[...] =/= (Descartes’) “natural light of reason”


%report on fables of objects #workshop (22.02.2017 HWD apass): attention to the sense and feeling of disparity, dispersity, stability, sublimity, authority, epicness, weakness, severity, solidity, scale, (a)social connections, and tangibility in the character of the object of each participants in the stories we wrote. where were active and passive qualities located? how were agencies distributed?
•origin story --> evolution story, love story [the object falls in love with...]
•daily story
•beast feeding story --> training story
evoking temporality of evolutionary time, face-to-face time, historical time, tiny scale time,
 -each story has a music, texture of colors, pattern of meaning and affect
•bodyguard --> fantastic creature invented to protect an organism (your “object”). this bodyguard can be organic, nonorganic, cyborg, any form, but always an agent. tell us why/how this or that feature helps the bodyguard with its task
•generation stories, describe and follow your object in three generations, its child and grandchild
•[for the second day or warm-up first day?] constraint based writing: (Kenney > Christian Bök's “literary genetics” poetics of encryption of data; poetic vectors, to “infect” the language;) describe/story your object (or an operative “verb” within your discourse) with univocalics: without using “e” or only using a single vowel. or, first write with 3, then 2, then 1 vowel.

-the workshop is about: what other stories (of your object) are possible?
-in the workshop (I take a temporary position to) challenge others to re-tell the story of their ((epistemological) found) objects
-a ‘generative constraint’ might help opening up paths before you, away from our habits of storytelling
-it is about getting a feeling for the resistances and potentials of language in our (sometimes mundane) descriptive practices, “strange richness of missing the letters we need” (Kenney)

the metaphors are dormant in our routines of talking and noticing each other. how then, by traversing the routine, our “knowledge” and “community” took on new meaning, as they get a chance of being rearticulated in different languages (or differenlty infected literature)
~-?==> changing the system of classification (of thought)

-in a way the workshop is about an *approach* to knowledge generation (and not necessarily a rigorous critique nor directly evaluating the production of our knowledges)


***nothing is never merely a metaphor***

[some fables from science studies:]
•Emily Martin's egg/sperm story --> stories of atomism, distribution of agency, ----[The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles]
•Hayward's microscope --> tropes of natural history docu, ----[[...]

[...] with our syntax?

“-scene” : the ‘now’ of the species [--> pleistocene image] also, a sharp change in the graph/diagram [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Extinction_intensity.svg]

Sa'di, thinking not with the capital T, rather with the flower, with the cut tail of the animaux

competency + competency (of different animal, human, machine, pigeon, etc) [=/= subtraction, taboo, obligation --> deficiency*]
(additive competencies)

“excess” is the name of the world
there is always more that we don't know; what yet has to come; the world is constantly doing stuff; (--✕--> accelerate manifesto, apocalyptic narratives)
(i am drawn to and by excess, and i am engaged in it: in my lectures, talkings, writings, and I take it up also visually in my drawings. my ajayeb hypertext search is contingent and opportunistic, and its searches are non-systematic)

in apass what my project is all about: *loving to tell you about what i am reading* (why it seams too difficult, complicated and impossible to understand!?)
-“to provides a feast of reading pleasures”

holding each other's unasked-for patterns (@Luisa)
taking up each other patterns [which are sometimes obvious, sometimes cryptic]
(what is the other name of the practices of “string figures” in Iran? -->[stars, facts, fabulations, “far”s, patternings,]--> all cosmopolitical, composes the “we”)

•a “we” compositional
•an “ajayeb” compositional
•

anthropocene system thinking
•feedback loops
•thermodynamics & 18th century mathematics (=/= hyperbolic mathematics in ‘crochet’ --> excess of surface, --> story of interface)
•comparative interpretive thinking (a dominant western model of knowledge production--which i am using!)
•modern synthesis: restrictive system theories within evolutionary theories
•systems idea
•
*“The global scale takes precedence--because it is the scale of the model.”* Tsing

[title]
Bilingual Stories for Ajayeb NatureCultures
(...stories ‘for’ =/= ...stories ‘of’)

does Brexit and Trumplandia changes the landscape of English use as a language?

the image of pedagogy : semiotic apparatus (& technological) (--> the ritual of Simpson strangling Bart)


(why am i cultivating the) *non-inventive imagination* (and its antimetabole [or chiasmus, chiastic patterns of antithesis]: non-imaginitive invention)
often we find ourselves inventing everything (in political animation) =/= to figure out what are we attached to

(inheriting something =/=? being heir to something)

the scientist inside me begs me to narrow my temporal scale, choose an epoch, let's say middle ages, choose a century let's say 15th, choose a year, choose a day, a moment, a micro-second slice of t[...]

