[...]ve other modes of response available to us other than how Hamlet takes in what is inherited to him, other ways of responding to the ghostly beings that talk to us from death. (inheritance ~= inhabiting spirit [they cannot be possess as a piece of property], reading inflaming flashes of remote spirits [--> is this hear from one another looks like? is technology placed at the source of this reflection?--technology itself answers the call--(Avital)]) could we work with Ophelia's kind of #Wortsalad instead? (Salad-e Kalame, khoresht-e kalame; same thing happens to Shirin of in Khosro Shirin, but unlike Shakespeare, Nezami allows another poetic drift;) Heidegger's “die Sprache spricht” : language is monologue --?--> schizophrenia and schizophrenic discourse --?--> structure of speaking]
[speaking asserts a certain temporal priority which we must undermine]
-listening *before* speaking
-“We hear language speaking” (Heidegger); a non-organic speaking; language is not equipped with organs of speech? (Avital)
serious joking / joking seriousness [Haraway]
joke/jest/gesture
a space of play --> where ideas come in to being
(story of ‘or’. is it where the original joker came? using or instead of and)
(there is no ‘or’ in nature!? what are the earlier forms of or that we can trace in cave paintings or tool makings?)
**if you don't take my idea seriously i will be utterly incomprehensible**
crafts-person for the building of lures of propositions --> ‘abstractions’
(abstraction is fragile and can hold worlds together)
where Europe comes from? (woher kommst du? i am born in, i am born in, ...)
what animates us rather than what civilizes us
(to Shabnam:) to ‘mourn with’ rather than ‘mourn about’
(-about =/= -with)
(structure of mourning)
to break in the philosophical and biological headquarters (and steal their stories, their abstractions, etc.)
exchanging and sharing instruments and languages
this is about building something that is ‘good enough’ to get you through...
these practices doesn't necessarily produce ‘separate entities’ (indivis)
am i fantasizing creating a monolithic structure of ideas?
critique is an art that tangles with what you are proposing
(like an octopus in a lure)
...................................
stories that can interrupt death (of our time, anthropocene, etc.)
(example of biology-story into culture-story: (1) ladder of evolution --> progress (2) sperm/egg story --> gender performance)
to change stories so that they are more livable
we live stories
to make mistakes as fast as possible
... move across earth space and narrative space
situated sto[...]
(1)[...notes/midday review.txt]%0.2[...]s of life that deserves work, that which deserve opposition, that which deserve our curiosity
disembodiment is a technologically produced effect--many people are very skillful in creating that effect --> effects that are also affect/affectional
(Haraway on writing the cyborg manifesto) SK
the physiological state of neutrality is an affective state
(the notion that violent and passion counts as affect and neutrality is without affect is chemically bizarre) -- neuro-chemistry of a certain kind of self-collection
refusing the division between material and immaterial
to call information-world immaterial is wrong
(this is the base of my work related to Haraway)
in the case of vision: the material and the semiotic always implode [the apparatus and the flesh] --> the effect of *disembodiment is a technologically produced effect* (that is also always affectional) (we have to get good at producing it)
[...so she was among (1983 Marxist) feminists (and the figure of cyborg is already in circulation for her--about the questions of reproduction technologies related to the situation of women) without biological education--not only that, many of her feminist allies thought of biology as the enemy [--> antinatural rejection of the sciences in feminist the agreement “that ‘nature’ is our enemy and that we must control our ‘natural’ bodies --> escalating logic of counterdomination] so her manifesto is all about that. biology is (a rich fabulous practice and) never innocent, and it is something that ‘we mean’. in the sense of ‘what do you mean?!'] [we are always telling knowledge stories that we need --> noninnocent]
(something is) boring =?=> (something is) wrong
why do i joke? it has to do with storytelling.
anything anybody tells me i tend to believe--what i learn from whores
working within an apparatus of thinking in order to get somewhere in a sustained way and not to drift into associations as fast as... -->
i can't finish the sentence until i can pay attention to what interrupts it. and if i syntactically require to come to the end of sentence, syntactically commits me to a position i don't hold. the technical requirement of clarity (and coherence--must learn how to do it). my storytelling is about how not to reach the end of sentence. (that Peter noted as suspension)
['thinking pushed into syntax’ --> my work lecture-performances are about a thinking excessing out of syntax. not all argumentation is made in syntax(= how a sentence must end), and turn it into a skill of nonsyntactical pragmatic language craft tradition, advocating the *exceedingly agential* world ~= there is always ‘a whole lot is going on']
the iterative and fractal quality of sentences
partial connections (of distinct entities) ~= analogy
analogy allows one part contaminate systematically another part and[...]
(2)[...notes/midday review.txt]%0.4[...]r />
anything anybody tells me i tend to believe--what i learn from whores
working within an apparatus of thinking in order to get somewhere in a sustained way and not to drift into associations as fast as... -->
i can't finish the sentence until i can pay attention to what interrupts it. and if i syntactically require to come to the end of sentence, syntactically commits me to a position i don't hold. the technical requirement of clarity (and coherence--must learn how to do it). my storytelling is about how not to reach the end of sentence. (that Peter noted as suspension)
['thinking pushed into syntax’ --> my work lecture-performances are about a thinking excessing out of syntax. not all argumentation is made in syntax(= how a sentence must end), and turn it into a skill of nonsyntactical pragmatic language craft tradition, advocating the *exceedingly agential* world ~= there is always ‘a whole lot is going on']
the iterative and fractal quality of sentences
partial connections (of distinct entities) ~= analogy
analogy allows one part contaminate systematically another part and vice versa
(Haraway on feminism)
feminist theory is especially good in getting at in particular ways doctrines of nature's work to enforce ways of life on women, on people of color, on the enslaved, on those who do not possess the qualities of mind and self-possession, on those who are on the marked categories to the unmarked. the feminist have been particularly good at getting how genre works. gender, in this regard. [...] --> that female by nature is committed to the species and the male by nature committed to transcendence.
[our inherited binaries -->] formulations of nature: executive/non-executive organs, immanence/transcendence, maintenance/novelty, catabolic(foru-sakht فرو ساخت, sukht سوخت)/anabolic(tarkib-saz ترکیب ساز) functions, ,,
-in Darwin's writing, non-theological account of diversity on earth, we find both interrupters and continuers of these particular notions of nature
the question of model, what is the model for what, what is similar to what?
****how do we do comparative thinking? comparative thinking depends on similarity judgment and difference judgment, and depends on good-enough models, and depends on a certain kind of rhetorical work of *crafting tropes*
--> figures of similarity/difference:
by similarity, or
by contiguity, or
by part-whole, or
...
(this is ‘building’ *among* us)
(how do i decide to compare two things? Shirin and Ophelia, etc)
models are built rhetorics
history of models
the power of models is that they are not the ‘same as’
circuits of meaning and power that flow through (materials and bodies)
mondial ~? situated knowledge
the idiom ‘situated’ makes people think ‘local’ [...]
(5)[...notes/midday review.txt]%0.5[...]ropes*
--> figures of similarity/difference:
by similarity, or
by contiguity, or
by part-whole, or
...
(this is ‘building’ *among* us)
(how do i decide to compare two things? Shirin and Ophelia, etc)
models are built rhetorics
history of models
the power of models is that they are not the ‘same as’
circuits of meaning and power that flow through (materials and bodies)
mondial ~? situated knowledge
the idiom ‘situated’ makes people think ‘local’ (instead of global)
by situated she means the ‘knot’ which always means some place and somewhere, but that someplace/somewhere could be in materiality a distributed digital network. the situated is always open. the point is that it is not nowhere and no place.
epidemic friendly
the flow of disease are major international research matter
eco-feminism, veganism is for Haraway is genocidal position, a position that advocates violence, a position dedicated to the destruction of ways of life and living beings including animals, [a position that] *concise all working animals to being nothing but evidence of the destructive and violating imposition of human will on natural stuff*, and “that domestic animals of all kinds are victims and demonstrations of human hubris گستاخى, and they have been made into tools” ~= an extreme developemnt of liberal theory --> the (work) animals are not self-defining subjects, are violations and victims, and should not exisit, except as:
•heritage-animals
•rescue-animals
•wards of guardianship
(my work on ajayeb and question of heritage has been exactly against that position)
the radical anti-food-industry position is a radical liberal theory turns all working animals into (at best) *heritage-animals* ~= animal to be preserved as much as possible separate from human use --> “all human use is bad”
(--✕--> we know that the question of use and instrumentalism cannot for mortal finite beings rid out of liberation theory and practice)
[for example the disposition of the film How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, where at the end dragons are better off their human partners ~ kabutar ba kabutar baz ba baz کبوتر با کبوتر باز با باز]
**killing is not something mortal beings can avoid** (us or them)
*the human beings have regularly and in complex ways produced other living entities as killable*
[category of killable: a killing that doesn't quite count as killing]
killing your pet when she is too sick = a judgment in responsive relationship that is not equal
to say that “meat culture everywhere and always are acts of violation” is wrong
“post-”, the notion of ‘surpassing’ that is inevitability built into the “post-”, is in our way politically
[...]
(10)[...notes/midday review.txt]%0.6[...]the end dragons are better off their human partners ~ kabutar ba kabutar baz ba baz کبوتر با کبوتر باز با باز]
**killing is not something mortal beings can avoid** (us or them)
*the human beings have regularly and in complex ways produced other living entities as killable*
[category of killable: a killing that doesn't quite count as killing]
killing your pet when she is too sick = a judgment in responsive relationship that is not equal
to say that “meat culture everywhere and always are acts of violation” is wrong
“post-”, the notion of ‘surpassing’ that is inevitability built into the “post-”, is in our way politically
the project of critique : finding that point of violation where you can say “got you!”, ‘I nailed you’ --> the practice of critique = to define what we are against }==> develop political movement that are fairly self-certain about what we are against ==> you will find yourself (perhaps) property addressing a particular issue but having no ability *to make political connection* (~= to think beyond the category) --> you find yourself crippled
posthumanist think of themselves as “better than”, more in possession of a “real” understanding of the nature of contemporary world, beyond the critique of technology
the politics of it all...
[we have never been -->] human : being on the side of the one who developed technology to realize intention of their mind in the matter [= The Iron Man]
=/= what it is to be people
we don't need fancy epistemological justification (such as posthumanism), people know the world in ordinary ways and we can learn from eachother, in all the (cultural, historical, power, wealth) differences among us [@Leo] --> ***partial translations happen all the time***
to take the risk of making a mistake --[the only way you can]--> affirm something positive : the positive knowledge pins on the possibility of mistake --(@Setareh; Goda wants to avoid mistakes?)
(learning from Foucault:) power = actual arrangement of the world (and not something ‘out there’)
(learning from Derrida:) responsibility is about the excess of it all (and not the irony of it all [*irony: incongruity of expectation and occurrence])
(learning from biology about:) differences organize themselves by ecologies (and not by binaries) --> ecologies have many scales (of temporality and physicality)***
scientific research + artistic research + contemporary philosophical critical inquiry ==> *topographies of difference* [--> important for Goda's use of the term “privilege” flattening differences]
(“+” are exchange zones, i am learning their differences of idioms)
[apass = partners locked into mimesis]
(my problem with the idea of) privilege: a special right, advantage, or immunity granted to a particular group or [...]
(11)[...notes/midday review.txt]%0.6[...]rsing from the bed to the wild?
pre-historic personhood
my work is concerned with connections, mediation and passages.
what you take for granted, is in another words, what that you can't not know.
(my proposal:)
the past is not absolute!
the idea is that the mythical became the mythological --> Things could be treasured for their beauty as opposed to
their utility or their numinousness.
(Martha Kenney's) “wild facts”
facts that won't hold still
fables
fables of ajayeb, creatures of imaginations, (im)possible worlds
...................................
your institutional hacks
three things to consider in my work:
projection, immersion, and synthesis
seeking to be at once inside and outside the topic
the issue of topology -- what remains invariant as a result of transformation
suggestive power of the figure
...................................
synthesis =/=? genesis (to originate something, to design)
genesis =/=? apocalypse
...................................
in research, contrast between method and subject, is a tool
(in studying natural history)
in critique, contrast between effect and affect, is a tool
(assumed quality of the object and one's own named experience)
[these tools are perhaps cognitive objects]
...................................
Enlightenment as cultural European phenomenon versus a scientific British one
(the theatrical function of natural philosophy in the England Enlightenment)
the function of natural philosopher in 18th century was to use experimental science machines to turn inert matter into active power, light/fire/heat/etc. to lecture an wealthy and polite fee-paying audience, in order to save them from irrationality, that inside all matter there is life and power, and that life was divine.
(however all this was all swept away in the industrial revelation)
William Herschel, an amateur natural philosopher discovering Uranus 1781
(Enlightenment was all about people changing their disciplines)
project of constructing a new theory of heavens
...................................
*i can't give you a direct grasp but i hope i can give slowly accuracy
*the ‘details’ of grasping
(zoom in the ‘grasp’)
from contingencies to certainties
i spend so much time with painting and computers, which were about compositions and hacks
i think there are few fields/figurations/skills we need to get good at: rhetoric, biology, aesthetics
...................................
trope - something other than its literal form
adding an adjective or replacing a name, (one-way movements?) -- let me [...]
(12)[...notes/midday review.txt]%1[...].
(however all this was all swept away in the industrial revelation)
William Herschel, an amateur natural philosopher discovering Uranus 1781
(Enlightenment was all about people changing their disciplines)
project of constructing a new theory of heavens
...................................
*i can't give you a direct grasp but i hope i can give slowly accuracy
*the ‘details’ of grasping
(zoom in the ‘grasp’)
from contingencies to certainties
i spend so much time with painting and computers, which were about compositions and hacks
i think there are few fields/figurations/skills we need to get good at: rhetoric, biology, aesthetics
...................................
trope - something other than its literal form
adding an adjective or replacing a name, (one-way movements?) -- let me tell you the story of:
*knowledge --to--> expressed knowledge
*knowledge --to--> knowing
*reality --to--> manifest realities
*real --to--> real enough
*islamic --to--> islamicate (“islamic” has always been a ‘range’ rather than a ‘binary switch’. things become more or less “islamic” in popular/proper belief)
*nature --to--> visual nature
*culture/civilization --to--> collective (emphasizing operation of gathering or composing and heterogeneity of the assembled)
*muslim countries --to--> muslim majority countries
*understanding --to--> better understanding
*what does X mean --to--> what does X mean for you
*body --to--> lived body
*body --to--> lived image
*language --to--> specialized languages
*world --to--> built world / thought world / described world / descripted world
*producing knowledge --to--> participating in knowledge projects
*to explain --to--> to explain in terms of...
*place/location --to--> neighborhood (ask ‘why this neighborhood?’ instead of place)
ajayeb helps me to work on:
-history
-poetics
-animality --> inhabiting material and semiotic positions --> how to find a descriptive act that is not in terms of the impressions it makes on our senses? / this is about the places things take and occupy in our phenomenal world. / it is difficult to discuss the night-sky without first breaking it up into constellations. (Matthew Carey)
i have been building my own islamology or islam-studies department, through a low-voice critical mildly blasphemic rant about imagination
(anthropology of non-experimental imagination in the islamicated worlds)
[there is a difference between **experimental imagination** and imagination]
we are at the edge of extinctions
many species and lives are migrating to “where” and nowheres, pushing to the oblivion.
my issue with the ‘timing of understanding’ --> i don[...]
(16)[...notes/midday review.txt]%1[...]fferences (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 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 p[...]
(18)[...notes/midday review.txt]%1.4[...]chnologies 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
•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[...]
(19)[...notes/midday review.txt]%1.5[...]y position to) challenge others to re-tell the story of their ((epistemological) found) objects
-a ‘generative constraint’ might help opening up paths before you, away from our habits of storytelling
-it is about getting a feeling for the resistances and potentials of language in our (sometimes mundane) descriptive practices, “strange richness of missing the letters we need” (Kenney)
the metaphors are dormant in our routines of talking and noticing each other. how then, by traversing the routine, our “knowledge” and “community” took on new meaning, as they get a chance of being rearticulated in different languages (or differenlty infected literature)
~-?==> changing the system of classification (of thought)
-in a way the workshop is about an *approach* to knowledge generation (and not necessarily a rigorous critique nor directly evaluating the production of our knowledges)
***nothing is never merely a metaphor***
[some fables from science studies:]
•Emily Martin's egg/sperm story --> stories of atomism, distribution of agency, ----[The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles]
•Hayward's microscope --> tropes of natural history docu, ----[Enfolded Vision: Refracting The Love Life of the Octopus]
•Kenney/Haraway's origin/nature fable --> the omnipotence of the “origin” story in our descriptions and interactions with the natural world
•Scott Gilbert's immunological “bouncer” story =/= immune systems as inclusive agents of symbiosis
•Lynn Margulis: life (made possible) by “combat” [the survival fable that TV series “The 100” and “Kelile Demne” for instance is based on] --✕--> life by networking
•Haraway: the tale of “organism = a system of division of labor with executive functions” (==> extraction of wealth among us)
•Morton's causality-story
•brain/body story --> where the “move” came from?
•Sina's “standing on the shoulders of giants” --> knowledge/continuity, role of authority and humility in science ----[http://www.sinaseifee.com/giants.html]
•Sina's 3 little pigs --> architecture/tech/ echics of encounter --> story of the center and periphery ----[http://www.sinaseifee.com/pigs.html]
•“weapon fathered man” --> 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” when they want to create artwork
•“look really hard inside yourself for what you really want”
•“you are an agent of change” that means art or thinking or being ought to be operative, active, transformative, (even destructive) and that is “political” [--> this fable in found in language; -[...]
(20)[...notes/midday review.txt]%1.6[...]resting answers
-asking about the differential productions, “=/=” or “=” or “==>” in each other practices. these assessments are propositional and poetic remarks, guessing the artificialities that we live with, not finding of matters of fact
◦asking about particularizations (تخصیص) and generalizations (تعمیم)
**literature begins, Blanchot writes, “at the moment when literature becomes a question”** (this is completely different than asking or question-marking in literature) [...] this question “is posed to language by language that has become literature” (the question that the meaning of the text asks is the question asked by literature; [of course at the moment of reading]) [then what is a text before becoming a question? complaining? revolution?]--%(negation wishes to realize itself.)
--> Rorty's critique of Descartes's way of asking questions
we have to be careful with our practice of questioning, because we often end up privileging a group of people by attributing it to “higher” levels cognition and of being “critically” in the world (=/= animal, nonpeople, other people with other ways of being in/with the apperceptive world that don't use the technology of questioning, as it is crafted historically and naturalized in the west for the univerasal method of ‘knowing more’)
...................................
#workshop, reading group
•reading as passionate betrayal. (hunting for precious empirical details, refigurative, reparative, poaching, reading can be a betrayal of textual authority and an act of survival)
•addressing /present* differences, not already pre-figured differences
•(condition of friendship, staying close to the text) staying close as a reader, as someone who could hold the text of the Other, receiving it in the withdrawal / Entzug (drug rehabilitation)
•i am in no position of ‘understanding’ or being clear about the text
•(i understand now that) it is not up to me to tell you how to 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[...]
(23)[...notes/midday review.txt]%1.7[...]sudden shocks and slippages.
the personality needs to be able to flow in order to move past anything that establishes itself firmly
Submitted to constant critique and revision
(Nietzsche) “We can destroy only as creators--But let us not forget this either: it is enough to create new names and estimations and probabilities in order to create in the long run new ‘things’”
invention's power over new things
work on aphorism and irony
radical critique of reason and truth
will to X ---- feeling of power, primitive form of the will (=/=? play)
arguing that knowledge is contingent and conditional
Nietzsche's campaign against morality :
(contrast between good and evil -->) *master-morality : charity, submission to the other, selflessness, etc. --> you hate yourself
(denying the inherent inequality -->) *slave-morality --> weakness is a matter of choice ==> nihilism
*transvaluation
(Nietzsche hated christianity for its non-affirmation of life. for him sex was a fundamental affirmation of life, christianity's elevation of chastity (including, for example, the story of Mary's virginal pregnancy) is counter to the natural instincts of humanity, and therefore a contradiction of “natural values”.)
•promise of an illustrious afterlife
•desires would be the product of stimuli rather than the product of “will”
...................................
to *adjust (our/your) question
...to have no positive knowledge claim
appropriate ~= zabt o rabt ضبط و ربط
(let me) fast forward to ‘nowhere’
chance-encounters in your/my efforts of ecriture (in San'an text)
(it is not possible to choreograph chance, we can only report our encounters with it)
like San'an, many of us are facing an anxiety of withdrawal from the world that claims us
i am interested in to-link to that which (suddenly) interupts my reveries
to sharpen my capacity for incapacitation
not being afraid to look into many archives of mistakes (ajayeb?)
‘will to scientific knowledge’
[Latour]
(certain) seperation is political :
when we are talking about (re)uniting curricula, linking fields in humanities we are talking about not bringing together two things that are separate, but actually interogating the distribution of power, a way a distributing agancies.
it is not a “common world” to discover, it is a common world to be produced. and the only way to produce it, is through the usual tools that we have in our disposal, which are comming from ‘representation.’
compose =/= discover/uncover
[...]
(24)[...notes/midday review.txt]%2[...]torture, a strictly constellated confluence of acts equally troubling to Aristotle and Aristophanes.
•pardeh-dari پرده دری, hajeb حاجب (after neghabat نقابت is hejabat حجابت [Beyhaghi]) (Nezami in Leili-o-majnun: haft arus-e noh emari bar dargah-e to be pardeh-dari (هفت عروس نو عماری بر درگه تو به پرده داری) --?--> angelology) =/=? hayula(ism) هیولی
...................................
hermeneutics regarding Jurisprudence (feghh فقه) and theology depend on the exegesis of written texts. in both cases the process of understanding is an act of application(?)
interpretation/hermenutice =/= commons/collectivsm
(ta'vil bayad dar jahate axe harkate jami va moshtarek bashad)
...................................
(Kohn) to “provincialize” (rustayi روستایی, bastani باستانی?) language in order to make room for another kind of thought--a kind of thought that is more capacious, one that holds and sustains the human.
...................................
my point in animals without narrative is that the apparatus that is working for Attar in his representation of birds is the same as the narrative tool in the so-called wildlife documentary series which produces nature----a sy.
transcend is about traveling from trope to truth (obur az majaz be haghighat عبور از مجاز به حقیقت,) from virtual to concret. but that is too easily reversible. my point is to stop this transference and interrogate the trope itself. my work in amazon book is about this ‘majaz’ (مجاز), an interface that we are inhabiting.
...................................
the main (and only?) question in my work/performance/lecture is ‘when’ the gift will/have pass(ed) on.
--> holding on to, preparing, strategizing, spontaneity, and so on
-my texture aversion and preference in soft/hard fabric of language and material tonality? --> the “inanimate affections” (that give us pleasure in life) --> we often give each other soft gifts as a way to care for one another (@Janina)
*radical affection does not require intentional politics* (Chen)
[Shepard 2004] Stanner (W. E. H. Stanner, White Man Got No Dreaming) describes how the universe became a moral system and consists of three elements: marvels, species diversity, and institutions. Marvels refer to that presence of the unexpected that one always encounters sooner or later in nature, particularly when the terrain reflects something about the mind that implies 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 u[...]
(26)[...notes/midday review.txt]%2.1[...]led wildlife documentary series which produces nature----a sy.
transcend is about traveling from trope to truth (obur az majaz be haghighat عبور از مجاز به حقیقت,) from virtual to concret. but that is too easily reversible. my point is to stop this transference and interrogate the trope itself. my work in amazon book is about this ‘majaz’ (مجاز), an interface that we are inhabiting.
...................................
the main (and only?) question in my work/performance/lecture is ‘when’ the gift will/have pass(ed) on.
--> holding on to, preparing, strategizing, spontaneity, and so on
-my texture aversion and preference in soft/hard fabric of language and material tonality? --> the “inanimate affections” (that give us pleasure in life) --> we often give each other soft gifts as a way to care for one another (@Janina)
*radical affection does not require intentional politics* (Chen)
[Shepard 2004] Stanner (W. E. H. Stanner, White Man Got No Dreaming) describes how the universe became a moral system and consists of three elements: marvels, species diversity, and institutions. Marvels refer to that presence of the unexpected that one always encounters sooner or later in nature, particularly when the terrain reflects something about the mind that implies 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-fil[...]
(27)[...notes/midday review.txt]%2.1[...]at **turn a divide into a living contrast**, one whose power is to affect, to produce thinking and feeling”
(regarding my footnote fetish) ... because writing such footnotes implies *feeling the text* as an *animating power*
philosophy =? a form of textual animation {--> approaching the work of ajayeb}
to turn the [ajayeb] (animist) modes of experience (existence), awareness, and knowledge into living contrasts (intensely powerful bridge-making tools)
can we reappropriate without reanimate? ----> i think if we deconstructively talk about the reappropriations of meaning we might allow animation to constitute itself.
-how to train yourself in spotting relevant questions and unilaterally [einseitig] 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 illusion[...]
(28)[...notes/midday review.txt]%2.3[...] |
impossibility =/= totality of what is
***impossible =/= not-possible***
--Derrida--> the impossible occurs at every moment (that belong to the effort of reading)
“have we not acquired the right to say everything?” (Sade)
who reads, and how, a text addressed to no one?
what status does it have?
[Lode Lauwaert]
for Blanchot Sade (libertine aristocrat novelist) was the writer par excellence
we should think about Sade in explicitly revolutionary terms [Sade's work ~= Robespierre's Reign of Terror]
•Sade's ideal of society is a reactive reality (it takes form specifically in reaction to something external) --> undertaken endlessly efforts against modes of social organization that are based on an stable internal point of reference
in Sade:
1. selfishness has an ontological (not a moral) meaning : ‘the essence of man = negation of the value of the other's existence’ (+ a destruction of the positive meaning other people have in normal life) =/= being-for-the-other
2. characters with theocentric universe (who deliver extended theological discussions)
3. blasphemous passages (negation of God's existence) --> Sade’s specific philosophy of nature (reference to nature is enough for a proper understanding of reality)
4. *every type of destruction always ultimately serves nature* --> nature (by virtue of her desire for optimum production) is forced to destroy her products continuously [--then--> how to annihilates nature?] --(essence of Sade's world)--> **radical negation**
each individual negation involves affirmation (of the other, humanity, God, nature) --Blanchot--> (Sade's oeuvre =) a movement of radical negation that is nothing but its *negative power* (it never affirms something)
Sade = permanent resistance + radical negation (of the other)
“nothing resembles the virtue as a great crime.”
(Blanchot > Sade)
Blanchot's interpretation of the Terror + French Revolution (<== Hegel)
revolution --> freedom (formerly situated in a divine sphere) operates from a purely immanent perspective
the idea of efficacy of the freedom --> destroys what is given radically --✕--> old regimes
--(understood absolutely)--> Saint-Just and Robespierre demanded that the new French citizens lived out their pure freedom in a radical way
break free from:
•(highly personal) pleasures
•(highly personal) affairs
•
Blanchot + Sade --> *one cannot use one's freedom to establish a new political order*
freedom not contaminated by a particular creation --> Reign of Terror = (a horrible state of) “between” the overthrow of the old & the establishment of the new regime
(~~> contemporary Iran's political state's endless resistance)
•endless resistance =/= enduring constitution (~=[...]
(32)[...notes/midday review.txt]%2.8[...]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 --> knowledge is knowledge-game (on an agonistic power field) ==> science is rhetoric : artifacts and facts are parts of the powerful art of rhetoric ~= practice is persuasion. {this view will use the nasty tools of semiology and deconstruction to insist on the rhetorical nature of truth.} --> Haraway calls this ‘The imagery of force fields’ (also an imagery of high-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 [...]
(38)[...notes/midday review.txt]%3.2[...]s 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 --> knowledge is knowledge-game (on an agonistic power field) ==> science is rhetoric : artifacts and facts are parts of the powerful art of rhetoric ~= practice is persuasion. {this view will use the nasty tools of semiology and deconstruction to insist on the rhetorical nature of truth.} --> Haraway calls this ‘The imagery of force fields’ (also an imagery of high-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 n[...]
(40)[...notes/midday review.txt]%3.3[...]f the dud is about hierarchical relations between past and present and teleological reasoning: where is the dud coming from. when i asked ‘who told the first joke?’ i am trying to break and joke with teleological mode of thinking about the category of ‘origin’.]
contingent =/=? analytical (--> Contingent propositions depend on some kind of epistemoloy, whereas analytic propositions are true without regard to any facts about which they speak.) {telos, ghasd قصد --> ghaside قصیده =/= ghazal غزل}
-We call a truth contingent when it *depends on something else* for its truth.
-has to do a lot with our material world
contingent ~= containing-agent*
--Tautological propositions, which must be true
--Contradictions which must necessarily be untrue
--possible propositions
never use contingency alone in a sentence --> historical contingency
never use understanding stand alon in a sentence --> better understanding {'better’ opens situatedness, for who and how “better,” etc.}
Rhetoric <--(has to do with)--> Contingent
Aristotle (in his work on rhetoric) was against contingency. He believed that the “unavoidable and potentially unmanageable presence of multiple possibilities” or the complex 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 establis[...]
(43)[...notes/midday review.txt]%4[...](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/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 subject, but the trajectory of the signifiers that represent the desire of those who occupy the place of the Other for the subject.]
[about demand: Lacan argues that “demand constitutes the Other as already possessing the ‘privilege’ of satisfying needs,” and that indeed the child's biological needs are themselves altered by “the condition that is imposed on him by the existence of the discourse, to make his need pass through the defiles of the signifier.” ... The subject has never done anything other than demand (since infancy!)] *{question =/= demand}*--> Nancy
[the use of ‘transference’ is a way to account for the relationship between readers and texts. the emphasis in Lacan is on the ‘supposed’ and not on the ‘know’. reader assume that the text ‘knows’. --> What Lacan's understanding of the transference points to is the fact that we must see the meaning of any given text not within the text itself but as a reconstruction between reader and text.] [in other words, transference is ‘a representation of the past’ (childhood and etc.) to the present ]
a pedagogical problem: rapid transferencial[...]
(44)[...notes/midday review.txt]%4[...]t-Lacanian’ means that you don't ‘transfer’ to the art-work nor artist?) #harem
parent --> teacher }==> what the student may desire to become (be recognized as)
according to Lacan there is no Pir (~ [often iconoclast] leader, guide, mentor, expert, knowing-hero, enlightener, rescuer knowing more, knowledgeable pedagogue/leader “helping students find themselves,” [--> my failed transference with Saeed])
-->? Discourse of the University* : (systematic) “knowledge” replaces the nonsensical master signifier in the dominant commanding position; in this case the sujet supposé savoir dependent upon the related knowledge of the Other, or the source of “the field” (journals, textbooks, etc.) ==> (arbiter of) truth --> *to transmit knowledge that is already given*
[account of knowledge as a symbolic and social network, master signifier, subject positions,]
in placing the ‘text’ in the position of a knowing expert who has the answers Lili (unconsciously) idealizes her texts, and of course when her ‘texts’ fail to satisfy that desire she demands ‘knowing’ from them in terms of cynicism: the feeling or state of being annoyed and irritated by them. this is a structural space of ‘demand’ in her. for me what is at stake is the complex nature of encounter between Lili and text which takes place in an artificial space--a symbolic space--that is at the same time the place of real investments of her desires.
@Lili; is she (like the rest of us humans) looking for an active, predatory art?--> if non-communicative non-predatory non-kinetic [a common issue with the students of choreography and dance in general] art exists on this planet, then we kave to learn “a whole new set of techniques.” [La Guin])
--the meter of ‘time,’ that essential element, matrix and measure of all kown human-animal art. what if there are other metric systems? art not as an action, but a reaction? not a communication, but a reception? {---> go to my master studies Diploma on passivity in performance art}
registers of ‘complaining’ in Lili's discourse. she is a bit like Faust groaning, habe nun akhhhhh Philosophie and so on. [Ach of Sprache] (that they have done all the work, they know everything, yet know not enough of what really counts [that is the incalculable] and cannot be satisfied by mere knowledge available to them. nor can they keep themselves to the restricted zone of knowability.) so Lili saying “it's too much!” is a hysteric wish for ‘more’?
(Freudian joke, the hysteric says: “is that all there is!?” while the neurotic says: “this is too much!” to the same object)
*it was Goethe who invented the super-ego, Freud named it following him.
the all-or-nothing view: i know everything or i don't know anything, problem of scale, problem of ‘circumstance = reality’
kloAQsvRkFY
the figure of the ‘accuser’ and the ‘straight talk’ for Lili[...]
(45)[...notes/midday review.txt]%4.2[...] (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 (?)
who are the “mothers of games” there? snake, Div, etc. (spirits that protect the game)
technical know-how to create intersubjective ambience/ambivalence --> regulated relations between one person and another }--these are--> cultivated plots
how can i, starting with apass, learn to create theaters of a subtle sociability (in which beings with different forms of language and physical aspect are ontologically indistinguishable)?
the category of “persons”: variations in the modes of communication that are made possible by an apprehension of perceived qualities that are unequally distributed
whose dialects are mutually intelligible?
human narcissism : that if a being possess a soul is only then capable of recognizing humans
---then let's give everyone souls!
...................................
(Massumi > Deleuze's) critique ~= modulation --> actively modulated from within the situation, immanent to it {
-augmenting* (taking a certain tendency to the limit)
-diverting* (deflecting it into a different tendency)
-transmutational* (interacting with other t[...]
(46)[...notes/midday review.txt]%5.5[...]ically indistinguishable)?
the category of “persons”: variations in the modes of communication that are made possible by an apprehension of perceived qualities that are unequally distributed
whose dialects are mutually intelligible?
human narcissism : that if a being possess a soul is only then capable of recognizing humans
---then let's give everyone souls!
...................................
(Massumi > Deleuze's) critique ~= modulation --> actively modulated from within the situation, immanent to it {
-augmenting* (taking a certain tendency to the limit)
-diverting* (deflecting it into a different tendency)
-transmutational* (interacting with other tendencies in a way that invents a whole new direction as a kind of surplus value of interaction)
-or, it can lead to a clash that stops the process
asking people “to be true to what they represent” ==> having them “encapsulated in already arrived-at opinion and judgment” ==> blockage
war of “disqualification” ~ Stengersian non-event
being (represented and) legitimated in proxy war
...................................
@Zoumana; “decadent gardener” that connot keep distinction between kin and pest, nature and culture
what is a garden full of indirections, snakes?
...................................
#my trope-findings, (bilingual nonsystematic comparative thinking for storytelling) (work with Avital?):
•پیر Pir / sujet supposé savoir (--✕-->? پیر فلک Pir-e falak in Hafez)
•غر Ghor / complaint (--> shekayat شکایت, and then, khamush خموش in Hafez)
•تعارف Tarof / greeting
•transcend <--> darajat درجات (-> Attar)
•super-ego <--> Div-mardom دیو مردم (-> Nezami)
•NatureZolmat (ظلمت --> ajayeb)
•آبرو Aberu / economy of value
•طیالارض tey-ol-arz / body scale, intensity and excess
•نگرانی negarani <--> practices of care
on Aberu, I became interested due to my lack of Aberu in presentationl quality and its abundance in other area's of my psychosomatic becoming.
Aberu traverses, calls itself in, animates, and exists for later visits.
-when you are devalued by the marked of bi-aberu, you are less tied to the strictures of shame, and ‘your behaviour’ becomes performance material
...................................
agency =? boresh برش, jahd جهد (in Farsi), “agential cut enacts a local causal structure” (Barad)
agency of ‘hemat’ همّت
hemate shahi همّت شاهی, lavazeme hemat لوازم همّت --> apparatus
sufi's hemat ~= magic
...................................
@Seba after accelerate manifesto reading: (what is and how can we not pivot on our work) the measure of the meaningfulness of action. (Seba's noti[...]
(48)[...notes/midday review.txt]%5.6[...] of probabilities, refusal to treat your subjects as if they were objects of management --> let's set aside our own hopes, and work to honour the **hopefulness of others** (Deborah Rose)
“And hope is here, all around us. Creatures want to live.” (not in the “future”)
the accelerationists putting things in their cascade of failures, (everything sinks effortlessly into it,) and creating a vanishing point in terms of a western saturated temporality. for them the present is the time of announcing the news of salvation or apocalypse, and has no thickness. (the desire) to step out of history, and is made void in the process of realization, the idea that “everything is possible.” they experience their freedom as universal freedom * (noted by Blanchot.) [--> the problem with all male action heroes...]
(is this a kind of “game-over” discourse?)
*time (thinking with Haraway)
the sequential palindromic time (in Western-related cultures) [جناس قلب palindrome: from the Greek roots palin “again” and dromos “way, direction”; a word, phrase, number, or other sequence of characters which reads the same backward as forward; (un)parsable palindromic motifs;]
there are many sorts of temporalities in West, but the most naturalized and intuitive, ready-to-hand (and black-boxed) version of it is the “past, present, future.” the notion of ‘present’ becomes a (mathematical) vanishing point, a pivot or a point rather than itself a thickness, an inaccessible past being transmuted into a future that is always to come. [=/= the lived time of the flesh]
--> what counts as a responsible person in temporality? (@Seba, @Pierre's “future”)
in my work on ajayeb in apass, i choose to give account to responsibility in a way *to face those who come before rather than to face the future*, this is about a switch in the direction of attention.
