[...] spirit [they cannot be possess as a piece of property], reading inflaming flashes of remote spirits [--> is this hear from one another looks like? is technology placed at the source of this reflection?--technology itself answers the call--(Avital)]) could we work with Ophelia's kind of #Wortsalad instead? (Salad-e Kalame, khoresht-e kalame; same thing happens to Shirin of in Khosro Shirin, but unlike Shakespeare, Nezami allows another poetic drift;) Heidegger's “die Sprache spricht” : language is monologue --?--> schizophrenia and schizophrenic discourse --?--> structure of speaking]
[speaking asserts a certain temporal priority which we must undermine]
-listening *before* speaking
-“We hear language speaking” (Heidegger); a non-organic speaking; language is not equipped with organs of speech? (Avital)


serious joking / joking seriousness [Haraway]
joke/jest/gesture
a space of play --> where ideas come in to being
(story of ‘or’. is it where the original joker came? using or instead of and)
(there is no ‘or’ in nature!? what are the earlier forms of or that we can trace in cave paintings or tool makings?)

**if you don't take my idea seriously i will be utterly incomprehensible**

crafts-person for the building of lures of propositions --> ‘abstractions’
(abstraction is fragile and can hold worlds together)


where Europe comes from? (woher kommst du? i am born in, i am born in, ...)


what animates us rather than what civilizes us



(to Shabnam:) to ‘mourn with’ rather than ‘mourn about’
(-about =/= -with)
(structure of mourning)


to break in the philosophical and biological headquarters (and steal their stories, their abstractions, etc.)
exchanging and sharing instruments and languages



this is about building something that is ‘good enough’ to get you through...

these practices doesn't necessarily produce ‘separate entities’ (indivis)
am i fantasizing creating a monolithic structure of ideas?


critique is an art that tangles with what you are proposing
(like an octopus in a lure)

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

stories that can interrupt death (of our time, anthropocene, etc.)
(example of biology-story into culture-story: (1) ladder of evolution --> progress (2) sperm/egg story --> gender performance)

to change stories so that they are more livable
we live stories

to make mistakes as fast as possible


... move across earth space and narrative space


situated stories
they can't tell everything, but what is needed here


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refugium_(population_biology)

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

ontological cho[...]

[...]ust control our ‘natural’ bodies --> escalating logic of counterdomination] so her manifesto is all about that. biology is (a rich fabulous practice and) never innocent, and it is something that ‘we mean’. in the sense of ‘what do you mean?!'] [we are always telling knowledge stories that we need --> noninnocent]

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

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

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

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

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

(Haraway on feminism)
feminist theory is especially good in getting at in particular ways doctrines of nature's work to enforce ways of life on women, on people of color, on the enslaved, on those who do not possess the qualities of mind and self-possession, on those who are on the marked categories to the unmarked. the feminist have been particularly good at getting how genre works. gender, in this regard. [...] --> that female by nature is committed to the species and the male by nature committed to transcendence.
[our inherited binaries -->] formulations of nature: executive/non-executive organs, immanence/transcendence, maintenance/novelty, catabolic(foru-sakht فرو ساخت, sukht سوخت)/anabolic(tarkib-saz ترکیب ساز) functions, ,,
-in Darwin's writing, non-theological account of diversity on earth, we find both interrupters and continuers of these particular notions of nature

the question of model, what is the model for what, what is similar to what?
****how do we do comparative thinking? comparative thinking depends on similarity  judgment and difference judgment, and depends on good-enough models, and depends on a certain kind of rhetorical work of *crafting tropes*
 --> figures of similarity/difference:
  by similarity, or
  by contiguity, or
  by part-whole, o[...]

[...]ntaminate systematically another part and vice versa

(Haraway on feminism)
feminist theory is especially good in getting at in particular ways doctrines of nature's work to enforce ways of life on women, on people of color, on the enslaved, on those who do not possess the qualities of mind and self-possession, on those who are on the marked categories to the unmarked. the feminist have been particularly good at getting how genre works. gender, in this regard. [...] --> that female by nature is committed to the species and the male by nature committed to transcendence.
[our inherited binaries -->] formulations of nature: executive/non-executive organs, immanence/transcendence, maintenance/novelty, catabolic(foru-sakht فرو ساخت, sukht سوخت)/anabolic(tarkib-saz ترکیب ساز) functions, ,,
-in Darwin's writing, non-theological account of diversity on earth, we find both interrupters and continuers of these particular notions of nature

the question of model, what is the model for what, what is similar to what?
****how do we do comparative thinking? comparative thinking depends on similarity  judgment and difference judgment, and depends on good-enough models, and depends on a certain kind of rhetorical work of *crafting tropes*
 --> figures of similarity/difference:
  by similarity, or
  by contiguity, or
  by part-whole, or
  ...
(this is ‘building’ *among* us)
(how do i decide to compare two things? Shirin and Ophelia, etc)

models are built rhetorics
history of models
the power of models is that they are not the ‘same as’

circuits of meaning and power that flow through (materials and bodies)

mondial ~? situated knowledge
the idiom ‘situated’ makes people think ‘local’ (instead of global)
by situated she means the ‘knot’ which always means some place and somewhere, but that someplace/somee/somewhere could be in materiality a distributed digital network. the situated is always open. the point is that it is not nowhere and no place.


epidemic friendly

the flow of disease are major international research matter

eco-feminism, veganism is for Haraway is genocidal position, a position that advocates violence, a position dedicated to the destruction of ways of life and living beings including animals, [a position that] *concise all working animals to being nothing but evidence of the destructive and violating imposition of human will on natural stuff*, and “that domestic animals of all kinds are victims and demonstrations of human hubris گستاخى, and they have been made into tools” ~= an extreme developemnt of liberal theory --> the (work) animals are not self-defining subjects, are violations and victims, and should not exisit, except as:
•heritage-animals
•rescue-animals
•wards of guardianship<[...]

[...]yeb helps me to work on:
-history
-poetics
-animality --> inhabiting material and semiotic positions --> how to find a descriptive act that is not in terms of the impressions it makes on our senses? / this is about the places things take and occupy in our phenomenal world. / it is difficult to discuss the night-sky without first breaking it up into constellations. (Matthew Carey)

i have been building my own islamology or islam-studies department, through a low-voice critical mildly blasphemic rant about imagination
(anthropology of non-experimental imagination in the islamicated worlds)
[there is a difference between **experimental imagination** and imagination]

we are at the edge of extinctions
many species and lives are migrating to “where” and nowheres, pushing to the oblivion.

my issue with the ‘timing of understanding’ --> i don't want to be understood by you, i want to be loved by you ==> messenger + message --> so how do i produce lovers? (=/= Don Juan's type of love) --> there is a genius in your everyday talks that transforms me and has nothing to do with understanding (with the information that i grasp)


(using Martha Kenney thinking:)
i am interested in crafting words, phrases, and languages that reworlds us. (reworlding is about reorienting us in the world differently. --> is that what i meant by changing the rhythm of somebody's story?) what is important for me is ***what words ‘do’ rather what words ‘point at.’*** --> if not evidence then ‘what’?! *****the magic of the right word*****

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

communicating knowledge is always also making it
(false: backstage making knowledge, finding truths, connections etc. and then all of this gonna be communicated by publication, teaching, exhibition, etc.)
all the useful ideas i ever had, have happened in the process of deliberating, communicating, exchanging, and so on.
**trying to communicate is the same as making knowledge
(i don't make, i communicate)

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

from paf:
-lunching a counter-exotic movement toward the Book of Wonders: (1) postponing immediate information. (2) ...
•if everything is not exotic then nothing is.
•framing as ‘tool,’ every tool is and has power, and is built in a discourse of power. tools are not innocent, nor can we do without them. they make us. what would be an idea of the ‘worst tool’ you can work with? poetics for me? [to write-about =/= to write-with the Book of Wonders. to use a language-tool that produces the most ambiguities and most misunderstandings, but that is the only way, there is no tool that can prommis clarity. evey tool produces its own ‘clear'--for someone, for some purpose. these makings are all tool-specific: making dichotomies, making similarities, making diferences, stc.]
•how far your research can host an [...]

[...]what Stengers calls to promote an “oikos”?)


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

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

art of staging = designing a scene

[the House TV series, the issue of the protagonist is] the distinguish between the figure of the expert and the figure of the diplomat.
*expert: ones whose practice is not threatend by the issue under discussion --> knowledge = relevance
*diplomat: ones who provide a voice for those whose practice, mode of existence, (and what is offen called) identity are threatened by a decision. to cause the experts second thoughts. --> knowledge ~= decision
[this is core in storytelling] [then, i am political. i used to use the word embassador, but it means also ‘diplomat.’ stories that can hold another story hanging. Sina's shy embassador ~=? ] (but what about the weak ones, the idiot, the one's who ‘rather not’ contribute to the political project?)
-diplomats are situated*
[for *Lili this is also a delima, she is torn apart between her expert self and diplomat who crafts relevance
diplomat--the relevance of feelings --> what is the knowledge in the kiss? (the kiss that she rendered as ‘irrelevant’)] [for me kiss is essentialy important. “it (everything) started with a kiss."]

universal knowledge =/= relevant knowledge


‘trust’ is one of many names for love
“you can never be indifferent to the trust you inspire” (Stengers)

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

#workshop: “the magic of the right word”
(against Sherlock Holmes)
(12-step recovery program for people suffering from) addiction to the truth

(to energize the connections to the things that animate us.)r />
1. gathering, basckets of concepts, objects, things, words, etc.
2. excersises, physical to-dos (cleaning, cooking, sport, sawing, etc.) while telling (this is about removing the codes of acting and representation process that interupt the telling)
3. everyday mundane talks, no stage. ‘you’ in it. (is it a one-to-one mentoring?)
4. convert into language the objects from the basket, write them down. since we are going to work with sign-language
5. make the connections (probably together)
6. special activities during the workshop? (cooking, drinking, etc.)
7. ending of the workshop. what would be the closure? what do we build? how do we evaluate?


[what are you summoned by? write about the person you see in the light of reverie? how to survive humanism?]

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

#workshop, fables
fable seen as a site where one formulates concepts and narratives that reorient one within one'[...]

[...]terest ==> chance of interesting answers
-asking about the differential productions,  “=/=” or “=” or “==>” in each other practices. these assessments are propositional and poetic remarks, guessing the artificialities that we live with, not finding of matters of fact
◦asking about particularizations (تخصیص) and generalizations (تعمیم)

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

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

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

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

#workshop, reading group
•reading as passionate betrayal. (hunting for precious empirical details, refigurative, reparative, poaching, reading can be a betrayal of textual authority and an act of survival)
•addressing /present* differences, not already pre-figured differences
•(condition of friendship, staying close to the text) staying close as a reader, as someone who could hold the text of the Other, receiving it in the withdrawal / Entzug  (drug rehabilitation)
•i am in no position of ‘understanding’ or being clear about the text
•(i understand now that) it is not up to me to tell you how to read
•what makes you write or scratch a text?
(aaaakh... our alphabetico-logical cultures...!)
•if everything is not fundamentally unreadable (snafu) we wouldn't be reading
•it is about to situate the place of a (un)learning
•throwing access to each other (not only in terms of transferential intensity #sss)
•which appetites and tastes are required to fulfill the *ethics and erotics of curiosity* (that I am cultivating and depending on)? flourishing (of my ajayeb) depends on a reading that is more like “mutual partial digestion” (Katie King, Haraway) [=/= “eating well"] the text
•“every time i read X, something new shows up”

my practice of ‘rhetorical reading’ (=/= ‘close reading’; or more like close reading and letting go. “close” is itself a metaphor, a rhetoric of reading;) doesn't work with the idea that there is something ‘in’ the text[...]

[...]lines. in a Derridean sense: (one is equiped with the question) “what is writing itself (in this text)”?
-two speculative spheres meet in rhetorical reading: one of the text and one of the reader, but they have to ‘stick’ to one another, the stickiness of your reading matters in consequential ways. this is against the idea that we read and each understand personally whatever.
•my second issue with ‘close reading’: there is no correlation between the speed of reading and comprehension/apprehension

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

‘fantasy of the unproblematic mode’

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

regarding biographical work according to Pierre, ok i am working even on the border of solipsism
what i am doing is not autopoiesis (self-making, making a poem out of yourself) rather sympoiesis (with-making, with people from different worlds and pasts)

trying to contain every available mode of interpretation in my work
(collecting all the modes of interpretation)

(for the psychoanalyst as writer,) the *unconscious functions as a *trope
unconscious ~=? trope

*my actual interest is in “the place of study”
which is embodied by its participants, is shared and full of stories that hold foster curiosity and learning. a place where hybrid agents of interpretation are alive and at work, partly technological partly human partly animal shared knowing processes.
-one of[...]