[...]br /> the labor of looking

“Movies made for women imagine a picture--perfect scene of an Inside--a Home filled with tangible objects that Mean or a Self filled with the intricate dramas of dreams launched, wounded, and finally satisfied or left behind. Affect itself is laid out on the carpet like a beautiful fetish that it is okay to love.”

(the #telegram is littered with image-written signs of personal/public disaster)
the surge of affect toward the scene of abjection --> abjection itself is felt as a contagion --> Navid's comments turned into stickers
-fascination of catastrophe
-something pleads to be touched
-the act of looking at the telegram's forward: my desire is your desire and we are all together in the mass desire
-images on telegram offer affects to mime, lines of vitality to follow, intimate secrets to plumb, tips to imbibe for safety or good health or the search for things new and vibrant with collective envy
-browsing telegram, we're trudging the rough terrain of bodies, sensuous accumulation, impact


“Sometimes when you hear someone scream it goes in one ear and out the other. Sometimes it passes right into the middle of your brain and gets stuck there.”

(cryptic and as) crystal clear as a scream


[a question or something else] lodged in a tactile sensate anxiety --> aesthetic scene (of the senses) --> scene --> shape
(anxiety has to do with the sensate and tactile and opens onto asthetic)
(some do this all the time [unknown shock of anxiety in the morning]:) morning --> mourning --> sudden dread and start scanning () () [], (trauma as an) everyday walking path

traumatic realism: a figuring that, like traumatic memory, fails to represent the inflicting force as an object in a symbolic order and therefore feels compelled to literally re-present it over and over, *miming the original haunting impact.* (Stewart > Hal Foster)
-the subject surging to bear an affect, surging toward an actualization, passionate connection of the subject who goes with the flow in an intoxicated moment (=/= sober distance)
(Hoda's impact of) shocked subjectivity (--> the real understood as traumatic) --> conjure up memories of death --?--> communal grieving
{referential vs. simulacral readings @Hoda, Marialena (‘referential object for’ / ‘empathetic object in’ /or ‘criticality of’ [<-- i don't agree with these clear cuts of ”/"]; what is “the reality of suffering and death” (or “reality and suffering of death”) for Hoda? (Xiri's interest in her) object's “total integration” into the political economy}

(Stewart's) signs of the senses
satisfaction in the making of sign-shrine
(question of satisfaction at Hoda:) satisfaction as a force, and end, in itself spoken through the bright, blunt, sensate aesthetics of the sign
-something slashes [= a wound [...]

[...] response-ability draw our attention to who is interested and who is made articulate in the apparatuses and ecologies we live inside.” (Kenney)*****

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

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


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

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


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

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


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

why think and write with the aesthetic?

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

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

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


**where do our power come from if not from evidence?** (@Seba)
--> the *specter of deception* (it happened when i used aesthetics in my questions in my excursion at Vladimir's block, my peers thinking “what if [...]

[...] (= ajayeb)
--the scene of a thing's demise

an edgy irruptive event

rules and edges are OK when separate, but together, a bad combination

(Karin + Sina + Hanno) we were humans together

--we adjust ourselves to the done deal that things happen--

(we find ourselve being) “from here” in a world made intimate through forgiveness, denial, detachment flowing in after a surge of something bad--a close call [Stewart]


*what are ajayeb's turns (and turn backs) to the inarticulate real?


hallucinogenically down-to-earth (Aela)


what are ajayeb's state of emergent expressivity [today]? (that tries to guess and describe ‘what is happening’) **** things that happen are incitements to form ****
--> intensities become expressive --> an خونسرد impassive corporeality --> intensities pass from body to body --{
•human bodies
•animal bodies
•machine bodies
•bodies of thought
•ecosystems
•visceralities and noumena [a thing in itself, as distinguished from a phenomenon] spread out across a vast atmospheric field

sediments of ajayeb:
•obvious
•much remarked
•cryptic --> favored
•situationally precise

how ajayeb is an improvisatory conceptuality?
does ajayeb-writing takes place in singularity? (because every worlding is singular and precise ==> the pleasure of its recognition)

#my project in apass has been a practice of writing that is an experiment in attuning to ajayeb's tune

ajayeb reports of:
•affect that has become native***, attaching to bodies and socialities, to an ethos***

with ajayeb (with Stewart) i am learning:
•to approach the tactile compositionality of things
•de-dramatization of academic thought
•to approach the thing that throws itself together *slowly and enigmatically*--> #andakhtan, andaze
•a descriptive detour (with Latour)
•a lyrical evocation (with Stewart)
•a method of awkwardly approaching an object by attuning to it as a thing of *promise and contact* (with Berlant)
•

concept: that which attunes itself to things coming into form; is both abstract & concrete; actual & unfolding

highly fractured stone of a collective intensity (--> Iran, and most other places)

______________


ajayeb was/is very much committed to the concrete: that means committed to speculation and curiosity (and not the demystification and uncovering truths that support a well-known picture of the world) (it was only to a certain degree in support of the middle age islamic picture)

*a something both animated and inhabitable

how to approach a weighted and reeling [walk as if unable to control one's movements] [...]

