[...]enamored of the new and of the creative
-extinctions are happening at extraordinary rate that are difficult to deal with the perceptual apparatuses of the bipedal hominid [for example sayinig ‘everything is collapsing’ is one of those categories, collapsology takes world's doom as a priori]
•knowledge =? production of novelty, product of novelty [that you need is not at all novelty for someone else]
•knowledge =? reduction of memory, production of memory
•knowledge =? cat's cradling each other
*what constitute flourishing?* [@collapsology =/= one is seduced, curious, interested, and intrigued ‘to what is going on there?']
[species are often] risks for your ongoingness
(work of) [*]hope: care not being possible out of the place of sheer joy
...................................
my issues with the commons
i have a problem with the conceptual and material apparatus called ‘resource’ that the commons takes uninterrogated. (and there is no way out of it because commons must take ‘a’ definition of resource for granted--and that makes it too easy to deconstruct). and it is too embedded within a political framework and vocabulary. and political is the most difficult syntax to start with, which won't allow it to access other literacies.
in this way the commons alone cannot properly address issues such as pollution, extinction, human-animal problems, rhetoric, inheritance, logic, alienation, and so on, that need multidisciplinary thinking.
...................................
•what is ‘feeling’ for Lili
•the issue of ‘similarity’ for Luiza
•zones of connectivity and presubjective singularities for Xiri. (what is even better than justice? kindness?)
(Xiri's use of the implicit element of ‘surprise,’ she is trying to communicate the ‘importance’ of her contents.) (trauma-story almost always silences other stories. -- she is compelled by her own storytelling --> baring witness to the injustice therefore resisting it.) --when the victimized personal veils the larger context of evil, the illusion of the true perpetrators - which is around you. (she stated the danger which is all around us.)
-the issue of immediacy for Xiri
-‘you can only heal what you have wounded’ (Wagner's Parsifal “only the weapon that made it will ever cure the wound.”)--what does this mean for our caring activities? @Sina: is this what you mean by western modern rationalization, and that is why you are thinking within the western/eastern philosophies, is the modern tools the antidote to themselves? (this is too soon for me to say and understand this question.)
what is my ‘will to’?
Xiri wants to abolish injustice?
Thiago, abolish selfishness?
Maarten, abolish weakness?
Aela, abolish entropy?
Sana,
Seba, abolish enmity?
Lili, abolish feelings?
Varinia, abolish obedience? [--what shortens our leash?][...]
(1)[...notes/midday review.txt]%0.8[...] scientific British one
(the theatrical function of natural philosophy in the England Enlightenment)
the function of natural philosopher in 18th century was to use experimental science machines to turn inert matter into active power, light/fire/heat/etc. to lecture an wealthy and polite fee-paying audience, in order to save them from irrationality, that inside all matter there is life and power, and that life was divine.
(however all this was all swept away in the industrial revelation)
William Herschel, an amateur natural philosopher discovering Uranus 1781
(Enlightenment was all about people changing their disciplines)
project of constructing a new theory of heavens
...................................
*i can't give you a direct grasp but i hope i can give slowly accuracy
*the ‘details’ of grasping
(zoom in the ‘grasp’)
from contingencies to certainties
i spend so much time with painting and computers, which were about compositions and hacks
i think there are few fields/figurations/skills we need to get good at: rhetoric, biology, aesthetics
...................................
trope - something other than its literal form
adding an adjective or replacing a name, (one-way movements?) -- let me tell you the story of:
*knowledge --to--> expressed knowledge
*knowledge --to--> knowing
*reality --to--> manifest realities
*real --to--> real enough
*islamic --to--> islamicate (“islamic” has always been a ‘range’ rather than a ‘binary switch’. things become more or less “islamic” in popular/proper belief)
*nature --to--> visual nature
*culture/civilization --to--> collective (emphasizing operation of gathering or composing and heterogeneity of the assembled)
*muslim countries --to--> muslim majority countries
*understanding --to--> better utter understanding
*what does X mean --to--> what does X mean for you
*body --to--> lived body
*body --to--> lived image
*language --to--> specialized languages
*world --to--> built world / thought world / described world / descripted world
*producing knowledge --to--> participating in knowledge projects
*to explain --to--> to explain in terms of...
*place/location --to--> neighborhood (ask ‘why this neighborhood?’ instead of place)
ajayeb helps me to work on:
-history
-poetics
-animality --> inhabiting material and semiotic positions --> how to find a descriptive act that is not in terms of the impressions it makes on our senses? / this is about the places things take and occupy in our phenomenal world. / it is difficult to discuss the night-sky without first breaking it up into constellations. (Matthew Carey)
i have been building my own islamology or islam-studies depar[...]
(2)[...notes/midday review.txt]%1[...]بدخط) as a mode of attention =/= (Descartes’) “natural light of reason”
%report on fables of objects #workshop (22.02.2017 HWD apass): attention to the sense and feeling of disparity, dispersity, stability, sublimity, authority, epicness, weakness, severity, solidity, scale, (a)social connections, and tangibility in the character of the object of each participants in the stories we wrote. where were active and passive qualities located? how were agencies distributed?
•origin story --> evolution story, love story [the object falls in love with...]
•daily story
•beast feeding story --> training story
evoking temporality of evolutionary time, face-to-face time, historical time, tiny scale time,
-each story has a music, texture of colors, pattern of meaning and affect
•bodyguard --> fantastic creature invented to protect an organism (your “object”). this bodyguard can be organic, nonorganic, cyborg, any form, but always an agent. tell us why/how this or that feature helps the bodyguard with its task
•generation stories, describe and follow your object in three generations, its child and grandchild
•[for the second day or warm-up first day?] constraint based writing: (Kenney > Christian Bök's “literary genetics” poetics of encryption of data; poetic vectors, to “infect” the language;) describe/story your object (or an operative “verb” within your discourse) with univocalics: without using “e” or only using a single vowel. or, first write with 3, then 2, then 1 vowel.
-the workshop is about: what other stories (of your object) are possible?
-in the workshop (I take a temporary position to) challenge others to re-tell the story of their ((epistemological) found) objects
-a ‘generative constraint’ might help opening up paths before you, away from our habits of storytelling
-it is about getting a feeling for the resistances and potentials of language in our (sometimes mundane) descriptive practices, “strange richness of missing the letters we need” (Kenney)
the metaphors are dormant in our routines of talking and noticing each other. how then, by traversing the routine, our “knowledge” and “community” took on new meaning, as they get a chance of being rearticulated in different languages (or differenlty infected literature)
~-?==> changing the system of classification (of thought)
-in a way the workshop is about an *approach* to knowledge generation (and not necessarily a rigorous critique nor directly evaluating the production of our knowledges)
***nothing is never merely a metaphor***
[some fables from science studies:]
•Emily Martin's egg/sperm story --> stories of atomism, distribution of agency, ----[The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles]
•Hayward's microscope --> tropes[...]
(3)[...notes/midday review.txt]%1.5[...] generation stories, describe and follow your object in three generations, its child and grandchild
•[for the second day or warm-up first day?] constraint based writing: (Kenney > Christian Bök's “literary genetics” poetics of encryption of data; poetic vectors, to “infect” the language;) describe/story your object (or an operative “verb” within your discourse) with univocalics: without using “e” or only using a single vowel. or, first write with 3, then 2, then 1 vowel.
-the workshop is about: what other stories (of your object) are possible?
-in the workshop (I take a temporary position to) challenge others to re-tell the story of their ((epistemological) found) objects
-a ‘generative constraint’ might help opening up paths before you, away from our habits of storytelling
-it is about getting a feeling for the resistances and potentials of language in our (sometimes mundane) descriptive practices, “strange richness of missing the letters we need” (Kenney)
the metaphors are dormant in our routines of talking and noticing each other. how then, by traversing the routine, our “knowledge” and “community” took on new meaning, as they get a chance of being rearticulated in different languages (or differenlty infected literature)
~-?==> changing the system of classification (of thought)
-in a way the workshop is about an *approach* to knowledge generation (and not necessarily a rigorous critique nor directly evaluating the production of our knowledges)
***nothing is never merely a metaphor***
[some fables from science studies:]
•Emily Martin's egg/sperm story --> stories of atomism, distribution of agency, ----[The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles]
•Hayward's microscope --> tropes of natural history docu, ----[Enfolded Vision: Refracting The Love Life of the Octopus]
◾Kenney/Haraway's origin/nature fable --> the omnipotence of the “origin” story in our descriptions and interactions with the natural world
•Scott Gilbert's immunological “bouncer” story =/= immune systems as inclusive agents of symbiosis
•Lynn Margulis: life (made possible) by “combat” [the survival fable that TV series “The 100” and “Kelile Demne” for instance is based on] --✕--> life by networking
•Haraway: the tale of “organism = a system of division of labor with executive functions” (==> extraction of wealth among us)
•Morton's causality-story
•brain/body story --> where the “move” came from?
•Sina's “standing on the shoulders of giants” --> knowledge/continuity, role of authority and humility in science ----[http://www.sinaseifee.com/giants.html]
•Sina's 3 little pigs --> architecture/tech/ echics of encounter --> story of the center and periphery ----[http://www.sinaseifee.com/pigs.html]
•“weapon fathered man” -[...]
(4)[...notes/midday review.txt]%1.6[...]/>
no need for “conflict” nor “hero”
(in the way we give feedback, relate, narrate, story, and tell eachother our matters of care and concern, and where we create zones of attachment; both in your “art work” and the mundane everyday of ‘getting on together’ --> interrupting one's own framework)
...................................
#workshop, on question, feedback method, to improve the questions we ask each other
-what are the questions (i could ask) that make you the most articulate?
-the question that asks what are the good questions that offer an interesting becoming for those to whom the question is addressed
-to ask: does this apparatus has stakes in docility or availability?
-more interesting questions ==enable==> more articulated answers ==> more articulated identities
-asking (questions) (is not about ‘you want to know,’) is about constructing interest ==> chance of interesting answers
-asking about the differential productions, “=/=” or “=” or “==>” in each other practices. these assessments are propositional and poetic remarks, guessing the artificialities that we live with, not finding of matters of fact
◦asking about particularizations (تخصیص) and generalizations (تعمیم)
**literature begins, Blanchot writes, “at the moment when literature becomes a question”** (this is completely different than asking or question-marking in literature) [...] this question “is posed to language by language that has become literature” (the question that the meaning of the text asks is the question asked by literature; [of course at the moment of reading]) [then what is a text before becoming a question? complaining? revolution?]--%(negation wishes to realize itself.)
--> Rorty's critique of Descartes's way of asking questions
we have to be careful with our practice of questioning, because we often end up privileging a group of people by attributing it to "higher” levels cognition and of being “critically” in the world (=/= animal, nonpeople, other people with other ways of being in/with the apperceptive world that don't use the technology of questioning, as it is crafted historically and naturalized in the west for the univerasal method of ‘knowing more’)
...................................
#workshop, reading group
•reading as passionate betrayal. (hunting for precious empirical details, refigurative, reparative, poaching, reading can be a betrayal of textual authority and an act of survival)
•addressing /present* differences, not already pre-figured differences
•(condition of friendship, staying close to the text) staying close as a reader, as someone who could hold the text of the Other, receiving it in the withdrawal / Entzug (drug rehabilitation)
•i am in no position of ‘understanding’ or being clear about the text
•(i understand now that) it is not up to me to tell you how to rea[...]
(5)[...notes/midday review.txt]%1.7[...]ing and depending on)? flourishing (of my ajayeb) depends on a reading that is more like “mutual partial digestion” (Katie King, Haraway) [=/= “eating well"] the text
•“every time i read X, something new shows up”
my practice of ‘rhetorical reading’ (=/= ‘close reading’; or more like close reading and letting go. “close” is itself a metaphor, a rhetoric of reading;) doesn't work with the idea that there is something ‘in’ the text per se (coded or encoded meaning or some sort of knowledge made and installed by an author), or that the writer wants to say something to the reader, or that the text is symptomatic with meaning and that its intentions needs to be listened to. rather, in a post-Lacanian critique, i work the text like a pattern of language, an organization of space, text as word-sequencer. it is like looking at an image, still starting from top-left to bottom-right of the page, a process of highlighting or embodied attention that produces non-zero clusters of salient words that come to glow different than others. but the way they become highlighted is not due to some idea of significance of the text but because of my--the reader's--interests, past readings and educated meaning-associations. this mode of reading is not at all suggested to newbies in literature, sorry but this requres some degree of advancement in one's abilities and skills of writingreading, that means the reader already enjoys an ongoing well-articulated interest before coming to a particular sitting with a piece of writing, and this means the rhetorical reader's encounter with the text is highly situated and is not a blind date. in this case reading is a radical meaning-making practice full of adventures and preparations, drawings and graphs, diffractions and detours, connections and risks of (mis)understanding in certain ways. this ‘reading’ looks very much ‘writing’ alike.
-the reading becomes *rereading past writing*, re(past)ed(writ)ing, a reading that has writen itself in palimpsestic lines. in a Derridean sense: (one is equiped with the question) “what is writing itself (in this text)”?
-two speculative spheres meet in rhetorical reading: one of the text and one of the reader, but they have to ‘stick’ to one another, the stickiness of your reading matters in consequential ways. this is against the idea that we read and each understand personally whatever.
•my second issue with ‘close reading’: there is no correlation between the speed of reading and comprehension/apprehension
*reading practices*
ontology usually decides what reading is --> *book-binding is reading. editorial compositional reformating and remodeling of the space of the text is reading.
(Stewartian) reading that happens in the writing: you can't do any kind of exegesis of the reading تفسير, rather: *you have to become related to the reading in what you are writing*
in research:
•skills of r[...]
(10)[...notes/midday review.txt]%1.8[...]
-the commitment to breaking up the book and its metaphysically laden pitch for closural sovereignty.
-linguistic pollutants
-dirty talks
#as a mode of writing, make a folding (fractal) book, style of children books, for ajayeb
(what would this structure mean? and how is that expandable?)
#making a cheap horror short-film from one of the ajayebs
#write a X-man short story in Tehran context with iranian everyday characters
•jurassic park --> ajayeb al makhlughat عجایب المخلوقات (horror, sublime, shivering water)
•nonapocalyptic stories and the otherworldly hauntingly familiar in the lost faces of forest (called Tehran?)
(accourding to Egyptian 1550 BCE,) book: a loose collection of magic spells intended to assist a dead person's journey through underworld, and into the afterlife and written by many priests
-are lists the origin of writing? (...way before the installation of the modern scriptural apparatus)
theory-minded academics have rigorously repudiated----or forgotten poetry. ----> poetic deprogrammmg
cohabitation of two sovereign linguistic attitudes----the grammars and behaviors that we associate with figures of literary performance and philosophical positing
18th century
rise of increasingly more mathematical and symbolic logics
more literary types of discursive formations,
Wordsworth, Rilke, and Keats disavowing Paul de Man?!
Freud without Goethe or Schiller?!
Benjamin off Baudelaire?!
Derrida deprived of Mallarme, Ponge, or Celan?!
Heidegger abandoned by Trakl or Holderlin?!
increasing technicization of critical language
colloquy, soliloquy
they are called to witness distinct regions of being ==> assuming the destiny of difference
% denken und dichten is at stake in the *theory of mourning
...................................
[Stengers]
the storyteller : “some people love to divide and classify, while others are bridge-makers--weaving relations that **turn a divide into a living contrast**, one whose power is to affect, to produce thinking and feeling”
(regarding my footnote fetish) ... because writing such footnotes implies *feeling the text* as an *animating power*
philosophy =? a form of textual animation {--> approaching the work of ajayeb}
to turn the [ajayeb] (animist) modes of experience (existence), awareness, and knowledge into living contrasts (intensely powerful bridge-making tools)
can we reappropriate without reanimate? ----> i think if we deconstructively talk about the reappropriations of meaning we might allow animation to constitute itself.
-how to train yourself in spotting relevant questions and unilaterally [einseitig] [...]
(11)[...notes/midday review.txt]%2.2[...]natural”
“nature”: that larger, older, and wiser configuration that gets credit for ingenuity (instead of the creature's bodily know-how) by the call of the scientist
عجایب ajayeb's relations to the world, rhizomatic connections to other practices that likewise explore a metamorphic (rather than representational) relation
Earth =/= cradle
Surrealists’ automatism to cultivate lucid trances is missing the techniques of imagination developed by Ibn Arabi, (or by Sohrevardi, and others)
(Breton's subjectivity is still hopelessly European)
=?=> to recuperate our physical force (old good Tasavof-?)
‘ideas’ --> to “animate” humans ~= erotically lure the human soul**
(Plato knew this)
to lure us into relevant metamorphic attention*
(Deleuze and Guattari:) my existence is my very participation in assemblages
in order to determine what is “really” responsible for what [= agency?].
-an agency that doesn't belong to us (who is ‘us’ in Stengers?)
the efficacy of assemblages (in ajayeb)
(assemblage --> landscape [in farsi: چشم انداز cheshm-andaz, is related not to the land but to the eyes, literally meaning the projection of gaze])
(the point is) to play a referential game that puts one at risk (instead of protecting via quote)
(let's immediately turn off that) monotonous little critical or reflexive voice whispering that (the only defense we have against fanaticism and the rule of illusions is that) we should not accept being mystified
commenting =/= touching
(lams kardan لمس کردن =/= ezhare nazar kardan اظهار نظر کردن) --> an issue in art criticism in Iran ایران
[@Foad]
**our senses are not for detached cognition but for participation**(David Abram)
-“The ways the senses themselves have, of throwing themselves beyond what is immediately given, in order to make tentative contact with the other sides of things that we do not sense directly, with the hidden or invisible aspects of the sensible.”
-“suggestions offered by the sensible itself.”
-we never step outside the “flux of participation.”
...................................
[Thomas Keenan]
reading: that which happens when we cannot apply the rules --> experience of responsibility =/= moment of security or cognitive certainty
rhetorical reading
who speaks, writes, and reads? not simply humans
“how can we have any chance of finding a way to say what we don't know how to say if we don't pay attention to the silence of the other inside us?”
literature, is then understood as the experience of risk, chance, the undecidable =/= pathos of resolution
(in Western e[...]
(13)[...notes/midday review.txt]%2.3[...]hat (the only defense we have against fanaticism and the rule of illusions is that) we should not accept being mystified
commenting =/= touching
(lams kardan لمس کردن =/= ezhare nazar kardan اظهار نظر کردن) --> an issue in art criticism in Iran ایران
[@Foad]
**our senses are not for detached cognition but for participation**(David Abram)
-“The ways the senses themselves have, of throwing themselves beyond what is immediately given, in order to make tentative contact with the other sides of things that we do not sense directly, with the hidden or invisible aspects of the sensible.”
-“suggestions offered by the sensible itself.”
-we never step outside the “flux of participation.”
...................................
[Thomas Keenan]
reading: that which happens when we cannot apply the rules --> experience of responsibility =/= moment of security or cognitive certainty
rhetorical reading
who speaks, writes, and reads? not simply humans
“how can we have any chance of finding a way to say what we don't know how to say if we don't pay attention to the silence of the other inside us?”
literature, is then understood as the experience of risk, chance, the undecidable =/= pathos of resolution
(in Western ethical, political, and literary traditions:) responsibility: a matter of articulating what is known with what is done =/= (Keenan:) *responsibility*: an asymmetry or an interruption between the orders of cognition and action
fable --> an exemplary *allegory of decision* (~~> installing or restoring subjectivity)
fables open abyssal aporias:
•to teach ‘singularity’ it offers ‘comparison’
•to underline ‘independence’ it resorts to ‘necessity’
[(the experience of) aporia =?=> morality, politics, responsibility =/= when the path is given]--> Germany is moving towards the removing of aporia [<-- a general panic popular in sci-fi]
(the very condition of possibility of) *responsibility*: a certain experience of the possibility of the impossible ~ aporia }==> the impossible invention --> *responsibility must be an invention*
[-Germany's notion of law: like any idea of law, are not by themselves motivators for morality or immorality, it is really upon (human) culture to do that.]
fable ==> possibility of another kind of reading --> exposure to something that breaks with the regimes of meaning and sense
politics of difficulty
...to fall back on the conceptual priority of the subject, agency, or identity as the grounds --✕--> we have politics because we have no ground
(Keenan suggests) “deconstruction” is not offered here as an antiauthoritarian discourse, an attack on grounds, but as an attempt to think abo[...]
(14)[...notes/midday review.txt]%2.4[...] idea of law, are not by themselves motivators for morality or immorality, it is really upon (human) culture to do that.]
fable ==> possibility of another kind of reading --> exposure to something that breaks with the regimes of meaning and sense
politics of difficulty
...to fall back on the conceptual priority of the subject, agency, or identity as the grounds --✕--> we have politics because we have no ground
(Keenan suggests) “deconstruction” is not offered here as an antiauthoritarian discourse, an attack on grounds, but as an attempt to think about this removal as the condition of any (political) action }~= democracy
(according to fables) responsibility begins in the bad example (--> the concept of conflict ~=> the ethics and politics of responsibility)
the classical subject --(the passage through the bad example)--> installed in its stance of responsibility and the safety of identity
“What is at stake in the fable is, more than anything else, the interpretation and practice of responsibility-our exposure to calls, others, and the names with which we are constituted and which put us in question.” (Keenan)
...practical effectivity of literature
•(for Annabel Patterson:) fable accomplishes a speculative Aufhebung : “[...]the role of metaphor is to mediate between human consciousness and human survival, [and here] the mind recognizes rock bottom, the irreducibly material, by rejoining the animals, one of whom is the human body”
•(for Louis Marin:) fable: uncertain model of praxis
•(for Hegel: Aesop was a “misshapen humpbacked slave” and his) fable = witty, witzig =/= spirit, depth, insight, vision, poetry, philosophy
•(for Lacoue-Labarthe:) fable: a name for the mutual implication and asymmetrical interference of literature with philosophy --> the suspension of the self-evidence of the categories “literature” and “philosophy” in order to use each to put the identity of the other into question. [to think the world as fable. Is it possible?]
•(for Keenan:) fable superimposes the relation of an address to the other in its singularity and in its anonymity (responsibility for the other) onto the traditional predicament of an articulation between the order of knowledge or cognition and that of action, ethico-political or otherwise --> *responsibility in Western philosophical tradition: an address to an other*
...the rhetorical event of a comparison
#[the theater of example]
the threat of example's excess
fables of responsibility ==securing==> *the morality of the subject who means* (who can they finally be submitted to the logic of an *evaluative destination*)
(Derrida's) mode of enunciation and the literary vehicle entrusted with its exemplification :
*[...]it is suffici[...]
(16)[...notes/midday review.txt]%2.5[...]is removal as the condition of any (political) action }~= democracy
(according to fables) responsibility begins in the bad example (--> the concept of conflict ~=> the ethics and politics of responsibility)
the classical subject --(the passage through the bad example)--> installed in its stance of responsibility and the safety of identity
“What is at stake in the fable is, more than anything else, the interpretation and practice of responsibility-our exposure to calls, others, and the names with which we are constituted and which put us in question.” (Keenan)
...practical effectivity of literature
•(for Annabel Patterson:) fable accomplishes a speculative Aufhebung : “[...]the role of metaphor is to mediate between human consciousness and human survival, [and here] the mind recognizes rock bottom, the irreducibly material, by rejoining the animals, one of whom is the human body”
•(for Louis Marin:) fable: uncertain model of praxis
•(for Hegel: Aesop was a “misshapen humpbacked slave” and his) fable = witty, witzig =/= spirit, depth, insight, vision, poetry, philosophy
•(for Lacoue-Labarthe:) fable: a name for the mutual implication and asymmetrical interference of literature with philosophy --> the suspension of the self-evidence of the categories “literature” and “philosophy” in order to use each to put the identity of the other into question. [to think the world as fable. Is it possible?]
•(for Keenan:) fable superimposes the relation of an address to the other in its singularity and in its anonymity (responsibility for the other) onto the traditional predicament of an articulation between the order of knowledge or cognition and that of action, ethico-political or otherwise --> *responsibility in Western philosophical tradition: an address to an other*
...the rhetorical event of a comparison
#[the theater of example]
the threat of example's excess
fables of responsibility ==securing==> *the morality of the subject who means* (who can they finally be submitted to the logic of an *evaluative destination*)
(Derrida's) mode of enunciation and the literary vehicle entrusted with its exemplification :
*[...]it is sufficient to introduce, into the fold of speech acts, a few wolves of the type (“undecidability” or “unconscious”) for the shepherd to lose track of his sheep: one is no longer certain where to find the identity of the “speaker” or the “hearer,” ... where to find the identity of an intention.*
--?--> wolf in sheep's clothing [--> also the problem/fantasy of the “integration” project (as the space of ethics and politics)~~>(“Appearances are deceptive” ==> exclusion of the parasite + identification of subjects as the task of responsibility); -what would mean for the German shepherd to lose track of his sheeps? (to go from) the fab[...]
(17)[...notes/midday review.txt]%2.5[...]>
•(for Louis Marin:) fable: uncertain model of praxis
•(for Hegel: Aesop was a “misshapen humpbacked slave” and his) fable = witty, witzig =/= spirit, depth, insight, vision, poetry, philosophy
•(for Lacoue-Labarthe:) fable: a name for the mutual implication and asymmetrical interference of literature with philosophy --> the suspension of the self-evidence of the categories “literature” and “philosophy” in order to use each to put the identity of the other into question. [to think the world as fable. Is it possible?]
•(for Keenan:) fable superimposes the relation of an address to the other in its singularity and in its anonymity (responsibility for the other) onto the traditional predicament of an articulation between the order of knowledge or cognition and that of action, ethico-political or otherwise --> *responsibility in Western philosophical tradition: an address to an other*
...the rhetorical event of a comparison
#[the theater of example]
the threat of example's excess
fables of responsibility ==securing==> *the morality of the subject who means* (who can they finally be submitted to the logic of an *evaluative destination*)
(Derrida's) mode of enunciation and the literary vehicle entrusted with its exemplification :
*[...]it is sufficient to introduce, into the fold of speech acts, a few wolves of the type (“undecidability” or “unconscious”) for the shepherd to lose track of his sheep: one is no longer certain where to find the identity of the “speaker” or the “hearer,” ... where to find the identity of an intention.*
--?--> wolf in sheep's clothing [--> also the problem/fantasy of the “integration” project (as the space of ethics and politics)~~>(“Appearances are deceptive” ==> exclusion of the parasite + identification of subjects as the task of responsibility); -what would mean for the German shepherd to lose track of his sheeps? (to go from) the fable of *the oriented sheepfold* --to--> the fable of *losing count*]
-the vexed relation between sheep and wolf, slave and master
(my work is all about: can we please look at) some *other* “interior of the system”
(system never has only one interior [=/= conspiracy: system's singular interiority])
•literature's (ir)responsibility to philosophy
•art's (ir)responsibility to journalism
Xanthus the philosopher decides to buy a slave, goes with his students to the slave market, and encounters the disfigured Phrygian Aesop (recently granted the power of speech after assisting a priestess of Isis and hence become too difficult for his previous master to handle). Their first exchange is exemplary, as the philosopher interrogates the slave in order to determine whether “he knows anything,” receives equivocal replies, and finishes by asking, “Do you want me to buy you?”
(Life of Aesop)
[...]
(19)[...notes/midday review.txt]%2.5[...]
fables of responsibility ==securing==> *the morality of the subject who means* (who can they finally be submitted to the logic of an *evaluative destination*)
(Derrida's) mode of enunciation and the literary vehicle entrusted with its exemplification :
*[...]it is sufficient to introduce, into the fold of speech acts, a few wolves of the type (“undecidability” or “unconscious”) for the shepherd to lose track of his sheep: one is no longer certain where to find the identity of the “speaker” or the “hearer,” ... where to find the identity of an intention.*
--?--> wolf in sheep's clothing [--> also the problem/fantasy of the “integration” project (as the space of ethics and politics)~~>(“Appearances are deceptive” ==> exclusion of the parasite + identification of subjects as the task of responsibility); -what would mean for the German shepherd to lose track of his sheeps? (to go from) the fable of *the oriented sheepfold* --to--> the fable of *losing count*]
-the vexed relation between sheep and wolf, slave and master
(my work is all about: can we please look at) some *other* “interior of the system”
(system never has only one interior [=/= conspiracy: system's singular interiority])
•literature's (ir)responsibility to philosophy
•art's (ir)responsibility to journalism
Xanthus the philosopher decides to buy a slave, goes with his students to the slave market, and encounters the disfigured Phrygian Aesop (recently granted the power of speech after assisting a priestess of Isis and hence become too difficult for his previous master to handle). Their first exchange is exemplary, as the philosopher interrogates the slave in order to determine whether “he knows anything,” receives equivocal replies, and finishes by asking, “Do you want me to buy you?”
(Life of Aesop)
thinking fable as language : ‘Fabula’ (narration or account), derived as it is from the Latin root ‘fari’ (to speak) and linked to the Greek ‘phanai’ (to speak or to say), finally implies nothing other than language as such
Mythos and logos, the one is not more true (or more false, deceptive, fictive, etc.) than the other
(to open to the) alterity of an ungoverned figuration
hero: the adventure of an identification that can only occur in the comparison that a fable demands
Horace's dictum: “with a change of names, the fable is told about you” (a trans-subjective movement, a tropological system =/= metaphor or metonymy, )
(for Nietzsche) responsibility: the ability to make and keep one's promises = being (able to be) held accountable (not simply by another but) already in advance by and for oneself : to answer to oneself in the place of the other
•Nietzsche's fable of morality: lamb & bird of prey (“eagle is evil ==> lambs are good”)-->[...]
(20)[...notes/midday review.txt]%2.5[...]ss name (a wingless not-eagle)
why fables are important? <-- others and their traces are always working within us already, in a space and time that cannot be reduced to that of consciousness (or self-presence)
•profound linguistic or rhetorical complexity of the call and response
the raven resounds (it does not just start talking) <-- it starts with the others: eagle, wether, shepherd
Lacoue Labarthe --> identification (the self-becoming of the Self) has always been thought as a matter of examples (+ their appropriation) --raven--> (paradoxical imperative) “imitate me in order to be what you are”
wolf in sheep's clothing (Aesop's “A Case of Mistaken Identity”)
a wolf thought that by disguising himself he could get plenty to eat. Putting on a sheep skin to trick the shepherd, he joined the flock at grass without being discovered. At nightfall the shepherd shut him with the sheep in the fold and made fast all round by blocking the entrance. Then, feeling hungry, he picked up his knife and slaughtered an animal for his supper. It happened to be the wolf.
--> a character that does not belong to one can involve one in serious trouble
[*]fable: (name of the) *literary thing* that aime to *teach responsibility* --Keenan--> self-understanding of the free subject (<--fable--we are exposed to something in language that troubles the possibility of that understanding)
[in my lecture performances with] fable [I aim to] offer an allegory-of unreading, of reading without limits and without guarantees --> freedom
governmental concepts:
•subject
•agency
•will
•choice
•freedom
•rights
}--deconstruction--> limitation of ethico-political responsibilities
for Keenan: **question of responsibility = question of freedom**
the free community of rational beings cannot simply be (regulatively) invoked
calculable & programmable law
responsibility: (names the predicament in which) *coincide the necessity/inevitability of action & the failure of law*
•politics (and ethics) --name--> the urgency and necessity of a response
•responsibility (and freedom) --name--> the impossibility of response with guarantee
ethical =/= actual
| |
impossibility =/= totality of what is
***impossible =/= not-possible***
--Derrida--> the impossible occurs at every moment (that belong to the effort of reading)
“have we not acquired the right to say everything?” (Sade)
who reads, and how, a text addressed to no one?
what status does it have?
[Lode Lauwaert]
for Blanchot Sade (libertine aristocrat novelist) was the writer par excellence
we should think about Sade[...]
(21)[...notes/midday review.txt]%2.7[...]otional inconvenience
2. contradictory unreasonableness (for example “religion should be abolished ==> a republican man to be a good husband and father” + “family should be destroyed, all women belong to all men”) --> intellectual inconvenience
3. (grotesque goal of) Sade aims at describing the whole of reality (seeking to say the last word about reality, *to say everything*) --Blanchot--> *the fury of writing* or *the revolt of writing* (Sade = abundant prolific excessive writer, *writing in an exuberant way* [while in prison for 32 years]) --> anesthetic inconvenience
Blanchot's Sade = ideal writer
•we should not understand Sade's oeuvre in an intellectual way (there is no message or insight)
◦disappearance of meaning in the materiality of language -->{death of content ==Saussure==> ‘the signifier'}--> reading Sade = accessing the rough meaningless materiality of language itself
•we should not understood Sade's content as a reflection of an authentic self (un moi profond) --> Sade as a person disappears into the background
◦we should not understood his writing as an instrument he uses to express content --> ‘language = an independent reality’ (=/= Sade as a master of language)
(Hegel and) Sartre --> literary works must be engaged and should express the author's involvement with reality
(for Sartre:) writer: someone who thinks about the
current course of the world and who wants to change the world with his literature
--> “language = a loaded gun” (literature should be understood by reference to the message)
=/= Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jean Ricardou, Eugène Ionesco
=/= Sade > Blanchot: writing need to bring the reader in touchwith the materiality and the autonomy of language
we never read just once
logos: the word that names and relates properly --> great truths are told in the light of day and discourse
Sade --Blanchot--> search of a new lucidity (pursued by clear assured decisive aifrmatiom =/= interrogatory mode)
xxxxxxxx
...................................
[D+G]
the intersection of concrete forms ==> abstract figure
[bringing objects close to each other produces story*]
...................................
my engagement with other apass participants, a form of critique as part of an ‘ecology of practice’ (Stengers)
-what are the questions (i could ask) that make you the most articulate?
-to feel what questions, passions, modes of attention animate one another
-to find yourself moved by their concerns
-what we articulate with our bodies? --> what do our gestures mean?
-what do they activate? ----> they don't always enact a precise language --(rather)--> gestures as organs for feeding, feeling, and grasping***
-(sensing) the trajectories, moods, and intensities the other apass participan[...]
(22)[...notes/midday review.txt]%2.9[...]duce science!}
-instead we need a *split and contradictory self* (one who can interrogate positionings and be accountable) [~~/?-> shath شطح (=/= shar’ شرع, or even sharh شرح?), shathiat (شطحیات) in Tasavof (تصوف), rend رند, rendane رندانه]
-so, instead of “being” she proposes “splitting”: heterogeneous multiplicities that are simultaneously salient and incapable of being squashed into isomorphic slots or cumulative lists. --> The knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, never whole, stitched together imperfectly [that is what she means by ‘split'] ==> join with another (without claiming to ‘be’ another) {if i am allowed i can map Haraway's “partiality” onto Deleuze's “schizophrenia” --> Greek for “split brain” (Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception, p.38) According to Beuler, “The selectivity which normal attention exercises among the sensory impressions can be reduced to zero, so that almost anything is recorded that reaches the senses.” One reason for the admiration which Deleuze and Guattari professed for the schizophrenic must lie in this complete lack of inhibition (khod-dari خودداری).} (a confusion of voice and sight, rather than clear and distinct ideas) ([to discriminate message types:] *to confuse literal and metaphorical*, the schizophrenic either does not know his responses are metaphorical or cannot say so --> the breakdown of his metacommunicative system : does not know what kind of message a message is --> the schizophrenic looks for hidden meanings everywhere (assuming everything is metaphorical) or tend to accept every message as literal) (Lacan: schizophrenia: breakdown in the signifying chain of language ==> experience of pure material signifiers [<-- personal identity is the effect of the temporal unification of past and future with one's present, and that such an active temporal unification is itself a function of language.])
subjectivity is multidimensional ==> vision is multidimensional
(an instruments of vision:) optics : politics of positioning --> one example of optical illusion: rationality (projected from nowhere comprehensivel)
(some perspective are more guilty : master point of view)
No one ever accused the God of monotheism of objectivity, only of indifference. The god trick is self-identical, and we have mistaken that for creativity and knowledge, omniscience even. (self-identical [having self identity] =/=! creativity/knowledge)
Technology: skilled practices. (How to see? Where to see from? and so on.)
@Sana, ‘observation’ and ‘technologies of positioning’
how to see?
the science question in military
the science question in colonialism
the science question in capitalism
the science question in feminism
...
master theory =/= webbed accounts
(what does she mean when she dichotomises theory and accou[...]
(25)[...notes/midday review.txt]%3.5[...]ated”
The biological female peopling : When female “sex” has been so thoroughly retheorized and revisualized that it emerges as practically indistinguishable from “mind,” --> the ‘difference’ is theorized biologically as situational, not intrinsic, (at every level from gene to foraging pattern, thereby fundamentally changing the biological politics of the body.)
-(example: Emily Martin)
points in SK:
1-finite partial perspectives
2-split and contradictory self
3-objectivity (--> positioned rationality, object of knowledge as an actor, mutual and usually *unequal* structuring, it is about taking risks)
how and why Haraway as a feminist fights for a better Primatology?
(Barad on) Situated Knowledges: are not merely about knowing/seeing from somewhere (as in having a perspective) but about taking account of how the specific prosthetic embodiment of the technologically enhanced visualizing apparatus matters to practices of knowing
-(Haraway's) move from *optics* [a politics of positioning, in Situated Knowledges] to *diffraction* [an optical metaphor for the effort to make a difference in the world, in Modest_Witness]
Katie King: “apparatus of literary production”: a matrix from which “literature” is born.
...the “facticity” of biological discourse that is absent from literary discourse and its knowledge claims. ----> Are biological bodies “produced” or “generated” in the same strong sense as poems? (biological body ~= poem)
“material-semiotic actor”: the object of knowledge as an active, meaning-generating part of apparatus of bodily production
bodies as objects of knowledge are material-semiotic generative nodes.
“objects” do not preexist as such --> Their boundaries materialize in social interaction. Boundaries are drawn by mapping practices.
world =/= mother/matter/mutterr />
world ~= coyote (a figure of the always problematic, always potent tie between meaning and bodies. world as coding trickster.)
(feminism) movement rooted in specification and articulation (of [different kinds of] ‘elsewhere’) =/= (assumption of the right or ability to) identities and representation (of identities)
#workshop reading SK (for apass)
Which version of “realism” are you talking about? Recollecting truth and objectivity are activated whenever a ‘point of view’ is produced among other metaphors that we use in our practice and thinking in techno-scientific societies. In this group reading session we are going to study one of the most stubborn and pervasive phantasms in art and sciences, the figure of objectivity, with the Donna Haraway's 1988 essay ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’. This reading focuses on politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and si[...]
(27)[...notes/midday review.txt]%3.7[...] learn “a whole new set of techniques.” [La Guin])
--the meter of ‘time,’ that essential element, matrix and measure of all kown human-animal art. what if there are other metric systems? art not as an action, but a reaction? not a communication, but a reception? {---> go to my master studies Diploma on passivity in performance art}
registers of ‘complaining’ in Lili's discourse. she is a bit like Faust groaning, habe nun akhhhhh Philosophie and so on. [Ach of Sprache] (that they have done all the work, they know everything, yet know not enough of what really counts [that is the incalculable] and cannot be satisfied by mere knowledge available to them. nor can they keep themselves to the restricted zone of knowability.) so Lili saying “it's too much!” is a hysteric wish for ‘more’?
(Freudian joke, the hysteric says: “is that all there is!?” while the neurotic says: “this is too much!” to the same object)
*it was Goethe who invented the super-ego, Freud named it following him.
the all-or-nothing view: i know everything or i don't know anything, problem of scale, problem of ‘circumstance = reality’
kloAQsvRkFY
the figure of the ‘accuser’ and the ‘straight talk’ for Lili
...that people would speak literally
going from proof to proof, from necessity to necessity --> displacement (=/= detour)
...................................
@Ekaterina; some other characters:
the jealous, the impassioned, the persecutive, the erotomaniacal,
complainer,
noble trader,
Ekaterina, asking for a fabulation? her totem making
Deleuzian fabulation: a fiction made up by people in their process of becoming
making up stories
=/= fiction (on its own; it doesn't have that relation with becoming)
in which conditions the paranoid mother occupies the failiour of the good-enough mother?
what constitutes the ‘site’ for her mother?
(how her) characters keep running into eachother in a universe of recursive connection (?)
**stories that collect stories** [~= archive? my hypertext? a mouth full? --this specific type of stories are dangerously worlders, usually handed to the unquestioned mechanics of universalized taxonomy and 17th century rigs: encyclopedic homogeneous tables. they are the stuff of ajayeb]
(mispronounced by Ekaterina > captured by Hoda > found object by Sina)
stories that collect other stories:
1- archive ~--> sortability
2- translation ~--> linearity
==> universality (that both these stories claim)
(my work on hypertext apass ajayeb graph rigs, is to deal within these conditions of storying. my shift of interest)
...................................
(“dealing” @Luiza:)
(or in Lili's term “..a way to tackle issues”)
[with Avital]
*modalities of [...]
(30)[...notes/midday review.txt]%4.2[...]evant for Lili also]
***complaint : the disenfranchised (az hagh mahrum shodeh از حق محروم شده) language of muted rage***
what is (let's) bitching together?
is religion one long complaint? (--'reformation’ as a cover-up)
the “i prefer,” non-need, non-preference
*forms of relatedness--in certain societies the opening self of sociality consists in complaining. (starter-utterances; social encounter involves nagging about your friends, parents, lovers, etc.) --making friends is via complaining. (this is about the conditions of Mitsein, being-with) {non-affirmation ~/=? complaint; we mistake so easily non-affirmation with complaining. (is this Lili's take? her complaints about the insufficiencies of being.)} --> is complaint parasitized by calls for retribution?
Klage (complaint) --to--> Anklage (accusation)
*complaint remains a repetitive fixation that feeds rather than exhausting its course (/Avital, aw9Cv_wQ4CQ) -- it does not finish itself off, or move up the ladder of transformation [important for Sana], actually increases pain --> so, (according to the analyst:) complain is jacking up one's suffering (the Analytiker can't take it anymore)
Avital > Kittler: the Ach of Sprache, (in our historical language usage:) literature or language as complaint. sigh in literature (also pointed out by Lili)
--the modern techo-monster Faust opens with the complain
**what is then a proper address?
...the wish for more
-do machines complaint or lament?
@Luiza; (one of sub-phenomenon of utterance) *blush* registers a complaint(?)
(--> to be noted that certain white skin-colors considered racistly “capable” of displaying moral anxiety.)
-a level of affect and meaning that remains at the loss of words, between shame and excitement, confession and disavow. blush speaks for her at moment when she cannot stand up for herself?
-or it betrays her with a sudden spread of skin-mapping releasing a secret or indexing a moral blemish (lakedar لکه دار), a pigmentation... (how to read it?)
-blush manages to register a complaint and it signs off [concludes] at an unspoken accusation...
-blossoming of senses, cultural significance, who is capable of blushing? --> (decency's) *outrage* (--> libidinally charged, prompting a political arousal --> still a vitality stirs in the complaint--*the complaint can bring movement*) [Luiza's climate of resistance and her integrated modality of ‘struggle'] --> **inner life of morality**
-flush?
[complaint,] is it issued from a place of impotence or does it have the potential to move mountains? (Avital--Sina's emergency supply of meaning)
can it arrive at any destination whatsoever?
‘complain’ and ‘explain’ relationships
(laughter as a form of complaining)
‘complain’ and ‘politeness’ relationships
what complaint has to do with our anger[...]
(31)[...notes/midday review.txt]%4.6[...]al (,, interrupting it)
for my ajayeb, how can i carve out a space to nurture my idea? --> nest-building --position/place--> digging out a bit of earth
*speculative empiricism : scientific + narrative
working with ajayeb so that it might stimulate a specualtive empiricism for composing more livable worlds --> ajayeb's storied biospheres
...................................
the notion of ‘magic’ in popular TV series, such as ‘Harry Potter’ franchise and ‘The Magicians’ among many others, and instrumentalization. magic as information technology that is completely instrumentalized. the capitalist ideology of ‘tool’ and ‘usefulness’ are insinuated heavily in the hipster figures of ‘The Magicians’ in the way that they interupt history and knowledge-burdened living. “stop the history lessen! tell me how do we kill the beast with it?” (the stupidity of the hipster hero moving through the matrix of merely teleological phenomena, stripping pleasure off thinking...)
(utopian?)
what a magic spell is good for if it is not a leverage?
[title]
The Magicians and The Absolute Freedom and Terror
(‘The Magicians’:) magic: instrumentalizing the logos
knowledge is literal --> magic spells are literal {the result of magic spell is predetermined}. in this case, the magic is both an instrument of power and renunciation of knowledge
(Heideggerian) techne of the Western project is an instrumentality that takes over, arrests, or enframes what it desires to manipulate or contain. (Christian Hubert's notes)
=/= poiesis, a bringing-forth (in Heidegger: blooming of the blossom) (also Greek)
“[(for the techno-monster-magicians) everything is] code to be cracked”
a kind of fantasies that Don Ihde calls techno-fantasy, which have been part of the transhumanism since 19th century
the toxic distinction between techne from episteme (since Homer). ‘The Magician’ suggests magic as a technology or tool apart from its context of involvements and referentialities : a hermeneutic or alterity relation =/= (Heidegger:) the tool is an embodiment relation
(one of the characters even states that humans without magic invented computers as replacement)
‘The Magician’ dismisses the generation of knowledge in the praxis of tool-use. science/magic is pragmatic relation of equipment or tools as ready-to-hand. the ideology of a knowledge relation: magic (as tool) is present-at-hand --> ontological relationship to the world (----the characters want to go and have an icecream when they are finished with all the magical fights.)
this notion of magic as tool (=/= epistemological object) in use achieves (what Don Ihde calls) *instrumental transparency* --> It “withdraws” when in use, but becomes conspicuous again when broken or missing [--> this is precisely the standard account of techno[...]
(33)[...notes/midday review.txt]%5[...]rticular memory
stitching together of the naked ethnic body
hupersexuality
...those who are undersexed
...................................
%note on Alice's workshop:
how the idea of mimesis came when we were not sure what she meant by “make note.” the signifier of “note” defined itself in a collective mimetic semi-conscious way.
(=/=? my work on how signifiers transmit and transform --> parasitism, rumorology, etc. ... weaker neighborhoods of thought)
Alice's notions:
•explosion <--> dance
•the “generative” notion in her discourse (--> notion of “active,” and “conscious intentionality” [--> a property of human agency and agential exceptionality. (the metric of) her work/workshop distinguishes the self-aware active entity from non-communicative receptive entity, ***intransitive =/= transitive-->{her privileged object}, and that distinction is not useful for me right now])
•the authority of the trope “practice” for Alice
(what would be a nonmimetic understanding of eachother? @Juan)
•the workshop was not her ‘thinking’ or ‘making’ in process or an open question or a not-knowing, rather the workshop was based on her (finished) ‘notions,’ with her ‘indisputables,’ her ‘literal’ objects; (dance, active, body, imagination, practice, generative, creative, etc.)
•production of the “I” in her work; (a nasty side-effect: collateral individuation) (when were the moments in the workshop that an interesting “we” was created and for whom?)
•the problematic difference between ‘literal’ and ‘metaphorical’ at the footing of her thinking (--> my whole apass research is about this)
•(artist's) imagination as a magic wand that can transform things
*what helped me was the idea of thinking with a ‘dormant metaphor’ (in my own work) and ‘activate’ it, in a way that the problems and pleasures of thinking with that metaphor is felt. by ‘dormant metaphor’ what i mean is an operative word that one is using often and is left uninterrogated. for example the problems of “landscape” as a particular ontological tool for me became apparent only after i committed myself to that metaphor in the course of the interview with Pierre and Alice. to stay with a story, to live its contradictions. (and the position of it in a sentence)
•“it was ‘landscape’ talking; not me!”
•why i was seeing Tehran as the ‘ghostly landscape’? (matter of a confrontation with Tehran? exteriority of my subjecthood is at stake? ~->!? the arbitrary position of “genius loci” : that from a genius position one can see for good. -how to make myself nonarbitrary--not subject to individual determination--in relation to Tehran? --> towards ‘situated knowledge’)
•what kind of material-discursive practices thinking with “landscape” committed me to? [to explore and feel this commitment (and its consequences) is ‘staying with the trouble’ for me]
[...]
(35)[...notes/midday review.txt]%5.4[...]ng good at to) explain what somebody else said
1- the first question has no clear answer, what i know is not placed somewhere in me, it is always an articulated matter of ‘with’ or in interaction with, it is a sym, changes before i can grasp, knowing is done always with a figure or a thing, it includes all sorts of optics and technologies, (affect theory, media theory, epistemology,)
2- the response to the second question is also not clear, i am not sure what i am told, i don't remember or hear, what i am told is infolded in what i know, (when i started with my islam lecture series i was testing the waters of these two questions and the possibility of staying with them without freaking out of ambiguity or ploting an answer)
3--> #cat's cradle
#on hypertext note:
i am becoming skilled at looking at my notes:
{(1) what are the *skills necessary* [=/= tabula rasa (of the reader, of the audience) of the communo-capitalism's standard of “user-interface"--the strange idea that the interaction and reading doesn't need or must not need learned-efforts or skills, that it should be “easy” and “effortless” --> fallacy of the unskilled listener.] to engage, interact, and get involved with the interface, data-set, grammar, and literacy of (my) reservoir? }--> ** let's ask that question with every apparatus that engages us into desire, movement, articulation, ...
skills --> to become ‘literate’ in this particular way --> situated knowledge includes this situated literacy and skills of reading particular to the object of “text” (in that case how do i address my interest in the pervert reader? the skills of the unlearning*)
the skills necessary for my work to work comes with time, attention, and desire ~-=>? #harem (=/= ladies room)
--> (2) this skills of (my) reservoir, what set of questions or problems equip me to address?
varzidan, varz, varzide, ورزیده
Sennett's love for his subjects is extraordinary (=/= iconoclasm, futurism) and it influences me deeply, his voice and care when he opens his reflection, findings, etc.
ok, again, the ‘skill’ question:
•1--> what are the set of skills needed for my work?
•2--> which problematics these skills equip me to address?
•3--> can i (or should i) not know these problematics in advance?
the bow and arrow --|)-> ♥ in my apass endweek (as sound object) was a relic of our shared physical energetic space, the nondiscursive --> how to keep it inarticulate?
•a way to record space, which is always social =/= silenced with no agency of the recorder (the “quiet recorder”)
•also a playful respective reading of La Guin, (something that may seem a misunderstanding of her carrier bag theory)
•carving out a practice agility area
...................................
the question ‘what does X mean?’ is always ‘what does X mean for yo[...]
(37)[...notes/midday review.txt]%6.2[...]tions or problems equip me to address?
varzidan, varz, varzide, ورزیده
Sennett's love for his subjects is extraordinary (=/= iconoclasm, futurism) and it influences me deeply, his voice and care when he opens his reflection, findings, etc.
ok, again, the ‘skill’ question:
•1--> what are the set of skills needed for my work?
•2--> which problematics these skills equip me to address?
•3--> can i (or should i) not know these problematics in advance?
the bow and arrow --|)-> ♥ in my apass endweek (as sound object) was a relic of our shared physical energetic space, the nondiscursive --> how to keep it inarticulate?
•a way to record space, which is always social =/= silenced with no agency of the recorder (the “quiet recorder”)
•also a playful respective reading of La Guin, (something that may seem a misunderstanding of her carrier bag theory)
•carving out a practice agility area
...................................
the question ‘what does X mean?’ is always ‘what does X mean for you?’
...................................
i am following the movement of certain words here
spam =/= internet
spam operates on/with patterns of literacy or an existing (in)sufficiencies in known categories of cognitive biases that people have
...................................
[title]
“it's your turn now to play”
...................................
(@Luisa on space,) (question of:) producing (your) presence
material-discursive --> semiotic-psychosis --> her Wortsalad
(Bocola > Kohut > Mondrian's bipolar structure:)
creation of universal beauty / aesthetic expression of oneself
(=?=> transcend the framework of artistic production)
exhibitionist pole of the self / idealized pole of the self
the grandiose self / the idealized structures
worldviews / self-images
what is the (diametric, dialectical) internal drama of her thinking and work?
(what are?) Luisa's overarching, idealized conception that lays claim to the validity of her values and standards as applied not only to herself and environment but to the entire universe: (question of structure)
•(pre-babylonian) universal abstractionism --> embodied knowledge
•fluid equilibrium --> movement of Being
[is this a romantic structural attitude?]
-and how is she confronted with cosmos prior to her inscriptions? (question of realism)
-what is (the mystery of) a ‘being through interpretation’ for her? (question of performativity)
[realistic:] to take possession of essential aspects of the external reality (~-> recreate them in the imagination) [--> empirical?]
[structural:] to experience the external reality as parts of an interconnected and comprehensive whole
[idealistic/symbolist:] to connect the (inner[...]
(40)[...notes/midday review.txt]%6.3[...]on’ for her? (question of performativity)
[realistic:] to take possession of essential aspects of the external reality (~-> recreate them in the imagination) [--> empirical?]
[structural:] to experience the external reality as parts of an interconnected and comprehensive whole
[idealistic/symbolist:] to connect the (inner) particular to the general
[romantic:] to make (inner) invisible visible
sublimated gratification of instincts, ambitions and ideals, (homogeneous) gestalt and expression of the self, narcissistic equilibrium, test its viability, haptic art,
“invisible reality and the aesthetics of universality” or a mean by which universal is recognized*
timelessness, wholesomeness, indivisibility, aesthetic standards
-pictorial thinking, movement thinking, affectual thinking, {--> all issued by the notion of “pure” and “purity”? tendency toward idealization? utopian?}
movement (the act) =/= mobility (the possibility)
(is Luisa interested in?) the immanent laws and essential unity of all being
...step to complete nonobjectivity
...objects with their expression of plasticity
-what is the symbolic term in her work?
she said: “space is literal.” --> the wholesome is proclaimed in the artistic act itself (and not as metaphor) --> experienced directly =/= imagined
--> احشايى the viscera (ahsha), visceral theory: affect and embodiment, transmissible physical charges, porous bodies,
@Luisa
kP_AfO7Ms4I
how to create a condition in which she can herself later give access to her thinking and making?
1- propose a curatorial gesture of an assembly: Luisa, Mondrian, Zen master, Malevich; with Bocola and Ahmed;
2- to open an investigation of affective economies for her: abstraction, constructivism, idealism, figurative empathy, symbolism, longing,
3-
4-
•
(psychoanalysis [@Luisa] allows us to see that) *emotionality involves movement*
associations whereby “feeling” take us across different levels of signification, not all of which can be admitted in the present. (+Ahmed)
-emotions move back and forth (past associations, repression traces on present) and sideways (sticky associations between figures and signs) --> something as the cause of a feeling in someone --> “involving relationships of *difference and displacement*{as the form or language of the unconscious} without positive value” --> affective economies -->{social, material, psychic}
{ psychoanalysis = "absent presence” of historicity-->(sideways movement of feelings) }==offers==> a theory of emotion as economy***
-by economy, Ahmed means, like capital (is about the movement of commodities and money*), an effect of its circulation (--> Luisa)
-the subject is one nodal point in the economy =/= subject as its origin and d[...]
(41)[...notes/midday review.txt]%6.4[...]ct” is less terrorizing than assuming that there is something natural that binds us... (@Luisa) contract is a non-natural conventional object. (the textual nature of contracts allows it to be read, written, rewritten, reformatted and rearranged.)%-->{ontic & ontologic}
•what kinds of violations does the contract capaciously includes in itself?
•there is nothing natural about here and us being here. (spatiotemporally clock tells us not only what time it is, but also where and who we are: how “time-teller” is spatially architecturally phallically positioned: in the center, on the top, wrapped around the body, and so on.)
...................................
[apass opening week 08.05.2017, (my response to) what is “artistic research”?] artistic research is a fancy way of transforming your “weird feelings” about the world into an “inquiry,” so to say, and at the same time resist to be faithful to standard accounts of what counts as a “serious knowledge claim.” So it includes a lot of messy thinking-feeling, embodied practices, affects, poeticity, semi-scientific work, magic, data collection, mutative interpretative reading, forgetting things, detours, rituals, dead-ends, writing under the influence of scarce foreign obscure philosophies, literary drugs, and boldly using metaphors from different disciplines of “study” that one can find. So, on the one hand, it is a term, invented to indicate a “fluid modern personality” within a turn in humanity studies that opens up to ‘what an artist already knows’ or ‘what an artist is allowed not to know’ within their specific historically situated set of tools. And, on the other hand, it indicates an important shift in the education of art, in which the attitude of the artist changes: instead of making things into a “resource” for artistic creation, rather making things into a “topic.” That means a whole new set of relationalities and new forms of attention need to be learned and cultivated, which were historically often absent in the education of art.
-i want to bring a circus inside {--> within}
-my business still with aesthetics (my own image) (narcissistic stuff...)
-to show up as a guy, castrated and very advanced (--> you can only come up castrated unless you are extremely advanced, #harem stuff)
-i am trying to come forward with all the rigor and rhetorics available to me
the death score
Leo correcting his proper name in my mouth. (signature: master of your name --> master of your house)
Leo named his future projection: “Empathoscene”
[sometimes your name is the first doorkeeper (as in Kafka'a Turhüter)]
Eszter's ‘what is there as an obstacle to the freedom of man (?)’ (question marked by me)
--> the spatial gesture of the ‘stop’ (#Selma)
Maarten's version of confusion (stated by himself) is due to that: the messianic horizon i[...]
(42)[...notes/midday review.txt]%6.7[...]lly on Wheels, adding “on wheels” to the title of every single page, using the move function of Wikipedia: renaming the existing title ==> moved to another namespace, without changing the base title)
-like myself, her saboteurs are critically not symbolic nor ontic, rather sometimes epistemic, or better, ontologic: they don't vandalize the “thing” itself, but the “nature of the properties” that constructs that thing for us
-rocket sculture (what does it mean for her?)
...................................
[the question of inevitability of anthropical view]
there is no final answer to a kind of question but a lot of answers
through inhabiting a figure you are crafting you find yourself addressing a set of problems
agency: liveliness of artifacts (?). there is some kind of liveliness that is both human and nonhuman
the kind of sociality that joins two categorically separate mode of agencies, is a sociality that constitutes both --> the interaction of humans and machines produced both =/= unilateral action
(my whole point or joke, with the bow and arrow was that the arrow of index finger does not move in one way.)
[=/= another mode that comes to mind is when your intimacy making leads always to yourself, getting laid, literally. that is when your concern becomes only you and someone, sexually interested --> economically, and you don't concern the sociality of your people with each other. #techno-capital singular subjectivity @--> this is super relevant for Sven, maybe: how one becomes interested, invested, and skillful in provoking interesting socialities for friends and peers--and not only for oneself? creating, inciting zones of connectivity]
-[it was not accidental that the rhetoric of drugs came up with Lilia when I suggested the attention to anthropos --> what figures human and otherwise was for her the subject of drug-induced rhetoric of mind-alteration; (this is the anthropos of the Enlightenment Europeans and classical Greece talking:) “in order to get rid of me you must take drugs!” #fable/_ --> being sober(?!), anthropos becoming, human nature, common sense, empiricism and interpretation are at stake here]
-[another thing was the label of “animal” that was passed around as a form of mock, instead of provocations for more conversation, I was stupefied. --how can we go on together and not render each other commitments nonsense?]
“point of view” is an important metaphor
#in my work in apass i am working on descriptive practices [poetics of animal description, histories of nonhuman inscription, etc.] to learn to name latent (and therefore emergent) ontologies, to name ‘what we are doing in new ways,’ which are hard to name. (also refusing not to name the violences of others and yourself. to reckon the nature and scope of the erasures we do in our works.) % why do you think that is important?
#and my shift of attention t[...]
(43)[...notes/midday review.txt]%6.9[...] name the violences of others and yourself. to reckon the nature and scope of the erasures we do in our works.) % why do you think that is important?
#and my shift of attention to peer's works is about that: our domain of practices must make claim on each other <== we inhabit differences together (--> attention and work on:) ‘local category abstractions’ (how do we talk and make each other feel our subjects of interest in apass for example) --> (the cumulative, associated and sensed) routines, gestures, and (inter)surfaces of our everyday life in apass, as a group of researchers, that don't necessarily align ==> worlding comes from these things.
[attunement =/= argument]
the name of the world is “detail”
***translation (essentailly imperfect) is the very condition of signification --> trope is the very condition of language
...................................
don't be docile bodies or innocent bystander, do what you have to do to constitute your courage
all i am saying is that: it is not clear what the destiny of art (or of anything) is
...................................
perhaps what i am trying to learn--with apass, ajayeb, writing, harem, etc--is to ask what do i need--which skills, abilities, or literacies--to become equipped to share the experience of the habits of the world (of ajayeb) that i am discovering
...................................
Luisa: “the visual (side)effects of a ‘not being supported’”
effect --> object --> suport --> object2 --> suport3 --> suport4 --> ...
(at one point Marialena pulling away a support box ==> Luisa's cry sound side-effect of a ‘not being supported’)
•?how is it done for her: construction of indifferent objects
•which import function is materializing her ‘objects’? [public import]
I want my friends to become marvelous thinkers makers, I want them to ask interesting questions
Esta: “when we enter the presentation we are researchers, we are not friends” [--> “neutrality” of encounter]
(but i want to explore new places in my work with the people who care for you)
(is this at all possible? to enter with friends a non-friend zone?)
inclusion =/= involvement
(inclusion usually mistaken as literally for physical inclusion)
How Kobe's work can move from a “case-finder agency” to a consequential work? [--> storytellings for making consequential meanings*] that means: what does it mean to live in the consequences of the relations one is enacting?
(when I look at my friends and peers in apass, I can see and feel the knowledges they inhabit in their bodies and the living effects of their languages. I re-figurally feel the figures they embody and their objects whether they assist or resist states of transformation.)
ephemeral things become food
[...]
(44)[...notes/midday review.txt]%7[...] is not clear what the destiny of art (or of anything) is
...................................
perhaps what i am trying to learn--with apass, ajayeb, writing, harem, etc--is to ask what do i need--which skills, abilities, or literacies--to become equipped to share the experience of the habits of the world (of ajayeb) that i am discovering
...................................
Luisa: “the visual (side)effects of a ‘not being supported’”
effect --> object --> suport --> object2 --> suport3 --> suport4 --> ...
(at one point Marialena pulling away a support box ==> Luisa's cry sound side-effect of a ‘not being supported’)
•?how is it done for her: construction of indifferent objects
•which import function is materializing her ‘objects’? [public import]
I want my friends to become marvelous thinkers makers, I want them to ask interesting questions
Esta: “when we enter the presentation we are researchers, we are not friends” [--> “neutrality” of encounter]
(but i want to explore new places in my work with the people who care for you)
(is this at all possible? to enter with friends a non-friend zone?)
inclusion =/= involvement
(inclusion usually mistaken as literally for physical inclusion)
How Kobe's work can move from a “case-finder agency” to a consequential work? [--> storytellings for making consequential meanings*] that means: what does it mean to live in the consequences of the relations one is enacting?
(when I look at my friends and peers in apass, I can see and feel the knowledges they inhabit in their bodies and the living effects of their languages. I re-figurally feel the figures they embody and their objects whether they assist or resist states of transformation.)
ephemeral things become food
...................................
Esta, risking one's life
@Hoda, Xiri,
the idea of “express its inner experience”
simulation of
Xiri's sense of entitlement to accusation
@Leo, fiction of sharing
‘something tangible, like a meal’
something phantasmatically hooked up to libidinal openness, like a drug
@Elen, DUI: driving under influence, what are we on when they were driving her cars
DUI has become the pharmecy take on drugs to take away and winning the drug war
movement under influence, MUI
legelized use of motor activity
driving while impaired/driving while intoxicated (DWI)
drink-driving (UK)
driving risky (DR)
drunk driver (DD)
the notion of game and rule for Elen and Luisa and Eszter: it is until ages of 3 and 6 that children must not play by rules, and only after that the concept of rule-based-games (such as sports) should be introduced to them. what does that say about our art[...]
(45)[...notes/midday review.txt]%7[...] an audience that doesn't want to know. but still somehow they became not indifferent to my madness and we managed to establish lines of interest and interference (=/= restoring the phalus to its proper place, or getting a membership)
i am building another wit =/= you know when you are on some kind of auto-respond, those smart fast answers. my wits take ages to come through. in a way i have been slowing down certain kinds of wit. that's also why it is so easy to silence me.
i have been also busy with the timing of understanding. how to keep understanding open and ongoing? there is this standard general sense that becomes very upset when things are not immediately understood (#double-click democratization of communication,) my workings have been perhaps invested in keeping my own (not-fully-)understood alive for a while. if things were instantly understandable we wouldn't be here.
...................................
question at Hoda
how to make her interested in metaphysics? in queer studies and practices
physics is the river of phenomena
meta: above, among, beyond
ontological commitment to:
sense of wonder
sense of sadness
sense of madness
what (else) literature can be if not elegy?
sonic level of sign-making and significance in her act
soft-spoken adjectives
“sigh”: poetry's start-up engine, aaaahh
somewhere between lament and mourning
proper address of the mother
which ‘scene of modern or classical language’ you are opening?
‘sigh’ is important, sigh initiates (many including german and iranian) literature
iranian historical comfort zones
where literature starts with sigh
when and how did you learn to sigh?
sigh is from the family of the specialized languages of complaining?
temporal climate of your remembrance (as mourning) --> related to the past?
mourning and memory are sojourn for her
incorporating the object of (her) loss
(holding onto) the unhappy objects of difference
anger, pain, misery, ...
which (good or bad) feelings saturates her poem?
question of saturation
which feelings modified by which poetics sutures which wounds? زخمبندی
or to be more psychoanalytically correct: where is the wound?
my own affirmative exposure of the unhappy effects of her poetry
what is the image of the ‘better life’ in her poetry?
somehow in the literary habitus she is moving, the origin of descriptive/inscriptive saying is made by an initial violation
Hoda's poem, which energies does it unleash in her?
sokhan-e ranj سخن رنج
شعر غنایی Lyric poetry, a formal type of poetry which is defined by or dedicated to expressing so-cal[...]
(46)[...notes/midday review.txt]%7.6[...]ign-making and significance in her act
soft-spoken adjectives
“sigh”: poetry's start-up engine, aaaahh
somewhere between lament and mourning
proper address of the mother
which ‘scene of modern or classical language’ you are opening?
‘sigh’ is important, sigh initiates (many including german and iranian) literature
iranian historical comfort zones
where literature starts with sigh
when and how did you learn to sigh?
sigh is from the family of the specialized languages of complaining?
temporal climate of your remembrance (as mourning) --> related to the past?
mourning and memory are sojourn for her
incorporating the object of (her) loss
(holding onto) the unhappy objects of difference
anger, pain, misery, ...
which (good or bad) feelings saturates her poem?
question of saturation
which feelings modified by which poetics sutures which wounds? زخمبندی
or to be more psychoanalytically correct: where is the wound?
my own affirmative exposure of the unhappy effects of her poetry
what is the image of the ‘better life’ in her poetry?
somehow in the literary habitus she is moving, the origin of descriptive/inscriptive saying is made by an initial violation
Hoda's poem, which energies does it unleash in her?
sokhan-e ranj سخن رنج
شعر غنایی Lyric poetry, a formal type of poetry which is defined by or dedicated to expressing so-called personal emotions or feelings.
the Lyre, a string instrument in Greek classical antiquity, is tuning the technicality of this ‘form’
historical contingencies of “personal feelings”
?what is more singular than your “personal” highs, trips, crashes, “feelings” ==> a text telling about itself (its ownmost experience of something that is radically singular)
-rhetoric of singularity
-(my point is that the expression of your) innermost experience (is often signed by someone else)
--> “distributed biographies,” thinking about sociality of perception
her poem is her textual body (<--> sexual body)
ecstasy
is subjectivity (permanently for Hoda) ecstatic?
this is the question of ‘where is the subject’? according to different practices with ecstasy we are outside ourselves. (in religion that is precisely where the ‘inside’ is located)
-permanent or structural ecstasy is clearly political
-ecstasy is disruptive
how much should I be invested or interested as a friend for your happiness and wellbeing?
•fellow-feeling
•sympathy (is expressed by:) returning feeling with like feeling
Sina: if a thinking makes you sad, that thinking is probably wrong?
within the rhetoric of integration a [...]
(49)[...notes/midday review.txt]%7.6[...]tive optical system
--> to be careful (or keep in check) with sequential palindromic notion of pop-up book, to deal with the parsable seesaw motif inherit in the pop-up book Blickmaschin
•use hylomorphic: assumes form is inscribed onto passive matter (by an agent with a design in mind)
•
(relevance should be worked) non-ironic non-symbolic non-anamorphic non-palindromic non-hylomorphic (?)
...................................
towards writing the end of apass dossier
•practices: workshops, (bow and arrow,) ajayeb.net, rigs --> pop-up book, notes, routines, excess,
•trajectory: bibliography, wonder, ongoingness, ontology,
•productions: study as artwork, reading as artwork, bottom-top approach to writing,
•findings: every research practice: must include “body image”, must include “the image of creativity” especially if you are iranian, must employ ontological attention to differential productions, must rework decompose redefine its root-metaphors, must give extensive equipment list, must trace its social connections in a wider ecology of practices, must include a critique of technology,
•moments of composition: a scene animated by some quality, or... taking place as accidents (or not)
key literature, magic wands:
1st stage:
•Richard Sennett: Flesh and Stonne --> learning about body image
•Manuel Delanda: A 1000 Years of Nonlinear History --> learning about material histories
•Eduardo Kohn: How Forests Thinks --> learning about semiotics
•Timothy Morton: Sublime Objects --> learning about ontology
•Avital Ronnel: (lectures and articles) --> learning about poetics
•Donna Haraway: (lectures and articles) --> learning about rhetorics
2nd stage:
•Martha Kenney: Fables of Attention --> *rationality: mixture of the highly rational and the highly fantastic
•Karen Barad: Posthumanist Performativity, Invertebrate Visions --> learning about apparatus
•Eva Hayward: visualizing apparatuses --> her interest in optics, in the optics in which marine invertebrates and people come together through visualizing apparatuses
•Vinciane Despret: The Becomings of Subjectivity in Animal Worlds --> learning about anthropo-zoo-genetics
•Kathleen Stewart: nonrepresentational theory --> other ways of description
•Katie King: technologies of writing --> a better thinking of locals and globals
•
(curiosity ==>) having to figure out how to do something that i don't already know how to do:
•ongoingness of collective practices of knowledge and concern
•talking about (what is going on with) ajayeb
•paying attention to differential ontologies
•the stuff that happens through face-to-face colleagueship
•to be in productive alliance
•
unalianated critical work = art
Seif[...]
(50)[...notes/midday review.txt]%7.9[...]by i think i am getting it”. i also always come back, loop again through the same material, go back to the question we were raising before and ***“watch what is happening to the language”***(Haraway). these are the ways my connections work. artistic and scholarly work works by **modes of attention** [--remember--> your mode of attention (= your mode of abstraction) is doing the foregrounding and the world is not actually built that way. so you make ‘your mode of attention = world’ to inhabit something for a certain time only to do a certain kind of work)] --(because)--> you are always jumping into the middle of something that is ongoing before you, into the middle of many conversations. you are learning how to get it in several ways at once. the hypertext that i have been building also characterizes these kinds of layering upon layering of textual work. teaching myself how to write and how to play with ideas.
working with (Haraway's) kind of good-enough approach to a body of scholarship --> inhabiting many things that i have only got half-digested (=/= through digestion, particular bodies of reading that people need to have mastered in order to argue)
(after five years now i am) feeling myself (a little bit more) competent and confident in (some) scientific literacy and in (some of) the skills of the arts and literature --> ?
after apass: apass was a safe-enough space for my inventive processes, to make interesting mistakes, but do i need a real scholarly undertaking with ajayeb?
i had a lousy education, don't know still how to write well and coherently and sustain a project. i don't have the skills to pull off my research as a phd, as a scholar. i need someone to work with me line-by-line. i need to go people who have serious educations in my subject, and ask them questions, and read.
and i am missing that kind of connectivity that your writing being read performs. do i need an atmosphere in which my kind of writerly activities are honored and foregrounded, and expected?
can my ajayeb beome a real scholarly project with seriously labor-intensive student work?
hostility =/= indigestibility {they cannot recognize it, it is something else}--> it is not personal, but a historical state of a discourse, and the nature of the kinds of possibilities that being opened up or closed
(in apass) all of us fail each other in different ways all the time*
we can barely read each other's works/books. but we do, and we struggle with each other's works/books
(in apass i am catching my self giving “advice” to others---risk of the advice:) violation of their integrity
*taxonomy: (constantly morphing) tools, they work and get worked, *they are part of situated conversations* (~ “theory conversations” Katie King < Haraway)
(=/= some kind of enemy that you never do)
***almost everybo[...]
(51)[...notes/midday review.txt]%8.3[...]bility to not being who you thought you were*** : openness to risk, less of a defensiveness, less of an attack mentality, not shaping each other up into vanguards پيشقراول --> (towards thinking) differential/oppositional consciousness (=/= father, single kind of creators)
“you can know if you are wrong in rather interesting, situated ways”
@Leo
@Maarten
[*]"was”: (so important for iranians [#past]) a geographical place, a place:
•of pain
•of fantasy
•of hope
•of possibility
•of defeat
•of breaking and building
(--> a borderland)
metaphors that are also real places
figurings that are also (always unequally) lived in the flesh
to think “contact zone” instead of “binary shape”
ways of living and technologies, ways of doing the world forcibly brought together in relations of serious inequality, but which do not take the simple shape of dominator and dominated
*“abstractions are precious and they take a huge amount of work to know how to build them well”*
(?how do i know when in working with ajayeb) sometimes you are required (at the same time!):
•to be dead literal
•to be precise
•to be analytically good
•to be unforgivingly technically right
•to be flaming imaginative
•
*breakdown*: where the normalizing fails ==> something else emerges
*every collective needs people who feel:
•(a grace given to you by the structure of your cells, you don't know where it comes from:) “root sense that the world is not dead” --> a sense that things are moving and alive and future-full
•its people who feel despair (...emphasize the futurelessness of it all)
*!!!--> we (also) need sensibilities that are angrey at each other
(aligned with Haraway) my position has been that: we don't choose our sensibilities, we wake up and figure out what they are
(Haraway take on the ways we) may enginner as a species now (tech, syntax, etc.)
to refuse the story of the apocalypse + (still) recognizing the depth of the trouble
--> Freud's thanatos غريزه مرگ, a death instinct, (it is a deep, instinctual lure:) *a perverse pleasure in believing in inevitable failure*
*transference is descriptively very apt for what goes on in artistic moves [<-- to be careful of]
**to risk a feeling of (despair, of...)
the ways some of us risk things intellectually and emotionally different than each other
prima donna: doing whatever one does without any particular effort to nuance anything
*multiple impossibilities
learning from religion, the ways of which the name of God has become a[...]
