[...]n (including: the prosthetic technologies interfaced with our biological eyes and brains.)

unmarked body: the power to see and not be seen
objectivity in scientific and technological, late-industrial, militarized, racist, and male-dominant societies

(she asks for:)
“So, I think my problem, and “our” problem, is how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own “semiotic technologies” for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a “real” world, one that can be partially shared and that is friendly to earthwide projects of finite freedom, adequate material abundance, modest meaning in suffering, and limited happiness.”

Haraway asks for an embodied objectivity that is able of accommodating *paradoxes* --> ‘situated knowledges’
-what does she mean when she says “All components of the desire are paradoxical and dangerous, and their combination is both contradictory and necessary.”

(instruments of visualization in multinationalist, postmodernist culture:) disembodiment : to distance to know
the visualizing technologies (--> my amazon project)

a perverse vision that has produced ‘techno-monsters’ (what does she mean by that?)
--> second birthing? transcendence?
[the frankenstein's techno-monsters, is modeled after who? and who is modeled after it? wondrously, murderously walking around...]
(‘second-birthing’: one of the deadly stories of killing: in the first-birthing we have merely birth to the earthly soil from the woman, and then the achievement of the tragically self-realized purpose of tragic consiousness, concretized and distilled by Sartre) “dire myths of self-birthing”... --> we must resist the stories of guilt laden knowledge and consciousness

unrestricted vision
presented as utterly transparent

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

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

‘partial perspective’ (what does she mean?)
==> become answerable for what we learn how to see. (Helen Verran: accountability; Isabelle Stengers: milieu thinking; Latour: ground;)
(partial way of organizing world)
unlocatable =? irresponsible (knowledge claims)
partial --> possibility of webs of connections: solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology
-to unfold the problem of relativism: ‘the elephant parable’ promisses seeing equally and fully. “equality” of positioning: relativism (another “god trick”) (!=[...]

[...]is absent from literary discourse and its knowledge claims. ----> Are biological bodies “produced” or “generated” in the same strong sense as poems? (biological body ~= poem)
“material-semiotic actor”: the object of knowledge as an active, meaning-generating part of apparatus of bodily production

bodies as objects of knowledge are material-semiotic generative nodes.
“objects” do not preexist as such --> Their boundaries materialize in social interaction. Boundaries are drawn by mapping practices.


world =/= mother/matter/mutter
world ~= coyote (a figure of the always problematic, always potent tie between meaning and bodies. world as coding trickster.)

(feminism) movement rooted in specification and articulation (of [different kinds of] ‘elsewhere’) =/= (assumption of the right or ability to) identities and representation (of identities)


#workshop reading SK (for apass)
Which version of “realism” are you talking about? Recollecting truth and objectivity are activated whenever a ‘point of view’ is produced among other metaphors that we use in our practice and thinking in techno-scientific societies. In this group reading session we are going to study one of the most stubborn and pervasive phantasms in art and sciences, the figure of objectivity, with the Donna Haraway's 1988 essay ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’. This reading focuses on politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating in our power-sensitive conversations, and what does it mean to become accountable and responsible for one's own noninnocent translations. We begin with her essay on the 2nd of February and talk about each of our practices in particular continuing on the 9th.


she wants to re-figure, not disavow, objectivity

“story-tellers exploring what it means to be embodied in high-tech worlds” =/= technophobia

technophilia is narcissistic : the notion that man invented himself and that man is involved in some kind of narrative of technological escalation whereby the objectification of human intentionality in the world has finally surpassed itself, and man has achieved self-objectification in a machine that will finally name him obsolescence as he is and destroy him in a technological apocalypse figured by the computer. (Haraway) [we need better dog stories =/= (Iron Man:) man, made in the image of a vanished god, takes on superpowers in his secular-sacred ascent, only to end tragic]
“...man making himself (by realizing his intentions in his tools) yet again in the Greatest Story Ever Told.” (your artwork doesn't need to be this kind of story!)
or the Darwinist tale of “Mitochondrial Eve in a neocolonial Out of Africa”
we need stories of companion species, the “very mundane and ongoing sort of tale, one full of misunderstandings,[...]

[...]ticism is genuine sublimation* : a reconciliation in the area of ego development and of internalization. (@Aela)
-desublimation (of reason?)
objective of sexuality conceptual transformation into Eros --> (asking Aela with Marcuse:) what is the non-repressive sublimation of the resexualized body? (=/= neurotic reactivation of narcissistic libido)
why Eros is so powerful? what kind of sublimation is the culture-building power of Eros?

in Derrida, narcissism is the passage to the Other, and not necessarily merely a collapse into oneself.

auto-erotic solipsism

باطل کردن طلسم ضمیر the ego appears [displaced elsewhere in the world as an effect] as the result of primary narcissism?
(batel kardan-e telesm-e zamir) dispulsion of ego
*ego forms in the world* (Lippit)

auto-erotic economy

the ego in the island, finding footprints of the others
(Freudian protocols of existence:) there is no world, there is only islands. --> multiplicity of isolations ~-> individuation

“In narcissism the ego disappears from the world and reappears in the imaginary realm of invisible interiority.” (Lippit)

{the erotic attachment to outside objects}<--pervert =/= narcissist-->{withdraw, calls it “instinct for self preservation"} (a shortcut: my way of undering my own narcissistic tendencies has been through perversity.)

[for Juan:] (artistic) narcissism =/=? fossilization (~->? mimesis)

*mimesis* is not about form
in order to represent the character of the supposed ‘word’ of another
mimesis + techne ~= copy (@Juan)

diegesis =/=? mimesis
(telling) -- (showing)
(recounted) -- (enacted)
}--> poiesis _////(actually a useful and necessary difference, synthesized by the Greeks--Plato and Aristotle)
(...and what about the question of the medium?)

*Juan's relationship with the (in)dependency of the individuated self of the artist--in this case himself--by means of mimetic techne is to overcome the visual artist's narcissism?

(Pierre:) being alone --> mimesis --> through mimetic intra-acting with the other
(Sina: there is no “being alone” only ‘feeling lonely’ which is itself a form of intra-acting : internalizing an external phenomena. “loneliness” is a belief that one has.)

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

narcissism as a mimetic and performative mode
transindividual narcissism --Maitra--> movement of the subject beyond ethnicity (ethnic formations that the bio-political processes of interpellation demand of the subject)
remediation of ethnic narcissism

[Maitra's queer diasporic reading practice of] (in diaspora media theory) performing an identity (that is “Iranian” for example)

*intermedia* (=/= multimedia: fuse disparate media)
frictions between dif[...]

[...]ct theory, media theory, epistemology,)
2- the response to the second question is also not clear, i am not sure what i am told, i don't remember or hear, what i am told is infolded in what i know, (when i started with my islam lecture series i was testing the waters of these two questions and the possibility of staying with them without freaking out of ambiguity or ploting an answer)
3--> #cat's cradle


#on hypertext note:
i am becoming skilled at looking at my notes:
{(1) what are the *skills necessary* [=/= tabula rasa (of the reader, of the audience) of the communo-capitalism's standard of “user-interface"--the strange idea that the interaction and reading doesn't need or must not need learned-efforts or skills, that it should be “easy” and “effortless” --> fallacy of the unskilled listener.] to engage, interact, and get involved with the interface, data-set, grammar, and literacy of (my) reservoir? }--> ** let's ask that question with every apparatus that engages us into desire, movement, articulation, ...
skills --> to become ‘literate’ in this particular way --> situated knowledge includes this situated literacy and skills of reading particular to the object of “text” (in that case how do i address my interest in the pervert reader? the skills of the unlearning*)
the skills necessary for my work to work comes with time, attention, and desire ~-=>? #harem (=/= ladies room)
--> (2) this skills of (my) reservoir, what set of questions or problems equip me to address?

varzidan, varz, varzide, ورزیده

Sennett's love for his subjects is extraordinary (=/= iconoclasm, futurism) and it influences me deeply, his voice and care when he opens his reflection, findings, etc.

ok, again, the ‘skill’ question:
•1--> what are the set of skills needed for my work?
•2--> which problematics these skills equip me to address?
•3--> can i (or should i) not know these problematics in advance?

the bow and arrow --|)-> ♥ in my apass endweek (as sound object) was a relic of our shared physical energetic space, the nondiscursive --> how to keep it inarticulate?
•a way to record space, which is always social =/= silenced with no agency of the recorder (the “quiet recorder”)
•also a playful respective reading of La Guin, (something that may seem a misunderstanding of her carrier bag theory)
•carving out a practice agility area


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

the question ‘what does X mean?’ is always ‘what does X mean for you?’

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

i am following the movement of certain words here

spam =/= internet

spam operates on/with patterns of literacy or an existing (in)sufficiencies in known categories of cognitive biases that people have

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

[title]
“it's your turn now to p[...]

[...] women studies, scene of writing:
•aesthetic tentacularity: Lindsay Kelley & Eva Hayward / “Carnal Light”

[week 7] digital media:
•Flusser on hypertext / “Does Writing Have a Future” (chapter: Supertext, 6 pages)
•Bolter / “Writing Space” (chapter 3 Writing as Technology, 13 pages)


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

#workshop little fables of practice, second day storytelling
(proposed initially to Lili:) #imagine and describe an alien world where its populace don't practice ‘knowing’
with this practice we get into questions of (--without directly addressing/announcing them we will provoke a better understanding of what we might think of them:)
•knowing --> (the inseparability of) knowing, being, and doing
•the ‘suppos’ of the supposed to know
•rhetorics, and intrinsicality (“on the inside”)
•response --> (‘knowing’ =) differential accountability =/= differential responsiveness
•environment
•description (discursive significance)
•world, and sense-making
•geometry (and -metry)
•(intelligibility and) materiality enacted --> question of discourse
•epistemology
•conceptions of space and time
•reflection (as a pervasive trope of knowing) [mirroring, imitation, reflection, tropes of “sameness"]
•material discursive evolving
•mattering; matter and intelligibility, episteme and techne, macro and micro,
•

the workshop is in a way about the trope of knowing, ontology of knowing

(ways of) knowing entangled with mode of being
(with which creature?) matter's dynamism is intrinsic to its biodynamic way of being (--Barad--> for brittlestar everything is intrinsic)
(creatures that) constantly changing its geometry and its topology --> ongoing reworking of bodily boundaries
(our, and an alien critter's “it”’s) discoursive practices: boundary-drawing practices by which it differentiates between “itself” and the “environment” ==> making sense of its world [--> that is why i am interested in the (better?) articulation of “differences” (= boundary-making practices, our “differential productions”) that we are making, as a way of getting into eachother discourses ~~and--> (its) ongoing materialization --> *differential materialization* (is discursive; Barad)]
•patterns of difference
•I am against the ‘frictionless narrative space’ (in the absence of the dominant story) where “everything” (therefore nothing) is possible

(the workshop engages in thinking) intertwined practices of knowing and being
[this practice of storytelling might be relevant for those invested in questions of: knowledge production, speculative theory, situated bodies critique, situated knowledges critique, being ‘of’ the world,]
-to think creatures/beings that have evolved in intra-action with their environment<[...]