•narratable memory with named people turned to ancestors and moved into dreaming time
•past: quiet country --> bear the mark of the care of generation, inhabits both living and dying --> recuperation (behbud بهبود, ramagh رمق)
•present: wilderness --> ongoingness (thickened with creatures)
[in (my reading?) ajayeb's temporality] things come from the past and the future simultaneously
what i respond to = what i inherit
science (in the way that is presented) is outside history, and becomes simply that which is “the case” of the world
**everything that one does is inside time, but that which is acquired (becomes a view onto a scene) and is outside of time**
***(dangerous) ways of being outside of the time of the thick present*** (Haraway)
‘-scene’: a thick presence of now, has many durations in it
(my work on ajayeb's past tense trans-species affair) is about those with whom one must get on together, in the enacting o[...]
(49)[...notes/midday review.txt]%5.7[...]ian san'at (صنعت techniques and technologies) of subject-making
•‘is’ --> information system
•‘ich’ --> intangible cultural heritage
[#contract, concerning modalities of being-with:] anxiety, Sorge, (~ care?) is *disclosive*, for Heidegger, is an ontologically fundamental mood that opens you up to the possibility of understanding, anxiety is the leading mood that allows understanding
(in Heidegger) anxiety ==> understanding
(in Farsi) negarani نگرانی --> vision بینندگی --> basirat بصیرت ==> ta'amol تأمل (modalities of meditation and speculation)
(in psychoanalysis) anxiety =/= fear
(in capitalism) anxiety --> boredom ==> capital
(in settler white colonialism) anxiety ==> safty
(in Ahmed) anxiety --> approach to objects
(in Ahmed) fear/anxiety ==> effect of “that which I am not”
(ghol قول, gharar قرار, gharardad قرارداد [~ that which is promised by the ghol], ghovate ghalb قوت قلب) contracts also come to reassure, otherwise we might be in the radically open space of psychosis.
***contracts, they disambiguate the space***
{+} (pointed out by Derrida:) “contract” is less terrorizing than assuming that there is something natural that binds us... (@Luisa) contract is a non-natural conventional object. (the textual nature of contracts allows it to be read, written, rewritten, reformatted and rearranged.)%-->{ontic & ontologic}
•what kinds of violations does the contract capaciously includes in itself?
•there is nothing natural about here and us being here. (spatiotemporally clock tells us not only what time it is, but also where and who we are: how “time-teller” is spatially architecturally phallically positioned: in the center, on the top, wrapped around the body, and so on.)
...................................
[apass opening week 08.05.2017, (my response to) what is “artistic research”?] artistic research is a fancy way of transforming your “weird feelings” about the world into an “inquiry,” so to say, and at the same time resist to be faithful to standard accounts of what counts as a “serious knowledge claim.” So it includes a lot of messy thinking-feeling, embodied practices, affects, poeticity, semi-scientific work, magic, data collection, mutative interpretative reading, forgetting things, detours, rituals, dead-ends, writing under the influence of scarce foreign obscure philosophies, literary drugs, and boldly using metaphors from different disciplines of “study” that one can find. So, on the one hand, it is a term, invented to indicate a “fluid modern personality” within a turn in humanity studies that opens up to ‘what an artist already knows’ or ‘what an artist is allowed not to know’ within their specific historically situated set of tools. And, on the other hand, it indicates an important shift in the education of art, in which t[...]
(50)[...notes/midday review.txt]%6.7[...]uence 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 (?)
his autopoiesis and cognitions
Nicolas's notion of “leaking” has to do with marginal non-textual non-accounted-for moments that bleed in absolute non-contractual and non-appropriable event? (the so-called moment when we show things to each other)
•his ‘climate of creativity'~~~_[what does ‘criticism’ mean for him?]
•when he says “gesture,” is he accessing ‘gesture’ having an uncalculable semiotic value =/= ‘performance’ that can be measured in economical terms? [but, what kind of consequential work is gesture doing?]
(Nicolas's order of inquiry and discovery)
(--> what is at stake is how do you locate the effects of your work. for Nicolas it is locate at the “sides” [which is already problematically prepositioned outside of him] --Ahmed--> ab object can be affective by virtue of its own *location* [...] and the *timing* of its appearence)
[the ‘image of the rigid’ in his presentation]
Kristien's chart:
questions <--> symptoms
answers <--> openings
past <--> diary
for Lilia: apparatus = score
for Eszter: apparatus = preparation {--?--> everything depends on the ways we prepare}
for Sin[...]
(54)[...notes/midday review.txt]%6.8[...]
for Hoda: apparatus = negative feelings
for
for
(other non-Agambenian notions of apparatus: Katie King's, Barad's, Wark's)
[Agamben still thinks of structure in Euclidian terms, pre-chaos theory and fractal geometry of (non)equilibrium. thermal chaos and dynamic system theory has changed the ways we think about global/local stabilities, discontinuities and noise. sympoiesis is another one.]
-with ‘apparatus’ what is at stake: flow of energy, order, waste, transformation,
Vladimir's tether on disambiguity
Elen, adding her own wheels to the flow(s)
and putting a stick/spoke in a rolling wheel (of others?) [her saboteur trends, چوب لای چرخ (=/=? kharab-kari خراب کاری), what is chub lay-e charkh for her? vandalizing the discourse of others]
-the famous vandal of wikipedia with the recursive name “-on wheels” (Willy on Wheels, adding “on wheels” to the title of every single page, using the move function of Wikipedia: renaming the existing title ==> moved to another namespace, without changing the base title)
-like myself, her saboteurs are critically not symbolic nor ontic, rather sometimes epistemic, or better, ontologic: they don't vandalize the “thing” itself, but the “nature of the properties” that constructs that thing for us
-rocket sculture (what does it mean for her?)
...................................
[the question of inevitability of anthropical view]
there is no final answer to a kind of question but a lot of answers
through inhabiting a figure you are crafting you find yourself addressing a set of problems
agency: liveliness of artifacts (?). there is some kind of liveliness that is both human and nonhuman
the kind of sociality that joins two categorically separate mode of agencies, is a sociality that constitutes both --> the interaction of humans and machines produced both =/= unilateral action
(my whole point or joke, with the bow and arrow was that the arrow of index finger does not move in one way.)
[=/= another mode that comes to mind is when your intimacy making leads always to yourself, getting laid, literally. that is when your concern becomes only you and someone, sexually interested --> economically, and you don't concern the sociality of your people with each other. #techno-capital singular subjectivity @--> this is super relevant for Sven, maybe: how one becomes interested, invested, and skillful in provoking interesting socialities for friends and peers--and not only for oneself? creating, inciting zones of connectivity]
-[it was not accidental that the rhetoric of drugs came up with Lilia when I suggested the attention to anthropos --> what figures human and otherwise was for her the subject of drug-induced rhetoric of mind-alteration; (this is the anthropos of the Enlightenment Europeans and classical Greece talking:) “in order to get rid of me you m[...]
(55)[...notes/midday review.txt]%6.9[...]man and nonhuman
the kind of sociality that joins two categorically separate mode of agencies, is a sociality that constitutes both --> the interaction of humans and machines produced both =/= unilateral action
(my whole point or joke, with the bow and arrow was that the arrow of index finger does not move in one way.)
[=/= another mode that comes to mind is when your intimacy making leads always to yourself, getting laid, literally. that is when your concern becomes only you and someone, sexually interested --> economically, and you don't concern the sociality of your people with each other. #techno-capital singular subjectivity @--> this is super relevant for Sven, maybe: how one becomes interested, invested, and skillful in provoking interesting socialities for friends and peers--and not only for oneself? creating, inciting zones of connectivity]
-[it was not accidental that the rhetoric of drugs came up with Lilia when I suggested the attention to anthropos --> what figures human and otherwise was for her the subject of drug-induced rhetoric of mind-alteration; (this is the anthropos of the Enlightenment Europeans and classical Greece talking:) “in order to get rid of me you must take drugs!” #fable/_ --> being sober(?!), anthropos becoming, human nature, common sense, empiricism and interpretation are at stake here]
-[another thing was the label of “animal” that was passed around as a form of mock, instead of provocations for more conversation, I was stupefied. --how can we go on together and not render each other commitments nonsense?]
“point of view” is an important metaphor
#in my work in apass i am working on descriptive practices [poetics of animal description, histories of nonhuman inscription, etc.] to learn to name latent (and therefore emergent) ontologies, to name ‘what we are doing in new ways,’ which are hard to name. (also refusing not to name the violences of others and yourself. to reckon the nature and scope of the erasures we do in our works.) % why do you think that is important?
#and my shift of attention to peer's works is about that: our domain of practices must make claim on each other <== we inhabit differences together (--> attention and work on:) ‘local category abstractions’ (how do we talk and make each other feel our subjects of interest in apass for example) --> (the cumulative, associated and sensed) routines, gestures, and (inter)surfaces of our everyday life in apass, as a group of researchers, that don't necessarily align ==> worlding comes from these things.
[attunement =/= argument]
the name of the world is “detail”
***translation (essentailly imperfect) is the very condition of signification --> trope is the very condition of language
...................................
don't be docile bodies or innocent bystander, do what you have to do to constitute your coura[...]
(56)[...notes/midday review.txt]%6.9[...]ted, 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
...................................
don't be docile bodies or innocent bystander, do what you have to do to constitute your courage
all i am saying is that: it is not clear what the destiny of art (or of anything) is
...................................
perhaps what i am trying to learn--with apass, ajayeb, writing, harem, etc--is to ask what do i need--which skills, abilities, or literacies--to become equipped to share the experience of the habits of the world (of ajayeb) that i am discovering
...................................
Luisa: “the visual (side)effects of a ‘not being supported’”
effect --> object --> suport --> object2 --> suport3 --> suport4 --> ...
(at one point Marialena pulling away a support box ==> Luisa's cry sound side-effect of a ‘not being supported’)
•?how is it done for her: construc[...]
(57)[...notes/midday review.txt]%7[...]ted (DWI)
drink-driving (UK)
driving risky (DR)
drunk driver (DD)
the notion of game and rule for Elen and Luisa and Eszter: it is until ages of 3 and 6 that children must not play by rules, and only after that the concept of rule-based-games (such as sports) should be introduced to them. what does that say about our artistic environment when we talk rules or breaking rules?
i am becoming more interested in the ‘rules’ that 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
•*behaviour 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 psycholo[...]
(58)[...notes/midday review.txt]%7.1[...] that i have only got half-digested (=/= through digestion, particular bodies of reading that people need to have mastered in order to argue)
(after five years now i am) feeling myself (a little bit more) competent and confident in (some) scientific literacy and in (some of) the skills of the arts and literature --> ?
after apass: apass was a safe-enough space for my inventive processes, to make interesting mistakes, but do i need a real scholarly undertaking with ajayeb?
i had a lousy education, don't know still how to write well and coherently and sustain a project. i don't have the skills to pull off my research as a phd, as a scholar. i need someone to work with me line-by-line. i need to go people who have serious educations in my subject, and ask them questions, and read.
and i am missing that kind of connectivity that your writing being read performs. do i need an atmosphere in which my kind of writerly activities are honored and foregrounded, and expected?
can my ajayeb beome a real scholarly project with seriously labor-intensive student work?
hostility =/= indigestibility {they cannot recognize it, it is something else}--> it is not personal, but a historical state of a discourse, and the nature of the kinds of possibilities that being opened up or closed
(in apass) all of us fail each other in different ways all the time*
we can barely read each other's works/books. but we do, and we struggle with each other's works/books
(in apass i am catching my self giving “advice” to others---risk of the advice:) violation of their integrity
*taxonomy: (constantly morphing) tools, they work and get worked, *they are part of situated conversations* (~ “theory conversations” Katie King < Haraway)
(=/= some kind of enemy that you never do)
***almost 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[...]
(61)[...notes/midday review.txt]%8.3[...] ‘this is what ajayeb is about’ (or Tasavof, etc.) --> ‘what is going on there’ (in ajayeb) is so built-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” --> na[...]
(62)[...notes/midday review.txt]%8.5[...]ant 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*
-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! (-a[...]
(63)[...notes/midday review.txt]%8.6[...]ism; *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 pieces at best. vegans de[...]
(64)[...notes/midday review.txt]%8.6[...]ories of death --?--> communal grieving
{referential vs. simulacral readings @Hoda, Marialena (‘referential object for’ / ‘empathetic object in’ /or ‘criticality of’ [<-- i don't agree with these clear cuts of ”/"]; what is “the reality of suffering and death” (or “reality and suffering of death”) for Hoda? (Xiri's interest in her) object's “total integration” into the political economy}
(Stewart's) signs of the senses
satisfaction in the making of sign-shrine
(question of satisfaction at Hoda:) satisfaction as a force, and end, in itself spoken through the bright, blunt, sensate aesthetics of the sign
-something slashes [= a wound made by cutting] at itself and spits at the world (/ politics of slashing --> poetics of slashing / the young girls who “cut” themselves so they can feel alive or, literally “come to their senses”) -- dramas of surge and arrest --> They do not ask for interpretation or construct the subject who would assign them a meaning, [they refuse] reference to “underlying systems” of signification that make them readable as texts
-something refuses to disappear
-(Hoda's land is) the land of sheer circulations --> (the question of) equilibriums --> how can she with her audience (let's say “we”) enter the unnatural calm of another form of arrest? to feel the scene resist synaesthesia
a state of the senses making contact with pen and paper (and matches)
(my enduring love of watching images, my) optical eye
“[...] young embodiments of a modern middle-ground-in-the-making came face-to-face with an otherness that compelled a closer look” --> violently affective contact
surged toward the scene of their confident excitement
impact ==> the social
#storytelling, compelled to repeat the event as the sentience of it still reverberated in their senses
a grounded writing, that sends people bouncing, takes place as a threshold, hits the senses as a set of provocations, or presents as *a problematic sensed in circuits of reaction already set in motion* @apass
(working with Stewart) writing affect #workshop
a practice of writing ourselves into our worlds as *emergent and disparate ensembles* --> we need the speculative concept of worlding (a term that wins philosophy, criticism, digital studies, and cultural study) in Tehran urgently
-the workshop offers a process of sharing, hearing, questioning, and 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 descri[...]
(65)[...notes/midday review.txt]%9.1[...]nge about the objects: no matter how many times you turned around a cion, you never saw the other side as the other side --> the #coin had a dark side that was seemingly irreducible
Morton's (technology of what we know) hyperobject is his sense of an asymmetry between the infinite powers of cognition and the infinite bening of things, yet he doesn't evoke descriptive practices, which could be helpfull--he is missing something, here: “the gap between phenomenon and thing yawns open, disturbing my sense of presence and being in the world.”
“[...] i cannot locate the gap between phenomenon and thing anywhere in my given, phenomenal, experiential, or indeed scientific space” --> Xiri's problem
he disagrees with: (from Plato up until Hume and Kant) that there is some kind of dotted line somewhere on a thing, saying “cut here” --so he concludes: “things are themselves, but we can't point to them directly.” =/= nonrepresentational theory, Stewart is much more useful. we can see Morton's taste for (a masculine) sublime in modeling his hyperobjects
flat ontology: there is hardly any difference between a person and a pincushion. and relationships between them, including causal ones, must be vicarious (نيابتى) and hence aesthetic in nature
(no) realism that only bases its findings on “ontic” data
scientific discoveries are necessarily based on a decision about what real things are
*disaster [ontologic] taking place against a stable background [ontic]*
causality after Hume and Kant : causality as a feature of phenomena, rather than things in themselves ==> humans are not totally in charge of assigning significance and value to events that can be statistically measured
entities that become visible through post-Humean and post-Kantian statistical causality --> anthropogenic global warming
causal factoid
humiliators [there is no center and we don't inhabit it]:
•Copernicus
•Darwin
•Freud (displacing the human from the very center of psychic activity)
•Marx (displacing human social life with economic organization)
•Heidegger
•Derrida (displacing the human from the center of meaning-making)
•Nietzsche
•Deleuze and Guattari
•
~= there is no edge =/= (film Lucy or Neil Tyson series suggesting that) there is an edge (of time to see everything perfectly), in some (privilaged) transcendental sphere of pure freedom, Lucy's chair literally sitting a VIP box beyond the edge --> anthropocentrism: the idea of a privilaged transcendental sphere
Kant --> (although we are limited in finitude) our transcendental faculties are at least metaphorically floating in space beyond the edge of the universe --> #milieu #tasavof #sufism
...هزار و یک hezaro yek
universe of trillions of finitudes
<[...]
(66)[...notes/midday review.txt]%9.4[...]an:) 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 away --> a dis-dimension called ‘away’ (door دور) in iran (door andakhtan دور انداختن)
(there is no away on this surface we are in) --> throw away: an optical effect : there is no loger distances our image from us in a nice, aesthetically manageable way, but sticks to us --> we are glued to our phenomenological situation (--> entanglement of equipment and quanta =/= three pigs)
a threatening proximity
“i do not feel ‘at home’ in the biosphere” (yet it surrounds them and penetrates them) --> most humans feel that way. how one's entire physical being is caught in its meshwork of narezayati نارضایتی
(physical existence carrying with it) a trace of unreality --> آمدنم بهر چه بود : “i am not sure where i am anymore. i am at home in feeling not at home.”
one's normal sense of time as a container
Ehsan's ghost/sheikh film --> demonic in that through them causalities flow like electricity
ambient, latin ‘ambo’ means ‘on both sides’
the old art theories that separated sweetness and power collapse
sweetness, it turns out, just is power: the most powerful thing
weather as monster
baby learns to distinguish between the vomit and the non-vomit, and comes to know the non-vomit as self
(a society in which) growing scientific *awareness of rish* ==changes==> the nature of democracy
back-to-nature festivals
nihilistic princes of darkn[...]
(67)[...notes/midday review.txt]%9.5[...]distances our image from us in a nice, aesthetically manageable way, but sticks to us --> we are glued to our phenomenological situation (--> entanglement of equipment and quanta =/= three pigs)
a threatening proximity
“i do not feel ‘at home’ in the biosphere” (yet it surrounds them and penetrates them) --> most humans feel that way. how one's entire physical being is caught in its meshwork of narezayati نارضایتی
(physical existence carrying with it) a trace of unreality --> آمدنم بهر چه بود : “i am not sure where i am anymore. i am at home in feeling not at home.”
one's normal sense of time as a container
Ehsan's ghost/sheikh film --> demonic in that through them causalities flow like electricity
ambient, latin ‘ambo’ means ‘on both sides’
the old art theories that separated sweetness and power collapse
sweetness, it turns out, just is power: the most powerful thing
weather as monster
baby learns to distinguish between the vomit and the non-vomit, and comes to know the non-vomit as self
(a society in which) growing scientific *awareness of rish* ==changes==> the nature of democracy
back-to-nature festivals
nihilistic princes of darkness
...................................
my work is *to mix stories*
everyday engagements with other kinds of creatures (in my case: ajayeb) ==> opens new kinds of possibilities for relating and understanding
cosmoecology: multiple beings (gods, jinns, animals, humans, living, dead, etc.) each bearing the consequences of the others’ ways (of living and dying)
‘the ecological question’ is about the needs that ought to be met in the ongoing creation of rapports and connections --> the questions are how does this being achieve the task of holding onto its existence =/= “does this being really exist, or is it not a representation”
==> (Despret:) *we may never know (safely and reliably, either ahead of time or a posteriori) which beings will bear/enjoy the consequences of the concrete attention we give to them*
...................................
on Kate Rich work
feral --> before or without a political state --?--> state of nature [a lot of moral political philosophers of the state asking “What was life like before civil society?"]--> in feral there are only freedoms ==> contracts (}--> what cultural anthropology has to say about that?)
she is in the Rousseauian tradition of *how to establish a ‘political community’ in the face of the problems of ‘commercial society’* (---> go to Rousseau's The Social Contract & Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men)
fighting the system --> feral tropes --> arsenal of the Enlightenment (Kant's motto: “Dare to thi[...]
(68)[...notes/midday review.txt]%9.6[...] and the non-vomit, and comes to know the non-vomit as self
(a society in which) growing scientific *awareness of rish* ==changes==> the nature of democracy
back-to-nature festivals
nihilistic princes of darkness
...................................
my work is *to mix stories*
everyday engagements with other kinds of creatures (in my case: ajayeb) ==> opens new kinds of possibilities for relating and understanding
cosmoecology: multiple beings (gods, jinns, animals, humans, living, dead, etc.) each bearing the consequences of the others’ ways (of living and dying)
‘the ecological question’ is about the needs that ought to be met in the ongoing creation of rapports and connections --> the questions are how does this being achieve the task of holding onto its existence =/= “does this being really exist, or is it not a representation”
==> (Despret:) *we may never know (safely and reliably, either ahead of time or a posteriori) which beings will bear/enjoy the consequences of the concrete attention we give to them*
...................................
on Kate Rich work
feral --> before or without a political state --?--> state of nature [a lot of moral political philosophers of the state asking “What was life like before civil society?"]--> in feral there are only freedoms ==> contracts (}--> what cultural anthropology has to say about that?)
she is in the Rousseauian tradition of *how to establish a ‘political community’ in the face of the problems of ‘commercial society’* (---> go to Rousseau's The Social Contract & Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men)
fighting the system --> feral tropes --> arsenal of the Enlightenment (Kant's motto: “Dare to think for yourself!” ~= “I don't follow orders!”), application of Reason in the public sphere of human affairs
with her work we are in the Age of Enlightenment, Age of Reason, resourcing authority and legitimacy, ideals of individual liberty and progress --> Kate's thinking founded on philosophical fictions of the 18th century (--Foucault--> problematic legacy of the Enlightenment)
•the legecy of 20th century: (Kate's dialectical negativity) to define and work in negative way, an ‘exit,’ a ‘way out’ --> transcendental [---> go to Singh, Khan,]
•question of contemporary reality --> Kate does a totalizing elevation (like many other artists)
•the realm of obedience --> artists’ childish attitude of never accepting someone else's authority (#fighting the system; should we fight the system systematically? @Nicolas)
...................................
basically everything i do is related to the question of reading --> make us better readers
my excessive use of footnote --> the most decisive indication of the concerns of a text are to be found in its margins & no ‘prope[...]
(70)[...notes/midday review.txt]%9.6[...]steem ==> building up
...................................
“nothing is more important in the world than the old ones” [?!]
liberation =/= freedom
•when it comes to liberation (those liberating actions that someone does, ex: women scarf in Iran, etc.), as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else, you just support it
liberation has to do a lot with style, or changing of style
•freesom is totally another thing, much more complicated, sometimes is in the opposite direction of liberation
(i think i might be committed to the freedom of Iranians, not their liberation...)
takhlie ehsas (feelings) =/= takhlie hayajan (emotions ~-> behaiviour)
تعميم
generalization ta'mim --> sign of depression
or --Borges--> a way of abstracttion by forgeting (certain) differences = thinking
the fable of “alem-e bi amal = zanbur-e bi asal” عالم بی عمل، زنبور بیعسل
-this kind of علم ‘knowing’ or knowledge refer to a more personal or subjective understanding of a given problem برداشت
-has nothing to do with scientific knowledge
rubah-palangi-e falak روبه پلنگی فلک
trick-rage of nature
farib (فریب deep in the view of Nezami regarding nature and his own work)
hendu (هندو most used insult word in Nezami)
...................................
•*neurotic: makes a house, doesn't show it to anyone, lives in it alone happy [--> disability to adapt to reality; (neurosis is a descriptive term for ‘hidden psychological mechanisms’ =/= behavior); a form of dissociation: anxiety, hysteria, phobia, repetition, fantasizing, negativity, cynicism, perfectionism,]
◦compulsive need =/= genuine interest in the world
◦neurotic caretaker ==> child develops basic anxiety ==> (imagined) idealized self-image; solution of basic conflict:
◾تسليم compliance --> goodness, love
◾سلطه aggressiveness --> strength, leadership
◾کناره گیر aloofness --> wisdom, independence
•*psychotic: makes a house, take it seriously, invites everyone to come (--> loss of touch with reality)
}=/= richer, more complex, more satisfying personality --> person responds to the world with the full depth of his or her spontaneous feelings
•old world of patience [<== lack of knowledge, sabr konim bebinim chi mishe]
•new [industrial capital] world of opportunity --> proactive (even before action; causing something to happen; world, you set it out;)
my problem with celebrity is problem with the victorious cause, when an other has hardened into an iconic position, and has become inauthentic with oneself
IHOTcgKYWXg 21:25
hoghe bazi حقه بازی babel
eye = pit of babe[...]
(71)[...notes/midday review.txt]%10.2[...]mobtani bar omur-e) beyn-ol-azhajni = common sense
[title]
ajayeb:
کاتب وحی kateb-e vahy
کاتب وحش kateb-e vahsh
کتاب وحی
کتاب وحش
pragmatism --> مصلحت maslahat (chi bayad goft) ==> alternative truth
less concerned with “reality” or good and bad
#project: an experiential field inquiry on how people think about randomness in Tehran.
what was the last little thing or a historical epoch-shaping event that they concider as random?
...................................
(in apass we use constantly) ghias قیاس, and not esteghra استقرا (inductive reasoning)
•استقرا inductive reasoning: X ~=> Y (can be strong or weak) --> epistemic uncertainty (generalizing or extrapolating from specific cases to general rules) [this is related to ‘hypothesis formation' = use of specific observations to make generalizations --(?being replaced by)--> discovery-based sciences, in which ‘hypothesis formation' = data-mining, analysis of (large volumes of) experimental data with the goal of finding new patterns or correlations, and further: machine learning and automated theorem proving }--replacing--> (ajayeb's kind of) “natural history” emerged in 16th century (<== describing and classifying plants, animals, minerals) which is becoming more about popular audiences]
•deductive reasoning: X ==> Y (is valid or invalid) --> کل به جزء (applying reductively general rules that hold over a closed domain of discourse)
•[artist's most used process of reasoning:] صغرى کبرى syllogistic reasoning (قیاس): X =/= Y ==> Z (or: some A are B, some B are C ==> some A are C [which is often wrong], nesbat dadan chizi az yek nafar be deigari نسبت دادن چیزی به دیگری) --> premise's pattern of distribution is the key (~ case)
•abductive conclusions: finding the simplest or most likely explanation for the observations [--> many forms of conclusions are due to the lack of time in the process of reasoning. when we give feedback (‘fast diagnosis’ [--> is that why Lacan is useful?]) in apass we have initially 2 minutes to make conclusions from observations, which later is deepened in the duration of block --> کلی گویی = making sense of what is going here in order to guess what is going on elsewhere]
•
(?am i learning about and moving my art into) formal sciences: language tools concerned with characterizing abstract structures described by sign systems ==> providing information/knowledge about the structures used to describe the world
-a formal logical system with its content targeted at the real things
-all their statements are analytic
=/= synthetic statements (propositions are true by how their meaning relates to the world)
‘natural sciences’ using tools from formal sciences and validated by ‘p[...]
(73)[...notes/midday review.txt]%10.3[...]sed process of reasoning:] صغرى کبرى syllogistic reasoning (قیاس): X =/= Y ==> Z (or: some A are B, some B are C ==> some A are C [which is often wrong], nesbat dadan chizi az yek nafar be deigari نسبت دادن چیزی به دیگری) --> premise's pattern of distribution is the key (~ case)
•abductive conclusions: finding the simplest or most likely explanation for the observations [--> many forms of conclusions are due to the lack of time in the process of reasoning. when we give feedback (‘fast diagnosis’ [--> is that why Lacan is useful?]) in apass we have initially 2 minutes to make conclusions from observations, which later is deepened in the duration of block --> کلی گویی = making sense of what is going here in order to guess what is going on elsewhere]
•
(?am i learning about and moving my art into) formal sciences: language tools concerned with characterizing abstract structures described by sign systems ==> providing information/knowledge about the structures used to describe the world
-a formal logical system with its content targeted at the real things
-all their statements are analytic
=/= synthetic statements (propositions are true by how their meaning relates to the world)
‘natural sciences’ using tools from formal sciences and validated by ‘peer review' = refereeing = *the process of subjecting somebody else's work*
issues with artistic feedback that i have directly encountered:
•our abilities for observation are questionable (--> apprehend what you notice)
•our abilities for induction are questionable (--> movement from observation)
•our abilities for inference are questionable (--> connecting with something other and elsewhere)
•our abilities for questioning are questionable (--> risking what you know + constructing interest)
}--> feedbacks are performative, perspectival, descriptive, discoursive, affective, fabulous, rhetorical, allegorical, experimental, speculative, agonistic, antagonist, sadistic, funny, rude, brute, masochistic, direct, sympathetic,
[two (organic?) ways of learning:]
**learing through networked syntax: meaning emerges as network, something new must be interconnected to others, cognition works in the network: a subject matter must be linked to dozen other things in order to be congnized ==> something disconnected from their network is something meaningless موضوعها به صورت ارتباطات ذهنی مرتبط با هم [--?--> mental intelligence: cannot learn something random]
=/=
**learing through syllable, unconnected unit of something new (an arbitrary syllables هجاهای بیمعنی) can be cognized without previous links [--?--> linguistic intelligence هوش زبانی, can learn new language easy]
}--> [although i am against and strongly hate arbitrary syllables] perhaps we need[...]
(74)[...notes/midday review.txt]%10.4[...]ity 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
-focus on “sedimentation” (--> where is the coexistence of contrasts for them?)
“decontextualization”: their technique of concept-making (==> claims of reality, of nunhuman, etc.)
[decontextualization is a very dangerous way of crafting concepts. there are other ways, committed to the contingencies of the historical material world of multispecies. rigor of conceptualization that i am learning from Stewart is about the *quality of an access to part of a world* =/= decontextualization]--so--> i say we need ‘concepts’ and not ‘philosophy’:
*philosophy (as practiced by M&M and Alex): claiming the nature of reality
*concept: a figure you make in order to do a limited situated work
“conceptualization = fortification” استحکامات
(to fortify one's own work with concepts ==> settlement)
Manning's affinity with infinitly, more, and multi --> what is their rigor is doing for them? commits them to the nonhabitual. (resisting to name their habits, depriving them of thier habitual labors) [=/= my work on descriptive practices]
-i want to know about their empirical tools that make translation-work visible (==> decomposition), not their conceptual descriptions [=/= textured description with thick details <== i really think the devil is in the details!! }--> art of noticing things]
-i want to know how Manning is compromised into desiring what she is doing. [compromise: being exposed or made liable to danger, suspicion, or disrepute. --the way she told the story of her practice had a difficult sense of success in it, of being cool and correct at every turn, uncompromised. (<-- why is this a turn-off for me?)]
for aesthetic, political, ethical reasons i want Manning to address in their work:
•the question of apparatus --> working within an apparatus of thinking in order to get somewhere in a sustained way. i want them to name their apparatus of literary production. how they engage with the interface, data-set, grammar, and literacy of their reservoir.
•the question of infrastructure --> how they balance the possible and the acceptable, the balance of action, tools, and the built environment
•the question of technology --> how they take apart the tool from its context of in[...]
(75)[...notes/midday review.txt]%10.9[...]pt or object. It tends to value what is invisible: a group dynamic, a social situation, a change of energy, a raised consciousness.
hit-and-miss field trips
the more one becomes involved, the harder it is to be objective – especially when a central component of a project concerns the formation of personal relationships
comfortable outsider status: impotent but secure in one's own critical superiority
...................................
only working with (that seems to be) your idea
(the problem of) being always so deliberate and cautious
...................................
Hillman
like the conver of his book (myth of analysis), an internal drama externalized materialized in the media, sci-fi fabulations of violence and war (such as Game of Thrones) are perhaps projects that also craft and give form to what is inside: dragon, torture, journey, landscape, getting caught, etc.
what are art's investments in psychology today?
all (including artists) must envision suffering and illness as something “wrong” =/= the fantasies, feelings, and behavior arising from the imaginal part of ourselves are *archetypal* in their sickness and thus *natural* --> (those odd irrationalities) ***are required for life***
--> then what is there to analyze? (<-- relevant question for apass)
“unconscious” and “psychodynamics” are *fantasies that could be replaced with better ones*
(Hillman's archetypal psychology) **asks the psyche to move with its sickness into life**
(to discover) a sense of soul in the sufferings of Psychopathology : ***something lives in me that is not of my own doing*** (--> demon, psychic force,,,) to take soul with one wherever one goes and to react to life in terms of this soul
symbolic meanings, insights, eros, body, craziness, the *lower aspects of the gods* --> the freedom to imagine and to feel psychic reality
“inner reality” --> called up by ego ==> individuality = to be peculiar, to be peculiarly what one is, with one's own odd patterns of archetypal responses
♥***we are never only persons; we are always also Mothers and Giants and Victims and Heroes and Sleeping Beauties*** (<-- what i am learning from psychoanalysis)
the mythic appears within the language, observation, and theories even of science
recent attempts to move out of analysis: (@Aela)
•group therapy
•sensitivity training (--> apass)
•love-ins
•blowing-the-mind with drugs
•
[*]analysis (is too potent) is too much a part of this century's self conception --requirement--> of ego psychology
([apollonic aim of enlightening consciousness -->] enlightened *egoization* of the psyche =/= *a darker and softer kind of life* ~-> end of neurosis, end of analysis[...]
(76)[...notes/midday review.txt]%11.5[...]ther 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 professional status, our institutional ‘worth,’ the social and cultural capital perceived to be attached to the ‘networks’ in which we operate)
[to interrogate] concepts of artistic labor and value
time, labor, and the creative investment that was embodied within [the object that you make]
[you might start with] requiring a catalogue containing critical essays to institutionally ‘legitimate’ your exhibition --yet--> sophisticated, playful and interesting ways to comment on and engage
*numerous ways in which cultural forms (in this case contemporary art) are simultaneously entangled in a number of spheres of meaning, value and mediation* ==> activate ongoing dialogue
[*]capitalist marketplace:
•people in both established and emerging ‘global’ economies forced to fulfill their everyday needs
•‘the market’ is naturalised and reified within social relations in ways we don't necessarily always recognise or acknowledge --> suffused and sublimated within creative production, our lexicon and gestures
(19th century anthropology's) the idea of [*]alterity: understanding how ‘other,’ ‘primitive’ societies operated ‘outside’ of modernity --assumption--> ‘small scale’ societies exchange (barter, gift exchange, and so on) would always, with evolution, give way to more ‘sophisticated’ means of trade
•Malinowski (study of the Kula ring) --> form of producing and reifying power relations
•Mauss (gift economies) --> gifts as stand alone systems + other kinds of economic structures
•Strathern (Melanesian gift exchange) --> how personhood is a malleable concept that is both implicated in, and created by, conceptions of individuality (tripartite views of people as constituted of a mind, body and spirit), or dividuality (persons as constituted from multiple essences and social relations, including the giving and receiving of gifts) + how gender is both studied and understood in the acts leading up to the performance of gift exchange
•Appadurai () --> ‘things’ have ‘social lives'that can be studied in relation to the different spheres of use
•
}--> (our understanding of) the human capacity for unlimited modes of developing creative forms of exchange and economic systems
...................................
https://mapmagazine.co.uk/notes-contemporary-art-and-anthropology
operations of statecraft:
•queuing in social security offices
•filling in tax forms
•circulation and arrival of letters demanding council t[...]
(77)[...notes/midday review.txt]%11.7[...]s + other kinds of economic structures
•Strathern (Melanesian gift exchange) --> how personhood is a malleable concept that is both implicated in, and created by, conceptions of individuality (tripartite views of people as constituted of a mind, body and spirit), or dividuality (persons as constituted from multiple essences and social relations, including the giving and receiving of gifts) + how gender is both studied and understood in the acts leading up to the performance of gift exchange
•Appadurai () --> ‘things’ have ‘social lives'that can be studied in relation to the different spheres of use
•
}--> (our understanding of) the human capacity for unlimited modes of developing creative forms of exchange and economic systems
...................................
https://mapmagazine.co.uk/notes-contemporary-art-and-anthropology
operations of statecraft:
•queuing in social security offices
•filling in tax forms
•circulation and arrival of letters demanding council tax payments
•census taking
-
}--> social organization that seems so habitual (mundane and ordinary) ==> unreflexively experienced
state's ordinariness --> irresistible enchantment --> overwhelming power ~~> supernatural trance-like experiences state seem to engender in populations =/= state as a rational entity
*capitalist market is a faith-based system* <== concealed practices of divination and the ‘conjuring’ of value and capital from what in many cases are immaterial voids
unmasking of its practices (~= faith + skepticism) ==> state power
mutant forms of technological self-subjugation
(Weber's) magic: coercive proceduralism --> managerial practices that characterise biopolitics
[*]census taking: pre-determined categories (like race, nationality, gender and political persuasion) are set out as objectively existing taxonomies (+ 'data’ manually gathered from individuals to ‘fit’ those categories) and thus summon [a term with magical implications purposefully employed here] a population into being
-McClanahan
census ==> statistics: factish object: hybrid and unstable (possibly inaccurate) yet fetishised and faith-based technologies that possess the ability to transform (the individual parts of social and cultural groups into a sacred somatic whole [~ people/nation])--> biopolitics
-can art succeed in transforming such a ‘whole’ into free and autonomous individual beings?
references to panopticon society
(?which camera angles suggest) naturalization of surveillance culture
[title]
*observational aesthetic* <== convergences of contemporary art and anthropology
...................................