[...]ehicle for “telling the truth” about the world [in early 1920s]

when documentary was not yet documentary -- fiction wasn't fiction yet either --Chanan-->{
moving pictures = visual tidbits لقمه چرب ونرم
made no demands on literacy (==> spread easily)
whe world on the screen remained anecdotal (and predominantly iconic)
practically inarticulate (in terms of public discourse)}

(1900) visual meaning-making machines that demanded not only attention but belief (by staging as real reenactments) --> mutated the desire to see far-off contemporary events
•--> Attack on a China Mission Station (1900), Hunting Big Game in Africa (1907), and With Captain Scott, R.N., the South Pole (1912), The Battle of the Somme (1916) and With Our Heroes at the Somme (Bei unseren Helden an der Somme, 1917)

(Baxstrom + Meyers) question of mimesis
-what is the relation between a fragmentary visual artifact drawn “from life” and the truth value of any such fragments?
-what sorts of filmmaking practices can felicitously mimic life as such?

[for example in Curtis's In the Land of the War Canoes] status of reenactment ==> prevailing standards of expressing the real

--later --> crypto-structuralist origin myth that falsely represented what “documentary” meant to pre-Griersonian filmmakers ==> “realist” Lumiere =/= the “fanciful” Melies

}--> *gap between witnessing and the real* in Europe (this question of evidence occupied inquisitors and theologians long before the invention of cinema)


preparing viewers for the “diegetic absorption”
(telling of a story by a narrator) diegesis =/= 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 [...]

[...]other formal regulations)}


limits of bounded rationality (عقل معاش aghle ma'ash?)
(Bounded rationality is the idea that in decision-making, rationality of individuals is limited by the information they have, the cognitive limitations of their minds, and the finite amount of time they have to make a decision.)
--> for example soil loss, due to careless exploitation of the forests’ resources has been a constant threat to urban centers throughout history. most urban civilization were able to pass their genes for only seventy generations before they ran out of soil ---> although some material and energy flows can be “socialized” (submitted to cultural control), in practice many are not.



(my interest and work on hayula is about:) the creative morphologies that have always resided outside the (west versus east) homoestatic text of the self and other

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

contemporary US film bestiary <==
•EC comics --> popular weird fantasy, horror science fiction
•creepy magazine
•the twilight zone --> horror, science fiction, suspense, comedy
•film noir --> flawed character hero <== german expressinonist cinematography
•cryptozoology (adventure)


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

division's of life

-monolithic notion of the mind has been challanged by psychology and phenomenology

biology has been previously essentially zoocentric --> monolithic notion of the body --> medically proper animal body =/= if we zoom in the living canvas, organisms blend into a pointillist landscape in which each dot of paint is also alive --> symbiosis, gaia, prokaryotic sex (omnisexuality)

gaia --> biosphere und understood not as environmental home but as body (physiological process)
bacterial omnisexuality --> fluid genetic transfers = sexualxual
=/= unitary self assumed in the zoocentric model

medieval microcosmic
correspondences among prokaryotic, eukaryotic, zoological and geophysiological (gaian) levels
--> holonomic continuum --> *a type of individuality that is spatially and temporally more inclusive* [-my research on ajayeb has been more tended on the temporal inclusivity]
==> (in new biology) chimerical body: hybrid of bacterial species --Sagan--> like that many headed beast, the microbeast of the animal cell combines into one entity bacteria that were originally freely living, self-sufficient and metabolically distinct

•when respirers entered and did not kill but, rather, were incorporated by larger anaerobic archaebacteria
•mitochondria are the descendants of bacteria that had be come lodged within the cells of animals and plants

bacteria ==> eukaryotic cell

(the fable of) [Spencer's] animal world as a “gladiator's sh[...]

[...]fe:)
•*massive* life of market
•*excessive* life of the brnad image
•*virtual* life of Facebook
•

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


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


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


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

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

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

[...]gnition in the audience had replaced the metaphysical claims of the author. Mistrusting themselves, they assuaged their fear of subjectivity by transferring the necessity of judgment to the audience.


