[...]tructure of mourning)


to break in the philosophical and biological headquarters (and steal their stories, their abstractions, etc.)
exchanging and sharing instruments and languages



this is about building something that is ‘good enough’ to get you through...

these practices doesn't necessarily produce ‘separate entities’ (indivis)
am i fantasizing creating a monolithic structure of ideas?


critique is an art that tangles with what you are proposing
(like an octopus in a lure)

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

stories that can interrupt death (of our time, anthropocene, etc.)
(example of biology-story into culture-story: (1) ladder of evolution --> progress (2) sperm/egg story --> gender performance)

to change stories so that they are more livable
we live stories

to make mistakes as fast as possible


... move across earth space and narrative space


situated stories
they can't tell everything, but what is needed here


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refugium_(population_biology)

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

ontological choreography
vital sort of play that the participants invent out of a history of body and mind they inherit

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

possible performances
*two doors, ?, talk, model, puppet
*using stop-motion animation, clay formation, material animal facial properties

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

seeing a car crashing, is seeing a causation, seeing a reasoning, is that logos? is it logos when we see a physical experimentation?

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

[Haraway]

the established (dis)order is NOT necessary!
grips of necessity
(the real does/did not have to be or happen that way. the ‘real’ is the result of contingencies and it can be undone by working the contingencies, with skill.)
laboring bodies, playing bodies, sensuous bodies
(feminism:) you can't get freedom outside of mortality
-theology, the negative way of knowing, the necessary discipline of positive affirmation in order to know what is not knowable, is a very helpful tradition


when it comes to language we, humans, will always win over the animals.
we will always be the ones who control the law, the database.
(all is bad news both for the charismatic endangered Bangali tiger and the individual chicken in the food industry.)
fight the divisions and differences
we are in a very bad place for animals and woman

can we do without instrumentalization?

categories of killable--the question of how we kill

the question of one's-own-old-hat

regarding what you are against: we might find ourselves properly addressing a particular [...]

[...]microworlds --> my frame is no more free of metaphysics than any other
-towards an ongoing untidy recursive theory --> keeping our objects, concepts, and insights in a state of generative transformation
-which “affective economies” animate our own bodies as artist and as people?
-what feelings inform our works?

staying with linguistic differences (in each of our stories or praxiography) is a way of investigating the ontological commitments embedded in language.
ontological --> worlding --> how language participates in shaping our lived worlds in some ways and not others.*** “it is not common for speakers of a language to examine what type of material objects their language commits them to.” (Verran)

solidity of found objects, in my case, the graphs and images i am making about ajayeb --> the graphs now reiterate for me as rituals in my research microworld.
with these graphs i am trying different ways of arranging space, time and matter when speaking a *sentence*. ...each language figures space, time, and matter into different kinds of objects. in my writing tools with ajayeb, what type of material objects my language, or Hemedani or Qazwini's language, commits us to? my graphs are “spatiotemporal particulars” and “sortal particulars”. trying to talk about ontological assumptions embedded in the English (and any other) language. the diagrams are *rigs*. i am using rigging instead of framework. --> clever technological rigs, are provisional constructions, setup for a specific myth and dismantled after. sometimes old rigs are reused or repurposed for new rigs.
-resist peaceful naturalization
-uncomfortable software
-building/creating technologies as one way to do ontological politics (in postcolonial context)
-my experiments with ajayeb:
 -(the danger in using) computer software to archive ajayeb's or ajib knowledge =/= lively collective memory tool
 -the software that is slick and seamless runs the risk of the digital media appear as *self-sufficient representations* (<--✕--> living context)
 -archived and frozen in time
-sorting operations

(if i continue with digital tech in reading ajayeb i have to ask) how the digitized ajib knowledge can resist appropriation and translation into an idiom that will not sustain its metaphysics****
◦powerful relational work that numbers (also? = =/= --> => etc.) perform -> “numbers are a particularly smooth and manipulable meaning-making tools. they hide their seams well. they are slick and trustworthy” (Porter) --> they are “materialized relations” (how can we tell a story of relations that for example numbers/math materialize?)
◦highlighting parts of ajayeb: as part of a material reading practice --> “highlighting” could easily be understood as metaphor of disembodied vision; highlighting is not about making things clear but about scribbling (bad-khat بدخ[...]

[...]r me as rituals in my research microworld.
with these graphs i am trying different ways of arranging space, time and matter when speaking a *sentence*. ...each language figures space, time, and matter into different kinds of objects. in my writing tools with ajayeb, what type of material objects my language, or Hemedani or Qazwini's language, commits us to? my graphs are “spatiotemporal particulars” and “sortal particulars”. trying to talk about ontological assumptions embedded in the English (and any other) language. the diagrams are *rigs*. i am using rigging instead of framework. --> clever technological rigs, are provisional constructions, setup for a specific myth and dismantled after. sometimes old rigs are reused or repurposed for new rigs.
-resist peaceful naturalization
-uncomfortable software
-building/creating technologies as one way to do ontological politics (in postcolonial context)
-my experiments with ajayeb:
 -(the danger in using) computer software to archive ajayeb's or ajib knowledge =/= lively collective memory tool
 -the software that is slick and seamless runs the risk of the digital media appear as *self-sufficient representations* (<--✕--> living context)
 -archived and frozen in time
-sorting operations

(if i continue with digital tech in reading ajayeb i have to ask) how the digitized ajib knowledge can resist appropriation and translation into an idiom that will not sustain its metaphysics****
◦powerful relational work that numbers (also? = =/= --> => etc.) perform -> “numbers are a particularly smooth and manipulable meaning-making tools. they hide their seams well. they are slick and trustworthy” (Porter) --> they are “materialized relations” (how can we tell a story of relations that for example numbers/math materialize?)
◦highlighting parts of ajayeb: as part of a material reading practice --> “highlighting” could easily be understood as metaphor of disembodied vision; highlighting is not about making things clear but about scribbling (bad-khat بدخط) as a mode of attention =/= (Descartes’) “natural light of reason”


%report on fables of objects #workshop (22.02.2017 HWD apass): attention to the sense and feeling of disparity, dispersity, stability, sublimity, authority, epicness, weakness, severity, solidity, scale, (a)social connections, and tangibility in the character of the object of each participants in the stories we wrote. where were active and passive qualities located? how were agencies distributed?
•origin story --> evolution story, love story [the object falls in love with...]
•daily story
•beast feeding story --> training story
evoking temporality of evolutionary time, face-to-face time, historical time, tiny scale time,
 -each story has a music, texture of colors, pattern of meaning and affect
•bodyguard --> fantastic creature invent[...]

[...]dition of friendship, staying close to the text) staying close as a reader, as someone who could hold the text of the Other, receiving it in the withdrawal / Entzug  (drug rehabilitation)
•i am in no position of ‘understanding’ or being clear about the text
•(i understand now that) it is not up to me to tell 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 [...]

[...]br />
-my texture aversion and preference in soft/hard fabric of language and material tonality? --> the “inanimate affections” (that give us pleasure in life) --> we often give each other soft gifts as a way to care for one another (@Janina)
*radical affection does not require intentional politics* (Chen)



[Shepard 2004] Stanner (W. E. H. Stanner, White Man Got No Dreaming) describes how the universe became a moral system and consists of three elements: marvels, species diversity, and institutions. Marvels refer to that presence of the unexpected that one always encounters sooner or later in nature, particularly when the terrain reflects something about the mind that implies a common structure. His second element, species diversity, coincides with one of the major moral issues of our time--the extinction of species and reduction of biodiversity.

-“marvels of affinity” is the key to reality, revealing how things are, what is known, and how to behave.

cosmogony (keyhan-zayi کیهان زایی‌)--how the universe became a moral system

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

[modes of existence]

science studies --> science
what was science before science studies? it was engaged in a sort of stupefaction that prevented meaningful study.

we do not take the fight against X (religion, fetish, etc.) for the truth about X.

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

[Avital]

i am adding “mama's boy” (bache-nane بچه ننه) to my short bio (nothing is added by “me,” everything is told to me.)


thanks to all the people who have given me their ‘sides’ (didn't necessorily confronted me)


(book, ketabat کتابت)
to do something to resignify and breakup the serenity and the serene closure of the book, as the universiy values it and seals it
-what deals does it seal?
-the commitment to breaking up the book and its metaphysically laden pitch for closural sovereignty.
-linguistic pollutants
-dirty talks

#as a mode of writing, make a folding (fractal) book, style of children books, for ajayeb
(what would this structure mean? and how is that expandable?)

#making a cheap horror short-film from one of the ajayebs

#write a X-man short story in Tehran context with iranian everyday characters
•jurassic park --> ajayeb al makhlughat عجایب المخلوقات (horror, sublime, shivering water)
•nonapocalyptic stories and the otherworldly hauntingly familiar in the lost faces of forest (called Tehran?)

(accourding to Egyptian 1550 BCE,) book: a loose collection of magic spells intended to assist a dead person's journey through underworld, and into the afterlife and written by many priests
-are lists the origin of writing? (...way before the installation of the modern scriptural [...]

[...] we do not sense directly, with the hidden or invisible aspects of the sensible.”
-“suggestions offered by the sensible itself.”
-we never step outside the “flux of participation.”


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

[Thomas Keenan]

reading: that which happens when we cannot apply the rules --> experience of responsibility =/= moment of security or cognitive certainty

rhetorical reading

who speaks, writes, and reads? not simply humans

“how can we have any chance of finding a way to say what we don't know how to say if we don't pay attention to the silence of the other inside us?”

literature, is then understood as the experience of risk, chance, the undecidable =/= pathos of resolution


(in Western ethical, political, and literary traditions:) responsibility: a matter of articulating what is known with what is done =/= (Keenan:) *responsibility*: an asymmetry or an interruption between the orders of cognition and action

fable --> an exemplary *allegory of decision* (~~> installing or restoring subjectivity)
fables open abyssal aporias:
•to teach ‘singularity’ it offers ‘comparison’
•to underline ‘independence’ it resorts to ‘necessity’

[(the experience of) aporia =?=> morality, politics, responsibility =/= when the path is given]--> Germany is moving towards the removing of aporia [<-- a general panic popular in sci-fi]
(the very condition of possibility of) *responsibility*: a certain experience of the possibility of the impossible ~ aporia }==> the impossible invention --> *responsibility must be an invention*
[-Germany's notion of law: like any idea of law, are not by themselves motivators for morality or immorality, it is really upon (human) culture to do that.]


fable ==> possibility of another kind of reading --> exposure to something that breaks with the regimes of meaning and sense


politics of difficulty

...to fall back on the conceptual priority of the subject, agency, or identity as the grounds --✕--> we have politics because we have no ground

(Keenan suggests) “deconstruction” is not offered here as an antiauthoritarian discourse, an attack on grounds, but as an attempt to think about this removal as the condition of any (political) action }~= democracy


(according to fables) responsibility begins in the bad example (--> the concept of conflict ~=> the ethics and politics of responsibility)

the classical subject --(the passage through the bad example)--> installed in its stance of responsibility and the safety of identity

“What is at stake in the fable is, more than anything else, the interpretation and practice of responsibility-our exposure to calls, others, and the names with which we are constituted and which put us i[...]

[...]ome accountable and responsible for one's own noninnocent translations. We begin with her essay on the 2nd of February and talk about each of our practices in particular continuing on the 9th.


she wants to re-figure, not disavow, objectivity

“story-tellers exploring what it means to be embodied in high-tech worlds” =/= technophobia

technophilia is narcissistic : the notion that man invented himself and that man is involved in some kind of narrative of technological escalation whereby the objectification of human intentionality in the world has finally surpassed itself, and man has achieved self-objectification in a machine that will finally name him obsolescence as he is and destroy him in a technological apocalypse figured by the computer. (Haraway) [we need better dog stories =/= (Iron Man:) man, made in the image of a vanished god, takes on superpowers in his secular-sacred ascent, only to end tragic]
“...man making himself (by realizing his intentions in his tools) yet again in the Greatest Story Ever Told.” (your artwork doesn't need to be this kind of story!)
or the Darwinist tale of “Mitochondrial Eve in a neocolonial Out of Africa”
we need stories of companion species, the “very mundane and ongoing sort of tale, one full of misunderstandings, achievements, crimes, and renewable hopes.” (Haraway, La Guin, Tessa Farmer,)

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

[Haraway on Ihde]

...technologies are not mediations--that is, something in between us and another bit of the world--rather, technologies are organs, full partners, in what Merleau-Ponty called “infoldings of the flesh.”

infolding =/= interface
•“What happens in the folds is what is important.”
•Interfaces are made out of interacting grappling devices.
•the infolding of others to each other is what makes up the knots we call beings or, perhaps better, following Bruno Latour, things.

