[...]g, actors, stage as Dystopie of presence
*Xiri: yes! this is often the case, we are between 2nd-chances and being-torn-apart

--------[who told the first joke?]
*Gerald: objects =/= actual life (absurdity and absoluteness of objects) (contemplating about object ==> inner smile)
*Nicolas: father (by not getting it right), not mother (she is not the teller type), the tickler is about lunching possibilities
*Vladimir: God, Vladimir thinks this is theological and therefore axiomatic (that means self-evident or unquestionable)
*Lise: Monty Python, specifically the philosopher soccer video, in the way that makes you laugh
*Elke: God, God said “this is reality” (but we didn't get his joke)
*Steven: some funny kid in the street when he was 5 or 6, and it wasn't really a joke more a story

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

i like to set up a synonym-finder machine
(looking at mutations of ...)
--> the same way that in Attar's birds, one birds trying to convince another birds, is living by a roaming assemblage of assertions, and not really an argument--i am also not having any argument in that sense

the words locked to certain meanings----lock is another word for lure, a key and lock seducing each other, we can check its mechanics


three interesting objects from apass’ environment:
-opposite
-omen
-alarm



in the beginning there was the ... rather than the word ‘or’

(or is about joke, alternatives, and maybes)


a mouthful: as much as a mouth will hold. : a word, name, or phrase that is very long or difficult to say. : something said that has a lot of meaning or importance.



interdisciplinary exploration of


is “what is your project about again?” the question we want to ask in apass? does this question really helps the other? or is it just for you, the questioner?
-how to resist the interference of double click?


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

(in the direction of my research; hastily opening the ontological envelope that saves a heart full of “list of specifications”...)
the visit will be to the ‘European Committee for Standardization’ (CEN, French: Comité Européen de Normalization), one of the EU fostered nonprofit public institutions of the cutting-edge development regarding ambitious notion of ‘data,’ ‘systematic knowledge,’ and ‘specifications’. the excursion will be oriented towards a meeting between the participants of advanced performance and scenography studies and the representatives of CEN, and encourages a run between the ontological demands of international economy and contemporary art, their disastrous split, and where their formations meet and intersect.

KEYWORDS: cosmology, experimentation, existence[...]

[...]ystematic knowledge,’ and ‘specifications’. the excursion will be oriented towards a meeting between the participants of advanced performance and scenography studies and the representatives of CEN, and encourages a run between the ontological demands of international economy and contemporary art, their disastrous split, and where their formations meet and intersect.

KEYWORDS: cosmology, experimentation, existence, specification, future, knowledge, irrationality, permanence and substance, technological acts--of naming, a path of becoming--on the grid of technological dominion, suspicious partnership of “advanced democracies” and “high technology"--what allows their mutuality?, standard-testing--which sectors of existence it is traversing?, pre-technological traces of cognitive normalization, the very little difference between specification and “the real thing,” THE origin of the demand for rigorous specification, migration of questions out of the areas of instrumental fitness, human relation to the surrounding world, impoverished zoologies--under techno-epistemo-anthropocentric values, squeezing prehistoric modes of weakening subjectival normativity--a field that today gets heavily technologized,

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

to bring our needs and lures towards each other
bring my lure to the table (that thing which i can't stop following)

who/what are you pregnant with?

(that is what you are proposing)

(that is to play with the ‘histories of body and mind’ [Haraway] you inherit --> for me is to play with the pre-subjective singularities)
[inheritance is of great importance for our research. it is about the passing of obligations from something ghost-like. i am sure we have other modes of response available to us other than how Hamlet takes in what is inherited to him, other ways of responding to the ghostly beings that talk to us from death. (inheritance ~= inhabiting spirit [they cannot be possess as a piece of property], reading inflaming flashes of remote spirits [--> is this hear from one another looks like? is technology placed at the source of this reflection?--technology itself answers the call--(Avital)]) could we work with Ophelia's kind of #Wortsalad instead? (Salad-e Kalame, khoresht-e kalame; same thing happens to Shirin of in Khosro Shirin, but unlike Shakespeare, Nezami allows another poetic drift;) Heidegger's “die Sprache spricht” : language is monologue --?--> schizophrenia and schizophrenic discourse --?--> structure of speaking]
[speaking asserts a certain temporal priority which we must undermine]
-listening *before* speaking
-“We hear language speaking” (Heidegger); a non-organic speaking; language is not equipped with organs of speech? (Avital)


serious joking / joking seriousness [Haraway]
joke/jest/gesture
a space of play --> where ideas come in to being
(story of ‘or’. is[...]

[...] a piece of property], reading inflaming flashes of remote spirits [--> is this hear from one another looks like? is technology placed at the source of this reflection?--technology itself answers the call--(Avital)]) could we work with Ophelia's kind of #Wortsalad instead? (Salad-e Kalame, khoresht-e kalame; same thing happens to Shirin of in Khosro Shirin, but unlike Shakespeare, Nezami allows another poetic drift;) Heidegger's “die Sprache spricht” : language is monologue --?--> schizophrenia and schizophrenic discourse --?--> structure of speaking]
[speaking asserts a certain temporal priority which we must undermine]
-listening *before* speaking
-“We hear language speaking” (Heidegger); a non-organic speaking; language is not equipped with organs of speech? (Avital)


serious joking / joking seriousness [Haraway]
joke/jest/gesture
a space of play --> where ideas come in to being
(story of ‘or’. is it where the original joker came? using or instead of and)
(there is no ‘or’ in nature!? what are the earlier forms of or that we can trace in cave paintings or tool makings?)

**if you don't take my idea seriously i will be utterly incomprehensible**

crafts-person for the building of lures of propositions --> ‘abstractions’
(abstraction is fragile and can hold worlds together)


where Europe comes from? (woher kommst du? i am born in, i am born in, ...)


what animates us rather than what civilizes us



(to Shabnam:) to ‘mourn with’ rather than ‘mourn about’
(-about =/= -with)
(structure of mourning)


to break in the philosophical and biological headquarters (and steal their stories, their abstractions, etc.)
exchanging and sharing instruments and languages



this is about building something that is ‘good enough’ to get you through...

these practices doesn't necessarily produce ‘separate entities’ (indivis)
am i fantasizing creating a monolithic structure of ideas?


critique is an art that tangles with what you are proposing
(like an octopus in a lure)

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

stories that can interrupt death (of our time, anthropocene, etc.)
(example of biology-story into culture-story: (1) ladder of evolution --> progress (2) sperm/egg story --> gender performance)

to change stories so that they are more livable
we live stories

to make mistakes as fast as possible


... move across earth space and narrative space


situated stories
they can't tell everything, but what is needed here


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refugium_(population_biology)

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

ontological choreography
vital sort of p[...]

[...] where the original joker came? using or instead of and)
(there is no ‘or’ in nature!? what are the earlier forms of or that we can trace in cave paintings or tool makings?)

**if you don't take my idea seriously i will be utterly incomprehensible**

crafts-person for the building of lures of propositions --> ‘abstractions’
(abstraction is fragile and can hold worlds together)


where Europe comes from? (woher kommst du? i am born in, i am born in, ...)


what animates us rather than what civilizes us



(to Shabnam:) to ‘mourn with’ rather than ‘mourn about’
(-about =/= -with)
(structure of mourning)


to break in the philosophical and biological headquarters (and steal their stories, their abstractions, etc.)
exchanging and sharing instruments and languages



this is about building something that is ‘good enough’ to get you through...

these practices doesn't necessarily produce ‘separate entities’ (indivis)
am i fantasizing creating a monolithic structure of ideas?


critique is an art that tangles with what you are proposing
(like an octopus in a lure)

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

stories that can interrupt death (of our time, anthropocene, etc.)
(example of biology-story into culture-story: (1) ladder of evolution --> progress (2) sperm/egg story --> gender performance)

to change stories so that they are more livable
we live stories

to make mistakes as fast as possible


... move across earth space and narrative space


situated stories
they can't tell everything, but what is needed here


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refugium_(population_biology)

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

ontological choreography
vital sort of play that the participants invent out of a history of body and mind they inherit

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

possible performances
*two doors, ?, talk, model, puppet
*using stop-motion animation, clay formation, material animal facial properties

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

seeing a car crashing, is seeing a causation, seeing a reasoning, is that logos? is it logos when we see a physical experimentation?

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

[Haraway]

the established (dis)order is NOT necessary!
grips of necessity
(the real does/did not have to be or happen that way. the ‘real’ is the result of contingencies and it can be undone by working the contingencies, with skill.)
laboring bodies, playing bodies, sensuous bodies
(feminism:) you can't get freedom outside of mortality
-theology, the negative way of knowing, the necessary discipline of positive affirmation in order[...]

[...]ngs? weave new worldling entanglements with the problem--not to solve it, but stay with it. dissolve essential differences between dichitomies such as: knowledge and expression (or ‘knowledge’ and the ‘communication of knowledge’), experimental and ethical, joke and seriousness, interiority and exteriority, mysterious and clear, uncovering and veiling. produce creative impossibilities that do not resolve to bionary answers easily, that unstable possitionality for good, that open for forms of consiounesses to experience thoughts which differ from itself. to think and entertain both particularities and generalities (of logic, ethics, politics, aesthetics, etc.) encounter can be both infinitly singular and general. that is a form of suggestive work that can deal with the specific as well. (think about ‘chicken’ as an anstract idea in our semiotic world and as an individual being in our material world)
•using the notion of delinking (reminded by Juan) with my research on the Book of Wonders. going from parable-thinking --to--> religious-thinking --to--> poststructuralist-thinking --to--> poetic-thinking --to--> riddle-thinking --to--> biological-thinking --to--> deconstructionist-thinking --to--> ...
•this other universe is always at the beyond--the other cosmos is a lure (?)
•all cages have wheels
•boat, as an image for both construction and destruction
•i don't need to be alone in destroying the boat
•how to move the boat =/= destination




possible workshops for Einat's project:
•moonwalk dance
•database programing --> how to live well with databases, not waging a quixotic war on database designers. we must learn how to read and understand database early in elementary school. databases are fundamental parts of our political social ethical cultural processes...
•regular expression --> how computer programming reads and patterns text
•text-based internet --> cyberfeminism
•intervention in the digital hegemonies (digital ==> cultural ==> material) (changes to the built digital environments, possiblities of reconfiguration --> production of space, articulations about ‘us’)
•what does it mean to look at a code? (a critical introduction to computer programming for artists)
•How to implement a programming language in (JavaScript?)--parsing, regexps, (http://lisperator.net/)
•teaching German with Holderlin's “Andenken” poem
•to create a *feast* (to celebrate is to become free of the habitual, becoming inhabitual. celebration is the tensional coming together of the unlikes --> through which human beings and gods could meet and greet. The festiveness that the celebration encourages constitutes the original Greeting. [Avital])


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

what i have beeing trying to mean by saying that i have been dependent on others to create spaces that a telling can happen, is actually [...]

[...] 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 w[...]

[...]scovered. 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 in explicitly revolutionary terms [Sade's work ~= Robespierre's Reign of Terror]
•Sade's ideal of society is a reactive reality (it takes form specifically in reaction to something external) --> undertaken endlessly efforts against modes of social organization that are based on an stable internal point of reference
in Sade:
1. selfishness has an ontological (not a moral) meaning : ‘the essence of man = negation of the value of the other's existence’ (+ a destruction of the positive meaning other people have in normal life) =/= being-for-the-other
2. characters with theocentric universe (who deliver extended theological discussions)
3. blasphemous passages (negation of God's existence) --> Sade’s specific philosophy of nature (reference to nature is enough for a proper understanding of reality)
4. *every type of destruction always ultimately serves nature* -->[...]

[...]t with just the option of making an index, a collection of trails and marks [...]”
sunday: “empty time that forces us to fill it through apparently free decisions that, if they are resolved properly, please us and re-constitute us” (Peran)
*freedom of action for self-realization* --> unstoppable egocentric machine
space of perpetual connection (@ERG's website)
(pseudo) communicative action by way of technological devices --> camouflaged alienation
“The promise of self-realization and the demand for visibility organize the mobilization of desire, turning it into work.”



do we need to formulize and formalize our uncomfortable concerns and experiences?
@apass, artist research



i want to *give connections*

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

#semester/seminar on destruction
-care, suffer, fubar,
[fubar: “fucked up beyond all recognition"--a term from veterans returning to the United States in 1960s]



#semester on Hojum
(surge,) on performance, media, sculpture, and surplus
Hojum has to do with the hojum (~=? ‘bodies’) of people to get in front of the line, the hojum of enemy, of friend, of information, also includes the plural form of ‘hajm’ (حجم)



#seminar on the history of translation
archaeology, interpretation, spaces of difficult translation, reading out of time, technology and transformational studies, semiotics, poetry, writing,

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

#on Situated Knowledges
-approach the text by creating intensity and my own partial perspective
-the elephant parable (against it)
-objectivity (disembodied view from nowhere)
-neutrality (biologically insane)
-marked people (my own story)
-situatedness of the situated
-The cyborg is a figure in which situatedness makes possible adventures with the beyond.
-globalization-as-situatedness: global is precisely space/place/time/situation
-the figure of the so-called scientist gathered around certain metaphors since the begining of the 17th cebtury, namely ‘objectivity’ and all its related adjectives: neutrality, perspective, universality, disembodiment (for certain race and sex), etc.
-metaphors create perspectives [the view that looks at blind men looking at the elephant]
-situatedness is different than ‘positionality’: a way of systematic error correction
-(resolving) specificity of vision --> scientific objectivity (is achievable)
-Haraway expresses her informed dissatisfaction with (the metaphysical substrate that supports) ‘social constrctivism’ and ‘traditional realism’ --> representationalist belief in the power of the words to mirror preexisting phenomena. they both believe that scientific knowledge (in its representational formats: theoretical concepts, graphs, particle tracks, ph[...]

