[...]l envelope that saves a heart full of “list of specifications”...)
the visit will be to the ‘European Committee for Standardization’ (CEN, French: Comité Européen de Normalization), one of the EU fostered nonprofit public institutions of the cutting-edge development regarding ambitious notion of ‘data,’ ‘systematic knowledge,’ and ‘specifications’. the excursion will be oriented towards a meeting between the participants of advanced performance and scenography studies and the representatives of CEN, and encourages a run between the ontological demands of international economy and contemporary art, their disastrous split, and where their formations meet and intersect.
KEYWORDS: cosmology, experimentation, existence, specification, future, knowledge, irrationality, permanence and substance, technological acts--of naming, a path of becoming--on the grid of technological dominion, suspicious partnership of “advanced democracies” and “high technology"--what allows their mutuality?, standard-testing--which sectors of existence it is traversing?, pre-technological traces of cognitive normalization, the very little difference between specification and “the real thing,” THE origin of the demand for rigorous specification, migration of questions out of the areas of instrumental fitness, human relation to the surrounding world, impoverished zoologies--under techno-epistemo-anthropocentric values, squeezing prehistoric modes of weakening subjectival normativity--a field that today gets heavily technologized,
...................................
to bring our needs and lures towards each other
bring my lure to the table (that thing which i can't stop following)
who/what are you pregnant with?
(that is what you are proposing)
(that is to play with the ‘histories of body and mind’ [Haraway] you inherit --> for me is to play with the pre-subjective singularities)
[inheritance is of great importance for our research. it is about the passing of obligations from something ghost-like. i am sure we have other modes of response available to us other than how Hamlet takes in what is inherited to him, other ways of responding to the ghostly beings that talk to us from death. (inheritance ~= inhabiting spirit [they cannot be possess as a piece of property], reading inflaming flashes of remote spirits [--> is this hear from one another looks like? is technology placed at the source of this reflection?--technology itself answers the call--(Avital)]) could we work with Ophelia's kind of #Wortsalad instead? (Salad-e Kalame, khoresht-e kalame; same thing happens to Shirin of in Khosro Shirin, but unlike Shakespeare, Nezami allows another poetic drift;) Heidegger's “die Sprache spricht” : language is monologue --?--> schizophrenia and schizophrenic discourse --?--> structure of speaking]
[speaking asserts a certain temporal priority which we must undermine]
-listening *before* s[...]
(1)[...notes/midday review.txt]%0.2[...]rts a certain temporal priority which we must undermine]
-listening *before* speaking
-“We hear language speaking” (Heidegger); a non-organic speaking; language is not equipped with organs of speech? (Avital)
serious joking / joking seriousness [Haraway]
joke/jest/gesture
a space of play --> where ideas come in to being
(story of ‘or’. is it where the original joker came? using or instead of and)
(there is no ‘or’ in nature!? what are the earlier forms of or that we can trace in cave paintings or tool makings?)
**if you don't take my idea seriously i will be utterly incomprehensible**
crafts-person for the building of lures of propositions --> ‘abstractions’
(abstraction is fragile and can hold worlds together)
where Europe comes from? (woher kommst du? i am born in, i am born in, ...)
what animates us rather than what civilizes us
/>
(to Shabnam:) to ‘mourn with’ rather than ‘mourn about’
(-about =/= -with)
(structure of mourning)
to break in the philosophical and biological headquarters (and steal their stories, their abstractions, etc.)
exchanging and sharing instruments and languages
this is about building something that is ‘good enough’ to get you through...
these practices doesn't necessarily produce ‘separate entities’ (indivis)
am i fantasizing creating a monolithic structure of ideas?
critique is an art that tangles with what you are proposing
(like an octopus in a lure)
...................................
stories that can interrupt death (of our time, anthropocene, etc.)
(example of biology-story into culture-story: (1) ladder of evolution --> progress (2) sperm/egg story --> gender performance)
to change stories so that they are more livable
ble
we live stories
to make mistakes as fast as possible
... move across earth space and narrative space
situated stories
they can't tell everything, but what is needed here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refugium_(population_biology)
...................................
ontological choreography
vital sort of play that the participants invent out of a history of body and mind they inherit
...................................
possible performances
*two doors, ?, talk, model, puppet
*using stop-motion animation, clay formation, material animal facial properties
...................................
seeing a car crashing, is seeing a causation, seeing a reasoning, is that logos? is it logos when we see a physical experimentation?
...................................
[Haraway]
the established (dis)order is NOT necessary!
grips of necess[...]
(2)[...notes/midday review.txt]%0.3[...]doors, ?, talk, model, puppet
*using stop-motion animation, clay formation, material animal facial properties
...................................
seeing a car crashing, is seeing a causation, seeing a reasoning, is that logos? is it logos when we see a physical experimentation?
...................................
[Haraway]
the established (dis)order is NOT necessary!
grips of necessity
(the real does/did not have to be or happen that way. the ‘real’ is the result of contingencies and it can be undone by working the contingencies, with skill.)
laboring bodies, playing bodies, sensuous bodies
(feminism:) you can't get freedom outside of mortality
-theology, the negative way of knowing, the necessary discipline of positive affirmation in order to know what is not knowable, is a very helpful tradition
when it comes to language we, humans, will always win over the animals.
we will always be the ones who control the law, the database.
(all is bad news both for the charismatic endangered Bangali tiger and the individual chicken in the food industry.)
fight the divisions and differences
we are in a very bad place for animals and woman
can we do without instrumentalization?
categories of killable--the question of how we kill
the question of one's-own-old-hat
regarding what you are against: we might find ourselves properly addressing a particular issue but having no ability to make political connection, to think beyond the categories
*thinking: a materialist practice with other thinkers--done best as storytelling
for me politics is that to be able to locate ways of life that deserves work, that which deserve opposition, that which deserve our curiosity
disembodiment is a technologically produced effect--many people are very skillful in creating that effect --> effects that are also affect/affectional
(Haraway on writing the cyborg manifesto) SK
the physiological state of neutrality is an affective state
(the notion that violent and passion counts as affect and neutrality is without affect is chemically bizarre) -- neuro-chemistry of a certain kind of self-collection
refusing the division between material and immaterial
to call information-world immaterial is wrong
(this is the base of my work related to Haraway)
in the case of vision: the material and the semiotic always implode [the apparatus and the flesh] --> the effect of *disembodiment is a technologically produced effect* (that is also always affectional) (we have to get good at producing it)
[...so she was among (1983 Marxist) feminists (and the figure of cyborg is already in circulation for her--about the questions of reproduction technologies related to the situation of women) without biological education--not[...]
(3)[...notes/midday review.txt]%0.4[...]always open. the point is that it is not nowhere and no place.
epidemic friendly
the flow of disease are major international research matter
eco-feminism, veganism is for Haraway is genocidal position, a position that advocates violence, a position dedicated to the destruction of ways of life and living beings including animals, [a position that] *concise all working animals to being nothing but evidence of the destructive and violating imposition of human will on natural stuff*, and “that domestic animals of all kinds are victims and demonstrations of human hubris گستاخى, and they have been made into tools” ~= an extreme developemnt of liberal theory --> the (work) animals are not self-defining subjects, are violations and victims, and should not exisit, except as:
•heritage-animals
•rescue-animals
•wards of guardianship
(my work on ajayeb and question of heritage has been exactly against that position)
the radical anti-food-industry position is a radical liberal theory turns all working animals into (at best) *heritage-animals* ~= animal to be preserved as much as possible separate from human use --> “all human use is bad”
(--✕--> we know that the question of use and instrumentalism cannot for mortal finite beings rid out of liberation theory and practice)
[for example the disposition of the film How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, where at the end dragons are better off their human partners ~ kabutar ba kabutar baz ba baz کبوتر با کبوتر باز با باز]
**killing is not something mortal beings can avoid** (us or them)
*the human beings have regularly and in complex ways produced other living entities as killable*
[category of killable: a killing that doesn't quite count as killing]
killing your pet when she is too sick = a judgment in responsive relationship that is not equalr />
to say that “meat culture everywhere and always are acts of violation” is wrong
“post-”, the notion of ‘surpassing’ that is inevitability built into the “post-”, is in our way politically
the project of critique : finding that point of violation where you can say “got you!”, ‘I nailed you’ --> the practice of critique = to define what we are against }==> develop political movement that are fairly self-certain about what we are against ==> you will find yourself (perhaps) property addressing a particular issue but having no ability *to make political connection* (~= to think beyond the category) --> you find yourself crippled
posthumanist think of themselves as “better than”, more in possession of a “real” understanding of the nature of contemporary world, beyond the critique of technology
the politics of it all...
[we have never been -->] human : being on the side of the one who developed technology to rea[...]
(4)[...notes/midday review.txt]%0.6[...]g to communicate the ‘importance’ of her contents.) (trauma-story almost always silences other stories. -- she is compelled by her own storytelling --> baring witness to the injustice therefore resisting it.) --when the victimized personal veils the larger context of evil, the illusion of the true perpetrators - which is around you. (she stated the danger which is all around us.)
-the issue of immediacy for Xiri
-‘you can only heal what you have wounded’ (Wagner's Parsifal “only the weapon that made it will ever cure the wound.”)--what does this mean for our caring activities? @Sina: is this what you mean by western modern rationalization, and that is why you are thinking within the western/eastern philosophies, is the modern tools the antidote to themselves? (this is too soon for me to say and understand this question.)
what is my ‘will to’?
Xiri wants to abolish injustice?
Thiago, abolish selfishness?
Maarten, abolish weakness?
Aela, abolish entropy?
Sana,
Seba, abolish enmity?
Lili, abolish feelings?
Varinia, abolish obedience? [--what shortens our leash?]
Sina, abolish selfhood?
Vladimir, abolish non-disambiguity?
@Esta, her enunciated need for “framework” [~->? instruments of economization], could she be needing “pathway”: path instead of frame, and way instead of work. [frame =/=? overflowing (--> my method of script?); identity =/=? avidity, hers;]
interplay of scales
the scale of intimacy, (of skin, of shared heartbeats and feelings)
data and surveillance and seduction
intimacy: still an unpredictable force?
intimacy: the biological spring from which affect drinks?
how Esta's proposal is capable of traversing from the lovers’ bed to the wild embrace of the crowd to the alien touch of networks?
[and when i say “abolish,” i am using a word that is about rendering something obsolete, mansukh, canceling, making reading to get rid of it, and this is not the same as destroying.]
@Arianna, ‘cleaning agents,’ to toxicity? how can we learn to live with “toxic animacy”(Chen)? dirt: “consequences overwhelming their cause” (Latour)
-narratives about urgent necessity: that we need to understand more in order to cure, prevent, construct, excel, survive.
*afterlife toxicities (?)
@Lili: cycle of planets instead of heartbeat of a planet. tuning in the soup of planets, instead of getting the pulse of a singular planet. the nebulous milk way of liquid bodies, instead of rigid mass of individual blood--Pluto.
@Varinia: (in her dog video, regarding her engagement with the law and the question of comparative thinking:) what is the model for what, what is similar to what?
-is her model based on the idea that beings exist as individual? (is this a ‘difference’ that her work produces?)
@Agnes: you are a response to the[...]
(5)[...notes/midday review.txt]%0.8[...]>
-also, the visual metaphor allows one to go beyond fixed appearances, which are only the end products. The metaphor invites us to investigate the varied apparatuses of visual production (including: the prosthetic technologies interfaced with our biological eyes and brains.)
unmarked body: the power to see and not be seen
objectivity in scientific and technological, late-industrial, militarized, racist, and male-dominant societies
(she asks for:)
“So, I think my problem, and “our” problem, is how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own “semiotic technologies” for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a “real” world, one that can be partially shared and that is friendly to earthwide projects of finite freedom, adequate material abundance, modest meaning in suffering, and limited happiness.”
Haraway asks for an embodied objectivity that is able of accommodating *paradoxes* --> ‘situated knowledges’
-what does she mean when she says “All components of the desire are paradoxical and dangerous, and their combination is both contradictory and necessary.”
(instruments of visualization in multinationalist, postmodernist culture:) disembodiment : to distance to know
the visualizing technologies (--> my amazon project)
a perverse vision that has produced ‘techno-monsters’ (what does she mean by that?)
--> second birthing? transcendence?
[the frankenstein's techno-monsters, is modeled after who? and who is modeled after it? wondrously, murderously walking around...]
(‘second-birthing’: one of the deadly stories of killing: in the first-birthing we have merely birth to the earthly soil from the woman, and then the achievement of the tragically self-realized purpose of tragic consiousness, concretized and distilled by ed by Sartre) “dire myths of self-birthing”... --> we must resist the stories of guilt laden knowledge and consciousness
unrestricted vision
presented as utterly transparent
***particularity and embodiment (of all vision) [not necessarily organic]
usable and not innocent
“We need to learn in our bodies, endowed with primate color and stereoscopic vision, how to attach the objective to our theoretical and political scanners in order to name where we are and are not, in dimensions of mental and physical space we hardly know how to name.”
‘partial perspective’ (what does she mean?)
==> become answerable for what we learn how to see. (Helen Verran: accountability; Isabelle Stengers: milieu thinking; Latour: ground;)
(partial way of organizing world)
unlocatable =? irresponsible (knowledge claims)
partial --> possibility of webs of connections: solidarity in politics and shared conversation[...]
(6)[...notes/midday review.txt]%3.1[...]ia” --> Greek for “split brain” (Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception, p.38) According to Beuler, “The selectivity which normal attention exercises among the sensory impressions can be reduced to zero, so that almost anything is recorded that reaches the senses.” One reason for the admiration which Deleuze and Guattari professed for the schizophrenic must lie in this complete lack of inhibition (khod-dari خودداری).} (a confusion of voice and sight, rather than clear and distinct ideas) ([to discriminate message types:] *to confuse literal and metaphorical*, the schizophrenic either does not know his responses are metaphorical or cannot say so --> the breakdown of his metacommunicative system : does not know what kind of message a message is --> the schizophrenic looks for hidden meanings everywhere (assuming everything is metaphorical) or tend to accept every message as literal) (Lacan: schizophrenia: breakdown in the signifying chain of language ==> experience of pure material signifiers [<-- personal identity is the effect of the temporal unification of past and future with one's present, and that such an active temporal unification is itself a function of language.])
subjectivity is multidimensional ==> vision is multidimensional
(an instruments of vision:) optics : politics of positioning --> one example of optical illusion: rationality (projected from nowhere comprehensivel)
(some perspective are more guilty : master point of view)
No one ever accused the God of monotheism of objectivity, only of indifference. The god trick is self-identical, and we have mistaken that for creativity and knowledge, omniscience even. (self-identical [having self identity] =/=! creativity/knowledge)
Technology: skilled practices. (How to see? Where to see from? and so on.)
@Sana, ‘observation’ and ‘technologies of positioning’
how to see?
the science question in military<br />
the science question in colonialism
the science question in capitalism
the science question in feminism
...
master theory =/= webbed accounts
(what does she mean when she dichotomises theory and account?)
instead of (creating and mastering) ‘theory’ she proposes webbing ‘accounts’***
-‘webs’ can have the property of being systematic
systematic: deep filaments and tenacious tendrils into time, space, and consciousness. systems are dimensions of world history.
she suggests to be accountable for (the intricacies of) visualization technologies in which we are embedded that we will find metaphors and means for understanding
and intervening in the *patterns of objectification* in the world.
--> politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating
partiality =/= universality
*partiality: view from a body, always a complex, contradictory, *structuring, and st[...]
(7)[...notes/midday review.txt]%3.3[...]re capital ==> big epistemic/financial pay-offs or costly dead ends [=/= (Stengers's notion of speculative) *being at risk with ones claims* =/= received notions of authority or rationality]
(an abstract challenge:) to bring specificity and imaginative traction
*speculation is a more feral practice
(wild) speculation [always improper] =/= proper science : rational production of univerasal knowledge
-speculation is not about what there is but what there might be
-speculation is on the side of the possible =/= probable (--> Stengers)
speculative operations (quietly) insist that *another world is here* (--> my ajayeb) =/= the smooth operation of business-as-usual (,, interrupting it)
for my ajayeb, how can i carve out a space to nurture my idea? --> nest-building --position/place--> digging out a bit of earth
*speculative empiricism : scientific + narrative
working with ajayeb so that it might stimulate a specualtive empiricism for composing more livable worlds --> ajayeb's storied biospheres
...................................
the notion of ‘magic’ in popular TV series, such as ‘Harry Potter’ franchise and ‘The Magicians’ among many others, and instrumentalization. magic as information technology that is completely instrumentalized. the capitalist ideology of ‘tool’ and ‘usefulness’ are insinuated heavily in the hipster figures of ‘The Magicians’ in the way that they interupt history and knowledge-burdened living. “stop the history lessen! tell me how do we kill the beast with it?” (the stupidity of the hipster hero moving through the matrix of merely teleological phenomena, stripping pleasure off thinking...)
(utopian?)
what a magic spell is good for if it is not a leverage?
[title]
The Magicians and The Absolute Freedom and Terror
(‘The Magicians’:) magic: instrumentalizing the logos
knowledge is literal --> magic spells are literal {the result of magic spell is predetermined}. in this case, the magic is both an instrument of power and renunciation of knowledge
(Heideggerian) techne of the Western project is an instrumentality that takes over, arrests, or enframes what it desires to manipulate or contain. (Christian Hubert's notes)
=/= poiesis, a bringing-forth (in Heidegger: blooming of the blossom) (also Greek)
“[(for the techno-monster-magicians) everything is] code to be cracked”
a kind of fantasies that Don Ihde calls techno-fantasy, which have been part of the transhumanism since 19th century
the toxic distinction between techne from episteme (since Homer). ‘The Magician’ suggests magic as a technology or tool apart from its context of involvements and referentialities : a hermeneutic or alterity relation =/= (Heidegger:) the tool is an embodiment relation
(one of the characters [...]
(8)[...notes/midday review.txt]%4.7[...]yeb) =/= the smooth operation of business-as-usual (,, interrupting it)
for my ajayeb, how can i carve out a space to nurture my idea? --> nest-building --position/place--> digging out a bit of earth
*speculative empiricism : scientific + narrative
working with ajayeb so that it might stimulate a specualtive empiricism for composing more livable worlds --> ajayeb's storied biospheres
...................................
the notion of ‘magic’ in popular TV series, such as ‘Harry Potter’ franchise and ‘The Magicians’ among many others, and instrumentalization. magic as information technology that is completely instrumentalized. the capitalist ideology of ‘tool’ and ‘usefulness’ are insinuated heavily in the hipster figures of ‘The Magicians’ in the way that they interupt history and knowledge-burdened living. “stop the history lessen! tell me how do we kill the beast with it?” (the stupidity of the hipster hero moving through the matrix of merely teleological phenomena, stripping pleasure off thinking...)
(utopian?)
what a magic spell is good for if it is not a leverage?
[title]
The Magicians and The Absolute Freedom and Terror
(‘The Magicians’:) magic: instrumentalizing the logos
knowledge is literal --> magic spells are literal {the result of magic spell is predetermined}. in this case, the magic is both an instrument of power and renunciation of knowledge
(Heideggerian) techne of the Western project is an instrumentality that takes over, arrests, or enframes what it desires to manipulate or contain. (Christian Hubert's notes)
=/= poiesis, a bringing-forth (in Heidegger: blooming of the blossom) (also Greek)
“[(for the techno-monster-magicians) everything is] code to be cracked”
a kind of fantasies that Don Ihde calls techno-fantasy, which have been part of the transhumanism since 19th century<br />
the toxic distinction between techne from episteme (since Homer). ‘The Magician’ suggests magic as a technology or tool apart from its context of involvements and referentialities : a hermeneutic or alterity relation =/= (Heidegger:) the tool is an embodiment relation
(one of the characters even states that humans without magic invented computers as replacement)
‘The Magician’ dismisses the generation of knowledge in the praxis of tool-use. science/magic is pragmatic relation of equipment or tools as ready-to-hand. the ideology of a knowledge relation: magic (as tool) is present-at-hand --> ontological relationship to the world (----the characters want to go and have an icecream when they are finished with all the magical fights.)
this notion of magic as tool (=/= epistemological object) in use achieves (what Don Ihde calls) *instrumental transparency* --> It “withdraws” when in use, but becomes conspicuous again when broken or missing [--> [...]
(10)[...notes/midday review.txt]%4.8[...] that takes over, arrests, or enframes what it desires to manipulate or contain. (Christian Hubert's notes)
=/= poiesis, a bringing-forth (in Heidegger: blooming of the blossom) (also Greek)
“[(for the techno-monster-magicians) everything is] code to be cracked”
a kind of fantasies that Don Ihde calls techno-fantasy, which have been part of the transhumanism since 19th century
the toxic distinction between techne from episteme (since Homer). ‘The Magician’ suggests magic as a technology or tool apart from its context of involvements and referentialities : a hermeneutic or alterity relation =/= (Heidegger:) the tool is an embodiment relation
(one of the characters even states that humans without magic invented computers as replacement)
‘The Magician’ dismisses the generation of knowledge in the praxis of tool-use. science/magic is pragmatic relation of equipment or tools as ready-to-hand. the ideology of a knowledge relation: magic (as tool) is present-at-hand --> ontological relationship to the world (----the characters want to go and have an icecream when they are finished with all the magical fights.)
this notion of magic as tool (=/= epistemological object) in use achieves (what Don Ihde calls) *instrumental transparency* --> It “withdraws” when in use, but becomes conspicuous again when broken or missing [--> this is precisely the standard account of technology in high-techno-scientific capitalist sunny societies] --> the idea that magicians can “forget” (or “lose”) their magic suggests a guarantor of instrumental transparency of magic (or knowledge).
-the popular vision of magic hinges around the desire for total transparency**
-this instrumental rationality is the heart of the modernizing project (which characterizes capitalism) --> the value-free calculable efficiency of administrative processes (--> a project of domination and denial of dependence) (=?=> Auschwitz)
(how to make The Magician's bounded utilitarian individualism unthinkable?)
(Frankfurt School:) technology ~= instrumental reason ~= reification (madiat, jesmiat) as reason
(Habermas:) systems rationality, economic and bureaucratic rationality (==> patterns of meaning rendered functional) =/= communicative processes that sustain the lifeworld
the same Platonic tradition produces: {theory =/= practice} ==> {mind =/= body} ==> {"conceptual” =/= “material"} (and privileging one over the other)
(for the Frankfurt School) truth = "a moment of correct praxis”
what is at stake is the way ‘The Magician’ heroes’ way of non-relating to an entire environment and with it to an implicit “world” that they inhabit.
...that science is an ‘account’ of reality not a ‘tool’ for coping with it
...when the world and the instrument interact
descriptions of the affordances of indissoluble instrument / world compl[...]
(13)[...notes/midday review.txt]%4.8[...]arantor of instrumental transparency of magic (or knowledge).
-the popular vision of magic hinges around the desire for total transparency**
-this instrumental rationality is the heart of the modernizing project (which characterizes capitalism) --> the value-free calculable efficiency of administrative processes (--> a project of domination and denial of dependence) (=?=> Auschwitz)
(how to make The Magician's bounded utilitarian individualism unthinkable?)
(Frankfurt School:) technology ~= instrumental reason ~= reification (madiat, jesmiat) as reason
(Habermas:) systems rationality, economic and bureaucratic rationality (==> patterns of meaning rendered functional) =/= communicative processes that sustain the lifeworld
the same Platonic tradition produces: {theory =/= practice} ==> {mind =/= body} ==> {"conceptual” =/= “material"} (and privileging one over the other)
(for the Frankfurt School) truth = "a moment of correct praxis”
what is at stake is the way ‘The Magician’ heroes’ way of non-relating to an entire environment and with it to an implicit “world” that they inhabit.
...that science is an ‘account’ of reality not a ‘tool’ for coping with it
...when the world and the instrument interact
descriptions of the affordances of indissoluble instrument / world complexes are at stake
then how can we think magic/knowledge/science without instrumentalization (‘something in order to’)?
the notion of ‘world’ and ‘worlding’ in other Hollywood sci-fi franchises, and the way a world (for example survival in Mars in ‘The Martian,’ surviving “outer space” in ‘Gravity,’ “pure wonder” and “abyssal unknown” in many Icarusian space exploration moves and movies, the deprived Earth in ‘Interstellar,’ and so on) is rendered dead or dangerous or prosperous, ideologies of anthropocentric extensionalism.
(this directly concerns my ajayeb apass research about the past, because hollywood constantly making science fictions about the past.)
[as much as Matt Damon is schizo-constructing a social environment (on “dead” Mars trying to contact “home”), Cinderella's schizo-affective relation with the talking animals is doing the same: talking back to a world that talks to her, where Matt is only able to talk to home station. I think we have better chances with Cinderella's kind of split personality.]
Modernity --> “Project of Enlightenment” : religion =/= metaphysics --> science + morality + art --> objective science + universal morality + law ----{each with its own “inner logic"}
(Luhmann; transition to modern:) stratified and hierarchical organization --to--> “functionally differentiated” organization
(project of modernity requires) a universally assumed but nowhere concretely localizable lifeworld*** (=/=? situated knowledges)
modern person : the self-f[...]
(17)[...notes/midday review.txt]%4.9[...]terventions or to produce a body of knowledge about your matters of concern,
(this is one place that i am recognizing and foregrounding a binary structure:)
•women in my life: Avital, Haraway, Ahmed, Scher, Barad, Despret, teaching me science and art, attentive modes of differential reading and writing, practices of care and concern
•men in my life: Serres, Sennett, Delanda, Levinas, Anand, teaching me a non-guilt-driven knowledge of history and past, a different mode of remembrance which provokes a different mode of response and responsibility
...................................
alive --[]--> dead --[]--> ancestor
what provokes storytelling?
(Harawayian) inhabiting ==> responsibility --> alignment
(a split-self at home with) contradictions ==> dealing with situated knowledge }--> this is about ‘ongoing’
note to self: not to throw away the contaminated concept that we have, (f[...]
(20)[...notes/midday review.txt]%5.6[...]ort zones
where literature starts with sigh
when and how did you learn to sigh?
sigh is from the family of the specialized languages of complaining?
temporal climate of your remembrance (as mourning) --> related to the past?
mourning and memory are sojourn for her
incorporating the object of (her) loss
(holding onto) the unhappy objects of difference
anger, pain, misery, ...
which (good or bad) feelings saturates her poem?
question of saturation
which feelings modified by which poetics sutures which wounds? زخمبندی
or to be more psychoanalytically correct: where is the wound?
my own affirmative exposure of the unhappy effects of her poetry
what is the image of the ‘better life’ in her poetry?
somehow in the literary habitus she is moving, the origin of descriptive/inscriptive saying is made by an initial violation
Hoda's poem, which energies does it unleash in her?
sokhan-e ranj سخن رنج
شعر غنایی Lyric poetry, a formal type of poetry which is defined by or dedicated to expressing so-called personal emotions or feelings.
the Lyre, a string instrument in Greek classical antiquity, is tuning the technicality of this ‘form’
historical contingencies of “personal feelings”
?what is more singular than your “personal” highs, trips, crashes, “feelings” ==> a text telling about itself (its ownmost experience of something that is radically singular)
-rhetoric of singularity
-(my point is that the expression of your) innermost experience (is often signed by someone else)
--> “distributed biographies,” thinking about sociality of perception
her poem is her textual body (<--> sexual body)
ecstasy
is subjectivity (permanently for Hoda) ecstatic?
this is the question of ‘where is the subject’? according to different practices with ecstasy we are outside ourselves. (in religion that is precisely where the ‘inside’ is located)
-permanent or structural ecstasy is clearly political
-ecstasy is disruptive
how much should I be invested or interested as a friend for your happiness and wellbeing?
•fellow-feeling
•sympathy (is expressed by:) returning feeling with like feeling
Sina: if a thinking makes you sad, that thinking is probably wrong?
within the rhetoric of integration a usual terrifying point is in which the duty of the migrant is to attach to a different, happier object
the future of reattachment --> Hoda
-in this integrative narrative, I have to be careful with assumptions that good feelings are open and bad feelings are closed
bad feelings are seen as orientated toward the past =/= my work on past
she said “here [...]
(21)[...notes/midday review.txt]%7.4[...]t's biograpphy, is a world, is a compositional node
matter-form worlding landscape and event --> the saint is is sent into a spin
a perspectival agency --> things jump into relation + unglued
Tazkirat al-Awliya: energies distribute across a field of subjects-objects-bodies-trajectories-affects
accrual and loss
...realm of killed off things
perception, context and cause
located nowhere in particular (or)
in some paranoid hyper-place
under what spell did things happen or half-happen or start to happen and fail?
Stewart: theory (drawn through writing) = compositional attunement
difference and repetition (+ potentiality and loss) ==> reals
...................................
knowledge: view from nowhere onto the world =/= knowing: participation in ongoing mutually constitutive processes in the world
...................................
رواقى
stoicism: “detachment ==> clear thinking”
psychological independence <== *stoicism* (<~~)--> causality =/= anxiety
philosophy shows many ‘theories about causality = ways to reduce anxiety’ --Despret--> our experience sometimes require us *to go farther than the instrumental (causal)* and to discover a place where disorder may be reestablished in the movement and contradiction
*anecdotic causality*
([in apass we constantly do] the practice of using) [*]anecdote: expressive causalities*
anecdote: the intersection between the artist (patient) and feedback (therapist) --> circular causality --> (helps the feedbacker or therapist) *to understand and create another way of thinking about disorder and confusion*
stoic distinction: event which are dependent on one's *will* =/= events which are in the realm of one's *desires* (one which one has no control)
--> closely related to the (Seligman's) *causal attribution: a theory of contingent causality affecting the subject in her or his interpretation*
•نسبت دادن attribution =/= explanation (behavior assigned to its cause) =/= inference (quality/attribute assigned to the agent's observed behavior)
◦can we do without *explanatory style*? (a person's causal dimensions of stability and globality) --> past dealing (optimism, pessimism, etc.)
◦can we do without *locus of control*? (a person's locus conceptualized as internal) --> future dealing (fate, hope, etc.)
stoic philosophy ==resulting==> therapy
([Holakouee's] stoic conception of) ****therapy: it is not the events which make people suffer but rather the perception they have of the events****
Aristotle ==> totality of causal explanation of the event
his theory of four causes [material, efficient, formal, final] is limited by the eternal relation between the subject (the creator) and the object (t[...]
(22)[...notes/midday review.txt]%11.9[...] perverted causality
[Deleuze:] when the causality relation one of the two elements (cause or effect) differs in nature from the other (one is corporeal, physical and the other is incorporeal) --> [they foster a relationship of] quasi-causality =/= relationship of expression
‘necessity’ belongs to an official order called *destiny: a sort of teleology of the system of causes*, a unity of the correspondent quasi-causality (=/= relation between cause and effect)
--> independence is installed in the presence of necessity
[Leibniz:] *causality = con-possibility*
the event is in a monadic world were everything is signs (analogies significant at several levels) --> a fish pond in which each fish is itself a fish pond
Leibniz's world is created and destroyed by harmonic or discordant correlations
“anxiety as cause”
[Holakouee's manner of interpreting reality -->] best therapy or remedy for anxieties:
•causality
•system: a group of necessary laws and rules
}--> no victim, no bully [~= opening the field of knowledge ~=>? erasing the sense of responsibility]
{Despret}--✕--> our experiences sometimes require us (to go farther that Holakouee's instrumentalism) ****to discover a place where disorder may be reestablished in the movement and contradiction**** [that i believe is urgently needed in Iran today =/= enlightening]
a space regulated by laws of stoic causality is the space where multiplicity can be reestablished --> *notional quasi-causality* [notional: gedanklich, تصور، انديشه]
[an stoic anecdote:]
“When, each evening, the guru sat down to proceed with the evening prayer the ashram's cat was in the way and distracted the monks so, he ordered that the cat should be attached during the evening prayers. A long time after the guru's death the cat continued to be attached during the evening prayer. Then, when the cat finished by dying, another cat was brought to the ashram so that it could be duly attached during the evening prayers. Centuries later the guru's disciples wrote wise treatises on the essential role of the cat in the good order of all prayers.” (DeMerlo)
--(in practice)--> the anecdote becomes the essential element in a chain of expressive causalities. it is the intersection point between several stories united for a time: *familial/familiar time & therapeutic time*
...you retreat behind a rampart which protects you
...the exterior scrutiny and criticism makes your failures heavier
...you refuse *scholastic integration* [you choose a complete rejection of the values suggested by the school, rules, or demands for success] ==> you increase the attention paid to you by the institution concerned with your sort of malfunctioning
...consultation dramatizes the contradition and rigidity of your r[...]