(Grashey's) police metaphor was entirely appropriate. Not only was the history of late-nineteenth-century photography thoroughly bound up with the history of crime control, the x-ray photography itself was increasingly finding its way into court.

scientific evidence

legal evidence

at issue was, once again, the shifting border between judgment and mechanization, between the possibility (or necessity) of human intervention and the routinized, automatic functioning of the technology.

medico-legal concept of evidence

the image of the x-ray appeared (in court at least) to preempt and displace all other forms of knowledge.

(Allan Poe:) “if we examine a work of ordinary art, by means of a powerful microscope, all traces of resemblance to nature will disappear--but the closest scrutiny of the photographic drawing discloses only a more absolute truth, more perfect identity of aspect with the thing represented.”

trompe l'oeil (new note)

in X-ray, the encryption of information takes place in the technology itself

photographs did not carry a transparent meaning


once so policed, and presumably only then, could the photographic process be elevated to a special epistemic status, putting it in a category of its own

in contrast to drawings, photograms were tarnished by the crudeness imposed by the limited palette of the color raster. Given the choice, the author clearly favored the crude but mechanical photographic process. Accuracy had to be sacrificed on the altar of objectivity. (is Kinect pure mechanical? why i have been insisting to remove my hands?! why i was craving for objectivity?)

=> to leave imperfections in the photograph as a literal mark of objectivity

testimony to objectivity

rejection of subjective temptation

sophistication could corrupt an individual? (you can be accurate but not sophisticated) (not cleaning up the image of plates)


The moral narrative surrounding this mechanical construction of pictorial objectivity took many forms. As we have argued, pictures (properly constructed) served as talismanic guards against frauds and system builders, aesthetes and idealizers.

extending the mystique of the visual to the dense symbolic presentation of functions and graphs

inscription instruments

(Marey, method grafique) “the graphical method translates all these changes in the activity of forces into an arresting form that one could call the language of the phenomena themselves, as it is superior to all other modes of expression.”

[...]

[...]tic recreation or translation of a given language-world that the new science of myth and history can hope to retrace the growths of consciousness

in apass, inventing a science of myth and history, towards a general theory of significant sign.

Corruption of language and decline of body politics?

Can we correlate the Persian syntax with the metaphysical ambience, internal divisions, and lyric bias of Persian people?

A pivot point must inform and relate

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

The language-matrix

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

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

...conjectures with prophetic brilliance

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

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

Literaturehaus, hause has always been a metaphor for consciousness

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

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

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

..a careful philosophically and poetically disciplined observation

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

‘the inner music of meaning’

the german tenderness
german tender---zart

(in Shabnam's poetry : the clash between ‘mental’ and ‘psychic’ codes of recognition)

the villain is outside the law (of exchange)

...the court of words---in ikhvano safa animals demonstration
...when the market of life has closed down

faith and substitution of meaning

how can i tear you from your vows, and not myself use vows?
The faiths that are sworn (before every exchange or change)

a word for a woman bound by another sacred word --> breaking your oaths---in the age of ... (message to the tribalist, the son)

Don Juan: yesterday [...]

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


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


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


deconstruction
==> counter-intuitive analyses
--> presupposes a detailed knowledge of construction (one must become intimate with the ways something is assembled) [=/= cart blanche for meaning]
--> (Jassem's style of) reading otherwise: passing the classical discipline (=/= abandon, jettison it) to explore what it omits, forgets, excludes, expels, marginalizes, dismisses, ignores, scorns, slights, takes too lightly, waves off, not serious enough

•anthropcentric truth: a truth that appears to human beings
◾instrumental truth: a truth aimed at getting things done (making things work)
•teleological truth: a truth which closes debate and fastens meaning


[*]visual = a form of control (<--Campbell-- this aspect makes it central to organizational analyses) <==
1. *visual organizes reality by claiming status as the preeminent form of representation* (vision is the dominant tyrannical phenomenology of the contemporary world ==> all forms of knowledge can be presented visually)
2. *conflation of the ‘seen = known’* : “vision = ways of knowing = experiencing the world” (<-- imagined inseparable) ==> the idea that depiction/picturing/seeing are ubiquitous features of the process by which most human beings come to know the world as it really is for them
3. *visual organizes the worldview of the seer* --> visual is at its most powerful when it is most invisble (for example scientific diagrams, mapping @apass)

***instances of visu[...]

[...]ne of many existential prototypes, subjectivity constellations, etc.

sliding between hostile and relaxed patterns of ...

