[...]olish injustice?
Thiago, abolish selfishness?
Maarten, abolish weakness?
Aela, abolish entropy?
Sana,
Seba, abolish enmity?
Lili, abolish feelings?
Varinia, abolish obedience? [--what shortens our leash?]
Sina, abolish selfhood?
Vladimir, abolish non-disambiguity?
@Esta, her enunciated need for “framework” [~->? instruments of economization], could she be needing “pathway”: path instead of frame, and way instead of work. [frame =/=? overflowing (--> my method of script?); identity =/=? avidity, hers;]
interplay of scales
the scale of intimacy, (of skin, of shared heartbeats and feelings)
data and surveillance and seduction
intimacy: still an unpredictable force?
intimacy: the biological spring from which affect drinks?
how Esta's proposal is capable of traversing from the lovers’ bed to the wild embrace of the crowd to the alien touch of networks?
[and when i say “abolish,” i am using a word that is about rendering something obsolete, mansukh, canceling, making reading to get rid of it, and this is not the same as destroying.]
@Arianna, ‘cleaning agents,’ to toxicity? how can we learn to live with “toxic animacy”(Chen)? dirt: “consequences overwhelming their cause” (Latour)
-narratives about urgent necessity: that we need to understand more in order to cure, prevent, construct, excel, survive.
*afterlife toxicities (?)
@Lili: cycle of planets instead of heartbeat of a planet. tuning in the soup of planets, instead of getting the pulse of a singular planet. the nebulous milk way of liquid bodies, instead of rigid mass of individual blood--Pluto.
@Varinia: (in her dog video, regarding her engagement with the law and the question of comparative thinking:) what is the model for what, what is similar to what?
-is her model based on the idea that beings exist as individual? (is this a ‘difference’ that her work produces?)
@Agnes: you are a response to the bed, making the bed and being made by its caress and embrace. it is not that you want all the audience in the world to identify with a general question or present this as a universal expression, but what could go beyond localization is precisely this concept that you, like me, transitioning body in your environment (bed or whatever) are outstretches of homeliness and forces that distribute across space and discourse, territories and sensing zones, you are an exchange between self and environment. this is pragmatism. like the variety of bed sheets, we are proposed with answers that vary, before posing any question.
to reformulate the question that was posed to you: how your proposal is capable of traversing from the bed to the wild?
pre-historic personhood
my work is concerned with connections, mediation and passages.
what yo[...]
(1)[...notes/midday review.txt]%0.9[...]ll you how to read
•what makes you write or scratch a text?
(aaaakh... our alphabetico-logical cultures...!)
•if everything is not fundamentally unreadable (snafu) we wouldn't be reading
•it is about to situate the place of a (un)learning
•throwing access to each other (not only in terms of transferential intensity #sss)
•which appetites and tastes are required to fulfill the *ethics and erotics of curiosity* (that I am cultivating and depending on)? flourishing (of my ajayeb) depends on a reading that is more like “mutual partial digestion” (Katie King, Haraway) [=/= “eating well"] the text
•“every time i read X, something new shows up”
my practice of ‘rhetorical reading’ (=/= ‘close reading’; or more like close reading and letting go. “close” is itself a metaphor, a rhetoric of reading;) doesn't work with the idea that there is something ‘in’ the text per se (coded or encoded meaning or some sort of knowledge made and installed by an author), or that the writer wants to say something to the reader, or that the text is symptomatic with meaning and that its intentions needs to be listened to. rather, in a post-Lacanian critique, i work the text like a pattern of language, an organization of space, text as word-sequencer. it is like looking at an image, still starting from top-left to bottom-right of the page, a process of highlighting or embodied attention that produces non-zero clusters of salient words that come to glow different than others. but the way they become highlighted is not due to some idea of significance of the text but because of my--the reader's--interests, past readings and educated meaning-associations. this mode of reading is not at all suggested to newbies in literature, sorry but this requres some degree of advancement in one's abilities and skills of writingreading, that means the reader already enjoys an ongoing well-articulated interest before coming to a particular sitting with a piece of writing, and this means the rhetorical reader's encounter with the text is highly situated and is not a blind date. in this case reading 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 compr[...]
(2)[...notes/midday review.txt]%1.8[...]hat come to glow different than others. but the way they become highlighted is not due to some idea of significance of the text but because of my--the reader's--interests, past readings and educated meaning-associations. this mode of reading is not at all suggested to newbies in literature, sorry but this requres some degree of advancement in one's abilities and skills of writingreading, that means the reader already enjoys an ongoing well-articulated interest before coming to a particular sitting with a piece of writing, and this means the rhetorical reader's encounter with the text is highly situated and is not a blind date. in this case reading 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 tryi[...]
(3)[...notes/midday review.txt]%1.8[...]
my engagement with other apass participants, a form of critique as part of an ‘ecology of practice’ (Stengers)
-what are the questions (i could ask) that make you the most articulate?
-to feel what questions, passions, modes of attention animate one another
-to find yourself moved by their concerns
-what we articulate with our bodies? --> what do our gestures mean?
-what do they activate? ----> they don't always enact a precise language --(rather)--> gestures as organs for feeding, feeling, and grasping***
-(sensing) the trajectories, moods, and intensities the other apass participants get caught up in, attached to, inhabit, to catch you in your acts,
(why knowing together?) **worlds come together through collective action and how they attract, repel, enroll, animate, and incite (tahrik تحریک, eghva اغوا) us. [...] worlds are “lived [compositions] with tempos, sensory knowledge, orientations, transmutations, habits, rogue force fields.” (Stewart)
-(engaging) in a form of critique that detour into descriptive eddies (گرداب کوچک مخالف) and attach to trajectories
-(through this i am making myself interested in) what (theoretical, philosophical, artistic,) storytelling, as one ***consequential practice*** among many, make possible in the collective task of building and sustaining livable worlds ----> taking texts as worlds, taking people as worlds
-(when talking about your project) you are teaching me what makes you move. --> that means i need to learn how to be affected differently (other than my own projects terms) in order to affect (others) differently [# my bow and arrow intervention] ---- to give intense attention to your gestures (expressing desires, expectations, affects) and to respond to them in remarkable way.
critical hedonism (Archer)
--> refusal of the “embodied anxiety”
affective economies (Ahmed)
--> which affective economies animate our own bodies as scholars/artist/... and as people
(asking) is this practice good for the subjects involved?
--> we create (involuntary) differences, the question is, is the world enriched by these differences? (by Sina, Xiri, Aela, etc.)
-(also be careful with) “differences as raw material” in a “delocalized cultural capitalism (geopolitics of knowledge)” --(Renan in conversation with Peran)--> “internal colonialism,” “local difference as an object of study and raw material,” and “cooptation of imagination in the networks of information-connection.”
-(looking for other metaphors of) alignments =/= operational references to co-production
(Marti Peran) “The surplus of images has reached the maximum degree of pollution. In turn, the planetary connection ensures the exchange of images regardless of the visual regimes from which they come from. Images no longer speak anywhere. In thi[...]
(4)[...notes/midday review.txt]%3[...]/>
how to see?
the science question in military
the science question in colonialism
the science question in capitalism
the science question in feminism
...
master theory =/= webbed accounts
(what does she mean when she dichotomises theory and account?)
instead of (creating and mastering) ‘theory’ she proposes webbing ‘accounts’***
-‘webs’ can have the property of being systematic
systematic: deep filaments and tenacious tendrils into time, space, and consciousness. systems are dimensions of world history.
she suggests to be accountable for (the intricacies of) visualization technologies in which we are embedded that we will find metaphors and means for understanding
and intervening in the *patterns of objectification* in the world.
--> politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating
partiality =/= universality
*partiality: view from a body, always a complex, contradictory, *structuring, and structured body* (what does she mean by ‘structuring and structured body’?)
--the sciences and politics of interpretation, translation, stuttering, and the partly understood.
*Feminism: critical vision ==(consequent upon)==> a critical positioning in unhomogeneous gendered social space.
location --> vulnerability ~~> (full of limits and contradictions)
“rational” knowledge : to be free from interpretation, to be free from being represented : to be fully self-contained (~ fully formalizable)
-no! let's make Rational Knowledge a process of ongoing critical interpretation among “fields” of interpreters and decoders --> a power-sensitive conversation
-accountability and responsibility for translations
. Situated knowledges are about communities, not about isolated individuals
(pinocchio and geppetto parable)
objectivity = positioned rationality
=/= images of escape and transcendence of limits (filled in Hollywood and sci)
faithfulness of our accounts to a “real world” (no matter how mediated for us and no matter how complex and contradictory these worlds may be)
Sex is “resourced” for its representation as gender, which “we” can control
Situated knowledges require that the object of knowledge be pictured as an actor and agent
-which version of “realism” is she argueing for?
“[...] we are not in charge of the world. We just live here and try to strike up noninnocent conversations by means of our prosthetic devices, including our visualization technologies.”
in the rich feminist practice in science (more than anywhere else) passive categories of objects of knowledge are “activated”
The biological female peopling : When female “sex” has been so thoroughly retheorized and revisualized that it emerges as pr[...]
(5)[...notes/midday review.txt]%3.6[...]ous hesitation* (=/= Leo's “slowness”)
going step by step in the confrontation (essential to the unfolding of thought)
**not turning ‘weakness’ (or metaphorical weariness) into a (compelling) paraconcept [<-- Levinas does it]
-taking on the the big topoi of the day like a warrior
courage --comes--> from the *abyss of needling fearfulness*
*German romantics invented the always-with-community, a living-with, a Mitsein practice of living life philosophically (full of moments of restricted solitude, pressure zones, etc.)
(office of friendship...) i am friend in a Freudian ambivalence, that means i undermine the friend, try to trap him and catch him off guard
-if you are so calm, then i will try to bring you over to my side of the barricade of obsessional neurotic (a condition in which the mind is intruded upon against her will by images, ideas, or words. consciousness remains lucid and power to reason remains intact ==> temporarily deprivation of individual of freedom of thought and action [<== intrapsychic conflict of sexual origin that mobilizes and blocks all flows of energy (in the case neurotic a source of pleasure to the child =/= hysteric)])
-when we write do we need to demonstrate a far-ranging grasp of the political consequences of every possible metaphysical move?
...prime mover or suspects such as Plato, Heidegger, Derrida
*acceleration: that we are result-oriented, business-oriented, under the gun of gains, and subject to the push towards scientific objectification =/= i try to work with different degrees of attention: slowing down for checkpoints, allusive clusters and dense indicators, that are also problematic and short-circuited (in my lectures) ==> to get to the *notational space* that we can calmly observe, examine and explore together.
-to be lucid about your own part taking in narcissistic economy
*mimesis*: those things we are still stuck in in very covert and unavowed ways ~-> ‘destiny’ (a term i use when i mean mimesis for us [-a disease that shows symptoms characteristic of another disease])
(i am not pessimistic at all) i have just a catastrophic intuition that informs my grammar =/= mimetic hell
...................................
*complaint (blocks ‘becoming’?)
-so if i am used to complaint in all sorts and forms and shapes, what do i do if not complaining? that means i need to start learning new techniques of being in the world.
-complain, forms of protest, grievance, <--(contamination)--> lament (sug سوگ, zaje ضجه)
-dispositions of Beschwerde
-which minorities are associated with bitching and moaning? (naleh va shekayat ناله و شکایت, ghor غرولند, غر) (a feminine accent?!)
-it is often said that “children should stop complaining”
“stop complaining” ?!! [~~> pointed to or relevant for Lili also]
***complaint : the disenfranchised (az hagh mahrum shodeh از حق[...]
(6)[...notes/midday review.txt]%4.5[...]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 ontological tool for me became apparent only after i committed myself to that metaphor in the course of the interview with Pierre and Alice. to stay with a story, to live its contradictions. (and the position of it in a sentence)
•“it was ‘landscape’ talking; not me!”
•why i was seeing Tehran as the ‘ghostly landscape’? (matter of a confrontation with Tehran? exteriority of my subjecthood is at stake? ~->!? the arbitrary position of “genius loci” : that from a genius position one can see for good. -how to make myself nonarbitrary--not subject to individual determination--in relation to Tehran? --> towards ‘situated knowledge’)
•what kind of material-discursive practices thinking with “landscape” committed me to? [to explore and feel this commitment (and its consequences) is ‘staying with the trouble’ for me]
it felt like Alice believes that people, we, have control over our metaphors, but in the course of the workshop there were many occasions that was not the case:
Sina, landscape --> optics
Esta, building/house --> geometry --> security
Agnes, supermarket --> exchange
Juan, crime --> arrest
Zoumana, garden (~-> fecundity) --> immunity
Eszter, electronic device --> closed
Ekaterina, zoo --> objects of care (~-> animal ~= diseased .--> objectifying or babying them)
* landscape ==>? optic -->? way of disembodied seeing
[artificial perspective {--> (objects are in) proportional variations in a seamless continuum}, gaze of the spectator, exterior space, homogeneous, infinite, systematic,] --> (this is all) *symbolic form*
[(tele/micro)scope <==] landscape <== perspective <-- arbitrary point of the observer
(Descola:) such “objectification of the subjective” ==>
(1) a distance between man and the world
(2) systematizes and stabilizes the external universe
***factuality is not intrinsic, it is rhetoric (that we live with)
history of the idea of nature
‘ajayeb's architects of a naturalistic cosmology who establish hierarchies and discontinuities among them =/= cosmogenesis of modernity's subjectivity's illusions of continuity
[Descola's “configurations of continuity"]
(ajayeb creates) hierarchical order according to the levels of the exchange of information that is reputed to be possible.
-which parties are set on the s[...]
(7)[...notes/midday review.txt]%5.5[...] notion of losing hope is because he put himself unconsciously in a cost-benefit analysis? “what is the effect of my actions?”) [in practice it is difficult to embody speculative thinking. we are still in the space of thinking in terms of the probable.]
to do hope-work is about ‘not talking (too much) about the future’ =/= commitment in terms of probabilities, refusal to treat your subjects as if they were objects of management --> let's set aside our own hopes, and work to honour the **hopefulness of others** (Deborah Rose)
“And hope is here, all around us. Creatures want to live.” (not in the “future”)
the accelerationists putting things in their cascade of failures, (everything sinks effortlessly into it,) and creating a vanishing point in terms of a western saturated temporality. for them the present is the time of announcing the news of salvation or apocalypse, and has no thickness. (the desire) to step out of history, and is made void in the process of realization, the idea that “everything is possible.” they experience their freedom as universal freedom * (noted by Blanchot.) [--> the problem with all male action heroes...]
(is this a kind of “game-over” discourse?)
*time (thinking with Haraway)
the sequential palindromic time (in Western-related cultures) [جناس قلب palindrome: from the Greek roots palin “again” and dromos “way, direction”; a word, phrase, number, or other sequence of characters which reads the same backward as forward; (un)parsable palindromic motifs;]
there are many sorts of temporalities in West, but the most naturalized and intuitive, ready-to-hand (and black-boxed) version of it is the “past, present, future.” the notion of ‘present’ becomes a (mathematical) vanishing point, a pivot or a point rather than itself a thickness, an inaccessible past being transmuted into a future that is always to come. [=/= the lived time of the flesh]
--> what counts as a responsible person in temporality? (@Seba, @Pierre's “future”)
in my work on ajayeb in apass, i choose to give account to responsibility in a way *to face those who come before rather than to face the future*, this is about a switch in the direction of attention.
•narratable memory with named people turned to ancestors and moved into dreaming time
•past: quiet country --> bear the mark of the care of generation, inhabits both living and dying --> recuperation (behbud بهبود, ramagh رمق)
•present: wilderness --> ongoingness (thickened with creatures)
[in (my reading?) ajayeb's temporality] things come from the past and the future simultaneously
what i respond to = what i inherit
science (in the way that is presented) is outside history, and becomes simply that which is “the case” of the world
**everything that one does is inside time, but that which is acquired (beco[...]
(8)[...notes/midday review.txt]%5.7[...], castrated and very advanced (--> you can only come up castrated unless you are extremely advanced, #harem stuff)
-i am trying to come forward with all the rigor and rhetorics available to me
the death score
Leo correcting his proper name in my mouth. (signature: master of your name --> master of your house)
Leo named his future projection: “Empathoscene”
[sometimes your name is the first doorkeeper (as in Kafka'a Turhüter)]
Eszter's ‘what is there as an obstacle to the freedom of man (?)’ (question marked by me)
--> the spatial gesture of the ‘stop’ (#Selma)
Maarten's version of confusion (stated by himself) is due to that: the messianic horizon is essentially confusing (?)
his autopoiesis and cognitions
Nicolas's notion of “leaking” has to do with marginal non-textual non-accounted-for moments that bleed in absolute non-contractual and non-appropriable event? (the so-called moment when we show things to each other)
•his ‘climate of creativity'~~~_[what does ‘criticism’ mean for him?]
•when he says “gesture,” is he accessing ‘gesture’ having an uncalculable semiotic value =/= ‘performance’ that can be measured in economical terms? [but, what kind of consequential work is gesture doing?]
(Nicolas's order of inquiry and discovery)
(--> what is at stake is how do you locate the effects of your work. for Nicolas it is locate at the “sides” [which is already problematically prepositioned outside of him] --Ahmed--> ab object can be affective by virtue of its own *location* [...] and the *timing* of its appearence)
[the ‘image of the rigid’ in his presentation]
Kristien's chart:
questions <--> symptoms
answers <--> openings
past <--> diary
for Lilia: apparatus = score
for Eszter: apparatus = preparation {--?--> everything depends on the ways we prepare}
for Sina: apparatus = (chaotic/strange) attractor
for Hoda: apparatus = negative feelings
for
for
(other non-Agambenian notions of apparatus: Katie King's, Barad's, Wark's)
[Agamben still thinks of structure in Euclidian terms, pre-chaos theory and fractal geometry of (non)equilibrium. thermal chaos and dynamic system theory has changed the ways we think about global/local stabilities, discontinuities and noise. sympoiesis is another one.]
-with ‘apparatus’ what is at stake: flow of energy, order, waste, transformation,
Vladimir's tether on disambiguity
Elen, adding her own wheels to the flow(s)
and putting a stick/spoke in a rolling wheel (of others?) [her saboteur trends, چوب لای چرخ (=/=? kharab-kari خراب کاری), what is chub lay-e charkh for her? vandalizing the discourse of others]
-the famous vandal of wikipedia with the recursive name “-on wheels” (Willy on Wheels, adding “on wheels” to [...]
(10)[...notes/midday review.txt]%6.8[...]earn--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 risky (DR)
drunk driver (DD)
the notion of game and rule for Elen and Luisa and Eszter: it is until ages of 3 and 6 that children must not play by rules, and only after that the concept of rule-based-games (such as sports) should be introduced to them. what does that say about our artistic environment when we talk rules or breaking rules?
i am becoming more interested in the ‘rules’ that the artist [...]
(11)[...notes/midday review.txt]%7[...]br />
after the first round we can ask: what do you need (un)know to write/think that story? or, what do you need to forget/unlearn in order to be able to think/imagine that world?
another round of the workshop could be: #imagine and describe an alien world where there is no ‘mediation’ or activities that are not ‘mediated’
...................................
because of working on ajayeb, i am becoming a “definitionist,” or “definitionologist” (not in the classical sense of concept theory)
a definition i give is a local abstraction, even when it is making boundaries for a dispersed or global concept, it is still a situated knowledge. that means it might be categorical but not applicable outside this particulare niche of space and time, whether it is in a bar in a conversation with Eszter or when accessed in my hypertext
...................................
committed to the imperative of the Rig, things not to do in the pop-up book:
•use as ironic: incongruity in expectations of what is ment and what it will mean in advance
•use to symbolize: as a way of not dealing with sujet supposé savoir
•use of anamorphic gaze: a non-diffractive optical system
--> to be careful (or keep in check) with sequential palindromic notion of pop-up book, to deal with the parsable seesaw motif inherit in the pop-up book Blickmaschin
•use hylomorphic: assumes form is inscribed onto passive matter (by an agent with a design in mind)
•
(relevance should be worked) non-ironic non-symbolic non-anamorphic non-palindromic non-hylomorphic (?)
...................................
towards writing the end of apass dossier
•practices: workshops, (bow and arrow,) ajayeb.net, rigs --> pop-up book, notes, routines, excess,
•trajectory: bibliography, wonder, ongoingness, ontology,
•productions: study as artwork, reading as artwork, bottom-top approach to writing,
•findings: every research practice: must include “body image”, must include “the image of creativity” especially if you are iranian, must employ ontological attention to differential productions, must rework decompose redefine its root-metaphors, must give extensive equipment list, must trace its social connections in a wider ecology of practices, must include a critique of technology,
•moments of composition: a scene animated by some quality, or... taking place as accidents (or not)
key literature, magic wands:
1st stage:
•Richard Sennett: Flesh and Stonne --> learning about body image
•Manuel Delanda: A 1000 Years of Nonlinear History --> learning about material histories
•Eduardo Kohn: How Forests Thinks --> learning about semiotics
•Timothy Morton: Sublime Objects --> learning about ontology
•Avital Ronnel: (lectures and articles) --> learning about poetics
•Donna Haraway: (lectures and article[...]
(14)[...notes/midday review.txt]%7.9[...]/>
(physical existence carrying with it) a trace of unreality --> آمدنم بهر چه بود : “i am not sure where i am anymore. i am at home in feeling not at home.”
one's normal sense of time as a container
Ehsan's ghost/sheikh film --> demonic in that through them causalities flow like electricity
ambient, latin ‘ambo’ means ‘on both sides’
the old art theories that separated sweetness and power collapse
sweetness, it turns out, just is power: the most powerful thing
weather as monster
baby learns to distinguish between the vomit and the non-vomit, and comes to know the non-vomit as self
(a society in which) growing scientific *awareness of rish* ==changes==> the nature of democracy
back-to-nature festivals
nihilistic princes of darkness
...................................
my work is *to mix stories*
everyday engagements with other kinds of creatures (in my case: ajayeb) ==> opens new kinds of possibilities for relating and understanding
cosmoecology: multiple beings (gods, jinns, animals, humans, living, dead, etc.) each bearing the consequences of the others’ ways (of living and dying)
‘the ecological question’ is about the needs that ought to be met in the ongoing creation of rapports and connections --> the questions are how does this being achieve the task of holding onto its existence =/= “does this being really exist, or is it not a representation”
==> (Despret:) *we may never know (safely and reliably, either ahead of time or a posteriori) which beings will bear/enjoy the consequences of the concrete attention we give to them*
...................................
on Kate Rich work
feral --> before or without a political state --?--> state of nature [a lot of moral political philosophers of the state asking “What was life like before civil society?"]--> in feral there are only freedoms ==> contracts (}--> what cultural anthropology has to say about that?)
she is in the Rousseauian tradition of *how to establish a ‘political community’ in the face of the problems of ‘commercial society’* (---> go to Rousseau's The Social Contract & Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men)
fighting the system --> feral tropes --> arsenal of the Enlightenment (Kant's motto: “Dare to think for yourself!” ~= “I don't follow orders!”), application of Reason in the public sphere of human affairs
with her work we are in the Age of Enlightenment, Age of Reason, resourcing authority and legitimacy, ideals of individual liberty and progress --> Kate's thinking founded on philosophical fictions of the 18th century (--Foucault--> problematic legacy of the Enlightenment)
•the legecy of 20th century: (Kate's dialectical negativity) t[...]
(15)[...notes/midday review.txt]%9.6[...]mained “how to define what i like (such as ‘anarchive’) that it remains open at all time to the ‘more’ and ‘multi’?” <-- and they provide an elusive non-definition of the term, impossible to pin down. because accourding to Manning when you pin down an idea/practice by its definition it becomes “fixed,” and fixity is categorically bad at all times <-- there is a desire to create a hygienic concept immune to corruption and hierarchy. Manning is alert to certain hierarchies ==> not acknowledging other hierarchies that precisely emerge out of that (--> preserve the ‘health’ of the idea of anarchive. [<-- maybe we need to let concepts rot? --> decompose])
Manning's elusiveness: (i have become hyper-conscious about qualities that endow infinite freedom of thought to human subjects...)
•elusive thought طفره (=/= volatile فرار) --> Spiderman's mode of freedom (-you can never catch him + infinite flexibility + ) (the effect of Spiderman on himself is that his moves are “amazing”)
•elusive thought ~->? mystical
•elusive thought =/= modest thought limited by curiosity
•
“hierarchy as the bad object” ==>
•to escape thinking about your own agency (for example what your name and reputation does? what are the precise responsible consequences of your particular position? your position involves not only the book you write or the argument you make, it involves also your name and reputation, the currency of your gender, your mode of charisma and authority, your affective techniques, your network enacted, and so on.)
•to escape naming the engineering talents and skills that are necessary to assemble (for example the senseLab website)
•to escape epistemological commitment (the question of: **how is my vocabulary crafted for whom?**)
•
it is not clear (but i can maybe guess about it, Manning's commitments are):
•(learning from Haraway:) what they have witnessed [hierarchies? ==commit==> anti-archive]
•(learning from Despret:) which bodies they care for [the autists? ==commit==> elusive creativity]
•(learning from Kenney:) where are their alliances پیوستگیها [with multiculturalism? ==commit==> democracy's logos of difference]
•(learning from Verran:) how their equipments are crafted [by processual metaphysics? ==commit==> infinity]
•(learning from Stewart:) how their rigor is built [by conceptual description? ==commit==> non-habituality]
(because of her immense intelligence she cannot be normal, but that doesn't mean she can prescribe normativity, and issue a command [in terms of the “de-” or “anti-“] or order a claim of reality [in terms of “an-” or “ab-“])
-Manning's “philosophy of event” (=/= multispecies ethnography, i prefer working with the animal idea, because there is no way you can make philosophy out of animal, they always relentlessly contingent and historically materially specific)
[...]
(17)[...notes/midday review.txt]%10.7[...] />
=/= abstraction as the challenge of bringing specificity and imaginative traction
“adventure” is not the name of the game for me, for two reasons:
1. Manning brought her concept of ‘adventure’ to Belgium: the land of Tintin, poster of the moderinst adventure agency sold by the image of the individual blond univerasal truth-seeker exporting company who always wins by definition, Tintin is the one who doesn't have a culture and always others have culture in his stories
2. i have been researching europeans who came for an “adventure” to iran in the last millennium (such as Olearius), and it doesn't look good. when europeans go out of their center to east it is adventure (or anthropology), that means othering and feeling the differences of the other in order to feel outside. but when, for example iranians go to Europe, they never feel they are there for “adventure,” they are there to learn. the mode of adventure plays this role in the colonial dynamic of “going out there”
(my fundamental difference with her is that) for Manning (and Alex): “philosophy is a priori to storytelling” [=/= Serres]
-why did i behave the way i did in the workshop?
-was it my politeness, routine, habit of respect? what are the consequences of my specific way of (non)relating to her figure as a master, knower, seer, in relation to that which she offers and represents?
-why the scandalous was responded to, assimilated, burried, swallowed in the way it did in the workshop?
rethinking emergence:
-with the idea of “let it emerge,” was it herself that emerged because of us? (apply emergence-thinking to her figure in the workshop)
-how a collective resentment “emerged” in the participants? (apply emergence-thinking to the participants)
-how hierarchies “emerged” in the workshop? and what are they?
to be ungraspable for the market ==> ? (marketing the self)
to be unintelligible for the university ==> ? (devitalizing the university)
questions:
•decontextualization, as an artistic ready-at-hand tool of concept-making, does it do good or bad to knowledge and imagination (as it is practiced by the people who use it) and how?
•facing the challenge of bringing specificity and imaginative traction to our objects of attention, how do we build nontranscendental abstractions?
•and, why self-promoting is such a turn-off? (projecting a self-image of being cool and correct)
how do you (not, and why not) tell the tale of your adventures and achievements? or, how can we respond to the ‘demand for the mobilization of desire’ in the economy of attention that Manning brought with herself? and how that economy is different from that of apass?
in the spectrum of ‘auto-ism’ (not the pathological term for developmental disorder) ['auto-’: from Greek αὐτo-, “self"] ‘being social[...]
(18)[...notes/midday review.txt]%11.1[...]atory 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 behaviour 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 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 ve[...]
(19)[...notes/midday review.txt]%11.3[...]ola:) ‘naturalism’ is only one of four ways in which connections between humans and nonhumans can be established
contrasts:
*reference chain*
*reproduction*
(Latour use of the term) *contrast* = mode of existence
immutable mobiles: to reach something far away through long arrays of instruments, you need to make sure that *necessities and constants are transported* with as little transformation as possible ==> to “reach” those entities
geometry, mathematical entities, inscriptions of all sorts ==> carry heavy-duty immutable mobiles
(Hoda's immutable mobiles are: [?])
[*]matter = highly elaborated, historically dated, and anthropologically situated hybrids***
(=/= ‘transportation of indisputable necessities through chains of cause and effect’ <-- a category mistake)
(for physicist:) “the ways we know the world = the ways in which the world behaves”
(less for chemist)
(not at all for engineer)
([in a way my work has been about investigating vectors and] *directions*) from knower to what is to be known
the beings of ajayeb face lots of causes and lots of effects
metaphysical consequences of evolutionary theory
***(Latour's positive veiw on) to be a Darwinian: you have to abandon the notion that all of those ‘organisms’ rest in ‘nature’ --> [*]organim: a hybrid production of representation & reference
*the widespread ideology of the *blind watch maker* : a blind cause acting from behind and reaching the optimum haphazardly
(has substituted the ‘mere transportation of indisputable necessities’ for *the risks taken by individual organisms to perpetuate, sustain, and reproduce themselves*)
&
*the widespread ideology of the *intelligent designer* :an intelligence dragging organisms towards the optimum by some predefined plans
}--> both are grounded in the *ideology of making and mechanism* ==>
•organisms are erased as individual actors
•organisms are transformed into the carriers if indisputable necessities
--> both tried to save individual organims from their apparent meaninglessness by adding to them an overarching narrative recited by an otherworldly divinity
(‘necessities’ are often imported)
(Assmans's) *mosaic division*
(=/= a sort of relaxed attitude towards truth)
divisions ahad never beed asked before whether or not they were the “true” ones. they could be added to one another, translated into one another, piled on top of one another for additional safety --✕--> *contesting the claims to existence of all divinities but one*
==> a connection between the question (irrelevant until then) of worship and a question of an absolute (=/= relative) difference between true and false
[*]i[...]
(20)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%13.7[...] death)
ashabe kahf (اصحاب کهف), ashabe raghim (اصحاب رقیم) --> immortality
(ajayeb-e kuh) عجایب کوه
om-ol-jebal (ام الجبال), ghaf (قاف): mother of mountains, all mountains link to her, earth
ecologically significant --> holders of water and Ganj (گنج), nailed the earth, they are your cradles
az ganj be ganj (فرستم به گنج تو از گنج خویش, Ferdosi)
*Ghiamat and Climate
[Haraway]
the metaphysical problem of (our) scale
(what are the scales in ajayeb? what is people in ajayeb? what it means to be animal? and what is their scale?)
ecologies that have many scales (in temporality and physicality): river scale, mountain scale, molecular times, Jinn's time, Ghiamat times, sense scale, ...
the ajayeb's model is (always?) the global scale?