(23)[...notes/midday review.txt]%12.1[...]chnology-human relation]
modernism's politicization of science
speaking of science scientifically ==> a scientific ‘worldview’ is deployed
speaking of religion religiously ==> a vague assemblage of pious moral vacuities is taken as an ‘alternative worldview’
}--> they both accept an* unscientific science* and an *irreligious religion*
Latour (quickly dissolving nonsense that accrues as one opposes ‘knowledge’ and ‘belief’):
•science = reference chain (what allow access to the far away) [nothing is out of the reach of reference chain]
•religion = presence (what allow access to the near)
science ~/= concrete, worldly, matter-of-fact, present-at-hand, domain of knowledge (<-- political activism has to work with that kind of knowledge)
what use is it to save your soul, if you forfeit the world? --> sci-fi's real frontier & Noah's project
the transcendence and transubstantiation of science
when nature enters, religion has to leave. in two equally fatal exit strategies:
•to limit itself to the inner sanctum of the soul
•to flee into the supernatural --> that religion will try in vain to imitate scientific instruments (<-- The Magicians TV series) + misinterpreted science [==> taking Bible as if it were geology book (<-- look at the rising Hollywood films that scientifize the events of Bible) -- projects of connecting religion to the world]
‘exit religion’: it will have lost any pretence of influencing the course of events, its impact will only be decorative
(Descola:) ‘naturalism’ is only one of four ways in which connections between humans and nonhumans can be established
contrasts:
*reference chain*
*reproduction*
(Latour use of the term) *contrast* = mode of existence
immutable mobiles: to reach something far away through long arrays of instruments, you need to make sure that *necessities and constants are transported* with as little transformation as possible ==> to “reach” those entities
geometry, mathematical entities, inscriptions of all sorts ==> carry heavy-duty immutable mobiles
(Hoda's immutable mobiles are: [?])
[*]matter = highly elaborated, historically dated, and anthropologically situated hybrids***
(=/= ‘transportation of indisputable necessities through chains of cause and effect’ <-- a category mistake)
(for physicist:) “the ways we know the world = the ways in which the world behaves”
(less for chemist)
(not at all for engineer)
([in a way my work has been about investigating vectors and] *directions*) from knower to what is to be known
the beings of ajayeb face lots of causes and lots of effects
metaphysical consequences o[...]
(24)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%13.6[...] present-at-hand, domain of knowledge (<-- political activism has to work with that kind of knowledge)
what use is it to save your soul, if you forfeit the world? --> sci-fi's real frontier & Noah's project
the transcendence and transubstantiation of science
when nature enters, religion has to leave. in two equally fatal exit strategies:
•to limit itself to the inner sanctum of the soul
•to flee into the supernatural --> that religion will try in vain to imitate scientific instruments (<-- The Magicians TV series) + misinterpreted science [==> taking Bible as if it were geology book (<-- look at the rising Hollywood films that scientifize the events of Bible) -- projects of connecting religion to the world]
‘exit religion’: it will have lost any pretence of influencing the course of events, its impact will only be decorative
(Descola:) ‘naturalism’ is only one of four ways in which connections between humans and nonhumans can be established
contrasts:
*reference chain*
*reproduction*
(Latour use of the term) *contrast* = mode of existence
immutable mobiles: to reach something far away through long arrays of instruments, you need to make sure that *necessities and constants are transported* with as little transformation as possible ==> to “reach” those entities
geometry, mathematical entities, inscriptions of all sorts ==> carry heavy-duty immutable mobiles
(Hoda's immutable mobiles are: [?])
[*]matter = highly elaborated, historically dated, and anthropologically situated hybrids***
(=/= ‘transportation of indisputable necessities through chains of cause and effect’ <-- a category mistake)
(for physicist:) “the ways we know the world = the ways in which the world behaves”
(less for chemist)
(not at all for engineer)
([in a way my work has been about investigating vectors and] *directions*) from knower to what is to be known
the beings of ajayeb face lots of causes and lots of effects
metaphysical consequences of evolutionary theory
***(Latour's positive veiw on) to be a Darwinian: you have to abandon the notion that all of those ‘organisms’ rest in ‘nature’ --> [*]organim: a hybrid production of representation & reference
*the widespread ideology of the *blind watch maker* : a blind cause acting from behind and reaching the optimum haphazardly
(has substituted the ‘mere transportation of indisputable necessities’ for *the risks taken by individual organisms to perpetuate, sustain, and reproduce themselves*)
&
*the widespread ideology of the *intelligent designer* :an intelligence dragging organisms towards the optimum by some predefined plans
}--> both are grounde[...]
(25)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%13.6[...]es,” much like the cyberspace we are born into and populate.
...
Not to remediate Barzakh (برزخ) but to propose a media theory, sketch it, and archive it for later. And there will be things that have to remain impossible to verify by us and in those records, the general-purpose language of the technologies that we choose to archive ourselves with, on the side of forgetting, the site of externalized memories, will not verify histories of presence tattooed under the ear of the elephant of our story, as you whispered somewhere in the dark.
[...]
Yes, vocal works that informed and influenced Qahveh-Khanehe (قهوه خانه) still can be found in some places of tea or cafe houses in Iran. They are called pardeh-Khani (پرده خوانی), here someone who is a pardeh-Dar پردهدر (“-Dar” meaning that who tears apart the pardeh پرده, and pardeh meaning screen or veil--the concept of pardeh always contains “a perpetually hidden message”), ‘Khandan’ (خواندن) meaning in Farsi ‘to read’ or to sing-off a plain of signifiers, is also the verb ‘Darridan,’ (دریدن) [#Derridean acting] meaning to rip apart.
...
I am sorry; I am just entangled in the topologically impossible pardeh, as an interfacial space where the body and instrument of music meet. I am touching with my fingers the ‘first three’ pardehs of Setar ستار, and thinking about to jack into the vague differences between another two magical canvases / magnetic disks: Plane of Destiny (lohe mahfuz لوح محفوظ) and Plane of Memory (lohe hafez لوح حافظ), while listening to the virtual narratives of Ghahveh-Khane theater. Which creatures have you encountered, in your travels, that bypass human installations (of memory)?
...................................
a Zoroastrian data: pre-existential ~ azali ازلی, sabegh-ol-vojud سابق الوجود
atefiate mahsus [عاطفیت محسوس] (queer? a queerness not familiar with mysticism?)
queer is about ‘marahele johare atefi’ (مراحل جوهر عاطفی), mohabat محبت (kindness or love,) without leading to ‘faghre erfani’ (فقر عرفانی)
[i have problem with] (escaping) the ‘pit of nature’ (chahe tabiat چاه طبیعت) in Sohrevardi's thought
-(he inverses the earth from positive to negative geology, sphere becomes pit)
-the project of post-Babylonian autopoietic-self, a self that is defined by the ‘meta-fall’ into the “pit of nature.”
‘andam-shenasi peikare latif’ (اندامشناسی پیکر لطیف)
...................................
[Avital]
what are the ways in which ajayebnameh relates to itself as its own future, its own labor and announced commitments?
(our reading of ajayeb is not a time quiz involving applicability and whether or not one “buys it.”)
i am “drifting” without anxiety into a new territory ([...]
(26)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%14.2[...]rigor, which has conditioned 20th century Anglo philosophy, “is the positivist's requirement that theories be testable. At the very least, a respectable philosophical theory should be stated with sufficient precision that one can tell what it says about something and whether its predictions about that subject matter are borne out” ---- to be capable of being articulated in the formalism of logic)
Testability furnishes the uninterrogated core of rigor. --> linked to a notion of computational realizability?
how “rigor” enables the displacement of truth by testability----as if the test could provide an unquestionably solid ground for overtaking reflection and other philosophically triggered interferences.
What kind of rigor is “a certain kind of rigor”?
what is being guaranteed if not the ability itself to guarantee
Everything rests on the *promise* of a certain kind of rigor.
the metaphysical fantasy of completion.
colonization of discourse with rigor
The discipline of programming leads to a shift in perspective on traditional issues. It invites--or rather requires--one to adopt what [Daniel] Dennett (1968) calls the design stance toward the mind
{ instrumental epistemology of how something works =/=? discovery }--> how can we suspend this “=/=”
trials and tryouts
[Avital's] phantasm of testing(‘s groundedness and unquestioned solidity)
...time-zone paradox of freezing the future in order to plan, in another register, the time for working through computations.
what are the conditions for thinking ‘through a problem’?
[Avital:] ****“To offset the competitive quality of the research that is being clocked, more philosophy must be allowed to drift in, if only to demystify those ideologies of acceleration that relentlessly run down the slower-paced thinking and an ethics of hesitation.”****
[origin] ==> temporal hysteria ==> [effect]
what tensional drama is occurs in the noncoincidence of planning...?
(planning = modeling, testing, constructing prototypes, development)
regardless of whether the future is foreseeable or not, something has to be maintained as a stable factor
test ~=> stability
***If the test cannot originate knowledge, it at least confirms that there is knowledge. (confirming that cognition occurs)
...tests have to be taken over and over again, if only to fill the **fictional time of the absolute present**
knowledge and test : it is not clear even that something is known until there is a test for it.
(test) is a certain type of metaphysically secured knowledge that needs only to ‘find’ itself
The normatively secured test does not originate knowledge but confirms what already exists as “knowable.”
...generous[...]
(27)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%14.4[...]ild, feral,
[who is naming the world what?
•accelerationism: “game-over”
•capitalism: “resource”
•technophobia: “obsolescence”
•technophilia: “information”
•monotheism: “transition”
•science: “taxa”
•multinationalism: “system”
•modernism: “globe"]
immune systems (in natureculture) determine where organisms, including people, can live and with whom.
“There is no time or place at which genetics ends and environment begins” [...]
(Haraway ☞ Gilbert)
“All stages of the life histories of evolving animals had to adapt to eager bacteria colonizing them inside and out.”
To be animal is to become-with bacteria
to inhabit an inter-subjective world, to love is about meeting the other in all the fleshly detail of a mortal relationship (to wit, first, somehow to learn what this other needs and desires)---permanent search for knowledge of the intimate other, with inevitable comic and tragic mistakes in that quest
thinking about animals as “other worlds” in a science fictional sense
scientifically informed, empirically grounded practice
theory ...still a limited discourse and a rough instrument
“who is at home?” --> ask in respect for all of time who and what are emerging in relationship --> (the obligation to ask) who are present and who are emergent? ***
(what are our) categorical labor
labor of training --> somehow all the participants of training are remodeled by it
labor of scale-making
(these are world-making practices, storytellings)
significant otherness-in-connection =/= intention-ascribing idioms of literalist anthropomorphism that sees furry humans in animal bodies and measures their worth in scales of similarity to the rights-bearing, humanist subjects of Western philosophy and political theory ==> assign privileges or guardianship (in place of ownership) in a modernist great chain of being
*action: beautiful, hard, specific, personal;
=/= abstract scales
differential sensibility =?=> situated emergence =?=> more livable worlds ~ ontological choreography
category of “rights” don't just exist (preformed to be uncovered,) rather we enter into a rights relationship with an other (animal or human)--> Hearne's “reciprocal possession”
-morality is a species-specific capacity
~ if i have X, my X has a human (which is me)
off-leash and cliff-enclosed @Varinia
(Haraway:) time-space scales co-constituted by human, animal, and inanimate agencies
1. evolutionary time (at the level of the planet earth) --> naturalcultural species
2. face-to-face time (at the scale of individual lifetimes) --> mortal bodies
3. historical time (at the scale of decades, populations[...]
(28)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%15.5[...]...Nature is that about which ‘relevant knowledge’ may be produced. If we pay due attention to it, we can learn, discern relations, and multiply entities and ratios.” (Stengers 2011)
eliminativism: the belief that one story or one set of practices (usually called rational or scientific) can explain nature.
a materialist understanding of ajayeb demands an interpretive adventure of how, with matter (in Stengersian way), we get sensitivity, life, memory, consciousness, passions and thought... =/= inert or mechanistic notion of matter
which metaphors stage nature as “witty agent and actor”?
speculative commitment --> learn how to relate differently ~-> (help us) name what we are doing in new and useful ways**** (Verran)
the egg from outside it doesn't seem to be doing anything --> to give the egg the power to challenge (our) well-defined categories
-how can we relate to the egg without breaking it? (ontological + ethical) --> *pragmatism*: an art of consequences, an art of paying attention =/= the logic of the omelet justifying cracked eggs
ajayeb is all about the ***staging of nature***
{Latour:} reductionism offer an enormously ‘useful’ handle to allow scientists to insert their instrumentarium, their paradigms and produce a long series of practical effects.
(efficient handles =/= staging of nature)
we must learn to tell trickster stories {a speculative sense that activates possibilities for thinking, feeling, and knowing within coyote nature =/= a closed conception of “reality itself"} OR ELSE we will end up settling for a rather vague version of what physics claim to be reality [~= a generalized (==> irrelevant?) version of a specific form of authoritative knowledge --> that which “simplifies away our world in terms of idealist judgments about what would ultimately matter and what does not” (, Stengers)] ----> (who has ?) the power to explain, (who/what decides what kind is ?) relevant knowledge
[Stengers] (wonder has everything to do with stories,) wonder incites storytelling
1 --> importance of narratives in our knowledge-making practices
2 --> politically robust narratives (that world us differently)
can the ontological be addressed without the ethical?
(feminism's answer is ‘no’) --> a materialism that is immediately ontological, epistemological, and ethical (=/=? Delanda's materialism)
ajayeb (+ my work on it ?) is a pragmatic project to fabricate a different kind of knowledge assemblage (Stengers ☞ Kenney ☞ Sina)
=/= (21st century) logics of capitalism
=/= toxic categories of modernity
i need (to learn) an inviting rhetoric
(Roughgarden)
([focus narrowly on] sexual selection =/=) social selection : “...selection for, and in the context of, the social infrastructure of a specie[...]
(29)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%16.4[...]nducing) wonder + (connection with) divine
-rich ornamentation --> honor something with our time, care, and attention
-‘encoding’ a writing requires time and attention, decryption ==> value and meaning
mystery of the undecipherable ==> occult knowledge {in a book that enrolls and transforms religious motifs, the experience of reading (or rather not reading) ...evokes the power of occult knowledge, the power of that which is hidden. (Kenney)}
occult knowledge <--> mystery <--> enchantment <--> ornamentation <--> illumination (=/= elucidate, tozihe shafaf توضیح شفاف) <--> wonder
***bibliographic aesthetics are arts of enchantment, vectors for the transmission of value and meaning***
why think and write with the aesthetic?
book as an object? writing as a practice? reading as world-making?***
(to feel) the effect of (our own) language
art: “ontological theater” (=/=? ‘linguistic turn’ {--> Marialena's remark on The Pillow Book, that the film don't care about what is being written. she is a child of the linguistic turn?})
(=/= “return to reality” : “the ontological turn”)
(=/= language as “a necessary evil,” aesthetics characterized as the main instrument of ideological mystification)
~ learn to trust objects figured in unfamiliar ways* (, my bow and arrow?)
[both Haraway (“material-semiotic”) and Barad (“material-discursive”) are working against this kind of split between language and reality, both in the level of analysis (of one's object) and composition (of one's book)]
**where do our power come from if not from evidence?** (@Seba)
--> the *specter of deception* (it happened when i used aesthetics in my questions in my excursion at Vladimir's block, my peers thinking “what if we are beguiled?” --> the suspicious refrains of “trust no one”) =/= “attentive wondering care” (Bynum)
***>
*** to tell enchanted stories --> <== we must struggle against the fear of being tricked ***
-this fear of being tricked ==> Descartes’ beast-machine hypothesis (against nonhuman agency) : the clockwork animal and gods; a site where animality and technicity were collapsed and both were rendered as deceptive.
-Descartes’ beast-machine anxieties are still with us. (being duped by the) trickster agencies of animal-like automata--animals, spirits, and technologies have dubious agencies.
(my work on ajayeb hopefully,) is about cultivating wild facts, to be at risk with our craft, creating beautiful objects that give charismatic form to their matters of care
i don't know in advance, how stories and words will flow through us --> i have to learn pragmatic experimentation with magic, words and ideas: [#ppp]
•poetry --> to do with the art of language
•poiesis --> process of creation
•poetics --> questions of[...]
(30)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%16.9[...]ts, inherit attribute of independently existing objects]---> go to critique of ‘positionality’)
“position” only has meaning when a rigid apparatus with fixed parts is used (for example a ruler is nailed to a fixed table in the laboratory ==> establishing a fixed frame of reference for specifying “position.”) --> any measurement of “position” using this apparatus cannot be attributed to some abstract independently existing “object” but rather is a property of the ‘phenomenon’ : ***the inseparability of “observed object” and “agencies of observation”***
--> simultaneous indeterminacy of “position” and “momentum” [*momentum*: material arrangement involving movable parts] [--> deconstructing the material exclusion of “position” and “momentum"]
(*)phenomena: primary epistemological unit, the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting “components” (Barad); ontologically primitive relations; relations without preexisting ‘relata’(~= mutual ontological dependencies =/= independent entities)
•(specific) intra-action ==> relata-within-phenomena
•(specific) agential intra-action ==> boundaries and properties of components of phenomena become determinate }~= phenomena
(*)apparatus = phenomena [=/= inscription devices, scientific instruments set in place before the action, machines that mediate the dialectic of resistance and accommodation, neutral probes of natural world, structures that deterministically impose some particular outcome,]
-apparatus: “dynamic (re)configurings of the world, specific agential practices/intra-actions/performances through which specific exclusionary boundaries are enacted”
(perpetually) open to:
•rearrangements
•rearticulations
•(and other) reworkings (--> [in my amazon project:] getting the instrumentation to work in a particular way for a particular purpose)
(boundaries are always ‘enacted,’ not ‘made’)
(*)reality: “things"-in-phenomena, ongoing ebb and flow of agency *****
-shifting boundaries and properties that stabilize and destabilize
(*)world: a dynamic process of intra-activity in the “ongoing reconfiguring of locally determinate causal structures” [~= contingency] with determinate boundaries, properties, meanings, and patterns of marks on bodies *****
(*)universe: agential intra-activity in its becoming
(*)word: material-discursive practices ==> boundaries are constituted (for example the differential constitution of “humans” and “nonhumans”; @Varinia)
==> meaning (=/= ideational, andisheyi اندیشهای) --> specific material (re)configuring of the world
(*)discourse: that which constrains and enables what can be said, practices that define what counts as meaningful (statement)***
(learning from Foucault, discursive practices are the local sociohistorical [=/= transcendental, phenomenological, ideational] [...]
(31)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%18.4[...]encies of observation”***
--> simultaneous indeterminacy of “position” and “momentum” [*momentum*: material arrangement involving movable parts] [--> deconstructing the material exclusion of “position” and “momentum"]
(*)phenomena: primary epistemological unit, the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting “components” (Barad); ontologically primitive relations; relations without preexisting ‘relata’(~= mutual ontological dependencies =/= independent entities)
•(specific) intra-action ==> relata-within-phenomena
•(specific) agential intra-action ==> boundaries and properties of components of phenomena become determinate }~= phenomena
(*)apparatus = phenomena [=/= inscription devices, scientific instruments set in place before the action, machines that mediate the dialectic of resistance and accommodation, neutral probes of natural world, structures that deterministically impose some particular outcome,]
-apparatus: “dynamic (re)configurings of the world, specific agential practices/intra-actions/performances through which specific exclusionary boundaries are enacted”
(perpetually) open to:
•rearrangements
•rearticulations
•(and other) reworkings (--> [in my amazon project:] getting the instrumentation to work in a particular way for a particular purpose)
(boundaries are always ‘enacted,’ not ‘made’)
(*)reality: “things"-in-phenomena, ongoing ebb and flow of agency *****
-shifting boundaries and properties that stabilize and destabilize
(*)world: a dynamic process of intra-activity in the “ongoing reconfiguring of locally determinate causal structures” [~= contingency] with determinate boundaries, properties, meanings, and patterns of marks on bodies *****
(*)universe: agential intra-activity in its becoming
(*)word: material-discursive practices ==> boundaries are constituted (for example the differential constitution of “humans” and “nonhumans”; @Varinia)
==> meaning (=/= ideational, andisheyi اندیشهای) --> specific material (re)configuring of the world
(*)discourse: that which constrains and enables what can be said, practices that define what counts as meaningful (statement)***
(learning from Foucault, discursive practices are the local sociohistorical [=/= transcendental, phenomenological, ideational] material conditions that enable and constrain disciplinary knowledge practices) *actual historically situated social conditions:
•speaking
•writing
•thinking
•calculating
•measuring
•filtering
•concentrating
•
--> statements + subjects emerge from a field of possibilities =/= statement as utterance of (originating) consciousness of a unified subject
(*)discursive practices: specific material (re)configurings of the world ==> local determinations of [...]
(32)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%18.4[...]>
the analytic experience has a narrative character? psychoanalytic dialogue ‘uncovers’ a certain kind of narrative discontinuity maintained in the analysand's efforts
--> meaningful narrative sequences,
and, recaptured memory : a rhetorical product
...................................
-the dominance of the narrative ‘The Origin’ [Ursprung] when we tell nature story, when we call in nature
-the dominance of the narrative ‘The Zoom’ when we tell nature story, (‘The Reveal’ story)
-
ok, it is 06.03.2017, i need to set up a track of commentary, a monogamous relation with ajayeb
and unload the myth that i am going to do something new:
1st: send super-ego away and cleared out --> no judgment
2nd: call the unengaged secretary to just write
3rd: throw some sort of sequencing on the page
4th: call the clean-up agent
5th: at some point super-ego comes and checks it out
6th: negotiation with the super-ego
(Avital,) start modest and small, listening to my passion, collects some texts or passages that hold this or that motif that i like or am concerned with, go in there and do a rhetorical reading, see what is going on in the language, allow myself be instructed and taught.
7th: wrap around the work, something of an *infomercial,* there i can get a little ego in there, bring myself to the table and situate myself in the world of art/scholarship/thinking/creativity/etc. and say where i am, what question do i bring to the table, what would be my question mark, i am at the table taking my place and this is my question mark, situate myself (=/= autistic, dar-khod-mandegi در خود ماندگی; i can't spin out as kind of rouge and solitary satellite that no one can connect with. i have to make the connections, in a world that is having debates and discursive encounters around my themes. i am *in conversation* --> responding, quoting, tuning,) standing up for myself and my text, “fake it till you make it,” yes i need to renarcissize and build up, at this phase towards the end i need to perform being assertive and show what i have brought to the table, and if i don't know that then i ask someone to tell me what have i done? where does it belong? how can i situate myself?
8th: sleep-walk, don't look down, don't wake myself up, don't ask why i am doing this
9th: (problematically Deleuzian:) *becoming woman*! (for Deleuze) all writing involves you (no matter how you are gendered or constructed or what you think you are) in becoming woman, which is to say the experience of a powerful submission and the ability to carry off the disappearance of agency or ego kick, subjecting oneself (to the other) before becoming subject.
[(Hayward) woman: vibratory being: sensation <~~(creative-response)~~> environment]
زن شو
...................................
wunderkammer,[...]
(33)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%18.7[...]s a salient attribute of the pot's character as a pot”
when zoomorphic figures are present...
ajayeb's zoomorphic figures with their salient attributes are not “purposed” necessarily being to encode their belief-system onto objects that we may read today--like story-board--but rather to make interventions into the world of human-nonhuman relations. to either assist or resist such transformations
[terms sharpened with Alberti + Katie King]
museum studies
(Hayward:) freedom --> initiative in shaping a narrative, a visible body, where one is able to engage and resist [@Xiri] --> contradicts itself because one is really not free from the policing of the physical body --> coming into a [...] body (==> reality and disillusion in public spaces) -->{ narrative, flesh, is filled with memory, emotions, and complexity [@Hoda]
*crafting a space for existence may involve:
•unfolding history
•mapping normative processes
•immersing a “body” in vulnerability (*)
deploy =/= unveiling
sort out =/= debunking هدايت
glocalizing
Katie King reading Hayward: [...] assembling apparatuses for enfolding visions of instrumental, subjective and cognitive technologies among ciliated (مودار, ریشهدار) bodies
...................................
technologies of the literal
grain of analysis, timescale, noting/creating hybrid objects of study
[comparing the incomparable --> lumping --then--> splitting]
***starting off a research project which eventually hopes to have something to say about that hybrid “thing”*** ...with some despised members of a particular time period (--> switching those who count as major or minor characters), promises to make it possible to build in *a range of genders (not just two), a range of writing technologies, a range of self-effacing acts, and a range of publics*, while working from a particular place and time
***there are many different interests creating the pasts***, the possible worlds...
(Leigh Star ☞ Katie King ☞ Sina) “comparing the incomparable”
here i am trying an outline of my interrelated research practices in a preliminary character, the intersection of which I am just at the beginning to understand
ajayeb: writing technologies of the 12th century Iran
plain style
soing naked as a sign
dress and address
ecology of writing technologies
(Katie King:) writing technologies: ideologies layered in time and space * under which writing has been divided [also cannot be divided] from other generations of cultural meaning
myriad hybrid forms, commingling in material and ideological proliferations
(with Katie King's interest in women's[...]
(34)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%19.9[...]ecology of writing technologies
(Katie King:) writing technologies: ideologies layered in time and space * under which writing has been divided [also cannot be divided] from other generations of cultural meaning
myriad hybrid forms, commingling in material and ideological proliferations
(with Katie King's interest in women's writing technologies)
“presentist”: a practice of classification and categorization to access pasts
continuities and local discontinuities --> is ‘continuity’ (always) a universal abstraction?**
relative universalization
prescrptions for speech and silence
what is gained and what is lost when “tidying up the archive”? (a german problem)
prescriptions for speech and silence
“politeness phenomena”
‘plain speech’ for Quakers: rejection of ‘idle’ speech. preaching was another version of sacrificing seld-will, and was appropriate speech.
public preaching in particular was also a challenge to social relations and interaction --> a challenge to gender, speaking public was a cultural humiliation for individual women --> the Quaker women practiced preaching as a personal humiliation instrumental to their own salvation [! in a weird way i also did this to my self] #becoming woman-->{a liquefying aspect: “womanhood” was used metaphorically to identify those who could not preach, the surrender of (male) authority to God by men was “female”
•inhibiting woman's prophetic agencies
•“lack of discipline” becomes discipline --!--> forms of discipline that appear “undisciplined” or out of control
(Katie King ☞ Mack:) “Quakers not only bathed in a sea of polymorphous sipritual nature and eroticism; they occasionally wrote as if they had succeeded in floating above gender altogether”
“going naked as a sign” (and Quaker's “plain style”) --> Tasavof, ajayeb, and communication strategies of the so-called new science of the same time (of Quakers)
‘nakedness’ was simultaneously literally his own, a figure of the world, an example of many others, the abstract principle, and the essential truth of the one addressed
-simplicity, economy, and plainness; to reject all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style
preferring language of artisans, countrymen, merchants, of wits and scholars
How sin is strengthened 1657
Milk for babes 1661
A message from the spirit of truth 1658
realized eschatology
انا الحق, an-al-hagh
(Damrosch:) the performance of the sign thus entailed a doubly negative aspect: in the person exhibiting it, a conviction of fulfilling a divine mandate in opposition to personal self-interest; and in those who witnessed it, an offense to ordinary social standards that actually served t[...]
(35)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20[...]ad of the curve
being in history
being in a predicament مخمصه
being ready for something--anything
a life's trajectories traverse the materializations of scenes or pulsations
@Foad
atmospheres have:
•gradients
•valences
•moods
•sensations
•tempos
•lifespans
•
an atmospheric fill resonates the edge between the material and the potential
[my recording symptom in 2009 was an atmospheric (not symptomatic) attunement; constant recording; take on the texture and density of a background hum; to produce a felt; barely felt sense of something happening in the house;]
-my father disappearing into violent, abandoning drinking
every person is a nexus of compositional moments
a worlding taking place in difference
!♥ Stewart talking about her stepson becoming a homeless
“People like to simplify the situation of homelessness as if it is a self-evident process of abject poverty without a safety net or as if it's just a matter of personal blame or failure. But it is also an attunement to a singular world's texture and shine. The body has to learn to play itself like a musical instrument in this world's compositions.” [@Luisa, Sven, Foad]
(i lack certain learnings in sensory labor of attuning as a zerang زرنگ person)
(do i also have) the habit of a worlding
trying to find the rhythm of a new bodily life
find lines of attachment
***to become describable as a body (by learning how to affect and to be affected in this world such as it is)***
(in my work on ajayeb i am becoming more and more committed to learn ways of) having stories meant to pull me into the sentience of the world i am in --> give it density, texture*
Stewart (2010) is writing an ajayebnameh of her mother in cancer, stepson becoming a homeless, and her hometown
______________
[*]regionality دهاتی ,داهاتی
-an event that jumps from landscape to bodies and back (Stewart)
--"here"-->{the blue law, the seasons, the color red, place names اسم خیابان [*the past snaps into the present with the recognition of the street names], bodily resonances, materialities bundled together like a sac of leaves, sharp-edged collectivities like race, ethnicity, class, gender, generation and religion, }--> “one ventures from home”
-a thing hollowed out by its labyrinth of edges; incessant interlinking
-a contact aesthetics
-a virtual mapping of things in a state of potential (Thrift)
-a sheer recognition of a sheer recognition: “we are from around here"-->{as *active survivors of the unexpected encounter and knowing readers of emergent situations*} (Roazan)
-turns spaces into animate[...]
(36)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%21.2[...]onceptualize the intensities of form and force
affect studies has made me feel less alone because before it
...................................
There are [always] other epic and epochal forces in our midst.
...................................
evil eye --> دیو چشم زخم --> غش --> اغشی
...................................
باغ plethora of old and new humanities, selves - with Sardar: There are plants that provide various colors of foliage, or hedges and borders, or climb up fences, or play architectural roles (=/= presumption that we must have a identity & supposition that we discover our identity & the Socratic “know thyself” as a fundamental human urge) we exist with multiple identities invoked differently in different context. subscribed to an imagined “heritage” ready to kill and be killed to save some “essence” (=/= San'an)
sake of the difference, scum and finest of men
(for example “black”: to be confused: once excluded, now technically empowered, a dominant group in the rainbow, but still practically marginalised by the history that created and continues to operate practical exclusion.)
@Iranians: how much of the Other is actually located within me?
“a perfectly permissible aspiration” --into--> “an instrument of war” (Maalouf)
British identity is based on an assumption of authority that makes the world a familiar place, a proper theatre in which to continue being British. #Olearius
exclude the (unsavoury) foreigners <==> romanticised history and frozen tradition
*history as a deliberate human creation ==> acknowledgement of a common past ==> (a difference called) identity [= “our” similarity against “their” difference,] (submerging, barbarising and differentiating itself from another identity) [for example ancient Greece + Rome + Christianity = Europe] ==> monolith ==> conflict and death
•my (jub جوب) gutter photos =/= Tehran's Americanization of the high street.
•my photos of Rima =/= her selfie's merchandised model of individualism
a deep desire for association
various and diverse traditions ==> identity: “the means to synthesise similarity through difference and to see difference as discrete means of expressing basic similarity” (Sardar)
“balance of similarities and differences as a way of locating what it is that makes life worth living and what connects us with the rest of the changing world”
*...continuation of the Enlightenment project of progress through instrumental science. One source of Truth, and one Civilization, continues in its trajectory
garden =/= {North America's arrogance in cosmological proportion as worlded in Hollywood, and science seeing itself as the only manifestation of reality, The Platonic idea that truth is same for everyone}
...................................
[body politics]
Greeks --> body politics --> elabor[...]
(37)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%24.1[...]ectly permissible aspiration” --into--> “an instrument of war” (Maalouf)
British identity is based on an assumption of authority that makes the world a familiar place, a proper theatre in which to continue being British. #Olearius
exclude the (unsavoury) foreigners <==> romanticised history and frozen tradition
*history as a deliberate human creation ==> acknowledgement of a common past ==> (a difference called) identity [= “our” similarity against “their” difference,] (submerging, barbarising and differentiating itself from another identity) [for example ancient Greece + Rome + Christianity = Europe] ==> monolith ==> conflict and death
•my (jub جوب) gutter photos =/= Tehran's Americanization of the high street.
•my photos of Rima =/= her selfie's merchandised model of individualism
a deep desire for association
various and diverse traditions ==> identity: “the means to synthesise similarity through difference and to see difference as discrete means of expressing basic similarity” (Sardar)
“balance of similarities and differences as a way of locating what it is that makes life worth living and what connects us with the rest of the changing world”
*...continuation of the Enlightenment project of progress through instrumental science. One source of Truth, and one Civilization, continues in its trajectory
garden =/= {North America's arrogance in cosmological proportion as worlded in Hollywood, and science seeing itself as the only manifestation of reality, The Platonic idea that truth is same for everyone}
...................................
[body politics]
Greeks --> body politics --> elaborated images for human society ==> citizen, city
(Haraway on) the junction of natural forces and economic progress in the formative years of capitalist industrialism
(Haraway's emphasize and telling stories about the) union of the political and the physiological
ancient and modern justifications --> differences (seen as natural, given, inescapable ==>) as *moral*
the ‘content’ as well as the soicla function of science --> renderd utopian: (that means) we leave this central, legitimating body of skill and knowledge to undermine our efforts
[we must fight with all our power against utopian(~= dystopian) stories of science ~-> accepting that there are natural objects (bodies) separate from social relations] --> (we must refuse) the damaging distinction between pure and applied science & double ideology of firm scientific objectivity and mere personal subjectivity
we have granted science the role of a *fetish*: an object human beings make only to forget their role in creating it
...agreeing that “nature” is our enemy and that we must control our “natural” bodies (by techniques given us by biomedical science) at all costs to enter the hallowed kin[...]
