[...]ity?, standard-testing--which sectors of existence it is traversing?, pre-technological traces of cognitive normalization, the very little difference between specification and “the real thing,” THE origin of the demand for rigorous specification, migration of questions out of the areas of instrumental fitness, human relation to the surrounding world, impoverished zoologies--under techno-epistemo-anthropocentric values, squeezing prehistoric modes of weakening subjectival normativity--a field that today gets heavily technologized,

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

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

who/what are you pregnant with?

(that is what you are proposing)

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


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

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

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


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


what animates us rather than what civilizes us



(to Shabnam:) to ‘mourn with’ rather than ‘mourn about’
(-abo[...]

[...][the House TV series, the issue of the protagonist is] the distinguish between the figure of the expert and the figure of the diplomat.
*expert: ones whose practice is not threatend by the issue under discussion --> knowledge = relevance
*diplomat: ones who provide a voice for those whose practice, mode of existence, (and what is offen called) identity are threatened by a decision. to cause the experts second thoughts. --> knowledge ~= decision
[this is core in storytelling] [then, i am political. i used to use the word embassador, but it means also ‘diplomat.’ stories that can hold another story hanging. Sina's shy embassador ~=? ] (but what about the weak ones, the idiot, the one's who ‘rather not’ contribute to the political project?)
-diplomats are situated*
[for *Lili this is also a delima, she is torn apart between her expert self and diplomat who crafts relevance
diplomat--the relevance of feelings --> what is the knowledge in the kiss? (the kiss that she rendered as ‘irrelevant’)] [for me kiss is essentialy important. “it (everything) started with a kiss."]

universal knowledge =/= relevant knowledge


‘trust’ is one of many names for love
“you can never be indifferent to the trust you inspire” (Stengers)

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

#workshop: “the magic of the right word”
(against Sherlock Holmes)
(12-step recovery program for people suffering from) addiction to the truth

(to energize the connections to the things that animate us.)

1. gathering, basckets of concepts, objects, things, words, etc.
2. excersises, physical to-dos (cleaning, cooking, sport, sawing, etc.) while telling (this is about removing the codes of acting and representation process that interupt the telling)
3. everyday mundane talks, no stage. ‘you’ in it. (is it a one-to-one mentoring?)
4. convert into language the objects from the basket, write them down. since we are going to work with sign-language
5. make the connections (probably together)
6. special activities during the workshop? (cooking, drinking, etc.)
7. ending of the workshop. what would be the closure? what do we build? how do we evaluate?


[what are you summoned by? write about the person you see in the light of reverie? how to survive humanism?]

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

#workshop, fables
fable seen as a site where one formulates concepts and narratives that reorient one within one's own research practices
-(how can we) participate in shaping our objects of knowledge (--> relational empiricism)
-learn through participating in different (though not fixed nor mutually exclusive) *microworlds* [microworld: a space where protocols and equipments are standardized to facilitate the emergence and stabilization of new objects. (Kenney)]
-“banal and ordinary s[...]

[...] (against Sherlock Holmes)
(12-step recovery program for people suffering from) addiction to the truth

(to energize the connections to the things that animate us.)

1. gathering, basckets of concepts, objects, things, words, etc.
2. excersises, physical to-dos (cleaning, cooking, sport, sawing, etc.) while telling (this is about removing the codes of acting and representation process that interupt the telling)
3. everyday mundane talks, no stage. ‘you’ in it. (is it a one-to-one mentoring?)
4. convert into language the objects from the basket, write them down. since we are going to work with sign-language
5. make the connections (probably together)
6. special activities during the workshop? (cooking, drinking, etc.)
7. ending of the workshop. what would be the closure? what do we build? how do we evaluate?


[what are you summoned by? write about the person you see in the light of reverie? how to survive humanism?]

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

#workshop, fables
fable seen as a site where one formulates concepts and narratives that reorient one within one's own research practices
-(how can we) participate in shaping our objects of knowledge (--> relational empiricism)
-learn through participating in different (though not fixed nor mutually exclusive) *microworlds* [microworld: a space where protocols and equipments are standardized to facilitate the emergence and stabilization of new objects. (Kenney)]
-“banal and ordinary sites of getting on in collective life” (Verran)
-bring your ‘found objects’ (objects, categories, stories, concepts, insights, writing under influence, etc.) and put them in ‘telling’ (telling stories about the lives of your found objects =/= insisting on the solidity of our found objects----[solidity = stability + authority] and in telling practices => (re)materializing your empirical objects =/= generating reliably-managed microworld)
-found objects are objects with which we inhabit worlds (or microworlds of our practices)
-(not claiming to occupy an) ontological no-man's-land outside of the microworlds --> my frame is no more free of metaphysics than any other
-towards an ongoing untidy recursive theory --> keeping our objects, concepts, and insights in a state of generative transformation
-which “affective economies” animate our own bodies as artist and as people?
-what feelings inform our works?

staying with linguistic differences (in each of our stories or praxiography) is a way of investigating the ontological commitments embedded in language.
ontological --> worlding --> how language participates in shaping our lived worlds in some ways and not others.*** “it is not common for speakers of a language to examine what type of material objects their language commits them to.” (Verran)

solidity of found objects, in[...]

[...] /> 5. make the connections (probably together)
6. special activities during the workshop? (cooking, drinking, etc.)
7. ending of the workshop. what would be the closure? what do we build? how do we evaluate?


[what are you summoned by? write about the person you see in the light of reverie? how to survive humanism?]

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

#workshop, fables
fable seen as a site where one formulates concepts and narratives that reorient one within one's own research practices
-(how can we) participate in shaping our objects of knowledge (--> relational empiricism)
-learn through participating in different (though not fixed nor mutually exclusive) *microworlds* [microworld: a space where protocols and equipments are standardized to facilitate the emergence and stabilization of new objects. (Kenney)]
-“banal and ordinary sites of getting on in collective life” (Verran)
-bring your ‘found objects’ (objects, categories, stories, concepts, insights, writing under influence, etc.) and put them in ‘telling’ (telling stories about the lives of your found objects =/= insisting on the solidity of our found objects----[solidity = stability + authority] and in telling practices => (re)materializing your empirical objects =/= generating reliably-managed microworld)
-found objects are objects with which we inhabit worlds (or microworlds of our practices)
-(not claiming to occupy an) ontological no-man's-land outside of the microworlds --> my frame is no more free of metaphysics than any other
-towards an ongoing untidy recursive theory --> keeping our objects, concepts, and insights in a state of generative transformation
-which “affective economies” animate our own bodies as artist and as people?
-what feelings inform our works?

staying with linguistic differences (in each of our stories or praxiography) is a way of investigating the ontological commitments embedded in language.
ontological --> worlding --> how language participates in shaping our lived worlds in some ways and not others.*** “it is not common for speakers of a language to examine what type of material objects their language commits them to.” (Verran)

solidity of found objects, in my case, the graphs and images i am making about ajayeb --> the graphs now reiterate for me as rituals in my research microworld.
with these graphs i am trying different ways of arranging space, time and matter when speaking a *sentence*. ...each language figures space, time, and matter into different kinds of objects. in my writing tools with ajayeb, what type of material objects my language, or Hemedani or Qazwini's language, commits us to? my graphs are “spatiotemporal particulars” and “sortal particulars”. trying to talk about ontological assumptions embedded in the English (and any other) language. the diagrams are *rigs*. i am using rigging instead o[...]

[...]e live with, not finding of matters of fact
◦asking about particularizations (تخصیص) and generalizations (تعمیم)

**literature begins, Blanchot writes, “at the moment when literature becomes a question”** (this is completely different than asking or question-marking in literature) [...] this question “is posed to language by language that has become literature” (the question that the meaning of the text asks is the question asked by literature; [of course at the moment of reading]) [then what is a text before becoming a question? complaining? revolution?]--%(negation wishes to realize itself.)

--> Rorty's critique of Descartes's way of asking questions

we have to be careful with our practice of questioning, because we often end up privileging a group of people by attributing it to “higher” levels cognition and of being “critically” in the world (=/= animal, nonpeople, other people with other ways of being in/with the apperceptive world that don't use the technology of questioning, as it is crafted historically and naturalized in the west for the univerasal method of ‘knowing more’)

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

#workshop, reading group
•reading as passionate betrayal. (hunting for precious empirical details, refigurative, reparative, poaching, reading can be a betrayal of textual authority and an act of survival)
•addressing /present* differences, not already pre-figured differences
•(condition of friendship, staying close to the text) staying close as a reader, as someone who could hold the text of the Other, receiving it in the withdrawal / Entzug  (drug rehabilitation)
•i am in no position of ‘understanding’ or being clear about the text
•(i understand now that) it is not up to me to tell you how to read
•what makes you write or scratch a text?
(aaaakh... our alphabetico-logical cultures...!)
•if everything is not fundamentally unreadable (snafu) we wouldn't be reading
•it is about to situate the place of a (un)learning
•throwing access to each other (not only in terms of transferential intensity #sss)
•which appetites and tastes are required to fulfill the *ethics and erotics of curiosity* (that I am cultivating and depending on)? flourishing (of my ajayeb) depends on a reading that is more like “mutual partial digestion” (Katie King, Haraway) [=/= “eating well"] the text
•“every time i read X, something new shows up”

my practice of ‘rhetorical reading’ (=/= ‘close reading’; or more like close reading and letting go. “close” is itself a metaphor, a rhetoric of reading;) doesn't work with the idea that there is something ‘in’ the text per se (coded or encoded meaning or some sort of knowledge made and installed by an author), or that the writer wants to say something to the reader, or that the text is symptomatic with meaning and that its intentions needs to [...]

[...]
(Keenan suggests) “deconstruction” is not offered here as an antiauthoritarian discourse, an attack on grounds, but as an attempt to think about this removal as the condition of any (political) action }~= democracy


(according to fables) responsibility begins in the bad example (--> the concept of conflict ~=> the ethics and politics of responsibility)

the classical subject --(the passage through the bad example)--> installed in its stance of responsibility and the safety of identity

“What is at stake in the fable is, more than anything else, the interpretation and practice of responsibility-our exposure to calls, others, and the names with which we are constituted and which put us in question.” (Keenan)

...practical effectivity of literature


•(for Annabel Patterson:) fable accomplishes a speculative Aufhebung : “[...]the role of metaphor is to mediate between human consciousness and human survival, [and here] the mind recognizes rock bottom, the irreducibly material, by rejoining the animals, one of whom is the human body”
•(for Louis Marin:) fable: uncertain model of praxis
•(for Hegel: Aesop was a “misshapen humpbacked slave” and his) fable = witty, witzig =/= spirit, depth, insight, vision, poetry, philosophy
•(for Lacoue-Labarthe:) fable: a name for the mutual implication and asymmetrical interference of literature with philosophy --> the suspension of the self-evidence of the categories “literature” and “philosophy” in order to use each to put the identity of the other into question. [to think the world as fable. Is it possible?]
•(for Keenan:) fable superimposes the relation of an address to the other in its singularity and in its anonymity (responsibility for the other) onto the traditional predicament of an articulation between the order of knowledge or cognition and that of action, ethico-political or otherwise --> *responsibility in Western philosophical tradition: an address to an other*


...the rhetorical event of a comparison

#[the theater of example]

the threat of example's excess

fables of responsibility ==securing==> *the morality of the subject who means* (who can they finally be submitted to the logic of an *evaluative destination*)

(Derrida's) mode of enunciation and the literary vehicle entrusted with its exemplification :
*[...]it is sufficient to introduce, into the fold of speech acts, a few wolves of the type (“undecidability” or “unconscious”) for the shepherd to lose track of his sheep: one is no longer certain where to find the identity of the “speaker” or the “hearer,” ... where to find the identity of an intention.*
--?--> wolf in sheep's clothing [--> also the problem/fantasy of the “integration” project (as the space of ethics and politics)~~>(“Appearances are deceptive” ==> exclusion of the p[...]

[...] of example]

the threat of example's excess

fables of responsibility ==securing==> *the morality of the subject who means* (who can they finally be submitted to the logic of an *evaluative destination*)

(Derrida's) mode of enunciation and the literary vehicle entrusted with its exemplification :
*[...]it is sufficient to introduce, into the fold of speech acts, a few wolves of the type (“undecidability” or “unconscious”) for the shepherd to lose track of his sheep: one is no longer certain where to find the identity of the “speaker” or the “hearer,” ... where to find the identity of an intention.*
--?--> wolf in sheep's clothing [--> also the problem/fantasy of the “integration” project (as the space of ethics and politics)~~>(“Appearances are deceptive” ==> exclusion of the parasite + identification of subjects as the task of responsibility); -what would mean for the German shepherd to lose track of his sheeps? (to go from) the fable of *the oriented sheepfold* --to--> the fable of *losing count*]
-the vexed relation between sheep and wolf, slave and master


(my work is all about: can we please look at) some *other* “interior of the system”
(system never has only one interior [=/= conspiracy: system's singular interiority])


•literature's (ir)responsibility to philosophy
•art's (ir)responsibility to journalism


Xanthus the philosopher decides to buy a slave, goes with his students to the slave market, and encounters the disfigured Phrygian Aesop (recently granted the power of speech after assisting a priestess of Isis and hence become too difficult for his previous master to handle). Their first exchange is exemplary, as the philosopher interrogates the slave in order to determine whether “he knows anything,” receives equivocal replies, and finishes by asking, “Do you want me to buy you?”
(Life of Aesop)


thinking fable as language : ‘Fabula’ (narration or account), derived as it is from the Latin root ‘fari’ (to speak) and linked to the Greek ‘phanai’ (to speak or to say), finally implies nothing other than language as such

Mythos and logos, the one is not more true (or more false, deceptive, fictive, etc.) than the other


(to open to the) alterity of an ungoverned figuration


hero: the adventure of an identification that can only occur in the comparison that a fable demands

Horace's dictum: “with a change of names, the fable is told about you” (a trans-subjective movement, a tropological system =/= metaphor or metonymy, )


(for Nietzsche) responsibility: the ability to make and keep one's promises = being (able to be) held accountable (not simply by another but) already in advance by and for oneself : to answer to oneself in the place of the other
•Nietzsche's fable[...]

[...]stop and resist “self-exploitation”? --> instead of thinking about transindividualism and commons, etc.

“An artwork executed from fatigue ‘exposes’ its intensity.” (Peran)
A “tired” artwork

(Marti Peran)
a minority that wishes to be a majority
the semiotic body disciplined to daily exercise and beautification
fatigue, unlike melancholy's passivity, implies performativity.
a way of being ill


(capital gains concentrated in the) self-production of identity
subject occupied full time in itself
the logic of “do it yourself”
obliged to make countless small decisions in all areas
subject mixed up with the incessant movement of its own alienation
*hyperactive life --> poverty of experience*
the banality of “i Like”
(maybe interesting for Laura:) *fatigue* is the instant of stopping and pausing [of exercise and beautification] (after which a diversity might be possible)
[*]fatigue: capable tiredness --> politicizes discomfort
[#we are in the domain of passivity, disappearance and inaction]
Peran suggests a position of fatigue where (some time ago) was occupied by melancholy
“is this not a mere “don't like” that re-enters the spiral of our mobilization?”
“we are left with just the option of making an index, a collection of trails and marks [...]”
sunday: “empty time that forces us to fill it through apparently free decisions that, if they are resolved properly, please us and re-constitute us” (Peran)
*freedom of action for self-realization* --> unstoppable egocentric machine
space of perpetual connection (@ERG's website)
(pseudo) communicative action by way of technological devices --> camouflaged alienation
“The promise of self-realization and the demand for visibility organize the mobilization of desire, turning it into work.”



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



i want to *give connections*

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

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



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



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

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

#on Situated Knowledges
-approach the text b[...]

