[...]ing 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 same level of reality (in ajayeb)?

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

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

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

whose dialects are mutually intelligible?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[...]s”: variations in the modes of communication that are made possible by an apprehension of perceived qualities that are unequally distributed

whose dialects are mutually intelligible?

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

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

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

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

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

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

@Zoumana; “decadent gardener” that connot keep distinction between kin and pest, nature and culture
what is a garden full of indirections, snakes?

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

#my trope-findings, (bilingual nonsystematic comparative thinking for storytelling) (work with Avital?):
•پیر Pir / sujet supposé savoir (--✕-->? پیر فلک Pir-e falak in Hafez)
•غر Ghor / complaint (--> shekayat شکایت, and then, khamush خموش in Hafez)
•تعارف Tarof / greeting
•transcend <--> darajat درجات‌ (-> Attar)
•super-ego <--> Div-mardom دیو مردم (-> Nezami)
•NatureZolmat (ظلمت --> ajayeb)
•آبرو Aberu / economy of value
•طی‌الارض tey-ol-arz / body scale, intensity and excess
•نگرانی negarani <--> practices of care

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

on Aberu, I became interested due to my lack of Aberu in presentationl quality and its abundance in other area's of my psychosomatic becoming.
Aberu traverses, calls itself in, animates, and exists for later visits.
-when you are devalued by the marked of bi-aberu, you are less tied to the strictures of shame, and ‘your behavior’ becomes performance material


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

agency =? boresh برش, jahd جهد (in Farsi), “agential cut enacts a local causal structure” (Barad)

agency of ‘hemat’ همّت
hemate shahi همّت شاهی, lavazeme hemat لوازم همّت --> apparatus
sufi's hemat ~= magic

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

@Seba after accelerate manifesto reading: (what is and how can we not pivot on our work) the measure of the meaningfulness of action. (Seba's notion of losing hope is because he put himself unconsciously in a cos[...]

[...] you are stuck with monumental history, and if you are burdened, carrying too much baggage (historically, aesthetically) ==> you are weighted down and cannot move forward

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

the image of hybrid being in ajayebnameh, half animal half human, is being both wild and tamed, vahshi-ram وحشی رام

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

(the word) wonder, it worlds.

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

work in ajayeb is about the phenomenon of understanding that is to be found in modes of experience that lie outside the universal claims of modern scientific method (--the experiences of art, of philosophy, and of history itself.)

in the hermeneutic universe i am building, Iran is made of China is made of India is made of Afghanistan is made of Iraq is made of Greece is made of ...

(can I say that my work has been all about Iran-centrism?)

gaps in cultural space that epistemology has not filled

hermeneutics =/=? epistemology

history of truth


*making an ecological landscape of ajayeb cosmology, that means making visible the connection between beings and contact zones among animate and inanimate and nonhuman:
diamond <--> snake
fire <--> speech
fire <--> animals
wind <--> future
cow <--> angel
water <--> light
darvishi درویشی <--> Div دیو
earth <--> Bahman بهمن
mars <--> wolf, pig
moon <--> effect of Gabriel's wings
earth <--> woman/enmity/illusio
mountain <--> ganj گنج
jinn جن <--> climate
Div <--> stone
climate <--> ghiamat قیامت
khidr خضر <--> life/death giving


(ajayeb-e chah) عجایب چاه
wonders of pits --> wonders of moon (Moghana مقنع, bringing a moon out of a pit, mah-e nakhshab ماه نخشب) [Moghana's work on mirror], [neiranjat نیرنجات and telesmat طلسمات (of Moghana’) ~=? ruse, tech],
[signifier of wonder:] mahi (ماهی‌ fish) [reflection of the moon in water] --> mah (ماه‌ moon) --> pointing at helal-e mah (هلال ماه half-moon) --> mouth of the beloved (یار yar) [registered in poetry of Sa'di سعدی] --> wonder finger on the open mouth
-also, Galileo's new telescope pointing at the moon (and sun-spots 900 years later than the chinese did,) and his pervasive approach to the knowledge milieu that he lived in, set the secular registers of truth
گفتم اگر از تو در خواهم شکافته شوی چه کنی؟ گفت شکافته شوم. بدو اشارت کرد و ماه به دو پاره شد

(ajayeb-e aab) عجایب آب
آشنا ashena (=/= stranger) in Farsi comes from the relationship with water and swimming, somehow knowing the water
cognition (in Greek cogn, ‘having learned’), in Farsi shena[...]

