[...]logical skin) --into--> sensibility
•

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


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

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

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

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

the mice, and the pattern of rice, how did we become the reader of mice's text? --> reader is always always constructed.
the mice disconnected us from global digital networks and wrote something on the floor...
(which objects of our systems design supporting some and not others) leaving out what are locally perceived as “nonpeople” can mean nonworking system. (biologists not seeing their secretaries as doing real science, artists in apass not seeing the mice doing real work, etc.)
--> *(Leigh Star's) “ethnography of infrastructure”* -infrastructure is both relational and ecological, both transparent and opaque. it is part of the balance of action, tools, and the built environment. [*]infrastructure: a dense interwoven fabric of shared visions of possible and acceptable dreams (of the inovative, as techniques, knowledge, know-how, and the institutions).

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

my previous lectures have been communicating something I don't quite understand to an audience that doesn't want to know. but still somehow they became not i[...]

[...] [title]
ajayeb:
کاتب وحی kateb-e vahy
کاتب وحش kateb-e vahsh

کتاب وحی
کتاب وحش


pragmatism --> مصلحت maslahat (chi bayad goft) ==> alternative truth
less concerned with “reality” or good and bad


#project: an experiential field inquiry on how people think about randomness in Tehran.
what was the last little thing or a historical epoch-shaping event that they concider as random?

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

(in apass we use constantly) ghias قیاس, and not esteghra استقرا (inductive reasoning)
•استقرا inductive reasoning: X ~=> Y (can be strong or weak) --> epistemic uncertainty (generalizing or extrapolating from specific cases to general rules) [this is related to ‘hypothesis formation' = use of specific observations to make generalizations --(?being replaced by)--> discovery-based sciences, in which ‘hypothesis formation' = data-mining, analysis of (large volumes of) experimental data with the goal of finding new patterns or correlations, and further: machine learning and automated theorem proving }--replacing--> (ajayeb's kind of) “natural history” emerged in 16th century (<== describing and classifying plants, animals, minerals) which is becoming more about popular audiences]
•deductive reasoning: X ==> Y (is valid or invalid) --> کل به جزء (applying reductively general rules that hold over a closed domain of discourse)
•[artist's most used process of reasoning:] صغرى کبرى syllogistic reasoning (قیاس): X =/= Y ==> Z (or: some A are B, some B are C ==> some A are C [which is often wrong], nesbat dadan chizi az yek nafar be deigari نسبت دادن چیزی به دیگری) --> premise's pattern of distribution is the key (~ case)
•abductive conclusions: finding the simplest or most likely explanation for the observations [--> many forms of conclusions are due to the lack of time in the process of reasoning. when we give feedback (‘fast diagnosis’ [--> is that why Lacan is useful?]) in apass we have initially 2 minutes to make conclusions from observations, which later is deepened in the duration of block --> کلی گویی = making sense of what is going here in order to guess what is going on elsewhere]
•

(?am i learning about and moving my art into) formal sciences: language tools concerned with characterizing abstract structures described by sign systems ==> providing information/knowledge about the structures used to describe the world
-a formal logical system with its content targeted at the real things
-all their statements are analytic
=/= synthetic statements (propositions are true by how their meaning relates to the world)

‘natural sciences’ using tools from formal sciences and validated by ‘peer review' = refereeing = *the process of subjecting somebody else's work[...]

[...]>
descriptive practices of poetics and natural history


mission of all atlases to characterize (not simply inventory) phenomena
(to characterize, not invent; mixed in ajayebnameh عجایب‌المخلوقات / عجایب نامه?!)

atlases habituate the eye, they are perforce visual
(what ajayebnameh habituates? not the eye?)

to explicate rival cosmologies

one problem of atlases is that they have to decide what nature is
they all have to solve the problem of choice


atlases of characteristic images presented individual cases as exemplary and illustrative of broader classes and casual processes (but not ajayebnameh عجایب نامه, aj bring precise individual instances in its unique stories)


atlas(es) of(/for) the eye

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

[the identity of objects:]

Manuel Delanda: Any materialist philosophy must take as its point of departure the existence of a material world that is independent of our minds. But then it confronts the problem of the origin of the enduring identity of the inhabitants of that world: if the mind is not what gives identity to mountains and rivers, plants and animals, then what does? An old answer is “essences,” the answer given by Aristotle. But if one rejects essentialism then there is no choice but to answer the question like this: all objective entities are products of a historical process, that is, their identity is synthesized or produced as part of cosmological, geological, biological, or social history. This need for a concept of “synthesis” or of “production” is what attracted Marx to Hegelian dialectics since it provided him with a model of synthesis: a conflict of opposites or the negation of the negation. Deleuze and Guattari, on the other hand, replace that model of synthesis with what they call a “double articulation”: first, the raw materials that will make up a new entity must be selected and pre-processed; second, they must be consolidated into a whole with properties of its own. A rock like limestone or sandstone, for example, is first articulated though a process of sedimentation (the slow gathering and sorting of the pebbles that are the component parts of the rock). Then it is articulated a second time as the accumulated sediment is glued together by a process of cementation. They use Hjemslev's terms “content” and “expression” as the names for the two articulations, but this is not meant to suggest that the articulations are in any way linguistic in origin. On the contrary: the sounds, words, and grammatical patterns of a language are materials that accumulate or sediment historically, then they are consolidated by another process, like the standardization of a dialect by a Royal Academy and its official dictionaries, grammars, and rules of pronunciation.

(synthetic =/=? analytic; [a p[...]

[...]e, for example, is first articulated though a process of sedimentation (the slow gathering and sorting of the pebbles that are the component parts of the rock). Then it is articulated a second time as the accumulated sediment is glued together by a process of cementation. They use Hjemslev's terms “content” and “expression” as the names for the two articulations, but this is not meant to suggest that the articulations are in any way linguistic in origin. On the contrary: the sounds, words, and grammatical patterns of a language are materials that accumulate or sediment historically, then they are consolidated by another process, like the standardization of a dialect by a Royal Academy and its official dictionaries, grammars, and rules of pronunciation.

(synthetic =/=? analytic; [a problematic distinction!] the logical particle “un-” in “no unmarried man is married”) (analytic =/=? contingent)
(Kantian?!) ‘a priori and synthetic’ ==> ‘a posteriori analytic’

[singular entities:]

The question of the “individuation of trajectories” is about mathematical models (which to me are the secret of the success of science) but you are correct that it goes beyond that. All entities synthesized historically are individual entities: individual plants and animals; individual species and ecosystems; individual mountains, planets, solar systems, et cetera. Here “individual” means simply “singular or unique,” that is, not a particular member of a general category, but a unique entity that may compose larger individual entities through a relation of part-to-whole, like individual pebbles composing a larger individual rock. A materialist ontology of individual entities is implicit in Deleuze and Guattari and Braudel, so we must give them credit for that, then move on and invent the rest.


..rethinking of the disciplinary boundaries (without using labels such as interdisciplinarity, etc.)



we must take in mind that materialism is good to be enriched, but, materialism is not an ‘a priori’!

in my research in apass on ajayeb عجایب‌, can be theoretical yet anti-methodological?



...Marx is his interest in the oppressed, that is, his anti-Aristotlianism that allows us to conceptualize the self-organizing power of “matter” without the “meaning” that should overcode it.

Delanda: The political economy of Marx is entirely a priori.
[--Laclau--> essentialist conception of both society and social agency in Marxism <== holistic approache : a “founding totality” (expressed at the surface of social life) which presents itself as an intelligible object of ‘knowledge’ (in Marxism notion of ‘ideology’) =/= {relational character of any (social) identity + infinite play of differences}= discourse --> ‘the social’ always exceeds the limits of the attempts to constitute ‘society’;
& (in advanced capitalist societie[...]

[...]mposing

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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


(on ajayeb,) ***creating sticky new attachment sites for thinking (human/nonhuman relations)***
###learning multiple writing tactics:
•thick description
•refiguring
•reading against the grain
•citational poaching (shekar-e gheir-mojaz شکار غیر مجاز) (also,[...]

[...] 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 fiction
•
==> to move/draw myself and my reader into my matter of care


project of *narrative remediation*, to re-story, to stage matters of care differently

(biological) ‘resilience’ is a tricky thing to narrate in ‘relational worlds’ (=/= military world) abounding with transforming and transformative agencies***

to meet the future organisms that we are becoming (Hayward) --> stories that figure us as: {constituted, contaminated, vulnerable, agential, creative, expressive,}--> all at the same time; (how to hold them all together?)

(Stryker > Haraway > Hayward > Kenney > Sina > Cinderella)
***so much that constitutes me I did not choose, but, now constituted, I feel myself in a place of agency*** ----> (my) ontological obligation {ontology: what there is and what debts we owe to it}--> *involutionary storytelling* (~/->? involuntary storytelling)

--> lives, affects, and bodies of organisms: “energetic forces, coe[...]

[...] 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?”

“rejecting the linguisticality of experience (according to which every culture lives in its own world) leads to a conception of a shared human experience in which the variation comes not from differences in sign[...]

[...]ocial: comprised of entities that are both present and absent (==> ajayeb), atmospheres, affects, virtual memories, hauntings, and that these are themselves moments of endurance (or not?), instants of the holding together of the disparate itself
(Stewart > Doel)


[!* Stewart describing the color] *red: “it moves through streams and tendrils into an associational register of connections and differences, materials and noumena وجود مجرد, the coagulation دلمه شدن and diffusions of lines of influence and bits of matter.”
(in my visual art studies we were given redness as a symbolic element in a representational order and a matter-of-fact) =/= state-of-sensory-alert, redness as an actual composition spun into representations, objects, and states of sensory alert
“[...] a germinal aesthetic. a tendril of practices and sensibilities gathered into an energetics of form
•black sky and ocean --> limit, outline, elemental flux, matter waiting formlessly
•white ice and snow --> stasis, shape and form, a blankness that challenges composition, the transitoriness
•red --> the feebly real, the long, low-frequency wave-lenght of the dying stars, the past, the effort to fix dead reality in a cast *
•green --> plants that glare with a harsh reality, the violence at the heart of the world we inhabite
•blue --> a limited, temporary success in fixing experience in a pattern
•


a landscape animated by the primariness of color =/= Molenbeek

american indians became “red” through a complex semiotics of encounters with colonists


...who knows what kinds of desires, fears and dead ends

(pay attention to Stewart list making narrative:)
events, sites, actors, stakes, consequences, properties, competences, modalities, attunements, velocities


... a world ==> ephemeral sparks ==> an atmosphere ==pulled==> qualities of sociality, personality and language out of people [--> ajayeb] ==created==> spaces of care, territoriality, order, horror


the stark mantras of representational critique: that the play of abstract categories (real/fabricated, nature/human habitat, wild/tame, red/white, high/low, etc.) bloodlessly determine worlds or adequately describe them ==> { everything is political = to always know what the political is }--> ‘political’ : something that exists in the big picture of broader significance, something strongly obvious (but not to most people!) that meanings can be automatically assigned to things and are the basis of those things’ value -->!@Ali

the effect of context

matters of composition, each with a “we”:
•feeble نحيف
•experimental
•eccentric --> Elen
•habitual --> my mother
•generous
•gestural -->
•half turned away
•reached the expressivity o[...]

[...]
commenting and making alliances across space-time with other figures


_[audience and markets]_
audience polyphony
audience and markets shift and converge in [flexible knowledges] complex address of multiple audiences, in that contradictory nest of niche political and epistemological “markets”
(**the story of the ‘interactive’:) “rich contradictory nestings permit an require visitors to select among possible salient narratives by animating differently layers of locals and globals”


to call oneself in and out of allience and its classifications, that *momentary universalism* shades into other ranges of affiliation and disaffiliation (*)

[...] --> [ ? ] --> salience --> tangible --> literal --> experimental

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

conceptualize the intensities of form and force
affect studies has made me feel less alone because before it




There are [always] other epic and epochal forces in our midst.

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

evil eye --> دیو چشم زخم --> غش --> اغشی

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

باغ plethora of old and new humanities, selves - with Sardar: There are plants that provide various colors of foliage, or hedges and borders, or climb up fences, or play architectural roles (=/= presumption that we must have a identity & supposition that we discover our identity & the Socratic “know thyself” as a fundamental human urge) we exist with multiple identities invoked differently in different context. subscribed to an imagined “heritage” ready to kill and be killed to save some “essence” (=/= San'an)
sake of the difference, scum and finest of men
(for example “black”: to be confused: once excluded, now technically empowered, a dominant group in the rainbow, but still practically marginalised by the history that created and continues to operate pract practical exclusion.)
@Iranians: how much of the Other is actually located within me?
“a perfectly permissible aspiration” --into--> “an instrument of war” (Maalouf)
British identity is based on an assumption of authority that makes the world a familiar place, a proper theatre in which to continue being British. #Olearius
exclude the (unsavoury) foreigners <==> romanticised history and frozen tradition
*history as a deliberate human creation ==> acknowledgement of a common past ==> (a difference called) identity [= “our” similarity against “their” difference,] (submerging, barbarising and differentiating itself from another identity) [for example ancient Greece + Rome + Christianity = Europe] ==> monolith ==> conflict and death
•my (jub جوب) gutter photos =/= Tehran's Americanization of the high street.
•my photos of Rima =/= her selfie's merchandised model of individualism
a deep desire for association
various and d[...]

[...]y seek to describe without being too concerned about accounting for it analytically [--> not accouting for the analyticallity of their objects?]
Lamarck --> (thinks of life in terms of) *duration*
Darwin --> (thinks of life in terms of) *interdependence*

Darwin's biogeographical environment =/=? Lamarck's environment


Humboldt (and Ritter) --> (19th century) geography: a science conscious of its method and its dignity
(naturalist traveler -->) *Humboldt's “Kosmos” [~ synthesis of knowledge, not aiming to be encyclopedic, but strives ***to arrive at an intuition of the universe***] combining:
•(“oikoumene” tradition of Greek geography:) *the science of the entire human world* [--> ajayeb]
•(“mathematical geography” founded by Eratosthenes, Hipparchus, Ptolemy:) *the science of coordination of human space in relation with the celectial configuration and movements* [--> Olearius]
}==> Earth [considered as a whole]: (stable support for the) *فراز و نشيب vicissitude of history* --> ‘terrestrial space + its configurations’ : object of geographical, geological, sociological, biological knowledge
(Humboldt) applied a whole system of barometric, thermometric in his investigation. *division of plants* according to different climates ==> “botanical geography” & “zoological geography”

history of the Weltanschauung

*****how Humboldt (and Ritter, [even Simondon does that too]) apply the *category of totality* to their object --> the relations between historical man and the environment ==> *determination of historical relationships*

the relations between the geographical environment and man ==> a spirit
(-->) *doing history*: reading a map, understanding by map the representation of a set of metrical, geodesic, geological, climatological, and descriptive biogeographical data


Loeb + Watson (phototropism in animals):
every movement of the organism in the environment = a movement into which the environment forces the organism ==> **animal = reflex** <-->{Darwinism + Cartesianism ==> behaviorist psychology*}
(Watson:) [*]psychology: program of the analytical investigation of the ‘stimulus-response couple'[= conditions of the living being's adaptation to the environment through the experimental production of relations between stimulation and response] (<-- one of physical determinism) ==> consciousness nullified as illusory
(the living being's situation:) “its being = a conditioning” (--> as artists we still have to deal with this idea or image, it is about the reality the artist receives and what they make of it)


process of reduction:
(ajayeb --to-->) biology --to--> behavior --to--> neurology --to--> energetics (--to--> electronics)

the perfect work of behaviorist psychology: construct man as a machine reacting to machines
<[...]