[ajayeb -->] concept or theory --> (a training in) absorption + attention + framing =/= truth effect
[...]
(78)[...notes/midday review.txt]%11.7[...]= state as a rational entity
*capitalist market is a faith-based system* <== concealed practices of divination and the ‘conjuring’ of value and capital from what in many cases are immaterial voids
unmasking of its practices (~= faith + skepticism) ==> state power
mutant forms of technological self-subjugation
(Weber's) magic: coercive proceduralism --> managerial practices that characterise biopolitics
[*]census taking: pre-determined categories (like race, nationality, gender and political persuasion) are set out as objectively existing taxonomies (+ ‘data’ manually gathered from individuals to ‘fit’ those categories) and thus summon [a term with magical implications purposefully employed here] a population into being
-McClanahan
census ==> statistics: factish object: hybrid and unstable (possibly inaccurate) yet fetishised and faith-based technologies that possess the ability to transform (the individual parts of social and cultural groups into a sacred somatic whole [~ people/nation])--> biopolitics
-can art succeed in transforming such a ‘whole’ into free and autonomous individual beings?
references to panopticon society
(?which camera angles suggest) naturalization of surveillance culture
[title]
*observational aesthetic* <== convergences of contemporary art and anthropology
...................................
[ajayeb -->] concept or theory --> (a training in) absorption + attention + framing =/= truth effect
[title]
Whatever Professor
[why apass asked me to do their website's] indexing: (a shrewd and thoughtful creativity in) the first interpretation of a content's body =/= presuming a standard taxonomic form
==>
•surprises
•styles of critical thought generates power in twists of voice and craft
•
allows one please to demonstrate the wonder
“We ask our readers to perform the jamb when language overruns the mental breathing that reading entails.” (Lepselter)
•or, nothing disappears --> You breathe the air you're given. (“I felt ripples from a rape in the seventeenth century, behind a barn somewhere in Romania, where generations later my bitter grandmother disparaged her children without knowing why.”)
•or, words sediment next to something laid low
•or, (index as in) to point sideways --> shifter's only meaning is the object it happens to point to
•drawing figures, hooks, asterisks
•or, placing what's structural, technical, transferential, pulped, leaking, intense
{things: an integrated thin layer to epitomize and abstract in new ways how people are hooked up with their technologies; parsing and criss-crossing some of the built-in categories and new needs of the people who are using it;}
things that do the reading, edi[...]
(79)[...notes/midday review.txt]%11.8[...]egories and new needs of the people who are using it;}
things that do the reading, editing, assembling
*every edit ==> (set off a cascade of:)
•word falls
•Rubik's Cubes
•tropes
•infrastructures
•genres
•rhymes
•off-rhymes
•tonal flips
•half-steps
[compositional listening]
one reads aloud + the others *listening compositionally*
#writing exercise:
following out the impact of things (words, thoughts, people, objects, ideas, worlds) in hundred-word units
theoretical reflections get folded into the analytic, observational, and transferential ways we move
(Stewart + Berlant)
aftershocks of a shock you can't point out
(we shouldn't always ask) “where does the misery come from?”
designers imagined a still life, not a lifeworld where we show up to build things out
>
evaluative critique =? (mental habit of) demagnetizing things (for the sake of clarity)
proliferation of little worlds...
story = relay, weiterleiten, رله
...................................
in fact i have never been working on the notion of nature, my topic of research, rather have been all along zoology
score: creating disorder out of order
@Lilia
wry --> wryly کج معوج شده
...................................
paleonymy (use of a preexisting word in a new context) --> we are stuck with old skeletons neurotic words [that are not mutating] (for example man, woman, animal, black, etc.) [=/= hope for mutation, random emergence, sudden epistemic newness]
(Avital:) *language = the house of being*
(not to think emancipatory -->) we live in language, we are structured and destructed by language
we can struggle, move, shift meanings, but never caver can erase or repress meanings
(Freud showed) that if you think you can be oblivious with things and do away with things and have erasure without remanence, it will go in the state of latency (underground) just to blow up in your face later (the ‘return’ of the repressed has ballistic velocities) --Derrida--> you have to work through with meaning and language (otherwise the old meanings always come back, you are never responsible enough with old meanings)
a word, becomes a thorn in our collective thigh
(what i am learning *rigor* from Avital > Derrida) something looks wrong, (instead of jumping on it and tagging it out,) first say why it is right, what necessitated and motivated it, why it had to be there = rigor: locate the problem zone + say why it had to be there (why it rhymes with what)
(mistake or glitch =/=) error: an exemplary error that teaches you, that had to be made to get where you are going, you had to get into this zone (and[...]
(80)[...notes/midday review.txt]%11.9[...]re going, you had to get into this zone (and as traumatic as it might be) it was neccesory and necessitated by the system that was pushing you forward, it pushed you toward a place of error and blindness and forgetting
...................................
practice of *worldly thinking* with Stewart
vivid pragmatics
weird robust realism of deobjectified deliteralized things =/= ajayeb
to correspond with #telegram media
constitutive differings
teenage: self-division between the move to surge out in a risky worlding and the labor of return alone and weighted
festering + sheltering
“When everything else has gone from my brain—the President’s name, the state capitals, the neighborhoods where I lived, and then my own name and what it was on earth I sought, and then at length the faces of my friends, and finally the faces of my family—when all of this has dissolved, what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that.” Dillard > Stewart
rock-solid otherness
sitting on the granite curb... --Stewart--> sitting on a threshold of expressivity
(Stewart's) intercorporeal intermundane world =/= dull naturalism
(dead matter =/=) the capacity to correspond with a multiplicity of continuous worldings that are both plastic and dense --> grounds us
indeterminate lines of force ripple across the phenomena of a field --> materiality ==> ‘our thought: multidimensional contingent overdetermined’
**we remember in stories of accidents, sledding, and labors**
emerging in circulations (or)
resting in stone (or)
the facades of strip malls
compositional writing: an associational register (of connections and differences) that worlds object-reals [real: a tangle of elements thrown together in a radical composition]
social-material world = composition = prismatic --> for people who are:
•attuned to them (or)
•identified with them (or)
•hostile to their existence (or)
•tired of them (or)
•excited to see their outline on the horizon (or)
•sharply excluded from them (or)
•
the way Attar (in the labor of a worlding) write in Tazkirat al-Awliya : describing a saint's biograpphy, is a world, is a compositional node
matter-form worlding landscape and event --> the saint is is sent into a spin
a perspectival agency --> things jump into relation + unglued
Tazkirat al-Awliya: energies distribute across a field of subjects-objects-bodies-trajectories-affects
accrual and loss
...realm of killed off things
perception, context and cause
located nowhere in particular (or)
in some paranoid hyper-place
under what spell did things hap[...]
(81)[...notes/midday review.txt]%12[...] material event which is efficient, formal, or final
Antique law --> effort to reduce the event to an equation ==permit==> determination of the responsibility: the primary cause ==> to reduce the overwhelming richness of reality in movement
--> in obsessional perspective of scientific research: reduce the quantity of information to make the reality clearer (more coherent) --> (a series of signs in hermeneutical perspective ==permit==>) “the image (the event) =/= the background (the sum of the events)”
(anecdote ~=) myth: an illustrative and contradictory example --> the defense against anxiety (in reality's confusion) : the categorizing of opposites in order to establish orderliness in the world of a search for causes [<-- which is a fable]
==> *the event (at the absence of significance of the signs) would justify the present reality* (==>? integration)
==therapy==> arrange the reality categorically & chronologically + enlarge on the reality by adding information
myth brings into play a purely expressive modality (expressed in an interpretative manner) [=/= explaining] }--> (stoic) perverted causality
[Deleuze:] when the causality relation one of the two elements (cause or effect) differs in nature from the other (one is corporeal, physical and the other is incorporeal) --> [they foster a relationship of] quasi-causality =/= relationship of expression
‘necessity’ belongs to an official order called *destiny: a sort of teleology of the system of causes*, a unity of the correspondent quasi-causality (=/= relation between cause and effect)
--> independence is installed in the presence of necessity
[Leibniz:] *causality = con-possibility*
the event is in a monadic world were everything is signs (analogies significant at several levels) --> a fish pond in which each fish is itself a fish pond
Leibniz's world is created and destroyed by harmonic or discordant correlations
“anxiety as cause”
[Holakouee's manner of interpreting reality -->] best therapy or remedy for anxieties:
•causality
•system: a group of necessary laws and rules
}--> no victim, no bully [~= opening the field of knowledge ~=>? erasing the sense of responsibility]
{Despret}--✕--> our experiences sometimes require us (to go farther that Holakouee's instrumentalism) ****to discover a place where disorder may be reestablished in the movement and contradiction**** [that i believe is urgently needed in Iran today =/= enlightening]
a space regulated by laws of stoic causality is the space where multiplicity can be reestablished --> *notional quasi-causality* [notional: gedanklich, تصور، انديشه]
[an stoic anecdote:]
“When, each evening, the guru sat down to proceed with the evening prayer the ashram's cat was in the way and distra[...]
(82)[...notes/midday review.txt]%12.1[...]ting liveliness
•
the anecdote, which dramatized the dead end where the intervenor's capacities are reduced to non-existence --> can also revitalize the relaional process (if introduced in a new quasi-causal chair)
[anecdote's] circular causal hypothesis which reduce the anxiety create a more accessible reality --> constructing a myth = [*]story: lies which tell the truth**
•anecdote takes it place in a causality chain where it lives for a fleeting moment carrying a *parasitical* or a *paratherapeutic* significance
==> construction of a specific restricting environment in which the parties [family and intervenor, artist and feedbacker] are trapped
--Despret--> ***the reduction [of anecdote] becomes the starting point for a new release of the energy it liberates***(!?)
...................................
Zoological Vandalism: Chimeric 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 r[...]
(83)[...notes/midday review.txt]%12.3[...]tive news is more likely to be perceived as truthful
ambiguous stimuli rated as threatening --> survive
(gestalt) law of closure: we perceive pieces of objects as part of a whole when grouped together
to produce counter-knowledge [~= to contest a problem] =/= (we need more) to *seduce our evacuation from the terms that establish the problem*
(Shapiro)
•stressor ==> emotion (short, intense)
•emotion + meaning (cognitively processed repeatedly) = feeling (lasting, less intense, combined)
•emotions هیجانی + feelings احساسی = [*]affect ~= mood
(in apass)
•concept: a medium of conversation
•narcissistic research
◦understanding narcissism is the key to understanding mental health --> *(the experience of) being in a cult = being in relation with a narcissist*
•mode of attention that is didactic and forensic
•(in artistic research environments) most of time we don't have questions
we have games of language --> illiteracy
◦exam: pose your questions =/= answer to my questions
answers don't show your level of knowledge, but the questions you have does
•generative nature of melancholia [*melancholia ==> teaching*]
•(artist's) writing with pearls of wisdom =/= referential writing
three problematic loci in artistic research:
•garden
•archive
•map
*is every garden zoological? --?--> training for future (imperialism)
good gardener ~= good (feeling, caring) imperialist
-enlightenment approach to captivity --> new sense of civilization (what is proper)
-removing any visible explicit means of captivity (animals appear move freeling, as if they wish to be there) <-- affective engagement
animal ~= border figure allowing institution to move between human world and animal world
science for empire --> mobilization of wonder (human capacity for curiosity that makes us human are mobilized in the service of questionable political goals)
...................................
[*]democracy: ‘farmandahi (commanding) = farmanbari (obeying)’
...................................
...thoughts expire on contact with words as quickly as words expire on contact with thoughts
(Pavic's Khazars)
two examples of metamarketing
1. Pleasantville (1998)
2. The Devil Wears Prada (2006)
(my flourishing in the scholl was always highly) teacher-dependent --?--> being social [=/= genius]
...................................
government (counting heads) =/= complexity (how to make mixity work)
morality --> ‘good =/= bad’ (incarnated in different things) [--> philosophical =/= value system ترجیحات --> sociological]
ethics --> assemblages[...]
(85)[...notes/midday review.txt]%12.6[...]emoving 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 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[...]
(86)[...notes/midday review.txt]%12.7[...]onistic 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), 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[...]
(89)[...notes/midday review.txt]%12.7[...]r 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 عجایبالمخلوقات / عجایب نامه?!)
atlases habituate the eye, they are perforce visual
(what ajayebnameh habituates? not the eye?)
to explicate rival cosmologies
one problem of atlases is that they have to decide what nature is
they all have to solve the problem of choice
atlases of characteristic images presented individual cases as exemplary and illustrative of broader classes and casual processes (but not ajayebnameh عجایب نامه, aj bring precise individual instances in its unique stories)
atlas(es) of(/for) the eye
...................................
[the identity of objects:]
Manuel Delanda: Any materialist philosophy must take as its point of departure the existence of a material world that is independent of our minds. But then it confronts the problem of the origin of the enduring identity of the inhabitants of that world: if the mind is not what gives identity to mountains and rivers, plants and animals, then what does? An old answer is “essences,” the answer given by Aristotle. But if one rejects essentialism then there is no choice but to answer the question like this: all objective entities are products of a historical process, that is, their identity is synthesized or produced as part of cosmological, geological, biological, or social history. This need for a concept of “synthesis” or of “production” is[...]
(93)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%12.8[...]e: competency in the temporal structures governing the syntagmatic order of “followability”
...empirical means to locate the boundaries of capitalism
(to enclose something -->) ontology of the Accounts Book --> Attar's Tazkirat al-Awliya's story of the boy, bird, butcher, accounts book, and the theme of repayment, quittance.
to place everything it does not take into account outside the enclosure and everything it does take into account and that properly belongs to him inside
--> origins of property
...................................
growing interest in *ecology* ==> growing interest in *theology* (--> granted a new relevant)
(Latour's notion of) ecotheology [~= ajayeb]
(how not to consider your self secretly--even under the self-reflectivity--as) the chosen people
renegotiation of values and features:
(if) recently european stopped having been modern ==> the ‘others’ have also stopped having been ‘other’
*the planet will no longer be modernized* (Latour shouting)
geopolitics of difference
“europe" = the modernist great narrative --or--> produce an alternative great narrative of what european cultures (and natures) have been
}--✕--> *contrasting *traits* (that have been elaborated in the course of european history)
“here is my *treasure*, here is my *heart*, if you deprive us of one of these contrasts, we are no longer humans”
to be sensitive to different original origins (=/= eurocentrism)
[different origins that speak also truthfully]
(Olearius drama:) dramatic encounter between the (early) anthropologist's gaze and the various cultures (and natures) he have discovered
...painful history of the anthropologist's gaze
[*]value: what one is ready to die for / what makes life not worth living if one is deprived of it
european history tied to the elaboration of:
•science as value (--✕--> apodictic truth, social construction, etc.)
•law as value (--✕--> power, rhetoric, etc.)
•politics as value (--✕--> [*]social: the name of what is assembled--associated)
•
•
scientific ties
legal ties
political ties
=/= social associates
so difficult to enunciate something religiously because of *the ease with which it is accounted for by other types of explanation* (especially social explanation)
in apass we need to practice saying: “I don't want to take that or this contrast into account any more” (because you want to do something else for a moment)
--> you return to a project --and--> i have been fighting so that (myself and) you **don't become modernist again** (~ that means you engage in the conflict of values that has characterized modernist history)
(with [...]
(95)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%13.6[...] him inside
--> origins of property
...................................
growing interest in *ecology* ==> growing interest in *theology* (--> granted a new relevant)
(Latour's notion of) ecotheology [~= ajayeb]
(how not to consider your self secretly--even under the self-reflectivity--as) the chosen people
renegotiation of values and features:
(if) recently european stopped having been modern ==> the ‘others’ have also stopped having been ‘other’
*the planet will no longer be modernized* (Latour shouting)
geopolitics of difference
“europe" = the modernist great narrative --or--> produce an alternative great narrative of what european cultures (and natures) have been
}--✕--> *contrasting *traits* (that have been elaborated in the course of european history)
“here is my *treasure*, here is my *heart*, if you deprive us of one of these contrasts, we are no longer humans”
to be sensitive to different original origins (=/= eurocentrism)
[different origins that speak also truthfully]
(Olearius drama:) dramatic encounter between the (early) anthropologist's gaze and the various cultures (and natures) he have discovered
...painful history of the anthropologist's gaze
[*]value: what one is ready to die for / what makes life not worth living if one is deprived of it
european history tied to the elaboration of:
•science as value (--✕--> apodictic truth, social construction, etc.)
•law as value (--✕--> power, rhetoric, etc.)
•politics as value (--✕--> [*]social: the name of what is assembled--associated)
•
•
scientific ties
legal ties
political ties
=/= social associates
so difficult to enunciate something religiously because of *the ease with which it is accounted for by other types of explanation* (especially social explanation)
in apass we need to practice saying: “I don't want to take that or this contrast into account any more” (because you want to do something else for a moment)
--> you return to a project --and--> i have been fighting so that (myself and) you **don't become modernist again** (~ that means you engage in the conflict of values that has characterized modernist history)
(with work on ajayeb) i am engaged in the project of ***disentangling the entire set of values that constitutes my rightful inheritance***
(the question of) “what treasure have we inherited? how can we claim it?” --> it is so dangerous to answer those questions alone, without each other ==> selfish identities and origins
(eurocentrism, or the former ‘others’ answering it for everyone, without you)
ecologizing
ecological consciousness =? your entire way of[...]
(96)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%13.6[...]gious passion
?@Leo
-what modernism did to science is worse than what it did to religion
it deprived it of its energy, restricting it, to *mere furniture of the soul* [--> Iron Man's idea of technology-human relation]
modernism's politicization of science
speaking of science scientifically ==> a scientific ‘worldview’ is deployed
speaking of religion religiously ==> a vague assemblage of pious moral vacuities is taken as an ‘alternative worldview’
}--> they both accept an* unscientific science* and an *irreligious religion*
Latour (quickly dissolving nonsense that accrues as one opposes ‘knowledge’ and ‘belief’):
•science = reference chain (what allow access to the far away) [nothing is out of the reach of reference chain]
•religion = presence (what allow access to the near)
science ~/= concrete, worldly, matter-of-fact, present-at-hand, domain of knowledge (<-- political activism has to work with that kind of knowledge)
what use is it to save your soul, if you forfeit the world? --> sci-fi's real frontier & Noah's project
the transcendence and transubstantiation of science
when nature enters, religion has to leave. in two equally fatal exit strategies:
•to limit itself to the inner sanctum of the soul
•to flee into the supernatural --> that religion will try in vain to imitate scientific instruments (<-- The Magicians TV series) + misinterpreted science [==> taking Bible as if it were geology book (<-- look at the rising Hollywood films that scientifize the events of Bible) -- projects of connecting religion to the world]
‘exit religion’: it will have lost any pretence of influencing the course of events, its impact will only be decorative
(Descola:) ‘naturalism’ is only one of four ways in which connections between humans and nonhumans can be established
contrasts:
*reference chain*
*reproduction*
(Latour use of the term) *contrast* = mode of existence
immutable mobiles: to reach something far away through long arrays of instruments, you need to make sure that *necessities and constants are transported* with as little transformation as possible ==> to “reach” those entities
geometry, mathematical entities, inscriptions of all sorts ==> carry heavy-duty immutable mobiles
(Hoda's immutable mobiles are: [?])
[*]matter = highly elaborated, historically dated, and anthropologically situated hybrids***
(=/= ‘transportation of indisputable necessities through chains of cause and effect’ <-- a category mistake)
(for physicist:) “the ways we know the world = the ways in which the world behaves”
(less for chemist)
(not at all for engineer)
([in [...]
(97)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%13.7[...]>
*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
[*]iconoclast: “if they are made, then they cannot be real”
monotheism ==allowed==> humans to escape from a too close adhesion چسبنده to the natural world
[...]
(100)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%13.7[...]selves*)
&
*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
[*]iconoclast: “if they are made, then they cannot be real”
monotheism ==allowed==> humans to escape from a too close adhesion چسبنده to the natural world
Moses's project ==> we have exctracted ourselves from the world
(Assmans:) without the transcendence of monotheism we would be left with the mere immanence of the natural world *** [--> the problem of transcendence/immanence as only options of relatedness]
(a bad story:) secular narratives that: the stark immanence of the natural world will save us from an escapist adherence to the transcendent world of beyond [--✕--> my Zolmat text is was about the problematization of that view (transcendent world of beyond) in Islamicated ecological consciousness in ajayeb]
****to move from ideology to recognition**** (of the many different contrasts we have lived by without granting them enough room)
the drab and entirly mythical drama of light overcoming darkness
religious traditio operates by its abilities of two transformation:
1. a radical transformation of the far away into the close and the proximate [#Zolmat] (dead is alive)
2. a positive view of all artificial transformations (=/= tendencyo conserve what it is)
**what happens if religion is allowed to weave its highly specific form of transcendence (salvation?) into the fabric of the other two modes of existence: reproduction and reference?
Leo's dream (and also deep sin): the urge radically to transform *that which is given* into *that which has to be fully renewed* --> alternative, dream of a different world
[=/= to grasp this world (and only this world) otherwise]
...................................
look at spec over the spectacular
(in[...]
(101)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%13.8[...]*to move from ideology to recognition**** (of the many different contrasts we have lived by without granting them enough room)
the drab and entirly mythical drama of light overcoming darkness
religious traditio operates by its abilities of two transformation:
1. a radical transformation of the far away into the close and the proximate [#Zolmat] (dead is alive)
2. a positive view of all artificial transformations (=/= tendencyo conserve what it is)
**what happens if religion is allowed to weave its highly specific form of transcendence (salvation?) into the fabric of the other two modes of existence: reproduction and reference?
Leo's dream (and also deep sin): the urge radically to transform *that which is given* into *that which has to be fully renewed* --> alternative, dream of a different world
[=/= to grasp this world (and only this world) otherwise]
...................................
look at spec over the spectacular
(in ajayeb)
i can't give you a dialectical conclusion
maybe a mouth-full
...................................
[Paul Shepard]
our perception of animals as the language of nature in Thinking Animals and The Others; the “natural” way of childrearing in Nature and Madness; and the bear as a dominant sacred animal connecting people ceremonially to the earth in The Sacred Paw.
Octavio Paz reminds us: “The past reappears because it is a hidden present. I am speaking of the real past, which is not the same as ‘what took place.’ . . . What took place is indeed the past, yet there is something that . . . takes place but does not wholly recede into the past, a constantly returning present.”
...................................
[Corbin]
it is so dangerous to say any thinker, writer, artist, or phiosopher ‘was of his/her own time.’ nobody has ever been in their own time, never. we are constantly out of time.
things occur in Malakut, not in the time of this world.
it is a matter of 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 ت[...]
(104)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%13.9[...]kut, 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, 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
[...]
(106)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%13.9[...]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, 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
-khiale khallagh خیال خلاق (--> alame mesal عالم مثال =/= alame ajsad عالم اجساد) :
1-khiale mottasel خیال متصل: imagining inherent in human
2-khiale monfasel خیال منفصل: imaginal apart from human
-alame hess عالم حسس: molk ملک --> universe of forgetfulness
Tonekaboni, is against: “mojudate moghayade vahmi faghede tagharor mibashand.” (موجودات مقید وهمی فاقد تقرر میباشند)
--> vahdate vojud وحدت وجود =/= vahdate mojud وحدت موجود
*danger: tarde amre mesali طرد امر مثالی ==> ma'ad dar amre khiali معاد در امر خیالی
death, life, past, and future are not properties of objects, rather of subjects (anha sefate nafs hastand آنها صفات نفس هستند) [Corbin]
and you bestow them to objects that you think they are “dead,” “alive,” “from past,” [...]
(107)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%14[...]ha sefate nafs hastand آنها صفات نفس هستند) [Corbin]
and you bestow them to objects that you think they are “dead,” “alive,” “from past,” or “of future”
“khorre” or “khorne” according to zaratustra: a light originated from the essence of the divine being and because of that some apparitions have gained hierarchy, and each human capable of a certain techne.
the idea of a divine presence in *heikal* هیکل
according to Socrates: bodies are frames and tools of the selves (nofus نفوس)
according to Plato, what the self (nafs نفس) does not had essentially that it had to descend into the material world? what the senses told the self that itself could not say?
an islamic-iranian cosmology:
-jabarut جبروت (alame oghule karubi عالم اقول کروبی) (Nous)
-malakut ملکوت (alame nofus عالم نفوس) (Psyche) --organ--> khiale fa'al خیال فعال (= jesme latife nafs جسم لطیف نفس. niruye khial نیروی خیال is trainded still in middle east. this inter-monde is where mater --> immaterial & immater --> material; jesm ruhani جسم روحانی & ruh jesmani روح جسمانی ==> constant happenings of historic nature ==> Ma'ad معاد) --> amre mesali امر مثالی
-molk ملک (omure mshhud امور مشهود) (Sarx)
[Ashtiani, 2nd vol, p44, footnote]
ensane okhravie daraye badan (انسان اخروی دارای بدن) --> nash'eye jesmanie alame akherat (نشئه جسمانی عالم آخرت)
(baghaye) badane okhravie alame made (بقای بدن اخروی عالم ماده) --> hades zamanie (حادث زمانی)
لطیف latif ~= immaterial
actual/real ~= a dream between earth and sky
asemanhaye napeydaye nojumi آسمانهای ناپیدای نجومی (celectial skies invisible)
dadehaye vahyi دا />
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 [...]
(108)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%14.1[...]s contains “a perpetually hidden message”), ‘Khandan’ (خواندن) meaning in Farsi ‘to read’ or to sing-off a plain of signifiers, is also the verb ‘Darridan,’ (دریدن) [#Derridean acting] meaning to rip apart.
...
I am sorry; I am just entangled in the topologically impossible pardeh, as an interfacial space where the body and instrument of music meet. I am touching with my fingers the ‘first three’ pardehs of Setar ستار, and thinking about to jack into the vague differences between another two magical canvases / magnetic disks: Plane of Destiny (lohe mahfuz لوح محفوظ) and Plane of Memory (lohe hafez لوح حافظ), while listening to the virtual narratives of Ghahveh-Khane theater. Which creatures have you encountered, in your travels, that bypass human installations (of memory)?
...................................
a Zoroastrian data: pre-existential ~ azali ازلی, sabegh-ol-vojud سابق الوجود
atefiate mahsus [عاطفیت محسوس] (queer? a queerness not familiar with mysticism?)
queer is about ‘marahele johare atefi’ (مراحل جوهر عاطفی), mohabat محبت (kindness or love,) without leading to ‘faghre erfani’ (فقر عرفانی)
[i have problem with] (escaping) the ‘pit of nature’ (chahe tabiat چاه طبیعت) in Sohrevardi's thought
-(he inverses the earth from positive to negative geology, sphere becomes pit)
-the project of post-Babylonian autopoietic-self, a self that is defined by the ‘meta-fall’ into the “pit of nature.”
‘andam-shenasi peikare latif’ (اندامشناسی پیکر لطیف)
...................................
[Avital]
what are the ways in which ajayebnameh relates to itself as its own future, its own labor and announced commitments?
(our reading of ajayeb is not a time quiz involving applicability and whether or not one “buys it.”)
i am “drifam “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 interfe[...]
(109)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%14.4[...]t. [...] Neither passive nor active, remaining behind indicates a way of going back, a returning to the source.”
-traveling to the impossible place of the other
-(wind) come and go without touching down or dropping anchor
-the agency, animacy and sentience of the wind is described by ajayeb's sensuous subjects within the wind. one feels enwrapped, enveloped in a sentient being that moves across vast distances, it comes and goes --> the materially textured poetics of description in the ajayeb-e bad باد
the poesy (~ fictional =/= truth, real) (Wahrheit und Dichtung) of ajayeb (are no longer distinguished from each other)
(greeting is the poet/artist's most essential mode of being)
a designed closure or reappropriation that locks the Other into a schema of subjectivity ---- at once promoted and subjected
*(re)fastened to the Greek origin
promoting the ousider to insider (who now holds an Ursprung and origin)
re-appropriation ~=?! an end to alienation {~=?=> the condition of possibility for totalitarianism} [Fynsk]
the illusion (and comfort) of noncastration
...................................
duty of deconstruction: the practice of non-avoidance
(duty =/= your nature)--> the duty of being unwelcomed
vomiting ~= healing
*after the 18th century (seems) all art (artists) wants to be:
•in the privileged place of nonrepresentational work. trying its self with the sublime, that which disturbs and devastates being
•performative = being + doing ~= becoming what it is
() parentheses:
•parental parenthetical remarks
•grammatically set to emphasize --> belonging to the secondary
•whispering ~ “this isn't much, but let me insert, inject”
•disavowal of the text
•denial
•confession
•pumping the text to its opposite meaning
•turns everything around --> a noble feeling
•
(Avital > Nietzsche:) destruction: commitment to futurity
affirms life, clears out the nonsense
=/= devastation: destruction without future
-if you are stuck with monumental history, and if you are burdened, carrying too much baggage (historically, aesthetically) ==> you are weighted down and cannot move forward
the image of hybrid being in ajayebnameh, half animal half human, is being both wild and tamed, vahshi-ram وحشی رام
...................................
(the word) wonder, it worlds.
...................................
work in ajayeb is about the phenomenon of understanding that is to be found in modes of experience that lie outside the universal claims of modern scientific method (--the experiences of art, of philosophy, and of history itself.)
in the hermeneutic universe i am building, Iran is made of [...]
(111)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%15[...]nd of system knowledge
-a giant database ----> do i need to formulate my project into a technological practice?
what is the smallest unit of interest in the ajayeb cosmology?
the practices of relocating germplasms, including people in form of slaves, all over the earth in order to produce surplus that is transported elsewhere for capital accumulation... (Haraway)
industrial agriculture and plantation
to be storied and studied
the holobiont: host plus of all its microbial symbionts that form ecological units
-recasting the individual as a holobiont; the collective genomes
(Lynn Margulis)
holobionts: “multicellular eukaryotes plus their colonies of persistent symbionts”
(Gilbert, Sapp, and Tauber 326; cited by Kenney)
(thinking with holobionts) the immune system is re-cast not as “defensive weaponry” but as a “socializing and unifying force” [via Kenney] --> “to obey the immune system is to become a citizen of the holobiont”
[this new developement of biological individuality (entangled identities at the heart of life mechanisms) in biological sciences of 21st century requires a new imaginative framework and new forms of curiosity equally relevant to natural sciences and artists]
(ajayeb-e gaz) عجایب گاز
co-existence of gasses
planet =/= terrestrial planet
(ajayeb-e graphs) psychotic tree-structure of giant databases, in trans-ing and lines of trans-affecting
-my ajayeb art is going to be the kind that depend on the machine----competent digital
-exploring the iterative and fractal quality of sentences in my digital graph-makings
-attending to the interruptions of syntactical commitments
partial connections (of distinct entities) ~= analogy [analogy allows one part contaminate systematically another part, and vice versa]
-coerced belief
the question of binaries: how we are who we are in relentless relationalities with other entities. in shaping and being shaped by objects, and subject/object is only convenient partial-good-enough for the moment --> **sorting operations** (kPRA0W1kECg), but they are not good descriptions beyond that.
#on Companion Manifesto
(Haraway's) *cyborg*: the “lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.” --to--> a much bigger queer family of *companion species* : becoming-with --> the co-constitutive interpenetration of humans and their others (machines, animals, and the environment).
-Haraway is going from ‘rage’ to ‘love’
“historically challenged people” (Schimpfwort? فحش)
half-trained arguments
embodied cross-species sociality
[...]
(112)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%15.3[...]ial identities and contradictory standpoints.” --to--> a much bigger queer family of *companion species* : becoming-with --> the co-constitutive interpenetration of humans and their others (machines, animals, and the environment).
-Haraway is going from ‘rage’ to ‘love’
“historically challenged people” (Schimpfwort? فحش)
half-trained arguments
embodied cross-species sociality
I am trying to inhabit ajayeb critically; neither in celebration nor condemnation (like my sister asked)
what is my context? isis, tech-sci, art, world-wars, stories, terror,
the figures of ajayeb that i am cultivating, do they “more fruitfully inform livable politics and ontologies in current life worlds”?
ajayeb's species bring together human and nonhuman, organic and technological, history and myth, freedom and structure, state and subject, ...
*concrete:
◦a concrescence (growth by assimilation, nemov moshtarek نمو مشترک) of prehensions (seizing, perception but not necessarily cognition) of prehensions (graspings, chang zadan چنگ زدن)
◦an actual occasion
=> beings do not preexist their relatings
the verb of reality is full of nouns with appendages
nature/culture: *local category abstractions* (=/= universal: misplaced concreteness)
subject/object: *potent consequences* (=/= preexisting foundations)
foundation is always contingent (Haraway > Butler)
•scale is contingent
•mutability is contingent
bestiary of agencies
kinds of relatings
in my work on ajayeb i am trying to carefully approach the notions of:
emergence, process, historicity, difference, specificity
-and by that teach myself an artful practice rich with:
co-habitation, co-constitution, contingency
on-the-ground work:
-Verran # Nigeria Yoruba --> “emergent ontologies,” “get on together” (...how can *general* knowledge be nurtured in postcolonial worlds committed to taking *difference* seriously?”)
-Thompson # Kenya --> “ontological choreographies” (...bodies, human and nonhuman, are taken apart and put together in processes)
-Strathern # Papua New Guinean --> “partial connections” (...patterns within which the players are neither wholes nor parts ... necessary counter-intuitive geometries and incongruent translations)
what kind of refigurations i need for the tropic work that feel is required for the for ontological choreography of ajayeb (in technoscience or elsewhere? 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?
[...]
(113)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%15.4[...]orists, 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 call]; [~-> what Tarof hails?] ---- for Althusser being aware of the other is a form of ideology. (how to recognize ourselv[...]
(114)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%15.5[...]e 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 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 quest
thinking about animals as “other worlds” in a science fictional sense
scientifically informed, empirically grounded practice
theory ...still a limited discourse and a rough instrument
“who is at home?” --> ask in respect for all of time who and what are emerging in relationship --> (the obligation to ask) who are present and who are emergent? ***
(what are our) categorical labor
labor of training --> somehow all the participants of training are remodeled by it
labor of scale-making
(these are world-making practices, storytellings)
significant otherness-in-connection =/= intention-ascribing idioms of literalist anthropomorphism that sees furry humans in animal bodies and measures their worth in scales of similarity to the rights-bearing, humanist subjects of Western philosophy and political theory ==> assign privileges or guardianship (in place of owner[...]
(115)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%15.6[...]abor
labor of training --> somehow all the participants of training are remodeled by it
labor of scale-making
(these are world-making practices, storytellings)
significant otherness-in-connection =/= intention-ascribing idioms of literalist anthropomorphism that sees furry humans in animal bodies and measures their worth in scales of similarity to the rights-bearing, humanist subjects of Western philosophy and political theory ==> assign privileges or guardianship (in place of ownership) in a modernist great chain of being
*action: beautiful, hard, specific, personal;
=/= abstract scales
differential sensibility =?=> situated emergence =?=> more livable worlds ~ ontological choreography
category of “rights” don't just exist (preformed to be uncovered,) rather we enter into a rights relationship with an other (animal or human)--> Hearne's “reciprocal possession”
-morality is a species-specific capacity
~ if i have X, my X has a human (which is me)
off-leash and cliff-enclosed @Varinia
(Haraway:) time-space scales co-constituted by human, animal, and inanimate agencies
1. evolutionary time (at the level of the planet earth) --> naturalcultural species
2. face-to-face time (at the scale of individual lifetimes) --> mortal bodies
3. historical time (at the scale of decades, populations, nations)
to tell (detailed love and training) stories at these levels
this is about distributed agencies in “layers of locals and globals,”
...................................
my interests lies really with the ecological cosmologies in my neighborhood (iran, old, middle east, far east, past, present,)
that is why i was interested in the birds of Attar, pig of san'an, wolf of the pigs, crow of the partridge, and so on.
so things take positions in our bigger semiotic material world, there is never just a life animal on the plate, the chicken has become killable first through linguistic interpretive representation network of semiotic relations. so my question in the birds performance was that how the excess of meaning is related in actuality to the removal of corporeality in Attar's non-birdness Simurgh (سیمرغ) till the chicken in khoresh-e morgh (خورشت مرغ).
...................................
[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 existence
embryonic homologies --> unity of type
==> “descent with modification” (or decent modifications)
[(embryology =/=) ‘fire’ could transform matters, “change” their class, their type and its unity --> “parvaneh sho!” (پروانه شو) Rumi مولوی wants embryology undermine[...]
(116)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%15.7[...] time (at the scale of individual lifetimes) --> mortal bodies
3. historical time (at the scale of decades, populations, nations)
to tell (detailed love and training) stories at these levels
this is about distributed agencies in “layers of locals and globals,”
...................................
my interests lies really with the ecological cosmologies in my neighborhood (iran, old, middle east, far east, past, present,)
that is why i was interested in the birds of Attar, pig of san'an, wolf of the pigs, crow of the partridge, and so on.
so things take positions in our bigger semiotic material world, there is never just a life animal on the plate, the chicken has become killable first through linguistic interpretive representation network of semiotic relations. so my question in the birds performance was that how the excess of meaning is related in actuality to the removal of corporeality in Attar's non-birdness Simurgh (سیمرغ) till the chicken in khoresh-e morgh (خورشت مرغ).