[...] topics, they have no ‘topic’ only ‘resource’ (in the making of their own myth of the figure of artist,) [=/= when something becomes a topic for you, it bounds you to the unsettling commitments of curiosity and research and hard work.]
-in their notion of “Artist in the Reign of Terror” they ask disturbingly “but many individuals have died and it means nothing?!” with a sneer (artwork as puzkhand پوزخند --> @Ali )
[**“sneer” is a contemptuous or mocking smile, remark, or tone, coming from a family of sarcastic tropes of complaint and ironizated complaining]
-their art-work finds and flourishes in a terrain of terror. in their nonspeculative work there is no “but, what if” or “but, not yet” and therefore no ‘becomings’
-for Hito and Rabih: zeitgenössisch (contemporary) = grausam (atrocious)
-they dichotomize (fact/fiction, real/unreal, etc.), rather than allowing a novel and interesting question to be raised
-what is the state of unknown in one's practice? rather than being a news agency

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

[negativity?]--> your bad feelings --> غر ghor complaint --(turn it into)--> critique --(start doing)--> research --(get)--> diploma --(turn it into)--> phd --(make your)--> department of studies --(into)--> craft tradition
[you don't have to start with negativity!]
[you don't need to end in your own myth tradition!]

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

@Anouk (@her “breathing archive”): (Lev Manovich's) relationship between ‘interface’ and ‘database,’ ‘perceptable’ to ‘information’. [Database as Symbolic Form: http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i290-1/s04/readings/manovich_database.pdf]
what is for Anouk ‘information’? and what is for her the relationship between information, knowledge, interface, and perceptable?
for her what is the relationship between ‘information’ and ‘infinite’? (infinite as the universe of all possible images)




*Pierre's ‘rights of nerves’ --> “talking to everybody”
[rights of nerves: you are promted to do what you do out of disgust, outrage, fear, or driven by anxiety, you don't know why, you are compelled towards an object or project or thing or unthing]


*Seba: for him “narrative =/= complex” (the question of “complexity's situatedness”) for him: “multiple perspectives ==> coherency (=/= bi-rabt بی‌ ربط, na-ham-dusti ناهمدوستی ?)” (is his idea of “coherency” leads to ‘friendship’? is for Seba ‘amity’ [ravabet-e hasane روابط حسنه] at stake? )
Seba's epistemological object(?): ‘evidence’ (=/?=>! cordial dispositions)

(complexity is the name of our game. Haraway)

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

my current work and interest involves the investigation of individualized subject formation (tajarode nafs تجرد نفس ?); interrogating the production of language; and tracing the divisible distingu[...]

[...]ition with aporia, (~ snafu before aporia,) “puzzlement, which breaks with the logic of identity,” and thus defining aporia. The result of this union is Eros...
poverty + {plenitude × aporia} ==> eros : {agency of passivity + resourcefulness}
1-metaphysical inquiry begins from ‘aporia’
2-rationalist inquiry begins from ‘a priori’
3-empiricist inquiry begins from ‘tabula rasa’ (hakim's beginning)
/
/
4-mystical inquiry begins from ‘affective a posteriori’ (effect, wonder, heyrat, tahayor)


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

sci-fi is imagining the elsewhere inside mortality. (==> feminism stakes in SF)

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

*make a series of studio photos with white clear backs, two different genders iranians having a physical/verbal fight or some sort of aggressive encounter

*the idea is to write a script for a movie or short series, combining the historical 14th century Iran with the 14th century imaginal beast fables from the ajayeb. the camera creats a non-exotic continuation between the two

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

[with Kenney]

-how to let emerge a seriousness as collective matters of care?
-how to stimulate pragmatic questions about how to craft relevant knowledge?

speculation is all about pragmatism


capitalist speculation : “one must speculate to accumulate” =/= relating & narrating

scientific speculation & venture capital ==> big epistemic/financial pay-offs or costly dead ends [=/= (Stengers's notion of speculative) *being at risk with ones claims* =/= received notions of authority or rationality]

(an abstract challenge:) to bring specificity and imaginative traction

*speculation is a more feral practice
(wild) speculation [always improper] =/= proper science : rational production of univerasal knowledge
-speculation is not about what there is but what there might be
-speculation is on the side of the possible =/= probable (--> Stengers)

speculative operations (quietly) insist that *another world is here* (--> my ajayeb) =/= the smooth operation of business-as-usual (,, interrupting it)

for my ajayeb, how can i carve out a space to nurture my idea? --> nest-building --position/place--> digging out a bit of earth

*speculative empiricism : scientific + narrative
working with ajayeb so that it might stimulate a specualtive empiricism for composing more livable worlds --> ajayeb's storied biospheres

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

the notion of ‘magic’ in popular TV series, such as ‘Harry Potter’ franchise and ‘The Magicians’ among many others, and instrumentalization. magic as information technology that is completely instrumentalized. the capitalist ideology of ‘tool’ and ‘usefulness’ are insinuated heavily in the hips[...]

[...]ور), little life animators often easy and ok to kill, a term in farsi for kids that worlds for them in particular ways
bio (“qualified life”) =/= zoe, juju, “bare life” (Agamben): that which is killable --?!--> that which must be transformed
[stories of originary exclusion and composition of body]

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

the form and function are having too tight fit. no no no!
(cities) being inclusive but not integrative

(setar different technique of vibrato and measure for instance in Saba and Ghavami, which part of the finger or body, one works in certain way for one and not for the other musician --> the explicit unpacking of the activity : what was formerly tacit [zemni, khamush, =/= habit] becomes dredged into explicit [=/= expressive] consciousness, precisely because there is a resistance, that there is something not right for the musician ==> reconsidering, reexploring --> the technique then again disappears into the tacit realm --> technique becomes variegated)
**tacit --> explicit (~= that which becomes available for reconsideration)**

when one masters a skill it is about being equipped to address a whole new set of problems
{expertise/mastery: problem solving}=/={craft: problem finding}--> when other things become problematic---the condition (in the craft work) that when you learn how to do one thing you see other things that need to be explored [-> question for Eunkyung's drawing skills and practice]

*craft is more important than art(?) (Sennett)
...the notion that the work art breaks the conventions of practice, that it is something that makes an epistemic break. --> emphasis on innovation (something new)--that is a reflection of sort of 19th century bourgeois ideas of about making art.
•privileging the creative act over the craftsman act
•in innovation the “innovator” is separated from the “mass” =/= craftsmanship is collective and additive --> (in craftsmanship) the performance is myself
•creativity being a form of individuation or separation (@the exploratory shift in Eunkyung's work that Pierre highlighted)

*** craft-work is about additive skill; it is about building on what you know rather than throwing it out *** (=/= capitalist logic of progress, creativity in the sense that ‘something’ where before was ‘nothing’) ---> a different way of building quality (into practices and objects)

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

Bakhtin's dialogic, to become a skilled listener : listening = response (=/= simply answering) --> (when we speak) we give other people talismans that are not (perfectly) clear to us----we penetrate and unpack what someone doesn't have the words clearly and response to what they intend --✕--> “common understanding,” “make something work,”

cooperation is about getting deeper into something

conditions that more skills are[...]

[...] ways we think about global/local stabilities, discontinuities and noise. sympoiesis is another one.]
-with ‘apparatus’ what is at stake: flow of energy, order, waste, transformation,

Vladimir's tether on disambiguity

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


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

[the question of inevitability of anthropical view]
there is no final answer to a kind of question but a lot of answers
through inhabiting a figure you are crafting you find yourself addressing a set of problems
agency: liveliness of artifacts (?). there is some kind of liveliness that is both human and nonhuman
the kind of sociality that joins two categorically separate mode of agencies, is a sociality that constitutes both --> the interaction of humans and machines produced both =/= unilateral action
(my whole point or joke, with the bow and arrow was that the arrow of index finger does not move in one way.)
[=/= another mode that comes to mind is when your intimacy making leads always to yourself, getting laid, literally. that is when your concern becomes only you and someone, sexually interested --> economically, and you don't concern the sociality of your people with each other. #techno-capital singular subjectivity @--> this is super relevant for Sven, maybe: how one becomes interested, invested, and skillful in provoking interesting socialities for friends and peers--and not only for oneself? creating, inciting zones of connectivity]
-[it was not accidental that the rhetoric of drugs came up with Lilia when I suggested the attention to anthropos --> what figures human and otherwise was for her the subject of drug-induced rhetoric of mind-alteration; (this is the anthropos of the Enlightenment Europeans and classical Greece talking:) “in order to get rid of me you must take drugs!” #fable/_ --> being sober(?!), anthropos becoming, human nature, common sense, empiricism and interpretation are at stake here]
-[another thing was the label of “animal” that was passed around as a form of mock, instead of provocations for more conversation, I was stupefied. --how can we go on together and[...]

[...]ities
learning from religion, the ways of which the name of God has become an impossible category. both catholics and muslim shia (#islam) are wellprepared for feeling this way, some kind of recognition of impossible thing. let's take that “being good at recognizing and affirming impossible things” and bring it to the name of women. that means as soon as you name what you mean by ‘women,’ you have told some kind of really impossible lie.
(how my muslim trained sensibilities are working and mattering in my ajayeb research? ways to respond to *the deadliness and the irreplaceable liveliness of religion* [کشندگی و سرزندگی یکتای مذهب], a semiotics with implosion of sign and flesh)--> (i am so happy that) i cannot not know what it is like to be in a believing community (a faith-based community)***


...out of your own particular little historical traditions


*because my research is about ajayeb it can never only be about ajayeb*


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


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


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


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


#(very important concept partly shaped by practices of Darwin into our lives:) “collect” --> lies (necessary?)
the frenzy [...]

[...]eal chance of producing resistance knowledge?) --> this is not freedom! (-an account of freedom for one entails reciprocal unfreedom for others) --> mixtures of work and play in this new economy, (Calvert > Bateson) the meta-communicative nature of *play[= strict rules with genuine freedom, the dual essence of play: curiosity and relationality];
(Calvert arguing for) “knowledge-makers” who engages in creation of situated knowledges by activity adapting, processing and sharing knowledge within the ecology of library ~= *bibliographic apparatus*
(Calvert's heuristic device to imagine what library practices might emerge:) imperfectly literate constituent seekers

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

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

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


now-but-not-then quality of continuities


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


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


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

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

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


up-to-the-minute technologies

complicated issues around security apparatuses and different national struggles

histories of dispossession and genocide


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


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


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


my issue with the image of the free floating meaning network [...]

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

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

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

-Manning's notion of impersonality ==> ‘people are exchangble’ + ‘the work is what is important and not “you”’ [--> *techniques of impersonality* has being used in sufism and iranian mysticism. i have seen how the special effects of impersonality is used in political projects, making of soldiers, master-disciple relationship, and so on
-look at the cool impersonality of the scientific language (depriving them of their own ideological status)
-early 19th century modern public s[...]

[...]thought ~->? mystical
•elusive thought =/= modest thought limited by curiosity
•
“hierarchy as the bad object” ==>
•to escape thinking about your own agency (for example what your name and reputation does? what are the precise responsible consequences of your particular position? your position involves not only the book you write or the argument you make, it involves also your name and reputation, the currency of your gender, your mode of charisma and authority, your affective techniques, your network enacted, and so on.)
•to escape naming the engineering talents and skills that are necessary to assemble (for example the senseLab website)
•to escape epistemological commitment (the question of: **how is my vocabulary crafted for whom?**)
•
it is not clear (but i can maybe guess about it, Manning's commitments are):
•(learning from Haraway:) what they have witnessed [hierarchies? ==commit==> anti-archive]
•(learning from Despret:) which bodies they care for [the autists? ==commit==> elusive creativity]
•(learning from Kenney:) where are their alliances پیوستگیها [with multiculturalism? ==commit==> democracy's logos of difference]
•(learning from Verran:) how their equipments are crafted [by processual metaphysics? ==commit==> infinity]
•(learning from Stewart:) how their rigor is built [by conceptual description? ==commit==> non-habituality]

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

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

-Manning's notion of impersonality ==> ‘people are exchangble’ + ‘the work is what is important and not “you”’ [--> *techniques of impersonality* has being used in sufism and iranian mysticism. i have seen how the special effects of impersonality is used in political projects, making of soldiers, master-disciple relationship, and so on
-look at the cool impersonality of the scientific language (depriving them of their own ideological status)
-early 19th century modern public space was reinventing and operating with impersonality: individuals are systematically habituated not to return the gaze of the other.
=/= i am actually very much attracted to persons. i am interested in their personality. the “you” is what i fall in love with, not the ‘abstract link'--> (Manning's) peripheral perceptivity =/= (i am trying to learn) to describe what is in front of me (which is never easy)]

-Manning's notion of “the problem gives the question to be asked of it” =/= the question proble[...]