[...]=> male control of reproduction in human families

cereal domesticated human
in the near east a shift towards gathering multiple small-grain grasses is associated with the 10000 years before domestication
focus on landscape --to--> focus on crops


across Eurasia the rise of state (and their specialised civilization) is associated with the spread of intensive cereal agriculture
(Tsing > Connor)

a political configuration:
states encouraged sedentary, stable farms, family-based households, and guaranteed the forms of family property and inheritance (that drew lines within and between families) ==> both women and grain confined and managed to maximise fertility
--Engels--> interspecies love affair

it was in the 19th century that standardization became itself the “modern standard”


[*]plantation: ordered cropping systems worked by non-owners and arranged for expansion
> ==>
•deepen domestication
•reintensifying plant dependencies
•forcing fertility

superaboundance of a single crop (without the ‘love’ [connector romance of people, plant, place] that was key in state-endorsed cereal agriculture)
(in plantation) the plants were exotic and labor was coerced slavery

only with **hierarchy and managed antagonism** in place enormous profits (+ complementary poverty) could be produced

plantation produced the wealth and the modus operandi that allowed Europeans to take over the world

(not technologies and resources, rather) *plantation system made the navies, science, and industrialization possible*

taking the alienation of people (from their crops) for granted

==> human subspecies were formulated and enforced : biology came to signify the difference between free “owner” and coerced “labor” --> racial divisions were produced and reproduced in each each dowered marriage and inheritance

-poor families needed more labor, particularly where child labor kept many adults alive
-privileged families were charged with the advancements of the race, women must bear its heirs --> late 19th century discourse of scientific hygiene and eugenics اصلاح نژاد informed white women's species segregation

{ boundaries of home = boundaries of love }--> fetishization of the home as the space of purity and interdependence ==> extra-domestic intimacies (within/between species) =
•archaic fantasies (the community, small farmer, etc.)
•passing affairs (feminism, animal rights, etc. )
+
outside the home = domain of economic rationality and conflicting individual interests

--> mid 20th century allowed other species accepted: pets are models for family devotion. but the model of the loving and the beloved pet does not spread love; it holds tight inside the family (-Tsin[...]

[...]methods to focus on those behaviors that are most meaningful to the animals themselves
•Shirly Strum --> I tried to let the baboons themselves “tell” me what was ‘important’ (-how a tree can tell you what is important to them?) -with the baboonss: nothing made them believe that she could be a baboon, so she decided after a while that she could try to urinate while staying among the baboons ==> surprise (=/= trying not to disturb the baboons with her body) --> her body (style, gender, smell, look, anime, etc.) made her enter into relationships with the animals in a new mode, **as a living person (like them) she creates with them an embodied proximity** (==> embodied affinities) [<-- Jassem is very good at it. this happens as well in apass research environment between artists]
  ---> go to Cinderella taking shower with her birds in the attic {urine, noise, surprise}
•Mark Bekoff --> empathy: possibility of sharing feelings involves mirror neurons (“I can feel the animals”) ~= (an experiment to incorporate) *to embody literally*
+ (Burghardt's) use of *critical anthropomorphism* (=/= Walt Disney) use of various forms of information (natural history, perception, behavioural description, autism, Cinderella, etc.)
•Temple Grandin (expert in factory plants for slaughter systems) --> *empathy without pathos* (for her and the animals) [*]world: a swirling mass of tiny details ~ [animal: autistic savant ~= special form of genius]--> a little plastic water bottle lying harmlessly, a shiny reflection, a yellow jacket hanging on a fence, all those turn out to be in their world *wrong details* (“I think the way animals think”) --> ****animals are visual thinkers**** {*you have to see in details*_ <-- how my work changed visually from abstract to baroque while working on the heritage of zoology. #Cinderella: which part of me animals give new powers and meanings? that part is of other beings}
-{Grandin actively transforms mindless animals into meaningful geniuses ==> gives them new powers ==> changes her}--> *animals (or your ghosts, your subjects) are invited to other modes of being, other relationships, new ways to inhabit the human world + to force human beings to address them differently : **disclosing unexpected affinities ==create==> new identities** (=/= empathy: tourism of the soul) --> identities do not pre-exist identification : *****previous construction of affinities ==> identity (is the outcome, the achievement)*****
(Grandin:) *marginal essence --transform--> partial perspective ==> affinities: (Haraway's) just-barely-connections*

}=/= romanticism: the belief that “feeling for another” belongs to some sort of naive state of nature


(#feedback: ways of showing the artists how they actively create the perspective that allows them to “see” --> ‘giving artistic feedback = being an anthropologist on Mars’)

Despret anticipate finding some references to the bo[...]

[...]ill baptize you with fire. (the Old Believers)


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

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

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



The Paleozoic was a time of dramatic geological, climatic, and evolutionary change. The Cambrian Period witnessed the most rapid and widespread diversification of life in Earth's history, known as the Cambrian explosion, in which most modern phyla first appeared. Fish, arthropods, amphibians, anapsida, synapsida, euryapsida and diapsida all evolved during the Paleozoic. Life began in the ocean but eventually transitioned onto land, and by the late Paleozoic, it was dominated by various forms of organisms. Great forests of primitive plants covered the continents, many of which formed the coal beds of Europe and eastern North America. Towards the end of the era, large, sophisticated diapsida and synapsida were dominant and the first modern plants (conifers) appeared.

The Paleozoic Era ended with the largest mass extinction in Earth's history, the Permian-Triassic extinction event. The effects of this catastrophe were so devastating that it took life on land 30 million years into the Mesozoic to recover.[4] Recovery of life in the sea may have been much faster.[5]

[4] Sahney, S. & Benton, M.J. (2008). “Recovery from the most profound mass extinction of all time” (PDF). Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological. 275 (1636): 759-65. doi:10.1098/rspb.2007.1370. PMC 2596898free to read. PMID 18198148.
[5] http://www.economist.com/node/16524904 The Economist



not a naturalistic schema of the geometry of hot point, nor a geometric schema of naturalistic fire.



i am loosening the tight axiom of relation of A<-->B, something other than the predecessor-successor or cause-effect pair (--> this order of structure is coming from greek geometric,) i am trying an unordered order-of-reason that is more reflexive, symmetric, and intransitive. (in the San'an text, the construction of the text represents each chain incomplete and displaced.)



greet and grid you

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

a word on anxiety*

For Kierkegaard and Heidegger, anxiety deals with “nothingness.” It is a breakdown of both world and self. For Goldstein, the drive to overcome anxiety by the conquest [...]

[...] a mass of hydrogen atoms accumulated into a dense point of critical state. As a result of this formation new fusions released many sip-offs of different energies and materials which we perceive today in our bodies and in the light that reaches our eyeballs from the time immemorial of that hydrogen cloud. This fossil of materiality implies the existence of traces of an ancient reality before the existence of the familiar--the terrestrial life. While these traces are gauged in theoretical experiments in which radioactive ratios of nuclides inform us of such ancestral events, in Amerindian cosmogonies not so differently steered hypothesis are explored. Yawanawa, the origin myth of the people of Pano from the western Amazon, imagines the anterior of the world where nothing existed, yet there only people existed--everything was made of people. Before the diversification and classification of kinds there was a primordial human, as the only substance of which everything eventually fabricated.

Like Yawanawa, Hayula (Persian: هیولا) literally in today's usage with the meaning of unformed monster, is a technical term in Iranian-Islamic cosmology indicating the first principle of everything material of which all other constitutive layers of beings are molded--minerals, plants, animals, etc. Hayula in one hand locates the lowest of the lowest, the bottom of the scalar existence where God resides at the very top, and on the other hand possesses a great anatomical plasticity, a persistent pre-cosmological being that undermines the second law of thermodynamic. First were the object then came the subject--to give away to the results of the stabilization of the infinite potential for transformation contained in Hayula, as universal substance, a matter out of which the world could have come to be formed.

The narratives of the time before form, an era of pre-cosmological beings, primordial people with unlimited and unbound corporeality, is the story of the originality of Hayula's virtual potential for being. Hayula, not fully human, tasting beyond morality (destruction, anthropophagy, etc.), becomes the subjects of other interventions and morphs into spheres and features of the world--of biological aspects, celestial bodies, humanoid zones, etc.

The realm of Hayula comes to interpret, and thus permit and strain, who and how an I can be, at the same time that it provides the vessel for the continuity, the survival, of that I. Here the I is the continuity of an inhabitation of a point of view. It marks a relative position within a hierarchical logic that spans the cosmos, a hierarchy that ranges from the nonhuman to the human realm and from the demons to the realm of the formless. Following the classic joke, that one goes to a place in order to discover the directions of how to keep out of that place, this project proposal suggests to explore the Hayula's experience of self and how it incorporates destabilizing its, which [...]

[...]al aspects, celestial bodies, humanoid zones, etc.

The realm of Hayula comes to interpret, and thus permit and strain, who and how an I can be, at the same time that it provides the vessel for the continuity, the survival, of that I. Here the I is the continuity of an inhabitation of a point of view. It marks a relative position within a hierarchical logic that spans the cosmos, a hierarchy that ranges from the nonhuman to the human realm and from the demons to the realm of the formless. Following the classic joke, that one goes to a place in order to discover the directions of how to keep out of that place, this project proposal suggests to explore the Hayula's experience of self and how it incorporates destabilizing its, which might permit or prohibit seeing beyond its conditions.

In another level of description we will look at the concept of Hayula as a device in cross-catalytic relations in matter-energy flows, looking at it as a semi metaphorical and physical nonlinear model for structure-generating processes that populate our world. How attractors and transistors consolidated different energy flows of certain intensities to gain access to self-organization? The energy trapped in winds and currents, atmosphere and hydrosphere, solar energy that plants capture through photosynthesis, has clocked societies for centuries and gave them rhythm. A small fraction of a plant life that has powered most of civilization's past intensifications. Enormous reservoir of oceanic and atmospheric energy fuels a great variety of self-organized structures: tornadoes, cyclones, pressure blocks, and, more importantly for human history, wind circuits. These forms of spontaneous structural generation suggest that inorganic matter is much more variable and creative than we ever imagined.



[...]

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

(Wietske Maas)

materiality that is specific to the eye

similar to a plant, the eye is not a simple aperture to absorb light, but a filter to mitigate external stimuli.

unveil vision as a process of chemical contamination and digestion stemming from plants. vision is rooted in the materiality of digestion.

the human eye is an organ complicit with plant photosynthesis.

in fact, seeing is a process of photosynthesis. as much as plant photosynthesis absorbs excessive light and turns it into the carbon structures of sugar molecules, the human eye has to mitigate light and turn it into the neural structure of vision, cognition, and memory. in this process the eye protects itself from the corruptive metabolism of light, tapping into some ancestral mechanism shared with plants.

if human eye protects itself like a plant, we can think of photosynthesis itself as a sort of primeval organ of vision spread out across the skin of the vegetable kingdom.

material commonality (worth explori[...]

[...]n cross-catalytic relations in matter-energy flows, looking at it as a semi metaphorical and physical nonlinear model for structure-generating processes that populate our world. How attractors and transistors consolidated different energy flows of certain intensities to gain access to self-organization? The energy trapped in winds and currents, atmosphere and hydrosphere, solar energy that plants capture through photosynthesis, has clocked societies for centuries and gave them rhythm. A small fraction of a plant life that has powered most of civilization's past intensifications. Enormous reservoir of oceanic and atmospheric energy fuels a great variety of self-organized structures: tornadoes, cyclones, pressure blocks, and, more importantly for human history, wind circuits. These forms of spontaneous structural generation suggest that inorganic matter is much more variable and creative than we ever imagined.



[...]

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


> (Wietske Maas)

materiality that is specific to the eye

similar to a plant, the eye is not a simple aperture to absorb light, but a filter to mitigate external stimuli.

unveil vision as a process of chemical contamination and digestion stemming from plants. vision is rooted in the materiality of digestion.

the human eye is an organ complicit with plant photosynthesis.

in fact, seeing is a process of photosynthesis. as much as plant photosynthesis absorbs excessive light and turns it into the carbon structures of sugar molecules, the human eye has to mitigate light and turn it into the neural structure of vision, cognition, and memory. in this process the eye protects itself from the corruptive metabolism of light, tapping into some ancestral mechanism shared with plants.

if human eye protects itself like a plant, we can think of photosynthesis itself as a sort of primeval organ of vision spread out acros across the skin of the vegetable kingdom.

material commonality (worth exploring)

incarnate an external organ of vision

our tie with the general metabolism of light

correlations between human vision and the organic world

using a technique to record the surface of reality or using to reveal the internal chemical composition of matter

in the chromatogram, a light reaction reveals the inner chemistry and transforms matter composition into visual patterns

different regime of visibility
light is not just a stream of waves to be passively refracted and recorded but an active and autonomous medium of image-making

mineral kingdom -- forces that drive the becoming of both organic and inorganic matter

drive to formation (Bildungstrieb)

“Runge's willingness to attribute a life force to chemicals is a continuation of Romantic natural philosoph[...]

[...]zation's past intensifications. Enormous reservoir of oceanic and atmospheric energy fuels a great variety of self-organized structures: tornadoes, cyclones, pressure blocks, and, more importantly for human history, wind circuits. These forms of spontaneous structural generation suggest that inorganic matter is much more variable and creative than we ever imagined.



[...]

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

(Wietske Maas)

materiality that is specific to the eye

similar to a plant, the eye is not a simple aperture to absorb light, but a filter to mitigate external stimuli.

unveil vision as a process of chemical contamination and digestion stemming from plants. vision is rooted in the materiality of digestion.

the human eye is an organ complicit with plant photosynthesis.

in fact, seeing is a process of photosynthesis. as much as plant photosynthesis absorbs excessive light and turns it into the carbon structures of sugar molecules, the human eye has to mitigate light and turn it into the neural structure of vision, cognition, and memory. in this process the eye protects itself from the corruptive metabolism of light, tapping into some ancestral mechanism shared with plants.

if human eye protects itself like a plant, we can think of photosynthesis itself as a sort of primeval organ of vision spread out across the skin of the vegetable kingdom.

material commonality (worth exploring)

incarnate an external organ of vision

our tie with the general metabolism of light

correlations between human vision and the organic world

using a technique to record the surface of reality or using to reveal the internal chemical composition of matter

in the chromatogram, a light reaction reveals the inner chemistry and transforms matter composition into visual patterns
<br /> different regime of visibility
light is not just a stream of waves to be passively refracted and recorded but an active and autonomous medium of image-making

mineral kingdom -- forces that drive the becoming of both organic and inorganic matter

drive to formation (Bildungstrieb)

“Runge's willingness to attribute a life force to chemicals is a continuation of Romantic natural philosophy but meshed with Geothean morphology and experiment.” (Leslie)

chromatogram is an image, which discloses it's own bodily formation

here our focus should shift from the eye as a globular organ in the head of a vertebrate animal to the eye as an epidermic lens, a light-mitigating organ that attenuates the visceral contamination of radiation.

our inseparable alliance with plants

our eyes are immersed within a vegetative metabolism of a kind. we look at plants, but plants have already canniba[...]

