[...]; not me!”
•why i was seeing Tehran as the ‘ghostly landscape’? (matter of a confrontation with Tehran? exteriority of my subjecthood is at stake? ~->!? the arbitrary position of “genius loci” : that from a genius position one can see for good. -how to make myself nonarbitrary--not subject to individual determination--in relation to Tehran? --> towards ‘situated knowledge’)
•what kind of material-discursive practices thinking with “landscape” committed me to? [to explore and feel this commitment (and its consequences) is ‘staying with the trouble’ for me]

it felt like Alice believes that people, we, have control over our metaphors, but in the course of the workshop there were many occasions that was not the case:
Sina, landscape --> optics
Esta, building/house --> geometry --> security
Agnes, supermarket --> exchange
Juan, crime --> arrest
Zoumana, garden (~-> fecundity) --> immunity
Eszter, electronic device --> closed
Ekaterina, zoo --> objects of care (~-> animal ~= diseased .--> objectifying or babying them)


* landscape ==>? optic -->? way of disembodied seeing
[artificial perspective {--> (objects are in) proportional variations in a seamless continuum}, gaze of the spectator, exterior space, homogeneous, infinite, systematic,] --> (this is all) *symbolic form*
[(tele/micro)scope <==] landscape <== perspective <-- arbitrary point of the observer


(Descola:) such “objectification of the subjective” ==>
(1) a distance between man and the world
(2) systematizes and stabilizes the external universe



***factuality is not intrinsic, it is rhetoric (that we live with)

history of the idea of nature

‘ajayeb's architects of a naturalistic cosmology who establish hierarchies and discontinuities among them =/= cosmogenesis of modernity's subjectivity's illusions of continuity
[Descola's “configurations of continuity"]
(ajayeb creates) hierarchical order according to the levels of the exchange of information that is reputed to be possible.
-which parties are set on the same level of reality (in ajayeb)?

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

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

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

[...]

[...]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 definiteness

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

who the fuck = theology
how the fuck = empiricism
what the fuck = ontology
how the what the fuck = epistemology
why what the fuck = metaphysics
why the fuck = ethics
why give a fuck = teleology
the fuck itself = phenomenology
fucked up = pathology
fuck all = nihilism

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

Aela to Sven: “everytime you disappoint me you gain in depth” (5 April 2017)

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

(06.04.2017) %notes after my apass endweek presentation:
•my implicit focus and energy on the body and its organs of gesture that animates 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[...]

[...]hings) (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 connection occur for me? #simultaneity]


(Stewart) “I remember childhood as a collection of arresting images”
that hinge on sensory details and open onto luminous scenes of affect [--> Feherlofia/Fehérlófia 1981, Son of the White Horse film. (we must resist calling this film “psychedelic”)

“[...]family as a viscerality through screen images of”

...sudden, repetitive eruption of images of alcoholism, accidents, violence, cancers

*technologies of family, church, law, and nation* (lay confident claim to affect as a capturable content of known and expected “feelings,” but affect itself--that which surges into view along the jumpy border of the actual and the virtual--is their raw material and their only renewable resource. Stewart)

(a sidestep? what) brings an uncanny, alien presence into the field of vision

*an object insists on being seen* (through the tricks of trauma, through the seductions of compulsive beauty,, , ) ~~--> aesthetic event of the senses [@Hoda]

spectacular graphics of disaster

watching: inhabiting the power of the tuned-in spectator; becoming an active participant in [TV's] logic of image (production and) recognition

--✕--> catharsis of mean-spirited
--✕--> festering (cherkin چرکین) alienation
--*--> vitality of the game itself

the image on the screen <--(game)--> the walking simulacrum of social life

the loop of the citizen as consumer

***Mimesis in a State of Shock*** @Hoda
-the link between shock and a cushioned recluse is direct, seductive, and mimetic

“When affect makes its jump between the visible thing, the idea, and the social sensibility, it can leave in its wake uncanny connections between otherwise disparate states of arrest, like shock and recluse گوشه نشينی” (Stewart)


@Hoda: affect jumps into view as the shock of an unassimilated trauma

cocoon room
holing up in your living room ==> “out there” ==> search for the arresting presence

spectrality and concrete substance

(?when am i) “relaxing” the jumpy move of affect

*Stewart's “jump of affect”
tactile image --(satisfies)--> move of affect --(actualizes)--> something tempting/haunting
-affecting presence at rest
-[in glamour magazines] models frozen in time and space stare back at you in a scene that stages the jump from fantasy to actual body/image and back
-jump from ideal to matter to ideal

-what to wear as the magic of affect itself

copy ~= contact

movies, ads, malls, car [...]

[...]ll 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)
2. a positive view of all artificial transformations (=/= tendencyo conserve what it is)

**what happens if religion is allowed to weave its highly specific form of transcendence (salvation?) into the fabric of the other two modes of existence: reproduction and reference?

Leo's dream (and also deep sin): the urge radically to transform *that which is given* into *that which has to be fully renewed* --> alternative, dream of a different world
[=/= to grasp this world (and only this world) otherwise]

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

look at spec over the spectacular
(in ajayeb)

i can't give you a dialectical conclusion

maybe a mouth-full

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

[Paul Shepard]

our perception of animals as the language of nature in Thinking Animals and The Others; the “natural” way of childrearing in Nature and Madness; and the bear as a dominant sacred animal connecting people ceremonially to the earth in The Sacred Paw.

Octavio Paz reminds us: “The past reappears because it is a hidden present. I am speaking of the real past, which is not the same as ‘what took place.’ . . . What took place is indeed the past, yet there is something that . . . takes place but does not wholly recede into the past, a constantly returning present.”

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

[Corbin]

it is so dangerous to say any thinker, writer, artist, or phiosopher ‘was of his/her own time.’ nobody has ever been in their own time, never. we are constantly out of time.

things occur in Malakut, not in the time of this world.
it is a matter of interior history, exoteric in the etymological sense of the word, subtle history whose events do not take place in the exterior world of objects, but in the subtle world of lived states, events in the Malakut, in the world of the ‘Soul,’ in the ‘Heaven’ or the ‘Hell’ which man carries within himself.
(and this is precisely what is ‘changing someone's story’ is about. ‘let me change the rhythm of your story. let me change your history.’ ~= storytelling)
this history----interior wild facts----intermingles with his[...]

[...]ves randomization, fuzziness, and interference. there is no coherent programming nor concerted demand for rigor
(Avital: The origin of the demand for rigor, which has conditioned 20th century Anglo philosophy, “is the positivist's requirement that theories be testable. At the very least, a respectable philosophical theory should be stated with sufficient precision that one can tell what it says about something and whether its predictions about that subject matter are borne out” ---- to be capable of being articulated in the formalism of logic)

Testability furnishes the uninterrogated core of rigor. --> linked to a notion of computational realizability?

how “rigor” enables the displacement of truth by testability----as if the test could provide an unquestionably solid ground for overtaking reflection and other philosophically triggered interferences.

What kind of rigor is “a certain kind of rigor”?

what is being guaranteed if not the ability itself to guarantee

Everything rests on the *promise* of a certain kind of rigor.

the metaphysical fantasy of completion.

colonization of discourse with rigor

The discipline of programming leads to a shift in perspective on traditional issues. It invites--or rather requires--one to adopt what [Daniel] Dennett (1968) calls the design stance toward the mind

{ instrumental epistemology of how something works =/=? discovery }--> how can we suspend this “=/=”

trials and tryouts

[Avital's] phantasm of testing(‘s groundedness and unquestioned solidity)

...time-zone paradox of freezing the future in order to plan, in another register, the time for working through computations.

what are the conditions for thinking ‘through a problem’?

[Avital:] ****“To offset the competitive quality of the research that is being clocked, more philo[...]

[...]/> [Eva Hayward]
***things do not have fully determinate boundaries or properties. Things happen ‘in’ and ‘by’ encounter--refraction is one critical mode of encounter***
-the object is always troubled by obscuration
-through refraction, the object is altered by *scale* and *encounter* --> the altered scale allows the object to reveal its specificity, its particularity; boundaries are rendered indeterminate and exist only to the extent that they are continually enacted.
-in ajayeb we can see these forms of refraction in descriptive acts

agential intra-acting: “phenomena do not merely mark the epistemological inseparability of ‘observer’ and ‘observed’; rather, ***phenomena are the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting ‘components’” that is, phenomena are ontologically primitive relations--relations without preexisting relata. (Barad)
*mutual constitution of entangled agencies*

never complete, never whole, but deep in composition--materially and semiotically--of conjoined forces that matter.

“dynamic (re)configurings of the world, specific agential practices/intra-actions/performances through which specific exclusionary boundaries are enacted” (Barad)

(now ontologically) spectatorship =/= representation =/= referent
(still? in ajayeb) reader ~= representation ~= citational non-evidence

(Hayward-->) if we recognize that clear vision is always predicated on distorted, bent, and otherwise refracted (and diffracted) light, how might we reconsider theoretical investigations (filmic, philosophical, etc.) that *rely exclusively on untroubled reflectivity*. yes, “clear” vision is secured by corrective measures in the eye (and elsewhere) but conversely sight is always multiply altered and realtered by transmedium movement of light.

there is an embedded conceptual tension in refraction between *lucidity* and *degradation*

"as it is” --> the object is always troubled by obscuration

***things do not have fully determinate boundaries or properties. things happen ‘in’ and ‘by’ encounter--refraction is one critical mode of encounter

object is altered by *scale* and *encounter* (through refraction)
--> “empirical perspective” : the *altered scale* also allows the object to reveal its specificity, its particularity; boundaries are rendered indeterminate and exist only to the extent that they are continually enacted.

(Hayward > Barad:)
Phenomena do not merely mark the epistemological inseparability of “observer” and “observed”; rather, phenomena are the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting ‘components.’ That is, phenomena are ontologically primitive relations--relations without preexisting relata. [*relatum: one of the objects between which a relation is said to hold. *relata: would-be antecedent (tabar تبار) components of relations[...]

[...] conceptual tension in refraction between *lucidity* and *degradation*

“as it is” --> the object is always troubled by obscuration

***things do not have fully determinate boundaries or properties. things happen ‘in’ and ‘by’ encounter--refraction is one critical mode of encounter

object is altered by *scale* and *encounter* (through refraction)
--> “empirical perspective” : the *altered scale* also allows the object to reveal its specificity, its particularity; boundaries are rendered indeterminate and exist only to the extent that they are continually enacted.

(Hayward > Barad:)
Phenomena do not merely mark the epistemological inseparability of “observer” and “observed”; rather, phenomena are the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting ‘components.’ That is, phenomena are ontologically primitive relations--relations without preexisting relata. [*relatum: one of the objects between which a relation is said to hold. *relata: would-be antecedent (tabar تبار) components of relations.]


reverie of reflectivity =/= refraction (--> makes explicit transforms the tendency of the image to orient representation, foregrounding the threaded visual space between the image and the spectator.)

***dynamic (re)configurings of the world, specific agential practices/intra-actions/performances through which specific exclusionary boundaries are enacted***
(Kaja Silverman, the subject of semiotics)

spectatorships =/=! representations =/=! referents
(ontological distinction: “=/=!”)

the surreal technoscientific look --?--> allowing wondrous but material extensions into the ajayeb domain

in creating a “look” for ajayeb: whether or not a used/user interaction can have ethical dimensions?


refraction is not framework, but a pathway. it engages patterns of interference and exchange



the xeno-sensual in the ajayeb
different differences that are sensed and mediated

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

poetic historiography
(historiography: the study of the writing of history and of written histories)

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

to begin writing about ajayeb with the citational, ‘avardeand ke...’ (...آورده‌اند که)
citation, an important characteristic of fables, is about relational histories.
absence of definitive source (in my old childhood favorite radio show, by bring an endless list of fantastic source and bodies of lures) allows monsters to flourish and me the full range of my passionate crafts. ajayeb's compelling mystery demands (from me) an unorthodox and omnivorous approach (hame-chiz-khar همه چیز خوار).

اما راویان اخبار و ناقلان آثار و طوطیان شکرشکن شیرین گفتار و خوشه چینان خرمن سخن [...]

[...]aymond Williams)
•forms emergent in the conduct of life are immaterial matterings --> *the contact aesthetics* of natural and dreamed up things throwing themselves together (Stewart)


ajayeb is a literally unblievable image, a sociality, a muscle, a world thrown together in a sensory refrain witnessed by a present subject; collective dreamed up nature and historical presents ripe with rhythms and speeds, with streams of matter and thought; ajayeb is a capacious assemblage

ajayeb stories are:
•material-sensory arc of history
•series of absent/present (moments) sensed through forms and events


lostness or reslessness of drifters

fantasies of potential “home”

(a plce of) abjection of state neglect ==> production of future


(Stewart's) the middle-class mobile citizenship and the proper traveling subject


Janina's “i don't know” s
a material semiosis of choices


what are ajayeb promises?
wtinessings, encounters, timeouts, fantasy, distraction,


a 19th century elite tradition of secular pilgrimage to the sacred

pursuit of see-it-yourselfness

a spectacular form of amnesia *


(the joints of my pop-up book) spin around fantastic axes


Stewart: “the state of public transportation in the U.S. is an event in the worlding of bodies in motion”
-a landscape abuzz with connectivity


shape-shifter jumping between composition and concrete


my apass project:
(sharing with you) the pleasure of recognizing a described world (in ajayeb)***
(i can sense the ajayeb's) pleasure in describing the animacy of forms
-describing a world is the pleasure of sensing the incipiency of *form in matter* and fantasy and the effort to draw the lines of form's traces. still palpable even it only imagined (Stewart ***)

(ajayeb's) heady business of making sense out of what happens
-to venture out in the manner of
-ajayeb sings an autopoetic refrain scoring and unfolding
-gesturing into form, a magnet burdened with impressions

textures give way to qualities of form


*before the blizzard: the sea monster

______________


Xh1IgPomwW8 Stewart's experiments coming at the phenomena of worlding through a series of angles organized prismatically:
•precision
•atmosphere
•attunement
•refrain ترجیع‌بند (poetic fixed form)

--> the tune on which people and things venture out
--> a kind of mapping infrastructure
--> lines and distributed biography


[pop-up book]
#description: (world is like a) pop-up map of possibilities [=/= map hylomorphically [...]

[...]production’ <--> ‘a version of the responsibilities and pleasures of professional and intellectual autonomy’
-TV shows are animated with folks from our time who invite audience identification as “us”: we are the viewers mentally enacting [~ playing at, reenacting, experimenting, speculating, trying to provide evidence for] various understandings of the so-called past***
melodramas of reenactment and experimentation ==> professional knowledges are elevated, while their bondaries threatend

in the production of an ‘object’ things (and meanings) get lost, they might be registered in “interference”


*anachronism, anachronistic --> #sleep-walking
“slippages in time” within the past as well as between “us” and the past
desire for tales of progress, with some particular “us” on top ~ chronology as essential origin {what we see often in technology tales such as Lucy (2014) or X-Men opening scenes}=/= to mix up who counts as “us” {what i have been trying to do, mixing up with Iran, Germany, etc.} to offer different timescales
•local details that animate generalizations
•archival labors dramatized and experienced as immediacy
•transparency of the material limitations of selection


spectacle of production

critique of the living-history ethos

giving science war pep talks... [TED]
(don't!)


[*]witnessing: “root of the experimental life”

[*]science: important and witnessable

freestanding photo-figures of scientists that work to situate and create scales of importance

commenting and making alliances across space-time with other figures


_[audience and markets]_
audience polyphony
audience and markets shift and converge in [flexible knowledges] complex address of multiple audiences, in that contradictory nest of niche political and epistemological “markets”
(**the story of the ‘interactive’:) “rich contradictory nestings permit an require visitors to select among possible salient narratives by animating differently layers of locals and globals”


to call oneself in and out of allience and its classifications, that *momentary universalism* shades into other ranges of affiliation and disaffiliation (*)

[...] --> [ ? ] --> salience --> tangible --> literal --> experimental

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

conceptualize the intensities of form and force
affect studies has made me feel less alone because before it

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

There are [always] other epic and epochal forces in our midst.

