[...]
not adding up to a comprehensive narrative of the ethnic self

*ego-under-construction*
Freud's primary narcissism, we love ourselves before loving others
(for the child) narcissism = intermediate
(secondary) narcissism: the processes by which the distinction between the ego and external object is lost
(Lacan) loss of distinction between the ego and its reflection in the mirror
--> narcissism helps the infant in trying to distinguish himself from the mother/other

narcissism beyond infantile sexuality -->
narcissism: structure (=/= state) <== when the burden of desire on the subject becomes intolerable

(?what are new structures of) artistic narcissism
*an occasion to erotisize your own body*
to erotically emphasize a particular memory
stitching together of the naked ethnic body

hupersexuality
...those who are undersexed




/>

%note on Alice's workshop:
how the idea of mimesis came when we were not sure what she meant by “make note.” the signifier of “note” defined itself in a collective mimetic semi-conscious way.
(=/=? my work on how signifiers transmit and transform --> parasitism, rumorology, etc. ... weaker neighborhoods of thought)

Alice's notions:
•explosion <--> dance
•the “generative” notion in her discourse (--> notion of “active,” and “conscious intentionality” [--> a property of human agency and agential exceptionality. (the metric of) her work/workshop distinguishes the self-aware active entity from non-communicative receptive entity, ***intransitive =/= transitive-->{her privileged object}, and that distinction is not useful for me right now])
•the authority of the trope “practice” for Alice
(what would be a nonmimetic understanding of eachother? @Juan)
•the workshop was not her ‘thinking’ or ‘making’ in process or ss or an open question or a not-knowing, rather the workshop was based on her (finished) ‘notions,’ with her ‘indisputables,’ her ‘literal’ objects; (dance, active, body, imagination, practice, generative, creative, etc.)
•production of the “I” in her work; (a nasty side-effect: collateral individuation) (when were the moments in the workshop that an interesting “we” was created and for whom?)
•the problematic difference between ‘literal’ and ‘metaphorical’ at the footing of her thinking (--> my whole apass research is about this)
•(artist's) imagination as a magic wand that can transform things

*what helped me was the idea of thinking with a ‘dormant metaphor’ (in my own work) and ‘activate’ it, in a way that the problems and pleasures of thinking with that metaphor is felt. by ‘dormant metaphor’ what i mean is an operative word that one is using often and is left uninterrogated. for example the problems of “landscape” as a particular ontologica[...]

[...]ak is never clean, just as contact was never continuous. The entire metaphysics of identity, presence and locality is scrambled, bringing with it a certain historical mutation in the relationship of the “self’ to other, to the irreducible precedence, as Derrida puts it in ‘Memoires,’ of the other. The other calls; you answer. But “you” have not yet been constituted, gathered or pulled together prior to the call.

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

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

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

modeling different styles of irony

(what are we) telehearing (?)


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


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



the mode of awesomeness and dissolvement with awe is the prescriptive utterance in the case of ajayeb, the ‘wonders of...’ translated from “ajayeb-e...” triggering the verb “ta'ajob” ت[...]

[...]imb) *imaginary loss of a penis* --> a “tool” for a recovery of what was “always already” missing --> Freud: libidinal memorial to the lost limb (@Elen's kind of mourning for preoedipal (~= precastrated) body, and her (erroneous) localization of it on the motorbike)
Grosz: “It is only through controlled use of the phantom that the artificial limb can (gradually) take the place of the lost limb”
#body image]


ecologies of reflection and diffraction --> resolution of nature

[*]diffraction: an effect that limits the ability of a lens (or a system of lenses) *to resolve an image*
•(to evolve a creative tension,) a trade-off, between the resolution of detail and diffraction effects, between geometrical and physical optics

ajayeb's ecologies mixed (less of) reflection and (much more of) diffraction, are taken from a yet not detachments of the experience of phenomena and the apparatuses of its description, of percepts and affects
#my findings of composites of ajayeb:
•animals varying number of legs --?--> animal + movement
•fantastic creatures --?--> animal + environment + affect
•fable poetics --?--> animal + apparatus of description
•tentative citationality [other name of “rumor”?] --?--> nonhuman + human relational histories
•remembering is an extremely creative (& imaginative) practice
•
--> ongoing, open-ended articulation of the world (<-- my work on ajayeb)
--> these are the diffraction patterns in ajayeb that are (artistically, politically, ethnically) significant for me (?)
--> these are instances of resistance against biomimesis in ajayeb (?) [biomimesis is involved with mirroring, imitation, or reflection, and other tropes of “sameness"] =/= trans-materialities of the creatures of the world, they transgress the sacrosanct divides between techne and episteme

(many creatures of our shared world have) evolved in intra-action with their environment, and old bestiaries, such as ajayeb, critically inhabit a mode of description and affect situated within the intra-activity of technologies of writing and perception
•the creatures of the mud know better not to get caught up in a “geometrical optics of knowing”
we are seeking a different genus of knowing =/= mediating machine, inscription devices, lenses, panopticons, and various other epistemological tools that many science studies and cultural studies scholars fancy. (is that also what Marialena fancies? her list of tools)

[*]intelligibility: an ontological performance of the world in its ongoing articulation
not a specifically human capacity, intelligibility does not require an (usually human) inttelective agent

the problem with design is that designers (as well as scientists and engineers) are busy with building ‘enhanced communication networks’ and principles of ‘usefulness’, in the way th[...]