[...]ate an external organ of vision

our tie with the general metabolism of light

correlations between human vision and the organic world

using a technique to record the surface of reality or using to reveal the internal chemical composition of matter

in the chromatogram, a light reaction reveals the inner chemistry and transforms matter composition into visual patterns

different regime of visibility
light is not just a stream of waves to be passively refracted and recorded but an active and autonomous medium of image-making

mineral kingdom -- forces that drive the becoming of both organic and inorganic matter

drive to formation (Bildungstrieb)

“Runge's willingness to attribute a life force to chemicals is a continuation of Romantic natural philosophy but meshed with Geothean morphology and experiment.” (Leslie)

chromatogram is an image, which discloses it's own bodily formation

here our focus should shift from the eye as a globular organ in the head of a vertebrate animal to the eye as an epidermic lens, a light-mitigating organ that attenuates the visceral contamination of radiation.

our inseparable alliance with plants

our eyes are immersed within a vegetative metabolism of a kind. we look at plants, but plants have already cannibalized our gaze as they become part of us looking back at them.


complex architecture of light:
plant photosynthesis is probably the most abused metaphor and analogy of life, widely quoted across a diverse spectrum of schools of thought to justify naturalist ideologies. it is believed that photosynthesis is behind a process of energy accumulation central to natural equilibrium and the food chain. however, there are various ways the process of light metabolism could be understood. it could also be understood as a process towards cosmic corruption and fermentation, or as a process towards more “complex architecture of light”.

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

[...]



(Ilana Halperin)

corporeal mineralogy

we are autobiographical trace fossils

what constitutes life in the world of geology?

microbes feasting on the mineral bodies of stones

more animal than mineral

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

big bang, first second of existence, second second, what is going on with the materiality

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

the dark matter, in Caecilian Kircher, we don't know what it is

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

[...]


[Gholam Hossein Rahimi + Abd Al-Rasul Emadi, 79113902605.pdf]

it is “proven” that location is not hayula (nor apparition)
hayula is anything that can have many faces [this is greek]

according[...]

[...] activities---coordinate and monitor compliance with central plans ==> internalization of antimarket institutions


the fully coexistence of the autocatalytic loops:
the digital / the energetic / the material
==> accumulation of hierarchical structures


are computers evolving in the direction of routinization?
-eroding the combinatorial richness of knowledge and making flows of information ever more sterile?


future turns out to belong to hierarchies?
-human history is a narrative of contingencies, not necessities, of missed opportunities to follow different routes of development, not of a nonlinear succession of ways to convert energy, matter, and information into cultural products.



[...]

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

the gene tells the flesh: “you are a human” or “you are a...”
**the flesh does not know any organs, continues pulsing to its own rhythms

(how to understand) activities of processes in other spheres of reality

living creatures and their inorganic counterparts


(G. Simmons:) “the flow of energy and mineral nutrients through an ecosystem manifest themselves as actual animals and plants of a particular species.”


biomass = circulation of flesh

plants biting into the system of solar radiation---capturing its sugars

in a sense “higher” animals are just fancy decorations in an ecosystem
(decorative large predators)

ecosystem = succession of plant assemblages ==> stable states ==> climax

ecosystem = a blind groping from stable state to stable state in which each plant assemblage creates the conditions that stabilize the next one.


continental forest <--- stability {the capacity to maintain a state with relatively minor internal fluctuations}
islands <--- resilience {the capacity to absorb major external and internal fluctuations by switching between several alternative stable states}


cities interaction with microorganisms

medieval cities ---islands--> {-concentration of energies -low degree of species heterogeneity (mainly humans)}

medieval European towns ----> isolated islands {/heat /food-web /cultural}

cattle as storage devices
process of shortening and redirecting food chains


biomass ["natural” state] ---> cooked biomass ---> processed through the “civilizing” power of fire*
{raw =/= cooked} ==> legend/myth
--> the cultural materials that accumulated unconsciously, sorted out by the pressure of the parasites themselves---germs and humans formed a meshwork

food ~ flow of flesh

culture is not a completely separate sphere of reality, but instead mixes and blends with flows of organic (and even mineral[...]

[...]ocentric --> monolithic notion of the body --> medically proper animal body =/= if we zoom in the living canvas, organisms blend into a pointillist landscape in which each dot of paint is also alive --> symbiosis, gaia, prokaryotic sex (omnisexuality)

gaia --> biosphere und understood not as environmental home but as body (physiological process)
bacterial omnisexuality --> fluid genetic transfers = sexual
=/= unitary self assumed in the zoocentric model

medieval microcosmic
correspondences among prokaryotic, eukaryotic, zoological and geophysiological (gaian) levels
--> holonomic continuum --> *a type of individuality that is spatially and temporally more inclusive* [-my research on ajayeb has been more tended on the temporal inclusivity]
==> (in new biology) chimerical body: hybrid of bacterial species --Sagan--> like that many headed beast, the microbeast of the animal cell combines into one entity bacteria that were originally freely living, self-sufficient and metabolically distinct

•when respirers entered and did not kill but, rather, were incorporated by larger anaerobic archaebacteria
•mitochondria are the descendants of bacteria that had be come lodged within the cells of animals and plants

bacteria ==> eukaryotic cell

(the fable of) [Spencer's] animal world as a “gladiator's show” --> evidence for parasitism and competition (~ social progress in 19th century)

the grass-green photosynthetic organelles of all plants may be the descendants of a single, wildly successful bacterium, now shackled, albeit gently, in its cytoplasmic prison
-Sagan

*all cells with nuclei (a unicellular amoeba or amultibillion-cell anaconda) <== orgiastic encounters (eating, infecting, engulfing, feeding on, having sex with and so on) among quite different types of bacteria*

(plant cell) chimera = protective anaerobic host cell + internally multiplying photosynthetic bacterium + respiring bacteria

metabolic waste product of the mutation ==> atmospheric oxygen --> catastrophic --> energetic catalyst --> ...

fermenting bacteria (like trolls or elves in a cosmic fairy tale) dwelling underground --> stromatolite

army of mutants that evolved in the aftermath of the oxygen infusion (the greatest pollution crisis the earth) ==> human beings

chimerical eukaryotic system:
*spirochete* [...] at the edge of larger cell, sites of leakage supplying a constant flow of food [...] renounced their former freedom of movement in order to permanently attach ==> a means of locomotion and food acquisition
•spirochete and mad talent, lyrical drive, (tubercle patients were orators or grandios liars)

[*]human body: an architectonic compilation of millions of agencies of chimerical cells

eukaryotic cells leveling cytoplasmic [...]

[...]are linked to movement -- embodied in jungle walk?



modernity's desire and fancy for tactile experience, driving and impulse to expand one's universe and eventually to project it, to exhibit personal passionate voyage of imagination -- effects of a spectatorial movement that is evolving further in Selfie. that is the emergence of such sequential virtues motion capturing that comes to inhibit the train of thought = interconnection in the sequence of ideas expressed during a connected discourse and how this sequence leads from one idea to another (modernity).  

(i don't do filmic voyage)

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

By Consequence, or train of thoughts, I understand that succession of one thought to another which is called, to distinguish it from discourse in words, mental discourse.
“When a man thinketh on anything whatsoever, his next thought after is not altogether so casual as it seems to be. Not every thought to every thought succeeds indifferently.” (— Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, The First Part: Of Man, Chapter III: Of the Consequence or Train of Imagination)

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

the current forms of biotic forests is due to the spreading of seed-dispersing plants millions years ago (what about abiotic? Kinect)

one of issues related with rate/speed is synchronicity

the effects of biotechnically / bioculturaly situated people

Amazon's nature in opposition to slave gardens (slave plantation systems with factory machine) (along with imperial botanical gardens)
for travel and propagation of...
moving material semiotic
part-time organisms


when visuality is looked at in a haptic modality (the tentacular face for example), vision can be figured as touch, not distance. negatively curving in loops and frills, not surveying(/surviving) from above.


r />



when a depiction (poetic, visual, etc.) is dangerously ambiguous?

are we really immersed in data realities? and that really means we are losing the sight on experiences fetched by our bodies?

co-existing and contradictory incomplete models that ground us in our critically limited existence. what does beyond the (techno-cartographic-episto-cogno-histo-) map's horizon means for this situated “us”?

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

(Amanda Boezkes)

the ontological purification apparatus

we are now on an idea of the earth in so to calibrate our sensorial systems to adjust to human-born unpredictabilities that override and neutralize long-standing histories of local knowledge.

how an ecological perspective can be incorporated into vision -- become a visuality? -- mobilization of visuality

how an artwork may account for the ways ecological change regist[...]

[...]objectivity with the escape from and all perspectives

it is tempting to collapse all of objectivity into the view from nowhere. this temptation to simplify by conflation should be resisted, for the highest expressions of objectivity in one mode may seem worthless when judged by the standards of another mode.
(as humans we must deal with our personal, idiosyncratic, perspectival perception)

photo: accurate rendering of sensory appearances

objectivity is a multifarious, mutable thing, capable of new meanings and new symbols: in both a literal and figurative sense, scientists of the late-nineteenth-century created a new image of objectivity

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

we must consider the paths people and trees have taken

entangled networks of matter and meaning

“i don't mind being ‘close to nature.’ but i know what they mean when they say that, and it's not what i mean.”
--Linda Noel, Koyungkawi poet and acorn mush maker

oaks were travelers and mixers

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

(Tomaz Mastnak)
Botanical decolonization

planting and displanting of humans and plants are elements of the same multispecies colonial endeavor

native plants as a discursive field

complex and unmarked ways that plants have been  sorted out as ‘native’ or ‘nonnative’

(as a measure of perfection and ‘civility’) gardening was also the key to the survival of colonies

(for Bacon) ‘plantation’ meant in the first place to ‘Plant in’ people
‘plantation in a pure soile’ (founding a colony)

once we see colonialism as the literal planting and displanting of peoples, animals, and plants--as inscribing a domination into blood and soil founded in the fantasy of molding ecosystems with godlike arrogance--it becomes clear how colonialism ushered in the anthropocene

native plants, by implication, were uncultivated. in the imperial imaginary this distinction between cultivated and native plants was isomorphic with people as well.

‘nature’, like the uncultivated native, was to be dominated by ‘culture’. such ‘government of nature’ found its metropolitan manifestation in botanic gardens. (species collected for scientific reasons, for aesthetic and ideological benefit)

government of nature

invasive animals

the real issue is that we still live in a colonial environment. we live with the legacy of botanical colonization without even knowing it. this legacy is not mere background to social and political life.


Nazis’ attempted eradication of Impatiens parviflora from their own native forests (Gröning and Wolschke-Bulmahn, 1992)


the idea of “borrowing freely from all the world's sty[...]

[...]cientific reasons, for aesthetic and ideological benefit)

government of nature

invasive animals

the real issue is that we still live in a colonial environment. we live with the legacy of botanical colonization without even knowing it. this legacy is not mere background to social and political life.


Nazis’ attempted eradication of Impatiens parviflora from their own native forests (Gröning and Wolschke-Bulmahn, 1992)


the idea of “borrowing freely from all the world's styles and floras” erases the violent colonial encounter of displacing by replacing it with the figure of the undocumented immigrant

..charging native plant enthusiasts and invasion biologists and managers with xenophobia...


(Davis et al, 2011 article published in journal Nature, title:) “Don't judge species on their origins”, is a misleading phrase; at issue is judging species not on their origins, but on their emplacement.

(Yanagisako and Delaney, 1995) “people think and act in the intersections of discourses”
but not every domain intersects in every instance, and the character of an ‘intersection’ is historically specific. it is a truism to claim that ‘like humans, plants and animal travel’ (Raffles, 2011, page 12). What Raffles fails to address is crucial: how, exactly, do those plants travel? to treat the ‘remaking’ of surroundings as a neutral, benign category, served from the colonial history of globalization, is problematic at best.


treating plants metaphorically only as immigrants, but never as settlers, paradoxically divides human from nature. it elides the forms of displanting--of botanical colonization--that were part and parcel of the colonial encounter.

Myths of the ‘noble eco-savage’ and the ‘ecological Indian’ have been shown to be inaccurate (Krech, 1999; Whelan, 1999)

(the notion of the Anthropocene implies) an ecology in which humans are immanent to the natural world

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

(eyes are) visual possibilities
“eyes” (are always) made available [...] with a wonderfully detailed, active, partial way of organizing worlds... [Haraway, SK]

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

lecture khm Luis
trans or cross ecological movement, from amazon to shahname, because i like it and i care for thoses ecologies.
and because we can't keep clean. i love to talk about clean and dirt. maybe some other time. if we can say anything about the world is that it is dirty and excessive and lunetic. literally lunar. the moon. if you think your bio and biology is not scheduled by moon or lunar forces think again.
do i need a bit of ego to sustain this skin-encapsulated organism (pointing to myself. this is another pointi dance)
tech interface amaz div device literature


[...]

[...]n the Middle East (and to explore their relevance across the topology of world thought at large)
-the fractal nature of his four separate subject-positions point to the *exceptional diversity and heterogeneous makeup of Middle Eastern cultural imaginaries*

...the insurgent carries a hundred masks within one, the poet a hundred more, the mystic a hundred more, and the sectarian a thousand
(@Geert)

[*]modernity: a self-naming historical epoch that redefines/fuses the exercise of power and knowledge and for which the enlightenment, capitalism, colonialism, technology, humanism, ideology, simulation, and the domination of instrumental reason become the main pillars of subjectivity

Mohaghegh offers a list of secondary literature that forms the relevant archive from which his manuscript borrows, and **marks its axis of engagement with preexisting interventions**
#bibliography


Nietzsche's conception of chaos
“nature and mask determine phenomenal being, the phenomenon in its being, as chaos”
(Deleuze interprets Nietzsche's chaos as:) a philosophical overture toward “the pure unformed”
--> the subject is this free, anonymous, and nomadic singularity which traverses men as well as plants and animals independently of the matter of their individuation and the forms of their personality [~~> #write a short story for hayula]

*Eastern insurgent's participation in the chaotic event* --> there is no natural or pure ==> (a more) apocalyptic response ==> to became available
[--> to deal with sense as a predicate مسند or a property دارايى =/=? to deal with sense as an event]


community
(on Eastern postmodern gathering)
(alternative categories that express the potential for “relationality”: assemblage, alignment, circle, swarm, etc. that are based on multiple vantages of intersection and divergence =/=) *community*:r /> •tends to evoke an essentialist claim
•there is typically some centralized discourse of unity, some absolute principle that binds everyone
•functions as self-enclosed and exclusionary phenomenon
•breeds insularity and protectionism
=/= vulnerable, permeable, susceptible to transformation
=/= riot crowd (open fever and pulsation always searching out new formulations, *new exteriorities* to traverse ==> remains restless, agitated, insatiate)
•community eventually ofers abstract representation of their lived experience (**becoming symbolic**) =/= riot crowd remains material, visceral, a carnavalesque sensation, and therefore formless [--> Elen's response to apass offered “community"]
(with the intention of it lasting, *nothing deserves to stay “as is”* [?!])
*stale archetypes of the collective knowing subject (“they”)*

problem with ‘periphery’
***deadly and deathly delusion that there is a “within”***[...]