[...]r /> -Manning's notion of impersonality ==> ‘people are exchangble’ + ‘the work is what is important and not “you”’ [--> *techniques of impersonality* has being used in sufism and iranian mysticism. i have seen how the special effects of impersonality is used in political projects, making of soldiers, master-disciple relationship, and so on
-look at the cool impersonality of the scientific language (depriving them of their own ideological status)
-early 19th century modern public space was reinventing and operating with impersonality: individuals are systematically habituated not to return the gaze of the other.
=/= i am actually very much attracted to persons. i am interested in their personality. the “you” is what i fall in love with, not the ‘abstract link'--> (Manning's) peripheral perceptivity =/= (i am trying to learn) to describe what is in front of me (which is never easy)]

-Manning's notion of “the problem gives the question to be asked of it” =/= the question problematizes

-focus on “sedimentation” (--> where is the coexistence of contrasts for them?)

“decontextualization”: their technique of concept-making (==> claims of reality, of nunhuman, etc.)
[decontextualization is a very dangerous way of crafting concepts. there are other ways, committed to the contingencies of the historical material world of multispecies. rigor of conceptualization that i am learning from Stewart is about the *quality of an access to part of a world* =/= decontextualization]--so--> i say we need ‘concepts’ and not ‘philosophy’:
*philosophy (as practiced by M&M and Alex): claiming the nature of reality
*concept: a figure you make in order to do a limited situated work

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

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

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

for aesthetic, political, ethical reasons i want Manning to address in their work:
•the question of apparatus --> working within an apparatus of thinking in order to get somewhere in a sustained way. i want the[...]

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

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

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

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

hit-and-miss field trips

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

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

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

only working with (that seems to be) your idea

(the problem of) being always so deliberate and cautious

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

Hillman

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

what are art's investments in psychology today?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the mythic appears within the language, observation, and theories even of science

recent attempts to move out of analysis: (@Aela)
•group therapy
•sensitivity tr[...]

[...]ding how ‘other,’ ‘primitive’ societies operated ‘outside’ of modernity --assumption--> ‘small scale’ societies exchange (barter, gift exchange, and so on) would always, with evolution, give way to more ‘sophisticated’ means of trade
•Malinowski (study of the Kula ring) --> form of producing and reifying power relations
•Mauss (gift economies) --> gifts as stand alone systems + other kinds of economic structures
•Strathern (Melanesian gift exchange) --> how personhood is a malleable concept that is both implicated in, and created by, conceptions of individuality (tripartite views of people as constituted of a mind, body and spirit), or dividuality (persons as constituted from multiple essences and social relations, including the giving and receiving of gifts) + how gender is both studied and understood in the acts leading up to the performance of gift exchange
•Appadurai () --> ‘things’ have ‘social lives'that can be studied in relation to the different spheres of use
•
}--> (our understanding of) the human capacity for unlimited modes of developing creative forms of exchange and economic systems

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

https://mapmagazine.co.uk/notes-contemporary-art-and-anthropology

operations of statecraft:
•queuing in social security offices
•filling in tax forms
•circulation and arrival of letters demanding council tax payments
•census taking
-
}--> social organization that seems so habitual (mundane and ordinary) ==> unreflexively experienced

state's ordinariness --> irresistible enchantment --> overwhelming power ~~> supernatural trance-like experiences state seem to engender in populations =/= state as a rational entity

*capitalist market is a faith-based system* <== concealed practices of divination and the ‘conjuring’ of value and capital from what in many cases are immaterial voids

unmasking of its practices (~= faith + skepticism) ==> state power

mutant forms of technological self-subjugation

(Weber's) magic: coercive proceduralism --> managerial practices that characterise biopolitics

[*]census taking: pre-determined categories (like race, nationality, gender and political persuasion) are set out as objectively existing taxonomies (+ ‘data’ manually gathered from individuals to ‘fit’ those categories) and thus summon [a term with magical implications purposefully employed here] a population into being
-McClanahan

census ==> statistics: factish object: hybrid and unstable (possibly inaccurate) yet fetishised and faith-based technologies that possess the ability to transform (the individual parts of social and cultural groups into a sacred somatic whole [~ people/nation])--> biopolitics
-can art succeed in transforming such a ‘whole’ into free and autonomous individual beings?

references [...]

[...]iduals to ‘fit’ those categories) and thus summon [a term with magical implications purposefully employed here] a population into being
-McClanahan

census ==> statistics: factish object: hybrid and unstable (possibly inaccurate) yet fetishised and faith-based technologies that possess the ability to transform (the individual parts of social and cultural groups into a sacred somatic whole [~ people/nation])--> biopolitics
-can art succeed in transforming such a ‘whole’ into free and autonomous individual beings?

references to panopticon society
(?which camera angles suggest) naturalization of surveillance culture



[title]
*observational aesthetic* <== convergences of contemporary art and anthropology

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

[ajayeb -->] concept or theory --> (a training in) absorption + attention + framing =/= truth effect

[title]
Whatever Professor

[why apass asked me to do their website's] indexing: (a shrewd and thoughtful creativity in) the first interpretation of a content's body =/= presuming a standard taxonomic form
==>
•surprises
•styles of critical thought generates power in twists of voice and craft
•
allows one please to demonstrate the wonder
“We ask our readers to perform the jamb when language overruns the mental breathing that reading entails.” (Lepselter)
•or, nothing disappears --> You breathe the air you're given. (“I felt ripples from a rape in the seventeenth century, behind a barn somewhere in Romania, where generations later my bitter grandmother disparaged her children without knowing why.”)
•or, words sediment next to something laid low
•or, (index as in) to point sideways --> shifter's only meaning is the object it happens to point to
•drawing figures, hooks, asterisks
•or, placing what's structural, technical, transferential, pulped, leaking, intense
{things: an integrated thin layer to epitomize and abstract in new ways how people are hooked up with their technologies; parsing and criss-crossing some of the built-in categories and new needs of the people who are using it;}


things that do the reading, editing, assembling

*every edit ==> (set off a cascade of:)
•word falls
•Rubik's Cubes
•tropes
•infrastructures
•genres
•rhymes
•off-rhymes
•tonal flips
•half-steps

[compositional listening]
one reads aloud + the others *listening compositionally*

#writing exercise:
following out the impact of things (words, thoughts, people, objects, ideas, worlds) in hundred-word units

theoretical reflections get folded into the analytic, observational, and transferential ways we move
(Stewart + Berlant)

afters[...]

[...] (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”
•science: “taxa”
•multinationalism: “system”
•modernism: “globe"]

immune systems (in natureculture) determine where organisms, including people, can live and with whom.

“There is no time or place at which genetics ends and env[...]

[...]s

tracing the web of horror and delight

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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


(thinking with Kenney / Verran:)
workflow on ajayeb:
1- tracing social connections (for which subjects is this usef[...]

[...]say the right words.” (can i do that with ajayeb's objects? how?)
“The moon rose above the river” (en) <--> “upward behind the onstreaming it mooned” (Tlon, a language by Borges with no nouns, only verbs)

(in old Iran, there is a measurement of time based on sa'd سعد and nahs نحس, the time of benevolent spirits and so on. the sensuous time, measurement is affect)


knowledge industry or “scientific factory”

how academic labor was implicated in capitalist systems and contemporary forms of knowledge/power

“ruse” (hile حیله, makr مکر, neyrang نیرنگ) --> my tool in work on ajayeb? -//-[مکر زنان ,گربه نره و روباه مکار, minorities associated with this accent: women, animals, machines,] [ruse in Kelile Demne کلیله و دمنه]
ruse: a set of small, mostly unconscious tactics by which workers resist capitalist systems (writing love letters on company's time, factory workers who takes a scrap of fabric home for his children to play with, etc.)
-“[h]ow to subvert the laws of the “scientific factory” through gift-giving, solidarity, and free exchange even when bosses and colleagues will not turn a blind eye” (de Certeau)

(how to?) collectively crafting critiques, commitments, stories, and actions (in the density and composition of ajayeb's atmospheres)
-feeling out their “rhythms, valences, moods, sensations, tempos” (Stewart)
-“real and virtual worlds, future and past worlds, fictional and theoretical worlds, always happening and happening and happening” (Kenney)


talking is also thinking


speculative valences (zarfiat ظرفیت) of wonder --> (through wonder, which) response-abilities are activated (?)

ajayeb is crafted responsive stories about life --> question of responsibility --> what kind of responsibilities are activated in the SF worlding (including reading it now) of ajayeb?


(work on ajayeb is about a practice of [writing] history as) *worlding the past*, to take the alterity of the past seriously and to be moved by textual encounter
-how can we not be subsumed by the sameness of the here-and-now? (collapsing of difference into sameness)
(my work on ajayeb is about) learning to tell better stories about the past*
*writing ~= (wonder:) a careful attention to differences in the practice of worlding the past. (demanding like a cat walking on our keyboard, interrupting you [Kenney])

(digital reading practices of) data mining =/= reading for the reactions of an implicit reader --> what the scholar of ajayeb (in the medieval) might have felt?


ajayebnameh is grounded in the history and materiality of scientific practices:
“Nature is neither knowable ...nor unknowable ...Nature is that about which ‘relevant knowledge’ may be produced. If we pay due atten[...]

[...]of knowledge/power

“ruse” (hile حیله, makr مکر, neyrang نیرنگ) --> my tool in work on ajayeb? -//-[مکر زنان ,گربه نره و روباه مکار, minorities associated with this accent: women, animals, machines,] [ruse in Kelile Demne کلیله و دمنه]
ruse: a set of small, mostly unconscious tactics by which workers resist capitalist systems (writing love letters on company's time, factory workers who takes a scrap of fabric home for his children to play with, etc.)
-“[h]ow to subvert the laws of the “scientific factory” through gift-giving, solidarity, and free exchange even when bosses and colleagues will not turn a blind eye” (de Certeau)

(how to?) collectively crafting critiques, commitments, stories, and actions (in the density and composition of ajayeb's atmospheres)
-feeling out their “rhythms, valences, moods, sensations, tempos” (Stewart)
-“real and virtual worlds, future and past worlds, fictional and theoretical worlds, always happening and happening and happening” (Kenney)


talking is also thinking


speculative valences (zarfiat ظرفیت) of wonder --> (through wonder, which) response-abilities are activated (?)

ajayeb is crafted responsive stories about life --> question of responsibility --> what kind of responsibilities are activated in the SF worlding (including reading it now) of ajayeb?


(work on ajayeb is about a practice of [writing] history as) *worlding the past*, to take the alterity of the past seriously and to be moved by textual encounter
-how can we not be subsumed by the sameness of the here-and-now? (collapsing of difference into sameness)
(my work on ajayeb is about) learning to tell better stories about the past*
*writing ~= (wonder:) a careful attention to differences in the practice of worlding the past. (demanding like a cat walking on our keyboard, interrupting you [Kenney])

(digital reading practices of) data mining =/= reading for the reactions of an implicit reader --> what the scholar of ajayeb (in the medieval) might have felt?


ajayebnameh is grounded in the history and materiality of scientific practices:
“Nature is neither knowable ...nor unknowable ...Nature is that about which ‘relevant knowledge’ may be produced. If we pay due attention to it, we can learn, discern relations, and multiply entities and ratios.” (Stengers 2011)

eliminativism: the belief that one story or one set of practices (usually called rational or scientific) can explain nature.

a materialist understanding of ajayeb demands an interpretive adventure of how, with matter (in Stengersian way), we get sensitivity, life, memory, consciousness, passions and thought... =/= inert or mechanistic notion of matter

which metaphors stage nature as “witty agent and actor”?[...]

[...]onal infidelity. their theories based on a sexual conflict model, is that this is an evolutionary adaptation that helps males ensure that they raise their own offspring and helps females ensure that the males will stick around to provide for their children.) --> is there another story? (this is a speculative + empirical question) --> multiple evolutionary stories are possible

(Roughgarden demands) a more rigorous relationship between narrative and evidence (=/= prevalence of studies where the “[raw] data are mined to effect an appearance of the confirmation of [a single] hypothesis”) ----she returns to the most potent fables of sexual selection and re-tells them --> these new stories make real species-shaping difference by contributing to the social infrastructure within which offspring are produced and reared

***how many plots can the data hold?*** --> pragmatic---the answer is many not infinite [Strathern: “more than one but less than many"]
-practices of *doing accuracy* --> storytellers
relationships between story and evidence --> an invitation to invent new forms of accuracy that might be unfamiliar or awkward but could be epistemologically narrativelly politically generative (Kenney)
(sometimes: story ==> data) the work to craft just one good story from the chaos of the data is (not only political challenge @Jassem, but also) an epistemological challenge



(Lynn Margulis)
*endosymbiosis: the theory that eukaryotic cells evolved by incorporating free-swimming bacteria, which later became organelles (cell organ) such as plastids and mitochondria
(ladder =/=) horizontal gene transfer : that the evolution and speciation are driven not by random genetic mutation and natural selection, but by symbiogenesis.

