[...]t 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 commodities]
patrons as constituent مولفه (==> new knowledge + themselves as knowers) =/= seamless information consumer discursively produced as an unmarked singular independent self-contained stable universal white male heteronormative technophilic subject [<-- this donesn't realy exisit as a person, rather as discoursive productions]
(now) our electronic recreation is work: our every click is surveilled, generating data about our desires and curiosities that feeds back into our formation as techno-capital subjects (@Sven's enthusiasm with social media--how can Sven has a real chance of producing resistance knowledge?) --> this is not freedom! (-an account of freedom for one entails reciprocal unfreedom for others) --> mixtures of work and play in this new economy, (Calvert > Bateson) the meta-communicative nature of *play[= strict rules with genuine freedom, the dual essence of play: curiosity and relationality];
(Calvert arguing for) “knowle[...]

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

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

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

(women's) mini-encounters with god --> kind of materiality of god tha[...]

[...] 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 cushioned recluse is direct, seductive, and mimetic

“When affect makes its jump between the visible thing, the idea, and the social sensibility, it can leave in its wake uncanny connections between otherwise disparate states of arrest, like shock and recluse گوشه نشينی” (Stewart)


@Hoda: affect jumps into view as the shock of an unassimilated trauma

cocoon room
holing up in your living room ==> “out there” ==> search for the arresting presence

spectrality and concrete substance

(?when am i) “relaxing” the jumpy move of affect

*Stewart's “jump of affect”
tactile image --(satisfies)--> move of affect --(actualizes)--> something tempting/haunting
-affecting presence at rest
-[in glamour magazines] models frozen in time and space stare back at you in a scene that stages the jump from fantasy to actual body/image and back
-jump from ideal to matter to ideal

-what to wear as the magic of affect itself

copy ~= contact

movies, ads, malls, car phones, daydreams,

modernity's mimetic machine


(“middle class” [or what people thinking as “Iranians"] is not just a “norm” it is a) *womblike space of affect* (where sentimentality and interiority becomes tactile, where ideals and materiality grow to excess,) (imploding under the weight of its own literal embodiment,,,)
-(it is an affective space) where the hegemonic claim *to channel trauma into beauty* is actualized:<[...]

[...]ll continues, despite the fact that ‘thought has already made it irrelevant’ --> thamii تامی, (for example birds for Attar are merely decorative features of Attar's social, psychic, and philosophical space)
soth صوث --> speculating outside of the human
sim سیم --> small island of meaning
etimom اتیموم --> everything is made of mind
hhbn هبن --> hand-holding benevolent narrator (-which is vanished)
(auto) cad کد --> (automatic) comforting aesthetic distances
iockat --> intentional objects commonly known as thoughts
atot آتو --> (you only ever perceive your particular) anthropomorphic translations of things
ejich جیش --> exhilarating jump into cognitive hyperspace --> displacement that Copernicus or Derrida does
foe --> fantasies of embeddedness [<-- phenomenology <== grounding of Kant (begining in 1900)]
avaa اوا --> a vertiginous antiliteral abyss
iwen --> intimacy with existing nonhumans
mok --> mathematization of knowing (--> Descartes, Newton) ==> hiding philosophical and ideological decisions made in acts of knowing =/= ontology (as a vital and contested political terrain)
icad --> ideology of “the consumer” and its “demands” (that capital then “meets”) --> adventure of modernity
fvod --> from the viewpoint of “objective” description (a bad way of explicating the objects that are already here)
toc --> troops of critique
towwk توک --> ‘technology of what we know’ (techniques that decide the differences between ‘what we know’ and ‘what is’. Morton's hyperobject is a towwk)
usoc --> uncanny strangeness of existence (work of Heidegger)
lawot --> (something is) ‘laying around in the workshop of thinking’ (let's reuse what appears to be broken lawot)

visist = visit + resist


correlationism: the notion that philosophy can only talk within a narrow bandwidth, restricted to the human-world correlate : meaning is only possible between a human mind and ‘what it thinks' = its “objects” (flimsy شل و ول and tenuous رفيق as they are) ~-> the light on in the fridge when you close the door
-Heidegger (towering through) is a correlationist who asserts that without Dasein, it makes no sense whatsoever to talk of the truth of things, which for him implies their very existence--for him idealism, not realism, holds the key to philosophy. (Heidegger's tool-analysis: when equipment--which for all intents and purposes could be anything at all--is functioning, or “executing” [Vollzug], it withdraws from access [Entzug]; that it is only when a tool is broken that it seems to become present-at-hand [vorhanden] --> is this what Femke is proposing to apass?)

Descartes uncritically importing the very scholasticism his work undermined

[*]epistemology:[...]

[...]sponding to that demand of name is to give your name as a performance in an amerindian mode: “three were dead before they knew.” that's my name.] The material ritual practice of ‘recognition’ : “Who is there?” and “It's me!” of the everyday life ==> makes us concrete subject (in the ideology in democracy and law) --> independent agents with self-produced identities. (in capitalist societies) **subject: a self-conscious “responsible” agent whose actions can be explained by his or her beliefs and thoughts.** subject formation defines the limits of each individual; values, desires, and preferences. ---- in a way that I realize that a ‘hailing’ was addressed at me, thinking ‘that means me,’ and the answer is what transforms me into a subject : a “mis-recognition” [--> we can open a dossier on prophet and ‘answering’ the call]; [~-> what Tarof hails?] ---- for Althusser being aware of the other is a form of ideology. (how to recognize ourselves outside of ideology?)} (Foucauldian/Althusserian: passively defined by identity ==> mobilizing around these identities --?--> potential for resistance)
(Althusser's) police officer [محتسب mohtaseb?] --hails--> concrete subject
(Foucault's) expert discourses --hails--> sexuality
(Adorno's) mass media --hails--> passive consumer
(Gauntlett's) uncritical consumption --hails--> assumption --> bad worlding
(Mulvey's) cinema --hails--> male protagonist
(Butler's) boy/girl --hails--> gender identity
(Sina's) تعارف Tarof --hails--> divnity ??

***(crafted faithfully?) more potent the tropes, the truer the story***
(without being distracted by scandals and meta-stories?!)

stories traffic in tropes, figures of speech
(the dogmatic and bizzar idea of) “trope-free communication”

*metaplasm, remodeling, remolding,,, inverting meanings, transposing the body of communication,
(in my graphs, or rigs, what a substitution in a string might change the meaning?)

what is the “troping that makes a fleshly difference”?

origin story (~=> establishing origin) ~=> sober scientific report ~=> scales of intelligence ~=> human as master

the “mere” village dog:
-canine Eves surviving in their mitochondrial DNA
-canine Adam through his Y-chromosome legacies

which metaplasmic, remodeled versions of ‘name’ could give ajayeb's being

(in apass I have been against the “what do I want as an artist?” question:)
pay attention to significant otherness =/= reflection of one's intentions

what is the name of the game? complexity, flexibility, opportunism, (finite worlds called:) domestic, wild, feral,
[who is naming the world what?
•accelerationism: “game-over”
•capitalism: “resource”
•technophobia: “obsolescence”
•technophilia: “information”
•monotheism: “transition”
•sc[...]

[...]e contingencies of strange connections
•foreclosed in the narrow channels of corporate expansion
•clashing state and popular terrorisms
•our best hopes (as well as our inchoate terrors)

*Tsing: “Contingency surrounds us, but we ignore its power to shape the future.”


**europe's secular prophecy's formulaic tropes for encapsulating time**
•most powerful future-making stories have told of the fulfillment of principles of progress and rationality
•driving force of technology will transform society
•ideal of democracy will be progressively encoded in law
=/=
**anti-progress prophecy's formulaic tropes for encapsulating time**
•national genius of a chosen people will blossom
•human nature will reestablish historic gender roles and racial hierarchies
•the essence of ancient civilizations will rise again to vie and clash

}--> There is no room for contingent connections in any of these predictions


(most important story of our time:) *the story of globalization*:
•the world is entering a global era without political or economic rifts
•nation-states and cultures are increasingly irrelevant
•a global menu of consumerdesires and entrepreneurial standards frames identity and sets individual and collective goals

--> since the end of the Cold War:
•global expansion of a few giant corporations
•the great flows of people from one continent to another
•forging of transnational standards for economics and politics
•development of widely spread audiences for once parochial forms of popular culture

--> Global capitalism is not seamless:
•leapfrogging financial crises
•“antiglobalization” politics springing up
•deflating policymakers’ hopes for a smooth transition to corporate empire


ultimate fantasy of an *era without politics*
ultimate fantasy of a *more complex evolutionary plan*
=/= contingency & interconnection



principles of (Tsing and Pollman's) Global Futures game:
you tell the story of this coalescence, and if your fellow players accept the story, it makes history: it becomes a part of the world of the game.
the goal is to develop a set of *coalescences* that fulfills a preassigned mission.
whoever tells the best story while completing the mission wins.

you (tell stories in which you) are free to:
•make the world a better place
•hatch a nefarious scheme
•narrate a true story

[*]coalescence: the historical force that arises from a transformative coming together of disparate groups, institutions, or things:
an unexpected connection ==> a “historical force"[= something that might change the world]
(parties might be: groups, institutions, ideas, iden[...]

[...]justice, extreme poverty, or excessive violence and then recount a growing consciousness of the structures that produced them, #Robin Hood]

inadvertent and even accidental convergences ==?==> political movements in Southeast Asia (throughout the late 1980s and 1990s) --> (students who participated in antigovernment protests in Rangoon/Yangon in the late 1980) described their entry into the political sphere (less exposed to the object of social injustice, not in terms of an originally shared project, not a shared analysis, but rather) as the result of a situational convergence (from which an ideological project had yet to be fabricated)

(to understand) your relationship to the political as *subjection to force* (and hence) ~=> *the violation of subjectivity* (=/= acceding to a fuller subjectivity)

they were just there (summoned to events the nature of which they did not know in advance) --> *ephemeral mobilization*:
•by anonymous calls (precipitated objectless gatherings by cell phone messaging, an anonymous call of an ideologically vacant sort)
•ephemeral rumors
•without ideological commitment
•by curiosity (gathered only to find out why others were gathered)
•attraction to spectacle
•to consume, pornographically, the visceral images of police and military violence
•
--> the idea of participation loses its meaning

formation of a crowd
materialization of the state's force

ephemeral mobilization (which later sets the stage for politicization) is a familiar instrument of power

the group:
•(has a) monopoly on violence
•manifestation of a will to democracy (for example the way Iranian movements were read by international bodies)

ahistoricism of conspiratorial orientation --> “powerful but secret instrumentalities ==> temporary formations” --misses--> the transformations of social consciousness and political possibility

(to open to the thought of a world beyond you)

narratives of accidental politicization (~ movements emerging from crowds without ever becoming masses or classes)
--✕--> from the state
--✕--> from the transnational media + whose circuits the images of these convergences travel
--> an experience of immediacy (as the origin of politics =/= encounter with representations of the world), sudden activation of an immediate presence in the public sphere --> political conceived as itself being contingent

to resignify and reorient the problem of the political in terms of civilizational difference (rather than ideological, and hence economic, difference)


the so-called nocturnal sudden death syndrome

rapacious female specter
in the fear of being killed by this nearly limitless desire for female dead, men (Thai constructor workers in Singapore) started to pai[...]

[...] film version of magic):
•witchcraft does not explain the world
•witchcraft is not an alternative mode of reasoning
•witchcraft does not permit anyone to control the forces (that assault and wound human being)
•witchcraft provides neither certitude nor escape from the anxieties that death bears for the living

(the interiority of the other is unknown and unknowable ==>)
[*]witchcraft ==provides==>
•an idiom in which the world's very immunity to explanation is affirmed (often with violent and terrifying consequence)
•figures and narrative forms in which to address (also reproduce) the opacity and ambivalence of sociality

[context:]
the other (like the empty seashell) is unknowable, though we must engage others and seek recognition from them to escape solitude and death [...] in forms of giving and reciprocation that demand generosity but that are also likely to provoke avarice --emerge--> witchcraft: a relentless question about appearances and the problem of knowing what they disclose

doubling of genitalia and mouth in Buli dream imagery

(marriage: to manage witchcraft)
tradition “establishes the ideal format for conviviality” ==ensuring==> sexuality and consumption are made the basis of sociality =/= witchcraft (as a perversion of marriage)

in Buli (against mistranslation or misrecognition of the foreign modern):
•Christian missionization (19th and early 20th century, and again in the 1930s)
•modernist developmentalism and statism under Suharto
•technologization associated with natural resource-based capitalism
}--scenario--> effort to become modern ==> enter an order of truth and knowledge (=/= dissimulation and doubt)

valorization of reciprocity (in Halmahera)

Morris asks: is not the coimbrication of doubt/belief precisely what the discourses of the Enlightenment science, namely knowledge through revelation of what is, promised to replace?

(Bubandt's assumptions in Kant/Morris terms:)
•doubt <== anxiety, fear, suspicion, rage (--> affective dimension)
•doubt <== an incapacity to transcend the aporia that defines the relation between the empirical and the transcendental (--> epistemological dimension)

“I have never seen a cannibal witch” --> anthropology's epistemological conundrum (an a priori postulate) --Kant--> an irreducible impasse between the empirical and the transcendental, of the incapacity of sensory experience (intuition) to provide the basis of absolute knowledge (=/= merely general knowledge)

Foucault --> intuition cannot ground knowledge of the absolute ~=> knowledge of individual human beings and their empirical histories cannot provide knowledge of “the human”

Evans-Pritchard --> witchcraft satisfies the demands for an explanation of the singular event: this d[...]