[...]ch in chars)

visiting of shobhe to the town
(shobhe gave the town a visit)
شبهه
شبح شبهه

bringing bits and pieces of songs from many places... over their cell phones... being well versed in the different types of music to be able to tell the songs apart...
(Sven, )

attention to the physical surround of the religious consciousness rather than to the inner workings of their body

.

آخرت

آخرش


smells, rotting bodies, eroding bodies, soil composition, etc.

(to imagine dogs and humans coexisting as) competting possibilities within unformed matter* [=/=? companion species]

dwindling quality of life (and diminished humanity)

(Anand, van Dooren, Naveeda wondering) how in certain geographies disappearance of species seems not to give the people a moment's pause

* what_ gives a pause ?


*species self-perpetuation is sometimes with:
•biological reproduction
•becoming
•transfiguration
•rebirth
•symbolic dispersal
•resynthesis
•


sunnat to kill (فى نفسه intrinsically evil) snakes (=/= jinn snake in Anand research/stories of saint animals)

straw, chaff, rice, wheat, lentils,
ماشوره، کاه، بوريا
سبوس
گندم
عدس

the gift of death for the animals:
•عید Eid, God in sacrifice, release from hardship and burden; blithe disposal of animal; euthanize
•چشم‌زخم evil eye or witchcraft as the cause of animal's death, if they are lost through illness, theft, or accident

bonanza
anthrax

euthanize

inoculate

cagey
•canny حيله گر کمرو
•showing self-interest and shrewdness in dealing with others
•characterized by great cautious and wariness
•reluctant to give information owing to caution or suspicion

بو
-treating smell as indicating an unsettled situation
-inadvertent stench of dead bodies disrupts the composed mental image of the ideal corpse within [...] funereal practices
*odors introduce terror or the terror of the uncontained within the social* (Neveeda > Siegel 1983)


double-edgeed prospect

common curse

“in the riparian contextm land forms and breaks with regular irregularity” [--> #entropy]
shifting its course, the river inducts new affectees into how to live (this way)
-there is a manner in which life proceeds--instead of feeling in step with it one begins to feel out of sync***

#start a geographic learning, riparian thought; thinking by rivers (& not countries)

_->{.\_,;,_/;-=,/


rural cos[...]

[...]t 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 ftive 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)


Anthropos =/= rich generative home of a multispecies Earth

“looks up at what he sees.”

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

ʿAjā'ib al-makhlūqāt wa gharā'ib al-mawjūdāt
Ajayeb al-makhlughat wa gharayeb al-mojudat (عجائب المخلوقات ,عجایب المخلوقات) in short: Ajayeb, is a suggestive cognitive work, full of strange linguistic pollu[...]

[...]r /> •agency
•


to recreate similarities between scientific and mundane practices (<-- neccesory for making companionship)

*agency is an equipment

*(greeting) rituals ~=perform==> social links* --> assess reliability
--> I am interested in ritual in its mundane sense =/= performance-art ritual {*}--> who are they in the (becoming in) ritual? (--> who is “Evamaria” in her performance-art ritual?) --> which meaning you embody?


the difference between response and reaction (not so clear [as 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*)[...]

[...] capitalism

coercive international development
civilizational paternalism
free-market bullying

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

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

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

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

physicalism: phenomenological features must themselves be given a physical account

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

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

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

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

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


schematic conceptions of Eszter


(old model of understanding:)
* --> stimulus (things sparkling) --> perception (hiting the senses) --> apprehension (mind aware without judgement) --> comprehension (psychological judgement about the manner of situation) --> knowing ==> world of doing, in which “action” is: expected (mother attending the child, free liberating the prisoners), commanded (soldier's hierarchy, job's duty), solved (engineer puzzling out a problem)


the things apprehended from a particular point of view (particular [...]

