[...] questioning (or their merge?), (statement/question) --> doubt --> postponing an immediate answer (“but before you answer...”) --> death of question
*Esteban: not to do: impose an answer, not triggering in the other, expecting an idea of an answer
*Arianna: deep truth involved, process, point of passage (the axis of child traverses your axis) what you say to the other is a container
*Joke: question --to--> invitation, creating the invitation
*Pierre: posting a problem is not about general sentences, it is about finding new relations in the existing fabric of the world, problematizing our intuitions into problems, therefore it is important to have the “?”
*Sina: remembering beyond history

--------[how can we enter something and not enter it at the same time?]
*Thiago: nonpresence <--> thinking, without body?!
*Aela: is about the question of distance and inside/outside, by practicing openness, it is about when something enters ‘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
[...]

[...]
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 institutions of the cutting-edge development regarding ambitious notion of ‘data,’ ‘systematic knowledge,’ and ‘specifications’. the excursion will be oriented towards a meeting between the participants of advanced performance and scenography studies and the representatives of CEN, and encourages a run between the ontological demands of international economy and contemporary art, their disastrous split, and where their formations meet and intersect.

KEYWORDS: cosmology, experimentation, existence, specification, future, knowledge, irrationality, permanence and substance, technological acts--of naming, a path of becoming--on the grid of technological dominion, suspicious partnership of “advanced democracies” and “high technology"--what allows their mutuality?, standard-testing--which sectors of existence it is traversing?, pre-technological traces of cognitive normalization, the very little difference between specification and “the real thing,” THE origin of the demand for rigorous specification, migration of questions out of the areas of instrumental fitness, human relation to the surrounding world, impoverished zoologies--under techno-epistemo-anthropocentric values, squeezing prehistoric modes of weakening subjectival normativity--a field that today gets heavily technologized,

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

to bring our needs and lures towards each other
bring my lure to the[...]

[...]is a radical meaning-making practice full of adventures and preparations, drawings and graphs, diffractions and detours, connections and risks of (mis)understanding in certain ways. this ‘reading’ looks very much ‘writing’ alike.
-the reading becomes *rereading past writing*, re(past)ed(writ)ing, a reading that has writen itself in palimpsestic lines. in a Derridean sense: (one is equiped with the question) “what is writing itself (in this text)”?
-two speculative spheres meet in rhetorical reading: one of the text and one of the reader, but they have to ‘stick’ to one another, the stickiness of your reading matters in consequential ways. this is against the idea that we read and each understand personally whatever.
•my second issue with ‘close reading’: there is no correlation between the speed of reading and comprehension/apprehension

*reading practices*
ontology usually decides what reading is --> *book-binding is reading. editorial compositional reformating and remodeling of the space of the text is reading.

(Stewartian) reading that happens in the writing: you can't do any kind of exegesis of the reading تفسير, rather: *you have to become related to the reading in what you are writing*


in research:
•skills of reading and writing
•(more abstract) skills of conceptualizing and analysing

@apass: begin with the generation of research question ==> importance of language
(you flag the importance of language whenever research is marked by question. “?” is a linguistic construct)

•the skill/craft is to select a research question that works better for certain descriptive purposes (than does previous tools)
•(realism:) research question <==outcome== different concerns and emphases

rigor of conceptualization : quality of an access to part of a world “out there”

research method:
•“mapping into knowledge” : co-fabrication between the researcher and the diverse others engaged in the process --> (problem of) ‘positionality ==> data’ (the idea that the researcher produces knowledge or “facts”)
◦positionality ==?==> politically correct jargon in artistic research environment [has positionality backfired into a language of trying to change a public opinion in your favour?]

‘fantasy of the unproblematic mode’

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

regarding biographical work according to Pierre, ok i am working even on the border of solipsism
what i am doing is not autopoiesis (self-making, making a poem out of yourself) rather sympoiesis (with-making, with people from different worlds and pasts)

trying to contain every available mode of interpretation in my work
(collecting all the modes of interpretation)

(for the psychoanalyst as writer,) the *unconscious functions as a *trope
unconsc[...]

[...]ed complaint (in the aesthetic terms of contemporary art market), non-researchers of their subjects and topics, they have no ‘topic’ only ‘resource’ (in the making of their own myth of the figure of artist,) [=/= when something becomes a topic for you, it bounds you to the unsettling commitments of curiosity and research and hard work.]
-in their notion of “Artist in the Reign of Terror” they ask disturbingly “but many individuals have died and it means nothing?!” with a sneer (artwork as puzkhand پوزخند --> @Ali )
[**“sneer” is a contemptuous or mocking smile, remark, or tone, coming from a family of sarcastic tropes of complaint and ironizated complaining]
-their art-work finds and flourishes in a terrain of terror. in their nonspeculative work there is no “but, what if” or “but, not yet” and therefore no ‘becomings’
-for Hito and Rabih: zeitgenössisch (contemporary) = grausam (atrocious)
-they dichotomize (fact/fiction, real/unreal, etc.), rather than allowing a novel and interesting question to be raised
-what is the state of unknown in one's practice? rather than being a news agency




[negativity?]--> your bad feelings --> غر ghor complaint --(turn it into)--> critique --(start doing)--> research --(get)--> diploma --(turn it into)--> phd --(make your)--> department of studies --(into)--> craft tradition
[you don't have to start with negativity!]
[you don't need to end in your own myth tradition!]

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

@Anouk (@her “breathing archive”): (Lev Manovich's) relationship between ‘interface’ and ‘database,’ ‘perceptable’ to ‘information’. [Database as Symbolic Form: http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i290-1/s04/readings/manovich_database.pdf]
what is for Anouk ‘information’? and what is for her the relationship between information, knowledge, interface, and perceptable?
for her what is the relationship between ‘information’ an[...]

[...]r /> ***translation (essentailly imperfect) is the very condition of signification --> trope is the very condition of language

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

don't be docile bodies or innocent bystander, do what you have to do to constitute your courage
all i am saying is that: it is not clear what the destiny of art (or of anything) is

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

perhaps what i am trying to learn--with apass, ajayeb, writing, harem, etc--is to ask what do i need--which skills, abilities, or literacies--to become equipped to share the experience of the habits of the world (of ajayeb) that i am discovering

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

Luisa: “the visual (side)effects of a ‘not being supported’”
effect --> object --> suport --> object2 --> suport3 --> suport4 --> ...
(at one point Marialena pulling away a support box ==> Luisa's cry sound side-effect of a ‘not being supported’)
•?how is it done for her: construction of indifferent objects
•which import function is materializing her ‘objects’? [public import]



I want my friends to become marvelous thinkers makers, I want them to ask interesting questions



Esta: “when we enter the presentation we are researchers, we are not friends” [--> “neutrality” of encounter]
(but i want to explore new places in my work with the people who care for you)
(is this at all possible? to enter with friends a non-friend zone?)

inclusion =/= involvement
(inclusion usually mistaken as literally for physical inclusion)



How Kobe's work can move from a “case-finder agency” to a consequential work? [--> storytellings for making consequential meanings*] that means: what does it mean to live in the consequences of the relations one is enacting?
(when I look at my friends and peers in apass, I can see and feel the knowledges they inhabit in their bodies and the living effects of their languages. I re-figurally feel the figures they embody and their objects whether they assist or resist states of transformation.)


ephemeral things become food

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

Esta, risking one's life


@Hoda, Xiri,
the idea of “express its inner experience”
simulation of

Xiri's sense of entitlement to accusation


@Leo, fiction of sharing
‘something tangible, like a meal’
something phantasmatically hooked up to libidinal openness, like a drug


@Elen, DUI: driving under influence, what are we on when they were driving her cars
DUI has become the pharmecy take on drugs to take away and winning the drug war
movement under influence, MUI
legelized use of motor activity
driving while impaired/driving while intoxicated (DWI)
drink-driving (UK)
driving risk[...]

[...]rounding and the world is not actually built that way. so you make ‘your mode of attention = world’ to inhabit something for a certain time only to do a certain kind of work)] --(because)--> you are always jumping into the middle of something that is ongoing before you, into the middle of many conversations. you are learning how to get it in several ways at once. the hypertext that i have been building also characterizes these kinds of layering upon layering of textual work. teaching myself how to write and how to play with ideas.
working with (Haraway's) kind of good-enough approach to a body of scholarship --> inhabiting many things that i have only got half-digested (=/= through digestion, particular bodies of reading that people need to have mastered in order to argue)

(after five years now i am) feeling myself (a little bit more) competent and confident in (some) scientific literacy and in (some of) the skills of the arts and literature --> ?

after apass: apass was a safe-enough space for my inventive processes, to make interesting mistakes, but do i need a real scholarly undertaking with ajayeb?
i had a lousy education, don't know still how to write well and coherently and sustain a project. i don't have the skills to pull off my research as a phd, as a scholar. i need someone to work with me line-by-line. i need to go people who have serious educations in my subject, and ask them questions, and read.
and i am missing that kind of connectivity that your writing being read performs. do i need an atmosphere in which my kind of writerly activities are honored and foregrounded, and expected?

can my ajayeb beome a real scholarly project with seriously labor-intensive student work?


hostility =/= indigestibility {they cannot recognize it, it is something else}--> it is not personal, but a historical state of a discourse, and the nature of the kinds of possibilities that being opened up or closed


(in apass) all of us fail each other in different ways all the time*

we can barely read each other's works/books. but we do, and we struggle with each other's works/books


(in apass i am catching my self giving “advice” to others---risk of the advice:) violation of their integrity

*taxonomy: (constantly morphing) tools, they work and get worked, *they are part of situated conversations* (~ “theory conversations” Katie King < Haraway)
(=/= some kind of enemy that you never do)


***almost everybody is organically part of more than one conversation at a time*** (Haraway)
(this is so important to recognize specially in collaborative research environments such as apass)


(in political movement:) working to a kind of clarity of ideological position ==> to do certain kinds of things (that are harder to do if you don't have them [those ideological positi[...]

[...]m that of apass?



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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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



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


i can't shake off the idea that behind every marketing strategy there i a predatory behavior concealed


***there is nothing quite so humiliating and disempowering as trying to prove the truth***

‘trying to prove the truth’ is the wors[...]

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


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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


i can't shake off the idea that behind every marketing strategy there i a predatory behavior concealed


***there is nothing quite so humiliating and disempowering as trying to prove the truth***

‘trying to prove the truth’ is the worst position you can find yourself in and it means you are fucked. because you are doing it to empower yourself in the face of a biger power that lies and claims you. the conditions that had let that happen are the question, not the truth of the matter --> that is why i find journalism most of the time useless

impossibility of having an interview with iranians (myself included): [<==? chaotic subjectivity]
deflection --> dodging: not giving meaningful answers : gradations of non-answers you are re[...]

[...]lection --> dodging: not giving meaningful answers : gradations of non-answers you are receiving
taking a keyword, repeating it, sounds like answering the question, introducing a nonsequitur to trip up the host
==> more confused & less informed

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

#project Puchberg landscape Austria
shifting baseline syndrome: reshaping the landscape and forgetting what was before ==>{ (new) reality = shaped and ruined landscapes
(Emirates was for me such reality of shaped ruin)
admiring one landscape and its biological entanglements (Puchberg Austrian meadows, with it cows and horses, place of beauty and leisure) ==entails==> forgetting many others --> ‘forgetting’ (~ privileging one assemblage over others) ==remakes==> landscapes
(yet) ghosts point to forgetting, show how living landscapes are imbued with earlier tracks and traces
( specters in grasslands...)


in apass (i can't pose problems until) we must address these question:
•European heritage of creating conviviality شادمانی قابل آمیزش (and very good at it)
•the idea of democracy as a political project اکثريت نجيب (soft ways of being together)
◦secularism of artistic research دين ناوابستگى (registers of logos)

[most of the times our collaborative research artistic practices explicate ‘soft ways of being together’ ==> a condition in which no one knows better than the other]

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

the accelerationist fable of “running before walking”
ask any scientist and it comes to this. any problem caused by progress is because it has been going too fast. but the direction of its movement remains intrinsic to the idea of human
...