(53)[...notes/midday review.txt]%8.4[...] a consumer who exercises freedom of choice of commodities]
patrons as constituent مولفه (==> new knowledge + themselves as knowers) =/= seamless information consumer discursively produced as an unmarked singular independent self-contained stable universal white male heteronormative technophilic subject [<-- this donesn't realy exisit as a person, rather as discoursive productions]
(now) our electronic recreation is work: our every click is surveilled, generating data about our desires and curiosities that feeds back into our formation as techno-capital subjects (@Sven's enthusiasm with social media--how can Sven has a real chance of producing resistance knowledge?) --> this is not freedom! (-an account of freedom for one entails reciprocal unfreedom for others) --> mixtures of work and play in this new economy, (Calvert > Bateson) the meta-communicative nature of *play[= strict rules with genuine freedom, the dual essence of play: curiosity and relationality];
(Calvert arguing for) “knowledge-makers” who engages in creation of situated knowledges by activity adapting, processing and sharing knowledge within the ecology of library ~= *bibliographic apparatus*
(Calvert's heuristic device to imagine what library practices might emerge:) imperfectly literate constituent seekers
-a double consciousness of play, where cognitive sensation amid multiple affectivities are continually teased between assertion and rejection
-a doubled unconscious connoisseurship of realist conventions pressured at new horizons
[Katie King]
...................................
(women's) mini-encounters with god --> kind of materiality of god that don't fit any of the available categories
now-but-not-then quality of continuities
Haraway's deep commitment to the ties of science and competence, pleasure, empowerment, ([*]science:) this craft where you did this incredibly fragile, important, hard work of asking questions of the world in such a way that you might have half a chance of knowing if you are wrong***
you get it “there” ==> (you have a chance of) figuring out something else*
(sustainable life ways that involve) breeds =/= factory farming
Haraway's problem with veganism's moral, wholistic, complex claim that they make on us (also a necessary kind of contemporary witness): that people's practices with animals as food and fiber and work animals, turning into nothing but museum pieces at best. vegans deadly imagination sometimes don't get what they kill: most kinds of animals that have long histories in close association with people.
there is no relationship to this world that does not involve extensive killig (Haraway)
up-to-the-minute technologies
complicated issues around security apparatuses and different national struggles
histories of di[...]
(54)[...notes/midday review.txt]%8.6[...]if you are wrong***
you get it “there” ==> (you have a chance of) figuring out something else*
(sustainable life ways that involve) breeds =/= factory farming
Haraway's problem with veganism's moral, wholistic, complex claim that they make on us (also a necessary kind of contemporary witness): that people's practices with animals as food and fiber and work animals, turning into nothing but museum pieces at best. vegans deadly imagination sometimes don't get what they kill: most kinds of animals that have long histories in close association with people.
there is no relationship to this world that does not involve extensive killig (Haraway)
up-to-the-minute technologies
complicated issues around security apparatuses and different national struggles
histories of dispossession and genocide
“do you believe?" = "do you believe in a list of dogma?”
totally wrong question: do you believe in God?
[should i go to Berlin after apass?] a parochial person دهاتی (in the pressure of the seriously elite places): you could be here, you could succeed here, but never belong here
Haraway's ‘literal’ makings:
•“companion” is about whom you are at table literally*
•to be homo sapiens is to be in multispecies interdependencies literally*
my issue with the image of the free floating meaning network popular in artists’ thinking: yes meanings foreground and background. they swirl, but they don't swirl at random
...................................
MOU (memorandum of understanding)-->{@Esta + Zoumana + Hoda
*memorandum: memo, reminder, note, تذکره --?--> passport : آنچه موجب یادآوری شود --> آنچه موجب دخول شود
a legal document describing an agreement between parties less formal than a contract
[1994 U.S.-North Korea nuclear pact, the MOU between Bush and Kerry for 2004 debates,]
...................................
batlagh باتلاق
it is (perhaps the most) important to help transform (your or my) ‘wounded-child’ to ‘wonder-child’ (--> @Hoda)
[the image of the wonder-child in all my workings]***
...................................
•accumulative: gradual increase as a whole, someone/something doing the accumulating, emphasis on the process of accumulating
•cumulative: nongradual successive additives, associated with that which is accumulated, emphasis on the result
ad- (“in addition”) plus cumulare, “heap up”, from cumulus, “heap”
...................................
[we need] ability to move from ‘close attention’ to ‘gestures’ and actions on the material world, all the way to an assortment of ‘artifacts’ able to enhance cognition, sensitivity, and sociali[...]
(55)[...notes/midday review.txt]%8.7[...] شود
a legal document describing an agreement between parties less formal than a contract
[1994 U.S.-North Korea nuclear pact, the MOU between Bush and Kerry for 2004 debates,]
...................................
batlagh باتلاق
it is (perhaps the most) important to help transform (your or my) ‘wounded-child’ to ‘wonder-child’ (--> @Hoda)
[the image of the wonder-child in all my workings]***
...................................
•accumulative: gradual increase as a whole, someone/something doing the accumulating, emphasis on the process of accumulating
•cumulative: nongradual successive additives, associated with that which is accumulated, emphasis on the result
ad- (“in addition”) plus cumulare, “heap up”, from cumulus, “heap”
...................................
[we need] ability to move from ‘close attention’ to ‘gestures’ and actions on the material world, all the way to an assortment of ‘artifacts’ able to enhance cognition, sensitivity, and sociality
...................................
Stewart
surge of signs + capital + sensoriums of public culture --> matter & image
images, when circulating things, suddenly enter the senses --> literally make sense ==> look and smell of an incipient vitality --> immanent intensity or force ~ affect
#my coin: two-sidedness of things, virtual meeting actual, seeping edge of potentiality
common sensate affect --> shock --> “continuous trembling that haunts the stable gaze” --> images and sensibilities that constantly exceed (reason, order, and common sense) #telegram
Affect, is about something is happening, something capable of impact
•sometging half noted out of the corner of the eye
•something in the commonsense world
•
(that which escapes/exceeds enclosure) --> it can be put into words[?] --> to become a figure of vitality and even freedom[?]*** @Iranians
[i welcome the reprieve (rokhsat, رخصت, a temporary relief) from] symbolic gridlock
“affect gathers its force to make image touch matter” --> image's power is the power of synaesthesia =/= collection of named “feelings” (invented in discourses of morals, ideals, and known subjectivities)
(let's study how [in Iran] raw materials are formed and exceeded -- sudden and lingering intensity of things) (which darvaze/دروازه/gate we can't and which سوراخ سوزن / surakh-e suzan / hole of needle we pass through)
[i am having always multiple books open, at least two, is that how connection occur for me? #simultaneity]
(Stewart) “I remember childhood as a collection of arresting images”
that hinge on sensory details and open onto luminous scenes of affect [--> Feherlofia/Fehérlófia 1981, Son of the White Horse film. (we must resist calling this film “psy[...]
(58)[...notes/midday review.txt]%8.8[...]n its wake uncanny connections between otherwise disparate states of arrest, like shock and recluse گوشه نشينی” (Stewart)
@Hoda: affect jumps into view as the shock of an unassimilated trauma
cocoon room
holing up in your living room ==> “out there” ==> search for the arresting presence
spectrality and concrete substance
(?when am i) “relaxing” the jumpy move of affect
*Stewart's “jump of affect”
tactile image --(satisfies)--> move of affect --(actualizes)--> something tempting/haunting
-affecting presence at rest
-[in glamour magazines] models frozen in time and space stare back at you in a scene that stages the jump from fantasy to actual body/image and back
-jump from ideal to matter to ideal
-what to wear as the magic of affect itself
copy ~= contact
movies, ads, malls, car phones, daydreams,
modernity's mimetic machine
(“middle class” [or what people thinking as “Iranians"] is not just a “norm” it is a) *womblike space of affect* (where sentimentality and interiority becomes tactile, where ideals and materiality grow to excess,) (imploding under the weight of its own literal embodiment,,,)
-(it is an affective space) where the hegemonic claim *to channel trauma into beauty* is actualized:
•sensible, solid accumulation, family values, colorful decor, techno-gadgets, daily lottery,
•constant stimulation of the senses (--> synaesthetic images, sounds, touches, and smells)
•circuitry of circulation itself
تأثر ta'asor, نتیجهی عواطف natije-y avatef
affect (~= vitality/hope) ~/= (nightmare image of) soical entropy
the big, beautiful, basic, intensely sensate commodity-to-live-in
in Iran:
•(the ‘public space’ or) “outside” ==> a “wilding” scene of crime, chaos, drug-addled monsters, danger, disease, and decay
•“inside” --overflowing-with--> scenes of aesthetic connection
}--> anxiety is the ground over which they (both) march
(modernist) image-affect of the new and clean and up-to-date
the feeling of being in the middle of something big and inevitable, watching it unfold
#my dreams
the labor of looking
“Movies made for women imagine a picture--perfect scene of an Inside--a Home filled with tangible objects that Mean or a Self filled with the intricate dramas of dreams launched, wounded, and finally satisfied or left behind. Affect itself is laid out on the carpet like a beautiful fetish that it is okay to love.”
(the #telegram is littered with image-written signs of personal/public disaster)
the surge of affect toward the scene of abjection --> abjection itself is felt as a contagion --> Navid's comments turned in[...]
(59)[...notes/midday review.txt]%8.9[...]he
-something pleads to be touched
-the act of looking at the telegram's forward: my desire is your desire and we are all together in the mass desire
-images on telegram offer affects to mime, lines of vitality to follow, intimate secrets to plumb, tips to imbibe for safety or good health or the search for things new and vibrant with collective envy
-browsing telegram, we're trudging the rough terrain of bodies, sensuous accumulation, impact
“Sometimes when you hear someone scream it goes in one ear and out the other. Sometimes it passes right into the middle of your brain and gets stuck there.”
(cryptic and as) crystal clear as a scream
[a question or something else] lodged in a tactile sensate anxiety --> aesthetic scene (of the senses) --> scene --> shape
(anxiety has to do with the sensate and tactile and opens onto asthetic)
(some do this all the time [unknown shock of anxiety in the morning]:) morning --> mourning --> sudden dread and start scanning () () [], (trauma as an) everyday walking path
traumatic realism: a figuring that, like traumatic memory, fails to represent the inflicting force as an object in a symbolic order and therefore feels compelled to literally re-present it over and over, *miming the original haunting impact.* (Stewart > Hal Foster)
-the subject surging to bear an affect, surging toward an actualization, passionate connection of the subject who goes with the flow in an intoxicated moment (=/= sober distance)
(Hoda's impact of) shocked subjectivity (--> the real understood as traumatic) --> conjure up memories of death --?--> communal grieving
{referential vs. simulacral readings @Hoda, Marialena (‘referential object for’ / ‘empathetic object in’ /or ‘criticality of’ [<-- i don't agree with these clear cuts of ”/"]; what is “the reality of suffering and death” (or “reality and suffering of death”) for Hoda? (Xiri's interest in her) object's “total integration” into the political economy}
(Stewart's) signs of the senses
satisfaction in the making of sign-shrine
(question of satisfaction at Hoda:) satisfaction as a force, and end, in itself spoken through the bright, blunt, sensate aesthetics of the sign
-something slashes [= a wound made by cutting] at itself and spits at the world (/ politics of slashing --> poetics of slashing / the young girls who “cut” themselves so they can feel alive or, literally “come to their senses”) -- dramas of surge and arrest --> They do not ask for interpretation or construct the subject who would assign them a meaning, [they refuse] reference to “underlying systems” of signification that make them readable as texts
-something refuses to disappear
-(Hoda's land is) the land of sheer circulations --> (the question of) equilibriums --> how can she with her audience (let's say “we”) enter the unnatural calm of[...]
(60)[...notes/midday review.txt]%9[...] object in a symbolic order and therefore feels compelled to literally re-present it over and over, *miming the original haunting impact.* (Stewart > Hal Foster)
-the subject surging to bear an affect, surging toward an actualization, passionate connection of the subject who goes with the flow in an intoxicated moment (=/= sober distance)
(Hoda's impact of) shocked subjectivity (--> the real understood as traumatic) --> conjure up memories of death --?--> communal grieving
{referential vs. simulacral readings @Hoda, Marialena (‘referential object for’ / ‘empathetic object in’ /or ‘criticality of’ [<-- i don't agree with these clear cuts of ”/"]; what is “the reality of suffering and death” (or “reality and suffering of death”) for Hoda? (Xiri's interest in her) object's “total integration” into the political economy}
(Stewart's) signs of the senses
satisfaction in the making of sign-shrine
(question of satisfaction at Hoda:) satisfaction as a force, and end, in itself spoken through the bright, blunt, sensate aesthetics of the sign
-something slashes [= a wound made by cutting] at itself and spits at the world (/ politics of slashing --> poetics of slashing / the young girls who “cut” themselves so they can feel alive or, literally “come to their senses”) -- dramas of surge and arrest --> They do not ask for interpretation or construct the subject who would assign them a meaning, [they refuse] reference to “underlying systems” of signification that make them readable as texts
-something refuses to disappear
-(Hoda's land is) the land of sheer circulations --> (the question of) equilibriums --> how can she with her audience (let's say “we”) enter the unnatural calm of another form of arrest? to feel the scene resist synaesthesia
a state of the senses making contact with pen and paper (and matches)
(my enduring love of watching images, my) optical eye
“[...] young embodiments of a modern middle-ground-in-the-making came face-to-face with an otherness that compelled a closer look” --> violently affective contact
surged toward the scene of their confident excitement
impact ==> the social
#storytelling, compelled to repeat the event as the sentience of it still reverberated in their senses
a grounded writing, that sends people bouncing, takes place as a threshold, hits the senses as a set of provocations, or presents as *a problematic sensed in circuits of reaction already set in motion* @apass
(working with Stewart) writing affect #workshop
a practice of writing ourselves into our worlds as *emergent and disparate ensembles* --> we need the speculative concept of worlding (a term that wins philosophy, criticism, digital studies, and cultural study) in Tehran urgently
-the workshop offers a process of sharing, hearing, questioning, and pro[...]
(61)[...notes/midday review.txt]%9.1[...]osophy's bandwidth
sdwa صدوا --> substances decorated with accidents -->
ldwa لدوا --> lumps decorated with accidents --> featureless lumps, and those things have accidental properties, like cupcakes decorated with colored sprinkles (arayesh آرایش) }--> this thinking still continues, despite the fact that ‘thought has already made it irrelevant’ --> thamii تامی, (for example birds for Attar are merely decorative features of Attar's social, psychic, and philosophical space)
soth صوث --> speculating outside of the human
sim سیم --> small island of meaning
etimom اتیموم --> everything is made of mind
hhbn هبن --> hand-holding benevolent narrator (-which is vanished)
(auto) cad کد --> (automatic) comforting aesthetic distances
iockat --> intentional objects commonly known as thoughts
atot آتو --> (you only ever perceive your particular) anthropomorphic translations of things
ejich جیش --> exhilarating jump into cognitive hyperspace --> displacement that Copernicus or Derrida does
foe --> fantasies of embeddedness [<-- phenomenology <== grounding of Kant (begining in 1900)]
avaa اوا --> a vertiginous antiliteral abyss
iwen --> intimacy with existing nonhumans
mok --> mathematization of knowing (--> Descartes, Newton) ==> hiding philosophical and ideological decisions made in acts of knowing =/= ontology (as a vital and contested political terrain)
icad --> ideology of “the consumer” and its “demands” (that capital then “meets”) --> adventure of modernity
fvod --> from the viewpoint of “objective” description (a bad way of explicating the objects that are already here)
toc --> troops of critique
towwk توک --> ‘technology of what we know’ (techniques that decide the differences between ‘what we know’ and ‘what is’. Morton's hyperobject is a towwk)
usoc --> uncanny strangeness of existence (work of Heidegger)
lawot --> (something is) ‘laying around in the workshop of thinking’ (let's reuse what appears to be broken lawot)
visist = visit + resist
correlationism: the notion that philosophy can only talk within a narrow bandwidth, restricted to the human-world correlate : meaning is only possible between a human mind and ‘what it thinks' = its “objects” (flimsy شل و ول and tenuous رفيق as they are) ~-> the light on in the fridge when you close the door
-Heidegger (towering through) is a correlationist who asserts that without Dasein, it makes no sense whatsoever to talk of the truth of things, which for him implies their very existence--for him idealism, not realism, holds the key to philosophy. (Heidegger's tool-analysis: when equipment--which for all intents and purposes could be anything at all--is functioning, or “executing” [V[...]
(62)[...notes/midday review.txt]%9.3[...]n nature
(no) realism that only bases its findings on “ontic” data
scientific discoveries are necessarily based on a decision about what real things are
*disaster [ontologic] taking place against a stable background [ontic]*
causality after Hume and Kant : causality as a feature of phenomena, rather than things in themselves ==> humans are not totally in charge of assigning significance and value to events that can be statistically measured
entities that become visible through post-Humean and post-Kantian statistical causality --> anthropogenic global warming
causal factoid
humiliators [there is no center and we don't inhabit it]:
•Copernicus
•Darwin
•Freud (displacing the human from the very center of psychic activity)
•Marx (displacing human social life with economic organization)
•Heidegger
•Derrida (displacing the human from the center of meaning-making)
•Nietzsche
•Deleuze and Guattari
•
~= there is no edge =/= (film Lucy or Neil Tyson series suggesting that) there is an edge (of time to see everything perfectly), in some (privilaged) transcendental sphere of pure freedom, Lucy's chair literally sitting a VIP box beyond the edge --> anthropocentrism: the idea of a privilaged transcendental sphere
Kant --> (although we are limited in finitude) our transcendental faculties are at least metaphorically floating in space beyond the edge of the universe --> #milieu #tasavof #sufism
...هزار و یک hezaro yek
universe of trillions of finitudes
[*]thing: a rift between what it is and how it appears
(Morton > Herman:) human consciousness wants *to preserve knowledge as a special kind of relation to the world quite different from the relations that raindrops and lizards have to the world* (<-- so dangerous and so difficult to resist [<-- next level of situated knowledges] -->) also want to claim that the very status of [his] utterance is somehow special <== (human) ‘thought’ is given a unique ability to negate and transcend immediate experience
(claims that the human doesn't exist ==>) elevating the strucure of human ‘thought’ to the ontological pinnacle سرمنزل
everything (such as modernity) banks on a certain forms of ontology and epistemology to secure its coordinates
speculative realism, a rogue machinery
saving power:
•expecting an eschatological solution from the sky
•a revolution in consciousness
•a people's army seizing control of the state
•
obsessive robots (that hold open the sliding doors of history just as they appear to be snapping shut, imprisoning us in modernity forever)
*distance*: (the schizophrenic defense, “object in mirror,”) a p[...]
(63)[...notes/midday review.txt]%9.5[...]llow 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 legecy of 20th century: (Kate's dialectical negativity) to define and work in negative way, an ‘exit,’ a ‘way out’ --> transcendental [---> go to Singh, Khan,]
•question of contemporary reality --> Kate does a totalizing elevation (like many other artists)
•the realm of obedience --> artists’ childish attitude of never accepting someone else's authority (#fighting the system; should we fight the system systematically? @Nicolas)
...................................
basically everything i do is related to the question of reading --> make us better readers
my excessive use of footnote --> the most decisive indication of the concerns of a text are to be found in its margins & no ‘proper’ starting/ending point for reading
each of my performances/projects reflect on their own status as examples of reading/misreading =/= achieving correct reading
literature: the problem of misreading (=/= the language it uses)
[with De Man]
i have become sensitive to the systematic avoidance of the problem of reading, of the interpretative or hermeneutic moment, in literary analysis and art
all language-use is tropological (~ rhetorical)
catachresis (the misuse of a word) <--fluid--> metaphor (the non-literal application of a word) <--fluid--> metonymy (in which the name of one thing is put for that of another related to it)
readability: the possibility of producing an essential/definitive reading --> closure =/= further interpretation
a language which would perfectly fit my multiple identity--persian consciousness
emboding (belonging to) two bordering cultures: western university and persian tradition of subjectivity
•mixture of English and Farsi
•spontaneous shift of style
•
•
...................................
learning from academia: committed to excessive rigor + sriousness of purpose
...................................
(Erikson's) developmental stages characterized by a psychosocial crisis of two conflicting forces: (each stage that came before and that follows has its own ‘crisis’)
[conflictual psychosocial crisis --> virtue ~-> (answers to) existential questions]
-(0-18 months) Trust / Mistrust --> Hope
[Can I trust the world?]
==> what constitutes dangerous situations (in life)
world is undependable, unpredictable, and possibly a dangerous place
[*]trust: syntonic quotient
[*]mistrust: diatonic quotient
--> o[...]
(64)[...notes/midday review.txt]%9.7[...] order to do a limited situated work
“conceptualization = fortification” استحکامات
(to fortify one's own work with concepts ==> settlement)
Manning's affinity with infinitly, more, and multi --> what is their rigor is doing for them? commits them to the nonhabitual. (resisting to name their habits, depriving them of thier habitual labors) [=/= my work on descriptive practices]
-i want to know about their empirical tools that make translation-work visible (==> decomposition), not their conceptual descriptions [=/= textured description with thick details <== i really think the devil is in the details!! }--> art of noticing things]
-i want to know how Manning is compromised into desiring what she is doing. [compromise: being exposed or made liable to danger, suspicion, or disrepute. --the way she told the story of her practice had a difficult sense of success in it, of being cool and correct at every turn, uncompromised. (<-- why is this a turn-off for me?)]
for aesthetic, political, ethical reasons i want Manning to address in their work:
•the question of apparatus --> working within an apparatus of thinking in order to get somewhere in a sustained way. i want them to name their apparatus of literary production. how they engage with the interface, data-set, grammar, and literacy of their reservoir.
•the question of infrastructure --> how they balance the possible and the acceptable, the balance of action, tools, and the built environment
•the question of technology --> how they take apart the tool from its context of involvements and referentialities
•the question of political orientation --> how they have accepted the democratization of knowledge and multiculturalism (the idea of “knowledge for everyone” [--> there is a very thin line between the impulse to democratize and commodify knowledge]; --could multiculturalism be radical capitalism in action?! ...faking diversity to build more diverse companies <-- “lip service”: to just say something but not actually do it)
[--> the hegemony and horror of “different experience” of the so-called different cultures (a form of racism?)]
[multiculturalism =/= trans-species]
[multiculturalism =/= eurasia]
[--> the hegemony and horror of “the completely different” (==>? deskilled society)]
Manning: “in senseLab we work with the people who don't use language, don't write, etc.” (<-- what does that legitimates, conceals, or smuggles? what sorts of hierarchies and ideologies of status emerge out of that?)
-as the philosopher of nonintentionality how did she responded (paranoically?) to our intents when questions where asked?
-as the philosopher of discord how did she responded to disagreement?
(?how do you tell the tale of) *your adventures سلوک and achievements کرامت* (karamat va soluk)
(why self-promot[...]
(67)[...notes/midday review.txt]%10.9[...] the so-called different cultures (a form of racism?)]
[multiculturalism =/= trans-species]
[multiculturalism =/= eurasia]
[--> the hegemony and horror of “the completely different” (==>? deskilled society)]
Manning: “in senseLab we work with the people who don't use language, don't write, etc.” (<-- what does that legitimates, conceals, or smuggles? what sorts of hierarchies and ideologies of status emerge out of that?)
-as the philosopher of nonintentionality how did she responded (paranoically?) to our intents when questions where asked?
-as the philosopher of discord how did she responded to disagreement?
(?how do you tell the tale of) *your adventures سلوک and achievements کرامت* (karamat va soluk)
(why self-promoting is such a turn-off? it makes the listener into someone to convince or win over into the Förderung of the speaker. [with Campbell:] self-marketing creates a ‘perverse knowledge’ about the work of the speaker, that means you give information about ‘healthy’ parts of your practice, your achievements and moral/material awards, with the assumption that the listener is going to make a good decision about the ‘halo effects’ of the speaker, but in fact you are made ‘brand literate’)
or [it is seems elementary but neccesory to ask Manning:] what is the difference between advertisement and knowledge?
there are innumerable ways to adapt to the world without creating a philosophical understanding of the world
(Manning) “we feel the force of form. this kind of beauty has nothing to do with an external aesthetic judgment.” (--> how the personal judgment is not worthy of philo when a tsunami is coming or one is on the way of being gang raped?)
during the workshop Manning remains the center of command. she constantly “knows” (better). and she insists that through letting go of our critical thinking the participants can understand her notions ==>? how can she not build disciples?!
on production
replacing the name of ‘production’ with ‘but we must leave a trace’ (which exactly do let the notion of production sneak back in under an other name)
(Manning on p.16 5th paragraph is an example of an) unaccountable unsituated abstract claim of reality:
•unaccountable --> where do you stand saying this?
•unsituated --> for whom is this good?
•abstract --> how you are saying it?
the notion of “care for the event”
=/= perspectives
=/= subjects
=/= persons
“occasion itself creates its subjects” (<-- you are a subject inside the occasion, how can you stand out and say that?)
(Manning) creating a concept of care =/= care as actually practiced in different parts of the world by people
(what is the politics of not caring?)
Manning's rhetoric of reasoning: ‘v[...]
(69)[...notes/midday review.txt]%11[...]if you think you can be oblivious with things and do away with things and have erasure without remanence, it will go in the state of latency (underground) just to blow up in your face later (the ‘return’ of the repressed has ballistic velocities) --Derrida--> you have to work through with meaning and language (otherwise the old meanings always come back, you are never responsible enough with old meanings)
a word, becomes a thorn in our collective thigh
(what i am learning *rigor* from Avital > Derrida) something looks wrong, (instead of jumping on it and tagging it out,) first say why it is right, what necessitated and motivated it, why it had to be there = rigor: locate the problem zone + say why it had to be there (why it rhymes with what)
(mistake or glitch =/=) error: an exemplary error that teaches you, that had to be made to get where you are going, you had to get into this zone (and as traumatic as it might be) it was neccesory and necessitated by the system that was pushing you forward, it pushed you toward a place of error and blindness and forgetting
...................................
practice of *worldly thinking* with Stewart
vivid pragmatics
weird robust realism of deobjectified deliteralized things =/= ajayeb
to correspond with #telegram media
constitutive differings
teenage: self-division between the move to surge out in a risky worlding and the labor of return alone and weighted
festering + sheltering
“When everything else has gone from my brain—the President’s name, the state capitals, the neighborhoods where I lived, and then my own name and what it was on earth I sought, and then at length the faces of my friends, and finally the faces of my family—when all of this has dissolved, what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that.” Dillard > Stewart
rock-solid otherness
sitting on the granite curb... --Stewart--> sitting on a threshold of expressivity
(Stewart's) intercorporeal intermundane world =/= dull naturalism
(dead matter =/=) the capacity to correspond with a multiplicity of continuous worldings that are both plastic and dense --> grounds us
indeterminate lines of force ripple across the phenomena of a field --> materiality ==> ‘our thought: multidimensional contingent overdetermined’
**we remember in stories of accidents, sledding, and labors**
emerging in circulations (or)
resting in stone (or)
the facades of strip malls
compositional writing: an associational register (of connections and differences) that worlds object-reals [real: a tangle of elements thrown together in a radical composition]
social-material world = composition = prismatic --> for people who are:
•attuned[...]
(70)[...notes/midday review.txt]%11.9[...]accept it when artists in research environment withdraw from reading certain positions by saying “this text is too academic.”
what is the state of art after Goya?
sites where political meaning is produced (the impulse to resist or correct inequality, injustice, lack, damage, tension, etc.) =/= attachment site (languages charged with power, inequality)
(i am interested in women) not because of gender [= identity politics, political correctness], but because of their practice and the question they pursue
-the horrific and dangerous idea that I hear under “I am now reading only women authors”
two visualized increases in the industry, science, and popular culture:
1. “how troubled we are” --> world simulation (catastrophic planet)
2. “how amazing we are” --> brain simulation (networks)
world is fubar ==> is interesting and is work to be done =/= paranoia conspiracy
something I learnt from my KHM study --> that technologies are ambiguous =/= Black Mirror TV series
hollywood =? hyperrealism
(art --?--> idealism)
poor cognition <--> boring environment
another sign of illiteracy:
•popping up of dialects or specialized languages (you walk to the next village and there they speak an almost different language than here)
romantic relationship:
dopamine --> love + hot sex [--> pleasure-related cognition]
anterior cingulate cortex --> empathy + comfort [--> impulse control]
برون افکن بنه زیندار نه در مگر کایمن شوی زین مار نه سر
revisit sanaat tashbih simile
tashbih not as alude but as description (literal)
مار نه سر mar-e noh-sar ~/= world
mar-e noh-sar is not a simile for the world (of the reader) but it describes a particular world that is in the image of mar-e noh-sar
haft modaber هفت مدبر
jealousy as affect --underlying--> Farsi ghazal
ابومعشر بلخی Abu Ma'shar Balkhi
الهی - فلک نور
اثیری - ۸ فلک آسمانی
هیولانی - جزء زیر قمر
...................................
***don't read (or make) theory as a means of empowerment*** (a tool to fight or flight oppression)
...................................
[title]
king real
...................................
my problem with
•conceptual art: jumping (transcending) from material to meaning
•viscerality: every expression matters as long as it affects the viewer in the stomach
(call of) phenomenology: to return to the appearing of that which appears
political philosophy
political science
political art
[...]
(71)[...notes/midday review.txt]%12.5[...]ursue
-the horrific and dangerous idea that I hear under “I am now reading only women authors”
two visualized increases in the industry, science, and popular culture:
1. “how troubled we are” --> world simulation (catastrophic planet)
2. “how amazing we are” --> brain simulation (networks)
world is fubar ==> is interesting and is work to be done =/= paranoia conspiracy
something I learnt from my KHM study --> that technologies are ambiguous =/= Black Mirror TV series
hollywood =? hyperrealism
(art --?--> idealism)
poor cognition <--> boring environment
another sign of illiteracy:
•popping up of dialects or specialized languages (you walk to the next village and there they speak an almost different language than here)
romantic relationship:
dopamine --> love + hot sex [--> pleasure-related cognition]
anterior cingulate cortex --> empathy + comfort [--> impulse control]
برون افکن بنه زیندار نه در مگر کایمن شوی زین مار نه سر
revisit sanaat tashbih simile
tashbih not as alude but as description (literal)
مار نه سر mar-e noh-sar ~/= world
mar-e noh-sar is not a simile for the world (of the reader) but it describes a particular world that is in the image of mar-e noh-sar
haft modaber هفت مدبر
jealousy as affect --underlying--> Farsi ghazal
ابومعشر بلخی Abu Ma'shar Balkhi
الهی - فلک نور
اثیری - ۸ فلک آسمانی
هیولانی - جزء زیر قمر
...................................
***don't read (or make) theory as a means of empowerment*** (a tool to fight or flight oppression)
...................................
[title]
king real
my problem with
•conceptual art: jumping (transcending) from material to meaning
•viscerality: every expression matters as long as it affects the viewer in the stomach
(call of) phenomenology: to return to the appearing of that which appears
political philosophy
political science
political art
...................................
in Tehran (?how are made) the boundaries of jorm (جرم =/= law), gonah (گناه =/= god), and ? (=/= norm)
--> norm, law, sin, akhlagh اخلاق
•[thanks to Gesellschaft =/= Gemeinschaft ==>] jamee جامعه society =/= ejtema اجتماع community = norm + place (+ identity)
◦ ejtemayi اجتماعی social =/= ejamyi اجماعی collective
•tars ترس fear =/= ezterab اضطراب anxiety
•sharm شرم shame =/= khejalat خجالت shyness
[...]
(72)[...notes/midday review.txt]%12.5[...] are shaped by negativity)
positive-negative asymmetry
(in trying to) make sense of the world --> focus more on the negative
bad ==> attention
negative news is more likely to be perceived as truthful
ambiguous stimuli rated as threatening --> survive
(gestalt) law of closure: we perceive pieces of objects as part of a whole when grouped together
to produce counter-knowledge [~= to contest a problem] =/= (we need more) to *seduce our evacuation from the terms that establish the problem*
(Shapiro)
•stressor ==> emotion (short, intense)
•emotion + meaning (cognitively processed repeatedly) = feeling (lasting, less intense, combined)
•emotions هیجانی + feelings احساسی = [*]affect ~= mood
(in apass)
•concept: a medium of conversation
•narcissistic research
◦understanding narcissism is the key to understanding mental health --> *(the experience of) being in a cult = being in relation with a narcissist*
•mode of attention that is didactic and forensic
•(in artistic research environments) most of time we don't have questions
we have games of language --> illiteracy
◦exam: pose your questions =/= answer to my questions
answers don't show your level of knowledge, but the questions you have does
•generative nature of melancholia [*melancholia ==> teaching*]
•(artist's) writing with pearls of wisdom =/= referential writing
three problematic loci in artistic research:
•garden
•archive
•map
*is every garden zoological? --?--> training for future (imperialism)
good gardener ~= good (feeling, caring) imperialist
-enlightenment approach to captivity --> new sense of civilization (what is proper)
-removing any visible explicit means of captivity (animals appear move freeling, as if they wish to be there) <-- affective engagement
animal ~= border figure allowing institution to move between human world and animal world
science for empire --> mobilization of wonder (human capacity for curiosity that makes us human are mobilized in the service of questionable political goals)
...................................
[*]democracy: ‘farmandahi (commanding) = farmanbari (obeying)’
...................................
...thoughts expire on contact with words as quickly as words expire on contact with thoughts
(Pavic's Khazars)
two examples of metamarketing
1. Pleasantville (1998)
2. The Devil Wears Prada (2006)
(my flourishing in the scholl was always highly) teacher-dependent --?--> being social [=/= genius]
...................................
government (counting heads) =/= complexity (how to make mixity work)
<[...]
(73)[...notes/midday review.txt]%12.6[...]ing of the infinite entity :
non-mystic monotheism ==> a personalized (incarnation of) God (--> everything ‘personal’ is subject to death and negation) ==> entrance of God in collectivism
تغییر ماهیت عالم taghyire mahiate alam (change in the essence of the universe) is the subject of study for iranian ancient philosophies and cosmologies
contemplation (moshahede nazari مشاهده نظری) ~= action
knowledge ~= creating (that insensible speculative world) (the world of ajayeb and its siblings is created and stated in my inner vision)
[hush-e nazari هوش نظری, ability to abstract, is the ability to look from above]
[(jaleb budan-e) heja-e bimani هجای بیمعنی, interest for meaningless morpheme]
(human's function:) the transfigurative function of the transcendental machine (karkhaneye mojarad-sazi کارخانه مجردسازی, by Sheikh Muhammad Tabatabayi)
*ta'vil bayad dar jahate axe harkate jami va moshtarek bashad تأویل باید در جهت عکس حرکت جمعی و مشترک باشد
(interpretation/hermeneutics =/= commons/collectivism)
(according to Sohrevardi:) haghighate lafzi حقیقت لفظی (verbal/literal truth) --> the metaphorical entity
face/surate/صورت/apparition/majaz/مجاز/trope --> truth/reality
(سهروردی Sohrevardi's accord:) up in the highest point in the hierarchy of existence there is nur-al-anvar نورالانوار (light of lights) which its material-removing (dematerialising?) abstraction (tajarode made-zoda تجرد مادهزدا) constantly transcends, beyond any other abstraction. ==> first light is originated from it: anvare ghahere انوار قاهره (~= anvare fereshtegani انوار فرشتگانی) ~= first maleke mogharab ملک مقرب (or Bahman بهمن, Vahumane وهومنه, first of Zoroastrian Amshaspandan امشاسپندان) ==> (due to their interactions:) second light, second maleke mogharab is created ==> eshragh اشراق ==> eshragh ==> eshragh ==> ...
جسمیتشناسی jesmiat-shenasi?
رب النوع rab-ol-no ~=? God of type, of abstract examples, (Plato's universals? type, general concept --> is always beyond the horizon, the reality of the type lies beyond a related one that it sustains (‘token’) ["Beyond the horizon there lies a Lion, a Lion more Lion than any more lion. And beyond saying ‘lion,’ which calls forth that Lion, lies yet another, who might just look back. And beyond this eyeing one, lies an undying one, one we call ‘Lion’ because she is a kind.” (Kohn, 2009)] --> apply this idea to the fire)
ارباب الانواع arbab-ol-anva ~=? angelology (iranians loved angels and were good at angelologic thinking, it was a technical term in knowledge production regarding *categories and types*) --> Platonic + Zor[...]
(74)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%14.2[...]d finally made impossible; (Nietzsche)
flora and fauna
this is not the scientist obsessed with an idée fixe--but one capable of uprooting and going
...invites ambivalence
...dreaming of immense edifices and the permanence promised by contracts written in stone
register(s) of understanding
A new fold in metaphysics, testing--that is, the types of relatedness that fall under this term--asserts another logic of truth.
A kind of questioning, a structure of incessant research, perhaps a modality of being, testing scans the walls of experience, measuring, probing, determining the “what is” of the lived world.
i marvel at...
wonders of...
marvels of...
unheards of...
mazhar ol-ajayeb مظهر العجایب
Motehayeran-e متحیران, Tahayor تحیر ~=? to wonder
dar ahval-e... در احوال
dar khavas-e... در خواص
navader-e... نوادر
sefat-e... صفات
ta'ajob تعجب =/=? heyrat حیرت
the mode of attention in ajayebnameh is tuned by ta'ajob (wonder) away from Iranian mystic preferences over transfixation and rapture (heyrat)
which literary or (not)knowing positions are installed in these two (observational?) stations?
the subject of ta'ajob is moved otherwise
تعجب در باب امر قدسی ta'ajob dar bab-e amr-e ghodsi, wonder in the matters of divine
...................................
Heidegger: die Wissenschaft denkt nicht
Derrida: links science to mourning and memory
Lacan: science is always there, ready to erupt, amaze or blow you away.
Husserl was perhaps the one most freaked out by the historical split (between science and philosophy--and art?)
...a matter of technological selfunderstanding,
...nor do I insist on sustaining the pathos that propels the images...
ethical and political issues are increasingly seem to have more to do with testing than questioning, hesitation, certainty
There is a test ... it claims and so it stands. There is the other test that crashes against walls, collapses certitudes, and lives by failure-lives by dying or, at least destroying.
The one register of testing offers results-certitudes-by which to calculate and count on the *other.*
the culture of Versuch, test or trial
(farhange kushesh, ghasd, sue ghasd, va emtehan)
(measuring and) testing that support, among so many others, political, religious, and educational institutions
testing has everything to do with the way the policing of political sites and bodies takes place, in modernity and with our experience of reality in general.
testing ~=/?==><--> the real
(elliptical circuit established be[...]
(75)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%14.6[...] and environment begins” [...]
(Haraway > Gilbert)
“All stages of the life histories of evolving animals had to adapt to eager bacteria colonizing them inside and out.”
To be animal is to become-with bacteria
to inhabit an inter-subjective world, to love is about meeting the other in all the fleshly detail of a mortal relationship (to wit, first, somehow to learn what this other needs and desires)---permanent search for knowledge of the intimate other, with inevitable comic and tragic mistakes in that quest
thinking about animals as “other worlds” in a science fictional sense
scientifically informed, empirically grounded practice
theory ...still a limited discourse and a rough instrument
“who is at home?” --> ask in respect for all of time who and what are emerging in relationship --> (the obligation to ask) who are present and who are emergent? ***
(what are our) categorical labor
labor of training --> somehow all the participants of training are remodeled by it
labor of scale-making
(these are world-making practices, storytellings)
significant otherness-in-connection =/= intention-ascribing idioms of literalist anthropomorphism that sees furry humans in animal bodies and measures their worth in scales of similarity to the rights-bearing, humanist subjects of Western philosophy and political theory ==> assign privileges or guardianship (in place of ownership) in a modernist great chain of being
*action: beautiful, hard, specific, personal;
=/= abstract scales
differential sensibility =?=> situated emergence =?=> more livable worlds ~ ontological choreography
category of “rights” don't just exist (preformed to be uncovered,) rather we enter into a rights relationship with an other (animal or human)--> Hearne's “reciprocal possession”
-moralityrality is a species-specific capacity
~ if i have X, my X has a human (which is me)
off-leash and cliff-enclosed @Varinia
(Haraway:) time-space scales co-constituted by human, animal, and inanimate agencies
1. evolutionary time (at the level of the planet earth) --> naturalcultural species
2. face-to-face time (at the scale of individual lifetimes) --> mortal bodies
3. historical time (at the scale of decades, populations, nations)
to tell (detailed love and training) stories at these levels
this is about distributed agencies in “layers of locals and globals,”
...................................
my interests lies really with the ecological cosmologies in my neighborhood (iran, old, middle east, far east, past, present,)
that is why i was interested in the birds of Attar, pig of san'an, wolf of the pigs, crow of the partridge, and so on.
so things take positions in ou[...]
(76)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%15.7[...]>
(our sense of) our own ecological peril and fragility--our shared fate with our neighbors.
[The ajayeb's beings and their neighbors]
...................................
[instead of the struggle against sin (~=? christianity) or the struggle against suffering (~=? Buddhism),] the struggle between (different) sins
...................................
(the reading of ajayeb portraits) the global [and therefore *ethical] consciousness (at the end of 12th century middle-south asia, “the east”)
...................................
[Martha Kenney]
(how not) render ‘wonder’ a strictly historical object(?)
[as basis for building a contemporary ethics]
(wonder is ajib عجیب)
just-so story
in science and philosophy, a just-so story, also called an ad hoc fallacy, is an unverifiable and unfalsifiable narrative explanation for a cultural practice, a biological trait, or behavior of humans or other animals. (wikipedia)
etiological myths
etiology: the study of causation, or origination
the politics technology and the politics of storytelling.
[...] Narratives, along with literary devices, tropes, figures, images and the aesthetics of language, inhabit and inform even our most reliable knowledge-making practices.
storytelling as one of the consequential material practices
[storytelling is material practice]
[where there is a situated perspectives there is storytelling]
it is “practicing generous reading”
and “technique of refiguration” --> create alternative forms of knowledge
[figuration ~ storytelling apparatuses]
(Haraway, Primate Vision)
•“Attention to narrative is not instead of attention to science, ...”
•[there is no way that we can] escape the particular pleasures and dangers embedded in the story-laden sciences.
•[what are the things that] could only be explained by cultural, not scientific, genealogies [?] --> ideological apparition[s]
•Something new was required to account for change; the logic informed a kind of paternal creation myth [........] unchanging “matrix” for the generative principle of change. (In Zihlman's story logic, both gathering and hunting emerged as repatternings, not opposites, in changed conditions of constraint and opportunity. Narratives of both gathering and hunting ways of life produced genders and citizens.)
•tool-weapon equation in masculinist scientific narratives
as careful scrutiny of wonders and marvels becomes a mainstay in European intellectual life, 17th century natural philosophers began to understand *wonder, *curiosity, and *attention as cloesly aligned and mutually defining.
epistemological beast fable
unnatu[...]
(77)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%16.1[...]ز) (also, i am trying to quote Muhammad, Sa'di, ajayeb, the bird sometimes, and something is called in)
•speculative fiction
•
==> to move/draw myself and my reader into my matter of care
project of *narrative remediation*, to re-story, to stage matters of care differently
(biological) ‘resilience’ is a tricky thing to narrate in ‘relational worlds’ (=/= military world) abounding with transforming and transformative agencies***
to meet the future organisms that we are becoming (Hayward) --> stories that figure us as: {constituted, contaminated, vulnerable, agential, creative, expressive,}--> 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 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 an[...]
(78)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%16.9[...]here is no preexistent nature)
(Aela's interest in?) spatiality: (characteristics of enclosures <-- concerned with shapes and sizes) ‘geometry’ =/= ‘topology’ (investigates questions of *connectivity* and *boundaries*)
***it is the very existence of ‘finitude’ that gets defined as ‘matter’
narcissistic bedtime stories... (positioning of materiality as either a given or a mere effect of human agency)
(*)matter: substance in its intra-active becoming
(*)performativity: iterative intra-activity
“I'm trying to complicate the locatability of human identity as a here and now, as an enclosed and finished product[/project]” ~ “perspective essentialism”
...nature performs itself differently
(Kirby)
[Barad:] **onto-epistem-ology**: the study of practices of knowing in being
“epistemology =/= ontology” is a reverberation of a metaphysics that assumes (inherent differences:) “human =/= nonhuman,” “subject =/= object,” “mind =/= body,” “matter =/= discourse”...
...................................
what kind of alphabetico-numerical forefinger can i build that can press a schizophrenic partial systematizing of ajayeb?
...................................
so much (in Iran's literature) still awaits reflection and comprehension (-without comprehensiveness please!)
...................................
...archeology of dying in our civilization
(archeology of our dying civilization)
...................................
Aristotle's narrative: catharsis of emotions --> first arousing pity and fear and then clearing them away
theories of narrative:
•formalist theories (Russian)
•dialogical theories (Bakhtinian)
•New Critical theories
•Chicago school, or neo-Aristotlian theories
•psychoanalytic theories (Freud, Kenneth Burke, Lacan, N. Abraham)
•hermeneutic and phenomenological theories
•structuralituralist, semiotic, and tropological theories
•Marxist and sociological theories
•reader-response theories
•poststructuralist and deconstructionist theories (Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man)
•feminist theories (Martha Kenney, Haraway, Stengers, Hayward)
•
•
structuralist: that there are typical formal elements or “deep structures” to narratives --> complex performative dimension between the telling of stories and what is told in them
(Paul de Man:) “The paradigm for all texts consists of a figure (or a system of figures) and its deconstruction. But since this model cannot be closed off by a final reading, it engenders, in its turn, a supplementary figural superposition which narrates the unreadability of the prior narration.”
the analytic experience has a narrative character? psychoanalytic dialogue ‘uncovers’ a certain kind of narrative discontinuity maintained in the analysand's efforts
-[...]
(79)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%18.7[...]eb each animal is a consensual hallucination device (~ each animal is a way of knowing the world); some pre-organic, inter-corporal species, with trans-ontological intentionalities.
...................................
infrastructure: piled-upon assemblages within which there are many discontinuities but also connections, some deliberative, some inadvertent. (Katie King)
--> “flexible knowledges”
...................................
آب حیوان {how could I know that Vladimir (in his performance for Lilia's apass score) was not (in)sourcing the Holy Waters, abe heyvan or vozu? his sweat was the ooze of a modern and secular labor. he was using a profane water?}
حیوان خوران جهان heyvan khorane jahan
زیرکان کهن kohan zirak
حجابی که ظلمات شد نام او روان آب حیوان از آرام او (Zolmat & abe heyvan)
...................................
#my work in apass is about:
•bestiary: archaeological anthropology of human-animal practices
•rhetoric: scaling, modeling, figuring out fields of practices
•ontology: circumscribe, address, or deal with the processes of ontological transformations
•storytelling: mobilizing different kinds of mental resources and literacies
•performance: what it would be to know together
•sociality: that which joins categorically separate mode of agencies
•
#my findings/questions, so far:
•animal subjectivity ~=? human imagination
•bestiary ~=? affect + episteme
•medieval bestiaries: world ~= phenomena
•definition ~=? ontological choreography ==> worlds are created
•metaphores of self ~-> body image ~=? image of world
•list ~=? reason
•
I found myself oriented towards a kind of ‘multispecies ethnography’: a new way of writing and mode of research in which creatures previously appearing on the margins of interest--as part of the landscape, as food for humans, as symbols (for mystic projects)--have been pressed into the foreground of interest.
(what are my) symbolic + symbiotic attachments
what/who is coughing, counting, working, communicating sited between divine and bestial in ajayeb?
-is my ajayeb a (dead/alive) multispecies art project? studying Indo-Arab-Iranian illuminated manuscripts as to be reading a paper in ecology or molecular biology or art.
unlike Alex Arteaga's question of “inevitable altruism” {started from “conscious human subjects” and ended there} (in his talk 30.05.2017 apass,) I would insist on giving an account of the metaphors of ‘self’ in the history of body and mind (that matters to ‘you’) [my findings of self: maginc lantern, iceberg's tip (==> unconsciousness), wasteland/wilderness, greedy beast within, ... {--> these are all (classical) basis for “higher” cognitive capacities}] [also I am against Alex's notion of “destablizing stabili[...]
(80)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%19.5[...]ation استيضاح) you(?)
it is very interesting the way Despret is working (on the field) with Haraway's (intuitive genius) analysis
scientist's will to be ‘no-one’ that would prevent any interaction
(Despret's constructivist and non-relativist translation of ‘the ways animals act are the consequences of the observer's gaze’:) *animal actions are responsible consequences*
[(*)performance: the responsible consequence of a (no less) responsible gaze]
...................................
Verran, knowledge economy
knowledger always authored
cross-cultural knowledge practices
-physis, “I bring forth”, “I produce”, “I make to grow” (=/= “techne” in Aristotlian sense)
X-physis: a process which sticks out in the direction X --> how this morpheme has come to mean (since mid-15th century) “form” and “nature”? (this is about thinking of making)
“physis” requires the different perspectives of the four causes (aitia):
•material --> source of matter
•efficient --> power/motion
•formal --> containing its form
•final --> end
zoopoiesis --> zoopoetics, explorations of how animals (zoo) shape the making of text, study of ‘the literary animal’
...................................
Katie King
“flexible knowledges” on the edge of validity ♥ (--> almost invalid*)
fantasy of education
culture wars
intellectual enterpreneurs
upheavals and connectivities of globalization
changing patterns of interaction
(aren't we here to) change the patterns of interaction
(aren't we here to) change the faith of letters and love stories
reenactments (are fantasy practices and realities) =/= simple, accessible, and democratized (knowledge)
“layers of locals and globals”
[somehow I couldn't feel in his long term project what is Kobe's relation to] (processes and their product that require) developing and learning new skills, pleasures, and communities
-at the end many of us (are busy with or) want to (or inhabit the “will to”) modelling reality
this is also what ajayeb was busy with
***we are always doing both “purification” and “hybridization”
[]we direct our attention simultaneously to the work of purification and the work of hybridization ==> we immediately stop being wholly modern --> *our future begins to change* / *our past begins to change*
[my work on ajayeb (“hybrids down below” {Latour}) is precisely about (this kind of) transformation of pasts and futures] ==> meeting companion species {if my work on ajayeb doesn't teach me how to meet the dog in my street, the pigeon on my window, the juju on the edge of my paper, what is it good for then?!}
(*)companion species: assemblages of living and non-living ‘specie[...]
(81)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%19.8[...]ject what is Kobe's relation to] (processes and their product that require) developing and learning new skills, pleasures, and communities
-at the end many of us (are busy with or) want to (or inhabit the “will to”) modelling reality
this is also what ajayeb was busy with
***we are always doing both “purification” and “hybridization”
[]we direct our attention simultaneously to the work of purification and the work of hybridization ==> we immediately stop being wholly modern --> *our future begins to change* / *our past begins to change*
[my work on ajayeb (“hybrids down below” {Latour}) is precisely about (this kind of) transformation of pasts and futures] ==> meeting companion species {if my work on ajayeb doesn't teach me how to meet the dog in my street, the pigeon on my window, the juju on the edge of my paper, what is it good for then?!}
(*)companion species: assemblages of living and non-living ‘species’***
(Janina is all along engaged with companion species)
(an strategy:) allocation of responsibility for grasping information
assemblage at various levels and sublevels characterizes *explanations* and *practices*
technoscientific tsunami that will obliterate prior practices and cultures...
(learning to) see old and new forms of confusions, docility, subjectivity, morality, agency, empowerment (when we are together)
(to recognize and make) new sites of negotiation
Alberti: bodies of Minoan figurines “wear” the appropriate gender for a specific ritual practice, they don't “bear” gender (as their essential feature) ==> gender salience is always in question, not a propor presupposition
“sex has emerged as a salient attribute of the pot's character as a pot”
when zoomorphic figures are present...
ajayeb's zoomorphic figures with their salient attributes are not “purposed” necessarily being to encode their belief-system onto objects that we may read today--like story-board--but rather to make interventions into the world of human-nonhuman relations. to either assist or resist such transformations
[terms sharpened with Alberti + Katie King]
museum studies
(Hayward:) freedom --> initiative in shaping a narrative, a visible body, where one is able to engage and resist [@Xiri] --> contradicts itself because one is really not free from the policing of the physical body --> coming into a [...] body (==> reality and disillusion in public spaces) -->{ narrative, flesh, is filled with memory, emotions, and complexity [@Hoda]
*crafting a space for existence may involve:
•unfolding history
•mapping normative processes
•immersing a “body” in vulnerability (*)
deploy =/= unveiling
sort out =/= debunking هدايت
glocalizing<[...]
(82)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%19.9[...]lient attributes are not “purposed” necessarily being to encode their belief-system onto objects that we may read today--like story-board--but rather to make interventions into the world of human-nonhuman relations. to either assist or resist such transformations
[terms sharpened with Alberti + Katie King]
museum studies
(Hayward:) freedom --> initiative in shaping a narrative, a visible body, where one is able to engage and resist [@Xiri] --> contradicts itself because one is really not free from the policing of the physical body --> coming into a [...] body (==> reality and disillusion in public spaces) -->{ narrative, flesh, is filled with memory, emotions, and complexity [@Hoda]
*crafting a space for existence may involve:
•unfolding history
•mapping normative processes
•immersing a “body” in vulnerability (*)
deploy =/= unveiling
sort out =/= debunking هدايت
glocalizing
Katie King reading Hayward: [...] assembling apparatuses for enfolding visions of instrumental, subjective and cognitive technologies among ciliated (مودار, ریشهدار) bodies
...................................
technologies of the literal
grain of analysis, timescale, noting/creating hybrid objects of study
[comparing the incomparable --> lumping --then--> splitting]
***starting off a research project which eventually hopes to have something to say about that hybrid “thing”*** ...with some despised members of a particular time period (--> switching those who count as major or minor characters), promises to make it possible to build in *a range of genders (not just two), a range of writing technologies, a range of self-effacing acts, and a range of publics*, while working from a particular place and time
***there are many different interests creating the pasts***, the possible worlds...
(Leigh Star > Katie King > Sina) “comparing the incomparable”
here i am trying an outline of my interrelated research practices in a preliminary character, the intersection of which I am just at the beginning to understand
ajayeb: writing technologies of the 12th century Iran
plain style
soing naked as a sign
dress and address
ecology of writing technologies
(Katie King:) writing technologies: ideologies layered in time and space * under which writing has been divided [also cannot be divided] from other generations of cultural meaning
myriad hybrid forms, commingling in material and ideological proliferations
(with Katie King's interest in women's writing technologies)
“presentist”: a practice of classification and categorization to access pasts
continuities and local discontinui[...]
(83)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20[...]ilence
“politeness phenomena”
‘plain speech’ for Quakers: rejection of ‘idle’ speech. preaching was another version of sacrificing seld-will, and was appropriate speech.
public preaching in particular was also a challenge to social relations and interaction --> a challenge to gender, speaking public was a cultural humiliation for individual women --> the Quaker women practiced preaching as a personal humiliation instrumental to their own salvation [! in a weird way i also did this to my self] #becoming woman-->{a liquefying aspect: “womanhood” was used metaphorically to identify those who could not preach, the surrender of (male) authority to God by men was “female”
•inhibiting woman's prophetic agencies
•“lack of discipline” becomes discipline --!--> forms of discipline that appear “undisciplined” or out of control
(Katie King > Mack:) “Quakers not only bathed in a sea of polymorphous sipritual nature and eroticism; they occasionally wrote as if they had succeeded in floating above gender altogether”
“going naked as a sign” (and Quaker's “plain style”) --> Tasavof, ajayeb, and communication strategies of the so-called new science of the same time (of Quakers)
‘nakedness’ was simultaneously literally his own, a figure of the world, an example of many others, the abstract principle, and the essential truth of the one addressed
-simplicity, economy, and plainness; to reject all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style
preferring language of artisans, countrymen, merchants, of wits and scholars
How sin is strengthened 1657
Milk for babes 1661
A message from the spirit of truth 1658
realized eschatology
انا الحق, an-al-hagh
(Damrosch:) the performance of the sign thus entailed a doubly negative aspect: in the person exhibiting it, a conviction of fulfilling a divine mandate in opposition to personal self-interest; and in those who witnessed it, an offense to ordinary social standards that actually served to authenticate it.
*the function of the sign was to bear prophetic witness rather than to get practical results; it fulfilled its purpose simply by being performed*
#shath, shathiat ==> tazkirat, --->{ what the saints of Tasavof (reported by Attar-{his “virtual witnessing” of “awliya” اولیا as a “realized"}, Quakers [as illegal nonconformist sect]) put together was their own writing technology infrastructure** ==> **routinization of charisma** <-- organizational structure ["advices and queries” نفحات الانس nafahat ~-> rationalized systematic intellectualizations]}
pattern of suffering that the believer literally and personally relives
(is Tasavof developed Christian modality of sacrifice? is *passivity imported from elsewhere in Islam*?)
a protagonist, like San'an, like an actor[...]
(84)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20.1[...]s, digressions, and swellings of style
preferring language of artisans, countrymen, merchants, of wits and scholars
How sin is strengthened 1657
Milk for babes 1661
A message from the spirit of truth 1658
realized eschatology
انا الحق, an-al-hagh
(Damrosch:) the performance of the sign thus entailed a doubly negative aspect: in the person exhibiting it, a conviction of fulfilling a divine mandate in opposition to personal self-interest; and in those who witnessed it, an offense to ordinary social standards that actually served to authenticate it.
*the function of the sign was to bear prophetic witness rather than to get practical results; it fulfilled its purpose simply by being performed*
#shath, shathiat ==> tazkirat, --->{ what the saints of Tasavof (reported by Attar-{his “virtual witnessing” of “awliya” اولیا as a “realized"}, Quakers [as illegal nonconformist sect]) put together was their own writing technology infrastructure** ==> **routinization of charisma** <-- organizational structure ["advices and queries” نفحات الانس nafahat ~-> rationalized systematic intellectualizations]}
pattern of suffering that the believer literally and personally relives
(is Tasavof developed Christian modality of sacrifice? is *passivity imported from elsewhere in Islam*?)
a protagonist, like San'an, like an actor in a mystery play, enacting in a deliberately challenging form, internalized and lived as a potent sign
(Bechwith:) rendered performance of religious materials both practically impossible and conceptually unthinkable
+ exercises their discipline of the senses and the imagination
*undisciplined loss of control in enthusiasm and in this extravagant example*
(stories of) a small group of powerful and vocal actors
***to attend to the local practices of inclusion and exclusion through which some speak and others are spoken for, some act and others are acted upon***
(#ontology)
gentlemanly practices --> (ask) what that legitimacy consisted in and how far it extended?
(wellborn connoisseurs of the new science)
leave the work tacit, and it fades into the wallpaper
•(Leigh Star's) ethnography of infrastructure
•(Bowker's) infra-structural inversion
•(Katie King's) ecology of writing technologies: massive, large-scale infrastructure in dynamic motion, bits changing at differential rates across time, made up of layered sub-systems complexity interconnected and animated by distributed agencies, including people, skills, devices and social powers.
the translation between ([my] deliberately) presentist (meta-)language (of cybernetic systems) and various local languages helps *to rescale particular objects of study*
(my research: “social st[...]
(85)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20.1[...]echnologies:
◦reification: strategic metonymic reduction, kenaye کنایه
◦enthusiasm: essentializing identities or ideas
◦members (of Royal Society): naturalizing ranges of inclusion and exclusion
◦*witnessing* rescales the infrastructure. the “work of witnessing” asserts that rhetoic as an element of witnessing is not a thing, not even a performance, but already itself a complex set of infrastructural systems with animating practices and agencies
...readers might submit to the illusion of having effectively witnessed an experiment themselves
*virtual witnessing realized an “enactment” in words*
black-boxing is totally neccessary to use/study infrastructures, they produce the “artifactual richness” [= a kind of archaeological layering of artifacts acquired in bits and pieces over time--(Lucy Suchman)] of systems
*black-boxing makes elegant some elements of the system/s differentially*
each author does it:
•Shapin black-boxing his range of systems to its complexity and elegance
•Haraway appropriating the idea of modest witness for her own feminist purpose
•
three technologies for fact-making (that Shapin and Schaffer name):
1. material
2. literary
3. social
Adrian Johns in The Nature of The Book: particular booksellers could indeed use their *stewardship* of such heterogeneous spaces to further political ideals and interests. behind the scenes and up the stairs, an interested London bookseller became a significant actor in cultural events.
nominal agency
actual person
principle architect
systems move in space, time, and process
some archaeological structures (that one uncover) are stable, some in motion, some evolving, some decaying --> *“there is no way of ever getting access to the past except through classification systems of one sort or another”* (at best) the past could be reordered to better reflect multiple constituencies now and then. (Bowker + Leigh Star)
(my ajayeb research: “epistemic virtues” [or powers] of the 12th century encyclopedic wonder-books,) “epistemological decorum” --> (to capture) “truth-making practices in action” (Shapin)
==> (my commitment to ajayeb:) engendering reflection on the nature of and function of categorization itself
a wonderful bit of meta-language
The Exhausted Receiver
Margaret Cavendish description of a new world, called the Blazing World, her own brand of natural philosophy under the guise of a romance... science for ladies{
1- enthusiasm ==> new science
2- study of natural philosophy ==> cardinal virtues of ladies, modesty and religious reverence
3- leisure activity, appropriate pasttime
*she participated in discussions central to her life and times* (am i participating [...]
(86)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20.2[...])
==> (my commitment to ajayeb:) engendering reflection on the nature of and function of categorization itself
a wonderful bit of meta-language
The Exhausted Receiver
Margaret Cavendish description of a new world, called the Blazing World, her own brand of natural philosophy under the guise of a romance... science for ladies{
1- enthusiasm ==> new science
2- study of natural philosophy ==> cardinal virtues of ladies, modesty and religious reverence
3- leisure activity, appropriate pasttime
*she participated in discussions central to her life and times* (am i participating in discussions central to my life and times?!)
Cavendish self-consciously produced herself as a fantastic and singular... (--> is that what i wish to produce?)
-Cavendish strangely shared with Quaker women an experimental life of proliferating genders, of dress, of personhood, og agency, of writing, of personae, but not of this *enabling collectivity*
hermaphroditical view of things: partly artificial, partly natural
status of clothing as a signifier of identity [<-- not always]
crossdressing (#my sticker period)
[modest witness] (--> Haraway's literal and figurative queering of categories)
the rhetoric of the modest witness --> the naked way of writing, undorned, factual, compelling: “naked writing” [crafted in the context of being virtually present at a demonstration, the ‘practice of credible witnessing’ (==> “truth”) in technoscience] was a proper reference point for feminist examination of objectivity and its relationship to a science founded in exclusion of women. the new man of science had to be chaste, modest, heterosexual man who desires yet eschews a sexually dangerous yet chaste and modest woman --> *female modesty was of the body; the new masculine virtue had to be of the mind* [women's presence turns out to disrupt the experiment (of the scientist or sufi) altogether] (“[...]best of women, pious, chaste, modest, and compassionate, are rendered unfit for science by the very qualities that make them the best of women”)
(Haraway, why credible witnessing is still at stake:) “this is the culture within which contingent facts [= the real case about the world, the object world] can be established with all the authority, but none of the considerable problems, of transcendental truth. this self-invisibility is the specifically modern, European, masculine, scientific form of the virtue of modesty. this is the form of modesty that pays off its practitioners in the coin of epistemological and social power. *this kind of modesty is one of the founding virtues of what we call modernity.* [...] and so he is endowed with the remarkable power to establish the facts.”
-“he [the civic man of reason] bears witness”: he is objective, he guarantees the clarity and purity of objects, as contestable represen[...]
(87)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20.3[...]. to have our likes means *certain things are gathered around us*
[what about “beyond”? =/= near-sphere Zolmat]
[*]orientation: registers the proximity of objects as well as shape what is proximate to the body
(Robin:) happiness does not have an object
(Freud:) anxiety does not have an object
=/= (Ahmed:) correspondence between objects and feelings is not any simple ~~--> proximity, “unattributed happiness”
[...] <-- ( us )"subject” --> ( ♥ )"object”
things --move--> us --make--> things ~~> ...
@Arjang, how happiness is displaced by the how of its arrival
(happiness can often recede or become anxious, when the feeling becomes an object of thought)
what it means for happiness to be thought in these terms (as an end for its own sake)
what it means for apparatus to be thought in these terms (of Agamben)
what it means for ocean to be thought in these terms (of Marialena)
in Islam, how does the good life get imagined through the proximity of objects?
[*]taste: “manifest preferences”: “practical affirmation of an inevitable difference” (Bourdieu)
history becomes second-nature ==> affects become literal ==> (we assume we experience delight because) “it” is delightful
(often with animals) the affective differentiation ==(basis of)==> (an essentially) moral economy
cheerfulness is the most communicative of emotions (♥ Ahmed)
(Ahmed's take on) loving (happily): knowing the peculiarity of a loved other's likes and dislikes, an intimacy with what the other likes and is given --> on conditions that such likes do not take us outside a *shared horizon*
***who/what introduces what feelings to whom?***
‘question of power' = do you go along with it?
sometimes the Iranian orientation is toward maximal comfort of the others
(maintaining) ‘comfort' = (your or some) bodies “go along with it”
bond-->{ affect ==> we search for an object }
...certain objects already circulate as socila goods before we “happen” upon them --> we do not just find happy objects anywhere (--> how happy objects are found in Tasavof? located, lost, transported, sold, advertised, criticized, etc.) *happy objects point us somewhere, a “where” from which we expect so much (--> happy objects of Tasavof [or HOT] {Qur'an, khezr, woman, poetry, .../ قرآن / خضر / زن / شعر}-->their sense of values, practice, styles, and aspirations; where do they point Iranians? beyond, Zolmat, animal, shadow, everyday objects, etc. what are the feelings involving the “points” of alignment wuth these objects?) ~~--> relocation of expectations:
•from beyond to earth
•from global to local
•from future to now
•
in situation[...]
(88)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20.6[...]
our resistance and breakdance
(Mehran Rad:) Hafez preferences on Farsi over Arabic:
Deir دیر / Some'e صومعه
Pir پیر / Sheikh شیخ
Parsa پارسا / Zahed زاهد
Parishan پریشان / Tafraghe تفرقه
moshtaghe bandegi مشتاق بندگی
(~? the advanced level of) ‘wannabe slave’
...................................
the dangerous suffixial worlders, prehensile adjective-builder, natural-inhabitant-makers of “-ian” or “-i” or “-isch” to the name of a nation/country ==> Iranian, Afgani, etc. --> makes subjects
in the case of the podcast https://soundcloud.com/norient/afghanistan-sucht-seine-musikalische-identitat-podcast listen to the way the story of the Afgani music is told by norient (“music in the globe”, “multi-modally”) --> articulation of western human rights & disarticulation of other ecology of stories
=/= Charles Amirkhanian radio programm Ode to Gravity
the protector of spiders who dies by the bite of a spider
-susceptible bodies entagled in networks of care, life and death, that are not always harmonious to popular narratives of nonviolence
...................................
ajayeb: mythoepic literature in translation from a Middle Persian corpus
-when i say ‘Middle Persian corpus’ what i actually mean is a shared world of ritual, religion, and mythology between Iranian, Urdu, Turkish, Zoroastrianism in Iran and Vedic Hinduism in India, Indo-European inheritance in ancient Iranian culture, South-Southeast Asian literatures, translations and transcreations (and transliteration) of stories (prose, poetry, drama, epic, jokes, parables, figures [that are not always part of the canon], the irreverent بى ادب, ) in Indian and Southeast Asian contexts,
my project is about learning the ‘how’ of cultivating the ability to fruitfully approach texts from different cultures anres and pasts
-(to study) the radical poetic force of the Persian texts--in ajayeb
-to become enhanced and enchanted in skills of reading wider ranges of linguistic registers
-to open up an approach to a dauntingly complex region of islamicated thought (not the ideological enterprise of “Islam”, which is usually badly politicized in the historical memory of the West. we could get interested in the economics of corruption and technologies of rule, the evolution of government bureaucracies and classificatory schemes, anti-colonial critique,)
ajayeb is on the side of counter-classical traditions of standard Muslem-ness, and its less elite histories and cultural forms,
(intellectual identity:)
cross-dresser of the order
autodidact odds
sufis, merchants, nomads, poets, pilgrims, smugglers, laborers,
religious identity, religious knowledge, religious violence,
medieval persian mysticism:
•[...]
(89)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%21[...]ty --> Eszter
•(auto)poiesis --> Hoda
•perception as action --> Elen
•speculative realism --> Zoumana
•radical virtualization --> Aela
--> we are all somehow busy (in apass) with reorienting to the creativity of thought-action crossings
life is germinaly جرثومهای aesthetic, and the aesthetic anywhere is already political* --> Kenney
[title]
ajayeb's stories of natural and dreamed up things
the immaterial matterings of supra-personal imaginal real of ajayeb forms
(different names for the same thing:)
•forms of emergent in the conduct of life (Nietzsche, Foucault attending to the intimate relations between knowledge and power)
•worlding, the mirror play of materiality and its poetic composition (Heidegger)
•planes of expressivity reaching a point of recognition or force (Deleuze and Guattari)
•the shimmer (Barthes)
•rhythm in itself (Lefebvre)
•structures of feeling into political theory (Raymond Williams)
•forms emergent in the conduct of life are immaterial matterings --> *the contact aesthetics* of natural and dreamed up things throwing themselves together (Stewart)
ajayeb is a literally unblievable image, a sociality, a muscle, a world thrown together in a sensory refrain witnessed by a present subject; collective dreamed up nature and historical presents ripe with rhythms and speeds, with streams of matter and thought; ajayeb is a capacious assemblage
ajayeb stories are:
•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 incipi[...]
(92)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%21.9[...] with those things
(attuning to) details in ajayeb loaded with intensities both strange and recognizable (=/= stable real)
a mode of perception that walks around an enigmatic object
an hour
a river
a walk
a deflating frog
far from being “after the fact,” my pop-up book involves multiplicity of bodies, characters and materialities to approach ‘description’ as “speculative theory in practice of how a world works” like ajayeb's work of “engendering a plane of prolific expressivity”
(عجایب المخلوقات / عجایب نامه) [*]ajayeb: a once percepted thing on the threshold of sense in the prisma of social poiesis producing a cartography of what might be happening in a world as an object of composition
firefly: a condensed point of precision one after another
ajayeb is made in citing repetitions and differences
(with Stewart:) ajayeb was once “the cutting edges of a harsh world in a state of uneven emergence, an ambient mapping of the not-yet or as-if of things becoming phenomenon” which itself became a repetitive impulse to story
i can't find a better kind of description of what ajayeb does than Stewart describing ‘description’ that literally puts a point things: “the expressivity of what happens to things throwing together in words is a kind of description attuned to what does not completely unfold but instead melds together with other unnamed but palpable things collected like a field of mineable resources and shiny afterthoughts.”
things throwing together in words ==> expressivity
ajayeb: collected (unnamed but palpable) things like mineable resources and shiny afterthoughts
پس انديشه
______________
[*]perspective: (an attending, enduring presence, a compositional node,) perspectival agency in which things jump into relation but remain unglued*** (Stewart)
...across a field of subjects-objects-bodies-trajectories-affects
realm of killed off things
new figures i am learning from Stewart's
•“throwing together”
•“manner of”
•
(in ajayeb) the whale: throwing together of the phenomena of fish and water, sailing, mood, atmosphere, and sensory charge
*ajayeb's descriptive apparauses: a mutating realism of a certain vision of light meeting movement
[*]ajayeb: things that were once named, perhaps written down, (differently than now,) through some kind of trickery (called citation,) and then metastasized (spread throughout a body) into circulation (readings, translations, etc.) are raised, incised, made singular and charged
•ajayeb's stories/reports ~= forms of co-recognition, something witnessed that gets cooked down into something saucy***
•ajayeb's writing: a more-than-represen[...]
(93)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%22.1[...]
what are the river and field doing now?
[*]theory: drawn through writing into the ways that people and things venture out into [*]reals:
•a recursive haeccity (Deleuze and Guattari)
•transversal arrays of qualities or activities which, like musical refrains, give order to materials and situations, human bodies and brains included, as actions undertaken act-back to shape muscles and bone senses (Anderson + Harrison)
•a mattering that is about the (contingent and temporary) becoming-determinate (and becoming-indeterminate) of matter and meaning (Barad)
•built out of difference and repetition (Deleuze)
•composed of potentiality and loss (Berlant)
•lean toward that which exists singularly as event, or as a gap, without ground or against the background of nothing (Dewsbury)
[*]reality: a rhythmic alteration between objects, events, and words---an uncreated world---{reverb between word and world --> [*]worling: a transposition of the existing knowledges already possible in a joke or a gesture --> singularities gathering and dissolving, #tools:
•snapshots (shoot of an affect)
•fictocriticism (fiction + theory + criticism; a name for those “critical” inventions which belong to literature while deforming its limits)
•sensory ethnography (ethnographic engagement based on curiosity and attachment) --> drawing
--> paths lit up in a rhythm interrupted
(as an aritist) you can make anything of anything, the questions is, what is it, what is it doing, what is in this consistency of rhythm?}
[*]social: comprised of entities that are both present and absent (==> ajayeb), atmospheres, affects, virtual memories, hauntings, and that these are themselves moments of endurance (or not?), instants of the holding together of the disparate itself
(Stewart > Doel)
[!* Stewart describing the color] *red: “it moves through streams and tendrils into an associational register of connections and differences, materials and noumena وجود مجرد, the coagulation دلمه شدن and diffusions of lines of influence and bits of matter.”
(in my visual art studies we were given redness as a symbolic element in a representational order and a matter-of-fact) =/= state-of-sensory-alert, redness as an actual composition spun into representations, objects, and states of sensory alert
“[...] a germinal aesthetic. a tendril of practices and sensibilities gathered into an energetics of form
•black sky and ocean --> limit, outline, elemental flux, matter waiting formlessly
•white ice and snow --> stasis, shape and form, a blankness that challenges composition, the transitoriness
•red --> the feebly real, the long, low-frequency wave-lenght of the dying stars, the past, the effort to fix dead reality in a cast *
•green --> plants that glare with a harsh reality, the violence [...]
