative worldview’
}--> they both accept an* unscientific science* and an *irreligious religion*


Latour (quickly dissolving nonsense that accrues as one opposes ‘knowledge’ and ‘belief’):
•science = reference chain (what allow access to the far away) [nothing is out of the reach of reference chain]
•religion = presence (what allow access to the near)

science ~/= concrete, worldly, matter-of-fact, present-at-hand, domain of knowledge (<-- political activism has to work with that kind of knowledge)


what use is it to save your soul, if you forfeit the world? --> sci-fi's real frontier & Noah's project


the transcendence and transubstantiation of science

when nature enters, religion has to leave. in two equally fatal exit strategies:
•to limit itself to the inner sanctum of the soul
•to flee into the supernatural --> that religion will try in vain to imitate scientific instruments (<-- The Magicians TV series) + misinterpreted science [==> taking Bible as if it were geology book (<-- look at the rising Hollywood films that scientifize the events of Bible) -- projects of connecting religion to the world]

‘exit religion’: it will have lost any pretence of influencing the course of events, its impact will only be decorative

(Descola:) ‘naturalism’ is only one of four ways in which connections between humans and nonhumans can be established


contrasts:
*reference chain*
*reproduction*

(Latour use of the term) *contrast* = mode of existence

immutable mobiles: to reach something far away through long arrays of instruments, you need to make sure that *necessities and constants are transported* with as little transformation as possible ==> to “reach” those entities

geometry, mathematical entities, inscriptions of all sorts ==> carry heavy-duty immutable mobiles

(Hoda's immutable mobiles are: [?])

[*]matter = highly elaborated, historically dated, and anthropologically situated hybrids***
(=/= ‘transportation of indisputable necessities through chains of cause and effect’ <-- a category mistake)

(for physicist:) “the ways we know the world = the ways in which the world behaves”
(less for chemist)
(not at all for engineer)


([in a way my work has been about investigating vectors and] *directions*) from knower to what is to be known

the beings of ajayeb face lots of causes and lots of effects


metaphysical consequences of evolutionary theory


***(Latour's positive veiw on) to be a Darwinian: you have t[...]

[...]ing.

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

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

(ajayeb's) (politics of) administering discrete objects ----(number sys)

(why should we engage in refiguration?)
(there are always a) multitude of agencies unfolding as the world is continuously reconfigured (=/= to explain away: when multiple objects are collapsed into one.)
-“Within this dynamic world it is impossible to imagine that one single story or one narrative style can capture all of the liveliness and exuberance; ***we need to deploy multiple stories about agency. Some meticulously empirical, some imaginative. Some on the quantum scale, some on the people scale. Different agential narratives enable different ways of responding and relating.” (Kenney)

postcolonial moments: “occasions for theorizing, for telling differences and samenesses in new ways” (Verran)


#to create ‘aerating’ (tahviyeh تهویه) in ajayeb, this includes:
/ crafting translations with ontological traction (enghebaz انقباض)
/ building empirical tools that make ajayeb's translation-work visible {#pop-up book}
/ translation --> *reconfigure sameness and difference*
/ staying with linguistic differences (in ajayeb) is a way of investigating the ontological commitments embedded in language.
◽ontological --> worlding --> how language participates in shaping our lived worlds in some ways and not others.*** “it is not common for speakers of a language to examine what type of material objects their language commits them to. [this also my question in iranian mystic mix,] rather the difference will be to notice as difficulty in translation.” (Verran)

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

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


(thinking with Kenney / Verran:)
workflow on ajayeb:
1- tracing social connections (for which subjects is this useful? which ecology of practices?)
2- making equipment list (materials and methods, an expanded and complicated version of equipment-list, providing accou[...]

[...]aratuses and ecologies we live inside.” (Kenney)*****

what is a narrative good for if it doesn't improve the quality of companionship (between human and nonhuman)? if it doesn't generate new sensitivities and enable different patterns of responsiveness?

stories of relationship ==> enlarge our thinking [=/= raising awareness]
these stories cannot known in advance --> note on fable #workshop, when you are excited about an assigned reading in a specific way only to find out that the participants connect or disconnect to something i don't notice


*wonder, a mode of attention to:
•the perpetual newness of the present (Irigaray)
•the other-worldliness of the past (Bynum)
•the aesthetics and politics of sf worlding that generate sensitivities for worlds-to-come (Stengers/Haraway)

latent possible worlds:
* could-have-beens
* almost-weres
* yet-to-comes


*ornamentation --> (inducing) wonder + (connection with) divine
-rich ornamentation --> honor something with our time, care, and attention
-‘encoding’ a writing requires time and attention, decryption ==> value and meaning
mystery of the undecipherable ==> occult knowledge {in a book that enrolls and transforms religious motifs, the experience of reading (or rather not reading) ...evokes the power of occult knowledge, the power of that which is hidden. (Kenney)}

occult knowledge <--> mystery <--> enchantment <--> ornamentation <--> illumination (=/= elucidate, tozihe shafaf توضیح شفاف) <--> wonder


***bibliographic aesthetics are arts of enchantment, vectors for the transmission of value and meaning***

why think and write with the aesthetic?

book as an object? writing as a practice? reading as world-making?***

(to feel) the effect of (our own) language

art: “ontological theater” (=/=? ‘linguistic turn’ {--> Marialena's remark on The Pillow Book, that the film don't care about what is being written. she is a child of the linguistic turn?})
(=/= “return to reality” : “the ontological turn”)
(=/= language as “a necessary evil,” aesthetics characterized as the main instrument of ideological mystification)
~ learn to trust objects figured in unfamiliar ways* (, my bow and arrow?)
[both Haraway (“material-semiotic”) and Barad (“material-discursive”) are working against this kind of split between language and reality, both in the level of analysis (of one's object) and composition (of one's book)]


**where do our power come from if not from evidence?** (@Seba)
--> the *specter of deception* (it happened when i used aesthetics in my questions in my excursion at Vladimir's block, my peers thinking “what if we are beguiled?” --> the suspicious refrains of “trust no one”) =/= “attentive wondering care[...]

[...]sconnect to something i don't notice


*wonder, a mode of attention to:
•the perpetual newness of the present (Irigaray)
•the other-worldliness of the past (Bynum)
•the aesthetics and politics of sf worlding that generate sensitivities for worlds-to-come (Stengers/Haraway)

latent possible worlds:
* could-have-beens
* almost-weres
* yet-to-comes


*ornamentation --> (inducing) wonder + (connection with) divine
-rich ornamentation --> honor something with our time, care, and attention
-‘encoding’ a writing requires time and attention, decryption ==> value and meaning
mystery of the undecipherable ==> occult knowledge {in a book that enrolls and transforms religious motifs, the experience of reading (or rather not reading) ...evokes the power of occult knowledge, the power of that which is hidden. (Kenney)}

occult knowledge <--> mystery <--> enchantment <--> ornamentation <--> illumination (=/= elucidate, tozihe shafaf توضیح شفاف) <--> wonder


***bibliographic aesthetics are arts of enchantment, vectors for the transmission of value and meaning***

why think and write with the aesthetic?

book as an object? writing as a practice? reading as world-making?***

(to feel) the effect of (our own) language

art: “ontological theater” (=/=? ‘linguistic turn’ {--> Marialena's remark on The Pillow Book, that the film don't care about what is being written. she is a child of the linguistic turn?})
(=/= “return to reality” : “the ontological turn”)
(=/= language as “a necessary evil,” aesthetics characterized as the main instrument of ideological mystification)
~ learn to trust objects figured in unfamiliar ways* (, my bow and arrow?)
[both Haraway (“material-semiotic”) and Barad (“material-discursive”) are working against this kind of split between language and reality, both in the level of analysis (of one's object) and composition (of one's book)]


**where do our power come from if not from evidence?** (@Seba)
--> the *specter of deception* (it happened when i used aesthetics in my questions in my excursion at Vladimir's block, my peers thinking “what if we are beguiled?” --> the suspicious refrains of “trust no one”) =/= “attentive wondering care” (Bynum)

*** to tell enchanted stories --> <== we must struggle against the fear of being tricked ***
-this fear of being tricked ==> Descartes’ beast-machine hypothesis (against nonhuman agency) : the clockwork animal and gods; a site where animality and technicity were collapsed and both were rendered as deceptive.
-Descartes’ beast-machine anxieties are still with us. (being duped by the) trickster agencies of animal-like automata--animals, spirits, and technologies have dubious agencies.


[...]

[...]ce of reading (or rather not reading) ...evokes the power of occult knowledge, the power of that which is hidden. (Kenney)}

occult knowledge <--> mystery <--> enchantment <--> ornamentation <--> illumination (=/= elucidate, tozihe shafaf توضیح شفاف) <--> wonder


***bibliographic aesthetics are arts of enchantment, vectors for the transmission of value and meaning***

why think and write with the aesthetic?

book as an object? writing as a practice? reading as world-making?***

(to feel) the effect of (our own) language

art: “ontological theater” (=/=? ‘linguistic turn’ {--> Marialena's remark on The Pillow Book, that the film don't care about what is being written. she is a child of the linguistic turn?})
(=/= “return to reality” : “the ontological turn”)
(=/= language as “a necessary evil,” aesthetics characterized as the main instrument of ideological mystification)
~ learn to trust objects figured in unfamiliar ways* (, my bow and arrow?)
[both Haraway (“material-semiotic”) and Barad (“material-discursive”) are working against this kind of split between language and reality, both in the level of analysis (of one's object) and composition (of one's book)]


**where do our power come from if not from evidence?** (@Seba)
--> the *specter of deception* (it happened when i used aesthetics in my questions in my excursion at Vladimir's block, my peers thinking “what if we are beguiled?” --> the suspicious refrains of “trust no one”) =/= “attentive wondering care” (Bynum)

*** to tell enchanted stories --> <== we must struggle against the fear of being tricked ***
-this fear of being tricked ==> Descartes’ beast-machine hypothesis (against nonhuman agency) : the clockwork animal and gods; a site where animality and technicity were collapsed and both were rendered as deceptive.
-Descartes’ beast-maast-machine anxieties are still with us. (being duped by the) trickster agencies of animal-like automata--animals, spirits, and technologies have dubious agencies.


(my work on ajayeb hopefully,) is about cultivating wild facts, to be at risk with our craft, creating beautiful objects that give charismatic form to their matters of care


i don't know in advance, how stories and words will flow through us --> i have to learn pragmatic experimentation with magic, words and ideas: [#ppp]
•poetry --> to do with the art of language
•poiesis --> process of creation
•poetics --> questions of composition and form
}--(attention to)--> form + composition + influence

“i am rubied by your attention”
(ruby: yaghute sorkh یاقوت سرخ) ~-> to describe the effect of an encounter between two

...shifting verbs to nouns and nouns to verb }--> practical

*relational propertie[...]

[...]e other bodies

entangled assemblages of relatings knotted at many scales and times with other assemblages, organic and not

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

ajayeb is system imagination

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

[Naveeda Khan]

Perhaps the question could be posed as, how do we come to grips with the universal, the supra-historical, or even the cosmos within our global present, imagining a local that lays claims upon all three?

is there a Muslim environmental imaginary?

‘Islamic ecology and environmental ethics’ --> the need to center a vibrant materiality or the liveliness of things in the anthropology of Islam (that has been to date largely preoccupied with Muslim polities and subjectivities.)

It should come as no surprise that my own efforts at centering materiality comes through studying how these predominantly Muslim farmers interact with and come to acknowledge nonhuman forms of life (including the figure of Khidr خضر, dogs, river waters, silt, and lightning, to name a few). Finally, I remain concerned to explore how the singularities of these lives, both human and nonhuman, come to be hitched to the global. This research will culminate in a book tentatively titled Ensouling the Anthropocene: Riverine Life and Climate Change in Bangladesh, in which “ensouling” treats the problem of scaling up singularity to the global, intensifying efforts that began with “Of Children and Jinn.” [source: https://culanth.org/curated_collections/19-everyday-islam/discussions/20-interview-with-naveeda-khan-about-of-children-and-jinn]

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

(what i am reading in ajayeb)_with Naveeda: “Muslim cosmology and eschatology hold promoise of ecological thought, providing an unexpectedly materialist perspective on our creaturely interconnectedness.”