[...]ic consiousness, concretized and distilled by Sartre) “dire myths of self-birthing”... --> we must resist the stories of guilt laden knowledge and consciousness

unrestricted vision
presented as utterly transparent

***particularity and embodiment (of all vision) [not necessarily organic]
usable and not innocent

“We need to learn in our bodies, endowed with primate color and stereoscopic vision, how to attach the objective to our theoretical and political scanners in order to name where we are and are not, in dimensions of mental and physical space we hardly know how to name.”

‘partial perspective’ (what does she mean?)
==> become answerable for what we learn how to see. (Helen Verran: accountability; Isabelle Stengers: milieu thinking; Latour: ground;)
(partial way of organizing world)
unlocatable =? irresponsible (knowledge claims)
partial --> possibility of webs of connections: solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology
-to unfold the problem of relativism: ‘the elephant parable’ promisses seeing equally and fully. “equality” of positioning: relativism (another “god trick”) (!=/= single-vision, totalization) =/= partial locatable] [mythic cartoon of pluralism] [myth of exact knowledges, dream of perfectly known, and politics of closure] --> positioning is at stake here

“all eyes, including our own organic ones, are active perceptual systems, building on translations and specific ways of seeing”

how to see ‘faithfully’... (what does she mean by that?)

appropriating the vision of the less powerful:
to see from the peripheries
to see from the depths

...this not unproblemat (why she uses double negation so often?)

“But how to see from below is a problem requiring at least as much skill with bodies and language, with the mediations of vision, as the ‘highest’ technoscientific visualizations.”

“Science has been utopian and visionary from the start; that is one reason “we” need it.” (what does she mean?)
(“utopian,” “visionary,” other old metaphors in science)

“Passionate detachment” requires more than ‘acknowledged and self-critical’ partiality. (being acknowledged and self-critical is not enough!!! how deos she mean?)
-‘perspective’ can never be known in advance --> knowledge potent for constructing worlds less organized by axes/axis of domination
-One cannot “be” either a cell or molecule--or a woman, colonized person, laborer, and so on. ‘passionate detachment’ is about the impossibility of entertaining innocent “identity” politics : seeing from their perspective in order to see well.
-problem with “positionality”: {testimony from the position of ‘oneself'} We are not immediately present to ourselves and the self is assumed finished and whole simply there and original and its (gr[...]

[...]ess tied to the strictures of shame, and ‘your behavior’ becomes performance material

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

agency =? boresh برش, jahd جهد (in Farsi), “agential cut enacts a local causal structure” (Barad)

agency of ‘hemat’ همّت
hemate shahi همّت شاهی, lavazeme hemat لوازم همّت --> apparatus
sufi's hemat ~= magic

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

@Seba after accelerate manifesto reading: (what is and how can we not pivot on our work) the measure of the meaningfulness of action. (Seba's notion of losing hope is because he put himself unconsciously in a cost-benefit analysis? “what is the effect of my actions?”) [in practice it is difficult to embody speculative thinking. we are still in the space of thinking in terms of the probable.]
to do hope-work is about ‘not talking (too much) about the future’ =/= commitment in terms of probabilities, refusal to treat your subjects as if they were objects of management --> let's set aside our own hopes, and work to honour the **hopefulness of others** (Deborah Rose)

“And hope is here, all around us. Creatures want to live.” (not in the “future”)

the accelerationists putting things in their cascade of failures, (everything sinks effortlessly into it,) and creating a vanishing point in terms of a western saturated temporality. for them the present is the time of announcing the news of salvation or apocalypse, and has no thickness. (the desire) to step out of history, and is made void in the process of realization, the idea that “everything is possible.” they experience their freedom as universal freedom * (noted by Blanchot.) [--> the problem with all male action heroes...]

(is this a kind of “game-over” discourse?)

*time (thinking with Haraway)
the sequential palindromic time (in Western-related cultures) [جناس قلب palindrome: from the Greek roots palin “again” and dromos “way, direction”; a word, phrase, number, or other sequence of characters which reads the same backward as forward; (un)parsable palindromic motifs;]
there are many sorts of temporalities in West, but the most naturalized and intuitive, ready-to-hand (and black-boxed) version of it is the “past, present, future.” the notion of ‘present’ becomes a (mathematical) vanishing point, a pivot or a point rather than itself a thickness, an inaccessible past being transmuted into a future that is always to come. [=/= the lived time of the flesh]

--> what counts as a responsible person in temporality? (@Seba, @Pierre's “future”)
in my work on ajayeb in apass, i choose to give account to responsibility in a way *to face those who come before rather than to face the future*, this is about a switch in the direction of attention.
•narratable memory with named people turned to ancestors and moved into dreaming time
•past: quiet count[...]

[...]e's psyche is impossible, as in psychology is an impossible science]
[*]cognitive therapy: identifying and changing unhelpful or inaccurate thinking, problematic behavior, and *distressing emotional responses*
--> learning to monitor thoughts (in three layers:)
1. core belief [deepest level of our thinking, underlying self-values and perceptions of the world, have an absolute quality: “I am worthless.” “I am inadequate.” “if I fail, I am worthless.” “I am unsafe in the world.” etc.]
2. intermediate beliefs [expectations and assumptions, guidelines we follow, maintaining our anxiety and depression: “Always look for danger and expect it to be there.” “If I don't understand something perfectly, then I'm dumb.” etc.]
3. automatic thoughts [immediate thoughts that go through our mind in response to a situation, usually negative and unquestioned: “She thinks I'm weird.” “I won't pass that test.” “This is too hard. I'll never understand this.” etc.]

/> types of automatic thoughts:
•evaluation (evaluative thoughts)
•coping strategies
•avoidance
•

[cognitive distortions]
typical mistakes in thinking:
•*all or nothing* / all-or-none thinking (“If I'm not a total success, I'm a failure.”)
•*catastrophizing* [--> middle eastern fortune-telling, omen, foretell the future] ( “I'll be so upset, I won't be able to function at all.”)
•*disqualifying the positive* (positive experiences do not count: “I did that project well, but that doesn't mean I'm competent; I just got lucky.”)
•*emotional reasoning* (“I know I do a lot of things okay at work, but I still feel like I'm a failure.”)
•*labeling* (“I'm a loser.” “He's no good.”)
•*magnification/minimization* (“Getting a mediocre evaluation proves how inadequate I am. Getting high marks doesn't mean I'm smart.”)
•*mental filter* [selective abstraction] (“Becau[...]

[...]هت

borderline personality disorder + narcissistic personality disorder [seeing people from top to down] ==> winning arguments by mixing imagination and reality, saying everything they like to others
--> (donya-e zehni) a mental world in which imagination and reality are not distinguish (~-> lying)

(a nontherapeutic approach) to turn the borderline into storyteller:
•dissociation --into--> impossible association
•disconnection as a state of consciousness --into--> impossible connection
•lying as a feature --into--> fabulation
•manipulative behavior --into--> articulative
•demand --into--> performance
•chaotic identity --into--> chaotic imagination
•ذهن پراکنده (sporadic mind) --into--> ذهن انحرافی (deviant mind)
•sensitivity (of thin or no psychological skin) --into--> sensibility
•

a therapeutic approach to borderline personality:
•dialectical behavior therapy (<--?-- mindfulness)
•


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

%notes on #workshop of question (HWD)
-how come in my drawing class participancts couldn't even hold the pen
-participants lenzes couldn't focus, the words were in blur and in disarray
-i had to stop free associations and staggerings, and return to the task at hand
-it was like teaching a new language
-i was trying to share my methorodlogy, specificly. not a jam session
-is it neccesory or interesting to learn eachother methodlogies in order to get involved and engagned in eachother practices? maybe not --> go back to representational tools --are representational tools the best we have? or maybe, structurally we can't give workshop in apass HWDs or endweeks, because participants are not there by free will that is usually mobilising them to look for and join a workshop that they are interested in.

%(am I?) ‘coming back with advices’ in my work [[#Esta]]

is it interesting for me or my research to think about how we moved that plant around in the 4th floor?
*moving plants* is risky
as backdrop for human activity
passively vegetating
making local and global connections: which local or global connections was made (by Sina, Xiri and Esta moving the plant)? (how the plant was repositioned in our) making of public common spaces
-practices of concern
(attentive to the plant that was a) shared “thing” between us
what was mediated, navigated and articulated with that plant in apass 4th floor?
(with this i am trying to ask about the) kinds of imaginative world-making at work
gathering forces
-

the mice, and the pattern of rice, how did we become the reader of mice's text? --> reader is always always constructed.
the mice disconnected us from global digital networks and wrote something on the floor...<[...]

[...] 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



Seifee wants to say something
something wants to say Seifee?


i like us to be skilled at
•objective perception
•5 minute perception
•rigorously passionate perception
•rhetorical perception
•sacred perception
•devilish perception
•queer non-perception
•having a taste for iranian stuff perception
•
--> polyskilled web of friends



#Bambi's mother studies:
•other stories possibility, past and history, performative approach to film
•politics of memory, and affect
•patterns of remembrance =/= event recall
•

three childhood memories, stories, from elementary school:
•the mime of “you think (too much)”
•the weird pro hit on the coming ball
•peeping into the toilet
•

my childhood recognizing:
•filaments (hypha, hyphae, تار) of spider webs
•patterns of ants
•motion color blurings --> that present is “physical if the eye is quick enough” (Stevens)
•

the ways i was engaged as a child in scope-apparatus, micro-macro scales


what other stories, remembrances of the past are possible?
-different apparatuses of attention, reconstruction, and storytelling, that are equipped to hold diffractive patterns of ‘that which comes to mind’


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

can we care for “iranians” without “for iran”?
(i can't care less about Iran)

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

perhaps artistic research is all about playing cat's cradle (=/= autism) : (you have all sorts of limbs, even phantom limbs) you must learn sustaining the rhythm of accepting and giving, (collaborative) patterning (that requires passion and action) [this is one skill that matters a lot, what i have been trying to teach myself above anything else in the last years] [i am playing that game with Haraway, joining her (and others) in thick, collaborative patterning; generous knottings; thickening the knots, relaying a mutated and resituated pattern for the next play]
•getting the knot, proposing another
•you must learn how to hold still
◦(more and more) in different material and conceptual grains of detail and resolution
•the most important thing in research practices is this patterning, networks reenacted (Katie King)
(Lili's kiss project was about that, blocked intersubjectivity, a matter of “learning to be affected”; can i say that Lili's issue is with the lack of [psychological, or psychic] dialogue? a language that no longer carries metaphor displaces the m[...]

[...]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 an impossible category. both catholics and muslim shia (#islam) are wellprepared for feeling this way, some kind of recognition of impossible thing. let's take that “being good at recognizing and affirming impossible things” and bring it to the name of women. that means as soon as you name what you mean by ‘women,’ you have told some kind of really impossible lie.
(how my muslim trained sensibilities are working and mattering in my ajayeb research? ways to respond to *the deadliness and the irreplaceable liveliness of religion* [کشندگی و سرزندگی یکتای مذهب], a semiotics with implosion of sign and flesh)--> (i am so happy that) i cannot not know what it is like to be in a believing community (a faith-based community)***


...out of your own particular little historical traditions


*because my research is about ajayeb it can never only be about ajayeb*


you can't do feminist theory without paying attention to the details of women lives
your mode of attention to women in the world ==(shapes)==> your mod[...]

[...]control --> focus of the libido: conflict of to pass or withhold]--> also a time person's relationship with authority is made. role of super-ego (parents) in toilet training. everything depends on what super-ego says about what you accomplish in the toilet (at the ages of 1 to 3) ==> creativity / khesasat:
•anal-retentive: to hold back ==> tidy, khasis (~ careful with money), and respectful to authority
•anal-expulsive: relieved whenever in inappropriate times ==> sharing personality, give things away,


subjectivity is porous, flow of thoughts without a thinker, self is unnecessary
‘self’ is such an unnecessary metaphor for the process of awareness and knowing
the question of “who/what am I?” is utterly boring


[title]

might suffer

Freud's penis


ignoria


aghsa اقصا
far, farther, to send far, everywhere places, earth
(+ aknaf) [virtual locality]
--?--> maghsad مقصد (when aghsa overlapse the here and now)



tamrin تمرین üben/training (bazi-e khatarnak) =/=
tajrobe تجربه Erfahrung/experience (experience in accident =/=> getting better at driving; or
failure =/=> science)
--> zehniate shakhshi mobtani bar bardashthaye mobtani bar tajribe ذهنیت شخصی مبتنی بر برداشت‌های مبتنی بر تجربه experiential subjectivity
•experience ==> personal perception
•train ==> skill

taghirat va tahavolat-e donya ra az birun ba az bala negah kardan (<-- we need more. [by “we” i mean iranians])



Lili's use of preposition or a conjunction “and” “or” ==> discourse marker



regarding the system, to resist is much more interesting than to complain

i am worried (as adult) about X's death, because earlier (as child) i have wished X's death
neurotic anxiety <== controlling the child (bokon nakon بکن نکن) ~~> fear of punishment
neurotic anxiety: unconscious fear that the *libidinal impulses of the id* will take control (at an inopportune inappropriate time)

شخصیت واقع بین shakhsiat vaghe bin: objectivity montabegh bar subjectivity ==> truth (in science) + commitment based on (accepted) reality [ta'ahod cannot be based on or created by mogheyiat, that means situatedness cannot make us feel/care/hate/commit]
شخصیت موقع بین shakhsiat moghe’ bin: situated subjectivity [--Haraway--> situated objectivity --> commitment based on care]

موقعیت mogheyiat (situtation, circumstance, condition) =/= واقعیت vagheyiat (reality)
(?one should) to live by vagheyiat, not mogheyiat
[i am educated to base research and knowledge both on mogheyiat and on vagheyiat --> crisis of situated knowledge in interpersonal relations: to[...]