(38)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%24.2[...]echanical origin of the notion,) “the total set of external circumstances necessary for the existence of every organism” [=/= Barad's intra-active model of explanation]
==> (rhetoric of) *dialectical conception of the relations between the organism and the environment* --instances such as “suited/adapted organism” and “favorable environment” [=/=? affordance theory]
Comte seeking a guarantee of his dialectical connection in the Newtonian principal of action and reaction:
organism --> variable
environment --> function
theory of the environment in Comte: (strictly mechanistic meaning of the word...) world --to--> man
Comte --> Lamarck: “milieu = circumstances = surrounding environment” ==suggest==> intuition of a *centered or focused formation* --> circle, sphere
***circumstances and surroundings still preserve a symbolic value, but milieu forgoes reference to any other relation other than that of a position forever denied by exteriority --?-->
چو پرگار میشدم...
چو نقطه...
گرد...
now refers to befor, here to its beyond, and so on without cease***
(in iranian poetry) environment: a pure system of relations without supports
*}==> environment: a universal instrument for dissolving *individualized organic synthesis* in the anonymity of universal elements and movements
(for example) metamerism of fish: “fish do not lead their lives themselves, the river has made them lead it, they are *persons without personality* (<== strictly mechanistic use of the notion of environment [<-- Descartes beast machine])
Lamarck: the environment dominates and control the evolution of living beings through the intermediary of *need*(= a subjective notion entailing reference to a positive pole of vital values)
(for Lamarck:) life and environment (which is unaware of it ~(Lamarckian *vitalism*:) ‘there is an originality of life of which the environment takes no account’) are two series of asynchronous events ==>
[*]adaptation: life's renewed effort to “stick” to an indifferent environment
[*]being: the effect of an effort [--?--> striving]
(--> this asynchronicity ==> “us” and “place”)
==> environment does nothing for life --Bichat--> “life: set of functions that resist death” (~-> tales of survival in America sci-fi TV series)
life resists solely by changing its shape in order to survive
Darwin explaining the ‘appearance of new forms’ conjunction of two mechanisms:
1- mechanism of the production of differences ~ variation
2- mechanism of the reduction and criticism of these produced differences ~ vital competition and natural selection
(for Darwin the fundamental biological relationship:) the relationship of the living being to other living beings --> precedence over environment conceived as a set of physical forces
-competition of forces
[...]
(39)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%25.7[...]thless ambition & [modernity's time:] metronomic synchrony 🕓)
•animating feral and partial connections
•remind us of an *impossible present* (that we live in)
* (embodied) contingency, asymmetry, indeterminacy *
•hauntings (are not immaterial!) : presumptive absence (presumed in the absence)
lures
--> monsters: [--> Kirsten's objects ~ small stories, little niches with ghostly contours (like a car's tire) ~ things growing in abundant]
•**bodies tumbled into bodies** (“monsters” <== assets and wastes (animal entanglement with the burning man) <-- bad symbiosis)
* unspectacular afterlife of discarded things * (debris of capitalist waste)
•weaving magical figures, conjuring fictions
•constant speculation, that are fed and touched, reparative and tender
•textured, formful, colorful
*lure: things that evoke or capture feelings and responses ==> to lure out relational responses
>
desire (superposition)
--> optics: (a form of distance) [--> Sina's stories ~ superposition [different scales] of dispersed times [~ unruly temporalities], multiple practice of knowing smallbig spacetime mattering]
•**positions tumbled into positions** (tumbled into politics: some instruments of seeing producing perspectives are more guilty than others)
* (disembodied) multiple practices of knowing --> landscapes: arrangement of life and afterlife, space that grows from ‘endings’ <== ‘death of’(s) ~~> contaminated (stories/diversities)
--> diagram: http://ajayeb.net/?q=rationalizable
(Sina performing) diffractive optics of knowing ==> ongoing articulation [=/= perspective]
•i shouldn't be talking, opening this
|
•remembrance --> Bambi's mother studies {what if remembering is something totally different than “lost member"}
|
•fox story --> animal trap:
◦perception {rhetorical perception, evil perception, etc.}
◦lure 🌀 can't stop following, trap: nearby-ness, becoming bodily, engaged in perspectival game and will ==> fox's relation to the forest [he is suspicious and rend =/= *lured into desiring & trusting* : we bring our lures and needs towards each other, (sometimes it is) critique is an art that tangles with what you are proposing, like fox in a lure (octopus is much better with lures than fox)]
◾propositions
◾abstractions --> (i love) ideas: to animate humans, erotic lure for soul ==> *metamorphic attention*
|
•omen --> potent sign of alarm
|
•evil {category crossing monsters [~= ajayeb's context of evil], force of liberation, beauty, complexity}
|
•Ursula's sea (from little mermaid):
◦the way she says “yes” {multisensorial call “yes” and “more"}
◦her laughter {develish perception, perceptual joke, joy of corrupting her morality [~ her heroism: who the hero is and how to live[...]
(40)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%27.5[...]ernment protests in Rangoon/Yangon in the late 1980) described their entry into the political sphere (less exposed to the object of social injustice, not in terms of an originally shared project, not a shared analysis, but rather) as the result of a situational convergence (from which an ideological project had yet to be fabricated)
(to understand) your relationship to the political as *subjection to force* (and hence) ~=> *the violation of subjectivity* (=/= acceding to a fuller subjectivity)
they were just there (summoned to events the nature of which they did not know in advance) --> *ephemeral mobilization*:
•by anonymous calls (precipitated objectless gatherings by cell phone messaging, an anonymous call of an ideologically vacant sort)
•ephemeral rumors
•without ideological commitment
•by curiosity (gathered only to find out why others were gathered)
•attraction to spectacle
•to consume, pornographically, the visceral images of police and military violence
•
--> the idea of participation loses its meaning
formation of a crowd
materialization of the state's force
ephemeral mobilization (which later sets the stage for politicization) is a familiar instrument of power
the group:
•(has a) monopoly on violence
•manifestation of a will to democracy (for example the way Iranian movements were read by international bodies)
ahistoricism of conspiratorial orientation --> “powerful but secret instrumentalities ==> temporary formations” --misses--> the transformations of social consciousness and political possibility
(to open to the thought of a world beyond you)
narratives of accidental politicization (~ movements emerging from crowds without ever becoming masses or classes)
--✕--> from the state
--✕--> from the transnational media + whose circuits the images of these convergences travel
--> an experience of immediacy (as the origin of politics =/= encounter with representations of the world), sudden activation of an immediate presence in the public sphere --> political conceived as itself being contingent
to resignify and reorient the problem of the political in terms of civilizational difference (rather than ideological, and hence economic, difference)
the so-called nocturnal sudden death syndrome
rapacious female specter
in the fear of being killed by this nearly limitless desire for female dead, men (Thai constructor workers in Singapore) started to paint their nails, attired themselves as women before going to sleep
[seek to accomplish in advance what is feared, emasculation]--> **mimesis of a crisis foretold**
(khwan)
a thread of unspun cotton tied about the wrist --to--> prevent the dissipation of one's vital essence
(mostly[...]
(41)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%28[...] causal logics rooted in the idea of interest and expressed as a faith in the liberatory capacity of knowledge
bearers of popular political agency
mediatized neoliberalizing world
(identification with middle classness [its universal interests] -->) aspiring to classlessness
spirit mediums dressing themselves in the costumes of ancient priests
inadvertent and accidental politicization ~=> an awkward form --> opening to the liberation of the political from historical determination and its various teleologies
the fall of Soviet socialism ==>
•disorientation of structures within which opposition to the injustices of the capitalism could be articulated
•more ethical conception of democracy
(rethinking the conditions of) posibility for political organization (and political forms)
-(let's not) programmatic politics --reverting--> to a parodic reinstantiation of older oligarchic forms
-(let's not) reduction of accidental to trauma [~= incapacity to speak]
crowd: a context in which one can become subject to powers that exceed one --> for which spirit possession offers a normative form
the crowd lends people an instrument by which they can become audible (to the extend that they lose their own particular voice) ~= the medium lends a body to the spirit who can speaks in a voice from elsewhere
[*]crowd: a mode of the (political) sublime : one dies as a subject to be recognized as a citizen(= one who has a voice)
*sorcery: the translation of one fact into the form of another*
an antecedent rendered as cause
when we say something needs retrospection, it means narration (that allows the accidental to appear as that which will recur, not an anxious anticipation, but *a resolute commitment to an ethics of the event) =/= retrospection structured only by the question of origin (--> an approach to *curing trauma*)
(sustainable forms of) social good and distributive justice
ghosts ~= signs of reason's failure
•failure =/= absence of rational faculties
•[*]reason: that which arises to transcend a kind of being that would live only in the mode of the accidental
Morris's ‘giving up ghosts’ --> ***an acknowledgment of the accidental ground on which reason enacts the enabling violence of its regulative ideals***
-*enabling violence* --{trauma =/= accident}--> accidental events (such as the convergence of a crowd in a street in Bangkok) can precisely be rendered as the “ground” of socially transformative politics and institutional interventions (without original motivations)
(?what is at stake in elaborating the relationship between [Derrida's]:)
•grounding --> gesture of rational calculation and decision making
•running ground --> moment of acc[...]
(43)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%28.2[...]rwise about both the past and the future*
(the failure of political imagination in only speculating about the future)
*(the basis of) the political: transcendence of the accidental*
Morris shows how the potential force of the political depends on the recognition that it is not merely that which can be relegated to the past
...................................
(Bubandt ☞ Morris ☞ in Buli, North Maluku in Indonesia) witchcraft: ambivalent aporia, the interminable problem of life ~= empty seashell (shell in which there might or might not be an occupant, provides the de-sexualized figure for doubt that saturates the consciousness of those who inhabit the world of witchcraft, an internally split subject)
anthropology of witchcraft
--✕--> charges of residual exoticism by reading witchcraft phenomena as sites at which the transformations of modernity are mediated and made available for resignification
-to displace (witchcraft) into the domain of representation --> capacity to resignify the historical real
lethal violence at Marikana (South Africa, August 2012) --> muti magic was a not matter of resurgent tradition (for the black South African analysts), rather, magic was a visceral, strategically instrumentalizable, and absolutely lethal power. the kind that enables people to go to war, the kind that operates at the point where language fails (--?--> the use of poetic mystical enchantment in Iran-Iraq war for sending young soldiers to the battle fields)
witchcraft only becomes visible in the moment of accusation, as a retrospective effect of oracular diagnosis (Evans-Pritchard)
(...no one is sure that he has indeed heard a witch)--Bubandt--> witchcraft: a condition of doubt (=/= a system of belief)
--✕--> Morris questions: doubt =/=? belief
Morris asks --> doubt:
•whether illness is caused by witchcraft?
•whether one's neighbor is a witch?
•*whether one is oneself a witch?*
in Buli (=/= The Magicians TV series, Harry Potter film version of magic):
•witchcraft does not explain the world
•witchcraft is not an alternative mode of reasoning
•witchcraft does not permit anyone to control the forces (that assault and wound human being)
•witchcraft provides neither certitude nor escape from the anxieties that death bears for the living
(the interiority of the other is unknown and unknowable ==>)
[*]witchcraft ==provides==>
•an idiom in which the world's very immunity to explanation is affirmed (often with violent and terrifying consequence)
•figures and narrative forms in which to address (also reproduce) the opacity and ambivalence of sociality
[context:]
the other (like the empty seashell) is unknowable, though we must engage others and seek recognition from them to escape solitude and death [...] in for[...]
(44)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%28.4[...]role in this drama, but they do not explain it. @OSP & Femke)
-women's understanding of improper English of Zuma's speech: a communicational fail that (from their perspective) is associated with illegality, corruption, and violence
(not to embrace) the kind of logocentric historiography that imagines literacy to constitute a secondary mediation of a primal and autoaffective orality
witches: *technicians of a speech* in which the identity between word and world reaches its maximal extent, when the mere utterance of a spell (even when that utterance is nonverbal) is thought to cause things to happen
zamazama's literacy: the means for communication across difference ==> the mastery of mediation and thus its effacement (=/= signify the secondary mediation of a primary orality)
...a society that is being reconstituted around a commitment to constitutional multilingualism and democratic proceduralism
rituals of governmentality
delay and deferral
fantasy of immediacy -->
•messianic movements
•direct-action politics
•various kinds of violence
•
}==> language
•hollowed out of ambiguity
•pried away from subjectivity
•instrumentalized in slogans and catchphrases (from obsolescent ideological programs)
*violent drive to immediacy* (~= direct-action politics)
(more than) the leakage of affect into a ritually rationalist space
transmission and identification needs and secures the appearance of their exteriority
slogan --> traverse the gap between word and deed, convert the difficult tasks of education and redistribution into the clarion call ~-> pop songs (anyone can utter these words and in so doing find themselves enthralled by the strange sensation of speaking someone else's words and simultaneously experiencing them as one's own)
*slogan: a deeply reified speech (at once vacuous and overfull) at the point were the boundary between language and thing threatens to dissolve -->
•(its communicative function:) *solicitation of identity among speakers*
•(its primary signification:) the fact of *collective utterance* (=/= dialogism)
[*]slogan: literalist response to the mundane crises of mediation (in a political rally) [reduced to the most instrumental dimension]
the awkward trace of dubious literacy (in miners message inscribed on the placard) --> resistance into the communicative process
who/what speaks?
(case of EFF:)
•pidgin, minimal and unambiguous message borders on telegraphic code (men miners)
•typographically standardized form, graphical form of a chant (women demo) --> vocalization of a slogan that anyone can speak ==> resignification and redeployment
(public sphere avowes) necessity of mediation but also of its effacement =/= short circui[...]
(45)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%28.7[...]•direct-action politics
•various kinds of violence
•
}==> language
•hollowed out of ambiguity
•pried away from subjectivity
•instrumentalized in slogans and catchphrases (from obsolescent ideological programs)
*violent drive to immediacy* (~= direct-action politics)
(more than) the leakage of affect into a ritually rationalist space
transmission and identification needs and secures the appearance of their exteriority
slogan --> traverse the gap between word and deed, convert the difficult tasks of education and redistribution into the clarion call ~-> pop songs (anyone can utter these words and in so doing find themselves enthralled by the strange sensation of speaking someone else's words and simultaneously experiencing them as one's own)
*slogan: a deeply reified speech (at once vacuous and overfull) at the point were the boundary between language and thing threatens to dissolve -->
•(its communicative function:) *solicitation of identity among speakers*
•(its primary signification:) the fact of *collective utterance* (=/= dialogism)
[*]slogan: literalist response to the mundane crises of mediation (in a political rally) [reduced to the most instrumental dimension]
the awkward trace of dubious literacy (in miners message inscribed on the placard) --> resistance into the communicative process
who/what speaks?
(case of EFF:)
•pidgin, minimal and unambiguous message borders on telegraphic code (men miners)
•typographically standardized form, graphical form of a chant (women demo) --> vocalization of a slogan that anyone can speak ==> resignification and redeployment
(public sphere avowes) necessity of mediation but also of its effacement =/= short circuiting to which the slogan aspires with language that is stripped of ambiguity
messianism: the drive to transcend mediation altogether
(Jassem's mode of) explaining what had happened with all the art of a storyteller and truly Spartican authority
-[Spartan athlete: marked by simplicity, frugality, or avoidance of luxury and comfort]
(leftist activist:) those who claim better representational capacities (because the representative function has been confused with a governing function) + aspiration for something beyond this representation
performance of moral righteousness
exclusion at the threshold of liberation
unconscious mythopoetic structures
insistence on being clandestine = claim of importance
offering oneself in the role of “leader” in the pursuit of immediacy
strike as an ecstatic experience of collectivity and self-presencing =/= self-representation, mediation
Marx's view of the role of the individual in history, in his Eightee[...]
(46)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%28.8[...]◾exorcists building on the techniques of inquisitors and witch hunters --> possession acts as the bridge across this chasm
•neurologists and psychologists construct the same
--✕--> (Malinowski's) anthropologists: fieldworkers as truth-tellers returning from the dark corners of the real (the witches are no longer explicitly the target of the inquiry)
Häxan's real object: the specter of sheer nonsense
hunt (even in objective scientific mastery) --> fueled by a desire operationalized in a method of being close enough to something to sense it
...................................
(?every time we have to) show how *the word (that we are using) relates to meaning*
Christensen makes every effort to craft a witch that is real to us : ontological fluidity of a cinematic image ==> “Häxan = word + image + thing”
metoposcopy: the expression of reasoning was to be found on the face, (dating back to Girolamo Cardano and the Renaissance) the operation of reason as the weaving together of images in the mind --> a proto-cinematic theory of the relation between image and thought if ever there was one
•respectable scholar indexes himself through his sources
•authoritarian first-person tenor --> instrumentally impersonal tenor
•establishing the X as a chapter within a much longer constellation of practices, discourses, traditions, and institutions
Kieckhefer --> how the long history of practical natural magic was enfolded into the specificity of European witchcraft in the late Middle Ages
Christ in Limbo --> Christensen's parallel editing ==> moving representation of a terra-centered universe <~~ elaborate wonders found in baroque wunderkammer (meticulously assembled by the German elite)
Renaissance Hermeticism:
writings of Hermes Trimesgistus ~=> foundation for:
•Ficino's relatively mild natural magic
•Pico della Mirandola's Christian Cabalist
•Agrippa's Christian magus
•Tommaso Campanella's (1568–1639) utopian City of the Sun
•Bruno's full-blown Hermetic–Cabalist (through the power of astrology and magic to bypass the Church altogether)
•
...rippling effects of the Hermetic–Cabalist tradition -->
•scrupulously mathematical astrology of Girolamo Cardano
•the rigorously empirical studies of the natural world demanded by Bruno's attempts to operate as a magus
}==> (paved the way for) science of Newton and Copernicus --> a new metaphysics to emerge
attacks on Renaissance magic and the Hermetic–Cabalist tradition (that authorized witch) ==> anti-witch treatises
(case of Giordano Bruno's execution --> Hermetic magic and Cabalism) how in the 16th century: “superstition = crime”
(Christensen attributing) --> Hortus deliciarum, a largely cohesive image of hell to [...]
(47)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.7[...]rdano
•the rigorously empirical studies of the natural world demanded by Bruno's attempts to operate as a magus
}==> (paved the way for) science of Newton and Copernicus --> a new metaphysics to emerge
attacks on Renaissance magic and the Hermetic–Cabalist tradition (that authorized witch) ==> anti-witch treatises
(case of Giordano Bruno's execution --> Hermetic magic and Cabalism) how in the 16th century: “superstition = crime”
(Christensen attributing) --> Hortus deliciarum, a largely cohesive image of hell to a period when the nature of hell's location and “topography” was a subject of fierce theological debate
-he strategically ignores debates and alternate conceptions of damnation that existed in the 15th and 16th centuries in Europe
[that which you choose] works to amplify affect more than further analysis (--> such as Christensen's attempt to heighten the fiery terror of the scene by billowing smoke ==> عام generic explanation)
...a palpable sexual dimension crepting into Christensen's thesis <-- images of women “sneaking away” to attend Sabbats
Häxan visually grounds itself in citable evidence from the start
•cinema: (as an instrument for “recording reality”) a vehicle 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 view[...]
(48)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.7[...] later Middle Ages) practices such as persecuting witchcraft to meditating on Christ = techniques (of sorting operation) to draw distinctions among visual phenomena, differentiating, say, physical objects from fantasies, dreams, and diabolical or artful deceptions
<--artist-- image-makers specialized in manipulating one thing (their materials) in order that a viewer should see something else ~ *to make something invisible visible* [<-- this is always ideological, and is very common in art]
(#testing) the objective knowledge possessed by the uncanny (in witch's pathological language of diabolic proofs) ==> witch must be experienced in her own milieu, a satanic biome, her state in nature
...................................
typical in 17th century: tacit mutuality of word & image
-artists habitually gave their paintings titles, mottoes, tags and quotations, and their works abound in literary allusions
-explicit interleaving of the verbal and visual
/>
cat feces and dove hearts boiled in the moonlight
stereotype of a debased and corrupted priest
object of the customer's affections
Protestant discourse against the Catholic Church in the 16th century --> artists of the period extended the instrumentalization of slander through the production of proto-pornographic images of bishops, priests, and the pope engaged in myriad obscene acts --depicting--> the emotional states and desires of the clergy
magical salves (considered particularly powerful and troubling by demonologists)
Häxan self-positioning as a scientific investigation + constantly pull back from the dramatic outcomes of what Häxan depicts
Häxan's demonstration of the power of the witch =/= paranoid delusions of witch- crazed villagers
widely held set of beliefs regarding the “nature” or “essence” of women
Christina Larner's assertion that witch trials wials were gender-related (but not by definition gender-specific)
--Baxstrom--> *women often came under suspicion of being witches because they were understood to be particularly susceptible to lust, avarice, and jealousy by their very nature [~ 16th century: **women “naturally” susceptible to witchcraft*** + women were presumed to possess elements of the nature more than men] =/= Federici's understanding of witch-hunt as straight-forward instance of misogyny*
--Roper--> *one cannot approach witchcraft or possession from a vantage point in the present without granting some legitimate status to the ways in which the Devil and witches were not only asserted to be real but were experienced as such*
(debates over) politics and evil
satan's malefic presence (in Dreyer's Leaves)
*a density of parallelisms*
Dreyer figures Satan as a problem of the present
“Bolsheviks violently engaged in revolutionary struggle = manifestation of[...]
(49)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%30.1[...]ry of nonsense
= ***a deep appreciation of (that might seem misguided to us):
•cause-and-effect relations
•forces at work in the natural world
(=/= indifference to the truth, retreat into superstition)
~
[these] cases suggestive of and empirically linked to general laws. the case said something about the world, and once a case was established, it would spread like a contagion (=/= proof of misogy or genocide as Federici asserts)
Flaherty ==> a certain truth regarding the total social environment : force of Nanook's life not only provides empirical evidence as to his mode of living but also allows for a refl ection on “nature”, “humanness”, “modernity” rooted in the haptic qualities of Flaherty's images
maleficium (of the witch --> palpable: destructive weather magic, assault of farm animals, sickness, unexplained death, etc.)
saturn's mythological violence <--> satan
the idea that saturn serves as patron to social outliers: the poor, elderly, disabled, criminals, jews, cannibals, magicians, witches
(early modern period -->) **satan = the principal authority of the natural world**, “master of the knowledge of natural properties and the techniques of their instrumentalization” =/= techniques of the healer =/= empirical instruments
(de Certeau observed that) every exercise of trained judgment is authorized through the [*]dark: ratifying force of theology
**dark forces --ratify--> all forms of natural expertise**
mastery of nonsense --driving--> confirming the suspicion of witchcraft = a form of non-knowledge ==opens==> a gap in knowing (specifically, ‘who’)
line of accusation that was quite common in the early modern period --> “the desperate search for the cause of what was other wise an unexplained illness or misfortune was frequently the catalyst for specific witchcraft accusations between friends, acquaintances, and often between family members themselves”
16th century --> this violence now bore the sanction of both secular and religious institutions (<== peasant complaints of maleficium زيان <== human beings have been suffering misfortune, illness, and death long before the power of the witch was felt during this time)
Dominican order --> aggressively promoting the cult of the virgin, to the status of the “perfect” woman {elevating the status of sexual neurosis to a virtue} =/= lustful credulous nature of common women (who were often associated with the temptations of Eve)
*conflicted status of women*
•in Häxan --through--> sternly patrilineal visual motifs (condescension + bemusement --> frail + hysterical)
•in ajayeb bestiary -->
(Häxan's) witch hunters act in accordance with their own procedures for investigating truth and falsehood and not simply out of malice, fear, or stup[...]
(50)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%30.2[...]cted) violence <--> composed alterity of the scene's stylistic correspondence between accused and inquisitor
(Christensen's method of) oscillating rhythm between tableau and face
-suppressing perspective and depth of field in favor of a continuous affective movement as expressed in the face
--Baxstrom--> Häxan is not grounded in a setting here; it is grounded in the forms of life present in the shot
sense of corporeal alienation from herself --> inhabit a script not her own --> critical to the “success” of witchcraft confessions
witch stereotype:
•Wild Ride
•pact with the Devil solemnized through sexual intercourse-
•cannibalism
•دیگ cauldron as the locus of the rite
•*massed, coordinated, female nature of witchcraft*
judicial machinery of a witch trial required evidence of criminal acts that (by definition) could not be witnessed
in Häxan
-the power of cinema to witness exceeds that of the witch hunter
-what it does is “worse” than rigging the truth --> it aligns itself (not with a concept of truth or the real but) with the power of the witch
(Häxan and many criminal story films) works through instruments of knowing rooted in the *dynamics of the confession*
#ajayeb storytelling
...clumsily rendered, the wriggling demons reflect an interesting set of variations to the witch stereotype, both ontologically and visually
(Maria giving birth to demon children)
Thomas Aquinas's theorization of the *virtual bodies* (of angels)
-angels do not need bodies for their sake but for ours --> unnatural couplings could produce children, but that the bodily essence of devils would rule out the possibility that these children would themselves be demons
16th century author primarily concern with Satan's ability to manipulate and pervert language (including erotic language)
wild flowing hair of the women --> a common visual metaphor for sexual promiscuity and disorder
images of cannibalistic night witches were explicitly a demonological variation on long-standing popular conceptions
...................................
xxxxxx
persistence of witchcraft
how witchcraft might still exist as more than just one of many choices available on a personal empowerment “menu”
-how rituals pertaining to magic came to be understood as a problem of knowledge
*magic binds forces that would otherwise overflow life*
a great subterranean need to “bind” forces that would otherwise exert themselves with impunity and without any greater explanation or meaning
--> enacting a dehistorification of a form of life that would otherwise be overwhelmed by the brutal timeliness of historical being
Baxs[...]
(52)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%30.5[...]e denied the possibility of a field researcher's being able to assume the *point of view* of the native in the bold manner that Malinowski declared was not only possible but actually the highest aspiration for anthropology [--> also the aspiration for critical feedback?]
(counterepistemological) Levy-Bruhl =/= Malinowski --> ([*]feedback: an art of engagement informed by critical relatedness and) **anthropological expertise grounded in the careful cultivation of a *sympathetic knowledge of the other* as a way of empirically knowing that other** : *method of sympathetic association*
in apass --> the laboratory of the times located in the person of the researcher himself
grounded Levy-Bruhl's science in the real <== he rejected a focus on a knowable singular subject in favor of a science based on the ability to detect and interpret the invisible forces that worked to produce a particular “mentality” [of the artist in the case of bad feedback]
(Levy-Bruhl's mistake:) systematic interrogation and illumination of mobile invisible forces that produced beings wholly unlike us =/={ method of sympathetic association --> participant observation: the felicity of evidence produced through the qualitative experiential methodological instruments [--> comes to define the modes of critical relatedness in apass]
(since 15th century) investigators ==> staking one's claim to the real on the mastery of those forces that relentlessly elude a plain direct visibility or sensibility ~~--> human sciences
*we still hunt ghosts, fueled by a desire operationalized in a method of being close enough to something to sense it, because our form of mastery demands a closeness to things unseen, unprovable, indeed ‘nonsensical,’ yet unquestionably ‘there’* -Baxstrom
...................................
Despret on Derrida's animal
the act of being seen by an animal ==> Derrida groups together on the end hand “scientists and philosophers =/= prophets and poets”
{ Bateson, Goodall, Bekoff, Smuts, and many others have met the gaze of the living diverse animals and in response undone an redone themselves & their sciences =/= Derrida }--Haraway--> why did Derrida leave unexamined the practices of communication outside the writing technologies he did know how talk about? ==> philosopher (speak in the absence of animal) =/= theoreticians (speak face to face with the animal) =/= scientists
•Derrida's original positioning: to speak (starting) from [~ a partir de] a real animal and not about animality [being animal] : to speak in the animal's presence and not in its absence --> this [this way of talking about animal is against his philosophical tradition] is not particularly original, it is part of the very game of philosophy: *to fight with ancestors and contemporaries [~=? recalcitrance تمرد tamarod] about great and noble ide[...]
(53)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%31.2[...]erference]
•[*]diffraction: mapping of interference ==Haraway==> where the *effects of* differences appear =/= differences appear
meaning + matter + action (always live together)
telegram animal carousel: nonhuman-animal-machine
my room/bedroom (~-> Cinderella's attic, architecture of containment)
overlapping perceptual worlds
synaesthetic force of perceiving and feeling, processing and mattering --> transposing of senses
immersion
kinesthesia
numerous haptic registers
we are transsensual
[*]sensation: the vibratory force in all organisms that seduces, sexulizes, entices, and mesmerizes the body
vibrate
oscillate
wave
aquarium ==> new sensations: deep-sea drifting and shimmering for upright opaque hominids --> that are sent further adrift through experience in yet unknown expressions
[*]ecology: ambivalent powerful elusive ways of composing through histories of interation, relationality, interconnection, and materiality
relational matter =/= matter of who has agency
Hayward's [and my] attention and sensuous reach are solicited by the ctenophores in the display, a display that instrumentalizes the jellies diffracting cilia and solicits my senses
-jellies participation in worldhood (further becomings)?
immersed in deep marine technoscience worlds...
...................................
Marx: human begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence ==> they produce their actual material life
--Haraway--> Marx understood relational sensuousness, and he thought deeply about the metabolism between human beings and the rest of the world enacted in living labor --> the humanist teleology of that labor: making of man himself
horses
oxen
police dogs
rescue dogs
messenger pigeons
Despret ☞ Ridout
(theological critical roots of theater:) before tragedy is its infancy [infans: the condition of those who are without language]
the division of labor, the death of god, the establishment of human dominion over the animals, the birth of tragedy may all be seen as simultaneous(?)
--> animals off stage in western theatre, to hide its origins in these moments of *inaugural violence* + the institution of division of labor
what was the animal doing on stage before the birth of tragedy?
mythical origin ==create==> stories (fabulous, fabulating): [storytelling: seeking for] means of making a vanished experience available again in the contemporary world (~ storytelling) ~/= *storymaking: creation of memories, the construction of a history that renders the present and the future richer in possibilities* [not just for your s[...]
(54)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%35.8[...]f
horses
oxen
police dogs
rescue dogs
messenger pigeons
Despret ☞ Ridout
(theological critical roots of theater:) before tragedy is its infancy [infans: the condition of those who are without language]
the division of labor, the death of god, the establishment of human dominion over the animals, the birth of tragedy may all be seen as simultaneous(?)
--> animals off stage in western theatre, to hide its origins in these moments of *inaugural violence* + the institution of division of labor
what was the animal doing on stage before the birth of tragedy?
mythical origin ==create==> stories (fabulous, fabulating): [storytelling: seeking for] means of making a vanished experience available again in the contemporary world (~ storytelling) ~/= *storymaking: creation of memories, the construction of a history that renders the present and the future richer in possibilities* [not just for your self and your kind, as Hollywood or the brands do it: personalize experiences at scale]
animals do not appear to work, in the referential framework that emerges from the division of labor / exclusion from labor [the idea of animals have been transformed into “potential instruments of satisfaction"] --> it is held that what animals do, they do it “naturally” : as if answering our needs is the same thing as *acting according to nature* [---> go to cooking manga anime Shokugeki no Soma, the nature of serving]
--Despret--> division of labor: a matter of dividing: those who explicitly really work =/= those who are only following a bent in their nature (a necessity of a biological rather than a historical sort)
Baratay --> possibility of writing a history from the animal's point of view
+ epistemic, conceptual, ideological obstacles
when the animals start paying attention to what humans are offering ir demanding, and then either accept, play for time, resist, refuse... stories in which they exhibit unusual skills or behaviours = acculturation: acceptance from the animal (not just humans imposing their will), dialogue between the two, influence of the animal upon the human
(thinking about animals that we raise in order to kill and eat them)
asking breeders: could one in any way way that their animals collaborate with them and work with them?
•the immediate general response is: no --✕--> yet you hear many stories about animals who did in fact participate in the work of those who were raising them : they acted in deliberate ways of their own volition
-do animals work?
the answer to this question will change something --> (Despret's pragmatism) *pragmatic position = involving a question whose answer turns out to have consequences*
(Porcher ☞ Tapper:) relationships between human and nonhuman animals (judging that this rel[...]
(55)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%35.9[...]on or collapsed selves =/= interpenetration
border crossing: forces and excitations of location, of neighborhood
sensation: a composite of affects and percepts
personal =/= individual
Hayward's story is shaped by repression : a wish to be seen as she wants to be seen =/= Sina
story: act of violence and deception
medicalized legacy of transsexual's self-narrativizing --> synchronous field of wrong body-ness ==> account
accurate accounting =/= describe transitional sensations
described: formalistically detailed transpositional
post-animal: the afterward of the animal is meat
bumptious coherence of bodies
(neighborhoods) designed to make some vulnerable while others safe
percussed by bullets or by traffic
*threat as invitation*
جراحی زیبایی who alter themselves through surgeries and hormonoes *to feel themselves differently*
(shia in iran is islam after a cosmetic surgery to feel their religion differently)
*changing sex is about changing senses and species* @Foad
depending on my needs, i pretend not to understand
instrumentalization of animal life
surgically changing body
technique of eschew اجتناب
eschewing a nature or culture distinction
sex in pieces
spheres of imagination
[my work:] transhistorical diagnosis: reading in pieces neighborhoods of imagination (opposed to what is available)
#sleep-walking
web-building beasts (spiders) [webbing =/=? weaving: a feminine trope?] }--> expression of the body
my fleshy referent 🕷
over-reaching subjects
*spider's web ==propose==> home and territory are of and with the body*
spiders are scenes of arachnophobia and revultion
extending bodily substance through sexual transition
(arrangment of) sensorial milieu of the self + profusion of the world
(trope for fear as emancipation)
an urban designer
weaver of cityscapes
[*]web: skeletalization of the surface, extension of the surface affects of the spider, dynamic threshold of sensibility --Hayward--> (the body is strengthed) react through a spatial and temporal generativity --> body: inter- and intra-threadings of many sensuous vectors that relay like the spider in its web ~= cities, web-builders
*center of her web = her touch world*
-moves quickly, even uncannily, there/then not, sill/in motion, unsettling/reassuring (seems to trap only dust)
*lived-web = optic skin, a resounding connective tissue
(spider's capacities to) create, syncopate, improvise
(spider and me in the appartment) we resonate in relation to our different movements and processes
[*]tra[...]