[ajayeb (and telegram) is full of] gestures of incorporating repugnant [offensive to the mind] others---that one sees reflections on divine creation qua [als] creaturliness


thoroughly disabused
aufklären آگاهیدن آگاییدن

expound تفسیر

incentive مشوق, فتنه انگيز

litany مناجات وعبادت تهليل دار

showmanship (نمايشگرى?)
effektvolle Darstellung, Schauspielproduktion

queasy به طور تهوع آوری لطیف مزاج

(a gedture of) ludic [playfull, spielerisch] transcendence of [the] present

obdurate سرسخت
-showing unfeeling resistance to tender feelings-
(picture of the world as) pristine nature طبیعت بکر being destroyed by humans (--> narcissistic?)
=/= view of theology/religion on ecology
=/= (stories of humans and dogs:) shared creatureliness and companionship entailing a turn to cofeasting on the flesh of the [...]

[...]al animal (a body-plan)

topological properties like connectivity (=/= metric space)

“[...]I surely reject the idea that morphogenesis needs any “mind” to operate. I also reject the neo-Kantian thesis of the linguisticality of experience. [...] Are we to assume that those ancient hunter gatherers lived in an amorphous world waiting for language to give it form?”

“rejecting the linguisticality of experience (according to which every culture lives in its own world) leads to a conception of a shared human experience in which the variation comes not from differences in signification (which is a linguistic notion), but of significance (which is a pragmatic one).”

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

*refraction* (vajje.com/search/کسر)

it is insane how the cold-blooded fact of the modern science has singled out individuals and species in a manner of objective study. the idea that one must individualize the subject of research is unacceptable. how we have allowed ourselves to separate the whale from the spontaneous whirlpools that surround it, from its larger group of species. the difference between environment and species is a constructed fabulated “fact” by frontiers of science since the 19th century. the book of ajayeb cultivates its objects with their stories, it fosters compounds and assemblages. not excluding the refractions, fantasying the illusion of so-called objective clarity that tends to categorize life into its own brand of differences (individual and environment, object and subject, live and dead, etc.), but including the ways agents of interpretation are playing part in a compound.
the story captures the rays in their refracted representations, the stories are interpretive objects, objects of engagement

[Eva Hayward]
***things do not have fully determinate boundaries or properties. Things happen ‘in’ and ‘by’ encounter--refraction is one critical mode of encounter***
-the object is always troubled by obscuration
-through refraction, the object is altered by *scale* and *encounter* --> the altered scale allows the object to reveal its specificity, its particularity; boundaries are rendered indeterminate and exist only to the extent that they are continually enacted.
-in ajayeb we can see these forms of refraction in descriptive acts

agential intra-acting: “phenomena do not merely mark the epistemological inseparability of ‘observer’ and ‘observed’; rather, ***phenomena are the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting ‘components’” that is, phenomena are ontologically primitive relations--relations without preexisting relata. (Barad)
*mutual constitution of entangled agencies*

never complete, never whole, but deep in composition--materially and semiotically--of conjoined forces that matter.

“dynamic (re)configurings of the world, specific agential pract[...]

[...]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?
(what constitutes a measurement for what?)

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

materiality itself is always already figured within a linguistic domain as its condition of possibility(?(!))
[ (?(!)) : a contingent question pregnant with wonder]
[my starting point in my lecture/performance is with the concern (warned by Nietzsche) that language is being granted too much po[...]

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

•in ajayeb.net the so-called url address or location bar, is itself a control panel, a graphical user interface widget; how did i come to use “?q=” : rhetorics of technologized inquiry in place before i even could think about how do I allow my objects constituted by “?”, “q” and “=” of the language and grammar of internet
•(when i uploaded my hypertext i faced immediately the big data:) google webmasters tools is my first readership, it communicates its reading with me; (did i have a desire to make the hypertext for a machine?) who/what is doing the reading (in the world of big data)? the interpretive work that is going on, in a writing and reading done by computers ==> ethical and social values
•url pased in facebook post, results into a link to فلزیاب، مطالب علمی و آموزشی / مدار فلزیاب و دستگاه فلزیاب تضمینی, a series of websites for selling treasure finders, finding metal under the ground, ganj, and so on...

the English (since second world war) --> (1) international lingua franca of high technology, (2) the language of computers
-in ajayeb.net the enforcement of standard spelling and even grammar is week or nonexistent
-the amount of linguistic replicators that circulate through my ajayeb hypertext are bound to a colloquial English, they are nevertheless “English”. but this English is being changed and adapted by my foreign use in different ways
-a flourishing of a neo-English and Farsi miniaturization of Eng


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

sometimes the answer to the question is to investigate the question itself
Despret asking with Rowell: how can we be sure that primates have a more complex social life? --> how did we build the comparison?*** --Latour--> if they are so intelligent, how did they get the ‘chance’ to become so ‘well equipped’?
(in this question can be raised an unexpected animal)
[(how) the makhlughat/مخلوقات/creatures/beings of ajayeb were well equipped (with agency, will, intention,)]


sheep, ‘the epitome of the silly animal’

(همگون دوستی hamgune-dusti, khod-no dusti خود نوع دوستی) altruism, in birds (and humans)

Zahavi calling his birds, ‘refugees,’ non-territorial individuals

quest for social ‘status’ and prestige in Babblers
(birds know [...]

[...]◦enthusiasm: essentializing identities or ideas
◦members (of Royal Society): naturalizing ranges of inclusion and exclusion
◦*witnessing* rescales the infrastructure. the “work of witnessing” asserts that rhetoic as an element of witnessing is not a thing, not even a performance, but already itself a complex set of infrastructural systems with animating practices and agencies
...readers might submit to the illusion of having effectively witnessed an experiment themselves
*virtual witnessing realized an “enactment” in words*


black-boxing is totally neccessary to use/study infrastructures, they produce the “artifactual richness” [= a kind of archaeological layering of artifacts acquired in bits and pieces over time--(Lucy Suchman)] of systems
*black-boxing makes elegant some elements of the system/s differentially*
each author does it:
•Shapin black-boxing his range of systems to its complexity and elegance
> •Haraway appropriating the idea of modest witness for her own feminist purpose
•

three technologies for fact-making (that Shapin and Schaffer name):
1. material
2. literary
3. social

Adrian Johns in The Nature of The Book: particular booksellers could indeed use their *stewardship* of such heterogeneous spaces to further political ideals and interests. behind the scenes and up the stairs, an interested London bookseller became a significant actor in cultural events.

nominal agency
actual person
principle architect


systems move in space, time, and process
some archaeological structures (that one uncover) are stable, some in motion, some evolving, some decaying --> *“there is no way of ever getting access to the past except through classification systems of one sort or another”* (at best) the past could be reordered to better reflect multiple constituencies now and then. (Bon. (Bowker + Leigh Star)


(my ajayeb research: “epistemic virtues” [or powers] of the 12th century encyclopedic wonder-books,) “epistemological decorum” --> (to capture) “truth-making practices in action” (Shapin)
==> (my commitment to ajayeb:) engendering reflection on the nature of and function of categorization itself

a wonderful bit of meta-language


The Exhausted Receiver


Margaret Cavendish description of a new world, called the Blazing World, her own brand of natural philosophy under the guise of a romance... science for ladies{
1- enthusiasm ==> new science
2- study of natural philosophy ==> cardinal virtues of ladies, modesty and religious reverence
3- leisure activity, appropriate pasttime
*she participated in discussions central to her life and times* (am i participating in discussions central to my life and times?!)
Cavendish self-consciously produced [...]

[...]me elements of the system/s differentially*
each author does it:
•Shapin black-boxing his range of systems to its complexity and elegance
•Haraway appropriating the idea of modest witness for her own feminist purpose
•

three technologies for fact-making (that Shapin and Schaffer name):
1. material
2. literary
3. social

Adrian Johns in The Nature of The Book: particular booksellers could indeed use their *stewardship* of such heterogeneous spaces to further political ideals and interests. behind the scenes and up the stairs, an interested London bookseller became a significant actor in cultural events.

nominal agency
actual person
principle architect


systems move in space, time, and process
some archaeological structures (that one uncover) are stable, some in motion, some evolving, some decaying --> *“there is no way of ever getting access to the past except through classification systems of one sort or another”* (at best) the past could be reordered to better reflect multiple constituencies now and then. (Bowker + Leigh Star)


(my ajayeb research: “epistemic virtues” [or powers] of the 12th century encyclopedic wonder-books,) “epistemological decorum” --> (to capture) “truth-making practices in action” (Shapin)
==> (my commitment to ajayeb:) engendering reflection on the nature of and function of categorization itself

a wonderful bit of meta-language


The Exhausted Receiver


Margaret Cavendish description of a new world, called the Blazing World, her own brand of natural philosophy under the guise of a romance... science for ladies{
1- enthusiasm ==> new science
2- study of natural philosophy ==> cardinal virtues of ladies, modesty and religious reverence
3- leisure activity, appropriate pasttime
*she participated in discussions central to her life and times* (am i participating in discussions central to my life and times?!)
Cavendish self-consciously produced herself as a fantastic and singular... (--> is that what i wish to produce?)
-Cavendish strangely shared with Quaker women an experimental life of proliferating genders, of dress, of personhood, og agency, of writing, of personae, but not of this *enabling collectivity*

hermaphroditical view of things: partly artificial, partly natural

status of clothing as a signifier of identity [<-- not always]
crossdressing (#my sticker period)


[modest witness] (--> Haraway's literal and figurative queering of categories)
the rhetoric of the modest witness --> the naked way of writing, undorned, factual, compelling: “naked writing” [crafted in the context of being virtually present at a demonstration, the ‘practice of credible witnessing’ (==> “truth”) in technoscience] was [...]

[...]◦layered textures of a scene



(paying attention to pressure points of ajayeb ==>)
in ajayeb, what is
•maintained as a prized possession
•left to rot
•hardened into little mythic kernal
•morphed into a cold dark edge
•hopeful
•
•
--> things take place as [*]precisions: the pressure points that open onto potentialities are taken up as apparitional things (surat صورت) and then sharpened and repeated in compositions that labor to describe but also flourish on their own terms


my efforts have not been to finally “know” ajayeb, Sven, or Sana, [i have been reluctant to collect them into a good enough story of what's going on with them,] rather to fashion some sort of address that is adequate (and fabulous) to their form
-does the intensity and texture of my routines (talks, writings, etc.) make ajayeb habitable and animate?
-in the last year in apass i have been training myself to become attuned to what a particular scene might offer

#my apass ajayeb project:
(learning) building an idiosyncratic map of connections between a series of singularities --> to create a contact zone for analysis ****
[~?-> ajayeb.net, pop-up book]
[that's why i have been against the popular idea of authorlessness in apass, i am invested in (our) singularities; identity is a zone of attunement]--> Stewart calls herself “she” to mark the difference between her writerly identity and the kind of subject that arises as a daydream of simple presence
-to touch details that establishes a direct contact

?in our group who
•gazes
•imagines
•senses
•takes on
•performs
•asserts (not a flat and finished truth)
•is in a hot persuit of something definitive @Lili
•a point of contract @Esta
•

watching and waiting for an event to unfold
the still life that gives a pause --> the story of many of us

______________


“every achieved poem inscribes a perceptual signature in the world” (Stewart > Doty)

poems have to be achieved (in the social-material world)
(achieved =/= archived)

[*]poem:
•etching *lines of action* and mood across the sensations
•compositions at work


my ajayeb's
•objects of analysis: “compositional elements of thrown together worlds”
•objects of critique: “associative account of the modification and reciprocity of bodies and actions, environs, senses, rhythms, tones, and proprioceptions"[: sense of the position of parts of the body, relative to other neighbouring parts of the body]
•objects of database: “are soicialy, poetically, materially compositional”


the social, the subject, matter and event are comprised of:
•affects
•[...]