Margulis's attention to bacteria rather than attention to animals ==> different research questions and metaphors, and different empirical objects

(her scholarly crafts are amazing:) “was the moon that pulled the tide of life from its oceanic depths to dry land and up into the air.” (1998)

/science is an interpretative adventure

(Margulis's insight into) the history of consciousness --> the components that fused in symbiogenesis are already conscious entities***, already able to sense light and motion --> we are made through our endosymbiotic histories : our own “sensitivities to wafting (nasim نسیم) plant scents, tasty salted mixtures, police cruiser sirens, loving touches and star light” (2005)
[...] “These avant guard cells of the nasal passages, the taste buds, the inner ear, the touch receptors in the skin and the retinal rods and cones all have in common the presence at their tips of projections (‘cell processes’) called cilia.”
[...] “The spirochete group of bacteria includes many harmless mud-dwellers but it also contains a few scary freaks: the treponeme of syphilis and t[...]

[...]ies-shaping difference by contributing to the social infrastructure within which offspring are produced and reared

***how many plots can the data hold?*** --> pragmatic---the answer is many not infinite [Strathern: “more than one but less than many"]
-practices of *doing accuracy* --> storytellers
relationships between story and evidence --> an invitation to invent new forms of accuracy that might be unfamiliar or awkward but could be epistemologically narrativelly politically generative (Kenney)
(sometimes: story ==> data) the work to craft just one good story from the chaos of the data is (not only political challenge @Jassem, but also) an epistemological challenge



(Lynn Margulis)
*endosymbiosis: the theory that eukaryotic cells evolved by incorporating free-swimming bacteria, which later became organelles (cell organ) such as plastids and mitochondria
(ladder =/=) horizontal gene transfer : that the evolution and speciation are driven not by random genetic mutation and natural selection, but by symbiogenesis.

Margulis's attention to bacteria rather than attention to animals ==> different research questions and metaphors, and different empirical objects

(her scholarly crafts are amazing:) “was the moon that pulled the tide of life from its oceanic depths to dry land and up into the air.” (1998)

/science is an interpretative adventure

(Margulis's insight into) the history of consciousness --> the components that fused in symbiogenesis are already conscious entities***, already able to sense light and motion --> we are made through our endosymbiotic histories : our own “sensitivities to wafting (nasim نسیم) plant scents, tasty salted mixtures, police cruiser sirens, loving touches and star light” (2005)
[...] “These avant guard cells of the nasal passages, the taste buds, the inner ear, the touch receptors in the skin and the retinal rods and cones all have in common the presence at their tips of projections (‘cell processes’) called cilia.”
[...] “The spirochete group of bacteria includes many harmless mud-dwellers but it also contains a few scary freaks: the treponeme of syphilis and the borrelias of Lyme disease. We animals got our exquisite ability to sense our surroundings--to tell light from dark, noise from silence, motion from stillness and fresh water from brackish brine--from a kind of bacterium whose relatives we despise.”

re-thinking consciousness

(Kenney) Margulis's speculations: they mattered, they worlded, they gathered

(Williamson:) larvae and adult insects of the same species do not have a common ancestor(!)
(how ?, the capacity for) drastic morphological change --> what would it be like to emerge as a moth with a new body, a new sensorium, with your caterpillar-self only a genomic memory?
reincarnation from one species [...]

[...]quisite ability to sense our surroundings--to tell light from dark, noise from silence, motion from stillness and fresh water from brackish brine--from a kind of bacterium whose relatives we despise.”

re-thinking consciousness

(Kenney) Margulis's speculations: they mattered, they worlded, they gathered

(Williamson:) larvae and adult insects of the same species do not have a common ancestor(!)
(how ?, the capacity for) drastic morphological change --> what would it be like to emerge as a moth with a new body, a new sensorium, with your caterpillar-self only a genomic memory?
reincarnation from one species to another

(need less?) just-so stories --> facts to live with
(need more?) what-if stories --> speculations to savor --(gives taste to)--> *paradigms* --> incommensurable ways of seeing the world and practicing science in it (Kohn) --> seeds for sowing worlds (Haraway) ~--> possibilities for thinking life***

(Kenney's proposal of) “bureau of what-if stories”
(--> Fables of Attention - Wonder in Feminist Theory and Scientific Practice 2013)

(Margulis's) holobiont: multicellular eukaryotes plus their colonies of persistent symbionts


ajayeb's craft and undisciplined tradition can be called empirical, it is an example of an archival research (done by historian.) i wan to highlight the aesthetic quality of this activity.
*aesthetics: how elements are arranged together, how they are composed, how they are brought into relation in the space of a text (Kenney > Latour, Stengers, Bellacasa) (--> La Guin's bag, bundle) }--> rigs
**aesthetics are political because they do consequential relational work**

novels, poetry, feminist theory, speculative fiction, bestiary list categories--these genres of composition *gather together* and *stage* their “matters of care” in ways that perform relations between things and teach their readers to inhabit sometimes unfamiliar, agential world. they are practices of sf worlding.

fiction ==> attitude --> holds things

(emphasis on) worlds that come together through dispersal (vofur وفور), induction (makesh مکش), volatility (farar فرّار), toxicity, drift,

the power that comes with ‘other’ (time/place of) styles of composing

(*bestiary is agential world*, that's why it is so interesting when you are available to it as a child. i am drawn to it --> agency bestiary sets to betray the anthropocentric binary: “active human =/= passive nature”)
(how to tell?) faithful and fantastic stories ==> better companion species

*a shift in humanities scholarship
(feminist science studies, the post humanities, the ecological humanities, animal studies, queer theory,) humanities scholars have represented their matters of care with an aesthetic (and therefore political) commitment [...]

[...]cal mystification)
~ learn to trust objects figured in unfamiliar ways* (, my bow and arrow?)
[both Haraway (“material-semiotic”) and Barad (“material-discursive”) are working against this kind of split between language and reality, both in the level of analysis (of one's object) and composition (of one's book)]


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

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


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


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

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

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

*relational properties of language:
•viscosity (chasbandegi چسبند‌گی)
•conductivity
•velocity
(=/= daunting)
 -collective
 -exploratory
 -supportive


(what to do with) the unavoidable childishness (and girlish) of wonder and of fables
-does wonder need to grow up?

there is a risk that that which awakens our epistemological appetite will ultimately be unfriendly, unseemly, unsophisticated, unsuitable
•wonder goes beyond what is suitable (Irigaray,) even threatens our status as “serious, adult thinkers” (Stengers)
hoax ==> compels us to do work that is sober and bound closer to reality

the bifurcation of childhood and adulthood gets in the way of thinking
-the child/adult divide as an “achievement” of the Vicorian Era

the context of my ajayeb:
“The Science War”
epistemological differences between sciences

[...]

[...]iousness rather than to the inner workings of their body

.

آخرت

آخرش


smells, rotting bodies, eroding bodies, soil composition, etc.

(to imagine dogs and humans coexisting as) competting possibilities within unformed matter* [=/=? companion species]

dwindling quality of life (and diminished humanity)

(Anand, van Dooren, Naveeda wondering) how in certain geographies disappearance of species seems not to give the people a moment's pause

* what_ gives a pause ?


*species self-perpetuation is sometimes with:
•biological reproduction
•becoming
•transfiguration
•rebirth
•symbolic dispersal
•resynthesis
•


sunnat to kill (فى نفسه intrinsically evil) snakes (=/= jinn snake in Anand research/stories of saint animals)

straw, chaff, rice, wheat, lentils,
ماشوره، کاه، بوريا
سبوس
گندم
عدس

the gift of death for the animals:
•عید Eid, God in sacrifice, release from hardship and burden; blithe disposal of animal; euthanize
•چشم‌زخم evil eye or witchcraft as the cause of animal's death, if they are lost through illness, theft, or accident

bonanza
anthrax

euthanize

inoculate

cagey
•canny حيله گر کمرو
•showing self-interest and shrewdness in dealing with others
•characterized by great cautious and wariness
•reluctant to give information owing to caution or suspicion

بو
-treating smell as indicating an unsettled situation
-inadvertent stench of dead bodies disrupts the composed mental image of the ideal corpse within [...] funereal practices
*odors introduce terror or the terror of the uncontained within the social* (Neveeda > Siegel 1983)


double-edgeed prospect

common curse

“in the riparian contextm land forms and breaks with regular irregularity” [--> #entropy]
shifting its course, the river inducts new affectees into how to live (this way)
-there is a manner in which life proceeds--instead of feeling in step with it one begins to feel out of sync***

#start a geographic learning, riparian thought; thinking by rivers (& not countries)

_->{.\_,;,_/;-=,/


rural cosmology
cosmology of modern science

human conception: flirtation with the failure to arrive


#two moveis:
•Exodus: Riddly Scott + Creation Bible + Big Bang + extinction theory + fluid animation research
•Noah: Nolan + Creation Bible + Darwin + motion graphic research
--> solving a problem proposed by _?_ }--> “the dream catcher” !!!
[...]

[...]ons/performances through which specific exclusionary boundaries are enacted***
(Kaja Silverman, the subject of semiotics)

spectatorships =/=! representations =/=! referents
(ontological distinction: “=/=!”)

the surreal technoscientific look --?--> allowing wondrous but material extensions into the ajayeb domain

in creating a “look” for ajayeb: whether or not a used/user interaction can have ethical dimensions?


refraction is not framework, but a pathway. it engages patterns of interference and exchange



the xeno-sensual in the ajayeb
different differences that are sensed and mediated

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

poetic historiography
(historiography: the study of the writing of history and of written histories)

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

to begin writing about ajayeb with the citational, ‘avardeand ke...’ (...آورده‌اند که)
citation, an important characteristic of fables, is about relational histories.
absence of definitive source (in my old childhood favorite radio show, by bring an endless list of fantastic source and bodies of lures) allows monsters to flourish and me the full range of my passionate crafts. ajayeb's compelling mystery demands (from me) an unorthodox and omnivorous approach (hame-chiz-khar همه چیز خوار).

اما راویان اخبار و ناقلان آثار و طوطیان شکرشکن شیرین گفتار و خوشه چینان خرمن سخن دانی و صرافان سر بازار معانی و چابک سواران میدان دانش توسن خوش خرام سخن را بدینگونه به جولان در آورده اند که ...

•Mirabile dictu... (miraculous to say...)

towards Despret's talking parrots
parrots (shekar-shekan) (and philosophers) really like to control the exchange, to keep control of a conversation : their refusal to let another individual choose the topic of conversation
***(parrots have) a pragmatic rather than a referential conception of language
[am i also referential (=/= pragmatic) in my conception of language?]--> to teach a being to speak presupposes not only a tolerance of but also *a profound interest in misunderstanding* (this ‘profound interest in misunderstanding’ is precisely both cognitive and political aspect of what I am trying to bring forth) ~-> (how language-learning with animals can help us learn) restating and inverting the question of control

*exchange can only be achieved when there is “a continous reprisal of translations and betrayals of meaning”* ==> understanding itself is compromised
[*]ajayeb: a non-stop betrayal of translations (of perspectives) and continuous redressal of meanings (of things)

“as if” has to do with misunderstanding

“meanings are constructed in a const[...]

[...], morality, agency, empowerment (when we are together)
(to recognize and make) new sites of negotiation


Alberti: bodies of Minoan figurines “wear” the appropriate gender for a specific ritual practice, they don't “bear” gender (as their essential feature) ==> gender salience is always in question, not a propor presupposition
“sex has emerged as a salient attribute of the pot's character as a pot”

when zoomorphic figures are present...

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


museum studies


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


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


glocalizing


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

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

technologies of the literal

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

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

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


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

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


ajayeb: writing technologies of the 12th century Iran

plain style

soing naked as a sign

dress and address
[...]

[...]r />

The Exhausted Receiver


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

hermaphroditical view of things: partly artificial, partly natural

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


[modest witness] (--> Haraway's literal and figurative queering of categories)
the rhetoric of the modest witness --> the naked way of writing, undorned, factual, compelling: “naked writing” [crafted in the context of being virtually present at a demonstration, the ‘practice of credible witnessing’ (==> “truth”) in technoscience] was a proper reference point for feminist examination of objectivity and its relationship to a science founded in exclusion of women. the new man of science had to be chaste, modest, heterosexual man who desires yet eschews a sexually dangerous yet chaste and modest woman --> *female modesty was of the body; the new masculine virtue had to be of the mind* [women's presence turns out to disrupt the experiment (of the scientist or sufi) altogether] (“[...]best of women, pious, chaste, modest, and compassionate, are rendered unfit for science by the very qualities that make them the best of women”)
(Haraway, why credible witnessing is still at stake:) “this is the culture within which contingent facts [= the real case about the world, the object world] can be established with all the authority, but none of the considerable problems, of transcendental truth. this self-invisibility is the specifically modern, European, masculine, scientific form of the virtue of modesty. this is the form of modesty that pays off its practitioners in the coin of epistemological and social power. *this kind of modesty is one of the founding virtues of what we call modernity.* [...] and so he is endowed with the remarkable power to establish the facts.”
-“he [the civic man of reason] bears witness”: he is objective, he guarantees the clarity and purity of objects, as contestable representations, or as construced documents in their potent capacity to define the facts =/= queering confidence: enable a more corporal, inflected, and optically dense, if l[...]