[...]e other (=/= hylomorphism: an active usually exclusively human subject confronts an inert and naturalized object)

**cosmology (~ the hyphen between nature and society is social) =/= naturalism (~ relations between society and nature are natural)**

we are body-objects in ecological interaction with other body-forces

-question for Viveiros de Castro: what would be then the “exchange” between Amerindian perspectivism and Western naturalism? (not only that “we” should learn from Amerindian perspectivism but) what they can learn from us?

European ontology: unextended thought and extended matter (--> Iron Man)
going from questions of representation --to--> questions of ontology
simplification of ontology (--> objects pacified and silenced) ==> complication of epistemology (--> subjects proliferate and chatter) [--> “discursive practices” and “politics of knowledge” are results of that pacification?]

***someone must be wrong, something has to be explained*** (<--?-- we have never been modern, they has ever been primitive)

(Viveiros de Castro)
formerly, savages mistook (their) representations for (our) reality; now, we mistake (our) representations for (other people's) reality. rumor has it we have even be mistaking (our) representations for (our) reality when we “occidentalize”


*culturalism, relativism, textualism --> reduces reality to representation
*cognitivism, sociobiology, evolutionary psychology --> reduces representation to reality

it has been obvious (for more than seventy-five years) that at the heart of the matter, there is no stuff; only form, only relation

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

“ajayeb” a term i use inclusively to examine a living and nonliving ‘historical site’ / ‘heritage web’ in order to learn/talk/speculate about what counts as writing ~= writing technologies ==> production of knowledges

(Katie King's) bits of pastpresent, a tool for scale making
~(Weston's) time claims
[*pastpresent: decline epistemologically charged purifications that devout complaints of “presentism” mandate]

-in my research (willing and required to become a beginner) i am asking: why past and present are so easy to separate?
(~~--> how our vision of past and future creates our present?)
==> directions, spinning dynamics,

in a sense my work on ajayeb is a critique of “presentism"[= overvaluing historically and culturally local constructions of the meaning and importance of a particular set of stories and their conditions of production (of “ours”). (for example the “future” story)]
-->? speculative presentisms (Dinshaw's queer historiography)

*globalization: “that travelogue of distributed, heterogeneous, linked, sociotechnical circulations that craft the world as a net c[...]

[...]ce of becoming companion species, and not a discarded phantom limb forever haunting the amputated you
|
(4) troubled stories
=/= clear-cut good stories about troubles
stories difficult to like:
•dirty, guilty, survivalist udyr? the evil horse? (we need more description of the evil horse)
Cinderella --> (not) the master of your house, of your name, of you
-sometimes it is not you who makes you


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

--Morris--> ghost problem --✕--> possbility of a politcal form
contingent politicization and the accidental in the Southeast Asia

theatrical acts of civil disobedience
democracy protestors
conjure the spirits of those who have been killed
political vengeance

(wherever there is) violence in Southeast Asia (even if this violence is merely the
force that possesses machinery) ==> ghosts
~=
(wherever there is) force that would oppose life (even and perhaps especially by resembling it) ==> ghosts

[the doxa of] {(no preparation) premature death / banished by disbelief ==> unhappy ghost, vindictive melancholy}[= *effect of context*]--in-->
•pulp novels
•secular humanist elite literature
•rumor
•folklore
•

(Morris points that) such specters are densest in the places where the accidents of modernity are most like to occur

*the death that is caused by another death*

technologization of life and death, movement and war --> *making one vulnerable to death* <== (often) a function of technology (technologization of life and death, movement and war, etc.)