(56)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%38.1[...] woman, a gendered neighbor, a historical subject
(being under the influence of the moon:) enfleshing elements of your (celestial) environment within yourself and expressing parts of yourself back into the (terrestrial social) environment
identification: “i am like you = i know you” ==> resolve the divide of difference
(let's not make that kind of garden again -->) inclusion in Adam's nameable Eden of belonging (=/= Cinderella's transbestiary)
cross-species rejoiners
mended spiderwebs
error is (still a kind of) expression
human: composites of zoo-intensities, animated movements, bio-differentials
(i always felt like this) my perceptions are refracted through psychic forces
anxious
uncertain
paranoid
“is everyone staring at the morphing ‘it’ that is me”
(understanding of art in contemporary european performance -->) art = intensifying bodily substance, to resonate otherwise, to feel different corpo(realities) through zones of transition and intervention, provocation = responses to our *capacities to resonate*
...medicalization, recognition, subjectification, instrumentalization, and responsiveness being with animals
...................................
what does the maze mean for the rat?
what a maze can mean?
experimental psychology --> subjects conform most often to the expectations of their experimenters [--Despret--> they are *artifactual*]
-*the scientists think that the subject respond to the question that is posed to them, but the subject in fact respond to another question* -->{question that is addressed to them = protocol to which they are submitted}--> they can take a position in relation to what is proposed to them in scientific research [=/= Cinderella's mice subject]
the idea that (the assumption that) their subjects could be influenced by what the scientist was looking for ==> the experimenters tried most often to camouflage the real questions guiding their research
-the assumption that the subjects do not do what they do because the experimenter asked then to do so, but for more abstract and more general reasons ==> “ecological validity”
-*the subjects most of the time not only predict what the experimenter expects of them but they comform to it*
-[they responded to] the way in which they interpreted that which was expected of them (<-- just because they are nice people.) “when the subjects were asked why they did all this [absurd tedious repetitive] work without objecting and without posing other questions, they responded that they had thought that is was a test of endurance. and they obeyed because a scientist asked then to”
difference between hypnotized subjects and “normal” experimental subjects
[...]
(57)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%38.3[...]ne 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 difficult landscapes (Lindsey Collins - phd) -->{climbing mountain peaks and summits figures as a journey similar to a struggle with disease --- wilderness therapy creates what she calls a **slow wilderness,** in which risk is made manageable and contained, and fast and risky aesthetics, coded as masculine, are traded for ecofeminist trope[...]
(58)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%40.6[...]he mountain or ocean?” An old form of preying. He introduces an intimate perspective into the geological time-continuum. The thousands-years-old div as geological phenomena (in Ferdowsi + Mu'in diagram:) structure and morphology of a landscape made by bacteria, [“...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 o[...]
(59)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%41.7[...]reath if life + *used by demonic spirits as a means to produce material effects*)
*spirit: celestial origin to the “innate heat” (calidum innatum) of living creatures
effects of solar heat on air : act of vitalization
pneuma of the stoics + astral body of Neoplatonic philosophy + medical spirits of Galenic medicine }==>
•Renaissance
•(christian notion of) Holy Ghost
•the idea of close connection between wind and divine power (in Bible)
(in alchemical view) spirits were somehow connected ti air <== quintessences were often separated from raw substances in the form of vapours
ajayebnameh ~= natural magic
*kinds of natural motions*
1. avoidance of avacum: from the form of a portion of air, when it does not want to be either expanded further or separated (from other matter). horror vacui --kinetic--> motion was regarded as due to a property of a specific part of the machine
2. resistance to excessive compression: the form of basic matter should not become less that what is right for it
3. the tendency of heavy things to descend and of light things to rise
air = vital spirit that joins things together, resounding spirit if the world instrument
Paraceksian theory of aerial niter
(an active principle) aerial version of earthly gunpowder - responsible for life, combustion, thunder, lightning, (some) illnesses
--> connecting the activity of air + life + weather phenomena
wind: (***in its irreducible qualitative variety***) expression of cosmic spirit + محرک باعث a motive force to be accurately estimated
منجنیق ~= geometry هندسه *pneumatic engineering* : distinction between moving and moved components ==evoke==> motive forces
elaborated pneumatic machines
mechanical clocks
tension of strings
*wind ==> celestial influences*
(Cardano regarded) expansion and contraction of air as symmetrical phenomena, both consisting a source of motive forces
-in the universe the element air had the function of receiving and conveying fiery celestial influences on earth providing health and wellbeing fir living creatures
Telesion (1509-1588)
soul and spirit identified with each other as a very subtle material substance pervading all bodies and making them capable of sensing and reacting to rach other with pleasure or pain
*(man’s) immortal soul did not play any role in determining natural phenomena*
innate heat of living bodies
wind: humid vapours flowing through the air
thinness of wind vapours
16th century
expiration and inspiration of the lungs
Holy Spirit is expressed in the nature of winds
interest in wind and weather was kindled by reports reaching Europe from the East and West Indies ab[...]
(60)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%42.5[...]problems: (1) the void's dimensions will mix with the matter's dimension. (2) void is infinite, therefore movement is impossible, since there is part of the universe that is not void therefore there can't be void in the universe since it has to be infinite.
Hayula has no resistance to different apparitions/surat/صورت
surathaye jesmani صورتهای جسمانی
...................................
[...]
pandora’s complexity
purely (?) material objective agent (evolving?)
Hayula--the first principle of everything material
bi-surat بی صورت
اشکال تن ashkal-e tan***
virtual proto-humanity (to different corporalities) --> pre-organic / anthropo*morphic* --> inter-corporal predation --> (sets post-mythic relations between species) --> trans-ontological intentionalities
hayula is a state of latency or potentiality --> possibility of metamorphosis in interpersonal relations...
every apparition demands a recipient
(مولوی) Rumi wants to be able to read the return-state to the hayula:
تبدیل شدن به tabdil shodan:
...be arkan (ارکان instrument)
...be heyvan (حیوان animal)
...be jan (جان aliveness? liveliness of artifacts? --?--> agency)
...be hilat (حيله, tech---means & ways) [tech? #ruse]
(in Rumi:) ruse ==> قید صید gheid-e seyd
Hafez is all about farib (فریب ruse)
material agents: {//complex forms of movement //affiliation into space}
stones, a substance indigenous to every place. (those who give up or try to stop or turn back become stones.)
the meta-fall of the material (in hayula هیولا)
apparition/surat/صورت (essence/mahiyat/ماهیت)?
matter/madeh/ماده (hast/هست/being/is-there)?
--(surat)-->--(surat)-->
animal---flora---inanimate---hayula
<--(madeh)--<--(madeh)--
in Sohrevardi, he removes the light as projection and ray-tracing, and proposes a theory of light (of theory of being) as “Filter” (veril?, hejab حجاب). (there is no filter between the sphere of the eye and the sphere of the planet Mars.)
apparition is essential or part of the essence or itself the essence
Hayula: mojude mobham o bi-ta'ayon, joz ghove-e mahz va este'dad-e serf nist. (jesme basit)
هیولا: موجود مبهم و بی تعین, جز قوه محض و استعداد صرف نیست
(جسم بسط)
[...]
...................................
(Delanda)
we are taking “real history” as starting-point
-to capture the dynamics of human historical processes, we must allow the nonhuman physics to infiltrate t[...]
(61)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%43.4[...]
counterintuitive ==give==> representation its psychological salience
the experience of dreaming is full of counterintuitive representations (rapidly forgotten)
counterintuitive context of ritual communication --> successful propagation of a representation (memorable)
for example recitation of shamanistic chants --construct--> an acoustic mask =/= convey meaningful message
for religion (and marketing?) culturally successful representation : *a counterintuitive representation formulated within counterintuitive conditions of communication*
}--Severi--> we need a more expressive theory of cultural propagation (<-- my try in telegram bestiary text)
doctrinal (semantic memory) and imagistic (episodic memory) religious modes
(how to better be understand the contemporary art's drive to) *ritual communication* --> performed through both action & speech
•the context: establishment of a particular form of interaction (from a series of contradictory connotations, being two things at the same time --> symbolic transformation) ==construct==> a special identity of the participants
--> xxxx جمع گرایانه syncretistic movement @apass (used as an instrument of resistance?)
messianism = intense propagation + paradoxical identification
--> convert entire populations in a short amount of time
pragmatics of communication --> appearance of a paradoxical “I” personified by the prophet
(warrior shaman messiah's) contradictory self-definition ==able==> enunciate paradoxical statements
--Severi--> to be faithful to the local tradition
Appache --> opposition to Christianity take the firm of conceptualizing Christianity as a different religion
•absorbing but not understanding the elements (of Christian religion) ~= being impressed by story {<-- i do this in my artistic work but i don't ask for devotion or trust}
--> using typical imagistic methods, ritual of dance
the old man Arnold
chant (ritual symbolism) -->
•treat illness
•accompany rite of passage
•impart magical powers
-
(amerindian) shamanism --> establishes a metaphorical link, a set of analogies ~= mystical relationships between ritual objects and living being [--> construct its own truthuniverse, supernatural dimension thought of a possible world]
bleeding pearl
parallelism : (a technique of) threading verbal images together
[Severi's early interpretation of] tradition (would need to) preserve the text + instructions to use --by--> verbalizing them (store them in the chant)
Kuna --> description of the position of the speaker (“shaman is now seated there and is saying...”) characterizes the special kind of communication (appropriate for ritua[...]
(62)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%44.5[...]in a short amount of time
pragmatics of communication --> appearance of a paradoxical “I” personified by the prophet
(warrior shaman messiah's) contradictory self-definition ==able==> enunciate paradoxical statements
--Severi--> to be faithful to the local tradition
Appache --> opposition to Christianity take the firm of conceptualizing Christianity as a different religion
•absorbing but not understanding the elements (of Christian religion) ~= being impressed by story {<-- i do this in my artistic work but i don't ask for devotion or trust}
--> using typical imagistic methods, ritual of dance
the old man Arnold
chant (ritual symbolism) -->
•treat illness
•accompany rite of passage
•impart magical powers
-
(amerindian) shamanism --> establishes a metaphorical link, a set of analogies ~= mystical relationships between ritual objects and living being [--> construct its own truthuniverse, supernatural dimension thought of a possible world]
bleeding pearl
parallelism : (a technique of) threading verbal images together
[Severi's early interpretation of] tradition (would need to) preserve the text + instructions to use --by--> verbalizing them (store them in the chant)
Kuna --> description of the position of the speaker (“shaman is now seated there and is saying...”) characterizes the special kind of communication (appropriate for ritual changing)
shaman: novel sort of enunciator (lending his voice to other invisible beings --> plural and contradictory identity)
acoustic mask: a reflexive means to define the ritual identity of the speaker
reflexive application of parallelism
(@Isabel, how to make community without becoming a cult?)
use snake --> capture the imagination of the followers ==> authority
imagistic (iconic mode, sequence of acid) + doctrinal (discursive mode, text, prayer) = pragmatics context of enunciation ==> messianistic religion
both paradoxical & parallelistic
new ways to be faithful...
...................................
exhibition-making and preventive conservation --> inspection and exposition <-- (different understandings and use of) *touch = curatorial*
professionalisation of curating
short-term education
cultural exchange
@apass feedback: (terrain of) peer engagement --> understanding each other’s practices
education, research, literacy, management, networking, custodianship, audience development
research (overdue) relationship with intelligence --✕--> **research: adventure of charismas**
...to be migratory (in thought, praxis, community)
...subjectivities without a heritage[...]
(63)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%44.5[...]n new nigf techniques. this is common in the history of technology, that a tool appears before people know how to use it. do we know how we can use computers? when we master a technique, its uses are not immediatly clear.
getting interested in the wrong answer in the four answer question.
no skill develops without a good dose of curiosity. which enables us to think about what might be, rather than what is.
There is a half-remembered discussion of Sigmund Freud I read once in a book and which I have been paraphrasing regularly ever since. It said that for Freud dreams were a way of thinking by doing. You run, you cry, you kiss, you love, you cheat, you argue, you fall, you kill, you eat, you sing, you get lost, you travel back in time, you become somebody else – but you do it all in your head. You do it in your head and so it is thinking, just not a thinking we recognize as thinking. When I am dreaming I am composing thoughts in the way an artist composes a painting or a witch a potion – an assemblage made of bodies and places and actions. An embodied thinking, that is no less eloquent or extraordinary or transformative for being so.
...................................
...One can chat and gossip but it is forbidden to preach, lecture or instruct.”
Claudio Magris’ Micronismi
...................................
(butler)
the structure of address itself
although I did not know in whose voice this person was speaking, whether the voice was his own or not, I did feel that I was being addressed.
To respond to this address seems an important obligation during these times.
It is about a mode of response that follows upon having been addressed, a comportment toward the Other only after the Other has made a demand upon me, accused me of a failing, or asked me to assume a responsibility.
The structure of address is important for understanding how moral authority is introduced and sustained if we accept not just that we address others when we speak, but that in some way we come to exist, as it were, in the moment of being addressed, and something about our existence proves precarious when that address fails.
...the demand that comes from elsewhere, sometimes a nameless elsewhere,...
We think of presidents as wielding speech acts in willful ways, so when the director of a university press, or the president of a university speaks, we expect to know what they are saying, and to whom they are speaking, and with what intent.
...perhaps we should think more seriously about the relation between modes of address and moral authority. (also one of the issues in today's performance art)
narration is always judgment
affective intervention
why should i listen to you?
because i have a voice!
visual culture has different stran[...]
(64)[...notes/notes Personen.txt]%45.7[...]cture of address is important for understanding how moral authority is introduced and sustained if we accept not just that we address others when we speak, but that in some way we come to exist, as it were, in the moment of being addressed, and something about our existence proves precarious when that address fails.
...the demand that comes from elsewhere, sometimes a nameless elsewhere,...
We think of presidents as wielding speech acts in willful ways, so when the director of a university press, or the president of a university speaks, we expect to know what they are saying, and to whom they are speaking, and with what intent.
...perhaps we should think more seriously about the relation between modes of address and moral authority. (also one of the issues in today's performance art)
narration is always judgment
affective intervention
why should i listen to you?
because i have a voice!
visual culture has different strand from lecture culture. people are able to express themselves with verbal signs long before they can draw anything, using visual sign (picture: a drawing by Hanno). verbal language because of its easy everyday usage has become mundane and instrumental to communication, visual sign due to its learning curve and skillfulness belonged to the art domain.
...................................
transitive verb constructions are the ones that require a direct object in order to complete the meaning and to be grammatical. Used in theater, between director and actor, by communicating with transitive verbs actors can perform the language of the director.
my work embodies and communicates a desire to read (and write) texts
[steiner]
in Greek mythology the poet and the seer are blind so that they may, by the antennae of speech, see further.
One thing is clear: every language-act has a temporal determinant. No semantic form is timeless. When using a word we wake into resonance, as it were, its entire previous history. A text is embedded in specific historical time; it has what linguists call a diachronic structure. To read fully is to restore all that one can of the immediacies of value and intent in which speech actually occurs.
The process of diachronic translation inside one’s own native tongue is so constant, we perform it so unawares, that we rarely pause either to note its formal intricacy or the decisive part it plays in the very existence of civilization. By far the greatest mass of the past as we experience it is a verbal construct. History is a speech-act, a selective use of the past tense. Even substantive remains such as buildings and historical sites must be ‘read,’ i.e. located in a context of verbal recognition and placement, before they assume real presence.
...................................
<[...]
(65)[...notes/notes Personen.txt]%45.7[...]with metaphor and end with algebra
•a “model” is a system of objects (any kind of objects) that make all of the sentences in a theory true , where a “theory” is a list of sentences in a language.
•metaphors somehow mobilize the difference between the two domains
•arena of alienation
•Cut the Noise
•mirrors with (/without) memories
•substitutability
•optical appearances (mind ~ eye)
•Dioptrics (science of refraction), catoptrics (reflection),
•that could not be spoken of or represented, because it was empty of discourse and thus of meaning.
•innocence of the eye
•Poor Unfortunate Souls
•being useful, like a prison guard
•autopoetic (complex self-referential systems)
•to take up the motives from the external world
•will-less perception, “the pure eye of genius”
•bringing from the artificial world to the art world
•object oriented programming / subject oriented
•Observer, system and environment
•a system (designed) with a purpose of itself
•magnifying or light-collecting optical device
•social selfish
•un-computational
•gray area
•self-identity is bad visual system
•Vision requires instruments of vision; an optics is a politics of positioning. Instruments of vision mediate standpoints;
•Identity, including self-identity, does not produce science; critical positioning does, that is, objectivity
•docile body
•technological visioning (vector of secret texts, books within books, ancient curses, digital dreams, and medieval cyber-art)
•empty space left by theory and philosophy
•technical visioning
•Technology is never merely “used,” never merely instrumental. It is always ” incorporated” and “lived.”
•In his last paintings, such as the Bride of 1912, Duchamp both elaborated an iconography that combined mechanical and visceral forms and began to move away from any procedures that revealed the artist's hand to create “retinal” or “anecdotal” art.
lemon grass plant, marigold
Saeed 0012063108222
Tehran Wi Fi: 88 57 27 92
newer medium may be ‘nested’ inside of an older medium (or vice versa)
mental life (memory, imagination, fantasy, dreaming, perception, cognition) is mediated and is embodied in the whole range of material media… we not only think about media, we think in them (Mitchell)
The shock of new media is as old as the hills
Franz Reuleux described this correlation: the more primitive the technology, the less attuned the parts of the machine to each other, the greater the degree of play -- the more perfected the technology, the closer the fit, the less play between the individual parts.
(For Winnicott,) play is a psychological state where the boundaries between self and the world r[...]
(66)[...notes/notes Personen.txt]%45.8[...]◦that could not be spoken of or represented, because it was empty of discourse and thus of meaning.
•innocence of the eye
•Poor Unfortunate Souls
•being useful, like a prison guard
•autopoetic (complex self-referential systems)
•to take up the motives from the external world
•will-less perception, “the pure eye of genius”
•bringing from the artificial world to the art world
•object oriented programming / subject oriented
•Observer, system and environment
•a system (designed) with a purpose of itself
•magnifying or light-collecting optical device
•social selfish
•un-computational
•gray area
•self-identity is bad visual system
•Vision requires instruments of vision; an optics is a politics of positioning. Instruments of vision mediate standpoints;
•Identity, including self-identity, does not produce science; critical positioning does, that is, objectivity
•docile body
•technological visioning (vector of secret texts, books within books, ancient curses, digital dreams, and medieval cyber-art)
•empty space left by theory and philosophy
•technical visioning
•Technology is never merely “used,” never merely instrumental. It is always ” incorporated” and “lived.”
•In his last paintings, such as the Bride of 1912, Duchamp both elaborated an iconography that combined mechanical and visceral forms and began to move away from any procedures that revealed the artist's hand to create “retinal” or “anecdotal” art.
lemon grass plant, marigold
Saeed 0012063108222
Tehran Wi Fi: 88 57 27 92
newer medium may be ‘nested’ inside of an older medium (or vice versa)
mental life (memory, imagination, fantasy, dreaming, perception, cognition) is mediated and is embodied in the whole range of material media… we not only think about media, we think in them (Mitchell)
The shock of new media is as old as the hills
Franz Reuleux described this correlation: the more primitive the technology, the less attuned the parts of the machine to each other, the greater the degree of play -- the more perfected the technology, the closer the fit, the less play between the individual parts.
(For Winnicott,) play is a psychological state where the boundaries between self and the world remain labile and fluid, (a state which is important not only for the development of the child, but with significant ramifications for human life and culture in general.)
Representation is a distinctive manner of imagining the real, and is a fundamental phenomenon upon which all culture rests.
Henri Lefebvre distinguishes Representations of space and Representational spaces . ... Representational spaces are “directly lived” through associated images and symbols which overlay physica[...]
(67)[...notes/notes Personen.txt]%45.9[...] bad example of Clement Greenberg)
◦(to make the invisible deep conditions of objects perceivable) prioritize *allusive style* above *literal description*
•claims to post-phenomenological sovereignty
•over-mining approach to knowledge production =/= objects's surplus of reality
◦methodological approach which encounters objects as objects (=/= actor network theory's manner of focusing upon an object's effects) [+ bad example of Dutch East India Company]--Campbell--> object-oriented social theory produces a rudimentary narrative with no discernible innovation on the level of:
◾objects --> the actors are recognisable companies, personalities, infrastructures
◾relations --> the major symbiotic moments are legal contracts, infrastructure and formative moments in a human's life
◾time --> there is standard chronology from birth to death, with emphasis on human-centric causes and effects
•“social theory = a mode of knowledge production” (=/= a decontextualised reflection of the world) ==> withdrawal: a psychological alibi, an aesthetic (=/= cognitive concept) ==stimulate==> an attitudinal response: humility [+ passivity?] in the face of overwhelming non-human existence [~ appeal ==produce==> a paternalistic-arrogant-instrumentalist attitude to the nonhuman =/= *appeal ==foster==> responsibility* (a norrnativity that withdrawal cannot) ---> go to Haraway + Campbell]
}=/= posthuman relationism: realists who draw on contemporary advances in disciplines like geology, biology, mathematics and neurology to make the case that non-human reality is not a sub-set of human reality -->
•commitment to an object-oriented realism (~= Harman)
•occupy an *anthropic* event horizon: their social analyses occur in the shifting, impossible ground hetween the human and the nonhuman (=/= Harman)
•dialectic of object **withdrawal + appeal** (=/= Harman's object withdrawal) ~ ***interaction between objective withdrawal & subjective appeal***
(Moss) earth as making an appeal --Freud--> a demand for work
“when the attention of an experienced person is drawn to the child's state by this path of discharge, [the path of discharge] ... acquires a secondary function of the highest importance, that of cornmunicalion
--> initial helplessness of human beings is the primal source of all moral motives
(child's) creaming and kicking --> appeal (made by the earth) is a combination of demand + accusation
contemporary social theorists are turning towards objects
<==Bennett== object produce a ‘gestalt shift’ in perception
}==Tsing==> (amounts to) a political act <== (turning towards objects) requires us:
•to re-divide the world
•to re-prioritise matler(s)
•to create different causalities
•to follow new agencies
•to produce new spacetimes
•to interrupt the ‘mind-lulling pres[...]
(68)[...otes on kinect performance.txt]%46.4[...]logical, postcorporal, cyborg existence, etc.)
to be human <--attack-- genomics, global finance, nature of social in virtual communities (telegram) ==> yet-to-be formalized paradigms of human experience
==> fracture the concept of legal self [legal theory (arbiter of human rights) --> concerned with what is to be human]
(taxonomies of the human species at its time -->) humanitas: legal term used in public in ancient Rome to distinguish Romans and Greeks from Barbarians
humans in persistent vegetative states
international trade of human organs
human genome project
xenotransplantation
technological unconscious
(tree of life replaced by) a model that:
•classifies species according to DNA
•disregards morphological type (how elements of body appear)
•reveals human to be a tiny subspecies in a mass of absolute diversity
classical philosophy --> scientized for a momden audience (by Descartes 17th century) --> special status of human <-- seen as a totally transparent, secular, scientific, liberal way of thinking about the world
humanism = a belief in progress (implicitly conceived as a technological instrumental profit-oriented) + technological masery over nature + ‘human =/= animal’ + therapeutic approach to scientific inquiry }<-- a 19th century anachronism --> deeply ingrained in contemporary self-consciousness and everyday common sense
human: hero of liberty <-- french in origin, political in purpose
August Comte --> the universe can only e understood when the scientific exploration of phenomena was separated from supernatural superstition =/= ajayeb
Campbell making the case --> humanism needs to be deconstructed (not in a blithe نرم وملایم postmodern discursive way, rather) the definitions of what it means to be human are of life-changing importance --> humanism's supposed universality and transparency masks the fact that it is *an inherited western relatively recent philosophical perspective of the world*
in consumer research --> human: culturally inflected, psychosocial producer of + produced by the market =/= human: a disembodied information-processor with a rationalistic indentity and a computatinoal approach to the market
--Campbell--> how can interpretative consumer research benefit from a perspective which acknowledges this ideology of humanism?
the term posthuman has been used to describe anything which extends human capcity --ironically--> something as ubiquitous banal ancient and human as *tool-use* could itself be described as posthuman (Hayles, Stiegler, Wills) ==> **posthuman is as ancient as the human itself** }--> [*]posthuman: (a radical recognition that) technological = *originary logic* + *ethical sensibility* (= a stepping-out [[...]
(69)[...otes on kinect performance.txt]%46.7[...]ns of this century**}@Chloe2
the metaphors of our time:
•becoming (=/= being) <-- a shift towards a *process metaphysics*
•
(Parsons + Maclaren)
items of disposal (do not fail to exists, but rather they) are *moved along* to other spaces or politics and become other things
•becoming a precious antique
•becoming a water blockage
•becoming a source of marine death
•becoming a materially precious thing (in another part of the world)
•
--> **how things actually move, how they transition between many states**
--> *object = data about the object =/= tangible thing* <-- (transition) from thinking of object as the primary reality --to--> perceicing the object as data in computatinoal environments
==?==> (change of the nature of object ==>) radical shift in theorizing consumer behaviour
posthumanism
•a key term in contemporary western postindustrial era
•a term htat has been used ti describe a highly technologized future existence
--variationally--> other stories (fables) about technology exists =/=
1. the claim of (often monolithic) novelty of the historical moment in the west
2. that technology is a sterile instrument
3. that technology aids the human in his ascent to ever greater degrees of humanity
(greek tradition -->) *to think deeply about technology, we have to think about its ontology*
•techno-sociology --> Latour
•ecological feminism --> Haraway
•post-Marxism --> Tiziana Terranova
•
•philosophy of tech --> Heidegger: the most dangerous thing we can do is to think of technology as something neutral --> we often make two ***intuitive ideological jumps of reason*** when we think of technology:
1. “technology = means to an end”
2. “technology is created by humans”
}<-- example of anthropological truth (about technology) ~ it is a truth as it appears to human beings & it is an *instrumental truth: truth aimed at getting things done or making things work* =/= [*]technology: the mode by which realities are brought into existence in the world (hervorbringen) {unconcealing ==> a concealment of another reality}= (process of) *poiesis = bring out + conceal*
-the greek word *techne = technology + art* derived from the term episteme (the ways in which one can know reality) ==> ****technology: a type of epistemology, a way of knowing****
}==Heidegger==> *technology needs to be understood beyond its instrumentalist humanist history* --Campbell--> *seeing technology historically as an ancient phenomenon*
technology thought of as something that comes from the west & does something to other people in other placers <-- a framework (even well-intentioned) that denies both agency & contemporaneity to the ‘other’
(-McQuire)
(we are told that)
[...]
(70)[...otes on kinect performance.txt]%47[...]atinoal environments
==?==> (change of the nature of object ==>) radical shift in theorizing consumer behaviour
posthumanism
•a key term in contemporary western postindustrial era
•a term htat has been used ti describe a highly technologized future existence
--variationally--> other stories (fables) about technology exists =/=
1. the claim of (often monolithic) novelty of the historical moment in the west
2. that technology is a sterile instrument
3. that technology aids the human in his ascent to ever greater degrees of humanity
(greek tradition -->) *to think deeply about technology, we have to think about its ontology*
•techno-sociology --> Latour
•ecological feminism --> Haraway
•post-Marxism --> Tiziana Terranova
•
•philosophy of tech --> Heidegger: the most dangerous thing we can do is to think of technology as something neutral --> we often make two ***intuitive ideological jumps of reason*** when we think of technology:
1. “technology = means to an end”
2. “technology is created by humans”
}<-- example of anthropological truth (about technology) ~ it is a truth as it appears to human beings & it is an *instrumental truth: truth aimed at getting things done or making things work* =/= [*]technology: the mode by which realities are brought into existence in the world (hervorbringen) {unconcealing ==> a concealment of another reality}= (process of) *poiesis = bring out + conceal*
-the greek word *techne = technology + art* derived from the term episteme (the ways in which one can know reality) ==> ****technology: a type of epistemology, a way of knowing****
}==Heidegger==> *technology needs to be understood beyond its instrumentalist humanist history* --Campbell--> *seeing technology historically as an ancient phenomenon*
technology thought of as something that comes from the west & does something to other people in other placers <-- a framework (even well-intentioned) that denies both agency & contemporaneity to the ‘other’
(-McQuire)
(we are told that)
•the era we exist in is the “information age”
•the world is “networked”
•marheting is “service-dominant”
--Campbell--> what realities do the terms “information” “network” “service-dominant” create, unconceal, conceal?
==> questions of:
-what is the consumer?
-the nature of consumer consciousness, knowledge, desire
*far from being a neutral uncomplicated relationship, consumers develop strategic behaviours for *coping with technology* that is paradoxial + fantastical + ideological + multidimensional
(-Konzinets)
•DIY technologies: forms of competence redefined + redistributed between hardware & human
•technology & identity interpolate each other
global debates of:
•fea[...]
(71)[...otes on kinect performance.txt]%47[...]that technology aids the human in his ascent to ever greater degrees of humanity
(greek tradition -->) *to think deeply about technology, we have to think about its ontology*
•techno-sociology --> Latour
•ecological feminism --> Haraway
•post-Marxism --> Tiziana Terranova
•
•philosophy of tech --> Heidegger: the most dangerous thing we can do is to think of technology as something neutral --> we often make two ***intuitive ideological jumps of reason*** when we think of technology:
1. “technology = means to an end”
2. “technology is created by humans”
}<-- example of anthropological truth (about technology) ~ it is a truth as it appears to human beings & it is an *instrumental truth: truth aimed at getting things done or making things work* =/= [*]technology: the mode by which realities are brought into existence in the world (hervorbringen) {unconcealing ==> a concealment of another reality}= (process of) *poiesis = bring out + conceal*
-the greek word *techne = technology + art* derived from the term episteme (the ways in which one can know reality) ==> ****technology: a type of epistemology, a way of knowing****
}==Heidegger==> *technology needs to be understood beyond its instrumentalist humanist history* --Campbell--> *seeing technology historically as an ancient phenomenon*
technology thought of as something that comes from the west & does something to other people in other placers <-- a framework (even well-intentioned) that denies both agency & contemporaneity to the ‘other’
(-McQuire)
(we are told that)
•the era we exist in is the “information age”
•the world is “networked”
•marheting is “service-dominant”
--Campbell--> what realities do the terms “information” “network” “service-dominant” create, unconceal, conceal?
==> questions of:
-what is the consumer?
-the nature of consumer consciousness, knowledge, desire
*far from being a neutral uncomplicated relationship, consumers develop strategic behaviours for *coping with technology* that is paradoxial + fantastical + ideological + multidimensional
(-Konzinets)
•DIY technologies: forms of competence redefined + redistributed between hardware & human
•technology & identity interpolate each other
global debates of:
•fear of genetic determination
•nature of consciousness --> similarities and differences between computation and human being
•
--> intimately concerned with the status of humanness
1990s theories of gift-giving, possession, labour, self-concept =/= *cyber consumer* --> circulation of desire and commodities in environments that are so highly mediated and technological that it begins to generate behaviour and situations that are quite foreign to existing thinking about that markets are and what consu[...]
(72)[...otes on kinect performance.txt]%47[...]ate in her mind, images of parents or the houses where she had lived. Lacking a continuous image of herself, she could re-create momentary images only when she was verifying to herself that she had a body. (see Strange, Familiar and Forgotten pp 40-42)
“If all self-reference were destroyed, consciousness and understanding would not be possible.
“Meaning and understanding are parts of the structure of consciousness that emerge from self-reference; they cannot exist without a body image.” (p.55)
“Self-reference is not a hypothetical idea but a demonstrable part of the structure of consciousness; a partial breakdown in the physiological mechanisms that create it give us the phenomenon of phantom limbs.” (p.56)
Two English neurologists, Lord Russell Brain and Henry Head (!) coined the phrase “body image” for the internal image and memory of one's body in space and time. The body image is not only a picture of the body but also an anticipatory plan for the detailed movements of the body, and rather than a fixed structure, it is dynamic and plastic, capable of reorganizing itself radically with the contingencies of experience.
The body image can also incorporate external object, implements, and instruments. When they are being used, they can become intimate, vital, even libidinally cathected parts of the body image.
(Don Ihde:) “To embody one's praxis through technologies is ultimately an existential relation with the world.” (Technology and Lifeworld, p.72)
Embodied relations such as the experience of “seeing through” glasses (or the use of hearing aids, blind man's cane, or driving a car) take the technology into the perceptual-bodily self-experience. The mediating technology becomes part of the body image, and achieves “instrumental transparency”
...................................