“Technologies are always compound. They are composed of diverse agents of interpretation, agents of recording, and agents for directing and multiplying relational action. These agents can be human beings or parts of human beings, other organisms in part or whole, machines of many kinds, or other sorts of entrained things made to work in the technological compound of conjoined forces.”

*animal (in zoological terminology) : a composite of individual organisms, an enclosure of zoons, a company of critters infolded into a one.

compound = composite + enclosure
camera: the technological eye --> philosophical pretension and self-certainty (=/= Christian's camera)
-- camera as a black-box with which to register pictures of the outside world in a representational, mentalist semiotic economy

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

Vinciane Despret, Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour, ”_how they make t[...]

[...]s intentions in his tools) yet again in the Greatest Story Ever Told.” (your artwork doesn't need to be this kind of story!)
or the Darwinist tale of “Mitochondrial Eve in a neocolonial Out of Africa”
we need stories of companion species, the “very mundane and ongoing sort of tale, one full of misunderstandings, achievements, crimes, and renewable hopes.” (Haraway, La Guin, Tessa Farmer,)

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

[Haraway on Ihde]

...technologies are not mediations--that is, something in between us and another bit of the world--rather, technologies are organs, full partners, in what Merleau-Ponty called “infoldings of the flesh.”

infolding =/= interface
•“What happens in the folds is what is important.”
•Interfaces are made out of interacting grappling devices.
•the infolding of others to each other is what makes up the knots we call beings or, perhaps better, following Bruno Latour, things.

> “Technologies are always compound. They are composed of diverse agents of interpretation, agents of recording, and agents for directing and multiplying relational action. These agents can be human beings or parts of human beings, other organisms in part or whole, machines of many kinds, or other sorts of entrained things made to work in the technological compound of conjoined forces.”

*animal (in zoological terminology) : a composite of individual organisms, an enclosure of zoons, a company of critters infolded into a one.

compound = composite + enclosure
camera: the technological eye --> philosophical pretension and self-certainty (=/= Christian's camera)
-- camera as a black-box with which to register pictures of the outside world in a representational, mentalist semiotic economy

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

Vinciane Despret, Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour, ”_how they make their subjects interesting,_“
to tell the story of their work of “translation,” of invention.

refuse all loyalty to my homeland and its values

*heuristic: mental shortcuts that ease the cognitive load of making a problem solvable
-trading optimality, completeness, accuracy, or precision for speed
it may *approximate* the exact solution for the problem
-enabling discover or learn something for themselves. (a ‘hands-on’ or interactive heuristic approach to learning)
[(in computing:) proceeding to a solution by trial and error or by rules that are only loosely defined.]
-from Greek heuriskein ‘find’

*contingent: using it with ‘historical’ always produces interesting ways --> contingency relates to a nonteleological [a doctrine explaining phenomena by their ends or purpose] and nonhierarchical multiplicity [when i say ‘dud’ and ‘cauphing’ and interupting ‘tracing’ i am asking for contingent modes of relating and thinking.[...]

[...]eak literally
going from proof to proof, from necessity to necessity --> displacement (=/= detour)

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

@Ekaterina; some other characters:
the jealous, the impassioned, the persecutive, the erotomaniacal,
complainer,
noble trader,

Ekaterina, asking for a fabulation? her totem making
Deleuzian fabulation: a fiction made up by people in their process of becoming
making up stories
=/= fiction (on its own; it doesn't have that relation with becoming)

in which conditions the paranoid mother occupies the failiour of the good-enough mother?
what constitutes the ‘site’ for her mother?

(how her) characters keep running into eachother in a universe of recursive connection (?)



**stories that collect stories** [~= archive? my hypertext? a mouth full? --this specific type of stories are dangerously worlders, usually handed to the unquestioned mechanics of universalized taxonomy and 17th century rigs: encyclopedic homogeneous tables. they are the stuff of ajayeb]
(mispronounced by Ekaterina > captured by Hoda > found object by Sina)

stories that collect other stories:
1- archive ~--> sortability
2- translation ~-->  linearity
==> universality (that both these stories claim)
(my work on hypertext apass ajayeb graph rigs, is to deal within these conditions of storying. my shift of interest)

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

(“dealing” @Luiza:)
(or in Lili's term “..a way to tackle issues”)

[with Avital]
*modalities of dealing-with:
-parasitism
-(under the spell) drugs =/= struggle (according to Marxian protocol: one is drugged and disabled [Date-rape-drug as an incapacitating agent] and neutralized by state apparatus, drugs are administrated and spend in all sorts of insidious ways.)
on the discourse of stupidity: Marx (in writing to Engels says that he) believed that proletariat are stupid. Marx's insight to replace the other drugs that have put so many into a stupor. people with Religion are not around, they are praying somewhere to some hallucination [this is Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, and others in 20th century] --> ideological stuporous drugs, ‘everyone is stoned on something’ =/= alert and lucid. [highly problematic!]
-this is about a body recognizing its ‘enemy’ (the figure of enemy for every and each of us and the way we “recognize” it, as historical bodies and minds inheriting the boys of 20th century.) ---- the state of the struggle depends on certain metaphorologies on ‘clean’ that are problematic and phantasmatic and on the loose. --> [the issue is that there is no “clean body”.] how to do dirty work? (--> for ‘morality’ and ‘clean’ go to Freud on the origin on morality: morality began as we stopped sniffing our asses and stood erect, nose in the air,[...]

[...]?
what constitutes the ‘site’ for her mother?

(how her) characters keep running into eachother in a universe of recursive connection (?)



**stories that collect stories** [~= archive? my hypertext? a mouth full? --this specific type of stories are dangerously worlders, usually handed to the unquestioned mechanics of universalized taxonomy and 17th century rigs: encyclopedic homogeneous tables. they are the stuff of ajayeb]
(mispronounced by Ekaterina > captured by Hoda > found object by Sina)

stories that collect other stories:
1- archive ~--> sortability
2- translation ~-->  linearity
==> universality (that both these stories claim)
(my work on hypertext apass ajayeb graph rigs, is to deal within these conditions of storying. my shift of interest)

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

(“dealing” @Luiza:)
(or in Lili's term “..a way to tackle issues”)

[with Avital]
*modalities of dealing-with:
-parasitism
-(under the spell) drugs =/= struggle (according to Marxian protocol: one is drugged and disabled [Date-rape-drug as an incapacitating agent] and neutralized by state apparatus, drugs are administrated and spend in all sorts of insidious ways.)
on the discourse of stupidity: Marx (in writing to Engels says that he) believed that proletariat are stupid. Marx's insight to replace the other drugs that have put so many into a stupor. people with Religion are not around, they are praying somewhere to some hallucination [this is Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, and others in 20th century] --> ideological stuporous drugs, ‘everyone is stoned on something’ =/= alert and lucid. [highly problematic!]
-this is about a body recognizing its ‘enemy’ (the figure of enemy for every and each of us and the way we “recognize” it, as historical bodies and minds inheriting the boys of 20th century.) ---- the state of the struggle dggle depends on certain metaphorologies on ‘clean’ that are problematic and phantasmatic and on the loose. --> [the issue is that there is no “clean body”.] how to do dirty work? (--> for ‘morality’ and ‘clean’ go to Freud on the origin on morality: morality began as we stopped sniffing our asses and stood erect, nose in the air, away from the dirt [that we are] --> morality's phobic appropriations and designations, [Lacan: from the genital order to the sublime; az kun be fayakon از کون به فیکون %--> #ouroboros #serpent], [so when we stood up, stood erect, our genitals became center, exposing ourselves to the other, sexually centered exposure], [], [],)
-Marxian: language/tool/art as a virus that infiltrates ideological structures
-Lacoue-Labarthe: in 20th century there are three fundamental modalities of “dealing-with,” three modes of relatedness to our concerns, our anxieties, our worries, our work, our projects [three major motifs for the thinkers that cont[...]

[...]sychic 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 محروم شده) language of muted rage***
what is (let's) bitching together?
is religion one long complaint? (--'reformation’ as a cover-up)
the “i prefer,” non-need, non-preference
*forms of relatedness--in certain societies the opening self of sociality consists in complaining. (starter-utterances; social encounter involves nagging about your friends, parents, lovers, etc.) --making friends is via complaining. (this is about the conditions of Mitsein, being-with) {non-affirmation ~/=? complaint; we mistake so easily non-affirmation with complaining. (is this Lili's take? her complaints about the insufficiencies of being.)} --> is complaint parasitized by calls for retribution?
Klage (complaint) --to--> Anklage (accusation)
*complaint remains a repetitive fixation that feeds rather than exhausting its course (/Avital, aw9Cv_wQ4CQ) -- it does not finish itself off, or move up the ladder of transformation [important for Sana], actually increases pain --> so, (according to the analyst:) complain is jac[...]

[...]mits between categories of human, animal, and monstrous.
#subjects of interest: The translator, language, the sublime, animals/animality, technicity/mechanicity, the divine/sacred,

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

the myth of Poros, Penia, and Eros for Aela:
(in Plato's Symposium;) Penia, the “child of poverty,” decides to forcefully impregnate herself with the inebriated Poros, “the personification of plenty,” who is always in opposition with aporia, (~ snafu before aporia,) “puzzlement, which breaks with the logic of identity,” and thus defining aporia. The result of this union is Eros...
poverty + {plenitude × aporia} ==> eros : {agency of passivity + resourcefulness}
1-metaphysical inquiry begins from ‘aporia’
2-rationalist inquiry begins from ‘a priori’
3-empiricist inquiry begins from ‘tabula rasa’ (hakim's beginning)
/
/
4-mystical inquiry begins from ‘affective a posteriori’ (effect, wonder, heyrat, tahayor)

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

sci-fi is imagining the elsewhere inside mortality. (==> feminism stakes in SF)

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

*make a series of studio photos with white clear backs, two different genders iranians having a physical/verbal fight or some sort of aggressive encounter

*the idea is to write a script for a movie or short series, combining the historical 14th century Iran with the 14th century imaginal beast fables from the ajayeb. the camera creats a non-exotic continuation between the two

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

[with Kenney]

-how to let emerge a seriousness as collective matters of care?
-how to stimulate pragmatic questions about how to craft relevant knowledge?

speculation is all about pragmatism


capitalist speculation : “one must speculate to accumulate” =/= relating & narrating

scientific speculation & venture capital ==> big epistemic/financial pay-offs or costly dead ends [=/= (Stengers's notion of speculative) *being at risk with ones claims* =/= received notions of authority or rationality]

(an abstract challenge:) to bring specificity and imaginative traction

*speculation is a more feral practice
(wild) speculation [always improper] =/= proper science : rational production of univerasal knowledge
-speculation is not about what there is but what there might be
-speculation is on the side of the possible =/= probable (--> Stengers)

speculative operations (quietly) insist that *another world is here* (--> my ajayeb) =/= the smooth operation of business-as-usual (,, interrupting it)

for my ajayeb, how can i carve out a space to nurture my idea? --> nest-building --position/place--> digging out a bit of earth

*speculative empiricism : scientific + narrative
working with ajayeb so that it might [...]

[...]ch) 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 (becomes a view onto a scene) and is outside of time**

***(dangerous) ways of being outside of the time of the thick present*** (Haraway)
‘-scene’: a thick presence of now, has many durations in it

(my work on ajayeb's past tense trans-species affair) is about those with wh[...]

[...]> (setar different technique of vibrato and measure for instance in Saba and Ghavami, which part of the finger or body, one works in certain way for one and not for the other musician --> the explicit unpacking of the activity : what was formerly tacit [zemni, khamush, =/= habit] becomes dredged into explicit [=/= expressive] consciousness, precisely because there is a resistance, that there is something not right for the musician ==> reconsidering, reexploring --> the technique then again disappears into the tacit realm --> technique becomes variegated)
**tacit --> explicit (~= that which becomes available for reconsideration)**

when one masters a skill it is about being equipped to address a whole new set of problems
{expertise/mastery: problem solving}=/={craft: problem finding}--> when other things become problematic---the condition (in the craft work) that when you learn how to do one thing you see other things that need to be explored [-> question for Eunkyung's drawing skills and practice]

*craft is more important than art(?) (Sennett)
...the notion that the work art breaks the conventions of practice, that it is something that makes an epistemic break. --> emphasis on innovation (something new)--that is a reflection of sort of 19th century bourgeois ideas of about making art.
•privileging the creative act over the craftsman act
•in innovation the “innovator” is separated from the “mass” =/= craftsmanship is collective and additive --> (in craftsmanship) the performance is myself
•creativity being a form of individuation or separation (@the exploratory shift in Eunkyung's work that Pierre highlighted)

*** craft-work is about additive skill; it is about building on what you know rather than throwing it out *** (=/= capitalist logic of progress, creativity in the sense that ‘something’ where before was ‘nothing’) ---> a different way of building quality (into practices and objects)

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

Bakhtin's dialogic, to become a skilled listener : listening = response (=/= simply answering) --> (when we speak) we give other people talismans that are not (perfectly) clear to us----we penetrate and unpack what someone doesn't have the words clearly and response to what they intend --✕--> “common understanding,” “make something work,”

cooperation is about getting deeper into something

conditions that more skills are required (and not the opposite)

in modernity everything seams to need to be verbalized. what happens to the unverbalized, the unprogrammatic? --> can you have an implicit right which can't be verbalized? maybe no, maybe this is the limit of the social...

purposiveness: when you hear somebody go “i am going to put clearly what we all want...” you have submitted to that person (almost erotic) --> “they really know who they are” ==> you become a spectator to their de[...]