[...]t of work to know how to build them well”*

(?how do i know when in working with ajayeb) sometimes you are required (at the same time!):
•to be dead literal
•to be precise
•to be analytically good
•to be unforgivingly technically right
•to be flaming imaginative
•


*breakdown*: where the normalizing fails ==> something else emerges


*every collective needs people who feel:
•(a grace given to you by the structure of your cells, you don't know where it comes from:) “root sense that the world is not dead” --> a sense that things are moving and alive and future-full
•its people who feel despair (...emphasize the futurelessness of it all)

*!!!--> we (also) need sensibilities that are angrey at each other

(aligned with Haraway) my position has been that: we don't choose our sensibilities, we wake up and figure out what they are


(Haraway take on the ways we) may enginner as a species now (tech, syntax, etc.)


to refuse the story of the apocalypse + (still) recognizing the depth of the trouble
--> Freud's thanatos غريزه مرگ, a death instinct, (it is a deep, instinctual lure:) *a perverse pleasure in believing in inevitable failure*


*transference is descriptively very apt for what goes on in artistic moves [<-- to be careful of]


**to risk a feeling of (despair, of...)

the ways some of us risk things intellectually and emotionally different than each other


prima donna: doing whatever one does without any particular effort to nuance anything


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


...out of your own particular little historical traditions


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


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

[...] thin line between the impulse to democratize and commodify knowledge]; --could multiculturalism be radical capitalism in action?! ...faking diversity to build more diverse companies <-- “lip service”: to just say something but not actually do it)
[--> the hegemony and horror of “different experience” of the so-called different cultures (a form of racism?)]
[multiculturalism =/= trans-species]
[multiculturalism =/= eurasia]
[--> the hegemony and horror of “the completely different” (==>? deskilled society)]

Manning: “in senseLab we work with the people who don't use language, don't write, etc.” (<-- what does that legitimates, conceals, or smuggles? what sorts of hierarchies and ideologies of status emerge out of that?)

-as the philosopher of nonintentionality how did she responded (paranoically?) to our intents when questions where asked?
-as the philosopher of discord how did she responded to disagreement?


(?how do you tell the tale of) *your adventures سلوک and achievements کرامت* (karamat va soluk)
(why self-promoting is such a turn-off? it makes the listener into someone to convince or win over into the Förderung of the speaker. [with Campbell:] self-marketing creates a ‘perverse knowledge’ about the work of the speaker, that means you give information about ‘healthy’ parts of your practice, your achievements and moral/material awards, with the assumption that the listener is going to make a good decision about the ‘halo effects’ of the speaker, but in fact you are made ‘brand literate’)
or [it is seems elementary but neccesory to ask Manning:] what is the difference between advertisement and knowledge?


there are innumerable ways to adapt to the world without creating a philosophical understanding of the world

(Manning) “we feel the force of form. this kind of beauty has nothing to do with an external aesthetic judgment.” (--> how the personal judgment is not worthy of philo when a tsunami is coming or one is on the way of being gang raped?)


during the workshop Manning remains the center of command. she constantly “knows” (better). and she insists that through letting go of our critical thinking the participants can understand her notions ==>? how can she not build disciples?!

on production
replacing the name of ‘production’ with ‘but we must leave a trace’ (which exactly do let the notion of production sneak back in under an other name)

(Manning on p.16 5th paragraph is an example of an) unaccountable unsituated abstract claim of reality:
•unaccountable --> where do you stand saying this?
•unsituated --> for whom is this good?
•abstract --> how you are saying it?

the notion of “care for the event”
=/= perspectives
=/= subjects
=/= persons

“occasion itself creates i[...]

[...]Aristotle is creating an] anecdotic causality: the search for a remote event, apparently insignificant, which has as much impact as the 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 stoi[...]

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


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

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

(ajayeb-e donya) عجایب دنیا
wonders of earth(?) --> ghul (غول), serial killer, house full of bones (horror story)
(after donya/earth comes immidiatly, ghiamat قیامت)
donya: the temporal world (~=? cthulu) (--?--> material-semiotic time-space of donya)
-search ‘donya’ and its semiotic network in Ferdosi and others
-search ‘alam’ (in Nezami: dar alam alam afaridan در عالم عالم آفریدن)
-‘zamin’ or zamini (زمین، زمینی‌), what is meant when we say one thinks zamini in ajayeb? which zamin?

(ajayeb-e mardom) عجایب مردم
look at the word ‘mardom’ in Shahname and how it (dis)articulates Div (دیو), animal, demon, dad (دد), janevar (جانور), etc.
‘mardom o janevar’ مردم و جانور (--> Shahname)
other name of mardom: folan فلان (unkown), yaru یارو (known),

(ajayeb-e jan) عجایب جان
jan-parvar جان پرور (Nezami)

(Mehran Rad)
andakht[...]

[...]ing new [~ *sensations/past never before experienced/thought*] out of (circumscribed body of) materials

archeological things carry both sensation & *residue of concepts* with them (~~> artistic research =/= artworks)
==> resurrect the conceptual potential immanent to the specific arrangement of materials (and their temporary forms)

(ontological dilemma [of both art and archeology]:) *how to anticipate the coming into being of something sensed but as yet not thought?*
(---> go to metaphor)

scientific interpretation and explanation of the past <-~ archeology
{my work: speculative interpretation and explanation of the past [--> prefigure new becomings + intensification and unleashing of ‘i am part of what i seek to understand’ (= my subjectivity)] =/= lock the past into predictability}
•my ‘things’ in ajayeb are to an extent ‘archeological things’

contemporary science --gives--> ontologically relational world (<-- to be acknowledged by art and archeology)

archeology --Alberti--> fostering **a particular sensibility to what is of the past in things**

anthropology: the art of inquiry
(something you can learn from)

[*]archeological sensibility: a pervasive set of attitudes towards traces and remains, towards memory, time and temporality, the fabric of history
-Shanks

craft --Ingold--> knowledge grow from the crucible of our practical and observational engagement with being and things
(Aristotlean poiesis ~~-->) [*]craft: slow and intimate knowledgeable work (of how we get along with the world; that cultivates in oneself the skill for discerning the *meanings that are already there*) --> ontological paring of conceptual language & physical condition
==> meaning and concepts are drawn out of objects (not given to them)


•Haraway --> companion species = biologist + creatures
•Barad --> concepts are literally embodied by the differing physical apparatuses
•


(we need more) art: careful accumulation of skills


21st century historiographic trends in 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
pro[...]

[...]hima 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 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 any psychol[...]

[...] world
•witchcraft is not an alternative mode of reasoning
•witchcraft does not permit anyone to control the forces (that assault and wound human being)
•witchcraft provides neither certitude nor escape from the anxieties that death bears for the living

(the interiority 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)

“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)[...]

[...]:
•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, expensive, and very risky to enter into this formal framework in order to address disputes or everyday injustices* ==> most ordinary people did not do so, choosing instead to pursue local and less formal modes of redress

15th and 16th century --> this procedure changed dramatically (with the emergence of the witch in europe)
•witch was understood as an agent of satan
•responsibility of civil and religious authorities to protect pious christians (from a power that would overwhelm the faithful regardless of their individual acts, intentions, or beliefs)

inchoate suspicion (of the fearful, the resentful, the spiteful) --> reporting --> inquisitors (positioned as experts) --> take this suspicion forward administratively --> *impersonal sociological sense* (<-- an example of Weberian rationalization)

to suspect someone of maleficium was not new --✕--> (in witch accusations) authorities were now eager to act on suspicions in dependently


unresolved sexual desires + such passion would be redirected in pathological, perverse manner ==Häxan==> witch accusations

the film emphasizes the crucial role sex played in discerning what constituted witchcraft and its status as a knowable category of (malefic) human practice


a great deal of demonological thinking was devoted to justifying the fact that civil and Church officials, despite their fears, by and large were not bewitched


following satan's idiom...

Häxan's tortured relation to “the truth”
the question of empirical certainty and reenactment haunts the status of the film as evidence

*acting the ideal type breathes life into the emptied, cliched figure* :
- Christensenrelying on the fact that the truth of the witch will take its most visible form by acting her out mimetically (~= Christensen chooses to “play” satan using his idiom to breathe life into his witch)
•Flaherty knew that the visceral force of Nanook of the North depended on the felicity of his Inuit interlocutors reenacting themselves




Christensen seems to be offering a cure for the *secularized christian blindness* at the heart of *positivist human science* --> his audience is pulled in “through a lens of 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 signi[...]

[...]nnibalism
•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

Renessancian world encounters ==> geo
[*]Renaissance: the age of demonology, the age of cosmographic revolution (--> nature of causality)
-presence of the devil in geographical space
-composite and cross-disciplinary network of nonh[...]

[...]e, friendship is part of the sovereign operation and is linked to reading.

apostrophe (citation) for Derrida is the possibility of postmortem discourse --> memory, acts of bringing back, recalling

can we take out no insurance policies to safeguard thinking or writing or building?

(Lyotard's) différend: a dispute or difference that cannot be resolved by the cognitive or linguistic resources we have at hand --(indicating rather)--> a rupture in the presentation of testimony (~ litigate)

something you could turn your tattooed back on


(#my work on [post-feminist] harem)
(companionship and sexuality and installations of community) --> The Inoperative Community [Bataille, Blanchot, Nancy]
(how to) create community wherever I go?
(establish relationships: humor, kindness, attention, reworking, “re-”, festivity, moderate arousal, silliness, playfulness, support,)
learning making a “fictive kin group in training” (how to learn to notice each other? how to learn to be in the same game?)
to insisted on community without relying on transcendence =/= communion
(community without illusions about itself)
a community that is self-annulling but rigorous (rigorously perverse)
(--the duties of the survivor)
-this is about creating convivial spaces (=/= urban design ideology)
(to set up around) work =/= (bodies of) knowledge
(let's make this an obligation:) to create an atmosphere in which interesting mistakes can get made
let's bring a huge amount of material what we get into trying to digest
--> [an effect of being in Europe ==>] is harem about having a space/time to claim as my own? [it can never be?] an actual space which i can dream of and re-create and hope toward? retrieving a mythic place of origin [that cannot be rebuilt]?
•*the harem girls my ancestors* --> Cinderella

=/= longstanding tradition of seeing the female experience as ‘inherently’ painful (as in the pathos of The Handmaids Tale TV series)

(#harem Manifesto)?

..telos of anything {in apass, my bow and arrow? (=/= a generalized claim) --> it was about knowing the energy of each other and trusting the honesty and coherence of directional postures and responsive movements. [#harem] (*) one's game might be geared to build success according to one's goals, but unless the game engages the other, it is worthless. (* it is about) learning how to wit. (*) my bow and arrow in use, my tropes and abstractions, what are they good for if others don't play/engage with them? to recontextualize ‘method’ and methodology. (*) “incommensurable tacit knowledges of diverse communities of practice” --> “communication” across irreducible difference (where “method” is not what matters most;) (game of) “situated partial connection” ==> subjects
(not always the human language is the medium) two-wa[...]

[...]rifts through the bodies of consumers

eating (ingesting and killing of) jellyfish usually takes the form of dried crisps sprinkled into salads and Chinese food



Cinderella's techne --> companion
Crusoe's techne --> human

-fictional kitchen where Cinderella works (and is not a master of)

[learning from] Cinderella (her room has been undone and remade by cohabitation with birds, mice, evil mother --> changing the self and adapting) ==> ontology: a practice of co-constitutive awareness


Alba --engineered--> to glow
pig --engineered--> to become sausage

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

Seymour
bad affect
(bad environmentalism's) respond to mainstream environmentalism + questioning its broader ideals of nature
=/= conventional environmental affect

both identify & respond to the aforementioned absurdities and ironies, through absurdity and irony + related affects and sensibilities:
•irreverence بى ادبى
•ambivalence
•camp
•frivolity هرزه
•indecorum بى نزاکتى
•awkwardness
•sardonicism زهر خنده
•perversity
•playfulness
•glee شاد شاد

affects and sensibilities typically associated with environmentalism:
•gloom
•doom
•guilt
•shame
•didacticism
•prescriptiveness
•sentimentality احساساتى
•reverence حرمت
•seriousness
•sincerity
•earnestness
•sanctimony تقدس
•self-righteousness
•wonder

assumptions:
•that reverence is required for ethical relations to the nonhuman
•that knowledge is key to fighting problems like climate change


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

__al __ : __ affects and matter of __
(sensational X : Y affects and the matter of Z)

ocularcentric selves

(Hayward's) jellyfish: prismatically, their kinesthetic bling is registered visually and haptically, which draws our attention to the construction of their enclosure

expressively dense
rendered literal and material
light is of this world

to think diffractively = to apprehend a critical difference within

(the formation of a word from a sound associated with what is named -->) onomatopoetic: designed around the sensation of water

Hayward is drawn (to the Monterey Bay aquarium) ==> trying to sort out the poetics of their display
[they] furnish a simulation of the real thing, soliciting the sensation of unmediated encounter with marine worlds, they *act as sites of ecological hope* --Acampora--> *zooscopic: a totalizing view that conceals meaningful human-animal encounters at the p[...]