[...]nce of being in the field

aesthetic attentiveness of bestiaries


pragmatic use of the word ontology in archeology --signal--> the potential world-shifting nature of what is being studied

to be ontological = entirety of the analytical apparatus and what is being studied should be included in the analysis
(caught up in the process:) the object of study + analytical scaffolding + method + analyst

the degree to which an approach is willing to do ontology to itself (investigate its own ontological assumptions)

metaphysical archeology + ontological anthropology --> perspective on reality


(assign things to preexisting conceptual structures =/=) looking for ways things can have an impact on your thinking, concepts, ontology ==> unlocking what is most “of the past” about things

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

Alberti
Ingold

correspondence: (a pre-conceptual practice -->) epistemological intimacy in the practices of art, science, and anthropology
•a way to understand one's own research process

(archeology: a science of correspondence)

Alberti suggesting to separate arts and crafts (for analytical purposes)

artwork: non-conceptual outcomes of practice

artwork & archeological things --share--> ontological problem of how to make something new [~ *sensations/past never before experienced/thought*] out of (circumscribed body of) materials

archeological things carry both sensation & *residue of concepts* with them (~~> artistic research =/= artworks)
==> resurrect the conceptual potential immanent to the specific arrangement of materials (and their temporary forms)

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

scientific interpretation and explanation of the past <-~ archeology
{my work: speculative interpretation and explanation of the past [--> prefigure new becomings + intensification and unleashing of ‘i am part of what i seek to understand’ (= my subjectivity)] =/= lock the past into predictability}
•my ‘things’ in ajayeb are to an extent ‘archeological things’

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

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

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

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

craft --Ingold--> knowledge grow from the crucible of our practical a[...]

[...] both sensation & *residue of concepts* with them (~~> artistic research =/= artworks)
==> resurrect the conceptual potential immanent to the specific arrangement of materials (and their temporary forms)

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

scientific interpretation and explanation of the past <-~ archeology
{my work: speculative interpretation and explanation of the past [--> prefigure new becomings + intensification and unleashing of ‘i am part of what i seek to understand’ (= my subjectivity)] =/= lock the past into predictability}
•my ‘things’ in ajayeb are to an extent ‘archeological things’

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

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

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

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

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


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


(we need more) art: careful accumulation of skills


21st century historiographic trends in art

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


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

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

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


prosaic nature of archeological research
production of the finds


the way Dion distorts archeological work (allegorizing archeological practice) --Alberti-->
•c[...]

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

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

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

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


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


(we need more) art: careful accumulation of skills


21st century historiographic trends in art

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


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

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

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


prosaic nature of archeological research
production of the finds


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

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


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

questions for the art:
•what effect is produced?
•how does this effect wrench from its materiality what has not been perceived or sensed before?
--> for archeology same question, from the material that remain from the past in the present
[...]

[...]oy simulacra of archeological practices and motifs* in their work


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

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

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


prosaic nature of archeological research
production of the finds


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

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


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

questions for the art:
•what effect is produced?
•how does this effect wrench from its materiality what has not been perceived or sensed before?
--> for archeology same question, from the material that remain from the past in the present

(the traditional task of art:)
•defamiliarization: to estrange our common consciousness and sensations of the world
•place of immanence: to project the coming of something materiaaterially new that is latent in our current reality. to *treat facts as events* that are about to come into being
•art is non-conceptual : impacting the nervous system without conceptual mediation --> sensations are monumentalized in the artwork for the future
•

...to treat the material of the past as anticipating something new

(my research and work on bestiary:)
•how can we produce new works that challenge us to think and experience archeological things (ajayeb) in new ways without resort to explanation or interpretation through a process of disarticulation, repurposing, and disruption of archeological artworks with a political intent in mind? (interpretive framework)
•how to allow ajayeb to continue to operate effectively on us?

both affective and historical force (of ajayeb)


art engenders material becomings (classical definition)
art engenders imaginative becomings

[...]

[...]from the past in the present

(the traditional task of art:)
•defamiliarization: to estrange our common consciousness and sensations of the world
•place of immanence: to project the coming of something materially new that is latent in our current reality. to *treat facts as events* that are about to come into being
•art is non-conceptual : impacting the nervous system without conceptual mediation --> sensations are monumentalized in the artwork for the future
•

...to treat the material of the past as anticipating something new

(my research and work on bestiary:)
•how can we produce new works that challenge us to think and experience archeological things (ajayeb) in new ways without resort to explanation or interpretation through a process of disarticulation, repurposing, and disruption of archeological artworks with a political intent in mind? (interpretive framework)
•how to allow ajayeb to continue to operate effectively on us?

both affective and historical force (of ajayeb)


art engenders material becomings (classical definition)
art engenders imaginative becomings

learning from archeology: to be pre-conceptual : the process of craft, to grasp how concepts make their way into things


undisciplinary space (instead of transdisciplinary)

disarticulation: repurposing and disruption of archeological artworks with a political intent in mind
--> cannot escape the anecdotal when it comes to interpretation --> artifacts (for example a neolithic Balkon clay figurine) become symbols for social position ~= allegorizing (=/= speculation)

historical energy (force) of things = something of the past that endures in them


(old and unhelpful definition of) art: impacting nervous system without conceptual mediation (directly impact living bodies) --engender--> material becomings ["art = giving birth"]

--Alberti--> art (and anthropology) need the pre-conceptual: the process of craft (to grasp how concepts make their way into things)


[*]concept: fragment of past world

maker + material ==emerge==> concept

-in artistic research @apass are we dealing with the simulacra of knowledge?


understanding the potters (and artists) who made the ceramics as crafters = understanding them as *intimately connected with a particular world* <-- knowledge of which came through skilled material practice
#feedback
-how does it apply to digital relations?

•practiced caressing of hand over clay forms (~ handling, nurturance) ==> zoomorphic, anthropomorphic bodies (Ingold call it anthropogenic)
•digital interface CG ==> ?
•


-how to read or confront ajayeb bestiary artifacts and think of them as *taking [...]

[...]ticulation, repurposing, and disruption of archeological artworks with a political intent in mind? (interpretive framework)
•how to allow ajayeb to continue to operate effectively on us?

both affective and historical force (of ajayeb)


art engenders material becomings (classical definition)
art engenders imaginative becomings

learning from archeology: to be pre-conceptual : the process of craft, to grasp how concepts make their way into things


undisciplinary space (instead of transdisciplinary)

disarticulation: repurposing and disruption of archeological artworks with a political intent in mind
--> cannot escape the anecdotal when it comes to interpretation --> artifacts (for example a neolithic Balkon clay figurine) become symbols for social position ~= allegorizing (=/= speculation)

historical energy (force) of things = something of the past that endures in them


(old and unhelpful definition of) art: impacting nervous system without conceptual mediation (directly impact living bodies) --engender--> material becomings ["art = giving birth"]

--Alberti--> art (and anthropology) need the pre-conceptual: the process of craft (to grasp how concepts make their way into things)


[*]concept: fragment of past world

maker + material ==emerge==> concept

-in artistic research @apass are we dealing with the simulacra of knowledge?


understanding the potters (and artists) who made the ceramics as crafters = understanding them as *intimately connected with a particular world* <-- knowledge of which came through skilled material practice
#feedback
-how does it apply to digital relations?

•practiced caressing of hand over clay forms (~ handling, nurturance) ==> zoomorphic, anthropomorphic bodies (Ingold call it anthropogenic)
•digital interface CG ==> ?
•


-how to read or confront ajayeb bestiary artifacts and think of them as *taking on something of the pre-conceptual labour that went into them*? --> (?how can it) provoke an art-like response [<=~ sleepwalking: no ontological difference between then and now ==> you are confronted with a raw material of affect and concept =/= past artifacts as vehicle for complex belief systems] }==drive==>
•new sensorial experience
•new conceptual work
---> go to description, Stewart


coalescing of language & concept & ...


[*]drawing: (the effect of being) harassed by reality

to be harassed by ajayeb past people animals (struggling in their reality)
---> go to haunted, possession

[*]art: risk of something new

archeology --> intimate knowledge of materials (--> appealing to art, crafter attune to their material)
[...]

[...]ing them as *intimately connected with a particular world* <-- knowledge of which came through skilled material practice
#feedback
-how does it apply to digital relations?

•practiced caressing of hand over clay forms (~ handling, nurturance) ==> zoomorphic, anthropomorphic bodies (Ingold call it anthropogenic)
•digital interface CG ==> ?
•


-how to read or confront ajayeb bestiary artifacts and think of them as *taking on something of the pre-conceptual labour that went into them*? --> (?how can it) provoke an art-like response [<=~ sleepwalking: no ontological difference between then and now ==> you are confronted with a raw material of affect and concept =/= past artifacts as vehicle for complex belief systems] }==drive==>
•new sensorial experience
•new conceptual work
---> go to description, Stewart


coalescing of language & concept & ...


[*]drawing: (the effect of being) harassed by reality

to be harassed by ajayeb past people animals (struggling in their reality)
---> go to haunted, possession

[*]art: risk of something new

archeology --> intimate knowledge of materials (--> appealing to art, crafter attune to their material)

my lecture-performances = exploring how to make my knowledge present (to myself so it has a chance to be reconsidered) and how things (ajayeb past bestiary telegram animal) affect me and to *allow them to engender their own concepts and meanings*

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

(modern western) human: composed of cultural clothing that hides and controls an essentially animal nature =/= (amazonian) animals have a human sociocultural inner aspect that is “disguised” by an ostensibly bestial bodily form -->{ [subjective particularity of spirit and meaning ==>]*multinatural =/= multicultural*[<== objective universality of body and substance] }

-Viveiros de Castro's dichotomous argument leaves out other modes of knowing, those that i care and haunt for (and i am claimed by them) in specific mystic muslim theology and eastern bestiary (---> go to Marks)

Amerindian “people” : spiritual unity and a corporeal diversity

possessing a soul ==> having a point of view ==> being a subject

==> event = action
(action =/= expression of intentional states)

[*]object: incompletely interpreted subject

“a muddy waterhole is seen by tapirs as a great ceremonial house”

(objectivist epistemology's) ‘to know' = to desubjectify, to make explicit the subject's partial presence in the object =/= (Amerindian shamanism epistemology's) ‘to know' = to personify, something that is always a someone

-the problem is that only the shaman and some rogue artists know how to personify. i want to pe[...]

[...]t the heart of the matter, there is no stuff; only form, only relation

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

“ajayeb” a term i use inclusively to examine a living and nonliving ‘historical site’ / ‘heritage web’ in order to learn/talk/speculate about what counts as writing ~= writing technologies ==> production of knowledges

(Katie King's) bits of pastpresent, a tool for scale making
~(Weston's) time claims
[*pastpresent: decline epistemologically charged purifications that devout complaints of “presentism” mandate]

-in my research (willing and required to become a beginner) i am asking: why past and present are so easy to separate?
(~~--> how our vision of past and future creates our present?)
==> directions, spinning dynamics,

in a sense my work on ajayeb is a critique of “presentism"[= overvaluing historically and culturally local constructions of the meaning and importance of a particular set of stories and their conditions of production (of “ours”). (for example the “future” story)]
-->? speculative presentisms (Dinshaw's queer historiography)

*globalization: “that travelogue of distributed, heterogeneous, linked, sociotechnical circulations that craft the world as a net called the global” (Haraway)
~= processes responsible for the power and mobility of media, money, politics, sexualities, and knowledge practices*** --> these meanings and powers can be “glocalized”: altered, filled in, indigenized, and reunderstood *within local agencies*(: people, art forms, practices of everyday life)
(globalization processes) ==> academically uncomfortable and sometimes politically reprehensible سزاوار سرزنش forms of hybrid histories

(Katie King's flexible knowledges:) layers of locals and globals

my aim in my research is creating *struggle for understanding* [= many communities involved in reading, writing, interpreting,] --> ***we are all members in these communities struggling for understanding***

Urton paying attention to decompiling intermediaty positions between so-calles reading and writing --> string records --> numerical accounts or maps or... ==> histories and narratives

my research on ajayeb in apass as a practice is about *disassembling and reordering classifications we use to access pasts*


the excursion i did in Vladmir's block was somehow about examining sites of implicitly or explicitly knowledge production in commercialized forms
museum, TV documentry as a metaphor {a richly contaminated set of crafty metaphors and realities} and narrative frame, a momentary melding of pastpresents in imaginative reenactment --> economic globalization figuring in artistic/academic capitalism
(--> ajayeb is also of this kind,) *site of heritage* culture as promoting particular versions of history, nation, science, [...]

