[...]my efforts of ecriture (in San'an text)
(it is not possible to choreograph chance, we can only report our encounters with it)

like San'an, many of us are facing an anxiety of withdrawal from the world that claims us

i am interested in to-link to that which (suddenly) interupts my reveries


to sharpen my capacity for incapacitation


not being afraid to look into many archives of mistakes (ajayeb?)


‘will to scientific knowledge’



[Latour]

(certain) seperation is political :
when we are talking about (re)uniting curricula, linking fields in humanities we are talking about not bringing together two things that are separate, but actually interogating the distribution of power, a way a distributing agancies.

it is not a “common world” to discover, it is a common world to be produced. and the only way to produce it, is through the usual tools that we have in our disposal, which are comming from ‘representation.’

compose =/= discover/uncover

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

enterances in ajayeb work, already generating form:
*-fire (talking fire)
*-darkness (Zolmat)
*-jinn
*-veil (pardeh)--purity of veiled origin; hidden matrix of signification (on which theoretical work secretly depends?) [also reading the secularization and the lifting of the veil, prostitute paradigm, conceptions of love,]
*-wall(?)


“truth” is veild, according to middle east (truth <----> pardeh پرده)
begining with the Greeks’ notion of basanos, relating truth to torture, a strictly constellated confluence of acts equally troubling to Aristotle and Aristophanes.

•pardeh-dari پرده دری, hajeb حاجب (after neghabat نقابت is hejabat حجابت [Beyhaghi]) (Nezami in Leili-o-majnun: haft arus-e noh emari bar dargah-e to be pardeh-dari (هفت عروس نو عماری بر درگه تو به پرده داری) --?--> angelology) =/=? hayula(ism) هیولی

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

hermeneutics regarding Jurisprudence (feghh فقه) and theology depend on the exegesis of written texts. in both cases the process of understanding is an act of application(?)

interpretation/hermenutice =/= commons/collectivsm
(ta'vil bayad dar jahate axe harkate jami va moshtarek bashad)

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

(Kohn) to “provincialize” (rustayi روستایی, bastani باستانی?) language in order to make room for another kind of thought--a kind of thought that is more capacious, one that holds and sustains the human.

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

my point in animals without narrative is that the apparatus that is working for Attar in his representation of birds is the same as the narrative tool in the so-called wildlife documentary series[...]

[...]ng is caught in its meshwork of narezayati نارضایتی
(physical existence carrying with it) a trace of unreality --> آمدنم بهر چه بود : “i am not sure where i am anymore. i am at home in feeling not at home.”


one's normal sense of time as a container


Ehsan's ghost/sheikh film --> demonic in that through them causalities flow like electricity


ambient, latin ‘ambo’ means ‘on both sides’


the old art theories that separated sweetness and power collapse
sweetness, it turns out, just is power: the most powerful thing


weather as monster

baby learns to distinguish between the vomit and the non-vomit, and comes to know the non-vomit as self


(a society in which) growing scientific *awareness of rish* ==changes==> the nature of democracy

back-to-nature festivals

nihilistic princes of darkness

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

my work is *to mix stories*

everyday engagements with other kinds of creatures (in my case: ajayeb) ==> opens new kinds of possibilities for relating and understanding

cosmoecology: multiple beings (gods, jinns, animals, humans, living, dead, etc.) each bearing the consequences of the others’ ways (of living and dying)

‘the ecological question’ is about the needs that ought to be met in the ongoing creation of rapports and connections --> the questions are how does this being achieve the task of holding onto its existence =/= “does this being really exist, or is it not a representation”
==> (Despret:) *we may never know (safely and reliably, either ahead of time or a posteriori) which beings will bear/enjoy the consequences of the concrete attention we give to them*

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

on Kate Rich work
feral --> before or without a political state --?--> state of nature [a lot of moral political philosophers of the state asking “What was life like before civil society?"]--> in feral there are only freedoms ==> contracts (}--> what cultural anthropology has to say about that?)
she is in the Rousseauian tradition of *how to establish a ‘political community’ in the face of the problems of ‘commercial society’* (---> go to Rousseau's The Social Contract & Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men)
fighting the system --> feral tropes --> arsenal of the Enlightenment (Kant's motto: “Dare to think for yourself!” ~= “I don't follow orders!”), application of Reason in the public sphere of human affairs
with her work we are in the Age of Enlightenment, Age of Reason, resourcing authority and legitimacy, ideals of individual liberty and progress --> Kate's thinking founded on philosophical fictions of the 18th century (--Foucault--> problematic legacy of the Enlightenment)
[...]

[...]>

(the word) wonder, it worlds.

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

work in ajayeb is about the phenomenon of understanding that is to be found in modes of experience that lie outside the universal claims of modern scientific method (--the experiences of art, of philosophy, and of history itself.)

in the hermeneutic universe i am building, Iran is made of China is made of India is made of Afghanistan is made of Iraq is made of Greece is made of ...

(can I say that my work has been all about Iran-centrism?)

gaps in cultural space that epistemology has not filled

hermeneutics =/=? epistemology

history of truth


*making an ecological landscape of ajayeb cosmology, that means making visible the connection between beings and contact zones among animate and inanimate and nonhuman:
diamond <--> snake
fire <--> speech
fire <--> animals
wind <--> future
cow <--> angel
water <--> light
darvishi درویشی <--> Div دیو
earth <--> Bahman بهمن
mars <--> wolf, pig
moon <--> effect of Gabriel's wings
earth <--> woman/enmity/illusio
mountain <--> ganj گنج
jinn جن <--> climate
Div <--> stone
climate <--> ghiamat قیامت
khidr خضر <--> life/death giving


(ajayeb-e chah) عجایب چاه
wonders of pits --> wonders of moon (Moghana مقنع, bringing a moon out of a pit, mah-e nakhshab ماه نخشب) [Moghana's work on mirror], [neiranjat نیرنجات and telesmat طلسمات (of Moghana’) ~=? ruse, tech],
[signifier of wonder:] mahi (ماهی‌ fish) [reflection of the moon in water] --> mah (ماه‌ moon) --> pointing at helal-e mah (هلال ماه half-moon) --> mouth of the beloved (یار yar) [registered in poetry of Sa'di سعدی] --> wonder finger on the open mouth <br /> -also, Galileo's new telescope pointing at the moon (and sun-spots 900 years later than the chinese did,) and his pervasive approach to the knowledge milieu that he lived in, set the secular registers of truth
گفتم اگر از تو در خواهم شکافته شوی چه کنی؟ گفت شکافته شوم. بدو اشارت کرد و ماه به دو پاره شد

(ajayeb-e aab) عجایب آب
آشنا ashena (=/= stranger) in Farsi comes from the relationship with water and swimming, somehow knowing the water
cognition (in Greek cogn, ‘having learned’), in Farsi shenakht (شناخت) is rooted in water, ashena: shenavar dar bahr budan شناور در بهر بودن, floating body, -shenasi شناسی‌-

(ajayeb-e donya) عجایب دنیا
wonders of earth(?) --> ghul (غول), serial killer, house full of bones (horror story)
(after donya/earth comes immidiatly, ghiamat قیامت)
donya: the temp[...]

[...]rips with the universal, the supra-historical, or even the cosmos within our global present, imagining a local that lays claims upon all three?

is there a Muslim environmental imaginary?

‘Islamic ecology and environmental ethics’ --> the need to center a vibrant materiality or the liveliness of things in the anthropology of Islam (that has been to date largely preoccupied with Muslim polities and subjectivities.)

It should come as no surprise that my own efforts at centering materiality comes through studying how these predominantly Muslim farmers interact with and come to acknowledge nonhuman forms of life (including the figure of Khidr خضر, dogs, river waters, silt, and lightning, to name a few). Finally, I remain concerned to explore how the singularities of these lives, both human and nonhuman, come to be hitched to the global. This research will culminate in a book tentatively titled Ensouling the Anthropocene: Riverine Life and Climate Change in Bangladesh, in which “ensouling” treats the problem of scaling up singularity to the global, intensifying efforts that began with “Of Children and Jinn.” [source: https://culanth.org/curated_collections/19-everyday-islam/discussions/20-interview-with-naveeda-khan-about-of-children-and-jinn]

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

(what i am reading in ajayeb)_with Naveeda: “Muslim cosmology and eschatology hold promoise of ecological thought, providing an unexpectedly materialist perspective on our creaturely interconnectedness.”

[ajayeb (and telegram) is full of] gestures of incorporating repugnant [offensive to the mind] others---that one sees reflections on divine creation qua [als] creaturliness


thoroughly disabused
aufklären آگاهیدن آگاییدن

expound تفسیر

incentive مشوق, فتنه انگيز

litany مناجات وعبادت تهليل دار

showmanship (نمايشگرى?)
effektvolle Darstellung, Schauspielproduktion

queasy به طور تهوع آوری لطیف مزاج

(a gedture of) ludic [playfull, spielerisch] transcendence of [the] present

obdurate سرسخت
-showing unfeeling resistance to tender feelings-
(picture of the world as) pristine nature طبیعت بکر being destroyed by humans (--> narcissistic?)
=/= view of theology/religion on ecology
=/= (stories of humans and dogs:) shared creatureliness and companionship entailing a turn to cofeasting on the flesh of the world --> mutual fate

does islamic theology (in both elite and popular belief) offers us a way toward *sensing our embeddedness in this world* ?
-might ajayeb (creationist?) narratives be generative of interconnections between humans and other animals within the predominant muslim context?
-why climate science doesn't/hasn't effect a meaningfu[...]

[...]

visiting of shobhe to the town
(shobhe gave the town a visit)
شبهه
شبح شبهه

bringing bits and pieces of songs from many places... over their cell phones... being well versed in the different types of music to be able to tell the songs apart...
(Sven, )

attention to the physical surround of the religious consciousness rather than to the inner workings of their body

.

آخرت

آخرش


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

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

dwindling quality of life (and diminished humanity)

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

* what_ gives a pause ?


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


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

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

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

bonanza
anthrax

euthanize

inoculate

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

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


double-edgeed prospect

common curse

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

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

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


rural cosmology
[...]

[...]ayal of translations (of perspectives) and continuous redressal of meanings (of things)

“as if” has to do with misunderstanding

“meanings are constructed in a constant movement of ‘attunement,’ which makes them emerge.”
(Despret, animal breeding practices)

(my work on ajayeb is also much about) *language-learning* [...]in its pragmatic function: it is an effective means of acting and of making others act


keep your end up


[*]type: identifying language use with modes of existence [Wittgenstein's mistake] (maybe useful to reanimate the question of ‘becoming’ for Marialena)
the mode of existence of lions is subordinated to that of an essence “lioness,” guaranteed by the identity of the species and the stability of its repertoire of behaviour ==> a burdensome conception of the naturalness of animals
***the question is not what ‘is’ a lion, but “how does one become a lion,” not only in lion community and species, but also in the work of scientists, constructing what it is to be a lion.
--> this is about becoming: of that of which the animal is rendered capable by the apparatuses that interrogate it

how can what I say about lions or baboons (or oceans or jinns) be authorized by them?


[*]we: constituted by the assemblage of different (animal-, nonhuman-, machine-, human-)beings equipped with an apparatus aimed at making them talk well --{by taking an interest in what constitutes the appropriateness of a material apparatus that transforms those it interrogates}--> fully agreeing to situate oneself in a regime of transformations and accomplishments =={that mingle with and give form to}==> *desires*
-researcher's desire is one the modes of their efficacity
-“our” problems are not a priori

a “we”:
+ “know full well”
+ “are different”
+ “who work”

rhetorics of pronouns, acts of crude generalizations: something is being specified and something generalized. [@Xiri's “I am the one who... your...” the specificity and generality of “I” and of “you” in her text. how the difference of “you” and “I” was envisaged in her poem?-->{I, the effected by =/= you, the haver} how can this I/you impose itself not as the effect of a strong-arm tactic? =/=? I want to find out how to live together; refuse to deepen the contrast between “us” and “them"] [in Xiri's poem: who/what makes her pronouns?] [to address people ‘as’ refugees, subjugated, poor, or victim, to recognize them by these identities, only repeats the process of exclusion(?) could be experienced as disabling.]