[...]established in the movement and contradiction**** [that i believe is urgently needed in Iran today =/= enlightening]


a space regulated by laws of stoic causality is the space where multiplicity can be reestablished --> *notional quasi-causality* [notional: gedanklich, تصور، انديشه]

[an stoic anecdote:]
“When, each evening, the guru sat down to proceed with the evening prayer the ashram's cat was in the way and distracted the monks so, he ordered that the cat should be attached during the evening prayers. A long time after the guru's death the cat continued to be attached during the evening prayer. Then, when the cat finished by dying, another cat was brought to the ashram so that it could be duly attached during the evening prayers. Centuries later the guru's disciples wrote wise treatises on the essential role of the cat in the good order of all prayers.” (DeMerlo)

--(in practice)--> the anecdote becomes the essential element in a chain of expressive causalities. it is the intersection point between several stories united for a time: *familial/familiar time & therapeutic time*


...you retreat behind a rampart which protects you
...the exterior scrutiny and criticism makes your failures heavier
...you refuse *scholastic integration* [you choose a complete rejection of the values suggested by the school, rules, or demands for success] ==> you increase the attention paid to you by the institution concerned with your sort of malfunctioning
...consultation dramatizes the contradition and rigidity of your role assignments
...if an intervenor approaches your problem, you play your idiot role
}--> a *merry-go-round of circular causality* --> the intervenor [looks for the ticket which would allow him to clim on and go around:]
•observe the causal chains
•giving the causal chains a different accent علامت، با تکیه بر صدا نه معنی
•create a global field of observation from which he is necessarily excluded
•
}--help--> anecdotic implication (=/= therapeutic system's theory):
•anecdote becomes the frame of the conversation
•risk of becoming involved in the anecdote's ridiculous fleeting liveliness
•

the anecdote, which dramatized the dead end where the intervenor's capacities are reduced to non-existence --> can also revitalize the relaional process (if introduced in a new quasi-causal chair)
[anecdote's] circular causal hypothesis which reduce the anxiety create a more accessible reality --> constructing a myth = [*]story: lies which tell the truth**
•anecdote takes it place in a causality chain where it lives for a fleeting moment carrying a *parasitical* or a *paratherapeutic* significance
==> construction of a specific restricting environment in which the parties [family and intervenor, art[...]

[...]ecessary for my existence? and therefore for your existence as well.) ----> the heterogeneity of the actors needed for the pursuit of any course of action


*metamorphosis (a mode of existence first detected in psychogenesis?) what we encounter whenever we address the manner in which existents are transformed or transform in order to subsist (zist زیست)
-defined by a certain kind of continuity and obtained by a certain type of discontinuity
-metamorphosis is about crisis, possession, alienation,
-metamorphosis sharply contrasts *cure* (~= ritual)
-allowing for installing unconscious (states,) crush, posses, bewitch, kill,
-beings with specific properties that are invisible, changeable, powerful, favorable, unfavorable
-exploration of transformations
-cosmological specialties
-seniority and extension of metamorphosical beings (of elaborations carried out by all groups in met)

{that which addresses the “me,” the “ego” =/=? that which allows one to resist the forces of metamorphosis}

the iconoclastic episode we are in now, which we must work to make it as short as possible

(to specify) dualisms that make it extraordinarily difficult to maintain ontological pluralism

it is the moderns quasi-subjects (‘person’) who feel themselves to be **directly addressed,** (redressed and saved) --> to exist
(what art suffers now, that i should directly address the modern subject, and other mode of subjectivity or other kinds of addressee and addressing is brutally criticized and irrelativized)
-(love's type of address:) addressed to us ==> make us exist --> a person
(existing as person is the only way? no no no!) -- the emergence of persons is a local and historical phenomenon that we simply cannot extend to all collectives

(how to extricate ourselves properly from the) notions of Nature, Matter, Object, and Subject

to get around two major *obstacles: (the prevailing notions of) Society and (especially of) Economy (=/=? modes of existence's system of coordinates)

the same beings that made the author of ajayeb speak, got my/our ancestors excited,


*technology: that which we emphasize whenever we pay attention to the unexpected detours {the hiatus of the detour, the zigzag of invention, ruse, trajectory obtained by a certain type of discontinuity} by which existents have to pass in order to subsist. (=/= technological domain technical objects, material world, socio-technical networks,) (~ technically)
-fictional beings adds additional variety to technical beings --> aestheticization of techniques: obsolescence, ruin, adjustment, efficiency
-we must extend ‘fictional beings’ far beyond the narrow domain of art and culture, is to give a whole new meaning to the expression “material culture.”
-1- Technique's zigzagging motion[...]

[...]king ‘through a problem’?

[Avital:] ****“To offset the competitive quality of the research that is being clocked, more philosophy must be allowed to drift in, if only to demystify those ideologies of acceleration that relentlessly run down the slower-paced thinking and an ethics of hesitation.”****

[origin] ==> temporal hysteria ==> [effect]

what tensional drama is occurs in the noncoincidence of planning...?
(planning = modeling, testing, constructing prototypes, development)
regardless of whether the future is foreseeable or not, something has to be maintained as a stable factor
test ~=> stability
***If the test cannot originate knowledge, it at least confirms that there is knowledge. (confirming that cognition occurs)

...tests have to be taken over and over again, if only to fill the **fictional time of the absolute present**

knowledge and test : it is not clear even that something is known until there is a test for it.

(test) is a certain type of metaphysically secured knowledge that needs only to ‘find’ itself

The normatively secured test does not originate knowledge but confirms what already exists as “knowable.”

...generous failure, productive of disclosure

...treaties suspend violence only momentarily, artificially

----only with the help of a discussion of rhetorical codes strong enough to scan the paradoxical logic of testing can we begin to analyze the problem of its unstoppability

...Platonic shredders, what allows us to know whether something is “good” if it has not been put to the test.
Can there be a human being without a test?

If Mary Shelley had seen the discovery of America as an event that occurred too suddenly, without the stops and protections of gradual inquiry--in sum, as a world-historical shock of intrusive violence that disrupted all sorts of ecologies, material and immaterial, conscious and unconscious--Nietzsche studies the profound disruption to thought that the experimental theater of America directed. (Ronell)

uninterrogated durability (as a first-rate value on earth)

(American) athleticism of identity switching----it means that anyone can in principle try anything out

Dr. Frankenstein's new *experimental jouissance*

experimenting inhabiting acts of promising (calculating or anticipation----acts by which the future can be nailed down)


It is thus that the maddest and most interesting ages of history always emerge, when the “actors,” all kinds of actors, become the real masters. As this happens, another human type is disadvantaged more and more and finally made impossible; (Nietzsche)

flora and fauna

this is not the scientist obsessed with an idée fixe--but one capable of uprooting and going
[...]

[...]mages...

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 between test & real)


Freud was working on to tests which are lost now: Aktualitätsprüfung to distinguish between reality and immediacy

Lacan has linked testing to the subject's creation of a first “outside"----a space that is no longer the same as “reality”

the way the state takes possession of the body presumptively on drugs.
-in this way, drugs are seen as eccentric: what is outside, or moves outside the center, can center it, they are animated by an outside already inside
-how drugs are isolating or how they establish community (of those who are somehow together or with nonpresence.) anything that refigures individuality or collectivity that brings you together with the other and absolutly keeps you apart from the other
drug: Dionysian frenzy, aspirin, religion, dirty language,
-I am sorry I have no drugs to offer you today!
-not everyone in civic societies has the privilege of getting high and mind-altering (that which supposedly sug[...]

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

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

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

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

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


[with Haraway]

what is the optics of ajayeb?
[that is entertaining being reductive for a moment, but that is productive]
(to help with that, the optics of the anthropocene is the image of the earth from space, Gaia?)
-a cybernetic, systems-theoretic entity, studied in different scales
-various reports (on the state, fictioning the state of the earth?)
-a global kind of system knowledge
-a giant database ----> do i need to formulate my project into a technological practice?

what is the smallest unit of interest in the ajayeb cosmology?

the practices of relocating germplasms, including people in form of slaves, all over the earth in order to produce surplus that is transported elsewhere for capital accumulation... (Haraway)

industrial agriculture and plantation


to be storied and studied

the holobiont: host plus of all its microbial symbionts that form ecological units
-recasting the individual as a holobiont; the collective genomes
(Lynn Margulis)
holobionts: “multicellular eukaryotes plus their colonies of persistent symbionts”
(Gilbert, Sapp, and Tauber 326; cited by Kenney)
(thinking with holobionts) the immune system is re-cast not as “defensive weaponry” but as a “socializing and unifying force” [via Kenney] --> “to obey the immune system is to become[...]

[...] (Gilbert's) genomic fragment in the picture of mutual-benefit life --?--> metropolitan life insurance company
[--> *apparatuses of thinking* have thick trading zones between ecology and economics up to and including today, that is the mutal adaptation in real world, producing problems for us]

(how we go?) from one life-table to another life-table
(for example from mathematics of life insurance to population biology ~=> co-developement of disciplines; 19th century laboratories + practices of political economy;)
[matters of historical, economical, manegerial, capital, ]


(protestants that were never burnt enough)


we (always) remain in contamination [never in innocence --> be attentive to the tropes and will to innocence in each other act text]


in our questioning and studies we (must) remain enmeshed, in a historical conjunction, in a situated way of being “this way” and not “that way”

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

[Stengers]

[a kind of] writing (not writing down)

writing is an experience of metamorphic transformation

to discover how to be compromised by ajayeb Nameh
the ways we can be lured into desiring and trusting it

how the assemblages of ajayeb generate metamorphic transformations in our capacity to affect and be affected? --> to feel, think, and imagine

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

[Serres]

ajayeb, a time when transport and itinerary were only myth

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

[Anand]

the sanctity and blessing of Muslim saints was integrally linked to local ecology and topography

that sanctification of birds and stones alerts us to an Indic and Islamic vision of humans in which we are not separated from and hierarchically superior to nature. Rather, the boundaries that separate stones, animals, humans and gods are porous as well as being non-hierarchical--making possible a “lateral” moral aspiration, where birds and stones can be moral exemplars for humans.

The interlinked sacrality of both ecology and cosmology, of ‘kudrat’ (~ power of nature?) is common to both Hindus and Muslims. ‘Kudrat’ is thus the cosmological aspect of north India's Invisible Religion.

There is a long Islamic tradition of seeing Nature as full of the signs (ayat آیات) of the work and presence of God. The Qur'anic verse “Withersoever you turn, there is the Face of God ( Qur'an 2: 115)” has traditionally been interpreted by the Sufis as meaning that the “order of nature is nothing but the Divine Reality manifesting itself on the plane of phenomenal existence (Nasr 1996, 62).”

description of the garden ---- [accounts of the heaven are filled with descriptions of springs and wells, tanks and streams, gardens and trees and[...]

[...]both abstractness and concreteness) -->[a tradition of thought that produces (& works with): “Abstraktheit =/= Greifbarkeit"]
***how ajayeb naratives provided the filaments of (muslim) ecological thought as a perspective on our interconnectedness and mutual entanglements? [Naveeda, Anand, ]

(wanting a) most perfect creation (to leave the best part to the end*) ==> God created humans last of all ==> consigned humans to a state of *belatedness to the world*
(unapologetically) anthropocentric: *making the human drama the most important one to watch*

acts of worship (that bears witness to):
•regularity in nature
•one's own nature

(agian) Khidr, the prophet in green, who is associated with hermeticism and also has a presence [...] as a way to suggest a subterranean connection between [...] textual tradition and the everyday lives of riparian (رود کنارى) Muslims [...]

riparian context ساحل کنار ,رود کنار ,حریم رودخانه
[context =? کنار]


“BE!” بععععع بع ع ع ع ع ع ع ع ع


Ikhwan: every creature knows and speaks of creation
that knowledge is not privilege of humans
that it is the failure of humans to imagine that they live in the presence of mute nature

نکیر و منکر interrogations by Nakir and Munkar, faith-testers of deads in their graves

دجال Dajjal as a dead body returned to life, many will follow him, but as dogs!
-return of humans as dogs --> idea of rebirth --> not homogeneously muslim space
“[who is] compelled to return as if it were a cosmic debt they owed the world”
-pathos of the inability of humans to sustain cross-species companionship --> the visceral dislike of the dregs of the many existence of dogs
--> dogs’ quality of aliveness; being more or less useless other than the occasional and fitful دمدمى tful دمدمى protection of households that made them serve as the singular sign of life, a trace of God's surplus creativity. (Naveeda's work in chauras)

one's future animal self

(هشتاد ساله) octogenarian mindful of life's finitude
-what do you say/do when your feet is one on the land breaking beneath and the other in the afterlife?
-polysemy of imagery and wordss

“earth breaks so much” --> ?>

suggesting a چاره (chareh)
inflection of chareh and fetrat
چاره ی فطرت


***ajayeb's heterogeneously muslim spaces
•traces of Hindu, Chinese, Greek interest and thought
•occasion for cross-species sentience (Naveeda's beautiful research in chars)

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

bringing bits and pieces of songs from many places... over their cel[...]

[...]>
bonanza
anthrax

euthanize

inoculate

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

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


double-edgeed prospect

common curse

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

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

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


rural cosmology
cosmology of modern science

human conception: flirtation with the failure to arrive


#two moveis:
•Exodus: Riddly Scott + Creation Bible + Big Bang + extinction theory + fluid animation research
•Noah: Nolan + Creation Bible + Darwin + motion graphic research
--> solving a problem proposed by _?_ }--> “the dream catcher” !!!
(in these cinematic examples we see the society imposed to the same spatiotemporal representational framework that science “discovers” in nature)


the insistent entanglements of physicality with the metaphysical

soil: earth rendered in the scientific register

“The alluvial sediments that come in the waters of the Jamuna river either become deposited as silt across floodplains or fall in the river to become ‘chars’” (Naveeda Khan 2014)

...the time of the arrival of clay is not assured
the inability to perpetuate human life*

the materialist metaphysics of Creation in non-elite belief

“you should not let a dog lick you.”
or “pigeon feather containing 40 different microbial diseases.” #clean
or “they are very dirty and will pass their germs to you.”

cross-species fraternity to the assertion of superiority over all animals

pragmatic + theological spoke:
1- divine privileging of humans
2- human right to transcend the ordinary (--> to aspire to God's position)

...lush growth of eucalyptus trees at the edge of the market
--> yesssss things that grow on the edges <-- my life-long attention (the cat who entered the house, the ants, the plants in Tehran, ...) [<== because of my own marginalized being?[...]