--> how can i seek and describe multiple situated worldings and multiple sorts of translations to engage ajayeb's globalism? (using Haraway's word on Tsing)
-attention to friction ==> (ethnographic accounts of) global interconnection
(some metaphors:) metabolisms, articulations, coproductions (*? of ajayeb's histories)
relational, sympoietic, consequential,
in ajayeb, what is cosmic, what is terran, what is cursed, *?
in ajayeb:
•what are the figures of finitude, destruction, astralized hearing, enactments of generation, the figures that take action, take heart?
•what are the chthonic entities? {the finite complex material systems that can break down =/= stories that personify (Mother Earth) are *misplaced concreteness*. [(i am against) personified =/= figurative (which i love. figures can be tentacular, patterns, processes, stories.) what Foad would say?]}
•what are the gorgeous, luring, dangerous precarities (of the terra)?
•what are (its specific) art science worldings?
*those creatures across taxa (taxon, categorical classification, taxonomic group)
taxonomic conveniences
[with Haraway]
what is the optics of ajayeb?
[that is entertaining being reductive for a moment, but that is productive]
(to help with that, the optics of the anthropocene is the image of the earth from space, Gaia?)
-a cybernetic, systems-theoretic entity, studied in different scales
-various reports (on the state, fictioning the state of the earth?)
-a global kind of system knowledge
-a giant database ----> do i need to formulate my project into a technological practice?
what is the smallest unit of interest in the ajayeb cosmology?
the practices of relocating germplasms, including people in form of slaves, all over the earth in order to produce surplus that is transported elsewhere for capital accumulation... (Haraway)
industrial agricultur[...]
(21)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%15.2[...] --> the co-constitutive interpenetration of humans and their others (machines, animals, and the environment).
-Haraway is going from ‘rage’ to ‘love’
“historically challenged people” (Schimpfwort? فحش)
half-trained arguments
embodied cross-species sociality
I am trying to inhabit ajayeb critically; neither in celebration nor condemnation (like my sister asked)
what is my context? isis, tech-sci, art, world-wars, stories, terror,
the figures of ajayeb that i am cultivating, do they “more fruitfully inform livable politics and ontologies in current life worlds”?
ajayeb's species bring together human and nonhuman, organic and technological, history and myth, freedom and structure, state and subject, ...
*concrete:
◦a concrescence (growth by assimilation, nemov moshtarek نمو مشترک) of prehensions (seizing, perception but not necessarily cognition) of prehensions (graspings, chang zadan چنگ زدن)
◦an actual occasion
=> beings do not preexist their relatings
the verb of reality is full of nouns with appendages
nature/culture: *local category abstractions* (=/= universal: misplaced concreteness)
subject/object: *potent consequences* (=/= preexisting foundations)
foundation is always contingent (Haraway > Butler)
•scale is contingent
•mutability is contingent
bestiary of agencies
kinds of relatings
in my work on ajayeb i am trying to carefully approach the notions of:
emergence, process, historicity, difference, specificity
-and by that teach myself an artful practice rich with:
co-habitation, co-constitution, contingency
on-the-ground work:
-Verran # Nigeria Yoruba --> “emergent ontologies,” “get on together” (...how can *general* knowledge be nurtured in postcolonial worlds committed to taking *difference* seriously?”)ence* seriously?”)
-Thompson # Kenya --> “ontological choreographies” (...bodies, human and nonhuman, are taken apart and put together in processes)
-Strathern # Papua New Guinean --> “partial connections” (...patterns within which the players are neither wholes nor parts ... necessary counter-intuitive geometries and incongruent translations)
what kind of refigurations i need for the tropic work that feel is required for the for ontological choreography of ajayeb (in technoscience or elsewhere? other societies with liberal or non-liberal individual or state, with other techno-monsters, automated warriors, terrorists, and all the waste, cruelty, indifference, ignorance, and loss that comes with, as well as joy, play, labor, and invention--)?
-how do i narrate this (ajayeb and non-ajayeb, the wondrous and the mundane) co-history?
-how do i embody an art of relating (as is never done once and for all)?
*species : biological kind [...]
(22)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%15.4[...] mutation,” noting that there are developmental constraints placed on what changes are possible.
•“we think of development as a cybernetic process, involving stablization through feed-back and other mechanisms.”
(Francois Jacob) “Evolution by tinkering” (sare-ham-bandi سرهم بندی)
(Leigh van Valen 1973) “evolution is the control of development by ecology”
phenotypic plasticity
developmental plasticity
organism: an epigenetic materialism****** (Hertwig 1894)
(Hertwig concludes: it has been shown [...] that much of what Weismann would explain by) determinants within the egg must have cause outside the egg.
[***egg and its outside]
[the causality drama is not that which came first, the chicken or the egg, but what inside the egg that has cause outside the egg]
context-dependent sex
genetic assimilation
life history strategies
teratology (kaj-rikht-shenasi کج ریخت شناسی, naghes-al-khelghe-shenasi ناقص الخلقه شناسی)
...................................
rewriting technique criteria (of the gene) [from new biological headquarters]
retro-transposon: a DNA sequence that can change its position within a genome, sometimes creating or reversing mutations and altering the cell's genetic identity and genome size
(we have uterus because of bacterial transposons)
intestinal
enzyme, macromolecular biological catalysts, accelerating chemical reaction
using hallucinogenic to cure autism (!?)
bacterial --> social
“individual" = an island to be colonized (by bacteria), [we are] a niche (upon niche (upon niche)) for bacteria
immunall agencise are not (has never been) defensive, they selectively inclusive, they facilitate symbiosis, allowing the possibility of microbes become part of the body
co-metabolism
host-diet
four major symbiosis (symbiotic things) that ruled the planet:
1. rhizobacteria/legumes for nitrogen fixation
2. mycorrhizal interaction with plant roots and seeds
3. endophytic fungal protection against dessication
4. coral reefs and tidal seagrass ecosystems sustain oceanic biodiversity
}--containing--> smaller symbiotic webs we call “organism” <==[product of]== (ancient symbiosis we call) “cells + (ancient symbiosis we call) “genomes”
ritual defense of a dissertation, matter of opponent
a medical theater of dissection, laid out on table with the working-class barber-surgeons laying bare structures for the disquisition (tafahos تفحص) of the professor --> (the ways we are in this) *multi-imaginative theater* (~ congnitive emotional apparatus) --> infectious joy, the situatedness of the joy is infectious
we [...]
(23)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%15.9[...]
[instead of the struggle against sin (~=? christianity) or the struggle against suffering (~=? Buddhism),] the struggle between (different) sins
...................................
(the reading of ajayeb portraits) the global [and therefore *ethical] consciousness (at the end of 12th century middle-south asia, “the east”)
...................................
[Martha Kenney]
(how not) render ‘wonder’ a strictly historical object(?)
[as basis for building a contemporary ethics]
(wonder is ajib عجیب)
just-so story
in science and philosophy, a just-so story, also called an ad hoc fallacy, is an unverifiable and unfalsifiable narrative explanation for a cultural practice, a biological trait, or behavior of humans or other animals. (wikipedia)
etiological myths
etiology: the study of causation, or origination
the politics technology and the politics of storytelling.
[...] Narratives, along with literary devices, tropes, figures, images and the aesthetics of language, inhabit and inform even our most reliable knowledge-making practices.
storytelling as one of the consequential material practices
[storytelling is material practice]
[where there is a situated perspectives there is storytelling]
it is “practicing generous reading”
and “technique of refiguration” --> create alternative forms of knowledge
[figuration ~ storytelling apparatuses]
(Haraway, Primate Vision)
•“Attention to narrative is not instead of attention to science, ...”
•[there is no way that we can] escape the particular pleasures and dangers embedded in the story-laden sciences.
•[what are the things that] could only be explained by cultural, not scientific, genealogies [?] --> ideological apparition[s]
•Something new was required to account for change; the logic informed a kind of paternal creation myth [........] unchanging “matrix” for the generative principle of change. (In Zihlman's story logic, both gathering and hunting emerged as repatternings, not opposites, in changed conditions of constraint and opportunity. Narratives of both gathering and hunting ways of life produced genders and citizens.)
•tool-weapon equation in masculinist scientific narratives
as careful scrutiny of wonders and marvels becomes a mainstay in European intellectual life, 17th century natural philosophers began to understand *wonder, *curiosity, and *attention as cloesly aligned and mutually defining.
epistemological beast fable
unnatural history
knowledge-making practices of other times and places
tracing the web of horror and delight
Serres reminds us the beast fable tradi[...]
(24)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%16.2[...] for the reactions of an implicit reader --> what the scholar of ajayeb (in the medieval) might have felt?
ajayebnameh is grounded in the history and materiality of scientific practices:
“Nature is neither knowable ...nor unknowable ...Nature is that about which ‘relevant knowledge’ may be produced. If we pay due attention to it, we can learn, discern relations, and multiply entities and ratios.” (Stengers 2011)
eliminativism: the belief that one story or one set of practices (usually called rational or scientific) can explain nature.
a materialist understanding of ajayeb demands an interpretive adventure of how, with matter (in Stengersian way), we get sensitivity, life, memory, consciousness, passions and thought... =/= inert or mechanistic notion of matter
which metaphors stage nature as “witty agent and actor”?
speculative commitment --> learn how to relate differently ~-> (help us) name what we are doing in new and useful ways**** (Verran)
the egg from outside it doesn't seem to be doing anything --> to give the egg the power to challenge (our) well-defined categories
-how can we relate to the egg without breaking it? (ontological + ethical) --> *pragmatism*: an art of consequences, an art of paying attention =/= the logic of the omelet justifying cracked eggs
ajayeb is all about the ***staging of nature***
{Latour:} reductionism offer an enormously ‘useful’ handle to allow scientists to insert their instrumentarium, their paradigms and produce a long series of practical effects.
(efficient handles =/= staging of nature)
we must learn to tell trickster stories {a speculative sense that activates possibilities for thinking, feeling, and knowing within coyote nature =/= a closed conception of “reality itself"} OR ELSE we will end up settling for a rather vague version of what physics claim to be reality [~= a generalized (==> irrelevant?) version of a specific form of authoritative knowledge --> that which “simplifies away our world in terms of idealist judgments about what would ultimately matter and what does not” (, Stengers)] ----> (who has ?) the power to explain, (who/what decides what kind is ?) relevant knowledge
[Stengers] (wonder has everything to do with stories,) wonder incites storytelling
1 --> importance of narratives in our knowledge-making practices
2 --> politically robust narratives (that world us differently)
can the ontological be addressed without the ethical?
(feminism's answer is ‘no’) --> a materialism that is immediately ontological, epistemological, and ethical (=/=? Delanda's materialism)
ajayeb (+ my work on it ?) is a pragmatic project to fabricate a different kind of knowledge assemblage (Stengers > Kenney > Sina)
=/= (21st century) logics of capitalism
=/= toxic catego[...]
(25)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%16.5[...](how ?, the capacity for) drastic morphological change --> what would it be like to emerge as a moth with a new body, a new sensorium, with your caterpillar-self only a genomic memory?
reincarnation from one species to another
(need less?) just-so stories --> facts to live with
(need more?) what-if stories --> speculations to savor --(gives taste to)--> *paradigms* --> incommensurable ways of seeing the world and practicing science in it (Kohn) --> seeds for sowing worlds (Haraway) ~--> possibilities for thinking life***
(Kenney's proposal of) “bureau of what-if stories”
(--> Fables of Attention - Wonder in Feminist Theory and Scientific Practice 2013)
(Margulis's) holobiont: multicellular eukaryotes plus their colonies of persistent symbionts
ajayeb's craft and undisciplined tradition can be called empirical, it is an example of an archival research (done by historian.) i wan to highlight the aesthetic quality of this activity.
*aesthetics: how elements are arranged together, how they are composed, how they are brought into relation in the space of a text (Kenney > Latour, Stengers, Bellacasa) (--> La Guin's bag, bundle) }--> rigs
**aesthetics are political because they do consequential relational work**
novels, poetry, feminist theory, speculative fiction, bestiary list categories--these genres of composition *gather together* and *stage* their “matters of care” in ways that perform relations between things and teach their readers to inhabit sometimes unfamiliar, agential world. they are practices of sf worlding.
fiction ==> attitude --> holds things
(emphasis on) worlds that come together through dispersal (vofur وفور), induction (makesh مکش), volatility (farar فرّار), toxicity, drift,
the power that comes with ‘other’ (time/place of) styles of composing
(*bestiary is agential wo[...]
(26)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%16.7[...] 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 intentionalities (between human and animal; relevant also for Varinia's dog relation [--> ‘I know that you know what I intend to do']--)--> language as a mean for creating an overlapping awareness between two speakers (Despret, Hearne, Senne[...]
(27)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%18[...], in offering a way for them to articulate the system, (not to make a system that articulates them)
(in experimenting with ajayeb) how can i involve my body, involve my knowledge, involve my responsibility, involve my future?
-how to let them adopt me?
-to produce an ajayeb body to allow a ajayeb world to affect me
the world of ajayeb is a richly articulated world =/= a world of enthusiastic automata (one who is only moved by itself) observing strange and mute creatures
...................................
[Mersad al-ebad] tabaye-i طبایعی (materialist)
historical specificity(s) of animal-human relationship
(worst-)translated science
...................................
[Haraway, Queering the non/human]
‘companion’ [she starts by showing the danger of the term like any other term]
reducing type is among other things at the heart of racism
>
types: colonised, enslaved, non-citizen, animal, refugee, [etc.], typological female reduced to her reproductive function,
secular semiotics (never nourished us?)
queering: the job of undoing ‘normal’ categories, [sorting operations]
...patterning, consequences, and the possibility of response.
queer, off-category, sf worlding
(what are the SF worldings of ajayeb?--SF as building alternative ontologies. finding absent but possible presents--whether presented as elsewheres or other times. “[...]an elsewhere from which different [...] articulations of naturecultures and alterity could be explored.”)
“The one who would be normal, in a category of his own” --> ends badly
(human scientist's) deadly one-way test: unable to recognize the presence of the trapped one --> (for him) no one is at home in the categorically Other
[Seed Bag]
...the problem of destruction and wounded flourishing--not simply survival--in exile, diaspora, abduction, and transportation--the earthly gift-burden of the descendents of slaves, refugees, immigrants, travelers, and of the indigenous too.
(In the feminist SF mode,) matter is never “mere” medium to the “informing” seed;
Homebody / traveler
...disruptive details of good stories that don't know how to finish
...................................
[Barad]
[...] remembering is not a replay of a string of moments, but an enlivening and reconfiguring of past and future that is larger than any individual. [...] The past is never finished. It cannot be wrapped up like a package, or a scrapbook, or an acknowledgment; we never leave it and it never leaves us behind.
Barad's mother's question: “what good is there in offering recognition that can't be recognized?”
[...] there is only the ongoing practice of being open and *alive to each(oth[...]
(28)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%18.2[...](Russian)
•dialogical theories (Bakhtinian)
•New Critical theories
•Chicago school, or neo-Aristotlian theories
•psychoanalytic theories (Freud, Kenneth Burke, Lacan, N. Abraham)
•hermeneutic and phenomenological theories
•structuralist, semiotic, and tropological theories
•Marxist and sociological theories
•reader-response theories
•poststructuralist and deconstructionist theories (Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man)
•feminist theories (Martha Kenney, Haraway, Stengers, Hayward)
•
•
structuralist: that there are typical formal elements or “deep structures” to narratives --> complex performative dimension between the telling of stories and what is told in them
(Paul de Man:) “The paradigm for all texts consists of a figure (or a system of figures) and its deconstruction. But since this model cannot be closed off by a final reading, it engenders, in its turn, a supplementary figural superposition which narrates the unreadability of the prior narration.”
the analytic experience has a narrative character? psychoanalytic dialogue ‘uncovers’ a certain kind of narrative discontinuity maintained in the analysand's efforts
--> meaningful narrative sequences,
and, recaptured memory : a rhetorical product
...................................
-the dominance of the narrative ‘The Origin’ [Ursprung] when we tell nature story, when we call in nature
-the dominance of the narrative ‘The Zoom’ when we tell nature story, (‘The Reveal’ story)
-
ok, it is 06.03.2017, i need to set up a track of commentary, a monogamous relation with ajayeb
and unload the myth that i am going to do something new:
1st: send super-ego away and cleared out --> no judgment
2nd: call the unengaged secretary to just write
3rd: throw some sort of sequencing on the page
4th: call the clean-up agent
5th: at some point super-ego comes and checks it out
6th: negotiation with the super-ego
(Avital,) start modest and small, listening to my passion, collects some texts or passages that hold this or that motif that i like or am concerned with, go in there and do a rhetorical reading, see what is going on in the language, allow myself be instructed and taught.
7th: wrap around the work, something of an *infomercial,* there i can get a little ego in there, bring myself to the table and situate myself in the world of art/scholarship/thinking/creativity/etc. and say where i am, what question do i bring to the table, what would be my question mark, i am at the table taking my place and this is my question mark, situate myself (=/= autistic, dar-khod-mandegi در خود ماندگی; i can't spin out as kind of rouge and solitary satellite that no one can connect with. i have to make the connections, in a world that is ha[...]
(29)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%18.8[...]arratives --> complex performative dimension between the telling of stories and what is told in them
(Paul de Man:) “The paradigm for all texts consists of a figure (or a system of figures) and its deconstruction. But since this model cannot be closed off by a final reading, it engenders, in its turn, a supplementary figural superposition which narrates the unreadability of the prior narration.”
the analytic experience has a narrative character? psychoanalytic dialogue ‘uncovers’ a certain kind of narrative discontinuity maintained in the analysand's efforts
--> meaningful narrative sequences,
and, recaptured memory : a rhetorical product
...................................
-the dominance of the narrative ‘The Origin’ [Ursprung] when we tell nature story, when we call in nature
-the dominance of the narrative ‘The Zoom’ when we tell nature story, (‘The Reveal’ story)
-
ok, it is 06.03.2017, i need to set up a track of commentary, a monogamous relation with ajayeb
and unload the myth that i am going to do something new:
1st: send super-ego away and cleared out --> no judgment
2nd: call the unengaged secretary to just write
3rd: throw some sort of sequencing on the page
4th: call the clean-up agent
5th: at some point super-ego comes and checks it out
6th: negotiation with the super-ego
(Avital,) start modest and small, listening to my passion, collects some texts or passages that hold this or that motif that i like or am concerned with, go in there and do a rhetorical reading, see what is going on in the language, allow myself be instructed and taught.
7th: wrap around the work, something of an *infomercial,* there i can get a little ego in there, bring myself to the table and situate myself in the world of art/scholarship/thinking/creativity/etc. and say where i am, what question do i bring to the table, what would be my question mark, i am at the table taking my place and this is my question mark, situate myself (=/= autistic, dar-khod-mandegi در خود ماندگی; i can't spin out as kind of rouge and solitary satellite that no one can connect with. i have to make the connections, in a world that is having debates and discursive encounters around my themes. i am *in conversation* --> responding, quoting, tuning,) standing up for myself and my text, “fake it till you make it,” yes i need to renarcissize and build up, at this phase towards the end i need to perform being assertive and show what i have brought to the table, and if i don't know that then i ask someone to tell me what have i done? where does it belong? how can i situate myself?
8th: sleep-walk, don't look down, don't wake myself up, don't ask why i am doing this
9th: (problematically Deleuzian:) *becoming woman*! (for Deleuze) all writing involves you (no matter how you[...]
(30)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%18.8[...]/>
ajayeb's histories (~ ajayeb's historically situated relational worldings) =/= societies of individuals in human-only histories (~ Euclidean figures and stories of Man)
(which network is?) a netbag for collecting up what is crucial for ongoing
ajayeb's technotheocratic geoengineering [, it “fixes” some common imaginations the “affairs of life,” and not specifically the “afterlife,” (within the {terminology ~} figural-conceptual powers of syms and material-semiotic time-space of the Indo-Greco-Arab-Turko-Persian terra taxa)]
•periods of time
•“known” life
•abode (budgah بودگاه, Wohnplatz)
•donya دنيا
-stories that focus on composition rather than intrusion
-stories that focus on ongoingness rather than game-over
(Haraway > Stengers > Latour > Margulis) Gaia, to name complex nonlinear couplings between processes that compose and sustain entwined but nonadditive subsystems as a partially cohering systemic whole
planet-transforming, historically situated, new-enough, worlding relations
(systematic stories are linked) metabolisms, articulations, coproductions
(they must also be) relational, sympoietic, consequential
myth-systems (are set-ups)
(a deadly one: “Man + Tool ==> history”)
names =/= faces (~ morphs of the same)
a thousand names of something else
(what Haraway is naming with) compound-eyed insectile and many-armed optics
winged domains
bird-bodies
(Haraway's spider and) my ajayeb's snake: tasks of thinking, figuring, and storytelling
--✕--> heady facial representation; [Luisa also dislikes this]
•figure of snake (circular serpent) is ajayeb Persian sf worlding, has ties with the Greek Chthonis (“of the earth,”) is at the same time the image of the continuity of life and the abyssal moral (eating your end, no gag reflex)-->{Gildas Hamel: “the abyssal and elemental forces before they were astralized by chief gods and their tame committees"}
“many critters acoss taxa” (juju جوجو + rade رده)
(I dispute Haraway's notion of “sacred.” popular religion is at many times populated by earthly figures alongside many astralized destructive finitudes.)
Haraway's urgently needed Chthulucene story
[Miyazaki's] biodiverse terra [God flips out] into something very slimy, like any overstressed complex adaptive system at the end of its abilities to absorb insult after insult. (Haraway's wording)
(yes yes we are all ultimately connected to one another,) but the specificity and proximity of connections matters
(Haraway + Latour's) ‘things’ are:
1- collection of entities
2- hard to classify, unsortable, (and probably with bad smell)
<[...]
(31)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%19.4[...]I thought]) #passive reacting beings...
(this difference) structures the way we see “passivity”
(tracing) “objectivity(s)” (in one's own culture's dominant epistemologies) --> “audience” poker-face in art & science (-adviced to be as neutral as possible, to be unavailable, to be no one) [=/= harem --(is about)--> domesticating practices] [--> (in order to query the ways) audience habituating the performer / scientists habituating their animals*], --> scientists are getting it, why the artists and their audience don't get it!? }--(ontological risk)--> ***the performer is a social subject*** : (category changes in everyday life)
•when I am by myself: I am an orangutan, sometimes snake, I am ‘something’
•when I am with others: I turn to human
•when I am “objective”: I am off-category, I am not ‘something’ (-super strange!)
}==> the ‘Other’ [not only the police officer,] always estizah (interpellation استيضاح) you(?)
it is very interesting the way Despret is working (on the field) with Haraway's (intuitive genius) analysis
scientist's will to be ‘no-one’ that would prevent any interaction
(Despret's constructivist and non-relativist translation of ‘the ways animals act are the consequences of the observer's gaze’:) *animal actions are responsible consequences*
[(*)performance: the responsible consequence of a (no less) responsible gaze]
...................................
Verran, knowledge economy
knowledger always authored
cross-cultural knowledge practices
-physis, “I bring forth”, “I produce”, “I make to grow” (=/= “techne” in Aristotlian sense)
X-physis: a process which sticks out in the direction X --> how this morpheme has come to mean (since mid-15th century) “form” and “nature”? (this is about thinking of making)
“physis” requires the different perspectives of the four causes (aitia):
- material --> source of matter
•efficient --> power/motion
•formal --> containing its form
•final --> end
zoopoiesis --> zoopoetics, explorations of how animals (zoo) shape the making of text, study of ‘the literary animal’
...................................
Katie King
“flexible knowledges” on the edge of validity ♥ (--> almost invalid*)
fantasy of education
culture wars
intellectual enterpreneurs
upheavals and connectivities of globalization
changing patterns of interaction
(aren't we here to) change the patterns of interaction
(aren't we here to) change the faith of letters and love stories
reenactments (are fantasy practices and realities) =/= simple, accessible, and democratized (knowledge)
“layers of locals and globals”
[somehow I couldn't feel in his long term project what is Kobe's relatio[...]
(32)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%19.8[...]f matter.”
(in my visual art studies we were given redness as a symbolic element in a representational order and a matter-of-fact) =/= state-of-sensory-alert, redness as an actual composition spun into representations, objects, and states of sensory alert
“[...] a germinal aesthetic. a tendril of practices and sensibilities gathered into an energetics of form
•black sky and ocean --> limit, outline, elemental flux, matter waiting formlessly
•white ice and snow --> stasis, shape and form, a blankness that challenges composition, the transitoriness
•red --> the feebly real, the long, low-frequency wave-lenght of the dying stars, the past, the effort to fix dead reality in a cast *
•green --> plants that glare with a harsh reality, the violence at the heart of the world we inhabite
•blue --> a limited, temporary success in fixing experience in a pattern
•
a landscape animated by the primariness of color =/= Molenbeek
american indians became “red” through a complex semiotics of encounters with colonists
...who knows what kinds of desires, fears and dead ends
(pay attention to Stewart list making narrative:)
events, sites, actors, stakes, consequences, properties, competences, modalities, attunements, velocities
... a world ==> ephemeral sparks ==> an atmosphere ==pulled==> qualities of sociality, personality and language out of people [--> ajayeb] ==created==> spaces of care, territoriality, order, horror
the stark mantras of representational critique: that the play of abstract categories (real/fabricated, nature/human habitat, wild/tame, red/white, high/low, etc.) bloodlessly determine worlds or adequately describe them ==> { everything is political = to always know what the political is }--> ‘political’ : something that exists in the big picture of broader significance, something strongly ongly obvious (but not to most people!) that meanings can be automatically assigned to things and are the basis of those things’ value -->!@Ali
the effect of context
matters of composition, each with a “we”:
•feeble نحيف
•experimental
•eccentric --> Elen
•habitual --> my mother
•generous
•gestural -->
•half turned away
•reached the expressivity of a mood, a tone of voice
•do they lighten things or load them down?
...a composition made explicit in the figure of *the active survivor* and *the knowing reader of impacts* --> a watchfulness-turned-impulse that ends not on meaning but in the haptic, multi-angled, sensorimotor qualities of a world's unimaginable detail
(@Varinia) qualities sensorimotor interactions with environments that are not reducible either to thoughts and imaginings:
•*richness: a scene spied provides infinite detail beyond what you ca[...]
(35)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%22.3[...]>
(@Varinia) qualities sensorimotor interactions with environments that are not reducible either to thoughts and imaginings:
•*richness: a scene spied provides infinite detail beyond what you can invent --> #excess
•*bodiliness: the motions of the body affect sensory input
•*insubordinateness: the world has a life of its own; things moved by themselves
•*grabbiness: sensory impacts matter apart from their cognition
--> having a phenomenal experience is having skills with these qualities** [@Hoda]
an ecology of potentialy marked by violence and care
...................................
[Alberti]
we might:
•provide a better understanding
•provoke novel realities/ontologoes (to emerge from material)
•provoke an understanding in the context of the everyday
*(Latour, Whitehead, Law:) archeological entity = ontological entity (by nature) }==> productive of reality
to focus on practices in which all possible elements of the process must be understood as active and creative (--> # equipment list)
*“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
[...]
(36)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%22.4[...] reality (a fundamental set of understandings about how the world is) }--Alberti--> one can conceptualize ontology: as a people's “beliefs about” reality / as people's actual ontological commitments (~ people's reality)
Latour's modes of existence: ontological tendencies that exist more or less precariously under the assault of modernization
conversion of ontological questions into epistemological questions ==> deontologizing other peoples’ *ontological commitments* [--> that Goda mistook for ideology]
*problem with pluralizing “reality” is that it might appear to be a form of cultural relativism, (demotion of) “ontology ~= culture (~ cultural beliefs about reality =/= reality)” ==back==> cultural construction
anti-Cartesian, relational, and antiontological exceptionalism
[a] Heideggerian idea: *the world we encounter is preinterpretive*
posthuman ~ nonrepresentational ~ realist ~ new materialism
(realism: an ontological approach)
•Latour's network
•Ingold's meshwork (commonality of processes across the ‘life =/= not life’) --> processes ~ becoming ~ growth ~ decay
•Barad's entanglement (relations are primary and relata are a consequence of relating ==dynamics==> intra-action {phenomenon = experiment + measuring device + techician + previous results + setting + ...})
•DeLanda's assemblage (how humans and nonhumans produced communities that changed in composition and through time... =/= linguistic model of context)
•
**relational ontology : stronger your “allies” are, the more reality you can claim** [= (Latour's notion of) truth]
[critique of human exceptionalism ==>] open ontology --> contingent categories: phenomena and assemblages are temporary, contingent, and unbounded
flat ontology: one made exclusively of unique, singular individuals, differing in spatio-temporal scale but not in ontological status --symmetry--> *to get at differences without determining what they are in advance* (<-- useful for ajayeb studies)
•archaeological types/objects: reified sets of relations
•job of the archaeologists: establish alternative taxonomies of being
ruin memories
nonrepresentational =/={"world of ideas =/= world of things” ~= the ideas must correspond to a truth demonstrable in the world of things}
(Lucas's) materialization: we can still say things about the past with great certainty
theories + apparatuses + material remains
ontological realism --claim--> objectivity and truth may be contingent but are nonetheless demonstrable and robust
archaeologist ontological approach: working on “material pasts in the present” ~= ‘how past actually gathers in the present’ =/= “material record = fragmentary evidence of history”
•(material's tempora[...]
(38)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.1[...]a...):
social ontology --> reconstruct the ontologies of past societies [<~~ my work on ajayeb]
ontological archaeology's background in feminism, queer, and phenomenological
approaches ==> interest in the body
influence of the animal turn in archaeology
nonanthropocentric zoological studies
(nomenological explorations of animal representations in Attar and tasavof)
what kinds of beings existed within the social universe of pre-Columbian Andean peoples
(renovated concept of) animism: ethnographic meta-analogy for past ontologies --> models of relationality for archaeologists to interpret material patterning in the archaeological record
investigations of personhood
(building toward a) taxonomy of past ontologies --✕--> ontological critique
(Alberti >) Viveiros de Castro's project: to systemize amerindian thought into a metaphysics such that it can have a reciprocal effect on anthropological thought and “naturalist” or Western metaphysics
ontological realism ==>{
new language attempt to imagine the complex topology of relational realities:
•Latour --> network: things exists as a consequence of the strength of their articulation
•Ingold --> meshwork =/= Aristotelian hylomorphism
•Barad --> entanglement = Quantum physics + queer theory ==> properties belong to the phenomena in question =/= inherent to things
•DeLanda --> assemblage: how humans + nonhumans produced communities that changed in composition and through time in neolithic and bronze age
assemblage --replace--> context
assemblage = phenomena --> temporary, contingent, unbounded
Latourian critique of categories =/= beyond human correlationalism
pluralizing ontology ==> charges of relativism <-- ‘objective knowledge =/= contingent foundations’ }--> nonrepresentational approach =/= over interpretation, abstraction
archeology operates by seeking strong and effective articulations between theories, apparatuses, material remains
ontological realism (=/= naturalism, constructivist) --> objectivity and truth are contingent, but also demonstrable and robust
@Chloe
material record: an expression of **how past gathers in the present** (=/= fragmentary evidence of history <-- forensic approach)
past continuously unfolding and therefore changing
Alberi --> (social) ontology: a new interpretive tool
additive work (=/= reconstructive)
archeological accounts of other's ontologies
animal turn in archeology --> nonanthropocentric zoological studies
Willerselv
Viveiros de Castro
Amazona --> animism (more than any other anthropological material) has provided[...]