*ghostliness (in Southeast Asia): an idiom with which to address issues about the difficult delineation of a boundary between the living and the dead* (=/= matter of improper burial)

if the dead cannot join the living, the living can die and thereby mingle with the already deceased ~-> fright

the location (where ghostliness arises) is not spatial but temporal (“something happened”)--> in a strange way, for the “occurrence” has no place in time ==> stop time and to displace other narratives (--> it has the structure of trace)
[@Marialena's summoning to life =/= (living) beings who can be summoned to death]
}~~?--> (Freud's) death drive (<== traumatic neuroses) + (Kantian conception of)
accident


(for Freud:) [*]consciousness: the form of a resistance to the world

unconscious is “timeless” : incapable of discerning order (in a Kantian sense)

trauma (=/= anxiety) ==> disables the pleasure principle but not the compulsion to repeat (which is typically a source of pleasure)
[*]trauma as precisely such a disturbance of time and of causal sequentiality

{earlier philosopher's analogy: substance (essentially unchanging) =/= acci[...]

[...] by a schema in which exposure to events leads to politicization) <-- an older genre of politicization narrative [~ individuals describe their encounter with social injustice, extreme poverty, or excessive violence and then recount a growing consciousness of the structures that produced them, #Robin Hood]

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

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

they were just there (summoned to events the nature of which they did not know in advance) --> *ephemeral mobilization*:
•by anonymous calls (precipitated objectless gatherings by cell phone messaging, an anonymous call of an ideologically vacant sort)
•ephemeral rumors
•without ideological commitment
•by curiosity (gathered only to find out why others were gathered)
•attraction to spectacle
•to consume, pornographically, the visceral images of police and military violence
•
--> the idea of participation loses its meaning

formation of a crowd
materialization of the state's force

ephemeral mobilization (which later sets the stage for politicization) is a familiar instrument of power

the group:
•(has a) monopoly on violence
•manifestation of a will to democracy (for example the way Iranian movements were read by international bodies)
r /> ahistoricism of conspiratorial orientation --> “powerful but secret instrumentalities ==> temporary formations” --misses--> the transformations of social consciousness and political possibility

(to open to the thought of a world beyond you)

narratives of accidental politicization (~ movements emerging from crowds without ever becoming masses or classes)
--✕--> from the state
--✕--> from the transnational media + whose circuits the images of these convergences travel
--> an experience of immediacy (as the origin of politics =/= encounter with representations of the world), sudden activation of an immediate presence in the public sphere --> political conceived as itself being contingent

to resignify and reorient the problem of the political in terms of civilizational difference (rather than ideological, and hence economic, difference)


the so-called nocturnal sudden death syndrome

[...]

[...]ily, and the ways the animal story circulate and live there. what is the animal holding in my family?
-stories or fables that permit wonder, or allow perhaps to approach crows or cats as creatures who could be capable of contingent cooperation or multispecies companionship. [i am referring to the video of the wild animal taking care of the baby pet, the popular video in social media that triggered the discussion about wild and domesticity during the lunch between my family members. an object that captured the dialectic of desire and disgust in my human family's response to the animal.]--> this is what I call cosmology: beings that depends on their placing within a particular cosmology. cosmology is very much alive --- [animals fitting in the visual rhetoric of web-based digital media is itself to be investigated... social relations, social animal, contemporary cosmology]
-the minimum relationship with feral cats, and rats, and pigeons (and their material environment.) and ambiguity towards them. evoking responses of affection, disgust, fear, and indifference.
-relationships between people, animals and place**** [a place as complex as Tehran's urban environment with its politics, televised operations, its ‘wilderness,’ and technologically mediated stories and rumors that populate its landscape.] --> are we having a Historical change? in epistemic principles --> what is inside and what is outside [keep in mind the historical moment in iran's political isolation. is this reflecting the exclusion of feral animals of everyday life?]
-my family was able to talk differently and find other expressions about violence in the landscape of tehran by applying the animal story (to the head and heart.) [this is also Kelile o Demneh.] the video was a heart-breaker. it had a healing moment, and their resistance to its originality as a tale of friendship is meaningful, the violence is solid and a-priori to companionship, and it supported the story of kinship instead of friendship. This story also promoted the Descartes’ beast-machine hypothesis, that the wild-being is devoid of intentions and is like a timepiece with regular motions, that the animal is object and not subject, beast-machine.
-my mother's relationship to the lions eating their offspring, octopus eating their mate, or cats licking their genitals and dogs filth scavenging--polluters of domestic space, cockroaches “belonging” to an stratum below civilized life, the “out of place” and abject owl, species sexual dispositions and different coupling, suggest difficulty in an anthropocentric expectation of alterity. animals simultaneously despised and admired --- the idea of eating your (so-called) “loved-one” (not a suitable object for affection) refutes cross-species identification according to anthropocentric standards. [windows of opportunity for cross-species bonding, domestic-wanna-be-feral story, myth of mental intention and animal flesh, irreducible heterogeneous ontolo[...]