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

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


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



where is absolutism in San'an?

own descent (Abstieg) into paranoia

when in master-disciple relationship one is asked/taught not only read the works of past visionaries: rather to entertain the same mania, drunkenness, cruelty, or absorb temperament that engendered the very materialization of that text.
[Attar asking us to entertain the same mania when reading Tazkirat al-Awliya?]

...lending cryptic terminologies and cosmic ideas

to become an echo of a profound legacy


we ask again: which phantom-sphere is more interesting? more aesthetically and philosophically attractive in its contours, appearances, and orchestrations?

which archive remains in fire throughout?

-which (archival?) constructs promise to survive us?
-things that run on hollow spectacles of meanings and simulations of depth
-adapting old tales to new territories of experience


an apocalyptic significance in the master-disciple relationship
(topology of communication/education)


(mysticism) an ex an excursion into the otherworldly (or the eternal)
lending cryptic terminologies and cosmic ideas a palpable and resurgent quality.



THE pursuit: to become the echo of a profound legacy

the question is not the legitimate/authentic knowledges versus superstitious/mythic doctrines, rather: which phantom-sphere is more arresting? which archive remains in fire throughout?

modern-individuality versus the magnetic power of the sectarian voice..

counter-veiling definitions of freedom: the freedom of infinite mediocritized choices versus the freedom to choose the all-engulfing one thing.

these preferences: on some remote place of calculation or in terms of immediate force?


(this talk might be) a critical rant

(eastern thirds:)
the voice of a strange immunity

sacred crimes

one is hard pressed to find a truth that does not h[...]

[...]biguity and doubt into our collective imagination



where is absolutism in San'an?

own descent (Abstieg) into paranoia

when in master-disciple relationship one is asked/taught not only read the works of past visionaries: rather to entertain the same mania, drunkenness, cruelty, or absorb temperament that engendered the very materialization of that text.
[Attar asking us to entertain the same mania when reading Tazkirat al-Awliya?]

...lending cryptic terminologies and cosmic ideas

to become an echo of a profound legacy


we ask again: which phantom-sphere is more interesting? more aesthetically and philosophically attractive in its contours, appearances, and orchestrations?

which archive remains in fire throughout?

-which (archival?) constructs promise to survive us?
-things that run on hollow spectacles of meanings and simulations of depth
-adapting old tales to new territories of experience


an apocalyptic significance in the master-disciple relationship
(topology of communication/education)


(mysticism) an excursion into the otherworldly (or the eternal)
lending cryptic terminologies and cosmic ideas a palpable and resurgent quality.



THE pursuit: to become the echo of a profound legacy

the question is not the legitimate/authentic knowledges versus superstitious/mythic doctrines, rather: which phantom-sphere is more arresting? which archive remains in fire throughout?

modern-individuality versus the magnetic power of the sectarian voice..

counter-veiling definitions of freedom: the freedom of infinite mediocritized choices versus the freedom to choose the all-engulfing one thing.

these preferences: on some remote place of calculation or in terms of immediate force?<br />

(this talk might be) a critical rant

(eastern thirds:)
the voice of a strange immunity

sacred crimes

one is hard pressed to find a truth that does not have a dead body


never-ending allegory of loss and primal innocence

irrational desire of a no-man's land of an eternal immaturity


(an existential evacuation)
committing oneself to erratic wanderings in the desert => translation of a familiar topology into an ontological modality?

the extravagant paradox of proximity and distance
(interiority and exteriority, presence and absence)

civilizational taxonomies (--> versus animist taxonomies, in Attar's animal-birds)



the (sacred boundaries of mysticism) and mystic boundaries of the civilized city
the peripheries of the city became mystic/sacred


mystical cha[...]

[...]ne part strategic essentialism, one part deconstructive smokescreen

part amateur, part pseudo-scholar, part civil servant, part serial killer

part vigilante, part crusader, part cult member, part thug


a site for hermeticism (recession from humans) ==> elevation



[inoperative community =/=] *excessive community*, where players must remain mesmerized, enchanted, and vigilant

sectarian <--> full charismatic authority -->? morshed (=/= “pseudo-autonomous passivity”)
مرشد --> with its own matrix of study: hypnotic exchange [it requires ecstatic projection, not scholarly detachment]

ISIS --> scaffoldings of invisible subjugations, highly performative site

***how does one make the memory [--> Hoda], the shadow [--> Ehsan], the ancestor [--> Sina] speak across generations?***


the riotous, the militant, the deranged --> they have suspicions ~=> ?

(sectarian mode of) *reading: to entertain the same mania, drunkenness, cruelty, or absurd temperament that engendered the very materialization of that text ==> apocalyptic significance (~ master-disciple relationship)--San'an--> an excursion into the otherworldly
-cryptic terminologies
-cosmic ideas
--> ‘knowing’ becomes a high-stake transaction, one's own identity, future, and self-consciousness hangs in the balance (--> i can recognize this extremism in myself)

(an issue with iranian artists:) the pursuit to become the echo of a profound legacy***(!!)