[...]eb = her touch world*
-moves quickly, even uncannily, there/then not, sill/in motion, unsettling/reassuring (seems to trap only dust)
*lived-web = optic skin, a resounding connective tissue
(spider's capacities to) create, syncopate, improvise
(spider and me in the appartment) we resonate in relation to our different movements and processes

[*]trap: a mouth, a mode of utterance, the “O” curve of lips and throat that sounds out and names the apprehension of being embodied
--> ***positionality ~/= situatedness = to be trapped*** (to speak and receive ranges of sensuous input from one's environment) --> *our bodies are not endlessly available to intentionality*

[*]articulation: speaking oneself into culture and history, but also creating a site, a gap, making room in cultural and political fabrications, and finding a tempo, a beat


•utopic inclusion (sexual, national, racial)
•*sexuality imagined as political promise* (radical force of nonnormative sexuality) [=/= (for Freud) sex is regressive]
•trans: energetic and fantastic space between objects

(racial, economic) **divisions = dependencies**

(Lyotard: we must) construct the anatomy of polymorphous perversion, unfold the immense membrane of libidinal body =/= system of parts

irreverent intimacies


thresholding: an intensity that must be exceeded for reaction to occur
“here is my home, i am freshly aware that my body is a threshold, an entry between rooms”

limits (of my body) = energized zones


sadomasochism stitches


*carnal improvisation* <-- paradigm of performance art in europe (---> go to karaoke in KHM, role of my body as medium in the circuit of transmissions, poetically imagine the shape of a new pattern)


pastpresent: an always present past in the present

*patterns longer than lived experience*

[*]history: libidinal tracings, erotogenic intensities, psychical cartographies


{ porosity = poiesis }--> collapse the boundary between the embodied self + its world + others ==> consitute a specific place


•puberty = the fantasy that this disfiguration will make me more myself
•teenager = you spend hours before the refracting reflection of your transmutating *body = your most intimate other* --> enact boundaries, sometimes lovingly, but also brutally


(senses are) reactive to the sensual abundance of the world but limited by affected perceptual milieus


[*]texture: residue of unmetabolized and metabolized sensations of animate forces --> emergence of bodiliness (<-- Hayward's rhetoric)

transitional body = textural body

architecture: the most binding part of the communal rhythm

[...]

[...]participants--eater and eaten--risk the improvements of mind against the certainty of occasional poor decisions, (faulty memory, carelessness, errors of judgment, and the decrepitude of age and disease.)
-Those who fled had to understand [the limits of distance, the intentions of the others, and] (the ability to control) the abyssal terror that itself would engulf them if they submitted to panic. ==> mind
-“self” emerged as the consequence of “participation,” a calculative and organizational relatoin of the individual within the group? (and perceiving the so-called “inanimate” entities) --- shaped by the game -- a participant amidst other participants oriented by the action
(David Abraham: Perception is Participation, in an animistic logic)

mind, memory, --> cognition and communication --> reference --> imitating the animal's calls ==> stylized performances ==> (a repertoire of) symbolized references (sign language?) ==> accumulation of synonims (--> we are already consuming symbolic ambition) --> early metaphores --> narratives get out of hand (--> “concrete” is invented) --> [...] (--> narration of past is invented which is always about the future) --> codification of world without tense or causality in language ----> tense & causality ----> pervasive truths
-this diagram is about the future for the subject whom is using the signs, telling the others where the game animal is and will be. in this text i am trying to pantomime a mimicked reference (of where the [game] animal is), sharing the idea of a thing that is syntaxically there, so we can run it. every utterance is about where i have last seen the “animal,” and how fat or far it is. [running had “magical ends” - Peter Nabokov, ‘Indian Running’ (Santa Barbara: Capra, 1981)]

symbolism --> man traveling within himself --> need to travel outside an infinitely larger reality ==> beyond --- different brand(s) of infinity

secular hunting --- the hunt becomes monstrous. i am calling for an old sacred hunt [sustained in myth and ceremony?] of concepts?
-hunt is gestalt(en)

(with our) hopes and tropes

boundary creatures and matters -- fire's function/act was peripheral, was in the threshold world of human passages(?) [then it made an entrance]

humans’ mimetic participation with fire

infinitely complex affinities



to be noted the nuanced differences between talking and telling (harf-zadan/goftan)
*talking* can not be accompanied by a direct object (the talked) and *telling* might not be accompanied by a direct subject (you are told without a direct teller.) so talking is about the talker and telling is about the told, the ear.
(you *ask fire questions, but you *listen to stone what it is telling. [what fire suggesting, offering to the sense? (i am thinking Ajayeb)] with fire you can debate but this debate is bulshit since yo[...]

[...] /> ****premodern natural phenomena
--more--> exploring and classifying *varieties* of things =/=
--less--> common *causes* of things

varieties =/= causes


cause ==>? highly complex phenomena
  |           |  
[-O-] ==> {t|/?#$^%V!~)&^} <-- premodern science and art today stays here (---> go to Stewart’s attunement to phenomena)


[*]navigation: negotiation between the direction one ‘witches’ to travel & the direction that is ‘possible’ to travel --> wind sense:
temperature
humidity
intensity
regularity
smell
knowledge of astronomy + geography


wind rose --> (connection between:) celestial + astronomical order + terrestrial variety (of land + living creature)

estimate the speed of the ship
throw a log with a rope attached to it overboard, and measure how much rope went overboard within a given period of time

Pliny the Elder --> historia naturalis

Seneca --> naturales quaestiones
air has a natural power of moving itself [==> agency باد]
}<== Seneca’s stoic worldview: conceived the cosmic principle of all life and movement (pneuma) as a subtle substance pervading everything and giving rise, among other things, to all weather phenomena
air = expression of pneuma (alive & live-giving)
all weather = manifestations as transmutations of air
(late medieval encyclopedia -->) *weather = a kind of alchemy of air*
(late medieval wind diagrams -->) wind: cosmic divine powers blowing from the celestial sphere onto earth

Aristotle + Albertus Magnus ==> explanation of the nature and origin of winds in Renaissance meteorological works
air and were then dragged along by the circular movement of the celestial spheres so that they ended up moving horizontally

hot and dry exhalations

aeolipila: a hollow metal sphere (shaped like the face of Aeolus) with a single tiny hole in it

air possessed a force (“vis”) that heat could awaken

16th century --increase--> interest in systematic explanation of meteorological phenomena

#workshop on wind poetry
epic battle, systems moving air, agency,

feature of Renaissance thought --> the idea of *a middle instance (neither fully corporal nor fully incorporeal) intervening between matter and soul* [+ fire as intermediator] ~ spiritus, pneum, quintessence ~ fire or air

...in schematic abstract structure of body-spirit-soul, spirit is somewhere in between

spirit: air-like substance
air: preferred vehicle of spirit (conveyed the breath if life + *used by demonic spirits as a means to produce material effects*)

*spirit: celestial origin to the “innate heat” (calidum innatum) of living creatures

effe[...]

[...]> 3. the tendency of heavy things to descend and of light things to rise

air = vital spirit that joins things together, resounding spirit if the world instrument

Paraceksian theory of aerial niter
(an active principle) aerial version of earthly gunpowder - responsible for life, combustion, thunder, lightning, (some) illnesses
--> connecting the activity of air + life + weather phenomena

wind: (***in its irreducible qualitative variety***) expression of cosmic spirit + محرک باعث a motive force to be accurately estimated

منجنیق ~= geometry هندسه *pneumatic engineering* : distinction between moving and moved components ==evoke==> motive forces
elaborated pneumatic machines
mechanical clocks
tension of strings

*wind ==> celestial influences*
(Cardano regarded) expansion and contraction of air as symmetrical phenomena, both consisting a source of motive forces
-in the universe the element air had the function of receiving and conveying fiery celestial influences on earth providing health and wellbeing fir living creatures

Telesion (1509-1588)
soul and spirit identified with each other as a very subtle material substance pervading all bodies and making them capable of sensing and reacting to rach other with pleasure or pain
*(man’s) immortal soul did not play any role in determining natural phenomena*

innate heat of living bodies

wind: humid vapours flowing through the air
thinness of wind vapours


16th century
expiration and inspiration of the lungs
Holy Spirit is expressed in the nature of winds
interest in wind and weather was kindled by reports reaching Europe from the East and West Indies about hitherto unknown meteorological phenomena عجایب


orderly majesty of God ==> encyclopedism about the universe + an analogue of a memory system

Jean Bodin
firm believer in and opponent of demonic magic
theater of the whole nature universe naturae theatrum
reason of wind (ratio ventorum):
•sun
•impulse (impulsus) of the angels or demons


sphere of sacrobosco
De sphaera mundi
(On the Sphere of the World, pre-Copernican astronomy)


...our sublunar world

gunpowder theory of thunder ⛈
compact earthly matter from underground whose expansion with expansion so fast that it moves large masses of air, like “salniter in fire or gunpowder which has caught fire”


visualization
making air visible
inverted glass experiment
linking thermal expansion & contraction of pure air to wind formation (Cardano)

(under the influence of) celestial fire ==> air (could become alive and active) acquiring motive force
[...]

[...]es (quarks)
3. biomolecular codes (genes)


view of the relationship of body and language (the problem of metaphor)
those of us who would still like to talk about reality

imagery of moves in the fully textualized and coded world
high tech (military) field

recognizing our own ‘semiotic technologies’ for making meanings,
life is semiotic as well as technology

(commitment?) to faithful accounts of a ‘real’ world

Haraway writes: All components of the desire are paradoxical and dangerous, and their combination is both contradictory and necessary.

We need the power of modern critical theories of how meanings and bodies get made, not in order to deny meaning and bodies, but in order to live in meanings and bodies that have a chance for a future. (reductionism?)

insist on the embodied nature of all vision, and so reclaim the sensory system that has been used to signify a leap out of the marked body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere. (how the exhibition can make visible my positing in the work? ground me in an embodied vision? my situation. to situate me. not necessarily organic embodiment? what have i need to learn in my bodies?)

perverse capacity of the eye

culture disembodies. (nature embodies?)
to distance the knowing subject from everybody and everything

visualizing technologies are without (apparent) limit?

linked to:
-artificial graphic manipulation systems
-computer aided scanners
-colour enhancement techniques

mapping is at stake. what kind of mapping the Kinect image provides? that is opposite to the zeiss lens?

how to go there with the technology and not fuck the world? carefully not give birth to mythical ideological seeing or promising transcendence

Kinect's generative, but not devouring vision

the perversion of the zeiss lens is in that it tries to let the viewer ‘experience’ the moment of discovery in immediate vision of the ‘object’

the exhibition is about a writing of the body that metaphorically emphasizes vision
= and commit to deconstruction and passionate construction.
= and passionate detachment, which is dependent on the impossibility of innocent ‘identity’ politics and epistemologies as strategies for seeing from (any) standpoints, in order to see well. (refer to lecture-performance Standing on the Shoulders of Giants - Sina Seifee 2015, on a critical epistemology of seeing-from-far)
= whom to see with?