[...]e feminine processes of Sudabeh, (she wants him, in an experimental [sex] erotic participation, her attempt at melting his moral ice, which we later find out fire cannot melt***) to break the fabric of obligation (his intense commitment to the father-king combination) =/= tribalism, betraying the patriarchal arrest (the myth of a single god/father and patriarchal faithfulness - *the myth of the strong personality*) ==> Siyavash--patriarcal type of guy who doesn't know how to greet her snaky figure politly--excuses himself of a vital encounter and sustains an ascetic subtraction, and lets Ferdosi--alwayes on God-Fire's side--execute Sudabeh through the bad boy Rostam hyper-masculinity itself. Siyavash/Rostam is utterly non-queer, Siyavash: Rostam's pet project, domesticated, passes the exam. Sudabeh is shocked and screwed-over by the narrative and spectacularisation of the fire's truth-event in an “enactment” plotted by Ferdosi--she is done, she doens't have a deal with fire. She is accused of being Eros, of being garrulous, of wasting words with lunatic prodigality, the chattering, ranting, gossiping female, the tattle, the scold, the toothless crone her mouth wind-full of speech.
smell of Sudabeh: moshk, golab, sharab, infinite odors--she is ‘full of it.’ drugs, toxins, rumorous texts, etc. smell of Siyavosh: nothing. neutral. sober. his silence-treatment appeals to the big father. (king's nose. smelling as justuce method? objective observation, provisional logic of nose, smell of smoke, and fire)
Rostam takes no delight in Sudabeh's voice since its register is nothing sweet nor low.
Siyavash corresponds to a set of idioms and is enraptured in the movement of certain silences in which he can grasp only certain falsehoods or menaces.
so Siyavash is ready to go to-the-fire but not to-the-woman.
(never hesitant, even kills his own son by ignoring his signals) Rostam never daird to look the devil in the eyes (---Sudabeh had?)

the Sudabeh's case is a non-agonistic agon, not to be fooled by its decieving differences from Rostam's combats--both are competition as a form of exclusion. in her case we see forms of social conflict in gender, class, race, and even material relations, (she is not relating to fire) leading to her losing the boy's game.

under the barbarous mathematics of Rostam, her figure fades into aspects and grammar of men,

fire signaling essence, essencing being (of her, his, it)
[things are still essencing at the distance---what Rostam radically is unable to understand]

(a network of relations and nonrelations depends on the way we address how Ferdosi greets Sudabeh, failed in the exam and examination ==> fire creating a network of relations [Rostam, Siyavosh,] and nonrelations [Sudabeh, King,])
-what are the conditions enabling the delivery of the Sudabeh [to the beyond (of Shahname)]? (of greeting her?) which poetic sites [we d[...]

[...]



against the curtain of fire trial stands a stack of iranian proverbs about stone triggering often ideas of rigidity ~= stupidity:
aghlesh par-sang barmidare عقلش پاره سنگ برمیداره (crazy, imagination, thinking, excess,)
divane sangi be chah miandazad... دیوانه سنگی به چاه می اندازد... (stupidity, tool, irreversibility, questions of agency and responsibility,)
naravad mikhe ahanin dar sang نرود میخ آهنین در سنگ (stupidity, penetration,)
shamshir bar sang azmudan شمشیر بر سنگ آزمودن (uselessness, stupidty, destruction, test, inattention,) [~= shekar zire ab penhan sakhtan (شکار زیر آب پنهان ساختن --> story of the apes, Buzinegano Kerme Shabtab بوزینگان و کرم شبتاب) ~= mosht dar tariki zadan مشت در تاریکی زدن]
sang az pase divar andakhtan سنگ از پس دیوار انداختن (uselessness, wrongness, chance,)
pay dar sang amadan پای در سنگ آمدن (random trouble, naturaly unforseen hardship, cripeled,)
sang dar kise kardan سنگ در کیسه کردن
del dar sang shekastan دل در سنگ شکستن (to keep quite, benefit of silence, resist speaking the rumorical utterence,)
dele sang دل سنگ (cold-hearted,)
آتش از دل سنگ بیرون آوردن atash az (ضمیر چوب zamire chub va) dele [darune] sang birun avardan (possiblity through work, interrogatory turture,)
sang سنگ =/= la'l لعل --how?--> sang (in Pahlavi) ~= value
sang سنگ =/= abgine آبگینه (glass, mirror, sky, diamond,) (سنگ آبگینه sange abgine: a rock to create mirrors with, abgine ze sang mizayad--khaghani آبگینه ز سنگ می زاید)
sange emtehan سنگ امتحان, az sang birun amadan از سنگ بیرون آمدن, bar sang zadan بر سنگ زدن (trial, test, valuate, messure, quality check,) --?--> related to mine and mineral that gave metal and gold (in many parts of iran sang is the unit of messurment for water ---> go to Dehkhoda) (sang is just a mean to put other things in weight, due to its abundance and nonshiny surface in front of reflective materials: diamond, water, etc.)
sang dar darya andakhtan سنگ در دریا انداختن (positive chance, relying on destiny, butterfly effect, questions of agency and responsibility,)
sang andakhtan سنگ انداختن (causality, scale, benefiting from the nature, lever, questions of agency and responsibility,)
sang bendaz baghalet baz she سنگ بنداز بغلت باز شه (stupidity, uselessness, unrewarded hardship, questions of agency and responsibility,)
sang az mum sakhtan سنگ از موم ساختن (impossibility, stupidity, wrongness,)
sang bar shishe zadan سنگ بر شیشه زدن = not drinking wine anymore (breaking the wine glass) (sometimes stone has come to mea[...]