...................................
[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 existence
embryonic homologies --> unity of type
==> “descent with modification” (or decent modifications)
[(embryology =/=) ‘fire’ could transform matters, “change” their class, their type and its unity --> “parvaneh sho!” (پروانه شو) Rumi مولوی wants embryology undermined?]
construct phylogenies
(phylogeny : branching out evolutionarily)
‘Haeckel claimed that Darwin's ideas included the progressive development of species. “Development and progress” was what characterized evolution. The explicit association of evolution with particular political, religious, and racial views became the hallmark of Haeckel's career. Haeckel proposed a causal parallelism between the embryological development and phylogeny. His “Biogenetic Law” that “Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny” was based on the idea that the successive (and to him, progressive) origin of new species was based on the same laws as the successive and progressive origin of new embryonic structures. Just as the earlier stages of human development developed into the later stages, so earlier species evolved into the later ones. Natural selection would eventually get rid of the earlier species. (In the Welträtsel, Haeckel [1899] would also proclaim that the more evolved humans [i.e., the Aryans] would out-compete and eliminate the more primitive races.) To Haeckel, the evolution of the animal kingdom was the same as individual development not only because the laws behind each were the same but also because the entire animal kingdom was an individual. Here, he was harking back to the views of the Naturp[...]
(117)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%15.7[...])
we (always) remain in contamination [never in innocence --> be attentive to the tropes and will to innocence in each other act text]
in our questioning and studies we (must) remain enmeshed, in a historical conjunction, in a situated way of being “this way” and not “that way”
...................................
[Stengers]
[a kind of] writing (not writing down)
writing is an experience of metamorphic transformation
to discover how to be compromised by ajayeb Nameh
the ways we can be lured into desiring and trusting it
how the assemblages of ajayeb generate metamorphic transformations in our capacity to affect and be affected? --> to feel, think, and imagine
...................................
[Serres]
ajayeb, a time when transport and itinerary were only myth
...................................
[Anand]
the sanctity and blessing of Muslim saints was integrally linked to local ecology and topography
that sanctification of birds and stones alerts us to an Indic and Islamic vision of humans in which we are not separated from and hierarchically superior to nature. Rather, the boundaries that separate stones, animals, humans and gods are porous as well as being non-hierarchical--making possible a “lateral” moral aspiration, where birds and stones can be moral exemplars for humans.
The interlinked sacrality of both ecology and cosmology, of ‘kudrat’ (~ power of nature?) is common to both Hindus and Muslims. ‘Kudrat’ is thus the cosmological aspect of north India's Invisible Religion.
There is a long Islamic tradition of seeing Nature as full of the signs (ayat آیات) of the work and presence of God. The Qur'anic verse “Withersoever you turn, there is the Face of God ( Qur'an 2: 115)” has traditionally been interpreted by the Sufis as meaning that the “order of nature is nothing but the Divine Reality manifesting itself on the plane of phenomenal existence (Nasr 1996, 62).”
description of the garden ---- [accounts of the heaven are filled with descriptions of springs and wells, tanks and streams, gardens and trees and flowers] --> recreating of heaven on earth was tight with natural and animal life forms
where a text or these texts (ajayeb's text and world) is *acclaimed*? today and before, by who? Indo-Pakistan sub-continent? South-Asia? Indo-Iranian regions?
***([who were the] agents through which ‘natural’ responses [to its impulses] are said to operate[?])
the hierarchy of created things [...]
apex in the righteous man, reaches down into the abyss of the inanimate by many gradations (Benjamin 1969b, 104)
“undiminished contact with the creatural, even with its petrified, inanimate, lowliest stratum, that of the sto[...]
(118)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%16[...]>
[storytelling is material practice]
[where there is a situated perspectives there is storytelling]
it is “practicing generous reading”
and “technique of refiguration” --> create alternative forms of knowledge
[figuration ~ storytelling apparatuses]
(Haraway, Primate Vision)
•“Attention to narrative is not instead of attention to science, ...”
•[there is no way that we can] escape the particular pleasures and dangers embedded in the story-laden sciences.
•[what are the things that] could only be explained by cultural, not scientific, genealogies [?] --> ideological apparition[s]
•Something new was required to account for change; the logic informed a kind of paternal creation myth [........] unchanging “matrix” for the generative principle of change. (In Zihlman's story logic, both gathering and hunting emerged as repatternings, not opposites, in changed conditions of constraint and opportunity. Narratives of both gathering and hunting ways of life produced genders and citizens.)
•tool-weapon equation in masculinist scientific narratives
as careful scrutiny of wonders and marvels becomes a mainstay in European intellectual life, 17th century natural philosophers began to understand *wonder, *curiosity, and *attention as cloesly aligned and mutually defining.
epistemological beast fable
unnatural history
knowledge-making practices of other times and places
tracing the web of horror and delight
Serres reminds us the beast fable tradition is as much about biomimicry as anthropomorphizing.
finding ways of “going-on together” (Verran)
“by experience and by affinity, some of us begin not with Pasteur, but with the monster, the outcast” (S. Leigh Star)
(ajayeb's) (politics of) administering discrete objects ----(number sys)
(why should we engage in refiguration?)
(there are always a) multitude of agencies unfolding as the world is continuously reconfigured (=/= to explain away: when multiple objects are collapsed into one.)
-“Within this dynamic world it is impossible to imagine that one single story or one narrative style can capture all of the liveliness and exuberance; ***we need to deploy multiple stories about agency. Some meticulously empirical, some imaginative. Some on the quantum scale, some on the people scale. Different agential narratives enable different ways of responding and relating.” (Kenney)
postcolonial moments: “occasions for theorizing, for telling differences and samenesses 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 v[...]
(124)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%16.2[...]ind of responsibilities are activated in the SF worlding (including reading it now) of ajayeb?
(work on ajayeb is about a practice of [writing] history as) *worlding the past*, to take the alterity of the past seriously and to be moved by textual encounter
-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 [...]
(126)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%16.5[...]ed 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 differently)
can the ontological be addressed without the ethical?
(feminism's answer is ‘no’) --> a materialism that is immediately ontological, epistemological, and ethical (=/=? Delanda's materialism)
ajayeb (+ my work on it ?) is a pragmatic project to fabricate a different kind of knowledge assemblage (Stengers > Kenney > Sina)
=/= (21st century) logics of capitalism
=/= toxic categories of modernity
i need (to learn) an inviting rhetoric
(Roughgarden)
([focus narrowly on] sexual [...]
(128)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%16.5[...]e of studies where the “[raw] data are mined to effect an appearance of the confirmation of [a single] hypothesis”) ----she returns to the most potent fables of 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 h[...]
(131)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%16.6[...] be called empirical, it is an example of an archival research (done by historian.) i wan to highlight the aesthetic quality of this activity.
*aesthetics: how elements are arranged together, how they are composed, how they are brought into relation in the space of a text (Kenney > Latour, Stengers, Bellacasa) (--> La Guin's bag, bundle) }--> rigs
**aesthetics are political because they do consequential relational work**
novels, poetry, feminist theory, speculative fiction, bestiary list categories--these genres of composition *gather together* and *stage* their “matters of care” in ways that perform relations between things and teach their readers to inhabit sometimes unfamiliar, agential world. they are practices of sf worlding.
fiction ==> attitude --> holds things
(emphasis on) worlds that come together through dispersal (vofur وفور), induction (makesh مکش), volatility (farar فرّار), toxicity, drift,
the power that comes with ‘other’ (time/place of) styles of composing
(*bestiary is agential world*, that's why it is so interesting when you are available to it as a child. i am drawn to it --> agency bestiary sets to betray the anthropocentric binary: “active human =/= passive nature”)
(how to tell?) faithful and fantastic stories ==> better companion species
*a shift in humanities scholarship
(feminist science studies, the post humanities, the ecological humanities, animal studies, queer theory,) humanities scholars have represented their matters of care with an aesthetic (and therefore political) commitment to narrating stories with an emphasis on the relationality among agencies, forces, phenomena, and entities usually kept separate, in the background, or out of the story altogether (lde a Bellacasa)
--> redistribution of agencies
political stake ==> aesthetic tactics
poet laureates of queer animacies
“malek"malek-o-sho'ara-e atefiate mahsus-e edrakat-e zende” (ملک الشعرا عاطفیات محسوس ادراکات زنده)
(animacy: Usually, animacy has to do with how alive or how sentient a noun is. In general, personal pronouns have the highest animacy, the first-person being the highest among them. Other humans follow them, and animals, plants, natural forces such as winds, concrete things, and abstract things follow in this order; however, according to the spiritual beliefs of the people whose language possesses an animacy hierarchy, deities, spirits, or certain types of animal or plant may be ranked very highly in the hierarchy.)
**animacy stories --> multitude of agencies
(what are the contemporary ajayeb animacy stories?
(neo-Darwinian's) standard evolutionary accounts of encounter between species (in terms of “sexual deception”) ==> individuation, competition, efficiency --> capitalist and military values (, econo[...]
(132)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%16.8[...]br />
(*bestiary is agential world*, that's why it is so interesting when you are available to it as a child. i am drawn to it --> agency bestiary sets to betray the anthropocentric binary: “active human =/= passive nature”)
(how to tell?) faithful and fantastic stories ==> better companion species
*a shift in humanities scholarship
(feminist science studies, the post humanities, the ecological humanities, animal studies, queer theory,) humanities scholars have represented their matters of care with an aesthetic (and therefore political) commitment to narrating stories with an emphasis on the relationality among agencies, forces, phenomena, and entities usually kept separate, in the background, or out of the story altogether (lde a Bellacasa)
--> redistribution of agencies
political stake ==> aesthetic tactics
poet laureates of queer animacies
“malek-o-sho'ara-e atefiate mahsus-e edrakat-e zende” (ملک الشعرا عاطفیات محسوس ادراکات زنده)
(animacy: Usually, animacy has to do with how alive or how sentient a noun is. In general, personal pronouns have the highest animacy, the first-person being the highest among them. Other humans follow them, and animals, plants, natural forces such as winds, concrete things, and abstract things follow in this order; however, according to the spiritual beliefs of the people whose language possesses an animacy hierarchy, deities, spirits, or certain types of animal or plant may be ranked very highly in the hierarchy.)
**animacy stories --> multitude of agencies
(what are the contemporary ajayeb animacy stories?
(neo-Darwinian's) standard evolutionary accounts of encounter between species (in terms of “sexual deception”) ==> individuation, competition, efficiency --> capitalist and military values (, economic tropes)
==> disenchanted “ecologies, populated by blind, reactive automations”
evolutionary stories =/= involutionary stories --> organisms become *involved* with one another's lives
(involution, pich-dar پیچدار, act or an instance of enfolding or entangling, an inward curvature or penetration; a function, transformation, or operator that is equal to its inverse, i.e. which gives the identity when applied to itself.)
“mimetic relations among plants and animals take shape in the thickness of the space between bodies, where affect and sensations are *transduced* through *excitable* tissues” (Myers & Hustak)--> affective ecologies, intimate encounters, articulate orchids
(on ajayeb,) ***creating sticky new attachment sites for thinking (human/nonhuman relations)***
###learning multiple writing tactics:
•thick description
•refiguring
•reading against the grain
•citational poaching (shekar-e gheir-mojaz شکار غیر مجاز) (also, i am t[...]
(133)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%16.8[...]ion”
(ruby: yaghute sorkh یاقوت سرخ) ~-> to describe the effect of an encounter between two
...shifting verbs to nouns and nouns to verb }--> practical
*relational properties of language:
•viscosity (chasbandegi چسبندگی)
•conductivity
•velocity
(=/= daunting)
-collective
-exploratory
-supportive
(what to do with) the unavoidable childishness (and girlish) of wonder and of fables
-does wonder need to grow up?
there is a risk that that which awakens our epistemological appetite will ultimately 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
trans
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
*desi[...]
(134)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%17.1[...] 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 idea that thinking involves disembodiment of the knowing organ is just insane.]
“articulating bodies to other bodies” ----> disarticulating bodies to rearticulate other bodies
entangled assemblages of relatings knotted at many scales and times with other assemblages, organic and not
...................................
ajayeb is system imagination
...................................
[Naveeda Khan]
Perhaps the question could be posed as, how do we come to grips with the universal, the supra-historical, or even the cosmos within our global present, imagining a local that lays claims upon all three?
is there a Muslim environmental imaginary?
‘Islamic ecology and environmental ethics’ --> the need to center a vibrant materiality or the liveliness of things in the anthropology of Islam (that has been to date largely preoccupied with Muslim polities and subjec[...]
(135)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%17.2[...] singularity to the global, intensifying efforts that began with “Of Children and Jinn.” [source: https://culanth.org/curated_collections/19-everyday-islam/discussions/20-interview-with-naveeda-khan-about-of-children-and-jinn]
...................................
(what i am reading in ajayeb)_with Naveeda: “Muslim cosmology and eschatology hold promoise of ecological thought, providing an unexpectedly materialist perspective on our creaturely interconnectedness.”
[ajayeb (and telegram) is full of] gestures of incorporating repugnant [offensive to the mind] others---that one sees reflections on divine creation qua [als] creaturliness
thoroughly disabused
aufklären آگاهیدن آگاییدن
expound تفسیر
incentive مشوق, فتنه انگيز
litany مناجات وعبادت تهليل دار
showmanship (نمايشگرى?)
effektvolle Darstellung, Schauspielproduktion
queasy به طور تهوع آوری لطیف مزاج
(a gedture of) ludic [playfull, spielerisch] transcendence of [the] present
obdurate سرسخت
-showing unfeeling resistance to tender feelings-
(picture of the world as) pristine nature طبیعت بکر being destroyed by humans (--> narcissistic?)
=/= view of theology/religion on ecology
=/= (stories of humans and dogs:) shared creatureliness and companionship entailing a turn to cofeasting on the flesh of the world --> mutual fate
does islamic theology (in both elite and popular belief) offers us a way toward *sensing our embeddedness in this world* ?
-might ajayeb (creationist?) narratives be generative of interconnections between humans and other animals within the predominant muslim context?
-why climate science doesn't/hasn't effect a meaningful engagement with the world? --> an image of thought that is not interiorized***
(Strauss: *thought is always in the world.* being in the world subsumes realms of both abstractness and concreteness) -->[a tradition of thought that produces (& works with): “Abstraktheit =/= Greifbarkeit"]
***how ajayeb naratives provided the filaments of (muslim) ecological thought as a perspective on our interconnectedness and mutual entanglements? [Naveeda, Anand, ]
(wanting a) most perfect creation (to leave the best part to the end*) ==> God created humans last of all ==> consigned humans to a state of *belatedness to the world*
(unapologetically) anthropocentric: *making the human drama the most important one to watch*
acts of worship (that bears witness to):
•regularity in nature
•one's own nature
(agian) Khidr, the prophet in green, who is associated with hermeticism and also has a presence [...] as a way to suggest a subterranean connection between [...] textual tradition and the everyday live[...]
(136)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%17.3[...]s:) shared creatureliness and companionship entailing a turn to cofeasting on the flesh of the world --> mutual fate
does islamic theology (in both elite and popular belief) offers us a way toward *sensing our embeddedness in this world* ?
-might ajayeb (creationist?) narratives be generative of interconnections between humans and other animals within the predominant muslim context?
-why climate science doesn't/hasn't effect a meaningful engagement with the world? --> an image of thought that is not interiorized***
(Strauss: *thought is always in the world.* being in the world subsumes realms of both abstractness and concreteness) -->[a tradition of thought that produces (& works with): “Abstraktheit =/= Greifbarkeit"]
***how ajayeb naratives provided the filaments of (muslim) ecological thought as a perspective on our interconnectedness and mutual entanglements? [Naveeda, Anand, ]
(wanting a) most perfect creation (to leave the best part to the end*) ==> God created humans last of all ==> consigned humans to a state of *belatedness to the world*
(unapologetically) anthropocentric: *making the human drama the most important one to watch*
acts of worship (that bears witness to):
•regularity in nature
•one's own nature
(agian) Khidr, the prophet in green, who is associated with hermeticism and also has a presence [...] as a way to suggest a subterranean connection between [...] textual tradition and the everyday lives of riparian (رود کنارى) Muslims [...]
riparian context ساحل کنار ,رود کنار ,حریم رودخانه
[context =? کنار]
“BE!” بععععع بع ع ع ع ع ع ع ع ع
Ikhwan: every creature knows and speaks of creation
that knowledge is not privilege of humans
that it is the failure of humans to imagine that they live in the presence of mute nature
نکیر و منکر interrogations by Nakir and Munkar, faith-testers of deads in their graves
دجال Dajjal as a dead body returned to life, many will follow him, but as dogs!
-return of humans as dogs --> idea of rebirth --> not homogeneously muslim space
“[who is] compelled to return as if it were a cosmic debt they owed the world”
-pathos of the inability of humans to sustain cross-species companionship --> the visceral dislike of the dregs of the many existence of dogs
--> dogs’ quality of aliveness; being more or less useless other than the occasional and fitful دمدمى protection of households that made them serve as the singular sign of life, a trace of God's surplus creativity. (Naveeda's work in chauras)
one's future animal self
(هشتاد ساله) octogenarian mindful of life's finitude
-what do you say/do when your feet is one on the land breaking beneath and the oth[...]
(137)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%17.4[...]at produces (& works with): “Abstraktheit =/= Greifbarkeit"]
***how ajayeb naratives provided the filaments of (muslim) ecological thought as a perspective on our interconnectedness and mutual entanglements? [Naveeda, Anand, ]
(wanting a) most perfect creation (to leave the best part to the end*) ==> God created humans last of all ==> consigned humans to a state of *belatedness to the world*
(unapologetically) anthropocentric: *making the human drama the most important one to watch*
acts of worship (that bears witness to):
•regularity in nature
•one's own nature
(agian) Khidr, the prophet in green, who is associated with hermeticism and also has a presence [...] as a way to suggest a subterranean connection between [...] textual tradition and the everyday lives of riparian (رود کنارى) Muslims [...]
riparian context ساحل کنار ,رود کنار ,حریم رودخانه
[context =? کنار]
“BE!” بععععع بع ع ع ع ع ع ع ع ع
Ikhwan: every creature knows and speaks of creation
that knowledge is not privilege of humans
that it is the failure of humans to imagine that they live in the presence of mute nature
نکیر و منکر interrogations by Nakir and Munkar, faith-testers of deads in their graves
دجال Dajjal as a dead body returned to life, many will follow him, but as dogs!
-return of humans as dogs --> idea of rebirth --> not homogeneously muslim space
“[who is] compelled to return as if it were a cosmic debt they owed the world”
-pathos of the inability of humans to sustain cross-species companionship --> the visceral dislike of the dregs of the many existence of dogs
--> dogs’ quality of aliveness; being more or less useless other than the occasional and fitful دمدمى protection of households that made them serve as the singular sign of life, a trace of God's surplus creativity. (Naveeda's work in chauras)
one's future animal self
(هشتاد ساله) octogenarian mindful of life's finitude
-what do you say/do when your feet is one on the land breaking beneath and the other in the afterlife?
-polysemy of imagery and wordss
“earth breaks so much” --> ?>
suggesting a چاره (chareh)
inflection of chareh and fetrat
چاره ی فطرت
***ajayeb's heterogeneously muslim spaces
•traces of Hindu, Chinese, Greek interest and thought
•occasion for cross-species sentience (Naveeda's beautiful research in chars)
visiting of shobhe to the town
(shobhe gave the town a visit)
شبهه
شبح شبهه
bringing bits and pieces of songs from many places... over their cell phones... being well versed in the different types of music to be[...]
(139)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%17.4[...]d bodies disrupts the composed mental image of the ideal corpse within [...] funereal practices
*odors introduce terror or the terror of the uncontained within the social* (Neveeda > Siegel 1983)
double-edgeed prospect
common curse
“in the riparian contextm land forms and breaks with regular irregularity” [--> #entropy]
shifting its course, the river inducts new affectees into how to live (this way)
-there is a manner in which life proceeds--instead of feeling in step with it one begins to feel out of sync***
#start a geographic learning, riparian thought; thinking by rivers (& not countries)
_->{.\_,;,_/;-=,/
rural cosmology
cosmology of modern science
human conception: flirtation with the failure to arrive
#two moveis:
•Exodus: Riddly Scott + Creation Bible + Big Bang + extinction theory + fluid animation research
•Noah: Nolan + Creation Bible + Darwin + motion graphic research
--> solving a problem proposed by _?_ }--> “the dream catcher” !!!
(in these cinematic examples we see the society imposed to the same spatiotemporal representational framework that science “discovers” in nature)
the insistent entanglements of physicality with the metaphysical
soil: earth rendered in the scientific register
“The alluvial sediments that come in the waters of the Jamuna river either become deposited as silt across floodplains or fall in the river to become ‘chars’” (Naveeda Khan 2014)
...the time of the arrival of clay is not assured
the inability to perpetuate human life*
the materialist metaphysics of Creation in non-elite belief
“you should not let a dog lick you.”
or “pigeon feather containing 40 different microbial diseases.” #clean
or “they are very dirty and will pass their germs to you.”
cross-species fraternity to the assertion of superiority over all animals
pragmatic + theological spoke:
1- divine privileging of humans
2- human right to transcend the ordinary (--> to aspire to God's position)
...lush growth of eucalyptus trees at the edge of the market
--> yesssss things that grow on the edges <-- my life-long attention (the cat who entered the house, the ants, the plants in Tehran, ...) [<== because of my own marginalized being?]
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 [...]
(140)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%17.6[...] in misunderstanding’ is precisely both cognitive and political aspect of what I am trying to bring forth) ~-> (how language-learning with animals can help us learn) restating and inverting the question of control
*exchange can only be achieved when there is “a continous reprisal of translations and betrayals of meaning”* ==> understanding itself is compromised
[*]ajayeb: a non-stop betrayal of translations (of perspectives) and continuous redressal of meanings (of things)
“as if” has to do with misunderstanding
“meanings are constructed in a constant movement of ‘attunement,’ which makes them emerge.”
(Despret, animal breeding practices)
(my work on ajayeb is also much about) *language-learning* [...]in its pragmatic function: it is an effective means of acting and of making others act
keep your end up
[*]type: identifying language use with modes of existence [Wittgenstein's mistake] (maybe useful to reanimate the question of ‘becoming’ for Marialena)
the mode of existence of lions is subordinated to that of an essence “lioness,” guaranteed by the identity of the species and the stability of its repertoire of behaviour ==> a burdensome conception of the naturalness of animals
***the question is not what ‘is’ a lion, but “how does one become a lion,” not only in lion community and species, but also in the work of scientists, constructing what it is to be a lion.
--> this is about becoming: of that of which the animal is rendered capable by the apparatuses that interrogate it
how can what I say about lions or baboons (or oceans or jinns) be authorized by them?
[*]we: constituted by the assemblage of different (animal-, nonhuman-, machine-, human-)beings equipped with an apparatus aimed at making them talk well --{by taking an interest in what constitutes the appropriateness of a material apparatus that transforms those it interrogates}--> fully agreeing to situate oneself in a regime of transformations and accomplishments =={that mingle with and give form to}==> *desires*
-researcher's desire is one the modes of their efficacity
-“our” problems are not a priori
a “we”:
+ “know full well”
+ “are different”
+ “who work”
rhetorics of pronouns, acts of crude generalizations: something is being specified and something generalized. [@Xiri's “I am the one who... your...” the specificity and generality of “I” and of “you” in her text. how the difference of “you” and “I” was envisaged in her poem?-->{I, the effected by =/= you, the haver} how can this I/you impose itself not as the effect of a strong-arm tactic? =/=? I want to find out how to live together; refuse to deepen the contrast between “us” and “them"] [in Xiri's poem: who/what makes her pronouns?] [to address people ‘as’ refugees, subjugated, poor, or victim, to[...]
(141)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%17.9[...]◦one doesn't interpret
•one experiments
•
--> these are perhaps non-immediate form of knowledge
--> these practices inscribe the animal and human in the world of “speaking” [@Marialena]
--> these are “perspectives” that “populate” our world
(each) [*]perspective is made up of translation of intentions*
(animal breeders are perspectivists)
situations of the exchange ~= situations of subjectivity --> adopting perspectives (--> <--) judge intentions }--> ‘response’
[*]intersubjectivity: accepting the proposal of subjectivity; becoming what the other suggests; acting in the manner in which the other addresses you [--> my apass bow and arrow, was about this suggestivity]
the apparatus of question (that you suggest,) activates some modes of existence rather than others
...shared perspectives, shared intelligences and intentions, resemblances, inversions and exchanges of properties (between humans and animals)
...................................
my practice and work on ajayeb is grounded in the history and materiality of scientific practices
...................................
(ajayeb's) particular and exceptional nature
...................................
(Despret)
“anthropo-zoo-genetic” : a practice that constructs animals and human
(how can i design an apparatus for ajayeb) to perform availability?
(build) questions that construe and construct signs that ‘make a world’ for the animal (entity of the ajayeb)
-how can i offer possible interesting becoming to the animals of ajayeb, in offering a way for them to articulate the system, (not to make a system that articulates them)
(in experimenting with ajayeb) how can i involve my body, involve my knowledge, involve my responsibility, involve my future?
-how to let them adopt me?
-to produce an ajayeb body to allow a ajayeb world to affect me
the world of ajayeb is a richly articulated world =/= a world of enthusiastic automata (one who is only moved by itself) observing strange and mute creatures
...................................
[Mersad al-ebad] tabaye-i طبایعی (materialist)
historical specificity(s) of animal-human relationship
(worst-)translated science
...................................
[Haraway, Queering the non/human]
‘companion’ [she starts by showing the danger of the term like any other term]
reducing type is among other things at the heart of racism
types: colonised, enslaved, non-citizen, animal, refugee, [etc.], typological female reduced to her reproductive function,
secular semiotics (never nourished us?)
queering: the job of undoing ‘normal’ categories, [sorting operations]
[...]
(142)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%18.1[...] ajayeb world to affect me
the world of ajayeb is a richly articulated world =/= a world of enthusiastic automata (one who is only moved by itself) observing strange and mute creatures
...................................
[Mersad al-ebad] tabaye-i طبایعی (materialist)
historical specificity(s) of animal-human relationship
(worst-)translated science
...................................
[Haraway, Queering the non/human]
‘companion’ [she starts by showing the danger of the term like any other term]
reducing type is among other things at the heart of racism
types: colonised, enslaved, non-citizen, animal, refugee, [etc.], typological female reduced to her reproductive function,
secular semiotics (never nourished us?)
queering: the job of undoing ‘normal’ categories, [sorting operations]
...patterning, consequences, and the possibility of response.
queer, off-category, sf worlding
(what are the SF worldings of ajayeb?--SF as building alternative ontologies. finding absent but possible presents--whether presented as elsewheres or other times. “[...]an elsewhere from which different [...] articulations of naturecultures and alterity could be explored.”)
“The one who would be normal, in a category of his own” --> ends badly
(human scientist's) deadly one-way test: unable to recognize the presence of the trapped one --> (for him) no one is at home in the categorically Other
[Seed Bag]
...the problem of destruction and wounded flourishing--not simply survival--in exile, diaspora, abduction, and transportation--the earthly gift-burden of the descendents of slaves, refugees, immigrants, travelers, and of the indigenous too.
(In the feminist SF mode,) matter is never “mere” medium to the “informing” seed;
Homebody / traveler
...disruptive details of good stories that don't know how to finish
...................................
[Barad]
[...] 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?
(wha[...]
(143)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%18.2[...]e categorically Other
[Seed Bag]
...the problem of destruction and wounded flourishing--not simply survival--in exile, diaspora, abduction, and transportation--the earthly gift-burden of the descendents of slaves, refugees, immigrants, travelers, and of the indigenous too.
(In the feminist SF mode,) matter is never “mere” medium to the “informing” seed;
Homebody / traveler
...disruptive details of good stories that don't know how to finish
...................................
[Barad]
[...] 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"[...]
(144)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%18.3[...]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, identity formation, and power
% Austin's speech acts, relationships between saying and doing --> Derrida's poststructuralist amendments --> Butler (with Foucault's understanding of the productive effects of regulatory power) in theorizing the notion of identity performativity {@Xiri, we understand gender not as a thing or a set of free-floating attributes, not as an essence--but rather as a “doing”: “gender is itself a kind of becoming or activity ... gender ought not to be conceived as a noun or a substantial thing or a static cultural marker, but rather as an incessant and repeated action of some sort” --> with this regard what questions should Xiri ask her subjects?}
{ practice of representation =/= represented entity }--> this “=/=” is ontological ==> question of accuracy (of representation) --> scientific knowledge objectivity
focus on the nature & production of scientific knowledge (--> mediates our access to the material world) --(science-studies)--> dynamics of the actual practice of science }--> ongoing patterns of situated activity
-*origins of “appearance”*-
...with Democritus's atomic theory emerges the possibility of a gap between representation and presented. (the idea that something “appears”)
-Democritus:
•atomism (-->? cornerstone of modern science)
•democracy (-->? cornerstone of modern politics)
}--> the idea that the world is composed of individuals with separately attributable properties**** (==> Newtonian physics of independent objects, @Heike)
*Newtonian framework --> meaphysics of individualism
1- that the world is composed of individual objects with individually determinate boundaries and properties whose well-defined values can be represented by abstract universal concepts that have determinate meanings independent of the specifices of practice (--this is exactly what Marialena should be carefull about: abstract univerality of ‘language,’ and the independency of her ‘recorder’)
2- that measurement involves continuous determinable interactions such as the values of the properties obtained can properly be assigned to the premeasurement properties of objects separate from the agencies of observation
(*)concept: specific material arrangements, concepts are defined by the circumstances required for their measurement
(is Luisa's “wholesomeness” also about a feeling for inseparability?)
deployments of power <--> body--{bodies, functions, physiological processes, sens[...]
(146)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%18.4[...]s**** (==> Newtonian physics of independent objects, @Heike)
*Newtonian framework --> meaphysics of individualism
1- that the world is composed of individual objects with individually determinate boundaries and properties whose well-defined values can be represented by abstract universal concepts that have determinate meanings independent of the specifices of practice (--this is exactly what Marialena should be carefull about: abstract univerality of ‘language,’ and the independency of her ‘recorder’)
2- that measurement involves continuous determinable interactions such as the values of the properties obtained can properly be assigned to the premeasurement properties of objects separate from the agencies of observation
(*)concept: specific material arrangements, concepts are defined by the circumstances required for their measurement
(is Luisa's “wholesomeness” also about a feeling for inseparability?)
deployments of power <--> body--{bodies, functions, physiological processes, sensations, pleasures,}
matter is not an end product, rather an active factor in further materializations
(*** matter materializes ***)
matter's ongoing historicity
precise causal nature of productive practices ==> differential constitutions are marked
ajayeb: a host of material-discursive forces
*for ajayeb i need to rework notions of:
•discursive practices
•materialization
•agency
•causality
*without:
•resorting to the optics of transparency
•the geometric of absolute exteriority or interiority
•theorization of human as either pure cause or pure effect
*any entity's ontology (its cast identity) is always open for future's reworkings* (Barad)
adding a Greek fused syntactical molding to the individual, ‘trans-’ is not enough, we have to make the postulation of individuality unthinkable, and that needs work
{how to make things unthinkable? not available to think with. what should be an “unthinkable” theory of relations?}
(Descartes's epistemology --> representationalist structure of words, knowers, and things)--> transparency of measurement (transparency of language) =/= Bohr's epistemological framework (after his empirical findings of an inherent discontinuity in measurement ----%> wave-particle duality paradox) ~-> Barad's “causal relationship between specific exclusionary practices embodied as specific material configurations of the world [~= discursive practices, (con)figurations rather than “words"] and specific material phenomena [~= relations rather than “things"]”
(*)position (~ specific physical arguments, [=/= well-defined abstract concepts, inherit attribute of independently existing objects]---> go to critique of ‘positionality’)
“position” only has meanin[...]
(147)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%18.4[...]hen a rigid apparatus with fixed parts is used (for example a ruler is nailed to a fixed table in the laboratory ==> establishing a fixed frame of reference for specifying “position.”) --> any measurement of “position” using this apparatus cannot be attributed to some abstract independently existing “object” but rather is a property of the ‘phenomenon’ : ***the inseparability of “observed object” and “agencies of observation”***
--> simultaneous indeterminacy of “position” and “momentum” [*momentum*: material arrangement involving movable parts] [--> deconstructing the material exclusion of “position” and “momentum"]
(*)phenomena: primary epistemological unit, the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting “components” (Barad); ontologically primitive relations; relations without preexisting ‘relata’(~= mutual ontological dependencies =/= independent entities)
•(specific) intra-action ==> relata-within-phenomena
•(specific) agential intra-action ==> boundaries and properties of components of phenomena become determinate }~= phenomena
(*)apparatus = phenomena [=/= inscription devices, scientific instruments set in place before the action, machines that mediate the dialectic of resistance and accommodation, neutral probes of natural world, structures that deterministically impose some particular outcome,]
-apparatus: “dynamic (re)configurings of the world, specific agential practices/intra-actions/performances through which specific exclusionary boundaries are enacted”
(perpetually) open to:
•rearrangements
•rearticulations
•(and other) reworkings (--> [in my amazon project:] getting the instrumentation to work in a particular way for a particular purpose)
(boundaries are always ‘enacted,’ not ‘made’)
(*)reality: “things"-in-phenomena, ongoing ebb and flow of agency *****
-shifting boundaries and properties that stabilize and destabilize
(*)world: a dynamic process of intra-activity in the “ongoing reconfiguring of locally determinate causal structures” [~= contingency] with determinate boundaries, properties, meanings, and patterns of marks on bodies *****
(*)universe: agential intra-activity in its becoming
(*)word: material-discursive practices ==> boundaries are constituted (for example the differential constitution of “humans” and “nonhumans”; @Varinia)
==> meaning (=/= ideational, andisheyi اندیشهای) --> specific material (re)configuring of the world
(*)discourse: that which constrains and enables what can be said, practices that define what counts as meaningful (statement)***
(learning from Foucault, discursive practices are the local sociohistorical [=/= transcendental, phenomenological, ideational] material conditions that enable and constrain disciplinary knowledge practices) *actual historically situated social conditions:[...]
(148)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%18.5[...]relation of absolute exteriority between (nor an idealistic collapse of) a “causal apparatus” and a “body effected” ----> ****an ongoing topological dynamics that enfolds the spacetime manifold upon itself**** <== apparatuses of bodily production are also part of the phenomena they produce
}--> **future is radically open at every turn** (Barad) [@Hoda --> her notion of overdetermination (جبر jabr?) --> what if she use “constraint” instead of “determinist”? esrar/ezterar ]--> enactment of a causal structure : particular possibilities for acting exist at every moment
-a term for Hoda: “causally deterministic power structures”
(*)agency: changes in the apparatuses of bodily production***
enactment of iterative changes to particular practices through the dynamics of intra-activity
(*)objectivity: being accountable to marks on bodies (=/= exteriority)
agential separability ==> objectivity
(Barad, Haraway, Kirby, Rouse, Bohr:) 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 cle[...]
(149)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%18.7[...]h the dynamics of intra-activity
(*)objectivity: being accountable to marks on bodies (=/= exteriority)
agential separability ==> objectivity
(Barad, Haraway, Kirby, Rouse, Bohr:) 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 dime[...]
(151)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%18.7[...]eud, 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 model cannot be closed off by a final reading, it engenders, in its turn, a supplementary figural superposition which narrates the unreadability of the prior narration.”
the analytic experience has a narrative character? psychoanalytic dialogue ‘uncovers’ a certain kind of narrative discontinuity maintained in the analysand's efforts
--> meaningful narrative sequences,
and, recaptured memory : a rhetorical product
...................................
-the dominance of the narrative ‘The Origin’ [Ursprung] when we tell nature story, when we call in nature
-the dominance of the narrative ‘The Zoom’ when we tell nature story, (‘The Reveal’ story)
-
ok, it is 06.03.2017, i need to set up a track of commentary, a monogamous relation with ajayeb
and unload the myth that i am going to do something new:
1st: send super-ego away and cleared out --> no judgment
2nd: call the unengaged secretary to just write
3rd: throw some sort of sequencing on the page
4th: call the clean-up agent
5th: at some point super-ego comes and checks it out
6th: negotiation with the super-ego
(Avital,) start modest and small, listening to my passion, collects some texts or passages that hold this or that motif that i like or am concerned with, go in there and do a rhetorical reading, see what is going on in the language, allow myself be instructed and taught.
7th: wrap around the work, something of an *infomercial,* there i can get a little ego in there, bring myself to the table and situate myself in the world of art/scholarship/thinking/creativity/etc. and say where i am, what question do i bring to the table, what would be my question mark, i am at the table taking my place and this is my question mark, situate myself (=/= autistic, dar-khod-mandegi در خود ماندگی; i can't spin out as kind of rouge and solitary satellite that no one can connect with. i have to make the connections, in a world that is having debates and discursive encounters around my themes. i am *in conversation* --> responding, quoting, tuning,) standing up for myself and my text, “fake it till you make [...]