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

@Hoda: to be very careful with the fetish of “refugee's suffering” --> turning a serious political problem (geopolitics of western intervention, europe's economic neocolonialism) into a (sentimental liberal) humanitarian concern ==> avoiding critical political analysis

?a different program: not to be yourself
to bring our struggles together (not our so-called cultural differences)

refusal to integration is problematic as integration (into host's pleasure principle)

authentic imperialism has always been multicultural

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

on affect
affective character practice of retrospection: a bit pensive and passive, a bit slow and solemn?

1970s and 1980s anthropology of emotion: how feelings variously fix and stick through different compositions of language and discourse =/= anthropology of affect: how some feelings slip, evade, and overflow capture ==> *creative methods to collect evidence of environments making and shaping bodies in ways more complex than and ontologically distinct from the poetics on[...]

[...]xibility and solidity
Finn is the body from nowhere by example, he goes to dimensions of fire, ice, dream, etc. and his ontology of knowledge and identity remains intact (he grows up like a good old cowboy) =/= you look at the land from the ice and you don't see the same reality if you look at it from the fire realm. ice/gas/water, you are always looking at it from somewhere. Harraway named it “situated knowledges”. and it seems these locations are not free floating and not available for everyone. some are more attached or stucked to particular positions, some less, they are “marked” as Harraway put it.


anti-knowledge disposition of sex-education tv seriese
verybody is self-educating in the story
all positivity is created by ‘bravery,’ not their ‘knowledge’
nobody knows anything or can know anythingbravery has replaced faith ()
•Otis's knowledge: psychology is debunked
•Maeve's knowledge: existentialism is irrelevant


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



what is the state of art after Goya?



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


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


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

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


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

poor cognition <--> boring environment


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


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



برون افکن بنه زین‌دار نه در[...]

[...]ro shirin
tarof ghabl az bad o bira goftan

shenidan (niushidan) ~= fahmidan فهمیدن

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

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


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



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



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



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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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



two examples [...]

[...]ies the profound disruption to thought that the experimental theater of America directed. (Ronell)

uninterrogated durability (as a first-rate value on earth)

(American) athleticism of identity switching----it means that anyone can in principle try anything out

Dr. Frankenstein's new *experimental jouissance*

experimenting inhabiting acts of promising (calculating or anticipation----acts by which the future can be nailed down)


It is thus that the maddest and most interesting ages of history always emerge, when the “actors,” all kinds of actors, become the real masters. As this happens, another human type is disadvantaged more and more and finally made impossible; (Nietzsche)

flora and fauna

this is not the scientist obsessed with an idée fixe--but one capable of uprooting and going

...invites ambivalence
...dreaming of immense edifices and the permanence promised by contracts written in stone

register(s) of understanding


A new fold in metaphysics, testing--that is, the types of relatedness that fall under this term--asserts another logic of truth.

A kind of questioning, a structure of incessant research, perhaps a modality of being, testing scans the walls of experience, measuring, probing, determining the “what is” of the lived world.

i marvel at...


wonders of...
marvels of...
unheards of...
mazhar ol-ajayeb مظهر العجایب
Motehayeran-e متحیران, Tahayor تحیر ~=? to wonder
dar ahval-e... در احوال
dar khavas-e... در خواص
navader-e... نوادر
sefat-e... صفات


ta'ajob تعجب =/=? heyrat حیرت
the mode of attention in ajayebnameh is tuned by ta'ajob (wonder) away from Iranian mystic preferences over transfixation and rapture (heyrat)
which literary or (not)knowing positions are installed in these two (observational?) stations?
the subject of ta'ajob is moved otherwise
تعجب در باب امر قدسی‌ ta'ajob dar bab-e amr-e ghodsi, wonder in the matters of divine

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

Heidegger: die Wissenschaft denkt nicht
Derrida: links science to mourning and memory
Lacan: science is always there, ready to erupt, amaze or blow you away.


Husserl was perhaps the one most freaked out by the historical split (between science and philosophy--and art?)


...a matter of technological selfunderstanding,

...nor do I insist on sustaining the pathos that propels the images...

ethical and political issues are increasingly seem to have more to do with testing than questioning, hesitation, certainty

There is a test ... it claims and so it stands. There is the other test that[...]

[...]he most potent fables of sexual selection and re-tells them --> these new stories make real species-shaping difference by contributing to the social infrastructure within which offspring are produced and reared

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



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

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

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

/science is an interpretative adventure

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

re-thinking consciousness

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

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

[...]omething is being specified and something generalized. [@Xiri's “I am the one who... your...” the specificity and generality of “I” and of “you” in her text. how the difference of “you” and “I” was envisaged in her poem?-->{I, the effected by =/= you, the haver} how can this I/you impose itself not as the effect of a strong-arm tactic? =/=? I want to find out how to live together; refuse to deepen the contrast between “us” and “them"] [in Xiri's poem: who/what makes her pronouns?] [to address people ‘as’ refugees, subjugated, poor, or victim, to recognize them by these identities, only repeats the process of exclusion(?) could be experienced as disabling.]


*/ generalization is constructed bit by bit

(that which constitutes) an expression of the parrot's opinion in relevance to what it is asked, the fact that it engages with, accepts and activly transforms what becomes a part of its world, translates an extension of this world and therefore an extension of its subjectivity as “parrot-with-human”


-when an animal escapes me, in fact it is making a form of the “judgement of relation” that animals make about humans


[*]anonymity: (a certain manners of presenting oneself,) that unquestioned condition of research that translates a certain type of relationship and a certain manner of defining those whom one addresses

I am against “feel free to say what you want” because it means actually what you say will have no consequences ==> (radical) asymmetry of expertises:
•researcher-author --> knows better
•social actor --> interchangeable holders of opinions


“scientist”: that who “knows better”
(if the fish cannot become a scientist, then I also don't want to --> let's change how one becomes a “fish” or a “scientist”)


(Laleh) could ask her subjects: “so, in your opinion, ‘as a child,’ how do you think I should construct my question so that it has a chance of being understood and of being interesting?”
•the question, that was my responsibility, that of difference, formulated in different ways
•“they” [your “subjects"] might unproot your question, displace it, modify its ambit (hoze حوزه), and when they find the right way of formulating it, they answer*

[*]asking ~= constructing interest ~=> (a chance of) interesting answers
•ask your subjects to construct interest
•the appropriateness of question
•problems are only interesting if they interest (?)
•(all) apparatuses create subjectivities


to attend to animal “paying attention” --> good translators of intentions
(how did I become interested in this?)


in farms, “talk is incessant. And because there is talk, there is talking back.”

talking back and forth --> exchange judgments about intentions --> adjusting the intentionalitie[...]

[...]e of a modern and secular labor. he was using a profane water?}
حیوان خوران جهان heyvan khorane jahan
زیرکان کهن kohan zirak

حجابی که ظلمات شد نام او روان آب حیوان از آرام او (Zolmat & abe heyvan)

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

#my work in apass is about:
•bestiary: archaeological anthropology of human-animal practices
•rhetoric: scaling, modeling, figuring out fields of practices
•ontology: circumscribe, address, or deal with the processes of ontological transformations
•storytelling: mobilizing different kinds of mental resources and literacies
•performance: what it would be to know together
•sociality: that which joins categorically separate mode of agencies
•

#my findings/questions, so far:
•animal subjectivity ~=? human imagination
•bestiary ~=? affect + episteme
•medieval bestiaries: world ~= phenomena
•definition ~=? ontological choreography ==> worlds are created
•metaphores of self ~-> body image ~=? image of world
•list ~=? reason
•

I found myself oriented towards a kind of ‘multispecies ethnography’: a new way of writing and mode of research in which creatures previously appearing on the margins of interest--as part of the landscape, as food for humans, as symbols (for mystic projects)--have been pressed into the foreground of interest.
(what are my) symbolic + symbiotic attachments
what/who is coughing, counting, working, communicating sited between divine and bestial in ajayeb?
-is my ajayeb a (dead/alive) multispecies art project? studying Indo-Arab-Iranian illuminated manuscripts as to be reading a paper in ecology or molecular biology or art.

unlike Alex Arteaga's question of “inevitable altruism” {started from “conscious human subjects” and ended there} (in his talk 30.05.2017 apass,) I would insist on giving an account of the metaphors of ‘self’ in the history of body and mind (that matters to ‘you’) [my findings of self: maginc lantern, iceberg's tip (==> unconsciousness), wasteland/wilderness, greedy beast within, ... {--> these are all (classical) basis for “higher” cognitive capacities}] [also I am against Alex's notion of “destablizing stabilities as the task of artistic research.” I choose to refuse to put what is in flux against what is stable or attempting to stabilize. (I am in alignment with Katie King sharpening for me that) we constantly share our stage, settings, performances, sensoria, reenactments among agencies and species, creating varying stabilities, some fragile, some robust]
*account--synonymous with: description, information, list, reason, record, statement, story, sum, tale
-a contractual relationship
-giving an itemized account of recent transactions and resulting balance (of your metaphors = material-discursive apparatus[...]

[...]
*“to take seriously" = to accept at a fundamental level the truth of a claim and to doggedly follow its consequences
(form an ontological and conceptual perspective)
(--> dogs follow consequences)
(indigenous thought is treated as a theoretical discourse on the nature of reality =/= an interesting interpretation of it)--> to take seriously the indigenous metaphysics of multinaturalism [or ajayeb] as a philosophical intervention : to trace out its effects on [our] concepts


multiculturalism: a single objective universe and many cultural interpretations of it
multinaturalism: multiple universes and a single mode of interpretation (Viveiros de Castro)
==> perspective =/= a different “point of view” on (the same way of knowing or seeing) qualitatively different worlds }-->* situated knowledges, #elephant parable


no: no --> de-historicizing effects of imposing psycho-cognitive shamanic models of art
> no --> purely cognitive significance (of...)


*miniature: a ritual activity, a grave offering, a sympathetic magic, a capture of the power of the original
--> common stories about how miniatures can be interpreted in archaeology


(ontological research approach)_
scale is utterly important because “careful attention to alternative ontologies of scale introduces new interoretive possibilities for...” (Alberti)

*ontology: the sense of a real, solid world
for example the question of “the substance of the world”, everyone has answered that already (reiterating that which makes sense) ==> concept of real --(invent)--> *cosmology (<-- this is not a relativizing gesture) ==(force)==> production of new concepts and materialities
@Eszter: importance of asking the right questions: unless we do, the answers make no difference (Grosz)


scopes and scales ()--> “dimensionally manifold weave of knowleknowledge worlds” (Haraway + Katie) are at stake in:
•science display
•TV series
•ajayeb
•pet video
•emergent transdisciplinary scholarship
•transmedia commercial apparatuses
•
*with reading/enacting ajayeb what is at stake is the “effectivities in realizing knowledge stories” --> epistemological affects


[*]scale
•operates through intensity and not size
•emergent and performative (Jones), (juxtapositions of) scales ==> “interesting psychological and phenomenological effects”
•a flat approach to scale does not separate the social and material, or the micro from the macro ==> [*]size: (emerges as a possibility, as) one means of enacting the potential of another scale; accidental effect of intensity: materialization of intensity and excess ==> humanity***
•is about intensity and excess --> potential for visibility/invisibility and proximity to the original condition of und[...]

[...]d grotesque

the more intense ==> the more body it is

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

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

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


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

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

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

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


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

kinetic activity + the experience of being in the field

aesthetic attentiveness of bestiaries


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

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

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

metaphysical archeology + ontological anthropology --> perspective on reality


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

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

Alberti
Ingold

correspondence: (a pre-conceptual practice -->) epistemological intimacy in the practices of art, science, and anthropology
•a way to understand one's own research process

(archeology: a science of correspondence)

Alberti suggesting to separate arts and crafts (for analytical purposes)[...]