[...] to viewing the test as a way of mobilizing courage

The Sphinx marks the porous boundary between Western and Eastern domains of questioning and tells of bodies menaced by pulverization: should the riddle not be solved, either the questioner or the questioned must go. Passing the test is a matter of survival of the species for Oedipus, as it is for the interspecial dominatrix of the riddle: la Sphinx dissolves when the young man offers the correct answer.
=/= koan

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

My performance here is maybe a form of prayer or invocation[8] not simply to be read as a mere theoretical and discursive statement, and is intended to be a table of digital curses. To reopen the agency of curse in a cultural style that I have come to encounter, it might produce a different but not necessarily better speculative difficulty in discussing about the virtual. A curse[9] (according to Iranian-Islamic mixture of traditions in the milieus of promising and swearing,) is basically a networking function with both mechanical and interventionist properties that translate desire into performance—an intersubjective textual momentum that run virtually into the real world and it may (or may not) run down its target. Much like rumor, curse is contagious and reproductive but unlike the publicity of rumorous velocities, curse insists on secrecy at the same time harvesting its powers for revealing. The reality of the ‘curse’ is ‘assumed’ mostly and that is the virtual nature of this relation (with the materialities of the world that curse inscribes on) that I am interested in.


Curse systematically works with names, to be more accurate, with the notion of the “proper name”[10] invested in the idea of an automatic function that shifts ‘name’ to ‘agency’, virtual to concrete. That is if one knows the proper name, one could raise all actual agencies that act with real consequences—slogans in politics may rely on this typical power of cursing. In the Amazon I was not looking for the proper name of nature, neither theological nor analytical nor the supposed accidental. That means (looking for ways) critically not to be real.


An extended concept of cursing enters visuality in the gaze of the evil eye.[11] The malevolent glare who stamps upon by staring at an accidental moment of encounter in the evil eye, brings together the narrative of the random traveler who casts a gaze in another world of virtual and visual agency, and emphasises the randomness and hideousness of looking. The transaction between the eyes in the evil eye goes both ways to posses both the beholders. The target of the evil eye is always missed[ar] due to the internal conflict of perception and will. The intersection of visions is feared and programmed in the modalities of material talisman and culturally protective performances for the subject from meeting the other’s gaz[...]

[...]erella to be/operate for each other) between:
orchestrator (influence, innovation, experimentation --> laboratory)
partner (equivalence, benefit, reciprocity --> alliance)
slave (captivity, labor, devotion, service, worship --> bondage)
--or--> l.a.b. stands for: laboratory, alliance, bondage {bondage should be part of every (artistic or knowledge-intensive) practice}

the question/problem of: incompatibility of past and present, there and here

object of event or journey (expedition, venture,)

story of the “archive of...” : collection of savored differences

the unreal is not always imaginative or speculative
it is sometimes:
a drive (suffering, passion,)
a password (encryption)
a device (machine, guide,)
accidental and chosen

the character’s wisdom, impulse, cunning, courage (endangerment), innocence (purity), violence (rage, atrocity)

intelligence: diabolical perception

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

(to achieve) the perfect secret: a secret that when revealed remains a secret (a riddle, a puzzle ~= monster: confrontation of the raw unnamable)
future liar --> to resurrect (in the form of fable or rumor):
•fake archive (=/= real witness)
•buried forged artifacts in some gamble
•
--> future out of sync (hyperbolic commons) ==> (an aesthetic of) temporal deviation [=/= messianic time of revolution, historical time of modernity, chronological time of capitalism,] --> (the task of) **thinking untimely**:
•forgetting
•erasure
•recreative
(Artaud's vampiric schizophrenic untimeliness...)

