[...]e about the person you see in the light of reverie? how to survive humanism?]
...................................
#workshop, fables
fable seen as a site where one formulates concepts and narratives that reorient one within one's own research practices
-(how can we) participate in shaping our objects of knowledge (--> relational empiricism)
-learn through participating in different (though not fixed nor mutually exclusive) *microworlds* [microworld: a space where protocols and equipments are standardized to facilitate the emergence and stabilization of new objects. (Kenney)]
-“banal and ordinary sites of getting on in collective life” (Verran)
-bring your ‘found objects’ (objects, categories, stories, concepts, insights, writing under influence, etc.) and put them in ‘telling’ (telling stories about the lives of your found objects =/= insisting on the solidity of our found objects----[solidity = stability + authority] and in telling practices => (re)materializing your empirical objects =/= generating reliably-managed microworld)
-found objects are objects with which we inhabit worlds (or microworlds of our practices)
-(not claiming to occupy an) ontological no-man's-land outside of the microworlds --> my frame is no more free of metaphysics than any other
-towards an ongoing untidy recursive theory --> keeping our objects, concepts, and insights in a state of generative transformation
-which “affective economies” animate our own bodies as artist and as people?
-what feelings inform our works?
staying with linguistic differences (in each of our stories or praxiography) is a way of investigating the ontological commitments embedded in language.
ontological --> worlding --> how language participates in shaping our lived worlds in some ways and not others.*** “it is not common for speakers of a language to examine what type of material objects their language commits them to.” (Verran)
solidity of found objects, in my case, the graphs and images i am making about ajayeb --> the graphs now reiterate for me as rituals in my research microworld.
with these graphs i am trying different ways of arranging space, time and matter when speaking a *sentence*. ...each language figures space, time, and matter into different kinds of objects. in my writing tools with ajayeb, what type of material objects my language, or Hemedani or Qazwini's language, commits us to? my graphs are “spatiotemporal particulars” and “sortal particulars”. trying to talk about ontological assumptions embedded in the English (and any other) language. the diagrams are *rigs*. i am using rigging instead of framework. --> clever technological rigs, are provisional constructions, setup for a specific myth and dismantled after. sometimes old rigs are reused or repurposed for new rigs.
-resist peaceful naturalization
-uncomfortable software
-building/creating t[...]
(1)[...notes/midday review.txt]%1.4[...]different kinds of objects. in my writing tools with ajayeb, what type of material objects my language, or Hemedani or Qazwini's language, commits us to? my graphs are “spatiotemporal particulars” and “sortal particulars”. trying to talk about ontological assumptions embedded in the English (and any other) language. the diagrams are *rigs*. i am using rigging instead of framework. --> clever technological rigs, are provisional constructions, setup for a specific myth and dismantled after. sometimes old rigs are reused or repurposed for new rigs.
-resist peaceful naturalization
-uncomfortable software
-building/creating technologies as one way to do ontological politics (in postcolonial context)
-my experiments with ajayeb:
-(the danger in using) computer software to archive ajayeb's or ajib knowledge =/= lively collective memory tool
-the software that is slick and seamless runs the risk of the digital media appear as *self-sufficient representations* (<--✕--> living context)
-archived and frozen in time
-sorting operations
(if i continue with digital tech in reading ajayeb i have to ask) how the digitized ajib knowledge can resist appropriation and translation into an idiom that will not sustain its metaphysics****
◦powerful relational work that numbers (also? = =/= --> => etc.) perform -> “numbers are a particularly smooth and manipulable meaning-making tools. they hide their seams well. they are slick and trustworthy” (Porter) --> they are “materialized relations” (how can we tell a story of relations that for example numbers/math materialize?)
◦highlighting parts of ajayeb: as part of a material reading practice --> “highlighting” could easily be understood as metaphor of disembodied vision; highlighting is not about making things clear but about scribbling (bad-khat بدخط) as a mode of attention =/= (Descartes’) “natural light of reason”
%report on fables of objects #workshop (22.02.2017 HWD apass): attention to the sense and feeling of disparity, dispersity, stability, sublimity, authority, epicness, weakness, severity, solidity, scale, (a)social connections, and tangibility in the character of the object of each participants in the stories we wrote. where were active and passive qualities located? how were agencies distributed?
•origin story --> evolution story, love story [the object falls in love with...]
•daily story
•beast feeding story --> training story
evoking temporality of evolutionary time, face-to-face time, historical time, tiny scale time,
-each story has a music, texture of colors, pattern of meaning and affect
•bodyguard --> fantastic creature invented to protect an organism (your “object”). this bodyguard can be organic, nonorganic, cyborg, any form, but always an agent. tell us why/how this or that feature helps the bodyguard with its task
•generatio[...]
(2)[...notes/midday review.txt]%1.5[...] and affect
•bodyguard --> fantastic creature invented to protect an organism (your “object”). this bodyguard can be organic, nonorganic, cyborg, any form, but always an agent. tell us why/how this or that feature helps the bodyguard with its task
•generation stories, describe and follow your object in three generations, its child and grandchild
•[for the second day or warm-up first day?] constraint based writing: (Kenney > Christian Bök's “literary genetics” poetics of encryption of data; poetic vectors, to “infect” the language;) describe/story your object (or an operative “verb” within your discourse) with univocalics: without using “e” or only using a single vowel. or, first write with 3, then 2, then 1 vowel.
-the workshop is about: what other stories (of your object) are possible?
-in the workshop (I take a temporary position to) challenge others to re-tell the story of their ((epistemological) found) objects
-a ‘generative constraint’ might help opening up paths before you, away from our habits of storytelling
-it is about getting a feeling for the resistances and potentials of language in our (sometimes mundane) descriptive practices, “strange richness of missing the letters we need” (Kenney)
the metaphors are dormant in our routines of talking and noticing each other. how then, by traversing the routine, our “knowledge” and “community” took on new meaning, as they get a chance of being rearticulated in different languages (or differenlty infected literature)
~-?==> changing the system of classification (of thought)
-in a way the workshop is about an *approach* to knowledge generation (and not necessarily a rigorous critique nor directly evaluating the production of our knowledges)
***nothing is never merely a metaphor***
[some fables from science studies:]
•Emily Martin's egg/sperm story --> stories of atomism, distribution of agency, ----[The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles]
•Hayward's microscope --> tropes of natural history docu, ----[Enfolded Vision: Refracting The Love Life of the Octopus]
•Kenney/Haraway's origin/nature fable --> the omnipotence of the “origin” story in our descriptions and interactions with the natural world
•Scott Gilbert's immunological “bouncer” story =/= immune systems as inclusive agents of symbiosis
•Lynn Margulis: life (made possible) by “combat” [the survival fable that TV series “The 100” and “Kelile Demne” for instance is based on] --✕--> life by networking
•Haraway: the tale of “organism = a system of division of labor with executive functions” (==> extraction of wealth among us)
•Morton's causality-story
•brain/body story --> where the “move” came from?
•Sina's “standing on the shoulders of giants” --> knowledge/continuity, role [...]
(4)[...notes/midday review.txt]%1.6[...] your object (or an operative “verb” within your discourse) with univocalics: without using “e” or only using a single vowel. or, first write with 3, then 2, then 1 vowel.
-the workshop is about: what other stories (of your object) are possible?
-in the workshop (I take a temporary position to) challenge others to re-tell the story of their ((epistemological) found) objects
-a ‘generative constraint’ might help opening up paths before you, away from our habits of storytelling
-it is about getting a feeling for the resistances and potentials of language in our (sometimes mundane) descriptive practices, “strange richness of missing the letters we need” (Kenney)
the metaphors are dormant in our routines of talking and noticing each other. how then, by traversing the routine, our “knowledge” and “community” took on new meaning, as they get a chance of being rearticulated in different languages (or differenlty infected literature)
>
~-?==> changing the system of classification (of thought)
-in a way the workshop is about an *approach* to knowledge generation (and not necessarily a rigorous critique nor directly evaluating the production of our knowledges)
***nothing is never merely a metaphor***
[some fables from science studies:]
•Emily Martin's egg/sperm story --> stories of atomism, distribution of agency, ----[The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles]
•Hayward's microscope --> tropes of natural history docu, ----[Enfolded Vision: Refracting The Love Life of the Octopus]
•Kenney/Haraway's origin/nature fable --> the omnipotence of the “origin” story in our descriptions and interactions with the natural world
•Scott Gilbert's immunological “bouncer” story =/= immune systems as inclusive agents of symbiosis
•Lynn Margulis: life (made possible) by “combat” [the survi survival fable that TV series “The 100” and “Kelile Demne” for instance is based on] --✕--> life by networking
•Haraway: the tale of “organism = a system of division of labor with executive functions” (==> extraction of wealth among us)
•Morton's causality-story
•brain/body story --> where the “move” came from?
•Sina's “standing on the shoulders of giants” --> knowledge/continuity, role of authority and humility in science ----[http://www.sinaseifee.com/giants.html]
•Sina's 3 little pigs --> architecture/tech/ echics of encounter --> story of the center and periphery ----[http://www.sinaseifee.com/pigs.html]
•“weapon fathered man” --> Kubrick's african genesis, technology + prehistory (in postwar period) “tool ==> man”
•
fables popular in apass:
•“a work [of art] should speak for itself”
•“the very last stage of the creative process is purely intuitive” --> when people say they stop “reading” or “knowing” w[...]
(5)[...notes/midday review.txt]%1.6[...]al of textual authority and an act of survival)
•addressing /present* differences, not already pre-figured differences
•(condition of friendship, staying close to the text) staying close as a reader, as someone who could hold the text of the Other, receiving it in the withdrawal / Entzug (drug rehabilitation)
•i am in no position of ‘understanding’ or being clear about the text
•(i understand now that) it is not up to me to tell you how to read
•what makes you write or scratch a text?
(aaaakh... our alphabetico-logical cultures...!)
•if everything is not fundamentally unreadable (snafu) we wouldn't be reading
•it is about to situate the place of a (un)learning
•throwing access to each other (not only in terms of transferential intensity #sss)
•which appetites and tastes are required to fulfill the *ethics and erotics of curiosity* (that I am cultivating and depending on)? flourishing (of my ajayeb) depends on a reading that is more like “mutual partial digestion” (Katie King, Haraway) [=/= “eating well"] the text
•“every time i read X, something new shows up”
my practice of ‘rhetorical reading’ (=/= ‘close reading’; or more like close reading and letting go. “close” is itself a metaphor, a rhetoric of reading;) doesn't work with the idea that there is something ‘in’ the text per se (coded or encoded meaning or some sort of knowledge made and installed by an author), or that the writer wants to say something to the reader, or that the text is symptomatic with meaning and that its intentions needs to be listened to. rather, in a post-Lacanian critique, i work the text like a pattern of language, an organization of space, text as word-sequencer. it is like looking at an image, still starting from top-left to bottom-right of the page, a process of highlighting or embodied attention that produces non-zero clusters of salient words that come to glow different than others. but the way they become highlighted is not due to some idea of significance of the text but because of my--the reader's--interests, past readings and educated meaning-associations. this mode of reading is not at all suggested to newbies in literature, sorry but this requres some degree of advancement in one's abilities and skills of writingreading, that means the reader already enjoys an ongoing well-articulated interest before coming to a particular sitting with a piece of writing, and this means the rhetorical reader's encounter with the text is highly situated and is not a blind date. in this case reading is a radical meaning-making practice full of adventures and preparations, drawings and graphs, diffractions and detours, connections and risks of (mis)understanding in certain ways. this ‘reading’ looks very much ‘writing’ alike.
-the reading becomes *rereading past writing*, re(past)ed(writ)ing, a reading that has writen itself in palimpsestic lines. in a Derridean sense: (on[...]
(6)[...notes/midday review.txt]%1.8[...]ies a common structure. His second element, species diversity, coincides with one of the major moral issues of our time--the extinction of species and reduction of biodiversity.
-“marvels of affinity” is the key to reality, revealing how things are, what is known, and how to behave.
cosmogony (keyhan-zayi کیهان زایی)--how the universe became a moral system
...................................
[modes of existence]
science studies --> science
what was science before science studies? it was engaged in a sort of stupefaction that prevented meaningful study.
we do not take the fight against X (religion, fetish, etc.) for the truth about X.
...................................
[Avital]
i am adding “mama's boy” (bache-nane بچه ننه) to my short bio (nothing is added by “me,” everything is told to me.)
thanks to all the people who have given me their ‘sides’ (didn't necessorily confronted me)
(book, ketabat کتابت)
to do something to resignify and breakup the serenity and the serene closure of the book, as the universiy values it and seals it
-what deals does it seal?
-the commitment to breaking up the book and its metaphysically laden pitch for closural sovereignty.
-linguistic pollutants
-dirty talks
#as a mode of writing, make a folding (fractal) book, style of children books, for ajayeb
(what would this structure mean? and how is that expandable?)
#making a cheap horror short-film from one of the ajayebs
#write a X-man short story in Tehran context with iranian everyday characters
•jurassic park --> ajayeb al makhlughat عجایب المخلوقات (horror, sublime, shivering water)
•nonapocalyptic stories and the otherworldly hauntingly familiar in the lost faces of forest (called Tehran?)
(accourding to Egyptian 1550 BCE,) book: a loose collection of magic spells intended to assist a dead person's journey through underworld, and into the afterlife and written by many priests
-are lists the origin of writing? (...way before the installation of the modern scriptural apparatus)
theory-minded academics have rigorously repudiated----or forgotten poetry. ----> poetic deprogrammmg
cohabitation of two sovereign linguistic attitudes----the grammars and behaviors that we associate with figures of literary performance and philosophical positing
18th century
rise of increasingly more mathematical and symbolic logics
more literary types of discursive formations,
Wordsworth, Rilke, and Keats disavowing Paul de Man?!
Freud without Goethe or Schiller?!
Benjamin off Baudelaire?!
Derrida deprived of Mallarme, Ponge, or Celan?!
Heidegger abandoned by Trakl or Holderlin?![...]
(7)[...notes/midday review.txt]%2.2[...]s of experience (existence), awareness, and knowledge into living contrasts (intensely powerful bridge-making tools)
can we reappropriate without reanimate? ----> i think if we deconstructively talk about the reappropriations of meaning we might allow animation to constitute itself.
-how to train yourself in spotting relevant questions and unilaterally [einseitig] imposed questions? (their differences) [~? mofti مفتی, fatva فتوا =/= khotbe خطبه]
(to put the ‘question’ at risk)
*milieu-thinking* (to think by the milieu) :
1. no reference to the ground
2. never separating from milieu
(Virgin Mary requires a milieu [of symbolic efficacy, categories of belief, etc.])
what is the milieu of ajayeb? (ghalamrov قلمرو, mohite ejtemayi محیط اجتمایی, its ecology)
“natural”: that which science will eventually explain ==> nature =/= “natural”
“nature”: that larger, older, and wiser configuration that gets credit for ingenuity (instead of the creature's bodily know-how) by the call of the scientist
عجایب ajayeb's relations to the world, rhizomatic connections to other practices that likewise explore a metamorphic (rather than representational) relation
Earth =/= cradle
Surrealists’ automatism to cultivate lucid trances is missing the techniques of imagination developed by Ibn Arabi, (or by Sohrevardi, and others)
(Breton's subjectivity is still hopelessly European)
=?=> to recuperate our physical force (old good Tasavof-?)
‘ideas’ --> to “animate” humans ~= erotically lure the human soul**
(Plato knew this)
to lure us into relevant metamorphic attention*
(Deleuze and Guattari:) my existence is my very participation in assemblages
in order to determine what is “really" responsible for what [= agency?].
-an agency that doesn't belong to us (who is ‘us’ in Stengers?)
the efficacy of assemblages (in ajayeb)
(assemblage --> landscape [in farsi: چشم انداز cheshm-andaz, is related not to the land but to the eyes, literally meaning the projection of gaze])
(the point is) to play a referential game that puts one at risk (instead of protecting via quote)
(let's immediately turn off that) monotonous little critical or reflexive voice whispering that (the only defense we have against fanaticism and the rule of illusions is that) we should not accept being mystified
commenting =/= touching
(lams kardan لمس کردن =/= ezhare nazar kardan اظهار نظر کردن) --> an issue in art criticism in Iran ایران
[@Foad]
**our senses are not for detached cognition but for participation**(David Abram)
-“The ways the se[...]
(8)[...notes/midday review.txt]%2.3[...]
*milieu-thinking* (to think by the milieu) :
1. no reference to the ground
2. never separating from milieu
(Virgin Mary requires a milieu [of symbolic efficacy, categories of belief, etc.])
what is the milieu of ajayeb? (ghalamrov قلمرو, mohite ejtemayi محیط اجتمایی, its ecology)
“natural”: that which science will eventually explain ==> nature =/= “natural”
“nature”: that larger, older, and wiser configuration that gets credit for ingenuity (instead of the creature's bodily know-how) by the call of the scientist
عجایب ajayeb's relations to the world, rhizomatic connections to other practices that likewise explore a metamorphic (rather than representational) relation
Earth =/= cradle
Surrealists’ automatism to cultivate lucid trances is missing the techniques of imagination developed by Ibn Arabi, (or by Sohrevardi, and others)
(Breton's subjectivity is still hopelessly European)
=?=> to recuperate our physical force (old good Tasavof-?)
‘ideas’ --> to “animate” humans ~= erotically lure the human soul**
(Plato knew this)
to lure us into relevant metamorphic attention*
(Deleuze and Guattari:) my existence is my very participation in assemblages
in order to determine what is “really” responsible for what [= agency?].
-an agency that doesn't belong to us (who is ‘us’ in Stengers?)
the efficacy of assemblages (in ajayeb)
(assemblage --> landscape [in farsi: چشم انداز cheshm-andaz, is related not to the land but to the eyes, literally meaning the projection of gaze])
(the point is) to play a referential game that puts one at risk (instead of protecting via quote)
(let's immediately turn off that) monotonous little critical or reflexive voice whispering that (the only defense we have against fanaticism and the rule of illusions is that) we should not accept being mystified
commenting =/= touching
(lams kardan لمس کردن =/= ezhare nazar kardan اظهار نظر کردن) --> an issue in art criticism in Iran ایران
[@Foad]
**our senses are not for detached cognition but for participation**(David Abram)
-“The ways the senses themselves have, of throwing themselves beyond what is immediately given, in order to make tentative contact with the other sides of things that we do not sense directly, with the hidden or invisible aspects of the sensible.”
-“suggestions offered by the sensible itself.”
-we never step outside the “flux of participation.”
...................................
[Thomas Keenan]
reading: that which happens when we cannot apply the rules --> experience of responsibility =/= moment of security[...]
(9)[...notes/midday review.txt]%2.3[...] />
fable ==> possibility of another kind of reading --> exposure to something that breaks with the regimes of meaning and sense
politics of difficulty
...to fall back on the conceptual priority of the subject, agency, or identity as the grounds --✕--> we have politics because we have no ground
(Keenan suggests) “deconstruction” is not offered here as an antiauthoritarian discourse, an attack on grounds, but as an attempt to think about this removal as the condition of any (political) action }~= democracy
(according to fables) responsibility begins in the bad example (--> the concept of conflict ~=> the ethics and politics of responsibility)
the classical subject --(the passage through the bad example)--> installed in its stance of responsibility and the safety of identity
“What is at stake in the fable is, more than anything else, the interpretation and practice of responsibility-our exposure to calls, others, and the names with which we are constituted and which put us in question.” (Keenan)
...practical effectivity of literature
•(for Annabel Patterson:) fable accomplishes a speculative Aufhebung : “[...]the role of metaphor is to mediate between human consciousness and human survival, [and here] the mind recognizes rock bottom, the irreducibly material, by rejoining the animals, one of whom is the human body”
•(for Louis Marin:) fable: uncertain model of praxis
•(for Hegel: Aesop was a “misshapen humpbacked slave” and his) fable = witty, witzig =/= spirit, depth, insight, vision, poetry, philosophy
•(for Lacoue-Labarthe:) fable: a name for the mutual implication and asymmetrical interference of literature with philosophy --> the suspension of the self-evidence of the categories “literature” and “philosophy” in order to use each to put the identity of the other into question. [to think the world as fable. Is it possible?]
•(for Keenan:) fable superimposes the relation of an address to the other in its singularity and in its anonymity (responsibility for the other) onto the traditional predicament of an articulation between the order of knowledge or cognition and that of action, ethico-political or otherwise --> *responsibility in Western philosophical tradition: an address to an other*
...the rhetorical event of a comparison
#[the theater of example]
the threat of example's excess
fables of responsibility ==securing==> *the morality of the subject who means* (who can they finally be submitted to the logic of an *evaluative destination*)
(Derrida's) mode of enunciation and the literary vehicle entrusted with its exemplification :
*[...]it is sufficient to introduce, into the fold of speech acts, a few wolves of the type (“undecidability” or “unconscious”) for the sheph[...]
(10)[...notes/midday review.txt]%2.5[...] to philosophy
•art's (ir)responsibility to journalism
Xanthus the philosopher decides to buy a slave, goes with his students to the slave market, and encounters the disfigured Phrygian Aesop (recently granted the power of speech after assisting a priestess of Isis and hence become too difficult for his previous master to handle). Their first exchange is exemplary, as the philosopher interrogates the slave in order to determine whether “he knows anything,” receives equivocal replies, and finishes by asking, “Do you want me to buy you?”
(Life of Aesop)
thinking fable as language : ‘Fabula’ (narration or account), derived as it is from the Latin root ‘fari’ (to speak) and linked to the Greek ‘phanai’ (to speak or to say), finally implies nothing other than language as such
Mythos and logos, the one is not more true (or more false, deceptive, fictive, etc.) than the other
(to open to the) alterity of an ungoverned figuration
hero: the adventure of an identification that can only occur in the comparison that a fable demands
Horace's dictum: “with a change of names, the fable is told about you” (a trans-subjective movement, a tropological system =/= metaphor or metonymy, )
(for Nietzsche) responsibility: the ability to make and keep one's promises = being (able to be) held accountable (not simply by another but) already in advance by and for oneself : to answer to oneself in the place of the other
•Nietzsche's fable of morality: lamb & bird of prey (“eagle is evil ==> lambs are good”)--> [the fable enacts the victory:] the lambs triumph in gaining the ability (and then the right) to hold the birds of prey responsible for doing what they do, for being what they are --claim--> the strong man is fee to be weak, the bird of prey free to be a lamb ==gain==> the right to make the bird of prey accountable for being a bird of prey
◦morality: a fabulous narrative about language and how it gets turned (with animals playing its roles) into an ethical and epistemological system --> the medium of the exploitation (*putting to use or the abuse of a linguistic possibility*)
◦the interpretation or institution of the birds as subjeets (choosing, willing
agents) depends on a fiction, a fable: the doer is merely a fiction added to the deed
==Nietzsche==>
•*responsibility: an exploitation of a verbal possibility*
•*fable: turning the merely grammatical subject into the fiction of the acting* <== zoomorphism (=/= anthropomorphism)
fable of the eagle and the raven
the story of the raven that, having once watched with envy as an eagle snatched a lamb from the flock and carried it off, later attempts a similar feat. But a raven is not an eagle, and his claws get stuck in the fleece of a wether (not a lamb): his prey becomes his trap. He [...]
(11)[...notes/midday review.txt]%2.6[...]ilding and sustaining livable worlds ----> taking texts as worlds, taking people as worlds
-(when talking about your project) you are teaching me what makes you move. --> that means i need to learn how to be affected differently (other than my own projects terms) in order to affect (others) differently [# my bow and arrow intervention] ---- to give intense attention to your gestures (expressing desires, expectations, affects) and to respond to them in remarkable way.
critical hedonism (Archer)
--> refusal of the “embodied anxiety”
affective economies (Ahmed)
--> which affective economies animate our own bodies as scholars/artist/... and as people
(asking) is this practice good for the subjects involved?
--> we create (involuntary) differences, the question is, is the world enriched by these differences? (by Sina, Xiri, Aela, etc.)
-(also be careful with) “differences as raw material” in a “delocalized cultural capitalism (geopolitics of knowledge)” --(Renan in conversation with Peran)--> “internal colonialism,” “local difference as an object of study and raw material,” and “cooptation of imagination in the networks of information-connection.”
-(looking for other metaphors of) alignments =/= operational references to co-production
(Marti Peran) “The surplus of images has reached the maximum degree of pollution. In turn, the planetary connection ensures the exchange of images regardless of the visual regimes from which they come from. Images no longer speak anywhere. In this situation, the political task is to return to the linguistic battlefield. It won't be possible to do things differently if we do not start talking differently. The most urgent imperative is a language inventiveness.”
(atomism)
-constant and precarious self-management of molecular projects in a horizon-less future
-artists in the operation of self-making ourselves
#the image i made for Sohrevardi; allegory of Sohrevardi; the image's discursive architecture and its diverse inventiveness; (being careful with being) seductive in staging diversity; --> “an ecology of monologues”? (Renan);
-“The monologue is a linguistic space freed from negotiation.” [...] “Now, it seems that everything could be solved by the universal application of mediation, participation, collaboration processes [etc.] without realizing that this entails the strengthening of the social cohesion model that becomes universally inclusive.” [...] “The monologue, in this perspective, is a form of silence, a way of disappearing. One way to cease-to-be when we are forced to be.” (Peran)
how can i stop and resist “self-exploitation”? --> instead of thinking about transindividualism and commons, etc.
“An artwork executed from fatigue ‘exposes’ its intensity.” (Peran)
A “tired” artwork
[...]
(12)[...notes/midday review.txt]%3.1[...]r 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, photographic images, etc.) mediates our access to the material world, whether it represents “nature” or “objects” of science both groups are subscribed to representationalism.
focus on the nature and production of scientific knowledge --(shift to science studies)--> dynamics of the actual practice of science }--> on ongoing pattern of situated activity
-(disembodied scietific) objectivity: that only certain people are allowed to have no body (Gender, race, etc.) and that high science in practice is not acting on textbook objectivity at all.
absent referents, deferred signifieds, split subjects, and the endless play of signifier
Haraway is feeling nervous with two views on objectivity:
(1)the ‘social constructionist’ view on this: getting to know the world ‘effectively’ by practicing the sciences --> kno[...]
(13)[...notes/midday review.txt]%3.2[...]tech military fields and of automated academic battlefields) {will to power} (for Luiza)
epistemological electroshock therapy
(feminists protecting their) sense of collective historical subjectivity and agency and our “embodied” accounts of the truth --> these are just excuse not to learn
(2)Humanistic Marxism (structuring theory about the domination of nature in the self-construction of man) ([young Marx, influenced by Feuerbach =/= Hegelian idealism, saying that:] man's essential nature is that of a free producer, freely reproducing their own conditions of life [--however--> under capitalism individuals are alienated from their productive activity, etc.])
--> “chance for life”
science: Global System, universal knowledge --> translation, convertibility, mobility
of meanings, and universality
money in capitalism ~= reductionism in science
...when we are talking about genes, social classes, elementary particles, genders, races, or texts
*vision: a sensory system that has been used leap out of the marked body ==> a gaze from nowhere
-“Vision is always a question of the power to see--and perhaps of the violence implicit in our visualizing practices”
-also, the visual metaphor allows one to go beyond fixed appearances, which are only the end products. The metaphor invites us to investigate the varied apparatuses of visual production (including: the prosthetic technologies interfaced with our biological eyes and brains.)
unmarked body: the power to see and not be seen
objectivity in scientific and technological, late-industrial, militarized, racist, and male-dominant societies
(she asks for:)
“So, I think my problem, and “our” problem, is how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own “semiotic technologies” for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a “real” world, one that can be partially shared and that is friendly to earthwide projects of finite freedom, adequate material abundance, modest meaning in suffering, and limited happiness.”
Haraway asks for an embodied objectivity that is able of accommodating *paradoxes* --> ‘situated knowledges’
-what does she mean when she says “All components of the desire are paradoxical and dangerous, and their combination is both contradictory and necessary.”
(instruments of visualization in multinationalist, postmodernist culture:) disembodiment : to distance to know
the visualizing technologies (--> my amazon project)
a perverse vision that has produced ‘techno-monsters’ (what does she mean by that?)
--> second birthing? transcendence?
[the frankenstein's techno-monsters, is modeled after who? and who is modeled after it? wondrously, murder[...]
(16)[...notes/midday review.txt]%3.3[...]responsible (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 (grounding) knowledge is organized around the imagery of vision --✕--> Self-knowledge requires a semiotic-material technology to link meanings and bodies. ***Self-identity is a bad visual system*** --> ‘positionality’ (meaning: ‘acknowledged and self-critical’ partiality) [at best showing in which ways one is not unmarked] is therefore insufficient. {Identity, including self-identity, does not produce science!}
-instead we need a *split and contradictory self* (one who can interrogate positionings and be accountable) [~~/?-> shath شطح (=/= shar’ شرع, or even sharh شرح?), shathiat (شطحیات) in Tasavof (تصوف), rend رند, rendane رندانه]
-so, instead of “being” she proposes “splitting”: heterogeneous multiplicities that are simultaneously salient and incapable of being squashed into isomorphic slots or cumulative lists. --> The knowing self is partial in all its [...]
(18)[...notes/midday review.txt]%3.5[...]!}
-instead we need a *split and contradictory self* (one who can interrogate positionings and be accountable) [~~/?-> shath شطح (=/= shar’ شرع, or even sharh شرح?), shathiat (شطحیات) in Tasavof (تصوف), rend رند, rendane رندانه]
-so, instead of “being” she proposes “splitting”: heterogeneous multiplicities that are simultaneously salient and incapable of being squashed into isomorphic slots or cumulative lists. --> The knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, never whole, stitched together imperfectly [that is what she means by ‘split'] ==> join with another (without claiming to ‘be’ another) {if i am allowed i can map Haraway's “partiality” onto Deleuze's “schizophrenia” --> Greek for “split brain” (Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception, p.38) According to Beuler, “The selectivity which normal attention exercises among the sensory impressions can be reduced to zero, so that almost anything is recorded that reaches the senses.” One reason for the admiration which Deleuze and Guattari professed for the schizophrenic must lie in this complete lack of inhibition (khod-dari خودداری).} (a confusion of voice and sight, rather than clear and distinct ideas) ([to discriminate message types:] *to confuse literal and metaphorical*, the schizophrenic either does not know his responses are metaphorical or cannot say so --> the breakdown of his metacommunicative system : does not know what kind of message a message is --> the schizophrenic looks for hidden meanings everywhere (assuming everything is metaphorical) or tend to accept every message as literal) (Lacan: schizophrenia: breakdown in the signifying chain of language ==> experience of pure material signifiers [<-- personal identity is the effect of the temporal unification of past and future with one's present, and that such an active temporal unification is itself a function of language.])
subjectivity is multidimensional ==> vision is multidimensional
(an instruments of vision:) optics : politics of positioning --> one example of optical illusion: rationality (projected from nowhere comprehensivel)
(some perspective are more guilty : master point of view)
No one ever accused the God of monotheism of objectivity, only of indifference. The god trick is self-identical, and we have mistaken that for creativity and knowledge, omniscience even. (self-identical [having self identity] =/=! creativity/knowledge)
Technology: skilled practices. (How to see? Where to see from? and so on.)
@Sana, ‘observation’ and ‘technologies of positioning’
how to see?
the science question in military
the science question in colonialism
the science question in capitalism
the science question in feminism
...
master theory =/= webbed accounts
(what does she mean when she dichotomises theory and account?)
[...]
(19)[...notes/midday review.txt]%3.5[...]ion: rationality (projected from nowhere comprehensivel)
(some perspective are more guilty : master point of view)
No one ever accused the God of monotheism of objectivity, only of indifference. The god trick is self-identical, and we have mistaken that for creativity and knowledge, omniscience even. (self-identical [having self identity] =/=! creativity/knowledge)
Technology: skilled practices. (How to see? Where to see from? and so on.)
@Sana, ‘observation’ and ‘technologies of positioning’
how to see?
the science question in military
the science question in colonialism
the science question in capitalism
the science question in feminism
...
master theory =/= webbed accounts
(what does she mean when she dichotomises theory and account?)
instead of (creating and mastering) ‘theory’ she proposes webbing ‘accounts’***
-‘webs’ can have the property of being systematic
systematic: deep filaments and tenacious tendrils into time, space, and consciousness. systems are dimensions of world history.
she suggests to be accountable for (the intricacies of) visualization technologies in which we are embedded that we will find metaphors and means for understanding
and intervening in the *patterns of objectification* in the world.
--> politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating
partiality =/= universality
*partiality: view from a body, always a complex, contradictory, *structuring, and structured body* (what does she mean by ‘structuring and structured body’?)
--the sciences and politics of interpretation, translation, stuttering, and the partly understood.
*Feminism: critical vision ==(consequent upon)==> a critical positioning in unhomogeneous gendered social space.
location --> vulnerability ~~> (full of limits and contradictions)
“rational” knowledge : to be free from interpretation, to be free from being represented : to be fully self-contained (~ fully formalizable)
-no! let's make Rational Knowledge a process of ongoing critical interpretation among “fields” of interpreters and decoders --> a power-sensitive conversation
-accountability and responsibility for translations
. Situated knowledges are about communities, not about isolated individuals
(pinocchio and geppetto parable)
objectivity = positioned rationality
=/= images of escape and transcendence of limits (filled in Hollywood and sci)
faithfulness of our accounts to a “real world” (no matter how mediated for us and no matter how complex and contradictory these worlds may be)
Sex is “resourced” for its representation as gender, which “we” can control
Situated knowledges require that the object of knowledge be pictured as an [...]
(23)[...notes/midday review.txt]%3.6[...]br />
in the rich feminist practice in science (more than anywhere else) passive categories of objects of knowledge are “activated”
The biological female peopling : When female “sex” has been so thoroughly retheorized and revisualized that it emerges as practically indistinguishable from “mind,” --> the ‘difference’ is theorized biologically as situational, not intrinsic, (at every level from gene to foraging pattern, thereby fundamentally changing the biological politics of the body.)
-(example: Emily Martin)
points in SK:
1-finite partial perspectives
2-split and contradictory self
3-objectivity (--> positioned rationality, object of knowledge as an actor, mutual and usually *unequal* structuring, it is about taking risks)
how and why Haraway as a feminist fights for a better Primatology?
(Barad on) Situated Knowledges: are not merely about knowing/seeing from somewhere (as in having a perspective) but about taking account of how the specific prosthetic embodiment of the technologically enhanced visualizing apparatus matters to practices of knowing
-(Haraway's) move from *optics* [a politics of positioning, in Situated Knowledges] to *diffraction* [an optical metaphor for the effort to make a difference in the world, in Modest_Witness]
Katie King: “apparatus of literary production”: a matrix from which “literature” is born.
...the “facticity” of biological discourse that is absent from literary discourse and its knowledge claims. ----> Are biological bodies “produced” or “generated” in the same strong sense as poems? (biological body ~= poem)
“material-semiotic actor”: the object of knowledge as an active, meaning-generating part of apparatus of bodily production
bodies as objects of knowledge are material-semiotic generative nodes.
“objects” do not preexist as such --> Their boundaries materialize in social interaction. Boundaries are drawn by mapping practices.
world =/= mother/matter/mutter
world ~= coyote (a figure of the always problematic, always potent tie between meaning and bodies. world as coding trickster.)
(feminism) movement rooted in specification and articulation (of [different kinds of] ‘elsewhere’) =/= (assumption of the right or ability to) identities and representation (of identities)
#workshop reading SK (for apass)
Which version of “realism” are you talking about? Recollecting truth and objectivity are activated whenever a ‘point of view’ is produced among other metaphors that we use in our practice and thinking in techno-scientific societies. In this group reading session we are going to study one of the most stubborn and pervasive phantasms in art and sciences, the figure of objectivity, with the Donna Haraway's 1988 essay ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminis[...]
(24)[...notes/midday review.txt]%3.7[...]
Katie King: “apparatus of literary production”: a matrix from which “literature” is born.
...the “facticity” of biological discourse that is absent from literary discourse and its knowledge claims. ----> Are biological bodies “produced” or “generated” in the same strong sense as poems? (biological body ~= poem)
“material-semiotic actor”: the object of knowledge as an active, meaning-generating part of apparatus of bodily production
bodies as objects of knowledge are material-semiotic generative nodes.
“objects” do not preexist as such --> Their boundaries materialize in social interaction. Boundaries are drawn by mapping practices.
world =/= mother/matter/mutter
world ~= coyote (a figure of the always problematic, always potent tie between meaning and bodies. world as coding trickster.)
(feminism) movement rooted in specification and articulation (of [different kinds of] ‘elsewhere’) =/= (assumption of the right or ability to) identities and representation (of identities)
#workshop reading SK (for apass)
Which version of “realism” are you talking about? Recollecting truth and objectivity are activated whenever a ‘point of view’ is produced among other metaphors that we use in our practice and thinking in techno-scientific societies. In this group reading session we are going to study one of the most stubborn and pervasive phantasms in art and sciences, the figure of objectivity, with the Donna Haraway's 1988 essay ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’. This reading focuses on politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating in our power-sensitive conversations, and what does it mean to become accountable and responsible for one's own noninnocent translations. We begin with her essay on the 2nd of February and talk about each of our practices in particular continuing on the 9th.
she wants to re-figure, not disavow, objectivity
“story-tellers exploring what it means to be embodied in high-tech worlds” =/= technophobia
technophilia is narcissistic : the notion that man invented himself and that man is involved in some kind of narrative of technological escalation whereby the objectification of human intentionality in the world has finally surpassed itself, and man has achieved self-objectification in a machine that will finally name him obsolescence as he is and destroy him in a technological apocalypse figured by the computer. (Haraway) [we need better dog stories =/= (Iron Man:) man, made in the image of a vanished god, takes on superpowers in his secular-sacred ascent, only to end tragic]
“...man making himself (by realizing his intentions in his tools) yet again in the Greatest Story Ever Told.” (your artwork doesn't need to be this kind of story!)
or the Darwinist tale of “Mitoc[...]
(25)[...notes/midday review.txt]%3.8[...]nature of decisions creates and invites rhetoric. (=/= Plato saw rhetoric as pure deceit [gul] and positioned it in politics. [you can see he is terrified by the death of his teacher and mentor Socrates by civility.])
rhetoric --> contigent --> epistemic: individuals make meaning through language and determine what constitutes truth
*ontology is death-dealing <--** terrible violence is directed to the non-existing, the never having existed
---> go to the root of exist --> which modes of existence deserve our curiosity?
...................................
(i found a word for it,) my register of @Lili's scream: i see it as ‘nonlaughter’(?)
(*proposal: there is a number when we dial we can listen to her scream on the phone.) (--> stream, technology, tele-, telephone, called,)
(for her) thinking =? knowing (sending =/= receiving)
(an SF scenario:) imagine and describe an alien world where its populace don't practice ‘knowing.’
**scream ==makes==> witnesses**
(fighting ==makes==> coordination)
از طلبکار به طلبه (az talabkar be talabe)
///the (symbolic?) structuration of ‘demand’ in Lili's presentation:
the ‘sujet supposé savoir’ #sss [~= Pir, (پیر always a paternal metaphor?) that Other whom you ‘call’ who holds (your) deepest truth ---> go to the metaphorology of “depth” =/= “skimming the surface"] (installed by Lacan) is a subject who is in a functional position and one presumes that this subject knows or retains or holds the knowledge (even vital and secret knowledge [this is knowledge-talabkar طلبکار]) that you want. this subject is functionally established. one of the laws of our encounter is that puts the speaker/writer/analyst/text/etc in the (even architectural) center: the subject-supposed-to-know in Lacan the analyst who sits there as a tower of knowledge that mostly withholds what s/he knows --> transferencial energy directed towards him/herim/her --> drama of identification (--> break-out of narcissism for Freud)
-it is one of the (negative?) binding transferential contracts in relation to “the one who speaks”
[*anthropology of exchange* --> Transference: (for Lacan) Each time a man speaks to another in an authentic and full manner, there is, in the true sense, transference, symbolic transference--something which takes place which changes the nature of the two beings present. Later Lacan articulates the transference in sujet supposé savoir: transference is the attribution of knowledge to the Other, the supposition that the Other is a subject who knows. “As soon as the subject who is supposed to know exists *somewhere* ... there is transference.” (Seminar II, p. 232)] [keep in mind that the (post?-)Lacanian theory is about the *constitutive function of the signifier in relation to the subject.* ... for Lacan, What constitutes the person and its identity can now be read as a text, and the author is not the [...]
(26)[...notes/midday review.txt]%4[...]s claim)
(my work on hypertext apass ajayeb graph rigs, is to deal within these conditions of storying. my shift of interest)
...................................
(“dealing” @Luiza:)
(or in Lili's term “..a way to tackle issues”)
[with Avital]
*modalities of dealing-with:
-parasitism
-(under the spell) drugs =/= struggle (according to Marxian protocol: one is drugged and disabled [Date-rape-drug as an incapacitating agent] and neutralized by state apparatus, drugs are administrated and spend in all sorts of insidious ways.)
on the discourse of stupidity: Marx (in writing to Engels says that he) believed that proletariat are stupid. Marx's insight to replace the other drugs that have put so many into a stupor. people with Religion are not around, they are praying somewhere to some hallucination [this is Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, and others in 20th century] --> ideological stuporous drugs, ‘everyone is stoned on something’ =/= alert and lucid. [highly problematic!]
-this is about a body recognizing its ‘enemy’ (the figure of enemy for every and each of us and the way we “recognize” it, as historical bodies and minds inheriting the boys of 20th century.) ---- the state of the struggle depends on certain metaphorologies on ‘clean’ that are problematic and phantasmatic and on the loose. --> [the issue is that there is no “clean body”.] how to do dirty work? (--> for ‘morality’ and ‘clean’ go to Freud on the origin on morality: morality began as we stopped sniffing our asses and stood erect, nose in the air, away from the dirt [that we are] --> morality's phobic appropriations and designations, [Lacan: from the genital order to the sublime; az kun be fayakon از کون به فیکون %--> #ouroboros #serpent], [so when we stood up, stood erect, our genitals became center, exposing ourselves to the other, sexually centered exposure], [], [],)
-Marxian: language/tool/art as a virus that infiltrates ideological structures
-Lacoue-Labarthe: in 20th century there are three fundamental modalities of “dealing-with,” three modes of relatedness to our concerns, our anxieties, our worries, our work, our projects [three major motifs for the thinkers that continue to provoke our thoughts]: (1) *struggle* that would be the Marxian motor, the modality in terms of concern for social justice. [Delanda on Marx --> a model of synthesis: a conflict of opposites] (2) *mission* as introduced and lunched by Heidegger, who was on a mission: we have a mission, we have a mission of transmission, we have a mission to inscribe things--not from God but from what has happened to us and been left to us after the death of God (as Nietzsche has announced.) {yes, without a proper address, a state of epistemic alert, and so on} and (3) *task* associated with Benjamin. the Aufgabe is that which inscribes in itself ‘giving up,’ the Aufgabe, it means it is impossible, we take it on as a kind of eth[...]
(28)[...notes/midday review.txt]%4.3[...] we can see how operate but also how they contaminate (and leak into each other.) we might have a sense of three of them}
-ontology of “struggling” a way out of Aporia [denotes, in philosophy, a philosophical puzzle or state of puzzlement] --> we can't! --> we must try to work to locate modalities of stagnancy (rokud) without necessarily seeing the Exit. how do we live with these catastrophic markers that mark us?
-Paleonymics: a certain operation according to which one continues to put old words to work. The use of a pre-existing word in a new context. -- we are stuck with old pomping meanings.
--(Stengers) connecting materialism with struggle --> (in apass) we are descendants of this trope
for Luiza, the meaning of ‘infold’? instead of ‘unravel’? --> interface*
(i want to point out the ‘synthesis’ in her work rather than the ‘analysis’ implied in the term ‘unravel’)
Lacoue-Labarthe made Heidegger possible to read for Avital
(and that is what Avital does, make a lot of things possible to read for me)
(to incorporate a) *rigorous hesitation* (=/= Leo's “slowness”)
going step by step in the confrontation (essential to the unfolding of thought)
**not turning ‘weakness’ (or metaphorical weariness) into a (compelling) paraconcept [<-- Levinas does it]
-taking on the the big topoi of the day like a warrior
courage --comes--> from the *abyss of needling fearfulness*
*German romantics invented the always-with-community, a living-with, a Mitsein practice of living life philosophically (full of moments of restricted solitude, pressure zones, etc.)
(office of friendship...) i am friend in a Freudian ambivalence, that means i undermine the friend, try to trap him and catch him off guard
-if you are so calm, then i will try to bring you over to my side of the barricade of obsessional neurotic (a condition in which the mind is intruded upon against her will by images, ideas, or words. consciousness remains lucid and power to reason remains intact ==> temporarily deprivation of individual of freedom of thought and action [<== intrapsychic conflict of sexual origin that mobilizes and blocks all flows of energy (in the case neurotic a source of pleasure to the child =/= hysteric)])
-when we write do we need to demonstrate a far-ranging grasp of the political consequences of every possible metaphysical move?
...prime mover or suspects such as Plato, Heidegger, Derrida
*acceleration: that we are result-oriented, business-oriented, under the gun of gains, and subject to the push towards scientific objectification =/= i try to work with different degrees of attention: slowing down for checkpoints, allusive clusters and dense indicators, that are also problematic and short-circuited (in my lectures) ==> to get to the *notational space* that we can calmly observe, examine and explore together.
-to be l[...]
(29)[...notes/midday review.txt]%4.4[...]slowness”)
going step by step in the confrontation (essential to the unfolding of thought)
**not turning ‘weakness’ (or metaphorical weariness) into a (compelling) paraconcept [<-- Levinas does it]
-taking on the the big topoi of the day like a warrior
courage --comes--> from the *abyss of needling fearfulness*
*German romantics invented the always-with-community, a living-with, a Mitsein practice of living life philosophically (full of moments of restricted solitude, pressure zones, etc.)
(office of friendship...) i am friend in a Freudian ambivalence, that means i undermine the friend, try to trap him and catch him off guard
-if you are so calm, then i will try to bring you over to my side of the barricade of obsessional neurotic (a condition in which the mind is intruded upon against her will by images, ideas, or words. consciousness remains lucid and power to reason remains intact ==> temporarily deprivation of individual of freedom of thought and action [<== intrapsychic conflict of sexual origin that mobilizes and blocks all flows of energy (in the case neurotic a source of pleasure to the child =/= hysteric)])
-when we write do we need to demonstrate a far-ranging grasp of the political consequences of every possible metaphysical move?
...prime mover or suspects such as Plato, Heidegger, Derrida
*acceleration: that we are result-oriented, business-oriented, under the gun of gains, and subject to the push towards scientific objectification =/= i try to work with different degrees of attention: slowing down for checkpoints, allusive clusters and dense indicators, that are also problematic and short-circuited (in my lectures) ==> to get to the *notational space* that we can calmly observe, examine and explore together.
-to be lucid about your own part taking in narcissistic economy
*mimesis*: those things we are still stuck in in very covert and unavowed ways ~-> ‘destiny’ (a term i use when i mean mimesis for us [-a disease that shows symptoms characteristic of another disease])
(i am not pessimistic at all) i have just a catastrophic intuition that informs my grammar =/= mimetic hell
...................................
*complaint (blocks ‘becoming’?)
-so if i am used to complaint in all sorts and forms and shapes, what do i do if not complaining? that means i need to start learning new techniques of being in the world.
-complain, forms of protest, grievance, <--(contamination)--> lament (sug سوگ, zaje ضجه)
-dispositions of Beschwerde
-which minorities are associated with bitching and moaning? (naleh va shekayat ناله و شکایت, ghor غرولند, غر) (a feminine accent?!)
-it is often said that “children should stop complaining”
“stop complaining” ?!! [~~> pointed to or relevant for Lili also]
***complaint : the disenfranchised (az hagh mahrum shodeh از حق محروم شده) language[...]
(30)[...notes/midday review.txt]%4.5[...]ing-fields)
de-shamanization and translation /(non-transparency should rule?!)
are we trapped in a grid of grievance?
different forms of ‘maybe’ (i am trying to install?)
how complaint is then situated in ‘becoming’?
[...] complaint haunts our era of desperate justice (Xiri, Sana, Varinia)
. a calling-system? a GPS that has lost its signal?
maternal super-ego
political passion emerging as a defensive strategy
(@Xiri, is she trying to add-on the super-ego for her concern of social justice?)
so, does complaint prevent the arrival of change or make way for new forms of sociality?
“I can't complain.” --> (a blockbuster;) those in stubborn destitution ----that there is no address in the era of the becoming anonymous of God. ‘Who would pick up your call?’
however, “the friend, whether ghostly, futural, or closely bound in time, receives the brunt of the complaint” --friends structurally listens to disappointed expectation, disappointed worldliness
what-should-have-been
On what approved contingencies, contractual loopholes, or transferential coordinates could I possibly befriend another?
metaphysical heritage of friendship (... reconfigured personhood)
(how can I do things without being a psycho about it?)
(How do I know by which politics of friendship, grid or writing practice I am being called up?)
a vocabulary existed to designate, approximate certain routines
R_dzvJYDZXM
CrGJIS3quYY
(30.03.2017) Rabih Mroue and Hito Steyerl duo: concern for injustice and conservative justice call disguised under an elaborated and augmented complaint (in the aesthetic terms of contemporary art market), non-researchers of their subjects and topics, they have no ‘topic’ only ‘resource’ (in the making of their own myth of the figure of artist,) [=/= when something becomes a topic for you, it bounds you to the unsettling commitments of curiosity and research and hard work.]
-in their notion of “Artist in the Reign of Terror” they ask disturbingly “but many individuals have died and it means nothing?!” with a sneer (artwork as puzkhand پوزخند --> @Ali )
[**“sneer” is a contemptuous or mocking smile, remark, or tone, coming from a family of sarcastic tropes of complaint and ironizated complaining]
-their art-work finds and flourishes in a terrain of terror. in their nonspeculative work there is no “but, what if” or “but, not yet” and therefore no ‘becomings’
-for Hito and Rabih: zeitgenössisch (contemporary) = grausam (atrocious)
-they dichotomize (fact/fiction, real/unreal, etc.), rather than allowing a novel and interesting question to be raised
-what is the state of unknown in one's practice? rather than being a news agency
[...]
(31)[...notes/midday review.txt]%4.7[...]ی ربط, na-ham-dusti ناهمدوستی ?)” (is his idea of “coherency” leads to ‘friendship’? is for Seba ‘amity’ [ravabet-e hasane روابط حسنه] at stake? )
Seba's epistemological object(?): ‘evidence’ (=/?=>! cordial dispositions)
(complexity is the name of our game. Haraway)
...................................
my current work and interest involves the investigation of individualized subject formation (tajarode nafs تجرد نفس ?); interrogating the production of language; and tracing the divisible distinguishing limits between categories of human, animal, and monstrous.
#subjects of interest: The translator, language, the sublime, animals/animality, technicity/mechanicity, the divine/sacred,
...................................
the myth of Poros, Penia, and Eros for Aela:
(in Plato's Symposium;) Penia, the “child of poverty,” decides to forcefully impregnate herself with the inebriated Poros, “the personification of plenty,” who is always in opposition with aporia, (~ snafu before aporia,) “puzzlement, which breaks with the logic of identity,” and thus defining aporia. The result of this union is Eros...
poverty + {plenitude × aporia} ==> eros : {agency of passivity + resourcefulness}
1-metaphysical inquiry begins from ‘aporia’
2-rationalist inquiry begins from ‘a priori’
3-empiricist inquiry begins from ‘tabula rasa’ (hakim's beginning)
/
/
4-mystical inquiry begins from ‘affective a posteriori’ (effect, wonder, heyrat, tahayor)
...................................
sci-fi is imagining the elsewhere inside mortality. (==> feminism stakes in SF)
...................................
*make a series of studio photos with white clear backs, two different genders iranians having a physical/verbal fight or some sort of aggressive encounter
*the idea is to write a script for a movie or short series, combining the historical 14th century Iran with the 14th century imaginal beast fables from the ajayeb. the camera creats a non-exotic continuation between the two
...................................
[with Kenney]
-how to let emerge a seriousness as collective matters of care?
-how to stimulate pragmatic questions about how to craft relevant knowledge?
speculation is all about pragmatism
capitalist speculation : “one must speculate to accumulate” =/= relating & narrating
scientific speculation & venture capital ==> big epistemic/financial pay-offs or costly dead ends [=/= (Stengers's notion of speculative) *being at risk with ones claims* =/= received notions of authority or rationality]
(an abstract challenge:) to bring specificity and imaginative traction
*speculation is a more feral practice
(wild) speculation [always improper] =/= proper science : rational production of univerasal kno[...]
(32)[...notes/midday review.txt]%4.9[...]..when the world and the instrument interact
descriptions of the affordances of indissoluble instrument / world complexes are at stake
then how can we think magic/knowledge/science without instrumentalization (‘something in order to’)?
the notion of ‘world’ and ‘worlding’ in other Hollywood sci-fi franchises, and the way a world (for example survival in Mars in ‘The Martian,’ surviving “outer space” in ‘Gravity,’ “pure wonder” and “abyssal unknown” in many Icarusian space exploration moves and movies, the deprived Earth in ‘Interstellar,’ and so on) is rendered dead or dangerous or prosperous, ideologies of anthropocentric extensionalism.
(this directly concerns my ajayeb apass research about the past, because hollywood constantly making science fictions about the past.)
[as much as Matt Damon is schizo-constructing a social environment (on “dead” Mars trying to contact “home”), Cinderella's schizo-affective relation with the talking animals is doing the same: talking back to a world that talks to her, where Matt is only able to talk to home station. I think we have better chances with Cinderella's kind of split personality.]
Modernity --> “Project of Enlightenment” : religion =/= metaphysics --> science + morality + art --> objective science + universal morality + law ----{each with its own “inner logic"}
(Luhmann; transition to modern:) stratified and hierarchical organization --to--> “functionally differentiated” organization
(project of modernity requires) a universally assumed but nowhere concretely localizable lifeworld*** (=/=? situated knowledges)
modern person : the self-fulfilling and self-justifying observing subject
...................................
(Freud's) ego: the record of abandoned object cathexes
(cathexes ~= electrical charge; the libidinal energy invested in some idea or person or object)
...................................
(15.02.2017) three objects from apass:
-complaint
-evidence
-monologue
...................................
on futurity; in SF capital (Mark Fisher) the information (somewhere between cybernetic futurism and “New Economy”) is a direct generator of economic value ==> ‘the information about the future’ circulates as as increasingly important commodity* (Eshun)
SF: engineering feedback between its preferred future and its becoming present --✕--> future --> manufacturing tools capable of intervention (=/=? disruption; the Sun Ra, character in the movie The Place is The Space, disrupts when he enters the youth club.)
@Ale --her--> predatory features/futures : (a space for researching[?] dimensions of) anticipatory designs, projects of emulation, manipulation, parasitism, interpellation into a bright corporate tomorrow <== faces smiling at screens (-->? a bitter joke)
-[...]
(33)[...notes/midday review.txt]%5.1[...]d itself in a collective mimetic semi-conscious way.
(=/=? my work on how signifiers transmit and transform --> parasitism, rumorology, etc. ... weaker neighborhoods of thought)
Alice's notions:
•explosion <--> dance
•the “generative” notion in her discourse (--> notion of “active,” and “conscious intentionality” [--> a property of human agency and agential exceptionality. (the metric of) her work/workshop distinguishes the self-aware active entity from non-communicative receptive entity, ***intransitive =/= transitive-->{her privileged object}, and that distinction is not useful for me right now])
•the authority of the trope “practice” for Alice
(what would be a nonmimetic understanding of eachother? @Juan)
•the workshop was not her ‘thinking’ or ‘making’ in process or an open question or a not-knowing, rather the workshop was based on her (finished) ‘notions,’ with her ‘indisputables,’ her ‘literal’ objects; (dance, active, body, imagination, practice, generative, creative, etc.)
•production of the “I” in her work; (a nasty side-effect: collateral individuation) (when were the moments in the workshop that an interesting “we” was created and for whom?)
•the problematic difference between ‘literal’ and ‘metaphorical’ at the footing of her thinking (--> my whole apass research is about this)
•(artist's) imagination as a magic wand that can transform things
*what helped me was the idea of thinking with a ‘dormant metaphor’ (in my own work) and ‘activate’ it, in a way that the problems and pleasures of thinking with that metaphor is felt. by ‘dormant metaphor’ what i mean is an operative word that one is using often and is left uninterrogated. for example the problems of “landscape” as a particular ontological tool for me became apparent only after i committed myself to that metaphor in the course of the interview with Pierre and Alice. to stay with a story, to live its contradictions. (and the position of it in a sentence)
•“it was ‘landscape’ talking; not me!”
•why i was seeing Tehran as the ‘ghostly landscape’? (matter of a confrontation with Tehran? exteriority of my subjecthood is at stake? ~->!? the arbitrary position of “genius loci” : that from a genius position one can see for good. -how to make myself nonarbitrary--not subject to individual determination--in relation to Tehran? --> towards ‘situated knowledge’)
•what kind of material-discursive practices thinking with “landscape” committed me to? [to explore and feel this commitment (and its consequences) is ‘staying with the trouble’ for me]
it felt like Alice believes that people, we, have control over our metaphors, but in the course of the workshop there were many occasions that was not the case:
Sina, landscape --> optics
Esta, building/house --> geometry --> security
Agnes, supermarket --> exchange
Juan, crime --> arrest[...]
(34)[...notes/midday review.txt]%5.4[...]orm things
*what helped me was the idea of thinking with a ‘dormant metaphor’ (in my own work) and ‘activate’ it, in a way that the problems and pleasures of thinking with that metaphor is felt. by ‘dormant metaphor’ what i mean is an operative word that one is using often and is left uninterrogated. for example the problems of “landscape” as a particular ontological tool for me became apparent only after i committed myself to that metaphor in the course of the interview with Pierre and Alice. to stay with a story, to live its contradictions. (and the position of it in a sentence)
•“it was ‘landscape’ talking; not me!”
•why i was seeing Tehran as the ‘ghostly landscape’? (matter of a confrontation with Tehran? exteriority of my subjecthood is at stake? ~->!? the arbitrary position of “genius loci” : that from a genius position one can see for good. -how to make myself nonarbitrary--not subject to individual determination--in relation to Tehran? --> towards ‘situated knowledge’)
•what kind of material-discursive practices thinking with “landscape” committed me to? [to explore and feel this commitment (and its consequences) is ‘staying with the trouble’ for me]
it felt like Alice believes that people, we, have control over our metaphors, but in the course of the workshop there were many occasions that was not the case:
Sina, landscape --> optics
Esta, building/house --> geometry --> security
Agnes, supermarket --> exchange
Juan, crime --> arrest
Zoumana, garden (~-> fecundity) --> immunity
Eszter, electronic device --> closed
Ekaterina, zoo --> objects of care (~-> animal ~= diseased .--> objectifying or babying them)
* landscape ==>? optic -->? way of disembodied seeing
[artificial perspective {--> (objects are in) proportional variations in a seamless continuum}, gaze of the spectator, exterior space, homogeneous, infinite, systematic,] --> (this is all) *symbolic form*
[(tele/micro)scope <==] landscape <== perspective <-- arbitrary point of the observer
(Descola:) such “objectification of the subjective” ==>
(1) a distance between man and the world
(2) systematizes and stabilizes the external universe
***factuality is not intrinsic, it is rhetoric (that we live with)
history of the idea of nature
‘ajayeb's architects of a naturalistic cosmology who establish hierarchies and discontinuities among them =/= cosmogenesis of modernity's subjectivity's illusions of continuity
[Descola's “configurations of continuity"]
(ajayeb creates) hierarchical order according to the levels of the exchange of information that is reputed to be possible.
-which parties are set on the same level of reality (in ajayeb)?
(what are the human and nonhuman) proliferation of forms in ajayeb (?)
[...]
(39)[...notes/midday review.txt]%5.5[...]uisa)
taking up each other patterns [which are sometimes obvious, sometimes cryptic]
(what is the other name of the practices of “string figures” in Iran? -->[stars, facts, fabulations, “far”s, patternings,]--> all cosmopolitical, composes the “we”)
•a “we” compositional
•an “ajayeb” compositional
•
anthropocene system thinking
•feedback loops
•thermodynamics & 18th century mathematics (=/= hyperbolic mathematics in ‘crochet’ --> excess of surface, --> story of interface)
•comparative interpretive thinking (a dominant western model of knowledge production--which i am using!)
•modern synthesis: restrictive system theories within evolutionary theories
•systems idea
•
*“The global scale takes precedence--because it is the scale of the model.”* Tsing
[title]
Bilingual Stories for Ajayeb NatureCultures
(...stories ‘for’ =/= ...stories ‘of’)
does Brexit and Trumplandia changes the landscape of English use as a language?
the image of pedagogy : semiotic apparatus (& technological) (--> the ritual of Simpson strangling Bart)
(why am i cultivating the) *non-inventive imagination* (and its antimetabole [or chiasmus, chiastic patterns of antithesis]: non-imaginitive invention)
often we find ourselves inventing everything (in political animation) =/= to figure out what are we attached to
(inheriting something =/=? being heir to something)
the scientist inside me begs me to narrow my temporal scale, choose an epoch, let's say middle ages, choose a century let's say 15th, choose a year, choose a day, a moment, a micro-second slice of the cake of the milieu that you are interested in, the instance in the bazar with Halaj in the sun and so on.
(my old school) obligatory knowledge <-- salon of scietific entertainment
}-> (is about creating) proper witness***
the tropes i am building in my current research, do they help build a better Iran? and how?
interms of:
•an ongoingness
•a commitment to a recent future thinking
‘homo-’: stuff of the soil, that figures of bright and sunny image of the same
#rigs and syms*
•games
•technological designs
•plots
•mechanisms
•sfs
•jokes
•jests
•
[title]
critical bestiaries
critique-bestiary
belonging = achievement (dastavard دستاورد) + violence (khoshunat خشونت)
...the ways we renounce the world through the use of the word “real” and “really”
(Stengers:) weaving: not secular nor religious, not traditional nor modern, is sensuous
#[nodes and notes]
the emptyland, terrestrial life, ‘per-’ instead of ‘her’ or ‘his’
-the way [...]
(40)[...notes/midday review.txt]%5.9[...] ‘nothing’) ---> a different way of building quality (into practices and objects)
...................................
Bakhtin's dialogic, to become a skilled listener : listening = response (=/= simply answering) --> (when we speak) we give other people talismans that are not (perfectly) clear to us----we penetrate and unpack what someone doesn't have the words clearly and response to what they intend --✕--> “common understanding,” “make something work,”
cooperation is about getting deeper into something
conditions that more skills are required (and not the opposite)
in modernity everything seams to need to be verbalized. what happens to the unverbalized, the unprogrammatic? --> can you have an implicit right which can't be verbalized? maybe no, maybe this is the limit of the social...
purposiveness: when you hear somebody go “i am going to put clearly what we all want...” you have submitted to that person (almost erotic) --> “they really know who they are” ==> you become a spectator to their definiteness
...................................
who the fuck = theology
how the fuck = empiricism
what the fuck = ontology
how the what the fuck = epistemology
why what the fuck = metaphysics
why the fuck = ethics
why give a fuck = teleology
the fuck itself = phenomenology
fucked up = pathology
fuck all = nihilism
...................................
Aela to Sven: “everytime you disappoint me you gain in depth” (5 April 2017)
...................................
(06.04.2017) %notes after my apass endweek presentation:
•my implicit focus and energy on the body and its organs of gesture that animates us
•loving telling you what i read
•giving you what i don't fully understand =/= gift from above
•(in lecture) to allow language greet the unverbalized
(it is about) organizing my memory
(it is about) that which comes to (my) mind, and “things” coming to minds
(it is about) the things I am told
__[these are perhaps other names of cognition, affect, memory, semiotics, history, inheritance, figuration, interface, thing-relations, huntology,]
__in our shared space where we let eachother in the effect of our languages, I want to practice what comes to mind when I stand in front of you and your work, ask myself ‘what else’ comes to mind? in a sense, my project on ajayeb is that kind of training
also in apass i want “to catch you in your acts”
it is my privilege to recognize you (as...)
asking:
1- what do I know?
2- what am I told?
3- (how getting good at to) explain what somebody else said
1- the first question has no clear answer, what i know is not placed somewhere in me, it is always an articulated matter of ‘with’ or in interaction with, it is a sym, changes b[...]
(41)[...notes/midday review.txt]%6.1[...]session of essential aspects of the external reality (~-> recreate them in the imagination) [--> empirical?]
[structural:] to experience the external reality as parts of an interconnected and comprehensive whole
[idealistic/symbolist:] to connect the (inner) particular to the general
[romantic:] to make (inner) invisible visible
sublimated gratification of instincts, ambitions and ideals, (homogeneous) gestalt and expression of the self, narcissistic equilibrium, test its viability, haptic art,
“invisible reality and the aesthetics of universality” or a mean by which universal is recognized*
timelessness, wholesomeness, indivisibility, aesthetic standards
-pictorial thinking, movement thinking, affectual thinking, {--> all issued by the notion of “pure” and “purity”? tendency toward idealization? utopian?}
movement (the act) =/= mobility (the possibility)
(is Luisa interested in?) the immanent laws and essential unity of all being
...step to complete nonobjectivity
...objects with their expression of plasticity
-what is the symbolic term in her work?
she said: “space is literal.” --> the wholesome is proclaimed in the artistic act itself (and not as metaphor) --> experienced directly =/= imagined
--> احشايى the viscera (ahsha), visceral theory: affect and embodiment, transmissible physical charges, porous bodies,
@Luisa
kP_AfO7Ms4I
how to create a condition in which she can herself later give access to her thinking and making?
1- propose a curatorial gesture of an assembly: Luisa, Mondrian, Zen master, Malevich; with Bocola and Ahmed;
2- to open an investigation of affective economies for her: abstraction, constructivism, idealism, figurative empathy, symbolism, longing,
3-
4-
(psychoanalysis [@Luisa] allows us to see that) *emotionality involves movement*
associations whereby “feeling” take us across different levels of signification, not all of which can be admitted in the present. (+Ahmed)
-emotions move back and forth (past associations, repression traces on present) and sideways (sticky associations between figures and signs) --> something as the cause of a feeling in someone --> “involving relationships of *difference and displacement*{as the form or language of the unconscious} without positive value” --> affective economies -->{social, material, psychic}
{ psychoanalysis = "absent presence” of historicity-->(sideways movement of feelings) }==offers==> a theory of emotion as economy***
-by economy, Ahmed means, like capital (is about the movement of commodities and money*), an effect of its circulation (--> Luisa)
-the subject is one nodal point in the economy =/= subject as its origin and destination
**the movement between signs converts into affect
[...]
(42)[...notes/midday review.txt]%6.4[...]on of open cultures involves the projection of what is closed onto others, and hence the concealment of what is closed and contained ‘at home’” (Ahmed ♥) {ouvrir le fermé, fermé le ouvert}
•alert citizens, amre be ma'ruf va nahye az monkar امر به معروف و نهی از منک --> meta-ontology of tosiye توصیه
•suspicious others
•saving women from religious fundamentalism
•negativity of latent (could-be-ness ==> opens up the power to detain, police pishgiri پلیس پیشگیری)
origins of bad feeling
threat to violate the pure bodies [vulnerable and damaged bodies of the white woman and child]
*affect is economic* --> it circulates between signifiers in relationships of difference and displacement --> they align subjects --> effect of collective --> (in Ahemd's economical model of emotions) they work to bind subjects together : the nonresidence of emotions is what makes them “binding” --> her notion of economy =/= {inside/outside model --> positive residence of emotions: “I have an emotion” or “something makes me feel a certain way"}--> “fear does not come from within the subject, nor does it reside in its object”
-([@Hoda's take on witness] alignment of the individual with the collective:) the accumulation of affective value shapes the surfaces of bodies and worlds; affect generates the surfaces of collective bodies (<==allows== not to locate affect in a subject or object) ~~--> [to initiate with Hoda an examination of the) *mobility of bodies of subjects* (in the West or her regions =/= question of the mediatization of her emotional experiences}
*emotions ‘involve’ subjects and objects*
what constructs emotions as positive or negative residence?
[*]psychoanalysis: a theory of the subject as lacking positive residence
(this ‘lack’ is commonly articulated as the “unconscious”: in Freudian terms, where an affective imp[...]
(43)[...notes/midday review.txt]%6.5[...]ming that there is something natural that binds us... (@Luisa) contract is a non-natural conventional object. (the textual nature of contracts allows it to be read, written, rewritten, reformatted and rearranged.)%-->{ontic & ontologic}
•what kinds of violations does the contract capaciously includes in itself?
•there is nothing natural about here and us being here. (spatiotemporally clock tells us not only what time it is, but also where and who we are: how “time-teller” is spatially architecturally phallically positioned: in the center, on the top, wrapped around the body, and so on.)
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[apass opening week 08.05.2017, (my response to) what is “artistic research”?] artistic research is a fancy way of transforming your “weird feelings” about the world into an “inquiry,” so to say, and at the same time resist to be faithful to standard accounts of what counts as a “serious knowledge claim.” So it includes a lot of messy thinking-feeling, embodied practices, affects, poeticity, semi-scientific work, magic, data collection, mutative interpretative reading, forgetting things, detours, rituals, dead-ends, writing under the influence of scarce foreign obscure philosophies, literary drugs, and boldly using metaphors from different disciplines of “study” that one can find. So, on the one hand, it is a term, invented to indicate a “fluid modern personality” within a turn in humanity studies that opens up to ‘what an artist already knows’ or ‘what an artist is allowed not to know’ within their specific historically situated set of tools. And, on the other hand, it indicates an important shift in the education of art, in which the attitude of the artist changes: instead of making things into a “resource” for artistic creation, rather making things into a “topic.” That means a whole new set of relationalities and new forms of attention need to be learned and cultivated, which were historically often absent in the education of art.
-i want to bring a circus inside {--> within}
-my business still with aesthetics (my own image) (narcissistic stuff...)
-to show up as a guy, castrated and very advanced (--> you can only come up castrated unless you are extremely advanced, #harem stuff)
-i am trying to come forward with all the rigor and rhetorics available to me
the death score
Leo correcting his proper name in my mouth. (signature: master of your name --> master of your house)
Leo named his future projection: “Empathoscene”
[sometimes your name is the first doorkeeper (as in Kafka'a Turhüter)]
Eszter's ‘what is there as an obstacle to the freedom of man (?)’ (question marked by me)
--> the spatial gesture of the ‘stop’ (#Selma)
Maarten's version of confusion (stated by himself) is due to that: the messianic horizon is essentially confusing (?)
[...]
(44)[...notes/midday review.txt]%6.7[...]e that comes to mind is when your intimacy making leads always to yourself, getting laid, literally. that is when your concern becomes only you and someone, sexually interested --> economically, and you don't concern the sociality of your people with each other. #techno-capital singular subjectivity @--> this is super relevant for Sven, maybe: how one becomes interested, invested, and skillful in provoking interesting socialities for friends and peers--and not only for oneself? creating, inciting zones of connectivity]
-[it was not accidental that the rhetoric of drugs came up with Lilia when I suggested the attention to anthropos --> what figures human and otherwise was for her the subject of drug-induced rhetoric of mind-alteration; (this is the anthropos of the Enlightenment Europeans and classical Greece talking:) “in order to get rid of me you must take drugs!” #fable/_ --> being sober(?!), anthropos becoming, human nature, common sense, empiricism and interpretation are at stake here]
-[another thing was the label of “animal” that was passed around as a form of mock, instead of provocations for more conversation, I was stupefied. --how can we go on together and not render each other commitments nonsense?]
“point of view” is an important metaphor
#in my work in apass i am working on descriptive practices [poetics of animal description, histories of nonhuman inscription, etc.] to learn to name latent (and therefore emergent) ontologies, to name ‘what we are doing in new ways,’ which are hard to name. (also refusing not to name the violences of others and yourself. to reckon the nature and scope of the erasures we do in our works.) % why do you think that is important?
#and my shift of attention to peer's works is about that: our domain of practices must make claim on each other <== we inhabit differences together (--> attention and work on:) ‘local category abstractions’ (how do we talk and make each other feel our subjects of interest in apass for example) --> (the cumulative, associated and sensed) routines, gestures, and (inter)surfaces of our everyday life in apass, as a group of researchers, that don't necessarily align ==> worlding comes from these things.
[attunement =/= argument]
the name of the world is “detail”
***translation (essentailly imperfect) is the very condition of signification --> trope is the very condition of language
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don't be docile bodies or innocent bystander, do what you have to do to constitute your courage
all i am saying is that: it is not clear what the destiny of art (or of anything) is
...................................
perhaps what i am trying to learn--with apass, ajayeb, writing, harem, etc--is to ask what do i need--which skills, abilities, or literacies--to become equipped to share the experience of the habits of the world (of ajayeb)[...]
(45)[...notes/midday review.txt]%7[...]t the artist (or non-artist) is proposing, and not my own ‘freedom’ in their work. what does it mean or do to become interested in the *freedom of others* and not yourself? ==> paying attention to the most implicit rules of your game, that means i am paying attention to your freedom that has articulated itself in the creative gesture
instead of (the “how” of) “how do i show my interested texts?” (which was proposed in Maarten's exhibition of poems) i like to ask (the “what” of) “what requires reading?” (also @Sven) (my kill-joys in apass ... am i being too ontologic with everything? --> I am operating from the position that understanding materials, practices, and interpretation implies questioning ontological assumption ==> challenge concepts)
@Eszter: is there a notion of ‘natural’ embeded in her ‘compelled’? there is nothing natural about us being here, there is nothing natural about here
•cognitivism: (when talking of representation) a psychology of doing which emphasizes human cognition endowment enabling man to develop intellectually ==> classifications (are easy seen) as properties of mind =/= classifications as materials or materially textured --> “a common way to hear people's experience of this materiality is through metaphors. So the generation of metaphors is closely linked with the shift to texture.” (Bowker)
•behaviorism: a theory of doing that focuses on objectively observable behaviors and discounts independent activities of the minds involved in the doing
-->? behavioral intervention
(footnote on) behavior therapy --> breaking one's loops (of: reverie [mind fleeing across secluded planes], reaction to stimuli [overwhelmed by the speech of the others ~ neurosis], distorted thinking [overstressed emotional reasoning], , ,)
[*]behavior therapy: treatment of neurotic symptoms by training the patient's reactions to stimuli --> *cognitive restructuring* could help Eszter in her artwork? (to reestablish the relationships between stimuli and responses)
(techniques:)
•counterconditioning
•punishment (operant conditioning)
•habituation
•functional analysis
•*behavior intervention plans*
•automatic thought record
•
i can only guess (with cognitive therapy) at the interior landscape of her reverie, her internal reality (~= psyche) [--> i am reminded by this again that knowing anyone'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.]<[...]
(46)[...notes/midday review.txt]%7.1[...] of shared visions of possible and acceptable dreams (of the inovative, as techniques, knowledge, know-how, and the institutions).
...................................
my previous lectures have been communicating something I don't quite understand to an audience that doesn't want to know. but still somehow they became not indifferent to my madness and we managed to establish lines of interest and interference (=/= restoring the phalus to its proper place, or getting a membership)
i am building another wit =/= you know when you are on some kind of auto-respond, those smart fast answers. my wits take ages to come through. in a way i have been slowing down certain kinds of wit. that's also why it is so easy to silence me.
i have been also busy with the timing of understanding. how to keep understanding open and ongoing? there is this standard general sense that becomes very upset when things are not immediately understood (#double-click democratization of communication,) my workings have been perhaps invested in keeping my own (not-fully-)understood alive for a while. if things were instantly understandable we wouldn't be here.
...................................
question at Hoda
how to make her interested in metaphysics? in queer studies and practices
physics is the river of phenomena
meta: above, among, beyond
ontological commitment to:
sense of wonder
sense of sadness
sense of madness
what (else) literature can be if not elegy?
sonic level of sign-making and significance in her act
soft-spoken adjectives
“sigh”: poetry's start-up engine, aaaahh
somewhere between lament and mourning
proper address of the mother
which ‘scene of modern or classical language’ you are opening?
‘sigh’ is important, sigh initiates (many including german and iranian) literature
iranian historical comfort zones
where literature starts with sigh
when and how did you learn to sigh?
sigh is from the family of the specialized languages of complaining?
temporal climate of your remembrance (as mourning) --> related to the past?
mourning and memory are sojourn for her
incorporating the object of (her) loss
(holding onto) the unhappy objects of difference
anger, pain, misery, ...
which (good or bad) feelings saturates her poem?
question of saturation
which feelings modified by which poetics sutures which wounds? زخمبندی
or to be more psychoanalytically correct: where is the wound?
my own affirmative exposure of the unhappy effects of her poetry
what is the image of the ‘better life’ in her poetry?
somehow in the literary habitus she is moving, the origin of descriptive/inscriptive say[...]
(48)[...notes/midday review.txt]%7.6[...]ative of the Rig, things not to do in the pop-up book:
•use as ironic: incongruity in expectations of what is ment and what it will mean in advance
•use to symbolize: as a way of not dealing with sujet supposé savoir
•use of anamorphic gaze: a non-diffractive optical system
--> to be careful (or keep in check) with sequential palindromic notion of pop-up book, to deal with the parsable seesaw motif inherit in the pop-up book Blickmaschin
•use hylomorphic: assumes form is inscribed onto passive matter (by an agent with a design in mind)
•
(relevance should be worked) non-ironic non-symbolic non-anamorphic non-palindromic non-hylomorphic (?)
...................................
towards writing the end of apass dossier
•practices: workshops, (bow and arrow,) ajayeb.net, rigs --> pop-up book, notes, routines, excess,
•trajectory: bibliography, wonder, ongoingness, ontology,
•productions: study as artwork, reading as artwork, bottom-top approach to writing,
•findings: every research practice: must include “body image”, must include “the image of creativity” especially if you are iranian, must employ ontological attention to differential productions, must rework decompose redefine its root-metaphors, must give extensive equipment list, must trace its social connections in a wider ecology of practices, must include a critique of technology,
•moments of composition: a scene animated by some quality, or... taking place as accidents (or not)
key literature, magic wands:
1st stage:
•Richard Sennett: Flesh and Stonne --> learning about body image
•Manuel Delanda: A 1000 Years of Nonlinear History --> learning about material histories
•Eduardo Kohn: How Forests Thinks --> learning about semiotics
•Timothy Morton: Sublime Objects --> learning about ontology
•Avital Ronnel: (lectures and articles) --> learning about poetics
•Donna Haraway: (lectures and articles) --> learning about rhetorics
2nd stage:
•Martha Kenney: Fables of Attention --> *rationality: mixture of the highly rational and the highly fantastic
•Karen Barad: Posthumanist Performativity, Invertebrate Visions --> learning about apparatus
•Eva Hayward: visualizing apparatuses --> her interest in optics, in the optics in which marine invertebrates and people come together through visualizing apparatuses
•Vinciane Despret: The Becomings of Subjectivity in Animal Worlds --> learning about anthropo-zoo-genetics
•Kathleen Stewart: nonrepresentational theory --> other ways of description
•Katie King: technologies of writing --> a better thinking of locals and globals
•
(curiosity ==>) having to figure out how to do something that i don't already know how to do:
•ongoingness of collective practices of knowledge and concern
•talking about (what i[...]
(50)[...notes/midday review.txt]%7.9[...]s 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 metaphorical drive: acting out the soul's metaphor in direct [nonverbal] action. the breath in Lili's work, is the same in her suffocated kiss and scream performance, once hold in and one unleashed, lack of a “breather,” of a “converser,” of a partner in cat's cradle.)--[i like to propose a repatterning: in research environments we play a lot “catch me if you can”: to catching you in action, to capture your ‘knowing’ in action, to capture eros or logos in act, --> #beauty is interested in action]
•it is about “understanding living with contradiction” : making choices without necessarily turning the other choices into something an enemy does --> important for collective research life; “[we] need each other's extremes”; *our activisms are not the same*: to open up to our extremes, to open up to what you are not sure of --> to find ways to be in productive alliance (=/= the notion that everybody has to do everything [tell Xiri])
•(educating oneself) actually know how to explain what somebody else said and not just what you said*** --> figuring out how to disagree with each other as well as agree, that no statement is going to be taken as evidence of being the enemy (--> we face this in apass)
•learning how to recognize authority (as a mentor and participant) (the problem of the inability to deal with authority, common in early feminist movement, traces in Xiri) --> being alert to how hierarchy shut people up that one don't acknowledge the hierarchies that emerge out of that *{alarm ==> hierarchy}*
•in apass i am trying to remember what my peers are doing, and when i see things i think of them, and they are in my citation net[...]
(51)[...notes/midday review.txt]%8.1[...]*almost everybody is organically part of more than one conversation at a time*** (Haraway)
(this is so important to recognize specially in collaborative research environments such as apass)
(in political movement:) working to a kind of clarity of ideological position ==> to do certain kinds of things (that are harder to do if you don't have them [those ideological positions] in the world) --> they are used as *tools* to produce what got called *political correctness* --> always producing those who count and those who don't count*
=/=? feminist movement = ***a kind of vulnerability to not being who you thought you were*** : openness to risk, less of a defensiveness, less of an attack mentality, not shaping each other up into vanguards پيشقراول --> (towards thinking) differential/oppositional consciousness (=/= father, single kind of creators)
“you can know if you are wrong in rather interesting, situated ways”
@Leo
@Maarten
[*]"was”: (so important for iranians [#past]) a geographical place, a place:
•of pain
•of fantasy
•of hope
•of possibility
•of defeat
•of breaking and building
(--> a borderland)
metaphors that are also real places
figurings that are also (always unequally) lived in the flesh
to think “contact zone” instead of “binary shape”
ways of living and technologies, ways of doing the world forcibly brought together in relations of serious inequality, but which do not take the simple shape of dominator and dominated
*“abstractions are precious and they take a huge amount of work to know how to build them well”*
(?how do i know when in working with ajayeb) sometimes you are required (at the same time!):
•to be dead 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 inst[...]
(54)[...notes/midday review.txt]%8.4[...]in to ideologies of many kinds (of progress, deep ecology, of history, and so on)
•to build a little taxonomy (in apass)
•working to give up the series of self-certainties around secularism ==> giving ways to talk to the religious ones : getting to grasp what the world looks like in faith-based communities (=/= check-list of dogma)
•category thinking: get into differential liveliness (with all sorts of inequalities:) *who gets parsed how* [#archive, #articulation, #storytelling] (and thinking about what it means to take up these relationships in cultures saturated with science and technology)
Xiri was doing her research with categories of victim and opressor, and now they suddenly disappeared from her work. that category change or vocabulary change was suspiciously effortless
*remembering is an extremely creative practice (-note to Hoda-)
memories are like ecotone کناربوم (transition area between two adjacent ecosystems)
#(very important concept partly shaped by practices of Darwin into our lives:) “collect” --> lies (necessary?)
the frenzy of the 1700 of surveying nature and collecting speciment ==> bioinfomatic
‘collect’ promises nontransformation
--> metaphors of archive, information-intense ways of thinking about life on earth
*“demonstration” coined by science
...................................
(with Scout Calvert) the ways the digital apparatuses are working, and the kinds of tensions and creativities between the cyber infrastructures and the other kinds informational management discourses displace other book discourses *** --> categories explode in library practice
[Calvert donig brilliant discourse analysis of library sciences --> has direct impact on practices of reading#, different kinds of knowers]
techno-biblio-capital: techno-capital and library practices embedded in each other -->{ [*]technology: assemblages of people, computers, software, discourses, techniques and workarounds that make them function; [*]capital: a social arrangement in which buyers of labor power are entitled to profits and the sellers of labor power to wages and all the effects entailed in that arrangement; [*]techno-capital: techniques, discourse and technologies used to naturalize and derive capital from information and information technologies}
*curiosity = a small and local kind of *freedom[= agency within constrain ==enabling==> skillful meanings], curiosity resists control and has the power to defeat one's favourite self-certainties, can also be commodified for consumer culture specializing in providing private pleasure,
techno-capital objectivism: (neutrality of) collection developemnt and format choices --> power-sensitive judgments
“we will engineer ourselves out of that” --> naive technological optimism; *the technological question is cruicial to questions of power and knowledge[...]
(55)[...notes/midday review.txt]%8.5[...]technological optimism; *the technological question is cruicial to questions of power and knowledge*
-library science tends to position library as power-neutral spaces
-(Foucault: resistence to power is always present)
“freedom to” is always disciplinary (because there is always a particular subject enjoying that) [citizen of liberal democracy who exercises the freedom of representative government, so much as a consumer who exercises freedom of choice of commodities]
patrons as constituent مولفه (==> new knowledge + themselves as knowers) =/= seamless information consumer discursively produced as an unmarked singular independent self-contained stable universal white male heteronormative technophilic subject [<-- this donesn't realy exisit as a person, rather as discoursive productions]
(now) our electronic recreation is work: our every click is surveilled, generating data about our desires and curiosities that feeds back into our formation as techno-capital subjects (@Sven's enthusiasm with social media--how can Sven has a real chance of producing resistance knowledge?) --> this is not freedom! (-an account of freedom for one entails reciprocal unfreedom for others) --> mixtures of work and play in this new economy, (Calvert > Bateson) the meta-communicative nature of *play[= strict rules with genuine freedom, the dual essence of play: curiosity and relationality];
(Calvert arguing for) “knowledge-makers” who engages in creation of situated knowledges by activity adapting, processing and sharing knowledge within the ecology of library ~= *bibliographic apparatus*
(Calvert's heuristic device to imagine what library practices might emerge:) imperfectly literate constituent seekers
-a double consciousness of play, where cognitive sensation amid multiple affectivities are continually teased between assertion and rejection
-a doubled unconscious connoisseurship of realist conventions pressured at new horizons
[Katie King]
...................................
(women's) mini-encounters with god --> kind of materiality of god that don't fit any of the available categories
now-but-not-then quality of continuities
Haraway's deep commitment to the ties of science and competence, pleasure, empowerment, ([*]science:) this craft where you did this incredibly fragile, important, hard work of asking questions of the world in such a way that you might have half a chance of knowing if you are wrong***
you get it “there” ==> (you have a chance of) figuring out something else*
(sustainable life ways that involve) breeds =/= factory farming
Haraway's problem with veganism's moral, wholistic, complex claim that they make on us (also a necessary kind of contemporary witness): that people's practices with animals as food and fiber and work animals, turning into nothing but museum piece[...]
(56)[...notes/midday review.txt]%8.6[...]hat sends people bouncing, takes place as a threshold, hits the senses as a set of provocations, or presents as *a problematic sensed in circuits of reaction already set in motion* @apass
(working with Stewart) writing affect #workshop
a practice of writing ourselves into our worlds as *emergent and disparate ensembles* --> we need the speculative concept of worlding (a term that wins philosophy, criticism, digital studies, and cultural study) in Tehran urgently
-the workshop offers a process of sharing, hearing, questioning, and proposing--for oneself and for the sake of others ==> to start to think through a project or concept by working with words
-we will learning how to read closely and to give feedback that is most useful for the authors
-working with questions:
•How do forms of writing change cultural theory?
•What questions do forms of writing raise about subjects and objects, forms of attention, the possibility of thinking through description?
•How do you describe a scene, a character, an event, a situation, a collective sensibility, a difference, a world?
•What does it mean to add density and texture to description?
...................................
armies of metaphors and metonymies that are to justify war
...................................
“there is something quite special about the recently discovered entities such as climate. these entities cause us to reflect on our very place on Earth and in the cosmos” ==> hyperobjects (“seem to force something on us”) --> i say every object does that, and it is not recent: ajayeb al makhlughat is about the description of that force
hyperobjects Morton
-an object that is “hyper” in relation to some other entity
-they are viscous: they “stick” to beings that are involved with them
-they are “nonlocal” : local manifestation of hyperobject =/= hyperobject
-they exhibit their effects interobjectively : they can be detected in a space that consists of interrelationships between aesthetic properties of objects\
=/= apocalyptic environmentalism
=/= the possibility of transcendental leaps “outside” physical reality
=/= that we are “embedded” in a “lifeworld”
high-dimrnsional phase space
invisible to humans for stretches of time
[*]hypocrisy <== the conditions of the impossibility of a [*]metalanguage= account for things while remaining uncontaminated by them, (~= an “outside”)
--> (Lacanian truth:) “there is no metalanguage” =/= postmodernism's “everything is a metaphor” =/= some metaphors are better than others ~= *there is nowhere to stand outside of things*
the time of hyperobjects is a time of hypocrisy =/= cynicism
[*]weakness <== the gap between phenomenon and thing
[*]lameness <== the fact that all entities are fragi[...]
(57)[...notes/midday review.txt]%9.1[...]iption?
...................................
armies of metaphors and metonymies that are to justify war
...................................
“there is something quite special about the recently discovered entities such as climate. these entities cause us to reflect on our very place on Earth and in the cosmos” ==> hyperobjects (“seem to force something on us”) --> i say every object does that, and it is not recent: ajayeb al makhlughat is about the description of that force
hyperobjects Morton
-an object that is “hyper” in relation to some other entity
-they are viscous: they “stick” to beings that are involved with them
-they are “nonlocal” : local manifestation of hyperobject =/= hyperobject
-they exhibit their effects interobjectively : they can be detected in a space that consists of interrelationships between aesthetic properties of objects\
=/= apocalyptic environmentalism
=/= the possibility of transcendental leaps “outside” physical reality
=/= that we are “embedded” in a “lifeworld”
high-dimrnsional phase space
invisible to humans for stretches of time
[*]hypocrisy <== the conditions of the impossibility of a [*]metalanguage= account for things while remaining uncontaminated by them, (~= an “outside”)
--> (Lacanian truth:) “there is no metalanguage” =/= postmodernism's “everything is a metaphor” =/= some metaphors are better than others ~= *there is nowhere to stand outside of things*
the time of hyperobjects is a time of hypocrisy =/= cynicism
[*]weakness <== the gap between phenomenon and thing
[*]lameness <== the fact that all entities are fragile
imagination as:
•Hume: a bundling of associations
•Kant: the possibility for synthetic judgments a priori
•object-oriented ontology: immanence of thinking to the physical, radicalldically displacing the human by insisting that my being is not everything it is cracked up to be--the being of a paper cup is as profound as mine
which hyperobject you are caught in?
image of writing --> shy, retiring octopuses that squirt out a dissembling (mask, cloak, vortäuschen) ink as they withdraw into the ontological shadow
figure of *mill* (the characters and technologies and ideas of the ages mill around in a state of a mild, semiblissful confusion) =/= Eszter's vortex
my intimate impressions “personal" = footprints of hyperobjects, distorted as they always must be by the entity in which they make their mark
situatedness is now a very uncanny place to be, like being the protagonist of a Wordsworth poem of a character in Blade Runner
*cool impersonality of the scientific language* (now is deprived of its ideological status)
the concept of th[...]
(58)[...notes/midday review.txt]%9.2[...]saster [ontologic] taking place against a stable background [ontic]*
causality after Hume and Kant : causality as a feature of phenomena, rather than things in themselves ==> humans are not totally in charge of assigning significance and value to events that can be statistically measured
entities that become visible through post-Humean and post-Kantian statistical causality --> anthropogenic global warming
causal factoid
humiliators [there is no center and we don't inhabit it]:
•Copernicus
•Darwin
•Freud (displacing the human from the very center of psychic activity)
•Marx (displacing human social life with economic organization)
•Heidegger
•Derrida (displacing the human from the center of meaning-making)
•Nietzsche
•Deleuze and Guattari
•
~= there is no edge =/= (film Lucy or Neil Tyson series suggesting that) there is an edge (of time to see everything perfectly), in some (privilaged) transcendental sphere of pure freedom, Lucy's chair literally sitting a VIP box beyond the edge --> anthropocentrism: the idea of a privilaged transcendental sphere
Kant --> (although we are limited in finitude) our transcendental faculties are at least metaphorically floating in space beyond the edge of the universe --> #milieu #tasavof #sufism
...هزار و یک hezaro yek
universe of trillions of finitudes
[*]thing: a rift between what it is and how it appears
(Morton > Herman:) human consciousness wants *to preserve knowledge as a special kind of relation to the world quite different from the relations that raindrops and lizards have to the world* (<-- so dangerous and so difficult to resist [<-- next level of situated knowledges] -->) also want to claim that the very status of [his] utterance is somehow special <== (human) ‘thought’ is given a unique ability to negate and transcend immediate experience
(claims that the human doesn't exist ==>) elevating the strucure of human ‘thought’ to the ontological pinnacle سرمنزل
everything (such as modernity) banks on a certain forms of ontology and epistemology to secure its coordinates
speculative realism, a rogue machinery
saving power:
•expecting an eschatological solution from the sky
•a revolution in consciousness
•a people's army seizing control of the state
•
obsessive robots (that hold open the sliding doors of history just as they appear to be snapping shut, imprisoning us in modernity forever)
*distance*: (the schizophrenic defense, “object in mirror,”) a psychic and ideological construct designed to protect me from the nearness of things
-the concept of ‘nature’ is (such) an “object in mirror” (#amazon project)
بنداز دور mythical land aw[...]
(62)[...notes/midday review.txt]%9.5[...]ntury: (Kate's dialectical negativity) to define and work in negative way, an ‘exit,’ a ‘way out’ --> transcendental [---> go to Singh, Khan,]
•question of contemporary reality --> Kate does a totalizing elevation (like many other artists)
•the realm of obedience --> artists’ childish attitude of never accepting someone else's authority (#fighting the system; should we fight the system systematically? @Nicolas)
...................................
basically everything i do is related to the question of reading --> make us better readers
my excessive use of footnote --> the most decisive indication of the concerns of a text are to be found in its margins & no ‘proper’ starting/ending point for reading
each of my performances/projects reflect on their own status as examples of reading/misreading =/= achieving correct reading
literature: the problem of misreading (=/= the language it uses)
[with De Man]
>
i have become sensitive to the systematic avoidance of the problem of reading, of the interpretative or hermeneutic moment, in literary analysis and art
all language-use is tropological (~ rhetorical)
catachresis (the misuse of a word) <--fluid--> metaphor (the non-literal application of a word) <--fluid--> metonymy (in which the name of one thing is put for that of another related to it)
readability: the possibility of producing an essential/definitive reading --> closure =/= further interpretation
a language which would perfectly fit my multiple identity--persian consciousness
emboding (belonging to) two bordering cultures: western university and persian tradition of subjectivity
•mixture of English and Farsi
•spontaneous shift of style
•
•
...................................
learning from academia: committed to excessive rigor + sriousness of purpose
...................................
(Erikson's) developmental stages characterized by a psychosocial crisis of two conflicting forces: (each stage that came before and that follows has its own ‘crisis’)
[conflictual psychosocial crisis --> virtue ~-> (answers to) existential questions]
-(0-18 months) Trust / Mistrust --> Hope
[Can I trust the world?]
==> what constitutes dangerous situations (in life)
world is undependable, unpredictable, and possibly a dangerous place
[*]trust: syntonic quotient
[*]mistrust: diatonic quotient
--> oral stage
-(2-4 years) Autonomy / Shame-Doubt --> Will
[Is it okay to be me?]
venture out to assert their will ==> learning about environment
lack/excess/ridiculed restriction ==> shame --> doubt (in dealing with, handling problems)
--> anal stage
-(4-5 years) Initiative / Guilt --> Purpose
[Is it okay for me to do, mo[...]
(63)[...notes/midday review.txt]%9.7[...]opment of libido]:
in Iranians: over-fed (more than 12 months) ==> dependency, needing stimulant
in Balkan: insufficiently fed ==> طلبکار و ناراضی talabkar narazi dissatisfied and manipulative (in need of oral stimulant for example sarcasm) [*narazi <~~--> tavagho’ توقع*]
(--> early experiences of love bound up with various kinds of suffering, and later in adulthood one will look for familiar forms of suffering)
•oral fixation: everything related to pleasure + pain + security + sex are all bound together and located in the mouth
**anal fixation [bowel and bladder 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[...]
(64)[...notes/midday review.txt]%10[...]ود goriz az khod : need to be everywhere but here]
•zamineye sargardani بیقراری restlessness (~=> escape) --sold--> nomadic
•zamineye narezayati نارضایتی dissatisfaction --sold--> critical
•zamineye konjkavi کنجکاوی curiosity --sold--> knowledge
•zamineye majarajuyi ماجراجویی adventure --sold--> wonder
(a [not always wanted?] form of relatedness in interpersonal relationships)
mentor ~= rahnama راهنما
(when someone is) angry = anxiety + depressed + obsessive–compulsive vasvasi + pessimist bad-bin + negative + offender motejavez
direct speech رک صریح بی پرده rok sarih bi-parde harf zadan = saying the real and truth in the right place that is necessary and almost an obligation =/= parde-dari provocation
...................................
note on the workshop of anarchive in Zsenne apass summer 2018
(my issues with Manning's presentation of) process philosophy --> a system-builder mode of thinking --> *saying something (right) about every single thing at once*
-process philosophy puts forward the will and desire for “change,” therefore it developes a resistant to change (?)