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


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


(we need more) art: careful accumulation of skills


21st century historiographic trends in art

artists increasingly *deploy simulacra of archeological practices and motifs* in their work


art practiced as craft (but not all the time) ==allow==> knowledge grow from the insight of being in the folding of life [of infantile grandious fantasy, as well] ~=? anthropology

producing contemporary ruins to draw attention to *the work of the present in the production of the past*

*artists take archeology as muse*
(through borrowing from archeology artists)
•create a kind of intellectual framing
•incorporate archival research
•themes of memory and entropy
•question of absence
•


prosaic nature of archeological research
production of the finds


the way Dion distorts archeological work (allegorizing archeological practice) --Alberti-->
•consequence of sleight of hand
•he is dibbling at, performing being an archeologist
•‘play at’ archeology
=/= Simon Callery

Alberti > Russell
transform archeology from metaphor to allegory --play--> archeology-as-aesthetics through performance [--> risk of undermining and reinforcing art as a subjective practice concerned with only aesthetics and affective]


craft: a model for careful practices and knowing the world =/= artwork: a model for how to break out of disciplinary frames and how to think of the ontology of archeological things [--> what Sennett calls epistemic breaking]

questions for the art:
•what effect is produced?
•how does this effect wrench from its materiality what has not been perceived or sensed before?
--> for archeology same question, from the material that remain from the past in the present

(the traditional task of art:)
•defamiliarization: to estrange our common consciousness and sensations of the world
•place of immanence: to project the coming of something materially new that is latent in our current reality. to *treat facts as events* that are about to come into being
•art is non-conceptual : impacting the nervous system without conceptual mediation --> sensations are monumentalized in the artwork for the future[...]

[...]in her writing

delight ==make==> impression

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

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

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

assumptions of human constancy --> autocratic military ideology =/= historically webbed interspecies dependence -=> a different cultural research trajectory

(to understand more about) domestication: web of entanglements
=/= neoliberal hard-line [human =/= wild] understanding of “domestication = human control” (ignoring that such relations might change humans too, ignoring the complex relations of interdependency) <== ideological commitment to human mastery (--> Sana's political commitment to liberalism) }==> (fantasies of) *the wild species self-making* =/= fantasies of control
==> life imprisonment and genetic standardization of domestic animals, wild species are ‘preserved’ in gene banks while their multispecies landscape are destroyed

i want Sana to become a researcher able to know something more about the cultural construction of gender, species, and binds--rather than “freeing” women from their gender, dogs from humans, slaves from masters--which will lead only to the constitution of autocratic liberalism made in the image of human free will and guardianship, another master program...
!?how can i say “let's stay in the prison and study” ...well, maybe i can't
#harem, the question of women confinement (usually at the center of a beautiful dream of order and plenty)

-how can i start and cultivate affection and appreciation for interspecies relations in Tehran today? (--> ways and methods)
-how with my chaotic and extremist iranian freedom-fighter friends we could become allies? (--> network)
-what is my evidences, examples, samples of the lived experience in Tehran? (--> data, stories that stick)

a dichotomy of analysis:
•species found inside human body --> discourse of cohabitation and interdependency
•species found outside human body --> discourse of human impact, management, and control

Engels's just-so story of private property: origin of property was in herds ==> 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 configura[...]

[...], myth, fairy tale, mutated war cry
[these potent signs are sneaking in the work “stranger within,” it is not just a historical dreamscape]
-the masked actors on stage have taken a venom (becoming faceless engravers) to cross into the next level of temporal experience --> ???
-muted rage and ecstasy indeterminacy positioned as creeping towards the midnight of moving & no longer moving... (as human? --> conflicting ways of being human; to acknowledge human & violence;)


--travel--
visiting an alchemy of domestic proclamations (homes) with its own lethal consortiums of drives (conversations); visiting sites of pure participation, the most savage, the most modern, creating a respond characterized as both ultra-alertness and insomnia of anticipation (acts by which the future can be nailed down) ==> becoming a *faceless engraver* (to remain fugitive and errant --> a course of action supposing a discontinuity that must be overcome in order to define a trajectory)
(Jassem and Mia are capable of being) bodies fully engaged in perspectival communication and battles of will, provided with affect and capacities, capable of knowing different things, types of relations they entered into =/=? poltergeist



--research--

trap <--> omen
lava <--> ice

•unstable space
•process ~= performance ~= meeting -->{
◦dinner --> *transaction* (what did you learn from the dinner that you bring?)
◦invite (exchange???)
◦respect & resist


now:
•something need to be named
•something need to be staged
•(something need to be styled)


Jassem's model:
you go through 5 minutes of hell then you arrive and unleash all your powers (--> talk about questions, art, history, self, etc.) then go there and perform together


contract of misunderstanding the “dance” (proposed by Jassem and Mia)
--?!--> categorically dance is misunderstood, dinner is understood


the rawness and minimalism of the performance <--?!--> richness and density of the research
(“<--?!-->” : question of reference?)

(not to make the performance mimetic)?
(but make it mnemonic --> designed to aid the memory)?
(but not anticipatory ==> omen)



for Jassem and Mia:
•what is the sign of danger?
•what is the sign of death?
•what is the sign of transformation of perspective (=/= change of perspective)?
•


chronically unstable bodies (--> mesopotamian)
anthropomorphism manifest in distorted corporeal forms and appendages ضميمه

a world conceived of inherently volatile (bodies?) --> site of subjectivity

intentional activation (?) --> affective capacities (in...?)

trap --> operate along sc[...]

[...]rrant --> a course of action supposing a discontinuity that must be overcome in order to define a trajectory)
(Jassem and Mia are capable of being) bodies fully engaged in perspectival communication and battles of will, provided with affect and capacities, capable of knowing different things, types of relations they entered into =/=? poltergeist



--research--

trap <--> omen
lava <--> ice

•unstable space
•process ~= performance ~= meeting -->{
◦dinner --> *transaction* (what did you learn from the dinner that you bring?)
◦invite (exchange???)
◦respect & resist


now:
•something need to be named
•something need to be staged
•(something need to be styled)


Jassem's model:
you go through 5 minutes of hell then you arrive and unleash all your powers (--> talk about questions, art, history, self, etc.) then go there and perform together


contract of misunderstanding the “dance” (proposed by Jassem and Mia)
--?!--> categorically dance is misunderstood, dinner is understood


the rawness and minimalism of the performance <--?!--> richness and density of the research
(“<--?!-->” : question of reference?)

(not to make the performance mimetic)?
(but make it mnemonic --> designed to aid the memory)?
(but not anticipatory ==> omen)



for Jassem and Mia:
•what is the sign of danger?
•what is the sign of death?
•what is the sign of transformation of perspective (=/= change of perspective)?
•


chronically unstable bodies (--> mesopotamian)
anthropomorphism manifest in distorted corporeal forms and appendages ضميمه

a world conceived of inherently volatile (bodies?) --> site of subjectivity

intentional activation (?) --> affective capacities (in...?)

trap --> operate along scale

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

entropy <--> atrophy
•entropy: energy no longer available for doing mechanical work (--> random ~=? violence)
•atrophy: the material, sensory labor of attending to loss, ***labor of looking at damage***
wasting away; withering; decrease in size caused by disuse
the feeling of being in the middle of something dirty, inevitable, watching it unfold
[deculturation: making a culture ‘previous']
(~ the imapct of capitalism/colonialism on indigenous)--> [nightmare image of social entropy] destablizing effects of non-meaning (~ nonanimal Udyr monster) --> (representing as) existential-cultural atrophy
[Cinderella doesn't experience atrophy after insult upon insult =/= Bambi's memory]

transculturalism ~ “seeing oneself in the other”
*language and materiality interact within an u[...]

[...]n does not stave off fear
•anxiety does not stave off trauma

reflective interpretation
narrativized interpretation
abstract interpretation

dissociation (in spirit possession) ==> (allows other individuals to witness) the loss of consciousness ==> memory traces of history become legible

(change the focus in trauma studies, a reorientation of perspective:)
missed encounter (~ wound) --to--> poorly anticipated encounter (~ accident)

(Caruth's argument:) **[*]trauma: a discourse that opens up ethical possibilities with its demand for a recognition of the need for historicization (of the relationship between destruction and survival)**

****(Morris as an anthropologist call for analysis of the accidental -->) to better comprehend *how history exceeds individual intentions* + how particular conceptions of history may enable more consequential action on the part of historical agents****
> ==> (to move from) affective symptoms of an overwhelming experience [@Hoda] --to--> the question of effectivity beyond representation
--> to construe an ethical relation to history--in terms of open relation to futurity [=/= an (impossible) mastery of the past]

every artist researcher should investigate:
•how anxiety is informing you
•how trauma is informing you

the question of the political understood as: (@Femke, OSP)
•the question of contingent factors
•the question of unexpected exposures
•the question of (relatively) unconscious processes
(and not of control)

neoliberal economic logics --> image of massness (=/= consciousness of one's collective interests) ==> condition the possibility of social action (movements characterized by a schema in which exposure to events leads to politicization) <-- an older genre of politicization narrative [~ individuals describe their encounter with social injustice, extreme poverty, or excessive violence and then recount a growing consciousness of the structures that produced them, #Robin Hood]

inadvertent and even accidental convergences ==?==> political movements in Southeast Asia (throughout the late 1980s and 1990s) --> (students who participated in antigovernment protests in Rangoon/Yangon in the late 1980) described their entry into the political sphere (less exposed to the object of social injustice, not in terms of an originally shared project, not a shared analysis, but rather) as the result of a situational convergence (from which an ideological project had yet to be fabricated)

(to understand) your relationship to the political as *subjection to force* (and hence) ~=> *the violation of subjectivity* (=/= acceding to a fuller subjectivity)

they were just there (summoned to events the nature of which they did not know in advance) --> *ephemeral mobilization*:
•by anonymous ca[...]

[...] standpoint of the human

(how Despret became) interested in actual practices (with Stengers and Latour), in the way they articulated questions and responded to questions

****stories that scientists [and Disney or Hollywood] develop about animals are also our stories**** --> these stories transform humans and their animals
--Stengers--> sciences (of the contemporaneity) for which: **production of knowledge = production of a way of being** ==> (they do not reveal what animals are, rather) they follow and accompany an act of becoming together : *an act of becoming with the stories that we construct concerning them* (good or bad)
•birds will have been far more interesting starting from the moment that Zahavi proposed to connect their stories to others [~-> how Cinderella became interesting for me when her stories became connected to other stories =/= restructure her story to make her fit my contemporary political correctness]
•sheep will have been far more sophisticated starting from the moment that Thelma Rowell asked them interesting questions

**to ask interesting question: to create conditions in which sheep [beings, your subject] are able to demonstrate an interest in these questions

**interesting research: looking at the conditions that allow beings to become interesting


{ how scientists made their animals agents = how scientists created the conditions for certain responses with respect to what was being asked of the animals }--Despret--> how these changing animals *became real* by way of the very *test of transformation* that had been proposed to them (~ how they were involved in the “process of verification”) --> *to understand the system of truth that was ay the heart of these tests* (=/= to produce an umpteenth critical analysis of “representation” @Pierre)
==> you are under the same constraints as those in whom you had placed your confidence

@Sina: do not construct knowledge about your mother behind her back! --> getting to know what matters (to them, to her) ==> allows transformations to occur
-i usually did both (as mentor in apass), construct knowledge behind people's back [psychosis] & getting to know what matters to them [paranoia]

(Despret discovered) one (unignorable) thing that mattered to scientists was: how animals take an active part in the knowledge that is produced about them


(why working on ajayeb bestiary involves becoming interested in sciences:) you work on animals --immediately--> you are marking on scientists

i remember the way i anticipated where a pigeon, a cat, spider, or ants, would make a home, a niche, in my childhood house...
the difference between ‘what i imagined’ & ‘where the nest actually appeared’ ==> made the world far more interesting
--> looking at the perception of animals (when you are child)


[...]

