[...]ing < Haraway)
(=/= some kind of enemy that you never do)


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


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


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


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


metaphors that are also real places
figurings that are also (always unequally) lived in the flesh


to think “contact zone” instead of “binary shape”
ways of living and technologies, ways of doing the world forcibly brought together in relations of serious inequality, but which do not take the simple shape of dominator and dominated


*“abstractions are precious and they take a huge amount of work to know how to build them well”*

(?how do i know when in working with ajayeb) sometimes you are required (at the same time!):
•to be dead lited literal
•to be precise
•to be analytically good
•to be unforgivingly technically right
•to be flaming imaginative
•


*breakdown*: where the normalizing fails ==> something else emerges


*every collective needs people who feel:
•(a grace given to you by the structure of your cells, you don't know where it comes from:) “root sense that the world is not dead” --> a sense that things are moving and alive and future-full
•its people who feel despair (...emphasize the futurelessness of it all)

*!!!--> we (also) need sensibilities that are angrey at each other

(aligned with Haraway) my position has been that: we don't choose our sensibilities, we wake up and figure out what they are


(Haraway take on the ways we) may enginner as a species now (tech, syntax, etc.)


to refuse the story of the apocalypse + (still) recogniz[...]

[...] --> metaphors of archive, information-intense ways of thinking about life on earth

*“demonstration” coined by science

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

(with Scout Calvert) the ways the digital apparatuses are working, and the kinds of tensions and creativities between the cyber infrastructures and the other kinds informational management discourses displace other book discourses *** --> categories explode in library practice
[Calvert donig brilliant discourse analysis of library sciences --> has direct impact on practices of reading#, different kinds of knowers]
techno-biblio-capital: techno-capital and library practices embedded in each other -->{ [*]technology: assemblages of people, computers, software, discourses, techniques and workarounds that make them function; [*]capital: a social arrangement in which buyers of labor power are entitled to profits and the sellers of labor power to wages and all the effects entailed in that arrangement; [*]techno-capital: techniques, discourse and technologies used to naturalize and derive capital from information and information technologies}
*curiosity = a small and local kind of *freedom[= agency within constrain ==enabling==> skillful meanings], curiosity resists control and has the power to defeat one's favourite self-certainties, can also be commodified for consumer culture specializing in providing private pleasure,
techno-capital objectivism: (neutrality of) collection developemnt and format choices --> power-sensitive judgments
“we will engineer ourselves out of that” --> naive technological optimism; *the technological question is cruicial to questions of power and knowledge*
-library science tends to position library as power-neutral spaces
-(Foucault: resistence to power is always present)
“freedom to” is always disciplinary (because there is always a particular subject enjoying that) [citizen of liberal democracy who exercises the freedom of representative government, so much as a consumer who exercises freedom of choice of commodities]
patrons as constituent مولفه (==> new knowledge + themselves as knowers) =/= seamless information consumer discursively produced as an unmarked singular independent self-contained stable universal white male heteronormative technophilic subject [<-- this donesn't realy exisit as a person, rather as discoursive productions]
(now) our electronic recreation is work: our every click is surveilled, generating data about our desires and curiosities that feeds back into our formation as techno-capital subjects (@Sven's enthusiasm with social media--how can Sven has a real chance of producing resistance knowledge?) --> this is not freedom! (-an account of freedom for one entails reciprocal unfreedom for others) --> mixtures of work and play in this new economy, (Calvert > Bateson) the meta-communicative nature of *play[= strict rules with genuine freedom, the dual essence of pla[...]

[...]on is the whispered word death


(in Iran we have) the problem of speechlessness (~->? Mehdi and Kourosh's talkativeness) ~= a state without agency --> unable to push back at things that impress upon them

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

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


festidious sense of accuracy


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

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

(the poem) interprets a wordless, creaturely presence

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

fusing impressions synesthetically in a startling phrase
peeling scales provoke simile

...mind moving swiftly from observation to reverie

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


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


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

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

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

*detail ==> subjectivity* : we are brought into intimate proximity to the slipstream of (her) sensations --> *subjectivity* is made of such detail (of all the ways in which the world impresses itself upon us --> knowing through our scaffoldings of concerns, the to[...]