*/ generalization is constructed bit by bit

(that which constitutes) an expression of the parrot's opinion in relevance to what it is asked, the fact that it engages with, accepts and activly transforms what becomes a part of its world, translates an extensio[...]

[...]storical societies

localness nests in:
•tastes
•bodies
•neigborhoods
•a valley
•a state
•a geographical region


“in each scene of the production of history there are events that are storied or otherwise pulled into play” (Stewart)

Stewart on salem witch trials
the accusations spiraled through families, catching people up like magnetic strips
“wicked little sorceries” -->{jumpy moments that suddenly lay the charge of a half-known intensity onto ordinary people and roads, regionality becomes a wicked little sorcery. a vortex that pulls possible forms into life into a moment's alignment}, {the adjective ‘wicked’ marking *excess* of all kinds}
astrology
fortune-telling
*an attunement to specters*
-a farmer admitted getting into ‘the snare of the devil’ because he had a large family and ‘the world went hard with him.’


robustness in cold weather


[title]
making of edges and scenes in ajayeb

character or texture of an edge

(ajayeb is made of elements that were) a thing sensed with certainty (yet made up of a shifting, edgy composite)
[a sentient shadow called jinn, God, darkness of a pit, a cycle, etc.]
--or--> made scenic *as a site of a world's potential* (= ajayeb)
--the scene of a thing's demise

an edgy irruptive event

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

(Karin + Sina + Hanno) we were humans together

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

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


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


hallucinogenically down-to-earth (Aela)


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

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

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

#my project in apass has b[...]

[...]al paternalism
free-market bullying

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

#my theory (=/= reductionist, or psychological identification) on specification of:
spider =/= linear temporality
whale =/= distinction of organism and environment
(?) =/= “single point of view ==> subjective phenomena”

Nagel: the fact that an organism has conscious experience = there is something it is like to be that organism {--> subjective character of experience}--✕--> analyzable in terms of any explanatory system of functional states, or intentional states

Blade Runner's notion of “soul”: ascribed to robots or automata that behave like people though they experience nothing

physicalism: phenomenological features must themselves be given a physical account

...if one travels too far down the phylogenetic tree, people gradually shed their faith that there is experience at all

anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat
anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited whale
anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited snake
anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited jinn
--> knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life

Nagel asking: we must consider whether any method will permit us to extrapolate استقراء to the inner life of the bat from our own case, and if not, what alternative methods there may be for understanding the notion

“our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited” --> Nagel's view remains secular and in the bounds of his disciplinary field. (religious studies, theology, animal subjectivity studies, art of description, they can be helpful to describe things not in terms of the impressions they make on our senses)
-Nagel is trying with the wrong language at bats: “does it make sense to ask what my experiences are ‘really’ like as opposed to how they appear to me? [...] objective processes can have a subjective nature.”

what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves =/= what it is like for a bat to be a bat


schematic conceptions of Eszter


(old model of understanding:)
* --> stimulus (things sparkling) --> perception (hiting the senses) --> apprehension (mind aware without judgement) --> comprehension (psychological judgement about the manner of situation) --> knowing ==> world of doing, in which “action” is: expected (mother attending the child, free liberating the prisoners), commanded (soldier's hierarchy, job's duty), solved (engineer puzzling out a problem)


the things apprehended from a particular point of view (particular visual phenomenology) are not connected to that point


Neo[...]

[...]?)

profane: a routine, ritual, process that does not in itself invoke a sacred purpose or value

-how would we measure the distance between the poles of the profane and sacred in terms of the mood and intention surrounding the ritual of killing?
-what is the mood sounding the sacrificial death? (veneration?)

animal sacrifice has a long history in textual and oral forms of Hinduism (as do arguments against it)

آرامش قصاب
butcher's easy hospitality
slow time of sadism

#story
tribe of bonded laborer decide not to sacrifice animals. “what is the use of someone's untimely death causing another?” (and because goats are expensive nowadays). one summer all the brothers get together and call the deity. he possessed my father's brother's son. we said: “baba, we won't give you a goat. eat us if you must.” the spirit began to get angry. he said if i accept this for you, then others will do the same. (after negotiation) he accepted only from one person and not others. the issue is still unresolved.

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

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


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

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

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

consumption of neighboring species


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

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

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

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

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


(dramatization of) agonistic intimacy : a relationship of proximity and violence between neighboring social groups (the body of neighboring species)
--Taussig--> ritual violence (the most stunning prop is the human: the all too profane body with its various appendages, fluids, undulating surfaces, folds, exists, entrances)
--Veena[...]

[...]he origin of fire

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

we are too abstract, we are thinking yes there are things out there wild or whatever. then we must be surprise to see that the abstract far thing is made of flesh, quartz, or fire.

unlike camels and rats and sheep, other four legged or mammals, fire is not designed for something, the way organisms evolved to have meanings and representations to each other. fire embodies a vast place in our material and industrial and semiotic world but itself is not a creature of evolution. it knows nothing of symbiogensis nor of molecular compartmenship. fire is an elementary radical reaction to closeness. the third person. pure manifestation.

every mountain range have personalities. rock is arrange by evolution. it tells you about itself when you feel it firm in your hand pressing to your ear, asking thousands of questions, exploring with imagination. stone is not a social creature, maybe that's why we listen to them. fires are social beings, death sentences.
their society and ecology
reaching access to the literacy of fire-work

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

(...) --> the black-box --> ka'ba --> an intermediate mechanism to reach beyond the door-knob --> dark medium of worship --> the jinn --> ontology of the envelopment --> an interiority that is exterior --> talking-fire --> mediums of the beyond --> put your ‘thing’ in the fire --> going through the fire --> test some fossils --> ice age --> databases that survive --> promises of futurity --> tech --> black-box is always about the-envelope and the-beyond --> going back to the cave --> monotheism invented darkness (praying in the dark marked singulaity of worship as the begining of subjectivity) --> there is a sudden big shift from telling-stone to talking-fire (introducing the spectacularization of truth-event, where risky aesthetic of fire coded as masculine is traded for a mutuality of slower wilderness a more feminine trope. the telling-stone proposes a totally different ecological model than the survivorship narratives encoded in the trial of the talking-fire. truth became untouchable visual spectacle that can burn and annihilate charging off the haptic closeness of the stone to the ear. truth became the matter of untouchable, visual. the angry truth god came with the fire both as tool of worship and punish (human taking lessens and used fire to discipline the forces of nature) --> the darkness that enveloped the worship, made the absence of light crucial for constructing interiority [note: before going to light-fire the worshipers must wash themselves in Vozu, in Namaz the worshpers wash themselvs before going to the darkness of prayers---is this water that we make vozu the same as ‘abe heyvan’? before going into the hyper space, the ritual plays a key role and a key hole. like all hyper spaces that forwards you yo the beyond the box as well is about deliverence (to the lover?): (for the sake of) s[...]

[...]ar, stop, and lead no further

older elements (seemingly unchanged) come to mean something quite different, have been interpreted to fit into a new system of meanings

religious metaphors:
•spiritual core in phenomena
•rulers
•parents


[and then later] dark age closed down on mesopotamia
many divine wills to the willful whim of a single despot
*major gods became natural gods* (identified with narrow national political aspirations)
--> barbarization of the idea of divinity

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

(how to take seriously) water's materiality --> how to think with water (or *how water means*):
•water can bring human conceptual life along with it from local to global concerns
•[can help us to] go beyond qualities that express some timeless properties

(my point: the experience of fire is as inseparable from that of stone)
[Alberti suggests] *to think in terms of the properties of the phenomenon ‘rock/water’ as engendered by specific, embodied practices in this place* (=/= grappling with the question of the agentive capacities or properties of the rock or water)

***there are many waters (fires, jinns, divs, stones, shadows), not only many meanings of water (fires, jinns, divs, stones, shadows)***

}--> Alberti's brilliant response to Strang's bad idea of universal notions of properties (which is a very common tendency towards relationality among artists --> Strang: “common material properties of things, and the shared cognitive and phenomenological processes through which people interact with them, generate recurrent ideas and patterns of engagement in diverse cultural and historical contexts”)

to bear on the form and content of an argument about water as:
•material
•social
--> describing relations (human and nonhuman) established through water
*what water can do: flow*

agentive or affective capacities of materials --> (bad philosophy of flux) flow as a overgeneralized model for materiality =/= expanding relations water engenders through its properties in particular locations or rivers

*humans are able to shift conceptual scales through reflexivity*

(Alberti asking within archaeology:) how to reconcile materials and meaning without introducing a representationalist logic where meaning is applied to matter by a thinking subject? how to show their co-existence without resorting to determinism?

now everyone is busy and talking about *relationality* than about *meaning* (=/= my work has alwayes been about both, how to take risks in meaning, my lecture-performances = adventures of meaning)
-we cannot mearly talk about relationality {quasi-universal experience of properties ==> commonalities of meanings across time and culture}, the question of me[...]

[...]> for me that is why visual arts are so important: politics is always visual)
**politics --> affect can explain the processes that are inexplicable through other functional explanations + affect exists as an object of power (political formations are reactive to and formed by affect)


(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[...]

[...]m, 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)

activating competing bodies of knowledge and sets of relations
(in the hope that one of them will pay off)<br />

insistence on a modicum [minimum amount] of consistency

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

...enmeshed within a certain unintentional malevolence existing alongside generosity.
-malevolence is something that holds out the possibility of harm rather than actively intending it
-generosity is the willingness to concede to others rather than a nobility of character


(also the dilemma of introducing the jinn to your child)
“exposing” his children to their disruptive yet generative powers


‘exposure of children to evil’
the innate resource of children
(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 p[...]

[...]/>

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)

activating competing bodies of knowledge and sets of relations
(in the hope that one of them will pay off)


insistence on a modicum [minimum amount] of consistency

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

...enmeshed within a certain unintentional malevolence existing alongside generosity.
-malevolence is something that holds out the possibility of harm rather than actively intending it
-generosity is the willingness to concede to others rather than a nobility of character


(also the dilemma of introducing the jinn to your child)
“exposing” his children to their disruptive yet generative powers


‘exposure of children to evil’
the innate resource of children
(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 anot[...]

[...]t 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 gaining voice



artifi[...]

[...]sibility 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 gaining voice


r /> artificiality of need in the everyday --> this view eclipses what is at stake in the everyday life, what jeopardized it internally and externally

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

*the formation of selves within contemporary Muslim societies:
(A) existence of multiple selves within an individual, which is context-dependent and intersubjective. the individual may espouse different self-representations at different moments, these are not viewed as inconsistent to the illusion of wholeness (Ewing 1997)
(B) the subject acts on herself in such a way as to make the norm constitute her as pious self. this is a self that is generated through its particular emergence from and interpenetration with, the norm. (Mahmood 2001)
(C) the self as the realm of presubjective possibilities. in Deleuze words “impersonal and pre-individual singularities” exists within a plane of immanence. “far from being individual or personal, singularities preside (take over and g[...]