-it tend to be a metaphysics without physics [?!] (when a metaphysics provoke less interest for ‘-physics’ and more for the ‘meta-’ /and why is that a problem?) [==> Barad is much more useful for me now]
-the real question of the workshop remained “how to define what i like (such as ‘anarchive’) that it remains open at all time to the ‘more’ and ‘multi’?” <-- and they provide an elusive non-definition of the term, impossible to pin down. because accourding to Manning when you pin down an idea/practice by its definition it becomes “fixed,” and fixity is categorically bad at all times <-- there is a desire to create a hygienic concept immune to corruption and hierarchy. Manning is alert to certain hierarchies ==> not acknowledging other hierarchies that precisely emerge out of that (--> preserve the ‘health’ of the idea of anarchive. [<-- maybe we need to let concepts rot? --> decompose])
Manning's elusiveness: (i have become hyper-conscious about qualities that endow infinite freedom of thought to human subjects...)
•elusive thought طفره (=/= volatile فرار) --> Spiderman's mode of freedom (-you can never catch him + infinite flexibility + ) (the effect of Spiderman on himself is that his moves are “amazing”)
•elusive thought ~->? mystical
•elusive thought =/= modest thought limited by curiosity
•
“hierarchy as the bad object” ==>
•to escape thinking about your own agency (for example what your name and reputation does? what are the precise responsible consequences of your particular position? your position involves not only the book you write or the argument you make, it involves also your name and reputation, the currency o[...]
(65)[...notes/midday review.txt]%10.7[...]r />
•elusive thought =/= modest thought limited by curiosity
•
“hierarchy as the bad object” ==>
•to escape thinking about your own agency (for example what your name and reputation does? what are the precise responsible consequences of your particular position? your position involves not only the book you write or the argument you make, it involves also your name and reputation, the currency of your gender, your mode of charisma and authority, your affective techniques, your network enacted, and so on.)
•to escape naming the engineering talents and skills that are necessary to assemble (for example the senseLab website)
•to escape epistemological commitment (the question of: **how is my vocabulary crafted for whom?**)
•
it is not clear (but i can maybe guess about it, Manning's commitments are):
•(learning from Haraway:) what they have witnessed [hierarchies? ==commit==> anti-archive]
•(learning from Despret:) which bodies they care for [the autists? ==commit==> elusive creativity]
•(learning from Kenney:) where are their alliances پیوستگیها [with multiculturalism? ==commit==> democracy's logos of difference]
•(learning from Verran:) how their equipments are crafted [by processual metaphysics? ==commit==> infinity]
•(learning from Stewart:) how their rigor is built [by conceptual description? ==commit==> non-habituality]
(because of her immense intelligence she cannot be normal, but that doesn't mean she can prescribe normativity, and issue a command [in terms of the “de-” or “anti-“] or order a claim of reality [in terms of “an-” or “ab-“])
-Manning's “philosophy of event” (=/= multispecies ethnography, i prefer working with the animal idea, because there is no way you can make philosophy out of animal, they always relentlessly contingent and historically materially specific)
-Manning's notion of impersonality ==> ‘people are exchangble’ + ‘the work is what is important and not “you”’ [--> *techniques of impersonality* has being used in sufism and iranian mysticism. i have seen how the special effects of impersonality is used in political projects, making of soldiers, master-disciple relationship, and so on
-look at the cool impersonality of the scientific language (depriving them of their own ideological status)
-early 19th century modern public space was reinventing and operating with impersonality: individuals are systematically habituated not to return the gaze of the other.
=/= i am actually very much attracted to persons. i am interested in their personality. the “you” is what i fall in love with, not the ‘abstract link'--> (Manning's) peripheral perceptivity =/= (i am trying to learn) to describe what is in front of me (which is never easy)]
-Manning's notion of “the problem gives the question to be asked of it” =/= the question problematizes
[...]
(68)[...notes/midday review.txt]%10.8[...]imagination
(rethought -->) [*]analysis: essentially as imaginative activity (or an activity of the imaginal realm) as it plays through all of life --> [the idea of one's “fable” ~] ***what is the fantasy he has of what he does?***
analysis is an *enactment*
enactment necessitates *myth*: a tale about its ritual
mysogyny <-- manifestation of the western, protestant, scientific, apollonic ego
****Hillman (penetrating the analysis in accordance with mythical perspective):
*transference --> erotic*
*unconscious --> imaginal*
*neurosis --> dionysian*
-what are the manifestations of ego in ajayeb?
-please let's have a darker kind of light...
(Keats:) world = the vale of soul-making }==> you'll find out the use of the world
(Hillman:) psychoanalysis: something one learns through “analysis” --> processes of the mind, heart, and soul (that were not included in the field of psychology in the past century)
(Jung:) depth psychology: an ontology of the soul based on archetypes
(a -logy that allows the) soul's speculative function
Hillman proposing a deep uncertainty concerning the root metaphor, the true myth of the work (of analysis)
mystes
epoptes (an initiate in the Eleusinian mysteries; one who has attended the epopteia)
shaman
an initiator
guru of the body*
root metaphor of psychology (?)
(until 1700: pattern = patron) --Hillman--> to discover this pattern [the general myth of our field] = to search for our patron: the father who creates and is the creative principle in us
[because] [we are uncertain of what we are:] we are uncertain of our author, from whom would come both our authority and our authenticity
tracing things back --> preserves of the mother-childhood and family (dominanting psychology) --> we come to her: ***materialism = maternalism (in acceptable disguise)***
...................................
(with the critical bestiaries magazine idea) is my work about defining a new mode of cultural discourse?
...................................
-philosophy (like mathematics) is a priori disciplines (or has an a priori methodology) at its core
-the posibility of *true answers* for “artistic questions”(?) --? can anybody outside your field be made to care whether you're right?
a priori =/= contingent
higher-order truths of...
self-supporting community of experts (= trap)
“philosophy is garbage, but the history of garbage is scholarship” -Burton Dreben
...................................
act of cultural and economic exchange
act of reciprocal exchange, of creative mutuality (to benefit in a myriad of ways related to our professi[...]
(69)[...notes/midday review.txt]%11.6[...]imeric Pragmatism in Animal-Filled Media
Zolmat and the Black Box as Media Beyond
Primordial House and Suffering Landscape
Changing Inside”, a multi-media performance and intervention with Mia Habib and Jassem Hindi
Four Oriental Cartography of the East
About Dense Properties
...................................
shift in our idea of nature not any more a source of *fecundity: how we relate abundance in nature to the way we live ourselves
we have to fight to keep things democratic (itself a privileged idea) and not autocratic when it comes to climate change
in Frozen II animated movie, Elsa build her way out of climate (magic = technology)
to make a debate point =/= trying to answer your question
(Hegel) negative values are much more clearer than affirmative values
the dangerous and dominant belief that whatever problems we face in this society the misfits (particular exceptional individual) can change it all
...................................
(from being an artist to artist researcher)
to articulate and demonstrate with brilliance ‘what you know’ --to--> to be able to exquisitely explain ‘how you know what you know’ [--?--> *metacognition: thinking about one's own thinking = reflection (thinking about
what we know) + self-regulation (managing how we go about learning)]
-metacognitives kills: to get good at recognizing flaws or gaps in one's own thinking + articulate thought processes + revise efforts
*classroom = mirror* (process of stepping back to see what you are doing)
(useful for artists) sciences of understanding:
•anthropology
•psychology
my whole work is about two things now:
•to think cumulatively (=/= epistemic breaks) --> more you know more your are interested in
•to think by layering (=/= singleness of partisan meaning) --> what you do is based on previous work
my research in storytelling:(from premodern) *describe the world* [bestiaries] --to--> (modern necessity to) *calculate the world* [recognizing a calculated world --how--> *secularization of interest* (in monsters, religious iconography, etc.)
adventure time tv series
educational model for children how to become post industrial liberal subjects --> adventure of imperialist mentality
the choreography of flexibility and solidity
Finn is the body from nowhere by example, he goes to dimensions of fire, ice, dream, etc. and his ontology of knowledge and identity remains intact (he grows up like a good old cowboy) =/= you look at the land from the ice and you don't see the same reality if you look at it from the fire realm. ice/gas/water, you are always looking at it from somewhere. Harraway named it “situated knowledges”. and it seems these locations [...]
(71)[...notes/midday review.txt]%12.3[...]ions
answers don't show your level of knowledge, but the questions you have does
•generative nature of melancholia [*melancholia ==> teaching*]
•(artist's) writing with pearls of wisdom =/= referential writing
three problematic loci in artistic research:
•garden
•archive
•map
*is every garden zoological? --?--> training for future (imperialism)
good gardener ~= good (feeling, caring) imperialist
-enlightenment approach to captivity --> new sense of civilization (what is proper)
-removing any visible explicit means of captivity (animals appear move freeling, as if they wish to be there) <-- affective engagement
animal ~= border figure allowing institution to move between human world and animal world
science for empire --> mobilization of wonder (human capacity for curiosity that makes us human are mobilized in the service of questionable political goals)
[*]democracy: ‘farmandahi (commanding) = farmanbari (obeying)’
...................................
...thoughts expire on contact with words as quickly as words expire on contact with thoughts
(Pavic's Khazars)
two examples of metamarketing
1. Pleasantville (1998)
2. The Devil Wears Prada (2006)
(my flourishing in the scholl was always highly) teacher-dependent --?--> being social [=/= genius]
...................................
government (counting heads) =/= complexity (how to make mixity work)
morality --> ‘good =/= bad’ (incarnated in different things) [--> philosophical =/= value system ترجیحات --> sociological]
ethics --> assemblages
...................................
#cat's cradle
nature = figures + stories + images (~= topos, commonplace)
paying attention to nature like a child <-- Haraway
[*]trope: a verse interpolated into a liturgical text عبادات to embellish or amplify its meaning
language --> material-semiotic flesh
liturgical possibilities of nature
•Christian liturgical year
•Zaratusztrian nowruz
•star wars --?--> practice of turning tropes into worlds [--> war of imagess]
•war of words
•
(agonistic fields:)
military combat
sexual domination
security maintenance
market strategy
technical environmental design )<-- does all sorts of boundary crossing)
culturally specific apparatuses of bodily production (--> clean and dirt --> forms of embodiment)
writing: to create metaphors [= reconstitue what counts as knowledge] --> materially implode (~ art, this is what we were practicing in my fable workshop)
technology: a form of life
language: a form of l[...]
(73)[...notes/midday review.txt]%12.6[...]ial [=/= genius]
...................................
government (counting heads) =/= complexity (how to make mixity work)
morality --> ‘good =/= bad’ (incarnated in different things) [--> philosophical =/= value system ترجیحات --> sociological]
ethics --> assemblages
...................................
#cat's cradle
nature = figures + stories + images (~= topos, commonplace)
paying attention to nature like a child <-- Haraway
[*]trope: a verse interpolated into a liturgical text عبادات to embellish or amplify its meaning
language --> material-semiotic flesh
liturgical possibilities of nature
•Christian liturgical year
•Zaratusztrian nowruz
•star wars --?--> practice of turning tropes into worlds [--> war of imagess]
•war of words
•
(agonistic fields:)
military combat
sexual domination
security maintenance
market strategy
technical environmental design )<-- does all sorts of boundary crossing)
culturally specific apparatuses of bodily production (--> clean and dirt --> forms of embodiment)
writing: to create metaphors [= reconstitue what counts as knowledge] --> materially implode (~ art, this is what we were practicing in my fable workshop)
technology: a form of life
language: a form of life
create a critique
create a difference (however small, partial, modest, without narrative, without guarantee)
oneiros
oneiric
technical axis |__
/ mythical axis
textual axis
a cosmos furnished in _ian style
•Aristotelian style: actors are self-moving modular single-substance subjects with adhering accidents ==Haraway==> all else is ground, resource, matrix, screen, secret to be revealed, fair game to be hunted by the hero (<-- our video games are designed in this style)
•
others with reduced powers of self-direction: women, people of color, the sick, nonhuman nature --> need to be *patient*
(metaphysical fatigue)
***patience =/= passivity***
self-invisible transcendent subjects out on a noble journey to report on embodied nature
the problem of (pre-discursive:) believing that nature and society are really fundamentally there
--> conjuring tricks of establishing categorical purity (of nature, of culture, of nonhuman, of human)
(Haraway's three webs of discourse:)
1. cultural studies: a set of discourses about the (irreducible specificity of) apparatus of bodily/cultural production (=/= comparative culture studies)
2. feminist theory/project: view from the marked bodies (in stories, discourses, practices), w[...]
(74)[...notes/midday review.txt]%12.7[...]exual domination
security maintenance
market strategy
technical environmental design )<-- does all sorts of boundary crossing)
culturally specific apparatuses of bodily production (--> clean and dirt --> forms of embodiment)
writing: to create metaphors [= reconstitue what counts as knowledge] --> materially implode (~ art, this is what we were practicing in my fable workshop)
technology: a form of life
language: a form of life
create a critique
create a difference (however small, partial, modest, without narrative, without guarantee)
oneiros
oneiric
technical axis |__
/ mythical axis
textual axis
a cosmos furnished in _ian style
•Aristotelian style: actors are self-moving modular single-substance subjects with adhering accidents ==Haraway==> all else is ground, resource, matrix, screen, secret to be revealed, fair game to be hunted by the hero (<-- our video games are designed in this style)
•
others with reduced powers of self-direction: women, people of color, the sick, nonhuman nature --> need to be *patient*
(metaphysical fatigue)
***patience =/= passivity***
self-invisible transcendent subjects out on a noble journey to report on embodied nature
the problem of (pre-discursive:) believing that nature and society are really fundamentally there
--> conjuring tricks of establishing categorical purity (of nature, of culture, of nonhuman, of human)
(Haraway's three webs of discourse:)
1. cultural studies: a set of discourses about the (irreducible specificity of) apparatus of bodily/cultural production (=/= comparative culture studies)
2. feminist theory/project: view from the marked bodies (in stories, discourses, practices), where *the description of the situation is never self-evident* + need for an elsewhere
3. science studies: technologies for establishing matters of facts, ‘technoscience =/= science and technology’, artifacts with politics, science as practice + culture
can't cradle
one person can build up a large repertoire of string figures on a single pair of hands --> the figures can be passed back and forth on the hands of several players
--> *embodied analytical skils* [<-- my goal im apass]
--> making + passing on cultural interesting patterns
=/= making a tangled mess
=/= theory of everything (--> for example string theory, stc.)
=/= war game ==>{models of knowledge building, tropes for one's own practice}
=/= trials of strength passing as critical theory (~ heroic, agonistic encounters)
...................................
Delamont & Williams --> (Haraway's) thread metaphor ~= *metamethod*
[...]
(75)[...notes/midday review.txt]%12.7[...]re, of nonhuman, of human)
(Haraway's three webs of discourse:)
1. cultural studies: a set of discourses about the (irreducible specificity of) apparatus of bodily/cultural production (=/= comparative culture studies)
2. feminist theory/project: view from the marked bodies (in stories, discourses, practices), where *the description of the situation is never self-evident* + need for an elsewhere
3. science studies: technologies for establishing matters of facts, ‘technoscience =/= science and technology’, artifacts with politics, science as practice + culture
can't cradle
one person can build up a large repertoire of string figures on a single pair of hands --> the figures can be passed back and forth on the hands of several players
--> *embodied analytical skils* [<-- my goal im apass]
--> making + passing on cultural interesting patterns
=/= making a tangled mess
=/= theory of everything (--> for example string theory, stc.)
=/= war game ==>{models of knowledge building, tropes for one's own practice}
=/= trials of strength passing as critical theory (~ heroic, agonistic encounters)
...................................
Delamont & Williams --> (Haraway's) thread metaphor ~= *metamethod*
(from) [analytical] tangled yarn ball --to--> [activist] can't cradle
Galison's intercalation [molecular interweaving] --> exposing an overt technology (the radar wants to be seen as both winner of war + advancing pure physics)
~/=
Haraway's weaving [textile dissection] --> exposing a covert technology (patriarchy, eugenics, colonialism, racism embedded behind the public face of conservation, education, biopolitical establishment)
biology = politics (by other means)
cyborg
•has no original eden it was banished from
•has no dust it can return to
==Haraway==> situated partial knowledges
gendering the laboratory ==>
•modest witness
•new forms of gender (male virility,)
touching the elephant and knowing
touching different part of the world
touching a human body and guessing at the riddle
by touching the different parts => some are running, rotting, flickering, etc.
for doing anatomy you need a corpse (that means you already rule out things such as eating)
archeological anthropology
human-animal stories
hunting each other / together
domestication
Tsing
the greedy beast within us
collaborative garden (feed together)
descriptive practices of poetics and natural history
mission of all atlases to characterize (not simply inventory) phenomena
(to characterize, not invent; mixed in ajayebnameh عجایبالم[...]
(76)[...notes/midday review.txt]%12.8[...]value” in ajayeb?
(sun, photosynthetic, micro-organisms, etc.)
fermentation, photosynthesis, respiration
ajayeb is the (shared, individual, or experienced) “memory” of which organizational layer or process of which communities of practice?
rethinking “invisible hand”
(dynamic between supply and demand. “planning system”?)
... against ... the dualisms that have been transmitted to us in the history of philosophy (matter vs. meaning, micro vs. macro, inorganic vs. organic vs. social, realism vs. social constructivism, etcetera.) and argue in favor of a new ontology according to which “mechanisms are largely causal, but they do not necessarily involve linear causality”
Neo-Materialism =/= Creationism: matter is an inert receptacle for forms that come from the outside imposed by an exterior psychic agency: “Let there be light!”
--> matter has morphogenetic capacities of its own and does not need to be commanded into generating form.
one of the idealisms that have been generated by postmodernism: that we know already how all past discourses have been generated, that we have the secret of all past conceptual systems, and that we can therefore engage in meta-theorizing based on that knowledge
Delanda: I am not convinced that avoiding dualities is the key to a new way of thinking (particularly if one simply adds new ones: modernism-postmodernism, rhizome-tree, power-resistance).
reified generalities that do not really exist: The Market, The State, and The People.
The duality emerges when one ignores the zone of overlap and reifies the averages.
...................................
[in ajayebnameh عجایب نامه...] to map the morphogenetic changes of the real
... bewildering heterogeneity of registers in ajayebnameh عجایب نامه
... treating entities trafficking in the futures
active capacities of description
this is not a project of repopulating the social sciences with nonhuman beings
the symbolic function of language is about detecting salient features of the world that can be organized in contrastive sets
(can we think not in contrasts?)
this is not about trying to think like X, that would be transposition of a relational experience at another scale
(non-religious semiotic model)
bodily disposition ==(produces)==> perspective ==(produces)==> self
the beings in ajayeb (عجایب) are ‘alive’ because of their ability to ‘do things’ in the ways they come to represent and interpret through me
recruiting scores of new actants so as to render the theater of worldly interactions more complex and interesting
what is the sociocultural world we cons[...]
(78)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%13.1[...]he places i come from, it is always a shock, happening, a truth-event]
-each word (God, Angle, Jinn جن, fog, etc.) brought into its own network,
-what are contrasts and of category mistakes particular to each
-and their crossings----and what is the vocabulary specific to each crossing
the network of associations necessary for the exercise of religion without bracketing off its ontological requirements.
explanatory rage (tavahoshe roshangari توحش روشنگری) --✕--> networks necessary for religious meaning
(the aim is) deploying the network (of ajayeb)
it is about grasping ajayeb's beings not as substances but as *trajectories*--and give them a more precise *direction.*
what is important in working these modes what kinds of possibilities are “afforded” to the investigator, myself. what kind of actor am i?
(specifications of the type of beings that the mode leaves in its wake)
**other beings necessary for its existence**
(my personal/public question, what other beings are necessary for my existence? and therefore for your existence as well.) ----> the heterogeneity of the actors needed for the pursuit of any course of action
*metamorphosis (a mode of existence first detected in psychogenesis?) what we encounter whenever we address the manner in which existents are transformed or transform in order to subsist (zist زیست)
-defined by a certain kind of continuity and obtained by a certain type of discontinuity
-metamorphosis is about crisis, possession, alienation,
-metamorphosis sharply contrasts *cure* (~= ritual)
-allowing for installing unconscious (states,) crush, posses, bewitch, kill,
-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 [...]
(79)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%13.2[...]>
(Descola:) ‘naturalism’ is only one of four ways in which connections between humans and nonhumans can be established
contrasts:
*reference chain*
*reproduction*
(Latour use of the term) *contrast* = mode of existence
immutable mobiles: to reach something far away through long arrays of instruments, you need to make sure that *necessities and constants are transported* with as little transformation as possible ==> to “reach” those entities
geometry, mathematical entities, inscriptions of all sorts ==> carry heavy-duty immutable mobiles
(Hoda's immutable mobiles are: [?])
[*]matter = highly elaborated, historically dated, and anthropologically situated hybrids***
(=/= ‘transportation of indisputable necessities through chains of cause and effect’ <-- a category mistake)
(for physicist:) “the ways we know the world = the ways in which the world behaves”
(less for chemist)
(not at all for engineer)
([in a way my work has been about investigating vectors and] *directions*) from knower to what is to be known
the beings of ajayeb face lots of causes and lots of effects
metaphysical consequences of evolutionary theory
***(Latour's positive veiw on) to be a Darwinian: you have to abandon the notion that all of those ‘organisms’ rest in ‘nature’ --> [*]organim: a hybrid production of representation & reference
*the widespread ideology of the *blind watch maker* : a blind cause acting from behind and reaching the optimum haphazardly
(has substituted the ‘mere transportation of indisputable necessities’ for *the risks taken by individual organisms to perpetuate, sustain, and reproduce themselves*)
&
*the widespread ideology of the *intelligent designer* :an intelligence dragging organisms towards the optimum by some predefined plans
}--> both are grounded in the *ideology of making and mechanism* ==>
•organisms are erased as individual actors
•organisms are transformed into the carriers if indisputable necessities
--> both tried to save individual organims from their apparent meaninglessness by adding to them an overarching narrative recited by an otherworldly divinity
(‘necessities’ are often imported)
(Assmans's) *mosaic division*
(=/= a sort of relaxed attitude towards truth)
divisions ahad never beed asked before whether or not they were the “true” ones. they could be added to one another, translated into one another, piled on top of one another for additional safety --✕--> *contesting the claims to existence of all divinities but one*
==> a connection between the question (irrelevant until then) of worship and a question of an absolute (=/= relative) difference between true and false
[...]
(84)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%13.7[...]interior history, exoteric in the etymological sense of the word, subtle history whose events do not take place in the exterior world of objects, but in the subtle world of lived states, events in the Malakut, in the world of the ‘Soul,’ in the ‘Heaven’ or the ‘Hell’ which man carries within himself.
(and this is precisely what is ‘changing someone's story’ is about. ‘let me change the rhythm of your story. let me change your history.’ ~= storytelling)
this history----interior wild facts----intermingles with his wills, and objectives itself in the web of exterior facts. these are events of ajayebnameh, Shahname شاهنامه, Qur'an قرآن, Grail Cycle and so on, the events of this history (inspire parables? and) make up sacred history (tarikh-e ghodsi تاریخ قدسی) =/= empirical historicity
*the question always remains:
-what *is of this world?
-what is the organ of perception?
-does oneself need to ‘belong’ to this sacred history in order to come to pass (in the Malakut ملکوت)? (being born in it, etc.)
[what was your fetish again? what was your Qibla قبله? what would be...]
platonic ideals, periodization of sacred history
ملا صدرا Mullah Sadra revolutionized the metaphysics of being, in reversing the order of priority of essence (mahiat ماهیت). he gives priority to existence (vojud وجود) : that means, it is the act and mode of existing that determine the nature of essence. the act of existing is in effect capable of multitude of degrees of intensification or of degradation.
(عجایبِ ajayeb-e) man: human-faced demon (ajene ensan-nama اجنه انساننما) / ... / ... / sublime state of perfect Man
-and body passing through a multitude of states : Hayula هیولا? / ... / jesm (جسم corruptible worldly body) / ... / divine body (jesm-e elahi جسم الهی)
Mullah Sadra is the philosopher of metamorphoses and palingenesis (estehaleh-ha استحالهها & rastakhiz-ha رستاخیزها)
*phenomenology of the act of existing*
there was a time (12th century--my favorite) when Avicenna ابن سینا was translated into Latin (in Toledo,) a moment when our cultures in east and west corresponded to the same type, a moment when the concept of science was inseparable from its spiritual context. ----> think of the alchemists for whom the operation undertaken in the laboratory only attained its end if it was accompanied by an interior transmutation of the man--that is to say only if it effected the interior birth (of spiritual man)
Alchemist's chemistry
Nicolas Oresme's geometry
[out of history]
Descartes’ geometry is also out of history, discontinuous
(for Corbin) Modern / Western venture = application of the intelligence to the scientific investigation of a nature that has been desacralised[...]
(85)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%13.9[...]his history (inspire parables? and) make up sacred history (tarikh-e ghodsi تاریخ قدسی) =/= empirical historicity
*the question always remains:
-what *is of this world?
-what is the organ of perception?
-does oneself need to ‘belong’ to this sacred history in order to come to pass (in the Malakut ملکوت)? (being born in it, etc.)
[what was your fetish again? what was your Qibla قبله? what would be...]
platonic ideals, periodization of sacred history
ملا صدرا Mullah Sadra revolutionized the metaphysics of being, in reversing the order of priority of essence (mahiat ماهیت). he gives priority to existence (vojud وجود) : that means, it is the act and mode of existing that determine the nature of essence. the act of existing is in effect capable of multitude of degrees of intensification or of degradation.
(عجایبِ ajayeb-e) man: human-faced demon (ajene ensan-nama اجنه انساننما) / ... / ... / sublime state of perfect Man
-and body passing through a multitude of states : Hayula هیولا? / ... / jesm (جسم corruptible worldly body) / ... / divine body (jesm-e elahi جسم الهی)
Mullah Sadra is the philosopher of metamorphoses and palingenesis (estehaleh-ha استحالهها & rastakhiz-ha رستاخیزها)
*phenomenology of the act of existing*
there was a time (12th century--my favorite) when Avicenna ابن سینا was translated into Latin (in Toledo,) a moment when our cultures in east and west corresponded to the same type, a moment when the concept of science was inseparable from its spiritual context. ----> think of the alchemists for whom the operation undertaken in the laboratory only attained its end if it was accompanied by an interior transmutation of the man--that is to say only if it effected the interior birth (of spiritual man)
Alchemist's chemistry
Nicomist's chemistry
Nicolas Oresme's geometry
[out of history]
Descartes’ geometry is also out of history, discontinuous
(for Corbin) Modern / Western venture = application of the intelligence to the scientific investigation of a nature that has been desacralised, which must be violated in order to find out its laws (and to subject its forces to the human will)
the dichotomies or dissociation of thought/being, being/action
حیدر آملی Haydar Amuli's delinkings (destroying precisely certain dialectics or dichotomies:)
...................................
Holul حلول, Sodur صدور, Tajasod تجسد
(immanence, transcendence, incarnation)
(the eidos reflected in the mirror--divine in the prophet--remains untouched by the mirror, because the real is not ‘incarnated’ in the eidos, the reflected image)
-alame khiali عالم خیالی: imaginaire/Hollywood
[...]
(86)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%14[...]
asemanhaye napeydaye nojumi آسمانهای ناپیدای نجومی (celectial skies invisible)
dadehaye vahyi دادههای وحی (data of revelation)
Avicenna (selselemaratebe ebn-sinaie oghul سلسله مراتب ابن سینایی عقول):
[each aghl عقل or angle with its own sky and nafs نفس ==> a whole universe for itself]
sending from one aghl to the other, till the 10th aghl = unlimited human nafs
10th aghl ~= philosopher's active aghl ~= ruh al ghodos روح القدس
(سهروردی) in Sohrevardi: angle and nafs are in the same trip
aghle hayulayi عقل هیولایی
[Averroesian/ابن رشدی =/= Avicennian/ishraghi/اشراقی] ==> destruction of the intermediate world of angles ==> secularization :
sociology <-- theology <-- angelology
(divine materiliazation --> social materialization)
totalitarianism <== ideology <-- spirituality (~=? intellectual immaterialism)
(?signing in iran:)
ghodsi shodane nahadha = orfi shodane maba'adotabi
قدسی شدن نهادها = عرفی شدن مابعدالطبیعه
sacredization of institutions = secularization of metaphysics
the tragedy is not the affirmation of individualism, it is rather the forgetting of the infinite entity :
non-mystic monotheism ==> a personalized (incarnation of) God (--> everything ‘personal’ is subject to death and negation) ==> entrance of God in collectivism
تغییر ماهیت عالم taghyire mahiate alam (change in the essence of the universe) is the subject of study for iranian ancient philosophies and cosmologies
contemplation (moshahede nazari مشاهده نظری) ~= action
knowledge ~= creating (that insensible speculative world) (the world of ajayeb and its siblings is created and stated in my inner vision)
[hush-e nazari هوش نظری, ability to abstract, is the ability to look from above]
[(jaleb budan-e) heja-e bimani هجای بیمعنی, interest for meaningless morpheme]
(human's function:) the transfigurative function of the transcendental machine (karkhaneye mojarad-sazi کارخانه مجردسازی, by Sheikh Muhammad Tabatabayi)
*ta'vil bayad dar jahate axe harkate jami va moshtarek bashad تأویل باید در جهت عکس حرکت جمعی و مشترک باشد
(interpretation/hermeneutics =/= commons/collectivism)
(according to Sohrevardi:) haghighate lafzi حقیقت لفظی (verbal/literal truth) --> the metaphorical entity
face/surate/صورت/apparition/majaz/مجاز/trope --> truth/reality
(سهروردی Sohrevardi's accord:) up in the highest point in the hierarchy of existence there is nur-al-anvar نورالانوار (l[...]
(87)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%14.1[...]ity :
non-mystic monotheism ==> a personalized (incarnation of) God (--> everything ‘personal’ is subject to death and negation) ==> entrance of God in collectivism
تغییر ماهیت عالم taghyire mahiate alam (change in the essence of the universe) is the subject of study for iranian ancient philosophies and cosmologies
contemplation (moshahede nazari مشاهده نظری) ~= action
knowledge ~= creating (that insensible speculative world) (the world of ajayeb and its siblings is created and stated in my inner vision)
[hush-e nazari هوش نظری, ability to abstract, is the ability to look from above]
[(jaleb budan-e) heja-e bimani هجای بیمعنی, interest for meaningless morpheme]
(human's function:) the transfigurative function of the transcendental machine (karkhaneye mojarad-sazi کارخانه مجردسازی, by Sheikh Muhammad Tabatabayi)
*ta'vil bayad dar jahate axe harkate jami va moshtarek bashad تأویل باید در جهت عکس حرکت جمعی و مشترک باشد
(interpretation/hermeneutics =/= commons/collectivism)
(according to Sohrevardi:) haghighate lafzi حقیقت لفظی (verbal/literal truth) --> the metaphorical entity
face/surate/صورت/apparition/majaz/مجاز/trope --> truth/reality
(سهروردی Sohrevardi's accord:) up in the highest point in the hierarchy of existence there is nur-al-anvar نورالانوار (light of lights) which its material-removing (dematerialising?) abstraction (tajarode made-zoda تجرد مادهزدا) constantly transcends, beyond any other abstraction. ==> first light is originated from it: anvare ghahere انوار قاهره (~= anvare fereshtegani انوار فرشتگانی) ~= first maleke mogharab ملک مقرب (or Bahman بهمن, Vahumane وهومنه, first of Zoroastrian Amshaspandan امشاسپندان) ==> (due to their interactions:) second light, second maleke mogharab is created ==> eshragh اشراق ==> eshragh ==> eshragh ==> ...
جسمیتشناسی jesmiat-shenasi?
رب النوع rab-ol-no ~=? God of type, of abstract examples, (Plato's universals? type, general concept --> is always beyond the horizon, the reality of the type lies beyond a related one that it sustains (‘token’) ["Beyond the horizon there lies a Lion, a Lion more Lion than any more lion. And beyond saying ‘lion,’ which calls forth that Lion, lies yet another, who might just look back. And beyond this eyeing one, lies an undying one, one we call ‘Lion’ because she is a kind.” (Kohn, 2009)] --> apply this idea to the fire)
ارباب الانواع arbab-ol-anva ~=? angelology (iranians loved angels and were good at angelologic thinking, it was a technical term in knowledge production regarding *categories and types*) --> Platonic + Z[...]
(88)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%14.2[...]m sorry; I am just entangled in the topologically impossible pardeh, as an interfacial space where the body and instrument of music meet. I am touching with my fingers the ‘first three’ pardehs of Setar ستار, and thinking about to jack into the vague differences between another two magical canvases / magnetic disks: Plane of Destiny (lohe mahfuz لوح محفوظ) and Plane of Memory (lohe hafez لوح حافظ), while listening to the virtual narratives of Ghahveh-Khane theater. Which creatures have you encountered, in your travels, that bypass human installations (of memory)?
...................................
a Zoroastrian data: pre-existential ~ azali ازلی, sabegh-ol-vojud سابق الوجود
atefiate mahsus [عاطفیت محسوس] (queer? a queerness not familiar with mysticism?)
queer is about ‘marahele johare atefi’ (مراحل جوهر عاطفی), mohabat محبت (kindness or love,) without leading to ‘faghre erfani’ (فقر عرفانی)
[i have problem with] (escaping) the ‘pit of nature’ (chahe tabiat چاه طبیعت) in Sohrevardi's thought
-(he inverses the earth from positive to negative geology, sphere becomes pit)
-the project of post-Babylonian autopoietic-self, a self that is defined by the ‘meta-fall’ into the “pit of nature.”
‘andam-shenasi peikare latif’ (اندامشناسی پیکر لطیف)
...................................
[Avital]
what are the ways in which ajayebnameh relates to itself as its own future, its own labor and announced commitments?
(our reading of ajayeb is not a time quiz involving applicability and whether or not one “buys it.”)
i am “drifting” without anxiety into a new territory (in the philosophical work of ajayebnameh,) drifting involves randomization, fuzziness, and interference. there is no coherent programming nor concerted demand for rigor
(Avital: The origin of the demand for rigor, which has conditioned 20th century Anglo philosophy, “is the positivist's requirement that theories be testable. At the very least, a respectable philosophical theory should be stated with sufficient precision that one can tell what it says about something and whether its predictions about that subject matter are borne out” ---- to be capable of being articulated in the formalism of logic)
Testability furnishes the uninterrogated core of rigor. --> linked to a notion of computational realizability?
how “rigor” enables the displacement of truth by testability----as if the test could provide an unquestionably solid ground for overtaking reflection and other philosophically triggered interferences.
What kind of rigor is “a certain kind of rigor”?
what is being guaranteed if not the ability itself to guarantee
Everything rests on the *promise* of a certain kind of rigor.
[...]
(89)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%14.4[...]ther or not one “buys it.”)
i am “drifting” without anxiety into a new territory (in the philosophical work of ajayebnameh,) drifting involves randomization, fuzziness, and interference. there is no coherent programming nor concerted demand for rigor
(Avital: The origin of the demand for rigor, which has conditioned 20th century Anglo philosophy, “is the positivist's requirement that theories be testable. At the very least, a respectable philosophical theory should be stated with sufficient precision that one can tell what it says about something and whether its predictions about that subject matter are borne out” ---- to be capable of being articulated in the formalism of logic)
Testability furnishes the uninterrogated core of rigor. --> linked to a notion of computational realizability?
how “rigor” enables the displacement of truth by testability----as if the test could provide an unquestionably solid ground for overtaking reflection and other philosophically triggered interferences.
What kind of rigor is “a certain kind of rigor”?
what is being guaranteed if not the ability itself to guarantee
Everything rests on the *promise* of a certain kind of rigor.
the metaphysical fantasy of completion.
colonization of discourse with rigor
The discipline of programming leads to a shift in perspective on traditional issues. It invites--or rather requires--one to adopt what [Daniel] Dennett (1968) calls the design stance toward the mind
{ instrumental epistemology of how something works =/=? discovery }--> how can we suspend this “=/=”
trials and tryouts
[Avital's] phantasm of testing(‘s groundedness and unquestioned solidity)
...time-zone paradox of freezing the future in order to plan, in another register, the time for working through computations.
what are the conditions for thinking ‘through a problem’?
[Avital:] ****“To offset the competitive quality of the research that is being clocked, more philosophy must be allowed to drift in, if only to demystify those ideologies of acceleration that relentlessly run down the slower-paced thinking and an ethics of hesitation.”****
[origin] ==> temporal hysteria ==> [effect]
what tensional drama is occurs in the noncoincidence of planning...?
(planning = modeling, testing, constructing prototypes, development)
regardless of whether the future is foreseeable or not, something has to be maintained as a stable factor
test ~=> stability
***If the test cannot originate knowledge, it at least confirms that there is knowledge. (confirming that cognition occurs)
...tests have to be taken over and over again, if only to fill the **fictional time of the absolute present**
knowledge and test : it is not [...]
(90)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%14.5[...]s and unquestioned solidity)
...time-zone paradox of freezing the future in order to plan, in another register, the time for working through computations.
what are the conditions for thinking ‘through a problem’?
[Avital:] ****“To offset the competitive quality of the research that is being clocked, more philosophy must be allowed to drift in, if only to demystify those ideologies of acceleration that relentlessly run down the slower-paced thinking and an ethics of hesitation.”****
[origin] ==> temporal hysteria ==> [effect]
what tensional drama is occurs in the noncoincidence of planning...?
(planning = modeling, testing, constructing prototypes, development)
regardless of whether the future is foreseeable or not, something has to be maintained as a stable factor
test ~=> stability
***If the test cannot originate knowledge, it at least confirms that there is knowledge. (confirming that cognition occurs)
...tests have to be taken over and over again, if only to fill the **fictional time of the absolute present**
knowledge and test : it is not clear even that something is known until there is a test for it.
(test) is a certain type of metaphysically secured knowledge that needs only to ‘find’ itself
The normatively secured test does not originate knowledge but confirms what already exists as “knowable.”
...generous 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 [...]
(91)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%14.5[...]adual 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
...invites ambivalence
...dreaming of immense edifices and the permanence promised by contracts written in stone
register(s) of understanding
A new fold in metaphysics, testing--that is, the types of relatedness that fall under this term--asserts another logic of truth.
A kind of questioning, a structure of incessant research, perhaps a modality of being, testing scans the walls of experience, measuring, probing, determining the “what is” of the lived world.
i marvel at...
wonders of...
marvels of...
unheards of...
mazhar ol-ajayeb مظهر العجایب
Motehayeran-e متحیران, Tahayor تحیر ~=? to wonder
dar ahval-e... در احوال
dar khavas-e... در خواص
navader-e... نوادر
sefat-e... صفات
ta'ajob تعجب =/=? heyrat حیرت
the mode of attention in ajayebnameh is tuned by ta'ajob (wonder) away from Iranian mystic preferences over transfixation and rapture (heyrat)
which literary or (not)knowing positions are installed in these two (observational?) stations?
the subject of ta'ajob is moved otherwise
تعجب در باب امر قدسی ta'ajob dar bab-e amr-e ghodsi, wonder in the matters of divine
...................................
Heidegger: die Wissenschaft denkt nicht
Derrida: links science to mourning and memory
Lacan: science is always there, ready to erupt, amaze or blow you away.
Husserl was perhaps the one most freaked out by the historical split (between science and philosophy--and art?)
...a matter of technological selfunderstanding,
...nor do I insist on sustaining the pathos that propels the images...
ethical and political issues are[...]
(92)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%14.6[...]
{four bodies don't belong to themselves: children, addicts, outlaws, and ghosts, are all busted by the state or certain legislated majority}
destructive (and artistic) modes of production.
test, does it have an essence? Is it pure relationality?
Avital's “speculative telephonics”
Heidegger: sign = cutting edge, Zeichen --Holderlin--> “we're cutting out” =/= (Avital:) schizo knows how to disconnect, how to depart, how to cut the shit
the place where a call can break into a body[=? orificial openings of a subject]
emergency verification: we are still trying to cut into the emergency line (that we are on) after the crashing down of the transcendental signifier
in the (technologically enabled) disappearance of long-distance what happens to the ‘elsewhere’ calling to the schizobody?
how our pretechnological ears were (trained) before the telephone?
the “call” comes from me and from beyond and over me.
Telephonics coils itself around a concept of “being there” supported by the recognition that contact has been broken. Still, the break is never clean, just as contact was never continuous. The entire metaphysics of identity, presence and locality is scrambled, bringing with it a certain historical mutation in the relationship of the “self’ to other, to the irreducible precedence, as Derrida puts it in ‘Memoires,’ of the other. The other calls; you answer. But “you” have not yet been constituted, gathered or pulled together prior to the call.
Wortsalad ---- Opheilia's kind of mouth that shoots poesy, one has the feeling that no one is there.
/ precisely when ophelia is about to become the poet Shakespeare strangles her in water to make place for hamlet's tragic autopoiesis /
it is (generally) very difficult to know “who” is talking --> “whom” is being addressed
endure the agony of the being called (a being-on-call, an answering device)
modeling different styles of irony
(what are we) telehearing (?)
language is the history of index finger (“...even when it is placed on the mouth to silence a speaking. The teacher points, the God and the schizophrenic speak through or to the spiritual forefinger [sababe سبابه, angoshte shahadat انگشت شهادت].”)
-Heidegger traces the route of saying from rumor to the spiritualized digitals. The semiotically invested finger comes to manipulate the alphabetico-numerical ordering of ‘Geschick.’ (Avital)
-The spiritual forefinger presses towards schizophrenic partial systematizing.
-Also, it is the bewitching finger, which makes it rude to point or to press red buttons, for the power of pointing used to be associated with *magical arrests* (thus in Jewish Orthodox marriage ceremonies the wedding ring is said[...]
(93)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%14.8[...]tains link to her, earth
ecologically significant --> holders of water and Ganj (گنج), nailed the earth, they are your cradles
az ganj be ganj (فرستم به گنج تو از گنج خویش, Ferdosi)
*Ghiamat and Climate
[Haraway]
the metaphysical problem of (our) scale
(what are the scales in ajayeb? what is people in ajayeb? what it means to be animal? and what is their scale?)
ecologies that have many scales (in temporality and physicality): river scale, mountain scale, molecular times, Jinn's time, Ghiamat times, sense scale, ...
the ajayeb's model is (always?) the global scale?
--> how can i seek and describe multiple situated worldings and multiple sorts of translations to engage ajayeb's globalism? (using Haraway's word on Tsing)
-attention to friction ==> (ethnographic accounts of) global interconnection
(some metaphors:) metabolisms, articulations, coproductions (*? of ajayeb's histories)
relational, sympoietic, consequential,
in ajayeb, what is cosmic, what is terran, what is cursed, *?
in ajayeb:
•what are the figures of finitude, destruction, astralized hearing, enactments of generation, the 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 bei[...]
(94)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%15.2[...] material and ecological deaths, earth related passings
main actor: Malek al-mot (ملک الموت Angel of death)
ashabe kahf (اصحاب کهف), ashabe raghim (اصحاب رقیم) --> immortality
(ajayeb-e kuh) عجایب کوه
om-ol-jebal (ام الجبال), ghaf (قاف): mother of mountains, all mountains link to her, earth
ecologically significant --> holders of water and Ganj (گنج), nailed the earth, they are your cradles
az ganj be ganj (فرستم به گنج تو از گنج خویش, Ferdosi)
*Ghiamat and Climate
[Haraway]
the metaphysical problem of (our) scale
(what are the scales in ajayeb? what is people in ajayeb? what it means to be animal? and what is their scale?)
ecologies that have many scales (in temporality and physicality): river scale, mountain scale, molecular times, Jinn's time, Ghiamat times, sense scale, ...
the ajayeb's model is (always?) the global scale?
--> how can i seek and describe multiple situated worldings and multiple sorts of translations to engage ajayeb's globalism? (using Haraway's word on Tsing)
-attention to friction ==> (ethnographic accounts of) global interconnection
(some metaphors:) metabolisms, articulations, coproductions (*? of ajayeb's histories)
relational, sympoietic, consequential,
in ajayeb, what is cosmic, what is terran, what is cursed, *?
in ajayeb:
•what are the figures of finitude, destruction, astralized hearing, enactments of generation, the 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 su[...]
(95)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%15.2[...]here? other societies with liberal or non-liberal individual or state, with other techno-monsters, automated warriors, terrorists, and all the waste, cruelty, indifference, ignorance, and loss that comes with, as well as joy, play, labor, and invention--)?
-how do i narrate this (ajayeb and non-ajayeb, the wondrous and the mundane) co-history?
-how do i embody an art of relating (as is never done once and for all)?
*species : biological kind of reality + scientific expertise necessary to that kind of reality
(what would or could trouble ‘biological kind,’ ‘categories of organism’?)
{ machinic + textual + organic ~-=> species }--> causality-story, origin-story, Real-Presence-story (~transubstantiated signs of the flesh),
•species is about defining difference, rooted in polyvocal fugues of **doctrines of cause**
•one thinks of species as logical category, logical type, visual impression, members of a category that have the same characteristics. but you also say “be specific!” you want the opposite. you want a list of relentless particularities.
•(for Haraway species is about) a particular kind of semiotics where sign and flesh are tangled
Marx and Freud in shit and gold, primitive scat and civilized metal, in specie
[title]
**ajayeb's technologies of (Persian) subject/object-making**
nature and culture implode into one another (in the relentlessly historically specific ways)
(Haraway > Althusser) **interpellation** (estizah استیضاح) ==> concrete individuals (in the modern state)
*the ideologically loaded narratives ==> life and death, health and illness, longevity and extinction, etc.
{how not to do estizah (our objects, peers)? latent individualization in apass's requirement of ‘intentionality’ from its participants: “no sleep-walking!” [--> art as “explicit intentional act.” Merleau-Ponty's account the body-schema.] [estizah is the site of encounter with the ‘man of law’ in which one becomes a man of law: by asking what is your “name and business,” demanding “proof” of me. one way of responding to that demand of name is to give your name as a performance in an amerindian mode: “three were dead before they knew.” that's my name.] The material ritual practice of ‘recognition’ : “Who is there?” and “It's me!” of the everyday life ==> makes us concrete subject (in the ideology in democracy and law) --> independent agents with self-produced identities. (in capitalist societies) **subject: a self-conscious “responsible” agent whose actions can be explained by his or her beliefs and thoughts.** subject formation defines the limits of each individual; values, desires, and preferences. ---- in a way that I realize that a ‘hailing’ was addressed at me, thinking ‘that means me,’ and the answer is what transforms me into a subject : a “mis-recognition” [--> we can open a dossier on prophet and ‘answering’ the[...]
(97)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%15.5[...]s) **subject: a self-conscious “responsible” agent whose actions can be explained by his or her beliefs and thoughts.** subject formation defines the limits of each individual; values, desires, and preferences. ---- in a way that I realize that a ‘hailing’ was addressed at me, thinking ‘that means me,’ and the answer is what transforms me into a subject : a “mis-recognition” [--> we can open a dossier on prophet and ‘answering’ the call]; [~-> what Tarof hails?] ---- for Althusser being aware of the other is a form of ideology. (how to recognize ourselves outside of ideology?)} (Foucauldian/Althusserian: passively defined by identity ==> mobilizing around these identities --?--> potential for resistance)
(Althusser's) police officer [محتسب mohtaseb?] --hails--> concrete subject
(Foucault's) expert discourses --hails--> sexuality
(Adorno's) mass media --hails--> passive consumer
(Gauntlett's) uncritical consumption --hails--> assumption --> bad worlding
/>
(Mulvey's) cinema --hails--> male protagonist
(Butler's) boy/girl --hails--> gender identity
(Sina's) تعارف Tarof --hails--> divnity ??
***(crafted faithfully?) more potent the tropes, the truer the story***
(without being distracted by scandals and meta-stories?!)
stories traffic in tropes, figures of speech
(the dogmatic and bizzar idea of) “trope-free communication”
*metaplasm, remodeling, remolding,,, inverting meanings, transposing the body of communication,
(in my graphs, or rigs, what a substitution in a string might change the meaning?)
what is the “troping that makes a fleshly difference”?
origin story (~=> establishing origin) ~=> sober scientific report ~=> scales of intelligence ~=> human as master
the “mere” village dog:
-canine Eves surviving in their mitochondrial DNA
-canine Adam through his Y-chromosome legacies
>
which metaplasmic, remodeled versions of ‘name’ could give ajayeb's being
(in apass I have been against the “what do I want as an artist?” question:)
pay attention to significant otherness =/= reflection of one's intentions
what is the name of the game? complexity, flexibility, opportunism, (finite worlds called:) domestic, wild, feral,
[who is naming the world what?
•accelerationism: “game-over”
•capitalism: “resource”
•technophobia: “obsolescence”
•technophilia: “information”
•monotheism: “transition”
•science: “taxa”
•multinationalism: “system”
•modernism: “globe"]
immune systems (in natureculture) determine where organisms, including people, can live and with whom.
“There is no time or place at which genetics ends and environment begins” [...]
(Haraway > Gilbert)
“All stages of the life histories of evolving anima[...]
(98)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%15.6[...] />
(Althusser's) police officer [محتسب mohtaseb?] --hails--> concrete subject
(Foucault's) expert discourses --hails--> sexuality
(Adorno's) mass media --hails--> passive consumer
(Gauntlett's) uncritical consumption --hails--> assumption --> bad worlding
(Mulvey's) cinema --hails--> male protagonist
(Butler's) boy/girl --hails--> gender identity
(Sina's) تعارف Tarof --hails--> divnity ??
***(crafted faithfully?) more potent the tropes, the truer the story***
(without being distracted by scandals and meta-stories?!)
stories traffic in tropes, figures of speech
(the dogmatic and bizzar idea of) “trope-free communication”
*metaplasm, remodeling, remolding,,, inverting meanings, transposing the body of communication,
(in my graphs, or rigs, what a substitution in a string might change the meaning?)
what is the “troping that makes a fleshly difference”?
/>
origin story (~=> establishing origin) ~=> sober scientific report ~=> scales of intelligence ~=> human as master
the “mere” village dog:
-canine Eves surviving in their mitochondrial DNA
-canine Adam through his Y-chromosome legacies
which metaplasmic, remodeled versions of ‘name’ could give ajayeb's being
(in apass I have been against the “what do I want as an artist?” question:)
pay attention to significant otherness =/= reflection of one's intentions
what is the name of the game? complexity, flexibility, opportunism, (finite worlds called:) domestic, wild, feral,
[who is naming the world what?
•accelerationism: “game-over”
•capitalism: “resource”
•technophobia: “obsolescence”
•technophilia: “information”
•monotheism: “transition”
•science: “taxa”
•multinationalism: “system”
•modernism: “globe"]
immune systems (inms (in natureculture) determine where organisms, including people, can live and with whom.
“There is no time or place at which genetics ends and environment begins” [...]
(Haraway > Gilbert)
“All stages of the life histories of evolving animals had to adapt to eager bacteria colonizing them inside and out.”
To be animal is to become-with bacteria
to inhabit an inter-subjective world, to love is about meeting the other in all the fleshly detail of a mortal relationship (to wit, first, somehow to learn what this other needs and desires)---permanent search for knowledge of the intimate other, with inevitable comic and tragic mistakes in that quest
thinking about animals as “other worlds” in a science fictional sense
scientifically informed, empirically grounded practice
theory ...still a limited discourse and a rough instrument
“who is at home?” --[...]
(100)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%15.6[...]tside]
[the causality drama is not that which came first, the chicken or the egg, but what inside the egg that has cause outside the egg]
context-dependent sex
genetic assimilation
life history strategies
teratology (kaj-rikht-shenasi کج ریخت شناسی, naghes-al-khelghe-shenasi ناقص الخلقه شناسی)
...................................
rewriting technique criteria (of the gene) [from new biological headquarters]
retro-transposon: a DNA sequence that can change its position within a genome, sometimes creating or reversing mutations and altering the cell's genetic identity and genome size
(we have uterus because of bacterial transposons)
intestinal
enzyme, macromolecular biological catalysts, accelerating chemical reaction
using hallucinogenic to cure autism (!?)
bacterial --> social
“individual" = an island to be colonized (by bacteria), [we are] a niche (upon niche (upon niche)) for bacteria
immunall agencise are not (has never been) defensive, they selectively inclusive, they facilitate symbiosis, allowing the possibility of microbes become part of the body
co-metabolism
host-diet
four major symbiosis (symbiotic things) that ruled the planet:
1. rhizobacteria/legumes for nitrogen fixation
2. mycorrhizal interaction with plant roots and seeds
3. endophytic fungal protection against dessication
4. coral reefs and tidal seagrass ecosystems sustain oceanic biodiversity
}--containing--> smaller symbiotic webs we call “organism” <==[product of]== (ancient symbiosis we call) “cells + (ancient symbiosis we call) “genomes”
ritual defense of a dissertation, matter of opponent
a medical theater of dissection, laid out on table with the working-class barber-surgeons laying bare structures for the disquisition (tafahos تفحص) of the professor --> (the ways we are in this) *multi-imaginative theater* (~ congnitive emotional apparatus) --> infectious joy, the situatedness of the joy is infectious
we (should always) work in the context of joy
lost for details (for the fleshiness of ‘this’), not as a general principal or an example for something else
*the tale of detail* --> a small detail that wrenches the self into something that was not before
(the tale of understanding)
Gilbert's bio-sym-poetic joy --> knowledge-making
(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 ano[...]
(101)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%15.9[...]fore
(the tale of understanding)
Gilbert's bio-sym-poetic joy --> knowledge-making
(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 ---[...]
(102)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%16[...]ses in new ways” (Verran)
#to create ‘aerating’ (tahviyeh تهویه) in ajayeb, this includes:
/ crafting translations with ontological traction (enghebaz انقباض)
/ building empirical tools that make ajayeb's translation-work visible {#pop-up book}
/ translation --> *reconfigure sameness and difference*
/ staying with linguistic differences (in ajayeb) is a way of investigating the ontological commitments embedded in language.
◽ontological --> worlding --> how language participates in shaping our lived worlds in some ways and not others.*** “it is not common for speakers of a language to examine what type of material objects their language commits them to. [this also my question in iranian mystic mix,] rather the difference will be to notice as difficulty in translation.” (Verran)
(for me working on ajayeb is) **lingering in the space of difficult translations**
==> making recourse (motevasel shodan be متوسل شدن به) to a *world of common referents* (space, time, and matter)
[to continue thinking with Verran] on *durations*, *extensions*, and *resistances* (in ajayeb's case)
these three foundation objects need not to be saddled with the history of Western metaphysics and do noy require that common ground be located only in Western territory. “Therefore they offer more promise for cross-cultural translation than the more conceptually nimble [tardast تردست, zerang زرنگ -- like the CEN or google] space, time, and matter. Newborn and awkward to our ears, these strange terms announce themselves as translation tools.” (Kenney)
(thinking with Kenney / Verran:)
workflow on ajayeb:
1- tracing social connections (for which subjects is this useful? which ecology of practices?)
2- making equipment list (materials and methods, an expanded and complicated version of equipment-list, providing accounts of the material-discursive apparatuses that are materializing my empirical objects, =/= exercise in representation or audit hesab-rasi حساب رسی)
3- narrating the relation (re-materializing my found empirical objects, re-enacting the objects)
interpretive cosmology
(ajayeb's objects,) “They represent different storytelling practices that contribute to different kinds of worldings.” [...] (through my engagement,) “They stimulate more compositions and decompositions--stories that narrate different beings and different doings, none of which can claim final ontological authority, but that each to different (ontic) work” (hopefully!)
-worlding: a choreography that generates ontologies (Thompson) --&--> there is no self without a world (Carson)
-not as a voyeur or anthropologist, but breathe in the density and composition of their atmospheres
(people = worlds)
ontic (hasti mojud-shenakhti هستی موجود [...]
(104)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%16.3[...]flow on ajayeb:
1- tracing social connections (for which subjects is this useful? which ecology of practices?)
2- making equipment list (materials and methods, an expanded and complicated version of equipment-list, providing accounts of the material-discursive apparatuses that are materializing my empirical objects, =/= exercise in representation or audit hesab-rasi حساب رسی)
3- narrating the relation (re-materializing my found empirical objects, re-enacting the objects)
interpretive cosmology
(ajayeb's objects,) “They represent different storytelling practices that contribute to different kinds of worldings.” [...] (through my engagement,) “They stimulate more compositions and decompositions--stories that narrate different beings and different doings, none of which can claim final ontological authority, but that each to different (ontic) work” (hopefully!)
-worlding: a choreography that generates ontologies (Thompson) --&--> there is no self without a world (Carson)
-not as a voyeur or anthropologist, but breathe in the density and composition of their atmospheres
(people = worlds)
ontic (hasti mojud-shenakhti هستی موجود شناختی): “factual” existence as =/= metaphysical ontologic existence)
[ontological interferences in ontic--{regular existence, difference in little beings} for example, ontic is when we ask what time it is, and the answer is on the clock. (snafu is ontic, aporia ontological*) when the ontic is disrupted ==> you have a “day off,” all sort of things can invade and open up, demons come out, there is a suspension of ontic time, a (Heideggerian) holiday]
(Verran) [number are] “always ready to actively re-exist when we do the right actions and say the right words.” (can i do that with ajayeb's objects? how?)
“The moon rose above the river” (en) <--> “upward behind the onstreaming it mooned” (Tlon, a language by Borges with no nouns, only verbs)
(in old Iran, there is a measurement of time based on sa'd سعد and nahs نحس, the time of benevolent spirits and so on. the sensuous time, measurement is affect)
knowledge industry or “scientific factory”
how academic labor was implicated in capitalist systems and contemporary forms of knowledge/power
“ruse” (hile حیله, makr مکر, neyrang نیرنگ) --> my tool in work on ajayeb? -//-[مکر زنان ,گربه نره و روباه مکار, minorities associated with this accent: women, animals, machines,] [ruse in Kelile Demne کلیله و دمنه]
ruse: a set of small, mostly unconscious tactics by which workers resist capitalist systems (writing love letters on company's time, factory workers who takes a scrap of fabric home for his children to play with, etc.)
-“[h]ow to subvert the laws of the “scientific factory” through gift-giving, solida[...]
(105)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%16.3[...]ounter
-how can we not be subsumed by the sameness of the here-and-now? (collapsing of difference into sameness)
(my work on ajayeb is about) learning to tell better stories about the past*
*writing ~= (wonder:) a careful attention to differences in the practice of worlding the past. (demanding like a cat walking on our keyboard, interrupting you [Kenney])
(digital reading practices of) data mining =/= reading for the reactions of an implicit reader --> what the scholar of ajayeb (in the medieval) might have felt?
ajayebnameh is grounded in the history and materiality of scientific practices:
“Nature is neither knowable ...nor unknowable ...Nature is that about which ‘relevant knowledge’ may be produced. If we pay due attention to it, we can learn, discern relations, and multiply entities and ratios.” (Stengers 2011)
eliminativism: the belief that one story or one set of practices (usually called rational or scientific) can explain nature.
a materialist understanding of ajayeb demands an interpretive adventure of how, with matter (in Stengersian way), we get sensitivity, life, memory, consciousness, passions and thought... =/= inert or mechanistic notion of matter
which metaphors stage nature as “witty agent and actor”?
speculative commitment --> learn how to relate differently ~-> (help us) name what we are doing in new and useful ways**** (Verran)
the egg from outside it doesn't seem to be doing anything --> to give the egg the power to challenge (our) well-defined categories
-how can we relate to the egg without breaking it? (ontological + ethical) --> *pragmatism*: an art of consequences, an art of paying attention =/= the logic of the omelet justifying cracked eggs
ajayeb is all about the ***staging of nature***
{Latour:} reductionism offer an enormously ‘useful’ handle to allow scientists to insert their instrumentarium, their paradigms and produce a long series of practical effects.
(efficient handles =/= staging of nature)
we must learn to tell trickster stories {a speculative sense that activates possibilities for thinking, feeling, and knowing within coyote nature =/= a closed conception of “reality itself"} OR ELSE we will end up settling for a rather vague version of what physics claim to be reality [~= a generalized (==> irrelevant?) version of a specific form of authoritative knowledge --> that which “simplifies away our world in terms of idealist judgments about what would ultimately matter and what does not” (, Stengers)] ----> (who has ?) the power to explain, (who/what decides what kind is ?) relevant knowledge
[Stengers] (wonder has everything to do with stories,) wonder incites storytelling
1 --> importance of narratives in our knowledge-making practices
2 --> politically robust narratives (that world us d[...]
(106)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%16.5[...]f sexual selection and re-tells them --> these new stories make real species-shaping difference by contributing to the social infrastructure within which offspring are produced and reared
***how many plots can the data hold?*** --> pragmatic---the answer is many not infinite [Strathern: “more than one but less than many"]
-practices of *doing accuracy* --> storytellers
relationships between story and evidence --> an invitation to invent new forms of accuracy that might be unfamiliar or awkward but could be epistemologically narrativelly politically generative (Kenney)
(sometimes: story ==> data) the work to craft just one good story from the chaos of the data is (not only political challenge @Jassem, but also) an epistemological challenge
(Lynn Margulis)
*endosymbiosis: the theory that eukaryotic cells evolved by incorporating free-swimming bacteria, which later became organelles (cell organ) such as plastids and mitochondria
(ladder =/=) horizontal gene transfer : that the evolution and speciation are driven not by random genetic mutation and natural selection, but by symbiogenesis.
Margulis's attention to bacteria rather than attention to animals ==> different research questions and metaphors, and different empirical objects
(her scholarly crafts are amazing:) “was the moon that pulled the tide of life from its oceanic depths to dry land and up into the air.” (1998)
/science is an interpretative adventure
(Margulis's insight into) the history of consciousness --> the components that fused in symbiogenesis are already conscious entities***, already able to sense light and motion --> we are made through our endosymbiotic histories : our own “sensitivities to wafting (nasim نسیم) plant scents, tasty salted mixtures, police cruiser sirens, loving touches and star light” (2005)
[...] “These avant guard cells of the nasal passages, the taste buds, the inner ear, the touch receptors in the skin and the retinal rods and cones all have in common the presence at their tips of projections (‘cell processes’) called cilia.”
[...] “The spirochete group of bacteria includes many harmless mud-dwellers but it also contains a few scary freaks: the treponeme of syphilis and the borrelias of Lyme disease. We animals got our exquisite ability to sense our surroundings--to tell light from dark, noise from silence, motion from stillness and fresh water from brackish brine--from a kind of bacterium whose relatives we despise.”
re-thinking consciousness
(Kenney) Margulis's speculations: they mattered, they worlded, they gathered
(Williamson:) larvae and adult insects of the same species do not have a common ancestor(!)
(how ?, the capacity for) drastic morphological change --> what would it be like to emerge as a moth with a new body, a new sensorium, with your cate[...]
(107)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%16.6[...]mately be unfriendly, unseemly, unsophisticated, unsuitable
•wonder goes beyond what is suitable (Irigaray,) even threatens our status as “serious, adult thinkers” (Stengers)
hoax ==> compels us to do work that is sober and bound closer to reality
the bifurcation of childhood and adulthood gets in the way of thinking
-the child/adult divide as an “achievement” of the Vicorian Era
the context of my ajayeb:
“The Science War”
epistemological differences between sciences
...................................
[Lorraine J. Daston]
the evolving collective sensibility of naturalists
objective order and subjective sensibility
...celestial apparitions, monsters,
how wonder and wonders fortified princely power, rewove the texture of scientific experience, and shaped the sensibility of intellectuals
(webs of cultural significance, material practices, and theoretical derivations)
(cultivate a distinctive scientific self wherein knowing and knower converge) Galison
...................................
*passion maintains a path between (--corporal impressions and movements toward an object):
philosophers <----> physicists
metaphysical research <----> cosmological research
transcendental <----> empirical
architecture of ideality : (sociofamilial) stratification of desire --> ideal ego ==> religiosity, slogans, publicity, terror, --✕--> roots {vegetal, earthly, ideal, heavenly,)
[Irigaray]
(@Ali , what is the source of movement? what is the motivating force behind mobility if not wonder?---in all dimensions)
(both active & passive) wonder ==> move
the “man” (in Nietzsche and Heidegger) thinks he is at the end of his growth, has completed a cycle
“can we look at, contemplate, wonder at the machine from a place where it does not see us?" *** --> the issue is how to be able to wonder at the face of something/somebody that is looking (back) at us. ,,,(@Lili)
surprise: not yet assimilated or disassimilated to known
energy tied to the dimension of the story =/= mobilization of new energies --> (still) blind to their horizon, or qualities
*desire: vectorialization of space and time (=/= Deleuze and Guattari notion of desire) --> movement toward, (not yet qualified)
mother who is magnanimous (großmütig) toward the little one
(-subject-[-) wonder {-]-desire-(-} world )
(for Descartes:) object <== alchemy of the subject's passion
places in brain that are (soft and) tender ---> not yet hardened by past impressions
***[for me the] (appearance of something or someone) new modifies the movement (of spirits in an unexpected manner) --> when we are faithful to the perpetual newness of the[...]
(108)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%17.1[...]nd of his growth, has completed a cycle
“can we look at, contemplate, wonder at the machine from a place where it does not see us?” *** --> the issue is how to be able to wonder at the face of something/somebody that is looking (back) at us. ,,,(@Lili)
surprise: not yet assimilated or disassimilated to known
energy tied to the dimension of the story =/= mobilization of new energies --> (still) blind to their horizon, or qualities
*desire: vectorialization of space and time (=/= Deleuze and Guattari notion of desire) --> movement toward, (not yet qualified)
mother who is magnanimous (großmütig) toward the little one
(-subject-[-) wonder {-]-desire-(-} world )
(for Descartes:) object <== alchemy of the subject's passion
places in brain that are (soft and) tender ---> not yet hardened by past impressions
***[for me the] (appearance of something or someone) new modifies the movement (of spirits in an unexpected manner) --> when we are faithful to the perpetual newness of the self, the other, the world --> faithful to becoming ***
Irigaray: *wonder* = passion of encounter (between the most material and the most metaphysical)
wonder:
•passion (of already born) --✕--> reenveloped in love
•touched and moves toward and within the attraction --✕--> nostalgia for the first dwelling
•passion of first encounter --✕--> repetition
[Haraway reading Derrida: on killing,]
(Derrida understood that this structure, this) logic of sacrifice and this exclusive possession of the capacity for response, is what produces the Animal
the death-defying arrogance of ascribing such wondrous positivities to the Human
(Derrida)"The question of the said animal in its entirety comes down to knowing not whether the animal speaks but whether one can know what ‘respond’ means. And how to distinguish a response from a reaction.”
the mistake of forgetting the ecologies of all mortal beings, who live in and through the use of one another's bodies
[this is against ] The naturalistic fallacy is the mirror-image misstep to transcendental humanism.
multispecies contingency
In the idiom of labor, animals are working subjects, not just worked objects.
the capacity to respond and to recognize response
We can never do without technique, without calculation, without reasons, but these practices will never take us into that kind of open where multispecies responsibility is at stake.
Engage them [the dogs] as mindful bodies, in relationships of response?
the practical labor of nonmimetic sharing(?)
[we make ‘knowing’. knowing is always a practice of making, and always embodied. the i[...]
(109)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%17.2[...]al 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 rtion 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?]
being fated (together)
...although the earth breaks, it reconstitutes
people find themselves in diminished form, or occupying a lesser form of life, or having the status of the resurrected dead, but they will nonetheless always find themselves here at this place in this moment****
...End Times bringing a fearful apocalyptic future into the present, evoking the eternal quest for union with a beloved without end, while not focused on a specific horizon
[...]
(110)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%17.6[...] />
[...] remembering is not a replay of a string of moments, but an enlivening and reconfiguring of past and future that is larger than any individual. [...] The past is never finished. It cannot be wrapped up like a package, or a scrapbook, or an acknowledgment; we never leave it and it never leaves us behind.
Barad's mother's question: “what good is there in offering recognition that can't be recognized?”
[...] there is only the ongoing practice of being open and *alive to each(other)* meeting
“How to disrupt patterns of thinking that see the past as finished and the future as not ours or only ours?”
*measurement
** the nature of nature depends on the apparatus that measure it
***--> which measurements are at use in ajayeb?
(what constitutes a measurement for what?)
the strangest idea: that we have access to cultural representations and their content (that we lack toward the things represented) (=/= “agential realist ontology” barad-posthumanist.pdf) [Foucault's “words and things” is the name of the game] [--> @Aela, perhaps we can begin with a different starting point, other than the old idea of “humanity's own captivity within language--the starting place of the metaphysics of representation,” perhaps it would be better to begin with a different metaphysics... -->{the term ‘metaphysics’ (far from being the deep origin of high philosophy) actually comes originally from (the writings of) Aristotle on physics, rearranged three centuries after his death by Andronicus of Rhodes}]
materiality itself is always already figured within a linguistic domain as its condition of possibility(?(!))
[ (?(!)) : a contingent question pregnant with wonder]
[my starting point in my lecture/performance is with the concern (warned by Nietzsche) that language is being granted too much power, tendency to take grammar too seriously : allowing linguistic structure to shape or determine our understanding {--> rigs}
believing that ‘subject’ + ‘predicate structure of language’ (~ grammatical categories) --reflects--> (a prior ontological reality of) substance and attribute (~ underlying structure of the world) (=/= *contingency *rhetoric);, --> still in the 16th century europe (pointed by Foucault) language was simply “one of the figurations of the world” =/= “language as medium"]
*performativity (the way i am understanding it using Barad's words) =/= the excessive power granted to language to determine what is real
-a contestation of the unexamined habits of mind that grant language and other forms of representation more power in determining our ontologies
-questions of correspondence between description and reality --> questions of ontology, materiality, and agency. (the things i am busy with in apass)
-(discursive dimensions include) questions of meaning, intelligibility, significance, ide[...]
(112)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%18.3[...] there is no such (“knower”) exterior observational point
@Laleh: we are not observers outside the world, not simply located at particular places ‘in’ the world (--> positionality)
(question at Aela:) the geometry of absolute interiority --> reduction of effect to its cause, nature ontologically distinct from culture
(that there is no preexistent nature)
(Aela's interest in?) spatiality: (characteristics of enclosures <-- concerned with shapes and sizes) ‘geometry’ =/= ‘topology’ (investigates questions of *connectivity* and *boundaries*)
***it is the very existence of ‘finitude’ that gets defined as ‘matter’
narcissistic bedtime stories... (positioning of materiality as either a given or a mere effect of human agency)
(*)matter: substance in its intra-active becoming
(*)performativity: iterative intra-activity
“I'm trying to complicate the locatability of human identity as a here and now, as an enclosed and finished product[/project]” ~ “perspective essentialism”
...nature performs itself differently
(Kirby)
[Barad:] **onto-epistem-ology**: the study of practices of knowing in being
“epistemology =/= ontology” is a reverberation of a metaphysics that assumes (inherent differences:) “human =/= nonhuman,” “subject =/= object,” “mind =/= body,” “matter =/= discourse”...
...................................
what kind of alphabetico-numerical forefinger can i build that can press a schizophrenic partial systematizing of ajayeb?
...................................
so much (in Iran's literature) still awaits reflection and comprehension (-without comprehensiveness please!)
...................................
...archeology of dying in our civilization
(archeology of our dying civilization)
...................................
Aristotle's narrative: catharsis of emotions --> first arousing pity and fear and then clearing them away
theories of narrative:
•formalist theories (Russian)
•dialogical theories (Bakhtinian)
•New Critical theories
•Chicago school, or neo-Aristotlian theories
•psychoanalytic theories (Freud, Kenneth Burke, Lacan, N. Abraham)
•hermeneutic and phenomenological theories
•structuralist, semiotic, and tropological theories
•Marxist and sociological theories
•reader-response theories
•poststructuralist and deconstructionist theories (Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man)
•feminist theories (Martha Kenney, Haraway, Stengers, Hayward)
•
•
structuralist: that there are typical formal elements or “deep structures” to narratives --> complex performative dimension between the telling of stories and what is told in them
(Paul de Man:) “The paradigm for all texts consists of a figure (or a system of figures) and its deconstruction. But since this mo[...]
(115)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%18.7[...]hilosophies aesthetics: tamed facts
#Rigs, my ajayeb diagrams
...................................
ajayeb's histories (~ ajayeb's historically situated relational worldings) =/= societies of individuals in human-only histories (~ Euclidean figures and stories of Man)
(which network is?) a netbag for collecting up what is crucial for ongoing
ajayeb's technotheocratic geoengineering [, it “fixes” some common imaginations the “affairs of life,” and not specifically the “afterlife,” (within the {terminology ~} figural-conceptual powers of syms and material-semiotic time-space of the Indo-Greco-Arab-Turko-Persian terra taxa)]
•periods of time
•“known” life
•abode (budgah بودگاه, Wohnplatz)
•donya دنيا
-stories that focus on composition rather than intrusion
-stories that focus on ongoingness rather than game-over
(Haraway > Stengers > Latour > Margulis) Gaia, to name complex nonlinear couplings between processes that compose and sustain entwined but nonadditive subsystems as a partially cohering systemic whole
planet-transforming, historically situated, new-enough, worlding relations
(systematic stories are linked) metabolisms, articulations, coproductions
(they must also be) relational, sympoietic, consequential
myth-systems (are set-ups)
(a deadly one: “Man + Tool ==> history”)
names =/= faces (~ morphs of the same)
a thousand names of something else
(what Haraway is naming with) compound-eyed insectile and many-armed optics
winged domains
bird-bodies
(Haraway's spider and) my ajayeb's snake: tasks of thinking, figuring, and storytelling
--✕--> heady facial representation; [Luisa also dislikes this]
•figure of snake (circular serpent) is ajayeb Persian sf worlding, has ties with the Greek Chthonis (“of the earth,”) is at the same time the image of the continuity of life and the abyssal moral (eating your end, no gag reflex)-->{Gildas Hamel: “the abyssal and elemental forces before they were astralized by chief gods and their tame committees"}
“many critters acoss taxa” (juju جوجو + rade رده)
(I dispute Haraway's notion of “sacred.” popular religion is at many times populated by earthly figures alongside many astralized destructive finitudes.)
Haraway's urgently needed Chthulucene story
[Miyazaki's] biodiverse terra [God flips out] into something very slimy, like any overstressed complex adaptive system at the end of its abilities to absorb insult after insult. (Haraway's wording)
(yes yes we are all ultimately connected to one another,) but the specificity and proximity of connections matters
(Haraway + Latour's) ‘things’ are:
1- colle[...]
(116)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%19.4[...]
آب حیوان {how could I know that Vladimir (in his performance for Lilia's apass score) was not (in)sourcing the Holy Waters, abe heyvan or vozu? his sweat was the ooze of a modern and secular labor. he was using a profane water?}
حیوان خوران جهان heyvan khorane jahan
زیرکان کهن kohan zirak
حجابی که ظلمات شد نام او روان آب حیوان از آرام او (Zolmat & abe heyvan)
...................................
#my work in apass is about:
•bestiary: archaeological anthropology of human-animal practices
•rhetoric: scaling, modeling, figuring out fields of practices
•ontology: circumscribe, address, or deal with the processes of ontological transformations
•storytelling: mobilizing different kinds of mental resources and literacies
•performance: what it would be to know together
•sociality: that which joins categorically separate mode of agencies
•
#my findings/questions, so far:
•animal subjectivity ~=? human imagination
•bestiary ~=? affect + episteme
•medieval bestiaries: world ~= phenomena
•definition ~=? ontological choreography ==> worlds are created
•metaphores of self ~-> body image ~=? image of world
•list ~=? reason
•
I found myself oriented towards a kind of ‘multispecies ethnography’: a new way of writing and mode of research in which creatures previously appearing on the margins of interest--as part of the landscape, as food for humans, as symbols (for mystic projects)--have been pressed into the foreground of interest.
(what are my) symbolic + symbiotic attachments
what/who is coughing, counting, working, communicating sited between divine and bestial in ajayeb?
-is my ajayeb a (dead/alive) multispecies art project? studying Indo-Arab-Iranian illuminated manuscripts as to be reading a paper in ecology or molecular biology or art.
unlike Alex Arteaga's question of “inevitable altruism” {started from “conscious human subjects” and ended there} (in his talk 30.05.2017 apass,) I would insist on giving an account of the metaphors of ‘self’ in the history of body and mind (that matters to ‘you’) [my findings of self: maginc lantern, iceberg's tip (==> unconsciousness), wasteland/wilderness, greedy beast within, ... {--> these are all (classical) basis for “higher” cognitive capacities}] [also I am against Alex's notion of “destablizing stabilities as the task of artistic research.” I choose to refuse to put what is in flux against what is stable or attempting to stabilize. (I am in alignment with Katie King sharpening for me that) we constantly share our stage, settings, performances, sensoria, reenactments among agencies and species, creating varying stabilities, some fragile, some robust]
*account--synonymous with: description, information, list,[...]
(117)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%19.5[...]ciality: that which joins categorically separate mode of agencies
•
#my findings/questions, so far:
•animal subjectivity ~=? human imagination
•bestiary ~=? affect + episteme
•medieval bestiaries: world ~= phenomena
•definition ~=? ontological choreography ==> worlds are created
•metaphores of self ~-> body image ~=? image of world
•list ~=? reason
•
I found myself oriented towards a kind of ‘multispecies ethnography’: a new way of writing and mode of research in which creatures previously appearing on the margins of interest--as part of the landscape, as food for humans, as symbols (for mystic projects)--have been pressed into the foreground of interest.
(what are my) symbolic + symbiotic attachments
what/who is coughing, counting, working, communicating sited between divine and bestial in ajayeb?
-is my ajayeb a (dead/alive) multispecies art project? studying Indo-Arab-Iranian illuminated manuscripts as to be reading a paper in ecology or molecular biology or art.
unlike Alex Arteaga's question of “inevitable altruism” {started from “conscious human subjects” and ended there} (in his talk 30.05.2017 apass,) I would insist on giving an account of the metaphors of ‘self’ in the history of body and mind (that matters to ‘you’) [my findings of self: maginc lantern, iceberg's tip (==> unconsciousness), wasteland/wilderness, greedy beast within, ... {--> these are all (classical) basis for “higher” cognitive capacities}] [also I am against Alex's notion of “destablizing stabilities as the task of artistic research.” I choose to refuse to put what is in flux against what is stable or attempting to stabilize. (I am in alignment with Katie King sharpening for me that) we constantly share our stage, settings, performances, sensoria, reenactments among agencies and species, creating varying stabilities, some fragile, some robust]
*account--synonymous with: description, information, list, reason, record, statement, story, sum, tale
-a contractual relationship
-giving an itemized account of recent transactions and resulting balance (of your metaphors = material-discursive apparatuses that are materializing your found empirical objects)
-accountability is always also about remaking those relations that produced your objects
-detailed explanation of money held in trust, to count, enumerate* -->{telling =? enumerating}
counting your senses
*accountability is about your ‘import’ functions (like in a programming language when you import a library of functions)
--> count: an agent of sorting that separates units or groups of a collection --> list, listed --> to have importance and worth ~-> country ---{? unexpected countries}
--0--> ‘count’ is also a word technologically tethered, origin of computing
(Kirksey > Leigh Star) to begin with the question, [...]
(118)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%19.5[...]
-is my ajayeb a (dead/alive) multispecies art project? studying Indo-Arab-Iranian illuminated manuscripts as to be reading a paper in ecology or molecular biology or art.
unlike Alex Arteaga's question of “inevitable altruism” {started from “conscious human subjects” and ended there} (in his talk 30.05.2017 apass,) I would insist on giving an account of the metaphors of ‘self’ in the history of body and mind (that matters to ‘you’) [my findings of self: maginc lantern, iceberg's tip (==> unconsciousness), wasteland/wilderness, greedy beast within, ... {--> these are all (classical) basis for “higher” cognitive capacities}] [also I am against Alex's notion of “destablizing stabilities as the task of artistic research.” I choose to refuse to put what is in flux against what is stable or attempting to stabilize. (I am in alignment with Katie King sharpening for me that) we constantly share our stage, settings, performances, sensoria, reenactments among agencies and species, creating varying stabilities, some fragile, some robust]
*account--synonymous with: description, information, list, reason, record, statement, story, sum, tale
-a contractual relationship
-giving an itemized account of recent transactions and resulting balance (of your metaphors = material-discursive apparatuses that are materializing your found empirical objects)
-accountability is always also about remaking those relations that produced your objects
-detailed explanation of money held in trust, to count, enumerate* -->{telling =? enumerating}
counting your senses
*accountability is about your ‘import’ functions (like in a programming language when you import a library of functions)
--> count: an agent of sorting that separates units or groups of a collection --> list, listed --> to have importance and worth ~-> country ---{? unexpected countries}
--0--> ‘count’ is also a word technologically tethered, origin of computing
(Kirksey > Leigh Star) to begin with the question, ‘cui bono?’ (for whose benefit?) =/= to begin with a celebration of the fact of human/nonhuman mingling
...................................
my Rigs diagrams are ‘swarms’? -a multitude of different creative agents
ajayeb.net (how can it be:) not a website but a “para-site”
•am i creating an ego (for ajayeb) in my ajayeb.net? if yes, that would be interesting how?
topos/topic of hypertext, spatial character of electronic writing
topic [from Greek ‘topos’: a place, in ancient rhetoric used to refer to commonplaces, conventional units, or methods of thought] exist in a writing space that is not only a visual surface but also a data structure in the computer --> Hypertext: “is not the writing of a place, but rather a writing with places, spatially realized topics.” (Bolter < Hubert)
-in my hypertext, which writing materials, cognitive mappings, itineraries of rea[...]
(119)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%19.5[...] visual surface but also a data structure in the computer --> Hypertext: “is not the writing of a place, but rather a writing with places, spatially realized topics.” (Bolter < Hubert)
-in my hypertext, which writing materials, cognitive mappings, itineraries of reading, textual stability, loops and reductions are addressed?
•in ajayeb.net the so-called url address or location bar, is itself a control panel, a graphical user interface widget; how did i come to use “?q=” : rhetorics of technologized inquiry in place before i even could think about how do I allow my objects constituted by “?”, “q” and “=” of the language and grammar of internet
•(when i uploaded my hypertext i faced immediately the big data:) google webmasters tools is my first readership, it communicates its reading with me; (did i have a desire to make the hypertext for a machine?) who/what is doing the reading (in the world of big data)? the interpretive work that is going on, in a writing and reading done by computers ==> ethical and social values
•url pased in facebook post, results into a link to فلزیاب، مطالب علمی و آموزشی / مدار فلزیاب و دستگاه فلزیاب تضمینی, a series of websites for selling treasure finders, finding metal under the ground, ganj, and so on...
the English (since second world war) --> (1) international lingua franca of high technology, (2) the language of computers
-in ajayeb.net the enforcement of standard spelling and even grammar is week or nonexistent
-the amount of linguistic replicators that circulate through my ajayeb hypertext are bound to a colloquial English, they are nevertheless “English”. but this English is being changed and adapted by my foreign use in different ways
-a flourishing of a neo-English and Farsi miniaturization of Eng
...................................
sometimes the answer to the question is to investigate the question itself
Despret asking with Rowell: how can we be sure that primates have a more complex social life? --> how did we build the comparison?*** --Latour--> if they are so intelligent, how did they get the ‘chance’ to become so ‘well equipped’?
(in this question can be raised an unexpected animal)
[(how) the makhlughat/مخلوقات/creatures/beings of ajayeb were well equipped (with agency, will, intention,)]
sheep, ‘the epitome of the silly animal’
(همگون دوستی hamgune-dusti, khod-no dusti خود نوع دوستی) altruism, in birds (and humans)
Zahavi calling his birds, ‘refugees,’ non-territorial individuals
quest for social ‘status’ and prestige in Babblers
(birds know that) signals for prestige are costly
inclusive fitness
porousness of the (semiotic) demarcation [wild/domesticated --> quasi-wild/quasi-domesticated] --> (successively and recursiv[...]
(120)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%19.6[...]riting has been divided [also cannot be divided] from other generations of cultural meaning
myriad hybrid forms, commingling in material and ideological proliferations
(with Katie King's interest in women's writing technologies)
“presentist”: a practice of classification and categorization to access pasts
continuities and local discontinuities --> is ‘continuity’ (always) a universal abstraction?**
relative universalization
prescrptions for speech and silence
what is gained and what is lost when “tidying up the archive”? (a german problem)
prescriptions for speech and silence
“politeness phenomena”
‘plain speech’ for Quakers: rejection of ‘idle’ speech. preaching was another version of sacrificing seld-will, and was appropriate speech.
public preaching in particular was also a challenge to social relations and interaction --> a challenge to gender, speaking public was a cultural humiliation for individual women --> the Quaker women practiced preaching as a personal humiliation instrumental to their own salvation [! in a weird way i also did this to my self] #becoming woman-->{a liquefying aspect: “womanhood” was used metaphorically to identify those who could not preach, the surrender of (male) authority to God by men was “female”
•inhibiting woman's prophetic agencies
•“lack of discipline” becomes discipline --!--> forms of discipline that appear “undisciplined” or out of control
(Katie King > Mack:) “Quakers not only bathed in a sea of polymorphous sipritual nature and eroticism; they occasionally wrote as if they had succeeded in floating above gender altogether”
“going naked as a sign” (and Quaker's “plain style”) --> Tasavof, ajayeb, and communication strategies of the so-called new science of the same time (of Quakers)
‘nakedness’ was simultaneously literally his own, a figure of the world, an example of many others, the abstract principle, and the essential truth of the one addressed
-simplicity, economy, and plainness; to reject all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style
preferring language of artisans, countrymen, merchants, of wits and scholars
How sin is strengthened 1657
Milk for babes 1661
A message from the spirit of truth 1658
realized eschatology
انا الحق, an-al-hagh
(Damrosch:) the performance of the sign thus entailed a doubly negative aspect: in the person exhibiting it, a conviction of fulfilling a divine mandate in opposition to personal self-interest; and in those who witnessed it, an offense to ordinary social standards that actually served to authenticate it.
*the function of the sign was to bear prophetic witness rather than to get practical results; it fulfilled its purp[...]
(121)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20.1[...]ernalized and lived as a potent sign
(Bechwith:) rendered performance of religious materials both practically impossible and conceptually unthinkable
+ exercises their discipline of the senses and the imagination
*undisciplined loss of control in enthusiasm and in this extravagant example*
(stories of) a small group of powerful and vocal actors
***to attend to the local practices of inclusion and exclusion through which some speak and others are spoken for, some act and others are acted upon***
(#ontology)
gentlemanly practices --> (ask) what that legitimacy consisted in and how far it extended?
(wellborn connoisseurs of the new science)
leave the work tacit, and it fades into the wallpaper
•(Leigh Star's) ethnography of infrastructure
•(Bowker's) infra-structural inversion
•(Katie King's) ecology of writing technologies: massive, large-scale infrastructure in dynamic motion, bits changing at differential rates across time, made up of layered sub-systems complexity interconnected and animated by distributed agencies, including people, skills, devices and social powers.
the translation between ([my] deliberately) presentist (meta-)language (of cybernetic systems) and various local languages helps *to rescale particular objects of study*
(my research: “social studies of”) studying animal subjectivity --(changes the way)--> studying infrastructures --requires--> one to think (explicitly) about scale and range --> boundaries/connections between one system and another --(what counts as)--> working sub-systems and various essential forms of “black-boxing” (that describe and use these infrastructures)
-Katie King's accounts of black-boxing (that might matter in conversations about) 17th century writing technologies:
◦reification: strategic metonymic reduction, kenaye کنایه
◦enthusiasm: essentializing identities or ideas
◦members (of Royal Society): naturalizing ranges of inclusion and exclusion
◦*witnessing* rescales the infrastructure. the “work of witnessing” asserts that rhetoic as an element of witnessing is not a thing, not even a performance, but already itself a complex set of infrastructural systems with animating practices and agencies
...readers might submit to the illusion of having effectively witnessed an experiment themselves
*virtual witnessing realized an “enactment” in words*
black-boxing is totally neccessary to use/study infrastructures, they produce the “artifactual richness” [= a kind of archaeological layering of artifacts acquired in bits and pieces over time--(Lucy Suchman)] of systems
*black-boxing makes elegant some elements of the system/s differentially*
each author does it:
•Shapin black-boxing his range of systems to its complexity and elegance
•Harawa[...]
(122)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20.2[...]◾
three technologies for fact-making (that Shapin and Schaffer name):
1. material
2. literary
3. social
Adrian Johns in The Nature of The Book: particular booksellers could indeed use their *stewardship* of such heterogeneous spaces to further political ideals and interests. behind the scenes and up the stairs, an interested London bookseller became a significant actor in cultural events.
nominal agency
actual person
principle architect
systems move in space, time, and process
some archaeological structures (that one uncover) are stable, some in motion, some evolving, some decaying --> *“there is no way of ever getting access to the past except through classification systems of one sort or another”* (at best) the past could be reordered to better reflect multiple constituencies now and then. (Bowker + Leigh Star)
(my ajayeb research: “epistemic virtues” [or powers] of the 12th century encyclopedic wonder-books,) “epistemological decorum” --> (to capture) “truth-making practices in action” (Shapin)
==> (my commitment to ajayeb:) engendering reflection on the nature of and function of categorization itself
a wonderful bit of meta-language
The Exhausted Receiver
Margaret Cavendish description of a new world, called the Blazing World, her own brand of natural philosophy under the guise of a romance... science for ladies{
1- enthusiasm ==> new science
2- study of natural philosophy ==> cardinal virtues of ladies, modesty and religious reverence
3- leisure activity, appropriate pasttime
*she participated in discussions central to her life and times* (am i participating in discussions central to my life and times?!)
Cavendish self-consciously produced herself as a fantastic and singular... (--> is that what i wish to produce?)
-Cavendish strangely shared with Quaker women an experimental life of proliferating genders, of dress, of personhood, og agency, of writing, of personae, but not of this *enabling collectivity*
hermaphroditical view of things: partly artificial, partly natural
status of clothing as a signifier of identity [<-- not always]
crossdressing (#my sticker period)
[modest witness] (--> Haraway's literal and figurative queering of categories)
the rhetoric of the modest witness --> the naked way of writing, undorned, factual, compelling: “naked writing” [crafted in the context of being virtually present at a demonstration, the ‘practice of credible witnessing’ (==> “truth”) in technoscience] was a proper reference point for feminist examination of objectivity and its relationship to a science founded in exclusion of women. the new man of science had to be chaste, modest, heterosexual man who desires yet eschews a sexually dangerous yet [...]
(123)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20.3[...]>
•the intimacy of قبيح دانستن deprecating others @Xiri
•a bad but human habit @Aela
•some wicked little sorcery @קݙ
•])
-
-an attunement that takes form
-a milieu in which the mouth relaxes into a town accent (نواحی?)
-a disorientation in the face of what lies beyond (Janina)
-a love affair with light and color (Foad)
-uncurtained windows (my mother)
-
-
-->{
•one recognizable entity with qualities
•lived modalities
•a history of its social production and uses
{elements, scenes, encounters, }--they-->{sediment, accrue, circulate, unfold, go flat, }-->{saturate a situation, fly under radar, pull into alignment, fall out of sync, }--> “a regional aesthetic hardens into iconic scenes of living”
calling to eachother in an intimacy of jokes about the things that can happen in their world
voice:
•the tone
>
•the timing
•the accent
•the phrasing
•the level of force
•the purposefulness of the way that voice lives in light, with trees, in the potentiality of a laugh
•
consistency of a laugh or an edge
***when the muteness of things metamorphoses into an aesthetic phenomenon*** --> singularities incite it
(an actual physical shadow of a state of being)
sing of something amiss:
•depression
•withdrawal
•indifference
•dysfunction
(my mother in Tehran:) a curtained house reduce the gestural economy of seeing and being seen to an occluded vision in which objects are dark, shadowy outlines with black cores, like a world seen through a ripe cataract آب مروارید -->(the house video project i did ‘city of domes’ 2008 http://www.sinaseifee.com/Cathedral.html was actually about that kind of attunement in my mother's house. i was committed to the description of interiority; my allegiance was inward. watchful consciousness in which one witnesses the procession of inner events of light perception <== a sense of lack. sensous grounding of the inner life)
window: a method of worlding in itself, a node of lines of sociality and mood
curtained house --> sign of something amiss (depression, withdrawal, indifference, dysfunction) but “the actual physical shadow of a state of being that broke the circuit of a *gestural economy of seeing and being seen*”
in the maner of my mother: you don't warm up to stranger, you know who you are talking to, you watch what is going on, you help those in the circle
(Stewart describing how in her town) lamps were strongly favored over overhead lighting, lending texture and specifity to the scenes
a pause at a window --> to check in with the unfolding and pleating of a world pulled in and out through the glass <-- this is not just a practice of looking but a mood*, ruminative[...]
(124)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%21.4[...]words is a kind of description attuned to what does not completely unfold but instead melds together with other unnamed but palpable things collected like a field of mineable resources and shiny afterthoughts.”
things throwing together in words ==> expressivity
ajayeb: collected (unnamed but palpable) things like mineable resources and shiny afterthoughts
پس انديشه
______________
[*]perspective: (an attending, enduring presence, a compositional node,) perspectival agency in which things jump into relation but remain unglued*** (Stewart)
...across a field of subjects-objects-bodies-trajectories-affects
realm of killed off things
new figures i am learning from Stewart's
•“throwing together”
•“manner of”
•
(in ajayeb) the whale: throwing together of the phenomena of fish and water, sailing, mood, atmosphere, and sensory charge
*ajayeb's descriptive apparauses: a mutating realism of a certain vision of light meeting movement
[*]ajayeb: things that were once named, perhaps written down, (differently than now,) through some kind of trickery (called citation,) and then metastasized (spread throughout a body) into circulation (readings, translations, etc.) are raised, incised, made singular and charged
•ajayeb's stories/reports ~= forms of co-recognition, something witnessed that gets cooked down into something saucy***
•ajayeb's writing: a more-than-representational method of writing attuned to the qualities of phenomena
•ajayeb's fabulations (appear as:)
◦(atmospheric) traces
◦(momentary) might-have-beens
ajayeb = people + matter + real --> *point of figuring compositional reals*
fast-forwarded throught great arcs of *history-in-itelf* or *place-in-itself* in The Time Machine (2002 film)
what are the river and field doing now?
[*]theory: drawn through writing into the ways that people and things venture out into [*]reals:
•a recursive haeccity (Deleuze and Guattari)
•transversal arrays of qualities or activities which, like musical refrains, give order to materials and situations, human bodies and brains included, as actions undertaken act-back to shape muscles and bone senses (Anderson + Harrison)
•a mattering that is about the (contingent and temporary) becoming-determinate (and becoming-indeterminate) of matter and meaning (Barad)
•built out of difference and repetition (Deleuze)
•composed of potentiality and loss (Berlant)
•lean toward that which exists singularly as event, or as a gap, without ground or against the background of nothing (Dewsbury)
[*]reality: a rhythmic alteration between objects, events, and words---an uncreated world---{reverb bet[...]
(125)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%22.2[...]ffect sensory input
•*insubordinateness: the world has a life of its own; things moved by themselves
•*grabbiness: sensory impacts matter apart from their cognition
--> having a phenomenal experience is having skills with these qualities** [@Hoda]
an ecology of potentialy marked by violence and care
...................................
[Alberti]
we might:
•provide a better understanding
•provoke novel realities/ontologoes (to emerge from material)
•provoke an understanding in the context of the everyday
*(Latour, Whitehead, Law:) archeological entity = ontological entity (by nature) }==> productive of reality
to focus on practices in which all possible elements of the process must be understood as active and creative (--> # equipment list)
*“to take seriously" = to accept at a fundamental level the truth of a claim and to doggedly follow its consequences
(form an ontological and conceptual perspective)
(--> dogs follow consequences)
(indigenous thought is treated as a theoretical discourse on the nature of reality =/= an interesting interpretation of it)--> to take seriously the indigenous metaphysics of multinaturalism [or ajayeb] as a philosophical intervention : to trace out its effects on [our] concepts
multiculturalism: a single objective universe and many cultural interpretations of it
multinaturalism: multiple universes and a single mode of interpretation (Viveiros de Castro)
==> perspective =/= a different “point of view” on (the same way of knowing or seeing) qualitatively different worlds }-->* situated knowledges, #elephant parable
no: no --> de-historicizing effects of imposing psycho-cognitive shamanic models of art
no --> purely cognitive significance (of...)