Haraway: only partial perspective promises objective vision. This is an objective vision that initiates, rather than closes off, the problem of responsibility for the generativity of all visual practices.

The ‘eyes’ made available in modern technological sciences shatter any idea of [...]

[...]eanings and bodies get made, not in order to deny meaning and bodies, but in order to live in meanings and bodies that have a chance for a future. (reductionism?)

insist on the embodied nature of all vision, and so reclaim the sensory system that has been used to signify a leap out of the marked body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere. (how the exhibition can make visible my positing in the work? ground me in an embodied vision? my situation. to situate me. not necessarily organic embodiment? what have i need to learn in my bodies?)

perverse capacity of the eye

culture disembodies. (nature embodies?)
to distance the knowing subject from everybody and everything

visualizing technologies are without (apparent) limit?

linked to:
-artificial graphic manipulation systems
-computer aided scanners
-colour enhancement techniques

mapping is at stake. what kind of mapping the Kinect image provides? that is opposite to the zeiss lens?

how to go there with the technology and not fuck the world? carefully not give birth to mythical ideological seeing or promising transcendence

Kinect's generative, but not devouring vision

the perversion of the zeiss lens is in that it tries to let the viewer ‘experience’ the moment of discovery in immediate vision of the ‘object’

the exhibition is about a writing of the body that metaphorically emphasizes vision
= and commit to deconstruction and passionate construction.
= and passionate detachment, which is dependent on the impossibility of innocent ‘identity’ politics and epistemologies as strategies for seeing from (any) standpoints, in order to see well. (refer to lecture-performance Standing on the Shoulders of Giants - Sina Seifee 2015, on a critical epistemology of seeing-from-far)
= whom to see with?

Haraway: only partial perspective promises objective vision. This is an objective vision that initiates, rather than closes off, the problem of responsibility for the generativity of all visual practices.

The ‘eyes’ made available in modern technological sciences shatter any idea of passive vision? these prosthetic devices show us that all eyes, including our own organic ones, are active perceptual systems, building in translations and specific ways of seeing, that is, ways of life.


partial way of organizing worlds

is unlocatable irresponsible?
is my visual exhibition a knowledge claim?

To see from below (or the perspective of the mathematics, Kinect, hacker?) is neither easily learned nor unproblematic

ways of being nowhere while claiming to see comprehensively (i did not claim any of these - i didn't try even. i was there traveling with relation to my co-travelers and a technology relation) my issue with the images is t[...]

[...]r />
technology is always sent to us
in the story we are shifting to ‘send’, this doesn't mean that there is a sovereign subject or some sort of powerful ‘self’ responsible or at the origin of the productive behavior (or accomplishment) of San'an.

(Heidegger collects:)
destiny, destination, schicken, Schicksal, etc.
[ungeschickt =? destinal failure, existential clumsiness]
[~= technical error in destiny. what is the future of error?]
•according to Heidegger, nobody (that also means everybody) can take at the wheel and make certain determinations and destinations
[this is his notion of ‘techne']
•Tarsaa's technical intervention in San'an's destiny

that is another kind of relatedness
you can no longer talk about the subject or object
is one in full possession of oneself? one doesn't belong to oneself or anybody else---that would be a post-Lacanian critique, which is the self-sabotage of the mystic is not necessarily attached to a inevitable devouring authority, “I don't belong to myself or anybody else.” nor God, nor teacher, etc. ==> the self is not necessarily devourable. [what are the certain components of the self of San'an that will remain unavailable, those that underlay a pervasive sense of not-belonging?---> longing (‘vermissen’) the girl/Tarsaa, ‘to-be-longing']
(why) am I including in my speech a rhetoric of faltering, self-sabotage, and hesitation?
should I edit it out? edit out the “I am not sure,” those self-canceling moments from my expression?
(my) thoughts deserve elegant expressions***


translation of this is very unstable


(according to Hölderlin)
we arrive at the truth / the moment that the truth or Das Wahre emerges / the moment it closing in on us, is when we have to say goodbye



(these are rather ‘stances,’ than ‘questions’)
how the poet-Attar serves or is served-up and devastated by language?



blast has a sense of destruction to it, and destruction is good and necessary, it clears away what is already dead and hanging around burdening your being. blast is not a devastation, devastation promises no futurity

-who are you destroyed by?

whom am I addressing here? but more importantly, who or what is addressing me here (in a non-present way)?

San'an/girl/pig assemblage
(what is girl in San'an story? what is animal in San'an story?)

San'an story, as a scenography of sexual difference, and ironization (to make ironic in appearance or effect) of question and answer, Q&As in Attar

there is a dramaturgy of repudiation (when the students ask and blame---everyone is insulted) --> Student is whom that which defines what is *failure* (--'to be fixed’ =? origin of teaching)
{pupil is that which ‘summons’ the master -[...]

[...]alk erect [Serres]



jede Sprache ist ein Versuch---*trial
(Humboldt)
different languages penetrate to different depths
--> (every try is a) starting over with *accuracy
ok, we are starting with language from scratch, here


Literaturhaus, house has always been a metaphor for consciousness


how Attar can become interested in other lives other that San'an's that are worth living?

although we see again and again in Islamic social order the hierarchical structured relationships, I like to show the otherwise in mystic stances, and argue that the model doesn't remain static normative from the master-disciple to the authority and dependence lock, that the master-disciple relationship doesn't affirm the divine order.
and San'an is also against the notion that Sufi man is without the need of a feminine principle.
we are presented with will of the Tarsaa, the destination of San'an, and the poetic representation is feminine. the female image is strong. although at the end it has to give up -- she converts to his style. the will of the disciple is not replaced by the will of the guide, the master himself doesn't have a will.


The Tarsaa is supervising San'an's diet, sleep, and speech


[I have become more interested in the term ‘tradition'---and more suspicious of preoccupations such as ‘invention’ as modernized and capitalist terms.]
tradition: an act of memory based on a salience-effect of shared knowledge
(ein Akt der Erinnerung basiert auf einer Hervorspringen-Effekt der gemeinsamen Kenntnisse)
-there is a sequence (where is the individual terms within it?)
-my storytelling is about: describing relations of inversion, extension, inclusion, analogy, etc. between mythical, lyrical, or even scientific ‘beings’ that are (1) *conventional* (recognizable repertoire), and (2) *closed* (refer to certain predefined situations and symbols)
==> I work-with and bypass with these aspects in Attar, Hafez, Ajā'ib al-makhlūqāt, etc.


the performance of ‘stop’ in San'an
sign-functions that cannot be stopped

the master-pupil lock
‘locken’ is also to lure, seduce, etc.


thank you for becoming my students, temporarily
we are not locked, and not necessarily unlocked



what is concealed behind the special effects of the awesome signifier in San'an's story?


concealed =/= canceled



in Rumi every word is pass-word. you don't translate a password! (fallacy of the literal)


•all same-sex relationships are hierarchical and dyadic (of two, ‘paarweise’ in German)?
and are based on the cultural diagram of the master-disciple relationship in Sufi orders?

Sufi order =/=? flirtatio[...]

[...]visiting heritage sites such as ajayeb?]
Shariati's defense of the non-western world --> manufacturing an exaggerated imagery of its *now lost grandeur* ==> (its former) essential identity-status
-->{what would Lacan's mirror stage say about this? [--> ‘sudden realization of a complete (specular) image of self =/= infant's primordial sense of her fragmented body’ before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other
[*]subjectivity: spatial relations (--> self-other construct)
[*]the imaginary: the space in which the relation between the ego and its images is developed]
(Mohaghegh:) [eastern] undo the moment of assimilation into a repressive [western] ‘symbolic order'[= the way the subject is organized & how the psyche becomes accessible]
[*]The Real: what cannot be symbolized – what loses it's “reality” once it is symbolized (made conscious) through language ==> the real is traumatic (& sublime?, =/=? media,,) @Hoda}

*cultural extinction*

urgency is (always?) neurotic

(?who and when sends) neurotic demand for an unmediated cognitive intimation


(Khomeini's) omat امت diesenfranchised populace

عناصر گول خورده perceptual perversion


•Khomeini <-- Marcuse (one-dimensional society, that promote a false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood)
•Khomeini <-- Chomsky (how superficial happiness can function as a detraction from the adverse effects of an alienated condition) [<-- Marxist tradition of the “serious” (=/= unreflective state) @Foad, “let everybody be crazed about professional sports or sex scandals or the personalities and their problems --> *consumption becomes ritualized*]
•Shariati <-- Jameson (theory of the “ever-new but always-the-same” within the theatrical operation of political economy)
•Al Ahmad <-- Adorno (skeptical prophecy)
•
} /> }==> principle of utopian potentiality

centers of corruption
pleasure-houses
makeup
games
alcoholic beverages
luxury goods

Marxist tradition:
the underground aesthetic is quickly transfigured into a mainstream aesthetic --always--> in the hands of an authoritarian elite (<-- in apass with Leo we were talking about this)

جنبش mass aesthetic fears becoming official سازمانی

...based on exposing the damage of the global-becoming-local

Al Ahmad traces this “transnational hypnosis” to economic origin (<-- Ali )

(Mohaghegh's judgment on iranian anticolonial ideology:) its ineptitude Ungeeignetheit in realizing the myriad variances that render any medium riddled with paradoxes--derives itself from its concurrent inability to observe the possibility for different subject-positions within the third world

omnipresent deception of modern[...]

[...]ot according to any set of invariants ~ antinomy: art is defined by relation to what it is not (separating itself from what it has developed out of)
(Adorno + Frankfurt School:) **subjectivity thrives in the decisive act of interpretation, one through which the ideological saturation of society finds itself unmasked and history is restored to its contestatory complexitoes**
•Sartre: existential liberation + historical “engagement” + artistic subjectivity --> writing = a praxis-based motioning toward futurity [~=? accelerationism]

Adorno/Sartre --> ***واجب indispensable search for a writing act tied to revolutionary desire, negational change, futural hope, pseudosalvatinoal intentionality*** [=/= Hedayat, Nietzsche]

==> invalidating mimesis as a legitimate conceptual category (!?*)

through an account of self and world as *mythopoetic entities* (~= willed immateriality) --> *chaos-consciousness* (interlacing experience + thought + desire) effectively disbands the Marxian hierarchy of true and false consciousness by virtue of its dissolution of all paradigms of historical “reality”

nowhere-zone between desolation and the everything --> experiential anarchy ==> the poet/artist (~= X-Men: Apocalypse film supervillain character watching the news of last millennia on TV) stands as the incarnation of history's redemption, saving it from itself, and therein bringing into perfect totality the fusion of the self, the aesthetic, and historical Being

historicity of the object
historicity of the subject

critical reason =/= instrumental reason

‘aesthetic depiction of reality =/= objective truth of its operation’ --> journalism
(“[*]artist: a creativity independent and existentially self-sufficient entity standing somewhere beyond the matrices of historical circumstance” =/=) Adorno:
1. artwork can struggle to engage directly with the moment ==> find itself invariably entrapped by the artificial presentations and camouflages of the obscenity it challenges ==> “permit the monstrosity of modern society to emerge in full clarity from the phenomena masking it” [--> an epic ==> freezing the dialectic in a rigid back-and-forth of monolithic polarizations and exaggerated narratives of good and evil]
2. delusion of art's distance from the everyday [--> to resurrect the archaic phantom of sovereignty amid a world of unavoidable mechanistic interconnections]
}==> artwork attests to a *fictive template of freedom* clinging to the *delusion of its righteous self-determination* ==> ***a mimetic intercourse between art and historical life*** [<-- this is most desired from artists today]

Adorno's premises (--> “progress”):
•unabashed use of the universalizing abstraction of “humanity”
•detrimental reconfirmation of a world-historical process inagurated by the alliance of enlightenment epis[...]