[...] in the idea of] “a phenomenology that is objective*

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

with Jassem and Mia

Norway ~= (a breakable) illusion --> that somebody is living it
green competition and technopositivist hubris

question of topology (in dream)
(topology: those qualities that remain invariant after transformation --> persistent forms)

fantastic peasant

a piece of hanging cloth that suggests horrors to receptacle receiving eyes


•landscape --> sounds
•poems
•divisions in Norway (<== second world war)
•sami cultural disappearance
◦domestic violence
◦racism
◦refugee geopolitics
•seagull, fish, salmon farming
•interviews
•doom --> delirium, murder, hallucination, whispering,
•ruin (of signs)
•entropy (=/=? emergence)
•

*affliction landscapes* --> Leid: existence thriving in the wound --> anticipation of oblivion

doom, ruin, entropy --> udyr (in norwegian u-: non- or bad, dyr: animal) bad or corrupted animal, nonanimal, monster, (rootless existence)

udyr (gate keepers creepers) <--?--> div (defeated)



--performance--
rotating styles of: folkloric ballads, existential meditation, doomsday rant, elegiac oration, children lullabies --into--> a singular blast of an account of a devastated space --mobilizing--> legend, omen, song, myth, fairy tale, mutated war cry
[these potent signs are sneaking in the work “stranger within,” it is not just a historical dreamscape]
-the masked actors on stage have taken a venom (becoming faceless engravers) to cross into the next level of temporal experience --> ???
-muted rage and ecstasy indeterminacy positioned as creeping towards the midnight of moving & no longer moving... (as human? --> conflicting ways of being human; to acknowledge human & violence;)


--travel--
visiting an alchemy of domestic proclamations (homes) with its own lethal consortiums of drives (conversations); visiting sites of pure participation, the most savage, the most modern, creating a respond characterized as both ultra-alertness and insomnia of anticipation (acts by which the future can be nailed down) ==> becoming a *faceless engraver* (to remain fugitive and errant --> a course of action supposing a discontinuity that must be overcome in order to define a trajectory)
(Jassem and Mia are capable of being) bodies fully engaged in perspectival communication and battles of will, provided with affect and capacities, capable of knowing different things, types of relations they entered into =/=? poltergeist



--research--

trap <--> omen
lava <--> ice

•unstable space
•process ~= performance ~= me[...]

[...]

(Yurchak's) *frozen present* = the time of nostalgia
}<== late socialist culture itself lived in a nostalgic mode, at a certain ironic, knowing distance from what it was supposed to be according to the memories of the heroic 40s-50s and the remnants of socialist propaganda --> *a familiar ironic mode of experiencing history vicariously* (in a way that is experienced in the imagination through the actions of another person)


(looking at televisual nostalgia -->) late socialism ==> an affect & epistemology that can only access the “authentic” through contradiction ambivalence self-reflective irony
<--Holdsworth-- expression of present anxieties about history and memory in general

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

___[notes Tehran 2023]___

semiotics: study of the differnce between “what you say ~/= what they understand”

(my fundamentals:)
*sharing =/= communicating*


آشپز دیو سپید
it is said that the White Div had a cook --> exploring the cosmology of Div (in Shahnameh) with food, hunting for eating, bestiary, cooking technology, taste
(inspired by anime JYfdfDU9JUY)
#short story: narrartor describes the story after the defeat of the White Div (Div-e Sefid) by Rostam. “rather than worring about the kingsmen X, he was more interested in what is for dinner...”. there is another being. a baby hayula (non-formity)... what other beings Div hunts for meat? (list, bestiary) “he would think about the next hunt X and get excited about the kabab of X...”  “immediately asked for more”

dungeons and dragons --> a non-cartographic space, there are no maps and one only learns by dying many times
dungeon has nothing to do with the medieval prison, it is a deterritorialized habitat, defined precisely by not having a map (or guide) --> are we in a dungeon?