[...]they mistake for one of their own kind, fox suddenly turns round
•(foxfish?) fish turns itself inside out like a glove, so that the interior becomes the exterior: the hook falls out


fox
[...]it lives, in its intelligence, in the depths of an earth which is admirably laid out. The dwelling that it digs itself has seven different entrances linked by as many corridors and the openings are situated a long way from each other.
[...]The fox is not to be captured by ambush nor by noose nor by net for it has no equal in smelling out an ambush; it is clever at severing ropes and escaping death through the subtlety of its cunning tricks.
(Oppian > Dettienne)


fox's escape = olisthcinein (in greek: an athlete whose body, rubbed with oil, slips through the grasp of his adversary)


--Detienne--> *it was not in nature that the Greeks found this type of reversal behavior in animals, but rather in their own minds (in the conception that they formed of metis)*
(metis is not something that is “out there”? ---> go to ajayeb bestiary)


octopus
(to the Greeks) octopus = a knot made up of a thousand arms, a living, interlacing, network, a poluplokos being (coil چنبره snake with its coils and folds, labyrinth, Typhon: multiple creature “with a hundred heads” whose trunk tapers out into its eel-like limbs)
*octopus mechane: enables it to merge with the stone to which it clings
*octopus logos: poluplokos
-it too knows how to disappear into the night, but it is a night which it can itself secrete (the ink, this dark cloud, this impenetrable night which defines one of the essential features of the octopus and of the cuttlefish)--> *pathless night* --> metis: only they can discover a poros
cephalopod -->  *oblique creatures*: they have neither front nor rear, they swim sideways with their eyes in front and their mouth behind, their heads haloed by their waving feet ==> confusion of directions --> aporia (aporai)


living traps --> they exploit a device (that Plutarch calls) sophisma: fish lurer


fox + octopus --define-->
•a type of human behavior: *present a different aspect of yourself to each of our friends*(!)
•a model for a form of intelligence (i call it *coiled intelligence* هوش مارپیچ) --trap--> the net in which his adversary becomes entangled [=/= chamaeleon: metamorphoses produced by fear]




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


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


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


Oppian is all about bonds, ropes, c[...]

[...]controlling combustion you can go up ==> alienation as the touchstone of humankind --> then comes the “reflective consciousness” of humankind --> and later the invention of the very strange object: the mirror [---> go to amazon#2DifficultForests] ==> a change in the “structure of existence” --> then the idea of “selftranscendence” by monotheist religions --> adventures of power and ideology --> then a very bad idea called “history” was introduced---an active, psychological force that separates humankind from the rest of nature because of its disregard for the deep connections to the past.[Shepard 2004] --- Lévi-Strauss points out, historical thought is analytical and concerned with continuity and “closing gaps and dissolving differences” to the point that it “transcends original discontinuity.”)
[in east mirror was never used as mean to self reflect, rather it was weaponized agains evil, although this evil was female and men used mirror to defeat it. unlike the western thought since the greeks in the Narcissus story where mirror is the foundation of self-absorbance and knowledge and madness, the easterns since they did not posses the same brand of selfhood they found mirror strange and uttelized it in curious ways, another optical problem ---> go to mirror and the laughing snake - mar-e ghahghahezan, img]
...through the speaking fire, events “on earth” were finished except for a final judgment by fire --> invention of sin, spiritual existence : selftranscendence. anthropoce separating themselves from earth and its processes
-‘essence’, ‘appearance’, and ‘change’ became sources of anxiety
-other forms of life are now irrelevant to humans
-from now on “you cannot be two things, in two places, or in two times, at once.” , no more overlapping identity ==> alienation from (the domains of) nonhuman life
-the “Persian” new mind, (intanced by fire,) divided the world into material creation and infinite spirit that would shape the philosophy of the civilized world. (Shepard 2004)
(-in my amazon book i am pointing out: Esthetic distancing also made possible the landscape arts and connoisseurship and commercialization as scenery painting, tourism, and recreation. To the credit of the Greeks, they resisted converting the landscape into scenery and wilderness into an aesthetic experience.)

we are not directed towards a measured location, (as his-story tries to make belief)

“After you die, others live.” (Sina)

old world's arboreal simians, monkeys

Anthropos

cultures of Pleistocene
-Pleistocene was the time of glaciation and ice. Much of the world's temperate zones were alternately covered by glaciers during cool periods and uncovered during the warmer interglacial periods when the glaciers retreated. it is when the evolution and expansion of Homo sapiens and by the close of the Pleistocene, humans had spread through most of the world. [...]