[...] based on misrecognition, a fantasy of self-mastery and unity, constitutive of the ego. it has the same structure as paranoia (involving the delusion of absolute knowledge and mastery)}
=/=
[*]savoir (knowing)-->{articulation of signifiers in the subject's symbolic universe, the signifying chain}

i use (sometimes associative) speech in collective research life as a progressive revelation of symbolic knowledge to the subject, where knowledge is the jouissance of the Other =/= “absolute knowledge”

[what ever we say about the symbolic is utterly important: because from the anthropological work of Strauss on the exchange of gifts that regulate kinship relations, emergence of symbolic structures was conceptualized as an essential feature of the human transition from nature to culture, to Saussure's theory of the sign: exchanges of signifiers, to Lacanian psychoanalysis: the impose of symbolic structures on sexuality]


defense: reaction of the ego to certain interior stimuli (and not the external) <-- Freud
(in Lacan:) *defense: permanent symbolic structures of subjectivity =/= *resistance: transitory imaginary responses to intrusions of the symbolic (on the side of the object)

the neurotic and the pervert defend themselves in their *desire* =/= psychotic defends himself in their *projection*

“to desire” is a defense mechanism (against going beyond a certain limit in jouissance?)

(>this is all about) the psychotic relation to reality and the relation of the subject to his speech


*unreal is transparent (for the paranoid)*
-hermeneutics of suspicion (<-- Nietzsche's perspectivism: all texts are but autobiographic memoirs)


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

[Searles]

schizophrenic individual is struggling with the question, not so much of ‘how to relate,’ but ‘whether to relate’ to others

(Searles's interpersonal ideal:) connection = relatedness without merging

spontaneous involvement of the therapist in terms of countertransference (pygmalionesque love?)

psychological illness = a disturbance of natural tendency to heal others (patient's unconscious therapeutic initiative)

“all patients have the ability to ‘read the unconscious’ of the therapist” (Searles)

*acknowledging what the patient's transference materializes*

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

apass's aetiology: the philosophical study of causation of disease
(deriving from the Greek words aitia = cause and logos = word/speech) --> “tell me what causes your psychosis or art”

(thing that actually drives you crazy:)
other individuals [~ tormentingly insecure nature of the ever-ambivalent symbiotic relatedness in infancy and childhood] ==> schizophrenia
nonhuman environment ==> Anxiety(?)
symbolic bad[...]

[...]eceptacle of competing backstories (of shame, conspiracy, superiority, covert, elite)

galleries of self-covering demonic beings

Gabriel: angel of revelation (oversees:)
•khasf خسف sinking into the ground
•maskh مسخ disfiguration of features


astigmatism (a type of refractive error, retinal tearing)
cartographical layerings



(Mohaghegh reading a Babylonian nocturnal prayer)

(old) god [divinity cults of ancient worlds]: signposts of an extra-human imaginary ==> consciousness trespass beyond itself

in the face of the night's obscurity (when the all-seeing shuts its eyes)
pastoral life turns murderous (at dark)

signaling the absence of fairness...
blurring of omniscience...
delay of verdict...
aimlessness of quest

•blindness to fill the void of divination
•wandering, detour, or stillness to fill the void of odyssey


Sin
moon-god
•enigma (“he whose heart cannot be read”) --> epistemic
•futurity (remote: “could see farther than all the gods”) --> temporal

somnolence خواب و بيدارى
==> branches of nonsense pervade (disbanding of the herd)

(cypress سرو) tree
inspector of cosmological space


in theo-terrestrial plane:
1. alluvion: the wash or flow of water against a shore --> inundation
2. alluvium: a deposit of clay, silt, sand, and gravel left by flowing streams in a river valley or delta --> detritus [residuum alone is left to control the universe?]


Ishtar
guardian of prostitutes
surrounded in myth by death and disaster
goddess of contradictory connotations and forces (fair play & enmity, etc,)


Lillith (derived from the Akkadian lilitu: evening creature, specter, or monster)
kidnapping sleeping children

(according to the Babylonian cosmology) night requires (non-identitarian) gods capable of abomination (backstabing)
-recognized by their tangible outlines as actual constellations in the night sky
-related to the more expansive domains of animality, vehicles, and objects
-emanate from a perceptual faculty closer to the child's imagination of cloud-shapes (=/= archetypal meaning)


Tiamat
primordial goddess of the salt sea, darkness, chaos, and creation
from the time of permanent nightfall
a destroyer-deity and yet whose sliced body parts form the heavens and earth
represented as unconscious, reckless annihilation and yet also holding diabolical intelligence
bathed in eternal blackness and yet known as “the glistening one”


Girra
dystopian potentials of technological invention
figure of wicked logos (undoing words)
[...]

[...]ic local horror =/= historical time, supernaturalism, occult modes of thinking encoded in fantastic narratives}
[Bergson > Lim > Tolentino:] horror --> heterogeneous temporality, heteroglossia: multiple tongues, to disengage in certain (nation) formations

horrific real
translation of historical terror in filmic horror

historical real + filmic mobilization --render--> real as porous & artificial

horror --Tolentino--> transhistorical (transgressional) continuity of the project of desire & pleasure
--> masochistic viewing experience + trajectory of critique

(during Marcos order in Philippines -->) horror genre talks about the popular dialectics of the known & unknown, moral & immoral, inclusion & exclusion, defeat & triumph, struggle & redemption, normal & abnormal, reality & alternative realities, religious & secular
•horror provides a cultural trope for the imagination of the nation

anxious state in horror films --represent--> anxious state in ... (nation-formation, citizenship, etc.) --> irony: (the anxious state) it is not what it is
----> [*]viewing: a sadomasochistic act [you know it is frightful (or garbage) yet enjoy viewing (in KHM we called it hate-watching)] --> pervers pleasure ==> individual and social categories to remain constantly in a flux

intensification of anxiety ~=> carnavalesque moment of drawing pleasure

(in the film) history of a chosen local
logic of absence --> prohibitive history of violence + excess
ritual of horrific foregrounding

scene + coherence of meaning
*horror is performative : it needs to be restaged in order to be evocative of meaning*

sexualization of women integral to the genre of horror [aimed at its male audience, similar to Charmed]:
•sexy female leading role (in love triangle)
•man --> representing evil and underworld
•man --> representing true love (engaged in a battle for love + choice of the young woman, sexualized in the male contest)
•female viacera sucker --> female creatures need to show hidden skin [popular sex-oriented star --to--> female monstrous figure --allow--> display of prohibited body parts + heteronormative desire]

(female star rendered both strong and weak)
1. exposing and defying the horror figure (first)
2. embodying the horrific abject subject (second)

in the narrative of horror
•the moral forthrightness that makes the female subject survive, endure, move on
•they are punished but never totally obliterated into the horror scene


internalization of fear ==>? domestication =? maintaining the status quo in community fronts --Foucault--> docile ==> productive for state formation

(the survivor never fully survives and triumphs over the adversaries of the) horror scene --> open-e[...]

[...]xperiences
◦be productive of
◾further movements of the tendency
◾countertendencies
◾its dissipation
◦

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

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

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

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

becoming a knowledgeable religious disputant

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

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

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

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

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

bedat بدعت
accretion of customs in the form of innovation


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

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

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

constantly evolving relationship between humans and jinns

from pre-islamic --to--> Islamic
both good & bad ascribed to jinn's constitution --to--> to be much more unequivocally associated with evil

the little mischievous nafs نفس that make up a self --> Muslim interiority (projects?)

...in the belief of jinns:
•complex arrangement of cultural memory
•political strategy
•mental illness
•individual subjectivity
•
--✕--> *Naveeda taking the existence of jinn for granted ==> (her effort) to learn more about the family that adopted them and their efforts at striving*

*taking the existence of X for granted ==to==> learn about the people who adopted X*


“Muslim children - how bring them up?” vol 3
(in Islam) child: bring without aghl عقل + ability to communicate with divine beings, without sin
--> alway[...]

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



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

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

skepticism shadows striving (?)


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


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

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


mulla = full-fledged maleficent persona


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


figure of the mulla [~= collective fear + revulsion] --traverse--> the fragmented public culture of the city


[*]ulama: guardian, transmitter, interpreter of shari'a
+ specific claims of knowledge upon:
1. تفسیر tafsir (commentary upon the Quran)
2. فقه figh (jurisprudence)
3. حدیث hadis (sayings of the prophet)
4. کلام kalam (speculative theology)
+ (in Pakistan) personnel in mosque:
1. امام imam
2. خطیب khatib (Frida sermon)
3. قاری gha[...]

[...]mullas
•mulla jokes
•cartoons
•
political commentary <--> criticism
--> mulla was to blame for everything that was perceived to be wrong (in Pakistan) --> *pervasive skepticism* [also in Iran]

skepticism shadows striving (?)


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


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

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


mulla = full-fledged maleficent persona


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


figure of the mulla [~= collective fear + revulsion] --traverse--> the fragmented public culture of the city


[*]ulama: guardian, transmitter, interpreter of shari'a
+ specific claims of knowledge upon:
1. تفسیر tafsir (commentary upon the Quran)
2. فقه figh (jurisprudence)
3. حدیث hadis (sayings of the prophet)
4. کلام kalam (speculative theology)
+ (in Pakistan) personnel in mosque:
1. امام imam
2. خطیب khatib (Frida sermon)
3. قاری ghari
4. موذن muezzin

mulla --derogatory--> one who is overzealous in upholding the letter of the shari'a
(+ additional connotation:)
•ignorant master [go to --> mulla nasruddin: religious master who gets by in life through hypocrisy and cunning + outsmarting those of noble birth and high cultivation]
•gabza agent (seizure of property)
•sodomizer (one who rapes men)
•a naive fool out of step with his time
•


colonial politics in south Asia --> British colonial administration in India see ulama as outdated, deliberately obscurantist, jahel ==> negative stereotype ----> post-colonial period

mullaism:
•Pakistani state --> fossilized state of knowledge on Islam
•Iqbal --> mullaism =/= freedom of ijtihad


(Talal Asad -->) Islamic diskursive tradition is grounded in *argument that anticipates resistance* in the form of doubt, indifference, or lack of understanding ==> it employs the force of reason to bring forth the *willing performance of a practice*<[...]

[...]onial politics in south Asia --> British colonial administration in India see ulama as outdated, deliberately obscurantist, jahel ==> negative stereotype ----> post-colonial period

mullaism:
•Pakistani state --> fossilized state of knowledge on Islam
•Iqbal --> mullaism =/= freedom of ijtihad


(Talal Asad -->) Islamic diskursive tradition is grounded in *argument that anticipates resistance* in the form of doubt, indifference, or lack of understanding ==> it employs the force of reason to bring forth the *willing performance of a practice*
}==produce==> domain of orthodoxy (+ relations of power)


(for Naveeda) anxiety or skepticism ~= sign of aspiration for striving


labbaik: i am here (to follow your orders)

theatrical unteality

...animus lies in the world
[later he] identitues this animus with thr workings of iblis (satan)
...this is a city of whispers [waswasen], a city of mad possession [shar], a city of deviation [ilhad], a city of anxiety [tazadzud], a city of dispersion [intishar]

the ability to smell oneself --> to experience oneself as other


how public culture can ability skepticism as a pervasive condition


mulla jokes --> horror stories = fear + revulsion

(Freudian) eruptive quality of jokes --> joke erupts into everyday life as of from elsewhere

political cartoon: maximum effect through a minimum of details

(mulla) jokes, horror stories, political cartoons --Naveeda--> *exiling the foreignness within*


stories of:
1. mosque in an upscale shopping center
2. sexually predictory mulla
}--> (speaks of:)
1. the perception that there were places in Pakistan where vise was allowed to grow unchecked
2. the menace the ulama introduced into everyday life
> }==> (the effect of:)
•keeping public attention upon possible sites and agents of corruption
•putting the everyday life into question (as to whether it was what it appeared to be)


political cartoons --imply-->
•Pakistanis are caught in someone else's game
•growing unfamiliarity of Pakistan


(charges of)
sinfulness
sexual voraciousness
cunning
gluttony
political ambition
worthlessness
corruption
self-destruction
--> continuous efforts to set the mulla outside of oneself (=/= everyday familiarity with the ulama)

***negative stories and cartoons --express--> various degrees of skeptical orientation to the world***
jokes --(descriptive density)--> full expression to skepticism
--{also in Iran}--> making (mulla) grotesquely other ==> inconcevable to imagine any points of relatedness (to mulla)



[...]