[...] obligation =/= commitment
[*]being obligatet = agreeing to expose oneself to failure, refusing to construct the words of order that would protect oneself from the requirements of the activity
{not all activities arise from obligations = not all activities put themselves at risk, not all activities make an effort to present themselves politically}


Haraway's writing technique: a remedy for indifference and contempt --> *becoming attached to the multiple threads that make up the fabric of the world*

(Despret obligated to hear) the blackbird sang as if the world itself depended on its song --and-->
*the importance of things came to dwell in its voice*
*the blackbird made importance exist in another way*
*importance became incorporated in the world*

and this importance rises like a question [a question that comes after “what matters for..."] --Despret--> how can i now write in such a way as to be worthy of what matters, with a similar insistence, for another being? (my question in Cinderella diaries)

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

my history (of continuous interest, or what created the next “-->”):
iran / visual arts --> germany / lecture and performance --> research / heritage study --> case / ajayeb bestiary --> epistemology / animal --> science / anthropology

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

home funerals put into practice an important dimensino of the lives lived by the deceased --> participates actiively in the instauration of their existence
-instauration: [re-storying] restoring, participating in a transformation that leads to a certain existence = to more existence, in the case of the deceased: both a biographical supplement and the accomplishment of an existence in another realm of reality ==Souriau==> brilliance of reality (of the dead): regards of the existence of the deceased, provided we agree on the right regime of reality that can be granted to them --> (envisioning definition of the mode of existence)==enable==> to account for what the deceased do and what they have others do ==> describe how they interfere in the lives of the living --✕--> (we avoid the trap of) the tradition that captures and generally freezes the problem, separating the ways of being into two categories: “physical existence =/= psychological existence” ==> the deceased = non-existence, fantasy, belief, hallucinations... (<-- bad for ajayeb)

vigil
the deceased retain thier full relatinoal capacity
the midwives stress that it is important to carry on talking to them, with love, soflty, carefully choosing one's words...
death --> passage --> a medico-scientifice time frame in which the living have work to do (=/= the work of mourning)
body remains vibrant matter <== communication remains possible

taking care of events through their affects

(Despret as[...]

[...] (Harawayian) re-member: enact the past, collect and compose ~/= (Despretian) to inherit: giving oneself an account of a certain task, which is more than just remembering
[storymaking] *to make a story = to reconstruct, to fabulate, to offer other presents and futures to the past* [~/= Sina: to fabulate = to give other pasts to the present and future]


how to ask the question of work properly?
you have to consider animals as other than victims, natural and cultural idiots that *need to be liberated* despite themselves --> ‘liberating the world of animals' = 'freeing the human world of the presence of animals’ [---> go to fabulation of animal human in the movie How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World]
=/= telegram's animals

*humans and animals must (not just considered together but) always be imagined together*

ceasing to consider “animal = victim” ==> (?how in telegram media) animals involve themselves (since they are not natural and cultural idiots), just as human (breeders) are not “exploiting,” but giving, receiving, exchanging, raising, and growing with, their animals


when Despret is putting the question of “do animals work?” to breeders, it is a real experiment : to explore the researcher's propositions with the breeders --> to make them hesitate (~ is about *what does it mean to speculate in such a way?*) [=/= means of knowing through information (to gather data or opinions) : “what do breeders think of X?"]


Despret’ amazing rigour --> the only place that the question (considering whether animals do work) can be brought forward is the place where only the meaning associated with exploitation can matter (in places where both humans and animals are greatly mistreated)
-place where the evidence of such work is found, are places where animals are industrially “produced” --> their behaviors appear very definitely as belonging to a work relationship


director of animal resources --> (in such frame) animal: occupy the place of an obscure underclass, malleable, serviceable, and disposable in the end

moder feeder operations --Porcher--> animals sometimes wanted to help

asking the breeders: could you help us learn how to ask our question so that it has a chance of making sense to other people? ==> they also could explore the *manner in which we were obligated to formulate our questions*


(Harawayiean) responsibility: a relationship crafted into intra-action through which entities, subjects, and objects, come into being

lead cow (the one who trusts the breeder, and one the herd trusts, usually is in the front) =/= dominant cow (in the hierarchy of the herd, is found in the middle of the herd)

a theme in animal technicians
paying attention to animals = being able to feel the limits that animals ask us to take into account (m[...]

[...]map out a field ~= philosophy of artistic research), doctors [analyst] and patients [analysand, artist] ascribe meaning in different ways --Annemarie--> yet they perform or enact reality together --> they *do the reality of a disease [problem, artwork]*
++{Annemarie uses the term “enact” to show that objects (such as body and disease) exist as articulations of the practices that produce them (~= Butler's performance), enacting (not explained by what went before, present remains unstable, patterns and routines and surprises) =/= making (‘causes’ lie when ‘making’ happened)}
[*]theory: conversations about the realities our words help to explore (=/= seeking to fix concepts)
in knowledge practice realities are various brought into being (+ limits of that adaptability) --> *ontology:
--anthropology--> people order “reality” seriously differently
--biomedical--> why, when, where is this truth realized? what does it depend on? what are its alternatives? --> *ontology does not precede knowledge practices* (various practices are closely linked ==> ontologies are linked [for example a patient who talks to a doctor in a consulting room may receive a clinical diagnosis, while laboratory measurements ‘do’ her disease in a different way. or in artistic research environments such as apass.])

(Annemarie's) praxiography --> asking what are the techniques that make things (their empirical, epistemological found objects) visible, audible, tangible, knowable (for this artist in front of me #feedback @apass)**


‘empathy’ is a word that is often recruited when bodies are involved --> resonances with troublesome romantic meanings (magic, fold 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[...]

[...] animals are as much subjects of history as humans are*

-why do we listen to prohpets?

quasi-theological and anthropocentric notions such as that of the great chain of being

(the importance of) changing ourselves as humans ==> change animals
•how changing human habits also gives other animals a chance to change theirs?
[*]ethology: a practice of habits involving distance, knowing activity, politeness, milieu, alliance

(i am interested in women) not because of gender [= identity politics, political correctness], but because of *their practice and the question they pursue*

what parrots talk about
talking birds and primates as subjective interlocutors who can become persons in the exchanges allowed by language


*they never posed the question of knowing what a raven could, through this somewhat maniacal behavior, teach them about what interested it*
-(curious) being always teach you what that being is interested in

very bottom of the ladder of choices...

for Tehran:
1. memory studies
2. kalagh shenasi (raven studies) کلاغ شناسی

ravens, evidently, do not want to obey any of the rules that make research possible: the incivility that excommunicated them from the laboratoies of the behaviorists having already been stigmatized from the time of the Flood (in Noah's ark)

ravens are by all account unreliable <-- calling into question the intelligence of their researchers, the pertinence of their models, and the solidity of their dispositives
---> go to Kelile Demne

*the ravens literally recruit their researcher*
to [*]recruit: they will reveal to him the resolution of an enigma the difficulty and the interest of which would be in accord with what makes them impossible to study

(from) season --to--> season
(from) enigma --to--> findings
(from) hypothesis --to--> tests
suspense and sudden turns ==> transform all that we know about ravens

the ravens present a behavior that has no sense from the point of view of evolution

the “guilty” of the story are given from the beginning

---> go to [Daston's] historian of science (always knew how the story ended): imagine you are the kind of a person who cheats when reading mystery novels, and you read the last page first to know who did it, and then when you read the rest of mystery story, you know everything is building towards this climax, you read it in a very different way than the person who has to retrace all that have been implanted in your way by the author to throw you off the scent of the real villain {==> you lose the past in the image of the present}
+ scientist (who wish to have a) story about *why we believe what we believe now and why it is right* [knowing that everything we know now will be overtu[...]

[...]icacity فراست + dissimulation فریب + improvisation بدیهه + vigilant attention هوشيار + sense of timeliness بجا (<-- this type of “getting to know” was constituted exaclty to be found in a domain where human intelligence is constantly at grips with the land or sea animals in an are where humans saw their intelligence and techniques transform in learning from animals**** [-how to prolong the possibility of this transformation?]) <-- *it is the only way of getting to know that can hope to address intelligent highly flexible* (Despret > Heinrish) = ravens who require of those who want to know them the same flexibility and the same intelligence
}-->[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 i[...]

[...]ng to know” : it actualizes competences that have less chance of occuring in usual conditions (those of the birds and those of the researcher) ==> transforms habits (those of the birds and those of the one who investigate them)

aviary مرغدانی

the most adventurous & the most curious ==> the most attached to the researcher (to Cinderella) ==> hierarchy takes shape as a function of bravery [=/= bravery of adventure in the shape of radical detachment and fluidity]

(when) *investigator becomes biographer* (==> the story changes)

(how when why) the fact of recruiting must be linked to demonstrations of bravery

position in the hierarchy
manner of recruiting


shyness: dancing a little dance of hesitation


(Despret's account of how Heinrish succeeded in) recruiting the ravens around his problem <~~~~> *he sufficiently recruited himself to invent pertinent ways of addressing them* ==> the models are now commensurate متناسب with their unpredictability
@apass

Heinrish becomes their expert and their reliable spokesperson ==> (like Pierre) he could now convince and interest his colleagues in terms that count for them (==> enroll other researchers to pose other questions) ==> he could bear witness for them
=/= Hitchcock's the birds --> nature turned to horror, based on in Germany in mid-1990s fifty ravens invaded the idyllie Swabian Alps region... ==> their killing would be necessary
(chain of recruitment:) the German ravens had in thier turn succeeded in recruiting the representative of the american ravens, and Heinrish was able to recruit ecologists, who in their turn mobilized experts and politicians, who themselves modified the habits of the owners of the cows and sheep... [---> go to Tsing's coalescence]

***amazing interspecific recruitment***


Sina --telegram--> visual animal --inventing--> hallucinating --spoiled--> dissociated
Goda --Boicic--> wounded dog --saving--> mothering --> traumatized (left alone)


wolf observers
Heinrish's colleagues who study wolves in Yellowstone Natural Park
the peaceful cohabitation between the wolves and ravens
in Yellowstone when the ravens are in the presence of wolves, do not demonstrate any timidity and do not hesitate a second before eating --> the wolves allow ravens to conquer their fear --> wolves changed the constrains that hold sway over the habits of the ravens
the ravens of much more alert and vigilant than the wolves (the birds serve the wolves as extra eyes and ears)


the prophecy translated in terms of recruitment --Despret--> who could have thought, if not no doubt a descendant of La Fontaine, that it is the ravens who protect the wolves and permit then to eat with their eyes closed? ♥

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


[...]

[...]
human: composites of zoo-intensities, animated movements, bio-differentials


(i always felt like this) my perceptions are refracted through psychic forces
anxious
uncertain
paranoid
“is everyone staring at the morphing ‘it’ that is me”


(understanding of art in contemporary european performance -->) art = intensifying bodily substance, to resonate otherwise, to feel different corpo(realities) through zones of transition and intervention, provocation = responses to our *capacities to resonate*


...medicalization, recognition, subjectification, instrumentalization, and responsiveness being with animals

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

what does the maze mean for the rat?
what a maze can mean?

experimental psychology --> subjects conform most often to the expectations of their experimenters [--Despret--> they are *artifactual*]
-*the scientists think that the subject respond to the question that is posed to them, but the subject in fact respond to another question* -->{question that is addressed to them = protocol to which they are submitted}--> they can take a position in relation to what is proposed to them in scientific research [=/= Cinderella's mice subject]

the idea that (the assumption that) their subjects could be influenced by what the scientist was looking for ==> the experimenters tried most often to camouflage the real questions guiding their research
-the assumption that the subjects do not do what they do because the experimenter asked then to do so, but for more abstract and more general reasons ==> “ecological validity”
-*the subjects most of the time not only predict what the experimenter expects of them but they comform to it*
-[they responded to] the way in which they interpreted that which was expected of them (<-- just because they are nice people.) “when the subjects were asked why they did all this [absurd tedious repetitive] work without objecting and without posing other questions, they responded that they had thought that is was a test of endurance. and they obeyed because a scientist asked then to”

difference between hypnotized subjects and “normal” experimental subjects

*the lure utilized to mask the expectations* (in psychology, far from resolving the problem)

organization of the research --> scientist distributes expertise in a very asymmetrical manner


what a maze can mean? --Despret--> **translating what happens to rats in terms of meaning**
(drawing on Uexküll's theory of Umwelt) --> open up for the animal the question of point of view

a concrete or lived Umwelt ==> the animal endowed with sensory organs different from our own, cannot perceive the same world as we do

{**perception: an act of creation =/= a form of reception**}-[...]