[...]or Seba ‘amity’ [ravabet-e hasane روابط حسنه] at stake? )
Seba's epistemological object(?): ‘evidence’ (=/?=>! cordial dispositions)

(complexity is the name of our game. Haraway)

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

my current work and interest involves the investigation of individualized subject formation (tajarode nafs تجرد نفس ?); interrogating the production of language; and tracing the divisible distinguishing limits between categories of human, animal, and monstrous.
#subjects of interest: The translator, language, the sublime, animals/animality, technicity/mechanicity, the divine/sacred,

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

the myth of Poros, Penia, and Eros for Aela:
(in Plato's Symposium;) Penia, the “child of poverty,” decides to forcefully impregnate herself with the inebriated Poros, “the personification of plenty,” who is always in opposition with aporia, (~ snafu before aporia,) “puzzlement, which breaks with the logic of identity,” and thus defining aporia. The result of this union is Eros...
poverty + {plenitude × aporia} ==> eros : {agency of passivity + resourcefulness}
1-metaphysical inquiry begins from ‘aporia’
2-rationalist inquiry begins from ‘a priori’
3-empiricist inquiry begins from ‘tabula rasa’ (hakim's beginning)
/
/
4-mystical inquiry begins from ‘affective a posteriori’ (effect, wonder, heyrat, tahayor)


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

sci-fi is imagining the elsewhere inside mortality. (==> feminism stakes in SF)

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

*make a series of studio photos with white clear backs, two different genders iranians having a physical/verbal fight or some sort of aggressive encounter

*the idea is to write a script for a movie or short series, combining the historical 14th century Iran with the 14th century imaginal beast fables from the ajayeb. the camera creats a non-exotic continuation between the two

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

[with Kenney]

-how to let emerge a seriousness as collective matters of care?
-how to stimulate pragmatic questions about how to craft relevant knowledge?

speculation is all about pragmatism


capitalist speculation : “one must speculate to accumulate” =/= relating & narrating

scientific speculation & venture capital ==> big epistemic/financial pay-offs or costly dead ends [=/= (Stengers's notion of speculative) *being at risk with ones claims* =/= received notions of authority or rationality]

(an abstract challenge:) to bring specificity and imaginative traction

*speculation is a more feral practice
(wild) speculation [always improper] =/= proper science : rational production of univerasal knowledge
-speculation is not about what there is but what there might be
-speculation is on [...]

[...]y]

-how to let emerge a seriousness as collective matters of care?
-how to stimulate pragmatic questions about how to craft relevant knowledge?

speculation is all about pragmatism


capitalist speculation : “one must speculate to accumulate” =/= relating & narrating

scientific speculation & venture capital ==> big epistemic/financial pay-offs or costly dead ends [=/= (Stengers's notion of speculative) *being at risk with ones claims* =/= received notions of authority or rationality]

(an abstract challenge:) to bring specificity and imaginative traction

*speculation is a more feral practice
(wild) speculation [always improper] =/= proper science : rational production of univerasal knowledge
-speculation is not about what there is but what there might be
-speculation is on the side of the possible =/= probable (--> Stengers)

speculative operations (quietly) insist that *another world is here* (--> my ajayeb) =/= the smooth operation of business-as-usual (,, interrupting it)

for my ajayeb, how can i carve out a space to nurture my idea? --> nest-building --position/place--> digging out a bit of earth

*speculative empiricism : scientific + narrative
working with ajayeb so that it might stimulate a specualtive empiricism for composing more livable worlds --> ajayeb's storied biospheres

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

the notion of ‘magic’ in popular TV series, such as ‘Harry Potter’ franchise and ‘The Magicians’ among many others, and instrumentalization. magic as information technology that is completely instrumentalized. the capitalist ideology of ‘tool’ and ‘usefulness’ are insinuated heavily in the hipster figures of ‘The Magicians’ in the way that they interupt history and knowledge-burdened living. “stop the history lessen! tell me how do we kill the beast with it?” (the stupidity of the hipster hero moving through the matrix of merely teleological phenomena, stripping pleasure off thinking...)
(utopian?)

what a magic spell is good for if it is not a leverage?

[title]
The Magicians and The Absolute Freedom and Terror

(‘The Magicians’:) magic: instrumentalizing the logos
knowledge is literal --> magic spells are literal {the result of magic spell is predetermined}. in this case, the magic is both an instrument of power and renunciation of knowledge
(Heideggerian) techne of the Western project is an instrumentality that takes over, arrests, or enframes what it desires to manipulate or contain. (Christian Hubert's notes)
=/= poiesis, a bringing-forth (in Heidegger: blooming of the blossom) (also Greek)

“[(for the techno-monster-magicians) everything is] code to be cracked”

a kind of fantasies that Don Ihde calls techno-fantasy, whi[...]

[...]X--> future --> manufacturing tools capable of intervention (=/=? disruption; the Sun Ra, character in the movie The Place is The Space, disrupts when he enters the youth club.)

@Ale --her--> predatory features/futures : (a space for researching[?] dimensions of) anticipatory designs, projects of emulation, manipulation, parasitism, interpellation into a bright corporate tomorrow <== faces smiling at screens (-->? a bitter joke)
-in her criticism of “eurocentrism” how are afrofuturism and arabfuturism located? (curatorial) let's invite them as her allies in Hansaring Studio.

countermemorial mediated practices

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

خودشیفتگی khodshiftegi:
[narcissistic personality disorder]
(exaggerated feeling of) self-importance, self-absorbed, self-perception of being unique, situated within self-presentation, sense of entitlement حق به جانب and self-centeredness schema
adult neurotic's sense of omnipotence --> relic of the old megalomania of infancy (~ all paranoic disorders) (~-> hurt with denial)

(Freud's) primal state: {id ~= ego ~= external world}--(not differentiated)
one could not lay hold of oneself as other ==> narcissism expires
(Lacan's) ego = another }==> the specular ego (in the mirror stage) =/= narcissistic
(‘=/=’ : erotic attraction or aggressive tension)

Nietzsche: the utterance “I am ugly” created “the beautiful”
[does this mean: “I am beautiful” created “the ugly” (in the other and world)?]


sublimation is passion transformed
or, object displacement, transformation of instincts,
a desuxualization (from primary to secondary narcissism) (--> what is Aela's “thirst for knowledge”?)~~--> unfolding into (differentiated elements of a oneness of) instinctual-spiritual experience. (Aela's) ‘oneness’ [an original unity + one hidden and defended against] stays alive as connection? --> the question of desire for Aela is about this hidden linkage.
[transitional objects, play, modifications of the pleasure principle, genital function,]
,
(noted by Christian Hubert: for Loewald:) *eroticism 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 r[...]

[...]ountermemorial mediated practices

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

خودشیفتگی khodshiftegi:
[narcissistic personality disorder]
(exaggerated feeling of) self-importance, self-absorbed, self-perception of being unique, situated within self-presentation, sense of entitlement حق به جانب and self-centeredness schema
adult neurotic's sense of omnipotence --> relic of the old megalomania of infancy (~ all paranoic disorders) (~-> hurt with denial)

(Freud's) primal state: {id ~= ego ~= external world}--(not differentiated)
one could not lay hold of oneself as other ==> narcissism expires
(Lacan's) ego = another }==> the specular ego (in the mirror stage) =/= narcissistic
(‘=/=’ : erotic attraction or aggressive tension)

Nietzsche: the utterance “I am ugly” created “the beautiful”
[does this mean: “I am beautiful” created “the ugly” (in the other and world)?]


sublimation is passion transformed
or, object displacement, transformation of instincts,
a desuxualization (from primary to secondary narcissism) (--> what is Aela's “thirst for knowledge”?)~~--> unfolding into (differentiated elements of a oneness of) instinctual-spiritual experience. (Aela's) ‘oneness’ [an original unity + one hidden and defended against] stays alive as connection? --> the question of desire for Aela is about this hidden linkage.
[transitional objects, play, modifications of the pleasure principle, genital function,]
,
(noted by Christian Hubert: for Loewald:) *eroticism 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)do)
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[...]

[...]r />
* landscape ==>? optic -->? way of disembodied seeing
[artificial perspective {--> (objects are in) proportional variations in a seamless continuum}, gaze of the spectator, exterior space, homogeneous, infinite, systematic,] --> (this is all) *symbolic form*
[(tele/micro)scope <==] landscape <== perspective <-- arbitrary point of the observer


(Descola:) such “objectification of the subjective” ==>
(1) a distance between man and the world
(2) systematizes and stabilizes the external universe



***factuality is not intrinsic, it is rhetoric (that we live with)

history of the idea of nature

‘ajayeb's architects of a naturalistic cosmology who establish hierarchies and discontinuities among them =/= cosmogenesis of modernity's subjectivity's illusions of continuity
[Descola's “configurations of continuity"]
(ajayeb creates) hierarchical order according to the levels of the exchange of information that is reputed to be possible.
-which parties are set on the same level of reality (in ajayeb)?

(what are the human and nonhuman) proliferation of forms in ajayeb (?)
who are the “mothers of games” there? snake, Div, etc. (spirits that protect the game)

technical know-how to create intersubjective ambience/ambivalence --> regulated relations between one person and another }--these are--> cultivated plots
how can i, starting with apass, learn to create theaters of a subtle sociability (in which beings with different forms of language and physical aspect are ontologically indistinguishable)?

the category of “persons”: variations in the modes of communication that are made possible by an apprehension of perceived qualities that are unequally distributed

whose dialects are mutually intelligible?

human narcissism : that if a being possess a soul is only then capable of recognizing humans
---then let's give everyone souls!

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

(Massumi > Deleuze's) critique ~= modulation --> actively modulated from within the situation, immanent to it {
-augmenting* (taking a certain tendency to the limit)
-diverting* (deflecting it into a different tendency)
-transmutational* (interacting with other tendencies in a way that invents a whole new direction as a kind of surplus value of interaction)
-or, it can lead to a clash that stops the process

asking people “to be true to what they represent” ==> having them “encapsulated in already arrived-at opinion and judgment” ==> blockage

war of “disqualification” ~ Stengersian non-event
being (represented and) legitimated in proxy war

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

@Zoumana; “decadent gardener” that connot keep distinction between kin and pest, nature and culture
what is a[...]

[...]throwing it out *** (=/= capitalist logic of progress, creativity in the sense that ‘something’ where before was ‘nothing’) ---> a different way of building quality (into practices and objects)

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

Bakhtin's dialogic, to become a skilled listener : listening = response (=/= simply answering) --> (when we speak) we give other people talismans that are not (perfectly) clear to us----we penetrate and unpack what someone doesn't have the words clearly and response to what they intend --✕--> “common understanding,” “make something work,”

cooperation is about getting deeper into something

conditions that more skills are required (and not the opposite)

in modernity everything seams to need to be verbalized. what happens to the unverbalized, the unprogrammatic? --> can you have an implicit right which can't be verbalized? maybe no, maybe this is the limit of the social...

purposiveness: when you hear somebody go “i am going to put clearly what we all want...” you have submitted to that person (almost erotic) --> “they really know who they are” ==> you become a spectator to their definiteness

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

who the fuck = theology
how the fuck = empiricism
what the fuck = ontology
how the what the fuck = epistemology
why what the fuck = metaphysics
why the fuck = ethics
why give a fuck = teleology
the fuck itself = phenomenology
fucked up = pathology
fuck all = nihilism

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

Aela to Sven: “everytime you disappoint me you gain in depth” (5 April 2017)

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

(06.04.2017) %notes after my apass endweek presentation:
•my implicit focus and energy on the body and its organs of gesture that animates us
•loving telling you what i read
•giving you what i don't fully understand =/= gift from above
•(in lecture) to allow language greet the unverbalized

(it is about) organizing my memory
(it is about) that which comes to (my) mind, and “things” coming to minds
(it is about) the things I am told
__[these are perhaps other names of cognition, affect, memory, semiotics, history, inheritance, figuration, interface, thing-relations, huntology,]
__in our shared space where we let eachother in the effect of our languages, I want to practice what comes to mind when I stand in front of you and your work, ask myself ‘what else’ comes to mind? in a sense, my project on ajayeb is that kind of training

also in apass i want “to catch you in your acts”
it is my privilege to recognize you (as...)

asking:
1- what do I know?
2- what am I told?
3- (how getting good at to) explain what somebody else said

1- the first question has no clear answer, what i know is not pl[...]

[...]sa on space,) (question of:) producing (your) presence

material-discursive --> semiotic-psychosis --> her Wortsalad

(Bocola > Kohut > Mondrian's bipolar structure:)
creation of universal beauty / aesthetic expression of oneself
(=?=> transcend the framework of artistic production)
exhibitionist pole of the self / idealized pole of the self
the grandiose self / the idealized structures
worldviews / self-images

what is the (diametric, dialectical) internal drama of her thinking and work?
(what are?) Luisa's overarching, idealized conception that lays claim to the validity of her values and standards as applied not only to herself and environment but to the entire universe: (question of structure)
•(pre-babylonian) universal abstractionism --> embodied knowledge
•fluid equilibrium --> movement of Being
[is this a romantic structural attitude?]
-and how is she confronted with cosmos prior to her inscriptions? (question of realism)
-what is (the mystery of) a ‘being through interpretation’ for her? (question of performativity)

[realistic:] to take possession of essential aspects of the external reality (~-> recreate them in the imagination) [--> empirical?]
[structural:] to experience the external reality as parts of an interconnected and comprehensive whole
[idealistic/symbolist:] to connect the (inner) particular to the general
[romantic:] to make (inner) invisible visible

sublimated gratification of instincts, ambitions and ideals, (homogeneous) gestalt and expression of the self, narcissistic equilibrium, test its viability, haptic art,

“invisible reality and the aesthetics of universality” or a mean by which universal is recognized*
timelessness, wholesomeness, indivisibility, aesthetic standards
-pictorial thinking, movement thinking, affectual thinking, {--> all issued by the notion of “pure” and “purity”? tendency toward idealization? utopian?}

movement (the act) =/= mobility (the possibility)

(is Luisa interested in?) the immanent laws and essential unity of all being

...step to complete nonobjectivity
...objects with their expression of plasticity
-what is the symbolic term in her work?
she said: “space is literal.” --> the wholesome is proclaimed in the artistic act itself (and not as metaphor) --> experienced directly =/= imagined


--> احشايى the viscera (ahsha), visceral theory: affect and embodiment, transmissible physical charges, porous bodies,
@Luisa
kP_AfO7Ms4I

how to create a condition in which she can herself later give access to her thinking and making?
1- propose a curatorial gesture of an assembly: Luisa, Mondrian, Zen master, Malevich; with Bocola and Ahmed;
2- to open an investigation of affec[...]

[...]the kind of sociality that joins two categorically separate mode of agencies, is a sociality that constitutes both --> the interaction of humans and machines produced both =/= unilateral action
(my whole point or joke, with the bow and arrow was that the arrow of index finger does not move in one way.)
[=/= another mode that comes to mind is when your intimacy making leads always to yourself, getting laid, literally. that is when your concern becomes only you and someone, sexually interested --> economically, and you don't concern the sociality of your people with each other. #techno-capital singular subjectivity @--> this is super relevant for Sven, maybe: how one becomes interested, invested, and skillful in provoking interesting socialities for friends and peers--and not only for oneself? creating, inciting zones of connectivity]
-[it was not accidental that the rhetoric of drugs came up with Lilia when I suggested the attention to anthropos --> what figures human and otherwise was for her the subject of drug-induced rhetoric of mind-alteration; (this is the anthropos of the Enlightenment Europeans and classical Greece talking:) “in order to get rid of me you must take drugs!” #fable/_ --> being sober(?!), anthropos becoming, human nature, common sense, empiricism and interpretation are at stake here]
-[another thing was the label of “animal” that was passed around as a form of mock, instead of provocations for more conversation, I was stupefied. --how can we go on together and not render each other commitments nonsense?]