*miniature: a ritual activity, a grave offering, a sympathetic magic, a capture of the power of the original
--> common stories about how miniatures can be interpreted in archaeology
(ontological research approach)_
scale is utterly important because “careful attention to alternative ontologies of scale introduces new interoretive possibilities for...” (Alberti)
*ontology: the sense of a real, solid world
for example the question of “the substance of the world”, everyone has answered that already (reiterating that which makes sense) ==> concept of real --(invent)--> *cosmology (<-- this is not a relativizing gesture) ==(force)==> production of new concepts and materialities
@Eszter: importance of asking the right questions: unless we do, the answers make no difference (Grosz)
scopes and scales ()--> “dimensionally manifold weave of knowledge worlds” (Haraway + Katie) are at stake in:
•science display
[...]
(126)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%22.4[...] have powerful and often unsettling (because paradoxical) cognitive and perceptual effects* --> these effects (in the case of figurines) enable people to enter “other worlds” (to think, manipulate and influence)
(in figurines) all the senses are implicated ==> “perceptually explosive objects” (Bailey)
•onto-transformative effect of miniaturization
*anthropocentrism of the scale of the human --> default ontological scale, self-evident human-sized body (-->?! the little bike i gave Elen, did i propose that kind of critique?)
-which organs are emphasized in iranian miniature?
(organs of knowledge: eyes, ears, mouths, skin)
-properties of materials and their relationship to form only ever emerge relationally }--> how can i construct an approach for iranian miniatur, or radif in these terms
◦countors --> decomposes to the shape of horses
◦gold
◦fields
--> and these forms emerged for people *who knew how to see it*
iranians experienced everything about the world as ‘...’ ? (جای خالی را پر کنید) --*-- the growth of children in an unreliable world نگرانی (#modalities of negarani)
inconstant and unreliable, continually threatening to transform ==> ontology involving matter =? metaphysics
(the drama of) finding the correct scale
***(Bailey > Alberti:) (“paradox of multiple worlds”:) when “other worlds” are precisely what is expected by an audience for whom the world is inherently unstable *** [<-- this is an iranian mode: loving outsiders, construct metaphysics, proliferating ajayebnameh, make belief in images, make thinking about kharej خارج, loving America, etc.]
}--> this was also why i couldn't think with Pierre's “other future” proposal; i am already living it
Alberti asks: will an ontological shift in scale reveal new ways of cenceptualizing the miniatures (the patterns)?
in Miyazaki the figure's size are part of an instantiation of scale rather than respond to an imposed scale
a scale must grow indiginously
Amazonian soul <~~--> harkat johari <~~--> tey-ol-arz طیالارض --> teleportation and tazkie nafs ?!
-designating a condition of transformability: all bodies contain the potential to transform into other bodies --> intrinsic capacity to be something else --> harkat johari حرکت جوهری
*tey-ol-arz --> intrinsic capacity to be somewhere else; [is tey-ol-arz in tasavof also about scale, body? (intensive difference) (condition of transformability is articulated in tey-ol-arz in terms of geo-temporal scale shift...)--> a moment of indiscernibility between “here” and “there” --> a super-divided being (intensive multiplicity) --> *(a specific form emerges:) a dynamic and intensive corporeality* (--> excessive intensity of all spirits) --> my argument is that tasavof is not the negation of body in favor[...]
(127)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%22.7[...]erti asks: will an ontological shift in scale reveal new ways of cenceptualizing the miniatures (the patterns)?
in Miyazaki the figure's size are part of an instantiation of scale rather than respond to an imposed scale
a scale must grow indiginously
Amazonian soul <~~--> harkat johari <~~--> tey-ol-arz طیالارض --> teleportation and tazkie nafs ?!
-designating a condition of transformability: all bodies contain the potential to transform into other bodies --> intrinsic capacity to be something else --> harkat johari حرکت جوهری
*tey-ol-arz --> intrinsic capacity to be somewhere else; [is tey-ol-arz in tasavof also about scale, body? (intensive difference) (condition of transformability is articulated in tey-ol-arz in terms of geo-temporal scale shift...)--> a moment of indiscernibility between “here” and “there” --> a super-divided being (intensive multiplicity) --> *(a specific form emerges:) a dynamic and intensive corporeality* (--> excessive intensity of all spirits) --> my argument is that tasavof is not the negation of body in favor of soul --> the key is not size or time but intensity or excess ==> to think tey-ol-arz: to think in many kinds of times, flesh, vulnerability, etc.]
tey-ol-arz metaphysics is based on the idea of a radical and infinite superposition of states: insides and outsides ~= heres and theres : are figures and ground to each other (--> #beyond)
--> there is no interior space to the body (~ there is no there/beyond to the body,) just an invisible body
#work on an exposure of work with tey-ol-arz with other interested artists
in Tehran, maybe in my parents house, informal space for opening a discussion in Farsi-English
(involve Pierre? where to get money?)
*campus: (a place where) new kinds of conversations are being invented in stabilized and social forms (sometimes departments, sometimes just research clusters)
i need to make that kind of mini-scale of quasi-organization between Tehran and Brussels: workshops, episodic and travel-mediated knots of practice
**(Alberti 2013 argues that) anything in the immediate, intimate vicinity of people can be subjectivized or personified through exchange and shared affects** --> an argument for ajayeb
‘to know a thing' = 'to subjectivize it’ : to add the maximum amount of intentionality to them (--> #equip them to talk well)
pots made to:
•to communicate (to an audience)
•to establish (relationships)
•to persuade (others of their point of view)
de-subjectivization: sometimes (objects) left deliberately partially subjectivized, semi-potent in their potential to know and be known
the intensely subjectivized pots --> *impede activity and enable knowledge*
•convince
•avtivate
-
•persuade
[...]
(129)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%22.7[...]or example] Wari pay much attention to human bodies to ensure proper growth, which is regarded as a collective responsibility: they are moulded and shaped by kin from foetus through to adult. actions carried out on the body, such as massage, painting and piercing [and negarani of iranian mother] are seen to have profound and lasting effects
•each being is stabilized through acts of care --> what are babies for iranians (and iranian mothers)? {[*]affect: dispositions or capacities which render the body of every species unique: what it eats, how it moves, how it communicates, where it lives, whether it is gregarious دسته اى or solitary ==(such practices ensure that)==> **individuals act and see in the same ways as their kin** }--> is this what mother does? (has to do with the ability or threat of transformation? -->) *#practices of care and نگرانی negarani are the production of a distinctly human body ~ naturally human ~=> different bodily constitutions of the subject ==> different worlds
a process that crucially entailed inconstancy: a continuous creative response to the exigencies of somatic uncertainty and ontological risk =/= intentional image into a realized product (a bad story of technology)
let's resist:
•the vessel metaphor
•the body's dual character as biological and cultural
archaeologists’ understanding of what bodies and artefacts are ==> a model (based on analogy) ==> “pot =/= body”
****sex and aging, defined as the real “physical characteristics” of the body that underpin human experiences --> usually remains unaltered
(for instance check the TV series Six Feet Under, how David's gay-ness is an intrinsic absolute fact of his body that underpins all his experiences)
we “wear”:
•sex
•aging
•personal feelings
•Iranian, or German, (basically being anything)
•
(basically in all Hollywood imaginings and standard archaeology) artefacts are only assigned secondary agency --> animacy is not considered as inherent attribute of the artefactual *** (Gell)
--✕--> pots as living organisms subject to processes of growth
(Ingold's) ecology of materials is characteristic of work that focuses on the inherent vitality of things (Barad)
*production: an ongoing process that produces both maker and object
(Alberti proposes) a change in focus: (from) *stopped up objects* --(to)--> *leaky things*
in his writing Alberti finishes 3 or 4 times his paragraphs with the same characterization of his field: “chronic instability of a world constantly at risk of transformation”
“if everything can be human, then nothing is human in a clear and distinct way.”
Viveiros de Castro
[*]subjectivity: a condition and outcome of all affective rel[...]
(130)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%22.9[...]ch: working on “material pasts in the present” ~= ‘how past actually gathers in the present’ =/= “material record = fragmentary evidence of history”
•(material's temporary sensitivity ==>) [*]residue: the idea of memory objects, material entities in which the memory of a moment in time is recorded
(it is precisely the) past --endures-in--> assemblage
interpretive endeavors <--characterize-- extension of the meaning of the social
•ontology as a new interpretive tool
•additive (=/= reconstructive)
Alberti's approach (in ontological equivalence of bodies and pots in anthropomorphic ceramics from northwest Argentina...):
social ontology --> reconstruct the ontologies of past societies [<~~ my work on ajayeb]
ontological archaeology's background in feminism, queer, and phenomenological
approaches ==> interest in the body
influence of the animal turn in archaeology
nonanthropocentric zoological studies
(nomenological explorations of animal representations in Attar and tasavof)
what kinds of beings existed within the social universe of pre-Columbian Andean peoples
(renovated concept of) animism: ethnographic meta-analogy for 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 t[...]
(131)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.2[...]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 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 wha[...]
(134)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.2[...]>
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 sense to us
(the danger of) a new metaontological orthodoxy becoming a immutable metaphysic
archeological alterity: things that do not make sense ontologically (escape traditional frameworks)
archeology's new kind of reflexivity
•openness
•wonder: an intentional naivete, naive empiricism (==> sustain altering + enabling meaning, to be besieged & committed to ---> go to Cinderella =/= moving beyond)
•emphasis on descriptive =/= theoretical
•attentiveness to our embodied responses
(a question of critical ontology in archeology -->) how are we to mobilize & manifest (describe & transform) the new past from things? [<-- my question in my research on ajayeb]
•how i am subjectively involved in the past we investigate
•how i am objectively part of those pasts
the all encompassing (nonlinear) descriptive writings of ancient and antiquarian travelers --> what is encountered imposes itself ==force==> a choice ==> description
kinetic activity + the experience of being in the field
aesthetic attentiveness of bestiaries
pragmatic use of the word ontology in archeology --signal--> the potential world-shifting nature of what is being studied
to be ontological = entirety of the analytical apparatus and what is being studied should be included in the analysis
(caught up in the process:) the object of study + analytical scaffolding + method + analyst
the degree to which an approach is willing to do ontology to itself (investigate its own ontological assumptions)
metaphysical archeology + ontological[...]
(137)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.3[...]tted to ---> go to Cinderella =/= moving beyond)
•emphasis on descriptive =/= theoretical
•attentiveness to our embodied responses
(a question of critical ontology in archeology -->) how are we to mobilize & manifest (describe & transform) the new past from things? [<-- my question in my research on ajayeb]
•how i am subjectively involved in the past we investigate
•how i am objectively part of those pasts
the all encompassing (nonlinear) descriptive writings of ancient and antiquarian travelers --> what is encountered imposes itself ==force==> a choice ==> description
kinetic activity + the experience of being in the field
aesthetic attentiveness of bestiaries
pragmatic use of the word ontology in archeology --signal--> the potential world-shifting nature of what is being studied
to be ontological = entirety of the analytical apparatus and what is being studied should be included in the analysis
(caught up in the process:) the object of study + analytical scaffolding + method + analyst
the degree to which an approach is willing to do ontology to itself (investigate its own ontological assumptions)
metaphysical archeology + ontological anthropology --> perspective on reality
(assign things to preexisting conceptual structures =/=) looking for ways things can have an impact on your thinking, concepts, ontology ==> unlocking what is most “of the past” about things
...................................
Alberti
Ingold
correspondence: (a pre-conceptual practice -->) epistemological intimacy in the practices of art, science, and anthropology
•a way to understand one's own research process
(archeology: a science of correspondence)
Alberti suggesting to separate arts and crafts (for analytical purposes)
artwork: non-conceptual outcomes of practice
artwork & archeological things --share--> ontological problem of how to make something new [~ *sensations/past never before experienced/thought*] out of (circumscribed body of) materials
archeological things carry both sensation & *residue of concepts* with them (~~> artistic research =/= artworks)
==> resurrect the conceptual potential immanent to the specific arrangement of materials (and their temporary forms)
(ontological dilemma [of both art and archeology]:) *how to anticipate the coming into being of something sensed but as yet not thought?*
(---> go to metaphor)
scientific interpretation and explanation of the past <-~ archeology
{my work: speculative interpretation and explanation of the past [--> prefigure new becomings + intensification and unleashing of ‘i am part of what i seek to understand’ (= my subjectivity)][...]
(139)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.3[...]hings to preexisting conceptual structures =/=) looking for ways things can have an impact on your thinking, concepts, ontology ==> unlocking what is most “of the past” about things
...................................
Alberti
Ingold
correspondence: (a pre-conceptual practice -->) epistemological intimacy in the practices of art, science, and anthropology
•a way to understand one's own research process
(archeology: a science of correspondence)
Alberti suggesting to separate arts and crafts (for analytical purposes)
artwork: non-conceptual outcomes of practice
artwork & archeological things --share--> ontological problem of how to make something new [~ *sensations/past never before experienced/thought*] out of (circumscribed body of) materials
archeological things carry both sensation & *residue of concepts* with them (~~> artistic research =/= artworks)
==> resurrect the conceptual potential immanent to the specific arrangement of materials (and their temporary forms)
(ontological dilemma [of both art and archeology]:) *how to anticipate the coming into being of something sensed but as yet not thought?*
(---> go to metaphor)
scientific interpretation and explanation of the past <-~ archeology
{my work: speculative interpretation and explanation of the past [--> prefigure new becomings + intensification and unleashing of ‘i am part of what i seek to understand’ (= my subjectivity)] =/= lock the past into predictability}
•my ‘things’ in ajayeb are to an extent ‘archeological things’
contemporary science --gives--> ontologically relational world (<-- to be acknowledged by art and archeology)
archeology --Alberti--> fostering **a particular sensibility to what is of the past in things**
anthropology: the art of inquiry
(something you can learn from)
[*]archeological sensibility: a pervasive set of attitudes towards traces and remains, towards memory, time and temporality, the fabric of history
-Shanks
craft --Ingold--> knowledge grow from the crucible of our practical and observational engagement with being and things
(Aristotlean poiesis ~~-->) [*]craft: slow and intimate knowledgeable work (of how we get along with the world; that cultivates in oneself the skill for discerning the *meanings that are already there*) --> ontological paring of conceptual language & physical condition
==> meaning and concepts are drawn out of objects (not given to them)
•Haraway --> companion species = biologist + creatures
•Barad --> concepts are literally embodied by the differing physical apparatuses
•
(we need more) art: careful accumulation of skills
21st century historiographic trends in[...]
(140)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.4[...]ng physical apparatuses
•
(we need more) art: careful accumulation of skills
21st century historiographic trends in art
artists increasingly *deploy simulacra of archeological practices and motifs* in their work
art practiced as craft (but not all the time) ==allow==> knowledge grow from the insight of being in the folding of life [of infantile grandious fantasy, as well] ~=? anthropology
producing contemporary ruins to draw attention to *the work of the present in the production of the past*
*artists take archeology as muse*
(through borrowing from archeology artists)
•create a kind of intellectual framing
•incorporate archival research
•themes of memory and entropy
•question of absence
•
prosaic nature of archeological research
production of the finds
the way Dion distorts archeological work (allegorizing archeological practice) --Alberti-->
•consequence of sleight of hand
•he is dibbling at, performing being an archeologist
•‘play at’ archeology
=/= Simon Callery
Alberti > Russell
transform archeology from metaphor to allegory --play--> archeology-as-aesthetics through performance [--> risk of undermining and reinforcing art as a subjective practice concerned with only aesthetics and affective]
craft: a model for careful practices and knowing the world =/= artwork: a model for how to break out of disciplinary frames and how to think of the ontology of archeological things [--> what Sennett calls epistemic breaking]
questions for the art:
•what effect is produced?
•how does this effect wrench from its materiality what has not been perceived or sensed before?
--> for archeology same question, from the material that remain from the past in the present
(the traditional task of art:)
•defamiliarization: to estrange our common consciousness and sensations of the world
•place of immanence: to project the coming of something materially new that is latent in our current reality. to *treat facts as events* that are about to come into being
•art is non-conceptual : impacting the nervous system without conceptual mediation --> sensations are monumentalized in the artwork for the future
•
...to treat the material of the past as anticipating something new
(my research and work on bestiary:)
•how can we produce new works that challenge us to think and experience archeological things (ajayeb) in new ways without resort to explanation or interpretation through a process of disarticulation, repurposing, and disruption of archeological artworks with a political intent in mind? (interpretive framework)
•how to allow ajayeb to continue to operate [...]
(141)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.5[...]s rendition of objectification is insufficient and not specified (in which discipline by who and when how ---> go to Barad)
-[in contemporary performance art: “becoming animal” --> a modality of narcissistic ego-formation]
“perspectives should be kept separate. Only shamans, who are so to speak species-androgynous, can make perspectives communicate, and then only under special, controlled conditions.”
perspectivism: something is a fish only by virtue of someone else whose fish it is
(any) exchange: exchange of perspectives ==> 100 percent relational universe ==> everything is primary fact (-then how would Viveiros de Castro explain deceive and lie? ---> go to Kohn)
multiculturalism --> relativism --> diversity of subjective and partial representations, each striving to grasp an external and unified nature
(different specificity of) bodies ==> perspectives
[*]affect: dispositions or capacities that render the body of each species unique ==> [*]body: assemblage of affects (ways of being) that constitute a habitus, bundle of affects and capacities
**humanity: a moral condition that excludes animals**
human-animal has a physical continuity [==> natural sciences] and a metaphysical discontinuity [==> humanities]
(what would be a *nonanimistic metaphysical continuity* between human-animal and other things? --> we need categorical mistakes and catachresis)
spirit/mind --> distinguisher (of cultures, species, etc.)
body --> connector (of material beings)
(Amerindian) spirit/mind =? reflexive form =/= immaterial inner substance
the neophenomenological appeal to the body as the site of subjective singularity
projects of “embodying” (the spirit) --?--> eliminative materialism
(culture: modern name for Spirit)
integration =/= *interspecific metamorphosis fact of nature* that understands bodies as inherent transformabilities, bodies as the great differentiators
integration cosmology --presume--> singular distinctiveness of minds ==> solipsism[= potentially absolute singularity of minds ==> fear that we will not recognize ourselves in our “own kind”; solipsism: ‘natural similarity of bodies =/=> a real community of spirit'] --multiculturalism--> spiritual: the locus of difference ==> theme of spiritual conversion
=/= bodily metamorphosis
(a traditional problem in the West:)
*how to connect and universalize*
individual substances are given, while relations have to be made
=/=
(Amerindian problem, and problem of ajayeb:)
*how to separate and particularize*
relations are given, while substances must be defined
transformation ==> nature <=/= creation
transference ==> culture <=/= invention
*culture = acculturation*
*exchan[...]
(142)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.7[...]ro explain deceive and lie? ---> go to Kohn)
multiculturalism --> relativism --> diversity of subjective and partial representations, each striving to grasp an external and unified nature
(different specificity of) bodies ==> perspectives
[*]affect: dispositions or capacities that render the body of each species unique ==> [*]body: assemblage of affects (ways of being) that constitute a habitus, bundle of affects and capacities
**humanity: a moral condition that excludes animals**
human-animal has a physical continuity [==> natural sciences] and a metaphysical discontinuity [==> humanities]
(what would be a *nonanimistic metaphysical continuity* between human-animal and other things? --> we need categorical mistakes and catachresis)
spirit/mind --> distinguisher (of cultures, species, etc.)
body --> connector (of material beings)
(Amerindian) spirit/mind =? reflexive form =/= immaterial inner substance
the neophenomenological appeal to the body as the site of subjective singularity
projects of “embodying” (the spirit) --?--> eliminative materialism
(culture: modern name for Spirit)
integration =/= *interspecific metamorphosis fact of nature* that understands bodies as inherent transformabilities, bodies as the great differentiators
integration cosmology --presume--> singular distinctiveness of minds ==> solipsism[= potentially absolute singularity of minds ==> fear that we will not recognize ourselves in our “own kind”; solipsism: ‘natural similarity of bodies =/=> a real community of spirit'] --multiculturalism--> spiritual: the locus of difference ==> theme of spiritual conversion
=/= bodily metamorphosis
(a traditional problem in the West:)
*how to connect and universalize*
individual substances are given, while relations have to be made
=/=r />
(Amerindian problem, and problem of ajayeb:)
*how to separate and particularize*
relations are given, while substances must be defined
transformation ==> nature <=/= creation
transference ==> culture <=/= invention
*culture = acculturation*
*exchange = transformation of a prior exchange event*
*to act = to response*
poiesis (creation/production/invention model of action ==> objectification: question of ‘documentation’ in art) =/= praxis (transformation/exchange/transfer model of action ==> subjectification: question of ‘what is/has changed?’)
story of “we had to steal fire from a divine father”
(god forbid the origin of our abilities be animal or queer)
mythology: a discourse on the given, the innate
myth: that which must be taken for granted
affinity and alliance --> exchange (amerindian)
parenthood --> [...]
(144)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.8[...]ndition that excludes animals**
human-animal has a physical continuity [==> natural sciences] and a metaphysical discontinuity [==> humanities]
(what would be a *nonanimistic metaphysical continuity* between human-animal and other things? --> we need categorical mistakes and catachresis)
spirit/mind --> distinguisher (of cultures, species, etc.)
body --> connector (of material beings)
(Amerindian) spirit/mind =? reflexive form =/= immaterial inner substance
the neophenomenological appeal to the body as the site of subjective singularity
projects of “embodying” (the spirit) --?--> eliminative materialism
(culture: modern name for Spirit)
integration =/= *interspecific metamorphosis fact of nature* that understands bodies as inherent transformabilities, bodies as the great differentiators
integration cosmology --presume--> singular distinctiveness of minds ==> solipsism[= potentially absolute singularity of minds ==> fear that we will not recognize ourselves in our “own kind”; solipsism: ‘natural similarity of bodies =/=> a real community of spirit'] --multiculturalism--> spiritual: the locus of difference ==> theme of spiritual conversion
=/= bodily metamorphosis
(a traditional problem in the West:)
*how to connect and universalize*
individual substances are given, while relations have to be made
=/=
(Amerindian problem, and problem of ajayeb:)
*how to separate and particularize*
relations are given, while substances must be defined
transformation ==> nature <=/= creation
transference ==> culture <=/= invention
*culture = acculturation*
*exchange = transformation of a prior exchange event*
*to act = to response*
poiesis (creation/production/invention model of action ==> objectification: question of ‘documentation’ in art) =/= praxis (transformation/exchange/transfer model of action ==> subjectification: question of ‘what is/has changed?’)
story of “we had to steal fire from a divine father”
(god forbid the origin of our abilities be animal or queer)
mythology: a discourse on the given, the innate
myth: that which must be taken for granted
affinity and alliance --> exchange (amerindian)
parenthood --> creation/production (modern western)
-the “exchange” (=/= “parenthood”) that Viveiros de Castro talks about fits seamlessly with capitalism's free exchange of knowledge
warrior/shaman/artist --> conductors of perspectives
relative
relational
enmity: full-blown social relationship, extreme exchange
schema of difference
(Amazonian cosmology:) generic attributive proposition = cannibal proposition
==> self: g[...]
(145)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.8[...]y)
~= processes responsible for the power and mobility of media, money, politics, sexualities, and knowledge practices*** --> these meanings and powers can be “glocalized”: altered, filled in, indigenized, and reunderstood *within local agencies*(: people, art forms, practices of everyday life)
(globalization processes) ==> academically uncomfortable and sometimes politically reprehensible سزاوار سرزنش forms of hybrid histories
(Katie King's flexible knowledges:) layers of locals and globals
my aim in my research is creating *struggle for understanding* [= many communities involved in reading, writing, interpreting,] --> ***we are all members in these communities struggling for understanding***
Urton paying attention to decompiling intermediaty positions between so-calles reading and writing --> string records --> numerical accounts or maps or... ==> histories and narratives
my research on ajayeb in apass as a practice is about *disassembling and reordering classifications we use to access pasts*
the excursion i did in Vladmir's block was somehow about examining sites of implicitly or explicitly knowledge production in commercialized forms
museum, TV documentry as a metaphor {a richly contaminated set of crafty metaphors and realities} and narrative frame, a momentary melding of pastpresents in imaginative reenactment --> economic globalization figuring in artistic/academic capitalism
(--> ajayeb is also of this kind,) *site of heritage* culture as promoting particular versions of history, nation, science, art, and religion*** --> (the excursion made me) with ajayeb to be careful with ‘the commerce with global knowledge production’ --(what is at stake)--> structure of pasts, peoples, and sensation
*heritage culture ==(impress)==> public histories* --> appropriation of national and personal identities; today (specially in university) no one is "immune from governing pressures of heritage culture or the impression of corporate management assumptions, styles, funding requirements, and money-making imperatives in enterprise culture” (Katie King > Morley & Robins) [i can imagine apass is struggling with this specially in Brussels]
(@Vera's position as a museum tour guide, exploitations of the interpreter/reenactors, who are promised semiprofessional recognition within social historical practice but instead end up as engineers of a “feel good” atmosphere for tourism)
(Katie King > Slaughter & Leslie) *global market:
•fields “close to the market” --(reguire)--> proucts
•fields “peripheral to the market” --(are pushed to)--> pedagogy and public service
(sometimes virtually indistinguishable:) impulse to democratize ~=? commodify knowledge
-they model for museum goers as:
◦reenactors
◦shadows
◦witnesses
◦a play at being “there”:
◾on set
[...]
(146)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%24[...]al daryayi دريايي، مربوط به دریانوردی، ملوانی
saying what ‘you’ see & saying why you ‘see’
the more accurate and sensory the apparent evocation of things, the more we have the sense of someone there doing the looking (<-- USA spectacle knows this)
X in Y's translation
“a fish never makes an aesthetic mistake” --> it sends us hurrying to every visual image of fish we can think of, to see if it could be true*
(a good) description: an evocation of the sensory world also suggests the limitations of such evoking, maintaining a sort of open space
in which meaning isn't closed or completed, but remains instead generative
a title sometimes does the useful work of placing us specifically, so that the body of the poem can turn its attention to the heart of the matter
(it is surprising how strongly the) naming of particulars ==(bring color into)==> poem's (or text's) perceptual web
distortion's power to suggest but not define linkage
•the use of ‘like’ --> would draw a firm line between the two elements
•not using ‘like’ --> no firm gesture of equivalence ==> we confront a metaphor that is far more alive in its associations, far more ambiguous, and more crucial --> both an evocation of alienation and a recognition of communality --tonally--> composed of *equal portions of sorrow and wonder* --> forcing us *to remain in the position of interpreter* of something that is perpetually open =/= direct statement
Blake (and Attar?) wouldn't be the great poet he is if he could allow his bloom to be entirely symbol
--> a bloom attached to the speaker, a memeber of Lord Death's troops, an assistant to the disruptive powers of the night
=/= transcendence
crucible بوته اهنگرى, this nere-archaic word with its connotations of flame and molten metal, magical heat and transformation
sunflower: the cry of the determined survivor**
(differently depicted) sunflower gain power from resisting the flower's conventional associations
the poetic =/= reinscribing the already known
“it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” (George Eliot > Doty) ♥
description = giving us the world + the inner life of the witness
evoking texture of experience --> beauty = accuracy
“whatever ‘what is’ is is what i want.” tosif توصیف
(Galway Kinnel)
“the deeds and sufferings of light.” -Goethe @Foad
into the reader's internal eye
Foad's paintings: ...two textures have now been added to the color, and in “rough” there is even a suggestion o[...]
(148)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%24.9[...]ted, but remains instead generative
a title sometimes does the useful work of placing us specifically, so that the body of the poem can turn its attention to the heart of the matter
(it is surprising how strongly the) naming of particulars ==(bring color into)==> poem's (or text's) perceptual web
distortion's power to suggest but not define linkage
•the use of ‘like’ --> would draw a firm line between the two elements
•not using ‘like’ --> no firm gesture of equivalence ==> we confront a metaphor that is far more alive in its associations, far more ambiguous, and more crucial --> both an evocation of alienation and a recognition of communality --tonally--> composed of *equal portions of sorrow and wonder* --> forcing us *to remain in the position of interpreter* of something that is perpetually open =/= direct statement
Blake (and Attar?) wouldn't be the great poet he is if he could allow his bloom to be entirely symbol
--> a bloom attached to the speaker, a memeber of Lord Death's troops, an assistant to the disruptive powers of the night
=/= transcendence
crucible بوته اهنگرى, this nere-archaic word with its connotations of flame and molten metal, magical heat and transformation
sunflower: the cry of the determined survivor**
(differently depicted) sunflower gain power from resisting the flower's conventional associations
the poetic =/= reinscribing the already known
“it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” (George Eliot > Doty) ♥
description = giving us the world + the inner life of the witness
evoking texture of experience --> beauty = accuracy
“whatever ‘what is’ is is what i want.” tosif توصیف
(Galway Kinnel)
“the deeds and sufferings of light.” -Goethe @Foad
into the reader's internal eye
Foad's paintings: ...two textures have now been added to the color, and in “rough” there is even a suggestion of place--it doesn't sound domestic, or urban--and of age
(coming close to an) impossible, longed-for accomplishment
the art of description = *the art of perception* }--> what do you require to say what you see?
to be better at description, we have to work at attentiveness
#training / do contour drawing just with your eyes
your erotic inflects and charges is your way of interacting with the world
...you basically just make love to the whole world
...and all the stories you tell yourself about your encounter with the cake
[*]economy =/= it is too much, excess
no one would want Prous[...]
(149)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%24.9[...]c, or urban--and of age
(coming close to an) impossible, longed-for accomplishment
the art of description = *the art of perception* }--> what do you require to say what you see?
to be better at description, we have to work at attentiveness
#training / do contour drawing just with your eyes
your erotic inflects and charges is your way of interacting with the world
...you basically just make love to the whole world
...and all the stories you tell yourself about your encounter with the cake
[*]economy =/= it is too much, excess
no one would want Proust to have less to say
fulsome discourse works only when perception itself is the subject --> Proust's novel is a huge inquiry into the nature of consciousness : a magnificently nuanced evocation of what it is to see and sense --> which is usually *too much*
here is one of those stories everyone swears is true,...
(an appetizer called) “smoked language”
the absolute centrality of figurative speech
(Susan Morrow:) how the scuttle of crab claws on sand influenced the hieroglyph for “writing”
we breathe metaphor, swim in metaphor, traffic in metaphor
(becoming poet = becoming the) handler of the figurative speech : employing language's tendency to connect like and disparate things to the richest possible effects
(in talk:) figurative is at its most sophisticated: condensed, alive with meaning, pointing in multiple directions at once
(Hollywood's ways) to make meaning seem more attractive =/= figurative speech itself means, and *means intensely*
baznegari-e sanaye adabi (بازنگری صنایع ادبی):
1. to say *what we see* = to speak figuratively (first project of simile tashbih تشبیه and metaphor esteare استعاره is to describe, to say what something's like ~~?--> measurement, we can't do so without comparison[?])
2. figures work together ==(to form)==> *networks of sense* (enjoying a metaphoric game, modes of appreciation)
3. figuration = a form of *self-portraiture* (intense involvement in rich, descriptive speech ==> perceptual signature : a destillation/condensation of the way one person knows herself/himself in time and in place)
4. metaphor ==introduces==> *tension* and *polarity* to language (figurative ==> enexpected language into text, shifting the elements of vocabulary)
5. metaphor's distancing aspect ==(allows)==> (us) to speak more freely (to explore a heated, charged experience, “I need more veil” ♥, a delight in a thin disuise; the way a good veil works [according to Doty]: you can see the veil itself, if you choose to. but if you want to, or you know how, you can read what lies beneath)
6. ***metaphor = an act of inquiry*** =/= an expression of what we[...]
(150)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%25[...]ess
no one would want Proust to have less to say
fulsome discourse works only when perception itself is the subject --> Proust's novel is a huge inquiry into the nature of consciousness : a magnificently nuanced evocation of what it is to see and sense --> which is usually *too much*
here is one of those stories everyone swears is true,...
(an appetizer called) “smoked language”
the absolute centrality of figurative speech
(Susan Morrow:) how the scuttle of crab claws on sand influenced the hieroglyph for “writing”
we breathe metaphor, swim in metaphor, traffic in metaphor
(becoming poet = becoming the) handler of the figurative speech : employing language's tendency to connect like and disparate things to the richest possible effects
(in talk:) figurative is at its most sophisticated: condensed, alive with meaning, pointing in multiple directions at once
(Hollywood's ways) to make meaning seem more attractive =/= figurative speech itself means, and *means intensely*
baznegari-e sanaye adabi (بازنگری صنایع ادبی):
1. to say *what we see* = to speak figuratively (first project of simile tashbih تشبیه and metaphor esteare استعاره is to describe, to say what something's like ~~?--> measurement, we can't do so without comparison[?])
2. figures work together ==(to form)==> *networks of sense* (enjoying a metaphoric game, modes of appreciation)
3. figuration = a form of *self-portraiture* (intense involvement in rich, descriptive speech ==> perceptual signature : a destillation/condensation of the way one person knows herself/himself in time and in place)
4. metaphor ==introduces==> *tension* and *polarity* to language (figurative ==> enexpected language into text, shifting the elements of vocabulary)
5. metaphor's distancing aspect ==(allows)==> (us) to speak more freely (to explore a heated, charged experience, “I need more veil” ♥, a delight in a thin disuise; the way a good veil works [according to Doty]: you can see the veil itself, if you choose to. but if you want to, or you know how, you can read what lies beneath)
6. ***metaphor = an act of inquiry*** =/= an expression of what we already know (“i can't prove this [...] but i can feel the power of the result.” unmistakable quality of discovery [of metaphoric figures]: the sort of energy generated when an idea [and a concomitant set of emotions] unfolds before the write [<-- Sven is missing this?]. in this way: metaphor = (a kind of) *argument*= a “thinking through” of what is implied, [oh i have made something] complicated = full of feeling and tension, #excess; investigation of erotic energy, thrilling sonic structures you build,,,)
to become a rhetorical reader of our *gesture drawing*
moments of rebelion, when you have just enough of the strictures[...]
(153)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%25[...]tra-active model of explanation]
==> (rhetoric of) *dialectical conception of the relations between the organism and the environment* --instances such as “suited/adapted organism” and “favorable environment” [=/=? affordance theory]
Comte seeking a guarantee of his dialectical connection in the Newtonian principal of action and reaction:
organism --> variable
environment --> function
theory of the environment in Comte: (strictly mechanistic meaning of the word...) world --to--> man
Comte --> Lamarck: “milieu = circumstances = surrounding environment” ==suggest==> intuition of a *centered or focused formation* --> circle, sphere
***circumstances and surroundings still preserve a symbolic value, but milieu forgoes reference to any other relation other than that of a position forever denied by exteriority --?-->
چو پرگار میشدم...
چو نقطه...
گرد...
now refers to befor, here to its beyond, and so on without cease***
(in iranian poetry) environment: a pure system of relations without supports
*}==> environment: a universal instrument for dissolving *individualized organic synthesis* in the anonymity of universal elements and movements
(for example) metamerism of fish: “fish do not lead their lives themselves, the river has made them lead it, they are *persons without personality* (<== strictly mechanistic use of the notion of environment [<-- Descartes beast machine])
Lamarck: the environment dominates and control the evolution of living beings through the intermediary of *need*(= a subjective notion entailing reference to a positive pole of vital values)
(for Lamarck:) life and environment (which is unaware of it ~(Lamarckian *vitalism*:) ‘there is an originality of life of which the environment takes no account’) are two series of asynchronous events ==>
[*]adaptation: life's renewed effort to “stick” to an indifferent environment
[*]being: the effect of an effort [--?--> striving]
(--> this asynchronicity ==> “us” and “place”)
==> environment does nothing for life --Bichat--> “life: set of functions that resist death” (~-> tales of survival in America sci-fi TV series)
life resists solely by changing its shape in order to survive
Darwin explaining the ‘appearance of new forms’ conjunction of two mechanisms:
1- mechanism of the production of differences ~ variation
2- mechanism of the reduction and criticism of these produced differences ~ vital competition and natural selection
(for Darwin the fundamental biological relationship:) the relationship of the living being to other living beings --> precedence over environment conceived as a set of physical forces
-competition of forces
-accidental morphological variation
(for Darwin:) ‘to live' = to submit an individual difference to the judgment of the set of[...]
(160)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%25.7[...]ertise in ethnographic methods
•history --> its turn to environmental narration
•biology --> (ecological evolutionary-developmental trends) that have shown how species come into being with each other
•science studies --> its lively juxtaposition of technological and philosophical methods
Tsing: there is no reason that anthropologists cannot study nonhumans using some of the very same methods we use to study humans--or close parallels to them
...................................
walking is the speed of bodily pleasure
the speed for looking for mushrooms
mushrooms jump into your hands with all three pleasures of the unasked for
*they are not the product of your labor* <-- we should be able to work and depend on those things
Tsing saying ‘bismillah’ in her writing
delight ==make==> impression
*noticing* and *coming back* to familiar places is the beginning of appreciation for multispecies interactions
Tehran expansive and overlapping geographies resist common models (which divide the world into “them” and “us”)
lichen: an association of a fungus and an alga or cyanobacteria, where the non-fungal partner fuels lichen metabolism through photosynthesis
assumptions of human constancy --> autocratic military ideology =/= historically webbed interspecies dependence -=> a different cultural research trajectory
(to understand more about) domestication: web of entanglements
=/= neoliberal hard-line [human =/= wild] understanding of “domestication = human control” (ignoring that such relations might change humans too, ignoring the complex relations of interdependency) <== ideological commitment to human mastery (--> Sana's political commitment to liberalism) }==> (fantasies of) *the wild species self-making* =/= fantasies of control
==> life imprisonment and genetic standardization of domestic animals, wild species are ‘preserved’ in gene banks while their multispecies landscape are destroyed
i want Sana to become a researcher able to know something more about the cultural construction of gender, species, and binds--rather than “freeing” women from their gender, dogs from humans, slaves from masters--which will lead only to the constitution of autocratic liberalism made in the image of human free will and guardianship, another master program...
!?how can i say “let's stay in the prison and study” ...well, maybe i can't
#harem, the question of women confinement (usually at the center of a beautiful dream of order and plenty)
-how can i start and cultivate affection and appreciation for interspecies relations in Tehran today? (--> ways and methods)
-how with my chaotic and extremist iranian freedom-fighter friends we could become allies? (--> network)
-what is my evidences, examples, samples of the[...]
(161)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%26.3[...]judgement) --> comprehension (psychological judgement about the manner of situation) --> knowing ==> world of doing, in which “action” is: expected (mother attending the child, free liberating the prisoners), commanded (soldier's hierarchy, job's duty), solved (engineer puzzling out a problem)
the things apprehended from a particular point of view (particular visual phenomenology) are not connected to that point
Neobeobachtungen
moshahedat مشاهدت
نگاه جدید
*essence of the internal world* --> who is busy with this? (this will define the fate of animal subjectivity)
*view from nowhere*: that their particular viewpoint is not part of the common reality (--✕--> sociology of science)
X is Y
“is”: converge, a technique of modeling (~~> sync)
X, Y: two referential paths
we know how X is supposed to be true
people are no told at an early age that *all matter is really energy* (--> capitalist physicalism. then what you say abnout ‘energy’ is saying something about the nature of reality)
physicalism: the hypothesis that a mental event is a physical event
someone with instinct metamorphosis
(my feedbacks in apass does not only apply to intentional mental events of each other)
(Nagel asking for:) to devise a method of expressing in objective terms much more than we can at present [but he is stuck in the idea of] “a phenomenology that is objective*
...................................
with Jassem and Mia
Norway ~= (a breakable) illusion --> that somebody is living it
green competition and technopositivist hubris
question of topology (in dream)
(topology: those qualities that remain invariant after transformation --> persistent forms)
fantastic peasant
a piece of hanging cloth that suggests horrors to receptacle receiving eyes
•landscape --> sounds
•poems
•divisions in Norway (<== second world war)
•sami cultural disappearance
◦domestic violence
◦racism
◦refugee geopolitics
•seagull, fish, salmon farming
•interviews
•doom --> delirium, murder, hallucination, whispering,
•ruin (of signs)
•entropy (=/=? emergence)
•
*affliction landscapes* --> Leid: existence thriving in the wound --> anticipation of oblivion
doom, ruin, entropy --> udyr (in norwegian u-: non- or bad, dyr: animal) bad or corrupted animal, nonanimal, monster, (rootless existence)
udyr (gate keepers creepers) <--?--> div (defeated)
--performance--
rotating styles of: folkloric ballads, existential meditation, doomsday rant, el[...]
(162)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%26.8[...]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 histories through which ecologies are made and unmade
*haunted --> presence of past
*landscapes --> arrangement of living spaces
*ghosts --> disturb us in their indeterminacy
-cracked cement
-worlds have ended many times before @Jassem
-which ‘endings’ come with which ‘death of’?
•a leaf
•a city
•a friendship
•a small promise
•a small story
•
***endings ==grow==> landscapes***
[...]
(163)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%27.5[...]
*ghostliness (in Southeast Asia): an idiom with which to address issues about the difficult delineation of a boundary between the living and the dead* (=/= matter of improper burial)
if the dead cannot join the living, the living can die and thereby mingle with the already deceased ~-> fright
the location (where ghostliness arises) is not spatial but temporal (“something happened”)--> in a strange way, for the “occurrence” has no place in time ==> stop time and to displace other narratives (--> it has the structure of trace)
[@Marialena's summoning to life =/= (living) beings who can be summoned to death]
}~~?--> (Freud's) death drive (<== traumatic neuroses) + (Kantian conception of)
accident
(for Freud:) [*]consciousness: the form of a resistance to the world
unconscious is “timeless” : incapable of discerning order (in a Kantian sense)
trauma (=/= anxiety) ==> disables the pleasure principle but not the compulsion to repeat (which is typically a source of pleasure)
[*]trauma as precisely such a disturbance of time and of causal sequentiality
{earlier philosopher's analogy: substance (essentially unchanging) =/= accident (the name of that which metamorphoses over time) }=/={ Kant's analogy: accidents = the “particular ways” in which substance is determined to exist}
--Morris--> causality: a concept that responds to and covers over a gap in the human capacity to inhabit a world of accident
--Freud--> sudden, unexpected event incapacitates the psyche (and its maturation) to such an extent that it will relate to the world only as accidentally existing --> [*]accident/trauma: the experience of the occurrence as having no reason [--causality as a principle of understanding]
accident ~=&==>
•trauma
•condition of possibility of a political opening to the future (one whose form is not determined a priori)
•condition of possibility of en ethical opening to the future (without guarantee)
•
}--Morris--> *accident: the name of a certain kind of freedom*
(it is initially tempting to suggest:) ghosts: symptoms of trauma, particular form of a repetition compulsion, externalized and made public, (untimeliness of an event that robs it of the structure of causality within which it could be more properly interpreted), a form of neurosis =/= Morris's reading of Southeast Asia ghosts
•recognition does not stave off fear
•anxiety does not stave off trauma
reflective interpretation
narrativized interpretation
abstract interpretation
dissociation (in spirit possession) ==> (allows other individuals to witness) the loss of consciousness ==> memory traces of history become legible
(change the focus in trauma studies, a reorientation of perspective:)
missed encounter (~ w[...]
(164)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%27.8[...]l political theory, public sphere characterized by deliberative processes)
*scenes of overhearing* --> public speaking makes that overhearing its goal
“migrant pirates of deindustrialization” (speak only to threaten) --> liberal opposition between language and violence ~~--> the rhetorical grace appropriate to leadership (inauguration speech of Obama, his charisma emanated from his identification with a righteous struggle --> *his being more than himself* [<-- young artist selflessness syndrome in aspiration with the right politcal cause])
zamazamas’ illiteracy, not eligible for a public sphere that depends on literacy. for without literacy, they cannot submit to the law. *defined in its essence by legality* (sustained by a desired opposition between language and violence)
a signature (sign your own name): a form of writing recognizable across all (mainly romanized) languages and is the ideal condition of possibility of recognition from within its constitutional order
mimic the address of someone wit charisma (~= authority)
(Morris on) mediaticity of speech (and not merely of media technologies)
Morris reading of a scene (of quotidian exchange) in HIV/AIDS NGO office: a metonym and a metaphor for a kind of South African public sphere that aspires to inclusiveness but is terrorized by its incapacity to know what that opens it up to
•arms itself against potentially aggressive others
•narratives of violence work *to reinforce the sense of necessity* (for a general securitization)
•work in the mode of a **negative meritocracy** (= those who would violate the rights of others are to be excluded, but no others --but--> how to know in advance who has perpetrated or intends to perpetrate such a violation?)
...in the shadow of communicational technology's fashion industry
...bountiful banality of the technologies and artifacts of mass reproducibility
[...] --> lithography --(superseded by)--> photography --(gives way to)--> cinema --(transformed by)--> sound technology --(displaced by)--> integrated and multiplatform digital media --> [...]
(teleological fantasy:) ontologized in epochal schema (these sequences become something more and different) --> analog media are said to be displaced by digital media ==> logic of representation gives way to that of information
=/= (Morris questioning) the conflation of media with mediation, which is itself symptomatic of both a technological determinism and an effort to ontologize technology --> a crises of mediation (not media): the communicative aspiration and the presumptive unity of medium and message in language are brought to their limit (--> media technologies play a role in this drama, but they do not explain it. @OSP & Femke)
-women's understanding of improper English of Zuma's speech: a communicational fail that (from their pers[...]
(165)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%28.6[...]ate, indistinct, chronic, and fragmented phenomena*
chemical sublime = انباشت استدلالهای جسمانی accrual of bodily reasoning
irritations --> agitations ==> attenuate the effects of vast toxic infrastructure
(masco nuclear) sublime ==translate==> resounding ethical call
chemical sublime ==> ?
...industry's mobilization of law, science, capital
Shapiro: we must look at how the sublime has brokered relations between exposure and the status quo since at least down of the enlightenment
(quintessential of enlightenment project) Kant's sublime: the immensity/might first overwhelms our imaginative capacity (or indicating the fragility of human body yielding a sense of helplessness and distress) then this feeling is countered and ultimately overcome by reassuring one's self of power of the mind ==> reason sets humanity apart and above the physical world
[*]sublime: *internal turmoil and sensuous displeasure is elevated into the delight and superiority of reason* --> humanity's continued progressing
(Shapiro + Gene Ray: ideological function of the aesthetic category of the) sublime within Kant's critical system is anxiously bound up with deep *metaphysical optimism*
formulation of sublime:
•form (space, time, and intensity) of exposure
•the relation between the supersensible (mind) and the sensible (matter)
•orientational movement (from without to within or vice versa)
•political reckoning
*bodily reasoning =/= object (of sublime) held at a distance
*sublimation of toxicity =/= mental mastery (over perceived threats)
*amplify =/= extinguish (the tensions, agitations, dissident potentiality of large-scale hazards)
*coalescing of underrecognized disturbances =/= compensation
*beginning of a confrontation =/= resolution
foil of human triumph: “transforming the worst into the best” <-- not possible anymore
...~->? potentiality of living otherwise (---> go to Tsing's contaminated diversity, Chen's queer toxicity)
...in these spaces where *enduring and knowing* are coterminous, the feeling of a living dead seeped into the margins of life for those with even minimal symptoms
(chemical phenomenology)
molecular cohabitants who physically hold our world together also encourage our unravelling*** [Shapiro] becoming a pupil of the air [Sloterdijk] is to attune to the aerostolized material culture and more-than-human semiotics [Kohn] within which one is immersed
***
chemical sublime (does not merely refigure a form of sublime in philosophical discourse but) poses an alternative **schema of eventfulness** (or call to action)
...................................
[title]
kulturgeist
...................................
[...]
(166)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.1[...]dy
•schizo body
•drugged body
•masochist body <-- my favourite
•
}--> these are all about the body from the point of view of its *potential* [=/=? method]
}--> we are at (an anthropological / psychoanalytic discourse of) excess and transgression --Artaud-->{ organs: functional articulations forced on the body }==> separation, determination, representation
body without organ =/= body image http://ajayeb.net/?q=body+image
-what feminist theory has to say about that? --Irigaray--> is not the body without organs women's own historical condition?
...the machinic, the inorganic, as well as the notions of loss of self, dispersion, and fluidity are all too familiar to women
(and to non-western subjects, i would say. Tasavof has been advocating body without organ within the context of mysticism in Iran)
are Deleuze and Guattari “cyberpunks, constructing fictions of terminal identity in the nearly familiar language of a techno-surrealism”? ~-> (to dissolve the body ==>) will to regain the world <~~--> [death of the auratic object ==> subject: a condemned and useless vestige alongside the simulacra that precede and envelope it]
...................................
(?we need) political metamorphosis
the tensions between:
[*]artist's “special task” (to oppose intellectual divisions) {(art of) forming, inventing, fabricating concepts (<== Deleuze and Guattari), (a “task” that) proceeds with a plane of immanence (or consistency) ~= self-referential (=/= referential) --> syntagmatic (word associations)}
and: [*]the increasing difficulty to ask questions (as a result of the constant increase in the specialization of the knowledges --> science) {propositions in discursive systems, (a “task” that) proceeds with a plane of reference --> paradigmatic (a worldview) ==>? to *confront chaos* ~= to provide chaos with reference points [<-- artists need to learn this]}****
(my work in lecture-performance: to provide chaos with reference points)
Barad, Stengers, <== stable foundations of physics had broken up and it is time for science to become philosophical
science becomes philosophical philosophy becomes artistic art becomes anthropological anthropology becomes poetic poetry becomes biological biology becomes archaeological archaeology becomes speculative speculation becomes scientific science becomes aesthetic aesthetics becomes adventurous adventure becomes rigorous rigor becomes Iranian Iran becomes German Germany becomes Arabic Arab becomes Egyptian Egypt becomes animalistic animal becomes fabulous fable becomes political politics becomes...
...................................
(Baxstrom + Meyers highlight a productive gap between intent & outcome in) Christensen making a case of witchcraft (in his pioneering, bizarre, and lavish project of Häxan):
•misidentified ner[...]
(167)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.2[...]t ==> *to make nature speak*] drove efforts to locate & combat witches, and it served to shape similar aporias between *sense & distance* imbricated in:
•the invention of modern hysteria in the 19th century
•the “discovery” of the “native's point of view” by anthropologists in the early 20th century
for Christensen: “witchcraft = unrecognized manifestations of clinical hysteria and psychosis”
excessiveness of Häxan's reenactment --> construct the witch's material, invisible, mobile force
(Häxan's objectivity) had no expectation that the real will simply “speak for itself”
Häxan's reception in the 1920s --> to energize a negative, conceptually dogmatic discourse that formed and hardened cinematic taxonomies [particularly the division between “documentary” (nonfiction) and “feature” (fictional) films]
experimentation + evidence making
sexual intercourse, cannibalism, cauldron --solemnize--> pact with the devil
evidentiary thinking
elaborated visualization of the witch stereotype
--> complex nature of *sensual explorations of the flesh* through masochism and exorcism
demonic influence
genres of transfiguration and metamorphosis
Christensen shows how those who were once identified as witches are now the objects of medical and social concern in modern life --> shows the potency of her various forms over time
--> Baxstrom + Meyers
(my work on ajayeb is based on that) [there is a largely] unacknowledged historical tendency and predisposition within the human sciences with roots in much older practices of:
•defining social facts
•discovery, interpretation, production of the real itself
[such as bestiary]
method that allows the researcher to sense
interpret and master forces that appear to be nonsensical (yet held to be present: held to be essential to the reality of everyday social life) --> an epistemological concern
privileged space of the irrational in medical discourses in 19th century: (Jonathan Strauss -->) irrationality (nonsense) was a legitimizing force for medicine in that the very incomprehensibility of the mad created a mysterious and extra-social language that the rising medical profession could adapt to its own purposes
“nonsense” of “the native” [--> my start-up engine in Islam lecture series, a privileged site of mysterious incomprehensibility allowed me to to form the methodological basis for a fieldwork for unknown forces of irrational life in distant societies...]
*anthropology: (a distinct human science from the desire to credibly) master nonsense*
(Baxstrom + Meyers)
anthropologists claiming to have assumed the “point of view” of another (~ fieldworker must achieve the cultivated sensed point of view of another) --[...]
(168)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.3[...]senses of the anthropologist)
*fieldwork ==> knowledge of hauntings that is itself haunted*
imaginative result of “I-witnessing”
*paradoxical necessity of an expressive element within an objective test in relation to what would other wise be nonsense* is evident in many of the examples of 16th century visual culture --> ajayeb bestiary
trial by ordeal
(illustrated in Eduard Fuchs)
the case: if the woman floats she is clearly able to contravene the nature and is therefore a witch or heretic; if she sinks, she has made no such pact with Satan
-procedural expertise --> trial by water here functions as *experiment as much as a punishment* designed to reveal an other wise invisible truth
testimony + experimental results + expert inquisitorial interpretation ==> early version of the ‘case study’ (synthesized as evidence in service of accounting for variation that exceeded general laws regarding relations and phenomenon in the world)
Baxstrom + Meyers
(ajayeb's) individual cases: an effective strategy in providing analytic (and empirical) purchase for phenomenon that were other wise invisible to even the discerning eye of the expert <-- **to move away from a reliance on metaphysics**
**medicalization of the invisible**
possession
set the stage for the explicit medicalization of the mobile invisible forces that experts had been struggling to master, explain, and take measures against --> a new mode that was equally *didactic and forensic* (as the theological frameworks deployed by inquisitors and the exorcise of demons by Church)
witchcraft, faith healing, and demonic possession
Bibliotheque diabolique --> case studies to demonstrate the precariousness of misrepresentation and the consequences of ignorance ~= investigations collected by Charcot and his students in their studies of hysteria
◦clarifying the link between witchcraft and hysteria
*witch hunting and the exorcism of spirits in the 16th century (--> antiquated forms of inquiry) ~=?! clinical studies of nervous illness in the 19th century --> conceptual scaffolding of the emergent science*:
•fascination with the secondary visible effects of primary invisible forces
•long-term labor of social interpretation that required the mutation of old categories and the creation of new ones
==> “witch = misdiagnosed”
epilepsy, the sacred disease, erroneously perceived as resulting from hostile magic
=/= hysteria (hold a special place in the moral imaginary)
the special susceptibility of women to witchcraft mirrored the “feminine weakness” associated with the hysteric, exacerbated by low social status
-in countless accounts of possession, we find descriptions of demons speaking through the mouths of girls
[Baxstrom + Meyers =/= [...]
(169)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.5[...]y impersonal tenor
•establishing the X as a chapter within a much longer constellation of practices, discourses, traditions, and institutions
Kieckhefer --> how the long history of practical natural magic was enfolded into the specificity of European witchcraft in the late Middle Ages
Christ in Limbo --> Christensen's parallel editing ==> moving representation of a terra-centered universe <~~ elaborate wonders found in baroque wunderkammer (meticulously assembled by the German elite)
Renaissance Hermeticism:
writings of Hermes Trimesgistus ~=> foundation for:
•Ficino's relatively mild natural magic
•Pico della Mirandola's Christian Cabalist
•Agrippa's Christian magus
•Tommaso Campanella's (1568–1639) utopian City of the Sun
•Bruno's full-blown Hermetic–Cabalist (through the power of astrology and magic to bypass the Church altogether)
•
...rippling effects of the Hermetic–Cabalist tradition -->
•scrupulously mathematical astrology of Girolamo Cardano
•the rigorously empirical studies of the natural world demanded by Bruno's attempts to operate as a magus
}==> (paved the way for) science of Newton and Copernicus --> a new metaphysics to emerge
attacks on Renaissance magic and the Hermetic–Cabalist tradition (that authorized witch) ==> anti-witch treatises
(case of Giordano Bruno's execution --> Hermetic magic and Cabalism) how in the 16th century: “superstition = crime”
(Christensen attributing) --> Hortus deliciarum, a largely cohesive image of hell to a period when the nature of hell's location and “topography” was a subject of fierce theological debate
-he strategically ignores debates and alternate conceptions of damnation that existed in the 15th and 16th centuries in Europe
[that which you choose] works to amplify affect more than further analysis (--> such as Christensen's attempt to heighten the fiery terror of the scene by billowing smoke ==> عام generic explanation)
...a palpable sexual dimension crepting into Christensen's thesis <-- images of women “sneaking away” to attend Sabbats
Häxan visually grounds itself in citable evidence from the start
•cinema: (as an instrument for “recording reality”) a vehicle for “telling the truth” about the world [in early 1920s]
when documentary was not yet documentary -- fiction wasn't fiction yet either --Chanan-->{
moving pictures = visual tidbits لقمه چرب ونرم
made no demands on literacy (==> spread easily)
whe world on the screen remained anecdotal (and predominantly iconic)
practically inarticulate (in terms of public discourse)}
(1900) visual meaning-making machines that demanded not only attention but belief (by staging as real reenactments[...]
(170)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.7[...]
judicial machinery of a witch trial required evidence of criminal acts that (by definition) could not be witnessed
in Häxan
-the power of cinema to witness exceeds that of the witch hunter
-what it does is “worse” than rigging the truth --> it aligns itself (not with a concept of truth or the real but) with the power of the witch
(Häxan and many criminal story films) works through instruments of knowing rooted in the *dynamics of the confession*
#ajayeb storytelling
...clumsily rendered, the wriggling demons reflect an interesting set of variations to the witch stereotype, both ontologically and visually
(Maria giving birth to demon children)
Thomas Aquinas's theorization of the *virtual bodies* (of angels)
-angels do not need bodies for their sake but for ours --> unnatural couplings could produce children, but that the bodily essence of devils would rule out the possibility that these children would themselves be demons
16th century author primarily concern with Satan's ability to manipulate and pervert language (including erotic language)
wild flowing hair of the women --> a common visual metaphor for sexual promiscuity and disorder
images of cannibalistic night witches were explicitly a demonological variation on long-standing popular conceptions
...................................
xxxxxx
persistence of witchcraft
how witchcraft might still exist as more than just one of many choices available on a personal empowerment “menu”
-how rituals pertaining to magic came to be understood as a problem of knowledge
*magic binds forces that would otherwise overflow life*
a great subterranean need to “bind” forces that would otherwise exert themselves with impunity and without any greater explanation or meaning
--> enacting a dehistorification of a form of life that would otherwise be overwhelmed by the brutal timeliness of historical being
Baxstrom > de Martino, Janet
making the precarity of our presence an object of knowledge
(firm unquestioning belief =/=) local doubt --sustins--> witchcraft (in Buli -Bubandt)
...face off with a persistent, seemingly eternal, spectral threat
...................................
Rolley
an anatomical (not geographical knowledge, diabolical atlas) demonological understanding
Renessancian world encounters ==> geo
[*]Renaissance: the age of demonology, the age of cosmographic revolution (--> nature of causality)
-presence of the devil in geographical space
-composite and cross-disciplinary network of nonhuman causality and transmedia writing [demonologists + cosmographers + travellers]
•demonology: identifiable sh[...]
(171)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%30.5[...][*]testimony: visualization of what cannot normally be seen
[my misunderstanding of ethnography ==> my approach to giving and receiving feedback --> the workshop i gave ‘little fables of practice'] *(your) ‘fact’ must allow itself to be parasitized by precisely what it excludes from its inner depths, of being a fable*
the picture of researcher's humanity (@Sana):
•researcher = detective, examining magistrate دادرس
•crime = fact
•guilty = interlocutor (in reality they guide you into [often organized] labyrinths)
•inquest = strategic operation
**the imaginative results of “I witnessing”**
@apass [what we do mainly is] witnessing eachother's works and mode of existence
+ paradoxical necessity of an expressive element
testimony + experimental results + expert inquisitorial interpretation ==> (an early versoin of) ‘case study’ ==> formation of ‘general law’
*inquisitorial strategies* (developed in the human sciences from the 19th century onward): جزء به کل ”(close analysis of) salient individual cases ==> hidden tendencies visible” [--> and is abused in storytelling]
[in both science and art] seeking to move away from *reliance on metaphysics* to a *reliance on verifiable details* (in their own expressions)
acknowledging satan's unquestioned power <--doubt--> truth-value of statements made by unlearned witnesses
*possession* (confessions of another sort)
confessions that were not ‘procured’ [ritualized torture of the witch trial to generate evidence] but rather ‘volunteered’ and ‘enacted’ (without the aid of inquisitor)
<== individual turmoil (=/= juridical manipulation)
==> medicalization (of the invisible forces) --> (a new mode) *didactic & forensic*
17th century --> a shift in the empirical approach to invisible forces
clinical hysteria --> fascination with a power that (by definition) destabilizes binaries such as inner/outer
@Pierre, apass? #feedback
****symptomology: discovering without learning****
--> physicians in relation to haunted nun, mobilized by attention, considers the deployment of a knowledge in the new and visible form of an appearing [of the other's nonsenses (~ artwork --> the object of feedback: an inconsistent invisible object of inquiry renamed and reimagined by the feedback)]
Charcot [in his storied career of the father of modern neurology] dealing with relations between religious ecstasy, magic, witchcraft, and “nervous disease” <-- great doctor's decision to compile <-- discernible
•weyer --> appealed to people's better nature and reason
•Bourneville --> appealed to an appraisal of history in service of a project on modernity
}--> to demonstrate the precariousness of interpretation & t[...]
(172)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%31[...]bout the phenomenology of *friendship and the *contract
Sa'di is the theoretician of friendship (“mojaverat” مجاورت) and Kelileo Demne is the theoretician of “sherarat” (شرارت villainy, felony) saying that the closeness of different subjects is catastrophic [--> proper differences between kinds and subjects.] Sa'di is writing golestan گلستان and bustan بوستان at the time of the Mongols threat---it is the news of the Mongols coming and we know about the velocities of news can penetrate within the thick walls of any city. Sa'di is theorizing proximity based on “mohabat” (محبت love, Liebe and kindness), he assembles a setting of ‘garden’ for the coming of Mongols army. Kelileo Demne's project is pessimist pragmatism, mobilizing ethics in a milieu of violence and power.
---> the story of birds entrapped escape away with the cage
---> the story of cat and mouse project
---> bat and owl
---> scorpion and..
Shakespearean villain <== nature [<-- i prefer Ursula, evil corporally located]
modern villain <== power struggle
کلیله و دمنه Kelile Demne is full of disastrous laws of encounter and encounters of law
a sort of a metaphysics of presence (imposing and projecting to and with animals) that regulates the possibility of a pedagogical encounter
•no mediated forms of presence and so on
•nobody breaking the semiotic rules
•what subject-supposed-to-know
•what blocks cordial disposition and animal amity?
•what genital lickings are welcomed or unwelcomed and discouraged or abandoned? and so on
to read Kelile Demne not as something that works as legitimator
reading and greeting
to form (an) intention
all that anthropomorphism performs and withholds on and with animality
<br />
[Rickels]
(my) animal-findings and fairy-tale associations
if dogs communicate through their trainability cats redirect lines of communication through play. the dog waits and watches, the cat looks and looks, which when is your turn to be looked at, can be therapeutic or unnerving.
meeting the cat half-way
...................................
[Avital]
the greeting ‘hello’, the initiatory and inaugural moment of our encounter
the gift sabotaging the freedom of the subject to receive greeting or offering greeting
a gift that becomes a curse for the person,
who has the civic stability to refuse a greeting?
the finantialy challenged and the greeting
explore friendship as a crucial modeling of justice?
configuration of encounter
It doesn't always have to be science fiction, risking the [...]
(173)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%32.7[...]br />
[Rickels]
(my) animal-findings and fairy-tale associations
if dogs communicate through their trainability cats redirect lines of communication through play. the dog waits and watches, the cat looks and looks, which when is your turn to be looked at, can be therapeutic or unnerving.
meeting the cat half-way
...................................
[Avital]
the greeting ‘hello’, the initiatory and inaugural moment of our encounter
the gift sabotaging the freedom of the subject to receive greeting or offering greeting
a gift that becomes a curse for the person,
who has the civic stability to refuse a greeting?
the finantialy challenged and the greeting
explore friendship as a crucial modeling of justice?
configuration of encounter
It doesn't always have to be science fiction, risking the wrong blend and watching the uncontrollable spill of consequences --> hook up friends
friendship, as Avital practices it, should often involve triangulation and the drama of departure?
I found myself (also) tempted to reduce her/him/you to sameness,
“meant to be,” relying on a kind of metaphysical latency.
invasion with little violation(?)
(In rhetoric:) citation = apostrophe [address to an absent or imaginary person, calling to the other]
(i am late. i am transed late. translation and trans-relations has everything to do with latency. )
Avital: For Bataille, friendship is part of the sovereign operation and is linked to reading.
apostrophe (citation) for Derrida is the possibility of postmortem discourse --> memory, acts of bringing back, recalling
can we take out no insurance policies to safeguard thinking or writing or building?
(Lyotard's) différend: a dispute or difference that cannot be resolved by the cognitive or linguistic resources we have at hand --(indicating rather)--> a rupture in the presentation of testimony (~ litigate)
something you could turn your tattooed back on
(#my work on [post-feminist] harem)
(companionship and sexuality and installations of community) --> The Inoperative Community [Bataille, Blanchot, Nancy]
(how to) create community wherever I go?
(establish relationships: humor, kindness, attention, reworking, “re-”, festivity, moderate arousal, silliness, playfulness, support,)
learning making a “fictive kin group in training” (how to learn to notice each other? how to learn to be in the same game?)
to insisted on community without relying on transcendence =/= communion
(community without illusions about itself)
a community that is self-annulling but rigorous (rigorously perverse)
(--the duties of the survivor)
-thi[...]
(174)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%32.8[...]ay that would truly mark or unhinge the brutal protocols of lived reality... ?
...who took no prisoners (...who can truly say that?)
(I also? take pleasure in) the injurious effects of language : words are bodies that can be hurled at the other, they can land in psyche or soma --> manifesto
...................................
(as a reader) friend is a partner in crime
...................................
Sa'di's scene of writing, saying goodbye:
ای ساربان آهسته رو کآرام جانم میرود وآن دل که با خود داشتم با دلستانم میرود
سرو سیمینا به صحرا میروی نیک بدعهدی که بی ما میروی
بگذار تا بگرییم چون ابر در بهاران کز سنگ ناله خیزد روز وداع یاران
(iranian culture and its relationship to farewell and khoda-hafezi, expanding it. why we find it so difficult to say goodbye, or even can't say goodbye. --- resume work with Mona?)
Holderlin's intervention/question: we arrive at the truth, Das Wahre emerges, the moment closing in on us, when we have to say goodby
in an Iranian modality the farewell is the loci of truth, (locus: a place or metaphysical locality collecting the center of activity)
(the so-called) poet's radical exposures
is violence in farsi: ‘azar’ آزار? (how would that change instead of ‘khoshunat’ خشونت?)
kam-azari کم آزاری, bi-azari بی آزاری (possible?)
eshgh عشق ~= bi-niazi بی نیازی
...................................
demography of violence and nonviolence
...................................
(Freud <--) *liability* (--> Levinas)
not yet guilty, an almost predisposition, an almost inclination toward being guilty, an openness to being guilty (-->? Seba's notion of ‘Schuld’ [~= debt, the obligation to pay or do something]) ~-> super-egoic formation (~=? that which we call “raising awareness”)
Trauma is structuring***
(to be noted that the concern of super-egoic formation rests on the structuring of ‘demand,’ which is not the being of ‘question’ that it wants to be. question is risky and consequential of new articulation)
[disposition: vaz’ وضع, halat حالت, mezaj مزاج, seresht سرشت, khu خو, khim خیم, saz ساز,]
[predisposition: este'dad استعداد, amadegi آمادگی, meyl-e ghabli میل قبلی; a liability or tendency to suffer from a particular condition]
super-ego [that part of you that exercises authority, “I am gonna make you swallow this” --> jouissance] ~=? Div-mardom دیو مردم (paternal correctional voice, “don't drink!” --> Nezami) =/= Div (says “benush!” بنوش)
...................................
(with Haraway;) the relation between what counts as nature and what coun[...]
(175)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%33.4[...]he concern of super-egoic formation rests on the structuring of ‘demand,’ which is not the being of ‘question’ that it wants to be. question is risky and consequential of new articulation)
[disposition: vaz’ وضع, halat حالت, mezaj مزاج, seresht سرشت, khu خو, khim خیم, saz ساز,]
[predisposition: este'dad استعداد, amadegi آمادگی, meyl-e ghabli میل قبلی; a liability or tendency to suffer from a particular condition]
super-ego [that part of you that exercises authority, “I am gonna make you swallow this” --> jouissance] ~=? Div-mardom دیو مردم (paternal correctional voice, “don't drink!” --> Nezami) =/= Div (says “benush!” بنوش)
...................................
(with Haraway;) the relation between what counts as nature and what counts as culture (in Tehran)--judging whether a behavior is the stuff of genes or rearing
the domestic animal is the epoch-changing tool --> (free) wolf/dog (servant) ==> civilization
what are the things we hate in the name of Wilderness (~=> “fall” into culture)
...................................
[lecture at apass, 10.03.2017]
i follow the scribbles of jamming and jam session
welcome to this metaphysical place
like you, i am also sometimes in heaven, sometimes in hell, in no-land, nowhere, elsewhere, in Belgium; also interested deeply in what signals my and our arrival in the metaphysical entity of Belgium. like Christian, as i am fantasizing his excursion that i missed, we went out and walked back into the city, studying what really signals our arrival, when and how and where on the body we feel that we are there. and my guess is that it is always technological. but in an another universe your arrival might be registered by greeting. and in an Iranian sense...
...................................
my lecturing, when it is about going after a term or a metaphor or a subphenomena or a paraconcept, {to arrive at its essential qualities or range, its meaning and historical rootedness, how does it hold things together, what holds it together (in related but different speculative milieu,) its intractable necessity, its ghostly effectiveness, its phenomenological maintenance, in which framework they maneuver, and so on} is a tentative intervention that i reside in the weaker neighborhoods of thought, even vandalizing (authoritative knowledge-)claims of legitimacy and abandoning the controlling of possibilities of comprehension.
-(purposeful?) anarchy of questioning, unfolding my thoughts anarchically
*not to work on X in order to get the point across that one remains susceptible (mosta'ed مستعد, dar khatar در خطر, dar ma'raz در معرض) to and in need of X : what X almost was, or is still about to be
(the character of X, and? the X-ian character)
-rather, ask, in what way X allows an appro[...]
(176)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%33.5[...]enush!” بنوش)
...................................
(with Haraway;) the relation between what counts as nature and what counts as culture (in Tehran)--judging whether a behavior is the stuff of genes or rearing
the domestic animal is the epoch-changing tool --> (free) wolf/dog (servant) ==> civilization
what are the things we hate in the name of Wilderness (~=> “fall” into culture)
...................................
[lecture at apass, 10.03.2017]
i follow the scribbles of jamming and jam session
welcome to this metaphysical place
like you, i am also sometimes in heaven, sometimes in hell, in no-land, nowhere, elsewhere, in Belgium; also interested deeply in what signals my and our arrival in the metaphysical entity of Belgium. like Christian, as i am fantasizing his excursion that i missed, we went out and walked back into the city, studying what really signals our arrival, when and how and where on the body we feel that we are there. and my guess is that it is always technological. but in an another universe your arrival might be registered by greeting. and in an Iranian sense...
...................................
my lecturing, when it is about going after a term or a metaphor or a subphenomena or a paraconcept, {to arrive at its essential qualities or range, its meaning and historical rootedness, how does it hold things together, what holds it together (in related but different speculative milieu,) its intractable necessity, its ghostly effectiveness, its phenomenological maintenance, in which framework they maneuver, and so on} is a tentative intervention that i reside in the weaker neighborhoods of thought, even vandalizing (authoritative knowledge-)claims of legitimacy and abandoning the controlling of possibilities of comprehension.
-(purposeful?) anarchy of questioning, unfolding my thoughts anarchically
*not to work on X in order to get the point across that one remains susceptible (mosta'ed مستعد, dar khatar در خطر, dar ma'raz در معرض) to and in need of X : what X almost was, or is still about to be
(the character of X, and? the X-ian character)
-rather, ask, in what way X allows an approach?
{Avital on} **authority, violent shores of human governance
what happened to authority after the demotion (tanazol-e rotbe تنزل رتبه) of the “big Other” (death of God, State, Pir, and other mostly masculinist idols)?
a primal impulse in the cuing of group formation; pre-givenness of our way of handling private and public spheres of encounter, domestic and foreign affairs;
-disappearance of authority functions as a figure for democracy in crisis; loss of authority and the loss of the enemy opens up abysses in boundaries that have kept the world recognizable
maternal (runs of) interference (or motherly Wechsel) --?--> still pump[...]
(178)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%33.5[...]ation
the ‘need’ for authority
(Arendt:) “It was after Socrates’ death that Plato began to discount persuasion (and argument) as insufficient for the guidance of men and to seek for something liable to compel them without using external means of violence.” ==> a power that renounces power; coercion without violence, (invention of hell, is it nonviolent?! a more earthbound rhetoric of persuasion?!)
(when we are out of master/slave relationship) expert knowledge commands confidence and obtains compliance (without force nor persuasion); soft coercion associated with reason --> Plato's philosopher-king --> **“Authority establishes relationality prior to command, promising compliance in the absence of force or argument”** (Avital)
aspects of the authority that might take in or shake up the other without harm
historical comfort zones ...and ...the ongoing torment of worldlessness
(Avital,) are the mourners of authority masking another loss for which “authority” would be a cover?
Greek way of handling:
domestic affairs --> persuasion
foreign affairs --> force and violence
*authority of the Father
ontological proof of God's existence (Kojeve contends) rests on the metaphysical placement of divine authority as the authority of the Father, who is seen as cause*
--> paternal authority in power and political authority --> as author of a work who exerts authority over the ‘Oeuvre’
father/judge/Pir: the principal figure holding together political and ethical qualities of existence ~ imago (in psychoanalysis is an idealized image of someone--usually a parent--formed in childhood), firm but benevolent caretaking, funding sources of divine authority, hierarchical hold, categorical imperative, a secure ground from which commands can be issued, “Achtung!”,
-authority subsists on borrowed transcendence
-authority produces effects of respectful adherence
-softening the space of committed citizenry (ground for political relatedness)
-is it possible to keep authority separate from respect? what this seclusion assures?
(Pir's authority nearing the) sublime regions of human relatedness
Kojeve > What accounts for the unconditional surrender of human reactivity?
legitimate principle of coercion
God is always the God of our ancestors --> character of “tradition”
where violence begins or what gets counted as violence?
the discourse of effacement (امحاء emha’, self-effacement: withdrawing into the background, making yourself inconspicuous)
is there an authority outside inequality? responsible asymmetry, the egological space, tropes of domination?
%this is anout the quality of asymmetry----(are we still in the realm of the human?)
Levinas tactics is spectacular, he runs down pat[...]
(179)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%33.6[...]earch assistant
}==> ‘photograph: material, immanent, interconnected’ ==> somatic intelligibility (embodiment) to my own somatic intelligence ~ enacted an encounter between the senses (subjective feelings) and their sense (objective knowledges)
a mutual embodiment <-- shared in the event of the photographic space
experience of these photographs [whale or telegram animal video]: an instance of *sensuous knowledge* --> way we are in some carnal modality able to touch and be touched by the substance of images (to feel a visual atmosphere envelop us)
(Grosz's) [*]perception: flesh's reversibility ~ the flesh touching, seeing, perceiving itself, one fold (provisionally) catching the other in its own selfembrace
human/animal and technological sensorium
-Hayward asking how coral communities create representational ruptures in photographs
-Sina asking how telegram virtual communities create representational ruptures in the real of human-animal of Tehran, how the enfleshed animal mobile phone photograph touch us
}--> liveliness of humananimal encounters [the way in which my aesthetic and ethical senses merge with animals in the flesh]
-how people get along in concrete, metamorphic, phantasmatic ways
**sensible and sensual ensembles of materialized capacities and activities that literally and metaphorically make sense of, and to, ourselves and other animals**
(Ihde >) [*]phenomenology: a philosophical style that emphasizes a certain interpretation of human experience and that, in particular, concerns perception and bodily activity --Hayward--> a theoretical practice grounded on the carnal, fleshy, material foundations of subjectivity as it engages and is transformed by and in the world
we attend to: content + form + context
invertebrates, product of displacement and comparison, a ruinous verb turned noun turned classification --Hayward--> foregrounding and rethinking the syntax, optics, and heterogeneity of vertebrate and invertebrate relationality
accountability and responsibility in the enmeshment of knowing, doing, seeing, and being
(we need less philosophizing and more) *envisioning: an enactment of dynamic en-figurings that imperil boundaries that clearly differentiate self and other without the loss of historical, cultural, and species specificity*
...................................
☾
light has illuminated western stories
•God said, let there be light: and there was light
•solar radiance --> refracted planetary atmosphere --> earth's watery matter --> lively forms
•life shaped by ice (Meloy)
•life shaped by dark (Mohaghegh)
•life shaped by animal (Sina)
•life shaped by light (Hayward) --> the invisible medium that makes a knowable world visible; *seeing light: a trope for[...]
(180)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%35[...] />
we attend to: content + form + context
invertebrates, product of displacement and comparison, a ruinous verb turned noun turned classification --Hayward--> foregrounding and rethinking the syntax, optics, and heterogeneity of vertebrate and invertebrate relationality
accountability and responsibility in the enmeshment of knowing, doing, seeing, and being
(we need less philosophizing and more) *envisioning: an enactment of dynamic en-figurings that imperil boundaries that clearly differentiate self and other without the loss of historical, cultural, and species specificity*
...................................
☾
light has illuminated western stories
•God said, let there be light: and there was light
•solar radiance --> refracted planetary atmosphere --> earth's watery matter --> lively forms
•life shaped by ice (Meloy)
•life shaped by dark (Mohaghegh)
•life shaped by animal (Sina)
•life shaped by light (Hayward) --> the invisible medium that makes a knowable world visible; *seeing light: a trope for making visible in a comprehensive form (such that they are real)*
1. *philosophy is photology* : language of philosophy is constituted by metaphors of light
2. sunlight metaphorizes into transcendent light : a heavenly light promising liberation from the flesh
transgenic technologies ==>
jellyfish + GFP (green fluorescent protein)
rhesus monkey
glowing kittens
transgenic pigs
(...animal examples of chimeric and impure)--Hayward--> articulation of carnal interdependence across species boundaries
bacteria, yeast, fungi, plant, fly, human cell
chimeric borderlands of GFP and transgenics
pushing against the perceptual and affective registers of laboratory walls embodied selves, eating practices, living conditions
bio-capitalism
animal industry
(Hayward on) carnality and radiance of naturecultures
(welcoming a) multidisciplinary table of where light is being eaten
visuality as corporality
light = meat
(Latin word) lumen: light, lantern, lamp, clairity, understanding, the central cavity of a hollow structure in an organism or cell
*somalumenal: how might luminosity, effulgence and illumination be about embodiment or corporality? light transubstantiated into flesh and matter (=/= body transcended by the thrills of enlightenment and radiance)*
(my work on telegram bestiary:) *post-animal studies*
[*]tranimal: a synecdochically imagined correspondence written as a portmanteau word --> changes in our understanding of bodily transformation, somatic and sensual synthesis that manifests synecdochically (a figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole or the whole for a part) [...]
(182)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%35.1[...]species boundaries
bacteria, yeast, fungi, plant, fly, human cell
chimeric borderlands of GFP and transgenics
pushing against the perceptual and affective registers of laboratory walls embodied selves, eating practices, living conditions
bio-capitalism
animal industry
(Hayward on) carnality and radiance of naturecultures
(welcoming a) multidisciplinary table of where light is being eaten
visuality as corporality
light = meat
(Latin word) lumen: light, lantern, lamp, clairity, understanding, the central cavity of a hollow structure in an organism or cell
*somalumenal: how might luminosity, effulgence and illumination be about embodiment or corporality? light transubstantiated into flesh and matter (=/= body transcended by the thrills of enlightenment and radiance)*
(my work on telegram bestiary:) *post-animal studies*
[*]tranimal: a synecdochically imagined correspondence written as a portmanteau word --> changes in our understanding of bodily transformation, somatic and sensual synthesis that manifests synecdochically (a figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole or the whole for a part) =/= metaphorically
[Cinderella is synecdochic]
*trans-
ongoing labor of cross-species agents
energetic and material crossings that disrupt bifurcated categories
(Haraway + Hayward) metaplasm قلب حروف: a change in a word (by adding, comitting or transposing its letters, syllables or sounds) that can signify a mistake, stumbling, a troping that makes a difference [in joined natureculture --Haraway--> flesh and signifier, bodies and words, stories and worlds]
to inflect tranimals with its tropic kin of antimeria that turns nouns into verbs, that mobilizes, incites, activates persons, animals, places, things and ideas
*i am rubied by your attention* : the relay of energies and forces (not just encounter) ==constitute==> ontology
[*]ontology: what there is + what debts we owe to it --> we owe ‘sensation’ to life's ‘insistencies’ : (Hayward arguing) we must respond to *life's insistencies* through sensation (corporal prehensions)
--(?why to write:)--> **noun = transitional responses to relationships** (=/= direct products of environment)
==?==> percussive distribution of affect
boundary: refracted interfaces of passage, prepositional orientation
sensuous being: unmetabolizable more, the residue of passing
jellyfish sting story
“a jellyfish stings human skin, leaving an empurpled mark that inscribes the boundaries of tentacle and skin (somatic technologies), but the excitation (sensorial transit) of burning and blistering energy remains partly unmetabolizable--this remainder is differentiating and binding. so excitation is not necessari[...]
(184)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%35.2[...]aphorically
[Cinderella is synecdochic]
*trans-
ongoing labor of cross-species agents
energetic and material crossings that disrupt bifurcated categories
(Haraway + Hayward) metaplasm قلب حروف: a change in a word (by adding, comitting or transposing its letters, syllables or sounds) that can signify a mistake, stumbling, a troping that makes a difference [in joined natureculture --Haraway--> flesh and signifier, bodies and words, stories and worlds]
to inflect tranimals with its tropic kin of antimeria that turns nouns into verbs, that mobilizes, incites, activates persons, animals, places, things and ideas
*i am rubied by your attention* : the relay of energies and forces (not just encounter) ==constitute==> ontology
[*]ontology: what there is + what debts we owe to it --> we owe ‘sensation’ to life's ‘insistencies’ : (Hayward arguing) we must respond to *life's insistencies* through sensation (corporal prehensions)
--(?why to write:)--> **noun = transitional responses to relationships** (=/= direct products of environment)
==?==> percussive distribution of affect
boundary: refracted interfaces of passage, prepositional orientation
sensuous being: unmetabolizable more, the residue of passing
jellyfish sting story
“a jellyfish stings human skin, leaving an empurpled mark that inscribes the boundaries of tentacle and skin (somatic technologies), but the excitation (sensorial transit) of burning and blistering energy remains partly unmetabolizable--this remainder is differentiating and binding. so excitation is not necessarily predicated on positive joins of ever expanding units of life, but emerges between them and therefore can be generated through haemorrhaging [flow of blood from a ruptured blood vessels], excising, amputating” [& killing(?)]
breaking fast with glowing light
Kac's GFP bunny: (chimera of) rabbit + jellyfish + human + technology
making bodies materially luminal --Hayward--> تابش effulgence bound to meatier substance =/= extraterrestrial force of more heavenly bodies
(-what about the moon?)
sexual planktonic medusa
دو شکلی dimorphic life history
جانور دریایی pelagic drifters
[*]drift: to be carried slowly by a current of air or water :
•move passively, aimlessly or involuntarily into a certain situation or condition
•a steady movement or developement from one thing toward another
•*your body is an index of its environment* (= jellyfish: when provoked give off a green glow... *glowing in response to provocation*)
•to be sent adrift as mutation
•the general intention of an argument (--> in writing: *technique of drifting*)
◦poetic joints
◦mixing ontologies into larger organizations
◦
blend [...]
(186)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%35.2[...]ttention to the construction of their enclosure
expressively dense
rendered literal and material
light is of this world
to think diffractively = to apprehend a critical difference within
(the formation of a word from a sound associated with what is named -->) onomatopoetic: designed around the sensation of water
Hayward is drawn (to the Monterey Bay aquarium) ==> trying to sort out the poetics of their display
[they] furnish a simulation of the real thing, soliciting the sensation of unmediated encounter with marine worlds, they *act as sites of ecological hope* --Acampora--> *zooscopic: a totalizing view that conceals meaningful human-animal encounters at the price of reinvigorating anthropocentrism {=/=? zoological vandalism --> what would be an animal social media?}
[in zooscopic experience:] the very structure of the human-animal encounter is disrupted, and the interaction that is sought (encountering the animal) becomes impossibility as the “real” animals disappear and the conditions for seeings are undermined [<-- how telegram does that? if telegram animal media is zooscopic, then i say that is good for Tehran, for the “real” encounters are violent. the idea of “truely seeing animal” is metaphysics]
captivity ==> animal against themselves, “animal = qualified noun, adjectival” [=/= *ajayeb's wilderness* was articulated in a time before the modern zoo]
--Acampora--> zone of species contact mediated by an interruption that voids actual encounter
--✕--> Sina: there has never been an “actual encounter”
--✕--> Hayward: does face-to-face “seeing” matter for organisms of a radically different scale and for whom “eyes” are light receptors rather than picture makers?
-how can we see mediation as a dynamic of encounter, even an ethical one?
(captivity is always mediated)
captivity diffracted
<br />
*(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, metamo[...]
(188)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%35.5[...]atter 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
(modern) aquarium: turning toward the monstrous oceanic but updated for a technoscientific postmodernity and anticipating a sci-fi futurity
exhibits as idealizations
the aquarium visitor is entertained into caring about environmental ethics and marine biology. enacting a moral imperative to protect local ecosystems, the aquarium is a savoir --> the parochial becomes the new cosmopolitan
technology + artistry[...]
(189)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%35.5[...] telegram animal media
(modern) aquarium: turning toward the monstrous oceanic but updated for a technoscientific postmodernity and anticipating a sci-fi futurity
exhibits as idealizations
the aquarium visitor is entertained into caring about environmental ethics and marine biology. enacting a moral imperative to protect local ecosystems, the aquarium is a savoir --> the parochial becomes the new cosmopolitan
technology + artistry + biology
playing with scale, volume, space
refractive technology:
•produces the visceral and optical experience of immersion...
•makes us profoundly aware of our bodies in space
•producing a disorienting visuality
*refracted vision = textured light*
refraction = corporal جسمى + carnal (جسمانى marked by the appetites and passions of the body) ==> effective stimulation
osmotic space
amniotic
eroded
bad boundaries
concretions
immersive medusa or jellies transducingly
snaky tresses of the mythical gorgon
more-ness of sensation
destroyed, transformed, conserved
jelly scatters
diffracting cilia and fluible mesoglea
metamorphosing diffraction patterns
multiple sensory registers temper the apparatus of seeing: sound, tactility, movement, proximity
immersion ==convey==> the experience of being totally inside a world, a state of mind, cultural and historical forms, and intellectual rumination =/= unreality or reality
==> cohabitation =/= representation
tactile visuality
fingery eyes
relies on textured proximity rather than objective distance
the visual apparatus is the touching body
[*]art: sensual movement of perceptual information (across media and bodies)
transduction:
(at an energetic transductioduction site: one form of organized energy asymmetrically converted into another kind of energy)
•transmission of messages through various media and the ways those messages become mis/translated into sense and sensation
•transmitted information reformatted and transformed through devices, forces, and processes, and then broadcast to other sensorial subjects... (---> go to my ajayeb-e pit story)
#telegram's zoological corruption =/= State, science
matter owes a debt to its own means of revelation: light
(Hayward's) [*]captivation: extraction of rhythm, pulse, color, texture ==> resonate for alternative purposes buth within the conditions of the frame
the (zoo's or aquarium's) display: motabolizes, creates, releases sensation into the world ==> environment of intense involvement --> familiar orderings are affectively transposed, altered, refigured
jellies --> surrealist white shapes<[...]
(190)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%35.6[...] identification impossible --> [*]identification: seeing familiarity in other organisms = a map for empathy and critical engagement* (=/= objectification of radically different organisms) : “transmutation of non-identification into aestheticization” ==> observer gawks بى خيال نگاه کردن and marvels at dissimilarity ==> making difference a marketable feature [--> ajayeb stuff]
=/= Hayward --> [*]identification: misalignment of empathy with the possibility of familiarity --relying-on--> extending empathy across similarity to dissimilarity : *the organism can only receive the benefits of empathy if we can identify with it* (=/= Seymour's wildboyz)
politics of erasure =/= empathy
telegram ajayeb channel =/= idealized visual pathways (save, preserve, conserve vanishing wildlife, while ignoring the idealization of nature)
aquarium (as boundary object) ==> borders of nature and culture (that functions as public spectacle, public enlightenment, and conquest) =/= telegram
-if not the ‘oppressed other’ then what kind of actor is ‘you,’ ‘them,’ or ‘me’?
Ponyo --> low-oxygen environment in which fish die but jellies thrive
distracting --> diffracted ethics --Haraway--> (as a metaphor to talk about) history of interaction, interference, reinforcement, difference =/= reflection or reflexivity: displacing the same elsewhere (in traditions of representation, searching for the authentic really real)
*diffraction: (depending on the phase differences and the amplitude of the light waves) elements of composite light (white light) are reinforced, weakened, or eliminated by each other alternately*
•scales of butterfly wings and fishes...
•modification of the form of a word to express the different grammatical relations into which it may enter
•to put concerns, entities, relationships, and actions into process [-to put your found object into process of interference]
•[*]diffraction: mapping of interference ==Haraway==> where the *effects of* differences appear =/= differences appear
meaning + matter + action (always live together)
telegram animal carousel: nonhuman-animal-machine
my room/bedroom (~-> Cinderella's attic, architecture of containment)
overlapping perceptual worlds
synaesthetic force of perceiving and feeling, processing and mattering --> transposing of senses
immersion
kinesthesia
numerous haptic registers
we are transsensual
[*]sensation: the vibratory force in all organisms that seduces, sexulizes, entices, and mesmerizes the body
vibrate
oscillate
wave
aquarium ==> new sensations: deep-sea drifting and shimmering for upright opaque hominids --> that are sent further adrift through experience in yet unknown expressions
[*]ecology: ambiva[...]
(191)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%35.7[...]aptic registers
we are transsensual
[*]sensation: the vibratory force in all organisms that seduces, sexulizes, entices, and mesmerizes the body
vibrate
oscillate
wave
aquarium ==> new sensations: deep-sea drifting and shimmering for upright opaque hominids --> that are sent further adrift through experience in yet unknown expressions
[*]ecology: ambivalent powerful elusive ways of composing through histories of interation, relationality, interconnection, and materiality
relational matter =/= matter of who has agency
Hayward's [and my] attention and sensuous reach are solicited by the ctenophores in the display, a display that instrumentalizes the jellies diffracting cilia and solicits my senses
-jellies participation in worldhood (further becomings)?
immersed in deep marine technoscience worlds...
...................................
>
...................................
Marx: human begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence ==> they produce their actual material life
--Haraway--> Marx understood relational sensuousness, and he thought deeply about the metabolism between human beings and the rest of the world enacted in living labor --> the humanist teleology of that labor: making of man himself
horses
oxen
police dogs
rescue dogs
messenger pigeons
Despret > Ridout
(theological critical roots of theater:) before tragedy is its infancy [infans: the condition of those who are without language]
the division of labor, the death of god, the establishment of human dominion over the animals, the birth of tragedy may all be seen as simultaneous(?)
--> animals off stage in western theatre, to hide its origins in these moments of *inaugural violence* + the institution of di of division of labor
what was the animal doing on stage before the birth of tragedy?
mythical origin ==create==> stories (fabulous, fabulating): [storytelling: seeking for] means of making a vanished experience available again in the contemporary world (~ storytelling) ~/= *storymaking: creation of memories, the construction of a history that renders the present and the future richer in possibilities* [not just for your self and your kind, as Hollywood or the brands do it: personalize experiences at scale]
animals do not appear to work, in the referential framework that emerges from the division of labor / exclusion from labor [the idea of animals have been transformed into “potential instruments of satisfaction"] --> it is held that what animals do, they do it “naturally” : as if answering our needs is the same thing as *acting according to nature* [---> go to cooking manga anime Shokugeki no Soma, the nature of serving]
--Despret-->[...]
(192)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%35.8[...] intensity that must be exceeded for reaction to occur
“here is my home, i am freshly aware that my body is a threshold, an entry between rooms”
limits (of my body) = energized zones
sadomasochism stitches
*carnal improvisation* <-- paradigm of performance art in europe (---> go to karaoke in KHM, role of my body as medium in the circuit of transmissions, poetically imagine the shape of a new pattern)
pastpresent: an always present past in the present
*patterns longer than lived experience*
[*]history: libidinal tracings, erotogenic intensities, psychical cartographies
{ porosity = poiesis }--> collapse the boundary between the embodied self + its world + others ==> consitute a specific place
•puberty = the fantasy that this disfiguration will make me more myself
•teenager = you spend hours before the refracting reflection of your transmutating *body = your most intimate other* --> enact boundaries, sometimes lovingly, but also brutally
(senses are) reactive to the sensual abundance of the world but limited by affected perceptual milieus
[*]texture: residue of unmetabolized and metabolized sensations of animate forces --> emergence of bodiliness (<-- Hayward's rhetoric)
transitional body = textural body
architecture: the most binding part of the communal rhythm
appearance ~= metonymic
appearance allows her to emerge situationally as a woman, a gendered neighbor, a historical subject
(being under the influence of the moon:) enfleshing elements of your (celestial) environment within yourself and expressing parts of yourself back into the (terrestrial social) environment
identification: “i am like you = i know you” ==> resolve the divide of difference
<br />
(let's not make that kind of garden again -->) inclusion in Adam's nameable Eden of belonging (=/= Cinderella's transbestiary)
cross-species rejoiners
mended spiderwebs
error is (still a kind of) expression
human: composites of zoo-intensities, animated movements, bio-differentials
(i always felt like this) my perceptions are refracted through psychic forces
anxious
uncertain
paranoid
“is everyone staring at the morphing ‘it’ that is me”
(understanding of art in contemporary european performance -->) art = intensifying bodily substance, to resonate otherwise, to feel different corpo(realities) through zones of transition and intervention, provocation = responses to our *capacities to resonate*
...medicalization, recognition, subjectification, instrumentalization, and responsiveness being with animals
<[...]
(193)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%38.2[...]m
--> captures the feeling of being close to violence:
•fear for one's life and that of others
•having to deal emotionally logistically with deaths of loved ones (escape, exile) [--> that is why we need an *anthropology of the exile*]
}--> living-in-violence =/= encounter, exposure
(Ghazzi is too fast in favoring “affective proximity =/= western rationalism”, as an iranian I am more exposed to an *affective jurnalism* [~= activism: politically motivated and highly emotive role] =/= journalism as a modernist and rationalist institution)
“activism ~= jurnalism” ~=> they need to:
1. project authenticity and emotion onto news narratives
2. act as objective witnesses able to produce truthful accounts
(more and more i feel the iranians need for ‘activism =/= jurnalism’ --> what one wants to happen =/= understanding what is happening)--> epistemology [the question of how one makes sense of one's practices --> in the case of Syria (also Iran): *affective proximity to violence* ==> sense]
...negotiating the distance of mediation when viewers and producers in the Global North are witnessing the suffering of others
(in Iran) activism + art = the human body as tool, medium, symbol, metaphor
[*]affect: circulation + stickiness of emotion (onto and between bodies, texts, objects, experiences) (Ahmed)
journalism = represent + narrate
(the ‘trick’ of) relying on the *outsourcing of emotional labour* to non-journalists (by:)
•having them express their emotions
•having the journalist describe them
(Ghazzi conceptualising the emotional field in journalism -->) ***unequal power relations ==> emotioal labor***
proximity (--> what i heard so much when i went back to iran: to ke inja insti nemiduni تو که اینجا نیستی نمیدونی)
*aesthetic of authenticity* in news reports (<-- mobile phones)
political economy of foreign reporting
politics of hope (with an ambition to inspire all Syrians to rebel)
...emotional attachment to political goals
*revolution: the event that changes people's lives and in relation to which they locate themselves politically
•conflict in Syria began as an uprising, it ended up an international war, which in 2020 appears to have mostly concluded in the favour of the regime =/= revolution
•the word “revolution” means something else to activists in Syria (how the meanings projected on the term changed in accordance to circumstances)
◦(most of the time, artists and activists) ****use a word to galvanise their emotions and bodies**** and inspired them to take actions they would not have imagined to pursue [use of words --> what people hope =/= descriptive]
◦word (for example “revolution”): a marker of an *inward-looking description* of belonging to[...]