[...]> •mixed-media compositions of matter and thought-feeling
•the world of ajayeb magnetizes materialities and forms of alertness for me to what's singular and prolific. i am circling through a heritage of (iranian) romanticism and pragmatism to arrive (with Stewart) at “the precision of a worldly composition's mattering forms”
◦*worlding: happens as matter poems composed of sensations, motion, bodies, and objects (--@Luisa)
•an attachment to the forms and forces of emergence and concrescence itself [...] in the actuality of this and that

learning from my mother by moving in the manner of her

we become *sentient* in making massages that courses in-between self and world

[*]pragmatist (thought): a moment like the front edge of an advancing wave crest always becoming more than itself

[*]writing: an experiment that can register years of living out the thing that is just then froming up the world as “..."
>

love folters and blows


Janina, teaching me, being in love with the surface of the world

@Elen, she shouts: drive! and see what happens to your senses.


Taussig's “I Swear I saw This” is the stuff of ajayeb. he wrote a book about a drawing he made in his notebook when he saw what might have been a woman leaning over what looked like a man lying down at the enterence to a freeway tunnel in Medellin in 2006 --> ajayeb is also about writing about what ‘might’ be or have been.

**a mediation on writing and drawing in a horrible world**

#my drawings in my notebook/papers in our apass meetings
-a hand that draws a scence also draws itself into its corporality, conjuring it in the manner of
-a line records as for what it leads the doodler to see
-“a autobiographical record of a discovery of an event” --> a trace and suspension of a wobbly emergence of alertness (to what my at my friend might have said) ---> these are lived abstractions


possible paradigms for the convergence of emergence:
•affinity --> Leo
•complexity --> Eszter
•(auto)poiesis --> Hoda
•perception as action --> Elen
•speculative realism --> Zoumana
•radical virtualization --> Aela
--> we are all somehow busy (in apass) with reorienting to the creativity of thought-action crossings


life is germinaly جرثومه‌ای aesthetic, and the aesthetic anywhere is already political* --> Kenney

[title]
ajayeb's stories of natural and dreamed up things
the immaterial matterings of supra-personal imaginal real of ajayeb forms


(different names for the same thing:)
•forms of emergent in the conduct of life (Nietzsche, Foucault attending to the intimate relations between knowledge and power)
•worlding, the mirror play of materiality a[...]

[...] matterings --> *the contact aesthetics* of natural and dreamed up things throwing themselves together (Stewart)


ajayeb is a literally unblievable image, a sociality, a muscle, a world thrown together in a sensory refrain witnessed by a present subject; collective dreamed up nature and historical presents ripe with rhythms and speeds, with streams of matter and thought; ajayeb is a capacious assemblage

ajayeb stories are:
•material-sensory arc of history
•series of absent/present (moments) sensed through forms and events


lostness or reslessness of drifters

fantasies of potential “home”

(a plce of) abjection of state neglect ==> production of future


(Stewart's) the middle-class mobile citizenship and the proper traveling subject


Janina's “i don't know” s
a material semiosis of choices


what are ajayeb promises?
wtinessings, encounters, timeouts, fantasy, distraction,


a 19th century elite tradition of secular pilgrimage to the sacred

pursuit of see-it-yourselfness

a spectacular form of amnesia *


(the joints of my pop-up book) spin around fantastic axes


Stewart: “the state of public transportation in the U.S. is an event in the worlding of bodies in motion”
-a landscape abuzz with connectivity


shape-shifter jumping between composition and concrete


my apass project:
(sharing with you) the pleasure of recognizing a described world (in ajayeb)***
(i can sense the ajayeb's) pleasure in describing the animacy of forms
-describing a world is the pleasure of sensing the incipiency of *form in matter* and fantasy and the effort to draw the lines of form's traces. still palpable even it only imagined (Stewart ***)

(ajayeb's) heady business of making sense out of what happens
-to venture out in the manner of
-ajayeb sings an autopoetic refrain scoring and unfolding
-gesturing into form, a magnet burdened with impressions

textures give way to qualities of form


*before the blizzard: the sea monster

______________


Xh1IgPomwW8 Stewart's experiments coming at the phenomena of worlding through a series of angles organized prismatically:
•precision
•atmosphere
•attunement
•refrain ترجیع‌بند (poetic fixed form)

--> the tune on which people and things venture out
--> a kind of mapping infrastructure
--> lines and distributed biography


[pop-up book]
#description: (world is like a) pop-up map of possibilities [=/= map hylomorphically onto meaning]:
•(condensed) points of precision
•fundam[...]

[...]hape-shifter jumping between composition and concrete


my apass project:
(sharing with you) the pleasure of recognizing a described world (in ajayeb)***
(i can sense the ajayeb's) pleasure in describing the animacy of forms
-describing a world is the pleasure of sensing the incipiency of *form in matter* and fantasy and the effort to draw the lines of form's traces. still palpable even it only imagined (Stewart ***)

(ajayeb's) heady business of making sense out of what happens
-to venture out in the manner of
-ajayeb sings an autopoetic refrain scoring and unfolding
-gesturing into form, a magnet burdened with impressions

textures give way to qualities of form


*before the blizzard: the sea monster

______________


Xh1IgPomwW8 Stewart's experiments coming at the phenomena of worlding through a series of angles organized prismatically:
> •precision
•atmosphere
•attunement
•refrain ترجیع‌بند (poetic fixed form)

--> the tune on which people and things venture out
--> a kind of mapping infrastructure
--> lines and distributed biography


[pop-up book]
#description: (world is like a) pop-up map of possibilities [=/= map hylomorphically onto meaning]:
•(condensed) points of precision
•fundamentally divergent nature of things that happen --prompting-->
•the mode of social poiesis
•a path into continuous variation of matter and form, word and world
•(pop-up book made of) mobile and immobile flickering
•a thing that can be physical if the eye is quick enough
•a crystalline image of the deforming of a form
•bending itself (myself?) in refraction (=/= intimate register of knowledge and power)
•a conceptual machinery of cutting edges
•a compositional jumping off pooff point; a ‘lifted out of’; a ‘being-moved in’
•...the ajayeb pop-up book two parallel spreading qualities and scenes across a cartography, registers differences in motion
•a compositional writing (=/= representational method) in the effort to keep up with the distributed agencies of *what is throwing together and what is falling apart* (~ ajayeb) [--> it is a practice of trying, in line with my lectures, to follow where things (might) go that habits of attunement become as associational logic***]
•particulars to become a hinge لولاى در (opening onto a world throwing together and falling apart)
•mixing of shiny elements: *flickering ontologies* the expansive mapping of elements in paly
•a cartography of compositional elements, formal compositions and unmarked ways of being loop around each other

(27.08.2017 my work on ajayeb is an inquiry into description:) ***it is about many different forms that something can take and do[...]

[...] parallel spreading qualities and scenes across a cartography, registers differences in motion
•a compositional writing (=/= representational method) in the effort to keep up with the distributed agencies of *what is throwing together and what is falling apart* (~ ajayeb) [--> it is a practice of trying, in line with my lectures, to follow where things (might) go that habits of attunement become as associational logic***]
•particulars to become a hinge لولاى در (opening onto a world throwing together and falling apart)
•mixing of shiny elements: *flickering ontologies* the expansive mapping of elements in paly
•a cartography of compositional elements, formal compositions and unmarked ways of being loop around each other

(27.08.2017 my work on ajayeb is an inquiry into description:) ***it is about many different forms that something can take and does take*** + the things that can be perceived and thought with those things

(attuning to) details in ajayeb loaded with intensities both strange and recognizable (=/= stable real)
a mode of perception that walks around an enigmatic object
an hour
a river
a walk
a deflating frog

far from being “after the fact,” my pop-up book involves multiplicity of bodies, characters and materialities to approach ‘description’ as “speculative theory in practice of how a world works” like ajayeb's work of “engendering a plane of prolific expressivity”

(عجایب المخلوقات / عجایب نامه) [*]ajayeb: a once percepted thing on the threshold of sense in the prisma of social poiesis producing a cartography of what might be happening in a world as an object of composition

firefly: a condensed point of precision one after another

ajayeb is made in citing repetitions and differences

(with Stewart:) ajayeb was once “the cutting edges of a harsh world in a state of un of uneven emergence, an ambient mapping of the not-yet or as-if of things becoming phenomenon” which itself became a repetitive impulse to story

i can't find a better kind of description of what ajayeb does than Stewart describing ‘description’ that literally puts a point things: “the expressivity of what happens to things throwing together in words is a kind of description attuned to what does not completely unfold but instead melds together with other unnamed but palpable things collected like a field of mineable resources and shiny afterthoughts.”

things throwing together in words ==> expressivity
ajayeb: collected (unnamed but palpable) things like mineable resources and shiny afterthoughts

پس انديشه

______________


[*]perspective: (an attending, enduring presence, a compositional node,) perspectival agency in which things jump into relation but remain unglued*** (Stewart)

[...]

[...]
***life not having been realy lived until it is narrated (@Ehsan)
(we need) to experience the satisfaction of matching words to the world --> **to feel, at least for a moment, language clicking into place, into a relation with the world that feels seamless and inevitable** -- when language seems to match experience, a kind of fusion between the word and the world : some tift is healed --> “the silken skilled *transremembrance* of a song” -[trans- : exchange of parts, one being fusing with another] --> “floating instant"--a part of the other, grown indistinguishable

the pleasure of recognizing a described world [****] --> work on ajayeb


festidious sense of accuracy


(Doty on) Elizabeth Bishop's poem “The Fish” (concerned with the experience of observing, aiming to track the pathways of scrutiny, *carefully rendered model of an engaged mind ar work*, looking into the fish's shifting eyes that can't be comfortably anthropomorphized. we can only guess if the poet is concerned with defeat, vitory, or survival) =/= Ferdosi's Rostam, or Div
Bishop's examination of the fish happening in the composition of the poem =/= straightforward record of perception

a tradition of seeking, in the vast book of difference (tha American continent offers)

(the poem) interprets a wordless, creaturely presence

baroque: attempt to dramatize the mind in action rather than in repose (Sa'di's baroque tendencies in Golestan)

fusing impressions synesthetically in a startling phrase
peeling scales provoke simile

...mind moving swiftly from observation to reverie

a compelling replica of inquiry ==> enlist the reader's participation in a version of the work of consciousness


descriptive acts --> attempt to render the world (and it is subject to revision)


*examplars of strangeness” (for my ajayeb, #writing Div descriptions)
-let's rewrite Div Sefid and give it more *wealth of detail*==> keeps the Div from becoming a symbol and allows it to *remain creaturely*
#Div poetry, to get close to a lived texture of creature, to allow the senses their complexity synthetic life

**every achieved poem inscribes a perceptual signature in the world**

the work of seeing ==> who is doing the looking, a specific, idiosyncratic sensibility

*detail ==> subjectivity* : we are brought into intimate proximity to the slipstream of (her) sensations --> *subjectivity* is made of such detail (of all the ways in which the world impresses itself upon us --> knowing through our scaffoldings of concerns, the tones and shadings of our moods) ~~--> we are in a sort of *readerly alliance*


[time]
#practice: try to describe what subjective time feels like --> to find variety of verbs to describe less readily ch[...]

[...]marily through the worldly evidence of Satan) + invisibility of the spiritual world was expressed as an essential given

{for the inquisitor (witch hunter) it was never enough to simply “believe” <==> a narrative must be produced that at least partially satisfied the demands of evidence}--> *interrogation under torture = an experimental form of knowing in crisis*

truth value of a nonsensical confession made sensible --> human belief, action, and social practices

ethnographic style of early French ethnographers --> **learning truth from lie** was essential to representing the “primitive” reality in order to interpret it in its true picture
-Marcel Griaule's approach to fieldwork: “The crime is the fact, the guilty party the interlocutor, and accomplices are all the members of this society. [...]the abundance of pieces of evidence serving to convict appear to facilitate the inquest, but in reality they guide it into labyrinths--labyrinths that are often organized. [...]The inquest must be treated like a strategic operation.”
--> nonsense to be mastered had shifted from the demonic, incredible forces at play for the inquisitor to the misguided tall tales of the native interlocutor [--> same mistake that Federici does in her book Caliban and the Witch. Federici, in search of the manifestations of misogyny, aggressively frames the scene of a feminist encounter with witch-hunt as a kind of antagonistic trial of social organization of the Middle Ages in transition to early capitalism... a mode of attention that is equally didactic and forensic as the witch inquisitors]

recognition of the struggle that lay at the heart of raising testimony to the status of the “really real” --Avital--> Griaule aggressively frames the scene of ethnographic encounter itself as a kind of antagonistic trial (whereby the ghosts and gods of the natives are forced out of the shadows and made concretely apparent to the senses of the anthropologist)
*fieldwork ==> knowledge of hauntings that is itself haunted*

imaginative result of “I-witnessing”

*paradoxical necessity of an expressive element within an objective test in relation to what would other wise be nonsense* is evident in many of the examples of 16th century visual culture --> ajayeb bestiary


trial by ordeal
(illustrated in Eduard Fuchs)
the case: if the woman floats she is clearly able to contravene the nature and is therefore a witch or heretic; if she sinks, she has made no such pact with Satan
-procedural expertise --> trial by water here functions as *experiment as much as a punishment* designed to reveal an other wise invisible truth

testimony + experimental results + expert inquisitorial interpretation ==> early version of the ‘case study’ (synthesized as evidence in service of accounting for variation that exceeded general laws regarding relations an[...]