[...] was just one of several different means of organizing knowledge..

graphical representation, capable of developing further degrees of complexity

“form”
recreate the ‘form’ (form : ‘state of organization of matter’)

within (this/a) variable system

“text” as sequences of cords

memorization (the creation of mnemonic relation) necessarily implies the modular organization of the knowledge it represents


constitutive dualism in many forms of the art of memory:
•order (Anordnung) and salience (Hervorspringen)
•expressivity (and power)
•encoding (Verschlüsselung) and evocation (Herbeirufen)

possible course between the twin rocks of writing: “social” and “arbitrary”

at the end it is the mental operation
(techniques of thought)

the image plays a central role in the construction of relations between (visual) themes and particularity of words, which in turn help organize narratives

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

these all were technical or formal questions so far


memory is a way consistency maintains itself


civil society is afraid of personal recollections and perverse databases, digital collections

is khm’s archive a state sponsored memorialization, monuments of a consistent history? (that assumes a sublime ending?)


the immemorial (in memorial)


have a strong philosophy of technology with this project
there is never merely a technological question, always already ontological

who wants to remember, solidify, and memorialize?
and for whom?
building a technological temple of memory, khm aesthetic narrative of its own history?
(first there is one big account of property that all these fragmented histories of numerous people who worked in khm are singed under one signature, of khm)

should we disavow any notion of “spirit” in khm?
we must agree that khm's render of its own history is pure aesthetic what so ever.


we must remain committed to the experimental, when dealing with archival domains in the school of media art where experimentation was in its original conception and foundational roots (as Zielinski expresses in one interview: “+25 KHM: Siegfried Zielinski” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3JQ3aTwu2s)

arte
DAS KURZFILM-MAGAZIN
KURZSCHLUSS
Siegfried Zielinski im Interview
http://cinema.arte.tv/de/artikel/siegfried-zielinski-im-interview



hybrid objects?
is the logistic characteristic of digital data inconsistent with the hybrid objects of art?



Forms of thought, from what Lévi-Strauss called the “systematization [of] what is immediately presented to the senses,”
<[...]

[...]ly in the whole/parts mode

--**--> numbers as particulars, in place and time, in situ, realized in specific practical ways

Platonist account of number
intuitionist account of number
instrumentalist account of number
Iranian accounr of number

(Verran's rhetoric --> the term) semiotic (an opaque term, both vague and highly technical) + material modifies

(Verran not refering to) [*]semiotic: the summoning up the baroque complexity of French structuralist and post-structuralist thought, and alternatively the specific categorical proposals of Peirce's philosophy and its offspring, american pragmatism.

the paradox of worlds as already/always meaningful, recognizing that doing worlds as knowable (whether by science or by trading) or for that matter through Yoruba, or Yolngu knowledge traditions --involves--> engaging with the world as it is here and now --accepts--> *studying ‘forms of life’ and ‘language games’ as complex clots of signs and collective actions*

--Peirce--> numbers can be:
•iconic (icons are deeply coconstitutive with clots of collective actions that generate entities)
•indexical
•symbolic (symbols and their objects enact a relation of supervenience امر غير مترقبه, objects are accepted as affecting and effecting their signs but not vice-versa)
--> degrees of reciprocal co-constitution of signs and collective embodied and embedded actions in which objects come to life
--Verran--> ethnographically found forms of the workings of signs

(depending on) how one understands ethnography ==> names work as icons, indexes, or symbols

removing the stigma of Yoruba number as primitive

numbers as working indexically or symbolically --> for examine: are being used to represent the ecological health of Australia's creeks and rivers, lakes and billabongs


difference between these relational forms:
the first thing we need to know about a number is whether:
•it takes the one/many form (potentially containing unity within the plurality of a many) [cardinal number --> conserve value]
•the whole/parts form (having plurality contained within a unity) [ordinal number --> conserve order]

(in) shape-shifting between:
one/many form
whole/parts form
symbolic/indexical mode of semiosis
indexical/iconic mode of semiosis
}--> number works in inventive ways


thousands of Australians regularly attending their streams with bottles, thermometers, and pH meters, peering at tiny creatures they have scooped up with a net, trying to identify what they are and count their numbers

(the slogan) “you can't sustain what you haven't measured”

numbers so enthusiastically generated by volunteers --also--> contribute to constituting water as c[...]

[...]r /> -Crary

19th century ‘crowd psychology’ assumption that attention has no necessary connection to objective optical observation of the world --> *crowd: drift toward a more primitive order of consciousness*
-withdrawal from surroundings and refocusing on some real or symbolic figure
--> theatrical configuration: means for controlling crowds --> (La Bon's) image of theater exceeding its older place within models of mimetic relation --to--> new effects of subjectification


Wagner's volkish homogeneity --> uniform modes of perception and response --> (problem of) community formation

Wagner's optical metaphor (community could see itself reflected in the mirror of tragedy) of theatrical existence --> *sense of vision serves to reinforce one's place within the social whole*
[--> when i look at Brussels from the 14th floor...]

Wagner's cultural program for social reintegration and his belief in the transformative effects of the collective experience of music drama preformed and produced as a ritual communal event

(typical 19th century --> debates about the effects of mass culture --articulated--> “distraction =/= self-conscious contemplative perception” -->) Wagner's deploying the pervasiveness of *distracted modes of cultural consumption* ==> “higher (deeply attentive --advocated--> purified and ethically superior perceptual engagement) =/= lower (distracted)” forms of listening
-his dissatisfaction with traditional theatre that had allowed or encouraged audiences to look at each other at the diverse social texture of the theatre

an attentive, absorbed public (unthinkable in the 18th century ---> go to Sennett)

(still we are suffering -->) [to have] *control over the attentiveness of an audience* to subordinate it to the will of the artist ==> generate a *collective state of reception* (worthy of an art with such social aspiration @Hoda, Ali , Sina, --to which extent my mysticism in art was about my ideas about spectators incapacity for attention in contemporary Tehran?)

19th century theatre --(transform into)--> ***construction of visibility*** (structure the spectators perceptual experience)

“collective act of seeing ==> semblance of a community”

(phantasmagoric character of his work) Wagner:
•eliminating lateral views ==> frontal engagement
•near-complete darkness ==> preventing peripheral distraction
•lowering the orchestra out of sight
--> systematic concealing and mystification of the process of production
--> (Wagner stands for) will to mastery over all aspects of the spectacle ==allow==> calculated production of states of regression, fascination, dream (synchronized sound --> cinema's attentiveness half a century later)
-control over emotional response
-remaking of spectator experience
-production of dream[...]

[...]hem

*(Archer lingering in the textile's volatile gum) to develop forms of critique that can account for the peculiar textiles ‘we’ are currently wrapped-up in* [globalized economies, militarized laboratories, etc. (BioSteel and so on)]

text +/& textile
•in metaphor: the social fabric, the Internet, the Fold, etc.
•in myth: Arachne's textiles, or Penelope's epic loom
}--✕-->? to account for neo-liberal and transgenic subjects

(traditionally:) textile (racialized and gendered, as “woman's work”) “=/=” text

*fabric conditions and binds our desires and bodies ---@Janina

(Archer >) Gernreich exposed how the fashion system instrumentalized the body's desire to move” while inscribing it within the time-signatures of modern capitalism

uniform = contemporary fashion's other

digi-camo (redesigned and digitally remixed camouflage fatigues worn by the US military)

desire for “freedom” and for alternative temporalities + desire for discipline and physical restraint
}--> *tight spaces our desires are prone to work themselves into*

textures and taxonomies of fashion and uniformity

Abu Ghraib --> (in the pursuit of a) perverse desire for justice (a desire that many feel is best met in the violent erasure of certain subjects)



(let's) stop pretending that “we” weren't already caught-up in the messy circuits of desire

“[...]Freud's figure of the woman who has nothing better to do than but braid her pubic hair into a futile simulation of the phallus, and who (interestingly enough) accidentally invents weaving as an outcome of this inherently fetishistic gesture” (Archer > Barthes > Freud)


Gernreich working with “the future” as a medium and not as a destination***
-he was keen to work with fashion as a ‘time-based medium’(~ deliver us onto alternative temporalities)

[*]fashion: a distinctly modern clothing regime engineered to materially manipulate “the past” so it may serve as a springboard into “the time to come”, an attempt to create the perfect tension between “right now” and “back then” ==> (fashion serving as one of modern culture's main engines catapults the wearers) towards a time and place where present-day problems can no longer reach them and unknown pleasures are made manifest & continually converting the erratic power of our desires into a kind of motion that can be effectively capitalized upon

(brackets and bracelets)

...momentary and marvelous sensations of free fall (by way of design)

Janina's wardrobe malfunctions

*the fine line between sexual liberation and sexual exploitation (in Space 1999 and Star Trek uniforms)*
(Archer:) “Star Trek's futuristic costumes assert their ‘other-worldliness’ by emphatically exposing as muc[...]

[...]ons ==> each stage participants in the production and differentiation of the body image)

libidinalization of bodily zones, organs, and functions ==builds==> body image particular form

child's body, an already sexually designated body (which culture's desires, wishes, fears, hopes are projected and internalized, mother/nurturer's successes and failures, ambitions and disappointments are most readily projected and played out = sources for self-worth and sexual value)

[*]puberty: greatest discord between the body image (psychical idealized self-image) and the lived body (bodily changes) --> the adolescent body is commonly experienced as awkward, alienating, an undesired biological imposition : *pubertal developement (date of teenagehood) ==> philosophical desire to transcend corporeality and its urges*

-it is only in adolescence that it becomes clear (wanted or not) that the subject has a sexual position (~ genital position)
> -during puberty, gentials and secondary sexual characteristics become definitive objects of consciousness and only bit by bit acquire representation in the body image

***in the refusal of sexual roles ordinated by heterosexuality,(for example gay men and lesbians) -->
•may perversely cling to preadolescent body images (--> to remain ambiguous regarding the differences between the sexes)
•invest greater intensity in erotogenic sites, making them the center of libidinal attention and narcissistic investment (Janina's room) (--> in effect reinscribing them in *a mode of resistance*)
}--> oral, anal, sadistic impulses, tactility, scopophilia, “sexual perversions” =? (to emphasize and cultivate) a mode of defiance to heterosexist requirements
[@Sina, the images that i have been clinging to are in the body image that i think i am refusing or inscribing: pony, unicorn, rainbow, skull, the childish bracelet i found in the park, etc.]