[...]aters) large circular buildings that moon
s inhabitants (endymionians) had erect to drain the swamps

science and cartography of th physical features of the moon
Hevelius
W. Gilbert


moon’s waxing phase --> earth that is in brightlight reflects light back (one third of the sunlight that reaches it) to the dark side of the moon

“what if the atmosphere had really withdrawn to this dark face? and if air, why not water? would not this be enough to infuse life into the whole continent? why should noy vegetation flourish on its plains, fish in its seas, animals in its forests, and man in every one of its zones that were capable of sustaining life? to these interesting questions, what a satisfaction it would be to be able to answer positively one wat or another! for thousands of difficult problems a mere glimpse at this hemisphere would be enough to furnish a satisfactory reply. how glorious it would be to contemplate a real, on which the eye of man has never yet rested!” (Jules Verne, All Around the Moon)

the side of the moon facing earth is being gradually eroded by earth’s gravitation

Pythagoreans <-- one of the first recorded visions of an inhabitable moon on which animas and plants flourish, larger and more beautiful than on earth <== *it makes to sense to create a planet that is uninhabited*
“[...] for she would then appear to have come into existence vainly and to no purpose, neither brining forth fruit nor providing fir men of some kind an origin, an abode, and a means of life, the purpose for which this earth of ours came into being” (Plutarch, On the Face of the Moon)

metaphors for the silence of the space --> perennial question of humankind

the black sea sparkle with lustrous fires, like the ceiling of a vast hall of ebony encrusted with flashing diamonds
with what a soft sweet light every star glowed
no matter what its magnitude, the stream that flowed from it looked calm and holy
not twinkling
no scintillation
no nictitation
disturbed their pure and lambent gleam

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

night dreams (after WIELS's exhibition)
starting with the story of the jinn studying origin of species --> bestiaries
mix of reports from Hedayat'neyrangestan + Shamlu's ketab kuche + Marzolph's topology of persian folklore iranian stories + ajayeb stories --to--> ?

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

jin lamp
tree
scared face

book Skala:
royal fairy tales
baba jaga kostliva noha / bony legs


the first worm

death skeleton afraid of itself, of its own image
self-reflective

you are following, while being followed, and the one who follows you is being followed...

pop-up book
•endles[...]

[...]the way they are operationalized and used”

*consequences of change are rarely socially, culturally, or economically neutral*


collectives
assemblages
configurations

try to tell yourself a “technology only” or “social only” story of knowledge infrastructure (and you will find it impossible)
(Brunton's) spam --> co-evolution of technical systems, communities, and social norms

knowledge infrastructures ==carry==> significant distributional consequences --> advancing the interests of some and actively damaging the prospects of others

(ways of producing “raw” date) davulated by “data sharing”:
•*labor-intensive* collecting practices
•site-specific expertise required
}--> long-standing craft traditions

once-vast secretarial ranks (of large organizations) [a British nostalgia for bureaucratic hierarchy fantasized and franchized by Harry Potter]

>
ajayeb's 13th century's “technologies” for “virtual” witnessing


--imbalance in the structure and distribution of our knowledge--
overrepresentation of research on “charismatic megafauna” (cuddly pandas, expenssive human-like chimps, tigers, hallucinogenic plants, etc.)


*dark continent fallacy*: ignorance (~ non-knowledge) = absence of knowledge : a site, phenomenon, or set of questions that we haven't yet been able or thought to investigate, as: ‘darkness = absence of light’ (--> Star Trek idea of frontier) --@!%--> the relationship between knowledge and non-knowledge may not be as simple or innocent as that

new (forms of) knowledge infrastructures (--> new ways of knowing) ==>
•new questions thinkable --> whole classes of questions, phenomena and forms of knowledge may be lost or rendered unthinkable
•new maps to known territories --> reshape the geography itself
•rework existing (stocks of) s of) knowledge
•reorder our sense of value and structure in the world
•*write new ontologies over old ones* (--> my interest in working with ajayeb)
•embed social norms

knowledge infrastructure ~= sociology of knowledge
= robust internetworks of people, artifacts, and institutions* (--> to attend kno.infs. as wholes, rather than focusing only on their most rapidly evolving elements; #ontology. and attending to the social relations both created and broken) [#to attend to Tehran's new digitally mediated social norms of negative ditributional consequences of change]
any effective sociology of knowledge ought to provide some account of its opposite: the accidental and systematic --> means by which non-knowledge is produced and maintained
**(Robert Proctor's) agnotology: the systematic study of ignorance** [+ Irvin Schick: unknowledge =/= ignorance --> socially constructed lack of knowledge : a conscious absence of socially pertin[...]

[...]= [*]riddles: the beginnings of stories ==> set those who are summoned by the enigma to work in a particular way: “what manner of living will make it possible to understand these riddless?”

riddle: key + guide

(speaking trope saying senses -->) tropisms =/= meanings

trope = affects that magnetize you
forces that pass through you and steer you

what should i do with ajayeb? = what kind of meaning is requested of me? ****what is my obligation to the meaning i am seeking?**** [=/= Mette's work]

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

to bring to BOZAR project with Goda into my interest in geo-feminism
the question of naming, of taxonomy --> a way of being into connectedness

[*]ajayeb studies = **how to inherit natural history otherwise**, how to think about natural history, embracing other (than western) heritages of natural history that enlarges the world for us and the ones we are living with


plantation system:
1. radical simplification, elimination of whole categories of players (in systemic encounters)
2. radical substitution, whole domains (plant life, animal life, human labor system in interaction with animals and plants and microbs) are substituted
==> radical break of connection to place
==> release of numbers : value added processes based on the management of numbers

to look at the planetary shape of some of our problems

-scene = condition of...
scenography --> ‘scene’ is a visual spatial way of thinking about what makes the ‘condition’ of something

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

(Calvert on The Nature of Difference book @Quinsy)

rise of population genomics
•efforts like Human Genome project --> refusing to afford a genetic basis for race categories
•tools to identify “deep ancestry” (indicating a geographic origin in prehistory)

postracial politics

recreational genomics --mutating--> “race” out of 19th century concept of “blood quantum” that imperfectly signals complex tribal relatedness and membership

(purchasers of) **genome = book of life** ==> racialized and medicalized subjects

*mutated racial discourses*

renaissance of race categories

science has the authority to establish truth claims that scholars in the humanities must reckon with
humanities scholars may avoid a scientific debate because:
1- they feel out of their depths interpreting scientific data
2- they resist scientific authority in response to well-documented instances of scientific exploration of people of color
3- they may have surrendered to science the work of settling matters of fact, keeping hermeneutics and textual matters for themselves


science and technology s[...]

[...]rating all the workings of nature into one whole

1950s --> a special relationship between the holism and the computer (the idea that if the assumption of holism is fed into a computer model, the computer faithfully reproduces it)

early 20th century --> notions of the complex unity of (living) systems ==> romantic conceptions of nature
*complexity = romantic holism =/= reductionist*

romantic tradition of complexity : to see an underlying unity in a world of heterogeneous objects and phenomena (Rousseau, Cuvier, last two thousands years, [is religion romantic?])


romantic scientist's moderate version of Kant's Copernican Revolution:
•Rousseau
•Humboldt --> ***to arrange the facts, not successively on the order in which they have presented themselves, but according to the relations which they have between themselves*** [~~> a sort of paranoia]
◦the idea that to see that Humboldt was able to see takes a “sensitive observer”
•Whitehead --> physical systems with endurance as the measure of their stability
•Tansley --> ecosystem ~= superorganism
•
=/= baroque (--Kwa--> neobaroque):
•Leibniz --> every bit of matter can be conceived as a garden full of plants : each drop of its bodily fluid is also such a garden ==> ***it is the direction of looking that matters *** (mode of attention)
•Deleuze
•Whitehead
•Darwin
•Benjamin
•

bestiary = baroque + romantic

*romantic complexity (looks up) =/= baroque complexity (looks down)*
•looking up: integrate individuals (who appear to be a heterogeneous lot) at the phenomenological level to a single entity at a higher level of organization --> (plants and animals, individuals) are*functionality integrated* [<-- my problem with the notion of community]
◦looking up to the world of platonic forms <-- a process of abstractionr /> •looking down: a table of companions --> (plants and animals, individuals) are *cooperating*

(romantic conceptions of) society as organism =/= (baroque conception of) organism as society


(historic) baroque
-grand style of 17th century
-(insist on) strong phenomenological realness --> sensuous materiality
-materiality flows out in many directions (=/= confined within) ==> blurring “individual =/= environment”
-inventiveness:
--music--> the ability to produce lots of novel combinations out of a rather limited set of elements
--theater--> (logical development of plot =/=) sequence of monologues and allegories ==> action


Leibniz baroque philosophy --> monad: individuals not linked to form greater systems (they don't even communicate), but they affect each other
--Deleuze--> each monad had its context represented inside itself (as fold) [more important the monad --> richer [...]

[...]terogeneous objects and phenomena (Rousseau, Cuvier, last two thousands years, [is religion romantic?])


romantic scientist's moderate version of Kant's Copernican Revolution:
•Rousseau
•Humboldt --> ***to arrange the facts, not successively on the order in which they have presented themselves, but according to the relations which they have between themselves*** [~~> a sort of paranoia]
◦the idea that to see that Humboldt was able to see takes a “sensitive observer”
•Whitehead --> physical systems with endurance as the measure of their stability
•Tansley --> ecosystem ~= superorganism
•
=/= baroque (--Kwa--> neobaroque):
•Leibniz --> every bit of matter can be conceived as a garden full of plants : each drop of its bodily fluid is also such a garden ==> ***it is the direction of looking that matters *** (mode of attention)
•Deleuze
•Whitehead
•Darwin
•Benjamin
•

bestiary = baroque + romantic

*romantic complexity (looks up) =/= baroque complexity (looks down)*
•looking up: integrate individuals (who appear to be a heterogeneous lot) at the phenomenological level to a single entity at a higher level of organization --> (plants and animals, individuals) are*functionality integrated* [<-- my problem with the notion of community]
◦looking up to the world of platonic forms <-- a process of abstraction
•looking down: a table of companions --> (plants and animals, individuals) are *cooperating*

(romantic conceptions of) society as organism =/= (baroque conception of) organism as society


(historic) baroque
-grand style of 17th century
-(insist on) strong phenomenological realness --> sensuous materiality
-materiality flows out in many directions (=/= confined within) ==> blurring “individual =/= environment”
-inventiveness:
--music--> the ability to produce lots of novel combinations out of a rather limited set of elements
--theater--> (logical development of plot =/=) sequence of monologues and allegories ==> action


Leibniz baroque philosophy --> monad: individuals not linked to form greater systems (they don't even communicate), but they affect each other
--Deleuze--> each monad had its context represented inside itself (as fold) [more important the monad --> richer its world]


metaphors of romanticism:
•organicism
•system --> (in graphical representation) depicted by connecting lives between constituent elements (=/= monad)
•

Whitehead --Deleuze--> a neobaroque philosopher --> possibility of a chaotic side-by-side existence of mutually exclusive realities
(baroque era) harmony: art of counterpoints (bringing together independent voices)


German baroque (Gryphius, Lohenstein) --> nat[...]

[...]> ***the local is not obvious*** : the local does not explain itself in its own terms, it is rather explained in terms that have traveled from elsewhere --> this is not to isolate the local, this is not against *traveling of terms*, rather, an argument for specificity: to ask ****which terms from elsewhere are relevant here?**** @Tehran:
what at stake there
what effected here
(what it means in my village?)

traveling of knowledge =/= traveling of repertoires of speeking
functions of import and embedding (something from another time or place in your present argument)

*there is no empirical without language*
there is no local without travel

(@Xiri, Hoda, to urgently shift from who to what)
(from) ‘who question’ of politics: who gets to talk? (like “do women get a say?”) --to--> ‘what question’: “what is made of women?”

[metaphors of doing]
(neoliberal legacy of) isolated acting objects =/= complex global-local inequalities
historical traces of the acting in the image of the fighting muscular man throwing a spear [~-> Arash kamangir آرش کمانگیر ~/=? my play with the bow and arrow in apass;] =/= digestion, eating (as “doing something” that you cannot control), plants growing, smelling (is not acting?)

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

*assemblages*
-continuities require ‘work’ to constitute them as ‘well-formed assemblages’
-the emergence of a stable assemblage requires ‘translations’
-(we should) search out the catalysts, enablers or inhibitors of processes that interest us
-how varied and multiple qualities of agency unfold as effects in assemblages that encompass both human and nonhuman forms, and how these effects subsequently achieve particular outcomes for different parties

(organic food) market <==emerging== ideological desires of embedded entrepreneurs who innovate within dynamic material-semiotic systems

(Foad stressed that assemblages are characterized by the condition of) ‘territory’: contexts that engender more or less conservative orientations of assemblages toward fixity
(Sina emphasized that assemblages are also characterized by the condition of) ‘abstraction’: the unique character of how an assemblage mobilizes new compositions of material and expressive thing
}--> relational territories of heterogeneous stuff territorialized [by value] and abstracted [by price]

can we trace consumption as it unfolds?

-family assemblages are characterized as collections of distinct but related units, things that are never the same twice, but somehow hold together and maintain coherent pathways through time
(Price and Epp)
-(for people who move often) ‘home’: something that needs to be continually recreated by combining all sorts of elements in imaginative ways--home is a hybrid (=/= simply th[...]

[...]ers ‘you’
*Sana: physical-presence =/= imagination (mental activity ~= dream) {She needs to see Miyazaki}
*Roger: we do it all the time, for him it is more about active engagement, role of feelings, moments that you are pushed out by the entity
*Maarten: no! enter =/= not-enter, research depends on definitions
*Juan: layers of realities are involved, it is about expanding the consciousness by charming it into 90% presences, theater gives a yes/no quality to the question of entering, actors, stage as Dystopie of presence
*Xiri: yes! this is often the case, we are between 2nd-chances and being-torn-apart

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

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

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

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


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



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

(or is about joke, alternatives, and maybes)


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



interdisciplinary exploration of


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


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

(in the direction of my research; hastily opening the ontological envelope that saves a heart full of “list of specifications”...)
the visit will be to the ‘European Committee for Standardization’ (CEN, French: Comité Européen de Normalization), one of the EU fostered nonprofit public[...]

[...]of which communities of practice?


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

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



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

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

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



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

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

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

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

[in ajayebnameh عجایب نامه...] to map the morphogenetic changes of the real



... bewildering heterogeneity of registers in ajayebnameh عجایب نامه

... treating entities trafficking in the futures

active capacities of description

this is not a project of repopulating the social sciences with nonhuman beings

the symbolic function of language is about detecting salient features of the world that can be organized in contrastive sets
(can we think not in contrasts?)

this is not about trying to think like X, that would be transposition of a relational experience at another scale

(non-religious semiotic model)
bodily disposition ==(produces)==> perspective ==(produces)==> self

the beings in ajayeb (عجایب‌) are ‘alive’ because of their ability to ‘do things’ in the ways they come to represent and interpret through me

recruiting scores of new actants so as to render the theater of worldly interactions more complex and interesting


what is the sociocultural world we construct?


dream images, vivid mythical scenes,


form travels/passes through us

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

[Latour modes of existence]

(to distinguish types of)[...]