“point of view” is an important metaphor


#in my work in apass i am working on descriptive practices [poetics of animal description, histories of nonhuman inscription, etc.] to learn to name latent (and therefore emergent) ontologies, to name ‘what we are doing in new ways,’ which are hard to name. (also refusing not to name the violences of others and yourself. to reckon the nature and scope of the erasures we do in our works.) % why do you think that is important?
#and my shift of attention to peer's works is about that: our domain of practices must make claim on each other <== we inhabit differences together (--> attention and work on:) ‘local category abstractions’ (how do we talk and make each other feel our subjects of interest in apass for example) --> (the cumulative, associated and sensed) routines, gestures, and (inter)surfaces of our everyday life in apass, as a group of researchers, that don't necessarily align ==> worlding comes from these things.
[attunement =/= argument]


the name of the world is “detail”


***translation (essentailly imperfect) is the very condition of signification --> trope is the very condition of language

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

don't be docile bodies or innocent bystander, do what you have to do to constitute your courage
all i am say[...]

[...]multaneity]


(Stewart) “I remember childhood as a collection of arresting images”
that hinge on sensory details and open onto luminous scenes of affect [--> Feherlofia/Fehérlófia 1981, Son of the White Horse film. (we must resist calling this film “psychedelic”)

“[...]family as a viscerality through screen images of”

...sudden, repetitive eruption of images of alcoholism, accidents, violence, cancers

*technologies of family, church, law, and nation* (lay confident claim to affect as a capturable content of known and expected “feelings,” but affect itself--that which surges into view along the jumpy border of the actual and the virtual--is their raw material and their only renewable resource. Stewart)

(a sidestep? what) brings an uncanny, alien presence into the field of vision

*an object insists on being seen* (through the tricks of trauma, through the seductions of compulsive beauty,, , ) ~~--> aesthetic event of the senses [@Hoda]

spectacular graphics of disaster

watching: inhabiting the power of the tuned-in spectator; becoming an active participant in [TV's] logic of image (production and) recognition

--✕--> catharsis of mean-spirited
--✕--> festering (cherkin چرکین) alienation
--*--> vitality of the game itself

the image on the screen <--(game)--> the walking simulacrum of social life

the loop of the citizen as consumer

***Mimesis in a State of Shock*** @Hoda
-the link between shock and a cushioned recluse is direct, seductive, and mimetic

“When affect makes its jump between the visible thing, the idea, and the social sensibility, it can leave in its wake uncanny connections between otherwise disparate states of arrest, like shock and recluse گوشه نشينی” (Stewart)


@Hoda: affect jumps into view as the shock of an unassimilated trauma

cocoon room
holing up in your living room ==> “out there” ==> search for the arresting presence

spectrality and concrete substance

(?when am i) “relaxing” the jumpy move of affect

*Stewart's “jump of affect”
tactile image --(satisfies)--> move of affect --(actualizes)--> something tempting/haunting
-affecting presence at rest
-[in glamour magazines] models frozen in time and space stare back at you in a scene that stages the jump from fantasy to actual body/image and back
-jump from ideal to matter to ideal

-what to wear as the magic of affect itself

copy ~= contact

movies, ads, malls, car phones, daydreams,

modernity's mimetic machine


(“middle class” [or what people thinking as “Iranians"] is not just a “norm” it is a) *womblike space of affect* (where sentimentality and inte[...]

[...]ative, agonistic, antagonist, sadistic, funny, rude, brute, masochistic, direct, sympathetic,


[two (organic?) ways of learning:]
**learing through networked syntax: meaning emerges as network, something new must be interconnected to others, cognition works in the network: a subject matter must be linked to dozen other things in order to be congnized ==> something disconnected from their network is something meaningless موضوع‌ها به صورت ارتباطات ذهنی مرتبط با هم [--?--> mental intelligence: cannot learn something random]
=/=
**learing through syllable, unconnected unit of something new (an arbitrary syllables هجا‌های بی‌معنی) can be cognized without previous links [--?--> linguistic intelligence هوش زبانی, can learn new language easy]

}--> [although i am against and strongly hate arbitrary syllables] perhaps we need both, because sometimes internalizing an alien syllable (via linguistic intelligence) might nest and flower their own random meaning networks, in a way that is not possible in mental intelligence



according to behavioral neuroscience, psychology soon will have been a myth
the move to the “hard” and biologically inspired science about consciousness-related processes {constitutive reductionism: ‘brain activity ==> mental processes'} =? end of psychology (and therefore: end of art? -because both always create *speculative molds*) --> which discipline will install an *understanding the psyche*
economically--> neuroscience will grow while psychology shrinks
[everything will depend on which reductionism you ascribe to them]

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

ideology: wrong questions

[parable of two side of a coin] tolerance = other side of harassment
(--Zizek--> the pseudo concept of) tolerance actually means “don't harassment me”

when you lack concrete politics ==> moralizations


we are no longer interpolated or addressed by power
politics of self-realization --> anti-bureaucratic creativity of artist --> postmodern capitalism: ([pretends to be] no longer hierarchical bureaucratic but) creative interactive autopoetic

(@Leo:) ethics =/= morals
*ethics --> my consistency with myself, fidelity to my own desires (which is transvaluated as external and part of social system)
*moral --> the symmetry of my relation to other humans (which is transvaluated as individual and internal, “don't do to me what you don't want me do to you”)
being immoral out of principle, to act in a certain way as part of a fundamental existential choice.
being immoral (destroying men's lives) while being truly ethical (faithfull to her chosen path)
(Nietzsche, the philosopher of) *immoral ethics* (=/= unethical morality)

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

[*]d[...]

[...]ever easy)]

-Manning's notion of “the problem gives the question to be asked of it” =/= the question problematizes

-focus on “sedimentation” (--> where is the coexistence of contrasts for them?)

“decontextualization”: their technique of concept-making (==> claims of reality, of nunhuman, etc.)
[decontextualization is a very dangerous way of crafting concepts. there are other ways, committed to the contingencies of the historical material world of multispecies. rigor of conceptualization that i am learning from Stewart is about the *quality of an access to part of a world* =/= decontextualization]--so--> i say we need ‘concepts’ and not ‘philosophy’:
*philosophy (as practiced by M&M and Alex): claiming the nature of reality
*concept: a figure you make in order to do a limited situated work

“conceptualization = fortification” استحکامات
(to fortify one's own work with concepts ==> settlement)
/>
Manning's affinity with infinitly, more, and multi --> what is their rigor is doing for them? commits them to the nonhabitual. (resisting to name their habits, depriving them of thier habitual labors) [=/= my work on descriptive practices]

-i want to know about their empirical tools that make translation-work visible (==> decomposition), not their conceptual descriptions [=/= textured description with thick details <== i really think the devil is in the details!! }--> art of noticing things]
-i want to know how Manning is compromised into desiring what she is doing. [compromise: being exposed or made liable to danger, suspicion, or disrepute. --the way she told the story of her practice had a difficult sense of success in it, of being cool and correct at every turn, uncompromised. (<-- why is this a turn-off for me?)]

for aesthetic, political, ethical reasons i want Manning to address in their work:
•the question of apparatus --> worki working within an apparatus of thinking in order to get somewhere in a sustained way. i want them to name their apparatus of literary production. how they engage with the interface, data-set, grammar, and literacy of their reservoir.
•the question of infrastructure --> how they balance the possible and the acceptable, the balance of action, tools, and the built environment
•the question of technology --> how they take apart the tool from its context of involvements and referentialities
•the question of political orientation --> how they have accepted the democratization of knowledge and multiculturalism (the idea of “knowledge for everyone” [--> there is a very thin line between the impulse to democratize and commodify knowledge]; --could multiculturalism be radical capitalism in action?! ...faking diversity to build more diverse companies <-- “lip service”: to just say something but not actually do it)
[--> the hegemony and horror of “different experien[...]

[...]ing cool and correct)
how do you (not, and why not) tell the tale of your adventures and achievements? or, how can we respond to the ‘demand for the mobilization of desire’ in the economy of attention that Manning brought with herself? and how that economy is different from that of apass?



in the spectrum of ‘auto-ism’ (not the pathological term for developmental disorder) ['auto-’: from Greek αὐτo-, “self"] ‘being socially inept, being with oneself,’ we can also locate ‘allism’ ['allo’: from Greek ἄλλος, állos, “other”, “else"] --> allistic: ‘to be skilled at being with the different other (assumed human)’

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

eurocentric =/= european
•i actually love “european.” i learn from it all the time. how does the world looks like from here.
•but eurocentrism is horrible. they assume an origin and displace it to any place/time --> it happens when a philosopher tries to be anti-western but assuming the same origins of thinking for everybody else and not taking the time to become interested in the (non)thinking forms of noneuropeans

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

#workshop on 3D animation all on Nude Descending a Staircase
inspired by minute 16 of “Pink Slime Caesar Shift” (2018)


“there is much more to you that meet the eye.” the motto of transformation in secular capitalism, sang by Jane Fonda and Transformer Optimus Prime

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

researcher's questions
in your obscure (elaborate and awkward) meditations, (?can we ask:) what is sacrificed, what is recooked, canibalized, chewed over, and eventually buried? in which economy of pleasure and pain is this mobilized? which harmful (or hedonistic) sensualism is deployed? which hallucinating enfant is writing? which raw material is being transformed into the gold of humanity?
-the question of will: which world is murdered and repopulated by the act of (your) will alone?

a research method of starting a conversation, for apass
*take me to you reader* --> bring me to the subject who you think is reading you, receiving your work in some sort,

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

few things (that i hate hysterically) that i think i urgently need (and any artist) to have a very good grasp of (within modern capital economy):
•marketing (--> integrated storytelling)
•fashion (--> manipulative regimes of time and place)
•journalism (explanatory technologies of news and opinion, vox, kurzgesagt, corporate media, immersive journalism, forensic aesthetics)
•politics (=/= political science): achieving and exercising positions of governance that have control over communities
•hollywood/comics (*corporate-produced fiction* --> business-decisions connecting cross-overs; ideas of: customer and merchandise)
[...]

[...]ld as much as a frame for viewing it

industry working also on affect, push confidently ahead, operationalizing their own idiosyncratic theories of affect toward the manufacturing of new regimes of technological knowledge on how bodies feel (Apple buying Emotient, SoftBank's emotional robot, collective AI cloud)

spread of populist anti-establishment sentiments
feelings increasingly become the primary field for strategizing, measuring, and experiencing politics with global precarity
•anger on the right
•fear on the left
•anxiety at large

affect: nonconscious intensities variously activating and deactivating bodies
emotion: those feelings that fix into place through a variety of discursive practices

methods of mining feeling
projects of knowing become projects of power : narratives seeking to close the affect-emotion gap

The Flash TV series character's motivation are more experienced as a story, for example, a goal, a personal pep talk, a collective call to arms--and not as momentum and force --> affect's sheer momentum

...effect as affect's long history breaking on a shore

countervailing forces of sense and story

to inspire a sense of critical urgency

affect ==> theory is of the world it so describes

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

contemporary tendencies in participatory art:
•**ongoing struggle to find artistic equivalents for political positions**
•tensions between quality and equality, singular and collective authorship
•sub-themes of education and therapy

***invention of a popular mass audience (in Italian Futurist serate 1910 onwards)

the gaps between: theory, practice, cultural policy, audience reception

anarchic and eroticised happening-art

“participation = collectivism =/= capitalism”

@Eszter: (?the “ideological” in) participation in a welfare state social democracy

the ‘project’ as a privileged vehicle of utopian experimentation at a time when a leftist project seemed to have vanished from the political imaginary (in Europe)

*changing identity of the audience across the 20th century* (Bishop & Crary on this topic)

*artistic models of democracy* --tenuous?--> actual forms of democracy

to refute the commodity-object in favour of an elusive experience

(Bishop:) today's participatory art is often at pains to emphasise process over a definitive image, concept or object. It tends to value what is invisible: a group dynamic, a social situation, a change of energy, a raised consciousness.

hit-and-miss field trips

the more one becomes involved, the harder it is to be objective – especially when a central component of [...]

[...]comment on and engage
*numerous ways in which cultural forms (in this case contemporary art) are simultaneously entangled in a number of spheres of meaning, value and mediation* ==> activate ongoing dialogue
[*]capitalist marketplace:
•people in both established and emerging ‘global’ economies forced to fulfill their everyday needs
•‘the market’ is naturalised and reified within social relations in ways we don't necessarily always recognise or acknowledge --> suffused and sublimated within creative production, our lexicon and gestures
(19th century anthropology's) the idea of [*]alterity: understanding how ‘other,’ ‘primitive’ societies operated ‘outside’ of modernity --assumption--> ‘small scale’ societies exchange (barter, gift exchange, and so on) would always, with evolution, give way to more ‘sophisticated’ means of trade
•Malinowski (study of the Kula ring) --> form of producing and reifying power relations
•Mauss (gift economies) --> gifts as stand alone systems + other kinds of economic structures
•Strathern (Melanesian gift exchange) --> how personhood is a malleable concept that is both implicated in, and created by, conceptions of individuality (tripartite views of people as constituted of a mind, body and spirit), or dividuality (persons as constituted from multiple essences and social relations, including the giving and receiving of gifts) + how gender is both studied and understood in the acts leading up to the performance of gift exchange
•Appadurai () --> ‘things’ have ‘social lives'that can be studied in relation to the different spheres of use
•
}--> (our understanding of) the human capacity for unlimited modes of developing creative forms of exchange and economic systems

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

https://mapmagazine.co.uk/notes-contemporary-art-and-anthropology

operations of statecraft:
•queuing in social security offices
•filling in tax forms
•circulation and arrival of letters demanding council tax payments
•census taking
-
}--> social organization that seems so habitual (mundane and ordinary) ==> unreflexively experienced

state's ordinariness --> irresistible enchantment --> overwhelming power ~~> supernatural trance-like experiences state seem to engender in populations =/= state as a rational entity

*capitalist market is a faith-based system* <== concealed practices of divination and the ‘conjuring’ of value and capital from what in many cases are immaterial voids

unmasking of its practices (~= faith + skepticism) ==> state power

mutant forms of technological self-subjugation

(Weber's) magic: coercive proceduralism --> managerial practices that characterise biopolitics

[*]census taking: pre-determined categories (like race, nationality, gender and political persuasion) are set out [...]

[...]stentialism is irrelevant


if in art we have affinities with unknowing and we are comfortable with misunderstanding and partial comprehensions --then--> let's use that to direct our readerly activities to texts that are difficult and different to us --> this is why I don't accept it when artists in research environment withdraw from reading certain positions by saying “this text is too academic.”



what is the state of art after Goya?



sites where political meaning is produced (the impulse to resist or correct inequality, injustice, lack, damage, tension, etc.) =/= attachment site (languages charged with power, inequality)
(i am interested in women) not because of gender [= identity politics, political correctness], but because of their practice and the question they pursue
-the horrific and dangerous idea that I hear under “I am now reading only women authors”


two visualized increases in the industry, science, and popular culture:
1. “how troubled we are” --> world simulation (catastrophic planet)
2. “how amazing we are” --> brain simulation (networks)


world is fubar ==> is interesting and is work to be done =/= paranoia conspiracy

something I learnt from my KHM study --> that technologies are ambiguous =/= Black Mirror TV series


hollywood =? hyperrealism
(art --?--> idealism)

poor cognition <--> boring environment


another sign of illiteracy:
•popping up of dialects or specialized languages (you walk to the next village and there they speak an almost different language than here)


romantic relationship:
dopamine --> love + hot sex [--> pleasure-related cognition]
anterior cingulate cortex --> empathy + comfort [--> impulse control]



برون افکن بنه زین‌دار نه در مگر کایمن شوی زین مار نه سر
revisit sanaat tashbih simile
tashbih not as alude but as description (literal)
مار نه سر mar-e noh-sar ~/= world
mar-e noh-sar is not a simile for the world (of the reader) but it describes a particular world that is in the image of mar-e noh-sar

haft modaber هفت مدبر

jealousy as affect --underlying--> Farsi ghazal 

ابومعشر بلخی Abu Ma'shar Balkhi
الهی - فلک نور
اثیری - ۸ فلک آسمانی
هیولانی - جزء زیر قمر

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

***don't read (or make) theory as a means of empowerment*** (a tool to fight or flight oppression)

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

[title]
king real

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

my problem with
•co[...]