***echo becoming*** --> (Mohaghegh's tone:) in an epoch that runs entirely on hollow spectacles of meaning and simulations of depth <-- aesthetic

(since declared by Western theory itself, and i agree too?) it is obsolete to speak of “legitimate/authentic knowledges =/= mythic doctrines” }==> the question then becomes:
*which phantom-sphere is more arresting, more aesthetically philosophically attractive?* (--> phantomology, Avital) ~/?= *which archive remains on fire throughout?* (--> the concern of many of my peers in apass. why archive has become a predominant topic and practice: lack of master signifier ==> archiving as one remaining meaningful thing to do, that there is nothing meaningful to be done [<-- that is my source of disagreement with archive-discourse, because it matters that there is something to be done now])


(taking) high doses of impulse and reason

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


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


•magnetic power of the se[...]

[...]is only magnified in its cult-value through its transmission over the air waves, testifying more to MacLuhan's interpretation of the persuasive impact of radio
--> technological media in iranian anticolonialism does not elicit the democratizing effect anticipated by Benjamin


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

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



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

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

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

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

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


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


literary front
Hedayat, Yushij, Shamlu, Forough

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

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

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

(how an eastern or third world vanguard characterize itself in the heart of major historical tremors:) [listen to their *tone of aggression*:]
Nima: “with my poetry i have driven people into a great conflict; good or bad, they have fallen in confusion; i myself am sitting in a corner, watching them: i have flooded the nest of ants”
Forough: “all those who are involved in creative work have as their motive ... a sort of need to confront and struggle wit[...]

[...]als who are reborn existentially precisely through the act of the escape, in order to trick their persecutors ==> survive
[=/= the juggler: Nicolas]

Mohaghegh's proposal: *to lie our way into the lie*

-how and where is my unreal located in my work on bestiaries?
past --> forsaken ancients
outside --> time of disappearance

seduction: immersion in style


our guardian: the thief

(learning from Mohaghegh and Cinderella to be/operate for each other) between:
orchestrator (influence, innovation, experimentation --> laboratory)
partner (equivalence, benefit, reciprocity --> alliance)
slave (captivity, labor, devotion, service, worship --> bondage)
--or--> l.a.b. stands for: laboratory, alliance, bondage {bondage should be part of every (artistic or knowledge-intensive) practice}

the question/problem of: incompatibility of past and present, there and here

object of event or journey (expedition, venture,)

story of the “archive of...” : collection of savored differences

the unreal is not always imaginative or speculative
it is sometimes:
a drive (suffering, passion,)
a password (encryption)
a device (machine, guide,)
accidental and chosen

the character’s wisdom, impulse, cunning, courage (endangerment), innocence (purity), violence (rage, atrocity)

intelligence: diabolical perception

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

(to achieve) the perfect secret: a secret that when revealed remains a secret (a riddle, a puzzle ~= monster: confrontation of the raw unnamable)
future liar --> to resurrect (in the form of fable or rumor):
•fake archive (=/= real witness)
•buried forged artifacts in some gamble
•
--> future out of sync (hyperbolic commons) ==> (an aesthetic of) temporal deviation [=/= messianic time of revolution, historical time of modernity, chronological time of capitalism,] --> (the task of) **thinking untimely**:
•forgetting
•erasure
•recreative
(Artaud's vampiric schizophrenic untimeliness...)

(Sina + Mohaghegh's) *existential radicalism*

night: underground of time
where other things can happen
a phenomena where people encounter mercilessly anonymous indifferent impersonal inhuman nature of the universe
(Mohaghegh's work on the renditions of nocturnality)

(carnaval's) multiple forms [prototype after prototype] --> formfullness =/= (deconstruction's) formlessness

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

ordering ==> violence, exclusion, injustice, sacrifice =/= ~=> residue (of ordering --Serres--> its excluded inessential, peripheral, parasitic) *thermal exciter*
•the anthologizing, selecting, and ordering act @Mar[...]

[...]cing account of the complex process of ordering

in a measured rigorous way...

what characterizes the system

development of taxonomic principle
system endowed with a high degree of logical power

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

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

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

salience
(colors, shapes of knots, folds)

the qualitative categories (meant to be named)

(finding) the organizing principles

precisely calibrated
oriented space
(geometrically?)