[...]the power and mobility of media, money, politics, sexualities, and knowledge practices*** --> these meanings and powers can be “glocalized”: altered, filled in, indigenized, and reunderstood *within local agencies*(: people, art forms, practices of everyday life)
(globalization processes) ==> academically uncomfortable and sometimes politically reprehensible سزاوار سرزنش forms of hybrid histories

(Katie King's flexible knowledges:) layers of locals and globals

my aim in my research is creating *struggle for understanding* [= many communities involved in reading, writing, interpreting,] --> ***we are all members in these communities struggling for understanding***

Urton paying attention to decompiling intermediaty positions between so-calles reading and writing --> string records --> numerical accounts or maps or... ==> histories and narratives

my research on ajayeb in apass as a practice is about *disassembling and reordering classifications we use to access pasts*


the excursion i did in Vladmir's block was somehow about examining sites of implicitly or explicitly knowledge production in commercialized forms
museum, TV documentry as a metaphor {a richly contaminated set of crafty metaphors and realities} and narrative frame, a momentary melding of pastpresents in imaginative reenactment --> economic globalization figuring in artistic/academic capitalism
(--> ajayeb is also of this kind,) *site of heritage* culture as promoting particular versions of history, nation, science, art, and religion*** --> (the excursion made me) with ajayeb to be careful with ‘the commerce with global knowledge production’ --(what is at stake)--> structure of pasts, peoples, and sensation
*heritage culture ==(impress)==> public histories* --> appropriation of national and personal identities; today (specially in university) no one is “immune from governing pressures of heritage culture or the impression of corporate management assumptions, styles, funding requirements, and money-making imperatives in enterprise culture” (Katie King > Morley & Robins) [i can imagine apass is struggling with this specially in Brussels]
(@Vera's position as a museum tour guide, exploitations of the interpreter/reenactors, who are promised semiprofessional recognition within social historical practice but instead end up as engineers of a “feel good” atmosphere for tourism)
(Katie King > Slaughter & Leslie) *global market:
•fields “close to the market” --(reguire)--> proucts
•fields “peripheral to the market” --(are pushed to)--> pedagogy and public service
(sometimes virtually indistinguishable:) impulse to democratize ~=? commodify knowledge
-they model for museum goers as:
◦reenactors
◦shadows
◦witnesses
◦a play at being “there”:
◾on set
◾on site
◾in that past
[...]

[...] تکه تکه کرد)


[*]research: problem of entering a culture from outside


points of the lecture:
-a nano-expose
-of kicking off this...
-not dramatically pitched at you
-cartography of collapse and sublime
-coming down or crushing down the watching post
-(disclosures and) promises of frontier technology
-


ghosts of the project:
/poltergeist --> not really capable of knowing different things and different types of relations they are entered into, bad at perspectival communication
/Hamlet's father --> wanting you to remember ~= revenge
/Cinderella --> doesn't show any psychological symptoms (she has no psychology?), she is not the master of anything, not even her name
/ruin --> place of unsettled identities

questions of:
•doom [=/= adjustment, management]: “contamination = end”
•subject surging to bear an affect, subject who goes with the flow in an intoxicated moment
•traumatic realism
•(endangered ==>) survival: fighting for “your right against others”
•less-than ideal livable collaborations
•
•constructing interest (not that ‘you want to know’ --> historically crafted and naturalized modalities of “knowing more”)
•contingent (~ lure, abstraction, fragile [--> they create interested bodies]) =/=? analytical [--> they create disembodied subjects]

[poem can do all of these:]
/proposition --> right/wrong declaratives
/exposition --> systematic explanation
/disposition --> affective orientation ~~> attitude ==> perspectives ==> selves

poet [=/= archivist] can be responsible for the ‘remainders’ --> good at greeting =/= traumatic realism


(1) traumatic realism
(real understood as traumatic:) “shock ==> subject”
a way of figuring that fails to bring the inflicting force (of real) into the symbolic order ==> mime, miming: you bring it into the present literally over and over (re-present)
|
(2) atmospheric attunement
a way of being in the noise
labor-intensive process that stretches across imaginaries [such as travel, house, haunt] --> responding to ” “
actual affects of modes of living brought into being
intimacy with a world [visiting families in Alta]
|
(3) phantom arm
“social = present-absent” (=/= Star Trek's interculturalism) (=/= Lacan's subject: proper sense of absence and loss)
connectivity does not require physical contiguity
-force of piled-up phantom limps
-hum of the palce, dormant noise --> worlding of a place [<-- material and sensory labor of attending to it]
-hauntology =/= Archimedean certainty of presence --> a knowing consciousnes
-so, that lost arm/limb (original part of you) could have a chance of becoming companion species, and n[...]

[...] />
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 paint their nails, attired themselves as women before going to sleep
[seek to accomplish in advance what is feared, emasculation]--> **mimesis of a crisis foretold**

(khwan)
a thread of unspun cotton tied about the wrist --to--> prevent the dissipation of one's vital essence

(mostly men's) satisfaction of commodity desire --entails--> absence from home

woman's work in technology and textile manufacturing and in the tourism sector (whether as service worker or prostitute) --> is deemed lamentable, even contemptible, but still tolerable

anxiety over lost male potency ==?==> widow ghost

the queen had a dream (that all the men in Thailand had vanished)
--> anxiety expressed as *extreme anticipation* (and not as an opposition to the feared object)
-the phenomena materializes what they seek to differ and mime (the force thday the want to stave off)

collective spirit possession

periods of commodification --> waves of witchcraft (traversed Thailand in 1905)

•episodes of disruption
•social crisis
•economic transformation
•attended reordering of social relations (including those of class and gender)
•

(khwan) rite: a try to evade loss by soliciting misrecognition (on the part of the ghost), but they cannot cover over the fact of an already existent loss

working as a repetition compulsion --> the widow ghost (بختک bakhtak?) as an example of death drive
(waking up nightly having felt themselves robbed of breath and speech)
--Mills+Morris--> capital (not war) as the source of this trauma

trauma that arises in war ~/= injury that is the function of insertion into new and painful economic structures

mastering the wounds produced by capital, depend on:
•not the production of cathartic discharge through aberration or historisization through narrative
•on some kind of socialization or collectivization through which the source of injury can be addressed

(تقدم anteriority =/= causality عليت)

*discernment of cause is precisely the domain of political analysis*
|
in a history that is experienced as the space of contingency, or accident, symptoms are likely to be recognized as cause (<== the order of anteriority is no longer distinguished from causality)
|
older patriarchal orders might reassert their values

young people being possessed by crowds and then escaping that possession --> the labor to discern other possibilities in relation to the accidental...


accidental e[...]

[...]e of politicization must be made repeatedly---often in situations that arise as though accidentally

...how the experience of the political as accidental (in popular mobilization during the 1990s) was also (at least partly) written into the interior of another discourse about the impossibility of change [~ neoliberalism's triumph and the end of history]

binarism of the war on terror resignifies older more disparate conflicts, and cultivates subjects who conceive of the political in these narrow oppositional terms --> to define the political as opposition between friends and enemies

***power always works by claiming that the future is already determined by a past narrated from its perspective*** (<-- that is why my work is about the past) --> [my work:] *learning to think otherwise about both the past and the future*

(the failure of political imagination in only speculating about the future)

*(the basis of) the political: transcendence of the accidental*

Morris shows how the potential force of the political depends on the recognition that it is not merely that which can be relegated to the past

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

(Bubandt > Morris > in Buli, North Maluku in Indonesia) witchcraft: ambivalent aporia, the interminable problem of life ~= empty seashell (shell in which there might or might not be an occupant, provides the de-sexualized figure for doubt that saturates the consciousness of those who inhabit the world of witchcraft, an internally split subject)

anthropology of witchcraft
--✕--> charges of residual exoticism by reading witchcraft phenomena as sites at which the transformations of modernity are mediated and made available for resignification
-to displace (witchcraft) into the domain of representation --> capacity to resignify the historical real

lethal violence at Marikana (South Africa, August 2012) --> muti magic was a not matter of resurgent tradition (for the black South African analysts), rather, magic was a visceral, strategically instrumentalizable, and absolutely lethal power. the kind that enables people to go to war, the kind that operates at the point where language fails (--?--> the use of poetic mystical enchantment in Iran-Iraq war for sending young soldiers to the battle fields)

witchcraft only becomes visible in the moment of accusation, as a retrospective effect of oracular diagnosis (Evans-Pritchard)
(...no one is sure that he has indeed heard a witch)--Bubandt--> witchcraft: a condition of doubt (=/= a system of belief)
--✕--> Morris questions: doubt =/=? belief

Morris asks --> doubt:
•whether illness is caused by witchcraft?
•whether one's neighbor is a witch?
•*whether one is oneself a witch?*

in Buli (=/= The Magicians TV series, Harry Potter film version of magic):
•witchcraft does n[...]

[...]epends on the recognition that it is not merely that which can be relegated to the past

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

(Bubandt > Morris > in Buli, North Maluku in Indonesia) witchcraft: ambivalent aporia, the interminable problem of life ~= empty seashell (shell in which there might or might not be an occupant, provides the de-sexualized figure for doubt that saturates the consciousness of those who inhabit the world of witchcraft, an internally split subject)

anthropology of witchcraft
--✕--> charges of residual exoticism by reading witchcraft phenomena as sites at which the transformations of modernity are mediated and made available for resignification
-to displace (witchcraft) into the domain of representation --> capacity to resignify the historical real

lethal violence at Marikana (South Africa, August 2012) --> muti magic was a not matter of resurgent tradition (for the black South African analysts), rather, magic was a visceral, strategically instrumentalizable, and absolutely lethal power. the kind that enables people to go to war, the kind that operates at the point where language fails (--?--> the use of poetic mystical enchantment in Iran-Iraq war for sending young soldiers to the battle fields)

witchcraft only becomes visible in the moment of accusation, as a retrospective effect of oracular diagnosis (Evans-Pritchard)
(...no one is sure that he has indeed heard a witch)--Bubandt--> witchcraft: a condition of doubt (=/= a system of belief)
--✕--> Morris questions: doubt =/=? belief

Morris asks --> doubt:
•whether illness is caused by witchcraft?
•whether one's neighbor is a witch?
•*whether one is oneself a witch?*

in Buli (=/= The Magicians TV series, Harry Potter 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
[...]

[...]m of belief)
--✕--> Morris questions: doubt =/=? belief

Morris asks --> doubt:
•whether illness is caused by witchcraft?
•whether one's neighbor is a witch?
•*whether one is oneself a witch?*

in Buli (=/= The Magicians TV series, Harry Potter 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
m
}--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)[...]

[...] /> •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 death, of this individual, in this moment (not death in general)
~-> for Bubandt, witchcraft: reproduction and valorization of this aporia (between the transcendental and the empirical)

James Siegel naming the witch (not only a political history but an investigation into the entire history of anthropological discourse on witchcraft and sorcery)
-he links the crisis of recognition brought on by the collapse of an authoritarian state that *had appropriated for itself the function of recognition*, to the rise of witchcraft accusations, to efforts to name a witch --> witches and not witchcraft were seen to proliferate after the fall of Suharto
•how the labor to designate the source of a menace that exceeds the empirical and that fails to explain the singular is inevitably failed
•the misrecognizing belief that eliminating witches could eliminate witchcraft

discern death drive in the very place that there is an effort to escape death

{ radical empiricism = close reading }==> attentive listening

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

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/689012

(two competing conceptions and aspirations,) two paradigms of communication:
•an ideal public sphere that recognizes the task of mediation but also requires its effacement
•to bypass mediation through apparently immediate forms of speech that range from visual slogans to messianic utterances that can be heard even by the dead (--> frustrated by deferral)

Morris: the social scene is technologicall[...]

[...]tagmatic (word associations)}
and: [*]the increasing difficulty to ask questions (as a result of the constant increase in the specialization of the knowledges --> science) {propositions in discursive systems, (a “task” that) proceeds with a plane of reference --> paradigmatic (a worldview) ==>? to *confront chaos* ~= to provide chaos with reference points [<-- artists need to learn this]}****

(my work in lecture-performance: to provide chaos with reference points)

Barad, Stengers, <== stable foundations of physics had broken up and it is time for science to become philosophical

science becomes philosophical philosophy becomes artistic art becomes anthropological anthropology becomes poetic poetry becomes biological biology becomes archaeological archaeology becomes speculative speculation becomes scientific science becomes aesthetic aesthetics becomes adventurous adventure becomes rigorous rigor becomes Iranian Iran becomes German Germany becomes Arabic Arab becomes Egyptian Egypt becomes animalistic animal becomes fabulous fable becomes political politics becomes...