[...]lective
•tars ترس fear =/= ezterab اضطراب anxiety
•sharm شرم shame =/= khejalat خجالت shyness



آتش آب خشک را پر میکرد از آتش تر
ab-e khosht = piale
atash-e tar = sharab


tar تر = allude آلوده = sabok سبک


khosro shirin
tarof ghabl az bad o bira goftan

shenidan (niushidan) ~= fahmidan فهمیدن

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

*negative bias = the negative is more ture*
negative bias: negative stimuli elicit a larger brain response than positive ones
(can then negative bias explain racism? <-- we are shaped by negativity)
positive-negative asymmetry
(in trying to) make sense of the world --> focus more on the negative
bad ==> attention
negative news is more likely to be perceived as truthful
ambiguous stimuli rated as threatening --> survive


(gestalt) law of closure: we perceive pieces of objects as part of a whole when grouped together



to produce counter-knowledge [~= to contest a problem] =/= (we need more) to *seduce our evacuation from the terms that establish the problem*
(Shapiro)



•stressor ==> emotion (short, intense)
•emotion + meaning (cognitively processed repeatedly) = feeling (lasting, less intense, combined)
•emotions هیجانی + feelings احساسی = [*]affect ~= mood



(in apass)
•concept: a medium of conversation
•narcissistic research
◦understanding narcissism is the key to understanding mental health --> *(the experience of) being in a cult = being in relation with a narcissist*
•mode of attention that is didactic and forensic
•(in artistic research environments) most of time we don't have questions
we have games of language --> illiteracy
◦exam: pose your questions =/= answer to my questions
answers don't show your level of knowledge, but the questions you have does
•generative nature of melancholia [*melancholia ==> teaching*]
•(artist's) writing with pearls of wisdom =/= referential writing


three problematic loci in artistic research:
•garden
•archive
•map

*is every garden zoological? --?--> training for future (imperialism)
good gardener ~= good (feeling, caring) imperialist
-enlightenment approach to captivity --> new sense of civilization (what is proper)
-removing any visible explicit means of captivity (animals appear move freeling, as if they wish to be there) <-- affective engagement
animal ~= border figure allowing institution to move between human world and animal world

science for empire --> mobilization of wonder (human capacity for curiosity that makes[...]

[...] of conversation
•narcissistic research
◦understanding narcissism is the key to understanding mental health --> *(the experience of) being in a cult = being in relation with a narcissist*
•mode of attention that is didactic and forensic
•(in artistic research environments) most of time we don't have questions
we have games of language --> illiteracy
◦exam: pose your questions =/= answer to my questions
answers don't show your level of knowledge, but the questions you have does
•generative nature of melancholia [*melancholia ==> teaching*]
•(artist's) writing with pearls of wisdom =/= referential writing


three problematic loci in artistic research:
•garden
•archive
•map

*is every garden zoological? --?--> training for future (imperialism)
good gardener ~= good (feeling, caring) imperialist
-enlightenment approach to captivity --> new sense of civilization (what is proper)
-removing any visible explicit means of captivity (animals appear move freeling, as if they wish to be there) <-- affective engagement
animal ~= border figure allowing institution to move between human world and animal world

science for empire --> mobilization of wonder (human capacity for curiosity that makes us human are mobilized in the service of questionable political goals)

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

[*]democracy: ‘farmandahi (commanding) = farmanbari (obeying)’

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

...thoughts expire on contact with words as quickly as words expire on contact with thoughts
(Pavic's Khazars)



two examples of metamarketing
1. Pleasantville (1998)
2. The Devil Wears Prada (2006)



(my flourishing in the scholl was always highly) teacher-dependent --?--> being social [=/= genius]

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

government (counting heads) =/= complexity (how to make mixity work)



morality --> ‘good =/= bad’ (incarnated in different things) [--> philosophical =/= value system ترجیحات --> sociological]
ethics --> assemblages

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

#cat's cradle

nature = figures + stories + images (~= topos, commonplace)

paying attention to nature like a child <-- Haraway

[*]trope: a verse interpolated into a liturgical text عبادات to embellish or amplify its meaning

language --> material-semiotic flesh

liturgical possibilities of nature
•Christian liturgical year
•Zaratusztrian nowruz
•star wars --?--> practice of turning tropes into worlds [--> war of imagess]
•war of words
•

(agonistic fields:)
military combat
sexual domination
security maintenance
market strateg[...]

[...] of a positive essence = ultimate suture (بخيه bakhie)
•nonrecognition of any positivity =/= ultimate suture
(society institutes itself <==) closure: nonrecognition of the infinite play of differences }--> ‘ideological ==> social’ ~(the social is impossible without some fixation of meaning) : “utopia is the essence of any communication and social practice” --!,]
[--Delanda--> (the mode of ‘downward thinking’ when we think in terms of) ideology (~ the established relations of a particular society constitutes people's identities) ~= intrinsic: the identity is created by relations {the fantasy of ‘seamless totality'} =/= (Deleuzian) extrinsic: the relations are real but don't determine identities]

what are artists (particular <-=> general) propositions (Angebot)?
•proposition: a declarative that can be right or wrong =/= a sentence, grammatical entities
•exposition: a systematic interpretation/explanation of a specific topic
•disposition: an affective orientation, knowledge attitude
[Marx's ruthlessness: criticism must not be afraid of its own conclusions]


what are the sources of “value” in ajayeb?
(sun, photosynthetic, micro-organisms, etc.)
fermentation, photosynthesis, respiration

ajayeb is the (shared, individual, or experienced) “memory” of which organizational layer or process of which communities of practice?


rethinking “invisible hand”
(dynamic between supply and demand. “planning system”?)

... against ... the dualisms that have been transmitted to us in the history of philosophy (matter vs. meaning, micro vs. macro, inorganic vs. organic vs. social, realism vs. social constructivism, etcetera.) and argue in favor of a new ontology according to which “mechanisms are largely causal, but they do not necessarily involve linear causality”



Neo-Materialism =/= Creationism: matter is an inert receptacle for forms that come from the outside imposed by an exterior psychic agency: “Let there be light!”

--> matter has morphogenetic capacities of its own and does not need to be commanded into generating form.

one of the idealisms that have been generated by postmodernism: that we know already how all past discourses have been generated, that we have the secret of all past conceptual systems, and that we can therefore engage in meta-theorizing based on that knowledge



Delanda: I am not convinced that avoiding dualities is the key to a new way of thinking (particularly if one simply adds new ones: modernism-postmodernism, rhizome-tree, power-resistance).

reified generalities that do not really exist: The Market, The State, and The People.

The duality emerges when one ignores the zone of overlap and reifies the averages.

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

[...]

[...]translation interest makes the (quasi) subject of a (quasi) object grow. --and vice versa--


radical position of *semiotics* on the issues of context, referent, and enunciation (that anthropology is able to escape)
(i am talking about a semiotics that is not obsessed with the search for “structure”)
{ (fictional beings ~=>) semiotic ~=? ontology }--> science of “sense” (=/= science of “signs”)
-the world itself is articulated
{ the study of sense =?=> extrication from language }--> this bifurcation (enshe'ab), as old as philosophy itself, used the discovery of “reference” as an opportunity to expel the referent to a position outside language.


(Aristotle's narrative : “the imitation of an action” -->) Ricoeur's three types of *mimesis:
1. prefiguration ()
2. configuration (kingdom of the “as if”)
3. refiguration (integration of the imaginative or “fictive” or “as if” into actual) of the field of action;

‘reading’ is configuration (Ricoeurian)

•use of symbols : being able to grasp one thing as standing for something else;
•narrative: competency in the temporal structures governing the syntagmatic order of “followability”


...empirical means to locate the boundaries of capitalism

(to enclose something -->) ontology of the Accounts Book --> Attar's Tazkirat al-Awliya's story of the boy, bird, butcher, accounts book, and the theme of repayment, quittance.
to place everything it does not take into account outside the enclosure and everything it does take into account and that properly belongs to him inside
--> origins of property

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

growing interest in *ecology* ==> growing interest in *theology* (--> granted a new relevant)

(Latour's notion of) ecotheology [~= ajayeb]


(how not to consider your self secretly--even under the self-reflectivity--as) the chosen people

renegotiation of values and features:
(if) recently european stopped having been modern ==> the ‘others’ have also stopped having been ‘other’

*the planet will no longer be modernized* (Latour shouting)

geopolitics of difference

“europe" = the modernist great narrative --or--> produce an alternative great narrative of what european cultures (and natures) have been
}--✕--> *contrasting *traits* (that have been elaborated in the course of european history)


“here is my *treasure*, here is my *heart*, if you deprive us of one of these contrasts, we are no longer humans”

to be sensitive to different original origins (=/= eurocentrism)
[different origins that speak also truthfully]

(Olearius drama:) dramatic encounter between the (early) anthropologist's gaze and the various cultures (and natures) h[...]

[...] same as ‘what took place.’ . . . What took place is indeed the past, yet there is something that . . . takes place but does not wholly recede into the past, a constantly returning present.”

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

[Corbin]

it is so dangerous to say any thinker, writer, artist, or phiosopher ‘was of his/her own time.’ nobody has ever been in their own time, never. we are constantly out of time.

things occur in Malakut, not in the time of this world.
it is a matter of interior history, exoteric in the etymological sense of the word, subtle history whose events do not take place in the exterior world of objects, but in the subtle world of lived states, events in the Malakut, in the world of the ‘Soul,’ in the ‘Heaven’ or the ‘Hell’ which man carries within himself.
(and this is precisely what is ‘changing someone's story’ is about. ‘let me change the rhythm of your story. let me change your history.’ ~= storytelling)
this history----interior wild facts----intermingles with his wills, and objectives itself in the web of exterior facts. these are events of ajayebnameh, Shahname شاهنامه, Qur'an قرآن, Grail Cycle and so on, the events of this history (inspire parables? and) make up sacred history (tarikh-e ghodsi تاریخ قدسی‌) =/= empirical historicity
*the question always remains:
-what *is of this world?
-what is the organ of perception?
-does oneself need to ‘belong’ to this sacred history in order to come to pass (in the Malakut ملکوت)? (being born in it, etc.)

[what was your fetish again? what was your Qibla قبله? what would be...]

platonic ideals, periodization of sacred history

ملا صدرا Mullah Sadra revolutionized the metaphysics of being, in reversing the order of priority of essence (mahiat ماهیت). he gives priority to existence (vojud وجود) : that means, it is the act and mode of existing that determine the nature of essence. the act of existing is in effect capable of multitude of degrees of intensification or of degradation.

(عجایبِ ajayeb-e) man: human-faced demon (ajene ensan-nama اجنه انسان‌نما) / ... / ... / sublime state of perfect Man
-and body passing through a multitude of states : Hayula هیولا? / ... / jesm (جسم corruptible worldly body) / ... / divine body (jesm-e elahi جسم الهی)

Mullah Sadra is the philosopher of metamorphoses and palingenesis (estehaleh-ha استحاله‌ها & rastakhiz-ha رستاخیز‌ها)
*phenomenology of the act of existing*


there was a time (12th century--my favorite) when Avicenna ابن سینا was translated into Latin (in Toledo,) a moment when our cultures in east and west corresponded to the same type, a moment when the concept of science was inseparable fro[...]

[...]was your Qibla قبله? what would be...]

platonic ideals, periodization of sacred history

ملا صدرا Mullah Sadra revolutionized the metaphysics of being, in reversing the order of priority of essence (mahiat ماهیت). he gives priority to existence (vojud وجود) : that means, it is the act and mode of existing that determine the nature of essence. the act of existing is in effect capable of multitude of degrees of intensification or of degradation.

(عجایبِ ajayeb-e) man: human-faced demon (ajene ensan-nama اجنه انسان‌نما) / ... / ... / sublime state of perfect Man
-and body passing through a multitude of states : Hayula هیولا? / ... / jesm (جسم corruptible worldly body) / ... / divine body (jesm-e elahi جسم الهی)

Mullah Sadra is the philosopher of metamorphoses and palingenesis (estehaleh-ha استحاله‌ها & rastakhiz-ha رستاخیز‌ها)
*phenomenology of the act of existing*


there was a time (12th century--my favorite) when Avicenna ابن سینا was translated into Latin (in Toledo,) a moment when our cultures in east and west corresponded to the same type, a moment when the concept of science was inseparable from its spiritual context. ----> think of the alchemists for whom the operation undertaken in the laboratory only attained its end if it was accompanied by an interior transmutation of the man--that is to say only if it effected the interior birth (of spiritual man)

Alchemist's chemistry
Nicolas Oresme's geometry
[out of history]
Descartes’ geometry is also out of history, discontinuous

(for Corbin) Modern / Western venture = application of the intelligence to the scientific investigation of a nature that has been desacralised, which must be violated in order to find out its laws (and to subject its forces to the human will)


the dichotomies or dissociation of thought/being, being/action



حیدر آملی Haydar Amuli's delinkings (destroying precisely certain dialectics or dichotomies:)

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

Holul حلول, Sodur صدور, Tajasod تجسد
(immanence, transcendence, incarnation)
(the eidos reflected in the mirror--divine in the prophet--remains untouched by the mirror, because the real is not ‘incarnated’ in the eidos, the reflected image)

-alame khiali عالم خیالی: imaginaire/Hollywood
-khiale khallagh خیال خلاق (--> alame mesal عالم مثال =/= alame ajsad عالم اجساد) :
1-khiale mottasel خیال متصل: imagining inherent in human
2-khiale monfasel خیال منفصل: imaginal apart from human
-alame hess عالم حسس: molk ملک --> universe of forgetfulness


Tonekaboni, is against: “mojudate moghayade vahmi faghede tagharor mi[...]

[...]ه جسمانی عالم آخرت)
(baghaye) badane okhravie alame made (بقای بدن اخروی عالم ماده) --> hades zamanie (حادث زمانی)


لطیف latif ~= immaterial

actual/real ~= a dream between earth and sky


asemanhaye napeydaye nojumi آسمانهای ناپیدای نجومی (celectial skies invisible)
dadehaye vahyi داده‌های وحی (data of revelation)


Avicenna (selselemaratebe ebn-sinaie oghul سلسله‌ مراتب ابن سینایی عقول):
[each aghl عقل or angle with its own sky and nafs نفس ==> a whole universe for itself]
sending from one aghl to the other, till the 10th aghl = unlimited human nafs
10th aghl ~= philosopher's active aghl ~= ruh al ghodos روح القدس

(سهروردی) in Sohrevardi: angle and nafs are in the same trip

aghle hayulayi عقل هیولایی

/>
[Averroesian/ابن رشدی =/= Avicennian/ishraghi/اشراقی] ==> destruction of the intermediate world of angles ==> secularization :
sociology <-- theology <-- angelology
(divine materiliazation --> social materialization)
totalitarianism <== ideology <-- spirituality (~=? intellectual immaterialism)

(?signing in iran:)
ghodsi shodane nahadha = orfi shodane maba'adotabi
قدسی‌ شدن نهادها = عرفی شدن مابعدالطبیعه
sacredization of institutions = secularization of metaphysics


the tragedy is not the affirmation of individualism, it is rather the forgetting of the infinite entity :
non-mystic monotheism ==> a personalized (incarnation of) God (--> everything ‘personal’ is subject to death and negation) ==> entrance of God in collectivism


تغییر ماهیت عالم taghyire mahiate alam (change in the essence of the universe) is the suthe subject of study for iranian ancient philosophies and cosmologies

contemplation (moshahede nazari مشاهده نظری) ~= action
knowledge ~= creating (that insensible speculative world) (the world of ajayeb and its siblings is created and stated in my inner vision)
[hush-e nazari هوش نظری, ability to abstract, is the ability to look from above]
[(jaleb budan-e) heja-e bimani هجای بیمعنی, interest for meaningless morpheme]

(human's function:) the transfigurative function of the transcendental machine (karkhaneye mojarad-sazi کارخانه مجرد‌سازی, by Sheikh Muhammad Tabatabayi)



*ta'vil bayad dar jahate axe harkate jami va moshtarek bashad تأویل باید در جهت عکس حرکت جمعی و مشترک باشد
(interpretation/hermeneutics =/= commons/collectivism)
(according to Sohrevardi:) haghighate lafzi حقیقت لفظی (verbal/literal truth)[...]