(195)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%39.4[...]ing description* of belonging to a broad political community defined by opposition
•“the revolution” --> affectively consumed the pursuit of truth
•an identity-marker (based on a political orientation) --> an inward-looking signifier to mark who one is + what political community they belong to [--> a politics of what one had wanted =/= describe what one observes]
•(revolution:) personified and humanised as a well-meaning political agent (that sometimes strays from its goals by committing errors)
•motivating people to get involved in activism
•
(Said's Orientalism -->) subaltern others (are typically considered) living within a constant state of violence <-- much older Western regime of representation perceived them as culturally close to violence
(Ghazzi > Badiou >) some events are felt as historic as they galvanise the energies of political actors who imagine themselves as ‘mounting the stage of history’ --Koselleck--> acts of information dissemination are engulfed by the event and are aimed at bridging the temporal distance between the desired and experienced ==> “journalism ~= activism”
...................................
collective memory --> historical victimhood --> consolidating power
(meta-history -->) a view of history as a series of junctures where good fought evil ==Ghazzi==> historical victimhood
global rise of populist politics ==> tropes of self-victimisation
•revolutionary
•resistance
•nationalism
•populism
•neo-fascism
}--> operationalize victimhood (by whom / against whom)
one is wronged, targeted, injured (by the elite, the media, external enemies)
•self = true underdog --> victim
•opponents = inauthentic adversary --> oppressor
= homogeneous + antagonistic
--Laclau--> chain of equivalence: (from) corruptions =/= origins --to--> traitors =/= patriots --to--> intruders =/= natives --to--> faithless =/= faithful --to--> *submission =/= heroism* and ...
}= *populism* (political dialectic)
(storytelling)
•the question of *what* a society remembers -->{highly formulaic plot structures --for--> narrating the past}
•the question of *how* a society remembers -->{powerful actors push for particular kinds of story forms that shape the ways they tell all stories}
zigzag structures of a rise and fall and/or fall and rise of the nation
--> future dramatically takes one of two routes: (in the direction of) either a golden age or the dark ages
}--Ghazzi--> forked historical consciousness : (an understanding & speaking of) “history = a series of junctures scattered across time”
(the problem is) ***historical consciousness*** --> orientational
“bestows upon actuality a temporal direction, an orientation that can guide action intentionally by the agency of histo[...]
(196)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%39.5[...] />
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 work cannot be done fully and if they worship fire of its benefits then in mud there is more benefits than that and in water more benefits than there is in fire and if The Creator wants to make wanderers of a folk he infects them with a substance as he infected the Indians with worshiping cow and Christians with worshiping the hoof of Christ's donkey and the pagans with worshiping idol and matter
and we shall mention the attributes of fire and its properties:
Know! That fire has taken the whole world of universe and no stone and no wood is not uncharged with fire. If a fool takes a piece of wood and asks “where is fire?” I say the way of everything is in manifestation as when two woods strike together made of Margh and Afar,[1] fire will appear or hit stone to metal
[1] According to Jashn-e Sadeh recalls the importance of light, fire and energy; light which comes from God is found in the hearts of his creatures. --> Hushang and the origin of fire
...................................
we are too abstract, we are thinking yes there are things out there wild or whatever. then we must be surprise to see that the abstract far thing is made of flesh, quartz, or fire.
unlike camels and rats and sheep, other four legged or mammals, fire is not designed for something, the way organisms evolved to have meanings and representations to each other. fire embodies a vast place in our material and industrial and semiotic world but itself is not a creature of evolution. it knows nothing of symbiogensis nor of molecular compartmenship. fire is an elementary radical reaction to closeness. the third person. pure manifestation.
every mountain range have personalities. rock is arrange by evolution. it tells you about itself when you feel it firm in your hand pressing to your ear, asking thousands of questions, exploring with imagination. stone is not a social creature, maybe that's why we listen to them. fires are social beings, death sentences.
their society and ecology
reaching access to the literacy of fire-work
...................................
(...) --> the black-box --> ka'ba --> an intermediate mechanism to reach beyond the door-knob --> dark medium of worship --> the jinn --> ontology of the envelopment --> an interiority that is exterior --> talking-fire --> mediums of the beyond --> put your ‘thing’ in the fire --> going through the fire --> test some fossils --> ice age --> dat[...]
(197)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%39.9[...]came with the fire both as tool of worship and punish (human taking lessens and used fire to discipline the forces of nature) --> the darkness that enveloped the worship, made the absence of light crucial for constructing interiority [note: before going to light-fire the worshipers must wash themselves in Vozu, in Namaz the worshpers wash themselvs before going to the darkness of prayers---is this water that we make vozu the same as ‘abe heyvan’? before going into the hyper space, the ritual plays a key role and a key hole. like all hyper spaces that forwards you yo the beyond the box as well is about deliverence (to the lover?): (for the sake of) salvation ‘rastgari’ is about delivering ‘you’ (--> Ma'ad --> masaleye “enteghal” [be alame digar] [dar tarikh falsafeye eslami irani ---> go to footnote in Motakhabat 2nd volume page44]) --> for *Rumi people is firewood, hizom, inflammables; fire is the present tense, its light is about the future and its ashes about the past: we like ash to perform our archiological readings of old fires and we like its light becsuse it helps us to push through and constatly make-imagine-lighten the future, i this model the present is untouchable.] --> the beyond is beginning to loosen its materiality --> accumulation of synonyms (before language) --> metaphors given birth slowly --> from the Pleistocene to Ordovician --> the accumulation of oxygen --> fire was permitted to exist --> etc.
(keeping a fire burring for a long time is a very strange thing to do. it is utterly Paleolithic to do keep fire, making it stone. it was Muhammad who turned off the lights, literally. when he was born, one the oldest Zoroastrians fire temples suddenly extinguished for no apparent reason. the blessed dark. the box, fire, both are means to have access to the inaccessible. #Muhammad inception/birth had to be connected to a supernatural event.)
(talking) fire --> speech
(telling) stone --> written
in the history, the leg-less-stone and the lying-visage have been together. a study of apparition must include the physical material as well, not as counterparts, rather as its play-mate.
(fire suppressing) an older ecology of reflection (namely the stone)
the telling stone is the same as spirit stone(?)---non-animal container (@Karin)
(stone is related to the spirits of the ground. the prisoner who throw a pebble into the pit, the pebble's sound is going to tell about the depths and darknesses that the human, on death sentence, does not have a long enough rope to carry too. so the rope is never enough, the linear connection, the closed chain of links, but the throwing stone can risk a disjunction between that mother->king->prisoner->darkness)
--> sending a guy into the pit is not typical for the cultures of Pleistocene: (using linear connection, darkness ~= unkown, and so on)
[Shepard] Prehistoric humans were autochthonous, that is, “native to their plac[...]
(198)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%40[...]icated by our exteriors. (it wasn't Aristotle first who was performing such procedures)
attaching sounds to things/animals/species when they were not visible
(“Never ignore a sound!”)
inheritance (DNA, etc.) calls upon human society and imagination to invent its exact expressions.
human species’ “theme” is Paleolithic
(those who are “better” live in a natural environment and a cultural system that are closer to) meeting the “expectations” of the genes
Children at age six are typically anthropomorphic
trees structure space
**imagining the possibilities of something else being in there.
(how we were doing it? before fire)
“A meditative stillness that is good for the human soul, suggests poet Gary Snyder, was invented by motionless hunters. That moment of silent reverence comes also at the final death stroke when one succumbs to the cycle of life.” (Shepard)
[from predation to hunting (there is a huge epistemological shift) (matter of representation and interpretation)]
mammalian ecology
[(let's) risk everything (instead of risk-reducing) --- issues of representation and agency in thinking ‘with’ animals. textual, metaphor animal in Attar line of thinking]
a distant call in known terrain says it is the there, not the here, where attention should be paid. [far, origins of our tropes, metaphysics? abstraction? =/=? motionless hunters invented motionless meditative worship]
-(kinfolk in) swamps, brush, and forest (in terms of discerning the *relationships between clues*)
-(indirect) dealing with the escapable (=?=> tracking strategies + symbolic thought)
a central theme: (a banquet/feast at which) the participants--eater and eaten--risk the improvements of mind against the certainty of occasional poor decisions, (faulty memory, carelessness, errors of judgment, and the decrepitude of age and disease.)
-Those who fled had to understand [the limits of distance, the intentions of the others, and] (the ability to control) the abyssal terror that itself would engulf them if they submitted to panic. ==> mind
-“self” emerged as the consequence of “participation,” a calculative and organizational relatoin of the individual within the group? (and perceiving the so-called “inanimate” entities) --- shaped by the game -- a participant amidst other participants oriented by the action
(David Abraham: Perception is Participation, in an animistic logic)
mind, memory, --> cognition and communication --> reference --> imitating the animal's calls ==> stylized performances ==> (a repertoire of) symbolized references (sign language?) ==> accumulation of synonims (--> we are already consuming symbolic ambition) --> early metaphores --> narratives get out of hand (--> “concrete” is invented) --> [...] (--> narration of past is inve[...]
(199)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%40.3[...] in) swamps, brush, and forest (in terms of discerning the *relationships between clues*)
-(indirect) dealing with the escapable (=?=> tracking strategies + symbolic thought)
a central theme: (a banquet/feast at which) the participants--eater and eaten--risk the improvements of mind against the certainty of occasional poor decisions, (faulty memory, carelessness, errors of judgment, and the decrepitude of age and disease.)
-Those who fled had to understand [the limits of distance, the intentions of the others, and] (the ability to control) the abyssal terror that itself would engulf them if they submitted to panic. ==> mind
-“self” emerged as the consequence of “participation,” a calculative and organizational relatoin of the individual within the group? (and perceiving the so-called “inanimate” entities) --- shaped by the game -- a participant amidst other participants oriented by the action
(David Abraham: Perception is Participation, in an animistic logic)
mind, memory, --> cognition and communication --> reference --> imitating the animal's calls ==> stylized performances ==> (a repertoire of) symbolized references (sign language?) ==> accumulation of synonims (--> we are already consuming symbolic ambition) --> early metaphores --> narratives get out of hand (--> “concrete” is invented) --> [...] (--> narration of past is invented which is always about the future) --> codification of world without tense or causality in language ----> tense & causality ----> pervasive truths
-this diagram is about the future for the subject whom is using the signs, telling the others where the game animal is and will be. in this text i am trying to pantomime a mimicked reference (of where the [game] animal is), sharing the idea of a thing that is syntaxically there, so we can run it. every utterance is about where i have last seen the “animal,” and how fat or far it is. [running had “magical ends” - Peter Nabokov, ‘Indian Running’ (Santa Barbara: Capra, 1981)]
symbolism --> man traveling within himself --> need to travel outside an infinitely larger reality ==> beyond --- different brand(s) of infinity
secular hunting --- the hunt becomes monstrous. i am calling for an old sacred hunt [sustained in myth and ceremony?] of concepts?
-hunt is gestalt(en)
(with our) hopes and tropes
boundary creatures and matters -- fire's function/act was peripheral, was in the threshold world of human passages(?) [then it made an entrance]
humans’ mimetic participation with fire
infinitely complex affinities
to be noted the nuanced differences between talking and telling (harf-zadan/goftan)
*talking* can not be accompanied by a direct object (the talked) and *telling* might not be accompanied by a direct subject (you are told without a direct teller.) so talking is about the talker and[...]
(201)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%40.4[...]chery 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 آتش
The Paleozoic was a time of dramatic geological, climatic, and evolutionary change. The Cambrian Period witnessed the most rapid and widespread diversification of life in Earth's history, known as the Cambrian explosion, in which most modern phyla first appeared. Fish, arthropods, amphibians, anap[...]
(202)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%40.7[...]with, abgine ze sang mizayad--khaghani آبگینه ز سنگ می زاید)
sange emtehan سنگ امتحان, az sang birun amadan از سنگ بیرون آمدن, bar sang zadan بر سنگ زدن (trial, test, valuate, messure, quality check,) --?--> related to mine and mineral that gave metal and gold (in many parts of iran sang is the unit of messurment for water ---> go to Dehkhoda) (sang is just a mean to put other things in weight, due to its abundance and nonshiny surface in front of reflective materials: diamond, water, etc.)
sang dar darya andakhtan سنگ در دریا انداختن (positive chance, relying on destiny, butterfly effect, questions of agency and responsibility,)
sang andakhtan سنگ انداختن (causality, scale, benefiting from the nature, lever, questions of agency and responsibility,)
sang bendaz baghalet baz she سنگ بنداز بغلت باز شه (stupidity, uselessness, unrewarded hardship, questions of agency and responsibility,)
sang az mum sakhtan سنگ از موم ساختن (impossibility, stupidity, wrongness,)
sang bar shishe zadan سنگ بر شیشه زدن = not drinking wine anymore (breaking the wine glass) (sometimes stone has come to mean the wine glass itself: sang ~= bade باده)
sange ghali سنگ قالی (to put a rock on an iranian carpet so the wind doesn't take it away. the stone is invited into the culture. doesn't matter why. it is there sitting with us.)
as a unit of measurement, it apears that in farsi stone associates with quantitative nature, and in Ajayeb (therefore) fire with qualitative production of nature(?)
atash is pure quality
sang has no quality, it has only quantity
---this is undermind:
a trip to the archive of stones, muze jawaherat tehran (Treasury of National Jewels موزه جواهرات ملی ایران)
ahjare nafise احجار نفیسه (diamond, gold, etc.)
ahjare [...]
(203)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%41.1[...] which may date from 3.7 billion years ago.[4][5] Lichen stromatolites are a proposed mechanism of formation of some kinds of layered rock structure that are formed above water, where rock meets air, by repeated colonization of the rock by endolithic lichens.[6][7] (Wikipedia)
*oxygen
[img https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Oxygenation-atm-2.svg]
O2 build-up in the Earth's atmosphere. Red and green lines represent the range of the estimates while time is measured in billions of years ago (Ga).
Stage 1 (3.85-2.45 Ga): Practically no O2 in the atmosphere. The oceans were also largely anoxic with the possible exception of O2 gases in the shallow oceans.
Stage 2 (2.45-1.85 Ga): O2 produced, and rose to values of 0.02 and 0.04 atm, but absorbed in oceans and seabed rock.
Stage 3 (1.85-0.85 Ga): O2 starts to gas out of the oceans, but is absorbed by land surfaces. There was no significant change in terms of oxygen level.
Stages 4 and 5 (0.85-present): O2 sinks filled and the gas accumulates.[1]
[1] Holland, Heinrich D. “The oxygenation of the atmosphere and oceans”. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences. Vol. 361. 2006. pp. 903-915.
metazoan phyla : animal
history of life is tight to hisory of oxygen --> fire
Aerobic metabolism is more efficient than anaerobic pathways
Abiogenesis: the natural process of life arising from non-living matter, how pre-life chemical reactions gave rise to life on Earth
•self-replicating molecules
•RNA world --> catalyze peptide ligation or amino acid polymerization --> protains, specialized biocatalysis --> RNA + iron ==> DNA : data storage
•synthesized from inorganic compounds
•catalysis in chemical systems =?=> molecules necessary for self-replication
•this is a protain writing
*water
Study of zircons has found that liquid water must have existed as long ago as 4.4 Ga, very soon after the formation of Earth [...] water with similar deuterium-to-hydrogen ratio was already available at the time of Earth's formation, as evidenced in ancient “eucrites” meteorites originating from the asteroid Vesta. (wikipedia)
(four elements temporal hierarchy)
earth > water > oxygen(air) > fire
...................................
[with Guy Debord]
fire media theoretic
‘image’ detached into a stream, percieved as generality --> an inversion of life (“visible” negation of life - that has invented a visual form for itself)
(its social practices)
fire, not subordinate, as spectacle comes as means of unification, locus of illusion, generalized apparition --> seperation
(its general truth) fire untouched by evolution and form binding constrains, is a universal mater, the spectac[...]
(204)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%41.3[...]in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and the New Testament.] --> the fate of the unfaithful
(--> perceptible to the naked of the prohpet)
fire's mechanisms of contemplation
(in my preaching here i won't do what christians used to encourage repentence)
it is important not to put fire in abstract opposition to concret stone activity
mystic order ~?-> spectacular order
the spectalce of fire reciprocal alienation was part and parcel of human social life and its essence underpinning its relations to the real
diversities and contrasts in looking into the image of flame
what is already in society that fire (spectacle) gives expression? the beyond
(fire, we are) governed by its agenda
***monopolization of the realm of appearances*** (excluding other illusions, apparition, tellings, etc.)
-with fire a new brand of storytelling
***fire's spectacular aspect (accumulated to the point that) produces an image-object that is a seperate entity [accumulation --> generality/category --> new object], that of the mediated, from the fire itself, a second objecthood detached from its materiality, introduing transcendent immateriality --?--> metaphysics
-taking over life and existence
from vision to wisdom
categories of visulaity took human cognition hostage, gave rise to a metaphysical tradition/abundance imposing itself upon existence, regulating the perception of material life, philosophizing ‘reality’ to ‘beyond nature’ : *alienated thought* (due to the alienated power of fire) --- immaterial specatle of the afterlife, the world-beyond rendering life dead
abounding in metaphysical subtleties
-metaphysical abundance
...allegiance to the frozen
(Rumi's calling) “You must burn!” - this is very selfish
[to Siyavash?]
still today in sci-fi we are talking to a technoilogized light (as the messenger of beyond)
fire, transforms the world, not in terms of changing manifest matriality, rather the mind and thinking
fire in its temporal animation renders space fixated, giving the illusion that (visual) animation = life {~= spectacle}
the fire spectacle colonizing our participation with the beyond, colonizing the way our flux of senses make tentative contact with the other sides,
(what a stone suggests? the senses that never stop participating, never stop throwing themselves beyond the immediatly visible)
every phase of existence
...................................
[Scott Gilbert]
(all organic beings have been formed on two general laws, according to Darwin:)
(1) unity of type and (2) conditions of existence --> inorganic? fire?
natural selection --> adaptation --> conditions of exist[...]
(206)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%41.4[...] kill. The Rostam-stone-div compilation is about the abyssal div’s death-forming and life-forming powers. Rostam, himself coming from certain transvaluative body-buildings, is taking a nap on a billion-years-old stromatolite. Is the div’s self a form of fossilization story of the now? “Do you want to go to the mountain or ocean?” An old form of preying. He introduces an intimate perspective into the geological time-continuum. The thousands-years-old div as geological phenomena (in Ferdowsi + Mu'in diagram:) structure and morphology of a landscape made by bacteria, [“...pay attention to your ‘place’ in] the bedrock I am carrying you on.”
The div Akvan, coming from Akoman and Aka Manah, in Avestan relates more or less to “noxious thinking.” Divs are old and skillful ancient biotic entities with disagreeable characteristics. Their definition is yet open and subject to interpretation. But always disobedient to the sovereign’s project and abyssal in nature, divs promoted another kind of order, other than the old Gods. Their project was always to disillusionize the ideas of divine nondestruction and nontechnological purity. They are on the side of destruction, technology and death. When Rostam captures the great White-Div, Div-e Sepid,[25] a nasty metamorphosical sentient master in “unsympathetic magic” and an expert in the crafts of necromancy [ارتباط با مردگان —> he works with form, apparition and spirit, “dead bodies,” his knowledge-cosmos includes textures of mineral assemblage and recrystallization,[26]] his blood is eventually instrumentalized in bringing back the lost eye-sights and unearthing the captured ones.
The athleticism of Shahnameh doesn’t allow Ferdowsi to have another take on the order of div. The poem will not permit chaos.[27] In Shahnameh, divs are the defeated ones. Ferdowsi’s contest-oriented poetic site is towards the defeat of victory of defeat. For him, transcendence, truth, and growth are generated from the outcome of the scene of contest.[28] He locks “dishonor” indefinitely to “defeat.” The defeated-ones become inescapably monsters, divs. So, upon a Ferdowsian landscape of heroism and agon, the way I am trying to archaeologically (re)locate the being of div on Earth and put him in relationality to the lithic techniques of geo-poiesis, is a way for me to ask: how Ferdowsi is disarticulating div’s bodies to rearticulate other bodies? The humanoid Middle-Ages Persian body, the stoned, the fleshy mineral, the decaying ones, the creaturely, and so on. How can we reversely remetaphorize his tropes? How can we arrive at the stone? How can we unfinish the (death)sentence div is uttered with, and pre-epically recompose him in order to syntactically arrive at his kinship? OK. We are testing questions of nonhuman alterity at Ferdowsi.
...................................
“the mind needs wild animals”
Meloy
mo[...]
(210)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%41.6[...]er in “unsympathetic magic” and an expert in the crafts of necromancy [ارتباط با مردگان —> he works with form, apparition and spirit, “dead bodies,” his knowledge-cosmos includes textures of mineral assemblage and recrystallization,[26]] his blood is eventually instrumentalized in bringing back the lost eye-sights and unearthing the captured ones.
The athleticism of Shahnameh doesn’t allow Ferdowsi to have another take on the order of div. The poem will not permit chaos.[27] In Shahnameh, divs are the defeated ones. Ferdowsi’s contest-oriented poetic site is towards the defeat of victory of defeat. For him, transcendence, truth, and growth are generated from the outcome of the scene of contest.[28] He locks “dishonor” indefinitely to “defeat.” The defeated-ones become inescapably monsters, divs. So, upon a Ferdowsian landscape of heroism and agon, the way I am trying to archaeologically (re)locate the being of div on Earth and put him in relationality to the lithic techniques of geo-poiesis, is a way for me to ask: how Ferdowsi is disarticulating div’s bodies to rearticulate other bodies? The humanoid Middle-Ages Persian body, the stoned, the fleshy mineral, the decaying ones, the creaturely, and so on. How can we reversely remetaphorize his tropes? How can we arrive at the stone? How can we unfinish the (death)sentence div is uttered with, and pre-epically recompose him in order to syntactically arrive at his kinship? OK. We are testing questions of nonhuman alterity at Ferdowsi.
...................................
“the mind needs wild animals”
Meloy
more often, there are places where mammal should be but is no longer, *and in this emptiness, too, there is fieldwork to be done*
[*]euphemism: roads that are too civilized
Jesuit padre-historian
Je suis padre (wanna-be-father) historians
(18th century) calling the deserts of Baja California “destitute” without asking the natices if they were misreable
*for many natives in the Jesuit era, christianity was not a means by to give order to mystery (or give order to misery)* it was food. [...] another kind of appetite could lead people there...
*the christian hell looked a lot like the life they had left [...] many Indians so hated the cold that on a chilly day at the mission, a sermon about the fires of christian hell delighted them ♥
Meloy > Steinbeck: “food is hard to get, and a man lives inward, closely related to time”
better roads and bigger tourism = predatory brand of industrial leisure examplified by Cabo San Lucas (and Dubai in the middle east)
(Meloy herself part of a group) a goofy one with animal notes, plant books, and ‘je suit’ literature
(clinging to) the delusion of *feral self-reliance* --> [*]fishing: citizenry in the public of resourcefulness
“do not go t[...]
(211)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%41.7[...]ares at you through your sliding glass door, demanding enchiladas.
mark the direction of jet black darkling beetles marching up a red dune like a troop of miniature helmets. east? south?
let black widows live in your soffits.
lie on your back on a breezy sweep of beach and stare at the undersides of magnificent frigate birds. master a hyena's laugh and use it when in the presence of politicians.
admire the make midwife toad, who carries fertilized eggs on his back for a month. understand that certain species of mollusk can change their gender, know that from a ball afloat on tiny filaments inside its fanned shell, a sea scallop can tell which way is up.
crane your neck. worm your way. wolf it down. monkey with things. outfox your foe. quit badgering your tax attorney.
take notes on the deagness of coral, the pea-size heart of a bat. be meticulous. we will need these things so that we may speak.
the human mind is the child of primate evolution and our complex fluid interactions with environment and one another. animals have enrished this social intelligence. they give concrete expression to thoughts and images. they carry the outside world to our inner one and back again. they helped language flower into metaphor, symbol, and ritual. we once sang and danced them, made music from their skin, sinew, and bone. their stories came off our tongues. we ate them. they ate us.
close attention to mollusks and frigate birds and wolves makes us aware ont only of our own human identity but also of how much more there is, an assertion of our imperfect hunger for mystery. ‘without mystery life shrinks,’ wrote biologist Edward O. Wilson. ‘the completely known is a numbing void to all active minds.’”
(Meloy, Eating Stone p142-143)
...................................
Jacobsen on ancient mesopotamian
*religion = response*
[*]numinous: a unique experience of *confrontation with power* not of this world, confrontation with a ‘wholly other’
--> terrifying, demonic dread, awe, sublime majesty, fascinating, demanding unconditional allegiance, etc.
*positive human response [in thought (myth, theology) + in action (culd, worship)] ==> religion*
metaphor: human psychological reaction to the experience [of numinous] by means of analogy
-in metaphors all that is shared by the worshipers of an individual culture or cultural period in their common response to the numinous is summed and crystallized
-choice of central metaphor: wants to recapture and transmit, the primary meaning on which it builds, which underlines and determines the *total character of its response* = the total character of its religion
-major religious metaphors of the ancient mesopotamians have a double nature as pointing beyond themselves to things not of this world & yet being and remaining very much of the world
[...]
(212)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%41.8[...]tion and our complex fluid interactions with environment and one another. animals have enrished this social intelligence. they give concrete expression to thoughts and images. they carry the outside world to our inner one and back again. they helped language flower into metaphor, symbol, and ritual. we once sang and danced them, made music from their skin, sinew, and bone. their stories came off our tongues. we ate them. they ate us.
close attention to mollusks and frigate birds and wolves makes us aware ont only of our own human identity but also of how much more there is, an assertion of our imperfect hunger for mystery. ‘without mystery life shrinks,’ wrote biologist Edward O. Wilson. ‘the completely known is a numbing void to all active minds.’”
(Meloy, Eating Stone p142-143)
...................................
Jacobsen on ancient mesopotamian
*religion = response*
[*]numinous: a unique experience of *confrontation with power* not of this world, confrontation with a ‘wholly other’
--> terrifying, demonic dread, awe, sublime majesty, fascinating, demanding unconditional allegiance, etc.
*positive human response [in thought (myth, theology) + in action (culd, worship)] ==> religion*
metaphor: human psychological reaction to the experience [of numinous] by means of analogy
-in metaphors all that is shared by the worshipers of an individual culture or cultural period in their common response to the numinous is summed and crystallized
-choice of central metaphor: wants to recapture and transmit, the primary meaning on which it builds, which underlines and determines the *total character of its response* = the total character of its religion
-major religious metaphors of the ancient mesopotamians have a double nature as pointing beyond themselves to things not of this world & yet being and remaining very much of the world
in attempting to interpret religious metaphors, one must seek to bring out as fully as possible its *powers to suggest and recall* the numinous
-to one generations is fresh and powerful may be to another seem old and trite
suggestiveness =/= representaive of its period --> literalness: attention to human purposes and values ==> [flase] sense that all has been explained and understood
human's recognition of dependency upon power not of this world --> religious expressino = transcendent hope and trust (=/= Nietzsche)
*(mesopotamian) numinous = immanence (in feature of confrontation) =/= all transcendence
mesopotamian experience of numinous power = revelation of *indwelling spirit* --> power at the center of something that caused it to be and thrive and flourish =/= Old Testament's numinous = transcendent {---> go to the experience of Moses with the burning bush: ‘God =/= bush’ --> **God happened as it were sojourn there موقتا but he is a[...]
(213)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%41.8[...]ng) ***house = temple = the place where the owner could be found (or felt)***
--> that god (the owner) was present and available
the god's retainers --> because the temple was god's home, was not only near and approachable, he was involved with the fortunes of the community and commited ti maintaining it --> *mesopotamian temple was profoundly awesome* (it carried awesome aura, awesome or angry nimbus هاله)
-the temple was covered with loveliness
-the god's private apartment shrouded in darkness : the dark room (no eye is to see)
--> specific closeness of essence + the power inhabiting it
authoritative revelation
know what was “the proper thing”
house mountain
house rising sun
house causing light
he who issues forth from the thriving...
ancient =? ancient to us ~=? ancient to them
there is no living cultural tradition that connects us with mesopotamia
immediate unanalyzed total reactions (?)
false meanings jar, stop, and lead no further
older elements (seemingly unchanged) come to mean something quite different, have been interpreted to fit into a new system of meanings
religious metaphors:
•spiritual core in phenomena
•rulers
•parents
[and then later] dark age closed down on mesopotamia
many divine wills to the willful whim of a single despot
*major gods became natural gods* (identified with narrow national political aspirations)
--> barbarization of the idea of divinity
...................................
(how to take seriously) water's materiality --> how to think with water (or *how water means*):
•water can bring human conceptual life along with it from local to global concerns
•[can help us to] go beyond qualities that express some timeless properties
(my point: the experience of fire is as inseparable from that of stone)
[Alberti suggests] *to think in terms of the properties of the phenomenon ‘rock/water’ as engendered by specific, embodied practices in this place* (=/= grappling with the question of the agentive capacities or properties of the rock or water)
***there are many waters (fires, jinns, divs, stones, shadows), not only many meanings of water (fires, jinns, divs, stones, shadows)***
}--> Alberti's brilliant response to Strang's bad idea of universal notions of properties (which is a very common tendency towards relationality among artists --> Strang: “common material properties of things, and the shared cognitive and phenomenological processes through which people interact with them, generate recurrent ideas and patterns of engagement in diverse cultural and historical contexts”)
to bear on the form and content of an argument about water as:
[...]
(218)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%42.1[...] (connection between:) celestial + astronomical order + terrestrial variety (of land + living creature)
estimate the speed of the ship
throw a log with a rope attached to it overboard, and measure how much rope went overboard within a given period of time
Pliny the Elder --> historia naturalis
Seneca --> naturales quaestiones
air has a natural power of moving itself [==> agency باد]
}<== Seneca’s stoic worldview: conceived the cosmic principle of all life and movement (pneuma) as a subtle substance pervading everything and giving rise, among other things, to all weather phenomena
air = expression of pneuma (alive & live-giving)
all weather = manifestations as transmutations of air
(late medieval encyclopedia -->) *weather = a kind of alchemy of air*
(late medieval wind diagrams -->) wind: cosmic divine powers blowing from the celestial sphere onto earth
Aristotle + Albertus Magnus ==> explanation of the nature and origin of winds in Renaissance meteorological works
air and were then dragged along by the circular movement of the celestial spheres so that they ended up moving horizontally
hot and dry exhalations
aeolipila: a hollow metal sphere (shaped like the face of Aeolus) with a single tiny hole in it
air possessed a force (“vis”) that heat could awaken
16th century --increase--> interest in systematic explanation of meteorological phenomena
#workshop on wind poetry
epic battle, systems moving air, agency,
feature of Renaissance thought --> the idea of *a middle instance (neither fully corporal nor fully incorporeal) intervening between matter and soul* [+ fire as intermediator] ~ spiritus, pneum, quintessence ~ fire or air
...in schematic abstract structure of body-spirit-soul, spirit is somewhere in between
spirit: air-like substance
air: preferred vehicle of spirit (conveyed the breath if life + *used by demonic spirits as a means to produce material effects*)
*spirit: celestial origin to the “innate heat” (calidum innatum) of living creatures
effects of solar heat on air : act of vitalization
pneuma of the stoics + astral body of Neoplatonic philosophy + medical spirits of Galenic medicine }==>
•Renaissance
•(christian notion of) Holy Ghost
•the idea of close connection between wind and divine power (in Bible)
(in alchemical view) spirits were somehow connected ti air <== quintessences were often separated from raw substances in the form of vapours
ajayebnameh ~= natural magic
*kinds of natural motions*
1. avoidance of avacum: from the form of a portion of air, when it does not want to be either expanded further or separated (from other matter). horror vacui --kinetic-[...]
(219)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%42.3[...]alterity of the past
(Alberti concerned with) how the indigene occupies textual space in Ingold: indigenous words appear in key moments in Ingold's text to seal an argument, or provoke an idea (at the level of analogy)
--Bakhtin--> monologism disguised as dialogism : a single voice playing many parts
analogical thinking:
--Thomas--> (interpretive) open ourselves to the difference of the past
--Alberti--> (appropriative) relies on representationalist logic; using analogies interpretively to the types of past we construct
(Viveires's) *controlled equivocation*
we compare mistaken assumptions on both sides
***interpretation =/= multivocality (polyphony)***
@apass: what other textual strategies can we develop other than polyphonic (multiculturalism at the level of text)?
[!we should say no to] general thing theory : tendency to produce overviews, universal accounts of the material world
•phenomenological world of essences that are revealed
•ecological world of affordances that are at hand
•some social world of false transcendence
-
...................................
mirror
ayene
pieces of metal that soldiers put on the back and legs
چارآینه
جفای فلک آینه گون ==> self (of the poet)
فلک falak --> ayene-gun --> jafa
دل del --> sang --> transforms stone to blood
آینه اسکندری ayene eskandari (was it a telescope? to inform/spy)
ارسطو به فسون و اعداد آن را از قعر دریا برآورد
•math اعداد, tricks فسون
mirror trap دام آینه
at any moment هرآینه
قبله مساز زآینه
mirror =/= qibla
آینه گردان
mirror-stepper = sun
•seven mirrors هفت آینه = planets
a short essay on matter mythology
[...]
Hayula---literally meaning ‘unformed monster’ tells the histories of nonhuman material and mythologies of matter-energy flow in the eye of different cultural convertors
[...]
Hayula (Persian: هیولا) (in classical islamic philosophy) mythologically refers to a pre-cosmological ‘form’ of energy---literally meaning ‘unformed monster'---from which eventually the ‘universe’ and ‘persons’ where created, and systematically provokes a meshwork of meanings that interrelate notions of energy, form, and selfhood in a premodern intercultural cosmology
[...]
parasitically seeking a host for Hayula nun-human histories
[...]
Memory is not the only and privileged way of connecting the past to the present. One of many crucial and i[...]
(220)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%42.8[...]dial people with unlimited and unbound corporeality, is the story of the originality of Hayula's virtual potential for being. Hayula, not fully human, tasting beyond morality (destruction, anthropophagy, etc.), becomes the subjects of other interventions and morphs into spheres and features of the world--of biological aspects, celestial bodies, humanoid zones, etc.
The realm of Hayula comes to interpret, and thus permit and strain, who and how an I can be, at the same time that it provides the vessel for the continuity, the survival, of that I. Here the I is the continuity of an inhabitation of a point of view. It marks a relative position within a hierarchical logic that spans the cosmos, a hierarchy that ranges from the nonhuman to the human realm and from the demons to the realm of the formless. Following the classic joke, that one goes to a place in order to discover the directions of how to keep out of that place, this project proposal suggests to explore the Hayula's experience of self and how it incorporates destabilizing its, which might permit or prohibit seeing beyond its conditions.
In another level of description we will look at the concept of Hayula as a device in cross-catalytic relations in matter-energy flows, looking at it as a semi metaphorical and physical nonlinear model for structure-generating processes that populate our world. How attractors and transistors consolidated different energy flows of certain intensities to gain access to self-organization? The energy trapped in winds and currents, atmosphere and hydrosphere, solar energy that plants capture through photosynthesis, has clocked societies for centuries and gave them rhythm. A small fraction of a plant life that has powered most of civilization's past intensifications. Enormous reservoir of oceanic and atmospheric energy fuels a great variety of self-organized structures: tornadoes, cyclones, pressure blocks, and, more importantly for human history, wind circuits. These forms of spontaneous structural generation suggest that inorganic matter is much more variable and creative than we ever imagined.
[...]
...................................
(Wietske Maas)
materiality that is specific to the eye
similar to a plant, the eye is not a simple aperture to absorb light, but a filter to mitigate external stimuli.
unveil vision as a process of chemical contamination and digestion stemming from plants. vision is rooted in the materiality of digestion.
the human eye is an organ complicit with plant photosynthesis.
in fact, seeing is a process of photosynthesis. as much as plant photosynthesis absorbs excessive light and turns it into the carbon structures of sugar molecules, the human eye has to mitigate light and turn it into the neural structure of vision, cognition, and memory. in this process the eye protects itself from the corrupti[...]
(221)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%43[...]hythm. A small fraction of a plant life that has powered most of civilization's past intensifications. Enormous reservoir of oceanic and atmospheric energy fuels a great variety of self-organized structures: tornadoes, cyclones, pressure blocks, and, more importantly for human history, wind circuits. These forms of spontaneous structural generation suggest that inorganic matter is much more variable and creative than we ever imagined.
[...]
...................................
(Wietske Maas)
materiality that is specific to the eye
similar to a plant, the eye is not a simple aperture to absorb light, but a filter to mitigate external stimuli.
unveil vision as a process of chemical contamination and digestion stemming from plants. vision is rooted in the materiality of digestion.
the human eye is an organ complicit with plant photosynthesis.
in fact, seeing is a process of photosynthesis. as much as plant photosynthesis absorbs excessive light and turns it into the carbon structures of sugar molecules, the human eye has to mitigate light and turn it into the neural structure of vision, cognition, and memory. in this process the eye protects itself from the corruptive metabolism of light, tapping into some ancestral mechanism shared with plants.
if human eye protects itself like a plant, we can think of photosynthesis itself as a sort of primeval organ of vision spread out across the skin of the vegetable kingdom.
material commonality (worth exploring)
incarnate an external organ of vision
our tie with the general metabolism of light
correlations between human vision and the organic world
using a technique to record the surface of reality or using to reveal the internal chemical composition of matter
in the chromatogram, a light reaction reveals the inner chemistry and transforms matter composition into visual patterns
different regime of visibility
light is not just a stream of waves to be passively refracted and recorded but an active and autonomous medium of image-making
mineral kingdom -- forces that drive the becoming of both organic and inorganic matter
drive to formation (Bildungstrieb)
“Runge's willingness to attribute a life force to chemicals is a continuation of Romantic natural philosophy but meshed with Geothean morphology and experiment.” (Leslie)
chromatogram is an image, which discloses it's own bodily formation
here our focus should shift from the eye as a globular organ in the head of a vertebrate animal to the eye as an epidermic lens, a light-mitigating organ that attenuates the visceral contamination of radiation.
our inseparable alliance with plants
our eyes are immersed within a vegetative[...]
(222)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%43[...]general metabolism of light
correlations between human vision and the organic world
using a technique to record the surface of reality or using to reveal the internal chemical composition of matter
in the chromatogram, a light reaction reveals the inner chemistry and transforms matter composition into visual patterns
different regime of visibility
light is not just a stream of waves to be passively refracted and recorded but an active and autonomous medium of image-making
mineral kingdom -- forces that drive the becoming of both organic and inorganic matter
drive to formation (Bildungstrieb)
“Runge's willingness to attribute a life force to chemicals is a continuation of Romantic natural philosophy but meshed with Geothean morphology and experiment.” (Leslie)
chromatogram is an image, which discloses it's own bodily formation
here our focus should shift from the eye as a globular organ in the head of a vertebrate animal to the eye as an epidermic lens, a light-mitigating organ that attenuates the visceral contamination of radiation.
our inseparable alliance with plants
our eyes are immersed within a vegetative metabolism of a kind. we look at plants, but plants have already cannibalized our gaze as they become part of us looking back at them.
complex architecture of light:
plant photosynthesis is probably the most abused metaphor and analogy of life, widely quoted across a diverse spectrum of schools of thought to justify naturalist ideologies. it is believed that photosynthesis is behind a process of energy accumulation central to natural equilibrium and the food chain. however, there are various ways the process of light metabolism could be understood. it could also be understood as a process towards cosmic corruption and fermentation, or as a process towards more “complex architecture of light”.
...................................
[...]
(Ilana Halperin)
corporeal mineralogy
we are autobiographical trace fossils
what constitutes life in the world of geology?
microbes feasting on the mineral bodies of stones
more animal than mineral
...................................
big bang, first second of existence, second second, what is going on with the materiality
...................................
the dark matter, in Caecilian Kircher, we don't know what it is
...................................
[...]
[Gholam Hossein Rahimi + Abd Al-Rasul Emadi, 79113902605.pdf]
it is “proven” that location is not hayula (nor apparition)
hayula is anything that can have many faces [this is greek]
according to Aristotle: matter cannot separate itself from hayula (bzw.[...]
(224)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%43.1[...]rition enters void?\
زمان سمتی zaman-e samti : directional time (?) [#archive]
for Avicenna location and located are inseparable, location is holder or an exterior or outer surface of the located.
for him, void has two problems: (1) the void's dimensions will mix with the matter's dimension. (2) void is infinite, therefore movement is impossible, since there is part of the universe that is not void therefore there can't be void in the universe since it has to be infinite.
Hayula has no resistance to different apparitions/surat/صورت
surathaye jesmani صورتهای جسمانی
...................................
[...]
pandora’s complexity
purely (?) material objective agent (evolving?)
Hayula--the first principle of everything material
bi-surat بی صورت
اشکال تن ashkal-e tan***
virtual proto-humanity (to different corporalities) --> pre-organic / anthropo*morphic* --> inter-corporal predation --> (sets post-mythic relations between species) --> trans-ontological intentionalities
hayula is a state of latency or potentiality --> possibility of metamorphosis in interpersonal relations...
every apparition demands a recipient
(مولوی) Rumi wants to be able to read the return-state to the hayula:
تبدیل شدن به tabdil shodan:
...be arkan (ارکان instrument)
...be heyvan (حیوان animal)
...be jan (جان aliveness? liveliness of artifacts? --?--> agency)
...be hilat (حيله, tech---means & ways) [tech? #ruse]
(in Rumi:) ruse ==> قید صید gheid-e seyd
Hafez is all about farib (فریب ruse)
material agents: {//complex forms of movement //affiliation into space}
stones, a substance indigenous to every place. (those who give up or try to stop or turn back become stones.)
the meta-fall of the material (in hayula هیولا)
apparition/surat/صورت (essence/mahiyat/ماهیت)?
matter/madeh/ماده (hast/هست/being/is-there)?
--(surat)-->--(surat)-->
animal---flora---inanimate---hayula
<--(madeh)--<--(madeh)--
in Sohrevardi, he removes the light as projection and ray-tracing, and proposes a theory of light (of theory of being) as “Filter” (veril?, hejab حجاب). (there is no filter between the sphere of the eye and the sphere of the planet Mars.)
apparition is essential or part of the essence or itself the essence
Hayula: mojude mobham o bi-ta'ayon, joz ghove-e mahz va este'dad-e serf nist. (jesme basit)
هیولا: موجود مبهم و بی تعین, جز قوه محض و استعداد صرف نیست
(جسم بسط)
[...]
(227)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%43.3[...]y (?) material objective agent (evolving?)
Hayula--the first principle of everything material
bi-surat بی صورت
اشکال تن ashkal-e tan***
virtual proto-humanity (to different corporalities) --> pre-organic / anthropo*morphic* --> inter-corporal predation --> (sets post-mythic relations between species) --> trans-ontological intentionalities
hayula is a state of latency or potentiality --> possibility of metamorphosis in interpersonal relations...
every apparition demands a recipient
(مولوی) Rumi wants to be able to read the return-state to the hayula:
تبدیل شدن به tabdil shodan:
...be arkan (ارکان instrument)
...be heyvan (حیوان animal)
...be jan (جان aliveness? liveliness of artifacts? --?--> agency)
...be hilat (حيله, tech---means & ways) [tech? #ruse]
(in Rumi:) ruse ==> قید صید gheid-e seyd
Hafez is all about farib (فریب ruse)
material agents: {//complex forms of movement //affiliation into space}
stones, a substance indigenous to every place. (those who give up or try to stop or turn back become stones.)
the meta-fall of the material (in hayula هیولا)
apparition/surat/صورت (essence/mahiyat/ماهیت)?
matter/madeh/ماده (hast/هست/being/is-there)?
--(surat)-->--(surat)-->
animal---flora---inanimate---hayula
<--(madeh)--<--(madeh)--
in Sohrevardi, he removes the light as projection and ray-tracing, and proposes a theory of light (of theory of being) as “Filter” (veril?, hejab حجاب). (there is no filter between the sphere of the eye and the sphere of the planet Mars.)
apparition is essential or part of the essence or itself the essence
Hayula: mojude mobham o bi-ta'ayon, joz ghove-e mahz va este'dad-e serf nist. (jesme basit)
هیولا: موجود مبهم و بی تعین, جز قوه محض و استعداد صرف نیست
(جسم بسط)
[...]
...................................
(Delanda)
we are taking “real history” as starting-point
-to capture the dynamics of human historical processes, we must allow the nonhuman physics to infiltrate the human society---complex materials that form human culture. --> (for example) water in its several distinct states (solid, liquid, gas) in phase transition (intensity of temperature)---that which human society “see” as material-change
example of spontaneous structural generations are coherent waves:
*solitons* - forming in many different types of materials, from tsunamis (ocean waves) to lasers. --> *attractors* {stable states, which can sustain coherent cycles activity {periodic / chaotic}}
*monsoon* - a wind c[...]
(228)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%43.3[...]e)
...................................
division's of life
-monolithic notion of the mind has been challanged by psychology and phenomenology
biology has been previously essentially zoocentric --> monolithic notion of the body --> medically proper animal body =/= if we zoom in the living canvas, organisms blend into a pointillist landscape in which each dot of paint is also alive --> symbiosis, gaia, prokaryotic sex (omnisexuality)
gaia --> biosphere und understood not as environmental home but as body (physiological process)
bacterial omnisexuality --> fluid genetic transfers = sexual
=/= unitary self assumed in the zoocentric model
medieval microcosmic
correspondences among prokaryotic, eukaryotic, zoological and geophysiological (gaian) levels
--> holonomic continuum --> *a type of individuality that is spatially and temporally more inclusive* [-my research on ajayeb has been more tended on the temporal inclusivity]
==> (in new biology) chimerical body: hybrid of bacterial species --Sagan--> like that many headed beast, the microbeast of the animal cell combines into one entity bacteria that were originally freely living, self-sufficient and metabolically distinct
•when respirers entered and did not kill but, rather, were incorporated by larger anaerobic archaebacteria
•mitochondria are the descendants of bacteria that had be come lodged within the cells of animals and plants
bacteria ==> eukaryotic cell
(the fable of) [Spencer's] animal world as a “gladiator's show” --> evidence for parasitism and competition (~ social progress in 19th century)
the grass-green photosynthetic organelles of all plants may be the descendants of a single, wildly successful bacterium, now shackled, albeit gently, in its cytoplasmic prison
-Sagan
*all cells with nuclei (a unicellular amoeba or amultibillion-cell anaconda) <== orgiastic encounters (eating, infecting, engulfing, feeding on, having sex with and so on) among quite different types of bacteria*
(plant cell) chimera = protective anaerobic host cell + internally multiplying photosynthetic bacterium + respiring bacteria
metabolic waste product of the mutation ==> atmospheric oxygen --> catastrophic --> energetic catalyst --> ...
fermenting bacteria (like trolls or elves in a cosmic fairy tale) dwelling underground --> stromatolite
army of mutants that evolved in the aftermath of the oxygen infusion (the greatest pollution crisis the earth) ==> human beings
chimerical eukaryotic system:
*spirochete* [...] at the edge of larger cell, sites of leakage supplying a constant flow of food [...] renounced their former freedom of movement in order to permanently attach ==> a means of locomotion and food acquisition<[...]
(229)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%43.8[...]usivity]
==> (in new biology) chimerical body: hybrid of bacterial species --Sagan--> like that many headed beast, the microbeast of the animal cell combines into one entity bacteria that were originally freely living, self-sufficient and metabolically distinct
•when respirers entered and did not kill but, rather, were incorporated by larger anaerobic archaebacteria
•mitochondria are the descendants of bacteria that had be come lodged within the cells of animals and plants
bacteria ==> eukaryotic cell
(the fable of) [Spencer's] animal world as a “gladiator's show” --> evidence for parasitism and competition (~ social progress in 19th century)
the grass-green photosynthetic organelles of all plants may be the descendants of a single, wildly successful bacterium, now shackled, albeit gently, in its cytoplasmic prison
-Sagan
*all cells with nuclei (a unicellular amoeba or amultibillion-cell anaconda) <== orgiastic encounters (eating, infecting, engulfing, feeding on, having sex with and so on) among quite different types of bacteria*
(plant cell) chimera = protective anaerobic host cell + internally multiplying photosynthetic bacterium + respiring bacteria
metabolic waste product of the mutation ==> atmospheric oxygen --> catastrophic --> energetic catalyst --> ...
fermenting bacteria (like trolls or elves in a cosmic fairy tale) dwelling underground --> stromatolite
army of mutants that evolved in the aftermath of the oxygen infusion (the greatest pollution crisis the earth) ==> human beings
chimerical eukaryotic system:
*spirochete* [...] at the edge of larger cell, sites of leakage supplying a constant flow of food [...] renounced their former freedom of movement in order to permanently attach ==> a means of locomotion and food acquisition
•spirochete and mad talent, lyrical drive, (tubercle patients were orators or grandios liars)
[*]human body: an architectonic compilation of millions of agencies of chimerical cells
eukaryotic cells leveling cytoplasmic calcium concentrations ==> [our] calcium phosphate of bone (mineral infrastructure of our bodies):
because seawater concentrations of calcium are often four orders of magnitude higher than [one in ten million], ocean-dwelling cells must exude calcium to avoid poisoning. in the full-fathomed sea did the bones of our ancestors and the shells of their eukaryote relatives evolve. skeletons dramatize an ancient waste, whispering a ghostly testimony to the useful internalization of hazardous waste sites. this givesa good indication of how life within the general economy evolves to deactivate, sacrifice and eventually incorporate the dangerous excesses that accrue from its solar growth. -Sagan
--> the body is multiple (even if orchestrated by vicissitudes and the need for harmon[...]
(230)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%43.8[...]on and artistic creation --Severi--> synesthetic
(my lecture-performances? ~ chimeric image of chiefs’ talk [khotbe خطبه fluent at combining different aesthetic resources] -->) linguistic + extralinguistic media in ritual performance (working/producing visual + mental images)
--> combining of indexical signs in communication acts ==> poetry of identities-in-motion (capable of projecting complex images of a nonvisual kind)
[*]image: an abstract portrait of identity fashioned out of cumulating patterns of congruence across all manner of indexical signs--including visual ones--that addressees and audiences can imaginatively experience, like a hologram
(Silverstein > Guerreiro)
~~--> ***relation between poetics and the production of identities***
chimerical representation: an art of ambiguity
(Strauss's Amazonian ethnology -->) dualism in perpetual disequilibrium: centripetal forces of centralization + centrifugal forces of dispersion
@apass ==> “societies against the state”
complex relations between hierarchy and counterhierarchy
(--> Renan's notion of monologue)
[Clastres's model rooted in Western language ideology looking at Amerindian language:]
metahistorical bond between *power & speech* cannot be conceived of separately
•state societies --> the word is a ‘right’ to power (that may be used to command)
•societies against the state --> the word is a ‘duty’ of the chief (an indigenous leader must be capable of offering society the words that it ‘demands’)
◾Amerindian chief: a voice preaching in the wilderness (literally says nothing, a repetition of “edifying discourse”) <-- his speech is not spoken in order to be listened to (~ ritualized act [=/= act of communication]) ==> chief's speech is transformed into pure value (~= poet's speech for whom words are values before they are signs) --> (for Clastres) language =/= violence: a facet of coercive power
denotative قوه تفکيک ()
predicative (Dickensian aspect)
referential (the efficacy of its context and meaning depends on something else)
enunciation (pragmatic) ==> effects on the enunciator + audience ~~Silverstein--> [*]politics: the dynamic arrangement and rearrangement of people as subjects within structures of actual and potential action of all sort --comprises--> poetics <== everything experienced as effective practice is formed semiotically (~ through sign)
*political oratory [=/= informing the content of a message] uses poetical resources that allow interlocutors to have their identities mutually constructed by means of indexical signs* (that connect the message's form to extralinguistic contextual facts) --> *message ascribes to me [=/= message describes my reality]*
Ali's use of political oratory in the context of ordinary interactions with me --> i forgot that the symbo[...]
(231)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%44.1[...]ction (from a series of contradictory connotations, being two things at the same time --> symbolic transformation) ==construct==> a special identity of the participants
--> xxxx جمع گرایانه syncretistic movement @apass (used as an instrument of resistance?)
messianism = intense propagation + paradoxical identification
--> convert entire populations in a short amount of time
pragmatics of communication --> appearance of a paradoxical “I” personified by the prophet
(warrior shaman messiah's) contradictory self-definition ==able==> enunciate paradoxical statements
--Severi--> to be faithful to the local tradition
Appache --> opposition to Christianity take the firm of conceptualizing Christianity as a different religion
•absorbing but not understanding the elements (of Christian religion) ~= being impressed by story {<-- i do this in my artistic work but i don't ask for devotion or trust}
--> using typical imagistic methods, ritual of dance
the old man Arnold
chant (ritual symbolism) -->
•treat illness
•accompany rite of passage
•impart magical powers
-
(amerindian) shamanism --> establishes a metaphorical link, a set of analogies ~= mystical relationships between ritual objects and living being [--> construct its own truthuniverse, supernatural dimension thought of a possible world]
bleeding pearl
parallelism : (a technique of) threading verbal images together
[Severi's early interpretation of] tradition (would need to) preserve the text + instructions to use --by--> verbalizing them (store them in the chant)
Kuna --> description of the position of the speaker (“shaman is now seated there and is saying...”) characterizes the special kind of communication (appropriate for ritual changing)
shaman: novel sort of enunciator (lending his voice to other invisible beings --> plural and contradictory identity)
acoustic mask: a reflexive means to define the ritual identity of the speaker
reflexive application of parallelism
(@Isabel, how to make community without becoming a cult?)
use snake --> capture the imagination of the followers ==> authority
imagistic (iconic mode, sequence of acid) + doctrinal (discursive mode, text, prayer) = pragmatics context of enunciation ==> messianistic religion
both paradoxical & parallelistic
new ways to be faithful...
...................................
exhibition-making and preventive conservation --> inspection and exposition <-- (different understandings and use of) *touch = curatorial*
professionalisation of curating
short-term education
cultural exchange
@apass feedback: (terrain[...]
(232)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%44.4[...]t to my diplom, via animal talk?
--> ‘face’ in performance. (read Haraway, Levinas, Derrida)
face is linked to sensibility and vision in an intimate way. something that resists categorization, containment or comprehension, infinitely foreign. it is not the biological face. it is the idea of infinity within oneself. this idea of infinity which the face encapsulates is for Levinas the key means by which thought is brought into relation with what goes beyond its capacity. and this is crucial in art and specifically in performance art for encountering something such as face, face of the performer or the face of the work. the face is perceived as something that resists possession or utilization. the face promotes a discourse when it invites me. (ranting against sober means of communication). the face to face situation founds language.
presence of the face coming from beyond the world , but committing me to human fraternity (Gemeinschaft) does not overwhelm me as a numinous essence arousing fear and trembling. to be in relationship while absolving oneself from this relation is ‘to speak’. the face always speaks directly and absolutely to me.
many late 20th century horror films feature a masked villain. the act of masking the face is not only metaphorical, but also has the terrifying effect of dehumanizing the villain. in herbert kelman's work on dehumanization, when the perception of a person “as an individual, independent and distinguishable from others, capable of making choices is denied, they no longer elicit compassion or other moral responses. the facelessness of the alien, swarms of ants, or other villains of pop culture.
for face look at facade too.
--> ‘provocation’ in performance. (read Haraway, Levinas)
--> ‘act’ in performance. (read grotowski)
what is to be: ‘completely natural and logical’. dealing with the discomfort of unreasonable presence on the stage. nonrepresentational aspects of performance
--> ‘teaching’ that is not rhetorics where the revelation of the other can take place (Avital, Levinas). teaching is synthesizing for someone else. what kind of communication is teaching involved?
the discourse inherent in the relation with the other is like or as a sermon.
--> ‘eyes’ threatening or seducing eyes of the performer (Rainer)
--> ‘ranting’ of the drunk in the face of the sober. disturbance of a continuity with attack with words.
--> ‘saying’, before it conjugates a verbal sign, is already an ethical gesture. saying is therefore already the proximity of one to the other, the commitment of an approach, the one for the other.
one saying enters into the service of the said, that is the thematization of being, purity of its intentions will be inevitably compromised. a saying that must be unsaid. a movement of thought that continues to resist collapsing into a settled [...]
(233)[...notes/notes Personen.txt]%44.7[...]ine, (form of shyness?)
when we send the shyest as an ambassador to represent us.
It is a self-defining system of signs referring to signs.
a quiet listener. we have yet no idea what is speak. how taking transforms the mind that talks. conditions of thinking in relation to talking, before or after the mouth that talks. thinking in other languages. if intimacy is saying before thinking, how fits the acts of maulwurfe?
work on shyness, I have to start (slowly) with what i (kind of) know.
“...Nudged on the scene as a kind of shivering being, anxious and shy,..” (kafka, test)
There is the suggestion here, as in Holderlin, that timidity might be a dialect of stupidity. (Finding no way of testing out of these subtle complicities, one falls asleep, exhausted by the distress of proving one's most minimal merit.) (Avital Ronell, The Veils of Servility)
According to Silvan Tomkins, “shame operates only after interest or enjoyment has been activated.”
as Sedgwick has argued, for some people, and most often queer subjects, “shame is simply the first, and remains a permanent, structuring fact of identity: one that ... has its own, powerfully productive and powerfully social metaphoric possibilities.
the idea is that the performance that avows its performanceness acknowledges the difficulty of fitting into roles, finding identities, and managing a self, especially a self vulnerable to the effects of stigma.
is there a queerness in me and my performance? is shyness, they way i do it, queer?
turn the spectator to the reader.
does shame intertwines with queer?
this affect and mode of performance (which normative euro American culture would rather eradicate) can be queered, twisted and turned into endless artful enactments.
queer, as experimental linguistic representational and political artistic performance.
shameless in my shyness. (at the level of affect theory?)
shyness: looking otherwise and feeling differently
to act shamed of exactly that which he is excited. (is this a queer subject?)
queer is not isomorphic with gay or lesbian or any other fixed identity, rather, queerness undoes all identities into an endless multiplicity and unbecoming. (liquefaction of any solidification)
queer seems to hinge much more radically and explicitly on a person’s undertaking particular, performative acts of experimental self-perception on a filiations.
Indeed, the performativity of both queer and shame can be reiterated differently; the subject can disidentify from such interpolations and re-deploy the abjecting and/or disciplining of the terms in unforeseen ways, which Warhol did.
In surrender the head bends and meets the heart. The head that does not bend has no value, and the head that is stiff w[...]
(234)[...notes/notes Personen.txt]%45.1[...]not isomorphic with gay or lesbian or any other fixed identity, rather, queerness undoes all identities into an endless multiplicity and unbecoming. (liquefaction of any solidification)
queer seems to hinge much more radically and explicitly on a person’s undertaking particular, performative acts of experimental self-perception on a filiations.
Indeed, the performativity of both queer and shame can be reiterated differently; the subject can disidentify from such interpolations and re-deploy the abjecting and/or disciplining of the terms in unforeseen ways, which Warhol did.
In surrender the head bends and meets the heart. The head that does not bend has no value, and the head that is stiff will have to bend sometime, either in surrender or in shame. The head that bends in surrender will never have to bend in shame. Shame accompanies arrogance. Shyness accompanies Love. See how children are endowed with shyness, that is natural. Shyness is inherent. Shame is inflicted by society and is acquired. Shame brings guilt and shyness adds to one? beauty. Retain your shyness and drop your shame. (?)
shame is simply the first and remains a permanent, structuring fact of identity: one that has its own, powerfully productive and powerfully social metaphoric possibilities.
deciding not to care how people thing (or feel?), because those are the things i don't want to change! (or i don't think i should want to change) (warhol)
what do i want to change? just having fun with my stuff. can i decide not to care what people think? shyness...
in shame i wish to continue to look (or talk, or make or perform) and be looked at (or spoken to or seen in my performing of myself), but i also do not wish to do so. (Silvan Tomkins)
i am embarrassed to show the shy singing.
chronically embarrassing my self. (Aula presentation, shy singing, ...)
on passivity, note for the reader: not to mistake it for endurance in this discourse. here we are talking about a philosophical term, in relation to the “being” and the “other”...
an architecture that tries to be modest, a performance that tries to be intimidating as much
as it can.
just in time shyness
what are the pitfalls and abysses of philosophical reflection on and with shyness?
what am i trying to shortcut?
was Socrates intruding in his punk philosopher, stopping people at back allies and perform philosophy. he doesn't hold back, he intrudes, tattooing the body of the other, questioning.
the problem of his project?
i am not shy in the work that i am trying to present publicly (?)
where am i shy?
posture of position or gesture
the moment you stand in front of the audience you stop being authentic.
when we listen to something very carefully and allow ourselves to be moved [...]
(235)[...notes/notes Personen.txt]%45.2[...]their definiteness. giving yourself up to somebody who seems more defined and more purposive.
cooperation in islam is not a personal experience, it is something that is encoded in very strict ritual. it is not an act of choice. cooperation is not a duty but a desire.
my talk is a fancy and careful way of responding to the voices of other. the ones that are sounding in my ear. (inslam, shakespear, math, that girl in enghelab square, etc.). i am not good at immediate reaction, so i respond with a delay and a lot of playfulness and black holes that come in to be of the part of this, by this relationship to the Other, that is manifesting itself through the language of the Other (islam)
In my performative practice, I seek a way to approach thinking about things that arrests my curiosity. It is a form of commitment to what comes forward and calls for thinking, an attention before what I do not know. My Talks are fancy and careful responding to that otherness, to the voice or face that speaks to you from somewhere that you cannot yet locate. This call could be from a sadistic super-ego inside or Shakespeare or kleinen Maulwurf, der wissen wollte, wer ihm auf den Kopf gemacht hat.
i am not just interested in my own foundational metaphors.
is there an amateurishness at the intersection of art and philosophy that i am drawing?
what is amateur?
the fact that i am giving talks is very much related to the social culture around me, in Germany the culture has a taste to listen and there is an interest for speech. now i get it like in the case of warhol he is rethinking his surrounding culture which is dominated at that time by pop, media and celebrity. i am rethinking the academia and philosophy that is in relationship with the arts, my issues and interests are different than warhol for that matter. i am enthusiastic and extremely interested in the material that i am working with, and at the same time overthrown by it and i believe in it, in the same way that maybe warhol believed in pop culture and business.
the nightmare after performance
the notion of skill in art, performance, life, work
trauma, in the experience of the trauma, the source mixes, and articulate in metaphors and hubric signifiers.
relationship between older works and performances, the issue of skill and technology.
it took 60 years after the developments in tempering metal, for barnors to learn new nigf techniques. this is common in the history of technology, that a tool appears before people know how to use it. do we know how we can use computers? when we master a technique, its uses are not immediatly clear.
getting interested in the wrong answer in the four answer question.
no skill develops without a good dose of curiosity. which enables us to think about what might be, rather than what is.
There is a h[...]
(236)[...notes/notes Personen.txt]%45.5[...] or face that speaks to you from somewhere that you cannot yet locate. This call could be from a sadistic super-ego inside or Shakespeare or kleinen Maulwurf, der wissen wollte, wer ihm auf den Kopf gemacht hat.
i am not just interested in my own foundational metaphors.
is there an amateurishness at the intersection of art and philosophy that i am drawing?
what is amateur?
the fact that i am giving talks is very much related to the social culture around me, in Germany the culture has a taste to listen and there is an interest for speech. now i get it like in the case of warhol he is rethinking his surrounding culture which is dominated at that time by pop, media and celebrity. i am rethinking the academia and philosophy that is in relationship with the arts, my issues and interests are different than warhol for that matter. i am enthusiastic and extremely interested in the material that i am working with, and at the same time overthrown by it and i believe in it, in the same way that maybe warhol believed in pop culture and business.
the nightmare after performance
the notion of skill in art, performance, life, work
trauma, in the experience of the trauma, the source mixes, and articulate in metaphors and hubric signifiers.
relationship between older works and performances, the issue of skill and technology.
it took 60 years after the developments in tempering metal, for barnors to learn new nigf techniques. this is common in the history of technology, that a tool appears before people know how to use it. do we know how we can use computers? when we master a technique, its uses are not immediatly clear.
getting interested in the wrong answer in the four answer question.
no skill develops without a good dose of curiosity. which enables us to think about what might be, rather than what is.
There is a half-remembered discussion of Sigmund Freud I read once in a book and which I have been paraphrasing regularly ever since. It said that for Freud dreams were a way of thinking by doing. You run, you cry, you kiss, you love, you cheat, you argue, you fall, you kill, you eat, you sing, you get lost, you travel back in time, you become somebody else – but you do it all in your head. You do it in your head and so it is thinking, just not a thinking we recognize as thinking. When I am dreaming I am composing thoughts in the way an artist composes a painting or a witch a potion – an assemblage made of bodies and places and actions. An embodied thinking, that is no less eloquent or extraordinary or transformative for being so.
...................................
...One can chat and gossip but it is forbidden to preach, lecture or instruct.”
Claudio Magris’ Micronismi
...................................
(butler)
the structure of address itself
although I did not know in [...]
(237)[...notes/notes Personen.txt]%45.5[...]istorical sites must be ‘read,’ i.e. located in a context of verbal recognition and placement, before they assume real presence.
...................................
(notes - december 15, 2011)
•Robots making Robots
•what a robot wants (and how it wants it)
•cataloging computer generated stones smoke
•digital to digital convertor
•physical interaction (between a user and a media object, pressing a button, choosing a link, moving the body) versus psychological interaction (the psychological processes of filling-in, hypothesis forming, recall and identification, which are required for us to comprehend any text or image at all)
•Mechanical Monsters
•blown away roof
•Technology: the new nature
•-error and - horror(-terror)
•edge of the earth
•gold and dream, gold price and power law
•the story of the viewer
•fact and perspective (elucidation)
◦love at first sight (digital)
•continual production of the new is what allows things to stay the same, (logic of the same)
•noise story
•the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium (McLuhan)
•The mediation of religion through buildings
•start with metaphor and end with algebra
•a “model” is a system of objects (any kind of objects) that make all of the sentences in a theory true , where a “theory” is a list of sentences in a language.
•metaphors somehow mobilize the difference between the two domains
•arena of alienation
•Cut the Noise
•mirrors with (/without) memories
•substitutability
•optical appearances (mind ~ eye)
•Dioptrics (science of refraction), catoptrics (reflection),
•that could not be spoken of or represented, because it was empty of discourse and thus of meaning.
•innocence of the eye
•Poor Unfortunate Souls
•being useful, like a prison guard
•autopoetic (complex self-referential systems)
•to take up the motives from the external world
•will-less perception, “the pure eye of genius”
•bringing from the artificial world to the art world
•object oriented programming / subject oriented
•Observer, system and environment
•a system (designed) with a purpose of itself
•magnifying or light-collecting optical device
•social selfish
•un-computational
•gray area
•self-identity is bad visual system
•Vision requires instruments of vision; an optics is a politics of positioning. Instruments of vision mediate standpoints;
•Identity, including self-identity, does not produce science; critical positioning does, that is, objectivity
•docile body
•technological visioning (vector of secret texts, books within books, ancient curses, digital dreams, and medieval cyber-art)
•empty space left by t[...]
(239)[...notes/notes Personen.txt]%45.7[...] notion of mirror stage and what does it mean for us and for the companien species that are entangled. what threads of meaning are taken apart by pulling on the thread of self reflection and self vision, what will gets account as nature for whom and when. the animal that is in charge of her own image is the representation of the universala man.
Appearance of eukaryotic cells around 2 billion years ago is probably the most significant event in the history of life on earth. It gave the creatures with DNA two important things: a nucleus that contained all the genetic materials and an interface to communicate with the world outside of the cell--a complex membrane--to talk with the materials alien to itself. Interface is a critical point of intersection between different life worlds, fields, or levels of organization. They are the areas in which social friction can be experienced and where diffusion of new technology is leading to structural discontinuities (which can be either positive or negative), the interface is where they will occur. The argent issue of interfaces in social interaction and flow between human animal, nonhumans, and computers is today becoming a zone of transition of ephemeral technologies, physical contact, socio-political boundaries, and metaphor-representation.
Since antiquity, representation has been the foundational concept of aesthetics and semiotics. In the modern era, it has also become a crucial concept in political theory. In a discussion of law and ethnography, Clifford Geertz calls into question the Western distinction between matters of fact and matters of value. “Facts and law we have perhaps everywhere; their polarization we perhaps have not.” Geertz's hermeneutic approach leads him to focus on the relation between the grounding of norms and the representation of fact. Therefore, he concludes, representation is a distinctive manner of imagining the real, and is a fundamental phenomenon upon which all culture rests.
The performance-talk is divided into three tangled narratives, one the social mode of traveling that includes the child--the opposite of the lonely masculine traveler--based on the real experience and a personal story in a trip to Amazon in Colombia with Karin Demuth and her three years old boy--Hanno--, second a multi-headed reading of technologies of interfacing within computer culture and the worlds of other species, the meaning of inter-facing with the other, and third a visual representation of the highly technical images recorded by Kinect infrared 3D-scanner/motion-detector. The result of the visualization is a heavily glitchy image, which aims in the performance to link the spatial practice to the perceived and the representational spaces to the lived. Affirming the “unnaturalness” of the image makes it a transposition of universal means of communication--the language--that would like to provide a direct, unmediated, and accurate representation of the jungle.
[...]
(241)[...otes on kinect performance.txt]%46[...] />
•Gould --> concept of punctuated equilibrium
•Serres --> ontology of the social as parasitism
•Hayles --> translation of epigenesis and technogenesis
•
{phenomenon of serial endosymbiosis theory <-- social theorists deploy this in the search for accounts of how change and creativity originate}--> (bio-econornic context) *symbiosis* has long been recognised as a theory which demonstrates the co-constitution of the social and the biological
=/= Darwinian story of: small variations, random mutation, long time scales, natural selection, fitness and incremental development:
•complexity derived by brute mechanical climbing from the base already built by the efforts of earlier climbing
•unit of change: the gene, or individual organism, the zoocentric, ‘big like us’ epistemic culture of both science and social science (=/= weird worldings of protists, archea, eukaryotes [Wertheim])
bacteriology ==> new organisms were often stemmed from profound and prolonged symbiotic relationships that have proven difficult to analyse =/= discrete
•traits are inherited outside of sexual dissemination (digestion, infection, donation, other complex forms of partnerning) --> consortia: amorphous symbiotic complexes (metabolic energetic networks) =/= organism: anatomically bounded objects (systems of information and exchange)
}==Margulis==> focus on how perceptual, political, social and scientific conditions precede objects: *objects = boundary-work*
--> differential speeds of change (sudden and unlikely mixes + slow and causal)
--> deconstruction of individuality
(co-constitutive bio-econornic-political-social context:)
**ideological contest between individualism and collectivism in political economy <==> intellectual development of symbiosis theory**
•socialist and anarchist concept of mutuellisme in the mid 1800
•Hobbesian-Malthusian-Darwinian bio-economic concept of struggle for existence in zero-sum games of all-against-all
•Kropotkin's symbiosis as evidence for the benefit of global cooperation towards the common good, the division of labour, protection of elements and interdependent organisation
•evolutionary theory used to champion individualism and the social policies of laissez faire
Campbell --> what Harman misses is the elementary starting point for sociologies of science: *that social science translates science* just as science translates “reality”
serial endosymbiosis theory ==>
1. no theory of social change is going to be value-free (endosymbiosis is a process that is always already highly charged with rich metaphor, entailing a ‘host’ that is in an ‘exchange,’ ‘relation’ or ‘merger’ with a ‘guest’ --> a form of ‘living together’ that becomes ‘close’ over time)
2. extraordinary range and nature of these relations can act as strategies for other worldings (o[...]
(242)[...otes on kinect performance.txt]%46.5[...]ow perceptual, political, social and scientific conditions precede objects: *objects = boundary-work*
--> differential speeds of change (sudden and unlikely mixes + slow and causal)
--> deconstruction of individuality
(co-constitutive bio-econornic-political-social context:)
**ideological contest between individualism and collectivism in political economy <==> intellectual development of symbiosis theory**
•socialist and anarchist concept of mutuellisme in the mid 1800
•Hobbesian-Malthusian-Darwinian bio-economic concept of struggle for existence in zero-sum games of all-against-all
•Kropotkin's symbiosis as evidence for the benefit of global cooperation towards the common good, the division of labour, protection of elements and interdependent organisation
•evolutionary theory used to champion individualism and the social policies of laissez faire
Campbell --> what Harman misses is the elementary starting point for sociologies of science: *that social science translates science* just as science translates “reality”
serial endosymbiosis theory ==>
1. no theory of social change is going to be value-free (endosymbiosis is a process that is always already highly charged with rich metaphor, entailing a ‘host’ that is in an ‘exchange,’ ‘relation’ or ‘merger’ with a ‘guest’ --> a form of ‘living together’ that becomes ‘close’ over time)
2. extraordinary range and nature of these relations can act as strategies for other worldings (other ways of being with each other) --> important normative function [at the cataclysmic endings =/= catastrophic ending]
3. a way to think about temporalities (when a bacterium nestled into a simple cell, creating an intimacy that has lasted four billion years)
4. a template for unlikely intimacies
Harman's philosophical monologue on social theoretical practice (which might yet be remedied by actual dialogue with social theorists) ==> performative fallacy (<-- common in artist writing)
@apass****
(Campbell asking) why has object-oriented ontology become such a popular force in other disciplines?
<== complex interplay between sociological + logical factors
+ rise of *para-academia*
@artist (in proliferation of artist writing)
****speculation = the alibi for a doctrine that wishes to spare itself the trouble of justification****
--> we need closer attention to rationality as the basis of judgement when we talk about speculation
--> we need to be more informed by (sciences) when we stretch relations to our rational outposts, without ignoring their appeals
...................................
posthumanism --> any discursive or bodily configuration that displaces the human, humanism, humanities --> (21st century) technology is the center of critical thought about culture and about nature
[...]
(243)[...otes on kinect performance.txt]%46.5[...]light descriptions of the human
•the ethical and radical realisation that the human only comes into existence by the work of (organic + technological) nonhuman others
cyborg --> associated with liberatory modes of identity
**technology deconstructs everyday human experience of agency, free will, choice, self** @apass
21st century --> technology is the center of critical thought about culture and nature (--> that is why it became organically part of my ajayeb research)--> *to think about technology in a manner which reflects its ubiquity, its deeper symbolic and aesthetic dimensions, the way in which it can radically chnage humanness and human-centered approaches
(humanistic epistemology ==>) mode of the human:
1. information processor
2. cognitive subject
3. cultural subject
posthuman mode:
1. to widen the temporal range of research (deep future, deep past)
2. take the form of an ethical inquiry (where the human is no longer the center of the world)
3. to think about the ontology of technology
4. the relationship of the human and the nonhuman (sustainability)
20th century --> gene
21st century --> posthuman (postgenetic metaphors)
robotic revolution + biotechnology revolution > agricultural revolution + industrial revolution + information revolution
(consumer research started to develop an outlook that) things are just as complex and social as people
•brand: entities that talk to and interact with other brands, entities that form relationships with humans
(lives that seem to exist in on the edges of simple humanist life:)
•*massive* life of market
•*excessive* life of the brnad image
•*virtual* life of Facebook
•
consumer research focuses on the ontological and epistemological givens of only the consumer<br />
(Turkle theorizing) how consumers change through their relationship with the nonhuman
•children view certain objects in the world around them as having degrees of aliveness
•children who have grown up with computers do not experience a dichotomy between biological and computatinoal processes
•playing with a toy like transformers, the toy shifs from being machines to being robots to being animals --learning--> fluid boundaries between mechanism and flesh
•(the ontological stickiness of the) [*]computer: a mind that is not yet a mind, inanimate yet interactive, it does not think yet neither is it external to thought
(Menser + Aronowitz) television: a complex object constituted by and related to many fields (solid-state physics, politics, etc.)
Latour...
}--> (such way of theorizing ==> precondition of) an era where radically mew technologies produce entities as indefinable complex global (as the Human Genome proj[...]
(244)[...otes on kinect performance.txt]%46.7[...]logical givens of only the consumer
(Turkle theorizing) how consumers change through their relationship with the nonhuman
•children view certain objects in the world around them as having degrees of aliveness
•children who have grown up with computers do not experience a dichotomy between biological and computatinoal processes
•playing with a toy like transformers, the toy shifs from being machines to being robots to being animals --learning--> fluid boundaries between mechanism and flesh
•(the ontological stickiness of the) [*]computer: a mind that is not yet a mind, inanimate yet interactive, it does not think yet neither is it external to thought
(Menser + Aronowitz) television: a complex object constituted by and related to many fields (solid-state physics, politics, etc.)
Latour...
}--> (such way of theorizing ==> precondition of) an era where radically mew technologies produce entities as indefinable complex global (as the Human Genome project) biofuel supply-chains or climate change models [--> also cryptocurrencies, blockchain]
}--Campbell--> consumer researchers are creating new concepts and figurations in order to expand the borders of waht constitutes life [for example “living-product” metaphor]
(the problem of the) [ontological division of] consumer =/= world of objects ==> (ideological move -->) privileges human : it is understood by the human, because the human (the only source of analytical attention) is the only thing doing the consuming, having the experience, making the meaning
figuration: new ways of taking account of the world =/= anthropomorphism
--Haraway--> practices that create *knots* of material-semiotic actors {<-- art does that? art's sometimes unreal figurations =/= **interpretative consumer research makes the most realistic figurations of this century**}@Chloe2
the metaphors of our time:
•becoming (=/= being) <-- a shift towards a *process metaphysics*
•
(Parsons + Maclaren)
items of disposal (do not fail to exists, but rather they) are *moved along* to other spaces or politics and become other things
•becoming a precious antique
•becoming a water blockage
•becoming a source of marine death
•becoming a materially precious thing (in another part of the world)
•
--> **how things actually move, how they transition between many states**
--> *object = data about the object =/= tangible thing* <-- (transition) from thinking of object as the primary reality --to--> perceicing the object as data in computatinoal environments
==?==> (change of the nature of object ==>) radical shift in theorizing consumer behavior
posthumanism
•a key term in contemporary western postindustrial era
•a term htat has been used ti describe a highly technologize[...]
(245)[...otes on kinect performance.txt]%46.8[...] neither is it external to thought
(Menser + Aronowitz) television: a complex object constituted by and related to many fields (solid-state physics, politics, etc.)
Latour...
}--> (such way of theorizing ==> precondition of) an era where radically mew technologies produce entities as indefinable complex global (as the Human Genome project) biofuel supply-chains or climate change models [--> also cryptocurrencies, blockchain]
}--Campbell--> consumer researchers are creating new concepts and figurations in order to expand the borders of waht constitutes life [for example “living-product” metaphor]
(the problem of the) [ontological division of] consumer =/= world of objects ==> (ideological move -->) privileges human : it is understood by the human, because the human (the only source of analytical attention) is the only thing doing the consuming, having the experience, making the meaning
figuration: new ways of taking account of the world =/= anthropomorphism
--Haraway--> practices that create *knots* of material-semiotic actors {<-- art does that? art's sometimes unreal figurations =/= **interpretative consumer research makes the most realistic figurations of this century**}@Chloe2
the metaphors of our time:
•becoming (=/= being) <-- a shift towards a *process metaphysics*
•
(Parsons + Maclaren)
items of disposal (do not fail to exists, but rather they) are *moved along* to other spaces or politics and become other things
•becoming a precious antique
•becoming a water blockage
•becoming a source of marine death
•becoming a materially precious thing (in another part of the world)
•
--> **how things actually move, how they transition between many states**
--> *object = data about the object =/= tangible thing* <-- (transition) from thinking of object as the primary reality --to--> perceicing the object as data in computatinoal environments
==?==> (change of the nature of object ==>) radical shift in theorizing consumer behavior
posthumanism
•a key term in contemporary western postindustrial era
•a term htat has been used ti describe a highly technologized future existence
--variationally--> other stories (fables) about technology exists =/=
1. the claim of (often monolithic) novelty of the historical moment in the west
2. that technology is a sterile instrument
3. that technology aids the human in his ascent to ever greater degrees of humanity
(greek tradition -->) *to think deeply about technology, we have to think about its ontology*
•techno-sociology --> Latour
•ecological feminism --> Haraway
•post-Marxism --> Tiziana Terranova
•
•philosophy of tech --> Heidegger: the most dangerous thing we can do is to think of technolog[...]
(246)[...otes on kinect performance.txt]%46.8[...]* (in visual presentation of the world) --> the intention and purpose of the gaze became medicalized and technologized [---> go to cartography]
•
}--> (from technoscience to feminism) theorists have noticed a *splicing* of direct and tactile human perception of reality with another reality, one that is mediated and technical ==produce==> a new reality that negotiates the individual's knowledge of the universe in diverse and complex ways (<-- not catastrophic =/= Hörl)
(time of) intellectual and artist upheaval ==> new and surprising modes of imagining the human
1950s concept of cybernetics constituted a fundamental change in thinking about control, communication, information, life itself (+ new language of feedback, autopoiesis, cellular automata, neural net)
1990s
computers + information --> cybernetic theory: (stressed that) information patterns are more important in understanding organisms than materiality
*cybernetic view of the world --> information coded in pattern & randomness =/= material absence & presence*
•(both) human and technological = informational entities
•human = cyborg: (human conceived as) cybernetic organism
[?how] discourses (narratives + metaphors + symbols) of science and technology --Campbell--> use in advertisement to create meaning
**technological imagination --seize--> social imagination**
always reinforcing the *awesome power of technology to capture reality* (objectively + without any agenda)
•movie Fantastic Voyage 1966 <--Dijck-- fascination with envisioning the body from a different perspective
•status of foetus (float in black and white) <--Haraway-- meanings whose legitimacy comes from technological systems of perception
•[computer-generated images =/=?] camera-generated images <--Cartwright-- (paradox of) camera's role in capturing the real + camera's capacity to evoke emotion and present a sense of the unattainable ~= (to appear to be at once) both *magical* & *truthful* ==introduce==> new subjectivities into marketplace
mediation of visual phenomena through the eye of technology ~=> new sets of truths (about the body, environment, etc.) --often--> a **disembodied technological gaze looks at the body**
advertisement becomes more highly finished, excessively produced, artificialized --> a technological gaze is found in the discourse of advertising --> scientized & technologized images celebrate a particular view of ***life as information***
...................................
nature = figures + stories + images (~= topos, commonplace)
paying attention to nature like a child <-- Haraway
[*]trope: a verse interpolated into a liturgical text عبادات to embellish or amplify its meaning
language --> material-semiotic flesh
liturgical possibilit[...]
(248)[...otes on kinect performance.txt]%47.1[...]support for the deepening of capitalism in the belief that this will hasten its self-destructive tendencies and ultimately eventuate its collapse.)
Selfie
seems to me the perfect example for this submission of the unconscious to the globalized machine
latest theoretical buzzwords
control over the interpretation of the world
circulation of the global image machine
tree-made paper
who are (not) allowed (not) to have a body?
all forms of knowledge claims,
acting on the ideological doctrines of disembodied scientific (cinematic) objectivity
all seem just effects of delayed render algorithms in the play of signifiers in a virtual force field
space of simulations
not giving up to the paranoid science fiction
getting to know the world effectively by practising the sciences
tools of semiology
rhetorical nature of truth
not Romantic nor modernist objects:
1. infective vectors (microbes)
2. elementary particles (quarks)
3. biomolecular codes (genes)
view of the relationship of body and language (the problem of metaphor)
those of us who would still like to talk about reality
imagery of moves in the fully textualized and coded world
high tech (military) field
recognizing our own ‘semiotic technologies’ for making meanings,
life is semiotic as well as technology
(commitment?) to faithful accounts of a ‘real’ world
Haraway writes: All components of the desire are paradoxical and dangerous, and their combination is both contradictory and necessary.
We need the power of modern critical theories of how meanings and bodies get made, not in order to deny meaning and bodies, but in order to live in meanings and bodies that have a chance for a future. (reductionism?)
insist on the embodied nature of all vision, and so reclaim the sensory system that has been used to signify a leap out of the marked body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere. (how the exhibition can make visible my positing in the work? ground me in an embodied vision? my situation. to situate me. not necessarily organic embodiment? what have i need to learn in my bodies?)
perverse capacity of the eye
culture disembodies. (nature embodies?)
to distance the knowing subject from everybody and everything
visualizing technologies are without (apparent) limit?
linked to:
-artificial graphic manipulation systems
-computer aided scanners
-colour enhancement techniques
mapping is at stake. what kind of mapping the Kinect image provides? that is opposite to the zeiss lens?
how to go there with the technology[...]
(249)[...notes/notes.txt]%47.4[...]e of all vision, and so reclaim the sensory system that has been used to signify a leap out of the marked body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere. (how the exhibition can make visible my positing in the work? ground me in an embodied vision? my situation. to situate me. not necessarily organic embodiment? what have i need to learn in my bodies?)
perverse capacity of the eye
culture disembodies. (nature embodies?)
to distance the knowing subject from everybody and everything
visualizing technologies are without (apparent) limit?
linked to:
-artificial graphic manipulation systems
-computer aided scanners
-colour enhancement techniques
mapping is at stake. what kind of mapping the Kinect image provides? that is opposite to the zeiss lens?
how to go there with the technology and not fuck the world? carefully not give birth to mythical ideological seeing or promising transcendence
Kinect's generative, but not devouring vision
the perversion of the zeiss lens is in that it tries to let the viewer ‘experience’ the moment of discovery in immediate vision of the ‘object’
the exhibition is about a writing of the body that metaphorically emphasizes vision
= and commit to deconstruction and passionate construction.
= and passionate detachment, which is dependent on the impossibility of innocent ‘identity’ politics and epistemologies as strategies for seeing from (any) standpoints, in order to see well. (refer to lecture-performance Standing on the Shoulders of Giants - Sina Seifee 2015, on a critical epistemology of seeing-from-far)
= whom to see with?
Haraway: only partial perspective promises objective vision. This is an objective vision that initiates, rather than closes off, the problem of responsibility for the generativity of all visual practices.
The ‘eyes’ made available in modern technological sciences shatter any idea of passive vision? these prosthetic devices show us that all eyes, including our own organic ones, are active perceptual systems, building in translations and specific ways of seeing, that is, ways of life.
partial way of organizing worlds
is unlocatable irresponsible?
is my visual exhibition a knowledge claim?
To see from below (or the perspective of the mathematics, Kinect, hacker?) is neither easily learned nor unproblematic
ways of being nowhere while claiming to see comprehensively (i did not claim any of these - i didn't try even. i was there traveling with relation to my co-travelers and a technology relation) my issue with the images is their generality and perhaps that is their unlocatablilty. but to situate my knowledge and myself i am not solely depending on the image rhetoric. i was committed to mobile positioning, and that is critical.[...]
(250)[...notes/notes.txt]%47.4[...]artial way of organizing worlds
is unlocatable irresponsible?
is my visual exhibition a knowledge claim?
To see from below (or the perspective of the mathematics, Kinect, hacker?) is neither easily learned nor unproblematic
ways of being nowhere while claiming to see comprehensively (i did not claim any of these - i didn't try even. i was there traveling with relation to my co-travelers and a technology relation) my issue with the images is their generality and perhaps that is their unlocatablilty. but to situate my knowledge and myself i am not solely depending on the image rhetoric. i was committed to mobile positioning, and that is critical.
mediate vision
knowledge potent for constructing worlds
trying to be less organized by axes of domination
Science has been utopian and visionary from the start? that is one reason ‘we’ need it.
my eye were crafted by the blood of mosquitoes...
translations and exchanges, material and semiotic
what has the property of systematicity in my Amazon?
orientations and responsibility in material semiotic fields of meaning.
is Here, Kinect's vision not immediately a very powerful metaphor or technology (for political epistemological clarification)?
The visual metaphor invites us to investigate the varied apparatuses of visual production, including the prosthetic technologies interfaced with our biological eyes and brains.
should i have an argue for (politics and) epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating?
view from a structuring and structured body
we love stuttering, and the partly understood
Translation is always interpretative, critical, and partial
Amazon (location) resists (the politics of) closure
logic of culture (nature made flexible)
science coded body
black coded body
colonised coded body
coded as self sufficient (when?)
the project and me are not boundary object (i am not tarzan)
suppress the lost text of aristotle on the rhetoric of humor
how can something work and not work?!
mathematical competition
what is the other story (of forest, journey, etc.) that i want urgently tell?
or the rhythm of what story i want to change?
...................................
In 1905 the French neurologists G. Deny and P. Camus recounted the case of Madame I who had lost body awareness. She described her “general insensibility” as follows: “I'm no longer aware of myself as I used to be. I can no longer feel my arms, my legs, my head, and my hair. I have to touch myself constantly in order to [...]
(251)[...notes/notes.txt]%47.5[...]
(anthropocene) change in the conditions of visuality
transformation of the world into images
phenomenological + epistemological consequences
images participate now in the forming of worlds, they have also become forms of thought
the optical mind
the radical change in the conditions of visuality has brought about a new subject position or point of view, announce by the trajectories of:
1. antihumanism (between impressionism and cubism)
2. posthumanism (between cubism and experimental film)
3. non-grounded form of vision (from experimental film to digital media)
this regime of visuality implies: automatization, tautological vision, and signs leading to other signs
resulted to => the proliferation of images also implying the cancellation of vision
“vision cancelled”
linearity of the Renaissance perspective plan created the illusion of a view to the outside world, analogous to a window.
cubism: showing a perpetual present in a parallel temporality.
perspectival multiplicity became embedded in the picture plane.
invented a discontinuous space, making identity and difference relative (questioning the classical metaphysics), by subverting the relations between subject and object.
does my Kinect pictural model employs the architectural space? is camera architectural?
in experimental film, duration became a key component of aesthetic experience, analogous to human consciousness, a prosthetic vision
identity and difference, rejection of a priori space
how to release the subject from human coordinates? what are references to human coordinates? screen's rectangular frame?
the machine (optical perception) delivers a posthuman, prosthetic enhancement of vision, which announces, first the incipient (initial) normalization of perception as augmented reality and data visualization
displacement of the subjective center of operations
epitomize
subvert
fragmentation brought by mechanization, has an alienating character
its impossibility to give back an image or serve a reflective mirror
it is indifferent to “me”
the exhaustive visualization and documentation of wildlife is effectively concealing its ongoing extinction (one of the reasons i am not using the zeiss-lens-camera recordings)
(for Susan Sontag) taking photographs [...] is a way of certifying experience, also a way of refusing it - by limiting experience to a search for the photographic, by converting experience to a souvenir. [...] the very activity of taking pictures [...] assuages (erleichtern) general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated (worsened) by travel.
cognitive activity
giving form to exp[...]
(253)[...notes/notes.txt]%48[...]anet/plant
=> intimacy with the organic/inorganic/technological processes that constitute the planet
(my work is to create or find out) poetics and the methodologies that register the bite and indexes its significance
(+ bite of the critter on my skins)
(Chakrabarty in The climate of history:) “man's environment did change but changed so slowly as to make the history of man's relation to his environment almost timeless and thus not a subject of historiography at all”
the collapse of this age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history
plant writing
formulate transitional categories that would be responsive to differentiated modes of activity attuned to the difficulties of depicting natural phenomena that are continuously in flux.
reader of the meteorological registers
envision the temporal flux
the shifting edges (of the Kinect building generics)
(Kinect image) as architectural form composed of different (transitional) materially instantiated temporalities
transposition of qualities
within grammatical and figurative textures (of poetic)
between the material and the metaphorical
modes of materiality
...................................
(W.A.G.E. working artists and greater economy)
for artists who don't have secondary jobs, their mobility--despite being underwritten in many cases by class privilege--is forced. they are wired-up, networked carriers of social and cultural capital set in perpetual motion, transforming cities in their passage through them on the art circuit--sophisticated nomadic clans who travel to survive.
...................................
nature of things (2013, Sina + Elisa)
places marked with zones of limited habitation--you can't live there, you are a visitor
a place that is both wasteland and wilderness at the same time
wasteland tourism (museum in chernobyl)
1. the christian tradition: it was our obligation to use up the earth before the apocalypse
2. the romantic view: we humans are the servants of the land, we are its eyes, we are its expression
we are becoming visitors of waste wilderness, most natural and unnatural land simultaneously
...................................
the moment the world enters my body it has already been transformed
for Elisa and me Bochum's forest was a location, with its decay, it's subtropical humidity and toxins, and because of the way it is trapped between the natural and the man-made.
“we are forever collecting ourselves” (Baudrillard)
we have always encountered the world via technology
(now internet)
...................................
(Zoe[...]
(254)[...notes/notes.txt]%48.2[...]new brand of scientific objectivity that emerged in the 19th century => restrain themselves from imposing their hopes, expectations, generalization, aesthetics, even ordinary language on the image of nature. (the image of nature has never been objective)
the present usage of objectivity can be applied to everything from empirical reliability to procedural correctness to emotional detachment
each component of objectivity opposes a distinct form of subjectivity; each is defined by censuring some (by no means all) aspects of the personal.
personal idiosyncrasies
this ideal of objectivity attempts to eliminate the mediating presence of the observer
the phenomena never sleep and neither should the observer
heroic self-discipline
profoundly moralized vision
and like almost all forms of moral virtuosity it preaches asceticism
human worker whose attention wandered, whose pace slackened, whose hand trembled
the self-recording instrument promised to replace the weary artist
machines offered freedom from will
being true to nature:
-in its method (mechanical)
-in its moral (restrained)
-in its metaphysics (individualised)
early alternative approaches to creating picture that were true to nature, but not objective in the mechanical sense
atlases habituate the eye, they are perforce visual
(contrast to the scientific visual forms of photography where one is on the right place at the right time with the right equipment) the Kinect's total randomness
one problem of atlases is that they have to decide what nature is
they all have to solve the problem of choice: which objects should be presented and from which viewpoint (Kinect choosing mechanism and arbitrariness?) (can we not choose what nature is when we are at it? and when we are at nature?)
rejection of aesthetics (but what seduction exactly betrays? or what does it make accurate?)
average (is truth to nature?)
asceticism of noninterventionist objectivity
“straight photography” is above all a signature of a particular scene, a specific and localized representation only awkwardly adaptable to a mosaic composition from different individuals (Zeiss-lens-camera images)
how scientists deployed mechanical means to police the artist
(for Martin Kusch - objectivity and historiography) truth-to-nature had its rationale in enlightenment sensationalist psychology, with its conception of the self as fragmented, passive, and excessively receptive.
--> to be true to nature was actively to select and interpret sensations and in that way bring them under epistemic control.
--> representation in nanofacture, i[...]
(255)[...notes/notes.txt]%48.6[...]kwardly adaptable to a mosaic composition from different individuals (Zeiss-lens-camera images)
how scientists deployed mechanical means to police the artist
(for Martin Kusch - objectivity and historiography) truth-to-nature had its rationale in enlightenment sensationalist psychology, with its conception of the self as fragmented, passive, and excessively receptive.
--> to be true to nature was actively to select and interpret sensations and in that way bring them under epistemic control.
--> representation in nanofacture, image is used to actually engineer the whole thing. making and seeing coincide.
eliminating judgment
the device would remove the process of abstraction from the artist's pen
what characterized the creation of late 19th century pictorial objectivity was self-surveillance
(note of Geppetto, Younus, Pinocchio)
personal equation: a systematic error correction
to produce reliable images
While in the early nineteenth century, the burden of representation was supposed to lie in the picture itself, now it fell to the audience. The psychology of pattern recognition in the audience had replaced the metaphysical claims of the author. Mistrusting themselves, they assuaged their fear of subjectivity by transferring the necessity of judgment to the audience.
(Grashey's) police metaphor was entirely appropriate. Not only was the history of late-nineteenth-century photography thoroughly bound up with the history of crime control, the x-ray photography itself was increasingly finding its way into court.
scientific evidence
legal evidence
at issue was, once again, the shifting border between judgment and mechanization, between the possibility (or necessity) of human intervention and the routinized, automatic functioning of the technology.
medico-legal concept of evidence
the image of the x-ray appeared (in court at least) to preempt and displace all other forms of knowledge.
(Allan Poe:) “if we examine a work of ordinary art, by means of a powerful microscope, all traces of resemblance to nature will disappear--but the closest scrutiny of the photographic drawing discloses only a more absolute truth, more perfect identity of aspect with the thing represented.”
trompe l'oeil (new note)
in X-ray, the encryption of information takes place in the technology itself
photographs did not carry a transparent meaning
once so policed, and presumably only then, could the photographic process be elevated to a special epistemic status, putting it in a category of its own
in contrast to drawings, photograms were tarnished by the crudeness imposed by the limited palette of the color raster. Given the [...]