[...] closer attention


nondialectical thought =/= law of noncontradiction : you are either for or against (Islam, state, ...)


a kind of life-force that an older generation of social science would have called “agency”:
“she is fearless and has an amazing ability to bring people together”, i was drawn to the vitality that she embody --> Singh understands her life not simply as a unidirectional story of “empowerment” or “agency” [a story many iranians are caught in] but as a *fluctuation between forms of strength and vulnerability*
(condition of life itself:) our particular strengths and vulnerabilities variably express themselves
...pushing a family from a position of relative strength into near destitution


how do we conceptualize relations between potentially hostile neighboring groups? (Singh 2011)


[agonistics & intimacies] --how--> they may traverse different intensities ~~~~> ***differences internal to a life***

agon (contest) --Singh--> agonistic intimacy: a way to understand the co-presence of modes of conflict and cohabitation, (*co-presence of violence and wellness*,) to leave open the possibility of a shared and contested future


jinn: a category of spirit shared by popular hinduism and islam
who, usually turns out, is a lifelong conpanion
*a relation that can be life-giving may also become life-denying
jinn and other minor spirits may also harbor the possibility of madness


[varying thresholds of life]
thinking of the dead, the unborn, spirits, and those participants among living --> what kind of conception of life this requires? --> (Deleuze > Singh's) ***varying thresholds of life*** (=/= Agamben's “bare life” [--✕--> Singh's starting point: how one thinks about life or vitality not just as bare life]) --> as a way of engaging ancestors (such as Ehsan's little girl ghost [#Ehsan's brilliant storytelling gives the “unbeliever” goosebumps from the intensities, the “incredible feeling of an unknown Nature-affect” that he embodies]), spirits, the undead, and the unborn who subsist alongside the living
*threshold:
•to denote points of passage accross phases of life
•refering to varying degrees of intensity (that may continue after death)--> as a spirit/jinn is preserved or recedes, through possession or in visions or memories, enduring in potentially multiple dimensions
*a memory, a dream, even a hallucination is also a threshold of life*
agency of spirits [jinn, abstract spirit of modernity, secular education, Thakur Baba, , ,] = *a threshold of life* (with its own immanent forms of movement and flux)
[-]lets not call it “disenchantment” or mere nostalgia, but *a shift in the quality of life* --> ethnographic investigation can be a form of heightened attentiveness (to varying thresholds of life [to the intensi[...]

[...]nd the co-presence of modes of conflict and cohabitation, (*co-presence of violence and wellness*,) to leave open the possibility of a shared and contested future


jinn: a category of spirit shared by popular hinduism and islam
who, usually turns out, is a lifelong conpanion
*a relation that can be life-giving may also become life-denying
jinn and other minor spirits may also harbor the possibility of madness


[varying thresholds of life]
thinking of the dead, the unborn, spirits, and those participants among living --> what kind of conception of life this requires? --> (Deleuze > Singh's) ***varying thresholds of life*** (=/= Agamben's “bare life” [--✕--> Singh's starting point: how one thinks about life or vitality not just as bare life]) --> as a way of engaging ancestors (such as Ehsan's little girl ghost [#Ehsan's brilliant storytelling gives the “unbeliever” goosebumps from the intensities, the “incredible feeling of an unknown Nature-affect” that he embodies]), spirits, the undead, and the unborn who subsist alongside the living
*threshold:
•to denote points of passage accross phases of life
•refering to varying degrees of intensity (that may continue after death)--> as a spirit/jinn is preserved or recedes, through possession or in visions or memories, enduring in potentially multiple dimensions
*a memory, a dream, even a hallucination is also a threshold of life*
agency of spirits [jinn, abstract spirit of modernity, secular education, Thakur Baba, , ,] = *a threshold of life* (with its own immanent forms of movement and flux)
[-]lets not call it “disenchantment” or mere nostalgia, but *a shift in the quality of life* --> ethnographic investigation can be a form of heightened attentiveness (to varying thresholds of life [to the intensities of Ehsan's ghost-girl, to the cannibal mice, Tehran's earthquake synthesis of affect, , ,]--(these [Tehran's range of moods and intensities] are)--> waxing and waning گام‌های ماه *intensities immanent to a milieu; affecting our ideas of ethics and politics)


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


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

(instead of “the social” lets get interested in more tha[...]

[...](that may continue after death)--> as a spirit/jinn is preserved or recedes, through possession or in visions or memories, enduring in potentially multiple dimensions
*a memory, a dream, even a hallucination is also a threshold of life*
agency of spirits [jinn, abstract spirit of modernity, secular education, Thakur Baba, , ,] = *a threshold of life* (with its own immanent forms of movement and flux)
[-]lets not call it “disenchantment” or mere nostalgia, but *a shift in the quality of life* --> ethnographic investigation can be a form of heightened attentiveness (to varying thresholds of life [to the intensities of Ehsan's ghost-girl, to the cannibal mice, Tehran's earthquake synthesis of affect, , ,]--(these [Tehran's range of moods and intensities] are)--> waxing and waning گام‌های ماه *intensities immanent to a milieu; affecting our ideas of ethics and politics)


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


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

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


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


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

yes yes the history might be made through bloody contradictions, and yet, we cannot be as Magi, waiting for the big drama to unfold --(we can do better)--> a signature capacity of ethnographic attentiveness in an affirmative lineage of thought --(not to deny contradiction)-[...]

[...]milieus]
-to think about religion is super usefull and relevant, because it is also about what secularism is

how people (in rural areas) conceive of vitality and advancement?
*how people imagine a better life?* --> (to think non-unilateral and non-static) *picture of aspiration* (in a world like Tehran; #proposal to research on ‘the image of growth’ رشد roshd, slow growth, [roshd-e bi-raviye رشد بی رویه of toxins and species, and so on] in the context of contemporary Tehran)
-imitations of forms

(i am activating a rhizomatic mode of perception [learning from Anand learning from Deleuze and Guattari])--> how one aspect of life leads to another =/= paritioning of the milieu


anthropology of the state : how one engages the state in an every day level


*historically one crucial exit point from the system of ruler-relation was to become ascetic (زهد): disregard for sovereign authority (حاکم hakem, hakemiat) --> a different form of power that one let's to lead to self-rule

[bare life =? life without a way of life --✕--> there is no life without a way of life]
(Singh:) someone's life cut off from their source of vitality
a local body of thought (jinn, etc.)

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

(Anand asking) what does it means to live in a city of jinns?
the jinn:
•serves as witnesses of times long gone
•figures of authority whose shrine blesses remembered forms of urban religious life
•forgotten by the amnesia of the postcolonial state
•rendered unislamic by the selective amnesia of revivalist tradition

jinn --> revive that old orientalist trope, constituted not only by bazzar, mosque, and hammam, but also of the antinomian potentials that have long been part of the Islamic tradition

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

vita
lives of saints
تذکرة الاولیا Tazkirat al-Awliya
concerned with canonization, education, and collective recollection of contemplative life
(vita as a biological genre recounting the lives of holly men and women in several religious traditions: Bhaktamala, Theravada buddhism, Therigata, etc.)

Singh asking: how would we narrate a scholarly life? (and i add to that: who could be oulia اولیا Arahant [further ones] today? queer or nonhuman)
*participated in the world historical “isms” (--> ajayeb)
--Singh--> narrating a conceptual life, vita

*uncertainties of reception* (in Attar's Tazkirat al-Awliya)

singularity of trajectory of Attar's saints =/= my random sampling of themes

anthropology: to write about anything that exists or imagined

can we talk affirmatively of a postmodern ethnography of ajayeb? =/= “totalizing vision” of culture

recove[...]

[...] yet rested!” (Jules Verne, All Around the Moon)

the side of the moon facing earth is being gradually eroded by earth’s gravitation

Pythagoreans <-- one of the first recorded visions of an inhabitable moon on which animas and plants flourish, larger and more beautiful than on earth <== *it makes to sense to create a planet that is uninhabited*
“[...] for she would then appear to have come into existence vainly and to no purpose, neither brining forth fruit nor providing fir men of some kind an origin, an abode, and a means of life, the purpose for which this earth of ours came into being” (Plutarch, On the Face of the Moon)

metaphors for the silence of the space --> perennial question of humankind

the black sea sparkle with lustrous fires, like the ceiling of a vast hall of ebony encrusted with flashing diamonds
with what a soft sweet light every star glowed
no matter what its magnitude, the stream that flowed from it looked calm and holy
not twinkling
no scintillation
no nictitation
disturbed their pure and lambent gleam

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

night dreams (after WIELS's exhibition)
starting with the story of the jinn studying origin of species --> bestiaries
mix of reports from Hedayat'neyrangestan + Shamlu's ketab kuche + Marzolph's topology of persian folklore iranian stories + ajayeb stories --to--> ?

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

jin lamp
tree
scared face

book Skala:
royal fairy tales
baba jaga kostliva noha / bony legs


the first worm

death skeleton afraid of itself, of its own image
self-reflective

you are following, while being followed, and the one who follows you is being followed...

pop-up book
•endless doors (on top of each other)
•rotation: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMR4VTo8s/
•rotation: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMR4Vp8Yb/
•https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMR4Vw7qk/
•https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMR4VttgH/
•moon https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMR4VV2CC/


•Philippines --> aesthetics of poverty [culture of material poverty --> poverty as scenic design and working philosophy] (==> the imperative to eliminate nonessentials =/= my philosophy)
•Iran --> aesthetics of ?
•(?what is) Instagram or TikTok people's appreciation of beauty =/= aesthetics of poverty's coupling expression with survival and change

the idea that becoming sensitive to the aesthetic qualities of local materials ==> increasing one's power of expression

theater director = aesthetic coordinator = sensitivity + selectivity

scenography in artistic research
my early interest in stage design {~ use of backdrops in capturing the essence of a play or story --> a way [...]

[...]ims to be a prophet, in any sense of the word or of any description whatsoever, after Muhammad or recognizes such a claimant as a prophet or a religious reformer


something akin to copyright (trademark law) --> disable non-Muslims from encroaching upon Muslim rights over their tradition (undertaking muslim modes of worship: use of honorific titles and modes of address specific to the prophetic community, building mosques, calling azan, citing from Quran or hadis, etc.)

khatam anbia --> khatm: seal --> aspects of Islam as sealed off and exclusive to muslims

(Pakistan supprim court's affective legal feedback loop) copyrighting islam = affirmation of Muslim nature <--Naveeda-- *a horizon of striving*
}<-- an example of (Iqbalian) reason + revelation


institutionalizing blindness


Iqbal on ahmadies:
•Tipu sultan collapse by the British 1799 = mark of political and psychological subjugation of Muslims --Iqbal--> Ahmadiyya messianic movement = subjugated people explaining to themselves their state of decline (negative enlightenment)
•tolerance = indifference

striving =/= progress

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

Naveeda chapter 4 jinn


strident --> engaging speech with vivid imagery
differential --> differing knowledge to proper authority

lack of consensus on what X is (among its varient constituents) ==> (problem of) loss of tolerance
(for example Pakistan:)
contradictions between commitments to:
•existing hierarchies
•tribal ties
•universalistic religion (whose version of community transcends those ties)


(Naveeda) thinking of the potential lines of movement among entrenched differences, cited texts, and possible positions generated by selves encountering others in the world

intensities that burn within you + openness to conversation

attention to time --Naveeda--> draw a consistent picture of an Islam with open future

disputation = a form of experimentation: doing and undoing of known forms (in the spirit of striving) [=/= experimentation: innovation in self-making, or social arrangements]
@apass

disputation: a form of interaction (with risks and ill effects [risk of alienation, estrangement of others])
--> [*]becoming: coming to terms with the trajectories and crystalization of tendencies within the transcriptions of the state and in public culture --> **excavating the resources (that this way of being Muslim) give to itself to reflect upon and evaluate (--> renew its inheritance of Islam)

•approaching history from the perspective of plenitude
•approaching history from the perspective of lack


(upsurge of excitement accompanying the creation of Pakistan --Smith--> a tendency [=/[...]