[...]be seen* (<-- this must be understood for any one who is invested in ‘showing’)
***--> the alternation between what you conceal and what you reveal (is[?] at the heart of thinking about creativity, about reproduction, about the perpetuation of society, about the perpetuation of relations)


exchange wealth between two clan groups
wealth
•has an aesthetic form
•has to be grown as well as exchanged
•must be accumulated privately and secretly
•must be revealed at the *moment of transfer*
•has to take a proper form ~ recognized by others as appropriate


[*]aesthetic = a proper form (at the moment of revelation) that other people have to respond
(--✕--> european notion of aesthetic = eliciting a sense of appreciation of beauty)


(my sister's wedding had/created) an appropriate form


**** exchange situations [shows, exhibitions, events, weddings, etc.] has to appear in a certain form, otherwise people will not recognize it, otherwise they fail to impress people ****
@Foad

-what are Tehran's contemporary contexts in which we can see exchanges working?

younger people are impressing one another in terms of consuming or participation in sports, or mobile phones, or whatever --> they create different kinds of relations (#telegram iran?)
(how among my freinds we impress one another?)
younger people, invest value in different things from what older people do


money does not have anything else but number

things that shine, things that glisten, things that sparkle --> a sense in which these objects *give off a presence* [@Janina] and people are affected by this

*quality of shininess* indicates the successful intervention of ancestral spirits --> a spiritual condition (acquainted with health)

they must display to be regarded as worthwhile

with mobile phones: what is going on here, what is their value, how are they circulating, how do people regard them?


(ibn ebn ابن) people belong because their fathers belonged and so forth + what they give away, the (gift) shells, can be regarded as female : items that have come into men's possessions (=/= Karin's gifts)
-so the shells are passive objects, women are/were (traditionally), classically regarded as objects in a similar way and were given the names of shells


***how to think about vocabulary:***
-i cannot start using economics of the market to describe what i am talking about
-in the vocabulary of gift exchange (Strathern) may be able to find the vocabulary of analysis (like an artist choosing the color)
-Strathern choice: the vocabulary of gift exchange might give her the vocabulary by which to start describing, is an *artificial choice*. the vocabulary of the gift econo[...]

[...]rs

[*]drift: to be carried slowly by a current of air or water :
•move passively, aimlessly or involuntarily into a certain situation or condition
•a steady movement or developement from one thing toward another
•*your body is an index of its environment* (= jellyfish: when provoked give off a green glow... *glowing in response to provocation*)
•to be sent adrift as mutation
•the general intention of an argument (--> in writing: *technique of drifting*)
◦poetic joints
◦mixing ontologies into larger organizations
◦

blend of tissue
reorder not only life but also light

-(Sagan -->) life: how matter interacts with interconnected systems that include organisms in their distinct perceiving worlds

-(Uexküll -->) Umwelt: perceptual bubbles (of the most unidentifiable animals: ticks, spiders, inverts) ==> ‘organs of animals are counterparts of lived environments’ : ***animal body: inverted map of its environment*** (mediated by its capacity to interpret habitat through bodily sensation) [Uexküll using music to define the laws of nature: “life = musical response,” effects of *animal capitalism*]

to travel through stages of evolution of the consumer product ~=> becoming a new harmony (<-- using jellyfish as advertising in posthuman consumerism)

-(Lingis -->) [*]sensation: ملقمه amalgamations made of movements and affects that shape the energetic relay between subjects and objects,, an intensity --that--> pressures us --feel--> our cohabitation --in--> a sensible environment --that--> opens outward (=/= simulation of our sensorys or nervous systems) ==> subject is *involved* into the sensuousness of being : *excitation of affect and desire within a sensuous environment ==generate==> substance of self*
•percepts oringinating in environmental harmonization

tranimals invoke the social, affective, sensorial response-abilities of becoming and eating [<-- Hayward's affirmative poetics of trans- --✕--> Stewart's much more complex pattern of description]

-my art work has been more about intensity + techne (= baroque?), than aesthetics ==> ([{when i make images} sharing] our) subjugation to sensation


( sensibility [ ... ) sensuousness ]
                 |
affect <--  sensation --> affect
   affect          affect
          affect affect   affect
        affect      ::{~body~}::


sensation --distribute--> affects & percepts (across bodies)

excitation (unleashes bodily organization at the site of contact) = zone of an *expressed threshold* =/= zone of contact


multispecies materialities --Grosz--> life folds over itself to embrace its contact with materiality


rabbit mammalizes light
glow: a dynamizing force ==> making matte[...]

[...]reshold* =/= zone of contact


multispecies materialities --Grosz--> life folds over itself to embrace its contact with materiality


rabbit mammalizes light
glow: a dynamizing force ==> making matter more


Hayward: through [Alba's] glow, her artfulness, we are reminded that species are not just relationships, nor are species ever directly in relationship with other species, we are resonances and dissonances of intensification, energetic cadences of one another--a sensorial ensemble [<-- what marketing would say about this?]


space between scientific experimentation (biocultural) & domestic cohabitation (composition #Cinderella, pet) --evoke--> invisible labour of jellyfish, research on the proliferation and patterns of cancer cells and the sensation of somalumenality [Hayward's Alba]


(Anker > Hayward:) the chimera must be understood in a social context: these beasts have always reflected the social, scientific and religious circumstances <-- my project in zoological vandalism


(Hayward's neologism --> posthumanist repositioning of visuality) carnophallogocentric visual appetite
...glow (intensifying vision) drifts through the bodies of consumers

eating (ingesting and killing of) jellyfish usually takes the form of dried crisps sprinkled into salads and Chinese food



Cinderella's techne --> companion
Crusoe's techne --> human

-fictional kitchen where Cinderella works (and is not a master of)

[learning from] Cinderella (her room has been undone and remade by cohabitation with birds, mice, evil mother --> changing the self and adapting) ==> ontology: a practice of co-constitutive awareness


Alba --engineered--> to glow
pig --engineered--> to become sausage

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





Seymour
bad affect
(bad environmentalism's) respond to mainstream environmentalism + questioning its broader ideals of nature
=/= conventional environmental affect

both identify & respond to the aforementioned absurdities and ironies, through absurdity and irony + related affects and sensibilities:
•irreverence بى ادبى
•ambivalence
•camp
•frivolity هرزه
•indecorum بى نزاکتى
•awkwardness
•sardonicism زهر خنده
•perversity
•playfulness
•glee شاد شاد

affects and sensibilities typically associated with environmentalism:
•gloom
•doom
•guilt
•shame
•didacticism
•prescriptiveness
•sentimentality احساساتى
•reverence حرمت
•seriousness
•sincerity
•earnestness
•sanctimony تقدس
•self-right[...]

[...]d my father's brother's son. we said: “baba, we won't give you a goat. eat us if you must.” the spirit began to get angry. he said if i accept this for you, then others will do the same. (after negotiation) he accepted only from one person and not others. the issue is still unresolved.

religiously infused conscience
banality of secular cruelty
long-standing intimacy between violence and the sacred

#story
Nitin is jinn and no jinn wants to marry their daughter to someone who sells chicken for a living. Nitin has debilitating nightmares about dying chickens.
•poultry industry
•cage-free farming


(there is no “irreducible” ontological gap, disjuncture of temporality, ontological untranslatability, between:)
time of history/capital ~= time of the gods/ritual

both ritual and capital --involve--> exchange relations ==> unpredictable forms of movement (across domains)

> •(show of being halal) recitation of kalma with the first bird and the last, assuming comprehensive coverage for the ones who fall between
•Skylard slaughterhouse building hospitals and temples
--> emotional, ritual, commercial traffic across sacred and profane

consumption of neighboring species


*cruelty as play*
(a less cultivated form of pleaser?)

deadended bird
ceased-but-not-killed mouse
not dead, not killed, but not quite a being either

the power to turn animals into things, as of they were never anything else

recognition of playful actually --Singh--> ethics of immanent obligation

([*]collaboration: interrupt each other's train of thought)


(dramatization of) agonistic intimacy : a relationship of proximity and violence between neighboring social groups (the body of neighboring species)
--Taussig--> ritual violenceolence (the most stunning prop is the human: the all too profane body with its various appendages, fluids, undulating surfaces, folds, exists, entrances)
--Veena--> sacrificial violence : dramatization of one's own inevitable death (there is a certain anxiety around violence that is integral to *the imagination of an ethical life* in Hindu texts and practices)
--Sina--> gamer video of zoo

condition of viscerality
a condition of being ransomed to death

Venna --> a major theological transformation (a critique of violence) in a nonmessianic nonsoteriological sense رستگاری شناختی in South Asia took place with the Mahabharata

*cruelty =/= violence*

•the feeling of noncruilty expressed in the unpredictable attachments, at times across species (companionship) in the Mahabharata (Veena) [in Attar? in Kelile and Demne?]
•companionable thinking (Cavell)
•commission species (Haraway)[...]

[...]r />
devastation ==> cohabitation (of species that were apart before)


Kelile and Demne --> agonistics can be comic (even if repercussions of tragic) --> mood of violence


“everything has to die”
question of routinized ritual or commercial production of killable bodies and of things ceasing to matter

animals don't die in villages, they could only be killed

anthropology of ethics
what is to kill?
what is to kill well?
what is to ber killed?
what is to be killable?

can we speak of a quality of death?

(Veena, Cavell, Harraway's) ‘companion’ is not a resolution to ethical quandaries of human-animal relations


culpability of homicide <--> veneration of sacrifice

life =/= zoo =/= bios

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

retro: (a postmodern sensibility firmly rooted in the present) appropriating [use + exploit, pick + mix] the aesthetics (aspects) of the past while not longing for its return =/= nostalgia: a mode of resistance against the present

retro: a mode of reading, an attitude towards the past without emotional attachment

ironic consumption...


... =/= how adults might perceive the political context

dissident discourse
(audience looking for) counter regime messages

*nostalgia + nationalism within a postcolonial Europe*
Europe's repressed imperial history --> longing for the divided Europe of the Cold War --> postsocialist nostalgia (in television [--> cultural memory])

past: retro comedy

comedy: retrospective representation

(comedy does not?) antagonize its audience ~= build a memory conflict
[*]comedy: strive for reconciliation (by focusing on the everyday life of its colorful characters)

the good soldier Svejk --> good-natured side of czech national identity

self-congratulatory narrative <-- (when you think you are always) morally on the right side
@apass

(tv series) forging resistance-based (national or individual) memory


the way in which a society understands its own past --> through culture (not a matter for politicians and legislative measures alone) that particular narratives about the past are kept alive and help to structure understandings of the present

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

strolling: walking in the city --> sense of belonging to the city
walking in 19th century (starting with England) --> something for the lower class
--later--> walking became a middle class pursuit (something you do in your garden ==> parks for walking)
city walking --> claiming step by step parts of the city --> practice of belonging [~ sense of place (in [...]

[...]s created by the individual on the ground) [~/=? a category of exclusion]

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

anger: an expression by which the observer perceives as if something *happened to the person who is angry* (a passive experience, not something that the person did)

intuition = recognition

•memory is really bad at remembering lists
•memory is really good at remembering routes through space
•(humans are good at remembering) agent-thinking =/= abstract notions


*anger ==reveals==> world*

anger ==> makes you ungly ==> prompts action
[the strange connection of: action <--> ugliness]

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

postsocialist nostalgia: relational expression of a heterogeneous set of desires that operate in an intercultural network

Imre

western European longing for the divided Europe of the Cold War --> Europe’s repressed imperial history


two different modes of remembering:
•history --> official, public and professional modes (associated with commemoration and musealization)
•memory --> unofficial, popular and private modes (frequently associated with nostalgia and consumerism)

literary and cinematic texts that foreground some form of preoccupation with the past


-television (amnesiac qualities) has been accused of undermining memory and perpetuating a sense of ephemerality and transience --✕--> *television is also a powerful mnemonic tool*

***television is both amnesiac & mnemonic*** --> tv's propensity to resonate in different temporalities at once

television: a vehicle for the transformation of and a source of information about the quotidian ~ primary generator of collective memory [<-- this is now social media, Instagram TikTok]

historical drama
pseudo documentaryry
period drama series
--> providing the viewers with a “useable past” that is always related to and relevant to the concerns of the present


in the postsocialist region, the past has especially sensitive nerve endings in the present

national regimes & individual citizens alike have tried to revive usable paradigms of identity from past periods (to clear away or at least cover up the historical debris left behind)

television as a massive archaeological site

polymorphic, undefinable identity with tentacles in several fields that makes television (and popular internet media) so confusing

(to understand who has stakes) in keeping history and memory practices separate and in minimizing the role of television and other popular media


(internet popular media) television's messy status as a medium

communist parties --> mould television to standardize citizens's [...]