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

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

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

textual archaeology - evaluates and decrypts, layer by layer

discovering (evidential) mnemonically oriented means of organizing traditional knowledge

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

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

graphical representation, capable of developing further degrees of complexity

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

within (this/a) variable system

“text” as sequences of cords

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


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

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

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

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

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

these all were technical or formal questions so far


memory is a way consistency maintains itself


civil society is afraid of personal recollections and perverse databases, digital collections<[...]

[...]ld + make it deterministic
--✕--> (we must) make information historical (again)*

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

Avital's work has concerned itself [...] with the fact that technology is irremissible. Mary Shelley projected this view of technology with her massive, monumental, commemorative work on the technobody, which was the nameless monster. The problem with (or opening for) technology is that no one is or can stay behind the wheel, finally, and no one is in charge. And the way she has tried to route and circuit the thinking of technology--indeed, in a posthumanist frame--exposes the extent to which it belongs to the domain of testing.

the contiguous neighborhoods of broken experience and rerouted memory

the myths of liveness

[my] problem with television[/news] is that it exists in trauma
-trauma undermines experience and yet acts as its tremendous retainer
*trauma: a memory that one cannot integrate into one's own experience, and as a catastrophic knowledge that one cannot communicate to others

the black-box of talking survival

Robocop: highly complex cyborg (who came equipped with memory traces, superego, id, and--ever displacing the ego--a crypt)

court's frame-by-frame analysis of video --> recording and human memory @Ali

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

which ‘well-defined terms,’ *qualities of persistence*, object repository, and identifier resolvers am i using in ajayeb.net?
the performance of digital objects (and identifiers) (not treated as a simple binary property)
*(to retrieve) human- and machine-readable information*

persistence of cited objects (in ajayeb.net)

[*]persistence: a prediction about an archive's commitment and capacity to provide some specific kind of long-term functionality

which objects in ajayeb.net are:
•strictly unchanging
•subject to correction
•subject to significant update


[Calvert naming strategy]--> an approach: to invent a term (a portmanteau word واژه مرکب از دو واژه) or choose an existing word that is unusual enough (rare, archaic) to make the reader hesitate to jump to a conclusion about its meaning *** [i used a farsi word in english: zolmat, pir, tarof,]
nothing is permanent --> we call some things/objects/identifiers naively nuanced “persistent” or “not persistant”
(important -->) ** of course, it is not a thing that resists change, it is the provider of a thing that resists or, more precisely, controls change **

“reproducible science needs citations” <-- what is my ajayeb relation to this?

(i am modifying some of Calvert's term:)
[*]identifier: an (always breakable) association
[*]actionable identifier: an identifier that can be acted upon b[...]

[...] malakut {ملکوت}. In it are to be found the mystical cities of Jabalqa جابلقا, Jabarsa جابرسا and Hurqalya هورقلیا.


It appears that Sohrevardi was indeed the first to elaborate the ontology of the inter-world, and the theme once introduced was taken up and expanded by all the mystics and gnostics of Islam.



stories:

The action of these Recitals, in fact, takes place in the ‘alame mesal’ [عالم مثال]. In them, the mystic relates the drama of his personal history on the level of a supra-sensible world, the world of the events of the soul, because the writer, in configurating his own symbols, spontaneously discovers the meaning of the symbols of the divine revelations.

We are not concerned with a series of ‘allegories’ but with the secret hierohistory, invisible to the external senses, which unfolds in the world of the malakut, and with which external and fleeting events symbolize.



سهروردی Sohrevardi's noble venture is not an ‘insurrection’ to islam an external and literalist religion, rather view that sees the integral Islam is spiritual, then Sohrevardi lies at the summit of this spirituality and is nourished by it.

crypto-Shiism شیعه

prophetic philosophy

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

Between a scientific treatise, a fable and philosophical discourse, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis imagines a pitch-dark world of an animal living as deep as possible down in the abyss in order to disclose a way of living opposed to the luminous one of the human being.

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

analogy of the cave


man with the x-ray vision

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

nowhere prosperous
ruinous prosperous

accidental intellects (subjects, qualities, quantities,)

light, self, presence, knowledge


One night darkness had settled in sky and a darkness that and held the hand of the brother of non-existence had been catered around the lower world.

After sleep came upon me, disappointment resulted.

I was holding a candle.

has two doors, one to the city and the other one to the desert. I went and closed the door

tailors of divine words

I then saw an eleven-layered pot thrown into the desert with some water in it and in the water were some pebbles around which here were a few animals.

The heavenly spheres were absolutely round and a straight line could not have been [drawn] between them. Those eleven levels were colorless and due to their extreme fineness, what was in them could not be veiled.

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

{Laura Marks}--[her method of description, “affective analysis”: act of describing, what is going on in your body, prior to the[...]