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

journalism: professional discursive pursuit (of truth, of propaganda, etc.)
=/= journalism: proximity to the event + the risks that that entails

(Ghazzi's notion of) *affective proximity* : (a mode of consideration, a way) to make sense of local media practitioners’ reporting and witnessing of suffering in their country
--> a media practitioner =/= the event they are representing and participating in
affective proximity : what locals navigate to reconcile their emotional and embodied entanglement within events in their country =/= discursive

*emotional labour* of media practices of local reporters and witnesses

what the word “revolution” mediates (in Syria, Iran, etc.) [~/?= civil war]
1. an indication of commitment to a desired goal
2. an identity marker based on a past-oriented lament over what was sought but not achieved

study of affect and emotion in global news --(contextualized withi[...]

[...]ority, it sent/banished the subject to the land of the mediated, ‘from now on you are coming from mediation.’ (Where the subject comes from? it comes from the mediation.) --> use me --> industrialize with me --> technologize with me --> stone-tech are 1.5 million years earlier than fire-tech --> with stone you can't reach the sky but by controlling combustion you can go up ==> alienation as the touchstone of humankind --> then comes the “reflective consciousness” of humankind --> and later the invention of the very strange object: the mirror [---> go to amazon#2DifficultForests] ==> a change in the “structure of existence” --> then the idea of “selftranscendence” by monotheist religions --> adventures of power and ideology --> then a very bad idea called “history” was introduced---an active, psychological force that separates humankind from the rest of nature because of its disregard for the deep connections to the past.[Shepard 2004] --- Lévi-Strauss points out, historical thought is analytical and concerned with continuity and “closing gaps and dissolving differences” to the point that it “transcends original discontinuity.”)
[in east mirror was never used as mean to self reflect, rather it was weaponized agains evil, although this evil was female and men used mirror to defeat it. unlike the western thought since the greeks in the Narcissus story where mirror is the foundation of self-absorbance and knowledge and madness, the easterns since they did not posses the same brand of selfhood they found mirror strange and uttelized it in curious ways, another optical problem ---> go to mirror and the laughing snake - mar-e ghahghahezan, img]
...through the speaking fire, events “on earth” were finished except for a final judgment by fire --> invention of sin, spiritual existence : selftranscendence. anthropoce separating themselves from earth and its processes
-‘essence’, ‘appearance’, and ‘change’ became sources of anxiety
-other forms of life are now irrelevant to humans
-from now on “you cannot be two things, in two places, or in two times, at once.” , no more overlapping identity ==> alienation from (the domains of) nonhuman life
-the “Persian” new mind, (intanced by fire,) divided the world into material creation and infinite spirit that would shape the philosophy of the civilized world. (Shepard 2004)
(-in my amazon book i am pointing out: Esthetic distancing also made possible the landscape arts and connoisseurship and commercialization as scenery painting, tourism, and recreation. To the credit of the Greeks, they resisted converting the landscape into scenery and wilderness into an aesthetic experience.)

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

“After you die, others live.” (Sina)

old world's arboreal simians, monkeys

Anthropos

cultures of Pleistocene
-Pleistocene was the time[...]

[...] Atash
•Fire and the Transcendental Subject
•Zolmat and the Appropriation of the Elsewhere
•Fire and Different Internals of Being
•Black-Box and other Human Extensions



genealogy of a worship (fire)
how can one pray ‘to’ animals? (~ prey upon them)
how can one pray ‘to’ elements?

amenity (of stone) (=/= enmity of fire)



*trial by fire, fire as judge
(test, respond to whether or not something is true or false)
iranian frost, is not the same as ice---ice was still the object of fascination. transforming fire into mosque---atash masjed shod. ‘dudeman’ coming from ‘dud,’ smoke as your ancestery. a telling-smoke was your inheritence, your grandpa. same in Latin: ‘focus’ means both fire-place and ancestral
ether --> azar --> atash
fire = (institutional?)-order ~ justice = law =/= nondialectic
the order of fire =/= agonism [positivly channeled disagreement]
the order of fire is a materialist conception of history, that fire eventually purifies and leave no reason but the reason of harmonious ~= consensus, the ubiquitous Übereinstimmung of fire
athletisism of Shahnameh and fire-trial (contest oriented toward victory of defeat; transcendence, truth, and growth are generated from the outcome of the contest;) is exactly the cancelation of an agonistic notion of defeat (in Shahnameh: dishonor = defeat --> the defeated = the monster, the ‘Div’)
‘agon’ in Latin literaly means arena of competition, the scene of contest--meydan? what would be (the instrumental) relation to the mode of destruction in Shahnameh's kind of fire?