(94)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%22.2[...]sification and unleashing of ‘i am part of what i seek to understand’ (= my subjectivity)] =/= lock the past into predictability}
•my ‘things’ in ajayeb are to an extent ‘archeological things’
contemporary science --gives--> ontologically relational world (<-- to be acknowledged by art and archeology)
archeology --Alberti--> fostering **a particular sensibility to what is of the past in things**
anthropology: the art of inquiry
(something you can learn from)
[*]archeological sensibility: a pervasive set of attitudes towards traces and remains, towards memory, time and temporality, the fabric of history
-Shanks
craft --Ingold--> knowledge grow from the crucible of our practical and observational engagement with being and things
(Aristotlean poiesis ~~-->) [*]craft: slow and intimate knowledgeable work (of how we get along with the world; that cultivates in oneself the skill for discerning the *meanings that are already there*) --> ontological paring of conceptual language & physical condition
==> meaning and concepts are drawn out of objects (not given to them)
•Haraway --> companion species = biologist + creatures
•Barad --> concepts are literally embodied by the differing physical apparatuses
•
(we need more) art: careful accumulation of skills
21st century historiographic trends in art
artists increasingly *deploy simulacra of archeological practices and motifs* in their work
art practiced as craft (but not all the time) ==allow==> knowledge grow from the insight of being in the folding of life [of infantile grandious fantasy, as well] ~=? anthropology
producing contemporary ruins to draw attention to *the work of the present in the production of the past*
*artists take archeology as muse*
(through borrowing from archeology artists)
•create a kind of intellectual framing
•incorporate archival research
•themes of memory and entropy
•question of absence
•
prosaic nature of archeological research
production of the finds
the way Dion distorts archeological work (allegorizing archeological practice) --Alberti-->
•consequence of sleight of hand
•he is dibbling at, performing being an archeologist
•‘play at’ archeology
=/= Simon Callery
Alberti > Russell
transform archeology from metaphor to allegory --play--> archeology-as-aesthetics through performance [--> risk of undermining and reinforcing art as a subjective practice concerned with only aesthetics and affective]
craft: a model for careful practices and knowing the world =/= artwork: a model for how to break out of disciplinary frames and how to think of the ontology o[...]
(95)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.4[...]hival labors dramatized and experienced as immediacy
•transparency of the material limitations of selection
spectacle of production
critique of the living-history ethos
giving science war pep talks... [TED]
(don't!)
[*]witnessing: “root of the experimental life”
[*]science: important and witnessable
freestanding photo-figures of scientists that work to situate and create scales of importance
commenting and making alliances across space-time with other figures
_[audience and markets]_
audience polyphony
audience and markets shift and converge in [flexible knowledges] complex address of multiple audiences, in that contradictory nest of niche political and epistemological “markets”
(**the story of the ‘interactive’:) “rich contradictory nestings permit an require visitors to select among possible salient narratives by animating differently layers of locals and globals”
to call oneself in and out of allience and its classifications, that *momentary universalism* shades into other ranges of affiliation and disaffiliation (*)
[...] --> [ ? ] --> salience --> tangible --> literal --> experimental
...................................
conceptualize the intensities of form and force
affect studies has made me feel less alone because before it
...................................
There are [always] other epic and epochal forces in our midst.
...................................
evil eye --> دیو چشم زخم --> غش --> اغشی
...................................
باغ plethora of old and new humanities, selves - with Sardar: There are plants that provide various colors of foliage, or hedges and borders, or climb up fences, or play architectural roles (=/= presumption that we must have a identity & supposition that we discover our identity & the Socratic “know thyself” as a fundamental human urge) we exist with multiple identities invoked differently in different context. subscribed to an imagined “heritage” ready to kill and be killed to save some “essence” (=/= San'an)
sake of the difference, scum and finest of men
(for example “black”: to be confused: once excluded, now technically empowered, a dominant group in the rainbow, but still practically marginalised by the history that created and continues to operate practical exclusion.)
@Iranians: how much of the Other is actually located within me?
“a perfectly permissible aspiration” --into--> “an instrument of war” (Maalouf)
British identity is based on an assumption of authority that makes the world a familiar place, a proper theatre in which to continue being British. #Olearius
exclude the (unsavoury) foreigners <==> romanticised history and frozen tradition
*history as a deliberate human crea[...]
(96)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%24.1[...]? never!”
-->
[*]صنعت تضاد san'at-e tazad, polarity: the pull of forces in opposition ==makes==> writing feel alive
[*]projection: that psychological mechanism by which we turn the world, or other people, or deer (into versions of ourselves) --> it is not a sin; it is our method of operating, our modus operandi (--> “pathetic fallacy”: inevitable perceptual work of the human; “if you are miserable, then the trees look miserable to you”)
[*]qualifiers sefat صفت gheyd (adjectives and adverbs) intended to lend a host of sensory qualities to the sentence; (sometimes too much) adjectival or adverbial flavoring. [#training: remove every adjective and adverb, and see what you have got left --> **there is always a more exact term waiting to be employed**] (Foad's severe economy of means; Janina's allusive, shimmery surfaces delight) ([*]style: a simple way of saying complex things. -Cocteau)
[*]نظم nazm: musicality of poetry, poem's body of sound is its specific particular flesh, sonic texture --> **making the language more markedly like the world** [a trail, pathway through a wood of sounds, an unmistakably specific landscape, loyal to the local]
[*]synesthesia: occasion of excitement, a skein of complicated perception, (sort of a literary technique,) something like a snapshot of the image-making mind at work --> superimposition of both events and of senses (and of scenes?) ==> a consciousness
(aim of many artists:) “to form the sensorium, the sphere of perception in which we dwell” @Hoda =/= (Doty suggests:) it is work to sort them out (what sorts out senses? question @Hoda, she must learn: an accurate rendering of an idiosyncratic process of sensory overlap and association)
[*]لحن tone: special effects, evoking a ‘moment of’ ... intense statement of feeling ==> a concretely descriptive feeling
[*]questions are always a little more trustworty than answers (?) -- sometimes things said do not take the *rhetorical form of a question* [--> in apass i was training to be able to capture those kind of ummarkedly questions] --> something said (described) with room for indeterminacy ///*convex mirror* (Doty's refractive thinking)
[*]فعل verb, the descriptive force of the right (hardworking) verb, a kind of muscular concreteness. sometimes verbs gain descriptive force when other parts of speech are newly cast in active roles
*invocation = directly addressing the thing creates a sense of immediacy and of connection
*thou, with its suggestion of divinity or beloved --> prayer
*hectic: uncomfortable alliance, inharmonious, something that might set the teeth on edge
*destroy --> a death-steeped perception that reads the wind as a “destroyer”
*world of fused duality
‘and’ --> the signature element of a place, of a landscape, the conjoined body : the animate and the inorganic as one thing
*the pro[...]
(97)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%25.3[...]nything, not even her name
/ruin --> place of unsettled identities
questions of:
•doom [=/= adjustment, management]: “contamination = end”
•subject surging to bear an affect, subject who goes with the flow in an intoxicated moment
•traumatic realism
•(endangered ==>) survival: fighting for “your right against others”
•less-than ideal livable collaborations
•
•constructing interest (not that ‘you want to know’ --> historically crafted and naturalized modalities of “knowing more”)
•contingent (~ lure, abstraction, fragile [--> they create interested bodies]) =/=? analytical [--> they create disembodied subjects]
[poem can do all of these:]
/proposition --> right/wrong declaratives
/exposition --> systematic explanation
/disposition --> affective orientation ~~> attitude ==> perspectives ==> selves
poet [=/= archivist] can be responsible for the ‘remainders’ --> good at greeting =/= traumatic realism
(1) traumatic realism
(real understood as traumatic:) “shock ==> subject”
a way of figuring that fails to bring the inflicting force (of real) into the symbolic order ==> mime, miming: you bring it into the present literally over and over (re-present)
|
(2) atmospheric attunement
a way of being in the noise
labor-intensive process that stretches across imaginaries [such as travel, house, haunt] --> responding to ” “
actual affects of modes of living brought into being
intimacy with a world [visiting families in Alta]
|
(3) phantom arm
“social = present-absent” (=/= Star Trek's interculturalism) (=/= Lacan's subject: proper sense of absence and loss)
connectivity does not require physical contiguity
-force of piled-up phantom limps
-hum of the palce, dormant noise --> worlding of a place [<-- material and sensory labor of attending to it]
-hauntology =/= Archimedean certainty of presence --> a knowing consciousnes
-so, that lost arm/limb (original part of you) could have a chance of becoming companion species, and not a discarded phantom limb forever haunting the amputated you
|
(4) troubled stories
=/= clear-cut good stories about troubles
stories difficult to like:
•dirty, guilty, survivalist udyr? the evil horse? (we need more description of the evil horse)
Cinderella --> (not) the master of your house, of your name, of you
-sometimes it is not you who makes you
...................................
--Morris--> ghost problem --✕--> possbility of a politcal form
contingent politicization and the accidental in the Southeast Asia
theatrical acts of civil disobedience
democracy protestors
conjure the spirits of those who have been killed
political vengeance
(wherever there is) vi[...]
(98)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%27.7[...]u) could have a chance of becoming companion species, and not a discarded phantom limb forever haunting the amputated you
|
(4) troubled stories
=/= clear-cut good stories about troubles
stories difficult to like:
•dirty, guilty, survivalist udyr? the evil horse? (we need more description of the evil horse)
Cinderella --> (not) the master of your house, of your name, of you
-sometimes it is not you who makes you
...................................
--Morris--> ghost problem --✕--> possbility of a politcal form
contingent politicization and the accidental in the Southeast Asia
theatrical acts of civil disobedience
democracy protestors
conjure the spirits of those who have been killed
political vengeance
(wherever there is) violence in Southeast Asia (even if this violence is merely the
force that possesses machinery) ==> ghosts
~=
(wherever there is) force that would oppose life (even and perhaps especially by resembling it) ==> ghosts
[the doxa of] {(no preparation) premature death / banished by disbelief ==> unhappy ghost, vindictive melancholy}[= *effect of context*]--in-->
•pulp novels
•secular humanist elite literature
•rumor
•folklore
•
(Morris points that) such specters are densest in the places where the accidents of modernity are most like to occur
*the death that is caused by another death*
technologization of life and death, movement and war --> *making one vulnerable to death* <== (often) a function of technology (technologization of life and death, movement and war, etc.)
*ghostliness (in Southeast Asia): an idiom with which to address issues about the difficult delineation of a boundary between the living and the dead* (=/= matter of improper burial)
if the dead cannot join the living, the living can die and thereby mingle with the already deceased ~-> fright
the location (where ghostliness arises) is not spatial but temporal (“something happened”)--> in a strange way, for the “occurrence” has no place in time ==> stop time and to displace other narratives (--> it has the structure of trace)
[@Marialena's summoning to life =/= (living) beings who can be summoned to death]
}~~?--> (Freud's) death drive (<== traumatic neuroses) + (Kantian conception of)
accident
(for Freud:) [*]consciousness: the form of a resistance to the world
unconscious is “timeless” : incapable of discerning order (in a Kantian sense)
trauma (=/= anxiety) ==> disables the pleasure principle but not the compulsion to repeat (which is typically a source of pleasure)
[*]trauma as precisely such a disturbance of time and of causal sequentiality
{earlier philosopher's analogy: substance (essentially u[...]
(99)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%27.8[...]tructures of obligation*** (=/= defensive strategies)
cell phones
•technological mediums of absent voices
•lighting up, buzzing, or ringing
•ciphers of a profane immanence
•fetishes in which are concealed the histories of mining and labor elsewhere
•promise contact with elsewhere + obstacles to the desire for full presence and the performative power of words ==> frustrated desire
a public whose membership cannot be known in advance--even when exclusionary limits are constitutive of its domain --> [*]public sphere: social formations enabled by technomedia phenomena (=/= spaces of rational deliberation and consensus making--as in liberal political theory, public sphere characterized by deliberative processes)
*scenes of overhearing* --> public speaking makes that overhearing its goal
“migrant pirates of deindustrialization” (speak only to threaten) --> liberal opposition between language and violence ~~--> the rhetorical grace appropriate to leadership (inauguration speech of Obama, his charisma emanated from his identification with a righteous struggle --> *his being more than himself* [<-- young artist selflessness syndrome in aspiration with the right politcal cause])
zamazamas’ illiteracy, not eligible for a public sphere that depends on literacy. for without literacy, they cannot submit to the law. *defined in its essence by legality* (sustained by a desired opposition between language and violence)
a signature (sign your own name): a form of writing recognizable across all (mainly romanized) languages and is the ideal condition of possibility of recognition from within its constitutional order
mimic the address of someone wit charisma (~= authority)
(Morris on) mediaticity of speech (and not merely of media technologies)
Morris reading of a scene (of quotidian exchange) in HIV/AIDS NGO office: a metonym and a metaphor for a kind of South African public sphere that aspires to inclusiveness but is terrorized by its incapacity to know what that opens it up to
•arms itself against potentially aggressive others
•narratives of violence work *to reinforce the sense of necessity* (for a general securitization)
•work in the mode of a **negative meritocracy** (= those who would violate the rights of others are to be excluded, but no others --but--> how to know in advance who has perpetrated or intends to perpetrate such a violation?)
...in the shadow of communicational technology's fashion industry
...bountiful banality of the technologies and artifacts of mass reproducibility
[...] --> lithography --(superseded by)--> photography --(gives way to)--> cinema --(transformed by)--> sound technology --(displaced by)--> integrated and multiplatform digital media --> [...]
(teleological fantasy:) ontologized in epochal schema (these [...]
(100)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%28.6[...]
...in the shadow of communicational technology's fashion industry
...bountiful banality of the technologies and artifacts of mass reproducibility
[...] --> lithography --(superseded by)--> photography --(gives way to)--> cinema --(transformed by)--> sound technology --(displaced by)--> integrated and multiplatform digital media --> [...]
(teleological fantasy:) ontologized in epochal schema (these sequences become something more and different) --> analog media are said to be displaced by digital media ==> logic of representation gives way to that of information
=/= (Morris questioning) the conflation of media with mediation, which is itself symptomatic of both a technological determinism and an effort to ontologize technology --> a crises of mediation (not media): the communicative aspiration and the presumptive unity of medium and message in language are brought to their limit (--> media technologies play a role in this drama, but they do not explain it. @OSP & Femke)
-women's understanding of improper English of Zuma's speech: a communicational fail that (from their perspective) is associated with illegality, corruption, and violence
(not to embrace) the kind of logocentric historiography that imagines literacy to constitute a secondary mediation of a primal and autoaffective orality
witches: *technicians of a speech* in which the identity between word and world reaches its maximal extent, when the mere utterance of a spell (even when that utterance is nonverbal) is thought to cause things to happen
zamazama's literacy: the means for communication across difference ==> the mastery of mediation and thus its effacement (=/= signify the secondary mediation of a primary orality)
...a society that is being reconstituted around a commitment to constitutional multilingualism and democratic proceduralism
rituals of governmentality
delay and deferral
fantasy of immediacy -->
•messianic movements
•direct-action politics
•various kinds of violence
•
}==> language
•hollowed out of ambiguity
•pried away from subjectivity
•instrumentalized in slogans and catchphrases (from obsolescent ideological programs)
*violent drive to immediacy* (~= direct-action politics)
(more than) the leakage of affect into a ritually rationalist space
transmission and identification needs and secures the appearance of their exteriority
slogan --> traverse the gap between word and deed, convert the difficult tasks of education and redistribution into the clarion call ~-> pop songs (anyone can utter these words and in so doing find themselves enthralled by the strange sensation of speaking someone else's words and simultaneously experiencing them as one's own)
*slogan: a deeply reified speech (at once vacu[...]
(103)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%28.7[...]/>
delay and deferral
fantasy of immediacy -->
•messianic movements
•direct-action politics
•various kinds of violence
•
}==> language
•hollowed out of ambiguity
•pried away from subjectivity
•instrumentalized in slogans and catchphrases (from obsolescent ideological programs)
*violent drive to immediacy* (~= direct-action politics)
(more than) the leakage of affect into a ritually rationalist space
transmission and identification needs and secures the appearance of their exteriority
slogan --> traverse the gap between word and deed, convert the difficult tasks of education and redistribution into the clarion call ~-> pop songs (anyone can utter these words and in so doing find themselves enthralled by the strange sensation of speaking someone else's words and simultaneously experiencing them as one's own)
*slogan: a deeply reified speech (at once vacuous and overfull) at the point were the boundary between language and thing threatens to dissolve -->
•(its communicative function:) *solicitation of identity among speakers*
•(its primary signification:) the fact of *collective utterance* (=/= dialogism)
[*]slogan: literalist response to the mundane crises of mediation (in a political rally) [reduced to the most instrumental dimension]
the awkward trace of dubious literacy (in miners message inscribed on the placard) --> resistance into the communicative process
who/what speaks?
(case of EFF:)
•pidgin, minimal and unambiguous message borders on telegraphic code (men miners)
•typographically standardized form, graphical form of a chant (women demo) --> vocalization of a slogan that anyone can speak ==> resignification and redeployment
(public sphere avowes) necessity of mediation but also of its effacement =/= short circuiting to which the slogan aspires with language that is stripped of ambiguity
messianism: the drive to transcend mediation altogether
(Jassem's mode of) explaining what had happened with all the art of a storyteller and truly Spartican authority
-[Spartan athlete: marked by simplicity, frugality, or avoidance of luxury and comfort]
(leftist activist:) those who claim better representational capacities (because the representative function has been confused with a governing function) + aspiration for something beyond this representation
performance of moral righteousness
exclusion at the threshold of liberation
unconscious mythopoetic structures
insistence on being clandestine = claim of importance
offering oneself in the role of “leader” in the pursuit of immediacy
strike as an ecstatic experience of collectivity and self-presencing =/= self-representation, me[...]
(105)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%28.8[...] epistemological* (~ “bodily knowledge” situated within a process of “bodily reasoning” that tempers not just what one knows but what one becomes with or is estranged from [=/= forensic architecture notion of knowledge])
‘sustained bodily reasoning ==> chemical sublime’
Shapiro + Kim Fortune --> call for ways to differently know and reimagine our ongoing late industrial present, which is marked by deteriorating sociotechnical systems and economic, climate, and infrastructural instability
**somatic susceptibility and epistemic capacity** common to human life --(informed by nonhuman life)--> molecular and relational appreciation --Shapiro--> domestically exposed (the ‘chemically wounded’ attuning to their own effects and affects ~ discerning the barely perceptible constituents of their environment [=/= “deviant agents,” diagnosed, resistors]
toxic = potency --implicate--> vulnerability of a living body
years of exposure --> biochemically magnified effects --> semiotically enflamed
somatic cognizance
(Shapiro on affect and phenomenological studies of environmental exposure -->) formaldehyde indicators and agents of social abandonment and precarity
(growing literature on) the body as existential, pedagogical, and ethical grounds of (cultures of) science
Shapiro: “how can expanding the avenues and temporality of sensing yield an appreciation of what many of us are abbreviating from our own sense of the world?”
Shapiro ethnographically elucidates the *somatic mode of attention*
--> bodies are sites for both actively absorbing the world and being put into motion by its constituent medley of humans and nonhumans
-becoming with (Haraway)
-orienting toward (Ahmed)
-bodily reasoning (Shapiro): the dynamic process through which knowledge of individual spaces of chronic exposure is somatically attained
women's accounts of self-monitoring for bodily dysfunctions (--> feminization of body care)
[Shapiro discovered] men's active indifference to slight somatic abnormalities (rejecting the possibility that their bodies wear permeable --> masculine self-image)
olfaction --> take displeasing scents as primary indicators of environmental contamination
--but--> smell recede from perception over time as they become incorporated into new senatorial norms (sensitivity down-regulates in a process of olfactory adaptation)
microscopic encounters --sensed--> less nameable and more diffuse sensory practices
exposure: an affective space, at the limit of the phenomenal, the somatic proceeds and then is entangled with the rational
sublime (in chemistry): transform from solid to gas bypassing the intermediate liquid form
*nuclear sublime*
weapons scientists felt [...]
(107)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29[...]that authorized witch) ==> anti-witch treatises
(case of Giordano Bruno's execution --> Hermetic magic and Cabalism) how in the 16th century: “superstition = crime”
(Christensen attributing) --> Hortus deliciarum, a largely cohesive image of hell to a period when the nature of hell's location and “topography” was a subject of fierce theological debate
-he strategically ignores debates and alternate conceptions of damnation that existed in the 15th and 16th centuries in Europe
[that which you choose] works to amplify affect more than further analysis (--> such as Christensen's attempt to heighten the fiery terror of the scene by billowing smoke ==> عام generic explanation)
...a palpable sexual dimension crepting into Christensen's thesis <-- images of women “sneaking away” to attend Sabbats
Häxan visually grounds itself in citable evidence from the start
•cinema: (as an instrument for “recording reality”) a vehicle for “telling the truth” about the world [in early 1920s]
when documentary was not yet documentary -- fiction wasn't fiction yet either --Chanan-->{
moving pictures = visual tidbits لقمه چرب ونرم
made no demands on literacy (==> spread easily)
whe world on the screen remained anecdotal (and predominantly iconic)
practically inarticulate (in terms of public discourse)}
(1900) visual meaning-making machines that demanded not only attention but belief (by staging as real reenactments) --> mutated the desire to see far-off contemporary events
•--> Attack on a China Mission Station (1900), Hunting Big Game in Africa (1907), and With Captain Scott, R.N., the South Pole (1912), The Battle of the Somme (1916) and With Our Heroes at the Somme (Bei unseren Helden an der Somme, 1917)
(Baxstrom + Meyers) question of mimesis
-what is the relation between a fragmentary visual artifact drawn “from life” and the truth value of any such fragments?
-what sorts of filmmaking practices can felicitously mimic life as such?
[for example in Curtis's In the Land of the War Canoes] status of reenactment ==> prevailing standards of expressing the real
--later --> crypto-structuralist origin myth that falsely represented what “documentary” meant to pre-Griersonian filmmakers ==> “realist” Lumiere =/= the “fanciful” Melies
}--> *gap between witnessing and the real* in Europe (this question of evidence occupied inquisitors and theologians long before the invention of cinema)
preparing viewers for the “diegetic absorption”
(telling of a story by a narrator) diegesis =/= mimesis
the strategy of “reimaging” is methodological and intentional (in the opening minutes of the film Häxan) --> (in European terms, for a very long time:) “knowledge = recitations of the kno[...]
(108)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.8[...]ssing and the real* in Europe (this question of evidence occupied inquisitors and theologians long before the invention of cinema)
preparing viewers for the “diegetic absorption”
(telling of a story by a narrator) diegesis =/= mimesis
the strategy of “reimaging” is methodological and intentional (in the opening minutes of the film Häxan) --> (in European terms, for a very long time:) “knowledge = recitations of the known”
+ creation of new images --> constituting its own evidence for what is at stake
(Christensen designating) **techniques of presentation rather than simple content**
****the “truth” gained by the reproduction of archival images**** <==through== their mobility in the context of their new use
--> (similar to Farocki) Christensen empties out such visual artifacts, expressing through their preestablished frame a meaning that was hidden and resisted
(Baxstrom + Meyers carefully treating the) methodological element of Christensen's image-making practices --in--> Häxan's depiction of the violent moral disorder of the Wild Ride of the witches to their Sabbats
(16th century) Wild Ride: a standard element of both demonological and popular literary accounts of the activities of witches, folding:
•older legends of wild hunters
•restless travels of the dead at night
•tales of the Furious Horde (a super natural band that was not originally associated with witchcraft)
•twisted chaos of the deep forest
Canon Episcopi regarding the power of demonic illusion to deceive women into imagining that they could travel great distances at night, often in the company of the goddess Diana
}--> conjoining of witch image to demonological discourse [<-- an empirically verifiable invention in the late medieval period and the Renaissance]
*the oscillating value of the non-fictive* (of its discrete artifacts)
hybrid human–animal creatures with each “natural” species being traceable within the complete appearance of the demonic creature
(coming into contemporary performance art -->) figures from antiquity:
•Saturn @Ale
•Circe @Bryana (changing men into beasts, games of chance, gambling, tricks, slight of hand, illusion, hybrid animal–human forms of the demons dancing around the “grandmother” with surprisingly young and beautiful appearance --melancholy--> general sense of sexual and societal disorder swirling around a placid, passive female protagonist) + empirical strain of the discourse of the witch
•Sabbat @Jassem
•
-->
pact of the witch
obsessed state of the hysteric
interplay of face and tableau
(Warburg's assertion that) donning a mask constitutes an active attempt “to wrest something magical from nature through the transformation of the person"<[...]
(109)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.8[...]ace
promiscuous: neither wholly artistic nor scientific =/=? hybrid artistic and scientific
traverse steep slope between past and future in the form of an event =/= plot
inability to automatically categorize Häxan (or any work of art) <== ***formal strategy rooted in an epistemic virtue***
***(in later Middle Ages) practices such as persecuting witchcraft to meditating on Christ = techniques (of sorting operation) to draw distinctions among visual phenomena, differentiating, say, physical objects from fantasies, dreams, and diabolical or artful deceptions
<--artist-- image-makers specialized in manipulating one thing (their materials) in order that a viewer should see something else ~ *to make something invisible visible* [<-- this is always ideological, and is very common in art]
(#testing) the objective knowledge possessed by the uncanny (in witch's pathological language of diabolic proofs) ==> witch must be experienced in her own milieu, a satanic biome, her state in nature
...................................
typical in 17th century: tacit mutuality of word & image
-artists habitually gave their paintings titles, mottoes, tags and quotations, and their works abound in literary allusions
-explicit interleaving of the verbal and visual
cat feces and dove hearts boiled in the moonlight
stereotype of a debased and corrupted priest
object of the customer's affections
Protestant discourse against the Catholic Church in the 16th century --> artists of the period extended the instrumentalization of slander through the production of proto-pornographic images of bishops, priests, and the pope engaged in myriad obscene acts --depicting--> the emotional states and desires of the clergy
magical salves (considered particularly powerful and troubling by demonologists)
Häxan self-positioning as a scientific investigation + constantly pull back from the dramatic outcomes of what Häxan depicts
Häxan's demonstration of the power of the witch =/= paranoid delusions of witch- crazed villagers
widely held set of beliefs regarding the “nature” or “essence” of women
Christina Larner's assertion that witch trials were gender-related (but not by definition gender-specific)
--Baxstrom--> *women often came under suspicion of being witches because they were understood to be particularly susceptible to lust, avarice, and jealousy by their very nature [~ 16th century: **women “naturally” susceptible to witchcraft*** + women were presumed to possess elements of the nature more than men] =/= Federici's understanding of witch-hunt as straight-forward instance of misogyny*
--Roper--> *one cannot approach witchcraft or possession from a vantage point in the present without granting some legitimate status to the [...]
(110)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%30[...]ury nearly 10000 women (destitute women, the insane, “idiots,” epileptics, and Parisian society's “least favored classes” [---> go to Foucault]) were kept in La Force prison, a second Bastille, in Paris
=/= the nuns and devoted female members of the church, who raised special concern when they were “possessed” by unexplained forces of demonic or neurologic origin
***(Ulrich Baer > Baxstrom:) Charcot ==> transformation of *tableau vivant* --to--> *tableau clinique* : a hysterical reliving of the original symptom and reframed trauma that attempted to suspend the two temporalities (real + imagined) in the same image***
[Sina ==> --to--> *tableau critique* : ??]
--> Freud and Breuer's efforts (in “reliving” with hypnosis) to isolate the mechanisms of hysteria
Acta Sanctorum [---> go to Attar's tazkirat ~ hagiography]
countless early descriptions of entities speaking through the mouths of girls and of the manifestation of “external signs” in the possessed @Bryana
(associated with) possession:
•anesthesias
•amnesias
•subconscious acts
•somnambulisms
•fixed ideas
•
***conceptually arranged abyss between outer and inner states ==> *literal mastery of nonsense* ==> gaining empirical purchase over forces openly acknowledged to be invisible and insensible in themselves***
•the exorcists (building upon the techniques of inquisitors and witch-hunters) take on possession acted as the *bridge across this abyss*
•the neurologists and psychologists draw unknowable forces out of the inner voids via the *symptom* --Malinowski--> witches, spirits, demons acting as middlemen and guids (=/= explicit target of inquiry) in the field of worker's journey to the dark cornerss of the real
----> (Baxstrom's anthropological insight is useful in artistic feedback, for) in apass: (we use exorcist technique + clinical symptomology) to bridge across the abyss between the artwork and artist (~ the enunciation and enunciator) --Sina--> ‘enunciation is the guide to an enunciator’ #feedback
Levy-Bruhl's haughty binarized “us and them” (his focus on “the primitive” as a category of social analysis and his insistence upon an unbridgeable epistemic gap) --> darker history of human sciences: an embarrassing historical curiosity... *an unsunstainable position* --Baxstrom--> Levy-Bruhl lost his position in th canon because the logic of his arguments regarding the forces that shaped the life-worlds of non-western people denied the possibility of a field researcher's being able to assume the *point of view* of the native in the bold manner that Malinowski declared was not only possible but actually the highest aspiration for anthropology [--> also the aspiration for critical feedback?]
(counterepistemological) Levy-Bruhl =/= Malinowski --> ([*]feedback: an art of engagement[...]
(111)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%31.1[...] honor the terms of the problem* (such as it is posed along with its contradictions ~ fubar)
==> (help you to) resist the common sense (or less common sense) solutions
[*]inheriting: an act that demands thought and commitment, an act that calls for our transformation by the very gift of inheriting --> my work on ajayeb, you start from ajayeb (better than “coughing”?)
Despert in reading Derrida through Haraway --> studying the way in which scientists were beginning to respond to their animals & becoming attentive to the animals’ responses in trun
[Sina + Despret + Haraway] ***to inherit is an act that demands a transformation on the part of the inheritor***
the importance of transforming that which is transmitted to us
thinking from animals
(Despret working on) the meaning of ”(starting) from” [a partir de]
•for philosophers: to depart from animals, to leave them as quickly as possible and never to return ==> “animal = text & pretext” : its function is to provide a reason for going (partir) elsewhere [<-- i have done this]
getting involved --to--> martyrdom
author-turned-ethologist --> classic genres of ethological literature
(a matter of) *performing through narration the passing obligation that is now mine*
(Latourian) *amateur: a person who likes and cultivates her tastes and does her best to cultivate a kind of becoming-sensitive to the world*
in ethology (and in animal sciences) monologues make terrible narratives
[@Femke, @Pierre, ?can we do without] the philosophical tradition of: **searching for traces of ideological and political contamination** in the work of scientific naturalist (or whatever other field) --> you (often) find a perfect target for this sort of critique
•(pay attention to) what makes a perfect target for your sort of critique (@Laura's Jane Fonda, etc.)
[zoological bird:] sociobiological literature prepares you to accept a certain kind of fact about this bird =/= Zahavi's babblers however do (altruism & cooperation) in a remarkably more inventive and diversified way and for entirely different reasons that sociobiological birds
anthropocentrism (credit birds with complex intentions, and [why?] complex intentions always seem human)
to see birds as “dancing” and for fairly complex reasons could only have been a result of the fact that the observers projected onto the animals their own frameworks and experiences
Despret observing the birds + their ethologist --> the birds made Zahavi interesting
(Despret discovering that) any theory of representation was at once partial and totalizing, because it proposed to elucidate the complex work of relations and encounters from the sole standpoint of the human
(how Despret[...]
(112)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%31.4[...]ransmitted to us
thinking from animals
(Despret working on) the meaning of ”(starting) from” [a partir de]
•for philosophers: to depart from animals, to leave them as quickly as possible and never to return ==> “animal = text & pretext” : its function is to provide a reason for going (partir) elsewhere [<-- i have done this]
getting involved --to--> martyrdom
author-turned-ethologist --> classic genres of ethological literature
(a matter of) *performing through narration the passing obligation that is now mine*
(Latourian) *amateur: a person who likes and cultivates her tastes and does her best to cultivate a kind of becoming-sensitive to the world*
in ethology (and in animal sciences) monologues make terrible narratives
[@Femke, @Pierre, ?can we do without] the philosophical tradition of: **searching for traces of ideological and political contamination** in the work of scientific naturalist (or whatever other field) --> you (often) find a perfect target for this sort of critique
•(pay attention to) what makes a perfect target for your sort of critique (@Laura's Jane Fonda, etc.)
[zoological bird:] sociobiological literature prepares you to accept a certain kind of fact about this bird =/= Zahavi's babblers however do (altruism & cooperation) in a remarkably more inventive and diversified way and for entirely different reasons that sociobiological birds
anthropocentrism (credit birds with complex intentions, and [why?] complex intentions always seem human)
to see birds as “dancing” and for fairly complex reasons could only have been a result of the fact that the observers projected onto the animals their own frameworks and experiences
Despret observing the birds + their ethologist --> the birds made Zahavi interesting
(Despret discovering that) any theory of representation was at once partial and totalizing, because it proposed to elucidate the complex work of relations and encounters from the sole standpoint of the human
(how Despret became) interested in actual practices (with Stengers and Latour), in the way they articulated questions and responded to questions
****stories that scientists [and Disney or Hollywood] develop about animals are also our stories**** --> these stories transform humans and their animals
--Stengers--> sciences (of the contemporaneity) for which: **production of knowledge = production of a way of being** ==> (they do not reveal what animals are, rather) they follow and accompany an act of becoming together : *an act of becoming with the stories that we construct concerning them* (good or bad)
•birds will have been far more interesting starting from the moment that Zahavi proposed to connect their stories to others [~-> how Cinderella became interesting for m[...]
(113)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%31.4[...]the direction and velocity of movement, accompanying the North-American notion of freedom and relation to destiny. in Iran the movement is also based on personal cars but everyone is stuck in traffic, so there is a freedom of choice implied and is initially available but then on the plain of possibilities there are all sorts of technologically situated block-roads that traffic in and hinder motility. this is also a condition of Tarof. “shoma befarmayid!” (after you!)
*Tarof might be as well a mode of resistance in order not to enter the economy of the other (--> at the mercy of the other), when they say “it's on me.”
•رودربایستی <--> ? a [در رودربایستی گیر کردن] (a --?--> حیا)
shah: one who sits while others stand --> tarof as king's behavior (tarof is adab-e salatin?) ~~--> tasavof's tarof: takalof (=/= javan-mardi: ‘self = guest’)
Khhv0M9n5_g
...................................
every call to speak involves some violation and over-joy, putting oneself in a persecutory way on the line, what Sa'di calls in “Dar Favaede Khamushi” in 4th chapter of his Golestan ‘on the disadvantages of speaking’ or “On the Advantages of Silence” (Written in 1258 CE)
literate or obliterate
infinitely less violent --> that there is never absolutely nonviolent, a value infinitely small but never zero; infinidecimals
degree of violence = 1/x {while “true”: x+1}
(Augustine:)
(Because of the arbitrariness of being:) “to love" = "I want you to be”
[we need to be witnessed:]
because “we have not made ourselves,” we “stand in need of confirmation. We are strangers; we stand in need of being welcomed”
*strangers and exchangers (sarraf)
this is an artistic concern with foreign-policy
[Arendt:] (in 20th century) shifts in the terms in which we locate the ethics and values of responsibility
citizen --> refugee
[demand for clear ethical responsiveness]
*citizen: an entity assumed to occupy the secured interior zones of polity (who generates the affect and discourse of care, concern, responsibility, and rights;)
*refugee: foreign and shifting body with no home base--has become the exemplary locus for any possible cosmopolitan ethics
you feel like a foreign body until you finally get a job, love, being greeted,
(you may remain foreign until the other claims your body: the police, the lover, the employer, some microorganism that make you sick, and so on.)
(Nietzsche's view of) the friend as the future***
Holderlin asking “Wo aber sind die Freunde?” (a central complaint of ethical proportions and political consequence), (that they have not come to the place from which the poet is greeting) scattered or not yet in existence --> nature of f[...]
(114)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%32.3[...]ilosophy)
--> what is important for a living self?
(bab-e) hekayat-e dusti-e kabutar o zagh o mush o bakhe o aahu o ...
بابِ / حکایت دوستی کبوتر و زاغ و موش و باخه و آهو و ...
[everyone?]
[the story of the friendship of these animals; the quality, properties, and pitfalls of relation]
•what is (re)activating the *imaginary friend*? (is it really fully on shut-down?) ---> trap to abstract thought? ---> this ‘abstract thought’ is dangerous for “sadness” to get lost in it, but it is amazing for “joy”
•how much we need sadness?
why jackal is so persistent and play-full (full of “plays”) in Kelile o Demne's bestiary?
bird people
,
fox people
,
arbab-e اربابِ --> dar bab-e در بابِ
(let's do this conversion, we are not “arbab”/master of the story nor ethics or anything else, we like to create “dar bab-e”: doors/openings into different possible path ways)
(it is about teller not fully understanding the story)
‘shekar’ [شکار prey] and ‘ashkar’ [آشکار visible], two entities in play, like the game of stone-paper-scissors, a link in our shared literature that relates the perceptible to the subject of hunt. in a discourse of friendship and enmity, the visible anticipating itself as target for violence, becomes meaningful when we approach it in a game-theoretic-semiotic linkage, relating and tying together issues of voyeurism, surveillance, violence, media and mediation, and predation in poetic itineraries.
[business] friendliness, تعارف Tarof and greetings [and its artificial inseminations] (sometimes) is it covering up or masking really predatory behaviors(?)
and in Kelile o Demne,
کلیله و دمنه Kelile o Demne (i am becoming more convinced that) is (all) about the phenomenology of *friendship and the *contract
Sa'di is the theoretician of friendship (“mojaverat” مجاورت) and Kelileo Demne is the theoretician of “sherarat” (شرارت villainy, felony) saying that the closeness of different subjects is catastrophic [--> proper differences between kinds and subjects.] Sa'di is writing golestan گلستان and bustan بوستان at the time of the Mongols threat---it is the news of the Mongols coming and we know about the velocities of news can penetrate within the thick walls of any city. Sa'di is theorizing proximity based on “mohabat” (محبت love, Liebe and kindness), he assembles a setting of ‘garden’ for the coming of Mongols army. Kelileo Demne's project is pessimist pragmatism, mobilizing ethics in a milieu of violence and power.
---> the story of birds entrapped escape away with the cage
---> the story of cat and mouse project
---> bat and owl
---> scorpion and..[...]
(116)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%32.7[...]taminate!”)
in the case of mobile phone animal meme, the human-animal relation does not operates solely through the physical proximity of humans and animals, but rather a wider geography, and networks the interiority of Tehran domestic environments.
-as the house becomes cleaner, the public domain becomes more feral, and the animal more contagious, and the proximity more virtual, and the cross-species relationships and pictural,
-questions of the vital, the dangerous, and the wild (in tehran)
“[...]animals, especially dead ones, enter centrally into what humans can themselves be and do in the world.” (Cockburn)
i am trying to establish an anthropological, sociological and psychological investigations in this matter, calling for a ‘cultural animal geography’ that focuses on the complex entanglings of human-animal relations with space, place, location, environment and landscape. ~-> topology(s) {it means that spaces and places involved make a difference to the very constitution of the relations in play}
[Tehran: wilderness ~ public ~ non-domesticity]
...differing peoples in differing periods and worldly contexts***
societies in a host of settlements, fields, farms, factories, imaginary, literary, psychological and virtual spaces (--> and how animalhuman is socially defined)
technologies of human orderings : telegram? [encountering all kinds of inventiveness that go on cross-species (human, animal, story, image, media), the kind of semiotic work]
*Space* (de Certeau) : A place (lieu) is the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence. It thus excludes the possibility of two things being in the same location (place.) The law of the ‘proper’ rules in the place: the elements taken into consideration are beside one another, each situated in its own ‘proper’ and distinct location, a location it defines. A place is thus an instantaneous configuration of positions. It implies an indication of stability.
--> space as the ‘scheme of things’ --> species-identifying
=/= imaginal space, animal space, memory, dream, etc.
‘species-identifying’ (classification) in:
•pre-Neolithic totemic societies (Shepard 1993)
•biblical classifications of the different beasts (Leviticus: Sibley 1995)
•ancient and medieval ‘great chain of being’ thinking (Lovejoy 1936)
•Linneaus's Systema naturae
•tabular representations of the natural world (Frangsmyr 1983; Spary 1996)
•...
understandings of what comprises an animal is different in each case.
what should be interested?
“(elaborating on Shepard,) Ingold (1994) suggests that hunter-gatherers generally view the distinction between humans and animals as permeable and easily crossed, unlike what is taken as read in much Western science and philos[...]
(117)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%33.1[...]location, a location it defines. A place is thus an instantaneous configuration of positions. It implies an indication of stability.
--> space as the ‘scheme of things’ --> species-identifying
=/= imaginal space, animal space, memory, dream, etc.
‘species-identifying’ (classification) in:
•pre-Neolithic totemic societies (Shepard 1993)
•biblical classifications of the different beasts (Leviticus: Sibley 1995)
•ancient and medieval ‘great chain of being’ thinking (Lovejoy 1936)
•Linneaus's Systema naturae
•tabular representations of the natural world (Frangsmyr 1983; Spary 1996)
•...
understandings of what comprises an animal is different in each case.
what should be interested?
“(elaborating on Shepard,) Ingold (1994) suggests that hunter-gatherers generally view the distinction between humans and animals as permeable and easily crossed, unlike what is taken as read in much Western science and philosophy.”
when/how you are persuaded to portray yourself as the relevant ‘expert’ in whatever field?
who are the legitimate spokespersons for animals? once Attar, and now biology sci.
(‘the modern constitution’ is as guilty as mysticism's literacy)
...and that strong human sense of the proper place of animals (which they should occupy physically) --> material-conceptual (double) placement ...(‘scheme of things’ [ajayeb] --> animals supposed to be found in the non-discursive spaces and places of the world) (or on the television)
-Said: ‘imaginative geography’, geographical ‘othering’
-overlappings that we find in telegram social media tehran --> what kinds of ‘animal’ (which animalities) are at stake there in the mobile phone's interface?
In recent years zoos have reinvented themselves as ‘arks’
animals categorically embodied ‘meaty beings,’ and how they are usually "out of place” in the the immediate locality made in Tehran
animals are very good at forging their own beastly places, ‘other’ spaces of that of the human
(this is not about ‘territory’)
who “can” think and act in the world?
who has the “ability” to prompt change?
[my apass research project is in a sence *contemplating the agency* and speculating *relocating qualities* ~-> (re)configuration of the world]
cultural cross-codings has always been constructed between ‘some’ humans and ‘some’ animals
*the “source” of agency, coined in Europe(?) from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries onwards: self-awareness, intention, thought and language --> properties of “consciousness”
(--> History of Consciousness department in the Humanities Division of the University of California, Santa Cruz. #entities that started to make decision deep in the ocean)
(--> ‘actor-network theory’ ANT; Callon, Law[...]
(118)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%33.2[...]ys been constructed between ‘some’ humans and ‘some’ animals
*the “source” of agency, coined in Europe(?) from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries onwards: self-awareness, intention, thought and language --> properties of “consciousness”
(--> History of Consciousness department in the Humanities Division of the University of California, Santa Cruz. #entities that started to make decision deep in the ocean)
(--> ‘actor-network theory’ ANT; Callon, Law, Latour, Serres. #the key difference here lies in the historical uses and mediations of objects, for humans objects are employed to solidify social bond. ANT sees agency emerging as an effect generated
and performed in configurations of different materials. Latour's work to relocate qualities.)
(--> New Materialism; radical constructionism, all world is a poem)
(--> nonrepresentational theory; Anderson, Harrison, Stewart; critique become vitalist: to watch grass grow, or curious and experimental to face an overbundance of things to be described or imagined; concepts are lived; the subject is present as witness to the moment in which some worlding is about to disclose itself in some form or event. the result is a subject attached to worlds throwing together in a sensory refrain, a literally unbelievable image, or a muscle of sociality or belief. theory: drawn through writing into the ways that people and things venture out into reals. a world in the present tense is always other than its representation [<-- another argument for #excess]. nonrepresentational writing : *a phenomenal method of attending and composing* =/= epiphenomenal: an expression of knowledge already garnered انبار from scholarship. to spin out of critical thinking's bad habits: the prizing of prefabricated good objects over bad objects.)
(--> Singh, Anand; agency as a threshold of life with its own immanent forms of movement and flux, studying spirits and shifts in intensity)
(--> )
(--> )
(the dangerous and bizzar idea of) a pure ‘human’ society
‘anthropomorphism’ actually ‘underestimates our humanity,’ in that the ‘anthropos’ and the ‘morphos’ together mean both that which has human shape and that which gives shape to humans (Philo + Wilbert > Latour)
technomorphism, zoomorphism, ...
anthropocentrism of the standard anthropomorphism critique --> human-referenced starting-point
trophies, stuffed parts, drawings
urine, faeces and other dirts
feral =/= wild =/= tame =/= feral
in-between animal-findings and animals finding
appropriate places of animals: in zoo or animations
(the 2016 film Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is about proper zoology and not animal epistemology. here what comes after “Find Them” is crucial.)
(the developement moral identities and psychological interiorities fo[...]
(119)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%33.3[...]rk on X in order to get the point across that one remains susceptible (mosta'ed مستعد, dar khatar در خطر, dar ma'raz در معرض) to and in need of X : what X almost was, or is still about to be
(the character of X, and? the X-ian character)
-rather, ask, in what way X allows an approach?
{Avital on} **authority, violent shores of human governance
what happened to authority after the demotion (tanazol-e rotbe تنزل رتبه) of the “big Other” (death of God, State, Pir, and other mostly masculinist idols)?
a primal impulse in the cuing of group formation; pre-givenness of our way of handling private and public spheres of encounter, domestic and foreign affairs;
-disappearance of authority functions as a figure for democracy in crisis; loss of authority and the loss of the enemy opens up abysses in boundaries that have kept the world recognizable
maternal (runs of) interference (or motherly Wechsel) --?--> still pumping effects of authority
authority of the breast
to slave tyranny
(who? insists in remaining a) non-reader = solid descriptor (sharh-dahande شرح دهنده) ~-> transparent utterance ~ rhetorically uncluttered argument
literature is snafu
how authorship (dead or alive) feeds authority?
What has been packaged as terror can be in fact misleading.
authority is the most elusive of terms that inform relations, and yet no politics, no family, no pride of accomplishment can exist without it
for Arendt, authority is an undeletable term, key to any grasp of politics
authority =/= rhetoric of persuasion
Plato's authority of philosophy: in an effort both to memorialize and to exact revenge for the verdict on Socrates. (as if Socrates didn't have any bullying tendencies in his persuasive energies.)
a recovery operation
the ‘need' for authority
(Arendt:) “It was after Socrates’ death that Plato began to discount persuasion (and argument) as insufficient for the guidance of men and to seek for something liable to compel them without using external means of violence.” ==> a power that renounces power; coercion without violence, (invention of hell, is it nonviolent?! a more earthbound rhetoric of persuasion?!)
(when we are out of master/slave relationship) expert knowledge commands confidence and obtains compliance (without force nor persuasion); soft coercion associated with reason --> Plato's philosopher-king --> **“Authority establishes relationality prior to command, promising compliance in the absence of force or argument”** (Avital)
aspects of the authority that might take in or shake up the other without harm
historical comfort zones ...and ...the ongoing torment of worldlessness
(Avital,) are the mourners of authority masking another loss for which[...]
(120)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%33.6[...]if i follow these objects as they move out of the highlands, and if they became, if they came into an art market, then absolutely what we would be dealing with is commodities[...] --> situated knowledges [#SK], #import function
...................................
*literature = the question of reading* (=/= matter of novels and poems)
...................................
what is the language of war?
(Keenan > Weizman:) we need to understand war as discourse --> *war = a threatened discourse*
-The language component of war exists in the gap between the level of destruction which is “possible” and the level of destruction which is “actually applied” in every given situation.
when war is no longer a means but an end in itself(?) -->? Hezbollah
deterrence: a means of controlling a person's behavior through negative motivational influences
“We are law-abiding, and we go wild.”
violence stripped of semiotics
The logic, the reason, of conflict is thus political ... for Clausewitz, politics is essentially logic, logos, discourse, people reasoning with one another, thinking and speaking, exchanging
@Luis, why conflict could be my concern? because it marks the breakdown of politics, when we can no longer have a conversation, engage in the game, where there is no possibility of further exchange, there is fighting
failure ==> use of force
Saskia Sassen called the attacks of September 11 “A Message From the Global South”
she wrote that the attacks bore witness to a failure in communication or to a “translation problem”
for her the language of September 11 attacks was clear
Sassen's dangerous and depraved rationalization of September 11: south is speaking in a language that needs no translation
the word ‘conflict’ (is c[...]
(121)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%34.1[...]e everyday life itself or are grown within the everyday
*event of traumatic loss functions as:
•an event
•a figure of thought
20th century as the century of genocides : the story of collective violence from the point of view of victims and survivors <-- we must contest this story
•(Kleinman & Kleinman, Mookherjee:) victim stories ==> voyeurism
•(Fassin & Rechtman:) ubiquity of a trauma narrative substitutes critical engagement with the structural forces of inequality (or discrimination by a psychologizing of experience and of subjectivity)
•
•
category of the victim is not transparent =/= bureaucratic legal forms through which the victim status is produced aligns with very different kinds of knowledge (shamanic, ritual, genealogical) to generate different kinds of affects
1947 Partition of India (marked by massive intercommunal killing, rape, and abduction of women) ==/==> victim
==> refugees, evacuee property, abducted persons
his fictionalized account of my responses to his questions inspired me to think
(your fictionalized account of my response to your question inspires me to think)
[to] rake the fallen leaves of language and literature to recreate experiences...
(usually) “treason” ==> massacres and violation of human rights by governmental forces
(one is forced to see events in other countiries in the light of issues pertaining to) transitional justice and the global form of truth
unknown dead imagined as hungry and thirsty ghosts
*the living cannot offer the dead solace because the unknown dead cannot be placed within the grid of genealogical knowledge necessary to make them into benign ancestors*
-the difference between kin and strangers, ancestors and ghosts
**hospitality being offered to the stranger could also become a way of reincorporating the estranged kin**(? -iranian hospitality?)
the intertwined nature of bureaucratic power and ritual action
the dead are haphazardly buried that have to be then contained or transformed through shamanic knowledge and ritual manipulations? -Veena
modern bureaucratic procedures ==> tear apart the continuity of generational connections <-~ the work of ritual to restore connections is engaged
the different ways we come to know something =/= the experience of ‘carrying’ a knowledge
...unknown dead in a milieu in which ancestors and ghosts are not simply distant and abstract concepts but are felt with every sinew of the body, who come to haunt the descendants through dreams and apparitions =/= Ta'zieh: ancestors in contexts in which the relation to the dead is commemorated primarily through national rituals
(in the Jeju uprising/massacre case that Veena studies) ‘victim’: the qualifying cond[...]
(122)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%34.7[...]of “eye machine”
•a range of practices for situating the “self” (that tender thing in postmodernity) in places and spaces grown thick with entanglements and consequences; a form both of “to face” and “to perceive”
aesthetic conceptions of beauty and/or ambiguity coupled with biological epistemology and phenomenology of the organisms --in--> in Jean Painleve, Genevieve Hamon, Leni Riefenstahl, David Powell ==construct==> a host of hybridized and enmeshed “encounters”
biosemiotics
zoosemiotics
-humanist fascist aesthetic --> desires to memorialize “beautiful and unpolluted” coral communities
-promise of immediate and luminous experience of “jellyfish otherness”
-systems (of power?) that constitutively produce animal and human actors
human-animal + nonhuman-animal + apparatuses --> co-constitutive in the process of trying to know something about whale ecology
(Hayward > Whitehead:) concrescence: “we” (con prefix) ere- (create) scence (sense, or the “scene,” that which is seen), the present is given by a consense of subjective forms. We are multiple individuals, but there are also multiple individual agents of consciousness operant in the construction of the given.
-literal materialization of a dynamic produced
photograph (only one part, a kind of lively limb, of the relay):
(ajayeb style -->) a bumptious and lively event of the processes of whale studies and whales themselves =/= a still record of a whale “that had been there”
the image: a kind of connective tissue, soliciting one's senses
solar light --> brushed up against, even touched, the whale --> translated through the camera --> into film --> into chemical bathes --> into photo-paper --> through my eye as a research assistant
}==> ‘photograph: material, immanent, interconnected’ ==> somatic intelligibility (embodiment) to my own somatic intelligence ~ enacted an encounter between the senses (subjective feelings) and their sense (objective knowledges)
a mutual embodiment <-- shared in the event of the photographic space
experience of these photographs [whale or telegram animal video]: an instance of *sensuous knowledge* --> way we are in some carnal modality able to touch and be touched by the substance of images (to feel a visual atmosphere envelop us)
(Grosz's) [*]perception: flesh's reversibility ~ the flesh touching, seeing, perceiving itself, one fold (provisionally) catching the other in its own selfembrace
human/animal and technological sensorium
-Hayward asking how coral communities create representational ruptures in photographs
-Sina asking how telegram virtual communities create representational ruptures in the real of human-animal of Tehran, how the enfleshed animal mobile phone photograph touch us
}--> live[...]
(123)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%35[...]diment) to my own somatic intelligence ~ enacted an encounter between the senses (subjective feelings) and their sense (objective knowledges)
a mutual embodiment <-- shared in the event of the photographic space
experience of these photographs [whale or telegram animal video]: an instance of *sensuous knowledge* --> way we are in some carnal modality able to touch and be touched by the substance of images (to feel a visual atmosphere envelop us)
(Grosz's) [*]perception: flesh's reversibility ~ the flesh touching, seeing, perceiving itself, one fold (provisionally) catching the other in its own selfembrace
human/animal and technological sensorium
-Hayward asking how coral communities create representational ruptures in photographs
-Sina asking how telegram virtual communities create representational ruptures in the real of human-animal of Tehran, how the enfleshed animal mobile phone photograph touch us
}--> liveliness of humananimal encounters [the way in which my aesthetic and ethical senses merge with animals in the flesh]
-how people get along in concrete, metamorphic, phantasmatic ways
**sensible and sensual ensembles of materialized capacities and activities that literally and metaphorically make sense of, and to, ourselves and other animals**
(Ihde >) [*]phenomenology: a philosophical style that emphasizes a certain interpretation of human experience and that, in particular, concerns perception and bodily activity --Hayward--> a theoretical practice grounded on the carnal, fleshy, material foundations of subjectivity as it engages and is transformed by and in the world
we attend to: content + form + context
invertebrates, product of displacement and comparison, a ruinous verb turned noun turned classification --Hayward--> foregrounding and rethinking the syntax, optics, and heterogeneity of vertebrate and invertebrate relationality
accountability and responsibility in the enmeshment of knowing, doing, seeing, and being
(we need less philosophizing and more) *envisioning: an enactment of dynamic en-figurings that imperil boundaries that clearly differentiate self and other without the loss of historical, cultural, and species specificity*
...................................
☾
light has illuminated western stories
•God said, let there be light: and there was light
•solar radiance --> refracted planetary atmosphere --> earth's watery matter --> lively forms
•life shaped by ice (Meloy)
•life shaped by dark (Mohaghegh)
•life shaped by animal (Sina)
•life shaped by light (Hayward) --> the invisible medium that makes a knowable world visible; *seeing light: a trope for making visible in a comprehensive form (such that they are real)*
1. *philosophy is photology* : languag[...]
(124)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%35[...]and irony + related affects and sensibilities:
•irreverence بى ادبى
•ambivalence
•camp
•frivolity هرزه
•indecorum بى نزاکتى
•awkwardness
•sardonicism زهر خنده
•perversity
•playfulness
•glee شاد شاد
affects and sensibilities typically associated with environmentalism:
•gloom
•doom
•guilt
•shame
•didacticism
•prescriptiveness
•sentimentality احساساتى
•reverence حرمت
•seriousness
•sincerity
•earnestness
•sanctimony تقدس
•self-righteousness
•wonder
assumptions:
•that reverence is required for ethical relations to the nonhuman
•that knowledge is key to fighting problems like climate change
...................................
__al __ : __ affects and matter of __
(sensational X : Y affects and the matter of Z)
ocularcentric selves
(Hayward's) jellyfish: prismatically, their kinesthetic bling is registered visually and haptically, which draws our attention to the construction of their enclosure
expressively dense
rendered literal and material
light is of this world
to think diffractively = to apprehend a critical difference within
(the formation of a word from a sound associated with what is named -->) onomatopoetic: designed around the sensation of water
Hayward is drawn (to the Monterey Bay aquarium) ==> trying to sort out the poetics of their display
[they] furnish a simulation of the real thing, soliciting the sensation of unmediated encounter with marine worlds, they *act as sites of ecological hope* --Acampora--> *zooscopic: a totalizing view that conceals meaningful human-animal encounters at the price of reinvigorating anthropocentrism {=/=? zoological vandalism --> what would be an animal social media?}
[in zooscopic experience:] the very structure of the human-animal encounter is disrupted, and the interaction that is sought (encountering the animal) becomes impossibility as the “real” animals disappear and the conditions for seeings are undermined [<-- how telegram does that? if telegram animal media is zooscopic, then i say that is good for Tehran, for the “real” encounters are violent. the idea of “truely seeing animal” is metaphysics]
captivity ==> animal against themselves, “animal = qualified noun, adjectival” [=/= *ajayeb's wilderness* was articulated in a time before the modern zoo]
--Acampora--> zone of species contact mediated by an interruption that voids actual encounter
--✕--> Sina: there has never been an “actual encounter”
--✕--> Hayward: does face-to-face “seeing” matter for organisms of a radically different scale and for whom “eyes” are light receptors rather than pic[...]
(125)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%35.4[...]br />
the old rule of “human bodies shouldn't interfere in a properly scientific research process =/= Lorenz:
...feed his jackdaw with worms
...attempted to teach him to fly
...swam with the geese
--Despret--> Lorenz aimed at elucidating ‘meaning’ in and through the relationships he sustained with the animals he was studying ==>
•he understood for a little goose what mother is/means by letting his own body be caught in that meaning of mother
•he achieved what ‘companionship’ is/means for a jackdaw through being fed and playing with, and flying lessons
•
--> ***what matters in the animal's world = what bears meaning from their point of view***
presence
*if the scientists body is evoked, it is never for itself nor is it named as such --> when seeking the body, we are offered a surprisingly abstract concept: “presence” (under the guise of “presence of the observer”) =/= body
-the presence has no skin, it does not sweat, nor does it eat, sleep, dream, fear --> [*]presence: the perceived body which never acknowledges itself as a body (there is no presence that could be unperceived in one way or in an other) = disembodied body <== *science: the cognitive activity par excellence*
•obliterates the actual presence of the observer --understood--> (in terms of a) convenient and non-problematized split “presence =/= absence”
•(?if these attempts succeed in) reducing the reactivity of the animal to the researcher =/= wildboyz
}--> ‘not having a body' = a mean to preclude (to prevent or to avoid) **the always possible reciprocity of the encounter** [--> aliens are watching us!]
}--> ‘having a body’ discloses and renders perceptible (it is the actual condition of) the very existence of reciprocity of the encounter
how scientists (and artists) construe their presence in the field
*the will to be there without being there*
the problematic “animals react =/= animal don't react”
(also in art -->) ***the regime of distrust of influence*** [--> fable of ‘artist's original interiority']
-*- what does ‘meaningful’ means? -*-
scientists aim to find new methods to focus on those behaviors that are most meaningful to the animals themselves
•Shirly Strum --> I tried to let the baboons themselves “tell” me what was ‘important’ (-how a tree can tell you what is important to them?) -with the baboonss: nothing made them believe that she could be a baboon, so she decided after a while that she could try to urinate while staying among the baboons ==> surprise (=/= trying not to disturb the baboons with her body) --> her body (style, gender, smell, look, anime, etc.) made her enter into relationships with the animals in a new mode, **as a living person (like them) she creates with them an embodied proximity** (==> embodied affinities) [<-- Jassem is v[...]
(126)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%36.5[...]= animal don't react”
(also in art -->) ***the regime of distrust of influence*** [--> fable of ‘artist's original interiority']
-*- what does ‘meaningful’ means? -*-
scientists aim to find new methods to focus on those behaviors that are most meaningful to the animals themselves
•Shirly Strum --> I tried to let the baboons themselves “tell” me what was ‘important’ (-how a tree can tell you what is important to them?) -with the baboonss: nothing made them believe that she could be a baboon, so she decided after a while that she could try to urinate while staying among the baboons ==> surprise (=/= trying not to disturb the baboons with her body) --> her body (style, gender, smell, look, anime, etc.) made her enter into relationships with the animals in a new mode, **as a living person (like them) she creates with them an embodied proximity** (==> embodied affinities) [<-- Jassem is very good at it. this happens as well in apass research environment between artists]
---> go to Cinderella taking shower with her birds in the attic {urine, noise, surprise}
•Mark Bekoff --> empathy: possibility of sharing feelings involves mirror neurons (“I can feel the animals”) ~= (an experiment to incorporate) *to embody literally*
+ (Burghardt's) use of *critical anthropomorphism* (=/= Walt Disney) use of various forms of information (natural history, perception, behavioral description, autism, Cinderella, etc.)
•Temple Grandin (expert in factory plants for slaughter systems) --> *empathy without pathos* (for her and the animals) [*]world: a swirling mass of tiny details ~ [animal: autistic savant ~= special form of genius]--> a little plastic water bottle lying harmlessly, a shiny reflection, a yellow jacket hanging on a fence, all those turn out to be in their world *wrong details* (“I think the way animals think”) --> ****animals are visual thinkers**** {*you have to see in details*_ <-- how my work changed visually from abstract to baroque while working on the heritage of zoology. #Cinderella: which part of me animals give new powers and meanings? that part is of other beings}
-{Grandin actively transforms mindless animals into meaningful geniuses ==> gives them new powers ==> changes her}--> *animals (or your ghosts, your subjects) are invited to other modes of being, other relationships, new ways to inhabit the human world + to force human beings to address them differently : **disclosing unexpected affinities ==create==> new identities** (=/= empathy: tourism of the soul) --> identities do not pre-exist identification : *****previous construction of affinities ==> identity (is the outcome, the achievement)*****
(Grandin:) *marginal essence --transform--> partial perspective ==> affinities: (Haraway's) just-barely-connections*
}=/= romanticism: the belief that “feeling for another” belongs to some sort of naive state of nature
[...]
(127)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%36.5[...] of generalization]
([artist's and] scientist's) body: a technical device, the witness
(companion story -->) ***to embody the way other beings solve their survival problems***
“the business of curling up to start with, and spinning around after each nap” (was vital to success with a dozing wolf) --> Cinderella's choreography of the morning greeting ceremony
limits of endurance
i feld that i, because of my specific superiority as a member of Homo sapiens, together with my intensive technical training, was entitled to *pride of place* =/= being under observation
Mowat's humour =/= Derrida not laughing at his own worries (concerned with: what distinguish animals from man is their “being naked without knowing it”)
•naked body is a pretext, a pre-text for more philosophy
•Derrida is talking to his colleagues (the very people who are **seeking grandiose difference** <-- also artists) =/= a difference that happens to him
•(my problem with the old tiring trend in philosophy [after encounter with Manning]:) looking for locus of things [a generality] : talk about ‘the figure of the cat' = the allegory for all the cats on the earth (~ the felines that traverses our myths and religions, literature and fables)
***what the cat might actually be doing***
(this is my relation to description, what is the world, that cat, the demon, the mice up to? and use my best imaginative crafts and precise descriptive acts, the answers are many. that is not about definition or defining ‘what is’ the cat that visits me or the spider in my room. i only try to well define concepts and not subjects. my style of presenting my research on ajayeb bestiary: narrating the contingency of the differences that happened and mattered to me in particular =/= philosophy)
wolves (=/= nomadic roamer) have strong feelings of property rights and they ritually and regularly mark their boundaries
what am i allowed to do with my body when i am with animals?
(Despret + Strum + Mowat) using one's body to make the animal respond (--> does this make sense with humans? in apass for example --?--> use your body to make them respond =/= react)
--Haraway--> a “good” (actually bad) scientist = learning to be invisible, like a rock to be unavailable, as if data-collecting humankind were not present, seeing the scene of nature close up through a peep-hole, remove from the subject animals’ social environment
•(ignoring animal social cues) imagining the baboons as seeing somebody off-category, not something --> to be a *nonentity* (tolerated but unobtrusive!!)
--> [*]distance: a cognitive and relational perspective {what kind of distance, aesop fables, Kelile Demne, or ajayeb takes or keeps?}
--> learn to be [*]polite: (in the ethical, political, and epistemological senses of the word) to respond, to ac[...]
(128)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%36.8[...]ving distance, knowing activity, politeness, milieu, alliance
(i am interested in women) not because of gender [= identity politics, political correctness], but because of *their practice and the question they pursue*
what parrots talk about
talking birds and primates as subjective interlocutors who can become persons in the exchanges allowed by language
*they never posed the question of knowing what a raven could, through this somewhat maniacal behavior, teach them about what interested it*
-(curious) being always teach you what that being is interested in
very bottom of the ladder of choices...
for Tehran:
1. memory studies
2. kalagh shenasi (raven studies) کلاغ شناسی
ravens, evidently, do not want to obey any of the rules that make research possible: the incivility that excommunicated them from the laboratoies of the behaviorists having already been stigmatized from the time of the Flood (in Noah's ark)
ravens are by all account unreliable <-- calling into question the intelligence of their researchers, the pertinence of their models, and the solidity of their dispositives
---> go to Kelile Demne
*the ravens literally recruit their researcher*
to [*]recruit: they will reveal to him the resolution of an enigma the difficulty and the interest of which would be in accord with what makes them impossible to study
(from) season --to--> season
(from) enigma --to--> findings
(from) hypothesis --to--> tests
suspense and sudden turns ==> transform all that we know about ravens
the ravens present a behavior that has no sense from the point of view of evolution
the “guilty” of the story are given from the beginning
---> go to [Daston's] historian of science (always knew how the story ended): imagine you are the kind of a person who cheats when reading mystery novels, and you read the last page first to know who did it, and then when you read the rest of mystery story, you know everything is building towards this climax, you read it in a very different way than the person who has to retrace all that have been implanted in your way by the author to throw you off the scent of the real villain {==> you lose the past in the image of the present}
+ scientist (who wish to have a) story about *why we believe what we believe now and why it is right* [knowing that everything we know now will be overturned if not now later]--> pathos and progress of science {==> negates science's enormous creativity and capacity for renovation}
-*Foucault showed how many more objects [sexuality, etc.] have histories (that we thought they don't, that they are constant for all humanity for all time for all cultures)
ravens are capable of being silent when they don't care to be noticed
([...]
(129)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%37.1[...]l animal --inventing--> hallucinating --spoiled--> dissociated
Goda --Boicic--> wounded dog --saving--> mothering --> traumatized (left alone)
wolf observers
Heinrish's colleagues who study wolves in Yellowstone Natural Park
the peaceful cohabitation between the wolves and ravens
in Yellowstone when the ravens are in the presence of wolves, do not demonstrate any timidity and do not hesitate a second before eating --> the wolves allow ravens to conquer their fear --> wolves changed the constrains that hold sway over the habits of the ravens
the ravens of much more alert and vigilant than the wolves (the birds serve the wolves as extra eyes and ears)
the prophecy translated in terms of recruitment --Despret--> who could have thought, if not no doubt a descendant of La Fontaine, that it is the ravens who protect the wolves and permit then to eat with their eyes closed? ♥
>
[title]
the old taghalob (تقلب cheat)
history of enumeration in the Iran (measurement, weight, scale)
the history of our non-mathematical practices
...................................
time travel (in TV series or literature) --> (regardless if they are dystopian or not) essential for creating sensations of historical continuity
Marzolph on premodern middle eastern narrative culture
seafaring merchant...
sailor's yarns
tales documented in persian literature of the muslim period appear to be offshoots of earlier versions in either indian or arabic literature --> arabic as the lingua franca of the day
Kitab ajayeb al Hind, wonders of india, 10th century by iranian captain Bozorg ibn Sahriyar of Ramhormoz
(Marzolph holisitic assessment [=/= Beyzai's parochial claims of iranianness] of) middle-eastern narrative traditions = arabic + persian + otaman turkish + jewish + christian (+ several other) narrative traditions related to each other and none of which may claim an exclusive position
city of Brass
the Golden City is a legendary city built in africa by Tawil, the brother of the giant Ug, both of whom were born from the incestuous relation between Cain and his sister Anaq. having been deserted for more than a thousand years, the Golden City was later conquered by Egyptians and became the source of their fabulous wealth.
agahi آگاهی knowledge
na javan mard ناجوانمرد impudent one
farz فرض rite
sonat سنت manner
mardi مردی manly combat
[Sina, Ehsan -->] in the manner of *narrative men* --> typical for the thousand and one nights--whose protagonists of merchants (often thrift sons of rich merchants, who embark on travel after they have wasted their fortune with false friends)
•save himself by his inventiveness, s[...]
(130)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%37.6[...]ick and waved it, until the ship came close and took me and my children aboard. They also asked me the same question [i. e. why my children had heads like horses], I told them my story, and they delivered me to my country. I had many more children with that woman. This is the story of my children and their ancestry.”
moral obligation of contemporary society
...the king would use the slave girl as muslim men would do = for entertainment of all kinds (including sexual intercourse, but not eating them)
relief after hardship فرج بعد از شدت
urdu romance bagh o bahar باغ و بهار
(the considerably older) misogynous motif of the unfaithful wife
husband and sife being buried together
--> part and parcel of the **narrative stock** talented storytellers would exploit to construct their tales
intertextual references
•cannibal black men
•the one-eyed person whose one eye had been picked out by a bird (a well-known narrative from premodern arabic and persian tradition, a one-eyed character is taken as an ill omen, whereas here he figures as a friendly advisor and helper)
•
--> ***stock characters*** of premodern middle eastern literature
Marzolph --> concider texts as artful creations composed by a talented narrator =/= taking texts as the products of an anonymous popular “fold” tradition that would indiscriminately غيرمشخص lump together all kinds of material ==> belittling the creative act of a single individual
*intertextual allusions (to themes, motifs, concepts familiar to the audience) : a highly effective narative technique for linking new and unknown tales to a web of tradition the audience shares*
...................................
*~._
all the familiar landmarks of your thoughts that you find in somebody else's
عجایب نامه ajayeb (doing it here in europe): the exotic charm of another system of thought (~= its limitation)
[*]zoo: terrible grounds that the child [= us] enjoys = primal scene of conquest (of nation building, of state power) --carceral--> scene of sadistic pleasure, where bodies become “flesh” [<-- telegram is all of this]
(Hayward + Borges)
[*]child: a primal scene = the promise of the social, the human, and the future --> ***child is necessary for the ongoingness of colonialism*** [---> go to the children in The 100 TV series <-- *white child: an explorer of terrible grounds*]
•conscripted labor
•enslavement
•necropolitical economy
•
--elaborating-proliferating--> productive engines of empire
}--Hayward--> how might the effects of colonialism always find children enjoying terrible places?
the subtending (entgegensetzend) logic of the zoo
[...]
(133)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%37.8[...]r enters into a relation with an object as such) --> meaning does not emerge from the object = objects are not alone in having meaning accorded to them
Umwelt: an environment of relations
no animal can be neutral of another (in the environment) <--if-- it can be seen to be accorded a meaning
***strange lures ==make=possible==> types of research***
Cinderella to the mice : alluring producer of sociality (lure: enticement for meaning) <== *lures are frequently required in order to convey the meanings of an animal*
a human can take on the meaning of *socius* (comrade, friend, ally)
a human can learn what a socius means in the like of a jackdaw (to be taken for a material socius)
--> ‘associating with' = carry out various activities together
you want to be taken by somebody from another species for a material socius (that is also why people have pets) =/= pray
meanings are not fixed once and for all, flowing from elementary needs of the organism: meanings are flexible, can apply to other beings, extend to unforseen situations, change, and even invent and create new relational uses (<-- this is what i experience in translational working with meanings in farsi literate in my lectures)
(Cinderella asking) when observing rats, what can produce the activity of translating their behaviors in terms of meanings?
one confuses the term “examine” with that of “neutralize” --> (Watson, scientist) removed the rat's eyes, olfactory bulb, and whikers, which are essential to the sense of touch in rats, before throwing it into the exploration of the maze...
--Despret--> if the world had probably lost all meaning for this de-sensed rat, the rat itself had lost all meaning for its experimenter (if it ever had one for him)
-this is the goal of the procedure: search out the lowest common denominator, the left-over, the automation, the behavior that from one species to another will render all organisms commensurable تناسب پذير [<-- no!!!!]
the tacit assumption that an animal could ever enter into a relationship with an object is false <--Uexküll-- (to have in mind) to study the most different kinds of animals in their relations to a maze
her attic, Cinderella in the universe of meanings
an epistemological problem --> it is not straightforward to enter into the subjective universe of an animal in interrogating it through an experimental dispositive thought up by a human
[dispositif: referring to machines and devices. as philosophical concept that has been drawn upon by Deleuze, Foucault, Althusser, Agamben, and many others, has been rendered as “apparatus”, social apparatus]
maze --> what this particular experimental dispositive can mean for a rat? how can this *traversing* come to be, from the point of [...]
(134)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%38.4[...]on the ground) [~/=? a category of exclusion]
...................................
anger: an expression by which the observer perceives as if something *happened to the person who is angry* (a passive experience, not something that the person did)
intuition = recognition
•memory is really bad at remembering lists
•memory is really good at remembering routes through space
•(humans are good at remembering) agent-thinking =/= abstract notions
*anger ==reveals==> world*
anger ==> makes you ungly ==> prompts action
[the strange connection of: action <--> ugliness]
...................................
postsocialist nostalgia: relational expression of a heterogeneous set of desires that operate in an intercultural network
Imre
western European longing for the divided Europe of the Cold War --> Europe’s repressed imperial history
two different modes of remembering:
•history --> official, public and professional modes (associated with commemoration and musealization)
•memory --> unofficial, popular and private modes (frequently associated with nostalgia and consumerism)
literary and cinematic texts that foreground some form of preoccupation with the past
-television (amnesiac qualities) has been accused of undermining memory and perpetuating a sense of ephemerality and transience --✕--> *television is also a powerful mnemonic tool*
***television is both amnesiac & mnemonic*** --> tv's propensity to resonate in different temporalities at once
television: a vehicle for the transformation of and a source of information about the quotidian ~ primary generator of collective memory [<-- this is now social media, Instagram TikTok]
historical drama
pseudo documentary
period drama series
--> providing the viewers with a “useable past” that is always related to and relevant to the concerns of the present
in the postsocialist region, the past has especially sensitive nerve endings in the present
national regimes & individual citizens alike have tried to revive usable paradigms of identity from past periods (to clear away or at least cover up the historical debris left behind)
television as a massive archaeological site
polymorphic, undefinable identity with tentacles in several fields that makes television (and popular internet media) so confusing
(to understand who has stakes) in keeping history and memory practices separate and in minimizing the role of television and other popular media
(internet popular media) television's messy status as a medium
communist parties --> mould television to standardize citizens's everyday domestic life rhyth[...]