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

evil eye --> دیو چشم زخم --> غش --> اغشی

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

باغ plethora of old and new humanities, selves - with Sardar: There are plants that provide va[...]

[...]ather, 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 ==(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 connotation[...]

[...]ition of anthropocene entanglement



[productive horror of our civil performance--Kirsten, Sina, Jassem and Mia:]

temporalities of ruin, body, optics
                   |     |     |
       matrix of rage, lure, desire

rage (violently affective contact)
--> ghosts: [--> Jassem and Mia's performance ~ “big story"]
•**histories tumbled into histories** (“ghosts” <== bad death <== settler colonialism + expansive capitalism --> they brought with them a peculiar kind of time: looking straight ahead to the future [==> optimization & salvation of a *single past*] --> ruthless ambition & [modernity's time:] metronomic synchrony 🕓)
•animating feral and partial connections
•remind us of an *impossible present* (that we live in)
* (embodied) contingency, asymmetry, indeterminacy *
•hauntings (are not immaterial!) : presumptive absence (presumed in the absence)

lures
--> monsters: [--> Kirsten's objects ~ small stories, little niches with ghostly contours (like a car's tire) ~ things growing in abundant]
•**bodies tumbled into bodies** (“monsters” <== assets and wastes (animal entanglement with the burning man) <-- bad symbiosis)
* unspectacular afterlife of discarded things * (debris of capitalist waste)
•weaving magical figures, conjuring fictions
•constant speculation, that are fed and touched, reparative and tender
•textured, formful, colorful
*lure: things that evoke or capture feelings and responses ==> to lure out relational responses

desire (superposition)
--> optics: (a form of distance) [--> Sina's stories ~ superposition [different scales] of dispersed times [~ unruly temporalities], multiple practice of knowing smallbig spacetime mattering]
•**positions tumbled into positions** (tumbled into politics: some instruments of seeing producing perspectives are more guilty than others)
* (disembodied) multiple practices of knowing --> landscapes: arrangement of life and afterlife, space that grows from ‘endings’ <== ‘death of’(s) ~~> contaminated (stories/diversities)
--> diagram: http://ajayeb.net/?q=rationalizable
(Sina performing) diffractive optics of knowing ==> ongoing articulation [=/= perspective]


•i shouldn't be talking, opening this
|
•remembrance --> Bambi's mother studies {what if remembering is something totally different than “lost member"}
|
•fox story --> animal trap:
◦perception {rhetorical perception, evil perception, etc.}
◦lure 🌀 can't stop following, trap: nearby-ness, becoming bodily, engaged in perspectival game and will ==> fox's relation to the forest [he is suspicious and rend =/= *lured into desiring & trusting* : we bring our lures and needs towards each other, (sometimes it is) critique is an art that tangles with what [...]

[...]counter 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 death syndrome

rapacious female specter
in the fear of being killed by this nearly limitless desire for female dead, men (Thai constructor workers in Sin[...]

[...]ommunicative fullness --> simple *oppositional corrective*
a substantialized, corporealized figuration of power vs. EFF make themselves into pure proxies

(pedagogy, a horrible and wrong idea of) “perfect transmission of intention ==> production of consensus”

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

[explosion of accuracies]

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

after death there is:
•rumer
•afterlife
•


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

(Nicholas Shapiro shows in his research on) people in ordinary toxic homes: *their apprehension of conventionally insensible domestic chemical exposure was informed by sustained attention to barely perceptible alteration of somatic function and atmosphere*

(Sloterdijk, Latour, Anderson, Berlant, Stewart, Shapiro) to explain body's relation to the world --> ancillary process of being a living body as:
•becoming sensitive
•embodying atmospheres
•somatically judging environments
•becoming corporeal aware of nonhumans
•protracted low-level encounter with domestic chemicals --accumulate--> *chemical sublime* <== (indistinct and distributed harm of) late industrial material ecologies (=/= enlightenment sublime: spectacle material threat with transcendence of immaterial reason)

silent and invisible microemissions accrue within the envelope of the home --> residents reckon with how their homes are decomposing into them as they decompose in their homes

somatic work of the chemically concerned is enmeshed with an *apprehension of their own bodies that is simultaneously sensuous and epistemological* (~ “bodily knowledge” situated within a process of “bodily reasoning” that tempers not just what one knows but what one becomes with or is estranged from [=/= forensic architecture notion of knowledge])

‘sustained bodily reasoning ==> chemical sublime’
Shapiro + Kim Fortune --> call for ways to differently know and reimagine our ongoing late industrial present, which is marked by deteriorating sociotechnical systems and economic, climate, and infrastructural instability


**somatic susceptibility and epistemic capacity** common to human life --(informed by nonhuman life)--> molecular and relational appreciation --Shapiro--> domestically exposed (the ‘chemically wounded’ attuning to their own effects and affects ~ discerning the barely perceptible constituents of their environment [=/= “deviant agents,” diagnosed, resistors]


toxic = potency --implicate--> vulnerability of a living body

years of exposure --> biochemically magnified effects --> semiotically enflamed

somatic cognizance

(Shapiro on affect and phenomenological studies of environmental exposure -->) formaldehyde indicators and agents of social abandonment and precarity

(growing lit[...]

[...]

-becoming with (Haraway)
-orienting toward (Ahmed)
-bodily reasoning (Shapiro): the dynamic process through which knowledge of individual spaces of chronic exposure is somatically attained

women's accounts of self-monitoring for bodily dysfunctions (--> feminization of body care)
[Shapiro discovered] men's active indifference to slight somatic abnormalities (rejecting the possibility that their bodies wear permeable --> masculine self-image)


olfaction --> take displeasing scents as primary indicators of environmental contamination
--but--> smell recede from perception over time as they become incorporated into new senatorial norms (sensitivity down-regulates in a process of olfactory adaptation)


microscopic encounters --sensed--> less nameable and more diffuse sensory practices

exposure: an affective space, at the limit of the phenomenal, the somatic proceeds and then is entangled with the rational


sublime (in chemistry): transform from solid to gas bypassing the intermediate liquid form

*nuclear sublime*
weapons scientists felt the blast bore into the being, into their faces, register of the power of the bomb
spectacular, brutal, and lightening-fast sensorial pummeling, tossing them to the ground
=/=
*chemical sublime*
formaldehyde sedate speed of chemical off-gassing and the regular human breathing; (not signalled by overwhelming sensory stimuli rather) indicated by a thickening veil of indistinction as perceptual faculties became occluded
...the bodywork employed to apprehend the qualities of indoor air

(Masco & Kant's privileging of) sublimity's correlation with public, spectacular, and violent events =/= (Shapiro's sublimity:) *profundity and density of widespread, private, indistinct, chronic, and fragmented phenomena*

chemical sublime = انباشت استدلالهای جسمانی accrual of bodily reasoning
irritations --> agitations ==> attenuate the effects of vast toxic infrastructure


(masco nuclear) sublime ==translate==> resounding ethical call
chemical sublime ==> ?

...industry's mobilization of law, science, capital


Shapiro: we must look at how the sublime has brokered relations between exposure and the status quo since at least down of the enlightenment

(quintessential of enlightenment project) Kant's sublime: the immensity/might first overwhelms our imaginative capacity (or indicating the fragility of human body yielding a sense of helplessness and distress) then this feeling is countered and ultimately overcome by reassuring one's self of power of the mind ==> reason sets humanity apart and above the physical world
[*]sublime: *internal turmoil and sensuous displeasure is elevated into the delight and superiorit[...]

[...] /> olfaction --> take displeasing scents as primary indicators of environmental contamination
--but--> smell recede from perception over time as they become incorporated into new senatorial norms (sensitivity down-regulates in a process of olfactory adaptation)


microscopic encounters --sensed--> less nameable and more diffuse sensory practices

exposure: an affective space, at the limit of the phenomenal, the somatic proceeds and then is entangled with the rational


sublime (in chemistry): transform from solid to gas bypassing the intermediate liquid form

*nuclear sublime*
weapons scientists felt the blast bore into the being, into their faces, register of the power of the bomb
spectacular, brutal, and lightening-fast sensorial pummeling, tossing them to the ground
=/=
*chemical sublime*
formaldehyde sedate speed of chemical off-gassing and the regular human breathing; (not signalled by overwhelming sensory stimuli rather) indicated by a thickening veil of indistinction as perceptual faculties became occluded
...the bodywork employed to apprehend the qualities of indoor air

(Masco & Kant's privileging of) sublimity's correlation with public, spectacular, and violent events =/= (Shapiro's sublimity:) *profundity and density of widespread, private, indistinct, chronic, and fragmented phenomena*

chemical sublime = انباشت استدلالهای جسمانی accrual of bodily reasoning
irritations --> agitations ==> attenuate the effects of vast toxic infrastructure


(masco nuclear) sublime ==translate==> resounding ethical call
chemical sublime ==> ?

...industry's mobilization of law, science, capital


Shapiro: we must look at how the sublime has brokered relations between exposure and the status quo since at least down of the enlightenment

(quintessential of enlightenment project) Kant's sublime: the immensity/might first overwhelms our imaginative capacity (or indicating the fragility of human body yielding a sense of helplessness and distress) then this feeling is countered and ultimately overcome by reassuring one's self of power of the mind ==> reason sets humanity apart and above the physical world
[*]sublime: *internal turmoil and sensuous displeasure is elevated into the delight and superiority of reason* --> humanity's continued progressing

(Shapiro + Gene Ray: ideological function of the aesthetic category of the) sublime within Kant's critical system is anxiously bound up with deep *metaphysical optimism*

formulation of sublime:
•form (space, time, and intensity) of exposure
•the relation between the supersensible (mind) and the sensible (matter)
•orientational movement (from without to within or vice versa)
•political reckoning
[...]

[...]nthropology becomes poetic poetry becomes biological biology becomes archaeological archaeology becomes speculative speculation becomes scientific science becomes aesthetic aesthetics becomes adventurous adventure becomes rigorous rigor becomes Iranian Iran becomes German Germany becomes Arabic Arab becomes Egyptian Egypt becomes animalistic animal becomes fabulous fable becomes political politics becomes...

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

(Baxstrom + Meyers highlight a productive gap between intent & outcome in) Christensen making a case of witchcraft (in his pioneering, bizarre, and lavish project of Häxan):
•misidentified nervous disease
•incompatibility of superstition and religious fanaticism with modernity and science
•bringing “errors of belief” in the 15th and 16th centuries into our view

living cinematic tableau, Häxan's excess =/= socially constrained thinking, discursive mode of analysis

Christensen's thesis concerned/gripped with abnormalities, events, and causes ==provide==> diagnosis
(like Favret-Saada) he was an un-witcher at once caught & catching

witch =? epiphenomenon

(to bring the ajayeb to life “objectively” is nonsense)

[Häxan = spectacle + argument ==> *to make nature speak*] drove efforts to locate & combat witches, and it served to shape similar aporias between *sense & distance* imbricated in:
•the invention of modern hysteria in the 19th century
•the “discovery” of the “native's point of view” by anthropologists in the early 20th century

for Christensen: “witchcraft = unrecognized manifestations of clinical hysteria and psychosis”

excessiveness of Häxan's reenactment --> construct the witch's material, invisible, mobile force
(Häxan's objectivity) had no expectation that the real will simply “speak for itself”

Häxan's reception in the 1920s --> to energize a negative, conceptually dogmatic discourse that formed and hardened cinematic taxonomies [particularly the division between “documentary” (nonfiction) and “feature” (fictional) films]

experimentation + evidence making

sexual intercourse, cannibalism, cauldron --solemnize--> pact with the devil

evidentiary thinking

elaborated visualization of the witch stereotype

--> complex nature of *sensual explorations of the flesh* through masochism and exorcism

demonic influence
genres of transfiguration and metamorphosis

Christensen shows how those who were once identified as witches are now the objects of medical and social concern in modern life --> shows the potency of her various forms over time


--> Baxstrom + Meyers
(my work on ajayeb is based on that) [there is a largely] unacknowledged historical tendency and predisposition within the h[...]

[...]s

a scaffolding: conceptually arranged chasm between outer and inner states ==>
•exorcists building on the techniques of inquisitors and witch hunters --> possession acts as the bridge across this chasm
•neurologists and psychologists construct the same
--✕--> (Malinowski's) anthropologists: fieldworkers as truth-tellers returning from the dark corners of the real (the witches are no longer explicitly the target of the inquiry)

Häxan's real object: the specter of sheer nonsense

hunt (even in objective scientific mastery) --> fueled by a desire operationalized in a method of being close enough to something to sense it

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

(?every time we have to) show how *the word (that we are using) relates to meaning*

Christensen makes every effort to craft a witch that is real to us : ontological fluidity of a cinematic image ==> “Häxan = word + image + thing”

metoposcopy: the expression of reasoning was to be found on the face, (dating back to Girolamo Cardano and the Renaissance) the operation of reason as the weaving together of images in the mind --> a proto-cinematic theory of the relation between image and thought if ever there was one

•respectable scholar indexes himself through his sources
•authoritarian first-person tenor --> instrumentally impersonal tenor
•establishing the X as a chapter within a much longer constellation of practices, discourses, traditions, and institutions

Kieckhefer --> how the long history of practical natural magic was enfolded into the specificity of European witchcraft in the late Middle Ages

Christ in Limbo --> Christensen's parallel editing ==> moving representation of a terra-centered universe <~~ elaborate wonders found in baroque wunderkammer (meticulously assembled by the German elite)


Renaissance Hermeticism:
writings of Hermes Trimesgistus ~=> foundation for:
•Ficino's relatively mild natural magic
•Pico della Mirandola's Christian Cabalist
•Agrippa's Christian magus
•Tommaso Campanella's (1568–1639) utopian City of the Sun
•Bruno's full-blown Hermetic–Cabalist (through the power of astrology and magic to bypass the Church altogether)
•

...rippling effects of the Hermetic–Cabalist tradition -->
•scrupulously mathematical astrology of Girolamo Cardano
•the rigorously empirical studies of the natural world demanded by Bruno's attempts to operate as a magus
}==> (paved the way for) science of Newton and Copernicus --> a new metaphysics to emerge

attacks on Renaissance magic and the Hermetic–Cabalist tradition (that authorized witch) ==> anti-witch treatises

(case of Giordano Bruno's execution --> Hermetic magic and Cabalism) how in the 16th century: “superstition = crime”
<[...]

[...]endliness (=/= 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

elderly functions have been lost in disintegration

.

ok. let's put the whip down. the point is just to mention the word whip, and since you are all well trained, it does its job. we are all trained animals, gathered here, calm and curious, want to investigate what or who is training us, whipping our asses, associating our senses with signals he or she or it sends to our bodies, being petted or molested by it...
•strong strangle-holds and deadl[...]

[...]alized image of someone--usually a parent--formed in childhood), firm but benevolent caretaking, funding sources of divine authority, hierarchical hold, categorical imperative, a secure ground from which commands can be issued, “Achtung!”,
-authority subsists on borrowed transcendence
-authority produces effects of respectful adherence
-softening the space of committed citizenry (ground for political relatedness)
-is it possible to keep authority separate from respect? what this seclusion assures?

(Pir's authority nearing the) sublime regions of human relatedness

Kojeve > What accounts for the unconditional surrender of human reactivity?
legitimate principle of coercion

God is always the God of our ancestors --> character of “tradition”

where violence begins or what gets counted as violence?

the discourse of effacement (امحاء emha’, self-effacement: withdrawing into the background, making yourself inconspicuous)

is there an authority outside inequality? responsible asymmetry, the egological space, tropes of domination?

%this is anout the quality of asymmetry----(are we still in the realm of the human?)

Levinas tactics is spectacular, he runs down patriarchy and meets the majestic escalade of the absolute other, he doesn't escape internment (toghif توقیف)
[patriarchy: when it is “of course” obvious who is the mother]

(where do we go with helplessness directed by the destruction of the world?)