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

industrial agriculture and plantation


to be storied and studied

the holobiont: host plus of all its microbial symbionts that form ecological units
-recasting the individual as a holobiont; the collective genomes
(Lynn Margulis)
holobionts: “multicellular eukaryotes plus their colonies of persistent symbionts”
(Gilbert, Sapp, and Tauber 326; cited by Kenney)
(thinking with holobionts) the immune system is re-cast not as “defensive weaponry” but as a “socializing and unifying force” [via Kenney] --> “to obey the immune system is to become a citizen of the holobiont”
[this new developement of biological individuality (entangled identities at the heart of life mechanisms) in biological sciences of 21st century requires a new imaginative framework and new forms of curiosity equally relevant to natural sciences and artists]


(ajayeb-e gaz) عجایب گاز
co-existence of gasses


planet =/= terrestrial planet


(ajayeb-e graphs) psychotic tree-structure of giant databases, in trans-ing and lines of trans-affecting
-my ajayeb art is going to be the kind that depend on the machine----competent digital
-exploring the iterative and fractal quality of sentences in my digital graph-makings
-attending to the interruptions of syntactical commitments
partial connections (of distinct entities) ~= analogy [analogy allows one part contaminate systematically another part, and vice versa]
-coerced belief


the question of binaries: how we are who we are in relentless relationalities with other entities. in shaping and being shaped by objects, and subject/object is only convenient partial-good-enough for the moment --> **sorting operations** (kPRA0W1kECg), but they are not good descriptions beyond that.



#on Companion Manifesto
(Haraway's) *cyborg*: the “lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.” --to--> a much bigger queer family of *companion species* : becoming-with --> the co-constitutive interpenetration of humans and their others (machines, animals, and the environment).
-Haraway is going from ‘rage’ to ‘love’

“historically challenged people” (Schimpfwort? فحش)
half-trained arguments
embodied cross-species sociality

I am trying to inhabit ajayeb critically; neither in celebration nor condemnation (like my sister asked)
what is my context? isis, tech-sci, art, world-wars, stories, terror,
the figures of ajayeb that [...]

[...]br />
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 understanding the language of even of inert, petrified stones. But the righteous man, in Benjamin's imagination, remains a man. What would he make of Patthar Baba, the stone turned to saint? (Anand)

(our sense of) our own ecological peril and fragility--our shared fate with our neighbors.

[The ajayeb's beings and their neighbors]

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

[instead of the struggle against sin (~=? christianity) or the struggle against suffering (~=? Buddhism),] the struggle between (different) sins

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

(the reading of ajayeb portraits) the global [and therefore *ethical] consciousness (at the end of 12th century middle-south asia, “the east”)

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

[Martha Kenney]

[...]

[...]ion 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 focot 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?”

“rejecting the linguisticality of experience (according to w[...]

[...]ctual enterpreneurs
upheavals and connectivities of globalization

changing patterns of interaction

(aren't we here to) change the patterns of interaction
(aren't we here to) change the faith of letters and love stories

reenactments (are fantasy practices and realities) =/= simple, accessible, and democratized (knowledge)

“layers of locals and globals”

[somehow I couldn't feel in his long term project what is Kobe's relation to] (processes and their product that require) developing and learning new skills, pleasures, and communities

-at the end many of us (are busy with or) want to (or inhabit the “will to”) modelling reality
this is also what ajayeb was busy with

***we are always doing both “purification” and “hybridization”
[]we direct our attention simultaneously to the work of purification and the work of hybridization ==> we immediately stop being wholly modern --> *our future begins to change* / *our past begins to change*
[my work on ajayeb (“hybrids down below” {Latour}) is precisely about (this kind of) transformation of pasts and futures] ==> meeting companion species {if my work on ajayeb doesn't teach me how to meet the dog in my street, the pigeon on my window, the juju on the edge of my paper, what is it good for then?!}

(*)companion species: assemblages of living and non-living ‘species’***
(Janina is all along engaged with companion species)


(an strategy:) allocation of responsibility for grasping information

assemblage at various levels and sublevels characterizes *explanations* and *practices*

technoscientific tsunami that will obliterate prior practices and cultures...

(learning to) see old and new forms of confusions, docility, subjectivity, morality, agency, empowerment (when we are together)
(to recognize and make) new sites of negotiation


Alberti: bodies of Minoan figurines “wear” the appropriate gender for a specific ritual practice, they don't “bear” gender (as their essential feature) ==> gender salience is always in question, not a propor presupposition
“sex has emerged as a salient attribute of the pot's character as a pot”

when zoomorphic figures are present...

ajayeb's zoomorphic figures with their salient attributes are not “purposed” necessarily being to encode their belief-system onto objects that we may read today--like story-board--but rather to make interventions into the world of human-nonhuman relations. to either assist or resist such transformations
[terms sharpened with Alberti + Katie King]


museum studies


(Hayward:) freedom --> initiative in shaping a narrative, a visible body, where one is able to engage and resist [@Xiri] --> contradicts itself because one is reall[...]

[...]a safety net or as if it's just a matter of personal blame or failure. But it is also an attunement to a singular world's texture and shine. The body has to learn to play itself like a musical instrument in this world's compositions.” [@Luisa, Sven, Foad]

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


(do i also have) the habit of a worlding

trying to find the rhythm of a new bodily life

find lines of attachment

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

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


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

______________


[*]regionality دهاتی ,داهاتی
-an event that jumps from landscape to bodies and back (Stewart)
--"here"-->{the blue law, the seasons, the color red, place names اسم خیابان [*the past snaps into the present with the recognition of the street names], bodily resonances, materialities bundled together like a sac of leaves, sharp-edged collectivities like race, ethnicity, class, gender, generation and religion, }--> “one ventures from home”
-a thing hollowed out by its labyrinth of edges; incessant interlinking
-a contact aesthetics
-a virtual mapping of things in a state of potential (Thrift)
-a sheer recognition of a sheer recognition: “we are from around here"-->{as *active survivors of the unexpected encounter and knowing readers of emergent situations*} (Roazan)
-turns spaces into animate envelopes that produce worlds (Sloterdijk)
-a form of worlding--an intimate, compositional process of dwelling that bears, gestures, gestates آبستن, worlds (Heidegger)
-the labored viscerality احشايى of being ‘in’ whatever's happening renders choices, aesthetics, surfaces and materialities *a part of something* (Stewart) ~~apass--> the sentience, of a worlding (lightened by soft scenes of the human condition [played out in:
•forms of pleasure @Sina
•weakness @Maarten
•fun @Elen
•humor @Eszter
•acquiescence رضايت ,تن در دادن @Leo
•self-deprecation اظهاربيميلى @Lili
•the intimacy of قبيح دانستن deprecating others @Xiri
•a bad but human habit @Aela
•some wicked little sorcery @קݙ
•])
-
-an attunement that takes form
-a milieu in which the mouth relaxes into a town accent (نواحی?)
-a disorientation in the face of what lies beyond (Janina)
-a love affair with light and color (Foad)
-uncurtained windows (my m[...]

[...]en
•humor @Eszter
•acquiescence رضايت ,تن در دادن @Leo
•self-deprecation اظهاربيميلى @Lili
•the intimacy of قبيح دانستن deprecating others @Xiri
•a bad but human habit @Aela
•some wicked little sorcery @קݙ
•])
-
-an attunement that takes form
-a milieu in which the mouth relaxes into a town accent (نواحی?)
-a disorientation in the face of what lies beyond (Janina)
-a love affair with light and color (Foad)
-uncurtained windows (my mother)
-
-
-->{
•one recognizable entity with qualities
•lived modalities
•a history of its social production and uses
 {elements, scenes, encounters, }--they-->{sediment, accrue, circulate, unfold, go flat, }-->{saturate a situation, fly under radar, pull into alignment, fall out of sync, }--> “a regional aesthetic hardens into iconic scenes of living”


> calling to eachother in an intimacy of jokes about the things that can happen in their world

voice:
•the tone
•the timing
•the accent
•the phrasing
•the level of force
•the purposefulness of the way that voice lives in light, with trees, in the potentiality of a laugh
•

consistency of a laugh or an edge

***when the muteness of things metamorphoses into an aesthetic phenomenon*** --> singularities incite it

(an actual physical shadow of a state of being)
sing of something amiss:
•depression
•withdrawal
•indifference
•dysfunction


(my mother in Tehran:) a curtained house reduce the gestural economy of seeing and being seen to an occluded vision in which objects are dark, shadowy outlines with black cores, like a world seen through a ripe cataract آب مروارید -->(the house video project i did ‘city of domes’ 20es’ 2008 http://www.sinaseifee.com/Cathedral.html was actually about that kind of attunement in my mother's house. i was committed to the description of interiority; my allegiance was inward. watchful consciousness in which one witnesses the procession of inner events of light perception <== a sense of lack. sensous grounding of the inner life)
window: a method of worlding in itself, a node of lines of sociality and mood
curtained house --> sign of something amiss (depression, withdrawal, indifference, dysfunction) but “the actual physical shadow of a state of being that broke the circuit of a *gestural economy of seeing and being seen*”
in the maner of my mother: you don't warm up to stranger, you know who you are talking to, you watch what is going on, you help those in the circle
(Stewart describing how in her town) lamps were strongly favored over overhead lighting, lending texture and specifity to the scenes
a pause at a window --> to check in wi[...]

[...]rge) we exist with multiple identities invoked differently in different context. subscribed to an imagined “heritage” ready to kill and be killed to save some “essence” (=/= San'an)
sake of the difference, scum and finest of men
(for example “black”: to be confused: once excluded, now technically empowered, a dominant group in the rainbow, but still practically marginalised by the history that created and continues to operate practical exclusion.)
@Iranians: how much of the Other is actually located within me?
“a perfectly permissible aspiration” --into--> “an instrument of war” (Maalouf)
British identity is based on an assumption of authority that makes the world a familiar place, a proper theatre in which to continue being British. #Olearius
exclude the (unsavoury) foreigners <==> romanticised history and frozen tradition
*history as a deliberate human creation ==> acknowledgement of a common past ==> (a difference called) identity [= “our” similarity against “their” difference,] (submerging, barbarising and differentiating itself from another identity) [for example ancient Greece + Rome + Christianity = Europe] ==> monolith ==> conflict and death
•my (jub جوب) gutter photos =/= Tehran's Americanization of the high street.
•my photos of Rima =/= her selfie's merchandised model of individualism
a deep desire for association
various and diverse traditions ==> identity: “the means to synthesise similarity through difference and to see difference as discrete means of expressing basic similarity” (Sardar)
“balance of similarities and differences as a way of locating what it is that makes life worth living and what connects us with the rest of the changing world”
*...continuation of the Enlightenment project of progress through instrumental science. One source of Truth, and one Civilization, continues in its trajectory
garden =/= {North America's arrogance in cosmological proportion as worlded in Hollywood, and science seeing itself as the only manifestation of reality, The Platonic idea that truth is same for everyone}

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

[body politics]

Greeks --> body politics --> elaborated images for human society ==> citizen, city

(Haraway on) the junction of natural forces and economic progress in the formative years of capitalist industrialism

(Haraway's emphasize and telling stories about the) union of the political and the physiological

ancient and modern justifications --> differences (seen as natural, given, inescapable ==>) as *moral*

the ‘content’ as well as the soicla function of science --> renderd utopian: (that means) we leave this central, legitimating body of skill and knowledge to undermine our efforts
[we must fight with all our power against utopian(~= dystopian) stories of science ~-> acce[...]

[...]/>
postmodernism's familiar hesitation on the inadequacy of language ==> giving up referentiality =/= my ajayeb

(taking up on moon, for me is about) not going in fear of that which has been looked at again and again. #moon is “deeply compelling and we probably won't ever get done with it”


...somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred years later


morality of description(?)--> embodying the dilemma and work of the witness


...wheels of thinking turn slowly for some of us


adabiat tosifi ادبیات توصیفی
divisive consciousness (with a certain) degree of removal from the world =/= (we want) *more* language (<-- more we name what we see and do)==?==> a larger and more valuable world
(Roethke:) “when is description mere? never!”
-->
[*]صنعت تضاد san'at-e tazad, polarity: the pull of forces in opposition ==makes==> writing feel alive
[*]projection: that psychological mechanism by which we turn the world, or other people, or deer (into versions of ourselves) --> it is not a sin; it is our method of operating, our modus operandi (--> “pathetic fallacy”: inevitable perceptual work of the human; “if you are miserable, then the trees look miserable to you”)
[*]qualifiers sefat صفت gheyd (adjectives and adverbs) intended to lend a host of sensory qualities to the sentence; (sometimes too much) adjectival or adverbial flavoring. [#training: remove every adjective and adverb, and see what you have got left --> **there is always a more exact term waiting to be employed**] (Foad's severe economy of means; Janina's allusive, shimmery surfaces delight) ([*]style: a simple way of saying complex things. -Cocteau)
[*]نظم nazm: musicality of poetry, poem's body of sound is its specific particular flesh, sonic texture --> **making the language more markedly like the world** [a trail, pathway through a wood of sounds,ounds, an unmistakably specific landscape, loyal to the local]
[*]synesthesia: occasion of excitement, a skein of complicated perception, (sort of a literary technique,) something like a snapshot of the image-making mind at work --> superimposition of both events and of senses (and of scenes?) ==> a consciousness
(aim of many artists:) “to form the sensorium, the sphere of perception in which we dwell” @Hoda =/= (Doty suggests:) it is work to sort them out (what sorts out senses? question @Hoda, she must learn: an accurate rendering of an idiosyncratic process of sensory overlap and association)
[*]لحن tone: special effects, evoking a ‘moment of’ ... intense statement of feeling ==> a concretely descriptive feeling
[*]questions are always a little more trustworty than answers (?) -- sometimes things said do not take the *rhetorical form of a question* [--> in apass i was training to be able to capture those kind of ummarkedly questions] --> something sai[...]

[...]ic”: by counting and putting things into boxes (missing the interesting stuff in the sciences, including our relations with other species)
•scientists tried to be more like humanities: decoration (missing the important insights of these fields, such as the fact that ethics is useless as long as the categories it assesses are already set in place)

[*]curiosity: alighting on common excitement to learn about the world and its goings on
[*]imagination: staying with (our) observations until we find frames for thinking about pattern and trajectory

to create new genres of translation (==> play)

(the problem of) *unintentional design*

(what i am learning with ajayeb is the art of) paying **close descriptive attention** (to human interactions with other species)
-to re-learn the arts of description, that the art of 20th century is so deprived of

“population genetics and neoclassical economics each made description unnecessary through a calculus in which self-contained individuals could be posited without attention to social relations and histories” (Tsing)

sciences that are designed specifically not to tackle problems of living together


#project on Tehran trees, on anthropogenic landscapes of Tehran
-descriptive methods for the study of social relation and histories
-learning (directly) about worldly objects of Tehran ==> take part in the kinds of creative play that are the hallmark of the research --> draws readers outside common-sense assumptions

using:
•anthropology --> its expertise in ethnographic methods
•history --> its turn to environmental narration
•biology --> (ecological evolutionary-developmental trends) that have shown how species come into being with each other
•science studies --> its lively juxtaposition of technological and philosophical methods


Tsing: there is no reason that anthropologists cannot study nonhumans using some of the very same methods we use to study humans--or close parallels to them

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

walking is the speed of bodily pleasure
the speed for looking for mushrooms

mushrooms jump into your hands with all three pleasures of the unasked for
*they are not the product of your labor* <-- we should be able to work and depend on those things

Tsing saying ‘bismillah’ in her writing

delight ==make==> impression

*noticing* and *coming back* to familiar places is the beginning of appreciation for multispecies interactions

Tehran expansive and overlapping geographies resist common models (which divide the world into “them” and “us”)

lichen: an association of a fungus and an alga or cyanobacteria, where the non-fungal partner fuels lichen metabolism through photosynthesis[...]