[...] to which they are submitted}--> they can take a position in relation to what is proposed to them in scientific research [=/= Cinderella's mice subject]

the idea that (the assumption that) their subjects could be influenced by what the scientist was looking for ==> the experimenters tried most often to camouflage the real questions guiding their research
-the assumption that the subjects do not do what they do because the experimenter asked then to do so, but for more abstract and more general reasons ==> “ecological validity”
-*the subjects most of the time not only predict what the experimenter expects of them but they comform to it*
-[they responded to] the way in which they interpreted that which was expected of them (<-- just because they are nice people.) “when the subjects were asked why they did all this [absurd tedious repetitive] work without objecting and without posing other questions, they responded that they had thought that is was a test of endurance. and they obeyed because a scientist asked then to”

difference between hypnotized subjects and “normal” experimental subjects

*the lure utilized to mask the expectations* (in psychology, far from resolving the problem)

organization of the research --> scientist distributes expertise in a very asymmetrical manner


what a maze can mean? --Despret--> **translating what happens to rats in terms of meaning**
(drawing on Uexküll's theory of Umwelt) --> open up for the animal the question of point of view

a concrete or lived Umwelt ==> the animal endowed with sensory organs different from our own, cannot perceive the same world as we do

{**perception: an act of creation =/= a form of reception**}--> the animal **fills its environment with perceptual objects**, it constructs its environment by *peopling* it with perceptual objects (=/= perceive passively)
*the activity of perception = an activity that confers meaning* = only that which has meaning is perceived, only that which can be perceived (~= is important of the organism) is *accorded a meaning* (~= accordance)
•butterfly lives in a world of luminous intensities and of odors
•tick lives in a world of butyric acid released by the sebaceous follicles of mammals
•spider lives in a world of...
•rat lives in a world of...
•

for a spider?
for a rat?
time, space, place, path, way, house, odor, enemy,,, --> each event (in the perceived world) “signified” which is not perceived except in that it signifies ==> ***animal = subject = a “lender” of meaning***

[*]subject: that which accords meaning

the object is constituted in action (the animal never enters into a relation with an object as such) --> meaning does not emerge from the object = objects are not alone in having meaning accorded to them

Umwe[...]

[...]xistence of an artifact ==> the possibility of taking into account the fact that the animal would have a point of view on the situation


(to take measure of) what one's anxiety prompts (in the course of research):
•expanding the imagination
•paralyzing the imagination ==> injection of more control


sciences that mobilize the beings that respond to it

each experiment indicates not only the manner in which the animals generally experience the procedures --but--> the way in which each of the animals lives them as a function of the perception that it has of them, as a function of what it expects

(Despret affirming that) there is no *artifact* unless there is *generalization*

*the time of the experimental dispositive* is not the same since it is set within a provisional and short time (five days if testing, corresponding to the work week) while *the time of the farm* is a time of accumulated memories and experience
-the memory of the food eaten before
#Cinderella

it expects something else <== what one gives it is not the sole cause involved


animals certainly respond to a question, but it is not the one we pose to them
*the researchers compartmentalize the research; the animals to not stop prompting them to decompartmentalize it* ♥

(always) the artifact --constitutes--> the object of critique


animals do not judge an *abstract situation*, but a situation offered to them *as it is offered* to them

(Cinderella's) reciprocal habituation --> animal itself actively takes the questions and the presence of the researcher into consideration
to negate the condition of research --> exchange judgment and opinions (+ mutually affect one another)

why is ‘interest’ a bad motive, in this frame?
-because the animal must be interested in other things besides the human being, it must continue to live its life as a goat or a sheep --✕--> “the good animal: the animal responds to her observer”

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

Singh + Dave --> ordinary affects of killing (animal) --> anthropology of ethics =/= Agamben's killablity (linked with sovereignty): routinized emotionally indifferent production of bare life (capacity to decide which bodies can be killed, without the killing counting either as homicide or as a sacrifice)

normative moral claims

(Laidlaw, Foucault) ethical life: reflexive practice of freedom --humanistic-->
•traditions of virtuous conduct
•changing practices of self-fashioning
•affective dispositions: compassion, devotion
•(altruistic question of) how ought to one live?
=/=
what is the mode of a killing?
what is the mood accompanying that killing?
+ ethical repercussions (if any) there of, e[...]

[...]ces that articulates a whole. A skill of making knots, meshes and nets that surprise, trap and bind. A net is the invisible (mesh of) bonds, the favorite technique of metis. Bond is the combination of two things, weave and twist.

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

[*]bond = weave + twist
[*]net: invisible (mesh of) bonds <-- favorite technique of metis


arm = bond
every part of its body is a *bond* which can secure anything (but nothing can seize)


*fox = a living bond* (can bend, unbend, reverse its own position at will)


Oppian is all about bonds, ropes, cords

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

Cinderella’s position neither victorious nor vanquished.


I use the word “trap” because it is more problematic and dangerous than lures


[For the record, Plato completely opposed the idea of hunting with traps, because these techniques were thought to cultivate cunning and duplicity which were against what a virtuous political man should be. For Plato embodiment was a form of distraction to true knowledge.]

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

The cunning of “getting to know them” [...]
You politely approach in order to get to know them, research as a lure for yourself to be transformed by the encounter. The nontransportive investigation is in fact full of transformations.


It is important to think about traps not as something great and necessary, but in a sense that we should be able to recognize and choose sometimes not to do it. I think we need lures, because the world is transient, shifting, disconcerting, ambiguous, and so are we. The question always is which trap are you caught in? How does it look like? Are you alone in it? Which Cinderella is making you a trap?

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

________________

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

points
* define cunning intelligence
   * greek notion of “metis” (you are a hunter: the world is made of traps and animals are full of cunning)
   * bonds --> fox + octopus
   * fox forest story kelile demne
      * is fox detached from the mimesis of the forest? Is this what critical intelligence looks like? by putting his paw and breaking that fragile assemble of skin, fat, tree, and wind. he reveals a lie. what other animals are trap engagers?
      * in which context you say yes to the trap?
* differentiate metis from Cinderella’s mouse trap (mechane, techne)
   * * trap as research method, but it has a double bind, it is as much as a lure for oneself as for the other
   *



my mimetic preoccupations --> with memory


(from mnemonic devices) to mimetic devices (lure)
mimetic participation with X
(with lures and traps we have mimetic participation)


a useful an[...]

[...] situated (comprehended).

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

________________

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

Enrica's transcription



trap in relationship to knowledge, art

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

Trap is a zoo anthropo biomorphic artifact
if you make a trap for another animal, you think from trans species perspective
it is a dangerous game
a body fully engaged in a perspectival communication

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

perspectival battle of wills


trap making = in the realm of bridging different sort of knowledge that has nothing to do with you
•To cite =/= to incite (unorthodox behavior)




Searching paths:
•bodily capture
•violence of the construction
•mimesis : how meaning takes form




But also traps get me trapped
lore - hansel and gretel’s house: doesn’t look like a trap but …
sometimes there is no maker behind the trap (is this a scandal? is this emptiness?)

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

how to make you interested in my trap/chapter?
images making/painting as a research tool/assemblage
gentle trapping yourself to where you like to stay

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

Vinciane Despret, “What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions?”
a conversation between scientist and animals in wild
your text experience is a trap, something that you gain knowledge from. Is there even a way to politely ask animals a question?
investigative research - how to deal with another subject that doesn’t even speak English to you? what trap am i being constructed into? what is the raven interested in?
and we are different things


the art of the lore and the tricks, learning from enygma - I’m interested in how do you produce knowledge from the work of others? [Sina, in the position of coordinator of the Master/educator]
edgy (transsectoral worlds): the edge of the forest, where sea and forest meet - where hunters/fishermen meet (...)


FOX suspicious - someone who s smart
“Sina, don’t be tricked!” my mom would tell me
a lore into desire
my needs =/= lores


OCTOPUS
best engagers
tentacles

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

Abstraction as an erotic lore of the soul
eroticism is here in the book
an open trap in the forest as an open mouth that names the apprehension that embodies
to be situated (how you are trapped/Haraway, how do you receive ranges from the environment you are caught in) VS positionality (i’m white, 40 years old, Italian, … and than you speak from that - it actually excludes possibility of hybridization)
we are not available t[...]

[...]thout 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

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




---> the story of birds entrapped escape away with the cage

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

THE prey and THE visible (both are categories of forest life survival stories. also have high stakes in iranian culture, thought, and philosophy)
--> what is important for a living self?


(bab-e) hekayat-e dusti-e kabutar o zagh o mush o bakhe o aahu o ...
بابِ / حکایت دوستی کبوتر و زاغ و موش و باخه و آهو و ...
[everyone?]
[the story of the friendship of these animals; the quality, properties, and pitfalls of relation]
•what is (re)activating the *imaginary friend*? (is it really fully on shut-down?) ---> trap to abstract thought? ---> this ‘abstract thought’ is dangerous for “sadness” to get lost in it, but it is amazing for “joy”
•how much we need sadness?

[...]

[...]> #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 conditioned by postulates or by decisions that are generally social, cultural, or historical in nature, which form it and orient it
--(nevertheless)--> sci is universal and free from contract #science-story
“I can't think of a mountain, a border, or a date which makes the agreement of scientists and everyone else relative on these points.”
-they say sci is conditioned but not determined


conditions that do not determine the contents of what they condition
(mathematics?)
but they determine the map of what they condition : the schema of its relations --> the topology of science; the clay remains the same but the shape changes

Fluid Mechanics can be a basis for biology (--> constitution of living being) or for a technology of the inert (--> theory of ship building).
...crazy! <[...]

[...]of watching the text die.

part of the disposition of this proposal is also the suggestion that the two collaborators of this project, Jassem and Foad, are invested in those notions in their practice. Foad Farahani's poem “farar” enacting contemporary artistic formations and past-compound-mask, and Jassem Hindi transnational poetic agency, are both artists with acute appetite for chaotic imagination. Their instinct for the fusion of nothingness and excess, appearance and disappearance, creation and destruction, is at once carved and unpacked in the literary-poetic mosaics of their work: Foad's use of middle-persian mystic sensibilities and Jassem's combination of intensive encounter with the poetics of apocalypse and acid textuality.

My work has been about: learning/training in the crafts of noticing little traps of semiotic and material trans-species cohabiting, mutual coproduction of economics, ecology, affect-studies, metaphysical household studies, and understanding of the orders of the natural and human world, in the particular history/story of the East. in my projects i take history as the overlapping tracks and traces and many tranjectories of world-making, human and nonhuman. the textual performance of this project is in the effects of my research and practice with the questions of globalism and inheritance: difficult translational spaces, communicative nonunderstanding, relational aesthetics, and the differential sites of reading. and i use performative lectures: a material practice, hybrid in digital manual tactile operations of speaking.

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

“Four Masks of an Eastern Postmodernism”

insurgent, poet, mystic, sectarian
    |       |       |        |
chaos, violence, illusion, silence

•(sectarianism) apocalyptic writing
•(poetic) will to chaos
•(mystic) exile space
•(insurgent's) otherless subjectivity


یاغی
شاعر
نوچه
زاهد


[performative methodology]
for the collaborative part of sharjah project, i like to propose four “masks” (or “rotational avatars”) of subjective anarchy, that are few among many existential prototypes and subjectivity constellations of eastern postmodernism, as collaborative sites of encounter with four (or less and not necessarily individual) artists/participants.

•collaborators’ masks: chaos, violence, illusion, silence / (yaghi یاغی, sha'er شاعر, noche نوچه, zahed زاهد)--each endeavoring to discern the ontological possibilities and aesthetic imaginations of four theoretically-worked dispositions that Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh puts forward: insurgent, poetic, mystical, sectarian modes of consciousness, operating within multiple terrains of human and inhuman experiences of the middle east.
--> masks (the above mentioned four masks are accompanied by four [...]