[...] us
•loving telling you what i read
•giving you what i don't fully understand =/= gift from above
•(in lecture) to allow language greet the unverbalized

(it is about) organizing my memory
(it is about) that which comes to (my) mind, and “things” coming to minds
(it is about) the things I am told
__[these are perhaps other names of cognition, affect, memory, semiotics, history, inheritance, figuration, interface, thing-relations, huntology,]
__in our shared space where we let eachother in the effect of our languages, I want to practice what comes to mind when I stand in front of you and your work, ask myself ‘what else’ comes to mind? in a sense, my project on ajayeb is that kind of training

also in apass i want “to catch you in your acts”
it is my privilege to recognize you (as...)

asking:
1- what do I know?
2- what am I told?
3- (how getting good at to) explain what somebody else said

1- the first question has no clear answer, what i know is not placed somewhere in me, it is always an articulated matter of ‘with’ or in interaction with, it is a sym, changes before i can grasp, knowing is done always with a figure or a thing, it includes all sorts of optics and technologies, (affect theory, media theory, epistemology,)
2- the response to the second question is also not clear, i am not sure what i am told, i don't remember or hear, what i am told is infolded in what i know, (when i started with my islam lecture series i was testing the waters of these two questions and the possibility of staying with them without freaking out of ambiguity or ploting an answer)
3--> #cat's cradle


#on hypertext note:
i am becoming skilled at looking at my notes:
{(1) what are the *skills necessary* [=/= tabula rasa (of the reader, of the audience) of the communo-capitalism's standard of “user-interface"--the strange idea that the interaction and reading doesn't need or must not need learned-efforts or skills, that it should be “easy” and “effortless” --> fallacy of the unskilled listener.] to engage, interact, and get involved with the interface, data-set, grammar, and literacy of (my) reservoir? }--> ** let's ask that question with every apparatus that engages us into desire, movement, articulation, ...
skills --> to become ‘literate’ in this particular way --> situated knowledge includes this situated literacy and skills of reading particular to the object of “text” (in that case how do i address my interest in the pervert reader? the skills of the unlearning*)
the skills necessary for my work to work comes with time, attention, and desire ~-=>? #harem (=/= ladies room)
--> (2) this skills of (my) reservoir, what set of questions or problems equip me to address?

varzidan, varz, varzide, ورزیده

Sennett's love for his subjects[...]

[...]olyskilled web of friends



#Bambi's mother studies:
•other stories possibility, past and history, performative approach to film
•politics of memory, and affect
•patterns of remembrance =/= event recall
•

three childhood memories, stories, from elementary school:
•the mime of “you think (too much)”
•the weird pro hit on the coming ball
•peeping into the toilet
•

my childhood recognizing:
•filaments (hypha, hyphae, تار) of spider webs
•patterns of ants
•motion color blurings --> that present is “physical if the eye is quick enough” (Stevens)
•

the ways i was engaged as a child in scope-apparatus, micro-macro scales


what other stories, remembrances of the past are possible?
-different apparatuses of attention, reconstruction, and storytelling, that are equipped to hold diffractive patterns of ‘that which comes to mind’

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

can we care for “iranians” without “for iran”?
(i can't care less about Iran)

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

perhaps artistic research is all about playing cat's cradle (=/= autism) : (you have all sorts of limbs, even phantom limbs) you must learn sustaining the rhythm of accepting and giving, (collaborative) patterning (that requires passion and action) [this is one skill that matters a lot, what i have been trying to teach myself above anything else in the last years] [i am playing that game with Haraway, joining her (and others) in thick, collaborative patterning; generous knottings; thickening the knots, relaying a mutated and resituated pattern for the next play]
•getting the knot, proposing another
•you must learn how to hold still
◦(more and more) in different material and conceptual grains of detail and resolution
•the most important thing in research practices is this patterning, networks reenacted (Katie King)
(Lili's kiss project was about that, blocked intersubjectivity, a matter of “learning to be affected”; can i say that Lili's issue is with the lack of [psychological, or psychic] dialogue? a language that no longer carries metaphor displaces the metaphorical drive: acting out the soul's metaphor in direct [nonverbal] action. the breath in Lili's work, is the same in her suffocated kiss and scream performance, once hold in and one unleashed, lack of a “breather,” of a “converser,” of a partner in cat's cradle.)--[i like to propose a repatterning: in research environments we play a lot “catch me if you can”: to catching you in action, to capture your ‘knowing’ in action, to capture eros or logos in act, --> #beauty is interested in action]
•it is about “understanding living with contradiction” : making choices without necessarily turning the other choices into something an enemy does --> important for collec[...]

[...]my research is about ajayeb it can never only be about ajayeb*


you can't do feminist theory without paying attention to the details of women lives
your mode of attention to women in the world ==(shapes)==> your mode of attention to:
•the way databases get set up
•the ways interdisciplinarities get crafted
•how you think about tools and genomics


my main point of my project has been about getting better at how to inherit your histories without trashing them*** (even figuring out how to inherit a history that you don't want to inherit)
(Islam, shyness, kindness, ajayeb, Iran, stuttering, being all too ready to find complexities, )
•to become relaxed about predigested version of ‘this is what ajayeb is about’ (or Tasavof, etc.) --> ‘what is going on there’ (in ajayeb) is so built-in to ideologies of many kinds (of progress, deep ecology, of history, and so on)
•to build a little taxonomy (in apass)
•working to give up the series of self-certainties around secularism ==> giving ways to talk to the religious ones : getting to grasp what the world looks like in faith-based communities (=/= check-list of dogma)
•category thinking: get into differential liveliness (with all sorts of inequalities:) *who gets parsed how* [#archive, #articulation, #storytelling] (and thinking about what it means to take up these relationships in cultures saturated with science and technology)


Xiri was doing her research with categories of victim and opressor, and now they suddenly disappeared from her work. that category change or vocabulary change was suspiciously effortless


*remembering is an extremely creative practice (-note to Hoda-)
memories are like ecotone کناربوم (transition area between two adjacent ecosystems)


#(very important concept partly shaped by practices of Darwin into our lives:) “collect” --> lies (necessary?)
the frenzy of the 1700 of surveying nature and collecting speciment ==> bioinfomatic
‘collect’ promises nontransformation
--> metaphors of archive, information-intense ways of thinking about life on earth

*“demonstration” coined by science

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

(with Scout Calvert) the ways the digital apparatuses are working, and the kinds of tensions and creativities between the cyber infrastructures and the other kinds informational management discourses displace other book discourses *** --> categories explode in library practice
[Calvert donig brilliant discourse analysis of library sciences --> has direct impact on practices of reading#, different kinds of knowers]
techno-biblio-capital: techno-capital and library practices embedded in each other -->{ [*]technology: assemblages of people, computers, software, discourses, techniques and workarounds that make them function; [*]capital: a [...]

[...]t they don't swirl at random

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

MOU (memorandum of understanding)-->{@Esta + Zoumana + Hoda
*memorandum: memo, reminder, note, تذکره --?--> passport : آنچه موجب یادآوری شود --> آنچه موجب دخول شود
a legal document describing an agreement between parties less formal than a contract
[1994 U.S.-North Korea nuclear pact, the MOU between Bush and Kerry for 2004 debates,]

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

batlagh باتلاق



it is (perhaps the most) important to help transform (your or my) ‘wounded-child’ to ‘wonder-child’ (--> @Hoda)
[the image of the wonder-child in all my workings]***

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

•accumulative: gradual increase as a whole, someone/something doing the accumulating, emphasis on the process of accumulating
•cumulative: nongradual successive additives, associated with that which is accumulated, emphasis on the result
ad- (“in addition”) plus cumulare, “heap up”, from cumulus, “heap”

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

[we need] ability to move from ‘close attention’ to ‘gestures’ and actions on the material world, all the way to an assortment of ‘artifacts’ able to enhance cognition, sensitivity, and sociality

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

Stewart

surge of signs + capital + sensoriums of public culture --> matter & image

images, when circulating things, suddenly enter the senses --> literally make sense ==> look and smell of an incipient vitality --> immanent intensity or force ~ affect

#my coin: two-sidedness of things, virtual meeting actual, seeping edge of potentiality

common sensate affect --> shock --> “continuous trembling that haunts the stable gaze” --> images and sensibilities that constantly exceed (reason, order, and common sense) #telegram

Affect, is about something is happening, something capable of impact
•sometging half noted out of the corner of the eye
•something in the commonsense world
•
(that which escapes/exceeds enclosure) --> it can be put into words[?] --> to become a figure of vitality and even freedom[?]*** @Iranians

[i welcome the reprieve (rokhsat, رخصت, a temporary relief) from] symbolic gridlock

“affect gathers its force to make image touch matter” --> image's power is the power of synaesthesia =/= collection of named “feelings” (invented in discourses of morals, ideals, and known subjectivities)

(let's study how [in Iran] raw materials are formed and exceeded -- sudden and lingering intensity of things) (which darvaze/دروازه/gate we can't and which سوراخ سوزن / surakh-e suzan / hole of needle we pass through)
[i am having always multiple books open, at least two, is that how connecti[...]

[...]we don't feel we have mastered or understood necessarily



janebe hagh ra gereftan جانب حق را گرفتن ==> hagh-be-janebi حق‌به‌جانبی


safineye nadan سفینه نادن
safineye nadani سفینه نادانی

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

Bettina's self almost entirely to be construed within the order of the will


(Hillman:) Eros is always curiously weaker than the problem it must deal with. --> logos is biger than its problem



1. revolution: changing/disturbing the value system
2. reform: changing/disturbing the social norm (hanjar هنجار) --> eslahat اصلاحات
3. invention/noavari: changing/disturbing the system/institution/sazman
4. coup d'état: changing/disturbing the people/apparatus


(amal bar asase:) sonat: gozashte, diruz, anja, anha
گذشته
دیروز
/>

phd: طرح مساله tarh-e masale --> everything depends on the ways you pattern a niche, a site of strings that you and your collieges are cought long enough

•using texture, form, color
•using embodiments
•using optics (in knowing) --> some sort of distance, disembodied seeing --> abstraction, figure,




carnal intellectuality
(intellectual carnality)

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

locating ‘shur’ شور del-shur دل شوره (also shuridegi شوریدگی) to the place of the unkown other
so when one has fearful fantacies about others in foreign lands they are in ‘shur’ for them



(psychologically tethered phantasy of the “independent person”:)

**oral fixation [everything depends on the duration of breast-feeding during the development of libido]:
in Iranians: over-fed (more than 12 months) ==> dependency, needing stimulant
nt
in Balkan: insufficiently fed ==> طلبکار و ناراضی talabkar narazi dissatisfied and manipulative (in need of oral stimulant for example sarcasm) [*narazi <~~--> tavagho’ توقع*]
(--> early experiences of love bound up with various kinds of suffering, and later in adulthood one will look for familiar forms of suffering)
•oral fixation: everything related to pleasure + pain + security + sex are all bound together and located in the mouth

**anal fixation [bowel and bladder control --> focus of the libido: conflict of to pass or withhold]--> also a time person's relationship with authority is made. role of super-ego (parents) in toilet training. everything depends on what super-ego says about what you accomplish in the toilet (at the ages of 1 to 3) ==> creativity / khesasat:
•anal-retentive: to hold back ==> tidy, khasis (~ careful with money), and respectful to authority
•anal-expulsive: relieved whenever in inapp[...]

[...]o name their apparatus of literary production. how they engage with the interface, data-set, grammar, and literacy of their reservoir.
•the question of infrastructure --> how they balance the possible and the acceptable, the balance of action, tools, and the built environment
•the question of technology --> how they take apart the tool from its context of involvements and referentialities
•the question of political orientation --> how they have accepted the democratization of knowledge and multiculturalism (the idea of “knowledge for everyone” [--> there is a very thin line between the impulse to democratize and commodify knowledge]; --could multiculturalism be radical capitalism in action?! ...faking diversity to build more diverse companies <-- “lip service”: to just say something but not actually do it)
[--> the hegemony and horror of “different experience” of the so-called different cultures (a form of racism?)]
[multiculturalism =/= trans-species]
[multiculturalism =/= eurasia]
[--> the hegemony and horror of “the completely different” (==>? deskilled society)]

Manning: “in senseLab we work with the people who don't use language, don't write, etc.” (<-- what does that legitimates, conceals, or smuggles? what sorts of hierarchies and ideologies of status emerge out of that?)