[...]gistic methods, ritual of dance

the old man Arnold

chant (ritual symbolism) -->
•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 [...]

[...]surface:
•revolutionary
•criminal
•religious
•mystical
•magical
•military
•*avant-garde*
•
**(its conceptual coridors:) each fuses the minimal (elitism) and the excessive (universality):
•delirium
•murdur
•hallucination
•whispering
•doom
•
}<=~ ***the self-chosen against the world***
(“we” is the electric compartment of the sect. the sectarian channels the alarming vibration of the “we"--the one who becomes many)


*evil: a force of liberation, beauty, complexity


Ali's microhostilities (on me, the way he tells)
*guided by dislike*

(*terminal Intimacy*: definite concept of friendship:) “they will all die for one another" = "they will all kill one another”


“the sect occasionally allows the opening of the closed circle, reforming as a stright line that penetrates the world of others” --> (a phantom) *imperative to entirity*

sectarian language: the author cages the reader (in each verse)

sectarian animism ==> paranoiac dialogues:
•language of things (communication with the inanimate)
•concert with sacred beasts (oracle, snakes, animal spirits, etc. **the uncooperative figures of nature**)
•warnings of extraterrestriality (those of faraway sentience)
•murmurings of superstition (man, fate, chance, fifth column[= the group who undermine a larger group from within])


hiding as mission --> dissimulation & hollowing

sectarian lives by code, but cannot be deciphered or analyzed* --methodological--> leaves one undetected (--> assassins who are inflexible, precise, and systematic to the highest degree, and traceless for this very reason)

...they remind of the ungovered body, the accidental, and death



xxxxx 280


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

(Mohaghegh's work on the middle east in his book) it is ***a theory that does not speak for ‘the East’(= a construction) but rather *an East*(= a radical illusion)***
-it offers careful insight into singular, distinctive episodes of thought and writing in the Middle East (and to explore their relevance across the topology of world thought at large)
-the fractal nature of his four separate subject-positions point to the *exceptional diversity and heterogeneous makeup of Middle Eastern cultural imaginaries*

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

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

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


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


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


non-metaphysical and equally nonhumanist devotion to the artificer (apparatus)

cosmic ballistics: scientific field of mechanics concerned with the launching, propulsion, flight, and effect of projectiles (trajectory and impact)


nocturnality and contagion

snakes and dragons of constellations

paradox (the beast)
instrumentality (the builder)
unleashing (the despoiler)


death-spell
نابودی gesture of *extispicy: ancient Mesopotamian practice of reading animal organs (often a sheep's liver) spattered upon a wall's surface
-a discipline involved less with knowing than with watching



The Egyptian Book of the Dead
philosophy of night, dusk, shadow

egyptian night-deities
-with astounding narrative-theoretical flexibility
-some slither, hunch, fly, or remain seated
-not residing on Olympian heights but rather in the subterranean below
star-covered nude woman
cow arching over the earth
--> night does rule from transcendent distances but rather envelops (or swallows) whole the existent into its gut (or uterus) [<-- digestion?]
[metaphysics:] (away from) patriarchal gaze --into--> maternal stomach

Khonsu
•bloodthirsty (eating the organs of royal opponents)
•merciful --> [its creative epithets:] traveler, embracer, pathfinder, defender, “He Who Lives on Hearts”
one who resembles his own waning moon

Nephthys
tied to the night of the soul's traversal
sepulchral
(endow pharaohs) with the vision for “that which is hidden by moonlight”

Apep =/= Ra (the light-god)
giant sea-snake said to lurk again in the primordial gloom
evil lizard, *world encircler*
•defeating Apep: basematerial outputs (spit) --to--> elemental properties (fire) --to--> man-made weaponries (lance, k[...]