(39)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.2[...]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
•
...to treat the material of the past as anticipating something new
(my research and work on bestiary:)
•how can we produce new works that challenge us to think and experience archeological things (ajayeb) in new ways without resort to explanation or interpr[...]
(40)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.5[...] 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 unstable locus of historicity* (specific historical conditions) [--> a european model of conviviality]
<== modern globalism --> reinventing of the new common culture /humanism [<==> coalescence: meeting, intermingling of different people and species and cultures and goods --> could be damaging and unintentional, hurting the world: decay, emergent, atrophy, new identities, crisis in language, confusing boundaries, challenges of life,,,]
(origins of bad feeling -->) looking at:
•damaged bodies
•damaged subjectivities
•damaged communities
•damaged relations ==> Udyr monster
•damaged ecologies
•damaged histories ==> insomnia
•
(@Jassem and Mia) is there (only) death at the end of entropy?
sequence of events from the point of view of plague narrative
extermination + determination, laws of identity, repetition
the material despair of a colonial capital modern condition leading in high speed to the entropy of cultural-individual ethics, under the overwhelming weight of tangible misery --(Jassem and Mia)--> cognize the immediate material urgency of the endangered subjectivity
--faceless--
nonanimal --> nonhuman + nonanimal ==> destabilizing effects
with their flexible plasticity, has an issue with appearance --> subjectivity's disassociation from the world
[in no (or which) calculus of assurance are they moving?]
ruined main body (of the performance)
ruin is (a fictional being) adding additional variety to technical being (frontier technologies) of Norway
-obsolescence (and why not adjustment? =/= extremist position ==> to emerge fanatically from the ruins)--(can we use our imagination not for world scale future speculation, and rather for small adjustment of this space?)
-give expression and meaning to the material culture
--landscape--
using it in the performance: a lens that refuses the abstraction of elements relation in a vacuum (as its optics, not a Blickmaschin)
show us: big stories take their form from seemingly minor contingencies, asymmetrical encounters, and moments of indeterminacy
(with “stranger within” [=? ‘desire within']) are we at the space of complain? <-- dispositions of Beschwerde
a form of protest --> (disenfranchized language of) *mutated rage* --> always innocent ==>[...]
(41)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%27.1[...]ing 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) =/= accident (the name of that which metamorphoses over time) }=/={ Kant's analogy: accidents = the “particular ways” in which substance is determined to exist}
--Morris--> causality: a concept that responds to and covers over a gap in the human capacity to inhabit a world of accident
--Freud--> sudden, unexpected event incapacitates the psyche (and its maturation) to such an extent that it will relate to the world only as accidentally existing --> [*]accident/trauma: the experience of the occurrence as having no reason [--causality as a principle of understanding]
accident ~=&==>
•trauma
•condition of possibility of a political opening to the future (one whose form is not determined a priori)
•condition of possibility of en ethical opening to the future (without guarantee)
•
}--Morris--> *accident: the name of a certain kind of freedom*
(it is initially tempting to suggest:) ghosts: symptoms of trauma, particular form of a repetition compulsion, externalized and made public, (untimeliness of an event that robs it of the structure of causality within which it could be more properly interpreted), a form of neurosis =/= Morris's reading of Southeast Asia ghosts
•recognition 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 his[...]
(42)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%27.8[...]>
(it is initially tempting to suggest:) ghosts: symptoms of trauma, particular form of a repetition compulsion, externalized and made public, (untimeliness of an event that robs it of the structure of causality within which it could be more properly interpreted), a form of neurosis =/= Morris's reading of Southeast Asia ghosts
•recognition 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 ha[...]
(43)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%27.9[...]kind that operates at the point where language fails (--?--> the use of poetic mystical enchantment in Iran-Iraq war for sending young soldiers to the battle fields)
witchcraft only becomes visible in the moment of accusation, as a retrospective effect of oracular diagnosis (Evans-Pritchard)
(...no one is sure that he has indeed heard a witch)--Bubandt--> witchcraft: a condition of doubt (=/= a system of belief)
--✕--> Morris questions: doubt =/=? belief
Morris asks --> doubt:
•whether illness is caused by witchcraft?
•whether one's neighbor is a witch?
•*whether one is oneself a witch?*
in Buli (=/= The Magicians TV series, Harry Potter film version of magic):
•witchcraft does not explain the world
•witchcraft is not an alternative mode of reasoning
•witchcraft does not permit anyone to control the forces (that assault and wound human being)
•witchcraft provides neither certitude nor escape from the anxieties that death bears for the living
(the interiority of the other is unknown and unknowable ==>)
[*]witchcraft ==provides==>
•an idiom in which the world's very immunity to explanation is affirmed (often with violent and terrifying consequence)
•figures and narrative forms in which to address (also reproduce) the opacity and ambivalence of sociality
[context:]
the other (like the empty seashell) is unknowable, though we must engage others and seek recognition from them to escape solitude and death [...] in forms of giving and reciprocation that demand generosity but that are also likely to provoke avarice --emerge--> witchcraft: a relentless question about appearances and the problem of knowing what they disclose
doubling of genitalia and mouth in Buli dream imagery
(marriage: to manage witchcraft)
tradition “establishes the ideal format for conviviality” ==ensuring==> sexuality and consumption are made the basis of sociality =/= witchcraft (as a perversion of marriage)
in Buli (against mistranslation or misrecognition of the foreign modern):
•Christian missionization (19th and early 20th century, and again in the 1930s)
•modernist developmentalism and statism under Suharto
•technologization associated with natural resource-based capitalism
}--scenario--> effort to become modern ==> enter an order of truth and knowledge (=/= dissimulation and doubt)
valorization of reciprocity (in Halmahera)
Morris asks: is not the coimbrication of doubt/belief precisely what the discourses of the Enlightenment science, namely knowledge through revelation of what is, promised to replace?
(Bubandt's assumptions in Kant/Morris terms:)
•doubt <== anxiety, fear, suspicion, rage (--> affective dimension)
•doubt <== an incapacity to transcend the aporia that[...]
(44)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%28.4[...] within its constitutional order
mimic the address of someone wit charisma (~= authority)
(Morris on) mediaticity of speech (and not merely of media technologies)
Morris reading of a scene (of quotidian exchange) in HIV/AIDS NGO office: a metonym and a metaphor for a kind of South African public sphere that aspires to inclusiveness but is terrorized by its incapacity to know what that opens it up to
•arms itself against potentially aggressive others
•narratives of violence work *to reinforce the sense of necessity* (for a general securitization)
•work in the mode of a **negative meritocracy** (= those who would violate the rights of others are to be excluded, but no others --but--> how to know in advance who has perpetrated or intends to perpetrate such a violation?)
...in the shadow of communicational technology's fashion industry
...bountiful banality of the technologies and artifacts of mass reproducibility
[...] --> lithography --(superseded by)--> photography --(gives way to)--> cinema --(transformed by)--> sound technology --(displaced by)--> integrated and multiplatform digital media --> [...]
(teleological fantasy:) ontologized in epochal schema (these sequences become something more and different) --> analog media are said to be displaced by digital media ==> logic of representation gives way to that of information
=/= (Morris questioning) the conflation of media with mediation, which is itself symptomatic of both a technological determinism and an effort to ontologize technology --> a crises of mediation (not media): the communicative aspiration and the presumptive unity of medium and message in language are brought to their limit (--> media technologies play a role in this drama, but they do not explain it. @OSP & Femke)
-women's understanding of improper English of Zuma's speech: a communicational fail that (from their perspective) is associated with illegality, corruption, and violence
(not to embrace) the kind of logocentric historiography that imagines literacy to constitute a secondary mediation of a primal and autoaffective orality
witches: *technicians of a speech* in which the identity between word and world reaches its maximal extent, when the mere utterance of a spell (even when that utterance is nonverbal) is thought to cause things to happen
zamazama's literacy: the means for communication across difference ==> the mastery of mediation and thus its effacement (=/= signify the secondary mediation of a primary orality)
...a society that is being reconstituted around a commitment to constitutional multilingualism and democratic proceduralism
rituals of governmentality
delay and deferral
fantasy of immediacy -->
•messianic movements
•direct-action politics
•various kinds o[...]
(45)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%28.7[...]tinguish (the tensions, agitations, dissident potentiality of large-scale hazards)
*coalescing of underrecognized disturbances =/= compensation
*beginning of a confrontation =/= resolution
foil of human triumph: “transforming the worst into the best” <-- not possible anymore
...~->? potentiality of living otherwise (---> go to Tsing's contaminated diversity, Chen's queer toxicity)
...in these spaces where *enduring and knowing* are coterminous, the feeling of a living dead seeped into the margins of life for those with even minimal symptoms
(chemical phenomenology)
molecular cohabitants who physically hold our world together also encourage our unravelling*** [Shapiro] becoming a pupil of the air [Sloterdijk] is to attune to the aerostolized material culture and more-than-human semiotics [Kohn] within which one is immersed
***
chemical sublime (does not merely refigure a form of sublime in philosophical discourse but) poses an alternative **schema of eventfulness** (or call to action)
...................................
[title]
kulturgeist
...................................
Zizek - Organs without Bodies. Deleuze and Consequences
(i am still at the title:) in your efforts to make ‘body without organ’ (the emergent, non-hierarchical, inclusive, flexible, smart, liquid good object) you might end up creating ‘organ without body’ (monstrous, hierarchical, authoritative, soulless, archaic bad object)
functional specificity of organs =/= to release the decoded and deterritorialized flows of [*]desire: a process of production without reference to any exterior agency (--although--> ‘fascism = desire’)]
an example of body without organ is the ‘ocean’ for Marialena
(for Marialena) ocean [~=? fluid women] (an unstratificated, non-coded flow, sex organs sprout everywhere, no organ is constant as regards either function or position) =/= (male fantasies of) armored body
(Deleuze and Guattari suggest) dismantling of the organism (~ molar organic body) ==>
•hypochondriac body (suffering from imaginary symptoms)
•paranoid body
•schizo body
•drugged body
•masochist body <-- my favourite
•
}--> these are all about the body from the point of view of its *potential* [=/=? method]
}--> we are at (an anthropological / psychoanalytic discourse of) excess and transgression --Artaud-->{ organs: functional articulations forced on the body }==> separation, determination, representation
body without organ =/= body image http://ajayeb.net/?q=body+image
-what feminist theory has to say about that? --Irigaray--> is not the body without organs women's own historical condition?
...the machinic, the inorganic, as well as the notions of loss of self, dispersion, a[...]
(46)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.1[...]s made no such pact with Satan
-procedural expertise --> trial by water here functions as *experiment as much as a punishment* designed to reveal an other wise invisible truth
testimony + experimental results + expert inquisitorial interpretation ==> early version of the ‘case study’ (synthesized as evidence in service of accounting for variation that exceeded general laws regarding relations and phenomenon in the world)
Baxstrom + Meyers
(ajayeb's) individual cases: an effective strategy in providing analytic (and empirical) purchase for phenomenon that were other wise invisible to even the discerning eye of the expert <-- **to move away from a reliance on metaphysics**
**medicalization of the invisible**
possession
set the stage for the explicit medicalization of the mobile invisible forces that experts had been struggling to master, explain, and take measures against --> a new mode that was equally *didactic and forensic* (as the theological frameworks deployed by inquisitors and the exorcise of demons by Church)
witchcraft, faith healing, and demonic possession
Bibliotheque diabolique --> case studies to demonstrate the precariousness of misrepresentation and the consequences of ignorance ~= investigations collected by Charcot and his students in their studies of hysteria
•clarifying the link between witchcraft and hysteria
*witch hunting and the exorcism of spirits in the 16th century (--> antiquated forms of inquiry) ~=?! clinical studies of nervous illness in the 19th century --> conceptual scaffolding of the emergent science*:
•fascination with the secondary visible effects of primary invisible forces
•long-term labor of social interpretation that required the mutation of old categories and the creation of new ones
==> “witch = misdiagnosed”
epilepsy, the sacred disease, erroneously perceived as resulting from hostile magic
=/= hysteria (hold a special place in the moral imaginary)
the special susceptibility of women to witchcraft mirrored the “feminine weakness” associated with the hysteric, exacerbated by low social status
-in countless accounts of possession, we find descriptions of demons speaking through the mouths of girls
[Baxstrom + Meyers =/= Federici's flat analysis of witch hunt as the tool of subjugation of the local population or of woman by men]
tableau vivant --into--> tableau clinique --into--> tableau critique
hysterical reliving of the original symptom --> reframed trauma: an attempt to suspend the two temporalities (real and reimagined) in the same image
@Hoda
one element of fascination with hysteria was its “look” --> hysteria's aesthetic link to forms of possession
possession --> aneasthesias, amnesias, subconscious acts, somnambulisms, fixed i[...]
(47)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.6[...]nd ‘enacted’ (without the aid of inquisitor)
<== individual turmoil (=/= juridical manipulation)
==> medicalization (of the invisible forces) --> (a new mode) *didactic & forensic*
17th century --> a shift in the empirical approach to invisible forces
clinical hysteria --> fascination with a power that (by definition) destabilizes binaries such as inner/outer
@Pierre, apass? #feedback
****symptomology: discovering without learning****
--> physicians in relation to haunted nun, mobilized by attention, considers the deployment of a knowledge in the new and visible form of an appearing [of the other's nonsenses (~ artwork --> the object of feedback: an inconsistent invisible object of inquiry renamed and reimagined by the feedback)]
Charcot [in his storied career of the father of modern neurology] dealing with relations between religious ecstasy, magic, witchcraft, and “nervous disease" <-- great doctor's decision to compile <-- discernible
•weyer --> appealed to people's better nature and reason
•Bourneville --> appealed to an appraisal of history in service of a project on modernity
}--> to demonstrate the precariousness of interpretation & the consequences of ignorance
}--> (errors of) demonologists and exorcists rooted in (what was characterized as) the mistaken conceptualization of their object of investigation
now antiquated *forms of inquiry* --> 16th century's witch-hunting and exorcism of spirits ~/= 19th century's clinical studies of nervous illness <-- conceptual scaffolding of the emergent science (by Charcot and his students) --> *visible effects of primary invisible forces* involved a *long term labor of social interpretation* that required the mutation of old categories and the creation of new ones...
}==> (19th century's new definition of the) witch: misdiagnosed hysterics of the middle ages <--{ susceptibility of women to witchcraft <== “feminine weakness” }
physical signs of witchcraft recorded centuries earlier --> detailed indexing of symptoms such as:
•religious ferver and stigmatization
•psychosomatic indicators such as blue edema or swelling with local cyanosis and hypothermia and autographic skin (that would appear intensely red after touch)
primitive practices ==> the word “medicine” (derived from the name Medea: the mother of witchcraft)
•epilepsy --> the sacred disease ([perceived] to result from hostile magic --rethought--> to result in terms of individual physiological disorder)
•hysteria [from the greek “uterus"] --> hold a special place in the moral imaginary
indigent madwoman: in the 17th century nearly 10000 women (destitute women, the insane, “idiots,” epileptics, and Parisian society's “least favored classes” [---> go to Foucault]) were kept in La Force prison, a seco[...]
(48)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%31[...]litics, poetics and affects of finitude
fossil nihilism
...................................
Frankenstein: an all-purpose modifier to denote technological crimes against nature--a criminal only after being left alone by his horrified creator
--Latour--> we have failed to care for our own creations : Frankenstein as a parable for political ecology
to be coextensive with...
to become compositionist: one that sees the process of human development as a process of becoming ever-more attached to nonhuman natures (=/= fallen from nature)
story of modernity:
•humankind's emancipation from nature
•***progress (forward movement of the arrow of time) = indifference to the past*** ==> “past: an archaic and dangerous confusion”
•the confidence of being able to differentiate clearly what in the past was still mixed up: facts & values
green politics ==> gloomy asceticism, a terror for trespassing nature, and diffidence toward industry, innovation, technology, and science
my work has been against the notion of “nature = a hierarchical totality”
emancipation =/= attachment =/= intimacy
*environment: what appeared when unwanted consequences came back to haunt the originators of collective modernizing actions
*environmentalism: when the unwanted consequences are suddenly considered to be a monstrosity (#apocalyptic) ==> abstain & repent --> Leo:
environmentalist logic: “precaution = abstention”
‘global warming’ is an unintended consequence (like anything in earth) <-- narrative of attachment =/= an scandal, end of the world (<-- apocalyptic narrative of emancipation, modernist myth of mastery)
pristine nature =/= our nature ~= national park: a rural ecosystem complete with post offices, well-tended roads, highly subsidized cows, and handsome villages
(Latour giving the example of theology:) ‘mastery ==> attachment’ : “the christian God gets folded into, involved with, implicated with, and incarnated into his creation.” =/= a master who is freed from dependents
}--Latour--> dominion means attachment
...................................
Mi You
modernization process of European societies ==> secularity ==> “religion = only one option among other ways of self-fulfilment and human flourishing”
*self-sufficient humanism has never existed on the same scale before in European societies before the Enlightenment*
...................................
#writing for mini-series bestiaries
inspired by the https://www.instagram.com/ajayebedidani/
1. https://www.instagram.com/p/CPYnbZnH2w3/ short episode at night in country X there is a talking apple that speeks in unknown language. character acting, location garden, animation, play with mixed CG architecture<[...]
(49)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%31.9[...]
(Because of the arbitrariness of being:) “to love" = "I want you to be”
[we need to be witnessed:]
because “we have not made ourselves,” we “stand in need of confirmation. We are strangers; we stand in need of being welcomed”
*strangers and exchangers (sarraf)
this is an artistic concern with foreign-policy
[Arendt:] (in 20th century) shifts in the terms in which we locate the ethics and values of responsibility
citizen --> refugee
[demand for clear ethical responsiveness]
*citizen: an entity assumed to occupy the secured interior zones of polity (who generates the affect and discourse of care, concern, responsibility, and rights;)
*refugee: foreign and shifting body with no home base--has become the exemplary locus for any possible cosmopolitan ethics
you feel like a foreign body until you finally get a job, love, being greeted,
(you may remain foreign until the other claims your body: the police, the lover, the employer, some microorganism that make you sick, and so on.)
(Nietzsche's view of) the friend as the future***
Holderlin asking “Wo aber sind die Freunde?” (a central complaint of ethical proportions and political consequence), (that they have not come to the place from which the poet is greeting) scattered or not yet in existence --> nature of future friendship. (is he keeping the friend necessarily remote? out of political reach? Avital's asking, accusing Holderlin of singularization)
-Graeco-Roman model of friendship
-(is there a specific Iranian model of friendship? --?--> Tarof)
-political model of friendship (based on reciprocity)
Greco-Roman --> Mediterranean World
-the “swimming-pool and spa” of the Greeks and Romans?
-wherein the cultural preferences, ideas and sensitivities of these peoples were dominant
-their urbanites and cosmopolitan elites
-mutual knowledge
politics of friendship in Kelileo Demne:
undiscovered treasures...
constantly warning of fall on the asymmetry
nonreciprocity
Kelile-o Demne is about communal forms of fragile human existence
a project of (asserted) nonalienation
-destinal velocities (the Turtle, the storks, etc.)
fictioning totality of nature, therefore, state
States of security, nature of illusion,
finite essence of friendship
(is muslim paradice and general idea of akherat in the way of finitude of friendship? what would friendship for a mojud-e okhravi mean?)
octo-paradisic systems
animal husbandry
[husband: conserve, husband, economize, economise, spouse, mate,]
[husbandry: the practice of cultivating the land or raising stock]
...................................
the national geography documentary crew and the editors fabula[...]
(52)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%32.4[...] not as something that works as legitimator
reading and greeting
to form (an) intention
all that anthropomorphism performs and withholds on and with animality
...................................
[Rickels]
(my) animal-findings and fairy-tale associations
if dogs communicate through their trainability cats redirect lines of communication through play. the dog waits and watches, the cat looks and looks, which when is your turn to be looked at, can be therapeutic or unnerving.
meeting the cat half-way
...................................
[Avital]
the greeting ‘hello’, the initiatory and inaugural moment of our encounter
the gift sabotaging the freedom of the subject to receive greeting or offering greeting
a gift that becomes a curse for the person,
who has the civic stability to refuse a greeting?
the finantialy challenged and the greeting
explore friendship as a crucial modeling of justice?
configuration of encounter
It doesn't always have to be science fiction, risking the wrong blend and watching the uncontrollable spill of consequences --> hook up friends
friendship, as Avital practices it, should often involve triangulation and the drama of departure?
I found myself (also) tempted to reduce her/him/you to sameness,
“meant to be,” relying on a kind of metaphysical latency.
invasion with little violation(?)
(In rhetoric:) citation = apostrophe [address to an absent or imaginary person, calling to the other]
(i am late. i am transed late. translation and trans-relations has everything to do with latency. )
Avital: For Bataille, friendship is part of the sovereign operation and is linked to reading.
<br />
apostrophe (citation) for Derrida is the possibility of postmortem discourse --> memory, acts of bringing back, recalling
can we take out no insurance policies to safeguard thinking or writing or building?
(Lyotard's) différend: a dispute or difference that cannot be resolved by the cognitive or linguistic resources we have at hand --(indicating rather)--> a rupture in the presentation of testimony (~ litigate)
something you could turn your tattooed back on
(#my work on [post-feminist] harem)
(companionship and sexuality and installations of community) --> The Inoperative Community [Bataille, Blanchot, Nancy]
(how to) create community wherever I go?
(establish relationships: humor, kindness, attention, reworking, “re-”, festivity, moderate arousal, silliness, playfulness, support,)
learning making a “fictive kin group in training” (how to learn to notice each other? how to learn to b[...]
(53)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%32.8[...]say goodbye. --- resume work with Mona?)
Holderlin's intervention/question: we arrive at the truth, Das Wahre emerges, the moment closing in on us, when we have to say goodby
in an Iranian modality the farewell is the loci of truth, (locus: a place or metaphysical locality collecting the center of activity)
(the so-called) poet's radical exposures
is violence in farsi: ‘azar’ آزار? (how would that change instead of ‘khoshunat’ خشونت?)
kam-azari کم آزاری, bi-azari بی آزاری (possible?)
eshgh عشق ~= bi-niazi بی نیازی
...................................
demography of violence and nonviolence
...................................
(Freud <--) *liability* (--> Levinas)
not yet guilty, an almost predisposition, an almost inclination toward being guilty, an openness to being guilty (-->? Seba's notion of ‘Schuld’ [~= debt, the obligation to pay or do something]) ~-> super-egoic formation (~=? that which we call “raising awareness”)
Trauma is structuring***
(to be noted that the concern of super-egoic formation rests on the structuring of ‘demand,’ which is not the being of ‘question’ that it wants to be. question is risky and consequential of new articulation)
[disposition: vaz’ وضع, halat حالت, mezaj مزاج, seresht سرشت, khu خو, khim خیم, saz ساز,]
[predisposition: este'dad استعداد, amadegi آمادگی, meyl-e ghabli میل قبلی; a liability or tendency to suffer from a particular condition]
super-ego [that part of you that exercises authority, “I am gonna make you swallow this” --> jouissance] ~=? Div-mardom دیو مردم (paternal correctional voice, “don't drink!” --> Nezami) =/= Div (says “benush!” بنوش)
...................................
(with Haraway;) the relation between what counts as nature and what counts as culture (in Tehran)--judging whether a behavior is the stuff of genes or rearing
the domestic animal is the epoch-changing tool --> (free) wolf/dog (servant) ==> civilization
what are the things we hate in the name of Wilderness (~=> “fall” into culture)
...................................
[lecture at apass, 10.03.2017]
i follow the scribbles of jamming and jam session
welcome to this metaphysical place
like you, i am also sometimes in heaven, sometimes in hell, in no-land, nowhere, elsewhere, in Belgium; also interested deeply in what signals my and our arrival in the metaphysical entity of Belgium. like Christian, as i am fantasizing his excursion that i missed, we went out and walked back into the city, studying what really signals our arrival, when and how and where on the body we feel that we are there. and my guess is that it is always technological. but in an another universe your arrival might be registered by gr[...]
(54)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%33.4[...]ics of globalization --✕--> crucial dimension of research: body <== “the precarious, accidental, contingent, expedient, striving, dynamic status of life in a messy, complicated, resistant, brute world of materiality, a world regulated by the exigencies, the forces, of space and time” + the conditions under which bodies are encultured, psychologized, given identity, historical location, and agency
*(you can) speak (back) to postmodernism (or democracy etc.), rather than simply speak on (your relationship to) it*
...................................
Hayward on the role of embodiment in visual cultures + meaning of animals in representation
*to envision animal* = to visualize, to experience, to figure, to image, kinds of species, discourses, representations, institutions, histories, epistemologies + to “imagine possible” a set of material and ethical relationships between species
envisioning:
◾a mode of seeing and embodying, of immersing and inhabiting, and of storytelling and theorizing in a techno-scientific world of “eye machine”
•a range of practices for situating the “self” (that tender thing in postmodernity) in places and spaces grown thick with entanglements and consequences; a form both of “to face” and “to perceive”
aesthetic conceptions of beauty and/or ambiguity coupled with biological epistemology and phenomenology of the organisms --in--> in Jean Painleve, Genevieve Hamon, Leni Riefenstahl, David Powell ==construct==> a host of hybridized and enmeshed “encounters”
biosemiotics
zoosemiotics
-humanist fascist aesthetic --> desires to memorialize “beautiful and unpolluted” coral communities
-promise of immediate and luminous experience of “jellyfish otherness”
-systems (of power?) that constitutively produce animal and human actors
human-animal + nonhuman-animal + apparatpparatuses --> co-constitutive in the process of trying to know something about whale ecology
(Hayward > Whitehead:) concrescence: “we” (con prefix) ere- (create) scence (sense, or the “scene,” that which is seen), the present is given by a consense of subjective forms. We are multiple individuals, but there are also multiple individual agents of consciousness operant in the construction of the given.
-literal materialization of a dynamic produced
photograph (only one part, a kind of lively limb, of the relay):
(ajayeb style -->) a bumptious and lively event of the processes of whale studies and whales themselves =/= a still record of a whale “that had been there”
the image: a kind of connective tissue, soliciting one's senses
solar light --> brushed up against, even touched, the whale --> translated through the camera --> into film --> into chemical bathes --> into photo-paper --> through my eye as a research as[...]
(55)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%34.9[...] matter of dividing: those who explicitly really work =/= those who are only following a bent in their nature (a necessity of a biological rather than a historical sort)
Baratay --> possibility of writing a history from the animal's point of view
+ epistemic, conceptual, ideological obstacles
when the animals start paying attention to what humans are offering ir demanding, and then either accept, play for time, resist, refuse... stories in which they exhibit unusual skills or behaviours = acculturation: acceptance from the animal (not just humans imposing their will), dialogue between the two, influence of the animal upon the human
(thinking about animals that we raise in order to kill and eat them)
asking breeders: could one in any way way that their animals collaborate with them and work with them?
•the immediate general response is: no --✕--> yet you hear many stories about animals who did in fact participate in the work of those who were raising them : they acted in deliberate ways of their own volition
-do animals work?
the answer to this question will change something --> (Despret's pragmatism) *pragmatic position = involving a question whose answer turns out to have consequences*
(Porcher > Tapper:) relationships between human and nonhuman animals (judging that this relationship must have followed a historical progression similar to that undergone by the relations of production between different groups of men):
1. hunting societies --> communitarian, animals are part of the same world as humans
2. domestication --> slavery
3. pastoralism --> contractual forms of the feudal type
4. industrial societies --> relationships based on means of production and capitalist relationships
Tapper (and Castelluci) raise the possibility that animals may indeed work, they also close these relationships up in a *single schema* of ownership and exploitation
to inherit: (not merely receptive,) implies a task, a pragmatic act = appropriation
**one's heritage is something constructed, and it is constantly transforming itself retroactively** بازگشتی --> it makes us capable of responding and that we in fact respond to our heritage =/= simply carrying on a tradition
***things are inherited, but we become ourselves in carrying out the gesture of inheriting***
(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 vi[...]
(56)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%35.9[...] problem @apass, the notion of asking participants to participate in an “active” way =/= animal work }--> “working well for an artist = violating normative organization (recommendations, regulations, procedures, codes, specifications)" = تمرد tamarod recalcitrance: practical or collective intelligence appearing when intentional mistakes are made, or when feigned misunderstanding leads to active disobedience*****
Vicki Hearne + Despret
why dogs often drop the stick they fetch a couple of feet in front of you. it is a way for the dog to give to the human a sense of the limits to the authority that she is ready to concede, with an almost mathematical precision, reminding us that not everything goes without saying ♥
‘communication with animals = being together engaged in work’ :
•learning patience in regard to them
•respecting them as they are ==imply==> you know them & recognise them
•
@Leo
we are required to think about people and animals as **connected in a single experience** (in which they jointly constitute their identities) #chimera
==> (obligates us to consider) the manner in which they keep faith with each other --> they respond to each other through the consequences of their action & their responses are part of the consequences (=/= act based on shared assumptions)
{being a victim ==imply==> passivity + all its consequences}--> *animal is not a victim* [because:]
•saying “animal = victim” =/= (Despret's) mode of being engaged in question
•(don't forget that) ***تقصیرپذیری culpability is easier to tolerate than responsiblity مسئولیتپذیری*** (because responsibility prevents the question from being closed)
•***a victim does not invite curiosity*** <-- curiosity is essential in relations in which two beings learn to look and to look back (Despret + Haraway)
victim =/= (Despret’ anim’ animal, Sina's Cinderella) more alive, more present, they invite more question --> they get the chance to become interesting
•a Cinderella who does her job engages us in a totally different manner than a Cinderella who is the victim of the authority of her evil mother and wicked sisters
(from a clinical standpoint + in human terms) [*]work: gestures, know-how, the involvement of the body and the intelligence, the ability to analyze, interpret and react to situations:
•work transforms the world
•work objectifies intelligence
•work produces subjectivity
work, not only has to do with economic rationality, but participate in other forms of rationality, in relation to:
•identities
•in relationship to God
•obligation and cures
•obedience to Nature or mastering it
•moral rationality --> (Marx's) work: definitve form of expressing their life (a mode of life, Dejours: assertion of the[...]