[...]in terms of “I can” ==> self-movement
(intra-action =/= that sensations are freestanding complexes and internally differentiated entities that can be identified and studied “before” the action)
*perception (is an act:) “animating” the data of sensation (?)

the extended body signifies itself through [=/= acts through] the technical mediation

the impersonal and atomizing (commonplace) associations with the notion of disembodiment --> the idea that in online involvement relations are abridged and trivialized, that there is a lack of commitment and risk, and moral engagement is impossible, and so on.

*what would be a situated account of the (lived-)body in CG?

“the ringing of the cell phone that embarrasses us in the middle of a lecture” --> extended body

plasticity and polymorphism of our bodies (online) [Ihde]

programmers working in other programmers’ works (--not imaginative engagement with the other, rather) --through--> interfaces and folds in interpretation {tutorial voices, screen videos, scripts, help files, layers of codes and tools on each other, nested folders on one's own computer, named categories by oneself, horde of text files and renders, etc}--> these are (en-/de-)crypting extended bodies constructed of language
subjectively constructed phenomenon of the communed fold interpreted : the 3D computer programm
(=/= romantic refusal of all mediation)

-what is the nature of the technology involved in CG?

•what is the source of the somatic sense of place, if not the body (since Greeks) and animality (since Deleuze + Guattari), in the case of CG? --?-->{the way a good farmer will pick up soil and feel the dirt in his hands}
(Greek word) ‘soma’ refers to a corpse (in Homer,) not a living body (--> #lived-body)
Neither the living body as an entity nor the Mind as an entity had a name.
for Aristotle, 'thinking’ part of the soul, had an existence from any connection to the body.
“to experience the world is the very nature of body inside out.” (Christian Hubert > John Schumacher)


a community whose members are aware of each others’ passive presence is different forms
(active =/= present)

these are issues of social subject in a technically mediated world

to look at CG embodiment relations:
•fold (Ihde)
•skill (Merleau-Ponty)
•theory of affordance (Gibson)
•intra-action (Barad)
•detour (Latour)

(Merleau-Ponty's) ‘body schema’ : space of the body = 'space of situation,’ orientation towards possible (not only existing) tasks ==> aspects of the external/virtual world
body understood in terms of their ability to enter into one's projects =/= spatial location
[what is the body schema of the hacker in CG? (an external world where there is no near or far.) wha[...]

[...]ous desire
•environmental degradation

}--2--> the idea that signs actually achieve their aims (through mortise and framing work, cropping, reification, interpellation, cooption, the gaze, face-ism, individuation) --> [Althusser's] interpellation: process by which we are called or hailed into subjecthood through practices imposed onto us from outside interests, subjects are created through material practices (going to church and kneeling down to pray precedes my subjecthood as a spiritual person)
•recruitment advertisement: interpellative genre par excellence ~ through the practice of response we enter into the predefined parameters of relation with the organization {Microsoft's “we want you!” --> 1: act of defining the subject: one who is special, unique, an individual among the masses. 2: collective pronoun: “we” serves to close the subject and the organization within a circuit of common purpose. 3: what is missing: a concrete visualization of working life in the organization, an absence which allows the reader to project his/her own fantasy onto space : ‘infantilize the organization ==> empower the subject’ --represent--> an imaginary relationship =/= real conditions of our existence}

}--✕--> (Campbell) ****images are ontologically cryptic**** : we conceive images to be both agentic & passive, residing in and affecting many spheres simultaneously
•image: visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse, bodies, figurality, exist within a distinctive socio-legal environment --> **multiple ontologies [Ihde's multistable] move images beyond simple categories of analysis (<-- that is why i am still a visual artist, @Pierre)
***images are extra-organizational entities*** (they are designed by organization but become) *quixotic* and *uncontrollable*
*fable of complex: there is something about the image that is beyond analytic investigation (--Mitchell--> every image theorist seems to find some residue (surplus value) that goes beyond communication, signification, persuassion (there is an extra in images) --> images are complex {
1. they are constantly mutating in meaning and significance
2. they cross aesthetic borders and are not confinable to a particular domain (image = aesthetic + political + social)
3. they act on all domains recursively --impossible--> how the aesthetic life of images affects the political life of images }--Mitchell--> *image as species* (co-evolutionary entities, quasi life-form depend on a host organism) ==>
◦something not fully under human control
◦spread through the host organicism
◦some die some become pandemic


aesthetic --affect--> politic --affect--> aesthetic --affect--> politic


#workshop make an ad for apass


advertising trend
1. information: (from) traditional forms of print & television --to--> intensification and hybridization in obliqu[...]