[...]br />

discourse of spiritual diagnosis
(takes place through an evaluation of one's physiology)

Deleuze's symptomatology: a creative act bringing about a change in health + affirmation of a way of life
•striving --> good health

Iqbal --> attentiveness to thr physiological as a means to gauge whether one's spirituality is on the right track
•with Bergson --> concern for the futurity of Islam
•with Nietzsche --> concern for the spiritual health
◦Nietzsche: physician of culture, (understood as political act) “striving and self-diagnosis ==> implicates the individual in the world ==> produce charges in the world”


Naveeda's ethnography method of interviewing:
1. locate traces of X in (context:)
◦everyday life
◦public culture
◦
3. see how this tendency crystallizes
◦at particular points
◦within particular persons
◦within particular texts
◦
5. study this crystallization
◦comes to be overlaid
◦expressed through lived experiences
◦be productive of
◾further movements of the tendency
◾countertendencies
◾its dissipation
◦

jinn <--> striving
Naveeda shiwsyin her research a single worshiper's choice of striving: relay upon a jinn for guidance on better ways to be a Muslim

*striving --> put collectivity (for example family) in jeopardy*
*@apass

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

(state pronouncements of) correct way to [?how to] *attach to the prophet*

becoming a knowledgeable religious disputant

Naveeda > Iqbal > the weary self that could not be roused to piety by religious zeal strikes a posture as much of resignation to sin by a nonpracticing Muslim as of a certain pride of withholding oneself from conformism.
--> of one goes to prayer in a mosque it is by one's own choice

...to dismiss differences = the political expression of the petit bourgeoisie


Iqbal's disapproval of guidance --variance--> (Sahib) seeking guidance from a jinn for pious pursuits

singularity of Sahib's efforts at improving himself as a Muslim --> (Iqbalian aspiration) posture of the nonconformist

state's fears that the milieu was pervaded by non-Muslim others posting as Muslims --jinn--> [made vivid] *skeptical experience of everyday life as a place of illusion and trance* (go to --> my work on Relaxing Horror Tales for Children and Adults)

bedat بدعت
accretion of customs in the form of innovation


jinn
-what nature of influences jinn introduce into human lives?

•library of religious commentary
•prophetic tales
•magicians’ manuals
•folklore
•ethnography
•
--> characterizat[...]

[...]•at particular points
◦within particular persons
◦within particular texts
◦
5. study this crystallization
◦comes to be overlaid
◦expressed through lived experiences
◦be productive of
◾further movements of the tendency
◾countertendencies
◾its dissipation
◦

jinn <--> striving
Naveeda shiwsyin her research a single worshiper's choice of striving: relay upon a jinn for guidance on better ways to be a Muslim

*striving --> put collectivity (for example family) in jeopardy*
*@apass

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

(state pronouncements of) correct way to [?how to] *attach to the prophet*

becoming a knowledgeable religious disputant

Naveeda > Iqbal > the weary self that could not be roused to piety by religious zeal strikes a posture as much of resignation to sin by a nonpracticing Muslim as of a certain pride of withholding oneself from conformism.
--> of one goes to prayer in a mosque it is by one's own choice

...to dismiss differences = the political expression of the petit bourgeoisie


Iqbal's disapproval of guidance --variance--> (Sahib) seeking guidance from a jinn for pious pursuits

singularity of Sahib's efforts at improving himself as a Muslim --> (Iqbalian aspiration) posture of the nonconformist

state's fears that the milieu was pervaded by non-Muslim others posting as Muslims --jinn--> [made vivid] *skeptical experience of everyday life as a place of illusion and trance* (go to --> my work on Relaxing Horror Tales for Children and Adults)

bedat بدعت
accretion of customs in the form of innovation


jinn
-what nature of influences jinn introduce into human lives?

•library of religious commentary
•prophetic tales
•magicians’ manualsr /> •folklore
•ethnography
•
--> characterization of jinn

human ~= jinm --> endowed with passion, rational faculties, responsibility for their actions, etc. they eat, grow, procreate, die

constantly evolving 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 [...]

[...]> •
--> characterization of jinn

human ~= jinm --> endowed with passion, rational faculties, responsibility for their actions, etc. they eat, grow, procreate, die

constantly evolving 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?)


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--> [...]

[...]to 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?)


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 her dying husband
--> ambiguities that undergrid lived relations

“Maryam rushed to greet him at the door of the house but then she fell back screening. apparently a thirty-feet-tall churail (witch) had followed Sahib from India. Sahib immediately dropped his bags at the doorstep and without pause rushed to the mosque to say his prayers. when he returned home, Maryam assured him that the witch had left him.”

Sahib allowed the entry of jinn into his home without the armature of the average amil (who undergoes considerable pain and deprivation to be able to lay claim upon particular force, and undertake continental exercises of the body and mind to control it)
--risk--> potential disruption of the family
--abdicate--> his position of authority within his family --to--> attend to his daughter's words of guidance

*his turn towards Maryam = turn away from the present* (of his everyday life not having the spiritual richness & *authoritative accounts* [he desired to make himself a better Muslim])

from a pedagogical figure --to--> pupil to his daughter
[...]

[...]het: 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 her dying husband
--> ambiguities that undergrid lived relations

“Maryam rushed to greet him at the door of the house but then she fell back screening. apparently a thirty-feet-tall churail (witch) had followed Sahib from India. Sahib immediately dropped his bags at the doorstep and without pause rushed to the mosque to say his prayers. when he returned home, Maryam assured him that the witch had left him.”

Sahib allowed the entry of jinn into his home without the armature of the average amil (who undergoes considerable pain and deprivation to be able to lay claim upon particular force, and undertake continental exercises of the body and mind to control it)
--risk--> potential disruption of the family
--abdicate--> his position of authority within his family --to--> attend to his daughter's words of guidance

*his turn towards Maryam = turn away from the present* (of his everyday life not having the spiritual richness & *authoritative accounts* [he desired to make himself a better Muslim])

from a pedagogical figure --to--> pupil to his daughter

pursuits of the self ~=> incorporate the unexpected --extent--> abdicating full control of oneself

in bringing a jinn into his life --> it became a version of him joining other versions of himself with whom he was bound

--Iqbal--> striving to one's next self


in the famous tale of Aladdin and the magic lamp, a child found a genie and could be literally pulled out of a humdrum existence to soar the skies
•Maryam shared the jinn's joy in discovering human food
•she got to whisper her secrets into his ears
•make him complicit in her projects
•she got to temporally take leave of her body that was changing beyond her control

(Naveeda asks) was Sulayman (the jinn) about the inability to acknowledge friendship over time?

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

Naveeda chapter 5 mulla


graffiti --> awareness of X at the level of gesture and affect

participation in change[...]

[...]trangement from her dying husband
--> ambiguities that undergrid lived relations

“Maryam rushed to greet him at the door of the house but then she fell back screening. apparently a thirty-feet-tall churail (witch) had followed Sahib from India. Sahib immediately dropped his bags at the doorstep and without pause rushed to the mosque to say his prayers. when he returned home, Maryam assured him that the witch had left him.”

Sahib allowed the entry of jinn into his home without the armature of the average amil (who undergoes considerable pain and deprivation to be able to lay claim upon particular force, and undertake continental exercises of the body and mind to control it)
--risk--> potential disruption of the family
--abdicate--> his position of authority within his family --to--> attend to his daughter's words of guidance

*his turn towards Maryam = turn away from the present* (of his everyday life not having the spiritual richness & *authoritative accounts* [he desired to make himself a better Muslim])

from a pedagogical figure --to--> pupil to his daughter

pursuits of the self ~=> incorporate the unexpected --extent--> abdicating full control of oneself

in bringing a jinn into his life --> it became a version of him joining other versions of himself with whom he was bound

--Iqbal--> striving to one's next self


in the famous tale of Aladdin and the magic lamp, a child found a genie and could be literally pulled out of a humdrum existence to soar the skies
•Maryam shared the jinn's joy in discovering human food
•she got to whisper her secrets into his ears
•make him complicit in her projects
•she got to temporally take leave of her body that was changing beyond her control

(Naveeda asks) was Sulayman (the jinn) about the inability to acknowledge friendship over time?
r />



Naveeda chapter 5 mulla


graffiti --> awareness of X at the level of gesture and affect

participation in change

(Agamben -->) [*]gesture: inhabiting of potentiality



Naveeda four scenes of aspiration:
1. librarians engaged in argumentation over the nature of the prophet's body after his death --gesture--> argumentation
2. neighborhoods embroiled in fights over mosques in attempting to prescribe the rightful atmosphere for prayer --gesture--> seizure
3. the state drawn into theological disputation and legal experimentation over how over should attach oneself to the prophet --gesture--> legal experimentation
4. a pious man trying to seek guidance on how to be Muslim from an invisible being (jinn) --gesture--> search for guidance
}--affect--> accompanied by intensity of seriousness, sincerity, excitement, disappointment, sense of loss[...]

[...]genie and could be literally pulled out of a humdrum existence to soar the skies
•Maryam shared the jinn's joy in discovering human food
•she got to whisper her secrets into his ears
•make him complicit in her projects
•she got to temporally take leave of her body that was changing beyond her control

(Naveeda asks) was Sulayman (the jinn) about the inability to acknowledge friendship over time?

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

Naveeda chapter 5 mulla


graffiti --> awareness of X at the level of gesture and affect

participation in change

(Agamben -->) [*]gesture: inhabiting of potentiality



Naveeda four scenes of aspiration:
1. librarians engaged in argumentation over the nature of the prophet's body after his death --gesture--> argumentation
2. neighborhoods embroiled in fights over mosques in attempting to prescribe the rightful atmosphere for prayer --gesture--> seizure
3. the state drawn into theological disputation and legal experimentation over how over should attach oneself to the prophet --gesture--> legal experimentation
4. a pious man trying to seek guidance on how to be Muslim from an invisible being (jinn) --gesture--> search for guidance
}--affect--> accompanied by intensity of seriousness, sincerity, excitement, disappointment, sense of loss
}--commitment--> friendship, neighborliness, familial ties

large arsenal of off-color jokes about specialist fogures of all religious traditions in the popular culture of the subcontinent...
•horror stories
•psychological profile of mullas
•weekly skewing of mullas
•mulla jokes
•cartoons
•
political commentary <--> criticism
--> mulla was to blame for everything that was perceived to be wrong (in Pakistan) --> *pervasive skepticism* [also in Iran]

skepticism shadows striving (?)


the other of the striving muslim in Pakistan:
•shadowi Shia
•deceiving Ahmadi
•bad-tempered mulla بدمزاج


mulla:
•Iqbal --> ossification of the institution of ulama
•Pakistani state --> ossification of commentary upon Islamic texts

...everyday assertion that one's religiousity is superior to others


mulla = full-fledged maleficent persona


skepticism of daily existence
1. ...(they become skeptical) about his rationality and grounds for his beliefs
2. ...(at some point) anything could be said or believed about him
3. ...(he felt like) everyone around him had turned to animals
4. ...(he presumed) everyday life was one of illusion and appearances [go to --> kelile demne این همه سودا است، مجاز]
}--> actualize the potential for *skepticism that existed in the [...]

[...](thinking with Bowker fL94LVYjhQQ) as new entities will come to being in the world, instead of creating access to what is reconfiguring of the past we lock ourselves into single unitary visions of the past totally unnecessary --> that is exactly what i am trying to do, providing and creating a kind of approach to what would be an access to a reconfiguring of the past, ajayeb as the case in a Farsi speaking world


on way or another, databases are structured objects, they constraint the forms of narrative you can take ==> a restrict set of stories --> when we are dealing with database we don't have an infinite sets of narrative space

i am taking a theological alterity discourse from pre-enlightenment (islamicated cosmology) and puting it in [...?]*** (Latour is putting it in scientific style of faith)
•artistic research practices/discourses
•modern Iran
•modern culture
•

non-contemplative intelligence basing the database in our time (=/= older traditions of sequencing)

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

*deterioration of the immanent (eco-, politico-,) ==> corruption of social relations ==> corruption of memory*** (of a shared existence, of coexistence with [Div, jinn, shadow, birds, Hindus, Arabs, ]) !!!--✕--> issues of historical injustice
-or-
corruption of a river : the entropy and deterioration immanent to it ==> conditions of possibility for corruption of intimate relations and of memory }--([this] experience of corruption)--> takes the nature of being defrauded (روزگار فريبکار) of one's own form of life, one's family or one's inheritance***


(Naveeda Khan talking about river's point of view in Bangladesh, but her keywords are all relevant for Iran's landscape as well)

***the muslim responses to entropy*** ==?==> eschatology
}--> muslim majority regions are more embeded in the world that what we know from islam

سازش
limits of “adaptation”

a rapport ~ ربط تقریباً همگام
or orientation جهتگيرى

a looming future


“[how] politics and policies of climate change stand to shortchange the present and the past”


Naveeda Khan exploring the perception of climate change within everyday life


those who live on such formations --[powerful river waters, eroding, accreting, village politics, dynamics of individual lives,]


fret ترش کردن

مزروعى arable lands


thinking rivers:
to consider water as a ‘total social fact’, to think holistically about water [Caton & Orlove] =/= [Naveeda's] climate thinking --> that there is specificity that needs attending: rivers are major conduits هادى of ‘connectivity’ --> domain of localized interactions
-to [...]