[...] (or “how could they not see the injustice”) (==> “I make them see” ~ violence of slowing down brutality videos, zooming, saturating, freeze-framing, obssesing with the visual details, etc.) --✕--> what we “see” is structured by other factors (race, etc.)
-recourse اعاده
(we can always do aggressive) counter reading --> counter forensic: the technical rhetorical work making evidence speek : “voice + image = task of persuasion” --claiming--> public truth and rights
•(Thrall and Keenan:) alternative modes other than using images (visual evidence, fundamentally a peaceful way of wanting ‘change’): using force(?)
•forensic ~ advocacy ~= configuration of claims and evidence --> claiming is always claiming rights [=/= commitments]}

Keenan: rights are something we claim (=/= something we have) --through-->
1. advocacy
2. forensics


(Spivak's question: can the subaltern speak?) --> (Veena suggests forms of attentiveness to) myriad fluctuations between yes and no (=/= Derrida's notion of absence of voice)

we come to recognize the expressiveness of our interlocutor (in its different and difficult forms)
[...working for the expressivity of others, and not yours]

(Veena research in Sultanpuri:) *theatrical performances of violence created a subjectivity that would not be carried forward in time*

-to what extent subjects posses the knowledge they enact? (~ do we know what we do?) --?--> question of structure and cognition (~ the extent to which we know the structures that we are part of, and what vulnerabilities and events this leaves us open to)

(let's stop throwing easy) political and moral posturing about neoliberalism

...there are only particular regions of the past that we potentially or actually have access to. we do not know in advance which regions of the past life might lead us to, or express through us --Veena--> we are not necessarily *cognizant of the structure*, but may still express *fragments of myth* --> ***nonagentive invocation of politics*** @Hoda (Veena example: right after Sultanpuri carnage, women were sitting in front of their burnt houses in a position of stillness letting their body grow dirty, sorrowfully embodying pollution and dirt, like Draupadi in Mahabharata proclaiming her violation through public expression of her pollution. but the women did not device a strategy to carry a tactic of everyday life into the realm of the political. it was as if the past has turned this face towards them--not that they had translated this past story into a present tactic of resistance --> living fragments of a myth)

more like a conceptual signpost =/= extended argument


two signature issues of politics:
•sovereignty --> the state
•associational life --> the social contract

[the state is supposed to be a proxy for peo[...]

[...] (in which your duty is to remember for others) [a professions without form ~~> nothing can be preserved, coding past knowledge and linking it to current practice---in the context of the hospital's sociotechnical system], or cleaning [doing everything that nobody else does], or storytelling [you have to go to a new country every day, going to a foreign zones], or certain kinds of performances [@Arianna --> the intensity, focus, and complexity of care], [going from being expert to novice], and many times not codable into discrete units of work practice to be carried out on specific occasions

in my hypertext writing, am i trying to enable myself to talk about my work in a language that computers could understand?

(do we need?) to get at (and maintain?) the deep structure of the one's situation
--> transformational grammar
--> bring intuitive decision-making to a conscious level

# the issue of the validity or not of ajayeb's knowledge is entirely orthogonal to my purpose. I am producing an anatomy of what it has meant in the case of bestiary writing to create such a science

(my issue with) [*]strategy: a way of managing a past that threatens to grow out of control

(in working with bestiaries my research question:) what could provide for a good ordering of memory?

-(which professions act as) distributed memory system (for who?)
-(what blocks between) internal memory and external memory --> the time needed to work complex representations

(we are trying to) situate our activity visibly within an informational[?*] world ==> to be factored
*in an informational world: accountability = measurable, finite, packaged, <--✕--> (other modes of) invisible and articulation work

...when technicians/artists seeking new ways of writing (scientific/poetic) papers so that their work gets acknowledged ==(and yet)==> the nature of their (scientific/artistic) truth is not impeached***
--> and sometimes we restructure our work so that (organizational, informational or truth-related) challenges will not be necessary ----> (at the end of the day there will be [always?] an) information infrastructure for the kind of work which contains an account of your activity ==> “informational panoptica” (Bowker)

the classification systems we are giving to embed in the tools and reports we give in apass

(in apass problematically we are asked to) copy the transparency of our activity from one representational space (internal memory, nomenclature, past events, paper) to another (computerized record, giving a talk, time-framing) (=/= contingency) ==> an ecology of attention : ***what can be forgotten and what should be remembered*** ==> development of (information) infrastructure
what is remembered in the formal information systems ==> ontology of that system

...recorded on a form; and forms ne[...]

[...]ast knowledge infrastructures as *neutral instruments* whose positive and negative effects lie solely in 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<br /> •new maps to known territories --> reshape the geography itself
•rework existing (stocks 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: unknow[...]

[...]when they change, authority, influence, and power are redistributed; (changes takes decades rather than years) --> a long-time-scale, historically informed framework to situate our thinking --> sustainable, accumulative, and shareable qualitative databases


internet-supported citizen science

the 19th century's Darwin favored ‘genetic form’ --> massive and global shift in modes of classification


standard --> *preserving the meaning of data is a human affair, requiring continuous curation


#knowledge zoom lens --> “the long now” (Bowker)


(it took 200 years for printed book's) *intellectual armature* (that now we consider intuitive:)
(in ajayeb.net i am responding and working all of them)
•index
•table of contents
•bibliography
•footnotes
•generally agreed rules on plagiarism
•page numbers (--> =^77988.1.6$shathiat)


***qualitative science*** : detailed, indepth, and meaning-oriented investigations --> analysis, statistical (for example the social network analysis strengths of scope and summation in Braudel's study)
(question of my “writing”:) how to nourish mechanisms for large-scale, long-term research?
-we need to go beyond one-off projects to develope systems and standards for collecting, curating (my knowledge, ajayeb's knowledge) while simultaneously protecting subject's identities and interests /***
=/= short-term, project-by-project work

-(constantvzw is doing this:) build collaborative sciences
sociotechnical phenomena do not rest within the domain of a single discipline

-comparative analysis techniques
comparison across cases (--> how Kobe in his case-based work produces a critically comparative data?)
creation of compatable data [: properly documented --> facilitate sharing] (--> how for my ajayeb?)
(in your work and research -->) encouraging the identification of crucial similarities and differences

-sustainable and sharable data archives, collected over multiple investigative projects --> ajayeb.net = knowledge/thoughts/notes of multiple projects (--> is this my “data”?)

cyberscholarship

#lens, to scale up qualitative social science <--> deploy data storage, visualization, hypertext, and collective-creation possibilities of the web and social media, *new tools for textual analysis*

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

[which] cultures (or stories) permit a graceful listening forth to our seeing[?]

(metaphorical economy of) *mnemonic deep*:
•past is a thing that you escape at all costs, our past explains who we are,
•as palimpsest, The infinite faces of the past can be read off the present face ==> narrative ideal presen
•

the time that the instituti[...]

[...] (Bowker > Babbage:) until the invention of printing, “the mass of mankind were in many respects almost the creatures of instict” --> “flood of light over the darkened intellects of their thankless countrymen”
(the spirit of 19th century embodied in Babbage) making the ***act of making information*** such a key variable:
(print rational/archival memory ==>) new space and time ==> (need for) regular working of the machines of nature and the world : *regularization of time and the distribution of tasks* [--> a mythological operation]<== infrastructural work:
•developement of computing (+ machineries)
•division of labor

Buckland + Babbage ==> complete knowability of the Book of Nature


information and database theory (in genomics --> a core science of our time)
archive ==(is central to ‘thinking about’ & ‘writing down’ of)==> objects being studied


information explosion of the early 19th century + new ways of describing the past


“locality of each geologist will be the terrestrial globe” (--> locality of Olearius)

heroic age --> everyone constructed complete systems (that are thrown up and down in cataclysmic succession [!]) [--> question of artistic research]


...relics of the animate creation of former ages [--> science special effects, museum of continuity,]
[title]


indifinite space as filled with worlds...


colossi

earthquakes
floods
storms

tranquil variations


“second nature”:
•(from) past
•analytical constructs of extended present


[title]
***an irregular past and a totalizing memory***
(‘chaos’ characterized of/for archive ==> human nature)

moral duty as humans [!!**] --> to recognize stasis at the heart of disorder **** (--> an ancient fable, archetype) *apperceive[~ perceive in terms of a past experience, accumulative perception] synchrony in the midst of diachrony[~ look for historical changes/roots in languages]* + to sync ([*]synchronization: to bring social and natural time into a unified form <--through-- production and storage of records)
@Marialena

the metronomic story
the mnemonic story


***spatializing time***
(for humanity) going out in space, to India, to the Orient, or within France to Brittany or the Pyrennees, was going backward in time (~ mapping technique ==> position of “humanity” out there nowhere --> anomalous, moral, short term [--> “impact” of Star Trek crew(~ a cult of people who have unlocked the secret of life and the universe) on the worlds they visit])
==> faceless scientist working in a vast and effective machine (--> Haraway talks about the same)


new memory practices
•***lie at the heart of o[...]

[...]>
(?what is lost at) linking the symbolic space of data-model to the qualities of the researches of participants [which are relational, procedural, and emotional]

s.s.s. (scroller, slider, still-life)

discourse =/= valorizing information

Pierre's fables:
•“nonviolent way”
•“not by chance ...”

*Apologue*

research --> data flow
sieve --> nodes in/of residual


internal categories:
•stickiness
•zoom
•cheat
•persistence
•repetition
•(vulgar)
•
}==> topology:
1. ramp
2. nest
3. skew

ramp: sequential, one dimensional, ‘sliders’
nest: fractal quality, JSON, hierarchical tree, ‘comments’
skew: verb act, streching, ‘2D field picker’

(slider: marking everything)

semantic in flux + persistence
object repository + identifiers


feedback --> quasi object --> structured knower --> data


#workshop in apass 2018 Summer
...a series of data models that was produced during a three days work session in a.pass May 2018.
The aim was to create a “filter" for the artistic research projects of each participants, in order to train in making meta-linguistic abstractions (on a given computer hardware) to construct a “thing” that enables describing the problem of Building Abstractions with Data, to increase/enhance the expressive/descriptive power of the languages we use. It addresses the question of machine/human readability in the digital imperative of computational world we are inhabiting, with the particular case of a.pass artistic research environments for advanced performance studies.
•interested in computational literacy (including data-collection, librarianship) as part of our *diversity-work* and our *articulation-work*
•interested in different languages (english, computer, non-sign languages, etc.) refers to different value systems and to different lived experience
•interested in the *labor of knowledge-work* (in collective digital flesh life)
•interested in shifts in topology (the ongoing reworking of bodily boundaries of each of our research practices)
•


TERMINOLOGY:

*articulation-work: the labor necessary to make technologies fit together seamlessly

*diversity-work: a kind of work in which we learn about the damage we cause, and of how “causes” are understood as “damage”

*librarianship: a work that hooks up people with their technologies

*data abstraction: a *technique of isolating* (the parts of your mini-language that deal with) how data/info objects are ‘represented’ from (the parts of your mini-language that deal with) how data/info objects are ‘used’ (---> i addressed this in my fable workshop in a totally differe[...]

[...]on-work: the labor necessary to make technologies fit together seamlessly

*diversity-work: a kind of work in which we learn about the damage we cause, and of how “causes” are understood as “damage”

*librarianship: a work that hooks up people with their technologies

*data abstraction: a *technique of isolating* (the parts of your mini-language that deal with) how data/info objects are ‘represented’ from (the parts of your mini-language that deal with) how data/info objects are ‘used’ (---> i addressed this in my fable workshop in a totally different epistemology)

*model: your object decomposed into *computational compound objects* (each with their own time-varying local state variables)

(representation of data and control over data:)
*modular: localized part of the system that are produced by the perception of the system
*objective: viewing a large system as a collection of distinct objects. concerned with how a computational object can change and yet maintain its identity
*streamous: information that flow in the system. its evaluation is delayed. infinite list

*metadata: machine-readable persistence statements

*digital interface: discrete object of your “research problem” that refers to something outside the cri (outside the digital model)

*topology: a (proposed) body-plan to investigate questions of *connectivity* and *boundaries*, in order to find out what remains invariant as a result of transformation. this will direct us to propose (well-intended but not tested) *transversal objects*.
to be able to propose: in the culture of each pad+participant+research what connects and joins, what delinks and disconnects.


PRACTICAL:

we want to find out how cri's “filter” translates its politics into metadata
and
what happens in linking the symbolic space of data-model to the (relational, procedural, emotional) qualities of the researches of participants

we will work on the block's opening week feedbacks and process them in this diagram:
feedback --> quasi object --> structured knower --> data
(or technically:)
semantic in flux --> persistence statements --> object repository --> identifiers

(Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are spent on the creation of “quasi objects”)

i propose some (well-intended but not tested) internal categories:
•stickiness
•zoom
•cheat
•persistence
•repetition
•vulgar

(i will describe them later)

and these categories produce three topologies:
1. ramp
2. nest
3. skew

(this is a maneuver to replace the question of ‘strategy’ to ‘topology’, the first act of making quasi-objects)

ramp: sequential, one dimensional, ‘sliders’
nest: fractal, serializa[...]

[...]gn?
--> ontology of document: an artifact with a specific layout and design

design has to do with the proper address (?) which is (always) about the proper witness (?)
(in the case of Vincent) do you agree with the amerindian know-how that “a good designer is a dead designer”?