(Sina + Mohaghegh's) *existential radicalism*

night: underground of time
where other things can happen
a phenomena where people encounter mercilessly anonymous indifferent impersonal inhuman nature of the universe
(Mohaghegh's work on the renditions of nocturnality)

(carnaval's) multiple forms [prototype after prototype] --> formfullness =/= (deconstruction's) formlessness

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

ordering ==> violence, exclusion, injustice, sacrifice =/= ~=> residue (of ordering --Serres--> its excluded inessential, peripheral, parasitic) *thermal exciter*
•the anthologizing, selecting, and ordering act @Marialena
•with the discourse of parasite we are at including and inclusion

now our relationship to knowledge is to be more extravagant and parasitic =/= economic and fast

every time we write (sometimes referring the reader to the dictionary) we are also reviving language

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

criminal's relation to the dark (fugitive, dealer, prowler ولگرد) =/= wanderer's relation to the dark (nomad, sojourner, sleepwalker)
[...]

[...]ent uncertainty?
-Benjamin: invocations of the uncanny
-Derrida: the spectral
-Veena: eventedness of the everyday (--> skepticism)

Cavell (on Hollywood cinema and other sites where the drama of separation and union is played out) --> how philosophers have typically focused on skepticism [longstanding western philosophical question and doubt about existence] with respect to material objects and the external world
...existence of the finite neighbour (seemingly known other) --> may become unknowable

--> *Veena discovers the concept of skepticism for anthropology (as a discipline centrally concerned with the varying conditions of human relatedness and otherness)*

[i have been trying dicover skepticism unsystematically in artistic practices those that have strong concerns of social justice and suffering, but i never named it as such. @Hoda, Xiri's emphasis on the threatening nature of liminality (demand for equality or freedom) =/= **to take the possibility of unsettlement or chaos as founding concern**]
--> skepticism (may) suggests a differnt route of inquiry

(Veena -2007:) “the intimacy between skepticism and the ordinary is revealed in the present work on several sites, as in the panic rumors that circulate and produce the picture of the other as phantasmal from whom all human subjectivity has been evacuated, or when violence in the register of literary is seen as transfiguring life into something else, call it a form of death, or of making oneself, as it were, into a ghost”

[violence ==> ghosts]

skeptical problematic --> shifting potency of words : energies that words may gather, and the ways these energies may give or deny life

speech =/= voice
==> ***silence is not necessarily life-denying or that it necessarily indicates a lack or an inability to mourn***

[victims of violence telling stories]
words imbued with spectral quality (yet animated by some other voice)

there is a deep moral energy in the *refusal to represent some violations of the human body* [=/= forensic architecture project's imperative of detailed representation of violation, explicit acknowledging traumatic memory]
--> ***living with poisonous knowledge*** (a different acknowledgement of traumatic memory) --> absorption exercises of remaking a world

--{on ‘forensic architecture’ (an aesthetics developed by Weizman): Keenan asks: if the excruciating citizon videos (showing police violence for instance) could not convince a jury how can forms of aesthetic critique based on research and visual evidence [= post-conceptual art] be anymore effective on the general poblic? (<== ‘evidence =/= proof’)
-age of testimony (-public truth-)
-citizon photo journalism --> “witnessing ~= action”
-the appearance of nonhuman objects as evidence (in forums and courts) as records [...]

[...]am امام the person who leads the give obligatory prayers during the day expect Friday
3. ghari قاری the person who had received enough training to render a pepper recitation of the quran
4. moazen موذن there person who gives the call to prayers, also responsible for cleaning the mosque


ghabze of mosque = expression of ambition (to found religious space) to forge the model Muslim community (beyond daily needs of worship)

***legal exercices & bureaucratic forms = a mode of experimentation*** (in being good [Muslim, intrinsic to Pakistan])
--> to enable civil relation (learning from Naveeda and Femke)


Islam is only one element of a complex weave of politics (involving local leadership, emergent communities of dissent and activism against an indifferent state)


flagging a social problem =/= filling a complaint


jahalat جهالت (=/= common sense + education + good breading)
resentment of uneducated
not class-coded?
--> character (determined by)
•nobility of birth =/= lowly birth
•enlightenment of education =/= ignorant
--Naveeda--> ‘maslak differences ~= grist for the art of war’


rumored
engineered
unfolding

sectarian geography of the city

mobilized in the form of bored policemen


prophet's era intermingled with Pakistan present
masjed zarar

gabze (mosque seizure قبضه مسجد) --explicit--> desire to stake a claim on a new nation-state (Pakistan) = expression of striving:
•tie religious/moral development to the nation-state development
•tie religious/moral development to the imagination of an earlier era of Islam

*expression of striving* in art: opening an art space, studio, school, or an institute (=/= create an institution as a conceptual gesture)<br /> --> tie your development to the nation-state development and to an imagination (of change?)