(135)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%38.9[...]rk }<-- **sense of intimate sociality disrupted by the collapse of a centralized system of governance and the influx of globalization**
nostalgia is a discourse (that is not specific to Eastern Europe) populations disappointed with and unequipped to deal with the advent of market democracy
there are more than one way of (content of) longing
television: a medium whose chief mode of operation is in reruns, recombinations, circulating formats and generic adaptations that constantly interweave national, regional and global scales ~= digital social media
(Imre > Boyer) to trace nostalgia back to the intellectual origins of European cultural nationalisms
...diverse and contradictory sentiments that make us see European cultures conjoined in mutual relationships of dependence, rather than separation
(Imre -->) *nostalgia as something by definition national at its core*
nostalgia --foreground--> coexistence of different temporalities in the present
postsocialist nostalgia in Romania is similar in structure to late socialist nostalgia of the 1980s in Hungary
manage feelings of dislocation ==> longing for national homes
~~--> preference for literature and high art as expressions of what has been identified as cultural nationalism (“national tradition = tradition invested in high art”) + perceived illegitimacy of popular cultural production and consumption (concealed by the allegedly rebellious “dissident” status of intellectuals) ==organize==> the contents of collective memory
Imre --> racialized underpinnings of allegedly “pure” aesthetic judgments
inherently nostalgic and pre-modern postsocialist population <==> Western Europe as the epicentre of progressive scientific modernity
television's capacity for personalization and narrativization
*demiworld of popular culture*
television’s dominant position within the domestic environment and its special appeal to an emotionally available female or feminine consumer --> television: the mass medium of the socialist period --pose--> the danger of a passive mindless consumption of formulaic narratives (a danger that has been ascribed to women’s inferior psychosocial needs and tastes =/= cerebral modernist masculinity of art) ---> go to Baxstrom's realizing the witch
Western European cultural nationalisms
the notion of nostalgic and premodern postsocialist population ==> Western Europe as the epicentre of progressive scientific modernity
West’s fanning of East European nostalgia --> a post-imperial symptom = (expression of a growing Western European awareness that) modernity is plurinodal rather than centred in European metropolitan headquarters
(postimperial European dimension of) *cultu[...]
(136)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%39[...]e*
television’s dominant position within the domestic environment and its special appeal to an emotionally available female or feminine consumer --> television: the mass medium of the socialist period --pose--> the danger of a passive mindless consumption of formulaic narratives (a danger that has been ascribed to women’s inferior psychosocial needs and tastes =/= cerebral modernist masculinity of art) ---> go to Baxstrom's realizing the witch
Western European cultural nationalisms
the notion of nostalgic and premodern postsocialist population ==> Western Europe as the epicentre of progressive scientific modernity
West’s fanning of East European nostalgia --> a post-imperial symptom = (expression of a growing Western European awareness that) modernity is plurinodal rather than centred in European metropolitan headquarters
(postimperial European dimension of) *cultural nationalism <~÷+-> nostalgia*
...utopian national rebirth scenarios for a united Germany --> (promoted by intellectual artists) the bad idea that suppression of German nationalism ==open==> influx of American audio-visual culture (that muat be resisted in order to preserve and nourish German culture in its purest literary manifestation)
= logocentric return to the ethos of German Romanticism [Kulturnation --> certain cultural identity --> cliche-ridden elitist racist implications] + new nationalism =/= results of Western integration over the last forty years
aspirational narrative (of nation...)
postimperial power dynamic:
•western researcher --> has the political capital to afford studying popular media
•eastern researcher --> has to faithfully fulfill the role to represent their national culture (elite achievement)
(Bourdon >Imre) the most obvious European commonality --> **a focus on high culture**
national specificities of memory systems developed around television
nostalgia machine
•Putin --> TV programming to a literary Soviet heritage
•Hungarian FIDESZ --> children’s channel of socialist children’s programmes
•showcase oeuvre of popular performers from the past
•rerunning vintage highbrow content: old films, television series and documentaries
•popular music's capacity to call up depoliticized affective memories
•commercials (--trigger--> postsocialist nostalgia)
•
}--> depoliticized reminiscences ==> an image of (socialist) sociality as a natural connecting glue among citizens gathered around the warm glow of their favourite singers and cabaret actors
FIDESZ = alarming racism + anti-Semitism + drastic neoliberal economic restructuring --> television = interfaces of official state nationalism + commercial purposes of a nostalgia industry
(ghost of d[...]
(137)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%39.1[...]than centred in European metropolitan headquarters
(postimperial European dimension of) *cultural nationalism <~÷+-> nostalgia*
...utopian national rebirth scenarios for a united Germany --> (promoted by intellectual artists) the bad idea that suppression of German nationalism ==open==> influx of American audio-visual culture (that muat be resisted in order to preserve and nourish German culture in its purest literary manifestation)
= logocentric return to the ethos of German Romanticism [Kulturnation --> certain cultural identity --> cliche-ridden elitist racist implications] + new nationalism =/= results of Western integration over the last forty years
aspirational narrative (of nation...)
postimperial power dynamic:
•western researcher --> has the political capital to afford studying popular media
•eastern researcher --> has to faithfully fulfill the role to represent their national culture (elite achievement)
(Bourdon >Imre) the most obvious European commonality --> **a focus on high culture**
national specificities of memory systems developed around television
nostalgia machine
•Putin --> TV programming to a literary Soviet heritage
•Hungarian FIDESZ --> children’s channel of socialist children’s programmes
•showcase oeuvre of popular performers from the past
•rerunning vintage highbrow content: old films, television series and documentaries
•popular music's capacity to call up depoliticized affective memories
•commercials (--trigger--> postsocialist nostalgia)
•
}--> depoliticized reminiscences ==> an image of (socialist) sociality as a natural connecting glue among citizens gathered around the warm glow of their favourite singers and cabaret actors
FIDESZ = alarming racism + anti-Semitism + drastic neoliberal economic restructuring --> television = interfaces of official state nationalism + commercial purposes of a nostalgia industry
(ghost of dictators in) humorous commercial context:
•Tito in post-Yugoslav republic commercials (as anti-capitalist and anti-commercialist hero)
•Ceausescu in commercials in Romania (old footage of him walking his dog in car tires ads)
•
}--Imre--> (blending) *top-down history lessons* + the work of *popular memory* ==> punctuate contemporary continuities with the communist regime that are taboo in official narratives but prevalent in popular perceptions of history
(==Georgescu==> counter-memory <-- does it assist coming to terms with the past, processing the paralyzing past and the humiliating present of globalization coupled with reactionary state control)
socialist advertising (--> promoted products and services that had not competition in the absence of a real market) ==now==> a sense of awkwardnes[...]
(138)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%39.1[...]to metal
[1] According to Jashn-e Sadeh recalls the importance of light, fire and energy; light which comes from God is found in the hearts of his creatures. --> Hushang and the 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 [...]
(139)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%40[...] 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) salvation ‘rastgari’ is about delivering ‘you’ (--> Ma'ad --> masaleye “enteghal” [be alame digar] [dar tarikh falsafeye eslami irani ---> go to footnote in Motakhabat 2nd volume page44]) --> for *Rumi people is firewood, hizom, inflammables; fire is the present tense, its light is about the future and its ashes about the past: we like ash to perform our archiological readings of old fires and we like its light becsuse it helps us to push through and constatly make-imagine-lighten the future, i this model the present is untouchable.] --> the beyond is beginning to loosen its materiality --> accumulation of synonyms (before language) --> metaphors given birth slowly --> from the Pleistocene to Ordovician --> the accumulation of oxygen --> fire was permitted to exist --> etc.
(keeping a fire burring for a long time is a very strange thing to do. it is utterly Paleolithic to do keep fire, making it stone. it was Muhammad who turned off the lights, literally. when he was born, one the oldest Zoroastrians fire temples suddenly extinguished for no apparent reason. the blessed dark. the box, fire, both are means to have access to the inaccessible. #Muhammad inception/birth had to be connected to a supernatural event.)
(talking) fire --> speech
(telling) stone --> written
in the history, the leg-less-stone and the lying-visage have been together. a study of apparition must include the physical material as well, not as counterparts, rather as its play-mate.
(fire suppressing) an older ecology of reflection (namely the stone)
the telling stone is the same as spirit stone(?)---non-animal container (@Karin)
(stone is related to the spirits of the ground. the prisoner who throw a pebble into the pit, the pebble's sound is going to tell about the depths and darknesses that the human, on death sentence, does not have a long enough rope to carry too. so the rope is never enough, the linear connection, the closed chain of links, but the throwing stone can risk a disjunction between that mother->king->prisoner->darkness)
--> sending a guy into the pit is not typical for the cultures of Pleistocene: (using linear connection, darkness ~= unkown, and so on)
[Shepard] Prehistoric humans were autochthonous, that is, “native to their place.” (related to the earthly stone =/= fire that perpetually evacuates) (it is not that of the introvert stone and the extrovert fire, but the opposite, stone was social and fire allied interiority, it sent/banished the subject to the land of the mediated, ‘from now on you are coming from mediation.’ (Where the subject com[...]
(140)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%40.1[...]rship (fire)
how can one pray ‘to’ animals? (~ prey upon them)
how can one pray ‘to’ elements?
amenity (of stone) (=/= enmity of fire)
*trial by fire, fire as judge
(test, respond to whether or not something is true or false)
iranian frost, is not the same as ice---ice was still the object of fascination. transforming fire into mosque---atash masjed shod. ‘dudeman’ coming from ‘dud,’ smoke as your ancestery. a telling-smoke was your inheritence, your grandpa. same in Latin: ‘focus’ means both fire-place and ancestral
ether --> azar --> atash
fire = (institutional?)-order ~ justice = law =/= nondialectic
the order of fire =/= agonism [positivly channeled disagreement]
the order of fire is a materialist conception of history, that fire eventually purifies and leave no reason but the reason of harmonious ~= consensus, the ubiquitous Übereinstimmung of fire
athletisism of Shahnameh and fire-trial (contest oriented toward victory of defeat; transcendence, truth, and growth are generated from the outcome of the contest;) is exactly the cancelation of an agonistic notion of defeat (in Shahnameh: dishonor = defeat --> the defeated = the monster, the ‘Div’)
‘agon’ in Latin literaly means arena of competition, the scene of contest--meydan? what would be (the instrumental) relation to the mode of destruction in Shahnameh's kind of fire?
Indo-Iranian register of fire worship (around 1500 BC)
-fire burns (ever) upwards
(Sadeh festival, Shahnameh, Iran)
-Sadeh: fire-related festivals celebrated throughout Greater Iran and date back to when Zoroastrianism was still the predominant religion of the region. (Wikipedia)
Lindsey Collins [on intersection of illness and landscape]
wilderness therapy (in cancer activism)
a feminist and still-growing therapeutic model, slow wilderness, in which risk is made manageable and contained, and fast and risky aesthetics, coded as masculine, are traded for ecofeminist tropes of mutuality, nurturing, and femininity
-recovery climbers actively make permeable bodies ==> ecologies
“recovery climbs = embodied practices of resilience + interrelation” =/= survivorship narrative
(for Woolf) illness: emergence of new landscape (you discover “wastes and deserts” and “obdurate oaks,” more so than a mere subtraction from or attenuation of life)
fire's dictatorship in Siyavash story, a fire's aspect as instituted social order
*trial by fire
trial by mountain [~= rock] (slow wilderness) -- suffering and healing in difficult landscapes (Lindsey Collins - phd) -->{climbing mountain peaks and summits figures as a journey similar to a struggle with disease --- wilderness therapy creates what she calls a **slow wilderness,** in which risk is made manageable and containe[...]
(141)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%40.5[...]human alterity at Ferdowsi.
...................................
“the mind needs wild animals”
Meloy
more often, there are places where mammal should be but is no longer, *and in this emptiness, too, there is fieldwork to be done*
[*]euphemism: roads that are too civilized
Jesuit padre-historian
Je suis padre (wanna-be-father) historians
(18th century) calling the deserts of Baja California “destitute” without asking the natices if they were misreable
*for many natives in the Jesuit era, christianity was not a means by to give order to mystery (or give order to misery)* it was food. [...] another kind of appetite could lead people there...
*the christian hell looked a lot like the life they had left [...] many Indians so hated the cold that on a chilly day at the mission, a sermon about the fires of christian hell delighted them ♥
Meloy > Steinbeck: “food is hard to get, and a man lives inward, closely related to time”
better roads and bigger tourism = predatory brand of industrial leisure examplified by Cabo San Lucas (and Dubai in the middle east)
(Meloy herself part of a group) a goofy one with animal notes, plant books, and ‘je suit’ literature
(clinging to) the delusion of *feral self-reliance* --> [*]fishing: citizenry in the public of resourcefulness
“do not go to the hunt carrying meat from home.”
in my work the technique of storytelling: to create a stage for a wider out-of-control explosion of gesticulating arms
...................................
“wherever you are, wherever you go, there are untamed creatures nearby that need you attention. unplug your modem. slam shut your self-help books. quit standing around like a wall trout. get to work.
invite warblers to your neighborhood with shaggy plots of greenery. learn everything you can about the bandit-eyed racoon that stares at you through your sliding glass door, demanding enchiladas.
mark the direction of jet black darkling beetles marching up a red dune like a troop of miniature helmets. east? south?
let black widows live in your soffits.
lie on your back on a breezy sweep of beach and stare at the undersides of magnificent frigate birds. master a hyena's laugh and use it when in the presence of politicians.
admire the make midwife toad, who carries fertilized eggs on his back for a month. understand that certain species of mollusk can change their gender, know that from a ball afloat on tiny filaments inside its fanned shell, a sea scallop can tell which way is up.
crane your neck. worm your way. wolf it down. monkey with things. outfox your foe. quit badgering your tax attorney.
take notes on the deagness of coral, the pea-size heart of a bat. be meticulous. we will need these thi[...]
(142)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%41.7[...]xperience of *confrontation with power* not of this world, confrontation with a ‘wholly other’
--> terrifying, demonic dread, awe, sublime majesty, fascinating, demanding unconditional allegiance, etc.
*positive human response [in thought (myth, theology) + in action (culd, worship)] ==> religion*
metaphor: human psychological reaction to the experience [of numinous] by means of analogy
-in metaphors all that is shared by the worshipers of an individual culture or cultural period in their common response to the numinous is summed and crystallized
-choice of central metaphor: wants to recapture and transmit, the primary meaning on which it builds, which underlines and determines the *total character of its response* = the total character of its religion
-major religious metaphors of the ancient mesopotamians have a double nature as pointing beyond themselves to things not of this world & yet being and remaining very much of the world
in attempting to interpret religious metaphors, one must seek to bring out as fully as possible its *powers to suggest and recall* the numinous
-to one generations is fresh and powerful may be to another seem old and trite
suggestiveness =/= representaive of its period --> literalness: attention to human purposes and values ==> [flase] sense that all has been explained and understood
human's recognition of dependency upon power not of this world --> religious expressino = transcendent hope and trust (=/= Nietzsche)
*(mesopotamian) numinous = immanence (in feature of confrontation) =/= all transcendence
mesopotamian experience of numinous power = revelation of *indwelling spirit* --> power at the center of something that caused it to be and thrive and flourish =/= Old Testament's numinous = transcendent {---> go to the experience of Moses with the burning bush: ‘God =/= bush’ --> **God happened as it were sojourn thern there موقتا but he is altogether transcendent, and there is nothing but a purely situational ephemeral relation with the bush}
--✕--> a mesopotamian would have experienced the burning bush differently: numinous power of the bush's being (not just “in” it) --> numinous = immanent =/= transcendent
power speaking to Moses in the desert disassociates itself from the bush and identifies itself as the god of Moses's father --> needs introduction =/= numinous power speaking to the mesopotamian Enkidu in Gilgamesh Epis does not choose to disassociate itself from it locus and so needs no introduction. --{"the sun god heard the word of his mouth; from afar, from the midst of heaven, he kept calling to him.” <-- the power is here seen as immanent in the visible sun, is what animates it and motivates it, *is the god who informs it*}
in Akkadian (the language in which epic of Gilgamesh is written): ‘the word for X = the numinous power in X’
•(wor[...]
(143)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%41.8[...]oose
“No god went by, why are my muscles paralyzed” (Gilgamesh) --> ‘god = paralyzing fear’
uncannily good luck
sudden realization of having come to harm
numinous power experienced in sudden illness
*no allegiance was invented* ==> no cult developed
they are gloomy, their shadow dark,
no light is in their bodies,
ever they slink along covertly,
walk not upright,
from their claws drips bitter gall,
their footprints are (full of) evil venom.
(from [more primitive?]) dread --to--> fascination
the shivers and chills (of death)
that fritter the sun of things,
spawn of the god of heavens,
spawned on an evil spirit,
the death warrants, beloved sons of the storm god,
born of the queen of the netherworld,
who were torn out of heaven and hurled from the earth as castoffs,
are creatures of hell, all
we are not determined, we are engendered
numinous as immanent --> external habituation: inviting (or magically enforcing) the presence of the power within
efforts of such habituation:
•cult dramatic
•fashioning or appropriate divine images
•religious literature
•temples
*cult drama: the form fills with its content*
literally re-present god, presenting his external form, (bring about the god's presence through ritual representation of him) --> beneficent results for the community [--> still works today]
•sacred marriage
•yearly lamentations
•battle drama (primeval contest for world order against the forces of chaos)
fashioning of images (of the god) --> to achive lasting presence
poetry: means of invoking the presence of powers [--> we are doing this still?! bad poetry]
creative power of the word underlines all mesopotamian (religious) literature
•works of praise
•works of lament (specialized lamentation-priest @Sana, Ali )
*lament: influencing and swaying the divine heart by reminding the god of past happiness, rather than by magically recreating that past*
(mesopotamian:) *temple = house*
(implication between) the divine owner and his house --> emotional closeness of a human owner and his home + the *closeness of essence* (of being) --amounting--> to embodiment =/= habituation
--> house = temple = representation of the power that is meant to fill it
(similar to human dwelling) ***house = temple = the place where the owner could be found (or felt)***
--> that god (the owner) was present and available
the god's retainers --> because the temple was god's home, was not only near and approachable, he was involved with the fortunes of the community and commited ti maintaining it --> *mesopotamian temple was profoundly awesome* (it carried awesome aura,[...]
(144)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%42[...] of things,
spawn of the god of heavens,
spawned on an evil spirit,
the death warrants, beloved sons of the storm god,
born of the queen of the netherworld,
who were torn out of heaven and hurled from the earth as castoffs,
are creatures of hell, all
we are not determined, we are engendered
numinous as immanent --> external habituation: inviting (or magically enforcing) the presence of the power within
efforts of such habituation:
•cult dramatic
•fashioning or appropriate divine images
•religious literature
•temples
*cult drama: the form fills with its content*
literally re-present god, presenting his external form, (bring about the god's presence through ritual representation of him) --> beneficent results for the community [--> still works today]
•sacred marriage
•yearly lamentations
•battle drama (primeval contest for world order against the forces of chaos)
fashioning of images (of the god) --> to achive lasting presence
poetry: means of invoking the presence of powers [--> we are doing this still?! bad poetry]
creative power of the word underlines all mesopotamian (religious) literature
•works of praise
•works of lament (specialized lamentation-priest @Sana, Ali )
*lament: influencing and swaying the divine heart by reminding the god of past happiness, rather than by magically recreating that past*
(mesopotamian:) *temple = house*
(implication between) the divine owner and his house --> emotional closeness of a human owner and his home + the *closeness of essence* (of being) --amounting--> to embodiment =/= habituation
--> house = temple = representation of the power that is meant to fill it
(similar to human dwelling) ***house = temple = the place where the owner could be found (or felt)***
--> that god (the owner) was present and available
the god's retainers --> because the temple was god's home, was not only near and approachable, he was involved with the fortunes of the community and commited ti maintaining it --> *mesopotamian temple was profoundly awesome* (it carried awesome aura, awesome or angry nimbus هاله)
-the temple was covered with loveliness
-the god's private apartment shrouded in darkness : the dark room (no eye is to see)
--> specific closeness of essence + the power inhabiting it
authoritative revelation
know what was “the proper thing”
house mountain
house rising sun
house causing light
he who issues forth from the thriving...
ancient =? ancient to us ~=? ancient to them
there is no living cultural tradition that connects us with mesopotamia
immediate unanalyzed total reactions (?)
[...]
(146)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%42[...]
sphere of sacrobosco
De sphaera mundi
(On the Sphere of the World, pre-Copernican astronomy)
...our sublunar world
gunpowder theory of thunder ⛈
compact earthly matter from underground whose expansion with expansion so fast that it moves large masses of air, like “salniter in fire or gunpowder which has caught fire”
visualization
making air visible
inverted glass experiment
linking thermal expansion & contraction of pure air to wind formation (Cardano)
(under the influence of) celestial fire ==> air (could become alive and active) acquiring motive force
on the transmutations of air
(typical of 16th century) steering the religious significance of the study of nature
spirit: a cosmic subtle substance, both recipient + vehicle of celestial influences ==allow==> elements to transmute into each other (+ meteorological phenomena)
(Drebbel’s favourite cosmic spirit:) fire = clearest of all elements ad top of the hierarchical order of elements (fire, air, water, earth), clarifying the other elements [such as Siavash]
(for Della Porta:) meteorological phenomena = transmutations of the air (in literal sense)
air becoming thinner or thicker ==rise==> winds, thunder, clouds, rain, snow, linking heaven + earth + bringing life to all animated creatures
(Della Porta conceived of) wind in vitalistic terms
...winds rising up from the mouth of the retort (boiling water)
how heat endowed air with motive force
(Drebbel presenting to the public) perpetuum mobile : expansion and contraction of air (which he claimed) demonstrated the force behind all movement and life
weatherglass (+ aeolipila) --demonstrated--> ****highly nontrivial natural phenomena**** (transformation of energy from heat into mechanical motion)
(ajayeb’s) theory about the origins of the wind
Galileo --> earth's rotation ==> (<--evidence--) wind
Bacon --> exhalations together with air [rarefaction and expansion of air / exhalation drawn up by sun] ==> wind
Fludd (meteorological cosmica) --> wind: principal meteorological phenomenon (princeps meteororum) and closest to God
“wind is an aerial spirit, of middle consistence, inspired or animated by the breath of Iehova, which he extracts from his treasure-case according to his will, to effect either a punishment or a benediction”
•angels: efficient cause of winds (in borg macro- and microcosmos)
•(changes in the air --corresponded-->) temperament of living creatures ==> wind
•pulse of the heart caused by the spirit of life
•thermal expansion
•vaporization (+ contraction) of air
•pneumatics
“wind = thermal expansion & contraction of air” -->[...]
(147)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%42.5[...]
“wind = thermal expansion & contraction of air” --> a vitalistic-alchemical Rosicrucian conception of meteorology and cosmology =/= Descartes’ mechanical-corpuscular view of nature -->{wind <== vapours drawn up from earth and water by solar heat (vapours expanded when heated and when they encountered the opposition of other vapours clouds or mountains they ended up escaping in the one free direction)
•vapour: (made out of) small corpuscles together with even smaller particles filling the gaps between the corpuscles
Froidmont --> wind: (made of) dry and hot exhalations =/= animated (as the stoics dream)
{winds flow towards Earth because of their gravity, like streams and rivers in their beds} gravity ==> wind =/= (direct expression of) celestial power and caused by God’s angels
scorched by rays and reflexes of the sun
denser
Torricelli conceptualized the motion of the hot and cold air masses by thinking them as separated by the walls of a building and in this way he ignored the air’s life-like tendency to expand when heated. instead he reasoned in terms of change of weight applying Archimedes principle
علم کلام
*reflections grounded on literary descriptions of ancient artefacts*
+ based on actual devices
--> wind = source of a potentially infinite quantity of motive force, the multiform expression of a single cosmic principle animating air
inverted glass experiment : a ***demonstration ~= simulacrum*** (of celestial motive forces) [~=? a fable]
#a demon working on demonstrations
mechanistic explanations ==> mechanical conceptualization:
•astronomical clocks
•clockwork automata
•computing machines
•optical tricks
--Borrelli--> weatherglass only became interesting when considered as a means of quantifying phenomena
*artefacts and artificial processes that lent themselves to conceptualization in vitalistic terms:
•alchemical experiments
•magnetic compass
•pneumatic engines
•speculate on wind
•falling bodies
•pendulum
(Halley’s) wind: successions of strokes indicating the direction in which a ship would travel under the influence of the wind blowing (at the specific point of the sea...) -~-~-> direction of a virtual invisible motive force
...................................
(?) people rely on singular ontology and multiple epistemologies
interpretation =? appropriation of other's existential labor (~/= culture)
Alberti's pot: instantiations of a concept of a world that is chronically unstable
(cranial modification, tattooing, treatment of the dead --manage-->) the inherent instability of bodies
•one's perspective is intimately connected to th[...]
(148)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%42.6[...]e level of text)?
[!we should say no to] general thing theory : tendency to produce overviews, universal accounts of the material world
•phenomenological world of essences that are revealed
•ecological world of affordances that are at hand
•some social world of false transcendence
-
...................................
mirror
ayene
pieces of metal that soldiers put on the back and legs
چارآینه
جفای فلک آینه گون ==> self (of the poet)
فلک falak --> ayene-gun --> jafa
دل del --> sang --> transforms stone to blood
آینه اسکندری ayene eskandari (was it a telescope? to inform/spy)
ارسطو به فسون و اعداد آن را از قعر دریا برآورد
•math اعداد, tricks فسون
mirror trap دام آینه
at any moment هرآینه
قبله مساز زآینه
mirror =/= qibla
آینه گردان
mirror-stepper = sun
•seven mirrors هفت آینه = planets
a short essay on matter mythology
[...]
Hayula---literally meaning ‘unformed monster’ tells the histories of nonhuman material and mythologies of matter-energy flow in the eye of different cultural convertors
[...]
Hayula (Persian: هیولا) (in classical islamic philosophy) mythologically refers to a pre-cosmological ‘form’ of energy---literally meaning ‘unformed monster'---from which eventually the ‘universe’ and ‘persons’ where created, and systematically provokes a meshwork of meanings that interrelate notions of energy, form, and selfhood in a premodern intercultural cosmology
[...]
parasitically seeking a host for Hayula nun-human histories
[...]
Memory is not the only and privileged way of connecting the past to the present. One of many crucial and important ways that past comes to effect the present is made over form. Form, with its strange logic and efficiency, has the capacity to freeze time. Life as we know it lies in the results of the processes that future forms come to effect the present. Any being's very survival depends on its ability to access the zones of continuity and possibility in these processes. How we can articulate these forms? What are the operations that connect the form-embedded self to the others?
4 billion years ago, the gravitational force of a mass of hydrogen atoms accumulated into a dense point of critical state. As a result of this formation new fusions released many sip-offs of different energies and materials which we perceive today in our bodies and in the light that reaches our eyeballs from the time immemorial of that hydrogen cloud. This fossil of materi[...]
(149)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%42.8[...]access the zones of continuity and possibility in these processes. How we can articulate these forms? What are the operations that connect the form-embedded self to the others?
4 billion years ago, the gravitational force of a mass of hydrogen atoms accumulated into a dense point of critical state. As a result of this formation new fusions released many sip-offs of different energies and materials which we perceive today in our bodies and in the light that reaches our eyeballs from the time immemorial of that hydrogen cloud. This fossil of materiality implies the existence of traces of an ancient reality before the existence of the familiar--the terrestrial life. While these traces are gauged in theoretical experiments in which radioactive ratios of nuclides inform us of such ancestral events, in Amerindian cosmogonies not so differently steered hypothesis are explored. Yawanawa, the origin myth of the people of Pano from the western Amazon, imagines the anterior of the world where nothing existed, yet there only people existed--everything was made of people. Before the diversification and classification of kinds there was a primordial human, as the only substance of which everything eventually fabricated.
Like Yawanawa, Hayula (Persian: هیولا) literally in today's usage with the meaning of unformed monster, is a technical term in Iranian-Islamic cosmology indicating the first principle of everything material of which all other constitutive layers of beings are molded--minerals, plants, animals, etc. Hayula in one hand locates the lowest of the lowest, the bottom of the scalar existence where God resides at the very top, and on the other hand possesses a great anatomical plasticity, a persistent pre-cosmological being that undermines the second law of thermodynamic. First were the object then came the subject--to give away to the results of the stabilization of the infinite potential for transformation contained in Hayula, as universal substance, a matter out of which the world could have come to be formed.
The narratives of the time before form, an era of pre-cosmological beings, primordial people with unlimited and unbound corporeality, is the story of the originality of Hayula's virtual potential for being. Hayula, not fully human, tasting beyond morality (destruction, anthropophagy, etc.), becomes the subjects of other interventions and morphs into spheres and features of the world--of biological aspects, celestial bodies, humanoid zones, etc.
The realm of Hayula comes to interpret, and thus permit and strain, who and how an I can be, at the same time that it provides the vessel for the continuity, the survival, of that I. Here the I is the continuity of an inhabitation of a point of view. It marks a relative position within a hierarchical logic that spans the cosmos, a hierarchy that ranges from the nonhuman to the human realm and from the demons to the realm of the formless. Followi[...]
(151)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%42.9[...]able of projecting complex images of a nonvisual kind)
[*]image: an abstract portrait of identity fashioned out of cumulating patterns of congruence across all manner of indexical signs--including visual ones--that addressees and audiences can imaginatively experience, like a hologram
(Silverstein > Guerreiro)
~~--> ***relation between poetics and the production of identities***
chimerical representation: an art of ambiguity
(Strauss's Amazonian ethnology -->) dualism in perpetual disequilibrium: centripetal forces of centralization + centrifugal forces of dispersion
@apass ==> “societies against the state”
complex relations between hierarchy and counterhierarchy
(--> Renan's notion of monologue)
[Clastres's model rooted in Western language ideology looking at Amerindian language:]
metahistorical bond between *power & speech* cannot be conceived of separately
•state societies --> the word is a ‘right’ to power (that may be used to command)
•societies against the state --> the word is a ‘duty’ of the chief (an indigenous leader must be capable of offering society the words that it ‘demands’)
◾Amerindian chief: a voice preaching in the wilderness (literally says nothing, a repetition of “edifying discourse”) <-- his speech is not spoken in order to be listened to (~ ritualized act [=/= act of communication]) ==> chief's speech is transformed into pure value (~= poet's speech for whom words are values before they are signs) --> (for Clastres) language =/= violence: a facet of coercive power
denotative قوه تفکيک ()
predicative (Dickensian aspect)
referential (the efficacy of its context and meaning depends on something else)
enunciation (pragmatic) ==> effects on the enunciator + audience ~~Silverstein--> [*]politics: the dynamic arrangement and rearrangement of people as subjects within structures of actual and potential action of all sort --comprises--> poetics <== everything experienced as effective practice is formed semiotically (~ through sign)
*political oratory [=/= informing the content of a message] uses poetical resources that allow interlocutors to have their identities mutually constructed by means of indexical signs* (that connect the message's form to extralinguistic contextual facts) --> *message ascribes to me [=/= message describes my reality]*
Ali's use of political oratory in the context of ordinary interactions with me --> i forgot that the symbolic procedures that separate ritual speech from ordinary interactions are not necessarily intended to mean something
-what was the pragmatic conditions that define the kind of ‘language game’ Ali was playing?
[*]formalization: reduction of combinatory and creative possibilities of language by the use of formulas, archaic vocabulary, syntactic and stylistic patterns {--> dist[...]
(152)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%44.1[...]n of the position of the speaker (“shaman is now seated there and is saying...”) characterizes the special kind of communication (appropriate for ritual changing)
shaman: novel sort of enunciator (lending his voice to other invisible beings --> plural and contradictory identity)
acoustic mask: a reflexive means to define the ritual identity of the speaker
reflexive application of parallelism
(@Isabel, how to make community without becoming a cult?)
use snake --> capture the imagination of the followers ==> authority
imagistic (iconic mode, sequence of acid) + doctrinal (discursive mode, text, prayer) = pragmatics context of enunciation ==> messianistic religion
both paradoxical & parallelistic
new ways to be faithful...
...................................
exhibition-making and preventive conservation --> inspection and exposition <-- (different understandings and use of) *touch = curatorial*
professionalisation of curating
short-term education
cultural exchange
@apass feedback: (terrain of) peer engagement --> understanding each other’s practices
education, research, literacy, management, networking, custodianship, audience development
research (overdue) relationship with intelligence --✕--> **research: adventure of charismas**
...to be migratory (in thought, praxis, community)
...subjectivities without a heritage in criticality and art
constraint: a source of self-abundance --Renan--> suffering and risk = opportunities to hybridize with life
curating:
•nutrition and extension
•analysis and transplantation
•=/= content historicization
•=/= data
extraterritoriality
being collocated in all the whispers of the world
wild pollination
artificial breeding
Renan: Institutional work carried by a freelancer, a private individual or a civil servant can improve the publicness of art. It gives confidence to the work of art in public service. This institutionality creates new tasks in art that can be sustained by other practitioners.
@apass
...................................
publication of the miracle
[the miraculous in exhibitions + self-exhibiting miracles]
Renan's *exhibitionary heritage* of miracles
seeing (risk of sight) --> passionate misunderstanding, confusion, rejection
cultural engineering of anthropology of heritage
exhibitionary heritage: a scaffolding that times, locates, and proliferates all that is exhibitionary (like a shower, or rainfall)
curatorial subjectivity
exhibitionary complex
•describe the problems of an exhibitionary heritage
•fin[...]
(153)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%44.5[...]erformer (Rainer)
--> ‘ranting’ of the drunk in the face of the sober. disturbance of a continuity with attack with words.
--> ‘saying’, before it conjugates a verbal sign, is already an ethical gesture. saying is therefore already the proximity of one to the other, the commitment of an approach, the one for the other.
one saying enters into the service of the said, that is the thematization of being, purity of its intentions will be inevitably compromised. a saying that must be unsaid. a movement of thought that continues to resist collapsing into a settled expression, freedom from the cage of thematics. this mission (responsibility for the other) can be adequately expressed only through a certain impossible undoing of language. presenting a philosophical other is only possible when we generate a saying saying saying itself.
my performance talk: to situate my subjectivity linguistically (in a nonpresence and a nonplace). (?) (if the stakes are at situating myself, then the question is why?)
saying becomes totally exposed in its approach to the other. in limited social situations it creates risks of embarrassment or rebuttal and perhaps sounding psychotic. something that will strip away all protective layers, whether cultural or literal, from the body (of knowledge). it can also be masochistically painful for the subject. the absolute saying is a trauma, with vulnerability and passivity even is a bodily way, where the ethical being is: one penetrated by the other. (saying is ethical while said is juridical.)
--> ‘psychology’ not only what we do but why we do. the science that should be studied so much in art, specially in performance art. the how of human behavior, feelings and emotions.
the psychological space, the intermediary space of the ethical relation, shyness and commitment to the other. “i am infinitely more demanding of myself than of others”. (is this the realm of shyness being before god?)
--> ‘intelligence’ in the sense that what do i pay attention to and why, and what do i ignore and why, and how do i put it together. (synthesizing)
--> ‘cornered’ someone that is cornered ontologically. can not shy out of the corner.
--> ‘present’ of presence signifies nowness. The movement of time makes things present by making them now. What is the relation of this “making present” to the world? Is the movement of time ultimately to be traced to that of the world? On such a view, we take the successive nows that constitute time’s movement as a function of the world. Their origin is the successive impressions we receive from its objects. We, thus, come to affirm that nowness is the world’s presence to us in the impressions it leaves. Augustine gives the classic expression of this position when he writes: “It is in you, O my mind, that I measure time. ... What I measure is the impress produced in you by the things as they pass and [[...]
(154)[...notes/notes Personen.txt]%44.8[...]) speculative realism {antipathy to “human-centred” intellectual traditions} ~=> object-oriented ontology
(objectivity =/= obliqtivity)
Harman's immaterialism: realism without materialism : objects can only ever be captured obliquely
object-oriented ontology's development:
•characterised by a consistent lament for how post-Kantian philosophy in general (Continental philosophy in particular) has abandoned hope of describing objects as objects
•the real: absolute autonomy of objects (withdraw from subjects)
◦objects: sleeping giants holding their forces in reserve
•prefer the excess of the aesthetic over the reduction by the scientific (materialism's tendency to reduce objects to a primary substratum ==> rendering them susceptible to mathematical capture) --Campbell--> *aesthetic foundationalism* [==engender==> an attitudinal response to objects] (@apass, this is also a problem in artistic research):
◦aesthetic appreciation above the reduction of the phenomenon achieved by science --> “art (art criticism) is a style that gets us closer to the nature of objects” (+ bad example of Clement Greenberg)
◦(to make the invisible deep conditions of objects perceivable) prioritize *allusive style* above *literal description*
•claims to post-phenomenological sovereignty
•over-mining approach to knowledge production =/= objects's surplus of reality
◦methodological approach which encounters objects as objects (=/= actor network theory's manner of focusing upon an object's effects) [+ bad example of Dutch East India Company]--Campbell--> object-oriented social theory produces a rudimentary narrative with no discernible innovation on the level of:
◾objects --> the actors are recognisable companies, personalities, infrastructures
◾relations --> the major symbiotic moments are legal contracts, infrastructure and formative moments in a human's life
◾time --> there is standard chronology from birth to death, with emphasis on human-centric causes and effects
•“social theory = a mode of knowledge production” (=/= a decontextualised reflection of the world) ==> withdrawal: a psychological alibi, an aesthetic (=/= cognitive concept) ==stimulate==> an attitudinal response: humility [+ passivity?] in the face of overwhelming non-human existence [~ appeal ==produce==> a paternalistic-arrogant-instrumentalist attitude to the nonhuman =/= *appeal ==foster==> responsibility* (a norrnativity that withdrawal cannot) ---> go to Haraway + Campbell]
}=/= posthuman relationism: realists who draw on contemporary advances in disciplines like geology, biology, mathematics and neurology to make the case that non-human reality is not a sub-set of human reality -->
•commitment to an object-oriented realism (~= Harman)
•occupy an *anthropic* event horizon: their social analyses occur in the shifting, impossible ground[...]
(155)[...otes on kinect performance.txt]%46.3[...]br />
medico-legal concept of evidence
the image of the x-ray appeared (in court at least) to preempt and displace all other forms of knowledge.
(Allan Poe:) “if we examine a work of ordinary art, by means of a powerful microscope, all traces of resemblance to nature will disappear--but the closest scrutiny of the photographic drawing discloses only a more absolute truth, more perfect identity of aspect with the thing represented.”
trompe l'oeil (new note)
in X-ray, the encryption of information takes place in the technology itself
photographs did not carry a transparent meaning
once so policed, and presumably only then, could the photographic process be elevated to a special epistemic status, putting it in a category of its own
in contrast to drawings, photograms were tarnished by the crudeness imposed by the limited palette of the color raster. Given the choice, the author clearly favored the crude but mechanical photographic process. Accuracy had to be sacrificed on the altar of objectivity. (is Kinect pure mechanical? why i have been insisting to remove my hands?! why i was craving for objectivity?)
=> to leave imperfections in the photograph as a literal mark of objectivity
testimony to objectivity
rejection of subjective temptation
sophistication could corrupt an individual? (you can be accurate but not sophisticated) (not cleaning up the image of plates)
The moral narrative surrounding this mechanical construction of pictorial objectivity took many forms. As we have argued, pictures (properly constructed) served as talismanic guards against frauds and system builders, aesthetes and idealizers.
extending the mystique of the visual to the dense symbolic presentation of functions and graphs
inscription instruments
(Marey, method grafique) “the graphical method translates all these changes in the activity of forces into an arresting form that one could call the language of the phenomena themselves, as it is superior to all other modes of expression.”
graphical representation could cut across the artificial boundaries of natural language to reveal nature to all people,
they were the words of nature itself
the search for this rendition of objective representation was a moral as much as technical, quest.
morality of self-restraint
(for the scientific atlas makers of the later nineteenth century,) the machine aided where the will failed. (at once a powerful and polyvalent symbol,) the machine was fundamental to the very idea of mechanical objectivity.
the machine, in the form of new scientific instruments, embodied a positive ideal of the observer: patient, indefatigable, ever alert, probing beyond the limits[...]
(156)[...notes/notes.txt]%48.8[...], scientists persuaded themselves and others of their worthiness to assume priestly functions in an ever more secularized society.
humanity and self-restraint, the one imposed from without and the other from within, thus define the pride-breaking morality of the scientists.
objectivity is a morality of prohibitions rather than exhortations
subspecies of interpretation: projection, anthropomorphism, insertion of hope/fear into images/facts of nature,
varieties of objectivity:
A. mechanical objectivity
B. the metaphysical element that makes objectivity synonymous with truth
C. aperspectival element that identifies objectivity with the escape from and all perspectives
it is tempting to collapse all of objectivity into the view from nowhere. this temptation to simplify by conflation should be resisted, for the highest expressions of objectivity in one mode may seem worthless when judged by the standards of another mode.
(as humans we must deal with our personal, idiosyncratic, perspectival perception)
photo: accurate rendering of sensory appearances
objectivity is a multifarious, mutable thing, capable of new meanings and new symbols: in both a literal and figurative sense, scientists of the late-nineteenth-century created a new image of objectivity
...................................
we must consider the paths people and trees have taken
entangled networks of matter and meaning
“i don't mind being ‘close to nature.’ but i know what they mean when they say that, and it's not what i mean.”
--Linda Noel, Koyungkawi poet and acorn mush maker
oaks were travelers and mixers
...................................
(Tomaz Mastnak)
Botanical decolonization
planting and displanting of humans and plants are elements of the same multispecies colonial endeavor
native plants as a discursive field
complex and unmarked ways that plants have been sorted out as ‘native’ or ‘nonnative’
(as a measure of perfection and ‘civility’) gardening was also the key to the survival of colonies
(for Bacon) ‘plantation’ meant in the first place to ‘Plant in’ people
‘plantation in a pure soile’ (founding a colony)
once we see colonialism as the literal planting and displanting of peoples, animals, and plants--as inscribing a domination into blood and soil founded in the fantasy of molding ecosystems with godlike arrogance--it becomes clear how colonialism ushered in the anthropocene
native plants, by implication, were uncultivated. in the imperial imaginary this distinction between cultivated and native plants was isomorphic with people as well.
‘nature’, like the uncultivated native, [...]
(157)[...notes/notes.txt]%48.9[...]rious, mutable thing, capable of new meanings and new symbols: in both a literal and figurative sense, scientists of the late-nineteenth-century created a new image of objectivity
...................................
we must consider the paths people and trees have taken
entangled networks of matter and meaning
“i don't mind being ‘close to nature.’ but i know what they mean when they say that, and it's not what i mean.”
--Linda Noel, Koyungkawi poet and acorn mush maker
oaks were travelers and mixers
...................................
(Tomaz Mastnak)
Botanical decolonization
planting and displanting of humans and plants are elements of the same multispecies colonial endeavor
native plants as a discursive field
complex and unmarked ways that plants have been sorted out as ‘native’ or ‘nonnative’
(as a measure of perfection and ‘civility’) gardening was also the key to the survival of colonies
(for Bacon) ‘plantation’ meant in the first place to ‘Plant in’ people
‘plantation in a pure soile’ (founding a colony)
once we see colonialism as the literal planting and displanting of peoples, animals, and plants--as inscribing a domination into blood and soil founded in the fantasy of molding ecosystems with godlike arrogance--it becomes clear how colonialism ushered in the anthropocene
native plants, by implication, were uncultivated. in the imperial imaginary this distinction between cultivated and native plants was isomorphic with people as well.
‘nature’, like the uncultivated native, was to be dominated by ‘culture’. such ‘government of nature’ found its metropolitan manifestation in botanic gardens. (species collected for scientific reasons, for aesthetic and ideological benefit)
government of natof nature
invasive animals
the real issue is that we still live in a colonial environment. we live with the legacy of botanical colonization without even knowing it. this legacy is not mere background to social and political life.
Nazis’ attempted eradication of Impatiens parviflora from their own native forests (Gröning and Wolschke-Bulmahn, 1992)
the idea of “borrowing freely from all the world's styles and floras” erases the violent colonial encounter of displacing by replacing it with the figure of the undocumented immigrant
..charging native plant enthusiasts and invasion biologists and managers with xenophobia...
(Davis et al, 2011 article published in journal Nature, title:) “Don't judge species on their origins”, is a misleading phrase; at issue is judging species not on their origins, but on their emplacement.
(Yanagisako and Delaney, 1995) “people [...]
(158)[...notes/notes.txt]%49[...] how, exactly, do those plants travel? to treat the ‘remaking’ of surroundings as a neutral, benign category, served from the colonial history of globalization, is problematic at best.
treating plants metaphorically only as immigrants, but never as settlers, paradoxically divides human from nature. it elides the forms of displanting--of botanical colonization--that were part and parcel of the colonial encounter.
Myths of the ‘noble eco-savage’ and the ‘ecological Indian’ have been shown to be inaccurate (Krech, 1999; Whelan, 1999)
(the notion of the Anthropocene implies) an ecology in which humans are immanent to the natural world
...................................
(eyes are) visual possibilities
“eyes” (are always) made available [...] with a wonderfully detailed, active, partial way of organizing worlds... [Haraway, SK]
...................................
lecture khm Luis
trans or cross ecological movement, from amazon to shahname, because i like it and i care for thoses ecologies.
and because we can't keep clean. i love to talk about clean and dirt. maybe some other time. if we can say anything about the world is that it is dirty and excessive and lunetic. literally lunar. the moon. if you think your bio and biology is not scheduled by moon or lunar forces think again.
do i need a bit of ego to sustain this skin-encapsulated organism (pointing to myself. this is another pointi dance)
tech interface amaz div device literature
...................................
[Avital]
in the conflict of rhetorics, the victory never goes to any but the third language. The task of this language is to release the prisoners: to scatter the signifieds, the catechisms
to enter areas of conflict [...] fragile zone where non-knowledge dominates knowledge
Self-dissolving and regathering, the subject became linked to the possibility of a new autonomy, and opium illuminated in this case (Baudelaire, though under De Quincey’s influence, was to use it differently) an individual who finally could not identify with his ownmost autonomy but found himself instead subjected to heroic humiliation in the regions of the sublime. Opium became the transparency upon which one could review the internal conflict of freedom, the cleave of subjectivity where it encounters the abyss of destructive jouissance.
mapping the body as an intensive conflictual site
scenography and rhetoric of armed conflict
(Avital on) the maternal trace in the technological revealing from Heidegger to the Bushies
the readers and nonreader
the scene of the proto-pedagogy (involves only two persons): The master and pupil together produce an allegory of being struck, enlightened
(for Levinas:) expérience =/=[...]
(159)[...notes/notes.txt]%49.1[...] dogmatism of united and systematic knowledge.
...the itinerary traces the transmission, transformation, and multiplication of messages through diverse spaces of communication.
The spatial language of the writing of the world, geography, language of paths, movements, marks the moment of passage towards a new epistemology.
World is the space of your inscription, scientists. To read and to journey are the one and same act.
Fantastic flow of myth. The sacred and the religious words are spoken at the same time and in the same breath as those of science and of journeys.
Two speakers, united against the phenomenon of interference and confusion. Who's stake is in interrupting communication? The above interlocutors are on the same side, far from the dialogical game.
Demin includes himself in the circuit, blurs the message, renders it unintelligible, and exactly by that assures transmission. Parasite produces by the way of disorder a more complex order.
..penetrative grasp of a text, discovery and recreative apprehension of it life-forms, is impossible to paraphrase or systematize.
..temporal and local settings of one's text. (to master it?)
to read X, is literally, to ‘prepare’ to read X
in certain civilizations there comes epochs in which syntax stiffens...
Changing landscape of fact
unexamined smiles
worn tropes
words, the guardians of meanings, are not immortal.
Metaphysical scandal
note on history: past is a language construct, that the past tense of the verb is the sole guarantor of history.
Dialectics as a method of intellectual chase.
Who first told a joke?
Certain languages are inhospitable to new metaphors.
Language-act
to read: is to restore all that one can of the immediacies of value and intent in which speech actually occurs.
my original repetition
we re-enact in our educated consciousness
in what sense does unperformed music exist?
The same ground, when using the ‘speculative instruments’, the critic, editor, actor, and reader stand on.
When we read or hear any language statement from the past, we translate.
Encode and decode “message”, misleading operative models of translation between different languages and even within a single language.
One treason in translation: words rarely show any outward mark of altered meaning, they body forth their history only in a fully established context.
What material reality has history out of language? --the tasavof verbal linguistic tradition
silence knows no history...?
...to remind you that everything is the condition of madness.
“Tense Past”
..the landscape composed by the past tense, the semantic organization of re[...]
(161)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%49.3[...]to read: is to restore all that one can of the immediacies of value and intent in which speech actually occurs.
my original repetition
we re-enact in our educated consciousness
in what sense does unperformed music exist?
The same ground, when using the ‘speculative instruments’, the critic, editor, actor, and reader stand on.
When we read or hear any language statement from the past, we translate.
Encode and decode “message”, misleading operative models of translation between different languages and even within a single language.
One treason in translation: words rarely show any outward mark of altered meaning, they body forth their history only in a fully established context.
What material reality has history out of language? --the tasavof verbal linguistic tradition
silence knows no history...?
...to remind you that everything is the condition of madness.
“Tense Past”
..the landscape composed by the past tense, the semantic organization of remembrance... is styled and coded differently by cultures. --miniature illustrating San'an?
The verbal icon made up of all successive translations of Greek literature and philosophy has oriented fundamental movements in Islamic feelings --Farabi, Mirdamad, etc.
My translation of classics is not out of a vital compulsion for immediacy or precise echo. I am not trying to build my own resonant past. Myth of the ‘true past’... different perspectives can co-exist and blur
the metaphysics of the insult, in San'an story
i am interested in the conventions in which texts can be read, in which a semantic statement can be carried over into someone's own idiom. I am teaching how to reread texts of Attar and so forth.
We have civilization because (we have learned) ‘to translate out of time'
/>
übertragen,
handing down thought narrative,
something that also depends on transfer of meaning in space.
Languages conceal and internalize more, perhaps, than they convey outwardly.
Speech-act is most expressive of status and power--when a peer is in earshot. (something that i have been trying to undermine in my lectures)
...calculated to guard some coherence of inner life (while wounding outward)
(motions of) menace and non-information (in top down dialogues)
monosyllables of the oppressed and polysemy of the upper class (the capacity of the same word to mean different things, such differences characterises the language of ideology.)
fracture of words and the maltreatment of grammatical norms, by children, they are a exploited and rebellious class, the child seeks to keep the world open to his own, by refusing to accept the rules of grown-up speech.
Lear note: su[...]
(162)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%49.4[...]historical record has been left by men. The process of ‘sexual translation’ or of the breakdown of linguistic exchange (is seen, almost invariably, from a male focus.)
-the breakdowns and translations in San'an story.
-The sexual translation and breakdown of linguistic exchange in San'an story.
How, when, and who can see or render the genius of women's speech and see the crisis of imperfect or abandoned translations (from both sides)?
...having an ‘ear’ for contrasting pressures of sexual discourse or identity
in San'an, man and woman, each respective experience of eros and language had set them desperately apart.
In whose idiom, male or female, one can grasp (only) falsehood or menace?
...as declaimer of my own stifled, tongue
any model if communication is a model of translation, of transfer of significance. No two localities use words and syntax to signify exactly the same things, to send identical signals (of valuation and inference).
[the matrix space tries to create that assurance of identical signals, the electronic, digital space, grid, systematic, node based-- but linguistic storytelling is not]
In performance, corresponding to my level of literacy, and a private thesaurus, part of my subconscious and personal memories, and using the singular and irreducibly specific ensemble of somatic and psychological identity.
Getting out of one's own dictionary of private remembrance, in old age.
A study of translation is a study of language
the ideal of a totally personal voice, of a unique ‘fit’ between an individual's expressive means and his world-image, perused by the poets.
Only when we reflect on it, when we lift the facts from the misleading context of the obvious, that the possible strangeness, the possible ‘unnaturalness’ of the human linguistic order strikes us.
I am interested in this pluralist framework we are living in since the inception of recorded history.
...
It is not a formal hard-edged linguistic relegation, rather a metaphysical speculation
(making a ‘language atlas’?)
constructs of universals / transformational grammars: that have nothing of substance to say about the prodigality of language atlas
my interest in the ajayeb is due to the traces it provides into verbal literacy, a living vulgar language, rather than a dead structure such as mantegh al teir Attar (Mantiq-ut-Tayr).
..vanishing languages and people, their history and morphological structures uncharted, dim into the oblivion, each takes with it a storehouse of consciousness.
An image of man as a language animal of implausible variety and waste.
Cultures (during Attar's?) seem to expend on their vocabulary and syntax acquisitive energies and ostentations entirely lackin[...]
(163)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%49.6[...]atic, node based-- but linguistic storytelling is not]
In performance, corresponding to my level of literacy, and a private thesaurus, part of my subconscious and personal memories, and using the singular and irreducibly specific ensemble of somatic and psychological identity.
Getting out of one's own dictionary of private remembrance, in old age.
A study of translation is a study of language
the ideal of a totally personal voice, of a unique ‘fit’ between an individual's expressive means and his world-image, perused by the poets.
Only when we reflect on it, when we lift the facts from the misleading context of the obvious, that the possible strangeness, the possible ‘unnaturalness’ of the human linguistic order strikes us.
I am interested in this pluralist framework we are living in since the inception of recorded history.
...
It is not a formal hard-edged linguistic relegation, rather a metaphysical speculation
(making a ‘language atlas’?)
constructs of universals / transformational grammars: that have nothing of substance to say about the prodigality of language atlas
my interest in the ajayeb is due to the traces it provides into verbal literacy, a living vulgar language, rather than a dead structure such as mantegh al teir Attar (Mantiq-ut-Tayr).
..vanishing languages and people, their history and morphological structures uncharted, dim into the oblivion, each takes with it a storehouse of consciousness.
An image of man as a language animal of implausible variety and waste.
Cultures (during Attar's?) seem to expend on their vocabulary and syntax acquisitive energies and ostentations entirely lacking in their material lives.
[very interesting point regarding the language of mysticism, Attar and others.]
language riches seem to act as compensatory mechanisms. (having 60 different words in Shahnameh for signifying ‘horse’, doesn't necessitates the material variety of horse in the ancient Iranian culture?)
--starving bands of Amazonian Indians may lavish on their condition more verb tenses than could Plato.
Is my language, or lack of speaking certain languages, a powerful obstacle to the material and social progress of me?
--withering inward by language barriers. Linguistically atomized
interaction of physical and spiritual agencies...
The nominalist mechanism of creation: each time man spoke he re-enacted, he mimed.
(...the early forms and feelings of consciousness in human ancestral pasts)
my reading or performance includes scrutinising configuration of letters and inverting words.
Bad translations communicate too much, limited to what is non-essential in the fabric of the original, missing the bond of meaning.
If translation is a form,[...]
(164)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%49.6[...]rd by language barriers. Linguistically atomized
interaction of physical and spiritual agencies...
The nominalist mechanism of creation: each time man spoke he re-enacted, he mimed.
(...the early forms and feelings of consciousness in human ancestral pasts)
my reading or performance includes scrutinising configuration of letters and inverting words.
Bad translations communicate too much, limited to what is non-essential in the fabric of the original, missing the bond of meaning.
If translation is a form, then the condition of translatability must be ontologically necessary to certain works.
Metaphysics of translation
translation is profoundly philosophic, ethical, and magical. It imports source of life. Alchemy, must retain a vital strangeness and ‘otherness’.
My translation, an interlinear version of the script, a virtual archetype of translation
obsessive awareness of the opaqueness of language, Kafka's continuous parable on the impossibility of genuine human communication. The impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing in German, of writing differently.
Presence of interpreters in the building site, Kafka, literature house
in Kafka, great wall = mosaic law ?
Only if men could use language without perusing meaning to the forbidden edge of the absolute.
Alpha & Aleph
...is certain to encompass ‘some terrible meaning’ in one of its secret languages
‘a poetic vocabulary of concepts’
‘connections or affinities’
pursuit of an inter-lingua for philosophic discourse
not to contemplate a mechanical transcription of the original
history, the mother of truth.
To define history not as an inquiry into reality, but as it's origin.
Menard, William James
translator's ‘mysterious duty’
if needed, i am anyone
language mysticism studies
...primitive seek expression through ‘imaginative universals’, this rapidly acquired a ‘infinite particularity’
it is only by means of essentially poetic recreation or translation of a given language-world that the new science of myth and history can hope to retrace the growths of consciousness
in apass, inventing a science of myth and history, towards a general theory of significant sign.
Corruption of language and decline of body politics?
Can we correlate the Persian syntax with the metaphysical ambience, internal divisions, and lyric bias of Persian people?
A pivot point must inform and relate
...the shaping agencies of intellect.
Speech is poiesis and human linguistic articulation is centrally creative.
The language-matrix
language, informed by en[...]
(165)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%49.7[...]r />
‘to know nature is a game’
experiment is also a game?
With win or lose possibilities, in which there exists a guaranteed winning strategy.
Game is the model of all exact knowledges.
...................................
The Ur-Supe, the original state of life, the marine mixture, the primal liquid state, prebiotic soup, the physiochemical condition for the origin of living beings
a mother emerges from a mother
the earth is in labor, a labor of metamorphosis, transformation, production, generation
beneath the anecdotes and pathos, the text mobilizes with great precision certain findings of rational mechanics
(ice and fire) is only relatively cold
vocabulary =? Model of precision
centers are breasts
periodic breasts
last science transcends the first
reservoir exists for the circulation
two notions structurally stable in encyclopedia: circulation & reservoir
elements + operation =/= structure
analysing a text in terms of encyclopedia, i need to answer two questions: what is reservoir? What is circulation?
question regarding iranian literature reservoir: what is the reservoir? Where is the reservoir? What are its configurations?
(the last question syntactically proposes also the possibility of reconfiguration)
Is it metaphorical? Is it closed?
What is its plan? How it transports according to this plan? What are the circulating elements? What is stable there? What are the transformations when it transports?
Reservoir is libidinal*
capital, quantity of energy, constancy of force,
what can be applied to the pattern of circulations?
(of vocabulary, value, money, desire, etc.)
what blocks circulation? Who or what governs it?
In answering, you reconstrconstruct (the entire set of what you consider interpretive)
application: strategy of conformity
explication: archaic and vague approximation
it is not necessary to introduce methods to read a text: the method is in the text. The text is its own criticism, its own explication, its own application.
Texts that operate = texts that are operated on ==> there are just texts
(there is no dichotomy in the operation)
technologies concerning heat, thermodynamics, shocked the traditional world and shaped the one we are now working in.
...theories concerning processes of transformation.
...stages of alchemical initiations, archaic figure of fire,
How to make the history of science as effective as science itself?
...................................
suddenly science falls silent and mythology speaks
transsubstantiation
the astronomer[...]
(166)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%49.9[...]hing unbearable about the retreat ----> panic of the political
-let's inhabit an understander of retreat and what it involves, and, taking the responsibility of leaving your post. [we learn from what Kafka(‘s architecture of decision) surveils and marks for us > Avital --> where we are speaking/speeding from? and what is the architecture from which language emerges? is it a textual ventilator? or things are threatening to fixate?]
how Iran named its Iran-Iraq war? Défense sacrée, the Holy Defense, دفاع مقدس, (and many other names)
how did we “have” an experience---after the war? (much less an adventure or an adventurous encounter with history pumped up with meaning and sense-making and productive futurity)
to tabulate
ok, i am refering to things that don't come up as part of the master discourse, things that don't come up as something we can assimilate (جذب) or appropriate
towards the gaze --> a theatrical gesture : to see everything serenely (in quiet contemplation) --> to be (at last) free from the Gods
(those who believe that) there is only transcendence, (that transcendence is all there is)
(this is also the common mistake in reading Iranian old mystic literature)
cruel hallucinations
laws criss-cross the world
...for i am a slave of science
the chain of orders : the new is born of the old =/= angle (interrupts the stoic chain, the chain of cause and effect)
extermination and determination
laws of identity, repetition, and information-free
death at the end of entropy --> sequence of events (from the point of view of plague narrative --> the law is the plague + the reason is the fall [--> everything falls to zero])
the same ~=?! non-being
drops of knowledge
physics of the military*
•sheets of atoms
•well-ordered arranges
•in columns
•the learned science of the teachers
•the structure of division
•Heraclitean physics of war
•chain of reason
•the knowledge of ranks
-
(in nature?) animals are born from flows
animals born from fluid mechanics
the infinite cylinder of parallel consequences, trains of reason rain down in torrent:
•contact space travel, doctor strange kick trip, lucy time travel, matrix clock scene
what is the analogy with the concrete model? In each case
what is the order of the world that is explained by visible phenomenon in each of these cinematic scenes?
The beginning of vortex
causality
perspective
body
(what are?) models in ajayeb:
concretes, quasi-concretes, laws, equations,
vortices, turbulent clouds,
random dispersions,
flows, disequilibrias,
packs, alliances, conventions,
[...]
(167)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%50.6[...]er of phenomena is physics)
they put (ajayeb's) nature outside nature, (placing it in the subject, and so on)
which facts “are” the foundation of materialism?
-(the idea they says) classical knowledge deserves classical philosophy
(#?%$@x*!!!---->) if there are monsters here, go elsewhere(!)
what? / how? --> by contract or by strategy?
the ‘question’ is always consequential, never naive or frivolous
we need? workers (=/= generals)
we need? contracts (=/= strategy)
(how can i understand my “strategies” and my “contracts” ?! contractual agreements that i use or depend on or produce in my research and work with ajayeb, and in relation to the others in my performances--{my vocabulary, thinking with me, (un)learning with me, etc}--and even prior to the event of our encouter, the binding transferential contract in relation to the one who speaks) ~~--> (and issuing its) betrayal
strategy --(always? [should?] ends with)-->? contract; (for example, making peace treaty after war)
[]
{*strategy, “art of generals,” from French stratégie, from Greek strategia “office or command of a general,” from strategos “general,” from stratos “multitude, army, expedition,” literally “that which is spread out” (--> “structure”) + agos “leader,” from agein “to lead” (--> “act”).}
(strategy/contract/...)
***science is conditioned but unconditional***
(Serres:) science is conditioned by postulates or by decisions that are generally social, cultural, or historical in nature, which form it and orient it
--(nevertheless)--> sci is universal and free from contract #science-story
“I can't think of a mountain, a border, or a date which makes the agreement of scientists and everyone else relative on these points.”
-they say sci is conditioned but not determined
conditions that do not determine the contents of what they condition
(mathematics?)
but they determine the map of what they condition : the schema of its relations --> the topology of science; the clay remains the same but the shape changes
Fluid Mechanics can be a basis for biology (--> constitution of living being) or for a technology of the inert (--> theory of ship building).
...crazy!
Education is conducted by duce
method ~=? path
strategy is not only a form of dynamics or energetics but first of all a topology*
the master pays no attention to the content
murder (increases) along the chain
...if one is the master of justice
freed from violence, he goes forward unnamed
-against the mechanisms of Mars (or moon) , we now let things to come to being as objects, outside the mechanisms that regulate our unregulated violence
-sacred forms a field of knowledge --[...]
(168)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%50.8[...]nguage.
There are always differences, tensions, paradoxes in the text, between what a text says and what a text does.
Derrida always begins (wherever he happens to find himself) in a specific context, which is to say in trying to engage with a specific text or scene of reading.
(Writing is) is winking at someone (you like) while listening to my favorite music.
A writing that is not structurally readable -- iterable -- beyond the death of the addressee, would not be writing.
The supplementarity of digression, a fictional supplementarity. Freud is compelled to tell a story but in the act of doing so, he betrays the annulment or effective impossibility of this story. Sons murder of primordial father. Origin of morality: earliest moral restrictions in primitive society have been explained by us as reactions to a dead which gave those who performed it the concept of crime.
The feeling that a text is especially written ‘for’ derrida... As if waiting for him to come along and point it out.
Freud's story is less the narration of an imaginary event than the simulacrum of narration. Freud's quasi event, is at once of fictional narrative and as narrative as fictive. It is the origin of literature at the same time as the origin of law, derrida suggests.
Kant, Freud, Kafka, what makes important all these thinkers for Derrida has to do with how each in their different way brings out a ghostly or virtual ‘narrativity and fiction’ at the very core of legal thought.
Law is always an idiom. An idiom is an expression with a meaning that cannot be guessed from the meanings of the individual words: its door concerns only you. One's relation to the law is singular.
The drama of naming (@Sonja naming the dance, dancing the name, is she dancing the name of the dance)
john Keats, prospective; Williams Wordsworth, retrospective. Prospective work consists of hopeful preparation, anticipation of future power rather than meditative reflections on past moments of insight and harmony. Oriented towards the future.
All i am doing today, like derrida, can be seen as a grafting (ghalameh zadan) or extension, supplement or prosthesis, an outgrowth from somewhere else, earlier on.
I will attach to the story of maulwürfe like the shit on his head.
Recalling and reinventing Shakespeare, the idea is not to bring it from past to present, something that is already disjointed in time towards the future. I push the characters of King Lear to a future. The deconstructive reading of the play has to do with the opening of the future itself. It is utterly important that you do something unpredictable for yourself. If you are in the business of hate, love suddenly, changing tracks brings the unexplainable to the trajectory. Going in discipline is like riding a train on rails, i am not saying [...]
(169)[...notes/Derrida old notes.txt]%51.5[...]cile in the end, [اسیر صورت --?--> اسیر معنی]
San'an is determined to see it through, the whole process
the German super-ego
the German ego
to carefully inject some of German super-ego to the Iranian ego
(for Anastasia) what is the next war?
ترسا
(to the audience:) you should feel free to make notes, because I am making notes while you are talking, and these kind of lectures I am doing are the process of those note-makings.
I like to interrupt you. the performance is itself an interruption of you, like when we say in a conversation “may I interrupt you” your pace, your velocity, your speech-acts, etc.
what is being ‘interested’ in the history of illusion?
in your process in becoming woman, you might end up becoming a female robot.
(Tarsaa's part)
whose testicles are smashed here?
to the less molested .... (body of the pupil)
psycho-history
human preparedness for inter-relations with technology and technologization
***test some failures
a different brand of anxiety (?)
walking on groundlessness, literature, house of literature?
protest against “was”
give literature in its totality
initiate a program
we don't love our selves nor our neighbors
San'an, when he thinks he is getting close, he has abysses he has to clear
which language the house speaks? or which language German speaks?
house of literature, house is the site of kinship too.
if literature is like a house at all
unreadable algorithm of encounter
...................................
I hope we can get along famously
my work has been really about old forms in the city, how should we build,
tyranny,
packaging (packaging existing knowledge, the way for example the IT industry does it.)
am I against packaging?
rationalizing and separating functions in the city
place, space, face,
in the history, the leg-less-stone and the lying-visage have been together. a study of apparition must include the physical material as well, not as counterparts, rather as its play-mate.
...................................
the structure of space in San'an poetry
distinction between subject and object, between signifier and signified, encompassing the whole of dualistic logic through its branching patterns, through its definitions of set pathways between root and branch.
the Arborescent model of relationships in San'an story?
The rhizome likewise resists structures of domination, such as the notion of “the mother ton[...]
(170)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%52.2[...]mash, shatter, slam; blare, fanfare, bellow, roar) --- in schmettern you already have the ‘smashing,’ the butterfly smashing in the windshield, by that we are in the land of technology.
Schmetterlinghaus? (The Imperial Butterfly House in Vienna)
خرمن پروانه
Schmetterling is also a German (Reich Air Ministry) air-to-air missile project developed during the WWII, which is detonated by acoustic and photoelectric proximity fuses (Abstandszünder)
(Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh)
time, space, being, death, subversion, pain, transcendence, victory, blood, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno, Benjamin, Baudrillard,
•poetic violence, obscure elsewhere,
•imaginative reservoir.
•political, poetic, spiritual, or aesthetic sources of inspiration.
•the rebel factor
resistance-fight / ideological dictator
artist-forerunner / experimental thinker
constellation of desire
ambush of destruction =>
...internalization of toxicity
to assimilate the poisonous
mithridatic (“mehr-dad” معجون مهرداد)
what is the dominant information in San'an world?
(ideological and) literary apparatus
issues of belonging and desertion
to endure the direct
epistemic fear
I suggest we go through the rhetorical treatises of Middle East political past century
(mystic war:)
the decadent view of the obliterated
(swallowing partial glances of the)
“extinction of society”
drinking it
these signals of vanishing are forms of training?
a formula of continuation?
ancient models of defense****
مکانیزم دفاعی
other mature forms of defenses:
•sublimation
•projection: a characteristic that one perceives in oneself but seems unacceptable is instead attributed to another person, denial in attribution [still popular Feuerbach's idea of “religion = projection”, “God = outward projection of a human's inward nature” informing secular anthropological explanation] نسبت دادن احساس خود به دیگری
◦it changes the reality (for the person who projects)
◦it operates unconsciously (the person won't accept that they project)
•rationalization: irrationalities are explained in a seemingly rational or logical manner and are made consciously tolerable, ad hoc hypothesis: to save it from being falsified [<== introspection illusion: cognitive bias of the origins of one's own state]
•fantasy
•denial
•reaction formation: responses to internal threats and anxieties, anxiety is mastered by exaggeration of the directly opposing tendency. phobia is always reaction formation: the person wants what he fears. [solicitude (may be a reaction formati[...]
(175)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%52.4[...]allen 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 the man, to elevate him); Jami: Salaman-o-Absal and Yusof-o-Zoleikha (woman is body and to be avoided); Gorgani: Vis-o-Ramin (woman is autonomous and for herself in the plot of the story)
*this time, he stammers in a situation articulated by her
preserving the ‘good object’
who is doing it and what is the good object for?
(the missing good object, forever)
Tarsaa demands him to drink and not to get drunk
سوی خوکان شتافت
San'an's pig-phobia
introducing the pig in a bird's story
(Hoopoe convincing the Nightingale, Nightingale convincing the ...)
the way of the pig
how earthly we are, we, creatures of earth, how metaphysics forecloses us
Attar keep throwing similies of horizontal and vertical
(simile صنعت تشبيه, شبيه صنع)
scanning through the scandalous moments in San'an...
I want to be German everyday
de-system or to desist, nondialectical negativity
‘Integrieren’ is transitive verb, has a virtual object or project
I am in Ausländerbehörde, the opposite of hospitality?
I have to stop talking opposite rhetoric. but this was not an antithesist opposite, it was a logical opposite
violences of the encounter
San'an's love-story, ist nicht das Tristan und Isolde
‘watch your back'[...]
(177)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%53.4[...]r />
“Authentic disciple of four hundred men, were regressed (zurückschreiten) on a journey with him.” [why Attar is insisting on the authenticity of the disciple and apprenticeship?]
we should always ask where this text comes from.
I try not to pre-program what is going to happen. [here now]
--> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9SIL38hkgw
in the Shams Group music video, the soldiers in the video are having the little-Rumi-packet in their backpacks, along with other suicides. (other soldiers having Holderlin or Nietzsche in their backpacks)
metaphysical strongholds
to keep partnership with the self, so that there can be interlocution
(is this a possible ethics? --> “can I live with myself?”)
what one does to be in consonant with what one is capable of.
(then what is vowel?) vowel switches tracks and resonations
/>
...penetrative grasp of a text, discovery and recreative apprehension of it life-forms, is impossible to paraphrase or systematize.
[Michel Serres]
...temporal and local settings of one's text. (to master it?)
to read X, is literally, to ‘prepare’ to read X
in certain civilizations there comes epochs in which syntax stiffens...
Changing landscape of fact
words, the guardians of meanings, are not immortal.
note on history: past is a language construct, that the past tense of the verb is the sole guarantor of history.
to read: is to restore all that one can of the immediacies of value and intent in which speech actually occurs.
What material reality has history out of language? --the Tasawwuf/Tasavof verbal linguistic tradition
...to remind you that everything is the condition of madness.ess.
(protest against “was” ---> go to Attar's relation with biographies in Tazkirat al-Awliya---he mobilizes ‘personalities’ in the index of his mystic-ontological demand---what would the lack of personality take revenge of Attar?)
we are at a tense past and a past tense---prison tense
..the landscape composed by the past tense, the semantic organization of remembrance... is styled and coded differently by cultures. --miniature illustrating San'an?
The verbal icon made up of all successive translations of Greek literature and philosophy has oriented fundamental movements in Islamic feelings --Farabi, Mirdamad, etc.
My translation of classics is not out of a vital compulsion for immediacy or precise echo. I am not trying to build my own resonant past. Myth of the ‘true past’... different perspectives can co-exist and blur
the metaphysics of the insult, in San'an st[...]
(178)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%53.8[...]literally, to ‘prepare’ to read X
in certain civilizations there comes epochs in which syntax stiffens...
Changing landscape of fact
words, the guardians of meanings, are not immortal.
note on history: past is a language construct, that the past tense of the verb is the sole guarantor of history.
to read: is to restore all that one can of the immediacies of value and intent in which speech actually occurs.
What material reality has history out of language? --the Tasawwuf/Tasavof verbal linguistic tradition
...to remind you that everything is the condition of madness.
(protest against “was” ---> go to Attar's relation with biographies in Tazkirat al-Awliya---he mobilizes ‘personalities’ in the index of his mystic-ontological demand---what would the lack of personality take revenge of Attar?)
we are at a tense past and a past tense---prison tense
..the landscape composed by the past tense, the semantic organization of remembrance... is styled and coded differently by cultures. --miniature illustrating San'an?
The verbal icon made up of all successive translations of Greek literature and philosophy has oriented fundamental movements in Islamic feelings --Farabi, Mirdamad, etc.
My translation of classics is not out of a vital compulsion for immediacy or precise echo. I am not trying to build my own resonant past. Myth of the ‘true past’... different perspectives can co-exist and blur
the metaphysics of the insult, in San'an story
I am interested in the conventions in which texts can be read, in which a semantic statement can be carried over into someone's own idiom. I am teaching how to reread texts of Attar and so forth.
I think we have civilization because (we have learned) ‘to translate out of time’
übertragen,
handing down thought narrative,
something that also depends on transfer of meaning in *space*
San'an's sudden interest in the woman/child (Tarsaa could also be a young boy) reminds us the uniquely vulnerable and creative condition of the childhood
privileged inferiority (of both child and woman)
we are dealing with both intercourse and discourse
how his voice will change after San'an actually gets the girl?