Indo-Iranian register of fire worship (around 1500 BC)
-fire burns (ever) upwards
(Sadeh festival, Shahnameh, Iran)
-Sadeh: fire-related festivals celebrated throughout Greater Iran and date back to when Zoroastrianism was still the predominant religion of the region. (Wikipedia)


Lindsey Collins [on intersection of illness and landscape]
wilderness therapy (in cancer activism)
a feminist and still-growing therapeutic model, slow wilderness, in which risk is made manageable and contained, and fast and risky aesthetics, coded as masculine, are traded for ecofeminist tropes of mutuality, nurturing, and femininity
-recovery climbers actively make permeable bodies ==> ecologies

“recovery climbs = embodied practices of resilience + interrelation” =/= survivorship narrative

(for Woolf) illness: emergence of new landscape (you discover “wastes and deserts” and “obdurate oaks,” more so than a mere subtraction from or attenuation of life)



fire's dictatorship in Siyavash story, a fire's aspect as instituted social order

*trial by fire
trial by mountain [~= rock] (slow wilderness) -- suffering and healing in difficu[...]

[...] [“...pay attention to your ‘place’ in] the bedrock I am carrying you on.”

The div Akvan, coming from Akoman and Aka Manah, in Avestan relates more or less to “noxious thinking.” Divs are old and skillful ancient biotic entities with disagreeable characteristics. Their definition is yet open and subject to interpretation. But always disobedient to the sovereign’s project and abyssal in nature, divs promoted another kind of order, other than the old Gods. Their project was always to disillusionize the ideas of divine nondestruction and nontechnological purity. They are on the side of destruction, technology and death. When Rostam captures the great White-Div, Div-e Sepid,[25] a nasty metamorphosical sentient master in “unsympathetic magic” and an expert in the crafts of necromancy [ارتباط با مردگان —> he works with form, apparition and spirit, “dead bodies,” his knowledge-cosmos includes textures of mineral assemblage and recrystallization,[26]] his blood is eventually instrumentalized in bringing back the lost eye-sights and unearthing the captured ones.

The athleticism of Shahnameh doesn’t allow Ferdowsi to have another take on the order of div. The poem will not permit chaos.[27] In Shahnameh, divs are the defeated ones. Ferdowsi’s contest-oriented poetic site is towards the defeat of victory of defeat. For him, transcendence, truth, and growth are generated from the outcome of the scene of contest.[28] He locks “dishonor” indefinitely to “defeat.” The defeated-ones become inescapably monsters, divs. So, upon a Ferdowsian landscape of heroism and agon, the way I am trying to archaeologically (re)locate the being of div on Earth and put him in relationality to the lithic techniques of geo-poiesis, is a way for me to ask: how Ferdowsi is disarticulating div’s bodies to rearticulate other bodies? The humanoid Middle-Ages Persian body, the stoned, the fleshy mineral, the decaying ones, the creaturely, and so on. How can we reversely remetaphorize his tropes? How can we arrive at the stone? How can we unfinish the (death)sentence div is uttered with, and pre-epically recompose him in order to syntactically arrive at his kinship? OK. We are testing questions of nonhuman alterity at Ferdowsi.

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

“the mind needs wild animals”
Meloy

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

[*]euphemism: roads that are too civilized

Jesuit padre-historian
Je suis padre (wanna-be-father) historians
(18th century) calling the deserts of Baja California “destitute” without asking the natices if they were misreable
*for many natives in the Jesuit era, christianity was not a means by to give order to mystery (or give order to misery)* it was food. [...] another kind of appetite could lead [...]

[...] shadow within the object --> history of science: the solid always envelopes something that can be rendered explicit***

radical negation of interior shadows

pyramid is itself fire, sun passes through it


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

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

without shadow ~= without secret

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

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

the birth of beauty never stops
.
.the eternal geometer

(mathematical science's) sudden fits

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

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


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

---->[the story of writing]
within the artist world [artist as a creative being who inscribe on the world and in the world] (including apass) “writing” is internalized as the ‘bad object’
always considered secondary, excremental مدفوعى, the sign of something lacking: if you were in the real space of action, of being, you wouldn't need to write
-(for artists) writing distressed as a[...]