[...]amic (re)configurings of the world, specific agential practices/intra-actions/performances through which specific exclusionary boundaries are enacted***
(Kaja Silverman, the subject of semiotics)

spectatorships =/=! representations =/=! referents
(ontological distinction: “=/=!”)

the surreal technoscientific look --?--> allowing wondrous but material extensions into the ajayeb domain

in creating a “look” for ajayeb: whether or not a used/user interaction can have ethical dimensions?


refraction is not framework, but a pathway. it engages patterns of interference and exchange



the xeno-sensual in the ajayeb
different differences that are sensed and mediated

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

poetic historiography
(historiography: the study of the writing of history and of written histories)

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

to begin writing about ajayeb with the citational, ‘avardeand ke...’ (...آورده‌اند که)
citation, an important characteristic of fables, is about relational histories.
absence of definitive source (in my old childhood favorite radio show, by bring an endless list of fantastic source and bodies of lures) allows monsters to flourish and me the full range of my passionate crafts. ajayeb's compelling mystery demands (from me) an unorthodox and omnivorous approach (hame-chiz-khar همه چیز خوار).

اما راویان اخبار و ناقلان آثار و طوطیان شکرشکن شیرین گفتار و خوشه چینان خرمن سخن دانی و صرافان سر بازار معانی و چابک سواران میدان دانش توسن خوش خرام سخن را بدینگونه به جولان در آورده اند که ...

•Mirabile dictu... (miraculous to say...)

towards Despret's talking parrots
parrots (shekar-shekan) (and philosophers) really like to control the exchange, to keep control of a conversation : their refusal to let another individual choose the topic of conversation
***(parrots have) a pragmatic rather than a referential conception of language
[am i also referential (=/= pragmatic) in my conception of language?]--> to teach a being to speak presupposes not only a tolerance of but also *a profound interest in misunderstanding* (this ‘profound interest in misunderstanding’ is precisely both cognitive and political aspect of what I am trying to bring forth) ~-> (how language-learning with animals can help us learn) restating and inverting the question of control

*exchange can only be achieved when there is “a continous reprisal of translations and betrayals of meaning”* ==> understanding itself is compromised
[*]ajayeb: a non-stop betrayal of translations (of perspectives) and continuous redressal of meanings (of things)

“as if” has to [...]

[...]rate (tajdide niru تجدید نیرو) attention to materiality but also matter's contingent force --> intersectional demands of assemblage
“and...and...and”
trans, speciating technology, the drive for suffixial endpoints


(prepositional operations on suffixiated) assemblages of spacetimematterings


**** terrible violence is directed to the non-existing, the never having existed


‘*’ (the asterisk) is paratactic (faghede ravabet فاقد روابط) (=/= conjunction,) it designates multiplication, it repurposes, displaces, renames, replicates, and intensifies terms, adding yet more texture, increased vitalization
-it is a sensuous node
-making (my points) a composite of affects and percepts --> speciation is always a cultivated response ***

*trap: “means also mouth, or mode of utterance; it is the “O” curve of lips and throat that makes sounds phonic and names the apprehension of becoming bodily. A trap, in weaving, is also a break in the threads, an unraveling, loosening, unwinding that opens up space. When we think of spider webs, trap is a silk net, a sticky mesh that registers sensation. For the spider, its trap is its nearby-ness, its where-ness, its with-ness. [--> lure;] (Hayward & Weinstein)
-how, then, might we hear the phrase “trapped in the wrong body” as less about authenticity (fixity and normativity) than about *textures of spacetime* (prefixial movements)?

[harkate johari حرکت جوهری ~/=? harkate pishvandi حرکت پیشوندی]._/'--> Sadra


(Susan Stryker warns) that transsexuals, in their capacity to be monstrous, arise, like Frankenstein's creature, from the operating tables of their (re)birth as “something more, and something other” than their medical service providers may have intended or imagined
more & other =/= with & of


*gender: sociopoliical taxomomizing ontologically distinct form (entwined) with enfleshed mattering


*animality: sensuous materialities, composites of affects and percepts, specificities but remain thresholds of emergence, individuation that prompt sensuous intra- and interchange ==> provocations

(Weaver, Kelley, Weinstein, Hayward, Kier, Franklin:) animal difference announces a radically singular Other marked by sexual differences

“trans-infused apprehensions and engagements with the expansive world of possibility opened up by non-anthropocentric perspectives.”


trans* + animal --> (alternative ways of envisioning) futures of:
•embodiment
•aesthetics
•biopolitics
•climates
•ethics


we have to negotiate the [contaminated concept of] human --(to deal with)--> the persistence of humanism in structures of thought


critical animal studies has(?) the transformative pow[...]

[...]s]

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


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

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

transgenerational
regenerations

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

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


(Eszter's lace-like interiors)


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

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

(hope =/= salvation)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



in ajayeb what are the:
•animacy hierarchies (--Chen)
•exposed and transpare[...]

[...]t might be happening

not being able to sit still
being exhausted
being left behind
being ahead of the curve
being in history
being in a predicament مخمصه
being ready for something--anything


a life's trajectories traverse the materializations of scenes or pulsations
@Foad

atmospheres have:
•gradients
•valences
•moods
•sensations
•tempos
•lifespans
•

an atmospheric fill resonates the edge between the material and the potential

[my recording symptom in 2009 was an atmospheric (not symptomatic) attunement; constant recording; take on the texture and density of a background hum; to produce a felt; barely felt sense of something happening in the house;]
-my father disappearing into violent, abandoning drinking


every person is a nexus of compositional moments
a worlding taking place in difference


!♥ Stewart talking about her stepson becoming a homeless
“People like to simplify the situation of homelessness as if it is a self-evident process of abject poverty without a safety net or as if it's just a matter of personal blame or failure. But it is also an attunement to a singular world's texture and shine. The body has to learn to play itself like a musical instrument in this world's compositions.” [@Luisa, Sven, Foad]

(i lack certain learnings in sensory labor of attuning as a zerang زرنگ person)


(do i also have) the habit of a worlding

trying to find the rhythm of a new bodily life

find lines of attachment

***to become describable as a body (by learning how to affect and to be affected in this world such as it is)***

(in my work on ajayeb i am becoming more and more committed to learn ways of) having stories meant to pull me into the sentience of the world i am in --> give it density, texture*


Stewart (2010) is writing an ajayebnameh of her mother in cancer, stepson becoming a homeless, and her hometown

______________


[*]regionality دهاتی ,داهاتی
-an event that jumps from landscape to bodies and back (Stewart)
--"here"-->{the blue law, the seasons, the color red, place names اسم خیابان [*the past snaps into the present with the recognition of the street names], bodily resonances, materialities bundled together like a sac of leaves, sharp-edged collectivities like race, ethnicity, class, gender, generation and religion, }--> “one ventures from home”
-a thing hollowed out by its labyrinth of edges; incessant interlinking
-a contact aesthetics
-a virtual mapping of things in a state of potential (Thrift)
-a sheer recognition of a sheer recognition: “we are from around here"-->{as *a[...]

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


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

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

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

shift from an epistemological to an ontological register in theoretical archaeology

critically ontological: turning insight back on the archaeological project

(in archaeology:) ontology = reality (what there is) / peoples’ claims about reality (a fundamental set of understandings about how the world is) }--Alberti--> one can conceptualize ontology: as a people's “beliefs about” reality / as people's actual ontological commitments (~ people's reality)

Latour's modes of existence: ontological tendencies that exist more or less precariously under the assault of modernization

conversion of ontological questions into epistemological questions ==> deontologizing other peoples’ *ontological commitments* [--> that Goda mistook for ideology]

*problem with pluralizing “reality” is that it might appear to be a form of cultural relativism, (demotion of) “ontology ~= culture (~ cultural beliefs about reality =/= reality)” ==back==> cultural construction


anti-Cartesian, relational, and antiontological exceptionalism


[a] Heideggerian idea: *the world we encounter is preinterpretive*

posthuman ~ nonrepresentational ~ realist ~ new materialism

(realism: an ontological approach)

•Latour's network
•Ingold's meshwork (commonality of processes across the ‘life =/= not life’) --> processes ~ becoming ~ growth ~ decay
•Barad's entanglement (relations are primary and relata are a consequence of relating ==dynamics==> intra-action {phenomenon = experiment + measuring device + techician + previous results + setting + ...})
•DeLanda's assemblage (how humans and nonhumans produced communities that changed in composition and through time... =/= linguistic model of context)
•

**relational ontology : stronger your “allies” are, the more reality you can claim** [= (Latour's notion of) truth]

[critique of human exceptionalism ==>] open ontology --> contingent categories: phenomena and assemblages are temporary, contingent, and unbounded

flat ontology: one made exclusively of unique, singular individuals, differing in spatio-temporal scale but not in ontological status --symmetry--> *to get at differences without determining what they are in advance* (<-- useful for ajayeb studies)
•archaeological types/objects: reified sets of relations
•job of the archaeologists: esta[...]

[...]or past ontologies --> models of relationality for archaeologists to interpret material patterning in the archaeological record

investigations of personhood

(building toward a) taxonomy of past ontologies --✕--> ontological critique

(Alberti >) Viveiros de Castro's project: to systemize amerindian thought into a metaphysics such that it can have a reciprocal effect on anthropological thought and “naturalist” or Western metaphysics



ontological realism ==>{

new language attempt to imagine the complex topology of relational realities:
•Latour --> network: things exists as a consequence of the strength of their articulation
•Ingold --> meshwork =/= Aristotelian hylomorphism
•Barad --> entanglement = Quantum physics + queer theory ==> properties belong to the phenomena in question =/= inherent to things
•DeLanda --> assemblage: how humans + nonhumans produced communities that changed in composition and through time in neolithic and bronze age

assemblage --replace--> context

assemblage = phenomena --> temporary, contingent, unbounded

Latourian critique of categories =/= beyond human correlationalism

pluralizing ontology ==> charges of relativism <-- ‘objective knowledge =/= contingent foundations’ }--> nonrepresentational approach =/= over interpretation, abstraction

archeology operates by seeking strong and effective articulations between theories, apparatuses, material remains

ontological realism (=/= naturalism, constructivist) --> objectivity and truth are contingent, but also demonstrable and robust
@Chloe


material record: an expression of **how past gathers in the present** (=/= fragmentary evidence of history <-- forensic approach)

past continuously unfolding and therefore changing


Alberi --> (social) ontology: a new interpretive tool
additive work (=/= reconstructive)

archeological accounts of other's ontologies

animal turn in archeology --> nonanthropocentric zoological studies
Willerselv
Viveiros de Castro

Amazona --> animism (more than any other anthropological material) has provided modes of relationality to archeologists to interpret material patterning in archeological records --> [*]animism: an ethnographic meta-analogy for past ontologies
•blurring between nature and culture
•relationship with other-than-human agencies (animal, spirit, artifact)
==✕==> ontological critique

Viveiros de Castro --> systemize amerindian thought into a metaphysics ==> to have an reciprocal effect on anthropological thought (western naturalist metaphysics)

reference to a “common world”

new animism ==> ontology becomes another name for cul[...]

[...] human correlationalism

pluralizing ontology ==> charges of relativism <-- ‘objective knowledge =/= contingent foundations’ }--> nonrepresentational approach =/= over interpretation, abstraction

archeology operates by seeking strong and effective articulations between theories, apparatuses, material remains

ontological realism (=/= naturalism, constructivist) --> objectivity and truth are contingent, but also demonstrable and robust
@Chloe


material record: an expression of **how past gathers in the present** (=/= fragmentary evidence of history <-- forensic approach)

past continuously unfolding and therefore changing


Alberi --> (social) ontology: a new interpretive tool
additive work (=/= reconstructive)

archeological accounts of other's ontologies

animal turn in archeology --> nonanthropocentric zoological studies
Willerselv
Viveiros de Castro

Amazona --> animism (more than any other anthropological material) has provided modes of relationality to archeologists to interpret material patterning in archeological records --> [*]animism: an ethnographic meta-analogy for past ontologies
•blurring between nature and culture
•relationship with other-than-human agencies (animal, spirit, artifact)
==✕==> ontological critique

Viveiros de Castro --> systemize amerindian thought into a metaphysics ==> to have an reciprocal effect on anthropological thought (western naturalist metaphysics)

reference to a “common world”

new animism ==> ontology becomes another name for culture

Alebrti outlining:
•anthropological project that considers ontology as a critical question productive of conceptual engagement
•work of archeologists who theorize and practice archeology on the basis of indigenous theories
}--> where new animists turn to animism for a source of analogies, critical ontology turns to animism for a source of theory

perspectivism: multiple natures (worlds) + singular culture (way of knowing those worlds) [~ working from *commonality* rather than *alterity*] --> a theoretical bomb =/= analogies based on ethnographic content

spirits experienced as diminutive yet brilliantly decorated or huge and grotesque

the more intense ==> the more body it is

(the promise of thinking through) [*]thing: a nonspecified ontological category that can be “filled” through ethnographic observation that is designed to allow ontological alterity to inform its content

recursive anthropology --> alterity: a function of the divergence between ethnographic materials and the assumptions the analyst brings to them

(if) ontology: what is ==> alterity: part of what others say ‘what is’ that does not make [...]