[...]n of the person”
[putting on a mask --> transformation of the person --> obtaining omething magical from nature]

Christensen formally constructing “the witch” through a cinematic iteration of metoposcopic naturalism
(metoposcopy: a form of divination in which the diviner predicts personality, character, and destiny, based on the pattern of lines on the subject's forehead.)

(Avital) scientific imperative (the demand in the 19th century for an epistemological reliable inquiry in the nature of things) <-- fascination for the freak and the occult <-- on the way to technology


(Baxstrom + Meyers > Philippe Alain-Michaud on Warburg) “in Mnemosyne, photographic reproduction is not merely illustrative but a general plastic medium to which all figures are reduced before being arranged in the space of a panel. In this way, the viewer participates in two successive transformations of the original material: different types of objects (paintings, reliefs, drawings, architecture, living beings) *are unified through photography* before being arranged on the panel stretched with black cloth. The panel is in turn *rephotographed in order to create a unique image*, which will be inserted into a series intended to take the form of a book. The atlas, then, does not limit itself to describing the migrations of images through the history of representation: it reproduces them. In this sense, it is based on a cinematic mode of thought, one that, by using figures, aims at not articulating meaning but at producing effects.”


transgressive approach to the archive:
•Gerhard Richter's Atlas, 2006
•Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du cinema, 1988
•Christensen's Häxan
•Warburg’ Mnemosyne (presentation of a series of visual cliches and stereotypes, fragments which were most likely already familiar to the viewer ~ figurative givens ==> empirical evidence + media to conjure with)
•Bataille's journal ‘Documents’ 1929–30 --> seizes cliched objects and then systematically empties them out in the course of its own expressions. Bataille and his contributors sought to defamiliarize the cliches, disturbing the placidly deceptive surface of the mundane in their fragmentary, juxtaposing methods of critique and presentation =/= Warburg + Christensen collecting mythological, figurative givens seemingly quite distant from the “really” real
}--> unsettling distances between myth and the everyday
-weave together episodic fragments in order to draw parallels (across domains of sense that cut across time) and correspondences across situations and characters
-Häxan deploys the techniques associated with Warburg's Mnemosyne and Bataille's Documents for purposes of affectively emphasizing the dark, chaotic forces that lurk under the smooth surface of the everyday
(Häxan's episodic structure ==>)
•characters seemingly out of a dead past to [...]

[...]ur ancestors --> character of “tradition”

where violence begins or what gets counted as violence?

the discourse of effacement (امحاء emha’, self-effacement: withdrawing into the background, making yourself inconspicuous)

is there an authority outside inequality? responsible asymmetry, the egological space, tropes of domination?

%this is anout the quality of asymmetry----(are we still in the realm of the human?)

Levinas tactics is spectacular, he runs down patriarchy and meets the majestic escalade of the absolute other, he doesn't escape internment (toghif توقیف)
[patriarchy: when it is “of course” obvious who is the mother]

(where do we go with helplessness directed by the destruction of the world?)

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

[Sennett] on authority, trust and cooperation

...in both a subtle and a coherent social structure

inequality makes a profound difference in the lives of children

“earned authority” manages the everyday experience of inequality


cultures in which the *dramaturgical display of yourself* is foregrounded =/= diplomacy as model for social relationships

facebook, an engineered social network organized for display =/= communication



in capitalism, in firms people at the top has more power but less authority, and that is a problem.
in reverse, Lear loses its power but keeps his authority, his lag on administrative change.

authority is a bound, a volunteriy obidience and care-giving
parent-children: something the child needs desperitly, they need direction, they need people not only as guids but as witnesses of what they are doing.


the destructive charismatic authoiry in politics
tests if he/she can keep himself together

the charisma of the user on facebook (marat, jonathan, etc., but both are also very good at face to face communication)

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

Sennett

we don't know how to use material objects and machines well

craftsmanship: the quest to make physical things well
•how the head and hand are connected
•doing something well for its own sake --> skill (not honoured in modern society)
==> free the craftsman (Sennett)


in many social relations we do not know exactly what we need from others – or what they ought to want from us

cooperation as a craft --> skill of understanding and responding to one another

urban design is a craft in peril (dar khatar)
•too much urban design ==> homogeneous and rigid
•modern built forms ==> only a faint imprint of personal and shared experience

Sennett --> (better understanding of) ‘material craftsmanship + social cooperation'[...]

[...]o is the mother]

(where do we go with helplessness directed by the destruction of the world?)

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

[Sennett] on authority, trust and cooperation

...in both a subtle and a coherent social structure

inequality makes a profound difference in the lives of children

“earned authority” manages the everyday experience of inequality


cultures in which the *dramaturgical display of yourself* is foregrounded =/= diplomacy as model for social relationships

facebook, an engineered social network organized for display =/= communication



in capitalism, in firms people at the top has more power but less authority, and that is a problem.
in reverse, Lear loses its power but keeps his authority, his lag on administrative change.

authority is a bound, a volunteriy obidience and care-giving
parent-children: something the child needs desperitly, they need direction, they need people not only as guids but as witnesses of what they are doing.


the destructive charismatic authoiry in politics
tests if he/she can keep himself together

the charisma of the user on facebook (marat, jonathan, etc., but both are also very good at face to face communication)

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

Sennett

we don't know how to use material objects and machines well

craftsmanship: the quest to make physical things well
•how the head and hand are connected
•doing something well for its own sake --> skill (not honoured in modern society)
==> free the craftsman (Sennett)


in many social relations we do not know exactly what we need from others – or what they ought to want from us

cooperation as a craft --> skill of understanding and responding to one another

urban design is a craft in peril (dar khatar)
•too much urban design ==> homogeneous and rigid
•modern built forms ==> only a faint imprint of personal and shared experience

Sennett --> (better understanding of) ‘material craftsmanship + social cooperation’ ==> cities better made

‘homo faber project’: the ancient idea of Man as his or her own maker, man as a maker of life through concrete practices
•limits on desire and will
•the experience of other people's needs (which cannot be reconciled with our own)
+ to recognize and honour what lies beyond us (and before us)

social relations & physical environment

issues of practical skill, tool, meaning, value


***the rebellious child (in me)


United States has become an intensely tribal society
*tribalism* [= adverse to getting along with those who differ, solidarity with others like yo[...]

[...]d
[*]resentment: an emotional-moral framework --aim--> continuously regenerate the felt intensities --underwrite--> demands for revenge + lamentations (of victimhood)


***nationalism ==> populism***

(many countries) national identity (& militancy) is intertwined with:
•narrative of self-victimization --
•invocation of trauma

victorious victimhood ==fuels==> aggressive militancy
for example --> Israel: nothing counts as evidence as one's own empowerment, one is always under threat, if Israel cannot maintain the omnipotent position that its victory offered (1967) it would be under existential threat

anticolonial nationalism (or postcolonial populism)
•past injury (“We have been oppressed” ==> “re-empower ourselves again”)
•decades after independence --still--> 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, minorit[...]

[...]"transcends original discontinuity.”)
[in east mirror was never used as mean to self reflect, rather it was weaponized agains evil, although this evil was female and men used mirror to defeat it. unlike the western thought since the greeks in the Narcissus story where mirror is the foundation of self-absorbance and knowledge and madness, the easterns since they did not posses the same brand of selfhood they found mirror strange and uttelized it in curious ways, another optical problem ---> go to mirror and the laughing snake - mar-e ghahghahezan, img]
...through the speaking fire, events “on earth” were finished except for a final judgment by fire --> invention of sin, spiritual existence : selftranscendence. anthropoce separating themselves from earth and its processes
-‘essence’, ‘appearance’, and ‘change’ became sources of anxiety
-other forms of life are now irrelevant to humans
-from now on “you cannot be two things, in two places, or in two times, at once.” , no more overlapping identity ==> alienation from (the domains of) nonhuman life
-the “Persian” new mind, (intanced by fire,) divided the world into material creation and infinite spirit that would shape the philosophy of the civilized world. (Shepard 2004)
(-in my amazon book i am pointing out: Esthetic distancing also made possible the landscape arts and connoisseurship and commercialization as scenery painting, tourism, and recreation. To the credit of the Greeks, they resisted converting the landscape into scenery and wilderness into an aesthetic experience.)

we are not directed towards a measured location, (as his-story tries to make belief)

“After you die, others live.” (Sina)

old world's arboreal simians, monkeys

Anthropos

cultures of Pleistocene
-Pleistocene was the time of glaciation and ice. Much of the world's temperate zones were alternately covered by glaciers during cool periods and uncovered during the warmer interglacial periods when the glaciers retreated. it is when the evolution and expansion of Homo sapiens and by the close of the Pleistocene, humans had spread through most of the world.

Agonic / Hedonic --> my Köln group, agonistic doctrine challenges that mode of personality

ontogenesis---extended in human (the specialized and scheduled development of physical and psychological traits that appear, disappear, or stagnate during the life cycle of the individual.) --> Neoteny (a “state of newness"--a retardation of certain parts of the maturing process.) preprograms life stages, so that our becoming is a lifelong process.
-developement of the self in terms of harmonious relations to other species and nunhumans.
-ontogenetic agenda --- (The agenda is a given; the support depends on a social readiness to nurture, itself a product of successful ontogeny of an older generation.)
-many myths corre[...]

[...]ting questions of nonhuman alterity at Ferdowsi.

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

“the mind needs wild animals”
Meloy

more often, there are places where mammal should be but is no longer, *and in this emptiness, too, there is fieldwork to be done*

[*]euphemism: roads that are too civilized

Jesuit padre-historian
Je suis padre (wanna-be-father) historians
(18th century) calling the deserts of Baja California “destitute” without asking the natices if they were misreable
*for many natives in the Jesuit era, christianity was not a means by to give order to mystery (or give order to misery)* it was food. [...] another kind of appetite could lead people there...
*the christian hell looked a lot like the life they had left [...] many Indians so hated the cold that on a chilly day at the mission, a sermon about the fires of christian hell delighted them ♥

Meloy > Steinbeck: “food is hard to get, and a man lives inward, closely related to time”

better roads and bigger tourism = predatory brand of industrial leisure examplified by Cabo San Lucas (and Dubai in the middle east)

(Meloy herself part of a group) a goofy one with animal notes, plant books, and ‘je suit’ literature


(clinging to) the delusion of *feral self-reliance* --> [*]fishing: citizenry in the public of resourcefulness

“do not go to the hunt carrying meat from home.”


in my work the technique of storytelling: to create a stage for a wider out-of-control explosion of gesticulating arms

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

    “wherever you are, wherever you go, there are untamed creatures nearby that need you attention. unplug your modem. slam shut your self-help books. quit standing around like a wall trout. get to work.
    invite warblers to your neighborhood with shaggy plots of greenery. learn everything you can about the bandit-eyed racoon that stares at you through your sliding glass door, demanding enchiladas.
    mark the direction of jet black darkling beetles marching up a red dune like a troop of miniature helmets. east? south?
    let black widows live in your soffits.
    lie on your back on a breezy sweep of beach and stare at the undersides of magnificent frigate birds. master a hyena's laugh and use it when in the presence of politicians.
    admire the make midwife toad, who carries fertilized eggs on his back for a month. understand that certain species of mollusk can change their gender, know that from a ball afloat on tiny filaments inside its fanned shell, a sea scallop can tell which way is up.
    crane your neck. worm your way. wolf it down. monkey with things. outfox your foe. quit badgering your tax attorney.
    take notes on the deagness of coral, the pea-size heart of a bat. be meticulous.[...]