(Giuliana Bruno)
This tangible, superficial contact, in fact, is what allows us to apprehend the objects and the spaces of art, turning contact into the communicative interface of a public intimacy. (but not in the Amazonian skin contact) (it is different than Lucretius reflecting upon the nature of things)
(materiality of) cultural surfaces
As a form of dwelling that engages mediation between subjects and with objects, the surface also can be viewed as a site for screening and projection.
The surfaces of the screens that surround us today express a new materiality as they convey the virtual transformation of our material relations. And these screens, which have become membranes of contact, exist in our environments in close relation to the surfaces of canvas and walls—also undergoing a process of substantial transformation. And so it is here—in this meeting place that is surface—that art forms are becoming reconnected and cr[...]
(73)[...notes/notes.txt]%47.7[...]a but a demonstrable part of the structure of consciousness; a partial breakdown in the physiological mechanisms that create it give us the phenomenon of phantom limbs.” (p.56)
Two English neurologists, Lord Russell Brain and Henry Head (!) coined the phrase “body image” for the internal image and memory of one's body in space and time. The body image is not only a picture of the body but also an anticipatory plan for the detailed movements of the body, and rather than a fixed structure, it is dynamic and plastic, capable of reorganizing itself radically with the contingencies of experience.
The body image can also incorporate external object, implements, and instruments. When they are being used, they can become intimate, vital, even libidinally cathected parts of the body image.
(Don Ihde:) “To embody one's praxis through technologies is ultimately an existential relation with the world.” (Technology and Lifeworld, p.72)
Embodied relations such as the experience of “seeing through” glasses (or the use of hearing aids, blind man's cane, or driving a car) take the technology into the perceptual-bodily self-experience. The mediating technology becomes part of the body image, and achieves “instrumental transparency”
...................................
(Giuliana Bruno)
This tangible, superficial contact, in fact, is what allows us to apprehend the objects and the spaces of art, turning contact into the communicative interface of a public intimacy. (but not in the Amazonian skin contact) (it is different than Lucretius reflecting upon the nature of things)
(materiality of) cultural surfaces
As a form of dwelling that engages mediation between subjects and with objects, the surface also can be viewed as a site for screening and projection.
The surfaces of the screens that surround us today express a new materiality as they convey the virtual transformation of our material relations. And these screens, which have become membranes of contact, exist in our environments in close relation to the surfaces of canvas and walls—also undergoing a process of substantial transformation. And so it is here—in this meeting place that is surface—that art forms are becoming reconnected and creating new, hybrid forms of admixture.
who shares (deep) engagements with superficial matters?
layered space of interaction between subject and object
surface can be read as an architecture
from mediated encounters with material space to mobilization of cultural space (the exhibition)
memory, imagination, and affect are linked to movement -- embodied in jungle walk?
modernity's desire and fancy for tactile experience, driving and impulse to expand one's universe and eventuall[...]
(74)[...notes/notes.txt]%47.7[...] of what is available by re-experiencing the historical world.”
...................................
(Peter Galison, in Image of Objectivity)
“let nature speak for itself” (!) a new brand of scientific objectivity that emerged in the 19th century => restrain themselves from imposing their hopes, expectations, generalization, aesthetics, even ordinary language on the image of nature. (the image of nature has never been objective)
the present usage of objectivity can be applied to everything from empirical reliability to procedural correctness to emotional detachment
each component of objectivity opposes a distinct form of subjectivity; each is defined by censuring some (by no means all) aspects of the personal.
personal idiosyncrasies
this ideal of objectivity attempts to eliminate the mediating presence of the observer
the phenomena never sleep and neither should the observer
heroic self-discipline
profoundly moralized vision
and like almost all forms of moral virtuosity it preaches asceticism
human worker whose attention wandered, whose pace slackened, whose hand trembled
the self-recording instrument promised to replace the weary artist
machines offered freedom from will
being true to nature:
-in its method (mechanical)
-in its moral (restrained)
-in its metaphysics (individualised)
early alternative approaches to creating picture that were true to nature, but not objective in the mechanical sense
atlases habituate the eye, they are perforce visual
(contrast to the scientific visual forms of photography where one is on the right place at the right time with the right equipment) the Kinect's total randomness
one problem of atlases is that they have to decide what nature is
they all have to solve the problem of choice: which objects should be presented and from which viewpoint (Kinect choosing mechanism and arbitrariness?) (can we not choose what nature is when we are at it? and when we are at nature?)
rejection of aesthetics (but what seduction exactly betrays? or what does it make accurate?)
average (is truth to nature?)
asceticism of noninterventionist objectivity
“straight photography” is above all a signature of a particular scene, a specific and localized representation only awkwardly adaptable to a mosaic composition from different individuals (Zeiss-lens-camera images)
how scientists deployed mechanical means to police the artist
(for Martin Kusch - objectivity and historiography) truth-to-nature had its rationale in enlightenment sensationalist psychology, with its conception of the self as fragme[...]
(75)[...notes/notes.txt]%48.7[...]/>
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.”
graphical representation could cut across the artificial boundaries of natural language to reveal nature to all people,
they were the words of nature itself
the search for this rendition of objective representation was a moral as much as technical, quest.
morality of self-restraint
(for the scientific atlas makers of the later nineteenth century,) the machine aided where the will failed. (at once a powerful and polyvalent symbol,) the machine was fundamental to the very idea of mechanical objectivity.
the machine, in the form of new scientific instruments, embodied a positive ideal of the observer: patient, indefatigable, ever alert, probing beyond the limits of the human senses. (what other relationships exist with the machine? other than this self-disciplined observer)
(rhetoric of) wonder-working machine
the machine, (now in the form of techniques of mechanical reproduction,) held out the promise of images uncontaminated by interpretation.
...the scientists’ continuing claim to such judgment-free representation is testimony to the intensity of their longing for the perfect ‘pure’ image. in this context the machine stood for authenticity: it was at once an observer and an artist, miraculously free from the inner temptation to theorize, anthropomorphize, bea[...]
(76)[...notes/notes.txt]%48.9[...]al 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.”
graphical representation could cut across the artificial boundaries of natural language to reveal nature to all people,
they were the words of nature itself
the search for this rendition of objective representation was a moral as much as technical, quest.
morality of self-restraint
(for the scientific atlas makers of the later nineteenth century,) the machine aided where the will failed. (at once a powerful and polyvalent symbol,) the machine was fundamental to the very idea of mechanical objectivity.
the machine, in the form of new scientific instruments, embodied a positive ideal of the observer: patient, indefatigable, ever alert, probing beyond the limits of the human senses. (what other relationships exist with the machine? other than this self-disciplined observer)
(rhetoric of) wonder-working machine
the machine, (now in the form of techniques of mechanical reproduction,) held out the promise of images uncontaminated by interpretation.
...the scientists’ continuing claim to such judgment-free representation is testimony to the intensity of their longing for the perfect ‘pure’ image. in this context the machine stood for authenticity: it was at once an observer and an artist, miraculously free from the inner temptation to theorize, anthropomorphize, beautify, or otherwise interpret nature.
one type of mechanical image, the photograph, became the emblem for all aspects of noninterventionist objectivity ... not because the photograph was necessarily truer to nature than hand-made images--but rather because the camera apparently eliminated human agency
(what is the difference between systematic image and mechanical image? same? -glitch..)
(mechanical) images that could be touted as nature's self-portrait
aura of stoic nobility
painstaking, humble, laborious (work)
moral virtuosity never exists without an appreciative audience
by ringing the changes on the resonant cultural themes of self-purification through self-abnegation, scientists persuaded themselves and others of their worthiness to assume priestly functions in an ever more secularized society.
humanity[...]
(77)[...notes/notes.txt]%48.9[...]it, blurs the message, renders it unintelligible, and exactly by that assures transmission. Parasite produces by the way of disorder a more complex order.
..penetrative grasp of a text, discovery and recreative apprehension of it life-forms, is impossible to paraphrase or systematize.
..temporal and local settings of one's text. (to master it?)
to read X, is literally, to ‘prepare’ to read X
in certain civilizations there comes epochs in which syntax stiffens...
Changing landscape of fact
unexamined smiles
worn tropes
words, the guardians of meanings, are not immortal.
Metaphysical scandal
note on history: past is a language construct, that the past tense of the verb is the sole guarantor of history.
Dialectics as a method of intellectual chase.
Who first told a joke?
Certain languages are inhospitable to new metaphors.
Language-act
to read: is to restore all that one can of the immediacies of value and intent in which speech actually occurs.
my original repetition
we re-enact in our educated consciousness
in what sense does unperformed music exist?
The same ground, when using the ‘speculative instruments’, the critic, editor, actor, and reader stand on.
When we read or hear any language statement from the past, we translate.
Encode and decode “message”, misleading operative models of translation between different languages and even within a single language.
One treason in translation: words rarely show any outward mark of altered meaning, they body forth their history only in a fully established context.
What material reality has history out of language? --the tasavof verbal linguistic tradition
silence knows no history...?
...to remind you that everything is the condition of madness.
“Tense Past”
..the landscape composed by the past tense, the semantic organization of remembrance... is styled and coded differently by cultures. --miniature illustrating San'an?
The verbal icon made up of all successive translations of Greek literature and philosophy has oriented fundamental movements in Islamic feelings --Farabi, Mirdamad, etc.
My translation of classics is not out of a vital compulsion for immediacy or precise echo. I am not trying to build my own resonant past. Myth of the ‘true past’... different perspectives can co-exist and blur
the metaphysics of the insult, in San'an story
i am interested in the conventions in which texts can be read, in which a semantic statement can be carried over into someone's own idiom. I am teaching how to reread texts of Attar and so forth.
We have civilization because (we have learned) ‘to translate out of time’
übertrage[...]
(78)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%49.5[...]ult'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 visual control:
•uniforms
•packaging
•computer software packages
•brand logos
•buildings
•websites @apass
•management reports
•staff
•servicescapes [an environment where the first/primary perceived aspect is service]
•
harmful, deficient, deformed, secondary =/= superman, supergirl
logocentrism: letting the logic lead the letter --Campbell--> images are logocentric in that they create meaning by appealing to a central apparently undeconstructible system of authoritative truth (appealing to sources of transcendence outside of the image) [--> for example forensic architecture images =/= Derr[...]
(79)[...notes/Derrida old notes.txt]%51.9[...]erence and not in the receiver of info.)
(question to an Iranian friend:) “why must we fasten our gaze to the objects of damage and derangement?” “why light lanterns to behold the corpse?” “or extend our focus on them?” (I am using Mohaghegh's words,) the extremist (or other aesthetic-philosophical strands of extremisms) would tell us not to look away, for the thought and expression have taken the shape of a ‘meteorological device,’ forecasting seasons (of storm)...
(you take the mithridatic venom to) cross into the next level of temporal experience
he makes “engravings of the atrocity”
(حکاکی از) سبعیت
a fanatical response to the storm
a charismatic authority undertakes a poetic articulation
or a poetic articulation becomes committed to an ideological program
[Iran Iraq war]
mysticism, a protocol of extremity, geared towards the immensification of narrow vision
gigantic singularity
itself the house of many paradoxes: that of wisdom and rage, that of boundlessness and confinement, that of precision and enormity, nature and technology (apprentices to a lesser artisan-metallurgist god interested only in functional architecture and instrumentalized objects), betrayal and devotion,
mysticism is one of postmodern ‘mask,’ there are many others (the chaos-mask / face?, etc.)
one 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, appearanc[...]
(80)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%52.7[...]e cinematic openness also is) guarantor of its constant mutability(?)
the exoteric logic of interiority (reigning since centuries in Iran)
for only the buried dimension is sovereign
secrecy =/= lie
(I am a fan of lie and against secrecy)
talk about a theory of lie
(a talk about a theory of violence)
[the issue of: opposite, omen, and alarm (in art)]
omen =/=? artwork
(omen is a phenomenon that is buried to foretell the future, isn't that an attractive trap for artist's self grandiosity?!)
omen has a binary answer
omen =~ ‘audire’ (Latin root, to listen)
omens come in the artistic and poetic production--in the poiesis--when the artist is young: the fabulous age of self-assertion, and he or she starts way to big and later is abandoned or abused by it.
(enforcement of an elusive stance from within) the self-enveloped site of the event----the artworks become closer to omens
at once episodic and veiled, protecting their right to invisibility above all else
(perceive themselves as) the merchants of the unreasoned experience.
(as opposed to the mechanisms of instrumental reason) ---- omens
Literatur(ware)haus
warehouse vs. Haus
(at the house of being)
warehouse of the irrational, a cellar-arena of provocation and unrest
I don't have an eloquent language--I am not in the house of language, but Attar is
transmutative
depthforming
sudden exposure to exile space
a postcultural interaction (?) --with no proximity to the past or known present
(am I trying to create proximity to history in my lectures versus my non-proximity in earlier visual works such as “vagabond” 2011 Tehran)
is that to adopt an ******existence without context******?
(in lectures, am I un-separating myself from my own history?)
*reverie (=the mind flees across secluded planes)
exile space =~ refuge, solitude, immobility =? nondialectics
[on Vagabond] --> http://www.sinaseifee.com/Vagabond.html
-domination of the partially unseen in my own film, ‘vagabond’
-did I believe that only the buried dimension is sovereign?
-continuously interlacing experiences of solitude and immobility
-minimalist side of mysticism --> stillness is a catalyst for acceleration?
-nomadic dispositions
-suspended (=the chasm of self-consciousness)
-
aesthetic tactility over aesthetic fantasy
where is the cinematic-mystical ritual happening?
profound separation from the networks of social reality
the subjects betrays its own history
interrupting the transmission of the episteme<[...]
(81)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%53[...]hinking) ==> ‘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 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]
<[...]
(82)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%55.7[...] degrees of cultural estrangement --into--> a tone of nationalist triumphalism ==> ***vanished premodern subjectivity to be restored*** (<-- i have to be careful with this)
-[that] the colonized intellectuals and political officials participate together in the eradication of third world heritage
-agents of foreign ministries: orientalists, ambassadors, advisors, who write hideous scrolls when they have finished their assignments that say “yes, you have the head of a lion and the tail of an elephant” (--> is this also close to my account of Olearius?!) ==> *devitalization* ==> *damaged subjectivity* + an *alternative historic consciousness* }==> hostile tenant of the before-this [=/= i work on an alternative queer]
(cyclopean view) Al Ahmad's dismissal of media: he is unable to see it as anything but a promoter of infinite pacification --> media =/= local
(a civilizational dichotomy ==>) portray media as abusive of islamic tradition
**rhetoric of endangered cultural subjectivity**
disappearance or extinction of one's own rightful place within the world (<--~~ will to hegemonic mastery)
*(Al Ahmad deduces Chomsky on a global-imperial scale -->) the operation of the media can not be divorced from objective systemic violence : media = instrument of bourgeois valuation
Shariati: existentialism + leftism + islamism
[islamic anticolonialism + neomarxist critical theory (of Frankfurt School)]
(presumed) deterioration of global consciousness + industrialization onto the stage of world history
-homogenized mass --> emergence of automation : an objectified and self-activating process wherein the subject becomes an instrument
“impersonation of the machine” <--Adorno--{totalitarian seizure of consciousness + devastating effects of instrumental reason}
Shariati's writing:
•the third world subject embraces the false consciousness
•self-inflicted cultural betrayal
•predatory-parasitic operation of the colonized imagination }-->
*defilement of the “what once was”
*the elevation of the indigenous as representative of an authentic return
==> ***past as antithesis to the present*** <-- transcendental signified of a precolonial subjectivity [<-- how not to do that while visiting heritage sites such as ajayeb?]
Shariati's defense of the non-western world --> manufacturing an exaggerated imagery of its *now lost grandeur* ==> (its former) essential identity-status
-->{what would Lacan's mirror stage say about this? [--> ‘sudden realization of a complete (specular) image of self =/= infant's primordial sense of her fragmented body’ before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other
[*]subjectivity: spatial relations (--> self-other construct)
[*]the imaginary: the space in which the relation between the ego and its images is developed]
(Mohaghegh:) [eastern] undo the moment of[...]
(83)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%56.8[...] a mere diguise of influence and supermacy?* or **is the firmness of its articulation sanctioned by some dominant elsewhere or otherworldliness?**
*does the poetic consciousness believe itself of an elite unknown rank (against the monolith)?
sociopolitical discourses either bore or aggravate Akhavan --only--> (transient historical specificity of) *turmoil demands poet's greater urgency*
(the poet has earned the station to say) “no more of this” (“it's enough”) ~ an *order* [=/= wisdom, sage, diplomatic response of an interlocutor, truth-telling, equal dialogue, negotiation]
poet's expertise and sensitivity: the storyteller's intimate relation to impermanence and destruction (--> Ali, Sana, Hoda, Setareh)
[-]Baraheni's depiction of the spatial domination of the city by Pahlavi regime from 1952 to 1979 --> SAVAK responded to and fueled a striking development in the political consciousness of the urban centers ==> labyrinthine evolution of the rebel form
hie poem “An Epic in Reverse” (Akhavanian reversal) neighborhoods of stigma, filth, and backwardness --> hybrid of animality and criminality
(Mohaghegh asking:) what is the author's recourse once stranded behind those iron bars, and now acquainted with the gleaming tools and instruments of the guards and royal executioners? for Baraheni, the answer seems to rest within a literary turn toward the arsenal of vulgarity, where language is forced to howl and curse again, to match the shock treatment and flagellation (شلاق shalagh) ==>
1. to unveil the degradation and depravity of power, to show it as unbeautiful and disgusting in its most bude form
2. to wage some reciprocal hate against power, to maximize the rawness of what is happening
[-]Shamlu's (dead-end) sightings of public execution and secret police night-raids of 1979-81
(Mohaghegh describing islamic state of iran through Shamlu:) a new iteration of revolutionary terror, millenarian clerical establishment that foresees self-congrave a feverish certainty across every corridor of urban reality (=/= conservative disposition of an ordained Shah seeking to keep his domination,) the vengefull return of a long-suppressed counterabsolutism that has been waiting anxiously for its chance to unleash and envelop a national identity in its now-seething ideology
-bringing the celestial abstractions of a faith crashing down into tangible existence --> they must ***sew, lash, and brand their righteous-ecstatic modalities into awesome materiality***
the vocabulary of: the prophetic, the messianic, the inspired, the sacred
}--> *Shamlu's avant-gardism had always led him to experiment with rotating styles of folkloric ballads, rebel anthems, existential meditations, doomsday rants, elegiac oration, children's lullabies --into--> (a singular blast of an) account of a devastated urban space that moves somewhere between legend, omen, song, myth, fairy tal[...]
(86)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%57.4[...]ry, a rare fleeting opportunity to reimagine existence as it potentially could have been but never will be (~=? fiction --> is that why science fiction for iranians does not have the same signification?) [=/= redemptive corrective to the barbarism of the will, =/= weapon by which one might attempt to overthrew the will]
•Hegel: (paradigm of a) complete collapse of subjectivity with history. reason is sovereign of the world
*Dasein: work within the preconceived framework (barriers) of historical consciousness in order to modify its stance within the world
•Marx: the intention of restoring humanity to its actual historicity, positivism + humanism, epochal advancement, *dialectical materialism*: placing subjectivity in a state of subservience to a larger “historical reality”
•Althusser --> *interpellation: power first manifactures a conception of the self that it can later subjugate through the surveillance techniques of the institution
*subjectivity exists solely within the revolutionary progression of the prevailing modes of production*
•Adorno: the discourse of individuality within modernity operates as an accomplice to techniques of reification and the overall obfuscation of the culture industry ~= *assimilation/execution of myth by instrumental reason* -->{ art can be understood only by its laws of movement, not according to any set of invariants ~ antinomy: art is defined by relation to what it is not (separating itself from what it has developed out of)
(Adorno + Frankfurt School:) **subjectivity thrives in the decisive act of interpretation, one through which the ideological saturation of society finds itself unmasked and history is restored to its contestatory complexitoes**
•Sartre: existential liberation + historical “engagement” + artistic subjectivity --> writing = a praxis-based motioning toward futurity [~=? accelerationism]
Adorno/Sartre --> ***واجب indispensable search for a writing act tied to revolutionary desire, negational change, futural hope, pseudosalvatinoal intentionality*** [=/= Hedayat, Nietzsche]
==> invalidating mimesis as a legitimate conceptual category (!?*)
through an account of self and world as *mythopoetic entities* (~= willed immateriality) --> *chaos-consciousness* (interlacing experience + thought + desire) effectively disbands the Marxian hierarchy of true and false consciousness by virtue of its dissolution of all paradigms of historical “reality”
nowhere-zone between desolation and the everything --> experiential anarchy ==> the poet/artist (~= X-Men: Apocalypse film supervillain character watching the news of last millennia on TV) stands as the incarnation of history's redemption, saving it from itself, and therein bringing into perfect totality the fusion of the self, the aesthetic, and historical Being
historicity of the object
historicity of the subject
[...]
(87)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%57.6[...] its contestatory complexitoes**
•Sartre: existential liberation + historical “engagement” + artistic subjectivity --> writing = a praxis-based motioning toward futurity [~=? accelerationism]
Adorno/Sartre --> ***واجب indispensable search for a writing act tied to revolutionary desire, negational change, futural hope, pseudosalvatinoal intentionality*** [=/= Hedayat, Nietzsche]
==> invalidating mimesis as a legitimate conceptual category (!?*)
through an account of self and world as *mythopoetic entities* (~= willed immateriality) --> *chaos-consciousness* (interlacing experience + thought + desire) effectively disbands the Marxian hierarchy of true and false consciousness by virtue of its dissolution of all paradigms of historical “reality”
nowhere-zone between desolation and the everything --> experiential anarchy ==> the poet/artist (~= X-Men: Apocalypse film supervillain character watching the news of last millennia on TV) stands as the incarnation of history's redemption, saving it from itself, and therein bringing into perfect totality the fusion of the self, the aesthetic, and historical Being
historicity of the object
historicity of the subject
critical reason =/= instrumental reason
‘aesthetic depiction of reality =/= objective truth of its operation’ --> journalism
(“[*]artist: a creativity independent and existentially self-sufficient entity standing somewhere beyond the matrices of historical circumstance” =/=) Adorno:
1. artwork can struggle to engage directly with the moment ==> find itself invariably entrapped by the artificial presentations and camouflages of the obscenity it challenges ==> “permit the monstrosity of modern society to emerge in full clarity from the phenomena masking it” [--> an epic ==> freezing the dialectic in a rigid back-and-forth of monolithic polarizations and exaggerated narratives of good and evil]
2. delusion of art's distance from the everyday [--> to resurrect the archaic phantom of sovereignty amid a world of unavoidable mechanistic interconnections]
}==> artwork attests to a *fictive template of freedom* clinging to the *delusion of its righteous self-determination* ==> ***a mimetic intercourse between art and historical life*** [<-- this is most desired from artists today]
Adorno's premises (--> “progress”):
•unabashed use of the universalizing abstraction of “humanity”
•detrimental reconfirmation of a world-historical process inagurated by the alliance of enlightenment epistemology and the commodity form
}==> Adorno's paranoiac tone (of infection, contamination, threat) ==> rhetoric of false and true consciousness ==> proclivity (تمايل طبيعى به چيز بد) for perpetual judgment and truth-seeking
--(enlightenment pathology)--> grand theories of degradation and decline about whenever Adorno delves i[...]
(88)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%57.7[...]ered or analyzed* --methodological--> leaves one undetected (--> assassins who are inflexible, precise, and systematic to the highest degree, and traceless for this very reason)
...they remind of the ungovered body, the accidental, and death
xxxxx 280
...................................
(Mohaghegh's work on the middle east in his book) it is ***a theory that does not speak for ‘the East’(= a construction) but rather *an East*(= a radical illusion)***
-it offers careful insight into singular, distinctive episodes of thought and writing in the Middle East (and to explore their relevance across the topology of world thought at large)
-the fractal nature of his four separate subject-positions point to the *exceptional diversity and heterogeneous makeup of Middle Eastern cultural imaginaries*
...the insurgent carries a hundred masks within one, the poet a hundred more, the mystic a hundred more, and the sectarian a thousand
(@Geert)
[*]modernity: a self-naming historical epoch that redefines/fuses the exercise of power and knowledge and for which the enlightenment, capitalism, colonialism, technology, humanism, ideology, simulation, and the domination of instrumental reason become the main pillars of subjectivity
Mohaghegh offers a list of secondary literature that forms the relevant archive from which his manuscript borrows, and **marks its axis of engagement with preexisting interventions**
#bibliography
Nietzsche's conception of chaos
“nature and mask determine phenomenal being, the phenomenon in its being, as chaos”
(Deleuze interprets Nietzsche's chaos as:) a philosophical overture toward “the pure unformed”
--> the subject is this free, anonymous, and nomadic singularity which traverses men as well as plants and animals independently of the matter of their individuation and the forms of their personality [~~> #write a short story for hayula]
*Eastern insurgent's participation in the chaotic event* --> there is no natural or pure ==> (a more) apocalyptic response ==> to became available
[--> to deal with sense as a predicate مسند or a property دارايى =/=? to deal with sense as an event]
community
(on Eastern postmodern gathering)
(alternative categories that express the potential for “relationality”: assemblage, alignment, circle, swarm, etc. that are based on multiple vantages of intersection and divergence =/=) *community*:
•tends to evoke an essentialist claim
•there is typically some centralized discourse of unity, some absolute principle that binds everyone
•functions as self-enclosed and exclusionary phenomenon
•breeds insularity and protectionism
=/= vulnerable, permeable, susceptible to transformation
=/= riot crowd (open fever and pulsa[...]
(89)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%58.4[...]pable of abomination (backstabing)
-recognized by their tangible outlines as actual constellations in the night sky
-related to the more expansive domains of animality, vehicles, and objects
-emanate from a perceptual faculty closer to the child's imagination of cloud-shapes (=/= archetypal meaning)
Tiamat
primordial goddess of the salt sea, darkness, chaos, and creation
from the time of permanent nightfall
a destroyer-deity and yet whose sliced body parts form the heavens and earth
represented as unconscious, reckless annihilation and yet also holding diabolical intelligence
bathed in eternal blackness and yet known as “the glistening one”
Girra
dystopian potentials of technological invention
figure of wicked logos (undoing words)
(leader of the terrible)
non-metaphysical and equally nonhumanist devotion to the artificer (apparatus)
/>
cosmic ballistics: scientific field of mechanics concerned with the launching, propulsion, flight, and effect of projectiles (trajectory and impact)
nocturnality and contagion
snakes and dragons of constellations
paradox (the beast)
instrumentality (the builder)
unleashing (the despoiler)
death-spell
نابودی gesture of *extispicy: ancient Mesopotamian practice of reading animal organs (often a sheep'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<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[...]
(90)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%60.7[...]tiary: paranormal excluded by religion
agricultural societies monopolized charisma (--> king) --> logistical functioning of the world of agriculture ==> global warming
neolithic privatization of enchantment ==> monotheism
Holocene --> strategy of survival at any cost
(Morton echoing the cliche of artists wanna do magic:) “art is demonic”: it emanates (not designed) from beyond sense that the artist is not in charge of, dangerous causative flicker
~ ‘art = charisma’ [= cause & effect]
--Morton--> (bad idea of) art ==> charismatic causality
force-like animal magnetism
magic = causality + illusion
appearance and essence are two different sides of Mobius strip
(pre-neolithic -->) *we live in a world of tricksters* (raindrops are tricksters,,,)
incomprehensible charisma of kitsch
(the objects in my room contain a palpable enjoyment that is without me, found objects that spray charismatic causality [without devotion or trust])
...................................
(Zizek's) Lacan four discourses via porn actress facial stages:
1- ecstatic state --> overwhelmed
2- serious --> hard work, instrumental control
3- boredom --> ignorance, indifference
4- mocking --> is this all you can do, smile
...................................
body...
how to feed it
when to fast
how to soothe
moisturize
let go
heal
you can't grasp your body once and for all --> one can only bear witness and offer testimony (<--Avital-- this is why writing is so often bound up with illness, “writer = invalid”)
cultural phantasms of bodily mutation
the body never stays put long enough to form self-identity --(this is why)--> our ancestors used to fast-forward and just lose it [transcending the body]
in Dostoevsky
body is variously insulted and humiliated --> subjected to injury (an injury capable of language and disclosure)
--> idiocy offered a delicate conflagration of soma + psyche
illness: the stealth master (the teacher whose lesson is unremittingly opaque yet purposeful)
(when you get hurt -->) body: “Honey, I’m home, I am your home.”
your body fighting for you
healing without cure
illness --Avital--> essentially related to the experience of injustice ~= your Geworfenheit
• illness visits you at will and does what it wants to your body (stinging surfaces you didn’t know you had)
•illness gives access to the devotional mode of surrender (abandoning to itself something other than the self)
•illness brings with it an alternative system of ecstasy and meaning
•*illness: an inescapable condition of being*
-
(Dostoevsky's[...]
(91)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%61[...]tage has never hardened into a clear ratial category within the society*
we must regard them as actors *even when we cannot see their choices*
(Naveeda Khan)
Jinns and children
a place for a child to build conviviality / continuity with a creature made of smokeless fire
(the girl) she charts through a modality of “hearing”
..that which defines the normative, the duties, and responsibilities that accompany observance of a religious tradition.
different intensities by which the normative is reiterated
Jinns are also known to eavesdrop (esteragh-e sam’) on the angels in the lower reaches of heaven to acquire limited knowledge of the future
the little mischievous spirits (nafs) that make up a self
**wonders of children
children are born free of sin and have the ability to communicate without reason (aghl) and therefore carry the threat of being easily led astray
8 year-old Maryam, channeling communication between the jinn and her family
a time that she would look into the palms of her hand (to see what the jinn would have her see)
she instructed the jinn that he could enter her father's body, with his permission, jinn wanted to taste human food
her father and brothers would listen carefully to her descriptions
(authoritative figure of the father becomes the pupil of his little daughter hearing her words of advice)--alterity
“in the middle east, the child is seen as the crucial generational link in the family unit, the key to its continuation, the living person that ties the present to the past and to the future” (Ferena 1005)
“in the indian case ...the child is seen as already being full person in domains to which the mother does not have access” (Veena Das 1989)
...healer or magician may utilize a child to bring into presence or communicate with the spiritual being
(***the presence of child in Ma'rekeh-Giri معرکه گیری?***)
...................................
ecstatic identifications with...
one could legitimately dream of the prophet, but one could never call him forth
both these paths escape jinn, having a dynamic if disruptive presence within human world, alongside the presence of angels and saints
there can be no other experience of the prophet other than through the record of his words and deeds??!!!
the daily struggle to presence the prophet
علما olama =/= بچه bache
face-to-face =/= via-jinn
face-to-face learning from the olama (the authoritative transmitters) versus a faceless and voiceless jinn with his child serving as its ventriloquist (arusak gardan)
[...]
(92)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%61.6[...]
(for Zezru) the children are pure, they represent non-evil. they belong to shades. their innocence does not imply a state of passivity.
what regions of experience and expression the child has access to?
innate resources of children
Reynolds
children’s own resources are bolstered by the protection afforded by living and dead kin
a parent (or guardian), cannot know in advance what regions of experience and expression the child has access to or what he or she is capable of
in Islam: children are considered to have a certain strength and prescience that makes them effective as conduits to the world of spirits =/= innocent creatures to be protected
•children are free of religious obligations up to the age when they are seen as maturing
•protected by countercharms and exorcism only to an extent
a certain unintentional malevolence existing alongside generosity
[*]malevolence: something that holds out the possibility of harm (=/= actively intending harm)
[*]generosity: the willingness to concede to others (=/= a nobility of character)
religious differences --materialized-->
•as a malevolent witch
•in a father’s potentially malevolent instrumentalization of his daughter (bringing the jinn home)
parsayi پارسایی
*pious self = composition of a series of *presubjective singularities* (standing alongside one another [within a milieu comprising other such series/seriousnesses])
=/= self-contradictory subject arching toward resolution
=/= norm-bearing subject that has achieved coherence
(*presubjective singularities*)
let's explore how a self moves alone this series of singularities, what brings about movement, and where may it be tending [wohin]
---Naveeda--> presubjective singularities: different versions of oneself that are not sharply distinguished from one another but are nonetheless distinct
[*]subjectivity: whatever you do set yourself apart from others
Maryam's father, has moved from a version of himself that he knew to other versions of himself of which he did not have prior knowledge
his movement was toward the jinn and then away from them. so not in the series that constituted ‘him’, but also moved toward the series constituting the jinn. a zone of jinn becoming.
(or human becoming for the jinn)
allowing himself to be a multiplicity
“Our faith had become weak and our obligatory worship was suffering.”
is Sulayman (the jinn) then the arc of a certain line of flight for Maryam?
friendship between a human (little sunni girl) and a nonhuman (jinn) [<-- enabled & nurtured by the possibilities of malevolence + generosity] ==> movement within a field of negativity ==Naveeda==> a means of gai[...]
(93)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%61.7[...]gushing streams of empty homogeneous time*
•bringing the upanishads, from several hundred years BCE, into conversation with the Quran <-- unconstrained by the *teleology of linear historical time*
--> (my lecture-performances: being) inhabited a world of multiple temporalities {=/= teleology ==> linear time of progress, moving ever forward--teleology of time is central to modernity & question of the self}
many post-colonial projects shares that sense of a break from the past, which must now be recovered --✕--> sense of rupture and alienation was not (and is not) the only way in which the colonized responded to the colonizer
Shakry --> *plenitude of time and the persistence of traditions* + productive conceptual dialogue (~= ajayeb studies)
•to engage with the ethico-philosophical questions
intellectual and religious elite across the colonial Middle East and South Asia lived within a plenitude of time in which Freud and Ibn Arabi, separated by centuries, could productively speak to each other unconstrained by the borders of “tradition” and “modernity,” “religious” and “secular”
(Shakry ☞ Anand)
...................................