<br /> ماليخوليا
hypochondria خودبيمارانگارى
a Freudian problem: to describe the transference of libido from the external world and love objects to the subject's own body in illness
-treating nongenital zones as if they had taken on genital meaning = (in the case of hysteria) hysterogenic zone takes on a sexual, usually phallic, function
*hypochondria: chronic and abnormal anxiety abour imaginary symptoms = a flight against narcissim* (the individual defends himself against the libidinous overtension of the hypochondriac organ --> to treat it like a foreign bosdy in the body image)
[hypochondria =/= narcissim]
hypochondriac tries to expel from the body image but cannot because the zone is overinvested with libido =/= خوددگربینی depersonalization = psychical transformation of the body image*, subject lose interest in the whole body, they refuse or are afraid to invest any narcissistic libido in the body image[...]

[...] />
a single movement reorients the whole of the body, creating what might be called a gait or posture, an individual and cultural bodily style

appersonization: treatment of one's own body as an outside object:
+ psychical vampirism: identification with the symptoms, actions, and fantasies of othe people
--> identification, incorporation, introjection

example of aging
-body image seems resistant to the changes brought about by aging
-they seem to have aged, whereas the subject feels as if he or she has not
--> condition of continual transformation + time lag in the perception and registeration of real changes in the body image

body image: condition of the subject's access to spatiality (including built environments) = a postural schema of the body [=/= mapping a biological body onto a psychological domain, providing a kind of translation of material into conceptual terms]
-->
•radical inseparability of biological from psychical elements
•connection between the question of sexual specificity (biological sexual difference)
•connection between the question of psychical identity


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

Grosz realizes two human perversion in psychoanalysis literature:
•male --> fetishism (sexual gratification from the use of inanimate partial objects alone)
•feminine --> exhibitionism, kleptomania

female fetishism --> lesbianism

fetishism --> excess of their psychoanalytic descriptions
feminism --> collective psychosis (~ a political disavowal of women's social reality as oppressed)

[*]play: a form of mastery (= a conversion of passivity into activity) + a technique for the production of pleasure

Freud:
•deviation in the sexual object --> homosexuality, pedophilia, bestiality
•deviation in the sexual aim --> transvestism, voyeurism, exhibitionism
fetishism: sexual overvaluation of a part (of the body or an inanimate object)
[--Grosz--> ‘overvaluation’ is a characteristic of masculine forms of loving]
“perversion =/= neuroses” --> pervert expresses precisely what it is that the neurotic represses (*perversion: to avoid the repression)

sexual normality = copulative nonincestual heterosexuality

fetishist: the boy/child who is unable to resolve the oedipal conflict in its various alternatives (unable or unwilling to abandon the mother as love object)
-he cannot, like the homosexual son, accept symbolic castration in order to take on the “feminine” position and adopt a passive sexual role in relation to his father
-he is not prepared to “pay” for his desire by facing the oedipal prohibition (give up the mother or lose the penis) --> fetish: a token of triumph over the threat of castration (and a protection against it) -->{makes women tolerabl[...]

[...]viding a kind of translation of material into conceptual terms]
-->
•radical inseparability of biological from psychical elements
•connection between the question of sexual specificity (biological sexual difference)
•connection between the question of psychical identity


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

Grosz realizes two human perversion in psychoanalysis literature:
•male --> fetishism (sexual gratification from the use of inanimate partial objects alone)
•feminine --> exhibitionism, kleptomania

female fetishism --> lesbianism

fetishism --> excess of their psychoanalytic descriptions
feminism --> collective psychosis (~ a political disavowal of women's social reality as oppressed)

[*]play: a form of mastery (= a conversion of passivity into activity) + a technique for the production of pleasure

Freud:
•deviation in the sexual object --> homosexuality, pedophilia, bestiality
•deviation in the sexual aim --> transvestism, voyeurism, exhibitionism
fetishism: sexual overvaluation of a part (of the body or an inanimate object)
[--Grosz--> ‘overvaluation’ is a characteristic of masculine forms of loving]
“perversion =/= neuroses” --> pervert expresses precisely what it is that the neurotic represses (*perversion: to avoid the repression)

sexual normality = copulative nonincestual heterosexuality

fetishist: the boy/child who is unable to resolve the oedipal conflict in its various alternatives (unable or unwilling to abandon the mother as love object)
-he cannot, like the homosexual son, accept symbolic castration in order to take on the “feminine” position and adopt a passive sexual role in relation to his father
-he is not prepared to “pay” for his desire by facing the oedipal prohibition (give up the mother or lose the penis) --> fetish: a token of triumph over the threat of castration (and a protection against it) -->{makes women tolerable as sexual objects + saves the fetishist from becoming a homosexual}
[*]fetish: (a substitute for or) *a talisman of the phallus*

(most significant one in the child's erotic life -->) mother's phallus: that which endows her with power and authority

fetish --> a way of both preserving his belief in the missing maternal phallus and at the same time accepting her castration and the possibility of his own

disavowal =/= repression (--> neurosis) =/= negation (denial) =/= repudiation (foreclosure --> psychosis)

negation: a provisional lifting of repression (not through acceptance, the repressed contents are verbally and affectively negated) --> affirmation: the process of registering or fixing a drive to an ideational content (signifying the former by the latter), both the condition of signification and of repression


[...]

[...]br /> Chen on animacy

animacy --> how matter that is considered insensate, immobile, deathly (or otherwise “wrong”) animates cultural life in important ways

[*]animacy: a quality of agency, awareness, mobility, liveness
--linguistics--> grammatical effects of the sentience or liveness of nouns

change of animacy ==> violates a cross-linguistic preference among speakers
(for example “the hikers that rocks crush” --> rock: the source of causality)

animacy
filled with life, disposed, inclined, animare to breathe, to quicken
anima, air, breath, life, soul, mind (mental impulse)
--connected--> animals
animosity --> animating spirit or temper of a hostile character

animating principle [--> rigging]

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

Ihde: playing a musical instrument (= a technological mediation) =/= the process of genetic manipulation
=/= Heidegger's technology: a metaphysically totalizing context (<-- every technology ended up with exactly the same output or analysis)

Ihde =/= utopian & dystopian views of technology

...to understand yourself to be thinking and acting ‘in the midst of’ the pervasive technoscientific character of life (@CG hacker)

Ihde --> ***technologies and humans constitute themselves interactively***

*technological mediation: heterogeneous relationships between individual human beings and the world + artifacts used for mediations =/= ideals of efficiency and clear communication



“breakdown ==> new gestalt” : something that had usually taken for granted, which then under breakdown conditions, now gets revealed in a new way (revelatory function)
=/= Ihde's *variational practice* : variations ==forefront==> new gestalts

(our) world = powerful effective & failing technology
we =/= tragic hero (+ broken hammer) or Enlightenment scientist (+ laboratory)



matrix --> female
those that move in the matrix --> formative male principle

(Foucault's) episteme: social-moral-religious stability


Latour
modernity <== settlement: (a clear and sharp distinction) society =/= nature --obscure--> the proliferation of hybrids: entities that are both cultural & natural (for example material technologies are both “real” & “constructed”)


Ihde --> technologies are in *mediating positions*

interrelational relativistic ontologies : there is interaction and mutual “non-neutral” and “noninnocent” productive and emergent shaping between humans + technologies + animals --> knowledge is “situated” and particular, not “transcendentally” true ==> putative symmetry between the human & nonhuman


bestiality (interrelational, sin?) is embedded in what has[...]

[...]l imagery
•medieval animal
•plant books
•cabalistic number mysticism
•old testament motifs
}==> emblematics became a kind of a language, that scholars and then readers of the vulgar tongue deciphered in books and then applied to a number of fields in daily life

spiritual symbols of allegory and myth + factual/fractal world --common--> visual art
}--> ‘title page’ : interplay of symbol & reality <-- interaction of different spheres of imagery:
•historical characters
•living people
•stuff of geography
•stuff of astronomy
•architectural views
•(in the 14th century scholars began to collect) ancient coins (and medals) [one side: great events, historic individuals -and- the reverse: depicted allegorical subjects, gods or the *fates*, allegorical personifications inherited from the middle ages [arts and vices]] ~--> *moralizing nature of (someone's) ‘specifications’* [--> frontispiece: personifications as simulated sculptures in niches flanking the archway]

Sa'di =/= author's portrait updated ~ Olearius



Olearius had three printing presses installed in his house, and required that the engravers live and work there, under his direct supervision

“Concerning the Changeability of Worldy Things, and the Wonder and Praise of Virtue”

‘flaming hearts’ symbolizing “their” union

symbolism (of the frontispiece tries to) contain the subject matter (of the text that follows)


the triumph of death (but with a happy end for the deceased) # Adventure Time

“that which i wish for is not mortal” (Duke's motto)
“virtue lives on after the funeral rites”

his home, name, heraldry, figure, allows the viewer to grasp the entire span of the deceased's life (and death) *at a single glance*

horn of plenty

cupid is astride (with a leg on each side of)
astrilized

*winged sphere*
winged fame trumpets the deceased's accomplishments

christian mastery over the infidel--who is blinded to the true faith

a group of international admirers


**methods used in Europe to disseminate information about foreign people** during the early modern era:
•Flugblatt (broad-sheet or broadside, 14th century), a medium directed at the illiterate classes (that needed visual cue) [included: news about battles, astrological prediction, sighting of comet, birth of a monstrous creature (animal or human), execution of a famous criminal, tales of witches, devils, religious or political propaganda]
Flugblatt counterparts:
◦Flugshrift (flying writ, flying pamphlet), popularized by Martin Luther, four pages with woodcut gracing, for audience with ability and leisure to read longer tracts
•illustrated costume book. with Manneri[...]

[...]br /> •wicked problem --> climate change as threat
•emotional frame --> focus on values and morality
•debate frame --> balance-as-bias: dedicating half of the frame to counter-evidence of climate change --> fundamental paradox of collective action @Chloe2 --> tragedy of the commons @Nicolas
•risk framing --> forgrounding the endemic nature of the problem --> a logic of translatability : ‘risk خطر ==> commensurability توافق’
•war frame (turf wars of positions) --> a problem framing that rhetorically amplifies climate change --> logic of outsideness : ‘climate change = an enemy that is fought against’, (drawing from) emergency logic ==urge==> single-shot unified geotechnical solutions
•crisis frame --> emotional framing --leverage--> temporal logic : a climax point (peak oil, peak carbon, etc.) points to the narrowing window of opportunity to act -->
•catastrophic framing --> (using emotional language) locates the frame in the aftermath of a climate changed [<-- a popular public framing of the problem]
•super wicked problem --> temporal logic of time running out --pointing-->
◦irrational future disounting
◦lack of a central organizing authority
◦
•anthropocene --> temporal logic + pervasive spatiality ==> situating the category in deep time + planetary scale [<-- a frame used by organizations]


[*]problem: analytical techniques that lend themselves to core framing tasks of “what, who, why, when, where” of a particular issue (<-- ‘research problem’ is a foundation of this technique)

define boundaries of climate change --to-->
•focus on who is responsible
•ask why is it happening
•identify when is it happening
•locate where

(Campbell's) meta-observation ==> more each field discovers about climate change ==> category expansion (the more it seems to grow in scale)

*what Campbell finds in the discursive evolution of climate change*: a manifestation of (what the philosophical movement known as speculative realism criticizes as) [*]correlationism: we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking & being, a means to temper the real, to constrain it such that is becomes thinkable to human categories (yoke thinking & being together : we cannot think the unthought without relating it to existing correlates) }--Meillassoux--> never able to get out of the relation being thought and being to distinguish between an object & properties belonging to the subjective access to the object --> bad idea of epistemology ==> recuperates climate change within categories that make it seam manageable =/= (Campbell claiming) *climage change : ontological world* ==> it is everywhere and nowhere, present at all levels and yet absent as a distinct “thing” we can point to


Meillassoux --> how difficult it is to think anything without in some way introduc[...]