(152)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%18.8[...]that no one can connect with. i have to make the connections, in a world that is having debates and discursive encounters around my themes. i am *in conversation* --> responding, quoting, tuning,) standing up for myself and my text, “fake it till you make it,” yes i need to renarcissize and build up, at this phase towards the end i need to perform being assertive and show what i have brought to the table, and if i don't know that then i ask someone to tell me what have i done? where does it belong? how can i situate myself?
8th: sleep-walk, don't look down, don't wake myself up, don't ask why i am doing this
9th: (problematically Deleuzian:) *becoming woman*! (for Deleuze) all writing involves you (no matter how you are gendered or constructed or what you think you are) in becoming woman, which is to say the experience of a powerful submission and the ability to carry off the disappearance of agency or ego kick, subjecting oneself (to the other) before becoming subject.
[(Hayward) woman: vibratory being: sensation <~~(creative-response)~~> environment]
زن شو
...................................
wunderkammer, cabinet of curiosities, is about the world unfinished
...................................
the prefixial nature of ‘trans-’ : across, into, through : a prepositional force
Trans* foregrounds and intensifies the prehensile (گیرکننده), prefixial (pishvandi پیشوندی) nature of ‘trans-’ and implies a suffixial (pasvandi پسوندی) space of attachment that is simultaneously generalizable and abstract yet its function can be enacted only when taken up by particular objects (Hayward & Weinstein)
trans* (prepositionally oriented) “is the process through which thingness and beingness are constituted” [...] “marking the ‘with,’ ‘through,’ ‘of,’ ‘in,’ and ‘across’ that make life possible”
•materializes prepositional movements
the ‘human on board’ no longer possesses critical purchase, it no longer “delineates a normative standard of legibility,” “the elite status of being considered fully human” (how is it in ajayeb?)
(biopolitics of) de-, in-, non-, trans-
a ‘turn’ (= a cause to move, a difference in position ==> a change in nature) enables creatures to migrate from the margins to the center of theoretical interrogatives
Haraway prefering (the energetic expressive capacity of) ‘with’ over ‘and’
-syntactical problem of ‘and’ raised to the power of n
-she puts the emphasis on with-ness --> to reinvigorate (tajdide niru تجدید نیرو) attention to materiality but also matter's contingent force --> intersectional demands of assemblage
“and...and...and”
trans, speciating technology, the drive for suffixial endpoints
(prepositional operations on suffixiated) assemblages of spacetimematterings
**** terrible violence is directed [...]
(155)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%18.9[...]ming subject.
[(Hayward) woman: vibratory being: sensation <~~(creative-response)~~> environment]
زن شو
...................................
wunderkammer, cabinet of curiosities, is about the world unfinished
...................................
the prefixial nature of ‘trans-’ : across, into, through : a prepositional force
Trans* foregrounds and intensifies the prehensile (گیرکننده), prefixial (pishvandi پیشوندی) nature of ‘trans-’ and implies a suffixial (pasvandi پسوندی) space of attachment that is simultaneously generalizable and abstract yet its function can be enacted only when taken up by particular objects (Hayward & Weinstein)
trans* (prepositionally oriented) “is the process through which thingness and beingness are constituted” [...] “marking the ‘with,’ ‘through,’ ‘of,’ ‘in,’ and ‘across’ that make life possible”
•materializes prepositional movements
the ‘human on board’ no longer possesses critical purchase, it no longer “delineates a normative standard of legibility,” “the elite status of being considered fully human” (how is it in ajayeb?)
(biopolitics of) de-, in-, non-, trans-
a ‘turn’ (= a cause to move, a difference in position ==> a change in nature) enables creatures to migrate from the margins to the center of theoretical interrogatives
Haraway prefering (the energetic expressive capacity of) ‘with’ over ‘and’
-syntactical problem of ‘and’ raised to the power of n
-she puts the emphasis on with-ness --> to reinvigorate (tajdide niru تجدید نیرو) attention to materiality but also matter's contingent force --> intersectional demands of assemblage
“and...and...and”
trans, speciating technology, the drive for suffixial endpoints
(prepositional operations on suffixiated) assemblages of spacetimematterings
**** terrible violence is directed to the non-existing, the never having existed
‘*’ (the asterisk) is paratactic (faghede ravabet فاقد روابط) (=/= conjunction,) it designates multiplication, it repurposes, displaces, renames, replicates, and intensifies terms, adding yet more texture, increased vitalization
-it is a sensuous node
-making (my points) a composite of affects and percepts --> speciation is always a cultivated response ***
*trap: “means also mouth, or mode of utterance; it is the “O” curve of lips and throat that makes sounds phonic and names the apprehension of becoming bodily. A trap, in weaving, is also a break in the threads, an unraveling, loosening, unwinding that opens up space. When we think of spider webs, trap is a silk net, a sticky mesh that registers sensation. For the spider, its trap is its nearby-ness, its where-ness, its with-ness. [--> lure;] (Hayward & Weinstein)
-how, then, might we hear the phrase “trapped in the wrong bo[...]
(157)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%18.9[...]-as an environment sickens and dies we harbor the loss
(hope =/= salvation)
...learning a new grammar of animacy (with Hayward)
“[...]memories of excess and delight, freaks, fright, and exploitations. Too much sugar. Surprise. And disappointment. Larger than life. Grotesque. Alluring. Captivating. Calling. Their juxtaposition in this contradictory scape of sea, desert, and mountains--surreal”
(the mer-creature) a living condensation and displacement of what people imagined as real
...how little is needed to prompt the imagination: paint, wheels, and wood.
(US/Mexico or land/ocean borders...) a space about who and what cannot move, of who and what falls apart, or of who and what is lost
...................................
(the inter- and trans-action of) learning, playing and thought
in ajayeb what are the:
•animacy hierarchies (--Chen)
>
•exposed and transparent conditions of possibility (--Hayward) ==> becomings and assemblages
•ontological fixities
•enactment of large-scale fantasies (--Chen)
•
...................................
(Mehran Rad) on description of spring
kofr کفر <--> “nature” (tabi'at طبيعت) <---> bahar بهار <--> bot-khane بت خانه
Manuchehri: نوبهار آمد و آورد گل و یاسمنا باغ همچون تبت و راغ بسان عدنا http://ganjoor.net/manoochehri/divanm/ghaside-ghete/sh1/
Hafez: کنون که در چمن آمد گل از عدم به وجود بنفشه در قدم او نهاد سر به سجود http://ganjoor.net/hafez/ghazal/sh219/
=/= durdastha دوردستها, beyonds
donya دنیا <--> gozar گذر
-->? materialist
Nezami:
بهاری داری ازوی بر خور امروز که هر فصلی نخواهد بود نوروز
گلی کو را نبوید آدمی زاد چو هنگام خزان آید برد باد
(ruse, san'at صنعت -->) hile حیله =/= sho'bade شعبده (shab-bazi شب بازی, neyrang نیرنگ,)
lahn-haye jahan
لحنهای جهان
...................................
(feral?) table of contents
how we know that contents are tabled at all? --> inheritances of taxonomy, natural philosophies 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 {t[...]
(158)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%19.3[...]nt of large-scale fantasies (--Chen)
•
...................................
(Mehran Rad) on description of spring
kofr کفر <--> “nature” (tabi'at طبيعت) <---> bahar بهار <--> bot-khane بت خانه
Manuchehri: نوبهار آمد و آورد گل و یاسمنا باغ همچون تبت و راغ بسان عدنا http://ganjoor.net/manoochehri/divanm/ghaside-ghete/sh1/
Hafez: کنون که در چمن آمد گل از عدم به وجود بنفشه در قدم او نهاد سر به سجود http://ganjoor.net/hafez/ghazal/sh219/
=/= durdastha دوردستها, beyonds
donya دنیا <--> gozar گذر
-->? materialist
Nezami:
بهاری داری ازوی بر خور امروز که هر فصلی نخواهد بود نوروز
گلی کو را نبوید آدمی زاد چو هنگام خزان آید برد باد
(ruse, san'at صنعت -->) hile حیله =/= sho'bade شعبده (shab-bazi شب بازی, neyrang نیرنگ,)
lahn-haye jahan
لحنهای جهان
...................................
(feral?) table of contents
how we know that contents are tabled at all? --> inheritances of taxonomy, natural philosophies 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-a[...]
(159)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%19.3[...]ecome 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 recursively) unstable and living tropes* --> we should probably redefine our (creaturely) subjects in correspondence to (Leibnizian) ‘quasi-causes’
quasi-feral
the ‘unexpected’ often unfolds in an unexpected way. (Despert > Leibniz)
anthropomorphism is always someone's anthropomorphism
anthropomorphism is always someone's common sense
{(becoming interested in) individual (detailed nuances of) difference =/= when “model” becomes the goal}--> standard model (of natural science) --> a presupposed specific idea of “science” --> use a technical, highly theoretical language ==> epistemological objectification of animals (--> representation of animals as natural objects) ~= desubjectified animals
(safeguards of) authorship and meaning (won't allow Attar) ==ask==> |X| what is your “subject” interested in? what matters to them?
(Attar never looked for varieties--in anecdotes, in little stories, in individual bird biographies -->{these are the materials that I am collecting from my family telegram group posted animal videos})
thinking with the bird
looking with it (=/= looking at it) --and--> and knowing its intentions
both humans and nonhumans create narratives, rather than just telling them. (there are socialities in which) they both create/disclose new scripts ~~--> inhabiting an existential world ~-> full of actors and living adventures, that give them:
•a history
•a bibliography
•a personality
•
(and) a full repertoire of:
•will
•intention
•agency
•
to recreate similarities between scientific and mundane practices (<-- neccesory for making companionship)
*agency is an equipment
*(greeting) rituals ~=perform==> social links* --> assess reliability
--> I am interested in ritual in its mundane sense =/= performance-art ritual {*}--> who are they in the (becoming in) ritual? (--> who is “Evamaria” in her performance-art ritual?) --> which meaning you embody?
the difference between response and reaction (not so clear [as I t[...]
(160)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%19.7[...]sk)--> ***the performer is a social subject*** : (category changes in everyday life)
•when I am by myself: I am an orangutan, sometimes snake, I am ‘something’
•when I am with others: I turn to human
•when I am “objective”: I am off-category, I am not ‘something’ (-super strange!)
}==> the ‘Other’ [not only the police officer,] always estizah (interpellation استيضاح) you(?)
it is very interesting the way Despret is working (on the field) with Haraway's (intuitive genius) analysis
scientist's will to be ‘no-one’ that would prevent any interaction
(Despret's constructivist and non-relativist translation of ‘the ways animals act are the consequences of the observer's gaze’:) *animal actions are responsible consequences*
[(*)performance: the responsible consequence of a (no less) responsible gaze]
...................................
Verran, knowledge economy
knowledger always authored
cross-cultural knowledge practices
-physis, “I bring forth”, “I produce”, “I make to grow” (=/= “techne” in Aristotlian sense)
X-physis: a process which sticks out in the direction X --> how this morpheme has come to mean (since mid-15th century) “form” and “nature”? (this is about thinking of making)
“physis” requires the different perspectives of the four causes (aitia):
•material --> source of matter
•efficient --> power/motion
•formal --> containing its form
•final --> end
zoopoiesis --> zoopoetics, explorations of how animals (zoo) shape the making of text, study of ‘the literary animal’
...................................
Katie King
“flexible knowledges” on the edge of validity ♥ (--> almost invalid*)
fantasy of education
culture wars
intellectual enterpreneurs
upheavals and connectivities of globalization
changing patterns of interaction
(aren't we here to) change the patterns of interaction
(aren't we here to) change the faith of letters and love stories
reenactments (are fantasy practices and realities) =/= simple, accessible, and democratized (knowledge)
“layers of locals and globals”
[somehow I couldn't feel in his long term project what is Kobe's relation to] (processes and their product that require) developing and learning new skills, pleasures, and communities
-at the end many of us (are busy with or) want to (or inhabit the “will to”) modelling reality
this is also what ajayeb was busy with
***we are always doing both “purification” and “hybridization”
[]we direct our attention simultaneously to the work of purification and the work of hybridization ==> we immediately stop being wholly modern --> *our future begins to change* / *our past begins to change*
[my wo[...]
(162)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%19.8[...] 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 purpose simply by being performed*
#shath, shathiat ==> tazkirat, --->{ what the saints of Tasavof (reported by Attar-{his “virtual witnessing” of “awliya” اولیا as a “realized"}, Quakers [as illegal nonconformist sect]) put together was their own writing technology infrastructure** ==> **routinization of charisma** <-- organizational structure ["advices and queries” نف[...]
(163)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20.1[...] 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
•Haraway appropriating the idea of modest witness for her own feminist purpose
•
three technologies for fact-making (that Shapin and Schaffer name):
1. material
2. literary
3. social
Adrian Johns in The Nature of The Book: particular booksellers could indeed use their *stewardship* of such heterogeneous spaces to further political ideals and interests. behind the scenes and up the stairs, an interested London bookseller became a significant actor in cultural events.
nominal agency
actual person
principle architect
systems move in space, time, and process
some archaeological structures (that one uncover) are stable, some in motion, some evolving, some decaying [...]
(164)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20.2[...]araway appropriating the idea of modest witness for her own feminist purpose
•
three technologies for fact-making (that Shapin and Schaffer name):
1. material
2. literary
3. social
Adrian Johns in The Nature of The Book: particular booksellers could indeed use their *stewardship* of such heterogeneous spaces to further political ideals and interests. behind the scenes and up the stairs, an interested London bookseller became a significant actor in cultural events.
nominal agency
actual person
principle architect
systems move in space, time, and process
some archaeological structures (that one uncover) are stable, some in motion, some evolving, some decaying --> *“there is no way of ever getting access to the past except through classification systems of one sort or another”* (at best) the past could be reordered to better reflect multiple constituencies now and then. (Bowker + Leigh Star)
(my ajayeb research: “epistemic virtues” [or powers] of the 12th century encyclopedic wonder-books,) “epistemological decorum” --> (to capture) “truth-making practices in action” (Shapin)
==> (my commitment to ajayeb:) engendering reflection on the nature of and function of categorization itself
a wonderful bit of meta-language
The Exhausted Receiver
Margaret Cavendish description of a new world, called the Blazing World, her own brand of natural philosophy under the guise of a romance... science for ladies{
1- enthusiasm ==> new science
2- study of natural philosophy ==> cardinal virtues of ladies, modesty and religious reverence
3- leisure activity, appropriate pasttime
*she participated in discussions central to her life and times* (am i participating 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 c[...]
(165)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20.3[...] 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 chaste and modest woman --> *female modesty was of the body; the new masculine virtue had to be of the mind* [women's presence turns out to disrupt the experiment (of the scientist or sufi) altogether] (“[...]best of women, pious, chaste, modest, and compassionate, are rendered unfit for science by the very qualities that make them the best of women”)
(Haraway, why credible witnessing is still at stake:) “this is the culture within which contingent facts [= the real case about the world, the object world] can be established with all the authority, but none of the considerable problems, of transcendental truth. this self-invisibility is the specifically modern, European, masculine, scientific form of the virtue of modesty. this is the form of modesty that pays off its practitioners in the coin of epistemological and social power. *this kind of modesty is one of the founding virtues of what we call modernity.* [...] and so he is endowed with the r[...]
(168)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20.3[...]ibed as a horizon of likes. to have our likes means *certain things are gathered around us*
[what about “beyond”? =/= near-sphere Zolmat]
[*]orientation: registers the proximity of objects as well as shape what is proximate to the body
(Robin:) happiness does not have an object
(Freud:) anxiety does not have an object
=/= (Ahmed:) correspondence between objects and feelings is not any simple ~~--> proximity, “unattributed happiness”
[...] <-- ( us )"subject” --> ( ♥ )"object”
things --move--> us --make--> things ~~> ...
@Arjang, how happiness is displaced by the how of its arrival
(happiness can often recede or become anxious, when the feeling becomes an object of thought)
what it means for happiness to be thought in these terms (as an end for its own sake)
what it means for apparatus to be thought in these terms (of Agamben)
what it means for ocean to be thought in these terms (of Marialena)
in Islam, how does the good life get imagined through the proximity of objects?
[*]taste: “manifest preferences”: “practical affirmation of an inevitable difference” (Bourdieu)
history becomes second-nature ==> affects become literal ==> (we assume we experience delight because) “it” is delightful
(often with animals) the affective differentiation ==(basis of)==> (an essentially) moral economy
cheerfulness is the most communicative of emotions (♥ Ahmed)
(Ahmed's take on) loving (happily): knowing the peculiarity of a loved other's likes and dislikes, an intimacy with what the other likes and is given --> on conditions that such likes do not take us outside a *shared horizon*
***who/what introduces what feelings to whom?***
‘question of power' = do you go along with it?
sometimes the Iranian orientation is toward maximal comfort of the others
(maintaining) ‘comfort' = (your or some) bodies “go along with it”
bond-->{ affect ==> we search for an object }
...certain objects already circulate as socila goods before we “happen” upon them --> we do not just find happy objects anywhere (--> how happy objects are found in Tasavof? located, lost, transported, sold, advertised, criticized, etc.) *happy objects point us somewhere, a “where” from which we expect so much (--> happy objects of Tasavof [or HOT] {Qur'an, khezr, woman, poetry, .../ قرآن / خضر / زن / شعر}-->their sense of values, practice, styles, and aspirations; where do they point Iranians? beyond, Zolmat, animal, shadow, everyday objects, etc. what are the feelings involving the “points” of alignment wuth these objects?) ~~--> relocation of expectations:
•from beyond to earth
•from global to local
•from future to now
•<[...]
(169)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20.6[...]mmon (which is usually the case in the environments that I am involved with,) how do I usually play a role? ==> (re)location of responsibility
self-exclusion
to make Iran or India or Germany happy “in bed”
(@Sina) *what ever there is in the hear and now, it does not mean you do not have to rebel or not get into trouble.
idiosyncratic likes (or dislikes) =/= jouissance
Ahmed reading many narratives of freedom, in which an indifference is “directed” as the apparent gift of freedom (, father becomes indifferent to what her daughter does as long as it makes her happy) --> the unhappy objects of difference
fantasies of proximity (in sense8 TV series) --> if only we could be closer, we would be as one
the happiness of the characters of sense8 is the promise of “the one”
...................................
how to learn to read the discursive practices of being of ajayeb? the ways each being proposes its own (or another's) changing geometry and topology, their boundary-drawing practices, their differential productions, and how each being makes sense of its world
-(the authors and beings of ajayeb,) what are their capacity to discern the reality of their (relational) nature?
-how their determinate position (in their relational nature) is or may be (usefully) (con)figured as *specific connectivity*? [the question of specific connectivites of ajayeb]--> this requires from me poetics: diffractive descriptive acts
-what are the ajayeb's beings and mine intertwined practices of knowing and being?
the agential cut of the brittlestar is a survival kit: the arm is “cut” and becomes part of the other (predator)
Barad is reading the brittlestar to rework (challenge conventional conceptions of) her discipline's ontologies and boundaries =/= scientist's usual frame of application and amusement of “discovery” that feeds technological advancement, “the excitement and romantic overtones that inevitably accompany the story of the scientist as explorer breaking into new frontiers” (Barad)
(embodiment-->) *bodies are not situated in the world. They are ‘of’ the world (in its dynamic specificity)* (Barad) (@Femke)
[*]objectivity
=/= occupying a determinate position in a given environment
=/= occupying a particular coordinates in space and time, in culture, and in history
=/= seeing from somewhere [=/= “objectivism” (view from nowhere) or “everywhere” (relativism)]
=/=
(like Barad's brittlestars) which ajayeb's being's bodily dynamism resists (or constructs) the familiar notion that space is preexisting container:
•space: a stage on which actors take their place
•time: the mere uniform ticking of clock
(how ajayeb's worlding is similar or different than the familiar notion of Shakespeare's “world is a stag[...]
(170)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20.7[...]ority between ontologically and epistemologically distinct kinds =/= ajayeb's diffractive differential materializations
perhaps that arm that got detached from you, could have a chance of not becoming a jettison phantom limb forever haunting the missing amputated ‘you,’ rather, a part of “companion species being helping out”? --> *connectivity does not require physical contiguity* (@Luisa's string “theory”)
[*phantom limb* (a concept every theorist/artist should take seriously), in Descartes: used as an illustration of the deception to which the inner senses are prone.
“fossil images,” persistence of pathological excitation to the peripheral nerves. (the condition of ‘amputees’ for the one who re-members and builds archives for his phantasmatically lost limb) *imaginary loss of a penis* --> a “tool” for a recovery of what was “always already” missing --> Freud: libidinal memorial to the lost limb (@Elen's kind of mourning for preoedipal (~= precastrated) body, and her (erroneous) localization of it on the motorbike)
Grosz: “It is only through controlled use of the phantom that the artificial limb can (gradually) take the place of the lost limb”
#body image]
ecologies of reflection and diffraction --> resolution of nature
[*]diffraction: an effect that limits the ability of a lens (or a system of lenses) *to resolve an image*
•(to evolve a creative tension,) a trade-off, between the resolution of detail and diffraction effects, between geometrical and physical optics
ajayeb's ecologies mixed (less of) reflection and (much more of) diffraction, are taken from a yet not detachments of the experience of phenomena and the apparatuses of its description, of percepts and affects
#my findings of composites of ajayeb:
•animals varying number of legs --?--> animal + movement
•fantastic creatures --?--> animal + environment + affect
•fable poetics --?--> animal + apparatus of description
•tentative citationality [other name of “rumor”?] --?--> nonhuman + human relational histories
•remembering is an extremely creative (& imaginative) practice
•
--> ongoing, open-ended articulation of the world (<-- my work on ajayeb)
--> these are the diffraction patterns in ajayeb that are (artistically, politically, ethnically) significant for me (?)
--> these are instances of resistance against biomimesis in ajayeb (?) [biomimesis is involved with mirroring, imitation, or reflection, and other tropes of “sameness"] =/= trans-materialities of the creatures of the world, they transgress the sacrosanct divides between techne and episteme
(many creatures of our shared world have) evolved in intra-action with their environment, and old bestiaries, such as ajayeb, critically inhabit a mode of description and affect situated within the intra-activity of technologies of writing and perception[...]
(172)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20.8[...] is involved with mirroring, imitation, or reflection, and other tropes of “sameness"] =/= trans-materialities of the creatures of the world, they transgress the sacrosanct divides between techne and episteme
(many creatures of our shared world have) evolved in intra-action with their environment, and old bestiaries, such as ajayeb, critically inhabit a mode of description and affect situated within the intra-activity of technologies of writing and perception
•the creatures of the mud know better not to get caught up in a “geometrical optics of knowing”
we are seeking a different genus of knowing =/= mediating machine, inscription devices, lenses, panopticons, and various other epistemological tools that many science studies and cultural studies scholars fancy. (is that also what Marialena fancies? her list of tools)
[*]intelligibility: an ontological performance of the world in its ongoing articulation
not a specifically human capacity, intelligibility does not require an (usually human) inttelective agent
the problem with design is that designers (as well as scientists and engineers) are busy with building ‘enhanced communication networks’ and principles of ‘usefulness’, in the way they relate to the “forms” of nature
*connections and commitments (come together)*
the copyright symbol © should be a sign not of the right to copy but, if anything, of the responsibilities entailed in producing differential materialization (for whom and at what costs?)*
Barad ♥
(brittlestar, the plant in my room, ajayeb's creatures,) ...their being is a flexible distributed growing and regenerating multi-oriented shape-shifting topologically variant dynamical system of diffraction gratings
(rhetoric of) re-veiling, which provokes the seeming need for a revealing of nature
entanglement --> inseparability --> spatially separated particles in an entangled state do not have separate identities
there is no epmirical evidence of such a disjunction ontologies at a particular scale, “micro-world” and “macro-world”
who insists on “quarantining quantum queerness”?
quarantining scale and time
quarantining Sadra to “his” time, or ajayeb to an older another temporality, and therefore irrelevant for us “today”
[*]scale: intra-actively (re)configured in the ongoing intra-active becoming on space-time-mattering
...................................
Khezr and San'an, the most repeated points of reference in tasavof
like you, Hafez, full of struggle, sensation, love,
our resistance and breakdance
(Mehran Rad:) Hafez preferences on Farsi over Arabic:
Deir دیر / Some'e صومعه
Pir پیر / Sheikh شیخ
Parsa پارسا / Zahed زاهد
Parishan پریشان / Tafraghe تفرقه[...]
(173)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20.9[...]us of knowing =/= mediating machine, inscription devices, lenses, panopticons, and various other epistemological tools that many science studies and cultural studies scholars fancy. (is that also what Marialena fancies? her list of tools)
[*]intelligibility: an ontological performance of the world in its ongoing articulation
not a specifically human capacity, intelligibility does not require an (usually human) inttelective agent
the problem with design is that designers (as well as scientists and engineers) are busy with building ‘enhanced communication networks’ and principles of ‘usefulness’, in the way they relate to the “forms” of nature
*connections and commitments (come together)*
the copyright symbol © should be a sign not of the right to copy but, if anything, of the responsibilities entailed in producing differential materialization (for whom and at what costs?)*
Barad ♥
(brittlestar, the plant in my room, ajayeb's creatures,) ...their being is a flexible distributed growing and regenerating multi-oriented shape-shifting topologically variant dynamical system of diffraction gratings
(rhetoric of) re-veiling, which provokes the seeming need for a revealing of nature
entanglement --> inseparability --> spatially separated particles in an entangled state do not have separate identities
there is no epmirical evidence of such a disjunction ontologies at a particular scale, “micro-world” and “macro-world”
who insists on “quarantining quantum queerness”?
quarantining scale and time
quarantining Sadra to “his” time, or ajayeb to an older another temporality, and therefore irrelevant for us “today”
[*]scale: intra-actively (re)configured in the ongoing intra-active becoming on space-time-mattering
...................................
Khezr and San'an, the most repeated points of reference in tasavof
like you, Hafez, full of struggle, sensation, love,
our resistance and breakdance
(Mehran Rad:) Hafez preferences on Farsi over Arabic:
Deir دیر / Some'e صومعه
Pir پیر / Sheikh شیخ
Parsa پارسا / Zahed زاهد
Parishan پریشان / Tafraghe تفرقه
moshtaghe bandegi مشتاق بندگی
(~? the advanced level of) ‘wannabe slave’
...................................
the dangerous suffixial worlders, prehensile adjective-builder, natural-inhabitant-makers of “-ian” or “-i” or “-isch” to the name of a nation/country ==> Iranian, Afgani, etc. --> makes subjects
in the case of the podcast https://soundcloud.com/norient/afghanistan-sucht-seine-musikalische-identitat-podcast listen to the way the story of the Afgani music is told by norient (“music in the globe”, “multi-modally”) --> articulation of western human righ[...]
(174)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20.9[...]r />
entanglement --> inseparability --> spatially separated particles in an entangled state do not have separate identities
there is no epmirical evidence of such a disjunction ontologies at a particular scale, “micro-world” and “macro-world”
who insists on “quarantining quantum queerness”?
quarantining scale and time
quarantining Sadra to “his” time, or ajayeb to an older another temporality, and therefore irrelevant for us “today”
[*]scale: intra-actively (re)configured in the ongoing intra-active becoming on space-time-mattering
...................................
Khezr and San'an, the most repeated points of reference in tasavof
like you, Hafez, full of struggle, sensation, love,
our resistance and breakdance
(Mehran Rad:) Hafez preferences on Farsi over Arabic:
Deir دیر / Some'e صومعه
Pir پیر / Sheikh شیخ
Parsa پارسا / Zahed زاهد
Parishan پریشان / Tafraghe تفرقه
moshtaghe bandegi مشتاق بندگی
(~? the advanced level of) ‘wannabe slave’
...................................
the dangerous suffixial worlders, prehensile adjective-builder, natural-inhabitant-makers of “-ian” or “-i” or “-isch” to the name of a nation/country ==> Iranian, Afgani, etc. --> makes subjects
in the case of the podcast https://soundcloud.com/norient/afghanistan-sucht-seine-musikalische-identitat-podcast listen to the way the story of the Afgani music is told by norient (“music in the globe”, “multi-modally”) --> articulation of western human rights & disarticulation of other ecology of stories
=/= Charles Amirkhanian radio programm Ode to Gravity
...................................
the protector of spiders who dies by the bite of a spider
-susceptible bodies entagled in networks of care, life and death, that are not always harmonious to popular naus to popular narratives of nonviolence
...................................
ajayeb: mythoepic literature in translation from a Middle Persian corpus
-when i say ‘Middle Persian corpus’ what i actually mean is a shared world of ritual, religion, and mythology between Iranian, Urdu, Turkish, Zoroastrianism in Iran and Vedic Hinduism in India, Indo-European inheritance in ancient Iranian culture, South-Southeast Asian literatures, translations and transcreations (and transliteration) of stories (prose, poetry, drama, epic, jokes, parables, figures [that are not always part of the canon], the irreverent بى ادب, ) in Indian and Southeast Asian contexts,
my project is about learning the ‘how’ of cultivating the ability to fruitfully approach texts from different cultures and pasts
-(to study) the radical poetic force of the Persian texts--in ajayeb
-to become enhanced and enchanted in skills of reading wider ranges of linguistic registers<[...]
(175)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%21[...]try, drama, epic, jokes, parables, figures [that are not always part of the canon], the irreverent بى ادب, ) in Indian and Southeast Asian contexts,
my project is about learning the ‘how’ of cultivating the ability to fruitfully approach texts from different cultures and pasts
-(to study) the radical poetic force of the Persian texts--in ajayeb
-to become enhanced and enchanted in skills of reading wider ranges of linguistic registers
-to open up an approach to a dauntingly complex region of islamicated thought (not the ideological enterprise of “Islam”, which is usually badly politicized in the historical memory of the West. we could get interested in the economics of corruption and technologies of rule, the evolution of government bureaucracies and classificatory schemes, anti-colonial critique,)
ajayeb is on the side of counter-classical traditions of standard Muslem-ness, and its less elite histories and cultural forms,
(intellectual identity:)
cross-dresser of the order
autodidact odds
sufis, merchants, nomads, poets, pilgrims, smugglers, laborers,
religious identity, religious knowledge, religious violence,
medieval persian mysticism:
•oral, temporal nature of speech
•speaking I to the unknown and unknowable Other
•the discourse of love
•apophatic discourse -->? politically subversive
•linguistic fragmentation, edges of meaning
•
...................................
dense and textured stories
(generativity is fueled by) densely felt textures
worlding of the place:
•the material, sensory labor of attending to an emergent and enduring hum
•the force of things amassed of phantom limbs
•actual residue of people “making something of things”
direct materiality of people's shared sense = attending to what is happening
a racist violence in the dark
a space of condensed displacement
watching things arrive in the company of others
*nameable clarities:
•family
•friendship
•love
•collapse
•laughing
•telling stories
•violence
•place
•
--> all atmospherics*** : forms of attending to what's happening, sensing out, accreting attachments and detachments, differences and indifferences, losses and proliferating possibilities. [Stewart]
(Stewart's) curious pause to wonder *what analytic objects matter* in the singularity of a situation and what forms of writing and thinking might approach them****
-experimenting with forms of theory and writing that are responsive to the moving objects they are trying to trace or highlight or escape, or whatever --> #number of legs in ajayeb {
•trying to describe what is happening in little animal moments, scenes
•(th[...]
(176)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%21[...]ity and texture of my routines (talks, writings, etc.) make ajayeb habitable and animate?
-in the last year in apass i have been training myself to become attuned to what a particular scene might offer
#my apass ajayeb project:
(learning) building an idiosyncratic map of connections between a series of singularities --> to create a contact zone for analysis ****
[~?-> ajayeb.net, pop-up book]
[that's why i have been against the popular idea of authorlessness in apass, i am invested in (our) singularities; identity is a zone of attunement]--> Stewart calls herself “she” to mark the difference between her writerly identity and the kind of subject that arises as a daydream of simple presence
-to touch details that establishes a direct contact
?in our group who
•gazes
•imagines
•senses
•takes on
•performs
•asserts (not a flat and finished truth)
•is in a hot persuit of something definitive @Lili
•a point of contract @Esta
•
watching and waiting for an event to unfold
the still life that gives a pause --> the story of many of us
______________
“every achieved poem inscribes a perceptual signature in the world” (Stewart > Doty)
poems have to be achieved (in the social-material world)
(achieved =/= archived)
[*]poem:
•etching *lines of action* and mood across the sensations
•compositions at work
my ajayeb's
•objects of analysis: “compositional elements of thrown together worlds”
•objects of critique: “associative account of the modification and reciprocity of bodies and actions, environs, senses, rhythms, tones, and proprioceptions"[: sense of the position of parts of the body, relative to other neighbouring parts of the body]
•objects of database: “are soicialy, poetically, materially compositional”
the social, the subject, matter and event are comprised of:
•affects
•potentialities
•energetics
•attunements
•orientations
•disorientations
•atmospheres
=/= finished actualities*
ajayeb is compositional, that means something reaches a point of expressivity, something throws itself together as matter already configured yet enigmatic and provocative
(Stewart helping me talk ajayeb)
(am i working to) bridge between more compositions (?)
“watching a spider negotiate its unlikely territory”
(useless concentration)
Foad, Sina, we were a slipstream of sensations made of all the ways that world impressed itself upon us
[*]world: a partial stabilization of practices, capacities, tendencies and affordances in the form of a recursive patterning (Anderson + Harr[...]
(177)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%21.8[...]when he saw what might have been a woman leaning over what looked like a man lying down at the enterence to a freeway tunnel in Medellin in 2006 --> ajayeb is also about writing about what ‘might’ be or have been.
**a mediation on writing and drawing in a horrible world**
#my drawings in my notebook/papers in our apass meetings
-a hand that draws a scence also draws itself into its corporality, conjuring it in the manner of
-a line records as for what it leads the doodler to see
-“a autobiographical record of a discovery of an event” --> a trace and suspension of a wobbly emergence of alertness (to what my friend might have said) ---> these are lived abstractions
possible paradigms for the convergence of emergence:
•affinity --> Leo
•complexity --> Eszter
•(auto)poiesis --> Hoda
•perception as action --> Elen
•speculative realism --> Zoumana
•radical virtualization --> Aela
--> we are all somehow busy (in apass) with reorienting to the creativity of thought-action crossings
life is germinaly جرثومهای aesthetic, and the aesthetic anywhere is already political* --> Kenney
[title]
ajayeb's stories of natural and dreamed up things
the immaterial matterings of supra-personal imaginal real of ajayeb forms
(different names for the same thing:)
•forms of emergent in the conduct of life (Nietzsche, Foucault attending to the intimate relations between knowledge and power)
•worlding, the mirror play of materiality and its poetic composition (Heidegger)
•planes of expressivity reaching a point of recognition or force (Deleuze and Guattari)
•the shimmer (Barthes)
•rhythm in itself (Lefebvre)
•structures of feeling into political theory (Raymond Williams)
•forms emergent in the conduct of life are immaterial matterings --> *the contact aesthetics* of natural and dreamed up things throwing themselves together (Stewart)
ajayeb is a literally unblievable image, a sociality, a muscle, a world thrown together in a sensory refrain witnessed by a present subject; collective dreamed up nature and historical presents ripe with rhythms and speeds, with streams of matter and thought; ajayeb is a capacious assemblage
ajayeb stories are:
•material-sensory arc of history
•series of absent/present (moments) sensed through forms and events
lostness or reslessness of drifters
fantasies of potential “home”
(a plce of) abjection of state neglect ==> production of future
(Stewart's) the middle-class mobile citizenship and the proper traveling subject
Janina's “i don't know” s
a material semiosis of choices
what are ajayeb promises?
[...]
(178)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%21.9[...]
possible paradigms for the convergence of emergence:
•affinity --> Leo
•complexity --> Eszter
•(auto)poiesis --> Hoda
•perception as action --> Elen
•speculative realism --> Zoumana
•radical virtualization --> Aela
--> we are all somehow busy (in apass) with reorienting to the creativity of thought-action crossings
life is germinaly جرثومهای aesthetic, and the aesthetic anywhere is already political* --> Kenney
[title]
ajayeb's stories of natural and dreamed up things
the immaterial matterings of supra-personal imaginal real of ajayeb forms
(different names for the same thing:)
•forms of emergent in the conduct of life (Nietzsche, Foucault attending to the intimate relations between knowledge and power)
•worlding, the mirror play of materiality and its poetic composition (Heidegger)
•planes of expressivity reaching a point of recognition or force (Deleuze and Guattari)
•the shimmer (Barthes)
•rhythm in itself (Lefebvre)
•structures of feeling into political theory (Raymond Williams)
•forms emergent in the conduct of life are immaterial matterings --> *the contact aesthetics* of natural and dreamed up things throwing themselves together (Stewart)
ajayeb is a literally unblievable image, a sociality, a muscle, a world thrown together in a sensory refrain witnessed by a present subject; collective dreamed up nature and historical presents ripe with rhythms and speeds, with streams of matter and thought; ajayeb is a capacious assemblage
ajayeb stories are:
•material-sensory arc of history
•series of absent/present (moments) sensed through forms and events
lostness or reslessness of drifters
fantasies of potential “home”
(a plce of) abjection of state neglect ==> production of future
(Stewart's) the middle-class mobile citizenship and the proper traveling subject
Janina's “i don't know” s
a material semiosis of choices
what are ajayeb promises?
wtinessings, encounters, timeouts, fantasy, distraction,
a 19th century elite tradition of secular pilgrimage to the sacred
pursuit of see-it-yourselfness
a spectacular form of amnesia *
(the joints of my pop-up book) spin around fantastic axes
Stewart: “the state of public transportation in the U.S. is an event in the worlding of bodies in motion”
-a landscape abuzz with connectivity
shape-shifter jumping between composition and concrete
my apass project:
(sharing with you) the pleasure of recognizing a described world (in ajayeb)***
(i can sense the ajayeb's) ple[...]