[...]d*** [and that ‘history’ is not like something you hand it to someone like a cake you baked]

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

قورباغه زدن با شلنگ بیرون پریدن گلوله قرمز
مورچه روی برگ روی آب
آجر پرتاب کردن گربه بالای درخت
مورچه سوزاندن با ذره‌بین
سوسک سوزاندن با آب داغ
جوجه ته چاه



heyvan, heyvun, heyvunak, heyvunaki
حیوان، حیوون، حیوانک، حیوونکی

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

(delight in) our *sensous involvement* with the *materials of language* (Lyn Hejinian)

Doty

all we see is slippery, nuanced, elusive

***“the world is wily, and doesn't want to be caught”*** (Susan Mitchell)

perception is simultaneous and layered

(elements of the) sensorium: continuous, comples response to things perpetually delivered by the senses, the encompassing sphere that is such a large part of our subjectivity

we are englobed entirely (by the reports of our senses) --> a seamless weft of ‘information’(=/= the data the senses offer)

dark, suggestive blur of shapes and colors

what we can take in is a partial rendering of the world

[dog's nose reading] ...a universe of scents--historical, multifaceted--presents itself to the canine “reader”

(Doty) ...deer cannot see red or orange, a biologist writes, but apparently can see blue much better that we can. who can even imagine what that would mean, for blue to be--well, more? ♥

“All accounts, it seems, are partial; thus all perception might be said to be tentative (versuchsweise), an opportunity for interpretation, a guessing game.”

Doty putting it into a single sentence in order to suggest, as Proust did, the simultaneity of perception. he [Proust] wanted to dilate the sentence toward its outer limit, so that one would feel the blu of space and time that the unit of syntax held all at once

*finding the words* --> the nature of my attention, the signature of my selfhood

...terms commensurate with the clamoring world

(recognize your acts of naming --> for example naming the sonic outruch of a bird “singing”) --> what birds are actually up to when they sing isn't clear **

Whitman describing the sea itself as a “fierce old mother” whose constant iteration is the whispered word death


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

***life not having been realy lived until it is narrated (@Ehsan)
(we need) to experience the satisfaction of matching words to the world --> **to feel,[...]

[...]ion this time”

*art is a house that tries to be haunted* ♥ (Doty > Dickinson)

قافیه به تنگ آمد ghafie tang, (when a choice is) driven more by sonic than by logic


what kind of game is the sea? @Marialena
lap and drag. crag and gleam
(monosyllables --> are we reading nouns or verbs? tough, playful ocean)

syntactical ambiguity disorients


(Khayam's) desire to die into the world (~ to surrender into the life of things)

[title]
*describer's art*


autumn
a kind of logarithn of decay and rekindling


to describe description
a work of advocacy
to go description-hunting in ajayeb
evocation of sense perception (--> a technique that Adventure Times TV series uses)

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

Foucault [_bestiary of the imagination]
...precisely because it puts them into categories of their own, the Chinese encyclopedia localizes their [fantastic entities, fabulous animals, polymorphous and demoniacal faces, creatures breathing fire,,] powers of contagion

encyclopedia ==> quality of monstrosity does not affect any real body (=/= lurk)

animals in the non-place of language, meeting in the immaterial sound of the voice pronouncing their enumeration

“Absurdity destroys the ‘and’ of the enumeration by making impossible the ‘in’ where the things enumerated would be divided up.”

the ‘operating table’
a table --> a tabula, “that enables thought to operate upon the entities of our world, to put them in order, to divide them into classes, to group them according to names that designate their similarities and their differences--the table upon which, since the beginning of time, language has intersected space.” (Foucault, The Order of Things)

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



*questionable interpretations

#attention
([art/]aesthetics of noticing)--> appreciation of multispecies landscape, making living ecologies

which sectors/fields of art require artist to go out and notice things?
(engage with which) details of the world --> breaking common sense

our mamalian bias:
•predetermined body shape and size
•run toward death (pre-programmed death =/= history) ==> makes us think in terms of set-life courses
}==> allow us to imagine a standard individual outside of history

(Tsing's) history: overlapping tracks and traces and many trajectories of world-making, human and not human

irreversible time ==> indeterminacy (of history) --> new alliances --> the ability of assemblages to produce historical changes in our common world

what needs to be stated
what needs to be produced

context-dependent --?--> the[...]

[...]re patchworks
-perspectival and performative
-contaminative and communicative
*fantastic and real vision*
-things that don't fit together, yet, there *are* together --> sym (=/= bifurcation) --> awkward relations & interrupting categories
•(necrophobia)
•schizophrenic relations to...
•deconstruction of presence...

(for you there is also) ***many fantastically large set of contexts within which to say “yes”***

(Tsing's) *contaminated diversity* (complicated, ugly, humbling) [=/= ‘endangered species’ and cultures (innocent victims of human progress)]
-implicates survivors in histories of greed, damage, and destruction --> cacophony of troubled stories --might--> help to learn something about the cultural and natural histories at stake
-difficult to love and relate

joint organs {part plant, part fungus} interspecies phisiology ==> *mushroom*



*tumble: falll down as if collapsing (from upright position), thrown together (in mess, and very difficult to rewind)
=/= transcend
=/= entropy

•bodies tumble into bodies --> monsters
•histories tumble into histories --> ghosts
•stories tumble into stories --> lures

(material lifeworld tumble into) forests tumble into fables tumble into politics tumble into ...

***dispersal & entanglement*** {
•dispersal --> shattered, torn, broken, dispersed, made particulate, whisked away on the breeze (--> smoke, Urashima turning into particls, dud to cough with سرفه sorfe) [<-- Jassem and Mia] --> time is crossed out ويرانه
•entanglement --> patchwork, care, weave, (together, reconnected, acknowledging care and entanglement) [<-- Kirsten] --> time of the hut کاشانه
} “&” --> ??? stories? reciprocal capture ==> immanent new modes of existing (in damage and loss) [<-- Sina] --> time (and things) are diffractivelly/differentially constituted


as humans we also have these qualities:
•our plasticity
•our ability to be affected
•our ability to hybridize


(modern human activity, burning man insults ==>) [*]monsters: ajayeb-e wonders of symbiosis (threats of ecological disruption, multispecies entanglement)
(Tsing, a useful figure to think with ==>)
•they help to pay attention to (ancient chimeric) entanglement
•they point to monstrosity of man
•they point toward life's symbiotic entanglement across bodies
monsters: nature suddenly unfamiliar (acting like udyr)

[*]ghosts: phantoms inside [your] (natural) history, layered temporalities of living and dying (==shape==> landscapes), creatures of ambivalent entanglement --> (help us read) *life's enmeshment in landscapes*


suffering from the ill of another species (or people):
•bacteria ins[...]

[...]s humans we also have these qualities:
•our plasticity
•our ability to be affected
•our ability to hybridize


(modern human activity, burning man insults ==>) [*]monsters: ajayeb-e wonders of symbiosis (threats of ecological disruption, multispecies entanglement)
(Tsing, a useful figure to think with ==>)
•they help to pay attention to (ancient chimeric) entanglement
•they point to monstrosity of man
•they point toward life's symbiotic entanglement across bodies
monsters: nature suddenly unfamiliar (acting like udyr)

[*]ghosts: phantoms inside [your] (natural) history, layered temporalities of living and dying (==shape==> landscapes), creatures of ambivalent entanglement --> (help us read) *life's enmeshment in landscapes*


suffering from the ill of another species (or people):
•bacteria inside (<== pollution, radiation)
•people next door (<== war, politics)
}--> this is the condition of anthropocene entanglement



[productive horror of our civil performance--Kirsten, Sina, Jassem and Mia:]

temporalities of ruin, body, optics
                   |     |     |
       matrix of rage, lure, desire

rage (violently affective contact)
--> ghosts: [--> Jassem and Mia's performance ~ “big story"]
•**histories tumbled into histories** (“ghosts” <== bad death <== settler colonialism + expansive capitalism --> they brought with them a peculiar kind of time: looking straight ahead to the future [==> optimization & salvation of a *single past*] --> ruthless ambition & [modernity's time:] metronomic synchrony 🕓)
•animating feral and partial connections
•remind us of an *impossible present* (that we live in)
* (embodied) contingency, asymmetry, indeterminacy *
•hauntings (are not immaterial!) : presumptive absence (presumed in the absence)

lures
--> monsters: [--> Kirsten's objects ~ small stories, little niches with ghostly contours (like a car's tire) ~ things growing in abundant]
•**bodies tumbled into bodies** (“monsters” <== assets and wastes (animal entanglement with the burning man) <-- bad symbiosis)
* unspectacular afterlife of discarded things * (debris of capitalist waste)
•weaving magical figures, conjuring fictions
•constant speculation, that are fed and touched, reparative and tender
•textured, formful, colorful
*lure: things that evoke or capture feelings and responses ==> to lure out relational responses

desire (superposition)
--> optics: (a form of distance) [--> Sina's stories ~ superposition [different scales] of dispersed times [~ unruly temporalities], multiple practice of knowing smallbig spacetime mattering]
•**positions tumbled into positions** (tumbled into politics: some instrument[...]

[...]pes), creatures of ambivalent entanglement --> (help us read) *life's enmeshment in landscapes*


suffering from the ill of another species (or people):
•bacteria inside (<== pollution, radiation)
•people next door (<== war, politics)
}--> this is the condition of anthropocene entanglement



[productive horror of our civil performance--Kirsten, Sina, Jassem and Mia:]

temporalities of ruin, body, optics
                   |     |     |
       matrix of rage, lure, desire

rage (violently affective contact)
--> ghosts: [--> Jassem and Mia's performance ~ “big story"]
•**histories tumbled into histories** (“ghosts” <== bad death <== settler colonialism + expansive capitalism --> they brought with them a peculiar kind of time: looking straight ahead to the future [==> optimization & salvation of a *single past*] --> ruthless ambition & [modernity's time:] metronomic synchrony 🕓)
•animating feral and partial connections
•remind us of an *impossible present* (that we live in)
* (embodied) contingency, asymmetry, indeterminacy *
•hauntings (are not immaterial!) : presumptive absence (presumed in the absence)

lures
--> monsters: [--> Kirsten's objects ~ small stories, little niches with ghostly contours (like a car's tire) ~ things growing in abundant]
•**bodies tumbled into bodies** (“monsters” <== assets and wastes (animal entanglement with the burning man) <-- bad symbiosis)
* unspectacular afterlife of discarded things * (debris of capitalist waste)
•weaving magical figures, conjuring fictions
•constant speculation, that are fed and touched, reparative and tender
•textured, formful, colorful
*lure: things that evoke or capture feelings and responses ==> to lure out relational responses

desire (superposition)
--> optics: (a form of distance) [--> Sina's stories ~ superposition [different scales] of dispersed times [~ unruly temporalities], multiple practice of knowing smallbig spacetime mattering]
•**positions tumbled into positions** (tumbled into politics: some instruments of seeing producing perspectives are more guilty than others)
* (disembodied) multiple practices of knowing --> landscapes: arrangement of life and afterlife, space that grows from ‘endings’ <== ‘death of’(s) ~~> contaminated (stories/diversities)
--> diagram: http://ajayeb.net/?q=rationalizable
(Sina performing) diffractive optics of knowing ==> ongoing articulation [=/= perspective]


•i shouldn't be talking, opening this
|
•remembrance --> Bambi's mother studies {what if remembering is something totally different than “lost member"}
|
•fox story --> animal trap:
◦perception {rhetorical perception, evil perception, etc.}
◦lure 🌀 c[...]

[...]trix of rage, lure, desire

rage (violently affective contact)
--> ghosts: [--> Jassem and Mia's performance ~ “big story"]
•**histories tumbled into histories** (“ghosts” <== bad death <== settler colonialism + expansive capitalism --> they brought with them a peculiar kind of time: looking straight ahead to the future [==> optimization & salvation of a *single past*] --> ruthless ambition & [modernity's time:] metronomic synchrony 🕓)
•animating feral and partial connections
•remind us of an *impossible present* (that we live in)
* (embodied) contingency, asymmetry, indeterminacy *
•hauntings (are not immaterial!) : presumptive absence (presumed in the absence)

lures
--> monsters: [--> Kirsten's objects ~ small stories, little niches with ghostly contours (like a car's tire) ~ things growing in abundant]
•**bodies tumbled into bodies** (“monsters” <== assets and wastes (animal entanglement with the burning man) <-- bad symbiosis)
* unspectacular afterlife of discarded things * (debris of capitalist waste)
•weaving magical figures, conjuring fictions
•constant speculation, that are fed and touched, reparative and tender
•textured, formful, colorful
*lure: things that evoke or capture feelings and responses ==> to lure out relational responses

desire (superposition)
--> optics: (a form of distance) [--> Sina's stories ~ superposition [different scales] of dispersed times [~ unruly temporalities], multiple practice of knowing smallbig spacetime mattering]
•**positions tumbled into positions** (tumbled into politics: some instruments of seeing producing perspectives are more guilty than others)
* (disembodied) multiple practices of knowing --> landscapes: arrangement of life and afterlife, space that grows from ‘endings’ <== ‘death of’(s) ~~> contaminated (stories/diversities)
--> diagram: http://ajayeb.net/?q=rationalizable
(Sina performing) diffractive optics of knowing ==> ongoing articulation [=/= perspective]


•i shouldn't be talking, opening this
|
•remembrance --> Bambi's mother studies {what if remembering is something totally different than “lost member"}
|
•fox story --> animal trap:
◦perception {rhetorical perception, evil perception, etc.}
◦lure 🌀 can't stop following, trap: nearby-ness, becoming bodily, engaged in perspectival game and will ==> fox's relation to the forest [he is suspicious and rend =/= *lured into desiring & trusting* : we bring our lures and needs towards each other, (sometimes it is) critique is an art that tangles with what you are proposing, like fox in a lure (octopus is much better with lures than fox)]
◾propositions
◾abstractions --> (i love) ideas: to animate humans, erotic lure for soul ==> *metamorphic attention*
|
•omen --> [...]