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

[Sennett] on authority, trust and cooperation

...in both a subtle and a coherent social structure

inequality makes a profound difference in the lives of children

“earned authority” manages the everyday experience of inequality


cultures in which the *dramaturgical display of yourself* is foregrounded =/= diplomacy as model for social relationships

facebook, an engineered social network organized for display =/= communication



in capitalism, in firms people at the top has more power but less authority, and that is a problem.
in reverse, Lear loses its power but keeps his authority, his lag on administrative change.

authority is a bound, a volunteriy obidience and care-giving
parent-children: something the child needs desperitly, they need direction, they need people not only as guids but as witnesses of what they are doing.


the destructive charismatic authoiry in politics
tests if he/she can keep himself together

the charisma of the user on facebook (marat, jonathan, etc., but both are also very good at face to face communication)

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

Sennett

we don't know how to use material objects and machines[...]

[...]y transposed, altered, refigured

jellies --> surrealist white shapes

i am not sure -->
(Desmond's) identification: the beautification of ‘drifters'[spending most of their time motionless with their tentacles extended over ten feet, netting the waters for food] makes cross-species identification impossible --> [*]identification: seeing familiarity in other organisms = a map for empathy and critical engagement* (=/= objectification of radically different organisms) : “transmutation of non-identification into aestheticization” ==> observer gawks بى خيال نگاه کردن and marvels at dissimilarity ==> making difference a marketable feature [--> ajayeb stuff]
=/= Hayward --> [*]identification: misalignment of empathy with the possibility of familiarity --relying-on--> extending empathy across similarity to dissimilarity : *the organism can only receive the benefits of empathy if we can identify with it* (=/= Seymour's wildboyz)

politics of erasure =/= empathy

telegram ajayeb channel =/= idealized visual pathways (save, preserve, conserve vanishing wildlife, while ignoring the idealization of nature)

aquarium (as boundary object) ==> borders of nature and culture (that functions as public spectacle, public enlightenment, and conquest) =/= telegram

-if not the ‘oppressed other’ then what kind of actor is ‘you,’ ‘them,’ or ‘me’?

Ponyo --> low-oxygen environment in which fish die but jellies thrive


distracting --> diffracted ethics --Haraway--> (as a metaphor to talk about) history of interaction, interference, reinforcement, difference =/= reflection or reflexivity: displacing the same elsewhere (in traditions of representation, searching for the authentic really real)
*diffraction: (depending on the phase differences and the amplitude of the light waves) elements of composite light (white light) are reinforced, weakened, or elimi eliminated by each other alternately*
•scales of butterfly wings and fishes...
•modification of the form of a word to express the different grammatical relations into which it may enter
•to put concerns, entities, relationships, and actions into process [-to put your found object into process of interference]
•[*]diffraction: mapping of interference ==Haraway==> where the *effects of* differences appear =/= differences appear

meaning + matter + action (always live together)

telegram animal carousel: nonhuman-animal-machine

my room/bedroom (~-> Cinderella's attic, architecture of containment)
overlapping perceptual worlds
synaesthetic force of perceiving and feeling, processing and mattering --> transposing of senses
immersion
kinesthesia
numerous haptic registers
we are transsensual

[*]sensation: the vibratory force in all organisms that seduces, sexuli[...]

[...] *work of the researcher = leading the ravens to take a position in relation to his fictions and hypothesis* (resisting those that don't explain, clarifying those that do) --Despret--> **the researcher must create a dispositive that confers on the ravens “the power not to submit to his interpretations”** <-- politeness of “getting to know” {"getting to know you” does not necessarily turn on an attentive benevolence but on the art of finding the forces, and exchanging them, in an exercise of [*]rivalry: (constituted by) a clever mixture of complicity & opposition}

test of the intelligence and cunning (of each other)

(in the case of ravens [and #feedback in art])
theoretically --> we understand nothing
practically --> we have to learn their tricks to be able to approach them

**a matter of finding the procedures that attest to the pertinence of explanations** (=/= a matter of explaining/understanding them)


enigma --{(like good detective stories) inscribes the protagonists in a relation of}--> rivalry هم اورى : if you want to understand them you must try to be as smart and cunning than they are (not letting oneself be duped by appearances)

politeness --> suspicion ~= respect (‘re-spectare’ to look twice)
•confidence without verification offers little guarantee as to its robustness

we want to witness in a reliable manner = we want that which we learn from the ravens is to be treated with confidence = we want to define ourselves as authorized by them to speak in their names = we want to (required to) offer them the opportunity to show what they can do (with the *great flexibility of our interpretation*)


[*]trap
(enigma of the apparently inexplicable behavior) --> *how to ask the ravens, with the same politeness, to take a position in relations to all the possible conjectures of the investigation?* how to ask them to teach us the good explanation, the right motive? ==> the researcher will have to learn the ***art of the trap and the net*** = the art of the lure and the trick = ***the art of learning from those whose enigma you are trying to solve*** (and have no intention of helping you) --> ‘how that which counts can count for them’
•*the art of metis / cunning intelligence* : the particular form of intelligence that the greeks (learning from hunters and fishermen) cultivated = intuition شهود + cunning مکر + perspicacity فراست + dissimulation فریب + improvisation بدیهه + vigilant attention هوشيار + sense of timeliness بجا (<-- this type of “getting to know” was constituted exaclty to be found in a domain where human intelligence is constantly at grips with the land or sea animals in an are where humans saw their intelligence and techniques transform in learning from animals**** [-how to prolong the possibility of this transformation?]) <-- *it is the only way of get[...]

[...]ows nothing of symbiogensis nor of molecular compartmenship. fire is an elementary radical reaction to closeness. the third person. pure manifestation.

every mountain range have personalities. rock is arrange by evolution. it tells you about itself when you feel it firm in your hand pressing to your ear, asking thousands of questions, exploring with imagination. stone is not a social creature, maybe that's why we listen to them. fires are social beings, death sentences.
their society and ecology
reaching access to the literacy of fire-work

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

(...) --> the black-box --> ka'ba --> an intermediate mechanism to reach beyond the door-knob --> dark medium of worship --> the jinn --> ontology of the envelopment --> an interiority that is exterior --> talking-fire --> mediums of the beyond --> put your ‘thing’ in the fire --> going through the fire --> test some fossils --> ice age --> databases that survive --> promises of futurity --> tech --> black-box is always about the-envelope and the-beyond --> going back to the cave --> monotheism invented darkness (praying in the dark marked singulaity of worship as the begining of subjectivity) --> there is a sudden big shift from telling-stone to talking-fire (introducing the spectacularization of truth-event, where risky aesthetic of fire coded as masculine is traded for a mutuality of slower wilderness a more feminine trope. the telling-stone proposes a totally different ecological model than the survivorship narratives encoded in the trial of the talking-fire. truth became untouchable visual spectacle that can burn and annihilate charging off the haptic closeness of the stone to the ear. truth became the matter of untouchable, visual. the angry truth god came with the fire both as tool of worship and punish (human taking lessens and used fire to discipline the forces of nature) --> the darkness that enveloped the worship, made the absence of light crucial for constructing interiority [note: before going to light-fire the worshipers must wash themselves in Vozu, in Namaz the worshpers wash themselvs before going to the darkness of prayers---is this water that we make vozu the same as ‘abe heyvan’? before going into the hyper space, the ritual plays a key role and a key hole. like all hyper spaces that forwards you yo the beyond the box as well is about deliverence (to the lover?): (for the sake of) salvation ‘rastgari’ is about delivering ‘you’ (--> Ma'ad --> masaleye “enteghal” [be alame digar] [dar tarikh falsafeye eslami irani ---> go to footnote in Motakhabat 2nd volume page44]) --> for *Rumi people is firewood, hizom, inflammables; fire is the present tense, its light is about the future and its ashes about the past: we like ash to perform our archiological readings of old fires and we like its light becsuse it helps us to push through and constatly make-imagine-lighten the future, i this model the present is untouchable.] --> the beyond is be[...]

[...]ad “magical ends” - Peter Nabokov, ‘Indian Running’ (Santa Barbara: Capra, 1981)]

symbolism --> man traveling within himself --> need to travel outside an infinitely larger reality ==> beyond --- different brand(s) of infinity

secular hunting --- the hunt becomes monstrous. i am calling for an old sacred hunt [sustained in myth and ceremony?] of concepts?
-hunt is gestalt(en)

(with our) hopes and tropes

boundary creatures and matters -- fire's function/act was peripheral, was in the threshold world of human passages(?) [then it made an entrance]

humans’ mimetic participation with fire

infinitely complex affinities



to be noted the nuanced differences between talking and telling (harf-zadan/goftan)
*talking* can not be accompanied by a direct object (the talked) and *telling* might not be accompanied by a direct subject (you are told without a direct teller.) so talking is about the talker and telling is about the told, the ear.
(you *ask fire questions, but you *listen to stone what it is telling. [what fire suggesting, offering to the sense? (i am thinking Ajayeb)] with fire you can debate but this debate is bulshit since you are under its spectacularity and authority, superior to the (inflammable) world, became the domminent contemplated object, administrating conditions of existence, you can never touch the fire, you can never become ‘bodies’ with fire, it is immune from human activity, endusing one-way communication (auto-governed gusture of comminution), garanteeing an abstract condition of hierarchical power. but stone ‘is’ for touching and bodying, sensuous touch is the matter of stone, intimacy*, sensuous intimacy with the stone, sensuous proximity)
---(rock in water : reef)
-transcontextual; transcontextuality = tanglement {figures running in opposit directions but held together}


nature is a context
*past is a context

*the landscape is full of ghosts (whether we want it or not)
mediated forms

Some examples of exothermic processes:
-spontaneous combustion (~= fire)
-Nuclear fusion (~= sun)
-(in this writing, i am going to take a defenition of fire recovering it from bible, that of the spectacle flame that of the material of specter in the Qur'anic Jinn, and not other forms of exothermic processes)

the issue is reversibility
(“evolution” inevitable? Irreversible?)


[title]
•A Materialist Inquiry into the Beyond
•A Mineral Inquiry into the Beyond
•Genealogy of a Worship: Talking-Fire and Telling-Stone
•Talking-Fire and Telling-Stone - Genealogy of a Worship
•Ajayeb-e Atash
•Fire and the Transcendental Subject
•Zolmat and the Appropriation of the Elsewhere
•Fire and Different Internals of Being
-[...]

[...]r.
(you *ask fire questions, but you *listen to stone what it is telling. [what fire suggesting, offering to the sense? (i am thinking Ajayeb)] with fire you can debate but this debate is bulshit since you are under its spectacularity and authority, superior to the (inflammable) world, became the domminent contemplated object, administrating conditions of existence, you can never touch the fire, you can never become ‘bodies’ with fire, it is immune from human activity, endusing one-way communication (auto-governed gusture of comminution), garanteeing an abstract condition of hierarchical power. but stone ‘is’ for touching and bodying, sensuous touch is the matter of stone, intimacy*, sensuous intimacy with the stone, sensuous proximity)
---(rock in water : reef)
-transcontextual; transcontextuality = tanglement {figures running in opposit directions but held together}


nature is a context
*past is a context

*the landscape is full of ghosts (whether we want it or not)
mediated forms

Some examples of exothermic processes:
-spontaneous combustion (~= fire)
-Nuclear fusion (~= sun)
-(in this writing, i am going to take a defenition of fire recovering it from bible, that of the spectacle flame that of the material of specter in the Qur'anic Jinn, and not other forms of exothermic processes)

the issue is reversibility
(“evolution” inevitable? Irreversible?)


[title]
•A Materialist Inquiry into the Beyond
•A Mineral Inquiry into the Beyond
•Genealogy of a Worship: Talking-Fire and Telling-Stone
•Talking-Fire and Telling-Stone - Genealogy of a Worship
•Ajayeb-e Atash
•Fire and the Transcendental Subject
•Zolmat and the Appropriation of the Elsewhere
•Fire and Different Internals of Being
•Black-Box and other Human Extensions



genealogy of a worship (fire)
how can one pray ‘to’ animals? (~ prey upon them)
how can one pray ‘to’ elements?

amenity (of stone) (=/= enmity of fire)



*trial by fire, fire as judge
(test, respond to whether or not something is true or false)
iranian frost, is not the same as ice---ice was still the object of fascination. transforming fire into mosque---atash masjed shod. ‘dudeman’ coming from ‘dud,’ smoke as your ancestery. a telling-smoke was your inheritence, your grandpa. same in Latin: ‘focus’ means both fire-place and ancestral
ether --> azar --> atash
fire = (institutional?)-order ~ justice = law =/= nondialectic
the order of fire =/= agonism [positivly channeled disagreement]
the order of fire is a materialist conception of history, that fire eventually purifies and leave no reason but the reason of harmonious ~= consensus, the ubiquitous Übereinstimmung of fire
athletisism[...]

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

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

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

fire signaling essence, essencing being (of her, his, it)
[things are still essencing at the distance---[...]

[...]the natural process of life arising from non-living matter, how pre-life chemical reactions gave rise to life on Earth
•self-replicating molecules
•RNA world --> catalyze peptide ligation or amino acid polymerization --> protains, specialized biocatalysis --> RNA + iron ==> DNA : data storage
•synthesized from inorganic compounds
•catalysis in chemical systems =?=> molecules necessary for self-replication
•this is a protain writing


*water
Study of zircons has found that liquid water must have existed as long ago as 4.4 Ga, very soon after the formation of Earth [...] water with similar deuterium-to-hydrogen ratio was already available at the time of Earth's formation, as evidenced in ancient “eucrites” meteorites originating from the asteroid Vesta. (wikipedia)


(four elements temporal hierarchy)
earth > water > oxygen(air) > fire

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

[with Guy Debord]

fire media theoretic

‘image’ detached into a stream, percieved as generality --> an inversion of life (“visible” negation of life - that has invented a visual form for itself)

(its social practices)

fire, not subordinate, as spectacle comes as means of unification, locus of illusion, generalized apparition --> seperation
(its general truth) fire untouched by evolution and form binding constrains, is a universal mater, the spectacle of burning flame manifests itself as a positivity out of reach and beyond. the case of fire is different than Deobord spectalcle who speaks: “Everything that appears is good; whatever is good will appear.”

therefore fire specatle is not image, rather social relationship between subjects that are mediated by it

thus the function and phenomenon of separation mediated by fire becomes part and parcel of the unity of the world, from now on
-a new form of the sacred emerged with the discovery of fire's image
-produced new worshipful subjection

the language of the fire as spectacle is composed of signs that talk to Moses, Zaratostra, and others
-in this writing i like to rewind theology and pause at the moment Moses meets Fire in mount sinai, go after some media theoretic specualtions, asking what are the conditions of this (inter)mediated encounter? and what are the consequences of talking to fire? (technicity and affectibilty)
(mount sinai : cradle of stone, rendered dead matter when ‘he’ comes out of stone-age)
•the Israelite's God, who appeared “by day as a cloud and by night as a fire” (Exodus 13:21)

[fire and brimstone, an idiomatic expression of signs of God's wrath in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and the New Testament.] --> the fate of the unfaithful
(--> perceptible to the naked of the prohpet)

fire's mechanisms of contemplation

[...]

[...]