[...] operations (arithmetic operations)

building abstractions by combining data objects to form compound data <==> *to increase the modularity* of (our) designs ==> to increase/enhance the expressive power of our language

data abstraction:
*technique of isolating* (the parts of a program that deal with) how data objects are ‘represented’ from (the parts of a program that deal with) how data objects are ‘used’


versioning
garbage collection

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

the question of “what [✕] can learn from [Y]?”


Calvert on Mestiza consciousness
library and information scientists
consciousness of the borderlands [~ in between categories, creative/annihilating forces a person living borderlands must struggle against]

***contradictory impulse for *hording* & *sharing*

categorizing, naming, describing --> power-laden practices we cannot do without

each *schema* reveals its priorities, legitimizes/delegitimizes, renders visible/invisible the knowledge it contains/excludes

(Foucault:) library: (places that preserve) discourses that one wishes to remember and keep in circulation [--✕--> Anand's jinn temporality and genealogy of human memory]

mestiza --> hybrid way of knowing/acting/living, as “none of the above”
what is hybrid and impure may be monstrous (in the epistemologies of power) and may experience *hightened visibility* (~= scrutiny, study, problematization, pity)

“orphans of infrastructure” (Leigh Star)

locked in a duel with the oppressor
lived experiences of marked classes
(in each duality pair, one is called “the consitutive outside” [subject/object, male/female, etc.]) --?--> switching polarity ==> valorizing feminine over masculine, black over white, nurture over nature, emotion over reason

crossing of cultures

*which collectivity does the daughter of the darkskinned mother listen to?*

(while i was in apass i had a shift of attention to) the *labor of knowledge work* (in collective digital flesh life)

media ~= knwoledge form

in media arts studies i learn to ask which cruicual material limitations have been radically eased in a digital era --> impulse to hoard/share + constant tension with the epistemological work of categorization and classification (--> database) + (ongoing) feminization of the field

the library and information science knowledge --> intense expertise required to enact it =/=!? art expertise (a category of works that are expertise-free)

(gift of Marx, Foucault, Lorde, Haraway, Leigh Star in) *understanding subjugated epistemologies*

(Lorde) master's tool dismantle the master's house? = can the technologies and epistemologies that have been used to organi[...]

[...]ntological status of their ‘objects’ (of enquiry)
•the epistemological status of their knowledge claims

--Campbell--> we need to “go ontological” about consumption, global warming, (hyperobjects)
hyperobjects:
•viscous (literally real, and you cannot throw it away)
•non-local
•larger on the inside than they are on the outside
•they call for forms ofjustice, ethics, politics and reason that are beyond humanist economies of identification and representation

social constructivism ==> everyone's interpretation of the real is legitimate [equal status of interpretation] =/= (Meillassoux's) speculative realism


understand the world at the level of the hyperobject <== we are creating (consumer) objects that are massive in scale and temporality

inter-generational justice (imagining till your grandchildren)


service-dominant logic (of consumer research) =/= object oriented (more than humanist/naturalist trophies)
service: that intangible value extracted from stuff by humans --to--> the increasing ability to separate, transport, and exchange information, apart from embodiment in goods and people

Meillassoux's arche fossil ~=? jinn
witnesses of the universe before humans

objects  withdraw  infinitely  from  humans
universal quality of all objects: *reserve*
==> (narcissistic) philosophy of a uniquely lonely human fate [--> popular contemporary depiction of human with one foot in animality and the other in consciousness]
----> then how *withdrawal* (should) play out in social theory?

Lingis's ‘imperative’: worlds are filled up with imperatives (human and nonhuman) that summon us --> enmeshed pre-cognitive, atavistic, technological, embodied modes in which we respond to the world --> how this does not get recuperated into the existing models of sociology

[flipside of withdrawal:] to think of capital: an  extraordinarily force overthrowing any imagination of an alternative --> there is no possibility of ‘intervention' in Capital ==> ‘accelerationism’: an inside-out radicalism, believing in unleashing productive forces of human wrought to continue its dynamism : “the only way out is to plunge further in”

Campbell: ‘withdrawal from capital' = passing through the eye of the needle

[that which is expressed in philosophy, political economy, science and science fiction, and in transhumanist, lifehacker, accelerationist movements:] *flight from consumption*
}--✕--> Campbell's *speculative consumption*
what if consumption has something relational about it?
(we must become interested in consumption @apass, Pierre, Foad, constantvzw)
*non-correlationist marketing theory* [=/= correlationism: humans doing things in the world to inanimate objects to ma[...]

[...]epresent and interpret through me

recruiting scores of new actants so as to render the theater of worldly interactions more complex and interesting


what is the sociocultural world we construct?


dream images, vivid mythical scenes,


form travels/passes through us

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

[Latour modes of existence]

(to distinguish types of)
incompatible truths

“truth"--is the expression of an encounter with forms of existence

to understand the others in the absence of a description of ourselves
(what is realistic?)

to direct attention towards the beings about which humans are interrogating themselves



عجایب‌ ajayeb is a ‘network’ more than anything else, in it “God” has no special privilege, is not located in addition to or beyond other beings

we are seeking to redefine the paths of beings that are unique to ajayeb without giving them substance and without jumping immediately into transcendence. (using Latour words) [transcendence is never gradual, in the places i come from, it is always a shock, happening, a truth-event]
-each word (God, Angle, Jinn جن, fog, etc.) brought into its own network,
-what are contrasts and of category mistakes particular to each
-and their crossings----and what is the vocabulary specific to each crossing

the network of associations necessary for the exercise of religion without bracketing off its ontological requirements.

explanatory rage (tavahoshe roshangari توحش روشنگری) --✕--> networks necessary for religious meaning

(the aim is) deploying the network (of ajayeb)
it is about grasping ajayeb's beings not as substances but as *trajectories*--and give them a more precise *direction.*

what is important in working these modes what kinds of possibilities are “afforded” to the investigator, myself. what kind of actor am i?

(specifications of the type of beings that the mode leaves in its wake)

**other beings necessary for its existence**
(my personal/public question, what other beings are necessary for my existence? and therefore for your existence as well.) ----> the heterogeneity of the actors needed for the pursuit of any course of action


*metamorphosis (a mode of existence first detected in psychogenesis?) what we encounter whenever we address the manner in which existents are transformed or transform in order to subsist (zist زیست)
-defined by a certain kind of continuity and obtained by a certain type of discontinuity
-metamorphosis is about crisis, possession, alienation,
-metamorphosis sharply contrasts *cure* (~= ritual)
-allowing for installing unconscious (states,) crush, posses, bewitch, kill,[...]

[...]عجایب خسف
ecological disasters
فرورفتگی و پستی و مغاکی ظاهر زمین
فرورفتن در زمین
--> page 150, Haman story, fire not burning Haman's heart, an example that God has no special privilege, is not located in addition to or beyond other beings

(ajayeb-e gur) عجایب گور
graves -- material and ecological deaths, earth related passings
main actor: Malek al-mot (ملک الموت Angel of death)
ashabe kahf (اصحاب کهف), ashabe raghim (اصحاب رقیم) --> immortality

(ajayeb-e kuh) عجایب کوه
om-ol-jebal (ام الجبال), ghaf (قاف): mother of mountains, all mountains link to her, earth
ecologically significant --> holders of water and Ganj (گنج), nailed the earth, they are your cradles
az ganj be ganj (فرستم به گنج تو از گنج خویش, Ferdosi)


*Ghiamat and Climate

[Haraway]
the metaphysical problem of (our) scale
(what are the scales in ajayeb? what is people in ajayeb? what it means to be animal? and what is their scale?)
ecologies that have many scales (in temporality and physicality): river scale, mountain scale, molecular times, Jinn's time, Ghiamat times, sense scale, ...

the ajayeb's model is (always?) the global scale?
--> how can i seek and describe multiple situated worldings and multiple sorts of translations to engage ajayeb's globalism? (using Haraway's word on Tsing)
-attention to friction ==> (ethnographic accounts of) global interconnection

(some metaphors:) metabolisms, articulations, coproductions (*? of ajayeb's histories)
relational, sympoietic, consequential,
in ajayeb, what is cosmic, what is terran, what is cursed, *?

in ajayeb:
•what are the figures of finitude, destruction, astralized hearing, enactments of generation, the fighe figures that take action, take heart?
•what are the chthonic entities? {the finite complex material systems that can break down =/= stories that personify (Mother Earth) are *misplaced concreteness*. [(i am against) personified =/= figurative (which i love. figures can be tentacular, patterns, processes, stories.) what Foad would say?]}
•what are the gorgeous, luring, dangerous precarities (of the terra)?
•what are (its specific) art science worldings?

*those creatures across taxa (taxon, categorical classification, taxonomic group)
taxonomic conveniences


[with Haraway]

what is the optics of ajayeb?
[that is entertaining being reductive for a moment, but that is productive]
(to help with that, the optics of the anthropocene is the image of the earth from space, Gaia?)
-a cybernetic, systems-theoretic entity, studied in different scales
-various reports (on the state, ficti[...]

[...]

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

[Naveeda Khan]

Perhaps the question could be posed as, how do we come to grips with the universal, the supra-historical, or even the cosmos within our global present, imagining a local that lays claims upon all three?

is there a Muslim environmental imaginary?

‘Islamic ecology and environmental ethics’ --> the need to center a vibrant materiality or the liveliness of things in the anthropology of Islam (that has been to date largely preoccupied with Muslim polities and subjectivities.)

It should come as no surprise that my own efforts at centering materiality comes through studying how these predominantly Muslim farmers interact with and come to acknowledge nonhuman forms of life (including the figure of Khidr خضر, dogs, river waters, silt, and lightning, to name a few). Finally, I remain concerned to explore how the singularities of these lives, both human and nonhuman, come to be hitched to the global. This research will culminate in a book tentatively titled Ensouling the Anthropocene: Riverine Life and Climate Change in Bangladesh, in which “ensouling” treats the problem of scaling up singularity to the global, intensifying efforts that began with “Of Children and Jinn.” [source: https://culanth.org/curated_collections/19-everyday-islam/discussions/20-interview-with-naveeda-khan-about-of-children-and-jinn]

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

(what i am reading in ajayeb)_with Naveeda: “Muslim cosmology and eschatology hold promoise of ecological thought, providing an unexpectedly materialist perspective on our creaturely interconnectedness.”

[ajayeb (and telegram) is full of] gestures of incorporating repugnant [offensive to the mind] others---that one sees reflections on divine creation qua [als] creaturliness


thoroughly disabused
aufklären آگاهیدن آگاییدن

expound تفسیر

incentive مشوق, فتنه انگيز

litany مناجات وعبادت تهليل دار

showmanship (نمايشگرى?)
effektvolle Darstellung, Schauspielproduktion

queasy به طور تهوع آوری لطیف مزاج

(a gedture of) ludic [playfull, spielerisch] transcendence of [the] present

obdurate سرسخت
-showing unfeeling resistance to tender feelings-
(picture of the world as) pristine nature طبیعت بکر being destroyed by humans (--> narcissistic?)
=/= view of theology/religion on ecology
=/= (stories of humans and dogs:) shared creatureliness and companionship entailing a turn to cofeasting on the flesh of the world --> mutual fate

does islamic theology (in both elite and popular belief) offers us a way toward *sensing our embeddedness in this world* ?
-might ajayeb (creationist?) narratives be generative of interc[...]