[...]r />
(internet popular media) television's messy status as a medium

communist parties --> mould television to standardize citizens's everyday domestic life rhythms
•cheerleading docufictions
•educational quiz shows
•uplifting entertainment such as theatrical broadcasts of Russian and European classics
•doctored news
•limited advertising
•domestically produced dramatic series focused firmly on the romanticized historical past

{projective ideals =/= actual experiential realities of socialism}==> layer of ironic distance between [media (television) and its viewers]

(1990s following the Soviet empire's disintegration -->) ironic overidentification ==> nostalgia
--Imre--> evasion of television allows for nostalgia to be misframed and misappropriated as a sentiment that marks the end of socialism [temporally and clearly demarcates backward-looking postsocialist populations from forward-looking (Western) observers]
----> takes into account television's (and internet social media) relevance to collective memory

post-X nostalgia: a near-visceral yearning for the false sense of safety derived from the memory of X (fetishistically attached to public personas or consumer products of the past)


nostalgia: an interpretive framework }<-- **sense of intimate sociality disrupted by the collapse of a centralized system of governance and the influx of globalization**

nostalgia is a discourse (that is not specific to Eastern Europe) populations disappointed with and unequipped to deal with the advent of market democracy


there are more than one way of (content of) longing

television: a medium whose chief mode of operation is in reruns, recombinations, circulating formats and generic adaptations that constantly interweave national, regional and global scales ~= digital social media
<br /> (Imre > Boyer) to trace nostalgia back to the intellectual origins of European cultural nationalisms

...diverse and contradictory sentiments that make us see European cultures conjoined in mutual relationships of dependence, rather than separation

(Imre -->) *nostalgia as something by definition national at its core*

nostalgia --foreground--> coexistence of different temporalities in the present

postsocialist nostalgia in Romania is similar in structure to late socialist nostalgia of the 1980s in Hungary

manage feelings of dislocation ==> longing for national homes
~~--> preference for literature and high art as expressions of what has been identified as cultural nationalism (“national tradition = tradition invested in high art”) + perceived illegitimacy of popular cultural production and consumption (concealed by the allegedly rebellious “dissident” status of intellectuals) ==organize==> the c[...]

[...]n Europe) populations disappointed with and unequipped to deal with the advent of market democracy


there are more than one way of (content of) longing

television: a medium whose chief mode of operation is in reruns, recombinations, circulating formats and generic adaptations that constantly interweave national, regional and global scales ~= digital social media

(Imre > Boyer) to trace nostalgia back to the intellectual origins of European cultural nationalisms

...diverse and contradictory sentiments that make us see European cultures conjoined in mutual relationships of dependence, rather than separation

(Imre -->) *nostalgia as something by definition national at its core*

nostalgia --foreground--> coexistence of different temporalities in the present

postsocialist nostalgia in Romania is similar in structure to late socialist nostalgia of the 1980s in Hungary

> manage feelings of dislocation ==> longing for national homes
~~--> preference for literature and high art as expressions of what has been identified as cultural nationalism (“national tradition = tradition invested in high art”) + perceived illegitimacy of popular cultural production and consumption (concealed by the allegedly rebellious “dissident” status of intellectuals) ==organize==> the contents of collective memory


Imre --> racialized underpinnings of allegedly “pure” aesthetic judgments


inherently nostalgic and pre-modern postsocialist population <==> Western Europe as the epicentre of progressive scientific modernity


television's capacity for personalization and narrativization

*demiworld of popular culture*
television’s dominant position within the domestic environment and its special appeal to an emotionally available female or feminine consumer --> television: the mass medium of the socialist period --pose--> the danger of a passive mindless consumption of formulaic narratives (a danger that has been ascribed to women’s inferior psychosocial needs and tastes =/= cerebral modernist masculinity of art) ---> go to Baxstrom's realizing the witch


Western European cultural nationalisms

the notion of nostalgic and premodern postsocialist population ==> Western Europe as the epicentre of progressive scientific modernity


West’s fanning of East European nostalgia --> a post-imperial symptom = (expression of a growing Western European awareness that) modernity is plurinodal rather than centred in European metropolitan headquarters


(postimperial European dimension of) *cultural nationalism <~÷+-> nostalgia*
...utopian national rebirth scenarios for a united Germany --> (promoted by intellectual artists) the bad idea that suppression of German nationalism ==open==> influ[...]

[...]eparation

(Imre -->) *nostalgia as something by definition national at its core*

nostalgia --foreground--> coexistence of different temporalities in the present

postsocialist nostalgia in Romania is similar in structure to late socialist nostalgia of the 1980s in Hungary

manage feelings of dislocation ==> longing for national homes
~~--> preference for literature and high art as expressions of what has been identified as cultural nationalism (“national tradition = tradition invested in high art”) + perceived illegitimacy of popular cultural production and consumption (concealed by the allegedly rebellious “dissident” status of intellectuals) ==organize==> the contents of collective memory


Imre --> racialized underpinnings of allegedly “pure” aesthetic judgments


inherently nostalgic and pre-modern postsocialist population <==> Western Europe as the epicentre of progressive scientific modernity


television's capacity for personalization and narrativization

*demiworld of popular culture*
television’s dominant position within the domestic environment and its special appeal to an emotionally available female or feminine consumer --> television: the mass medium of the socialist period --pose--> the danger of a passive mindless consumption of formulaic narratives (a danger that has been ascribed to women’s inferior psychosocial needs and tastes =/= cerebral modernist masculinity of art) ---> go to Baxstrom's realizing the witch


Western European cultural nationalisms

the notion of nostalgic and premodern postsocialist population ==> Western Europe as the epicentre of progressive scientific modernity


West’s fanning of East European nostalgia --> a post-imperial symptom = (expression of a growing Western European awareness that) modernity is plurinodal rather than centred in European metropolitan headquarters


(postimperial European dimension of) *cultural nationalism <~÷+-> nostalgia*
...utopian national rebirth scenarios for a united Germany --> (promoted by intellectual artists) the bad idea that suppression of German nationalism ==open==> influx of American audio-visual culture (that muat be resisted in order to preserve and nourish German culture in its purest literary manifestation)
= logocentric return to the ethos of German Romanticism [Kulturnation --> certain cultural identity --> cliche-ridden elitist racist implications] + new nationalism =/= results of Western integration over the last forty years


aspirational narrative (of nation...)

postimperial power dynamic:
•western researcher --> has the political capital to afford studying popular media
•eastern researcher --> has to faithfully fulfill the role to represent their national cult[...]

[...]bor***

proximity (--> what i heard so much when i went back to iran: to ke inja insti nemiduni تو که اینجا نیستی نمیدونی)

*aesthetic of authenticity* in news reports (<-- mobile phones)
political economy of foreign reporting
politics of hope (with an ambition to inspire all Syrians to rebel)
...emotional attachment to political goals


*revolution: the event that changes people's lives and in relation to which they locate themselves politically
•conflict in Syria began as an uprising, it ended up an international war, which in 2020 appears to have mostly concluded in the favour of the regime =/= revolution
•the word “revolution” means something else to activists in Syria (how the meanings projected on the term changed in accordance to circumstances)
◦(most of the time, artists and activists) ****use a word to galvanise their emotions and bodies**** and inspired them to take actions they would not have imagined to pursue [use of words --> what people hope =/= descriptive]
◦word (for example “revolution”): a marker of an *inward-looking description* of belonging to a broad political community defined by opposition
•“the revolution” --> affectively consumed the pursuit of truth
•an identity-marker (based on a political orientation) --> an inward-looking signifier to mark who one is + what political community they belong to [--> a politics of what one had wanted =/= describe what one observes]
•(revolution:) personified and humanised as a well-meaning political agent (that sometimes strays from its goals by committing errors)
•motivating people to get involved in activism
•

(Said's Orientalism -->) subaltern others (are typically considered) living within a constant state of violence <-- much older Western regime of representation perceived them as culturally close to violence

(Ghazzi > Badiou >) some events are felt as historic as they galvanise the energies of political actors who imagine themselves as ‘mounting the stage of history’ --Koselleck--> acts of information dissemination are engulfed by the event and are aimed at bridging the temporal distance between the desired and experienced ==> “journalism ~= activism”

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

collective memory --> historical victimhood --> consolidating power
(meta-history -->) a view of history as a series of junctures where good fought evil ==Ghazzi==> historical victimhood

global rise of populist politics ==> tropes of self-victimisation
•revolutionary
•resistance
•nationalism
•populism
•neo-fascism
}--> operationalize victimhood (by whom / against whom)

one is wronged, targeted, injured (by the elite, the media, external enemies)
•self = true underdog --> victim
•opponents = inauthentic[...]

[...]ss meditative worship]
-(kinfolk in) swamps, brush, and forest (in terms of discerning the *relationships between clues*)
-(indirect) dealing with the escapable (=?=> tracking strategies + symbolic thought)

a central theme: (a banquet/feast at which) the participants--eater and eaten--risk the improvements of mind against the certainty of occasional poor decisions, (faulty memory, carelessness, errors of judgment, and the decrepitude of age and disease.)
-Those who fled had to understand [the limits of distance, the intentions of the others, and] (the ability to control) the abyssal terror that itself would engulf them if they submitted to panic. ==> mind
-“self” emerged as the consequence of “participation,” a calculative and organizational relatoin of the individual within the group? (and perceiving the so-called “inanimate” entities) --- shaped by the game -- a participant amidst other participants oriented by the action
(David Abraham: Perception is Participation, in an animistic logic)

mind, memory, --> cognition and communication --> reference --> imitating the animal's calls ==> stylized performances ==> (a repertoire of) symbolized references (sign language?) ==> accumulation of synonims (--> we are already consuming symbolic ambition) --> early metaphores --> narratives get out of hand (--> “concrete” is invented) --> [...] (--> narration of past is invented which is always about the future) --> codification of world without tense or causality in language ----> tense & causality ----> pervasive truths
-this diagram is about the future for the subject whom is using the signs, telling the others where the game animal is and will be. in this text i am trying to pantomime a mimicked reference (of where the [game] animal is), sharing the idea of a thing that is syntaxically there, so we can run it. every utterance is about where i have last seen the “animal,” and how fat or far it is. [running had “magical ends” - Peter Nabokov, ‘Indian Running’ (Santa Barbara: Capra, 1981)]

symbolism --> man traveling within himself --> need to travel outside an infinitely larger reality ==> beyond --- different brand(s) of infinity

secular hunting --- the hunt becomes monstrous. i am calling for an old sacred hunt [sustained in myth and ceremony?] of concepts?
-hunt is gestalt(en)

(with our) hopes and tropes

boundary creatures and matters -- fire's function/act was peripheral, was in the threshold world of human passages(?) [then it made an entrance]

humans’ mimetic participation with fire

infinitely complex affinities



to be noted the nuanced differences between talking and telling (harf-zadan/goftan)
*talking* can not be accompanied by a direct object (the talked) and *telling* might not be accompanied by a direct subject (you are told without a direct teller[...]

[...] />
wild pollination
artificial breeding

Renan: Institutional work carried by a freelancer, a private individual or a civil servant can improve the publicness of art. It gives confidence to the work of art in public service. This institutionality creates new tasks in art that can be sustained by other practitioners.
@apass

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

publication of the miracle
[the miraculous in exhibitions + self-exhibiting miracles]
Renan's *exhibitionary heritage* of miracles

seeing (risk of sight) --> passionate misunderstanding, confusion, rejection

cultural engineering of anthropology of heritage

exhibitionary heritage: a scaffolding that times, locates, and proliferates all that is exhibitionary (like a shower, or rainfall)

curatorial subjectivity

exhibitionary complex
•describe the problems of an exhibitionary heritage
•find solutions to artistic problems in the description of exhibitionary complexes

(the bad idea of interpreting exhibitionary heritage as an) exhibitionary solution to problems that are represented by the works of art --> correlate artistic solutions with exhibitionary problems }<--Renan-- consumes the links between art, exhibits, and curation naturally and atheoretically

creation of art <--✕--> birth of exhibition
(artistic problem ~/= exhibitionary problem)

...using the concepts and tools of exhibition history

the bad idea of the artistic is conceived in exhibitions & the exhibitionary in artworks

postulate matter in terms of
•errors
•questions
(not necessarily in terms of)
•exhibition
•artwork


exhibitionary heritage of
•artistic practices --> the miracle in ideas/objects
•curatorial practices --> categories of the miracle
•exhibitionary practices --> the miraculous as datum of the world

miracle can be contained or can burst into the study of traditions and transmissions

miracle = content + form

miraculous --> surrogate medium of the artistic

(Renan:) how a miracle can turn the hopeful perplexity surrounding Virgin Mary into the relentless exhibitionary ----> *the power of suggestion is curatorial* --> materials can be rearranged (or other contents can be shaken off from them according to the demands of art history)


flower showers

an auspicious beginning for a lasting devotion

گلبرگ --> the petal applied to the body of the sick and invalid, a sacred relic that is progressively distant yet proliferative


problem of the exhibitionary heritage --Renan--> discursify that even miracles can be interpreted art historically, that they are worthy of belief

[...]

[...] be a tiny subspecies in a mass of absolute diversity


classical philosophy --> scientized for a momden audience (by Descartes 17th century) --> special status of human <-- seen as a totally transparent, secular, scientific, liberal way of thinking about the world


humanism = a belief in progress (implicitly conceived as a technological instrumental profit-oriented) + technological masery over nature + ‘human =/= animal’ + therapeutic approach to scientific inquiry }<-- a 19th century anachronism --> deeply ingrained in contemporary self-consciousness and everyday common sense

human: hero of liberty <-- french in origin, political in purpose

August Comte --> the universe can only e understood when the scientific exploration of phenomena was separated from supernatural superstition =/= ajayeb


Campbell making the case --> humanism needs to be deconstructed (not in a blithe نرم وملایم postmodern discursive way, rather) the definitions of what it means to be human are of life-changing importance --> humanism's supposed universality and transparency masks the fact that it is *an inherited western relatively recent philosophical perspective of the world*


in consumer research --> human: culturally inflected, psychosocial producer of + produced by the market =/= human: a disembodied information-processor with a rationalistic indentity and a computatinoal approach to the market

--Campbell--> how can interpretative consumer research benefit from a perspective which acknowledges this ideology of humanism?


the term posthuman has been used to describe anything which extends human capcity --ironically--> something as ubiquitous banal ancient and human as *tool-use* could itself be described as posthuman (Hayles, Stiegler, Wills) ==> **posthuman is as ancient as the human itself** }--> [*]posthuman: (a radical recognition tha that) technological = *originary logic* + *ethical sensibility* (= a stepping-out [=/= coming-after] of the enclosure of what is only important and necessary to the human)
•a concept that draws attention to the cracks that have always existed in the water-light descriptions of the human
•the ethical and radical realisation that the human only comes into existence by the work of (organic + technological) nonhuman others

cyborg --> associated with liberatory modes of identity

**technology deconstructs everyday human experience of agency, free will, choice, self** @apass

21st century --> technology is the center of critical thought about culture and nature (--> that is why it became organically part of my ajayeb research)--> *to think about technology in a manner which reflects its ubiquity, its deeper symbolic and aesthetic dimensions, the way in which it can radically chnage humanness and human-centered approaches

[...]