[...]atives in the Jesuit era, christianity was not a means by to give order to mystery (or give order to misery)* it was food. [...] another kind of appetite could lead people there...
*the christian hell looked a lot like the life they had left [...] many Indians so hated the cold that on a chilly day at the mission, a sermon about the fires of christian hell delighted them ♥

Meloy > Steinbeck: “food is hard to get, and a man lives inward, closely related to time”

better roads and bigger tourism = predatory brand of industrial leisure examplified by Cabo San Lucas (and Dubai in the middle east)

(Meloy herself part of a group) a goofy one with animal notes, plant books, and ‘je suit’ literature


(clinging to) the delusion of *feral self-reliance* --> [*]fishing: citizenry in the public of resourcefulness

“do not go to the hunt carrying meat from home.”


in my work the technique of storytelling: to create a stage for a wider out-of-control explosion of gesticulating arms

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

    “wherever you are, wherever you go, there are untamed creatures nearby that need you attention. unplug your modem. slam shut your self-help books. quit standing around like a wall trout. get to work.
    invite warblers to your neighborhood with shaggy plots of greenery. learn everything you can about the bandit-eyed racoon that stares at you through your sliding glass door, demanding enchiladas.
    mark the direction of jet black darkling beetles marching up a red dune like a troop of miniature helmets. east? south?
    let black widows live in your soffits.
    lie on your back on a breezy sweep of beach and stare at the undersides of magnificent frigate birds. master a hyena's laugh and use it when in the presence of politicians.
    admire the make midwife toad, who carries fertilized eggs on his back for a month. understand that certain species of mollusk can change their gender, know that from a ball afloat on tiny filaments inside its fanned shell, a sea scallop can tell which way is up.
    crane your neck. worm your way. wolf it down. monkey with things. outfox your foe. quit badgering your tax attorney.
    take notes on the deagness of coral, the pea-size heart of a bat. be meticulous. we will need these things so that we may speak.
    the human mind is the child of primate evolution and our complex fluid interactions with environment and one another. animals have enrished this social intelligence. they give concrete expression to thoughts and images. they carry the outside world to our inner one and back again. they helped language flower into metaphor, symbol, and ritual. we once sang and danced them, made music from their skin, sinew, and bone. their stories came off our tongues. we ate them. they ate us.
    close attention to mollusk[...]

[...]inking the academia and philosophy that is in relationship with the arts, my issues and interests are different than warhol for that matter. i am enthusiastic and extremely interested in the material that i am working with, and at the same time overthrown by it and i believe in it, in the same way that maybe warhol believed in pop culture and business.

the nightmare after performance

the notion of skill in art, performance, life, work

trauma, in the experience of the trauma, the source mixes, and articulate in metaphors and hubric signifiers.

relationship between older works and performances, the issue of skill and technology.
it took 60 years after the developments in tempering metal, for barnors to learn new nigf techniques. this is common in the history of technology, that a tool appears before people know how to use it. do we know how we can use computers? when we master a technique, its uses are not immediatly clear.

getting interested in the wrong answer in the four answer question.
no skill develops without a good dose of curiosity. which enables us to think about what might be, rather than what is.

There is a half-remembered discussion of Sigmund Freud I read once in a book and which I have been paraphrasing regularly ever since. It said that for Freud dreams were a way of thinking by doing. You run, you cry, you kiss, you love, you cheat, you argue, you fall, you kill, you eat, you sing, you get lost, you travel back in time, you become somebody else – but you do it all in your head. You do it in your head and so it is thinking, just not a thinking we recognize as thinking. When I am dreaming I am composing thoughts in the way an artist composes a painting or a witch a potion – an assemblage made of bodies and places and actions. An embodied thinking, that is no less eloquent or extraordinary or transformative for being so.




...One can chat and gossip but it is forbidden to preach, lecture or instruct.”
Claudio Magris’ Micronismi

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

(butler)

the structure of address itself

although I did not know in whose voice this person was speaking, whether the voice was his own or not, I did feel that I was being addressed.

To respond to this address seems an important obligation during these times.

It is about a mode of response that follows upon having been addressed, a comportment toward the Other only after the Other has made a demand upon me, accused me of a failing, or asked me to assume a responsibility.

The structure of address is important for understanding how moral authority is introduced and sustained if we accept not just that we address others when we speak, but that in some way we come to exist, as it were, in the moment of being addressed, and something about our existence pro[...]

[...]tion
•Cut the Noise
•mirrors with (/without) memories
•substitutability
•optical appearances (mind ~ eye)
•Dioptrics (science of refraction), catoptrics (reflection),
•that could not be spoken of or represented, because it was empty of discourse and thus of meaning.
•innocence of the eye
•Poor Unfortunate Souls
•being useful, like a prison guard
•autopoetic (complex self-referential systems)
•to take up the motives from the external world
•will-less perception, “the pure eye of genius”
•bringing from the artificial world to the art world
•object oriented programming / subject oriented
•Observer, system and environment
•a system (designed) with a purpose of itself
•magnifying or light-collecting optical device
•social selfish
•un-computational
•gray area
•self-identity is bad visual system
•Vision requires instruments of vision; an optics is a politics of positioning. Instruments of vision mediate standpoints;
•Identity, including self-identity, does not produce science; critical positioning does, that is, objectivity
•docile body
•technological visioning (vector of secret texts, books within books, ancient curses, digital dreams, and medieval cyber-art)
•empty space left by theory and philosophy
•technical visioning
•Technology is never merely “used,” never merely instrumental. It is always ” incorporated” and “lived.”
•In his last paintings, such as the Bride of 1912, Duchamp both elaborated an iconography that combined mechanical and visceral forms and began to move away from any procedures that revealed the artist's hand to create “retinal” or “anecdotal” art.


lemon grass plant, marigold

Saeed 0012063108222
Tehran Wi Fi: 88 57 27 92

newer medium may be ‘nested’ inside of an older medium (or vice versa)

mental life (memory, imagination, fantasy, dreaming, perception, cognition) is mediated and is embodied in the whole range of material media… we not only think about media, we think in them (Mitchell)

The shock of new media is as old as the hills

Franz Reuleux described this correlation: the more primitive the technology, the less attuned the parts of the machine to each other, the greater the degree of play -- the more perfected the technology, the closer the fit, the less play between the individual parts.

(For Winnicott,) play is a psychological state where the boundaries between self and the world remain labile and fluid, (a state which is important not only for the development of the child, but with significant ramifications for human life and culture in general.)

Representation is a distinctive manner of imagining the real, and is a fundamental phenomenon upon which all culture[...]

[...]s its ubiquity, its deeper symbolic and aesthetic dimensions, the way in which it can radically chnage humanness and human-centered approaches

(humanistic epistemology ==>) mode of the human:
1. information processor
2. cognitive subject
3. cultural subject

posthuman mode:
1. to widen the temporal range of research (deep future, deep past)
2. take the form of an ethical inquiry (where the human is no longer the center of the world)
3. to think about the ontology of technology
4. the relationship of the human and the nonhuman (sustainability)


20th century --> gene
21st century --> posthuman (postgenetic metaphors)

robotic revolution + biotechnology revolution > agricultural revolution + industrial revolution + information revolution


(consumer research started to develop an outlook that) things are just as complex and social as people
- brand: entities that talk to and interact with other brands, entities that form relationships with humans

(lives that seem to exist in on the edges of simple humanist life:)
•*massive* life of market
•*excessive* life of the brnad image
•*virtual* life of Facebook
•

consumer research focuses on the ontological and epistemological givens of only the consumer


(Turkle theorizing) how consumers change through their relationship with the nonhuman
•children view certain objects in the world around them as having degrees of aliveness
•children who have grown up with computers do not experience a dichotomy between biological and computatinoal processes
•playing with a toy like transformers, the toy shifs from being machines to being robots to being animals --learning--> fluid boundaries between mechanism and flesh
•(the ontological stickiness of the) [*]computer: a mind that is not yet a mind, inanimate yet interactive, it does not think yet neither is it external to thought
(Menser + Aronowitz) television: a complex object constituted by and related to many fields (solid-state physics, politics, etc.)
Latour...
}--> (such way of theorizing ==> precondition of) an era where radically mew technologies produce entities as indefinable complex global (as the Human Genome project) biofuel supply-chains or climate change models [--> also cryptocurrencies, blockchain]
}--Campbell--> consumer researchers are creating new concepts and figurations in order to expand the borders of waht constitutes life [for example “living-product” metaphor]


(the problem of the) [ontological division of] consumer =/= world of objects ==> (ideological move -->) privileges human : it is understood by the human, because the human (the only source of analytical attention) is the only thing doing the consuming, having the experience, making t[...]

[...] tyranny,
packaging (packaging existing knowledge, the way for example the IT industry does it.)
am I against packaging?


rationalizing and separating functions in the city



place, space, face,



in the history, the leg-less-stone and the lying-visage have been together. a study of apparition must include the physical material as well, not as counterparts, rather as its play-mate.

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

the structure of space in San'an poetry

distinction between subject and object, between signifier and signified, encompassing the whole of dualistic logic through its branching patterns, through its definitions of set pathways between root and branch.

the Arborescent model of relationships in San'an story?

The rhizome likewise resists structures of domination, such as the notion of “the mother tongue” in linguistics, though it does admit to ongoing cycles of what Deleuze refers to as “deterritorializing” and “reterritorializing” moments.

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

about my performances:

“There is no longer a tripartite division between a field 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 do[...]

[...]nger a tripartite division between a field 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 acers 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 learni[...]

[...]?
(in lectures, am I un-separating myself from my own history?)


*reverie (=the mind flees across secluded planes)

exile space =~ refuge, solitude, immobility =? nondialectics


[on Vagabond] --> http://www.sinaseifee.com/Vagabond.html
-domination of the partially unseen in my own film, ‘vagabond’
-did I believe that only the buried dimension is sovereign?
-continuously interlacing experiences of solitude and immobility
-minimalist side of mysticism --> stillness is a catalyst for acceleration?
-nomadic dispositions
-suspended (=the chasm of self-consciousness)
-


aesthetic tactility over aesthetic fantasy
where is the cinematic-mystical ritual happening?

profound separation from the networks of social reality
the subjects betrays its own history

interrupting the transmission of the episteme


> the result of mystic disjointment => a renovated perception of all activity as self-forsaking (Tark-e Nafs? ترک نفس), (such that all locations appear scorched in turn)

stab-through and un-brace one once was

San'an's mechanistic commitments, he need to first book out of a place in order to write text, or to book himself in again
the San'an's poem's ‘Will' = instinct for abandonment and anonymity
is this instinct predicting what Attar will write? or explains *why he writes?
[writing as an act of memory and perform?]

the mystic event is predicted by an instinct for abandonment and anonymity,
at the same time it mutates the urban environment in which it stage its runaways line.
the cityscape is cast into the frenetic rush of this disavowal, to the extent that it becomes the equivalent of the desert

what are the indentitarian qualifiers that San'an wants or needs to chain-break?

t /> to be honest, Attar's San'an's poetry, is living by a roaming assemblage of assertions. [he wrote his poem in a time when the highly religious Sheikhs would go to monasteries and get drunk with the non-Muslims, getting high with the nonhuman. it is Seljuq (سلجوق) time, medieval Turko-Persian. The Seljuqs were educated in the service of Muslim courts as slaves or mercenaries. The dynasty brought with itself a sense of revival. Under the Seljuqs, New-Persian became the language for historical recording. Attar (عطار) means herbalist, druggist, perfumist or alchemist, and during his lifetime in Persia, much of medicine and drugs were based on herbs. Therefore, by profession he was similar to a modern-day town doctor and pharmacist. Rose oil means ‘attar’. Attar died a violent death in the massacre which the Mongols inflicted on Nishapur in April 1221.]
-in his Birds epic, he is bringing an instinct coalition that translates all movement into a devouring collectivity --[...]