•anything could be believed about a certain imam
•when someone (or group) attack you, they transform from human to animal
--> skeptical turn towards the world

neighborhood = ties + tensions

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

Naveeda chapter 2 Iqbal

Naveeda's ethnographic example of a scene of aspiration:
•librarians sit around a table (in a public library) engaged in a heated religious argument that threatens to spill into accusations of blasphemy
•Lahoris resolve to build mosques for their neighborhoods only to preside over the dissolution of their communities in their fights over the mosques
<-- sites of dissonance + aspiration

aspiration --> efforts at being Muslim (in the ways one knows or attached to) marked by a striving to an as-yet-unattained self without presuming that this nex[...]

[...]> [*]sense: (from the biological and psychological point of view:) an appreciation of values in relation to a [*]need: (for the one who experuences and lives it:) an irreducible ==(thereby)==> absolute, system of reference


Naveeda's notion of river's point of view:
“...” while the inorganic, such as a river, lacks the building blocks of life in being produced through the action of geological forces, it too has norms and values that take statistical form or are found (in both sense of the word: discovered and originating) in moments of spontaneous action (---> go to Delanda#)


...village and kinship structures being flexible, there is a high value places on sexual normativity


absence of water --> human suffering --> the death of the river --> emergence of land as property


Naveeda examines 3 films:
•focus on corruption, melodramatic specificities of the film-scale, subtext of pain --> Titash Ekti Nodir Naam
•focus on entropy within the Padma river, *ambivalent expression over the necessity for migration that will undoubtedly be one of the strategies of adaptation for an ocean-facing country such as Bangladesh* --> Padma Nodir Majhi
•(film's anticipation of) how rumors and bad news come to unsettle existence, the rumor of climate change may do more to re-organize a social milieu than its actual binding reality --> Chitra Nodir Parey


*there is a “systematic undervaluation of involuntary loss of places and cultures [which] disguises real, experienced but subjective limits to adaptation [and integration*]” (Naveeda > Adger)


(people in interrelation to the Jamuns river...) what may be coming up or downstream or even overhead or below ground, that they are also involved in displacements in situ either because of floods or erosion --> continual throwing up of constitutive elements of social life into the air and their constant re-organization when they return to ground


the erosive tendencies of the river --> the slow movement in place or lateral shifts that lead people to just drop off the scene


(Naveeda: we are in a) landscape not just erosive of relations but also *productive of forgetting* --> adaptation in the present entails an ongoing corruption of memory [--> #Bowker, forms of erasure]***
(#stories of integration in Germany)

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

[pre-notes with Delanda's A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History]

what are word-forming resources in farsi?
(not to increase their prestige, rather, to problematize) reservoirs of expressive resources in ajayeb and tehran --> to challenge which international standard?

what are the definitive historical process that create uniform set of linguistic norms in iran?

in my work on ajayeb, also, perhap[...]

[...]ms littered the kitchen
tangent to an elsewhere

gleamingly restored eighteenth-century perfections <-- Cinderella's mansion
...of autonomous objects lying around...
a zone of randomly abandoned X
against the background of nothing
visceral avoidance
pretty and fresh as blueberry pie
townies (how i am not a townie where i live)
•townie: loyalty to the expressivity of things
sociality of a wedding party (filled with roles and dressings)
crazy ricochet..
perfectly ordinary...
...long-ago layered over the wood (necrotic غانقرايايا)


“expressivity sliced through matter, word, and action, locking them together in a harshly half-formed world”


writing Cinderella diaries --> questions of realism
•what kind of real we enter?
•her realism (bring her) --into--> a rough contact with objects human and non-human
•Cinderella does things to and with them (her animals) [and reverse]

*social pressure ==> (people) make descriptive mistake*

a problematic (for example afterlife of a tragedy) --that--> inspires X --to--> speculative interest in forms
•Cinderella stating to noticing things (rumors, gossip, realism)
•gossip: realist attention to things

the world were his secret
loved the smell of the cold
in the night's dark hours

demanded our co-emotional sharpness
the world literally burst into color on the home side --and--> went gray in the instant of passing over the edge
no one knew their names...
...the energy of small things...
as if the point of living was to...
mosquitoes drew blood...
a helmet of white roots
...painted hyperbright colors in paint so flat it makes my fingertips dry just to look at it
dull dark oversized furniture
collapsed piles...


(nothing ever happens without first) registering a commitment to exhausting webs of complication

learning from mice --> dark little tunnels of limited choice


(Stewart's) points of precision: (of any act or story) what matters is the singularity of an angle of approach (a surprise contact, an opening onto some world's cocomposition, momentary flourishing of some capacity) [=/= a meaning]

shaken profusion in things =/= rush evaluative critique

so ordinary and problematic

so the idea of writing about “clean” started being interested in this website: https://www.politicalconcepts.org, and the desire to write a political entry point for them on the idea of clean in the 20th century

also after i moved to Brussels May 2016, the affect of dirty

to have a little talk or jam on the notion of “clean” and “clean body”

i have been[...]