(four elements temporal hierarchy)
earth > water > oxygen(air) > fire

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

[with Guy Debord]

fire media theoretic

‘image’ detached into a stream, percieved as generality --> an inversion of life (“visible” negation of life - that has invented a visual form for itself)

(its social practices)

fire, not subordinate, as spectacle comes as means of unification, locus of illusion, generalized apparition --> seperation
(its general truth) fire untouched by evolution and form binding constrains, is a universal mater, the spectacle of burning flame manifests itself as a positivity out of reach and beyond. the case of fire is different than Deobord spectalcle who speaks: “Everything that appears is good; whatever is good will appear.”

therefore fire specatle is not image, rather social relationship between subjects that are mediated by it
>
thus the function and phenomenon of separation mediated by fire becomes part and parcel of the unity of the world, from now on
-a new form of the sacred emerged with the discovery of fire's image
-produced new worshipful subjection

the language of the fire as spectacle is composed of signs that talk to Moses, Zaratostra, and others
-in this writing i like to rewind theology and pause at the moment Moses meets Fire in mount sinai, go after some media theoretic specualtions, asking what are the conditions of this (inter)mediated encounter? and what are the consequences of talking to fire? (technicity and affectibilty)
(mount sinai : cradle of stone, rendered dead matter when ‘he’ comes out of stone-age)
•the Israelite's God, who appeared “by day as a cloud and by night as a fire” (Exodus 13:21)

[fire and brimstone, an idiomatic expression of signs of God's wrath in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and the New Testament.] --> the fate of the unfaithful
(--> perceptible to the naked of the prohpet)

fire's mechanisms of contemplation

(in my preaching here i won't do what christians used to encourage repentence)

it is important not to put fire in abstract opposition to concret stone activity

mystic order ~?-> spectacular order

the spectalce of fire reciprocal alienation was part and parcel of human social life and its essence underpinning its relations to the real

diversities and contrasts in looking into the image of flame

what is already in society that fire (spectacle) gives expression? the beyond

(fire, we are) governed by its agenda

***monopolization of the realm of appearances*** (excluding other illusions, apparition, tellings, etc.)

-with fire a new brand of storytelling
***fire's spectacular aspect (accumulated to the point that) pr[...]

[...]by fire becomes part and parcel of the unity of the world, from now on
-a new form of the sacred emerged with the discovery of fire's image
-produced new worshipful subjection

the language of the fire as spectacle is composed of signs that talk to Moses, Zaratostra, and others
-in this writing i like to rewind theology and pause at the moment Moses meets Fire in mount sinai, go after some media theoretic specualtions, asking what are the conditions of this (inter)mediated encounter? and what are the consequences of talking to fire? (technicity and affectibilty)
(mount sinai : cradle of stone, rendered dead matter when ‘he’ comes out of stone-age)
•the Israelite's God, who appeared “by day as a cloud and by night as a fire” (Exodus 13:21)

[fire and brimstone, an idiomatic expression of signs of God's wrath in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and the New Testament.] --> the fate of the unfaithful
(--> perceptible to the naked of the prohpet)

fire's mechanisms of contemplation

(in my preaching here i won't do what christians used to encourage repentence)

it is important not to put fire in abstract opposition to concret stone activity

mystic order ~?-> spectacular order

the spectalce of fire reciprocal alienation was part and parcel of human social life and its essence underpinning its relations to the real

diversities and contrasts in looking into the image of flame

what is already in society that fire (spectacle) gives expression? the beyond

(fire, we are) governed by its agenda

***monopolization of the realm of appearances*** (excluding other illusions, apparition, tellings, etc.)

-with fire a new brand of storytelling
***fire's spectacular aspect (accumulated to the point that) produces an image-object that is a seperate entity [accumulation --> generality/category --> new object], that of the mediated, from the fire itself, a second objecthood detached from its materiality, introduing transcendent immateriality --?--> metaphysics
-taking over life and existence


from vision to wisdom
categories of visulaity took human cognition hostage, gave rise to a metaphysical tradition/abundance imposing itself upon existence, regulating the perception of material life, philosophizing ‘reality’ to ‘beyond nature’ : *alienated thought* (due to the alienated power of fire) --- immaterial specatle of the afterlife, the world-beyond rendering life dead

abounding in metaphysical subtleties
-metaphysical abundance

...allegiance to the frozen

(Rumi's calling) “You must burn!” - this is very selfish
[to Siyavash?]

still today in sci-fi we are talking to a technoilogized light (as the messenger of beyond)

fire, transforms t[...]

[...]ed to the point that) produces an image-object that is a seperate entity [accumulation --> generality/category --> new object], that of the mediated, from the fire itself, a second objecthood detached from its materiality, introduing transcendent immateriality --?--> metaphysics
-taking over life and existence


from vision to wisdom
categories of visulaity took human cognition hostage, gave rise to a metaphysical tradition/abundance imposing itself upon existence, regulating the perception of material life, philosophizing ‘reality’ to ‘beyond nature’ : *alienated thought* (due to the alienated power of fire) --- immaterial specatle of the afterlife, the world-beyond rendering life dead

abounding in metaphysical subtleties
-metaphysical abundance

...allegiance to the frozen

(Rumi's calling) “You must burn!” - this is very selfish
[to Siyavash?]

still today in sci-fi we are talking to a technoilogized light (as the messenger of beyond)

fire, transforms the world, not in terms of changing manifest matriality, rather the mind and thinking

fire in its temporal animation renders space fixated, giving the illusion that (visual) animation = life {~= spectacle}


the fire spectacle colonizing our participation with the beyond, colonizing the way our flux of senses make tentative contact with the other sides,
(what a stone suggests? the senses that never stop participating, never stop throwing themselves beyond the immediatly visible)

every phase of existence

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

[Scott Gilbert]

(all organic beings have been formed on two general laws, according to Darwin:)
(1) unity of type and (2) conditions of existence --> inorganic? fire?
natural selection --> adaptation --> conditions of existence
embryonic homologies --> unity of type
==> “descent with modification” (or decent modifications)
[(embryology =/=) ‘fire’ could transform matters, “change” their class, their type and its unity --> “parvaneh sho!” Rumi wants embryology undermined?]

construct phylogenies
(phylogeny : branching out evolutionarily)


small genetic changes was not sufficient to generate evolutionary novel structures such as teeth, feathers, cnidocysts or mullusk shells (Goldschmidt, 1940) (--> lizards had birdness in it --> potentiality [~-> mutation is not random])

(Waddington then launched into a) critique of the notion of “random mutation,” noting that there are developmental constraints placed on what changes are possible.

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

...a perceptual game of risking linearity, collapsing discovery and jurisdiction (a judiciary not a branch of any map of governance)

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

(Haraway [...]

[...]in other languages. if intimacy is saying before thinking, how fits the acts of maulwurfe?

work on shyness, I have to start (slowly) with what i (kind of) know.

“...Nudged on the scene as a kind of shivering being, anxious and shy,..” (kafka, test)

There is the suggestion here, as in Holderlin, that timidity might be a dialect of stupidity. (Finding no way of testing out of these subtle complicities, one falls asleep, exhausted by the distress of proving one's most minimal merit.) (Avital Ronell, The Veils of Servility)

According to Silvan Tomkins, “shame operates only after interest or enjoyment has been activated.”

as Sedgwick has argued, for some people, and most often queer subjects, “shame is simply the first, and remains a permanent, structuring fact of identity: one that ... has its own, powerfully productive and powerfully social metaphoric possibilities.

the idea is that the performance that avows its performanceness acknowledges the difficulty of fitting into roles, finding identities, and managing a self, especially a self vulnerable to the effects of stigma.

is there a queerness in me and my performance? is shyness, they way i do it, queer?

turn the spectator to the reader.

does shame intertwines with queer?
this affect and mode of performance (which normative euro American culture would rather eradicate) can be queered, twisted and turned into endless artful enactments.
queer, as experimental linguistic representational and political artistic performance.

shameless in my shyness. (at the level of affect theory?)

shyness: looking otherwise and feeling differently

to act shamed of exactly that which he is excited. (is this a queer subject?)

queer is not isomorphic with gay or lesbian or any other fixed identity, rather, queerness undoes all identities into an endless multiplicity and unbecoming. (liquefaction of any solidification)
queer seems to hinge much more radically and explicitly on a person’s undertaking particular, performative acts of experimental self-perception on a filiations.
Indeed, the performativity of both queer and shame can be reiterated differently; the subject can disidentify from such interpolations and re-deploy the abjecting and/or disciplining of the terms in unforeseen ways, which Warhol did.

In surrender the head bends and meets the heart. The head that does not bend has no value, and the head that is stiff will have to bend sometime, either in surrender or in shame. The head that bends in surrender will never have to bend in shame. Shame accompanies arrogance. Shyness accompanies Love. See how children are endowed with shyness, that is natural. Shyness is inherent. Shame is inflicted by society and is acquired. Shame brings guilt and shyness adds to one? beauty. Retain your shy[...]

[...]. subjunctive mood (konjuktiv) not only is to zusammenbinden the elements of semantic also to zusammenbinden the the people who are speaking in these terms.

cooperation is a rehearsal not a performance.

public real made of people who don't argue in behalf of their own interest but to think most disinterestedly.

my talks/works is about how we make sense of our environment, the network that we live in and the texts and discourses that we are reading and writing.

how shyness (even) look like? can we recognize it when we see it?
what is feeling comfortable in the presence of strangers? not verbally i mean, physically.
the notion of being comfortable in the presence of difference. being physically comfortable in presence of the people who are not like yourself.

the subjunctive is the language that the shy uses naturally, which is one of the necessary elements of cooperation. in contrast to subjunctive speech, there is declarative speech is a form of declaration invites submission, and it invites submission because somebody else defines for you clearly what something is about. there is almost an erotic of that, they really now what they are on about, they really know who they are, and you become a spectator to their definiteness. giving yourself up to somebody who seems more defined and more purposive.

cooperation in islam is not a personal experience, it is something that is encoded in very strict ritual. it is not an act of choice. cooperation is not a duty but a desire.

my talk is a fancy and careful way of responding to the voices of other. the ones that are sounding in my ear. (inslam, shakespear, math, that girl in enghelab square, etc.). i am not good at immediate reaction, so i respond with a delay and a lot of playfulness and black holes that come in to be of the part of this, by this relationship to the Other, that is manifesting itself through the language of the Other (islam)

In my performative practice, I seek a way to approach thinking about things that arrests my curiosity. It is a form of commitment to what comes forward and calls for thinking, an attention before what I do not know. My Talks are fancy and careful responding to that otherness, to the voice or face that speaks to you from somewhere that you cannot yet locate. This call could be from a sadistic super-ego inside or Shakespeare or kleinen Maulwurf, der wissen wollte, wer ihm auf den Kopf gemacht hat.

i am not just interested in my own foundational metaphors.
is there an amateurishness at the intersection of art and philosophy that i am drawing?
what is amateur?

the fact that i am giving talks is very much related to the social culture around me, in Germany the culture has a taste to listen and there is an interest for speech. now i get it like in the case of warhol he is rethinking his surrounding culture[...]

[...]rs) gets ontological with technology*

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

McQuire
defining the technological --activate--> the border between nature & culture = (the heart of) what it means to be human

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

[title]
system attic

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

(in my work with apass digital designs, i have been trying to negotiate with the notion of)
*technological gaze*

what new modes of subjectivity are filtered through technological gaze?

(?how) high-tech images are cultural artifacts

technological gaze's method to put its meaning together:
1. impossible subject-positioning
2. codification of flesh
3. visualization of scientific narrative
4. aestheticization of information


(Maturana + Varela) everything said is said by an observer =/= philosopher


marketing communication theory

[*]gaze: (a technical term for) the ways we visually consume images of people and places + the ways images are constructed to entertain & encourage certain ways of seeing

•(using psychoanalysis) Mulvey's gaze: the way in which the camera acts as the eyes and ears of the spectator, presenting ways of framing the world (power-laden + not neutral position) ==> certain understanding of the world is assumed
•Shroeder --> gaze signifies a psychological relationship of power --> the gazer is superior to the object of the gaze [---> go to zoo]


how “human” ways of experiencing the world are gradually being integrated with non-human, technological ways of perceiving and understanding reality:
•Baudrillard --> virtual gaze
•Virilio --> automation of perception (war weaponry --> the idea that in west we have technologies so advanced we achieve absolute vision)
•Balsamo --> cosmetic surgery (~= new visualization technologies) ==es) ==> new forms of dominance [---> go to Kardashians TV shows], *replacing the male gaze with a normative disembodied technical gaze
•Haraway --> technocratic gaze
•Strafford --> (starting in enlightenment) *automated spectralization* (in visual presentation of the world) --> the intention and purpose of the gaze became medicalized and technologized [---> go to cartography]
•
}--> (from technoscience to feminism) theorists have noticed a *splicing* of direct and tactile human perception of reality with another reality, one that is mediated and technical ==produce==> a new reality that negotiates the individual's knowledge of the universe in diverse and complex ways (<-- not catastrophic =/= Hörl)


(time of) intellectual and artist upheaval ==> new and surprising modes of imagining the human


1950s concept of cybernetics constituted a fundamental change in thinking about control, communication, information, life[...]

[...]void mystifying it by recourse to technological explanations (this was my mistake!)
•an observer is more importantly one who sees within a prescribed set of possibilities, one who is embedded in a system of conventions and limitations.
•measurable in terms of objects and signs
•newly constituted human sciences in regulating and modifying the behavior of individuals.
•it was through these disciplines that the subject in a sense became visible
•passage from the geometrical optics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to physiological optics
•to expose the idiosyncrasies of the “normal” eye
•Retinal afterimages, peripheral vision, binocular vision, and thresholds of attention
•outcome of a complex remaking of the individual as observer into something calculable-and regularizable and of human vision into something measurable and thus, exchangeable.
•standardization of visual imagery
•in the amphitheatre / on the stage / in the Panoptic machine
•dissociation of touch from sight ==> “separation of the senses” and industrial remapping of the body in the nineteenth century
•unloosening of the eye from the network of referentiality incarnated in tactility ==> fitted for the tasks of “spectacular” consumption
•Perception for Benjamin was acutely temporal and kinetic;
•a mobile consumer of a ceaseless succession of illusory commodity-like Images.
•Machines are social before being technical
•desiring machines
•The paintings of J-B. Chardin are lodged within these same questions of knowledge and perception His still lifes, especially, are a last great presentation of the classical object in all its plenitude, before it is sundered irrevocably into exchangeable and ungrounded signifiers or into the painterly traces of an autonomous vision.
•that the very process of becoming tired was in fact perception. “When the eye fixes itself on a single color...
•the clear eye of the world
•The more Schopenhauer involved himself in the new collective knowledge of a fragmented body composed of separate organic systems, subject to the opacity of the sensory organs and dominated by involuntary reflex activity, the more intensely he sought to establish a visuality that escaped the demands of that body.
•the physiological makeup of the subject as the site on which the formation of representations occurs.
•Of these only the cerebrum, together with the sensory nerves attached to it, and the posterior spinal nerve fascicles are intended to take up the motives from the external world. All the other parts, on the other hand, are intended only to transmit the motives to the muscles in which the will directly manifests itself. (Schopenhauer)
•It is knowledge that Simultaneously provided techniques for the external control and domination of the human subject and was the emancipating ground for noti[...]

[...]>
As a form of dwelling that engages mediation between subjects and with objects, the surface also can be viewed as a site for screening and projection.

The surfaces of the screens that surround us today express a new materiality as they convey the virtual transformation of our material relations. And these screens, which have become membranes of contact, exist in our environments in close relation to the surfaces of canvas and walls—also undergoing a process of substantial transformation. And so it is here—in this meeting place that is surface—that art forms are becoming reconnected and creating new, hybrid forms of admixture.

who shares (deep) engagements with superficial matters?

layered space of interaction between subject and object

surface can be read as an architecture

from mediated encounters with material space to mobilization of cultural space (the exhibition)

memory, imagination, and affect are linked to movement -- embodied in jungle walk?



modernity's desire and fancy for tactile experience, driving and impulse to expand one's universe and eventually to project it, to exhibit personal passionate voyage of imagination -- effects of a spectatorial movement that is evolving further in Selfie. that is the emergence of such sequential virtues motion capturing that comes to inhibit the train of thought = interconnection in the sequence of ideas expressed during a connected discourse and how this sequence leads from one idea to another (modernity).  