(57)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%36.2[...]al and methodological priority of the individual
...................................
https://merionwest.com/2018/07/31/purity-politics-is-ruining-progressivism/
prison: mechanism available to remove people from society
[my problem with: political philosophy (of) authentic radical politics -->] (academic or artistic) critical scholarship [critical race theory, post-colonial theory, gender studies, etc. -->{busy with **systemic grievances** (white supremacy, colonialism, racism, etc,)} + left-wing identity politics --> *leftist purity politics*] universalizing a kind of moral complicity ==> a reductionist social ontology of guilt and victimization -->{
•bad idea of the whole (liberalism) is historically associated with, for example, colonialism ==> all of its parts (people, ideas, etc.) are equally associated with colonialism
•the idea of modernity + the rise of the individual ==> (a sense of) loss of community
==>
•participation
◾horizontalism
•institutional distrust
•ad hoc organizations
forensic architecture: purifying itself of (and overcome) injustice =/= meaningful progressive change
(Occupy movement, protest mentality --> how left-wing purity politics missed the) consequences electoral capacity, electoral politics
(not knowing how to use) liberal institutions
•(thinking with Bruzzone -->) we need more *impure politics* : (reform & compromise mentality)
◦how to transform knowledge into *electoral mobilization* (=/= Pierre's interest in fiction, Leo's interest in a morally pure collective future)
◦how to form alliances with groups whom you have grave doubts
•we don't need *hoard of like-minded people sharing collective anger and disgust at injustice*
postmodern conservatism: empirical / ideological
neoliberal societies: hierarchies tolerated by citizens so long as the economy conmy continues to prosper
something happens ==> together --> social group
entitative: the quality of groupiness, a perception that the people together are a group : *perception of similarity*
interaction based on interdependence ==> social group
[*]group: experience of social identity
...................................
[*]embody: empathetically experience situations ‘from outside’
(Despret raising the question) *what can we do or what are we allowed to do with our bodies when we are with our animals?*
[*]empathy: bodies that undo and redo each other (reciprocally though not symmetrically) [=/= experiencing with one's own body what the other experiences]
==> possibilites of an embodied communication
feeling & emotions are not alone in making up what life is all about
(Despret researching) ways in which scientists’ bodies[...]
(60)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%36.4[...]fe.” (Shepard)
[from predation to hunting (there is a huge epistemological shift) (matter of representation and interpretation)]
mammalian ecology
[(let's) risk everything (instead of risk-reducing) --- issues of representation and agency in thinking ‘with’ animals. textual, metaphor animal in Attar line of thinking]
a distant call in known terrain says it is the there, not the here, where attention should be paid. [far, origins of our tropes, metaphysics? abstraction? =/=? motionless hunters invented motionless meditative worship]
-(kinfolk in) swamps, brush, and forest (in terms of discerning the *relationships between clues*)
-(indirect) dealing with the escapable (=?=> tracking strategies + symbolic thought)
a central theme: (a banquet/feast at which) the participants--eater and eaten--risk the improvements of mind against the certainty of occasional poor decisions, (faulty memory, carelessness, errors of judgment, and the decrepitude of age and disease.)
-Those who fled had to understand [the limits of distance, the intentions of the others, and] (the ability to control) the abyssal terror that itself would engulf them if they submitted to panic. ==> mind
-“self” emerged as the consequence of “participation,” a calculative and organizational relatoin of the individual within the group? (and perceiving the so-called “inanimate” entities) --- shaped by the game -- a participant amidst other participants oriented by the action
(David Abraham: Perception is Participation, in an animistic logic)
mind, memory, --> cognition and communication --> reference --> imitating the animal's calls ==> stylized performances ==> (a repertoire of) symbolized references (sign language?) ==> accumulation of synonims (--> we are already consuming symbolic ambition) --> early metaphores --> narratives get out of hand (--> “concrete” is invented) --> [...] (--> narration of past is invented which is always about the future) --> codification of world without tense or causality in language ----> tense & causality ----> pervasive truths
-this diagram is about the future for the subject whom is using the signs, telling the others where the game animal is and will be. in this text i am trying to pantomime a mimicked reference (of where the [game] animal is), sharing the idea of a thing that is syntaxically there, so we can run it. every utterance is about where i have last seen the “animal,” and how fat or far it is. [running had “magical ends” - Peter Nabokov, ‘Indian Running’ (Santa Barbara: Capra, 1981)]
symbolism --> man traveling within himself --> need to travel outside an infinitely larger reality ==> beyond --- different brand(s) of infinity
secular hunting --- the hunt becomes monstrous. i am calling for an old sacred hunt [sustained in myth and ceremony?] of concepts?
-hunt is gestalt(en)
(w[...]
(61)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%40.3[...]ized. At the meeting-place of the Vadegah-e Ghiamat, at The Resurrection, The Last judgment, this text will greet me, as all writing is resurrected and approaching their authors, while we tremble together to the other-side.
#For those who love stones.
better that your tomb be the hearts of men
a symbolic geography of the land of fireplaces, poses a landscape which creats its own generation of eyes.
their minds each a fireplace
...................................
Sohrevardi, in one of his stories, proposes a creature in darkness with no senses, blind and deaf. still he recieves a mail, an incoming call, in the dark.
elsewhere, the agency of fire (khasiate fa'ale atash) <-- bizari az khala (abhorrence of vacuum/void?)
the extraordinary honor of fire is because of its ability to move more sublime than any other. fire is related to movement. stillness is darkness and lack of ‘cause’ --> if you move, you create the ‘cause’ of movement in the world, in the beings that sense that movement, interpret it, and absorb your movement: the movement is semiotic, because it generates/proposes/sustains/initiates causality--not in the sense that your movement has consequence, but it that it risks semiotically in the eyes of the beholder a causation ‘of’ movement prior to the mover.
tabiate atash shabihe jan ast (nature of fire is like essence of life)
(for ancient iranians) fire became thus Qibla
fire: atashe mahsus (sensable fire,) khalife anvare maghul (deputy of intellectual illuminations)
(not stewardship?)
(Empedocles) “only with fire fire can be seen.”
...................................
(what complicates?) the itinerary of claims we make about the world and its contractions
the expansive fields of immanence and trancendence we can read in fire fossil
<br />
our contract with Allah
with fire we are at a testing site, at least of the the God of the Old Testament who showed a will to perpetual pursuit, perpetual rupture, fire is a testing device for subsidiary admission policy. this function or figure is precisly that which permeats modern existance
...drafts that describe an outer domain of signification
contaminative and communicative
...................................
in talking about our agreements with fire, i like to read how our rapport to the beyond has mutated (--undergone considerable mutations--) by means of our adherence to the imperatives of... trial by fire(?), test of the beyond. ==> our relation to (explanatory and descriptive) language, truth, process, and identity. (---> go to Ferdosi's poetic site)
what kind of grid the fire produces?
beyond cannot be tested, it tests you***
testability? we want everyone and everything teste[...]
(62)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%40.9[...]gation of life - that has invented a visual form for itself)
(its social practices)
fire, not subordinate, as spectacle comes as means of unification, locus of illusion, generalized apparition --> seperation
(its general truth) fire untouched by evolution and form binding constrains, is a universal mater, the spectacle of burning flame manifests itself as a positivity out of reach and beyond. the case of fire is different than Deobord spectalcle who speaks: “Everything that appears is good; whatever is good will appear.”
therefore fire specatle is not image, rather social relationship between subjects that are mediated by it
thus the function and phenomenon of separation mediated by fire becomes part and parcel of the unity of the world, from now on
-a new form of the sacred emerged with the discovery of fire's image
-produced new worshipful subjection
the language of the fire as spectacle is composed of signs that talk to Moses, Zaratostra, and others
-in this writing i like to rewind theology and pause at the moment Moses meets Fire in mount sinai, go after some media theoretic specualtions, asking what are the conditions of this (inter)mediated encounter? and what are the consequences of talking to fire? (technicity and affectibilty)
(mount sinai : cradle of stone, rendered dead matter when ‘he’ comes out of stone-age)
•the Israelite's God, who appeared “by day as a cloud and by night as a fire” (Exodus 13:21)
[fire and brimstone, an idiomatic expression of signs of God's wrath in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and the New Testament.] --> the fate of the unfaithful
(--> perceptible to the naked of the prohpet)
fire's mechanisms of contemplation
(in my preaching here i won't do what christians used to encourage repentence)
it is important not to put fire in abstract opposition to concret stone activity
mystic order ~?-> spectacular order
the spectalce of fire reciprocal alienation was part and parcel of human social life and its essence underpinning its relations to the real
diversities and contrasts in looking into the image of flame
what is already in society that fire (spectacle) gives expression? the beyond
(fire, we are) governed by its agenda
***monopolization of the realm of appearances*** (excluding other illusions, apparition, tellings, etc.)
-with fire a new brand of storytelling
***fire's spectacular aspect (accumulated to the point that) produces an image-object that is a seperate entity [accumulation --> generality/category --> new object], that of the mediated, from the fire itself, a second objecthood detached from its materiality, introduing transcendent immateriality --?--> metaphysics
-taking over life and existence
[...]
(63)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%41.4[...]◦iconic representation & indexical indication
==> intensification (of the efficacy of chimeric images) : “capture the eye = capture the imagination” + demand that by projection [the observer] mentally “complete” the image
indexical signs have a causal contiguity (spatiotemporal contiguity) with what they signify
ritual action and artistic creation --Severi--> synesthetic
(my lecture-performances? ~ chimeric image of chiefs’ talk [khotbe خطبه fluent at combining different aesthetic resources] -->) linguistic + extralinguistic media in ritual performance (working/producing visual + mental images)
--> combining of indexical signs in communication acts ==> poetry of identities-in-motion (capable of projecting complex images of a nonvisual kind)
[*]image: an abstract portrait of identity fashioned out of cumulating patterns of congruence across all manner of indexical signs--including visual ones--that addressees and audiences can imaginatively experience, like a hologram
(Silverstein > Guerreiro)
~~--> ***relation between poetics and the production of identities***
chimerical representation: an art of ambiguity
(Strauss's Amazonian ethnology -->) dualism in perpetual disequilibrium: centripetal forces of centralization + centrifugal forces of dispersion
@apass ==> “societies against the state”
complex relations between hierarchy and counterhierarchy
(--> Renan's notion of monologue)
[Clastres's model rooted in Western language ideology looking at Amerindian language:]
metahistorical bond between *power & speech* cannot be conceived of separately
•state societies --> the word is a ‘right’ to power (that may be used to command)
•societies against the state --> the word is a ‘duty’ of the chief (an indigenous leader must be capable of offering society the words that it ‘demands’)
•Amerindian chief: a voice preaching in the wilderness (literally says nothing, a repetition of “edifying discourse”) <-- his speech is not spoken in order to be listened to (~ ritualized act [=/= act of communication]) ==> chief's speech is transformed into pure value (~= poet's speech for whom words are values before they are signs) --> (for Clastres) language =/= violence: a facet of coercive power
denotative قوه تفکيک ()
predicative (Dickensian aspect)
referential (the efficacy of its context and meaning depends on something else)
enunciation (pragmatic) ==> effects on the enunciator + audience ~~Silverstein--> [*]politics: the dynamic arrangement and rearrangement of people as subjects within structures of actual and potential action of all sort --comprises--> poetics <== everything experienced as effective practice is formed semiotically (~ through sign)
*political oratory [=/= informing the content of a message] uses poetical r[...]
(64)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%44.1[...]) -->
•treat illness
•accompany rite of passage
•impart magical powers
-
(amerindian) shamanism --> establishes a metaphorical link, a set of analogies ~= mystical relationships between ritual objects and living being [--> construct its own truthuniverse, supernatural dimension thought of a possible world]
bleeding pearl
parallelism : (a technique of) threading verbal images together
[Severi's early interpretation of] tradition (would need to) preserve the text + instructions to use --by--> verbalizing them (store them in the chant)
Kuna --> description of the position of the speaker (“shaman is now seated there and is saying...”) characterizes the special kind of communication (appropriate for ritual changing)
shaman: novel sort of enunciator (lending his voice to other invisible beings --> plural and contradictory identity)
acoustic mask: a reflexive means to define the ritual identity of the speaker
reflexive application of parallelism
(@Isabel, how to make community without becoming a cult?)
use snake --> capture the imagination of the followers ==> authority
imagistic (iconic mode, sequence of acid) + doctrinal (discursive mode, text, prayer) = pragmatics context of enunciation ==> messianistic religion
both paradoxical & parallelistic
new ways to be faithful...
...................................
exhibition-making and preventive conservation --> inspection and exposition <-- (different understandings and use of) *touch = curatorial*
professionalisation of curating
short-term education
cultural exchange
@apass feedback: (terrain of) peer engagement --> understanding each other’s practices
education, research, literacy, management, networking, custodianship, audience development
research (overdue) relationship with intelligence --✕--> **research: adventure of charismas**
...to be migratory (in thought, praxis, community)
...subjectivities without a heritage in criticality and art
constraint: a source of self-abundance --Renan--> suffering and risk = opportunities to hybridize with life
curating:
•nutrition and extension
•analysis and transplantation
•=/= content historicization
•=/= data
extraterritoriality
being collocated in all the whispers of the world
wild pollination
artificial breeding
Renan: Institutional work carried by a freelancer, a private individual or a civil servant can improve the publicness of art. It gives confidence to the work of art in public service. This institutionality creates new tasks in art that can be sustained by other pr[...]
(65)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%44.5[...]
•it is an aesthetic dream, dream of ismorphism between the discursive object and the visible object
•exteriorization of the body (relation between face / hand / tool )
•The “exact meeting place” of form, matter, tool, and hand is the touch(Henri Focillon)
•
////////////////////////
In this interconnection of embodied being and environing world, what happens in the interface is what is important.
--Don Ihde, Bodies in Technology
At first glance, strapped to the body of critters such as green turtles in Shark Bay, off Western Australia, humpback whales in the waters off southeast Alaska, and emperor penguins in Antarctica, a nifty miniature video camera is the central protagonist. Since the first overwrought seventeenth-century European discussions about the camera lucida and camera obscura, within technoculture the camera (the technological eye)seems to be the central object of both philosophical pretension and selfcertainty, on the one hand, and cultural skepticism and the authenticitydestroying powers of the artificial, on the other hand. The camera--that vault or arched chamber, that judge's chamber--moved from elite Latin to the vulgar, democratic idiom in the nineteenth century only as a consequence of a new technology called photography, or “light-writing.” A camera became a black-box with which to register pictures of the outside world in a representational, mentalist, and sunny semiotic economy, an analogy to the seeing eye in brainy, knowing man, for whom body and mind are suspicious strangers, if also near neighbors in the head. Nonetheless, no matter how gussied up with digitalized optical powers, the camera has never lost its job to function as a judge's chamber, in camera, within which the facts of the world--indeed, the critters of the world--are assayed by the standard of the visually convincing and, at least as important, the visually new and exciting.
... first we have to plough through some very predictable semiotic road blocks that try to limit us to a cartoonish epistemology about visual self-evidence and the lifeworlds of human-animal-technology compounds.
Gilbert stresses that nothing makes itself in the biological world, but rather reciprocal induction within and between always-in-process critters ramifies through space and time on both large and small scales in cascades of inter- and intra-action. In embryology, Gilbert calls this “interspecies epigenesis."43 Gilbert writes: “I think that the ideas that Lynn [Margulis] and I have are very similar; it's just that she was focusing on adults and I want to extend the concept (as I think the science allows it to be fully extended) to embryos. I believe that the embryonic co-construction of the physical bodies has many more implications because it means that we were ‘never’ individuals”
caring: becoming subject to the unsettling obligation of curiosity, w[...]
(66)[...otes on kinect performance.txt]%45.9[...]s, the surface also can be viewed as a site for screening and projection.
The surfaces of the screens that surround us today express a new materiality as they convey the virtual transformation of our material relations. And these screens, which have become membranes of contact, exist in our environments in close relation to the surfaces of canvas and walls—also undergoing a process of substantial transformation. And so it is here—in this meeting place that is surface—that art forms are becoming reconnected and creating new, hybrid forms of admixture.
who shares (deep) engagements with superficial matters?
layered space of interaction between subject and object
surface can be read as an architecture
from mediated encounters with material space to mobilization of cultural space (the exhibition)
memory, imagination, and affect are linked to movement -- embodied in jungle walk?
/>
modernity's desire and fancy for tactile experience, driving and impulse to expand one's universe and eventually to project it, to exhibit personal passionate voyage of imagination -- effects of a spectatorial movement that is evolving further in Selfie. that is the emergence of such sequential virtues motion capturing that comes to inhibit the train of thought = interconnection in the sequence of ideas expressed during a connected discourse and how this sequence leads from one idea to another (modernity).
(i don't do filmic voyage)
...................................
By Consequence, or train of thoughts, I understand that succession of one thought to another which is called, to distinguish it from discourse in words, mental discourse.
“When a man thinketh on anything whatsoever, his next thought after is not altogether so casual as it seems to be. Not every thought to every thought succeeds indifferently.” (— Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, The First Part: Part: Of Man, Chapter III: Of the Consequence or Train of Imagination)
...................................
the current forms of biotic forests is due to the spreading of seed-dispersing plants millions years ago (what about abiotic? Kinect)
one of issues related with rate/speed is synchronicity
the effects of biotechnically / bioculturaly situated people
Amazon's nature in opposition to slave gardens (slave plantation systems with factory machine) (along with imperial botanical gardens)
for travel and propagation of...
moving material semiotic
part-time organisms
when visuality is looked at in a haptic modality (the tentacular face for example), vision can be figured as touch, not distance. negatively curving in loops and frills, not surveying(/surviving) from above.
...................................
when a depiction (poetic, v[...]
(67)[...notes/notes.txt]%47.7[...]unement, and attention
low-tech works may be critical for developing a visuality that is not yet integral to or explicit within new media, visualising the specifically neurological dimension of ecologicity and mobilizing vision as a perceiving organ to cultivate this self-awareness.
...................................
(McKenzie Wark)
climate science, a key science of our time, rests on an apparatus of very powerful computers and communication vectors, which overcome the “friction”, as Paul Edwards calls it, between data and communication. it brings together global data according to global standards, mathematical models of physics of climate drawn from fluid dynamics, and massive computational power. the model and data coproduce each other in a way, as the data sets are all partial, and many data points have to be interpolated to make the models work. and then all of that has to be mediated back to human awareness via tables, graphs, computer simulations, and so forth.
...................................
(Irmgard Emmelhainz)
(anthropocene) change in the conditions of visuality
transformation of the world into images
phenomenological + epistemological consequences
images participate now in the forming of worlds, they have also become forms of thought
the optical mind
the radical change in the conditions of visuality has brought about a new subject position or point of view, announce by the trajectories of:
1. antihumanism (between impressionism and cubism)
2. posthumanism (between cubism and experimental film)
3. non-grounded form of vision (from experimental film to digital media)
this regime of visuality implies: automatization, tautological vision, and signs leading to other signs
resulted to => the proliferation of images also implying the cancellation of vision
“vision cancelled”
linearity of the Renaissance perspective plan created the illusion of a view to the outside world, analogous to a window.
cubism: showing a perpetual present in a parallel temporality.
perspectival multiplicity became embedded in the picture plane.
invented a discontinuous space, making identity and difference relative (questioning the classical metaphysics), by subverting the relations between subject and object.
does my Kinect pictural model employs the architectural space? is camera architectural?
in experimental film, duration became a key component of aesthetic experience, analogous to human consciousness, a prosthetic vision
identity and difference, rejection of a priori space
how to release the subject from human coordinates? what are references to human coordinates? screen's rectangular frame?
the machine (optical perc[...]
(72)[...notes/notes.txt]%47.9[...] 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 gaze. But the evil eye is precisely so powerful and real because of its ability to name the uncanny event of encounter. “Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic.”[12]
[Serres]
does experimentation, in art science, excludes subjectivity? More the importance of experiment on self. Returning the aim back to knowledge, instead of the division of knowledge. Our subjectivity is not an illusion to be overcomed, but that is another part of reality.
Displacement on the space of myth. Myth informs science.
To know is to navigate between local fragments of space , to reject techniques of[...]
(73)[...notes/notes.txt]%49.2[...] exchange)
...the court of words---in ikhvano safa animals demonstration
...when the market of life has closed down
faith and substitution of meaning
how can i tear you from your vows, and not myself use vows?
The faiths that are sworn (before every exchange or change)
a word for a woman bound by another sacred word --> breaking your oaths---in the age of ... (message to the tribalist, the son)
Don Juan: yesterday you gave me your word to come to dine with me.
A beautiful woman: yes where must i go?
Don Juan: give me your hand.
a madman /
outside the law of reason, a dog /
outside the law of man, a devil /
outside the law of god, a...
The hypocrite pays in appearance
devil dubing/subtitling the society of reasonable men
..mad dogs
law directs the circulation of goods. What does it mean for an object oriented thought?
Law directs the circulation of goods, women, promise; of representations, insults, jests
i, as the text of sina, will show you that...
An ordering relation is irreflexive, antisymmetric, and transitive
sequential to consequential
(the concern of narrative)
order of reason (one order among many other sequences)
reason has immense consequences, so does aesthetics
betterable better : finding a stronger one---Kelileh Demneh
the case is of a maximum
the tree of the “better”
a whole forest hidden by a single tree
‘possibility’ is always the higher point on the tree
if you kill me now, my time freezes and its order disappears.
(said sheep to the wolf)
relative relations and absolute limit; he is the master of future
where do you come from? : this is of your clan : irreversible genealogical tree : complete model of kinship (for the ordered structure)
the idea of non-destruction is strange in nature, as if there is a notion of construction in nature, establishes a responsibility.
Care, claims to have suffer
at the end; you are the cause, i am the effect.
Perfect, is free of the psychologism of hypocrisy
•hypocrisy comes from the word to judge
stable structures and dialectical processes are inseparable
(each choice associated with a location on the tree)
(best) reason always permits a winning game (?)
might into right and obedience into duty, that is transforming force into factual necessity, by the stronger. Obedience into law. This is Rousseau
means to have access to the inaccessible
the exact sciences the optimal relationship from subject to object, conceived since the classical ages
A slave who, while sleeping, dreams t[...]
(74)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%49.8[...]ent to another. From a point of view outside the system ambiguity must be added to increase the system's complexity
theory of change (in sign)
what are the unconsciousnesses of integration?
(many) interlocking (black) boxes
obstacles do organise, noise becomes dialect
they come crashing at our feet
in the forms of eros and death
like surf at the edge of the beach
unconscious is the last black observer of chance
aging, is a process we understand as the drifting of information into background noise
عجایب المخلوقات ajayeb al makhlughat, anamnesis, memory, and everything imaginable
body creates language from information and noise
one who utters language, is the receiver at the end chain, the final observer. But the initial dispatcher is (always) unknown.
Ajayeb, make? a chance-program couple
to perform both:
•i am submerged in (its) signal exchanges
•i observe its global set of exchanges
introspection veers off into experience
as Freud, who started from energy models of thermodynamics, has intuited, everything occurs by a dynamic of language, the subsequent development of thermodynamics into information theory.
Knowledge is always linked to an observer
we are drifting towards noise and black depths of the universe...
knowledge is at most the reversal of drifting, that strange conversion of times, always paid for by additional drift; but this is complexity itself, which was once called being
...................................
Auguste Comte says: in light of previous experience we must acknowledge that impossibility determining, by direct measurement, most of the heights and distances we like to know.
Thales, geometry as ruse
construction of summary
operation of application
use of metrics
in applied sciences
(often) measurement is the essential element of application,
but primary in the touch (sensory)
practice <--> ruse <--> theory
we need a ‘ruse’ to go from practice to theory
(mathematics? Is this why young philosophers are lured into math?)
the length my body cannot reach, sun, horizon, the far side of the river
greek idea of theorize: see
sight: by “placing” measurement, measurement by sighting
greek:
vision is tactile without contact
Descartes knew this better than anyone
inaccessible (is at times) accessible to vision
the ruler (the mode notion of module) has been placed accurately on the thing
the eye is a witness of covering-over
to measure is to relate
but, the ‘relation’ implies a transporting, of the ruler
(we[...]
(78)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%50.3[...]are threatening to fixate?]
how Iran named its Iran-Iraq war? Défense sacrée, the Holy Defense, دفاع مقدس, (and many other names)
how did we “have” an experience---after the war? (much less an adventure or an adventurous encounter with history pumped up with meaning and sense-making and productive futurity)
to tabulate
ok, i am refering to things that don't come up as part of the master discourse, things that don't come up as something we can assimilate (جذب) or appropriate
towards the gaze --> a theatrical gesture : to see everything serenely (in quiet contemplation) --> to be (at last) free from the Gods
(those who believe that) there is only transcendence, (that transcendence is all there is)
(this is also the common mistake in reading Iranian old mystic literature)
cruel hallucinations
laws criss-cross the world
...for i am a slave of science
the chain of orders : the new is born of the old =/= angle (interrupts the stoic chain, the chain of cause and effect)
extermination and determination
laws of identity, repetition, and information-free
death at the end of entropy --> sequence of events (from the point of view of plague narrative --> the law is the plague + the reason is the fall [--> everything falls to zero])
the same ~=?! non-being
drops of knowledge
physics of the military*
•sheets of atoms
•well-ordered arranges
•in columns
•the learned science of the teachers
•the structure of division
•Heraclitean physics of war
•chain of reason
•the knowledge of ranks
-
(in nature?) animals are born from flows
animals born from fluid mechanics
the infinite cylinder of parallel consequences, trains of reason rain down in torrent:
•contact space travel, doctor strange kick trip, lucy time travel, matrix clock scene
what is the analogy with the concrete model? In each case
what is the order of the world that is explained by visible phenomenon in each of these cinematic scenes?
The beginning of vortex
causality
perspective
body
(what are?) models in ajayeb:
concretes, quasi-concretes, laws, equations,
vortices, turbulent clouds,
random dispersions,
flows, disequilibrias,
packs, alliances, conventions,
struggles with nature, alliances,
downhills, slopes,
content, norms, results,
the model and theory are both necessitarians
(how can this be explained materially?)
(what is the opposite of ‘people’?)
“physics”: the global contract (=/= global conflict; promise of physics), the general scheme of things (that scientists agree on)
f[...]
(79)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%50.6[...]ntemplation) --> to be (at last) free from the Gods
(those who believe that) there is only transcendence, (that transcendence is all there is)
(this is also the common mistake in reading Iranian old mystic literature)
cruel hallucinations
laws criss-cross the world
...for i am a slave of science
the chain of orders : the new is born of the old =/= angle (interrupts the stoic chain, the chain of cause and effect)
extermination and determination
laws of identity, repetition, and information-free
death at the end of entropy --> sequence of events (from the point of view of plague narrative --> the law is the plague + the reason is the fall [--> everything falls to zero])
the same ~=?! non-being
drops of knowledge
physics of the military*
•sheets of atoms
•well-ordered arranges
•in columns
•the learned science of the teachers
•the structure of division
•Heraclitean physics of war
•chain of reason
•the knowledge of ranks
-
(in nature?) animals are born from flows
animals born from fluid mechanics
the infinite cylinder of parallel consequences, trains of reason rain down in torrent:
•contact space travel, doctor strange kick trip, lucy time travel, matrix clock scene
what is the analogy with the concrete model? In each case
what is the order of the world that is explained by visible phenomenon in each of these cinematic scenes?
The beginning of vortex
causality
perspective
body
(what are?) models in ajayeb:
concretes, quasi-concretes, laws, equations,
vortices, turbulent clouds,
random dispersions,
flows, disequilibrias,
packs, alliances, conventions,
struggles with nature, alliances,
downhills, slopes,
content, norms, results,
the model and theory are both necessitarians
(how can this be explained materially?)
(what is the opposite of ‘people’?)
“physics”: the global contract (=/= global conflict; promise of physics), the general scheme of things (that scientists agree on)
flow did not follow (the general theorem of mechanics)
[@Sana] (why is it important) to describe flow in all its concrete complexity (--> Freud describes psychological flow in his work on libido)
----> formation of living systems
#the mindful stochastic knowledge of phenomenas#
Sohrevardi's work on the soul out of the tangible realm
(if your house or town is on an ocean the chosen model is a fluid one =/= polyhedron crystal) --> how would Sohrevardi choose a model? What would he think of fluid systems? [--> The Solids of...]
what are his rigorous bodies?
in Sohrevardi the[...]
(80)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%50.7[...]tion, and information-free
death at the end of entropy --> sequence of events (from the point of view of plague narrative --> the law is the plague + the reason is the fall [--> everything falls to zero])
the same ~=?! non-being
drops of knowledge
physics of the military*
•sheets of atoms
•well-ordered arranges
•in columns
•the learned science of the teachers
•the structure of division
•Heraclitean physics of war
•chain of reason
•the knowledge of ranks
-
(in nature?) animals are born from flows
animals born from fluid mechanics
the infinite cylinder of parallel consequences, trains of reason rain down in torrent:
•contact space travel, doctor strange kick trip, lucy time travel, matrix clock scene
what is the analogy with the concrete model? In each case
what is the order of the world that is explained by visible phenomenon in each of these cinematic scenes?
The beginning of vortex
causality
perspective
body
(what are?) models in ajayeb:
concretes, quasi-concretes, laws, equations,
vortices, turbulent clouds,
random dispersions,
flows, disequilibrias,
packs, alliances, conventions,
struggles with nature, alliances,
downhills, slopes,
content, norms, results,
the model and theory are both necessitarians
(how can this be explained materially?)
(what is the opposite of ‘people’?)
“physics”: the global contract (=/= global conflict; promise of physics), the general scheme of things (that scientists agree on)
flow did not follow (the general theorem of mechanics)
[@Sana] (why is it important) to describe flow in all its concrete complexity (--> Freud describes psychological flow in his work on libido)
----> formation of living systems
#the mindful stochastic knowledge of phenomenas#
Sohrevardi's work on the soul out of the tangible realm
(if your house or town is on an ocean the chosen model is a fluid one =/= polyhedron crystal) --> how would Sohrevardi choose a model? What would he think of fluid systems? [--> The Solids of...]
what are his rigorous bodies?
in Sohrevardi the *order* is of the ...[?] {of the world? Of the street? Of the code? Laboratory? Of the operative? Civil? Logical? Social? Scholastic?
more phenomenological ~=?(&?) less measured
(the river of phenomena is physics)
they put (ajayeb's) nature outside nature, (placing it in the subject, and so on)
which facts “are” the foundation of materialism?