[...]ers

cyborg --> associated with liberatory modes of identity

**technology deconstructs everyday human experience of agency, free will, choice, self** @apass

21st century --> technology is the center of critical thought about culture and nature (--> that is why it became organically part of my ajayeb research)--> *to think about technology in a manner which reflects 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 figurati[...]

[...]essive* 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 the meaning


figuration: new ways of taking account of the world =/= anthropomorphism
--Haraway--> practices that create *knots* of material-semiotic actors {<-- art does that? art's sometimes unreal figurations =/= * =/= **interpretative consumer research makes the most realistic figurations of this century**}@Chloe2

the metaphors of our time:
•becoming (=/= being) <-- a shift towards a *process metaphysics*
•

(Parsons + Maclaren)
items of disposal (do not fail to exists, but rather they) are *moved along* to other spaces or politics and become other things
•becoming a precious antique
•becoming a water blockage
•becoming a source of marine death
•becoming a materially precious thing (in another part of the world)
•
--> **how things actually move, how they transition between many states**
--> *object = data about the object =/= tangible thing* <-- (transition) from thinking of object as the primary reality --to--> perceicing the object as data in computatinoal environments
==?==> (change of the nature of object ==>) radical shift in theorizing consumer behavior


p[...]

[...] source of analytical attention) is the only thing doing the consuming, having the experience, making the meaning


figuration: new ways of taking account of the world =/= anthropomorphism
--Haraway--> practices that create *knots* of material-semiotic actors {<-- art does that? art's sometimes unreal figurations =/= **interpretative consumer research makes the most realistic figurations of this century**}@Chloe2

the metaphors of our time:
•becoming (=/= being) <-- a shift towards a *process metaphysics*
•

(Parsons + Maclaren)
items of disposal (do not fail to exists, but rather they) are *moved along* to other spaces or politics and become other things
•becoming a precious antique
•becoming a water blockage
•becoming a source of marine death
•becoming a materially precious thing (in another part of the world)
•
--> **how things actually move, how they transition between many states**
--> *object = data about the object =/= tangible thing* <-- (transition) from thinking of object as the primary reality --to--> perceicing the object as data in computatinoal environments
==?==> (change of the nature of object ==>) radical shift in theorizing consumer behavior


posthumanism
•a key term in contemporary western postindustrial era
•a term htat has been used ti describe a highly technologized future existence

--variationally--> other stories (fables) about technology exists =/=
1. the claim of (often monolithic) novelty of the historical moment in the west
2. that technology is a sterile instrument
3. that technology aids the human in his ascent to ever greater degrees of humanity


(greek tradition -->) *to think deeply about technology, we have to think about its ontology*
•techno-sociology --> Latour
•ecological feminism --> Haraway
•post-Marxism --> Tiziana Terranova
•
•philosophy of tech --> Heidegger: the most dangerous thing we can do is to think of technology as something neutral --> we often make two ***intuitive ideological jumps of reason*** when we think of technology:
  1. “technology = means to an end”
  2. “technology is created by humans”
  }<-- example of anthropological truth (about technology) ~ it is a truth as it appears to human beings & it is an *instrumental truth: truth aimed at getting things done or making things work* =/= [*]technology: the mode by which realities are brought into existence in the world (hervorbringen) {unconcealing ==> a concealment of another reality}= (process of) *poiesis = bring out + conceal*
 -the greek word *techne = technology + art* derived from the term episteme (the ways in which one can know reality) ==> ****technology: a type of epistemology, a way of knowing****
}==Heidegger==> *technology need[...]

[...]gical truth (about technology) ~ it is a truth as it appears to human beings & it is an *instrumental truth: truth aimed at getting things done or making things work* =/= [*]technology: the mode by which realities are brought into existence in the world (hervorbringen) {unconcealing ==> a concealment of another reality}= (process of) *poiesis = bring out + conceal*
 -the greek word *techne = technology + art* derived from the term episteme (the ways in which one can know reality) ==> ****technology: a type of epistemology, a way of knowing****
}==Heidegger==> *technology needs to be understood beyond its instrumentalist humanist history* --Campbell--> *seeing technology historically as an ancient phenomenon*

technology thought of as something that comes from the west & does something to other people in other placers <-- a framework (even well-intentioned) that denies both agency & contemporaneity to the ‘other’
(-McQuire)

(we are told that)
•the era we exist in is the “information age”
•the world is “networked”
•marheting is “service-dominant”
--Campbell--> what realities do the terms “information” “network” “service-dominant” create, unconceal, conceal?
==> questions of:
-what is the consumer?
-the nature of consumer consciousness, knowledge, desire

*far from being a neutral uncomplicated relationship, consumers develop strategic behaviors for *coping with technology* that is paradoxial + fantastical + ideological + multidimensional
(-Konzinets)
•DIY technologies: forms of competence redefined + redistributed between hardware & human
•technology & identity interpolate each other

global debates of:
•fear of genetic determination
•nature of consciousness --> similarities and differences between computation and human being
•
--> intimately concerned with the status of humanness

1990s theories of gift-giving, possession, labour, self-concept =/= *cyber consumer* --> circulation of desire and commodities in environments that are so highly mediated and technological that it begins to generate behavior and situations that are quite foreign to existing thinking about that markets are and what consumers want

**technology: an active force that both consumes & creates consumers**


(problem of) sustainability
1. to sustain: rest, retreat --> humannes is a major threat to all nonhuman planetary existence ==> the idea that radical threats to nonhumanness must be warded off by radical decreases in human population, consumption, normtive standards of living
<-- this notion of sustainability exists radically at the limits of human capability (more than ecological crisis or human inequality, more than the threat of terrorism or nuclear proliferation)
2. to sustain: to extend, strengthen --> the idea that if w[...]

[...]at comes from the west & does something to other people in other placers <-- a framework (even well-intentioned) that denies both agency & contemporaneity to the ‘other’
(-McQuire)

(we are told that)
•the era we exist in is the “information age”
•the world is “networked”
•marheting is “service-dominant”
--Campbell--> what realities do the terms “information” “network” “service-dominant” create, unconceal, conceal?
==> questions of:
-what is the consumer?
-the nature of consumer consciousness, knowledge, desire

*far from being a neutral uncomplicated relationship, consumers develop strategic behaviors for *coping with technology* that is paradoxial + fantastical + ideological + multidimensional
(-Konzinets)
•DIY technologies: forms of competence redefined + redistributed between hardware & human
•technology & identity interpolate each other

global debates of:
◾fear of genetic determination
•nature of consciousness --> similarities and differences between computation and human being
•
--> intimately concerned with the status of humanness

1990s theories of gift-giving, possession, labour, self-concept =/= *cyber consumer* --> circulation of desire and commodities in environments that are so highly mediated and technological that it begins to generate behavior and situations that are quite foreign to existing thinking about that markets are and what consumers want

**technology: an active force that both consumes & creates consumers**


(problem of) sustainability
1. to sustain: rest, retreat --> humannes is a major threat to all nonhuman planetary existence ==> the idea that radical threats to nonhumanness must be warded off by radical decreases in human population, consumption, normtive standards of living
<-- this notion of sustainability exists radically at th at the limits of human capability (more than ecological crisis or human inequality, more than the threat of terrorism or nuclear proliferation)
2. to sustain: to extend, strengthen --> the idea that if we are not here then nothing on the planet has worth; if humans ado not exists, then the earth does not exists ==> our efforts of ecological sustainability are intrinsically human-centered [--(implicit attitude)--> prolonging humanness]==> ecological problem = crisis: an intense, short-lived episode in human history + it will be solved by high-technology solutions


technology has co-evolved with being throughout billions of years --Hayles--> (myriad profound subtle ways) to make nature

--paradox--> *it is “human nature” to use technology + technology changes “human nature”*

--Campbell--> ***while not everything is technical, everything is technological***

*posthuman stance (strategically oriented towards deep futu[...]

[...]uman nature”*

--Campbell--> ***while not everything is technical, everything is technological***

*posthuman stance (strategically oriented towards deep future, pays attention to the lives of nonhuman others) gets ontological with technology*

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

McQuire
defining the technological --activate--> the border between nature & culture = (the heart of) what it means to be human

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

[title]
system attic

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

(in my work with apass digital designs, i have been trying to negotiate with the notion of)
*technological gaze*

what new modes of subjectivity are filtered through technological gaze?

(?how) high-tech images are cultural artifacts

technological gaze's method to put its meaning together:
1. impossible subject-positioning
2. codification of flesh
3. visualization of scientific narrative
4. aestheticization of information


(Maturana + Varela) everything said is said by an observer =/= philosopher


marketing communication theory

[*]gaze: (a technical term for) the ways we visually consume images of people and places + the ways images are constructed to entertain & encourage certain ways of seeing

•(using psychoanalysis) Mulvey's gaze: the way in which the camera acts as the eyes and ears of the spectator, presenting ways of framing the world (power-laden + not neutral position) ==> certain understanding of the world is assumed
•Shroeder --> gaze signifies a psychological relationship of power --> the gazer is superior to the object of the gaze [---> go to zoo]


how “human” ways of experiencing the world are gradually being integrated with non-human, technological ways of perceiving and understanding reality:
•Baudrillard --> virtual gaze
•Virilio --> automation of perception (war weaponry --> the idea that in west we have technologies so advanced we achieve absolute vision)
•Balsamo --> cosmetic surgery (~= new visualization technologies) ==> new forms of dominance [---> go to Kardashians TV shows], *replacing the male gaze with a normative disembodied technical gaze
•Haraway --> technocratic gaze
•Strafford --> (starting in enlightenment) *automated spectralization* (in visual presentation of the world) --> the intention and purpose of the gaze became medicalized and technologized [---> go to cartography]
•
}--> (from technoscience to feminism) theorists have noticed a *splicing* of direct and tactile human perception of reality with another reality, one that is mediated and technical ==produce==> a new reality that negotiates the individual's knowledge of the universe in diverse and complex ways (<-- not catastrophic =/= Hörl)


[...]

[...]ng it by recourse to technological explanations (this was my mistake!)
•an observer is more importantly one who sees within a prescribed set of possibilities, one who is embedded in a system of conventions and limitations.
•measurable in terms of objects and signs
•newly constituted human sciences in regulating and modifying the behavior of individuals.
•it was through these disciplines that the subject in a sense became visible
•passage from the geometrical optics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to physiological optics
•to expose the idiosyncrasies of the “normal” eye
•Retinal afterimages, peripheral vision, binocular vision, and thresholds of attention
•outcome of a complex remaking of the individual as observer into something calculable-and regularizable and of human vision into something measurable and thus, exchangeable.
•standardization of visual imagery
•in the amphitheatre / on the stage / in the Panoptic machine
•dissociation of touch from sight ==> “separation of the senses” and industrial remapping of the body in the nineteenth century
•unloosening of the eye from the network of referentiality incarnated in tactility ==> fitted for the tasks of “spectacular” consumption
•Perception for Benjamin was acutely temporal and kinetic;
•a mobile consumer of a ceaseless succession of illusory commodity-like Images.
•Machines are social before being technical
•desiring machines
•The paintings of J-B. Chardin are lodged within these same questions of knowledge and perception His still lifes, especially, are a last great presentation of the classical object in all its plenitude, before it is sundered irrevocably into exchangeable and ungrounded signifiers or into the painterly traces of an autonomous vision.
•that the very process of becoming tired was in fact perception. “When the eye fixes itself on a single color...<or...
•the clear eye of the world
•The more Schopenhauer involved himself in the new collective knowledge of a fragmented body composed of separate organic systems, subject to the opacity of the sensory organs and dominated by involuntary reflex activity, the more intensely he sought to establish a visuality that escaped the demands of that body.
•the physiological makeup of the subject as the site on which the formation of representations occurs.
•Of these only the cerebrum, together with the sensory nerves attached to it, and the posterior spinal nerve fascicles are intended to take up the motives from the external world. All the other parts, on the other hand, are intended only to transmit the motives to the muscles in which the will directly manifests itself. (Schopenhauer)
•It is knowledge that Simultaneously provided techniques for the external control and domination of the human subject and was the emancipating ground for notions of subjec[...]

[...]e how of a poem or text dictating a kind of addictive reading or desire in the reader.

The project of a text, the project of a theory

according to Freud, when the work of mourning is completed the ego becomes free and uninhabited again. Funeral speeches and related writings, are possibilities that structures the movement of identification. Mourning is the interiorization of the dead other, also its contrary. Politics is figured as first and foremost an organization of the time and space of mourning.

After him, it is all war and crumbling.

We know better than ever today that the dead must be able to work. And to cause to work, perhaps more than ever.


The meaning of meaning [...]