...communication like breathing is subject to obstruction and homicidal breakdowns, under stress of hatred, of boredom, or of sudden panic, great gaps open ...that their previous understanding had been based on a trivial pidgin which had left the heart of meaning untouched.
What is the female speech in San'an?
-the breakdowns and translations in San'an story.
-The [...]
(179)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%53.8[...]Tarsaa could also be a young boy) reminds us the uniquely vulnerable and creative condition of the childhood
privileged inferiority (of both child and woman)
we are dealing with both intercourse and discourse
how his voice will change after San'an actually gets the girl?
...communication like breathing is subject to obstruction and homicidal breakdowns, under stress of hatred, of boredom, or of sudden panic, great gaps open ...that their previous understanding had been based on a trivial pidgin which had left the heart of meaning untouched.
What is the female speech in San'an?
-the breakdowns and translations in San'an story.
-The sexual translation and breakdown of linguistic exchange in San'an story.
...having an ‘ear’ for contrasting pressures of sexual discourse or identity
in San'an, man and woman, each respective experience of Eros and language had set them desperately apart.
In whose idiom, male or female, one can grasp (only) falsehood or menace?
...as declaimer of my own stifled, tongue
my performance, corresponding to my level of literacy, and a private thesaurus, part of my subconscious and personal memories, and using the singular and irreducibly specific ensemble of somatic and psychological identity.
the ideal of a totally personal voice, of a unique ‘fit’ between an individual's expressive means and his world-image, perused by the poets.
this is not a formal hard-edged linguistic relegation, rather a metaphysical speculation
*note to self: my interest in the ʿAjā'ib al-makhlūqāt (جائب المخلوقات وغرائب الموجودات) is due to the traces it provides into verbal literacy, a living vulgar language of mix, rather than a dead structure such as Manṭiq-uṭ-Ṭayr (منطق الطیر) of Attar.
Cultures (during Attar's?) seem to expend on their vocabulary and syntax acquisitive energies and ostentations entirely lacking in their material lives.
[very interesting point by Serres regarding the language of mysticism, Attar and others.]
my translation of Attar, an interlinear version of the script, a virtual archetype of translation
think about the presence of interpreters in the building site -- Kafka's literature house
Only if men could use language without perusing meaning to the forbidden edge of the absolute.
‘a poetic vocabulary of concepts’
‘connections or affinities’
pursuit of an inter-lingua for philosophic discourse
as you can see in this writing, I am practicing loosening the tight axiom of relation of A<-->B, something other than the predecessor-succ[...]
(180)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%53.9[...]>
What is the female speech in San'an?
-the breakdowns and translations in San'an story.
-The sexual translation and breakdown of linguistic exchange in San'an story.
...having an ‘ear’ for contrasting pressures of sexual discourse or identity
in San'an, man and woman, each respective experience of Eros and language had set them desperately apart.
In whose idiom, male or female, one can grasp (only) falsehood or menace?
...as declaimer of my own stifled, tongue
my performance, corresponding to my level of literacy, and a private thesaurus, part of my subconscious and personal memories, and using the singular and irreducibly specific ensemble of somatic and psychological identity.
the ideal of a totally personal voice, of a unique ‘fit’ between an individual's expressive means and his world-image, perused by the poets.
this is not a formal hard-edged linguistic relegation, rather a metaphysical speculation
*note to self: my interest in the ʿAjā'ib al-makhlūqāt (جائب المخلوقات وغرائب الموجودات) is due to the traces it provides into verbal literacy, a living vulgar language of mix, rather than a dead structure such as Manṭiq-uṭ-Ṭayr (منطق الطیر) of Attar.
Cultures (during Attar's?) seem to expend on their vocabulary and syntax acquisitive energies and ostentations entirely lacking in their material lives.
[very interesting point by Serres regarding the language of mysticism, Attar and others.]
my translation of Attar, an interlinear version of the script, a virtual archetype of translation
think about the presence of interpreters in the building site -- Kafka's literature house
Only if men could use language without perusing meaning to the forbidden edge of the absolute.
‘a poetic vocabulary of concepts’
‘connections or affinities’
pursuit of an inter-lingua for philosophic discourse
as you can see in this writing, I am practicing loosening the tight axiom of relation of A<-->B, something other than the predecessor-successor or cause-effect pair (--> this order of structure is coming from Greek geometric,) I am trying an unordered order-of-reason that is more reflexive, symmetric, and intransitive. (the construction of the text represents each chain incomplete and displaced--Attar knows)
towards a general theory of significant sign
Can we correlate the Persian syntax with the metaphysical ambience, internal divisions, and lyric bias of Persian people?
the language-matrix
language, informed by energies proper to itself, more comprehensive and timeless than any who makes use of[...]
(181)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%53.9[...]performance, corresponding to my level of literacy, and a private thesaurus, part of my subconscious and personal memories, and using the singular and irreducibly specific ensemble of somatic and psychological identity.
the ideal of a totally personal voice, of a unique ‘fit’ between an individual's expressive means and his world-image, perused by the poets.
this is not a formal hard-edged linguistic relegation, rather a metaphysical speculation
*note to self: my interest in the ʿAjā'ib al-makhlūqāt (جائب المخلوقات وغرائب الموجودات) is due to the traces it provides into verbal literacy, a living vulgar language of mix, rather than a dead structure such as Manṭiq-uṭ-Ṭayr (منطق الطیر) of Attar.
Cultures (during Attar's?) seem to expend on their vocabulary and syntax acquisitive energies and ostentations entirely lacking in their material lives.
[very interesting point by Serres regarding the language of mysticism, Attar and others.]
my translation of Attar, an interlinear version of the script, a virtual archetype of translation
think about the presence of interpreters in the building site -- Kafka's literature house
Only if men could use language without perusing meaning to the forbidden edge of the absolute.
‘a poetic vocabulary of concepts’
‘connections or affinities’
pursuit of an inter-lingua for philosophic discourse
as you can see in this writing, I am practicing loosening the tight axiom of relation of A<-->B, something other than the predecessor-successor or cause-effect pair (--> this order of structure is coming from Greek geometric,) I am trying an unordered order-of-reason that is more reflexive, symmetric, and intransitive. (the construction of the text represents each chain incomplete and displaced--Attar knows)
towards a general theory of significant sign
Can we correlate the Persian syntax with the metaphysical ambience, internal divisions, and lyric bias of Persian people?
the language-matrix
language, informed by energies proper to itself, more comprehensive and timeless than any who makes use of it...
discourse (die Rede) would not be muffled by the ground---we walk erect [Serres]
jede Sprache ist ein Versuch---*trial
(Humboldt)
different languages penetrate to different depths
--> (every try is a) starting over with *accuracy
ok, we are starting with language from scratch, here
Literaturhaus, house has always been a metaphor for consciousness
how Attar can become interested in other lives other that San'an's that are worth living?
although we see again and again in[...]
(182)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%53.9[...] preoccupations such as ‘invention’ as modernized and capitalist terms.]
tradition: an act of memory based on a salience-effect of shared knowledge
(ein Akt der Erinnerung basiert auf einer Hervorspringen-Effekt der gemeinsamen Kenntnisse)
-there is a sequence (where is the individual terms within it?)
-my storytelling is about: describing relations of inversion, extension, inclusion, analogy, etc. between mythical, lyrical, or even scientific ‘beings’ that are (1) *conventional* (recognizable repertoire), and (2) *closed* (refer to certain predefined situations and symbols)
==> I work-with and bypass with these aspects in Attar, Hafez, Ajā'ib al-makhlūqāt, etc.
the performance of ‘stop’ in San'an
sign-functions that cannot be stopped
the master-pupil lock
‘locken’ is also to lure, seduce, etc.
thank you for becoming my students, temporarily
we are not locked, and not necessarily unlocked
what is concealed behind the special effects of the awesome signifier in San'an's story?
concealed =/= canceled
in Rumi every word is pass-word. you don't translate a password! (fallacy of the literal)
•all same-sex relationships are hierarchical and dyadic (of two, ‘paarweise’ in German)?
and are based on the cultural diagram of the master-disciple relationship in Sufi orders?
Sufi order =/=? flirtation
mystic, is one mode of subjectivity emerged in the middle eastern thought--- a prototype of closeness and removal.
in Rumi--Masnavi's third book--the un-concentrated Sheikh (- story of Daghughi - شیخ دقوقی) is scandalously abandoned by his devotees. they broke his heart.
[Plot: Daghughi and his disciples are in deep trance beside a beach. a ship comes and sink in a sudden theatrical storm right in front of them, but miraculously the passengers survive. the students check with each other if any of them have prayed for the God's help's redirect to the sinking ship. no, they deduce it must have been their sheikh who saved those people: “he is distracted by the world.” finally when sheikh comes out of his Namaz he turns his head to greet his devotees but only to realize that all of them have left him in silence!]
and then Rumi goes in length in differences between mud and water. [the “prison” of mud for the water, who “belongs” to the sea, and this is a problem, the mud doesn't want to dry, therefore doesn't let go of the water, and so on.]
what the image of the sinking ship has to do with the anti-clarity movements of the Sufis?
[and then suddenly: pishe and bishe (پیشه و بیشه)---lion comes out of Pishe(business)/Bishe(bushes) and rubs you off,
bush =/= Arbeit/craft]
also, Rumi opens the[...]
(183)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%54[...]
main title:
“Four Eastern Cartographies of Entrapment”
video:
“Writing on Chaos - A Terminal Intimacy”
performance:
“The Reward of The Victim - Towards Poetic Extremism”
image assemblage wallpaper:
“Bad Temper - Apocalyptic Climates of Endangered Subjectivity”
delve
delvi
delphi
dilated
dionysian ecotone for performance
defp
dionysian epitom studies for performing ecotone
desfpe
artistic research center for material epitom studies
arcfmes
(art)mes
eccentric center of/for material and performance studies
(eco)maps
dionysian epitom for material and performance studies
demaps
eccentric center of/for epitomized material studies
ecfem
cologne center for social research
ccsr
ecotone
>
epitom
parc
performance and research center
cream
center for research in epistemology and matter
...................................
***sharjah project***
[general approach of the project:]
this proposal gathers literary forces from the speculative insights of Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh (on ‘radical modes of resistance’) and Edouard Glissant (on ‘modest modes of resistance’) in order to perform a ‘slider’ between hostile and relaxed patterns of “contact” and “nothingness” that has been rotating throughout the past century in the Middle East. the performance of a knowledge-zoom in the hypnotic effects, nondialogue, nonnarrative, and radical exile spaces that have emerged in eastern postmodernism to reverse and supersede the question of modernity.
by traversing the domains of revolutionary ideology, avant-garde literature, new-wave cinema, extremist thought, and protests from the limitless imaginative reservoir of their political, poetic, spiritual, and aesthetic predecessors--this projects examines a Middle Eastern navigation of identity (via the concept of the ‘mask’) and its particular modest/hostile modes of resistance (via the concept of the ‘text’). visiting sites such as: subversive epitomes of charismatic authority undertaking a poetic articulation, when chaotic imagination makes contact with nothingness, the will to chaos, and inscription of fatality in literature-as-moral-transaction.
[pressure points:]
mobile within a speculative/suggestive milieu, this project is interested in examining literary sites such as Kelile-o Demne's communal forms of fragile human cohabitation (11th century political/bestial fable), Rumi's simulation of nonexistence (13th century production of schizo-darvish), Hafez's engineering metaphor-factory (14th century imaginal faculty of extreme presence), Hedayat's Buf Koor the Shelley's Frankenstein's monst[...]
(184)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%55.1[...]studies
arcfmes
(art)mes
eccentric center of/for material and performance studies
(eco)maps
dionysian epitom for material and performance studies
demaps
eccentric center of/for epitomized material studies
ecfem
cologne center for social research
ccsr
ecotone
epitom
parc
performance and research center
cream
center for research in epistemology and matter
...................................
***sharjah project***
[general approach of the project:]
this proposal gathers literary forces from the speculative insights of Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh (on ‘radical modes of resistance’) and Edouard Glissant (on ‘modest modes of resistance’) in order to perform a ‘slider’ between hostile and relaxed patterns of “contact” and “nothingness” that has been rotating throughout the past century in the Middle East. the performance of a knowledge-zoom in the hypnotic effects, nondialogue, nonnarrative, and radical exile spaces that have emerged in eastern postmodernism to reverse and supersede the question of modernity.
by traversing the domains of revolutionary ideology, avant-garde literature, new-wave cinema, extremist thought, and protests from the limitless imaginative reservoir of their political, poetic, spiritual, and aesthetic predecessors--this projects examines a Middle Eastern navigation of identity (via the concept of the ‘mask’) and its particular modest/hostile modes of resistance (via the concept of the ‘text’). visiting sites such as: subversive epitomes of charismatic authority undertaking a poetic articulation, when chaotic imagination makes contact with nothingness, the will to chaos, and inscription of fatality in literature-as-moral-transaction.
[pressure points:]
mobile within a speculative/suggestive milieu, this project is interested in examining literary sites such as Kelile-o Demne's communal forms of fragile human cohabitation (11th century political/bestial fable), Rumi's simulation of nonexistence (13th century production of schizo-darvish), Hafez's engineering metaphor-factory (14th century imaginal faculty of extreme presence), Hedayat's Buf Koor the Shelley's Frankenstein's monster favorate book (20th century forms of renunciation), Amir Naderi and Forough Farrokhzad films (20th century strategies of withdrawal), Jala Al Ahmad and Ali Shariati writings (20th century fatal concepts of the outside), [list to be modified]
[background:]
this form of half-digestive omnivorous work is situated in a larger trajectory of creative investigations, which i have been busy with under “storytelling,” are dealing with the questions of conditions in which non-antagonistic critical encounters between ordered conventions of knowing and chaotic textuality/imaginati[...]
(185)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%55.2[...]
***sharjah project***
[general approach of the project:]
this proposal gathers literary forces from the speculative insights of Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh (on ‘radical modes of resistance’) and Edouard Glissant (on ‘modest modes of resistance’) in order to perform a ‘slider’ between hostile and relaxed patterns of “contact” and “nothingness” that has been rotating throughout the past century in the Middle East. the performance of a knowledge-zoom in the hypnotic effects, nondialogue, nonnarrative, and radical exile spaces that have emerged in eastern postmodernism to reverse and supersede the question of modernity.
by traversing the domains of revolutionary ideology, avant-garde literature, new-wave cinema, extremist thought, and protests from the limitless imaginative reservoir of their political, poetic, spiritual, and aesthetic predecessors--this projects examines a Middle Eastern navigation of identity (via the concept of the ‘mask') and its particular modest/hostile modes of resistance (via the concept of the ‘text’). visiting sites such as: subversive epitomes of charismatic authority undertaking a poetic articulation, when chaotic imagination makes contact with nothingness, the will to chaos, and inscription of fatality in literature-as-moral-transaction.
[pressure points:]
mobile within a speculative/suggestive milieu, this project is interested in examining literary sites such as Kelile-o Demne's communal forms of fragile human cohabitation (11th century political/bestial fable), Rumi's simulation of nonexistence (13th century production of schizo-darvish), Hafez's engineering metaphor-factory (14th century imaginal faculty of extreme presence), Hedayat's Buf Koor the Shelley's Frankenstein's monster favorate book (20th century forms of renunciation), Amir Naderi and Forough Farrokhzad films (20th century strategies of withdrawal), Jala Al Ahmad and Ali Shariati writings (20th century fatal concepts of the outside), [list to be modified]
[background:]
this form of half-digestive omnivorous work is situated in a larger trajectory of creative investigations, which i have been busy with under “storytelling,” are dealing with the questions of conditions in which non-antagonistic critical encounters between ordered conventions of knowing and chaotic textuality/imagination is possible. to take the mind where it does not belong. to the rogue arsenals of middle eastern reservoir of imagination and its locatable mimicries. to its repetitive scaffoldings, fugitive trajectories, its performances of fatal experience of the text. to unload its corrosive textualities and let them run their acids across one another. this project is interested in both the unleashing and the pleasure of watching the text die.
part of the disposition of this proposal is also the suggestion that the two collaborators of this project, Ja[...]
(186)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%55.2[...]rm of half-digestive omnivorous work is situated in a larger trajectory of creative investigations, which i have been busy with under “storytelling,” are dealing with the questions of conditions in which non-antagonistic critical encounters between ordered conventions of knowing and chaotic textuality/imagination is possible. to take the mind where it does not belong. to the rogue arsenals of middle eastern reservoir of imagination and its locatable mimicries. to its repetitive scaffoldings, fugitive trajectories, its performances of fatal experience of the text. to unload its corrosive textualities and let them run their acids across one another. this project is interested in both the unleashing and the pleasure of watching the text die.
part of the disposition of this proposal is also the suggestion that the two collaborators of this project, Jassem and Foad, are invested in those notions in their practice. Foad Farahani's poem “farar” enacting contemporary artistic formations and past-compound-mask, and Jassem Hindi transnational poetic agency, are both artists with acute appetite for chaotic imagination. Their instinct for the fusion of nothingness and excess, appearance and disappearance, creation and destruction, is at once carved and unpacked in the literary-poetic mosaics of their work: Foad's use of middle-persian mystic sensibilities and Jassem's combination of intensive encounter with the poetics of apocalypse and acid textuality.
My work has been about: learning/training in the crafts of noticing little traps of semiotic and material trans-species cohabiting, mutual coproduction of economics, ecology, affect-studies, metaphysical household studies, and understanding of the orders of the natural and human world, in the particular history/story of the East. in my projects i take history as the overlapping tracks and traces and many tranjectories of world-making, human and nonhuman. the textual performance of this project is in the effects of my research and practice with the questions of globalism and inheritance: difficult translational spaces, communicative nonunderstanding, relational aesthetics, and the differential sites of reading. and i use performative lectures: a material practice, hybrid in digital manual tactile operations of speaking.
...................................
“Four Masks of an Eastern Postmodernism”
insurgent, poet, mystic, sectarian
| | | |
chaos, violence, illusion, silence
•(sectarianism) apocalyptic writing
•(poetic) will to chaos
•(mystic) exile space
•(insurgent's) otherless subjectivity
یاغی
شاعر
نوچه
زاهد
[performative methodology]
for the collaborative part of sharjah project, i like to propose four “masks” (or “rotational avatars”) of subjective anarchy, that are few among ma[...]
(188)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%55.3[...]ercenary, revolutionary edifice
amorphous, obscure, versatile (thinker/writers)
conceptual axes/archetypes of: power, hostility, banishment, solitude, desire, sacrifice
[*]mystic:
sunken tranquility, relaxed self-annihilation, ascetic renunciation of material (=/= postmodernism's obsession with speed, with narcissistic technologies, hyper-materialism)
neomystial trajectories of new-wave iranian cinema filmic style --> hypnotic effect =/= audition, dialogue, narrative
& exile space
[*]sectarian:
will to extremity
(apocalyptic writing)
breakaway modality
نوچه پروری noche-parvary's effective radars and tactics of attunement, detection, narration
(annihilatic temptation to) convert the text into a closed circle
(sect's threats of) forbidden power, moral ambiguity, collective density(/destiny)
...................................
[this project works with:]
[]
contributions/responses of:
•radical leaders (Jala Al Ahmad, Ali Shariati, Khomeini) --> ideological suspicion towards models of machinism and cosmopolitanism in the modern age
•intellectual forerunners (--> sectarian)
•literary icons (textual innovations of Hedayat, Shamlu, Akhavan, Baraheni) --> *poetic violence* and its apocalyptic tendencies --> that the declared east is plunged into a catastrophic epoch ==freed==> a “will to chaos”
•artistic visionaries (Naderi, Forough, iranian new-wave cinema neomystical) --> strategies of withdrawal, aims of disappearance, situated in obscure elsewheres of auditory and visual landscape
}--> #ideology #literature #mysticism #sectarianism
(from the middle eastern front) to (the issues of):
◦post-historical instant
◦catastrophic resistance
◦creative imagination
}--> issues of:
◾technology
◾representation<ation
◾globalization
◾colonialism
+}--> drastic reinterpretations of:
◽time and being
◽death
◽pain
◽transcendence
◽victory
◽blood
~~(modernity is an extremist epoch)==> mithridatic approaches
anticultural visionaries
extreme --> resistance-fighter/ideological dictator, artistic forerunner/experimental thinker, different constellations of desire
***mithridatism مهردارو mehr-daru: *internalization of toxicity* (the gradual ingestion of lethal substances so as to gain immunity) --> an archaic protective tactic, an ancient model of defense, (subterranean practice of pirates, alchemists, cult leaders, shamans, guerrilla columns, spies, paranoid kings's *logic of encounter*)
(poetic extremism -->) mithridatic: dispensing fragmented verses, aphorisms, and engravings of the atrocity; invitation and unleashing of the malevolence itself, to seduce oblit[...]
(189)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%55.4[...]nd visual landscape
}--> #ideology #literature #mysticism #sectarianism
(from the middle eastern front) to (the issues of):
◦post-historical instant
◦catastrophic resistance
◦creative imagination
}--> issues of:
◾technology
◾representation
◾globalization
◾colonialism
+}--> drastic reinterpretations of:
◽time and being
◽death
◽pain
◽transcendence
◽victory
◽blood
~~(modernity is an extremist epoch)==> mithridatic approaches
anticultural visionaries
extreme --> resistance-fighter/ideological dictator, artistic forerunner/experimental thinker, different constellations of desire
***mithridatism مهردارو mehr-daru: *internalization of toxicity* (the gradual ingestion of lethal substances so as to gain immunity) --> an archaic protective tactic, an ancient model of defense, (subterranean practice of pirates, alchemists, cult leaders, shamans, guerrilla columns, spies, paranoid kings's *logic of encounter*)
(poetic extremism -->) mithridatic: dispensing fragmented verses, aphorisms, and engravings of the atrocity; invitation and unleashing of the malevolence itself, to seduce obliteration;
-affliction, existence thriving in the wound
(assumptions of) inevitability + anticipation + projection ==> mithridatic remedy (in ideological & literary apparatuses): “swallowing partial glances of the extinction of society, actuality, and being itself” (Mohaghegh) [a form of training? for continuation?]--> the poet asking us to fasten our reeling gazes to the objects of damage and derangement (@Ali ) ==> (extremist:) thought and expression have taken the shape of a *meteorological device*, forecasting seasons of pestilence and mutilation [<-- my whole work has been against that]
fanatical responses to the evolving storm [=/= the fool (the one whose cognitive defend-system is down), the joker (figure of the always problematic, with its speculative sense for potent tie between meaning and bodies), the cheerleader (porpoising socially deviant, corrupting forerunner), the sleep-walker (moving in anachronistic temporality, in non-explicit non-intentional acting), the eros (weaker than the problem it tries to solve), the queer (optically dense and less elegant kind of corporality in our encounters), the rabbit-chaser (detouring off the ontological anxiety of humanity's enigmatic destination)]
cyclopean protocols of extremity --> narrowest vision (immensified)
the cyclopean organ (of doing/thinking) ==> ‘oracle = explosive device’
|
--> wisdom + rage
--> boundless confined
--> precision + enormity
--> nature + technology
--> betrayal + devotion
|
....three brothers سه برادر
----[they were said to have primordial understanding, having mo[...]
(191)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%55.5[...]to the Wonderland's Alice?]) ==> (a non-regimented) textuality within a body that charges --> *uncivil incarnation*
*killer's freedom*
freedom
-Heidegger: (massive difference between) a self-automating freedom that one attains via a borrowed sacred (handed-over, Frankenstein) and a hard-won-freedom attained through the rending-apart of a closed world (through the intractable سرپيچی)
-Sartre: a self-conscious authorship of the world, condemned to a certain responsibility before the event of one's own existence [--> the problem occurs when someone made it their task, duty, or entertainment to compel the other to experience such freedom]
-Nietzsche: ‘freedom = exclusive gift of the enemy’ ~ ‘respect-for-life = euphemism for death’ [life (if it has worth) is meant to be disrespected, contested, and hounded] --> ‘insurgent = warrior’(<-- the substance remains the same)
Adonis: “don't come closer, the wound is nearer than you / don't come closer, the wound is more beautiful than you” (@Hoda, Ali )
ancillary فرعى کمکى, تابع, مستخدم بومى --> کلفت
avarice حرص
affective overreaction <~=-> radical coldness
**literal**
western inability to understand the turbulant reaction abroad --> loss of the power of the literal (--> *democracy depends and works with the literal*:)
literal has given way in the west to the transference of image, language, and thought to a purely representational or metaphoric domain (to talk about things, but not speak the event itself)
“one cannot grow angered over a film, sculpture, treatise, or drawing (or a dance), then one also cannot experience captivation with a film, sculpture, treatise, or drawing” (Mohaghegh)
[yet the literal is sneaky in that is always decontextualizes, it vibrates and swings so conspicuously from its point of origin]
r />
(old Marxist, anarchist, and postmodern critique: ‘hyper-mediation + technological diffusion ==> obliteration of the sharpness of the senses in modernity’) =/= loss of the radioactive potential of the world of appearances --> *rabbit chaser* [a mask that i am invested in,] a middle eastern existential cost at stake : the myriad and triggers that alone make possible the descent into Alice's Wonderland--the child chases the the white rabbit(~a partial flashing image) without real thought to its enigmatic reasons or destinations (“why and where is he going?”) Alice (like Janina) is only consumed by his color, speed, movement, and nervous incantation افسون of lateness*** (--> metaphorology of “depth” in east)
code of urgency: “mean what you say and say what you mean”
a (monumental problem or) discord in the West between: saying (or showing in terms of images) and meaning () }--> problem for the propensity of acting, running, hungering, wanting, and [...]
(193)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%56.4[...]tical prophecy)
•
}==> principle of utopian potentiality
centers of corruption
pleasure-houses
makeup
games
alcoholic beverages
luxury goods
Marxist tradition:
the underground aesthetic is quickly transfigured into a mainstream aesthetic --always--> in the hands of an authoritarian elite (<-- in apass with Leo we were talking about this)
جنبش mass aesthetic fears becoming official سازمانی
...based on exposing the damage of the global-becoming-local
Al Ahmad traces this “transnational hypnosis” to economic origin (<-- Ali )
(Mohaghegh's judgment on iranian anticolonial ideology:) its ineptitude Ungeeignetheit in realizing the myriad variances that render any medium riddled with paradoxes--derives itself from its concurrent inability to observe the possibility for different subject-positions within the third world
omnipresent deception of modernity
(aesthetic radicalism [ X ) political resistance]
“X” --> limited anticolonialism
(Mohaghegh on)
-Mehrjui's The Cow, offers a moving allegorical journey into the psychic turbulence of a peasant confronted with the obliteration of his premodern world (and thus becomes his lost animal)
-Naderi's Man with a Gun, depicts the material avarice that has overtaken local configurations in the wake of nascent capitalist formations to such a drastic extent that it gives rise to a well-digger's being cheated of his life savings
-Kimiai's The Deers, ...
}--> strong consonance with the anticolonial ideologues (examined thus far)
...caught up in your prose
on Sa'edi’ short story “Dandil” [--> grotesque cultural disaffection of the masses within Sa'edi's Dandil]
-depicting the horrors of daily life within a semicolonized atmosphere of a red-light district of a northern Iranian city
-there is an imagery of closure and suffocation
(Sa'edi revealing:) the material despair of a colonial condition leading (in high speed) to the entropy of cultural-individual ethics
under the overwhelming weight of tangible misery
--cognize--> the immediate material urgency of the third world subject
(Dandilian gathering around to watch the taking of the picture -->) the third world subject has assumed the schizophrenic role of a voyeur himself, spectating his own literal-symbolic rape but not fully understanding it as such, while the real agent of power remains camouflaged in semi-invisibility
(Mohaghegh:) the ideological content of Dandil stands the notion that the technological advancement of the western world has turned the peripheral individual into its unknowing accomplice همدست, a vital participant in the abuse and mutilation of his own locality
(a Dandilian policemen remarking:) “They [westerns[...]
(199)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%56.8[...] the psychic turbulence of a peasant confronted with the obliteration of his premodern world (and thus becomes his lost animal)
-Naderi's Man with a Gun, depicts the material avarice that has overtaken local configurations in the wake of nascent capitalist formations to such a drastic extent that it gives rise to a well-digger's being cheated of his life savings
-Kimiai's The Deers, ...
}--> strong consonance with the anticolonial ideologues (examined thus far)
...caught up in your prose
on Sa'edi’ short story “Dandil” [--> grotesque cultural disaffection of the masses within Sa'edi's Dandil]
-depicting the horrors of daily life within a semicolonized atmosphere of a red-light district of a northern Iranian city
-there is an imagery of closure and suffocation
(Sa'edi revealing:) the material despair of a colonial condition leading (in high speed) to the entropy of cultural-individual ethics
under the overwhelming weight of tangible misery
--cognize--> the immediate material urgency of the third world subject
(Dandilian gathering around to watch the taking of the picture -->) the third world subject has assumed the schizophrenic role of a voyeur himself, spectating his own literal-symbolic rape but not fully understanding it as such, while the real agent of power remains camouflaged in semi-invisibility
(Mohaghegh:) the ideological content of Dandil stands the notion that the technological advancement of the western world has turned the peripheral individual into its unknowing accomplice همدست, a vital participant in the abuse and mutilation of his own locality
(a Dandilian policemen remarking:) “They [westerns] are not beggers like us. they all have private cars. their whores spend four or five hours a day just playing around in the beauty shops.” --> for Sa'edi that is the pathological fantasy endemic to the inner workings of a colonized mind. the third world subject perceiving itself as the negational instantiation of occidental greatness ==> swallowing down the civilizational hierarchies of its oppressor's self-projecting image
(preparing for the coming of rapist colonizer) the Dandilians rush to make the Madame's house clean and tidy: “[...]the curtains had been drawn aside. Pots of geranium had been placed on the wall and beside the steps[...]” ~-> Baudrillard's theory of simulation : the Dandilian presenting to the colonizer a Disneyland, *a play of illusions and phantasms* [~->? Dubai: self-affirmation via the domination of the constructed other]
(the american officer leaves the next morning with a mocking laughter and he refuses to play and the Dandilians can't do anything)--> the civilizational dichotomy remains intact in spite of the horrifying events that have transpired, with the trafficked deflowered child serving as a metaphor for the cultural-political mistreatment of the third worl[...]
(200)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%56.8[...]nt of the third world under colonial rule
on Akhavan's “Adamak” (“Stick-Figure”) [--> historical treachery committed within Akhavan's nostalgic Stick-Figure]
demonization of the television's arrival
-television as a “magical box” an artificial phenomenon that “entrances” its audience
again the idea of authenticity is largely emphasized here, as the television is perceived as a “foreign” entity and therefore an enemy to the millennial history of the province
new medium =/= indigenous modes of communication/expression (of which the roving storyteller is the ultimate instantiation)
(poignancy of the) poet's anthropomorphic profile of the new technologically oriented media
-Akhavan's representation symbolizes the storyteller himself, lamenting his own erasure from the moment of the now (or it is his prophecy for the imminent destruction of the new media in the coming islamic regime?)
--> aesthetic testament to the possibility for a third world revolutionary imagination to emerge from the ruins of the colonial era [, *from the ruins of the empire*]
--> representing the third world as in a state of complete existential-cultural atrophy (tahlil تحليل رفتن) @Hoda
**anticolonial literature reaffirms the all-encompassing grasp of modernity over peripheral subjectivity [--> marginal leader (Mamitua Saber's Marginal Leadership in a Culture Contact Situation)]
(Mohaghegh > Huyssen on Baudrillard:)
Baudrillard's notion of the *silent mass* of the spectators disables any analysis of *heterogeneous subject position in the act of reception* @Laura
any economic or institutional analysis of apparatuses of image production is rendered obsolete by Baudrillard's notion of an almost self-generating and monolithic machinary of image production [...] (<-- Laura should be very aware of this)
Baudrillard's society of simulation does not allow for such distinctions ... simulation, after all, may simply be the latest version of the ideology of the end of ideology
}--> part of the theoretical apparatus of *anticolonial ideology*
one immediate danger of this approach is that it recklessly dismisses anything associated with the other side of the binary (of West/East, self/other, first-world/third-world, modern/premodern, etc.) ==> overlook the subversive utility and democratic accessibility of certain technological innovation --> evident in Shariati's ultra-atavistic endorsement for an aesthetic tradition: “intrusion of the machine into the humna-half may go so far as to paralyze man; it destroys creativity. imagine a type-written page that can be imposed upon millions of people, while before the advent of the typewriter everyone was free to use his creativity to the utmost in calligraphy” --Mohaghegh--> it is not reflecting on the historical reality that the exercise of calligraphy was always linked to a feudalist class stru[...]
(201)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%56.9[...]ntemporaneity of the localized apocalyptic (infinitesimal becomings)
•present as close an interpretation of the unthinkable strangeness of reality as possible
•on an ongoing desertion of the real
Adorno: “works that make socially univocal discursive judgments thereby negate art as well as themselves” @Laura's judgment on the fascist body (--> can consumption be resistance? @Laura: becoming fascist body ==> ? )
the medium of film-making in present-day iran attempts solely to bring the crypto-vantage of the everyday into obscurity-ridden view (to leave less clear --> my pre-2012 videos ‘Vagabond,’ ‘Constant Prince,’ and ‘city of domes’), allowing for a critical distance on the part of the spectator to examine one's own being-in-the-world in raw, blurred form (the truth is haze itself --> Hoda)
exoticization of the local --> reduce it to a nativist enterprise
(Mohaghegh > Tomlinson:) the everyday culture has ingested foreign elements from exogenous sources, with the various elementss gradually brcoming “naturalized” within it =/= image of pure, internally homogenous, authentic, indigenous culture
Sharjah art foundation of the Emirate's *postcultural imagination*
literary front
Hedayat, Yushij, Shamlu, Forough
Hedayat's The Blind Owl variants of a “will to chaos”
middle eastern avant-garde's vision of the writing-act --sketching--> a fugitive postmodern map of escape from its grasp
[in] moments of great social disorder
==> secret societies, iconoclastic trajectories, a type of consciousness that perceives the catastrophic-apocalyptic hint at each turn
(how an eastern or third world vanguard characterize itself in the heart of major historical tremors:) [listen to their *tone of aggression*:]
Nima: “with my poetry i have driven people into a great conflict; good or bad, they have fallen in confusion; i myself am sitting in a corner, watching them: i have flooded the nest of ants”
Forough: “all those who are involved in creative work have as their motive ... a sort of need to confront and struggle with annihilation”
Shamlu: “the children of the depths,” “the children of the storm,” “the horsemen,” “the bold ones,”
--> definition of the poetic world as a protosectarian space
رابطه مریدی مرادی
دار و دسته
قبيله
(Ali, to a subculture of) persecuted and endangered
==> peripheral narative (marginal leadership) become a force of intrigue and seduction (among iranian youth)
-how did poetry respond to historical events of atrocity and transition
-did the poets understand themselves as resembling a mystical, criminal, mercenary, or revolutionary edifice?
amorphous, obscure, versatile (thinkers and writers launching an intellec[...]
(202)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%57.1[...]y some dominant elsewhere or otherworldliness?**
*does the poetic consciousness believe itself of an elite unknown rank (against the monolith)?
sociopolitical discourses either bore or aggravate Akhavan --only--> (transient historical specificity of) *turmoil demands poet's greater urgency*
(the poet has earned the station to say) “no more of this” (“it's enough”) ~ an *order* [=/= wisdom, sage, diplomatic response of an interlocutor, truth-telling, equal dialogue, negotiation]
poet's expertise and sensitivity: the storyteller's intimate relation to impermanence and destruction (--> Ali, Sana, Hoda, Setareh)
[-]Baraheni's depiction of the spatial domination of the city by Pahlavi regime from 1952 to 1979 --> SAVAK responded to and fueled a striking development in the political consciousness of the urban centers ==> labyrinthine evolution of the rebel form
hie poem “An Epic in Reverse” (Akhavanian reversal) neighborhoods of stigma, filth, and backwardness --> hybrid of animality and criminality
(Mohaghegh asking:) what is the author's recourse once stranded behind those iron bars, and now acquainted with the gleaming tools and instruments of the guards and royal executioners? for Baraheni, the answer seems to rest within a literary turn toward the arsenal of vulgarity, where language is forced to howl and curse again, to match the shock treatment and flagellation (شلاق shalagh) ==>
1. to unveil the degradation and depravity of power, to show it as unbeautiful and disgusting in its most bude form
2. to wage some reciprocal hate against power, to maximize the rawness of what is happening
[-]Shamlu's (dead-end) sightings of public execution and secret police night-raids of 1979-81
(Mohaghegh describing islamic state of iran through Shamlu:) a new iteration of revolutionary terror, millenarian clerical establishment that foresees self-congrave a feverish certainty across every corridor of urban reality (=/= conservative disposition of an ordained Shah seeking to keep his domination,) the vengefull return of a long-suppressed counterabsolutism that has been waiting anxiously for its chance to unleash and envelop a national identity in its now-seething ideology
-bringing the celestial abstractions of a faith crashing down into tangible existence --> they must ***sew, lash, and brand their righteous-ecstatic modalities into awesome materiality***
the vocabulary of: the prophetic, the messianic, the inspired, the sacred
}--> *Shamlu's avant-gardism had always led him to experiment with rotating styles of folkloric ballads, rebel anthems, existential meditations, doomsday rants, elegiac oration, children's lullabies --into--> (a singular blast of an) account of a devastated urban space that moves somewhere between legend, omen, song, myth, fairy tale, and war cry [--> Shamlu responding to an islamic revolutionary ideology that had enlisted its o[...]
(203)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%57.2[...]e very source of chaos-consciousness saliency
ferocious risk of greatness & the asphyxiating decadence of mediocrity
(Ali's) peotic-becoming aestheticized existence
irresolute =/= reactive =/= dismissive
continental philosophy's approach to the associations of three spheres: history[==>], art, subjectivity --✕--> chaotic nonstate: clash between a hypersubjectivized aesthetic & the barriers of historical Being (--> annihilation of both “I” and the historical)
Benjamin's subjectivity must defend itself against the profane rotations of the historical (--> apocalyptic battle)
Benjaminian “angel of history” ravaged of its innocence at the hands of progress and then restored by overriding strength of the historical materialist:
demonization of the monstrosity of the historical + celebratory poeticization of the subject
=/= Nietzsche and Hedayat's subjectivity [should] not to be held in a “derivative placement =/= the here and now” (one must imagine beyond طالع بینی <-- شخصیت فراسو نگر) --> (card reading) one must place under scrutiny the commensurate manner in which the historical is navigated, orchestrated, and then overcome [=/= alibi for some alternative discourse of literary-philosophical humanism or aesthetic transcendence]
[?what is Adrijana's card reading relation to] the desire to divorce history from any potential taxonomy of meaning or intelligibility --Hedayat--> “one is confined in a proud, deceptive consciousness... that rests upon the merciless, the insatiable, the murderous, in the indifference of his ignorance--hanging in dreams”
the poem i wrote in 2010 “our metaphor” https://archive.org/details/ourmetaphor is an example of (my Nietzschean and Hedayatian influence, to address) the indeterminacy and illogic necessarily associated with a chaotic world
(for Nietzsche:) positivism = historical subjectivity's fictive interiority --leads--> decadence of a will to truth, attributing to events a rational look by fixing them within universalizing patterns of signification
Nietzsche: “it is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations” =/= fraud of the historical ==>
•Platonic idealism
•messianic grandiosity of the Hegelian world-historical process
•
•*rational historicism: a discursive phenomenon indispensably linked to enlightenment epistemology and its overriding drive for world-mastery*
}=/= explosiveness of a chaotic universe + experiential immediacy of this creative-destructive effusion نشد
Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy (seemingly) a study of the pre-Socratic culture of Dionysian ecstasy --but--> a self-projected hallucination of antiquity ==> *theme of history as subjective dreamscape* (--> my way of working historical ajayeb is Nietzschean[?])
-in Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche wages an archaeological assaul[...]
(204)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%57.7[...]urn with fascinated sockets to the world-as-illusion
chaos in حکایت باخه و دو بط in Kelile Demne --> history: the myriad series of spectral constructs by which subjectivity comes to be constituted as an ordered entity
chaotic desire --> a temporary pact with radical aloneness --> Hoda
=/= homogenizing abstraction of “human”
(Foad, Hoda, Sartre's) exilic disposition, always alone, always apart
tranjective frenzy
to come down from the mountain and infest the back-alleys --> wtf!
deterritorialization one's owb footprints --> identitatian technologies
@Shervin commission the wanderer: a nameless eyeless character sitting on the outskirts of a wasteland in conversation with his own shadow --> (beyond time and space) as a gesture toward discarded worlds without clocks or maps --> *the will to aimlessness*
(Hedayat in The Blind Owl) “I had no idea in what direction I was going [...] I did not care whether or not I ever arrived at any palce”
Mikhail Bakhtin --> art for iranian artists = (carnivalesque) a site that grants the right to understand, the right to confuse, to tease, to hyperbolize life; the right to parody others while talking; *the right to not be taken literally*, not ‘to be oneself’ [...] the right to rip off masks, the right to rage at others with a primeval (almost cultic) rage--and finally, the right to betray to the public a personal life, down to its most private and prurient little secrets
Baudrillard: the real is no longer possible ==> illusion is no longer possible ==>{impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level = impossibility of staging illusion}--> hollows the inability of existence to escape its own fictive composition (=/= epistemologies of repair, reading, weaving, etc.)
(Hedayat's) techniques of stealing from the reader the most basic hermeneutic device of distinguishing between imaginary and the actual --> Hoda, Ali
***annihilation: ontological death ==> death of ontology***
زنده به گور buried alive, an unmediated experiential sensitivity to the randomness of existence
***chaotic imaginary =/= tyranny of historicity***
--> ahistorical figure, having traversed the borders of language, humanity, time, space, and reality --> Foad's poem (--> world as endless becoming or nightmaze) =/= historicized existential experience (folloing only two distinct path, of subject and object)
*philosophy = learnign how to kill* (=/= Socratic-Platonic versoin of “philosophy = learning how to die”)
Hedayat straying beyond signification, mortality, and ontological or phenomenological framing =/= my work with ajayeb
([why?] many artists do that) ***to make oneself unrecognizable***
consciousness: only a host of many someones
Nietzsche's transvaluation of historica[...]
(205)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%57.8[...]/= Socratic-Platonic versoin of “philosophy = learning how to die”)
Hedayat straying beyond signification, mortality, and ontological or phenomenological framing =/= my work with ajayeb
([why?] many artists do that) ***to make oneself unrecognizable***
consciousness: only a host of many someones
Nietzsche's transvaluation of historical limitations --> experience would no longer find itself entrapped by apparitions of objectivity and cohesion and could theretofore invite chance, risk, and endless experimentation
will to power --> a premediated calculable claim to mastery
Nietzsche: art as an active competitive exchange =/= Schopenhauer's mystical retreat: art to lure aside from the great road of suffering of humanity those who are wretched, exhausted, and sick, and to offer them a brief lustful moment--a little intoxication and madness (--> a view that many artists today hold)
Nietzsche + Hedayat + Aslani + Hoda's immediate acknowledgement of the world-as-unreal =/= obstacle of historicity =/= Sina: I am following a very different critique of historicity in ajayeb
بادیه نشین فلسفی Nietzsche + Hedayat (elicit repercussions for) subordination of history to a kind of literary-philosophical piracy or bedouinism =/= citadel (of geography, civilization, culture)--> many fabricatoins of art happens in citadels in Europe
Pierre has always been busy with the question of synthesis
entitlement: way of intrusion in homogenous axes of existence
xxxxx 164
...................................
xxxxx 213
most of Mohaghegh's attacks are rhetorical
the (sacred?) boundaries of mysticism
(the boundaries of cities became mystic/sacred)
mystical channels
presenting worlds immersed in a kind of constructed a priori (arising from an amorphous collection of sound and image. @Hoda)
Mohaghegh working to isolate the rare technical and conceptual arsenal behind an ethnographically immagined space
initiatives toward the horizons of a mystical inquest
...................................
sect's threat
breakaway modality of a sectarian consciousness
hermeneutic arsenals
organic theoretical apparatuses
(its own) effective radars and tactics of attunement, detection, and narration
Adonis, Samih al-Qasim, Ghada Samman, Nazim Hikmat, Ahmad Shamlu, Farrokhzad --> all tempted to (antihumanist) convert the text into a closed circle
forbidden power
moral ambiguity
collective destiny
will to extremity
shadow nears and targets
itself presumed source of all tension and unhappiness
while also spreading its influence over o[...]
(206)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%57.9[...]ng the inner circles in dissimulated form and thus unspotted
no mediation
revenge in closeness
and even more than this,
shadow will attempt to escape accusation if possible
the spectacle
enemy's overhanging presence
--> continual motion
--> time is restless
tower, bastion, citadel, stronghold
operational apparitional center
phantasmatic points of references
a spiritual geoscape of concentration
it must appear formidable, immutable, and impenetrable
as a tangible headquarters encased amid far-flung mountains.
it drifts mainly as a figment in the nomadic mind
of the one who lives most of the nights as a marauder in enemy camps
roaming through its courtyards
speaking with the tower's white and black keepers
before receiving the next command
with it the facticity of another harsh assignment.
from tower's security standpoint
the world looks ripe for the taking.
the fortress holds, and with it, the dream of the fortress.
the earth
closing on us
a deteriorating prism
tightness, entrapment
this cylinder
to a mutual obliteration
all inhabitants are squeezed together
to make another planet
another dream of the enemy:
1. extraplanetary construction
2. confinement of the unwanted
3. momentary infiltration of the lair
4. consumption of the planet
|
conceptual twists: (quadrangulation:)
[four desires - four attributes - four corresponding identify-formation]
1. the most accountable --> creation ~~> *labor* (to build it) --> carpenter خلق
2. the most disconnected --> banishment ~~> *renunciation* (to disown it) --> judge خلع
3. the most invested --> possession ~~> *stealth* (to invade it) --> trespasser خفيه
4. the most around/above/upon --> engulfing ~~> *hunger* (to eat it) --> glutton دله
the entire worlds are disponsable
to salivate and gorge on what is most detested
the torment of overlapping, of absolute possession and absolute dispossession
unreal
surrealism
anti-realism
hyper-realism
irrealism
inaccurate, misleading signs around each corner of the cityscape
deceptive and insidious facades
taken astray and stranded amid false omens
the misinformation of the world's existence
the minor syndicate versus the drone
stretching between the memorandum and the dispatch
always in a dual hermeneutics of suspicion and discovery
drinking from the fool's gold of confusion ill-advising codes
the sectarian's remedy:
vulgarization requires vulgarity
response to disgrace is[...]
(207)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%58[...]ematic to the highest degree, and traceless for this very reason)
...they remind of the ungovered body, the accidental, and death
xxxxx 280
...................................
(Mohaghegh's work on the middle east in his book) it is ***a theory that does not speak for ‘the East’(= a construction) but rather *an East*(= a radical illusion)***
-it offers careful insight into singular, distinctive episodes of thought and writing in the Middle East (and to explore their relevance across the topology of world thought at large)
-the fractal nature of his four separate subject-positions point to the *exceptional diversity and heterogeneous makeup of Middle Eastern cultural imaginaries*
...the insurgent carries a hundred masks within one, the poet a hundred more, the mystic a hundred more, and the sectarian a thousand
(@Geert)
[*]modernity: a self-naming historical epoch that redefines/fuses the exercise of power and knowledge and for which the enlightenment, capitalism, colonialism, technology, humanism, ideology, simulation, and the domination of instrumental reason become the main pillars of subjectivity
Mohaghegh offers a list of secondary literature that forms the relevant archive from which his manuscript borrows, and **marks its axis of engagement with preexisting interventions**
#bibliography
Nietzsche's conception of chaos
“nature and mask determine phenomenal being, the phenomenon in its being, as chaos”
(Deleuze interprets Nietzsche's chaos as:) a philosophical overture toward “the pure unformed”
--> the subject is this free, anonymous, and nomadic singularity which traverses men as well as plants and animals independently of the matter of their individuation and the forms of their personality [~~> #write a short story for hayula]
*Eastern insurgent's participation in the chaotic event* --> there is no natural or pure ==> (a more) apocalyptic response ==> to became available
[--> to deal with sense as a predicate مسند or a property دارايى =/=? to deal with sense as an event]
community
(on Eastern postmodern gathering)
(alternative categories that express the potential for “relationality”: assemblage, alignment, circle, swarm, etc. that are based on multiple vantages of intersection and divergence =/=) *community*:
•tends to evoke an essentialist claim
•there is typically some centralized discourse of unity, some absolute principle that binds everyone
•functions as self-enclosed and exclusionary phenomenon
•breeds insularity and protectionism
=/= vulnerable, permeable, susceptible to transformation
=/= riot crowd (open fever and pulsation always searching out new formulations, *new exteriorities* to traverse ==> remains restless, agitated, insa[...]
(208)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%58.2[...]onstant antagonism (in his work and in his speech acts)
Mohaghegh's use of “third-world authors”
they write the unnamable --&--> execute a vast becoming (of devastating scale and proportion)
to place these authors in immediate exchange with “western” thought --> to allow for a toxic, فرسایشی abrasive confrontation that reveals the outstanding distance from such conventions of knowing [--> my work is about this, to visist (visit + resist) these sites of critical encounter and embed them in my performative acts ==> to provide/produce a condition in which a non-antagonistic critical encounter between the “Western” order of knowing and the chaotic textualities of “Middle East” is possible]
epistemic warfare (~/= my ajayeb)
masks of an impersonal nightwalker consciousness
madness
hallucination
amnesia
becoming a faceless engraver
their explicit conceptual elements:
•burial --> blindness
•annihilation --> contagion
•shadow --> inhuman
•desertion --> deception
}--> chaotic experience
(according to Mohaghegh) this chaotic middle eastern elsewhere is not yet openly acknowledged by literature
-borderline illegible narratives
-emergent textualities
(my allegiance is with Mohaghegh's allegiance with) badlands of postcolonial site and its rogue arsenals [...] ==allows==> a fugitive, errant trajectory
(i have been tracing the locatable mimicries of middle east)
***chaotic textuality <--> <==> conflict***
actualization of a *will to cruelty*
to performance a fatal experience of the text
(literature as question =/=) literature as moral transaction [<-- chaos reminds us] --> Ali, Shabnam, Hoda, --Sina--> let's enjoy the pleasure of watching the text die* (_to rid literature of its survival instinct)
literature as a space of unbearable vulnerability --> perpetual sabotage --> each idea, each interpretation draws the text closer to (the hour of a) collapse
*contact with nothingness*
inscription of fatality
conceptual matrix of fatality:
•extremity --> breaking points
•excess --> an effusion, an unforming
•exhaustion (=/= fatigue)
the avatar of ecstasy
veiled secrecy of affirmation
}--> *archetype of cruelty*
--> [to speak of] (chaotic text as) *alchemy*: corrupt the order of things, become reborn in a polluted sensibility
(is this what i do?)
chaotic text must fashion a generative prism, unnatural admixtures, *contaminated alliances*
[let's] *unload texts toward corrosive depths [...] where they run their acids across one another* --> my work
transition from theory --to--> thef[...]
(209)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%58.4[...] them in my performative acts ==> to provide/produce a condition in which a non-antagonistic critical encounter between the “Western” order of knowing and the chaotic textualities of “Middle East” is possible]
epistemic warfare (~/= my ajayeb)
masks of an impersonal nightwalker consciousness
madness
hallucination
amnesia
becoming a faceless engraver
their explicit conceptual elements:
•burial --> blindness
•annihilation --> contagion
•shadow --> inhuman
•desertion --> deception
}--> chaotic experience
(according to Mohaghegh) this chaotic middle eastern elsewhere is not yet openly acknowledged by literature
-borderline illegible narratives
-emergent textualities
(my allegiance is with Mohaghegh's allegiance with) badlands of postcolonial site and its rogue arsenals [...] ==allows==> a fugitive, errant trajectory
(i have been tracing the locatable mimicries of middle east)
***chaotic textuality <--> <==> conflict***
actualization of a *will to cruelty*
to performance a fatal experience of the text
(literature as question =/=) literature as moral transaction [<-- chaos reminds us] --> Ali, Shabnam, Hoda, --Sina--> let's enjoy the pleasure of watching the text die* (_to rid literature of its survival instinct)
literature as a space of unbearable vulnerability --> perpetual sabotage --> each idea, each interpretation draws the text closer to (the hour of a) collapse
*contact with nothingness*
inscription of fatality
conceptual matrix of fatality:
•extremity --> breaking points
•excess --> an effusion, an unforming
•exhaustion (=/= fatigue)
the avatar of ecstasy
veiled secrecy of affirmation
}--> *archetype of cruelty*
--> [to speak of] (chaotic text as) *alchemy*: corrupt the order of things, become reborn in a polluted sensibility
(is this what i do?)
chaotic text must fashion a generative prism, unnatural admixtures, *contaminated alliances*
[let's] *unload texts toward corrosive depths [...] where they run their acids across one another* --> my work
transition from theory --to--> theft
transition from (the profession of the) reader --to--> smuggler
(strands of thought ranging:)
from cruelty --to--> fatality
from alchemy --to--> piracy
chaos --> anarchic potential, disquieting worlds
(Mohaghegh asking:)
*is chaos an affirmative or nihilistic experience of the world?
*is chaos primarily creative or destructive?
*is the expressive act (aesthetic or philosophical) a chaotic state?
*(east's) horizon [...]
(210)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%58.4[...] closure (of a whole [subject/person])
its own raw self-refracting (textual event) --> *forever refracting itself* (--> is refractive writing/thinking really useful for iranians today?)
-transparently nebulous vision of darkened vantages
[Reza, Setareh, Ehsan, Foad, Hoda's conceptual register and incorporating themes:]
annihilation, rage, ecstasy, madness, deception, apocalypse, desertion, contagion, eternity, the shadow
imperative to restlessness
writing-act as inherently antagonistic
borders of subjectivity:
•dominant ideologies of history
•conspiracies of identity
Foad's poem “farar”
textual experience as a prism of subversion, innovation, and becoming
•hardened instinct for ruin kharabat خرابات
•fusion of:
◦appearance & disappearance
◦tragedy & delirium
◦creation & destruction
•(unsteady condition of the writing-act [unpacks itself without origin] where) *nothingness & excess* tangle
bluring of possibility and impossibility
to compose an affective universe without recourse to the myth of origin (*?) ~= to express a singular voice without access to a name
his literary-poetic mosaics
tracking the chaotic imaginary
(subjectivity's) disassociation from the world --> Hedayat's The Blind Owl (<-- an overreactive consciousness?)
*one that owes nothing to what came before*
a consciousness once held hostage
*carving inward and then assuming a combatitive stance*
ever quickening its velocity, only then to exhaust its force and vanish as if exorcised into breathlessness (--> what is this body?) -->{ persistent injury --> chronic wearing-down ==> subjectivity is overcome : *acceptance of cruelty* (=/= death wish) : raising the stakes of existential experience by transmitting the authorial self beyond its own limits and toward its chaotic possibility (=/= death wish)
annihilation epitomized as instance of vicious travel*** --> ?!
thought-scarring affect
(radical modification of consciousness:)
•Kierkegaard: “I die death itself”
•Bataille: “he who does not ‘die’ from being merely a man will never be other than a man” ~~--> Rumi's bemirid بمیرید بمیرید
•Nietzschean call for an experience of the end: “from love of life, one should desire a different death: free, conscious, without accident, without ambush”
•Cioran's futurity that would “let all form become formless, and chaos shwallow the structure of the world in a gigantic maelstrom, that would be tremendous commotion and noise, terror, and explosion, and then let be eternal silence and total forgetfulness”
•Deleuze and Guattari's meditation on life overrun by “desiring machines for whom the self and the non-sel[...]
(214)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%58.6[...]age = excess + shadow (~ blackout) }--to--> formlessness [example: Hedayat: author's misshapen hallucination, beggin for an end to subjectivity and existence to “surrender myself to the sleep of oblivion"]
*individous potentials* of the rage (<-- lure of the rage)
-(Sana's) angered disposition
(as a) performativity of ignition and collapse
**rage/anger is always (sees itself as) innocent**
rage proceeds as a state of innocence, a forward moving clearance, to become an agent of sheer delivery, to commit at will
innocence tries to remember ~ that which “remembers” has become foremost innocent. wants its members/phallus back
[rage components: innocence, forgetting, coldness]
--> impact without imprint (--we must always have an imprint of our impacts)
the text becomes existence itself (--> the monsterous consciousness of Hedayat's narrator in The Blind Owl)
every object, event, or image, is synthesized back into the empire of the narrator's own account***** [=/= my work, my storytelling]
...fastened itself to...
(...currents of)
chaos**~~
annihilation**~~
rage**~~
*shadow*
--> **to elicit the transfiguration toward an emergent literature of the inhuman**
•Hedayat's shadow
•Nietzsche use of the shadow as a guarantor of the overman: “how his shadow stands even now behind everyone” , “now light, now shadow of that which must come” , “i will complete it: for a shadow came to me--the most silent, the lightest of all things came to me! the beauty of the superman came to me as a shadow: what are the gods to me now”
tilted destiny
beyond the need for being
chaos experienced as a *deception*
Ali motioning to chaotic discord, his rhetoric of video editing: phantasmatic lawlessness --> surrender the text to a certain sorcery(!), schemes of a textual unreality
=/= restrictive epistemologies of truth
=/= technologies of regulation
convulsive discontinuity (=/= systematicity)
carries the will to execute fantasia
(yet transpiring morphologies that carve in) authoritarian injunctions of being-in-the-world [=/= experimentation]
--> (Ali's mirage:) suffocated prism of reality --> rebellion becomes instinctive
-narrating graphic instances of sociopolitical violence --view--> modernity as a state of permanent collapse
(for Ali :) literature/art = espionage عمل خرابکارانه در مواضع دشمن (=/= bribery)
(in order to say no to being) “passive witness to an overconstructed world” =/=
•Beckett: absurdism (with minimalist penteration)
•Nietzsche: intoxication (Dionysian assault against surface/depth binary)
•Adorno: fantasy (is the real act of knowledge)
[*]text:
•mimetic transposition of the ideal
•reflex[...]
(215)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%58.7[...]-> **to elicit the transfiguration toward an emergent literature of the inhuman**
•Hedayat's shadow
•Nietzsche use of the shadow as a guarantor of the overman: “how his shadow stands even now behind everyone” , “now light, now shadow of that which must come” , “i will complete it: for a shadow came to me--the most silent, the lightest of all things came to me! the beauty of the superman came to me as a shadow: what are the gods to me now”
tilted destiny
beyond the need for being
chaos experienced as a *deception*
Ali motioning to chaotic discord, his rhetoric of video editing: phantasmatic lawlessness --> surrender the text to a certain sorcery(!), schemes of a textual unreality
=/= restrictive epistemologies of truth
=/= technologies of regulation
convulsive discontinuity (=/= systematicity)
carries the will to execute fantasia
(yet transpiring morphologies that carve in) authoritarian injunctions of being-in-the-world [=/= experimentation]
--> (Ali's mirage:) suffocated prism of reality --> rebellion becomes instinctive
-narrating graphic instances of sociopolitical violence --view--> modernity as a state of permanent collapse
(for Ali :) literature/art = espionage عمل خرابکارانه در مواضع دشمن (=/= bribery)
(in order to say no to being) “passive witness to an overconstructed world” =/=
•Beckett: absurdism (with minimalist penteration)
•Nietzsche: intoxication (Dionysian assault against surface/depth binary)
•Adorno: fantasy (is the real act of knowledge)
[*]text:
•mimetic transposition of the ideal
•reflexive treatment of the world
the invention of transparent**
[who invented transparency?]
deception --?--> suggestion of the world as unreal [==>?! pragmatism]
lucid interchange of untruths
existential distortion
San'an + moridan (مریدان) --> authority of authenticity
annihilated consciousness of the disciple (morid)
(volatility of) lived dreamscapes <-- (always) staged imaginary
(illusions go on unarrested)
Hoda's visual techniques (in video) ~ her special effects (--> launches what?):
*unreality of the emergent world* (+ production of emergent illusion)
•hazing of self and world
•curved mirroring
•shape-shifting
•aerial, apparitional,
•فرّار evasive and amorphous
-=> seamless apparition
--> ***eradicated storytelling*** + “I” as a spectral outcast of consciousness
*Hoda works on the unsaid (--> the imperceptible)
*Sina works on the incomprehensible (-->? the incidental)
Hoda's insurgent imagination in her cinematic techniques (part of the intellectual-aesthetic facet of middle east[...]
(216)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%58.7[...]Other* (that can never be filled?)
infantile sexuality
jouissance: enjoyment from indirect pleasure (for example enjoyment of organizing pleasure)
Lacan --> pleasure makes us guilty + without guilt there is no pleasure
*chaotic topology of imagination*( --> more like a pile of sugar =/= Freudian topology of consciousness/unconsciousness)--> erasing the boundary between interiority and exteriority
--> (once-unitary) subject ==> an oblique network }--> that is us, iranians
--> schizoid view of nomadological thought
separate methodologies of blurring and fragmentation:
1- shadow
2- mirror image
Hedayat's shadow (his palpable aesthetic-existential operation--in The Blind Owl) [=/= Kafka's metamorphoses]: skeletal transfiguration of a conceivably human form into a *shadow collectivity* [=/= camouflage]
anticipation of oblivion
Hoda, Foad,
(maybe interesting for Hoda:) bitching ~= concerted methodology of confrontation and provocation
to write on chaos
to write as chaos
to write chaos***
[an iranian topology of imagination:]
subjectivity --> deception
literature --> rage
chaos --> annihilation
deserter
textual encounter --> the method by which a chaotic imaginary is uncovered and set loose:
1. lure consciousness into desertion
2. perceive textual artifacts as forces of immanent contagion
3. identify the text as a carrier of shadow-becoming
4. text conceive the setting of inhuman
deserter (position) --> unearthing --> chaotic imagination
...a fractal exteriority that alters and generates vivid, intensified hierarchies of instinct, desire, and knowing*
*exhaustion
damaged allegory of man
*evacuation --> surrender to fugitive trajectory
takes place on amorphous dust
wrenched
shadow-scapes
enterence <--> ejection
•misadventurism of the wanderer
•rogue thought
influx
disintegration
fever
velocity
the deserter mind is made to synchronize the internalization of waste and unrest and to ravage itself
spatiality of the the nowhere
intentionally sets out to become lost
vagrant: drifter در به در
اوباش
self that personified the dejected
self-eclipsing vagrant that becomes the outside itself
arc of necessity
the super-power of holding objects suspending in the air --> an intruder topology where everything is held suspend...
{ false subjectivity = hiding place }<-- chaotic imagination overruns it[...]
(217)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%58.9[...]stematizing pressures of assimilation and deculturation
==> to create a more immediate, oral, corporeal language
-inadequate process of attempting to note down, chronicle or relate the experience of opacity
chaos + opacity + resistance (in Glissant)
primordial act of defiance lajbazi
negation = heroic (=/= pedestrian)
Glissant's anonymous and pedestrian form of resistance --> knowledge of camouflaged reality
“The one with whom the poet is enchanted, that he names with each breath. But for whom words are inadequate.”
...in the unexpected expanse of global relating
“a poetics not of the tree but of vegetation”
[poetics of the decentered subject]
epitomise (pure) revolt (--> tree grows to reveal human configurations, fierce and solitary revolt against the plantation system)
modest forms of resistance
fragmentation of fiction --to--> polyphonic quiltwork of stories
[system of imagery]
(Glissant's) insistence on marine symbolism
transforming, restorative power of water
harsh bitter truth of the sea <--> inscrutable, ambiguous nature of the experience
preoccupation with the need to create a literary language --> specificity of lived experience
*narrateur enfant*
narrator distorting and simplifying my experience
“burning with a silent and stubborn multitude”
...................................
Mishra
[the evidence of Europe's advantages -->] an expression of europe in terms of a 19th century progress, which has been be increasingly hard to refute:
place of West in the avant-garde of progress <== manifold achievements of technology, constitutional government, secular state and modern administration <== (a separate and
distinct ‘nation-state’ <==) American and French revolutions
}--> unable to assess by Muslims? ~~?--> the tale of the bewildered Asian:
•dast-e gheyb دست غیب divinely ordained dispensation
•dast-e taghdir دست تقدیر mysterious workings of fate
•charkh-e ruzegar چرخ روزگار cyclical rise and fall of political fortune
•uncreative dynastic rulers
(=/= organized human energy and action)
cultural arrogance
...................................
paranoia (=/= schizophrenia), an instinct (for the original hostility of the world, name of the world is ‘conflict’ =/= instinctual needs for acceptance and for the assignment of a place)
para + nous (~ out of mind, beside the mind) --> part of the everyday life : when you think you are “somebody” or you have “agency” you are on a small dose of paranoid delusion. {do we always need some dose of paranoia to form critical relations with our current condition?
according t[...]
(218)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%59[...]r person)
•[*]tangentiality: deviation from relevancy; wandering train of thought, lack of focus, never returning to the initial topic --> *topic maintenance*
◦self-centered social responses
◦attention to one's own speech is overcome during the occurrence of cognition ==> evasive vocalized content
(language use”)
referential (for the sake of context)
poetic (for the sake of message)
emotive (for the sake of addresser)
conative (for the sake of addressee)
pathic (for the sake of interaction)
metalingual (for the sake of itself)
...................................
-the concept of “wearing” from Alberti (prehispanic South America)
-the concept of “mask” from Mohaghegh (postmodern Middle East)
-the concept of “style” from Archer (post-industrial Britain)
[these theories are very helpful for me and import-rich for reimagining subjectivity. Alberti committed to anthropology, Mohaghegh to the philosophical, Archer to sociology]
...................................
slave: a person attached by law and by custom to the identity of another individual --> ‘social death’ of slavery (as legal nonperson ==> alienation) [in academic literature comparative study of slavery], slavery as a substitute for death in war
--shift--> (the concept that) slaves might influence the tastes, the language, the actions, and even the ideas of their masters
acknowledgement of presence =/= significance in relation to history
(A. Lee on) the African dimension of the genesis of the Babi religion
((oral sources for) the recovery of) subaltern histories in Iran [erased from historical memory]
--> deep resentment of “the presence in Iran of an ‘Other’ that does not conform to the imagined Iranian Self”
unblemished national selfhood
purity fetishism of... <== *purity deeply rooted in religion* [?]
...................................
(issues) politics of liberation:
•that liberal democracy requires common basis for culture and society
•identity politics:
◦“the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else's oppression” (Eisenstein)
◦invites people to stay in, to look inward, to obsess over the body and the self, to surround themselves with a moral forcefield to protect their worldview
◦a particular identity is opposing all people who belong to a particular identity
◦naming and claiming lived experience, and the authority arising from that
◦[no more?] sexual orientation (that it is now only about disrupting the mainstream)
◦(in the context of cultural negotiations) *strategic essentialism*: (despise strong differences in members of) minorities to temporarily “essentialize” themse[...]
(219)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%59.7[...]>
cultural phantasms of bodily mutation
the body never stays put long enough to form self-identity --(this is why)--> our ancestors used to fast-forward and just lose it [transcending the body]
in Dostoevsky
body is variously insulted and humiliated --> subjected to injury (an injury capable of language and disclosure)
--> idiocy offered a delicate conflagration of soma + psyche
illness: the stealth master (the teacher whose lesson is unremittingly opaque yet purposeful)
(when you get hurt -->) body: “Honey, I’m home, I am your home.”
your body fighting for you
healing without cure
illness --Avital--> essentially related to the experience of injustice ~= your Geworfenheit
• illness visits you at will and does what it wants to your body (stinging surfaces you didn’t know you had)
•illness gives access to the devotional mode of surrender (abandoning to itself something other than the self)
•illness brings with it an alternative system of ecstasy and meaning
•*illness: an inescapable condition of being*
-
(Dostoevsky's Myshkin) suffers a sacred illness
[your?] heritage -->
backed up by literature
backed up by philosophy
claimed by mythology
*epilepsy* (has a place in the history of thought) --> the Idiot's illness
•between psyche & soma
•between the *theory of trauma* (which focuses the history of the subject) & the *theory of fantasy* (which refers to transference and countertransference)
•the only illness to have its own mythological figure -->
•madness
•visionary excess
herald of epilepsy: Hercules, Buddha, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoléon, Lord Byron, Pascal, Van Gogh, Dostoevsky, etc.
foolishness
drunkards
maniacs
the pathologically resentful
the envious
a rapist
a crowd of cheaters
classic neurotics
subjects of delusional rantings
subjects of criminal intent
conscious =/= unconscious =/= drive
contract to his illness
manipulations of care
the sick often find someone who is even sicker to take care of (<-- the case with the Prince)
(according to Nancy -->) literature has always tried to produce the body (which philosophy suppresses)
any discussion of the body risks engaging a double bind (a psychosis):
•failure to produce a discourse on the body
•failure not to produce discourse on the body
--Nancy--> *the sick body* (in a frenzied state of belated, compensatory awakening) --demands--> a reading (interpretive and diagnostic strategies) that often culminate in *an excess of discourse* ==> opens up the space of necessary obscurity by which our bodies[...]
(220)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%60.8[...]ing*
-
(Dostoevsky's Myshkin) suffers a sacred illness
[your?] heritage -->
backed up by literature
backed up by philosophy
claimed by mythology
*epilepsy* (has a place in the history of thought) --> the Idiot's illness
•between psyche & soma
•between the *theory of trauma* (which focuses the history of the subject) & the *theory of fantasy* (which refers to transference and countertransference)
•the only illness to have its own mythological figure -->
•madness
•visionary excess
herald of epilepsy: Hercules, Buddha, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoléon, Lord Byron, Pascal, Van Gogh, Dostoevsky, etc.
foolishness
drunkards
maniacs
the pathologically resentful
the envious
a rapist
a crowd of cheaters
classic neurotics
subjects of delusional rantings
subjects of criminal intent
conscious =/= unconscious =/= drive
contract to his illness
manipulations of care
the sick often find someone who is even sicker to take care of (<-- the case with the Prince)
(according to Nancy -->) literature has always tried to produce the body (which philosophy suppresses)
any discussion of the body risks engaging a double bind (a psychosis):
•failure to produce a discourse on the body
•failure not to produce discourse on the body
--Nancy--> *the sick body* (in a frenzied state of belated, compensatory awakening) --demands--> a reading (interpretive and diagnostic strategies) that often culminate in *an excess of discourse* ==> opens up the space of necessary obscurity by which our bodies come to us
Nancy --> The body does not know; but it is not ignorant either. Quite simply, it is elsewhere. It is from elsewhere, another place, another regime, another register [not an “obscure” knowledge, or a “pre-conceptual” knowledge, or a “global,” “immanent,” or “immediate” knowledge]
•philosophy calls “body” presupposes the determination of something like an
authority of “immediate knowledge,” a contradiction in terms, which inevitably becomes “mediated” (as “sensation,” “perception,” synaesthesia, and as immense reconstitutions of a presupposed “representation”)
the site of nonknowledge that the body traverses --Nancy--> *is related to thought* <-- the body thinks (in a sense) beyond giving or making sense
==> *thought is itself a body*
-Heidegger was the one who unhitched “thought” from philosophical operations and gave it weighs in as body ==> Nancy
in Dostoevsky --> the body commended by *illness* bears a memory trace of the *sacred* (+ finitude of all bodies)
“God is dead = God no longer has a body[...]
(221)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%60.9[...] which inevitably becomes “mediated” (as “sensation,” “perception,” synaesthesia, and as immense reconstitutions of a presupposed “representation”)
the site of nonknowledge that the body traverses --Nancy--> *is related to thought* <-- the body thinks (in a sense) beyond giving or making sense
==> *thought is itself a body*
-Heidegger was the one who unhitched “thought” from philosophical operations and gave it weighs in as body ==> Nancy
in Dostoevsky --> the body commended by *illness* bears a memory trace of the *sacred* (+ finitude of all bodies)
“God is dead = God no longer has a body” ==Nancy==> bodies (bereft of trickle-down symbolicity) will have to be:
•pumped up
•prosthetically amplified
•steroid-enhanced
•“built”
•buffed
•bionically ensured
•drugged
•“medicated”
•cloned
•remade
==> the technobody or replicant will be made to substitute for the lost body of the divine trait
last night he dreamed of (apocalypse technological dominion:) spread of the railroad and the distribution of connectors installed by new technologies as instigators of the unsacrificeable...
(in literature) apocalypse = vehicle (a technological momentum)
the unnamed God has vanished together with this unnameable thing...
Myshkin’s illness still binds him to the sacred --> this body retains and persists in making sense, the illness continues to produce sense
...poverty, hunger, deportation, torture, deprivation, ugliness, horror --> bodies sacrificed to nothing
[*]sacrifice: a body's passage to a limit where it becomes the body of a community
(after Christ -->) body is nothing but a wound =/= illness
(when it persists) pain ==> I'm not well, I'm in trouble, therefore I am.
jouissance: a pain that succeeds <-- a place where being, utterly exposed, is external to itself
[*]body: surplus of objectivity
our body acts as a traumatic place (that causes a series of failures)
(idiot's seizure) epilepsy
Then suddenly something seemed torn asunder before him; his soul was flooded with intense inner light. The moment lasted perhaps half a second, yet he clearly and consciously remembered the beginning, the first sound of the fearful scream which broke of itself from his breast and which he could not have checked by any effort. Then his consciousness was instantly extinguished and complete darkness followed.
(going to fetal position)
seizure: an enactment of a wish to return to the womb
epilepsy --Sutterman--> sadomasochistic phantasms that feature the self as murdered child
breaking a prized vase
delivering rants in place of conversation
Dostoe[...]
(222)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%60.9[...]r />
(going to fetal position)
seizure: an enactment of a wish to return to the womb
epilepsy --Sutterman--> sadomasochistic phantasms that feature the self as murdered child
breaking a prized vase
delivering rants in place of conversation
Dostoevsky's idiot:
•repugnant
•uncanny
•a kind of Bataillean reversal (at bottom is unmistakably Christian)
•provokes love
according to Dostoevsky: *idiot ==provoke==> love*
Faust had reported that two souls inhabit his body [==> switching body types] {--> two sick bodies} (hallucinated + internalized)
1. the ailing body --> you can get rid off with drugs (dealt with Mephistopheles)
2. the abandoned body --> inglorious corpse
body doubles reflecting one another (---> go to mirror)
Avital --✕--> movements [such] as Positive Action, Positive Choices, and the marks of similar tags of empowerment that issue from the hope that we know what we’re doing, that we can take charge and act up and affirm our bodies, our selves, that we can now stop being victims and relinquish passivity.
torturer <--> healer
...................................