-(the idea they says) classical knowledge deserves classical philosophy
(#?%$@x*!!!---->) if there are monsters here, go elsewhere(!)
what? / how? --[...]
(81)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%50.7[...] not follow (the general theorem of mechanics)
[@Sana] (why is it important) to describe flow in all its concrete complexity (--> Freud describes psychological flow in his work on libido)
----> formation of living systems
#the mindful stochastic knowledge of phenomenas#
Sohrevardi's work on the soul out of the tangible realm
(if your house or town is on an ocean the chosen model is a fluid one =/= polyhedron crystal) --> how would Sohrevardi choose a model? What would he think of fluid systems? [--> The Solids of...]
what are his rigorous bodies?
in Sohrevardi the *order* is of the ...[?] {of the world? Of the street? Of the code? Laboratory? Of the operative? Civil? Logical? Social? Scholastic?
more phenomenological ~=?(&?) less measured
(the river of phenomena is physics)
they put (ajayeb's) nature outside nature, (placing it in the subject, and so on)
which facts “are” the foundation of materialism?
-(the idea they says) classical knowledge deserves classical philosophy
(#?%$@x*!!!---->) if there are monsters here, go elsewhere(!)
what? / how? --> by contract or by strategy?
the ‘question’ is always consequential, never naive or frivolous
we need? workers (=/= generals)
we need? contracts (=/= strategy)
(how can i understand my “strategies” and my “contracts” ?! contractual agreements that i use or depend on or produce in my research and work with ajayeb, and in relation to the others in my performances--{my vocabulary, thinking with me, (un)learning with me, etc}--and even prior to the event of our encouter, the binding transferential contract in relation to the one who speaks) ~~--> (and issuing its) betrayal
strategy --(always? [should?] ends with)-->? contract; (for example, making peace treaty after war)
[]
{*strategy, “art of generals,” from French stratégie, from Greek strategia “office or command of a general,” from strategos “general,” from stratos “multitude, army, expedition,” literally “that which is spread out” (--> “structure”) + agos “leader,” from agein “to lead” (--> “act”).}
(strategy/contract/...)
***science is conditioned but unconditional***
(Serres:) science is 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 rel[...]
(82)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%50.7[...]w
no one is better endowed by nature for trickery than a Greek. These masters invented dichotomy, separation, and partition. ... They invented the theory of the specificity of various realms (~ cosmology?)
their divisions and clarifications ==> “we today have the weak and awkward fancy to read the world as polysemic and out of sync”, polytomy {from Greek: πολυ-, poly-, “many” and σῆμα, sêma, “sign” ==> multiple semes or sememes and thus multiple senses. ---(soft/hard) polysemous ontologies---(polytomy =/= homonymy اشتراک لفظی ,یک لفظ =/= synonymy یک معنی)} ~--> the awareness of any metabasis to another genre, “discrete” (--> 3D apps today)
(Greek) mathematic =/= illusionist
“if there is a separate field in which no one can keep cards up their sleeves without being resoundingly defeated, it is definitely mathematics.” (Serres)
Greeks theory of segments in the representation of distinct worlds *** (when one uses greek technologies today, which worlds are rendered distinct?)
mathematics, myth, medicine, theory of exchange, ...
Serres's field trip
(Lucretius and our answer to the) what is a living thing?
•! a thing in equilibrium and disequilibrium, a flow, a vortex, heat, etc
•atomist physics
what ‘abundance’ means for Juan?
For me? for Sa'di in golestan...?
abundance is when it seems the artist hasn't put limitations on the flow of signs and meanings.
#my basic methods(?): abundancies, adjacencies,
~-/?--> simplest complex, simplex (concern of comparative topology) ~= the stable network of compositions
my ajayeb hypertext, what is there the specific ‘law of putting together letters’ ([and atoms?] to produce a text)? That means the question of Greekness and syntax technology, and my reworking articulated
•alphabetical proto cloud (Serres) --?--> without law, random
•what are the laws of ‘good combination’ that i am reworking or resisting or acquiring or answering to, in my ajayeb hypertext? (how composition is reproduced?)
--> (the law enunciates [تلفظ کردن ,مژده دادن] the federated,) * the law repeats the fact =/= the ‘things’ of ajayeb are (still) in the process of being formed (--> the morality of reading that i am working on)
(in the facts of the law there is no space between things and language is reduced to zero)
-language and things are born together with the very same process (Serres - Hermes.) --> stable gathering of elements
•ajayeb's version of the network of primordial elements in communication with each other
my interest in the devil is in the details of my makings (and others)
--> to touch details that establishes a direct contact
...................................
“Venus states the foedus, the contract, as an [...]
(83)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%50.9[...]the freedom from emotional attachment was developed since early middle ages for merchants in order to (in a meddieval sense) *trade* =/= melancholic introspective contemplative efforts of faith]
------[apatheia: eradicating the tendency to react emotionally or egotistically to external events, ~ equanimity, =/= indifference*@Sven; (metriopatheia: men between the excess and deficiency of emotions;) a form of response to the world? ]
@Sven:
•interdifference [open systems between or among (in)differences?] --> interindifference --> entering differences, enter in diff
•intradifference [closed system inside or within (in)differences?]
Nature is rivers and whirl winds
streaming of mortality
Greek preference of ‘fall’ over ‘transition’:
things arrive and occur and only crumble and disintegrate for a unique figurative case*
symptom, a natural object, materialism
{the intersection of independent causal chains ==> river rise of chance occurrence}
@Seba's new planet story workshop & @Sana: what generate things, spinning the wheel, streaming flow, cascades (global fluidity of local solids,) *principles of heat* (that make worlds and bodies,) the *state of disequilibrium* (of the world [for Seba] & of the soul [for Sana])
***what is the name of disturbance?
(i have been proposing Sana to mix physics and psychology)
what are moral mortals linked to?
anguish and anxiety (in the absence of God, after the death of God)
#archive
thermodynamic time:
“...we have to mark irreversible time on the clock. It ticks away. Irreversibly, marking degradation. The things that were formed in the hollows of the vortices lose their atoms little by little in the downstream flow. [...] time of heat, weight and flow.” (Serres)
(Greek idea of) history is only the translation or transposition of this material principle.
--> (thermodynamic principle of) archive: hollow man up to the erosion of irreversible time
-vector of the progressive civilization going up stream (in the tropic river)
in archive invariability is global =/= irreversibility & chance
([i am more interested in the] obstacles in front of the) well-founded “conjoined world”
system statue
that which can be touched and tested
constant general random invariabilities in primordial path of matter
(**Serres:) morality = physics
(--> the image of physical collision and causality simulation --> morality)
--> what is then the image of the CG artist in the world? The wise man in and of the world, friend of the world, extended to the global universe:
*this is an important moment in Greek Wisdom, man is not an stranger but at home in world, (a disturbance a vortex in turbulent nature,) in contract with Venus =/= (br[...]
(84)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%51.1[...]rating functions in the city
place, space, face,
in the history, the leg-less-stone and the lying-visage have been together. a study of apparition must include the physical material as well, not as counterparts, rather as its play-mate.
...................................
the structure of space in San'an poetry
distinction between subject and object, between signifier and signified, encompassing the whole of dualistic logic through its branching patterns, through its definitions of set pathways between root and branch.
the Arborescent model of relationships in San'an story?
The rhizome likewise resists structures of domination, such as the notion of “the mother tongue” in linguistics, though it does admit to ongoing cycles of what Deleuze refers to as “deterritorializing” and “reterritorializing” moments.
...................................
about my performances:
“There is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author). Rather, an assemblage establishes connections between certain multiplicities drawn from each of these orders, so that a book has no sequel nor the world as its object nor one or several authors as its subject.”
(Deleuze - Rhizome)
...consists not in an argument, but in the ecstatic elaboration of a metaphor, a web of interconnected concepts, the development of a new vocabulary without a pause for explanation or so much as a simple definition.
“...a mapping rather than a tracing”
“What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious”
“It fosters connections between fields, the removal of blockagesckages... “
(removing some blockages of meaning-lock in San'an)
my lecture, emphasizes the rhizomatic to foster imaginative work that challenges typical critical forms.
not to overlook the working of matters, and the exteriority of their relations.
(in a book, a lecture, etc.) there are lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification.
(what are Attar's Sheikh's actual authority as a teacher?)
(George Makdisi: “Madrasa and University in the Middle Ages”)
[...] “Perhaps the most fundamental difference between the two systems is embodied in their systems of certification; namely, in medieval Europe, the licentia docendi, or license to teach; in medieval Islam, the ijazah, or authorization. In Europe, the license to teach was a license to teach a certain field of knowledge. It was conferred b[...]
(85)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%52.3[...]ested in other lives other that San'an's that are worth living?
although we see again and again in Islamic social order the hierarchical structured relationships, I like to show the otherwise in mystic stances, and argue that the model doesn't remain static normative from the master-disciple to the authority and dependence lock, that the master-disciple relationship doesn't affirm the divine order.
and San'an is also against the notion that Sufi man is without the need of a feminine principle.
we are presented with will of the Tarsaa, the destination of San'an, and the poetic representation is feminine. the female image is strong. although at the end it has to give up -- she converts to his style. the will of the disciple is not replaced by the will of the guide, the master himself doesn't have a will.
The Tarsaa is supervising San'an's diet, sleep, and speech
[I have become more interested in the term ‘tradition'---and more suspicious of preoccupations such as ‘invention’ as modernized and capitalist terms.]
tradition: an act of memory based on a salience-effect of shared knowledge
(ein Akt der Erinnerung basiert auf einer Hervorspringen-Effekt der gemeinsamen Kenntnisse)
-there is a sequence (where is the individual terms within it?)
-my storytelling is about: describing relations of inversion, extension, inclusion, analogy, etc. between mythical, lyrical, or even scientific ‘beings’ that are (1) *conventional* (recognizable repertoire), and (2) *closed* (refer to certain predefined situations and symbols)
==> I work-with and bypass with these aspects in Attar, Hafez, Ajā'ib al-makhlūqāt, etc.
the performance of ‘stop’ in San'an
sign-functions that cannot be stopped
the master-pupil lock
‘locken’ is also to lure, seduce, etc.
thank you for becoming my students, temporarily
we are not locked, and not necessarily unlocked
what is concealed behind the special effects of the awesome signifier in San'an's story?
concealed =/= canceled
in Rumi every word is pass-word. you don't translate a password! (fallacy of the literal)
•all same-sex relationships are hierarchical and dyadic (of two, ‘paarweise’ in German)?
and are based on the cultural diagram of the master-disciple relationship in Sufi orders?
Sufi order =/=? flirtation
mystic, is one mode of subjectivity emerged in the middle eastern thought--- a prototype of closeness and removal.
in Rumi--Masnavi's third book--the un-concentrated Sheikh (- story of Daghughi - شیخ دقوقی) is scandalously abandoned by his devotees. they broke his heart.
[Plot: Daghughi and his disciples are in deep trance beside a beach. a shi[...]
(86)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%54[...]br />
Nearness was struggling to open the year Secret sea wave was in my heart.
Chest particle seek love from ambush.
Ka'ba gave birth to Don Juan's love: prominent wander unseen love.
It was all a bit too much.
Who are you going to get me?
Contact your building, because it is the principle.
I was connected to hope.
Contact finds The Familiar.
*Find a burn in The Separation!
Open the old! Girl said, “Heyyy ‘captured,’ my cabin is expensive and very poor for you! Gold and silver should know about me. When the wireless gold separates the fibers of the head, the sun shall be a person. Wait and be a Man!”
Sheikh said, “A tall cypress wire! To the head! Testament has no good. But you do not have one beautiful Negar (نگار). Finally, keep hands off these practices. Each tail of another type of tail. It had your blood without you. I was working on you. It was intercepted. ...were in love with each: Infidelity and Islam and loss and profit. You wait a few days. You did not like that with me. The friends turned against me, enemies of my soul. ‘He is such and such,’ because I am. Die was not me and not die, because I am. I'm an excellent nature---with you in Hell without you in Heaven.”
The sequel came because Sheikh, man, hell burned that month of her pain, said an unfinished ‘ever’. “I now keep racing pigs a year.” A year has passed, both together. To share in the joys and sorrows of life.
Sheikh's commands will give pigs a year. In hundred pig's anywhere, around dead pigs. You're a nobody, so that's no suspicion.
He was an old-enough risk.
---This risk is within each person.
Meal, that comes out of head's trip. If you are aware of their pig-finals: a hard excuse, that the Ra-man is final.
If you step on the path of forbidding the working-man, (both Betty and nose pig hundred thousand,) catch pigs!
Idols burning The ‘Why’ of Love.
Sheikh shows notorious love.
...also unable so, center of John unable to stay down. Because it caught him, of his help. He fled as ‘The Bad.’
In sadness he took over the territory. (Was helping Among the chest.) Sheikh was already at work, loose: “Today we are going to open the Ka'ba.”
What is the command that must be said in secret?
•Or all the time, because you're christians.
“We, scandal of his altar. We, dislike such you, alone. Around us you are like barbarism. You also fail to your vision.” Saddle earth, early escape without you.
We stayed at the Ka'ba's sit.
Sheikh's speech of my life was filled with pain. “Want to go anywhere soon?” asked me, “I'm late, girl!” John increases all my fears.
(Both were inspired by my grief. )
Friends return, to what it will be. If they ask of us, right. From wandering to where is commonplace. Blood filled his eyes and mouth full of venom. Remained in the mouth of [...]
(87)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%54.7[...]to deliberately become/stay mad [--> Jassem, Sana's methodology, the state of horrible energy] in order to heal/strengthened
-ecstatic loss of the self, hermetic elements in his works, and the idea of the “complete actor,” whirlpool of feelings and lunatic expressions, counter-force from the act of gesture, (and from his teacher Dullin) emphasis on mime, gymnastics, improvisation, voice production, and various exercises intended to heighten sensory perception, all reminds me of my own theatre training with Reza in jome class.}
(demonizing) the vital concept of the outside(r)
untrustworthy epistemic climate --> patterns of smoothness/coarseness
militant negotiations of desire
(Dabashi's vertical-horizontal colonialism:)
the third world subject:
1- marginalized by enlightenment discourse
2- materialy exploited under global division of labor
}-->{
alienated by:
1- (horizontally) the epistemic violence of colonialism
2- (vertically) foreign colonial state + indigenous comprador elite (واسطهها و دلالان سرمایهداران خارجی در کشورهای آسیا و آفریقا و آمریکای لاتین)
2- (vertically) subsequent oppression and exploitation of anti-colonial regime
3- (horizontally) global division of labor
navigation of identity
the reward of the victim جایزه قربانی (--> to be beaten)
the reward of the survivor (--> the self-conscious affirmation of having endured and gone beyond)
slave moralities
the *self-with-no-other* (too far gone)
Hegel's master-slave dialectic (an insight into the skeleton of domination): the basic way in which it is always the master (self) who requires recognition from an external entity (the othered slave) [--> Westworld TV series base: master remains in a state of complete dependency for his own self-definition on the slave, whereas the slave can gradually ascend toward an independent consciousness by virtue of his subjection --> “its own being-for-self” (=/= multispecies companionship)]
or
Spikvak's dissolution of the master-slave dialectic: proposition for individuals to imagine themselves as both “receivers and givers” (distinction between ‘agency'[as rationally legislated and institutionally validated] and ‘subjectivity'[as unrepresentability])
--> this intervention is successful in greeting modernity as a global responsibility
***decolonization as a populist mode of resistance
otherless individuation:
•the hermit
•the mercenary
•the maniac
the lowest common denominator turned into a metaphysics
authentic malevolence
*objective cruelty* (of the modern epoch and its dialectic strap) [...]
(88)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%56[...]late previously repressed material...)
•stimulate the other person sexually (in a setting where gratification is impossible--for example to behave in a seductive way toward the child) ==> conflict (between sexual needs on the one hand, and rigorous super-ego retaliations)
parental double bind
**simultaneous or rapidly alternating stimulation-and-frustration of other needs** ==Searles==> a disintegrating effect
**chronic pleas for sympathy** --> child's desire and felt-duty to be helpful
Jassem/Sina typically engaging the other in some politico-philosophical debate, in which he talks with machine-gun rapidity expressing himself with a virile kind of forceful, businesslike vigour (while the other feels quite strongly urged to argue some of these points with him, though not being given a chance to say much), while he strolls about on his mobile phone and posing himself physically irrelevant to the other --> when in-fronted with Jassem or Sina, one feels strange (losing your mind, feeling like an insecure child *engaged in such a broadly divided interrelatedness with a parent*) while that feeling appears as simply a ‘crazy’ product of one's own imagination
(is non-verbal interaction always sexual?)
nonsequitur (a typical schizophrenic technique)
(to get free from) the delusion that you had had not one mother but many different ones
a continual unexpected switching from one conversational topic to another without any marked shift in feeling-content is in itself a mode of interpersonal participation which can have a significantly disintegrating effect upon the other person's psychological functioning --> a remark for me in my lecture-performances, i can't cause disintegration on other people's thinking for the sake of art --> *to undermine the other person's confidence in the reliability of their own emotional reactions and of their own perception of outer reality* ==> de-maintain grasp on reality <-- (often) artist's failure to develop **adequate reality testing**
-the artist is not allowed to make the audience crazy!!?? @Jassem, Dominguez's “mental cruelty”
techniques of undermining of ego-functioning (in the form of: deliberate experiments in the service of totalitarian political ideologies, cultural undercurrents in present-day democratic societies, and in the lives of the schizophrenic)
-what are the effects of your work on other's ability of participation in life?
Searles: effort to drive the other person crazy can be motivated predominantly by a desire to externalize the threatening craziness in oneself
(-artists do that?)
*introjected crazy parent* (==> predominance of the one's own irrational and cripplingly powerful superego)
(parents, crazy or not crazy, are always introjected[?])
love and solicitude (in mother-child relatedness) ==[...]
(89)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%59.4[...]
recrudescence of symbiotic techniques
the [same] sensation of being driven utterly mad by the impossible object [patient, economy, system, self, world, love object, etc.] --> symbiotic relatedness (development of symbiotic reciprocal dependency)
(@apass, the tale we say in artistic research environment:) critical feedback = 'making ill’ of one another, is an effective forms of opening up anxieties which can be interpreted and worked through ==> to become independent (integration) and to leave
}=/={ to acknowlede our highly immature and ‘sick’ but deeply gratifying symbiotic mode of relatedness with the other (disintegration) (in Searles's terms: our efforts in keeping the other person crazy)
*how can we develop *untherapeutic techniques* of critical relatedness?
*how can we face our own conflict between desires to help (the student to become better integrated, that is more mature and healthy) and desires to destroy (the student in the state of poor integration)? --> schizophrenic conditions of artistic feedback
...................................
مماس
schizophrenia: (a general understanding of all) content-thought disorder (=/= form of thought)
*the disease of cognitive abnormality : abnormal sequential thinking*
*tangential thinking*
•disorganised thinking ==> disorganised speech
•mood disorders
•dementia
•mania
•clanging (situationally inappropriate association of words based upon sound rather than concepts)
•echolalia (unsolicited repetition of vocalizations made by another person)
•[*]tangentiality: deviation from relevancy; wandering train of thought, lack of focus, never returning to the initial topic --> *topic maintenance*
◦self-centered social responses
◦attention to one's own speech is overcome during the occurrence of cognition ==> evasive vocalized content
(language use”)
referential (for the sake of context)
poetic (for the sake of message)
emotive (for the sake of addresser)
conative (for the sake of addressee)
pathic (for the sake of interaction)
metalingual (for the sake of itself)
...................................
-the concept of “wearing” from Alberti (prehispanic South America)
-the concept of “mask” from Mohaghegh (postmodern Middle East)
-the concept of “style” from Archer (post-industrial Britain)
[these theories are very helpful for me and import-rich for reimagining subjectivity. Alberti committed to anthropology, Mohaghegh to the philosophical, Archer to sociology]
...................................
slave: a person attached by law and by custom to the identity of another individual --> ‘social death’ of slavery (as legal nonperson ==> alienation) [in academic literature comparative study of slavery], slavery as a substi[...]
(90)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%59.7[...]capes its former wretchedness to become an increasingly scenic area, with the government finally bringing electrical power and the locals planting flow- ers and showing acts of kindness to one another…all in honour of their two strange visitors (with whom we read that everyone has grown enamoured). They even build a stone monument in veneration to these silent newcomers. But then one morning the blondes do not materialize, as a violent coup is underway that sets the district on fire with bombs and missiles; amid the fighting, our narrator is flung against a wall, his life then saved by one of the blondes (their statue since demolished), and awakens in a mental asylum railing about the speechless aliens who rescued him (and the others)—only to find that no one has any memory of such beings or any trust in his recol- lections of them; he later finds himself strapped with a detonative suicide vest (the final light-bracketed image).
...................................
Morton on Weber --> sociology is itself (the logistics of) disenchanted in exploring disenchantment
charisma-based society ~=> disenchanted bureaucratic society
charisma: (paranormal) force field that surrounds and penetrate us with *healing + destructive* consequences
(<-- this is super ok as long as that force field is not curated by wannabe spiritual philosopher human)
bestiary: paranormal excluded by religion
agricultural societies monopolized charisma (--> king) --> logistical functioning of the world of agriculture ==> global warming
neolithic privatization of enchantment ==> monotheism
Holocene --> strategy of survival at any cost
(Morton echoing the cliche of artists wanna do magic:) “art is demonic”: it emanates (not designed) from beyond sense that the artist is not in charge of, dangerous causative flicker
~ ‘art = charisma’ [= cause & effect]
--Morton--> (bad idea of) art ==> charismatic causality
force-like animal magnetism
magic = causality + illusion
appearance and essence are two different sides of Mobius strip
(pre-neolithic -->) *we live in a world of tricksters* (raindrops are tricksters,,,)
incomprehensible charisma of kitsch
(the objects in my room contain a palpable enjoyment that is without me, found objects that spray charismatic causality [without devotion or trust])
...................................
(Zizek's) Lacan four discourses via porn actress facial stages:
1- ecstatic state --> overwhelmed
2- serious --> hard work, instrumental control
3- boredom --> ignorance, indifference
4- mocking --> is this all you can do, smile
...................................
body...
how to feed it
when to fast
how to soothe
mois[...]
(91)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%60.7[...] master taking a slave as his concubine
both *slavery* and *concubinage* were recognize and regulated by islamic law (shari'a)
umm-walad ام ولد mother of the son --> slave woman کنیز impregnated by her owner, thereby bearing a child
--Lee-> slave woman might, under these circmustances, have a strong incentive to bear a child by her master, in order to move toward the center of her master's household, to protect herself from sale, to free her child and herself, and to inherit part of the master's wealth (through her offspring) <-- the sexual aspects of the relationship were considered incidental ضمنی and carried no moral stigma or social shame [=/= children born to slave fathers were slaves]
gathering of men (were held regularly) as social occasions for business, entertainment, smoke opium, etc.
clandestine conversations were not unusual
shari'a was interpreted and administrated by shii clerics in Yazd, and there was always room for manipulation of the law
Ziba Khanum's situation illustrates the problem of applying western legal categories of “slave” and “free” to the lived experience of enslaved women in iran
(her legal status as a free woman had little consequence <-- she remained dependent of the family and lived in their household)
***limited value of “slave =/= free” --Lee--> when applied to the study of muslim world***
modern state ==> “slave =/= free” (presupposing a secular state that is able to guarantee the lives and properties of individuals who can claim its protection) }<-- societies that are constructed around the ideas of:
rights, citizenship, secular state =/=
| | |
kinship, belonging, religious authority, hierarchies of dependence (<-- middle east)
19th century iran --> there was no ideal within the society of freedom from relationships (of kinship, household, belonging, community solidarity, wealthy patron)--with--> implications of dependence, obedience, obligation
•any such freedom would have left an individual *isolated* and *vulnerable*
****
all enslaved persons (and akk other persons) in 19th century iran necessarily were *embedded in muslim households* and moved along a continuum of whatever situation of power, respect, wealth, independence they might be able to *negotiate*
#Cinderella
****
women --> at the margins of wealth and power --> slave women most especailly (they moved toward the center by:)
1. performed valuable domestic duties
2. became the master's regular sexual partner
3. bore the master child
the goal of most women (slave or not) om 19th century iran --> to negotiate the most respected position (within the family that they found themselves attached to) <-- **the defining factor was gender, rather than slavery**
[...]
(92)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%61.2[...]) =/= cataphatic (immanent + experiential)
unstable & somatic ways we respond to (and seek out) everyday images
evocative & powerful (<--Sina-- nonartisitic images)
(art or not art) ***aesthetic response***
[*]children's media: aesthetic social imagination
(moral components of:)
cruelty, hurt, disgust, disdain
kindness, happiness, admiration, love
physical, material, somatic relation to the ethereal, metaphysical, intellectual
(?how can we) confidently treat “images = sources of socioculturel information”
(from) Islamic culture --to--> cultures associated with isalm
strong opposition to representational religious art <-- modern Islamic societies --> unproblematic accepting of representational religious materials intended for children
didactic islamic visual media:
•(Kuwait) the 99 --> heroes for each name of the God
•(Pakistan, India, Afghanistan) burqa avenger --> burqa clad superhero against a corrupt view of traditional religion, using veil as costume
•(Pakistan) Ferozsons publisher
•Uysal press
•Timas press (Cem Kiziltug)
•
age-graded sequences of children's religious books --> progressively decreasing use of images
questions (> Elias:)
•are there culturally specific ways of seeing --answer--> yes
•does religion requires its own categories for understanding visuality and sensory systems? --> *religion is a problematic category* <== inherently unstable {religion referring simultaneously to systematic ideological systems, atomized and multivalent beliefs, range of individual and cultural practices}--> constant flux + relative to each other =/= religion: discrete phenomena
•scholars who argue for a transcendental quality to religion
•Durkheim + Weber --> religious = behavioral
•Otto --> location of religion: a fascinating incomprehensible force outside of the human person
•Eliade --> essential unity of the religious (~= commensurate human behavior)
•Elias --> manifestation of belief and ideology in visual written emotive forms --functionalist--> [*]religion = visual art
visual material --serve-->
•aesthetic
•generator of meaning
•generator of affirmation شعاری
•icon
•talisman
•objects imbued with religious function
•token of aspiration
•instrument of aspiration (or other emotions)
•explicit reminder (of good behavior)
•gesture towards a better future : wish images
•
seeing = embodied act (---> go to Gossip Girl)
•(individuals make complicated interpretive choices concerning) what to look at & what they have seen
•*we feel through, about, from the visual* ~= visuality is embodied [...]
(93)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%61.5[...]> blind man's stick
•[Groz --> phantom limb]
(Asad > Elias) power of things is their ability to act within a network enabling conditions (physical + mental --> feeling, remembering, hoping) -->{capacity of objects ==> society and politics become vitally material}
(the idea of power:) objects have agency in the complex web of interactions that joins them to other [--> object having itinerary] =/= objects have abilities or sentience that they use autonomously [--> object having life]
}--Elias--> critique of the idea of scopic regime
Elias furnishing the minimum information necessary to create an informed context (to frame of discussion) =/= give comprehensive history (about iran, pakistan, or turkey)
objects --> *affecting presence* (objects elicit affects)
[*]object: location of emotion, happiness pointer (---> go to index finger)
visual object: signifier of individual and collective emotion and aspiration
index
we do not have access to reliable system of deductible reasoning that assures us of an accurate interpretation of one value to the index --> lack of precise causative relationship between *observed phenomena* and their *affective consequences* (manifested on individuals and human societies)
}<-- this plagues visial material cultural studies
(Gell's notion of) abduction: a form of reasoning to abduce a possible (=/= actual) agent or effect
abductive reasoning (=/= deduction, communication, translation)
--> ***to analyze and experiment in the lack of data or causal relationships*** (which happens most of the time)
(i have been using the term speculation as synonym for abduction)
abduction = informed abduction : you need as much contextually relevant information as possible
(learning from Elias)
•specificity of emotions and affects <-- much more interesting
•specificity of objects or people
[*]emotion: object of (unintentional) human manufacture ==> location of human meaning & motivation
...................................
childhood Elias chap2
philosophical notions of selfhood in late antiquity (= islam + europe) ==> study of emotions & feelings
Platonic + Aristotelian : “emotion = ambivalent urges need to be disciplined and harnessed through some process of education” ==> islamic ideas of body & mind
favorite emotion (~ religious expression + motivator) in islam [+ sufism]: love & virtue [--✕--> my interest in hate & monster]
it was only one and half a century ago that William James argued that human mental states were incapable inseparable from our bodily forms (=/= “mind =/= body”)
modern theories of emotion:
•universalism <-- sentimental desire to believe in the essential community of all human bei[...]
(94)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%61.6[...]e forces we affirm. negation is not expelled --(Singh reading D+G+N's ethnographic intuition)--> what ‘is’ may be richer than any ideal ‘ought’ ==> anthropology and philosophy, then, are two distinct but related ways in which life may be examined
to think affirmativelt ==> our negations become sharper
my recent knee-jerk reaction (for example to Olearius) would be to invoke Eurocentrism
(resist: “west” and “non-west”, built on entirely negative images of Europe, from which perspective postcolonial settings appear with double negativity from which they can never recover)
thoughtful moments among friends but scholastic and conversational traditions (--> Greek) =/= “sage”, part of a larger conversational contest culture (not always between “friends” but is an agon -->? Kelile-o Demne)
-other conceptual-conversational traditions (in Iran,,,?) [for example “taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous”, producing an anthropologically oriented Deleuze, a reading of ___ that produces a ___ically oriented ___]
*** it is not a question of negating dialectices but of setting out a different style of thought and examining the ethnographic and political consequences that follow ***
“when you asked him the question about deities, you began a type of conversation called gyan-charcha --> knowledge-talk technique (<-- my favorite mode of reading of literature, and basically everything, is like that)
?which concept(s) you use to think through these things:
•bonded and legitimate labor
•power relations
•marriage
•sacrifice
•kinship
•intimacy
•buying
•selling
•
}--> the fabric of human relatedness depends on it
*[lunar enlightenment]*
(Singh's beautiful lunar reterritorialization of “enlighting”:) what kind of light do we assume as our image of plenitude?
عجایب ماه #moon's inflow-ence, waxing and waning intensities, fluctuating thresholds, the rise and fall of gods, tutelage of moon, a lunar rather than a solar sense of enlightenment, blemished and inconstant, the moon is nondialectical, *neighbors lunacy*
Derridean moment of negative transcendence
waxing and waning plenitude of that flux
Singh:
•varying thresholds and intensities
•logics of a/not-a
•ethics and energetics @Sana
•
•
*** a shift of even a degree (say, a different mode of contract or force) could be the difference between social life and death, happiness and despair, or exploitation and freedom ***
(Singh teaching me to think about Tehranians)
دروغ بد را با دروغ بهتر جایگزین کنیم نه با حقیقت
Nietzsche's double affirmation, y[...]