[...]of time and change --> ***forms of human and nonhuman possibility imagined within current discussions of politics and culture***

*world power =/= world time*

time --> evolutionary ladder --> progressive --> supportive trellises of flowering liberalism + critical charts of intensifying capitalism

coercive international development
civilizational paternalism
free-market bullying

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

#my theory (=/= reductionist, or psychological identification) on specification of:
spider =/= linear temporality
whale =/= distinction of organism and environment
(?) =/= “single point of view ==> subjective phenomena”

Nagel: the fact that an organism has conscious experience = there is something it is like to be that organism {--> subjective character of experience}--✕--> analyzable in terms of any explanatory system of functional states, or intentional states

Blade Runner's notion of “soul”: ascribed to robots or automata that behave like people though they experience nothing

physicalism: phenomenological features must themselves be given a physical account

...if one travels too far down the phylogenetic tree, people gradually shed their faith that there is experience at all

anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat
anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited whale
anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited snake
anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited jinn
--> knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life

Nagel asking: we must consider whether any method will permit us to extrapolate استقراء to the inner life of the bat from our own case, and if not, what alternative methods there may be for understanding the notion

“our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited” --> Nagel's view remains secular and in the bounds of his disciplinary field. (religious studies, theology, animal subjectivity studies, art of description, they can be helpful to describe things not in terms of the impressions they make on our senses)
-Nagel is trying with the wrong language at bats: “does it make sense to ask what my experiences are ‘really’ like as opposed to how they appear to me? [...] objective processes can have a subjective nature.”

what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves =/= what it is like for a bat to be a bat


schematic conceptions of Eszter


(old model of understanding:)
* --> stimulus (things sparkling) --> perception (hiting the senses) --> apprehension (mind aware without judgement) --> comprehension (psychological judgement about the manne[...]

[...] (to the extend that they lose their own particular voice) ~= the medium lends a body to the spirit who can speaks in a voice from elsewhere

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

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

an antecedent rendered as cause

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

(sustainable forms of) social good and distributive justice

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

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

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

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

([can we ever?] resist) melancholy eschatology


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

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

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

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

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

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

Morris shows how the[...]

[...]t the attacks bore witness to a failure in communication or to a “translation problem”
for her the language of September 11 attacks was clear
Sassen's dangerous and depraved rationalization of September 11: south is speaking in a language that needs no translation



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

(Barthes’ fable of) the woodcutter[~= an agent of change] ==> language = act (without mediation or image, operating *an immediate transformation* ==> politic) :
If I am a woodcutter and I am led to name the tree which I am cutting down [j'abats], whatever the form of my sentence, I speak the tree, I do not speak about it. This means that my language is operative, linked to its object in a transitive way; between the tree and myself, there is nothing but my labor, that is to say, an act. This is a political language: it presents nature to me only to the extent that I am going to transform it, it is a language by which I act the object; the tree is not an image for me, it is simply the meaning of my action. But if I am not a woodcutter, I can no longer speak the tree, I can only speak of it, about it.
@apass @Femke

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

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

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



(the very strange claim [made by political leaders] that) force is a kind of language, and not just any language. It is one which solves the problem that seems endemic to all things linguistic, namely: failure, indirection, misunderstanding, drift. [...]that the language of force actively and successfull[...]

[...]hem more available for some kind of political action) and doesn't just take for granted that their meaning follows automatically

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

-what is the political effect of revelation? @Ali

beyond the immediate shock effect of the images --> they are testament to the ways in which many different political actors make use of them (over a long period of time) --> with interestingly different outcomes

...intermediate space between a traditional [...]

[...]erceived in one way or in an other) = disembodied body <== *science: the cognitive activity par excellence*
•obliterates the actual presence of the observer --understood--> (in terms of a) convenient and non-problematized split “presence =/= absence”
•(?if these attempts succeed in) reducing the reactivity of the animal to the researcher =/= wildboyz
}--> ‘not having a body' = a mean to preclude (to prevent or to avoid) **the always possible reciprocity of the encounter** [--> aliens are watching us!]
}--> ‘having a body’ discloses and renders perceptible (it is the actual condition of) the very existence of reciprocity of the encounter


how scientists (and artists) construe their presence in the field
*the will to be there without being there*

the problematic “animals react =/= animal don't react”

(also in art -->) ***the regime of distrust of influence*** [--> fable of ‘artist's original interiority']


-*- what does ‘meaningful’ means? -*-

scientists aim to find new methods to focus on those behaviors that are most meaningful to the animals themselves
•Shirly Strum --> I tried to let the baboons themselves “tell” me what was ‘important’ (-how a tree can tell you what is important to them?) -with the baboonss: nothing made them believe that she could be a baboon, so she decided after a while that she could try to urinate while staying among the baboons ==> surprise (=/= trying not to disturb the baboons with her body) --> her body (style, gender, smell, look, anime, etc.) made her enter into relationships with the animals in a new mode, **as a living person (like them) she creates with them an embodied proximity** (==> embodied affinities) [<-- Jassem is very good at it. this happens as well in apass research environment between artists]
  ---> go to Cinderella taking shower with her birds in the attic {urine, noise, surprise}
•Mark Bekoff --> empathy: possibility of sharing feelings involves mirror neurons (“I can feel the animals”) ~= (an experiment to incorporate) *to embody literally*
+ (Burghardt's) use of *critical anthropomorphism* (=/= Walt Disney) use of various forms of information (natural history, perception, behavioural description, autism, Cinderella, etc.)
•Temple Grandin (expert in factory plants for slaughter systems) --> *empathy without pathos* (for her and the animals) [*]world: a swirling mass of tiny details ~ [animal: autistic savant ~= special form of genius]--> a little plastic water bottle lying harmlessly, a shiny reflection, a yellow jacket hanging on a fence, all those turn out to be in their world *wrong details* (“I think the way animals think”) --> ****animals are visual thinkers**** {*you have to see in details*_ <-- how my work changed visually from abstract to baroque while working on the heritage of zoology. #Cinderella: which part of me animals gi[...]

[...]old knowledge)
embodied empathy shifts its meaning from one situation to another --> different meanings ==> different outcomes
[*]empathy: the process by which one delegates to one's body a question, or a problem, that matters and that involves other beings’ bodies --> bodies are articulating and become articulated in the asking and in its responses
= making the body available for the response of another being (=/= feeling what the other feels)
==create==> possibility of an embodied communication (=/= experiencing with one's body what the other experiences)
---> go to Cinderella's empathy: make one think with & with the body
--Despret--> *empathy becomes a scientific tool* that need to be shaped, forged, refined, embodied, a tool that attunes bodies

[*]care: it matters for them that it matters for their animals (***what matters for the other person becomes your matters***)

how to act in a polite manner in a baboon's world? (or in an artist's world, when we give feedbacks)
{seeing like a baboon =/= acting like a baboon = corresponding with a baboon}--> *they transform themselves in order to create partial connections* (James’ “acting as if”) =/= performative
•to act with the baboons (learn how a tree gives you dirty looks, how it resists the proposition of your presence)
•Lorenz's “becoming with”
•Despret's “the miracle of the attunement”

embodied communication --> responsible relation --> constructing the possibility of engagement

[*]responsible: the one who constructs him/herself in order to be available to a respond

--Despret--> (to imagine that we can actually) correspond through the choreographic language of our bodies

“traying to get knowledge" = knowing for the sake of knowing }<-- 19th century adventure hunter archeologist imperialism

***(for James) [*]emotion: what makes us feel (=/= what is felt), an experience of making available ==> an occasion for others : ****emotions ==> dispose our bodies**** (+ our bodies dispose our emotions) @Chloe
-if we want to feel an emotion, we can dispose our body to produce it (<-- this was my method in my early performances in 2014)

Lorenz, Strum, Smuts, Despret
learn to become what it becames when it acts ‘as if’ --> *stakes of reliable knowledge : to thing with*

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

Baxstrom --> anthropology of the anthropologist
Despret --> ethology of the ethologist

اشعیا Isaiah provides a vivid imaginary of multispecies bonds and flourishing: the wold will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them

*nonhuman animals are as much subjects of history as humans are*

-why do we listen to prohpets?

quasi[...]

[...]igence
}-->[reading ajayeb bestiary as enigma; Bambi's mother studies; little mermaid; (using Despret's ethological research to think about) art of feedback ~= getting to know you =/= audience engagement]


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


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

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


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

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

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


biological detective stories

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

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

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

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

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


(recognizing one another ==>) to go by way of what the ravens demand --Cinderella--> *progress often depends more on how well one follows the situation than on how well one controls* (especially when control is difficult)
•one must learn to ask them to give [...]

[...]t of successful ontogeny of an older generation.)
-many myths correspond to the ontogenesis. in Ontogeny, timing is everything---narrative.
-aspect of the ontogenetic self---(the modern world has lost the ways to guide the) new person emerging at each stage
[from kinfolk complexity and elderhood to medically sustained old age] -- i myself have turned to old folk to do storytelling, as necessity(!?)

one emerging in Pleistocene, is about perceiving one's place in the scheme of things (and not sending people down the pit into darknesses)

WE NOT ONLY LOOKED ‘AT’ ANIMALS, WE ALSO LOOKED ‘INSIDE’ THEM, realizing that they were more kin than indicated by our exteriors. (it wasn't Aristotle first who was performing such procedures)

attaching sounds to things/animals/species when they were not visible
(“Never ignore a sound!”)

inheritance (DNA, etc.) calls upon human society and imagination to invent its exact expressions.

human species’ “theme” is Paleolithic

(those who are “better” live in a natural environment and a cultural system that are closer to) meeting the “expectations” of the genes

Children at age six are typically anthropomorphic

trees structure space

**imagining the possibilities of something else being in there.
(how we were doing it? before fire)

“A meditative stillness that is good for the human soul, suggests poet Gary Snyder, was invented by motionless hunters. That moment of silent reverence comes also at the final death stroke when one succumbs to the cycle of life.” (Shepard)
[from predation to hunting (there is a huge epistemological shift) (matter of representation and interpretation)]

mammalian ecology

[(let's) risk everything (instead of risk-reducing) --- issues of representation and agency in thinking ‘with’ animals. textual, metaphor animal in Attar line of thinking]

a distant call in known terrain says it is the there, not the here, where attention should be paid. [far, origins of our tropes, metaphysics? abstraction? =/=? motionless hunters invented motionless meditative worship]
-(kinfolk in) swamps, brush, and forest (in terms of discerning the *relationships between clues*)
-(indirect) dealing with the escapable (=?=> tracking strategies + symbolic thought)

a central theme: (a banquet/feast at which) the participants--eater and eaten--risk the improvements of mind against the certainty of occasional poor decisions, (faulty memory, carelessness, errors of judgment, and the decrepitude of age and disease.)
-Those who fled had to understand [the limits of distance, the intentions of the others, and] (the ability to control) the abyssal terror that itself would engulf them if they submitted to panic. ==> mind
-“self” emerged as the consequence of “partici[...]

[...]?
(energizing the creative imagination in Iranian Islamicate phiosophy?)

interpretation <--?--> experience

fire-tech conscience translated and sublimated into a scientific conscience?
-transvaluation


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

[Serres]

technologies concerning heat--thermodynamics--shocked the traditional world and shaped the one we are working in now.
...theories concerning processes of transformation
...stages of alchemical initiations; archaic figure of fire

(ice and fire) is only relatively cold

fire, and transcendental subject

[my body lives still in that space that the society of sudabeh-fire-siyavash has formed, with fixities and social variieties. it is not an euclidian house.]


siyavosh/sohrab is one of the descendants of disseminated spaces, of catastrophic separation of the continuous

when Rostam recognizes the mark of his son, Ferdosi giving a version of recognition scene, connects --> Oedipus
the son, the mother
-we can recognize a typological space: the same and the other: the separated
-the space of the world is described requiring connection
-family tree
-parts are to be joined
-Rostam and Sohrab, Siyavosh and Sudabeh, cannot be composed to form a single homogeneous space. (Rostam and Siyavosh do that)


transsubstantiation

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

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

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

against the curtain of fire trial stands a stack of iranian proverbs about stone triggering often ideas of rigidity ~= stupidity:
aghlesh par-sang barmidare عقلش پاره سنگ برمیداره (crazy, imagination, thinking, excess,)
divane sangi be chah miandazad... دیوانه سنگی به چاه می اندازد... (stupidity, tool, irreversibility, questions of agency and responsibility,)
naravad mikhe ahanin dar sang نرود میخ آهنین در سنگ (stupidity, penetration,)
shamshir bar sang azmudan شمشیر بر سنگ آزمودن (uselessness, stupidty, destruction, test, inattention,) [~= shekar zire ab penhan sakhtan (شکار زیر آب پنهان ساختن --> story of the apes, Buzinegano Kerme Shabtab بوزینگان و کرم شبتاب) ~= mosht dar tariki zadan مشت در تاریکی زدن]
sang az pase divar andakhtan سنگ از پس دیوار انداختن (uselessness, wrongness, chance,)
pay dar sang amadan پای در سنگ آمدن (random trouble, naturaly unforseen hardship, cripeled,)
sang dar kise kardan سنگ در کیسه کردن
del dar sang shekastan دل در سنگ شکستن (to keep quite, benefit of silence, resist speaking the rumorical utterence,)
dele sang دل سنگ (cold-hearte[...]

[...]system. we move beyond yes or no to exploring something emergent, something whose elements was there but whose form was unknown to us. a fancy and careful way of saying “something new”, because it is new to our understanding.

William Empson
art results from overcrowding(?)

when one is responsive rather than assertive one can't imagine where one will end Up: thinking. this responsiveness is different than the state of being active or passive. a passivity that motivates and mobilizes the subject into places that are yet unknown to her/him.
Thinking, as Heidegger says, may be much the same as wandering. my lectures are like wandering.
someone who studies paradoxes, poetry and philosophy
(keeping what you know away from society, history and away from art, not to acknowledge what you have learn)

incompatibility between a particular love and a particular social arrangement for love.

when you play with others, not try to shine and not try to shy. (shyness is dangerous to society)
it is like being lynched by kukluksklan.
curios about somebody else rather than identifying with them.
i really learned how to work with people by learning how to keep people from killing each other in street.

if we are very sympathetic, saying “i know how you feel” is privileging solidarity: “we are all in this together”. but well we can't all be in this together in the same way, so what is it that we do together, despite this fact.

instead of the declaring voice “i believe this or that”, we can say “i would have though” or “perhaps” introducing a zone of ambiguity in people's relationship with each other you might get something social. subjunctive mood (konjuktiv) not only is to zusammenbinden the elements of semantic also to zusammenbinden the the people who are speaking in these terms.

cooperation is a rehearsal not a performance.

public real made of people who don't argue in behalf of their own interest but to think most disinterestedly.

my talks/works is about how we make sense of our environment, the network that we live in and the texts and discourses that we are reading and writing.

how shyness (even) look like? can we recognize it when we see it?
what is feeling comfortable in the presence of strangers? not verbally i mean, physically.
the notion of being comfortable in the presence of difference. being physically comfortable in presence of the people who are not like yourself.

the subjunctive is the language that the shy uses naturally, which is one of the necessary elements of cooperation. in contrast to subjunctive speech, there is declarative speech is a form of declaration invites submission, and it invites submission because somebody else defines for you clearly what something is about. there is almost an erotic of that, they really now what [...]