[...]word can be spoken
...but a new crisis make it start over again
-the sacred is formed by (this) catastrophic and repetitive dynamic

ruse (kalak کلک, che kalake khubi چه کلک خوبی): the “laws” of nature a projection of a (usually political) constitution on the world; to give a status of a natural necessity to arbitrary power
ruse ~ reason---the dominance of the here and now

no one is better endowed by nature for trickery than a Greek. These masters invented dichotomy, separation, and partition. ... They invented the theory of the specificity of various realms (~ cosmology?)

their divisions and clarifications ==> “we today have the weak and awkward fancy to read the world as polysemic and out of sync”, polytomy {from Greek: πολυ-, poly-, “many” and σῆμα, sêma, “sign” ==> multiple semes or sememes and thus multiple senses. ---(soft/hard) polysemous ontologies---(polytomy =/= homonymy اشتراک لفظی ,یک لفظ =/= synonymy یک معنی‌)}  ~--> the awareness of any metabasis to another genre, “discrete” (--> 3D apps today)

(Greek) mathematic =/= illusionist
“if there is a separate field in which no one can keep cards up their sleeves without being resoundingly defeated, it is definitely mathematics.” (Serres)

Greeks theory of segments in the representation of distinct worlds *** (when one uses greek technologies today, which worlds are rendered distinct?)
mathematics, myth, medicine, theory of exchange, ...

Serres's field trip

(Lucretius and our answer to the) what is a living thing?
•! a thing in equilibrium and disequilibrium, a flow, a vortex, heat, etc
•atomist physics




what ‘abundance’ means for Juan?
For me? for Sa'di in golestan...?
abundance is when it seems the artist hasn't put limitations on the flow of signs and meanings.
#my basic methods(?): abundancies, adjacencies,
~-/?--> simplest complex, simplex (concern of comparative topology) ~= the stable network of compositions

my ajayeb hypertext, what is there the specific ‘law of putting together letters’ ([and atoms?] to produce a text)? That means the question of Greekness and syntax technology, and my reworking articulated
•alphabetical proto cloud (Serres) --?--> without law, random
•what are the laws of ‘good combination’ that i am reworking or resisting or acquiring or answering to, in my ajayeb hypertext? (how composition is reproduced?)
--> (the law enunciates [تلفظ کردن ,مژده دادن] the federated,) * the law repeats the fact =/= the ‘things’ of ajayeb are (still) in the process of being formed (--> the morality of reading that i am working on)
(in the facts of the law there is no space between things and language is reduced to zero)
-language and things are bor[...]

[...]own), the joker (figure of the always problematic, with its speculative sense for potent tie between meaning and bodies), the cheerleader (porpoising socially deviant, corrupting forerunner), the sleep-walker (moving in anachronistic temporality, in non-explicit non-intentional acting), the eros (weaker than the problem it tries to solve), the queer (optically dense and less elegant kind of corporality in our encounters), the rabbit-chaser (detouring off the ontological anxiety of humanity's enigmatic destination)]



cyclopean protocols of extremity --> narrowest vision (immensified)
the cyclopean organ (of doing/thinking) ==> ‘oracle = explosive device’
|
--> wisdom + rage
--> boundless confined
--> precision + enormity
--> nature + technology
--> betrayal + devotion
|
....three brothers سه برادر
----[they were said to have primordial understanding, having monitored the building of creation itself--yet this brings no consolation تسلى, no spiritual composure ارامش, only chronic infuriation, such that they remain at once eternal and impatient]
----[they are gargantuan, immortal, and among the rarest exceptions to be released from the underworld after the great defeat of the chthonic orders, and yet brought back to the surface to dwell among/away from men and the new gods in hard labor on a faraway island, discharged from one hell only to find another imprisonment]
----[they alone can swing the hammers that form mountains, bedrock, ocean floors, tectonic plates, seisamic, yet there is such insane detail even within their most jagged strokes, a punishing symbiosis of the minuscule and the colossal]
----[they are the initial inventors of the earth's wild proportions, yet now are condemned to serve as apprentices to a lesser artisan-metallurgist god interested only in functional architecture and instrumentalized objects]
----[they are traitors to the new line of anthropomorphic gods, having fought against their false ascent, and thus still fiercely loyal to the old titanic codes, even in their captivity and forced collusion, forever scarred by the robbery perpetrated against the older deities, able to picture the drainage ditches into which the others are now outcast, such that each episode of mastication and uproar is hurled like a psychic bomb intended to free this discarded confederation]

isolationism + monumentality

(teratological formations in modernity)

inner contemplation / evacuation

attunement to the nothing
athleticism of stillness

[interiority (feels the need to?) stretch out into exteriority:] (to transfer) personal self-contained oblivion --onto--> universal plane