شطح shath: literary technique (san'at adabi صنعت ادبی)
(jCzF0RD-a_M)
shath: contradictory speech (kofr + iman)
del-bari (dressing up and going out[?]) =/= gush be harf kasi dadan (listening)
گوش به حرف کسی دادن =/= دلبری
خجسته khojaste: thinking all the time that everyone is saying hello to you
Hafez = connected pockets of meaning =/= Ferdosi's organized pockets of meaning =/= bestiary's listed pockets of meaning
...................................
indian ocean diaspora
indian ocean slave trade ==> atlantic slave trade and the new-world diaspora
Lee --> influence of African and afro-iranian people on other iranians and on persian society and culture
Ziba Khanum (d. 1932 Yazd)
the life of one enslaved African woman who lived in iran
(recovering what can be recovered of their industrial lives)
iranian history --> issues of:
•race
•gender
•religion
•elite social and economic networks
•nature of slavery
•value of subaltern history
the idea of (academioc study of) history: study of structures, institutions, abstractions ==> generalizing categories (such as slavery, freedom, modernization, etc.) =/= (biographical turn) towards biography of one woman
****(biography ~~>) *personal experience* =/= (category of) slavery: an abstraction that bunches together and confuses historical instances of displacement, isolation, dependence, unfree labor****
(--Cinderella-->)
personal experience =/= displacement
[...]
(223)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%61[...] with meanings that overlap and inconsistent)
honor selfsubsistent male
honor related to women
notions of virtue
notions of shyness
gheirat غیرت : an emotional alarm system [for one's personal image (aberu آبرو), family, religion, country]
gheirat specifies one's appropriate reactions to the particular acts of the other --> in the form of emotions: anger, hatred, jealousy
(Elias’ problematic and useful definition of) [*]affect: perceivable measurable describable effect of emotional events and experiences, what is felt + what is emoted at an individual and collective level, (enacted + perceived) ‘happening’ of the human experience (=/= undefined protoevent)
affect: a way in which one knows an experience is occurring + a way in which one reacts to an experience ==shape==> future human experience
1. enactment (performativity) of emotion is inseparable from its experience
2. emotions, enjoying words, emotion events cannot be comprehended apart from the sociopolitical context in which they occur (emotion act ~/?= emotion evoked)
somatic activity (crying) ==make==> emotions (sadness)
(in islam) happiness <--> virtue
(robust genre of literature) marvels and bestiary --> wonder at natural & manufactured wonders of the world (pyramids ~= mortality) “==encourage==>” contemplation of God's creative powers
(in sufism) tension between good and bad feelings (ugly, outlaw emotions...) ==> progress (spiritual advancement)
--> (sufi) scandalous behavior: performative 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 [...]
(224)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%62.2[...]ontract* together constitute sovereignty):
[*]Romulus (& Varuna) --> warrior ambitions --> terrible and violent aspect of sovereignty; Varuna (--Foucault-->) as punitive power and force morph into a range of disciplinary mechanisms [*in a way Foucault's entire carrier can be understood as a way of engaging Varuna in different forms]
[*]Numa (& Mitra) --> peaceful elder --> embody contract, the friendlier, pact-making aspect of sovereignty (==> rule of law), producer of welfare and health and productive economy
khoshunat + refah خشونت و رفاه
we have to engage paradoxes of state power: capacity and incapacity (--> my point: the state in Iran is ambiguous.)
#workshop: Studying State Power---in Tehran we must explore theoretical alternatives to the concept of force: consent, contract, Singh's bipolar theory of force and contract, varying ideas of the “magic” of the state, Foucault's governmentality --> contemporary anthropology of the state, we examine varying pictures of state incapacity
•requirements: willingness to engage challenging concepts and texts, weekly online comment, class presentations and participation
•aims: a final essay: to make a coherent argument drawing on anthropological and theoretical literatures on state power
•axis: i work with Singh: that “there is no one correct answer we hope that students will come away with a better sense of the paradoxical coordinates of power such as violence and welfare, central to the making and unmaking of global modernity”
•reading: we will gradually build up towards the more difficult texts and ideas.
•note: You will not necessarily receive a better grade for any external research or new information you bring in but on how well you relate to the texts and ideas we have discussed in class. two student presentations. often a quieter, more considered response will be more highly valued.
[Singh seeks to signal] a wider range of forces (of which “repression” sarkub سرکوب would be one) and forms of contract (modes of give and take that are not exactly captured by the idea of “compassion” rahm رحم) [=/= VOA or BBC's dangerous notion of “informing” iranians’ political awareness]
-these two forms exist as potential tendencies of power, two forms among others that **power over life may take**
*tendencies* are not static or ahistorical [- Foad's “tendencies” (to destiny)] --> tendencies may morph and take new shapes --> they can also turn toxic when they are disappointed --> we oscillate from redemption to catastrophe =/= [this is the kind of political act/project we need:] “with Mitra and Varuna (~ region of structural-potential tendencies) we are not giving up hope, but the project becomes more specific: to track the particular degrees of force (many of which may be morally objectionable) and the modes of contract that are available in a polity” -Singh
...gest[...]
(225)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%62.8[...]s in which life may be examined
to think affirmativelt ==> our negations become sharper
my recent knee-jerk reaction (for example to Olearius) would be to invoke Eurocentrism
(resist: “west” and “non-west”, built on entirely negative images of Europe, from which perspective postcolonial settings appear with double negativity from which they can never recover)
thoughtful moments among friends but scholastic and conversational traditions (--> Greek) =/= “sage”, part of a larger conversational contest culture (not always between “friends” but is an agon -->? Kelile-o Demne)
-other conceptual-conversational traditions (in Iran,,,?) [for example “taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous”, producing an anthropologically oriented Deleuze, a reading of ___ that produces a ___ically oriented ___]
*** it is not a question of negating dialectices but of setting out a different style of thought and examining the ethnographic and political consequences that follow ***
“when you asked him the question about deities, you began a type of conversation called gyan-charcha --> knowledge-talk technique (<-- my favorite mode of reading of literature, and basically everything, is like that)
?which concept(s) you use to think through these things:
•bonded and legitimate labor
•power relations
•marriage
•sacrifice
•kinship
•intimacy
•buying
•selling
•
}--> the fabric of human relatedness depends on it
*[lunar enlightenment]*
(Singh's beautiful lunar reterritorialization of “enlighting”:) what kind of light do we assume as our image of plenitude?
عجایب ماه #moon's inflow-ence, waxing and waning intensities, fluctuating thresholds, the rise and fall of gods, tutelage of moon, a lunar rather than a solar sense of enlightenment, blemished and inconstant, the moon is nondialectical, *neighbors lunacy*
Derridean moment of negative transcendence
waxing and waning plenitude of that flux
Singh:
•varying thresholds and intensities
•logics of a/not-a
•ethics and energetics @Sana
•
•
*** a shift of even a degree (say, a different mode of contract or force) could be the difference between social life and death, happiness and despair, or exploitation and freedom ***
(Singh teaching me to think about Tehranians)
دروغ بد را با دروغ بهتر جایگزین کنیم نه با حقیقت
Nietzsche's double affirmation, yes yes
Deleuze, “the ass does not know how to say no because he says yes to everything with is no” --> to affirm is “to release, to set free what lives”
--> the idea of “challage your presuppositions” --[...]
(226)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%63.2[...]igata, 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
recovery of a human voice as a moral imperative (--> Hoda)
(?your history as a) telos of increasingly self-awareness
-Derrida's philosophical style tending to negative transcendence (différance: an absence that transcends ‘a’ and ‘not a’)
-Deleuze's tradition of affirmative immanence
(Singh > Deleuze > Strauss:) structure is composed of “pre-individual singularities” ~ nomadic distribution of potential --immanent--> contradictions, accidents, mutations
pure/impure
suspicious/inauspicious
life/death
heretic --> reorder and obliterate the partitioning of categories that compose the structural order of religion [--> Veena on Sikhism and Hinduism: symbolism of Sikhism understood in relation to Hinduism structural order, annihilating the categorical prioritise (intellectual and social) of the medieval world. Sikhism rejecting the opposition between categories of: the rulers, the caste system, and the orders of renunciation --> investment of the virtues of all three *in a single body of faith* and conduct]
heterodox sects
rebellious thinkers
--> negation of the organizing conceptual order
(social and) ritual order generates its own forms of instability
...ambivalences of key concepts ==bring==> “play” to the structure, for good and ill ~ liminality
(Veena's) liminial situation: a form of instability where the individual experiences his social world as separated from the cosmic --> death: disarticulation --> must be undone by inhabiting the liminality : ritually rejoining the flow of life
similarities of ritual mourner and ascetic: transcending the categories of the social and the cosmic
incorporation of the liminal undead (preta) with ritually incorporated ancestors (pitri) [job of the mourner]
(crucial task of the) ritual: conveying the dead from the threshold of liminality into an ancestral flow of life
emphasis on the system is (always?) at the cost of the event
(eternal investment of the artists in foregrounding of the event rather than the structure --> rapture with structure as caste, tradition, state, norm, system, etc. at the cost of missing the practical k[...]
(227)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%63.4[...] />
Cavell (on Hollywood cinema and other sites where the drama of separation and union is played out) --> how philosophers have typically focused on skepticism [longstanding western philosophical question and doubt about existence] with respect to material objects and the external world
...existence of the finite neighbour (seemingly known other) --> may become unknowable
--> *Veena discovers the concept of skepticism for anthropology (as a discipline centrally concerned with the varying conditions of human relatedness and otherness)*
[i have been trying dicover skepticism unsystematically in artistic practices those that have strong concerns of social justice and suffering, but i never named it as such. @Hoda, Xiri's emphasis on the threatening nature of liminality (demand for equality or freedom) =/= **to take the possibility of unsettlement or chaos as founding concern**]
--> skepticism (may) suggests a differnt route of inquiry
/>
(Veena -2007:) “the intimacy between skepticism and the ordinary is revealed in the present work on several sites, as in the panic rumors that circulate and produce the picture of the other as phantasmal from whom all human subjectivity has been evacuated, or when violence in the register of literary is seen as transfiguring life into something else, call it a form of death, or of making oneself, as it were, into a ghost”
[violence ==> ghosts]
skeptical problematic --> shifting potency of words : energies that words may gather, and the ways these energies may give or deny life
speech =/= voice
==> ***silence is not necessarily life-denying or that it necessarily indicates a lack or an inability to mourn***
[victims of violence telling stories]
words imbued with spectral quality (yet animated by some other voice)
there is a deep moral energy in the *refusal to represent some violations of the human body* body* [=/= forensic architecture project's imperative of detailed representation of violation, explicit acknowledging traumatic memory]
--> ***living with poisonous knowledge*** (a different acknowledgement of traumatic memory) --> absorption exercises of remaking a world
--{on ‘forensic architecture’ (an aesthetics developed by Weizman): Keenan asks: if the excruciating citizon videos (showing police violence for instance) could not convince a jury how can forms of aesthetic critique based on research and visual evidence [= post-conceptual art] be anymore effective on the general poblic? (<== ‘evidence =/= proof’)
-age of testimony (-public truth-)
-citizon photo journalism --> “witnessing ~= action”
-the appearance of nonhuman objects as evidence (in forums and courts) as records of imperssions [sense perception] --> object = sensor (waiting to be interpreted by justice-seekers) ~-> ***proxy for an absent victim***
[*]forensic: proce[...]
(228)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%63.7[...]hings
...tuned in to some little something somewhere
“in a video that blankly records an arresting image, young embodiments of a mainstream in the making come face to face with an otherness that compels a closer look. the order of representation gives way to a more violently affective contact”
Stewart
force of things --> what counts as an event
a politics of being/feeling conected
a politics of ways of watching
a politics of waiting for something to happen
a politics of difference (of habit and dull routine)
childhood coming back [to you] as shocks of beauty
graphic stories prompted by the seemingly simple work of remembering:
•kinship ties
•married names
•stories of alcoholism
•stories of accidents
•stories of violence
•stories of cancers
[*]potential: fleeting and amorphous, it lives as a residue or resonance in an emergent assemblage of disparate forms and realms of life; a thing immanent to fragments of sensory experience and dreams of presence --engenders--> attachments or system of investment...
(people are) collecting found objects snatched off the literal or metaphorical side of the road
...................................
Yazid: the archetypal tyrant of islamic memory
...a shift from thinking of Urdu as exclusively Muslim to thinking of Muslims as the custodians of a shared heritage that Hindus have forgotten, but have the potential to reclaim
-Anand --> how do we understand the islamicness of urdu poetry?
spread of [...] poetry far beyond the bounds of exclusively muslim identity
sufism as an everyday mode of speaking of and speaking to the self (not as an esoteric practice, or as institutionally bounded)
-it gives you a language to explore their interiority
-(traditions of self-scrutiny and self-reflection,) a poetry of self-knowledge + rebellion against social convention [+ frenzied violence (vahshat) --> Majnun: an intellectual articulation, literary elaboration, and social proliferation of the “mazhab of love” a dominant strand of sufi theology, ethics, and political thought in the Balkans to Bengal complex]
earlier mode of understanding X as irreligious
discourses that recognize X as islamic
Anand --> *indic nature of islam*
-islam is indexed within the lives of non-Muslim Indians through a form of stranger hospitality
many, besides muslims, have ongoing relations to islamic sacred objects
•embrace of the divine
•efflorescence of relations with nonhumans (snakes and cats)
(Naveeda on) Anand's mournful tone --> forces of restoration = forces of destruction
importance of shadows for an understanding of sensory exp[...]
(229)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%64.1[...]nce
•stories of cancers
[*]potential: fleeting and amorphous, it lives as a residue or resonance in an emergent assemblage of disparate forms and realms of life; a thing immanent to fragments of sensory experience and dreams of presence --engenders--> attachments or system of investment...
(people are) collecting found objects snatched off the literal or metaphorical side of the road
...................................
Yazid: the archetypal tyrant of islamic memory
...a shift from thinking of Urdu as exclusively Muslim to thinking of Muslims as the custodians of a shared heritage that Hindus have forgotten, but have the potential to reclaim
-Anand --> how do we understand the islamicness of urdu poetry?
spread of [...] poetry far beyond the bounds of exclusively muslim identity
sufism as an everyday mode of speaking of and speaking to the self (not as an esoteric practice, or as institutionally bounded)
-it gives you a language to explore their interiority
-(traditions of self-scrutiny and self-reflection,) a poetry of self-knowledge + rebellion against social convention [+ frenzied violence (vahshat) --> Majnun: an intellectual articulation, literary elaboration, and social proliferation of the “mazhab of love” a dominant strand of sufi theology, ethics, and political thought in the Balkans to Bengal complex]
earlier mode of understanding X as irreligious
discourses that recognize X as islamic
Anand --> *indic nature of islam*
-islam is indexed within the lives of non-Muslim Indians through a form of stranger hospitality
many, besides muslims, have ongoing relations to islamic sacred objects
•embrace of the divine
•efflorescence of relations with nonhumans (snakes and cats)
(Naveeda on) Anand's mournful tone --> forces of restoration = forces of destruction
importance of shadows for an understanding of sensory experience, aesthetics, and divine order
(Naveeda asks for an) alternative approach to the islamic tradition besides the trope of light --Anand--> imagining a lived islam from the perspective of shadows
shadows as the (relational and individual) self
*ruin: draw visitors by making itself the inner rendered as the outer --> a traversal of one's inner self, otherwise hidden to oneself
perspective from the shadow --allows--> to think about tradition paradoxically (about *affective inheritances* in the constitution, transmission, and transformations of the islamic tradition)
Anand --> ****islam as identity =/= islam as inheritance****
islam as inheritance --Spadola--> like a river (#meander)
Anand --> *how older forms of knowing and being coexist and are constantly in conversation and contestation w[...]
(230)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%64.1[...]al and individual) self
*ruin: draw visitors by making itself the inner rendered as the outer --> a traversal of one's inner self, otherwise hidden to oneself
perspective from the shadow --allows--> to think about tradition paradoxically (about *affective inheritances* in the constitution, transmission, and transformations of the islamic tradition)
Anand --> ****islam as identity =/= islam as inheritance****
islam as inheritance --Spadola--> like a river (#meander)
Anand --> *how older forms of knowing and being coexist and are constantly in conversation and contestation with more modern form*
...to reimagine the very definition and coherence of “discourse”
*(Foucauldian) archaeological work*: full of ruptures, disagreements, and reworkings ranging across an array of texts and conversations from contemporary to colonial records to hadith to eighteenth-century poetry
question of coherence = question of finding a grammar
difficult intellectual commitment to both contingency and coherence
(you can witnessed in Tehran a lot of anti-patriarchal, anti-hierarchical, and anti-identitarian)
[our challenge:] *to make ourselves literate* able to read what is currently illegible to us
Kant's notion of hospitality = translation of the sanskrit upanishads into persian by the mughal prince and philosopher Dara Shukoh (1615-1659)
--Ganeri--> hospitality towards texts and ideas?
*for an intellectual tradition to have the ability to show hospitality to an intellectual stranger*
-Shakry
what does it mean to think through psychoanalysis and islam together, not as a “problem,” but as a creative encounter of ethical engagement?
-how arabic intellectual world showed profound hospitality to Freudian thought
-how iranians showed profound hospitality to western philosophies --witness--> self-confident and enriching ethical encounter with a foreign system of knowledge
گورکانی pre-colonial mughal empire, inheritor of long and unbroken traditions of islamic and indic thought, (from a place of power, privilege, integration) welcomed the upanishads into dialogue with the conceptual world of tasavof
economic, military, and discursive powers of European imperialism ==> epistemological and ontological havoc they wreak on muslim forms of life
•to move back and forth between al-Ghazali (1058-1111) and Freud (1856-1939) <-- without any sense of swimming against the *gushing streams of empty homogeneous time*
•bringing the upanishads, from several hundred years BCE, into conversation with the Quran <-- unconstrained by the *teleology of linear historical time*
--> (my lecture-performances: being) inhabited a world of multiple temporalities {=/= teleology ==> linear time of [...]
(231)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%64.2[...]br />
intensification of anxiety ~=> carnavalesque moment of drawing pleasure
(in the film) history of a chosen local
logic of absence --> prohibitive history of violence + excess
ritual of horrific foregrounding
scene + coherence of meaning
*horror is performative : it needs to be restaged in order to be evocative of meaning*
sexualization of women integral to the genre of horror [aimed at its male audience, similar to Charmed]:
•sexy female leading role (in love triangle)
•man --> representing evil and underworld
•man --> representing true love (engaged in a battle for love + choice of the young woman, sexualized in the male contest)
•female viacera sucker --> female creatures need to show hidden skin [popular sex-oriented star --to--> female monstrous figure --allow--> display of prohibited body parts + heteronormative desire]
(female star rendered both strong and weak)
1. exposing and defying the horror figure (first)
2. embodying the horrific abject subject (second)
in the narrative of horror
•the moral forthrightness that makes the female subject survive, endure, move on
•they are punished but never totally obliterated into the horror scene
internalization of fear ==>? domestication =? maintaining the status quo in community fronts --Foucault--> docile ==> productive for state formation
(the survivor never fully survives and triumphs over the adversaries of the) horror scene --> open-endedness of the closure = of knowing + of being abjected
(libidinal drive in) citizenship claims in nation-formations ~= (libidinal drive in) continuing performative of the horror subject
}--> one is constitutes through but never thoroughly in power relations
white sexy female star + horror + social melodrama (= Charmed)
orally told tales of female violence
miscegenation
desire for liminal female sexuality
necrophilia
female haunting
heterosexual desire
nostalgia for truth
==provide==> template for cultural idiomatic imagination
historical experience --> futile & enunciated through the orality of retelling (+ being capable of retelling)
historical justice has not been served in actual social reality ==> the horror scene bears the constant threat and possibility of repeating itself on the future
...................................
#idea
namaz gestures as alchemical ruse to open portals, kill enemies, transmute objects, and other specs
...................................
Naveeda chapter 1 mosque
mosque =/= shell for prayers
•monumental structures built by the state
old mosque: part of complex devoted to
•learning
•dispensing justice
[...]
(232)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%64.7[...]hib 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
(Agamben -->) [*]gesture: inhabiting of potentiality
<br />
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 m[...]
(233)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%65.7[...]/>
processing is largely parallel, while, attention is largely serial
disciplines of the modern subject
(in artistic work the unsolved issue remians:) technniques for/of the external control
...................................
[*] which spaciotemporal vectors are embeded in the archive, as a modern feeling of arrow that thrusts forward differentiating past from the future, “archaic” from the “advanced”?
[*] archive produces a “yesterday”
a dangerous arrow of time that is constituted and announced
-how do we attend the histories of implication and attachment?
futurity [aghebat عاقبت, (even) akherat اخرت], the promis of the archive
...................................
trauma: that which it won't tell its story =/= total recall
how can history tell?
history, a compensatory device?
...................................
gist
جان کلام
مراد
[Geoffrey Bowker]
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~gbowker/forget.html
Grand Historiographer, Sima Qin (1994 [ca 100BC]), writing of the burning of the books in 213BC, notes that the Chief Minister adviced the emperor that: Aall who possess literature such as the Songs, the Documents, and the sayings of the hundred schools should get rid of it without penalty. If they have not got rid of it a full thirty days after the order has reached them, they should be branded and sent to do forced labor on the walls. there should be exemption for books concerned with medicine, pharmacy, divination by tortoise-shell and milfoil, the sowing of crops, and the planting of trees (31). In response to this, the Emperor ordered the famous burning of the books - to cite Qin: Athe First Emperor collected up and got rid of the Songs, the Documents, and the sayings of the hundred schools in order to make the people stupid and ensure that in all under Heaven there shoun there should be no rejection of the present by using the past. The clarification of laws and regulations and the settling of statutes and ordinances all stared with the First Emperor. He standardized documents.
(to think of) memory as a construction of the present
analyzing organizational memory
organizing analytical memory
memorizing organizational analysis
--> multifaceted stories open to interpretation =/= true/false facts
****remembering: an activity which carries with it its own context****
work on ajayeb and my ongoing commentary on archive and memory is part and parcel of the organizational theory
not to forget that:
•rediscovery is easier than remembering
•statistics --as--> filtering mechanism --as--> proactive forgetting
•forgetting ==> change of identity ['clean slate’ is very well known state to mysticism, --> clearance(=? is to take away useless[...]
(234)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%66.5[...]=> classifying the memorization the world scientifically
classification system ==> filter --> encoding (of information about the environment) ==> coherent framework = memory (Schachter, 1996)
Bowker > Matsuda > Edouard Claparede's experiment (1907) of having a stranger rush into the classroom, do something outrageous, and then have students describe what happened --> “that the past--even of a simple event--was less a record than a sort of taxonomy. Not perceptions, but categorization of familiar types was the major function of memory”
#bambi
pigeonholing of facts
how apass as an organizations is coding for artistic research within the framework of their memory systems?
“There is no room on the [filling] form to write an essay on race identity politics.”
do we need to develop and standardize my discipline-specific nomenclature (in our research microworld) in order to name without ambiguity? --> redefinition of disciplinary boundaries --> shaping of your work so that its future practice converges on potential memory
we murder, they note
they draw from their secret[s]
infrastructure-thinking: Ajayeb Network-Making Minimum Data Set
in ajayeb's literature the very information infrastructure itself (should let be or) is in flux ==> discourses make strange connections between themselves
-in ajayeb the infrastructure assumes the position of every node --> reworked in my #Rigs
“...we are afloat in a sea of multiple, fractured causalities each demanding their own classification systems--and their own apparatus of record collection.” (Bowker)
classification (systems): a warrant and a tool for forgetting, and operating the distribution of this forgetting (in space of scientific memory.)
it tells you what to forget (for example the religious and metaphysical,) and how to forget it
[the formation (training) of artists covers up the formation (production) of artistic knowledge]
-the social story of science is excluded from the organization of the sciences, and held outside of it =/= situated knowledge
-a natural hierarchy of sciences is offered: every discipline needs to remember only a given set of facts --> each type of memory which has been distributed in space will also be sequenced in time (http://ajayeb.net/?q=imperative+of+knowing) [for example mathematics --> physics --> chemistry --> biology --> sociology] ==> formal memory system
the problem of the detective is that for him only those facts are relevant that hand him the solution of crime (~-> goal-oriented individual disposition) =/= chasing rabbits
-the detective (has to) classify away traces: the systematic and deliberate forgetting of some actions in order to better remember others
-what makes a difference?
-in sorting animals which past knowledges (--> aj[...]
(235)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%66.7[...]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 take the river to convey local, embodied knowledge within the longer temporalities and emergent horizons (associated with climate change,) (new global urgencies produced by climate thinking)
a sufficient sense of the river
(Cavell < Naveeda's) there-ness of the river: “the rivers are a distinctive and significant locale at which human beings, though not only human beings, find their dwelling place.” Cavell responds thus, “The river poetizes the human being because, in providing *the unity of locality and journeying* it conceals and reveals Dasein's being and becoming ‘homely,’ homelike, I might say, homebound.”
in an analytical approach to examine separately [that is ‘to model']: narative actions and [-ian] images
Marks’ understanding of film as conveying the corporeality of objects
[*]milieu
a powerful concept with genealogy across a range of disciplines [physics, biology, geography, literature --> orienting our use of it]
•18th century: the fluid or ether in which physical bodies are immersed ==(that enable their)==> inter-dependence (#shena, shenavar?) --> milieu becomes universal
•19th century: as producing circumstances that changes needs [Lamarck] --> for Darwin milieu only produced change (at the level of the organism's phenotype)
•milieu rendered as complexes of elements whose actions mutually limit each other and in which the effects of causes become causes in turn, modifying the causes that gave rise to them. (Canguilhem)
umwelt: organisms privilege certain stimuli and response, thus, suggesting to Canguilhem that it isn't merely ‘need’ mediating between organism and milieu (as in Lamarck's formulation) but a prior sense of values that evaluates certain signals as worthy of response over others
--> *the animal finds it simpler to do what it privileges* (Canguilhem 2008)
[*]sense: (from the biological and psychological point of view:) an appreciation of values in relation to a [*]need: (for the one who experuences and lives it:) an irreducible ==(thereby)==> absolute, system of reference
Naveeda's notion of river's point of view:
“...” while the inorganic, such as a river, lacks the building blocks of life in being produced through the action of geological forces, it too has norms and values that take statistical form or are found (in both sense of the word: discovered and originating) in moments of spontaneous action (---> go to Delanda#)
...village and kinship structures being flexible, there is a high value places on sexual normativity[...]
(236)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%67.5[...]resent entails an ongoing corruption of memory [--> #Bowker, forms of erasure]***
(#stories of integration in Germany)
...................................
[pre-notes with Delanda's A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History]
what are word-forming resources in farsi?
(not to increase their prestige, rather, to problematize) reservoirs of expressive resources in ajayeb and tehran --> to challenge which international standard?
what are the definitive historical process that create uniform set of linguistic norms in iran?
in my work on ajayeb, also, perhaps i am offering a grammar to the empire---learning system thinking
dictionary --> formal codification of language
regarding my ajayeb hypertext
--✕-->? certain spelling rules, grapheme نويسه [characters A, B, ...], morpheme واژک [smallest meaningful language unit]
--✕--> what are my articulatory shortcuts? (least effort needed)
-how internet press is aiding which minor languages in their struggle against majors?
-and which standards are rising there?
-and what are the hegemonizing effect of my ajayeb hypertext on language and energy? its conservative pressures (on literary imagination) --> my concern with farsi linguistic evolution and its contaminations with other languages
what are my ajayeb hypertext contact situations?
(in my ajayeb) “?q=” =/=? searching device abstract probe head
==>? sorted into homogeneous sets
-->? abstract automata -->{ ajayeb.net ~= a valid-enough mean of transferring the *combinatorial productivity* of automaton [by different (social) dynamics] }-->? #bottom-top approach to writing
my Rigs are about:
•processes responsible for the generation of phrases and sentences
•to produce new strings =/= checking them for validity
(you cannot be not connected to) *collective assemblage* (of enunciations)
(what is my -or-) do i need an abstract machine that connects my language to the semantic and pragmatic contents of statements, to the collective assemblage?
my ajayeb: a throng (هجوم) of (neo-English-Farsi) dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized languages
my Rigs... :
•local restrictions of wach word
•the tendency of words to occur next to each other their degree of crystallization
[for my hypertext] (Zellig Harris:) the constraints or demands that words place on one another are transmitted as socially obligatory information [as physical information, the kind measured in bits, not the semantic information used in dictionary definitions.]
socially obligatory ‘information’-[as ‘physical information’ (kind measured in bits) =/= semantic information (used in dictionary definitions)] ==(transmits)==> constraints or d[...]
(237)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%67.6[...]*Do we know things if we cannot explain why they are true?*** (Anderson)
hierachically organized forms of credentialing
in Julia's seminar we were trying to examine: commodified data analysis tools and widely available software skills ==> (larger number of participants to) analyze data and run models
(*a problem with university students:) [students who do appear] more motivated by the university as a *rite of passage* (گذار از بلوغ) and a *lifestyle*
=/= learning
*professors are no longer seen as infallible experts, but as resources whose facts can be checked in real time
(question of) standard / ontology --> (desire for) universality / (need for) change
knowledge of past climates
@apass
(through my love and study for ajayeb --> infrastructure -->) questions for apass:
-what new forms of organization and community are emerging? what power relations do they rely on, create, or destroy? who wins and who loses as knowledge infrastructure change? (questions proposed by a knowledge infrastructure workshop 2012)
-(ways to) encode and reinforce existing interests and relations of power
-(we need) a design community versed in these literatures:
•different social worlds
•conflicting conceptual frameworks
•sociology of science and technology
•sociology of standards (--> standardizing data has proven to be a crucial activity in *scaling up* the sciences) #lens
•boundary objects
•trading zones
•actor networks
•how sharing works in practice
•agreements on shared norms, practices, and technical systems (problematized by Femke, she focuses my attention on how software developers are too quick to construct “ontologies”)
•
==> to scale up the generally lower-level focus of design thinking [--> how my ajayeb.net addresses this?]
--> to co-design new infrastructures
--> to look beyond the scale of a field and timeframe of a career
(we need) meaningful access to digital media (not an exciting add-on investment)
--> new forms of knowledge infrastructure may disadvantage and devalue older forms of knowledge production:
•new sensor network replacing ecological fieldwork -->? my #amazon
•“instrumenting ocean” supplanting traditions of the oceanographic cruise [in the last 20 years new sensor grids have come to cover the oceans, land, sky and space] -->? my #ajayeb's is concerned with thinking “beyond the *instrumental languages of utility and function*, which tend to cast knowledge infrastructures as *neutral instruments* whose positive and negative effects lie solely in the way they are operationalized and used”
*consequences of change are rarely socially, culturally, or economically neutral*
collectives
assemblages
configur[...]
(238)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%67.9[...]er
(i have been working against:) “the irrelevance of the past for a purified real present (which Bowker underlines in Lyell's work)
syllogism صغرى کبرى
soghra kobra
senility kohulat
**database
(replacing syllogism) principle of the *division of labor* --> simultaneity of groups (of people) --> “the succession of acts of which a single act is composed, is the same thing as the succession of diverse works necessary to arrive at a result which is nevertheless single.” (this) succession ==> division of labor
“there is not context only text” --> when you get to Paris, upbringing and race are irrelevant to a person's actions. contemporary humanity would move completely outside the flow of narrative time
1830s geology
history: a science of singularity and secular change
earth: records of catastrophic events that affected the body terrestrial (much as political events affected the body politic)
(Lyell + Buchez + Michelet ==>) (reconfigured the world from) a *tapestry of tales*[~= ajayeb] --to--> random access memory/archive [RAM]****
isotropic spatiotemporal analysis
glitterati
glitter + literati
(framed people: made fashionable and beautiful)
Lyell's time:
1- time: passive container --> attempt to give a chronology to the history of the earth, to trace its origin or deny that there is any evidence that it has origin
2- time: process --> attempt to pick out certain types of changes that are invariably associated with the history of the earth at any age [--> RAM] and are thus in a sense a feature of time itself
Bowker reading consistant patterning in Lyell's writing, finds that in his work in each disparate quotes that Bowker cites:
•the part: (is take as) varying, liable to be created or destroyed
•(=/=) the whole: immutable and eternal (just like Buchez's society)
}--> fable of ‘nature as a whole’
[==asserting==> that no hybrid had ever achieved a permanent niche on earth]**
that nature keeps a check on the whole process by organizing flora and fauna into “nations”
[==asserting==> nothing can survive long outside its nation]** (=/= cyborg)
“cycle” of years <--> a region
a climatic great year <--> earth over time
“revolutions” of the earth's surface <--> species change
industrial revolution, reaching its peak as Lyell was writing
--> the stillness, the ***ineluctable equilibrium between creation and destruction*** (=/= other facts available to Lyell's contemporaries)
(fable, a powerful myth still stalking our collective discourse today:) that human time was going faster now than it ever had in the past --to--> give humanity a privileged position within the geological record
(a dif[...]
(239)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%68.6[...] and music, (=/= form, =/= style)
content that includes an actionalbe id string:
•extraversuioned, offering no direct actionalbe access
•introversioned, version is opaque, shyness?, good for longevity, bad for inferring provenance منشاء
found in the wild
found in ajayeb.net:
•constructed content reference
•scholarly web
•standardized query strings
•the question of landing page --with--> typed links navigable by software
how ajayeb.net performs analysis and prioritization of its own service definition?
how ajayeb.net translates its politics into metadata[~= machine-readable persistence statements]?
which “well-intentioned but untested” set of terms are used and addressed in ajayeb.not?
...................................
[(gendered, racialized, politicized, colonial,,,) narratives of innovation]
(i tended to this field with ajayeb [عجایب المخلوقات: a context of pedagogy and librarianship] -->) library and information science : technologically intensive profession (<-- also many other professions)
علوم بايگانی <--> علوم کتابداری
(my performance and literary interest:) *librarianship and teaching are both professions that resist commodification because they rely on embodied labor and personal interaction*
*people-centric work* (like library science and education)
quantitative =/= qualitative
measurable =/= descriptive
(objective concepts)
--> (Calvert reading) the ostensibly qualitative, measurable, and hence objective concepts of competition and competitiveness stand in contrast with qualitative, descriptive concepts of both “culture and collaboration”
to open up some of the ‘literature of’
(Calvert working on) the implicit notion that competition and innovation are a natural fit --> the “measure, controlm and automatic” rationality of US-style economic competition
difficult to commodify
difficult to describe
not taking apparent differences (between men and women, human and animal,,) to be timeless, necessary, or inevitable --> descriptive =/= prescriptive (descriptions not intended to be prescriptive) --> *to historicize and denaturalize concepts (of competition, innovation,,)*
Bowker + Leigh Star > Calvert: *things perceived as real are real in their consequences*
market competitiveness has a plethora[~ excess, افراط ,ازدياد] of measures --✕--> profit: the seller-centric proxy measure of consumer interest
“our idealized notion of competition as a generator of innovation black-boxes a host of processes for competition, including unfair practices, externalizing costs, marketing, deception, and deskilling.”
(our idealized[...]
(240)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%69.2[...]nition?
how ajayeb.net translates its politics into metadata[~= machine-readable persistence statements]?
which “well-intentioned but untested” set of terms are used and addressed in ajayeb.not?
...................................
[(gendered, racialized, politicized, colonial,,,) narratives of innovation]
(i tended to this field with ajayeb [عجایب المخلوقات: a context of pedagogy and librarianship] -->) library and information science : technologically intensive profession (<-- also many other professions)
علوم بايگانی <--> علوم کتابداری
(my performance and literary interest:) *librarianship and teaching are both professions that resist commodification because they rely on embodied labor and personal interaction*
*people-centric work* (like library science and education)
quantitative =/= qualitative
measurable =/= descriptive
>
(objective concepts)
--> (Calvert reading) the ostensibly qualitative, measurable, and hence objective concepts of competition and competitiveness stand in contrast with qualitative, descriptive concepts of both “culture and collaboration”
to open up some of the ‘literature of’
(Calvert working on) the implicit notion that competition and innovation are a natural fit --> the “measure, controlm and automatic” rationality of US-style economic competition
difficult to commodify
difficult to describe
not taking apparent differences (between men and women, human and animal,,) to be timeless, necessary, or inevitable --> descriptive =/= prescriptive (descriptions not intended to be prescriptive) --> *to historicize and denaturalize concepts (of competition, innovation,,)*
Bowker + Leigh Star > Calvert: *things perceived as real are real in their consequences*
market competitivenetiveness has a plethora[~ excess, افراط ,ازدياد] of measures --✕--> profit: the seller-centric proxy measure of consumer interest
“our idealized notion of competition as a generator of innovation black-boxes a host of processes for competition, including unfair practices, externalizing costs, marketing, deception, and deskilling.”
(our idealized notion of:){ competition ==> innovation }--black-boxes--> (a host of) processes for competition:
•unfair practices
•externalizing costs
•marketing
•deception
•deskilling
•
individualistic and social Darwinist overtones
[*]inovation: a form of wishful thinking that aims to bring about the desired transformations without the associated costs in time and human effort (Suchman & Bishop)
(‘labor-intensive artistic work’: noninovative creative work; deepen the density of curiosity;)
capitalism continuously appli[...]
(241)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%69.2[...]inated with further technological innovations
competetiveness and the technological *savvy* implicit in innovation are themselves markers of contemporary masculinity --> “the enduring force of the identification between technology and manliness is not an inherent biological sex difference. it is instead the result of the historical and cultural construction of gender” (Wajcman)
a big part of the problem is that women's technological labor (=/= ghost busters) is culturally invisible --(Katie King in her research on writing technologies argues)--> (a metonymy:) when technologies are reduced to singular, stable, self-contained devices [~ Star Wars] =/= assemblages
[dichotomy of “enforcement =/= destruction” Star Wars either or: if you are not destroying it you are enforcing it]
problems that cannot be conceptualized in terms of measures and endpoints, or which involve holistic, qualitative solutions, will be at a disadvantage for selection
(Cowan shows) the developement of new household tachnologies did not free women from the domestic shpere. rather, it allowed women to enter the paid labor force while leaving the gendered division of labor in the home untouched.
(makes me throw up -->) large literature of self-determination theory (~ showing people are more creative and happy when their work allows them to be autonomous, related, and competent) + reward systems cultivating competitive environments
[*]autonomy: self-willing, volitional, being an agent in the action =/= being a “pawn”
spheres where processes and outcomes have been the name of the game (in feminized fields of education and librarianship)
labs (such as laser developement) that require collaboration with other labs
trading zones: a metaphor for understanding how cooperation between researchers enables new scientific paradigms --> Galison
*the development of this or that research looks like a continuous trajectory, but the trajectory was actually discontinuous and ruptured. that fact that we have invented or discovered something makes that developement seem inevitable, but things could always have turned out some other way* --> Cowan > Calvert
competition is not a guarantor of innovation, our cultural belief in it can obscure other explanations for innovation --> for example (Wylie showing:) (archaeology's enshrined belief that) male-centered hunting activities dominated prehistoric caloric intakes ==✕==> other hypotheses for the transition to agriculture --✕--> women's leading role in the development of agriculture--arguably the most significant innovation in human history--could finally be detected
[bids for status by denying the feminized and second class aspects of library work] --> ***the labor of care is at the core of library work*** --> *teaching, like technology, is always a relationship, an[...]
(242)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%69.4[...]) that require collaboration with other labs
trading zones: a metaphor for understanding how cooperation between researchers enables new scientific paradigms --> Galison
*the development of this or that research looks like a continuous trajectory, but the trajectory was actually discontinuous and ruptured. that fact that we have invented or discovered something makes that developement seem inevitable, but things could always have turned out some other way* --> Cowan > Calvert
competition is not a guarantor of innovation, our cultural belief in it can obscure other explanations for innovation --> for example (Wylie showing:) (archaeology's enshrined belief that) male-centered hunting activities dominated prehistoric caloric intakes ==✕==> other hypotheses for the transition to agriculture --✕--> women's leading role in the development of agriculture--arguably the most significant innovation in human history--could finally be detected
[bids for status by denying the feminized and second class aspects of library work] --> ***the labor of care is at the core of library work*** --> *teaching, like technology, is always a relationship, and that relationship is undergrided by the labor of care* (--> affective labor is literally vital to the successful delivery of other kinds of services)***
the ways women are called on to manage their and other's feelings <--✕--> technology is positioned in out culture as rational and precise and therefore (masculine and) unemotional [--> look at the film Lucy]
successful education and mentorship depend on this skill, which, like household labor, is difficult to account for in “competitive” economic analysis
**articulation work**
the labor necessary to make technologies fit together seamlessly --> Leigh Star
(my work begins in) information systems may leave gaps in work processes that require real-time adjustments, or ‘articulation work,’ to complete the processes
(my research: through ajayeb i have been busy with learning to “make friends” with both technologies and theories)
every system is an assemblage --> Calvert applying Haraway's insight and think of technologies as significant prostheses ==> [*]librarianship: a work that (primarily) hooks up people with their technologies
librarians articulate technologies --> they help people adapt technologies
librarian's articulation work is both technological and affective =/= competitive
(in techno-capital) supressing labor costs ==> deskilling
deskilling and de-professionalization under the intertwined guises of competitiveness and innovation
an example of deskilling:
-Haraway: “to be feminized means to be made extremely vulnerable; able to be disassembled, reassembled, exploited as a reserve labor force, seen less as workers than as servers; [...]
(243)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%69.4[...] />
•persistence
•repetition
•(vulgar)
•
}==> topology:
1. ramp
2. nest
3. skew
ramp: sequential, one dimensional, ‘sliders’
nest: fractal quality, JSON, hierarchical tree, ‘comments’
skew: verb act, streching, ‘2D field picker’
(slider: marking everything)
semantic in flux + persistence
object repository + identifiers
feedback --> quasi object --> structured knower --> data
#workshop in apass 2018 Summer
...a series of data models that was produced during a three days work session in a.pass May 2018.
The aim was to create a “filter" for the artistic research projects of each participants, in order to train in making meta-linguistic abstractions (on a given computer hardware) to construct a “thing” that enables describing the problem of Building Abstractions with Data, to increase/enhance the expressive/descriptive power of the languages we use. It addresses the question of machine/human readability in the digital imperative of computational world we are inhabiting, with the particular case of a.pass artistic research environments for advanced performance studies.
•interested in computational literacy (including data-collection, librarianship) as part of our *diversity-work* and our *articulation-work*
•interested in different languages (english, computer, non-sign languages, etc.) refers to different value systems and to different lived experience
•interested in the *labor of knowledge-work* (in collective digital flesh life)
•interested in shifts in topology (the ongoing reworking of bodily boundaries of each of our research practices)
•
TERMINOLOGY:
*articulation-work: the labor necessary to make technologies fit together seamlessly
*diversity-work: a kind of work in which we learn about the damage we cause, and of how “causes” are understood as “damage”
*librarianship: a work that hooks up people with their technologies
*data abstraction: a *technique of isolating* (the parts of your mini-language that deal with) how data/info objects are ‘represented’ from (the parts of your mini-language that deal with) how data/info objects are ‘used’ (---> i addressed this in my fable workshop in a totally different epistemology)
*model: your object decomposed into *computational compound objects* (each with their own time-varying local state variables)
(representation of data and control over data:)
*modular: localized part of the system that are produced by the perception of the system
*objective: viewing a large system as a collection of distinct objects. concerned with how a computational object can change and yet maintain its identity
*streamous: information that flow in the system. its evaluation is delay[...]
(244)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%70[...]h segment of your practice is temporalized? this means also which part of your practice stands out of time?
with Olga
regards of the question “what are an artwork's boundaries?” and it's intersections with documents, lists, and reports
for Olga:
document = evidence
research = mourning
(mourning as the passionate and demonstrative activity of expressing the state of loss or deprivation of a certain object for a certain subject, and demand for its revival or memorialization)
what is the feeling of the document?
*document is a story that (usually) silences other stories*
where our powers to provoke care (could/should) come from (if not from document/evidence)?
is document (in its form and feeling) the best way we have at our disposal to provoke the care of the generations? ...to mark each other with the mark of the care?
putting the narrative into proper sleep
casting the names
-artist has turned herself into a mnemonic device --> suggesting “amnesia” as her context
-artist has become a reminder and (therefore) her audiences have become memorizers
(question of) memory and remembering --> the idea of ‘literal remembrance’ in her performance, re-membering, literally bringing back the “members” of the Kurt Jooss company into the present of her audiences
-the problem with her remembrance is that “there is something that is important to remember” regardless of the person/subject who remembers
indisputability of the Green Table for Olga
the artist has chosen to protect The Green Table's meaning and message (due to her political and ethical commitments [for world peace?]) in a sense her subject of research remains unresearched, her values unevaluated, her moral settlements settled
how can she become interested in decomposing her research-bodies of The Green Table?
can we remain critically ethically responsible in thinking about the “meaning and message” of our subject of study and still be able to decompose it in interesting serious ways? (yes yes)
questions of: thinking, reminding, remaining,
Sofia's documentation
she asks “what is document today?”
-what was document yesterday (that is not anymore today)?
-how the agency and meaning of docu is (or is not) mutating in time?*
-what is beyond the question of documentation and preservation? --> *durational aesthetics*
-is document a limited way of asking questions about what we do and our relationship with time and duration? [you never know what the present brings into the future.]
what art cannot say that document can? “truth”?
when truth was invented where was document standing?
is document today a mere effect of technologies of inscribing?
why we are[...]
(245)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%70.5[...] and practical metaphors
...................................
Sofia's textual machine, switching between binary values of faire contract --> staying with the polar syntax of ‘you’ and ‘them’
-how the rotating axis of her machine is able of creating breaks in the syntax of the contract?
-(for her machine: “understanding = an act of application”) --> how new forms of *understanding* could change the ways we might achieve fair societies? and not merely changing the order of sentence to visualize and objectification of unfairness and precariousness of the employment economy, in the exegesis of the writen contract. what would it mean to install an understander (taking a risk), for Sofia, and not a reversal syntaxer (making aware)?
-employer and the employee as different “species” with their different “natural” tendencies to fuck with one another? --> zero-sum game
-the question of symbiotic relatedness (--> psychoanalysis) =/=? contractual relatedness
>
...................................
to emphasis on the contingent and the contextual
the process of becoming researcher (of science and technology studies : inquiry into the politics and practices of knowledge-making)
vignette (sketch, a brief literary description, narrate scenes from familiar activities)
the question is not ‘how can we care more?’ (as predetermined set of affective practices) rather: **what happens to our work when we pay attention to moments where the question of ‘how to care?’ is insistent but not easily answerable** (‘care’ as an analytic or provocation)
-Kenney
...................................
Manoto TV station program “sher yadet nare” شعر یادت نره respond to the questions of translation (from the UK produced program “Don't Forget the Lyrics” into an Iranian contemporary popular media culture) and memory practices (archival memory act performance popce pop quiz show mixed with consumer culture TV broadcasting)
...................................
*cognitive companions* (--> coordinating multiple agencies characteristically)
-tiny clay token sheep were enclosed in clay envelopes with markings indicating what was inside (*molding and inscribing clay* was the favored sensory technology for making in Mesopotamia 5000 years ago)
•maybe your makings involves “true writing” that companions preferentially with language
•maybe your makings involves spinning plant and animal fiber and feeling, tying, and untying knots
•processual affirmative re-writings
•systeming meditations
•context-sensitive pushback
•operational closure (of a system)
•fluctuation, entrainment, blocked synchrony
•
[Katie King use of a term, how she shifts it from mechanism to affect:] [*]stigmergy: feeling of being in among and as the self-organizing bits that [...]
(247)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%70.6[...]tangle design, science, fact and fiction, boundary objects, system-ing, [*]design: ***making things that tell stories*** [=/= telling stories])
(my encounters with) ajayeb's vibrating particularism
[*]website, talksite: play, trial and error, permutation and mistakes (none of it innocent or exemplary @ERG's website) ==> *cognitive reassembly*
-->{relations between developers and users to create and work out a technical interface ==> communicative tangle}
transmedia story (with its origins commercial and suspect, often entangled with social critique and social panic ~= conditions of making knowledge today; we knowingly or without reflection, gather and pin together such stories across media...)
-you can't take *citation pools* for granted
-how we will take what each other says
companion gatherings (do not exactly cohere or consort well) ==sometimes==> violation of standardization (that some believe is more equal)
(companions need to) [*]learn: emergently sensitize and attune among new cognitive and political circumstances (in and as their very moments of unknowing, when ethical and moral sortings are properly in flux)
(with) Bateson's negative sensitivities to systems, and with Katies King, I keep discovering just how literal is our many being-ness in multiply embedded sorts of biomic sympoiesis
{[*]lecture: feeling-in-the-mouth system, (the word-as-world inhabited by) alternate and overlapping peoples, memories, attunements, citation pools, histories, communities of practice, knowledges, ocean and freshwater “edges"}
{?can i propose (Katie King and Sandoval's) “oppositional consciousness” instead of (Mouffe's) “agonistic pluralism"}
responses, abilities, infrastructures, distributed embodiments,
[*]traumas: intensities crowded with affiliations, loyalties, essential truths
(Bateson > Leigh Star > Katie King) *transcontextual* (transcontextual circumstances: moving from one context to another, one world to another, one set of knowledges to another) ==> [*]boundary objects: workaround things, concepts, processes, even routines that permit coordination, sometimes collaboration, without consensus (non-conscious and conscious)--local, supralocaling, and global in material topologies in which spacetimenatureculture may be mixed, developmental yet transtemporal, (they don't create boundaries) *they work to keep boundaries from getting in the way of collaboration* [~=? sleep-walking: ignore or even miss that there are boundaries about, or honor boundaries = differences that should be honored without being stuck there]
---[can i suggest ‘enfolding’ instead of ‘sympoiesis’ for artists?]
****ajayeb: my transcontextual habitat**** [--(Katie King)--> sites where people, objects, animals, ecological processes, academic restructurings, and scales of injustice unfold, enfold]
‘to feel family and parent [...]
(248)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%70.7[...]/>
(*systems humans participate in and do not control*)
(? am i part of this) “we” and “us” gathers sympoietically these boundary objects storing details and affects
the fable of “if it's about everything it is about nothing” --> no!
sharpening focus =/= narrowing focus
workshop for thinking
•with objects
◦moved around
◾in visual play
to take your imaginations along other things
•so their worlds layer and enfold and map out and crochet together
◦so that can be sensed and worked on
(?what are) our helpers in apass:
•companion imaginations = our collective animalities
◦such imaginations have worlds that layer and enfold and map out and crochet together (--> systems humans participate in and do not control)
•our complex personhood
•our distributed being
•objects we take as cognitive companions
•our significant otherness honored in on-going attentions
•new learnings
•new materialities
•
(?what are our) methodology of companioning with things
...................................
what is happening to me: attention to knowledge making practices (in the context of a literary pleasure)
*sharing = making*
*communicating = making*
clues --for--> contexts --shapes--> how we will take what each other says
(Katie King > Anzaldua:) who and what facilitates such movement among worlds?
home = domination + domestication + love
Katie King:
•why science fiction matters?
•how cultural studies helps us make SF meaningful?
interactive possibilities of media art, commercial production, mass culture
SF = effect of defamiliarization
(problem with Star Trek is that it is over familiar)
Janet, from a lesbian utopian future (death by disease of all the men)
Jeannine, from an alternate present (US never entered WWII)
Jael, where “War Between the Sexes” has become deadly literal
Joanna, the author of the book, Joanna Russ (in a shimmering joking literalization has enfolded into her own story)
my ajayeb studies --> *cultural studies: how cultural products are part of cultural processes* (=/= what makes an art work good) --> getting around the term “art”
-mysteries, romance novels, movies, (bestiaries,) all of them deeply commercial forms of entertainment and often produced in complicated technical collaborations [--> and that's what makes them interesting (=/= simple single authorships)]
-genre, formula, (style, fashion,) are intrinsic to the ways these products are produced and the ways they are enjoyed
genre --> subtle shifts possible across many repetitions (=/= something that happens only one time)
premodern literary forms (bestiary) --> structural variatio[...]
(249)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%71[...] not control)
•our complex personhood
•our distributed being
•objects we take as cognitive companions
•our significant otherness honored in on-going attentions
•new learnings
•new materialities
•
(?what are our) methodology of companioning with things
...................................
what is happening to me: attention to knowledge making practices (in the context of a literary pleasure)
*sharing = making*
*communicating = making*
clues --for--> contexts --shapes--> how we will take what each other says
(Katie King > Anzaldua:) who and what facilitates such movement among worlds?
home = domination + domestication + love
Katie King:
•why science fiction matters?
•how cultural studies helps us make SF meaningful?
interactive possibilities of media art, commercial production, mass culture
SF = effect of defamiliarization
(problem with Star Trek is that it is over familiar)
Janet, from a lesbian utopian future (death by disease of all the men)
Jeannine, from an alternate present (US never entered WWII)
Jael, where “War Between the Sexes” has become deadly literal
Joanna, the author of the book, Joanna Russ (in a shimmering joking literalization has enfolded into her own story)
my ajayeb studies --> *cultural studies: how cultural products are part of cultural processes* (=/= what makes an art work good) --> getting around the term “art”
-mysteries, romance novels, movies, (bestiaries,) all of them deeply commercial forms of entertainment and often produced in complicated technical collaborations [--> and that's what makes them interesting (=/= simple single authorships)]
-genre, formula, (style, fashion,) are intrinsic to the ways these products are produced and the ways they are enjoyed
genre --> subtle shifts possible across many repetitions (=/= something that happens only one time)
premodern literary forms (bestiary) --> structural variations + their pleasurable effects
fandom (collectivities of fans): venues in which high intensities of engagement and collaboration occur --> social and collaborative, (writing) reengineered with various apparatus, [pre-internet Trekkers:]
•...audio tape each episode and listen to the voices over and over in my bed at night, until I had the dialog memorized
•wrote long letters about each episode several times a week, coast to coast, analyzing each in great detail, and writing out particularly memorable bits of repartee
•
--> SF media fandoms (=/= SF literary fandoms), first really organized around Star Trek in the late 60s, early 70s and increasingly international, have tended to be dominated by female fans
[*]poaching: how fans and fandoms appropriate commercial products for their o[...]
(250)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%71[...]ience fiction matters?
•how cultural studies helps us make SF meaningful?
interactive possibilities of media art, commercial production, mass culture
SF = effect of defamiliarization
(problem with Star Trek is that it is over familiar)
Janet, from a lesbian utopian future (death by disease of all the men)
Jeannine, from an alternate present (US never entered WWII)
Jael, where “War Between the Sexes” has become deadly literal
Joanna, the author of the book, Joanna Russ (in a shimmering joking literalization has enfolded into her own story)
my ajayeb studies --> *cultural studies: how cultural products are part of cultural processes* (=/= what makes an art work good) --> getting around the term “art”
-mysteries, romance novels, movies, (bestiaries,) all of them deeply commercial forms of entertainment and often produced in complicated technical collaborations [--> and that's what makes them interesting (=/= simple single authorships)]
-genre, formula, (style, fashion,) are intrinsic to the ways these products are produced and the ways they are enjoyed
genre --> subtle shifts possible across many repetitions (=/= something that happens only one time)
premodern literary forms (bestiary) --> structural variations + their pleasurable effects
fandom (collectivities of fans): venues in which high intensities of engagement and collaboration occur --> social and collaborative, (writing) reengineered with various apparatus, [pre-internet Trekkers:]
•...audio tape each episode and listen to the voices over and over in my bed at night, until I had the dialog memorized
•wrote long letters about each episode several times a week, coast to coast, analyzing each in great detail, and writing out particularly memorable bits of repartee
•
--> SF media fandoms (=/= SF literary fandoms), first really organized around Star Trek in the late 60s, early 70s and increasingly international, have tended to be dominated by female fans
[*]poaching: how fans and fandoms appropriate commercial products for their own informal uses
*commercial exuberance* <== media franchises (<-- take advantage of the structure of multinational corporations [film and tv production, book, music and video publishing and distribution, theme parks, theaters, book stores, and so on. tie-in novels and coffee table, graphic novels, toys and games, other paraphernalia such as telephones, t-shirts and porcelain plates, music, commercial internet sites and catalog buying, and even scholarly works] + xeroxed fanfic, fiction written and self-published by fans,)
Star Trek = commercial media art =/= “art for art's sake”
-commercial media art is pleasurable precisely because *one instance of it is always insufficient in a very palpable way*
‘not enough’ ==> interactive & an on-going --> multiply coll[...]
(252)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%71[...]eb studies --> *cultural studies: how cultural products are part of cultural processes* (=/= what makes an art work good) --> getting around the term “art”
-mysteries, romance novels, movies, (bestiaries,) all of them deeply commercial forms of entertainment and often produced in complicated technical collaborations [--> and that's what makes them interesting (=/= simple single authorships)]
-genre, formula, (style, fashion,) are intrinsic to the ways these products are produced and the ways they are enjoyed
genre --> subtle shifts possible across many repetitions (=/= something that happens only one time)
premodern literary forms (bestiary) --> structural variations + their pleasurable effects
fandom (collectivities of fans): venues in which high intensities of engagement and collaboration occur --> social and collaborative, (writing) reengineered with various apparatus, [pre-internet Trekkers:]
•...audio tape each episode and listen to the voices over and over in my bed at night, until I had the dialog memorized
•wrote long letters about each episode several times a week, coast to coast, analyzing each in great detail, and writing out particularly memorable bits of repartee
•
--> SF media fandoms (=/= SF literary fandoms), first really organized around Star Trek in the late 60s, early 70s and increasingly international, have tended to be dominated by female fans
[*]poaching: how fans and fandoms appropriate commercial products for their own informal uses
*commercial exuberance* <== media franchises (<-- take advantage of the structure of multinational corporations [film and tv production, book, music and video publishing and distribution, theme parks, theaters, book stores, and so on. tie-in novels and coffee table, graphic novels, toys and games, other paraphernalia such as telephones, t-shirts and porcelain plates, music, commercial internet sites and catalog buying, and even scholarly works] + xeroxed fanfic, fiction written and self-published by fans,)
Star Trek = commercial media art =/= “art for art's sake”
-commercial media art is pleasurable precisely because *one instance of it is always insufficient in a very palpable way*
‘not enough’ ==> interactive & an on-going --> multiply collaborative process (across media)
= processes: people engage in varying degrees and forms of intensity and with varying collaborative possibilities -->{fandom: an interactive engagement that is culturally ambiguous =/= ‘society that values property,’ or ‘unique creations by single artists'}
(such media is) inspirational exactly because *so much is left out*, so much invites elaboration
•gossipy pleasures
•extratextual information
•many layered joke
•alerting the refrain of male friendship
•
like other kinds of SF Star Trek also often does replicate the very aspects of cultu[...]
(253)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%71[...]ection of objectivity with study of history
(since 17th century) memory has been essential to our conceptualization of what does it mean to have a self --> why we are so concerned with memory damage ceases (alzheimer, etc.)
husod3oqLds
many time when we define (say “what X is”), what we are doing is to how to make a term more precise, to make something *artificially operational*
...................................
*sciences of the archive*
depend on longed lived collections
(since 16th century, as we know it) modern science's epistemic goal: *predictive accuracy* =/= *to elevate certainty* (the case in medieval Latin Europe)
books (past discoveries) & instruments (future discoveries) interspersed --when--> they both belong to the same practice ==> library
(Goethe:) search nothing beyond the phenomena
Morris
movement of commerce's subject (=/= walking of the Parisian flaneur)
plaque's morbid sentimen --> evades the reduction of signs to mere reference
[*]public art: the art of a world bifurcated by capital --tending--> *monumentality: an exaggerated literality + excess of scale (incapable of irony)
(of image -->) textuality: something lurking off that bids us engage the ambiguity
metonym
critique: (analogy of) a movement toward the outside
a grammatical negative can never efface what it attempts to contradict
a call for judgment hides in the defensive gesture
criminality: departure from (or failure) to recognize a law
new violence
•violence against the sovereignty of local subjects
•violence against an internationalized regime that increasingly claimed exclusive sovereignty for itself
ethnography of capitalist crisis (a project on:)
•the politics of [*]transparency: the ideological pointing stick by which the market has appropriated for itself the function of regulating the state (where it was the function of the state to regulate the market)
•how capitalism ([Morris] in Thailand) disguises itself as mere monetization
•how money's total and totalizing meditations have come to be experienced in the contrary idioms of immediacy and eternal present-being
•
([i am] learning with Morris) ethnography of crisis
-how capitalism in Thailand disguises itself as mere monetization
-how money's (total and totalizing) mediations have come to be experienced in the contrary idioms of immediacy (and eternal present-being)
-rhetorics of transparency and visibility (conceived in aesthetic domains)
(narcissistic act of) teletechnic encompassment
*spirit mediumship*
[[...]
(254)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%72.8[...]ize animal geography]
(legacy of bibliography and book collecting) 1930 --> library practice centered on the development of bibliographic standards emphasizing procedures for identifying and indexing authors and tides
(21st century) democracy of texts, collaboration with autodidacticism and public education, is now giving itself over to the *circulation of commodities*
**the subjects produced through 21st century librarianship are customers and consumers** (who seeks content =/= knowledge)
new librarian --> new freedom of information --> free market (in the form of atomized particles of “microcontent” allowing free-floating information to be freely accessed via computers and networks, without the censorious mediation of embodied librarians)
libraries --> techniques for ordering (~-> discourse of standardization)
(shifting) ways the library has operated alongside the state as a disciplinary & ideological apparatus
•18th century --> national library
•19th century --> new techniques for ordering, discourse of standardization and order (in the library) + searching and retrieval external to the mind of the librarian
•19th century --> [emerging understanding of the role of literacy in worker self improvement ==>] public library <==> a project of nation, citizenship, democracy, self-betterment, universal education + concurrent with a serious reconstitution of hierarchies of access to books
•late 19th century --> paternalist financial auspices of Andrew Carnegie (who funded 1689 library buildings) for the explicit objective of the self-education of
workers and immigrants --purpose--> acculturation and assimilation
•Paul Otlet --> universal decimal classification 1899
•late 20th century --> dreams of intelligent computers and objectivized information science : (from) library school --to--> school of information management systems
-
}--> *schematization efforts* --> (20th century) library science (continue producing itself) as a cooperative venture of flourishing information [triumphant rationalism]
•standardization
•automation
•propagate
•expand
(in the name of) democratization & civil rights
library ==contribute==> to the civic sphere:
•providing the information
•providing *behaviors* necessary for appropriate citizenship
library ==> classification system (DDC) --> general knowledge organization tool
late 20th century neo-liberal rationality ==intensify==>
•moral directive for self-betterment (as workers)
•reorienting the relation of subjects (toward the state and the social) as one of consumership
+ shift in the definition of knowledge
technobibliocapital --> (new era of) ordering texts & subjects
[*appreciative =/= affirmative* <-- learning fr[...]
(255)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%73.9[...]rant resource: (technologies, knowledge, skill) those employed to act on operand resources
}--> a conceptual separation with roots in Greek philosophy:
•Plato: “material embodiment = distraction to true knowledge”
•Descartes: privileging of mental life over physical matter
==> we inherit this style of philosophy (in the west) that values formal abstract objectless thinking as the standard canonical way of knowing the world
--> *information age*:
•endorses the pre-eminence of the immaterial and disembodies (mind, skill, mental life) over the material and embodied (brute matter, physicality)
•celebrate a *culture of demateriality*
•
=/= object oriented philosophy:
•Heidegger's theory of tool-being
•Latour's displacement of the human proposed by the actor-network theory
•Merleau-Ponty's sensual phenomenology
•
(continental philosophy + analytical philosophy in West -->) **philosophies of access** to the world : they assume that the human-world gap is the privileged site of all rigorous philosophy
interest in human access to objects [--> correlationism: if things exists, they do so only for us] =/=? interest in objects
(in marketing literature)
•operant resources:
human sophisticated
cultural strategic
active dynamic
agentic immaterial
specialized intelligent
relational primary
*infinite*
--link--> to notions of progrss and achievement in contemporary society
•operand resources:
inhuman machine-like
basic stuff
functional physical
inanimate raw
inert less important
secondary lesser
tangible subordinate
*finite*
service-dominant logic {
•operant --> infinite --> human's skill
•operand --> finite --> world's material
service-dominant logic ==> a cut (“=/=”) --> operant resources will take these sluggish raw inherently secondary materials and act on them to whisk them into something valuable
--Barad--> every act of observation makes a “cut” in what is otherwise an indissolubly unauflösbare entangled natural-cultural universe : *every new way of observation cuts open new logics ==> undermines what is known + what can be known*
[*]operand resources: resources which require action to create benefit
--✕--> crucial scenarios where operand resources (forests, sea beds, topsoil) require the opposite of action (unused or underused) in order to create or maintain (their intrinsic) value
*value-in-use: somthing is assessed according to the use a consumer has for it
*value-in-underuse --> (tourism's) deserted beaches, unspoiled countryside, uninhabited ruins
for example brand management implicitly leverages the[...]
(256)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%74.1[...]reholders* [--> issue with fandom]
for example *affective value*: when vlaue lies in the general sentiment of a networked group of actors
(in marketing's theory of value creation) the *role of the consumer* in the value creation process is now explicitly recognized and articulated (incorporated) through compelling concepts such as cocreation, coproduction, *prosumerism* [an individual who both consumes & produces]
@apass collaborative environments
[consumer research]
recognizing the ways in which consumers and consumption are both productive and value-adding
Holbrook's topology of consumer value
value is active = when it entails physical or mental manipulation of an object
value is reactive = when things are done by a product to the consumer (objects act on consumers to create value)
xxxxxx
...................................
Hayles
/>
(to take) a problem-based approach --> taking a problem and looking for solutions =/= investigating problematics (<-- humanities [and art])
what are the reward structures in artistic research? (the way a work is recognized and validated by the field)
postliteracy
the future of human & the future of writing are entwined
meaning = resistance
to be human = to resist techno-language
an informed scientific-literate and humanistically educated public ==> democracy
...................................
(mass media) cultural standing (and standard) of live performance
paradigm of televisual <--✕--> digital
(Auslander historicizing) liveness --> historical (=/= ontological)
ideology of authenticity (in live music)
at the level of cultural economy --> theatre (live performance) =/= mass media
...................................
[why is contemporary art so reluctant to describe our experience of digitized life? --Bishop-->] digital ~= code (inherently alien to human perception) --> a linguistic model
Guy Debord --> (*physical and the social were pitched against the virtual and the representational* ~ “subjective =/= technological” -->) social relations today are not mediated by monodirectional media imagery ==>
•favor intersubjective exchange and homespun activities (cooking, gardening, conversation) with the aim of reinforcing a social bond fragmented by spectacle
•desire for face-to-face relations against the disembodiment of the Internet
•retro-craftiness
•fiddly collages
•tapestries
--assert--> subjectivity (+ tactility) =/= impregnable surface of the screen
reformatting
transcoding
modulation of preexisting files --> selection strategy ~~> meaningful recontextualization (of existing artifacts)
[...]
(257)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%74.2[...]-to--> atemporal or beyond time
(from) stress on spirit --to--> sense of embodied or reembodied self
(shift from) tamed death: a death expected and prepared for, experienced in community --to--> personal death: the moment of death as decisive accounting for an individual self
purgatory: in-between time and space
afterlife --> the concept of the (embodied) human person
somatomorphic: separated soul imagined as bodily
ordinary piety -->
•significance of physical death
•spiritual value of somatic phenomena (namely suffering)
the sense of an ending hovers over all spiritual writing in the middle ages
eschatology of:
1. resurrection: a sense of last things that focuses significance in the moment at the end of time when the physical body is reconstituted and judged
[<-- arise from traditions with a much less immanent sense of “last things"]
--emphasis-->
◦time end
◦person embodied
◦humanity collective
2. immortality: the experience of personal death is the moment of judgement
3. apocalypse --> (coerces) **what matters is the here and now** <-- implying a political payoff
==> inflect and deepen the literature (description of plague, visions of heaven and hell)
}--> three eschatology differ:
•what is the person fundamentally
•fate collective or individual
•how and whether time marches
•where the end is located
•
medical eschatology
eschatology (in the west) is perhaps the most paradoxical (and inconsistent) aspect of religiosity
(traditions in which) earthly experience is a moment in an eternal dreaming
Islam, Judaism, Christianity are brooded over by the sense [*]last things: a sense of the end [soon or distant, individual or collective] contradicts itself (explodes itself) <== *it looks for a moment that gives significance to the course of time by finally denying (erasing, ending) that to which it offers significance* }<--- western european middle ages utilizes and deepens this multifold and contradictory tradition (=/= deny, impoverish)
(three types of awareness:)
1- significance of dying and afterlife --> space time of personal collective destiny
2- apocalyptic time -->
3- eschatological imagination -->
purgation
purgatory time
•do pottery while you are in purgatory
•learn ice-skating while you are waiting in zamharir
•
{personal drama of death <--> progressive unfolding of collective history}--> ultimate disposition for individual soul and body ~~> the notion of ***bliss after torment***
torment: individual glimpse of the end
Augustine --> the imperfect but not reprobate
suffering: means of salvati[...]
(259)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%74.4[...]ion and separation that allowed the notion of visuality to become the intellectually available concept that it is today
(we should do that with all our ready at hand concepts)
what is the genealogy of attention in Persian subjectivity?
•an embodied subject is both the location of operations of power and the potential for resistance
•vision is only one part of a body capable of evading institutional capture
social economic representational shifts and practices
visual/auditory culture
...richer and more historically determined notions of “embodiment”
spectator culture is not founded on the necessity of making a subject ‘see’ (Crary)
rather, individuals are isolated, separated, and inhabit time as disempowered.
counter-forms of attention are constituted as other temporalities and states (--> my lectures, reverie)
for Crary, “perception”: a way of indicating a subject definable in terms of more than the single-sense modality of sight
•fundamental absence at the heart of seeing
•impossibility of the perception of presence
•impossibility of an unmediated visual access to a plentitude of being
•
historical obliteration of the possibility of thinking the idea of presence in perception
*attention: simulation of presence, a pragmatic substitute in the face of its impossibility
atemporal nature of perception
? direct perceptual access to self-presdenceex
(newly) designated “pathologies” of attention and creative, intensive states of deep absorption and daydreaming
(subjective conception of vision ==>) *attention: the means by which an individual observer can transcend those subjective limitations and make perception ‘its own’ [&] the means by which a perceiver becomes open to control and annexation by external agencies***
interrelated problem of perception and modernization
Crary's development of the issue of attention is to question the relevance of isolating an aesthetically determined contemplation or absorption
general problem of perceptual synthesis and disintegrative possibilities of attention
optical verisimilitude
attention --> tension --> possibly of a fixation, of holding something in wonder or contemplation, in which the attentive subject is both immobile and ungrounded
how can something originate in its opposite?
Nietzsche
sudden emergence of model of subjective vision (in the 19th century)
complex and contingent physiological makeup of the observer ==> vision is rendered faulty, even arbitrary
reality maintenance
aftershocks of apperception
failure of a capacity for synthesis of conscious thought (named dissoc[...]
(260)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%74.9[...]nity of his optical aggregates was always an ephemeral subjective construction that never objectively modified the abstract and segmented status of his dots, so his assembling of provisional social aggregates never alters the obdurately insular character of their individual human character.”
Seurat stakes out a darker and more skeptical position than Durkheim about the possibility of *positive knowledge of “social reality”* --> his works are determined by a sense of **impalpability and evanescence of the social itself**
(what is my “sociology” in my works?)
{ great social catastrophes of the 19th century + accumulated bourgeois anxiety over the disorders of revolution (1848 and 1871) }==> (emergence of French 1890s of) “science” of sociology
let's stop mourning about the earlier model of political theater being displaced by by the modernized forms of spectacle (--> my critic on Kurzgesagt is outdated?)
/>
(for Seurat:) *art work = solicitation of attention*
play of attraction and absence (in Sina and Foad's work):
a visual or performative work designed around the cancellation and suspension of what it promises
Seurat --> (Sina and) Foad's obliteration of the scenographic conditions of the work even as he simulates their persistence
Seurat --> my work has always been scenic, positioning its viewers before an apparently stagelike space [without orthogonal guides ==> assemblage of disjunct planner elements]
my (painting before and even more now) mimics a classical theatrical space, and (in play with that) at the same time it establishes an illusory world extending away from the spectator (collapsing that “stage,” dramatically sealing off possible avenues of entry into the work for our eyes) ==?==> a world related to the viewer's own point of view
deliberate archaism
(--> medieval mystery plays)
)
closed-off antiscenic space --> forms of popular display (shadow figure, puppet theatre,) that only simulate or evoke the “cube” of theatrical space
to be careful with *grid*
[*--stories that the grid tells--*]
(Crary > Krauss:) by its very abstraction, grid conveys one of the basic laws of knowledge: *punctuality* [---> go to apass psychological optics and image of knowledge incorporated in presentation of projects, #workshop on topology] --> the separation of the perceptual screen from that of the “real” world
[*]grid: (19th century) emblem of the infrastructure of vision --> becoming an increasingly insistent and visible feature of neo-impressionist painting
(~/= Crary is hesitant to characterize Seurat's flatness structurally as grid)
-tabular field with rows and columns making impossible a point to point (= punctual) relation between spectator and image
(Martin Jay:) two scopic regimes:
•metri[...]
(261)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%77.2[...] with as a problem)
--Gouz--> [*]capitalism: *disaffection of value* (the libidinal, the intersubjective, the semantic are completely divorced from the economic relation ==> economic sector =/= semantic affective investment)
Seurat's meditation on the emptiness of a modern relation of display and consumption
cost of admission at two different rates:
-Leonardo: head of Jesus at the vanishing point of the window opening onto infinite celestial space (--> regime of signs that possess intrinsic value =/=)
-Seurat: price tag, grid space (--> regime of signs that are symbols of value)
[*]scenic: determined by the position of an (depicted) observer
ubiquity of the subjective experience of “shopping” & its construction as spectacle
‘price tag’: (one of the vanishing points of modernity,) the draining away of the illusion of reference or stability
Poe's stranger itinerary, a paradigmatic articulation of modern loneliness
“at no moment did he see that i watched him. he entered shop after shop, priced nothing, spoke no word, and look at the object with a vacant stare.”
process of circulation and convertibility
simulation inherent in the literal spectacle inseparable from the “semblance”(~ price tag)
(Marx:) ‘price tag’: the symbol of itself
“only fleeting, a reality destined constantly to disappear, to be suspended, not to be count as a definitive realization but always only as an intermediate, mediating realization. [...] it exists, therefore, in so far as it remains in this constant movement [...] its reality is not that it is the price but that it represents it, is its representative--the materially present representative of the price, this of itself, and as such, of the exchange value of commodities.”