[...] of Versuch, test or trial
(farhange kushesh, ghasd, sue ghasd, va emtehan)

(measuring and) testing that support, among so many others, political, religious, and educational institutions

testing has everything to do with the way the policing of political sites and bodies takes place, in modernity and with our experience of reality in general.

testing ~=/?==><--> the real
(elliptical circuit established between test & real)


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

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

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

your pee belongs to the state----new civic readability

{four bodies don't belong to themselves: children, addicts, outlaws, and ghosts, are all busted by the state or certain legislated majority}


destructive (and artistic) modes of production.

test, does it have an essence? Is it pure relationality?



Avital's “speculative telephonics”

Heidegger: sign = cutting edge, Zeichen --Holderlin--> “we're cutting out” =/= (Avital:) schizo knows how to disconnect, how to depart, how to cut the shit

the place where a call can break into a body[=? orificial openings of a subject]

emergency verification: we are still trying to cut into the emergency line (that we are on) after the crashing down of the transcendental signifier


in the (technologically enabled) disappearance of long-distance what happens to the ‘elsewhere’ calling to the schizobody?

how our pretechnological ears were (trained) before the telephone?

the “call” comes from me and from beyond and over me.

Telephonics coils itself around a concept of “being there” supported by the recognition that contact has been broken. Still, the break is never clean, just a[...]

[...] Telephonics coils itself around a concept of “being there” supported by the recognition that contact has been broken. Still, the break is never clean, just as contact was never continuous. The entire metaphysics of identity, presence and locality is scrambled, bringing with it a certain historical mutation in the relationship of the “self’ to other, to the irreducible precedence, as Derrida puts it in ‘Memoires,’ of the other. The other calls; you answer. But “you” have not yet been constituted, gathered or pulled together prior to the call.

Wortsalad ---- Opheilia's kind of mouth that shoots poesy, one has the feeling that no one is there.
/ precisely when ophelia is about to become the poet Shakespeare strangles her in water to make place for hamlet's tragic autopoiesis /

it is (generally) very difficult to know “who” is talking --> “whom” is being addressed

endure the agony of the being called (a being-on-call, an answering device)

modeling different styles of irony

(what are we) telehearing (?)


language is the history of index finger (“...even when it is placed on the mouth to silence a speaking. The teacher points, the God and the schizophrenic speak through or to the spiritual forefinger [sababe سبابه, angoshte shahadat انگشت شهادت].”)
-Heidegger traces the route of saying from rumor to the spiritualized digitals. The semiotically invested finger comes to manipulate the alphabetico-numerical ordering of ‘Geschick.’ (Avital)
-The spiritual forefinger presses towards schizophrenic partial systematizing.
-Also, it is the bewitching finger, which makes it rude to point or to press red buttons, for the power of pointing used to be associated with *magical arrests* (thus in Jewish Orthodox marriage ceremonies the wedding ring is said to be placed on this spiritual finger of the woman, to block her potency).
-making the marionette come alive
-history of index finger points to the essential being of language, which is “Saying as Showing.” (Avital reading Heidegger)
-Heidegger shows, “Speaking must have speakers” (not merely in the same way as an effect must have a cause)
(...what must remain unspoken in the sense that it is beyond the reach of speaking)
...decisive disconnectedness in all language tracings.
schizophrenogenic understanding of language (and of anything)
[this is related to the story of the fox and sound, accidental essencing of the index...]


“We are hypnotized things suffering from positive and from negative hallucinations, that is, we see what is not there and often we do not see what is there. In the first place because what it is to be there has no clarity of being. It is as if we cannot see a thing.” (Avital)
(focus the lense on being)



the mode of awesomeness and dissolvement with awe[...]

[...]name of the game? complexity, flexibility, opportunism, (finite worlds called:) domestic, wild, feral,
[who is naming the world what?
•accelerationism: “game-over”
•capitalism: “resource”
•technophobia: “obsolescence”
•technophilia: “information”
•monotheism: “transition”
•science: “taxa”
•multinationalism: “system”
•modernism: “globe"]

immune systems (in natureculture) determine where organisms, including people, can live and with whom.

“There is no time or place at which genetics ends and environment begins” [...]
(Haraway > Gilbert)

“All stages of the life histories of evolving animals had to adapt to eager bacteria colonizing them inside and out.”
To be animal is to become-with bacteria


to inhabit an inter-subjective world, to love is about meeting the other in all the fleshly detail of a mortal relationship (to wit, first, somehow to learn what this other needs and desires)---permanent search for knowledge of the intimate other, with inevitable comic and tragic mistakes in that quest


thinking about animals as “other worlds” in a science fictional sense


scientifically informed, empirically grounded practice

theory ...still a limited discourse and a rough instrument

“who is at home?” --> ask in respect for all of time who and what are emerging in relationship --> (the obligation to ask) who are present and who are emergent? ***

(what are our) categorical labor
labor of training --> somehow all the participants of training are remodeled by it
labor of scale-making
(these are world-making practices, storytellings)

significant otherness-in-connection =/= intention-ascribing idioms of literalist anthropomorphism that sees furry humans in animal bodies and measures their worth in scales of similarity to the rights-bearing, humanist subjects of Western philosophy and political theory ==> assign privileges or guardianship (in place of ownership) in a modernist great chain of being

*action: beautiful, hard, specific, personal;
=/= abstract scales

differential sensibility =?=> situated emergence =?=> more livable worlds ~ ontological choreography

category of “rights” don't just exist (preformed to be uncovered,) rather we enter into a rights relationship with an other (animal or human)--> Hearne's “reciprocal possession”
-morality is a species-specific capacity
~ if i have X, my X has a human (which is me)


off-leash and cliff-enclosed @Varinia


(Haraway:) time-space scales co-constituted by human, animal, and inanimate agencies
1. evolutionary time (at the level of the planet earth) --> naturalcultural species
2. face-to-face time (at the scale of individua[...]

[...] />

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

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

[Stengers]

[a kind of] writing (not writing down)

writing is an experience of metamorphic transformation

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

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

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

[Serres]

ajayeb, a time when transport and itinerary were only myth

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

[Anand]

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

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

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

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

description of the garden ---- [accounts of the heaven are filled with descriptions of springs and wells, tanks and streams, gardens and trees and flowers] --> recreating of heaven on earth was tight with natural and animal life forms


where a text or these texts (ajayeb's text and world) is *acclaimed*? today and before, by who? Indo-Pakistan sub-continent? South-Asia? Indo-Iranian regions?
***([who were the] agents through which ‘natural’ responses [to its impulses] are said to operate[?])

the hierarchy of created things [...]
apex in the righteous man, reaches down into the abyss of the inanimate by many gradations (Benjamin 1969b, 104)

“undiminished contact with the creatural, even with its petrified, inanimate, lowliest stratum, that of the stone… (Hannsen 2000, 150)”. The righteous man's justice consists of his attentiveness to nature, of his giving a hearing to all created things, of understandi[...]

[...]ratives


as careful scrutiny of wonders and marvels becomes a mainstay in European intellectual life, 17th century natural philosophers began to understand *wonder, *curiosity, and *attention as cloesly aligned and mutually defining.

epistemological beast fable

unnatural history

knowledge-making practices of other times and places

tracing the web of horror and delight

Serres reminds us the beast fable tradition is as much about biomimicry as anthropomorphizing.

finding ways of “going-on together” (Verran)

“by experience and by affinity, some of us begin not with Pasteur, but with the monster, the outcast” (S. Leigh Star)

(ajayeb's) (politics of) administering discrete objects ----(number sys)

(why should we engage in refiguration?)
(there are always a) multitude of agencies unfolding as the world is continuously reconfigured (=/= to explain away: when multiple objects are collapsed into one.)
-“Within this dynamic world it is impossible to imagine that one single story or one narrative style can capture all of the liveliness and exuberance; ***we need to deploy multiple stories about agency. Some meticulously empirical, some imaginative. Some on the quantum scale, some on the people scale. Different agential narratives enable different ways of responding and relating.” (Kenney)

postcolonial moments: “occasions for theorizing, for telling differences and samenesses in new ways” (Verran)


#to create ‘aerating’ (tahviyeh تهویه) in ajayeb, this includes:
/ crafting translations with ontological traction (enghebaz انقباض)
/ building empirical tools that make ajayeb's translation-work visible {#pop-up book}
/ translation --> *reconfigure sameness and difference*
/ staying with linguistic differences (in ajayeb) is a way of investigatitigating the ontological commitments embedded in language.
◽ontological --> worlding --> how language participates in shaping our lived worlds in some ways and not others.*** “it is not common for speakers of a language to examine what type of material objects their language commits them to. [this also my question in iranian mystic mix,] rather the difference will be to notice as difficulty in translation.” (Verran)

(for me working on ajayeb is) **lingering in the space of difficult translations**
==> making recourse (motevasel shodan be متوسل شدن به) to a *world of common referents* (space, time, and matter)

[to continue thinking with Verran] on *durations*, *extensions*, and *resistances* (in ajayeb's case)
these three foundation objects need not to be saddled with the history of Western metaphysics and do noy require that common ground be located only in Western territory. “Therefore they offer more promise for cross-c[...]

[...]iranian mystic mix,] rather the difference will be to notice as difficulty in translation.” (Verran)

(for me working on ajayeb is) **lingering in the space of difficult translations**
==> making recourse (motevasel shodan be متوسل شدن به) to a *world of common referents* (space, time, and matter)

[to continue thinking with Verran] on *durations*, *extensions*, and *resistances* (in ajayeb's case)
these three foundation objects need not to be saddled with the history of Western metaphysics and do noy require that common ground be located only in Western territory. “Therefore they offer more promise for cross-cultural translation than the more conceptually nimble [tardast تردست, zerang زرنگ -- like the CEN or google] space, time, and matter. Newborn and awkward to our ears, these strange terms announce themselves as translation tools.” (Kenney)


(thinking with Kenney / Verran:)
workflow on ajayeb:
1- tracing social connections (for which subjects is this useful? which ecology of practices?)
2- making equipment list (materials and methods, an expanded and complicated version of equipment-list, providing accounts of the material-discursive apparatuses that are materializing my empirical objects, =/= exercise in representation or audit hesab-rasi حساب رسی)
3- narrating the relation (re-materializing my found empirical objects, re-enacting the objects)


interpretive cosmology

(ajayeb's objects,) “They represent different storytelling practices that contribute to different kinds of worldings.” [...] (through my engagement,) “They stimulate more compositions and decompositions--stories that narrate different beings and different doings, none of which can claim final ontological authority, but that each to different (ontic) work” (hopefully!)
-worlding: a choreography that generates ontologies (Thompson) --&--> there is no self without a world (Carson)
-not as a voyeur or anthropologist, but breathe in the density and composition of their atmospheres
(people = worlds)

ontic (hasti mojud-shenakhti هستی‌ موجود شناختی‌): “factual” existence as =/= metaphysical ontologic existence)

[ontological interferences in ontic--{regular existence, difference in little beings} for example, ontic is when we ask what time it is, and the answer is on the clock. (snafu is ontic, aporia ontological*) when the ontic is disrupted ==> you have a “day off,” all sort of things can invade and open up, demons come out, there is a suspension of ontic time, a (Heideggerian) holiday]

(Verran) [number are] “always ready to actively re-exist when we do the right actions and say the right words.” (can i do that with ajayeb's objects? how?)
“The moon rose above the river” (en) <--> “upward behind the onstreaming it mooned” (Tlon, a language by Bo[...]

[...]authority, but that each to different (ontic) work” (hopefully!)
-worlding: a choreography that generates ontologies (Thompson) --&--> there is no self without a world (Carson)
-not as a voyeur or anthropologist, but breathe in the density and composition of their atmospheres
(people = worlds)

ontic (hasti mojud-shenakhti هستی‌ موجود شناختی‌): “factual” existence as =/= metaphysical ontologic existence)

[ontological interferences in ontic--{regular existence, difference in little beings} for example, ontic is when we ask what time it is, and the answer is on the clock. (snafu is ontic, aporia ontological*) when the ontic is disrupted ==> you have a “day off,” all sort of things can invade and open up, demons come out, there is a suspension of ontic time, a (Heideggerian) holiday]

(Verran) [number are] “always ready to actively re-exist when we do the right actions and say the right words.” (can i do that with ajayeb's objects? how?)
“The moon rose above the river” (en) <--> “upward behind the onstreaming it mooned” (Tlon, a language by Borges with no nouns, only verbs)

(in old Iran, there is a measurement of time based on sa'd سعد and nahs نحس, the time of benevolent spirits and so on. the sensuous time, measurement is affect)


knowledge industry or “scientific factory”

how academic labor was implicated in capitalist systems and contemporary forms of knowledge/power

“ruse” (hile حیله, makr مکر, neyrang نیرنگ) --> my tool in work on ajayeb? -//-[مکر زنان ,گربه نره و روباه مکار, minorities associated with this accent: women, animals, machines,] [ruse in Kelile Demne کلیله و دمنه]
ruse: a set of small, mostly unconscious tactics by which workers resist capitalist systems (writing love letters on company's time, factory workers who takes a scrap of fabric home for his children to play with, etc.)
-“[h]ow to subvert the laws of the “scientific factory” through gift-giving, solidarity, and free exchange even when bosses and colleagues will not turn a blind eye” (de Certeau)

(how to?) collectively crafting critiques, commitments, stories, and actions (in the density and composition of ajayeb's atmospheres)
-feeling out their “rhythms, valences, moods, sensations, tempos” (Stewart)
-“real and virtual worlds, future and past worlds, fictional and theoretical worlds, always happening and happening and happening” (Kenney)


talking is also thinking


speculative valences (zarfiat ظرفیت) of wonder --> (through wonder, which) response-abilities are activated (?)

ajayeb is crafted responsive stories about life --> question of responsibility --> what kind of responsibilities are activated in the SF worlding (including reading it now) of ajayeb?
[...]