(256)[...notes/notes.txt]%48.7[...]mechanical image, the photograph, became the emblem for all aspects of noninterventionist objectivity ... not because the photograph was necessarily truer to nature than hand-made images--but rather because the camera apparently eliminated human agency
(what is the difference between systematic image and mechanical image? same? -glitch..)
(mechanical) images that could be touted as nature's self-portrait
aura of stoic nobility
painstaking, humble, laborious (work)
moral virtuosity never exists without an appreciative audience
by ringing the changes on the resonant cultural themes of self-purification through self-abnegation, scientists persuaded themselves and others of their worthiness to assume priestly functions in an ever more secularized society.
humanity and self-restraint, the one imposed from without and the other from within, thus define the pride-breaking morality of the scientists.
objectivity is a morality of prohibitions rather than exhortations
subspecies of interpretation: projection, anthropomorphism, insertion of hope/fear into images/facts of nature,
varieties of objectivity:
A. mechanical objectivity
B. the metaphysical element that makes objectivity synonymous with truth
C. aperspectival element that identifies objectivity with the escape from and all perspectives
it is tempting to collapse all of objectivity into the view from nowhere. this temptation to simplify by conflation should be resisted, for the highest expressions of objectivity in one mode may seem worthless when judged by the standards of another mode.
(as humans we must deal with our personal, idiosyncratic, perspectival perception)
photo: accurate rendering of sensory appearances
objectivity is a multifarious, mutable thing, capable of new meanings and new symbols: in both a literal and figurative sense, scientists of the late-nineteenth-century created a new image of objectivity
...................................
we must consider the paths people and trees have taken
entangled networks of matter and meaning
“i don't mind being ‘close to nature.’ but i know what they mean when they say that, and it's not what i mean.”
--Linda Noel, Koyungkawi poet and acorn mush maker
oaks were travelers and mixers
...................................
(Tomaz Mastnak)
Botanical decolonization
planting and displanting of humans and plants are elements of the same multispecies colonial endeavor
native plants as a discursive field
complex and unmarked ways that plants have been sorted out as ‘native’ or ‘nonnative’
(as a measure of perfection and ‘civility’) gardening was a[...]
(258)[...notes/notes.txt]%48.9[...]social and political life.
Nazis’ attempted eradication of Impatiens parviflora from their own native forests (Gröning and Wolschke-Bulmahn, 1992)
the idea of “borrowing freely from all the world's styles and floras” erases the violent colonial encounter of displacing by replacing it with the figure of the undocumented immigrant
..charging native plant enthusiasts and invasion biologists and managers with xenophobia...
(Davis et al, 2011 article published in journal Nature, title:) “Don't judge species on their origins”, is a misleading phrase; at issue is judging species not on their origins, but on their emplacement.
(Yanagisako and Delaney, 1995) “people think and act in the intersections of discourses”
but not every domain intersects in every instance, and the character of an ‘intersection’ is historically specific. it is a truism to claim that ‘like humans, plants and animal travel’ (Raffles, 2011, page 12). What Raffles fails to address is crucial: how, exactly, do those plants travel? to treat the ‘remaking’ of surroundings as a neutral, benign category, served from the colonial history of globalization, is problematic at best.
treating plants metaphorically only as immigrants, but never as settlers, paradoxically divides human from nature. it elides the forms of displanting--of botanical colonization--that were part and parcel of the colonial encounter.
Myths of the ‘noble eco-savage’ and the ‘ecological Indian’ have been shown to be inaccurate (Krech, 1999; Whelan, 1999)
(the notion of the Anthropocene implies) an ecology in which humans are immanent to the natural world
...................................
(eyes are) visual possibilities
“eyes” (are always) made available [...] with a wonderfully detailed, active, partial way of organizing worlds... [Haraway, SK]
...................................
lecture khm Luis
trans or cross ecological movement, from amazon to shahname, because i like it and i care for thoses ecologies.
and because we can't keep clean. i love to talk about clean and dirt. maybe some other time. if we can say anything about the world is that it is dirty and excessive and lunetic. literally lunar. the moon. if you think your bio and biology is not scheduled by moon or lunar forces think again.
do i need a bit of ego to sustain this skin-encapsulated organism (pointing to myself. this is another pointi dance)
tech interface amaz div device literature
...................................
[Avital]
in the conflict of rhetorics, the victory never goes to any but the third language. The task of this language is to release the prisoners: to scatter the signifieds, the catechisms
to enter areas of conflict [...] fragile zone where non-kn[...]
(259)[...notes/notes.txt]%49[...]m Heidegger to the Bushies
the readers and nonreader
the scene of the proto-pedagogy (involves only two persons): The master and pupil together produce an allegory of being struck, enlightened
(for Levinas:) expérience =/= épreuve
•experience --> a knowing of which the self is master is always said
•épreuve (text, trial, proof) --> the idea of life and of a critical ‘verification’ which overflows the self of which it is only the ‘scene’ ~~> a test site in which the self is placed at absolute risk, life submitted to incessant probes, find themselves subjected to the rigors of the épreuve
conflict's another logic of rigor in certain types of non-Western practices (such as Zen and yogic teachings)
the pupil is led to an inner experience without interiority, to understanding without cognition, without a history ==> subjectivity
the Zen pupil, often a wanderer, listens differently, stilling herself to consider the sonic eventfulness of growing grass
...understanding no longer crowns the end of a labored process of appropriation =/= Western narratives of testing
going after the grail or attempting to reach a metaphysically-laden Castle
...cannot be properly located or possessed
the inaction hero
(?are we accustomed) to viewing the test as a way of mobilizing courage
The Sphinx marks the porous boundary between Western and Eastern domains of questioning and tells of bodies menaced by pulverization: should the riddle not be solved, either the questioner or the questioned must go. Passing the test is a matter of survival of the species for Oedipus, as it is for the interspecial dominatrix of the riddle: la Sphinx dissolves when the young man offers the correct answer.
=/= koan
...................................
My performance here is maybe a form of prayer or invocation[8] not simply to be read as a mere theoretical and discursive statement, and is intended to be a table of digital curses. To reopen the agency of curse in a cultural style that I have come to encounter, it might produce a different but not necessarily better speculative difficulty in discussing about the virtual. A curse[9] (according to Iranian-Islamic mixture of traditions in the milieus of promising and swearing,) is basically a networking function with both mechanical and interventionist properties that translate desire into performance—an intersubjective textual momentum that run virtually into the real world and it may (or may not) run down its target. Much like rumor, curse is contagious and reproductive but unlike the publicity of rumorous velocities, curse insists on secrecy at the same time harvesting its powers for revealing. The reality of the ‘curse’ is ‘assumed’ mostly and that i[...]
(260)[...notes/notes.txt]%49.1[...]words are spoken at the same time and in the same breath as those of science and of journeys.
Two speakers, united against the phenomenon of interference and confusion. Who's stake is in interrupting communication? The above interlocutors are on the same side, far from the dialogical game.
Demin includes himself in the circuit, blurs the message, renders it unintelligible, and exactly by that assures transmission. Parasite produces by the way of disorder a more complex order.
..penetrative grasp of a text, discovery and recreative apprehension of it life-forms, is impossible to paraphrase or systematize.
..temporal and local settings of one's text. (to master it?)
to read X, is literally, to ‘prepare’ to read X
in certain civilizations there comes epochs in which syntax stiffens...
Changing landscape of fact
unexamined smiles
worn tropes
words, the guardians of meanings, are not immortal.
Metaphysical scandal
note on history: past is a language construct, that the past tense of the verb is the sole guarantor of history.
Dialectics as a method of intellectual chase.
Who first told a joke?
Certain languages are inhospitable to new metaphors.
Language-act
to read: is to restore all that one can of the immediacies of value and intent in which speech actually occurs.
my original repetition
we re-enact in our educated consciousness
in what sense does unperformed music exist?
The same ground, when using the ‘speculative instruments’, the critic, editor, actor, and reader stand on.
When we read or hear any language statement from the past, we translate.
Encode and decode “message”, misleading operative models of translation between different languages and even within a single language.
One treason in translation: words rarely show any outward mark of altered meaning, they body forth their history only in a fully established context.
What material reality has history out of language? --the tasavof verbal linguistic tradition
silence knows no history...?
...to remind you that everything is the condition of madness.
“Tense Past”
..the landscape composed by the past tense, the semantic organization of remembrance... is styled and coded differently by cultures. --miniature illustrating San'an?
The verbal icon made up of all successive translations of Greek literature and philosophy has oriented fundamental movements in Islamic feelings --Farabi, Mirdamad, etc.
My translation of classics is not out of a vital compulsion for immediacy or precise echo. I am not trying to build my own resonant past. Myth of the ‘true past’... different perspectives can co-exist and blur
the metaphysics of [...]
(261)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%49.3[...] actor, and reader stand on.
When we read or hear any language statement from the past, we translate.
Encode and decode “message”, misleading operative models of translation between different languages and even within a single language.
One treason in translation: words rarely show any outward mark of altered meaning, they body forth their history only in a fully established context.
What material reality has history out of language? --the tasavof verbal linguistic tradition
silence knows no history...?
...to remind you that everything is the condition of madness.
“Tense Past”
..the landscape composed by the past tense, the semantic organization of remembrance... is styled and coded differently by cultures. --miniature illustrating San'an?
The verbal icon made up of all successive translations of Greek literature and philosophy has oriented fundamental movements in Islamic feelings --Farabi, Mirdamad, etc.
My translation of classics is not out of a vital compulsion for immediacy or precise echo. I am not trying to build my own resonant past. Myth of the ‘true past’... different perspectives can co-exist and blur
the metaphysics of the insult, in San'an story
i am interested in the conventions in which texts can be read, in which a semantic statement can be carried over into someone's own idiom. I am teaching how to reread texts of Attar and so forth.
We have civilization because (we have learned) ‘to translate out of time’
übertragen,
handing down thought narrative,
something that also depends on transfer of meaning in space.
Languages conceal and internalize more, perhaps, than they convey outwardly.
Speech-act is most expressive of status and power--when a peer is in earshot. (something that i have been trying to undermine in my lectures)
...calculated to guard some coherence of inner life (while wounding outward)
(motions of) menace and non-information (in top down dialogues)
monosyllables of the oppressed and polysemy of the upper class (the capacity of the same word to mean different things, such differences characterises the language of ideology.)
fracture of words and the maltreatment of grammatical norms, by children, they are a exploited and rebellious class, the child seeks to keep the world open to his own, by refusing to accept the rules of grown-up speech.
Lear note: surrounded by incomprehensible or hostile reality, the child breaks off verbal contact. He seems to choose silence to destroy his imagined enemy. Like murderous Cordelia, children know that silence can destroy another human being.
The multitudinous existence of child has left comparatively few archives.
...the uniquely vulnerabl[...]
(262)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%49.4[...]translation, of transfer of significance. No two localities use words and syntax to signify exactly the same things, to send identical signals (of valuation and inference).
[the matrix space tries to create that assurance of identical signals, the electronic, digital space, grid, systematic, node based-- but linguistic storytelling is not]
In performance, corresponding to my level of literacy, and a private thesaurus, part of my subconscious and personal memories, and using the singular and irreducibly specific ensemble of somatic and psychological identity.
Getting out of one's own dictionary of private remembrance, in old age.
A study of translation is a study of language
the ideal of a totally personal voice, of a unique ‘fit’ between an individual's expressive means and his world-image, perused by the poets.
Only when we reflect on it, when we lift the facts from the misleading context of the obvious, that the possible strangeness, the possible ‘unnaturalness’ of the human linguistic order strikes us.
I am interested in this pluralist framework we are living in since the inception of recorded history.
...
It is not a formal hard-edged linguistic relegation, rather a metaphysical speculation
(making a ‘language atlas’?)
constructs of universals / transformational grammars: that have nothing of substance to say about the prodigality of language atlas
my interest in the ajayeb is due to the traces it provides into verbal literacy, a living vulgar language, rather than a dead structure such as mantegh al teir Attar (Mantiq-ut-Tayr).
..vanishing languages and people, their history and morphological structures uncharted, dim into the oblivion, each takes with it a storehouse of consciousness.
An image of man as a language animal of implausible variety and waste.
Cultures (during Attar's?) seem to expend on their vocabulary and syntax acquisitive energies and ostentations entirely lacking in their material lives.
[very interesting point regarding the language of mysticism, Attar and others.]
language riches seem to act as compensatory mechanisms. (having 60 different words in Shahnameh for signifying ‘horse’, doesn't necessitates the material variety of horse in the ancient Iranian culture?)
--starving bands of Amazonian Indians may lavish on their condition more verb tenses than could Plato.
Is my language, or lack of speaking certain languages, a powerful obstacle to the material and social progress of me?
--withering inward by language barriers. Linguistically atomized
interaction of physical and spiritual agencies...
The nominalist mechanism of creation: each time man spoke he re-enacted, he mimed.
(...the early forms and feelings of consciousness in human ancestral pasts)<[...]
(263)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%49.6[...]br />
Only if men could use language without perusing meaning to the forbidden edge of the absolute.
Alpha & Aleph
...is certain to encompass ‘some terrible meaning’ in one of its secret languages
‘a poetic vocabulary of concepts’
‘connections or affinities’
pursuit of an inter-lingua for philosophic discourse
not to contemplate a mechanical transcription of the original
history, the mother of truth.
To define history not as an inquiry into reality, but as it's origin.
Menard, William James
translator's ‘mysterious duty’
if needed, i am anyone
language mysticism studies
...primitive seek expression through ‘imaginative universals’, this rapidly acquired a ‘infinite particularity’
it is only by means of essentially poetic recreation or translation of a given language-world that the new science of myth and history can hope to retrace the growths of consciousness
in apass, inventing a science of myth and history, towards a general theory of significant sign.
Corruption of language and decline of body politics?
Can we correlate the Persian syntax with the metaphysical ambience, internal divisions, and lyric bias of Persian people?
A pivot point must inform and relate
...the shaping agencies of intellect.
Speech is poiesis and human linguistic articulation is centrally creative.
The language-matrix
language, informed by energies proper to itself, more comprehensive and timeless than any who makes use of it...
There is a phenomenon of linguistic Entfremdung inseparable from the creative genius of the word. (Humboldt)
...conjectures with prophetic brilliance
discourse (Rede) would not be muffled by the ground---we walk erect
jede Sprache ist ein Versuch---trial
(Humboldt)
different languages penetrate to different depths
Literaturehaus, hause has always been a metaphor for consciousness
cryptotypr : categories of semantic organization
which translates the underlying metaphysics of a language into its overt or surface grammar.
...understanding of those deep-seated dynamics of meaning, of chosen and significant form, (that make up a culture)
it is exceedingly difficult for an outsider to, operating inevitably within the world-frame of his own tongue, to penetrate to the active symbolic depths of a foreign tongue.
---we reach for the bottom and stir up further darkness.
..a careful philosophically and poetically disciplined observation
beautifully logical (discrimination) about: causation, action, result
dynamic or energetic quality, directness of experience.
(these words for Sh[...]
(264)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%49.7[...]/>
it is only by means of essentially poetic recreation or translation of a given language-world that the new science of myth and history can hope to retrace the growths of consciousness
in apass, inventing a science of myth and history, towards a general theory of significant sign.
Corruption of language and decline of body politics?
Can we correlate the Persian syntax with the metaphysical ambience, internal divisions, and lyric bias of Persian people?
A pivot point must inform and relate
...the shaping agencies of intellect.
Speech is poiesis and human linguistic articulation is centrally creative.
The language-matrix
language, informed by energies proper to itself, more comprehensive and timeless than any who makes use of it...
There is a phenomenon of linguistic Entfremdung inseparable from the creative genius of the word. (Humboldt)
...conjectures with prophetic brilliance
discourse (Rede) would not be muffled by the ground---we walk erect
jede Sprache ist ein Versuch---trial
(Humboldt)
different languages penetrate to different depths
Literaturehaus, hause has always been a metaphor for consciousness
cryptotypr : categories of semantic organization
which translates the underlying metaphysics of a language into its overt or surface grammar.
...understanding of those deep-seated dynamics of meaning, of chosen and significant form, (that make up a culture)
it is exceedingly difficult for an outsider to, operating inevitably within the world-frame of his own tongue, to penetrate to the active symbolic depths of a foreign tongue.
---we reach for the bottom and stir up further darkness.
..a careful philosophically and poetically disciplined observation
beautifully logical (discrimination) about: causation, action, result
dynamic or energetic quality, directness of experience.
(these words for Shabnam?)
...all matters of the function of thinking
(why do i want to bring to her, to Shabnam, the quintessence of the rational?)
‘the inner music of meaning’
the german tenderness
german tender---zart
(in Shabnam's poetry : the clash between ‘mental’ and ‘psychic’ codes of recognition)
the villain is outside the law (of exchange)
...the court of words---in ikhvano safa animals demonstration
...when the market of life has closed down
faith and substitution of meaning
how can i tear you from your vows, and not myself use vows?
The faiths that are sworn (before every exchange or change)
a word for a woman bound by another sacred word --> breaking your oaths---in the age of ... (message to the tribalist, the so[...]
(265)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%49.7[...]cessible
the exact sciences the optimal relationship from subject to object, conceived since the classical ages
A slave who, while sleeping, dreams that he is free
(put to the order of slave, a slave presenting a project to his master)
leipniz and Descartes, posit a maximum and minimum strategy in an ordered space.
The universal quantifactor : constant repetition of all, always, never, absolutely, etc. --> “i shall always follow this path.”
“perfect” signifies “optimal”
quantification of a relationship followed to its limits.
The process quantified, the tactics maximised
(“result:” instead of “-->” (“arrows”) in my writing? )
‘to know nature is a game’
experiment is also a game?
With win or lose possibilities, in which there exists a guaranteed winning strategy.
Game is the model of all exact knowledges.
...................................
The Ur-Supe, the original state of life, the marine mixture, the primal liquid state, prebiotic soup, the physiochemical condition for the origin of living beings
a mother emerges from a mother
the earth is in labor, a labor of metamorphosis, transformation, production, generation
beneath the anecdotes and pathos, the text mobilizes with great precision certain findings of rational mechanics
(ice and fire) is only relatively cold
vocabulary =? Model of precision
centers are breasts
periodic breasts
last science transcends the first
reservoir exists for the circulation
two notions structurally stable in encyclopedia: circulation & reservoir
elements + operation =/= structure
analysing a text in terms of encyclopedia, i need to answer two questions: what is reservoir? What is circulation?
question regarding iranian literature reservoir: what is the reservoir? Where is the reservoir? What are its configurations?
(the last question syntactically proposes also the possibility of reconfiguration)
Is it metaphorical? Is it closed?
What is its plan? How it transports according to this plan? What are the circulating elements? What is stable there? What are the transformations when it transports?
Reservoir is libidinal*
capital, quantity of energy, constancy of force,
what can be applied to the pattern of circulations?
(of vocabulary, value, money, desire, etc.)
what blocks circulation? Who or what governs it?
In answering, you reconstruct (the entire set of what you consider interpretive)
application: strategy of conformity
explication: archaic and vague approximation
it is not necessary to introduce methods to read a text: the meth[...]
(267)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%49.9[...]act knowledges.
...................................
The Ur-Supe, the original state of life, the marine mixture, the primal liquid state, prebiotic soup, the physiochemical condition for the origin of living beings
a mother emerges from a mother
the earth is in labor, a labor of metamorphosis, transformation, production, generation
beneath the anecdotes and pathos, the text mobilizes with great precision certain findings of rational mechanics
(ice and fire) is only relatively cold
vocabulary =? Model of precision
centers are breasts
periodic breasts
last science transcends the first
reservoir exists for the circulation
two notions structurally stable in encyclopedia: circulation & reservoir
elements + operation =/= structure
analysing a text in terms of encyclopedia, i need to answer two questions: what is reservoir? What is circulation?
question regarding iranian literature reservoir: what is the reservoir? Where is the reservoir? What are its configurations?
(the last question syntactically proposes also the possibility of reconfiguration)
Is it metaphorical? Is it closed?
What is its plan? How it transports according to this plan? What are the circulating elements? What is stable there? What are the transformations when it transports?
Reservoir is libidinal*
capital, quantity of energy, constancy of force,
what can be applied to the pattern of circulations?
(of vocabulary, value, money, desire, etc.)
what blocks circulation? Who or what governs it?
In answering, you reconstruct (the entire set of what you consider interpretive)
application: strategy of conformity
explication: archaic and vague approximation
it is not necessary to introduce methods to read a text: the method is in the text. The text is its own criticism, its own explication, its own application.
Texts that operate = texts that are operated on ==> there are just texts
(there is no dichotomy in the operation)
technologies concerning heat, thermodynamics, shocked the traditional world and shaped the one we are now working in.
...theories concerning processes of transformation.
...stages of alchemical initiations, archaic figure of fire,
How to make the history of science as effective as science itself?
...................................
suddenly science falls silent and mythology speaks
transsubstantiation
the astronomer falls in ==> the truth comes out
(ask maryam's astronomer: what disconnects the connected?)
throw the key to the text
for classification, connection is at stake,[...]
(268)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%49.9[...] the rough
organism = meaning + direction
organism combines memory, invariance, plan, message, loss, redundancy, etc
it is old, mortal, and transmiter of new cycle
تو نیکی میکن و در دجله انداز
to niki mikono dar dejle andaz...
(organism?) is a quasi stable turbulence that a flow produces, the eddy closed upon itself for an instance, which finds its balance in the middle of the current and appears to move upstream, but is in fact undone by the flow and re-formed else where.
Man is one at high temperatures
from the information point of view there is a tremendous background noise
the noise of a complex to which a receptor is linked
this unconsciousness
(no one can call that) information is fortunate
there must be noise in pleasure and information in pain (?!)
---hmmm we can't know this properly?
Find in ajayeb, operating functions:
transformations,
fixations,
energy displacements,
movements of observer,
ambiguity functions,
freudian slip,
exploits of signs,
exploits of energy,
(ajayeb is defined by its resistance to metaphors in a system of language)
یک کلاغ چهل کلاغ yek kalagh chel kalagh is precisely noise in a transmission system along a given circuit from one element to another. From a point of view outside the system ambiguity must be added to increase the system's complexity
theory of change (in sign)
what are the unconsciousnesses of integration?
(many) interlocking (black) boxes
obstacles do organise, noise becomes dialect
they come crashing at our feet
in the forms of eros and death
like surf at the edge of the beach
unconscious is the last black observer of chance
ag/>
aging, is a process we understand as the drifting of information into background noise
عجایب المخلوقات ajayeb al makhlughat, anamnesis, memory, and everything imaginable
body creates language from information and noise
one who utters language, is the receiver at the end chain, the final observer. But the initial dispatcher is (always) unknown.
Ajayeb, make? a chance-program couple
to perform both:
•i am submerged in (its) signal exchanges
•i observe its global set of exchanges
introspection veers off into experience
as Freud, who started from energy models of thermodynamics, has intuited, everything occurs by a dynamic of language, the subsequent development of thermodynamics into information theory.
Knowledge is always linked to an observer
we are drifting towards noise and black depths of the universe...
knowledge is a[...]
(269)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%50.3[...]Comte says: in light of previous experience we must acknowledge that impossibility determining, by direct measurement, most of the heights and distances we like to know.
Thales, geometry as ruse
construction of summary
operation of application
use of metrics
in applied sciences
(often) measurement is the essential element of application,
but primary in the touch (sensory)
practice <--> ruse <--> theory
we need a ‘ruse’ to go from practice to theory
(mathematics? Is this why young philosophers are lured into math?)
the length my body cannot reach, sun, horizon, the far side of the river
greek idea of theorize: see
sight: by “placing” measurement, measurement by sighting
greek:
vision is tactile without contact
Descartes knew this better than anyone
inaccessible (is at times) accessible to vision
the ruler (the mode notion of module) has been placed accurately on the thing
the eye is a witness of covering-over
to measure is to relate
but, the ‘relation’ implies a transporting, of the ruler
(we are with this) at the realm of the accessible (=/= metaphysics?)
in the realm of inaccessible, vision must take care of displacement
The goal is either civil or astronomical
civil =/=? astronomical
to ask the object in motion to provide a constant flow of information about the object at rest.
Thales stops time to measure space
time freeze in order to perceive
eternity of mathematical figure
how geometry came to the Greeks?
•a practical genesis: build a reduced model, have a notion of module, bring the distant to the immediate.
•a senatorial genesis: organize a visual representation of that which defies physical contact.
•a civil or epistemological genesis: take astronomy as a starting point, reverse the question of the gnomon.
•a genesis that is either conceptual or esthetic: erase time in order to measure and master space.
exchange of the stable and the variant
in a culture with oral tradition, story takes the place of schema, and theater equates intuition.
In Thales story, the schema is the invariant of the tale instead of the tale being the origin of the schema. To teach the theorem is to tell the pseudo-myth of the origin =/= mythical tales being the dramatization of content
Thales theorem is itself anecdotal in relation to the invariable concept that it expresses its own genre: that of similarity***
from a practice he gets another practice
which messages, and how, answers and questions was covered over the centuries by the scenography of shadow-light opposition?
Descartes story: perspectival geometry[...]
(270)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%50.4[...]forms a field of knowledge --of-->{intersubjective & polemical relationship}
first, sacred is located elsewhere, placed outside the world, then Nature is born objectively --> in the new contract, the exact word can be spoken
...but a new crisis make it start over again
-the sacred is formed by (this) catastrophic and repetitive dynamic
ruse (kalak کلک, che kalake khubi چه کلک خوبی): the “laws” of nature a projection of a (usually political) constitution on the world; to give a status of a natural necessity to arbitrary power
ruse ~ reason---the dominance of the here and now
no one is better endowed by nature for trickery than a Greek. These masters invented dichotomy, separation, and partition. ... They invented the theory of the specificity of various realms (~ cosmology?)
their divisions and clarifications ==> “we today have the weak and awkward fancy to read the world as polysemic and out of sync”, polytomy {from Greek: πολυ-, poly-, “many” and σῆμα, sêma, “sign” ==> multiple semes or sememes and thus multiple senses. ---(soft/hard) polysemous ontologies---(polytomy =/= homonymy اشتراک لفظی ,یک لفظ =/= synonymy یک معنی)} ~--> the awareness of any metabasis to another genre, “discrete” (--> 3D apps today)
(Greek) mathematic =/= illusionist
“if there is a separate field in which no one can keep cards up their sleeves without being resoundingly defeated, it is definitely mathematics.” (Serres)
Greeks theory of segments in the representation of distinct worlds *** (when one uses greek technologies today, which worlds are rendered distinct?)
mathematics, myth, medicine, theory of exchange, ...
Serres's field trip
(Lucretius and our answer to the) what is a living thing?
•! a thing in equilibrium and disequilibrium, a flow, a vortex, heat, etc
•atomist physics
...................................
what ‘abundance’ means for Juan?
For me? for Sa'di in golestan...?
abundance is when it seems the artist hasn't put limitations on the flow of signs and meanings.
#my basic methods(?): abundancies, adjacencies,
~-/?--> simplest complex, simplex (concern of comparative topology) ~= the stable network of compositions
my ajayeb hypertext, what is there the specific ‘law of putting together letters’ ([and atoms?] to produce a text)? That means the question of Greekness and syntax technology, and my reworking articulated
•alphabetical proto cloud (Serres) --?--> without law, random
•what are the laws of ‘good combination’ that i am reworking or resisting or acquiring or answering to, in my ajayeb hypertext? (how composition is reproduced?)
--> (the law enunciates [تلفظ کردن ,مژده دادن] the federated,) * the law repeats the fact =/= the ‘things’ of ajayeb are [...]
(271)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%50.9[...] Irreversible time is the master here : the physics of things resists it in spots, but in the flow of the drift; history follows, barely a ripple in the flow. History flows around physics.” (Serres - Hermes p.116)
...events are all of the socio-political order
(if science or physics or episteme classifies things, what classifies physics?)
what classifies what?
Question of epidemiology
slave: material object
master: spatial object
Serres: Lucretius: dichotomies are symptoms of better-connected material things
•history symptom of nature
•time symptom of symptoms
“Mars is only an accident of stable Venus, a temporary relief outside the assembled convention. Mars passes, badly connected.”
Mars is only in transit
a penis captive
(like Lucretius, do I need to distinguish, in ajayeb) the conjunctional, contractual, stable links, (and projections of the constitution of political order?)
what are ajayeb's unstable historical contracts? --> historical contingencies --?-- “there would be nothing without the existence of the former, which quickly disappears around them”
that which disappears from definition, reappears metaphorically
the small amount of linkage between events
(with translation we might ask: with/by what are you translating? --> input and output of the translation cannot be known in advance)
ataraxia: the absence of trouble, peace of the garden (=/= soul made of atoms, unstable) a moral state ==> a physical state
(=/= aporia)
•not perturbed,
•the term was also used to describe the ideal mental state for soldiers entering battle. [-->? the image of the ideal soldier: Keanu Reeves kind of coolness in The Matrix film, (the machines are made in the image of the emotional ones.) at the end of the first film, we have an aesthetics (of indifferent and silent:) transcendence + perfect warrior], [another theory is that the freedom from emotional attachment was developed since early middle ages for merchants in order to (in a meddieval sense) *trade* =/= melancholic introspective contemplative efforts of faith]
------[apatheia: eradicating the tendency to react emotionally or egotistically to external events, ~ equanimity, =/= indifference*@Sven; (metriopatheia: men between the excess and deficiency of emotions;) a form of response to the world? ]
@Sven:
•interdifference [open systems between or among (in)differences?] --> interindifference --> entering differences, enter in diff
•intradifference [closed system inside or within (in)differences?]
Nature is rivers and whirl winds
streaming of mortality
Greek preference of ‘fall’ over ‘transition’:
things arrive and occur and only crumble and disintegrate for a unique figurative [...]
(272)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%51[...] concrete universe as its representation.”
Stengers + Prigogine
(?what do we have that helps us give up the idea of a) rational nature of the real
observation ==> generalization
measurement ==> precision
which precisions can be achieved by other than measurement?
How not to travel through the universe like free and self-determined gods? (#magicians)
Stengers > Leibniz @Luisa: “movement is produced within a full world, an interdependent world in which nothing can happen that has not been made possible by the state of the set of bodies according to a harmony that determines and checks at every moment the unfolding of the different movements.”
the full and compact nature, version of ajayeb
my work in apass is on a theory of transformation among languages (not about the best point of view =/=> system integrated =/=> trajectories calculated):
•ajayeb's natural language
•system language of differential logic
•english grammar and syntax
•organic and intersubjective space of my peers
•old farsi
•animal
•
“speak of” science
“speak about” science
“speak” science
“speak” metaphysics
speaking the language of dynamics
what is still at stake in science: the description of a world of processes
...................................
Lezra
In the European imaginary, the public struggle over the “better” word makes the city (the polis) @apass
Derrida calls for patience, take care read on slowly. Kafka: all human errors are impatience. Radical patience, is the necessity to differ, but also to rush in precipitately, one has to make decisions: absolute urgency.
Literature for derrida, reading in my works, is indissociably bound up with questions of politics, democracy and responsibility, religion, nationality and nationalism, identity and law.
E m foster, how can i tell what i think, till i see what i say.
What one finds repeatedly in derrida's work is the uncanny effect by which one is invited to sense the unfolding of all his thinking starting out from anywhere, from any idea, any word, any thought that happen to be at issue. Deconstruction is the name for this?
Derrida proceeds with patience and pleasure, to describe what is going on in a particular text or situation.
Every reading is difficult, Shakespeare, maulwürfe, mathematics. The difficulty of reading is in transforming the ways we are obliged to think about those texts.
The transformation is crucially always already in the texts he reads. Describing what happens when reading a passage of anything. Everything is in Shakespeare, in Plato, in Kafka. The relation between description and transforma[...]
(273)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%51.4[...]isual organizes the worldview of the seer* --> visual is at its most powerful when it is most invisble (for example scientific diagrams, mapping @apass)
***instances of visual control:
•uniforms
•packaging
•computer software packages
•brand logos
•buildings
•websites @apass
•management reports
•staff
•servicescapes [an environment where the first/primary perceived aspect is service]
•
harmful, deficient, deformed, secondary =/= superman, supergirl
logocentrism: letting the logic lead the letter --Campbell--> images are logocentric in that they create meaning by appealing to a central apparently undeconstructible system of authoritative truth (appealing to sources of transcendence outside of the image) [--> for example forensic architecture images =/= Derrida's *there is nothing outside of the text*]
•in investigating an image we often posses a logocentric vision, drawing it into convergence, making it coherent and giving it a non-contradictory and singularly authoritative meaning
[title]
ruined coherent heritage
there is no escaping the enclosure of (logocentrism of western tradition of) metaphysics <-- we can critically engage it from within
bricolage
bricoleur --> one is participating in the intellectual heritage one is critiqing
death of man
•Barthes --> death of author
•Strauss --> structuralist approach to human nature
•Foucault --> history of the historical arbitrariness (of the human sciences)
•
}--> antihumanism (of Barthes and Foucault) suggests it might be possible to stand outside the humanist legacy (and analyse from a position outside) ==Derrida==> (escaping from human constitutes) a very human tendency that has been at work in the cultural and social imaginary since antiquity --> for example Foucault's archaeology: (to understand) *how reason determined madness in different eras by looking at how reason evolved historically* ==> puts the analyst outside the humanist legacy of reason ==restore==> the metaphysical illusion of mastery and control
=/= Derrida
(my problem with making alternative *archives, gardens, and maps* in art:)
•metaphysical complicity (with archive and garden) + critique we direct against complicity (with archive and garden) --> we cannot give up the “+" = slip into the form, logic, implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest
logocentrism operates in images by appealing to sources of transcendence outside of the image --> for example
[*]map: visual organization of the world --> quickly erase or black box the circumstances and history of their own construction ==> marshal vision into logocentric coherence --> act as reflection (=/= representation) of the world
ra[...]
(274)[...notes/Derrida old notes.txt]%51.8[...]hing outside of the text*]
•in investigating an image we often posses a logocentric vision, drawing it into convergence, making it coherent and giving it a non-contradictory and singularly authoritative meaning
[title]
ruined coherent heritage
there is no escaping the enclosure of (logocentrism of western tradition of) metaphysics <-- we can critically engage it from within
bricolage
bricoleur --> one is participating in the intellectual heritage one is critiqing
death of man
•Barthes --> death of author
•Strauss --> structuralist approach to human nature
•Foucault --> history of the historical arbitrariness (of the human sciences)
•
}--> antihumanism (of Barthes and Foucault) suggests it might be possible to stand outside the humanist legacy (and analyse from a position outside) ==Derrida==> (escaping from human constitutes) a very human tendency that has been at work in the cultural and social imaginary since antiquity for example Foucault's archaeology: (to understand) *how reason determined madness in different eras by looking at how reason evolved historically* ==> puts the analyst outside the humanist legacy of reason ==restore==> the metaphysical illusion of mastery and control
=/= Derrida
(my problem with making alternative *archives, gardens, and maps* in art:)
•metaphysical complicity (with archive and garden) + critique we direct against complicity (with archive and garden) --> we cannot give up the “+" = slip into the form, logic, implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest
logocentrism operates in images by appealing to sources of transcendence outside of the image --> for example
[*]map: visual organization of the world --> quickly erase or black box the circumstances and history of their own construction ==> marshal vision into logocentric coherence --> act as reflection (=/= representation) of the world
radical cartography is now an established sub-discipline of geography (*maps are deconstructed to identify their logos*) @Sina's mimesis of Olearius's cartography
deconstruction is most needed at precisely those images where our immediate reaction is to say “there's nothing to be deconstructed here” (“that's just the way it is”)
software design (website interfaces) --> images of technology
critical practice: producing a new knowledge of the text (==> explain the ideological necessity of its silence) =/= make a whisper audible, complete what the text leaves unsaid
other: other meanings of a text, other ways of seeing things
self/other --Derrida--> it only has meaning insofar as it differs from something else
•every concept has its opposite or its other (somehow marked within it)
•the good one can be designated [...]
(275)[...notes/Derrida old notes.txt]%51.8[...]logocentrism operates in images by appealing to sources of transcendence outside of the image --> for example
[*]map: visual organization of the world --> quickly erase or black box the circumstances and history of their own construction ==> marshal vision into logocentric coherence --> act as reflection (=/= representation) of the world
radical cartography is now an established sub-discipline of geography (*maps are deconstructed to identify their logos*) @Sina's mimesis of Olearius's cartography
deconstruction is most needed at precisely those images where our immediate reaction is to say “there's nothing to be deconstructed here” (“that's just the way it is”)
software design (website interfaces) --> images of technology
critical practice: producing a new knowledge of the text (==> explain the ideological necessity of its silence) =/= make a whisper audible, complete what the text leaves unsaid
other: other meanings of a text, other ways of seeing things
self/other --Derrida--> it only has meaning insofar as it differs from something else
•every concept has its opposite or its other (somehow marked within it)
•the good one can be designated only through the metaphor of the bad one #fable
deconstructing an image:
•looking at what the image includes and excludes
•detecting the social roles it creates
•examining the hierarchies that appear natural in the image
}<== **visual representation works as much through what is not shown as what is shown** (Hall), through feints and deceptions (Mitchel), through gaps and silences (Joy + Venkatesh), through stated and unstated (Stern), through the not seen or said (Rose)
reading: detailed and specific examination (of a piece of text) = لاروب dredging machine --> disturb the text (dissecting patiently and minutely the narrative, structure, syntax, figuration, images, metaphors, metonyms استعمال لفظ در معنای غیرحقیقی majaz) ==(draw out)==> complexities, ambiguities, aporias, ironies, taken-for-grantedness, just-is-ness
--imply--> a critique of objectivity
{revelation = disturbance}-->{alternative meaning = site of simultaneous deconstruction}
dynamics of reading (close reading)
1. working of a text hides itselg (images of soap powder, children's science homework, computer chips, etc.)
2. rigorous inspection of the text
3. text is not immune to interpretation (~ text reconfigures itself according to the touch of history, personality, method, intention, politics, culture of any given interpretation =/= closed space)
*reading = producing meaning* =/= reflecting
•Toyota's advertisement --> an image of gay family life --> the image converges on a notion of multicultural pansexual divergence --> market condi[...]
(277)[...notes/Derrida old notes.txt]%51.9[...](website interfaces) --> images of technology
critical practice: producing a new knowledge of the text (==> explain the ideological necessity of its silence) =/= make a whisper audible, complete what the text leaves unsaid
other: other meanings of a text, other ways of seeing things
self/other --Derrida--> it only has meaning insofar as it differs from something else
•every concept has its opposite or its other (somehow marked within it)
•the good one can be designated only through the metaphor of the bad one #fable
deconstructing an image:
•looking at what the image includes and excludes
•detecting the social roles it creates
•examining the hierarchies that appear natural in the image
}<== **visual representation works as much through what is not shown as what is shown** (Hall), through feints and deceptions (Mitchel), through gaps and silences (Joy + Venkatesh), through stated and unstated (Stern), through the not seen or said (Rose)
reading: detailed and specific examination (of a piece of text) = لاروب dredging machine --> disturb the text (dissecting patiently and minutely the narrative, structure, syntax, figuration, images, metaphors, metonyms استعمال لفظ در معنای غیرحقیقی majaz) ==(draw out)==> complexities, ambiguities, aporias, ironies, taken-for-grantedness, just-is-ness
--imply--> a critique of objectivity
{revelation = disturbance}-->{alternative meaning = site of simultaneous deconstruction}
dynamics of reading (close reading)
1. working of a text hides itselg (images of soap powder, children's science homework, computer chips, etc.)
2. rigorous inspection of the text
3. text is not immune to interpretation (~ text reconfigures itself according to the touch of history, personality, method, intention, politics, culture of any given interpretation =/= closed space)
*reading = producing meaning* =/= reflecting
•Toyota's advertisement --> an image of gay family life --> the image converges on a notion of multicultural pansexual divergence --> market conditions under which homosexuality is accepted
•Joe Camel campaign --> Joe (from Joseph Old Testament) shortened in colloquial american usages to “Joe”, which by the 1930s began to designate anyone whose real name is unknown or connoted the “most typical” of any category of person [=/= dinosaurs] + camel: beast of burden and of humility (Aesop's fables) and as creatures of uncontrollable lust (from depiction by monks in medieval times to teach moral fables to the public)
performance of a textual sex change operation
(monotonality) monovisuality of the dominant visual message
logocentric: a transcendental signified to which the text refers
Plato's powerful att[...]
(278)[...notes/Derrida old notes.txt]%51.9[...]amily life --> the image converges on a notion of multicultural pansexual divergence --> market conditions under which homosexuality is accepted
•Joe Camel campaign --> Joe (from Joseph Old Testament) shortened in colloquial american usages to “Joe”, which by the 1930s began to designate anyone whose real name is unknown or connoted the “most typical” of any category of person [=/= dinosaurs] + camel: beast of burden and of humility (Aesop's fables) and as creatures of uncontrollable lust (from depiction by monks in medieval times to teach moral fables to the public)
performance of a textual sex change operation
(monotonality) monovisuality of the dominant visual message
logocentric: a transcendental signified to which the text refers
Plato's powerful attack on writing as “dead speech”: Socrates and Phaedrus walk in the countryside. Socrates recounts to him a myth about the origin of writing: the king Thamus is presented with a present from his son Theus; the gift of writing. Theus tells his father that the gift will make his people wise as it will improve their memory --✕--> Derrida shows that in the same argument Socrates goes on to describe speech as another sort of writing; he actually uses a writing metaphor to describe the “true nature” of speech “not merely as a knowing, living, animate discourse, but as an inscription of truth in the soul”
deconstruction =/= re-interpretation
| |
impossible + providing a
plausible story different story
deconstructive reading (idiosyncratic to the text) ==offer==> multiple & contradictory potential meanings to the text
Derridean approach to meaning making:
•cricular
•paradoxical
~= it requires us to *deconstruct the deconstruction* --> *work against meaning and interpretation*
name of man: (the name of that being who throughout the entire history has dreamed of full presence = the reassuring foundation, the origin =/= play)
[my fable workshop was about this -->] Derridean deconstruction of images -->
•drawing attention to the way image constructs itself in order to implicitly represent a single history (=/= seeking to tell the truth about what X means)
•keeping alive the contradictions within it (=/= solutionizing)
(?how to deconstruct [iamges of]) nanotechnology: practice of manipulating all types of living and non-living matter at its atomic level
•corporations portraying nanotechnology as a positive and legitimate force (+ visually close down the possible meanings of its products) = Iron Man
•nanospace: planetary bodies afloat in the darkenss of intergalactic space
•fantastical unserious endeavour
([what is?] my problem with) message شعاری
<[...]
(279)[...notes/Derrida old notes.txt]%52[...]ntion to the way image constructs itself in order to implicitly represent a single history (=/= seeking to tell the truth about what X means)
•keeping alive the contradictions within it (=/= solutionizing)
(?how to deconstruct [iamges of]) nanotechnology: practice of manipulating all types of living and non-living matter at its atomic level
•corporations portraying nanotechnology as a positive and legitimate force (+ visually close down the possible meanings of its products) = Iron Man
•nanospace: planetary bodies afloat in the darkenss of intergalactic space
•fantastical unserious endeavour
([what is?] my problem with) message شعاری
**advertisement ==> confuse agency & ownership**
the fantastic is rescued by the human (face)
(in advertisement -->) **the ways in which knowledge & reality are marshalled into collective visual consensus**
visual deconstruction --> rigor towards the idiosyncrasy and singularity of any text
restricted economy of the text ==> particular meaning =/= Derrida: moveing from a restricted --to--> general economy of the text
...................................
metaphysics: enterprise of returning (strategically, ideally) to an origin (a priority) thought to be simple, intact, normal, pure, standard, self-identical [=/= to think in terms of derivation, complication, deterioration, accident]
<--Derrida-- (the most constant profound potent metaphysical gesture in Western philosophy:) conceiving simple before the complex, essential before the accidental
}--> logocentric thought: thought which does not adequately attend to the contradictions inherent in its own medium ==> [logocentrism:] (fable) faith in the status of language as a lucid carrier of meaning (=/= attentiveness to the materiality of communication and the implications of such a project)
pecific languages make communication material, and exploring the interplay of terms within a linguistic system (-->? baroque) =/= Enlightenment = Age of Reason (logos)
...................................
Beauty and the Beast
or, blast of the clean slate
(goddamn it)
The picture of a relatively undifferentiated and continuous topological space undergoing discontinuous transitions and progressively acquiring detail until it condenses into the measurable and divisible metric space which we inhabit, is a powerful metaphor for the cosmic genesis of spatial structure. (Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy)
baroque Trauerspiel, classical synthesis, ...
synthesis: synthetic thinking (the combination of ideas into a complex whole)
this is not a reasoning exercise (deducing particularity, etc.)
imagine you find a head[...]
(280)[...notes/Derrida old notes.txt]%52[...]ideally) to an origin (a priority) thought to be simple, intact, normal, pure, standard, self-identical [=/= to think in terms of derivation, complication, deterioration, accident]
<--Derrida-- (the most constant profound potent metaphysical gesture in Western philosophy:) conceiving simple before the complex, essential before the accidental
}--> logocentric thought: thought which does not adequately attend to the contradictions inherent in its own medium ==> [logocentrism:] (fable) faith in the status of language as a lucid carrier of meaning (=/= attentiveness to the materiality of communication and the implications of such a project)
pecific languages make communication material, and exploring the interplay of terms within a linguistic system (-->? baroque) =/= Enlightenment = Age of Reason (logos)
...................................
Beauty and the Beast
or, blast of the clean slate
(goddamn it)
The picture of a relatively undifferentiated and continuous topological space undergoing discontinuous transitions and progressively acquiring detail until it condenses into the measurable and divisible metric space which we inhabit, is a powerful metaphor for the cosmic genesis of spatial structure. (Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy)
baroque Trauerspiel, classical synthesis, ...
synthesis: synthetic thinking (the combination of ideas into a complex whole)
this is not a reasoning exercise (deducing particularity, etc.)
imagine you find a head. how do you search for the body? (research project)
graduating from ... and approaching ...
(from fairy tale ---> approach myth)
--> http://www.sinaseifee.com/DifficultForests.html
becoming Amazon as the fear of the male.
(Amazon as male hunter symbol)
(symbol for) masculine gender principle
(to disavow sexual difference)
I am not bringing the text to you, or you to the text.
as you have already guessed we have to destroy both the notion of text and you, to some extent, in order to permit a reading to constitutes itself.
is San'an a prince charming?
(let's examine)
the spiritually established death-birth (death of birth and birth of death) at the end of story
Miyazaki's faceless monster (in Spirited Away 千と千尋の神隠し), with his flexible plasticity, has an issue with appearance. he goes from loneliness, to love, to greed, and finally becomes a student body. he has great agency in the beginning and docile in the end, [اسیر صورت --?--> اسیر معنی]
San'an is determined to see it through, the whole process
the German super-ego
the German ego
to carefully inject some of German super-ego to the Iranian ego<[...]
(282)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%52.1[...]tudy of apparition must include the physical material as well, not as counterparts, rather as its play-mate.
...................................
the structure of space in San'an poetry
distinction between subject and object, between signifier and signified, encompassing the whole of dualistic logic through its branching patterns, through its definitions of set pathways between root and branch.
the Arborescent model of relationships in San'an story?
The rhizome likewise resists structures of domination, such as the notion of “the mother tongue” in linguistics, though it does admit to ongoing cycles of what Deleuze refers to as “deterritorializing” and “reterritorializing” moments.
...................................
about my performances:
“There is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author). Rather, an assemblage establishes connections between certain multiplicities drawn from each of these orders, so that a book has no sequel nor the world as its object nor one or several authors as its subject.”
(Deleuze - Rhizome)
...consists not in an argument, but in the ecstatic elaboration of a metaphor, a web of interconnected concepts, the development of a new vocabulary without a pause for explanation or so much as a simple definition.
“...a mapping rather than a tracing”
“What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious”
“It fosters connections between fields, the removal of blockages... “
(removing some blockages of meaning-lock in San'an)
my lecture, emphasizes the rhizomatic to foster imaginative work that challenges typical critical forms.
not to overlook the working of matters, and the exteriority of their relations.
(in a book, a lecture, etc.) there are lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification.
(what are Attar's Sheikh's actual authority as a teacher?)
(George Makdisi: “Madrasa and University in the Middle Ages”)
[...] “Perhaps the most fundamental difference between the two systems is embodied in their systems of certification; namely, in medieval Europe, the licentia docendi, or license to teach; in medieval Islam, the ijazah, or authorization. In Europe, the license to teach was a license to teach a certain field of knowledge. It was conferred by the licensed masters acting as a corporation, with the consent of a Church authority, in Paris, by the Chancellor of the Cathedral Chapter... Certification in the Muslim East remained a pe[...]
(283)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%52.3[...]consent of a Church authority, in Paris, by the Chancellor of the Cathedral Chapter... Certification in the Muslim East remained a personal matter between the master and the student. The master conferred it on an individual for a particular work, or works.” [...]
feeling cool and correct
(in) a parasitical golden age
what is “education” in a mystical world (or actually a mystical world-view)
how can be undermined or rewired, (“teaching” without education)
magical idealism
from Delphi-magiscism to the San'an
(does San'an actually wants to go to Greece?! but went to Italy?)
اقصای روم
the space we are founding ourselves in is not neutral, not innocent, not un-signed
it is paid for, has a certain architecture, (phallic work)
the intellectual mask...
semiotic of learning and thinking
(Maulwurf,) shit on your head, shit is the origin of all gifts, when a child offers his first donation, “look what I have produced!” I honor you with this Kacke.
--> http://www.sinaseifee.com/VomkleinenMaulwurf.html
how can we bring the variety of animals into the singular butterfly metaphor? (Attar's bird's butterfly effect)
Schmetterling! (parvaneh - پروانه)
(‘schmettern’ in German: v. smash, shatter, slam; blare, fanfare, bellow, roar) --- in schmettern you already have the ‘smashing,’ the butterfly smashing in the windshield, by that we are in the land of technology.
Schmetterlinghaus? (The Imperial Butterfly House in Vienna)
خرمن پروانه
Schmetterling is also a German (Reich Air Ministry) air-to-air missile project developed during the WWII, which is detonated by acoustic and photoelectric proximity fuses (Abstandszünder)
(Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh)
<br />
time, space, being, death, subversion, pain, transcendence, victory, blood, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno, Benjamin, Baudrillard,
•poetic violence, obscure elsewhere,
•imaginative reservoir.
•political, poetic, spiritual, or aesthetic sources of inspiration.
•the rebel factor
resistance-fight / ideological dictator
artist-forerunner / experimental thinker
constellation of desire
ambush of destruction =>
...internalization of toxicity
to assimilate the poisonous
mithridatic (“mehr-dad” معجون مهرداد)
what is the dominant information in San'an world?
(ideological and) literary apparatus
issues of belonging and desertion
to endure the direct
epistemic fear
I suggest we go through the rhetorical treatises of Middle East political past century
(mystic war:)
the [...]
(284)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%52.4[...]mes that there is something in the information that makes a difference and not in the receiver of info.)
(question to an Iranian friend:) “why must we fasten our gaze to the objects of damage and derangement?” “why light lanterns to behold the corpse?” “or extend our focus on them?” (I am using Mohaghegh's words,) the extremist (or other aesthetic-philosophical strands of extremisms) would tell us not to look away, for the thought and expression have taken the shape of a ‘meteorological device,’ forecasting seasons (of storm)...
(you take the mithridatic venom to) cross into the next level of temporal experience
he makes “engravings of the atrocity”
(حکاکی از) سبعیت
a fanatical response to the storm
a charismatic authority undertakes a poetic articulation
or a poetic articulation becomes committed to an ideological program
[Iran Iraq war]
mysticism, a protocol of extremity, geared towards the immensification of narrow vision
gigantic singularity
itself the house of many paradoxes: that of wisdom and rage, that of boundlessness and confinement, that of precision and enormity, nature and technology (apprentices to a lesser artisan-metallurgist god interested only in functional architecture and instrumentalized objects), betrayal and devotion,
mysticism is one of postmodern ‘mask,’ there are many others (the chaos-mask / face?, etc.)
one of many existential prototypes, subjectivity constellations, etc.
sliding between hostile and relaxed patterns of ...
with a sixth sense for disappearance
gained attunement to nothing
what are the athleticism of this stillness?
the turn in the thought of the mystic to externalize that same meditative daze!
what if an enthusiasm took hold to transfer this personal, self-contained oblivion onto a universal plane?
a single mood-shift: interiority feels the need to stretch out into exteriority.
without the logic of judgment
(in the aftermath of the 2th century) many visionaries of western thought (--postmoderns--) have emphasized a (desperate) need to inject ambiguity and doubt into our collective imagination
where is absolutism in San'an?
own descent (Abstieg) into paranoia
when in master-disciple relationship one is asked/taught not only read the works of past visionaries: rather to entertain the same mania, drunkenness, cruelty, or absorb temperament that engendered the very materialization of that text.
[Attar asking us to entertain the same mania when reading Tazkirat al-Awliya?]
...lending cryptic terminologies and cosmic ideas
to become an echo of a profound legacy
we ask again: which phantom-sphere is more interesting? more aesth[...]
(285)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%52.6[...]igma of something that no longer is)
precisely Bayazid defines Tasawwuf/Tasavof as something that ‘was’ and had no name and today ‘is not’ and has name.
I am taking in terms of constructions and phantasms
everything that comes at you, which is persecutory, is absorbed. that being able to crucified by the other.
doesn't have an experience to fire aggression
is it possible to be kind in a non-manipulative non-cognitive or non-calculative way?
San'an was booked “elsewhere,” he had a transcendental hearing, he had to take a call
[we should here study a ‘hauntology'---the science of morning-disorder. all prophets have it also]. haunt---the figure is neither present nor absent --> (and “real” presence has always been the religion's obsession)
از شبح به شیخ
از صنع به صنعان
صنع = fake, صانع fabricated, made-up, technological, dead, etc.
صنم = idol
صنع = eidolon
-(eídōlon, “figure, representation”), from εἶδος? (eîdos, “sight”), from εἴδω? (eídō, “I see”)
-a phantom, a ghost or elusive entity (=/=? haecceity)
-‘you still see them'---is this an origin of metaphysic?
-eidolon is the image in water, apparition, ‘surat,’ a double / technical. idea comes from the word “to see” in Greek verbs, linked to the notion of ‘eidolon’ is the ‘visible image’ (in ancient optics and theories of perception) [the visible image is what appears to operate San'an's dream]
-why eidolon has the tendency to become an idol that talks back? (San'an practically encounters an eidolon and converts it to an idol. what Tarsaa asks San'an to worship is the confirmation of what sheikh has already done.)
-what is the secret of the vitality of the image that bewitches San'an? why dream/images, works of metaphors have lives of their own and cannot be explained as epistemological windows onto reality?
-San'an is first captive of apparition (صورت), then captive of meaning (معنی)
-originality of the site is abolished by technological register of the ‘sent,’ (the telephonic cyber-space) of the eidolon =?=> displacement (-how San'an loses a sense of place first in order to move)
[in the beginning of Miyazaki's 2013 The Wind Rises 風立ちぬ, a boy, vivid dreaming, meets an Italian aerospace engineer, who is shocked when he hears that the boy thinks he is dreaming. then he deceivingly says to the boy: “yesssss yes you are in a dream, boy” and saying to himself “how naive the boy is."]
-how is it naive to think that you are dreaming? that what you are seeing and hearing is not ‘real’? ----San'an is not naive in that sense. he knows that the dream is not just a projection of his subjectivity. he is not Freudian, or he knows his own subconscious too well.
San'an going to Italy (Vatican?)
[...]
(286)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%53.1[...]auntology'---the science of morning-disorder. all prophets have it also]. haunt---the figure is neither present nor absent --> (and “real” presence has always been the religion's obsession)
از شبح به شیخ
از صنع به صنعان
صنع = fake, صانع fabricated, made-up, technological, dead, etc.
صنم = idol
صنع = eidolon
-(eídōlon, “figure, representation”), from εἶδος? (eîdos, “sight”), from εἴδω? (eídō, “I see”)
-a phantom, a ghost or elusive entity (=/=? haecceity)
-‘you still see them'---is this an origin of metaphysic?
-eidolon is the image in water, apparition, ‘surat,’ a double / technical. idea comes from the word “to see” in Greek verbs, linked to the notion of ‘eidolon’ is the ‘visible image’ (in ancient optics and theories of perception) [the visible image is what appears to operate San'an's dream]
-why eidolon has the tendency to become an idol that talks back? (San'an practically encounters an eidolon and converts it to an idol. what Tarsaa asks San'an to worship is the confirmation of what sheikh has already done.)
-what is the secret of the vitality of the image that bewitches San'an? why dream/images, works of metaphors have lives of their own and cannot be explained as epistemological windows onto reality?
-San'an is first captive of apparition (صورت), then captive of meaning (معنی)
-originality of the site is abolished by technological register of the ‘sent,’ (the telephonic cyber-space) of the eidolon =?=> displacement (-how San'an loses a sense of place first in order to move)
[in the beginning of Miyazaki's 2013 The Wind Rises 風立ちぬ, a boy, vivid dreaming, meets an Italian aerospace engineer, who is shocked when he hears that the boy thinks he is dreaming. then he deceivingly says to the boy: “yesssss yes you are in a dream, boy” and saying to himself “how naive the boy is."]
-how is it naive to think that you are dreaming? that what you are seeing and hearing is not ‘real’? ----San'an is not naive in that sense. he knows that the dream is not just a projection of his subjectivity. he is not Freudian, or he knows his own subconscious too well.
San'an going to Italy (Vatican?)
a mapping is going on
his cognitive defend system is down (=/= ‘rend’ رند)
رند =? idiot [~=? the one who cannot be tricked]
[rend: the paragon of indifference; an iconoclast; an informal trickster; prone to drunkenness, sin, and heresy; he is forever scorned but *shows no sign of injury*(?!); he is without shame or conformism; he is vivid, energetic, guiltless]
and the question of technology?
how technology breaks up and breaks into all sorts of metaphysical premises
San'an is at a primal scene of aggression?
provoking hostility
there is no swe[...]
(287)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%53.2[...]sent,’ (the telephonic cyber-space) of the eidolon =?=> displacement (-how San'an loses a sense of place first in order to move)
[in the beginning of Miyazaki's 2013 The Wind Rises 風立ちぬ, a boy, vivid dreaming, meets an Italian aerospace engineer, who is shocked when he hears that the boy thinks he is dreaming. then he deceivingly says to the boy: “yesssss yes you are in a dream, boy” and saying to himself “how naive the boy is."]
-how is it naive to think that you are dreaming? that what you are seeing and hearing is not ‘real’? ----San'an is not naive in that sense. he knows that the dream is not just a projection of his subjectivity. he is not Freudian, or he knows his own subconscious too well.
San'an going to Italy (Vatican?)
a mapping is going on
his cognitive defend system is down (=/= ‘rend’ رند)
رند =? idiot [~=? the one who cannot be tricked]
[rend: the paragon of indifference; an iconoclast; an informal trickster; prone to drunkenness, sin, and heresy; he is forever scorned but *shows no sign of injury*(?!); he is without shame or conformism; he is vivid, energetic, guiltless]
and the question of technology?
how technology breaks up and breaks into all sorts of metaphysical premises
San'an is at a primal scene of aggression?
provoking hostility
there is no sweet device that should supposed to suspend hostility, there is no magic flute in San'an story
why am I taking so many detours? whether this is describable at all
discursive formations
the teacher vs. trainer
the teacher that asks for your interiority**** (love?) any kind of transfers of emotional funds. or other economies of approval
Attar, the great and complicated poet
also my own attachments to certain formations
what kinds of poetic bodies Attar sacrifices?
what cognitive back-up system he uses?
and so on
(the students) cannot cognize (San'an's program)
forecloser, foreclosing you
توقيف
distribution of value, action, and non-action in San'an
to discover San'an where it dwells, what kinds of figures and disfigurations it is responsible for, and what else does it mask culturally?
we also add on cultural anthropological tracks to see which cultures or groups-psychologies practice San'an's teachings and in the service of what--what kind of will to power. because rarely something is practiced and it is not in service of some sort of buffing off a self or something.
(does San'an practice the will to obedience and to listening?)
what (the hell) does he want (from Tarsaa, from her Being)?!!!
to let the other go
I am talking about Attar so we can properly lose him (this is not about finding)
I have to [...]
(288)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%53.2[...]arsaa?
*****Tarsaa doesn't have a father.
-she is autonomous and emancipated
-San'an is of course another legendary non-feminist position
-it's a masculinist story after all, in its plot
medieval narratives of woman's image relating to the so-called sexual self-respect---woman always representing the matter and the material
a comparative literary note on Tarsaa's framework and other female protagonist/antagonists -->
in: Nezami: Khosro-o-Shirin and Leili-o-Majnun (woman is there for the man, to elevate him); Jami: Salaman-o-Absal and Yusof-o-Zoleikha (woman is body and to be avoided); Gorgani: Vis-o-Ramin (woman is autonomous and for herself in the plot of the story)
*this time, he stammers in a situation articulated by her
preserving the ‘good object’
who is doing it and what is the good object for?
(the missing good object, forever)
Tarsaa demands him to drink and not to get drunk
سوی خوکان شتافت
San'an's pig-phobia
introducing the pig in a bird's story
(Hoopoe convincing the Nightingale, Nightingale convincing the ...)
the way of the pig
how earthly we are, we, creatures of earth, how metaphysics forecloses us
Attar keep throwing similies of horizontal and vertical
(simile صنعت تشبيه, شبيه صنع)
scanning through the scandalous moments in San'an...
I want to be German everyday
de-system or to desist, nondialectical negativity
‘Integrieren’ is transitive verb, has a virtual object or project
I am in Ausländerbehörde, the opposite of hospitality?
I have to stop talking opposite rhetoric. but this was not an antithesist opposite, it was a logical opposite
violences of the encounter
r />
San'an's love-story, ist nicht das Tristan und Isolde
‘watch your back’ is the origin of surveillance {?}
I hope I am not interrupting here!
killing it and loving it completely
so we are working (fine-tuning) on phantom noises, parasite emissions, we have a sound-track here
we want to be aware of where we speak from, what kind of other sonic layers are somehow offering themselves, or coughing in (‘sorfe’ سرفه)
to point out the static, dormant, inert, ambient
...................................
and I like to hand myself over
how flowers make sense
(in Iranian metaphysics)
(---> go to Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal)
the rhetoric of desire in San'an, how is it (technologically{?}) determined?
how are things turned on or turned off in San'an? etc.
right at the mom[...]
(289)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%53.4[...]بيه صنع)
scanning through the scandalous moments in San'an...
I want to be German everyday
de-system or to desist, nondialectical negativity
‘Integrieren’ is transitive verb, has a virtual object or project
I am in Ausländerbehörde, the opposite of hospitality?
I have to stop talking opposite rhetoric. but this was not an antithesist opposite, it was a logical opposite
violences of the encounter
San'an's love-story, ist nicht das Tristan und Isolde
‘watch your back’ is the origin of surveillance {?}
I hope I am not interrupting here!
killing it and loving it completely
so we are working (fine-tuning) on phantom noises, parasite emissions, we have a sound-track here
we want to be aware of where we speak from, what kind of other sonic layers are somehow offering themselves, or coughing in (‘sorfe’ سرفه)
to point out the static, dormant, inert, ambient
...................................
and I like to hand myself over
how flowers make sense
(in Iranian metaphysics)
(---> go to Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal)
the rhetoric of desire in San'an, how is it (technologically{?}) determined?
how are things turned on or turned off in San'an? etc.
right at the moment that he is allegedly at an emission of a dream/call, we are dealing (or working) with (the essence of) technology, there is a mitten, trans-mitten, transmitting, emission, etc.
[he is welcoming a call---it was Heidegger who linked thinking with welcoming---to arrive] --- [to San'an, ‘what (the hell) was he thinking!!!?’ both in the sense of the ‘blame’ and the ontology -and epistemology of it]
(how is he revealed to experience the call of a more primal truth? the girl)
[if San'an was medium-reflective he would pose himself with the call/dream and never set foot out or act or take an ego-suicidal mission---but that is also a problem;
*footnote: Hafez trying to travel (to India, invited kindly with Reisef?rderung (travel grants) from Sultan Ghias al-din himself, singing شکرشکن شوند همه طوطیان هند زین قند پارسی که به بنگاله میرود, he is going to shake India and so on.) but returning by -and because of a language-turn, when he is standing in front of the stormed sea, he turns back to Shiraz via a trope: چه آسان مینمود اول غم دریا به بوی سود غلط کردم که این طوفان به صد گوهر نمیارزد it is so interesting how scholars and other poets are trying to map out his itineraries and travel-logs from his poesies/poiesis. the nagging and complaining Hafez, always an[...]
(290)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%53.5[...]
--> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9SIL38hkgw
in the Shams Group music video, the soldiers in the video are having the little-Rumi-packet in their backpacks, along with other suicides. (other soldiers having Holderlin or Nietzsche in their backpacks)
metaphysical strongholds
to keep partnership with the self, so that there can be interlocution
(is this a possible ethics? --> “can I live with myself?”)
what one does to be in consonant with what one is capable of.
(then what is vowel?) vowel switches tracks and resonations
...penetrative grasp of a text, discovery and recreative apprehension of it life-forms, is impossible to paraphrase or systematize.
[Michel Serres]
...temporal and local settings of one's text. (to master it?)
to read X, is literally, to ‘prepare’ to read X
in certain civilizations there comes epochs in which syntax stiffens...
Changing landscape of fact
words, the guardians of meanings, are not immortal.
note on history: past is a language construct, that the past tense of the verb is the sole guarantor of history.
to read: is to restore all that one can of the immediacies of value and intent in which speech actually occurs.
What material reality has history out of language? --the Tasawwuf/Tasavof verbal linguistic tradition
...to remind you that everything is the condition of madness.
(protest against “was” ---> go to Attar's relation with biographies in Tazkirat al-Awliya---he mobilizes ‘personalities’ in the index of his mystic-ontological demand---what would the lack of personality take revenge of Attar?)
we are at a tense past and a past tense---prison tense
..the landsca[...]
(291)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%53.7[...]story.
to read: is to restore all that one can of the immediacies of value and intent in which speech actually occurs.
What material reality has history out of language? --the Tasawwuf/Tasavof verbal linguistic tradition
...to remind you that everything is the condition of madness.
(protest against “was” ---> go to Attar's relation with biographies in Tazkirat al-Awliya---he mobilizes ‘personalities’ in the index of his mystic-ontological demand---what would the lack of personality take revenge of Attar?)
we are at a tense past and a past tense---prison tense
..the landscape composed by the past tense, the semantic organization of remembrance... is styled and coded differently by cultures. --miniature illustrating San'an?
The verbal icon made up of all successive translations of Greek literature and philosophy has oriented fundamental movements in Islamic feelings --Farabi, Mirdamad, etc.
My translation of classics is not out of a vital compulsion for immediacy or precise echo. I am not trying to build my own resonant past. Myth of the ‘true past’... different perspectives can co-exist and blur
the metaphysics of the insult, in San'an story
I am interested in the conventions in which texts can be read, in which a semantic statement can be carried over into someone's own idiom. I am teaching how to reread texts of Attar and so forth.
I think we have civilization because (we have learned) ‘to translate out of time’
übertragen,
handing down thought narrative,
something that also depends on transfer of meaning in *space*
San'an's sudden interest in the woman/child (Tarsaa could also be a young boy) reminds us the uniquely vulnerable and creative condition of the childhood
privileged inferiority (of both child and woman)
we are dealing with both intercourse and discourse
how his voice will change after San'an actually gets the girl?
...communication like breathing is subject to obstruction and homicidal breakdowns, under stress of hatred, of boredom, or of sudden panic, great gaps open ...that their previous understanding had been based on a trivial pidgin which had left the heart of meaning untouched.
What is the female speech in San'an?
-the breakdowns and translations in San'an story.
-The sexual translation and breakdown of linguistic exchange in San'an story.
...having an ‘ear’ for contrasting pressures of sexual discourse or identity
in San'an, man and woman, each respective experience of Eros and language had set them desperately apart.
In whose idiom, male or female, one can [...]
(292)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%53.8[...]s, under stress of hatred, of boredom, or of sudden panic, great gaps open ...that their previous understanding had been based on a trivial pidgin which had left the heart of meaning untouched.
What is the female speech in San'an?
-the breakdowns and translations in San'an story.
-The sexual translation and breakdown of linguistic exchange in San'an story.
...having an ‘ear’ for contrasting pressures of sexual discourse or identity
in San'an, man and woman, each respective experience of Eros and language had set them desperately apart.
In whose idiom, male or female, one can grasp (only) falsehood or menace?
...as declaimer of my own stifled, tongue
my performance, corresponding to my level of literacy, and a private thesaurus, part of my subconscious and personal memories, and using the singular and irreducibly specific ensemble of somatic and psychological identity.
the ideal of a totally personal voice, of a unique ‘fit’ between an individual's expressive means and his world-image, perused by the poets.
this is not a formal hard-edged linguistic relegation, rather a metaphysical speculation
*note to self: my interest in the ʿAjā'ib al-makhlūqāt (جائب المخلوقات وغرائب الموجودات) is due to the traces it provides into verbal literacy, a living vulgar language of mix, rather than a dead structure such as Manṭiq-uṭ-Ṭayr (منطق الطیر) of Attar.
Cultures (during Attar's?) seem to expend on their vocabulary and syntax acquisitive energies and ostentations entirely lacking in their material lives.
[very interesting point by Serres regarding the language of mysticism, Attar and others.]
my translation of Attar, an interlinear version of the script, a virtual archetype of translation
think about the presence of interpreters in the building site -- Kafka's literature house
Only if men could use language without perusing meaning to the forbidden edge of the absolute.
‘a poetic vocabulary of concepts’
‘connections or affinities’
pursuit of an inter-lingua for philosophic discourse
as you can see in this writing, I am practicing loosening the tight axiom of relation of A<-->B, something other than the predecessor-successor or cause-effect pair (--> this order of structure is coming from Greek geometric,) I am trying an unordered order-of-reason that is more reflexive, symmetric, and intransitive. (the construction of the text represents each chain incomplete and displaced--Attar knows)
towards a general theory of significant sign
Can we correlate the Persian syntax with the metaphysical ambience, internal divisions[...]
(293)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%53.9[...]ultures (during Attar's?) seem to expend on their vocabulary and syntax acquisitive energies and ostentations entirely lacking in their material lives.
[very interesting point by Serres regarding the language of mysticism, Attar and others.]
my translation of Attar, an interlinear version of the script, a virtual archetype of translation
think about the presence of interpreters in the building site -- Kafka's literature house
Only if men could use language without perusing meaning to the forbidden edge of the absolute.
‘a poetic vocabulary of concepts’
‘connections or affinities’
pursuit of an inter-lingua for philosophic discourse
as you can see in this writing, I am practicing loosening the tight axiom of relation of A<-->B, something other than the predecessor-successor or cause-effect pair (--> this order of structure is coming from Greek geometric,) I am trying an unordered order-of-reason that is more reflexive, symmetric, and intransitive. (the construction of the text represents each chain incomplete and displaced--Attar knows)
towards a general theory of significant sign
Can we correlate the Persian syntax with the metaphysical ambience, internal divisions, and lyric bias of Persian people?
the language-matrix
language, informed by energies proper to itself, more comprehensive and timeless than any who makes use of it...
discourse (die Rede) would not be muffled by the ground---we walk erect [Serres]
jede Sprache ist ein Versuch---*trial
(Humboldt)
different languages penetrate to different depths
--> (every try is a) starting over with *accuracy
ok, we are starting with language from scratch, here
Literaturhaus, house has always been a metaphor for consciousness
how Attar can become interested in other lives other that San'an's that are worth living?
although we see again and again in Islamic social order the hierarchical structured relationships, I like to show the otherwise in mystic stances, and argue that the model doesn't remain static normative from the master-disciple to the authority and dependence lock, that the master-disciple relationship doesn't affirm the divine order.
and San'an is also against the notion that Sufi man is without the need of a feminine principle.
we are presented with will of the Tarsaa, the destination of San'an, and the poetic representation is feminine. the female image is strong. although at the end it has to give up -- she converts to his style. the will of the disciple is not replaced by the will of the guide, the master himself doesn't have a will.
The Tarsaa is supervising San'an's diet, sleep, and speech
[...]
(294)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%53.9[...]finities’
pursuit of an inter-lingua for philosophic discourse
as you can see in this writing, I am practicing loosening the tight axiom of relation of A<-->B, something other than the predecessor-successor or cause-effect pair (--> this order of structure is coming from Greek geometric,) I am trying an unordered order-of-reason that is more reflexive, symmetric, and intransitive. (the construction of the text represents each chain incomplete and displaced--Attar knows)
towards a general theory of significant sign
Can we correlate the Persian syntax with the metaphysical ambience, internal divisions, and lyric bias of Persian people?
the language-matrix
language, informed by energies proper to itself, more comprehensive and timeless than any who makes use of it...
discourse (die Rede) would not be muffled by the ground---we walk erect [Serres]
jede Sprache ist ein Versuch---*trial
(Humboldt)
different languages penetrate to different depths
--> (every try is a) starting over with *accuracy
ok, we are starting with language from scratch, here
Literaturhaus, house has always been a metaphor for consciousness
how Attar can become interested in other lives other that San'an's that are worth living?
although we see again and again in Islamic social order the hierarchical structured relationships, I like to show the otherwise in mystic stances, and argue that the model doesn't remain static normative from the master-disciple to the authority and dependence lock, that the master-disciple relationship doesn't affirm the divine order.
and San'an is also against the notion that Sufi man is without the need of a feminine principle.
we are presented with will of the Tarsaa, the destination of San'an, and the poetic representation is feminine. the female image is strong. although at the end it has to give up -- she converts to his style. the will of the disciple is not replaced by the will of the guide, the master himself doesn't have a will.
The Tarsaa is supervising San'an's diet, sleep, and speech
[I have become more interested in the term ‘tradition'---and more suspicious of preoccupations such as ‘invention’ as modernized and capitalist terms.]
tradition: an act of memory based on a salience-effect of shared knowledge
(ein Akt der Erinnerung basiert auf einer Hervorspringen-Effekt der gemeinsamen Kenntnisse)
-there is a sequence (where is the individual terms within it?)
-my storytelling is about: describing relations of inversion, extension, inclusion, analogy, etc. between mythical, lyrical, or even scientific ‘beings’ that are (1) *conventional* (recognizable repertoire), and (2) *closed* (refer to certain predefined situations and [...]
(295)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%54[...]head to greet his devotees but only to realize that all of them have left him in silence!]
and then Rumi goes in length in differences between mud and water. [the “prison” of mud for the water, who “belongs” to the sea, and this is a problem, the mud doesn't want to dry, therefore doesn't let go of the water, and so on.]
what the image of the sinking ship has to do with the anti-clarity movements of the Sufis?
[and then suddenly: pishe and bishe (پیشه و بیشه)---lion comes out of Pishe(business)/Bishe(bushes) and rubs you off,
bush =/= Arbeit/craft]
also, Rumi opens the mechanics of praying in this story, he zooms in Daghughi's performance, the God is force-handed into the pray, because the human prayer temporarily simulates nonexistence (فنا). the prayer becomes Nichts and God takes over both the position of pray and its answer; a site where subjectivity evacuates, almost mechanically generates a form of existential void that God functionally cannot not fill (ejabat - اجابت).
...................................
what time is it for San'an?
switching time-zones, from quotidian to ontological, transcendental to experimental
his jet-lags
exhaustion of metaphysics
I am just alerting to a relation to time
(in a nano-structural sense---are we fast? slow? which all these classics and texts I am having here.)
how much time does it take or took for the San'an's students to hook on to the teacher, to the difficult philosophical program that each teaching brings to bear?
...................................
I am introducing myself to you
...................................
#postscript
***Sheikh-e-San'an*** was the Old Testament itself.
It was the perfection of whatever I say more.
(Was it she at the shrine of Sheikh for fifty years?)
Cherished with the perfect disciple. He was a disciple of Kahn, wow!! (Who is Kahn?!)
Ministry of austerity, day and night; Practiced the science of offspringing. Discovering the (secrets that are) revealed. *It was a life to be had* --->
But Hajj (حج) had claws instead of proximity. He didn't know the meaning of his own extremes. He did not sink any traditions.
•Leaders who were in love with him. Wild-gardens (باغ وحشها) themselves came to him.
*A hairy spiritual man.
trotzdem, in greatness and strong authorities, her illness and frailty found him. And he correctly found the tail—people's definitions of joy and sorrow—an idol in the world of science.
Although the Qibla (قبله) his compass could see, a few nights on still he dreamed, ‘the fall of a shrine in the center.’
Betty would prostrate on durability. (Who is Betty?).
He woke up to the world as a lifesaver, and said, “Alas!” this time, “Joseph has succeeded to [...]
(296)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%54.1[...] throughout the past century in the Middle East. the performance of a knowledge-zoom in the hypnotic effects, nondialogue, nonnarrative, and radical exile spaces that have emerged in eastern postmodernism to reverse and supersede the question of modernity.
by traversing the domains of revolutionary ideology, avant-garde literature, new-wave cinema, extremist thought, and protests from the limitless imaginative reservoir of their political, poetic, spiritual, and aesthetic predecessors--this projects examines a Middle Eastern navigation of identity (via the concept of the ‘mask’) and its particular modest/hostile modes of resistance (via the concept of the ‘text’). visiting sites such as: subversive epitomes of charismatic authority undertaking a poetic articulation, when chaotic imagination makes contact with nothingness, the will to chaos, and inscription of fatality in literature-as-moral-transaction.
[pressure points:]
mobile within a speculative/suggestive milieu, this project is interested in examining literary sites such as Kelile-o Demne's communal forms of fragile human cohabitation (11th century political/bestial fable), Rumi's simulation of nonexistence (13th century production of schizo-darvish), Hafez's engineering metaphor-factory (14th century imaginal faculty of extreme presence), Hedayat's Buf Koor the Shelley's Frankenstein's monster favorate book (20th century forms of renunciation), Amir Naderi and Forough Farrokhzad films (20th century strategies of withdrawal), Jala Al Ahmad and Ali Shariati writings (20th century fatal concepts of the outside), [list to be modified]
[background:]
this form of half-digestive omnivorous work is situated in a larger trajectory of creative investigations, which i have been busy with under “storytelling,” are dealing with the questions of conditions in which non-antagonistic critical encounters between ordered conventions of knowing and chaotic textuality/imagination is possible. to take the mind where it does not belong. to the rogue arsenals of middle eastern reservoir of imagination and its locatable mimicries. to its repetitive scaffoldings, fugitive trajectories, its performances of fatal experience of the text. to unload its corrosive textualities and let them run their acids across one another. this project is interested in both the unleashing and the pleasure of watching the text die.
part of the disposition of this proposal is also the suggestion that the two collaborators of this project, Jassem and Foad, are invested in those notions in their practice. Foad Farahani's poem “farar” enacting contemporary artistic formations and past-compound-mask, and Jassem Hindi transnational poetic agency, are both artists with acute appetite for chaotic imagination. Their instinct for the fusion of nothingness and excess, appearance and disappearance, creation and destruction, is at once carv[...]
(297)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%55.2[...]s of middle eastern reservoir of imagination and its locatable mimicries. to its repetitive scaffoldings, fugitive trajectories, its performances of fatal experience of the text. to unload its corrosive textualities and let them run their acids across one another. this project is interested in both the unleashing and the pleasure of watching the text die.
part of the disposition of this proposal is also the suggestion that the two collaborators of this project, Jassem and Foad, are invested in those notions in their practice. Foad Farahani's poem “farar” enacting contemporary artistic formations and past-compound-mask, and Jassem Hindi transnational poetic agency, are both artists with acute appetite for chaotic imagination. Their instinct for the fusion of nothingness and excess, appearance and disappearance, creation and destruction, is at once carved and unpacked in the literary-poetic mosaics of their work: Foad's use of middle-persian mystic sensibilities and Jassem's combination of intensive encounter with the poetics of apocalypse and acid textuality.
My work has been about: learning/training in the crafts of noticing little traps of semiotic and material trans-species cohabiting, mutual coproduction of economics, ecology, affect-studies, metaphysical household studies, and understanding of the orders of the natural and human world, in the particular history/story of the East. in my projects i take history as the overlapping tracks and traces and many tranjectories of world-making, human and nonhuman. the textual performance of this project is in the effects of my research and practice with the questions of globalism and inheritance: difficult translational spaces, communicative nonunderstanding, relational aesthetics, and the differential sites of reading. and i use performative lectures: a material practice, hybrid in digital manual tactile operations of speaking.
...................................
“Four Masks of an Eastern Postmodernism”
insurgent, poet, mystic, sectarian
| | | |
chaos, violence, illusion, silence
•(sectarianism) apocalyptic writing
•(poetic) will to chaos
•(mystic) exile space
•(insurgent's) otherless subjectivity
یاغی
شاعر
نوچه
زاهد
[performative methodology]
for the collaborative part of sharjah project, i like to propose four “masks” (or “rotational avatars”) of subjective anarchy, that are few among many existential prototypes and subjectivity constellations of eastern postmodernism, as collaborative sites of encounter with four (or less and not necessarily individual) artists/participants.
•collaborators’ masks: chaos, violence, illusion, silence / (yaghi یاغی, sha'er شاعر, noche نوچه, zahed زاهد)--each endeavoring to discern the ontological possibilities[...]
(298)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%55.3[...]west vision (immensified)
the cyclopean organ (of doing/thinking) ==> ‘oracle = explosive device’
|
--> wisdom + rage
--> boundless confined
--> precision + enormity
--> nature + technology
--> betrayal + devotion
|
....three brothers سه برادر
----[they were said to have primordial understanding, having monitored the building of creation itself--yet this brings no consolation تسلى, no spiritual composure ارامش, only chronic infuriation, such that they remain at once eternal and impatient]
----[they are gargantuan, immortal, and among the rarest exceptions to be released from the underworld after the great defeat of the chthonic orders, and yet brought back to the surface to dwell among/away from men and the new gods in hard labor on a faraway island, discharged from one hell only to find another imprisonment]
----[they alone can swing the hammers that form mountains, bedrock, ocean floors, tectonic plates, seisamic, yet there is such insane detail even within their most jagged strokes, a punishing symbiosis of the minuscule and the colossal]
----[they are the initial inventors of the earth's wild proportions, yet now are condemned to serve as apprentices to a lesser artisan-metallurgist god interested only in functional architecture and instrumentalized objects]
----[they are traitors to the new line of anthropomorphic gods, having fought against their false ascent, and thus still fiercely loyal to the old titanic codes, even in their captivity and forced collusion, forever scarred by the robbery perpetrated against the older deities, able to picture the drainage ditches into which the others are now outcast, such that each episode of mastication and uproar is hurled like a psychic bomb intended to free this discarded confederation]
isolationism + monumentality
(teratological formations in modernity)
inner contemplation / evacuation
attunement to the nothing
athleticism of stillness
[interiority (feels the need to?) stretch out into exteriority:] (to transfer) personal self-contained oblivion --onto--> universal plane
(Setareh's event:) one part shadow, one part mist, one part smoke and mirrors *.*.*.
...one part strategic essentialism, one part deconstructive smokescreen
part amateur, part pseudo-scholar, part civil servant, part serial killer
part vigilante, part crusader, part cult member, part thug
a site for hermeticism (recession from humans) ==> elevation
[inoperative community =/=] *excessive community*, where players must remain mesmerized, enchanted, and vigilant
sectarian <--> full charismatic authority -->? morshed (=/= “pseudo-autonomous passivity”)
مرشد --> with its own matrix of study: hypnotic exchange [i[...]
(299)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%55.6[...]reward of the survivor (--> the self-conscious affirmation of having endured and gone beyond)
slave moralities
the *self-with-no-other* (too far gone)
Hegel's master-slave dialectic (an insight into the skeleton of domination): the basic way in which it is always the master (self) who requires recognition from an external entity (the othered slave) [--> Westworld TV series base: master remains in a state of complete dependency for his own self-definition on the slave, whereas the slave can gradually ascend toward an independent consciousness by virtue of his subjection --> “its own being-for-self” (=/= multispecies companionship)]
or
Spikvak's dissolution of the master-slave dialectic: proposition for individuals to imagine themselves as both “receivers and givers” (distinction between ‘agency'[as rationally legislated and institutionally validated] and ‘subjectivity'[as unrepresentability])
--> this intervention is successful in greeting modernity as a global responsibility
***decolonization as a populist mode of resistance
otherless individuation:
•the hermit
•the mercenary
•the maniac
the lowest common denominator turned into a metaphysics
authentic malevolence
*objective cruelty* (of the modern epoch and its dialectic strap) can only be undone by (a non-matching iteration of) *subjective cruelty*
*!!!
local: a forced site of radical alterity
(be careful with the notion of premodern local [~= anti-modern] --> retrieved moment of premodernity. --> rhetoric of retrieve and retrieving / remembering / )
(detachment is a genre)
justice: a sacrosanct universal
to protect one concept above all others, (justice)
undeconstructible call to planetary justive**
original philosopher being called:
-Heidegger support Nazism
-Adorno turned his back on postwar German student movement
-Foucault endorsed Islomic front in the Iranian revolution and Zionism at different times
Spikvak's project:
to articulate an escape from the border position of otherness
to make indivuality the culprit متهم beneath the heels of packed generalities
==> a negational subjectivity: preluding any form of existential action that is not politically oriented
(Mohaghegh:) otherness cannot be the best point of departure for resistance --> one walks over the abyss; one does not stay within it
belligerence --> resentment
“an Eastern postmodernity cannot therefore come about through the constitution of aplanetary subjectivity, which fearfully resembles the liberalist rhetoric of universalism and in the wrong hands could even potentially serve as an underhanded discursive alibi for globalization, but must [...]
(300)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%56[...] the self-regulating disciplinary apparatus of the modern state) }<-- they don't get it: Middle Eastern response of Adonis, Darwish, Shamlu, Hedayat, and others. that is, to perceive modernity as the manifold extension of an eternal atrocity
the problem is those who have no patience for either concepts of “the world” or “the historical”
(eastern insurgent has been:)
•technically innovative
•epistemologically and ideologically distinctive
•existentially grounded in the waters of ‘what has always been’
Mohaghegh making a link between Hassan Sabbah and Ahmad Shamlu:
•Sabbah: leader of the Ismaili assassins and keeper of their Nizari fortress at Alamut: that he was said to have never left his inner quarters [the library, courtyard, or bedchamber] for thirty-five years except twice to stand on the rooftop and look out beyond the mountain --> this is the worldview of the eternalist at work. He participated in ‘change,’ manipulated them toward fatally constructive ends even, but did not honor these developments as a journey of any substantial kind.
[flash forward a thousand years...]
•Shamlu: same attitude: when he was asked to comment on his country's most recent uprisings offered the following metaphor: he said to think of the event as when a man who is sleeping on one side of his body for most of the night begins to ache and so rolls over to his other side and continues sleeping --> the movement is not sufficient as to prove impressive
(Mohaghegh stresses in postmodern Middle Eastern thought:) the prominence, variability, and magnification of the willing subject
-Foucault's early outright support for the Iranian Revolution of 1979
-Baudrillard's theoretical flirtation with Islamic terrorism
-Badiou and Zizek's dazzled looks toward the Arab Spring
}--> they mistake fireworks for explosions, and ill-equipped for such far-off archaeological digs
internal saboteur
heritage of deconstruction:
•parody
•parasitism
•mimicry
Rumi points to those madmen who would wash their wounds in blood
... we are no longer interested in the face of the other but only the other's defacement
the destruction that cleanses
the rabidness that is a precipice
(what i am learning from Shahrzad, i wish and my work has been always about the ways of learning: ****to buy my people time to think and breathe in other directions****)
an eastern step: to make language peripatetic (salek سالک wandering from place to place on foot [why not make it to the Wonderland's Alice?]) ==> (a non-regimented) textuality within a body that charges --> *uncivil incarnation*
*killer's freedom*
freedom
-Heidegger: (massive difference between) a self-automating fre[...]
(301)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%56.3[...]handed-over, Frankenstein) and a hard-won-freedom attained through the rending-apart of a closed world (through the intractable سرپيچی)
-Sartre: a self-conscious authorship of the world, condemned to a certain responsibility before the event of one's own existence [--> the problem occurs when someone made it their task, duty, or entertainment to compel the other to experience such freedom]
-Nietzsche: ‘freedom = exclusive gift of the enemy’ ~ ‘respect-for-life = euphemism for death’ [life (if it has worth) is meant to be disrespected, contested, and hounded] --> ‘insurgent = warrior’(<-- the substance remains the same)
Adonis: “don't come closer, the wound is nearer than you / don't come closer, the wound is more beautiful than you” (@Hoda, Ali )
ancillary فرعى کمکى, تابع, مستخدم بومى --> کلفت
avarice حرص
affective overreaction <~=-> radical coldness
>
**literal**
western inability to understand the turbulant reaction abroad --> loss of the power of the literal (--> *democracy depends and works with the literal*:)
literal has given way in the west to the transference of image, language, and thought to a purely representational or metaphoric domain (to talk about things, but not speak the event itself)
“one cannot grow angered over a film, sculpture, treatise, or drawing (or a dance), then one also cannot experience captivation with a film, sculpture, treatise, or drawing” (Mohaghegh)
[yet the literal is sneaky in that is always decontextualizes, it vibrates and swings so conspicuously from its point of origin]
(old Marxist, anarchist, and postmodern critique: ‘hyper-mediation + technological diffusion ==> obliteration of the sharpness of the senses in modernity’) =/= loss of the radioactive potential of the world of appearances --> *rabbit chaser* [a mask that i am invested in,] a middle eastern existential cost at stake : the myriad and triggers that alone make possible the descent into Alice's Wonderland--the child chases the the white rabbit(~a partial flashing image) without real thought to its enigmatic reasons or destinations (“why and where is he going?”) Alice (like Janina) is only consumed by his color, speed, movement, and nervous incantation افسون of lateness*** (--> metaphorology of “depth” in east)
code of urgency: “mean what you say and say what you mean”
a (monumental problem or) discord in the West between: saying (or showing in terms of images) and meaning () }--> problem for the propensity of acting, running, hungering, wanting, and living itself --this-is-why--> most groundbreaking ideational products in the West often fail to penetrate enough to excite or instigate (the avant-garde can not longer shock [--> bankruptcy of the contemporary artists in europe]) =/= in the East: 1400 year mythologies can still provoke hyste[...]
(302)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%56.4[...]er of the literal (--> *democracy depends and works with the literal*:)
literal has given way in the west to the transference of image, language, and thought to a purely representational or metaphoric domain (to talk about things, but not speak the event itself)
“one cannot grow angered over a film, sculpture, treatise, or drawing (or a dance), then one also cannot experience captivation with a film, sculpture, treatise, or drawing” (Mohaghegh)
[yet the literal is sneaky in that is always decontextualizes, it vibrates and swings so conspicuously from its point of origin]
(old Marxist, anarchist, and postmodern critique: ‘hyper-mediation + technological diffusion ==> obliteration of the sharpness of the senses in modernity’) =/= loss of the radioactive potential of the world of appearances --> *rabbit chaser* [a mask that i am invested in,] a middle eastern existential cost at stake : the myriad and triggers that alone make possible the descent into Alice's Wonderland--the child chases the the white rabbit(~a partial flashing image) without real thought to its enigmatic reasons or destinations (“why and where is he going?”) Alice (like Janina) is only consumed by his color, speed, movement, and nervous incantation افسون of lateness*** (--> metaphorology of “depth” in east)
code of urgency: “mean what you say and say what you mean”
a (monumental problem or) discord in the West between: saying (or showing in terms of images) and meaning () }--> problem for the propensity of acting, running, hungering, wanting, and living itself --this-is-why--> most groundbreaking ideational products in the West often fail to penetrate enough to excite or instigate (the avant-garde can not longer shock [--> bankruptcy of the contemporary artists in europe]) =/= in the East: 1400 year mythologies can still provoke hysteria and radical fever }<-- a scary difference***!!
*the visual, the auditory, the spiritual, the philosophical are still fulminating currencies of animation in the context (in the East --> that is why most art theory and conceptions don't apply to everywhere at the same time. values of European contemporary art scene don't fully dig the notion of art in middle east)
Mohaghegh asking: how can the sentence, picture, musical note, poetic, stanza, ideological or theological concoction, genrate so much energy in certain atmospheres, unleashing irregular storms while reviving millennia-old ones? [--> Stewart's affect theory and atmospheric attunement could be helpful]
a fable of difference (between W&E):
a tension between an agoraphobic West (with its endless barricades, shelters, and technocracies of dilution رقيق سازى raghigh-sazi) & an overexhilarated East (with its endless throngs, zealotries, dogmatic caresses, and emergencies)
dysmorphic labor
emetic estefraghi استفراغ اور
[...]
(303)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%56.4[...]-- a scary difference***!!
*the visual, the auditory, the spiritual, the philosophical are still fulminating currencies of animation in the context (in the East --> that is why most art theory and conceptions don't apply to everywhere at the same time. values of European contemporary art scene don't fully dig the notion of art in middle east)
Mohaghegh asking: how can the sentence, picture, musical note, poetic, stanza, ideological or theological concoction, genrate so much energy in certain atmospheres, unleashing irregular storms while reviving millennia-old ones? [--> Stewart's affect theory and atmospheric attunement could be helpful]
a fable of difference (between W&E):
a tension between an agoraphobic West (with its endless barricades, shelters, and technocracies of dilution رقيق سازى raghigh-sazi) & an overexhilarated East (with its endless throngs, zealotries, dogmatic caresses, and emergencies)
dysmorphic labor
emetic estefraghi استفراغ اور
[*]insurgent = revolutionary of the unreal (=/= [Nasser's kind of] the traditional freedom-fighter who picks up a weapon and takes to the mountains, singing anthems of liberation or reveling in the simple metanarrative of some diorama شهر فرنگ of good and evil)
the insurgent does not fall victim to:
•collective mythologies of nation, language, and culture
•elusive rhetoric of ethics and justice ==> provide power with a convincing smokescreen
the third world insurgents are anarchists of a higher order of *aneurysmal consciousness and affect*
(gaze of the aneurysmal:) an uncompromising gaze that sees what power tries so hard to mask--that there is nothing there to see
*practice of irregular warfare ==> irregular subject of war*
(weeds of) modernity:
•as ideology --> power
•as institutional mechanism --> society
•as phenomenology --> perception
•as ontology --> being/death
•as cultural emergence --> spectacle
•as temporal orchestration --> time
•as configuration --> body/space
•as political economy --> capital
•as epistemological framework --> knowledge
•as discursive apparatus --> language/meaning
•as epoch --> history
immediacy =/=? alienation
brutal =/=? idealistic
retrograde =/=? futuristic
esoteric =/=? banal
technological =/=? carnal
genesis =/=? apocalypse
system =/=? chaos
...................................
iran: transition from a semi-colonial to postcolonial space --> anticolonial islamic front
the self-other construct
***islamic revolutionary thought borrows heavily from Marxist theory (at the same time equating them with colonial mastery)
}==> forge a specific revolutionary mind-set out of i[...]
(304)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%56.5[...]a vital participant in the abuse and mutilation of his own locality
(a Dandilian policemen remarking:) “They [westerns] are not beggers like us. they all have private cars. their whores spend four or five hours a day just playing around in the beauty shops.” --> for Sa'edi that is the pathological fantasy endemic to the inner workings of a colonized mind. the third world subject perceiving itself as the negational instantiation of occidental greatness ==> swallowing down the civilizational hierarchies of its oppressor's self-projecting image
(preparing for the coming of rapist colonizer) the Dandilians rush to make the Madame's house clean and tidy: “[...]the curtains had been drawn aside. Pots of geranium had been placed on the wall and beside the steps[...]” ~-> Baudrillard's theory of simulation : the Dandilian presenting to the colonizer a Disneyland, *a play of illusions and phantasms* [~->? Dubai: self-affirmation via the domination of the constructed other]
(the american officer leaves the next morning with a mocking laughter and he refuses to play and the Dandilians can't do anything)--> the civilizational dichotomy remains intact in spite of the horrifying events that have transpired, with the trafficked deflowered child serving as a metaphor for the cultural-political mistreatment of the third world under colonial rule
on Akhavan's “Adamak” (“Stick-Figure”) [--> historical treachery committed within Akhavan's nostalgic Stick-Figure]
demonization of the television's arrival
-television as a “magical box” an artificial phenomenon that “entrances” its audience
again the idea of authenticity is largely emphasized here, as the television is perceived as a “foreign” entity and therefore an enemy to the millennial history of the province
new medium =/= indigenous modes of communication/expression (of which the roving storyteller is the ultimate instantiation)
(poignancy of the) poet's anthropomorphic profile of the new technologically oriented media
-Akhavan's representation symbolizes the storyteller himself, lamenting his own erasure from the moment of the now (or it is his prophecy for the imminent destruction of the new media in the coming islamic regime?)