[...]gical figures, conjuring fictions
•constant speculation, that are fed and touched, reparative and tender
•textured, formful, colorful
*lure: things that evoke or capture feelings and responses ==> to lure out relational responses

desire (superposition)
--> optics: (a form of distance) [--> Sina's stories ~ superposition [different scales] of dispersed times [~ unruly temporalities], multiple practice of knowing smallbig spacetime mattering]
•**positions tumbled into positions** (tumbled into politics: some instruments of seeing producing perspectives are more guilty than others)
* (disembodied) multiple practices of knowing --> landscapes: arrangement of life and afterlife, space that grows from ‘endings’ <== ‘death of’(s) ~~> contaminated (stories/diversities)
--> diagram: http://ajayeb.net/?q=rationalizable
(Sina performing) diffractive optics of knowing ==> ongoing articulation [=/= perspective]


•i shouldn't be talking, opening this
|
•remembrance --> Bambi's mother studies {what if remembering is something totally different than “lost member"}
|
•fox story --> animal trap:
◦perception {rhetorical perception, evil perception, etc.}
◦lure 🌀 can't stop following, trap: nearby-ness, becoming bodily, engaged in perspectival game and will ==> fox's relation to the forest [he is suspicious and rend =/= *lured into desiring & trusting* : we bring our lures and needs towards each other, (sometimes it is) critique is an art that tangles with what you are proposing, like fox in a lure (octopus is much better with lures than fox)]
◾propositions
◾abstractions --> (i love) ideas: to animate humans, erotic lure for soul ==> *metamorphic attention*
|
•omen --> potent sign of alarm
|
•evil {category crossing monsters [~= ajayeb's context of evil], force of liberation, beauty, complexity}
|
•Ursula's sea (from little mermaid):
◦the way she says “yes” {multisensorial call “yes” and “more"}
◦her laughter {develish perception, perceptual joke, joy of corrupting her morality [~ her heroism: who the hero is and how to live happily ever after]}
◦fish-story --> aqua culture
|
•Ursula La Guin --> Urashima story
|
•finish with evil laughter


(follow the departure from ‘evil’ to ‘misunderstanding’ or ‘perspective’ in Disney's animated movies)


[according to *creation ancestral dreamings*(~ founding ancestors):] shape-shifter (are not only haunted, but also are) creators of biotic life, founders of kin groups (of humans and ghosts)

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

the wind (of...?) carries ghosts--signs of past ways of life still charged in the present ... stories of those winds as they blow over haunted landscapes ... ghosts are the traces of more-than-human[...]

[...]g a culture from outside


points of the lecture:
-a nano-expose
-of kicking off this...
-not dramatically pitched at you
-cartography of collapse and sublime
-coming down or crushing down the watching post
-(disclosures and) promises of frontier technology
-


ghosts of the project:
/poltergeist --> not really capable of knowing different things and different types of relations they are entered into, bad at perspectival communication
/Hamlet's father --> wanting you to remember ~= revenge
/Cinderella --> doesn't show any psychological symptoms (she has no psychology?), she is not the master of anything, 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
|
[...]

[...]ion (and political forms)

-(let's not) programmatic politics --reverting--> to a parodic reinstantiation of older oligarchic forms
-(let's not) reduction of accidental to trauma [~= incapacity to speak]

crowd: a context in which one can become subject to powers that exceed one --> for which spirit possession offers a normative form

the crowd lends people an instrument by which they can become audible (to the extend that they lose their own particular voice) ~= the medium lends a body to the spirit who can speaks in a voice from elsewhere

[*]crowd: a mode of the (political) sublime : one dies as a subject to be recognized as a citizen(= one who has a voice)

*sorcery: the translation of one fact into the form of another*

an antecedent rendered as cause

when we say something needs retrospection, it means narration (that allows the accidental to appear as that which will recur, not an anxious anticipation, but *a resolute commitment to an ethics of the event) =/= retrospection structured only by the question of origin (--> an approach to *curing trauma*)

(sustainable forms of) social good and distributive justice

ghosts ~= signs of reason's failure
•failure =/= absence of rational faculties
•[*]reason: that which arises to transcend a kind of being that would live only in the mode of the accidental

Morris's ‘giving up ghosts’ --> ***an acknowledgment of the accidental ground on which reason enacts the enabling violence of its regulative ideals***
-*enabling violence* --{trauma =/= accident}--> accidental events (such as the convergence of a crowd in a street in Bangkok) can precisely be rendered as the “ground” of socially transformative politics and institutional interventions (without original motivations)

(?what is at stake in elaborating the relationship between [Derrida's]:)r /> •grounding --> gesture of rational calculation and decision making
•running ground --> moment of accident when the boat touches bottom and is immobilized

(we can never) guarantee its own effectivity
(cannot know that if it is effect or cause)

([can we ever?] resist) melancholy eschatology


(?) the gesture of politicization must be made repeatedly---often in situations that arise as though accidentally

...how the experience of the political as accidental (in popular mobilization during the 1990s) was also (at least partly) written into the interior of another discourse about the impossibility of change [~ neoliberalism's triumph and the end of history]

binarism of the war on terror resignifies older more disparate conflicts, and cultivates subjects who conceive of the political in these narrow oppositional terms --> to define the political as opposition between friends and enemies
[...]

[...]ip between [Derrida's]:)
•grounding --> gesture of rational calculation and decision making
•running ground --> moment of accident when the boat touches bottom and is immobilized

(we can never) guarantee its own effectivity
(cannot know that if it is effect or cause)

([can we ever?] resist) melancholy eschatology


(?) the gesture of politicization must be made repeatedly---often in situations that arise as though accidentally

...how the experience of the political as accidental (in popular mobilization during the 1990s) was also (at least partly) written into the interior of another discourse about the impossibility of change [~ neoliberalism's triumph and the end of history]

binarism of the war on terror resignifies older more disparate conflicts, and cultivates subjects who conceive of the political in these narrow oppositional terms --> to define the political as opposition between friends and enemies

***power always works by claiming that the future is already determined by a past narrated from its perspective*** (<-- that is why my work is about the past) --> [my work:] *learning to think otherwise about both the past and the future*

(the failure of political imagination in only speculating about the future)

*(the basis of) the political: transcendence of the accidental*

Morris shows how the potential force of the political depends on the recognition that it is not merely that which can be relegated to the past

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

(Bubandt > Morris > in Buli, North Maluku in Indonesia) witchcraft: ambivalent aporia, the interminable problem of life ~= empty seashell (shell in which there might or might not be an occupant, provides the de-sexualized figure for doubt that saturates the consciousness of those who inhabit the world of witchcraft, an internally split subject)

anthropology of witchcraft
--✕--> charges of residual exoticism by reading witchcraft phenomena as sites at which the transformations of modernity are mediated and made available for resignification
-to displace (witchcraft) into the domain of representation --> capacity to resignify the historical real

lethal violence at Marikana (South Africa, August 2012) --> muti magic was a not matter of resurgent tradition (for the black South African analysts), rather, magic was a visceral, strategically instrumentalizable, and absolutely lethal power. the kind that enables people to go to war, the kind that operates at the point where language fails (--?--> the use of poetic mystical enchantment in Iran-Iraq war for sending young soldiers to the battle fields)

witchcraft only becomes visible in the moment of accusation, as a retrospective effect of oracular diagnosis (Evans-Pritchard)
(...no one is sure that he has indeed heard a witch)[...]

[...]t at producing effects.”


transgressive approach to the archive:
•Gerhard Richter's Atlas, 2006
•Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du cinema, 1988
•Christensen's Häxan
•Warburg’ Mnemosyne (presentation of a series of visual cliches and stereotypes, fragments which were most likely already familiar to the viewer ~ figurative givens ==> empirical evidence + media to conjure with)
•Bataille's journal ‘Documents’ 1929–30 --> seizes cliched objects and then systematically empties them out in the course of its own expressions. Bataille and his contributors sought to defamiliarize the cliches, disturbing the placidly deceptive surface of the mundane in their fragmentary, juxtaposing methods of critique and presentation =/= Warburg + Christensen collecting mythological, figurative givens seemingly quite distant from the “really” real
}--> unsettling distances between myth and the everyday
-weave together episodic fragments in order to draw parallels (across domains of sense that cut across time) and correspondences across situations and characters
-Häxan deploys the techniques associated with Warburg's Mnemosyne and Bataille's Documents for purposes of affectively emphasizing the dark, chaotic forces that lurk under the smooth surface of the everyday
(Häxan's episodic structure ==>)
•characters seemingly out of a dead past to live again
•draw the phenomenology of the hysteric
•draw the work's own contemporary time to the surface


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<[...]

[...]uel beings*

[it is good to be able to say that] certain scientists not only do “bad science” (which remains a way of keeping distance) but that they do “science badly”


creatures that happened to be animals
creatures that happened to be ghosts
creatures that happened to be ...


(the influence of) Anglo-Saxon animal studies [on me]


(in Despretian way) learning to think from love


(the bad) fable of coming out of the closet
there is no closet. there are transformations.
falling from a horse, on a path that no longer leads to Damascus

(the story of) Saul does not answer God; he politely asks him to wait two minutes while he comforts his horse. let God wait; other things matter <--Despret-- this is where true conversation takes place

(a philosophy, or thought) one of: obligation =/= distance
(Stengers:) obligation =/= requirements -->{*a distinction that is to be made*, to be created, to be invented, not acknowledged as already manifest in the state of things}
obligation (is much more demanding than) =/= right
(Sina:) obligation =/= commitment
[*]being obligatet = agreeing to expose oneself to failure, refusing to construct the words of order that would protect oneself from the requirements of the activity
{not all activities arise from obligations = not all activities put themselves at risk, not all activities make an effort to present themselves politically}


Haraway's writing technique: a remedy for indifference and contempt --> *becoming attached to the multiple threads that make up the fabric of the world*

(Despret obligated to hear) the blackbird sang as if the world itself depended on its song --and-->
*the importance of things came to dwell in its voice*
*the blackbird made importance exist in another way*
*importance became incorporated in the world*

and this importance rises like a question [a question that comes after “what matters for..."] --Despret--> how can i now write in such a way as to be worthy of what matters, with a similar insistence, for another being? (my question in Cinderella diaries)

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

my history (of continuous interest, or what created the next “-->”):
iran / visual arts --> germany / lecture and performance --> research / heritage study --> case / ajayeb bestiary --> epistemology / animal --> science / anthropology

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

home funerals put into practice an important dimensino of the lives lived by the deceased --> participates actiively in the instauration of their existence
-instauration: [re-storying] restoring, participating in a transformation that leads to a certain existence = to more existence, in the case of the deceased: both a bi[...]

[...]ciously?)
manipulative simulation of friendliness
\\



(in Germany) we need ‘detours’ and taking detours =/= having end-goals

we are not built to handle peace --> existence is perhaps ok, but coexistence is a real problem
coexistence includes all sorts of aggressions

burdened with a bird name
(birds of Attar)

20 minutes to propose some itineraries

all the different ways we come to life. (some even through violation, being shaken awake, libidinal surge, thrill, etc.) --> the delusion to desiring nonviolence (whenever there is desire there is violence)
wanting, desire <--> violence
(نیاز niaz <--> azar آزار)

which organs of peacefulness are we resisting?

{punishment, wanting to be punished}
delivery (not ‘from’ but) ‘of’ punishment
(for Varinia: what about the people feeling guilting and destructive who rush to the judge or the penal system confessing and begging for punishment? --where is the figure of persecutor located at her practice? if at all addressed.)
(@Sana: how do i deal with helplessness? the Hilflosigkeit is primal, [the start-up engine of psychoanalysis, powerlessness and power-failure.] --> (then let's ask) where does it hurt? in the eyes? ears? --for Varinia it hurts on the neck)
-and despair
-and distress

when I punish you...

i cannot say if our encounter is specifically Levinasian

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

[Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert]

‘natural’:
-scientist's site of fieldwork
-naturalist's site of biological conservation
-entrepreneur's site of capital accumulation
-poacher's site of prey
-soldier's site of refuge
--> geographies of human struggle, politics, colonialism, capitalism, intervention,

what is shapping in these sites (science labors, natural parks, pig and chicken farms, mobile phones, etc.) human-animal relations (in their widely divergent kinds)?
(technology, ethics, welfare and politics in Tehran)

the ways my mother thinks about the diffission of animals’ bodily wastes beyond the bounds of their immediately present: dog's poop, etc. --> spatial externality of animals (--"they contaminate!”)

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, ent[...]

[...]/>

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

*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 coined as a discoursive necessity and) bears with itself an analysis of politics which sees it as a rational enterprise, a structured confrontation or conversation aimed at compromise or reconciliation, the exchange of demands and the negotiation of outcomes --> a Greek tradition : to protect politics from irrationality and persuasion, and that State's monopoly of law enforcement is the only legitimate violence --> (as a term) ‘conflict’ carries with itself a telos of consensus (etefagh-e ara اتفاق آرا Übereinstimmung), agreement ==> perfect understanding ~~--> (Greek -->) democracy's dream of overcoming internal opacities of mediation or signification, dream of a final unification, dream of a clear universal language

(Barthes’ fable of) the woodcutter[~= an agent of change] ==> language = act (without mediation or image, operating *an immediate transformation* ==> politic) :
If I am a woodcutter and I am led to name the tree which I am cutting down [j'abats], whatever the form of my sentence, I speak the tree, I do not speak about it. This means that my language is operative, linked to its object in a transitive way; between the tree and myself, there is nothing but my labor, th[...]

[...] language: it presents nature to me only to the extent that I am going to transform it, it is a language by which I act the object; the tree is not an image for me, it is simply the meaning of my action. But if I am not a woodcutter, I can no longer speak the tree, I can only speak of it, about it.
@apass @Femke

(Barthes:) political = operative (~ active, transformative, destructive) --> this is an important fable for artists

talking about ‘conflict’ is also like this, is a “political” speech, an “operative” language, it “presents” the object of my action to me, which is democracy, and not Colombia

(some figurative ‘violence of language’ =/= [Austin, Derrida, Butler ==>] i am talking about paying attention to) the language used in a certain manner by certain agents --> studying in KHM media school teaches me to be careful with the erasure of distance, mediation, reference, representation, to be careful with the collapse of hermeneutic (in any discourse) --> the labor of transparency [@Mona @Ali ]



(the very strange claim [made by political leaders] that) force is a kind of language, and not just any language. It is one which solves the problem that seems endemic to all things linguistic, namely: failure, indirection, misunderstanding, drift. [...]that the language of force actively and successfully delivers its message --> a fable: “everybody understands the language of force” (unlike ordinary, diplomatic, political language) --> the readability or communicative power of the utterance, violence is seen as continuous with discourse --@Mona
[*]violence: “speaking the (only) language of the other” --> (very strange fable:) that violence is noninterpretive direct(~ umediated) and nonanalytic, that it is unmisunderstandable, that it takes hold and transforms its listener [--> fantasy of affective communication], hermeneutic and cognitive of the language is effaced and what is left is only *delivery* itself [@Ali's way of talking has a hint of this (a self-erasing speech,) he “delivers” his (political) message to me #tattooing me }--> the silencing/elimination of his interlocutor, **the little annihilatory gestures** of my friends], that it [violence] aspires to a *pure present*

•this is a translational problem? Keenan
•how do we know when things cannot get any worse?
•when/where the translation should stop? @Ali @Sina --> this is about the ethical risks (we are making all the time) in mistaking an annihilatory gesture for a discursive or political one


there is no language which needs no translation (not even violence)

*translation: an active relation between and within languages =/= to overcome language --> is exaclty where the name politics ought to be reserve (Ranciere) (--> that is why i am doing political work [my work on: discordant objects of reference, misunderstanding, active deconstruction[...]