-as the philosopher of nonintentionality how did she responded (paranoically?) to our intents when questions where asked?
-as the philosopher of discord how did she responded to disagreement?


(?how do you tell the tale of) *your adventures سلوک and achievements کرامت* (karamat va soluk)
(why self-promoting is such a turn-off? it makes the listener into someone to convince or win over into the Förderung of the speaker. [with Campbell:] self-marketing creates a ‘perverse knowledge’ about the work of the speaker, that means you give information about ‘healthy’ parts of your practice, your achievements and moral/material awards, with the assumption that the listener is going to make a good decision about the ‘halo effects’ of the speaker, but in fact you are made ‘brand literate’)
or [it is seems elementary but neccesory to ask Manning:] what is the difference between advertisement and knowledge?


there are innumerable ways to adapt to the world without creating a philosophical understanding of the world

(Manning) “we feel the force of form. this kind of beauty has nothing to do with an external aesthetic judgment.” (--> how the personal judgment is not worthy of philo when a tsunami is coming or one is on the way of being gang raped?)


during the workshop Manning remains the center of command. she constantly “knows” (better). and she insists that through letting go of our critical thinking the participants can understand her notions ==>? how can she not build disciples?!

o[...]

[...]er tries to be anti-western but assuming the same origins of thinking for everybody else and not taking the time to become interested in the (non)thinking forms of noneuropeans

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

impossibility of having an interview with iranians (myself included): [<==? chaotic subjectivity]
deflection --> dodging: not giving meaningful answers : gradations of non-answers you are receiving
taking a keyword, repeating it, sounds like answering the question, introducing a nonsequitur to trip up the host
==> more confused & less inform[...]

[...]ality in movement
--> in obsessional perspective of scientific research: reduce the quantity of information to make the reality clearer (more coherent) --> (a series of signs in hermeneutical perspective ==permit==>) “the image (the event) =/= the background (the sum of the events)”

(anecdote ~=) myth: an illustrative and contradictory example --> the defense against anxiety (in reality's confusion) : the categorizing of opposites in order to establish orderliness in the world of a search for causes [<-- which is a fable]
==> *the event (at the absence of significance of the signs) would justify the present reality* (==>? integration)
==therapy==> arrange the reality categorically & chronologically + enlarge on the reality by adding information

myth brings into play a purely expressive modality (expressed in an interpretative manner) [=/= explaining] }--> (stoic) perverted causality


[Deleuze:] when the causality relation one of the two elements (cause or effect) differs in nature from the other (one is corporeal, physical and the other is incorporeal) --> [they foster a relationship of] quasi-causality =/= relationship of expression

‘necessity’ belongs to an official order called *destiny: a sort of teleology of the system of causes*, a unity of the correspondent quasi-causality (=/= relation between cause and effect)
--> independence is installed in the presence of necessity


[Leibniz:] *causality = con-possibility*
the event is in a monadic world were everything is signs (analogies significant at several levels) --> a fish pond in which each fish is itself a fish pond
Leibniz's world is created and destroyed by harmonic or discordant correlations


“anxiety as cause”

[Holakouee's manner of interpreting reality -->] best therapy or remedy for anxieties:
•causality
•system: a group of necessary laws and rules
}--> no victim, no bully [~= opening the field of knowledge ~=>? erasing the sense of responsibility]
{Despret}--✕--> our experiences sometimes require us (to go farther that Holakouee's instrumentalism) ****to discover a place where disorder may be reestablished in the movement and contradiction**** [that i believe is urgently needed in Iran today =/= enlightening]


a space regulated by laws of stoic causality is the space where multiplicity can be reestablished --> *notional quasi-causality* [notional: gedanklich, تصور، انديشه]

[an stoic anecdote:]
“When, each evening, the guru sat down to proceed with the evening prayer the ashram's cat was in the way and distracted the monks so, he ordered that the cat should be attached during the evening prayers. A long time after the guru's death the cat continued to be attached during the evening prayer. Then, when the cat finished by dying, another cat wa[...]

[...]tional quasi-causality* [notional: gedanklich, تصور، انديشه]

[an stoic anecdote:]
“When, each evening, the guru sat down to proceed with the evening prayer the ashram's cat was in the way and distracted the monks so, he ordered that the cat should be attached during the evening prayers. A long time after the guru's death the cat continued to be attached during the evening prayer. Then, when the cat finished by dying, another cat was brought to the ashram so that it could be duly attached during the evening prayers. Centuries later the guru's disciples wrote wise treatises on the essential role of the cat in the good order of all prayers.” (DeMerlo)

--(in practice)--> the anecdote becomes the essential element in a chain of expressive causalities. it is the intersection point between several stories united for a time: *familial/familiar time & therapeutic time*


...you retreat behind a rampart which protects you
...the exterior scrutiny and criticism makes your failures heavier
...you refuse *scholastic integration* [you choose a complete rejection of the values suggested by the school, rules, or demands for success] ==> you increase the attention paid to you by the institution concerned with your sort of malfunctioning
...consultation dramatizes the contradition and rigidity of your role assignments
...if an intervenor approaches your problem, you play your idiot role
}--> a *merry-go-round of circular causality* --> the intervenor [looks for the ticket which would allow him to clim on and go around:]
•observe the causal chains
•giving the causal chains a different accent علامت، با تکیه بر صدا نه معنی
•create a global field of observation from which he is necessarily excluded
•
}--help--> anecdotic implication (=/= therapeutic system's theory):
•anecdote becomes the frame of the conversation
◦risk of becoming involved in the anecdote's ridiculous fleeting liveliness
•

the anecdote, which dramatized the dead end where the intervenor's capacities are reduced to non-existence --> can also revitalize the relaional process (if introduced in a new quasi-causal chair)
[anecdote's] circular causal hypothesis which reduce the anxiety create a more accessible reality --> constructing a myth = [*]story: lies which tell the truth**
•anecdote takes it place in a causality chain where it lives for a fleeting moment carrying a *parasitical* or a *paratherapeutic* significance
==> construction of a specific restricting environment in which the parties [family and intervenor, artist and feedbacker] are trapped
--Despret--> ***the reduction [of anecdote] becomes the starting point for a new release of the energy it liberates***(!?)

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

Zoological Vandalism: Chimeric Pragmatism in Animal-[...]

[...] Pleasantville (1998)
2. The Devil Wears Prada (2006)



(my flourishing in the scholl was always highly) teacher-dependent --?--> being social [=/= genius]

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

government (counting heads) =/= complexity (how to make mixity work)



morality --> ‘good =/= bad’ (incarnated in different things) [--> philosophical =/= value system ترجیحات --> sociological]
ethics --> assemblages

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

#cat's cradle

nature = figures + stories + images (~= topos, commonplace)

paying attention to nature like a child <-- Haraway

[*]trope: a verse interpolated into a liturgical text عبادات to embellish or amplify its meaning

language --> material-semiotic flesh

liturgical possibilities of nature
•Christian liturgical year
•Zaratusztrian nowruz
•star wars --?--> practice of turning tropes into worlds [--> war of imagess]
•war of words
•

(agonistic fields:)
military combat
sexual domination
security maintenance
market strategy


technical environmental design )<-- does all sorts of boundary crossing)

culturally specific apparatuses of bodily production (--> clean and dirt --> forms of embodiment)

writing: to create metaphors [= reconstitue what counts as knowledge] --> materially implode (~ art, this is what we were practicing in my fable workshop)

technology: a form of life
language: a form of life

create a critique
create a difference (however small, partial, modest, without narrative, without guarantee)

oneiros
oneiric


technical axis  |__
                        /   mythical axis
    textual axis


a cosmos furnished in _ian style
•Aristotelian style: actors are self-moving modular single-substance subjects with adhering accidents ==Haraway==> all else is ground, resource, matrix, screen, secret to be revealed, fair game to be hunted by the hero (<-- our video games are designed in this style)
•

others with reduced powers of self-direction: women, people of color, the sick, nonhuman nature --> need to be *patient*

(metaphysical fatigue)

***patience =/= passivity***

self-invisible transcendent subjects out on a noble journey to report on embodied nature

the problem of (pre-discursive:) believing that nature and society are really fundamentally there
--> conjuring tricks of establishing categorical purity (of nature, of culture, of nonhuman, of human)


(Haraway's three webs of discourse:)
1. cultural studies: a set of discourses about the (irreducible specificity of) [...]

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

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

[singular entities:]

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

[...]oject


the transcendence and transubstantiation of science

when nature enters, religion has to leave. in two equally fatal exit strategies:
•to limit itself to the inner sanctum of the soul
•to flee into the supernatural --> that religion will try in vain to imitate scientific instruments (<-- The Magicians TV series) + misinterpreted science [==> taking Bible as if it were geology book (<-- look at the rising Hollywood films that scientifize the events of Bible) -- projects of connecting religion to the world]

‘exit religion’: it will have lost any pretence of influencing the course of events, its impact will only be decorative

(Descola:) ‘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 o[...]

[...] 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

[*]iconoclast: “if they are made, then they cannot be real”

monotheism ==allowed==> humans to escape from a too close adhesion چسبنده to the natural world
Moses's project ==> we have exctracted ourselves from the world

(Assmans:) without the transcendence of monotheism we would be left with the mere immanence of the natural world *** [--> the problem of transcendence/immanence as only options of relatedness]
(a bad story:) secular narratives that: the stark immanence of the natural world will save us from an escapist adherence to the transcendent world of beyond [--✕--> my Zolmat text is was about the problematization of that view (transcendent world of beyond) in Islamicated ecological consciousness in ajayeb]


****to move from ideology to recognition**** (of the many different contrasts we have lived by without granting them enough room)


the drab and entirly mythical drama of light overcoming darkness


religious traditio operates by its abilities of two transformation:
1. a radical transformation of the far away into the close and the proximate [#Zolmat] (dead is alive)
[...]

[...]iginate knowledge, it at least confirms that there is knowledge. (confirming that cognition occurs)

...tests have to be taken over and over again, if only to fill the **fictional time of the absolute present**

knowledge and test : it is not clear even that something is known until there is a test for it.

(test) is a certain type of metaphysically secured knowledge that needs only to ‘find’ itself

The normatively secured test does not originate knowledge but confirms what already exists as “knowable.”

...generous failure, productive of disclosure

...treaties suspend violence only momentarily, artificially

----only with the help of a discussion of rhetorical codes strong enough to scan the paradoxical logic of testing can we begin to analyze the problem of its unstoppability

...Platonic shredders, what allows us to know whether something is “good” if it has not been put to the test.
Can there be a human being without a test?

If Mary Shelley had seen the discovery of America as an event that occurred too suddenly, without the stops and protections of gradual inquiry--in sum, as a world-historical shock of intrusive violence that disrupted all sorts of ecologies, material and immaterial, conscious and unconscious--Nietzsche studies the profound disruption to thought that the experimental theater of America directed. (Ronell)

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

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

Dr. Frankenstein's new *experimental jouissance*

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


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

flora and fauna

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

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

register(s) of understanding


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

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

i marvel at...


wonders of...
marvels of...
unheards of...
mazhar ol-ajayeb مظهر العجایب
Motehayer[...]

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



the mode of awesomeness and dissolvement with awe is the prescriptive utterance in the case of ajayeb, the ‘wonders of...’ translated from “ajayeb-e...” triggering the verb “ta'ajob” تعجب
(using Avital's words) But if we were to remain in this mood, then, despite appearances, we would not be awestruck, or even struck, by the [text]: we would have missed the encounter with it. In fact, our astonishment would mean that we took the entity of the ajayeb for an object, one created by an author [...] admire a product [by God] and be pleased by a cultural achievement.----Gazwini is making this mistake with God.
-how can we resist the “ta'ajob” or wonderment in reading ajayeb?
-we would not have allowed ourselves to be greeted by the enlisted creatures of ajayeb, be met by its poetic Greeting.
-reading the promises of ajayeb----(and keep in mind that) everything in the Greeting is offered to the greeted as a sort of promise

Ungleiche is a figure

by getting on top of the material, we have not let it speak its word

(not to master or master over the material of ajayeb)
“If we allow ourselves to be greeted by the poem instead of overwhelming it with our knowledge and facility for reformatting poetry according to cultural or philological codes, then we are faced with the enigma from which the poem cannot be wrested by our acquired habits of mastery.” (Avital on Heidegger's Holderlin's Andenken)
***Mastery is not a content but a habit.***
disposition from knowing is required if we are to let the word of ajayeb speak to us (in the form of greeting)
[as Holderlin announces that the “remains” for which poets are responsible.]----> memory (don't let engineers build you archives! (making it about grounding and historicity, instead:) let the poet be responsible for whatever has “remained.”) [this would be Holderlinian advice]
-inappropriable remainder(s)

memory/remember is sojourn
memory and its (peculiar) temporal climate
-how can we not situate remembrance as mourning? (as Holderlin teaches everyone)
remembrance =/=? joyous festivity [----the issue and point in project Persische Abend PARS VIDEO 2014]

the minute you see in a text (@Hoda, Sana, Ali having even) one memory that is clear and guaranteed --> your signals should go on: there is one unrevised (in an original form), no secondary revision, *pure memory* <-- this is a memory that is unnegotiable for them

*on Wind
wind, is a coming that arrives from the future
(compare “going"[...]