--> aesthetic testament to the possibility for a third world revolutionary imagination to emerge from the ruins of the colonial era [, *from the ruins of the empire*]
--> representing the third world as in a state of complete existential-cultural atrophy (tahlil تحليل رفتن) @Hoda
**anticolonial literature reaffirms the all-encompassing grasp of modernity over peripheral subjectivity [--> marginal leader (Mamitua Saber's Marginal Leadership in a Culture Contact Situation)]
(Mohaghegh > Huyssen on Baudrillard:)
Baudrillard's notion of the *silent mass* of the spectators disables any analysis of *heterogeneous subject position [...]
(305)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%56.8[...] critically-minded humanist social science schollar artists is the tendency to use critical theory (as diverse as it is) *to interrogate reality*
for us ([left inheritance] as postcolonialist, feminist, or biopolitician) the modus operandi of critical theory is to derealize, is to say: “this is an expression of paar.” “this is discursive formation.” “this is material assembly of objects.” ~= (an attempt to say) “this isn't real.” <-- this has been essentially a really powerful force and set of political strategies of the left @apass; this modus operandi is a killer blow for climate change from a leftist perspective (because the climate change is very real) (=/= speculative realism)]
Khomeini's cassette-tape revolution (radio medium infused with anticolonial propaganda) demonstrates the insufficiency of Benjamin's stance that “mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art...”
the symbolic fury of Khomeini's voice is only magnified in its cult-value through its transmission over the air waves, testifying more to MacLuhan's interpretation of the persuasive impact of radio
--> technological media in iranian anticolonialism does not elicit the democratizing effect anticipated by Benjamin
from--> metaphysical awe --to--> banalized horror
each year the islamic republic itself reenacts the arrival of the Khomeini in tehran airport through a procession of myriad cardboard interact and converse with these mock-images of the imam in a kind of makeshift, state-run passion play
post 1979 iranian cinematic renaissance
•medium of film achieved in the decolonized space
•hooked into the contemporaneity of the localized apocalyptic (infinitesimal becomings)
•present as close an interpretation of the unthinkable strangeness of reality as possible
•on an ongoing desertion of the real
Adorno: “works that make socially univocal discursive judgments thereby negate art as well as themselves” @Laura's judgment on the fascist body (--> can consumption be resistance? @Laura: becoming fascist body ==> ? )
the medium of film-making in present-day iran attempts solely to bring the crypto-vantage of the everyday into obscurity-ridden view (to leave less clear --> my pre-2012 videos ‘Vagabond,’ ‘Constant Prince,’ and ‘city of domes’), allowing for a critical distance on the part of the spectator to examine one's own being-in-the-world in raw, blurred form (the truth is haze itself --> Hoda)
exoticization of the local --> reduce it to a nativist enterprise
(Mohaghegh > Tomlinson:) the everyday culture has ingested foreign elements from exogenous sources, with the various elementss gradually brcoming “naturalized” within it =/= image of pure, internally homogenous, authentic, indigenous culture
Sharjah art foundation of the Emirate's *po[...]
(306)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%57[...]ion of its righteous self-determination* ==> ***a mimetic intercourse between art and historical life*** [<-- this is most desired from artists today]
Adorno's premises (--> “progress”):
•unabashed use of the universalizing abstraction of “humanity”
•detrimental reconfirmation of a world-historical process inagurated by the alliance of enlightenment epistemology and the commodity form
}==> Adorno's paranoiac tone (of infection, contamination, threat) ==> rhetoric of false and true consciousness ==> proclivity (تمايل طبيعى به چيز بد) for perpetual judgment and truth-seeking
--(enlightenment pathology)--> grand theories of degradation and decline about whenever Adorno delves into critique of the world [--> habit of most of my friends and artists...] ==> (purist theology of negation) ***reverse-messianicism*** (~= “he can do nothing” هیچ کاری نمیشه کرد، همیشه همینجوری بوده)
}=/= chaotic engagement (with the questions of art, history, self)
Adorno's dedication to the Marxian perception of historical Being as an intrinsically teleological functioning ==> his intense cynicism
=/= Schopenhauer's pessimism
=/= Nietzschean intervention of *treating history as metaphorical illusion*, [*]history: a hallow significatory edifice that nevertheless manufactures meaning, directionality, and causality (for an otherwise anarchic world) --> iranian chaoticism [and why Nietzsche is so widely read in Iran], for Nietzschean: “art [--> eruptive potentiality of the will to truth] =/= history [--> desolation of the will to power]” --> the disparity between art and historical reality becomes the very source of chaos-consciousness saliency
ferocious risk of greatness & the asphyxiating decadence of mediocrity
(Ali's) peotic-becoming aestheticized existence
irresolute =/= reactive =/= dismissive
continental philosophy's approach to the associations of three spheres: history[==>], art, subjectivity --✕--> chaotic nonstate: clash between a hypersubjectivized aesthetic & the barriers of historical Being (--> annihilation of both “I” and the historical)
Benjamin's subjectivity must defend itself against the profane rotations of the historical (--> apocalyptic battle)
Benjaminian “angel of history” ravaged of its innocence at the hands of progress and then restored by overriding strength of the historical materialist:
demonization of the monstrosity of the historical + celebratory poeticization of the subject
=/= Nietzsche and Hedayat's subjectivity [should] not to be held in a “derivative placement =/= the here and now” (one must imagine beyond طالع بینی <-- شخصیت فراسو نگر) --> (card reading) one must place under scrutiny the commensurate manner in which the historical is navigated, orchestrated, and then overcome [=/= alibi for some alt[...]
(307)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%57.6[...] barriers of historical Being (--> annihilation of both “I” and the historical)
Benjamin's subjectivity must defend itself against the profane rotations of the historical (--> apocalyptic battle)
Benjaminian “angel of history” ravaged of its innocence at the hands of progress and then restored by overriding strength of the historical materialist:
demonization of the monstrosity of the historical + celebratory poeticization of the subject
=/= Nietzsche and Hedayat's subjectivity [should] not to be held in a “derivative placement =/= the here and now” (one must imagine beyond طالع بینی <-- شخصیت فراسو نگر) --> (card reading) one must place under scrutiny the commensurate manner in which the historical is navigated, orchestrated, and then overcome [=/= alibi for some alternative discourse of literary-philosophical humanism or aesthetic transcendence]
[?what is Adrijana's card reading relation to] the desire to divorce history from any potential taxonomy of meaning or intelligibility --Hedayat--> “one is confined in a proud, deceptive consciousness... that rests upon the merciless, the insatiable, the murderous, in the indifference of his ignorance--hanging in dreams”
the poem i wrote in 2010 “our metaphor” https://archive.org/details/ourmetaphor is an example of (my Nietzschean and Hedayatian influence, to address) the indeterminacy and illogic necessarily associated with a chaotic world
(for Nietzsche:) positivism = historical subjectivity's fictive interiority --leads--> decadence of a will to truth, attributing to events a rational look by fixing them within universalizing patterns of signification
Nietzsche: “it is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations” =/= fraud of the historical ==>
•Platonic idealism
•messianic grandiosity of the Hegelian world-historical process
•
•*rational historicism: a discursive phenomenon indis[...]
(308)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%57.7[...]archive.org/details/ourmetaphor is an example of (my Nietzschean and Hedayatian influence, to address) the indeterminacy and illogic necessarily associated with a chaotic world
(for Nietzsche:) positivism = historical subjectivity's fictive interiority --leads--> decadence of a will to truth, attributing to events a rational look by fixing them within universalizing patterns of signification
Nietzsche: “it is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations” =/= fraud of the historical ==>
•Platonic idealism
•messianic grandiosity of the Hegelian world-historical process
•
•*rational historicism: a discursive phenomenon indispensably linked to enlightenment epistemology and its overriding drive for world-mastery*
}=/= explosiveness of a chaotic universe + experiential immediacy of this creative-destructive effusion نشد
Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy (seemingly) a study of the pre-Socratic culture of Dionysian ecstasy --but--> a self-projected hallucination of antiquity ==> *theme of history as subjective dreamscape* (--> my way of working historical ajayeb is Nietzschean[?])
-in Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche wages an archaeological assault against the composition and enforcement of moral and metaphysical (from religion to law, discussion of the ascetic ideal and the origin of ressentiment and slave morality)
misunderstanding of “the will”
Nietzsche's skepticism (is his a priori) --> the link between chaos and a certain poetic evocation
*monumental*: seeking out heroic episodes from the the past as examples of imminent قريب الوقوع greatness within the present and future (resurrecting examples of nobility) <-- an ethos behind which large-scale causes are mobilized (+ antiquarian ~=) [*]archive: a harmless reverence for that which has elapsed, leading largely to a compulsive preservation of faded events for no other purpose than that of ensuring their permanence in memory
=/= [*]critical: the courage for insurgency and disavowal of historical legacy*** ==> realization of an alternative counterfuture in the present
“He is blind to everything behind him, new sounds are muffled and meaningless though his perceptions were never so intimately felt in all their color, light and music, and he seems to grasp them with his five senses together . . . His whole case is most indefensible; it is narrow, ungrateful to the past, blind to danger, deaf to warnings, a small living eddy in a dead sea of night and forgetfulness. And yet this condition, unhistorical and antihistorical throughout, is the cradle not only of unjust action, but of every just and justifiable action in the world.” --> sounds like one of my masks “the sleep-walker”
in Hedayat
nihilistic absurdist approach to both metaphysics and society
distancing himself from the symbolics of divine authority
forsaking empty promi[...]
(310)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%57.7[...]monumental*: seeking out heroic episodes from the the past as examples of imminent قريب الوقوع greatness within the present and future (resurrecting examples of nobility) <-- an ethos behind which large-scale causes are mobilized (+ antiquarian ~=) [*]archive: a harmless reverence for that which has elapsed, leading largely to a compulsive preservation of faded events for no other purpose than that of ensuring their permanence in memory
=/= [*]critical: the courage for insurgency and disavowal of historical legacy*** ==> realization of an alternative counterfuture in the present
“He is blind to everything behind him, new sounds are muffled and meaningless though his perceptions were never so intimately felt in all their color, light and music, and he seems to grasp them with his five senses together . . . His whole case is most indefensible; it is narrow, ungrateful to the past, blind to danger, deaf to warnings, a small living eddy in a dead sea of night and forgetfulness. And yet this condition, unhistorical and antihistorical throughout, is the cradle not only of unjust action, but of every just and justifiable action in the world.” --> sounds like one of my masks “the sleep-walker”
in Hedayat
nihilistic absurdist approach to both metaphysics and society
distancing himself from the symbolics of divine authority
forsaking empty promises of metaphysical longing
consciousness rushes to disguise and camouflage its own lack of purpose
حاجی آقا Haji Agha: “my existence is useless [...] hence the greatest and most noble poem in my life will mark the destruction of you and your kind”
--> streamsof betrayal, defilement, seclusion, degradation, anonymous deaths
(subversively, through a series of hallucinogenic contraptions) crash the unchained terrain of neo-fantasia into the claustrophobic region of socalled reality
این همه سودا است to return with fascinated sockets to the world-as-illusion
chaos in حکایت باخه و دو بط in Kelile Demne --> history: the myriad series of spectral constructs by which subjectivity comes to be constituted as an ordered entity
chaotic desire --> a temporary pact with radical aloneness --> Hoda
=/= homogenizing abstraction of “human”
(Foad, Hoda, Sartre's) exilic disposition, always alone, always apart
tranjective frenzy
to come down from the mountain and infest the back-alleys --> wtf!
deterritorialization one's owb footprints --> identitatian technologies
@Shervin commission the wanderer: a nameless eyeless character sitting on the outskirts of a wasteland in conversation with his own shadow --> (beyond time and space) as a gesture toward discarded worlds without clocks or maps --> *the will to aimlessness*
(Hedayat in The Blind Owl) “I had no idea in what direction I was going [...] I did not care whe[...]
(311)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%57.8[...]= riot crowd remains material, visceral, a carnavalesque sensation, and therefore formless [--> Elen's response to apass offered “community"]
(with the intention of it lasting, *nothing deserves to stay “as is”* [?!])
*stale archetypes of the collective knowing subject (“they”)*
problem with ‘periphery’
***deadly and deathly delusion that there is a “within”***
-the periphery in its own removed site it circumscribes a sacred boundary
--> exilic consciousness
-interior sense of belonging: remaining an outsider event --> using treachery for the sake of vitality [~~>? Elen's *playful betrayal* (in apass environment) to emerge (and inflect) herself at will]
what makes the exile (=/= the knowing subject) more fascinating is that *it does not need to exist* (--> the ‘need to exist’ lies at the root of the knowing subject's violence)
the community is desperate to exist ==degenerates==> into totalitarian declaration of its rights; obsessed with constructing mythologies of presence (and being represented)
=/= the exile (the animal, the child, the shadow, the monster, the machine, the thing, the contagion) carries none of the anxiety of ontological authenticity. they come and go, as impersonal, nameless, metamorphosing creatures, never too long in the same place, always with some *new game* or *secret to pursue*
communities --> distinctly humanist : importing a kind of micro-universality --> ladem with oppressive suggestions of an inborn ethical obligation (originally from the enlightenment) ==became==> source of judgment ==> taxonomies of power ==> disenchantment, alienation, genocidal playback
Mohaghegh suggests the always social logic of community formation is toxic, “the death sentence to its mutability and actual freedom” --> to avoid the “trappings of a social framework, with its false codifications of ethical responsibility, and seek more elusive pathways of dialogue and juncture” (--> i am not sure about it, this could be also problematic)
...................................
[title]
**chaotic topology of imagination**
Ali's constant antagonism (in his work and in his speech acts)
Mohaghegh's use of “third-world authors”
they write the unnamable --&--> execute a vast becoming (of devastating scale and proportion)
to place these authors in immediate exchange with “western” thought --> to allow for a toxic, فرسایشی abrasive confrontation that reveals the outstanding distance from such conventions of knowing [--> my work is about this, to visist (visit + resist) these sites of critical encounter and embed them in my performative acts ==> to provide/produce a condition in which a non-antagonistic critical encounter between the “Western” order of knowing and the chaotic textualities of “Middle East” is possible]
epistemic [...]
(313)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%58.3[...]e signifier of jouissance within Elen's performance
Elen's retribution of the boy who symbolically ‘have’ the phallus --> (we are back to) castration
**Elen's true woman-power lies with giving up her phallic identification. (the image of innovation in her work: she is still busy with ‘inovative creativity,’ inherently a phallic function). this is a hope, the symbolic phallus ins her work (and in anyone's work) is often in the place of *the lack of the signifier in the Other* (that can never be filled?)
infantile sexuality
jouissance: enjoyment from indirect pleasure (for example enjoyment of organizing pleasure)
Lacan --> pleasure makes us guilty + without guilt there is no pleasure
*chaotic topology of imagination*( --> more like a pile of sugar =/= Freudian topology of consciousness/unconsciousness)--> erasing the boundary between interiority and exteriority
--> (once-unitary) subject ==> an oblique network }--> that is us, iranians
--> schizoid view of nomadological thought
separate methodologies of blurring and fragmentation:
1- shadow
2- mirror image
Hedayat's shadow (his palpable aesthetic-existential operation--in The Blind Owl) [=/= Kafka's metamorphoses]: skeletal transfiguration of a conceivably human form into a *shadow collectivity* [=/= camouflage]
anticipation of oblivion
Hoda, Foad,
(maybe interesting for Hoda:) bitching ~= concerted methodology of confrontation and provocation
to write on chaos
to write as chaos
to write chaos***
[an iranian topology of imagination:]
subjectivity --> deception
literature --> rage
chaos --> annihilation
deserter
textual encounter --> the method by which a chaotic imaginary is uncovered and set loose:
1. lure consciousness into desertion
2. perceive textual artifacts as forces of immanent contagion
3. identify the text as a carrier of shadow-becoming
4. text conceive the setting of inhuman
deserter (position) --> unearthing --> chaotic imagination
...a fractal exteriority that alters and generates vivid, intensified hierarchies of instinct, desire, and knowing*
*exhaustion
damaged allegory of man
*evacuation --> surrender to fugitive trajectory
takes place on amorphous dust
wrenched
shadow-scapes
enterence <--> ejection
•misadventurism of the wanderer
•rogue thought
influx
disintegration
fever
velocity
the deserter mind is made to synchronize the internalization of waste and unrest and to ravage itself
spatiality of the the nowhere
intention[...]
(314)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%58.9[...]tegrated, that is more mature and healthy) and desires to destroy (the student in the state of poor integration)? --> schizophrenic conditions of artistic feedback
...................................
مماس
schizophrenia: (a general understanding of all) content-thought disorder (=/= form of thought)
*the disease of cognitive abnormality : abnormal sequential thinking*
*tangential thinking*
•disorganised thinking ==> disorganised speech
•mood disorders
•dementia
•mania
•clanging (situationally inappropriate association of words based upon sound rather than concepts)
•echolalia (unsolicited repetition of vocalizations made by another person)
•[*]tangentiality: deviation from relevancy; wandering train of thought, lack of focus, never returning to the initial topic --> *topic maintenance*
◦self-centered social responses
◦attention to one's own speech is overcome during the occurrence of cognition ==> evasive vocalized content
(language use”)
referential (for the sake of context)
poetic (for the sake of message)
emotive (for the sake of addresser)
conative (for the sake of addressee)
pathic (for the sake of interaction)
metalingual (for the sake of itself)
...................................
-the concept of “wearing” from Alberti (prehispanic South America)
-the concept of “mask” from Mohaghegh (postmodern Middle East)
-the concept of “style” from Archer (post-industrial Britain)
[these theories are very helpful for me and import-rich for reimagining subjectivity. Alberti committed to anthropology, Mohaghegh to the philosophical, Archer to sociology]
...................................
slave: a person attached by law and by custom to the identity of another individual --> ‘social death’ of slavery (as legal nonperson ==> alienation) [in academic literature comparative study of slavery], slavery as a substitute for death in war
--shift--> (the concept that) slaves might influence the tastes, the language, the actions, and even the ideas of their masters
acknowledgement of presence =/= significance in relation to history
(A. Lee on) the African dimension of the genesis of the Babi religion
((oral sources for) the recovery of) subaltern histories in Iran [erased from historical memory]
--> deep resentment of “the presence in Iran of an ‘Other’ that does not conform to the imagined Iranian Self”
unblemished national selfhood
purity fetishism of... <== *purity deeply rooted in religion* [?]
...................................
(issues) politics of liberation:
•that liberal democracy requires common basis for culture and society
•identity politics:
◦“the most profound and potentially most radical polit[...]
(315)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%59.7[...]al relies upon a certain exact mastery of night's formulas + learning its conceptual-experiential relations to: time, space, fear, nothingness, desire, death, forgetting, enigma, solitude, sensation, vision, secrecy, monstrosity, the body
night
•[where one] fathoms otherwise
•the time-space of the visionary, the imaginary, the unreal, the unknown, the elsewhere, the outside, the emergent
•[where one] letting fall those droplets of mad and dangerous consciousness
•[where] governing categories of human existence are suspended ==> alternative classifications (banned libraries, archives, catalogs, arrangements)
•
•
=/= light --promises--> a certain stability of Being
those with a pathological need to rule
those with a diabolical impulse to abandon (subvert, reinvent)
those with nothing to lose (desperation)
those with everything to gain (quest)
time of weeping
(mourn, “this should never have happened”) creation as error; being as error
solipsistic cruelty: no longer recognizes itself in anything else nor anything else within itself
[Mohaghegh, prototype harbour, night harbors:]
return of the full moon --> metamorphosis --> werewolf
return of the nightmare --> fright --> dreamer
return of the sacred --> resurrection --> redeemer
return of the curse --> vengeance --> enemy
return of the tides --> migration --> sailor
return of the banished --> hatred --> exile
return of the ancient --> power --> idol
return of the text --> evocation --> messenger
return of the threat --> intimidation --> extortionist
return of the dead --> disappearance --> ghost
return of desire --> obsession --> stalker
return of pain --> infection --> virus
return of the discarded --> waste --> vagrant
return of glory --> vindication --> fighter
return of the scene --> concealment --> criminal
return of dust --> mortality --> creation
return of instinct --> animality --> creature
point of no return --> irreversibility --> lost cause
masochistic skepticism
sadistic truth
(Mohaghegh's) *deception theory*
death of God + death of the Human + death of the Real ==> limitless epochal existential era of lying
existential forgery
ingenuity
deceit
treacherous play
fictive double-crossing
elaboration
(thief's, runaway's, insomniac's, hysteric's, sorcerer's, and other night-traveler's) sensorial orchestrations of the dark intervals
morphologies of the night-traveler:
•the old boat-passengers once placed under enforced isolation
•the exiles displaced from occupied homelands
•the marauding sectarian factions who patrolled city streets ea[...]
(316)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%60.1[...]of prostitutes
surrounded in myth by death and disaster
goddess of contradictory connotations and forces (fair play & enmity, etc,)
Lillith (derived from the Akkadian lilitu: evening creature, specter, or monster)
kidnapping sleeping children
(according to the Babylonian cosmology) night requires (non-identitarian) gods capable of abomination (backstabing)
-recognized by their tangible outlines as actual constellations in the night sky
-related to the more expansive domains of animality, vehicles, and objects
-emanate from a perceptual faculty closer to the child's imagination of cloud-shapes (=/= archetypal meaning)
Tiamat
primordial goddess of the salt sea, darkness, chaos, and creation
from the time of permanent nightfall
a destroyer-deity and yet whose sliced body parts form the heavens and earth
represented as unconscious, reckless annihilation and yet also holding diabolical intelligence
bathed in eternal blackness and yet known as “the glistening one”
Girra
dystopian potentials of technological invention
figure of wicked logos (undoing words)
(leader of the terrible)
non-metaphysical and equally nonhumanist devotion to the artificer (apparatus)
cosmic ballistics: scientific field of mechanics concerned with the launching, propulsion, flight, and effect of projectiles (trajectory and impact)
nocturnality and contagion
snakes and dragons of constellations
paradox (the beast)
instrumentality (the builder)
unleashing (the despoiler)
death-spell
نابودی gesture of *extispicy: ancient Mesopotamian practice of reading animal organs (often a sheep's liver) spattered upon a wall's surface
-a discipline involved less with knowing than with watchingr />
The Egyptian Book of the Dead
philosophy of night, dusk, shadow
egyptian night-deities
-with astounding narrative-theoretical flexibility
-some slither, hunch, fly, or remain seated
-not residing on Olympian heights but rather in the subterranean below
star-covered nude woman
cow arching over the earth
--> night does rule from transcendent distances but rather envelops (or swallows) whole the existent into its gut (or uterus) [<-- digestion?]
[metaphysics:] (away from) patriarchal gaze --into--> maternal stomach
Khonsu
•bloodthirsty (eating the organs of royal opponents)
•merciful --> [its creative epithets:] traveler, embracer, pathfinder, defender, “He Who Lives on Hearts”
one who resembles his own waning moon
Nephthys
tied to the night of the soul's traversal
sepulchral
(endow pharaohs) with the vision for “tha[...]
(317)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%60.5[...]er of the terrible)
non-metaphysical and equally nonhumanist devotion to the artificer (apparatus)
cosmic ballistics: scientific field of mechanics concerned with the launching, propulsion, flight, and effect of projectiles (trajectory and impact)
nocturnality and contagion
snakes and dragons of constellations
paradox (the beast)
instrumentality (the builder)
unleashing (the despoiler)
death-spell
نابودی gesture of *extispicy: ancient Mesopotamian practice of reading animal organs (often a sheep's liver) spattered upon a wall's surface
-a discipline involved less with knowing than with watching
The Egyptian Book of the Dead
philosophy of night, dusk, shadow
egyptian night-deities
-with astounding narrative-theoretical flexibility
-some slither, hunch, fly, or remain seated
>
-not residing on Olympian heights but rather in the subterranean below
star-covered nude woman
cow arching over the earth
--> night does rule from transcendent distances but rather envelops (or swallows) whole the existent into its gut (or uterus) [<-- digestion?]
[metaphysics:] (away from) patriarchal gaze --into--> maternal stomach
Khonsu
•bloodthirsty (eating the organs of royal opponents)
•merciful --> [its creative epithets:] traveler, embracer, pathfinder, defender, “He Who Lives on Hearts”
one who resembles his own waning moon
Nephthys
tied to the night of the soul's traversal
sepulchral
(endow pharaohs) with the vision for “that which is hidden by moonlight”
Apep =/= Ra (the light-god)
giant sea-snake said to lurk again in the primordial gloom
evil lizard, *world encircler*
•defeating Apep: basematerial outputs (spit) --to--> elemental propertieperties (fire) --to--> man-made weaponries (lance, knife) --to--> fetishistic physiologies (the left foot) --to--> sympathetic magic (tearing apart of effigies
(sectarian logic?)
desire for clear reactional materiality [=/= sadistic or paranoiac serial killings]
teratological and semi-demonological turn
interjecting thingness, fiendishness, and monstrosity into our midst
night: indefinite definite ~=> nihilistic force of closure
(from) orthodoxy --to--> dramaturgy
(Mohaghegh's theory of) fanatical sovereignty in pagan thought --> ultimate keeping & violation of the law ~= obsessive form & apocalyptic formlessness
(reconciling) *the toxic dialectics of presence & absence* behind every theo-political order : gods walk among us in immanent ambush, hiding in night's open view (of many faces, masks, tongues, robes, tastes, proportions, and gestures), adopt infinite visages, appare[...]
(318)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%60.5[...]visual objects
making consumer choices [--(is not always)-->] interacting with visual objects in ways that further ideological formations
*religious reaction to sensory inputs are aesthetic* <-- they anticipate knowledge to be revealed in the future =/= rest contemplatively in the present
*religious gaze = apocalyptic glance*
=/= Kantian aesthetics (noninstrumental form of enjoyment)
Plato + Aristoteles ==> premodern islamic thinkers --> “beauty = virtue” (harmony of physical and moral)
(problem with) philosophical aesthetics of disinterested contemplations --Elias-->
•ignores majority of human experience
•(favors) apophatic (transcendent + ineffable غیر قابل توصیف) =/= cataphatic (immanent + experiential)
unstable & somatic ways we respond to (and seek out) everyday images
evocative & powerful (<--Sina-- nonartisitic images)
(art or not art) ***aesthetic response***
[*]children's media: aesthetic social imagination
(moral components of:)
cruelty, hurt, disgust, disdain
kindness, happiness, admiration, love
physical, material, somatic relation to the ethereal, metaphysical, intellectual
(?how can we) confidently treat “images = sources of socioculturel information”
(from) Islamic culture --to--> cultures associated with isalm
strong opposition to representational religious art <-- modern Islamic societies --> unproblematic accepting of representational religious materials intended for children
didactic islamic visual media:
•(Kuwait) the 99 --> heroes for each name of the God
•(Pakistan, India, Afghanistan) burqa avenger --> burqa clad superhero against a corrupt view of traditional religion, using veil as costume
•(Pakistan) Ferozsons publisher
•Uysal press
•Timas press (Cem Kiziltug)
•
age-graded sequences of children's religious books --> progressively decreasing use of images
questions (> Elias:)
•are there culturally specific ways of seeing --answer--> yes
•does religion requires its own categories for understanding visuality and sensory systems? --> *religion is a problematic category* <== inherently unstable {religion referring simultaneously to systematic ideological systems, atomized and multivalent beliefs, range of individual and cultural practices}--> constant flux + relative to each other =/= religion: discrete phenomena
•scholars who argue for a transcendental quality to religion
•Durkheim + Weber --> religious = behavioral
•Otto --> location of religion: a fascinating incomprehensible force outside of the human person
•Eliade --> essential unity of the religious (~= commensurate human behavior)
[...]
(319)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%61.5[...]on
cognitive psychology --> humanistic + social-scientific theories of emotions --promoting--> (fables of)
•universal basic emotions: happiness, anger, disgust, fear, sadness, surprise [--> regardless what these terms might be in other languages other than english, or even if there are equivalent concepts]
•emotions do not occur in language but are physically manifested in the face [--> micro-expression in business negotiations]
•(the fable of) artworks can convey emotions accurately and reliably across time and culture [---> go to the fable of *unmediated response* + emotional appeal of “great art"]
•distinguish the essential from the optional, to capture the invariant, to break complex concepts into maximally simple ones [conceptual primes + lexicogrammatical universals] (<-- Wierzbicka's NSM)
=/=
•emotion --> Joseph leDoux 1996
•emotion --> Klaus Scherer 1979
•affects --> Deleuze and Guattari 1980
>
•perasaan hati --> indonasia 1980
•affect --> Massumi 2002
•emozioni --> Cesare Lombroso 1976
social constructivism approach:
•emotional experience is not precultural but preeminently cultural --> Lutz
anthropological approach l:
•metaphors/words for different emotions --Kovecses--> individuals choose to conceptualize their emotions differently within the constraints impressed on them by in universal physiology {*force: the primary emotional metaphor*}
•body-based constructivism
(William Reddy >) emotive: (for example saying “i am happy.”) performative (effects change) + constative (describes the world)
•emotive utterance --> getting through of something nonverbal into verbal --> failure of representation --> a person
}--Elias-->
•logocentric concept of emotive <-- comes from speech act theory (there is no evidence that thinking and saying out loud “i am happy” have the same effectsffects, or forcing one self to smile)
•there is no reason to consider one action more or less descriptive than performative than the other [--Sina--> my whole work has been about arguing the performativity of descriptive acts, there are no descriptions that do not generate emotions]
•lack of methodological distinction between (anthropological) fieldwork [: subject is changed by the presence of researcher] =/= historical research
•problem of synchrony in “emotive” <-- ignoring memory, aspiration (on the list of the emotional actor)
emotional states can be evoked or avoided(?)
conditions can be manipulated with the goal of shaping emotions in the future
emotion and its affects
•emotion --> medicated and sustained
•affect (a very recent idea) --> ephemeral instantaneously rises and dissipates (leaving residual effects)
}<-- a heuristic device (difference) to highlight different kinds of experiences[...]
(320)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%61.8[...]pulation of our affective lives can do but also because we will otherwise miss the*potential for ethical creativity* and transformation that ‘technologies of the self’ designed to work on our embodied being can help bring about.”
enterprise of theorizing affect --Elias-->
(1) ideologically driven by an attempt to reverse an imagined poststructuralist theoretical hegemony ==> conscious turn from rational methods --> *asignifying transcendence*
-Massumi's affect: asocial virtual potential (=/= actualizes) ==> affect: unformed & unstructured (potential: transmitable + socially powerful) ~= undefinable & unknowable ~= unanalyzable & unpredictable <-- not usable as a theoretical concept
Massumi (moving away from linguistic towards t) --> affect becomes ethereal abstraction (=/= historical materiality) removed from the grasp of critical assessment
feeling --> personal & biographical
emotions --> social
affect --> prepersonal (non-conscious experience of intensity)
(2) florid and convoluted use of language --> fail to eschew obfuscation (without it there is not so much to say)
Massumi: “thought strikes like lightning, with sheering ontogenic force. It is felt.” <--Elias-- meaningless metaphor
the notion of precognitive affective event
•do nothing to help one understand the nature of conscious, felt, enacted emotion + its social ramifications
•provides no rubric through which one can engage in comparative analysis (or informed discussion)
(Brennan) affect: physiological in effect, social in origin
(Grossberg) affect: to locate human beings in their environment (why ideology is only effective some of the time? quotidien = pleasure + ideology) *it is in the affect (affective life) that people struggle to care about something, find the energy to survive, enact their projects and possibilities*
ideology -->
•affective intensities
•affective investments
(Hennessey) *affect-culture: transmission of sensation and cognitive emotion through cultural practices* (materially shaped by social networks, circulating of natives, they work with & against structured relationships, can operate intuitively or oblique)
[*]sense: obvious knowledge [--> awareness of right & wrong] (=/= cognitive or learned knowledge) --> ***meaning-making through sense ~= ideology***
(Reddy) emotion: range of loosely connected thought material --> when activated it exceeds attention's capacity to translate it to action/talk
(emotive:) emotional regime: how public emotional acts and *emotional standards* [---> go to soup opera integrating emotional ecosystem] help to shape the lives of individuals
affect: explain (historical) events that elude (political, economical) explanation
*emotion exists in its expression and description* (sp[...]
(322)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%62[...]al singularities” exists within a plane of immanence. “far from being individual or personal, singularities preside (take over and govern) over the genesis of individuals and persons; they are distributed in a ‘potential’ which admits neither Self not I, but which produces them by actualizing or realizing itself, although the figures of this actualization do not at all resemble the realized potential.” the actualizations are in link with his plane of immanence. (Deleuze 1990)
a given individual moves between these qualities without necessarily morphing into entirely different selves --> ***difference internal to being***
(that ‘difference’ is internal to being)
to betray the immediate norm (of this society) (to ensure a continued relationship with them)
but i am already moving to my next self
*ethics of listening
(1) gestures as cultural text (Clifford Geertz)
(2) codes to crack the regulative mechanisms of a society (Pierre Bourdieu)
(3) how thinking proceeds apace with gestures, how gestures gather thought, sounded and unsounded, and how voice is incorporative [tending to incorporate or include things] of these gestures
(Heidegger shows)
metaphysical relation: think ==> speech
(only when one speaks, does he think--not the other way around)
temporality of memory
(...it took them two years to remember to tell me this)
possession: is to be struck by any number of somatic illnesses or psychic effects of mysterious origins (Bown 1993)
mythopoetic (registers of Qur'an)
mythopoetic registers of everyday life
Jinn can trick the humans into looking at a copy of them (and then change form or into formlessness)
the copies of time-honored practice of embodying and transmitting the islamic tradition is now haunted by *modern anxieties*
Asb-e Imam-Hossein
it is in islamic tradition that being a muslim entails keeping up the illusory nature of everyday life while also participating in it. (not excessive withdrawal nor excessive attachment)
[why isis breaks this?]
...................................
[✕] technologies of the “here and now”
[✕] semiotic-tech of “elsewheres”
}-->
(separated in the past, *ontological difference*, a fiction) in West: (--> that is why Latour anthropologizes modernism)
*[philosophy]--signals--> here (in Europe and West), selves
*[anthropology]--signals--> elsewhere, others }--> a wannabe discourse on Others
}--> (ontological difference between anthropology & philosophy [in their mode of immersion in the metaphysical] is part of) colonial community, a form of ‘negation’ =/= my recent antagoni[...]
(323)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%62.5[...]esses or psychic effects of mysterious origins (Bown 1993)
mythopoetic (registers of Qur'an)
mythopoetic registers of everyday life
Jinn can trick the humans into looking at a copy of them (and then change form or into formlessness)
the copies of time-honored practice of embodying and transmitting the islamic tradition is now haunted by *modern anxieties*
Asb-e Imam-Hossein
it is in islamic tradition that being a muslim entails keeping up the illusory nature of everyday life while also participating in it. (not excessive withdrawal nor excessive attachment)
[why isis breaks this?]
...................................
[✕] technologies of the “here and now”
[✕] semiotic-tech of “elsewheres”
}-->
(separated in the past, *ontological difference*, a fiction) in West: (--> that is why Latour anthropologizes modernism)
*[philosophy]--signals--> here (in Europe and West), selves
*[anthropology]--signals--> elsewhere, others }--> a wannabe discourse on Others
}--> (ontological difference between anthropology & philosophy [in their mode of immersion in the metaphysical] is part of) colonial community, a form of ‘negation’ =/= my recent antagonism [the way i am studying is for *extension*{= extending but also standing in tension with, a lineage(=/= rupture)} rather than *negation*]: since i got into Olearius, 2017, I am developing recently a philosphpical-genealogical antagonism. (in Iran we are used to philosophy naturally inhabiting the otherness of Europe, among others, we never see them as anthropological objects, but they see us as such. *we don't think ethnographically about Others*)
}--> my aim is to mix this while i am “here” --> i say life (also power and ethics) comes to attention simultaneously anthropologically and philosophically from elsewhere and here [--> to reed something from the outside ~= reterritorialization (of concepts, interests, affects, percepts,)]--> when concepts are reterritorialized they illuminate the world differently
*we need better construction of past for building truly decolonial community* <-- is my antagonism needed for this?
anthropology: a mode of heightened attentiveness to life
(Singh)
Foucault, Benjamin, Derrida, Deleuze --> a loss of anthropologically generated theory
(more than once in a single day i find myself paused to wonder at) how thought moves
(long-standing philosophical between) dialectical and nondialectical genealogies of thought
-to be drawn to nondialectical is not the negation of dialectical, it is a way of thinking about the “meta"-physics (Singh)
philosophy reconciders this: ‘concepts come more explicitly to the surface as impressions grow into[...]
(324)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%62.6[...]developing recently a philosphpical-genealogical antagonism. (in Iran we are used to philosophy naturally inhabiting the otherness of Europe, among others, we never see them as anthropological objects, but they see us as such. *we don't think ethnographically about Others*)
}--> my aim is to mix this while i am “here” --> i say life (also power and ethics) comes to attention simultaneously anthropologically and philosophically from elsewhere and here [--> to reed something from the outside ~= reterritorialization (of concepts, interests, affects, percepts,)]--> when concepts are reterritorialized they illuminate the world differently
*we need better construction of past for building truly decolonial community* <-- is my antagonism needed for this?
anthropology: a mode of heightened attentiveness to life
(Singh)
Foucault, Benjamin, Derrida, Deleuze --> a loss of anthropologically generated theory
(more than once in a single day i find myself paused to wonder at) how thought moves
(long-standing philosophical between) dialectical and nondialectical genealogies of thought
-to be drawn to nondialectical is not the negation of dialectical, it is a way of thinking about the “meta"-physics (Singh)
philosophy reconciders this: ‘concepts come more explicitly to the surface as impressions grow into thoughts’ --> no! no!
how philosophy relates to and draws on nonphilosophy (is usually geographical*)
more differences:
•geographical: western/non-western
•naional: indian/french
•subdisciplinary: analytic/continental
(trajectories of Derrica, a tradition of) negative transcendence: différance, an absence that transcends “a” and “not a” [=/= (trajectories of Deleuze, a tradition of) affirmative immanence, the self-differentiating intensities of “a”, compresence of “a"]
some Deleuzian terms:
•assemblages
•deterritorization
•becoming
•multiplicities
•excess
•schizophrenia (~ nondialectical thought, a nondialectical expression of different polarities held together. use ‘split’ to create a philosophy, [the ‘split’ metaphore is] an argument for the dynamism and temporality of the structure =/= dialectical historism and the Freudian unconscious) -- schizophrenia marks an unresolved, nondialectical tension
}--> giving me a range of concepts with which to inhabit a plenitude of life --> we need to create/borrow/steal/appropriate a range of concepts with which to inhabit the plenitude of life (in Tehran) that exceeds all the time. (that which the political consciousness of contemporary Tehran fails to grasp.) ***between moments of (my) departure and return (to Iran) lay a whole world, full of life (and hope)***
Deleuze's hostility to dialectics
“we will misunderstand the whole of Nietzsche's[...]
(325)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%62.6[...]
(more than once in a single day i find myself paused to wonder at) how thought moves
(long-standing philosophical between) dialectical and nondialectical genealogies of thought
-to be drawn to nondialectical is not the negation of dialectical, it is a way of thinking about the “meta"-physics (Singh)
philosophy reconciders this: ‘concepts come more explicitly to the surface as impressions grow into thoughts’ --> no! no!
how philosophy relates to and draws on nonphilosophy (is usually geographical*)
more differences:
•geographical: western/non-western
•naional: indian/french
•subdisciplinary: analytic/continental
(trajectories of Derrica, a tradition of) negative transcendence: différance, an absence that transcends “a” and “not a” [=/= (trajectories of Deleuze, a tradition of) affirmative immanence, the self-differentiating intensities of “a”, compresence of “a"]
>
some Deleuzian terms:
•assemblages
•deterritorization
•becoming
•multiplicities
•excess
•schizophrenia (~ nondialectical thought, a nondialectical expression of different polarities held together. use ‘split’ to create a philosophy, [the ‘split’ metaphore is] an argument for the dynamism and temporality of the structure =/= dialectical historism and the Freudian unconscious) -- schizophrenia marks an unresolved, nondialectical tension
}--> giving me a range of concepts with which to inhabit a plenitude of life --> we need to create/borrow/steal/appropriate a range of concepts with which to inhabit the plenitude of life (in Tehran) that exceeds all the time. (that which the political consciousness of contemporary Tehran fails to grasp.) ***between moments of (my) departure and return (to Iran) lay a whole world, full of life (and hope)***
Deleuze's hostility to dialectics
“we will misunderstand the whole of Nietzscietzsche's work if we do not see ‘against whom’ its principal concepts are directed”
[*]dialectics:
1- the idea of a power of the negative as a theoretical principle manifested in opposition and contradiction
2- the valorization of the “sad passions” as a practical principle --> “the unhappy consciousness is the subject of the whole dialectic” (Nietzsche)
3- the idea of positivity as a theoretical and practical product of negation itself
•Hegelian: a determinate negation, followed by a “higher” synthesis
•Badiou 2000, Jameson 2009, Zizek 200k, a counterwave of contemporary dialecticians
dialectics: a habit of thought--variably expressed in anthropology and philosophy and critical theory
postcolonial theory, critical theory, cultural studies <--(descendants of)-- negative dialectics =/= affirmative nondialectics
to notice (over time) in Tehran:
•relations involving intergenerational servitude and no[...]
(326)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%62.7[...]ver” goosebumps from the intensities, the “incredible feeling of an unknown Nature-affect” that he embodies]), spirits, the undead, and the unborn who subsist alongside the living
*threshold:
•to denote points of passage accross phases of life
•refering to varying degrees of intensity (that may continue after death)--> as a spirit/jinn is preserved or recedes, through possession or in visions or memories, enduring in potentially multiple dimensions
*a memory, a dream, even a hallucination is also a threshold of life*
agency of spirits [jinn, abstract spirit of modernity, secular education, Thakur Baba, , ,] = *a threshold of life* (with its own immanent forms of movement and flux)
[-]lets not call it “disenchantment” or mere nostalgia, but *a shift in the quality of life* --> ethnographic investigation can be a form of heightened attentiveness (to varying thresholds of life [to the intensities of Ehsan's ghost-girl, to the cannibal mice, Tehran's earthquake synthesis of affect, , ,]--(these [Tehran's range of moods and intensities] are)--> waxing and waning گامهای ماه *intensities immanent to a milieu; affecting our ideas of ethics and politics)
the social =? “our” version of the transcendent/immanent metaphysical
how many dimensions is “our” metaphysical composed of (in Tehran)?
(Durkheim starts:) religion = an engagement with a vital animating principle, “a kind of anonymous and impersonal force [...] none possesses it entirely and all share in it”
-spirits, demons, jinns, gods of every rank are the *concrete forms* that capture this energy, this *potentiality*
(later Durkheim reduces this remarkable promising formulation in his signiture from the metaphysical: “the moral authority of society”, ‘religion ==> solidarity انسجام’ }=/= innumerable anthropologists have shown how religion does not necessarily “reawaken solidarity”)
(instead of “the social” lets get interested in more than one dimension of life, lets think, with Singh and Deleuze, of) *vast continuum of human and nonhuman life*
“Baba, I have been troubled for years. What can I do to please my ancestral spirits?”
Beyzai analyzes deities and myths in Iran, negating any potential for spiriual movement between rival groups, even in what is clearly *a form of religious life moving across*
Beyzai preoccupation with defeat doesn't allow him to attend to ‘forms of religious life moving across’
•bottom-up thesis of oppositional negation and from its “top-down” opposite
=/= the idea of spiritual conversation
imitation of [upper caste,,,] values
[***]the fatality of these ideas of negation and of imitation is that they obscure the possibility of a spiritual inheritence that may be shared and contested in ways that create the possibility of a *cohabited future between neighbors [...]
(327)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%63[...]
...tuned in to some little something somewhere
“in a video that blankly records an arresting image, young embodiments of a mainstream in the making come face to face with an otherness that compels a closer look. the order of representation gives way to a more violently affective contact”
Stewart
force of things --> what counts as an event
a politics of being/feeling conected
a politics of ways of watching
a politics of waiting for something to happen
a politics of difference (of habit and dull routine)
childhood coming back [to you] as shocks of beauty
graphic stories prompted by the seemingly simple work of remembering:
•kinship ties
•married names
•stories of alcoholism
•stories of accidents
•stories of violence
•stories of cancers
[*]potential: fleeting and amorphous, it lives as a residue or resonance in an emergent assemblage of disparate forms and realms of life; a thing immanent to fragments of sensory experience and dreams of presence --engenders--> attachments or system of investment...
(people are) collecting found objects snatched off the literal or metaphorical side of the road
...................................
Yazid: the archetypal tyrant of islamic memory
...a shift from thinking of Urdu as exclusively Muslim to thinking of Muslims as the custodians of a shared heritage that Hindus have forgotten, but have the potential to reclaim
-Anand --> how do we understand the islamicness of urdu poetry?
spread of [...] poetry far beyond the bounds of exclusively muslim identity
sufism as an everyday mode of speaking of and speaking to the self (not as an esoteric practice, or as institutionally bounded)
-it gives you a language to explore their interiority
-(traditions of self-scrutiny and self-reflection,) a poetry of self-knowledge + rebellion against social convention [+ frenzied violence (vahshat) --> Majnun: an intellectual articulation, literary elaboration, and social proliferation of the “mazhab of love” a dominant strand of sufi theology, ethics, and political thought in the Balkans to Bengal complex]
earlier mode of understanding X as irreligious
discourses that recognize X as islamic
Anand --> *indic nature of islam*
-islam is indexed within the lives of non-Muslim Indians through a form of stranger hospitality
many, besides muslims, have ongoing relations to islamic sacred objects
•embrace of the divine
•efflorescence of relations with nonhumans (snakes and cats)
(Naveeda on) Anand's mournful tone --> forces of restoration = forces of destruction
importance of shadows for an understanding of sensory experie[...]
(330)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%64.1[...]ad really withdrawn to this dark face? and if air, why not water? would not this be enough to infuse life into the whole continent? why should noy vegetation flourish on its plains, fish in its seas, animals in its forests, and man in every one of its zones that were capable of sustaining life? to these interesting questions, what a satisfaction it would be to be able to answer positively one wat or another! for thousands of difficult problems a mere glimpse at this hemisphere would be enough to furnish a satisfactory reply. how glorious it would be to contemplate a real, on which the eye of man has never yet rested!” (Jules Verne, All Around the Moon)
the side of the moon facing earth is being gradually eroded by earth’s gravitation
Pythagoreans <-- one of the first recorded visions of an inhabitable moon on which animas and plants flourish, larger and more beautiful than on earth <== *it makes to sense to create a planet that is uninhabited*
“[...] for she would then appear to have come into existence vainly and to no purpose, neither brining forth fruit nor providing fir men of some kind an origin, an abode, and a means of life, the purpose for which this earth of ours came into being” (Plutarch, On the Face of the Moon)
metaphors for the silence of the space --> perennial question of humankind
the black sea sparkle with lustrous fires, like the ceiling of a vast hall of ebony encrusted with flashing diamonds
with what a soft sweet light every star glowed
no matter what its magnitude, the stream that flowed from it looked calm and holy
not twinkling
no scintillation
no nictitation
disturbed their pure and lambent gleam
...................................
night dreams (after WIELS's exhibition)
starting with the story of the jinn studying origin of species --> bestiaries
mix of reports from Hedayat'neyrangestan + Shamlu's ketab kuche + Marzolph's topology of persian folklore iranian stories + ajayeb stories --to--> ?
...................................
jin lamp
tree
scared face
book Skala:
royal fairy tales
baba jaga kostliva noha / bony legs
the first worm
death skeleton afraid of itself, of its own image
self-reflective
you are following, while being followed, and the one who follows you is being followed...
pop-up book
•endless doors (on top of each other)
•rotation: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMR4VTo8s/
•rotation: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMR4Vp8Yb/
•https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMR4Vw7qk/
•https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMR4VttgH/
•moon https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMR4VV2CC/
•Philippines --> aesthetics of poverty [culture of material poverty --> poverty as scenic design and working philosophy] (==> the impera[...]
(331)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%64.5[...]ion in Iqbal's case) --toward--> producing the readiness for change
-attitudes of toleration comes with belief in dogma
Mohammad
the prophet's return is creative : insert himself into the sweep of time with a view to control the forces of history ==> create a new world of ideals
*prophetic consciousness: a mode of economizing individual thought and choice by providing readymade judgment, choices, ways of action
Islam is strongly informed by *teleology: final causes and ends
•(a tradition of) biding worshippers to act in this world with the knowledge of brevity of earthly existence (and the certainty that they will meet their maker)
--> perception of time
Bergson --> enabling change in the human perception of time so that humans could see how their present was charged with open-ended potential
(1934:)
•duration: reality of time as a dynamic continuity
•intuition: imaginative means by which humans could perceive duration
(picture of) life = vital impulse through matter
--> (positive account of) evolution: continual discharge of creative ideas (and tendencies) moving through a world of matter
[*]metaphysics: a technique to avoid “false problems”
Bergson's understanding of intellect: denying humans the experience of time as duration ==> Iqbal
how Iqbal rendered (Bergson's) vitalist philosophy (which denied teleology) acceptable to Islam (which strongly is based on teleology):
the idea of a forward-looking aspect to the intelligence permeanting life --> for a Muslim an “ought to be” stands in the forefront inflecting the present well before any final end
human-God copartnership --imply--> advancement of the self as the object of striving {the self arcs towards God and partners with God in order to advance}==> change in the world
<br />
“the finite ego must be distinct, though not isolated, from the infinite”
(Iqbal)
Iqbal's striving:
•the end of one's striving is one's *next self*
•nonprogressive: one's next self could lay ahead, alongside of one, or in one's past
•not to part with their finitude too quickly (no fana dar hagh)
Iqbal's pholosophy -->? aesthetics of the self (~ creation of personality)
--(preoccupied with)--> *muslims crafting and tethering their subjectivity to the commentary world*
Iqbal's self-seeking individuals : actualize qualities attribited to God [(impersonal qualities:) majesty, beauty, grace] (to the best of one's ability) --Naveeda--> (individual impersonality) ***individuality marked by a certain impersonality*** : the more impersonal the qualify that is manifested the more unique one is
=/= [*]modern identity : right-bearing citizen in nation-state, a subject distinguished by the pecul[...]
(332)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%65.1[...]s an organizations is coding for artistic research within the framework of their memory systems?
“There is no room on the [filling] form to write an essay on race identity politics.”
do we need to develop and standardize my discipline-specific nomenclature (in our research microworld) in order to name without ambiguity? --> redefinition of disciplinary boundaries --> shaping of your work so that its future practice converges on potential memory
we murder, they note
they draw from their secret[s]
infrastructure-thinking: Ajayeb Network-Making Minimum Data Set
in ajayeb's literature the very information infrastructure itself (should let be or) is in flux ==> discourses make strange connections between themselves
-in ajayeb the infrastructure assumes the position of every node --> reworked in my #Rigs
“...we are afloat in a sea of multiple, fractured causalities each demanding their own classification systems--and their own apparatus of record collection.” (Bowker)
classification (systems): a warrant and a tool for forgetting, and operating the distribution of this forgetting (in space of scientific memory.)
it tells you what to forget (for example the religious and metaphysical,) and how to forget it
[the formation (training) of artists covers up the formation (production) of artistic knowledge]
-the social story of science is excluded from the organization of the sciences, and held outside of it =/= situated knowledge
-a natural hierarchy of sciences is offered: every discipline needs to remember only a given set of facts --> each type of memory which has been distributed in space will also be sequenced in time (http://ajayeb.net/?q=imperative+of+knowing) [for example mathematics --> physics --> chemistry --> biology --> sociology] ==> formal memory system
the problem of the detective is that for him only those facts are relevant that hand him the solution of crime (~-> goal-oriented individual disposition) =/= chasing rabbits
-the detective (has to) classify away traces: the systematic and deliberate forgetting of some actions in order to better remember others
-what makes a difference?
-in sorting animals which past knowledges (--> ajayeb) are deliberatly forgotten in order to remember them as incorporated into an information infrastructure called ‘species’? -->! the classified are remembered (in the technoscience world)
(what is the) complex ecology of memory practices (particular within apass?)
•Hoda --> politics of remembrance
•Zoumana --> situated perspective
•Sina --> narratable past
•Marialena --> type of language
•S
today, 18.07.2017, the ajayeb's knowledge can be stored and expressed in a quite restricted range of genres called myth, ancient, imaginary,
______________
<[...]
(333)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%66.8[...]ber of different ways: [*] it might be distributed (held in another part of the organization than in that which produces the text), [*] built into the infrastructure (the work environment is changed such that the modality is never encountered), etc. =/= #accountability] ==> fact (+ single articulation, only one plot of data) --> mobilizing a set of black-boxes-->{Xiri's “queers,” Eszter's “participants,”: what goes inside these black-boxes and how they look like, is seen as irrelevant for them. [--> translating from the context of storage to the present situation (one might store a fact for reason X but recall it for reason Y) Latour + Bowker]}
X --> indeterminacy & multiplicity --> conflict --> negotiations --> standard
where to make the cuts in the system, for example, down to what level of detail one specifies a description of work, of an illness, of a setting, [of an animal, of a queerness, of a subjectivity, and so on.]
residual categories {rest, others, miscellaneous,} are ubiquitous
what are the mismatches between subsystems in ajayeb and Qur'an?
--> “cumulative mess trajectory” (Strauss) --> when the trajectories become so tangled that you can't return and the interactions multiply
we are riding on metaphores to move in a densely classified world
“There is no way of ever getting access to the past except through classification systems of one sort or another - formal or informal, hierarchical or not” Bowker
•“in the 14th century” --> segmentation of time, system of calendar
•“Iranian” --> discourse of national genius only arose in the 19th century
•“revolution” --> our current conception of ‘revolution’ is marked by the historiographical work of Karl Marx
•(historiographical traditions)
compare first lines of Halaj's biography in Attar and Wikipedia:
•آن فی الله فی سبیل الله آن شیر بیشه تحقیق آن شجاع صفدر صدیق آن غرقه دریای مواج حسین منصور حلاج رحمةالله علیه کار او کاری عجب بود و واقعات غرایب که خاص او را بود که هم در غایت سوز و اشتیاق بود و در شدت لهب و فراق مست و بیقرار و شوریده روزگار بود و عاشق صادق و پاک باز و جد وجهدی عظیم داشت و ریاضتی و کرامتی عجب و عالی همت و رفیع قدر بود او را تصانیف بسیار است [...]
•Mansur al-Hallaj (Arabic: Abū ‘l-Muġīṭ Al-Ḥusayn bin Manṣūr al-Ḥallāğ; Persian: Mansūr-e Ḥallāj) (c. 858 – 26 March 922) (Hijri c. 244 AH – 309 AH) was a Persian mystic, poet and teacher of Sufism [...]
(at the end it is the colonialism that) decides what a disease is [=/= other system/culture (fragile networks) for classifying dise[...]
(334)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%67.1[...] (my knowledge, ajayeb's knowledge) while simultaneously protecting subject's identities and interests /***
=/= short-term, project-by-project work
-(constantvzw is doing this:) build collaborative sciences
sociotechnical phenomena do not rest within the domain of a single discipline
-comparative analysis techniques
comparison across cases (--> how Kobe in his case-based work produces a critically comparative data?)
creation of compatable data [: properly documented --> facilitate sharing] (--> how for my ajayeb?)
(in your work and research -->) encouraging the identification of crucial similarities and differences
-sustainable and sharable data archives, collected over multiple investigative projects --> ajayeb.net = knowledge/thoughts/notes of multiple projects (--> is this my “data”?)
cyberscholarship
#lens, to scale up qualitative social science <--> deploy data storage, visualization, hypertext, and collective-creation possibilities of the web and social media, *new tools for textual analysis*
...................................
[which] cultures (or stories) permit a graceful listening forth to our seeing[?]
(metaphorical economy of) *mnemonic deep*:
•past is a thing that you escape at all costs, our past explains who we are,
•as palimpsest, The infinite faces of the past can be read off the present face ==> narrative ideal presen
•
the time that the institution of the sciences create:
1- the time of the experiment/field study: going back billions of years, quantum units of time, tree rings; peat mosses; fossil seeds;
2- the time of the scientific enterprise, historiographical stances shared among sets of disciplines
3- the law of nature: the past which scientists create can be read as an eternal present
(total recall:) memory as a metaphor needed by a ‘handicapped’ observer who cannot see a complete system
(same technique was used in Gulf War, Ali's production of consensus by flat) encephalogram
Ehsan's transmission sub rosa of information: stories and practices from his wild, discontinuous, ever-changing past
(Lyell's geology of earth:) working from the position that there was no sign of the origin of the earth, nor any portent of its end--what we have access to is a set of records in the landscape which leave the impression of massive upheaval and discontinuity in the past
tools to think past =/=? tools of (our own) archive
“most groups [...] engrave their form in some way upon the soil and retrieve their collective remembrances within the spatial framework thus defined” (Halbwachs 1968 > Bowker)
built: we often don't think of such [reworked natural landscapes] trails in memory terms, because[...]
(335)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%68.2[...]nable and sharable data archives, collected over multiple investigative projects --> ajayeb.net = knowledge/thoughts/notes of multiple projects (--> is this my “data”?)
cyberscholarship
#lens, to scale up qualitative social science <--> deploy data storage, visualization, hypertext, and collective-creation possibilities of the web and social media, *new tools for textual analysis*
...................................
[which] cultures (or stories) permit a graceful listening forth to our seeing[?]
(metaphorical economy of) *mnemonic deep*:
•past is a thing that you escape at all costs, our past explains who we are,
•as palimpsest, The infinite faces of the past can be read off the present face ==> narrative ideal presen
•
the time that the institution of the sciences create:
1- the time of the experiment/field study: going back billions of years, quantum units of time, tree rings; peat mosses; fossil seeds;
2- the time of the scientific enterprise, historiographical stances shared among sets of disciplines
3- the law of nature: the past which scientists create can be read as an eternal present
(total recall:) memory as a metaphor needed by a ‘handicapped’ observer who cannot see a complete system
(same technique was used in Gulf War, Ali's production of consensus by flat) encephalogram
Ehsan's transmission sub rosa of information: stories and practices from his wild, discontinuous, ever-changing past
(Lyell's geology of earth:) working from the position that there was no sign of the origin of the earth, nor any portent of its end--what we have access to is a set of records in the landscape which leave the impression of massive upheaval and discontinuity in the past
tools to think past =/=? tools of (our own) archive
“most groups [...] engrave their form in some way upon the soil and retrieve their collective remembrances within the spatial framework thus defined” (Halbwachs 1968 > Bowker)
built: we often don't think of such [reworked natural landscapes] trails in memory terms, because it is not our own personal memory that is being engraved--it is the collective memory of our culture
(my favorite) specialized archival technology (~= memory practice): list*
synchronization in the 14th century, where information provided the ‘coin’ which allowed multiple endeavors--social and natural, along a (different) material substrate
...................................
idio + sync
-idio- (“private,” “one's own,” not capable of engaging in the public sphere, for Athenians: concerned exclusively with private (--> a natural state of ignorance that all persons are born into) (private soldier with no skills?) [~=? mast [...]
(336)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%68.2[...]osser objects that we can taste, touch, accumulate
the master of ceremonies to a cage of tigers
Bowker on Charles Lyell
Buckland: (generally speaking) all things on earth can be seen at once objects and archives:
•as objects: they function in the world
•as archives: they maintain traces of their own past
a rock:
•object of lithosphere
•document of its history (striation: past glaciation; strata: complex stories of deposition + radioactive isotopes; journy through the mantle; etc.)
earth: a variable legible palimpsest
(office procedures & computer programs are both) designed as *abstract machines*
-for ajayeb i designed an abstract machine called ajayeb.net to realize a seamless interchangeability between my artist/research procedures and computer programs
bootstrap: a simple system activating a more complicated system
(i have become hypersensitive to:) progressivist telling of the history of the earth =/= strangely synchronic world where there is no effective arrow of time
[*]synchronization: the work that it takes to bring the various bits of the world into a single archival framework*** (with their metaphors and strategies) ==permit==> cohabitation of discipliness --> **synchronization of the social and natural worlds to the same temporality**
(synchronization is always at work and is technologically determined)
--> conjuring of the social and natural world into forms that render themselves amenable to recording ==> (imperial records) archiving changes the world & creates a record of it --Derrida--> sequential & jussive (imperative)
+ scientific work epitomized the developement and rigorous application of these procedures (---> go to Serres's origin of geometry and greek empire)
***synchronization brings material forms (commodity flow, train travel) together and when geological and historical time are mapped into the same time --> metaphorical & ideological & material interact (==> emerging powerful possibilities) [--> in art we also do a lot of syncing and synchronization (<-- this is perhaps what Pierre meant by saying that researchers are creating their own science)]
time management, a central issue in industrialization
Babbage: clock = regulator of time
industrial world-knowledge ==> importance of the division of the history of the earth into equal periods of time
information drive (a drive *to save as little information as possible about something*)
(Latour's) oligopticon: special places where the micro-structures of macro-phenomena are crafted, local activities become a “bigger” issue (such as parliaments, courtrooms, offices), where different strands of “macro-social” phenomena are weaved
-they see much too little, but what they see, they see it well (=/= [...]
(337)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%68.3[...]t machine called ajayeb.net to realize a seamless interchangeability between my artist/research procedures and computer programs
bootstrap: a simple system activating a more complicated system
(i have become hypersensitive to:) progressivist telling of the history of the earth =/= strangely synchronic world where there is no effective arrow of time
[*]synchronization: the work that it takes to bring the various bits of the world into a single archival framework*** (with their metaphors and strategies) ==permit==> cohabitation of discipliness --> **synchronization of the social and natural worlds to the same temporality**
(synchronization is always at work and is technologically determined)
--> conjuring of the social and natural world into forms that render themselves amenable to recording ==> (imperial records) archiving changes the world & creates a record of it --Derrida--> sequential & jussive (imperative)
+ scientific work epitomized the developement and rigorous application of these procedures (---> go to Serres's origin of geometry and greek empire)
***synchronization brings material forms (commodity flow, train travel) together and when geological and historical time are mapped into the same time --> metaphorical & ideological & material interact (==> emerging powerful possibilities) [--> in art we also do a lot of syncing and synchronization (<-- this is perhaps what Pierre meant by saying that researchers are creating their own science)]
time management, a central issue in industrialization
Babbage: clock = regulator of time
industrial world-knowledge ==> importance of the division of the history of the earth into equal periods of time
information drive (a drive *to save as little information as possible about something*)
(Latour's) oligopticon: special places where the micro-structures of macro-phenomena are crafted, local activities become a “bigger” issue (such as parliaments, courtrooms, offices), where different strands of “macro-social” phenomena are weaved
-they see much too little, but what they see, they see it well (=/= total surveillance of panopticon)
watch (from 1800 to 1820 at least 100000 clocks and watches were produced every year)
“clockwork ocean” with waves and cycles of salinity as “balance wheels”
(Bowker > Graham Burnett > Fontaine Maury)
}==> imposing a **temporally mediated qualitative difference between the creator and created** (instantiated on the factory floor and in nature) --> creators stood outside regular space and time (=/= situated knowledges)
(19th century) scientific work = imposition of a representative framework of regular space and time on social and natural time
(science was and still is) making society confirm to the same spatiotemporal representational framework it wa[...]
(338)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%68.3[...]
(a problem in management:) “time had conspired with capital to annihilate space
@Sana
[a ‘second nature’ being created] railway (+ telegraph) ==> commodification + communication
in our trip to Rivage with Marialena we were in terested in signs in the built landscape, the “second nature” in the nature of Rivage, which were “concrete embodiments of the environmental partitioning that made farming possible”
a heterogeneous collection of lived spaces and histories
a heterogeneous collection of lives and spaces
why translation must be a monopoly (according to railway):
you need centralized bureaucracy and effective monopoly in order to operate with efficiency [...] you could not have every train running on its own (loca) time ==> (Bahn railway map =) a representation that permit efficient operation --> *an absolute time and annihilated space*
(industrialization -->) railway/railroads --> basic accounting techniques used by American business enterprise (into the 20th century)
==> infrastructural technology: organizational form (accounting techniques, reports, etc.) synchronized with its own impact on the world (regularizing it) providing both a ***material and metaphorical implusion*** (to order its forms of inquiry/activity)
@apass monday reading
means of new infrastructural technobody ==> technoscientific representations ==> (dual process of) commodification (railway) + representation (abstract space-time)
--> “you need to be able to represent the world in a *coherent and standard* form [~ databases] in order to run railways [or program language operation] and deal in commodities
increasingly less well-defined boundaries --Serres--> we need analytic categories that allow us to account for the unified representational time and space applied to both bureaucratic and scientific work --(Sohn-Rethel)--> (rela (relationship between) **commodity form and the process of intellectual abstraction** [-abstractness governs the whole orbit of commodity form]. when commodity is up for sale, it is by definition not to be used; it exists in a kind of “frozen time” outside the normal flow of time. it moves in an abstract spatiotemporal world (~= “second nature"[==> cognitive faculty of conceptual things] =/= concrete world of “first nature”)
*import* the ideal abstraction basic to greek philosophy and to modern science
systematizers
nested series of regions
synchronic extension --> “trace” back records in past: indian empire preceded edgyptian preceded persian preceded western. a second world, Europe, is contained within larger world (~= european union) --> (fable of the “step by step”:) man has step by step, broken with this natural asian world, and constructed, through industry and trial a world informated by liberty [--> my german orientat[...]
(339)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%68.5[...] device could be mitigated (as Beaumont and Lyell pointed out) by redundencies in the recording process -->> these redundencies could be perceived through efficient use of the new transport infrastructure (steamboat, train, etc.) -->> then geology would converge with astronomy in calling forth a historical time as regular and perfect as that of the clockwork solar system (hymned as an accurate clock)
}-->
“archival process ~= a natural technology” --> from natural to ideal: archive being mediated by technology marked by clockwork regularity
==> “earth = clock” (associated with the triumph of industrial society, because it ran like clockwork [---> go to german pünktlich punctuality]) --> industrial time writen into Lyell's geology: two methods of factory production *the division of labor* and the *parceling up of time into regular units* are both writen into time that Lyell created for the new discipline of geology
--> factory & geology were the precisely the same problem: *organization of time*
census
statistical record-keeping, a central technology for a modern state
statistical thinking
(this is Lyell in Bowker's research on memory practices in sciences:)
through a linguistic metaphor, Lyell endeavored to explain the apparent asymmetry between past and present. this metaphor brings out the peculiar centrality of humanity in Lyell's geology and thus the centrality of human society to his problematic
idea of the ‘book of nature’
(Lyell's logic) --> we humans have access only to a limited and random grammar of the ‘book of nature’ ==> *burden of proof* lies with those with thier set of *past causes* to explain the past
[!!]
Lyell's geology is a kind of bookkeeping device that allows the storage of vast amounts of information by sorting them into a kind of filing cabinet of different kinds of events (=/= ajayeb)
(his work revolving around an understanding of archives)
Lyell's “economy of nature”
principle of division of labor into the profession of geology + into the economy of nature }==> cumulative reports in a stateless present (=/= situated knowledges) ==> calculus of regularity out of apparent chaos and old time
true language of geology
(from a) groundwork --> contemplation of more general questions --> complicated results -->{ indefinite lapse of ages --> the existing causes of change
(?Marialena contributing to) earth's archive
scriptural authority (=/= rigor)
halcyon future
ایام خوب گذشته ayam-e khub-e gozashte/ayande
when the center of calculation is in place, there is no need to move
past --> knowledge developed catastrophically, and analysis were framed in terms of catastrophes
present --> kno[...]
(340)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%68.8[...]>
*content variance* in ajayeb.net
(how did i or didn't perform/stage setting user expectations in my apass representations of ajayeb.net)
--> (question of) *objects that grow*, identifier assignment policy, content moves away (varies) from its original state
(any) content change ==triggers==> generation of new object identifier
finite, indefinite, lifetime, subinfinite
content in the presence of versions
(Calvert's defining “content” without using the term “meaning”:)
[*]content: abstract substance, found in such strings as writing, speech, images, and music, (=/= form, =/= style)
content that includes an actionalbe id string:
•extraversuioned, offering no direct actionalbe access
•introversioned, version is opaque, shyness?, good for longevity, bad for inferring provenance منشاء
found in the wild
found in ajayeb.net:
•constructed content reference
•scholarly web
•standardized query strings
•the question of landing page --with--> typed links navigable by software
how ajayeb.net performs analysis and prioritization of its own service definition?
how ajayeb.net translates its politics into metadata[~= machine-readable persistence statements]?
which “well-intentioned but untested” set of terms are used and addressed in ajayeb.not?
...................................
[(gendered, racialized, politicized, colonial,,,) narratives of innovation]
(i tended to this field with ajayeb [عجایب المخلوقات: a context of pedagogy and librarianship] -->) library and information science : technologically intensive profession (<-- also many other professions)
علوم بايگانی <--> علوم کتابداری
(my performance and literary interest:) *librarianship and teaching are both professions that resist commodification because they rely on embodied labor and personal interaction*
*people-centric work* (like library science and education)
quantitative =/= qualitative
measurable =/= descriptive
(objective concepts)
--> (Calvert reading) the ostensibly qualitative, measurable, and hence objective concepts of competition and competitiveness stand in contrast with qualitative, descriptive concepts of both “culture and collaboration”
to open up some of the ‘literature of’
(Calvert working on) the implicit notion that competition and innovation are a natural fit --> the “measure, controlm and automatic” rationality of US-style economic competition
difficult to commodify
difficult to describe
not taking apparent differences (between men and women, human and animal,,) to be timeless, necessary, or inevitable --> descriptive =/= prescriptive (descriptions n[...]
(342)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%69.2[...]ess, افراط ,ازدياد] of measures --✕--> profit: the seller-centric proxy measure of consumer interest
“our idealized notion of competition as a generator of innovation black-boxes a host of processes for competition, including unfair practices, externalizing costs, marketing, deception, and deskilling.”
(our idealized notion of:){ competition ==> innovation }--black-boxes--> (a host of) processes for competition:
•unfair practices
•externalizing costs
•marketing
•deception
•deskilling
•
individualistic and social Darwinist overtones
[*]inovation: a form of wishful thinking that aims to bring about the desired transformations without the associated costs in time and human effort (Suchman & Bishop)
(‘labor-intensive artistic work’: noninovative creative work; deepen the density of curiosity;)
capitalism continuously applies new technology designed to fragment and deskill labor, so that labor becomes cheaper and subject to greater control (Wajcman)
(sometimes) obsolescence is created through minor redesigns of consumer commodities
“let's sell more” ~-> undesirable consequences for human rights, global trade in rare metals, and toxic waste disposal
[*]technological determinism and optimism: the belief that the present social arrangements and technologies were the inevitable byproducts of historical developement, and that any problems entailed in our technologies and their production processes can be eliminated with further technological innovations
competetiveness and the technological *savvy* implicit in innovation are themselves markers of contemporary masculinity --> “the enduring force of the identification between technology and manliness is not an inherent biological sex difference. it is instead the result of the historical and cultural construction of gender” (Wajcman)<br />
a big part of the problem is that women's technological labor (=/= ghost busters) is culturally invisible --(Katie King in her research on writing technologies argues)--> (a metonymy:) when technologies are reduced to singular, stable, self-contained devices [~ Star Wars] =/= assemblages
[dichotomy of “enforcement =/= destruction” Star Wars either or: if you are not destroying it you are enforcing it]
problems that cannot be conceptualized in terms of measures and endpoints, or which involve holistic, qualitative solutions, will be at a disadvantage for selection
(Cowan shows) the developement of new household tachnologies did not free women from the domestic shpere. rather, it allowed women to enter the paid labor force while leaving the gendered division of labor in the home untouched.
(makes me throw up -->) large literature of self-determination theory (~ showing people are more creative and happy when their[...]
(343)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%69.3[...]logies argues)--> (a metonymy:) when technologies are reduced to singular, stable, self-contained devices [~ Star Wars] =/= assemblages
[dichotomy of “enforcement =/= destruction” Star Wars either or: if you are not destroying it you are enforcing it]
problems that cannot be conceptualized in terms of measures and endpoints, or which involve holistic, qualitative solutions, will be at a disadvantage for selection
(Cowan shows) the developement of new household tachnologies did not free women from the domestic shpere. rather, it allowed women to enter the paid labor force while leaving the gendered division of labor in the home untouched.
(makes me throw up -->) large literature of self-determination theory (~ showing people are more creative and happy when their work allows them to be autonomous, related, and competent) + reward systems cultivating competitive environments
[*]autonomy: self-willing, volitional, being an agent in the action =/= being a “pawn”
spheres where processes and outcomes have been the name of the game (in feminized fields of education and librarianship)
labs (such as laser developement) that require collaboration with other labs
trading zones: a metaphor for understanding how cooperation between researchers enables new scientific paradigms --> Galison
*the development of this or that research looks like a continuous trajectory, but the trajectory was actually discontinuous and ruptured. that fact that we have invented or discovered something makes that developement seem inevitable, but things could always have turned out some other way* --> Cowan > Calvert
competition is not a guarantor of innovation, our cultural belief in it can obscure other explanations for innovation --> for example (Wylie showing:) (archaeology's enshrined belief that) male-centered hunting activities dominated prehistoric caloric intakes ==✕==> other hypotheses for the transition to agriculture --✕--> women's leading role in the development of agriculture--arguably the most significant innovation in human history--could finally be detected
[bids for status by denying the feminized and second class aspects of library work] --> ***the labor of care is at the core of library work*** --> *teaching, like technology, is always a relationship, and that relationship is undergrided by the labor of care* (--> affective labor is literally vital to the successful delivery of other kinds of services)***
the ways women are called on to manage their and other's feelings <--✕--> technology is positioned in out culture as rational and precise and therefore (masculine and) unemotional [--> look at the film Lucy]
successful education and mentorship depend on this skill, which, like household labor, is difficult to account for in “competitive” economic analysis
**ar[...]
(344)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%69.4[...]ctures make ethical decisions for us =/= producing methods/ethic that allows librarians to mandate characteristics in developing technologies which both preserve librarians’ prerogatives to make (necessary visible) ethical judgment calls <-- Calvert
جعبه--"containers” continue to dictate the name of the game (for the immensely diverse patronage of the public library)
...................................
bilingualism
different languages (farsi and arabic in ajayeb) refers to different value systems and to different lived experience
...................................
[Ahmed]
(complaint ~=) diversity-work = data-collection
we learn about the damage we cause, of how causes are understood as damage
...................................
my old background (in computer sciences):
•www.joelonsoftware.com (Joel Spolsky runs a company which sells bug databases, “FogBugz”)
•wiki.c2.com
•“Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs”
computational process
abstract beings (processes*) manipulate other abstract things (data*)
--> a pattern of rules (program*)
programming: *metalinguistic abstraction* [--> engineering design] : building a mini-language to express a problem, using a fixed computer programming language (on a given hardware) to construct a new language that enables describing (and hence to think) the problem --> using:
•primitives means of combination
•primitives means of abstraction
--> representation of data and control (<~~ individual bits of storage and primitive machine instructions)
+ using the given hardware to erect systems/utilities for the efficient implementation of resource-limited computations
distinction between “passive” data and “active” processes =/= Lisp
(procedures and data are just abstractions, they are not really distinct) --> programming language should have methods for combining and abstracting procedures and data
means of abstraction: by which compound elements can be named and manipulated as units
modularity --> localized part of the system
<== perception of the system
•objective: viewing a large system as a collection of distinct objects --> concerned with how a computational object can change and yet maintain its identity
•streamous: information that flow in the system --> delayed evaluation
(for example) a bank account: has state in that the answer to the question “Can I withdraw $100?” depends upon the history of deposit and withdrawal transactions
object decomposed into computational objects (each with their own time-varying local state variables) --> model
object programming: model real-world objects with local state by computational ob[...]
(345)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%69.6[...]g and nonliving entities)
*score of recognizable historical era*
using:
•filmic techniques (animation, montage, time lapse)
•affective techniques (sarcasm, intimacy)
how can we address aspects of apass's exceptionalism?
(with its things: characters, colors, doings, values)
*historical/cultural specificities of apass*
enlightenment inheritances:
•quest for universality
•
apparent seamlessness and universality with the veneer روکش of helpfulness ==> purity, deny multivocality, hide the residuum produced, and exclude hybridity
--> (pulling the carpet of familiarity out from under users:)
to replace ‘familiar generic conventions’ (~ universal) --replace-with--> a “universal of local application” (~= residuum)
(we rely on) [*]words: value-laden components of language that also serve as categories and moor لنگر us in the symbolic, to effect the transformations of the collections
labels ~-/==> power and oppression epistemologies <== *organizing logics* (that remain invisible when when we change the words or subsitute new sets of categories)--> that is why i am reluctant with only changing the metadata @Pierre: using metadata to manipulate the organizing apparatus ==> versions of residuality (?)
...................................
[working on apass milieu data model, summer2018]
c.r.i. (“collective research interface”)
--?--> a pathological collage
discrete object (of problem [who, when, how,]) interface
--> refering to something outside c.r.i. (outside the digital model)
face (slider) --> object monster
(?what is lost at) linking the symbolic space of data-model to the qualities of the researches of participants [which are relational, procedural, and emotional]
s.s.s. (scroller, slider, still-life)
discourse =/= valorizing information
Pierre's fables:
•“nonviolent way”
•“not by chance ...”
*Apologue*
research --> data flow
sieve --> nodes in/of residual
internal categories:
•stickiness
•zoom
•cheat
•persistence
•repetition
•(vulgar)
•
}==> topology:
1. ramp
2. nest
3. skew
ramp: sequential, one dimensional, ‘sliders’
nest: fractal quality, JSON, hierarchical tree, ‘comments’
skew: verb act, streching, ‘2D field picker’
(slider: marking everything)
semantic in flux + persistence
object repository + identifiers
feedback --> quasi object --> structured knower --> data
#workshop in apass 2018 Summer
...a series of data models that was produced during [...]
(346)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%69.9[...]el to the qualities of the researches of participants [which are relational, procedural, and emotional]
s.s.s. (scroller, slider, still-life)
discourse =/= valorizing information
Pierre's fables:
•“nonviolent way”
•“not by chance ...”
*Apologue*
research --> data flow
sieve --> nodes in/of residual
internal categories:
•stickiness
•zoom
•cheat
•persistence
•repetition
•(vulgar)
•
}==> topology:
1. ramp
2. nest
3. skew
ramp: sequential, one dimensional, ‘sliders’
nest: fractal quality, JSON, hierarchical tree, ‘comments’
skew: verb act, streching, ‘2D field picker’
(slider: marking everything)
semantic in flux + persistence
object repository + identifiers
feedback --> quasi object --> structured knower --> data
#workshop in apass 2018 Summer
...a series of data models that was produced during a three days work session in a.pass May 2018.
The aim was to create a “filter" for the artistic research projects of each participants, in order to train in making meta-linguistic abstractions (on a given computer hardware) to construct a “thing” that enables describing the problem of Building Abstractions with Data, to increase/enhance the expressive/descriptive power of the languages we use. It addresses the question of machine/human readability in the digital imperative of computational world we are inhabiting, with the particular case of a.pass artistic research environments for advanced performance studies.
•interested in computational literacy (including data-collection, librarianship) as part of our *diversity-work* and our *articulation-work*
•interested in different languages (english, computer, non-sign languages, etc.) refers to different value systems and to different lived experience
•interested in the *labor of knowledge-work* (in collective digital flesh life)
•interested in shifts in topology (the ongoing reworking of bodily boundaries of each of our research practices)
•
TERMINOLOGY:
*articulation-work: the labor necessary to make technologies fit together seamlessly
*diversity-work: a kind of work in which we learn about the damage we cause, and of how “causes” are understood as “damage”
*librarianship: a work that hooks up people with their technologies
*data abstraction: a *technique of isolating* (the parts of your mini-language that deal with) how data/info objects are ‘represented’ from (the parts of your mini-language that deal with) how data/info objects are ‘used’ (---> i addressed this in my fable workshop in a totally different epistemology)
*model: your object decomposed i[...]
(348)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%69.9[...]es of each of our research practices)
•
TERMINOLOGY:
*articulation-work: the labor necessary to make technologies fit together seamlessly
*diversity-work: a kind of work in which we learn about the damage we cause, and of how “causes” are understood as “damage”
*librarianship: a work that hooks up people with their technologies
*data abstraction: a *technique of isolating* (the parts of your mini-language that deal with) how data/info objects are ‘represented’ from (the parts of your mini-language that deal with) how data/info objects are ‘used’ (---> i addressed this in my fable workshop in a totally different epistemology)
*model: your object decomposed into *computational compound objects* (each with their own time-varying local state variables)
(representation of data and control over data:)
*modular: localized part of the system that are produced by the perception of the system
*objective: viewing a large system as a collection of distinct objects. concerned with how a computational object can change and yet maintain its identity
*streamous: information that flow in the system. its evaluation is delayed. infinite list
*metadata: machine-readable persistence statements
*digital interface: discrete object of your “research problem” that refers to something outside the cri (outside the digital model)
*topology: a (proposed) body-plan to investigate questions of *connectivity* and *boundaries*, in order to find out what remains invariant as a result of transformation. this will direct us to propose (well-intended but not tested) *transversal objects*.
to be able to propose: in the culture of each pad+participant+research what connects and joins, what delinks and disconnects.
PRACTICAL:
we want to find out how cri's “filter” translates its politics into metadata
and
what happens in linking the symbolic space of data-model to the (relational, procedural, emotional) qualities of the researches of participants
we will work on the block's opening week feedbacks and process them in this diagram:
feedback --> quasi object --> structured knower --> data
(or technically:)
semantic in flux --> persistence statements --> object repository --> identifiers
(Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are spent on the creation of “quasi objects”)
i propose some (well-intended but not tested) internal categories:
•stickiness
•zoom
•cheat
•persistence
•repetition
•vulgar
(i will describe them later)
and these categories produce three topologies:
1. ramp
2. nest
3. skew
(this is a maneuver to replace the question of ‘strategy’ to ‘topology’, the first act of[...]
(349)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%70[...]ology)
*model: your object decomposed into *computational compound objects* (each with their own time-varying local state variables)
(representation of data and control over data:)
*modular: localized part of the system that are produced by the perception of the system
*objective: viewing a large system as a collection of distinct objects. concerned with how a computational object can change and yet maintain its identity
*streamous: information that flow in the system. its evaluation is delayed. infinite list
*metadata: machine-readable persistence statements
*digital interface: discrete object of your “research problem” that refers to something outside the cri (outside the digital model)
*topology: a (proposed) body-plan to investigate questions of *connectivity* and *boundaries*, in order to find out what remains invariant as a result of transformation. this will direct us to propose (well-intended but not tested) *transversal objects*.
to be able to propose: in the culture of each pad+participant+research what connects and joins, what delinks and disconnects.
PRACTICAL:
we want to find out how cri's “filter” translates its politics into metadata
and
what happens in linking the symbolic space of data-model to the (relational, procedural, emotional) qualities of the researches of participants
we will work on the block's opening week feedbacks and process them in this diagram:
feedback --> quasi object --> structured knower --> data
(or technically:)
semantic in flux --> persistence statements --> object repository --> identifiers
(Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are spent on the creation of “quasi objects”)
i propose some (well-intended but not tested) internal categories:
•stickiness
•zoom
•cheat
•persistence
- repetition
•vulgar
(i will describe them later)
and these categories produce three topologies:
1. ramp
2. nest
3. skew
(this is a maneuver to replace the question of ‘strategy’ to ‘topology’, the first act of making quasi-objects)
ramp: sequential, one dimensional, ‘sliders’
nest: fractal, serializable, arborescent, ‘comments’
skew: verb-active, streching, ‘2D field color picker pointer’
each is “queryable” in different ways and propose different difficulties
each of them addapted from an existing technologies (range sliders, commenting, color pickers)
each embeds one of: colors, doings, values
slider: marking everything with decimals
comments: hypertextualizing
field picker: spreading
}--> they are all milieu-makers
ramp --> arc of necessity
nest --> mosaic divisions
skew --> chromatic/lumi[...]
(350)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%70[...]it in interesting serious ways? (yes yes)
questions of: thinking, reminding, remaining,
Sofia's documentation
she asks “what is document today?”
-what was document yesterday (that is not anymore today)?
-how the agency and meaning of docu is (or is not) mutating in time?*
-what is beyond the question of documentation and preservation? --> *durational aesthetics*
-is document a limited way of asking questions about what we do and our relationship with time and duration? [you never know what the present brings into the future.]
what art cannot say that document can? “truth”?
when truth was invented where was document standing?
is document today a mere effect of technologies of inscribing?
why we are not talking about “file”?
(---> go to the ontology of evidence and files in X-Files TV series)
is ‘file’ the bedrock of reading today?
>
document assumes, constructs and promises its own labor of reading
? document is that which reads as referent, truthful, evident, economic value, , ,
Femke, with multiple understanders of the blended, blending world
the question of the metaphors of the body
manuality
manual understanders
for her “the point of origin” is at stake? --> the “ground” is at once desired and disarticulated for the sake of an idea of situatedness --> politics of positioning
placement, world, Dasein, fall
in CG bodies are articulated in differential vectors, not “grounds” --> does she want to ground the body?
she was mobilizing the metaphors of: body, ground, falling
how is she falling? in which historically contingent practices of grounding is she grounded, building her discourse?
ontology of the variable --> (question of the) figure of variationr />
her work with the partners of crime, getting in the front line and frontiers of CG working and practical metaphors
...................................
Sofia's textual machine, switching between binary values of faire contract --> staying with the polar syntax of ‘you’ and ‘them’
-how the rotating axis of her machine is able of creating breaks in the syntax of the contract?
-(for her machine: “understanding = an act of application”) --> how new forms of *understanding* could change the ways we might achieve fair societies? and not merely changing the order of sentence to visualize and objectification of unfairness and precariousness of the employment economy, in the exegesis of the writen contract. what would it mean to install an understander (taking a risk), for Sofia, and not a reversal syntaxer (making aware)?
-employer and the employee as different “species” with their different “natural” tendencies to fuck with one another? --> zero-sum game
-t[...]
(351)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%70.6[...]contextual confusion*** (<-- requres transcontextual gifts one may or may not have...) @apass #feedback: urgent appropriate response
--Bateson--> double bind patterning = intense:
•contradictory (two order of messages each of which denies the other)
•unvoiced (making explicit checks of context impossible, inappropriate, meaningless)
“(there is nothing to determine) whether a give individual shall become a clown, a poet, a schizophrenic, or a combination of these” --> we deal with a genus of syndromes (most of which are not conventionally regarded as pathological) [~= art work]#feedback
•those life is enriched by transcontextual gifts (--> Elen)
•those who are impoverished by transcontextual confusions (--> Ali)
}--> for both there is a “double take”
a falling leaf or the greeting of a friend is not “just that and nothing more”
(taking from Bateson, Katie -->) play with this range of terror and possibility --(with + through)--> (individual & biosocial) *consciousness: reflection + recursion* (at the edge of apprehension) = environments of being : context, pattern, layers of abstraction, storytelling all have material effects and provide *materials for agency*
[*]play: metacommunicative media*, a double consciousness (in which the player is well aware of the artificiality of the play situation) [=/= immersive fallacy: the idea that games get better and better as they become whatever that thing “more real” is ==> implications for the meaning of: rigor, representation, evidence, method, assessment]
(animal and children learn to play --learn-->) there are some ways *play self =/= everyday self* & [they learn] to perform this separation in interactive cognitive and social communication *forms of not* : they amuse themselves by performing the communication “this is not it”:
•the puppy nips, but not hard enough to injure --> violence? not. --> the nip actually hurts a bit
•the teen kisses in spin the bottle, but not the person they like the most --> sex? not. --> the kissing blush and stammer
•my body is reacting as if i am in danger, but really i am in front of a computer --> reality? not.
•
}--> double consciousness
(Katie > Bateson) *play creates its own commentary in itself about itself as an intense and pleasurable interactive dynamism* = metacommunication: communicative + neurological + hormonal
***good signaling skills make nonabusive play on the edge of double bind possible***
(skills of) transcontextual movement without falling apart
finding out:
•which bits are active
•which bits are context
•which bits can be made explicit
•which rules are perceptible
•which distributed embodiments, cognitions, and infrastructures are in play
(these are the skills needed for the kind of game we play in apass)
<[...]
(354)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%71.9[...]f being : context, pattern, layers of abstraction, storytelling all have material effects and provide *materials for agency*
[*]play: metacommunicative media*, a double consciousness (in which the player is well aware of the artificiality of the play situation) [=/= immersive fallacy: the idea that games get better and better as they become whatever that thing “more real” is ==> implications for the meaning of: rigor, representation, evidence, method, assessment]
(animal and children learn to play --learn-->) there are some ways *play self =/= everyday self* & [they learn] to perform this separation in interactive cognitive and social communication *forms of not* : they amuse themselves by performing the communication “this is not it”:
•the puppy nips, but not hard enough to injure --> violence? not. --> the nip actually hurts a bit
•the teen kisses in spin the bottle, but not the person they like the most --> sex? not. --> the kissing blush and stammer
•my body is reacting as if i am in danger, but really i am in front of a computer --> reality? not.
•
}--> double consciousness
(Katie > Bateson) *play creates its own commentary in itself about itself as an intense and pleasurable interactive dynamism* = metacommunication: communicative + neurological + hormonal
***good signaling skills make nonabusive play on the edge of double bind possible***
(skills of) transcontextual movement without falling apart
finding out:
•which bits are active
•which bits are context
•which bits can be made explicit
•which rules are perceptible
•which distributed embodiments, cognitions, and infrastructures are in play
(these are the skills needed for the kind of game we play in apass)
playing/gaming (now covers): gambling, economic game theory, game art, design, learning, role playing, system theory --> *playing with our distributed being* [Katie's accounting for digital]
-what the hell are my hormonal plays? (not always including another person)
(for Haraway [*]wording:) game of cat's cradle (across a range of transmedia) pictured, described, metacommunicated, performed, extended, *relayed*
(my image assemblages: writing:) techno-organic polyglot polymorphic wiring diagrams
to pattern
to relay (passing something along, relaying =/= sharing)
to perceive multiform
rewarded by dopamine
triggered by pleasure, anticipation, yawning fields for memory [--> my ajayeb study], learning and unlearning, tenacious addictive repetitions
tools: drawing, role playing, gaming, writing, critiquing, reviewing, costuming, songwriting, singing, webby community building, techy arts, fans advocating their interests in films
--> shaping environments and contexts for imagination and cognition
*wording: a pra[...]
(355)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%71.9[...]x? not. --> the kissing blush and stammer
•my body is reacting as if i am in danger, but really i am in front of a computer --> reality? not.
•
}--> double consciousness
(Katie > Bateson) *play creates its own commentary in itself about itself as an intense and pleasurable interactive dynamism* = metacommunication: communicative + neurological + hormonal
***good signaling skills make nonabusive play on the edge of double bind possible***
(skills of) transcontextual movement without falling apart
finding out:
•which bits are active
•which bits are context
•which bits can be made explicit
•which rules are perceptible
•which distributed embodiments, cognitions, and infrastructures are in play
(these are the skills needed for the kind of game we play in apass)
playing/gaming (now covers): gambling, economic game theory, game art, design, learning, role playing, system theory --> *playing with our distributed being* [Katie's accounting for digital]
-what the hell are my hormonal plays? (not always including another person)
(for Haraway [*]wording:) game of cat's cradle (across a range of transmedia) pictured, described, metacommunicated, performed, extended, *relayed*
(my image assemblages: writing:) techno-organic polyglot polymorphic wiring diagrams
to pattern
to relay (passing something along, relaying =/= sharing)
to perceive multiform
rewarded by dopamine
triggered by pleasure, anticipation, yawning fields for memory [--> my ajayeb study], learning and unlearning, tenacious addictive repetitions
tools: drawing, role playing, gaming, writing, critiquing, reviewing, costuming, songwriting, singing, webby community building, techy arts, fans advocating their interests in films
--> shaping environments and contexts for imagination and cognition
*wording: a practice of displaying + crafting worlds, of sharing + enjoying expertise, of noticing tiny details of connection and similarity amid the tweaks and frissons of alternative shadings across many intertextualities of association, history, genre, care*
in interface
what was obvious to one was mystery to another
what was trivial to one was a barrier to another
how do you reply in terms that are alien to you?
@apass
*actual materialities of distributed thinking* <--among-- infrastructures of:
•publication
•media
•conferences
•scholarly communication
•research results and processes
•
elegant parsimonies of explanation
clever bodies at the edge of apprehension (Despret's Clever Hans Effect)
an interative agency (Katie calls) *learning to be affected* =/= “mearly the effect of...” ...ولی اون فقط داره
[...]
(356)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%72[...]jects
**(my project in apass:) to be curious and value how claims to epistemological authority operate and how comparative relativism can be accountable + can i irritatingly passionately disagree with
democratization of oppression (?)
reading across the media sustains a depth of experience that motivates more consumption
...the economic logic of a horizontally integrated entertainment industry
#telegram iran (commercial world of entertainment)
material examples of *stacked realities* cascading over various media and technological platforms with differing degrees of interoperability and standardization --Katie--> *transmedia stories* (inevitably commercialized)
integrationism
revolutionary action
supermacism
separatism
anarchism
political defense
redefinition of the human
to intervene in and democratically refocus social and psychic powers --> place-based ecological activism: self-consciously identifying and producing invigorating political and cultural planetary geographies
ethically augmented and affected cognitive sensorium
variable and sensitized tactics and ethics of “democratics” --Sandoval--> meta-ideologizing: functions both within and against ideology
@Leo?
(my work on ajayeb is aimed at:) old and new media collide ==Jenkins==> *convergence culture* --inhabited-by--> those who learn how to play with media, information, visualization, and who live among and produce hypertexted or relational and relative materialities
preemptive
proleptic
prophetic
(the way i am using the term) queer: to learn to be affected by the political economies of knowledge worlds
(my art in lecture and performances:) *to play with our own consciousness* --Katie--> to curiosly work at the edge of “this is not it”, [bits that are] some activated and activating across the tacit and the explicit
(no to) idealization
(no to) disillusionment
(Katie asks) *****which “we” gathers, locating inside of worlding processes, as elements in reorganizations that “we” matter in, but do not control?*****
(the game we play in artistic research:) *transcontextual movement witout falling apart*
[in apass people do] sensitized transmedia knowledge practices
...................................
origin of computing goes back to 19th century insurance industry: modern elimination of risks
social theory of data science
1820s (Babbage’s) difference engine
right at the industrial revolution: division of labor (for Babbage was the highest human achievement)
==> welfare state
the state protects and promotes the economic and social well-being of the citizens
we are living by the rationality of insurance i[...]
(357)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%72.3[...]ionless economy ==> must go faster and faster
discourse of stasis =/= how to explore change?
not preserving endangered species, but preserving the possibility of change
desks are information technologies
Bowker > Sina: every critical work (today) must include the centrality of data (and calculation) in our lives
(from premodern) *describe the world* [bestiaries] --to--> (modern necessity to) *calculate the world* [recognizing a calculated world --> my interest in Olearius]
...................................