[...]He Who Lives on Hearts”
one who resembles his own waning moon

Nephthys
tied to the night of the soul's traversal
sepulchral
(endow pharaohs) with the vision for “that which is hidden by moonlight”

Apep =/= Ra (the light-god)
giant sea-snake said to lurk again in the primordial gloom
evil lizard, *world encircler*
•defeating Apep: basematerial outputs (spit) --to--> elemental properties (fire) --to--> man-made weaponries (lance, knife) --to--> fetishistic physiologies (the left foot) --to--> sympathetic magic (tearing apart of effigies


(sectarian logic?)
desire for clear reactional materiality [=/= sadistic or paranoiac serial killings]

teratological and semi-demonological turn
interjecting thingness, fiendishness, and monstrosity into our midst

night: indefinite definite ~=> nihilistic force of closure

(from) orthodoxy --to--> dramaturgy


(Mohaghegh's theory of) fanatical sovereignty in pagan thought --> ultimate keeping & violation of the law ~= obsessive form & apocalyptic formlessness
(reconciling) *the toxic dialectics of presence & absence* behind every theo-political order : gods walk among us in immanent ambush, hiding in night's open view (of many faces, masks, tongues, robes, tastes, proportions, and gestures), adopt infinite visages, apparels, pseudonyms, and dialects [=/= monochrome trappings of daily identity]


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

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

a sunless place

mortal transactions [...]

[...]lim to thinking of Muslims as the custodians of a shared heritage that Hindus have forgotten, but have the potential to reclaim
-Anand --> how do we understand the islamicness of urdu poetry?

spread of [...] poetry far beyond the bounds of exclusively muslim identity

sufism as an everyday mode of speaking of and speaking to the self (not as an esoteric practice, or as institutionally bounded)
-it gives you a language to explore their interiority
-(traditions of self-scrutiny and self-reflection,) a poetry of self-knowledge + rebellion against social convention [+ frenzied violence (vahshat) --> Majnun: an intellectual articulation, literary elaboration, and social proliferation of the “mazhab of love” a dominant strand of sufi theology, ethics, and political thought in the Balkans to Bengal complex]

earlier mode of understanding X as irreligious
discourses that recognize X as islamic


Anand --> *indic nature of islam*
-islam is indexed within the lives of non-Muslim Indians through a form of stranger hospitality

many, besides muslims, have ongoing relations to islamic sacred objects
•embrace of the divine
•efflorescence of relations with nonhumans (snakes and cats)

(Naveeda on) Anand's mournful tone --> forces of restoration = forces of destruction

importance of shadows for an understanding of sensory experience, aesthetics, and divine order

(Naveeda asks for an) alternative approach to the islamic tradition besides the trope of light --Anand--> imagining a lived islam from the perspective of shadows

shadows as the (relational and individual) self
*ruin: draw visitors by making itself the inner rendered as the outer --> a traversal of one's inner self, otherwise hidden to oneself



perspective from the shadow --allows--> to think about tradition paradoxically (about *affective inheritances* in the constitution, transmission, and transformations of the islamic tradition)

Anand --> ****islam as identity =/= islam as inheritance****
islam as inheritance --Spadola--> like a river (#meander)

Anand --> *how older forms of knowing and being coexist and are constantly in conversation and contestation with more modern form*

...to reimagine the very definition and coherence of “discourse”

*(Foucauldian) archaeological work*: full of ruptures, disagreements, and reworkings ranging across an array of texts and conversations from contemporary to colonial records to hadith to eighteenth-century poetry

question of coherence = question of finding a grammar

difficult intellectual commitment to both contingency and coherence

(you can witnessed in Tehran a lot of anti-patriarchal, anti-hierarchical, and anti-identitarian)

[...]