[...]estions’
(costs of) generalization ==>
•stabilizes what counts ==> silences subjects (<-- do it, but pay the cost)
•fosters proving, not improving
•offers managerial solution, not citizen satisfaction
•
•

(a modern sentence:) people tend to think that their quality of life depends on themselves, that means: what ‘you’ are going to do about ‘you being miserable’

the (good or bad) worlding of university's counter-fact-ism and functionalism

(Manning's mistake:) “evaluation or valuation techniques ==> boosting” (=/= tinkering*)
(in rehabilitation clinic) scale of independence to map the condition of a person --> a process in which valuing is transformed from a ‘tool for improving’ into a ‘tool for proving’

(enough food)
shifts from ‘want’ to ‘need’

counting calories (=/= enjoying food) --> orchestrate guilt (=/= satisfaction) --> limit oneself --> hide hunger
[*counting* (a protestant value?) has been a behavioral technique to produce self-conscious being, still a way of making responsible persons, “counting the number of times they were hit...” *rhetoric of counting (a socio-material practice) ==> civic world witness*]


rumors travel
facts travel
practices travel


clean city --> (19th century quest, classic goal of) hygiene

what do citizens value? <-- let's (take a step back and) ask that (@NRW cultural fund, governmentality Regierungsfähigkeit, the city of Cologne)
[this question is asked by people in certain socio-material practices with stakes in producing citizens, such as professional of cleanness municipal responsibility ==often==> citizens disappear]
-maybe we like the lively dandelions (repertoire of green) and messy weeds (repertoire of clean) that grow in the cracks

being happy with cleanliness
being happy with seeing people cleaning --> seeing municipal care

leanring ‘where question’ from Annemarie: if you are local that doesn't mean you are local --> ***the local is not obvious*** : the local does not explain itself in its own terms, it is rather explained in terms that have traveled from elsewhere --> this is not to isolate the local, this is not against *traveling of terms*, rather, an argument for specificity: to ask ****which terms from elsewhere are relevant here?**** @Tehran:
what at stake there
what effected here
(what it means in my village?)

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

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

(@Xiri, Hoda, to urgently shift from who to what)
(from) ‘who question’ of politics: who gets to talk? (like “do w[...]

[...]he ways “primitive” icons are used in discourses of high technology
technological merges into the mythological
ancient merges with the modern
•eXistenZ film 1999, a high-tech-primitive blend of amphibian eggs and synthetic DNA
portrayal of a symbolically resonant ancient life-source + form of a technical life-source


(Campbell suggesting) atavism: how supposedly primitive evolutionary traits which had disappeared generations ago reappear in contemporary human or animal life
-traits of a former time but still exist in the present
*proto-atavism: (exhibiting of) future evolutionary traits in the present ==> collapsing the quality of linear time [~=? my sleep-walking] (=/= human approaching a state of technological perfection through an orderly ascent of increasing complexity and sophistication)
--> technological progress = nonlinear, punctuated, multiple [<-- used in marketing today]
proto-atavism --argument--> that multiple paradigms of life exist on the peripheries of humanist life ==Campbell==> (how) *human life: a cacophony of co-existing interacting states of past present future existences with no recourse to a single reassuring origin* (=/= singular progression)


(like animal rumors in old bestiaries ajayeb in a story-starated world) found telegram videos and internet pic used in my image assemblages --> (found images which make it difficult to trace their lineage) in an image-starated world ==construct==> ambivalent visual representations that do not have a signifier in an external “real” world (Baudrillard's rhetoric simulacrum: an object that is a copy of something which does not “exist”)
==Toffoletti==> potentiality: exceeding the bounds of description


(we are living in an) age of **technosubjectivity**
(Margulis theorizes) the symbolic basis of eukaryotic cells
(Dawkins posits) the existence of selfish genes and the extended phenotype
*system theory: human life subsumed radically into an all-encompassing concept of system, of which the human is merely a psychic system, where the only important unit of analysis is systems (human, cell, society, law)
(Sagan's) metametazoa: a multiple creature afloat in the omnisexuality of bacterial exchange
(Octavia Butler's) xenogenesis: polysexual interspecies reproduction
(Haraway's) differential artifactualism: (~= SF, science fiction) a diffractive interruptive mutative anti-reflective monstrous logic (to a humanist eyes) --> generation of novel forms which need not be imagined in the stodgy bipolar terms of hominids ==make==> ontological room for naturecultures
-mixotricha paradoxa: “a mixed up, paradoxical, microscopic bit of hair [...]they are nested in each other's tissues in a myriad of ways that make words like competition and cooperation, or individual and collective, fall into the trash heap of pallid metaphors and bad o[...]