(Cameron's image of) Terminator: relentless unidirectional progress [that you can't negotiate with] (~= modernity) ==> destruction of cultures and communities --> destroy ourselves
how to live with Terminator = how to live with modernity --> postmodernity
(in the film the Terminator is finally terminated by a determined woman using rather old-fashioned technology)
absolutely will not stop
inside: hyperalloy combat chassis, microprocessor controlled, fully armoured, very tough
outside: living human tissue, flesh, skin, hair, blood --> controlled by a clinical logic: *it cannot be reasoned with*, it cannot be bargained with
its metal skeleton rises from the ashes and carries on with its mission. the skeleton too is chopped to bits, the individual bits come to life and continue with their goal
(for Sardar) modernity is the conceptual equivalent of the Terminator (incepted in European Enlightenment: modernize traditional cultures and relentlessly lead mankind, screaming and protesting, by the nose towards a progressive utopia)
modernity ~=> (witnessed, if not caused:)
•death and elimination of numerous cultures
•destruction of countless communities and histories
•disappearance of hundreds of valuable animal and plant species
•transformed arable land into wastelands lands and deserts
modernity: the official culture of the world
(Nietzsche, Heidegger -->) it is not possible to think our way out of modernity with the philosophical system of thought and language supplied by modernity
--> Vattimo's (bad) philosophy of crisis:
•history
what was traditionally referred to as “history” is now perceived as having broken down into an infinity of “histories” that can no longer be (re)combined into a single narrative governed by a central theme
(today:) history = a kind of writing
•progress: *something qualitatively different from what precedes it* (a forward movement in history) --✕--> [now:] welf established technique (of such masters as Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Lyotard and Baudrillard:) to deconstruct rational metaphysics in order to open it, to rewrite it and thus to lay the foundation, in terms of a Marxian-inspired historicism, of new truths for a postmodernist thought
•(Vatt[...]
(358)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%72.4[...]quivalent of the Terminator (incepted in European Enlightenment: modernize traditional cultures and relentlessly lead mankind, screaming and protesting, by the nose towards a progressive utopia)
modernity ~=> (witnessed, if not caused:)
•death and elimination of numerous cultures
•destruction of countless communities and histories
•disappearance of hundreds of valuable animal and plant species
•transformed arable land into wastelands and deserts
modernity: the official culture of the world
(Nietzsche, Heidegger -->) it is not possible to think our way out of modernity with the philosophical system of thought and language supplied by modernity
--> Vattimo's (bad) philosophy of crisis:
•history
what was traditionally referred to as “history” is now perceived as having broken down into an infinity of “histories” that can no longer be (re)combined into a single narrative governed by a central theme
(today:) history = a kind of writing
•progress: *something qualitatively different from what precedes it* (a forward movement in history) --✕--> [now:] welf established technique (of such masters as Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Lyotard and Baudrillard:) to deconstruct rational metaphysics in order to open it, to rewrite it and thus to lay the foundation, in terms of a Marxian-inspired historicism, of new truths for a postmodernist thought
•(Vattimo's use of) nihilism as weapon to attack notions of ‘truth’ and ‘reason’ (in western metaphysics) ==>
◦‘logic = (just another kind of) rhetoric’
◦‘truth = will to power (by those who claim to be seeking truth over those who are being addressed by them)’
◦‘science and technology = dominating metaphysical systems’
--✕--> (eliminated any) possibility of a dialogue with cultures that are truly other as the rational metaphysics of science and technology
(the idea of) plurality of cultures and discourses must become a basic premise of postmodernist thought ==> widespread and widely pluralistic religious revival [+ excessive indulgence in relativism]
(the meaning of) morality and principles of justice in a postmodern world: [democracy's western ethos:]
•recognition of human needs
•courage
•solidarity
•justice
•prudence
•(virtue of) participating in rational discourse
(Sardar's reading:)
•stating the obvious with a sense of grand discovery is an essential postmodern disease
•what modern science and technology, free market economy and multinational corporations are doing in the name of freedom, justice and fairness
--> despite wonderful sentiments, and all the arguments for justice and equify, we end up with more of the same
(problem of the East with) modernity: a European cultural construct based on specific historical l[...]
(359)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%72.4[...]dernity (not coming right after it)??**** <-- my research question (to separate the bond between science and modernity? to flow the curiosity in that direction)
{ the idea of “science created the modern world + western global dominance” (=/= everyone else) }==> “understanding of modernity = understanding history of science”
(one of rare moments that) european middle ages is conflated with the whole of middle east civilization, as pre-Newtonian (in the eyes of W. Rostow)
--> cold war (maneuvering for the alliances of the newly decolonized nations)
--> all the ways of knowing that were not included in the current Anglophone and Francophone definition of “science = the natural sciences in English only in mid 19th century” =/= elm علم, Wissenschaft
**there is no culture without (its own implicit systematics of) knowledge**
•epistemological hierarchy (even without the display or existence of *epistemic culture* [dedicated to the persue of knoweldge] --> yet put pressure on communities of learning ==> ideas & practices, for example alchemy was court science par excellence)
•social hierarchy
•rational who can practice them why
(Daston:) the stuck of hands-on knowledge shoots up and then metaphysics plump it --> persue of knowledge becomes collective (with different pressure points)
for many cultures [including Persian]:
•the philology (grammer) is the queen of the sciences
•the stricing prevalence of *dispute: intellectual discourse staged as agonistic duel --> (most of our) ***intellectual life is conducted as polemic***
...................................
the more you study an environment the less your inheritiability of that environment will be (?)
...................................
history: study of past as it it commemorate in traces (textual, physical, etc.) =/= [ajayeb studies =] memory studies: subjective commemoration of the past, collective forms of commemorations (for example the name of streets, or monuments, or unconscious way of navigating in Tajrish square, etc.) --> present in oral interviews
•how the past has been enlisted emotionally, politically, communally,,, (in various causes: construction of autobiography to the construction of national myth) [==> objectivity does not make sense in memory studies]
•it includes (not only that which cab be documented, it rather) includes an element of the subjective : how people feel about what happened in the past, how they reconstruct events of the past but also narratives =/= what happened in the past --Daston--> objectivity (among histories:)
◦cross-checking of sources
◦(19th century technique of) “reading against the grain”: try to discover, from the surviving sources, from what perspective they were written (what historical context they were embedded in) = “critical reading” from [...]
(363)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%72.6[...] between the medium and his audience
broadcasting device = recording device
authorship --(displaced by)--> a logic of *tracking of traces without a subject* (<-- reduction of representation and inscription)
modern mediumship ~= [*]automatic writing: (most associated with surrealism, in Western contexts) the writer seeks to merely transmit his or her unconscious thoughts and, in the process, to disavow the notion of authorial agency... [it marks a more general transitional moment in the history of representation --Morris-->] ***the production of meaning ceases to be a function of writing --> actuality or facticity becomes the primary object of inscription***)
confessional performances
denunciation of possession performance
untranslatable utterances [**increasing performance of untranslatability, glossolalia غريبه گفتارى --> contemporary spirit possession performances ==> the truth of the spirits in the mass-mediatized world is not referential and certainly not universal --✕--> the truth of the spirits centers on questions about the difference between noise and information]
mediums embrace technology
mediumship proliferates
mediums and the media provide each other with metaphors
(mediums seek to escape the relationship altogether) in forms of ecstatic nonrepresentation or absolute renunciation
Chuchad cutting his tongue --> disavow disavowal
“[...]he rendered himself voiceless, and the only sounds he could make were those of exhalation and inhalation: sounds of the body as machine”
...the crowd gasped and then repeated --> confused awe & automatism
[a fable:] “Chuchad placed the tongue on a piece of white paper, and the blood quickly diffused into the fibers. For a moment it appeared as though the tongue was writing a blunt, indecipherable hieroglyph. Chuchad then held the paper to his mouth so it was covering his face and pressed the tongue back into its original place. This time, he seemed to be rewriting, or rather, writing in reverse, and the glyph was inscribed on the tongue as though the tongue had been transformed into paper and the paper into pen. Thus did writ- ing make speech possible. The medium pulled the paper away, folded it carefully, and then, with only a little blood reddening his lips, began speaking.” (Morris)
•tongue excision = performative repudiation of mediumship
•voice = the vehicle of a simple exteriorization
•[*]fable: staged risk in the form of a bad example ==> “object of transmission = the truth”
•[*]confession: a mode of accession or conformity to the message
in Buddhism of premodern cosmologies --> a domain of natural signification where there is *a pure identity between signifier and signified*
auxiliary hell جهنم کمکی
[a fable:] scrutiny ==> (meritorious bein[...]
(364)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%73[...]sentational capacity of inscription --to--> a deployment of writing in the mode of mathematics (bureaucratic list poetry)
incorporation of technologies of mass mediatization into the language (and performance of possession --by--> the discourses of lost tradition)
-what kind of mediation is (not simply the inscription of its technique, but) a renewed transmission of meaning?
**the fantasy of a return to meaning**
[Morris submits that] (direct marketing ~=) *pyramid schemes* are the economic counterpart of *mediumship*
= the mode of retailing in which the function of distribution and resale (and indeed the movement of capital) is masked in the *rhetoric of directness*
•[*]directness: withdrawal of an infrastructure of mediation into the person of the distributor + مستتر کردن occulting of technique in the very moment of display
•[*]pyramid scheme: a structure in which retailers recruit more retailers --> (mainly serves the interests of) multinational entities parading as local entrepeneurialism
grotesquely functionalized room
abandoning the ontology of mediumship (for...)
putatively unmediated truth (of...)
magic's metamorphosis entailes a repetition
([Morris analysis of Chuchad:] a medium becoming) a middleman disavowing the mediations that he performed in order to produce the illusion of value, or meaning, or truth
•working only in the repression of its own operations --> truth-effect of marketing
--> *the market can substitute for magic*, the media can be itself, the very nature of money (its abstractions and its generality) can compensate for the differences it effaces
*rhetoric of asian family*
occult network: networks that are not publicly disclosed
(in environments that are believed not to operate as an open economy --> economies are dominated not only by particular families but by the logic of family [exclusive and unassailable ties between small communities])
=/= rationalization of local economies, market liberalization,,
•anachronistic imaginary of transnational capitalism and the racialized family (of asian nations) --> idealized
•metaphorical ruse of kinship's discourse
•*neocolonial fantasy concealed in the dream of immediacy* --> Amway: theologically informed market liberalism--pursuing a noiseless world where feedback is impossible
confessional disclosures of new capital
rhetoric of transparency
mediumship's (enthralling) dramaturgy of disclosure
(Morris asking) what else is transparency in the massified world? a mediation so total that it has become invisible (?)
...................................
•to challange them
•to break with their own gesture
•to inherit from them<[...]
(365)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%73.1[...]rves the interests of) multinational entities parading as local entrepeneurialism
grotesquely functionalized room
abandoning the ontology of mediumship (for...)
putatively unmediated truth (of...)
magic's metamorphosis entailes a repetition
([Morris analysis of Chuchad:] a medium becoming) a middleman disavowing the mediations that he performed in order to produce the illusion of value, or meaning, or truth
•working only in the repression of its own operations --> truth-effect of marketing
--> *the market can substitute for magic*, the media can be itself, the very nature of money (its abstractions and its generality) can compensate for the differences it effaces
*rhetoric of asian family*
occult network: networks that are not publicly disclosed
(in environments that are believed not to operate as an open economy --> economies are dominated not only by particular families but by the logic of family [exclusive and unassailable ties between small communities])
=/= rationalization of local economies, market liberalization,,
•anachronistic imaginary of transnational capitalism and the racialized family (of asian nations) --> idealized
•metaphorical ruse of kinship's discourse
•*neocolonial fantasy concealed in the dream of immediacy* --> Amway: theologically informed market liberalism--pursuing a noiseless world where feedback is impossible
confessional disclosures of new capital
rhetoric of transparency
mediumship's (enthralling) dramaturgy of disclosure
(Morris asking) what else is transparency in the massified world? a mediation so total that it has become invisible (?)
...................................
•to challange them
•to break with their own gesture
•to inherit from them
*Socrates --> alleged epistemo-sociological enquiry ([the tradition of] asking people what they know and how they think) --Savransky--> (hallmark of social sciences today:) *ethics of estrangement*: ‘becoming estranged’ from the realm of appearances made available by direct experience in order to ‘gain access’ to a realm of facts and causes**** ==Whitehead==> *bifurcation of nature*: a mode of understanding whereby experience only discloses that which is apparent, whereas the ‘relevant’ factors in the process of knowing the world must always lie, and be sought, somewhere else
*=/= Alice in Wonderland
*=/= Cinderella [--> harem girl, hallucinating with animals, not becoming a psycho (angry), arrested]
*=/= William James: inquiry is about **the way some people cultivate an expertise**, **how they hesitate**, **how they think**, **how they complicate a problem** [#feedback] (for example)
◦*religious experience: to address his questions to the ones who know, the ones whose exper[...]
(366)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%73.1[...]ot the point) settler colonialism and its ecologies, the introducing species--including ourselves--are always bad --> the extraordinary practice of disavowal (of the ‘creatures of the empire’ #Haraway) --> inheriting the notion of ‘belonging’ and ‘not-belonging’ (in this tradition) disavowal is almost the only way you can “keep” belonging. and one of the ways you practice disavowal and belonging is to exterminate the other (feral pigs, etc.) who “really” don't belong.]
•(which) *practices of belonging* (are not part of (whose?) dreaming?) --> they always turn up in family stories {feral =/= pest}
•how various kinds of species can and cannot get on together?
•who should be killed and lived-with?
•(who exists only under the) categories that come from the cunning of recognition [categories of the traditional, of the subsistence food (ma'ash معاش), of the enacting of a culture in view of tourist public,]
•managed belongingness
In Jean Genet's portrayal of dusk (quoted by Minh-ha 1996:101-102), he captures the ambiguity of this transitional time in the expression ‘entre chien et loup,’ between dog and wolf, that is, a time of day when one cannot be distinguished from the other, and he also describes it as ‘the hour of metamorphoses when people ‘half hope, half fear’ that a dog will become a wolf’ (our emphasis). This quotation exemplifies the ambiguously ‘unheimlich,’ [...]
security is never secure enough
Jesus knocks at your heart's door
(history's or pig's) happy ending
absence of ambivalence (in animals)
conditions of admission ---> artistic, sexual, natural *selections*
tickets to power-holding cliques that control the resources
phantoms of non-destruction
or
phantoms of ‘constructed adequately’
pausing dogs
mixed messages
who>
who is wanted for dinner?
the moment when the message is finally received --> tech, magic, ethic, morph
poetic historiography
pivotal reading of ancient Greece --- out of day-dream fantasy
[Rickels]
*beauty is interested in action
(pure) beauty re-lingering on primary narcissism, that's why beauty must be administrated, in proper doses.
(my) animal-findings and fairy-tale associations
if dogs communicate through their trainability cats redirect lines of communication through play. the dog waits and watches, the cat looks and looks, which when is your turn to be looked at, can be therapeutic or unnerving.
meeting the cat half-way
[Ingraham]
the house, passed over in history, brings with it a great many dangers
architecture (never touches the object) is enchanted with object discourse
...all of us have been asked to[...]
(367)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%74.5[...]development of the issue of attention is to question the relevance of isolating an aesthetically determined contemplation or absorption
general problem of perceptual synthesis and disintegrative possibilities of attention
optical verisimilitude
attention --> tension --> possibly of a fixation, of holding something in wonder or contemplation, in which the attentive subject is both immobile and ungrounded
how can something originate in its opposite?
Nietzsche
sudden emergence of model of subjective vision (in the 19th century)
complex and contingent physiological makeup of the observer ==> vision is rendered faulty, even arbitrary
reality maintenance
aftershocks of apperception
failure of a capacity for synthesis of conscious thought (named dissociation) became linked in the 19th century with pathological psychosis
this label (of pathological disintegration) was evidence of a shift in the relation of the subject to a visual field
*synthesis
•for Bergson: bind with creative forces of memory
•for Dilthey: creative forms of fusion specific to human imagination
•for Nietzsche: endlessly creative and metamorphic and not constitutive of truth
the rise of psychological explanation within epistemology
Kant saw perception crowding in upon the soul
for Külpe attention was the very condition of thinking, consciousness not in the mercy of external impressions
the importance of attention to the conception of subjective time in Augustine and Husserl
(curiosity triggered by) wonder for Descartes
in 18th century:
-‘unified’ operation of mental life
-force of a sensation
-an effect of an event external to the subject
--✕-->
in 19th century, attention: an essential but fragile imposition of coherence and clarity onto the dispersed content of consciousness
running in the park, a motif of selfhood, of individual freedom, finality of the possibility of soul from the enduring experience of active, willed effort in relation to the body
==> moi: a repository of self-initiated (mental physical) activity and free will
-running in park/city: a priori believe in the self
-your experience is yours
•attention
•judgement
•memory
•perception
•mediation
apperception --> nature of intuition --> (a mobile and dynamic) conception of will --> motor activity
19th century:
attention = will
character = unity
attention ==> mind --{attention is plainly the essential condition of the formation and development of mind}, systematic acquirement of knowledge, for the control of passions and emotions
--> powerful a[...]
(368)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%74.9[...]onservatory) blossoming bride and bachelor enmeshed in a verdant anticonjugal machine of perpetual nonfulfilment
cultural corrosion of conjugality <== (one of) larger disintegration of premodern positions (of male and female):
•violent insertion of women into the process of commodity production
*labor and society assume a mass character ==> “women = mass articles” & lose:
•their “natural” qualities (female essence defined by the production of life)
•their poetic aura
traditional positions disrupted by the logic of exchangeability***
greenhouses in 19th century, extended the dwelling and bore witness to the expansion of the private sphere. greenhouse provided a place to stroll in all weathers
--> frozen temporality ~=> memory and history excluded =(congealed present)==> dehistorisized subjectivity
(fundamental) withdrawal of the possibility of *gesture* --Agamben--> part of the particularly modern failure of ethos, of character
[gesture <-->? ethos]
incapacitation: renunciation of *potentia*[~= capacity for being affected, any expansion of practical being <-- Spinoza]
smell of flowers = disintegrated product of their sexual metabolism <-- Freud
D+G becoming woman
*man: molar entity par excellence (=/= becomings are molecular), man constitutes the majority, the standard in which the majority is based: white, male, adult, rational ~ the average european, the subject of enunciation
@Leo
(--> problematized by Grosz ---> go to ajayeb.net/?q=Grosz%2BDeleuze%2BGuattari)
the perpetual self-invention of “free subjectivity” --defining--> modernity
cycle of decoding & recoding :
daring innovation --> hyperanxious self-consolidation --> renewed innovation --> ...
Manet =/= Caravaggio:
•intense optical contact
- tactile contact
•a reciprocal system of investment in the transactional nature of the encounter--infused with the interplay of the social, libidinal, and economic difference
hands as:
•expression of individual consciousness (in Caravaggio)
•instrument of active gesture (in Manet)
activity ~=? simulation of gesture
pointing index finger
confirmation of the impossibility of a direct perception, impossibility of an attention that was an immediate possession of its object (--> Sa'di pointing out to the moon and his lover...)--> every point of fixation is deferral
--✕--> (once?) functioned to denote a plane of transcendence
figuration of utopia --> simultaneous mapping out of death, absence, and finitude of historical subjectivity
Peirce's (nonoptical operation of attentive consciousness =/= Descartes) --> impossibility of direct intuition, of interpretiv[...]
(369)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%76.3[...]:) symbolic opening to a noumenal world =/= facade of appearance and semblance
(=/=? coalescence, knowledge and diversity work, etc.)
i can't insist enough (learning from Seurat) that the foreclosure of the noumenal world (the true world) is inseparable from the fragility and insubstantiality of the apparent world
(shabah az sanaat joda nist شبه و صنع)
a residue of an earlier social world (in which the sacred, the occult, and artmaking were much more closely tied together)
...Egyptian priest, medieval magus, Babylonian snake charmer, headsman or executioner,
suggestion of magician --> emblematic of a modernized order of spectacle --> mass management of attentiveness + its commodification : *rationalized magic of a technology of attraction* (that conceals its synthetic construction)
opposition of charismatic and bureaucratic domination
Weber's “routinizatiom" = castration of charisma (==> permanent institutional structures)
prophetic/oracular individual (has seen the extinction of his society) [==implying==> an unstable domination] =/= administrated and rationalized order of a money economy
priestly status of Elen in her performances implying an pathos and metaphysics of distance (and dismantling it?)
be careful with this liminal positions:
•activation of a broken collective memory
•imposition of modern oblivion on the other
presenting music:
socialized activity, indicating the *superficial appearance of a collective reception*
immediacy of an audience
“physicality of music making itself” --Leppert--> the sight of the body's labor to produce sound
19th century ideal of a musical performer as a quasi-sexual virtuoso
performing music --> suggestion of collective participation --evoke--> harmonic relationships and premodern mysteries [implicit in music and geometrical forms (even as they are collapsed into modern abstraction and the image of a fully administrated world)]
@Ali, KHM sound department
...remnant of what once might have the living Dionysian reality (of the antique chorus)
*score* (coming from the boredom of a third-rate military music band after 1850 in Europe) aligned with the rationalizing imperatives of industrial production: hierarchically ranked states *executing an external algorithm* ~= partition: allocating its parts
[*]score: the image of programmed labor in our society (@Lilia) --> logic of combination
-in apass i have been fighting against artists ambivalent characterization of themselves. i want my peers particular figuration of measurement, quantities, and ratios of their diagnosis of crisis of value and of devaluation of life and the world (when they perceive as such... negation and inversion)
(Aristotle's metaphy[...]
(370)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%77.5[...]c making itself” --Leppert--> the sight of the body's labor to produce sound
19th century ideal of a musical performer as a quasi-sexual virtuoso
performing music --> suggestion of collective participation --evoke--> harmonic relationships and premodern mysteries [implicit in music and geometrical forms (even as they are collapsed into modern abstraction and the image of a fully administrated world)]
@Ali, KHM sound department
...remnant of what once might have the living Dionysian reality (of the antique chorus)
*score* (coming from the boredom of a third-rate military music band after 1850 in Europe) aligned with the rationalizing imperatives of industrial production: hierarchically ranked states *executing an external algorithm* ~= partition: allocating its parts
[*]score: the image of programmed labor in our society (@Lilia) --> logic of combination
-in apass i have been fighting against artists ambivalent characterization of themselves. i want my peers particular figuration of measurement, quantities, and ratios of their diagnosis of crisis of value and of devaluation of life and the world (when they perceive as such... negation and inversion)
(Aristotle's metaphysics ==>) Pythagorian: art = harmony = analogy between opposites
~~--> **social project of reconciliation through the use of aesthetic forms** (from the 4th century and still popular today)--> “training of the people begins with the senses” : music and rhythm from which came healing of human temperaments and passions
Pythagoranism: number =/= infinite
•infinite = void of knowledge, limitless and undetermined
•number = rational limit and determination
Pythagorean =/= premodern mystic values
*some of the great disenchanters at the origin of modern western science are deeply Pythagorean:
***number is the essence of reality ==today==> “nature must be studied quantitatively” (=/= ajayeb's quality of descriptive nature of the world)
...and appeal to mathematics in artmaking still comes from the hope of establishing clear and distinct ideas, which as such are necessarily true
Pythagorean primal cosmogenic principle: breath --> repression's binary rhythm of inhaling and exhaling, the mutual interaction of contraries (like sex) : the original generative force
(the union of the limited and the unlimited) --> still operating today in the year 2018
theories of dynamogeny on iranian traditional music radif, that certain musical proportions poses cheerful or bitter qualities, influence the person's emotional state
to transcend from quantitative number of dastgah --to--> a mysterious qualitative dimension of pardeh
(Crary's) Seurat's anarchism: (painting of the) world of mere empirical relations, cut off from the infinite (loss of the va[...]
(371)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%77.5[...] utopias of an allembracing explanation of mankind reducible to torrents of binary oppositions result in “nothingness”
Freud's nirvana principle: to remove interval tension due to stimuli (--> death instinct)
Sina:
(painted and visible philosophy)
in my image assemblages what are and how they work:
•mimes of meaning
•full of graphic gestation
•figural groupings
•architecture
•compositional thinking
what sorts of structural rightness do my image assemblages make inevitable? (innocently indicating the sweet source of truth)
or, what kinds of geometric simplicities (purity of form and efficiency of expression) does it betray?
what is the ‘status of idea’ in there?
what are the allegorical abstractions? (in Sohrevardi image: the mediation between heaven and earth) (horizons, vanishing points, grids, orthogonals, heavenward movements, gestures, axis or axiomatic geometry,,,)
[my performances are teachings on how to read the figural language of my image assemblages (?)]
the particular geometry of pictorial structure in my image assemblages testifies to which truth?
which pictorial realizations (knowledge of things) do they epitomize?
which metaphysical polarities translated into geometric contrasts? (integral part of revealed truth) [or that there is a or no central truth...?]
which allusions ground the abstract truth of the image in a certain reality?
(----David Rosand's) Raphael: theological truth <--> axiomatic geometry (~ congruence of simple structures) --> divinity of the circle
supernatural status of the form, reaffirmed by gold (<-- an archaic and discounseled technique) ==> *put ‘form’ beyond the reach of pictorial illusion and beyond the realm of nature*
*pictorial truth sometimes lies in the painter's choice in working on the surface* (acknowledging the powerful claims of the axis of the field and the determining control of its shape, recognizing the dialectic of circle and square, the signifying tension between picture plane and orthogonal recession, etc.) --> in the case of Raphael: theology becomes a commentary on painting : pictorial structure (directly semiotic and not mimetic) = meaning
(always?) *faithfuls need their originals*
in Helmholtz's 1856 comprehensive account of human vision, the eye emerges *empathically embedded in the thinness and opacity of the body*
eye (=/= a marvelous apparatus) : an apparatus with built-in aberrations, proneness to error, and inconsistencies in is processing of visual information --> entoptical phenomenon --James--> subjective optical sensation: example of selective attention excludes from consciousness sensations that are *nonreferential* (= irrelevant to the knowledge about the world)
(~= Ernst Mach's sight phantasms)
arborescent vocabulary of the scientific liter[...]
(372)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%77.6[...]y > Chastel > Seurat's method was) a research into archetypal forms (lines, colors, directions) which answered to a double and deliberately compound ambition, at once *****archaic regression and scientific reduction***** [<-- this describe my work!] the artist/painter's operations set up a meeting point between *an ancient hieratic art and the rationalized discipline of the future* [= my work on ajayeb] --> culturally reactionary component of my projects, progressive and regressive at once, (past and future)
=/= Meyer Schapiro's Seurat: an enlightened politically progressive artisan-artist embracing science and technological paradigms in the interests of *forging an image of a nonhierarchical social world* [<-- an uncritical stance towards “science” and “technology,” approaching “the rationality of method” (in Seurat) as a final locus of meaning =/= the site of powerful and unresolved contradictions]****
-can our modern practices be constituted without reinventing its relations to the ancient?
troublesome ambivalence of Pythagoreanism: part of an animistic premodern magical world view yet deeply embedded in the essential assumption of modernity that all of nature is understandable in terms of numbers (-Bloch, modernism: quantitative side with metaphysics proper strictly scientific =/= figural-qualitative symbolic side)
... --> Seurat's unresolvable problem: to think simultaneously the idea of universality in terms of aesthetic absolute and the inescapable universality of modern exchange and calculation
--> (Norman Brown:) the money complex, archaic or modern, is inseparable from symbolism, and *symbolism is (not the mark of rationality, as Simmel thought, but) the mark of sacred* @Luiza's diagrams [--> this is important for apass, “aesthetic experience occurs within, not above, the opposition of the symbolic and the economy, and within the lived conflict between self-activity and reification” -Brenkman]
==> undialectical disjunction of sacred and secular
silent reflective monk
mechanical assemblage of never quite integrated elements
Seurat's texture of work <== an intuition of the loss of art's immediacy --> shift of (what might have been) contemplation into mere attentiveness
(Crary) Seurat concretizes the *modern dilemma of the disappearance of aura*
...bringing into the work the forms of rationalization that eradicated aura in the first place --> appearance is privileged over essence, and technological rationality is deployed in the service of appearance
negotiating rapture
(ajayeb ~/=?) to produce a dialectic image: to criticize modernity (~ foregrounding of the aura) through an act of memory, and at the same time, to criticize archaism (~ nostalgia for the aura) through an act of essentially modern invention (substitution and designification)
color...
how[...]
(373)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%77.8[...]
negotiating rapture
(ajayeb ~/=?) to produce a dialectic image: to criticize modernity (~ foregrounding of the aura) through an act of memory, and at the same time, to criticize archaism (~ nostalgia for the aura) through an act of essentially modern invention (substitution and designification)
color...
how forms of ‘synthesis’ (optical mixture, purely additive and accumulative functions of industrialized procedures) produce ‘qualitative’ change (pre-bourgeois non-quantitative connection to nature, for which color did not exist as an autonomous experience or as a separate and specialized science)
Seurat: surface fascinations consequences of a disappointment at the impossibility of immediacy and the historical inaccessibility of the dream of the ritual/magical practice of art --> Seurat's work's exhaustive denial of presence ==> (another kind of immediacy:) the ***fusing of image and eye*** @Foad
=/= art as a medium for disclosing essential truths
=/= redemptive optimism
...................................
a desiring system dependent on operations of rebinding and immobilization
the problem of *contrapposto* [and *chiaroscuro* (contrast of colors)]:
a Renaissance ideal, invoking a metaphysical dualism that found expression in rhetorical devices of contrast and antithesis --sumbsumed--> within the *larger ideal of opposition*
contrapposto could be decorative or structural, justified by its vividness, the clarity with which art could bring opposites into harmony
classical image (of the body) as an expression of a self-determining balance of internal forces
“authentic images” seem capable of action, seem to posses dynamis (supernatural power)
Universal Exposition of 1889 + international congresses of hypnosis:
•rationalizing ideological imperatives (concertized in the actual organization and layout of the Exposition --> rooted in the enlightenment's faith in man's limitless potential for mastery of his environment)
•hypnosis optimistically as the most effective entry into (previously inaccessible) territories and processes of human psychic life (and hopefully mastering this terrain)
•extensive presentation of colonial people and lifestyle as objects of spectacle in the 1889 Exposition (simulated villages inhabited by Congolese, Javanese, New Caledonians, Senegalese, and others) --> became contents of an imaginary immortal space, contents that were seemingly assimilable into the rationalizing taxonomy of the exposition's organizational schema [=/= Steven's schema in apass]
*both hypnosis (with its profoundly indecipherable trance states) & material life of colonial people (primitive cultures with their singular forms of exchange, of value and power relations) took on an exhibitionary existence at the threshold of their marginalization,[...]
(374)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%77.9[...]servation”: a cognitive model predicated on workable notion of objective reality (a classical epistemological model) that begins to corrode within a field saturated by illusion, hallucination, and whole industries of simulation
-individual subsumed in crowd is incapable of observation --> modern spectacular culture (to be articulated 7 decades later by Guy Debord
the crowd (in Le Bon) is a generalized site on which the accumulated dread and hope associated in the 19th century with social insurrection collapse into am abstract countless mass onto which dream imaginary of any sort can be projected
-Crary
19th century ‘crowd psychology’ assumption that attention has no necessary connection to objective optical observation of the world --> *crowd: drift toward a more primitive order of consciousness*
-withdrawal from surroundings and refocusing on some real or symbolic figure
--> theatrical configuration: means for controlling crowds --> (La Bon's) image of theater exceeding its older place within models of mimetic relation --to--> new effects of subjectification
Wagner's volkish homogeneity --> uniform modes of perception and response --> (problem of) community formation
Wagner's optical metaphor (community could see itself reflected in the mirror of tragedy) of theatrical existence --> *sense of vision serves to reinforce one's place within the social whole*
[--> when i look at Brussels from the 14th floor...]
Wagner's cultural program for social reintegration and his belief in the transformative effects of the collective experience of music drama preformed and produced as a ritual communal event
(typical 19th century --> debates about the effects of mass culture --articulated--> “distraction =/= self-conscious contemplative perception” -->) Wagner's deploying the pervasiveness of *distracted modes of cultural consumption* ==> “higher (deeply attentive --advocated--> purified and ethically superior perceptual engagement) =/= lower (distracted)” forms of listening
-his dissatisfaction with traditional theatre that had allowed or encouraged audiences to look at each other at the diverse social texture of the theatre
an attentive, absorbed public (unthinkable in the 18th century ---> go to Sennett)
(still we are suffering -->) [to have] *control over the attentiveness of an audience* to subordinate it to the will of the artist ==> generate a *collective state of reception* (worthy of an art with such social aspiration @Hoda, Ali , Sina, --to which extent my mysticism in art was about my ideas about spectators incapacity for attention in contemporary Tehran?)
19th century theatre --(transform into)--> ***construction of visibility*** (structure the spectators perceptual experience)
“collective act of seeing ==> semblance of a community”
(phantasm[...]
(375)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%78.3[...]
modernization of perception
center =/= periphery
dispersed functioning of sensory response
(how in 19th century capacities of human eye was made into:)
1. architectural model of *panorama* = permanent activation of optical periphery + no stable center of focused attentiveness
2. *stereoscope* = decisive exclusion of the periphery + 3D image hypertangiblity (<-- our model of visual consumption)
}==> loss of *consistent and coherent relations of distance between image and observer* [<-- this lost consistency is now in 2020 what everyone in art is busy with or to reactivate]
...having the fixed eye many disconnected areas of the visual field at once = continual beginning at a new center = Cezanne ~= *radical rethinking the nature of [*]synthesis: rhythmic coexistence of radically heterogenous and temporally dispersed elements*
...a subjective immobilization
seeking to enter into the world's ceaseless movement of destabilization (=/= holding together the content) ==> a more intensive recreation of a subjective interface with the world (=/= reverie, disassociation)
}-->
•every object's identity is swallowed up in difference
•*vision: veritable theater of metamorphosis and permutations*
(Cezanne reexamining the composition of the visual world ==>)
fanatical attentiveness to the data of sense ==> dissolution of unity, destabilization of objects onto flux, dispersion, displaced the body to the world, into a stream of change, of time, *undoing the immediacy of the world* [<-- my reexamination of the composition of the epistemological world of fables in West Asia, my work's relationship with knowledge is like that. to gain control of myself in the midst of moving concepts, the circulation of concerns, jumble of paths and knots, whirlpool of velocities, and recourse to my capacity for forgetting...]
perceptual consistency is a phantom
(Lucretius:) [*]world: infinite Cascades of self-differentiation
-the question is: how to make aesthetic constructions [the task of the artist] (if the world is so fragile)?
-how to go back and forth between attention and reverie?
perplexity of the eye (related to a deeper and metaphysical perplexity)
an imageless vision
...a mind for which no visible form is visible enough
the fixed and monocular eye has been posed (in recent theatrical writing) as the formative element of classical system of representation **functioning to arrest duration and change in order to achieve a conceptual matey mastery of phenomena** {==> zoocentric animal anatomy =/= ajayeb}
--✕--> (Crary's suggestion that) ***the fixed immobile eye is what annihilates the “naturalness” of the world*** (disclosing the provisional and fluid nature of visual experience) =/= mobile glancing eye [...]
(376)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%78.9[...] the content) ==> a more intensive recreation of a subjective interface with the world (=/= reverie, disassociation)
}-->
•every object's identity is swallowed up in difference
•*vision: veritable theater of metamorphosis and permutations*
(Cezanne reexamining the composition of the visual world ==>)
fanatical attentiveness to the data of sense ==> dissolution of unity, destabilization of objects onto flux, dispersion, displaced the body to the world, into a stream of change, of time, *undoing the immediacy of the world* [<-- my reexamination of the composition of the epistemological world of fables in West Asia, my work's relationship with knowledge is like that. to gain control of myself in the midst of moving concepts, the circulation of concerns, jumble of paths and knots, whirlpool of velocities, and recourse to my capacity for forgetting...]
perceptual consistency is a phantom
(Lucretius:) [*]world: infinite Cascades of self-differentiation
-the question is: how to make aesthetic constructions [the task of the artist] (if the world is so fragile)?
-how to go back and forth between attention and reverie?
perplexity of the eye (related to a deeper and metaphysical perplexity)
an imageless vision
...a mind for which no visible form is visible enough
the fixed and monocular eye has been posed (in recent theatrical writing) as the formative element of classical system of representation **functioning to arrest duration and change in order to achieve a conceptual matey mastery of phenomena** {==> zoocentric animal anatomy =/= ajayeb}
--✕--> (Crary's suggestion that) ***the fixed immobile eye is what annihilates the “naturalness” of the world*** (disclosing the provisional and fluid nature of visual experience) =/= mobile glancing eye is what preserves the preconstructed character of the world
<br />
•moving eye --> habitually familiarly caresses objects (extracting previously established relations among them)
•fixed eye --> (immobile eye triggers a ferment of activity ==>) trance and perceptual disintegration --> dissolving the physiognomy of the everyday world [~=>? bestiary's perceptual uncanniness]
fixed truth-taking stare ==> perceptual uncanniness
the idea of un undistorted original perception ==> objects in some accessable state available for objective comparison and evaluation
fixation sets the world in motion
visual field begin vibration and oscillating
chromatic instability
the physiological apparatus (our bodies) incapable of stability =/= the aim of stabilizing the world to look at it analytically
perceptualism: the idea that (artists, cultures, etc.) expressions in varying degrees involves the transcription of the world “as it appears” to them
[...]
(377)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%79[...]l experience as a nondirectional, acentric, multitemporal event
--> empathic decentering of the observer
+ (widespread) practical and discursive remaking of the observer as subject, vision is no longer a distinct and isolable phenomenon
Freud --> psyche = a perpetually available innocence + infinite reserve of traces
*perception arouse interest on the account of their possible connection with the object wished for* : ‘perception = question of internal excitation’
Cezanne --(in Pineapple and Rocks)--> coexistence (continuity) of:
•an attentiveness that is bound (cathected) onto established (facilitated) patterns [= one's own history + its fixation]
•a perception of animality and novelty [= relaxation of grip, musical, (Deleuze and Guattari's) *antimemory* =/= atemporal forgetting]
vertigo: auto-movement of chaos
“Cezanne's work = model of a nonhuman perception” : (reading of Cezanne as) austere project of formal rigor, performed on some remote plane of aesthetic production; an enterprise tragically detached from an engagement with the social contradiction of his time =/= (Crary's reading of) Cezanne coinciding historically with new perceptual technologies --> new metaphoric possibilities
accumulated experience --basis--> radical depersonalization --intuit--> creative forces of chaos (in your own provence)
**Cezanne's imaginative refiguration of himself as machine = translate automatically** ==> release from grounded condition of human perception : to become an apparatus = implacability apprehend a world outside of the terms (that the artist wants out) ==> novelty (~= to overcome the gravity of one's own interiority) --Cezanne--> primordial image (of irreducible formlessness, of ***world in process without horizon***, without position, of slowly vibrating colors...) [<-- *apparatus becoming* is now the cliche of contemporary artist]
glow of a geological dawn
archaic + inert
Precambrian
deterritorializing processes of capitalism (+ its imperatives of perpetual renovation) --> (its compatible) uprooted nonorientable subject
nature experienced as vibrations, animations, chromatic reverberation (+ seeking a “logic” to clarify its unfolding)
hideous sign of progress (for Cezanne: electric light, cinema, )
artistic modernism <==Adorno== (the fact that) the most advanced procedures of material production and organization are not limited to the sphere in which they originate (---> go to incarnation)
demotivated subjectivity
wants something that is neither optical nor mechanical nor intellectual ==> substitute a mode of consciousness that is predominantly intuitive : the awareness of touch
historical adjacency (<-- Crary's knowledge zoom)
*late work of Cezanne (in spi[...]
(378)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%79.5[...]ces that are vagabond yet rigorous ==> situate fuzzy aggregates =/= fixed distinct and formed essences
corporeality = formed and perceived thinghood
•inseparable from processes of transformation
•inseparable from expressive qualities
vague = intermediary --> autonomous, stretching itself between things and thoughts --establish--> new relations (--> this is what Manning has adopted from Deleuze and Guattari)
variable intense affects
topological =/= geometrical
hylomorphic model =/= active and affective... (matter-flow can only be followed)
hylomorphic: imposing a form upon matter =/= materiality possessing a nomos : material traits of expression constituting affects (for example surrendering to the wood, then following where it leads by connecting operations to a materiality...)
-the critique of the hylomorphic schema is based on the existence between form and matter, of a zone of medium and intermediary dimension, of energetic... [and what about digital technology?]--> we need more artisan (follows the matter) =/= artist (invents/breaks the matter)
*artisan* --> one who is determined in such a way as to follow a flow of matter, of *machinic phylum* (@OSP, for example metallurgist = one who works inside the mold, the consciousness of thought of the matter-flow + metal the correlate of this consciousness)
[follow a flow of matter = to itinerate, to ambulate]
artisan =/= farmer
artisan =/= animal raiser
[*]artisan: take up craft activity + follow the matter-flow as pure productivity
continous development of form, chromaticism --> a form proper to matter [-->? not in middle east: metaphysics --> metallurgist =/= metamorphosist poet --> chaotic =/= harmonic, nomadic]
not everything is metal, but metal is everywhere (--> what would X-Men say about this)
--D+G--> *thought is born more from metal than from stone*(!!)
metallurgy is minor science, vague science, phenomenology of matter
metal is neither a thing not an organism, but a *body without organs*
(on the symbolic value of metal and its correspondence with an organic soul but on the immanent power of corporeality)
smiths (Sina, OSP?)
their space is neither the striated space of the sedentary nor the smooth space of the nomad (--> my room and computer desktop) --> #tent, in the manner of a cave or a hole
--> *they are cave dwellers not by nature by by artistry and need*
internal itinerancy, their vague essences ==> their relation to others
--> *smith* [follows the flow of matter ==> (surplus value:) ‘resist the State’, Tamar Yaen Pierre Sina Goda]
=/= *migrant* [existence depends upon and constrained by the logic of the State (with its boundaries and borders) ==> (surplus value:) ‘residual gold in the ruins’, Hoda Sana Rui Flavio Quins[...]
(379)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%80.8[...]poreality)
smiths (Sina, OSP?)
their space is neither the striated space of the sedentary nor the smooth space of the nomad (--> my room and computer desktop) --> #tent, in the manner of a cave or a hole
--> *they are cave dwellers not by nature by by artistry and need*
internal itinerancy, their vague essences ==> their relation to others
--> *smith* [follows the flow of matter ==> (surplus value:) ‘resist the State’, Tamar Yaen Pierre Sina Goda]
=/= *migrant* [existence depends upon and constrained by the logic of the State (with its boundaries and borders) ==> (surplus value:) ‘residual gold in the ruins’, Hoda Sana Rui Flavio Quinsy Elen]
=/= *nomad* [occupies and inhabits smooth space beyond or bellow the State ==> (surplus value:) ‘alternative’, Deborah Xiri Leo Isabel Aela Agnes]
=/= *pastoral transhuman* [rotates through a circuit ==> (surplus value:) ‘erotic inclusivity']
vital forms of nonorganic life
[title]
your strength and your nothingness
transpierce =/= scaling
excavate =/= striating
...vagabond sign of itinerancy سيارى
from hole to hole
a line of variation
***the hybrid metallurgist, a weapon- and toolmaker, communicates with the sedentaries and with the nomads at the same time***
phylum:
--connected-to--> nomad space
--conjugates-with--> sedentary space
(we have both:)
*war machine*:
•opening
•rhizome
•gaps
•detours
•holes
•stems
=/=
*state apparatus*:
•capture phylum
•play the lines of flight
•into code
•into form
war machine collides with States and cities (forces of striation) ==> war
Deleuze and Guattari ask:
-how will the State appropriate the war machine?
(appropriate: subordinates it to its political aims)
from encasement قفسه --to--> (forms of) appropriation تصاحب
Genghis Khan and his followers were able to hold out for a long time by partially integrating themselves into the conquered empires, while at the same time maintaining a smooth space on the steppes to which the imperial centers were subordinated
Timur who constructed a fantastic war machine turned back against the nomads, but who, by that very fact, was obliged to erect a State apparatus all the heavier and more unproductive since it existed only as the empty form of appropriation of that machine
the peace of terror or survival
-the postfascist figure that takes peace as its object directly
-we have seen war machine assign its objective a peace still more terrifying than fascist death
*the unspecified enemy* we have seen it put its counterguerrilla elements into place
[...]
(390)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%80.9[...]
Nozick (~ Terminator) --> the rules of procedures that constitute rationality would be valid, would be efficacious, but algorithmic. executed by machine, but opaque to human understanding
~ Wittgenstein --> to follow a rule: a practice taught by example =/= precept
}--> *to understand rules in an algorithmic sense* =/= model, maxim, tacit knowledge
Daston --> there is no simple way, in which historical context determines the form and content of the thinkable. but (as in the case of algorithmic rules and cold war rationality) historical circumstances do light up some parts of the intellectual landscape and darken others
our current understanding of what it means to be rational owes a great deal to the power of place and time
•for Kant: judgement = highest faculties =/= for modern (us) judgement is problematic
...................................
[the horror of the contemporary German art:] to deliberate: کنکاش سنجیده و عمدی =/= Janina
(art of [ironic] deliberation =/= chaotic venture, Sina's lecture-performances)
deliberation: thinking then doing it =/= doing then thinking about what you have done (~= communication, intimacy)
...................................
metaphysics of natural law
Daston's rigor: trying to understand why is it so persistant (almost irresistible) that we **extract social and moral norms from nature** (rather than jumping up saying that it is a doomed idea)
[--> got to fable; ikhvano safa court of animals; panchatantra Kelile Demne]
•to merge natural and social orders together
•to make nature meaningful
•to invoke nature to buttress human values of: true, good, beautiful
•
devil = collective human imagination of chaos
formless and lawless
land of no promises
past is no guide to the future
at the mercy of chance
the axiom of modern thought: society =/= nature [of which trespassings are rife]
[#fable]
to extract some sort of politics from:
•beehive
•physics of liver
•evolutionary theory
•organic specialization [--Aristotle--> slavery]
•
1. how conceptions of natural order sustains specific norms & the model of any kind of norm <-- historical + empirical
2. appeal to nature capture something profound about values in general regardless of their specific context <-- philosophical
(the human) impulse to *make nature meaningful* --> psychological + epistemological + ethical necessity
(1)
(specific) [*]nature: the ontological identity card : that which makes a particular thing what it is (what makes skwerl a skwerl)
the idea of ***fixed natural kind ==inspire==> the ideal of justice***
--> the idea of organic specialization [organ: ‘tool’ in greek; for Aristotl[...]
(391)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%81.1[...]cating the responses of an implicit reader/viewer)
•a keyword search for “anger” will tend to turn up set pieces on how to control it --> discussions of where it is not
•reactions such as wonder, delight, or terror (do not simply occur) they are *evoked*, sometimes even *staged* --> we can explore what evoked them
finding wonder-words =/= finding wonder (complex semantic field)
wonder-reaction:
•terror
•disgust
•solemn astonishment
•playful delight
in medieval accounts wonder often has:
•a mischievous quality
Bernard of Clairvaux --> spice of stories
11th century --> (naughtily) impish girl saint jokes
Gerald of Wales --> nature's pranks
}--> moralizing bestiary tradition (taking more pleasure in the animal tales than in theology)
analogies between animals and humans are anything but solemn and didactic
•a dreadful quality
(Attar's accounts of saint torture)
Gerald of Wales --> recounting some of the earliest warewold stories to survive in european literature, he glosses the admiratio felt by those inside the story as stupor خرفتی, timor بیم, horror خوف
◦shape-shifting violating nature
◦tales of metamorphoses --> the real change of substance in the eucharist عشاربانى + the terrifying possibility that sexual intercourse between humans and animals might produce monsters
(Bynum asking) what in medieval accounts or artistic representations tends to trigger wonder? *where do the surviving source give us access either to intensely heightened reactions or to events and objects calculated to evoke or stage such reactions?*
--> where wonder is not?
(didactic purposes of) miracle collections
*hovering significance* (of unusual natural events: eclipse, earthquakes, famines) --> sometimes listed as clipped matter-of-fact prose
William Auvergne + Oresme --> natural causes can be found for marvels tend to flatten the language of some accounts of natural world as well
}==> miracles, portents فال بد, oddities are sites and stagings of wonder less often than we might suppose
12th - 14th century --> narrative accounts tell us of objects and events carefully constructed to elicit awe, delight, dread
*rulers (secular + ecclesiastical) --competed--> display of power and splender including tricks and automata --calculated--> to amaze and tantalize:
•(13th century) خانه وحشت 🏰 evidence of a count of Artois who built an elaborate funhouse with distorting mirrors, rooms that simulated thunderstorms, hidden pipes for wetting unsuspecting visitors and covering them with flour
•puppet shows in pastry (sotelties)
•food was often planned as an illusion or trick for the eye (---> go to instagram cake baked in the shape of ordinary objects)
[...]
(392)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%82.2[...]acteristic term barzakh, when used in eschatology, means the intermediate, and when used in cosmology, it means the inter-world {the ‘mundus imaginalis’). In Sohrevardi's philosophy of the Ishraq it assumes a more general meaning: it designates in general everything that is body, everything that is a ‘screen’ and an ‘interval’, and which of itself is Night and Darkness.
That concept, therefore, that the word barzakh connotes is fundamental to Sohrevardi's system of physics. The barzakh is pure Darkness; it could exist as such even if the Light were to withdraw. Thus, it is not even a potential light, a virtuality in the Aristotlian sense; in relation to Light it is pure negativity, Ahrimanian (اهریمنی) negativity as Sohrevardi understood it. It would be a mistake, then, to attempt to base the causal explanation of a positive fact on this negativity. Every species is an ‘icon’ of its Angel, a theurgy effected by this Angel in the barzakh which in itself is death and absolute night.
the schema of Mazdean cosmology, in which the universe of being is divided into menuk {celestial, subtle) and getik {terrestrial, dense);
{سهروردی}--{*} In Sohrevardi, the perception of the world includes, in structural terms, a metaphysics of essences; existence is simply a way of regarding {e'tebar اعتبار) essence or quiddity--it does not add anything to it in concrete.
The schema of the universe, then, is arranged according to a fourfold plan:
... (4) There is the mundus imaginalis (alame mesal عالم مثال). This is the world which is intermediary between the intelligible world of the beings of pure Light and the sensible world; and the perceiving organ proper to it is the active Imagination. It is the world not of Platonic ideas (muthuli flatunlyah مثل افلاطونی?), but of Forms and Images ‘in suspension’ (muthul mu'allaqah مثل معلق). This term means that such forms are not imminent in a material sub-stratum, as the colour red, for example, is imminent in a red body; they possess ‘epiphanic places’ (mazahir مظاهر) where they manifest themselves like the image ‘in suspension’ in a mirror. This world contains all the richness and variety of the world of sense in a subtle state; it is a world of subsistent and autonomous Forms and Images, the threshold of the malakut {ملکوت}. In it are to be found the mystical cities of Jabalqa جابلقا, Jabarsa جابرسا and Hurqalya هورقلیا.
It appears that Sohrevardi was indeed the first to elaborate the ontology of the inter-world, and the theme once introduced was taken up and expanded by all the mystics and gnostics of Islam.
stories:
The action of these Recitals, in fact, takes place in the ‘alame mesal’ [عالم مثال]. In them, the mystic relates the drama of his personal history on the level of a supra-sensible[...]
(393)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%83[...]br />
...................................
Marks’ take on Sadra's triadic ontology of sensible, imaginal عالم خیال, and intelligible realms
+cognitive trinity of:
•mental intuition
•bodily knowledge
•spiritual knowledge
------> different human faculties perceive each real:
•sense perception --> external particulars: the sensible world of matter
•imagination --> internal particulars: the imaginal
•intellect --> universals: the intelligible
}--> with Avital i am learning technically (in language) to stay in a state of contamination (and their rewiring) of these faculties --> not to disavow the eching lines of my inherited tradition (“-->” + “~~>”)
◦sense perception ~~> universals
◦imagination ~~> external particulars
◦intellect ~~> internal particulars
◦...
*the islamic imaginal realm is (an audiovisual intangible) supra-individual and more real than matter*
Sadra argues that the imaginal realm subsists in the soul, mediating between the senses and the intelligence; it explains how extrapersonal, supra-sensory realities present themselves to imaginative perception --> نجمالدین کبری Najmuddin Kubra expert on visual metaphysics
تجربه شهودی
خيال و شهود
مراتب تجلّی
[*]imaginal realm: a radically pro-image concept
=/= Platonic denunciation of images (as misleading and false)
=/= Byzantine iconoclasm
=/= islamic aniconism
=/= 20th century culture of media critique
=/= iconoclasm of contemporary religious fanatics
=/= fantasies
=/= surrealism
suprasensory imaginal realm of sufism
history of imagination
world philosophy abounds with theories of the imagination
ancient Greek idea of how the imagination can make contact with a supra-individual reality --{followed & developed}--> Neoplatonist (understading of the imagination as) receptive of divine images
=/= memory images
=/= fantasmatic images --> phantasia --{i am wotking against the idea of “fantastic beast” ~-> phantasmata: post-sensory images combined in mind, independently of sense impressions ==> memory, dreams, and sensory illusion}
=/= imaginal images
هیولا hayula: the base, corporeal world
sensory-imaginal-intelligible
•a bottom-up theory of the imagination --> active intellect in the human
•a top-down theory of imagination --> pre-existing divine mind
i disagree with Marks that the (islamicated) imagination was a means to connect to a divine reality, higher truth. in ajayeb we encounter and abundance of descriptive environmental materialities.
Avital studies the interferences of:
1- the lower, sensory imagination
2- the higher[...]
(394)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%83.6[...]e-existing divine mind
i disagree with Marks that the (islamicated) imagination was a means to connect to a divine reality, higher truth. in ajayeb we encounter and abundance of descriptive environmental materialities.
Avital studies the interferences of:
1- the lower, sensory imagination
2- the higher, intellective imagination (that receives inspiration from above; #prophets)
ajayeb: synthesized Greek philosophy + Qur'anic thought + popular material body belief
( material body [ X ) immaterial intellect ]
“X” : imaginal مثل: (audio-visual glimpses of divine reality)
•accounts of afterlife --> gardens
•accounts of apocalypse --> sounds
•saints biographies --> performances
•
christian tradition started to view the intellect as internal to the soul ==> regard imagination as psychological: an inspiration, invention, recombination from within (and not from without) (Elen finds herself in this tradition?) ==> concept of an autonomous psychological subject
so persian subject wanted the so much to be there, when there was no flower, that the went to a zone of beyond, picked some schizo-flowers and came back {this is Sa'di}--> iranian metaphysics
-i am more interested in the blooming of flowers, also metaphorical understanding of their morphogenesis. this tag line can be a subject of a phd study. for the last thousand years the iranian literature has been busy with this, how to describe flowers
*iranians believe in image
sufis, iranian philosophers, ... --> so poluted concepts and words
attachment to the world <--...(intelligible, barzakh)...--> presence of God
(who knows what the ‘presence of God’ means. let's not assume we know.)
Sohrevardi argues that the imagination effectively the indipendent real of images
فتوحات fotuhat --?--> illuminations
the imagination realm exercises its ruling property over every thing and non-thing. it gives form to absolute nonexistence , to the impossible, to the necessary, and to possibility. it makes existence nonexistence existent. (Ibn Arabi < Marks)
majmu al bahrain مجموع البحرین, confluence of two oceans, to set two oceans in motion that flow side by side together, with a barzakh between
--> #my بحرین theory, wave surface theory of language
(to be careful with the figure of) wave --> questioning the textual case while then morphing into the unreadablity of its own answer
Giovanni Pico de Mirandola: phantasy can strive to draw the senses to things celestial ... but if, yeslding to the senses, phantasy shall decline to apply itself to the business of virtue, so great is its power that it afflicts the body and beclouds the mind, and finally brings it about that man divests himsel[...]
(395)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%83.7[...]a, and of induction for Peirce. (Marks)
}--> (my departure:) a point of research branch for me: “to swept away quiddity”, is another story possible?
images have the power to multiply --> and other “sticky” things?
(like Sadra and Marks) i also prefer images that do not simply confirm general categories of what can be thought but undermine them with singularities that stimulate the imagination (=/= The Black Mirror tv series)
(destructive delusions, ideological images,) true visions and hallucinations --> the disappointment in hearing the deja vu
-deja vu is the dream of remembering
the divine outside
an immanentized imaginal real to be the source of truthful visions
to read Qur'an (or any text) as if it has been revealed to you
the visions of the imaginal are nonstatice images of things in their act of becoming
-is my ajayeb a modern interpreter of the islamic imaginal realm?
the ajayeb is about the lesser elite stances of the islamicated imagination --> the imaginal ecological consciousness
[title]
*imagination in rational thought [logocentrism]:
myth, symbol, and metaphors used as part of rational dialogue
--✕--> other ways of bringing the unthought [beyond] into the thinkable }--> tasavof
--✕--> other ways of bringing the far into the wondrous (~ the active imaginal) ==> as a basis for practical concepts }--> ajayeb
}--> beyond the official discourse
a time-specific (contingent) truth that intensifies as more people engage with it
[like all the concepts and metaphors we are working and patterning in apass]
...................................
Malabou's plasticity (<--✕-- différance)
the subject is plastic (~= malleable, =/= elastic), it never springs back into its original form, it can explode
[we are now dealing with a (highly adaptable, flexible, and disciplined) rational autonomous subject in a post-industrial and global world]
neuronal subject
mojud-e dahri-e ma'ghul
...................................
[...] اسم اعظمِ
esme a'zam
reality has an autor --> author always has a proper name
Alice (in wonderland): words can have many meanings
Haraway: the question is: which one (of many meanings) is to be {the master (meaning)}--> problem of art criticism in iran --> *let's resource aesthetics* / in iran we need more “making-with” and “make-kin” rather than “criticize” or “grounding” (of criticism) or...
[*]master: one with power to dispose something, male head of house, conqueror, a man skilled in something --> *one holding this title*
-->[*]to author: to have the power to originate, to name [#Beyzai seeking to produce natural iranian knowl[...]
(397)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%84[...]realism [that which Holakouee promotes for “modern” iranian]) (--> to avoid the problem of epistemological anarchism: an epistemology that justifies not taking a stand on the nature of things is of little use to women trying **to build a shared politics** [Mehdi is angry at the sculpture community because they embody that failure])
•(to adopt) a radical form of epistemology that denies the possibility of access to a real world and an objective standpoint
•noninvasive knowing (such as Sa'di) and prediction and control (#Olearius)
•(authority and power, as Beyzai is after,) to name/give the world a new identity, a new story
•accurate rendering of an idiosyncratic process of sensory overlap and association
•
•
[*]biology: modern origin story
biology tell tales about origins, about genesis, and about nature
biologizing
[what is the word made of, what is the flesh made of]
***(Haraway highlights) an inherited knowledge through the paternal line: the *word* was Aristotle's Galileo's Bacon's Newton's Linnaeus's Darwin's; the *flesh* was woman's --> and the word was made flesh, naturally
(in Europe, from 15th to 18th century, transformations of [both] metaphors [and social systems]:) female nature --from--> nurturing mother --to--> patient-resournce
--> capitalist forms of patriarchy: *merchant تاجر seeing dialectic of apocalypse* (TV series such as West World, etc.)
[the book of nature]
nature is authored (by somebody)
(power +) autorship ==(fabricates)==> reality
Milton's justification of the ways of God, [to tell stories]
*(how many times we[?] are) forced to read a book in a language that signifies our lack, our difference*
two rhetorical strategies for contesting (جنگیدن برای) a voice (-to set the terms of speech that define gfine good knowledge):
1- reinterpreted the origin story to get it right the second time
2- rebelliously proclaimed a totally new story
(Olearius does the same with iran and his european audience,) [Haraway on] Barash “reveal to the popular audience the inner voice of biology, the cake of nature under the icing of culture, the biogrammer of genes structuring the message of the organism--all that modern people structuring the message of the organism--all so that modern people might come to know themselves and fulfill their potential. Barash maintains that biology is the most powerful tool in the humanist project to know and achieve the self.”
phallic language
sociobiologica reasoning (<-- so dominant)
Star Trek --> sociobiology promises more than knowledge of the self; it also promises, like all humanisms, human unity, a real togetherness of nature beneath the merely verbal icing of culture<[...]
(399)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%84.2[...]ntieth century
ground for ethics, knowledge, and hope
(Kojeve, Bataille, reconceiving) atheism: a way out of any and all ideological systems
theological questions + mistrust of political hopes
to replace god with a political messianism, nation or state,
“disenchantment of the world = death knell for man” (?)
nonhumanist atheism: determined opposition to foundational concepts of man, knowledge, and truth (=/= critically rethinking problems of anthropotheism, of transcendence, of finitude)
critique of idealism = critique of transcendence
1920s: atheist humanism = idealist arguments about the capacity of the human mind (to transcend and objectively pattern the things that compose the world around it)
might and violence of ideologies relied on definitions of humanity (that made this violence not only plausible and rational, but almost necessary --> communism and colonialism)
Sartre's postwar minimal humanist commitment --> “existentialism = humanism”
-call or claim to failure of foundations and of man's status in the universe ultimately called up a new ethical command --> call for man to decide and to commit politically (--> atheism + political humanisms + old metaphysical commitment)
atheist political theology
Kojeve, Bataille, Sartre, Koyre, Heidegger, Adorno
mysticism of progress, self-perfection, and history
their anti-utopian and antiprogressivist claims and that found expression in: Blanchot (The Most High), Bataille (Summa Atheologica), Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus), Beckett (Endgame)
figuration of finitude
critique of dreams of transparency
replace transcendence with excess or escape (<-- mystical background...)
=/= un-self-conscious humanist mysticism
secular interwar Europe's raising the human subject to all-powerful status ==> techno-scientific apocalypse --> waste of hope in the self and in the rhetoric of equality and humanism
(2)
philosophical antihumanism
human in suspension and deny that it owns or controls his own specificity and particularity
--> negative theology
denial to man of positive knowledge of divine nature
withdrawal from the possibility of first defining what is specifically human
=/= world deemed anthropocentric and subjectivist
•*reformulates the question of man, locating him in conceptual systems led by notions, such as Being, reality, society, or language* (--> to define him “negatively”)
•problematization of human subjectivity
--> modern determinations of “the human”
(Diderot in Encyclopedie:) “man: a sensing, reflecting, thinking being, which freely traverses the surface of the earth, which appears at the head of all other animals over which it reigns, which lives in society, which has invented the sciences and [...]
(400)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%84.6[...]ought i do?
•what is man?
}--> [*]humanism: mobilization of a foundationalist concept of man
=/= tradition of identifying man with a certain feature, aspect, or property that embodies or expresses his nature
=/= the Platonic-christian idea that man possesses an eternal soul
=/= Feuerbachian-Marxist approach that sees Man as his own goal
=/= the idea of a human nature that is given, foundational, single, or readily available
“death of man”
Heidegger's Letter on Humanism
Kojeve's second note on “the end of history”
Althusser
Foucault's concluding chapter to The Order of Things
Derrida's The Ends of Man
(existentialist entrapment of man in his world, #alienation)
(in Being and Time) Heidegger's Dasein ==>
•stripping man's shared element down to its being-there
•subsumes and displaces the humanity of man
•rejection of the I as an absolute, independent subject that approaches a world largely separate from it
--> from ontic determination --to--> ontico-ontological determination [of human]
*the humanity of Dasein remains and must be understood as derivative of both its ontic and ontological status
metaphysical presupposition (that he cannot claim to be capable of fully describing or understanding natur) -->
(human approached and understood only in terms of) *results* or *side-effects* (of language, existence, history, phenomena):
•in phenomena: man finds himself thrown in the world of phenomena and life; he is not grounded in some transcendental fashion (Heidegger, Kojeve, Malraux, Sartre, Beaufret)
•in language: he is an interpreter of signs and symbols that form part of greater systems independent of his individual will
•in history: he is constructed and operates within cultural, religious, and philosophical limits imposed on him
•
[and] these systems are not consequences of man's creative activity, desire, or will
they are domains in which he finds himself
}--> *the human in man comes to mean less and less* ==> *we can only know what his approach to others (and other things) can reveal*
emergence of the new nonhumanist atheism + the negative philosophical anthropology --> French antihumanism's assault on:
•contemporary humanisms
•the legacies and utopian hopes of the Enlightenment
•liberal-bourgeois thinking grounded in human rights and individual autonomy
•Marxist humanism with its critique of liberalism and its expectations of a superior
humanity
•(human perfection & social harmony)
(Geroulanos's account of primary constellations of) humanism:
•christian humanism
•Renaissance educational humanism (founded on a return to ancient Greek models)
•Humboldt's reconceptualization of Renai[...]
(401)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%84.8[...]nfigured a major matrix of concerns
problem with secular humanist utopias --> forging of a ‘new man’ through the mobilization of a specific a priori definition of man required (both):
•man's divinization خداسازى
•man's purge پاکسازى
essentialist definitions of man ==> biologistic, scientistic, political, religious, moralist projects ==>
•lay claim on universality
•prioritize themselves over any such universality
ideologies continue to disguise a *politics of the will* as a universalism
antihumanism = antiredemptive, antimoralist, antimessianist worldview
+ proliferation of tropes --> dooming contemporary man to an existence without meaning or future:
•last man (Nietzsche, Camus, Blanchot)
•death of Man (Malraux, Kojeve, Blanchot, Foucault)
•devirilization of man (Kojeve, Bataille, Queneau)
•terror (Marlaux, Bataille, Kojeve, Merleau-Ponty)
•
Kojeve and Jean Wahl --> antifoundational realism --> new anthropology
antihumanism
a precondition of thought
a fluid matrix of ideas
a philosophical attitude
...................................
Malraux's (literary-metaphysical pursuits [echoes Nietzsche + intellectual Left]) heritage to us (to artists): the alternative to bourgeois individualism [can be achieved] through commitment to a justice based on a quasi-Marxist notion of human dignity --> the *uprooted, cultured, and powerless individual* who struggled against the nation-driven, science-executed destruction wrought by (arid and morally bankrupt) modern warfare [---> go to forensic architecture, apass] --> (the idea that death of man can be averted through) ***a recognition of the heroism of the resistance*** + turn to human creativity
how i have used a non-western voice (“i am from outside the west”) to provide for myself an escape from political categorization + claiming the knowledge of an insider and enjoying the analytical clarity of distance --> i make claims both *expertise in* and cool-headed *distance from* the essence of europe
(technique of) epistolary exchange
(to think of Kantian cosmopolitanism a) a genuine model for commitment =/= outdated illusion
...................................
research method (a heritage of surrealism:) exquisite corpse technique --> (unpredictable and) innocent inventiveness
...................................
for Sohrevardi and Avicenna: nature = chah چاه shahr gheyravan (material of nature/world: ghir قیر) --> zolmatkade ظلمت کده
#comparative reading of stranded
ghorbat gharbia --> Crusoe
•daryaye sabz دریای سبز (green sea) = donyaye mahsusat دنیای محسوسات (phenomenological world)
•دایه daye = na[...]
(402)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%84.9[...]. An active rigid body reacts to dynamics--fields, collisions, and springs--not to keys. A passive rigid body can have active rigid bodies collide with it. You can key its Translate and Rotate attributes, but dynamics have no effect on it.
notes on The Rigid Bodies / (metaphysics of 3D)
the simulacrum / ideal / image --> Plato
mystic geometry --> Pythagoras (--> mathematization of the real, real ‘is’ math)
}--> what does it mean to perform 3D for these two thinkers?
fire simulation in Maya <--> cotton touching fire in Islamic philosophy
(<)> -->{
() manifest image --> shader/topology/raytracing
<> underlying (scientific?) image --> C++ / physics engine / object oriented programming
the mode of production in current 3D-biz creates a sort of cultural collateral or collateral culture (term by Lazzarato). 3D practices are arising as series of activities, not recognized as “work,” rather involved in defining and fixing artistic/cultural standards, tastes, norms, and strategically public opinion.
“is this real or fake?” (you have to click)
--> when the productive mediation is smashed to pieces and replaced by this question.
either it is ‘made’ or ‘real’
[structural imposibility, a double bind, ...]
}--> the image-warrior who violently asks us to choose between the visible and the invisible
( <-)--?--(-> )
...................................
the notion of “general purpose toolkit”
synthesis, patches,
environment --> media
interface --> physical
dataflow programming, rapid prototyping, indeterministic machine paradigms,
one-dimensional array of values
telemetry (duri-sanj دوری سنج)
...................................
an evangelist builds a monument
softimage monument
virtual?
movement and stillness in houdini?<[...]
(403)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%85[...]y asks us to choose between the visible and the invisible
( <-)--?--(-> )
...................................
the notion of “general purpose toolkit”
synthesis, patches,
environment --> media
interface --> physical
dataflow programming, rapid prototyping, indeterministic machine paradigms,
one-dimensional array of values
telemetry (duri-sanj دوری سنج)
...................................
an evangelist builds a monument
softimage monument
virtual?
movement and stillness in houdini?
who the 3d software, as an ontological device to recreate and study and understand being, is devided or made-up? the presebce of the notion of movement in it and essence. what is movement and apparition?
[we can have a workshop that teaches houdini just through movement. or a non-movement approuch to 3D making.]
nonrepresentational maya
epistemology and cognitive approuch to space and matter
ontology of matter in maya
worlding in autodesk industry (look at the trailers, tutorials, and so on.)
historical view?
i see maya and other 3D apps as visualization technologies enlisted as metaphors by Haraway and as languages that actively intertwine in the production of literary value
friction, forms of masks (shaders?), and play, and the dance of Dis-tanz
the separations and partings
nearness
transforming and transformative agencies
...................................
“matter refers to the materiality/materialization of phenomena” (Barad)
-let's look at my 3D-related practices again and investigate their ontological implications and rework how matter is defined, [matter, force, interdependency, appearance,,, phenomena, meaning,] Delanda-[intensification, articulation, flow-of,]
#Femke workshop: on rigging and skinning, writing stories cultivating creation and creatures before their enrollment in George Lucas film, speculating on the inorganic skeletal animacies
...................................
(Brey > Ihde:) [technology:] a special class of artifacts (for example telescopes, probes, hearing aids, etc) that are capable of engaging in ‘symbiotic’ relationships with the human body. [...] means through which the environment is experienced and acted on.
essential ambiguity of technology / of material human-technology relations
hermeneutic fluency (and the special enigma) of the connection between text and world
*bird's-eye=?/!~navigational~/?=.'<-phenomenological
[...in front of the open (blank) page (of the book) (we teach children to take the) position of the industrialist, the urban planner, or the Cartesian philosopher --> outside the page is outside and [...]
(404)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%85.1[...]f flexibilty, stretch and tention between the nodes in a Rig?
◦what a substitution in a string-Rig might change the ways that being is animated, and therefore change the meaning?
-that means: change the Rig, and you will change the ways space and time are arranged
-that means: thinking about Rigs is like thinking about the language, or better: ontological commitments embedded in language. and since we are interested in materiality [that means: material human-technology relations], i would ask: what are the material objects that this language commits us to? to be more exact: what are the material objects that the language-Rig commits the CG-hacker to?
-ontological assumptions embeded in any “device” (English grammar, CG Rigs, architect's tools, a definition in language, etc.)
-Rigs are clever technological provisional constructions, (always) setup for a specific naturalization.
-Rigs articulate animacies, that is to say: they are almost linguistic structures that shape or determine our animations
-Rigs do consequential work
-how elements are arranged together, how they are composed, how they are brought into relation in the space of a field, narrative, text, environment, etc
whenever you give a definition (a metaphor, a concept) and work with it, and find yourself committed to certain findings, tracings and meanings because of that: you are working with a Rig. that is to say: Rigs are definitional structures, not arguments themselves, but their conditions.
then the question would be: when do you know that it is time to dismantle a Rig? how to recognize, learn to reuse or repurpose old Rigs?
in CG the business of Rigging and Rig-making is handed to the engineering talent and point of view, it has made a pure technical problem.
skeletal, it's all about the ‘arm’
http://www.toxik.sk/img/maya2011_ya.jpg
an arm is a spaciotemporal particularity
the organisms that crafted in their bodies the subphylum vertebrata, a terrestrial technology for moving the flesh.
the images we make are made in the image of the one-with-arms
mechanical
bipedal
facial
quadrupedal
many arms and legs
spinal
surficial
hair
feather
rain Rig by محمد عبدالله
eqFUnFPcuwg
an Optimus Prime transformation Rig by Eske Yoshinob
VDrAzeNS2pk?t=28
(strictly) possible tranformational arrangements
how a being is Rigged into transformational particularities
in this sense, the question of the Rig is ontoloical, specially in a world populated by devices and techniques, interfaces and folds upon folds, constructions that do things for another constructions, Rigs that translate
kinematic equations, inverse kinematics, the math of it is called the Jacobian inverse technique
[...]
(405)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%85.8[...]us communication, boundry articulations) --> reference must be made to bodies in order for concepts to have meaning (?)*
•my Rigs and books are about how discursive practices are related to material phenomena
(*)reading: “text” is the interface between the matrialization of “reality” and subjectivation of “reader” --> inseparability of language and reality in ajayeb
(“We are suspended in language in such a way that we cannot say what is up and what is down, The word ‘reality’ is also a word, a word which we must learn to use correctly.” Petersen < Barad)
ajayeb's iterative processes of materialization
عجایب نامه =/= imagined and idealized human-independent reality
ajayeb's stories of historically nunhuman people
in ajayeb's descriptive intra-actions with reality, humans and language are part of the configuaration or ongoing reconfiguring of the world, that is phenomena
we cannot so easily answer where the apparatus “ends”
•(but again, how can I answer) which ontological practices are embodied (or embeded) in (the productive and constraining dimension of regulatory) apparatuses of my ajayeb? (rigs, hypertext, pop-up, etc.)
•(resisting the anti-metaphysics legacy) how can I keep insisting on accountability for the particular exclusions that are enacted in (my) ajayeb and taking up the responsibility to perpetually contest and rework the boundries (of my objectivities)?
(*)effect: marks left on the agencies of observation
enacted =/= having
(agency is the matter of enactment not something that one ‘has’)
(*)disarticulation: the question of who/what gets to be imagined (and in which way)
(Barad's sentences are long in a way for the reader to feel all those particular words in one breath)
(in medical practices) the machine becomes the interface between the objectification of the spacific body under experience (for example the fetus) and subjectivation of the technician, physicianm engineer, and scientist.
...some ontologies:
•classical realist: posit some fixed notion of being that is prior to signification
•Kantian transcendentalism: being completely inaccessible to language
•linguistic monism: being completely of language
•Baradian agential realism: phenomena are constitutive of reality
...................................
kinetic, energies expressed in variables
integrated definitions:
•movements of an isolated body
•in detachment with the rest of the world
•linear function of time
•all energy is kinetic
•value of “potential energy” is zero
...................................
metallurgy concerns matter in movement
matter-flow
what[...]
(406)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%86.2[...]
enacted =/= having
(agency is the matter of enactment not something that one ‘has’)
(*)disarticulation: the question of who/what gets to be imagined (and in which way)
(Barad's sentences are long in a way for the reader to feel all those particular words in one breath)
(in medical practices) the machine becomes the interface between the objectification of the spacific body under experience (for example the fetus) and subjectivation of the technician, physicianm engineer, and scientist.
...some ontologies:
•classical realist: posit some fixed notion of being that is prior to signification
•Kantian transcendentalism: being completely inaccessible to language
•linguistic monism: being completely of language
•Baradian agential realism: phenomena are constitutive of reality
...................................
kinetic, energies expressed in variables
/>
integrated definitions:
•movements of an isolated body
•in detachment with the rest of the world
•linear function of time
•all energy is kinetic
•value of “potential energy” is zero
...................................
metallurgy concerns matter in movement
matter-flow
what about the 3D hacker? what is in flow?
form is ever-emergent =/= pre-determined -->? default
[Alberti on northwest Argentina first millennium ceramic vessels:] potters’ bodies were shaped irrevocably by their skilled practice
objects they made were never complete ==> they were aligned with others’ concerns ==> they were drawn into potters’ social identities --> into the category of potter
*skill and ontoloical risk [--> question at CG artist]
-becoming subject to the processes they are involved in --(this commitment)--> involves them in both thoth the task and its ongoing material consequence
skilled practices situated as the mediator between one realm and the other =/= (in Amazonia) where natural and cultural processes are not distinguished in the same way, skill is conceived far more broadly and is not an exclusively human capacity
(for Kuna) [*]skill: a mark of the maker's openness to alterity, learned in dreams from animals that lost the ability to perform those activities in mythic times, it not only acts upon surfaces or moulds forms; it also transfers qualities
skill matters (=/= gauge of technical action applied to raw material--like the case of The Magicians)
hackers and potters
(potters’ identities were vulnerable, how about hackers after a millennium?)
CG artist's intervensions in 3D materials (concidered active)
(we are living in) an inconstant world in which materials (including computers?) were lively and equally ca[...]
(407)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%86.3[...]
Hitchcock's vertigo effect --> a tool i built years ago: https://www.highend3d.com/maya/script/vertigotool-for-maya
simultaneously zooming and pulling away : we apear to be in the same place, yet the place seems to distort beyond our control ==reestablishing==> the way we experience “here”
the vertigo tool doens't do away with human experience, it drastically modifies it in a dizzing manner
--> a dangerous knowledge zoom lens tool, a vertiginous antirealist/antiliteral abyss (=/=? irony device ==> presenting us with intimacy with existing nonhumans)
...................................
#veil
@Janina
@Ale
Nicole Archer: ‘textile’: a material formed at the intersections of desire and modern politics
•textile's ‘textility' = texture
•textile's ‘textuality' = readability
to be prepared to address relations consistencies ==> (hope to) meaningfully reform them
*(Archer lingering in the textile's volatile gum) to develop forms of critique that can account for the peculiar textiles ‘we’ are currently wrapped-up in* [globalized economies, militarized laboratories, etc. (BioSteel and so on)]
text +/& textile
•in metaphor: the social fabric, the Internet, the Fold, etc.
•in myth: Arachne's textiles, or Penelope's epic loom
}--✕-->? to account for neo-liberal and transgenic subjects
(traditionally:) textile (racialized and gendered, as “woman's work”) “=/=” text
*fabric conditions and binds our desires and bodies ---@Janina
(Archer >) Gernreich exposed how the fashion system instrumentalized the body's desire to move” while inscribing it within the time-signatures of modern capitalism
uniform = contemporary fashion's other
digi-camo (redesigned and digitally remixed camouflage fatigues worn by the US military)
desire for “freedom” and for alternative temporalities + desire for discipline and physical restraint
}--> *tight spaces our desires are prone to work themselves into*
textures and taxonomies of fashion and uniformity
Abu Ghraib --> (in the pursuit of a) perverse desire for justice (a desire that many feel is best met in the violent erasure of certain subjects)
(let's) stop pretending that “we” weren't already caught-up in the messy circuits of desire
“[...]Freud's figure of the woman who has nothing better to do than but braid her pubic hair into a futile simulation of the phallus, and who (interestingly enough) accidentally invents weaving as an outcome of this inherently fetishistic gesture” (Archer > Barthes > Freud)
Gernreich working with “the future” as a medium and not as a destination***
-he was keen to work with fashion as a ‘time-based medium’(~ deliver us[...]
(408)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%86.4[...]
...................................
Grosz on Deleuze and Guattari
problem with “becoming woman”
the process of becoming-X [marginal, woman, non-western, etc.] means nothing as a strategy if one is already X =/= question of difference, specificity
*desire
*machinic functions
*assemblages
*rhizomatics
*cartography
*intensities
*speed
*planes
appropriation (recuperation) of the positions and struggles of X ==risks==> depoliticizing aestheticizing struggles and political challenges crucial to the survival and self-definition of X
problem with becoming
(Deleuze and Guattari are invested in a) romantic elevation of models of psychosis, schizophrenia, and madness ==>
•ignore the very real pain and torment of individuals
•raise pathology to an unlivable, unviable ideal for others
our reservations and suspicions (in apass when we face each other)
Deleuzian rhizomatics & feminist theory --> reversal of Platonism: “ideal =/= real” (opposition integral to Western thought)
rhizomatics, cartography, schizoanalysis (deconstruction, grammatology) ==> clear the ground of metaphysical concepts ==> (others) may be able to devise their own knowledges
four “illusions” of representation:
•identity
•opposition
•analogy
•resemblance
}--✕--> becoming (beyond the logic and confines of being)
}--✕--> multiplicity [defined by the outside] (beyond doubling or multicentering of proliferating subjects)
Deleuzian-Foucauldian understanding of politics theorizes in a clearer and more direct form than *rival (alternative) political philosophies* (including Marxism, socialism, liberalism, and anarchism), the kinds of theoretical and political struggles in which feminists are involved
[*]body: a discontinuous, nontotalized series of processes, organs, flows, energies, corporeal substances and events, intensities, and durations --link--> organs + biological processes + material objects + social practices
[Spinoza's rare affirmative understanding of] body: (is analyzed and assessed more) in terms of *what it can do*, the things it can perform, the linkages it establishes, the transformations it undergoes, the machinic connections it forms with other bodies (=/= a locus for a conscious subject, as an organically determined object, by their genus and species, by their organs and functions)
from Plato to Lacan --> desire: negative, abyssal, a lack at the level of ontology itself (an effect of frustration) [desire is frustrated by the real]
=/= Spinoza Nietzsche Deleuze --> desire: immanent, positive and productive, ***desire is a relation of effectuation, not of satisfaction*** [desire is productive of reality] --> aleatory, bricolag[...]
(409)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%88.4[...] the kind of power that “the uniform” signifies?
how styles (sartorial, campy, grotesque) serve as a serious index of our collective complicity in the ongoing production of state violence?
...................................
Chen on animacy
animacy --> how matter that is considered insensate, immobile, deathly (or otherwise “wrong”) animates cultural life in important ways
[*]animacy: a quality of agency, awareness, mobility, liveness
--linguistics--> grammatical effects of the sentience or liveness of nouns
change of animacy ==> violates a cross-linguistic preference among speakers
(for example “the hikers that rocks crush” --> rock: the source of causality)
animacy
filled with life, disposed, inclined, animare to breathe, to quicken
anima, air, breath, life, soul, mind (mental impulse)
--connected--> animals
animosity --> animating spirit or temper of a hostile character
animating principle [--> rigging]
...................................
Ihde: playing a musical instrument (= a technological mediation) =/= the process of genetic manipulation
=/= Heidegger's technology: a metaphysically totalizing context (<-- every technology ended up with exactly the same output or analysis)
Ihde =/= utopian & dystopian views of technology
...to understand yourself to be thinking and acting ‘in the midst of’ the pervasive technoscientific character of life (@CG hacker)
Ihde --> ***technologies and humans constitute themselves interactively***
*technological mediation: heterogeneous relationships between individual human beings and the world + artifacts used for mediations =/= ideals of efficiency and clear communication
“breakdown ==> new gestalt” : something that had usually taken for granted, which then under breakdown conditions, now gets revealed in a new way (revelatory function)
=/= Ihde's *variational practice* : variations ==forefront==> new gestalts
(our) world = powerful effective & failing technology
we =/= tragic hero (+ broken hammer) or Enlightenment scientist (+ laboratory)
matrix --> female
those that move in the matrix --> formative male principle
(Foucault's) episteme: social-moral-religious stability
Latour
modernity <== settlement: (a clear and sharp distinction) society =/= nature --obscure--> the proliferation of hybrids: entities that are both cultural & natural (for example material technologies are both “real” & “constructed”)
Ihde --> technologies are in *mediating positions*
interrelational relativistic ontologies : there is interaction and mutual “non-neutral” and “noninnocent” productive and e[...]
(410)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%88.5[...]business and military
means of consistent calibration
🕓 coordinated time --> material-economic necessity + cultural imaginary
==> 1900 blossoming of chronometric patents: on remote alarms, remote regulation of pendula, telephonic, even wireless-transmission of time
}--> pass through the Swiss patent office in Bern & Einstein's desk --> Einstein's expertise on electromechanical devices (1902)
electromagnetic clock coordination : transforming small electrical currents into high-precision rotatory movements
}--> “time is money” --Galison--> no old-fashioned mechanical, hydraulic, or pneumatic system would do--electricity was the key to the future (a future that would only come about properly if humankind broke with its mechanical clock past riven by anarchy, incoherence, and routinization)
distant simultaneity --> political, profitable, pragmatic =/= anarcho-clockism
#title
international bureau of measurement
Einstein agonizing over the nature of moving bodies and electrodynamics
=/= ether: the centerpiece of nineteenth-century physical theories
kinematics: geometry of motion, behavior of matter in the absence of force
metaphysics of Einstein's relativity theory --Galison--> underlined through some of the most symbolized mechanisms of modernity ~ determining train arrival times using electromagnetically coordinated clocks (was precisely the technological issue that had been racking Europe 1902) : symbol of the interconnected sped-up world of modernity
*centralized time* distribution was the temporal-physical glory of the unified German empire
turn-of-the-century Euro-American world --> overlapping networks of coordination: webs of train tracks, telegraph lines, meteorological networks, longitude surveys under the watchful, increasingly universal, clock system
--> Einstein's special theory of relativity was (an imaginative) machine <-- Galison's technological reading of (Einstein's) most theoretical paper
Einstein had opened the zone of unification (but in the process:)
•he removed Berlin as the Zeitzentrum
•designed a machine that upended the very category of metaphysical centrality
post world war I
all the activities of man, whether conscious or unconscious (sleeping, eating, meditating, playing) take place in time; without order, without specified plans, we risk falling into anarchy (physical, intellectual and moral misery)
--Favarger--> the remedy: the precise measurement and determination of time with the rigor of an astronomical observatory
(to) democratize time : time rigor must be distributed electrically
(=/= gears and magnets)
Galison's exploring the material culture of clock coordination is to set Einstein's place in a universe of meaning --avoid--> two pro[...]
(411)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%88.8[...]rement
Einstein agonizing over the nature of moving bodies and electrodynamics
=/= ether: the centerpiece of nineteenth-century physical theories
kinematics: geometry of motion, behavior of matter in the absence of force
metaphysics of Einstein's relativity theory --Galison--> underlined through some of the most symbolized mechanisms of modernity ~ determining train arrival times using electromagnetically coordinated clocks (was precisely the technological issue that had been racking Europe 1902) : symbol of the interconnected sped-up world of modernity
*centralized time* distribution was the temporal-physical glory of the unified German empire
turn-of-the-century Euro-American world --> overlapping networks of coordination: webs of train tracks, telegraph lines, meteorological networks, longitude surveys under the watchful, increasingly universal, clock system
--> Einstein's special theory of relativity was (an imaginative) machine <-- Galison's technological reading of (Einstein's) most theoretical paper
Einstein had opened the zone of unification (but in the process:)
•he removed Berlin as the Zeitzentrum
•designed a machine that upended the very category of metaphysical centrality
post world war I
all the activities of man, whether conscious or unconscious (sleeping, eating, meditating, playing) take place in time; without order, without specified plans, we risk falling into anarchy (physical, intellectual and moral misery)
--Favarger--> the remedy: the precise measurement and determination of time with the rigor of an astronomical observatory
(to) democratize time : time rigor must be distributed electrically
(=/= gears and magnets)
Galison's exploring the material culture of clock coordination is to set Einstein's place in a universe of meaning --avoid--> two problematic positions (*on the relation of things to thoughts*):
1. materialism or empiricism: inductive, observation-centered account of scientific development (~ that ideas emerge causally and univalently from the disposition of objects and the impressions they make upon us) ==> “theory = provisional addition”
2. antipositivist movement of the 1960s and 1970s (that programmes, paradigms, and conceptual schemes came first ==reshape==> experiments and instruments all the way down) “thoughts fully structured things”
1902 --> triumph of the *electrical over the mechanical* was already symbolically wired to dreams of modernity
*electrical chronocoordination --signified--> political, cultural, technical unity all at once [*Einheitszeit = imperial empire (~= democracy, world citizenship, and antianarchism)]
*patent office: grandstand seat for the great parade of modern technologies
==> Einstein (eliminating the master clock + raising the conventionally set time to a phys[...]
(412)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%88.8[...]ent and action) --help--> *how the potential for events to happen are being designed into environments* (preemption, both digital and physical)
mania for what is surprising, for what immediately sweeps us away and impresses us for fleetingness as the basic law of constancy <--Heidegger-- a logic that is central to our experience of modern technology
~/=
games involve the development of techniques for interacting with them that subsist over longer periods of time within the body
•(gamer's) body <==shaped== through the creative responses generated by users in relation to the images they experience
•(game's) responses ==bring==> into being different bodily capacities and modes of attunement, which cannot be intentionally determined (by those who produce the images through the processes of design)
correct mixture of contingency and structure
...................................
prosthesis + castration complex --> “cyberspace: having your everything amputated”
prosthetic skill ~= mastery of the phantom limb
--> rigging
prosthetic --> vivid illustration of the human-technology relations in terms of the body [=/=? hyperobjects]
(set of) architectural metaphors --provide--> foundation of the university
-(in the case of rigging) mechanical metaphors --provide--> foundation of moving bodies
prosthetic technology (like the *magic lantern*)
***technology of theory***
rigging and the question of morphological correspondence (homology: systematic similarity) --> isomorphic systems of relations
•isomorphic: 1-1 mapping, structure-preserving mapping --✕--> breakable objects
homology: principle of rigging, essentially the same (parts might have different shapes and be employed for different purposes) --> geometrical similarity --> ‘abstraction: materials of organization’ [position + structure] (Geoffroy > Hubert)
~~✕--> Deleuze and Guattari's body without organs [anatomical: pure plane of immanence (~ *rig = abstract animal*)]
--> (thinkers of) *organic folding* + *comparative biological intuition* --> *science of form*
•analogue: a part or organ in one animal that has the same function as another part or organ in a different animal (--> rig is the analogue of the animal's body)
•homotypy (homotype: serially repeated parts) --> Goethe
homology: a morphological correspondence determined primarily by relative position and connection ~= rigging
--Darwin--> material ancestors (replaced metaphysical archetypes)
philosophical anatomy <~~?--> rigging
•dialectics is the search for rational laws which are active in nature
•discontent with merely empiricism
•transcendental (philosopher) ==> morphologist
rigging: (step away form ordinary perception and) building in[...]
(413)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%89.1[...]of rigging) mechanical metaphors --provide--> foundation of moving bodies
prosthetic technology (like the *magic lantern*)
***technology of theory***
rigging and the question of morphological correspondence (homology: systematic similarity) --> isomorphic systems of relations
•isomorphic: 1-1 mapping, structure-preserving mapping --✕--> breakable objects
homology: principle of rigging, essentially the same (parts might have different shapes and be employed for different purposes) --> geometrical similarity --> ‘abstraction: materials of organization’ [position + structure] (Geoffroy > Hubert)
~~✕--> Deleuze and Guattari's body without organs [anatomical: pure plane of immanence (~ *rig = abstract animal*)]
--> (thinkers of) *organic folding* + *comparative biological intuition* --> *science of form*
•analogue: a part or organ in one animal that has the same function as another part or organ in a different animal (--> rig is the analogue of the animal's body)
•homotypy (homotype: serially repeated parts) --> Goethe
homology: a morphological correspondence determined primarily by relative position and connection ~= rigging
--Darwin--> material ancestors (replaced metaphysical archetypes)
philosophical anatomy <~~?--> rigging
•dialectics is the search for rational laws which are active in nature
•discontent with merely empiricism
•transcendental (philosopher) ==> morphologist
rigging: (step away form ordinary perception and) building internal homologies (=/= external ressemblance)
==> comprehensible order (--> systematic animation)
~=> complexities and accidents (are also part of it)
--> rational morphology
--> mathematization of space [--> analytic geometry (not necessarily Euclidean or rigid bodies, but also curved spaces, n-dimensional spaces, particle spaces, volumetric space, phase space, etc.) (looking at the animal) ==> abstract, proliferation of types --> rig] {--Lefebvre--> social critique of abstract space --> rigged}
-the way i learned 3D animation, the space of the software was a n-dimensional spaces (X, Y, Z, time, texture, audio, constraining, etc.)
automaton
a bit of machinery exhibiting somewhat complex behavior --rigging--> programming movement ==produce==> a working simulacrum of a living organism
•(in the days of magic) “name of god” was the rig for golem [?]
•(in the time of Newton) automaton: clockwork music box
•(in 19th century) automaton: glorified heat engine
•(in 20th century) intelligent building [~= rig]
•(perhaps rigging is our age's) desire to produce and study automata [~= computational mechanization, kinematic model]
(abstractly) automaton: a set of physically unspecified states, input, output, and operational rules
[...]
(415)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%89.2[...]relationships that bind humans to their nonhuman companions [...to virtual explosive demons of Charmed TV series --> how we embody animals and how they embody us? rigging demons (my digital folk tale), rigging as sensory medium (a mode of nearness), bodies bound through appropriation]
(in apass:)
zoosemiotic registers
meaning making registers
bodily contact zones
(Charmed demons state of trans:) modes of incorporation, intimacy, inhabitation
--> tranimals: trans animals, range of kinds of sapience and being in various distributed cognitions, syntaxes,and embodiments (and affects)
animals become “animals” not just in terms of plurality but in terms of a plurality that is located within spatiotemporal coordinations
(Kelley, Hayward > Katie)
‘here’ and ‘there’ ~ material partials
...
sensuous trafficking
from inorganic to organic
transcode sensoria
as refrain
by which life gets lived
play enjoyed
augmented states of being emerge
*distributed cognitions* (populated digitalities) ==Hayles==> abandonment of mastery (anthropomorphic fantasies of control)
my text rigging demons = (an unmetabolized knowledge,) play between technical animator programming + CG interface + soap opera + my affective involvement --> speciation bestiary style
not only tranimals, but national restructuring, political economies of sciences, images, culture industries, and technologies reordering in infrastructural assemblages are also sensuous refrains
•some becomings and assemblages might refuse these refrains and *demand ontological primacy*
Leigh Star
for some kinds of tasks we (humans) are highly distributed --> remembering: ***much of our memories are in other people*** (libraries and homes)
part of our selves extend beyond the skin in every imaginable way <--phantom limb
--Katie--> embodiments (and beings) are distributed among memories, capacities, corporealities
demon dematerialization --> body dissolve (vanquish) --> relinquish --> networking materializing forces --> this text
the state of cut in manga series Attack on Titan
•affective wounds
•affective formations that break the skin
•restructuring
•chaotic and unpredictable nature
•your avatar (your monster): sensuously augmented elements of self
•territory registers
•materially real scales of involvement
•
play = double consciousness --> being in both states (is & is not, assertion & rejection) --creates--> its own commentary in itself about itself <-- intense and pleasurable interactive dynamism <-- meta communications performed by embodied selves at multiple levels (of organic and social systems)
commercial [...]
(416)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%89.3[...]dustries, and technologies reordering in infrastructural assemblages are also sensuous refrains
•some becomings and assemblages might refuse these refrains and *demand ontological primacy*
Leigh Star
for some kinds of tasks we (humans) are highly distributed --> remembering: ***much of our memories are in other people*** (libraries and homes)
part of our selves extend beyond the skin in every imaginable way <--phantom limb
--Katie--> embodiments (and beings) are distributed among memories, capacities, corporealities
demon dematerialization --> body dissolve (vanquish) --> relinquish --> networking materializing forces --> this text
the state of cut in manga series Attack on Titan
•affective wounds
•affective formations that break the skin
•restructuring
•chaotic and unpredictable nature
•your avatar (your monster): sensuously augmented elements of self
/>
•territory registers
•materially real scales of involvement
•
play = double consciousness --> being in both states (is & is not, assertion & rejection) --creates--> its own commentary in itself about itself <-- intense and pleasurable interactive dynamism <-- meta communications performed by embodied selves at multiple levels (of organic and social systems)
commercial entertainment drawing on understandings of mammalian-affective structure : transmedia + mammalian animalities + AI agents (~= rigging)
Disney = interactive dramas of mammalian behavior of psychological bonding
3D application: interactive microworld of augmented assemblage of objects and beings and tools and zoons, visualization of mulistable cognition
= a form of globally restructuring knowledge work + embodied learning + economies
exosome explosive demons, as significant other?
we love to create worlds (thds (that is why we make and watch soap operas)
careful negotiation of meaning and tools (in apass, not careful always)
...................................
(Katie -->) [*]web: a material example of a then counter-intuitive convergence and recombination, one across forms of inscription and meaning making devices[...]in that fictional everywhere of “everyone's” lives
emerging posthumanities: humans are only some of the agencies self-organizing in altering systems of things + people + worldly processes --Katie--> being inside and moved around literally by the very material and conceptual structures you are analyzing and writing about -->
•transdisciplinary consciousness: telescoping out to engage infrastructures in their layered accretions رشد
•witing (saying what counts) [has to] diverge perpendicularly across the normative --> performative = demonstration + simulation
•knowledge workings --embed--> withi[...]