[...]ot burning Haman's heart, an example that God has no special privilege, is not located in addition to or beyond other beings

(ajayeb-e gur) عجایب گور
graves -- material and ecological deaths, earth related passings
main actor: Malek al-mot (ملک الموت Angel of 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 i[...]

[...]g and unifying force” [via Kenney] --> “to obey the immune system is to become a citizen of the holobiont”
[this new developement of biological individuality (entangled identities at the heart of life mechanisms) in biological sciences of 21st century requires a new imaginative framework and new forms of curiosity equally relevant to natural sciences and artists]


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


planet =/= terrestrial planet


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


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



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

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

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

[...]mpirical objects, =/= exercise in representation or audit hesab-rasi حساب رسی)
3- narrating the relation (re-materializing my found empirical objects, re-enacting the objects)


interpretive cosmology

(ajayeb's objects,) “They represent different storytelling practices that contribute to different kinds of worldings.” [...] (through my engagement,) “They stimulate more compositions and decompositions--stories that narrate different beings and different doings, none of which can claim final ontological authority, but that each to different (ontic) work” (hopefully!)
-worlding: a choreography that generates ontologies (Thompson) --&--> there is no self without a world (Carson)
-not as a voyeur or anthropologist, but breathe in the density and composition of their atmospheres
(people = worlds)

ontic (hasti mojud-shenakhti هستی‌ موجود شناختی‌): “factual” existence as =/= metaphysical ontologic existence)

[ontological interferences in ontic--{regular existence, difference in little beings} for example, ontic is when we ask what time it is, and the answer is on the clock. (snafu is ontic, aporia ontological*) when the ontic is disrupted ==> you have a “day off,” all sort of things can invade and open up, demons come out, there is a suspension of ontic time, a (Heideggerian) holiday]

(Verran) [number are] “always ready to actively re-exist when we do the right actions and say the right words.” (can i do that with ajayeb's objects? how?)
“The moon rose above the river” (en) <--> “upward behind the onstreaming it mooned” (Tlon, a language by Borges with no nouns, only verbs)

(in old Iran, there is a measurement of time based on sa'd سعد and nahs نحس, the time of benevolent spirits and so on. the sensuous time, measurement is affect)


knowledge industry or “scientific factory”

how academic labor was implicated in capitalist systems and contemporary forms of knowledge/power

“ruse” (hile حیله, makr مکر, neyrang نیرنگ) --> my tool in work on ajayeb? -//-[مکر زنان ,گربه نره و روباه مکار, minorities associated with this accent: women, animals, machines,] [ruse in Kelile Demne کلیله و دمنه]
ruse: a set of small, mostly unconscious tactics by which workers resist capitalist systems (writing love letters on company's time, factory workers who takes a scrap of fabric home for his children to play with, etc.)
-“[h]ow to subvert the laws of the “scientific factory” through gift-giving, solidarity, and free exchange even when bosses and colleagues will not turn a blind eye” (de Certeau)

(how to?) collectively crafting critiques, commitments, stories, and actions (in the density and composition of ajayeb's atmospheres)
-feeling out their “rhythms, valences, moods, sensations, temp[...]

[...]le, agential, creative, expressive,}--> all at the same time; (how to hold them all together?)

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

--> lives, affects, and bodies of organisms: “energetic forces, coextensive overlappings, shared milieus make species; species are sensuous responses” **Hayward

thinking with animals : {figural + literal}
spiders, rats, ...

“the transitioning body is also a gossamer outstretch of homeliness, energetic force or potential, a discursive pulse, a throb of sensations distributed across sensoriums, spaces, and times, delimiting territory but also sensing zones, places, and coherences.”

criticism = speculative fantasy

undoing the eye's property of vision (Kelley and Hayward)


([my account of] ajayeb's stories are) moral tales that model an ecological attention to relationality, vulnerability, and resilience ==> living well in a world contaminated (by all sorts of linguistic and chemical animacies)


*traumatic hope*
(Sedgwick: the reparatively positioned reader tries to recognize the fragments and part-objects she encounters or creates ~= what i am doing)

why tell stories like this, when there are only more and more openings and no bottom lines? --> because there are quite definite response-abilities that are strengthened in such stories (La Guin > Haraway > Kenney)

bottomless story ==> response-ability (an enabling of responsiveness within particular relatings--Schrader 2010)

not only human call & not only human respond --> the world is full of “propositions” (waiting to be registered by interested bodies) [yes we need to produce ‘interested bodies']

“fables of response-ability draw our attention to who is interested and who is made articulate in the apparatuses and ecologies we live inside.” (Kenney)*****

what is a narrative good for if it doesn't improve the quality of companionship (between human and nonhuman)? if it doesn't generate new sensitivities and enable different patterns of responsiveness?

stories of relationship ==> enlarge our thinking [=/= raising awareness]
these stories cannot known in advance --> note on fable #workshop, when you are excited about an assigned reading in a specific way only to find out that the participants connect or disconnect to something i don't notice


*wonder, a mode of attention to:
•the perpetual newness of the present (Irigaray)
•the other-worldliness of the past (Bynum)
•the aesthetics and politics of sf worlding[...]

[...]ossible interesting becoming to the animals of ajayeb, 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 [...]

[...]in the 16th century europe (pointed by Foucault) language was simply “one of the figurations of the world” =/= “language as medium"]

*performativity (the way i am understanding it using Barad's words) =/= the excessive power granted to language to determine what is real
-a contestation of the unexamined habits of mind that grant language and other forms of representation more power in determining our ontologies
-questions of correspondence between description and reality --> questions of ontology, materiality, and agency. (the things i am busy with in apass)
-(discursive dimensions include) questions of meaning, intelligibility, significance, identity formation, and power
% Austin's speech acts, relationships between saying and doing --> Derrida's poststructuralist amendments --> Butler (with Foucault's understanding of the productive effects of regulatory power) in theorizing the notion of identity performativity {@Xiri, we understand gender not as a thing or a set of free-floating attributes, not as an essence--but rather as a “doing”: “gender is itself a kind of becoming or activity ... gender ought not to be conceived as a noun or a substantial thing or a static cultural marker, but rather as an incessant and repeated action of some sort” --> with this regard what questions should Xiri ask her subjects?}

{ practice of representation =/= represented entity }--> this “=/=” is ontological ==> question of accuracy (of representation) --> scientific knowledge objectivity

focus on the nature & production of scientific knowledge (--> mediates our access to the material world) --(science-studies)--> dynamics of the actual practice of science }--> ongoing patterns of situated activity

-*origins of “appearance”*-
...with Democritus's atomic theory emerges the possibility of a gap between representation and presented. (the idea that something “appears”)
-Democritus:
•atomism (-->? cornerstone of modern science)
•democracy (-->? cornerstone of modern politics)
}--> the idea that the world is composed of individuals with separately attributable properties**** (==> Newtonian physics of independent objects, @Heike)

*Newtonian framework --> meaphysics of individualism
1- that the world is composed of individual objects with individually determinate boundaries and properties whose well-defined values can be represented by abstract universal concepts that have determinate meanings independent of the specifices of practice (--this is exactly what Marialena should be carefull about: abstract univerality of ‘language,’ and the independency of her ‘recorder’)
2- that measurement involves continuous determinable interactions such as the values of the properties obtained can properly be assigned to the premeasurement properties of objects separate from the agencies of observation

(*)concept: specific mat[...]

[...]epts that have determinate meanings independent of the specifices of practice (--this is exactly what Marialena should be carefull about: abstract univerality of ‘language,’ and the independency of her ‘recorder’)
2- that measurement involves continuous determinable interactions such as the values of the properties obtained can properly be assigned to the premeasurement properties of objects separate from the agencies of observation

(*)concept: specific material arrangements, concepts are defined by the circumstances required for their measurement

(is Luisa's “wholesomeness” also about a feeling for inseparability?)


deployments of power <--> body--{bodies, functions, physiological processes, sensations, pleasures,}

matter is not an end product, rather an active factor in further materializations
(*** matter materializes ***)
matter's ongoing historicity

precise causal nature of productive practices ==> differential constitutions are marked


ajayeb: a host of material-discursive forces

*for ajayeb i need to rework notions of:
•discursive practices
•materialization
•agency
•causality
*without:
•resorting to the optics of transparency
•the geometric of absolute exteriority or interiority
•theorization of human as either pure cause or pure effect


*any entity's ontology (its cast identity) is always open for future's reworkings* (Barad)


adding a Greek fused syntactical molding to the individual, ‘trans-’ is not enough, we have to make the postulation of individuality unthinkable, and that needs work
{how to make things unthinkable? not available to think with. what should be an “unthinkable” theory of relations?}

(Descartes's epistemology --> representationalist structure of words, knowers, and things)--> transparency of measurement (transparency of language) =/= Bohr's epistemological framework (after his empirical findings of an inherent discontinuity in measurement ----%> wave-particle duality paradox) ~-> Barad's “causal relationship between specific exclusionary practices embodied as specific material configurations of the world [~= discursive practices, (con)figurations rather than “words"] and specific material phenomena [~= relations rather than “things"]”

(*)position (~ specific physical arguments, [=/= well-defined abstract concepts, inherit attribute of independently existing objects]---> go to critique of ‘positionality’)
“position” only has meaning when a rigid apparatus with fixed parts is used (for example a ruler is nailed to a fixed table in the laboratory ==> establishing a fixed frame of reference for specifying “position.”) --> any measurement of “position” using this apparatus cannot be attributed to some abstract independently existing “object” [...]

[...]es” 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 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[...]

[...]dies

(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)


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 pollutants, interesting agencies and animations, and like most of the medieval sciences and knowledge systems that were busy with the transformation of agencies it collapses “lists” and “narratives.” In Ajayeb each animal is a consensual hallucination device (~ each animal is a way of knowing the world); some pre-organic, inter-corporal species, with trans-ontological intentionalities.

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

infrastructure: piled-upon assemblages within which there are many discontinuities but also connections, some deliberative, some inadvertent. (Katie King)
--> “flexible knowledges”

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

آب حیوان {how could I know that Vladimir (in his performance for Lilia's apass score) was not (in)sourcing the Holy Waters, abe heyvan or vozu? his sweat was the ooze of a modern and secular labor. he was using a profane water?}
حیوان خوران جهان heyvan khorane jahan
زیرکان کهن kohan zirak

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

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

#my work in apass is about:
•bestiary: archaeological anthropology of human-anim[...]

[...]aginc lantern, iceberg's tip (==> unconsciousness), wasteland/wilderness, greedy beast within, ... {--> these are all (classical) basis for “higher” cognitive capacities}] [also I am against Alex's notion of “destablizing stabilities as the task of artistic research.” I choose to refuse to put what is in flux against what is stable or attempting to stabilize. (I am in alignment with Katie King sharpening for me that) we constantly share our stage, settings, performances, sensoria, reenactments among agencies and species, creating varying stabilities, some fragile, some robust]
*account--synonymous with: description, information, list, reason, record, statement, story, sum, tale
-a contractual relationship
-giving an itemized account of recent transactions and resulting balance (of your metaphors = material-discursive apparatuses that are materializing your found empirical objects)
-accountability is always also about remaking those relations that produced your objects
-detailed explanation of money held in trust, to count, enumerate* -->{telling =? enumerating}
counting your senses
*accountability is about your ‘import’ functions (like in a programming language when you import a library of functions)
 --> count: an agent of sorting that separates units or groups of a collection --> list, listed --> to have importance and worth ~-> country ---{? unexpected countries}
 --0--> ‘count’ is also a word technologically tethered, origin of computing


(Kirksey > Leigh Star) to begin with the question, ‘cui bono?’ (for whose benefit?) =/= to begin with a celebration of the fact of human/nonhuman mingling

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

my Rigs diagrams are ‘swarms’? -a multitude of different creative agents
ajayeb.net (how can it be:) not a website but a “para-site”
•am i creating an ego (for ajayeb) in my ajayeb.net? if yes, that would be interesting how?

topos/topic of hypertext, spatial character of electronic writing
topic [from Greek ‘topos’: a place, in ancient rhetoric used to refer to commonplaces, conventional units, or methods of thought] exist in a writing space that is not only a visual surface but also a data structure in the computer --> Hypertext: “is not the writing of a place, but rather a writing with places, spatially realized topics.” (Bolter < Hubert)
-in my hypertext, which writing materials, cognitive mappings, itineraries of reading, textual stability, loops and reductions are addressed?