[...] (=/=? Delanda's materialism)

ajayeb (+ my work on it ?) is a pragmatic project to fabricate a different kind of knowledge assemblage (Stengers > Kenney > Sina)
=/= (21st century) logics of capitalism
=/= toxic categories of modernity


i need (to learn) an inviting rhetoric


(Roughgarden)
([focus narrowly on] sexual selection =/=) social selection : “...selection for, and in the context of, the social infrastructure of a species within which offspring are produced and reared”

co-parenting, animal friendships, same-sex sex, non-reproductive sex, and other reproductive social behaviors

*physio-semiotics: physical traits that have social functions, that communicate to other members of the social group

(Darwin sexual selection : claims that in humans, men are more jealous about sexual infidelity of their partners, whereas woman are more jealous of emotional infidelity. their theories based on a sexual conflict model, is that this is an evolutionary adaptation that helps males ensure that they raise their own offspring and helps females ensure that the males will stick around to provide for their children.) --> is there another story? (this is a speculative + empirical question) --> multiple evolutionary stories are possible

(Roughgarden demands) a more rigorous relationship between narrative and evidence (=/= prevalence of studies where the “[raw] data are mined to effect an appearance of the confirmation of [a single] hypothesis”) ----she returns to the most potent fables of sexual selection and re-tells them --> these new stories make real species-shaping difference by contributing to the social infrastructure within which offspring are produced and reared

***how many plots can the data hold?*** --> pragmatic---the answer is many not infinite [Strathern: “more than one but less than many"]
-practices of *doing accuracy* --> storytellers
relationships between story and evidence --> an invitation to invent new forms of accuracy that might be unfamiliar or awkward but could be epistemologically narrativelly politically generative (Kenney)
(sometimes: story ==> data) the work to craft just one good story from the chaos of the data is (not only political challenge @Jassem, but also) an epistemological challenge



(Lynn Margulis)
*endosymbiosis: the theory that eukaryotic cells evolved by incorporating free-swimming bacteria, which later became organelles (cell organ) such as plastids and mitochondria
(ladder =/=) horizontal gene transfer : that the evolution and speciation are driven not by random genetic mutation and natural selection, but by symbiogenesis.

Margulis's attention to bacteria rather than attention to animals ==> different research questions and metaphors, and different empirical objects

(her schol[...]

[...]ells them --> these new stories make real species-shaping difference by contributing to the social infrastructure within which offspring are produced and reared

***how many plots can the data hold?*** --> pragmatic---the answer is many not infinite [Strathern: “more than one but less than many"]
-practices of *doing accuracy* --> storytellers
relationships between story and evidence --> an invitation to invent new forms of accuracy that might be unfamiliar or awkward but could be epistemologically narrativelly politically generative (Kenney)
(sometimes: story ==> data) the work to craft just one good story from the chaos of the data is (not only political challenge @Jassem, but also) an epistemological challenge



(Lynn Margulis)
*endosymbiosis: the theory that eukaryotic cells evolved by incorporating free-swimming bacteria, which later became organelles (cell organ) such as plastids and mitochondria
(ladder =/=) horizontal gene transfer : that the evolution and speciation are driven not by random genetic mutation and natural selection, but by symbiogenesis.

Margulis's attention to bacteria rather than attention to animals ==> different research questions and metaphors, and different empirical objects

(her scholarly crafts are amazing:) “was the moon that pulled the tide of life from its oceanic depths to dry land and up into the air.” (1998)

/science is an interpretative adventure

(Margulis's insight into) the history of consciousness --> the components that fused in symbiogenesis are already conscious entities***, already able to sense light and motion --> we are made through our endosymbiotic histories : our own “sensitivities to wafting (nasim نسیم) plant scents, tasty salted mixtures, police cruiser sirens, loving touches and star light” (2005)
[...] “These avant guard cells of the nasal passages, the taste buds, the innee inner ear, the touch receptors in the skin and the retinal rods and cones all have in common the presence at their tips of projections (‘cell processes’) called cilia.”
[...] “The spirochete group of bacteria includes many harmless mud-dwellers but it also contains a few scary freaks: the treponeme of syphilis and the borrelias of Lyme disease. We animals got our exquisite ability to sense our surroundings--to tell light from dark, noise from silence, motion from stillness and fresh water from brackish brine--from a kind of bacterium whose relatives we despise.”

re-thinking consciousness

(Kenney) Margulis's speculations: they mattered, they worlded, they gathered

(Williamson:) larvae and adult insects of the same species do not have a common ancestor(!)
(how ?, the capacity for) drastic morphological change --> what would it be like to emerge as a moth with a new body, a new sensorium, with your caterpillar-self only a genomi[...]

[...]imming bacteria, which later became organelles (cell organ) such as plastids and mitochondria
(ladder =/=) horizontal gene transfer : that the evolution and speciation are driven not by random genetic mutation and natural selection, but by symbiogenesis.

Margulis's attention to bacteria rather than attention to animals ==> different research questions and metaphors, and different empirical objects

(her scholarly crafts are amazing:) “was the moon that pulled the tide of life from its oceanic depths to dry land and up into the air.” (1998)

/science is an interpretative adventure

(Margulis's insight into) the history of consciousness --> the components that fused in symbiogenesis are already conscious entities***, already able to sense light and motion --> we are made through our endosymbiotic histories : our own “sensitivities to wafting (nasim نسیم) plant scents, tasty salted mixtures, police cruiser sirens, loving touches and star light” (2005)
[...] “These avant guard cells of the nasal passages, the taste buds, the inner ear, the touch receptors in the skin and the retinal rods and cones all have in common the presence at their tips of projections (‘cell processes’) called cilia.”
[...] “The spirochete group of bacteria includes many harmless mud-dwellers but it also contains a few scary freaks: the treponeme of syphilis and the borrelias of Lyme disease. We animals got our exquisite ability to sense our surroundings--to tell light from dark, noise from silence, motion from stillness and fresh water from brackish brine--from a kind of bacterium whose relatives we despise.”

re-thinking consciousness

(Kenney) Margulis's speculations: they mattered, they worlded, they gathered

(Williamson:) larvae and adult insects of the same species do not have a common ancestor(!)
(how ?, the capacity for) drastic morphological change --> what would it be like to emerge as a moth with a new body, a new sensorium, with your caterpillar-self only a genomic memory?
reincarnation from one species to another

(need less?) just-so stories --> facts to live with
(need more?) what-if stories --> speculations to savor --(gives taste to)--> *paradigms* --> incommensurable ways of seeing the world and practicing science in it (Kohn) --> seeds for sowing worlds (Haraway) ~--> possibilities for thinking life***

(Kenney's proposal of) “bureau of what-if stories”
(--> Fables of Attention - Wonder in Feminist Theory and Scientific Practice 2013)

(Margulis's) holobiont: multicellular eukaryotes plus their colonies of persistent symbionts


ajayeb's craft and undisciplined tradition can be called empirical, it is an example of an archival research (done by historian.) i wan to highlight the aesthetic quality of this activity.
*aesthetics: how elements are[...]

[...] light from dark, noise from silence, motion from stillness and fresh water from brackish brine--from a kind of bacterium whose relatives we despise.”

re-thinking consciousness

(Kenney) Margulis's speculations: they mattered, they worlded, they gathered

(Williamson:) larvae and adult insects of the same species do not have a common ancestor(!)
(how ?, the capacity for) drastic morphological change --> what would it be like to emerge as a moth with a new body, a new sensorium, with your caterpillar-self only a genomic memory?
reincarnation from one species to another

(need less?) just-so stories --> facts to live with
(need more?) what-if stories --> speculations to savor --(gives taste to)--> *paradigms* --> incommensurable ways of seeing the world and practicing science in it (Kohn) --> seeds for sowing worlds (Haraway) ~--> possibilities for thinking life***

(Kenney's proposal of) “bureau of what-if stories”
(--> Fables of Attention - Wonder in Feminist Theory and Scientific Practice 2013)

(Margulis's) holobiont: multicellular eukaryotes plus their colonies of persistent symbionts


ajayeb's craft and undisciplined tradition can be called empirical, it is an example of an archival research (done by historian.) i wan to highlight the aesthetic quality of this activity.
*aesthetics: how elements are arranged together, how they are composed, how they are brought into relation in the space of a text (Kenney > Latour, Stengers, Bellacasa) (--> La Guin's bag, bundle) }--> rigs
**aesthetics are political because they do consequential relational work**

novels, poetry, feminist theory, speculative fiction, bestiary list categories--these genres of composition *gather together* and *stage* their “matters of care” in ways that perform relations between things and teach their readers to inhabit sometimes unfamiliar, agential world. they are practices of sf worlding.

fiction ==> attitude --> holds things

(emphasis on) worlds that come together through dispersal (vofur وفور), induction (makesh مکش), volatility (farar فرّار), toxicity, drift,

the power that comes with ‘other’ (time/place of) styles of composing

(*bestiary is agential world*, that's why it is so interesting when you are available to it as a child. i am drawn to it --> agency bestiary sets to betray the anthropocentric binary: “active human =/= passive nature”)
(how to tell?) faithful and fantastic stories ==> better companion species

*a shift in humanities scholarship
(feminist science studies, the post humanities, the ecological humanities, animal studies, queer theory,) humanities scholars have represented their matters of care with an aesthetic (and therefore political) commitment to narrating stories with an emphasis on the rel[...]

[...]d. i am drawn to it --> agency bestiary sets to betray the anthropocentric binary: “active human =/= passive nature”)
(how to tell?) faithful and fantastic stories ==> better companion species

*a shift in humanities scholarship
(feminist science studies, the post humanities, the ecological humanities, animal studies, queer theory,) humanities scholars have represented their matters of care with an aesthetic (and therefore political) commitment to narrating stories with an emphasis on the relationality among agencies, forces, phenomena, and entities usually kept separate, in the background, or out of the story altogether (lde a Bellacasa)
--> redistribution of agencies
political stake ==> aesthetic tactics

poet laureates of queer animacies
“malek-o-sho'ara-e atefiate mahsus-e edrakat-e zende” (ملک الشعرا عاطفیات محسوس ادراکات زنده)

(animacy: Usually, animacy has to do with how alive or how sentient a noun is. In general, personal pronouns have the highest animacy, the first-person being the highest among them. Other humans follow them, and animals, plants, natural forces such as winds, concrete things, and abstract things follow in this order; however, according to the spiritual beliefs of the people whose language possesses an animacy hierarchy, deities, spirits, or certain types of animal or plant may be ranked very highly in the hierarchy.)

**animacy stories --> multitude of agencies
(what are the contemporary ajayeb animacy stories?


(neo-Darwinian's) standard evolutionary accounts of encounter between species (in terms of “sexual deception”) ==> individuation, competition, efficiency --> capitalist and military values (, economic tropes)
==> disenchanted “ecologies, populated by blind, reactive automations”

evolutionary stories =/= involutionary stories --> organisms become *involved* with one another's lives

(involution, pich-dar پیچدار, act or an instance of enfolding or entangling, an inward curvature or penetration; a function, transformation, or operator that is equal to its inverse, i.e. which gives the identity when applied to itself.)

“mimetic relations among plants and animals take shape in the thickness of the space between bodies, where affect and sensations are *transduced* through *excitable* tissues” (Myers & Hustak)--> affective ecologies, intimate encounters, articulate orchids


(on ajayeb,) ***creating sticky new attachment sites for thinking (human/nonhuman relations)***
###learning multiple writing tactics:
•thick description
•refiguring
•reading against the grain
•citational poaching (shekar-e gheir-mojaz شکار غیر مجاز) (also, i am trying to quote Muhammad, Sa'di, ajayeb, the bird sometimes, and something is called in)
•speculative ficti[...]

[...] /> (=/= “return to reality” : “the ontological turn”)
(=/= language as “a necessary evil,” aesthetics characterized as the main instrument of ideological mystification)
~ learn to trust objects figured in unfamiliar ways* (, my bow and arrow?)
[both Haraway (“material-semiotic”) and Barad (“material-discursive”) are working against this kind of split between language and reality, both in the level of analysis (of one's object) and composition (of one's book)]


**where do our power come from if not from evidence?** (@Seba)
--> the *specter of deception* (it happened when i used aesthetics in my questions in my excursion at Vladimir's block, my peers thinking “what if we are beguiled?” --> the suspicious refrains of “trust no one”) =/= “attentive wondering care” (Bynum)

*** to tell enchanted stories --> <== we must struggle against the fear of being tricked ***
-this fear of being tricked ==> Descartes’ beast-machine hypothesis (against nonhuman agency) : the clockwork animal and gods; a site where animality and technicity were collapsed and both were rendered as deceptive.
-Descartes’ beast-machine anxieties are still with us. (being duped by the) trickster agencies of animal-like automata--animals, spirits, and technologies have dubious agencies.


(my work on ajayeb hopefully,) is about cultivating wild facts, to be at risk with our craft, creating beautiful objects that give charismatic form to their matters of care


i don't know in advance, how stories and words will flow through us --> i have to learn pragmatic experimentation with magic, words and ideas: [#ppp]
•poetry --> to do with the art of language
•poiesis --> process of creation
•poetics --> questions of composition and form
}--(attention to)--> form + composition + influence

“i am rubied by your attention”
(ruby: yaghute sorkh یاقوت سرخ) ~-> to describe the effect of an encounter between two

...shifting verbs to nouns and nouns to verb }--> practical

*relational properties of language:
•viscosity (chasbandegi چسبند‌گی)
•conductivity
•velocity
(=/= daunting)
 -collective
 -exploratory
 -supportive


(what to do with) the unavoidable childishness (and girlish) of wonder and of fables
-does wonder need to grow up?

there is a risk that that which awakens our epistemological appetite will ultimately be unfriendly, unseemly, unsophisticated, unsuitable
•wonder goes beyond what is suitable (Irigaray,) even threatens our status as “serious, adult thinkers” (Stengers)
hoax ==> compels us to do work that is sober and bound closer to reality

the bifurcation of childhood and adulthood gets in the way of thinking
-the child/adult divide as an “ac[...]

[...]eyond what is suitable (Irigaray,) even threatens our status as “serious, adult thinkers” (Stengers)
hoax ==> compels us to do work that is sober and bound closer to reality

the bifurcation of childhood and adulthood gets in the way of thinking
-the child/adult divide as an “achievement” of the Vicorian Era

the context of my ajayeb:
“The Science War”
epistemological differences between sciences

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

[Lorraine J. Daston]

the evolving collective sensibility of naturalists

objective order and subjective sensibility

...celestial apparitions, monsters,

how wonder and wonders fortified princely power, rewove the texture of scientific experience, and shaped the sensibility of intellectuals

(webs of cultural significance, material practices, and theoretical derivations)

(cultivate a distinctive scientific self wherein knowing and knower converge) Galison

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

*passion maintains a path between (--corporal impressions and movements toward an object):
philosophers <----> physicists
metaphysical research <----> cosmological research
transcendental <----> empirical

architecture of ideality : (sociofamilial) stratification of desire --> ideal ego ==> religiosity, slogans, publicity, terror, --✕--> roots {vegetal, earthly, ideal, heavenly,)
[Irigaray]

(@Ali , what is the source of movement? what is the motivating force behind mobility if not wonder?---in all dimensions)
(both active & passive) wonder ==> move

the “man” (in Nietzsche and Heidegger) thinks he is at the end of his growth, has completed a cycle

“can we look at, contemplate, wonder at the machine from a place where it does not see us?” *** --> the issue is how to be able to wonder at the face of something/somebody that is looking (back) at us. ,,,(@Lili)

surprise: not yet assimilated or disassimilated to known

energy tied to the dimension of the story =/= mobilization of new energies --> (still) blind to their horizon, or qualities

*desire: vectorialization of space and time (=/= Deleuze and Guattari notion of desire) --> movement toward, (not yet qualified)


mother who is magnanimous (großmütig) toward the little one


(-subject-[-) wonder {-]-desire-(-} world )


(for Descartes:) object <== alchemy of the subject's passion

places in brain that are (soft and) tender ---> not yet hardened by past impressions

***[for me the] (appearance of something or someone) new modifies the movement (of spirits in an unexpected manner) --> when we are faithful to the perpetual newness of the self, the other, the world --> faithful to becoming ***

Irigaray:[...]