(?what was the) proper affect of history (that his work was creating)
through the aesthetic of old and antique video projectors his colonialism belonged properly to the past --> (question of) the production of the proper witness

the architecture and flag of BOZAR plus his notion of design, are they interesting and necessary ways of forming kinship and properly distanced history?

Vincent “knew” his distance to the past (--> do you smell a problem?)
in which clock he is looking at time? which time machine he is handed to or placed in? who/what is making his time model?
also, which segment of your practice is temporalized? this means also which part of your practice stands out of time?



with Olga

regards of the question “what are an artwork's boundaries?” and it's intersections with documents, lists, and reports

for Olga:
document = evidence
research = mourning
(mourning as the passionate and demonstrative activity of expressing the state of loss or deprivation of a certain object for a certain subject, and demand for its revival or memorialization)

what is the feeling of the document?

*document is a story that (usually) silences other stories*
where our powers to provoke care (could/should) come from (if not from document/evidence)?
is document (in its form and feeling) the best way we have at our disposal to provoke the care of the generations? ...to mark each other with the mark of the care?

putting the narrative into proper sleep
casting the names

-artist has turned herself into a mnemonic device --> suggesting “amnesia” as her context
-artist has become a reminder and (therefore) her audiences have become memorizers

(question of) memory and remembering --> the idea of ‘literal remembrance’ in her performance, re-membering, literally bringing back the “members” of the Kurt Jooss company into the present of her audiences
-the problem with her remembrance is that “there is something that is important to remember” regardless of the person/subject who remembers

indisputability of the Green Table for Olga
the artist has chosen to protect The Green Table's meaning and message (due to her political and ethical commitments [for world peace?]) in a sense her subject of research remains unresearched, her values unevaluated, her moral settlements settled

how can she become interested in decomposing her research-bodies of The Green Table?
can we remain critically eth[...]

[...]ts revival or memorialization)

what is the feeling of the document?

*document is a story that (usually) silences other stories*
where our powers to provoke care (could/should) come from (if not from document/evidence)?
is document (in its form and feeling) the best way we have at our disposal to provoke the care of the generations? ...to mark each other with the mark of the care?

putting the narrative into proper sleep
casting the names

-artist has turned herself into a mnemonic device --> suggesting “amnesia” as her context
-artist has become a reminder and (therefore) her audiences have become memorizers

(question of) memory and remembering --> the idea of ‘literal remembrance’ in her performance, re-membering, literally bringing back the “members” of the Kurt Jooss company into the present of her audiences
-the problem with her remembrance is that “there is something that is important to remember” regardless of the person/subject who remembers

indisputability of the Green Table for Olga
the artist has chosen to protect The Green Table's meaning and message (due to her political and ethical commitments [for world peace?]) in a sense her subject of research remains unresearched, her values unevaluated, her moral settlements settled

how can she become interested in decomposing her research-bodies of The Green Table?
can we remain critically ethically responsible in thinking about the “meaning and message” of our subject of study and still be able to decompose it in interesting serious ways? (yes yes)

questions of: thinking, reminding, remaining,



Sofia's documentation
she asks “what is document today?”
-what was document yesterday (that is not anymore today)?
-how the agency and meaning of docu is (or is not) mutating in time?*
-what is beyond the question of documentation and preservation? --> *durational aesthetics*
-is document a limited way of asking questions about what we do and our relationship with time and duration? [you never know what the present brings into the future.]

what art cannot say that document can? “truth”?
when truth was invented where was document standing?

is document today a mere effect of technologies of inscribing?

why we are not talking about “file”?
(---> go to the ontology of evidence and files in X-Files TV series)

is ‘file’ the bedrock of reading today?

document assumes, constructs and promises its own labor of reading
? document is that which reads as referent, truthful, evident, economic value, , ,



Femke, with multiple understanders of the blended, blending world

the question of the metaphors of the body

manuality
manual understan[...]

[...]e variable --> (question of the) figure of variation
her work with the partners of crime, getting in the front line and frontiers of CG working and practical metaphors

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

Sofia's textual machine, switching between binary values of faire contract --> staying with the polar syntax of ‘you’ and ‘them’
-how the rotating axis of her machine is able of creating breaks in the syntax of the contract?
-(for her machine: “understanding = an act of application”) --> how new forms of *understanding* could change the ways we might achieve fair societies? and not merely changing the order of sentence to visualize and objectification of unfairness and precariousness of the employment economy, in the exegesis of the writen contract. what would it mean to install an understander (taking a risk), for Sofia, and not a reversal syntaxer (making aware)?
-employer and the employee as different “species” with their different “natural” tendencies to fuck with one another? --> zero-sum game
-the question of symbiotic relatedness (--> psychoanalysis) =/=? contractual relatedness


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

to emphasis on the contingent and the contextual

the process of becoming researcher (of science and technology studies : inquiry into the politics and practices of knowledge-making)

vignette (sketch, a brief literary description, narrate scenes from familiar activities)

the question is not ‘how can we care more?’ (as predetermined set of affective practices) rather: **what happens to our work when we pay attention to moments where the question of ‘how to care?’ is insistent but not easily answerable** (‘care’ as an analytic or provocation)
-Kenney


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

Manoto TV station program “sher yadet nare” شعر یادت نره respond to the questions of translation (from the UK produced program “Don't Forget the Lyrics” into an Iranian contemporary popular media culture) and memory practices (archival memory act performance pop quiz show mixed with consumer culture TV broadcasting)

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

*cognitive companions* (--> coordinating multiple agencies characteristically)
-tiny clay token sheep were enclosed in clay envelopes with markings indicating what was inside (*molding and inscribing clay* was the favored sensory technology for making in Mesopotamia 5000 years ago)
•maybe your makings involves “true writing” that companions preferentially with language
•maybe your makings involves spinning plant and animal fiber and feeling, tying, and untying knots
•processual affirmative re-writings
•systeming meditations
•context-sensitive pushback
•operational closure (of a system)
•fluctuation, entrainment, blocked synchrony
•
[[...]

[...]hought (as have most philosophers in western history who have appealed to nature for ethics)

new postmodernism's value:
•ecological wisdom
•grassroots democracy
•personal and social responsibility
•non-violence
•decentralization
•community-based economics
•postpatriarchal values
•respect for diversity
•global responsibility
•future focus


*modernity is based on a fundamental value-idea --> secularism (a value whose opposite cannot be chosen as value)*

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

importance of scale
archive --> scale of the infinite

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

*history of knowledge [in my work on ajayeb] = dream of knowledge (present in the mind) of the people who are not anglophone =/= history of science*

inside and outide the mental map of the historian (of science)

SDzVaBj492s
Daston on *disciplinary neurosis* of the history of science

all timelines are maps (are chronologies, are provincial)
most drawings are maps (are charming)


[Sina:] ****can we have (imagine) science without modernity (not coming right after it)??**** <-- my research question (to separate the bond between science and modernity? to flow the curiosity in that direction)


{ the idea of “science created the modern world + western global dominance” (=/= everyone else) }==> “understanding of modernity = understanding history of science”
(one of rare moments that) european middle ages is conflated with the whole of middle east civilization, as pre-Newtonian (in the eyes of W. Rostow)
--> cold war (maneuvering for the alliances of the newly decolonized nations)
--> all the ways of knowing that were not included in the current Anglophone and Francophone definition of “science = the natural sciences in English only in mid 19th century” =/= elm علم, Wissenschaft

**there is no culture without (its own implicit systematics of) knowledge**
•epistemological hierarchy (even without the display or existence of *epistemic culture* [dedicated to the persue of knoweldge] --> yet put pressure on communities of learning ==> ideas & practices, for example alchemy was court science par excellence)
•social hierarchy
•rational who can practice them why

(Daston:) the stuck of hands-on knowledge shoots up and then metaphysics plump it --> persue of knowledge becomes collective (with different pressure points)

for many cultures [including Persian]:
•the philology (grammer) is the queen of the sciences
•the stricing prevalence of *dispute: intellectual discourse staged as agonistic duel --> (most of our) ***intellectual life is conducted as polemic***


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

the more you study an environ[...]

[...] 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 studies --> *tracing objects through the practices and discourses that produce them as settled matters of fact, made, but not made up*

(tracking) social and legal arrangements ==producing==> race


***science is coded as the interpreter of nature in western discourse*** --> that is why i have to study science in my research on bestiaries


Hammond + Herzig on how scientific practices across disciplines describe and create what thereby becomes *naturalized difference* (=/= describing the nature of difference itself)

(learn from Hammond + Herzig -->)
source material --> organize & comment --sustain--> argument
+ questions that point the reader to discoursive moves and modes of attention of the author (=/= Quinsy's ملانقطى pedantic exploration of racism)

(politically correcting the popular understanding of race =/=) to show the unsettled and ongoing nature of the debate. [asking readers] to track the rise and permutation of various features of the argument
[asking Captain America --anatomical-->] “in what larger political, economic, and social contexts might ears, noses, index fingers, or brains hemispheres attract attention as reliable signs of racial difference?”


some wrong ideas:
•adaptation to new environments signals evolution (~= degenerating groups would eventually cease to exist)
•high mortality rates could signal problems in work and living condition
•sexual dimorphism thought to be a component of degeneration
•“more often than not, the views of society have shaped science rather than the other way around. in this instance, it may be time for science to reshape the views of society.” [<-- scary!]
•


to start with political agenda (good or bad) and fit evidence to that
political correctness (~ a social interest)
dogged persue of truth

*science's power to beguile اغفال imagination* (for examp[...]

[...]s are theory laden --> theories are value laden --> values are history laden *

•animal model research is full of illogical shoddy evidence and special pleading (Lila Leibowitz & Ruth Bleier)
•relations of aggression and gender (Freda Salzman)
•similarities in sociobiology and biosociology (Marian Lowe & Ruth Habbard)
•lateralization in neurophysiology (Leigh Star)
•medicalization of moral-political issues through transsexual surgery (Janice Raymond)

•**everything is a cultural institution** (animal studies applied to humans, science is a cultural institution)
•upright stance and times of divergence between ape and hominid lines have been arenas of mortal combat in evolutionary theory more than once


how science becomes official

“evidence becomes a hero of mine”

the heavy hero's burden of telling the hard truth --> a story sold well in iran's intellectualism
(i have become interested instead in extended bibliographies, *to see our alternatives*)


خیس خیس

language plays a major role in generating reality --> what plays major role in generating reality and legitimator of new realities in iran?

research question of storytelling:
***what are the rules of interpretation that make any story unequivocally readable?


(Haraway shows) the epistemological and political problems of humanism and realism latent (or patent) in feminism


two things i am teaching myself (since 3 or 4 years):
1- how to hold someone else's speech --> دیگری چه گفت؟
2- how to sustain a discussion --> چطور بحث را عوض نکردن؟


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

*bad geography: insult, tohin, similar to trauma, they don't have an concret external object (yet they create them), it is a register of an event, vent, affectual implosion of a percept
insult dones't exist out there, (tohin kardan vojud khareji nadarad), it is in the inside --> is that why tasavof works and labors with insult?

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

(also in apass, dancers and choreographers, are the children of modernism art of De Kooning) reaching inward to find within the body that sublime thing (Deleuze calls) the *figural* [=/= (iranian miniature's) sublimity of the infinite (<-- Aela testing this, under ‘mysticism'~-> state of constant openness ==> transformative relation between self and other)]

we can trace the (seductive power of) fana فنا in contemporary media art (Hoda's sublime digital-rhythmic embodiments? --> transcendental desires remain questionable)

doctrine of the minimal: smallest unit is the atom or point =/=
doctrine of Zaher/Baten: smallest unit is the fold*** ==> zoomorphic writing, infinitesimal

(mysticism:) a system of [...]