•in ajayeb.net the so-called url address or location bar, is itself a control panel, a graphical user interface widget; how did i come to use “?q=” : rhetorics of technologized inquiry in place before i even could think about how do I allow my objects constituted by “?”, “q” and “=” of the language and grammar of internet
•(when i uploaded my hypertext i faced immediately the big data:) google [...]

[...]ecific ritual practice, they don't “bear” gender (as their essential feature) ==> gender salience is always in question, not a propor presupposition
“sex has emerged as a salient attribute of the pot's character as a pot”

when zoomorphic figures are present...

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


museum studies


(Hayward:) freedom --> initiative in shaping a narrative, a visible body, where one is able to engage and resist [@Xiri] --> contradicts itself because one is really not free from the policing of the physical body --> coming into a [...] body (==> reality and disillusion in public spaces) -->{ narrative, flesh, is filled with memory, emotions, and complexity [@Hoda]
*crafting a space for existence may involve:
•unfolding history
•mapping normative processes
•immersing a “body” in vulnerability (*)


deploy =/= unveiling
sort out =/= debunking هدايت


glocalizing


Katie King reading Hayward: [...] assembling apparatuses for enfolding visions of instrumental, subjective and cognitive technologies among ciliated (مودار, ریشه‌دار) bodies

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

technologies of the literal

grain of analysis, timescale, noting/creating hybrid objects of study
[comparing the incomparable --> lumping --then--> splitting]

***starting off a research project which eventually hopes to have something to say about that hybrid “thing”*** ...with some despised members of a particular time period (--> switching those who count as major or minor characters), promises to make it possible to build in *a range of genders (not just two), a range of writing technologies, a range of self-effacing acts, and a range of publics*, while working from a particular place and time

***there are many different interests creating the pasts***, the possible worlds...


(Leigh Star > Katie King > Sina) “comparing the incomparable”

here i am trying an outline of my interrelated research practices in a preliminary character, the intersection of which I am just at the beginning to understand


ajayeb: writing technologies of the 12th century Iran

plain style

soing naked as a sign

dress and address

ecology of writing technologies


(Katie King:) writing technologies: ideologies layered in time and space * under which writing has been divided [also cannot be divided] fro[...]

[...]oxing is totally neccessary to use/study infrastructures, they produce the “artifactual richness” [= a kind of archaeological layering of artifacts acquired in bits and pieces over time--(Lucy Suchman)] of systems
*black-boxing makes elegant some elements of the system/s differentially*
each author does it:
•Shapin black-boxing his range of systems to its complexity and elegance
•Haraway appropriating the idea of modest witness for her own feminist purpose
•

three technologies for fact-making (that Shapin and Schaffer name):
1. material
2. literary
3. social

Adrian Johns in The Nature of The Book: particular booksellers could indeed use their *stewardship* of such heterogeneous spaces to further political ideals and interests. behind the scenes and up the stairs, an interested London bookseller became a significant actor in cultural events.

nominal agency
actual person
principle architect


systems move in space, time, and process
some archaeological structures (that one uncover) are stable, some in motion, some evolving, some decaying --> *“there is no way of ever getting access to the past except through classification systems of one sort or another”* (at best) the past could be reordered to better reflect multiple constituencies now and then. (Bowker + Leigh Star)


(my ajayeb research: “epistemic virtues” [or powers] of the 12th century encyclopedic wonder-books,) “epistemological decorum” --> (to capture) “truth-making practices in action” (Shapin)
==> (my commitment to ajayeb:) engendering reflection on the nature of and function of categorization itself

a wonderful bit of meta-language


The Exhausted Receiver


Margaret Cavendish description of a new world, called the Blazing World, her own brand of natural philosophy under the guise of a romance... science for ladies{
1- enthusiasm ==> new science
2- study of natural philosophy ==> cardinal virtues of ladies, modesty and religious reverence
3- leisure activity, appropriate pasttime
*she participated in discussions central to her life and times* (am i participating in discussions central to my life and times?!)
Cavendish self-consciously produced herself as a fantastic and singular... (--> is that what i wish to produce?)
-Cavendish strangely shared with Quaker women an experimental life of proliferating genders, of dress, of personhood, og agency, of writing, of personae, but not of this *enabling collectivity*

hermaphroditical view of things: partly artificial, partly natural

status of clothing as a signifier of identity [<-- not always]
crossdressing (#my sticker period)


[modest witness] (--> Haraway's literal and figurative queering of categories)
the rh[...]

[...]an of reason] bears witness”: he is objective, he guarantees the clarity and purity of objects, as contestable representations, or as construced documents in their potent capacity to define the facts =/= queering confidence: enable a more corporal, inflected, and optically dense, if less elegant, kind of witness (to the matters of fact to emerge in the worlds of technoscience) [--> this is why i was trying to enable that kind of “optically dense” and “less elegant” kind of corporeality in our work on Olearius#]
(Haraway + Potter + Shapin + Schaffer:) elaboration on the idea of modest witness in which “modesty” might flip between either two sides:
1- historically masking a masculine solipsism as a preciously unmarked category: modest witness =/= haec vir : God forbid that the experimental way of life have queer foundations
2- (working across partialities) to create “a more adequate, self-critical technoscience committed to situated knowledges”


a nameless sin about which, without describing, he sought counsel

oratory

tension between dedication and prevarication (zaban bazi زبان بازی)

([let's not] being a member of) a “class” of those whose truth-telling was privileged
in certain sorts of people credibility was embodied


ajayeb.net's style of writing =/= a style of writing driven by the needs of readers who are relatively unskilled (in practical divinity, casuistry, or theology, and so on)


*** what kind of classification work, work of historical representation, is necessary now to show over time with greater clarity, in cooperation with more and more communities of practice, that in the best of all possible worlds, at any given moment, the past could be reordered to better reflect multiple constituencies now and then? ***
(Katie King + Bowker + Leigh Star)

[my ajayeb-making is about] partial connections (across time) ==> communities


([my point in work on ajayeb:] we need) the possbility of competing and shifting claims on individuals (=/= self-making individual), rather persons with partial connections (across time) and queer relations with pastpresent ==> negotiating forms of evidence ==> units of analysis ==> past reordered

[with the help of Katie King's figure of writing technologies:] i am interested in and interested to help make historical representations of nonhuman iranians in writing technological ecologies (which are inevitably products of new social movements, new research agendas, new publics of interest, and new contests for historical meaning)

with ajayeb this became immediately my concern: *infrastructures of historical representation*

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

(what are the) stickiness of ajayeb's being (?) or, in which affective economy they are ‘passed around’? [social goods, acc[...]

[...]symbolic meaning*** (in short: canon of “Thinking”) --> “bigger” structures and underlying causes obscure the ways in which a reeling present is composed out of heterogeneous and noncoherent singularities
-Sven's ordinary affects and DJings --> his noncoherent singularity ==> a nonrepresentational theory is needed to address them
asking Sven:
•what needs attending to (for you)?
•what/who are you in conversation with?



[scenes and selves]***
•layered textures of a scene



(paying attention to pressure points of ajayeb ==>)
in ajayeb, what is
•maintained as a prized possession
•left to rot
•hardened into little mythic kernal
•morphed into a cold dark edge
•hopeful
•
•
--> things take place as [*]precisions: the pressure points that open onto potentialities are taken up as apparitional things (surat صورت) and then sharpened and repeated in compositions that labor to describe but also flourish on their own terms


my efforts have not been to finally “know” ajayeb, Sven, or Sana, [i have been reluctant to collect them into a good enough story of what's going on with them,] rather to fashion some sort of address that is adequate (and fabulous) to their form
-does the intensity and texture of my routines (talks, writings, etc.) make ajayeb habitable and animate?
-in the last year in apass i have been training myself to become attuned to what a particular scene might offer

#my apass ajayeb project:
(learning) building an idiosyncratic map of connections between a series of singularities --> to create a contact zone for analysis ****
[~?-> ajayeb.net, pop-up book]
[that's why i have been against the popular idea of authorlessness in apass, i am invested in (our) singularities; identity is a zone of attunement]--> Stewart calls herself “she” to mark the difference between her writerly identity and the kind of subject that arises as a daydream of simple presence
-to touch details that establishes a direct contact

?in our group who
•gazes
•imagines
•senses
•takes on
•performs
•asserts (not a flat and finished truth)
•is in a hot persuit of something definitive @Lili
•a point of contract @Esta
•

watching and waiting for an event to unfold
the still life that gives a pause --> the story of many of us

______________


“every achieved poem inscribes a perceptual signature in the world” (Stewart > Doty)

poems have to be achieved (in the social-material world)
(achieved =/= archived)

[*]poem:
•etching *lines of action* and mood across the sensations
•compositions at work


my ajayeb's
•objects of ana[...]

[...]tivities in realizing knowledge stories” --> epistemological affects


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


Alberti argues for a form of ontological symmetry between the theory we bring to bear on our evidence and the way that material acts as evidence (@Seba)


*[mesopotamia] chronically unstable bodies
a corpus of zoo-anthropo-biomorphic artifacts and traps
anthropomorphism manifest in distorted corporeal forms and appendages ضميمه

all sorts of dualism are at work in the archaeological imaginary of the region from Amazon to the Andes

marking a body =/= representation of that act

Alberti's arguments”
•the fantastic forms, bulges, protuberances برامدگى, and other modifications of bodies and pots express a general concern with “shoring up” or “fixing” a world conceived of as inherently volatile فرار --> bodies (pots and people) were considered “chronically unstable”* {pots --> intentional activation of affective capacities in the clay; pots and bodies are “grown” in he same way}
•chaotically scale-changing, their scale is one of intensity and excessiveness (--> figure-ground relationship between visible/invisible, body/soul)

*perspectivism: all species potentially share a way of knowing with humans. their “essence” or “soul” is human : they see themselves as human and others as animals
*to occupy a body = to have a perspective on the world*
•an intensive difference that carries the human/nonhuman difference to the inside of every existing thing --> there is no a priori reason for everything not being a subject [--> also Sadra]

[*]bodies:
•bundles of affect : collection of affects bundled into an unstable bodily form
•carrying out specific tasks
•sensing the world in particular way
•sharing capacities and habits with others in what keeps a body as it is and maintains its similarity to other bodies in a group
•coincident with subjectivity* --> you need a body to know
--> (particular differentiation of a body:) body ornaments, clothing, sex, and other so-called cultu[...]

[...]n particular to each


[*]traps(/pots): bodies fully engage in perspectival communication and battles of will, variously constructed and provided with affects and capacities, capable of knowing different things and of inciting different kinds of knowledge through the types of relations they entered into


______________


archaeological material ~= myrtle (=/= marble)


[*]ontology: a theory and experience of what exists


*hylomorphic model of production (underlined by the substance ontology) ~= marble
=/= myrtle
=/= ajayeb's inscribings
a making which assumes that form is inscribed onto passive matter
that pots accrue (انباشتن منتج) meaning through their processes of manufacture and role in social relations
~ form is brought to matter by an agent with a design in mind (Ingold) --> a concept of material culture in which “brute matter” is shaped by cultural agency
traces of action --> skilled means of representing a mental image
~= ‘design’ (as conventionally conceived) : to ‘project’ future states


[*]perspectivist theory: the conception according to which the universe is inhabited by different sorts of persons, human and nonhuman, which apprehend reality from distinct points of view (Viveiros de Castro)
-it suggests that there is no interior space to the body, only superposition of body and soul: the human form is, as it were, the body within the body, the naked primordial body [hayula]--the soul of the body --> infinite superposition of states #tey-ol-arz
--> the body, not the mind (or ‘soul’), is the seat of knowledge, different parts of the body know in quite distinct ways: (loci/organ of knowledge:)
•hand knowledge (meken una)
•eye knowledge (bedu una) (particularly prominent sometimes...)
•ear knowledge (pabinki una)
•liver knowledge (taka una)
•skin knowledge (bitxi una) <-- knowledge of sun, rain and wind is acquired through the skin
(painting, ear piercing can also facilitate the absorption of knowledge into the body)

[*]bodies ~= artefacts : sites of subjectivity
•the body is fabricated, just like the pot [Alberti]
•as ‘lived experience’ performs, communicates and extends personhood through inscriptive and representational practices that fully incorporate material culture and the surrounding world. (Joyce)
•people are made: bodies are composite transformations of artefacts from the time of myth* [for example] Wari pay much attention to human bodies to ensure proper growth, which is regarded as a collective responsibility: they are moulded and shaped by kin from foetus through to adult. actions carried out on the body, such as massage, painting and piercing [and negarani of iranian mother] are seen to have profound and lasting effects
•each being is s[...]