(i don't do filmic voyage)

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

By Consequence, or train of thoughts, I understand that succession of one thought to another which is called, to distinguish it from discourse in words, mental discourse.
“When a man thinketh on anything whatsoever, his next thought after is not altogether so casual as it seems to be. Not every thought to every thought succeeds indifferently.” (— Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, The First Part: Of Man, Chapter III: Of the Consequence or Train of Imagination)

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

the current forms of biotic forests is due to the spreading of seed-dispersing plants millions years ago (what about abiotic? Kinect)

one of issues related with rate/speed is synchronicity

the effects of biotechnically / bioculturaly situated people

Amazon's nature in opposition to slave gardens (slave plantation systems with factory machine) (along with imperial botanical gardens)
for travel and propagation of...
moving material semiotic
part-time organisms


when visuality is looked at in a haptic modality (the tentacular face for example), vision can be figured as touch, not distance. negatively curving in loops and frills, not surveying(/surviving) from above.
[...]

[...]onal, self-contained oblivion onto a universal plane?
a single mood-shift: interiority feels the need to stretch out into exteriority.
without the logic of judgment


(in the aftermath of the 2th century) many visionaries of western thought (--postmoderns--) have emphasized a (desperate) need to inject ambiguity and doubt into our collective imagination



where is absolutism in San'an?

own descent (Abstieg) into paranoia

when in master-disciple relationship one is asked/taught not only read the works of past visionaries: rather to entertain the same mania, drunkenness, cruelty, or absorb temperament that engendered the very materialization of that text.
[Attar asking us to entertain the same mania when reading Tazkirat al-Awliya?]

...lending cryptic terminologies and cosmic ideas

to become an echo of a profound legacy


we ask again: which phantom-sphere is more interesting? more aesthetically and philosophically attractive in its contours, appearances, and orchestrations?

which archive remains in fire throughout?

-which (archival?) constructs promise to survive us?
-things that run on hollow spectacles of meanings and simulations of depth
-adapting old tales to new territories of experience


an apocalyptic significance in the master-disciple relationship
(topology of communication/education)


(mysticism) an excursion into the otherworldly (or the eternal)
lending cryptic terminologies and cosmic ideas a palpable and resurgent quality.



THE pursuit: to become the echo of a profound legacy

the question is not the legitimate/authentic knowledges versus superstitious/mythic doctrines, rather: which phantom-sphere is more arresting? which archive remains in fire throughout?

modern-individuality versus the magnetic power of the sectarian voice..

counter-veiling definitions of freedom: the freedom of infinite mediocritized choices versus the freedom to choose the all-engulfing one thing.

these preferences: on some remote place of calculation or in terms of immediate force?


(this talk might be) a critical rant

(eastern thirds:)
the voice of a strange immunity

sacred crimes

one is hard pressed to find a truth that does not have a dead body


never-ending allegory of loss and primal innocence

irrational desire of a no-man's land of an eternal immaturity


(an existential evacuation)
committing oneself to erratic wanderings in the desert => translation of a familiar topology into an ontological modality?

the extravagant paradox of proximity and distance
(interiority[...]

[...]esmerized, enchanted, and vigilant

sectarian <--> full charismatic authority -->? morshed (=/= “pseudo-autonomous passivity”)
مرشد --> with its own matrix of study: hypnotic exchange [it requires ecstatic projection, not scholarly detachment]

ISIS --> scaffoldings of invisible subjugations, highly performative site

***how does one make the memory [--> Hoda], the shadow [--> Ehsan], the ancestor [--> Sina] speak across generations?***


the riotous, the militant, the deranged --> they have suspicions ~=> ?

(sectarian mode of) *reading: to entertain the same mania, drunkenness, cruelty, or absurd temperament that engendered the very materialization of that text ==> apocalyptic significance (~ master-disciple relationship)--San'an--> an excursion into the otherworldly
-cryptic terminologies
-cosmic ideas
--> ‘knowing’ becomes a high-stake transaction, one's own identity, future, and self-consciousness hangs in the balance (--> i can recognize this extremism in myself)

(an issue with iranian artists:) the pursuit to become the echo of a profound legacy***(!!)

***echo becoming*** --> (Mohaghegh's tone:) in an epoch that runs entirely on hollow spectacles of meaning and simulations of depth <-- aesthetic

(since declared by Western theory itself, and i agree too?) it is obsolete to speak of “legitimate/authentic knowledges =/= mythic doctrines” }==> the question then becomes:
*which phantom-sphere is more arresting, more aesthetically philosophically attractive?* (--> phantomology, Avital) ~/?= *which archive remains on fire throughout?* (--> the concern of many of my peers in apass. why archive has become a predominant topic and practice: lack of master signifier ==> archiving as one remaining meaningful thing to do, that there is nothing meaningful to be done [<-- that is my source of disagreement with archive-discourse, because it matters that there is something to be done now])


(taking) high doses of impulse and reason

**adapting old tales to new territories of experience** (<-- we need to permanently work this, read it, and so on)


exceedingly well-versed fever-dreams of Rumi
his intellectual-bodily gesture
its innovative proportions
his typology of communication/education (in Majales-e Sab'e مجالس سبعه)
remote plane of calculation


•magnetic power of the sectarian voice (=/= “the weak cult of modern inevitability” ==> a formula of alienation, insularity انزوا, indifference)
•freedom to choose the all-engulfing one thing (--> ISIS) =/= countervailing definitions of freedom: the freedom of infinite mediocritized choices (--> consumerism)


(Elen's struggle to gauge her place in the existential game)


my critical rant
[...]

[...] magnetic power of the sectarian voice (=/= “the weak cult of modern inevitability” ==> a formula of alienation, insularity انزوا, indifference)
•freedom to choose the all-engulfing one thing (--> ISIS) =/= countervailing definitions of freedom: the freedom of infinite mediocritized choices (--> consumerism)


(Elen's struggle to gauge her place in the existential game)


my critical rant


*build the raft* <-- a poetic strategy (<-- i do this too, to go beyond the postcolonial aftermath)


tale of the “symptom of a plague” (--> tale of “where we stand”) ==> (a concealed need for) ***immunity*** (=/= toxication)
‘reality principle’ of Ali , apass

“the eastern postmodernism arrives at the doorstep of the western philosophical outlook as a foreigner” -Mohaghegh
==> a *privileged semantic heritage* --suggesting--> an occluded alternative --from--> a shrouded/shredded resource ریزریزشده [==?==> my reparative readings (of ajayeb). this is something i should be careful about: to give the iranian semantic heritage density and texture, and not privileging it, not to give it a “voice” or “awareness"]

(Mona's disposition:) the assassin = the spectator

(for Ali ) truth has a dead body, (deranged, tortured, raped)

(oriental)[*]exotic: commingling of ***excess & absence*** ~= the third world (middle eastern) becomes all that EU renounces: the indecent, unrefined savage whose raw delirium stood as an offense to your elegance but somehow still enchanting a disenchanted earth

[*]eurocentrism: *carving a mirror into your presumed beginnings* (so it is displaces in elsewheres, as the effect of the mirror ---> go to the discussion of mirror in my amazon project)
[an imaginary mechanism of cutting off what the superego perceives as bad or good aspects of oneself (weakness or power) and projecting them onto someone else “over there” where they can be condemned, punished, praised, or endorsed (--mirror--> relates to images? =/=? introjection: process of symbolic identification --> relates to signifiers)]

iran has become the global instantiation of madness

***dispossessed of sublimity and excised from the world-historical process ==> *ontological vacancy* ==> Taliban extremism, achieving the mutual exercise of the death drive and the pleasure principle***(?!) ~->{rage of the id + libidinal appetite}--> never-ending allegory of loss and primal innocence

margin sedimented its own center


making my own white noise


masochistic + melancholic = ?


infantilizing and self-contained forms of play masquerading itself as autonomy
(fashion makes such monsters:) “self-hating winners of the game”


[civilizational taxonomies]
of globalist division[...]

[...]> •today: “alternatives within" = an imperial device that works well ‘in itself’ but not ‘for itself’ --> trans-systemic reality

...to believe in an outsider subjectivity capable of ahistorical imagination

(inflated dispositions of) triumphalism and alarmist nightmare


communist (Marxist silhouette) and liberatory combatants of the 20th century, intellectuals persecuted and exiled in the course of anti-fascist struggles, freedom-fighters of the anti-colonial/anti-imperialist wars --> nostalgic portrait of the contemporary militant
(Nietzsche, Kafka, Bataille, Foucault, Artaud, Baudrillard, Serres, D+G, etc.) continental thinkers architects of masks:
•the overhuman (--> Nietzsche)
•the supplicant
•the deviant (or barbarian --> Foucault)
•the body-without-organs (--> D+G)
•the criminal
•the schizoid
•the headless monstrosity (--> Bataille)
[(an exilic) postcolonial intelligentsia]


---{Nietzsche and Artaud's familiar persuasive authority, similar exuberant phraseology, and motifs in extremis --> ‘cruelty,’ Artaud wanted to “reject form and incite chaos.” antipsychological violent physical determination (a cruel yet necessary act upon the spectator) to shatter the false reality (theatre/art as a place where the spectator/actor is *exposed* [=/= “protected"]) =/= (aesthetic) distance (---> go to ‘distance matters’); this is the paradigm in iran's theatre and performance scene, where the audience are to be engulfed and physically affected by the show, ‘to be trapped and powerless’ as a theatrical value is an Artaudian tradition.
-delirium: he wanted to deliberately become/stay mad [--> Jassem, Sana's methodology, the state of horrible energy] in order to heal/strengthened
-ecstatic loss of the self, hermetic elements in his works, and the idea of the “complete actor,” whirlpool of feelings and lunatic expressions, counter-force from the act of gesture, (and from his teacher Dullin) emphasis on mime, gymnastics, improvisation, voice production, and various exercises intended to heighten sensory perception, all reminds me of my own theatre training with Reza in jome class.}


(demonizing) the vital concept of the outside(r)


untrustworthy epistemic climate --> patterns of smoothness/coarseness

militant negotiations of desire

(Dabashi's vertical-horizontal colonialism:)
the third world subject:
1- marginalized by enlightenment discourse
2- materialy exploited under global division of labor
}-->{
alienated by:
1- (horizontally) the epistemic violence of colonialism
2- (vertically) foreign colonial state + indigenous comprador elite (واسطه‌ها و دلالان سرمایه‌داران خارجی در کشورهای آسیا و آفریقا و آمریکای لاتین)
2-[...]

[...]cies of dilution رقيق سازى raghigh-sazi) & an overexhilarated East (with its endless throngs, zealotries, dogmatic caresses, and emergencies)


dysmorphic labor

emetic estefraghi استفراغ اور


[*]insurgent = revolutionary of the unreal (=/= [Nasser's kind of] the traditional freedom-fighter who picks up a weapon and takes to the mountains, singing anthems of liberation or reveling in the simple metanarrative of some diorama شهر فرنگ of good and evil)
the insurgent does not fall victim to:
•collective mythologies of nation, language, and culture
•elusive rhetoric of ethics and justice ==> provide power with a convincing smokescreen
the third world insurgents are anarchists of a higher order of *aneurysmal consciousness and affect*
(gaze of the aneurysmal:) an uncompromising gaze that sees what power tries so hard to mask--that there is nothing there to see


*practice of irregular warfare ==> irregular subject of war*

(weeds of) modernity:
•as ideology --> power
•as institutional mechanism --> society
•as phenomenology --> perception
•as ontology --> being/death
•as cultural emergence --> spectacle
•as temporal orchestration --> time
•as configuration --> body/space
•as political economy --> capital
•as epistemological framework --> knowledge
•as discursive apparatus --> language/meaning
•as epoch --> history

immediacy =/=? alienation
brutal =/=? idealistic
retrograde =/=? futuristic
esoteric =/=? banal
technological =/=? carnal
genesis =/=? apocalypse
system =/=? chaos

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

iran: transition from a semi-colonial to postcolonial space --> anticolonial islamic front

the self-other construct

***islamic revolutionary thought borrows heavily from Marxist theory (at the same time equating them with colonial mastery)
}==> forge a specific revolutionary mind-set out of its own historical realities/myths (=/= “ill-trafficked remedies of an outsider ideology”, a *second-hand personality* [<-- this is OK!])

cartographies of entrapment

Al Ahmad binary reasoning in his Westoxification
-the “eternal” struggle of east and west --> a rhetoric of transcendental struggle
-to perceive the “west” as merely an *epistemic fabrication* and not a civilizational reality <-- the enemy is authenticated
(-he makes a very bad move: relocate the structural site of resistance to somewhere outside the walls of the university)
*Al Ahmad's orchestration of degrees of cultural estrangement --into--> a tone of nationalist triumphalism ==> ***vanished premodern subjectivity to be restored*** (<-- i have to be careful with this)
-[that] the colonized int[...]

[...]orical journey into the psychic turbulence of a peasant confronted with the obliteration of his premodern world (and thus becomes his lost animal)
-Naderi's Man with a Gun, depicts the material avarice that has overtaken local configurations in the wake of nascent capitalist formations to such a drastic extent that it gives rise to a well-digger's being cheated of his life savings
-Kimiai's The Deers, ...
}--> strong consonance with the anticolonial ideologues (examined thus far)


...caught up in your prose


on Sa'edi’ short story “Dandil” [--> grotesque cultural disaffection of the masses within Sa'edi's Dandil]
-depicting the horrors of daily life within a semicolonized atmosphere of a red-light district of a northern Iranian city
-there is an imagery of closure and suffocation
(Sa'edi revealing:) the material despair of a colonial condition leading (in high speed) to the entropy of cultural-individual ethics
under the overwhelming weight of tangible misery
--cognize--> the immediate material urgency of the third world subject
(Dandilian gathering around to watch the taking of the picture -->) the third world subject has assumed the schizophrenic role of a voyeur himself, spectating his own literal-symbolic rape but not fully understanding it as such, while the real agent of power remains camouflaged in semi-invisibility
(Mohaghegh:) the ideological content of Dandil stands the notion that the technological advancement of the western world has turned the peripheral individual into its unknowing accomplice همدست, a vital participant in the abuse and mutilation of his own locality
(a Dandilian policemen remarking:) “They [westerns] are not beggers like us. they all have private cars. their whores spend four or five hours a day just playing around in the beauty shops.” --> for Sa'edi that is the pathological fantasy endemic to the inner workings of a colonized mind. the third world subject perceiving itself as the negational instantiation of occidental greatness ==> swallowing down the civilizational hierarchies of its oppressor's self-projecting image

(preparing for the coming of rapist colonizer) the Dandilians rush to make the Madame's house clean and tidy: “[...]the curtains had been drawn aside. Pots of geranium had been placed on the wall and beside the steps[...]” ~-> Baudrillard's theory of simulation : the Dandilian presenting to the colonizer a Disneyland, *a play of illusions and phantasms* [~->? Dubai: self-affirmation via the domination of the constructed other]

(the american officer leaves the next morning with a mocking laughter and he refuses to play and the Dandilians can't do anything)--> the civilizational dichotomy remains intact in spite of the horrifying events that have transpired, with the trafficked deflowered child serving as a metaphor for the cultural-political mistreatmen[...]

[...]henomenon that “entrances” its audience
again the idea of authenticity is largely emphasized here, as the television is perceived as a “foreign” entity and therefore an enemy to the millennial history of the province
new medium =/= indigenous modes of communication/expression (of which the roving storyteller is the ultimate instantiation)
(poignancy of the) poet's anthropomorphic profile of the new technologically oriented media
-Akhavan's representation symbolizes the storyteller himself, lamenting his own erasure from the moment of the now (or it is his prophecy for the imminent destruction of the new media in the coming islamic regime?)
--> aesthetic testament to the possibility for a third world revolutionary imagination to emerge from the ruins of the colonial era [, *from the ruins of the empire*]
--> representing the third world as in a state of complete existential-cultural atrophy (tahlil تحليل رفتن) @Hoda

**anticolonial literature reaffirms the all-encompassing grasp of modernity over peripheral subjectivity [--> marginal leader (Mamitua Saber's Marginal Leadership in a Culture Contact Situation)]

(Mohaghegh > Huyssen on Baudrillard:)
Baudrillard's notion of the *silent mass* of the spectators disables any analysis of *heterogeneous subject position in the act of reception* @Laura
any economic or institutional analysis of apparatuses of image production is rendered obsolete by Baudrillard's notion of an almost self-generating and monolithic machinary of image production [...] (<-- Laura should be very aware of this)
Baudrillard's society of simulation does not allow for such distinctions ... simulation, after all, may simply be the latest version of the ideology of the end of ideology
}--> part of the theoretical apparatus of *anticolonial ideology*
one immediate danger of this approach is that it recklessly dismisses anything associated with the other side of the binary (of West/East, self/other, first-world/third-world, modern/premodern, etc.) ==> overlook the subversive utility and democratic accessibility of certain technological innovation --> evident in Shariati's ultra-atavistic endorsement for an aesthetic tradition: “intrusion of the machine into the humna-half may go so far as to paralyze man; it destroys creativity. imagine a type-written page that can be imposed upon millions of people, while before the advent of the typewriter everyone was free to use his creativity to the utmost in calligraphy” --Mohaghegh--> it is not reflecting on the historical reality that the exercise of calligraphy was always linked to a feudalist class structure, and often exclusively to the confines of the palace court, whereas the printed word open to a more widespread audience independent of material status
--> anticolonial ideology ==>
•carries out the presupposed will of modernity by homogenizing its very own constituency[...]