(Setareh's event:) one part shadow, one part mist, one part smoke and mirrors *.*.*.

...one part strategic essentialism, one part de[...]

[...]ep's liver) spattered upon a wall's surface
-a discipline involved less with knowing than with watching



The Egyptian Book of the Dead
philosophy of night, dusk, shadow

egyptian night-deities
-with astounding narrative-theoretical flexibility
-some slither, hunch, fly, or remain seated
-not residing on Olympian heights but rather in the subterranean below
star-covered nude woman
cow arching over the earth
--> night does rule from transcendent distances but rather envelops (or swallows) whole the existent into its gut (or uterus) [<-- digestion?]
[metaphysics:] (away from) patriarchal gaze --into--> maternal stomach

Khonsu
•bloodthirsty (eating the organs of royal opponents)
•merciful --> [its creative epithets:] traveler, embracer, pathfinder, defender, “He Who Lives on Hearts”
one who resembles his own waning moon

Nephthys
tied to the night of the soul's traversal
sepulchral
(endow pharaohs) with the vision for “that which is hidden by moonlight”

Apep =/= Ra (the light-god)
giant sea-snake said to lurk again in the primordial gloom
evil lizard, *world encircler*
•defeating Apep: basematerial outputs (spit) --to--> elemental properties (fire) --to--> man-made weaponries (lance, knife) --to--> fetishistic physiologies (the left foot) --to--> sympathetic magic (tearing apart of effigies


(sectarian logic?)
desire for clear reactional materiality [=/= sadistic or paranoiac serial killings]

teratological and semi-demonological turn
interjecting thingness, fiendishness, and monstrosity into our midst

night: indefinite definite ~=> nihilistic force of closure

(from) orthodoxy --to--> dramaturgy


(Mohaghegh's theory of) fanatical sovereignty in pagan thought --> ultimaultimate keeping & violation of the law ~= obsessive form & apocalyptic formlessness
(reconciling) *the toxic dialectics of presence & absence* behind every theo-political order : gods walk among us in immanent ambush, hiding in night's open view (of many faces, masks, tongues, robes, tastes, proportions, and gestures), adopt infinite visages, apparels, pseudonyms, and dialects [=/= monochrome trappings of daily identity]


Ahriman =/= fire-god
omnimalevolent side
first destructive spirit
twins of the primeval choice
==> crises of perception
dwelling in non-being
shape-stealer
self-cutting (cooking of his own paranormal tissue)

earthly creation = ruse, net, and temporary prison (a decorative window-dressing to lure the false god away)

a sunless place

mortal transactions (of civilizational, philosophical, religious, and moral trials)


night-raid[...]

[...] politics)


the social =? “our” version of the transcendent/immanent metaphysical
how many dimensions is “our” metaphysical composed of (in Tehran)?


(Durkheim starts:) religion = an engagement with a vital animating principle, “a kind of anonymous and impersonal force [...] none possesses it entirely and all share in it”
-spirits, demons, jinns, gods of every rank are the *concrete forms* that capture this energy, this *potentiality*
(later Durkheim reduces this remarkable promising formulation in his signiture from the metaphysical: “the moral authority of society”, ‘religion ==> solidarity انسجام’ }=/= innumerable anthropologists have shown how religion does not necessarily “reawaken solidarity”)

(instead of “the social” lets get interested in more than one dimension of life, lets think, with Singh and Deleuze, of) *vast continuum of human and nonhuman life*


“Baba, I have been troubled for years. What can I do to please my ancestral spirits?”