(we should ask the question of “symbolism” at each age again and differently)
(Brian Rotman:) an isomorphism (emerged in renaissance) between:
•vanishing point in visual representation
•use of zero in computation
•abstract money in economic exchange
[*]vanishing point: a figure of the coincidence of the transcendent & the empirical
[Panofsky: perspective as symbolic form: perspective in transforming the ‘ousia’ (reality) into ‘phainomenon’ (appearance), seams to reduce the divine to a mere subject matter for human consciousness; but for that very reason, conversely, it'd expands human consciousness into a vessel for the divine]
--> an infinity not only prefigured in god, but indeed actually embodied in empirical reality --> ****in Last Supper the miraculous becomes the direct experience of the beholder, in that the supernatural events in a sense erupt into his own, apparently natural visual space****
effects of vanishing point
(in all my image assemblages [...]
(262)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%77.3[...] form, reaffirmed by gold (<-- an archaic and discounseled technique) ==> *put ‘form’ beyond the reach of pictorial illusion and beyond the realm of nature*
*pictorial truth sometimes lies in the painter's choice in working on the surface* (acknowledging the powerful claims of the axis of the field and the determining control of its shape, recognizing the dialectic of circle and square, the signifying tension between picture plane and orthogonal recession, etc.) --> in the case of Raphael: theology becomes a commentary on painting : pictorial structure (directly semiotic and not mimetic) = meaning
(always?) *faithfuls need their originals*
in Helmholtz's 1856 comprehensive account of human vision, the eye emerges *empathically embedded in the thinness and opacity of the body*
eye (=/= a marvelous apparatus) : an apparatus with built-in aberrations, proneness to error, and inconsistencies in is processing of visual information --> entoptical phenomenon --James--> subjective optical sensation: example of selective attention excludes from consciousness sensations that are *nonreferential* (= irrelevant to the knowledge about the world)
(~= Ernst Mach's sight phantasms)
arborescent vocabulary of the scientific literature on the eye in the 1880s
*new diagram of the eye: photoreceptors in the human eye are placed at the back of retina, behind the blood vessels (that literally intervene seeing) --Seurat--> inseparable mix of an abstract mathematically constructed & a physiological perception more subjectivity determined, “domain of vision has been integrated Iin the field of desire” (Lacan), “phantasmatic events that occur on the surface of the bodies” (Crary)
=/= older diagram of the eye: the ideal unobstructed functioning of camera obscura --> ‘scene of representation’
‘dream of immediacy’ --to--> (Seurat's refusal of scenography ==> nondisclosure ~) fantasy of a theatre without representation
Rousseau's affirmation of *political self-sovereignty* in the ‘festival’: a stage which presents nothing to the sight --Derrida--> a place where the spectator, presenting himself as spectacle, will no longer be seer or voyeur *** (<-- what i learned from Phill) ==> presence will be full as the intimacy of a self-presence, as the sentiment of self-proximity, of self-sameness
Lyotard: theatrically fold --> a box closed upon itself --> only those to appear on the stage which come from what will be known as the ‘exterior’
*zero: the sign of the empty center, the place where everything is supposed to be visible and intelligible : the place of knowledge --> god, organized body, society, capital, the ego, platonic forms, etc.
Grosz: construction of embodied subjectivity --> mobius strip (a 19th century invention), inflection of mind and body to one another through a kind of twisting or inversion -->[...]
(263)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%77.7[...]classical (and early modern) status of the image
=/= as a windowlike plane intersecting a cone of vision
=/= as a flat plane covered with colored patches
(Seurat's optics:) ***images apparitional value*** <== effect of image's detachment from a broader visual field (=/= diaroma and stereoscop)
--> 19th century optical experiences that severed the image from any continuous or intelligible relation to the position of the observing objects
(=/= Wagnerian aesthetics)
--> *collective visual experience* ~~--> precinematic forms of moving images
(@apass: hand drawing is not about being “trapped in older artisanal modes of production” --?--> “performance =/= projection”)
to assess (the relationships between):
•your own technological products
•makeup of your audience
•economical realities of the marketplace
}==> inventor of 19th century (Raynaud, Edison, )
--> modify your machines in terms of:
•performance
•shifting audience needs (and possibilities)
phantasmagoric: occultation of production by means of the outward appearance of the product (creating an experience for a solitary and immobile spectator)
(spectral) atopic image: literally not there
shimmering --> effect of detachment from the environment
Reynaud's projected moving images --> elastic and reversible temporalities (that had little to do with Lumieres's “real time”)
Cheret's posters (joyful modern women, advertisement for cosmetics, lighting fixtures, department stores, ballets, and so on) --> a technology of attention + a specific ornamental representation of commodity culture
(--> practical functionings of consumption culture in the 1870s) @OSP
*Cheret's “personal style” in graphic design = an abstract luster جلوه a decorative formula that could be applied promiscuously to any possible object of consumption* =/= Seurat's dream of universal style
****rich textures of entertainment and visual spectacle****
-which range of optical apparatuses are available for public consumption now?
[in 1880s: peep show, magic lantern, shadow theater, large-scale stethoscope, zeotropes, etc.]
my links with Seurat --> his interest in:
•contemporary popular visual culture
•perceptual modernization
•
Crary's reading of Seurat's cirque: new experience of form deployed in time --> kinematic (=/= semantic, iconographic significance of the clown and acrobat in the painting) --> *the illusion of movement*
beginning with the phenakistoscope and zoetrope in the 1830s --through--> innumerable optical devices all the way into 1890s --> endlessly fascinating and repetitive --> sites of attentiveness (~= attraction)
{ Seurat + Reynaud + Edison (~ producers of the ***machines of the visible***, all[...]
(265)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%78.4[...]tremely unstable scientific ground] used monsters and marvels (as a sort of intellectual hygiene) to jolt people out of their assumptions about the natural world
=/= Aristotelian natural philosophy
--> anomaly took center stage of scientific explanations ~= art's investment in the exceptional
==> curiosity becomes a virtue =/= vice
•nature is allowed to joke
•nature has the freedom to experiment =/= God
--> ended by:
•18th century's *division of labor*
•19th century's *institution of science*
(two-headed cat's) deformations --> terrifying + electrifying
[*]bestiary = Telegram media from God:
•sign of end
•sign of fecundity, creativity, variety of nature
.../horror/wonder/horror/wonder/horror/wonder/...
“everyone was trafficking in marvels in the 17th century”
Daston
... --> premodern sci --> age of wonder --> modern science --> ...
cabinets of curiosity
(Daston's) chambers of wonders
•to overwhelm you
•to impress the ambassador
for Aristotle, philosophy starts with wonder, but you make it disappear as soon as possible (“wonder = sign of ignorance” of the unlettered and illiterate)
genre of natural history involving the marvels of insects --> domesticate the emotion of wonder for things we can explain
Daston =/= (early 20th century) morose and elegiac discourse about the disenchantment of the world
...................................
pessimism ~= realism
(optimism ~= idealism)
...................................
(to move from) eternal truths --to--> eternal archives
(an aesthetic:) archival monuments
despite computer's hype and undeniable capacity and flexibility of computerize databases, the practices of collecting, inventorying, describing, image-making, collating, and publishing have remaining stable since the monumental projects of 19th century: corpus inscriptionum latinarum, carte du ciel, botanical gardens, etc. --> archival projects
...................................
popular and learned interest in monsters
(in the 16th century & 17th century Baconian scientific programm:) treatments of nature and natural history must have included (with rigorous selection) monsters (~ aberrations in the natural order: new, rare, and unusual nature, both exotic & domestic)
[*]nature: an ingenious craftsman --> [*]monster: nature's most artful work (--> they bridged the natural & the artificial)
•corresponded to the activities of nature =/= types of subject matter, methods of investigation
•interest in irregularities (=/= end of 17th century interest in nature's uniformity and order)
•
Lazarus exhibition, the parasitic twin (the italian conjoined twins who toured freak shows in 17th century europe)
[...]
(266)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%81.4[...]ct matter, methods of investigation
•interest in irregularities (=/= end of 17th century interest in nature's uniformity and order)
•
Lazarus exhibition, the parasitic twin (the italian conjoined twins who toured freak shows in 17th century europe)
(Daston --> a case study of) the changing relationship between popular & learned culture
legal status of monsters
infanticide in antiquity
earlier tradition of interest in monster:
•Aristotle --> Albertus Magnus
•divine sign --> Cicero, Augustine, Isidore of Sevill
•cosmographical & anthropologic --> Solinus
monsters in a context of a whole natural phenomen (bestiary):
earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions, celestial apparitions, strange rains (of blood), stones, and miscellanea
(monsters --> shift from) signs of God's wrat --to--> signs of nature's fertility
(by the end of 17th century) --to--> comparative anatomy and embryology (teratology)
(from) اعجوبه prodigy --to--> examples of medical pathology
*peasant and professional had participated to a significant extent in a shared culture of intellectual and religious interest* --✕-->{
(literate culture evolved far more rapidly ==> sharpening of social boundaries of)
city dwellers =/= peasants
urban literate elite =/= unlettered day laboure
--> for the educated layman: (religious associations of) monsters = another manifestation of popular ignorance and superstition --fostering--> uncritical wonder =/= sober investigation of natural cause
prodigy --> contrary to nature --> attributable directly to God (divine displeasure)
-the sunne shal suddenly shine againe in the night, and the moone thre times a day. blood shal drop out of the wood, and the stone shal give his voyce [...] There shalbe a confusion in many places, and the fyre shal oft breake forthe, and the wilde beastes shal change their places, and menstruous women shal beare monstres[...]
•monstrum = prodigium ==> monstrat [monstro: i wonder --> i indict --> i teach, demonstrate] = god's will
•apocalyptic association --> world reformation, the overthrow of the wicked --> vindication of god's elect
(bestiaries were a lot commentaries)
various bestial parts...
bestial vices and errors (of...)
ephemeral literature
displayed and recited publicly
characteristically illustrated
appeal through spoken word & image to the illiterate
Pierre Boaistuau [<== Peucer, Lycosthenes, Swiss surgeon Jakob Rueff, naturalist Konrad Gesner, Pierre Belon]
histoire tragique
histoire prodigieuse (monster literature, bestiary?)
•two-headed woman seen in Bavaria in 1541
•three-legged Siamese twins from 1552
•calf witho[...]
(267)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%81.4[...] a shared culture of intellectual and religious interest* --✕-->{
(literate culture evolved far more rapidly ==> sharpening of social boundaries of)
city dwellers =/= peasants
urban literate elite =/= unlettered day laboure
--> for the educated layman: (religious associations of) monsters = another manifestation of popular ignorance and superstition --fostering--> uncritical wonder =/= sober investigation of natural cause
prodigy --> contrary to nature --> attributable directly to God (divine displeasure)
-the sunne shal suddenly shine againe in the night, and the moone thre times a day. blood shal drop out of the wood, and the stone shal give his voyce [...] There shalbe a confusion in many places, and the fyre shal oft breake forthe, and the wilde beastes shal change their places, and menstruous women shal beare monstres[...]
•monstrum = prodigium ==> monstrat [monstro: i wonder --> i indict --> i teach, demonstrate] = god's will
•apocalyptic association --> world reformation, the overthrow of the wicked --> vindication of god's elect
(bestiaries were a lot commentaries)
various bestial parts...
bestial vices and errors (of...)
ephemeral literature
displayed and recited publicly
characteristically illustrated
appeal through spoken word & image to the illiterate
Pierre Boaistuau [<== Peucer, Lycosthenes, Swiss surgeon Jakob Rueff, naturalist Konrad Gesner, Pierre Belon]
histoire tragique
histoire prodigieuse (monster literature, bestiary?)
•two-headed woman seen in Bavaria in 1541
•three-legged Siamese twins from 1552
•calf without forelegs reported in 1556
•celebrated monster of Cracow
•
ghoulish tone, religious didacticism, erudite آموزنده, monsters as polemical weapons
“nature's wonder?” --> to “discovre the secret judgment and scourge of the ire of God”
The Scripture sayth, before the ende
Of all thinges shall appeare,
God will wounders straunge thinges send,
As some is sene this yeare.
The selye infantes, voyde of shape,
The calues and pygges so straunge,
With other mo of suche mishape,
Declareth this worldes chaunge.
...monsters began to lose their religious resonance
it was unlawful to “delight” in the undesirable
portentous meaning of monster
(from) fear --to--> delight
(from) prodigy --to--> wonder
(from) sermon --to--> table-talk
(from) horrible, terrible, effrayable, espouventable --to--> strange, wonderful, merveilleux (marvelous جالب)
(from) final cause --to--> proximate cause (physical explanations and the natural order)
}==> nature began to assume the role of an autonomous entity with a will (and sense of humour of her own) ~~>[...]
(269)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%81.5[...]
•calf without forelegs reported in 1556
•celebrated monster of Cracow
•
ghoulish tone, religious didacticism, erudite آموزنده, monsters as polemical weapons
“nature's wonder?” --> to “discovre the secret judgment and scourge of the ire of God”
The Scripture sayth, before the ende
Of all thinges shall appeare,
God will wounders straunge thinges send,
As some is sene this yeare.
The selye infantes, voyde of shape,
The calues and pygges so straunge,
With other mo of suche mishape,
Declareth this worldes chaunge.
...monsters began to lose their religious resonance
it was unlawful to “delight” in the undesirable
portentous meaning of monster
(from) fear --to--> delight
(from) prodigy --to--> wonder
(from) sermon --to--> table-talk
(from) horrible, terrible, effrayable, espouventable --to--> strange, wonderful, merveilleux (marvelous جالب)
(from) final cause --to--> proximate cause (physical explanations and the natural order)
}==> nature began to assume the role of an autonomous entity with a will (and sense of humour of her own) ~~> natural wonder
wonder literature ([lavishly illustrated bestiary, cosmography, travel literature, geological curiosa, herbal and astrological lore,] of later 16th and 17th century Daston) --> secularization of an interest in (monsters as) prodigies
--part-of--> the great body of common culture
--affinity--> popular 16th century genre of diverses lefons (selections from famous authors)
catalogues of strange instances or hidden properties of animals, vegetables and mineral
(middle class culture in elizabethan england)
prodigies denuded of their supernatural aura & (presented) to surprise and entertain the reader =/= to acquaint the reader with imminent apocalypse and judgeme
Certaine Secrete Wonders of Nature
portentous events بد شگون
(crocodiles) to be granted honorary monstrous status by virtue of their rarit
many will reade them [monsters], heare them and haue profit by them, that otherwise whould neuer haue knowen them. For many (I suppose) will buye this Booke for the things whereto they are affectioned, that neuer coulde or would have bought, or looked on the bookes, wherein all they are. -Lupton
common and popular forms of escapist literature: *travel books* and *chivalric romanc*
(--> don Quixote)
monstrous races (men with a single giant foot, or huge ears, or their faces on their chests, giants and dwarfs)
medically oriented monster literature
[Daston:] Pare was forced to eliminate a section on lesbianism, with a graphic description of the female genitals, before including Des monstres in later editions of his collected[...]
(272)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%81.5[...]/>
wonder literature ([lavishly illustrated bestiary, cosmography, travel literature, geological curiosa, herbal and astrological lore,] of later 16th and 17th century Daston) --> secularization of an interest in (monsters as) prodigies
--part-of--> the great body of common culture
--affinity--> popular 16th century genre of diverses lefons (selections from famous authors)
catalogues of strange instances or hidden properties of animals, vegetables and mineral
(middle class culture in elizabethan england)
prodigies denuded of their supernatural aura & (presented) to surprise and entertain the reader =/= to acquaint the reader with imminent apocalypse and judgeme
Certaine Secrete Wonders of Nature
portentous events بد شگون
(crocodiles) to be granted honorary monstrous status by virtue of their rarit
many will reade them [monsters], heare them and haue profit by them, that otherwise whould neuer haue knowen them. For many (I suppose) will buye this Booke for the things whereto they are affectioned, that neuer coulde or would have bought, or looked on the bookes, wherein all they are. -Lupton
common and popular forms of escapist literature: *travel books* and *chivalric romanc*
(--> don Quixote)
monstrous races (men with a single giant foot, or huge ears, or their faces on their chests, giants and dwarfs)
medically oriented monster literature
[Daston:] Pare was forced to eliminate a section on lesbianism, with a graphic description of the female genitals, before including Des monstres in later editions of his collected work
A Helpe to Memorie and Discourse (of Wonders, Foreign and Domestic)
*the passages and occurrences of the world* #ajayeb
•the creatures thereof
•the casualties therein
little-known properties of... (wine and water, fish, dogs, cuckolds, hunchbacks and monsters)
popular ignorance
solitary efforts of the professional scholar
culture of the educated layman (lawyer, businessman, government official, and their wives and daughters)
[change in sensibility (&-=>? change in interpretation)]
beginning of the withdrawal of the educated classes from more popular culture
@Goda
monsters (familiar canon of prodigies) became a subject of great fashion and not vulgar
(Daston tracing how) “in the wonder literature, then, monsters--along with the rest of the canon of prodigies--began to cast off their religious associations. this trend was accompanied by a movement to emphasize natural causes over supernatural ones.”
Pare represented [the causes of monstrous births] an elaboration on the natural explanations offered by Aristotle and writers in the Aristotelian tradition (too much or too little seed[...]
(274)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%81.6[...] escapist literature: *travel books* and *chivalric romanc*
(--> don Quixote)
monstrous races (men with a single giant foot, or huge ears, or their faces on their chests, giants and dwarfs)
medically oriented monster literature
[Daston:] Pare was forced to eliminate a section on lesbianism, with a graphic description of the female genitals, before including Des monstres in later editions of his collected work
A Helpe to Memorie and Discourse (of Wonders, Foreign and Domestic)
*the passages and occurrences of the world* #ajayeb
•the creatures thereof
•the casualties therein
little-known properties of... (wine and water, fish, dogs, cuckolds, hunchbacks and monsters)
popular ignorance
solitary efforts of the professional scholar
culture of the educated layman (lawyer, businessman, government official, and their wives and daughters)
[change in sensibility (&-=>? change in interpretation)]
beginning of the withdrawal of the educated classes from more popular culture
@Goda
monsters (familiar canon of prodigies) became a subject of great fashion and not vulgar
(Daston tracing how) “in the wonder literature, then, monsters--along with the rest of the canon of prodigies--began to cast off their religious associations. this trend was accompanied by a movement to emphasize natural causes over supernatural ones.”
Pare represented [the causes of monstrous births] an elaboration on the natural explanations offered by Aristotle and writers in the Aristotelian tradition (too much or too little seed, maternal imagination, a narrow womb, a traumatic pregnancy, hereditary disease, bestiality and so on) + a new causal category: artifice (to include fakes and children mutilated by their parents to enhance their take as beggars)
shift in *causal thinking* --> (expanded the power of) maternal imagination covering eventuality ==> a new way of talking about nature
{(from) in the prodigy literature nature was effectively transparent (a veil through which God's purposes could be discerned)}--to--> nature gained a new autonomy ( fertility of invention =/= wrath) --> *nature personified* (the artisan) [Pare: “chambermaid to our great God"], monsters were treated as jokes or “sports” (lusus) of a personified nature
transcorporeal fields of sensoriality =/= boundedness of isolated bodies and things
nonanthropocentric zoological studies
Bacon's (tripartite division of) natural history:
1. *natural: the study of nature “in course”, or natural history
2. *preternatural: the study of nature “erring”, or the “history of marvels” --> a coherent category (=/= miscellaneous collection of phenomen)
3. *artificial: the study of nature “wrought, or the history of arts
nat[...]
(276)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%81.6[...]y efforts of the professional scholar
culture of the educated layman (lawyer, businessman, government official, and their wives and daughters)
[change in sensibility (&-=>? change in interpretation)]
beginning of the withdrawal of the educated classes from more popular culture
@Goda
monsters (familiar canon of prodigies) became a subject of great fashion and not vulgar
(Daston tracing how) “in the wonder literature, then, monsters--along with the rest of the canon of prodigies--began to cast off their religious associations. this trend was accompanied by a movement to emphasize natural causes over supernatural ones.”
Pare represented [the causes of monstrous births] an elaboration on the natural explanations offered by Aristotle and writers in the Aristotelian tradition (too much or too little seed, maternal imagination, a narrow womb, a traumatic pregnancy, hereditary disease, bestiality and so on) + a new causal category: artifice (to include fakes and children mutilated by their parents to enhance their take as beggars)
shift in *causal thinking* --> (expanded the power of) maternal imagination covering eventuality ==> a new way of talking about nature
{(from) in the prodigy literature nature was effectively transparent (a veil through which God's purposes could be discerned)}--to--> nature gained a new autonomy ( fertility of invention =/= wrath) --> *nature personified* (the artisan) [Pare: “chambermaid to our great God"], monsters were treated as jokes or “sports” (lusus) of a personified nature
transcorporeal fields of sensoriality =/= boundedness of isolated bodies and things
nonanthropocentric zoological studies
Bacon's (tripartite division of) natural history:
1. *natural: the study of nature “in course”, or natural history
2. *preternatural: the study of nature “erring”, or the “history of marvels” --> a coherent category (=/= miscellaneous collection of phenomen)
3. *artificial: the study of nature “wrought, or the history of arts
nature's aberrations for the finest examples of her workmanship
nature imagery of the wonder book
renaissance thought -->{ (antithesis of) art =/= nature }--> art may aid, imitate, modify or surpass nature
--✕--> Bacon: art (formal and final causes) should become more natural & nature (material and efficient causes) should be made more artificial --> monster: nature's artificial work
•nature in extremis =/= conventional wisdom
•monsters: models for the novelties of art
--Bacon--> enrichment of both speculative and operative natural philosophy (=/= books of fabulous experiments and secrets)
**wonder literature sacrificed accuracy to admiration**
corroboration
xxxxxx
[...]
(277)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%81.7[...]re treated as jokes or “sports” (lusus) of a personified nature
transcorporeal fields of sensoriality =/= boundedness of isolated bodies and things
nonanthropocentric zoological studies
Bacon's (tripartite division of) natural history:
1. *natural: the study of nature “in course”, or natural history
2. *preternatural: the study of nature “erring”, or the “history of marvels” --> a coherent category (=/= miscellaneous collection of phenomen)
3. *artificial: the study of nature “wrought, or the history of arts
nature's aberrations for the finest examples of her workmanship
nature imagery of the wonder book
renaissance thought -->{ (antithesis of) art =/= nature }--> art may aid, imitate, modify or surpass nature
--✕--> Bacon: art (formal and final causes) should become more natural & nature (material and efficient causes) should be made more artificial --> monster: nature's artificial work
•nature in extremis =/= conventional wisdom
•monsters: models for the novelties of art
--Bacon--> enrichment of both speculative and operative natural philosophy (=/= books of fabulous experiments and secrets)
**wonder literature sacrificed accuracy to admiration**
corroboration
xxxxxx
...................................
to take echoing abstractions (reason, nature, etc.) and try to cash them out in concrete practices
(transformation of) extremely abstract --to--> extremely concrete
-why is it so irresistible to reach analogies between the moral and the natural orders?
other orders of nature [**every order of nature sustains a moral order**]:
1. local nature (what happens when we scale up)
2. ontological identity card (what makes a squirrels)
3. universal natural laws
aggregation of these forms of orders ]**each provokes a characteristic cognitive passion** : they involve judgment + emotional reaction to its transgressions]:
1. disequilibria (--> terror: fear saturated by guilt) --> local nature
2. monsters (--> horror) --> specific nature
3. marvels and miracles (--> wonder) --> natural laws
[(a very recently) forceful kind of] argument to anchor moral or political order in a natural foundation
--Daston--> we are species that represent (**we must model our orders** : to make visible & external) --{with an appeal to a natural analog}--> *nature: the richest source of models of all kind of orders
[!!!today task of artist:] ***to give back humanity its childhood*** (that was lost in the age of objectivity) @Sina, Sarah
...................................
Schutz
social nature of knowledge
how people grasp the consciousness of others while living within their own streams of consciousness
[...]
(278)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%81.7[...]priates what it endeavors to know or project its self onto an imagined other --> a passion that reduces to a startle response at the unfamiliar
}=/= historian (and teacher [and performance-lecturer]) vacation (or responsibility) --> (we must aspire to) imagine the kind of nonappropriative perspectival *intensely cognitive* response
middle ages (how they characterize their difference:)
1. theological-philosophical understanding of wonder <== university intellectuals {
◦admiratio =/= scientia ==> knowledge
◦admiratio ~= diversitas (diversity) =/= solitum (the usual, the general)
2. religious discourse about wonder <-- sermons, hagiography, devotional writing, enormously popular genre of *saint's lives* (tazkirat تذکره نویسی) {
◦admiratio =/= imitatio (imitation جعلى) [the readers were urged to wonder at and not immitate the power and extravagant asceticism of holy men and women (in Attar?)]
◾admiratio ~= paradox (coincidence of opposites) [one finds mira (wondrous) again and again in the texts alongside mixta (mixed, composite things, chimera)]
◦admiratio ~/= curiositas (curiosity کنجکاوی)
◦admiratio ~/= disputatio (disputatiousness ستيزه جويى)
3. literature of entertainment: travel accounts, history writing, collection of odd stories called by one author
◦admirari (to wonder at) =/= rimari (to pay into)
◦(collected stories ==> amuse, instruct, move their aristocratic listeners -->) wonder =/= inductio exemplorum (generalizing)
12th 14th centuries
(twin authorities for middle ages) Aristotle + Augustine ==> tradition of understanding wonder as perspectival & psychological ==> theological-philosophical discourse
•Augustine: marvel =/= what we know of nature (=/= nature) --> *lodge the wonderful-ness of things (not in our reaction to them but) in their ontological status*
•Anselm of Canterbury: marvelous =/= natural =/= artificial (voluntary, made by humans)
}--> miracles are objectively wonderful (because produced by God's power alone)
[1]
early middle ages latin texts --> mirabilia (wonder) ~= miracula (miracle)
13th century --> mirabilia (wonder) =/= miracula (miracle) ==ontological==> flatten the impulse to wonder:
1- (tends to) separate out (with hair-splitting distinction) a small number of phenomena as objectively wonder-inducing (*whereas all others no matter how odd are wonderful only to the ignorant*)
2- (suggests that) most events have natural causes: *if philosophers are diligent enough ==> wonder will cease* [= Sherlock Holmes]
◦(1235) William of Augergne --> people do not know how to go about investigating the cause [--> detective]
◦(1325) Oresme --> *vigorous imagining of a retained species + small external appearance + imbalance of some internal disposition ==> marvelou[...]
(279)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%81.9[...]on that de-wondered anomalies by insisting on an increasingly ordered world, whose laws were decipherable by the wise)
[2]
in the discourse of the homiletic موعظه and hagiographical تاريخ انبياء (tazkirat) --> wonder =/= imitable قابل تقلید (--✕--> the known, the knowable, the usual)
“non imitandum sed admirandum” (not to be immitated but to be marveled at)
heroes and martyrs =/= ordinary faithful
--> (Attar [master of rhetorics] in تذکرة الاولیا uses) a kind of *humility topos* intended to express an author's conviction that the miracle-working charisma of a saint was far beyond the capacity of author and reader alike (channel the attention of the faithful... towards the emulation of ordinary virtues: to control credulity ساده لوحی, extravagant asceticism, straining after flamboyant religiosity)
}--> nonappropriative nature of wonder
Bernard of Clairvaux (medieval piety)
(rhetoric of) wonder =/= curiosity
praying to the affairs of others
praying to the secrets of the universe
wonderful deformed beauty (of Romanesque sculpture)
--> ****imitatio (جعل) = appropriation = being in society with [---> go to drawing mimetics, literal CG 3D modeling], experiencing, learning, taking into oneself, consuming****
“we, when we take the deeds [of others] for imitation, ought to make the lofty things hidden and humble ones manifest” (like the shape of the seal: sculpted inward is appeared concave when printed) --> mimesis
*the encounter is made possible because an ontological similarity to that other is built into the experiencing self*
golden goblet 🏆
we consume, absorb, incorporate the drink (~= imitate the virtues) =/= we give back (~= we wonder at) the goblet, we wonder at what we cannot in any sense incorporate, or consume, or encompass in our mental categories --> we wonder at mystery, at paradox, at admirabiles mixturae <==Bernard== three hybrids:
1- mixture of God and man
2- mixture of woman and virgin
3- mixture of belief and falsity (in our hearts)
(Attar seductively drawn to the wonderful deformed beauty of saints of early sufism)
[title]
failed exorcism
[3]
(Bynum providing a) medieval theory of wonder in the *literature of enlightenment*:
history writing
travel accounts
story collection
عجایبالمخلوقات ajayebnameh: the encyclopedic tradition of the ancient world known as *paradoxology: collection of oddities (monsters, hybrids, distant races, marvelous lands, [telegram beasts, instagram animals]) + antique notions of portents or omen: unusual events that foreshadowed the (usually catastrophic) future + accompanied by a vague sense of dread [it gives you goosebumps]
+ (Ehsan master of) [*][...]
(280)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%82.1[...]auty (of Romanesque sculpture)
--> ****imitatio (جعل) = appropriation = being in society with [---> go to drawing mimetics, literal CG 3D modeling], experiencing, learning, taking into oneself, consuming****
“we, when we take the deeds [of others] for imitation, ought to make the lofty things hidden and humble ones manifest” (like the shape of the seal: sculpted inward is appeared concave when printed) --> mimesis
*the encounter is made possible because an ontological similarity to that other is built into the experiencing self*
golden goblet 🏆
we consume, absorb, incorporate the drink (~= imitate the virtues) =/= we give back (~= we wonder at) the goblet, we wonder at what we cannot in any sense incorporate, or consume, or encompass in our mental categories --> we wonder at mystery, at paradox, at admirabiles mixturae <==Bernard== three hybrids:
1- mixture of God and man
2- mixture of woman and virgin
3- mixture of belief and falsity (in our hearts)
(Attar seductively drawn to the wonderful deformed beauty of saints of early sufism)
[title]
failed exorcism
[3]
(Bynum providing a) medieval theory of wonder in the *literature of enlightenment*:
history writing
travel accounts
story collection
عجایبالمخلوقات ajayebnameh: the encyclopedic tradition of the ancient world known as *paradoxology: collection of oddities (monsters, hybrids, distant races, marvelous lands, [telegram beasts, instagram animals]) + antique notions of portents or omen: unusual events that foreshadowed the (usually catastrophic) future + accompanied by a vague sense of dread [it gives you goosebumps]
+ (Ehsan master of) [*]fabulae: (story) told without claims to their ontological status =/= historia
}==> theory of wonder: [@apass]
1. *response to facticity*
2. *response to the singular*
3. *is deeply perspectival*
•William of Newburgh --> (some sort of) probatio (testing, evidence) --base--> rimari (probe, pry into فضولی، با اهرم بلند کردن) =/= admirari (to wonder at)
•Gervais of Tilbury --> facts ==induce==> marvel ~= res gestae (deeds or historical accounts) =/= stories (fabulae, lies) [~= *you cannot be amazed by what you don't believe* (stories of ghosts, vampires, migration of quail, flight of squirrels, etc.)]
•John of Salisbury --> *marvellous singularity* (collection of advice for courtiers and princes) ~ wonder: response to majesty (hidden wisdom, significance) =/= generalizing = moralizing (inductio exemplorum, citing of instructive general causes --> forensic)
•
credible deeply unusual singular event ==> admiratio
[*]perspectival: reaction of a particular “us” to an “other” that is “other” only relative to the particular “us” (<-- this is wh[...]
(281)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%82.1[...]we find words for it)
***texts may give us access to reactions less through adjectives attached to nouns*** (by calling something “wonderful” or “dreadful” =/= indicating the responses of an implicit reader/viewer)
•a keyword search for “anger” will tend to turn up set pieces on how to control it --> discussions of where it is not
•reactions such as wonder, delight, or terror (do not simply occur) they are *evoked*, sometimes even *staged* --> we can explore what evoked them
finding wonder-words =/= finding wonder (complex semantic field)
wonder-reaction:
•terror
•disgust
•solemn astonishment
•playful delight
in medieval accounts wonder often has:
•a mischievous quality
Bernard of Clairvaux --> spice of stories
11th century --> (naughtily) impish girl saint jokes
Gerald of Wales --> nature's pranks
}--> moralizing bestiary tradition (taking more pleasure in the animal tales than in theology)
analogies between animals and humans are anything but solemn and didactic
•a dreadful quality
(Attar's accounts of saint torture)
Gerald of Wales --> recounting some of the earliest warewold stories to survive in european literature, he glosses the admiratio felt by those inside the story as stupor خرفتی, timor بیم, horror خوف
◦shape-shifting violating nature
◦tales of metamorphoses --> the real change of substance in the eucharist عشاربانى + the terrifying possibility that sexual intercourse between humans and animals might produce monsters
(Bynum asking) what in medieval accounts or artistic representations tends to trigger wonder? *where do the surviving source give us access either to intensely heightened reactions or to events and objects calculated to evoke or stage such reactions?*
--> where wonder is not?
(didactic purposes of) miracle collections
*hovering significance* (of unusual natural events: eclipse, earthquakes, famines) --> sometimes listed as clipped matter-of-fact prose
William Auvergne + Oresme --> natural causes can be found for marvels tend to flatten the language of some accounts of natural world as well
}==> miracles, portents فال بد, oddities are sites and stagings of wonder less often than we might suppose
12th - 14th century --> narrative accounts tell us of objects and events carefully constructed to elicit awe, delight, dread
*rulers (secular + ecclesiastical) --competed--> display of power and splender including tricks and automata --calculated--> to amaze and tantalize:
•(13th century) خانه وحشت 🏰 evidence of a count of Artois who built an elaborate funhouse with distorting mirrors, rooms that simulated thunderstorms, hidden pipes for wetting unsuspecting visitors and covering them with flour
•p[...]
(282)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%82.2[...]mong different planes at different speeds ==illusion==> movement and depth
labyrinth --(Deleuze and Guattari)--> “smooth space” [can be explored only by legwork]
labyrinth --> immersion & navigation [--> descriptions of technology]
labyrinth --> texture field (a form of emerging visuality)
Jassem + Sina's labyrinthine polychromic activities (==> underlying artistic creation) --> interpret form symbolically through the visual residues of the technical operations
fetish: unnatural participation with things
*field theory*
behaviour of a dynamic system that is extended in space
all fields in nature are quantum fields
•[*]matter: energy bound within fields
•[=/= classical magic --> action at a distance]
•system --> a relation-concept [=/= additive whole]
--> ability to exhibit gradients, or lines of force
self-organization: (the capacity of a field) to generate patterns spontaneously
topological reading is a christian tradition, theory, and practice of interpreting the figurative meaning of the Bible. It is part of Biblical exegesis.
According to ideas developed by the Church Fathers, the literal meaning, or God-intended meaning of the words of the Bible, may be either figurative or non-figurative; for instance, in the Song of Songs (also called Canticles or Song of Solomon), the inspired meaning is always figurative. The typical meaning is the inspired meaning of words referring to persons, things, and actions of the Old Testament which are inspired types of persons, things, and actions of the New Testament.
The early uses of allegory and topology were very close. Later a clearer distinction was made between the allegorical mystical, and tropological moral, styles of interpretation
...................................
(Mitchell:) vision has played the role of the sovereign sense since God looked at his own creation and saw it was good, or perhaps even earlier when he began the act of creation with the division of light from the darkness.
...................................
(Corbin)
Platonic archetypes in terms of Zoroastrian angelology
psalms and invocations to the beings of light
the celestial physics, which limits the number of Intelligences
victoriality
Sovereignty of Light, heralded by Zarathustra زرتشت
(arch)angelic vectors
to grasp the notion of ishraq (eshragh اشراق), the structure of the world that it governs, and the form of spirituality that it determines.
ishragh is at the same time both the ‘illumination’ and the ‘reflection’ (zuhur ظهور) of being
appearance = unveiling
Thus, just as in the sensible world the term signifies the splendor of the morning, the first radiance[...]
(283)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%82.8[...]This world contains all the richness and variety of the world of sense in a subtle state; it is a world of subsistent and autonomous Forms and Images, the threshold of the malakut {ملکوت}. In it are to be found the mystical cities of Jabalqa جابلقا, Jabarsa جابرسا and Hurqalya هورقلیا.
It appears that Sohrevardi was indeed the first to elaborate the ontology of the inter-world, and the theme once introduced was taken up and expanded by all the mystics and gnostics of Islam.
stories:
The action of these Recitals, in fact, takes place in the ‘alame mesal’ [عالم مثال]. In them, the mystic relates the drama of his personal history on the level of a supra-sensible world, the world of the events of the soul, because the writer, in configurating his own symbols, spontaneously discovers the meaning of the symbols of the divine revelations.
We are not concerned with a series of ‘allegories’ but with the secret hierohistory, invisible to the external senses, which unfolds in the world of the malakut, and with which external and fleeting events symbolize.
سهروردی Sohrevardi's noble venture is not an ‘insurrection’ to islam an external and literalist religion, rather view that sees the integral Islam is spiritual, then Sohrevardi lies at the summit of this spirituality and is nourished by it.
crypto-Shiism شیعه
prophetic philosophy
...................................
Between a scientific treatise, a fable and philosophical discourse, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis imagines a pitch-dark world of an animal living as deep as possible down in the abyss in order to disclose a way of living opposed to the luminous one of the human being.
...................................
analogy of the cave
man with the x-ray vision
...................................
nowhere prosperous
ruinous prosperous
accidental intellects (subjects, qualities, quantities,)
light, self, presence, knowledge
One night darkness had settled in sky and a darkness that and held the hand of the brother of non-existence had been catered around the lower world.
After sleep came upon me, disappointment resulted.
I was holding a candle.
has two doors, one to the city and the other one to the desert. I went and closed the door
tailors of divine words
I then saw an eleven-layered pot thrown into the desert with some water in it and in the water were some pebbles around which here were a few animals.
The heavenly spheres were absolutely round and a straight line could not have been [drawn] between them. Those eleven levels were colorless and due to their extreme fineness, what was in them could not be veiled.
[...]
(284)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%83.1[...]mental materialities.
Avital studies the interferences of:
1- the lower, sensory imagination
2- the higher, intellective imagination (that receives inspiration from above; #prophets)
ajayeb: synthesized Greek philosophy + Qur'anic thought + popular material body belief
( material body [ X ) immaterial intellect ]
“X” : imaginal مثل: (audio-visual glimpses of divine reality)
•accounts of afterlife --> gardens
•accounts of apocalypse --> sounds
•saints biographies --> performances
•
christian tradition started to view the intellect as internal to the soul ==> regard imagination as psychological: an inspiration, invention, recombination from within (and not from without) (Elen finds herself in this tradition?) ==> concept of an autonomous psychological subject
so persian subject wanted the so much to be there, when there was no flower, that the went to a zone of beyond, picked some schizo-flowers and came back {this is Sa'di}--> iranian metaphysics
-i am more interested in the blooming of flowers, also metaphorical understanding of their morphogenesis. this tag line can be a subject of a phd study. for the last thousand years the iranian literature has been busy with this, how to describe flowers
*iranians believe in image
sufis, iranian philosophers, ... --> so poluted concepts and words
attachment to the world <--...(intelligible, barzakh)...--> presence of God
(who knows what the ‘presence of God’ means. let's not assume we know.)
Sohrevardi argues that the imagination effectively the indipendent real of images
فتوحات fotuhat --?--> illuminations
the imagination realm exercises its ruling property over every thing and non-thing. it gives form to absolute nonexistence , to the impossible, to the necessary, and to possibility. it makes existence nonexistence existent. (Ibn Arabi < Marks)
majmu al bahrain مجموع البحرین, confluence of two oceans, to set two oceans in motion that flow side by side together, with a barzakh between
--> #my بحرین theory, wave surface theory of language
(to be careful with the figure of) wave --> questioning the textual case while then morphing into the unreadablity of its own answer
Giovanni Pico de Mirandola: phantasy can strive to draw the senses to things celestial ... but if, yeslding to the senses, phantasy shall decline to apply itself to the business of virtue, so great is its power that it afflicts the body and beclouds the mind, and finally brings it about that man divests himself of humanity
(@Aela?)
imagination according to:
Kant + Hume combining and synthesizing agent
-what new materialism has to say about the imaginal?
Jungian archetype --> ex[...]
(285)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%83.7[...]d, and configured a major matrix of concerns
problem with secular humanist utopias --> forging of a ‘new man’ through the mobilization of a specific a priori definition of man required (both):
•man's divinization خداسازى
•man's purge پاکسازى
essentialist definitions of man ==> biologistic, scientistic, political, religious, moralist projects ==>
•lay claim on universality
•prioritize themselves over any such universality
ideologies continue to disguise a *politics of the will* as a universalism
antihumanism = antiredemptive, antimoralist, antimessianist worldview
+ proliferation of tropes --> dooming contemporary man to an existence without meaning or future:
•last man (Nietzsche, Camus, Blanchot)
•death of Man (Malraux, Kojeve, Blanchot, Foucault)
•devirilization of man (Kojeve, Bataille, Queneau)
•terror (Marlaux, Bataille, Kojeve, Merleau-Ponty)
•
Kojeve and Jean Wahl --> antifoundational realism --> new anthropology
antihumanism
a precondition of thought
a fluid matrix of ideas
a philosophical attitude
...................................
Malraux's (literary-metaphysical pursuits [echoes Nietzsche + intellectual Left]) heritage to us (to artists): the alternative to bourgeois individualism [can be achieved] through commitment to a justice based on a quasi-Marxist notion of human dignity --> the *uprooted, cultured, and powerless individual* who struggled against the nation-driven, science-executed destruction wrought by (arid and morally bankrupt) modern warfare [---> go to forensic architecture, apass] --> (the idea that death of man can be averted through) ***a recognition of the heroism of the resistance*** + turn to human creativity
how i have used a non-western voice (“i am from outside the west”) to provide for myself an escape from political categorization + claiming the knowledge of an insider and enjoying the analytical clarity of distance --> i make claims both *expertise in* and cool-headed *distance from* the essence of europe
(technique of) epistolary exchange
(to think of Kantian cosmopolitanism a) a genuine model for commitment =/= outdated illusion
...................................
research method (a heritage of surrealism:) exquisite corpse technique --> (unpredictable and) innocent inventiveness
...................................
for Sohrevardi and Avicenna: nature = chah چاه shahr gheyravan (material of nature/world: ghir قیر) --> zolmatkade ظلمت کده
#comparative reading of stranded
ghorbat gharbia --> Crusoe
•daryaye sabz دریای سبز (green sea) = donyaye mahsusat دنیای محسوسات (phenomenological world)
•دایه da[...]
(286)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%84.9[...]/>
the notion of “general purpose toolkit”
synthesis, patches,
environment --> media
interface --> physical
dataflow programming, rapid prototyping, indeterministic machine paradigms,
one-dimensional array of values
telemetry (duri-sanj دوری سنج)
...................................
an evangelist builds a monument
softimage monument
virtual?
movement and stillness in houdini?
who the 3d software, as an ontological device to recreate and study and understand being, is devided or made-up? the presebce of the notion of movement in it and essence. what is movement and apparition?
[we can have a workshop that teaches houdini just through movement. or a non-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
...................................
“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,]
...................................
#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 spac[...]
(287)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%85.1[...]nt for my research on ajayeb, due to the ways iranian culture is attracted to the image, and my self to CG and digital form making)
my relationship with the digital (articulated with Alberti:) that body-polys (body-pots) are ambivalent responses to the threat of inconstancy in a world wherein forms (like statues of myrtle) were only ever apparent --> each making of a body-poly (or pot) is a performance and an improvisation, unscripted and therefore cab go wronge
[Alberti + Budden + Sofaer + Ingold + Hallam]
3D model = partial subject
...................................
in Maya particles are as little ping-pong balls --✕--> relativity theory destroyed the idea of consistent objects
--> extreme forms of realism
Hitchcock's vertigo effect --> a tool i built years ago: https://www.highend3d.com/maya/script/vertigotool-for-maya
simultaneously zooming and pulling away : we apear to be in the same place, yet the place seems to distort beyond our control ==reestablishing==> the way we experience “here”
the vertigo tool doens't do away with human experience, it drastically modifies it in a dizzing manner
--> a dangerous knowledge zoom lens tool, a vertiginous antirealist/antiliteral abyss (=/=? irony device ==> presenting us with intimacy with existing nonhumans)
...................................
#veil
@Janina
@Ale
Nicole Archer: ‘textile’: a material formed at the intersections of desire and modern politics
•textile's ‘textility' = texture
•textile's ‘textuality' = readability
to be prepared to address relations consistencies ==> (hope to) meaningfully reform them
*(Archer lingering in the textile's volatile gum) to develop forms of critique that can account for the peculiar textiles ‘we’ are currently wrapped-up in* [globalized economies, militarized laboratories, etc. (BioSteel and so on)]
text +/& textile
•in metaphor: the social fabric, the Internet, the Fold, etc.
•in myth: Arachne's textiles, or Penelope's epic loom
}--✕-->? to account for neo-liberal and transgenic subjects
(traditionally:) textile (racialized and gendered, as “woman's work”) “=/=” text
*fabric conditions and binds our desires and bodies ---@Janina
(Archer >) Gernreich exposed how the fashion system instrumentalized the body's desire to move” while inscribing it within the time-signatures of modern capitalism
uniform = contemporary fashion's other
digi-camo (redesigned and digitally remixed camouflage fatigues worn by the US military)
desire for “freedom” and for alternative temporalities + desire for discipline and physical restraint
}--> *tight spaces our desires are prone to work themselves into*
[...]
(288)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%86.4[...] />
Gernreich working with “the future” as a medium and not as a destination***
-he was keen to work with fashion as a ‘time-based medium’(~ deliver us onto alternative temporalities)
[*]fashion: a distinctly modern clothing regime engineered to materially manipulate “the past” so it may serve as a springboard into “the time to come”, an attempt to create the perfect tension between “right now” and “back then” ==> (fashion serving as one of modern culture's main engines catapults the wearers) towards a time and place where present-day problems can no longer reach them and unknown pleasures are made manifest & continually converting the erratic power of our desires into a kind of motion that can be effectively capitalized upon
(brackets and bracelets)
...momentary and marvelous sensations of free fall (by way of design)
Janina's wardrobe malfunctions
*the fine line between sexual liberation and sexual exploitation (in Space 1999 and Star Trek uniforms)*
(Archer:) “Star Trek's futuristic costumes assert their ‘other-worldliness’ by emphatically exposing as much of a woman's body as possible to a relatively prudish American public during the peak of the sexual revolution. Theiss’ garments were literally devised to slip back into the legacies of shame that had heretofore defined the origin of sexual difference and the litany of unequal gender relations that followed.”
() the artist and his muse (typically gendered image of the fashion designer and his model) --> based on the classical notion of an unhampered and naturally feminine ground of conception =/= masculine drive to be “creative” : (old notion that) “woman is the origin ==> it is up to man (Gernreich) to be original” --> to refashion feminine mater-iality into more meaningful forms
easily inscribed and veiled shame of nudity
*hyper-exposure* and *self-consciousness* (aimed at the shame ‘we,’ who live within ‘the cultures of the textile,’ are possessed by)
...deep-seated knowledge that the textile leaves us continually and hopelessly exposed
*our need to be forever wrapped-up in the text/ile* : endlessly bound by the perpendicular, criss-crossing of one another's desires and the ‘significances’ we ascribe to such satisfying predictability
textile screens
textile’s discursive usefulness: its ability to support and exploit the image of our “alternative” identities
(Lacan's) objet petit a : prediscursive, meaningless thing’
textiles (and the clothing shaped from them) are not “convenient things” that help curtail or discipline our desires (by properly veiling them), rather, they are the very object cause of our desire
capturing and suspending our desires in fabricated flights of fancy =/= a sieve (alak) to pass through onto places unknown[...]
(289)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%86.5[...]not enough--it falls short in showing] the way that these suits clearly encourage their wearers to close their eyes and explore the kinky pleasure found specifically in the way PVC peels from your flesh in one long slurp
plastics don't have the same ‘memory’ as textiles
they don't hold onto the past
they won't stay obediently folded like a cotton calico
vinyl swimsuit
*these designs proliferated a multi-faceted understanding of one's own skin*
-exposed skin feels so starkly and qualitatively different than a torso left to sweat it out under a nearly non-porous plasticine cloth
xxxx
...................................
(we are in) style wars***
critical considerations of style --> think across subjectivities & cultural practices
*aesthetics of mending*
mend: replacing a part or putting together what is torn or broken
(--> regarding ajayeb, reparative, refigurative reading of the past, mending of *those thing that seem beyond repair* --> important for Tehran's landscape of affect and aspiration)
Archer: how arrangement of masculinity (~= acts of violence and wounding) might be *styled otherwise*
literal fashion victim of war hero
“every man” will put himself on the line, and earn his masculinity via rituals, narratives, and professions that are predicted on brutality--and that he will do this without grievance or hesitation
to be a man under such conditions, is to enter into a deeply gendered dialectic forged through acts of wounding and care that demand “men” to hurt, and “women” to do the work of mending
...the ways modern gender binaries synthesize sexual difference
business of state violence: accepting the notion that our identities are forged through obligatory acts of barbarism
how each of us work to fix identities
to do the maintenance work that modernity requires each of us
relic enduring centuries --> cultural need to materially substantiate the distance that lies between proper and improper forms of masculinity (dandy and war hero)
*routine and spectacular acts of wounding that gender identities presuppose*
--also--> attest to the critical will to desire different forms of masculinity
(artifacts preserved in climate controlled bubbles survive time to tell many stories)
conspicuous ornaments of legend
masculinities (and femininities) secured through woundings
(the work of) the maintenance of a particular form of gossip
towel
complex figuration of gendered social relations
which relics in contemporary Iran are emblematic of how and why the gender binary is imperative?
...relentless and futile acts of tearing and repair[...]
(290)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%86.9[...]narration, analysis (she will never get a chance to tell her side of the story)
medusa in:
•Perseus: (in Ovid) turn power into vulnerability and vulnerability into power
•Freud: (in Das Medusenhaupt) displaced representation of female genitalia, as a fetish, an emblem of castration, girl's realization of her own ‘castration’ <== “to decapitate = to castrate”
•Helene Cixous: (in The Laugh of the medusa) as apotrope: “we are going to show them [prists] our sexts”
•Haraway: (in Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene) the lady of the beasts is a potent (apotrope?) --> “dashing the twenty-first-century ships of the heroes [motherless mind children] on a living coral reef”, chthonic powers in Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds and beyond
•Owens:
Kruger as a model of artist is like Perseus in medusa myth
Lacan's imaginary order: a dual relationship (symmetric & immediate opposite) between consciousness and its other (in the play of reflection in the mirror)
ego: imaginary construct by the capture of the image (in the mirror)
see yourself ==> you are petrified ~ *arrest*
...~->? scopic drive
(Lacan on) evil eye --> arrest movement and literally kill life
(psychological concept of) sature (to join two lips of a wound): pseudo-identification of an initial moment of seeing and a terminal moment of arrest --Owens--> *medusa effect*: imaginary identification of the seer and seen (immediacy, capture, stereotype)
Lacan placing the moment of arrest prior to the moment of seeing --> what happens when we look at a picture : first an arrested gesture (a picture) then the act of seeing (completing the picture)
[*]to pose: to present onself to the gaze of the other as if one were already frozen (immobilized, suspended, a picture), **mimicing the immobilizing power of the gaze** --Owens--> pose forces the gaze to surrender
***to pose = to pose a threat*** ~ apotrope
artist reflects the stereotype back on its self --> to defeat an apotrope with an apotrope
is Kruger different than politically motivated artists (consciousness-raising)?
--Owens--> Kruger stages the techniques of stereotype (that interpolate her/him as subjects)
-is the viewer led or allowed to reject her work's address? ==?==> gesture of refusal --or?-- mobilization of the spectator
...................................
Archer (philosopher of wardrobes, patterns and textility) on Owens's medusa effect ~~✕--> Calderwood's drawings *messy material semiotic* (figures that forcefully demand one's attention) --> queer pleasure to be caught in their dense but finely rendered patterns
-following the phallic loops & yonic openings (that obscure any semblance of a singular true body)
apotropaic stockings
جوراب زنانه بلاگ[...]
(291)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%87.4[...]/>
[*]pattern: an essential forecasting tool, (through pattern's) rhythms we come to place bets on our future [like the sun's cycle], maps of those terrains where belief most directly meets desire, where aesthetics meets significance
stripes --> capacity to serve as “a tool for setting things in order” (--Pastoureau--> between the lines a tangle of uncanny specters lurk)
-stripe's ability (not simply to signify but) to formalize or figure the abnormal within medieval visual and material culture [a culture accustomed to transmitting visual messages along very different frequencies: an image was created by superimposing successive levels, and, to read it well, it was necessary to begin with the bottom level and, passing through all the intermediary layers, end with the top on] (-what is noise for medieval visual culture?)
-with the stripe: the structure is the figure ==> force certain bodies into genuine non-place --> fields of actual nonsense
-(modern stripe's clarity is a case of) how ideologically saturated, or unnatural, the act of looking is
-(genealogy of stripe --> historical processes:) *yesterday's noise --into--> today's signal*
***power is formally established and formally critiqued through the adaption or the obliteration of patterns*** ==> *pattern manipulation* so strategically necessary [@Laura, Elen] --> (Archer's) call to:
•to take advantage of those aesthetic practices that can direct attention away from a pattern's typical symbolic function (*or responsibilities to secure meaning and certain attending forms of power*)
•to aestheticize the pattern's capacity to function performatively (as a kind of critical figure that is always already inserted within the discourse of everyday life)
[in apass (we have to mark) how and where the negative knowledge about the reliability of linguistic utterance is made available (#feedback)]
(de Man:) the figural dimension of a text “gives the language considerable freedom from referential restraint, but it also makes it epistemologically highly suspect and volatile, since its use can no longer be said to be determined by considerations of truth and falsehood, good and evil, beauty and ugliness, or pleasure and pain”
(?how in our feedbacking instead of linguistic we can be able to) manipulating the figure of the pattern --> (in apass we are constantly busy with) a way to critically and actively resist ideology (of block curator, Vladimir's settlement's ‘order of thing,’ the institution, etc.) or to critically gesture toward and theorize the possibility of “another way”
the *genital panic* (forever lodged within the heart of discourses on sexual or gendered difference...)
(to examine) the varied ways that pattern is used to put one in one's place
Nicki Green, Yayoi Kusama, Adriana Varejao, Yinka Shonibare, Craig Calderwood
spaces[...]
(292)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%87.5[...]t reorients the whole of the body, creating what might be called a gait or posture, an individual and cultural bodily style
appersonization: treatment of one's own body as an outside object:
+ psychical vampirism: identification with the symptoms, actions, and fantasies of othe people
--> identification, incorporation, introjection
example of aging
-body image seems resistant to the changes brought about by aging
-they seem to have aged, whereas the subject feels as if he or she has not
--> condition of continual transformation + time lag in the perception and registeration of real changes in the body image
body image: condition of the subject's access to spatiality (including built environments) = a postural schema of the body [=/= mapping a biological body onto a psychological domain, providing a kind of translation of material into conceptual terms]
-->
•radical inseparability of biological from psychical elements
•connection between the question of sexual specificity (biological sexual difference)
•connection between the question of psychical identity
...................................
Grosz realizes two human perversion in psychoanalysis literature:
•male --> fetishism (sexual gratification from the use of inanimate partial objects alone)
•feminine --> exhibitionism, kleptomania
female fetishism --> lesbianism
fetishism --> excess of their psychoanalytic descriptions
feminism --> collective psychosis (~ a political disavowal of women's social reality as oppressed)
[*]play: a form of mastery (= a conversion of passivity into activity) + a technique for the production of pleasure
Freud:
•deviation in the sexual object --> homosexuality, pedophilia, bestiality
•deviation in the sexual aim --> transvestism, voyeurism, exhibitionism
fetishism: sexual overvaluation of a part (of the body or an inanimate object)
[--Grosz--> ‘overvaluation’ is a characteristic of masculine forms of loving]
“perversion =/= neuroses” --> pervert expresses precisely what it is that the neurotic represses (*perversion: to avoid the repression)
sexual normality = copulative nonincestual heterosexuality
fetishist: the boy/child who is unable to resolve the oedipal conflict in its various alternatives (unable or unwilling to abandon the mother as love object)
-he cannot, like the homosexual son, accept symbolic castration in order to take on the “feminine” position and adopt a passive sexual role in relation to his father
-he is not prepared to “pay” for his desire by facing the oedipal prohibition (give up the mother or lose the penis) --> fetish: a token of triumph over the threat of castration (and a protection against it) -->{makes women tolerable as sexual objects + save[...]
(293)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%88.3[...]mmunications performed by embodied selves at multiple levels (of organic and social systems)
commercial entertainment drawing on understandings of mammalian-affective structure : transmedia + mammalian animalities + AI agents (~= rigging)
Disney = interactive dramas of mammalian behavior of psychological bonding
3D application: interactive microworld of augmented assemblage of objects and beings and tools and zoons, visualization of mulistable cognition
= a form of globally restructuring knowledge work + embodied learning + economies
exosome explosive demons, as significant other?
we love to create worlds (that is why we make and watch soap operas)
careful negotiation of meaning and tools (in apass, not careful always)
...................................
(Katie -->) [*]web: a material example of a then counter-intuitive convergence and recombination, one across forms of inscription and meaning making devices[...]in that fictional everywhere of “everyone's” lives
emerging posthumanities: humans are only some of the agencies self-organizing in altering systems of things + people + worldly processes --Katie--> being inside and moved around literally by the very material and conceptual structures you are analyzing and writing about -->
•transdisciplinary consciousness: telescoping out to engage infrastructures in their layered accretions رشد
•witing (saying what counts) [has to] diverge perpendicularly across the normative --> performative = demonstration + simulation
•knowledge workings --embed--> within culture industries + transnational educational restructuring projects
writing technologie (~= activities + skills + devices in layered assemblages + material + conceptual inscription) --literalize--> tensions in grammatology:
•between writing's many possible referent/sign relationships in historical progression <-- Ignace Gelb
•call to account of assumptions about writing's derivations from speech built into the assertion of these relationships <-- Derrida
my writing on Charmed and rigging --> a mime of writing, mime understanding [#simulacra of knowledge], (using Katie's word) a literalizing attempt to work/write in the middle of writing technologies
...................................
lord of the rings (and similar movies) ~= new forms of evangelization
---> go to propaganda
temporality, time, day & night:
in ajayeb:
گویند که در حدود مغرب حیوانی است. چون آفتاب برآید، حالی بچّه بزاید و بچّه را در آفتاب نهد. به یک روز بزرگ گردد. چون آفتاب فرو رود، بمیرد و بچّه آبستن گردد. دیگر روز که آفتاب برآید، بم[...]
(294)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%89.4[...]
exosome explosive demons, as significant other?
we love to create worlds (that is why we make and watch soap operas)
careful negotiation of meaning and tools (in apass, not careful always)
...................................
(Katie -->) [*]web: a material example of a then counter-intuitive convergence and recombination, one across forms of inscription and meaning making devices[...]in that fictional everywhere of “everyone's” lives
emerging posthumanities: humans are only some of the agencies self-organizing in altering systems of things + people + worldly processes --Katie--> being inside and moved around literally by the very material and conceptual structures you are analyzing and writing about -->
•transdisciplinary consciousness: telescoping out to engage infrastructures in their layered accretions رشد
•witing (saying what counts) [has to] diverge perpendicularly across the normative --> performative = demonstration + simulation
•knowledge workings --embed--> within culture industries + transnational educational restructuring projects
writing technologie (~= activities + skills + devices in layered assemblages + material + conceptual inscription) --literalize--> tensions in grammatology:
•between writing's many possible referent/sign relationships in historical progression <-- Ignace Gelb
•call to account of assumptions about writing's derivations from speech built into the assertion of these relationships <-- Derrida
my writing on Charmed and rigging --> a mime of writing, mime understanding [#simulacra of knowledge], (using Katie's word) a literalizing attempt to work/write in the middle of writing technologies
...................................
lord of the rings (and similar movies) ~= new forms of evangelization
---> go to propaganda
>
temporality, time, day & night:
in ajayeb:
گویند که در حدود مغرب حیوانی است. چون آفتاب برآید، حالی بچّه بزاید و بچّه را در آفتاب نهد. به یک روز بزرگ گردد. چون آفتاب فرو رود، بمیرد و بچّه آبستن گردد. دیگر روز که آفتاب برآید، بمیرد وعمر وی یک شب و دو روز بود.
به حدود مکران وتیردابه یست بزرگ از دریا براید و در آفتاب مینگرد و بیهوش گردد تا به وقت زوال چنان شود که مرده، ملاحان با وی بازی کنند، چو آفتاب فرو رود زنده گردد، در آفتاب جان بدهد و از وی سیر نگردد
از اسکندر رومی پرسیدند که در عالم چه دیدی از عجایب؟ گفت در مشارق و مغارب گردیدم اعجوبه د[...]
(295)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%89.4[...]>
which technologies (of composing, of writing, of figuring) are installed for Sa'di in the 12th century and for Adam Olearius in the 16th century that allows them to imagine and engage in/with what we call today *mondial*?
(Sa'di + Olearius:)
chance encounter, failures, writing, making figures, loving, making friends, their acts of worlding (?), composing worlds, (de-compose?)
technicity: armillary sphere, Globe of Gottorf, Golestan, drawings, star constellations with astrological and mythological symbols, inside-outside model of the cosmos,
--> they both have concerns of *global consciousness* --> and their differences: two (or more) different world knowledges
GPS: global system position, concern of both Sa'di and Olearius
an excuse to read and investigate their worldings? translations between worlds, and sewing, tearings, and so on during the Safaviten and the Russian Tsar 16th century cosmology and models of reciprocity
(Translation is always interpretive, critical, and partial.)
intersection of multiple hierarchies:
-the Safaviten order (Isfahan architecture)
-the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp order (family architecture, court and mathematic)
-Tsar order (urban)
-literature of reciprocity***
Sana keywords: distortion, displacement, distance, alternation, collage, blur (noun), noise, voice-over, subtle changes, micro-macro, micro-politic, rhythm, turbulence, fragmentation, metaphor, persistence, repetition, disturbance,
(unexpected)
--> separation ??? =/=? compose
media/mediums: new narratives (script, score, etc.), image archive, garden (material and semiotic site), performance poetry, land-art, video
why video: using performative materials, enactments and staging of speculative narratives, experimental film making, editing, cheap visual effects, animation and drawing. by using the local geography and landscape of Eckernförde, employment of fragmented scores and modest embodiment, experimental acting and storytelling, the video as a generous medium holds and hosts all our gathered materials, and enables a linear but expansive experience. we will write short scripts based on stories from Olearius's travel logs in Iran and Sa'di's Golestan in order to put them into tests after 8 and 3 centuries, and produce intensity and curiosity for a richer way of relating to our shared cultural heritages and literacies.
practical: we will explore all the mentioned ideas and storylines as starting points to create interest for material-discursive practices of ‘worlding’ and ‘encountering’ in cross-techno-cultural intersections.
...................................
[working] title:
Das Gesicht des Paradies
the cast of one Globe to another
Globe of Gottorf of Golestan
“Each serving diligently in its own appointed place”
“Deliverance f[...]
(297)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%89.8[...]family architecture, court and mathematic)
-Tsar order (urban)
-literature of reciprocity***
Sana keywords: distortion, displacement, distance, alternation, collage, blur (noun), noise, voice-over, subtle changes, micro-macro, micro-politic, rhythm, turbulence, fragmentation, metaphor, persistence, repetition, disturbance,
(unexpected)
--> separation ??? =/=? compose
media/mediums: new narratives (script, score, etc.), image archive, garden (material and semiotic site), performance poetry, land-art, video
why video: using performative materials, enactments and staging of speculative narratives, experimental film making, editing, cheap visual effects, animation and drawing. by using the local geography and landscape of Eckernförde, employment of fragmented scores and modest embodiment, experimental acting and storytelling, the video as a generous medium holds and hosts all our gathered materials, and enables a linear but expansive experience. we will write short scripts based on stories from Olearius's travel logs in Iran and Sa'di's Golestan in order to put them into tests after 8 and 3 centuries, and produce intensity and curiosity for a richer way of relating to our shared cultural heritages and literacies.
practical: we will explore all the mentioned ideas and storylines as starting points to create interest for material-discursive practices of ‘worlding’ and ‘encountering’ in cross-techno-cultural intersections.
...................................
[working] title:
Das Gesicht des Paradies
the cast of one Globe to another
Globe of Gottorf of Golestan
“Each serving diligently in its own appointed place”
“Deliverance from the yoke of bondage”
The Globe of Gottorf and deliverance from the yoke of bondage
The cast of Golestan and the magnitude prison of Globe
Das Gesicht des Paradies und schlichtendes Gottorfer Riesenglobus
Adam Olearius and Sa'di in bondage
magnetic fields of
intermediate category
contiguous mass of flowers and tulips
magnitude prison
Others adopt Hell
...instead you are in paradise
traveling
post travel
Paradise Roads
Gesicht
Globe of Gottorf and Golestan of Sa'di
foreign affairs
...................................
Planthroposcene, the age of gardens
...................................
[...] remembering is not a replay of a string of moments, but an enlivening and reconfiguring of past and future that is larger than any individual. [...] The past is never finished. It cannot be wrapped up like a package, or a scrapbook, or an acknowledgment; we never leave it and it never leaves us behind.
Barad's mother's question: “what good is there in offering recognit[...]
(298)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%89.9[...]d by the appropriation, control, and administration of power (as David Buisseret [1992], Michel Foucault [1975 and 1994 (1967)], J. Brian Harley [1988 and 2001], Denis Wood [1992], and others have shown)
symbolic and political effectiveness of cartographic diagrams
(to leave open) the art of living with space itself
what it means to be located and discerned in the world
they lead the viewer “all over the map”
regime of the “image-fact” --> implicit cartography
an abstract point of view on reality that is analyzed
Conley > Bazin is close in spirit to the first sentence of Ptolemy's Geography in which cosmography is likened to the construction of a world map in the way a painter executes the portrait of the sitter, while topography is seen as a local view (of a city) in the way that the same painter depicts an isolated or detached piece, such as an eye or an ear.
(my deep interest:) spatial histories that procede us
Renaissance
*art: various and always mobile articulation of space
*writings: spatially conceived and materially determined --> they explore surfaces and volumes
*cartography: component of the literary imagination of the early modern age
{narratives of the Renaissance tell of the construction of the subject through a venture--a plotted itinerary--into the realm of death and back again} (# Adventure Time)
construction of space in disciplines that pertain to geometry*
treating writing as a function of extension [according to Conley, Self-Made Map]
writing holds, penetrates, delineates, and explores space; it maps itself in relation to an autonomous signature--born of the congress of space
early modern: a growth of a composite writing that moves between diagrammatical and discursive inspiration ~=> creation of self
(i have a relation with ajayeb, or any ‘old’ text, in that of “the pleasure these works afford is due the ways that they allow us to invent imaginary realms of space through our illusion of having ‘first-hand’ contact with them” -->? creation of my “self”)
in a world in which we discover our heritage as gratuitous beings --> a partial and universal history of ourselves
we are products of individual and collective histories
geographic literature
the sudden birth and growth of mapping (between 15th and 17th century):
•in Renaissance admiration for antiquity Ptolemy esteemed as the world's founding geographer
•in growth of scientific revolution quantification and measurement was stressed, the human body and the geographic landscape of the natural world became topics of interest
•plotting and perspective: in representation art a “saturated reality” began to animate paintings + the invention of artificial perspective[...]
(299)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%90.2[...]ings: spatially conceived and materially determined --> they explore surfaces and volumes
*cartography: component of the literary imagination of the early modern age
{narratives of the Renaissance tell of the construction of the subject through a venture--a plotted itinerary--into the realm of death and back again} (# Adventure Time)
construction of space in disciplines that pertain to geometry*
treating writing as a function of extension [according to Conley, Self-Made Map]
writing holds, penetrates, delineates, and explores space; it maps itself in relation to an autonomous signature--born of the congress of space
early modern: a growth of a composite writing that moves between diagrammatical and discursive inspiration ~=> creation of self
(i have a relation with ajayeb, or any ‘old’ text, in that of “the pleasure these works afford is due the ways that they allow us to invent imaginary realms of space through our illusion of having ‘first-hand’ contact with them” -->? creation of my “self”)
in a world in which we discover our heritage as gratuitous beings --> a partial and universal history of ourselves
we are products of individual and collective histories
geographic literature
the sudden birth and growth of mapping (between 15th and 17th century):
•in Renaissance admiration for antiquity Ptolemy esteemed as the world's founding geographer
•in growth of scientific revolution quantification and measurement was stressed, the human body and the geographic landscape of the natural world became topics of interest
•plotting and perspective: in representation art a “saturated reality” began to animate paintings + the invention of artificial perspective ==> new ways of gridding and plotting the world
•political unification, or nation building, to use maps to construct systems of defense
•*emerging self and to the self's relation to the idea of national space
new modes of surveying and plotting the world influence representation of the private and public domains of the individual writer
theatricalization of the self --> a consciousness of its autonomy (through modes of positioning [in gridded and textual reality])
--> a new cartographic impulse:
•changing conditions of information
•new taxonomies
•new relations that individuals hold with space
•emerging sense of national identity
the self would acquire its identity through the creation of a space that bears the presence (or the reminder) of the mapping of its signature
its “foundational fantasy” depends on (an alliance with) a strongly marked geographic consciousness
mimes the construction (of a world)
contemporary politics of statecraft
...to locate a mobile site of anguish to project the portrait (of e[...]
(300)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%90.2[...]r />
Meerwunder, exotic curiosities from the sea
“we were about a gun-shot's distance”
in the age of incipient European colonialist expansion
a truly Baroque (bestseller) work, Vermehrte Newe Beschreibung der Muscowitischen and Persischen Reyse
(in terms of Oriental drama)
erudition (fazl فضل) + adventure }-> in narrative
•it is Adventure Time
proto-ethnography
acquire eyewitness information about a relatively unknown part of the world
-(with Olearius's style we can hear) ethnography's mantra: “writing from the ground” --> attention to the shakenness of difference (encountered or imagined) [Stewart bringing my attention to the writing affect:] “ground” sends people bouncing, takes place as a threshold, hits the senses as a set of provocations. “Writing matters if objects of analysis are to be understood as emergent forms with qualities, intensities, and trajectories that can be described or evoked. Writing is not epiphenomenal to thought but its medium. As it sidles up to worlds, disparate and incommensurate things throw themselves together.” (Stewart 2012)
(the ground of Iran on which Olearius stands cannot be summarized in a literalized description, under the spell of a kind of cartographic shorthand [tond-nevisi تند نويسى، مختصر نويسى], into a strangely idealist paradigm that imagines the things of the world)
*writing can be:
•the practice of writing ourselves into our worlds as emergent and disparate ensembles --> speculative concept of ‘worlding.’ [to consider our] writing as an inscription that configures the spaces of form and event in daily living
•Stewart slowed ethnographic practice: Why does writing matter in ethnography? How do forms of writing change cultural theory? What questions do forms of writing raise about subjects and objects, forms of attention, the possibility of thinking through description? How do you describe a scene, a character, an event, a situation, a collective sensibility, a difference, a world? What does it mean to add density and texture to ethnographic description? What can ethnography do?
•attuned to the *forms and forces* unfolding in scenes and encounters --> *apparatus of conceptualization* [pulled into (a tricky) alignment with (your field's) immanent concerns and with the concerns of the worlds.] your (anthropological) objects have to “be walked around,” “approached from precise angles,” and seen as “states of being,” emergent, or suspended in potentiality, or collapsing, or residual, roosting on live matter. *culture ~= [*]the cultural: “a resonant and magnetizing field that registered in people and things living through events and conditions.” we try to describe sensibilities hitting people and traversing [...] things:
◦bodies of thought
◦assemblages of infrastructures and institutions
[...]
(301)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%90.9[...]hich is a prolific, mixed-use contact zone in an ongoing state of transition that leaves [Iranian] people “improvising with already-felts” [~=? Golestan Sa'di]) -- affect added an affirmative critique that registers surprise at what and how things happen.
[*]affective subject: “a person who waits in the company of others for things to arrive, one who learns to sense out what's coming and what forms it might take, one who aims to notice what crystallizes and how things ricochet and rebound in a social-natural-aesthetic ecology of compositions and thresholds of expressivity.” --> “For the affective subject, there is always the weight of the world in what can be hoped for and what must be feared, in what flourishes and what matters.”
[*]Life: “an experiment of being in a world, of finding ways to be in circuits of force and form, an aspiration to get something out of the alchemical transmogrifications of things that twist off on trajectories far beyond humanist models of suffering or the usual hyperlegible registers of normativity and the state.” --> “[Life] takes place in the inhuman gestures of demons and angels, in the struggles of addicts and the rage of racists, in the endurance of the unbelievably injured or the oddly still curious.” (Stewart)
•a world deliteralized (with no endemic divide between a naturalized given order and the exceptionalism of event)
•things, to become recognizable as something to be in or near, or else to oppose and resist
•(affect --Deleuze-->) differential ontology: the prolific generativity of difference and connection taking place in a field of possibilities. affect studies now hitting:
◦anthropology
◦new materialism
◦object-oriented ontology
◦naturecultures
◦multispecies work
◦science studies
◦new ecologies
--> “the generativity and volatility of life as such, to its capacity to actively shift or harden into forms of peace or violence, pleasure and pain, collectivities and chaos.”
[...] it looks for ways to describe what precedes and exceeds the categorical in the labors of living through historical presents.
[...] affect-inflected [study] leans into its descriptive objects with an eye to their hardenings into something recognizable (=/= what is often called ‘critical thinking’: habits of snapping, to catch the world in a lie, dualist dead ends of modernist humanist social science, independent logic of data, the conviction that something is wrong --> paranoid approaches to the world)
•ethnographic method of mattering, [why conceptuality might take radically different forms in Iran?] attention to the still unfolding [--> Foad's (mental habit of) describing the fixed object of destiny (of Iran).] how to move in the manner of things slipping in and out of existence? the way a world (in this case: Iran) elaborates in prolific forms, taking off in directions. the Iranian real is alchemical, traveli[...]