(417)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%89.4[...]/>
(Sa'di + Olearius:)
chance encounter, failures, writing, making figures, loving, making friends, their acts of worlding (?), composing worlds, (de-compose?)
technicity: armillary sphere, Globe of Gottorf, Golestan, drawings, star constellations with astrological and mythological symbols, inside-outside model of the cosmos,
--> they both have concerns of *global consciousness* --> and their differences: two (or more) different world knowledges
GPS: global system position, concern of both Sa'di and Olearius
an excuse to read and investigate their worldings? translations between worlds, and sewing, tearings, and so on during the Safaviten and the Russian Tsar 16th century cosmology and models of reciprocity
(Translation is always interpretive, critical, and partial.)
intersection of multiple hierarchies:
-the Safaviten order (Isfahan architecture)
-the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp order (family architecture, court and mathematic)
-Tsar order (urban)
-literature of reciprocity***
Sana keywords: distortion, displacement, distance, alternation, collage, blur (noun), noise, voice-over, subtle changes, micro-macro, micro-politic, rhythm, turbulence, fragmentation, metaphor, persistence, repetition, disturbance,
(unexpected)
--> separation ??? =/=? compose
media/mediums: new narratives (script, score, etc.), image archive, garden (material and semiotic site), performance poetry, land-art, video
why video: using performative materials, enactments and staging of speculative narratives, experimental film making, editing, cheap visual effects, animation and drawing. by using the local geography and landscape of Eckernförde, employment of fragmented scores and modest embodiment, experimental acting and storytelling, the video as a generous medium holds and hosts all our gathered materials, and enables a linear but expansive experience. we will write short scripts based on stories from Olearius's travel logs in Iran and Sa'di's Golestan in order to put them into tests after 8 and 3 centuries, and produce intensity and curiosity for a richer way of relating to our shared cultural heritages and literacies.
practical: we will explore all the mentioned ideas and storylines as starting points to create interest for material-discursive practices of ‘worlding’ and ‘encountering’ in cross-techno-cultural intersections.
...................................
[working] title:
Das Gesicht des Paradies
the cast of one Globe to another
Globe of Gottorf of Golestan
“Each serving diligently in its own appointed place”
“Deliverance from the yoke of bondage”
The Globe of Gottorf and deliverance from the yoke of bondage
The cast of Golestan and the magnitude prison of Globe
Das Gesicht des Paradies und schlichten[...]
(418)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%89.8[...]replay of a string of moments, but an enlivening and reconfiguring of past and future that is larger than any individual. [...] The past is never finished. It cannot be wrapped up like a package, or a scrapbook, or an acknowledgment; we never leave it and it never leaves us behind.
Barad's mother's question: “what good is there in offering recognition that can't be recognized?”
[...] there is only the ongoing practice of being open and *alive to each(other)* meeting
“How to disrupt patterns of thinking that see the past as finished and the future as not ours or only ours?”
...................................
When we read or hear any language statement from the past, we translate.
...................................
the ways Olearius remains non-Iranian all the way
...................................
Conley's notion of “Haptic Eye” (in line with Marks)
dilate the way (here?), we can't elsewhere
/>
the lines that Olearius draws have their origin in their process, in the line, and in the support that line receives,
the drawing that causes the line
the hand that sees
a hand that perceives
the reciprocity between seeing and drawing is that which metabolizes Olearius --(the interchangeability of the visual and verbal)--> “simultaneous process of subjectivation and objectivation” (of sensation)
study of the Persian object
gradually discovering what is in the image
to the image
(already knowing what it is)
how the screen/surface inflicting things far and near
(an) art of viewing
how the eye and the object of my vision constitute each other
optical visuality
erotically charged moment
--> the distanced is sensed
*world laid bare
lay: to place down in a position of rest, or in a horizontal position
n
bare: naked, open
a political aesthetic: a seeing hand relates to prehension (Greifen) of the world at large, the world at its imagined totality, *a world in which any ocular grasp is utopian* (and is always politically invested)
celestial sphere
|
terrestrial sphere
|
the insular eye
...................................
[a map] it tells a story, an itinerary [...] it whets the imagination. It propels narrative but also, dividing our attention, prompts reverie and causes our eyes to look both inward, at our own geographies, and outward, to rove about the frame and to engage, however we wish, the space[...]
(طرز بیان tarz-e bayan) idiolect of the geographer and cartographer
is composed of signs that do not transcribe speech. Riddled with speech and writing
a “map” that plots and colonizes the imagination of the public it is said to “inven[...]
(419)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%90[...]Sa'di's relationship to) ‘the accumulated knowledge’(==> device)
[*]device (symbolum): a combination of a picture and a personal motto. a private adage (امثال و حکم) or clever aphorism --> heraldic image --fusion~=> device: a personal message by means of which a knight would define himself--developed from the chivalric tradition** ==?==> Sa'di's moral devices
-theoretical advice and examples of devices
-a craftsmann, a painter or goldsmith, would then supply the visual form of the idea that the learned scholar created
(moral) device --discuss--> general qualities and characteristics such as courage, nobility, obligation ==> (genre of) [*]emblem: --(pictorial + verbal)-striving--> for *universal applicability*
*emblem <-- the desire to understand the mysteries of antiquity, especially ancient Edgyptian hieroglyphs (in obelisks, sphinxes, lions), which were thought to represent a secret language [original wisdom of early man] (<== concerns of Renaissance [for example Hieroglyphica written in Greek by Horapollo 14th century])
(what are my ‘hieroglyphics’ in ajayeb?) Renaissance humanists wanting to research and understand antiquity, also wiched to *make it come alive*, by using hieroglyphics + Pythogorean symbols (were added, since metaphors and allegories of the ancients supposedly derived from the wisdom of Edgyptian priests)
ancient mythologies and medieval allegories in Renaissance applied hieroglyphic science:
•ancient coins (interpreted as hieroglyphics)
•biblical imagery
•medieval animal
•plant books
•cabalistic number mysticism
•old testament motifs
}==> emblematics became a kind of a language, that scholars and then readers of the vulgar tongue deciphered in books and then applied to a number of fields in daily life
spiritual symbols of allegory and myth + factual/fractal world --common--> visual art
}--> ‘title page’ : interplay of symbol & reality <-- interaction of different spheres of imagery:
•historical characters
•living people
•stuff of geography
•stuff of astronomy
•architectural views
•(in the 14th century scholars began to collect) ancient coins (and medals) [one side: great events, historic individuals -and- the reverse: depicted allegorical subjects, gods or the *fates*, allegorical personifications inherited from the middle ages [arts and vices]] ~--> *moralizing nature of (someone's) ‘specifications’* [--> frontispiece: personifications as simulated sculptures in niches flanking the archway]
Sa'di =/= author's portrait updated ~ Olearius
Olearius had three printing presses installed in his house, and required that the engravers live and work there, under his direct supervision
“Concerning the Changeability of Worldy Things, and the Wonder and Praise of Virtue”
‘flaming hearts[...]
(420)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%91.5[...]rience, humorous insights, and aphorisms (of an ethical/didactic nature)
-Muhammadian like the manner of Virgil-->{the past as legacy, disposing with the divine mechanism, purchase Virgil's tomb and worshipped it, poetry as a tool of divination, embodiment of experience, pastoral and erotic, attraction toward people of any gender, agriculture as man's struggle against a hostile natural world, way of a comparison with foreign marvels,}
religious relativism in Olearius's orientalism --> in deference to his christian audience and as a dependent of the Gottorf court--he disparages islam (verführischer Glauben, seductive belief)
-he is also a forerunner to the comparative religious studies (when he uses the word “Gott/God” rather than the name “Allah”)
-manipulating Hakwirdi's voice in the propagandistic confrontation between the great religions --> Olearius speaking for his persian friend: who feels the customs of his homeland do not measure up to those of his adopted country [like Norbert!]
‘other's blindness’: (a *textual disclaimer* of) the other who exists in spiritual and religious darkness =/= pictorial depiction
(in Persianischer Rosenthal the entire) ***enterprise of translation*** (from Farsi to German) is cloaked in highly metaphoric language, charged with fostering the development of the german language + nationalized sentiment, “our German language that used to lie beneath the dust of contempt now shines forth once again” (<-- i meet this all the time when i was living and working in Germany)
“Die Persianer” in Olearius is an ambiguous term, it could stand for either Sa'di or the text of the Golestan, or Hakwirdi, but this “Persians” is to be “let inside, wearing a German coat,” Olearius's body is charged with teaching “the Persian to speak German” (--> integration)
other translations of Golestan:
•Andre du Ryer
•Johan Ochsenbach
•Georg Gentius
*Golestan
taut and well-translated epigrams
end-rhyme poems
a ‘treasury’ of rhetorical and poetical motifs
a voluminous index of sayings
-*short and astute speeches* (ایجاز ijaz ناقلا naghola)
*the genre of aphorism* = "apophthegma” (concise saying --> fit for advice, --> emblem)
(clever and) *sharp* ==> memorable
practical advice for individuals (members of the bourgeois, merchants) who wanted to climb the social ladder and learn *how to behave at court*
Golestan was considered a rich sourch of (such) “oriental wisdom”
(why Olearius is so into Sa'di's Golestan:) the aphorisms try to convey mental images or pictures [...] the apophthegma are the verbal equivalent of the images of the frontispiece --Brancaforte--> both genres try to convey a great deal of information in a condensed form (verbal or pictorial) [--> this is also why i am into Olearius and Sa'di #baroque]
(frontispiece + Golestan[...]
(421)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%91.7[...]are
“you see me from the outside, as a pleasant young man in years, but on the murderous interior i am a tyrant.”
the scene of Eastern opulence and decadence corresponds to a 17th century (or even 21st century) Westerner's conception of an Oriental court
oriental stage
...................................
صورت الأرض surate al-arz (face of earth)
اصطخری Istakhri, 10th century, translated into German by Mordtmann
he met another celebrated traveler, Ibn Haukul ابن حوقل
...................................
Verran: *innovating to effect the discipline of deductive proof in ancient Greek*
(i found out--Pierre also noted--that in my work i tend to) inspire a baroque style of empirical analysis
[*]baroque
--> now you see it, now you don't
--> (a thread of innovation in) mixing words and visuals
--> wonder-filled difference
--> sensibility concerned with collective way finding through complexity
*baroque sensibility* loves unlikely juxtaposition
*baroque form lives with passionate intensity*
****forms of non-explanation [=/= to reflect of ‘what is’ from a meta position****]:
•juxtaposition
•stories
•framing
•reframing
•folds --> working within the ‘folds’
•working on the edge
-
--> *pushing and pulling at the interfaces we feel ourselves enmeshed in* [<-- that is exactly the description of what i do. #amazon project]
to recognize stories of entrepreneurship as stories of working relations between people, technology, and nature
@Setareh
acknowledge our “understanding of”(s)
(taking diagrams as involved only in) epistemic practices linking the mess of the actual and the ideal of the future =/= (account of diagrams that focuses on their unique) contribution in rhetoric --> *collective way-finding* (that #Olearius works agains for iranians and german, and Sa'di's version)
[diagrams:]
•(graphs, images, visuals that fill the) two-dimensional physical spaces
•screened images that cover the surfaces of a *tapestry*
•visuals performing in a graphic register in *tension* with linguistic registers (Verran) --> figurations designed to work with text --> open up a space for imagining their capacities as *agential devices* --> (how) diagrams intervene in the organization and governance of institutions --> *diagrams as objects of governance and organization* embeding working imaginaries (such as in the imperial enterprise of the Duke Frederick that Olearius worked for) --and--> diagramatic devices of technoscience ==> enforcing *non-equivocation* and *non-contradiction* : the standard rhetoric of Western scientific thought and argument - - --> ***devices enacting norm***
[...]
(422)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%92.3[...]erve as a spiritual haven, or is it invoked as an identitarian response to the ravages of a globalized world?” (Toor)
(unpack we must)
***to unpack different islams (for different actors who deploy it)
‘islam’ certainly cannot be unproblematically deployed as the explanatory ‘variable’
Toor in her example cases showing that the ‘islam connection,’ when it is there, is varied, complex, and sometimes contradictory (=/= mainstream discourse on Islam)
(i want Hoda to make her categorical labor harder, i want her to make historically and socially contextual analysis, not just take shortcuts towards generalization predetermined by a priori categories (of Iran, Islam, women), rather to begin with the empirical reality)
...................................
a new legible object of analysis (in writing culture): qualities, trajectories, aesthetics ==> writing became tactile and compositional, an attunement, a response, “a vigilant protection of a worlding” (Stewart)
*writing = a way of thinking*
[*]precarity: register of the singularity of emergent phenomena, the way that they accrete, accrue and wear out
(=/= recognizing self-identical objects, metaculturally marked)
forms of perceiving (seeing, thinking) are themselves emergent
a writing that hones attention to the way that a thing (like precarity, etc.) starts to take form as:
•a composition
•a recognition
•a sensibility
•some collection of:
•materialities
•laws
•movements
obvious: totalizing dramatizations of the thing in itself
precarity can take the form of:
•fraility (living in it and through it)
•a sea change
•a darkening atmosphere
•a hard fall
•the barely perceptible sense of a reprieve
•
ordinary things (=/= melodrama) they matter because they shimmer precariously
...seasons magnetized to tones of voice and a quality of light
place (=/= immpasive corporeality) : affective charges:
•a mantel of redemption
•a glacier of impatience
•a high desert of anxiety dissected by fault lines of rage
}--performed--> in **little scenes of recognition** (--> “visceral complicity of those laying claim to a composed tactility[...]” =/= naturalized order per se)
(Tehran's?) drawn curtains: physical shadow of a state of hardening, a rotting from the inside out
(...curtained people, they suck the) *gestural sensory attachments of seeing and being seen* (into a world in which things are dark)
precarity ==?==> intimacy (of people in place)
(in winter with T-shirt and sandals) the townie body unfazed by the cold, endearing, a little heroic
an imaginary --> a logic of some sort -[...]
(423)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%93[...]enological level to a single entity at a higher level of organization --> (plants and animals, individuals) are*functionality integrated* [<-- my problem with the notion of community]
◦looking up to the world of platonic forms <-- a process of abstraction
•looking down: a table of companions --> (plants and animals, individuals) are *cooperating*
(romantic conceptions of) society as organism =/= (baroque conception of) organism as society
(historic) baroque
-grand style of 17th century
-(insist on) strong phenomenological realness --> sensuous materiality
-materiality flows out in many directions (=/= confined within) ==> blurring “individual =/= environment”
-inventiveness:
--music--> the ability to produce lots of novel combinations out of a rather limited set of elements
--theater--> (logical development of plot =/=) sequence of monologues and allegories ==> action
Leibniz baroque philosophy --> monad: individuals not linked to form greater systems (they don't even communicate), but they affect each other
--Deleuze--> each monad had its context represented inside itself (as fold) [more important the monad --> richer its world]
metaphors of romanticism:
•organicism
•system --> (in graphical representation) depicted by connecting lives between constituent elements (=/= monad)
•
Whitehead --Deleuze--> a neobaroque philosopher --> possibility of a chaotic side-by-side existence of mutually exclusive realities
(baroque era) harmony: art of counterpoints (bringing together independent voices)
German baroque (Gryphius, Lohenstein) --> nature = [*]ruin: heap of highly significant fragments =/= seamless web (@ERG website)
•fragment: independent individual things with a monadological structure (~/= postmodern understanding of fragment)
•link (between them) = reciprocal reference =/= connection
◦(references remain in their) *allegorical immanence*
•
World War II ~=> systems theories (attempt to explain the structure and behavior of complex objects
Charney + von Neumann
deterministic description of the atmosphere
“long-range forecasting”
computer-based metrology
==> *field* became the essence of atmospheric state (field =/= structure, phenomena such as cyclones, fronts, cyclogenesis, frontogenesis)
<--Lorenz-- a given that the atmosphere is a single whole
romantic & nonromantic Darwin
evolutionary theory
phylogenetic tree
-“war of nature ==> higher animals directly follow”
-individual organisms engage in various interactions with each other ==> speciation
Tansley (fulfilling a romantic expectation with regard to complex systems) --1926--> maintenance of equilibrium by eco[...]
(424)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%93.6[...]eap of highly significant fragments =/= seamless web (@ERG website)
•fragment: independent individual things with a monadological structure (~/= postmodern understanding of fragment)
•link (between them) = reciprocal reference =/= connection
◦(references remain in their) *allegorical immanence*
•
World War II ~=> systems theories (attempt to explain the structure and behavior of complex objects
Charney + von Neumann
deterministic description of the atmosphere
“long-range forecasting”
computer-based metrology
==> *field* became the essence of atmospheric state (field =/= structure, phenomena such as cyclones, fronts, cyclogenesis, frontogenesis)
<--Lorenz-- a given that the atmosphere is a single whole
romantic & nonromantic Darwin
evolutionary theory
phylogenetic tree
-“war of nature ==> higher animals directly follow”
-individual organisms engage in various interactions with each other ==> speciation
Tansley (fulfilling a romantic expectation with regard to complex systems) --1926--> maintenance of equilibrium by ecosystem ["life = equilibrium"]
=/= Schrödinger (showed that equilibrium is unfit as a metaphor for life) --> life = islands of low entropy (complex locations) in a sea of high entropy (of decreasing complexity)
Lokta
(evolution of) chemical systems = general systems
Patten
ecosystem ecologist
“ecosystem = natural control system” ~= (single equilibrium simple cybernetic) technical control device <-- the metaphor of *automatic machine* (taken literally)
representing whole ecosystems by (mathematized and fit for simulation on digital computers) models
1960s 70s --> system ecology
--lurck--> (romantic trope of) rigorous functionalism [every little plant or insect had its place as a cog on a giant machinery]
Rene Thom
chemical reaction kinetics
biological morphogenesis
catastrophe theory: slight change in a single variable of a system can give rise to sharp discontinuous change
==> existence of multiple equilibria
Slobodkin
game theory
management of natural systems
Prigogine + Stengers
brusselator device (--> strange attractor) --> behavior and evolution of complex systems --illustrate-->
•discontinuous development
•bifurcation (points at which the system may go in either of two directions --> the system behaves as a whole)
local random fluctuations (around a mean) --> bifurcation point --> the system as a whole evolves to a new order
=/= cybernetic system (control center)
=/= steam engine (governor)
Robert May
the more complex a system is, the more likely it is that small [...]
(425)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%93.6[...]bodkin
game theory
management of natural systems
Prigogine + Stengers
brusselator device (--> strange attractor) --> behavior and evolution of complex systems --illustrate-->
•discontinuous development
•bifurcation (points at which the system may go in either of two directions --> the system behaves as a whole)
local random fluctuations (around a mean) --> bifurcation point --> the system as a whole evolves to a new order
=/= cybernetic system (control center)
=/= steam engine (governor)
Robert May
the more complex a system is, the more likely it is that small fluctuations (will be just large enough) to be critical
complexity ==> unstability
~~~~> chaos theory
(for Prigogine) fluctuation: essential condition for order of physical universe, life, civilization
[the most humble aspect of the behavior of matter:] white noise --(chaotic phenomena)--> order [on macro level]
turbulence <-- cannot be predicted (deterministic approach), but we have empirical certainty that they will appear
55BC --turbulence--> Lucretius’ De Rerum natura (philosophical poem on the nature of things)
(his basic metaphor of) nature: hydrodynamic flow of particles in free fall, in swirls, in vortexes
‘small cause ==> disproportional nonlinearity’ : ‘random collision of some falling atoms ==> constitution of world’
--Serres--> (Lucretius) heterodox tradition (=/= orthodoxe)
romantic & baroque are ***discourse =/= paradigm***
•discourse (available to draw from)
•paradigm (to succeed another paradigm) [<-- to be careful as an artist, the fantasy of genesis]
•since the 19th century romantic complexity had been the more orthodox discourse
•since 1975 baroque complexity became the focus of interest
}=/= new conception of reality
•romantic complexity --favor--> stable structural metaphors (self-correcting cybernetic machine, Gaya, etc.)
◦criteria can be established (more easily) --> delineate emergent wholes (*abstract criteria*)
•baroque complexity --favor--> swarming individuals metaphor (population of individuals in turbulent motion) --> delineate emergent wholes (*situational criteria*)
◦conceptual problem of baroque: there may be higher level order, but what is it?
◾(it is not) stable patterns of communication (<== if patterns exists they are short-lived, individuals take part in several wholes rather than in one)
body = turbulent phenomena par excellence
*****
--Deleuze--> the very idea of “concept” is different in baroque thinking : [*]concept = an allegory, a narrative =/= a symbol of the cosmos <-- romantic idea of concept: a cosmological order that is grasped by the thinking subject
[...]
(427)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%93.7[...]ity
~~~~> chaos theory
(for Prigogine) fluctuation: essential condition for order of physical universe, life, civilization
[the most humble aspect of the behavior of matter:] white noise --(chaotic phenomena)--> order [on macro level]
turbulence <-- cannot be predicted (deterministic approach), but we have empirical certainty that they will appear
55BC --turbulence--> Lucretius’ De Rerum natura (philosophical poem on the nature of things)
(his basic metaphor of) nature: hydrodynamic flow of particles in free fall, in swirls, in vortexes
‘small cause ==> disproportional nonlinearity’ : ‘random collision of some falling atoms ==> constitution of world’
--Serres--> (Lucretius) heterodox tradition (=/= orthodoxe)
romantic & baroque are ***discourse =/= paradigm***
•discourse (available to draw from)
•paradigm (to succeed another paradigm) [<-- to be careful as an artist, the fantasy of genesis]
•since the 19th century romantic complexity had been the more orthodox discourse
•since 1975 baroque complexity became the focus of interest
}=/= new conception of reality
•romantic complexity --favor--> stable structural metaphors (self-correcting cybernetic machine, Gaya, etc.)
◦criteria can be established (more easily) --> delineate emergent wholes (*abstract criteria*)
•baroque complexity --favor--> swarming individuals metaphor (population of individuals in turbulent motion) --> delineate emergent wholes (*situational criteria*)
◦conceptual problem of baroque: there may be higher level order, but what is it?
◾(it is not) stable patterns of communication (<== if patterns exists they are short-lived, individuals take part in several wholes rather than in one)
body = turbulent phenomena par excellence
*****
--Deleuze--> the very idea of “concept” is different in baroque thinking : [*]concept = an allegory, a narrative =/= a symbol of the cosmos <-- romantic idea of concept: a cosmological order that is grasped by the thinking subject
the uncertainty (of the world) in the baroque case is ontological [=/= epistemological --> uncertainty is an effect of not knowing enough]
...................................
(i say in iran, instead of public jurnalism we need more) *public anthropology*
...................................
(Stenger > Stewart > vivid pragmatics ~=)
(McCormack > Stewart > radical) [*]empiricism: if you walk in the woods --encounter--> the unthinkable profusion of forms --> material-aesthetic registers of (mobile & immobile flickering of) is and was (=/= sensory details described)
•[*]description: accidental glimpse of what matters + what shifts its matter in a moment of recognizable though unnamed and partial significance
[...]
(428)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%93.7[...]s...
as if the point of living was to...
mosquitoes drew blood...
a helmet of white roots
...painted hyperbright colors in paint so flat it makes my fingertips dry just to look at it
dull dark oversized furniture
collapsed piles...
(nothing ever happens without first) registering a commitment to exhausting webs of complication
learning from mice --> dark little tunnels of limited choice
(Stewart's) points of precision: (of any act or story) what matters is the singularity of an angle of approach (a surprise contact, an opening onto some world's cocomposition, momentary flourishing of some capacity) [=/= a meaning]
shaken profusion in things =/= rush evaluative critique
so ordinary and problematic
so the idea of writing about “clean” started being interested in this website: https://www.politicalconcepts.org, and the desire to write a political entry point for them on the idea of clean in the 20th century
also after i moved to Brussels May 2016, the affect of dirty
to have a little talk or jam on the notion of “clean” and “clean body”
i have been scribbling on its metaphorology for a while, thinking with it about the 20th century political thinking, institutional thinking, criminology, xenophobia, morality, and many other things. it is a key term for me.
•difference and indifference regarding the foreign body and urbanism
•clean's stakes in architecture, toilet, the primordial element of architecture
•the clean body in Marx and its geneology in the left
•origins of morality in Freud
•xenophobia in crosscultural histories, Islam on hygiene and kofr's dirt
•Nazism and racial cleansing --> aesthetics & politics
•Victorian sanitation, sanitas
•pollution
•anality
•animality --> domestic life (Tehran, Brussels, Cologne,)
•metaphorology of ‘fesad’
•loose analogies of clean/dirt
•pure bodies (being threatened by violation of impurities)
•
readings:
-Koolhaas, toilet
-Sennett, Flesh and Stone
-Ashenburg, Dirt on Clean
-Serres, Malfeasance
-Ahmed, pure bodies
-Vom kleinen Maulwurf
-
in terrestrial ecosystems:
detritus
dead particulate organic material (as opposed to dissolved organic material). It typically includes the bodies or fragments of dead organisms as well as fecal material
typically colonized by communities of microorganisms which act to decompose (or remineralize) the material
...................................
(in clinic)
each method enacts an object of its own =/= approaching a single object in different ways
in [...]
(430)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%94[...]hings =/= rush evaluative critique
so ordinary and problematic
so the idea of writing about “clean” started being interested in this website: https://www.politicalconcepts.org, and the desire to write a political entry point for them on the idea of clean in the 20th century
also after i moved to Brussels May 2016, the affect of dirty
to have a little talk or jam on the notion of “clean” and “clean body”
i have been scribbling on its metaphorology for a while, thinking with it about the 20th century political thinking, institutional thinking, criminology, xenophobia, morality, and many other things. it is a key term for me.
•difference and indifference regarding the foreign body and urbanism
•clean's stakes in architecture, toilet, the primordial element of architecture
•the clean body in Marx and its geneology in the left
•origins of morality in Freud
•xenophobia in crosscultural histories, Islam on hygiene and kofr's dirt
•Nazism and racial cleansing --> aesthetics & politics
•Victorian sanitation, sanitas
•pollution
•anality
•animality --> domestic life (Tehran, Brussels, Cologne,)
•metaphorology of ‘fesad’
•loose analogies of clean/dirt
•pure bodies (being threatened by violation of impurities)
•
readings:
-Koolhaas, toilet
-Sennett, Flesh and Stone
-Ashenburg, Dirt on Clean
-Serres, Malfeasance
-Ahmed, pure bodies
-Vom kleinen Maulwurf
-
in terrestrial ecosystems:
detritus
dead particulate organic material (as opposed to dissolved organic material). It typically includes the bodies or fragments of dead organisms as well as fecal material
typically colonized by communities of microorganisms which act to decompose (or remineralize) the material
...................................
(in clinic)
each method enacts an object of its own =/= approaching a single object in different ways
in 19th century Western philosophy, ontology was coined as a powerful word for the given and fixed collection of what there is
(Annemarie Mol)
ontologies ==> there is no longer a singular “it” to look at from different sides
ontologies are not exclusive, they allow for interferences, partial connections, sharing practices =/= mono-realist singularities
[*]politics: (is not one of otherness,) it is about fights; not between people (a politics of who) but between versions of reality (a politics of what)
the value of “what is,” what western philosophy calls “normativity” and its counterfactuals suggesting “what could be” (--> are different ontologies?)
yet ‘ontologies’ is ill-suited f[...]
(431)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%94[...]zens disappear]
-maybe we like the lively dandelions (repertoire of green) and messy weeds (repertoire of clean) that grow in the cracks
being happy with cleanliness
being happy with seeing people cleaning --> seeing municipal care
leanring ‘where question’ from Annemarie: if you are local that doesn't mean you are local --> ***the local is not obvious*** : the local does not explain itself in its own terms, it is rather explained in terms that have traveled from elsewhere --> this is not to isolate the local, this is not against *traveling of terms*, rather, an argument for specificity: to ask ****which terms from elsewhere are relevant here?**** @Tehran:
what at stake there
what effected here
(what it means in my village?)
traveling of knowledge =/= traveling of repertoires of speeking
functions of import and embedding (something from another time or place in your present argument)
*there is no empirical without language*
there is no local without travel
(@Xiri, Hoda, to urgently shift from who to what)
(from) ‘who question’ of politics: who gets to talk? (like “do women get a say?”) --to--> ‘what question’: “what is made of women?”
[metaphors of doing]
(neoliberal legacy of) isolated acting objects =/= complex global-local inequalities
historical traces of the acting in the image of the fighting muscular man throwing a spear [~-> Arash kamangir آرش کمانگیر ~/=? my play with the bow and arrow in apass;] =/= digestion, eating (as “doing something” that you cannot control), plants growing, smelling (is not acting?)
...................................
*assemblages*
-continuities require ‘work’ to constitute them as ‘well-formed assemblages’
-the emergence of a stable assemblage requires ‘translations’
-(we should) search out the catalysts, enablers or inhibitors of processes that interest us
-how varied and multiple qualities of agency unfold as effects in assemblages that encompass both human and nonhuman forms, and how these effects subsequently achieve particular outcomes for different parties
(organic food) market <==emerging== ideological desires of embedded entrepreneurs who innovate within dynamic material-semiotic systems
(Foad stressed that assemblages are characterized by the condition of) ‘territory’: contexts that engender more or less conservative orientations of assemblages toward fixity
(Sina emphasized that assemblages are also characterized by the condition of) ‘abstraction’: the unique character of how an assemblage mobilizes new compositions of material and expressive thing
}--> relational territories of heterogeneous stuff territorialized [by value] and abstracted [by price]
can we trace consumption as it unfolds?
-family assemblages are [...]
(432)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%94.2[...]/>
•computation of life
•laboratorization of life (simple categories of liveness and deadness over the last 30 years)
•miniturization of life
•complexification of life
•automation of life
relation: smallest possible unit of analysis, extremely prosaic and mundane ==> world
theorizing in the way of relation (as in feminist science, actor-network theory, or nonrepresentational theory) ==Haraway==> engendering a more humble, more modest attitude in the human observer --✕--> Meillassoux's non-relational theory
(since Kand) western philosophy has been epistemological [~ investigating human relationship to things =/= ontological]
--> correlations (between thinking and being), we turn things into affordances when we think about them --> correlationism: we only have access to the correlation between thinking (thing-for-us) and being (thing-in-itself) ==> ‘all knowledge is relative’ [=/= realism]
Meillassoux's absolutes:
•there might be something outside thought
lack of a necessary ultimate cause or meaning (facticity) --Meillassoux--> fundarnental source of being (ontological contingency ~ “facticity itself is necessary”) : no ‘higher’ or ‘supreme’ force or reason (metaphysical, physical, spiritual) is guiding it [~ total ontological absence of a necessity] ==> *contingency* is absolutely necessary in the universe
“Everything in the universe is without reason and is therefore capable of becorning otherwise without reason.” --> this has happened already at least 3 times (where new sets of laws enlerge from nowhere):
•Big Bang
•life from non-life (==> new laws of biological life)
•thought
absolute is wider
“two billiard balls strike into each other, resulting in both balls flying off into the air, or fusing together, or turning into two immaculate but rather grumpy mares, or into two maroon but rather affable lilies”
(@apass)
every research agonizes about:
•the ontological status of their ‘objects’ (of enquiry)
•the epistemological status of their knowledge claims
--Campbell--> we need to “go ontological” about consumption, global warming, (hyperobjects)
hyperobjects:
•viscous (literally real, and you cannot throw it away)
•non-local
•larger on the inside than they are on the outside
•they call for forms ofjustice, ethics, politics and reason that are beyond humanist economies of identification and representation
social constructivism ==> everyone's interpretation of the real is legitimate [equal status of interpretation] =/= (Meillassoux's) speculative realism
understand the world at the level of the hyperobject <== we are creating (consumer) objects that are massive in scale and temporality
inter-generational j[...]
(433)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%94.6[...]irical/logical = beginning of ontological (secular)
=/=
end of empirical/logical =? beginning of eschatological (nonsecular)
}--Campbell--> **ontologization of climate change**
*climate change = the world we live in =/= a problem within the world*
[*]climate change: the absolute context that determines what is possible + what has replaced a previous world
(i find Meillassoux + Campbell argumentation more convincing than Morton's hyperobject)
climate change as “problem” (that can be framed), “thing”, “within the world” [=/= the world: generative context from where problems emerge ==> forms of organization without precedent] ==problem==>
1. epistemological assumptions (+ expectations + responses)
2. unable to encompass (the qualities of climate change)
3. misrecognition of climate change
speculative realist idea of world
[*]speculative realism: a strategy for thinking, organizing, solving at the *widest rational angle: a form of thinking and acting that is concerned with the fundamental structure of reality in its absolute and unconditioned form (=/= manifestations of phenomena) ==> to deliver metaphysical truths unto the world without deforming them with the forceps انبر جراحى of one's own epistemic apparatus
(as) ontological threat ==Campbell==> escalation and absolutization of ethics (*that is necessary to aithentically occupy it*)
@apass: constant investigation of one's epistemology (=/= ontology) in artistic research
--Sina--> the danger of ontologization...
**massively expansive vista of rationality** =/= disavowing rationality
(the old philosophical idea of) the absolute =/= equivocal status
bleak optimism: organizing without hope <== climate change has already happened
--> how to die : a creative form of foreclosure that unlocks a justice that cannot exist without realizing the ontological dimensions of climate change
frame: general organizing device ==>
•define problems
•diagnose causes
•suggest solutions
(their) argumentative strength ==influence==> organization
frame --> define climate change ==> produce climate change --through--> (the work of:)
•problem-identification
•claim-making
•attribution-laying
•boundary delineation
•counter-framing
•bridging
•amplification
•constructing identity-forming vocabularies and discourses
==> *alter an audience's ideological beliefs*
climate change literature has been dominated by economics, (geo)engineering, legal theory/policy studies ==> solutions (to climate change) --invoke--> markets, technologies, policies (with differing criteria about what constitutes legitimacy, authority, ef[...]
(434)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%95[...]mplifies climate change --> logic of outsideness : ‘climate change = an enemy that is fought against’, (drawing from) emergency logic ==urge==> single-shot unified geotechnical solutions
•crisis frame --> emotional framing --leverage--> temporal logic : a climax point (peak oil, peak carbon, etc.) points to the narrowing window of opportunity to act -->
•catastrophic framing --> (using emotional language) locates the frame in the aftermath of a climate changed [<-- a popular public framing of the problem]
•super wicked problem --> temporal logic of time running out --pointing-->
◦irrational future disounting
◦lack of a central organizing authority
◦
•anthropocene --> temporal logic + pervasive spatiality ==> situating the category in deep time + planetary scale [<-- a frame used by organizations]
[*]problem: analytical techniques that lend themselves to core framing tasks of “what, who, why, when, where" of a particular issue (<-- ‘research problem’ is a foundation of this technique)
define boundaries of climate change --to-->
•focus on who is responsible
•ask why is it happening
•identify when is it happening
•locate where
(Campbell's) meta-observation ==> more each field discovers about climate change ==> category expansion (the more it seems to grow in scale)
*what Campbell finds in the discursive evolution of climate change*: a manifestation of (what the philosophical movement known as speculative realism criticizes as) [*]correlationism: we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking & being, a means to temper the real, to constrain it such that is becomes thinkable to human categories (yoke thinking & being together : we cannot think the unthought without relating it to existing correlates) }--Meillassoux--> never able to get out of the relation being thought and being to distinguish between an object & properties belonging to the subjective access to the object --> bad idea of epistemology ==> recuperates climate change within categories that make it seam manageable =/= (Campbell claiming) *climage change : ontological world* ==> it is everywhere and nowhere, present at all levels and yet absent as a distinct “thing” we can point to
Meillassoux --> how difficult it is to think anything without in some way introducing a qualification that one cannot know it without rendering it “for-us” though our framing = *it cannot be known absolutely*
(problem of access:) anti-realism within continental tradition of philosophy ==> the idea that reality is inaccessible in-itself =/= Meillassoux's attempt to ***fuse reality with speculation in a logical manner***
to deploy speculative leap to defuse the problem of access --> *weird realism* to avoid the paths of analytic thought, positivism, scientism (~?!=> religion, faith, conspiracy [...]
(435)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%95.3[...]m of access:) anti-realism within continental tradition of philosophy ==> the idea that reality is inaccessible in-itself =/= Meillassoux's attempt to ***fuse reality with speculation in a logical manner***
to deploy speculative leap to defuse the problem of access --> *weird realism* to avoid the paths of analytic thought, positivism, scientism (~?!=> religion, faith, conspiracy theory, paranoia, ,,)
correlationism ==> despite repeatedly showing that it creates massive sudden fluctuating geologic singularities, climate change is still folded back into known organizational coordinates
}--> *interactional openness* (+ temporal boundedness) (@apass) ==> negotiation complexity, high technical policy instrument, multiplication of actors, multiplication of negotiation tracks
}==> *solutions shift from a field-endogenous catalyst of institutional change --to--> a mechanism of field maintenance*
}--Campbell--> framing of climate change ==dictate==> the organizational structure to address it ==> misrecognize what it is
=/= ***a world [=/= a problem] ==generates==> problems (that no current organizational form can address)***
correlationism (--> prevailing belief that human reason cannot attain certainty in metaphysical, religious, moral matters) ==Meillassoux==> fear of dogma/absolute (deep-seated desire to be non-dogmatic) ==> *knowledge becomes a matter of belief* ==>{ reason undergoes a process of religionizing : ‘reason = a means to buttress claims based on faith’ =/= aiming to capture absolute knowledge itself, condemning irrational claims upon it }==> ***discourage hierarchies of reason (always to slightly disblieve waht we believe) [<-- happens in apass!]
speculative realism ==>
1. *organizational research* (@Chloe2) in the future must be deidicated to finding the right categories to account for a new worl (and not for a superwicked problem)
2. enables us to approach climate change from the *widest rational angle*
3. (‘climate change = world’ ==>) we can begin to theorize the escalation and absolutization of ethics that is necessary to authentically occupy it --Campbell--> bleak optimism: acceptance of ecological collapse + begin the necessary work to organize within the new world of climate change (@Inga)
dialectical process of critique and reassessment <-- absorbed by organizations
•strategic agenda
•framed as an opportunity
•how climate change is always conceived as something “outside” that needs to be internalized by the organization
(Campbell thinking with Meillassoux) laws of nature changing (~ *forms of emergence without precedent* [three cases/advents --> *radical discontinuities rupture the fabric of what has come before*]):
**world of material =/= world of life =/= world of thought**
1. matter: reducible to what can be theorized in phy[...]
(436)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%95.4[...] />
Weber{ modern bureaucratization and intellectualization ==> disenchantment of the world }--> modern experience = rationalization and mythological mysticism ==> marketplace, *no institution has been more willing and able to respond to this (Weberian) desire for enchantment than the modern marketplace* ~=> ***normative preference for enchantment = consumption***
--problem--> *the market remains firmly in charge of myth of consumption, its rewards and its consequences* : marketplace mythology has increasingly become an all-encompassing construct of assorted descriptions and theoretical advancements including the sacred, extraordinary, symbolic and transcendental
myth: a way of organizing perceptions of realities
consumer culture theory
{[Mead & Blumer's] symbolic perspective of myth: how symbols are adorned with meaning and that affect social interaction --> symbolic myth research: verbal/nonverbal forms of communication, with an emphasis on how people behave in day-to-day circumstances in the context of socio-historical structure and ideological of their environment ==> “mythology = narrative” }=/= Joseph Campbell: “interaction with the symbolic ==> mythology”
•Freud's use of mythic stories as metaphors in psychoanalysis ==> (early) symbolic perspective
•Jung's archetype: embodiment beliefs/images ==collectively==> myth and religion }==> “mythology = extension of the collective unconscious into society”
•Blumer's social life: construction built up by the actor (=/= relationship of structures directing human life); ability to act toward oneself, ability to internally define themselves as objects [self with goal] as the symbols of their own actions
--McAdams--> personal myth: narrative storyline as a means to organize meaning in their lives --in--> context <==forms== historical, religious and state-influenced belief systems, culturally specific themes and ideology
}--> identity and society --responsible-for--> life story --negotiated--> personal myth as interpretive strategy
}==> concepts of ‘consumption’ and ‘identity’ in consumer culture theory
identity work =/= personal myth
[Velliquette + Murray + Creyer:] example of tattoo culture: private and public burrs physically with the attachment of personal meaning to physical marking of the skin and symbolically through the personal stories attached to public brands --> *individuals attach meaning to consumption* <== negotiating the cultural tensions <==throu== perception of self contrasted with the influence of institutional structures (race, class, gender, age) and ideological pressure }==> “meaning = dialectic of object and consumer”
•(Jung's archetype ==>) Joseph Campbell's monomyth: universally applicable narrative of mythology (like in Hollywood films about the hero's rites of passage --> experience of life in accordance with the phenomena [...]
(437)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%95.7[...]nguage and *emancipation*[= demythologising (dominant ideology)] <== Marx's ‘false consciousness’ (for example capitalist ideology conceals and naturalizes managerial power and implicit subordination of workers) --> either side of a power duality can become valorised
•Hegel: “mythology = ideology aesthetically expressed for easy adoption by society” --> “ideology = an imaginary map”; political breakdowns ==> ideologies become apparent (independent of mythology)
-(Murray and Ozanne:) meanings people attribute to social structures change more slowly than the structures themselves --> reality[= the meanings given to social structure and the objective structures] is contradictory <== *inconsistency between subject and object* (~ societies both create reality and are shaped by it)
}--> consumers as the oppressed class in postindustrial society
Thompson: natural health myth (based on ‘cultural creatives’: dominant consumer segment of natural medicine):
•*romantic ideology derived from technologies’ ill effects on humanity and nature --> nature is mythologized as a state of harmony, science and technology as forbidden knowledge
•*gnostic myth emerged from a desire of consumers to bridge technology and spirituality --> “the immune system is metaphorically rendered as a mysterious immaterial force, constituted by intricate mind-body connections and ephemeral energistic forces, which can be brought to practical ends through quasi-magical practices of holistic healing” [Thompson 2004]
}--> advertisers exploit these tensions as conflicting ideologies converge with reality
brand ==> a point of difference + oppositional meanings --> [for example the attraction of the coffee shops that don't personify the Starbucks hegemony ~] anti-hegemonic consumers hold strong preferences for decor that symbolises the counter-culture
(Thompson + Barthes ==> Kristensen, Boye, Askegaard:) how communities develop conceptualizations of right and wrong
*moral systems are inherently ideological* in order to emancipate consumers from these forces critical reflection must occur***
@constant and apass: ***consumers don't escape the market per se but instead reshape collective identity through counter-mythology***
(for example) hipster consumer's attempt to demythologize a consumption ideology in order to protect themselves from mainstream consumers or ‘followers’ (when followers encroach on inside values:) consumers demythologize their consumption practices ==allowing==> new avenues of consumption to occur in an emancipated state
(critical theorists:) **market = arena of domination and power struggle**
==> consumerism can be enslaving and manipulative mythology crafted by the ruling class, can be overcome through resistance and demythologizing ==> ***emancipation = (a form of) new consumption arenas (that hold a favourable power dynamic for consumers)***
[...]
(438)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%96[...] escape the market per se but instead reshape collective identity through counter-mythology***
(for example) hipster consumer's attempt to demythologize a consumption ideology in order to protect themselves from mainstream consumers or ‘followers’ (when followers encroach on inside values:) consumers demythologize their consumption practices ==allowing==> new avenues of consumption to occur in an emancipated state
(critical theorists:) **market = arena of domination and power struggle**
==> consumerism can be enslaving and manipulative mythology crafted by the ruling class, can be overcome through resistance and demythologizing ==> ***emancipation = (a form of) new consumption arenas (that hold a favourable power dynamic for consumers)***
mythology --> consumer resistance, emancipation and identity projects
neoliberalism:
•community-based meaning of goods
•individuals (able of) attaching meaning to objects in their own self-expressive way
mythology research: shifted from ‘myth as organizational cohesion’ to ‘understanding agency and emancipatory consumption practices in oppressive situations’
...................................
with Ereshefsky
how to do scientific metaphysics?
•conduct piecewise and local metaphysics (not universalist metaphysics, not science fiction)
•balance naturalism and normativity
◦naturalism --> learn about different scientific practices that have different aims
◦normativity --> evaluate how well those practices achieve those (epistemic and pragmatic) aims
•
...................................
filial piety --> family formation + consumption behaviours (in Asian context)
(public policymakers and) social marketers addressing family dissatisfaction
understanding family identity has important implications for consumption --western-->
•how meal consumption helps to maintain family bonds
•how home-made meals are useful in constructing and communicating family identity (@apass, Leo, Sarah, food-ing, ‘formulations of family identity ~=!? collective’)
•how families preserve identity through the transfer of inalienable possessions
•how families navigate complex consumption choices such as involving parenthood
•
...................................
(Campbell + Saren -->) [*]posthumanism: an aesthetic (not just an epistemology) that blends:
1. the primitive
2. technology
3. horror
[*]metamorphosis: (an engine that encourages the viewer) to recognize life not as being, but as perpetual becoming =/= (liberatory promises of) ‘flow’
(each articulating opposing fantasies of posthumanism:)
morphing =/= mutating
primal technology
proto-atavism نياکان گرايى --[...]
(439)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%96.1[...]not universalist metaphysics, not science fiction)
•balance naturalism and normativity
◦naturalism --> learn about different scientific practices that have different aims
◦normativity --> evaluate how well those practices achieve those (epistemic and pragmatic) aims
•
...................................
filial piety --> family formation + consumption behaviours (in Asian context)
(public policymakers and) social marketers addressing family dissatisfaction
understanding family identity has important implications for consumption --western-->
•how meal consumption helps to maintain family bonds
•how home-made meals are useful in constructing and communicating family identity (@apass, Leo, Sarah, food-ing, ‘formulations of family identity ~=!? collective’)
•how families preserve identity through the transfer of inalienable possessions
•how families navigate complex consumption choices such as involving parenthood
•
...................................
(Campbell + Saren -->) [*]posthumanism: an aesthetic (not just an epistemology) that blends:
1. the primitive
2. technology
3. horror
[*]metamorphosis: (an engine that encourages the viewer) to recognize life not as being, but as perpetual becoming =/= (liberatory promises of) ‘flow’
(each articulating opposing fantasies of posthumanism:)
morphing =/= mutating
primal technology
proto-atavism نياکان گرايى --> ***multiple paradigms of life exist on the peripheries of humanist life***
Campbell --> a posthuman biology (an ethical imperative that in a technological age, that life is not just life)
Golem --> perennial horror in western imagination
Jewish psalms of the 6th century
formation of life (golmi: unformed limb) <==emanate== mother's womb & nonhuman earth itself
--exemplifies--> how *western humanist versions of technology tend to create a master-servant dialectic* (master-slave) and anything that threatens this divide invokes horror
(roots embedded in the Romantic tradition:)
•“frankenfood” (mash up original and unexpected food combinations, genetically modified crops)
•genetic engineering technologies
•“revenge of nature”
•“nature out of control” leitmotif
•
*since antiquity (in the west) technology has been simultaneously imbued with magic and rationality, evil and redemption, trickery and transparency [---> go to Baxstrom + Meyers Realizing The Witch]
Descartes: the philosopher who provided the western imagination with the most enduring model of the human --> preoccupation with mechanism as something that pervaded machines, bodies and animals but never the non-material, spiritual realm of the mind
*esch[...]
(442)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%96.1[...]bodies and animals but never the non-material, spiritual realm of the mind
*eschatological significance attached to technology*
schizoid stance, alternating between the technophobic and the technophilic (--> expressed in avant-garde): Dadaism, Futurism, Cubism, constructivism)
•technocs aestheticized and fetishized: world expos such as the Crystal Palace, garden cities, the cite industrielle, Citta Nuova, the Werknund, etc.
•military machinery of first world war which alienated human life while at the same time making the human inhuman
*technology as revold*
imagined as rebellious and repellent
(human civilization) haunted by the temptation of a reverse evolution which coexists in it with the potential for progress
--> *techno-anxiety: potential infallibility of the technological
(teratology, wider context of studies on monsters)
logic of contemporary technoculture --trope-->
•primitive
•technology
•horror
(Campbell drawing from a larger) intertextual repertoire consisting of advertising, film, and other images in visual culture
--> aesthetic conflation of the primitive, technology, and horror points to three new concepts:
•metamorphing: {<<--** exactly my problem with Manning's process philosophy}
◦(a logic of) ***identity as constant becoming***
◦***emphasis on flow*** (as a necessary way to understand process)
•primal technology =/= (humanist and pervasive) concept of technology as modern, progressive, clean, nonalive
•proto-atavism: evolutionary traits from the future can exist in the present (=/= atavism: evolutionary traits from the past can exist in the present) []
==> type of posthuman biology conception of life
(let's have atavism instead of activism)
Campbell --> *critique the almost universal celebration of flow in contemporary philosophical thought* {<-- yes yes! thank you! ♥}
primitive: a site of primordial simplicity ~= originary unity }<== history of technology <--(told from a western lens)-- gradual progression and sophistication of the technical (for example Black Panther film)
-the presence or absence of specific technologies has often been read as a marker of cultural ‘backwardness’ <== “technology = something that comes from the West (rich-world technologies) and does something to other people in other places such as the “third world” (a well-intentioned framework that denies both agency and contemporaneity to the ‘other’ --> for example Eliasson's Little Sun)
technological progress is not a force unique to modern ‘civilized’ society; it is intimately bound with art and antiquity
•Heidegger (seeks the origin of technology in ancient Greece) --> technology referred to the ways in which realities are brought into the world, a mode of unconcealing realit[...]
(443)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%96.2[...]ts of toxicity and environmental pollution ==> new monsters [--> Tsing]
experience of the world of high-technology
artifacts of visual culture, (TV advertisements) dealing with the tropes of the primitive, technology, horror:
(these artifacts connote دلالت ضمنى long histories of techno-mytho-political dramas)
•Audi spider; where Audi is likened to a preditor, ensnaring, devouring its rivals; Vorsprung durch Technik written in gothic-style jagged, suspended cobwebs {<-- Ridley Scott's alien's technology as dirty; a lair swathed in a thick cobweb-like substance --> *technology as life* <== the dirt and dampness of *dirty technology* suggest an animate, sweating, breathing life-force [~ an aesthetic]} --> horror <== damp dark leaking space containing moulding cocoons of spider --Campbell--> motivation, goals or logic of this life form cannot be recovered within the economy of the human (=/= clean cold untouched technological artefact)
◦***technology covered in its own dirt --implies--> life --implies--> disorganization --implies--> disintegration of borders between ‘us’ (bounded) and ‘them’ (unbounded) --implies--> loss of control
◦ajayeb-e spider // links the world (of primitive + high-technology), its metamorphosis into automobile ==> its multiple and contradictory genealogy; sight of spider --Freud--> induce crisis of neurotic anxiety (arguing that this fear comes from an unconscious association of the spider with the image of the phallic mother and the web --> threatens to engulf us --> mpnstrous feminine, Ridley Scott's alien = technologized embodiment of the phallic mother)
◾ancient activity of weaving [computer emerges out of the history of weaving; the first computers were based on the logic of the loom, quintessence of women's work (Plant, Babbage, Campbell)] --> *contemporary technoculture is an era of insectophilia* (love of insects and arachnids, spiders ants bees worms etc.)<== these insects embody the logic of high-technology which values decenterdness, microprocessing, and swarm intelligence. colonies, swarms, teems ==acts==> *metaphor & epistemology & ontology* to understand decenterdness, rhizomaticity, distribution and microprocessing ==> *insect aesthetic* [#use the term collapse as marketing storytelling, divided entities now mixed with eachother to induce mixed feelings in the audience --> chimera in advertisement]
◽matrix, from the latin ‘mater' = womb, the term matrix possessing the potential to nurture & to trap (---> go to Matrix film series)
◽Arachne: a younge woman, was so skilful at weaving that she was rash enough to challenge the goddess Athene to a contest. she was transformed into a spider and was doomed to weave forever
•Nike mutant foot; to convey the feeling that running with these shoes is like running in bare feet (--> chimera?); the mutant foot evokes a worn and labored transition from human to post[...]
(444)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%96.5[...]vation, goals or logic of this life form cannot be recovered within the economy of the human (=/= clean cold untouched technological artefact)
◦***technology covered in its own dirt --implies--> life --implies--> disorganization --implies--> disintegration of borders between ‘us’ (bounded) and ‘them’ (unbounded) --implies--> loss of control
◦ajayeb-e spider // links the world (of primitive + high-technology), its metamorphosis into automobile ==> its multiple and contradictory genealogy; sight of spider --Freud--> induce crisis of neurotic anxiety (arguing that this fear comes from an unconscious association of the spider with the image of the phallic mother and the web --> threatens to engulf us --> mpnstrous feminine, Ridley Scott's alien = technologized embodiment of the phallic mother)
◾ancient activity of weaving [computer emerges out of the history of weaving; the first computers were based on the logic of the loom, quintessence of women's work (Plant, Babbage, Campbell)] --> *contemporary technoculture is an era of insectophilia* (love of insects and arachnids, spiders ants bees worms etc.)<== these insects embody the logic of high-technology which values decenterdness, microprocessing, and swarm intelligence. colonies, swarms, teems ==acts==> *metaphor & epistemology & ontology* to understand decenterdness, rhizomaticity, distribution and microprocessing ==> *insect aesthetic* [#use the term collapse as marketing storytelling, divided entities now mixed with eachother to induce mixed feelings in the audience --> chimera in advertisement]
◽matrix, from the latin ‘mater' = womb, the term matrix possessing the potential to nurture & to trap (---> go to Matrix film series)
◽Arachne: a younge woman, was so skilful at weaving that she was rash enough to challenge the goddess Athene to a contest. she was transformed into a spider and was doomed to weave forever
•Nike mutant foot; to convey the feeling that running with these shoes is like running in bare feet (--> chimera?); the mutant foot evokes a worn and labored transition from human to posthuman which leaves behind traces of pain; ‘foot of the future’ contains within it the supplement of its embodied visceral human existence, a potent reminder of the human within the posthuman. Nike mutant foot *suffers from origin horror* (= no secure telos of origin which can link back to a primary source of either technology or organicism) we cannot trace it back to an originary ideal category of existence ==> it horrifies
•Nissan pathfinder; shape-shifting technology, moves between the animal and technical --> *automobile metamorphoses without any trace of its metamorphosis* (it bears no marks, scatches, dents, damage); mighty industrialized rendering (transformers film series) --> (an X-Men fantasy:) a future world of *ontological mobility* : entities are not fixed, their morphing into other entities is not painful, but a natural instantaneou[...]
(445)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%96.6[...]y, distribution and microprocessing ==> *insect aesthetic* [#use the term collapse as marketing storytelling, divided entities now mixed with eachother to induce mixed feelings in the audience --> chimera in advertisement]
◽matrix, from the latin ‘mater' = womb, the term matrix possessing the potential to nurture & to trap (---> go to Matrix film series)
◽Arachne: a younge woman, was so skilful at weaving that she was rash enough to challenge the goddess Athene to a contest. she was transformed into a spider and was doomed to weave forever
•Nike mutant foot; to convey the feeling that running with these shoes is like running in bare feet (--> chimera?); the mutant foot evokes a worn and labored transition from human to posthuman which leaves behind traces of pain; ‘foot of the future’ contains within it the supplement of its embodied visceral human existence, a potent reminder of the human within the posthuman. Nike mutant foot *suffers from origin horror* (= no secure telos of origin which can link back to a primary source of either technology or organicism) we cannot trace it back to an originary ideal category of existence ==> it horrifies
•Nissan pathfinder; shape-shifting technology, moves between the animal and technical --> *automobile metamorphoses without any trace of its metamorphosis* (it bears no marks, scatches, dents, damage); mighty industrialized rendering (transformers film series) --> (an X-Men fantasy:) a future world of *ontological mobility* : entities are not fixed, their morphing into other entities is not painful, but a natural instantaneous reaction to their environment [=/= ajayeb]
•BBC digital faces; a giant disembodied head that roams across hilly countryside ~ *an affront to a humanist sensibility of integral bounded being*; filled with tiny selves --> genealogy of monstrous and mythical forms (Matrix 3rd episode the machine face) --> *visualization of the idea that the self possesses no central consciousness* [<-- posthuman: all mental thought, all consciousness and spirit, can be attributed to the operation of micro-material processes distributed in autopoitic (~ self-creating) body] /ERG website
metamorphing
critique of becoming (of consumer)
Cartesian (human logic of a world of fixed entities) =/= posthumanism (polymorphic unfixity, articulating a logic of identity as decentered and in the state of transition)
mutating =/= morphing (universally regarded as positive, apolitical <-- in poststructural theory)--> imagined technological posthumanism which cruises effortlessly and seamlessly through ontologies [like T1000 in Terminator]
digital morphing is a common production device in contemporary visual culture (transformers, X-Men <-- to resist that in our web designs)
morphing =/= ontological fixity
•how technology does not oppose nature, but stimulate it (Nissan pathfinder)
•how the mo[...]
(446)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%96.6[...] human within the posthuman. Nike mutant foot *suffers from origin horror* (= no secure telos of origin which can link back to a primary source of either technology or organicism) we cannot trace it back to an originary ideal category of existence ==> it horrifies
•Nissan pathfinder; shape-shifting technology, moves between the animal and technical --> *automobile metamorphoses without any trace of its metamorphosis* (it bears no marks, scatches, dents, damage); mighty industrialized rendering (transformers film series) --> (an X-Men fantasy:) a future world of *ontological mobility* : entities are not fixed, their morphing into other entities is not painful, but a natural instantaneous reaction to their environment [=/= ajayeb]
•BBC digital faces; a giant disembodied head that roams across hilly countryside ~ *an affront to a humanist sensibility of integral bounded being*; filled with tiny selves --> genealogy of monstrous and mythical forms (Matrix 3rd episode the machine face) --> *visualization of the idea that the self possesses no central consciousness* [<-- posthuman: all mental thought, all consciousness and spirit, can be attributed to the operation of micro-material processes distributed in autopoitic (~ self-creating) body] /ERG website
metamorphing
critique of becoming (of consumer)
Cartesian (human logic of a world of fixed entities) =/= posthumanism (polymorphic unfixity, articulating a logic of identity as decentered and in the state of transition)
mutating =/= morphing (universally regarded as positive, apolitical <-- in poststructural theory)--> imagined technological posthumanism which cruises effortlessly and seamlessly through ontologies [like T1000 in Terminator]
digital morphing is a common production device in contemporary visual culture (transformers, X-Men <-- to resist that in our web designs)
morphing =/= ontological fixity
•how technology does not oppose nature, but stimulate it (Nissan pathfinder)
•how the morph causes a radical splintering of consciousness (BBC digital faces)
•how morph is the a visualization not of being, but of becoming
--> *flow, universally coded as positive* (sensibility of process and flux considered liberatory)
--> a logic of quick-change (embedded in entertainment and computer industries)
high-technology embodiments:
•cyborg
•foetus
•ecosystem
•database
•genome
•cellular automata
•insects
•
morphing =/= mutating: the visceral, painful, embodied experience that results from ontological boundary clashes
mutating into otherness =/= morphing into otherness
(pain of the flow -->) ***mutation is a concept that stops the flow***
(utopian:) technological imaginary portraying a simple and painless ascent into a silicon existence
[...]
(448)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%96.6[...]ay]
proto-atavism --argument--> that multiple paradigms of life exist on the peripheries of humanist life ==Campbell==> (how) *human life: a cacophony of co-existing interacting states of past present future existences with no recourse to a single reassuring origin* (=/= singular progression)
(like animal rumors in old bestiaries ajayeb in a story-starated world) found telegram videos and internet pic used in my image assemblages --> (found images which make it difficult to trace their lineage) in an image-starated world ==construct==> ambivalent visual representations that do not have a signifier in an external “real” world (Baudrillard's rhetoric simulacrum: an object that is a copy of something which does not “exist”)
==Toffoletti==> potentiality: exceeding the bounds of description
(we are living in an) age of **technosubjectivity**
(Margulis theorizes) the symbolic basis of eukaryotic cells
(Dawkins posits) the existence of selfish genes and the extended phenotype
*system theory: human life subsumed radically into an all-encompassing concept of system, of which the human is merely a psychic system, where the only important unit of analysis is systems (human, cell, society, law)
(Sagan's) metametazoa: a multiple creature afloat in the omnisexuality of bacterial exchange
(Octavia Butler's) xenogenesis: polysexual interspecies reproduction
(Haraway's) differential artifactualism: (~= SF, science fiction) a diffractive interruptive mutative anti-reflective monstrous logic (to a humanist eyes) --> generation of novel forms which need not be imagined in the stodgy bipolar terms of hominids ==make==> ontological room for naturecultures
-mixotricha paradoxa: “a mixed up, paradoxical, microscopic bit of hair [...]they are nested in each other's tissues in a myriad of ways that make words like competition and cooperation, or individual and collective, fall into the trash heap of pallid metaphors and bad ontology”
(Thacker speaks for) extrinsic life: the kinds of life that cannot be contained inside itself (such as: the epidemic) ~ lifelike death ==> depict the strangeness of life in a technological era
(diffraction ==>) myopic: eyesight abnormality resulting from the eye's faulty refractive ability --> posthuman: an essentially ethical precondition of life in high-technology
background of posthuman theory:
•metamorphing --> premised on the liberatory potential of flow : processes objects and living systems are thought to be in a constant state of becoming =/= Campbell: flow is not always a liberatory metaphor -->{ (a politics or logic of) *inertia* =/= contemporary politics of flow }
•primal technology --> technology is not always s progressive civilizing inanimate force, rather it is a destructive-constructive rich-poor lively-inanimate force in the world
•proto-atavism --> modes of livi[...]
(449)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%96.8[...] of something which does not “exist”)
==Toffoletti==> potentiality: exceeding the bounds of description
(we are living in an) age of **technosubjectivity**
(Margulis theorizes) the symbolic basis of eukaryotic cells
(Dawkins posits) the existence of selfish genes and the extended phenotype
*system theory: human life subsumed radically into an all-encompassing concept of system, of which the human is merely a psychic system, where the only important unit of analysis is systems (human, cell, society, law)
(Sagan's) metametazoa: a multiple creature afloat in the omnisexuality of bacterial exchange
(Octavia Butler's) xenogenesis: polysexual interspecies reproduction
(Haraway's) differential artifactualism: (~= SF, science fiction) a diffractive interruptive mutative anti-reflective monstrous logic (to a humanist eyes) --> generation of novel forms which need not be imagined in the stodgy bipolar terms of hominids ==make==> ontological room for naturecultures
-mixotricha paradoxa: “a mixed up, paradoxical, microscopic bit of hair [...]they are nested in each other's tissues in a myriad of ways that make words like competition and cooperation, or individual and collective, fall into the trash heap of pallid metaphors and bad ontology”
(Thacker speaks for) extrinsic life: the kinds of life that cannot be contained inside itself (such as: the epidemic) ~ lifelike death ==> depict the strangeness of life in a technological era
(diffraction ==>) myopic: eyesight abnormality resulting from the eye's faulty refractive ability --> posthuman: an essentially ethical precondition of life in high-technology
background of posthuman theory:
•metamorphing --> premised on the liberatory potential of flow : processes objects and living systems are thought to be in a constant state of becoming =/= Campbell: flow is not always a liberatory metaphor -->{ (a politics or logic of) *inertia* =/= contemporary politics of flow }
•primal technology --> technology is not always s progressive civilizing inanimate force, rather it is a destructive-constructive rich-poor lively-inanimate force in the world
•proto-atavism --> modes of living at the edges of humanist life
•posthuman biology ==> *monolith of humanist life is myopic*
in a way, in my research i have been seeking ways to acknowledge the place of posthuman ways of being in the world --through-->
•observing the high-tech (cellular automata, database, bibliographic technologies)
•observing the ancient (medieval bestiaries ajayeb al makhlughat ajayeb technologies)
•
...................................
roots of ‘emancipate ourselves’ --in--> “being critical" = ability to be self-reflexive and to translate criticality into action and expressions of art (Renan)
transform knowledge sites --to--> knowledge s[...]
(451)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%96.8[...] idea of the injured body that seeks to stabilize itself
#integration
the interwoven data recovered from the study of systemic and functional aspects of the broken organism ==> totality ~ establishment of a nonliberal individualism (+ social welfare) ==> **society = an integrated and fragile whole in need of care**
today's integrative medicine --> conceptualizations of the whole body ==> picture of the patient:
•neoliberal in character
•(always) future tense in orientation
destiny = personalized medicine (a project to anticipate and guide the patient's destiny)
welfare state's widest possible inclusion of its citizens clashes with the realities of the marketplace
to reconcile the individual's cognitive and physical realities with the particular demands of their world
...sociological quest to understand the locus of injury
[title]
duet of integration-crisis (==> whole-body ideals)
(Geroulanos and Meyers argue that) understanding integration and crisis in medicine ==> to wrap our heads around the way later-dominant cybernetic and structuralist theories located the individual in the world
bodily metaphor [in] integrations of domestic societies
the integrated, disintegrating human body:
•a new site of meaning and care
•subject for new analogies of body biological and body politic
•object of direct experimentation
story of the human body (at once social & biological)
...................................
question of technology
--locational--> where does the technological take place?
(and when?)
Heidegger --> (latecomers were) addicted to technology
“under what conditions we could arrive at a free relation to technology?”
Heidegger problem with addicted --> *addiction is content with what is merely available* (it never surpasses this limit) =/= anxiety
Avital focus on the *chemical prosthesis*
in war, drugs become another piece of equipment --> taking the pill: technologizing oneself into the war machine
heroin comes from heroisch
technically calibrated culture
drug --> hallucinated exteriority
electronic/drug culture --> (Nancy + Blanchot's) désœuvrement: without an end or program, an unworking that nonetheless occurs
how the *prosthetic subject* is constituted
(Junger's drug, Heidegger's tech, Benjamin's hashish, de Quincey's opium, Duras's alcoholizations:) a saturated text, pushing beyond the materiality of the book though not into any ideality
the right to drugs + the supplementary interiority that they produce
there has never been a war on drugs that is not carried by another typ[...]
(454)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%97.3[...]aning from a consumer's perspective)
2. site of production = processes involved in making ads (favoured in media studies and ethnographic approaches to advertising)
3. site of the image: analysis of the meaning of the image itself (independent of intention and reception) are the most powerful way to show what images include and exclude (drawing influence primarily from the disciplines of history, philosophy, sociology and linguistics)
how meaning moved from *the world of advertising* --to--> *the world of the consumer* : ways in which advertising is integrated into the life-world of people
****advertising: a powerful translator of the cultural world**** & داور a central arbiter of meaning in consumer worlds (--> this is why advertising concerns me)
Barthes + Saussure + Peirce + Jacobsen --> semiotics can be regarded as one of the most comprehensive studies of sign system ~ advertisement: bundle of signs that formed finely constructed conventions ==> ‘image = text’ (its grammar:)
1. micro-level: tiny units, vectors, colors, forms (within the visual plane)
2. mid-level: human-level characteristics of gender, hairstyle, posture, facial expression, buildings, rhetorical devices in the image (such as metaphor and troping)
3. meta-level: narrative structure, mythic in nature, to see embodied in the properties and dynamics of the image the macro properties and fynamics of social world (<-- business of semiotic)
Barthes --> (new medium of) photographic advertisement = a codified structure =/= a transparent reflection of the world
-*Barthes reading of Citroen DS car
impossible newness
it appears at first sight as a superlative object صفت عالی
object which appear at first sight as completely finished present to us at once a perfection and an absence of origin, closure and a brilliance, *a transformation of life into matter*, a silence that belongs to the realm of fairy tales
*smoothness is not a property of material, but a social value*
-Christ's robe was seamless, science fiction, made of unbroken metal, phenomenology of assembling, hold together by sole virtue of their wondrous shape ==> the idea of benign nature
}--learn--> (to make) lines of connection: visual convention + religious painting, science fiction film, politics of nature (constructed over the past 2000 years of western culture) [<-- to understand this in your own work #feedback @apass]
-*Haraway
neutral images of (high-tech) science --> stock of Renaissance visual analogues ==> legitimate lineage + origin story (for technical revolutions)
(Barthes > Campbell) **what sign constructions do westerners use to tell the story of how technology comes to be present in the world?**
-*Campbell reading of Simens’ ad “builing blocks” (2005)
Simens products [...]
(455)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%98[...]ed as one of the most comprehensive studies of sign system ~ advertisement: bundle of signs that formed finely constructed conventions ==> ‘image = text’ (its grammar:)
1. micro-level: tiny units, vectors, colors, forms (within the visual plane)
2. mid-level: human-level characteristics of gender, hairstyle, posture, facial expression, buildings, rhetorical devices in the image (such as metaphor and troping)
3. meta-level: narrative structure, mythic in nature, to see embodied in the properties and dynamics of the image the macro properties and fynamics of social world (<-- business of semiotic)
Barthes --> (new medium of) photographic advertisement = a codified structure =/= a transparent reflection of the world
-*Barthes reading of Citroen DS car
impossible newness
it appears at first sight as a superlative object صفت عالی
object which appear at first sight as completely finished present to us at once a perfection and an absence of origin, closure and a brilliance, *a transformation of life into matter*, a silence that belongs to the realm of fairy tales
*smoothness is not a property of material, but a social value*
-Christ's robe was seamless, science fiction, made of unbroken metal, phenomenology of assembling, hold together by sole virtue of their wondrous shape ==> the idea of benign nature
}--learn--> (to make) lines of connection: visual convention + religious painting, science fiction film, politics of nature (constructed over the past 2000 years of western culture) [<-- to understand this in your own work #feedback @apass]
-*Haraway
neutral images of (high-tech) science --> stock of Renaissance visual analogues ==> legitimate lineage + origin story (for technical revolutions)
(Barthes > Campbell) **what sign constructions do westerners use to tell the story of how technology comes to be present in the world?**
-*Campbell reading of Simens’ ad “builing blocks” (2005)
Simens products float into space, as naturally and as pure white snowflake falling to the earth
absence of labor ==herald==> a universe of self-organizing invisible agency
“technology = invisible force that is lighter than air, rearranging itself into whatever seems to be needed” (=/= fashioned, melted, hammered , soldered and generally forced into the natural order)
==> the agency that organizes is non-pollutant, non-disruptive, non-energetic
(from) cacophonous --to--> harmonious [<-- technology seeks its home]
sky above, supra-structure =/= [*]infrastructure: structure from below
--Simens--> [*]technology: apotheosized (تکريم) by extending its self-organizing capabilities, lending it a divinity which is universal, inevitable, natural and just (Simens’ ad ==> Iron Man image)
supra-structure --> new / Star Trek
[...]
(457)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%98[...]knowledge and the institution of university]
(Goldman's landscape of Capital -->) corporate advertising:
•visually depicts the phenomenon of globalization
•affect the cultural imaginary
•shape political sensibilities (with respect to life in high-tech globalism)
amorphous phenomena (that require high-stakes visualization):
•counter-terrorism
•climate change
•
[*]advertising: an institution that organizes meaning, a visual sign system (as powerful as other systems that organize meaning: medicine, law, education,,,) [~/= apass]
--> *a form of literacy* = can be learned + lexicon + grammer (that can be fruitfully investigated)
*advertising = capitalism + aesthetic* ==Campbell==> research in advertising one of the most important research priorities in any discipline today (@apass)
...................................
***marketing = the ultimate social practice of postmodernity***
marketing practices
promotional campaigns
consumption culture
postmodernity: a phenomena specific to the cultural history of western europe and north america --impact--> globe
--Lyotard--> incredulity toward *metanarratives: unified idea systems
--Jameson--> consumer society (marked by:)
◦pastiche: an attitude of a certain detachment (on the part of the individual) where all stylistic expressions of parody, nostalgia, and other illustrated feeling lack emotional depth and commitment
◦schizophrenia: disjointedness and discontinuity of the individual's personal identity and experience in life
--Angus--> infinite delay of *modernity: improving human lives by controlling nature
--Wilson--> expression of incoherence of contemporary urban life
postmodernity =/= authority, unity, continuity, purpose, commitment
= “modernity: era of scientific ideology ==> disillusionment, disintegration, anxiety”
--> hedonism
--> tolerance (recognition) of difference
--> metanarrative = story (that people construct to tell themselves) =Foucault= regimes of truth
=/= conformity
examples of modern metanarratives:
•bourgeois (capitalist) ideology
•marxism
}--✕--> *market = new metanarrative in postmodernity*
postmodern condition:
1- [*]hyperreality: becoming real of what initially was/is a simulation/hype: simulation of imagined potential or imagined past (signifiers arbitrary linked to their original referent)
marketing: a practice that resignifies (a brand name)
tendency and willingness of the customers to prefer the simulation (for example the theme areas in city centers of an imagined pasts) =/= “real”
postmodernism is a cultural critique (=/= economic, social critique) of moderni[...]
(458)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%98.4[...]ost important research priorities in any discipline today (@apass)
...................................
***marketing = the ultimate social practice of postmodernity***
marketing practices
promotional campaigns
consumption culture
postmodernity: a phenomena specific to the cultural history of western europe and north america --impact--> globe
--Lyotard--> incredulity toward *metanarratives: unified idea systems
--Jameson--> consumer society (marked by:)
◦pastiche: an attitude of a certain detachment (on the part of the individual) where all stylistic expressions of parody, nostalgia, and other illustrated feeling lack emotional depth and commitment
◦schizophrenia: disjointedness and discontinuity of the individual's personal identity and experience in life
--Angus--> infinite delay of *modernity: improving human lives by controlling nature
--Wilson--> expression of incoherence of contemporary urban life
postmodernity =/= authority, unity, continuity, purpose, commitment
= “modernity: era of scientific ideology ==> disillusionment, disintegration, anxiety”
--> hedonism
--> tolerance (recognition) of difference
--> metanarrative = story (that people construct to tell themselves) =Foucault= regimes of truth
=/= conformity
examples of modern metanarratives:
•bourgeois (capitalist) ideology
•marxism
}--✕--> *market = new metanarrative in postmodernity*
postmodern condition:
1- [*]hyperreality: becoming real of what initially was/is a simulation/hype: simulation of imagined potential or imagined past (signifiers arbitrary linked to their original referent)
marketing: a practice that resignifies (a brand name)
tendency and willingness of the customers to prefer the simulation (for example the theme areas in city centers of an imagined pasts) =/= “real”
postmodernism is a cultural critique (=/= economic, social critique) of modernity
postmodern critique tends to rely on experiential or sensible judgement (--valued--> trusting intuition and sensing of what is practical/pragmatic based on cultural experience) =/= analysis of material evidence
****post world war II politics --> youth movement culminated in the 1960s --> institutionalization of the generational rebellion --> postmodernism*** ==>
•postmodern cultural critique rely on intuition + experiential sensibilities (in seeking a better world)
•postmodern consumer feels more justified in playful enjoyment of the simulation (=/= constantly seeking the somber reminders of “reality”)
hyperreality ==> “loss of history” : historical phenomena = collage with visual excitement = journalism
*voyeuristic exposure to the spectacle = cultura[...]
(459)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%98.4[...]ame)
tendency and willingness of the customers to prefer the simulation (for example the theme areas in city centers of an imagined pasts) =/= “real”
postmodernism is a cultural critique (=/= economic, social critique) of modernity
postmodern critique tends to rely on experiential or sensible judgement (--valued--> trusting intuition and sensing of what is practical/pragmatic based on cultural experience) =/= analysis of material evidence
****post world war II politics --> youth movement culminated in the 1960s --> institutionalization of the generational rebellion --> postmodernism*** ==>
•postmodern cultural critique rely on intuition + experiential sensibilities (in seeking a better world)
•postmodern consumer feels more justified in playful enjoyment of the simulation (=/= constantly seeking the somber reminders of “reality”)
hyperreality ==> “loss of history” : historical phenomena = collage with visual excitement = journalism
*voyeuristic exposure to the spectacle = cultural pastiche of the contemporary world*
--> #integration of the hollywood films (nested: music brand names become sub-spectacle within the spectacle of the film) --> (we are immersed in) an era of *metamarketing: marketing itself is marketed (becomes a prominent spectacle ---> go to Devil wears prada movie)
blurring of genres in news programs (Vox news), soap operas (), games ()
decontextualization + spectacle
the duality of ‘appearance =/= essence’ is dead in postmodernity --> cereal strategic decision-making in marketing : ****image = positioning****
-consumer always seeks an essence (in adopting a product)
-consumer of postmodern culture play the game of “surface” (they increasingly acquire the skills of recognizing the images and the positions these images offer)
[*]marketing: institution of simulation, imaginary, hype
(forms of) persuasive communication : transformational propositions ==> simulating potential experiences (=/= true or false discourse)
2- [*]fragmentation: the consumer engages in a series of independent, separate, unconnected acts --each--> require a different product
+ fleeting moments of exciting scenes and images
(postmodern) transcendence of the (modernist) necessity to *understand connections*
***artists of all kinds are increasingly assuming the role of marketing institutions***
the consumers (of postmodernity) are encouraged to play the game of *image-switching* (caring mother, efficient manager, elegant partner, gourmet homemaker --each--> require a different style {labeled as consumer liberation}) =/= central character
[---> go to Deleuze and Guattari's schizophrenia of late capitalism]
disconnected from authentic self ==> (enormous potential for) cr[...]
(462)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%98.5[...] which individuals define themselves, status, image (=/= common) --> a social act, symbolic meaning ==> an individual with certain tastes, mentality, values (a type of humanity)
production & consumption prove to be different moments of the same cycle
•during production: producers are human beings, products are commodities
•during consumption: producers are images, products are human beings
4- [*]decentering subject
•modernist: the subject is in the pursuit of its goals, constituted in the separation of body and mind, to graduate from the *state of being* (existential) to the *state of knowing* (cognitive) : distance oneself from a pure existence of being (its context and condition) in order to develop a cognitive understanding
•postmodern: the subject is not in control, role of the human is to allow products perform their functions
marketing orientation
•positioning of the products (in the market)
•positioning of the consumer (in the social market)
(today's) body culture: self-objectification (==> to be consumed)
distancing of one's own gaze from one's own body to view one's self and scrutinize one's own images
--> ***fashion becomes the metaphor for culture***
5- [*]juxtaposition of anything with anything (its name?)
•opposing emotions: love & hate, contempt & annotation
•opposing cognitions: belief & doubt, reverence & ridicule
--> in advertisement a product is simultaneously made fun of and prompted, or making credibility by discrediting advertising
*high art and mundane consumption*
}<== growing acceptance of *doublethink* (~=? double bond) : the metagame of playing along as if the rules are what they seem on the surface while having the knowledge the rules of the game played are quite different from what that appear to be
•in advertisement: the consumer thinks while other people are persuaded, they themselves are not
•in politics: the consumers (voters) listen as if the politicians are espousing genuinely personal views
•in media: stating the role of the polls + reflecting the politicians view with utmost seriousness
•ethnic restaurants --> delicious life styles of which food is just a manifestation --> **simulated adventure in a theatrical society**
•
}--> the postmodern consumer does not judge the experience from a foundational perspective
*it recognizes only difference*, only fragments (=/= inequality, conflict)
anything is at once acceptable and suspect ( مجاز majaz)
*juxtaposition of opposites ==> total irony + ambiguity --> pastiche*
marketing --> *incorporation: pulling the contradictory (country cultural) movements into market economy : emptying expressions (music, fashion) of rebellion (for example punk) of their content ==> commo[...]
(463)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%98.7[...]al cultures in order to survive have to become marketable --> touristic attractions
•marketing taking the center stage in most western institutions
•market = locus (dominant mediator) of legitimation
marketing: a cultural process representing the post-
transnational (corporation) : postmodern cultural change agent
in traditional world of commerce ‘commercial space & time =/= programming space & time’
modernist vacuum created by obsolete notions of what is good or bad (sacred or profane) --> filled by marketing (enters --into--> culture)
fragmentation ==require==> use of many different styles and forms
(ideas and movements which already have made) sensational impact --> spectacle --> commodities
(marketing helped in entrenching) artist selebrity setting new trends and values <-- a postmodern phenomena with its roots in 1960s “anti-” movements
•not challenging or endorsing or committing to any one style, but rebelling by doing “one's own thing” (Madonna's rebellion 1991 --> she will continue to find large audiences as long as she represents and combines the postmodern aspects of critique of the metanarrative and the marketable commercial sensationalism of the fragmented spectacle)
paradoxical nature of postmodern culture <-- fragmentation and discontinuity of their experience
not owning a TV (conscious rejection) + driving a car (integrated into mainstream)
merging of education and marketing
*televisual generation*
(in north america and western europe) the education is taking place mostly outside of three classroom
(modern) institutionalized education --> (postmodern) marketing system : the individual of the postmodern encounters the institutionalized education as obligation, drudgery, and the means to achieve positions
(from) a process of reading issues and questions for exploration --to--> a process of persuasively communicating the necessities of knowing (and following efficient ways of doing things) --> literacy: being able to manipulate and construct (recognize and grasp multi-layered multi-faceted multi-media images --> to impress upon all senses) }<-- marketing is best situated to educate this
[-can a true critical deconstruction of postmodernism start from literacy? ---> go to telegram bestiary text]
***the consumer is also a signifier***
(constructed in the images that are culturally signified, for example the female)
(even metaphorically) putting somebody on the pedestal (stage) ==> exposure to voyeuristic gaze ==> objectification ~=> commodification }--Baudrillard-->
•a liberation (the subject is the object which has the powers of seduction as the focus of desire --> in control)
•a loss of freedom (the[...]
(465)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%98.8[...]
paradoxical nature of postmodern culture <-- fragmentation and discontinuity of their experience
not owning a TV (conscious rejection) + driving a car (integrated into mainstream)
merging of education and marketing
*televisual generation*
(in north america and western europe) the education is taking place mostly outside of three classroom
(modern) institutionalized education --> (postmodern) marketing system : the individual of the postmodern encounters the institutionalized education as obligation, drudgery, and the means to achieve positions
(from) a process of reading issues and questions for exploration --to--> a process of persuasively communicating the necessities of knowing (and following efficient ways of doing things) --> literacy: being able to manipulate and construct (recognize and grasp multi-layered multi-faceted multi-media images --> to impress upon all senses) }<-- marketing is best situated to educate this
[-can a true critical deconstruction of postmodernism start from literacy? ---> go to telegram bestiary text]
***the consumer is also a signifier***
(constructed in the images that are culturally signified, for example the female)
(even metaphorically) putting somebody on the pedestal (stage) ==> exposure to voyeuristic gaze ==> objectification ~=> commodification }--Baudrillard-->
•a liberation (the subject is the object which has the powers of seduction as the focus of desire --> in control)
•a loss of freedom (the subject is culturally signified and constructed for fonctions determined outside its own power --> a property of the other)
*decoupling of culturally signified categories (of gender, etc.)* --marketing--> (postmodern stance and trend:) male model/actors who represent emotional, nurturing, and sensitive + female model/actors who represent aggressive, powerful, rational (in American advertisement and TV series)
==> “i shop, therefore i am” becomes applicable to men
==> both men and women become ideal consumers --> flourish of market exchange
* * (both male and female) seek authentic self --> (get caught up in) objectification + fragmentation * *
pattern quest: imaging (representing) =/= being, knowing
[image marketing]
*the image does not represent the product, but the product represents the image* -->
•consumers are essentially consumers of symbols
•consumption culture = construction of symbolic environment
}==> tourism as the largest industry in the world (translate your culture images into marketable products ~= consumer fetishes) --> *global culturalism*
[manipulation of symbols]
(from) ethical issue (modern) --to--> stylistic issue (phenomenological, postmodern)
[*]globalization: (create fragmented heterogenized market -->) serve t[...]
(466)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%98.8[...]hat ideology lies hidden beneath the symptom [=/=! problem of artists]
Campbell mode of analysis (with sinthome) =/= a revelatory mode of critique (where our illusions arre laid bare) [<-- artists’ symptom]
advertisements offer striking evidence of *autoimmune tendecies* in contemporary market society : the body politic misrecognizes its own boundaries and attacks parts of itself
@Femke
(Joyce's Bloom) first thing that we see or feel is not in fact ourselves, but bacteria [---> go to body image] --> (his solution:) avoiding one kind of bacteria by embracing another (<-- psychoanalytically effective ***non-solution***)
(in social sciences [Ereshefsky]) *species pluralism : how various biopolitical forces use segmentation strategies in the organic world to produce competing species’ hierarchies and taxa*
thinkers in social theory --> the entities under investigation are:
•so massive --> Gaya regulatory system of planetary scope
•so dispersed --> climate change
•so ancient --Haraway--> bacterial protist Mixotricha paradoxa (“the paradoxical being with mixed-up hairs”)
•so minute جزئی --> new materials engineered through nanotechnology
•so boundless --Sagan--> metametazoa: human as a multiple afloat in the omnisexuality or bacterial exchange
•so relational --thacker--> swarm, pack, flock, epidemic [---> go to ERG website's epidemic nodes --> *the image of the relational*]
•so
}<==motivation==
1. considering the strangeness of life forms act as a template ==to==> think differently about life by mobilizing new ***prepositions of connection*** (with, alongside, between, sym-, etc.) ==provoke==> different theoretical insights into how society might work
2. ethical political drive to promote radical inclusivity and to challenge mindsets that fixate on identity and difference (<-- Harawayian) [--> Isabel, Sara]
3. work of decentering the human as the premier valance of the universe (may in turn) ==cultivate==> an ethics that is ecological, in the sense of global and interspecies (<-- Mortonian) [--> Sina]
4. conceiving of the ‘other’ as planetmate, messmate, natureculture, mind-body, etc. (maybe) ==lead==> new conceptions of camaraderie, community, society, friendship [--> artistic research, apass, Viveiros de Castro]
bacteria [also: mushroom, swamp] --> poster-creatures of the flat ontology movement --> challenging classification
replacing Tree of Life with DNA-based model of life (homo sapiens: a micro-ingredient of an astonishing bacterial soup of prokaryotes, archaea, eukaryotes)
*bacteria: the ground zero life forms* -->! ***nearest we can get imagining the Lacanian Real***
we are more bacteria than human
(global) bacterial biome: para-collective (=/= “merely” biological)
*our ways of reacting to bact[...]
(467)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%99.2[...] ‘prolonged symbiotic associations ==> appearance of new organism’ (massive contagion that moves across phyla and lineages across biotic and abiotic spaces ~/= Darwinian natural selection)
1940s --> monomorphism: (in bacteria sex, proposing that) male and female are separate but visually indistinguishable
categories of inside/outside, host/guest, parent/child, original/copy, female/male --> organize civil life =/= bacteria
==> in advertising bacteria propagation appears “deviant” (in non-productive forms) --> antibacterials confer moral righteousness
Karin's germ management ♥
(Karin) “good germ management =/= good parenting”
(Dettol:) “good germ management = good parenting” [when a mother at home protects children from contact with the floor]
(in iran:) contact is contagion
Campbell assuming women tolerate germs more than men --> not in iran
**staging the unbacterial woman**
*body is a closed private property =/= contagion emanates from bodies that are not properly closed or private*
“community = the single biggest source of threat” (our sovereign cleanliness) --> *bacteria as other people* مجاز مرسل metonymically (not just metaphorically)
•degenerate human
•homeless man
•transvestite
•street sweeper
•
(cleanliness is always sovereign)
if ”(deep) ideology =/= (critical) thought” --then--> fantasy =/= ?
‘deviant’ mobilizes deep-seated fears and fantasies ==> images that are visually intense + build exceedingly successful brands
critical analysis can move from thinking about symptoms as indirect expressions of deep ideology (paranoia) --to--> *indirect expressinos of structurating fantasies*
(brands know that) ***fantasy =/= ideology***
•Lacan --> even when patients could articulate their symptoms it didn't seem to dissipate ==> symptom was a constitutive core of their own subjectivity
•Zizek --> ideology: fantasy structuring out social reality itself =/= an illusion masking the real state of things
•Marx, Freud, Zizek --> symptom =/= a thing behind which secret content is hidden
for Marx *the secret is in hte form of commodity itself** (<--but-- commodity as a central symptom of capitalism) --Sina--> in the form of the hair-styles in The Magicians TV series
from symptom (veil) --to--> sinthome (screen)
*sinthome* is not directly analysable --Campbell--> images of bacteria are symptoms of the Real, not the symbiotic order, because the Real unsymbolizable
sinthomes organize the subject (without them the subject would be obliterated, Zizek)
(psychoanalytic paradigm --> emerging research in marketing:)
•sustainability practices’ fetishistic disavowal of reality can serve to exacerba[...]
(469)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%99.5[...] the itinerary of claims we make about the world and its contractions
the expansive fields of immanence and trancendence we can read in fire fossil
our contract with Allah
with fire we are at a testing site, at least of the the God of the Old Testament who showed a will to perpetual pursuit, perpetual rupture, fire is a testing device for subsidiary admission policy. this function or figure is precisly that which permeats modern existance
...drafts that describe an outer domain of signification
contaminative and communicative
...................................
in talking about our agreements with fire, i like to read how our rapport to the beyond has mutated (--undergone considerable mutations--) by means of our adherence to the imperatives of... trial by fire(?), test of the beyond. ==> our relation to (explanatory and descriptive) language, truth, process, and identity. (---> go to Ferdosi's poetic site)
what kind of grid the fire produces?
beyond cannot be tested, it tests you***
testability? we want everyone and everything tested
after testing the fire...
monitor time according to the pulse of German/Iranian Idealism/Metaphorism,
[God] singular infinity (~= beyondness) --> [death of God] unlimited finiteness
the temporality we associate with informtion technology is originated with fire
what ciruits are installed by this?
how the mediality of talking fire designs an actual real materially enabled?
what reality has stood its ground since Siyavash trial?
what form of trial discovers, exposes, establishes, or perhaps even invents the ground (on which Sudabeh has no standing)?
how my threading between black-box, darkness, and beyond helps us to spot those figures that makes claims of absoluteness?
(energizing the creative imagination in Iranian Islamicate phiosophy?)
interpretation <--?--> experience
fire-tech conscience translated and sublimated into a scientific conscience?
-transvaluation
...................................
[Serres]
technologies concerning heat--thermodynamics--shocked the traditional world and shaped the one we are working in now.
...theories concerning processes of transformation
...stages of alchemical initiations; archaic figure of fire
(ice and fire) is only relatively cold
fire, and transcendental subject
[my body lives still in that space that the society of sudabeh-fire-siyavash has formed, with fixities and social variieties. it is not an euclidian house.]
siyavosh/sohrab is one of the descendants of disseminated spaces, of catastrophic separation of the continuous
whe[...]
(470)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%41[...]y, language of paths, movements, marks the moment of passage towards a new epistemology.
World is the space of your inscription, scientists. To read and to journey are the one and same act.
Fantastic flow of myth. The sacred and the religious words are spoken at the same time and in the same breath as those of science and of journeys.
Two speakers, united against the phenomenon of interference and confusion. Who's stake is in interrupting communication? The above interlocutors are on the same side, far from the dialogical game.
Demin includes himself in the circuit, blurs the message, renders it unintelligible, and exactly by that assures transmission. Parasite produces by the way of disorder a more complex order.
..penetrative grasp of a text, discovery and recreative apprehension of it life-forms, is impossible to paraphrase or systematize.
..temporal and local settings of one's text. (to master it?)
to read X, is literally, to ‘prepare’ to read X
in certain civilizations there comes epochs in which syntax stiffens...
Changing landscape of fact
unexamined smiles
worn tropes
words, the guardians of meanings, are not immortal.
Metaphysical scandal
note on history: past is a language construct, that the past tense of the verb is the sole guarantor of history.
Dialectics as a method of intellectual chase.
Who first told a joke?
Certain languages are inhospitable to new metaphors.
Language-act
to read: is to restore all that one can of the immediacies of value and intent in which speech actually occurs.
my original repetition
we re-enact in our educated consciousness
in what sense does unperformed music exist?
The same ground, when using the ‘speculative instruments’, the critic, editor, actor, and reader stand on.
When we read or hear any language statement from the past, we translate.
Encode and decode “message”, misleading operative models of translation between different languages and even within a single language.
One treason in translation: words rarely show any outward mark of altered meaning, they body forth their history only in a fully established context.
What material reality has history out of language? --the tasavof verbal linguistic tradition
silence knows no history...?
...to remind you that everything is the condition of madness.
“Tense Past”
..the landscape composed by the past tense, the semantic organization of remembrance... is styled and coded differently by cultures. --miniature illustrating San'an?
The verbal icon made up of all successive translations of Greek literature and philosophy has oriented fundamental movements in Islamic feelings --Farabi, Mi[...]
(471)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%49.3[...]lacking in their material lives.
[very interesting point regarding the language of mysticism, Attar and others.]
language riches seem to act as compensatory mechanisms. (having 60 different words in Shahnameh for signifying ‘horse’, doesn't necessitates the material variety of horse in the ancient Iranian culture?)
--starving bands of Amazonian Indians may lavish on their condition more verb tenses than could Plato.
Is my language, or lack of speaking certain languages, a powerful obstacle to the material and social progress of me?
--withering inward by language barriers. Linguistically atomized
interaction of physical and spiritual agencies...
The nominalist mechanism of creation: each time man spoke he re-enacted, he mimed.
(...the early forms and feelings of consciousness in human ancestral pasts)
my reading or performance includes scrutinising configuration of letters and inverting words.
Bad translations communicate too much, limited to what is non-essential in the fabric of the original, missing the bond of meaning.
If translation is a form, then the condition of translatability must be ontologically necessary to certain works.
Metaphysics of translation
translation is profoundly philosophic, ethical, and magical. It imports source of life. Alchemy, must retain a vital strangeness and ‘otherness’.
My translation, an interlinear version of the script, a virtual archetype of translation
obsessive awareness of the opaqueness of language, Kafka's continuous parable on the impossibility of genuine human communication. The impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing in German, of writing differently.
Presence of interpreters in the building site, Kafka, literature house
in Kafka, great wall = mosaic law ?
Only if men could use language without perusing meaning to the forbidden edge of the absolute.
Alpha & Aleph
...is certain to encompass ‘some terrible meaning’ in one of its secret languages
‘a poetic vocabulary of concepts’
‘connections or affinities’
pursuit of an inter-lingua for philosophic discourse
not to contemplate a mechanical transcription of the original
history, the mother of truth.
To define history not as an inquiry into reality, but as it's origin.
Menard, William James
translator's ‘mysterious duty’
if needed, i am anyone
language mysticism studies
...primitive seek expression through ‘imaginative universals’, this rapidly acquired a ‘infinite particularity’
it is only by means of essentially poetic recreation or translation of a given language-world that the new science of myth and history can hope to retrace [...]
(472)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%49.6[...]y a) physiological response
[*]wonder: recognition of the singularity and significance of the thing encountered
‘thing =/= knower’ (in a context + from a particular point of view) ==trigger==> wonder
telegram bestiary --> capacity to be shocked by the singularity of the event (==Sina==> search for significance ~/= cause, explanation)
scholarship on (early modern age of) wonder
1- enthusiasm for wonders = *expropriative & appropriative* (ضبط و سلب) --> *orientalism: projection of self or construction of “other” as self --> the rape of the New World seems implicit in wonder at it
(early modern europe) impulse to *collect & explore*:
◦collection of narwal horns and jewels, deformed fetuses and human captives (made by rulers, missionaries, and naturalist)
◦origins of museums in the wunderkammer (wonder cabinet)
◦voyages to the New World with their attendant goals of *conquering & missionizing* (=/= Sinbad)
◦use of inquisitors and questionnaires by government to assemble information for juridical *processings & taxation*
◦Columbus's “desire to know the secrets of the world” (glossed with) Jode de Acosta's praise of proselytizing curiosity
2- Aristotle's Metaphysics: “wonder = ignorance and doubt” { desire to seek causes (it did not understand) ==arose==> wonder (admiratio) ==> replacement by knowledge (scientia or philosophia) }--> miracula (marvel: natural effects we fail to understand) =/= mirabilia (unusual and difficult events [produced by God])
3- Descartes’ wonder: (first of all passions) a sudden surprise of the soul ==> tend to consider attentively those objects (which seem to it rare and extraordinary)
◦*begining of the tendency to reduce emotion to physiology*
◦Charles Le Brun's drawings of the passions
◦Darwin's wonder: a reaction ==> making the animal see and breathe better in crisis ==> increased its chances of survival (...raised eyebrows, opened and protruding lips, a hand held up, palm out with fingers open)
◦early modern physiology --> wonder: (~ startled response,) paradigmatic emotion
4- (the horrible) philosophical understanding of wonder: ignorance rationalized or erased by knowledge
a wondering desire that collects and appropriates what it endeavors to know or project its self onto an imagined other --> a passion that reduces to a startle response at the unfamiliar
}=/= historian (and teacher [and performance-lecturer]) vacation (or responsibility) --> (we must aspire to) imagine the kind of nonappropriative perspectival *intensely cognitive* response
middle ages (how they characterize their difference:)
1. theological-philosophical understanding of wonder <== university intellectuals {
◦admiratio =/= scientia ==> knowledge
◦admiratio ~= diversitas (diversity) =/= solitum (the usual, the gener[...]
(473)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%81.9