(179)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%21.9[...]
(i can sense the ajayeb's) pleasure in describing the animacy of forms
-describing a world is the pleasure of sensing the incipiency of *form in matter* and fantasy and the effort to draw the lines of form's traces. still palpable even it only imagined (Stewart ***)
(ajayeb's) heady business of making sense out of what happens
-to venture out in the manner of
-ajayeb sings an autopoetic refrain scoring and unfolding
-gesturing into form, a magnet burdened with impressions
textures give way to qualities of form
*before the blizzard: the sea monster
______________
Xh1IgPomwW8 Stewart's experiments coming at the phenomena of worlding through a series of angles organized prismatically:
•precision
•atmosphere
•attunement
•refrain ترجیعبند (poetic fixed form)
--> the tune on which people and things venture out
--> a kind of mapping infrastructure
--> lines and distributed biography
[pop-up book]
#description: (world is like a) pop-up map of possibilities [=/= map hylomorphically onto meaning]:
•(condensed) points of precision
•fundamentally divergent nature of things that happen --prompting-->
•the mode of social poiesis
•a path into continuous variation of matter and form, word and world
•(pop-up book made of) mobile and immobile flickering
•a thing that can be physical if the eye is quick enough
•a crystalline image of the deforming of a form
•bending itself (myself?) in refraction (=/= intimate register of knowledge and power)
•a conceptual machinery of cutting edges
•a compositional jumping off point; a ‘lifted out of’; a ‘being-moved in’
•...the ajayeb pop-up book two parallel spreading qualities and scenes across a cartography, registers differences in motion
◦a compositional writing (=/= representational method) in the effort to keep up with the distributed agencies of *what is throwing together and what is falling apart* (~ ajayeb) [--> it is a practice of trying, in line with my lectures, to follow where things (might) go that habits of attunement become as associational logic***]
•particulars to become a hinge لولاى در (opening onto a world throwing together and falling apart)
•mixing of shiny elements: *flickering ontologies* the expansive mapping of elements in paly
•a cartography of compositional elements, formal compositions and unmarked ways of being loop around each other
(27.08.2017 my work on ajayeb is an inquiry into description:) ***it is about many different forms that something can take and does take*** + the things that can be perceived and thought with those things
(attuning to) details in ajayeb loaded with intensities both strange and recognizable (=/= stable[...]
(181)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%22[...]line, elemental flux, matter waiting formlessly
•white ice and snow --> stasis, shape and form, a blankness that challenges composition, the transitoriness
•red --> the feebly real, the long, low-frequency wave-lenght of the dying stars, the past, the effort to fix dead reality in a cast *
•green --> plants that glare with a harsh reality, the violence at the heart of the world we inhabite
•blue --> a limited, temporary success in fixing experience in a pattern
•
a landscape animated by the primariness of color =/= Molenbeek
american indians became “red” through a complex semiotics of encounters with colonists
...who knows what kinds of desires, fears and dead ends
(pay attention to Stewart list making narrative:)
events, sites, actors, stakes, consequences, properties, competences, modalities, attunements, velocities
... a world ==> ephemeral sparks ==> an atmosphere ==pulled==> qualities of sociality, personality and language out of people [--> ajayeb] ==created==> spaces of care, territoriality, order, horror
the stark mantras of representational critique: that the play of abstract categories (real/fabricated, nature/human habitat, wild/tame, red/white, high/low, etc.) bloodlessly determine worlds or adequately describe them ==> { everything is political = to always know what the political is }--> ‘political’ : something that exists in the big picture of broader significance, something strongly obvious (but not to most people!) that meanings can be automatically assigned to things and are the basis of those things’ value -->!@Ali
the effect of context
matters of composition, each with a “we”:
•feeble نحيف
•experimental
•eccentric --> Elen
•habitual --> my mother
•generous
•gestural -->
•half turned away
- reached the expressivity of a mood, a tone of voice
•do they lighten things or load them down?
...a composition made explicit in the figure of *the active survivor* and *the knowing reader of impacts* --> a watchfulness-turned-impulse that ends not on meaning but in the haptic, multi-angled, sensorimotor qualities of a world's unimaginable detail
(@Varinia) qualities sensorimotor interactions with environments that are not reducible either to thoughts and imaginings:
•*richness: a scene spied provides infinite detail beyond what you can invent --> #excess
•*bodiliness: the motions of the body affect 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
[...]
(182)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%22.3[...] they lighten things or load them down?
...a composition made explicit in the figure of *the active survivor* and *the knowing reader of impacts* --> a watchfulness-turned-impulse that ends not on meaning but in the haptic, multi-angled, sensorimotor qualities of a world's unimaginable detail
(@Varinia) qualities sensorimotor interactions with environments that are not reducible either to thoughts and imaginings:
•*richness: a scene spied provides infinite detail beyond what you can invent --> #excess
•*bodiliness: the motions of the body affect 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] conceptsr />
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 sens[...]
(183)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%22.4[...] “chronically unstable”* {pots --> intentional activation of affective capacities in the clay; pots and bodies are “grown” in he same way}
•chaotically scale-changing, their scale is one of intensity and excessiveness (--> figure-ground relationship between visible/invisible, body/soul)
*perspectivism: all species potentially share a way of knowing with humans. their “essence” or “soul” is human : they see themselves as human and others as animals
*to occupy a body = to have a perspective on the world*
•an intensive difference that carries the human/nonhuman difference to the inside of every existing thing --> there is no a priori reason for everything not being a subject [--> also Sadra]
[*]bodies:
•bundles of affect : collection of affects bundled into an unstable bodily form
•carrying out specific tasks
•sensing the world in particular way
•sharing capacities and habits with others in what keeps a body as it is and maintains its similarity to other bodies in a group
•coincident with subjectivity* --> you need a body to know
--> (particular differentiation of a body:) body ornaments, clothing, sex, and other so-called cultural markings are no different in kind from the so-called natural markers of bodily difference and capacity: ***clothes ~= claws ~= affects*** --> “sign and substance of capacities and dispositions” (Alberti > Hugh-Jones > Viveiros de Castro)
*marking, molding, painting, adorning, clothing, piercing, and otherwise working on body ~=> to fix a body ==> to stabilize an otherwise wildly unpredictable perspective and world*
*body surfaces of spirits and humans are often brilliant and intensely marked* --> excessive corporeality --> potency of the embodied subject: their “scale” [in timespace tey-ol-arz] as efficacious beings, dense with affective capacities, (the body that is marked with tey-ol-arz incites embodied subjects)--> *trap* (operates along scale) [sufi's termporal “scale” (in tey-ol-arz طیالارض) as her/his efficacious being, dense with affective capacities for Attar in Tazkirat al-Awliya (--> also relevant for pit-story #measurement) --> the figure of the moving sufi across scales of spacetime on geo, works as a trap precisely along this scale --> materialization of intensity and excess ==> humanity]
* bodies ~= artefacts : sites of subjectivity *
*soul: the capacity to transform: a matter of chaning bodies
dead --> ancestor
(transformation is an ontological event: “-->”), @Hoda
for Wari to have a soul is a sign of danger, a sign that some transformation (of perspective) is imminent []
ajayeb is full of stories of instability: one's soul is always vulnerable to ontological predation by another spirit or person ==> one's perspective can always change
“correspond” is keyword in working with ontologies : ‘interpretatio[...]
(187)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%22.6[...]br />
•the body is fabricated, just like the pot [Alberti]
•as ‘lived experience’ performs, communicates and extends personhood through inscriptive and representational practices that fully incorporate material culture and the surrounding world. (Joyce)
•people are made: bodies are composite transformations of artefacts from the time of myth* [for 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 remally 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 fi[...]
(188)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%22.9[...]r />
•personal feelings
•Iranian, or German, (basically being anything)
•
(basically in all Hollywood imaginings and standard archaeology) artefacts are only assigned secondary agency --> animacy is not considered as inherent attribute of the artefactual *** (Gell)
--✕--> pots as living organisms subject to processes of growth
(Ingold's) ecology of materials is characteristic of work that focuses on the inherent vitality of things (Barad)
*production: an ongoing process that produces both maker and object
(Alberti proposes) a change in focus: (from) *stopped up objects* --(to)--> *leaky things*
in his writing Alberti finishes 3 or 4 times his paragraphs with the same characterization of his field: “chronic instability of a world constantly at risk of transformation”
“if everything can be human, then nothing is human in a clear and distinct way.”
Viveiros de Castro
[*]subjectivity: a condition and outcome of all affective relations =/= a capacity that can be awakened in a seemingly inert thing
=/=?! transference, (is transference an object-oriented account?)
the active nature of materials refers to their recognized capacity to escape form : their untrustworthiness
(a paradime for creative arts:) artifactual production --> animal creativity
(in Amazonia, and) in ajayeb, no distinction is made between thoughts, feelings, body and mind --> thoughts and actions happen in the same ontological space
(Alberti > Viveiros de Castro)
...................................
shift from an epistemological to an ontological register in theoretical archaeology
critically ontological: turning insight back on the archaeological project
(in archaeology:) ontology = reality (what there is) / peoples’ claims about reality (a fundamental set of understandings about how the world is) }--Alberti--> one can conceptualize ontology: as a people's “beliefs about” reality / as people's actual ontological commitments (~ people's reality)
Latour's modes of existence: ontological tendencies that exist more or less precariously under the assault of modernization
conversion of ontological questions into epistemological questions ==> deontologizing other peoples’ *ontological commitments* [--> that Goda mistook for ideology]
*problem with pluralizing “reality” is that it might appear to be a form of cultural relativism, (demotion of) “ontology ~= culture (~ cultural beliefs about reality =/= reality)” ==back==> cultural construction
anti-Cartesian, relational, and antiontological exceptionalism
[a] Heideggerian idea: *the world we encounter is preinterpretive*
posthuman ~ nonrepresentationa[...]
(189)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23[...]aning 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 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[...]
(190)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.2[...]an thought into a metaphysics such that it can have a reciprocal effect on anthropological thought and “naturalist” or Western metaphysics
ontological realism ==>{
new language attempt to imagine the complex topology of relational realities:
•Latour --> network: things exists as a consequence of the strength of their articulation
•Ingold --> meshwork =/= Aristotelian hylomorphism
•Barad --> entanglement = Quantum physics + queer theory ==> properties belong to the phenomena in question =/= inherent to things
•DeLanda --> assemblage: how humans + nonhumans produced communities that changed in composition and through time in neolithic and bronze age
assemblage --replace--> context
assemblage = phenomena --> temporary, contingent, unbounded
Latourian critique of categories =/= beyond human correlationalism
pluralizing ontology ==> charges of relativism <-- ‘objective knowledge =/= contingent foundations’ }--> nonrepresentational approach =/= over interpretation, abstraction
archeology operates by seeking strong and effective articulations between theories, apparatuses, material remains
ontological realism (=/= naturalism, constructivist) --> objectivity and truth are contingent, but also demonstrable and robust
@Chloe
material record: an expression of **how past gathers in the present** (=/= fragmentary evidence of history <-- forensic approach)
past continuously unfolding and therefore changing
Alberi --> (social) ontology: a new interpretive tool
additive work (=/= reconstructive)
archeological accounts of other's ontologies
animal turn in archeology --> nonanthropocentric zoological studies
Willerselv
Viveiros de Castro
Amazona --> animism (more than any other anthropological material) has provided modes of relationality to archeologists to interpret material patterning in archeological records --> [*]animism: an ethnographic meta-analogy for past ontologies
•blurring between nature and culture
•relationship with other-than-human agencies (animal, spirit, artifact)
==✕==> ontological critique
Viveiros de Castro --> systemize amerindian thought into a metaphysics ==> to have an reciprocal effect on anthropological thought (western naturalist metaphysics)
reference to a “common world”
new animism ==> ontology becomes another name for 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 [...]
(191)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.2[...]onalism
pluralizing ontology ==> charges of relativism <-- ‘objective knowledge =/= contingent foundations’ }--> nonrepresentational approach =/= over interpretation, abstraction
archeology operates by seeking strong and effective articulations between theories, apparatuses, material remains
ontological realism (=/= naturalism, constructivist) --> objectivity and truth are contingent, but also demonstrable and robust
@Chloe
material record: an expression of **how past gathers in the present** (=/= fragmentary evidence of history <-- forensic approach)
past continuously unfolding and therefore changing
Alberi --> (social) ontology: a new interpretive tool
additive work (=/= reconstructive)
archeological accounts of other's ontologies
animal turn in archeology --> nonanthropocentric zoological studies
Willerselv
Viveiros de Castro
Amazona --> animism (more than any other anthropological material) has provided modes of relationality to archeologists to interpret material patterning in archeological records --> [*]animism: an ethnographic meta-analogy for past ontologies
•blurring between nature and culture
•relationship with other-than-human agencies (animal, spirit, artifact)
==✕==> ontological critique
Viveiros de Castro --> systemize amerindian thought into a metaphysics ==> to have an reciprocal effect on anthropological thought (western naturalist metaphysics)
reference to a “common world”
new animism ==> ontology becomes another name for culture
Alebrti outlining:
•anthropological project that considers ontology as a critical question productive of conceptual engagement
•work of archeologists who theorize and practice archeology on the basis of indigenous theories
}--> where new animists turn to animism for a source of analogies, critical ontology turns to animism for a source of theory
perspectivism: multiple natures (worlds) + singular culture (way of knowing those worlds) [~ working from *commonality* rather than *alterity*] --> a theoretical bomb =/= analogies based on ethnographic content
spirits experienced as diminutive yet brilliantly decorated or huge and grotesque
the more intense ==> the more body it is
(the promise of thinking through) [*]thing: a nonspecified ontological category that can be “filled” through ethnographic observation that is designed to allow ontological alterity to inform its content
recursive anthropology --> alterity: a function of the divergence between ethnographic materials and the assumptions the analyst brings to them
(if) ontology: what is ==> alterity: part of what others say ‘what is’ that does not make sense to us
[...]
(192)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.2[...]unts of other's ontologies
animal turn in archeology --> nonanthropocentric zoological studies
Willerselv
Viveiros de Castro
Amazona --> animism (more than any other anthropological material) has provided modes of relationality to archeologists to interpret material patterning in archeological records --> [*]animism: an ethnographic meta-analogy for past ontologies
•blurring between nature and culture
•relationship with other-than-human agencies (animal, spirit, artifact)
==✕==> ontological critique
Viveiros de Castro --> systemize amerindian thought into a metaphysics ==> to have an reciprocal effect on anthropological thought (western naturalist metaphysics)
reference to a “common world”
new animism ==> ontology becomes another name for culture
Alebrti outlining:
•anthropological project that considers ontology as a critical question productive of conceptual engagement
•work of archeologists who theorize and practice archeology on the basis of indigenous theories
}--> where new animists turn to animism for a source of analogies, critical ontology turns to animism for a source of theory
perspectivism: multiple natures (worlds) + singular culture (way of knowing those worlds) [~ working from *commonality* rather than *alterity*] --> a theoretical bomb =/= analogies based on ethnographic content
spirits experienced as diminutive yet brilliantly decorated or huge and grotesque
the more intense ==> the more body it is
(the promise of thinking through) [*]thing: a nonspecified ontological category that can be “filled” through ethnographic observation that is designed to allow ontological alterity to inform its content
recursive anthropology --> alterity: a function of the divergence between ethnographic materials and the assumptions the analyst brings to them
(if) ontology: what is ==> alterity: part of what others say ‘what is’ that does not make 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 p[...]
(194)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.3[...]/>
(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 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<br />
...................................
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 [...]
(195)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.3[...]along with the world; that cultivates in oneself the skill for discerning the *meanings that are already there*) --> ontological paring of conceptual language & physical condition
==> meaning and concepts are drawn out of objects (not given to them)
•Haraway --> companion species = biologist + creatures
•Barad --> concepts are literally embodied by the differing physical apparatuses
•
(we need more) art: careful accumulation of skills
21st century historiographic trends in art
artists increasingly *deploy simulacra of archeological practices and motifs* in their work
art practiced as craft (but not all the time) ==allow==> knowledge grow from the insight of being in the folding of life [of infantile grandious fantasy, as well] ~=? anthropology
producing contemporary ruins to draw attention to *the work of the present in the production of the past*
*artists take archeology as muse*
(through borrowing from archeology artists)
•create a kind of intellectual framing
•incorporate archival research
•themes of memory and entropy
•question of absence
•
prosaic nature of archeological research
production of the finds
the way Dion distorts archeological work (allegorizing archeological practice) --Alberti-->
•consequence of sleight of hand
•he is dibbling at, performing being an archeologist
•‘play at’ archeology
=/= Simon Callery
Alberti > Russell
transform archeology from metaphor to allegory --play--> archeology-as-aesthetics through performance [--> risk of undermining and reinforcing art as a subjective practice concerned with only aesthetics and affective]
craft: a model for careful practices and knowing the world =/= artwork: a model for how to break out of disciplinary frames and how to think of the ontology 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 rese[...]
(196)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.5[...]them as *taking on something of the pre-conceptual labour that went into them*? --> (?how can it) provoke an art-like response [<=~ sleepwalking: no ontological difference between then and now ==> you are confronted with a raw material of affect and concept =/= past artifacts as vehicle for complex belief systems] }==drive==>
•new sensorial experience
•new conceptual work
---> go to description, Stewart
coalescing of language & concept & ...
[*]drawing: (the effect of being) harassed by reality
to be harassed by ajayeb past people animals (struggling in their reality)
---> go to haunted, possession
[*]art: risk of something new
archeology --> intimate knowledge of materials (--> appealing to art, crafter attune to their material)
my lecture-performances = exploring how to make my knowledge present (to myself so it has a chance to be reconsidered) and how things (ajayeb past bestiary telegram animal) affect me and to *allow them to engender their own concepts and meanings*
...................................
(modern western) human: composed of cultural clothing that hides and controls an essentially animal nature =/= (amazonian) animals have a human sociocultural inner aspect that is “disguised” by an ostensibly bestial bodily form -->{ [subjective particularity of spirit and meaning ==>]*multinatural =/= multicultural*[<== objective universality of body and substance] }
-Viveiros de Castro's dichotomous argument leaves out other modes of knowing, those that i care and haunt for (and i am claimed by them) in specific mystic muslim theology and eastern bestiary (---> go to Marks)
Amerindian “people” : spiritual unity and a corporeal diversity
possessing a soul ==> having a point of view ==> being a subject
==> event = action
(action =/= expression of intentional states)
[*]object: incompletely interpreted subject
“a muddy waterhole is seen by tapirs as a great ceremonial house”
(objectivist epistemology's) ‘to know' = to desubjectify, to make explicit the subject's partial presence in the object =/= (Amerindian shamanism epistemology's) ‘to know' = to personify, something that is always a someone
-the problem is that only the shaman and some rogue artists know how to personify. i want to personify Viveiros de Castro!)
-his 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.”
[...]
(197)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.7[...]y tapirs as a great ceremonial house”
(objectivist epistemology's) ‘to know' = to desubjectify, to make explicit the subject's partial presence in the object =/= (Amerindian shamanism epistemology's) ‘to know' = to personify, something that is always a someone
-the problem is that only the shaman and some rogue artists know how to personify. i want to personify Viveiros de Castro!)
-his 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 c[...]
(199)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.7[...] 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*
*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 (mo[...]
(201)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.8[...]/>
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: gift of the other (=/= hylomorphism: an active usually exclusively human subject confronts an inert and naturalized object)
**cosmology (~ the hyphen between nature and society is social) =/= naturalism (~ relations between society and nature are natural)**
we are body-objects in ecological interaction with other body-forces
-question for Vive[...]
(203)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.8[...]change = 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: gift of the other (=/= hylomorphism: an active usually exclusively human subject confronts an inert and naturalized object)
**cosmology (~ the hyphen between nature and society is social) =/= naturalism (~ relations between society and nature are natural)**
we are body-objects in ecological interaction with other body-forces
-question for Viveiros de Castro: what would be then the “exchange” between Amerindian perspectivism and Western naturalism? (not only that “we” should learn from Amerindian perspectivism but) what they can learn from us?
European ontology: unextended thought and extended matter (--> Iron Man)
going from questions of representation --to--> questions of ontology
simplification of ontology (--> objects pacified and silenced) ==> complication of epistemology (--> subjects proliferate and chatter) [--> “discursive practices” and “politics of knowledge” are results of that pacification?]
***someone must be wrong, something has to be explained*** (<--?-- we have never been modern, they has ever been primitive)
(Viveiros de Castro)
formerly, savages mistook (their) representations for (our) reality; now, we mistake (our) representations for (other people's) reality. rumor has it we have even be mistaking (our) representations for (our) reality when we “occidentalize”
*culturalism, relativism, textualism --> reduces reality to representation
*cognitivism, sociobiology, evolutionary psychology --> reduces representation to reality
it has been obvious (for more than seventy-five years) that at the heart of the matter, there is no stuff; only form, only relation
...................................
[...]
(204)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.8[...]self from another identity) [for example ancient Greece + Rome + Christianity = Europe] ==> monolith ==> conflict and death
•my (jub جوب) gutter photos =/= Tehran's Americanization of the high street.
•my photos of Rima =/= her selfie's merchandised model of individualism
a deep desire for association
various and diverse traditions ==> identity: “the means to synthesise similarity through difference and to see difference as discrete means of expressing basic similarity” (Sardar)
“balance of similarities and differences as a way of locating what it is that makes life worth living and what connects us with the rest of the changing world”
*...continuation of the Enlightenment project of progress through instrumental science. One source of Truth, and one Civilization, continues in its trajectory
garden =/= {North America's arrogance in cosmological proportion as worlded in Hollywood, and science seeing itself as the only manifestation of reality, The Platonic idea that truth is same for everyone}
...................................
[body politics]
Greeks --> body politics --> elaborated images for human society ==> citizen, city
(Haraway on) the junction of natural forces and economic progress in the formative years of capitalist industrialism
(Haraway's emphasize and telling stories about the) union of the political and the physiological
ancient and modern justifications --> differences (seen as natural, given, inescapable ==>) as *moral*
the ‘content’ as well as the soicla function of science --> renderd utopian: (that means) we leave this central, legitimating body of skill and knowledge to undermine our efforts
[we must fight with all our power against utopian(~= dystopian) stories of science ~-> accepting that there are natural objects (bodies) separate from social relations] --> (we must refuse) the damaging distinction between pure and applied science & double ideology of firm scientific objectivity and mere personal subjectivity
we have granted science the role of a *fetish*: an object human beings make only to forget their role in creating it
...agreeing that “nature” is our enemy and that we must control our “natural” bodies (by techniques given us by biomedical science) at all costs to enter the hallowed kingdom of the cultural body politic as defined by liberal (and radical) theories of political economy
[a traditional reduction of the body:] Freud --> (a theory of body politics:) “culture in the cost of sex” [<-- no!] : human social developement = progressive domination of nature (particularly of human sexual energies) --> *sex as danger and as nature* are central to Freud's system
*** Freud (, Brown, and Firestone) are useful tools in a dissection of the theories of the political and physiological organs of the bo[...]
(210)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%24.2[...]ogical organs of the body politic because they all begin their explanations with sexuality, add a dynamic of culturla repression, and then attempt to liberate again the personal and collective body
civilization = body politic
(in iran:)
personal body =/= social body }--> both not natural
(a fundamental human condition:) through labor, we make ourselves individually and collectively in a constant interaction with all that has not yet been humanized ♥
[animal body politic]
[the science of animal]
animal sociology (in fables since millennia [--> Kelile Demne stories of natural basis of cultural cooperation and competition]):
•construction of oppressive theories of the body political
•science of animal groups
•a tool in the reproduction of world
•enhancing material power
*animals* (played an importan role in)
•the project of human engineering: the project of design and management of human material for efficient, rational functioning in a scientifically ordered society (or in belief communities)
--> animals were/are:
1- plastic raw material of knowledge (subject to exact laboratory discipline)
2- having special status as natural objects that can show people their origin [--> Attenborough's civilizer films], and therefore their prerational, premanagement, precultural essence
***animal societies have been extensively employed in rationalization and naturalization of the oppressive orders of domination in the human body politic***
3- naturalization of patriarchal division of authority in the body politic and in reduction of the body politic to sexual physiology [--> Tehran's mice cannibalistic libido]
--> animal science of the body [<-- is important for everyone]
we might free nature in freeing ourselves
become aware of “fallacies of the claim to objectivity” and not to “permit facile (باسانى قابل اجرا) rejection of scientific discipline”
we cannot dismiss the layers of domination in the science of animal groups as a film of unfortunate bias or ideology that can be peeled off the healthobjective strata of knowledge below
if you are not freeing others, in freeing yourself, your freedom is total bullshit
(Sina)
for him intelligence is the perfect expression of evolutionary position ==> experimental comparative psychology --> intelligence test --> species, racila, and individual qualities were fundamentally tied to the central index of intelligence
#merchant
*entrepreneur in primate studies* --> (merchant seeing himself) working to foster a rational society based on science and preserved from old ignorance
[transformation of human sex into a scientific problem]
-trading sex for “privilege”:
primate inte[...]
(219)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%24.3[...]f domination in the science of animal groups as a film of unfortunate bias or ideology that can be peeled off the healthobjective strata of knowledge below
if you are not freeing others, in freeing yourself, your freedom is total bullshit
(Sina)
for him intelligence is the perfect expression of evolutionary position ==> experimental comparative psychology --> intelligence test --> species, racila, and individual qualities were fundamentally tied to the central index of intelligence
#merchant
*entrepreneur in primate studies* --> (merchant seeing himself) working to foster a rational society based on science and preserved from old ignorance
[transformation of human sex into a scientific problem]
-trading sex for “privilege”:
primate intelligence --allowed--> sexual states --stimulate--> the beginnings of human concepts of social right and privilege
physiology <--economic--> politics }--> scientifically confirmed to life at the organic base of civilization
sex-linked differences,
the primacy of sex in organic and social processes,
scientific managers over women's lives
monkey and apes as:
•natural objects
•unobscured by culture
•organic base in relation to which culture emerged
--> *human engineering*
(Haraway naming those) scientific networks crucially determined who did science and what science was considered good
(#sohrevardi)
Darwinian conception of natural political economy of population
(in Attar, Kelile Demne, Ajayeb, i am hunting for) *** early systems theory *** --> providing the technical base for (different claims such as:) the claim to scientific maturity of the social sciences based on concepts of culture and social group
“he removed the putative head from the collective animal body.” --> animal body politic
--> society was derived from complex interactions of pairs of individuals, understood and measured by psychological techniques, which constituted the social field space. one looked for axes of dominance as organizing principles on both the physiological and psychological levels
--> the theory of the function of male dominance nicely joins the political economy aspect of the study of animal behavior and evolution:
•competition
•division of labor
•resources allocation model
with the social integration aspect:
•cooperative coordination through leadership and social position
with the purely physiological understanding of reproductive and embryological phenomena
*Garden of Industry*
dominance as a natural property (with a physical-chemical base)
a cross ideological exercise (is not possible): science cannot be reclaimed for liberating[...]
(223)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%24.4[...]s considered good
(#sohrevardi)
Darwinian conception of natural political economy of population
(in Attar, Kelile Demne, Ajayeb, i am hunting for) *** early systems theory *** --> providing the technical base for (different claims such as:) the claim to scientific maturity of the social sciences based on concepts of culture and social group
“he removed the putative head from the collective animal body.” --> animal body politic
--> society was derived from complex interactions of pairs of individuals, understood and measured by psychological techniques, which constituted the social field space. one looked for axes of dominance as organizing principles on both the physiological and psychological levels
--> the theory of the function of male dominance nicely joins the political economy aspect of the study of animal behavior and evolution:
•competition
•division of labor
•resources allocation model
with the social integration aspect:
•cooperative coordination through leadership and social position
with the purely physiological understanding of reproductive and embryological phenomena
*Garden of Industry*
dominance as a natural property (with a physical-chemical base)
a cross ideological exercise (is not possible): science cannot be reclaimed for liberating purposes by simply reinterpreting observations or changing terminology --> (Princess Bubblegum) denying a dialectical interaction with the animals in the project of self-creation through scientific labor
(let's switch to a deeper look at primates, not as models of human beings, rather:) how they live and relate to their environment in ways that may have little to do with us [this is so helpful for everyone and is why i am interested in animal body politics] and that will surely reform our sense of relation to nature in our theories of the body politic [--> #body image]
-bodies and societies that do not depend on dominance hierarchies
--> [my work with ajayeb bestiary early animal science is about learning] ***how to build natural sciences to underpin new relations with the world*** [and that ‘history’ is not like something you hand it to someone like a cake you baked]
...................................
قورباغه زدن با شلنگ بیرون پریدن گلوله قرمز
مورچه روی برگ روی آب
آجر پرتاب کردن گربه بالای درخت
مورچه سوزاندن با ذرهبین
سوسک سوزاندن با آب داغ
جوجه ته چاه
heyvan, heyvun, heyvunak, heyvunaki
حیوان، حیوون، حیوانک، حیوونکی
...................................
(delight in) our *sensous involvement* with the *materials of language* (Lyn Hejinian)
[...]
(225)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%24.5[...]d for axes of dominance as organizing principles on both the physiological and psychological levels
--> the theory of the function of male dominance nicely joins the political economy aspect of the study of animal behavior and evolution:
•competition
•division of labor
•resources allocation model
with the social integration aspect:
•cooperative coordination through leadership and social position
with the purely physiological understanding of reproductive and embryological phenomena
*Garden of Industry*
dominance as a natural property (with a physical-chemical base)
a cross ideological exercise (is not possible): science cannot be reclaimed for liberating purposes by simply reinterpreting observations or changing terminology --> (Princess Bubblegum) denying a dialectical interaction with the animals in the project of self-creation through scientific labor
(let's swit[...]
(226)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%24.5[...]aneous and layered
(elements of the) sensorium: continuous, comples response to things perpetually delivered by the senses, the encompassing sphere that is such a large part of our subjectivity
we are englobed entirely (by the reports of our senses) --> a seamless weft of ‘information’(=/= the data the senses offer)
dark, suggestive blur of shapes and colors
what we can take in is a partial rendering of the world
[dog's nose reading] ...a universe of scents--historical, multifaceted--presents itself to the canine “reader”
(Doty) ...deer cannot see red or orange, a biologist writes, but apparently can see blue much better that we can. who can even imagine what that would mean, for blue to be--well, more? ♥
“All accounts, it seems, are partial; thus all perception might be said to be tentative (versuchsweise), an opportunity for interpretation, a guessing game.”
Doty putting it into a single sentence in order to suggest, as Proust did, the simultaneity of perception. he [Proust] wanted to dilate the sentence toward its outer limit, so that one would feel the blu of space and time that the unit of syntax held all at once
*finding the words* --> the nature of my attention, the signature of my selfhood
...terms commensurate with the clamoring world
(recognize your acts of naming --> for example naming the sonic outruch of a bird “singing”) --> what birds are actually up to when they sing isn't clear **
Whitman describing the sea itself as a “fierce old mother” whose constant iteration is the whispered word death
(in Iran we have) the problem of speechlessness (~->? Mehdi and Kourosh's talkativeness) ~= a state without agency --> unable to push back at things that impress upon them
***life not having been realy lived until it is narrated (@Ehsan)
(we need) to experience the satisfaction of matching words to the world --> **to feel, at least for a moment, language clicking into place, into a relation with the world that feels seamless and inevitable** -- when language seems to match experience, a kind of fusion between the word and the world : some tift is healed --> “the silken skilled *transremembrance* of a song” -[trans- : exchange of parts, one being fusing with another] --> “floating instant"--a part of the other, grown indistinguishable
the pleasure of recognizing a described world [****] --> work on ajayeb
festidious sense of accuracy
(Doty on) Elizabeth Bishop's poem “The Fish” (concerned with the experience of observing, aiming to track the pathways of scrutiny, *carefully rendered model of an engaged mind ar work*, looking into the fish's shifting eyes that can't be comfortably anthropomorphized. we can only guess if the poet is concerned with defeat, vitory, or su[...]
(228)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%24.6[...]eat, vitory, or survival) =/= Ferdosi's Rostam, or Div
Bishop's examination of the fish happening in the composition of the poem =/= straightforward record of perception
a tradition of seeking, in the vast book of difference (tha American continent offers)
(the poem) interprets a wordless, creaturely presence
baroque: attempt to dramatize the mind in action rather than in repose (Sa'di's baroque tendencies in Golestan)
fusing impressions synesthetically in a startling phrase
peeling scales provoke simile
...mind moving swiftly from observation to reverie
a compelling replica of inquiry ==> enlist the reader's participation in a version of the work of consciousness
descriptive acts --> attempt to render the world (and it is subject to revision)
*examplars of strangeness” (for my ajayeb, #writing Div descriptions)
-let's rewrite Div Sefid and give it more *wealth of detail*==> keeps the Div from becoming a symbol and allows it to *remain creaturely*
#Div poetry, to get close to a lived texture of creature, to allow the senses their complexity synthetic life
**every achieved poem inscribes a perceptual signature in the world**
the work of seeing ==> who is doing the looking, a specific, idiosyncratic sensibility
*detail ==> subjectivity* : we are brought into intimate proximity to the slipstream of (her) sensations --> *subjectivity* is made of such detail (of all the ways in which the world impresses itself upon us --> knowing through our scaffoldings of concerns, the tones and shadings of our moods) ~~--> we are in a sort of *readerly alliance*
[time]
#practice: try to describe what subjective time feels like --> to find variety of verbs to describe less readily chartable motions
(the time of interiority) pools, cibstricts, tunbles, speeds
-we live in a felt narrative progression, through which experience is transformed into memory
*memory edits*
what is memory but a story about how we have lived?
-timelessness: the interior landscape of reverie
lyric state of mind : seized by a moment that suddenly seems edgeless, unbounded
-wholly giving oneself over to experiencing an object
-unpointed awareness
-perfectly useless concentration
-entirely occupied
lyric moment is isolate =/= (parts of a) narrative are contiguous
(according to the lyric -->) consciousness or immortality is without date(?)
moment dilates as it is described
creating an alternate sense of duration
the surface of language
the complexity and interest of the surface
thickness means we have to *labor to enunciate* them -- is a way of mirroring the physicality of the world
seaml[...]
(230)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%24.7[...]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 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 langua[...]
(231)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%25[...]e,...
(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 of the composed still life the teacher had assigned, you whip out...
description is fueled by ***hunger for the world***, the need to taste, to name, to claim what is seen, to bring it --> the resurrection of the world within the perceiver
*it is very often true that what we are compelled to describe is terrible, or oppressive, or heartbreak[...]
(232)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%25[...]gh of the strictures of the composed still life the teacher had assigned, you whip out...
description is fueled by ***hunger for the world***, the need to taste, to name, to claim what is seen, to bring it --> the resurrection of the world within the perceiver
*it is very often true that what we are compelled to describe is terrible, or oppressive, or heartbreaking. language is hungry for that, too [...] to eat everything. even the falling and fading world, even misery* (Doty)
-they speak to our hunger for a vocabulary for the whole range of feeling, even the awful parts (--> destruction of speech is dangerous, having no language for what we do good or bad)
desctiption is made both more moving and more exact when it is acknowledged that is is inevitably incomplete
(in the strictest sense) one could say that nothing unintelligible is a meaning =/= *there is always meaning*
-the perception of meaning [such as goose sound] that cannot be translated into any other form of speech --> chasm barzakh between the incomprehensible and the making of meaning --> (how?) to build a construct of language that acknowledges the “meanings” that live outside of words (a ‘description’ that builds an argument about the nature of real) [--> ajayeb's concern; part of a function of the humility of the speaker]
([ajayeb is full of?] similes that produce) juxtaposition of the natural and the artificial, [the vegetal and the made, the tiny and the immense] : (unexpected) collision of elements (in the framing field of thinking) ==means==> to bring energy into language [--> #adjacencies: bringing things, objects, stories, arguments next to each other --> interrupting stories with stories]
ritual of flirtation
sky's deep machinery
“poor girls make themselves fabulous”
“white girl make herself black, at least while she is pretending to be a supreme”
reprofessor
(my work and interest since 2012:) attention and allegiance to a *process of knowing*
(ajayeb.net has interest in reworking the conventions of syntax and of the sentence)
•the experience of ajayeb.net is like watching something leap; scrambled elements, something clicks into place; a stubborn suspension, not quite parsable
•the experience of ajayeb (mode of description) is like *a sudden event happening so quickly we don't have a name for what we see, cannot identify the motion* (==> animals in ajayeb have many legs and arms)--> [*]motion: the patterning life of energy ~~--> world of forms
(Doty > Cummings:) “rearrangingly” + “become" = rea(be)rran(com)gi(e)ngly
ajayeb = "how everything happens” (based on the ebb and flow of percept + episteme)
(an index finger that) points to the world's ways of happening (in energetic and enigmatic waves of world's coming [...]