(95)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%63.2[...]-{also in Iran}--> making (mulla) grotesquely other ==> inconcevable to imagine any points of relatedness (to mulla)
•scatological jokes
•reworking of official rhetoric for ludic effect
•exaggerated performance of power
}--Mbembe--> “relationship of conviviality with the realm of official power”
vulgarity ==long-term==> *zombification of official figures* (robbed of their humanity --> they cannot be apprehended except through their caricatures)
...................................
to loosen some terms carefully: memory, form, order,
[The arts of memory- Comparative perspectives on a mental artifact. Revised and updated by the author Carlo Severi. Translated by Matthew Carey - Severi - HAU- Journal of Ethnographic Theory]
memory as a domain of social life
archive
“order” constitutes a principle to engender other forms of knowledge
totem poles, simply records the different circumstances that marked a particular social group, were comprised of organized series
occupied with the transmission of ‘names’, but necessarily, paralleled by a form of logical power, implies sequential ordering of different forms of knowledge.
the “art of memory” applies different types of relationships or archival techniques that are not limited to mere numerical calculation: mnemonic, iconographic, and logical techniques.
provide a convincing account of the complex process of ordering
in a measured rigorous way...
what characterizes the system
development of taxonomic principle
system endowed with a high degree of logical power
the idea of pure quantity, based on decimal numbers applicable to wide range of categories: people, objects, units of time or space, etc.
an “art of memory” possessed of rudimentary form of visual salience and an extremely complex ordering of representable knowledge
what matters are system's logical implications and not its visual manifestations
salience
(colors, shapes of knots, folds)
the qualitative categories (meant to be named)
(finding) the organizing principles
precisely calibrated
oriented space
(geometrically?)
what constitutes the logical poles of the vast spectrum of the projects in the archive (people, objects, units of time or space, etc.)
(concerning the archive) we can negotiate two types of knowledge: lists and narratives
to identify a series of key elements that allow us to rethink a wider chronology
textual archaeology - evaluates and decrypts, layer by layer
discovering (evidential) mnemonically oriented means of organizing traditional know[...]
(96)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%66[...]s of knots, folds)
the qualitative categories (meant to be named)
(finding) the organizing principles
precisely calibrated
oriented space
(geometrically?)
what constitutes the logical poles of the vast spectrum of the projects in the archive (people, objects, units of time or space, etc.)
(concerning the archive) we can negotiate two types of knowledge: lists and narratives
to identify a series of key elements that allow us to rethink a wider chronology
textual archaeology - evaluates and decrypts, layer by layer
discovering (evidential) mnemonically oriented means of organizing traditional knowledge
(Montesinos's book:) “list of one hundred kings”
should we abandon the conventional terms of “narrative”
the term narrative used to describe mnemonically oriented lists of names..
narrative was just one of several different means of organizing knowledge..
graphical representation, capable of developing further degrees of complexity
“form”
recreate the ‘form’ (form : ‘state of organization of matter’)
within (this/a) variable system
“text” as sequences of cords
memorization (the creation of mnemonic relation) necessarily implies the modular organization of the knowledge it represents
constitutive dualism in many forms of the art of memory:
•order (Anordnung) and salience (Hervorspringen)
•expressivity (and power)
•encoding (Verschlüsselung) and evocation (Herbeirufen)
possible course between the twin rocks of writing: “social” and “arbitrary”
at the end it is the mental operation
(techniques of thought)
the image plays a central role in the construction of relations between (visual) themes and particularity of words, which in turn help organize narratives
...................................
these all were technical or formal questions so far
memory is a way consistency maintains itself
civil society is afraid of personal recollections and perverse databases, digital collections
is khm’s archive a state sponsored memorialization, monuments of a consistent history? (that assumes a sublime ending?)
the immemorial (in memorial)
have a strong philosophy of technology with this project
there is never merely a technological question, always already ontological
who wants to remember, solidify, and memorialize?
and for whom?
building a technological temple of memory, khm aesthetic narrative of its own history?
(first there is one big account of property that all these fragmented histories of numerous people who worked in khm are singed under one signature, o[...]
(97)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%66.1[...]tial memory
we murder, they note
they draw from their secret[s]
infrastructure-thinking: Ajayeb Network-Making Minimum Data Set
in ajayeb's literature the very information infrastructure itself (should let be or) is in flux ==> discourses make strange connections between themselves
-in ajayeb the infrastructure assumes the position of every node --> reworked in my #Rigs
“...we are afloat in a sea of multiple, fractured causalities each demanding their own classification systems--and their own apparatus of record collection.” (Bowker)
classification (systems): a warrant and a tool for forgetting, and operating the distribution of this forgetting (in space of scientific memory.)
it tells you what to forget (for example the religious and metaphysical,) and how to forget it
[the formation (training) of artists covers up the formation (production) of artistic knowledge]
-the social story of science is excluded from the organization of the sciences, and held outside of it =/= situated knowledge
-a natural hierarchy of sciences is offered: every discipline needs to remember only a given set of facts --> each type of memory which has been distributed in space will also be sequenced in time (http://ajayeb.net/?q=imperative+of+knowing) [for example mathematics --> physics --> chemistry --> biology --> sociology] ==> formal memory system
the problem of the detective is that for him only those facts are relevant that hand him the solution of crime (~-> goal-oriented individual disposition) =/= chasing rabbits
-the detective (has to) classify away traces: the systematic and deliberate forgetting of some actions in order to better remember others
-what makes a difference?
-in sorting animals which past knowledges (--> ajayeb) are deliberatly forgotten in order to remember them as incorporated into an information infrastructure called ‘species’? -->! the classified are remembered (in the technoscience world)
(what is the) complex ecology of memory practices (particular within apass?)
•Hoda --> politics of remembrance
•Zoumana --> situated perspective
•Sina --> narratable past
•Marialena --> type of language
•S
today, 18.07.2017, the ajayeb's knowledge can be stored and expressed in a quite restricted range of genres called myth, ancient, imaginary,
______________
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~gbowker/records.html
we have learned from Foucault that different (medical) records, different practices of reading and writing are intertwined with the production of different patient's bodies, body politic, and bodies of knowledge
@Olga
record is the story of the organizational infrastructure [@Marialena, Olga]
[Foucault on knowing in the practice of medicine:] cascade of[...]
(98)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%66.8[...]ng into being
how the structuring of the record speaks to the structuring of the bodies (of the artists?) we investigate? (@Sofia, Olga)
record -->{
production of human bodies
organizational hierarchies
selective memories
_________
Ribes Bowker - Between Meaning and Machine.pdf
...in the wake of ontologies
in participating in knowledge projects, first we learn about ontologies and then learned how to create them
(we rarely “produce” knowledge, we always participate)
ontology: an information technology for representing specialized knowledge in order to:
•facilitate communication across disciplines
•share data
•enable collaboration
(am i) representing the knowledge of my communities (?) -- what does that mean?
*routinization* (is that which is at stake in ontologies) --?--> *apprehension*: orientation to the informational organization of ones field
(to attend the routinizations and apprehensions in one's own practice --> ontology building)
•my routines of reading, highlighting, writing, idiosyncratic talks, feedbacks, questions, silences,
--> (attend to the) transformative consequences of learning and traversing routines --[+]--> the practice and material tools that accompany the reworking of them {knowledge in informational terms, fables, etc.}--> problematic of inter-operability
--> (and asking) how a (broader) community's interests are at stake with this? {to engage and enrol that community through what activities?} #microworld
(my routines:) with confidence deliberately working with:
•interrupting stories with stories
•partial connection (and its performance)
•moving arguments through by infecting them with other arguments (=/= dialectical)
•mobilizing (multidisciplinary) fields (=/= the imperative of knowing A, B, and C first before you do D)
•mobilizing citation apparatus --> that which gives sense to what enables this work --> deliberately having a conversation with ajayeb al makhlughat
•mobilizing anachronic apparatus --> mobilizing different timescales ==> mixing up what counts as “us” (=/= chronology [?==> belonging])
•remembering what one knows (and organizing, performing, reworking it)
•having stakes in rationality (i constantly criticize rationality, but as you can see, i am not at all throwing it out)
•omnivorous approach
•
wild facts amenable (تابع) to formal representation (formal modeling)
routine: practically enacted, having no existence outside its performance, embedded in the configuration of material resources that enable practical work
[#workshop fables] how, by traversing the routine, “knowledge” and “community” took on new meaning, as they were rearticulated in the different [...]
(99)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%66.9[...]xistence outside its performance, embedded in the configuration of material resources that enable practical work
[#workshop fables] how, by traversing the routine, “knowledge” and “community” took on new meaning, as they were rearticulated in the different languages
uncertain activities of knowledge
(what i am learning in apass is that) modeling ontologies involves articulating knowledge in ways that sometimes appears alien to that domain community
[asking with Bowker:] for my ontology-building to appear representative, does my community itself have to learn the goals and language of my knowledge modeling? (the question i asked Sven, telling others ‘this or that is the language i am using.’) (i am using a language that is Harawayian, Ronellian, Sadrian)
______________
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~gbowker/actnet.html
...it is easy to get lost in Baudrillard's cool memories of simulacra (1990)
at stake: day to day work of building classification system
things to learnd from actor-network approach: (Latour, Callon > Bowker)
•regimes of delegation
•centrality of mediation
•the position that nature and society are not causes but consequences of human scientific and tachnical work
--> “technoscientific societies are powerful precisely because they are so good at delegating and distributing; and that actor-network theory is well position to track and describe the work of delegation and distribution.”
fact is a consequence
(Dewey)
(in a way, my work and interest in ajayeb is about histories of standards in knowledge production, which, i argue, is key to all sorts of other productions) (& the politics of remembrance : the politics and philosophy of classifying certain textual/material activities such that they have a chance of being part of the cultural *potential* memory)-->{Olga, Hoda, Sana}
artists are using a lot of standards (of representations or materials)
(out of) control standards
-there is a huge amount of standards i am depending on in my hypertext
-international diplomacy depends on manufacturing and enforcement of standard vocabulary --> how much are we really in diplomatic businesses?
Google: “To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful”
standards are often:
•making things work together
•enforced by legal bodies
•have their own (significant) inertia --> hard to change, and is not about the technically superior standards winning [DOS, VHS, A4, etc.]
standards --> *aspect of acting in the world* ==> classifications
what are (or have been) the behind the scenes, boring, background processes of the “real” work of ajayeb (and any past and practical politics of knowledge production)? (==> becoming interested in a wid[...]
(100)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%67[...]r />
compare first lines of Halaj's biography in Attar and Wikipedia:
•آن فی الله فی سبیل الله آن شیر بیشه تحقیق آن شجاع صفدر صدیق آن غرقه دریای مواج حسین منصور حلاج رحمةالله علیه کار او کاری عجب بود و واقعات غرایب که خاص او را بود که هم در غایت سوز و اشتیاق بود و در شدت لهب و فراق مست و بیقرار و شوریده روزگار بود و عاشق صادق و پاک باز و جد وجهدی عظیم داشت و ریاضتی و کرامتی عجب و عالی همت و رفیع قدر بود او را تصانیف بسیار است [...]
•Mansur al-Hallaj (Arabic: Abū ‘l-Muġīṭ Al-Ḥusayn bin Manṣūr al-Ḥallāğ; Persian: Mansūr-e Ḥallāj) (c. 858 – 26 March 922) (Hijri c. 244 AH – 309 AH) was a Persian mystic, poet and teacher of Sufism [...]
(at the end it is the colonialism that) decides what a disease is [=/= other system/culture (fragile networks) for classifying diseases of the body and spirit, such as ajayeb. (for example see how schizophrenia is classified and understood)]
--> practical ontology
representation of the past
sequencing of the present
==> making it appear that science describes nature --> social power
(at the end you see only those actants who are strong enough, and shaped in the right way, to impact)
“[...] the loosest classification of work is accorded to those with the most power and discretion, who are able to set their own terms.” Bowker 1996
lingua franca of the medical insurance companies
actor network theory: looking in detail at the role of (relatively) black-boxed hybrids [what scientists are actually manufacturing] in creating the discourse of pure science (as endpoint)
science's objective account of natural order:
•trials of strength
•enrolling of allies
•cascades of inscriptions
•operation of immutable mobiles
--> development of standards
‘Janus face’ of science
[Janus, in ancient Roman is the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, and endings. a god of transitions. having two faces, he looks to the future and to the past. (Greeks had no equivalent to Janus.)]
when your work (artistic/scientific) can be seen as a direct translation of the quest for Iranian/French honor after defeat in the battlefield --> the actors don't see what is excluded: they construct a world in which that exclusion could occur
(Latour --> according to American pragmatist strongholds:) reality = 'that which resists’
common language ~= standard language
(we can't talk about the commons without sorting out our understanding of our standard-saturated world)
[...]
(102)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%67.2[...] is behind a lot of the ways in which we create memories and histories (on the web): that there will be someone who has the time to go back and recognize the values we have created --> recognize ourselves as monuments in the world
(thinking with Bowker fL94LVYjhQQ) as new entities will come to being in the world, instead of creating access to what is reconfiguring of the past we lock ourselves into single unitary visions of the past totally unnecessary --> that is exactly what i am trying to do, providing and creating a kind of approach to what would be an access to a reconfiguring of the past, ajayeb as the case in a Farsi speaking world
on way or another, databases are structured objects, they constraint the forms of narrative you can take ==> a restrict set of stories --> when we are dealing with database we don't have an infinite sets of narrative space
i am taking a theological alterity discourse from pre-enlightenment (islamicated cosmology) and puting it in [...?]*** (Latour is putting it in scientific style of faith)
•artistic research practices/discourses
•modern Iran
•modern culture
•
non-contemplative intelligence basing the database in our time (=/= older traditions of sequencing)
...................................
*deterioration of the immanent (eco-, politico-,) ==> corruption of social relations ==> corruption of memory*** (of a shared existence, of coexistence with [Div, jinn, shadow, birds, Hindus, Arabs, ]) !!!--✕--> issues of historical injustice
-or-
corruption of a river : the entropy and deterioration immanent to it ==> conditions of possibility for corruption of intimate relations and of memory }--([this] experience of corruption)--> takes the nature of being defrauded (روزگار فريبکار) of one's own form of life, one's family or one's inheritance***
(Naveeda Khan talking about river's point of view in Bangladesh, but her keywords are all relevant for Iran's landscape as well)
***the muslim responses to entropy*** ==?==> eschatology
}--> muslim majority regions are more embeded in the world that what we know from islam
سازش
limits of “adaptation”
a rapport ~ ربط تقریباً همگام
or orientation جهتگيرى
a looming future
“[how] politics and policies of climate change stand to shortchange the present and the past”
Naveeda Khan exploring the perception of climate change within everyday life
those who live on such formations --[powerful river waters, eroding, accreting, village politics, dynamics of individual lives,]
fret ترش کردن
مزروعى arable lands
thinking rivers:
to consider water as a ‘total socia[...]
(103)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%67.4[...]ns
•boundary objects
•trading zones
•actor networks
•how sharing works in practice
•agreements on shared norms, practices, and technical systems (problematized by Femke, she focuses my attention on how software developers are too quick to construct “ontologies”)
•
==> to scale up the generally lower-level focus of design thinking [--> how my ajayeb.net addresses this?]
--> to co-design new infrastructures
--> to look beyond the scale of a field and timeframe of a career
(we need) meaningful access to digital media (not an exciting add-on investment)
--> new forms of knowledge infrastructure may disadvantage and devalue older forms of knowledge production:
•new sensor network replacing ecological fieldwork -->? my #amazon
•“instrumenting ocean” supplanting traditions of the oceanographic cruise [in the last 20 years new sensor grids have come to cover the oceans, land, sky and space] -->? my #ajayeb's is concerned with thinking “beyond the *instrumental languages of utility and function*, which tend to cast 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) =[...]
(104)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%68[...]ants, etc.)
*dark continent fallacy*: ignorance (~ non-knowledge) = absence of knowledge : a site, phenomenon, or set of questions that we haven't yet been able or thought to investigate, as: ‘darkness = absence of light’ (--> Star Trek idea of frontier) --@!%--> the relationship between knowledge and non-knowledge may not be as simple or innocent as that
new (forms of) knowledge infrastructures (--> new ways of knowing) ==>
•new questions thinkable --> whole classes of questions, phenomena and forms of knowledge may be lost or rendered unthinkable
•new maps to known territories --> reshape the geography itself
•rework existing (stocks of) knowledge
•reorder our sense of value and structure in the world
•*write new ontologies over old ones* (--> my interest in working with ajayeb)
•embed social norms
knowledge infrastructure ~= sociology of knowledge
= robust internetworks of people, artifacts, and institutions* (--> to attend kno.infs. as wholes, rather than focusing only on their most rapidly evolving elements; #ontology. and attending to the social relations both created and broken) [#to attend to Tehran's new digitally mediated social norms of negative ditributional consequences of change]
any effective sociology of knowledge ought to provide some account of its opposite: the accidental and systematic --> means by which non-knowledge is produced and maintained
**(Robert Proctor's) agnotology: the systematic study of ignorance** [+ Irvin Schick: unknowledge =/= ignorance --> socially constructed lack of knowledge : a conscious absence of socially pertinent knowledge, for example ‘terra incognita --> Western political and economic attention --> enabling colonialism...]
institutional elements of knowledge infrastructure:
•universities
•libraries
•scientific societies
}--> they all have typically conservative, slow-changing forms* -- because 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 (-[...]
(106)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%68.1[...] />
•document of its history (striation: past glaciation; strata: complex stories of deposition + radioactive isotopes; journy through the mantle; etc.)
earth: a variable legible palimpsest
(office procedures & computer programs are both) designed as *abstract machines*
-for ajayeb i designed an abstract machine called ajayeb.net to realize a seamless interchangeability between my artist/research procedures and computer programs
bootstrap: a simple system activating a more complicated system
(i have become hypersensitive to:) progressivist telling of the history of the earth =/= strangely synchronic world where there is no effective arrow of time
[*]synchronization: the work that it takes to bring the various bits of the world into a single archival framework*** (with their metaphors and strategies) ==permit==> cohabitation of discipliness --> **synchronization of the social and natural worlds to the same temporality**
(synchronization is always at work and is technologically determined)
--> conjuring of the social and natural world into forms that render themselves amenable to recording ==> (imperial records) archiving changes the world & creates a record of it --Derrida--> sequential & jussive (imperative)
+ scientific work epitomized the developement and rigorous application of these procedures (---> go to Serres's origin of geometry and greek empire)
***synchronization brings material forms (commodity flow, train travel) together and when geological and historical time are mapped into the same time --> metaphorical & ideological & material interact (==> emerging powerful possibilities) [--> in art we also do a lot of syncing and synchronization (<-- this is perhaps what Pierre meant by saying that researchers are creating their own science)]
time management, a central issue in industrialization
Babbage: clock = regulator of time
industrial world-knowledge ==> importance of the division of the history of the earth into equal periods of time
information drive (a drive *to save as little information as possible about something*)
(Latour's) oligopticon: special places where the micro-structures of macro-phenomena are crafted, local activities become a “bigger” issue (such as parliaments, courtrooms, offices), where different strands of “macro-social” phenomena are weaved
-they see much too little, but what they see, they see it well (=/= total surveillance of panopticon)
watch (from 1800 to 1820 at least 100000 clocks and watches were produced every year)
“clockwork ocean” with waves and cycles of salinity as “balance wheels”
(Bowker > Graham Burnett > Fontaine Maury)
}==> imposing a **temporally mediated qualitative difference between the creator and created** (instantiated on the factory floo[...]
(107)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%68.3[...] factory floor and in nature) --> creators stood outside regular space and time (=/= situated knowledges)
(19th century) scientific work = imposition of a representative framework of regular space and time on social and natural time
(science was and still is) making society confirm to the same spatiotemporal representational framework it was/is “discovering” in nature (---> go to the #scientification of christian genesis in Nolan's Noah film)
*imposition of a regular spatiotemporal representational framework* = (Bowker's) [*]convergence (a key aspect of synchronization): a cosmology (inspired by factory production) of nature and humanity--to make science, art and politics converge more and more towards the same goal, to introduce to them the notion of change, progress, succession, continuity, life, submit them to the same law (of constancy and uniformity)
•in astronomy: (1836) “the return of the comet of Halley at its predicted time has been remarked with intense curiosity and satisfaction by astronomers, and by the public. this has now become a regular and well ordered member of our system” (=/= ajayeb)
*representational framework of temporal regularity* ==> one can read backward into the past and forward into the future (--> # sequential palindromic time)
--> tale of the real archive : tale of stasis [==> “violent care”: preservation of current species and the imposition of stasis] : single law : (the fable of:) “perturbations and oscillations providing noise that true understanding would filter out”
fable of industry:
•how humanity had gone from being initially weak to currently king of nature : “industry = second nature”
•art submits to science
•industry recognizes science for its regulator
chaotic spacelike, lacking direction and granularity
working of childhood marked by staccato syncopation (=/= regular rhythms)
machine regularizes “man”: processes synchronizing him to industrial time
mechanical uniformity became the “natural” state of affairs
Facebook within the spirit of industry --> “under the [spirit of industry's] influence, people will begin by grouping themselves more naturally [...] people will come closer together, mass according to their real analogies and according to their real interests [...] the same ideas will circulate in all countries [...] uniformity of costumes [...] the same needs, a similar civilization, will develope everywhere [...] without confusion or violence, relations both as complex and as easy, as peaceful and as profitable as may be” -Charles Dunoyer
ufs (unidentified flying subject)
ufo
arguments about rates of change = about facts of change
eternal, unchanging present
train traveler looking out the window
a Newtonian [...]
(108)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%68.4[...]
(my performance and literary interest:) *librarianship and teaching are both professions that resist commodification because they rely on embodied labor and personal interaction*
*people-centric work* (like library science and education)
quantitative =/= qualitative
measurable =/= descriptive
(objective concepts)
--> (Calvert reading) the ostensibly qualitative, measurable, and hence objective concepts of competition and competitiveness stand in contrast with qualitative, descriptive concepts of both “culture and collaboration”
to open up some of the ‘literature of’
(Calvert working on) the implicit notion that competition and innovation are a natural fit --> the “measure, controlm and automatic” rationality of US-style economic competition
difficult to commodify
difficult to describe
not taking apparent differences (between men and women, human and animal,,) to be timeless, necessary, or inevitable --> descriptive =/= prescriptive (descriptions not intended to be prescriptive) --> *to historicize and denaturalize concepts (of competition, innovation,,)*
Bowker + Leigh Star > Calvert: *things perceived as real are real in their consequences*
market competitiveness has a plethora[~ excess, افراط ,ازدياد] of measures --✕--> profit: the seller-centric proxy measure of consumer interest
“our idealized notion of competition as a generator of innovation black-boxes a host of processes for competition, including unfair practices, externalizing costs, marketing, deception, and deskilling.”
(our idealized notion of:){ competition ==> innovation }--black-boxes--> (a host of) processes for competition:
•unfair practices
•externalizing costs
•marketing
•deception
•deskilling
•
individualistic and social Darwinist overtones
[*]inovation: a form of wishful thinking that aims to bring about the desired transformations without the associated costs in time and human effort (Suchman & Bishop)
(‘labor-intensive artistic work’: noninovative creative work; deepen the density of curiosity;)
capitalism continuously applies new technology designed to fragment and deskill labor, so that labor becomes cheaper and subject to greater control (Wajcman)
(sometimes) obsolescence is created through minor redesigns of consumer commodities
“let's sell more” ~-> undesirable consequences for human rights, global trade in rare metals, and toxic waste disposal
[*]technological determinism and optimism: the belief that the present social arrangements and technologies were the inevitable byproducts of historical developement, and that any problems entailed in our technologies and their production processes can be eliminated with further technol[...]
(109)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%69.3[...]r />
market competitiveness has a plethora[~ excess, افراط ,ازدياد] of measures --✕--> profit: the seller-centric proxy measure of consumer interest
“our idealized notion of competition as a generator of innovation black-boxes a host of processes for competition, including unfair practices, externalizing costs, marketing, deception, and deskilling.”
(our idealized notion of:){ competition ==> innovation }--black-boxes--> (a host of) processes for competition:
•unfair practices
•externalizing costs
•marketing
•deception
•deskilling
•
individualistic and social Darwinist overtones
[*]inovation: a form of wishful thinking that aims to bring about the desired transformations without the associated costs in time and human effort (Suchman & Bishop)
(‘labor-intensive artistic work’: noninovative creative work; deepen the density of curiosity;)
capitalism continuously applies new technology designed to fragment and deskill labor, so that labor becomes cheaper and subject to greater control (Wajcman)
(sometimes) obsolescence is created through minor redesigns of consumer commodities
“let's sell more” ~-> undesirable consequences for human rights, global trade in rare metals, and toxic waste disposal
[*]technological determinism and optimism: the belief that the present social arrangements and technologies were the inevitable byproducts of historical developement, and that any problems entailed in our technologies and their production processes can be eliminated with further technological innovations
competetiveness and the technological *savvy* implicit in innovation are themselves markers of contemporary masculinity --> “the enduring force of the identification between technology and manliness is not an inherent biological sex difference. it is instead the result of the historical and cultural construction of gender” (Wajcman)
a big part of the problem is that women's technological labor (=/= ghost busters) is culturally invisible --(Katie King in her research on writing technologies argues)--> (a metonymy:) when technologies are reduced to singular, stable, self-contained devices [~ Star Wars] =/= assemblages
[dichotomy of “enforcement =/= destruction” Star Wars either or: if you are not destroying it you are enforcing it]
problems that cannot be conceptualized in terms of measures and endpoints, or which involve holistic, qualitative solutions, will be at a disadvantage for selection
(Cowan shows) the developement of new household tachnologies did not free women from the domestic shpere. rather, it allowed women to enter the paid labor force while leaving the gendered division of labor in the home untouched.
(makes me throw up -->) large literature of self-determination theory (~ show[...]
(110)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%69.3[...] which compound elements can be named and manipulated as units
modularity --> localized part of the system
<== 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 --> delayed evaluation
(for example) a bank account: has state in that the answer to the question “Can I withdraw $100?” depends upon the history of deposit and withdrawal transactions
object decomposed into computational objects (each with their own time-varying local state variables) --> model
object programming: model real-world objects with local state by computational objects with local variables --> identify time variation in the real world with time variation in the computer --> implement the time variation of the states of the model objects in the computer with assignments to the local variables of the model objects
--✕--> (how?) model a time function
stream: delayed (infinite) list
stream programming:
•different abstractions such as: map, filter, accumulate,
•transformations of lists
•sequence manipulations without incurring the costs of manipulating sequences as lists
•tadriji incremental computation
random: statistical properties of uniform distribution
object-orientation: polymorphic abstract data types =/= relational data model
Building Abstractions with Data
how to use:
•primitive data (numbers)
•primitive operations (arithmetic operations)
building abstractions by combining data objects to form compound data <==> *to increase the modularity* of (our) designs ==> to increase/enhance the expressive power of our language
data abstraction:
*technique of isolating* (the parts of a program that deal with) how data objects are ‘represented’ from (the parts of a program that deal with) how data objects are ‘used’
versioning
garbage collection
...................................
the question of “what [✕] can learn from [Y]?”
Calvert on Mestiza consciousness
library and information scientists
consciousness of the borderlands [~ in between categories, creative/annihilating forces a person living borderlands must struggle against]
***contradictory impulse for *hording* & *sharing*
categorizing, naming, describing --> power-laden practices we cannot do without
each *schema* reveals its priorities, legitimizes/delegitimizes, renders visible/invisible the knowledge it contains/excludes
(Foucault:) library: (places that preserve) discourses that one wishes to reme[...]
(111)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%69.7[...]w sets of categories)--> that is why i am reluctant with only changing the metadata @Pierre: using metadata to manipulate the organizing apparatus ==> versions of residuality (?)
...................................
[working on apass milieu data model, summer2018]
c.r.i. (“collective research interface”)
--?--> a pathological collage
discrete object (of problem [who, when, how,]) interface
--> refering to something outside c.r.i. (outside the digital model)
face (slider) --> object monster
(?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: [...]
(113)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%69.9[...]nsversal 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, serializable, arborescent, ‘comments’
skew: verb-active, streching, ‘2D field color picker pointer’
each is “queryable” in different ways and propose different difficulties
each of them addapted from an existing technologies (range sliders, commenting, color pickers)
each embeds one of: colors, doings, values
slider: marking everything with decimals
comments: hypertextualizing
field picker: spreading
}--> they are all milieu-makers
ramp --> arc of necessity
nest --> mosaic divisions
skew --> chromatic/luminous effect (of mixture)
and also:
•to address (in a longer term) how apass performs analysis and prioritization of its own service definition?
•to address (in a longer term) historical/cultural specificities of apass
•to address aspects of apass's exceptionalism (its characters, colors, doings, values)
REPORT:
Geert
zoom / biger picture
perform a zoom
Geert and Michael knowledge zoom-level
Geert's strech-work
which cheats
vulgar: direct, =/= suffisticated, =/= nice(in a classical sense), =/= institutional code [--> a cheat], everyday, good taste, context?!!
suggested topology: skew --changed--> nest (tow branches answering yes and no to: “is he cheating?”)
Leo
stickiness ~ residual (left overs of impression), we couldn't find little objects, litte stickies
zoom is tooooo wide, megacategories, “fermentation” is a different zoom level
cheat -[...]
(114)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%70.1[...]hink**, **how they complicate a problem** [#feedback] (for example)
◦*religious experience: to address his questions to the ones who know, the ones whose expertise could help him learn something new and often unexpected --> passionate, even if problematic, experience of living in a world where God matters*
◦*emotional experience: with theater actors, who know about creating, discriminating, disclosing, and sharing emotional experiences*
***from whom should we inherit our practices, and how?***
learning from Despret's *anachronism* (her field philosophy)
اشتباه در ترتیب حقیقی وقایع
(heritage of Socrates) form of epistemic and ethical bifurcation ==> search for hidden causes (underlying the conduct of actors)
Socrates's “you think you know, but actually, you don't know and you don't think” ==created==> ***[1]a device that inhabits thinking and produced only mental paralysis***
--✕--> (Despret:) investigators rarely ask the question of how the people they interview might be interested in the questions addressed to them
*relevance = adventure*
there are many examples of how a piece of abstract knowledge that looked like devoid of any imaginable consequences came to matter (acquired an importance nobody would contest)
-relevance may be lost in translation
*ecology of dynamic and fragile patterns of relevance, of modes of mattering for oneself and for others (Savransky)
[*]relevance: a sense that there is value beyond ourselves (something that is not ourselves, matters) --Stengers--> (daring to connect the) speculative + ethical + practical
(risk of) to renounce *knowledge as a right* + embrace *knowledge's achievement as an event*
[title]
(ego engineering)
***[2]device of anonymity (“to protect people”) ==> distributes expertise, and builds induces performs an asymm asymmetry of roles
•the imperative of deontology
•(can be) a regime of insult
“you, the refugees” --> an anonymous mass marked with **an identity that they had not chosen, and from which they cannot invent themselves**
risk of disclosing
risk of separating
risk of isolating
risk of making people talk while silencing
risk of stealing the words
risk of of drawing the words out from the speaker
risk of retying the secret to its etymology [secretus: to separate, to isolate]
(what we like to think about in apass) to reflect on what anonymity can produce in other research situations
[instead of asking “what the body does/produces?” =/= what Sina's body does for the spider in his room? what Ninja Turtles body does for Iron Man? what anonymous refugee body does for Xiri? what Jane Fonda body does for Laura? etc.]