[...]ion of things ==> known to a wider public ==> knowledge properly considered ==> wise decisions ==> actions”
=/= (a more properly) political moment of: inscribe images --within--> a narrative or a persuasive project --within--> a campaign that actually narrates them (captions them, makes them more available for some kind of political action) and doesn't just take for granted that their meaning follows automatically

the way performative dimension involves a kind of action that doesn't pass through the same cognitive circuits or the same process of knowing (in images)

•living by the image
•vulnerable to the exposure of the distortion or falseness of the image

to get a rich sense of the political context in which you operate (knowing about the history, knowing what the local forces are, who the actors are, and so on) =/=  ethically-self-confident political movement reassured by the quality of their own good intentions ==> skip over a lot of local analysis, research, or interaction

...is it a humanitarian catastrophe (a crisis of suffering) or genocide (a crisis of an
ideological sort)
quasi-raw material of images --> recoding, contextualization, narration,

the bad stories and failures (in our lifetime) that do need to be excavated and thought about

Keenan --> *the fantasy of being able to move so directly from knowledge to action that one almost skips the moment of knowledge altogether* --example-->{ Barthes in his woodcutter: a woodcutter in cutting the tree manages to avoid language (something that needs no translation, the woodcutter in unilateral relation to the tree), in which “language” is representation, knowledge as representation, “act the things” --> Barthes skips over all the opacities and paradoxes and difficulties of representation and just goes after the tree directly

*there are demands which are placed on you that won't wait for the knowledge that is necessary* (or situations in which you might feel as though you've been overwhelmed by too much knowledg)

[*]responsibility: (when) one has to act in a way for which the knowledge doesn't provide a full alibi ~ one's action is in some important way disconnected, or not entirely saturated by one's knowledge

every event (take September 11) is rich in translation, a moment when an enormous number of competing narrative frames were already available for understanding or processing or
reading what is at stake --> there is no unequivocal act


*witness: (in the fantasy of the act) the witness for whom no translation is necessary* --Levinas-Blanchot-Keenan--> hostage (for example images of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the media, the public event takes us hostage): a position of extreme passivity that is equally the most intense experience of responsibility

-what is the political effect of revela[...]

[...]l” 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 picture makers?

-how can we see mediation as a dynamic of encounter, even an ethical one?
(captivity is always mediated)


captivity diffracted


*(telegram's) [*]encounter: sensuous rapport or energetic cadence*


aquariums engage a story of looking + deep roots in imperialism and the process of nation building --> aquarium: a stage of an unspoiled garden in nature, بوته hearth for learning human self from animal other + (clarification of) ontological and epistemological disorders of nature and culture [=/= Tsing's contaminated landscapes]
-18th century: the ocean was taboo, a place of great fear, a cursed world full of monsters lurking in shadowy fathoms, (waters: low and deep =/= air: domain of morality and aspiration, closer to heaven)
-19th century europe victorian glass *aqua vivarium* --> windows that interfaced between human sight and subaqueous scenes (the unknown provoked feelings of bot curiosity and apprehension)--Stott--> for the naturalist the marine or freshwater aquarium provided a constantly changing, glass-fronted theater of bizarre and exotic bodies, moving, metamorphosing, interacting and breeding in sensational ways
-aquariums became sacred spaces where cohabited forces of godliness and nature were contained, compartmentalized, and studied --> animal = metonymic of particularly nonhuman environments --> victorian sensibilities

(Darwinan trope...) monstrously minute, potent and parasitic, characterized by missing body parts

efforts to know, classify, and conquer the oceanic (--> capture for visual pleasure) ==> counter-conquest of the home by monsters and sexual deviants

the most prized organisms were “exotics” from non-european environments that fueled ongoing colonialism in the mode of animal husbandry


Hayward:
differences in display technologies
variations in viewer experience and perception
alterations in cross-species encounters
aquarium's promise of immediacy(?)

the rhetoric of animal domination is not the only discourse at work (in aquarium display, telegram, in ajayeb, in zoo, etc.)

Hayward's attention to the expressiveness of sensation, display technologies, and the animals themselves =/=? my attention to telegram animal media
[...]

[...] **a matter of finding the procedures that attest to the pertinence of explanations** (=/= a matter of explaining/understanding them)


enigma --{(like good detective stories) inscribes the protagonists in a relation of}--> rivalry هم اورى : if you want to understand them you must try to be as smart and cunning than they are (not letting oneself be duped by appearances)

politeness --> suspicion ~= respect (‘re-spectare’ to look twice)
•confidence without verification offers little guarantee as to its robustness

we want to witness in a reliable manner = we want that which we learn from the ravens is to be treated with confidence = we want to define ourselves as authorized by them to speak in their names = we want to (required to) offer them the opportunity to show what they can do (with the *great flexibility of our interpretation*)


[*]trap
(enigma of the apparently inexplicable behavior) --> *how to ask the ravens, with the same politeness, to take a position in relations to all the possible conjectures of the investigation?* how to ask them to teach us the good explanation, the right motive? ==> the researcher will have to learn the ***art of the trap and the net*** = the art of the lure and the trick = ***the art of learning from those whose enigma you are trying to solve*** (and have no intention of helping you) --> ‘how that which counts can count for them’
•*the art of metis / cunning intelligence* : the particular form of intelligence that the greeks (learning from hunters and fishermen) cultivated = intuition شهود + cunning مکر + perspicacity فراست + dissimulation فریب + improvisation بدیهه + vigilant attention هوشيار + sense of timeliness بجا (<-- this type of “getting to know” was constituted exaclty to be found in a domain where human intelligence is constantly at grips with the land or sea animals in an are where humans saw their intelligence and techniques transform in learning from animals**** [-how to prolong the possibility of this transformation?]) <-- *it is the only way of getting to know that can hope to address intelligent highly flexible* (Despret > Heinrish) = ravens who require of those who want to know them the same flexibility and the same intelligence
}-->[reading ajayeb bestiary as enigma; Bambi's mother studies; little mermaid; (using Despret's ethological research to think about) art of feedback ~= getting to know you =/= audience engagement]


strange politeness
art of cunning (lures + manipulation) --> enticing ravens
*seeing without being seen*
obliging them : luring them to actualize the choices : ***creating situations as if they were natural*** (so as to let the birds do the talking)
(it is a matter of) rendering them more robust [giving them the occasion to resists, of giving them *the power to send the researcher/storyteller [...]

[...]***the art of learning from those whose enigma you are trying to solve*** (and have no intention of helping you) --> ‘how that which counts can count for them’
•*the art of metis / cunning intelligence* : the particular form of intelligence that the greeks (learning from hunters and fishermen) cultivated = intuition شهود + cunning مکر + perspicacity فراست + dissimulation فریب + improvisation بدیهه + vigilant attention هوشيار + sense of timeliness بجا (<-- this type of “getting to know” was constituted exaclty to be found in a domain where human intelligence is constantly at grips with the land or sea animals in an are where humans saw their intelligence and techniques transform in learning from animals**** [-how to prolong the possibility of this transformation?]) <-- *it is the only way of getting to know that can hope to address intelligent highly flexible* (Despret > Heinrish) = ravens who require of those who want to know them the same flexibility and the same intelligence
}-->[reading ajayeb bestiary as enigma; Bambi's mother studies; little mermaid; (using Despret's ethological research to think about) art of feedback ~= getting to know you =/= audience engagement]


strange politeness
art of cunning (lures + manipulation) --> enticing ravens
*seeing without being seen*
obliging them : luring them to actualize the choices : ***creating situations as if they were natural*** (so as to let the birds do the talking)
(it is a matter of) rendering them more robust [giving them the occasion to resists, of giving them *the power to send the researcher/storyteller to work* =/= to disarticulate (what Ferdosi does in Shahnameh to the Div)]


to find an enticement that interests them ~= to let himself be recruited by them
[from Latin “cresc-” grow, rise ==> crescent, crew, decrease, crescendo, recruit]

to trust them = to act like them
@apass feedback (differential knowledge that is created because of not trusting)


the lure could be used to respond to this question: the ravens fall for the trick
...not only do the ravens not respond to questions but they pose new ones

-how could we ask them (the ravens, trees, etc.) to verify our hypothesis (about them)?

*he has no answers =/= he has nine hypothesis*


biological detective stories

curiosity (for the things you discover that you don't know) <== the more you know

more cunning
more imagination
more activities
--to--> obligate ravens to choose between hypothesis

{ Heinrish: “It is still dark, and I'm already being awakened by raven calls! Several birds are flying over Kaflunk making short, high-pitched calls that are unlike the usual quorks. These calls convey excitement. The birds are flying to a kill! I feel it. Even I can[...]

[...]<-- *it is the only way of getting to know that can hope to address intelligent highly flexible* (Despret > Heinrish) = ravens who require of those who want to know them the same flexibility and the same intelligence
}-->[reading ajayeb bestiary as enigma; Bambi's mother studies; little mermaid; (using Despret's ethological research to think about) art of feedback ~= getting to know you =/= audience engagement]


strange politeness
art of cunning (lures + manipulation) --> enticing ravens
*seeing without being seen*
obliging them : luring them to actualize the choices : ***creating situations as if they were natural*** (so as to let the birds do the talking)
(it is a matter of) rendering them more robust [giving them the occasion to resists, of giving them *the power to send the researcher/storyteller to work* =/= to disarticulate (what Ferdosi does in Shahnameh to the Div)]


to find an enticement that interests them ~= to let himself be recruited by them
[from Latin “cresc-” grow, rise ==> crescent, crew, decrease, crescendo, recruit]

to trust them = to act like them
@apass feedback (differential knowledge that is created because of not trusting)


the lure could be used to respond to this question: the ravens fall for the trick
...not only do the ravens not respond to questions but they pose new ones

-how could we ask them (the ravens, trees, etc.) to verify our hypothesis (about them)?

*he has no answers =/= he has nine hypothesis*


biological detective stories

curiosity (for the things you discover that you don't know) <== the more you know

more cunning
more imagination
more activities
--to--> obligate ravens to choose between hypothesis

{ Heinrish: “It is still dark, and I'm already being awakened by raven calls! Several birds are flying over Kaflunk making short, high-pitched calls that are unlike the usual quorks. These calls convey excitement. The birds are flying to a kill! I feel it. Even I can understand, and I too am recruited” }--Despret--> ***if this recruitment by nonhumans was able to acquire such an efficacy, it is because the human was transformed by those whose enigma he was trying to understand*** [=/= animal rights activist ==> evidence arrive in the form of a weakened raven that has to be saved]

***letting himself be drawn into their enigma = converting the environment into a little more of himself ==> he learned to become sensitive to what makes the ravens sensitive*** (Cinderella's mice learned that about her)

Heinrish --> I, as a mammal for whom they are not intended, can feel [...] I also feel I can detect a raven's surprise, happiness, bravado, and self-aggrandizement


(recognizing one another ==>) to go by way of what the [...]

[...]carno-political regimes of racial capitalist valuation) [<-- Hayward's misrecognition of contemporary society as “regime"]

genre of animal

Gossett + Hayward's argument --> the psychic life of zoophobia and zoophilia are tied up with negrophobia and negrophilia ~= species divides (human/animal) are technologies of race (human/black)


maroon: escaped cattle


typography: domain of style, of appearance, of aesthetic

glyph “*”
asterisk
a diminutive star
limb-y reach
a grasping
erring on the side of over-population, over-use, excessiveness
“*” can denote a database search or censorship
designate multiplication
a disclaimer
mark genetic identity
pseudonyms that have been changed
* --> *the star of life*

xenogenesis --> proliferating difference (genesis) built through pessimism (xeno)

Sun Ra (in Space is the Place ~= earth is “nowhere,” no longer a place [+ Octavia, Delany]) signaled the failed projects of planetary humanist and earthly liberalism, inviting blacks living in Oakland to leave the gratuitous violence of the world
afro-futurism is about the impossible, the unbearable, the failure of the world <--> afro-pessimism (blackness as loss, as nothingness)
(mode of imagination:) “anti-black racism ==> radical politics of abolition”
==> “being (white) is made possible thourgh and with black bodies cannibalized by a racial capitalism and its scientific jaws” [<-- Hayward's politically correct and simple fantasy about good and bad]

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

*body* --> sociohistorical construct & constrain
=/=
*embodiment* --> sense of being bodily (pain, ...) [<-- my focus has been on this one more than the other] --> **never embody ironically!** (<-- maybe irony is OK in visual or written medium?)
•embodiment goes beyond body (my body is still my body but also not)

•to pose
•to transpose

in my work, i transpose: walk through readings (=/= transform: performative “true” embodiment)
•transposition: a mapping of senses, to change something into another form (+ its foreclosures, refusals, limits) = expressive excitation, provocation of difference that cannot be resolved by penetration or collapsed selves =/= interpenetration

border crossing: forces and excitations of location, of neighborhood

sensation: a composite of affects and percepts

personal =/= individual

Hayward's story is shaped by repression : a wish to be seen as she wants to be seen =/= Sina

story: act of violence and deception

medicalized legacy of transsexual's self-narrativizing --> synchronous field of wrong body-ness ==> account

accurate accounting =/= describe transitional sensat[...]