[...]
پرچم = دم گاو بزرگ
خانه = اتاق
هیجان = مستی جنسی (حیوان نر)، جنبش دریا
دانستن to know = توانستن to be able to
خسته شدن getting tired = مجروح شدن getting injured
سرشتن to create = مخلوط کردن to mix, compose
راه بردن = شناختن، بلد بودن
raftan = eshal gerftan
dashtan = motevaghef kardan
afzudan = toghyan kardan



TRAVEL*

-Adam Olearius (ambassador, translator, Russian+Persian)
-Sa'di (poet, traveler, theorist of love and friendship, )
-Sana+Sina (artist, researcher, translator, )

world? what is late today? trans-late: beyond being late --> travel and arriving late
travel, trans, transportation, poetry, disruption in travel, traumatic travel, log,

traumatic travel:
poetic source/act
related to refuging
voyage
exploration

investigate poetry and travel in the 12th century and 16th century and 21st century encounter
translational worlding between German Iranian cross-cultural speculative narratives that we fabulate with artistic and research methodologies

trajectory, destined beings, translations, transportation, routs, paths, maps,
transportation system
translation system
error in destination(?) [ontology of ‘error’ in 12th, 16th, 21st]
mutation in the garden(?)
technological system of destiny -?-> Sa'di
the flow of energy and material : dejle-biaban continuity

which agential force or travel agency Sa'di or Olearius or Sana or Sina is enrolled or registered in, that it sends them off to far distances?

pure political plays?
the question of ambassadorship
ambassadorial activities of Sana and Sina
the question of diplomacymacy
ambassador: storytelling, acting,
comparative thinking, comparative research, comparative translational methodology : *self in world* tech., lit., dis.,
which technologies (of composing, of writing, of figuring) are installed for Sa'di in the 12th century and for Adam Olearius in the 16th century that allows them to imagine and engage in/with what we call today *mondial*?


(Sa'di + Olearius:)
chance encounter, failures, writing, making figures, loving, making friends, their acts of worlding (?), composing worlds, (de-compose?)
technicity: armillary sphere, Globe of Gottorf, Golestan, drawings, star constellations with astrological and mythological symbols, inside-outside model of the cosmos,
--> they both have concerns of *global consciousness* --> and their differences: two (or more) different world knowledges
GPS: global system position, concern of both Sa'di and Olearius

an excuse to read an[...]

[...]oday? trans-late: beyond being late --> travel and arriving late
travel, trans, transportation, poetry, disruption in travel, traumatic travel, log,

traumatic travel:
poetic source/act
related to refuging
voyage
exploration

investigate poetry and travel in the 12th century and 16th century and 21st century encounter
translational worlding between German Iranian cross-cultural speculative narratives that we fabulate with artistic and research methodologies

trajectory, destined beings, translations, transportation, routs, paths, maps,
transportation system
translation system
error in destination(?) [ontology of ‘error’ in 12th, 16th, 21st]
mutation in the garden(?)
technological system of destiny -?-> Sa'di
the flow of energy and material : dejle-biaban continuity

which agential force or travel agency Sa'di or Olearius or Sana or Sina is enrolled or registered in, that it sends them off to far distances?

pure political plays?
the question of ambassadorship
ambassadorial activities of Sana and Sina
the question of diplomacy
ambassador: storytelling, acting,
comparative thinking, comparative research, comparative translational methodology : *self in world* tech., lit., dis.,
which technologies (of composing, of writing, of figuring) are installed for Sa'di in the 12th century and for Adam Olearius in the 16th century that allows them to imagine and engage in/with what we call today *mondial*?


(Sa'di + Olearius:)
chance encounter, failures, writing, making figures, loving, making friends, their acts of worlding (?), composing worlds, (de-compose?)
technicity: armillary sphere, Globe of Gottorf, Golestan, drawings, star constellations with astrological and mythological symbols, inside-outside model of the cosmos,
--> they both have concerns of *global consciousness* --> and their differences: two (or more) different world knowledges
GPS: global system position, concern of both Sa'di and Olearius

an excuse to read and investigate their worldings? translations between worlds, and sewing, tearings, and so on during the Safaviten and the Russian Tsar 16th century cosmology and models of reciprocity
(Translation is always interpretive, critical, and partial.)

intersection of multiple hierarchies:
-the Safaviten order (Isfahan architecture)
-the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp order (family architecture, court and mathematic)
-Tsar order (urban)
-literature of reciprocity***

Sana keywords: distortion, displacement, distance, alternation, collage, blur (noun), noise, voice-over, subtle changes, micro-macro, micro-politic, rhythm, turbulence, fragmentation, metaphor, persistence, repetition, disturbance,
(unexpected)

--> se[...]

[...]rnt and transmitted by specialists (Stengers, @Eszter)


Verran > Stengers working on the “gods and demons that populate physics”


[...] rejection and enclosure within the domain of ‘nonscientific’ or ‘simply subjective’ (of anything that cannot be reduced to the canon of the ‘simple’ model)
[Stengers]


(Verran on) the capacities of numbers to interpellate (رسما سوال کردن، استيضاح کردن) their users


diptych قاب دو لوحى


model of meaning-making that diagrams initiate (spatially + linguistically)

articulated sets of relations

a particularly efficacious form of certainty-generating rhetoric by ancient Greek mathematicians (appropriated by thier politicians), according to Netz: meaning-making in geometry proceeds in a particular way, a way that generates deductive proof --> (Netz's notion of) oral performance origins of meaning-making with diagrammatic device =/= (Verran's) graphics embedded within flows of words --> relations graphically plotted frame the relations plotted in flows of words (and reversed): diagrams labile ناپايدار in their forms of participation in collectives***

{my research on premodern systematic investigation of strange singularities of the labile phenomena [lability: liable to err and fall, slip, glide, flow] in the middle ages --helps--> how in the absence of authoritative *source of knowledge* in artistic research environments such as apass, *styles of knowing* mime and intertwine in poetics, practice, and politics}

speaking from diagram (offering possibilities of pilotage of the emergent relations) =/= speaking to diagram (a form of presentation, a proposed ‘found’ past in an idealized future, proposing as a realistic map of a given)

@Eszter: the question of recognizing the complexity of manipulating sets of relations expressed graphically --> developing (in my self) a contrast which offers possibilities for rhetorically distinguishing between ‘speaking from’ and ‘speaking to’ ==> shifts that can effect moves in collective meaning-making

wordy texts

(Star Trek's) displaying “our” modern commonplaces out of the place they are coming from --> makes me vomit
-in US sci-fi TV series we face that we are still Aristotlian, in our regulation of speech, we live under the regime of non-contradiction and of non-equivocation (tie up our public life in it) (--> when i say this is not my story, i am talking about another tradition of speech regulation)


proto-Baroque theater


*ambiguous monarchy*

absolutism has never been a feature of Iran monarchies

(who?) put an end to the complex, emergent baroque polity

a baroque sensibility was no longer salient in the Danish monarchical context and the ba[...]

[...] the stories are about + authors (+ their peers + readers)

****(from) postmodern concern about the authority of the author --to--> a concern about partiality and generative critique****
@apass #feedback
(Verran giving voice to what my concern and interest is in artistic research environment)


the question of how to re-present others (their diverse practices) on good faith? <-- moral
~~> the bad idea of “good faith =/= bad faith” ==> assume a moral high ground that we have no reason to argue in favor of

altering oneself to good faith = altering oneself to the possibility of double vision

(in ethnography) good faith: writing generalizing stories that intervene, because of the partiality of research and analysis (not despite of it)
•good faith analysis: having faith in it being possible to write stories that are generative for *some of* the practices we study + for *some of* our peers

(stories --Verran-->) two moments of generalizing:
1. *onemany* form ==enable==> abstracting
2. *whole-parts* form ==bring==> a situating moment
~={ Star Wars apocalyptic stories (single vision) + lived social bodily realities = (Harawayian) many-headed monster }--> #Tehran index

ethnographic research is always embedded in multi-stakeholder situations

the Verran is proposing
=/= writing stories that narrate what collaborators hope to hear
=/= hardening the categories of the everyday

[*]generalization: (performative) ways of making and negotiating different realities

(Hinde -->) adequate story: objects that *find* audiences ~= *pointing to* (<-- performative) ~/= *pointing for* (<--Verran-- invite them to do work to see their own ontological commitments)
@apasa, research on performativity entailles when not to be performative

ethnographic story: re-performance / re-presenta[...]

[...]er to extend the usefulness of a particular market offering across wider consumption assemblages in time and space
-marketers think in terms of catalyzing interactions and consistencies amongst stubborn, messy and dynamic assemblages of spaces, representations, things and consumers

knowing: an intervention in the world
(Bettany)

[*]ethnography: stories that have in them a capacity to represent the world in ways that are generative for the people and practices that the stories are about @constantvzw
(Winthereik and Verran)

in the case of data streaming: what are the people, objects, texts and practices that constitute processes of assembling?
-in our research let's not prioritize either people or things in advance ==> unexpected sources of influence in markets and consumer cultures @Foad
-to map together material/technological as well as linguistic aspects of consumer culture: narratives, phenomenological techniques, etc.
-consumers ‘become’ during consumption
*[?why become interested in] consumption/markets: hybrid networks of narratives, objects, devices and practices (that [it seems] are necessary to create conditions for any ‘human’ action)*
(still use other more old-fashioned research techniques: depth interviews [Xiri], phenomenological methods [], hermeneutic analysis [Sina], etc.)
-(how to account for) tech-mediated flows of information and knowledge that pass through the massive assemblages of the Internet
-majority of interactions are technology-to-technology and system-to-system interactions

this assemblage-thinking is against[?]:
•Virilio's way of ‘questioning technology'--for him: “to be a subject or to be subjected, that is the question.” he sees crisis in the temporal dimensions of the present moment: the lack of a future-oriented longer time-frame connects “real time”, pollution, and economic inequalities. All of them result from a lack of shared responsibility for the future. (<-- noted by Hubert); or: “The now immaterial environment is connected to the “terminal” body of men and women with interactive prostheses who become the virtual equivalent of the well-equipped invalid.”
•Guattari's machinic (=/= simple construction partes extra partes): omnipresent homogenized capitalist exchange value
•Nancy's ecotechnics: critique of globalization and sovereignty
•Avital's narcotics: on Heidegger: the notion of ‘addicted to technology’ --asking--> under what conditions we could arrive at a *free relation to technology*? being ‘fast’ --> on the run ==> dumps understanding along the way. (for Heidegger) freedom depends upon Dasein's openness to anxiety ==diverts==> addiction [a certain type of being-on-drugs] }--> drugs have something to do with technology? @constantvzw
drugs in warfare: taking pills (or tranced by nohe مداحی جنگ) into superior performance, technologizing [...]

[...]le of imperialism)
•(romantic notion of) nature: idyllic =/= (Crusoe) nature: unforgiving + sparse }<-- utopian =/= dystopian nature --> Lord of the Flies


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

(with Annemarie's help @apass)

*sources of knowledge =/= styles of knowing* ==> tensions

judgment: an occasion to apply one's own standards =/= observation: a mean to get to know somebody else's standards

difference
which differences exactly?
what are their interferences and their diffractions?
--> the surprises that come with finding “variations”

(stories about)
vessels & fluids
pain & technicians
patients & doctors
techniques & technologies

(bracketing the practices =/=) foregrounding the practices --> objects come into being and disappear with the practices in which they are manipulated ==> reality multiplies
=/= single passive object in the middle waiting to be seen from the point of view of seemingly endless series of perspectives (SK the elephant parable)

philosophy used to approach knowledge in an epistemological way (~ preconditions for acquiring true knowledge = Alex's question “what is artistic research”) =/= (Annemarie's) *knowledge = a matter of manipulation (=/= reference)* ==> ethnographic interest in knowledge practices (--to--> “what are artist researchers doing?”)


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#project: to create a multidisciplinary knowledge program around the relationship between art, marketing and [?], highlighting the imbricated فلس فلس nature of [?] as tangible resources and knowledge

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

#project index Tehran theory: to think ethnographically about non-unilateral and non-static picture of aspiration in the context of contemporary Tehran eco-techno-culture
•archive question
•contemporary media technology
•data/knowledge organization
•infrastructure
•epistemology
•Tehran techno-culture multispecies ethnography
•mini worlds
•*how people imagine a better life?* --> (to think non-unilateral and non-static) *picture of aspiration* (in the context of contemporary Tehran)
•imitations of forms
•http://ajayeb.net/?q=sensibilities+hitting+people
•start as collaborative online platform for writings/projects about Tehran emerging ecologies:
◦mice موش
◦mobile phones موبایل
◦monsters هیولا
◦heavens مثل
◦
•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 c[...]