(233)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%25.1[...]a =/= (Doty suggests:) it is work to sort them out (what sorts out senses? question @Hoda, she must learn: an accurate rendering of an idiosyncratic process of sensory overlap and association)
[*]لحن tone: special effects, evoking a ‘moment of’ ... intense statement of feeling ==> a concretely descriptive feeling
[*]questions are always a little more trustworty than answers (?) -- sometimes things said do not take the *rhetorical form of a question* [--> in apass i was training to be able to capture those kind of ummarkedly questions] --> something said (described) with room for indeterminacy ///*convex mirror* (Doty's refractive thinking)
[*]فعل verb, the descriptive force of the right (hardworking) verb, a kind of muscular concreteness. sometimes verbs gain descriptive force when other parts of speech are newly cast in active roles
*invocation = directly addressing the thing creates a sense of immediacy and of connection
*thou, with its suggestion of divinity or beloved --> prayer
*hectic: uncomfortable alliance, inharmonious, something that might set the teeth on edge
*destroy --> a death-steeped perception that reads the wind as a “destroyer”
*world of fused duality
‘and’ --> the signature element of a place, of a landscape, the conjoined body : the animate and the inorganic as one thing
*the project of being alive* (is little understood)
([my project is perhaps] to become) a person whom the ancient world is remarkably vivid*** ♥
to have gossiped about figures of ancient Persia
to believe that the *world is queer* (=/= Mobed, Foad, Reza)
(we need -->) a window of doupt through which all creative possbility comes into being
(Forster:) “[...] standing absolutly motionless at a sight angle to the universe”
(queer =?) an oblique مورب position in relation to the real (=/= buisiness as usual)
queer to be interested in what can't be packaged or sold in the marketplace
queer to enjoy the fundamentally useless, contemplative pleasure of (poetry, ajayeb, etc.)
description --> *providing the particular evidence of specificity*
not everything can/need to be described --> **the choice of what to evoke**, to make any scene seem ‘real’ vagheyi. look at USA film industry and all the efforts put in scenic description of the WWII, vampire stories, teenage life, nation; or in iran in Iran-Iraq war (Iranq)
lush, sensuous, flowering
parallel text to the creature
“you are gorgeous and i am coming” ♥
an approximation, unstoppable as an approachoig sound of approaching organism
testing and smelling
insight and sound --> Lili
an aphrodisiac and a chastening reminder: getting sidetracked by grief
[...]
(235)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%25.3[...]s landscape, making living ecologies
which sectors/fields of art require artist to go out and notice things?
(engage with which) details of the world --> breaking common sense
our mamalian bias:
•predetermined body shape and size
•run toward death (pre-programmed death =/= history) ==> makes us think in terms of set-life courses
}==> allow us to imagine a standard individual outside of history
(Tsing's) history: overlapping tracks and traces and many trajectories of world-making, human and not human
irreversible time ==> indeterminacy (of history) --> new alliances --> the ability of assemblages to produce historical changes in our common world
what needs to be stated
what needs to be produced
context-dependent --?--> the way things are
architecture of podium <--✕--> labor-process of the actual speaker
how talks are *actually* produced
in your material practices
hybrid in digital manual tactile operations of speaking
noticing ants, spiders, little traps, species cohabiting, mutual coproduction of economics, ecology, labor-studies, house-hold studies, ajayeb-studies, and understanding of the orders of the natural and human world
(Gordon allowing) *algorithms to become stories*
(the technological enablement of some) *disciplines of attention*
“we are al lichen”: we are all ecosystem composite critters
ants, combining two kinds of noise, half-hazard patterns of interaction
half-hazard contact
half-hazard context
}==> it works (=/= perfection, precision/efficiency of clockwork)
#some Baradian models of intra-action in popular cinema:
•(intra-action received and wielded through discipleship and pre-programmed talent:) The Force in Starwars. [the story don't allow any other story of The Forhe Force and its contingencies other that good and evil tool-use of it]
•(intra-action resisted by individual subjectification:) the shadowy monster from the Upside Down in The Stranger Things, possessing the character. [the story is based on non-intra-active models and mode of being in the world of multispecies in multi-dimensions, it wants clear boundried subjects encapsulated by psychological ego and self-possession persons, ideas of identity and power --> life insurance system]
•(intra-action resisted by the political modern concrete individualism:) relationship with the phantom of state in The Handmaid's Tale. [overlapping a flat image of totalitarian society into religion]
...................................
technosphere: (conceptualized as) an unintended muddle of multispecies relationships emerging from contaminated landscapes, dumps
--reconsider-with-> feral technologies: novel and weedy capacities for materially significant change
[...]
(236)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%25.5[...] 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 living beings ~= *die or be part of the jury*
monstrosity: the rule
originality: provisional ordinariness
finalism --Darwin--> selection
***both Lamarck and Darwin denounce finalism and celebrate mechanism
(both, [complementary] biologists to whom) life appears as a datum which they seek to describe without being too concerned about accounting for it analytically [--> not accouting for the analyticallity of their objects?]
Lamarck --> (thinks of life in terms of) *duration*
Darwin --> (thinks of life in terms of) *interdependence*
Darwin's biogeographical environment =/=? Lamarck's environment
Humboldt (and Ritter) --> (19th century) geography: a science conscious of its method and its dignity
(naturalist traveler -->) *Humboldt's “Kosmos” [~ synthesis of knowledge, not aiming to be encyclopedic, but strives ***to arrive at an intuition of the universe***] combining:
•(“oikoumene” tradition of Greek geography:) *the science of the entire human world* [--> ajayeb]
•(“mathematical geography” founded by Eratosthenes, Hipparchus, Ptolemy:) *the science of coordination of human space in relation with the celectial configuration and movements* [--> Olearius]
}==> Earth [considere[...]
(237)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%25.8[...]
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 living beings ~= *die or be part of the jury*
monstrosity: the rule
originality: provisional ordinariness
finalism --Darwin--> selection
***both Lamarck and Darwin denounce finalism and celebrate mechanism
(both, [complementary] biologists to whom) life appears as a datum which they seek to describe without being too concerned about accounting for it analytically [--> not accouting for the analyticallity of their objects?]
Lamarck --> (thinks of life in terms of) *duration*
Darwin --> (thinks of life in terms of) *interdependence*
Darwin's biogeographical environment =/=? Lamarck's environment
Humboldt (and Ritter) --> (19th century) geography: a science conscious of its method and its dignity
(naturalist traveler -->) *Humboldt's “Kosmos” [~ synthesis of knowledge, not aiming to be encyclopedic, but strives ***to arrive at an intuition of the universe***] combining:
•(“oikoumene” tradition of Greek geography:) *the science of the entire human world* [--> ajayeb]
•(“mathematical geography” founded by Eratosthenes, Hipparchus, Ptolemy:) *the science of coordination of human space in relation with the celectial configuration and movements* [--> Olearius]
}==> Earth [considered as a whole]: (stable support for the) *فراز و نشيب vicissitude of history* --> ‘terrestrial space + its configurations’ : object of geographical, geological, sociological, biological knowledge
(Humboldt) applied a whole system of barometric, thermometric in his investigation. *division of plants* according to different climates ==> “botanical geography” & “zoological geography”
history of the Weltanschauung
*****how Humboldt (and Ritter, [even Simondon does that too]) apply the *category of totality* to their object --> the relations between historical man and the environment ==> *determination of historical relationships*
the relations between the geographical environment and man ==> a spirit
(-->) *doing history*: reading a map, understanding by map the representation of a set of metrical, geodesic, geological, climatological, and descriptive biogeographical data
Loeb + Watson (phototropism in animals):
every movement of the organism in the environment = a movement into which the environment forces the organism ==> **animal = reflex** <-->{Darwinism + Cartesianism ==> behavio[...]
(238)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%25.8[...]ve sample in the Umgebung }--> milieu
environment: “man's Umwelt” ~ the ordinary world of his perspective and pragmatic experience
*human suject: creator of techniques and values
==> animal's Umwelt: a centered environment/milieu relative to this living being as essentially a subject of vital values
a subjectivity at the root of this organization --> شپش shepesh tick
Uexküll story of the tick --> *mechanical theory of the reflex*
...the animal may remain completely indifferent and insensitive for a considerable length of time to all the excitations of an environment like a forest, and that the only excitation that is capable of triggering its movement, to the exclusion of any other, is the odor of rancid butter.
--> *an organism is therefore never equal to the theoretical totality of its possibilities
organism =/= preferential behavior
reversal of organism-environment relationship:
◦“the meaning of an organism is its being” (Goldstein)
•“the living being's acquisition of its form” (Mendel)
•“the environment is not an agent of formation strictly speaking, but rather of realization” (Brachet)
•
(Soviet) ambition of complete domination of nature and limit the possibilities of an intentional alteration of living species
*which stories of life and why emphasize the separation of the organism from the environment (and make this separation intuitive and ready-to-hand)? [--> ajayeb]
(Lamarck focused on the point where) life coincides with its own meaning, where through sensibility the living being is positively or negatively *situated absolutly in existence* --> ***the indivisible totality of organism and environment*** [<-- Barad has to say a lot about that]
for Lamarck:
“circumstances” and “ambience” spherical, centered arrangement
astrological conceptions ==> “influence” and “influencing circumstances”
(in 18th and start of 19th century:) geographical + astronomical + astrological ==> [*]climate: the changing aspect of the sky + the influence exerted by the sky on the Earth
--> ajayeb-e climate
--> ajayeb-e moon
--> Olearius's anthropogeographical mechanics (<== Newton's celectial mechanics)
[*]geography: (for the Greeks) the projection of the sky on the Earth --establishing--> a correspondence of sky and Earth:
•topographical correspondence --> geometry + cosmography
•hierarchical correspondence --> physics + astrology
(philosophy of the) stoics ==> (Greek) geology ***
[رواقی stoic: deterministic understanding of a universe (overseen by a god and governed by reason), integrity of character (--> walking erect), psychological independence from society, self-control and detachment, indifference to pleasure or pain ==> “clear thinker"]
}---> ***the[...]
(239)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%26[...]determinism ==> geographical theory of environments (= milieu): biocentric conception of the cosmos (crossed over the Middle Ages to bloom in the Renaissance)
the idea of the cosmos:
(with Copernicus and Kepler:) Earth of living beings and man : the privileged center of reference of the ancient world
**(with Galielo and Descartes -->) two theories:
•a centered qualitative space in which the mi-lieu is a center
•a decentered homogeneous space in which the mi-lieu is an intermediary field
need for expansionist security + requirements of scientific knowledge
Pascal --> we drift over a vast mileu ["we are floating in a medium of vast extent"]
he needs a place to contain him
he needs time to exist --> *durer*
(Pascal's) image of the world as a *finite totality* --> a permanent myth of originally Neo-Platonist mystical thought in which the intuition of the spherical world centered on and by the living being is combined with the already heliocentric cosmology of the Pythagoreans
(Newtonian:)
space --> means of God's omnipresence
ether --> support and medium of forces
*empiricism hides the theological foundations* ==Canguilhem==> the natural philosophy which is the source of the positivist and mechanistic conception of the environment in fact turns out to be supported by the mystical intuition of a sphere of energy whose central action is identically present and effective at every point
a story: the ideal of the objectivity of knowledge requires a *decentring of the view of things* <-- seams normal to any find formed in the mathematical and physical discipline
(Canguilhem > Haldane:) man's specific environment is the world of his perception, that is to say, the field of his pragmatic experience in which his actions, orientated and governed by values immanent to tendencies, separate out qualified objects and situate them in relation to each other and all of them in relation to himself (---> go to Barthes's discussion on the notion of operative language/tool)
--> that is why we need a different language to relate to environment
the inhuman environment =/=? ajayeb
kinds of “recognitions” that were established by disqualification of all specific subjectively centered environment [such as ajayeb], including that of man, as vital illusions or errors
*ajayeb = (one of many past) *centers of organization, adaptation, and invention* (now dissolved by science: to dissolve living beings in the anonymity of the mechanical, physical, and chemical environment ==> encompass the man)
(ajayeb's hesitate or) bold undertaking for life
[*]ajayeb's science (using Canguilhem's words): the work of a humanity rooted in life before being enlighted by knowledge, (if) it is a fact in the world at the same time as *a vision [...]
(240)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%26.1[...] seam (to begin with)
•pleasure of variety beyond the domestic
•how places are differentiated and specific
...................................
Global Futures
(a game of) possibilities of contingent connections
a game that develops our ideas of the productivity--for better or worse--of contingency
a game to appreciate contingent connections [=/= stale and dangerous predictions (==> mithridatism)]
futures of all sorts are forged in the contingencies of strange connections
•foreclosed in the narrow channels of corporate expansion
•clashing state and popular terrorisms
•our best hopes (as well as our inchoate terrors)
*Tsing: “Contingency surrounds us, but we ignore its power to shape the future.”
**europe's secular prophecy's formulaic tropes for encapsulating time**
•most powerful future-making stories have told of the fulfillment of principles of progress and rationality
•driving force of technology will transform society
•ideal of democracy will be progressively encoded in law
=/=
**anti-progress prophecy's formulaic tropes for encapsulating time**
•national genius of a chosen people will blossom
•human nature will reestablish historic gender roles and racial hierarchies
•the essence of ancient civilizations will rise again to vie and clash
}--> There is no room for contingent connections in any of these predictions
(most important story of our time:) *the story of globalization*:
•the world is entering a global era without political or economic rifts
•nation-states and cultures are increasingly irrelevant
•a global menu of consumerdesires and entrepreneurial standards frames identity and sets individual and collective goals
--> since the end of the Cold War:
•global expansion of a few giant corporations
•the great flows of people from one continent to another
•forging of transnational standards for economics and politics
•development of widely spread audiences for once parochial forms of popular culture
--> Global capitalism is not seamless:
•leapfrogging financial crises
•“antiglobalization” politics springing up
•deflating policymakers’ hopes for a smooth transition to corporate empire
ultimate fantasy of an *era without politics*
ultimate fantasy of a *more complex evolutionary plan*
=/= contingency & interconnection
principles of (Tsing and Pollman's) Global Futures game:
you tell the story of this coalescence, and if your fellow players accept the story, it makes history: it becomes a part of the world of the game.
the goal is to develop a set of *coalescences* that fulfills a preassigned mission.
whoever tells the best story whi[...]
(241)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%26.6[...]itutions, or things:
an unexpected connection ==> a “historical force"[= something that might change the world]
(parties might be: groups, institutions, ideas, identities, things, or beings. chili peppers and Thai cuisine; African rice producers and the Carolina coast; astrolabes, compasses, and plane tables)
[contemplative mode of togetherness: (in Europe) coalescence انعقاد =/= (in Middle East) confluence تلاقى }--> transnationalism =/= internationalism }~-> forms of alliance that are possible and needed that can be created differentially with “trans-” =/= “inter-“]--> *coalescence is not meaningful nor possible in Middle East?*
example:
•not coalescence story: to say that a cat and a goldfinch are both animals. or to imagine a pet store that sells both
•coalescence story: a cat-feeding fad that requires that cats eat nothing but goldfinches to give the cats a sleeker coat, while goldfinches become seriously endangered because of the program <-- *both cats and goldfinches are changed in the encounter*
coalescence can be unintentional, seriously damage collaborator and the world
missions could be:
•create a revolution
•corrupt a nation's government
•use a natural resource to create havoc
•revitalize an ancient philosophy
•
future-making cards:
icons of historical agency
they represent the world through stereotypes and symbols
used as an ideology about X (=/= as the real thing)
eternal essences as natural objects or cultural codes prevent theories to require things to change =/= Global Futures conceptualization of time and change --> ***forms of human and nonhuman possibility imagined within current discussions of politics and culture***
*world power =/= world time*
time --> evolutionary ladder --> progressive --> supportive trellises of flowering liberalism + critical charts of intensifying capitalism
coercive international development
civilizational paternalism
free-market bullying
...................................
#my theory (=/= reductionist, or psychological identification) on specification of:
spider =/= linear temporality
whale =/= distinction of organism and environment
(?) =/= “single point of view ==> subjective phenomena”
Nagel: the fact that an organism has conscious experience = there is something it is like to be that organism {--> subjective character of experience}--✕--> analyzable in terms of any explanatory system of functional states, or intentional states
Blade Runner's notion of “soul”: ascribed to robots or automata that behave like people though they experience nothing
physicalism: phenomenological features must themselves be given a physical account
...if one travel[...]
(242)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%26.7[...]genetic tree, people gradually shed their faith that there is experience at all
anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat
anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited whale
anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited snake
anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited jinn
--> knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life
Nagel asking: we must consider whether any method will permit us to extrapolate استقراء to the inner life of the bat from our own case, and if not, what alternative methods there may be for understanding the notion
“our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited” --> Nagel's view remains secular and in the bounds of his disciplinary field. (religious studies, theology, animal subjectivity studies, art of description, they can be helpful to describe things not in terms of the impressions they make on our senses)
-Nagel is trying with the wrong language at bats: “does it make sense to ask what my experiences are ‘really’ like as opposed to how they appear to me? [...] objective processes can have a subjective nature.”
what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves =/= what it is like for a bat to be a bat
schematic conceptions of Eszter
(old model of understanding:)
* --> stimulus (things sparkling) --> perception (hiting the senses) --> apprehension (mind aware without judgement) --> comprehension (psychological judgement about the manner of situation) --> knowing ==> world of doing, in which “action” is: expected (mother attending the child, free liberating the prisoners), commanded (soldier's hierarchy, job's duty), solved (engineer puzzling out a problem)
the things apprehended from a particular point of view (particular visual phenomenology) are not connected to that point
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 do[...]
(244)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%26.8[...] model of understanding:)
* --> stimulus (things sparkling) --> perception (hiting the senses) --> apprehension (mind aware without judgement) --> comprehension (psychological judgement about the manner of situation) --> knowing ==> world of doing, in which “action” is: expected (mother attending the child, free liberating the prisoners), commanded (soldier's hierarchy, job's duty), solved (engineer puzzling out a problem)
the things apprehended from a particular point of view (particular visual phenomenology) are not connected to that point
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 (defeat[...]
(245)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%26.8[...]f family's farm
slow disturbance
mode of inquiry: take small details and ask big questions with them
living in ruins
--Jassem--> maybe is a nightmare story
--Tsing--> maybe is a mushroom story
(capital/genocide/...)
(destroyed by...)
rats, rabbits, and algae seaweed
your abilites to nurture and tell stories --tales--> *life emerging from damaged human comunities* (and blasted landscapes) --> not exactly a story of hope (=/= towards a better sleep, the “less you know better you sleep” kind of story), stories of displacement and losses (due to war and concentration of wealth in our time)
=/= *big narrative of progress* : a single world trajectory and time [=/= *time of surprise*] of which “everybody takes part” (*moving forward together* --> #sci-fi series of transnational crew on a spaceship) ...powerful ways of knowing the world [<==?== renaissance] (--my ajayeb project is about those ways of knowing, stories of what sets the world on motion, such as universalism & cultural relativism)
--> *building communal agenda* ~ (dream of) transculturalism [~ blend communal identities] (<== Jassem and Mia's Norway: humans get richer, more efficient, and more make the natural world work for them), is given to us by “men” (that we don't have to follow)
[*]progress: anthropogentic landscapes haunted by imagined futures
--or--> (you might) leave your home and run into a vast new problem
stability is a privilege
[what is?] the future of your dreams
[what are?] the nunhumans worth noticing
species that signal “i am available”
[capitalist accumulations + insult upon insult upon insult ==>] diversity
diversity: (in Germany, considered archaic and chaotic) collateral damage of improvement, necessory victim of progress
fire, herding, farming,
--> creating niches for hunting and forging
--> messing with (nature)
-the question of how much (of human, neighbor, etc.) disturbance we can live with
-what is to consider other's (species, peasant, etc.) ways of life-making trajectories along ours? [==> world-making (requires this)]
the question of niche-making
-niches interact with one another
[*]alienation: the ability to stand alone (--> Nietzschean ethics =/= niche-making entanglement *always imperfect and continent*)
==> (people, things, and species become) [*]assets: mobiles that can be moved from their lifeworlds to be exchanged elsewhere--everything else is waste (=/= eating others)
}--> progress: search for assets =/= art: unalienated critical work, ***reciprocal capture*** ~~> tumble [=/= transcend one another, or bow down, question of integration]
*niche: adjusted timing & quality, small sto[...]
(246)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%27.2[...]prise*] of which “everybody takes part” (*moving forward together* --> #sci-fi series of transnational crew on a spaceship) ...powerful ways of knowing the world [<==?== renaissance] (--my ajayeb project is about those ways of knowing, stories of what sets the world on motion, such as universalism & cultural relativism)
--> *building communal agenda* ~ (dream of) transculturalism [~ blend communal identities] (<== Jassem and Mia's Norway: humans get richer, more efficient, and more make the natural world work for them), is given to us by “men” (that we don't have to follow)
[*]progress: anthropogentic landscapes haunted by imagined futures
--or--> (you might) leave your home and run into a vast new problem
stability is a privilege
[what is?] the future of your dreams
[what are?] the nunhumans worth noticing
species that signal “i am available”
[capitalist accumulations + insult upon insult upon insult ==>] diversity
diversity: (in Germany, considered archaic and chaotic) collateral damage of improvement, necessory victim of progress
fire, herding, farming,
--> creating niches for hunting and forging
--> messing with (nature)
-the question of how much (of human, neighbor, etc.) disturbance we can live with
-what is to consider other's (species, peasant, etc.) ways of life-making trajectories along ours? [==> world-making (requires this)]
the question of niche-making
-niches interact with one another
[*]alienation: the ability to stand alone (--> Nietzschean ethics =/= niche-making entanglement *always imperfect and continent*)
==> (people, things, and species become) [*]assets: mobiles that can be moved from their lifeworlds to be exchanged elsewhere--everything else is waste (=/= eating others)
}--> progress: search for assets =/= art: unalienated critical work, ***reciprocal capture*** ~~> tumble [=/= transcend one another, or bow down, question of integration]
*niche: adjusted timing & quality, small stories, convexe,
=/= house --> has foundation
=/= your monument
=/= building
...................................
[title]
ecologies of nothingness***
premise of my lecture:
•*all places are polluted and difficult*
•‘abuse of language’ is every time you open your mouth
•the social always always includes nonhuman
•there is no encounter without the contractual
..and i can't tell grave from garden
-perhaps i have been unconsciously working on the question of “why are we here?” or “am i here?”
-cartographies of thinking--&--how i am inscribed in them
(itineraries i am stuck with)
going to a place =/= embrace it as a site
--> always i have a resistance to where[...]
(247)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%27.3[...], or bow down, question of integration]
*niche: adjusted timing & quality, small stories, convexe,
=/= house --> has foundation
=/= your monument
=/= building
...................................
[title]
ecologies of nothingness***
premise of my lecture:
•*all places are polluted and difficult*
•‘abuse of language’ is every time you open your mouth
•the social always always includes nonhuman
•there is no encounter without the contractual
..and i can't tell grave from garden
-perhaps i have been unconsciously working on the question of “why are we here?” or “am i here?”
-cartographies of thinking--&--how i am inscribed in them
(itineraries i am stuck with)
going to a place =/= embrace it as a site
--> always i have a resistance to where i am:
•the ways we lose a sense of place --> displacement
•the ways we experience livability through places
(has to do with my own broken/corrupt/fubar link with ancestry <-- only “your people” can show you how to imagine it, the center/home)
transportation --{traumatic & distruptive}--> transformation
time of surprise ==> nonanimal (udyr)
-nature-culture patchworks
-perspectival and performative
-contaminative and communicative
*fantastic and real vision*
-things that don't fit together, yet, there *are* together --> sym (=/= bifurcation) --> awkward relations & interrupting categories
•(necrophobia)
•schizophrenic relations to...
•deconstruction of presence...
(for you there is also) ***many fantastically large set of contexts within which to say “yes”***
(Tsing's) *contaminated diversity* (complicated, ugly, humbling) [=/= ‘endangered species’ and cultures (innocent victims of human progress)]
-implicates survivors in histories of greed, damage, and destruction --> cacophony of troubled stories --might--> help to learn something about the cultural and natural histories at stake
-difficult to love and relate
joint organs {part plant, part fungus} interspecies phisiology ==> *mushroom*
*tumble: falll down as if collapsing (from upright position), thrown together (in mess, and very difficult to rewind)
=/= transcend
=/= entropy
•bodies tumble into bodies --> monsters
•histories tumble into histories --> ghosts
•stories tumble into stories --> lures
(material lifeworld tumble into) forests tumble into fables tumble into politics tumble into ...
***dispersal & entanglement*** {
•dispersal --> shattered, torn, broken, dispersed, made particulate, whisked away on the breeze (--> smoke, Urashima turning into particls, dud to cough with سرفه sorfe) [<-- Jassem and Mia] --> time is crossed out [...]
(248)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%27.3[...]a place =/= embrace it as a site
--> always i have a resistance to where i am:
•the ways we lose a sense of place --> displacement
•the ways we experience livability through places
(has to do with my own broken/corrupt/fubar link with ancestry <-- only “your people” can show you how to imagine it, the center/home)
transportation --{traumatic & distruptive}--> transformation
time of surprise ==> nonanimal (udyr)
-nature-culture patchworks
-perspectival and performative
-contaminative and communicative
*fantastic and real vision*
-things that don't fit together, yet, there *are* together --> sym (=/= bifurcation) --> awkward relations & interrupting categories
•(necrophobia)
•schizophrenic relations to...
•deconstruction of presence...
(for you there is also) ***many fantastically large set of contexts within which to say “yes”***
(Tsing's) *contaminated diversity* (complicated, ugly, humbling) [=/= ‘endangered species’ and cultures (innocent victims of human progress)]
-implicates survivors in histories of greed, damage, and destruction --> cacophony of troubled stories --might--> help to learn something about the cultural and natural histories at stake
-difficult to love and relate
joint organs {part plant, part fungus} interspecies phisiology ==> *mushroom*
*tumble: falll down as if collapsing (from upright position), thrown together (in mess, and very difficult to rewind)
=/= transcend
=/= entropy
•bodies tumble into bodies --> monsters
•histories tumble into histories --> ghosts
•stories tumble into stories --> lures
(material lifeworld tumble into) forests tumble into fables tumble into politics tumble into ...
***dispersal & entanglement*** {
•dispersal --> shattered, torn, broken, dispersed, made particulate, whisked away on the breeze (--> smoke, Urashima turning into particls, dud to cough with سرفه sorfe) [<-- Jassem and Mia] --> time is crossed out ويرانه
•entanglement --> patchwork, care, weave, (together, reconnected, acknowledging care and entanglement) [<-- Kirsten] --> time of the hut کاشانه
} “&” --> ??? stories? reciprocal capture ==> immanent new modes of existing (in damage and loss) [<-- Sina] --> time (and things) are diffractivelly/differentially constituted
as humans we also have these qualities:
•our plasticity
•our ability to be affected
•our ability to hybridize
(modern human activity, burning man insults ==>) [*]monsters: ajayeb-e wonders of symbiosis (threats of ecological disruption, multispecies entanglement)
(Tsing, a useful figure to think with ==>)
•they help to pay attention to (ancient chimeric) entanglement
[...]
(249)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%27.4[...]feworld tumble into) forests tumble into fables tumble into politics tumble into ...
***dispersal & entanglement*** {
•dispersal --> shattered, torn, broken, dispersed, made particulate, whisked away on the breeze (--> smoke, Urashima turning into particls, dud to cough with سرفه sorfe) [<-- Jassem and Mia] --> time is crossed out ويرانه
•entanglement --> patchwork, care, weave, (together, reconnected, acknowledging care and entanglement) [<-- Kirsten] --> time of the hut کاشانه
} “&” --> ??? stories? reciprocal capture ==> immanent new modes of existing (in damage and loss) [<-- Sina] --> time (and things) are diffractivelly/differentially constituted
as humans we also have these qualities:
•our plasticity
•our ability to be affected
•our ability to hybridize
(modern human activity, burning man insults ==>) [*]monsters: ajayeb-e wonders of symbiosis (threats of ecological disruption, multispecies entanglement)
(Tsing, a useful figure to think with ==>)
•they help to pay attention to (ancient chimeric) entanglement
•they point to monstrosity of man
•they point toward life's symbiotic entanglement across bodies
monsters: nature suddenly unfamiliar (acting like udyr)
[*]ghosts: phantoms inside [your] (natural) history, layered temporalities of living and dying (==shape==> landscapes), creatures of ambivalent entanglement --> (help us read) *life's enmeshment in landscapes*
suffering from the ill of another species (or people):
•bacteria inside (<== pollution, radiation)
•people next door (<== war, politics)
}--> this is the condition of anthropocene entanglement
[productive horror of our civil performance--Kirsten, Sina, Jassem and Mia:]
temporalities of ruin, body, optics
| | |
matrix of rage, lure, desire
rage (violently affective contact)
--> ghosts: [--> Jassem and Mia's performance ~ “big story"]
•**histories tumbled into histories** (“ghosts” <== bad death <== settler colonialism + expansive capitalism --> they brought with them a peculiar kind of time: looking straight ahead to the future [==> optimization & salvation of a *single past*] --> ruthless ambition & [modernity's time:] metronomic synchrony 🕓)
•animating feral and partial connections
•remind us of an *impossible present* (that we live in)
* (embodied) contingency, asymmetry, indeterminacy *
•hauntings (are not immaterial!) : presumptive absence (presumed in the absence)
lures
--> monsters: [--> Kirsten's objects ~ small stories, little niches with ghostly contours (like a car's tire) ~ things growing in abundant]
•**bodies tumbled into bodies** (“monsters” <== assets and wastes (an[...]
(250)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%27.4[...]in --> 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***
[title]
shadow biology
Jassem: make sami complicated
project's two categories:
•nature --> perverse
•culture --> endangered (--therefore?--> innocent, pure)
-homesick
-seasick
-sickened in home
چیقزستن
شخصیت توصیفی --> descriptive? (drift in describing)
شخصیت حاشیهای --> digressive نامربوط پرت, excursions superficial relevances, off the subject [=/= انحرافی]
شخصیت خود محور --> rotating along the axis of ego, tangled subjective schemas with objective reality, talking regardless of the listener [egoist: vampire without self-reflection =/= narcissistic personality]
شخصیت مقایسهای --> comparing?
}=/= (always askin asking) how do you make a subject of conversation out of what you are concerned with --> make ‘your subjects’ into ‘subjects of conversation’ with others --> موضوع
•غیر قابل حل کردن =/=
•تفکیک کردن
(مطرح کردن به صورت که تکه تکه کرد)
[*]research: problem of entering a culture from outside
points of the lecture:
-a nano-expose
-of kicking off this...
-not dramatically pitched at you
-cartography of collapse and sublime
-coming down or crushing down the watching post
-(disclosures and) promises of frontier technology
-
ghosts of the project:
/poltergeist --> not really capable of knowing different things and different types of relations they are entered into, bad at perspectival communication
/Hamlet's father --> wanting you to remember ~= revenge
/Cinderella --> doesn't show a[...]
(252)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%27.6[...]ه کرد)
[*]research: problem of entering a culture from outside
points of the lecture:
-a nano-expose
-of kicking off this...
-not dramatically pitched at you
-cartography of collapse and sublime
-coming down or crushing down the watching post
-(disclosures and) promises of frontier technology
-
ghosts of the project:
/poltergeist --> not really capable of knowing different things and different types of relations they are entered into, bad at perspectival communication
/Hamlet's father --> wanting you to remember ~= revenge
/Cinderella --> doesn't show any psychological symptoms (she has no psychology?), she is not the master of anything, not even her name
/ruin --> place of unsettled identities
questions of:
•doom [=/= adjustment, management]: “contamination = end”
•subject surging to bear an affect, subject who goes with the flow in an intoxicated moment
•traumatic realism
•(endangered ==>) survival: fighting for “your right against others”
•less-than ideal livable collaborations
•
•constructing interest (not that ‘you want to know’ --> historically crafted and naturalized modalities of “knowing more”)
•contingent (~ lure, abstraction, fragile [--> they create interested bodies]) =/=? analytical [--> they create disembodied subjects]
[poem can do all of these:]
/proposition --> right/wrong declaratives
/exposition --> systematic explanation
/disposition --> affective orientation ~~> attitude ==> perspectives ==> selves
poet [=/= archivist] can be responsible for the ‘remainders’ --> good at greeting =/= traumatic realism
(1) traumatic realism
(real understood as traumatic:) “shock ==> subject”
a way of figuring that fails to bring the inflicting force (of real) into the symbolic order ==> mime, miming: you bring it into the present literally over and over (re-present)
|
(2) atmospheric attunement
a way of being in the noise
labor-intensive process that stretches across imaginaries [such as travel, house, haunt] --> responding to ” “
actual affects of modes of living brought into being
intimacy with a world [visiting families in Alta]
|
(3) phantom arm
“social = present-absent” (=/= Star Trek's interculturalism) (=/= Lacan's subject: proper sense of absence and loss)
connectivity does not require physical contiguity
-force of piled-up phantom limps
-hum of the palce, dormant noise --> worlding of a place [<-- material and sensory labor of attending to it]
-hauntology =/= Archimedean certainty of presence --> a knowing consciousnes
-so, that lost arm/limb (original part of you) could have a chance of becoming companion species, and not a discard[...]
(253)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%27.7[...]unconscious processes
(and not of control)
neoliberal economic logics --> image of massness (=/= consciousness of one's collective interests) ==> condition the possibility of social action (movements characterized by a schema in which exposure to events leads to politicization) <-- an older genre of politicization narrative [~ individuals describe their encounter with social injustice, extreme poverty, or excessive violence and then recount a growing consciousness of the structures that produced them, #Robin Hood]
inadvertent and even accidental convergences ==?==> political movements in Southeast Asia (throughout the late 1980s and 1990s) --> (students who participated in antigovernment protests in Rangoon/Yangon in the late 1980) described their entry into the political sphere (less exposed to the object of social injustice, not in terms of an originally shared project, not a shared analysis, but rather) as the result of a situational convergence (from which an ideological project had yet to be fabricated)
(to understand) your relationship to the political as *subjection to force* (and hence) ~=> *the violation of subjectivity* (=/= acceding to a fuller subjectivity)
they were just there (summoned to events the nature of which they did not know in advance) --> *ephemeral mobilization*:
•by anonymous calls (precipitated objectless gatherings by cell phone messaging, an anonymous call of an ideologically vacant sort)
•ephemeral rumors
•without ideological commitment
•by curiosity (gathered only to find out why others were gathered)
•attraction to spectacle
•to consume, pornographically, the visceral images of police and military violence
•
--> the idea of participation loses its meaning
formation of a crowd
materialization of the state's force
ephemeral mobilization (which later sets the stage for politicization) is a familiar instrument of power
the group:
•(has a) monopoly on violence
•manifestation of a will to democracy (for example the way Iranian movements were read by international bodies)
ahistoricism of conspiratorial orientation --> “powerful but secret instrumentalities ==> temporary formations” --misses--> the transformations of social consciousness and political possibility
(to open to the thought of a world beyond you)
narratives of accidental politicization (~ movements emerging from crowds without ever becoming masses or classes)
--✕--> from the state
--✕--> from the transnational media + whose circuits the images of these convergences travel
--> an experience of immediacy (as the origin of politics =/= encounter with representations of the world), sudden activation of an immediate presence in the public sphere --> political conceived as itself being contingent
[...]
(254)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%28[...]rity of the other is unknown and unknowable ==>)
[*]witchcraft ==provides==>
•an idiom in which the world's very immunity to explanation is affirmed (often with violent and terrifying consequence)
•figures and narrative forms in which to address (also reproduce) the opacity and ambivalence of sociality
[context:]
the other (like the empty seashell) is unknowable, though we must engage others and seek recognition from them to escape solitude and death [...] in forms of giving and reciprocation that demand generosity but that are also likely to provoke avarice --emerge--> witchcraft: a relentless question about appearances and the problem of knowing what they disclose
doubling of genitalia and mouth in Buli dream imagery
(marriage: to manage witchcraft)
tradition “establishes the ideal format for conviviality” ==ensuring==> sexuality and consumption are made the basis of sociality =/= witchcraft (as a perversion of marriage)
in Buli (against mistranslation or misrecognition of the foreign modern):
•Christian missionization (19th and early 20th century, and again in the 1930s)
•modernist developmentalism and statism under Suharto
•technologization associated with natural resource-based capitalism
}--scenario--> effort to become modern ==> enter an order of truth and knowledge (=/= dissimulation and doubt)
valorization of reciprocity (in Halmahera)
Morris asks: is not the coimbrication of doubt/belief precisely what the discourses of the Enlightenment science, namely knowledge through revelation of what is, promised to replace?