[...]y 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 interpretation through a process of disarticulation, repurposing, and disruption of archeological artworks with a political intent in mind? (interpretive framework)
•how to allow ajayeb to continue to operate effectively on us?

both affective and historical force (of ajayeb)


art engenders material becomings (classical definition)
art engenders imaginative becomings

learning from archeology: to be pre-conceptual : the process of craft, to grasp how concepts make their way into things


undisciplinary space (instead of transdisciplinary)

disarticulation: repurposing and disruption of archeological artworks with a political intent in mind
--> cannot escape the anecdotal when it comes to interpretation --> artifacts (for example a neolithic Balkon clay figurine) become symbols for social position ~= allegorizing (=/= speculation)

historical energy (force) of things = something of the past that endures in them


(old and unhelpful definition of) art: impacting nervous system without conceptual mediation (directly impact living bodies) --engender--> material becomings ["art = giving birth"]

--Alberti--> art (and anthropology) need the pre-conceptual: the process of craft (to grasp how concepts make their way into things)


[*]concept: fragment of past world

maker + material ==emerge==> concept

-in artistic research @apass are we dealing with the simulacra of knowledge?


understanding the potters (and artists) who made the ceram[...]

[...]endencies in Golestan)

fusing impressions synesthetically in a startling phrase
peeling scales provoke simile

...mind moving swiftly from observation to reverie

a compelling replica of inquiry ==> enlist the reader's participation in a version of the work of consciousness


descriptive acts --> attempt to render the world (and it is subject to revision)


*examplars of strangeness” (for my ajayeb, #writing Div descriptions)
-let's rewrite Div Sefid and give it more *wealth of detail*==> keeps the Div from becoming a symbol and allows it to *remain creaturely*
#Div poetry, to get close to a lived texture of creature, to allow the senses their complexity synthetic life

**every achieved poem inscribes a perceptual signature in the world**

the work of seeing ==> who is doing the looking, a specific, idiosyncratic sensibility

*detail ==> subjectivity* : we are brought into intimate proximity to the slipstream of (her) sensations --> *subjectivity* is made of such detail (of all the ways in which the world impresses itself upon us --> knowing through our scaffoldings of concerns, the tones and shadings of our moods) ~~--> we are in a sort of *readerly alliance*


[time]
#practice: try to describe what subjective time feels like --> to find variety of verbs to describe less readily chartable motions
(the time of interiority) pools, cibstricts, tunbles, speeds
-we live in a felt narrative progression, through which experience is transformed into memory
*memory edits*
what is memory but a story about how we have lived?
-timelessness: the interior landscape of reverie


lyric state of mind : seized by a moment that suddenly seems edgeless, unbounded
-wholly giving oneself over to experiencing an object
-unpointed awareness
-perfectly useless concentration
-entirely occupied
lyric moment is isolate =/= (parts of a) narrative are contiguous
(according to the lyric -->) consciousness or immortality is without date(?)

moment dilates as it is described
creating an alternate sense of duration


the surface of language
the complexity and interest of the surface

thickness means we have to *labor to enunciate* them -- is a way of mirroring the physicality of the world

seamlessness ==> our attention is suspended

(a poem/writing) shift time ==> put us inside a scene

...slip the confines of the body

poem's leap toward transcendence

people slip out of the story they are living all the time (@iranians)
(daily life is full of small moments of:)
•rupture
•disappearance
•interiority

because of her [Bishop's poem The Fis[...]

[...]لزل pleasure in being overcome by what is (for him) the *sensory evidence* (of the divine, or an excessive described world)]
(in my performances) through description, twining strands of meaning, braiding together elements of [my] thinking and perception to make an image both elusive and unforgettable, unparaphrasable نقل بيان نشدنی
*density* ==> melds perception with thinking and feeling ==> making a new generative reality
(the speed of my talking has to do with the quick and compressed that) operates on us before we have even had time to think about what is happening ~=> a world that is both immediate and immense, a moment out of context, a pouring stream of being (on the way so somewhere else) [a viscerality that Vanja reported after experiencing my performance; my #routines]
-when you look at my performances there is a feeling of it is not quite figured out how he is yet, there is no settled mastery on its way, rather, there is a restless experimentation, a trying on of different densities (of meanings, letters, spoken energies, etc.), various surfaces, degrees of busyness and calm --> how to look at this kind of work?
(we don't need anymore art like this: as if they have been made on secret, and *their radicalism lends them a sort of urgency* [<-- no no!], a perpetual quality of surprise)
-my imaginal portals: to invoke an inviting world of associations, a scented cool, ~ an indirect way of naming (=/= to program language : reducing language to a debasing perceptual shorthand)
-proposing ‘it is’ by placing another beside it, cultivating opposition and tension


“something understood” --> left open, undefined, ...


(Elen's “je suis” [Ich bin] in her images and...)


(with the help of Janina, we are) madly in love with the surface of the world

@Marialena; transmembering power of the sea, nautical daryayi دريايي، مربوط به دریانوردی، ملوانی



saying what ‘you’ see & saying why you ‘see’

the more accurate and sensory the apparent evocation of things, the more we have the sense of someone there doing the looking (<-- USA spectacle knows this)


X in Y's translation


“a fish never makes an aesthetic mistake” --> it sends us hurrying to every visual image of fish we can think of, to see if it could be true*

(a good) description: an evocation of the sensory world also suggests the limitations of such evoking, maintaining a sort of open space
in which meaning isn't closed or completed, but remains instead generative


a title sometimes does the useful work of placing us specifically, so that the body of the poem can turn its attention to the heart of the matter

(it is surprising how strongly the) naming of particulars ==([...]

[...]rpetual quality of surprise)
-my imaginal portals: to invoke an inviting world of associations, a scented cool, ~ an indirect way of naming (=/= to program language : reducing language to a debasing perceptual shorthand)
-proposing ‘it is’ by placing another beside it, cultivating opposition and tension


“something understood” --> left open, undefined, ...


(Elen's “je suis” [Ich bin] in her images and...)


(with the help of Janina, we are) madly in love with the surface of the world

@Marialena; transmembering power of the sea, nautical daryayi دريايي، مربوط به دریانوردی، ملوانی



saying what ‘you’ see & saying why you ‘see’

the more accurate and sensory the apparent evocation of things, the more we have the sense of someone there doing the looking (<-- USA spectacle knows this)


X in Y's translation


“a fish never makes an aesthetic mistake” --> it sends us hurrying to every visual image of fish we can think of, to see if it could be true*

(a good) description: an evocation of the sensory world also suggests the limitations of such evoking, maintaining a sort of open space
in which meaning isn't closed or completed, but remains instead generative


a title sometimes does the useful work of placing us specifically, so that the body of the poem can turn its attention to the heart of the matter

(it is surprising how strongly the) naming of particulars ==(bring color into)==> poem's (or text's) perceptual web


distortion's power to suggest but not define linkage
•the use of ‘like’ --> would draw a firm line between the two elements
•not using ‘like’ --> no firm gesture of equivalence ==> we confront a metaphor that is far more alive in its associations, far more ambiguous, and more crucial --> both an evocation of alienation and a recognition of communality --tonally--> composed of *equal portions of sorrow and wonder* --> forcing us *to remain in the position of interpreter* of something that is perpetually open =/= direct statement


Blake (and Attar?) wouldn't be the great poet he is if he could allow his bloom to be entirely symbol
--> a bloom attached to the speaker, a memeber of Lord Death's troops, an assistant to the disruptive powers of the night
=/= transcendence

crucible بوته اهنگرى, this nere-archaic word with its connotations of flame and molten metal, magical heat and transformation


sunflower: the cry of the determined survivor**

(differently depicted) sunflower gain power from resisting the flower's conventional associations

the poetic =/= reinscribing the already known

“it would be like hearing the grass grow[...]

[...]u choose to. but if you want to, or you know how, you can read what lies beneath)
6. ***metaphor = an act of inquiry*** =/= an expression of what we already know (“i can't prove this [...] but i can feel the power of the result.” unmistakable quality of discovery [of metaphoric figures]: the sort of energy generated when an idea [and a concomitant set of emotions] unfolds before the write [<-- Sven is missing this?]. in this way: metaphor = (a kind of) *argument*= a “thinking through” of what is implied, [oh i have made something] complicated = full of feeling and tension, #excess; investigation of erotic energy, thrilling sonic structures you build,,,)


to become a rhetorical reader of our *gesture drawing*
moments of rebelion, when you have just enough of the strictures of the composed still life the teacher had assigned, you whip out...


description is fueled by ***hunger for the world***, the need to taste, to name, to claim what is seen, to bring it --> the resurrection of the world within the perceiver
*it is very often true that what we are compelled to describe is terrible, or oppressive, or heartbreaking. language is hungry for that, too [...] to eat everything. even the falling and fading world, even misery* (Doty)
-they speak to our hunger for a vocabulary for the whole range of feeling, even the awful parts (--> destruction of speech is dangerous, having no language for what we do good or bad)

desctiption is made both more moving and more exact when it is acknowledged that is is inevitably incomplete


(in the strictest sense) one could say that nothing unintelligible is a meaning =/= *there is always meaning*
-the perception of meaning [such as goose sound] that cannot be translated into any other form of speech --> chasm barzakh between the incomprehensible and the making of meaning --> (how?) to build a construct of language that acknowledges[...]

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

*invocation = directly addressing the thing creates a sense of immediacy and of connection
*thou, with its suggestion of divinity or beloved --> prayer
*hectic: uncomfortable alliance, inharmonious, something that might set the teeth on edge
*destroy --> a death-steeped perception that reads the wind as a “destroyer”
*world of fused duality


‘and’ --> the signature element of a place, of a landscape, the conjoined body : the animate and the inorganic as one thing


[...]

[...] to one standard of domestic intimacy (USA or iran):
they love their children and pets ==> imagine themselves as compassionate and moral --> makes them ‘good people’ ==> equip them to make decisions for the whole world ==> moral hierarchy (~ your goodness is qualification for global goodness) ==> other people & other species are judged --> project to improve the world ==> *collateral damage is unfortunate but not inhumane*

urban jungle
jumble of diversity + imperial planners
excessive teams

technique of unmapping, for separating paired projects and effects and places and things. (for example unmap state and capital from diversity places)
•spread obscurity
•to know something from disordered edges (=/= ptoductive edges)
•what grows in the seam (to begin with)
•pleasure of variety beyond the domestic
•how places are differentiated and specific


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

Global Futures
(a game of) possibilities of contingent connections
a game that develops our ideas of the productivity--for better or worse--of contingency
a game to appreciate contingent connections [=/= stale and dangerous predictions (==> mithridatism)]

futures of all sorts are forged in the contingencies of strange connections
•foreclosed in the narrow channels of corporate expansion
•clashing state and popular terrorisms
•our best hopes (as well as our inchoate terrors)

*Tsing: “Contingency surrounds us, but we ignore its power to shape the future.”


**europe's secular prophecy's formulaic tropes for encapsulating time**
•most powerful future-making stories have told of the fulfillment of principles of progress and rationality
•driving force of technology will transform society
•ideal of democracy will be progressively encoded in law
=/=
**anti-progress prophecy's formulaic tropes for encapsulating time**
•national genius of a chosen people will blossom
•human nature will reestablish historic gender roles and racial hierarchies
•the essence of ancient civilizations will rise again to vie and clash

}--> There is no room for contingent connections in any of these predictions


(most important story of our time:) *the story of globalization*:
•the world is entering a global era without political or economic rifts
•nation-states and cultures are increasingly irrelevant
•a global menu of consumerdesires and entrepreneurial standards frames identity and sets individual and collective goals

--> since the end of the Cold War:
•global expansion of a few giant corporations
•the great flows of people from one continent to another
•forging of transnational standards for economics and politics
•development of widely spread a[...]

[...]cination, whispering,
•ruin (of signs)
•entropy (=/=? emergence)
•

*affliction landscapes* --> Leid: existence thriving in the wound --> anticipation of oblivion

doom, ruin, entropy --> udyr (in norwegian u-: non- or bad, dyr: animal) bad or corrupted animal, nonanimal, monster, (rootless existence)

udyr (gate keepers creepers) <--?--> div (defeated)



--performance--
rotating styles of: folkloric ballads, existential meditation, doomsday rant, elegiac oration, children lullabies --into--> a singular blast of an account of a devastated space --mobilizing--> legend, omen, song, myth, fairy tale, mutated war cry
[these potent signs are sneaking in the work “stranger within,” it is not just a historical dreamscape]
-the masked actors on stage have taken a venom (becoming faceless engravers) to cross into the next level of temporal experience --> ???
-muted rage and ecstasy indeterminacy positioned as creeping towards the midnight of moving & no longer moving... (as human? --> conflicting ways of being human; to acknowledge human & violence;)


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



--research--

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

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


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


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


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


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

(not to make the performance mimeti[...]