[...]@Ali , what is the source of movement? what is the motivating force behind mobility if not wonder?---in all dimensions)
(both active & passive) wonder ==> move

the “man” (in Nietzsche and Heidegger) thinks he is at the end of his growth, has completed a cycle

“can we look at, contemplate, wonder at the machine from a place where it does not see us?” *** --> the issue is how to be able to wonder at the face of something/somebody that is looking (back) at us. ,,,(@Lili)

surprise: not yet assimilated or disassimilated to known

energy tied to the dimension of the story =/= mobilization of new energies --> (still) blind to their horizon, or qualities

*desire: vectorialization of space and time (=/= Deleuze and Guattari notion of desire) --> movement toward, (not yet qualified)


mother who is magnanimous (großmütig) toward the little one


(-subject-[-) wonder {-]-desire-(-} world )


(for Descartes:) object <== alchemy of the subject's passion

places in brain that are (soft and) tender ---> not yet hardened by past impressions

***[for me the] (appearance of something or someone) new modifies the movement (of spirits in an unexpected manner) --> when we are faithful to the perpetual newness of the self, the other, the world --> faithful to becoming ***

Irigaray: *wonder* = passion of encounter (between the most material and the most metaphysical)

wonder:
•passion (of already born) --✕--> reenveloped in love
•touched and moves toward and within the attraction --✕--> nostalgia for the first dwelling
•passion of first encounter --✕--> repetition




[Haraway reading Derrida: on killing,]

(Derrida understood that this structure, this) logic of sacrifice and this exclusive possession of the capacity for response, is what produces the Animal

the death-defying arrogance of ascribing such wondrous positivities to the Human

(Derrida)"The question of the said animal in its entirety comes down to knowing not whether the animal speaks but whether one can know what ‘respond’ means. And how to distinguish a response from a reaction.”

the mistake of forgetting the ecologies of all mortal beings, who live in and through the use of one another's bodies
[this is against ] The naturalistic fallacy is the mirror-image misstep to transcendental humanism.

multispecies contingency

In the idiom of labor, animals are working subjects, not just worked objects.

the capacity to respond and to recognize response

We can never do without technique, without calculation, without reasons, but these practices will never take us into that kind of open where multispecies responsibility is at stake.
[...]

[...]ction theory + fluid animation research
•Noah: Nolan + Creation Bible + Darwin + motion graphic research
--> solving a problem proposed by _?_ }--> “the dream catcher” !!!
(in these cinematic examples we see the society imposed to the same spatiotemporal representational framework that science “discovers” in nature)


the insistent entanglements of physicality with the metaphysical

soil: earth rendered in the scientific register

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

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

the materialist metaphysics of Creation in non-elite belief

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

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

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

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


being fated (together)

...although the earth breaks, it reconstitutes
people find themselves in diminished form, or occupying a lesser form of life, or having the status of the resurrected dead, but they will nonetheless always find themselves here at this place in this moment****

...End Times bringing a fearful apocalyptic future into the present, evoking the eternal quest for union with a beloved without end, while not focused on a specific horizon


*foreshprtended horizons*


intensification of existing scenes of suffering

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

[Delanda]
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/o/ohp/11515701.0001.001/1:4.2/--new-materialism-interviews-cartographies?rgn=div2;view=fulltext

topology =/= Aristotle's geometry (his “genus” and his “species.” )
genus =/= species as a contingent historical individual
species =/= topological animal (a body-plan)

topological properties like connectivity (=/= metric space)

“[...]I surely reject the idea that morphogenesis needs any “mind” to operate. I also reject the neo-Kantian thesis of the linguisticality of experience. [...] Are we to assume that those ancient hunter gatherers lived in an amorphous world waiting for language to give it form?”
[...]

[...]aterially and semiotically--of conjoined forces that matter.

“dynamic (re)configurings of the world, specific agential practices/intra-actions/performances through which specific exclusionary boundaries are enacted” (Barad)

(now ontologically) spectatorship =/= representation =/= referent
(still? in ajayeb) reader ~= representation ~= citational non-evidence

(Hayward-->) if we recognize that clear vision is always predicated on distorted, bent, and otherwise refracted (and diffracted) light, how might we reconsider theoretical investigations (filmic, philosophical, etc.) that *rely exclusively on untroubled reflectivity*. yes, “clear” vision is secured by corrective measures in the eye (and elsewhere) but conversely sight is always multiply altered and realtered by transmedium movement of light.

there is an embedded conceptual tension in refraction between *lucidity* and *degradation*

“as it is” --> the object is always troubled by obscuration

***things do not have fully determinate boundaries or properties. things happen ‘in’ and ‘by’ encounter--refraction is one critical mode of encounter

object is altered by *scale* and *encounter* (through refraction)
--> “empirical perspective” : the *altered scale* also allows the object to reveal its specificity, its particularity; boundaries are rendered indeterminate and exist only to the extent that they are continually enacted.

(Hayward > Barad:)
Phenomena do not merely mark the epistemological inseparability of “observer” and “observed”; rather, phenomena are the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting ‘components.’ That is, phenomena are ontologically primitive relations--relations without preexisting relata. [*relatum: one of the objects between which a relation is said to hold. *relata: would-be antecedent (tabar تبار) components of relations.]


reverie of reflectivity =/= refraction (--> makes explicit transforms the tendency of the image to orient representation, foregrounding the threaded visual space between the image and the spectator.)

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

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

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

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


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



the xeno-sensual in the ajayeb
different differences that are sensed a[...]

[...]is not an end product, rather an active factor in further materializations
(*** matter materializes ***)
matter's ongoing historicity

precise causal nature of productive practices ==> differential constitutions are marked


ajayeb: a host of material-discursive forces

*for ajayeb i need to rework notions of:
•discursive practices
•materialization
•agency
•causality
*without:
•resorting to the optics of transparency
•the geometric of absolute exteriority or interiority
•theorization of human as either pure cause or pure effect


*any entity's ontology (its cast identity) is always open for future's reworkings* (Barad)


adding a Greek fused syntactical molding to the individual, ‘trans-’ is not enough, we have to make the postulation of individuality unthinkable, and that needs work
{how to make things unthinkable? not available to think with. what should be an “unthinkable” theory of relations?}

(Descartes's epistemology --> representationalist structure of words, knowers, and things)--> transparency of measurement (transparency of language) =/= Bohr's epistemological framework (after his empirical findings of an inherent discontinuity in measurement ----%> wave-particle duality paradox) ~-> Barad's “causal relationship between specific exclusionary practices embodied as specific material configurations of the world [~= discursive practices, (con)figurations rather than “words"] and specific material phenomena [~= relations rather than “things"]”

(*)position (~ specific physical arguments, [=/= well-defined abstract concepts, inherit attribute of independently existing objects]---> go to critique of ‘positionality’)
“position” only has meaning when a rigid apparatus with fixed parts is used (for example a ruler is nailed to a fixed table in the laboratory ==> establishing a fixed frame of reference for specifying “position.”) --> any measurement of “position” using this apparatus cannot be attributed to some abstract independently existing “object” but rather is a property of the ‘phenomenon’ : ***the inseparability of “observed object” and “agencies of observation”***
--> simultaneous indeterminacy of “position” and “momentum” [*momentum*: material arrangement involving movable parts] [--> deconstructing the material exclusion of “position” and “momentum"]

(*)phenomena: primary epistemological unit, the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting “components” (Barad); ontologically primitive relations; relations without preexisting ‘relata’(~= mutual ontological dependencies =/= independent entities)
•(specific) intra-action ==> relata-within-phenomena
•(specific) agential intra-action ==> boundaries and properties of components of phenomena become determinate }~= phenomena
(*)apparat[...]

[...]b-Iranian illuminated manuscripts as to be reading a paper in ecology or molecular biology or art.

unlike Alex Arteaga's question of “inevitable altruism” {started from “conscious human subjects” and ended there} (in his talk 30.05.2017 apass,) I would insist on giving an account of the metaphors of ‘self’ in the history of body and mind (that matters to ‘you’) [my findings of self: maginc lantern, iceberg's tip (==> unconsciousness), wasteland/wilderness, greedy beast within, ... {--> these are all (classical) basis for “higher” cognitive capacities}] [also I am against Alex's notion of “destablizing stabilities as the task of artistic research.” I choose to refuse to put what is in flux against what is stable or attempting to stabilize. (I am in alignment with Katie King sharpening for me that) we constantly share our stage, settings, performances, sensoria, reenactments among agencies and species, creating varying stabilities, some fragile, some robust]
*account--synonymous with: description, information, list, reason, record, statement, story, sum, tale
-a contractual relationship
-giving an itemized account of recent transactions and resulting balance (of your metaphors = material-discursive apparatuses that are materializing your found empirical objects)
-accountability is always also about remaking those relations that produced your objects
-detailed explanation of money held in trust, to count, enumerate* -->{telling =? enumerating}
counting your senses
*accountability is about your ‘import’ functions (like in a programming language when you import a library of functions)
 --> count: an agent of sorting that separates units or groups of a collection --> list, listed --> to have importance and worth ~-> country ---{? unexpected countries}
 --0--> ‘count’ is also a word technologically tethered, origin of computing


(Kirksey > Leigh Star) to begin with the question, ‘cui bono?’ (for whose benefit?) =/= to begin with a celebration of the fact of human/nonhuman mingling

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

my Rigs diagrams are ‘swarms’? -a multitude of different creative agents
ajayeb.net (how can it be:) not a website but a “para-site”
•am i creating an ego (for ajayeb) in my ajayeb.net? if yes, that would be interesting how?

topos/topic of hypertext, spatial character of electronic writing
topic [from Greek ‘topos’: a place, in ancient rhetoric used to refer to commonplaces, conventional units, or methods of thought] exist in a writing space that is not only a visual surface but also a data structure in the computer --> Hypertext: “is not the writing of a place, but rather a writing with places, spatially realized topics.” (Bolter < Hubert)
-in my hypertext, which writing materials, cognitive mappings, itineraries of reading, textual stability, loops and reductions are addressed?

•i[...]

[...]umental to their own salvation [! in a weird way i also did this to my self] #becoming woman-->{a liquefying aspect: “womanhood” was used metaphorically to identify those who could not preach, the surrender of (male) authority to God by men was “female”
•inhibiting woman's prophetic agencies
•“lack of discipline” becomes discipline --!--> forms of discipline that appear “undisciplined” or out of control

(Katie King > Mack:) “Quakers not only bathed in a sea of polymorphous sipritual nature and eroticism; they occasionally wrote as if they had succeeded in floating above gender altogether”

“going naked as a sign” (and Quaker's “plain style”) --> Tasavof, ajayeb, and communication strategies of the so-called new science of the same time (of Quakers)
‘nakedness’ was simultaneously literally his own, a figure of the world, an example of many others, the abstract principle, and the essential truth of the one addressed
-simplicity, economy, and plainness; to reject all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style


preferring language of artisans, countrymen, merchants, of wits and scholars


How sin is strengthened 1657
Milk for babes 1661
A message from the spirit of truth 1658


realized eschatology

انا الحق, an-al-hagh
(Damrosch:) the performance of the sign thus entailed a doubly negative aspect: in the person exhibiting it, a conviction of fulfilling a divine mandate in opposition to personal self-interest; and in those who witnessed it, an offense to ordinary social standards that actually served to authenticate it.
*the function of the sign was to bear prophetic witness rather than to get practical results; it fulfilled its purpose simply by being performed*
#shath, shathiat ==> tazkirat, --->{ what the saints of Tasavof (reported by Attar-{his “virtual witnessing” of “awliya” اولیا as a “realized"}, Quakers [as illegal nonconformist sect]) put together was their own writing technology infrastructure** ==> **routinization of charisma** <-- organizational structure ["advices and queries” نفحات الانس nafahat ~-> rationalized systematic intellectualizations]}

pattern of suffering that the believer literally and personally relives
(is Tasavof developed Christian modality of sacrifice? is *passivity imported from elsewhere in Islam*?)
a protagonist, like San'an, like an actor in a mystery play, enacting in a deliberately challenging form, internalized and lived as a potent sign

(Bechwith:) rendered performance of religious materials both practically impossible and conceptually unthinkable
+ exercises their discipline of the senses and the imagination
*undisciplined loss of control in enthusiasm and in this extravagant example*


(stories of) a small group of powerful and v[...]

[...]

(often with animals) the affective differentiation ==(basis of)==> (an essentially) moral economy


cheerfulness is the most communicative of emotions (♥ Ahmed)

(Ahmed's take on) loving (happily): knowing the peculiarity of a loved other's likes and dislikes, an intimacy with what the other likes and is given --> on conditions that such likes do not take us outside a *shared horizon*


***who/what introduces what feelings to whom?***

‘question of power' = do you go along with it?

sometimes the Iranian orientation is toward maximal comfort of the others
(maintaining) ‘comfort' = (your or some) bodies “go along with it”


bond-->{ affect ==> we search for an object }


...certain objects already circulate as socila goods before we “happen” upon them --> we do not just find happy objects anywhere (--> how happy objects are found in Tasavof? located, lost, transported, sold, advertised, criticized, etc.) *happy objects point us somewhere, a “where” from which we expect so much (--> happy objects of Tasavof [or HOT] {Qur'an, khezr, woman, poetry, .../ قرآن / خضر / زن / شعر}-->their sense of values, practice, styles, and aspirations; where do they point Iranians? beyond, Zolmat, animal, shadow, everyday objects, etc. what are the feelings involving the “points” of alignment wuth these objects?) ~~--> relocation of expectations:
•from beyond to earth
•from global to local
•from future to now
•

in situations where feelings are shared or are in common (which is usually the case in the environments that I am involved with,) how do I usually play a role? ==> (re)location of responsibility

self-exclusion

to make Iran or India or Germany happy “in bed”

(@Sina) *what ever there is in the hear and now, it does not mean you do not have to rebel or not get into trouble.

idiosyncratic likes (or dislikes) =/= jouissance

Ahmed reading many narratives of freedom, in which an indifference is “directed” as the apparent gift of freedom (, father becomes indifferent to what her daughter does as long as it makes her happy) --> the unhappy objects of difference

fantasies of proximity (in sense8 TV series) --> if only we could be closer, we would be as one
the happiness of the characters of sense8 is the promise of “the one”

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

how to learn to read the discursive practices of being of ajayeb? the ways each being proposes its own (or another's) changing geometry and topology, their boundary-drawing practices, their differential productions, and how each being makes sense of its world
-(the authors and beings of ajayeb,) what are their capacity to discern the reality of their (relational) nature?
-how their det[...]

[...]ildhood and strangely satisfying, like a loop i had to make, *an emotive-agentive place i had to check in with* --?--> Janina + Sina forms of belonging
(sometimes that place is a fully-invested connection and weighted, like home)
***forms of belonging: tactile + full of force + tentative + risky /--{"+” : are, and, yet}
--> an ecology of paths that matter by means of the things that happen in a present in which we are *lost yet attuned*

--> all the ways that people and things venture out into reals [my mother, Sina, Janina, ...]


[*]town: currents of difference, affiliation, history, ordinary dullness and comforts, characters and their stories


psyching out ethnicity


(my old attunement:) the fear of cockroaches

the miracle mile of computer technology

the elitism of the historical societies

localness nests in:
•tastes
•bodies
•neigborhoods
•a valley
•a state
•a geographical region


“in each scene of the production of history there are events that are storied or otherwise pulled into play” (Stewart)

Stewart on salem witch trials
the accusations spiraled through families, catching people up like magnetic strips
“wicked little sorceries” -->{jumpy moments that suddenly lay the charge of a half-known intensity onto ordinary people and roads, regionality becomes a wicked little sorcery. a vortex that pulls possible forms into life into a moment's alignment}, {the adjective ‘wicked’ marking *excess* of all kinds}
astrology
fortune-telling
*an attunement to specters*
-a farmer admitted getting into ‘the snare of the devil’ because he had a large family and ‘the world went hard with him.’


robustness in cold weather


[title]
making of edges and scenes in ajayeb

character or texture of an edge

(ajayeb is made of elements that were) a thing sensed with certainty (yet made up of a shifting, edgy composite)
[a sentient shadow called jinn, God, darkness of a pit, a cycle, etc.]
--or--> made scenic *as a site of a world's potential* (= ajayeb)
--the scene of a thing's demise

an edgy irruptive event

rules and edges are OK when separate, but together, a bad combination

(Karin + Sina + Hanno) we were humans together

--we adjust ourselves to the done deal that things happen--

(we find ourselve being) “from here” in a world made intimate through forgiveness, denial, detachment flowing in after a surge of something bad--a close call [Stewart]


*what are ajayeb's turns (and turn backs) to the inarticulate real?


hallucinogenically down-to-earth (Aela)


what are a[...]