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

(Baxstrom + Meyers highlight a productive gap between intent & outcome in) Christensen making a case of witchcraft (in his pioneering, bizarre, and lavish project of Häxan):
•misidentified nervous disease
•incompatibility of superstition and religious fanaticism with modernity and science
•bringing “errors of belief” in the 15th and 16th centuries into our view

living cinematic tableau, Häxan's excess =/= socially constrained thinking, discursive mode of analysis

Christensen's thesis concerned/gripped with abnormalities, events, and causes ==provide==> diagnosis
(like Favret-Saada) he was an un-witcher at once caught & catching

witch =? epiphenomenon

(to bring the ajayeb to life “objectively” is nonsense)

[Häxan = spectacle + argument ==> *to make nature speak*] drove efforts to locate & combat witches, and it served to shape similar aporias between *sense & distance* imbricated in:
•the invention of modern hysteria in the 19th century
•the “discovery” of the “native's point of view” by anthropologists in the early 20th century

for Christensen: “witchcraft = unrecognized manifestations of clinical hysteria and psychosis”

excessiveness of Häxan's reenactment --> construct the witch's material, invisible, mobile force
(Häxan's objectivity) had no expectation that the real will simply “speak for itself”

Häxan's reception in the 1920s --> to energize a negative, conceptually dogmatic discourse that formed and hardened cinematic taxonomies [particularly the division between “documentary” (nonfiction) and “feature” (fictional) films]

experimentation + evidence making

sexual interco[...]

[...]ecomes political politics becomes...

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

(Baxstrom + Meyers highlight a productive gap between intent & outcome in) Christensen making a case of witchcraft (in his pioneering, bizarre, and lavish project of Häxan):
•misidentified nervous disease
•incompatibility of superstition and religious fanaticism with modernity and science
•bringing “errors of belief” in the 15th and 16th centuries into our view

living cinematic tableau, Häxan's excess =/= socially constrained thinking, discursive mode of analysis

Christensen's thesis concerned/gripped with abnormalities, events, and causes ==provide==> diagnosis
(like Favret-Saada) he was an un-witcher at once caught & catching

witch =? epiphenomenon

(to bring the ajayeb to life “objectively” is nonsense)

[Häxan = spectacle + argument ==> *to make nature speak*] drove efforts to locate & combat witches, and it served to shape similar aporias between *sense & distance* imbricated in:
•the invention of modern hysteria in the 19th century
•the “discovery” of the “native's point of view” by anthropologists in the early 20th century

for Christensen: “witchcraft = unrecognized manifestations of clinical hysteria and psychosis”

excessiveness of Häxan's reenactment --> construct the witch's material, invisible, mobile force
(Häxan's objectivity) had no expectation that the real will simply “speak for itself”

Häxan's reception in the 1920s --> to energize a negative, conceptually dogmatic discourse that formed and hardened cinematic taxonomies [particularly the division between “documentary” (nonfiction) and “feature” (fictional) films]

experimentation + evidence making

sexual intercourse, cannibalism, cauldron --solemnize--> pact with the devil

evidentiary thinking

elaborated visualization of the witch stereotype

--> complex nature of *sensual explorations of the flesh* through masochism and exorcism

demonic influence
genres of transfiguration and metamorphosis

Christensen shows how those who were once identified as witches are now the objects of medical and social concern in modern life --> shows the potency of her various forms over time


--> Baxstrom + Meyers
(my work on ajayeb is based on that) [there is a largely] unacknowledged historical tendency and predisposition within the human sciences with roots in much older practices of:
•defining social facts
•discovery, interpretation, production of the real itself
[such as bestiary]

method that allows the researcher to sense
interpret and master forces that appear to be nonsensical (yet held to be present: held to be essential to the reality of everyday s[...]

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

testimony + experimental results + expert inquisitorial interpretation ==> early version of the ‘case study’ (synthesized as evidence in service of accounting for variation that exceeded general laws regarding relations and phenomenon in the world)
Baxstrom + Meyers

(ajayeb's) individual cases: an effective strategy in providing analytic (and empirical) purchase for phenomenon that were other wise invisible to even the discerning eye of the expert <-- **to move away from a reliance on metaphysics**


**medicalization of the invisible**

possession
set the stage for the explicit medicalization of the mobile invisible forces that experts had been struggling to master, explain, and take measures against --> a new mode that was equally *didactic and forensic* (as the theological frameworks deployed by inquisitors and the exorcise of demons by Church)

witchcraft, faith healing, and demonic possession
Bibliotheque diabolique --> case studies to demonstrate the precariousness of misrepresentation and the consequences of ignorance ~= investigations collected by Charcot and his students in their studies of hysteria
•clarifying the link between witchcraft and hysteria

*witch hunting and the exorcism of spirits in the 16th century (--> antiquated forms of inquiry) ~=?! clinical studies of nervous illness in the 19th century --> conceptual scaffolding of the emergent science*:
•fascination with the secondary visible effects of primary invisible forces
•long-term labor of social interpretation that required the mutation of old categories and the creation of new ones

==> “witch = misdiagnosed”

epilepsy, the sacred disease, erroneously perceived as resulting from hostile magic
=/= hysteria (hold a special place in the moral imaginary)

the special susceptibility of women to witchcraft mirrored the “feminine weakness” associated with the hysteric, exacerbated by low social status
-in countless accounts of possession, we find descriptions of demons speaking through the mouths of girls
[Baxstrom + Meyers =/= Federici's flat analysis of witch hunt as the tool of subjugation of the local population or of woman by men]

tableau vivant --into--> tableau clinique --into--> tableau critique

hysterical reliving of the original symptom --> reframed trauma: an attempt to suspend the two temporalities (real and reimagined) in the same image
@Hoda

one element of fascination with hysteria was i[...]

[...]mobile invisible forces that experts had been struggling to master, explain, and take measures against --> a new mode that was equally *didactic and forensic* (as the theological frameworks deployed by inquisitors and the exorcise of demons by Church)

witchcraft, faith healing, and demonic possession
Bibliotheque diabolique --> case studies to demonstrate the precariousness of misrepresentation and the consequences of ignorance ~= investigations collected by Charcot and his students in their studies of hysteria
•clarifying the link between witchcraft and hysteria

*witch hunting and the exorcism of spirits in the 16th century (--> antiquated forms of inquiry) ~=?! clinical studies of nervous illness in the 19th century --> conceptual scaffolding of the emergent science*:
•fascination with the secondary visible effects of primary invisible forces
•long-term labor of social interpretation that required the mutation of old categories and the creation of new ones

==> “witch = misdiagnosed”

epilepsy, the sacred disease, erroneously perceived as resulting from hostile magic
=/= hysteria (hold a special place in the moral imaginary)

the special susceptibility of women to witchcraft mirrored the “feminine weakness” associated with the hysteric, exacerbated by low social status
-in countless accounts of possession, we find descriptions of demons speaking through the mouths of girls
[Baxstrom + Meyers =/= Federici's flat analysis of witch hunt as the tool of subjugation of the local population or of woman by men]

tableau vivant --into--> tableau clinique --into--> tableau critique

hysterical reliving of the original symptom --> reframed trauma: an attempt to suspend the two temporalities (real and reimagined) in the same image
@Hoda

one element of fascination with hysteria was its “look” --> hysteria's aesthetic link to forms of possession

possession --> aneasthesias, amnesias, subconscious acts, somnambulisms, fixed ideas

a scaffolding: conceptually arranged chasm between outer and inner states ==>
•exorcists building on the techniques of inquisitors and witch hunters --> possession acts as the bridge across this chasm
•neurologists and psychologists construct the same
--✕--> (Malinowski's) anthropologists: fieldworkers as truth-tellers returning from the dark corners of the real (the witches are no longer explicitly the target of the inquiry)

Häxan's real object: the specter of sheer nonsense

hunt (even in objective scientific mastery) --> fueled by a desire operationalized in a method of being close enough to something to sense it

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

(?every time we have to) show how *the word (that we are using) relates to meaning*

Christensen makes every effort to c[...]

[...]linique --into--> tableau critique

hysterical reliving of the original symptom --> reframed trauma: an attempt to suspend the two temporalities (real and reimagined) in the same image
@Hoda

one element of fascination with hysteria was its “look” --> hysteria's aesthetic link to forms of possession

possession --> aneasthesias, amnesias, subconscious acts, somnambulisms, fixed ideas

a scaffolding: conceptually arranged chasm between outer and inner states ==>
•exorcists building on the techniques of inquisitors and witch hunters --> possession acts as the bridge across this chasm
•neurologists and psychologists construct the same
--✕--> (Malinowski's) anthropologists: fieldworkers as truth-tellers returning from the dark corners of the real (the witches are no longer explicitly the target of the inquiry)

Häxan's real object: the specter of sheer nonsense

hunt (even in objective scientific mastery) --> fueled by a desire operationalized in a method of being close enough to something to sense it

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

(?every time we have to) show how *the word (that we are using) relates to meaning*

Christensen makes every effort to craft a witch that is real to us : ontological fluidity of a cinematic image ==> “Häxan = word + image + thing”

metoposcopy: the expression of reasoning was to be found on the face, (dating back to Girolamo Cardano and the Renaissance) the operation of reason as the weaving together of images in the mind --> a proto-cinematic theory of the relation between image and thought if ever there was one

•respectable scholar indexes himself through his sources
•authoritarian first-person tenor --> instrumentally impersonal tenor
•establishing the X as a chapter within a much longer constellation of practices, discourses, traditions, and institutions
<br /> Kieckhefer --> how the long history of practical natural magic was enfolded into the specificity of European witchcraft in the late Middle Ages

Christ in Limbo --> Christensen's parallel editing ==> moving representation of a terra-centered universe <~~ elaborate wonders found in baroque wunderkammer (meticulously assembled by the German elite)


Renaissance Hermeticism:
writings of Hermes Trimesgistus ~=> foundation for:
•Ficino's relatively mild natural magic
•Pico della Mirandola's Christian Cabalist
•Agrippa's Christian magus
•Tommaso Campanella's (1568–1639) utopian City of the Sun
•Bruno's full-blown Hermetic–Cabalist (through the power of astrology and magic to bypass the Church altogether)
•

...rippling effects of the Hermetic–Cabalist tradition -->
•scrupulously mathematical astrology of Girolamo Cardano
•the rigorously empirical studies of th[...]

[...] of the real (the witches are no longer explicitly the target of the inquiry)

Häxan's real object: the specter of sheer nonsense

hunt (even in objective scientific mastery) --> fueled by a desire operationalized in a method of being close enough to something to sense it

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

(?every time we have to) show how *the word (that we are using) relates to meaning*

Christensen makes every effort to craft a witch that is real to us : ontological fluidity of a cinematic image ==> “Häxan = word + image + thing”

metoposcopy: the expression of reasoning was to be found on the face, (dating back to Girolamo Cardano and the Renaissance) the operation of reason as the weaving together of images in the mind --> a proto-cinematic theory of the relation between image and thought if ever there was one

•respectable scholar indexes himself through his sources
•authoritarian first-person tenor --> instrumentally impersonal tenor
•establishing the X as a chapter within a much longer constellation of practices, discourses, traditions, and institutions

Kieckhefer --> how the long history of practical natural magic was enfolded into the specificity of European witchcraft in the late Middle Ages

Christ in Limbo --> Christensen's parallel editing ==> moving representation of a terra-centered universe <~~ elaborate wonders found in baroque wunderkammer (meticulously assembled by the German elite)


Renaissance Hermeticism:
writings of Hermes Trimesgistus ~=> foundation for:
•Ficino's relatively mild natural magic
•Pico della Mirandola's Christian Cabalist
•Agrippa's Christian magus
•Tommaso Campanella's (1568–1639) utopian City of the Sun
•Bruno's full-blown Hermetic–Cabalist (through the power of astrology and magic to bypass the Church altogether)
•

...rippling effects of the Hermetic–Cabalist tradition -->
•scrupulously mathematical astrology of Girolamo Cardano
•the rigorously empirical studies of the natural world demanded by Bruno's attempts to operate as a magus
}==> (paved the way for) science of Newton and Copernicus --> a new metaphysics to emerge

attacks on Renaissance magic and the Hermetic–Cabalist tradition (that authorized witch) ==> anti-witch treatises

(case of Giordano Bruno's execution --> Hermetic magic and Cabalism) how in the 16th century: “superstition = crime”


(Christensen attributing) --> Hortus deliciarum, a largely cohesive image of hell to a period when the nature of hell's location and “topography” was a subject of fierce theological debate
-he strategically ignores debates and alternate conceptions of damnation that existed in the 15th and 16th centuries in Europe

[that which you choose] works to ampli[...]