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

[*]deconstruction: a sort of strategic device + opening onto its own abyss (one of the most influential approaches to texts) =/= method

Campbell --> Derridean deconstruction is visual
Derrida's thinking helps us take images seriously (as philosophical artefacts)
•organizational image: the aesthetic ambassador for the organization (it visualizes + gives aesthetic value to it)
•advertisement: preeminent image of production and consumption of the global economy

image = logocentric vision --need--> problematizing =/= solutionizing


-is there a spirit of critique that is not liberatory in purpose?

Derridean deconstruction: a critical approach --draw--> attention to the operations of method itself (=/= method):
[~? feedback types:]
1. interventionist --advocate--> different/contradictory readings (of images)
2. radical --interest--> roots of meaning-making activity
3. liberatory --seek--> evoke justice (forcing an image to account for itself)
4. ethical --concern--> what is overlooked
5. innovative (productive) --promote--> non-traditional ways of reading (of interpretting, of finding meaning)


intellectual climate in 1960s ==>
•Derrida's deconstruction --> bringing Saussure's own work to its own radical paradoxical conclusion
•Foucault's archeological approach [question the idea that human is an a priori --> how humans have been diagnosed in psychiatry and (ab)normalized in criminal and sexual *discourses* ==produce==> reality effects at the level of body]
•Barthes's semiology =/= the idea that the author is the single and authoritative source of meaning


Derrida's list of concepts:
differance
retrait
revenant
dissemination
deconstruction
hymen
invagination
archiécriture
supplement
khora
pharmakon
scrypt
parergon
subjectile
}--> levers applying torque گشتاور and displacement in the textual machinery


deconstructi[...]

[...]antom-sphere is more arresting, more aesthetically philosophically attractive?* (--> phantomology, Avital) ~/?= *which archive remains on fire throughout?* (--> the concern of many of my peers in apass. why archive has become a predominant topic and practice: lack of master signifier ==> archiving as one remaining meaningful thing to do, that there is nothing meaningful to be done [<-- that is my source of disagreement with archive-discourse, because it matters that there is something to be done now])


(taking) high doses of impulse and reason

**adapting old tales to new territories of experience** (<-- we need to permanently work this, read it, and so on)


exceedingly well-versed fever-dreams of Rumi
his intellectual-bodily gesture
its innovative proportions
his typology of communication/education (in Majales-e Sab'e مجالس سبعه)
remote plane of calculation


•magnetic power of the sectarian voice (=/= “the weak cult of modern inevitability” ==> a formula of alienation, insularity انزوا, indifference)
•freedom to choose the all-engulfing one thing (--> ISIS) =/= countervailing definitions of freedom: the freedom of infinite mediocritized choices (--> consumerism)


(Elen's struggle to gauge her place in the existential game)


my critical rant


*build the raft* <-- a poetic strategy (<-- i do this too, to go beyond the postcolonial aftermath)


tale of the “symptom of a plague” (--> tale of “where we stand”) ==> (a concealed need for) ***immunity*** (=/= toxication)
‘reality principle’ of Ali , apass

“the eastern postmodernism arrives at the doorstep of the western philosophical outlook as a foreigner” -Mohaghegh
==> a *privileged semantic heritage* --suggesting--> an occluded alternative --from--> a shrouded/shredded resource ریزریزشده [==?==> my reparative readings (of ajayeb). this is something i should be careful about: to give the iranian semantic heritage density and texture, and not privileging it, not to give it a “voice” or “awareness"]

(Mona's disposition:) the assassin = the spectator

(for Ali ) truth has a dead body, (deranged, tortured, raped)

(oriental)[*]exotic: commingling of ***excess & absence*** ~= the third world (middle eastern) becomes all that EU renounces: the indecent, unrefined savage whose raw delirium stood as an offense to your elegance but somehow still enchanting a disenchanted earth

[*]eurocentrism: *carving a mirror into your presumed beginnings* (so it is displaces in elsewheres, as the effect of the mirror ---> go to the discussion of mirror in my amazon project)
[an imaginary mechanism of cutting off what the superego perceives as bad or good aspects of oneself (weakness or power) and projecting them on[...]

[...]eral**
western inability to understand the turbulant reaction abroad --> loss of the power of the literal (--> *democracy depends and works with the literal*:)
literal has given way in the west to the transference of image, language, and thought to a purely representational or metaphoric domain (to talk about things, but not speak the event itself)
“one cannot grow angered over a film, sculpture, treatise, or drawing (or a dance), then one also cannot experience captivation with a film, sculpture, treatise, or drawing” (Mohaghegh)
[yet the literal is sneaky in that is always decontextualizes, it vibrates and swings so conspicuously from its point of origin]

(old Marxist, anarchist, and postmodern critique: ‘hyper-mediation + technological diffusion ==> obliteration of the sharpness of the senses in modernity’) =/= loss of the radioactive potential of the world of appearances --> *rabbit chaser* [a mask that i am invested in,] a middle eastern existential cost at stake : the myriad and triggers that alone make possible the descent into Alice's Wonderland--the child chases the the white rabbit(~a partial flashing image) without real thought to its enigmatic reasons or destinations (“why and where is he going?”) Alice (like Janina) is only consumed by his color, speed, movement, and nervous incantation افسون of lateness*** (--> metaphorology of “depth” in east)

code of urgency: “mean what you say and say what you mean”

a (monumental problem or) discord in the West between: saying (or showing in terms of images) and meaning () }--> problem for the propensity of acting, running, hungering, wanting, and living itself --this-is-why--> most groundbreaking ideational products in the West often fail to penetrate enough to excite or instigate (the avant-garde can not longer shock [--> bankruptcy of the contemporary artists in europe]) =/= in the East: 1400 year mythologies can still provoke hysteria and radical fever }<-- a scary difference***!!
*the visual, the auditory, the spiritual, the philosophical are still fulminating currencies of animation in the context (in the East --> that is why most art theory and conceptions don't apply to everywhere at the same time. values of European contemporary art scene don't fully dig the notion of art in middle east)


Mohaghegh asking: how can the sentence, picture, musical note, poetic, stanza, ideological or theological concoction, genrate so much energy in certain atmospheres, unleashing irregular storms while reviving millennia-old ones? [--> Stewart's affect theory and atmospheric attunement could be helpful]

a fable of difference (between W&E):
a tension between an agoraphobic West (with its endless barricades, shelters, and technocracies of dilution رقيق سازى raghigh-sazi) & an overexhilarated East (with its endless throngs, zealotries, dogmatic caresses, and emergencies)
[...]

[...]spatial relations (--> self-other construct)
[*]the imaginary: the space in which the relation between the ego and its images is developed]
(Mohaghegh:) [eastern] undo the moment of assimilation into a repressive [western] ‘symbolic order'[= the way the subject is organized & how the psyche becomes accessible]
[*]The Real: what cannot be symbolized – what loses it's “reality” once it is symbolized (made conscious) through language ==> the real is traumatic (& sublime?, =/=? media,,) @Hoda}

*cultural extinction*

urgency is (always?) neurotic

(?who and when sends) neurotic demand for an unmediated cognitive intimation


(Khomeini's) omat امت diesenfranchised populace

عناصر گول خورده perceptual perversion


•Khomeini <-- Marcuse (one-dimensional society, that promote a false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood)
•Khomeini <-- Chomsky (how superficial happiness can function as a detraction from the adverse effects of an alienated condition) [<-- Marxist tradition of the “serious” (=/= unreflective state) @Foad, “let everybody be crazed about professional sports or sex scandals or the personalities and their problems --> *consumption becomes ritualized*]
•Shariati <-- Jameson (theory of the “ever-new but always-the-same” within the theatrical operation of political economy)
•Al Ahmad <-- Adorno (skeptical prophecy)
•
}==> principle of utopian potentiality

centers of corruption
pleasure-houses
makeup
games
alcoholic beverages
luxury goods

Marxist tradition:
the underground aesthetic is quickly transfigured into a mainstream aesthetic --always--> in the hands of an authoritarian elite (<-- in apass with Leo we were talking about this)

جنبش mass aesthetic fears becoming official سازمانی

...based on exposing the damage of the global-becoming-local

Al Ahmad traces this “transnational hypnosis” to economic origin (<-- Ali )

(Mohaghegh's judgment on iranian anticolonial ideology:) its ineptitude Ungeeignetheit in realizing the myriad variances that render any medium riddled with paradoxes--derives itself from its concurrent inability to observe the possibility for different subject-positions within the third world

omnipresent deception of modernity

(aesthetic radicalism [ X ) political resistance]
“X” --> limited anticolonialism


(Mohaghegh on)
-Mehrjui's The Cow, offers a moving allegorical journey into the psychic turbulence of a peasant confronted with the obliteration of his premodern world (and thus becomes his lost animal)
-Naderi's Man with a Gun, depicts the material avarice that has overtaken local configurations in the wake of nascent capitalist[...]

[...]y of Benjamin's stance that “mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art...”
the symbolic fury of Khomeini's voice is only magnified in its cult-value through its transmission over the air waves, testifying more to MacLuhan's interpretation of the persuasive impact of radio
--> technological media in iranian anticolonialism does not elicit the democratizing effect anticipated by Benjamin


from--> metaphysical awe --to--> banalized horror

each year the islamic republic itself reenacts the arrival of the Khomeini in tehran airport through a procession of myriad cardboard interact and converse with these mock-images of the imam in a kind of makeshift, state-run passion play



post 1979 iranian cinematic renaissance
•medium of film achieved in the decolonized space
•hooked into the contemporaneity of the localized apocalyptic (infinitesimal becomings)
•present as close an interpretation of the unthinkable strangeness of reality as possible
•on an ongoing desertion of the real

Adorno: “works that make socially univocal discursive judgments thereby negate art as well as themselves” @Laura's judgment on the fascist body (--> can consumption be resistance? @Laura: becoming fascist body ==> ? )

the medium of film-making in present-day iran attempts solely to bring the crypto-vantage of the everyday into obscurity-ridden view (to leave less clear --> my pre-2012 videos ‘Vagabond,’ ‘Constant Prince,’ and ‘city of domes’), allowing for a critical distance on the part of the spectator to examine one's own being-in-the-world in raw, blurred form (the truth is haze itself --> Hoda)

exoticization of the local --> reduce it to a nativist enterprise

(Mohaghegh > Tomlinson:) the everyday culture has ingested foreign elements from exogenous sources, with the various elementss gradually brcoming “naturalized” within it =/= image of pure, internally homogenous, authentic, indigenous culture


Sharjah art foundation of the Emirate's *postcultural imagination*


literary front
Hedayat, Yushij, Shamlu, Forough

Hedayat's The Blind Owl variants of a “will to chaos”

middle eastern avant-garde's vision of the writing-act --sketching--> a fugitive postmodern map of escape from its grasp

[in] moments of great social disorder
==> secret societies, iconoclastic trajectories, a type of consciousness that perceives the catastrophic-apocalyptic hint at each turn

(how an eastern or third world vanguard characterize itself in the heart of major historical tremors:) [listen to their *tone of aggression*:]
Nima: “with my poetry i have driven people into a great conflict; good or bad, they have fallen in confusion; i myself am sitting in a corner, watching them: i have f[...]

[...]ر و دسته
قبيله

(Ali, to a subculture of) persecuted and endangered

==> peripheral narative (marginal leadership) become a force of intrigue and seduction (among iranian youth)

-how did poetry respond to historical events of atrocity and transition
-did the poets understand themselves as resembling a mystical, criminal, mercenary, or revolutionary edifice?

amorphous, obscure, versatile (thinkers and writers launching an intellectual-existential offensive against the disenchantment of the modern age)
along archetypes:
•power
•hostility
•banishment
•solitude
•desire
•sacrifice


contradictory experiences of the modern cityscape of the middle east --> at once a site of:
•autocracy and insurgency
•concealment and detection
•connectivity and alienation
•integration and crumbling
•gesticulation and idleness


Setareh's topics:
experiences of upheaval, hysteria, sabotage, collective suffering
--> Sana's topics:
existential-spatial understanding of questions of cruelty, betrayal, torment, annihilation


(poets finding themselves consumed with) the distinctive emergence of “the martyr”:

[-]Akhavan writing/witnessing at the time of reterritorialization of urban space during Mossadegh era: the subdivision of streets, districts, and neighborhoods into dueling sectors of power and resistance.
Akhavan's lament in “Winter”
disenchantment, bitterness, semiotic disorientation
touch = final sensory prism
Akhavan's task: to protect the domain of radical individuality (==> Ali's subjectivity)
(Mohaghegh asking:) *is the artist charge a mere diguise of influence and supermacy?* or **is the firmness of its articulation sanctioned by some dominant elsewhere or otherworldliness?**
*does the poetic consciousness believe itself of an elite unknown rank (against the monolith)?
sociopolitical discourses either bore or aggravate Akhavan --only--> (transient historical specificity of) *turmoil demands poet's greater urgency*
(the poet has earned the station to say) “no more of this” (“it's enough”) ~ an *order*  [=/= wisdom, sage, diplomatic response of an interlocutor, truth-telling, equal dialogue, negotiation]
poet's expertise and sensitivity: the storyteller's intimate relation to impermanence and destruction (--> Ali, Sana, Hoda, Setareh)

[-]Baraheni's depiction of the spatial domination of the city by Pahlavi regime from 1952 to 1979 --> SAVAK responded to and fueled a striking development in the political consciousness of the urban centers ==> labyrinthine evolution of the rebel form
hie poem “An Epic in Reverse” (Akhavanian reversal) neighborhoods of stigma, filth, and backwardness --> hybrid of animality and criminal[...]