[...]ial imagination --> social forms become more recognisable when we had some time to classify them, articulate them, theorize them)

(Williams > Campbell) structure of feeling
we can point to times in the past and say that as an X sensibility (they were romantics, enlightenment, postmodernism) =/= sensing here and now --> practical consciousness, a period at an embryonic stage, at the very edge of *semantic availability*

what structure of feeling is forming in the contemporary western world? --> posthumanism
(postbiological, postcorporal, cyborg existence, etc.)


to be human <--attack-- genomics, global finance, nature of social in virtual communities (telegram) ==> yet-to-be formalized paradigms of human experience

==> fracture  the concept of legal self [legal theory (arbiter of human rights) --> concerned with what is to be human]

(taxonomies of the human species at its time -->) humanitas: legal term used in public in ancient Rome to distinguish Romans and Greeks from Barbarians


humans in persistent vegetative states
international trade of human organs
human genome project
xenotransplantation
technological unconscious

(tree of life replaced by) a model that:
•classifies species according to DNA
•disregards morphological type (how elements of body appear)
•reveals human to be a tiny subspecies in a mass of absolute diversity


classical philosophy --> scientized for a momden audience (by Descartes 17th century) --> special status of human <-- seen as a totally transparent, secular, scientific, liberal way of thinking about the world


humanism = a belief in progress (implicitly conceived as a technological instrumental profit-oriented) + technological masery over nature + ‘human =/= animal’ + therapeutic approach to scientific inquiry }<-- a 19th century anachronism --> deeply ingrained in contemporary self-consciousness and everyday common sense

human: hero of liberty <-- french in origin, political in purpose

August Comte --> the universe can only e understood when the scientific exploration of phenomena was separated from supernatural superstition =/= ajayeb


Campbell making the case --> humanism needs to be deconstructed (not in a blithe نرم وملایم postmodern discursive way, rather) the definitions of what it means to be human are of life-changing importance --> humanism's supposed universality and transparency masks the fact that it is *an inherited western relatively recent philosophical perspective of the world*


in consumer research --> human: culturally inflected, psychosocial producer of + produced by the market =/= human: a disembodied information-processor with a rationalistic indentity and a computatinoal approach to the market
[...]

[...]er with the sensory nerves attached to it, and the posterior spinal nerve fascicles are intended to take up the motives from the external world. All the other parts, on the other hand, are intended only to transmit the motives to the muscles in which the will directly manifests itself. (Schopenhauer)
•It is knowledge that Simultaneously provided techniques for the external control and domination of the human subject and was the emancipating ground for notions of subjective vision within modernist art theory and experimentation.


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

bad visual systems

narcissism as a cultural practice (that also motivates and steers technological inventions)

accelerationism
(Accelerationism may also refer more broadly, and usually pejoratively, to support for the deepening of capitalism in the belief that this will hasten its self-destructive tendencies and ultimately eventuate its collapse.)

/> Selfie
seems to me the perfect example for this submission of the unconscious to the globalized machine


latest theoretical buzzwords

control over the interpretation of the world

circulation of the global image machine

tree-made paper

who are (not) allowed (not) to have a body?

all forms of knowledge claims,

acting on the ideological doctrines of disembodied scientific (cinematic) objectivity

all seem just effects of delayed render algorithms in the play of signifiers in a virtual force field

space of simulations

not giving up to the paranoid science fiction

getting to know the world effectively by practising the sciences

tools of semiology

rhetorical nature of truth

not Romantic nor modernist objects:
1. infective vectors (microbes)
2. elementary particlarticles (quarks)
3. biomolecular codes (genes)


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

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

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

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

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

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

insist on the embodied nature of all vision, and so reclaim the sensory system that has be[...]

[...]ic obsession of Western civilization/art with material-as-mirror)

(Dwayne Donald:) place-based cultures and knowledge systems
colonialism is basicly “disconnection”, denial of relation
(in its heart is written “we are not related”)

(so few indigenous bodies are present in sites where academic discourse are being forged and practiced) when they are present, they are often dismissed as biased, overly emotional, or unable to maintain objectivity over the issues they present. (can i say the same treat is with iranians? and in which scene or context? -- iranians are “not” famous for exhaustive discursive unemotional and unopinionated maintenances)

(around me / around here) => importances and pleasures of going from “around me” to “around here”

(how can we stop in art to) recreate exploitative patterns from the past (?)

ecological imagination is a turn towards reciprocity and relationship

in Kinect the path of a journey is refracted, mirroring a critical site of refraction, as a practice. walking with Hanno in the Amazon forest is a joyful and critical engagement through a form of practice that resists universalizing tendencies.

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

tree is never tree-like (filial, Arborescent, versus rhizomatic)
vertical vs. lateral
Arborescent vs. reticulated (like the patterns on a giraffe or spots on the python)
stake at “relationships”



how can we problematize narcissism? what if it is the wrong word describing a certain property of life? Narcissus is recognizing himself in his environment and he dissolves himself in that image. the main thing about this story is that he is most alive via the story, Narcissus is basically undead.

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

close-range vision

how can we practice movement and touch in the physio-locality of the eyes?
tentacularity
touching was considered a cruder scanning at close range and seeing a more subtle touching at a distance
importance of far distance over close range => refer to project Standing on the Shoulders of Giants (2015, Sina)

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

forest's “space”

Hernri Lefebvre distinguishes Representation of space and Representational spaces. ... Representational spaces are “directly lived” through associated images and symbols which overlay physical space, making symbolic use of its objects.

Representation is a distinctive manner of imagining the real, and is a fundamental phenomenon upon which all culture rests.

or instead of how a forest looks like, what is the forest made of? and for whom? what is the forest made of is the matter of negotiation (between the different kinds of beings who think differently about the forest)

in order not to neutralise the forest to culture [...]

[...]ithin, thus define the pride-breaking morality of the scientists.

objectivity is a morality of prohibitions rather than exhortations

subspecies of interpretation: projection, anthropomorphism, insertion of hope/fear into images/facts of nature,


varieties of objectivity:
A. mechanical objectivity
B. the metaphysical element that makes objectivity synonymous with truth
C. aperspectival element that identifies objectivity with the escape from and all perspectives

it is tempting to collapse all of objectivity into the view from nowhere. this temptation to simplify by conflation should be resisted, for the highest expressions of objectivity in one mode may seem worthless when judged by the standards of another mode.
(as humans we must deal with our personal, idiosyncratic, perspectival perception)

photo: accurate rendering of sensory appearances

objectivity is a multifarious, mutable thing, capable of new meanings and new symbols: in both a literal and figurative sense, scientists of the late-nineteenth-century created a new image of objectivity

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

we must consider the paths people and trees have taken

entangled networks of matter and meaning

“i don't mind being ‘close to nature.’ but i know what they mean when they say that, and it's not what i mean.”
--Linda Noel, Koyungkawi poet and acorn mush maker

oaks were travelers and mixers

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

(Tomaz Mastnak)
Botanical decolonization

planting and displanting of humans and plants are elements of the same multispecies colonial endeavor

native plants as a discursive field

complex and unmarked ways that plants have been  sorted out as ‘native’ or ‘nonnative’

(as a measure of perfection and ‘civility’) gardening was also the key to the survival of colonies

(for Bacon) ‘plantation’ meant in the first place to ‘Plant in’ people
‘plantation in a pure soile’ (founding a colony)

once we see colonialism as the literal planting and displanting of peoples, animals, and plants--as inscribing a domination into blood and soil founded in the fantasy of molding ecosystems with godlike arrogance--it becomes clear how colonialism ushered in the anthropocene

native plants, by implication, were uncultivated. in the imperial imaginary this distinction between cultivated and native plants was isomorphic with people as well.

‘nature’, like the uncultivated native, was to be dominated by ‘culture’. such ‘government of nature’ found its metropolitan manifestation in botanic gardens. (species collected for scientific reasons, for aesthetic and ideological benefit)

g[...]

[...]e every exchange or change)

a word for a woman bound by another sacred word --> breaking your oaths---in the age of ... (message to the tribalist, the son)

Don Juan: yesterday you gave me your word to come to dine with me.
A beautiful woman: yes where must i go?
Don Juan: give me your hand.

                         a madman /
outside the law of reason, a dog  /
outside the law of man, a devil /
outside the law of god, a...

The hypocrite pays in appearance

devil dubing/subtitling the society of reasonable men
..mad dogs

law directs the circulation of goods. What does it mean for an object oriented thought?
Law directs the circulation of goods, women, promise; of representations, insults, jests

i, as the text of sina, will show you that...

An ordering relation is irreflexive, antisymmetric, and transitive

sequential to consequential
(the concern of narrative)
order of reason (one order among many other sequences)
reason has immense consequences, so does aesthetics

betterable better : finding a stronger one---Kelileh Demneh
the case is of a maximum
the tree of the “better”
a whole forest hidden by a single tree
‘possibility’ is always the higher point on the tree

if you kill me now, my time freezes and its order disappears.
(said sheep to the wolf)
relative relations and absolute limit; he is the master of future

where do you come from? : this is of your clan : irreversible genealogical tree : complete model of kinship (for the ordered structure)

the idea of non-destruction is strange in nature, as if there is a notion of construction in nature, establishes a responsibility.
Care, claims to have suffer

at the end; you are the cause, i am the effect.<br />
Perfect, is free of the psychologism of hypocrisy
•hypocrisy comes from the word to judge

stable structures and dialectical processes are inseparable
(each choice associated with a location on the tree)

(best) reason always permits a winning game (?)

might into right and obedience into duty, that is transforming force into factual necessity, by the stronger. Obedience into law. This is Rousseau

means to have access to the inaccessible

the exact sciences the optimal relationship from subject to object, conceived since the classical ages

A slave who, while sleeping, dreams that he is free
(put to the order of slave, a slave presenting a project to his master)

leipniz and Descartes, posit a maximum and minimum strategy in an ordered space.

The universal quantifactor : constant repetition of all, always, never, absolutely, etc. --> “i [...]

[...]lexive, antisymmetric, and transitive

sequential to consequential
(the concern of narrative)
order of reason (one order among many other sequences)
reason has immense consequences, so does aesthetics

betterable better : finding a stronger one---Kelileh Demneh
the case is of a maximum
the tree of the “better”
a whole forest hidden by a single tree
‘possibility’ is always the higher point on the tree

if you kill me now, my time freezes and its order disappears.
(said sheep to the wolf)
relative relations and absolute limit; he is the master of future

where do you come from? : this is of your clan : irreversible genealogical tree : complete model of kinship (for the ordered structure)

the idea of non-destruction is strange in nature, as if there is a notion of construction in nature, establishes a responsibility.
Care, claims to have suffer

at the end; you are the cause, i am the effect.

Perfect, is free of the psychologism of hypocrisy
•hypocrisy comes from the word to judge

stable structures and dialectical processes are inseparable
(each choice associated with a location on the tree)

(best) reason always permits a winning game (?)

might into right and obedience into duty, that is transforming force into factual necessity, by the stronger. Obedience into law. This is Rousseau

means to have access to the inaccessible

the exact sciences the optimal relationship from subject to object, conceived since the classical ages

A slave who, while sleeping, dreams that he is free
(put to the order of slave, a slave presenting a project to his master)

leipniz and Descartes, posit a maximum and minimum strategy in an ordered space.

The universal quantifactor : constant repetition of all, always, never, absolutely, etc. --> “i shall always follow this path.”

“perfect” signifies “optimal”

quantification of a relationship followed to its limits.
The process quantified, the tactics maximised

(“result:” instead of “-->” (“arrows”) in my writing? )

‘to know nature is a game’
experiment is also a game?
With win or lose possibilities, in which there exists a guaranteed winning strategy.
Game is the model of all exact knowledges.

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

The Ur-Supe, the original state of life, the marine mixture, the primal liquid state, prebiotic soup, the physiochemical condition for the origin of living beings

a mother emerges from a mother

the earth is in labor, a labor of metamorphosis, transformation, production, generation

beneath the anecdotes and pathos, the text mobilizes with[...]

[...] (there is no dichotomy in the operation)

technologies concerning heat, thermodynamics, shocked the traditional world and shaped the one we are now working in.
...theories concerning processes of transformation.
...stages of alchemical initiations, archaic figure of fire,

How to make the history of science as effective as science itself?

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

suddenly science falls silent and mythology speaks

transsubstantiation

the astronomer falls in ==> the truth comes out
(ask maryam's astronomer: what disconnects the connected?)

throw the key to the text

for classification, connection is at stake, space is at stake

the formal invariant is something like a transport

what is worse for classification?

non-connections that are at stake

we shall never be free of space
>
fire, and transcendental subject

accidents of space (at work upon the multiplicity of spatial varieties

what is the program of topology?

My body lives in as many spaces as the group (the society) has formed.
The euclidian house, the street and its networks, open/closed garden, closed space of the sacred, school and its fix points and social varieties, complex ensemble of flow charts, those of language, of factory of family, of political party, and so forth.

..my body is plunged in the intersection of this multiplicity

culture : constructing precise and particular connections between such spatial varieties --> “original intersection”

topology; culture connects and joints, art delinks and disconnects
(the law of incest prohibition connects the disconnected)

pure --> untainted --> separated, enclosed

the discourse of rationality replacing the mythical tical text --> art becomes science --- the realization of a project is left to reason

siyavosh/sohrab is one of the descendants of disseminated spaces, of catastrophic separation of the continuous

when Rostam recognises the mark of his son, Ferdosi giving a version of recognition scene, connects --> Oedipus
the son, the mother
-we can recognise a typological space: the same and the other: the separated
-the space of the world is described requiring connection
-family tree
-parts are to be joined
-rostam and sohrab, siyavosh and sudabeh, cannot be composed to form a single homogeneous space. (rostam and siyavosh do that)

the presuppose that before discourse there existed a mutual policy of unrelated spaces ~ chaos
-the object or the target of (cultural) discourse is to connect
-to transform a chaos of separate spatial varieties into a space of communication
-scatered members, re-me[...]

[...]e group (the society) has formed.
The euclidian house, the street and its networks, open/closed garden, closed space of the sacred, school and its fix points and social varieties, complex ensemble of flow charts, those of language, of factory of family, of political party, and so forth.

..my body is plunged in the intersection of this multiplicity

culture : constructing precise and particular connections between such spatial varieties --> “original intersection”

topology; culture connects and joints, art delinks and disconnects
(the law of incest prohibition connects the disconnected)

pure --> untainted --> separated, enclosed

the discourse of rationality replacing the mythical text --> art becomes science --- the realization of a project is left to reason

siyavosh/sohrab is one of the descendants of disseminated spaces, of catastrophic separation of the continuous

when Rostam recognises the mark of his son, Ferdosi giving a version of recognition scene, connects --> Oedipus
the son, the mother
-we can recognise a typological space: the same and the other: the separated
-the space of the world is described requiring connection
-family tree
-parts are to be joined
-rostam and sohrab, siyavosh and sudabeh, cannot be composed to form a single homogeneous space. (rostam and siyavosh do that)

the presuppose that before discourse there existed a mutual policy of unrelated spaces ~ chaos
-the object or the target of (cultural) discourse is to connect
-to transform a chaos of separate spatial varieties into a space of communication
-scatered members, re-membered
-incoherent chaos, reformulated in the common space of transport when it is reconstructed

Kelileh
...she is the signatory of the discourse
...she mimes the progress and delays of Demneh

ajayeb, a time when transport and itinerary were only myth


transport ~/=? transfer
-transport is a unitary space where transfer is *always possible (like money)
-transfer is only a possibility

so, we must find the word or construct a conditional logos that *already works to connect the crevices which run across the spatial chaos of disconnect varieties, the *proto-worker of space*, the weaver in the topology of nodes

separations by sudden stoppage
•is this a myth?

a worker of the single space
(we are not)

euclidian space of every possible displace
(what are the displaces and displacements in Ajayeb? Be specific)

(proliferating multiplicities of) unlinked morphologies

(fire text)
to practice dichotomy (and its connected paths) one must know that its clefts follow and overlap the ancient mythical narrative (in which wo[...]