[...](things that) must address anxiety --?--> a religious stamp


what is the San'an text promising the Other? (like every text does, every utterance)
what it cannot *not do?


my childish playful inventiveness and its relationship to weakness.
so I come up week, saying ‘let us do this or that,’ but that is a will to power (?)


we are here to understand the appropriation of meaning.
what does or does not belong to the protocols of reading, etc.

(think in terms of de-appropriation, which entails a form of rigorous hesitation when assuming responsibility for the work or thought of another) is that what I am practicing encountering the work of Attar? as an ally or ancestor or an unknown sidetrack of writing


different modalities of love and loving

I guess what I wanted to ask you is your love

I have been teaching Islam to you?! in a shattered and transgressive way
of course this not teach-according-to-definition

of course every demand is the demand for love


the SM-inserts in San'an story
he is asked to perform some serious Sado-Masochist interactions with nonhuman animals, his favorite book, and Tarsaa as stage-manager
we are left with the task of reading the enigma of something that no longer is. if things ‘were’ we wouldn't need to be thinking, reading, running after them.
(I am reading the enigma of something that no longer is)
precisely Bayazid defines Tasawwuf/Tasavof as something that ‘was’ and had no name and today ‘is not’ and has name.


I am taking in terms of constructions and phantasms

everything that comes at you, which is persecutory, is absorbed. that being able to crucified by the other.
doesn't have an experience to fire aggression

is it possible to be kind in a non-manipulative non-cognitive or non-calculative way?

San'an was booked “elsewhere,” he had a transcendental hearing, he had to take a call
[we should here study a ‘hauntology'---the science of morning-disorder. all prophets have it also]. haunt---the figure is neither present nor absent --> (and “real” presence has always been the religion's obsession)


از شبح به شیخ

از صنع به صنعان


صنع = fake, صانع fabricated, made-up, technological, dead, etc.
صنم = idol
صنع = eidolon
-(eídōlon, “figure, representation”), from εἶδος? (eîdos, “sight”), from εἴδω? (eídō, “I see”)
-a phantom, a ghost or elusive entity (=/=? haecceity)
-‘you still see them'---is this an origin of metaphysic?
-eidolon is the image in water, apparition, ‘surat,’ a double / technical. idea comes from the word “to see” in Greek verbs, linked to the notion of ‘eidolon[...]

[...]ncestor or an unknown sidetrack of writing


different modalities of love and loving

I guess what I wanted to ask you is your love

I have been teaching Islam to you?! in a shattered and transgressive way
of course this not teach-according-to-definition

of course every demand is the demand for love


the SM-inserts in San'an story
he is asked to perform some serious Sado-Masochist interactions with nonhuman animals, his favorite book, and Tarsaa as stage-manager
we are left with the task of reading the enigma of something that no longer is. if things ‘were’ we wouldn't need to be thinking, reading, running after them.
(I am reading the enigma of something that no longer is)
precisely Bayazid defines Tasawwuf/Tasavof as something that ‘was’ and had no name and today ‘is not’ and has name.


I am taking in terms of constructions and phantasms

everything that comes at you, which is persecutory, is absorbed. that being able to crucified by the other.
doesn't have an experience to fire aggression

is it possible to be kind in a non-manipulative non-cognitive or non-calculative way?

San'an was booked “elsewhere,” he had a transcendental hearing, he had to take a call
[we should here study a ‘hauntology'---the science of morning-disorder. all prophets have it also]. haunt---the figure is neither present nor absent --> (and “real” presence has always been the religion's obsession)


از شبح به شیخ

از صنع به صنعان


صنع = fake, صانع fabricated, made-up, technological, dead, etc.
صنم = idol
صنع = eidolon
-(eídōlon, “figure, representation”), from εἶδος? (eîdos, “sight”), from εἴδω? (eídō, “I see”)
-a phantom, a ghost or elusive entity (=/=? haecceity)
-‘you still see them'---is this an origin of metaphysic?
-eidolon is the image in water, apparition, ‘surat,’ a double / technical. idea comes from the word “to see” in Greek verbs, linked to the notion of ‘eidolon’ is the ‘visible image’ (in ancient optics and theories of perception) [the visible image is what appears to operate San'an's dream]
-why eidolon has the tendency to become an idol that talks back? (San'an practically encounters an eidolon and converts it to an idol. what Tarsaa asks San'an to worship is the confirmation of what sheikh has already done.)
-what is the secret of the vitality of the image that bewitches San'an? why dream/images, works of metaphors have lives of their own and cannot be explained as epistemological windows onto reality?
-San'an is first captive of apparition (صورت), then captive of meaning (معنی‌)
-originality of the site is abolished by technological register of the ‘sent,’ (the telephonic[...]

[...], or even scientific ‘beings’ that are (1) *conventional* (recognizable repertoire), and (2) *closed* (refer to certain predefined situations and symbols)
==> I work-with and bypass with these aspects in Attar, Hafez, Ajā'ib al-makhlūqāt, etc.


the performance of ‘stop’ in San'an
sign-functions that cannot be stopped

the master-pupil lock
‘locken’ is also to lure, seduce, etc.


thank you for becoming my students, temporarily
we are not locked, and not necessarily unlocked



what is concealed behind the special effects of the awesome signifier in San'an's story?


concealed =/= canceled



in Rumi every word is pass-word. you don't translate a password! (fallacy of the literal)


•all same-sex relationships are hierarchical and dyadic (of two, ‘paarweise’ in German)?
and are based on the cultural diagram of the master-disciple relationship in Sufi orders?

Sufi order =/=? flirtation


mystic, is one mode of subjectivity emerged in the middle eastern thought--- a prototype of closeness and removal.



in Rumi--Masnavi's third book--the un-concentrated Sheikh (- story of Daghughi - شیخ دقوقی) is scandalously abandoned by his devotees. they broke his heart.
[Plot: Daghughi and his disciples are in deep trance beside a beach. a ship comes and sink in a sudden theatrical storm right in front of them, but miraculously the passengers survive. the students check with each other if any of them have prayed for the God's help's redirect to the sinking ship. no, they deduce it must have been their sheikh who saved those people: “he is distracted by the world.” finally when sheikh comes out of his Namaz he turns his head to greet his devotees but only to realize that all of them have left him in silence!]
and then Rumi goes in length in differences between mud and water. [the “prison” of mud for the water, who “belongs” to the sea, and this is a problem, the mud doesn't want to dry, therefore doesn't let go of the water, and so on.]

what the image of the sinking ship has to do with the anti-clarity movements of the Sufis?

[and then suddenly: pishe and bishe (پیشه و بیشه)---lion comes out of Pishe(business)/Bishe(bushes) and rubs you off,
bush =/= Arbeit/craft]

also, Rumi opens the mechanics of praying in this story, he zooms in Daghughi's performance, the God is force-handed into the pray, because the human prayer temporarily simulates nonexistence (فنا). the prayer becomes Nichts and God takes over both the position of pray and its answer; a site where subjectivity evacuates, almost mechanically generates a form of existential void that God functionally cannot not fill (ejabat - اجابت).



[...]

[...], 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.

part of the disposition of this proposal is also the suggestion that the two collaborators of this project, Jassem and Foad, are invested in those notions in their practice. Foad Farahani's poem “farar” enacting contemporary artistic formations and past-compound-mask, and Jassem Hindi transnational poetic agency, are both artists with acute appetite for chaotic imagination. Their instinct for the fusion of nothingness and excess, appearance and disappearance, creation and destruction, is at once carved and unpacked in the literary-poetic mosaics of their work: Foad's use of middle-persian mystic sensibilities and Jassem's combinatio[...]

[...]e for one another" = "they will all kill one another”


“the sect occasionally allows the opening of the closed circle, reforming as a stright line that penetrates the world of others” --> (a phantom) *imperative to entirity*

sectarian language: the author cages the reader (in each verse)

sectarian animism ==> paranoiac dialogues:
•language of things (communication with the inanimate)
•concert with sacred beasts (oracle, snakes, animal spirits, etc. **the uncooperative figures of nature**)
•warnings of extraterrestriality (those of faraway sentience)
•murmurings of superstition (man, fate, chance, fifth column[= the group who undermine a larger group from within])


hiding as mission --> dissimulation & hollowing

sectarian lives by code, but cannot be deciphered or analyzed* --methodological--> leaves one undetected (--> assassins who are inflexible, precise, and systematic to the highest degree, and traceless for this very reason)

...they remind of the ungovered body, the accidental, and death



xxxxx 280

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

(Mohaghegh's work on the middle east in his book) it is ***a theory that does not speak for ‘the East’(= a construction) but rather *an East*(= a radical illusion)***
-it offers careful insight into singular, distinctive episodes of thought and writing in the Middle East (and to explore their relevance across the topology of world thought at large)
-the fractal nature of his four separate subject-positions point to the *exceptional diversity and heterogeneous makeup of Middle Eastern cultural imaginaries*

...the insurgent carries a hundred masks within one, the poet a hundred more, the mystic a hundred more, and the sectarian a thousand
(@Geert)

[*]modernity: a self-naming historical epoch that redefines/fuses the exercise of power and knowledge and for which the enlightenment, capitalism, colonialism, technology, humanism, ideology, simulation, and the domination of instrumental reason become the main pillars of subjectivity

Mohaghegh offers a list of secondary literature that forms the relevant archive from which his manuscript borrows, and **marks its axis of engagement with preexisting interventions**
#bibliography


Nietzsche's conception of chaos
“nature and mask determine phenomenal being, the phenomenon in its being, as chaos”
(Deleuze interprets Nietzsche's chaos as:) a philosophical overture toward “the pure unformed”
--> the subject is this free, anonymous, and nomadic singularity which traverses men as well as plants and animals independently of the matter of their individuation and the forms of their personality [~~> #write a short story for hayula]

*Eastern insurgent's particip[...]

[...]evacuation --> surrender to fugitive trajectory
takes place on amorphous dust

wrenched
shadow-scapes

enterence <--> ejection

•misadventurism of the wanderer
•rogue thought

influx
disintegration
fever
velocity

the deserter mind is made to synchronize the internalization of waste and unrest and to ravage itself

spatiality of the the nowhere

intentionally sets out to become lost

vagrant: drifter در به در
اوباش
self that personified the dejected

self-eclipsing vagrant that becomes the outside itself



arc of necessity


the super-power of holding objects suspending in the air --> an intruder topology where everything is held suspend...

{ false subjectivity = hiding place }<-- chaotic imagination overruns it




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

Glissant

constrictions of the ‘forced poetics’ of writing (in plastic arts)

grandiose concept of the writer (of writing as an ordering process)

world meant as raw material for a book

Glissant's thoroughgoing exploration of models of disorder/chaos --> (his subversive epitome of) *opacite/opacity* --> realm of the intuitive and indeterminate as a corrective response to the systematizing pressures of assimilation and deculturation
==> to create a more immediate, oral, corporeal language
-inadequate process of attempting to note down, chronicle or relate the experience of opacity

chaos + opacity + resistance (in Glissant)
primordial act of defiance lajbazi

negation = heroic (=/= pedestrian)

Glissant's anonymous and pedestrian form of resistance --> knowledge of camouflaged reality

“Th> “The one with whom the poet is enchanted, that he names with each breath. But for whom words are inadequate.”

...in the unexpected expanse of global relating

“a poetics not of the tree but of vegetation”
[poetics of the decentered subject]
epitomise (pure) revolt (--> tree grows to reveal human configurations, fierce and solitary revolt against the plantation system)

modest forms of resistance
fragmentation of fiction --to--> polyphonic quiltwork of stories

[system of imagery]
(Glissant's) insistence on marine symbolism
transforming, restorative power of water
harsh bitter truth of the sea <--> inscrutable, ambiguous nature of the experience

preoccupation with the need to create a literary language --> specificity of lived experience


*narrateur enfant*

narrator distorting and simplifying my experience

“burning with [...]