[...]sence
--> continual motion
--> time is restless



tower, bastion, citadel, stronghold
operational apparitional center
phantasmatic points of references
a spiritual geoscape of concentration
it must appear formidable, immutable, and impenetrable
as a tangible headquarters encased amid far-flung mountains.
it drifts mainly as a figment in the nomadic mind
of the one who lives most of the nights as a marauder in enemy camps
roaming through its courtyards
speaking with the tower's white and black keepers
before receiving the next command
with it the facticity of another harsh assignment.
from tower's security standpoint
the world looks ripe for the taking.
the fortress holds, and with it, the dream of the fortress.



the earth
closing on us
a deteriorating prism
tightness, entrapment
this cylinder
to a mutual obliteration
all inhabitants are squeezed together



to make another planet
another dream of the enemy:
1. extraplanetary construction
2. confinement of the unwanted
3. momentary infiltration of the lair
4. consumption of the planet
|
conceptual twists: (quadrangulation:)
[four desires - four attributes - four corresponding identify-formation]
1. the most accountable --> creation ~~> *labor* (to build it) --> carpenter خلق
2. the most disconnected --> banishment ~~> *renunciation* (to disown it) --> judge خلع
3. the most invested --> possession ~~> *stealth* (to invade it) --> trespasser خفيه
4. the most around/above/upon --> engulfing ~~> *hunger* (to eat it) --> glutton دله

the entire worlds are disponsable
to salivate and gorge on what is most detested
the torment of overlapping, of absolute possession and absolute dispossession



unreal
surrealism
anti-realism
hyper-realism
irrealism

inaccurate, misleading signs around each corner of the cityscape
deceptive and insidious facades
taken astray and stranded amid false omens
the misinformation of the world's existence
the minor syndicate versus the drone
stretching between the memorandum and the dispatch
always in a dual hermeneutics of suspicion and discovery

drinking from the fool's gold of confusion ill-advising codes



the sectarian's remedy:
vulgarization requires vulgarity
response to disgrace is to enter the disgrace
to inflict the profane occurence and encourage the contamination of language and sign
into the stint of atrocity
to go barefoot and dismembered
sectarian appears before the maker:
in blemished and tattered from
[...]

[...] speak? Lee's answer is no
we have no access to her thoughts or her inner life --but--> that does not mean her life is without meaning or value to history
*we must listen for the african voice in iran even when it cannot be heard*

siah siyah سیاه: afro-iranian children (descendants of african woman slaves served as domestic servants and concubines) who remained in iran, married local people, and could live normal lives as iranians (although they might be identified as black)
==> *some percentage of the iranian population is of african descent (especially among the wealthy clases who could afford slaves) <-- this heritage has never hardened into a clear ratial category within the society*

we must regard them as actors *even when we cannot see their choices*

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

childhood Elias chap1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

*under five*[...]

[...]culture <-- implementation of ideology in society

turkey, pakistan, iran:
•strongly ideological (like other states)
•multiethnic
•shaped by encounter with colonial empire
•strategic (=/= cultural) engagement with (west) global powers
•belief in the existence of charismatic religious authority
•belief in barkat برکت

Iran special relation to *religious visual art*


(Elias's) aesthetic: social imagination, creating reaction without words (= showing)
=/= telling
=/= nonutilitarian form of contemplation of art
=/= cognitive


Western mid 18th century philosophy ==> “aesthetics”
lower cognitive faculties
experience of sensate body
how the world strikes the body
emotional and affective response

modern aesthetics --> contemplation of beauty (superior to idleness and boredom <-- some sort of failure of moral vigilance)
“art = description of beauty”
==> Kant: aesthetics = sublime beauty (=/= quotidien)
}--> (fable of) the idea that **beauty engenders virtue** --> the beauty must be formal


(social system --> people) interacting with visual objects
making consumer choices [--(is not always)-->] interacting with visual objects in ways that further ideological formations


*religious reaction to sensory inputs are aesthetic* <-- they anticipate knowledge to be revealed in the future =/= rest contemplatively in the present
*religious gaze = apocalyptic glance*
=/= Kantian aesthetics (noninstrumental form of enjoyment)

Plato + Aristoteles ==> premodern islamic thinkers --> “beauty = virtue” (harmony of physical and moral)


(problem with) philosophical aesthetics of disinterested contemplations --Elias-->
•ignores majority of human experience
•(favors) apophatic (transcendent + ineffable غیر قابل توصیف) =/= cataphatic (immanent + experiential)

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 me[...]

[...]onal interaction*

*people-centric work* (like library science and education)

quantitative =/= qualitative
measurable =/= descriptive
(objective concepts)
--> (Calvert reading) the ostensibly qualitative, measurable, and hence objective concepts of competition and competitiveness stand in contrast with qualitative, descriptive concepts of both “culture and collaboration”


to open up some of the ‘literature of’


(Calvert working on) the implicit notion that competition and innovation are a natural fit --> the “measure, controlm and automatic” rationality of US-style economic competition

difficult to commodify
difficult to describe

not taking apparent differences (between men and women, human and animal,,) to be timeless, necessary, or inevitable --> descriptive =/= prescriptive (descriptions not intended to be prescriptive) --> *to historicize and denaturalize concepts (of competition, innovation,,)*

Bowker + Leigh Star > Calvert: *things perceived as real are real in their consequences*

market competitiveness has a plethora[~ excess, افراط ,ازدياد] of measures --✕--> profit: the seller-centric proxy measure of consumer interest

“our idealized notion of competition as a generator of innovation black-boxes a host of processes for competition, including unfair practices, externalizing costs, marketing, deception, and deskilling.”

(our idealized notion of:){ competition ==> innovation }--black-boxes--> (a host of) processes for competition:
•unfair practices
•externalizing costs
•marketing
•deception
•deskilling
•

individualistic and social Darwinist overtones

[*]inovation: a form of wishful thinking that aims to bring about the desired transformations without the associated costs in time and human effort (Suchman & Bishop)
(‘labor-intensive artistic work’: noninovative creative work; deepen the density of curiosity;)

capitalism continuously applies new technology designed to fragment and deskill labor, so that labor becomes cheaper and subject to greater control (Wajcman)

(sometimes) obsolescence is created through minor redesigns of consumer commodities

“let's sell more” ~-> undesirable consequences for human rights, global trade in rare metals, and toxic waste disposal

[*]technological determinism and optimism: the belief that the present social arrangements and technologies were the inevitable byproducts of historical developement, and that any problems entailed in our technologies and their production processes can be eliminated with further technological innovations

competetiveness and the technological *savvy* implicit in innovation are themselves markers of contemporary masculinity --> “the en[...]

[...]vert: *things perceived as real are real in their consequences*

market competitiveness has a plethora[~ excess, افراط ,ازدياد] of measures --✕--> profit: the seller-centric proxy measure of consumer interest

“our idealized notion of competition as a generator of innovation black-boxes a host of processes for competition, including unfair practices, externalizing costs, marketing, deception, and deskilling.”

(our idealized notion of:){ competition ==> innovation }--black-boxes--> (a host of) processes for competition:
•unfair practices
•externalizing costs
•marketing
•deception
•deskilling
•

individualistic and social Darwinist overtones

[*]inovation: a form of wishful thinking that aims to bring about the desired transformations without the associated costs in time and human effort (Suchman & Bishop)
(‘labor-intensive artistic work’: noninovative creative work; deepen the density of curiosity;)

capitalism continuously applies new technology designed to fragment and deskill labor, so that labor becomes cheaper and subject to greater control (Wajcman)

(sometimes) obsolescence is created through minor redesigns of consumer commodities

“let's sell more” ~-> undesirable consequences for human rights, global trade in rare metals, and toxic waste disposal

[*]technological determinism and optimism: the belief that the present social arrangements and technologies were the inevitable byproducts of historical developement, and that any problems entailed in our technologies and their production processes can be eliminated with further technological innovations

competetiveness and the technological *savvy* implicit in innovation are themselves markers of contemporary masculinity --> “the enduring force of the identification between technology and manliness is not an inherent biological sex difference. it is instead the result of the historical and cultural construction of gender” (Wajcman)

a big part of the problem is that women's technological labor (=/= ghost busters) is culturally invisible --(Katie King in her research on writing technologies argues)--> (a metonymy:) when technologies are reduced to singular, stable, self-contained devices [~ Star Wars] =/= assemblages
[dichotomy of “enforcement =/= destruction” Star Wars either or: if you are not destroying it you are enforcing it]

problems that cannot be conceptualized in terms of measures and endpoints, or which involve holistic, qualitative solutions, will be at a disadvantage for selection

(Cowan shows) the developement of new household tachnologies did not free women from the domestic shpere. rather, it allowed women to enter the paid labor force while leaving the gendered division of labor in the home untouched.


(makes[...]

[...]r (making aware)?
-employer and the employee as different “species” with their different “natural” tendencies to fuck with one another? --> zero-sum game
-the question of symbiotic relatedness (--> psychoanalysis) =/=? contractual relatedness


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

to emphasis on the contingent and the contextual

the process of becoming researcher (of science and technology studies : inquiry into the politics and practices of knowledge-making)

vignette (sketch, a brief literary description, narrate scenes from familiar activities)

the question is not ‘how can we care more?’ (as predetermined set of affective practices) rather: **what happens to our work when we pay attention to moments where the question of ‘how to care?’ is insistent but not easily answerable** (‘care’ as an analytic or provocation)
-Kenney


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


> Manoto TV station program “sher yadet nare” شعر یادت نره respond to the questions of translation (from the UK produced program “Don't Forget the Lyrics” into an Iranian contemporary popular media culture) and memory practices (archival memory act performance pop quiz show mixed with consumer culture TV broadcasting)

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

*cognitive companions* (--> coordinating multiple agencies characteristically)
-tiny clay token sheep were enclosed in clay envelopes with markings indicating what was inside (*molding and inscribing clay* was the favored sensory technology for making in Mesopotamia 5000 years ago)
•maybe your makings involves “true writing” that companions preferentially with language
•maybe your makings involves spinning plant and animal fiber and feeling, tying, and untying knots
•processual affirmative re-writings
•systeming meditations
•context-sensitive pushbackack
•operational closure (of a system)
•fluctuation, entrainment, blocked synchrony
•
[Katie King use of a term, how she shifts it from mechanism to affect:] [*]stigmergy: feeling of being in among and as the self-organizing bits that are system-ing (=/= a method of communication in emergent systems, mechanically defined as “indirect coordination” self-organizing termites and ants or flash mobs or political action)
@apass: how do you provide different *undisciplined ways of envisioning* new kinds of environments, artifacts and practices? (entangle design, science, fact and fiction, boundary objects, system-ing, [*]design: ***making things that tell stories*** [=/= telling stories])
(my encounters with) ajayeb's vibrating particularism
[*]website, talksite: play, trial and error, permutation and mistakes (none of it innocent or exemplary @ERG's website) ==> *cognitive reassembly*
-->{relations between developers and users to cre[...]

[...]espret

de-passion knowledge ==> a world ‘without us’ ==> a world without ‘them’

*impoverished: a world of minds without bodies, of bodies without minds, bodies without hearts, expectations, interests, a world of enthusiastic automata observing strange and mute creatures --Despret--> **a poorly articulated (and poorly articulating) world**


•autological subject: discourses, practices, and fantasies about self-making, self-sovereignty, and the value of individual freedom associated with the Enlightenment project of contractual constitutional democracies
Sven, Maarten,
Isabel for whom sex is disseminated
•genealogical society: discourses, practices, and fantasies about various social constraints and psychic assaults on the autological subject by various kinds of inheritances


“liberation denied, liberation achieved” -->
•both visions dependent upon an all-or-nothing approach to social change
•both visions dependent on vision and an unexamined allegiance to the concept of change
...at the self-proclaimed centers of freedom
--Katie--> *how do we know social change when we see it?*

when ‘eye candy’ begins to describe a range of visually induced consumer pleasures

theoretical apparatus:
space-plus-time (space + time) =/= spacetime
-the additive understanding of “+” pictures time and space as two geometric planes that intersect =/= ‘spacetime’ there is no need to explain how they come together, because nothing stands between them

“a woman's survival depends upon calling people into classification”
“...hair-trigger judgments about gender lead to romance as well as lethal exchange.”

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

Verran in her work with Yoruba (West African) and Yolngu (Aboriginal Australian)

=/= thinking of numbers used in enumerating the real world as helping us to work relation ==> numbers (and mathematical objects) as cognitive tools
elements of schooling --> learning to use mathematical tools

*can number be considered as an inventive frontier in social, cultural, political and moral life?* --Verran--> *number = materialized relations*, enumerated materiality

people having kin relations
people are relations (in an embodied sense + semiotic in the sense of expressing a formal relation [for example wife/husband])

example:
•in river water --> taking numbers as semiotic = to identify numbers as the formal relation unity/plurality
•in working markets --> numbers enact generalizing iconically in the whole/parts mode

--**--> numbers as particulars, in place and time, in situ, realized in specific practical ways

Platonist account of number
intuitionist account of number
instrumentalist acc[...]