***anonymity ==> identity***
(the position[...]
(115)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%73.2[...]ering)
***[2]device of anonymity (“to protect people”) ==> distributes expertise, and builds induces performs an asymmetry of roles
•the imperative of deontology
•(can be) a regime of insult
“you, the refugees” --> an anonymous mass marked with **an identity that they had not chosen, and from which they cannot invent themselves**
risk of disclosing
risk of separating
risk of isolating
risk of making people talk while silencing
risk of stealing the words
risk of of drawing the words out from the speaker
risk of retying the secret to its etymology [secretus: to separate, to isolate]
(what we like to think about in apass) to reflect on what anonymity can produce in other research situations
[instead of asking “what the body does/produces?” =/= what Sina's body does for the spider in his room? what Ninja Turtles body does for Iron Man? what anonymous refugee body does for Xiri? what Jane Fonda body does for Laura? etc.]
***anonymity ==> identity***
(the position of “subject” in an investigation is created by erasing the name)
•“feel free to say anything you want” or “speak without fear" = your words will have no consequences
•they are always at risk of putting people in situations where they are unlikely to be interesting & unlikely to be interested
Despret's interview where an exchange really meant something =/= Mette's notion of nothing means anymore except the absurd gesture that announces meaninglessness of itself
inquiry = experience & experimentation, *testing & putting into continuity an ensemble of experiences*
Kimiavi in his film The Garden of Stones, his subject by the very fact that they are now part of the conditions of the environment in relation to which investigator develops skills, desires, knowledge or science
|
*inquiry: set of transformations that the very process of inquiry imposes, concrete and existential transformations for the objects studied just as much as the inquiring subject --> (Kimiavi's) logic of creative experimentation =/= logic of logic of discovery
|
*creative dimension (of every fieldwork):
•(it may) take the form of a device that sparks the creation of thoughts
•(it may) transform the relationship between the enquirer and the one she is addressing
•(it may) disclose some dimensions of the situation that were not visible or felt
•(it may) completely redefine what people actually docile
•
positivist sociological approach: to discover a reality already given, already stabilized + procedures asserting this stability + questions wanting to be neutral + a large and distributed sample + a modest investigator: who disappears behind the strength of the data (Haraway)
[*]inquiry: studies what it[...]
(116)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%73.3[...]echnical conditions, insignificant “interior” faculty, a set of effects that could be measured externally
(technological transformation of physiology and psychology in the 19th century, development of electrophysiology --> cultural history of electricity)
behaviour with a historical structure: a behaviour articulated in terms of socially determined norms and is part of the formation of a modern technological milieu
1879, Wundt's psychology laboratory in Leipzig, one of the practical and discursive spaces within modernity in which human beings “problematized what they are.” Foucault/
(Wundt's account defined attention [= will] as one of the highest integrative functions [---> go to #integrative in Sennett], its essential role in producing an effective unity of consciousness)
part of the cultural logic of capitalism demands that we accept as natural switching our attention rapidly from one thing to another --> (capitalism as a) regime of reciprocal attentiveness and distraction
conceptualizer of a new economic and social space based on the quantification and distribution of energy:
•Wener von Siemens
•Lord Kelvin: globalization of telegraphic communication and subsequently in the commodification and marketing of electric power (in England) [telegraph: a world of anonymous, decontextualized information; moved history into the background and amplified the instant and simultaneous present/person]
•Edison: transition to centralised corporate capitalism (in late 19th century): his role in the emergence of a new system of quantification and distribution, a system for transmission and reception as abstract processes, ways in which a space of consumption and circulation could be dynamized/activated --> social field of individual subjects could be arranged into increasingly separate and specialized units (of consumption)
“Edison was a holistic conceptualizer and determined solver of the problems associated with the growth of systems” (Crary > Hughes)
Edison is paradigmatic: *the indistinction between information and visual images, and the making of quantifiable and abstract flow into the object of attentive consumption. his grasp of some of the systemic features of capitalism (in 1880s and 1890s) underscores the abstract nature of the products he “invented”. his work is inseparable from the continual manufacturer of new needs and the consequent restructuring of the network of relations in which such products would be consumed* --> other participants in the same historical project of perpetual rationalization and modernization: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Andrew Grove, etc.
(kinetoscope and phonograph logic:) the structuring of perceptual experience in terms of a solitary rather than a collective subject --> today's computer screen as the primary vehicle for the distribution and consumption (of electronic commo[...]
(117)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%75.1[...]Wener von Siemens
•Lord Kelvin: globalization of telegraphic communication and subsequently in the commodification and marketing of electric power (in England) [telegraph: a world of anonymous, decontextualized information; moved history into the background and amplified the instant and simultaneous present/person]
•Edison: transition to centralised corporate capitalism (in late 19th century): his role in the emergence of a new system of quantification and distribution, a system for transmission and reception as abstract processes, ways in which a space of consumption and circulation could be dynamized/activated --> social field of individual subjects could be arranged into increasingly separate and specialized units (of consumption)
“Edison was a holistic conceptualizer and determined solver of the problems associated with the growth of systems” (Crary > Hughes)
Edison is paradigmatic: *the indistinction between information and visual images, and the making of quantifiable and abstract flow into the object of attentive consumption. his grasp of some of the systemic features of capitalism (in 1880s and 1890s) underscores the abstract nature of the products he “invented”. his work is inseparable from the continual manufacturer of new needs and the consequent restructuring of the network of relations in which such products would be consumed* --> other participants in the same historical project of perpetual rationalization and modernization: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Andrew Grove, etc.
(kinetoscope and phonograph logic:) the structuring of perceptual experience in terms of a solitary rather than a collective subject --> today's computer screen as the primary vehicle for the distribution and consumption (of electronic commodities)
(late 20th century) management of attention <-- capacity of an observer to adjust to continual repatterning of the ways in which a sensory world can be consumed
@Hoda
ADD
dubious classification of an attentive deficit disorder --> durability of attention (posed as [implicitly] natural function) as a normative category of institutional power
-social construction of illness
-now ADD is not linked to any weakness of the will
-in adults: any economic shortcoming or social insecurity is now understandable in terms of a failure to apply oneself attentively to the ideologically determined standards of performance and “achievement”
--> in a culture that is so relentlessly founded on a short attention span, on the logic of the nonsequitur, on perceptual overload, on the generalized ethic of “getting ahead,” on the celebration of aggressiveness, (Crary poses that it is nonsensical to pathologize attention in this culture, a double bind, in which the individual is caught between subjective dislocations of modernization and imperative for institutional discipline and productivity)
(Mi[...]
(118)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%75.1[...]uring of the network of relations in which such products would be consumed* --> other participants in the same historical project of perpetual rationalization and modernization: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Andrew Grove, etc.
(kinetoscope and phonograph logic:) the structuring of perceptual experience in terms of a solitary rather than a collective subject --> today's computer screen as the primary vehicle for the distribution and consumption (of electronic commodities)
(late 20th century) management of attention <-- capacity of an observer to adjust to continual repatterning of the ways in which a sensory world can be consumed
@Hoda
ADD
dubious classification of an attentive deficit disorder --> durability of attention (posed as [implicitly] natural function) as a normative category of institutional power
-social construction of illness
-now ADD is not linked to any weakness of the will
-in adults: any economic shortcoming or social insecurity is now understandable in terms of a failure to apply oneself attentively to the ideologically determined standards of performance and “achievement”
--> in a culture that is so relentlessly founded on a short attention span, on the logic of the nonsequitur, on perceptual overload, on the generalized ethic of “getting ahead,” on the celebration of aggressiveness, (Crary poses that it is nonsensical to pathologize attention in this culture, a double bind, in which the individual is caught between subjective dislocations of modernization and imperative for institutional discipline and productivity)
(Miller @Zoumana) ...the unconscious as part of a system in which ‘automatic’ behaviour was reciprocally intertwined with the changing needs of conscious activity, including attention. in contrast to the custodial Freudian interpretation, many 19th century psychologists saw the unconscious as “actively generating the processes which are integral to memory, perception, and behaviour. its contents are inaccessible not, as in psychoanalytic theory, because they are held in strenuously preventive detention but, more interestingly, because the effective implementation of cognition and conduct does not actually require comprehensive awareness.
Darwin: a certain kind of reactive attention was believed to be an essential part of human biology, systematic response to novel stimuli (visual, olfactory, or auditory)
-an attentive observer might appear motionless
-an ideo-motor network of forces --> that which immobilizes
(the structural psychology of) associationism (theories of knowledge)
institutional discourse
techniques of the subject
attention (~= will) ~/= consciousness
(noncoincidence of attention with consciousness)
<-- modern shift to semantic and semiotic frameworks of analysis
(from epistemo[...]
(119)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%75.2[...]] when attention isolates a particular content from a larger cognitive field, the act of dissociation can be the initiation of a productive process
[---> go to Sherlock Holmes]
Weltpanorama
a 19th century attraction: sweeping *comprehensive view*
stereoscopic peep show
a consumer would pay to observe a mechanized series of photographic images
Fuhrmann + Daguerre: illusory three-dimensional scenes whose reality-effects were augmented by concealed lighting and translucent painting
Kaiserpanorama <-- (a site [in which the *automation of perception* occurs] among many of) industrialization of visual consumption
~ a space in which the physical and temporal alignment of body and machine correspond to the rhythms of factory production (: the way novelty and interruptions were introduced into assembly-line labor in order to prevent attention from veering into trance and daydream. -Crary) this is common to:
•precinematic devices in 1880s
•cinematic devices in 1890s
--> (fragmentation of perception inherent to the apparatus presented in terms of) **a mechanically produced continuum that “naturalizes” the disjunctions**
(Crary asks:) by what logic of temporal sequence or spatial continuity does one move from the interior of papal apartments in Rome to the Great Wall of China to the Italian Alps in 120-seconds intervals?
[--?--> visual equivalence of political imperialism? slogans such as “Reisen durch die ganze Welt.” German colonialism of the 1880s --Sternberger--> “the views from European windows had lost their depth, becoming part and parcel of the same panorama world surrounding them and constituting a painted surface every where.” #Olearius; tourism + forms of visual consumption]
Muybridge's 1879 work on sequential photography ==> atomized field + not “truthful” syntax --> segmentation--opening--> onto an abstract order of continuities and uninterrupted circuits
...we are in a specific historical phase in the reduction of the time and cost of movement <==> circulating capital
}--Marx--> “capital by its nature drives beyond every spatial barrier” ==>
•creation of the physical condition of exchange
•creation of the means of communication and transport
•*eradication of space by time*
instantaneity of vision from which space is deleted
vision compatible with the smooth space of the global marketplace
uprooting of perception from any stable space-time coordination
the history of capitalism is the history of (effective operation of) overcoming obstacles of:
•anything with a permanent stable location (incapable of being inserted into circulation)
•anything that is part of a code (traditional or established pattern of behaviour, resisting deployment in networks of abstract relations)
[...]
(120)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%76.5[...]serpanorama <-- (a site [in which the *automation of perception* occurs] among many of) industrialization of visual consumption
~ a space in which the physical and temporal alignment of body and machine correspond to the rhythms of factory production (: the way novelty and interruptions were introduced into assembly-line labor in order to prevent attention from veering into trance and daydream. -Crary) this is common to:
•precinematic devices in 1880s
•cinematic devices in 1890s
--> (fragmentation of perception inherent to the apparatus presented in terms of) **a mechanically produced continuum that “naturalizes” the disjunctions**
(Crary asks:) by what logic of temporal sequence or spatial continuity does one move from the interior of papal apartments in Rome to the Great Wall of China to the Italian Alps in 120-seconds intervals?
[--?--> visual equivalence of political imperialism? slogans such as “Reisen durch die ganze Welt.” German colonialism of the 1880s --Sternberger--> “the views from European windows had lost their depth, becoming part and parcel of the same panorama world surrounding them and constituting a painted surface every where.” #Olearius; tourism + forms of visual consumption]
Muybridge's 1879 work on sequential photography ==> atomized field + not “truthful” syntax --> segmentation--opening--> onto an abstract order of continuities and uninterrupted circuits
...we are in a specific historical phase in the reduction of the time and cost of movement <==> circulating capital
}--Marx--> “capital by its nature drives beyond every spatial barrier” ==>
•creation of the physical condition of exchange
•creation of the means of communication and transport
•*eradication of space by time*
instantaneity of vision from which space is deleted
vision compatible with the smooth space of the global marketplace
uprooting of perception from any stable space-time coordination
the history of capitalism is the history of (effective operation of) overcoming obstacles of:
•anything with a permanent stable location (incapable of being inserted into circulation)
•anything that is part of a code (traditional or established pattern of behaviour, resisting deployment in networks of abstract relations)
(images productive of labor usually end up intermingling the representation of that land as a *tranquil earthly paradise*)
an image: self-evident presence of native workers on the coffee plantation; they remain invisible except as abstract components within flow of capital or as “naturalized” elements within an imaginary landscape
an image: workers gathering and packing beans under midday clouds; a fraudulently homogenous and static image of elements (bodies and land) which have become quantified and exchangeable, part o[...]
(121)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%76.5[...]y remain invisible except as abstract components within flow of capital or as “naturalized” elements within an imaginary landscape
an image: workers gathering and packing beans under midday clouds; a fraudulently homogenous and static image of elements (bodies and land) which have become quantified and exchangeable, part of an unstable system *incapable of immobilization*. it discloses the antinomic coexistence of living labor power (with its irreducible existential temporalities) and the tendency of capital to “circulation without circulation time.” the violence and social devastation underlying this all over distribution of human being within the lush vegetation of an apparently premodern landscape...
(my period of abstract digital image glitch: play of machinic objectivity -->) Muybridge's 1870s photograph of The Horse Motion ==> “*to be outside of* a syntactical and semantic organization that supported historical narrative”
-the machinic objectivity in play does not stake out a subjective position from which a “this happened” or a sense of “having been there” could be authenticated’ [=/= my later lecture-performances]. they are instances of *combinatorial logic* in which the individual images, although ostensibly part of a linear sequence and syntax [--> the way Julia noted ‘adjacency’ in the way i was presenting my image series], have a (‘newly’ in 19th century) ***autonomous, floating identity.*** their immobilization and groundlessness and mutable temporality is also the condition of their detachment from any binding continuities or trajectories, in a *decoding of perceptual experience*[--> also relevant for Foad's ahistorical “intuition"]. {this is could be related to a deeper relation with my youth's reality and its perceptions =/= attachment to binding continuities and trajectories are central to my recent work****}
==>
•rationalization and quantification of movement and time (==> mechanization of the body)
•posing plural scattering of attention (--> Sina)
•possibility of unforeseen perceptual synthesis (outside of any disciplinary imperatives --> Foad)
Kaiserpanorama --> industrialized sequence of disconnected images
Muybridge's work --> repetitive but disjunct series
(Crary shows:) demise of the punctual or anchored classical observer begins in the early 19th century --> a new unstable attentive subject (with a *vision refigured as dynamic, temporal, composite*) ==> consumer/agent of/in synthesis of a proliferating diversity of reality-effects (~=> digital and cybernetic imperatives of our present time)
invention
dissolution
creative synthesis
...................................
antimony: contradiction between two equally reasonable statements
the antinomic character (of my conceptual schema: rigidity and banality, attention and disintegration,,, ==> *an ob[...]
(122)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%76.6[...]anization that supported historical narrative”
-the machinic objectivity in play does not stake out a subjective position from which a “this happened” or a sense of “having been there” could be authenticated’ [=/= my later lecture-performances]. they are instances of *combinatorial logic* in which the individual images, although ostensibly part of a linear sequence and syntax [--> the way Julia noted ‘adjacency’ in the way i was presenting my image series], have a (‘newly’ in 19th century) ***autonomous, floating identity.*** their immobilization and groundlessness and mutable temporality is also the condition of their detachment from any binding continuities or trajectories, in a *decoding of perceptual experience*[--> also relevant for Foad's ahistorical “intuition"]. {this is could be related to a deeper relation with my youth's reality and its perceptions =/= attachment to binding continuities and trajectories are central to my recent work****}
==>
•rationalization and quantification of movement and time (==> mechanization of the body)
•posing plural scattering of attention (--> Sina)
•possibility of unforeseen perceptual synthesis (outside of any disciplinary imperatives --> Foad)
Kaiserpanorama --> industrialized sequence of disconnected images
Muybridge's work --> repetitive but disjunct series
(Crary shows:) demise of the punctual or anchored classical observer begins in the early 19th century --> a new unstable attentive subject (with a *vision refigured as dynamic, temporal, composite*) ==> consumer/agent of/in synthesis of a proliferating diversity of reality-effects (~=> digital and cybernetic imperatives of our present time)
invention
dissolution
creative synthesis
...................................
antimony: contradiction between two equally reasonable statements
the antinomic character (of my conceptual schema: rigidity and banality, attention and disintegration,,, ==> *an object outside its logical control*
-charged with antagonistic forces, like Seurat, my lectures (since now 2018) negate a possibility of an attentive closure, even as it fervently attempts to generate its own internal formula for perceptual presence and unity. like Seurat's Parade de Cirque, it operates in a ceaseless play of disclosure and concealment. [is it time to change?])
Seurat preoccupation with nonspecific temporalities
(estrangement from) a dream of instinctual wholeness
harmonious sensory utopia
-my lecture-performances constitute a provisional realm of freedom for an individual observer [~ myself: a psychic, social, imaginary position called being an Iranian--] of a prismatic past, coinciding with a proliferation of discourse [~= shifting plurality of ‘centers']
--> dream of subjective freedom + effects of power
perhaps my [...]
(123)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%76.7[...]esent time)
invention
dissolution
creative synthesis
...................................
antimony: contradiction between two equally reasonable statements
the antinomic character (of my conceptual schema: rigidity and banality, attention and disintegration,,, ==> *an object outside its logical control*
-charged with antagonistic forces, like Seurat, my lectures (since now 2018) negate a possibility of an attentive closure, even as it fervently attempts to generate its own internal formula for perceptual presence and unity. like Seurat's Parade de Cirque, it operates in a ceaseless play of disclosure and concealment. [is it time to change?])
Seurat preoccupation with nonspecific temporalities
(estrangement from) a dream of instinctual wholeness
harmonious sensory utopia
-my lecture-performances constitute a provisional realm of freedom for an individual observer [~ myself: a psychic, social, imaginary position called being an Iranian--] of a prismatic past, coinciding with a proliferation of discourse [~= shifting plurality of ‘centers']
--> dream of subjective freedom + effects of power
perhaps my work is inseparable from (the consequences of the emergence of) *models of subjective vision*
-use of optical mixture in my work.
how important is the retina (for any artist)? -->(the question of) the seeing body in all of its physiological density + ambiguous position of that body within conceptions of visuality
•chromatic or luminous effects on the body
physiological regime of visuality (beginning with Thomas Young and Goethe, developed by Johannes Müller, Helmholtz and others) =/= renaissance-based pictorial order
collapse of *camera obscura* model of vision --> emergence of *psychological optics*
1890s
construction of various nonreferential models of perception
+
pragmatic functions of an observing subject
--> status of vision and mind
--> nature and value of sensation
--> representation of social facts
central to many developments in the visual culture in the West in late 19th century: *questions of perceptual and cognitive synthesis*
Gestalt theory ==> essential primacy and ethical value of the ‘whole’ ~=> an observer who perceives organized structures, who is marked by innate form-giving and form-apprehending capacities --> an effort to endow human perception with an inherent meaningfulness, coherence, and even orderliness (amid its perceptual decomposition within 20th century spectacular culture) ~~-->[preparing for the perceptual logic of high capitalism:] it was not the attentive subject who identified form from a larger background, but rather the reverse, that “good” form had the capacity to produce attentiveness[...]
(124)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%76.7[...]esignate: appointed or made clear which place or direction spatially or figuratively. related to *design --> destine*]
early 1890s
the time when western science accepts the notion “that there might be several ways to represent the same fact” [--> elephant parable =/= situated knowledges]
1850s and 1860s
construction of models of the reflex functioning of the human nervous system --> nature of human response to external stimulation
dynamogenesis (~ every state of consciousness tends to realize itself in an appropriate muscular movement)
vision reformed in 19th century: nonoptical modal of attentive subject, not the one who sees, rather, the subject is the one who is susceptible to psychomotor induction
(what was once figured as visual representation are now) the abstract and quantified reactions of the body as a composite set of physical systems
--Fere--> instrumental relocation of vision (from a disembodied and punctual system of images) to an interplay of forces and motor reactions (in which representation is irrelevant)
[this is inseparable from the larger project of scientific amelioration of collective emotional hygiene of the 19th century]
--> *sensation: part of a sequence of events (in which the end point is not an inner state, such as: knowledge, cognition, perception, rather:) it is that which culminates in movement
some of the 1850s rationalizing ambitions (of widespread philosophical and scientific conceptualization of a fundamental relation between sensation and motor behaviour) indirectly informs Seurat's work --proposing-->{ sensory stimuli ==> motor expression (in the perceiver) }--> (the question of) **human response based on bypassing of conscious thought altogether**
(very important for iranian artists: the question of the *rational mind of an observer* and intellectual construction directed to that --> status of a conscious observer)
-producing effects involuntary in the observer
-(Foad and Sina engaging with an) exclusively optical consciousness of the individual human subject [--> can we go beyond that? to which philosophical sensual ethics of bodily awareness Foad and Sina are optically bind to? which anti-optical aesthetic positions are available to us?]
•Foad's neoimpressionist: implication of total organic resonance ==>{ from organic activity of perception --to--> transforming physical existence }
•Sina's Einfuhlung: mode of intense perceptual absorption in which lines and forms are experienced as catalysts for vitalization of the imagination
Seurat --> dream of a fully unalienated instinctual aesthetic gratification --through--> quantifiable and manageable economy of excitation (within an organized and controllable body)
biological romanticism
anxiety of overstimulation --> power of suggestion
[...]
(125)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%76.8[...]br />
silent reflective monk
mechanical assemblage of never quite integrated elements
Seurat's texture of work <== an intuition of the loss of art's immediacy --> shift of (what might have been) contemplation into mere attentiveness
(Crary) Seurat concretizes the *modern dilemma of the disappearance of aura*
...bringing into the work the forms of rationalization that eradicated aura in the first place --> appearance is privileged over essence, and technological rationality is deployed in the service of appearance
negotiating rapture
(ajayeb ~/=?) to produce a dialectic image: to criticize modernity (~ foregrounding of the aura) through an act of memory, and at the same time, to criticize archaism (~ nostalgia for the aura) through an act of essentially modern invention (substitution and designification)
color...
how forms of ‘synthesis’ (optical mixture, purely additive and accumulative functions of industrialized procedures) produce ‘qualitative’ change (pre-bourgeois non-quantitative connection to nature, for which color did not exist as an autonomous experience or as a separate and specialized science)
Seurat: surface fascinations consequences of a disappointment at the impossibility of immediacy and the historical inaccessibility of the dream of the ritual/magical practice of art --> Seurat's work's exhaustive denial of presence ==> (another kind of immediacy:) the ***fusing of image and eye*** @Foad
=/= art as a medium for disclosing essential truths
=/= redemptive optimism
...................................
a desiring system dependent on operations of rebinding and immobilization
the problem of *contrapposto* [and *chiaroscuro* (contrast of colors)]:
a Renaissance ideal, invoking a metaphysical dualism that found expression in rhetorical devices of contrast and antithesis --sumbsumed--> within the *larger ideal of opposition*
contrapposto could be decorative or structural, justified by its vividness, the clarity with which art could bring opposites into harmony
classical image (of the body) as an expression of a self-determining balance of internal forces
“authentic images” seem capable of action, seem to posses dynamis (supernatural power)
Universal Exposition of 1889 + international congresses of hypnosis:
•rationalizing ideological imperatives (concertized in the actual organization and layout of the Exposition --> rooted in the enlightenment's faith in man's limitless potential for mastery of his environment)
•hypnosis optimistically as the most effective entry into (previously inaccessible) territories and processes of human psychic life (and hopefully mastering this terrain)
•extensive presentation of colonial people and lifestyle as objects o[...]
(126)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%77.9[...]emantic, iconographic significance of the clown and acrobat in the painting) --> *the illusion of movement*
beginning with the phenakistoscope and zoetrope in the 1830s --through--> innumerable optical devices all the way into 1890s --> endlessly fascinating and repetitive --> sites of attentiveness (~= attraction)
{ Seurat + Reynaud + Edison (~ producers of the ***machines of the visible***, allowing the constructed and synthetic nature of machine vision to coincide with their own rationalization of perceptual process) + forms of machinic vision developing through 1880s }--> (examples of an emerging) *****industrial art***** : from *artisanal practices* --to--> standardizing industrial modes of image-making
Crary reading Seurat without isolating him from the effects of what Raynaud, Edison and many others (Muybridge, Fuhrmann,) were developing through out the 1880s
{ the audience in Seurat's painting = the audience of the static backgrounds used in Reynaud's machines }--> the unchanging, unreflective, even unseeing nature of modern spectatorship : *a crowd of spectators permanently in place, installed as a fundamental component of the social world* (in which the specific content displayed to them is the matter of absolute inconsequence)
shadow show
clown as magician-engineer who with his right hand opens the curtains onto an illuminated and abstractly assembled plane of visual stimulation
(Seurat were disclosed to the) congruence of an immaterial, atopic and evanescent image with powerful reality effects and techniques of attraction
techniques of perceptual modernization --constituting--> an autonomous space of invention --> imposing its own constructed visions and truths on viewers
(Crary shows how) the mechanization of vision had no intrinsic link to objectivity, but rather to new capacities for simulation, illusion, conjuration
(my paintings? ...early) dreams of an impossible and inhuman vision, of a desire for perceptual ubiquity exceeding the spacial and temporal limits of human faculties --?--> remake the self into a sovereign eye would create and impose its own truths
-the horses of Gericault and Seurat, in their airborne oneiric trajectories, incarnate a deeper truth of the body: they become abstract correlates of psychological and kinetic response to perceived movement --> ideomotor experience (=/= truth of mechanical spatial movement)
(--> ajayeb description movement animal in motion)
***animal is arrested --> presence is not directly accessible to human vision, but can only be the product of technical procedures of simulation*** --> “nature = scenographic space” (--collapse--> precondition for the impossible unseeable apparition specter --Seurat--> spectacle)
phantasmal homeostasis
detemporalization of experience
management of attention <--> [...]
(127)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%78.5[...]ile the other *relays before having understood*
--> the necessity of not having control over language ~ (Chloe:) the necessity of being a foreigner in one's own tongue
--> “bring something incomprehensible into the world” --> in the form of exteriority
--> the becoming woman of the thinker ~ the becoming thought of the woman
--> (Chloe =) the Gemüt [feeling, heart, soul, mind] that refuses to be controlled ==forms==> a war machine : a thought grappling with exterior forces instead of being gathered up in an interior form
--> operating by relay =/= forming an image @Rob--> a thought that appeals to government ministry
--> event-thought =/= subject-thought
--> problem-thought =/= essence-thought, theorem
striating of mental space =/= Sina's textures and lectures
@Pierre: is horizon a striation?
Deleuze and Guattari: a horizonless milieu --> smooth space
the true name of race: bastard, mixed-blood
-a race is defined not by its purity but rather by the impurity conferred upon it by a system of domination
[(aspects of) war machine or] machine:
•spatiogeographic
•arithmatic
•affective
principle =/= consequence
-in nomads life what is a principle and what is only a consequence?
{migrant --> goes principally}=/={nomad --> goes as a consequence}
{(sedentary) road --> parcel out a closed space to people}=/={(nomadic) trajectory --> distributes people or animals in an open space, indifinite and noncommunicating}
(space) in the manner of a vortex
migrant leaves behind a milieu that has become amorphous or hostile
forest and house --> both striated?
pigs --> pragmatism or expertise
-the pigs story might not predict the coming of the nomad wolf, but it constitutes the principles of architecture for which an incoming is striated. striated space is the result of the pigs story
عرفان همیشه بیابانی است؟
does mysticism always requires deprivation of life? mysticism ~=? symbolism
[*]godzilla: dramatization of where the mountain recedes, of the earth deterritorializing itself ==> providing the nomad with a territory
*vectors of deterritorialization and local operations* that:
•wolf adds to the forest
•godzilla adds to Tokio
•
#video concept
in tiktok comedy style, a group of iranians (talking Farsi, all acted by one person?) are personifying a govermental response to a godzilla who is roaming in the city.
localized =/= delimited
[the spot where the forest recedes] or the desert advances
گرگ در جنگل / آل در بیابان
.... .\ ____ _
... \_____
. .... \ __ __
.... . \ ____
. ...\ _ ___ _[...]
(128)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%80.3[...]ining
insitutes an entire economy of violence
--> *a way of making violence durable*
two ideal models motor:
work =/= free action
•(let's) work: tool meets resistance
•free action: operates only upon the mobile body itself, is not consumed in its effect(?), continues from one moment to the next [--> style of artistic research]. the way in which the elements of the body escape gravitation to occupy absolutely a nonpunctuated space
weapon is moving
tool is moved
tool presupposes work, tool does not define work
***the principle behind all technology is to demonstrate that a technical element remains abstract***, remains entirely undetermined --> as long as one does not relate it to an assemblage it presupposes
tool
-one cannot speak of weapons or tools before defining the constituent assemblages they presuppose and enter into @OSP
the tool is essentially tied to a gensis, a displacement, and an expenditure of force (whose laws reside in work) =/= weapon concerns only the exercise or manifestation of force in space and time (in conformity with free action)
when speed added to displacement ==> ?
tools & weapons = consequences ~/=? causes
the morning star and the battle-axes
variable assemblages of human, animal, and thing
*assemblage*: (passional) compositions of desire[=/= natural determination, spontaneous determination] --D+G--> there is no desire, but assembling/assembled desire
assemblage ==(bring into play)==> [*]passion: effectuations of desire that differ according to the assemblage [=/= Germany]
man-animal-weapon
man-horse-bow
assemblage of speed
...