[...]iential)

unstable & somatic ways we respond to (and seek out) everyday images

evocative & powerful (<--Sina-- nonartisitic images)

(art or not art) ***aesthetic response***


[*]children's media: aesthetic social imagination

(moral components of:)
cruelty, hurt, disgust, disdain
kindness, happiness, admiration, love

physical, material, somatic relation to the ethereal, metaphysical, intellectual

(?how can we) confidently treat “images = sources of socioculturel information”

(from) Islamic culture --to--> cultures associated with isalm


strong opposition to representational religious art <-- modern Islamic societies --> unproblematic accepting of representational religious materials intended for children

didactic islamic visual media:
•(Kuwait) the 99 --> heroes for each name of the God
•(Pakistan, India, Afghanistan) burqa avenger --> burqa clad superhero against a corrupt view of traditional religion, using veil as costume
•(Pakistan) Ferozsons publisher
•Uysal press
•Timas press (Cem Kiziltug)
•

age-graded sequences of children's religious books --> progressively decreasing use of images


questions (> Elias:)
•are there culturally specific ways of seeing --answer--> yes
•does religion requires its own categories for understanding visuality and sensory systems? --> *religion is a problematic category* <== inherently unstable {religion referring simultaneously to systematic ideological systems, atomized and multivalent beliefs, range of individual and cultural practices}--> constant flux + relative to each other =/= religion: discrete phenomena


•scholars who argue for a transcendental quality to religion
•Durkheim + Weber --> religious = behavioral
•Otto --> location of religion: a fascinating incomprehensible force outside of the human person
•Eliade --> essential unity of the religious (~= commensurate human behavior)
•Elias --> manifestation of belief and ideology in visual written emotive forms --functionalist--> [*]religion = visual art

visual material --serve-->
•aesthetic
•generator of meaning
•generator of affirmation شعاری
•icon
•talisman
•objects imbued with religious function
•token of aspiration
•instrument of aspiration (or other emotions)
•explicit reminder (of good behavior)
•gesture towards a better future : wish images
•

seeing = embodied act (---> go to Gossip Girl)
•(individuals make complicated interpretive choices concerning) what to look at & what they have seen
•*we feel through, about, from the visual* ~= visuality is embodied ~= visuality is multisensory [...]

[...]mbivalent urges need to be disciplined and harnessed through some process of education” ==> islamic ideas of body & mind

favorite emotion (~ religious expression + motivator) in islam [+ sufism]: love & virtue [--✕--> my interest in hate & monster]

it was only one and half a century ago that William James argued that human mental states were incapable inseparable from our bodily forms (=/= “mind =/= body”)


modern theories of emotion:
•universalism <-- sentimental desire to believe in the essential community of all human beings + appeal of neuroscientific inquiries into the biological bases of emotions + certain linguistics theories [--> for example (the fable of universal emotion) *fear in the face of the enemy* transcends time and space]
•social constructivism <-- 80s sociology and cultural studies

using clinical data for humanistic arguments <-- problematic and unpersuasive


*******generation of new knowledge --approached-->
humanistic method (also applies to art?) --> authoritative: establishing control over the previous scholarship in the field + incremental advancement to collective knowledge
(*written as eureka moments of the revelation of knowledge* --> book: definitive work that closes discussion)
=/=
scientific method --> testing hypothesis, expecting one's own hypothesis to be proven wrong or incomplete in a very short time
(*written as progress reports on findings in ongoing research* --> article)

}--> this makes it dangerous for humanity scholars to take advantage of scientific research

[*]emotion
cognitive psychology --> humanistic + social-scientific theories of emotions --promoting--> (fables of)
•universal basic emotions: happiness, anger, disgust, fear, sadness, surprise [--> regardless what these terms might be in other languages other than english, or even if there are equivalent concepts]
•emotions do not occur in language but are physically manifested in the face [--> micro-expression in business negotiations]
•(the fable of) artworks can convey emotions accurately and reliably across time and culture [---> go to the fable of *unmediated response* + emotional appeal of “great art"]
•distinguish the essential from the optional, to capture the invariant, to break complex concepts into maximally simple ones [conceptual primes + lexicogrammatical universals] (<-- Wierzbicka's NSM)

=/=

•emotion --> Joseph leDoux 1996
•emotion --> Klaus Scherer 1979
•affects --> Deleuze and Guattari 1980
•perasaan hati --> indonasia 1980
•affect --> Massumi 2002
•emozioni --> Cesare Lombroso 1976

social constructivism approach:
•emotional experience is not precultural but preeminently cultural --> Lutz

anthropological approach l:
-[...]

[...]entially bodily, pre-social (=/= asocial), filled with motion, vibratory motion, resonation, a nonconscious (never-to-be-conscious) automatic remainder
visceral perception
precognitive visceral moment (=/= physical reaction)
--> think of affect in virtual terms {virtual: sphere of potential + emergent + indeterminate tendencies}
***conscious perception = narration of affect*** [to perceive = to narrate your affects ---> go to #feedback of artwork: actualization of the affective event (?can it include the excess of affect, the virtual?), feedback: narration of unconscious perception] --Massumi--> outside of this perception is the virtual domain (nonconscious automatic remainder, disconnected from meaning) []
--> “affect is the whole world” (<-- Massumi's attraction to indeterminacy)
--Sina--> affect: the deep historical remainder (fossil) of a pre-civilizational (pre-social) open-ended togetherness (I-am-involved-ness)

Flatley
> affect --> (nonvirtual) they come out unpredictability in dreams and physical symptoms
(interaction of) affect + habit, belief, thought, ideas = emotion


neuropolitics: neurobiological universals can predictively manifest themselves


article =/= book (more rewarded in the humanities)

...technical, symbolic, formula-filled language of scientific research


antirationalism of turn to body in affect theory --Leys--> “the claim is that we human beings are corporeal creatures imbued with subliminal affective intensifies and resonances that so decisively influence it condition our political and other beliefs that that we ignore those affective intensities or resonances at our peril--not only because doing so leads us to underestimate the political harm that the deliberate manipulation of our affective lives can do but also because we will otherwise miss the*potential for ethical creativity* and transformation that ‘technologies of the self’ designed to work on our embodied being can help bring about.”



enterprise of theorizing affect --Elias-->

(1) ideologically driven by an attempt to reverse an imagined poststructuralist theoretical hegemony ==> conscious turn from rational methods --> *asignifying transcendence*
-Massumi's affect: asocial virtual potential (=/= actualizes) ==> affect: unformed & unstructured (potential: transmitable + socially powerful) ~= undefinable & unknowable  ~= unanalyzable & unpredictable <-- not usable as a theoretical concept
Massumi (moving away from linguistic towards t) --> affect becomes ethereal abstraction (=/= historical materiality) removed from the grasp of critical assessment
feeling --> personal & biographical
emotions --> social
affect --> prepersonal (non-conscious experience of intensity)

(2) florid and convoluted use of language --> fail to eschew ob[...]

[...]nd signal their legitimacy in the face of massive human suffering?
-manufacture of pain
-theology of suffering

the discovery of the event, as a question for anthropology, is precisely that: *event exceeds structure*
(exess ==> reimagining the networks that compose our lives)

Veena --> Bhopal industrial disaster: neither social relations nor locally available knowledge were sufficient to apprehend the event. it is at this point that people had to actively search for new knowledge, for new kinds of social actors that might help them address the question of what was happening to their bodies --> they had to reconstruct social relations to include the existence of international legal systems and governmental bureaucracies in their image of society***

toxic potency (==> difference, collective violence [such as the partition of India and Pakistan =/=], stable violence [such as a village caste dispute],,,)

poles of life and death that separates different kinds of collective violence --> the sexual and reproductive violence witnessed in the Partition connot be understood by taking social relations as model
(Veena)

...distance that arises out of forms of proximity

Veena 3 books:
•Structure and Cognition --> illuminates certain recurring patterns
•Critical Event --> paints a kind of national lanscape
•Life and Words --> turn to an art of an anthropological portraiture

...healing properties of the everyday
...everyday life generates its own forms of toxicity

(Singh's) art of portraiture
of individuals, of milieu,

*singularity (of a portraiture) may express something both local and global*

Veena --> how would we conceptualize the moments of potentially violent uncertainty?
-Benjamin: invocations of the uncanny
-Derrida: the spectral
-Veena: eventedness of the everyday (--> skepticism)

Cavell (on Hollywood cinema and other sites where the drama of separation and union is played out) --> how philosophers have typically focused on skepticism [longstanding western philosophical question and doubt about existence] with respect to material objects and the external world
...existence of the finite neighbour (seemingly known other) --> may become unknowable

--> *Veena discovers the concept of skepticism for anthropology (as a discipline centrally concerned with the varying conditions of human relatedness and otherness)*

[i have been trying dicover skepticism unsystematically in artistic practices those that have strong concerns of social justice and suffering, but i never named it as such. @Hoda, Xiri's emphasis on the threatening nature of liminality (demand for equality or freedom) =/= **to take the possibility of unsettlement or chaos as founding concern**]
--> skepticism (may[...]

[...]rth <== *it makes to sense to create a planet that is uninhabited*
“[...] for she would then appear to have come into existence vainly and to no purpose, neither brining forth fruit nor providing fir men of some kind an origin, an abode, and a means of life, the purpose for which this earth of ours came into being” (Plutarch, On the Face of the Moon)

metaphors for the silence of the space --> perennial question of humankind

the black sea sparkle with lustrous fires, like the ceiling of a vast hall of ebony encrusted with flashing diamonds
with what a soft sweet light every star glowed
no matter what its magnitude, the stream that flowed from it looked calm and holy
not twinkling
no scintillation
no nictitation
disturbed their pure and lambent gleam

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

night dreams (after WIELS's exhibition)
starting with the story of the jinn studying origin of species --> bestiaries
mix of reports from Hedayat'neyrangestan + Shamlu's ketab kuche + Marzolph's topology of persian folklore iranian stories + ajayeb stories --to--> ?

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

jin lamp
tree
scared face

book Skala:
royal fairy tales
baba jaga kostliva noha / bony legs


the first worm

death skeleton afraid of itself, of its own image
self-reflective

you are following, while being followed, and the one who follows you is being followed...

pop-up book
•endless doors (on top of each other)
•rotation: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMR4VTo8s/
•rotation: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMR4Vp8Yb/
•https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMR4Vw7qk/
•https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMR4VttgH/
•moon https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMR4VV2CC/


•Philippines --> aesthetics of poverty [culture of material poverty --> poverty as scenic design and working philosophy] (==> the imperative to eliminate nonessentials =/= my philosophy)
•Iran --> aesthetics of ?
•(?what is) Instagram or TikTok people's appreciation of beauty =/= aesthetics of poverty's coupling expression with survival and change

the idea that becoming sensitive to the aesthetic qualities of local materials ==> increasing one's power of expression

theater director = aesthetic coordinator = sensitivity + selectivity

scenography in artistic research
my early interest in stage design {~ use of backdrops in capturing the essence of a play or story --> a way to *establish setting* [=/= scene] --> sense of (not necessarily authentic) history, calling for the patina of history} ==> my recent scenic paintings --present--> *visual stream of consciousness* ~= diorama ~= to capture the essence of a practice interest optic episteme (--> establish a setting to get caught lu[...]

[...]elopment of taxonomic principle
system endowed with a high degree of logical power

the idea of pure quantity, based on decimal numbers applicable to wide range of categories: people, objects, units of time or space, etc.

an “art of memory” possessed of rudimentary form of visual salience and an extremely complex ordering of representable knowledge

what matters are system's logical implications and not its visual manifestations

salience
(colors, shapes of knots, folds)

the qualitative categories (meant to be named)

(finding) the organizing principles

precisely calibrated
oriented space
(geometrically?)

what constitutes the logical poles of the vast spectrum of the projects in the archive (people, objects, units of time or space, etc.)