[...]ce” or “soul” is human : they see themselves as human and others as animals
*to occupy a body = to have a perspective on the world*
•an intensive difference that carries the human/nonhuman difference to the inside of every existing thing --> there is no a priori reason for everything not being a subject [--> also Sadra]

[*]bodies:
•bundles of affect : collection of affects bundled into an unstable bodily form
•carrying out specific tasks
•sensing the world in particular way
•sharing capacities and habits with others in what keeps a body as it is and maintains its similarity to other bodies in a group
•coincident with subjectivity* --> you need a body to know
--> (particular differentiation of a body:) body ornaments, clothing, sex, and other so-called cultural markings are no different in kind from the so-called natural markers of bodily difference and capacity: ***clothes ~= claws ~= affects*** --> “sign and substance of capacities and dispositions” (Alberti > Hugh-Jones > Viveiros de Castro)
*marking, molding, painting, adorning, clothing, piercing, and otherwise working on body ~=> to fix a body ==> to stabilize an otherwise wildly unpredictable perspective and world*
*body surfaces of spirits and humans are often brilliant and intensely marked* --> excessive corporeality --> potency of the embodied subject: their “scale” [in timespace tey-ol-arz] as efficacious beings, dense with affective capacities, (the body that is marked with tey-ol-arz incites embodied subjects)--> *trap* (operates along scale) [sufi's termporal “scale” (in tey-ol-arz طی‌الارض) as her/his efficacious being, dense with affective capacities for Attar in Tazkirat al-Awliya (--> also relevant for pit-story #measurement) --> the figure of the moving sufi across scales of spacetime on geo, works as a trap precisely along this scale --> materialization of intensity and excess ==> humanity]
* bodies ~= artefacts : sites of subjectivity *

*soul: the capacity to transform: a matter of chaning bodies

dead --> ancestor
(transformation is an ontological event: “-->”), @Hoda
for Wari to have a soul is a sign of danger, a sign that some transformation (of perspective) is imminent []

ajayeb is full of stories of instability: one's soul is always vulnerable to ontological predation by another spirit or person ==> one's perspective can always change


“correspond” is keyword in working with ontologies : ‘interpretations correspond with stable ontologies’


(this we must take things as -->) ontological =/= analogical (<-- representation of a world, an ego, etc.)

how to approach (iranian miniatur and) miniaturization?
miniaturization have powerful and often unsettling (because paradoxical) cognitive and perceptual effects* --> these effects (in the case of figurines)[...]

[...]rwise working on body ~=> to fix a body ==> to stabilize an otherwise wildly unpredictable perspective and world*
*body surfaces of spirits and humans are often brilliant and intensely marked* --> excessive corporeality --> potency of the embodied subject: their “scale” [in timespace tey-ol-arz] as efficacious beings, dense with affective capacities, (the body that is marked with tey-ol-arz incites embodied subjects)--> *trap* (operates along scale) [sufi's termporal “scale” (in tey-ol-arz طی‌الارض) as her/his efficacious being, dense with affective capacities for Attar in Tazkirat al-Awliya (--> also relevant for pit-story #measurement) --> the figure of the moving sufi across scales of spacetime on geo, works as a trap precisely along this scale --> materialization of intensity and excess ==> humanity]
* bodies ~= artefacts : sites of subjectivity *

*soul: the capacity to transform: a matter of chaning bodies

dead --> ancestor
> (transformation is an ontological event: “-->”), @Hoda
for Wari to have a soul is a sign of danger, a sign that some transformation (of perspective) is imminent []

ajayeb is full of stories of instability: one's soul is always vulnerable to ontological predation by another spirit or person ==> one's perspective can always change


“correspond” is keyword in working with ontologies : ‘interpretations correspond with stable ontologies’


(this we must take things as -->) ontological =/= analogical (<-- representation of a world, an ego, etc.)

how to approach (iranian miniatur and) miniaturization?
miniaturization have powerful and often unsettling (because paradoxical) cognitive and perceptual effects* --> these effects (in the case of figurines) enable people to enter “other worlds” (to think, manipulate and influence)
(in figurines) all the senses are implicated ==> “perceptually explosive objects” (Bailey)
•onto-transformative effect of miniaturization
*anthropocentrism of the scale of the human --> default ontological scale, self-evident human-sized body (-->?! the little bike i gave Elen, did i propose that kind of critique?)
-which organs are emphasized in iranian miniature?
(organs of knowledge: eyes, ears, mouths, skin)
-properties of materials and their relationship to form only ever emerge relationally }--> how can i construct an approach for iranian miniatur, or radif in these terms
◦countors --> decomposes to the shape of horses
◦gold
◦fields
 --> and these forms emerged for people *who knew how to see it*
iranians experienced everything about the world as ‘...’ ? (جای خالی را پر کنید) --*-- the growth of children in an unreliable world نگرانی (#modalities of negarani)
inconstant and unreliable, continually threatening to transform ==> ontology involving matter[...]

[...] proliferating ajayebnameh, make belief in images, make thinking about kharej خارج, loving America, etc.]
}--> this was also why i couldn't think with Pierre's “other future” proposal; i am already living it


Alberti asks: will an ontological shift in scale reveal new ways of cenceptualizing the miniatures (the patterns)?

in Miyazaki the figure's size are part of an instantiation of scale rather than respond to an imposed scale
a scale must grow indiginously


Amazonian soul <~~--> harkat johari <~~--> tey-ol-arz طی‌الارض --> teleportation and tazkie nafs ?!
-designating a condition of transformability: all bodies contain the potential to transform into other bodies --> intrinsic capacity to be something else --> harkat johari حرکت جوهری
*tey-ol-arz --> intrinsic capacity to be somewhere else; [is tey-ol-arz in tasavof also about scale, body? (intensive difference) (condition of transformability is articulated in tey-ol-arz in terms of geo-temporal scale shift...)--> a moment of indiscernibility between “here” and “there” --> a super-divided being (intensive multiplicity) --> *(a specific form emerges:) a dynamic and intensive corporeality* (--> excessive intensity of all spirits) --> my argument is that tasavof is not the negation of body in favor of soul --> the key is not size or time but intensity or excess ==> to think tey-ol-arz: to think in many kinds of times, flesh, vulnerability, etc.]
tey-ol-arz metaphysics is based on the idea of a radical and infinite superposition of states: insides and outsides ~= heres and theres : are figures and ground to each other (--> #beyond)
--> there is no interior space to the body (~ there is no there/beyond to the body,) just an invisible body


#work on an exposure of work with tey-ol-arz with other interested artists
in Tehran, maybe in my parents house, informal space for opening a discussion in Farsi-English
(involve Pierre? where to get money?)
*campus: (a place where) new kinds of conversations are being invented in stabilized and social forms (sometimes departments, sometimes just research clusters)
i need to make that kind of mini-scale of quasi-organization between Tehran and Brussels: workshops, episodic and travel-mediated knots of practice


**(Alberti 2013 argues that) anything in the immediate, intimate vicinity of people can be subjectivized or personified through exchange and shared affects** --> an argument for ajayeb


‘to know a thing' = 'to subjectivize it’ : to add the maximum amount of intentionality to them (--> #equip them to talk well)


pots made to:
•to communicate (to an audience)
•to establish (relationships)
•to persuade (others of their point of view)

de-subjectivization: sometimes (objects) left deliberatel[...]

[...]ive knowledge =/= contingent foundations’ }--> nonrepresentational approach =/= over interpretation, abstraction

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

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


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

past continuously unfolding and therefore changing


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

archeological accounts of other's ontologies

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

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

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

reference to a “common world”

new animism ==> ontology becomes another name for culture

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

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

spirits experienced as diminutive yet brilliantly decorated or huge and grotesque

the more intense ==> the more body it is

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

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

(if) ontology: what is ==> alterity: part of what others say ‘what is’ that does not make sense to us


(the danger of) a new metaontological orthodoxy becoming a im[...]

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

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

reference to a “common world”

new animism ==> ontology becomes another name for culture

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

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

spirits experienced as diminutive yet brilliantly decorated or huge and grotesque

the more intense ==> the more body it is

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

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

(if) ontology: what is ==> alterity: part of what others say ‘what is’ that does not make sense to us


(the danger of) a new metaontological orthodoxy becoming a immutable metaphysic

archeological alterity: things that do not make sense ontologically (escape traditional frameworks)

archeology's new kind of reflexivity
•openness
•wonder: an intentional naivete, naive empiricism (==> sustain altering + enabling meaning, to be besieged & committed to ---> go to Cinderella =/= moving beyond)
•emphasis on descriptive =/= theoretical
•attentiveness to our embodied responses

(a question of critical ontology in archeology -->) how are we to mobilize & manifest (describe & transform) the new past from things? [<-- my question in my research on ajayeb]
•how i am subjectively involved in the past we investigate
•how i am objectively part of those pasts


the all encompassing (nonlinear) descriptive writings of ancient and antiquarian travelers --> what is encountered imposes itself ==force==> a choice ==> description
[...]

[...] source of analogies, critical ontology turns to animism for a source of theory

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

spirits experienced as diminutive yet brilliantly decorated or huge and grotesque

the more intense ==> the more body it is

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

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

(if) ontology: what is ==> alterity: part of what others say ‘what is’ that does not make sense to us


(the danger of) a new metaontological orthodoxy becoming a immutable metaphysic

archeological alterity: things that do not make sense ontologically (escape traditional frameworks)

archeology's new kind of reflexivity
•openness
•wonder: an intentional naivete, naive empiricism (==> sustain altering + enabling meaning, to be besieged & committed to ---> go to Cinderella =/= moving beyond)
•emphasis on descriptive =/= theoretical
•attentiveness to our embodied responses

(a question of critical ontology in archeology -->) how are we to mobilize & manifest (describe & transform) the new past from things? [<-- my question in my research on ajayeb]
•how i am subjectively involved in the past we investigate
•how i am objectively part of those pasts


the all encompassing (nonlinear) descriptive writings of ancient and antiquarian travelers --> what is encountered imposes itself ==force==> a choice ==> description

kinetic activity + the experience of being in the field

aesthetic attentiveness of bestiaries


pragmatic use of the word ontology in archeology --signal--> the potential world-shifting nature of what is being studied

to be ontological = entirety of the analytical apparatus and what is being studied should be included in the analysis
(caught up in the process:) the object of study + analytical scaffolding + method + analyst

the degree to which an approach is willing to do ontology to itself (investigate its own ontological assumptions)

metaphysical archeology + ontological anthropology --> perspective on reality


(assign things to preexisting conceptual structures =/=) looking for ways things can have an impact on your thinking, concepts, ontology ==> unlocking what is most “of the past” about things




[...]

[...]fference between then and now ==> you are confronted with a raw material of affect and concept =/= past artifacts as vehicle for complex belief systems] }==drive==>
•new sensorial experience
•new conceptual work
---> go to description, Stewart


coalescing of language & concept & ...


[*]drawing: (the effect of being) harassed by reality

to be harassed by ajayeb past people animals (struggling in their reality)
---> go to haunted, possession

[*]art: risk of something new

archeology --> intimate knowledge of materials (--> appealing to art, crafter attune to their material)

my lecture-performances = exploring how to make my knowledge present (to myself so it has a chance to be reconsidered) and how things (ajayeb past bestiary telegram animal) affect me and to *allow them to engender their own concepts and meanings*

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





(modern western) human: composed of cultural clothing that hides and controls an essentially animal nature =/= (amazonian) animals have a human sociocultural inner aspect that is “disguised” by an ostensibly bestial bodily form -->{ [subjective particularity of spirit and meaning ==>]*multinatural =/= multicultural*[<== objective universality of body and substance] }

-Viveiros de Castro's dichotomous argument leaves out other modes of knowing, those that i care and haunt for (and i am claimed by them) in specific mystic muslim theology and eastern bestiary (---> go to Marks)

Amerindian “people” : spiritual unity and a corporeal diversity

possessing a soul ==> having a point of view ==> being a subject

==> event = action
(action =/= expression of intentional states)

[*]object: incompletely interpreted subject

“a muddy waterhole is seen by tapirs as a great ceremoniremonial house”

(objectivist epistemology's) ‘to know' = to desubjectify, to make explicit the subject's partial presence in the object =/= (Amerindian shamanism epistemology's) ‘to know' = to personify, something that is always a someone

-the problem is that only the shaman and some rogue artists know how to personify. i want to personify Viveiros de Castro!)
-his rendition of objectification is insufficient and not specified (in which discipline by who and when how ---> go to Barad)
-[in contemporary performance art: “becoming animal” --> a modality of narcissistic ego-formation]

“perspectives should be kept separate. Only shamans, who are so to speak species-androgynous, can make perspectives communicate, and then only under special, controlled conditions.”

perspectivism: something is a fish only by virtue of someone else whose fish it is

(any) exchange: exchange of perspectives ==> 100 percent r[...]

[...]rmation]

“perspectives should be kept separate. Only shamans, who are so to speak species-androgynous, can make perspectives communicate, and then only under special, controlled conditions.”

perspectivism: something is a fish only by virtue of someone else whose fish it is

(any) exchange: exchange of perspectives ==> 100 percent relational universe ==> everything is primary fact (-then how would Viveiros de Castro explain deceive and lie? ---> go to Kohn)

multiculturalism --> relativism --> diversity of subjective and partial representations, each striving to grasp an external and unified nature

(different specificity of) bodies ==> perspectives

[*]affect: dispositions or capacities that render the body of each species unique ==> [*]body: assemblage of affects (ways of being) that constitute a habitus, bundle of affects and capacities

**humanity: a moral condition that excludes animals**
human-animal has a physical continuity [==> natural sciences] and a metaphysical discontinuity [==> humanities]

(what would be a *nonanimistic metaphysical continuity* between human-animal and other things? --> we need categorical mistakes and catachresis)

spirit/mind --> distinguisher (of cultures, species, etc.)
body --> connector (of material beings)

(Amerindian) spirit/mind =? reflexive form =/= immaterial inner substance

the neophenomenological appeal to the body as the site of subjective singularity
projects of “embodying” (the spirit) --?--> eliminative materialism

(culture: modern name for Spirit)

integration =/= *interspecific metamorphosis fact of nature* that understands bodies as inherent transformabilities, bodies as the great differentiators

integration cosmology --presume--> singular distinctiveness of minds ==> solipsism[= potentially absolute singularity of minds ==> fear that we will not recognize ourselves in our “own kind”; solipsism: ‘natural similarity of bodies =/=> a real community of spirit'] --multiculturalism--> spiritual: the locus of difference ==> theme of spiritual conversion
=/= bodily metamorphosis

(a traditional problem in the West:)
*how to connect and universalize*
individual substances are given, while relations have to be made
=/=
(Amerindian problem, and problem of ajayeb:)
*how to separate and particularize*
relations are given, while substances must be defined


transformation ==> nature <=/= creation
transference ==> culture <=/= invention

*culture = acculturation*
*exchange = transformation of a prior exchange event*
*to act = to response*

poiesis (creation/production/invention model of action ==> objectification: question of ‘documentation’ in art) =/= praxis (tra[...]