(what Game of Thrones TV series missed:) military of men --> homosexual eros replaces the zoosexual eros of horesman [--> اسب امام حسین]r />
State ==>{(training of) worker --to--> (apprenticeship of) soldier}
{affect: active discharge of emotion --> projectile ~ weapon}=/={feeling: displaced, retarded, resisting emotion --> introceptive ~ tool}
martial arts: the not-doing of the warrior ~ the undoing of the subject
effectuated in the void (=/= nothingness)
form-matter =/= motif-support
(the support is as mobile as the motif)
goldsmith's and silversmith's is the barbarian art par excellence
picto-ideographic
short war
live messages
[text that is] ornamental (a way of encoding) =/= scriptural (according to a sacred writing)
tools
weapons
signs
jewellery
jewellery/sign --> expression
model --> free action / work
direction --> projection / introception (#bow and arrow)
[...]
(131)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%80.7[...]s nature
--✕--> Bacon: art (formal and final causes) should become more natural & nature (material and efficient causes) should be made more artificial --> monster: nature's artificial work
•nature in extremis =/= conventional wisdom
•monsters: models for the novelties of art
--Bacon--> enrichment of both speculative and operative natural philosophy (=/= books of fabulous experiments and secrets)
**wonder literature sacrificed accuracy to admiration**
corroboration
xxxxxx
...................................
to take echoing abstractions (reason, nature, etc.) and try to cash them out in concrete practices
(transformation of) extremely abstract --to--> extremely concrete
-why is it so irresistible to reach analogies between the moral and the natural orders?
other orders of nature [**every order of nature sustains a moral order**]:
1. local nature (what happens when we scale up)
2. ontological identity card (what makes a squirrels)
3. universal natural laws
aggregation of these forms of orders ]**each provokes a characteristic cognitive passion** : they involve judgment + emotional reaction to its transgressions]:
1. disequilibria (--> terror: fear saturated by guilt) --> local nature
2. monsters (--> horror) --> specific nature
3. marvels and miracles (--> wonder) --> natural laws
[(a very recently) forceful kind of] argument to anchor moral or political order in a natural foundation
--Daston--> we are species that represent (**we must model our orders** : to make visible & external) --{with an appeal to a natural analog}--> *nature: the richest source of models of all kind of orders
[!!!today task of artist:] ***to give back humanity its childhood*** (that was lost in the age of objectivity) @Sina, Sarah
...................................
Schutz
social nature of knowledge
how people grasp the consciousness of others while living within their own streams of consciousness
absent friends:
•his brother whom he has described to me
•the professor whose books i have read
•the postal clerk
•the Canadian Parliament
•abstract entities like Canada herself
•the rules of English grammar
•the basic principles of jurisprudence
•
--Schutz--> more one goes into the contemporary world, the more anonymous the contemporary inhabitants become
...................................
wonder
and its marvels
(Paris wall slogan from the student rebellion of 1968 -->) “every view of things that is not strange (bizarre, foreign) is false” --Bynum--> to jolt her listeners nad readers into encounter with a past that is unexpected and strange
past --> answer questions we haven't asked
[...]
(132)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%81.7[...]r />
(existentialist entrapment of man in his world, #alienation)
(in Being and Time) Heidegger's Dasein ==>
•stripping man's shared element down to its being-there
•subsumes and displaces the humanity of man
•rejection of the I as an absolute, independent subject that approaches a world largely separate from it
--> from ontic determination --to--> ontico-ontological determination [of human]
*the humanity of Dasein remains and must be understood as derivative of both its ontic and ontological status
metaphysical presupposition (that he cannot claim to be capable of fully describing or understanding natur) -->
(human approached and understood only in terms of) *results* or *side-effects* (of language, existence, history, phenomena):
•in phenomena: man finds himself thrown in the world of phenomena and life; he is not grounded in some transcendental fashion (Heidegger, Kojeve, Malraux, Sartre, Beaufret)
>
•in language: he is an interpreter of signs and symbols that form part of greater systems independent of his individual will
•in history: he is constructed and operates within cultural, religious, and philosophical limits imposed on him
•
[and] these systems are not consequences of man's creative activity, desire, or will
they are domains in which he finds himself
}--> *the human in man comes to mean less and less* ==> *we can only know what his approach to others (and other things) can reveal*
emergence of the new nonhumanist atheism + the negative philosophical anthropology --> French antihumanism's assault on:
•contemporary humanisms
•the legacies and utopian hopes of the Enlightenment
•liberal-bourgeois thinking grounded in human rights and individual autonomy
•Marxist humanism with its critique of liberalism and its expectations of a superior
humanity
•(human perfectionection & social harmony)
(Geroulanos's account of primary constellations of) humanism:
•christian humanism
•Renaissance educational humanism (founded on a return to ancient Greek models)
•Humboldt's reconceptualization of Renaissance humanism (in 19th century Germany)
•Enlightenment humanism (from Montesquieu through Rousseau and Condorcet)
•19th century liberal humanism (frequently based on natural law, autonomy over one's own body and mind, and human rights)
•socialist humanisms (with its commitment to contractarian social theory)
Encyclopedie's attack on theological knowledge
19th century construction of modern humanism (sociopolitical goals of a “human nature”) --> left-leaning, often democratic, (but certainly) utopian sociopolitical mentality
[*]ideology: a thinking that does not critique, nor even think its provenance from and proper relation to reality --Nancy-->[...]
(133)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%84.8[...] way of escape... [Christian Hubert] #Haraway
•the question of the “soul” is read as the question of (certain technology of) power over bodiess
(traits of) cyborg:
1. boundary transgression
2. the recognition and re-scripting of myth
3. simulations of identity
4. coalitions of affinity
reembodiment of intelligence
Hubert > Serres: “My body (I cannot help it) is not plunged into a single, specified space. It works in Euclidean space, but it only works there. It sees in a projective space; it touches, caresses, and feels in a topological space; it suffers in another; hears and communicates in a third; and so forth, as far as one wishes to go. Euclidean space was chosen in our work-oriented cultures because it is the space of work--of the mason, the surveyor, or the architect. [...] My body lives in as many spaces as the society, the group, or the collectivity have formed: the Euclidean house, the street and its network, the open and closed garden, the church or the enclosed spaces of the sacred, the school and its spatial varieties containing fixed points, and the complex ensemble of flow-charts, those of language, of the factory, of the family, of the political party, and so forth. Consequently my body is not plunged into one space but into the intersection or the junctions of this multiplicity.” (Hermes, pp 44-45) (@Aela)
...................................
(feminist open-source --✕-->?) I am actually coming from a masculinist closed-source culture-thing, that is to say, my background is in masculinist black-boxed concepts of being and beyond, that means i have a different relationship with interference and parasitism
•how and when a concept becomes black-boxed? by which processes?
@Sven: what matters is the input/output, stimulus/response [--> “black-box of the beyond” (#zolmat writing)] --> transfer characteristics, data-flow, the ontology of the “internal working” : “open” exchanges inforamtion about its interactions }--> open-source is part of the tradition of anthropocene system thinking: network synthesis, system engineering, theory of the organism, evolutionary theory, thermodynamics, and world system perspective
...................................
what are the nodes of energy in interdigitalities intra-actions in human-machine relations?
***we are belonging to a set of cultures that regularly believes in the idiom of: organism =/= technology
--> this little ontological dichotomous device is doing serious worldings, making and destroying worlds
technologies of descriptive practices
technology is descriptive practice
technology: anything describable as a technology --> idiom اصطلاح
...................................
[title]
age of stone, and stories for computers
...................................
(#workshop in[...]
(134)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%85.6[...]YWORDS: soft bodies, skin, skinnig, Rig, Rigging, unwrapping, fold, CG, animation, locomotion, kinectics, skeleton, mechanics, interface, technology,
...................................
Rigs are about:
-ways of arranging space, time and matter : like a sentence, that sticks words sequentially together in a certain way. Rig would be a way those elements are attached to one another in time and space.
[*] --> one-dimenisional skeletal Rigs are generally intereseting for my research, because of the specific sequential order that many forms of culture take. (for example, “tradition” is from that famility of Rigs, a string of things in a particular order and not another. [---> go to totem columns]. “language” is another one.)
◦what are the degrees of flexibilty, stretch and tention between the nodes in a Rig?
◦what a substitution in a string-Rig might change the ways that being is animated, and therefore change the meaning?
-that means: change the Rig, and you will change the ways space and time are arranged
-that means: thinking about Rigs is like thinking about the language, or better: ontological commitments embedded in language. and since we are interested in materiality [that means: material human-technology relations], i would ask: what are the material objects that this language commits us to? to be more exact: what are the material objects that the language-Rig commits the CG-hacker to?
-ontological assumptions embeded in any “device” (English grammar, CG Rigs, architect's tools, a definition in language, etc.)
-Rigs are clever technological provisional constructions, (always) setup for a specific naturalization.
-Rigs articulate animacies, that is to say: they are almost linguistic structures that shape or determine our animations
-Rigs do consequential work
-how elements are arranged together, how they are composed, how they are brought into relation in the space of a field, [...]
(135)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%85.7[...] forms of culture take. (for example, “tradition” is from that famility of Rigs, a string of things in a particular order and not another. [---> go to totem columns]. “language” is another one.)
◦what are the degrees of flexibilty, stretch and tention between the nodes in a Rig?
◦what a substitution in a string-Rig might change the ways that being is animated, and therefore change the meaning?
-that means: change the Rig, and you will change the ways space and time are arranged
-that means: thinking about Rigs is like thinking about the language, or better: ontological commitments embedded in language. and since we are interested in materiality [that means: material human-technology relations], i would ask: what are the material objects that this language commits us to? to be more exact: what are the material objects that the language-Rig commits the CG-hacker to?
-ontological assumptions embeded in any “device” (English grammar, CG Rigs, architect's tools, a definition in language, etc.)
-Rigs are clever technological provisional constructions, (always) setup for a specific naturalization.
-Rigs articulate animacies, that is to say: they are almost linguistic structures that shape or determine our animations
-Rigs do consequential work
-how elements are arranged together, how they are composed, how they are brought into relation in the space of a field, narrative, text, environment, etc
whenever you give a definition (a metaphor, a concept) and work with it, and find yourself committed to certain findings, tracings and meanings because of that: you are working with a Rig. that is to say: Rigs are definitional structures, not arguments themselves, but their conditions.
then the question would be: when do you know that it is time to dismantle a Rig? how to recognize, learn to reuse or repurpose old Rigs?
in CG the business of Rigging and Rig-making is handed to the engineering talent and point of view, it has made a pure technical problem.
skeletal, it's all about the ‘arm’
http://www.toxik.sk/img/maya2011_ya.jpg
an arm is a spaciotemporal particularity
the organisms that crafted in their bodies the subphylum vertebrata, a terrestrial technology for moving the flesh.
the images we make are made in the image of the one-with-arms
mechanical
bipedal
facial
quadrupedal
many arms and legs
spinal
surficial
hair
feather
rain Rig by محمد عبدالله
eqFUnFPcuwg
an Optimus Prime transformation Rig by Eske Yoshinob
VDrAzeNS2pk?t=28
(strictly) possible tranformational arrangements
how a being is Rigged into transformational particularities
in this sense, the question of the Rig is ontoloical, specially in a world populated by devices and technique[...]
(137)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%85.8[...]ly inaccessible to language
•linguistic monism: being completely of language
•Baradian agential realism: phenomena are constitutive of reality
...................................
kinetic, energies expressed in variables
integrated definitions:
•movements of an isolated body
•in detachment with the rest of the world
•linear function of time
•all energy is kinetic
•value of “potential energy” is zero
...................................
metallurgy concerns matter in movement
matter-flow
what about the 3D hacker? what is in flow?
form is ever-emergent =/= pre-determined -->? default
[Alberti on northwest Argentina first millennium ceramic vessels:] potters’ bodies were shaped irrevocably by their skilled practice
objects they made were never complete ==> they were aligned with others’ concerns ==> they were drawn into potters’ social identities --> into the category of potter
*skill and ontoloical risk [--> question at CG artist]
-becoming subject to the processes they are involved in --(this commitment)--> involves them in both the task and its ongoing material consequence
skilled practices situated as the mediator between one realm and the other =/= (in Amazonia) where natural and cultural processes are not distinguished in the same way, skill is conceived far more broadly and is not an exclusively human capacity
(for Kuna) [*]skill: a mark of the maker's openness to alterity, learned in dreams from animals that lost the ability to perform those activities in mythic times, it not only acts upon surfaces or moulds forms; it also transfers qualities
skill matters (=/= gauge of technical action applied to raw material--like the case of The Magicians)
hackers and potters
(potters’ identities were vulnerable, how about hackers after a millennium?)
CG artist's intervensions in 3D materials (concidered active)
(we are living in) an inconstant world in which materials (including computers?) were lively and equally capable of subjectivity
(conventionally conceived) polygon modeling: reproducing, or representing a mental image of a completed body-pot
*?how CG artist can learn, like La Candelaria potters ****to take part in an aesthetics of care that is also a response to the threat of the inconstancy of all forms****, responding to perturbations in the movement of materials, to include knowledge of its inconstancy and of materials always capable of subjectivity
(this is significant for my research on ajayeb, due to the ways iranian culture is attracted to the image, and my self to CG and digital form making)
my relationship with the digital (articulated with Alberti:) that body-polys (body-pots) ar[...]
(138)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%86.3[...]n of the modern social fabric--intended (like the warp and weft of a textile) to remain discreet, always perpendicular
modern aesthetic theory --> contradictory structure of difference of “fashion =/= art” : “fashion design = art's constitutive other” (= that mode of creative production that is beholden to the market and to the manufactured whims of the embodied, consumer passions =/={ art's singularity, extraordinariness, [Nietzschean ethics of] standing alone ==> timeless or universal knowledge =/= ‘everyday culture'})
radical beauty of the quotidian
mundane material culture is repeatedly *elevated* and “translated” into art --> “losing its place within lived reality ==> to become critically meaningful” =/= (Gernreich's) art and fashion critically transformed so that they run parallel and start to resonate with one another
(for Benjamin) translation [~= criticism]: allowing (translatior's) language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue [=/= preserves the state in which (translatior's own) language happens to be]
-to transform “the original” text/thing through the medium of the other, echoes that are produced in the space that opens up between an “original” and “secondary” text --> [*]translation: inconsequentiality of original/secondary separation
--Gernreich--> to make clothes in-between art and fashion (now and the future, the self and the other)
it-girl
Beatlesque escape
new paths that young people are charting requires clothes
(Archer is making me interested in fashion by helping me go through the) economic and scopophilic grains of the fashion industry
the idea of the ‘new look’ absolutely dominating the fashion scene during the mid 21st century
‘new look’ fashion strictly obeying the laws and divisions of optically delineated Cartesian space, and its attending epistemo-ontologies and political economies (-Archer: the proportions of Dior's famous silhouette absolutely required that one always take a well-heeled “step-back” in order to comprehend themselves in a mirror, a camera lens, or even a street window) --> (offering consumers new manners in which) to dress, but also **to see and to understand themselves and their potentiality**
[myself, like many critical artists of my generation, we glean (harvest خوشه چينى) the occurrence of ideological violence]
relaxed clothing shapes
affordable
easy-to-care-for
mix-and-match fabrics
hyper-modern color combinations and patterns
couture خياط زنانه
animosity, bad blood, animus's system, the system is made
perennial enfant terrible
(the naked constant prince)
social change <== **fashion must (and will) go out of fashion**
Gernreich's economic critique of the fash[...]
(139)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%86.6[...]on offers our desires a medium through which:
•to formally manipulate the discourse of the body
•to violently threaten the rational ordering of its meaning
•to from which to produce pleasures that exceed satisfaction or sense
•to operate on the text/ile in ways that are non-linguistic (within waking life)
Lyotard's “the dream-work does not think, but ‘manhandles’ the text and operates on the text as if it were a material” =/= Lacan's “the unconscious is structured like a language”
Lyotard on Freud's assumption and insistence that the textures of a text affect its meaning --> Lacan's failure (as analyst and philosopher) in not being able to appreciate how fantasy (~ the forms of desire ~? fashion) pits the materiality of signifiers against what they try to signify
“if desire is the mobile element (here the wind, elsewhere water) that crumples the text, can it also be the fixative which keeps certain parts of it readable? I know of only one notion which can satisfy these conflicting demands: the notion of form, of fantasy”
(my struggle with my colleagues) not to confuse fashion [or any object] for “an object that the subject imagines and aims at” instead of recognizing fashion as “a sequence in which the subject has their own part to play and in which permutations of roles and attributions are possible”
@Hoda, Pierre, Ali
(Zizek:) through fashion we learn how to desire --> how to desire our own subjugation, as well as the possibilities of our own freedom
*political potency of desire* (--> do we need to recognize and manipulate it to our advantage? @Foad)
توان سیاسی میل
[looking for?] proper names --> quickly recognized for offering some sense of sonic semblance in a sea of deconstructed phonemes in Anglo-shaped mouths
#wear my lecture
*fantastic critique* =/= parochial critique (usually rational economic)
[unpossessed persons are the ones who usually talking about magic, and transformative potentlies]
people who don't care about *dressing up* are situating dress reform (fashion) in a type of neutered and disembodied utilitarianism (--Janina--> ignorant to fashion's textures and to the ways that fashion's formal dimensions could motivate the body to move beyond the pleasure principle)
politics and feelings of pleasure and displeasure --Gernreich--> absolutely central to any critical understanding or experience of the world
@Jassem: desires (always, even in the most strict desire regimes) could lead us astray
(the radical moment) when my body pursues its own ideas (~/= the ideas that i do)
post-structuralist textiles (a different form of political activity) =/= radical politics (such as movements and so on)
that is why i cannot simply cr[...]
(140)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%86.8[...]r />
@Jassem: desires (always, even in the most strict desire regimes) could lead us astray
(the radical moment) when my body pursues its own ideas (~/= the ideas that i do)
post-structuralist textiles (a different form of political activity) =/= radical politics (such as movements and so on)
that is why i cannot simply critique existing forms for their morality nor simply offer humanist solutions to the problems (of capitalism, Iran, etc.) like Gernreich, i am recognizing that by reinforcing or relaxing shapes and materials of the there-is, i could direct the ways our desires became caught-up in the system's works, or that certain materials only worked in certain ways
affordable (double)knit fabrics: made of variable columns of inter-looping yarns, [they] are made to stretch in a variety of directions =/= non-elasticated woven fabrics
--> texture of the night, (use it) to drape oneself over the arm of a couch, or to run after someone leaving a party a little too early
paths and forms of pleasure that Gernreich hoped to see all young people exploring
[...] Meanwhile ‘Man’ is temporarily bereaved. But they will find a new way. ***And the new way will have important consequences for clothes*** -Gernreich
capitalize: transformation of unexpected --into--> simple --into--> expectable --into--> convention/style
images of hyper-sexualized damsels laid amidst tall grasses (most controversial 19th or 20th century figurations of women) --> [that is not enough--it falls short in showing] the way that these suits clearly encourage their wearers to close their eyes and explore the kinky pleasure found specifically in the way PVC peels from your flesh in one long slurp
plastics don't have the same ‘memory’ as textiles
they don't hold onto the past
they won't stay obediently folded like a cotton calico
vinyl swimsuit
*these designs proliferated a multi-faceted understanding of one's own skin*
-exposed skin feels so starkly and qualitatively different than a torso left to sweat it out under a nearly non-porous plasticine cloth
xxxx
...................................
(we are in) style wars***
critical considerations of style --> think across subjectivities & cultural practices
*aesthetics of mending*
mend: replacing a part or putting together what is torn or broken
(--> regarding ajayeb, reparative, refigurative reading of the past, mending of *those thing that seem beyond repair* --> important for Tehran's landscape of affect and aspiration)
Archer: how arrangement of masculinity (~= acts of violence and wounding) might be *styled otherwise*
literal fashion victim of war hero
“every man” will put himself on the line, and ear[...]
(141)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%86.8[...] is the direction of looking that matters *** (mode of attention)
•Deleuze
•Whitehead
•Darwin
•Benjamin
•
bestiary = baroque + romantic
*romantic complexity (looks up) =/= baroque complexity (looks down)*
•looking up: integrate individuals (who appear to be a heterogeneous lot) at the phenomenological level to a single entity at a higher level of organization --> (plants and animals, individuals) are*functionality integrated* [<-- my problem with the notion of community]
◦looking up to the world of platonic forms <-- a process of abstraction
•looking down: a table of companions --> (plants and animals, individuals) are *cooperating*
(romantic conceptions of) society as organism =/= (baroque conception of) organism as society
(historic) baroque
-grand style of 17th century
-(insist on) strong phenomenological realness --> sensuous materiality
-materiality flows out in many directions (=/= confined within) ==> blurring “individual =/= environment”
-inventiveness:
--music--> the ability to produce lots of novel combinations out of a rather limited set of elements
--theater--> (logical development of plot =/=) sequence of monologues and allegories ==> action
Leibniz baroque philosophy --> monad: individuals not linked to form greater systems (they don't even communicate), but they affect each other
--Deleuze--> each monad had its context represented inside itself (as fold) [more important the monad --> richer its world]
metaphors of romanticism:
•organicism
•system --> (in graphical representation) depicted by connecting lives between constituent elements (=/= monad)
•
Whitehead --Deleuze--> a neobaroque philosopher --> possibility of a chaotic side-by-side existence of mutually exclusive realities
(baroque era) harmony: art of counterpoints (bringing together independent voices)
German baroque (Gryphius, Lohenstein) --> nature = [*]ruin: heap of highly significant fragments =/= seamless web (@ERG website)
•fragment: independent individual things with a monadological structure (~/= postmodern understanding of fragment)
•link (between them) = reciprocal reference =/= connection
◦(references remain in their) *allegorical immanence*
•
World War II ~=> systems theories (attempt to explain the structure and behavior of complex objects
Charney + von Neumann
deterministic description of the atmosphere
“long-range forecasting”
computer-based metrology
==> *field* became the essence of atmospheric state (field =/= structure, phenomena such as cyclones, fronts, cyclogenesis, frontogenesis)
<--Lorenz-- a given that the atmosphere is a single whole
[...]
(142)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%93.5[...]of import and embedding (something from another time or place in your present argument)
*there is no empirical without language*
there is no local without travel
(@Xiri, Hoda, to urgently shift from who to what)
(from) ‘who question’ of politics: who gets to talk? (like “do women get a say?”) --to--> ‘what question’: “what is made of women?”
[metaphors of doing]
(neoliberal legacy of) isolated acting objects =/= complex global-local inequalities
historical traces of the acting in the image of the fighting muscular man throwing a spear [~-> Arash kamangir آرش کمانگیر ~/=? my play with the bow and arrow in apass;] =/= digestion, eating (as “doing something” that you cannot control), plants growing, smelling (is not acting?)
...................................
*assemblages*
-continuities require ‘work’ to constitute them as ‘well-formed assemblages’
-the emergence of a stable assemblage requires ‘translations’
-(we should) search out the catalysts, enablers or inhibitors of processes that interest us
-how varied and multiple qualities of agency unfold as effects in assemblages that encompass both human and nonhuman forms, and how these effects subsequently achieve particular outcomes for different parties
(organic food) market <==emerging== ideological desires of embedded entrepreneurs who innovate within dynamic material-semiotic systems
(Foad stressed that assemblages are characterized by the condition of) ‘territory’: contexts that engender more or less conservative orientations of assemblages toward fixity
(Sina emphasized that assemblages are also characterized by the condition of) ‘abstraction’: the unique character of how an assemblage mobilizes new compositions of material and expressive thing
}--> relational territories of heterogeneous stuff territorialized [by value] and abstracted [by price]
can we trace consumption as it unfolds?
-family assemblages are characterized as collections of distinct but related units, things that are never the same twice, but somehow hold together and maintain coherent pathways through time
(Price and Epp)
-(for people who move often) ‘home’: something that needs to be continually recreated by combining all sorts of elements in imaginative ways--home is a hybrid (=/= simply there waiting for them)
an “I love you” --enter--> assemblages in manners that catalyse (or inhibit) ongoing hybrid relations
levels of analysis is always unexpected [=/= purification]
modern separation between ‘believing in unicorns’ and ‘managing environmental disasters’ [~/=? ajayeb] ~ modern separations/boundaries: science/mythology/politics/religion/leisure (<--Latour/Haraway-- this is a problem) ==> ***purify components of our cultures***
‘program o[...]
(143)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%94.2[...]
unthinkability: refusal to let framing occur
...................................
how mythology is being used in consumer research
[...]
[Tillotson and Martin offering various myth typologies to support theorists in evaluation of myth theories and appropriate integration of theoretical advancements in the field of consumer culture theory:] --> how consumer researchers have sailed though every discipline--from psychology, sociology, anthropology and cultural studies, to literary criticism, history and political economy...
myth has been understood in consumer research from five perspective:
•symbolic
•functionalist
•semiotic
•structuralist
•critical theory
•monomythic
Weber{ modern bureaucratization and intellectualization ==> disenchantment of the world }--> modern experience = rationalization and mythological mysticism ==> marketplace, *no institution has been more willing and able to respond to this (Weberian) desire for enchantment than the modern marketplace* ~=> ***normative preference for enchantment = consumption***
--problem--> *the market remains firmly in charge of myth of consumption, its rewards and its consequences* : marketplace mythology has increasingly become an all-encompassing construct of assorted descriptions and theoretical advancements including the sacred, extraordinary, symbolic and transcendental
myth: a way of organizing perceptions of realities
consumer culture theory
{[Mead & Blumer's] symbolic perspective of myth: how symbols are adorned with meaning and that affect social interaction --> symbolic myth research: verbal/nonverbal forms of communication, with an emphasis on how people behave in day-to-day circumstances in the context of socio-historical structure and ideological of their environment ==> “mythology = narrative” }=/= Joseph Campbell: “interaction with the symbolic ==> mythology”
•Freud's use of mythic stories as metaphors in psychoanalysis ==> (early) symbolic perspective
•Jung's archetype: embodiment beliefs/images ==collectively==> myth and religion }==> “mythology = extension of the collective unconscious into society”
•Blumer's social life: construction built up by the actor (=/= relationship of structures directing human life); ability to act toward oneself, ability to internally define themselves as objects [self with goal] as the symbols of their own actions
--McAdams--> personal myth: narrative storyline as a means to organize meaning in their lives --in--> context <==forms== historical, religious and state-influenced belief systems, culturally specific themes and ideology
}--> identity and society --responsible-for--> life story --negotiated--> personal myth as interpretive strategy
}==> concepts of ‘consumption’ and ‘identity’ in con[...]
(144)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%95.7[...]rginalizing yourself as alternative
research organization =/= magazine
Renan http://temporaryartreview.com/the-infantilization-of-local-contexts/
artworld's cynical consumption of the global periphery
international worship of dialogue
unified complicity
transnational capital of in-group favoritism
cosmetology of democratism
advanced capitalism: non-hierarchical transactions, horizontal decision-making
(business of) trading contexts
Western ethnocentrism
(1970s) “art played a vital role in the amassing of cultural resources, assimilation, and formation of national cultures” ==> “improving humankind” (the colonial definition of development)
*rhetoric of development ==shaped/shaping==> art*
•diverse group of global interlopers
•content-providing native informants
•regional mediators/specialists
•solvent-like multinational institutions
[cultural development:] art act adhesive for civil society --> good governance ==> dialogues (~= to create a new moral image of man)
-*conditionally inclusive vision of the international artworld: a politically legitimate place with pluralistic inter-institutional structures driven by economic liberalism, subsequently confirmed by the participation of civil society*
...a practice of dialogue between art and development, across geographies: banking on the coalition of ethno-nationalism and globalization, and promoting “indigenous” forms of capitalism, while avoiding the optics of exoticization }==>
•divides and controls localities
•contextual differences are distributed as needs and urgencies
•juridico-engineering structures (symbolized progress)
•cultural globalism with consumption at its core
•regions soused on the liberal democratic fantasy of salvation via harmonious, multilateral exchange
(we don't want dialogues, we need meaningful dialogues)
--Renan--> [to relocate the “struggle for exchange” in] monological circuits across the topographies of power and restitution =/= geographies of guilt and embarrassment
antagonistic knowledges (organise and rally actions and thoughts for resistance) --> changes how you are socialized
Robinson Crusoe
a miniature history of human development according to bourgeois individualism [...] changed into an encyclopedic storytelling of religious virtues
•using European technology, agriculture, economic individualism [<== spiritual autobiography], (rudimentary) political hierarchy, (civilizing effect of) Christianity [--> pursuit of meaningful spiritual engagement]
...as the inertia of the colonial world's knowledge system breaks into the streams of exploratory capital, the relay of fragments crystallizes before seeping through the colonial subject's social ground
http://www.curators-network.eu/blog-entry/lightnin[...]
(145)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%97[...] or anthropologists, addressing an object-world as the endless representation of some further meaning or reality
==Crary==> reality: that which presents itself as an exhibit before an observer
(Seurat's Parade de Cirque: ...a figuration of social territory where) techniques of fascination and attraction, of appearance and semblance, have the capacity to overpower an observer or audience
(شهر بازی fairground kinesthetic experiences, such as:) *merry-go-round*: a fragmentary and mechanical recuperation of carnival energies --> controlled circumstances inciting of dynamogenic bodily sensation
&
cinema later would radically displace survivals of premodern forms like the circus [--> look at Hollywood today 2018]
different modes of regression and fantasy
***late 19th century shift from “viewing machine” to “vertigo machine”
19th century's interrelations between:
•photography
◾hypnosis (both medically and mythically)
•cinema
•psychoanalysis
*strong epistemological configurations* ==> a new place of subject (in western culture) linked to formation of certain images of:
•time
•past
•memory
(for Brown Sequard) collective effect of acts of inhibition and dynamogeny ==> hypnotism ==(Charles Henry)==> demonstrating that perception is fundamentally unconscious (consisting of involuntary responses to stimuli) ==Seurat==> *indistinction between the automatism of a hypnotized subject and the perceptual experience of a so-called normal subject* --Foad--> [reading people in a contemporary social phenomena of suggestion and somnambulism (~ sleep-walking):] a bypassing of intellectual process (such as reason and judgement) in an attentive spectator
-{my discussion with Foad was perhaps about the question of social justice (= sufferings and causes are constant and self-evident, singularized principle of value [social injury] located in a particular product [political processes leading to social injustice]) and/against thinking with assemblages (= contextual relational uncertain concept of the social of things and people as system of objects, in which nothing merely rules itself or others, emphasizing heterogeneity and process)... finally saying that Tehran is a relational heterogeneous uncertain system [Sina] and not a destined coerced programmed doom-object [Foad]. question: can we oppose the ideas of suffering and injustice and their expressions as essential qualities in the context of Tehran? what conceptual hybrids or precarious collectives are ethically available or necessary to think with? can injustice and suffering as target of analysis be investigated not as concrete evident necessities [stable essences, as something to defend or fight against] but as distributed changing and changeable always in process, in the contemporary Tehran (specially if you are the one who is[...]
(146)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%78.1