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

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

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

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

formation of a crowd
materialization of the state's force

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

the group:
•(has a) monopoly on violence
•manifestation of a will to democracy (for example the way Iranian movements were read by international bodies)

ahistoricism of conspiratorial orientation --> “powerful but secret instrumentalities ==> temporary formations” --misses--> the transformations of social consciousness and political possibility

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

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

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


the so-called nocturnal sudden dea[...]

[...]on crepting into Christensen's thesis <-- images of women “sneaking away” to attend Sabbats

Häxan visually grounds itself in citable evidence from the start
•cinema: (as an instrument for “recording reality”) a vehicle for “telling the truth” about the world [in early 1920s]

when documentary was not yet documentary -- fiction wasn't fiction yet either --Chanan-->{
moving pictures = visual tidbits لقمه چرب ونرم
made no demands on literacy (==> spread easily)
whe world on the screen remained anecdotal (and predominantly iconic)
practically inarticulate (in terms of public discourse)}

(1900) visual meaning-making machines that demanded not only attention but belief (by staging as real reenactments) --> mutated the desire to see far-off contemporary events
•--> Attack on a China Mission Station (1900), Hunting Big Game in Africa (1907), and With Captain Scott, R.N., the South Pole (1912), The Battle of the Somme (1916) and With Our Heroes at the Somme (Bei unseren Helden an der Somme, 1917)

(Baxstrom + Meyers) question of mimesis
-what is the relation between a fragmentary visual artifact drawn “from life” and the truth value of any such fragments?
-what sorts of filmmaking practices can felicitously mimic life as such?

[for example in Curtis's In the Land of the War Canoes] status of reenactment ==> prevailing standards of expressing the real

--later --> crypto-structuralist origin myth that falsely represented what “documentary” meant to pre-Griersonian filmmakers ==> “realist” Lumiere =/= the “fanciful” Melies

}--> *gap between witnessing and the real* in Europe (this question of evidence occupied inquisitors and theologians long before the invention of cinema)


preparing viewers for the “diegetic absorption”
(telling of a story by a narrator) diegesis =/= mimesis

the strategy of “reimaging” is methodological and intentional (in the opening minutes of the film Häxan) --> (in European terms, for a very long time:) “knowledge = recitations of the known”

+ creation of new images --> constituting its own evidence for what is at stake
(Christensen designating) **techniques of presentation rather than simple content**

****the “truth” gained by the reproduction of archival images**** <==through== their mobility in the context of their new use
--> (similar to Farocki) Christensen empties out such visual artifacts, expressing through their preestablished frame a meaning that was hidden and resisted



(Baxstrom + Meyers carefully treating the) methodological element of Christensen's image-making practices --in--> Häxan's depiction of the violent moral disorder of the Wild Ride of the witches to their Sabbats

(16th century) Wild Ride: a standard elemen[...]

[...]osing methods of critique and presentation =/= Warburg + Christensen collecting mythological, figurative givens seemingly quite distant from the “really” real
}--> unsettling distances between myth and the everyday
-weave together episodic fragments in order to draw parallels (across domains of sense that cut across time) and correspondences across situations and characters
-Häxan deploys the techniques associated with Warburg's Mnemosyne and Bataille's Documents for purposes of affectively emphasizing the dark, chaotic forces that lurk under the smooth surface of the everyday
(Häxan's episodic structure ==>)
•characters seemingly out of a dead past to live again
•draw the phenomenology of the hysteric
•draw the work's own contemporary time to the surface


promiscuous: neither wholly artistic nor scientific =/=? hybrid artistic and scientific

traverse steep slope between past and future in the form of an event =/= plot


inability to automatically categorize Häxan (or any work of art) <== ***formal strategy rooted in an epistemic virtue***


***(in later Middle Ages) practices such as persecuting witchcraft to meditating on Christ = techniques (of sorting operation) to draw distinctions among visual phenomena, differentiating, say, physical objects from fantasies, dreams, and diabolical or artful deceptions
<--artist-- image-makers specialized in manipulating one thing (their materials) in order that a viewer should see something else ~ *to make something invisible visible* [<-- this is always ideological, and is very common in art]
(#testing) the objective knowledge possessed by the uncanny (in witch's pathological language of diabolic proofs) ==> witch must be experienced in her own milieu, a satanic biome, her state in nature

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

typical in 17th century: tacit mutuality of word & image<br /> -artists habitually gave their paintings titles, mottoes, tags and quotations, and their works abound in literary allusions
-explicit interleaving of the verbal and visual


cat feces and dove hearts boiled in the moonlight

stereotype of a debased and corrupted priest
object of the customer's affections


Protestant discourse against the Catholic Church in the 16th century --> artists of the period extended the instrumentalization of slander through the production of proto-pornographic images of bishops, priests, and the pope engaged in myriad obscene acts --depicting--> the emotional states and desires of the clergy

magical salves (considered particularly powerful and troubling by demonologists)

Häxan self-positioning as a scientific investigation + constantly pull back from the dramatic outcomes of what Häxan depicts

Häxan's demonstration of the power of the [...]

[...]recisely what it excludes from its inner depths, of being a fable*

the picture of researcher's humanity (@Sana):
•researcher = detective, examining magistrate دادرس
•crime = fact
•guilty = interlocutor (in reality they guide you into [often organized] labyrinths)
•inquest = strategic operation

**the imaginative results of “I witnessing”**
@apass [what we do mainly is] witnessing eachother's works and mode of existence
+ paradoxical necessity of an expressive element


testimony + experimental results + expert inquisitorial interpretation ==> (an early versoin of) ‘case study’ ==> formation of ‘general law’

*inquisitorial strategies* (developed in the human sciences from the 19th century onward): جزء به کل ”(close analysis of) salient individual cases ==> hidden tendencies visible” [--> and is abused in storytelling]

[in both science and art] seeking to move away from *reliance on metaphysics* to a *reliance on verifiable details* (in their own expressions)


acknowledging satan's unquestioned power <--doubt--> truth-value of statements made by unlearned witnesses


*possession* (confessions of another sort)
confessions that were not ‘procured’ [ritualized torture of the witch trial to generate evidence] but rather ‘volunteered’ and ‘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 exor[...]

[...]> [Sina + Despret + Haraway] ***to inherit is an act that demands a transformation on the part of the inheritor***

the importance of transforming that which is transmitted to us


thinking from animals
(Despret working on) the meaning of ”(starting) from” [a partir de]
•for philosophers: to depart from animals, to leave them as quickly as possible and never to return ==> “animal = text & pretext” : its function is to provide a reason for going (partir) elsewhere [<-- i have done this]


getting involved --to--> martyrdom


author-turned-ethologist --> classic genres of ethological literature

(a matter of) *performing through narration the passing obligation that is now mine*

(Latourian) *amateur: a person who likes and cultivates her tastes and does her best to cultivate a kind of becoming-sensitive to the world*

in ethology (and in animal sciences) monologues make terrible narratives

[@Femke, @Pierre, ?can we do without] the philosophical tradition of: **searching for traces of ideological and political contamination** in the work of scientific naturalist (or whatever other field) --> you (often) find a perfect target for this sort of critique
•(pay attention to) what makes a perfect target for your sort of critique (@Laura's Jane Fonda, etc.)

[zoological bird:] sociobiological literature prepares you to accept a certain kind of fact about this bird =/= Zahavi's babblers however do (altruism & cooperation) in a remarkably more inventive and diversified way and for entirely different reasons that sociobiological birds

anthropocentrism (credit birds with complex intentions, and [why?] complex intentions always seem human)
to see birds as “dancing” and for fairly complex reasons could only have been a result of the fact that the observers projected onto the animals their own frameworks and experiences


Despret observing the birds + their ethologist --> the birds made Zahavi interesting

(Despret discovering that) any theory of representation was at once partial and totalizing, because it proposed to elucidate the complex work of relations and encounters from the sole standpoint of the human

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

****stories that scientists [and Disney or Hollywood] develop about animals are also our stories**** --> these stories transform humans and their animals
--Stengers--> sciences (of the contemporaneity) for which: **production of knowledge = production of a way of being** ==> (they do not reveal what animals are, rather) they follow and accompany an act of becoming together : *an act of becoming with the stories that we construct concerning them* (good or ba[...]

[...]d as a girl)

(man up! woman up! child up! animal up! etc.)


the world that is claiming me, recruiting me, ...

if you are an iranian child you would know some violences...
endangered being, endangered animal, if you are then you know what is a violent care.
*leaving unprotected*


becoming attached, making friends, putting together a family

like other anxious creatures, I can exhibit friendliness (=/= keeping my stubborn alterity intact. how much space for the utter strangeness we are allowed or able to hold?)

an iranian default position


داستانِ dastan-e


according to Heidegger:
thinking <---> thanking
complaining <---> explaining
(to explain =/=? to thank)
(to complain =/=? to think)
[explain : from Latin explain? ?(“I flatten, spread out, make plain or clear, explain”), from ex- ?(“out”) + plan? ?(“I flatten, make level”), from planus ?(“level, plain”); see plain and plane.]


afformations

sexual arousal, and its presence in freindship,
normalcy codes, and institutionalizations of friendship (--> friendship insures the modeling of all sorts of vital ethical and political dispositions)
(#harem)

pro-ject, intro-ject, and ob-ject
the things we introject,

fb

good example, bad example, etc.

if you “understand” someone you are off friendship
understanding presuposses distance and difference
friendship must include disidentification
empathy replacing understanding? (do we really want an “empathic non-understanding”? to enfold the spectator with..)
[empathic non-understanding: a relationship that gives up the self's need for constant affirmation (Laura Marks) --> pulls us instead into a “meterial understanding” of our connection with other animals] ==> challenging the ontological primacy of centers (in general and not only human center stage)
“you are thrown off by this narcisistic extension that the other appropriated by your identification has become” (Avital)
-disproportion is always present and operating



i am not sure if there is an iranian pop song we can agree to like (or to hit ‘like’)



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


The jungle is a social space. {biological real, disciplinary boundary making stories}


Children at age six are typically anthropomorphic

...youth “hanging out” in age-specific gangs they are “growing themselves up,” often in a milieu of violence and power

deprivation of (avuncular and) grandparental care =?=> lifelong hostility to one's parents
[...]

[...] look like? do we have Tarof with animals? The Tarof's affection itself cannot be separated from a desire to dominate.

Levinas narrates a greeting, when he was in a concentration camp in germany, they call them dog. then a stray dog shows up and they call him Bobi. when they came back from the dehumanizing labor of the camp, Bobi would run to them every day and greet them. and that was what rehumanize them.

tarof and complaint
(is tarof capable of forming a protest?)

using tropes of traffic in different cultures with relation to tropes of technology, mobility and constitution of freedom. in Germany talking about ‘rail’ and ‘track’, changing tracks, shifting tracks and so on, meaning there is a predefined trajectory systematically mobilizing the individual in plain of possibilities. in US people more use cars and car can go anywhere, park or decide when and in which speed to move on, including complete autonomy on the direction and velocity of movement, accompanying the North-American notion of freedom and relation to destiny. in Iran the movement is also based on personal cars but everyone is stuck in traffic, so there is a freedom of choice implied and is initially available but then on the plain of possibilities there are all sorts of technologically situated block-roads that traffic in and hinder motility. this is also a condition of Tarof. “shoma befarmayid!” (after you!)

*Tarof might be as well a mode of resistance in order not to enter the economy of the other (--> at the mercy of the other), when they say “it's on me.”


•رودربایستی <--> ? a [در رودربایستی گیر کردن] (a --?--> حیا)


shah: one who sits while others stand --> tarof as king's behavior (tarof is adab-e salatin?) ~~--> tasavof's tarof: takalof (=/= javan-mardi: ‘self = guest’)
Khhv0M9n5_g

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

every call to speak involves some violation and over-joy, putting oneself in a persecutory way on the line, what Sa'di calls in “Dar Favaede Khamushi” in 4th chapter of his Golestan ‘on the disadvantages of speaking’ or “On the Advantages of Silence” (Written in 1258 CE)



literate or obliterate



infinitely less violent --> that there is never absolutely nonviolent, a value infinitely small but never zero; infinidecimals
degree of violence = 1/x {while “true”: x+1}


(Augustine:)
(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 locat[...]