[...]r /> proto-atavism نياکان گرايى --> ***multiple paradigms of life exist on the peripheries of humanist life***

Campbell --> a posthuman biology (an ethical imperative that in a technological age, that life is not just life)


Golem --> perennial horror in western imagination
Jewish psalms of the 6th century
formation of life (golmi: unformed limb) <==emanate== mother's womb & nonhuman earth itself
--exemplifies--> how *western humanist versions of technology tend to create a master-servant dialectic* (master-slave) and anything that threatens this divide invokes horror
(roots embedded in the Romantic tradition:)
•“frankenfood” (mash up original and unexpected food combinations, genetically modified crops)
•genetic engineering technologies
•“revenge of nature”
•“nature out of control” leitmotif
•
*since antiquity (in the west) technology has been simultaneously imbued with magic and rationality, evil and redemption, trickery and transparency [---> go to Baxstrom + Meyers Realizing The Witch]

Descartes: the philosopher who provided the western imagination with the most enduring model of the human --> preoccupation with mechanism as something that pervaded machines, bodies and animals but never the non-material, spiritual realm of the mind

*eschatological significance attached to technology*
schizoid stance, alternating between the technophobic and the technophilic (--> expressed in avant-garde): Dadaism, Futurism, Cubism, constructivism)
•technocs aestheticized and fetishized: world expos such as the Crystal Palace, garden cities, the cite industrielle, Citta Nuova, the Werknund, etc.
•military machinery of first world war which alienated human life while at the same time making the human inhuman

*technology as revold*
imagined as rebellious and repellent
(human civilization) haunted by the temptation of a reverse evolution which coexists in it with the potential for progress
--> *techno-anxiety: potential infallibility of the technological

(teratology, wider context of studies on monsters)
logic of contemporary technoculture --trope-->
•primitive
•technology
•horror


(Campbell drawing from a larger) intertextual repertoire consisting of advertising, film, and other images in visual culture
--> aesthetic conflation of the primitive, technology, and horror points to three new concepts:
•metamorphing: {<<--** exactly my problem with Manning's process philosophy}
◦(a logic of) ***identity as constant becoming***
◦***emphasis on flow*** (as a necessary way to understand process)
•primal technology =/= (humanist and pervasive) concept of technology as modern, progressive, clean, nonalive
•proto-atavism: evolutionary traits from the fut[...]

[...] Dadaism, Futurism, Cubism, constructivism)
•technocs aestheticized and fetishized: world expos such as the Crystal Palace, garden cities, the cite industrielle, Citta Nuova, the Werknund, etc.
•military machinery of first world war which alienated human life while at the same time making the human inhuman

*technology as revold*
imagined as rebellious and repellent
(human civilization) haunted by the temptation of a reverse evolution which coexists in it with the potential for progress
--> *techno-anxiety: potential infallibility of the technological

(teratology, wider context of studies on monsters)
logic of contemporary technoculture --trope-->
•primitive
•technology
•horror


(Campbell drawing from a larger) intertextual repertoire consisting of advertising, film, and other images in visual culture
--> aesthetic conflation of the primitive, technology, and horror points to three new concepts:
•metamorphing: {<<--** exactly my problem with Manning's process philosophy}
◦(a logic of) ***identity as constant becoming***
◦***emphasis on flow*** (as a necessary way to understand process)
•primal technology =/= (humanist and pervasive) concept of technology as modern, progressive, clean, nonalive
•proto-atavism: evolutionary traits from the future can exist in the present (=/= atavism: evolutionary traits from the past can exist in the present) []
==> type of posthuman biology conception of life

(let's have atavism instead of activism)

Campbell --> *critique the almost universal celebration of flow in contemporary philosophical thought* {<-- yes yes! thank you! ♥}


primitive: a site of primordial simplicity ~= originary unity }<== history of technology <--(told from a western lens)-- gradual progression and sophistication of the technical (for example: Black Panther film)
-the presence or absence of specific technologies has often been read as a marker of cultural ‘backwardness’ <== “technology = something that comes from the West (rich-world technologies) and does something to other people in other places such as the “third world” (a well-intentioned framework that denies both agency and contemporaneity to the ‘other’ --> for example Eliasson's Little Sun)

technological progress is not a force unique to modern ‘civilized’ society; it is intimately bound with art and antiquity
•Heidegger (seeks the origin of technology in ancient Greece) --> technology referred to the ways in which realities are brought into the world, a mode of unconcealing reality (hervorbringen) [=/= mere means or instrument]
+ every unconcealment of reality is also by necessity a concealment of another reality
*poiesis: bring hither out of concealment forth into unconcealment* --> techne = tech + art

[...]

[...]/>
advertising trend
1. information: (from) traditional forms of print & television --to--> intensification and hybridization in oblique ways + through new media (adver-gaming, twitter-piccing, virtual-worlding, Corridor Crew's product placement)
2. persuasion: [as a rhetorical force] (from) information-heavy selling --to--> dramatic persuasion
3. entertainment: communication through entertainment =/= information, persuasion
•(from) staging products in films --to--> embedding of brands so deeply into the fabric of the film's narrative as object-actors that propel the plot
(Corridor Crew's unobtrusive embedding of branded goods and services in storytelling, hybrid both staging and embedding)

brand --> creativity of consumers to create artistic output in the form of art (Star Wars world, Marina Abramovic) --advertising--> rhetorical purpose: *entertain* =/= inform (announcement), persuade, *warn*[old original function of advertising]

*to warn = to inform* [<-- 15th century advertising ==> journalism]


ever growing impetus of advertising to reproduce itself in new forms ==> different account of the evolution of new media : advertising creates new media to propagate itself (*two globally pervasive and path-changing forms of media that would not exist without advertising revenue:)
•search engine
•social networking site

(McLuhan's “medium = message” --> that we should look at the structural nature of media rather than what it contains =/=) *message = medium* (in 20th century)--> [*]advertising: species that create media in order to allow it to replicate =/= a thing that we humans create and put in media as an incidental extra to an originary agent of meaning [<-- hylomorphic understanding of advertising]


[in 20th century (task of)] advertising: to render the invisible [qualities, such as: complexity, network, information,,,] into compelling visualities (--into--> public imagination)
•(in organizational discourse) complexity: (--articulate-->) unpredictable, multi-layered, decentered, emergent, globalized (world of Homeland TV series, of apass, of ERG's website: technological + adaptable + multi-layered)
*success <== visualize the complexity of their products* [in the case of ERG: student's knowledge and the institution of university]

(Goldman's landscape of Capital -->) corporate advertising:
•visually depicts the phenomenon of globalization
•affect the cultural imaginary
•shape political sensibilities (with respect to life in high-tech globalism)

amorphous phenomena (that require high-stakes visualization):
•counter-terrorism
•climate change
•


[*]advertising: an institution that organizes meaning, a visual sign system (as powerful as other systems that organize meaning: medicine, law, educatio[...]

[...]pulation
3. lower classes
4. deviant sex
}--channel--> utterances that (indirectly [political discourse of establishment neoliberalism cannot address such things in direct ways]) express fantasies about:
•purity
•gender
•race
•community
•family
•pollution
•class
•disease
•sexual promiscuity (deviancy)
}<--Campbell-- symptoms of a capitalist socio-economic order --> they are found in:
◦explicit rhetoric of anti-establishment politics (the alt-right, anti-immigrant movements)
◦implicit content of the marketing material of globalized and globalizing multinationals



bacteria: symptoms of a capitalist socio-economic order --> repressed fears and fantasies about purity, gender, race, community, pollution, class, sexual promiscuity <-- leveraged by antibacterial brands

from (psychoanalytical concept of) symptom --to--> sinthome
> [*]symptom: repressed extrinsic ideology that must be revealed =/= [*]sinthome: a fantasy that does not dissolve when brought to light <== it structures reality intrinsically

a *psychoanalytically informed critical marketing* --> *consumer is made to trace their symptoms* (<-- the perverse effects of emancipatory revelatory critical analysis)

--Campbell--> sinthome presents a tool for analysing *fantasies that focus on the form of their expression, rather than their content*
•in the case of (fantasy takes the form of) bacteria --reveal--> (a confluence between) *the politics of community & the physiology of (auto)immunity* [--> clean and dirty]


dilemma of modern subject : how to live with the unsettling truths given to us by new sciences
•my mother about fake honey
•bacteriology ==> everything (including our very selves) is terrifyingly coated in bacteria

a moment of marketing in Joyce's Ulysses character Bloom -->
•overwhelmed by the teeming bacteria <--> ingesting a different set of cultured bacteria: wine, cheese, bread
•the city and its germs envelop and simultaneously individuate him --> ****his subjectivity can only be expressed in terms of the dialectic of alienation and belonging that is at the foundation of our social world****


***living in modernity = being in constant contact with the mass of beings***
<== uncontrollable overwhelming disintegrative forces of otherness (the problem of living in a community in modern metropolis)
<-- *multiplicity of strange strangers through whom the healthy subject finds his or her sense of self*

(@Femke, analysing political arrangments of X) *market society* =/= looking at the way that we come (and invited to come) into contact with X (in Campbell's case: bacteria)


[*]sinthome: why X (symptoms) appear to us as such =/= what X mean
sinth[...]

[...]/= ideology***
•Lacan --> even when patients could articulate their symptoms it didn't seem to dissipate ==> symptom was a constitutive core of their own subjectivity
•Zizek --> ideology: fantasy structuring out social reality itself =/= an illusion masking the real state of things
•Marx, Freud, Zizek --> symptom =/= a thing behind which secret content is hidden
for Marx *the secret is in hte form of commodity itself** (<--but-- commodity as a central symptom of capitalism) --Sina--> in the form of the hair-styles in The Magicians TV series


from symptom (veil) --to--> sinthome (screen)

*sinthome* is not directly analysable --Campbell--> images of bacteria are symptoms of the Real, not the symbiotic order, because the Real unsymbolizable
sinthomes organize the subject (without them the subject would be obliterated, Zizek)

(psychoanalytic paradigm --> emerging research in marketing:)
•sustainability practices’ fetishistic disavowal of reality can serve to exacerbate ecological catastrophe
•the inherently narcissistic nature of the consumer needs others to suffer in order to derive pleasure from (consumer) objects
•reinvestigation of consumer desire as jouissance --> a perverse pleasure in the “mad destruction” of our bodies and minds
}--> examples of critical marketing pursuing emancipatory unveiling procedures
--✕--> sinthome can offer:
1. an *analytic strategy for feeling out* the contours of symptoms
2. directing us to a new *question we may ask of texts of all kinds* --> ***why do they take the form that they do?*** [=/= what ideology is beneath them --> at the level of the latent contents (meaning) of a symptom] --bacteria-->
◦why do fantasies about community, sex, death, deviance take the form of the bacteria?
◦what is it about bacteria that is so compelling that it provides a structure for this array of phenomena? (<-- we can ask that at art/artists use of biology)

***the problem of bacteria for humans = the problem of living with others***

bacteria --think--> the problem of surviving in large, alienating, cross-infecting, co-dependent populations --> *metonymy between immunity & community*
•مجازمرسل metonymy =/= structural similarity تشابه
==reveal==> disciplines of *biology* and that of *political organization* are closely related [--> to understand fundamental concepts such as individuality and agency we need to frame the immune system not as a biological but a politico-psychic-physical phenomena]


*munus: public service, duty
{munus = onus + officium, obligation + office --> root of communitas}
co-munus: to be part of a community = to be a giver and receiver of the munus, which has a kind of coercive connective power
-anyone outside this gifting cycle is described as “immune” (@apass)[...]