[...]at is posed to them, but the subject in fact respond to another question* -->{question that is addressed to them = protocol to which they are submitted}--> they can take a position in relation to what is proposed to them in scientific research [=/= Cinderella's mice subject]

the idea that (the assumption that) their subjects could be influenced by what the scientist was looking for ==> the experimenters tried most often to camouflage the real questions guiding their research
-the assumption that the subjects do not do what they do because the experimenter asked then to do so, but for more abstract and more general reasons ==> “ecological validity”
-*the subjects most of the time not only predict what the experimenter expects of them but they comform to it*
-[they responded to] the way in which they interpreted that which was expected of them (<-- just because they are nice people.) “when the subjects were asked why they did all this [absurd tedious repetitive] work without objecting and without posing other questions, they responded that they had thought that is was a test of endurance. and they obeyed because a scientist asked then to”

difference between hypnotized subjects and “normal” experimental subjects

*the lure utilized to mask the expectations* (in psychology, far from resolving the problem)

organization of the research --> scientist distributes expertise in a very asymmetrical manner


what a maze can mean? --Despret--> **translating what happens to rats in terms of meaning**
(drawing on Uexküll's theory of Umwelt) --> open up for the animal the question of point of view

a concrete or lived Umwelt ==> the animal endowed with sensory organs different from our own, cannot perceive the same world as we do

{**perception: an act of creation =/= a form of reception**}--> the animal **fills its environment with perceptual objects**, it constructs its environment by *peopling* it with perceptual objects (=/= perceive passively)
*the activity of perception = an activity that confers meaning* = only that which has meaning is perceived, only that which can be perceived (~= is important of the organism) is *accorded a meaning* (~= accordance)
•butterfly lives in a world of luminous intensities and of odors
•tick lives in a world of butyric acid released by the sebaceous follicles of mammals
•spider lives in a world of...
•rat lives in a world of...
•

for a spider?
for a rat?
time, space, place, path, way, house, odor, enemy,,, --> each event (in the perceived world) “signified” which is not perceived except in that it signifies ==> ***animal = subject = a “lender” of meaning***

[*]subject: that which accords meaning

the object is constituted in action (the animal never enters into a relation with an object as [...]

[...]t constructs its environment by *peopling* it with perceptual objects (=/= perceive passively)
*the activity of perception = an activity that confers meaning* = only that which has meaning is perceived, only that which can be perceived (~= is important of the organism) is *accorded a meaning* (~= accordance)
•butterfly lives in a world of luminous intensities and of odors
•tick lives in a world of butyric acid released by the sebaceous follicles of mammals
•spider lives in a world of...
•rat lives in a world of...
•

for a spider?
for a rat?
time, space, place, path, way, house, odor, enemy,,, --> each event (in the perceived world) “signified” which is not perceived except in that it signifies ==> ***animal = subject = a “lender” of meaning***

[*]subject: that which accords meaning

the object is constituted in action (the animal never 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 [...]

[...]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--> postsoc[...]

[...]r /> -exactly what kind of state apparatus we have in iran?


historical victimhood --> resurgent populist discourse
•people have been enduring victimhood for too long
•fateful junctures throughout history
•authentic great path
•urgency of message
•

animating rhetoric with self-victimhood ==produce==> divisions (men =/= women, us =/= enemy, etc.)



exclusionary politics <-- homogeneous community (=/= alien intrusion, outside forces, immigrants, minorities, etc.)

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

Kundera
is humor modern?
*humor is not ancient* (?!)
“whatever humor touches it ambiguites”
humor = ambiguitor

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

globalization =/= cold war
globalization =/= enlightenment (“universal humanism + rationalized tech ==> freedom for all”)

cold war = a meaningfull relation between ideology & power [==give==> orientation + identity --> normative approach to global phenomena]
geopolitc + ideologic borders
=/=
globalization --> completly different political behaivor (definitions of national goals, friend and enemy, etc.) --> pluralist democracy (differences + contrasts) =/= social democracy (erasing differences)

globalization = attitude حالت =/= meaning
[cold war: “world ~= (a sort of) problem” --> behaviors had] meaning ==> (base for) power

cold war: war ==> identities
globalization: conflits =/=> identities

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

two points
•artistic research: a form of art that uses knowledge as its main medium
•artistic research has no relation to the unknown (=/= an idea of research im in which one faces something unknown or new therefore needs to research)
•my work (in general) has been about the critique of engineering (the talent of engineering)


the fossil of fire goes back before the wild-life

the history of fire related to the history of forest

In the 1950s, government officials in Sierra Juarez of Oaxaca--in southern Mexico--blamed forest destruction upon the local indigenous communities. Fire, as a symbol of disorder, became the target of state control and the subject of a state-sponsored discourse of environmental degradation. [...] Fire suppression frequently has been part of state policies of social control. [...] The vision of fire as destructive, part of the state narrative [...] How has the memory of the traditional use of fire by indigenous communities been suppressed? [...]State political myth has obscured community memories of fire as a force in the forest, and as a tool for human use. [...] Why the indigenous communities of the Sierra Juarez no longer talk about the long-term history o[...]

[...]

electrical fire



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

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

how to write cold with fire? the medium of fire is incompatible with that of the paper. paper burns fire off! the combustion emerging elements energized by their contact fuels a sudden blow of increase in their excited entropy. flame. action is the breeze that death digs. foam knows no halt. the focus is noised and seeds location. place penetrates in shattery nozzles originating from thousands of nowheres. inferno's insurance is about aggression of hot.

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

A) Accident, Action, Adrenaline, Aggressive, Aid, Aircraft, Alarm, Alert, Ambulance, Apprehension, Arson, Ash, Assess, Assist
B) Bad, Barricades, Battle, Blacken, Blame, Blanket, Blast, Blaze, Blister, Blow out, Breeze, Burning, Burns, Bystander
C) Car, Careless, Catastrophe, Caution, Challenge, Char, Chimney, Choice, Claim, Conflagration, Consume, Consumption, Contain, Control, Coordination, Crackle, Crash
D) Damage, Death, Destruction, Detect, Dig, Direction, Dirty, Dispatch, Drama
E) Electrical, Embers, Emergency, EMT, Engulf, Experience, Explode, Extinguish
F) Facts, Failure, Fared, Fascination, Fell, Fierce, Fire-break, Firefighter, Fireplace, Flames, Flammable, Flash, Foam, Focus, Fright, Fuel
G)
H) Halt, Happening, Holocaust, Home, Hose, Hot, Hot spot, House, Hydrant
I) Inaccessible, Inferno, Injury, Insurance, Interfere, Investigation
J) Judgment, Jurisdiction
K) Kindle, Knowledge
L) Laboring, Life-threatening, Lightening strike, Limitations, Lives, Location, Losses, Luck
M) Malfunction, Matches, Mechanical, Medical attention, Memory, Mesmerize, Misery
N) Needs, Nine-one-one, Noise, Nozzle
O) Observe, Odor, Ordeal, Origin
P) Paramedic, Penetration, Place, Police, Potency, Potential, Prevention, Progress, Prone, Pumps
Q) Quench, Quick
R) Reaction, Repellent, Requirement, Residue, Risk
S) Safety, Scenario, Set, Shatter, Shelter, Siren fire truck, Situation, Smell, Smoke, Smoke jumper, Smokey the Bear, Smoldering, Smother, Sprinkler system, Statement, Stop, Strategy, Strength, Stressful, Stretcher, Suffering, Susceptible, Swath
T) Tactic, Target, Terror, Thick, Threaten, Trailer, Training, Trees, Trench
U) Uncontrolled, Urgent
V) Victim, Vigilant, Volunteers
W) Watch, Water, Weakness, Weather, Wilderness, Wind, Worse
X) X-ray
Y) Yelling
Z) Zone



(Ajayeb)
Know! That I saw in fire many benefits, insomuch benefits that ‘he’ set in fire, the intellects of India and Greece erred and prostrated this fire-thing and this betrayal stayed in magus [Zoroastrians] and they became fire-worshiper until it became certain that the God's guidance offers and just with reason alone w[...]

[...]) which poetic sites [we don't want to enroll]? (we don't want to enroll in Rostam's department. the tragic hero, he ‘hits’, always after to save his sovereign, good at haft-khan, ending beasts [we are interested in the beasts, and not in his “seven” trails], so hurried in killing that he finshes his own son, not invincible to treachery and that is his end. but what was treachery again? (in Shahnameh) anything other than athletism and boys sord play: female “mouth”)
-Ferdosi resisting any project of fusional gathering
[unlike Sudabeh, Tahmineh--Rostam's wife--was after having a child with him. she gets a pass, passing Ferdosi's test of maternity. is Sudabeh's fault that she doesn't want to mother? And Rudabeh wants Zal az far as he plays the classic male role model in stealing her?]

[there is a moment in Shahname when it conjoins women and [disgust?], enmeshing them] [and why am i taking upon myself to defend woman? interrupting the abyssal enjoyment of the poem in punishing Sudabeh?]----of Ferdosi not allowing a feminine drift and deviation, from the Law. ***it's Father Time.
--> am i reclaiming otherness by enforcement? (recover her? =/=? understand her) why zoom in her? why teaching myself how to trust and desire her? (allowing myself being lured by her. why it is imperative to let ourselvse to be lured by the “her-idea”?) (is Ferdosi mobilizing forces in iranian hearts? militarize them? “jang-avari”) (the point is not to take critical power in disclaming the fire that valorized Siyavash and then take Sudabeh's side. rather the point is to energize the experiences of metamorphic transformation that animated fire of the fire-temple in the mind of Ferdosi. by participating in Sudabeh's case, her assemblage, i am also recovering my own capacity to care for Ferdosi's fire too and accept being mystified by its telling flames. [end of Sudabeh part])

in a world where humans were increasingly rendered particularly lively (than the creatures without nervous systems ~= objects) with intense awarenesses, fire seemed to be even more lively, with an access to a/its/the beyond
(from stone as a fellow being to the fire the authority figure---by the end of Pleistocene)

(Jesus) will baptize you with fire. (the Old Believers)


moses in fire: stop the representation! stop the constant demonstration! show me body! show me a flesh i can feel! put your hand in the fire moses! i am that which is not burning your hand. i am what that lies beyond. you are my creation, you are of mediation. if your body was my creation, your hand would burn.
it is told that Zaratustra had a fire that was everlasting and would not burn.

باور ‘bavar’ ba+var (var = tested ~= just or fairly judged)
Ibrahim's case is a *warm var

water trial, drowning women to examine if they are witches
water+fire trial -- azmun-e ab-o-atash آزمون آب و آ[...]

[...]ut since the mighty roar of the thunder could not well be imagined as issuing from other than a lion's maw, this bird was given a lion's head

**form-giving imagination**
rings the changes on a basic meaningful form in a whole series of variations, each expressing the underlying numinous content in different ways
-series of suggestive variant images all expressive of its power to wax, to produce and yield


lord: a charismatic leader magically responsible for producing fertility and plenty for his subjects
...situationally determined nonhuman forms --✕--> victory of human form over nonhuman forms slowly and with difficulty (with the begining of third millennium from early Dynastic onward)


intransitive: fulfilled in the specific situation or phenomenon and did not reach out beyond it (~ characteristic boundness to some phenomena)
(ancient mesopotamian saw) numinous as immanent ==> name that power and attribut form to it in terms of the phenomena


[Jacobsen's well articulation to pose a question -->] *the characteristic of mesopotamian boundness to the externals of situation in which the numinous was encountered...* ==>
•intransitiveness
•differentiation ==> pluralistic aspect (--> polytheism) --> divine aspects that it recognized

plurality ==> ability to:
•distinguish
•evaluate
•choose

“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) --> benefice[...]

[...] /> •one's perspective is intimately connected to the body one is
}<-- did Alberti say all these things from the pots? no.


in Ingold: the indigenous people are presented as having some kind of privileged access to the workings of the world due to their close relationship to the land


ethics of theory
accounts of non-western
in our reconstruction of the past
usage glossed as a heuristic: an interpretive tool


Alberti --> claims to universality in our theories of matter rely on falsification through assimilation other people's theories of matter
==renforce==> (archeology) academy as an alibi for neocolonialism

(we should stop) searching for the answer to our relationship with the physical world [ontology of everything <-- this is my problem with philosophy] =/= ***accept a role as the point of articulation among sources of theories of matter, tangible evidence of alternative ontologies, communities past and present***

problems:
•*the elision of ontological claims by epistemological claims* : necessity of a singular ontology (as a guarantor in theories) even while a diversity of epistemologies are recognized and accepted (and when we pluralize “ontologies”)
•to use ethnographic accounts at the level of analogy (<-- i do this all the time)
•privileging of others (of their accounts of the world) --> for example in Ingold =/= attempting to *gain purchase on other people's world* --> for example Viveiros de Castro's concern is ontological (dialogical) =/= epistemological (monological)

*epistemologies masquerading as ontologies*(?)
•pluralizing the terms [ontologies, knowledges, epistemologies, etc.] --> (sending out the message that) we are good relativists --✕-->? actually allowing alternative theories of reality

([i have talked about this problem elsewhere -->] ontologies are relegated into) hierarchical epistemologies:
•anthropology --> they look at cultures --access--> ontology (nature of things) [==> “culture = ontology"]
•native ontology --> they look at matter: indifferent unchanging universal substance --produce--> epistemology [disguised as ontology] (worldview, perspectives)
}==> **our incommensurability is understood only at the level of epistemological difference**

-when i was iran, we were interested in the western ontologies, their universal theories of matter. people didn't recognize western philosophy as a cultural perspective or different epistemology, but as ontology. this is relation unfortunately is not reciprocal ---> go to Star Trek
-when you read other people's theories of matter, you don't do epistemological inquiry (~= anthropology)


***foreclosed =/= privileged***

tendencies in archeological theorizing:
1. *foreclosure: other peoples’ wor[...]