Beyzai analyzes deities and myths in Iran, negating any potential for spiriual movement between rival groups, even in what is clearly *a form of religious life moving across*
Beyzai preoccupation with defeat doesn't allow him to attend to ‘forms of religious life moving across’
•bottom-up thesis of oppositional negation and from its “top-down” opposite
=/= the idea of spiritual conversation
imitation of [upper caste,,,] values
[***]the fatality of these ideas of negation and of imitation is that they obscure the possibility of a spiritual inheritence that may be shared and contested in ways that create the possibility of a *cohabited future between neighbors and rivals* (Singh)

yes yes the history might be made through bloody contradictions, and yet, we cannot be as Magi, waiting for the big drama to unfold --(we can do better)--> a signature capacity of ethnographic attentiveness in an affirmative lineage of thought --(not to deny contradiction)--> to be able to sense **varying intensities of conflict and cohabitation**
(play and war may both be latent in the give and take of everyday life, and the difference may not always be clear-cut)

نیرومندی و کثرت اهالی و تعارضات کشمکش و جماع
(how?) (to be able to) sense varying intensities [کیفیتی با شدت و سختی و حجم ~= انقباض ,در هم کشیدگی + شتافتن ,گرفته شدن + فراهم آمدن ,گرفتگی ,ترنجیدگی] of conflict and cohabitation[: my sister thinks of this term as family in small scale]
--> differential [داراى ضريب متغير، افتراقی، تشخیص دهنده the result of differentiation =/= different تمایز] intensities


bawdy مستهجن

intimate insults ==> accumulate deadly force

s[...]

[...]e represented + how citizenry is enforced and embodied (at the ground level)

Philippines: from Marcos dictatorship --to--> neoliberalism: privatized, deregulated, commercialized, marketized public services

•Crane using psychoanalytical tropes --> horror = everyday terror
[*]horror: excessive communication
•Creed using trope of monstrous-feminine --> horror = gestalten deeds in adjection and castration
•Lim --> *horror = temporal critique* {fantastic local horror =/= historical time, supernaturalism, occult modes of thinking encoded in fantastic narratives}
[Bergson > Lim > Tolentino:] horror --> heterogeneous temporality, heteroglossia: multiple tongues, to disengage in certain (nation) formations

horrific real
translation of historical terror in filmic horror

historical real + filmic mobilization --render--> real as porous & artificial

horror --Tolentino--> transhistorical (transgressional) continuity of the project of desire & pleasure
--> masochistic viewing experience + trajectory of critique

(during Marcos order in Philippines -->) horror genre talks about the popular dialectics of the known & unknown, moral & immoral, inclusion & exclusion, defeat & triumph, struggle & redemption, normal & abnormal, reality & alternative realities, religious & secular
•horror provides a cultural trope for the imagination of the nation

anxious state in horror films --represent--> anxious state in ... (nation-formation, citizenship, etc.) --> irony: (the anxious state) it is not what it is
----> [*]viewing: a sadomasochistic act [you know it is frightful (or garbage) yet enjoy viewing (in KHM we called it hate-watching)] --> pervers pleasure ==> individual and social categories to remain constantly in a flux

intensification of anxiety ~=> carnavalesque moment of drawing pleasure

(in the film) history of a chosen local
logic of absence --> prohibitive history of violence + excess
ritual of horrific foregrounding

scene + coherence of meaning
*horror is performative : it needs to be restaged in order to be evocative of meaning*

sexualization of women integral to the genre of horror [aimed at its male audience, similar to Charmed]:
•sexy female leading role (in love triangle)
•man --> representing evil and underworld
•man --> representing true love (engaged in a battle for love + choice of the young woman, sexualized in the male contest)
•female viacera sucker --> female creatures need to show hidden skin [popular sex-oriented star --to--> female monstrous figure --allow--> display of prohibited body parts + heteronormative desire]

(female star rendered both strong and weak)
1. exposing and defying the horror figure (first)
2. embodying the horrific abject subject (se[...]