(concerning the archive) we can negotiate two types of knowledge: lists and narratives

to identify a series of key elements that allow us to rethink a wider chronology

textual archaeology - evaluates and decrypts, layer by layer

discovering (evidential) mnemonically oriented means of organizing traditional knowledge

(Montesinos's book:) “list of one hundred kings”

should we abandon the conventional terms of “narrative”
the term narrative used to describe mnemonically oriented lists of names..
narrative was just one of several different means of organizing knowledge..

graphical representation, capable of developing further degrees of complexity

“form”
recreate the ‘form’ (form : ‘state of organization of matter’)

within (this/a) variable system

“text” as sequences of cords

memorization (the creation of mnemonic relation) necessarily implies the modular organization of the knowledge it represents

r /> constitutive dualism in many forms of the art of memory:
•order (Anordnung) and salience (Hervorspringen)
•expressivity (and power)
•encoding (Verschlüsselung) and evocation (Herbeirufen)

possible course between the twin rocks of writing: “social” and “arbitrary”

at the end it is the mental operation
(techniques of thought)

the image plays a central role in the construction of relations between (visual) themes and particularity of words, which in turn help organize narratives

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

these all were technical or formal questions so far


memory is a way consistency maintains itself


civil society is afraid of personal recollections and perverse databases, digital collections

is khm’s archive a state sponsored memorialization, monuments of a consistent history? (that assumes a sublime ending?)


[...]

[...]f the artist] ==establishes==> awareness of the existence of the body


processing is largely parallel, while, attention is largely serial

disciplines of the modern subject
(in artistic work the unsolved issue remians:) technniques for/of the external control

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

[*] which spaciotemporal vectors are embeded in the archive, as a modern feeling of arrow that thrusts forward differentiating past from the future, “archaic” from the “advanced”?

[*] archive produces a “yesterday”
a dangerous arrow of time that is constituted and announced
-how do we attend the histories of implication and attachment?

futurity [aghebat عاقبت, (even) akherat اخرت], the promis of the archive

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

trauma: that which it won't tell its story =/= total recall
how can history tell?
history, a compensatory device?

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

gist
جان کلام
مراد

[Geoffrey Bowker]
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~gbowker/forget.html

Grand Historiographer, Sima Qin (1994 [ca 100BC]), writing of the burning of the books in 213BC, notes that the Chief Minister adviced the emperor that: Aall who possess literature such as the Songs, the Documents, and the sayings of the hundred schools should get rid of it without penalty. If they have not got rid of it a full thirty days after the order has reached them, they should be branded and sent to do forced labor on the walls. there should be exemption for books concerned with medicine, pharmacy, divination by tortoise-shell and milfoil, the sowing of crops, and the planting of trees (31). In response to this, the Emperor ordered the famous burning of the books - to cite Qin: Athe First Emperor collected up and got rid of the Songs, the Documents, and the sayings of the hundred schools in order to make the people stupid and ensure that in all under Heaven there should be no rejection of the present by using the past. The clarification of laws and regulations and the settling of statutes and ordinances all stared with the First Emperor. He standardized documents.


(to think of) memory as a construction of the present

analyzing organizational memory
organizing analytical memory
memorizing organizational analysis
--> multifaceted stories open to interpretation =/= true/false facts

****remembering: an activity which carries with it its own context****

work on ajayeb and my ongoing commentary on archive and memory is part and parcel of the organizational theory

not to forget that:
•rediscovery is easier than remembering
•statistics --as--> filtering mechanism --as--> proactive forgetting
•forgetting ==> change of identity ['c[...]

[...]cientific/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 ==>? “potential memory” (~= possible future reconstructions) <-- rejecting the ways in which memory is structured in the organization named Iran, or Middle East, or Germany, or Europe,
needed for development of potential memory:
•(forms of) erasure of local context --> to some degree this is always done
•(forms of) classification system --> computerized, affectual, or materially textured categories

* construction is always reconstruction *

artificial memory (characteristic of the 16th century:) “a search for the perfectly proportioned image containing the ‘soul’ of the knowledge to be remembered” --to--> discovery of the right logical category ==> classifying the memorization the world scientifically

classification system ==> filter --> encoding (of information about the environment) ==> coherent framework = memory (Schachter, 1996)

Bowker > Matsuda > Edouard Claparede's experiment (1907) of having a stranger rush into the classroom, do something outrageous, and then have students describe what happened --> “that the past--even of a simple event--was less a record than a sort of taxonomy. Not perceptions, but categorization of familiar types was the major function of memory”
#bambi

pigeonholing of facts

how apass as an organizations is coding fo[...]

[...]>


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 Greeks, is the mother of the Muses

occult memory systems <== Renaissance Hermetic tradition --?--> lullism (lullaby? Hoda) <--✕-- rhetoric tradition

the history of memory

the problems of the mental image, of the activation of images, of the grasp of reality through images

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

the horror of no longer remembering the reason for forgetting, or, “when the times comes for our battle, the memories'll be the armour”
Thyrza Goodeve


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

knowledge infrastructure
how do changes in knowledge infrastructures reinforce or redistributes authority, influence, and power? --> new ways of thinking and acting

create + share + dispute knowledge

(Facebook, Google, etc.:) vast stores of anonymized data to analysis and exploitation, engaging users and publics in new ways

axes of change: [fundamental transformations challenging our understanding of the ways knowledge is processed:]
1- technical systems and standards
2- new modes of analyzing social (re)organization that exploit the extensive traces left behind by users of information

including:
•education
•libraries: changing structures, services, and physical spaces
•publishing industry
•intellectual property
•global flow
•knowledge politics: filter bubble, counter-expertise,
•

unpaind individuals
“sticky” processes and routines --> *most knowledge workers’ salaries are still paid by bricks-and-mortar organizations with hierarchical structures, established insitutional cultures, systems of credit and compensation/

eventual rise of a scientific culture of “extreme openness”

(forms that are) human-readable & machine-readable <-- the move i made from my notebook to ajayeb.net



infrastructure =/= system

infrastructure perspective:
•modular
•multi-layered, multi-scaled (layered nature of infrastructure, navigating among different scales)
•rough-cut character
•ecologies/complex adaptive systems
-->** infrastructures consist of numerous systems, each with unique *origins and *goals, which are made to interoperate by means of *standards, socket layers [: a bony hollow into which a structure fits], social norms, and individual behaviors that smooth o[...]

[...]tructures reinforce or redistributes authority, influence, and power? --> new ways of thinking and acting

create + share + dispute knowledge

(Facebook, Google, etc.:) vast stores of anonymized data to analysis and exploitation, engaging users and publics in new ways

axes of change: [fundamental transformations challenging our understanding of the ways knowledge is processed:]
1- technical systems and standards
2- new modes of analyzing social (re)organization that exploit the extensive traces left behind by users of information

including:
•education
•libraries: changing structures, services, and physical spaces
•publishing industry
•intellectual property
•global flow
•knowledge politics: filter bubble, counter-expertise,
•

unpaind individuals
“sticky” processes and routines --> *most knowledge workers’ salaries are still paid by bricks-and-mortar organizations with hierarchical structures, established insitutional cultures, systems of credit and compensation/

eventual rise of a scientific culture of “extreme openness”

(forms that are) human-readable & machine-readable <-- the move i made from my notebook to ajayeb.net



infrastructure =/= system

infrastructure perspective:
•modular
•multi-layered, multi-scaled (layered nature of infrastructure, navigating among different scales)
•rough-cut character
•ecologies/complex adaptive systems
-->** infrastructures consist of numerous systems, each with unique *origins and *goals, which are made to interoperate by means of *standards, socket layers [: a bony hollow into which a structure fits], social norms, and individual behaviors that smooth out connections among them
=/=
system perspective:
•fully coherent
•deliberately engineered
•end-to-end process


(Weinberger's notion of) *stoping point*
“knowledge as a series of stopping points”
•printed journal articles
•books
•textbooks
•(other fixed products)
--[changing to]--> a world where knowledge is perceptually in motion }--> in a way ajayeb.net is part of this transition
we face a world of abundant information, hyperlinked ideas, permission-free resources, highly public interaction, and massive, unresolved disagreement. (Weinberger)
individual expertise is (many argue) being replaced by the wisdom of crowds: noisy and endlessly contentious, but also rich, diverse, and multi-skilled [=/= fantasies of Black Mirror TV series]


wikis of all sorts

(?is my ajayeb.net a) citizen science

vigor and growing utility

“distance matters”
(Olson)


commodification of data : the presentation of d[...]

[...] individuals
“sticky” processes and routines --> *most knowledge workers’ salaries are still paid by bricks-and-mortar organizations with hierarchical structures, established insitutional cultures, systems of credit and compensation/

eventual rise of a scientific culture of “extreme openness”

(forms that are) human-readable & machine-readable <-- the move i made from my notebook to ajayeb.net



infrastructure =/= system

infrastructure perspective:
•modular
•multi-layered, multi-scaled (layered nature of infrastructure, navigating among different scales)
•rough-cut character
•ecologies/complex adaptive systems
-->** infrastructures consist of numerous systems, each with unique *origins and *goals, which are made to interoperate by means of *standards, socket layers [: a bony hollow into which a structure fits], social norms, and individual behaviors that smooth out connections among them
=/=
system perspective:
•fully coherent
•deliberately engineered
•end-to-end process


(Weinberger's notion of) *stoping point*
“knowledge as a series of stopping points”
•printed journal articles
•books
•textbooks
•(other fixed products)
--[changing to]--> a world where knowledge is perceptually in motion }--> in a way ajayeb.net is part of this transition
we face a world of abundant information, hyperlinked ideas, permission-free resources, highly public interaction, and massive, unresolved disagreement. (Weinberger)
individual expertise is (many argue) being replaced by the wisdom of crowds: noisy and endlessly contentious, but also rich, diverse, and multi-skilled [=/= fantasies of Black Mirror TV series]


wikis of all sorts

(?is my ajayeb.net a) citizen science

vigor and growing utility

“distance matters”
(Olson)


commodification of data : the presentation of datasets as complete, interchangeable products in readily exchanged formats


data-driven science
problem of evaluation
--> ***Do we know things if we cannot explain why they are true?*** (Anderson)

hierachically organized forms of credentialing

in Julia's seminar we were trying to examine: commodified data analysis tools and widely available software skills ==> (larger number of participants to) analyze data and run models

(*a problem with university students:) [students who do appear] more motivated by the university as a *rite of passage* (گذار از بلوغ) and a *lifestyle*
=/= learning
*professors are no longer seen as infallible experts, but as resources whose facts can be checked in real time

(question of) standard / ontology --> (desire for) universality[...]

[...]ntal and systematic --> means by which non-knowledge is produced and maintained
**(Robert Proctor's) agnotology: the systematic study of ignorance** [+ Irvin Schick: unknowledge =/= ignorance --> socially constructed lack of knowledge : a conscious absence of socially pertinent knowledge, for example ‘terra incognita --> Western political and economic attention --> enabling colonialism...]

institutional elements of knowledge infrastructure:
•universities
•libraries
•scientific societies
}--> they all have typically conservative, slow-changing forms* -- because when they change, authority, influence, and power are redistributed; (changes takes decades rather than years) --> a long-time-scale, historically informed framework to situate our thinking --> sustainable, accumulative, and shareable qualitative databases


internet-supported citizen science

the 19th century's Darwin favored ‘genetic form’ --> massive and global shift in modes of classification


standard --> *preserving the meaning of data is a human affair, requiring continuous curation


#knowledge zoom lens --> “the long now” (Bowker)


(it took 200 years for printed book's) *intellectual armature* (that now we consider intuitive:)
(in ajayeb.net i am responding and working all of them)
•index
•table of contents
•bibliography
•footnotes
•generally agreed rules on plagiarism
•page numbers (--> =^77988.1.6$shathiat)


***qualitative science*** : detailed, indepth, and meaning-oriented investigations --> analysis, statistical (for example the social network analysis strengths of scope and summation in Braudel's study)
(question of my “writing”:) how to nourish mechanisms for large-scale, long-term research?
-we need to go beyond one-off projects to develope systems and standards for collecting, curating (my knowledge, ajayeb's knowledge) while simultaneously protecting subject's identities and interests /***
=/= short-term, project-by-project work

-(constantvzw is doing this:) build collaborative sciences
sociotechnical phenomena do not rest within the domain of a single discipline

-comparative analysis techniques
comparison across cases (--> how Kobe in his case-based work produces a critically comparative data?)
creation of compatable data [: properly documented --> facilitate sharing] (--> how for my ajayeb?)
(in your work and research -->) encouraging the identification of crucial similarities and differences

-sustainable and sharable data archives, collected over multiple investigative projects --> ajayeb.net = knowledge/thoughts/notes of multiple projects (--> is this my “data”?)

cyberscholarship

#lens, to scale up qualitative social scien[...]