(Mufti ☞ Weber:) inescapability of calculation and instrumental rationality in a capitalist society ==> fundamental transformation of religious belief and practice in the transition to the modern social order
•“steel-hard shell” (stahlhartes Gehäuse), “iron cage” --provides--> range of possibilities for social action and social imagination
***modern intellectualist form of romantic irrationalism*** [in contemporary art within Europe --> #fables of: novelty, innovation, departure]
redemption from the rationalism and intellectualism of science --> craving spheres of the irrational (spheres that intellectualism has not yet touched) are now raised into consciousness and put under its lens
}= a method of emancipation from intellectualism
intensive social transformation in the postcolonial world
conditions of neoliberal global capitalism
[we have to see] disenchantment, necessarily open-ended and incomplete =/= self-consciously formulated projects of re-enchantment
[i have to be carefull with my] allusive evocation of the passing of secularity into obsolescence
my work with computre programming and database --> practices of calculability: a hallmark of the secularization thesis
subtraction stories: accounts of the emergence of modernity-secularity as merely the falling away of extraneous elements (leaving a core of foundational human experience and its self-understanding)
(Mufti ☞ Asad --clarifying--> the ways in which) ***the very category of religious experience as a distinct and delimited domain of social and cultural life emerges out of transitions to modernity***
islamism: a return[...]
(94)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%63.6[...]lving relationship between humans and jinns
from pre-islamic --to--> Islamic
both good & bad ascribed to jinn's constitution --to--> to be much more unequivocally associated with evil
the little mischievous nafs نفس that make up a self --> Muslim interiority (projects?)
...in the belief of jinns:
•complex arrangement of cultural memory
•political strategy
•mental illness
•individual subjectivity
•
--✕--> *Naveeda taking the existence of jinn for granted ==> (her effort) to learn more about the family that adopted them and their efforts at striving*
*taking the existence of X for granted ==to==> learn about the people who adopted X*
“Muslim children - how bring them up?” vol 3
(in Islam) child: bring without aghl عقل + ability to communicate with divine beings, without sin
--> always under the threat of being easily led astray
eight-year-old Maryam
-attuned to ways in which this world and the jinn world were mirrored and intertwined
-would look into the palm of her hand to see what the jinn would have her to see
-relayed the requests of human world to the jinn
-bringing forth advice, instruction, expression of desire (from the jinn)
relationship of ventriloquism (between Maryam and jinn)
there was an accepted contiguity of jinn and human selves & possibility of a plurality of voices in Maryam's mediation --> enjoin her family to attend closely to her words
coterminous
هم مرز، هم زمان
Ahmadi in Pakistan
each Muslim group claimed itself the truest of all <-- the idea that *to accept the X's claim to be Muslim = accept one's own annihilation as Muslim*
--Naveeda--> question the limits of contiguity of different forms of life (when copresence was tolerable? when copresence was made intolerable?)r />
imitato Muhammadi
emulating X (to experience X) --through--> passionate love and ecstatic identification with the X
(for example the prophet: seeing the prophet on one's mind's eye + imitating him)
•sufist approach: prophet is immanent in the world
•varied affective relations to the prophet:
◦ecstatic love
◦reverential love
◦respect
◦
jinns having a dynamic disruptive presence within the human world
Sunni Deobandi's belief that the prophet is alive in his grave in Medina ~= Shia's notion of the hidden imam
*several (competing) bodies of knowledge*
Naveeda --read--> Sahib taking cues --on--> prophet's example --from--> faceless voiceless jinn --with--> little child surving as its medium
-parental disappointment with sons
-children possible abandonment by their fathers
-wife's estrangement from he[...]
(95)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%64.9[...]d striving)
Nietzsche's overman ~= Iqbal's prophet (Muhammad) ~= one's next self
Iqbal = cognizant of chronic weakness that plagued the striver + necessity for (complete and reshuffle) diagnostics of spiritual exhaustion
(for him:)
•desire for self-annihilation
•search for ultimate guidance
=/= striving
no Gabriel
no paradise
no houri
no God
☹️
Iqbal's ambivalence in feeling affinity with thinkers whose thoughts, taken to its logical conclusion, spoke of the irrelevance of God
Nietzschean Iqbal ~=> supreme court of Pakistan's call to Muslims to be more vigilant against dissembling non-muslims (one's debased forms)
ulama: repugnant other (incommensurability with respect to everyday life and public culture)
expressions of striving
•International Committee for the Protection of the Finality of Prophethood
•Blasphemy Law (Pakistan)
•...my alim is superior and provides the best guidance toward being a good Muslim
•
[debate as an omen:]
debate: indication of self-deception
(practical aspects of piety <--) rightful instruction =/= self-deception (--> quarrel ~= debate & disputation)
--> debate & argue : competitive exchange --✕--> cajoling, explaining patiently, waiting to be understood
umma: moral community (--> my problem with community in artistic research is rooted here)
ejtehadi --> interpretive
nazariati --> ideological
“...being bitten by the rabid dog of wrongful ideology”
bedat, gomrahi --> world as illusion (experiencing the world as fictional) --> one's capacity to be alienated --> problem of one's striving
reply to the letterwriter
fatwa فتوا --attention--> scene of aspiration as expressed through religious discussion and debate in everyday life
mofti مفتی jurist
(from) giving technical religious advise --to--> assessment of the shredded nature of social life [<-- like how artists give fatwa, *artistic fatwa and research*]
“fetne فتنه ~= civil discord” --> the idea that it is wrong for ordinary people to engage in religious debates, for they will land definitely in error ==> spark for uncharitable behavior
riya ریا
hypocrisy, ostentation, dissimulation
--> excesses of speech: gossip, rumor
Thanawi's suggestion: use different parts of the body to flatter the tongue
(from) riya --to--> adat (habit) --to--> ebadat (worship) --to--> ekhlas (sincerity of character)
}--> Thanawi's exploration of persistence presence of skepticism within everyday acts of piety and religiosity =/= Ludhianvi's overcoming of skepticism
I[...]
(96)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%65.4[...]ions proposed by a knowledge infrastructure workshop 2012)
-(ways to) encode and reinforce existing interests and relations of power
-(we need) a design community versed in these literatures:
•different social worlds
•conflicting conceptual frameworks
•sociology of science and technology
•sociology of standards (--> standardizing data has proven to be a crucial activity in *scaling up* the sciences) #lens
•boundary objects
•trading zones
•actor networks
•how sharing works in practice
•agreements on shared norms, practices, and technical systems (problematized by Femke, she focuses my attention on how software developers are too quick to construct “ontologies”)
•
==> to scale up the generally lower-level focus of design thinking [--> how my ajayeb.net addresses this?]
--> to co-design new infrastructures
--> to look beyond the scale of a field and timeframe of a career
>
(we need) meaningful access to digital media (not an exciting add-on investment)
--> new forms of knowledge infrastructure may disadvantage and devalue older forms of knowledge production:
•new sensor network replacing ecological fieldwork -->? my #amazon
•“instrumenting ocean” supplanting traditions of the oceanographic cruise [in the last 20 years new sensor grids have come to cover the oceans, land, sky and space] -->? my #ajayeb's is concerned with thinking “beyond the *instrumental languages of utility and function*, which tend to cast knowledge infrastructures as *neutral instruments* whose positive and negative effects lie solely in the way they are operationalized and used”
*consequences of change are rarely socially, culturally, or economically neutral*
collectives
assemblages
configurations
try to tell yourself a “technology only” or “social only” story of knowledge infrastructure (and you will find it impossible)
(Brunton's) spam --> co-evolution of technical systems, communities, and social norms
knowledge infrastructures ==carry==> significant distributional consequences --> advancing the interests of some and actively damaging the prospects of others
(ways of producing “raw” date) davulated by “data sharing”:
•*labor-intensive* collecting practices
•site-specific expertise required
}--> long-standing craft traditions
once-vast secretarial ranks (of large organizations) [a British nostalgia for bureaucratic hierarchy fantasized and franchized by Harry Potter]
ajayeb's 13th century's “technologies” for “virtual” witnessing
--imbalance in the structure and distribution of our knowledge--
overrepresentation of research on “charismatic megafauna” (cuddly pandas, expenssive human-like chimps, tigers, hallucinogenic plants, etc.)
[...]
(97)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%67.7[...]r />
bilingualism
different languages (farsi and arabic in ajayeb) refers to different value systems and to different lived experience
...................................
[Ahmed]
(complaint ~=) diversity-work = data-collection
we learn about the damage we cause, of how causes are understood as damage
...................................
my old background (in computer sciences):
•www.joelonsoftware.com (Joel Spolsky runs a company which sells bug databases, “FogBugz”)
•wiki.c2.com
•“Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs”
computational process
abstract beings (processes*) manipulate other abstract things (data*)
--> a pattern of rules (program*)
programming: *metalinguistic abstraction* [--> engineering design] : building a mini-language to express a problem, using a fixed computer programming language (on a given hardware) to construct a new language that enables describing (and hence to think) the problem --> using:
•primitives means of combination
•primitives means of abstraction
--> representation of data and control (<~~ individual bits of storage and primitive machine instructions)
+ using the given hardware to erect systems/utilities for the efficient implementation of resource-limited computations
distinction between “passive” data and “active” processes =/= Lisp
(procedures and data are just abstractions, they are not really distinct) --> programming language should have methods for combining and abstracting procedures and data
means of abstraction: by which compound elements can be named and manipulated as units
modularity --> localized part of the system
<== perception of the system
•objective: viewing a large system as a collection of distinct objects --> concerned with how a computational object can change and yet maintain its identity
•streamous: information that flow in the system --> delayed evaluation
(for example) a bank account: has state in that the answer to the question “Can I withdraw $100?” depends upon the history of deposit and withdrawal transactions
object decomposed into computational objects (each with their own time-varying local state variables) --> model
object programming: model real-world objects with local state by computational objects with local variables --> identify time variation in the real world with time variation in the computer --> implement the time variation of the states of the model objects in the computer with assignments to the local variables of the model objects
--✕--> (how?) model a time function
stream: delayed (infinite) list
stream programming:
•different abstractions such as: map, filter, accumulate,
[...]
(100)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%69.4[...]lassification”
“...hair-trigger judgments about gender lead to romance as well as lethal exchange.”
...................................
Verran in her work with Yoruba (West African) and Yolngu (Aboriginal Australian)
=/= thinking of numbers used in enumerating the real world as helping us to work relation ==> numbers (and mathematical objects) as cognitive tools
elements of schooling --> learning to use mathematical tools
*can number be considered as an inventive frontier in social, cultural, political and moral life?* --Verran--> *number = materialized relations*, enumerated materiality
people having kin relations
people are relations (in an embodied sense + semiotic in the sense of expressing a formal relation [for example wife/husband])
example:
•in river water --> taking numbers as semiotic = to identify numbers as the formal relation unity/plurality
•in working markets --> numbers enact generalizing iconically in the whole/parts mode
--**--> numbers as particulars, in place and time, in situ, realized in specific practical ways
Platonist account of number
intuitionist account of number
instrumentalist account of number
Iranian accounr of number
(Verran's rhetoric --> the term) semiotic (an opaque term, both vague and highly technical) + material modifies
(Verran not refering to) [*]semiotic: the summoning up the baroque complexity of French structuralist and post-structuralist thought, and alternatively the specific categorical proposals of Peirce's philosophy and its offspring, american pragmatism.
the paradox of worlds as already/always meaningful, recognizing that doing worlds as knowable (whether by science or by trading) or for that matter through Yoruba, or Yolngu knowledge traditions --involves--> engaging with the world as it is here and now --accepts--> *studying ‘forms of life’ and ‘language games’ as complex clots of signs and collective actions*
--Peirce--> numbers can be:
•iconic (icons are deeply coconstitutive with clots of collective actions that generate entities)
•indexical
•symbolic (symbols and their objects enact a relation of supervenience امر غير مترقبه, objects are accepted as affecting and effecting their signs but not vice-versa)
--> degrees of reciprocal co-constitution of signs and collective embodied and embedded actions in which objects come to life
--Verran--> ethnographically found forms of the workings of signs
(depending on) how one understands ethnography ==> names work as icons, indexes, or symbols
removing the stigma of Yoruba number as primitive
numbers as working indexically or symbolically --> for examine: are being used to represent the ecological health of Au[...]
(101)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%71[...]sources
◦(19th century technique of) “reading against the grain”: try to discover, from the surviving sources, from what perspective they were written (what historical context they were embedded in) = “critical reading” from the stand point of all of one might say “the illusions of memory” which might cloud an objective impartial records of events (not accepting the narrative that place value in the source) [=/= my work on ajayeb]
◦securing evidence (---> go to archive) : intersection of objectivity with study of history
(since 17th century) memory has been essential to our conceptualization of what does it mean to have a self --> why we are so concerned with memory damage ceases (alzheimer, etc.)
husod3oqLds
many time when we define (say “what X is”), what we are doing is to how to make a term more precise, to make something *artificially operational*
...................................
*sciences of the archive*
depend on longed lived collections
(since 16th century, as we know it) modern science's epistemic goal: *predictive accuracy* =/= *to elevate certainty* (the case in medieval Latin Europe)
books (past discoveries) & instruments (future discoveries) interspersed --when--> they both belong to the same practice ==> library
(Goethe:) search nothing beyond the phenomena
...................................
Morris
movement of commerce's subject (=/= walking of the Parisian flaneur)
plaque's morbid sentimen --> evades the reduction of signs to mere reference
[*]public art: the art of a world bifurcated by capital --tending--> *monumentality: an exaggerated literality + excess of scale (incapable of irony)
(of image -->) textuality: something lurking off that bids us engage the ambiguity
metonym
critique: (ana: (analogy of) a movement toward the outside
a grammatical negative can never efface what it attempts to contradict
a call for judgment hides in the defensive gesture
criminality: departure from (or failure) to recognize a law
new violence
•violence against the sovereignty of local subjects
•violence against an internationalized regime that increasingly claimed exclusive sovereignty for itself
...................................
ethnography of capitalist crisis (a project on:)
•the politics of [*]transparency: the ideological pointing stick by which the market has appropriated for itself the function of regulating the state (where it was the function of the state to regulate the market)
•how capitalism ([Morris] in Thailand) disguises itself as mere monetization
•how money's total and totalizing meditations have come to be experienced in the contrary idioms of immediacy and et[...]
(102)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%72.5[...]cribed on the tongue as though the tongue had been transformed into paper and the paper into pen. Thus did writ- ing make speech possible. The medium pulled the paper away, folded it carefully, and then, with only a little blood reddening his lips, began speaking.” (Morris)
•tongue excision = performative repudiation of mediumship
•voice = the vehicle of a simple exteriorization
•[*]fable: staged risk in the form of a bad example ==> “object of transmission = the truth”
•[*]confession: a mode of accession or conformity to the message
in Buddhism of premodern cosmologies --> a domain of natural signification where there is *a pure identity between signifier and signified*
auxiliary hell جهنم کمکی
[a fable:] scrutiny ==> (meritorious beings:) people in question become miraculously equipped with memory
recorded on luminous jewel-encrusted gold tablets
quaint traditions عجیب و جالب
(i am learning from Morris how not to) reject the cosmology as a symptom of superstition or a relic of bygone times
ubiquity alone is inadequate to demonstrate relevance
(in the story of Yama) in the evildoer's case, speech is not the mere instrument of truth: it is both a symptom and a cause of sin
where the law rules ==>
•there is no difference between *object* and *sign*
•there is no difference between *speech* and *voice*
the language of truth (personified in the speechless child) =/= corruptions of human utterance : {truth's silent ideality =/= sin's “over-naming"}
mediumship's representational function: transmission of a referential truth + repeated registration of the mere technique of its transmission
(Chuchad's) instrumental “writing”
(like Chuchad, many performance artists are today) inhabiting the era of ***technique's fetishization*** = (Heidegger's era of) technology
occult returning in the guise of transparency
nationalized discourse of modernity: (oppositional terms of) science =/= magic
redolent of... حاکی
when *observation* (propelled by desire =/=) become a form of *attention* (propelled by labor)
[Morris ☞ Kittler on “discourse network” of Freud, Simmel, Rilke:] writing = an exhaustion that endlessly refused to end (=/= miniatures of meaning)
--> “writing is nothing beyond its materiality” and people who practice this act simply replace writing machine ==promis==> *mystical union of writing and delirium*
(from) actual magicality of script --to--> the representational capacity of inscription --to--> a deployment of writing in the mode of mathematics (bureaucratic list poetry)
incorporation of technologies of mass mediatization into the language (and performance of possession --by--> the discourses of[...]
(103)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%72.8[...]sage
in Buddhism of premodern cosmologies --> a domain of natural signification where there is *a pure identity between signifier and signified*
auxiliary hell جهنم کمکی
[a fable:] scrutiny ==> (meritorious beings:) people in question become miraculously equipped with memory
recorded on luminous jewel-encrusted gold tablets
quaint traditions عجیب و جالب
(i am learning from Morris how not to) reject the cosmology as a symptom of superstition or a relic of bygone times
ubiquity alone is inadequate to demonstrate relevance
(in the story of Yama) in the evildoer's case, speech is not the mere instrument of truth: it is both a symptom and a cause of sin
where the law rules ==>
•there is no difference between *object* and *sign*
•there is no difference between *speech* and *voice*
the language of truth (personified in the speechless child) =/= corruptions of human utterance : {truth's silent ideality =/= sin's “over-naming"}
mediumship's representational function: transmission of a referential truth + repeated registration of the mere technique of its transmission
(Chuchad's) instrumental “writing”
(like Chuchad, many performance artists are today) inhabiting the era of ***technique's fetishization*** = (Heidegger's era of) technology
occult returning in the guise of transparency
nationalized discourse of modernity: (oppositional terms of) science =/= magic
redolent of... حاکی
when *observation* (propelled by desire =/=) become a form of *attention* (propelled by labor)
[Morris ☞ Kittler on “discourse network” of Freud, Simmel, Rilke:] writing = an exhaustion that endlessly refused to end (=/= miniatures of meaning)
--> “writing is nothing beyond its materiality” and people who practice this act simply replace writing machine ==promis==> *mystical union of writing and delirium*
(from) actual magicality of script --to--> the representational capacity of inscription --to--> a deployment of writing in the mode of mathematics (bureaucratic list poetry)
incorporation of technologies of mass mediatization into the language (and performance of possession --by--> the discourses of lost tradition)
-what kind of mediation is (not simply the inscription of its technique, but) a renewed transmission of meaning?
**the fantasy of a return to meaning**
[Morris submits that] (direct marketing ~=) *pyramid schemes* are the economic counterpart of *mediumship*
= the mode of retailing in which the function of distribution and resale (and indeed the movement of capital) is masked in the *rhetoric of directness*
•[*]directness: withdrawal of an infrastructure of mediation i[...]
(104)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%72.8[...] matters with thoughts and learns to create (what Despret would call) the relevant *milieu of thought*
Matrix world: “consumer victim =/= resistant hacker fighter” and nothing else
if you are a student of ghosts --> you are competent in sensing the taste of ghosts
{ancestors ate too much salt ==> descendants desire water}--> *intersubjective nature of remembering*
-[Despret ☞ Kwon] true human desires are not those of an isolated individual. it is the individual who feels the desire, whereas the origin of the desirem, like the spirit's phantom salt, may be with someone else, for it is in the presence of this other that the water becomes salty --> ***the desire to remember can be a desire that rises somewhere between the past and the present***
-agencement: the act of commemoration responds to a desire, so one cannot choose whether it emanates from the one who is remembered or the one who takes charge of remembering --> the desire to be remembered & the desire to remember hold together [=/= giving ontological priority to the imagination of the living]
what can i learn from Tehran's bestiary, from my mother, from unusual old iranian fables, from telegram animals?
•let myself be instructed by the events that my inquiry creates
•let myself be called by the enigma that will guide me inmy understanding of events
*to be instructed ~= honouring the problem ~= following it up & letting oneself be led by it --> Alice Wonderland chasing rabbits
****questions do not call for explanation or elucidation, questions call for creation**** ~= [*]riddles: the beginnings of stories ==> set those who are summoned by the enigma to work in a particular way: “what manner of living will make it possible to understand these riddless?”
riddle: key + guide
(speaking trope saying senses -->) tropisms =/= meanings
trope = affects that magnetize you
forces that pass through you and steer you
what should i do with ajayeb? = what kind of meaning is requested of me? ****what is my obligation to the meaning i am seeking?**** [=/= Mette's work]
...................................
to bring to BOZAR project with Goda into my interest in geo-feminism
the question of naming, of taxonomy --> a way of being into connectedness
[*]ajayeb studies = **how to inherit natural history otherwise**, how to think about natural history, embracing other (than western) heritages of natural history that enlarges the world for us and the ones we are living with
plantation system:
1. radical simplification, elimination of whole categories of players (in systemic encounters)
2. radical substitution, whole domains (plant life, animal life, human labor system in interaction with animals and plants and mic[...]
(105)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%73.3[...]itions of admission ---> artistic, sexual, natural *selections*
tickets to power-holding cliques that control the resources
phantoms of non-destruction
or
phantoms of ‘constructed adequately’
pausing dogs
mixed messages
who is wanted for dinner?
the moment when the message is finally received --> tech, magic, ethic, morph
poetic historiography
pivotal reading of ancient Greece --- out of day-dream fantasy
[Rickels]
*beauty is interested in action
(pure) beauty re-lingering on primary narcissism, that's why beauty must be administrated, in proper doses.
(my) animal-findings and fairy-tale associations
if dogs communicate through their trainability cats redirect lines of communication through play. the dog waits and watches, the cat looks and looks, which when is your turn to be looked at, can be therapeutic or unnerving.
meeting the cat half-way
[Ingraham]
the house, passed over in history, brings with it a great many dangers
architecture (never touches the object) is enchanted with object discourse
...all of us have been asked to “instrumentalize” architectural [or art] theory according to a particular building
material given a structure
...................................
Q & A ?, interactivity, swarovski party, servants and robots interacting with foreign bodies --> feeling at home? excited... --> disco without bouncers and borders without border check, spaces you can seamlessly in and out, labyrinthine
i am generating some vocabularies
parsite and parasitical, not all of them are predatory like the wolf
(Karen Barad)
With all mirroring practices, biomimcry has built-in optics on the geometry of distance from what which is other.
(Irigaray)
surprise (to be new): not yet assimilated or disassimilated as known
our attention to that which is not yet (en)coded
...................................
(something to consider, regarding the pigs and wolf story, also an interest for performances that happen in closed space;) there is a standard account that says ‘interiors’ and ‘interiority’ are linked, that the articulation of interior physical space enabled the development of certain kind of (initially bourgeois European) sense of subjective life--as something sheltered and enclosed.
=/= interiority (subjectivity) is linked to the exterior [Sennett]
O-- still in the 15th century (when sex and sleeping was not veiled under curtains) there was no correlation between the notion of privacy and the interior
O-- in the mid 18th century (among European bourgeoisie) a new ideal of domesticity appeared which dictates a new interior space --> separate [...]
(107)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%74.4[...]curse, ,]
hypnosis --> unsettling outlines of of a subject whose makeup could evade both intellectual and institutional mastery + precariousness and malleability of (what had been thought of as) consciousness
hypnosis adjacent to attention?! intense refocusing and narrowing of attention + inhibition of motor responses
focalization: concentrating one's attention on some specific object
sustained looking at a single point (i used to do as a child) ==> dramatic reorganization of consciousness
Crary in his book, Suspension of Perception, shows how high science and peripheral pseudoscience never had clear-cut distinctions in the 19th century. that there were a complex and shifting relation of mutual exchange between the “luminous” physics with a huge range of other “darker” ideas about ‘action in a distance’ enacted in spiritism
@Zoumana
hypnosis & suggestion --> automatic processes (inferior, more instinctual, continuous with animality), “mental decapitation” =/= ration elicit patient with conscious participating will power [--> Star Wars will of the weaker and less independent, powerful natures exercise over weaker ones, jedi --> strance states (of the weaker ones): being instrument of undisguised power --Stengers--> deviant types of behavioural control]
(hypnosis still being researched on but) ideologically could not be acknowledged as a constitutive part of human sciences
==> (stigmata of critical position [@Ali; follow it in Marxism]:)
volitional human action modified by external forces
Ali's tacit appeal to state secret, military secret --> importance of low-level effects of suggestion and influence in contemporary global culture (Ali's interest)
the role ‘suggestion’ plays in a society of communication --> the effects of:
•fashion
•mimesis
•mass psychology
•media-related contagions
+ influences of all kind ==> “oblige” us
}--> the assumption that attention can be controlled for specific ends
(over a hundred years) underpinning institutional strategies has been the position that *human subjects have determinate psychological capacities and functions that might be susceptible to technological management*
attention has been both: strategy of control & locus of resistance and drift
(by the end of 20th century) the attentive subject is part of an ‘internalization’ of disciplinary imperative --> individuals are made more directly responsible for their own efficient or profitable utilization
Foucault's society of discipline
Guy Debord's society of spectacle
(Guy Debord's) *spectacle: a development of a technology of separation*, [multiple strategies of isolation] --> (capitalism's restructuring of) society without community
+
(Foucault's[...]
(108)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%75.5[...]namic of flux/dispersal}--> barely contained
(Manet's) faciality (a site of pictorial effect): casual amorphousness, a surface that no longer discloses interiority or self-reflection
(within 19th + 20th century modernity) face: (par excellence) the substance of expression of the signifier --(D+G)--> **capitalist faciality** (exists to serve a signifying formula): the means by which the signifier takes control, the ways it organizes a certain mode of individuated subjectification and collective madness of a *machine without any content* (Crary ☞ Guattari)
-who returns to the more tightly bound order of faciality? when and why?
--> articulated hierarchy of socialized body
...relative integrity of the face --> a larger mode of conformity to a dominant reality
@Geert
(Deleuze and Guattari:) when head ceases to be coded by the body ==> ‘face’ () --> ‘body (+ head)’ [~ multidimensional polyvocal corporeal code] overcoded by what we call the Face
(////we have to escape the face and facialization!)
indication of bodies in my peers projects in apass:
-kinds of subduing and constrain necessary for the construction of an *organized and inhibited corporeality* (--> Laura's project)
-instruments of domestication
fixed pictorial (--> a holding action) --> social organization
study object of empirical sciences around 1880: perceptual field newly decomposed into various abstract units of sensation + related possibilities of synthesis
+ newly invented nervous disorders (hysteria, etc.)
--> (busy with) failures of the integrity of perception --> disassociated fragments --> (impairment asymbolias:)
*agnosia*: inability to make any conceptual or symbolic identification of an object ~ visual information experienced with a primal strangeness:
“perceptual field --✕--> pragmatic plasticity”
flat perception, no determination of depth object
}--> labelled as pathological [=/= my amazon project--was a form agnosia:
•resistance to consuming the world in a productive or social way
•rejection of habitual or conventional patterns of organized perceptual information]
-this is part of the phenomenology of knowledge***
desymbolization of perception --> Foad
{for Janet:} attention: power of mental synthesis (~ the power of subject to form new perception, to have memories)
{for Freud:} attention: dynamic activity of repression
“[a] society recognizes itself and its own positivity through the morbid and pathological forms it identifies and invents” (Crary + Foucault)
subjectivity: provisional assembly of mobile and mutable components --> attentiveness:
•conscious/voluntary {task-oriented, higher behaviour}
•automatic/passive {areas of habitual activity, daydreaming, reverie, somnambulant st[...]
(109)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%75.8[...]ben--> part of the particularly modern failure of ethos, of character
[gesture <-->? ethos]
incapacitation: renunciation of *potentia*[~= capacity for being affected, any expansion of practical being <-- Spinoza]
smell of flowers = disintegrated product of their sexual metabolism <-- Freud
D+G becoming woman
*man: molar entity par excellence (=/= becomings are molecular), man constitutes the majority, the standard in which the majority is based: white, male, adult, rational ~ the average european, the subject of enunciation
@Leo
(--> problematized by Grosz ---> go to ajayeb.net/?q=Grosz%2BDeleuze%2BGuattari)
the perpetual self-invention of “free subjectivity” --defining--> modernity
cycle of decoding & recoding :
daring innovation --> hyperanxious self-consolidation --> renewed innovation --> ...
Manet =/= Caravaggio:
•intense optical contact
•tactile contact
•a reciprocal system of investment in the transactional nature of the encounter--infused with the interplay of the social, libidinal, and economic difference
hands as:
•expression of individual consciousness (in Caravaggio)
•instrument of active gesture (in Manet)
activity ~=? simulation of gesture
pointing index finger
confirmation of the impossibility of a direct perception, impossibility of an attention that was an immediate possession of its object (--> Sa'di pointing out to the moon and his lover...)--> every point of fixation is deferral
--✕--> (once?) functioned to denote a plane of transcendence
figuration of utopia --> simultaneous mapping out of death, absence, and finitude of historical subjectivity
Peirce's (nonoptical operation of attentive consciousness =/= Descartes) --> impossibility of direct intuition, of interpretive process
**cognition and perception could only occur indirectly**
index: exercising a real physiological force over the attention -- mesmerized into its particular object of sense.
= *everything that focuses the attention*, (everything that startles us into an index)
--> make something conceptually present which is perceptually absent
installed economy of attraction(/distraction) [in European cities, and its deviation in Tehran differences]
fashion works to bind attention onto its own pseudo-unity
against the living, fashion asserts the rights of corpse and the sex appeal of the inorganic
(Benjamin)
--> death drive
(supreme cult of the commodity:) fashion: a blossoming forth into a luminous apparition of the new
[==>? withdrawal from fashion = a strategy of freedom]
Adorno: in the age of growing powerlessness of subjective spirit vis [...]
(110)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%76.1[...]exchangeable
@Laura: *designated bodies* (are never permanent[!!?])
-is she actually busy with destiny and destined bodies? (for Laura:) design = destiny
-is she going to redesignate? how can she not? if she believes that the designated bodies are already on a fixed destiny or destination
[designate: appointed or made clear which place or direction spatially or figuratively. related to *design --> destine*]
early 1890s
the time when western science accepts the notion “that there might be several ways to represent the same fact” [--> elephant parable =/= situated knowledges]
1850s and 1860s
construction of models of the reflex functioning of the human nervous system --> nature of human response to external stimulation
dynamogenesis (~ every state of consciousness tends to realize itself in an appropriate muscular movement)
vision reformed in 19th century: nonoptical modal of attentive subject, not the one who sees, rather, the subject is the one who is susceptible to psychomotor induction
(what was once figured as visual representation are now) the abstract and quantified reactions of the body as a composite set of physical systems
--Fere--> instrumental relocation of vision (from a disembodied and punctual system of images) to an interplay of forces and motor reactions (in which representation is irrelevant)
[this is inseparable from the larger project of scientific amelioration of collective emotional hygiene of the 19th century]
--> *sensation: part of a sequence of events (in which the end point is not an inner state, such as: knowledge, cognition, perception, rather:) it is that which culminates in movement
some of the 1850s rationalizing ambitions (of widespread philosophical and scientific conceptualization of a fundamental relation between sensation and motor behaviour) indirectly informs Seurat's work --proposing-->{ sensory stimuli ==> motor expression (in the perceiver) }--> (the question of) **human response based on bypassing of conscious thought altogether**
(very important for iranian artists: the question of the *rational mind of an observer* and intellectual construction directed to that --> status of a conscious observer)
-producing effects involuntary in the observer
-(Foad and Sina engaging with an) exclusively optical consciousness of the individual human subject [--> can we go beyond that? to which philosophical sensual ethics of bodily awareness Foad and Sina are optically bind to? which anti-optical aesthetic positions are available to us?]
•Foad's neoimpressionist: implication of total organic resonance ==>{ from organic activity of perception --to--> transforming physical existence }
•Sina's Einfuhlung: mode of intense perceptual absorption in which lines and forms are experienced as catalysts for vitalization of the[...]
(111)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%76.6[...]ife, and which a physical contagion carries over to the attention of the spectator.”