[...]environmental degradation. [...] Fire suppression frequently has been part of state policies of social control. [...] The vision of fire as destructive, part of the state narrative [...] How has the memory of the traditional use of fire by indigenous communities been suppressed? [...]State political myth has obscured community memories of fire as a force in the forest, and as a tool for human use. [...] Why the indigenous communities of the Sierra Juarez no longer talk about the long-term history of their forests. Clearly, the communities internalized parts of the state-sponsored degradation discourse. (However, discourse analysis is not enough; it is all too easy to treat discourse as a monolithic structure of ideas[...] ) [...] These discourses require a threat, a source of chaos and disorder to which the moral regeneration of the progressive discourse can provide a solution. In the case of the Sierra juarez, forest fires provide this opposition. [...] It is exactly this resistance of the natural world to discursive domination that is one of the themes of this article. [1]

[1]ANDREWSA LVADORMA THEWS - suppressing FIRE AND MEMORY: ENVIRONMENTALDE GRADATIONAN D POLITICALRE STORATION INT HES IERRAJ UAREZO F OAXACA, 1887-2001

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

Jinn older and Man

ecology of the Jinn


(Qur'an)
raging fire
scorched by burning fire
striking sparks of fire
and roasting at hell-fire
the fire of Allah, kindled
...



bringing together of two homogeneous blocks of material in a given, already-inhabited space

as if we knew what space and time mean



“the desert bighorn is an animal shaped by ice. [...] the design of wild sheep is very much an expression of arctic cold.” (Meloy)
(what the design of fire is as expression of? what shaped fire? ice?)
(we are shaped also by fire)

how you go from lizard to bird?
it must have been through the behavior of lizard that ‘birdness’ has come to be possible. a certain trait of behavior have allowed the lizard find itself in the air.


ice age
story of fire, story of grass, ...

after the establishment of a land-based flora (Middle Ordovician period, 470 million years ago) and permitting the accumulation of oxygen in the atmosphere it permitted the possibility of wildfire.

Fire also became more abundant when grasses radiated and became the dominant component of many ecosystems, around 6 to 7 million years ago;

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

electrical fire



conflict between the “junk” and the “text” that seemed to fascinate

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

how to write cold with fire? the medium of fire is incompatible with that of the paper. paper burns fire off! the combustion emerging elements [...]

[...]t it is telling. [what fire suggesting, offering to the sense? (i am thinking Ajayeb)] with fire you can debate but this debate is bulshit since you are under its spectacularity and authority, superior to the (inflammable) world, became the domminent contemplated object, administrating conditions of existence, you can never touch the fire, you can never become ‘bodies’ with fire, it is immune from human activity, endusing one-way communication (auto-governed gusture of comminution), garanteeing an abstract condition of hierarchical power. but stone ‘is’ for touching and bodying, sensuous touch is the matter of stone, intimacy*, sensuous intimacy with the stone, sensuous proximity)
---(rock in water : reef)
-transcontextual; transcontextuality = tanglement {figures running in opposit directions but held together}


nature is a context
*past is a context

*the landscape is full of ghosts (whether we want it or not)
mediated forms

Some examples of exothermic processes:
-spontaneous combustion (~= fire)
-Nuclear fusion (~= sun)
-(in this writing, i am going to take a defenition of fire recovering it from bible, that of the spectacle flame that of the material of specter in the Qur'anic Jinn, and not other forms of exothermic processes)

the issue is reversibility
(“evolution” inevitable? Irreversible?)


[title]
•A Materialist Inquiry into the Beyond
•A Mineral Inquiry into the Beyond
•Genealogy of a Worship: Talking-Fire and Telling-Stone
•Talking-Fire and Telling-Stone - Genealogy of a Worship
•Ajayeb-e Atash
•Fire and the Transcendental Subject
•Zolmat and the Appropriation of the Elsewhere
•Fire and Different Internals of Being
•Black-Box and other Human Extensions



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

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



*trial by fire, fire as judge
(test, respond to whether or not something is true or false)
iranian frost, is not the same as ice---ice was still the object of fascination. transforming fire into mosque---atash masjed shod. ‘dudeman’ coming from ‘dud,’ smoke as your ancestery. a telling-smoke was your inheritence, your grandpa. same in Latin: ‘focus’ means both fire-place and ancestral
ether --> azar --> atash
fire = (institutional?)-order ~ justice = law =/= nondialectic
the order of fire =/= agonism [positivly channeled disagreement]
the order of fire is a materialist conception of history, that fire eventually purifies and leave no reason but the reason of harmonious ~= consensus, the ubiquitous Übereinstimmung of fire
athletisism of Shahnameh and fire-trial (contest oriented toward victory [...]

[...] the absence of his students and the absence of himself and the absence of his God.

*****Tarsaa takes away San'an's human ID, his masterhood, his members [his parts: his pupils, pencils, penises], (that's why he must remember? his ‘members’ returning to him? what is he composed of anyways?!) [memory is a way consistency maintain itself---are we having a disjunction?] [he makes contact, and contact is the medium of language --> and this is his performance]
in this story *the human ID = master*
(self-possession is supposed a primordial property)
-the question is how let yourself be invested with alterity, without becoming a seed of transcendence? (San'an let himself but then fails in the second part) by ‘seed of transcendence’ I mean making a symbol that is of a symbol (the basis of power---state?) ---> is this how San'an's symbolism can be recruited by Iranian war lords?
San'an in the story is shamanistically de-subjectified (by becoming the pig, etc.) instead of becoming hyper-subjectified (game-animal) [something that Abu-Saeed Abu-Al-Kheir almost achieve it?] **a game-animal is for example when dogs go after a dear in the forest, the dear is in this case a game-animal. the San'an's pigsty is not that, he doesn't become wolf or dear or Jinn for that matter!

if I where Tarsaa I would ask San'an to become the Jinn instead of pig.

(Tarsaa is sighted by him initially on her balcony)
balcony's architectural register
San'an might have been fallen in love with the balcony, not the girl!
(we see proof of this later when he goes “down” on her)
“hu hu I found a torture device” says San'an when he sees the girl-balcony assemblage

Tarsaa's morphology--different in every aesthetic moment, a dynamic entity
[person of flesh, thing of illusio, category of mechanism,
ترسا or ترسنده =~ child-being, نصرانی =~ the-other]

Tarsaa is a defferent kind of mediatized body, not that of woman on the television, which produces a wasted body in front of the TV

what kind of hostility is she performing -or making available?

she doesn't accept his marriage proposal

is there a woman hidden under the concept of Tarsaa?
which toxicities or horrors the-woman-of-the-house in the story of San'an conceals precisely with the figure of Tarsaa?

*****Tarsaa doesn't have a father.
-she is autonomous and emancipated
-San'an is of course another legendary non-feminist position
-it's a masculinist story after all, in its plot

medieval narratives of woman's image relating to the so-called sexual self-respect---woman always representing the matter and the material
a comparative literary note on Tarsaa's framework and other female protagonist/antagonists -->
in: Nezami: Khosro-o-Shirin and Leili-o-Majnun (woman is there for th[...]

[...]formative form of cultivating negative emotions in oneself and others

emotional regime
ecological phenomenology
emotional habitus

habitus = [*]mood: collective feeling --Bourdieu--> *making and using moods have to be integral part of (the goal of) any sociopolitical process* (@Foad, @Sina)
(**collective action if impossible if people are not in the mood**)


*educational material (~= ideological material) : integrated attitude toward the world*

regulatory forces of society construct (=/= control) behavior
[two feelings: you are *constructed* but still might find yourself with agency =/= you are original (essential, special) and might find yourself *controlled* by forces of society <-- bad idea for political engagement]

**politics --> a sphere that is deeply imbricated in the visual regimes of societies** (--> for me that is why visual arts are so important: politics is always visual)
**politics --> affect can explain the processes that are inexplicable through other functional explanations + affect exists as an object of power (political formations are reactive to and formed by affect)


(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 [...]

[...]oves between these qualities without necessarily morphing into entirely different selves --> ***difference internal to being***
(that ‘difference’ is internal to being)



to betray the immediate norm (of this society) (to ensure a continued relationship with them)

but i am already moving to my next self



*ethics of listening
(1) gestures as cultural text (Clifford Geertz)
(2) codes to crack the regulative mechanisms of a society (Pierre Bourdieu)
(3) how thinking proceeds apace with gestures, how gestures gather thought, sounded and unsounded, and how voice is incorporative [tending to incorporate or include things] of these gestures

(Heidegger shows)
metaphysical relation: think ==> speech
(only when one speaks, does he think--not the other way around)



temporality of memory
(...it took them two years to remember to tell me this)



possession: is to be struck by any number of somatic illnesses or psychic effects of mysterious origins (Bown 1993)



mythopoetic (registers of Qur'an)
mythopoetic registers of everyday life



Jinn can trick the humans into looking at a copy of them (and then change form or into formlessness)


the copies of time-honored practice of embodying and transmitting the islamic tradition is now haunted by *modern anxieties*


Asb-e Imam-Hossein



it is in islamic tradition that being a muslim entails keeping up the illusory nature of everyday life while also participating in it. (not excessive withdrawal nor excessive attachment)
[why isis breaks this?]

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

[✕] technologies of the “here and now”
[✕] semiotic-tech of “elsewheres”
}-->
(separated in the past, *ontological difference*, a fiction) in West: (--> that is why Latour anthropologizes modernism)
*[philosophy]--signals--> here (in Europe and West), selves
*[anthropology]--signals--> elsewhere, others }--> a wannabe discourse on Others
}--> (ontological difference between anthropology & philosophy [in their mode of immersion in the metaphysical] is part of) colonial community, a form of ‘negation’ =/= my recent antagonism [the way i am studying is for *extension*{= extending but also standing in tension with, a lineage(=/= rupture)} rather than *negation*]: since i got into Olearius, 2017, I am developing recently a philosphpical-genealogical antagonism. (in Iran we are used to philosophy naturally inhabiting the otherness of Europe, among others, we never see them as anthropological objects, but they see us as such. *we don't think ethnographically about Others*)
}--> my aim is to mix this while i am “here” --> i say [...]

[...]’?
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 bed, making the bed and being made by its caress and embrace. it is not that you want all the audience in the world to identify with a general question or present this as a universal expression, but what could go beyond localization is precisely this concept that you, like me, transitioning body in your environment (bed or whatever) are outstretches of homeliness and forces that distribute across space and discourse, territories and sensing zones, you are an exchange between self and environment. this is pragmatism. like the variety of bed sheets, we are proposed with answers that vary, before posing any question.
to reformulate the question that was posed to you: how your proposal is capable of traversing from the bed to the wild?


pre-historic personhood

my work is concerned with connections, mediation and passages.
[...]