[...]concretes, quasi-concretes, laws, equations,
vortices, turbulent clouds,
random dispersions,
flows, disequilibrias,
packs, alliances, conventions,
struggles with nature, alliances,
downhills, slopes,
content, norms, results,

the model and theory are both necessitarians
(how can this be explained materially?)

(what is the opposite of ‘people’?)

“physics”: the global contract (=/= global conflict; promise of physics), the general scheme of things (that scientists agree on)

flow did not follow (the general theorem of mechanics)

[@Sana] (why is it important) to describe flow in all its concrete complexity (--> Freud describes psychological flow in his work on libido)
----> formation of living systems

#the mindful stochastic knowledge of phenomenas#

Sohrevardi's work on the soul out of the tangible realm
(if your house or town is on an ocean the chosen model is a fluid one =/= polyhedron crystal) --> how would Sohrevardi choose a model? What would he think of fluid systems? [--> The Solids of...]
what are his rigorous bodies?

in Sohrevardi the *order* is of the ...[?] {of the world? Of the street? Of the code? Laboratory? Of the operative? Civil? Logical? Social? Scholastic?

more phenomenological ~=?(&?) less measured
(the river of phenomena is physics)

they put (ajayeb's) nature outside nature, (placing it in the subject, and so on)
which facts “are” the foundation of materialism?
-(the idea they says) classical knowledge deserves classical philosophy

(#?%$@x*!!!---->) if there are monsters here, go elsewhere(!)

what? / how? --> by contract or by strategy?

the ‘question’ is always consequential, never naive or frivolous

we need? workers (=/= generals)
we need? contracts (=/= strategy)
(how can i understand my “strategies” and my “contracts” ?! contractual agreements that i use or depend on or produce in my research and work with ajayeb, and in relation to the others in my performances--{my vocabulary, thinking with me, (un)learning with me, etc}--and even prior to the event of our encouter, the binding transferential contract in relation to the one who speaks) ~~--> (and issuing its) betrayal
strategy --(always? [should?] ends with)-->? contract; (for example, making peace treaty after war)
[]

{*strategy, “art of generals,” from French stratégie, from Greek strategia “office or command of a general,” from strategos “general,” from stratos “multitude, army, expedition,” literally “that which is spread out” (--> “structure”) + agos “leader,” from agein “to lead” (--> “act”).}

(strategy/contract/...)

***science is conditioned but unconditional***
(Serres:) science is conditio[...]

[...] up towards the Ka'ba.”
(**If the Ka'ba was not told sooner.)
@“My Ka'ba in late sober drunk...”
@Said another one, “This time a determined way, in temples I sit and beg my pardon.”
@The journalist said on its doorstep, “it is Will's apologize that hurts me.”
@Another one said to him “that hell is intercepted. Man is hell!”
@“If Hell is the way,” I said it, “Seven of Hell, burn me a sigh!”
@Another one said to him “that the hope of heaven? Go back and repeat saddle evil!”
@Said the man, “Is a paradise on now?! (of course!) - it is paradise this dormitory.” (--> Naaaareh)
@Another said to him that “the shame of the right with God?!”
@Said, “The fire in my right.”
@“That is...” another one resident said to him “Go! Open a believe that is believing!”
@“But I wonder blasphemy!” replied Sheikh, “Faith disbelieves faith.”


Because he did not speak work, that was the end of treatment.
Woman wave the curtain hearts blood-glucose.
What comes to your meeting unfolds... Leave days, with golden shield. Hinduism night to cast the razor head. Proud the other day. It was like a sea of light absorbing Fountain Creek.
Sheikh quiet in alley of the building, working with street dogs. Stayed on the ground and sat released. Such was the-hair-in-the-mouth. Finished up closeness day and night in his dormitory.
He waited for the sun.
Became ill.
(Soil was the idol bed in his dormitory.)



*The girl was aware of love.
Made a journalist of herself, “What patrol!” said Sheikh restless, who have drunk of the wine of idolatry.
christians meeting in dormitories.
Sheikh confessed to the Other, “Each blow brought a frenzy.” Sheikh asked him, “Do you see the tongue? Therefore stolen heart? Open heart or make me! I need perspective! Several prayers!”
Cute and proud of the passage: a stranger loved and follo followed.
“John commands thee, although you will still die of lips.” “...of lips and my losses and profits.” Kuwait was the destination and to me. Do not twist the hair in shit! The shit in my eyes is not drunk.
(Heart on fire, seen as clouds from the top:)
“Without you, my lifeworld begs the center of you. Like rain that clouds the eye, without you, I eye the eye. Devil has seen the stay in mourning, the sighting of view—grief remains.”
I saw there was not one inch. I did not like the blood of the wine on the lives of the poor man.
He kicked several men's conquests. I refuse waiting time.
There was **the time of start-stop**. Each night, the ambush of my life. John played on your campus.
Power is on the ground, my life.
I survive rates of cheap dirt.
“Some moan on power, in the opener, but I blow to the self-confidant ‘now.’”
Sunny---from as far away as you think. Although such Sheikh of anxiety jammed in the[...]

[...]ction (among iranian youth)

-how did poetry respond to historical events of atrocity and transition
-did the poets understand themselves as resembling a mystical, criminal, mercenary, or revolutionary edifice?

amorphous, obscure, versatile (thinkers and writers launching an intellectual-existential offensive against the disenchantment of the modern age)
along archetypes:
•power
•hostility
•banishment
•solitude
•desire
•sacrifice


contradictory experiences of the modern cityscape of the middle east --> at once a site of:
•autocracy and insurgency
•concealment and detection
•connectivity and alienation
•integration and crumbling
•gesticulation and idleness


Setareh's topics:
experiences of upheaval, hysteria, sabotage, collective suffering
--> Sana's topics:
existential-spatial understanding of questions of cruelty, betrayal, torment, annihilation


(poets finding themselves consumed with) the distinctive emergence of “the martyr”:

[-]Akhavan writing/witnessing at the time of reterritorialization of urban space during Mossadegh era: the subdivision of streets, districts, and neighborhoods into dueling sectors of power and resistance.
Akhavan's lament in “Winter”
disenchantment, bitterness, semiotic disorientation
touch = final sensory prism
Akhavan's task: to protect the domain of radical individuality (==> Ali's subjectivity)
(Mohaghegh asking:) *is the artist charge a mere diguise of influence and supermacy?* or **is the firmness of its articulation sanctioned by some dominant elsewhere or otherworldliness?**
*does the poetic consciousness believe itself of an elite unknown rank (against the monolith)?
sociopolitical discourses either bore or aggravate Akhavan --only--> (transient historical specificity of) *turmoil demands poet's greater urgency*
(the poet has earned the station to say) “no more of this” (“it's enough”) ~ an *order*  [=/= wisdom, sage, diplomatic response of an interlocutor, truth-telling, equal dialogue, negotiation]
poet's expertise and sensitivity: the storyteller's intimate relation to impermanence and destruction (--> Ali, Sana, Hoda, Setareh)

[-]Baraheni's depiction of the spatial domination of the city by Pahlavi regime from 1952 to 1979 --> SAVAK responded to and fueled a striking development in the political consciousness of the urban centers ==> labyrinthine evolution of the rebel form
hie poem “An Epic in Reverse” (Akhavanian reversal) neighborhoods of stigma, filth, and backwardness --> hybrid of animality and criminality
(Mohaghegh asking:) what is the author's recourse once stranded behind those iron bars, and now acquainted with the gleaming tools and instruments of the guards and royal executioners[...]

[...]subjectivity = hiding place }<-- chaotic imagination overruns it

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

Glissant

constrictions of the ‘forced poetics’ of writing (in plastic arts)

grandiose concept of the writer (of writing as an ordering process)

world meant as raw material for a book

Glissant's thoroughgoing exploration of models of disorder/chaos --> (his subversive epitome of) *opacite/opacity* --> realm of the intuitive and indeterminate as a corrective response to the systematizing pressures of assimilation and deculturation
==> to create a more immediate, oral, corporeal language
-inadequate process of attempting to note down, chronicle or relate the experience of opacity

chaos + opacity + resistance (in Glissant)
primordial act of defiance lajbazi

negation = heroic (=/= pedestrian)

Glissant's anonymous and pedestrian form of resistance --> knowledge of camouflaged reality

“The one with whom the poet is enchanted, that he names with each breath. But for whom words are inadequate.”

...in the unexpected expanse of global relating

“a poetics not of the tree but of vegetation”
[poetics of the decentered subject]
epitomise (pure) revolt (--> tree grows to reveal human configurations, fierce and solitary revolt against the plantation system)

modest forms of resistance
fragmentation of fiction --to--> polyphonic quiltwork of stories

[system of imagery]
(Glissant's) insistence on marine symbolism
transforming, restorative power of water
harsh bitter truth of the sea <--> inscrutable, ambiguous nature of the experience

preoccupation with the need to create a literary language --> specificity of lived experience


*narrateur enfant*

narrator distorting and simplifying my experience

“burning with a silent and stubborn multitude”

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

Mishra


[the evidence of Europe's advantages -->] an expression of europe in terms of a 19th century progress, which has been be increasingly hard to refute:
place of West in the avant-garde of progress <== manifold achievements of technology, constitutional government, secular state and modern administration <== (a separate and
distinct ‘nation-state’ <==) American and French revolutions
}--> unable to assess by Muslims? ~~?--> the tale of the bewildered Asian:
•dast-e gheyb دست غیب divinely ordained dispensation
•dast-e taghdir دست تقدیر mysterious workings of fate
•charkh-e ruzegar چرخ روزگار cyclical rise and fall of political fortune
•uncreative dynastic rulers
(=/= organized human energy [...]

[...]br /> return of the threat --> intimidation --> extortionist
return of the dead --> disappearance --> ghost
return of desire --> obsession --> stalker
return of pain --> infection --> virus
return of the discarded --> waste --> vagrant
return of glory --> vindication --> fighter
return of the scene --> concealment --> criminal
return of dust --> mortality --> creation
return of instinct --> animality --> creature
point of no return --> irreversibility --> lost cause


masochistic skepticism
sadistic truth
(Mohaghegh's) *deception theory*


death of God + death of the Human + death of the Real ==> limitless epochal existential era of lying

existential forgery
ingenuity
deceit
treacherous play
fictive double-crossing
elaboration


(thief's, runaway's, insomniac's, hysteric's, sorcerer's, and other night-traveler's) sensorial orchestrations of the dark intervals

morphologies of the night-traveler:
•the old boat-passengers once placed under enforced isolation
•the exiles displaced from occupied homelands
•the marauding sectarian factions who patrolled city streets each night (darkness = ideology)
•the slaughtered minorities traversed into non-being
•night-revelers عیاش
•

militant storyteller
phantom ancestors
phantom offsprings


nightclub: a place of nocturnal survival

club manager
lighthouse-keeper

(catastrophic imagination --> fable of) slum = the true face of the city

persecuted, transient, unrescued

(wunderkammer) a cabinet of curiosities (~/?= pandora's box) of subjects, objects, atmospheres, associates, body parts

ontocidal: decimation of Being, both individual and universal
r />
medieval islamic world renders us countless templates linking night to sacred and profane realms: stories of augury, mantic beings, and vatic utterances in circulation from all sides

Thousand and One Nights
god's turbulent relation to obscurity

crescent moon

...brilliant speculative accomplishment of the Golden Age of Islamic Thought now a dark age of its own

معراج miraj (Mohaghegh's Dante's ascension)
sky-voyage of the Prophet Mohammad from Mecca to Jerusalem and then upwards into heavenly spheres, filled with supernatural descriptive passages of guardian angels, paradisiac gardens, hell-bound valleys, meteorological orbits, fatal latitudes and meridians, and the gargantuan throne of God itself

night-journey: spiritual + corporeal --> prophetic night (of strange breathing apparatus <-- angelic wing)

angel's wing [that spans entire worlds] --reopens--> (the relatio[...]

[...]rity, covert, elite)

galleries of self-covering demonic beings

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


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



(Mohaghegh reading a Babylonian nocturnal prayer)

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

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

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

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


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

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

(cypress سرو) tree
inspector of cosmological space


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


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


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

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


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


Girra
dystopian potentials of technological invention
figure of wicked logos (undoing words)
(leader of the terrible)


non-metaphysica[...]

[...]-political order : gods walk among us in immanent ambush, hiding in night's open view (of many faces, masks, tongues, robes, tastes, proportions, and gestures), adopt infinite visages, apparels, pseudonyms, and dialects [=/= monochrome trappings of daily identity]


Ahriman =/= fire-god
omnimalevolent side
first destructive spirit
twins of the primeval choice
==> crises of perception
dwelling in non-being
shape-stealer
self-cutting (cooking of his own paranormal tissue)

earthly creation = ruse, net, and temporary prison (a decorative window-dressing to lure the false god away)

a sunless place

mortal transactions (of civilizational, philosophical, religious, and moral trials)


night-raid
nocturnal fierceness
asceticism of the warrior
asceticism of the night-watchman


(Goda riding with the) exponential disinformation of legend

learn to talk with night <-- not indicative of a knowing subject
--> to become both hypnotized & hypnotic whisper

language of mood (subtle movements of):
•temperature drops
•intermittent gusts of air and wind
•snapping of tree branches
•shooting comets of sky


Bronze Age eschatologies

queen of riddles
cosmic idolater
her language never argues, only propositions



dark thoughts

evanescing moon

...guerilla leader who fled into the mountains and froze to death beneath the night sky

thoughts of
•obvious separation (from family, lovers)
•potential victory and loss (fatalistic struggle)
•futility of human experience amid insects and animals creeping in his midst (transfigured)

*night <--tied--> wondering*
*night <--tied--> uprising*
*night <--tied--> possession + dispossession*
*night <--tied--> countdown* شمارش معکوس
*night <--tied--> disappearance*
*night <--tied--> abdication*
*night <--tied--> dismay* جبن
*night <--tied--> obscenity* جبن

***night --to--> bring the mind elsewhere***

Mirza Kuchak Khan
Jangali

...once the leader of the jungle movement; now the jungle will confiscate him


(tactics of the willed unknown)
inspiration <--> madness
horoscope <--> puppetry


sensitivity to lower-grade intimation ==> gaining of subtle lunatic powers (in the arts as well #feedback):
•slight paranoiac ability
•slight manic ability
•slight delusional ability
•slight schizophrenic ability
•slight obsessive ability
•slight melancholic ability


when dreams replace sleep
when the dead pass into th[...]