1880s and 1890s is exactly the time where many different discourses considered the ways in which external forces and procedures could influence or control both individual and collective subject
-common in French sociological thinkers (Durkheim, Tarde, Le Bon): the primal fact of social life is some system of control or coercion that is imposed on the individual {for example Tarde: “stupefied and feverish beings [in] magical charm of their environment [...] it is always more fatiguing to think for oneself [...] man lives in an animated environment [...] he gradually refrains from all intellectual efforts [...] his mind becomes stultified and more and more excited [= somnambulistic] characteristic of many city dwellers [...]"}
the audience in many artworks still today has the sign of the distracted crowd (جمعیت خواب)
(“man without qualities” =) de-individualized = suggestible, hypnotizable
(Fried:)
anti-rococo French painting: a painting had to first attract (call to someone) and then to arrest (bring him to a halt in front of itself) and finally to enthral (hold him there as if spellbound) = the modernizing instrumentality that is fulfilled in cinema today
for Tarde:
“social existence = somnambulism"[= heightened receptivity to suggestion, individuals apt to imitate one another] ==> “social = (a form of) dream”
--> hypnotic aspect of the life of crowds
•“intercerebration”: one brain fascinates the other
•“fashion's suggestibility”: half-conscious observation and mere physical proximity produce a functional social homogeneity
•“fascination”: a genuine neurosis, a kind of polarization of love and faith --> effects of obedience and imitation
•“attention”: transformation of sensation by effort and desire --> the desire for an increase in personal believe
•“plateau”: a flexible figure for natural, social, and statistical processes and events (including desire) [--?--> Deleuze and Guattari's plateau]
Le Bon:
“social = a particular modality of perception,” as a specific social arrangement that conditions the limits of perceptual experience
(modern) crowd: a viewing machine capable of generating “collective hallucinations,” a place for consumption of illusion, (with a “psychological unity” that occupies spatially remote locations,)
•“observation”: a cognitive model predicated on workable notion of objective reality (a classical epistemological model) that begins to corrode within a field saturated by illusion, hallucination, and whole industries of simulation
-individual subsumed in crowd is incapable of observation --> modern spectacular culture (to be articulated 7 decades later by Guy Debord
the crowd (in Le Bon) is a generalized site on which the accumulate[...]
(112)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%78[...]ne: the more habitual and repetitive one's perceptual response to one's environment ==> the less autonomy and freedom characterize that individual experience }--> creativity = (zone of) indetermination
--again--> Bergson (disturbed by new arrangement of spectacular consumption posed as novelty within a mass society ==> redundancy and habit + decay of traditional forms of collective memory) his work is a response to:
•general standardization of experience
•automation of perceptual response
(<--Sina-- typical problem of life-philosophers lebensphilosophie at the turn of the century reaction to the “intrusion of the mechanical”)
*preconditions of a free and autonomous subject* + *endangered (coherent) system of meaning*
(weak evolutionary assumptions of Bergson's elaboration of) human subject (= the most developed organism) = potential (for indetermination) = escape from a relationship of constraint and necessity in one's lived milieu [=/= animal]
Helmholtz (research on physiological optics) ==> غیر واقعی nonveridical status of vision (and perception) ~= there is no direct correspondence between sense experience and objects in the world ==>
•uprooting: rationalization and instrumentalization of senses (--> technical prostheses)
•displacing: reterritorializing of perception
Helmholtz (~/= Bergson) committed to expanding and optimizing the productive functioning of socioeconomic world (of imperial Germany) --> vision of capitalist industrialization (exchangeability, convertibility, etc.)
Helmholtz's ontology --> physics
Helmholtz's epistemology --> semiotics: representational and quasilogical order of signs
(Helmholtz +) Bergson's attention:
1. condition of relative motor arrest (Ribot)
2. gives up the useful effect of present perception
3. backward movement of the mind
Bergson's attention: a binding together of reality to ward off both perceptual and psychic disintegration
endosmosis: process of remaking an object of perception
Deleuze's attention: gives back to duration its true characteristic... a very special coexistence (=/= succession), a simultaneity of fluxes, in which the body was always implicated --> “freedom = awareness of that coexistence”,
“reality function”
(psychic+) sensorimotor grounding in the reality
in early 20th century --> clinic designation of a condition called “the feeling of unreality” : failure of an apperceptive attention : when present impressions do not link up with memory association ==> sense of unfamiliarity of the present objects
*(inconsistent and anxious treatment of) Bergson sketching out the marvels of a multidimensional perception* (capable of apprehending and creativity engaging the imman[...]
(113)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%79.1[...]*creative line of flight* (the composition of a smooth space and of the movement of people in that space)
an ideological, scientific, or artistic movement can be a potential war machine, to the precise extent to which it draws, in relation to aphylum, a plane of consistency, a creative line of flight, a smooth space of displacement
...................................
0.99993
Daston history of reason
Daston asking: how reason became rationality?
rationality (~= universal calculus of) =/= reasoning
•(a more) ancient ideal --> reasoning [with recourse to the faculty of judgement]
•modern ideal --> (cold war) rationality: a finite well-defined set of rules that can be applied unambiguously in specified settings without recourse to the faculty of judgement
cold war: crystalline + generality + conclusivess could cope with a world on the brink
--> algorithmic rules as the core of rationality
--> sacrifice of [precious to philosophers] ‘insight’ and ‘understanding’ ascpects of reason
--> automatic: you don't need to understand them to execute them
*the posiblity of a mechanical mind*
Turing's [*]programming: constructing instruction tables
(1794 early French revolution) universal school for future French citizen with arithmetic [3 + 4 = 7] at its core --teach-> “exactitude of the mind” --> children are going to learn:
•the meaning of self evidence [of arithmetic propositions]
•the meaning of justified belief
•formation of ideas
•judgement
•reasoning
}--foundation--> quanitative science of a human realm
first reliable calculator --> 1850
rationality عقلانيت
•history of ever more sophisticated mechanical computers
•how rules themselves became increasingly identified with algorithms
•how algorithms became increasingly identified with mindlessness
Kant --> science as mechanical skill that can be mastered by diligence and determinate rules
tacit knowledge: a manul labor [styles of knowing] that cannot be captured by algorithms
---> go to Encyclopedie (Diderot)...
deskilling calculation ==> economic rationality (economic rationalization): you take the task, decompose it into simplest possible steps, you divide the labor, you hire the least skilled and cheapest labor possible ==Babbage==> increase the efficiency and the costs
•game theory
•rational choice theory
(memory + understanding + judgement + imagination)
*judgement (Daston) and imagination (Sina) are integral to the exercise of reason*
reason in rationality: algorithmic rule governed =/=
•passions اشتياق تعصب
•fantasy وسواس
•sloppy thinking درهم وبرهم
[...]
(114)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%80.8[...]rer]) vacation (or responsibility) --> (we must aspire to) imagine the kind of nonappropriative perspectival *intensely cognitive* response
middle ages (how they characterize their difference:)
1. theological-philosophical understanding of wonder <== university intellectuals {
◦admiratio =/= scientia ==> knowledge
◦admiratio ~= diversitas (diversity) =/= solitum (the usual, the general)
2. religious discourse about wonder <-- sermons, hagiography, devotional writing, enormously popular genre of *saint's lives* (tazkirat تذکره نویسی) {
◦admiratio =/= imitatio (imitation جعلى) [the readers were urged to wonder at and not immitate the power and extravagant asceticism of holy men and women (in Attar?)]
◾admiratio ~= paradox (coincidence of opposites) [one finds mira (wondrous) again and again in the texts alongside mixta (mixed, composite things, chimera)]
◦admiratio ~/= curiositas (curiosity کنجکاوی)
◦admiratio ~/= disputatio (disputatiousness ستيزه جويى)
3. literature of entertainment: travel accounts, history writing, collection of odd stories called by one author
◦admirari (to wonder at) =/= rimari (to pay into)
◦(collected stories ==> amuse, instruct, move their aristocratic listeners -->) wonder =/= inductio exemplorum (generalizing)
12th 14th centuries
(twin authorities for middle ages) Aristotle + Augustine ==> tradition of understanding wonder as perspectival & psychological ==> theological-philosophical discourse
•Augustine: marvel =/= what we know of nature (=/= nature) --> *lodge the wonderful-ness of things (not in our reaction to them but) in their ontological status*
•Anselm of Canterbury: marvelous =/= natural =/= artificial (voluntary, made by humans)
}--> miracles are objectively wonderful (because produced by God's power alone)
[1]
early middle ages liddle ages latin texts --> mirabilia (wonder) ~= miracula (miracle)
13th century --> mirabilia (wonder) =/= miracula (miracle) ==ontological==> flatten the impulse to wonder:
1- (tends to) separate out (with hair-splitting distinction) a small number of phenomena as objectively wonder-inducing (*whereas all others no matter how odd are wonderful only to the ignorant*)
2- (suggests that) most events have natural causes: *if philosophers are diligent enough ==> wonder will cease* [= Sherlock Holmes]
◦(1235) William of Augergne --> people do not know how to go about investigating the cause [--> detective]
◦(1325) Oresme --> *vigorous imagining of a retained species + small external appearance + imbalance of some internal disposition ==> marvelous appearance* [--✕--> himself was fascinated and enchanted by the “marvelous properties” of animals and the *diversitas of human experience* especially of tastes in *food and in sexual positions and partners*][...]
(115)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%81.8[...]ebnameh: the encyclopedic tradition of the ancient world known as *paradoxology: collection of oddities (monsters, hybrids, distant races, marvelous lands, [telegram beasts, instagram animals]) + antique notions of portents or omen: unusual events that foreshadowed the (usually catastrophic) future + accompanied by a vague sense of dread [it gives you goosebumps]
+ (Ehsan master of) [*]fabulae: (story) told without claims to their ontological status =/= historia
}==> theory of wonder: [@apass]
1. *response to facticity*
2. *response to the singular*
3. *is deeply perspectival*
•William of Newburgh --> (some sort of) probatio (testing, evidence) --base--> rimari (probe, pry into فضولی، با اهرم بلند کردن) =/= admirari (to wonder at)
•Gervais of Tilbury --> facts ==induce==> marvel ~= res gestae (deeds or historical accounts) =/= stories (fabulae, lies) [~= *you cannot be amazed by what you don't believe* (stories of ghosts, vampires, migration of quail, flight of squirrels, etc.)]
•John of Salisbury --> *marvellous singularity* (collection of advice for courtiers and princes) ~ wonder: response to majesty (hidden wisdom, significance) =/= generalizing = moralizing (inductio exemplorum, citing of instructive general causes --> forensic)
•
credible deeply unusual singular event ==> admiratio
[*]perspectival: reaction of a particular “us” to an “other” that is “other” only relative to the particular “us” (<-- this is why ajayebnameh is interesting)
•James of Vitry --> ***cyclopses who all have one eye marvel as much at those who have two eyes as we marvel at them*** (1200)
•Gosswin of Metz & John Mandeville --> turning such perspectivalism into gently ironic comments on themselves
•William of Rubruck --> barefoot travel through harsh terrain and climate required by Franciscan asceticism seems as monstrous a practice in the East as certain Eastern customs appear when reported “back home”
•
**(how? can we simply?) study medieval emotion** =/= wonder stated by historians, travelers, theologians, philosophers, preachers, devotional writers
*traces of emotion* that survive are mediated through texts, pictures, artifacts --Bynum--> we are not entitled either to assume a sort of Darwinian universal emotion, or to think that emotion-behavior is culturally constructed (as to exist only where we find words for it)
***texts may give us access to reactions less through adjectives attached to nouns*** (by calling something “wonderful” or “dreadful” =/= indicating the responses of an implicit reader/viewer)
•a keyword search for “anger” will tend to turn up set pieces on how to control it --> discussions of where it is not
•reactions such as wonder, delight, or terror (do not simply occur) they are *evoked*, sometimes even *staged* --> we ca[...]
(116)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%82[...]ment in the world*) provided a new way of conceiving:
1. the meaning and limitations of noumena (radically undermine it)
2. the question of (the lack of) a foundation to human existence
}--Kojeve--> a non-metaphysical properly ontological conception
Geroulanos critical reading of Wahl's “Toward the Concrete”
philosophical manifesto
novelty of the book itself is coated in polite and classical rhetoric
conciliatory tone and a terminology seeking to convert philosophers of the 1920s
inclusive tendency
(disrupts and abuses of) mixture of phenomenological with classical philosophical terminology
(seeking to) offer an alternative relation of subject to world --> primacy of the world over the subject
phenomenology and quantum physics are not elaborately treated as Wahl's targets in this text, but they offer a privileged mode of entry into his subject
*the sentiment of our existence in the midst of things* --> Wahl:
•‘reality =/= subjectivity's desires & claims’ (reality makes itself evident through its resistance to subjectivity's desires and claims)--> evocation of inaccessibility ==maintain==> (need for a) mystical vision
•‘failure of perception ==> science: an instrument of analysis’ (“perception presents, it does not explain =/= science: as an instrument of analysis, can break down the real”)
Heidegger's spatial and unmediated character of Being-in-the-world...
uncertainty in physics ==> affirmation of the impossibility of a perfect knowledge of reality ~ *view from nowhere* (<-- prime philosophical result) [in the hands of Wahl, Bachelard, Kojeve, Bataille, Merleau-Ponty and others] ==Geroulanos==>
•attack on philosophical anthropocentrism
•turn toward a *negative anthropology*: recognition of a human existence whose only describable aspects are its failures (the failure to concur with reality)
(using Heidegger's term) man's *thrownness* in the world: his inability to postulate himself as exceeding or contrasting to the world so as to fully understand or map out this world ==> antifoundational realism ==enable=> to treat the real as a philosophical as well as an existential problem
french phenomenology =/= classical transcendence
speculative mysticism
german idealism
romanticism
...................................
xxxxxxx
Begriffsgeschichte (on “meanings of” X) =/= semiotic history (on “uses of” X)
anxiety over the epistemic norms underpinning new forms of:
•governmentality
•bureaucratic management
•surveillance
•totalitarian domination
Kojeve: architect of *european union*: liberal empire ~= bureaucrat + sage حکیم
...................................
research method (a herita[...]
(117)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%85.1[...] how matter is defined, [matter, force, interdependency, appearance,,, phenomena, meaning,] Delanda-[intensification, articulation, flow-of,]
...................................
#Femke workshop: on rigging and skinning, writing stories cultivating creation and creatures before their enrollment in George Lucas film, speculating on the inorganic skeletal animacies
...................................
(Brey ☞ Ihde:) [technology:] a special class of artifacts (for example telescopes, probes, hearing aids, etc) that are capable of engaging in ‘symbiotic’ relationships with the human body. [...] means through which the environment is experienced and acted on.
essential ambiguity of technology / of material human-technology relations
hermeneutic fluency (and the special enigma) of the connection between text and world
*bird's-eye=?/!~navigational~/?=.'<-phenomenological
[...in front of the open (blank) page (of the book) (we teach children to take the) position of the industrialist, the urban planner, or the Cartesian philosopher --> outside the page is outside and inside the page is inside ]@Eunkyung's scriptural enterprise --> Derridean proper space of writing
-the panopticon as observing instrument for human sciences is embeded in the page of the book we open. part of this tradition =/= first person shooter
(Ihde on) game-bodies: (on multistability -->) ‘modes of navigation’ [macro phenomenological conditions, modeling observational possibilities, ]:
[1]- third person (pretended) overhead view looking down a map-like world and plotting your course, one says “I go to X.” he calls it “the reading position” (usually a western navigator) --> using instrumental mediations to translate this (overhead) position, star patterns are with the north star
[2]- first person shooter, take your body as stable position, one says: “X is coming to me.” (usually a south pacific navigator) --> reading phenomena as instruments, dynamic motion of star patterns are without the north star
[3]-
every major culture/civilization watches the *movements of heaven*
technologies of temporality, lunar calendars (mostly migratory or non-agricultural people who were into smaller cycles) and solar calendars (people who were into lager cycles), knowledge of repeated patterns of environmental phenomena
from stonehenge [= stabilizer of perception, #stone telling the movement of heavens;] to chip (, devices to record cycles) --> the technoscience has changed (phenomenologically merely) in scale
[*] science is always science-mediated-through-instrument [--> regarding ajayeb: #model is the principal instrument of (modern) science.]---> am I in which model-shift? (how? and why?):
•idealized models [~-> my “art"] (<--)to--> heuristic models [~-> my lectures] ?
•computational models [~-> my CG period] [...]
(119)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%85.3[...]
(Ihde on) game-bodies: (on multistability -->) ‘modes of navigation’ [macro phenomenological conditions, modeling observational possibilities, ]:
[1]- third person (pretended) overhead view looking down a map-like world and plotting your course, one says “I go to X.” he calls it “the reading position” (usually a western navigator) --> using instrumental mediations to translate this (overhead) position, star patterns are with the north star
[2]- first person shooter, take your body as stable position, one says: “X is coming to me.” (usually a south pacific navigator) --> reading phenomena as instruments, dynamic motion of star patterns are without the north star
[3]-
every major culture/civilization watches the *movements of heaven*
technologies of temporality, lunar calendars (mostly migratory or non-agricultural people who were into smaller cycles) and solar calendars (people who were into lager cycles), knowledge of repeated patterns of environmental phenomena
from stonehenge [= stabilizer of perception, #stone telling the movement of heavens;] to chip (, devices to record cycles) --> the technoscience has changed (phenomenologically merely) in scale
[*] science is always science-mediated-through-instrument [--> regarding ajayeb: #model is the principal instrument of (modern) science.]---> am I in which model-shift? (how? and why?):
•idealized models [~-> my “art"] (<--)to--> heuristic models [~-> my lectures] ?
•computational models [~-> my CG period] (<--)to--> phenomenological models [~-> my ajayeb] ?
•fantasy models [~-> my ?] (<--)to--> theoretical models ?
•representational models [~= my images?] (<--)to--> epistemological models ?
[*]
...................................
like the blind man's cane or probe, means through which the environment is perceived and acted on, how is the 3D computer simulations an embodiment relation? what are the (dis)embodied habituations of the hacker? ==> philosophy of action : how 3D work as an (dis)embodied artifact change our relation to the world? or, which world is experienced as perceived through embodied artifact of the 3D?
•representations of the location
•question of orientation
--> epistemological studies of scientific instrumentation
(Feenberg, passivity missing in Ihde)
(my own interest in shyness and the) passive dimensions of body--lived experience of being the object of action***
Feenberg (reflecting on medical situations forward:) we live our body not only as actors in the world, but also as beings who invite action on our bodies by others
dependent body --> highly technologized experience
instrumentalized status of modernism, in which the ‘dependent body’ belongs to childhood
purified “humans” : the subject distinguished from its instrumentalities
sex: construction of the d[...]
(122)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%85.4[...]from stonehenge [= stabilizer of perception, #stone telling the movement of heavens;] to chip (, devices to record cycles) --> the technoscience has changed (phenomenologically merely) in scale
[*] science is always science-mediated-through-instrument [--> regarding ajayeb: #model is the principal instrument of (modern) science.]---> am I in which model-shift? (how? and why?):
•idealized models [~-> my “art"] (<--)to--> heuristic models [~-> my lectures] ?
•computational models [~-> my CG period] (<--)to--> phenomenological models [~-> my ajayeb] ?
•fantasy models [~-> my ?] (<--)to--> theoretical models ?
•representational models [~= my images?] (<--)to--> epistemological models ?
[*]
...................................
like the blind man's cane or probe, means through which the environment is perceived and acted on, how is the 3D computer simulations an embodiment relation? what are the (dis)embodied habituations of the hacker? ==> philosophy of action : how 3D work as an (dis)embodied artifact change our relation to the world? or, which world is experienced as perceived through embodied artifact of the 3D?
•representations of the location
•question of orientation
--> epistemological studies of scientific instrumentation
(Feenberg, passivity missing in Ihde)
(my own interest in shyness and the) passive dimensions of body--lived experience of being the object of action***
Feenberg (reflecting on medical situations forward:) we live our body not only as actors in the world, but also as beings who invite action on our bodies by others
dependent body --> highly technologized experience
instrumentalized status of modernism, in which the ‘dependent body’ belongs to childhood
purified “humans” : the subject distinguished from its instrumentalities
sex: construction of the dependent subjectivized bodies
(Sartre & Merleau-Ponty:) person becomes a thing in the world of the other
lived-body =/= body [--> also the concern of Irigaray and Butler]
(this is Husserl's Körper and Leib)
~ machine-infused neuro-physical body
◦kinaesthetic sensations
◦presentational sensations
◦“internal” perception
◦“subject” -body
◦organ of perception / organ of action /
--> (identity of the ego -->) the (existentialist visualist and strange) idea of: “I am my body"--body 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 --> t[...]
(124)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%85.4[...]onomic garment of globalization era --> Straitjacket
(Cold War era:)
•Mao --> suit
•Nehru --> jacket
•Russian --> fur
•
•Islam --> hejab
(Tasavof-->{for which the body does not remain concrete and material, and soul is ambiguous and polymorphic}, Pythagorean:) veli: soul can clothe itself in different bodies =/= (Aristotle:) soul is the form of a particular living body { soul = organization of the body }--> “..there seems to be no case in which the soul can act or be acted on without involving the body” =/= (Descartes:) soul = enlightened machine (~=? proper organization of the brain)
***The body is a special image --> body image
body, the priveleged image, the world of consiousness (through self-reference), the brain's primary frame of reference [-constructed with libidinal intensity? --> a map of narcissistic investment] (=/= body without organs)
•condition of the subject's access to spatiality (of the [numero-computationally?] built environment)
•anatomy is always “imaginary anatomy”
•the (body-)ego is a formation of body image through primary narcissim (in terms of Oedipus complex)
•body image also incorporate external objects (implements and instruments --> intimate, vital, even libidinally cathected parts of the body) ~--> the “detachable” parts of the body: urine, faeces, saliva, sperm, blood, vomit, hair, nails, skin--all retain something of the cathexis and value of a body
-for Bergson: an image that one know from within by affections, rather than from without by perceptions: body }==> “my body” is the center of actions ==births==> representation
-for Whitehead: “self-knowledge of our bodily event” ==> (organic) conception of nature
-masculinity: body subordinate to the mind ~=>{ body: site for feminist critique
-for contemporary feminism (Grosz): body is neither a biological nor a sociological category, but rather a point of overlap between physical, symbolic, and material conditions
the ideological representations of a “real” precultural body
[--> idealized in terms of abstract geometry, rendered primal in primates,,,]
“The theory of the body is already a theory of perception.” Merleau-Ponty
(in his studies on body, Christian Hubert quotes John Schumacher quoting) James Gibson: “The optical information to specify the self, including the head, body, arms, and hands, accompanies the optical information to specify the environment. The two sources of information coexist. The one could not exist without the other. When a man sees the world, he sees his nose at the same time; or rather, the world and his nose are both specified and his awareness can shift....The supposedly separate realms of the subjective and objective are actually only poles of attention.” (The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception)
s[...]
(127)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%85.6[...]fault scence, setting up rigs to begin with...)
begining with:
•void
•camera
•light
•chaos
•soup
•turtle's back
•absolute geometry
•ornament
•
how the Latin language in software interfaces dominates the mode of thinking and conditions synthesis?
•how, for example, a Farsi inhabiter might craft a different spatial synthesis in terms of a different linguistic ontology?
[b + a = ba] =/= [آ + ب ~=> با] {a different effect}
•interface question
•phenomenological question
•in Farsi the joint attachments undergo transfiguration, different viscous relational property, adhesion refigured
what would be an interesting interface question posed to each of the 3D softwares?
one language ---{Bauhaus? De Stijl? nasta'ligh نستعلیق?}--to--> another language
...................................
painfully queer
*questions for my ajayeb's Rigs and pop-up book:
my rigs and pop-up book are descriptive concepts, that means: they obtain their meaning by reference to a particular physical apparatus ==>? a constructed cut between the object and the agencies of observation
•pop-up book: an instrument with fixed parts ==> concept of “position”
•Rigs on the other hand tries not to exclude other concepts such as “momentum” from having meaning
--> ajayeb's variables require an instrument with moveable parts for their definition (?)
*exclusions (= physical & conceptual constraints) are co-constitutive*
*objectivity (= possibility of unambiguous communication, boundry articulations) --> reference must be made to bodies in order for concepts to have meaning (?)*
•my Rigs and books are about how discursive practices are related to material phenomena
(*)reading: “text” is the interface between the matrialization of “reality” and subjectivation of “reader” --> inseparability of language and reality in ajayeb
(“We are suspended in language in such a way that we cannot say what is up and what is down, The word ‘reality’ is also a word, a word which we must learn to use correctly.” Petersen ☜ Barad)
ajayeb's iterative processes of materialization
عجایب نامه =/= imagined and idealized human-independent reality
ajayeb's stories of historically nunhuman people
in ajayeb's descriptive intra-actions with reality, humans and language are part of the configuaration or ongoing reconfiguring of the world, that is phenomena
we cannot so easily answer where the apparatus “ends”
•(but again, how can I answer) which ontological practices are embodied (or embeded) in (the productive and constraining dimension of regulatory) apparatuses of my ajayeb? (rigs, hypertext, pop-up, etc.)
•(resisting the anti-metaphysics legacy) how[...]
(128)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%86.3[...] a dangerous knowledge zoom lens tool, a vertiginous antirealist/antiliteral abyss (=/=? irony device ==> presenting us with intimacy with existing nonhumans)
...................................
#veil
@Janina
@Ale
Nicole Archer: ‘textile’: a material formed at the intersections of desire and modern politics
•textile's ‘textility' = texture
•textile's ‘textuality' = readability
to be prepared to address relations consistencies ==> (hope to) meaningfully reform them
*(Archer lingering in the textile's volatile gum) to develop forms of critique that can account for the peculiar textiles ‘we’ are currently wrapped-up in* [globalized economies, militarized laboratories, etc. (BioSteel and so on)]
text +/& textile
•in metaphor: the social fabric, the Internet, the Fold, etc.
•in myth: Arachne's textiles, or Penelope's epic loom
}--✕-->? to account for neo-liberal and transgenic subjects
(traditionally:) textile (racialized and gendered, as “woman's work”) “=/=” text
*fabric conditions and binds our desires and bodies ---@Janina
(Archer >) Gernreich exposed how the fashion system instrumentalized the body's desire to move” while inscribing it within the time-signatures of modern capitalism
uniform = contemporary fashion's other
digi-camo (redesigned and digitally remixed camouflage fatigues worn by the US military)
desire for “freedom” and for alternative temporalities + desire for discipline and physical restraint
}--> *tight spaces our desires are prone to work themselves into*
textures and taxonomies of fashion and uniformity
Abu Ghraib --> (in the pursuit of a) perverse desire for justice (a desire that many feel is best met in the violent erasure of certain subjects)
(let's) stop pretending that “we” weren't already caught-up in the messy circuits of desire
“[...]Freud's figure of the woman who has nothing better to do than but braid her pubic hair into a futile simulation of the phallus, and who (interestingly enough) accidentally invents weaving as an outcome of this inherently fetishistic gesture” (Archer ☞ Barthes ☞ Freud)
Gernreich working with “the future” as a medium and not as a destination***
-he was keen to work with fashion as a ‘time-based medium’(~ deliver us onto alternative temporalities)
[*]fashion: a distinctly modern clothing regime engineered to materially manipulate “the past” so it may serve as a springboard into “the time to come”, an attempt to create the perfect tension between “right now” and “back then” ==> (fashion serving as one of modern culture's main engines catapults the wearers) towards a time and place where present-day problems can no long[...]
(130)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%86.6[...] and suffusion
-using your own self-consciously branded personae to stand out in a cluttered field of visual noise
“famous for being famous” --> the fable of “that which captures our gaze, does not capture our respect”
-fame is built out of material human bodies moving through physical space, engaging and interacting with other material human bodies. it is forged in a social somewhere.
...photographed on the right sidewalks at the right times by the right photographers
-persistent logic of image accumulation and circulation
-photographer’s exceptional status: the ‘decisive moment
-making yourself into a street style sensation through sheer force of will
***practice of distinction*** (--> you have to make it appear that other people are more interested in you than you are in them)
...take someone’s photo, post it online, appropriate their social capital, then ditch them and move on (a game played throughout the fashion industry) <-- constant and well-managed visibility
(the misleading idea of) “style ==> to be picked out of a crowd” [style, that little something extra as vague and indeterminate as Weberian charisma that most people simply do not possess]
-the fashion photographer's eye: the affective instrument through which the photographers feels what she sees (intuitive, embodied, automatic, as a style radar)
street style star <== the right people like you
-what is new in new moment of public viewing? can we have a public moment (exhibition, etc.) and concider glamor and fashion and modernity coinciding with technology and digital platforms?
(for me still the inner thoughts and public life are not blured, that is why i cannot post so quick online)
why use design as a template for reworking ethnography?
*the design process is generally oriented toward transforming (or cooking) “raw” information into “useful knowledge,” a guided mutation of “mere ideas” into “workable concepts” or a “feasible design” that then becomes an “object” (in all possible meanings of the term) in the world*
design: techniques for “working out” and “working through”
charrette شارت
a balance between structure and flexibility
1. active deconstruction: (to arrive at collaboratively, of the work's otherwise obscured underlying composition) to focus on:
•ethnographic specifics
•theoretical frameworks
•(writing) style
•how arguments are constructed
•
2. projection: (to engage a bit more seriously in speculative, comparative, and synthetic thinking)
•sorting activity, posting on the wall
•identify clusters of concepts that could form new and potentially unexpected categories
•to select a few of the clusters that you feel (individually and collectively) are useful for generating possible new avenues for speculation
•
[...]
(131)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%87.2[...]and not a subject position)
-linguistic class of deixis: here, now, this, that [--> carnal discourse]
-linguistic class of deictic: I, you [--> directly to the addressee: acquires body, weight, gravity]
she addresses ‘me’ ==> double address : oscillate between the personal and the impersonal ~ inclusion & exclusion --> to welcome...
personal pronouns ~-> ‘shifter’ ==allow==> speakers to ***shift from code to message*** (~ from the abstract to the concrete)
(for Barthes:) operation of messages of the mass media: ***to personalize all information, to make every utterance a direct challenge, not directed at the entire mass of readers, but at each reader in particular*** @constantvzw streaming hypothesis
(‘The Fashion System’)
(a too common) artistic strategy: *contradictory construction of the viewing subject by the stereotype*
(a too common) artistic address: *struggle over the control and positioning of the body in political and ideological terms* [--> in which stereotype plays a decisive role @Laura]
(?do you want me to be your)
worshiper
citizen
consumer
producer
(for Foad, and for most contemporary artists:) [*]stereotype: an instrument of subjection, to produce ideological subjects that can be smoothly inserted into existing institutions of government, economy, and sexual identity
“stereotype = to disavow agency”
(Owens on Kruger)
images of the nonproductive body
stereotype of action: worker, rebel --emphasising--> body's institutionalization: factory, family
for Laura, in fascist media regime: ‘the body is dismantled as a locus of practice and reassembled as a discontinuous series of gestures and poses --> “body = semiotic field” ==> *body inscribed into the register of discourse*
[artistic common views:]
(stereotype uses) deterrence, [according to Baudrillard:] dissuasion, promoting passivity, receptivity, inactivity, docile bodies [<-- i challenged this in my master thesis on shyness and passivity in performance art]
stereotype replaces *physical violence* with *semiotic coercion* (--> that is why it is often seen in art the use of direct physical contact to counter that idea)
stereotype --> rhetoric of intimidation --> it poses a threat to the artist --> the artist bears witness to the state of affairs --> signify threat to the audience --> gesture (regarded as threat) ~ *apotrope* (a gesture performed with the express purpose of intimidating the enemy into submission, #omen, apotropaic, averting the evil eye, to turn away harm, --> mithridatic) --> artwork is thus engineered to produce an immediate subjection, (by reiterating a stereotype) imprint the stereotype directly on the viewer's imagination + (through juxtaposition) force us to decode them
(Foucault's notion of) power = effecti[...]
(132)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%87.4[...]smotic (تراوش کننده), they have the remarkable power of incorporating and expelling outside and inside in an ongoing interchange --> *social*
Schilder's “zones of sensitivity”: bodily orifices + its sensation experienced about one centimeter from the opening (-for example how the diseases of internal organs are not experienced in their precise anatomical locations)
*zones outside the body* --> intrusion into this bodily space is considered as much a violation as penetration of the body itself, the size and form of this surrounding space of safety is individually, sexually, racially, and culturally variable [--> #clean and dirt for my mother; my body image outside space surrounding it when i am in my room is the room itself, every corner, every niche accumulates senses and thoughts...]
the space surrounding the body is not uniform:
•thinner in some places (which more readily tolerate body contact)
•thicker in some places (which are particularly psychically, socially, and culturally “privatized”)
•
-acting uses body image --> body image can shrink or expand; it can give parts to the outside world and can take other parts into itself
-playing setar --> (part of the difficulty of learning how to use instruments, such as setar) the libidinal problem of how they become psychically invested (=/= simply the technical problem of how they are used)
surgeon's body image
in driving, trying to fit into a small parking spot <-- experienced in the body image of the driver (and sometimes, to their horror, in that of the passengers) [--> by inability to drive is related to a bad body image?]
body image is capable of accommodating and incorporating an extremely wide range of objects:
•clothing
•jewelry
•other bodies
•objects
•nail polish
•jets, ships, cars
•bodily zones:
◦orifices
◦curves<br />
◦convex spaces
◦concave spaces
•“detachable” or intermediate category of objects, midway between the inanimate and the bodily [~= Lacanian objet a, Kristeva's abject]:
◦body's excretions
◦body's waste products
◦bodily byproducts
◾urine
◾faeces
◾saliva
◾sperm
◾blood
◾vomit
◾hair
◾nails
◾skin
}--> retain something of the cathexis and value of the body (--> keeping my chopped nails, old toys, art-works... ?! --?--> ‘detachment = your work (art, etc.) is not bound up with your body image’), they remain magically linked to the body --> narcissistic investment in the body image
}--> ****human subjects never simply have a body****
the body is always necessarily the object and subject of attitudes and judgments, psychically invested, never a matter of indifference
-the body never has merely instrumental or utilitari[...]