[...]olonialism does not elicit the democratizing effect anticipated by Benjamin


from--> metaphysical awe --to--> banalized horror

each year the islamic republic itself reenacts the arrival of the Khomeini in tehran airport through a procession of myriad cardboard interact and converse with these mock-images of the imam in a kind of makeshift, state-run passion play



post 1979 iranian cinematic renaissance
•medium of film achieved in the decolonized space
•hooked into the contemporaneity of the localized apocalyptic (infinitesimal becomings)
•present as close an interpretation of the unthinkable strangeness of reality as possible
•on an ongoing desertion of the real

Adorno: “works that make socially univocal discursive judgments thereby negate art as well as themselves” @Laura's judgment on the fascist body (--> can consumption be resistance? @Laura: becoming fascist body ==> ? )

the medium of film-making in present-day iran attempts solely to bring the crypto-vantage of the everyday into obscurity-ridden view (to leave less clear --> my pre-2012 videos ‘Vagabond,’ ‘Constant Prince,’ and ‘city of domes’), allowing for a critical distance on the part of the spectator to examine one's own being-in-the-world in raw, blurred form (the truth is haze itself --> Hoda)

exoticization of the local --> reduce it to a nativist enterprise

(Mohaghegh > Tomlinson:) the everyday culture has ingested foreign elements from exogenous sources, with the various elementss gradually brcoming “naturalized” within it =/= image of pure, internally homogenous, authentic, indigenous culture


Sharjah art foundation of the Emirate's *postcultural imagination*


literary front
Hedayat, Yushij, Shamlu, Forough

Hedayat's The Blind Owl variants of a “will to chaos”

middle eastern avant-garde's vision of the writing-act --sketching--> a fugitive postmodern map of escape from its grasp

[in] moments of great social disorder
==> secret societies, iconoclastic trajectories, a type of consciousness that perceives the catastrophic-apocalyptic hint at each turn

(how an eastern or third world vanguard characterize itself in the heart of major historical tremors:) [listen to their *tone of aggression*:]
Nima: “with my poetry i have driven people into a great conflict; good or bad, they have fallen in confusion; i myself am sitting in a corner, watching them: i have flooded the nest of ants”
Forough: “all those who are involved in creative work have as their motive ... a sort of need to confront and struggle with annihilation”
Shamlu: “the children of the depths,” “the children of the storm,” “the horsemen,” “the bold ones,”

--> definition of the poetic world as a protosectarian space
ر[...]

[...]ographically immagined space

initiatives toward the horizons of a mystical inquest

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

sect's threat

breakaway modality of a sectarian consciousness

hermeneutic arsenals

organic theoretical apparatuses

(its own) effective radars and tactics of attunement, detection, and narration

Adonis, Samih al-Qasim, Ghada Samman, Nazim Hikmat, Ahmad Shamlu, Farrokhzad --> all tempted to (antihumanist) convert the text into a closed circle

forbidden power
moral ambiguity
collective destiny
will to extremity



shadow nears and targets
itself presumed source of all tension and unhappiness
while also spreading its influence over others
many are susceptible to its whisperings
thus he develops a perpetual alertness to its approach
schemes are everywhere
it seeks
to slip into (the sectarian's own) camp under disguise
penetrating the inner circles in dissimulated form and thus unspotted
no mediation
revenge in closeness
and even more than this,
shadow will attempt to escape accusation if possible
the spectacle



enemy's overhanging presence
--> continual motion
--> time is restless



tower, bastion, citadel, stronghold
operational apparitional center
phantasmatic points of references
a spiritual geoscape of concentration
it must appear formidable, immutable, and impenetrable
as a tangible headquarters encased amid far-flung mountains.
it drifts mainly as a figment in the nomadic mind
of the one who lives most of the nights as a marauder in enemy camps
roaming through its courtyards
speaking with the tower's white and black keepers
before receiving the next command
with it the facticity of another harsh assignment.
from tower's security standpoint
the world looks ripe for the taking.
the fortress holds, and with it, the dream of the fortress.



the earth
closing on us
a deteriorating prism
tightness, entrapment
this cylinder
to a mutual obliteration
all inhabitants are squeezed together



to make another planet
another dream of the enemy:
1. extraplanetary construction
2. confinement of the unwanted
3. momentary infiltration of the lair
4. consumption of the planet
|
conceptual twists: (quadrangulation:)
[four desires - four attributes - four corresponding identify-formation]
1. the most accountable --> creation ~~> *labor* (to build it) --> carpenter خلق
2. the most disconnected --> banishment ~~> *renunciation* (to disown it) --> judge [...]

[...]carnage, women were sitting in front of their burnt houses in a position of stillness letting their body grow dirty, sorrowfully embodying pollution and dirt, like Draupadi in Mahabharata proclaiming her violation through public expression of her pollution. but the women did not device a strategy to carry a tactic of everyday life into the realm of the political. it was as if the past has turned this face towards them--not that they had translated this past story into a present tactic of resistance --> living fragments of a myth)

more like a conceptual signpost =/= extended argument


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

[the state is supposed to be a proxy for people to appropriate power (of death?!), rather than laying absolute claim over it]
-how such claim is contested or reformulated in iran?

the figure of the abducted and rescued woman --> sign of authority --> sign of state

having a politics =/=? do politics ~ political act
*agonistic impulse of politics* (often, if not prophetic, a heroic mode of action in terms of escaping the ordinary rather than descend into it [--> Marx]. such as: Antigone's spectacular defiant voice celebrated in philosophical and political thought, stable locus of redemption. usually a rebellion in some sort, craving a socially progressive agonistics --> French Revolution)
--or--> (=/= possibility of an ethnographic) integrity: *attempt to attain a proximity to the vagaries of life* ~~> ordinary works of repair in a life, such as Asha
--or--> *reparative impulse of politics* (=/= agonistic), Shahrzad's non-agonistic socially progressive politics of working under “terror” animated by the question of how we might continue to live together, how the social fabric holds together
--or-->

(it is our/my imperative today) ***to give each other a more open-ended picture of [our] bad objects (caste, capital, state, modernity, etc.)***

exchange, resettlement, fission, mythological replacement (~ friction and movement within the system) ==> repartitioning of categories ==> rearrangement of hierarchies ==> opposing and heretical sects and religions

-art's (ethnographic?) proximity to life
-political postures and stands

(nobody has, neither state nor communities) monopoly on ethical pronouncement [~ declaration of good and evil]

(political) postures are not unimportant, they allow us to take a stand --> perspective
--or--> evocatively ambiguous formulation on... =/= [*]politic: spirit of resentment on behalf of the victim (Setareh, Hoda, Ali ; also @Sina not to deny the possibility of victimhood) --> *how possibilities of life close down and where other possibilities open up under the weight of patriarchal norms*

question at Hoda:
[...]

[...]dia art where experimentation was in its original conception and foundational roots (as Zielinski expresses in one interview: “+25 KHM: Siegfried Zielinski” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3JQ3aTwu2s)

arte
DAS KURZFILM-MAGAZIN
KURZSCHLUSS
Siegfried Zielinski im Interview
http://cinema.arte.tv/de/artikel/siegfried-zielinski-im-interview



hybrid objects?
is the logistic characteristic of digital data inconsistent with the hybrid objects of art?



Forms of thought, from what Lévi-Strauss called the “systematization [of] what is immediately presented to the senses,”


(Jakobson)
transmutation: cognition involved by the form of translation

data ontology



what is the point of view of rationality in this for us?
(what is the point of view in witchcraft? knowledge is a performative recipe)
what is the point in point of view?

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

(Jorge Luis Borges - ‘Funes the Memorious’ in ‘Labyrinths: selected stories & other writings’ 1964)
in Borges story, Funes, the character unable to forget is incapable of the concept of ‘general’
solitary and lucid spectator of [...] an intolerably precise world
not capable of thought
in order to sleep, he had to imagine a direction he would turn his face, made of homogeneous darkness
“To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions.”

Borges ‘homogeneous darkness’ is what we as forgetful immortals afraid of to turn to?
maybe the directions we sleep into, orientation to the cosmos?!

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

is archive naturally and necessarily generated (out of regular form of activity)?

a (technologically implemented) beyond


the drive to animate and mobilize; and the drive to conserve, to fix, and so forth, are mutually constitutive for modern imagery and media (from museum to archive)
archive performs a strange dialectics


to see the archive as a technological rational question, and engineering assignment, is to naively avoid the thinking about your own activity as a constructive activity 


depriving yourself of any tools to act
is archive a tool to act?


the agency of an archive..


“other ways” of composing?


marking its territory? how to make a map without giving way to the territory as an extension of the map?

["Angels Without Wings” A conversation between Bruno Latour and Anselm Franke]

the mechanical extension, Res extensa, the (descartian) extended thing, the visualizing technologies, technical drawings, has been so strong that the temptation so say “well, that's what the world is really like” is very great, esp[...]

[...]ay, good taste, context?!!
suggested topology: skew --changed--> nest (tow branches answering yes and no to: “is he cheating?”)

Leo
stickiness ~ residual (left overs of impression), we couldn't find little objects, litte stickies
zoom is tooooo wide, megacategories, “fermentation” is a different zoom level
cheat --> perception/intention, value of non-doing ?, ‘order is cheat’, ritual ==> heal/cope
vulgar: ritual of popular knowledge, =/= social acceptence, communicating emotional needs, guilt on behalf of the vulgars,
suggested topology: skew (with 4 axioms: negativity, positivity, passivity, ritual)

Caterina
sticky: difiicult to remove categories, dirty, quality of trape, almost negative, like honey as an intermediary sticky for other objects to become sticky
zoom: Latina candition macro, ass rincles micro, herself, change of lens is what matters not the zoom level, the macro of the term culture itself
cheat: against the rule of community/aggreement, always cheating the system, against the game, bad relation to the game, lazy relation, faking?
vulgar: ordinary, insultive, perjurative, of the “people”, (Geert:) a marking always coming from above, what television does: non-actual + spectacle, (Elen:) immoral, not original, not elegant, thinking in terms of the ‘same’, group forming, non-individual, twards mass formation,
suggested topology: nest

Eszter
polarized lense
confusion / being confused is ‘cheating’
stickiness absent
suggested topology: nest (with two branches: naive & political leader)

Goda
nothing sticks anymore therefor we go to swamp to stick to relevant objects
swamp as archive (refuge from the capitalist) =/=? cheat
constructing ‘bad example’ (?) --> role model
zooming in losers of capitalism
X-ray kind of lens into the opacity of swamp
(her) treasures in the swamp [--> epistemological buried objects]
criticizing how capitalism zooms for her irrelevant objects
buffoon --> vulgar
suggested topology: skew (the skew is a plain around the edges, gets deeper in the middle, and a narrow way up in the center: the exit)

Elen
presence of the working of subconscious ==provokes==> etymology
very sticki “hell yea!"s
affirmative, sometimes technical knowledge
something sold (“self”) with something morphic on it (“apparition” or ‘surat’ in farsi)
suggested topology: ramp

Hoda
cheat: sharp radical formation, playing ambiguity
totalizing vision lense (“if then all...”)
“because i asked i could feel”
anti-psychological
suggested topology: ramp

Katinka
makeover slider
vulgar: makeover show, e-bay
statements not touching her, something else is sticki object: sympathy?
slider: stack
sugg[...]

[...]ield)

postliteracy
the future of human & the future of writing are entwined
meaning = resistance
to be human = to resist techno-language

an informed scientific-literate and humanistically educated public ==> democracy

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

(mass media) cultural standing (and standard) of live performance
paradigm of televisual <--✕--> digital

(Auslander historicizing) liveness --> historical (=/= ontological)

ideology of authenticity (in live music)

at the level of cultural economy --> theatre (live performance) =/= mass media

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

[why is contemporary art so reluctant to describe our experience of digitized life? --Bishop-->] digital ~= code (inherently alien to human perception) --> a linguistic model

Guy Debord --> (*physical and the social were pitched against the virtual and the representational* ~ “subjective =/= technological” -->) social relations today are not mediated by monodirectional media imagery ==>
•favor intersubjective exchange and homespun activities (cooking, gardening, conversation) with the aim of reinforcing a social bond fragmented by spectacle
•desire for face-to-face relations against the disembodiment of the Internet
•retro-craftiness
•fiddly collages
•tapestries
--assert--> subjectivity (+ tactility) =/= impregnable surface of the screen

reformatting
transcoding
modulation of preexisting files --> selection strategy ~~> meaningful recontextualization (of existing artifacts)

paranoid will to connect what cannot be connected
subjective rationales
arbitrary systems (=/= established taxonomies)

vernacular forms of aggregation --> everyone with a personal computer today has become a de facto archivist (storing and filing thousands of documents, images, and music files, + porn)

analog in appearance + digital in structure

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

eschatos: furthest, last (in Greek)

theological anthropology --> the theory of the person


?how eschatological attitudes changed over time + how they hovered over human experience

millenarian expectation
?how year 1000 was perceived

•preoccupation with the time of Christ second coming
•natural and political disasters and upheavals --sign--> denouncement of sacred history


medieval = fear + passion (+ expectation) ==> eschatological imagination

escapology: significance of immanent (catastrophic) future history

calculations of the end
demand for reform
monastic analysis

discourse against an identifiable moment of apocalypse
<[...]

[...]n ==> wearing a mask, you show nothing to people, you are not there. and behind this mask there is the feelings you are having, and these sensations behind the mask are your subjectivity.
it is a reaction to being exposed to difference and complexity
the subject is divided: neutral on the outside / stimulated in the inside

(i don't want to become a camera)
observe (without interacting)
observational cruising
[the standard account:] interiority ~= reflexive detachment, reflexive withdraw

social media and exteriority

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

Sennett, “3rd world” SPeCo62Mz2Q : condition in which centralized space or distributed communication networks are missing
-a public space that is officially organized
*parks: open space that are reserved for the public: “where informal economy wants to be but is banned”

*public space: (@Selma on st.open project)
(21st century) modern thought <-- *two traditions of thinking about public realm:
1- as a dialogical condition (of exchange, of political engagement) --> Arendt & Habermas; --->{a communicative immaterial space} : “more talk ==> more agreement, common understanding” ---[dialogic & immaterial]
2- as a space of spectacle --> (goes back to 19th century) Baudelaire's ‘individual passers-by’ watching something on the fold (--> [old Greek idea of spectacle:] “unfolding of narrative.” a bad idea of ‘how people should be physically in space’ for example, a landscape architect that creates a scenography in a park ==> a witness in a scene, watching as spectator from out of a situated identity in the world), (not so new) urban sensibility and urban subject matter; criticized by Guy Debord; --->{a theater with performers and spectators, a very physical understanding of public space, ---[dramatic & material]}

3- inclusive =/= integrative
many of the differences (culture, class, religion, etc) that cities contain can't be reconciled ---> how can I talk to you and not pressing a point of integration, rather inclusion? (where people feel provoked to integrate, integrieren, an inherently passive condition)
-always more parallel activities that don't form a spectacle only but are also productive
---[inclusive & synchronous]

***(in the public realm:) integration <~-> spectacle

public spaces must be much smaller =/= gigantism of dramatized power of the politics in large scale public places
small ==> intensity (--> this i learned from Julia as well, create small spaces to show our art-works to each other, the intensity of that moment generative of desire)


(most public spaces have been designed by powers that want to use the very size of the public space as way to *dramatizing their own power*)
•public space inspired by power
•public space inspired by wealth
•


[...]