[...]aranteed --> your signals should go on: there is one unrevised (in an original form), no secondary revision, *pure memory* <-- this is a memory that is unnegotiable for them

*on Wind
wind, is a coming that arrives from the future
(compare “going” [staying behind] in Attar, Hafez, and Holderlin) [in San'an nobody is greeting, there is no greet-event. Attar misses: Greeting as pure letting go**]
(Avital on Holderlin:) “[...] in going, comes. Parting is not a mere leave-taking and empty staying behind. Parting is also not a mere going away and disappearing. The poet remains in the rustling wind. to the extent that he goes with its going. [...] Nonetheless. the poet stays with the wind. Accompaniment now shapes the Greeting. As the gusting wind is alternately a coming and a going. so is the Greeting a staying behind that nonetheless flutters away. becoming a going with. [...] The poet's staying behind is crucial. Staying behind is not meant to mark the isolation or even desolation of the poetic act. [...] Neither passive nor active, remaining behind indicates a way of going back, a returning to the source.”
-traveling to the impossible place of the other
-(wind) come and go without touching down or dropping anchor
-the agency, animacy and sentience of the wind is described by ajayeb's sensuous subjects within the wind. one feels enwrapped, enveloped in a sentient being that moves across vast distances, it comes and goes --> the materially textured poetics of description in the ajayeb-e bad باد

the poesy (~ fictional =/= truth, real) (Wahrheit und Dichtung) of ajayeb (are no longer distinguished from each other)

(greeting is the poet/artist's most essential mode of being)

a designed closure or reappropriation that locks the Other into a schema of subjectivity ---- at once promoted and subjected
*(re)fastened to the Greek origin
promoting the ousider to insider (who now holds an Ursprung and origin)

re-appropriation ~=?! an end to alienation {~=?=> the condition of possibility for totalitarianism} [Fynsk]

the illusion (and comfort) of noncastration

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

duty of deconstruction: the practice of non-avoidance
(duty =/= your nature)--> the duty of being unwelcomed

vomiting ~= healing



*after the 18th century (seems) all art (artists) wants to be:
•in the privileged place of nonrepresentational work. trying its self with the sublime, that which disturbs and devastates being
•performative = being + doing ~= becoming what it is

() parentheses:
•parental parenthetical remarks
•grammatically set to emphasize --> belonging to the secondary
•whispering ~ “this isn't much, but let me insert, inject”
•disavowal of the text
•denial
•confession
•pumping th[...]

[...]o inhabit sometimes unfamiliar, agential world. they are practices of sf worlding.

fiction ==> attitude --> holds things

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

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

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

*a shift in humanities scholarship
(feminist science studies, the post humanities, the ecological humanities, animal studies, queer theory,) humanities scholars have represented their matters of care with an aesthetic (and therefore political) commitment to narrating stories with an emphasis on the relationality among agencies, forces, phenomena, and entities usually kept separate, in the background, or out of the story altogether (lde a Bellacasa)
--> redistribution of agencies
political stake ==> aesthetic tactics

poet laureates of queer animacies
“malek-o-sho'ara-e atefiate mahsus-e edrakat-e zende” (ملک الشعرا عاطفیات محسوس ادراکات زنده)

(animacy: Usually, animacy has to do with how alive or how sentient a noun is. In general, personal pronouns have the highest animacy, the first-person being the highest among them. Other humans follow them, and animals, plants, natural forces such as winds, concrete things, and abstract things follow in this order; however, according to the spiritual beliefs of the people whose language possesses an animacy hierarchy, deities, spirits, or certain types of animal or plant may be ranked very highly in the hierarchy.)

**animacy stories --> multitude of agencies
(what are the contemporary ajayeb animacy stories?


(neo-Darwinian's) standard evolutionary accounts of encounter between species (in terms of “sexual deception”) ==> individuation, competition, efficiency --> capitalist and military values (, economic tropes)
==> disenchanted “ecologies, populated by blind, reactive automations”

evolutionary stories =/= involutionary stories --> organisms become *involved* with one another's lives

(involution, pich-dar پیچدار, act or an instance of enfolding or entangling, an inward curvature or penetration; a function, transformation, or operator that is equal to its inverse, i.e. which gives the identity when applied to itself.)

“mimetic relations among plants and animals take shape in the thickness of the space between bodies, where affect and sensations are *transduced* through *excitable* tissues” (Myers & Hustak)--> affective e[...]

[...]e,}--> all at the same time; (how to hold them all together?)

(Stryker > Haraway > Hayward > Kenney > Sina > Cinderella)
***so much that constitutes me I did not choose, but, now constituted, I feel myself in a place of agency*** ----> (my) ontological obligation {ontology: what there is and what debts we owe to it}--> *involutionary storytelling* (~/->? involuntary storytelling)

--> lives, affects, and bodies of organisms: “energetic forces, coextensive overlappings, shared milieus make species; species are sensuous responses” **Hayward

thinking with animals : {figural + literal}
spiders, rats, ...

“the transitioning body is also a gossamer outstretch of homeliness, energetic force or potential, a discursive pulse, a throb of sensations distributed across sensoriums, spaces, and times, delimiting territory but also sensing zones, places, and coherences.”

criticism = speculative fantasy

undoing the eye's property of vision (Kelley and Hayward)


([my account of] ajayeb's stories are) moral tales that model an ecological attention to relationality, vulnerability, and resilience ==> living well in a world contaminated (by all sorts of linguistic and chemical animacies)


*traumatic hope*
(Sedgwick: the reparatively positioned reader tries to recognize the fragments and part-objects she encounters or creates ~= what i am doing)

why tell stories like this, when there are only more and more openings and no bottom lines? --> because there are quite definite response-abilities that are strengthened in such stories (La Guin > Haraway > Kenney)

bottomless story ==> response-ability (an enabling of responsiveness within particular relatings--Schrader 2010)

not only human call & not only human respond --> the world is full of “propositions” (waiting to be registered by interested bodies) [yes w[yes we need to produce ‘interested bodies']

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

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

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


*wonder, a mode of attention to:
•the perpetual newness of the present (Irigaray)
•the other-worldliness of the past (Bynum)
•the aesthetics and politics of sf worlding that generate sensitivities for wo[...]

[...]ositions on a series of spectrums, where human, animal, and machine bleed into one another” [Huebert]--{"it”: exclusive right of gendered pronouns--"it” ascribed to artificial animals and androids --> the distinction between “genuine” and “inauthentic”; “it” leaves us in a perpetual species panic}
•*animal symbolic* --> origin of the construction of the human located in sexual difference [Nurka]
it seems with ‘human’ one always spring inexorably back to sex --> sexual difference and its origins in the problematic of difference
-individuating difference ==>? prepositional singularities--the potentialities to differ that are not yet stabilized into the categories of an individual
[Nurka > Colebrook] concept of “transitive indifference” transforms the self/other pairing beyond the demands of recognition and relation --> (all-too-often) animal difference serves to secure human sameness [=/= ouroboros abyssal beastliness] --> ontological difference serves only to erect man as the being for whom “the world is nothing more than the arena whereby he recognizes his proper difference,”
•*animal techne* ~~--> Jackass & Wildboyz : animality is viscerally, painfully, and transformatively encountered or enacted by the human body [Seymour], sliding down the animacy hierarchy [Chen], gesturing toward various interconnected trans-(species) corporalities performed in (Critical Life Studies texts and) Wildboyz (=/= elite status of human) --> (Barad's) ethics of mattering : connections of human and nonhuman life always already taking place on bodies*****


transdisciplinarity: a self-adaptive complexity [...] foreground[ing] the transduction of knowledge as it passes across and between the interpretive and methodological planes of composing knowledge. (Katie King)

“distributed being and cognition”

...attendant mammalian attachment

individuating indifference

(anthropocene's iteration of the) expansionist logic of manifest destiny



-situated knowledges (Haraway)
-trans-knowledges (Hayward)

[*]trans- : *promise of moving across without holding tightly to the locations that it is moving from*, crossing of spacetime, a movement within relationship [~/=? inheritance, the experience of being tied to a long string that is stretching and is connected to somewhere]
coalitional thinking = trans-knowledge --Hayward--> (~= my work: heuristic + trans-) a thought here, then a reflection, perhaps a question that prompts another story, and probably a walk full of pointing and talking, walking on scales [on burdens and atrocities of abundance] (--> I use:) translation, transfiguration, transformation, trans-differentiation, transcription
-what happens to knowing when it is crossing, trans- materializes that process of movements, *marks the where-ness of with-ness*

my stories of getting to know [...]

[...]: what would an ardently materialist eco-critical race politics look like?
[=/= toward materiality: bumptious liveliness of matter ==> to deracinate life, to depoliticize worldliness]

to host a guest: an ethics of care, a willingness to remain open to a guest without anticipation or expectation
(hospital =) alter the equation of hostile to hostel. Is this what is meant by hospitality?


Leo's angry and productive underbelly
Leo's take on honesty: real and raw

(gardens are full of) grotesqueness and splendor, death and life, delicacy and treachery, softness and sting

transgenerational
regenerations

liminal: a threshold without a value, a doorway without assurance

that false divide between life and death (somebody animating it)


(Eszter's lace-like interiors)


loss ==shapes==> our relationship to the living (@Jassem)

(*ambivalence of loss and remembering* in the) melancholic calculus of the archive: “what is lost can become what is preserved as part of the self”
-as an environment sickens and dies we harbor the loss

(hope =/= salvation)

...learning a new grammar of animacy (with Hayward)

“[...]memories of excess and delight, freaks, fright, and exploitations. Too much sugar. Surprise. And disappointment. Larger than life. Grotesque. Alluring. Captivating. Calling. Their juxtaposition in this contradictory scape of sea, desert, and mountains--surreal”

(the mer-creature) a living condensation and displacement of what people imagined as real

...how little is needed to prompt the imagination: paint, wheels, and wood.

(US/Mexico or land/ocean borders...) a space about who and what cannot move, of who and what falls apart, or of who and what is lost

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

(the inter- and trans-action of) learning, playing and thought



in ajayeb what are the:
•animacy hierarchies (--Chen)
•exposed and transparent conditions of possibility (--Hayward) ==> becomings and assemblages
•ontological fixities
•enactment of large-scale fantasies (--Chen)
•


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

(Mehran Rad) on description of spring
kofr کفر <--> “nature” (tabi'at طبيعت) <---> bahar بهار <--> bot-khane بت خانه
Manuchehri: نوبهار آمد و آورد گل و یاسمنا باغ همچون تبت و راغ بسان عدنا http://ganjoor.net/manoochehri/divanm/ghaside-ghete/sh1/
Hafez: کنون که در چمن آمد گل از عدم به وجود بنفشه در قدم او نهاد سر به سجود http://ganjoor.net/hafez/ghazal/sh219/
=/= durdastha دوردستها, beyonds

donya دنیا <--> gozar گذر
-->?[...]

[...]ath (somebody animating it)


(Eszter's lace-like interiors)


loss ==shapes==> our relationship to the living (@Jassem)

(*ambivalence of loss and remembering* in the) melancholic calculus of the archive: “what is lost can become what is preserved as part of the self”
-as an environment sickens and dies we harbor the loss

(hope =/= salvation)

...learning a new grammar of animacy (with Hayward)

“[...]memories of excess and delight, freaks, fright, and exploitations. Too much sugar. Surprise. And disappointment. Larger than life. Grotesque. Alluring. Captivating. Calling. Their juxtaposition in this contradictory scape of sea, desert, and mountains--surreal”

(the mer-creature) a living condensation and displacement of what people imagined as real

...how little is needed to prompt the imagination: paint, wheels, and wood.

(US/Mexico or land/ocean borders...) a space about who and what cannot move, of who and what falls apart, or of who and what is lost

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

(the inter- and trans-action of) learning, playing and thought



in ajayeb what are the:
•animacy hierarchies (--Chen)
•exposed and transparent conditions of possibility (--Hayward) ==> becomings and assemblages
•ontological fixities
•enactment of large-scale fantasies (--Chen)
•


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

(Mehran Rad) on description of spring
kofr کفر <--> “nature” (tabi'at طبيعت) <---> bahar بهار <--> bot-khane بت خانه
Manuchehri: نوبهار آمد و آورد گل و یاسمنا باغ همچون تبت و راغ بسان عدنا http://ganjoor.net/manoochehri/divanm/ghaside-ghete/sh1/
Hafez: کنون که در چمن آمد گل از عدم به وجود بنفشه در قدم او نهاد س[...]