[...]visual space****

effects of vanishing point

(in all my image assemblages there is a system of fluid relations in which subjectivity is imagined [not in terms of coincidence with a quantifiable point of view])--> in every image and diagram subjectivity (~ identity and reference) is imagined in a system of relations @Eszter's binding order

zero
primal image of nothingness
•kabbalah
•the egg
•oroboros
•

my issue with contemporary ritual practices in the arts is that they are based the symbolic privileging of the معنوی noumenal =/= phenomenal
(rituals that artists practice today, Leonardo's Last Supper:) symbolic opening to a noumenal world =/= facade of appearance and semblance
(=/=? coalescence, knowledge and diversity work, etc.)
i can't insist enough (learning from Seurat) that the foreclosure of the noumenal world (the true world) is inseparable from the fragility and insubstantiality of the apparent world
(shabah az sanaat joda nist شبه و صنع)


a residue of an earlier social world (in which the sacred, the occult, and artmaking were much more closely tied together)
...Egyptian priest, medieval magus, Babylonian snake charmer, headsman or executioner,

suggestion of magician --> emblematic of a modernized order of spectacle --> mass management of attentiveness + its commodification : *rationalized magic of a technology of attraction* (that conceals its synthetic construction)

opposition of charismatic and bureaucratic domination

Weber's “routinizatiom" = castration of charisma (==> permanent institutional structures)
prophetic/oracular individual (has seen the extinction of his society) [==implying==> an unstable domination] =/= administrated and rationalized order of a money economy

priestly status of Elen in her performances implying an pathos and metaphysics of distance (and dismantling it?)

be careful with this liminal positions:
•activation of a broken collective memory
•imposition of modern oblivion on the other


presenting music:
socialized activity, indicating the *superficial appearance of a collective reception*
immediacy of an audience
“physicality of music making itself” --Leppert--> the sight of the body's labor to produce sound
19th century ideal of a musical performer as a quasi-sexual virtuoso

performing music --> suggestion of collective participation --evoke--> harmonic relationships and premodern mysteries [implicit in music and geometrical forms (even as they are collapsed into modern abstraction and the image of a fully administrated world)]
@Ali, KHM sound department

...remnant of what once might have the living Dionysian reality (of the antique chorus)


*scor[...]

[...]mages of the frontispiece --Brancaforte--> both genres try to convey a great deal of information in a condensed form (verbal or pictorial) [--> this is also why i am into Olearius and Sa'di #baroque]
(frontispiece + Golestan's) architectural framework --serving--> organizing structure; formal entrance to the scene

[]
relation to the soverign in Sa'di

in Golestan, the tales speak of the love or affection between a man and a young male. however, in the introduction to his translation, Olearius notes that he has subsituted the term “girl, lover, person, or human being” for “youth,” so that it will not offend young people who read the book --> (resisting the) jocular moralistic-didactic use of the momoerotic motif a much deeper understanding of Sufi terminology and motivation than one can expect from a 17th century translator
Olearius normalizes the discourse (of sufi) for fear of offending the sensibilities of his reading public

> angelic piety
Englische Frömmigkeit

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

the lionskin story

lion symbolizing the element of fire as well as purification
astrological relationship between lion and sun, in the image of Mithras, entwined by snake, symbolizing the path of the sun

mithraic influences survived into the islamic era as well, and became even more prevalent with the safavid dynasty --> lion imagery became strongly associated with Ali, the fist imam in twelver shi'ism

cosmic imagery and forms of address

the persian sun/lion symbol becomes intelligible for a european audience, when it is represented as a symbol of royalty

the lionskin, in Olearius's title, Persianischer Rosenthal
the animal's interior surface contains the writing, which provides the information about Persian society

Finn and Jake (given to wanderlust and creative risk) in Adventure Tture Time --> “more powerful through spoils”
(this tradition goes back to Hercules, trophy, skin of the beast,)

“slain and flayed, exposed to the European audience, the lion/skin serves as a background on which the German author inscribes the story[/history]” (Brancaforte)



[Brancaforte studying] the early modern European frontispieces that were associated with the Orient


...superfluity of details mannered and cluttered with unread decorative motifs set in an unreadable space
[16th century frontispiece; my work is sometimes like that]
=/= (Rubin's title pages:) portrayed in an intelligible space, imbued with dramatic light effects, with a sense of movement, monumental architecture with three-dimensional figures moving in a readable illusionistic space

‘stretched-out animal skin with the head in the top center’ --> Rubin's artistic vocabulary [--> followed in today way of layout]
[...]