[...]ile ecologies

heterodox political economy of contemporary digital capitalist control + its parasitical and autonomous pirate kingdoms (Sundaram > Rai)

Foucault --> ****knowledge was not made for understanding, it was made for cutting****

entrepreneurial capture of digital cultures and their hacking (in India)

-what is the force, sense, and value of the habituation (of CG hacking, of pragmatic experimentation habits)? --Sina--> (question of) passage between affective states
-(how can we?) better diagram through connecting relations and functions of force, value, and sense in (pirated & corporate) contemporary digital media infrastructures

(how to understand effectively the knots of) ***technoperceptual*** (becoming, relations, assemblages, habituation)

negotiating the digital (irreducible to capitalist strategies of value capture ~ resistance form)

the ecology of sense and sensation that jugaad events [technical animation CG] operate through (and happen in) *requires specific pirate infrastructures*

Rai's jugaad --affirm--> becoming through a counteractualization of the infrastructures of postdigital cultures

strategic narratives of acts of consumption --> sources of new productivity

(Ris's notion of) ecological: process-oriented historical materialism

interpretation by thinking --through--> assemblages of action --through--> assemblages of thought

collective practices of habituation

([Rai's] methodology of) *affect-as-capacity* --shift--> the focus of attention away from language (discourse and representation) toward habituated and emergent sensations in historically specific media assemblages

transformation of telecommunications in colonial and postcolonial South Asia

(Guattari's) assemblage: a prepersonal practice, a kind of style, a creative mutation that binds an individual or a group consciously or unconsciously

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

*traveling the bibliographic among knowledge worlds*

(Katie making a) multimedia bibliographic essay *with an argument* --> working out a practice of *transdisciplinary inspection*
(@apass, a few index of evaluation for such practice:)
•*how well it learns and models how to be affected or moved*
•*how well it opens up unexpected elements of one's own embodiments in lively and re-sensitizing world*
•(what are) *its possibilities for immersive play among sensations and platforms amid media technologies*
•(what are) *its ways of participating in multispecies learning or self-organization across ecologies
•(what are its capacities for) *mattering without owning the action* [--> play]

transdisciplinary connections have been made on the basis of *play*--between: psychiatry, mathematical, [...]

[...], indications of shifts from one knowledge world to another assemblaged through boundary objects?
-who gets to say in which knowledge world?

routinized rhetoric about feminism

apparatus: open-ended practices

****(ok yes) “we honestly believe that there are no positions that are epistemologically superior to any other” --but--> at the same time [Katie and i totally] argue with and try to overthrow those i don't agree with****

neutrality (<-- moral commitment) =/= relativism: forswearing claims to absolute epistemological authority

(learning from Katie) my technique in ajayeb study --> i brazenly detach words from their original context and mobilize then all together for my own irritating purposes [...] i both reduce and add to the complexity (of globals and locals)
**(my play:) double or multiple consciousness ==> [*]ajayeb: growing boundary objects
**(my project in apass:) to be curious and value how claims to epistemological authority operate and how comparative relativism can be accountable + can i irritatingly passionately disagree with


democratization of oppression (?)

reading across the media sustains a depth of experience that motivates more consumption
...the economic logic of a horizontally integrated entertainment industry

#telegram iran (commercial world of entertainment)
material examples of *stacked realities* cascading over various media and technological platforms with differing degrees of interoperability and standardization --Katie--> *transmedia stories* (inevitably commercialized)



integrationism
revolutionary action
supermacism
separatism
anarchism
political defense
redefinition of the human
to intervene in and democratically refocus social and psychic powers --> place-based ecological activism: self-consciously identifying and producing invigorating political and cultural planetary geographies

ethically augmented and affected cognitive sensorium

variable and sensitized tactics and ethics of “democratics” --Sandoval--> meta-ideologizing: functions both within and against ideology
@Leo?


(my work on ajayeb is aimed at:) old and new media collide ==Jenkins==> *convergence culture* --inhabited-by--> those who learn how to play with media, information, visualization, and who live among and produce hypertexted or relational and relative materialities

preemptive
proleptic
prophetic

(the way i am using the term) queer: to learn to be affected by the political economies of knowledge worlds


(my art in lecture and performances:) *to play with our own consciousness* --Katie--> to curiosly work at the edge of “this is not it”, [bits that are] some activated and activating across the t[...]

[...]terested in the very sophisticated way they think
(=/= social scientist's need to determinate the causes of something [designates it as an anomaly ==> impoverishing the object of study] --> asking “why people believe?” or “how can we explain such an odd thing as people believing in a supernatural being?”)
(she explored and learned with people how they think -->) ****how they take care of what matters for them with thoughts**** --> takes the form (in the pilgrims experience) of [*]hesitation: a sign that identifies that thought is occuring & this thought is taking care of something that matters [---> go to Attar Tazkirat al-Awliya]
forms of hesitation:
•openly contradictory alteration of positions
•a critical position (the apparition is not there)
•a position of belief
•using semantics or syntactic devices that introduce ambivalence
--> Claverie learns to hesitate with them
--Stengers--> ecological practice: a practice that takes into account the fact that the inquiry participates in the ‘milieu’ of those it addresses --> *the practicioner is herself taking care of what matters with thoughts and learns to create (what Despret would call) the relevant *milieu of thought*



Matrix world: “consumer victim =/= resistant hacker fighter” and nothing else

if you are a student of ghosts --> you are competent in sensing the taste of ghosts

{ancestors ate too much salt ==> descendants desire water}--> *intersubjective nature of remembering*
-[Despret > Kwon] true human desires are not those of an isolated individual. it is the individual who feels the desire, whereas the origin of the desirem, like the spirit's phantom salt, may be with someone else, for it is in the presence of this other that the water becomes salty --> ***the desire to remember can be a desire that rises somewhere between the past and the present***
-agencement: the act of commemoration responds to a desire, so one cannot choose whether it emanates from the one who is remembered or the one who takes charge of remembering --> the desire to be remembered & the desire to remember hold together [=/= giving ontological priority to the imagination of the living]


what can i learn from Tehran's bestiary, from my mother, from unusual old iranian fables, from telegram animals?
•let myself be instructed by the events that my inquiry creates
•let myself be called by the enigma that will guide me inmy understanding of events
*to be instructed ~= honouring the problem ~= following it up & letting oneself be led by it --> Alice Wonderland chasing rabbits


****questions do not call for explanation or elucidation, questions call for creation**** ~= [*]riddles: the beginnings of stories ==> set those who are summoned by the enigma to work in a particular way: “what manner of living will make it possible to u[...]

[...]o) ~~> forensic aesthetic: all evidence = signifying فوری (easy + immediate) =/= aesthetic object فرار (volatile)

object in evidence --> offer it as evidence by the way it is arranged, indexed, presented
its manner --> in arranging material so that someone may be able to make use of it as new evidence for some purpose (=/= finding material that already is in evidence)

what is a digital document?
--Buckland--> becomes more problematic, unless we remember the path of reasoning underlying the largely forgotten discussions of Otlet's objects and Briet's antelope


**documenting the antelope** =/= ajayeb
antelope: Ethiopian word for the elusive unicorn

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

Calvert
technobibliocapital

librarians cannot hope to really change how people seek knowledge in libraries (they are not *information awareness office* ~= news agency)

will to knowledge --manifest--> in a massive electronic data processing project

[*]library science: a set of practices for producing knowledge in subjects --> *producing subjects through knowledge production*

patron: certain kinds of subjects (=/= citizen), consumers with an abiding market rationality and an interest in individualist private space

enmeshed in practices of classification, circulation, collection

technology + libraries + capital
•capital: social, political, economic, and other relationships crystallized in things, including books and libraries
•biblio: libraries, books, knowledge
•techno: technologies (both silicon-based and not) that make producing, storing, and reproducing knowledge possible and efficient

technology and capital shaping library practices [and animation of animal practices? --> emphasize animal geography]

(legacy of bibliography and book collk collecting) 1930 --> library practice centered on the development of bibliographic standards emphasizing procedures for identifying and indexing authors and tides

(21st century) democracy of texts, collaboration with autodidacticism and public education, is now giving itself over to the *circulation of commodities*

**the subjects produced through 21st century librarianship are customers and consumers** (who seeks content =/= knowledge)

new librarian --> new freedom of information --> free market (in the form of atomized particles of “microcontent” allowing free-floating information to be freely accessed via computers and networks, without the censorious mediation of embodied librarians)

libraries --> techniques for ordering (~-> discourse of standardization)

(shifting) ways the library has operated alongside the state as a disciplinary & ideological apparatus
•18th century --> national library
-[...]

[...] of practices for producing knowledge in subjects --> *producing subjects through knowledge production*

patron: certain kinds of subjects (=/= citizen), consumers with an abiding market rationality and an interest in individualist private space

enmeshed in practices of classification, circulation, collection

technology + libraries + capital
•capital: social, political, economic, and other relationships crystallized in things, including books and libraries
•biblio: libraries, books, knowledge
•techno: technologies (both silicon-based and not) that make producing, storing, and reproducing knowledge possible and efficient

technology and capital shaping library practices [and animation of animal practices? --> emphasize animal geography]

(legacy of bibliography and book collecting) 1930 --> library practice centered on the development of bibliographic standards emphasizing procedures for identifying and indexing authors and tides

(21st century) democracy of texts, collaboration with autodidacticism and public education, is now giving itself over to the *circulation of commodities*

**the subjects produced through 21st century librarianship are customers and consumers** (who seeks content =/= knowledge)

new librarian --> new freedom of information --> free market (in the form of atomized particles of “microcontent” allowing free-floating information to be freely accessed via computers and networks, without the censorious mediation of embodied librarians)

libraries --> techniques for ordering (~-> discourse of standardization)

(shifting) ways the library has operated alongside the state as a disciplinary & ideological apparatus
•18th century --> national library
•19th century --> new techniques for ordering, discourse of standardization and order (in the library) + searching and retrieval external to the mind of the librarian
•19th century --> [emerging understanding of the role of literacy in worker self improvement ==>] public library <==> a project of nation, citizenship, democracy, self-betterment, universal education + concurrent with a serious reconstitution of hierarchies of access to books
•late 19th century --> paternalist financial auspices of Andrew Carnegie (who funded 1689 library buildings) for the explicit objective of the self-education of
workers and immigrants --purpose--> acculturation and assimilation
•Paul Otlet --> universal decimal classification 1899
•late 20th century --> dreams of intelligent computers and objectivized information science : (from) library school --to--> school of information management systems
•
}--> *schematization efforts* --> (20th century) library science (continue producing itself) as a cooperative venture of flourishing information [triumphant rationalism]
•standa[...]

[...]ess to books
•late 19th century --> paternalist financial auspices of Andrew Carnegie (who funded 1689 library buildings) for the explicit objective of the self-education of
workers and immigrants --purpose--> acculturation and assimilation
•Paul Otlet --> universal decimal classification 1899
•late 20th century --> dreams of intelligent computers and objectivized information science : (from) library school --to--> school of information management systems
•
}--> *schematization efforts* --> (20th century) library science (continue producing itself) as a cooperative venture of flourishing information [triumphant rationalism]
•standardization
•automation
•propagate
•expand

(in the name of) democratization & civil rights

library ==contribute==> to the civic sphere:
•providing the information
•providing *behaviors* necessary for appropriate citizenship

library ==> classification system (DDC) --> general knowledge organization tool

late 20th century neo-liberal rationality ==intensify==>
•moral directive for self-betterment (as workers)
•reorienting the relation of subjects (toward the state and the social) as one of consumership
+ shift in the definition of knowledge

technobibliocapital --> (new era of) ordering texts & subjects

[*appreciative =/= affirmative* <-- learning from Calvert, we can be appreciative but not affirmative]
[to be critical =] ****not to:
•dismiss X (by thinking of it as) composed entirely of domination [<-- @apass, Pierre] ~= to laud something as a timeless ideal
•evoke a sense of relief that we have X that are free (of power relations, freely available to all, and filled with free-flowing information)
}--> historical + present + future-looking formulations of X

•reverence for libraries of long gone days...
•accolades مراسم اعطای منصب شوالیه for librarians as heroes...
•libraries as the saviors of the people...
•as just another manifestation of government intrusion (paternalism, library: robust civilizing apparatuses, an ideal philanthropic gift)...
--Calvert--> **libraries are potent resources with vast possibilities for creating the worlds we inhabit** -->[*]library: (collectively produced ~ both collectively funded and collected from many sources) vibrant sites of knowledge generation + of power (for those who generate knowledge through libraries in turn diffuse this knowledge through other places and other people)

without a robust definition of power ==Calvert==> librarians have been unable to see or articulate how libraries have been in the service of disciplining subjugating power (a power that is productive not just for readers but of readers)

..weak appeals to market freedom


[...]

[...]rimary
*infinite*
--link--> to notions of progrss and achievement in contemporary society

•operand resources:
inhuman     machine-like
basic       stuff
functional  physical
inanimate   raw
inert       less important
secondary   lesser
tangible    subordinate
*finite*


service-dominant logic {
•operant --> infinite --> human's skill
•operand --> finite --> world's material

service-dominant logic ==> a cut (“=/=”) --> operant resources will take these sluggish raw inherently secondary materials and act on them to whisk them into something valuable
--Barad--> every act of observation makes a “cut” in what is otherwise an indissolubly unauflösbare entangled natural-cultural universe : *every new way of observation cuts open new logics ==> undermines what is known + what can be known*


[*]operand resources: resources which require action to create benefit
--✕--> crucial scenarios where operand resources (forests, sea beds, topsoil) require the opposite of action (unused or underused) in order to create or maintain (their intrinsic) value

*value-in-use: somthing is assessed according to the use a consumer has for it

*value-in-underuse --> (tourism's) deserted beaches, unspoiled countryside, uninhabited ruins
for example brand management implicitly leverages the concept of *value-in-underuse*
brands are often valuable for the very fact that they are underused : when their use is confined to small communities, enabling them to maintain their cultural capital (exclusivity or authenticity)

*vlaue-in-context: value is conceived as something that is collectively co-created by multiple actors
for example in service-dominant logic an operant resource like *brand vlaue* is one which is externally-based and dynamically determined in the context (cannot be own by a single actor) --> *consumers might co-derive affective cognitive social value in creating the brand but economic value that accrues as a result belongs entirely to the brand's shareholders* [--> issue with fandom]
for example *affective value*: when vlaue lies in the general sentiment of a networked group of actors

(in marketing's theory of value creation) the *role of the consumer* in the value creation process is now explicitly recognized and articulated (incorporated) through compelling concepts such as cocreation, coproduction, *prosumerism* [an individual who both consumes & produces]
@apass collaborative environments

[consumer research]
recognizing the ways in which consumers and consumption are both productive and value-adding

Holbrook's topology of consumer value
value is active = when it entails physical or mental manipulation of an object
value is reactive = when things are done[...]