(133)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%88.3[...]ve is related to a bad body image?]
body image is capable of accommodating and incorporating an extremely wide range of objects:
•clothing
•jewelry
•other bodies
•objects
•nail polish
•jets, ships, cars
•bodily zones:
◦orifices
◦curves
◦convex spaces
◦concave spaces
•“detachable” or intermediate category of objects, midway between the inanimate and the bodily [~= Lacanian objet a, Kristeva's abject]:
◦body's excretions
◦body's waste products
◦bodily byproducts
◾urine
◾faeces
◾saliva
◾sperm
◾blood
◾vomit
◾hair
◾nails
◾skin
}--> retain something of the cathexis and value of the body (--> keeping my chopped nails, old toys, art-works... ?! --?--> ‘detachment = your work (art, etc.) is not bound up with your body image’), they remain magically linked to the body --> narcissistic investment in the body image
}--> ****human subjects never simply have a body****
the body is always necessarily the object and subject of attitudes and judgments, psychically invested, never a matter of indifference
-the body never has merely instrumental or utilitarian value for the subject --Grosz--> which organs are libidinally invested and the kinds of investments that animate them are functions of the subject's psychical, interpersonal, and sociohistorical relations and are malleable and continually changing --> *always potentially open to new meanings and investments*
body image: (to a large extent) function of socially shared significance
-(for example) male and female genitals have a particular social meaning in western patriarchal cultures that the individual alone or even in groups is unable to transform (-these meanings are deeply etched into and lived as part of the body image) [=/= Frankenstein]
==> () very different self-perception and very different organic body =/= dichotomous division of sexed bodies
Grosz generally finds Schilder useful --but-->
•he writes in terms of a sexually neutral subject who experiences cerebral lesions and neurological or psychological disorders in a sexually neutral way
•he develops a single frame of reference (not so clearly relevant for women and female sexuality)
•he does not specify that male experience is taken as the norm and woman's experience is discussed only insofar as it deviates from or compares to this referential framework (<== influence that studies of war injuries had on the developement of this field + vast disproportion of male subjects in active war)
Schilder: attainment of a stable genital form of sexuality ==>
•unification of the body image
•cohesion of our self-identities
--> phallic = genital phallic sexuality hierarchically *subordinates t[...]
(134)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%88.3[...]ther
erotic stylization of deadly force --(Archer asks)--> why is it stylish for one to be attracted to the kind of power that “the uniform” signifies?
how styles (sartorial, campy, grotesque) serve as a serious index of our collective complicity in the ongoing production of state violence?
...................................
Chen on animacy
animacy --> how matter that is considered insensate, immobile, deathly (or otherwise “wrong”) animates cultural life in important ways
[*]animacy: a quality of agency, awareness, mobility, liveness
--linguistics--> grammatical effects of the sentience or liveness of nouns
change of animacy ==> violates a cross-linguistic preference among speakers
(for example “the hikers that rocks crush” --> rock: the source of causality)
animacy
filled with life, disposed, inclined, animare to breathe, to quicken
anima, air, breath, life, soul, mind (mental impulse)
--connected--> animals
animosity --> animating spirit or temper of a hostile character
animating principle [--> rigging]
...................................
Ihde: playing a musical instrument (= a technological mediation) =/= the process of genetic manipulation
=/= Heidegger's technology: a metaphysically totalizing context (<-- every technology ended up with exactly the same output or analysis)
Ihde =/= utopian & dystopian views of technology
...to understand yourself to be thinking and acting ‘in the midst of’ the pervasive technoscientific character of life (@CG hacker)
Ihde --> ***technologies and humans constitute themselves interactively***
*technological mediation: heterogeneous relationships between individual human beings and the world + artifacts used for mediations =/= ideals of efficiency and clear communication
“breakdown ==> new gestalt” : something that had usually taken for granted, which then under breakdown conditions, now gets revealed in a new way (revelatory function)
=/= Ihde's *variational practice* : variations ==forefront==> new gestalts
(our) world = powerful effective & failing technology
we =/= tragic hero (+ broken hammer) or Enlightenment scientist (+ laboratory)
matrix --> female
those that move in the matrix --> formative male principle
(Foucault's) episteme: social-moral-religious stability
Latour
modernity <== settlement: (a clear and sharp distinction) society =/= nature --obscure--> the proliferation of hybrids: entities that are both cultural & natural (for example material technologies are both “real” & “constructed”)
Ihde --> technologies are in *mediating positions*
interr[...]
(135)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%88.7[...]ad to transform absolute beliefs into “private” ones (taken off the streets and battlegrounds) <--now-- returning!
****technologies are multistable: having unpredictable side-effects and embeddable in different ways in different cultures****
[technology + embodied -->] abstract philosophical reflects + mundane work practices
to incarnate a material agency-ethic --> are also multistable: can belong to any number of contexts
...to recognizes that X plays an important role in defining Y-ic meaning
Merleau-Ponty's implicit body is a sort of sports body (active and transparent in action) --Iris--> fringe awareness of wearing glasses in sports activities
visualization of phantom limbs
hermeneutic-cultural body
embodiment through technologies
Andy Clark Natural Born Cyborgs
echnology of telepresence
the measurement of time ==> changes in human existence
the idea of *science = intervention + grasping*
•grasping ==> active dimension of acquiring knowledge is a genuinely contstructive activity (=/= a representational task of trying to represent external structures)
--> experiment & instruments (==> how theoretical entities come to be proven as real)
◦experimental-manipulative realism (Hacking)
◦modelistic constructive realism (Giere)
◦instrumental realism (Ihde)
[*]performance: conception + production + witnessing of material events, the experience of which is meaning generating in that these events give us back more than what we put into them
(Crease ☞ Ihde)
experimentation need to be both:
•[*]hermeneutical: who experimental intentions and practices arise and evolve out of and already existing involvement with, and understanding of a concrete situation
•[*]phenomenology: (taking its point of departure from what is called embodiment) the experiences of a unified being, which cannot be understood apart from concrete human experience
philosopher --> values experts --> (fit into various) applied ethics contexts
Ihde rejecting a normativity that is predetermined by a dystopian/utopian cast
“let the things speak for themselves” (after they have been critically interrogated)
...................................
Galison
(employing) kinesthetic-tactile body experiences in Einstein's Gedanken-experimenten --> notions of the equivalence of gravity and acceleration
perceptual experience in relative train movement
clock watching in different space-time particularities
“On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”
Einstein's special relativity --> begins with basic assumptions about the behavior of clocks, rulers, and bodies in force-free motion
Eins[...]
(136)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%88.9[...]d the zone of unification (but in the process:)
•he removed Berlin as the Zeitzentrum
•designed a machine that upended the very category of metaphysical centrality
post world war I
all the activities of man, whether conscious or unconscious (sleeping, eating, meditating, playing) take place in time; without order, without specified plans, we risk falling into anarchy (physical, intellectual and moral misery)
--Favarger--> the remedy: the precise measurement and determination of time with the rigor of an astronomical observatory
(to) democratize time : time rigor must be distributed electrically
(=/= gears and magnets)
Galison's exploring the material culture of clock coordination is to set Einstein's place in a universe of meaning --avoid--> two problematic positions (*on the relation of things to thoughts*):
1. materialism or empiricism: inductive, observation-centered account of scientific development (~ that ideas emerge causally and univalently from the disposition of objects and the impressions they make upon us) ==> “theory = provisional addition”
2. antipositivist movement of the 1960s and 1970s (that programmes, paradigms, and conceptual schemes came first ==reshape==> experiments and instruments all the way down) “thoughts fully structured things”
1902 --> triumph of the *electrical over the mechanical* was already symbolically wired to dreams of modernity
*electrical chronocoordination --signified--> political, cultural, technical unity all at once [*Einheitszeit = imperial empire (~= democracy, world citizenship, and antianarchism)]
*patent office: grandstand seat for the great parade of modern technologies
==> Einstein (eliminating the master clock + raising the conventionally set time to a physical principle ==> modern 20th century physics of relativity)
...................................
James Ash
on videogame designer (<-- i am applying that to technical animators)
distribution and transmission of media affects
[animators] work to create the potential for *positively affective encounters to occur* (encounters which increase the body’s capacity to act & produce associated positive senses of intensity)
creating critically and commercially successful
*producing contingency* (that designers attempt to manage and control)
rigging
the code space of the software environment + embodied techniques hackers generate (in response to that environment)
*structural determination + emergent practice*
a key aspect of media today --Stiegler--> [*]selection: a decision is made to broadcast one story over another
testing --> calculative logics of anticipation and preemption --shape--> the contingency of the event
the actual practices of riggers (technical anima[...]
(138)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%89.1[...]his is how empire makes the world meaningful to its subjects, how it weaves itself into the everyday.
...empire made us part of a history that was somewhere else made by people who were not us. At the same time, when it came to Africa, we knew who we were. Sunday school missionary stories built the color line into our imaginations. That was part of their job, to create us as subjects of empire, give us our place in the order.
The book aims to be both a study in genre and a critique of ideology. Its predominant theme is how travel books written by Europeans about non-European parts of the world created the imperial order for Europeans “at home” and gave them their place in it. I ask how travel writing made imperial expansion meaningful and desirable to the citizenries of the imperial countries, even though the material benefits of empire accrued mainly to the few. Travel books, I argue, gave European reading publics a sense of ownership, entitlement and familiarity with respect to the distant parts of the world that were being explored, invaded, invested in, and colonized. Travel books were very popular. They created a sense of curiosity, excitement, adventure, and even moral fervor about European expansionism. They were, I argue, one of the key instruments that made people “at home” in Europe feel part of a planetary project; a key instrument, in other words, in creating the “domestic subject” of empire.
the rise of natural history
These case studies are shaped by a number of shared questions. With what codes has travel and exploration writing produced “the rest of the world” for European readerships at particular points in Europe’s expansionist process?
codifications of reality
the emanating glow of the civilizing mission
the cash flow of development
(it habitually blinds itself to) the reverse dynamic
obsessive need to present and re-present its peripheries
It becomes dependent on its others to know itself
important historical transitions alter the way people write, because they alter people’s experiences and the way people imagine, feel and think about the world they live in.
[...]how European travel writing interacted with enlightenment natural history to produce a Eurocentered form of global or “planetary” consciousness.
[Pratt considers] the classificatory schemes of natural history in relation to the vernacular peasant knowledges they sought to displace.
tourist propaganda
testimonio
oral history
If one studies only what the Europeans saw and said, one reproduces the monopoly on knowledge and interpretation that the imperial enterprise sought.
the passport: contact zone, like the flirting gaze of an Iranian woman with German ambassadors in Olearius images
T[...]
(139)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%91[...]mall terestrial globe (*globo terrestri*) the entire circle of the earth with all its landscapes ~(in the same way)~> “our common father in heaven,” the Lord, his revealed Word, he wrote for us (his children and students) the great book of wonders --recognize--> Himself
}--> (the concepts of) microcosm & macrocosm : something small (a dot on a globe) stands for something else, larger than itself (a city) ==> individual objects of study or curiosities of nature, that are collected and presented to a reader/observer, represent a greater whole ==> interconnectedness --> “the great chain of being” ~-> God teaches humans by means of natural wonders #ajayeb
}==> (microcosmic world of the) frontispiece = visual macrocosm of the larger book, *the textual macrocosm* that it introduces
[my video atlas in Eckernförde was reworking with frontispiece as it is meant to intrigue the reader with its complex set of visual images (taken from classical coins and medals, from devices and emblems), to be decoded after reading the book that follows. Olearius brings all desciplines onto the stage of his's world: ethnography, history, natural science, geography, architecture, and literature --> this is very baroque _+]
Olearius's didactic program: to entertain while instructing
(tasavof's) world as *mundus symbolicus* <== cosmos of significance (~= art + history + nature)
[Das grosse Wunderbuch die Welt]
*theatrum mundi*
staging of nature (~ ajayeb) : nature in all its various manifestations (animal, vegetable, and mineral) must be displayed on a stage (of the title page, on the compartments of Kunstkammer)
•an arch of gateway resting on a platform or plinth (--> a basic model provided by classical architecture for the majority of Renaissance and Baroque stagings), a design that recalls the structures of allegorical tableaux used for triumphal entries into Italian and Dutch Renaissance cities, on order to honor the hero of the day
•(early modern title page *iconographic program*) incorporating the feature of the triumphal arch in order to signify the symbolic entry into the written work [<-- we don't need to do this!!] --> *formal monumental opening* (leading the “reader” to the ‘interior of’)--> Olearius's frontispiece (monumental, awe-inspiring works that aimed to spark the viewer's interest):
◦(to commemorate) official functions at the court
◦literary activities
[*]baroque: ***the art of not rejecting anything*** (el arte de no renunciar a nada -Montesinos)
(am i baroque?)
different types of frontispiece:
1. divided into geometrical compartments (german origin?)
2. depicting a particular scene (german invention) [images/elements chosen/included for doctrinal and controversial significance]
3. single cartouche (school of Fontainebleau), a predilection for Mannerist irrationality and illusionism; [...]
(141)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%91.6[...]ed ~= adaptations of) astrology
10th century --> gradual decline in literacy in Arabic ==> Persian treaties on sciences
rag-shenasi (knowledge of the pulse) --> Avicenna
روضة المنجمین
rowzat (روضة to look) [~/=? nozhat نزهت] ~= garden ~= astrological site
-(iran) university garden =/= (greek) university gymnasium
book: expository discourse (رساله توضیحی، تفسیری، نمایشی)
•poems on the subject
•تحسین و تمجید lengthy laudatory adjectives to describe the dedicatee:
◦patronage of the courts
◦the teaching circles
◦the family lineages of professions
◦the existence of “amateurs de sciences” (the private individuals interested in science)
•anecdotes (historical or legendary)
•questions and answers
•observation on the usefulness and the excellence of knowledge in general
...................................
ethnography:
•set of methods for knowing about social relations [--> storytelling] (=/=?)
•cultural-analytical scholarship [--> analysis]
ethnography: [*]ethnographic stories = generalizations that intervene (~= instruments that make intervention possible <-- a knowledge product in contemporary sci & tech studies STS)
ethnography: stories that have in them a capacity represent the world in ways that are generative for the people and practices that the stories are about + authors (+ their peers + readers)
****(from) postmodern concern about the authority of the author --to--> a concern about partiality and generative critique****
@apass #feedback
(Verran giving voice to what my concern and interest is in artistic research environment)
the question of how to re-present others (their diverse practices) on good faith? <-- moral
~~> the bad idea of “good faith =/= bad faith” ==> assume a moral high ground that we have no reason to argue in favor of
altering oneself to good faith = altering oneself to the possibility of double vision
(in ethnography) good faith: writing generalizing stories that intervene, because of the partiality of research and analysis (not despite of it)
•good faith analysis: having faith in it being possible to write stories that are generative for *some of* the practices we study + for *some of* our peers
(stories --Verran-->) two moments of generalizing:
1. *onemany* form ==enable==> abstracting
2. *whole-parts* form ==bring==> a situating moment
~={ Star Wars apocalyptic stories (single vision) + lived social bodily realities = (Harawayian) many-headed monster }--> #Tehran index
ethnographic research is always embedded in multi-stakeholder situations
the Verran is proposing
=/= writin[...]
(142)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%93.4[...]nographic stories deal with necessarily being just one of infinitely many possible stories of a herenow
(John Law:) ethnography: a method of assemblage : enactment of presence, manifest absence, and absence as otherness
#Tehran index
attending to indexes for herenow that embed two logics generalization: one-many & whole-parts
1. one kind of story embeds a logic of one-many generalization --> represents its here-now as an example of something in general [--> story = evidence base of a general statement about human, world, erc.]--Kwa--> *romantic*
3. one kind of story embeds a logic of whole-parts generalization --> presents its here-now by first building this world [--> story = an emergent entity on a vague whole]--Kwa--> *baroque*
20th century history of complexity theory
*romantic =/= baroque ways of doing complexity*
--Verran--> we should use both simultaneously ~= Haraway cyborg double vision
---> go to Latour's analysis of Ambassadors painting (~= illustration of an ethnographic story)
•technique of anamorphosis: invite the viewer to shift their perspective --> *they are invited to do the work of recognizing the alternative logics of generalization*
•agential instrumentality
•dual logic: ambassadors & skull
•skull/brownish object --signal--> a ‘viewer’ must ‘lean over’ in order to see the database (in Verran's example) as authoritative & as autonomous and *capable of making new kinds of knower* emerge (worker, storyteller, ethnographer)
-
my image assemblages are whole-part generalizations, one-many pictures, vague whole with emergent parts
#workshop on training two modes of generalization, use of drawing and image making, writing ethnographic stories
(artists typically make the mistake of making these two identical -->)
*indicator =/= outcome*
•indicator: for example ample you implement something
•outcome: a change in behavior (= accomplished indicator)
*one-many generalization*
x is one of many possible stories about X in general (--Latour--> purification:) spacetime specificities are transformed into general claims }--> abstracting
=/=
*whole-parts generalization*
x is a participant on an assemblage where all actors are somehow emerging parts --> one does not yet know what X is or may become (X remains a vague whole) (--Latour--> translation work:) working a number of herenows into the picture }--> situating
--> how to write (ethnographic) stories embedding the dual logic of generalization? = *how to arrive at a non-relativizing non-universalizing description that nevertheless works as a generalization?*
==constitute==> generalization: an irresolvable tension
<-- interventionist potentiel
narratives that allow both:
•information exchange (handli[...]
(143)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%93.6[...]tive access to the object --> bad idea of epistemology ==> recuperates climate change within categories that make it seam manageable =/= (Campbell claiming) *climage change : ontological world* ==> it is everywhere and nowhere, present at all levels and yet absent as a distinct “thing” we can point to
Meillassoux --> how difficult it is to think anything without in some way introducing a qualification that one cannot know it without rendering it “for-us” though our framing = *it cannot be known absolutely*
(problem of access:) anti-realism within continental tradition of philosophy ==> the idea that reality is inaccessible in-itself =/= Meillassoux's attempt to ***fuse reality with speculation in a logical manner***
to deploy speculative leap to defuse the problem of access --> *weird realism* to avoid the paths of analytic thought, positivism, scientism (~?!=> religion, faith, conspiracy theory, paranoia, ,,)
correlationism ==> despite repeatedly showing that it creates massive sudden fluctuating geologic singularities, climate change is still folded back into known organizational coordinates
}--> *interactional openness* (+ temporal boundedness) (@apass) ==> negotiation complexity, high technical policy instrument, multiplication of actors, multiplication of negotiation tracks
}==> *solutions shift from a field-endogenous catalyst of institutional change --to--> a mechanism of field maintenance*
}--Campbell--> framing of climate change ==dictate==> the organizational structure to address it ==> misrecognize what it is
=/= ***a world [=/= a problem] ==generates==> problems (that no current organizational form can address)***
correlationism (--> prevailing belief that human reason cannot attain certainty in metaphysical, religious, moral matters) ==Meillassoux==> fear of dogma/absolute (deep-seated desire to be non-dogmatic) ==> *knowledge becomes a matter of belief* ==>{ reason undergoes a process of religionizing : ‘reason = a means to buttress claims based on faith’ =/= aiming to capture absolute knowledge itself, condemning irrational claims upon it }==> ***discourage hierarchies of reason (always to slightly disblieve waht we believe) [<-- happens in apass!]
speculative realism ==>
1. *organizational research* (@Chloe2) in the future must be deidicated to finding the right categories to account for a new worl (and not for a superwicked problem)
2. enables us to approach climate change from the *widest rational angle*
3. (‘climate change = world’ ==>) we can begin to theorize the escalation and absolutization of ethics that is necessary to authentically occupy it --Campbell--> bleak optimism: acceptance of ecological collapse + begin the necessary work to organize within the new world of climate change (@Inga)
dialectical process of critique and reassessment <-- ab[...]
(144)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%95.6[...]traits from the past can exist in the present) []
==> type of posthuman biology conception of life
(let's have atavism instead of activism)
Campbell --> *critique the almost universal celebration of flow in contemporary philosophical thought* {<-- yes yes! thank you! ♥}
primitive: a site of primordial simplicity ~= originary unity }<== history of technology <--(told from a western lens)-- gradual progression and sophistication of the technical (for example Black Panther film)
-the presence or absence of specific technologies has often been read as a marker of cultural ‘backwardness’ <== “technology = something that comes from the West (rich-world technologies) and does something to other people in other places such as the “third world” (a well-intentioned framework that denies both agency and contemporaneity to the ‘other’ --> for example Eliasson's Little Sun)
technological progress is not a force unique to modern ‘civilized’ society; it is intimately bound with art and antiquity
•Heidegger (seeks the origin of technology in ancient Greece) --> technology referred to the ways in which realities are brought into the world, a mode of unconcealing reality (hervorbringen) [=/= mere means or instrument]
+ every unconcealment of reality is also by necessity a concealment of another reality
*poiesis: bring hither out of concealment forth into unconcealment* --> techne = tech + art
paleolithic hunters (so-called primitive societies) have been shown to have been affluent and technologically advanced
technological primitivism, as aesthetic in subcultures of high-technology, incorporating into their philosophies icons of: shamanism, esotericism, hermeticism, the occult, mythology
=/= my ajayeb.net
horror in commercial images (Campbell's investigation =/= fear appeals that act to discourage or warn)
horror (like primitive) is a historically specific form =/= an eternal constant (~ whay is horrific today might be completely unhorrific tomorrow --> for example ajayeb's horror)
horror = science fiction + primitivism
liberatory/avant-garde horror
female-as-victim
female-as-horror
--> apparatus of phallogocentrism
--Campbell--> *horror works to produce figures that contain within them an overflow of contradictory signs*
20th century high-tech machines induce horror : depiction of *technology out of control* inducing horror in the humanist consciousness (for example Black Mirror TV series)
(both primitive & technical) borderline figures of contemporary culture: replicants, androgynes, zombies, androids, posthumans, avatars, clones, undead
}--> *almost-not-quite ontologies* <-- displacing the unitary subject of classical humanism <== {new processes and quasi objects} <==create== ***{globalization, questions of h[...]
(145)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%96.6[...] how technology does not oppose nature, but stimulate it (Nissan pathfinder)
•how the morph causes a radical splintering of consciousness (BBC digital faces)
•how morph is the a visualization not of being, but of becoming
--> *flow, universally coded as positive* (sensibility of process and flux considered liberatory)
--> a logic of quick-change (embedded in entertainment and computer industries)
high-technology embodiments:
•cyborg
•foetus
•ecosystem
•database
•genome
•cellular automata
•insects
•
morphing =/= mutating: the visceral, painful, embodied experience that results from ontological boundary clashes
mutating into otherness =/= morphing into otherness
(pain of the flow -->) ***mutation is a concept that stops the flow***
(utopian:) technological imaginary portraying a simple and painless ascent into a silicon existence
chimera: (a term biotechnological discourse uses to refer to) the evolution of elements that do not belong together
[in greek mythology, a savage beast part lion part goat part snake =/= natural order]
•(Iron Man's definition of) technology: an instrument which accords the human with a gradual ascend towards increasing civilization, linear progress and power over her or his environment
•(Black Mirror's definition of) technology: paradoxical scene, a primal instinctual force
(my ajayeb =/=) technological primitivism: (aesthetic that is produced by) the ways “primitive” icons are used in discourses of high technology
technological merges into the mythological
ancient merges with the modern
•eXistenZ film 1999, a high-tech-primitive blend of amphibian eggs and synthetic DNA
portrayal of a symbolically resonant ancient life-source + form of a technical life-source
(Campbell suggesting) atavism: how supposedly primitive evolutionary traits which had disappeared generations ago reappear in contemporary human or animal life
-traits of a former time but still exist in the present
*proto-atavism: (exhibiting of) future evolutionary traits in the present ==> collapsing the quality of linear time [~=? my sleep-walking] (=/= human approaching a state of technological perfection through an orderly ascent of increasing complexity and sophistication)
--> technological progress = nonlinear, punctuated, multiple [<-- used in marketing today]
proto-atavism --argument--> that multiple paradigms of life exist on the peripheries of humanist life ==Campbell==> (how) *human life: a cacophony of co-existing interacting states of past present future existences with no recourse to a single reassuring origin* (=/= singular progression)
(like animal rumors in old bestiaries ajayeb in a story-starated world) f[...]
(146)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%97[...] era (intelligent machine takeover)
--> ecological ethics (human not the most important form of life on earth)
***attempt to overcome humanness is an age-old human tendency***
what constitutes life
•women --> Schiebinger
•slaves --> Douzinas
•computer viruses --> Parikka
•cellular automata --> Delanda
•bacteria --> Haraway
•swarms -->Thacker
•
*brand = living system* (--> distinguish themselves from environment, exclude from it what is not, feedback communication with environment, self replicate, evolve, ) =/= cultural product
@Femke
(Campbell arguing that) the human and the posthuman are (ways to describe the forces that are) already present in the human condition:
1.
computation of life
mid 19th century weaving technologies ==> logic of computation ==ontology==> “universe = giant computer” : attempting to uncover what life itself is through a better understanding and appreciation of the power and seeming omnipresence of computational logic
•a discourse [~ a way of talking about the world] (and not only a claim that people make)
--> an example of how dominant technologies are not just instruments but models (through which the world is understood)
‘clockwork universe’ was the model for the last four millennia: clockwork-like essence of cosmos + state + body (=/= romanticism, galvanism, mesmerism, quantum mechanics)
}==>
•consumer as computer/computational (consumer as information processor, consumer as automatic subject =/= psychological agent) <== science of cybernetics, automaticity, feedback
•information (a new powerful substance in mid 20th century), “raw data ==> decisions, models, theories”, a specialized value-free term (=/= fact, learning, wisdom, understanding, enlightenment) --> second half of 20th century: information began to assume a deep and proved privileges place (in politics, cultural imaginary), to informationalize consumer objects:
◦jeans as “intelligent denim” --> “vector graphics and pixelation as there expression of your individuality” (Jack & Jones)
◦cream as “pro-retinal A nanosomes and Par-Elasty” (L'Oreal)
•
2.
laborization of life
growing sophistication of the previously simple and straightforward categories of aliveness and deadness (<== technologies since the 1970s: stem cell engineering, in vitro fertilization, genomics, virtual surgery, biomaterial engineering)
}==>
•make the range of what constitutes ‘alive’ larger and more complex
•stage the interpenetration of the machinic and the organic
(in the future it will be the) marketers as the most influential groups in re-drawing categories of existence and deciding what is animate or inanimate, natural or technical (not scientists or philosophers)
[***classical[...]
(147)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%97.9[...]-> “free won't” : the mind exists in a climate which says yes, but it can say no
agency is outsourced to systems that increasingly invisiblize from everyday life (software deciding mortgage, Facebook suggest friend, turning car into a moving computer)
dystopian imaginary of Black Mirror TV series --> these developments are a tyrannical force that undermine an a priori and fundamental humanness
--Campbell--> consumer researcher's results will be powerful counter-balances to the often too blindly utopian and dystopian accounts of the future
...................................
[*]advertising: (ubiquitous and contentious) symptom of organization[= corporate entity and/or common practice]
aesthetic ambassador of the organization
--(a way through which)--> **anyone outside the organization mythologizes an imaginary inside**
(its) media:
•***indirect messages of public relations that are embedded deep in the heart of non-advertising genres***
•bombastic and direct appeal of made-for-cinema advertisement and corporate communication
•
how advertising used to be scorned as a practice and profession --> gained responsibility in American culture:
-1 advertising became instrumental in enlisting soldiers during world war I ==> lending it a moral force which served more noble purposes besides commerce
-2 it was elevated through its incorporation into education (first in Harvard University 1924)
-3 it becames adept at referencing styles and commissioning work from the realm of high culture
}--now--> advertising does not just produce culture, but ***culture produces advertising***
(one of the central questions of advertising in contemporary times has been the extent to which) *advertising enframes everything within its discourse and logic*
--Campbell--> ****if advertising is everything, what is it not?**** [@apass] <-- this is a crucial question about advertising and it is part of a larger global crucial devate about the commodification of life and previously inalienable aspects thereof
scientific advertising ---> go to Haraway
advertising:
1. fascinates us
2. it works
an average person in the western world is exposed to 3000 advertisements per day
everyday, it transforms me from this world to an imaginary one for a moment
(advertising) offers through a *constant stream of visual cameos* برجسته کارى, *implicit standards* of cleanliness, sociality, family life, health, happiness, and a great many other values ==> affect me
****modern advertising works by appearing not to care if it works**** --> when someone utters the immortal phrase “advertising doesn't affect me" = advertising has achieved its ultimate goal --> *****advertising empowers us to feel distant to it*****
Ca[...]
(148)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%98.1[...]. that is the only duty)
...................................
MADMAN#1: i like to think, “i am rich they can't hurt me.”
MADMAN#2: that's a mistake.
MADMAN#1: i am being punished for making my job look easy... Although, that kid, guy, he has a spark. He is a pure account man.
MADMAN#2: and what is that job all about?
MADMAN#1: i don't know. it's about listening to people and never saying what's really on your mind.
MADMAN#2: no. it's about letting things go so you can get what you want.
“I could tell the minute she saw who I realy was, she never wanted to look at me again, which is why I never told her.”
--> i am not telling you anything, because the minute you see who i realy am, you never want to look at me again.
“...but nobody knows what is wrong with themselves, and everyone else can see it right away.”
...................................
is this an honour?
(a) bette[...]
(149)[...notes/midday review.txt]%9.7[...]em of objects (any kind of objects) that make all of the sentences in a theory true , where a “theory” is a list of sentences in a language.
•metaphors somehow mobilize the difference between the two domains
•arena of alienation
•Cut the Noise
•mirrors with (/without) memories
•substitutability
•optical appearances (mind ~ eye)
•Dioptrics (science of refraction), catoptrics (reflection),
•that could not be spoken of or represented, because it was empty of discourse and thus of meaning.
•innocence of the eye
•Poor Unfortunate Souls
•being useful, like a prison guard
•autopoetic (complex self-referential systems)
•to take up the motives from the external world
•will-less perception, “the pure eye of genius”
•bringing from the artificial world to the art world
•object oriented programming / subject oriented
•Observer, system and environment
•a system (designed) with a purpose of itself
•magnifying or light-collecting optical device
•social selfish
•un-computational
•gray area
•self-identity is bad visual system
•Vision requires instruments of vision; an optics is a politics of positioning. Instruments of vision mediate standpoints;
•Identity, including self-identity, does not produce science; critical positioning does, that is, objectivity
•docile body
•technological visioning (vector of secret texts, books within books, ancient curses, digital dreams, and medieval cyber-art)
•empty space left by theory and philosophy
•technical visioning
•Technology is never merely “used,” never merely instrumental. It is always ” incorporated” and “lived.”
•In his last paintings, such as the Bride of 1912, Duchamp both elaborated an iconography that combined mechanical and visceral forms and began to move away from any procedures that revealed the artist's hand to create “retinal” or “anecdotal” art.
lemon grass plant, marigold
Saeed 0012063108222
Tehran Wi Fi: 88 57 27 92
newer medium may be ‘nested’ inside of an older medium (or vice versa)
mental life (memory, imagination, fantasy, dreaming, perception, cognition) is mediated and is embodied in the whole range of material media… we not only think about media, we think in them (Mitchell)
The shock of new media is as old as the hills
Franz Reuleux described this correlation: the more primitive the technology, the less attuned the parts of the machine to each other, the greater the degree of play -- the more perfected the technology, the closer the fit, the less play between the individual parts.
(For Winnicott,) play is a psychological state where the boundaries between self and the world remain labile and fluid, (a state which is important not only fo[...]
(150)[...notes/notes Personen.txt]%45.9[...] multiplicities of) unlinked morphologies
(fire text)
to practice dichotomy (and its connected paths) one must know that its clefts follow and overlap the ancient mythical narrative (in which worlds are torn ...)
when geometry is born myth falls silent
(the ancient journey) from islands to catastrophes, from passage to fault, from bridge to well, from relay to labyrinth
the original function
the “new space” is always universal
the space of reason is universal, within it there are no more encounters
one can walk on two or four or three legs ----> how the earth is measured
(before entering the Ajayeb website asking that question?)
(a dangerous) flock of chaotic morphologies
(is this subdued or maintained in Ajayeb?)
(i am also more interested in) the aged Europe asleep beneath the mantle of reason and measure
(Leibniz said that one should listen to) old wives’ tales***
The Old Wives’ Tales
...................................
recapitulation
appropriation
=/= fabrication
creation
what are the ‘forces in motion’ in Ajayeb? What are:
Instruments of leverage,
machines,
producers of forces,
for packing,
for transporting,
as source,
as origine,
the applied geometry of our relation to the world
tools are dominated by form
virtual velocities
objective world
geometric reasoning
industrial revolution, a revolution operating on matter
one takes force or produces it
matter transformed by fire
Turner saw the introduction of fiery matter into culture
an axis of (roaring) fire
matter is no longer left in the prison of diagram, fire desolves it, makes it vibrant, tremble, oscillate, makes it explode into clouds.
New matter ==> new world
fire delivers one from the ice***
steam engine triumphs over forced immobility, inertia
the cut of the reference
product of furnace, the cold product of fusion
old-style riddle
navigate between two pronouns
...................................
properly formed cluster (of letters) = standardization
standard compromises the non-essential, or inessential, those without meaning
what is a logician interested in?
Form --> pathology
misguided sciences
if static is accidental, background noise is essential to communication
pathology
spocken: stammering, mispronounciation, regiomil accents, dysphonia, cacophony
technical: background noise, jamming, static, cut-off, hyteresis, various interrupt[...]
(151)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%50.3