[...] many of the differences (culture, class, religion, etc) that cities contain can't be reconciled ---> how can I talk to you and not pressing a point of integration, rather inclusion? (where people feel provoked to integrate, integrieren, an inherently passive condition)
-always more parallel activities that don't form a spectacle only but are also productive
---[inclusive & synchronous]

***(in the public realm:) integration <~-> spectacle

public spaces must be much smaller =/= gigantism of dramatized power of the politics in large scale public places
small ==> intensity (--> this i learned from Julia as well, create small spaces to show our art-works to each other, the intensity of that moment generative of desire)


(most public spaces have been designed by powers that want to use the very size of the public space as way to *dramatizing their own power*)
•public space inspired by power
•public space inspired by wealth
•




the “stop” as an architectural project itself (@Selma)
we argue, in our project st.open, that there should be many activities going on at once in public space, that public space should be synchronous, productive as well as spectacular

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

*the way we concentrate has a deeply historical character*
Crary

looking at opera or television or driving,
we are in a dimension of contemporary experience that requires that we effectively cancel out or exclude from consciousness much of our immediate environment

Crary: how western modernity since the 19th century has demanded that individuals define and shape themselves in terms of a capacity for “paying attention”*** --> disengagement from a broader field of attraction for the sake of isolating or focusing on a reduced number of stimuli

{ our lives = disconnected patchwork of stats }<== dense and powerful remaking of human subjectivity in the West over the last 150 years

the so-called crisis of subject disintegration is diagnosed as a deficiency of “attention”

attentive norms and practices ==> modern distraction


imperative of concentrated attentiveness within the disciplinary organization of labor, education, and mass consumption
+
ideal of sustained attentiveness as a constitutive element of a creative and free subjectivity

a cultivated individual gazing (~ Jassem) on a great work of art or nature
+
a factory worker concentrating on the performance of some repetitive task

--> institutional constructions of a productive and manageable subjectivity + purified aesthetic perception
["+” : inseparability]

==> experience of subjective autonomy (for example in Jassem)
+ ambivalent limi[...]

[...]rms of a capacity for “paying attention”*** --> disengagement from a broader field of attraction for the sake of isolating or focusing on a reduced number of stimuli

{ our lives = disconnected patchwork of stats }<== dense and powerful remaking of human subjectivity in the West over the last 150 years

the so-called crisis of subject disintegration is diagnosed as a deficiency of “attention”

attentive norms and practices ==> modern distraction


imperative of concentrated attentiveness within the disciplinary organization of labor, education, and mass consumption
+
ideal of sustained attentiveness as a constitutive element of a creative and free subjectivity

a cultivated individual gazing (~ Jassem) on a great work of art or nature
+
a factory worker concentrating on the performance of some repetitive task

--> institutional constructions of a productive and manageable subjectivity + purified aesthetic perception
["+” : inseparability]

==> experience of subjective autonomy (for example in Jassem)
+ ambivalent limits and failures of an attentive individual

19th century emergence of new technological forms of spectacle and recording




...set of terms and positions that cannot be construed simply as questions of opacity

vision is not an autonomous and self-justifying problem

(we have to rework the) forces of specialization and separation that allowed the notion of visuality to become the intellectually available concept that it is today
(we should do that with all our ready at hand concepts)

what is the genealogy of attention in Persian subjectivity?
•an embodied subject is both the location of operations of power and the potential for resistance
•vision is only one part of a body capable of evading institutional capture

social economic representational shifts and practices
visual/auditory culture

...richer and more historically determined notions of “embodiment”

spectator culture is not founded on the necessity of making a subject ‘see’ (Crary)
rather, individuals are isolated, separated, and inhabit time as disempowered.
counter-forms of attention are constituted as other temporalities and states (--> my lectures, reverie)

for Crary, “perception”: a way of indicating a subject definable in terms of more than the single-sense modality of sight

•fundamental absence at the heart of seeing
•impossibility of the perception of presence
•impossibility of an unmediated visual access to a plentitude of being
•

historical obliteration of the possibility of thinking the idea of presence in perception

*attention: simulation of p[...]

[...]/>
--> institutional constructions of a productive and manageable subjectivity + purified aesthetic perception
["+” : inseparability]

==> experience of subjective autonomy (for example in Jassem)
+ ambivalent limits and failures of an attentive individual

19th century emergence of new technological forms of spectacle and recording




...set of terms and positions that cannot be construed simply as questions of opacity

vision is not an autonomous and self-justifying problem

(we have to rework the) forces of specialization and separation that allowed the notion of visuality to become the intellectually available concept that it is today
(we should do that with all our ready at hand concepts)

what is the genealogy of attention in Persian subjectivity?
•an embodied subject is both the location of operations of power and the potential for resistance
•vision is only one part of a body capable of evading institutional capture

social economic representational shifts and practices
visual/auditory culture

...richer and more historically determined notions of “embodiment”

spectator culture is not founded on the necessity of making a subject ‘see’ (Crary)
rather, individuals are isolated, separated, and inhabit time as disempowered.
counter-forms of attention are constituted as other temporalities and states (--> my lectures, reverie)

for Crary, “perception”: a way of indicating a subject definable in terms of more than the single-sense modality of sight

•fundamental absence at the heart of seeing
•impossibility of the perception of presence
•impossibility of an unmediated visual access to a plentitude of being
•

historical obliteration of the possibility of thinking the idea of presence in perception

*attention: simulation of presence, a pragmatic substitute in the face of its impossibility

atemporal nature of perception

? direct perceptual access to self-presdenceex

(newly) designated “pathologies” of attention and creative, intensive states of deep absorption and daydreaming

(subjective conception of vision ==>) *attention: the means by which an individual observer can transcend those subjective limitations and make perception ‘its own’ [&] the means by which a perceiver becomes open to control and annexation by external agencies***

interrelated problem of perception and modernization

Crary's development of the issue of attention is to question the relevance of isolating an aesthetically determined contemplation or absorption

general problem of perceptual synthesis and disintegrative possibilities of attention

optica[...]

[...]tial condition of the formation and development of mind}, systematic acquirement of knowledge, for the control of passions and emotions
--> powerful accounts of the nature of human subjectivity


practical or knowledge world of objects (the berlin naturkunde museum)

attention became part of the dense network of institutional discourses/practices around which “the truth of perception was organised and structured”
not part of a “regime of power” rather part of a space in which new conditions of subjectivity were articulated

19th century reconceptualization of attention: inevitable fragmentation of a visual field, an activity of exclusion, of rendering parts of a perceptual field unperceived ==>
1. attention as expression of the conscious will of an autonomous subject, as free choice, part of that subject's self-constituting freedom
2. attention as a function of biologically determined instinct, shaped our lived relation to environment
3. attentive subject could be produced and managed through the knowledge and control of external procedures of stimulation: technologies of attraction [--> formative component of a modernized mass visual culture (in the West): strategies of engaging an attentive spectator: comedians smirking at the camera, gesturing conjurers in magic film --> a cinema that displays its visibility, rupturing a self-enclosed fictional world for a chance to solicit the attention of the spectator; Gunning 1990]

Hegel's understanding of attention as “the beginning of education”

(rationalizing possibilities of) psychometrics
a site of quantification
==> subjective operations of repression and anesthetization ~~--> Freud

the model of an attentive human observer
compatible with technical conditions, insignificant “interior” faculty, a set of effects that could be measured externally
(technological transformation of physiology and psychology in the 19th century, development of electrophysiology --> cultural history of electricity)


behaviour with a historical structure: a behaviour articulated in terms of socially determined norms and is part of the formation of a modern technological milieu

1879, Wundt's psychology laboratory in Leipzig, one of the practical and discursive spaces within modernity in which human beings “problematized what they are.” Foucault/
(Wundt's account defined attention [= will] as one of the highest integrative functions [---> go to #integrative in Sennett], its essential role in producing an effective unity of consciousness)


part of the cultural logic of capitalism demands that we accept as natural switching our attention rapidly from one thing to another --> (capitalism as a) regime of reciprocal attentiveness and distraction


conceptualizer of a new economic and so[...]

[...]thetic perception --desire--> to escape bodily time (and its vagaries)
•(Hume's) artist: someone in whom “nature has forgotten to attach their faculty for perception to their faculty for action” (<-- sounds familiar? “free” artistic perception)
•(for Roger Fry:) “imaginative life” is about contemplation disconnected from the possibility of action (=/= instinctive reactions to sensible objects and their accompanying emotions ~= animal)}--> a bad fable
modernist art: *timeless perception* [formal conditions of the possibility of vision, pure form operates as a principle of structure, Krauss outlines how temporality is excluded] =/= mundane or quotidian forms of seeing or listening [the object bounded by its contours, spurred/hated by modernism]


whenever we try to look at or listen to one thing for too long the attention (containing within itself the conditions for its own disintegration) inevitably reaches a threshold at which it breaks down[<-- a game i used to play as a child, playing with attention and distraction, mutating myself into a state of trance or autohypnosis, absorbed, diverted, nebulous =/= socially adaptive subject] --> *perceptual identity* (of its object) begins to deteriorate (& paralysis of will?) [_that is why in spectacle visual regimes the duration of perception must be regulated in short intervals]

attention is thermodynamic : a given force could assume more than ine form
partial sleep <--> abnormal fixation


(i am cautious at every turn to capture my own) *experience of distraction* is part of ajayeb studies. because it has to do with modes of attention and its persian history

perception is a dream

(an account of) [*]modernity: a process of fragmentation and destruction in which premodern forms of wholeness and integrity were irretrievably broken up or degraded through technological, urban, and economic reorganization
==> a “decay” in the capacity for perception [<-- to be careful in working for ajayeb not to romanticize (elitist and regressive fantasy of communal relations in) premodern modalities of looking/listening as richer, deeper, or more valuable :
modern urban life as “swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli” =/= premodern's “slower, more habitual, more smoothly flowing rhythm of the sensory-mental phase"]

(sensory mental schema)


understanding of distraction within a larger deterioration of experience

-distraction (not as a product of decay or anthropy, rather) as a mean to overcome bankruptcy of bourgeois aesthetic (late 19th century):
•Benjamin: absorbed contemplation purified of the excess stimuli of modernity
•Adorno: distraction as regression: perception that is “arrested in the infantile stage” =/= “deep concentration”
•Rilke: authentic attention as precious and rare survival o[...]

[...]onstitutive part of human sciences
==> (stigmata of critical position [@Ali; follow it in Marxism]:)
volitional human action modified by external forces

Ali's tacit appeal to state secret, military secret --> importance of low-level effects of suggestion and influence in contemporary global culture (Ali's interest)
the role ‘suggestion’ plays in a society of communication --> the effects of:
•fashion
•mimesis
•mass psychology
•media-related contagions
+ influences of all kind ==> “oblige” us
}--> the assumption that attention can be controlled for specific ends

(over a hundred years) underpinning institutional strategies has been the position that *human subjects have determinate psychological capacities and functions that might be susceptible to technological management*

attention has been both: strategy of control & locus of resistance and drift


(by the end of 20th century) the attentive subject is part of an ‘internalization’ of disciplinary imperative --> individuals are made more directly responsible for their own efficient or profitable utilization


Foucault's society of discipline
Guy Debord's society of spectacle

(Guy Debord's) *spectacle: a development of a technology of separation*, [multiple strategies of isolation] --> (capitalism's restructuring of) society without community
+
(Foucault's) [production of] docile bodies ~{ body = political force }
+
(<== Weber's) inner isolation of individual [<==> capitalist modernity]

management of attention is masscultural forms has to do (less with the visual contents and much more) with a larger **strategy of the individual** }-->
spectacle:
[--✕--> looking at images]
----> (construction of conditions that) individuate, immobilize, separate subjects
}==>
attention --> operation of noncoercive forms of power

(Crary:) optical/technological objects --> arrangement of bodies in space (--modernism--> techniques of separation)

television + personal computer --> anti-nomadic procedures (that fix and striate) ==> rendering bodies controllable and useful + simulation of choices and interactivity
--> (Williams: a technological and logic of) *mobile privatization*

(through the assessment of the works of Deleuze and Guattari, and now popular narratives) the relation between human and machine is based on internal, mutual communication, and no longer on usage or action (~ human operator linked to a machine as an exterior object) [~/=? companion species]


irresistible imperative of communication ~~--> continuous effects of control

panoptic techniques & attentive imperatives (function reciprocally)

classical power:
•repression
•ideo[...]

[...]f all kind ==> “oblige” us
}--> the assumption that attention can be controlled for specific ends

(over a hundred years) underpinning institutional strategies has been the position that *human subjects have determinate psychological capacities and functions that might be susceptible to technological management*

attention has been both: strategy of control & locus of resistance and drift


(by the end of 20th century) the attentive subject is part of an ‘internalization’ of disciplinary imperative --> individuals are made more directly responsible for their own efficient or profitable utilization


Foucault's society of discipline
Guy Debord's society of spectacle

(Guy Debord's) *spectacle: a development of a technology of separation*, [multiple strategies of isolation] --> (capitalism's restructuring of) society without community
+
(Foucault's) [production of] docile bodies ~{ body = political force }
+
(<== Weber's) inner isolation of individual [<==> capitalist modernity]

management of attention is masscultural forms has to do (less with the visual contents and much more) with a larger **strategy of the individual** }-->
spectacle:
[--✕--> looking at images]
----> (construction of conditions that) individuate, immobilize, separate subjects
}==>
attention --> operation of noncoercive forms of power

(Crary:) optical/technological objects --> arrangement of bodies in space (--modernism--> techniques of separation)

television + personal computer --> anti-nomadic procedures (that fix and striate) ==> rendering bodies controllable and useful + simulation of choices and interactivity
--> (Williams: a technological and logic of) *mobile privatization*

(through the assessment of the works of Deleuze and Guattari, and now popular narratives) the relation between human and machine is based on internal, mutual communication, and no longer on usage or action (~ human operator linked to a machine as an exterior object) [~/=? companion species]


irresistible imperative of communication ~~--> continuous effects of control

panoptic techniques & attentive imperatives (function reciprocally)

classical power:
•repression
•ideology
•
modern power:
•normalization
•modulation
•modelling
•*information that bear on:
◦language
◦perception
◦desire
◦movement
--> by way of microassemblages
(= *subjectification*)

-the shape of absentmindedness in my performances is skewed by the attentive imperative of modern subjectification? something unfocused, **something folds back against itself** =/= “processing” a stream of heterogeneous stimuli (in film, radio, televis[...]

[...]cation, and no longer on usage or action (~ human operator linked to a machine as an exterior object) [~/=? companion species]


irresistible imperative of communication ~~--> continuous effects of control

panoptic techniques & attentive imperatives (function reciprocally)

classical power:
•repression
•ideology
•
modern power:
•normalization
•modulation
•modelling
•*information that bear on:
◦language
◦perception
◦desire
◦movement
--> by way of microassemblages
(= *subjectification*)

-the shape of absentmindedness in my performances is skewed by the attentive imperative of modern subjectification? something unfocused, **something folds back against itself** =/= “processing” a stream of heterogeneous stimuli (in film, radio, television, cyberspace)
-my audience felt an uncomfortable sense of their own inattentiveness (in my performances of the experience of dissociation, of temporality incompatible with capitalist patterns of flow). what is they are asking me is to give a stream of heterogeneous stimuli --> ****how temporality is inhabited****


to diffuse (societies of spectacle) into (a single) integrated society of spectacle (==> separate, isolated, but not introspective individuals)


(film and television in competition with) *daydream* --> a domain of resistance internal to any system of coercion [?]-->
(?is capitalism's contemporary arrangement allowing/playing an) oscillation between spectacular attentiveness and the free play of subjective absorption
~ info/telematic systems simulating the possibility of drift ==> modes of sedentarization
--> (Crary asks) how creative modes of trance, inattention, daydream, and fixation can flourish in the interstices of these circuits? @Sven ...amid technological forms of boredom ~ *modern boredom* [--> cognitive and perceptual synthesis. boredom is involved with the intensification of a sense of selfhood? ~~--> romantic (turned inside out?)]