(Bubandt's assumptions in Kant/Morris terms:)
•doubt <== anxiety, fear, suspicion, rage (--> affective dimension)
•doubt <== an incapacity to transcend the aporia that defines the relation between the empirical and the transcendental (--> epistemological dimension)<br />
“I have never seen a cannibal witch” --> anthropology's epistemological conundrum (an a priori postulate) --Kant--> an irreducible impasse between the empirical and the transcendental, of the incapacity of sensory experience (intuition) to provide the basis of absolute knowledge (=/= merely general knowledge)
Foucault --> intuition cannot ground knowledge of the absolute ~=> knowledge of individual human beings and their empirical histories cannot provide knowledge of “the human”
Evans-Pritchard --> witchcraft satisfies the demands for an explanation of the singular event: this death, of this individual, in this moment (not death in general)
~-> for Bubandt, witchcraft: reproduction and valorization of this aporia (between the transcendental and the empirical)
James Siegel naming the witch (not only a political history but an investigation into the entire history of anthropological discourse on witchcraft and sorcery)[...]
(255)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%28.4[...]cealed the histories of mining and labor elsewhere
•promise contact with elsewhere + obstacles to the desire for full presence and the performative power of words ==> frustrated desire
a public whose membership cannot be known in advance--even when exclusionary limits are constitutive of its domain --> [*]public sphere: social formations enabled by technomedia phenomena (=/= spaces of rational deliberation and consensus making--as in liberal political theory, public sphere characterized by deliberative processes)
*scenes of overhearing* --> public speaking makes that overhearing its goal
“migrant pirates of deindustrialization” (speak only to threaten) --> liberal opposition between language and violence ~~--> the rhetorical grace appropriate to leadership (inauguration speech of Obama, his charisma emanated from his identification with a righteous struggle --> *his being more than himself* [<-- young artist selflessness syndrome in aspiration with the right politcal cause])
zamazamas’ illiteracy, not eligible for a public sphere that depends on literacy. for without literacy, they cannot submit to the law. *defined in its essence by legality* (sustained by a desired opposition between language and violence)
a signature (sign your own name): a form of writing recognizable across all (mainly romanized) languages and is the ideal condition of possibility of recognition from within its constitutional order
mimic the address of someone wit charisma (~= authority)
(Morris on) mediaticity of speech (and not merely of media technologies)
Morris reading of a scene (of quotidian exchange) in HIV/AIDS NGO office: a metonym and a metaphor for a kind of South African public sphere that aspires to inclusiveness but is terrorized by its incapacity to know what that opens it up to
•arms itself against potentially aggressive others
•narratives of violence work *to reinforce the sense of necessity* (for a general securitization)
•work in the mode of a **negative meritocracy** (= those who would violate the rights of others are to be excluded, but no others --but--> how to know in advance who has perpetrated or intends to perpetrate such a violation?)
...in the shadow of communicational technology's fashion industry
...bountiful banality of the technologies and artifacts of mass reproducibility
[...] --> lithography --(superseded by)--> photography --(gives way to)--> cinema --(transformed by)--> sound technology --(displaced by)--> integrated and multiplatform digital media --> [...]
(teleological fantasy:) ontologized in epochal schema (these 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[...]
(256)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%28.6[...]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 nervous disease
•incompatibility of superstition and religious fanaticism with modernity and science
•bringing “errors of belief” in the 15th and 16th centuries into our view
living cinematic tableau, Häxan's excess =/= socially constrained thinking, discursive mode of analysis
Christensen's thesis concerned/gripped with abnormalities, events, and causes ==provide==> diagnosis
(like Favret-Saada) he was an un-witcher at once caught & catching
witch =? epiphenomenon
(to bring the ajayeb to life “objectively” is nonsense)
[Häxan = spectacle + argument ==> *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 [...]
(257)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.3[...]
witch =? epiphenomenon
(to bring the ajayeb to life “objectively” is nonsense)
[Häxan = spectacle + argument ==> *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)
anth[...]
(258)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.3[...]lam 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) --> distillation of method & disposition (?) <-- when confronted with the question “who are you?” and “what do you do?”
(according to Malinowski: this) privileged relation to the unknown must emerge through the ability to test what is asserted to be real --> a series of subjective trials subsumed within the rubric of “fieldwork”
*presumptions:
•experiential disposition of the analyst ==> understanding of a phenomenon other wise held to be imaginary and fictional
•witnessing and testimony ==> evidence as to the reality beyond the direct experience of the researcher
([Malinowski updated and secularized a much older epistemology of] Luther:) faith = a commitment to the representation of a truth --> Western Christianity's own efforts to discern truth and the nature of the world
proliferation of witches in 15th century Europe
reassuring relief for the pious believer: force Satan (and his followers) from the shadows through an interpretive expertise over the concrete secondary manifestations of God's reality --✕--> (most had no luxury to imagine) *the embrace of life that the devil urges in binary opposition to that of the good*
--> Devil interfering with the most intimate communications with the Divine
-how does one really know who is speaking when prayer is returned?
[for] the demonologists of the 15th and 16th century --> “God must exist because Satan is right in front of me!” : reality of witches ==> Satan
Institoris, Sprenger, Johannes Nider,
the name of the witch ~=> sacrilegious and inhuman deeds (subject to verification)
*inquisitors believed that what was reported to them was possible* (still they desired proof) <== interweaving of learned demonology into the fabric of a dominant theology (<-- sovereignty of God ratified primarily through the worldly evidence of Satan) + invisibility of the spiritual world was expressed as an essential given
{for the inquisitor (witch hunter) it was never enough to simply “believe” <==> a narrative must be produced that at least partially satisfied the demands of evidence}--> *interrogation under torture = an experimental form of knowing in crisis*
truth value of a nonsensical confession made sensible --> human belief, action, and social practices
ethnographic style of early French ethnographers --> **learning truth from lie** was essential to repres[...]
(259)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.4[...]ll tales of the native interlocutor [--> same mistake that Federici does in her book Caliban and the Witch. Federici, in search of the manifestations of misogyny, aggressively frames the scene of a feminist encounter with witch-hunt as a kind of antagonistic trial of social organization of the Middle Ages in transition to early capitalism... a mode of attention that is equally didactic and forensic as the witch inquisitors]
recognition of the struggle that lay at the heart of raising testimony to the status of the “really real” --Avital--> Griaule aggressively frames the scene of ethnographic encounter itself as a kind of antagonistic trial (whereby the ghosts and gods of the natives are forced out of the shadows and made concretely apparent to the 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[...]
(260)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.5[...]ts: fieldworkers as truth-tellers returning from the dark corners of the real (the witches are no longer explicitly the target of the inquiry)
Häxan's real object: the specter of sheer nonsense
hunt (even in objective scientific mastery) --> fueled by a desire operationalized in a method of being close enough to something to sense it
...................................
(?every time we have to) show how *the word (that we are using) relates to meaning*
Christensen makes every effort to craft a witch that is real to us : ontological fluidity of a cinematic image ==> “Häxan = word + image + thing”
metoposcopy: the expression of reasoning was to be found on the face, (dating back to Girolamo Cardano and the Renaissance) the operation of reason as the weaving together of images in the mind --> a proto-cinematic theory of the relation between image and thought if ever there was one
•respectable scholar indexes himself through his sources
•authoritarian first-person tenor --> instrumentally impersonal tenor
•establishing the X as a chapter within a much longer constellation of practices, discourses, traditions, and institutions
Kieckhefer --> how the long history of practical natural magic was enfolded into the specificity of European witchcraft in the late Middle Ages
Christ in Limbo --> Christensen's parallel editing ==> moving representation of a terra-centered universe <~~ elaborate wonders found in baroque wunderkammer (meticulously assembled by the German elite)
Renaissance Hermeticism:
writings of Hermes Trimesgistus ~=> foundation for:
•Ficino's relatively mild natural magic
•Pico della Mirandola's Christian Cabalist
•Agrippa's Christian magus
•Tommaso Campanella's (1568–1639) utopian City of the Sun
•Bruno's full-blown Hermetic–Cabalist (through the power of astrology and magic to bypass the Church altogether)
•
...rippling effects of the Hermetic–Cabalist tradition -->
•scrupulously mathematical astrology of Girolamo Cardano
•the rigorously empirical studies of the natural world demanded by Bruno's attempts to operate as a magus
}==> (paved the way for) science of Newton and Copernicus --> a new metaphysics to emerge
attacks on Renaissance magic and the Hermetic–Cabalist tradition (that authorized witch) ==> anti-witch treatises
(case of Giordano Bruno's execution --> Hermetic magic and Cabalism) how in the 16th century: “superstition = crime”
(Christensen attributing) --> Hortus deliciarum, a largely cohesive image of hell to 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 centurie[...]
(261)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.7[...]-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) --> mutated the desire to see far-off contemporary events
•--> Attack on a China Mission Station (1900), Hunting Big Game in Africa (1907), and With Captain Scott, R.N., the South Pole (1912), The Battle of the Somme (1916) and With Our Heroes at the Somme (Bei unseren Helden an der Somme, 1917)
(Baxstrom + Meyers) question of mimesis
-what is the relation between a fragmentar[...]
(264)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.7[...]c absorption”
(telling of a story by a narrator) diegesis =/= mimesis
the strategy of “reimaging” is methodological and intentional (in the opening minutes of the film Häxan) --> (in European terms, for a very long time:) “knowledge = recitations of the known”
+ creation of new images --> constituting its own evidence for what is at stake
(Christensen designating) **techniques of presentation rather than simple content**
****the “truth” gained by the reproduction of archival images**** <==through== their mobility in the context of their new use
--> (similar to Farocki) Christensen empties out such visual artifacts, expressing through their preestablished frame a meaning that was hidden and resisted
(Baxstrom + Meyers carefully treating the) methodological element of Christensen's image-making practices --in--> Häxan's depiction of the violent moral disorder of the Wild Ride of the witches to their Sabbats
(16th century) Wild Ride: a standard element of both demonological and popular literary accounts of the activities of witches, folding:
•older legends of wild hunters
•restless travels of the dead at night
•tales of the Furious Horde (a super natural band that was not originally associated with witchcraft)
•twisted chaos of the deep forest
Canon Episcopi regarding the power of demonic illusion to deceive women into imagining that they could travel great distances at night, often in the company of the goddess Diana
}--> conjoining of witch image to demonological discourse [<-- an empirically verifiable invention in the late medieval period and the Renaissance]
*the oscillating value of the non-fictive* (of its discrete artifacts)
hybrid human–animal creatures with each “natural” species being traceable within the complete appearance of the demonic creature
(coming into contemporary performance art -->) figures from antiquity:
•Saturn @Ale
•Circe @Bryana (changing men into beasts, games of chance, gambling, tricks, slight of hand, illusion, hybrid animal–human forms of the demons dancing around the “grandmother” with surprisingly young and beautiful appearance --melancholy--> general sense of sexual and societal disorder swirling around a placid, passive female protagonist) + empirical strain of the discourse of the witch
•Sabbat @Jassem
•
-->
pact of the witch
obsessed state of the hysteric
interplay of face and tableau
(Warburg's assertion that) donning a mask constitutes an active attempt “to wrest something magical from nature through the transformation of the person”
[putting on a mask --> transformation of the person --> obtaining omething magical from nature]
Christensen formally constructing “the witch” through a cinematic ite[...]
(265)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.8[...]xt of their new use
--> (similar to Farocki) Christensen empties out such visual artifacts, expressing through their preestablished frame a meaning that was hidden and resisted
(Baxstrom + Meyers carefully treating the) methodological element of Christensen's image-making practices --in--> Häxan's depiction of the violent moral disorder of the Wild Ride of the witches to their Sabbats
(16th century) Wild Ride: a standard element of both demonological and popular literary accounts of the activities of witches, folding:
•older legends of wild hunters
•restless travels of the dead at night
•tales of the Furious Horde (a super natural band that was not originally associated with witchcraft)
•twisted chaos of the deep forest
Canon Episcopi regarding the power of demonic illusion to deceive women into imagining that they could travel great distances at night, often in the company of the goddess Diana
}--> conjoining of witch image to demonological discourse [<-- an empirically verifiable invention in the late medieval period and the Renaissance]
*the oscillating value of the non-fictive* (of its discrete artifacts)
hybrid human–animal creatures with each “natural” species being traceable within the complete appearance of the demonic creature
(coming into contemporary performance art -->) figures from antiquity:
•Saturn @Ale
•Circe @Bryana (changing men into beasts, games of chance, gambling, tricks, slight of hand, illusion, hybrid animal–human forms of the demons dancing around the “grandmother” with surprisingly young and beautiful appearance --melancholy--> general sense of sexual and societal disorder swirling around a placid, passive female protagonist) + empirical strain of the discourse of the witch
•Sabbat @Jassem
•
-->
pact of the witch
obsessed state of the hysteric
interplay of face and tableau
(Warburg's assertion that) donning a mask constitutes an active attempt “to wrest something magical from nature through the transformation of the person”
[putting on a mask --> transformation of the person --> obtaining omething magical from nature]
Christensen formally constructing “the witch” through a cinematic iteration of metoposcopic naturalism
(metoposcopy: a form of divination in which the diviner predicts personality, character, and destiny, based on the pattern of lines on the subject's forehead.)
(Avital) scientific imperative (the demand in the 19th century for an epistemological reliable inquiry in the nature of things) <-- fascination for the freak and the occult <-- on the way to technology
(Baxstrom + Meyers > Philippe Alain-Michaud on Warburg) “in Mnemosyne, photographic reproduction is not merely illustrative but a general plastic medi[...]
(266)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.9[...]to deceive women into imagining that they could travel great distances at night, often in the company of the goddess Diana
}--> conjoining of witch image to demonological discourse [<-- an empirically verifiable invention in the late medieval period and the Renaissance]
*the oscillating value of the non-fictive* (of its discrete artifacts)
hybrid human–animal creatures with each “natural” species being traceable within the complete appearance of the demonic creature
(coming into contemporary performance art -->) figures from antiquity:
•Saturn @Ale
•Circe @Bryana (changing men into beasts, games of chance, gambling, tricks, slight of hand, illusion, hybrid animal–human forms of the demons dancing around the “grandmother” with surprisingly young and beautiful appearance --melancholy--> general sense of sexual and societal disorder swirling around a placid, passive female protagonist) + empirical strain of the discourse of the witch
•Sabbat @Jassem
•
-->
pact of the witch
obsessed state of the hysteric
interplay of face and tableau
(Warburg's assertion that) donning a mask constitutes an active attempt “to wrest something magical from nature through the transformation of the person”
[putting on a mask --> transformation of the person --> obtaining omething magical from nature]
Christensen formally constructing “the witch” through a cinematic iteration of metoposcopic naturalism
(metoposcopy: a form of divination in which the diviner predicts personality, character, and destiny, based on the pattern of lines on the subject's forehead.)
(Avital) scientific imperative (the demand in the 19th century for an epistemological reliable inquiry in the nature of things) <-- fascination for the freak and the occult <-- on the way to technology
(Baxstrom + Meyers > Philippe Alain-Michaud on Warburg) “in Mnemosyne, photographic reproduction is not merely illustrative but a general plastic medium to which all figures are reduced before being arranged in the space of a panel. In this way, the viewer participates in two successive transformations of the original material: different types of objects (paintings, reliefs, drawings, architecture, living beings) *are unified through photography* before being arranged on the panel stretched with black cloth. The panel is in turn *rephotographed in order to create a unique image*, which will be inserted into a series intended to take the form of a book. The atlas, then, does not limit itself to describing the migrations of images through the history of representation: it reproduces them. In this sense, it is based on a cinematic mode of thought, one that, by using figures, aims at not articulating meaning but at producing effects.”
transgressive approach to the archive:
•Gerhard Rich[...]
(267)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.9[...]yday
(Häxan's episodic structure ==>)
•characters seemingly out of a dead past to live again
•draw the phenomenology of the hysteric
•draw the work's own contemporary time to the surface
promiscuous: neither wholly artistic nor scientific =/=? hybrid artistic and scientific
traverse steep slope between past and future in the form of an event =/= plot
inability to automatically categorize Häxan (or any work of art) <== ***formal strategy rooted in an epistemic virtue***
***(in later Middle Ages) practices such as persecuting witchcraft to meditating on Christ = techniques (of sorting operation) to draw distinctions among visual phenomena, differentiating, say, physical objects from fantasies, dreams, and diabolical or artful deceptions
<--artist-- image-makers specialized in manipulating one thing (their materials) in order that a viewer should see something else ~ *to make something invisible visible* [<-- this is always ideological, and is very common in art]
(#testing) the objective knowledge possessed by the uncanny (in witch's pathological language of diabolic proofs) ==> witch must be experienced in her own milieu, a satanic biome, her state in nature
...................................
typical in 17th century: tacit mutuality of word & image
-artists habitually gave their paintings titles, mottoes, tags and quotations, and their works abound in literary allusions
-explicit interleaving of the verbal and visual
cat feces and dove hearts boiled in the moonlight
stereotype of a debased and corrupted priest
object of the customer's affections
Protestant discourse against the Catholic Church in the 16th century --> artists of the period extended the instrumentalization of slander through the production of proto-pornographic images of bishops, priests, and the pope engaged in myriad obscene acts --depicting--> the emotional states and desires of the clergy
magical salves (considered particularly powerful and troubling by demonologists)
Häxan self-positioning as a scientific investigation + constantly pull back from the dramatic outcomes of what Häxan depicts
Häxan's demonstration of the power of the witch =/= paranoid delusions of witch- crazed villagers
widely held set of beliefs regarding the “nature” or “essence” of women
Christina Larner's assertion that witch trials were gender-related (but not by definition gender-specific)
--Baxstrom--> *women often came under suspicion of being witches because they were understood to be particularly susceptible to lust, avarice, and jealousy by their very nature [~ 16th century: **women “naturally” susceptible to witchcraft*** + women were presumed to possess elements of the nature more than men] =/= Federici's u[...]
(271)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%30[...] witch must be experienced in her own milieu, a satanic biome, her state in nature
...................................
typical in 17th century: tacit mutuality of word & image
-artists habitually gave their paintings titles, mottoes, tags and quotations, and their works abound in literary allusions
-explicit interleaving of the verbal and visual
cat feces and dove hearts boiled in the moonlight
stereotype of a debased and corrupted priest
object of the customer's affections
Protestant discourse against the Catholic Church in the 16th century --> artists of the period extended the instrumentalization of slander through the production of proto-pornographic images of bishops, priests, and the pope engaged in myriad obscene acts --depicting--> the emotional states and desires of the clergy
magical salves (considered particularly powerful and troubling by demonologists)
Häxan self-positioning as a scientific investigation + constantly pull back from the dramatic outcomes of what Häxan depicts
Häxan's demonstration of the power of the witch =/= paranoid delusions of witch- crazed villagers
widely held set of beliefs regarding the “nature” or “essence” of women
Christina Larner's assertion that witch trials were gender-related (but not by definition gender-specific)
--Baxstrom--> *women often came under suspicion of being witches because they were understood to be particularly susceptible to lust, avarice, and jealousy by their very nature [~ 16th century: **women “naturally” susceptible to witchcraft*** + women were presumed to possess elements of the nature more than men] =/= Federici's understanding of witch-hunt as straight-forward instance of misogyny*
--Roper--> *one cannot approach witchcraft or possession from a vantage point in the present without granting some legitimate status to the ways in which the Devil and witches were not only asserted to be real but were experienced as such*
(debates over) politics and evil
satan's malefic presence (in Dreyer's Leaves)
*a density of parallelisms*
Dreyer figures Satan as a problem of the present
“Bolsheviks violently engaged in revolutionary struggle = manifestation of a transcendental demonic power”
question of theodicy --> God's seeming absence from the world
sleep-walking --> enticing a nude female somnambulist out of her home into the forest, where she eventually kneels before a demon who embraces her
proving sexual relations with the devil ==> empirical evidence for satan's existence
(Benjamin > Christensen's art sets out) to conquer meaning
...so it is no stretch to suggest that...
subject and subtext
dreamtime of the 16h century
dreamtime of [...]
(272)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%30.1[...]eventually kneels before a demon who embraces her
proving sexual relations with the devil ==> empirical evidence for satan's existence
(Benjamin > Christensen's art sets out) to conquer meaning
...so it is no stretch to suggest that...
subject and subtext
dreamtime of the 16h century
dreamtime of the witch
•Durer, Baldung, Cranach, artists at the dawn of the Reformation sought to represent the void as a figure
•strategies by which Expressionist painting sought to externalize states of mind
(Baxstrom + Meyers emphasizing) how Häxan *corresponds with a variety of traditions* without seeking to assimilate the film fully within one over another
stillness and fixity of tableau-like shot composition (Dreyer, Murnau, Christensen) ==> (the affect of) suffocating organization
Deleuze summary of Expressionism: play of light and darkness, with the mixture of the two producing an effect that suggests either falling into the black hole or ascending towards the light <-- *face* makes this affective power mobile
•(in Murnau) tableau --> frees the viewer for introspection regarding nature in a kind of emotional, spiritual release =/= close-up (disruptive pathos)
•(in Häxan) tableau --> grounds the uncontrollable forces at work on the faces of those confronted by the power of the witch (constituting a shot that is intensive =/= introspective)
Häxan film --> progressive unfolding of the material world through the style of a lecture
-exploration of the wonders and “errors” of the past (with near-messianic belief in the perfectibility of man)
magnified form of realist cinema + rooted in a naturalist impulse --> Christensen's witch is not only here now, it has always been here: “witch = a figure of nature”
-Häxan begins with woodcuts, drawings, and paintings that originate from *an act of touch* ==> haptic vision ==> to present figurative cliched givens ==> establish the ground
-seizes (the audience) and is seized (by the witch)
-seeing and touching *virtual beings* (such as devils)
--> rigorously logical structure + expressing the tangible singularity of the power of the witch
*(from) tales --to--> theology --to--> diagnosis*
“advancement” of natural knowledge <--> demonology
witch: a viral character
witch hunters's trial by water *is not a “trial” but rather an experiment* (to identify evidence of evil's presence---in the absence of direct unmotivated proof) --operating--> though a form of non-knowledge <-- mastery of nonsense
= ***a deep appreciation of (that might seem misguided to us):
•cause-and-effect relations
•forces at work in the natural world
(=/= indifference [...]
(276)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%30.2[...]ies by which Expressionist painting sought to externalize states of mind
(Baxstrom + Meyers emphasizing) how Häxan *corresponds with a variety of traditions* without seeking to assimilate the film fully within one over another
stillness and fixity of tableau-like shot composition (Dreyer, Murnau, Christensen) ==> (the affect of) suffocating organization
Deleuze summary of Expressionism: play of light and darkness, with the mixture of the two producing an effect that suggests either falling into the black hole or ascending towards the light <-- *face* makes this affective power mobile
•(in Murnau) tableau --> frees the viewer for introspection regarding nature in a kind of emotional, spiritual release =/= close-up (disruptive pathos)
•(in Häxan) tableau --> grounds the uncontrollable forces at work on the faces of those confronted by the power of the witch (constituting a shot that is intensive =/= introspective)
Häxan film --> progressive unfolding of the material world through the style of a lecture
-exploration of the wonders and “errors” of the past (with near-messianic belief in the perfectibility of man)
magnified form of realist cinema + rooted in a naturalist impulse --> Christensen's witch is not only here now, it has always been here: “witch = a figure of nature”
-Häxan begins with woodcuts, drawings, and paintings that originate from *an act of touch* ==> haptic vision ==> to present figurative cliched givens ==> establish the ground
-seizes (the audience) and is seized (by the witch)
-seeing and touching *virtual beings* (such as devils)
--> rigorously logical structure + expressing the tangible singularity of the power of the witch
*(from) tales --to--> theology --to--> diagnosis*
“advancement” of natural knowledge <--> demonology
witch: a viral character
witch hunters's trial by water *is not a “trial” but rather an experiment* (to identify evidence of evil's presence---in the absence of direct unmotivated proof) --operating--> though a form of non-knowledge <-- mastery of nonsense
= ***a deep appreciation of (that might seem misguided to us):
•cause-and-effect relations
•forces at work in the natural world
(=/= indifference to the truth, retreat into superstition)
~
[these] cases suggestive of and empirically linked to general laws. the case said something about the world, and once a case was established, it would spread like a contagion (=/= proof of misogy or genocide as Federici asserts)
Flaherty ==> a certain truth regarding the total social environment : force of Nanook's life not only provides empirical evidence as to his mode of living but also allows for a refl ection on “nature”, “humanness”, “modernity” rooted in the ha[...]
(277)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%30.2[...]fective power mobile
•(in Murnau) tableau --> frees the viewer for introspection regarding nature in a kind of emotional, spiritual release =/= close-up (disruptive pathos)
•(in Häxan) tableau --> grounds the uncontrollable forces at work on the faces of those confronted by the power of the witch (constituting a shot that is intensive =/= introspective)
Häxan film --> progressive unfolding of the material world through the style of a lecture
-exploration of the wonders and “errors” of the past (with near-messianic belief in the perfectibility of man)
magnified form of realist cinema + rooted in a naturalist impulse --> Christensen's witch is not only here now, it has always been here: “witch = a figure of nature”
-Häxan begins with woodcuts, drawings, and paintings that originate from *an act of touch* ==> haptic vision ==> to present figurative cliched givens ==> establish the ground
-seizes (the audience) and is seized (by the witch)
-seeing and touching *virtual beings* (such as devils)
--> rigorously logical structure + expressing the tangible singularity of the power of the witch
*(from) tales --to--> theology --to--> diagnosis*
“advancement” of natural knowledge <--> demonology
witch: a viral character
witch hunters's trial by water *is not a “trial” but rather an experiment* (to identify evidence of evil's presence---in the absence of direct unmotivated proof) --operating--> though a form of non-knowledge <-- mastery of nonsense
= ***a deep appreciation of (that might seem misguided to us):
•cause-and-effect relations
•forces at work in the natural world
(=/= indifference to the truth, retreat into superstition)
~
[these] cases suggestive of and empirically linked to general laws. the case said something about the world, and once a case was established, it would spread like a contagion (=/= proof of misogy or genocide as Federici asserts)
Flaherty ==> a certain truth regarding the total social environment : force of Nanook's life not only provides empirical evidence as to his mode of living but also allows for a refl ection on “nature”, “humanness”, “modernity” rooted in the haptic qualities of Flaherty's images
maleficium (of the witch --> palpable: destructive weather magic, assault of farm animals, sickness, unexplained death, etc.)
saturn's mythological violence <--> satan
the idea that saturn serves as patron to social outliers: the poor, elderly, disabled, criminals, jews, cannibals, magicians, witches
(early modern period -->) **satan = the principal authority of the natural world**, “master of the knowledge of natural properties and the techniques of their instrumentalization” =/= techniques of the healer =/= empirical instruments
[...]
(279)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%30.2[...]itch)
-seeing and touching *virtual beings* (such as devils)
--> rigorously logical structure + expressing the tangible singularity of the power of the witch
*(from) tales --to--> theology --to--> diagnosis*
“advancement” of natural knowledge <--> demonology
witch: a viral character
witch hunters's trial by water *is not a “trial” but rather an experiment* (to identify evidence of evil's presence---in the absence of direct unmotivated proof) --operating--> though a form of non-knowledge <-- mastery of nonsense
= ***a deep appreciation of (that might seem misguided to us):
•cause-and-effect relations
•forces at work in the natural world
(=/= indifference to the truth, retreat into superstition)
~
[these] cases suggestive of and empirically linked to general laws. the case said something about the world, and once a case was established, it would spread like a contagion (=/= proof of misogy or genocide as Federici asserts)
Flaherty ==> a certain truth regarding the total social environment : force of Nanook's life not only provides empirical evidence as to his mode of living but also allows for a refl ection on “nature”, “humanness”, “modernity” rooted in the haptic qualities of Flaherty's images
maleficium (of the witch --> palpable: destructive weather magic, assault of farm animals, sickness, unexplained death, etc.)
saturn's mythological violence <--> satan
the idea that saturn serves as patron to social outliers: the poor, elderly, disabled, criminals, jews, cannibals, magicians, witches
(early modern period -->) **satan = the principal authority of the natural world**, “master of the knowledge of natural properties and the techniques of their instrumentalization” =/= techniques of the healer =/= empirical instruments
(de Certeau observed that) every exercise of trained judgment is authorized through the [*]dark: ratifying force of theology
**dark forces --ratify--> all forms of natural expertise**
mastery of nonsense --driving--> confirming the suspicion of witchcraft = a form of non-knowledge ==opens==> a gap in knowing (specifically, ‘who’)
line of accusation that was quite common in the early modern period --> “the desperate search for the cause of what was other wise an unexplained illness or misfortune was frequently the catalyst for specific witchcraft accusations between friends, acquaintances, and often between family members themselves”
16th century --> this violence now bore the sanction of both secular and religious institutions (<== peasant complaints of maleficium زيان <== human beings have been suffering misfortune, illness, and death long before the power of the witch was felt during this time)
Dominican order --> aggressively p[...]
(281)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%30.2[...]absence of direct unmotivated proof) --operating--> though a form of non-knowledge <-- mastery of nonsense
= ***a deep appreciation of (that might seem misguided to us):
•cause-and-effect relations
•forces at work in the natural world
(=/= indifference to the truth, retreat into superstition)
~
[these] cases suggestive of and empirically linked to general laws. the case said something about the world, and once a case was established, it would spread like a contagion (=/= proof of misogy or genocide as Federici asserts)
Flaherty ==> a certain truth regarding the total social environment : force of Nanook's life not only provides empirical evidence as to his mode of living but also allows for a refl ection on “nature”, “humanness”, “modernity” rooted in the haptic qualities of Flaherty's images
maleficium (of the witch --> palpable: destructive weather magic, assault of farm animals, sickness, unexplained death, etc.)
saturn's mythological violence <--> satan
the idea that saturn serves as patron to social outliers: the poor, elderly, disabled, criminals, jews, cannibals, magicians, witches
(early modern period -->) **satan = the principal authority of the natural world**, “master of the knowledge of natural properties and the techniques of their instrumentalization” =/= techniques of the healer =/= empirical instruments
(de Certeau observed that) every exercise of trained judgment is authorized through the [*]dark: ratifying force of theology
**dark forces --ratify--> all forms of natural expertise**
mastery of nonsense --driving--> confirming the suspicion of witchcraft = a form of non-knowledge ==opens==> a gap in knowing (specifically, ‘who’)
line of accusation that was quite common in the early modern period --> “the desperate search for the cause of what was other wise an unexplained illness or misfortune was frequently the catalyst for specific witchcraft accusations between friends, acquaintances, and often between family members themselves”
16th century --> this violence now bore the sanction of both secular and religious institutions (<== peasant complaints of maleficium زيان <== human beings have been suffering misfortune, illness, and death long before the power of the witch was felt during this time)
Dominican order --> aggressively promoting the cult of the virgin, to the status of the “perfect” woman {elevating the status of sexual neurosis to a virtue} =/= lustful credulous nature of common women (who were often associated with the temptations of Eve)
*conflicted status of women*
•in Häxan --through--> sternly patrilineal visual motifs (condescension + bemusement --> frail + hysterical)
•in ajayeb bestiary -->
(Häxan's) witch hunters act in accordance with their own[...]
(282)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%30.2[...] natural properties and the techniques of their instrumentalization” =/= techniques of the healer =/= empirical instruments
(de Certeau observed that) every exercise of trained judgment is authorized through the [*]dark: ratifying force of theology
**dark forces --ratify--> all forms of natural expertise**
mastery of nonsense --driving--> confirming the suspicion of witchcraft = a form of non-knowledge ==opens==> a gap in knowing (specifically, ‘who’)
line of accusation that was quite common in the early modern period --> “the desperate search for the cause of what was other wise an unexplained illness or misfortune was frequently the catalyst for specific witchcraft accusations between friends, acquaintances, and often between family members themselves”
16th century --> this violence now bore the sanction of both secular and religious institutions (<== peasant complaints of maleficium زيان <== human beings have been suffering misfortune, illness, and death long before the power of the witch was felt during this time)
Dominican order --> aggressively promoting the cult of the virgin, to the status of the “perfect” woman {elevating the status of sexual neurosis to a virtue} =/= lustful credulous nature of common women (who were often associated with the temptations of Eve)
*conflicted status of women*
•in Häxan --through--> sternly patrilineal visual motifs (condescension + bemusement --> frail + hysterical)
•in ajayeb bestiary -->
(Häxan's) witch hunters act in accordance with their own procedures for investigating truth and falsehood and not simply out of malice, fear, or stupidity
the inquisitor priest/friar (within the realm of their own assumptions about the world) were dedicated to investigating and verifying the claims [of the accused witch) =/= (mainstream depiction of inquisitors as) gullible, fanatical, overtly misogynistic
(during the witch craze) **desire to believe =/= simple belief**
despite the unbelievable scope of demonic power, the inquisitors must believe that what the young maiden is reporting is possible
****important changes in the legal systems in europe well into the 14th century: proffering a formal indictment against another individual required the plaintiff to submit to an accusatory form of criminal procedure. (derived from Roman law) this procedure presumed such offenses as *matters between the accused and accuser* ==> the idea that “crime” was a matter between society and the accused did not exist (--> the presentday distinction between criminal and civil complaints meaningless)
raising a formal complaint required:
•the accuser to furnish proof of the allegation
•to submit to severe penalties agreed in advance if the judge was unconvinced of the complaint's merit
*it was complex, expensi[...]
(285)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%30.3[...] science =/= as misguided inquisitors”
working with *figurative givens of witches and demons* --formulate--> visual thesis (about uncanny, mobile power)
etchings into a material
carving outlines into the image of figures that have been hiding in plain sight
beautifully composed tableau of the torture chamber
static plane of the tableau =/= sense depth signify an open or free space
totality of (depicted) violence <--> composed alterity of the scene's stylistic correspondence between accused and inquisitor
(Christensen's method of) oscillating rhythm between tableau and face
-suppressing perspective and depth of field in favor of a continuous affective movement as expressed in the face
--Baxstrom--> Häxan is not grounded in a setting here; it is grounded in the forms of life present in the shot
sense of corporeal alienation from herself --> inhabit a script not her own --> critical to the “success” of witchcraft confessions
witch stereotype:
•Wild Ride
•pact with the Devil solemnized through sexual intercourse-
•cannibalism
•دیگ cauldron as the locus of the rite
•*massed, coordinated, female nature of witchcraft*
judicial machinery of a witch trial required evidence of criminal acts that (by definition) could not be witnessed
in Häxan
-the power of cinema to witness exceeds that of the witch hunter
-what it does is “worse” than rigging the truth --> it aligns itself (not with a concept of truth or the real but) with the power of the witch
(Häxan and many criminal story films) works through instruments of knowing rooted in the *dynamics of the confession*
#ajayeb storytelling
...clumsily rendered, the wriggling demons reflect an interesting set of variations to the witch stereotype, both ontologically and visually
(Maria giving birth to demon children)
Thomas Aquinas's theorization of the *virtual bodies* (of angels)
-angels do not need bodies for their sake but for ours --> unnatural couplings could produce children, but that the bodily essence of devils would rule out the possibility that these children would themselves be demons
16th century author primarily concern with Satan's ability to manipulate and pervert language (including erotic language)
wild flowing hair of the women --> a common visual metaphor for sexual promiscuity and disorder
images of cannibalistic night witches were explicitly a demonological variation on long-standing popular conceptions
...................................
xxxxxx
persistence of witchcraft
how witchcraft might still exist as more than just one of many choices available [...]
(286)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%30.5[...] of corporeal alienation from herself --> inhabit a script not her own --> critical to the “success” of witchcraft confessions
witch stereotype:
•Wild Ride
•pact with the Devil solemnized through sexual intercourse-
•cannibalism
•دیگ cauldron as the locus of the rite
•*massed, coordinated, female nature of witchcraft*
judicial machinery of a witch trial required evidence of criminal acts that (by definition) could not be witnessed
in Häxan
-the power of cinema to witness exceeds that of the witch hunter
-what it does is “worse” than rigging the truth --> it aligns itself (not with a concept of truth or the real but) with the power of the witch
(Häxan and many criminal story films) works through instruments of knowing rooted in the *dynamics of the confession*
#ajayeb storytelling
...clumsily rendered, the wriggling demons reflect an interesting set of variations to the witch stereotype, both ontologically and visually
(Maria giving birth to demon children)
Thomas Aquinas's theorization of the *virtual bodies* (of angels)
-angels do not need bodies for their sake but for ours --> unnatural couplings could produce children, but that the bodily essence of devils would rule out the possibility that these children would themselves be demons
16th century author primarily concern with Satan's ability to manipulate and pervert language (including erotic language)
wild flowing hair of the women --> a common visual metaphor for sexual promiscuity and disorder
images of cannibalistic night witches were explicitly a demonological variation on long-standing popular conceptions
...................................
xxxxxx
persistence of witchcraft
how witchcraft might still exist as more than just one of many choices available on a personal empowerment “menu”
-how rituals pertaining to magic came to be understood as a problem of knowledge
*magic binds forces that would otherwise overflow life*
a great subterranean need to “bind” forces that would otherwise exert themselves with impunity and without any greater explanation or meaning
--> enacting a dehistorification of a form of life that would otherwise be overwhelmed by the brutal timeliness of historical being
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
[...]
(287)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%30.5[...]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