[...]equencing of the present
==> making it appear that science describes nature --> social power

(at the end you see only those actants who are strong enough, and shaped in the right way, to impact)

“[...] the loosest classification of work is accorded to those with the most power and discretion, who are able to set their own terms.” Bowker 1996

lingua franca of the medical insurance companies


actor network theory: looking in detail at the role of (relatively) black-boxed hybrids [what scientists are actually manufacturing] in creating the discourse of pure science (as endpoint)

science's objective account of natural order:
•trials of strength
•enrolling of allies
•cascades of inscriptions
•operation of immutable mobiles
--> development of standards

‘Janus face’ of science
[Janus, in ancient Roman is the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, and endings. a god of transitions. having two faces, he looks to the future and to the past. (Greeks had no equivalent to Janus.)]

when your work (artistic/scientific) can be seen as a direct translation of the quest for Iranian/French honor after defeat in the battlefield --> the actors don't see what is excluded: they construct a world in which that exclusion could occur

(Latour --> according to American pragmatist strongholds:) reality = 'that which resists’

common language ~= standard language
(we can't talk about the commons without sorting out our understanding of our standard-saturated world)


(my hypertext is not data-driven [= a system with focus on the acquisition, management, processing, and presentation of ‘atomic-level’ data] nor a process-driven (or process-sensitive system, for example delivering a care), what is it then?) (also not systematically storing [my] “knowledge” for later access, storage of information in such long-term memory, no no no)
-is it a support for my various tasks and practices outside the computer? --> excess-driven storytellings =/= minimum data set
-a non-data-driven systems in this society are named secretive and mysterious in the name of transparency
#in a way i am building an adequate mode of encounter with the “Iranian scientist”

they draw from their secret[s]

a technical issue (for example about how to code process) is also a an organizational theory

social embeddedness of scientific truth

(authors of ajayeb approached nature not in a way to sketch the boundaries of a discrete animal event, therefore, a unit of analysis, (which is very natural at 21st century;) rather an infrastructure itself in flux, providing an unnatural hierarchy)--> this is my rhetorical reading of ajayeb

as long as you/God pays attention to them, they w[...]

[...] a model of artist is like Perseus in medusa myth

Lacan's imaginary order: a dual relationship (symmetric & immediate opposite) between consciousness and its other (in the play of reflection in the mirror)

ego: imaginary construct by the capture of the image (in the mirror)
see yourself ==> you are petrified ~ *arrest*
...~->? scopic drive

(Lacan on) evil eye --> arrest movement and literally kill life

(psychological concept of) sature (to join two lips of a wound): pseudo-identification of an initial moment of seeing and a terminal moment of arrest --Owens--> *medusa effect*: imaginary identification of the seer and seen (immediacy, capture, stereotype)

Lacan placing the moment of arrest prior to the moment of seeing --> what happens when we look at a picture : first an arrested gesture (a picture) then the act of seeing (completing the picture)

[*]to pose: to present onself to the gaze of the other as if one were already frozen (immobilized, suspended, a picture), **mimicing the immobilizing power of the gaze** --Owens--> pose forces the gaze to surrender
***to pose = to pose a threat*** ~ apotrope

artist reflects the stereotype back on its self --> to defeat an apotrope with an apotrope
is Kruger different than politically motivated artists (consciousness-raising)?
--Owens--> Kruger stages the techniques of stereotype (that interpolate her/him as subjects)
-is the viewer led or allowed to reject her work's address? ==?==> gesture of refusal --or?-- mobilization of the spectator


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

Archer (philosopher of wardrobes, patterns and textility) on Owens's medusa effect ~~✕--> Calderwood's drawings *messy material semiotic* (figures that forcefully demand one's attention) --> queer pleasure to be caught in their dense but finely rendered patterns
-following the phallic loops & yonic openings (that obscure any semblance of a singular true body)

apotropaic stockings
جوراب زنانه بلاگردان

Kruger & Calderwood --Archer--> searing critique of gender identity and the ways that gendered stereotypes capture the body within a tight weave of politics and ideology

[*]medusa effect: a critical gesture located when the swipe of Perseus's sword just reaches the Gorgon's perfectly posed neck ==possibility==> infinite outcomes
-a transitory but potent act of resistance (lies between identify and difference)

Kruger's feminist-inflected pronoun --> refigure the personal pronoun's normal operative function ==> viewers dislodge themselves from the law of the letter ==expose==> language of gendered oppression's limits

find a way of articulating oneself beyond pronoun's strict logics (--> alternative subject position) =/= Calderwood --> *contingency of seeing* : “manipulat[...]