[...]material-sensory arc of history
•series of absent/present (moments) sensed through forms and events


lostness or reslessness of drifters

fantasies of potential “home”

(a plce of) abjection of state neglect ==> production of future


(Stewart's) the middle-class mobile citizenship and the proper traveling subject


Janina's “i don't know” s
a material semiosis of choices


what are ajayeb promises?
wtinessings, encounters, timeouts, fantasy, distraction,


a 19th century elite tradition of secular pilgrimage to the sacred

pursuit of see-it-yourselfness

a spectacular form of amnesia *


(the joints of my pop-up book) spin around fantastic axes


Stewart: “the state of public transportation in the U.S. is an event in the worlding of bodies in motion”
-a landscape abuzz with connectivity


shape-shifter jumping between composition and concrete


my apass project:
(sharing with you) the pleasure of recognizing a described world (in ajayeb)***
(i can sense the ajayeb's) pleasure in describing the animacy of forms
-describing a world is the pleasure of sensing the incipiency of *form in matter* and fantasy and the effort to draw the lines of form's traces. still palpable even it only imagined (Stewart ***)

(ajayeb's) heady business of making sense out of what happens
-to venture out in the manner of
-ajayeb sings an autopoetic refrain scoring and unfolding
-gesturing into form, a magnet burdened with impressions

textures give way to qualities of form


*before the blizzard: the sea monster

______________


Xh1IgPomwW8 Stewart's experiments coming at the phenomena of worlding through a series of angles organized prismatically:
•precision
•atmosphere
•attunement
•refrain ترجیع‌بند (poetic fixed form)

--> the tune on which people and things venture out
--> a kind of mapping infrastructure
--> lines and distributed biography


[pop-up book]
#description: (world is like a) pop-up map of possibilities [=/= map hylomorphically onto meaning]:
•(condensed) points of precision
•fundamentally divergent nature of things that happen --prompting-->
•the mode of social poiesis
•a path into continuous variation of matter and form, word and world
•(pop-up book made of) mobile and immobile flickering
•a thing that can be physical if the eye is quick enough
•a crystalline image of the deforming of a form
•bending itself (myself?) in refraction (=/= intimate register of knowledge and power)
•a conceptual machi[...]

[...]threat of transformation? -->) *#practices of care and نگرانی negarani are the production of a distinctly human body ~ naturally human ~=> different bodily constitutions of the subject ==> different worlds

a process that crucially entailed inconstancy: a continuous creative response to the exigencies of somatic uncertainty and ontological risk =/= intentional image into a realized product (a bad story of technology)

let's resist:
•the vessel metaphor
•the body's dual character as biological and cultural

archaeologists’ understanding of what bodies and artefacts are ==> a model (based on analogy) ==> “pot =/= body”


****sex and aging, defined as the real “physical characteristics” of the body that underpin human experiences --> usually remains unaltered
(for instance check the TV series Six Feet Under, how David's gay-ness is an intrinsic absolute fact of his body that underpins all his experiences)


we “wear”:
•sex
•aging
•personal feelings
•Iranian, or German, (basically being anything)
•


(basically in all Hollywood imaginings and standard archaeology) artefacts are only assigned secondary agency --> animacy is not considered as inherent attribute of the artefactual *** (Gell)
--✕--> pots as living organisms subject to processes of growth


(Ingold's) ecology of materials is characteristic of work that focuses on the inherent vitality of things (Barad)

*production: an ongoing process that produces both maker and object


(Alberti proposes) a change in focus: (from) *stopped up objects* --(to)--> *leaky things*


in his writing Alberti finishes 3 or 4 times his paragraphs with the same characterization of his field: “chronic instability of a world constantly at risk of transformation”


“if everything can be human, then nothing is human in a clear and distinct way.”
Viveiros de Castro


[*]subjectivity: a condition and outcome of all affective relations =/= a capacity that can be awakened in a seemingly inert thing
=/=?! transference, (is transference an object-oriented account?)


the active nature of materials refers to their recognized capacity to escape form : their untrustworthiness


(a paradime for creative arts:) artifactual production --> animal creativity

(in Amazonia, and) in ajayeb, no distinction is made between thoughts, feelings, body and mind --> thoughts and actions happen in the same ontological space
(Alberti > Viveiros de Castro)

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

shift from an epistemological to an ontological register in theoretical archaeology

critically ontological: turning insight back on the archaeological project
[...]

[...]movement approuch to 3D making.]


nonrepresentational maya
epistemology and cognitive approuch to space and matter

ontology of matter in maya

worlding in autodesk industry (look at the trailers, tutorials, and so on.)
historical view?


i see maya and other 3D apps as visualization technologies enlisted as metaphors by Haraway and as languages that actively intertwine in the production of literary value


friction, forms of masks (shaders?), and play, and the dance of Dis-tanz
the separations and partings
nearness


transforming and transformative agencies

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“matter refers to the materiality/materialization of phenomena” (Barad)
-let's look at my 3D-related practices again and investigate their ontological implications and rework how matter is defined, [matter, force, interdependency, appearance,,, phenomena, meaning,] Delanda-[intensification, articulation, flow-of,]

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#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

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(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 mo[...]

[...]nthesis, system engineering, theory of the organism, evolutionary theory, thermodynamics, and world system perspective

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

what are the nodes of energy in interdigitalities intra-actions in human-machine relations?

***we are belonging to a set of cultures that regularly believes in the idiom of: organism =/= technology
--> this little ontological dichotomous device is doing serious worldings, making and destroying worlds

technologies of descriptive practices
technology is descriptive practice
technology: anything describable as a technology --> idiom اصطلاح

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

[title]
age of stone, and stories for computers

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(#workshop in Stuttgart 11.04.2017 with Femke http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/possiblebodies.rigging)
provisional sketch for a workshop on “Rigging,” notes and nodes

>
on the notion and practice of Rig in CG
(CG as in “computational gesture”)

[title]
on Rigging and skinning: stories for cultivating creation and creatures of the industrial empire.
a practice in: rhetoric of technical reasoning in inorganic skeletal animacies.


•I begin with the position that believes in the essential ambiguity of technology
•let's look at some terms and notions and the ways they are enacted, practiced, and embodied, and to practice some hermeneutic fluency in phenomenological conditions in what we call character animation


KEYWORDS: soft bodies, skin, skinnig, Rig, Rigging, unwrapping, fold, CG, animation, locomotion, kinectics, skeleton, mechanics, interface, technology,


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

Rigs are about:
-ways of arranging space, time and matter : like a sentence, that sticks words sequentially together in a certain way. Rig would be a way t way those elements are attached to one another in time and space.
[*] --> one-dimenisional skeletal Rigs are generally intereseting for my research, because of the specific sequential order that many forms of culture take. (for example, “tradition” is from that famility of Rigs, a string of things in a particular order and not another. [---> go to totem columns]. “language” is another one.)
◦what are the degrees of flexibilty, stretch and tention between the nodes in a Rig?
◦what a substitution in a string-Rig might change the ways that being is animated, and therefore change the meaning?
-that means: change the Rig, and you will change the ways space and time are arranged
-that means: thinking about Rigs is like thinking about the language, or better: ontological commitments embedded in language. and since we are interested in materiality [that means: material human-technology relations], i would ask: what are the material objects that this langu[...]

[...]e-dimenisional skeletal Rigs are generally intereseting for my research, because of the specific sequential order that many forms of culture take. (for example, “tradition” is from that famility of Rigs, a string of things in a particular order and not another. [---> go to totem columns]. “language” is another one.)
◦what are the degrees of flexibilty, stretch and tention between the nodes in a Rig?
◦what a substitution in a string-Rig might change the ways that being is animated, and therefore change the meaning?
-that means: change the Rig, and you will change the ways space and time are arranged
-that means: thinking about Rigs is like thinking about the language, or better: ontological commitments embedded in language. and since we are interested in materiality [that means: material human-technology relations], i would ask: what are the material objects that this language commits us to? to be more exact: what are the material objects that the language-Rig commits the CG-hacker to?
-ontological assumptions embeded in any “device” (English grammar, CG Rigs, architect's tools, a definition in language, etc.)
-Rigs are clever technological provisional constructions, (always) setup for a specific naturalization.
-Rigs articulate animacies, that is to say: they are almost linguistic structures that shape or determine our animations
-Rigs do consequential work
-how elements are arranged together, how they are composed, how they are brought into relation in the space of a field, narrative, text, environment, etc

whenever you give a definition (a metaphor, a concept) and work with it, and find yourself committed to certain findings, tracings and meanings because of that: you are working with a Rig. that is to say: Rigs are definitional structures, not arguments themselves, but their conditions.
then the question would be: when do you know that it is time to dismantle a Rig? how to recognize, learn to reuse or repurpose old Rigs?

in CG the business of Rigging and Rig-making is handed to the engineering talent and point of view, it has made a pure technical problem.



skeletal, it's all about the ‘arm’
http://www.toxik.sk/img/maya2011_ya.jpg
an arm is a spaciotemporal particularity
the organisms that crafted in their bodies the subphylum vertebrata, a terrestrial technology for moving the flesh.
the images we make are made in the image of the one-with-arms

mechanical
bipedal
facial
quadrupedal
many arms and legs
spinal
surficial
hair
feather

rain Rig by محمد عبدالله
eqFUnFPcuwg

an Optimus Prime transformation Rig by Eske Yoshinob
VDrAzeNS2pk?t=28

(strictly) possible tranformational arrangements

how a being is Rigged into transformational particulari[...]

[...]iculations of control---(that one-way flow of influence between the soft and the rigid)?
•process and becoming: how the technological nature of the Rig and its relations with the image of the organism in CG can be Rigged for a different articulation of the lived-body? and to which extend the Rig can be helpfull to think about the becoming of the beings-of-the-CG (that means: hacker + 3D model)?
•identity: How within an industry such as Pixar, deeply invested in what is a feeling and affectious living characher, a whole new set of technologies and ontologies must be made and destroyed, learned and unlearned, for a different question of identity: what is a living thing? how Rig matter in a world that is made of Rigs that make Rigs for beings to articulate themselves in, through, and with them? inventing and being invented by them
•model: animation = life; asking what brings us to life, makes us alive? (what we animate and what animates us)
•reading and space of the text: the practice we did with pop-up-book making, a joint page of a book when opened wide, the meaning and influence of the reading animates itself like a Rig, coming into movement, flow and inflow as the result of the muscular skeletal gesture of a “reader” who has two hands: mechanical animacies of the act of reading set in time and space by the “writer”
•which rigs rig rigs? (with Strathernian rhetorics) ---- Rig-making practices are ontological technological choreographies that (in the case of CG) make mesh matter*-----they are involved in ‘making mesh flesh’


[14.05.2017]

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rig: a higher-level description of the motion of the part (of mesh) it is influencing (--> set of “bones” may not be hierarchical or interconnected)
[a] simplified user interface allowing animators to control often complex algorithms and a huge amount of geometry --> control the deformation of the mesh data (=/= imitate real anatomy or physical processes)

modern rigging = hacking (in 3D softwares)

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Disney --> body-ege: feeling good about oneself

(via) the playful mastery over anthropomorphized machines


(Rickels > Hanns Sachs:) the last time machines were used for play and not work was during the time of the Greeks and Romans : culture's value of the human body ==> machine used for amusement

**narcissistic investment (of interest) in the body protects against submission to the machine** --> conceived no longer as plaything but as his own prosthetic extension

movement of fantasmatization

to fantasize aggression = to turn it around upon oneself

guild: the currency of the father function

both genders (at the beginning) are phallically aggressive when it comes to mother


Kafka an[...]

[...]on*** [desire is productive of reality] --> aleatory, bricolage

Spinoza's ethics: capacity for action and passion, increase or decrease one's capacities and strengths <-- good & bad
=/= Levinasian ethics (modeled on a subject-to-subject, self-to-other relation)

(psychoanalysis) *partial objects: organs, processes, and flows, which show no respect for the autonomy of the subject*

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(Archer > Saint Lauren:) “fashion fades, style is eternal" = 'notions of style <--> notions of history’ ={"to have style" = to have the means of inserting oneself into history / “to lack style" = to risk oblivion}

Archer --> how critical considerations of style can offer opportunities to think across sets of subjectivities and cultural practices that are often disassociated or pitted against one another

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?

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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]

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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 h[...]