(302)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%91.1[...]ern stereotypes regarding exotic eroticism
Shah Safi's banquet (sur سور) corresponds fully to a European's notion of what an oriental feast should entail
he marks the poles of Persian culture: as the site, on the one hand, of voluptuous, erotic encounters, and of unnatural cruelty and despotism on the other hand --> meant for the moral edification/codification of its western readers. (readers were taught about different countries + taught to be better European persons [with proper differences])
Baroque's excess of information
(as Pierre also noted in my style of language)
Beschreibung
*** the customs of the observed peoples ***
-->(language of pictorial representation emphasized)
temporal displacements [in his frames pictures]
inscriptions, conveying a sense of movement
scorpion bites Olearius (“Ich vom Scorpion gestochen” --> oriental danger) --> specimen scorpion (--> immobilized and tamed) --> back in the Kunstkammer --> Duke's cabinet of curiosities (--> on display)
["his” experience =/= Sa'di's technologies of writing]
Olearius + Hakwirdi --> Golestan of Sa'di
Sa'di's influence on German baroque literature:
•Grimmelshausen (Simplicissimus)
•Lohenstein (Ibrahim Bassa and Ibrahim Sultan)
•Gryphius (Catherina von Georgien)
•Montesquieu (Letters Persanes)
•Goethe (West-östlicher Divan)
Jens from Kiel library, like Olearius, is appointed court librarian, by state/Duke, given the task of cataloging and expanding the ducal/official collection, and developing the Duke's Kunstkammer/Wunderkammer
Gotterffische Kunstkammer --> “Wunderbuch” (book of wonders), with its insistence on the concepts of writing + drawing
Olearius's genre of frontispiece, his engraved title pages --follow--> Norbert: kluger Vater or fleissiger Praeceptor
clever father / industrious preceptor مرشد مربى #Pir [--> “our common father in heaven"], wants to introduce his children and students to something in arts or sciences, “make them understand” by means of his mouth + pen :
*analogy/simile: showing something grand by showing them something small --> an astronomer shows on a small hand-globe (*globo coelesti*) the make-up of the great heaven with all its visible bodies, where a point means a star ~(in the same way)~> the geographer represents on a small terestrial globe (*globo terrestri*) the entire circle of the earth with all its landscapes ~(in the same way)~> “our common father in heaven,” the Lord, his revealed Word, he wrote for us (his children and students) the great book of wonders --recognize--> Himself
}--> (the concepts of) microcosm & macrocosm : something small (a dot on a globe) stands for something else, larger than itself (a city) ==> individual objects of study or cur[...]
(303)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%91.3[...]ll its visible bodies, where a point means a star ~(in the same way)~> the geographer represents on a small terestrial globe (*globo terrestri*) the entire circle of the earth with all its landscapes ~(in the same way)~> “our common father in heaven,” the Lord, his revealed Word, he wrote for us (his children and students) the great book of wonders --recognize--> Himself
}--> (the concepts of) microcosm & macrocosm : something small (a dot on a globe) stands for something else, larger than itself (a city) ==> individual objects of study or curiosities of nature, that are collected and presented to a reader/observer, represent a greater whole ==> interconnectedness --> “the great chain of being” ~-> God teaches humans by means of natural wonders #ajayeb
}==> (microcosmic world of the) frontispiece = visual macrocosm of the larger book, *the textual macrocosm* that it introduces
[my video atlas in Eckernförde was reworking with frontispiece as it is meant to intrigue the reader with its complex set of visual images (taken from classical coins and medals, from devices and emblems), to be decoded after reading the book that follows. Olearius brings all desciplines onto the stage of his's world: ethnography, history, natural science, geography, architecture, and literature --> this is very baroque _+]
Olearius's didactic program: to entertain while instructing
(tasavof's) world as *mundus symbolicus* <== cosmos of significance (~= art + history + nature)
[Das grosse Wunderbuch die Welt]
*theatrum mundi*
staging of nature (~ ajayeb) : nature in all its various manifestations (animal, vegetable, and mineral) must be displayed on a stage (of the title page, on the compartments of Kunstkammer)
•an arch of gateway resting on a platform or plinth (--> a basic model provided by classical architecture for the majority of Renaissance and Baroque stagings), a design that recalls the structures of allegorical tableaux used for triumphal entries into Italian and Dutch Renaissance cities, on order to honor the hero of the day
•(early modern title page *iconographic program*) incorporating the feature of the triumphal arch in order to signify the symbolic entry into the written work [<-- we don't need to do this!!] --> *formal monumental opening* (leading the “reader” to the ‘interior of’)--> Olearius's frontispiece (monumental, awe-inspiring works that aimed to spark the viewer's interest):
◦(to commemorate) official functions at the court
◦literary activities
[*]baroque: ***the art of not rejecting anything*** (el arte de no renunciar a nada -Montesinos)
(am i baroque?)
different types of frontispiece:
1. divided into geometrical compartments (german origin?)
2. depicting a particular scene (german invention) [images/elements chosen/included for doctrinal and controversial significance]
3. s[...]
(304)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%91.4[...]ture, and literature --> this is very baroque _+]
Olearius's didactic program: to entertain while instructing
(tasavof's) world as *mundus symbolicus* <== cosmos of significance (~= art + history + nature)
[Das grosse Wunderbuch die Welt]
*theatrum mundi*
staging of nature (~ ajayeb) : nature in all its various manifestations (animal, vegetable, and mineral) must be displayed on a stage (of the title page, on the compartments of Kunstkammer)
•an arch of gateway resting on a platform or plinth (--> a basic model provided by classical architecture for the majority of Renaissance and Baroque stagings), a design that recalls the structures of allegorical tableaux used for triumphal entries into Italian and Dutch Renaissance cities, on order to honor the hero of the day
•(early modern title page *iconographic program*) incorporating the feature of the triumphal arch in order to signify the symbolic entry into the written work [<-- we don't need to do this!!] --> *formal monumental opening* (leading the “reader” to the ‘interior of’)--> Olearius's frontispiece (monumental, awe-inspiring works that aimed to spark the viewer's interest):
◦(to commemorate) official functions at the court
◦literary activities
[*]baroque: ***the art of not rejecting anything*** (el arte de no renunciar a nada -Montesinos)
(am i baroque?)
different types of frontispiece:
1. divided into geometrical compartments (german origin?)
2. depicting a particular scene (german invention) [images/elements chosen/included for doctrinal and controversial significance]
3. single cartouche (school of Fontainebleau), a predilection for Mannerist irrationality and illusionism; interlocking, complicated scroll-work and strapwork; imitating the three-dimensional scrolling, with edges curling forward around the inscription; fantastic architectural structures, and grotesque figures and monsters taken from classical mythology
4. architectural title page (with the most monumental and most three-dimensional character), arrangement of sculpture-like allegorical figures or personifications
shifts from the techniques of woodcut --to--> engraving (--to-->? digital) ==> greater pictorial detail & better illusionism
*Sa'di's advice and devices* [title]
(Sa'di's relationship to) ‘the accumulated knowledge’(==> device)
[*]device (symbolum): a combination of a picture and a personal motto. a private adage (امثال و حکم) or clever aphorism --> heraldic image --fusion~=> device: a personal message by means of which a knight would define himself--developed from the chivalric tradition** ==?==> Sa'di's moral devices
-theoretical advice and examples of devices
-a craftsmann, a painter or goldsmith, would then supply the visual form of the idea that the learned scholar create[...]
(305)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%91.4[...]ting presses installed in his house, and required that the engravers live and work there, under his direct supervision
“Concerning the Changeability of Worldy Things, and the Wonder and Praise of Virtue”
‘flaming hearts’ symbolizing “their” union
symbolism (of the frontispiece tries to) contain the subject matter (of the text that follows)
the triumph of death (but with a happy end for the deceased) # Adventure Time
“that which i wish for is not mortal” (Duke's motto)
“virtue lives on after the funeral rites”
his home, name, heraldry, figure, allows the viewer to grasp the entire span of the deceased's life (and death) *at a single glance*
horn of plenty
cupid is astride (with a leg on each side of)
astrilized
*winged sphere*
winged fame trumpets the deceased's accomplishments
christian mastery over the infidel--who is blinded to the true faith
a group of international admirers
**methods used in Europe to disseminate information about foreign people** during the early modern era:
•Flugblatt (broad-sheet or broadside, 14th century), a medium directed at the illiterate classes (that needed visual cue) [included: news about battles, astrological prediction, sighting of comet, birth of a monstrous creature (animal or human), execution of a famous criminal, tales of witches, devils, religious or political propaganda]
Flugblatt counterparts:
◦Flugshrift (flying writ, flying pamphlet), popularized by Martin Luther, four pages with woodcut gracing, for audience with ability and leisure to read longer tracts
•illustrated costume book. with Mannerist strapwork, grotesque, garlands, allegorical personifications; in scenes representing the original reason why humans need to wear clothing
•(Norbert when he uses “we” in his language) --> *author*: active, nude, individual with his scissors, not dressed for battle, who will actively clothe the other figures ... [in frontispiece to Hans Weigel's Trachtenbuch the personifications of the non-Europeans are all prepared for battle] (male warriors in female continents [continents are usually represented by female figures, derived from biblical and classical sources such as Roman coins]) {Amerindian's headdress once was removed from its original ethnographic context, “decontextualized,” and then “recontextualized in a different setting --> europeans might have thought that it was a skirt. the reverse is the story of shalite شلیته?}
mid 16th century also saw the development of the periodical newssheet (adapted from broadside)
consisting of image and text--work together in order to provide meaning for the design --> view needed to combine ==> a composing/composer subjectivity
allegorical putti (symbolizing industry)
inscripti[...]
(306)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%91.6[...]
the dramatic pose of the Persian husband
the curtain-like skin
the “emblematic corpse” on a “stage”
to serve as ‘exemplum’ tamsil تمثيل
+ martyr-like European hero who suffers the slings and arrows of outrageous Tatars
}--> theater of cruelty
bellicosity (amade be jang آماده به جنگ)
reader/viewer is horrified & fascinated --provide--> a tale of *oriental atrocities* --set-for--> stage adventure stories that follow...
...................................
less obviously, from standard geographical texts of the Islamic world. yet with its emphasis on direct observation and critical objectivity, the map also points the way toward the more exacting “scientific” standards of the Enlightenment.
maps are cultural artifacts
Persia: exotic + faraway
map ==> analysis
a map--like a frontispiece--is comprised of both visual and textual elements, combining word and image; it represents a type of text, or discourse, that needs to be analyzed in detail in order to be “read” correctly
maps are never completely translatable (nor readable)
language translates into historical practice
carto-literacy
rhetorical device, ekphrasis: description
graph-o suggests both picture and writing *
the cartographic enterprises under Duke Frederick III of Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorf
mathematical principles + projection methods
14th century, seeks to include “ancient and modern discoveries in one verbal and visual description”
early modern age military and strategic situation of europe
establish fortifications
(Harley:) behind most cartographers there is a patron
mapping so became the business of the state and cartography is early nationalized
-global empire building
-preservation of the nation-state
-local assertion of individual property rights
}--> in each of these contexts the dimensions of polity and territory were fused in images which were part of the intellectual apparatus of power **
individual niches [on] architectural plinth
in Newe Landesbeschreibung: “in the beginning of the world, God created everything at once, with his clever/intelligent finger, using measure, weight and number ... because God is not a God of disorder, but wants everything to proceed in a proper manner and with the proper differentiation.” (translated in Vision of Persia, p.123)
illustrious predecessors
through their patronage and linked to the noble art of geography
the map is framed by scale bars (the cartouche [of title] rests on a kind of architectural base in which a scale bar is contained)***
(graticules, more details,)
typography plays a[...]
(307)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%91.9[...]he invisible history that the image cannot put into words.” (Conley)
grid, superimposed on the map
a common topos in Persian painting: a male protagonist expecting the female to pour wine or some other liquid into the shallow bowl he is holding
this ‘anticipation of drink’ is construed (in the title of Olearius map of persia) as a gesture of welcome and hospitality; providing the viewer with an iconic image of two “typical” inhabitants and their form of dress --> “promise and peril” [riches to be found + dangers encountered; treasures + giant snakes]
this continues today: the image of an iranian woman in native dress
on the Persians’ inner nature and customs
the dedicatory cartouche's [special effects]: ruler's name, capitalized, special style of italics
establishing the Duke's geographical purview --> linked to foreign territories
through ‘knowledge’ and ‘discovery’ --> learn about Safavid Persia
(Conley)
(cartography during early modern age afforded to) the emerging self and the self's relation to the idea of national space
between raw perception and creative imagination
surveying and plotting the world
the drama of european literature: an unforeseen theatricalization of the self in the 15th-17th century
-the self seems to be produced in the form of a subject, as a paradoxical being divided between a representation of the conditional relations it is producing and the composite nature of the simultaneously aural and visual medium of print
-growth of cartography parallels that of the coming of autobiography --> mapping is responsible for the consciousness that leads to the production of the fashioned self
rise of:
•autobiography
•opera
•natural history
Olearius multiplicity of roles
artist, geographer, historian, tourist, merchant, diplomat,
Olearius's production of self
mantle of artist is passed on to the author, who asserts himself and his new status in pictorial form
[in the corner of the map of Flensborg from Newe Landsbeschreibung] a hat obscures the specific character traits of the individual [artist/cartographer], and the image opts instead to emphasize the professional activity of the geographer [==> *expert: a new subject ruled by laws of classification or ideology, an expert cosmographer or topographer]
+ beautiful theories of a fire that burned in the human heart
he stick to his calculations despite the criticism he receives from colleagues and friends
Olearius's scientific reticence (kam-guyi کم گويى)
he quotes (without attribution) Athanasius Kircher: “some think that the earth, as well as the heavens have their intelligent angels or spirits which move inside them and thus bring the waters out of their depth” (V[...]
(308)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%92.1[...]artist is passed on to the author, who asserts himself and his new status in pictorial form
[in the corner of the map of Flensborg from Newe Landsbeschreibung] a hat obscures the specific character traits of the individual [artist/cartographer], and the image opts instead to emphasize the professional activity of the geographer [==> *expert: a new subject ruled by laws of classification or ideology, an expert cosmographer or topographer]
+ beautiful theories of a fire that burned in the human heart
he stick to his calculations despite the criticism he receives from colleagues and friends
Olearius's scientific reticence (kam-guyi کم گويى)
he quotes (without attribution) Athanasius Kircher: “some think that the earth, as well as the heavens have their intelligent angels or spirits which move inside them and thus bring the waters out of their depth” (Vision of Persia p.153)
therefore the waters were driven by a natural power through the hidden veins of the earth and rose up into the mountains, just as in a human being the blood rises from the liver to the heart and moves upward to the head through the vena cava. --?--> Harvey's discovery of the circulation of blood
...cartographic literature both reflected and brought about changing perceptions of the world
about Marco Polo
Gabriel: Marco Polo did not have the influence on geography that one might have expected [...] he had no corresponding education, had been unable to make astronomical observation, and the results of these thrown-together maps was complete chaos [!]
the shape-shifting Caspian sea
*** Tabula Asiae ***
Olearius's travel account also seeks to be encyclopedic
...describe and judges the deviations from the European norm
common
barbarous
destruction of the body itself
Munster's final judgment:
“[Perisans] do not speak much and are more apt to act than to speak. they like the uncleanness or lust of the body; they are measured in their eating habits; they seldom keep to what they promise unless it is to their advantage” --> a laconic (mojez موجز) group of people who are frugal (sarfeju صرفه جو) in their habits, rarely keep their word unless it is to their advantage and are also oversexed ==> they are indeed different from the Europeans
discourse of analogy
cartographic evidence
a book of others
the ways it fashions received information
“Ortelius's innovation in the science of cartography is that he attends less to the “big picture” of the world than to putting together an illustrated summery of possibly infinite number of fragmentary parts (Conley)
--> “segmentable” units of an infinite possibility of scale and focus (#Goolge maps)
[]
[...]
(309)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%92.2[...]er of fragmentary parts (Conley)
--> “segmentable” units of an infinite possibility of scale and focus (#Goolge maps)
[]
Blue Map of Persia
influence of Ptolemy on the early islamic cartographers, in the time of Ma'mun
the notion of the inhabitable world being divided into seven horizontal bands called ‘climata’ or agalim/aghalim/ اقلیم(a geographical model derived probably from Persia)
*encircling ocean* surrounded the known world, and that usually have south at the top, probably to emphasize the importance of Mecca
system of Climes
(book of) notification: tanbih تنبیه
...pioneer on the road toward a (geographically) correct picture of Persia
_Persienbild_
...................................
“drawn from life”
the imagery and allegorical figures found on the frontispiece are learned signifiers belonging to a visual world that reflects and prefigures the verbal description that forms the body of the work
Olearius designs a brilliant visual program
visual table of contents
his nascent (dar tavalod درحال تولد) nationalist feelings
he translates both:
•the literature of the Persian poet
•the visual code of the land (he has visited)
traces of the author within the map
signs of the hidden power relation
depiction of the exotic “other” --> represented visually and typologically categorized, be it within the map itself, or in the boundary areas, in the margins of the representational space**
--?--> Timuri jiz
patronage
naming
“es gab eine lustige perspective”
of note in this scene [shah Safi's banquet for the Hostein embassy] is the woman alongside the right wall, who seems to be flirting coquettishly with a German looking in her direction, thus establishing a kind of contact between the two cultures
the monarch's true nature is laid bare
“you see me from the outside, as a pleasant young man in years, but on the murderous interior i am a tyrant.”
the scene of Eastern opulence and decadence corresponds to a 17th century (or even 21st century) Westerner's conception of an Oriental court
oriental stage
...................................
صورت الأرض surate al-arz (face of earth)
اصطخری Istakhri, 10th century, translated into German by Mordtmann
he met another celebrated traveler, Ibn Haukul ابن حوقل
...................................
Verran: *innovating to effect the discipline of deductive proof in ancient Greek*
(i found out--Pierre also noted--that in my work i tend to) inspire a baroque style of empirical analysis
[*]baroque
[...]
(310)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%92.2[...]dealized future, proposing as a realistic map of a given)
@Eszter: the question of recognizing the complexity of manipulating sets of relations expressed graphically --> developing (in my self) a contrast which offers possibilities for rhetorically distinguishing between ‘speaking from’ and ‘speaking to’ ==> shifts that can effect moves in collective meaning-making
wordy texts
(Star Trek's) displaying “our” modern commonplaces out of the place they are coming from --> makes me vomit
-in US sci-fi TV series we face that we are still Aristotlian, in our regulation of speech, we live under the regime of non-contradiction and of non-equivocation (tie up our public life in it) (--> when i say this is not my story, i am talking about another tradition of speech regulation)
proto-Baroque theater
*ambiguous monarchy*
absolutism has never been a feature of Iran monarchies
(who?) put an end to the complex, emergent baroque polity
a baroque sensibility was no longer salient in the Danish monarchical context and the baldachin became war booty --> that is how Adventure Time's sensibility is now
[Verran & Winthereik briliant thinking and literature:] “baldachin was designed to perform within the tense shifting landscape of partnerships associated with an aristocracy vigorously reorganizing itself as it emerged out of the crisis of the late medieval.”
there was a shift from ‘vertical to horizontal social integration’ (Christianson) with a better-off peasantry and a surge in the urban middle classes, and secular magnate families (najibzade نجيب زاده)
the baldachin was a device that performed in a force field--a wary but indomitable alliance of crown and noble magnates --> baldachin as a diagram in association with texts, the speech, and bodily gesture of court events
diagram: amam: ambiguously and ambivalently ‘spoken from’ (--> proposing how a just society might be achieved) and ‘spoken to’ (--> a vivid vision of a just polity)
a figuration that equivocates over what a just society is
baroque diagram's felicity and ability to assist **collective passage through complexity**
tapestry (فرش / منقوش --> is concerned with collective way-finding ~ pilotage) and diagram }--> has to do with the collective
baldachin and the (innovation) model as material semiotic devices that intervene in the ‘happening of the real’ (Lury & Wakeford, Winthereik & Verran)
-they press upon others their presence as *participating entities* and offer *pilotage*
the model perfroms by eschewing اجتناب contradiction and equivocation =/= the baldachin (my graphs, atlases) elaborately figures both equivocation and contradiction --> *it equivocates about contradiction*
[equivo[...]
(311)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%92.6[...]Court would rule in their favor, the judgment drew on the presence of the figure of Hermaphrodite in Ancient Greece to Islam + discussed with sympathy by mainstream media + well-organized and politically savvy hijra community in Pakista
}--> @Hoda, since she is interested in women's status under purportedly Islamic regimes
}==> Islam is not the overarching motor within purportedly Muslim societies that mainstream discourse would have us believe
(Rastegar > Toor:) “it is typical of much human rights discourse in the Third World to focus on [...] practices of regulating women's bodies, especially those identified with Islamic law, while ignoring socioeconomic concern.” @Hoda
Toor's two distinctions [=/= collapsing all forms of ‘Islamization’ resulting in a serious misunderstanding of the social processes at work]:
•‘Islamization from below’ : rise of (voluntary) public piety among Muslims, adoption of particular styles of facial hair by men and of various forms of hijab by women
•‘Islamization from above’ : the ways in which structures of power—from families to states—deploy ‘Islam’ in order to control women (and men)
(Toor:) Shah's cogent critique of the fetishization of the ‘community’ in ethnographic literature
a society defined by ‘a history of’
•dictatorial regimes (with support of the U.S.)
•(under siege from joint pressures of) a corrupt ruling class
•a heavy debt burden
•predatory and conspicuous consumption
•ongoing (neo)colonial intervention
==> cultural identity becomes a contentious issue & women's bodies become sites (for these cultural politics and the class struggles they embody)
~=> regulation of women sexuality : the key hegemonic move through which consent across social classes can be secured**
the increasing interconnectedness of different parts of the world at economic, political, and cultural levels (= globalization) ==> intensification in the dynamics of social change ==> anxiety ==> (greater) regulation of women (in kin-networks as a response to political, social and cultural anxieties under globalization)
[This was just as true of Europe during the period of capitalist modernization in the 18th and 19th centuries, and of colonized and decolonizing societies in the mid-20th century =/= Islamic exceptionalism = a form of Orientalism operative today : an exclusive focus on ‘Islam']
haq bakhshwana (in rural Punjab): the daughter of a propertied family is ‘married’ to the Qur'an, or, in some cases, to a tree—so as to prevent her share of the family property transferring to her husband's family --> women are both the property of their kin (symbolically and sometimes literally) while having rights to property themselves
Toor suggesting in her analysis a healthy dose of skepticism towards projects that present the ‘[...]
(312)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%92.9[...] predatory and conspicuous consumption
•ongoing (neo)colonial intervention
==> cultural identity becomes a contentious issue & women's bodies become sites (for these cultural politics and the class struggles they embody)
~=> regulation of women sexuality : the key hegemonic move through which consent across social classes can be secured**
the increasing interconnectedness of different parts of the world at economic, political, and cultural levels (= globalization) ==> intensification in the dynamics of social change ==> anxiety ==> (greater) regulation of women (in kin-networks as a response to political, social and cultural anxieties under globalization)
[This was just as true of Europe during the period of capitalist modernization in the 18th and 19th centuries, and of colonized and decolonizing societies in the mid-20th century =/= Islamic exceptionalism = a form of Orientalism operative today : an exclusive focus on ‘Islam']
>
haq bakhshwana (in rural Punjab): the daughter of a propertied family is ‘married’ to the Qur'an, or, in some cases, to a tree—so as to prevent her share of the family property transferring to her husband's family --> women are both the property of their kin (symbolically and sometimes literally) while having rights to property themselves
Toor suggesting in her analysis a healthy dose of skepticism towards projects that present the ‘Muslim world’ --and asking how (in a Foucauldian sense) is ‘Islam'[~ the idea that something stable and immutable called ‘Islam’ exists anywhere] being deployed, by whom, and for what purpose? “Is it being used as an ideological tool, does it serve as a spiritual haven, or is it invoked as an identitarian response to the ravages of a globalized world?” (Toor)
(unpack we must)
***to unpack different islams (for different actors who deploy it)
‘islam’ certainly cannot be unproblematically deployed as the explanatory ‘variable’
Toor in her example cases showing that the ‘islam connection,’ when it is there, is varied, complex, and sometimes contradictory (=/= mainstream discourse on Islam)
(i want Hoda to make her categorical labor harder, i want her to make historically and socially contextual analysis, not just take shortcuts towards generalization predetermined by a priori categories (of Iran, Islam, women), rather to begin with the empirical reality)
...................................
a new legible object of analysis (in writing culture): qualities, trajectories, aesthetics ==> writing became tactile and compositional, an attunement, a response, “a vigilant protection of a worlding” (Stewart)
*writing = a way of thinking*
[*]precarity: register of the singularity of emergent phenomena, the way that they accrete, accrue and wear out
(=/= recognizing self-identica[...]
(313)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%92.9[...]demonstrating theories + scientific tools + direct references to natural objects
--> searchable interfaces (+ desire for condensed information)
(**list ==> searchable**)
(Apianus's early modern cognitive horizon -->) eye: another organ used to calibrate settings
activated eye --> new empirical pursuits
my epistemic images : work of an image fetishist
bestiary: animal character diagnosis
[horses]
(from) genre of taking care of the animal: veterinary --to--> chiromancy: profiling of the animal conditioned through the serial nature of list (==> control)
...................................
Brancaforte
readings of the apparatuses framing Olearius's books
tradition of representing Persia in the West (Xenophon and Herodotus)
narrative elements of Olearius’ works remain largely unexamined
Brentjes
elm naghli علم نقلی (artistic research knowledge) =/= elm aghli علم عقلی (rationality)
(science) elm in Iran <== (10th century written in Persian:) limits of the world [hodud al-alam] + pharmacological medicine + (translated ~= adaptations of) astrology
10th century --> gradual decline in literacy in Arabic ==> Persian treaties on sciences
rag-shenasi (knowledge of the pulse) --> Avicenna
روضة المنجمین
rowzat (روضة to look) [~/=? nozhat نزهت] ~= garden ~= astrological site
-(iran) university garden =/= (greek) university gymnasium
book: expository discourse (رساله توضیحی، تفسیری، نمایشی)
•poems on the subject
•تحسین و تمجید lengthy laudatory adjectives to describe the dedicatee:
◦patronage of the courts
◦the teaching circles
◦the family lineages of professions
◦the existence of “amateurs de sciences” (the private individuals interested in science)
•anecdotes (historical or legendary)
•questions and answers
•observation on the usefulness and the excellence of knowledge in general
...................................
ethnography:
•set of methods for knowing about social relations [--> storytelling] (=/=?)
•cultural-analytical scholarship [--> analysis]
ethnography: [*]ethnographic stories = generalizations that intervene (~= instruments that make intervention possible <-- a knowledge product in contemporary sci & tech studies STS)
ethnography: stories that have in them a capacity represent the world in ways that are generative for the people and practices that the stories are about + authors (+ their peers + readers)
****(from) postmodern concern about the authority of the author --to--> a concern about partiality and generative critique****
@apass #feedback
(Ve[...]
(314)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%93.2[...]behavior of complex objects
Charney + von Neumann
deterministic description of the atmosphere
“long-range forecasting”
computer-based metrology
==> *field* became the essence of atmospheric state (field =/= structure, phenomena such as cyclones, fronts, cyclogenesis, frontogenesis)
<--Lorenz-- a given that the atmosphere is a single whole
romantic & nonromantic Darwin
evolutionary theory
phylogenetic tree
-“war of nature ==> higher animals directly follow”
-individual organisms engage in various interactions with each other ==> speciation
Tansley (fulfilling a romantic expectation with regard to complex systems) --1926--> maintenance of equilibrium by ecosystem ["life = equilibrium"]
=/= Schrödinger (showed that equilibrium is unfit as a metaphor for life) --> life = islands of low entropy (complex locations) in a sea of high entropy (of decreasing complexity)
>
Lokta
(evolution of) chemical systems = general systems
Patten
ecosystem ecologist
“ecosystem = natural control system” ~= (single equilibrium simple cybernetic) technical control device <-- the metaphor of *automatic machine* (taken literally)
representing whole ecosystems by (mathematized and fit for simulation on digital computers) models
1960s 70s --> system ecology
--lurck--> (romantic trope of) rigorous functionalism [every little plant or insect had its place as a cog on a giant machinery]
Rene Thom
chemical reaction kinetics
biological morphogenesis
catastrophe theory: slight change in a single variable of a system can give rise to sharp discontinuous change
==> existence of multiple equilibria
Slobodkin
game theory
management of natural systems
Prigogine + Stengers
brussebrusselator device (--> strange attractor) --> behavior and evolution of complex systems --illustrate-->
•discontinuous development
•bifurcation (points at which the system may go in either of two directions --> the system behaves as a whole)
local random fluctuations (around a mean) --> bifurcation point --> the system as a whole evolves to a new order
=/= cybernetic system (control center)
=/= steam engine (governor)
Robert May
the more complex a system is, the more likely it is that small fluctuations (will be just large enough) to be critical
complexity ==> unstability
~~~~> chaos theory
(for Prigogine) fluctuation: essential condition for order of physical universe, life, civilization
[the most humble aspect of the behavior of matter:] white noise --(chaotic phenomena)--> order [on macro level]
turbulence <-- cannot be predicted (deterministic appro[...]
(315)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%93.6[...] spark of color
a modulation in tempo
half-patterned expressivity
--of--> a scene teemingly differentiated and marked by thresholds of matter
when a tree is “charged and transfigured” by a violent sunset
Stewart + Dillard
a thing becomes a call to word
(Harman:) objects themselves, like voices or forms of writing, have style
Stewart > Dillard's causal logic of bizarre but categorical predation:
a small frog perched precariously on a lily pad in a pond, its back end already strangely slumped in the water. Then it suddenly deflates
its skin “ruck, and rumple, and fall’ and then “formless as a pricked balloon, lay in floating folds like blight scum on top of the water”
--suggest--> its style
=/= exempla of a generality
=/= embodiments of something
*points of precision* in moments, scenes, forms, and states of matter
an image synesthetically remembered --> engineered bridges of the purely social or thee purely natural imagine a flatly describable world composed of fully present states of being
...the wind forms blades in the sea like lines on a page
description: an approach to an ungraspable thing --> deliteralizing
remainders
(distributed gap between residents’ reports and police determinations:) [examples of semi-events (half-witnessed):]
•a dangerous-looking animal moving about on a man's property turned out to be a black plastic trash bag blowing in the wind
•threatening graffiti on a lawn were markings made by phone company employees
•a strange noise was wind in the trees
•a report of a man licking the locks on doorways of apartments on North Pleasant Street (--> suggestion of this licking everywhere remained)
•a blood-soaked glove on the ground outside the DB Mart was a pink glove (-- establish--> pattern of possible hands in roads)
-
--Stewart--> **an staging ground for people's perceptive** --> **attention to the weird possibilities emergent in the ordinary**
==> *mysterious patterns with precise details* [= ajayeb] --> (bring into relief) a background, a zone, a worlding in which things become perceptible (in a weirdly realist way)
[explanation =/=] stranger faithfulness to the spirit of the unnamed thing they witnessed ==> moved to make a report (something is a little off)
(if there is grounding it is grounding in) world's variegated poesis --> ([*]description:) to make room ([for its] emergence --into--> theory)
A walker with a routine gets used to the little apparitions of something throwing together in his or her vicinity
(questions of points of contact:) what to do with your eyes?
([against?] positionality of) writing from the ground
(memory of a city:) a contact aesthetic of histories[...]
(316)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%93.8[...]the background of nothing
visceral avoidance
pretty and fresh as blueberry pie
townies (how i am not a townie where i live)
•townie: loyalty to the expressivity of things
sociality of a wedding party (filled with roles and dressings)
crazy ricochet..
perfectly ordinary...
...long-ago layered over the wood (necrotic غانقرايايا)
“expressivity sliced through matter, word, and action, locking them together in a harshly half-formed world”
writing Cinderella diaries --> questions of realism
•what kind of real we enter?
•her realism (bring her) --into--> a rough contact with objects human and non-human
•Cinderella does things to and with them (her animals) [and reverse]
*social pressure ==> (people) make descriptive mistake*
a problematic (for example afterlife of a tragedy) --that--> inspires X --to--> speculative interest in forms
•Cinderella stating to noticing things (rumors, gossip, realism)
•gossip: realist attention to things
the world were his secret
loved the smell of the cold
in the night's dark hours
demanded our co-emotional sharpness
the world literally burst into color on the home side --and--> went gray in the instant of passing over the edge
no one knew their names...
...the energy of small things...
as if the point of living was to...
mosquitoes drew blood...
a helmet of white roots
...painted hyperbright colors in paint so flat it makes my fingertips dry just to look at it
dull dark oversized furniture
collapsed piles...
(nothing ever happens without first) registering a commitment to exhausting webs of complication
learning from mice --> dark little tunnels of limited choice
(Stewart's) points of precision: (of any act or story) what matters is the singularity of an angle of approach (a surprise contact, an opening onto some world's cocomposition, momentary flourishing of some capacity) [=/= a meaning]
shaken profusion in things =/= rush evaluative critique
so ordinary and problematic
so the idea of writing about “clean” started being interested in this website: https://www.politicalconcepts.org, and the desire to write a political entry point for them on the idea of clean in the 20th century
also after i moved to Brussels May 2016, the affect of dirty
to have a little talk or jam on the notion of “clean” and “clean body”
i have been scribbling on its metaphorology for a while, thinking with it about the 20th century political thinking, institutional thinking, criminology, xenophobia, morality, and many other things. it is a key term for me.
•difference and indiffer[...]
(317)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%93.9[...]/= simple construction partes extra partes): omnipresent homogenized capitalist exchange value
•Nancy's ecotechnics: critique of globalization and sovereignty
•Avital's narcotics: on Heidegger: the notion of ‘addicted to technology’ --asking--> under what conditions we could arrive at a *free relation to technology*? being ‘fast’ --> on the run ==> dumps understanding along the way. (for Heidegger) freedom depends upon Dasein's openness to anxiety ==diverts==> addiction [a certain type of being-on-drugs] }--> drugs have something to do with technology? @constantvzw
drugs in warfare: taking pills (or tranced by nohe مداحی جنگ) into superior performance, technologizing himself into the war machine (hero on heroin) --> technically calibrated culture
‘chemical prosthesis’ (a technology of the human) has been part of man-machinic hybridizations
-hallucinated exteriority
-stimulant, opening another hallucinogenre in life, at the edge of being
-our culture is bascially the history of ‘high culture’
(Avital suggests) drugs [master object of considerable libidinal investment] have been about exploring ‘fractal interiorities’ (and not exterior dimensions)
ecstasy of intoxication, forgetfulness, mimetic poisoning (of literature [= singular staging of the imaginary]): as sedative, as cure, as escape [= forced decision upon the subject]
-for Baudelaire opium became the transparency upon which one could review the internal conflict of freedom, the cleave of subjectivity where it encounters the abyss of destructive jouissance.
-(Emma Bovary had busted) a logic of reappropriation, collapsing the dreams of restoring a self
@constantvzw's investment in the critique of hallucinated plenitude and pure communication (enabled by digital media) --> transcendental telepathy (being online/connected over distances in a Facebook sense)
-pleasure and liberty values freely exercised upon a coded body
*hallucinator: a creature of simulacrum*
-what is wrong with the social media stream addict? a transport going nowhere; addictive, artificial, and beside oneself; [genuinely clean or drug free ~=? being exposed to existence, placing one's body in the grips of a temporality that pains]; phantasm of lack in abstinence; (like drugs they are) linked to *a mode of departing*, to desocialization, (like the activity of writing) nonproductive and somehow irresponsible, being-in-drugs (being-in-Facebook) supposedly resists the production of real value (incapable of stabilizing the truth of a real world); figure of drifter/dissident: obsessed and entranced, narcissistic, private, unable to achieve transference; movement of the simulacrum without address;
speed: going nowhere fast
...................................
[Campbell] on marketing theory
bacteria: entities that threaten our secluded sovereign cleanliness
our ideas of bacteria are sha[...]
(318)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%94.4[...]
lack of a necessary ultimate cause or meaning (facticity) --Meillassoux--> fundarnental source of being (ontological contingency ~ “facticity itself is necessary”) : no ‘higher’ or ‘supreme’ force or reason (metaphysical, physical, spiritual) is guiding it [~ total ontological absence of a necessity] ==> *contingency* is absolutely necessary in the universe
“Everything in the universe is without reason and is therefore capable of becorning otherwise without reason.” --> this has happened already at least 3 times (where new sets of laws enlerge from nowhere):
•Big Bang
•life from non-life (==> new laws of biological life)
•thought
absolute is wider
“two billiard balls strike into each other, resulting in both balls flying off into the air, or fusing together, or turning into two immaculate but rather grumpy mares, or into two maroon but rather affable lilies”
(@apass)
every research agonizes about:
•the ontological 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 recupe[...]
(319)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%94.6[...]mpbell==> escalation and absolutization of ethics (*that is necessary to aithentically occupy it*)
@apass: constant investigation of one's epistemology (=/= ontology) in artistic research
--Sina--> the danger of ontologization...
**massively expansive vista of rationality** =/= disavowing rationality
(the old philosophical idea of) the absolute =/= equivocal status
bleak optimism: organizing without hope <== climate change has already happened
--> how to die : a creative form of foreclosure that unlocks a justice that cannot exist without realizing the ontological dimensions of climate change
frame: general organizing device ==>
•define problems
•diagnose causes
•suggest solutions
(their) argumentative strength ==influence==> organization
frame --> define climate change ==> produce climate change --through--> (the work of:)
•problem-identification
•claim-making
•attribution-laying
•boundary delineation
•counter-framing
•bridging
•amplification
•constructing identity-forming vocabularies and discourses
==> *alter an audience's ideological beliefs*
climate change literature has been dominated by economics, (geo)engineering, legal theory/policy studies ==> solutions (to climate change) --invoke--> markets, technologies, policies (with differing criteria about what constitutes legitimacy, authority, efficacy) }<--Campbell-- *before they get a solution, the phenomenon has already been scientized, politicized, mediatized, organized*
indigenous framing of climate change
drawing from indigenous cultures in the hope that a deeper emotional maturity might lead to a deep engagement with the environment which ultimately bestows life }--> framed as an existential threat ==> (question what it means to be) an ecologically interdependent species with moral agency @Chloe2
eschatological cliche --> “existentially significant activities are no longer possible ==> the loss of meaning” (=/= Cinderella)
[*]frame, framing: enfold audiences into an enclosure that is conceptually accessible
for example
•*ecological modernization* : a frame for climate change that seems to enclose the grreatest number of diverse stakeholders --- uses carbon as a way to engage diverse stakeholders, a centrifugal locus that is calculable, non-political, scientific ==> presents opportunities for innovation }--Campbell--> short-term strategy: a reification process that transforms climate change into “the carbon problem” ==> production of carbon markets that ironically serve as creative new modes of accumulation <-- reifies ecological maladaptation
•*catastrophic framing* of climate change --> backfires, moomerang effects, causing audiences to disbelieve the entire message
•*frame-bridging* [...]
(320)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%95.1[...] countries with *double consciousness* تجربه چندگانگی تجربه دوگانگی are good at *hopeless optimism* خوش بین ناامید}
1. acknowledge the unbounded unthinkabile incalculable nature of this new reality
2. a chance to experiment with organizational forms of justice, ethics, politics, reason (that are without precedent)
{(examining growing boundaries of) climate change ==> increasing category expansion ==> epistemologies cannot encompass climage change reality}--Campbell--> (we are) afforded a chance to ontologize it
speculative realism: a mode of commitment to a non-correlated reality --Campbell--> an organizational strategy ==> a mood --> bleak optimism
unthinkability: refusal to let framing occur
...................................
how mythology is being used in consumer research
[...]
[Tillotson and Martin offering various myth typologies to support theorists in evaluation of myth theories and appropriate integration of theoretical advancements in the field of consumer culture theory:] --> how consumer researchers have sailed though every discipline--from psychology, sociology, anthropology and cultural studies, to literary criticism, history and political economy...
myth has been understood in consumer research from five perspective:
•symbolic
•functionalist
•semiotic
•structuralist
•critical theory
•monomythic
Weber{ modern bureaucratization and intellectualization ==> disenchantment of the world }--> modern experience = rationalization and mythological mysticism ==> marketplace, *no institution has been more willing and able to respond to this (Weberian) desire for enchantment than the modern marketplace* ~=> ***normative preference for enchantment = consumption***
--problem--> *the market remains firmly in charge of myth of consumption, its rewards and its consequences* : marketplace mythology has increasingly become an all-encompassing construct of assorted descriptions and theoretical advancements including the sacred, extraordinary, symbolic and transcendental
myth: a way of organizing perceptions of realities
consumer culture theory
{[Mead & Blumer's] symbolic perspective of myth: how symbols are adorned with meaning and that affect social interaction --> symbolic myth research: verbal/nonverbal forms of communication, with an emphasis on how people behave in day-to-day circumstances in the context of socio-historical structure and ideological of their environment ==> “mythology = narrative” }=/= Joseph Campbell: “interaction with the symbolic ==> mythology”
•Freud's use of mythic stories as metaphors in psychoanalysis ==> (early) symbolic perspective
•Jung's archetype: embodiment beliefs/images ==collectively==> myth and[...]
(321)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%95.7[...]--negotiated--> personal myth as interpretive strategy
}==> concepts of ‘consumption’ and ‘identity’ in consumer culture theory
identity work =/= personal myth
[Velliquette + Murray + Creyer:] example of tattoo culture: private and public burrs physically with the attachment of personal meaning to physical marking of the skin and symbolically through the personal stories attached to public brands --> *individuals attach meaning to consumption* <== negotiating the cultural tensions <==throu== perception of self contrasted with the influence of institutional structures (race, class, gender, age) and ideological pressure }==> “meaning = dialectic of object and consumer”
•(Jung's archetype ==>) Joseph Campbell's monomyth: universally applicable narrative of mythology (like in Hollywood films about the hero's rites of passage --> experience of life in accordance with the phenomena of time)
myths/dreams find expression in symbolic form --> "participating in ritual == engaging myth”
}--> **consumer research as hero's journey** : Consumer Behavior Odyssey's travelling across America in a motorhome to learn about self, the world, and other people [@Jassme and Mia] --> transcendental knowledge of the American consumer ==> academic literature
(consumer Odyssey found that) ‘the journey’ holds a sacred status that transforms knowledge generation into new mythological epistemologies and opens up new doors to understanding (of consumption)
&
‘extraordinary experiences as rites of passage’ [--example: white water river rafting --> (emergent themes of) personal growth, communitas harmony with nature translated to other consumer experiences]
‘rites of passage’ [~= ‘monomyth']:
•separation [~= departure]
•transition [~= initiation]
•reintegration [~= return]
(river rafting ~=) ritual ~= enactment of myth
}--(Arnould & Price)--> narrative of service embodies the initiation of the journey
‘extraordinary experience' = event & *enchanted temporal period*
liminality: the threshold of a ritual where ambiguity and disorientation occurs before the ritual has been completed [Van Gennep, Turner]
[Dobscha and Foxman:] how a joyous activity is actually stressful and invokes *transcendent experiences of a mythic journey* --> ‘call to adventure’ in a chaotic retail setting rife with conflict [~= buying (the quintessential perfect) wedding dress at Filene]
consumers engage and overcome conflicts (by enacting power, achievement, and mastery ~ mythic agency) and cross the mythic threshold ==> transform consumption process into extraordinary event
Saussure's “words considered as signifiers to signs where meaning is held” & meaning is dependent on difference (and not on concepts outside language) --structuralism--> “myth = a form of speech that exists before ideas"
[...]
(322)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%95.8[...]f passage’ [~= ‘monomyth']:
•separation [~= departure]
•transition [~= initiation]
•reintegration [~= return]
(river rafting ~=) ritual ~= enactment of myth
}--(Arnould & Price)--> narrative of service embodies the initiation of the journey
‘extraordinary experience' = event & *enchanted temporal period*
liminality: the threshold of a ritual where ambiguity and disorientation occurs before the ritual has been completed [Van Gennep, Turner]
[Dobscha and Foxman:] how a joyous activity is actually stressful and invokes *transcendent experiences of a mythic journey* --> ‘call to adventure’ in a chaotic retail setting rife with conflict [~= buying (the quintessential perfect) wedding dress at Filene]
consumers engage and overcome conflicts (by enacting power, achievement, and mastery ~ mythic agency) and cross the mythic threshold ==> transform consumption process into extraordinary event
Saussure's “words considered as signifiers to signs where meaning is held” & meaning is dependent on difference (and not on concepts outside language) --structuralism--> “myth = a form of speech that exists before ideas”
==> Strauss: [speech and remembrance ==>] pre-literary societies produce images and narratives that resembled nature and the meaning of the mind --> mythic narrative = embodied resolution of contradiction [=/= archives of achievements]
--Doja--> mythic structures: generalizable forms (common in all types of societies and universal categories of the human mind) ~ “collective structures ==> superstructures = myth”
Strauss: “myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact”
[for example Mauss's gift: obligation of reciprocation = power-relationship creating a binary of giver and receiver ==reciprocity==> synthesis of the gift]
•Geertz's ‘thick description’ (--> an antidote, symbolic anthropology =/= technocratic, mechanistic means of understanding cultures and settings, exercise of bridging perceived binary oppositions and creating triadic arrays of meaning)
•Derrida's random movement of signifiers (=/= origin as a transcendental anchor to build signification, Strauss's concept of the exemplar model)
Saussure ==>
•Barthes: “myth = manifestation of ideological tendencies of cultures” --> distorts history, depoliticizes speech ==> “language of the bourgeoisie becomes the myth of universal truths, obscuring the power relations and blocking the perspective of power between class, race, gender and other marginalized people” --> perpetuate existing social conditions
=/= Peirce: systems of signification create discourses (~ practices create the meaning behind an individual's interaction with a sign)
}--> ‘advertisers and marketers use signs and symbols to create meaning surrounding their brands. consumers interpret these signs and sy[...]
(323)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%95.8[...]aration of the end of humanity as we know it
•heralding an era of:
◦human being will be superseded by technical being (+ ironically promissing to vouchsafe human being for eternity)
◦(liberatory seeks to) displace the arrogance of the human (as the ultimate and sole authorities of meaning)
•replete with ideological positions (ranging from horrific to hopeful)
•concerned with deconstruting the human as an ancient concept [~?~> dissatisfied and alienated by nature]
ectogenetic foetus (growth of an organism in an artificial environment)
surrogate mother جایگزین
pregnant man {in the fear-fantasy of miscegenation
(crossing:)
animal
human
inanimate
technologies
}==> horror (accompanying the posthuman)
[title]
monstrous logic of ajayeb
monstrous =/= neat categories
teratology
in a wider context of studies of monsters
written texts (not only physical manifestations) ~ defy canonical categories
[*]gothic: (not only a genre,) any type of text that makes coherent interpretation fail*** <== text suffers from an overload of contradictory meanings which make it literally fall apart at the seams
(Derrida:) monster: *species of the nonspecies* = as-yet unnameable which is proclaiming itself --> make people turn their eyes away
-the figure of the monster embodies a means of thinking otherwise
-event of the Derridean text signalling a rupture with the discourses in which it is gestated
--Campbell--> both Derrida and Darwin were engaged in the *practice of revealing monstrosity to the world*
***contemporary Iran = postmodern gothic***
آخوند akhoond: social imaginary of post-industrial society producing teratological monstrous formations <== their technological character transgresses conventions of taxonomical description --Braidotti--> cyber-teratological (fascinatino with grotesque + technological)
-what are the non-unitary subjectivities in Tehran today? (monster = horror + marvel)
monster =/= demonstrate, de-monstrate <-- vision + monstrosity
*monster: sites of otherworldliness* --used--> teratoscopy
1- Greek and Roman --> race of monsters: ethnic entity horrific & fantastic
2- baroque and enlightenment --> began to produce a scientific, wondrous, fantastic, rare, entertaining --(such as: madmen and dwarfs and other marvels participated in the life of his or her town and enjoys certain privileges [...] jesters and fools can transgress social conventions and do things that “normal” human beings cannot afford -Braidotti)
3- genetic turning point in the post-nuclear era --> cybernetic teratology: effects of toxicity and environmental pollution ==> new monsters [--> Tsing]
experie[...]
(324)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%96.4[...]ng to bourgeois individualism [...] changed into an encyclopedic storytelling of religious virtues
•using European technology, agriculture, economic individualism [<== spiritual autobiography], (rudimentary) political hierarchy, (civilizing effect of) Christianity [--> pursuit of meaningful spiritual engagement]
...as the inertia of the colonial world's knowledge system breaks into the streams of exploratory capital, the relay of fragments crystallizes before seeping through the colonial subject's social ground
http://www.curators-network.eu/blog-entry/lightning-studies-ctcccs-part-1-3 (Renan)
Cinderella's precarity
the question of: how can we translate contexts? (the context of which I bring my precarity differs from here in Brussels)
(the notion of *difficulty* in) Cinderella =/=? Robinson Crusoe
Crusoe's precarity (European) is something that you can overcome
•technology --> I can develop something out of my precarity and survive being struck on an island
•Crusoe's techne --> human =/= Cinderella's techne --> companion
•Crusoe ==> *rise of the ordinary individual in the nation* <== every individual values themselves high enough to consider themselves the proper subject of serious literature
◦modern individual: an ordinary & alone person is able to triumph over physical environment ~ to be able to exploit every situation
using diary format for Cinderella was inspired by respond to Crusoe's epistolary and confessional method of writing
(one of the earliest genre of) realistic fiction
written during the Enlightenment
one of the most widely published books in history
==> castaway narrative: improvise the means of survival from limited resources at hand
•progress through technology
•rebuilding of civilisation (civilisation = a form of triumph)
•unfriendliness of nature
◦he is with a dog, two cats and a parrot but he cannot talk to them =/= Cinderella
◦Crusoe starts making Bible fals (فال انجیل opening the Bible to a random page and read a verse that he believed was addressed at him)
◦he makes list (pro & cons --> debit & credit [--> mentality of business studies] --Weber--> book-keeping: distinctive technical feature of modern capitalism)
◦
•Crusoe: true protagonist of the empire (--Joyce--> prototype of British colonialism, *mythology of colonialism* --Sina--> #fable of imperialism)
•(romantic notion of) nature: idyllic =/= (Crusoe) nature: unforgiving + sparse }<-- utopian =/= dystopian nature --> Lord of the Flies
...................................
(with Annemarie's help @apass)
*sources of knowledge =/= styles of knowing* ==> tensions
judgment: an occasion to apply one's own standards =/= observation: a mean to get to know somebody else's standards
[...]
(325)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%97[...]t* is constituted
(Junger's drug, Heidegger's tech, Benjamin's hashish, de Quincey's opium, Duras's alcoholizations:) a saturated text, pushing beyond the materiality of the book though not into any ideality
the right to drugs + the supplementary interiority that they produce
there has never been a war on drugs that is not carried by another type of drug (religion, patriotism, oil, TV)
history of narcotica ~= history of culture
[*]intoxication: (names) a method of mental labor that is responsible for making phantoms appear --> mnemonic apparatus
“you have something in you that must be killed” ==> ambivalent stimulant/tranquilizer
body proper regains its corruptible organic status
self-medication and vitamins become the occupation of every singularity
drugs explore fractal interiorities (=/= seeking an exterior transcendental dimension)
renunciation چشم پوشی، ترک، کناره گیری، قطع علاقه
(addict = nonrenouncer)
virtual reality
cyberprojections
(Dasein's) dependency: a state in which anxiety is still bound
*mimetic poisoning* (of pharmacodependency associated with literature, as sedative, as cure, as escape, etc.) --?--> relationship to law
(our French heritage --> Flaubert: “a thinker should have neither religion nor fatherland nor even any social conviction”) *thinking = radically rupturing*
drugs forced decision upon the subject --> de Quincey
opium: the transparency upon which one could review the internal conflict of freedom (+ encounters the abyss of destructive jouissance)
war against pain
higher forms of drug
*(like any good parasite) drugs travel both inside and out of the boundaries of a narcissistically defended politics* ==producing==> a lexiconicon of body control and a private property of self
drug's virtual and fugitive patterns
they have a secret communications network with the internalized order
Madame Bovary = clinic of phantasms
everything said about technology can be applied to drugs: acceleration, speed, inertia, the third interval
drug/medicine ==>
•deaden the pain
•separate from a poisonous maternal flux
...
•hallucinated plenitude
•pure communication ~= transcendental telepathy
(have in mind that) any substance can function as a drug
“It wasn't clear then whether the body was private property or not, whether the authorities could legislate zoning ordinances, or whether pleasure and liberty were values freely exercised upon a coded body.”
-Avital
my work over the etymology of the signifier --> moon index
(i shoot up trash[...]
(326)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%97.4[...]nefit sought by the consumer* ~ illumination instead of lighting fixtures, prestige instead of automobiles, sex appeal instead of mere soap,,) *products --offer--> mini-solutions to the dilemmas of modernity[= the pace and scale of rationalization, depersonalization and urbanization brought by modern industrial capitalism ==exerted==> هزینه خسارت a toll on the human psyche]
1950 - 1960
(from) public role of sign identification --to--> private and psychological space of one's mind and interior life
rise of *depth men* (--> Mad Men TV series, people in advertising agencies that reportedly used psychological techniques to uncovers the subconscious needs, desires, insecurities, fears of consumers)
*product = unconscious fulfilments, solutions, comforts and fantasies to them*
[Packard's Betty Crocker cake mix and Esso's Tiger in your Tank campaign --> alleged power of small groups of people to organize meaning on a massive and uncontrolled level]
•freezer = a nostalgic site of security in a threatening environment =/= a device for cooling foodstuffs (*giving of food <--~~> love* + insecurity ==> more food than you can eat)
-more sophisticated motivational research and appeals
****advertising: a form of literacy**** (a new and bewildering code)
sign system of advertising is not static
the generations to come will regard contemporary sign systems as rudimentary and easy to decode
ultra-sophisticated images will appear antiquited and perhaps even humorous (@Goda hating contemporary sign system)
-the way in which advertising today visualizes software, the environment, nanotechnology as seemingly *undeconstructible & transparent* will be staple examples in classroom curricula
(the most obvious and immediate way of conceptualizing) advertising: a system that creates signs with the purpose of communicating meaning =/= Campbell
discipline of marketing --support--> investigation of image consumption
early models of advertising (--> **how we understand the philosophy of what information and communication are**)
•1949 Bell Laboratories --> information: universalized component of any system that communicated =/= “information” as rather poetic and sipritual term (at home in philosophy =/= engineering) --advertising--> hierarchy of effects: cognitive --to--> affective --to--> behavioral [--> informationalize and measure aspects of advertising]
(to understand) *information theory of communication as a reflection of larger scientific and philosophical aims of the time*
***information theory of communication ==>
•providing codified models that predict response
•enframe communication within a logic of relative effectiveness or ineffectiveness
}=/= my lectures
brand memories
brand equity
boundary betwee[...]
(327)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%97.9[...]in media as an incidental extra to an originary agent of meaning [<-- hylomorphic understanding of advertising]
[in 20th century (task of)] advertising: to render the invisible [qualities, such as: complexity, network, information,,,] into compelling visualities (--into--> public imagination)
•(in organizational discourse) complexity: (--articulate-->) unpredictable, multi-layered, decentered, emergent, globalized (world of Homeland TV series, of apass, of ERG's website: technological + adaptable + multi-layered)
*success <== visualize the complexity of their products* [in the case of ERG: student's knowledge and the institution of university]
(Goldman's landscape of Capital -->) corporate advertising:
•visually depicts the phenomenon of globalization
•affect the cultural imaginary
•shape political sensibilities (with respect to life in high-tech globalism)
amorphous phenomena (that require high-stakes visualization):
•counter-terrorism
•climate change
•
[*]advertising: an institution that organizes meaning, a visual sign system (as powerful as other systems that organize meaning: medicine, law, education,,,) [~/= apass]
--> *a form of literacy* = can be learned + lexicon + grammer (that can be fruitfully investigated)
*advertising = capitalism + aesthetic* ==Campbell==> research in advertising one of the most important research priorities in any discipline today (@apass)
...................................
***marketing = the ultimate social practice of postmodernity***
marketing practices
promotional campaigns
consumption culture
postmodernity: a phenomena specific to the cultural history of western europe and north america --impact--> globe
--Lyotard--> incredulity toward *metanarratives: unified idea systems
--Jameson--> consumer society (marked by:)
◦pastiche: an attitude of a certain detachment (on the part of the individual) where all stylistic expressions of parody, nostalgia, and other illustrated feeling lack emotional depth and commitment
◦schizophrenia: disjointedness and discontinuity of the individual's personal identity and experience in life
--Angus--> infinite delay of *modernity: improving human lives by controlling nature
--Wilson--> expression of incoherence of contemporary urban life
postmodernity =/= authority, unity, continuity, purpose, commitment
= “modernity: era of scientific ideology ==> disillusionment, disintegration, anxiety”
--> hedonism
--> tolerance (recognition) of difference
--> metanarrative = story (that people construct to tell themselves) =Foucault= regimes of truth
=/= conformity
examples of modern metanarratives:
•bourgeois (capitalist) ideology
•marxism[...]
(328)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%98.4[...]al character, fragmented experience of all cultures)
unrestricted ability to use signifiers [?pushed back by some emerging sensibilities of cultural appropriation, political correctness, gender policing, religious, etc.]
--> marketing competition rests on the creation of images (meanings) removed from any history, context, origin =/= excellence and sophistication in form and technique
[---> go to contemporary artists anti-excellence attitude and the celebration of failure and failing]
--> **each instance of communication becomes a spectacle**
purposefully decontextualized + rendered free floating ==> marketable product
(surrealist artists made use of this --now--> shop window designer)
Duchamp, Rauschenberg, Warhol (ready-made)
***themes of postmodern culture:
irreverence
nonconformity
noncommitment
detachment
difference
fragmentation
(paradoxically) what seems to be difference at the level of symbolic culture stems from an underlying uniformity <-- ***heterogeneity has its origins in homogeneity*** : cultures where market and marketing are less developed exhibit greater variance in both the quality and kinds of life patterns
literacy:
•in modernity --> to read + discover connections among seemingly unrelated objects ==> understanding
•in postmodernity --> watching : recognizing images (exposing oneself to innumerable images and recognize what they stand for ~ attach meaning to them) <-- this is what i did in my telegram bestiary text!
literacy in consumption culture ~/=? established nortons of education
3- [*]reversal of production & consumption
•modernist: value is created in production (meaningful) and destroyed in consumption (profane)
•postmodern: production continues during the moment of consumption, value is created during consumption: a process through which individuals define themselves, status, image (=/= common) --> a social act, symbolic meaning ==> an individual with certain tastes, mentality, values (a type of humanity)
production & consumption prove to be different moments of the same cycle
•during production: producers are human beings, products are commodities
•during consumption: producers are images, products are human beings
4- [*]decentering subject
•modernist: the subject is in the pursuit of its goals, constituted in the separation of body and mind, to graduate from the *state of being* (existential) to the *state of knowing* (cognitive) : distance oneself from a pure existence of being (its context and condition) in order to develop a cognitive understanding
•postmodern: the subject is not in control, role of the human is to allow products perform their functions
marketing orientation
•positioning of[...]
(329)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%98.6[...]ist selebrity setting new trends and values <-- a postmodern phenomena with its roots in 1960s “anti-” movements
•not challenging or endorsing or committing to any one style, but rebelling by doing “one's own thing” (Madonna's rebellion 1991 --> she will continue to find large audiences as long as she represents and combines the postmodern aspects of critique of the metanarrative and the marketable commercial sensationalism of the fragmented spectacle)
paradoxical nature of postmodern culture <-- fragmentation and discontinuity of their experience
not owning a TV (conscious rejection) + driving a car (integrated into mainstream)
merging of education and marketing
*televisual generation*
(in north america and western europe) the education is taking place mostly outside of three classroom
(modern) institutionalized education --> (postmodern) marketing system : the individual of the postmodern encounters the institutionalized education as obligation, drudgery, and the means to achieve positions
(from) a process of reading issues and questions for exploration --to--> a process of persuasively communicating the necessities of knowing (and following efficient ways of doing things) --> literacy: being able to manipulate and construct (recognize and grasp multi-layered multi-faceted multi-media images --> to impress upon all senses) }<-- marketing is best situated to educate this
[-can a true critical deconstruction of postmodernism start from literacy? ---> go to telegram bestiary text]
***the consumer is also a signifier***
(constructed in the images that are culturally signified, for example the female)
(even metaphorically) putting somebody on the pedestal (stage) ==> exposure to voyeuristic gaze ==> objectification ~=> commodification }--Baudrillard-->
•a liberation (the subject is the object which has the powers of seduction as the focus of desire --> in control)
•a loss of freedom (the subject is culturally signified and constructed for fonctions determined outside its own power --> a property of the other)
*decoupling of culturally signified categories (of gender, etc.)* --marketing--> (postmodern stance and trend:) male model/actors who represent emotional, nurturing, and sensitive + female model/actors who represent aggressive, powerful, rational (in American advertisement and TV series)
==> “i shop, therefore i am” becomes applicable to men
==> both men and women become ideal consumers --> flourish of market exchange
* * (both male and female) seek authentic self --> (get caught up in) objectification + fragmentation * *
pattern quest: imaging (representing) =/= being, knowing
[image marketing]
*the image does not represent the product, but the product represents the image* -->
•consumers are esse[...]
(331)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%98.8[...]lability
•secondary relations:
◦resentment at being emotionally manipulated
◦contempt for the weakness of cute --accompany--> desire to:
◾touch
◾clasp
◾dominate
◾destroy
◾
}--> *cute: a site of visual intensity that is both pleasurable & disgusting*
****three objects that are most often rendered cute in consumer aesthetics:
1- women
2- technology
3- children
}<-- (in psychoanalytic terms) inherently dangerous ==> in need of control****
Campbell > why is it useful to see bacteria as cute?
***cuteness as a deep link to violence***
[*]cuteness: aestheticization of powerlessness --> a necessary step in permitting its extinction [to make everybody like unto little children is not such a bad way of disposing of them]
•representing the Other (the enemy) as despicable --> powerful effect
•representing the Other as domesticated + infantalized:
◦demonstrates the sublime Otherness of bacteria
◦we are relieved of guilt <== the bacteria is rendered beneath the threshold of ethical consideration
2. overpopulation
cramming of many life forms into tiny spaces ~= (literally) an uncanny microcosm of the imagined and feared socio-economic order
***new technologies to visualize the world ==produce==> new imaginateis of life itself*** [<-- my research on bestiaries]
microscope (19th century) --> microbial visuality --Latour--> new modes of interacting with and ingesting/consuming the world
bacteriology as a discipline emerged at the same time as the (so-called) transformation “from industrial capitalism --to--> market society”
•overpopulation
•bacterial proliferation
--> a trope in visualizing contemporary bacteria
bacteria live in obscene proximity to each other --> *bacterial intimacy =/= individualizing force of modernity*
the fantasy of there is some sort of “away” which can absorb what we overproduce
removal of excrement (in all its quises) --> demonstrating the urbanites class distinction --> (an apparent) desire to reorganize urban space according to a logic of repugnance مغايرت (--> this is why i am so uncomfortable with “clean” streets)
•the idea that a veritable subterranean system delivering *shit-free cleanliness* ==> citizen's physical, moral, sipritual cleanliness --with--> materila markers of the civilized society: cubicles, toilets, drains, sewers
(Lacan > Morton > Campbell >) the problem of human society : what to do with one's shit
anti-bacterial advertising --> fantasy of awayness
keeping nature at a distance ==Morton==> (act out an imagined preservation -->) dumps on the rest of the world
[sadistic admiration] putting something called nature on a[...]
(333)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%99.4[...]tical) thought” --then--> fantasy =/= ?
‘deviant’ mobilizes deep-seated fears and fantasies ==> images that are visually intense + build exceedingly successful brands
critical analysis can move from thinking about symptoms as indirect expressions of deep ideology (paranoia) --to--> *indirect expressinos of structurating fantasies*
(brands know that) ***fantasy =/= ideology***
•Lacan --> even when patients could articulate their symptoms it didn't seem to dissipate ==> symptom was a constitutive core of their own subjectivity
•Zizek --> ideology: fantasy structuring out social reality itself =/= an illusion masking the real state of things
•Marx, Freud, Zizek --> symptom =/= a thing behind which secret content is hidden
for Marx *the secret is in hte form of commodity itself** (<--but-- commodity as a central symptom of capitalism) --Sina--> in the form of the hair-styles in The Magicians TV series
from symptom (veil) --to--> sinthome (screen)
*sinthome* is not directly analysable --Campbell--> images of bacteria are symptoms of the Real, not the symbiotic order, because the Real unsymbolizable
sinthomes organize the subject (without them the subject would be obliterated, Zizek)
(psychoanalytic paradigm --> emerging research in marketing:)
•sustainability practices’ fetishistic disavowal of reality can serve to exacerbate ecological catastrophe
•the inherently narcissistic nature of the consumer needs others to suffer in order to derive pleasure from (consumer) objects
•reinvestigation of consumer desire as jouissance --> a perverse pleasure in the “mad destruction” of our bodies and minds
}--> examples of critical marketing pursuing emancipatory unveiling procedures
--✕--> sinthome can offer:
1. an *analytic strategy for feeling out* the contours of symptoms
2. directing us to a new *question we may ask of texts of all kinds* --> ***why do they take the form that they do?*** [=/= what ideology is beneath them --> at the level of the latent contents (meaning) of a symptom] --bacteria-->
◦why do fantasies about community, sex, death, deviance take the form of the bacteria?
◦what is it about bacteria that is so compelling that it provides a structure for this array of phenomena? (<-- we can ask that at art/artists use of biology)
***the problem of bacteria for humans = the problem of living with others***
bacteria --think--> the problem of surviving in large, alienating, cross-infecting, co-dependent populations --> *metonymy between immunity & community*
•مجازمرسل metonymy =/= structural similarity تشابه
==reveal==> disciplines of *biology* and that of *political organization* are closely related [--> to understand fundamental concepts such as individuality and agency we need to frame the immune[...]
(334)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%99.6[...]d a ‘infinite particularity’
it is only by means of essentially poetic recreation or translation of a given language-world that the new science of myth and history can hope to retrace the growths of consciousness
in apass, inventing a science of myth and history, towards a general theory of significant sign.
Corruption of language and decline of body politics?
Can we correlate the Persian syntax with the metaphysical ambience, internal divisions, and lyric bias of Persian people?
A pivot point must inform and relate
...the shaping agencies of intellect.
Speech is poiesis and human linguistic articulation is centrally creative.
The language-matrix
language, informed by energies proper to itself, more comprehensive and timeless than any who makes use of it...
There is a phenomenon of linguistic Entfremdung inseparable from the creative genius of the word. (Humboldt)
...conjectures with prophetic brilliance
discourse (Rede) would not be muffled by the ground---we walk erect
jede Sprache ist ein Versuch---trial
(Humboldt)
different languages penetrate to different depths
Literaturehaus, hause has always been a metaphor for consciousness
cryptotypr : categories of semantic organization
which translates the underlying metaphysics of a language into its overt or surface grammar.
...understanding of those deep-seated dynamics of meaning, of chosen and significant form, (that make up a culture)
it is exceedingly difficult for an outsider to, operating inevitably within the world-frame of his own tongue, to penetrate to the active symbolic depths of a foreign tongue.
---we reach for the bottom and stir up further darkness.
..a careful philosophically and poetically disciplined observation
<br />
beautifully logical (discrimination) about: causation, action, result
dynamic or energetic quality, directness of experience.
(these words for Shabnam?)
...all matters of the function of thinking
(why do i want to bring to her, to Shabnam, the quintessence of the rational?)
‘the inner music of meaning’
the german tenderness
german tender---zart
(in Shabnam's poetry : the clash between ‘mental’ and ‘psychic’ codes of recognition)
the villain is outside the law (of exchange)
...the court of words---in ikhvano safa animals demonstration
...when the market of life has closed down
faith and substitution of meaning
how can i tear you from your vows, and not myself use vows?
The faiths that are sworn (before every exchange or change)
a word for a woman bound by another sacred word --> breaking your oaths---in the age of[...]
(335)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%49.7[...]odies according to a harmony that determines and checks at every moment the unfolding of the different movements.”
the full and compact nature, version of ajayeb
my work in apass is on a theory of transformation among languages (not about the best point of view =/=> system integrated =/=> trajectories calculated):
•ajayeb's natural language
•system language of differential logic
•english grammar and syntax
•organic and intersubjective space of my peers
•old farsi
•animal
•
“speak of” science
“speak about” science
“speak” science
“speak” metaphysics
speaking the language of dynamics
what is still at stake in science: the description of a world of processes
...................................
Lezra
In the European imaginary, the public struggle over the “better” word makes the city (the polis) @apass
Derrida calls for patience, take care read on slowly. Kafka: all human errors are impatience. Radical patience, is the necessity to differ, but also to rush in precipitately, one has to make decisions: absolute urgency.
Literature for derrida, reading in my works, is indissociably bound up with questions of politics, democracy and responsibility, religion, nationality and nationalism, identity and law.
E m foster, how can i tell what i think, till i see what i say.
What one finds repeatedly in derrida's work is the uncanny effect by which one is invited to sense the unfolding of all his thinking starting out from anywhere, from any idea, any word, any thought that happen to be at issue. Deconstruction is the name for this?
Derrida proceeds with patience and pleasure, to describe what is going on in a particular text or situation.
Every reading is difficult, Shakespeare, maulwürfe, mathematics. The difficulty of reading is in transforming the ways we are obliged to think about those texts.
The transformation is crucially always already in the texts he reads. Describing what happens when reading a passage of anything. Everything is in Shakespeare, in Plato, in Kafka. The relation between description and transformation is uncanny.
To talk about the logics of supplement is another way of attending the deconstructive effects of the and. To put into effect new discourses, new acts. This description and transformation is deconstruction, is more than a language and no more than a language.
There are always differences, tensions, paradoxes in the text, between what a text says and what a text does.
Derrida always begins (wherever he happens to find himself) in a specific context, which is to say in trying to engage with a specific text or scene of reading.
(Writing is)[...]
(336)[...notes/Derrida old notes.txt]%51.4[...] mutability(?)
the exoteric logic of interiority (reigning since centuries in Iran)
for only the buried dimension is sovereign
secrecy =/= lie
(I am a fan of lie and against secrecy)
talk about a theory of lie
(a talk about a theory of violence)
[the issue of: opposite, omen, and alarm (in art)]
omen =/=? artwork
(omen is a phenomenon that is buried to foretell the future, isn't that an attractive trap for artist's self grandiosity?!)
omen has a binary answer
omen =~ ‘audire’ (Latin root, to listen)
omens come in the artistic and poetic production--in the poiesis--when the artist is young: the fabulous age of self-assertion, and he or she starts way to big and later is abandoned or abused by it.
(enforcement of an elusive stance from within) the self-enveloped site of the event----the artworks become closer to omens
at once episodic and veiled, protecting their right to invisibility above all else
(perceive themselves as) the merchants of the unreasoned experience.
(as opposed to the mechanisms of instrumental reason) ---- omens
Literatur(ware)haus
warehouse vs. Haus
(at the house of being)
warehouse of the irrational, a cellar-arena of provocation and unrest
I don't have an eloquent language--I am not in the house of language, but Attar is
transmutative
depthforming
sudden exposure to exile space
a postcultural interaction (?) --with no proximity to the past or known present
(am I trying to create proximity to history in my lectures versus my non-proximity in earlier visual works such as “vagabond” 2011 Tehran)
is that to adopt an ******existence without context******?
(in lectures, am I un-separating myself from my own history?)
*reverie (=the mind flees across secluded planes)
exile space =~ refuge, solitude, immobility =? nondialectics
[on Vagabond] --> http://www.sinaseifee.com/Vagabond.html
-domination of the partially unseen in my own film, ‘vagabond’
-did I believe that only the buried dimension is sovereign?
-continuously interlacing experiences of solitude and immobility
-minimalist side of mysticism --> stillness is a catalyst for acceleration?
-nomadic dispositions
-suspended (=the chasm of self-consciousness)
-
aesthetic tactility over aesthetic fantasy
where is the cinematic-mystical ritual happening?
profound separation from the networks of social reality
the subjects betrays its own history
interrupting the transmission of the episteme
the result of mystic disjointmen[...]
(337)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%52.8[...] of concepts’
‘connections or affinities’
pursuit of an inter-lingua for philosophic discourse
as you can see in this writing, I am practicing loosening the tight axiom of relation of A<-->B, something other than the predecessor-successor or cause-effect pair (--> this order of structure is coming from Greek geometric,) I am trying an unordered order-of-reason that is more reflexive, symmetric, and intransitive. (the construction of the text represents each chain incomplete and displaced--Attar knows)
towards a general theory of significant sign
Can we correlate the Persian syntax with the metaphysical ambience, internal divisions, and lyric bias of Persian people?
the language-matrix
language, informed by energies proper to itself, more comprehensive and timeless than any who makes use of it...
discourse (die Rede) would not be muffled by the ground---we walk erect [Serres]
jede Sprache ist ein Versuch---*trial
(Humboldt)
different languages penetrate to different depths
--> (every try is a) starting over with *accuracy
ok, we are starting with language from scratch, here
Literaturhaus, house has always been a metaphor for consciousness
how Attar can become interested in other lives other that San'an's that are worth living?
although we see again and again in Islamic social order the hierarchical structured relationships, I like to show the otherwise in mystic stances, and argue that the model doesn't remain static normative from the master-disciple to the authority and dependence lock, that the master-disciple relationship doesn't affirm the divine order.
and San'an is also against the notion that Sufi man is without the need of a feminine principle.
we are presented with will of the Tarsaa, the destination of San'an, and the poetic representation is feminine. the female image is strong. although at the end it has to give up -- she converts to his style. the will of the disciple is not replaced by the will of the guide, the master himself doesn't have a will.
The Tarsaa is supervising San'an's diet, sleep, and speech
[I have become more interested in the term ‘tradition'---and more suspicious of preoccupations such as ‘invention’ as modernized and capitalist terms.]
tradition: an act of memory based on a salience-effect of shared knowledge
(ein Akt der Erinnerung basiert auf einer Hervorspringen-Effekt der gemeinsamen Kenntnisse)
-there is a sequence (where is the individual terms within it?)
-my storytelling is about: describing relations of inversion, extension, inclusion, analogy, etc. between mythical, lyrical, or even scientific ‘beings’ that are (1) *conventional* (recognizable repertoire), and (2) *closed* (refer [...]
(338)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%54