[...]egesis =/= mimesis

the strategy of “reimaging” is methodological and intentional (in the opening minutes of the film Häxan) --> (in European terms, for a very long time:) “knowledge = recitations of the known”

+ creation of new images --> constituting its own evidence for what is at stake
(Christensen designating) **techniques of presentation rather than simple content**

****the “truth” gained by the reproduction of archival images**** <==through== their mobility in the context of their new use
--> (similar to Farocki) Christensen empties out such visual artifacts, expressing through their preestablished frame a meaning that was hidden and resisted



(Baxstrom + Meyers carefully treating the) methodological element of Christensen's image-making practices --in--> Häxan's depiction of the violent moral disorder of the Wild Ride of the witches to their Sabbats

(16th century) Wild Ride: a standard element of both demonological and popular literary accounts of the activities of witches, folding:
•older legends of wild hunters
•restless travels of the dead at night
•tales of the Furious Horde (a super natural band that was not originally associated with witchcraft)
•twisted chaos of the deep forest
Canon Episcopi regarding the power of demonic illusion to deceive women into imagining that they could travel great distances at night, often in the company of the goddess Diana
}--> conjoining of witch image to demonological discourse [<-- an empirically verifiable invention in the late medieval period and the Renaissance]

*the oscillating value of the non-fictive* (of its discrete artifacts)

hybrid human–animal creatures with each “natural” species being traceable within the complete appearance of the demonic creature


(coming into contemporary performance art -->) figures from antiquity:
•Saturn @Ale
•Circe @Bryana (changing men into beasts, games of chance, gambling, tricks, slight of hand, illusion, hybrid animal–human forms of the demons dancing around the “grandmother” with surprisingly young and beautiful appearance --melancholy--> general sense of sexual and societal disorder swirling around a placid, passive female protagonist) + empirical strain of the discourse of the witch
•Sabbat @Jassem
•
-->

pact of the witch
obsessed state of the hysteric
interplay of face and tableau

(Warburg's assertion that) donning a mask constitutes an active attempt “to wrest something magical from nature through the transformation of the person”
[putting on a mask --> transformation of the person --> obtaining omething magical from nature]

Christensen formally constructing “the witch” through a cinematic iteration of metoposcopic naturalism
(metoposcopy: a f[...]

[...]ace of the mundane in their fragmentary, juxtaposing methods of critique and presentation =/= Warburg + Christensen collecting mythological, figurative givens seemingly quite distant from the “really” real
}--> unsettling distances between myth and the everyday
-weave together episodic fragments in order to draw parallels (across domains of sense that cut across time) and correspondences across situations and characters
-Häxan deploys the techniques associated with Warburg's Mnemosyne and Bataille's Documents for purposes of affectively emphasizing the dark, chaotic forces that lurk under the smooth surface of the everyday
(Häxan's episodic structure ==>)
•characters seemingly out of a dead past to live again
•draw the phenomenology of the hysteric
•draw the work's own contemporary time to the surface


promiscuous: neither wholly artistic nor scientific =/=? hybrid artistic and scientific

traverse steep slope between past and future in the form of an event =/= plot


inability to automatically categorize Häxan (or any work of art) <== ***formal strategy rooted in an epistemic virtue***


***(in later Middle Ages) practices such as persecuting witchcraft to meditating on Christ = techniques (of sorting operation) to draw distinctions among visual phenomena, differentiating, say, physical objects from fantasies, dreams, and diabolical or artful deceptions
<--artist-- image-makers specialized in manipulating one thing (their materials) in order that a viewer should see something else ~ *to make something invisible visible* [<-- this is always ideological, and is very common in art]
(#testing) the objective knowledge possessed by the uncanny (in witch's pathological language of diabolic proofs) ==> witch must be experienced in her own milieu, a satanic biome, her state in nature

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

typical in 17th century: tacit mutuality of word & image
-artists habitually gave their paintings titles, mottoes, tags and quotations, and their works abound in literary allusions
-explicit interleaving of the verbal and visual


cat feces and dove hearts boiled in the moonlight

stereotype of a debased and corrupted priest
object of the customer's affections


Protestant discourse against the Catholic Church in the 16th century --> artists of the period extended the instrumentalization of slander through the production of proto-pornographic images of bishops, priests, and the pope engaged in myriad obscene acts --depicting--> the emotional states and desires of the clergy

magical salves (considered particularly powerful and troubling by demonologists)

Häxan self-positioning as a scientific investigation + constantly pull back from the dramatic outcomes of what Häxan depicts

[...]

[...]> cat feces and dove hearts boiled in the moonlight

stereotype of a debased and corrupted priest
object of the customer's affections


Protestant discourse against the Catholic Church in the 16th century --> artists of the period extended the instrumentalization of slander through the production of proto-pornographic images of bishops, priests, and the pope engaged in myriad obscene acts --depicting--> the emotional states and desires of the clergy

magical salves (considered particularly powerful and troubling by demonologists)

Häxan self-positioning as a scientific investigation + constantly pull back from the dramatic outcomes of what Häxan depicts

Häxan's demonstration of the power of the witch =/= paranoid delusions of witch- crazed villagers


widely held set of beliefs regarding the “nature” or “essence” of women
Christina Larner's assertion that witch trials were gender-related (but not by definition gender-specific)
--Baxstrom--> *women often came under suspicion of being witches because they were understood to be particularly susceptible to lust, avarice, and jealousy by their very nature [~ 16th century: **women “naturally” susceptible to witchcraft*** + women were presumed to possess elements of the nature more than men] =/= Federici's understanding of witch-hunt as straight-forward instance of misogyny*
--Roper--> *one cannot approach witchcraft or possession from a vantage point in the present without granting some legitimate status to the ways in which the Devil and witches were not only asserted to be real but were experienced as such*


(debates over) politics and evil
satan's malefic presence (in Dreyer's Leaves)
*a density of parallelisms*
Dreyer figures Satan as a problem of the present
“Bolsheviks violently engaged in revolutionary struggle = manifestation of a transcendental demonic power”

question of theodicy --> God's seeming absence from the world

sleep-walking --> enticing a nude female somnambulist out of her home into the forest, where she eventually kneels before a demon who embraces her

proving sexual relations with the devil ==> empirical evidence for satan's existence

(Benjamin > Christensen's art sets out) to conquer meaning


...so it is no stretch to suggest that...

subject and subtext



dreamtime of the 16h century
dreamtime of the witch


•Durer, Baldung, Cranach, artists at the dawn of the Reformation sought to represent the void as a figure
•strategies by which Expressionist painting sought to externalize states of mind

(Baxstrom + Meyers emphasizing) how Häxan *corresponds with a variety of traditions* without seeking to assimilate the film fully within one[...]

[...]ce a case was established, it would spread like a contagion (=/= proof of misogy or genocide as Federici asserts)



Flaherty ==> a certain truth regarding the total social environment : force of Nanook's life not only provides empirical evidence as to his mode of living but also allows for a refl ection on “nature”, “humanness”, “modernity” rooted in the haptic qualities of Flaherty's images

maleficium (of the witch --> palpable: destructive weather magic, assault of farm animals, sickness, unexplained death, etc.)

saturn's mythological violence <--> satan
the idea that saturn serves as patron to social outliers: the poor, elderly, disabled, criminals, jews, cannibals, magicians, witches

(early modern period -->) **satan = the principal authority of the natural world**, “master of the knowledge of natural properties and the techniques of their instrumentalization” =/= techniques of the healer =/= empirical instruments

(de Certeau observed that) every exercise of trained judgment is authorized through the [*]dark: ratifying force of theology
**dark forces --ratify--> all forms of natural expertise**

mastery of nonsense --driving--> confirming the suspicion of witchcraft = a form of non-knowledge ==opens==> a gap in knowing (specifically, ‘who’)


line of accusation that was quite common in the early modern period --> “the desperate search for the cause of what was other wise an unexplained illness or misfortune was frequently the catalyst for specific witchcraft accusations between friends, acquaintances, and often between family members themselves”
16th century --> this violence now bore the sanction of both secular and religious institutions (<== peasant complaints of maleficium زيان <== human beings have been suffering misfortune, illness, and death long before the power of the witch was felt during this time)

Dominican order --> aggressively promoting the cult of the virgin, to the status of the “perfect” woman {elevating the status of sexual neurosis to a virtue} =/= lustful credulous nature of common women (who were often associated with the temptations of Eve)


*conflicted status of women*
•in Häxan --through--> sternly patrilineal visual motifs (condescension + bemusement --> frail + hysterical)
•in ajayeb bestiary -->


(Häxan's) witch hunters act in accordance with their own procedures for investigating truth and falsehood and not simply out of malice, fear, or stupidity

the inquisitor priest/friar (within the realm of their own assumptions about the world) were dedicated to investigating and verifying the claims [of the accused witch) =/= (mainstream depiction of inquisitors as) gullible, fanatical, overtly misogynistic

(during the witch craze) **desire to believe =/= simple belief**[...]

[...]f the complaint's merit
*it was complex, expensive, and very risky to enter into this formal framework in order to address disputes or everyday injustices* ==> most ordinary people did not do so, choosing instead to pursue local and less formal modes of redress

15th and 16th century --> this procedure changed dramatically (with the emergence of the witch in europe)
•witch was understood as an agent of satan
•responsibility of civil and religious authorities to protect pious christians (from a power that would overwhelm the faithful regardless of their individual acts, intentions, or beliefs)

inchoate suspicion (of the fearful, the resentful, the spiteful) --> reporting --> inquisitors (positioned as experts) --> take this suspicion forward administratively --> *impersonal sociological sense* (<-- an example of Weberian rationalization)

to suspect someone of maleficium was not new --✕--> (in witch accusations) authorities were now eager to act on suspicions in dependently


unresolved sexual desires + such passion would be redirected in pathological, perverse manner ==Häxan==> witch accusations

the film emphasizes the crucial role sex played in discerning what constituted witchcraft and its status as a knowable category of (malefic) human practice


a great deal of demonological thinking was devoted to justifying the fact that civil and Church officials, despite their fears, by and large were not bewitched


following satan's idiom...

Häxan's tortured relation to “the truth”
the question of empirical certainty and reenactment haunts the status of the film as evidence

*acting the ideal type breathes life into the emptied, cliched figure* :
•Christensenrelying on the fact that the truth of the witch will take its most visible form by acting her out mimetically (~= Christensen chooses to “play” satan using his idiom to breathe life into his witch)
•Flaherty knew that the visceral force of Nanook of the North depended on the felicity of his Inuit interlocutors reenacting themselves




Christensen seems to be offering a cure for the *secularized christian blindness* at the heart of *positivist human science* --> his audience is pulled in “through a lens of science =/= as misguided inquisitors”


working with *figurative givens of witches and demons* --formulate--> visual thesis (about uncanny, mobile power)

etchings into a material
carving outlines into the image of figures that have been hiding in plain sight


beautifully composed tableau of the torture chamber
static plane of the tableau =/= sense depth signify an open or free space

totality of (depicted) violence <--> composed alterity of the scene's stylistic correspondence between acc[...]

[...]nterlocutors reenacting themselves

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

Christensen seems to be offering a cure for the *secularized christian blindness* at the heart of *positivist human science* --> his audience is pulled in “through a lens of science =/= as misguided inquisitors”


working with *figurative givens of witches and demons* --formulate--> visual thesis (about uncanny, mobile power)

etchings into a material
carving outlines into the image of figures that have been hiding in plain sight


beautifully composed tableau of the torture chamber
static plane of the tableau =/= sense depth signify an open or free space

totality of (depicted) violence <--> composed alterity of the scene's stylistic correspondence between accused and inquisitor

(Christensen's method of) oscillating rhythm between tableau and face
-suppressing perspective and depth of field in favor of a continuous affective movement as expressed in the face
--Baxstrom--> Häxan is not grounded in a setting here; it is grounded in the forms of life present in the shot

sense of corporeal alienation from herself --> inhabit a script not her own --> critical to the “success” of witchcraft confessions

witch stereotype:
•Wild Ride
•pact with the Devil solemnized through sexual intercourse-
•cannibalism
•دیگ cauldron as the locus of the rite
•*massed, coordinated, female nature of witchcraft*


judicial machinery of a witch trial required evidence of criminal acts that (by definition) could not be witnessed


in Häxan
-the power of cinema to witness exceeds that of the witch hunter
-what it does is “worse” than rigging the truth --> it aligns itself (not with a concept of truth or the real but) with the power of the witch


(Häxan and many criminal story films) works through instruments of knowing rooted in the *dynamics of the confession*
#ajayeb storytelling

...clumsily rendered, the wriggling demons reflect an interesting set of variations to the witch stereotype, both ontologically and visually
(Maria giving birth to demon children)


Thomas Aquinas's theorization of the *virtual bodies* (of angels)
-angels do not need bodies for their sake but for ours --> unnatural couplings could produce children, but that the bodily essence of devils would rule out the possibility that these children would themselves be demons


16th century author primarily concern with Satan's ability to manipulate and pervert language (including erotic language)


wild flowing hair of the women --> a common visual metaphor for sexual promiscuity and disorder


images of cannibalistic night witches were explicitly a demonological[...]