[...]ings) (i also need to be careful with my collages: (not?) to map out creations that are totalities much greater than its author's own appreciation or conscious knowledge of them; to emerge an often confused and paradoxical but signatory “self” in the liminal/marginal areas of the page)
•“the mass of textual material that accompanies single-sheet or atlas maps tends to reveal its ideological perspective in the gaps between a silent, spatial, schematic rendering of an area (in visual form) and a voluble (por-harf پرحرف، روان، سليس، چرب و نرم، خوش زبان), copious (mofasal مفصل), emphatic (mo'akad تاکيد شده), printed discourse that strives to tell of the invisible history that the image cannot put into words.” (Conley)


grid, superimposed on the map

a common topos in Persian painting: a male protagonist expecting the female to pour wine or some other liquid into the shallow bowl he is holding
this ‘anticipation of drink’ is construed (in the title of Olearius map of persia) as a gesture of welcome and hospitality; providing the viewer with an iconic image of two “typical” inhabitants and their form of dress --> “promise and peril” [riches to be found + dangers encountered; treasures + giant snakes]
this continues today: the image of an iranian woman in native dress

on the Persians’ inner nature and customs

the dedicatory cartouche's [special effects]: ruler's name, capitalized, special style of italics
establishing the Duke's geographical purview --> linked to foreign territories


through ‘knowledge’ and ‘discovery’ --> learn about Safavid Persia

(Conley)
(cartography during early modern age afforded to) the emerging self and the self's relation to the idea of national space
between raw perception and creative imagination
surveying and plotting the world
the drama of european literature: an unforeseen theatricalization of the self in the 15th-17th century
-the self seems to be produced in the form of a subject, as a paradoxical being divided between a representation of the conditional relations it is producing and the composite nature of the simultaneously aural and visual medium of print
-growth of cartography parallels that of the coming of autobiography --> mapping is responsible for the consciousness that leads to the production of the fashioned self

rise of:
•autobiography
•opera
•natural history


Olearius multiplicity of roles
artist, geographer, historian, tourist, merchant, diplomat,

Olearius's production of self
mantle of artist is passed on to the author, who asserts himself and his new status in pictorial form
[in the corner of the map of Flensborg from Newe Landsbeschreibung] a hat obscures the specific character traits of the individu[...]

[...] to resist that in our web designs)

morphing =/= ontological fixity
•how technology does not oppose nature, but stimulate it (Nissan pathfinder)
•how the morph causes a radical splintering of consciousness (BBC digital faces)
•how morph is the a visualization not of being, but of becoming
--> *flow, universally coded as positive* (sensibility of process and flux considered liberatory)
--> a logic of quick-change (embedded in entertainment and computer industries)


high-technology embodiments:
•cyborg
•foetus
•ecosystem
•database
•genome
•cellular automata
•insects
•


morphing =/= mutating: the visceral, painful, embodied experience that results from ontological boundary clashes
mutating into otherness =/= morphing into otherness
(pain of the flow -->) ***mutation is a concept that stops the flow***

(utopian:) technological imaginary portraying a simple and painless ascent into a silicon existence

chimera: (a term biotechnological discourse uses to refer to) the evolution of elements that do not belong together
[in greek mythology, a savage beast part lion part goat part snake =/= natural order]


•(Iron Man's definition of) technology: an instrument which accords the human with a gradual ascend towards increasing civilization, linear progress and power over her or his environment
•(Black Mirror's definition of) technology: paradoxical scene, a primal instinctual force


(my ajayeb =/=) technological primitivism: (aesthetic that is produced by) the ways “primitive” icons are used in discourses of high technology
technological merges into the mythological
ancient merges with the modern
•eXistenZ film 1999, a high-tech-primitive blend of amphibian eggs and synthetic DNA
portrayal of a symbolically resonant ancient life-source + form of a technical life-source


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