[...]"cut” in what is otherwise an indissolubly unauflösbare entangled natural-cultural universe : *every new way of observation cuts open new logics ==> undermines what is known + what can be known*


[*]operand resources: resources which require action to create benefit
--✕--> crucial scenarios where operand resources (forests, sea beds, topsoil) require the opposite of action (unused or underused) in order to create or maintain (their intrinsic) value

*value-in-use: somthing is assessed according to the use a consumer has for it

*value-in-underuse --> (tourism's) deserted beaches, unspoiled countryside, uninhabited ruins
for example brand management implicitly leverages the concept of *value-in-underuse*
brands are often valuable for the very fact that they are underused : when their use is confined to small communities, enabling them to maintain their cultural capital (exclusivity or authenticity)

*vlaue-in-context: value is conceived as something that is collectively co-created by multiple actors
for example in service-dominant logic an operant resource like *brand vlaue* is one which is externally-based and dynamically determined in the context (cannot be own by a single actor) --> *consumers might co-derive affective cognitive social value in creating the brand but economic value that accrues as a result belongs entirely to the brand's shareholders* [--> issue with fandom]
for example *affective value*: when vlaue lies in the general sentiment of a networked group of actors

(in marketing's theory of value creation) the *role of the consumer* in the value creation process is now explicitly recognized and articulated (incorporated) through compelling concepts such as cocreation, coproduction, *prosumerism* [an individual who both consumes & produces]
@apass collaborative environments

[consumer research]
recognizing the ways in which consumers and consumption are both productive and value-adding

Holbrook's topology of consumer value
value is active = when it entails physical or mental manipulation of an object
value is reactive = when things are done by a product to the consumer (objects act on consumers to create value)


xxxxxx

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

Hayles

(to take) a problem-based approach --> taking a problem and looking for solutions =/= investigating problematics (<-- humanities [and art])

what are the reward structures in artistic research? (the way a work is recognized and validated by the field)

postliteracy
the future of human & the future of writing are entwined
meaning = resistance
to be human = to resist techno-language

an informed scientific-literate and humanistically educated public ==> democracy[...]

[...]ur project st.open, that there should be many activities going on at once in public space, that public space should be synchronous, productive as well as spectacular

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

*the way we concentrate has a deeply historical character*
Crary

looking at opera or television or driving,
we are in a dimension of contemporary experience that requires that we effectively cancel out or exclude from consciousness much of our immediate environment

Crary: how western modernity since the 19th century has demanded that individuals define and shape themselves in terms of a capacity for “paying attention”*** --> disengagement from a broader field of attraction for the sake of isolating or focusing on a reduced number of stimuli

{ our lives = disconnected patchwork of stats }<== dense and powerful remaking of human subjectivity in the West over the last 150 years

/> the so-called crisis of subject disintegration is diagnosed as a deficiency of “attention”

attentive norms and practices ==> modern distraction


imperative of concentrated attentiveness within the disciplinary organization of labor, education, and mass consumption
+
ideal of sustained attentiveness as a constitutive element of a creative and free subjectivity

a cultivated individual gazing (~ Jassem) on a great work of art or nature
+
a factory worker concentrating on the performance of some repetitive task

--> institutional constructions of a productive and manageable subjectivity + purified aesthetic perception
["+” : inseparability]

==> experience of subjective autonomy (for example in Jassem)
+ ambivalent limits and failures of an attentive individual

19th century emergence of new technological forms of spectacle and recording




...set of terms and positions that cannot be construed simply as questions of opacity

vision is not an autonomous and self-justifying problem

(we have to rework the) forces of specialization and separation that allowed the notion of visuality to become the intellectually available concept that it is today
(we should do that with all our ready at hand concepts)

what is the genealogy of attention in Persian subjectivity?
•an embodied subject is both the location of operations of power and the potential for resistance
•vision is only one part of a body capable of evading institutional capture

social economic representational shifts and practices
visual/auditory culture

...richer and more historically determined notions of “embodiment”

spectator culture is not founded on the necessity of making a subject ‘see’ (Crary)
rat[...]

[...]gy laboratory in Leipzig, one of the practical and discursive spaces within modernity in which human beings “problematized what they are.” Foucault/
(Wundt's account defined attention [= will] as one of the highest integrative functions [---> go to #integrative in Sennett], its essential role in producing an effective unity of consciousness)


part of the cultural logic of capitalism demands that we accept as natural switching our attention rapidly from one thing to another --> (capitalism as a) regime of reciprocal attentiveness and distraction


conceptualizer of a new economic and social space based on the quantification and distribution of energy:
•Wener von Siemens
•Lord Kelvin: globalization of telegraphic communication and subsequently in the commodification and marketing of electric power (in England) [telegraph: a world of anonymous, decontextualized information; moved history into the background and amplified the instant and simultaneous present/person]
•Edison: transition to centralised corporate capitalism (in late 19th century): his role in the emergence of a new system of quantification and distribution, a system for transmission and reception as abstract processes, ways in which a space of consumption and circulation could be dynamized/activated --> social field of individual subjects could be arranged into increasingly separate and specialized units (of consumption)
“Edison was a holistic conceptualizer and determined solver of the problems associated with the growth of systems” (Crary > Hughes)
Edison is paradigmatic: *the indistinction between information and visual images, and the making of quantifiable and abstract flow into the object of attentive consumption. his grasp of some of the systemic features of capitalism (in 1880s and 1890s) underscores the abstract nature of the products he “invented”. his work is inseparable from the continual manufacturer of new needs and the consequent restructuring of the network of relations in which such products would be consumed* --> other participants in the same historical project of perpetual rationalization and modernization: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Andrew Grove, etc.

(kinetoscope and phonograph logic:) the structuring of perceptual experience in terms of a solitary rather than a collective subject --> today's computer screen as the primary vehicle for the distribution and consumption (of electronic commodities)

(late 20th century) management of attention <-- capacity of an observer to adjust to continual repatterning of the ways in which a sensory world can be consumed
@Hoda


ADD
dubious classification of an attentive deficit disorder --> durability of attention (posed as [implicitly] natural function) as a normative category of institutional power
-social construction of illness
-now ADD is not linked to any weakness [...]

[...]> (idea for video documentation: a lagging mirror attached in front of the camera's lenses)



(a fable)

looking out the window
perceive a landscape
light of consciousness
distribute over the landscape
then i try
to apprehend a single tree branch
the consciousness that the rest of the landscape was deployed then fades
diminishes into associational debris
into disappearance of representations

real nexus of psychic life
permeated colored enlivened feelings
distribution of feelings
the gradual unfolding
efforts of attention
are forms of volitional activity
impulsive energy to individual imagery
permit them to fade away
therefore, the tree branch, the window, is a process

Dilthey


in Peirce:
[*]attention = anti-optical act of selection [=/= (in traditional epistemological thought) singling out a contemplative object], “the power by which thought at one time is connected with and made to relate to thought at another time”
--✕--> *firstness: self-immediacy, absolute presence (before synthesis and differentiation) ~ nonreferenciality (=/= perception, attention consumed/constituted in time ~= continuous quantity = *secondness)


using a more act-oriented term “thought” instead of “consciousness”

dissociation
anaesthesia
hallucination
multiple selves
--James--> temporal model of mind: ‘stream’
(=/= scenic model of mind)
[this was part of a larger institutional field in which scientific psychology generally was abandoning ‘elemental’ conceptions of consciousness in favour of operational or functional models]
==> observer: an artist confronted with the primordial chaos of sensation --> (ethics of) overlapping common choices (made of autonomous subjects [--> you can see James seeking to lessen the shock of recent works in science and psychology for an American middle-class readership])
(William James:) irreducible plurality of experience ==> (think in terms of) fluidity and immobilization



my work is usually unformed and informal: a speaking properly in terms of irradiated strata, an aggregate


emergence of increasingly powerful technologies and institutions that would determine and enforce *externally* the objects of attention for mass population --> history of cinema
•disciplinary framework: it is the aim of the teacher to fix the attention of the pupils --> habit of attention becomes amenable to the will of the teacher



attention was an indispensable component of the “normal” and “rational” subject of the late 19th century industrial society, yet had a disturbing proximity to “pathological” and “irrational” effects.
-Crary

[...]

[...] /> (Deleuze and Guattari:) when head ceases to be coded by the body ==> ‘face’ () --> ‘body (+ head)’ [~ multidimensional polyvocal corporeal code] overcoded by what we call the Face
(////we have to escape the face and facialization!)

indication of bodies in my peers projects in apass:
-kinds of subduing and constrain necessary for the construction of an *organized and inhibited corporeality* (--> Laura's project)
-instruments of domestication

fixed pictorial (--> a holding action) --> social organization



study object of empirical sciences around 1880: perceptual field newly decomposed into various abstract units of sensation + related possibilities of synthesis
+ newly invented nervous disorders (hysteria, etc.)
--> (busy with) failures of the integrity of perception --> disassociated fragments --> (impairment asymbolias:)
*agnosia*: inability to make any conceptual or symbolic identification of an object ~ visual information experienced with a primal strangeness:
“perceptual field --✕--> pragmatic plasticity”
flat perception, no determination of depth object
}--> labelled as pathological [=/= my amazon project--was a form agnosia:
•resistance to consuming the world in a productive or social way
•rejection of habitual or conventional patterns of organized perceptual information]
-this is part of the phenomenology of knowledge***
desymbolization of perception --> Foad

{for Janet:} attention: power of mental synthesis (~ the power of subject to form new perception, to have memories)
{for Freud:} attention: dynamic activity of repression


“[a] society recognizes itself and its own positivity through the morbid and pathological forms it identifies and invents” (Crary + Foucault)

subjectivity: provisional assembly of mobile and mutable components --> attentiveness:
•conscious/voluntary {task-oriented, higher behaviour}
•automatic/passive {areas of habitual activity, daydreaming, reverie, somnambulant states}


(the state of) the seated woman


[19th century regime of facility]
Clark's “face of fashion” (= Manet's blanks), fashion would keep one's face from any identity (==> ‘the look’: public, outward, blase, impassive, not bored, not tired, not disdainful, not quite focused on anything)
impersonality -->(Benjamin's modernity:) public space in which, for the first time, individuals are systematically habituated not to return the gaze of the other [~-> “chi dadash!?” or “was guckst du?!"]
-for three centuries, the meaning of human face was explained in terms of rhetoric of language. in 19th century suddenly face occupies a precarious position: it is belonging to a human being as a:
•physiological organism
•privatized, socialized individual subject
[...]

[...]ion(/distraction) [in European cities, and its deviation in Tehran differences]


fashion works to bind attention onto its own pseudo-unity

against the living, fashion asserts the rights of corpse and the sex appeal of the inorganic
(Benjamin)
--> death drive

(supreme cult of the commodity:) fashion: a blossoming forth into a luminous apparition of the new
[==>? withdrawal from fashion = a strategy of freedom]

Adorno: in the age of growing powerlessness of subjective spirit vis a vis social objectivity, fashion registers the alien excess of objectivity in subjective spirit, which is painful yet all the same a corrective of the illusion that subjective spirit exist purely within itself. against its detractors, fashion's most powerful response is that it participates in the individual's impulse, which is saturated with history. (“Aesthetic Theory” p316)


(?what are my time's) rhythms of attentiveness


*mask: a means of mental survival

mask (of masculinity) --> the ability to keep a secret --> *all secrets are (at the end) sexual*


[]should our artistic practices comment or be continuous with the (emerging) world of consumer culture? #make a fashion magazine with Ali and Janina: excursion into the stultifying and emancipatory effects of the fashion commodity. discussion on: jewellery, decoration, women's bodies, show, travel, glitter, ----> kaleidoscopic decomposition and displacement of the glitter object
-Mallarme's La Derniere Mode
==> luminosity of a single object is lost amidst its indefinite reflections on the multiplied and fractured surfaces adjacent to it
*insubstantial world (of mode) aligned with (its own) sublime disavowal of the immediate* (, an emptiness and anxiety at the heart of this impossible presence --> “to be out of style = death”)
•its titular concept
◦internal movement of its text


artisanal craft


(repetitive forms of:)
primal intuition of absence
transcendental signifier of religion
sacramental authenticity of antiquity


(for Nietsche:) decadence: perpetual adaptability of spectacular culture ~= (one loses one's power of) resistance against stimuli [--> this is Ali ]
=/= existing capacities for action and living
(obsolescence, not the business of the poet. Mallarme)
(the question of resistance is weak. we must ask what are the emergent forms of life caused by that? --> might be interesting for Hoda)

(apass's own hoped-for ritual civic theater of the future)*

attention sustained and enhanced by the regular introduction of novelty [...] means of simulating experiences of singularity and identity in the face of the processes of exchangeablity and equivalence
-Guy Debord

[...]