*perception without awareness* (vilified in art and criticism)
--?--> automaticity: performance under conditions of divided attention

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

Manet: disengagement of perception from a model of interiority
Manet's painting discloses some of the important reconfigurations of the status of the observer (that had occurred by the middle of 19th century)

my Olearius video figuratively repositions the observing subject outside of the term of which system of vision?
world present to the subject in relations of reflection?

...three observers by the virtue of their unmediated, unobstructed self-presence

=/= *romanticism: (maintained) resistance to externality*
[compare Manet's balcony with Goya'[...]

[...]/>

*mask: a means of mental survival

mask (of masculinity) --> the ability to keep a secret --> *all secrets are (at the end) sexual*


[]should our artistic practices comment or be continuous with the (emerging) world of consumer culture? #make a fashion magazine with Ali and Janina: excursion into the stultifying and emancipatory effects of the fashion commodity. discussion on: jewellery, decoration, women's bodies, show, travel, glitter, ----> kaleidoscopic decomposition and displacement of the glitter object
-Mallarme's La Derniere Mode
==> luminosity of a single object is lost amidst its indefinite reflections on the multiplied and fractured surfaces adjacent to it
*insubstantial world (of mode) aligned with (its own) sublime disavowal of the immediate* (, an emptiness and anxiety at the heart of this impossible presence --> “to be out of style = death”)
•its titular concept
•internal movement of its text


artisanal craft


(repetitive forms of:)
primal intuition of absence
transcendental signifier of religion
sacramental authenticity of antiquity


(for Nietsche:) decadence: perpetual adaptability of spectacular culture ~= (one loses one's power of) resistance against stimuli [--> this is Ali ]
=/= existing capacities for action and living
(obsolescence, not the business of the poet. Mallarme)
(the question of resistance is weak. we must ask what are the emergent forms of life caused by that? --> might be interesting for Hoda)

(apass's own hoped-for ritual civic theater of the future)*

attention sustained and enhanced by the regular introduction of novelty [...] means of simulating experiences of singularity and identity in the face of the processes of exchangeablity and equivalence
-Guy Debord


for the hysteric: objects are too present --> excess of presence make representation impossible
(for Deleuze history of painting has been about warding off hysteria*)


organization of perceptual binding and synthesis (taking place while Monet was working)


determined by
different libidinal setup
other category of perceptual dispersion
potential site of fixation


Freud (+ Klinger) --> inseparability of attention from dream process & aesthetic production

(Freud is testing) psychical energy = mobile attention

***observer = a kinetic seeing body set in movement*** (to glide along undeterminated social and durational trajectories)

place: that ordinary anxiety, the expectancy, the sublimated precariousness of a modernizing urban world in which the individual is adrift on a smoothed-out surface devoid of any markers

*origins of aesthetic sentiments*
of [...]

[...]st)? -->(the question of) the seeing body in all of its physiological density + ambiguous position of that body within conceptions of visuality
•chromatic or luminous effects on the body

physiological regime of visuality (beginning with Thomas Young and Goethe, developed by Johannes Müller, Helmholtz and others) =/= renaissance-based pictorial order


collapse of *camera obscura* model of vision --> emergence of *psychological optics*


1890s
construction of various nonreferential models of perception
+
pragmatic functions of an observing subject

--> status of vision and mind
--> nature and value of sensation
--> representation of social facts


central to many developments in the visual culture in the West in late 19th century: *questions of perceptual and cognitive synthesis*


Gestalt theory ==> essential primacy and ethical value of the ‘whole’ ~=> an observer who perceives organized structures, who is marked by innate form-giving and form-apprehending capacities --> an effort to endow human perception with an inherent meaningfulness, coherence, and even orderliness (amid its perceptual decomposition within 20th century spectacular culture) ~~-->[preparing for the perceptual logic of high capitalism:] it was not the attentive subject who identified form from a larger background, but rather the reverse, that “good” form had the capacity to produce attentiveness in a subject
(Gestalt theory was a dream of:)
the reciprocal affirmation of the unity of the individual subject & the unified object of perception
[--> bisect visual filed into: significant “figure” and insignificant “background"]


impression ادراک/برداشت =/= inference استنباط/استنتاج
(Peirce:) color is not an impression, but an inference


(the last kind of) “natural” sign available to a visual artist


Seurat (like many others around that time) was testing the limits and possibilities of an observer attentive to a heterogeneity and simultaneity of sensory data
[specifically:] how an irreducible plurality of luminous information could be organized and perceived coherently ... rearranged and made exchangeable


@Laura: *designated bodies* (are never permanent[!!?])
-is she actually busy with destiny and destined bodies? (for Laura:) design = destiny
-is she going to redesignate? how can she not? if she believes that the designated bodies are already on a fixed destiny or destination
[designate: appointed or made clear which place or direction spatially or figuratively. related to *design --> destine*]


early 1890s
the time when western science accepts the notion “that there might be several ways to represent the same fact” [--> elephant parable =[...]

[...]fic conditions of satisfaction, are subsumed to an open-ended ‘plasticity’ (susceptible to substitution)
drive constantly misses its aim


(for Seurat, Fere, Nietzsche:)
art = physics (=/= semiology) : the question of meaning in art was not about representation but a relation of forces --> for Seurat color was not something accessible as a sign to a sovereign gaze but was an interpretation made by the body

(both Seurat [in his painting] and Nietzsche [in will to power] have felt that there was) an extreme calm in certain *sensations of rapture* ~ extra retardation of the feeling of time and space --> the classical style is essentially a representation of this calm, simplification, abbreviation, concentration }--> (?Sina's paintings) logical and geometrical simplification <== enhancement of strength*!


a lot of artists are still busy with:
stimulus-response mechanisms
**techniques for the external management of aesthetic response** --> quantifiable emotional engineering
@Eszter directly
(the origins of this discourse lies in 19th century automatic behaviour and nervous response, nature of mass subjectivity and desire for social integration, and since Seurat in visual art)
[*]spectator: a being that is acted apon
(does the artist want the spectator “obey” a predetermined program of effects? specially in theater... even if we say this subject [hypothetical individual observer] is a creative inventive affirmative body --still--> presupposing **a subject that is a unity with a conscious will to be overcome** ~-> method)

putting a little onlooker at the bottom of my paintings -->? potential objects of techniques for the control and management of perception and attention
(what are Foad's such objects?)

}--> the question of *how a sensory world is dismantled, synthesized, and represented (~ my paintings) is inseparable from the problem of how a world of objects, individuals, and social relations (~ my performances) organizes itself*

what concerns Seurat (in different terms of color image or human figures) is a ***tension between cohesion and disintegration*** (--> that has been also my constant aesthetic concern)
--this is evident in my work:
[*my paintings busy with] questions of how diverse stimuli become tentatively “bound” into a coherent constellation
[*my performances busy with] questions of how contents referring to a social world are fused or integrated into a network of relations

(in my work) experimenting with:
•the unity of subjective experience (myself performing under influence, mad lectures, excessive synthesis, pathological and disruptive storytelling)
•integrity of social institution and processes (the loci and conditions of us coming together, space of art)
=/= social tranquility --> economic productivity
=/= social[...]

[...] modernity --> state of harmonious equilibrium --> interaction in relation of agreement and mutuality --> new set of moral imperative --> *solidarity*: the duty to become a “social being” (~ to become socialized in relation to a wide range of institutions)


anomie: breakdown of an organized set of connections and adjacencies, deranges a normally regulated flow of communication and feedback (=/= solidarity) }--> thermodynamic framework

anomie (used to be) a celebrated passage is when the individual worker is no longer the living cell moved by continual contact with neighboring cells (=/= now in late liberal capitalism anomie is the mode of labor)

anomie (in thermodynamic framework) describes a statistical distribution of elements in which insufficient contact or adjacency prevents the flow of messages our information within the system as a whole. systemwide increase of local zones of dissociation and disintegration <-- Durkheim



(Durkheim was writing at the time of) crisis of social cohesion within a transitional period ==> a systematic response was being shaped (foreshadowed in several of Seurat's major works) -*-*-*--> the making of a society whose effective unity was founded on the ubiquity of *spectacular consumption through mass media and technologies of illusion*
if *religion* was the key “collective representation” (in Durkheim premodern mechanical solidarity) --> *spectacle* was to become the primary simulation of cohesion and unification within 20th century modernity****
--> (Debord:) capitalism's solidarity: unity of subjects in their very separatedness


(Crary >) Seurat's entire visual output: [systematic movement between:]
•large engineered representation of social collectivities (~ crowds)
•images of isolation and separation

“[...]the unity of his optical aggregates was always an ephemeral subjective construction that never objectively modified the abstract and segmented status of his dots, so his assembling of provisional social aggregates never alters the obdurately insular character of their individual human character.”

Seurat stakes out a darker and more skeptical position than Durkheim about the possibility of *positive knowledge of “social reality”* --> his works are determined by a sense of **impalpability and evanescence of the social itself**


(what is my “sociology” in my works?)


{ great social catastrophes of the 19th century + accumulated bourgeois anxiety over the disorders of revolution (1848 and 1871) }==> (emergence of French 1890s of) “science” of sociology


let's stop mourning about the earlier model of political theater being displaced by by the modernized forms of spectacle (--> my critic on Kurzgesagt is outdated?)


(for Seurat:) *art work = solicitation of attention*<[...]

[...]ury modernity****
--> (Debord:) capitalism's solidarity: unity of subjects in their very separatedness


(Crary >) Seurat's entire visual output: [systematic movement between:]
•large engineered representation of social collectivities (~ crowds)
•images of isolation and separation

“[...]the unity of his optical aggregates was always an ephemeral subjective construction that never objectively modified the abstract and segmented status of his dots, so his assembling of provisional social aggregates never alters the obdurately insular character of their individual human character.”

Seurat stakes out a darker and more skeptical position than Durkheim about the possibility of *positive knowledge of “social reality”* --> his works are determined by a sense of **impalpability and evanescence of the social itself**


(what is my “sociology” in my works?)


{ great social catastrophes of the 19th century + accumulated bourgeois anxiety over the disorders of revolution (1848 and 1871) }==> (emergence of French 1890s of) “science” of sociology


let's stop mourning about the earlier model of political theater being displaced by by the modernized forms of spectacle (--> my critic on Kurzgesagt is outdated?)


(for Seurat:) *art work = solicitation of attention*

play of attraction and absence (in Sina and Foad's work):
a visual or performative work designed around the cancellation and suspension of what it promises

Seurat --> (Sina and) Foad's obliteration of the scenographic conditions of the work even as he simulates their persistence

Seurat --> my work has always been scenic, positioning its viewers before an apparently stagelike space [without orthogonal guides ==> assemblage of disjunct planner elements]
my (painting before and even more now) mimics a classical theatrical space, and (in play with that) at the same time it establishes an illusory world extending away from the spectator (collapsing that “stage,” dramatically sealing off possible avenues of entry into the work for our eyes) ==?==> a world related to the viewer's own point of view

deliberate archaism
(--> medieval mystery plays)
closed-off antiscenic space --> forms of popular display (shadow figure, puppet theatre,) that only simulate or evoke the “cube” of theatrical space


to be careful with *grid*
[*--stories that the grid tells--*]
(Crary > Krauss:) by its very abstraction, grid conveys one of the basic laws of knowledge: *punctuality* [---> go to apass psychological optics and image of knowledge incorporated in presentation of projects, #workshop on topology] --> the separation of the perceptual screen from that of the “real” world
[*]grid: (19th century) emblem of the infrastructure of vision --> becoming a[...]

[...]rmined by a sense of **impalpability and evanescence of the social itself**


(what is my “sociology” in my works?)


{ great social catastrophes of the 19th century + accumulated bourgeois anxiety over the disorders of revolution (1848 and 1871) }==> (emergence of French 1890s of) “science” of sociology


let's stop mourning about the earlier model of political theater being displaced by by the modernized forms of spectacle (--> my critic on Kurzgesagt is outdated?)


(for Seurat:) *art work = solicitation of attention*

play of attraction and absence (in Sina and Foad's work):
a visual or performative work designed around the cancellation and suspension of what it promises

Seurat --> (Sina and) Foad's obliteration of the scenographic conditions of the work even as he simulates their persistence

Seurat --> my work has always been scenic, positioning its viewers before an apparently stagelike space [without orthogonal guides ==> assemblage of disjunct planner elements]
my (painting before and even more now) mimics a classical theatrical space, and (in play with that) at the same time it establishes an illusory world extending away from the spectator (collapsing that “stage,” dramatically sealing off possible avenues of entry into the work for our eyes) ==?==> a world related to the viewer's own point of view

deliberate archaism
(--> medieval mystery plays)
closed-off antiscenic space --> forms of popular display (shadow figure, puppet theatre,) that only simulate or evoke the “cube” of theatrical space


to be careful with *grid*
[*--stories that the grid tells--*]
(Crary > Krauss:) by its very abstraction, grid conveys one of the basic laws of knowledge: *punctuality* [---> go to apass psychological optics and image of knowledge incorporated in presentation of projects, #workshop on topology] --> the separation of the perceptual screen from that of the “real” world
[*]grid: (19th century) emblem of the infrastructure of vision --> becoming an increasingly insistent and visible feature of neo-impressionist painting
(~/= Crary is hesitant to characterize Seurat's flatness structurally as grid)
-tabular field with rows and columns making impossible a point to point (= punctual) relation between spectator and image

(Martin Jay:) two scopic regimes:
•metric and homogenous tableau loosely synonymous with classical space
•decentered and destabilized perceptual regime with its mobile and embodied observer

the evocation of a scenographic setup in Seurat (Parade de cirque) is a veil over the desiccated, nonhomogenous, and additive construction of the work


frontality and unity of framing (of “primitive” cinema...)


[?do we need to] (in an illusionist [...]

[...]e now) mimics a classical theatrical space, and (in play with that) at the same time it establishes an illusory world extending away from the spectator (collapsing that “stage,” dramatically sealing off possible avenues of entry into the work for our eyes) ==?==> a world related to the viewer's own point of view

deliberate archaism
(--> medieval mystery plays)
closed-off antiscenic space --> forms of popular display (shadow figure, puppet theatre,) that only simulate or evoke the “cube” of theatrical space


to be careful with *grid*
[*--stories that the grid tells--*]
(Crary > Krauss:) by its very abstraction, grid conveys one of the basic laws of knowledge: *punctuality* [---> go to apass psychological optics and image of knowledge incorporated in presentation of projects, #workshop on topology] --> the separation of the perceptual screen from that of the “real” world
[*]grid: (19th century) emblem of the infrastructure of vision --> becoming an increasingly insistent and visible feature of neo-impressionist painting
(~/= Crary is hesitant to characterize Seurat's flatness structurally as grid)
-tabular field with rows and columns making impossible a point to point (= punctual) relation between spectator and image

(Martin Jay:) two scopic regimes:
•metric and homogenous tableau loosely synonymous with classical space
•decentered and destabilized perceptual regime with its mobile and embodied observer

the evocation of a scenographic setup in Seurat (Parade de cirque) is a veil over the desiccated, nonhomogenous, and additive construction of the work


frontality and unity of framing (of “primitive” cinema...)


[?do we need to] (in an illusionist mode) satisfy the principle of unitary organization of the scenic space


(how should you be concerned with [public record] of your intellectual and aesthetic formations?)



Seurat's Parade de cirque =/= Leonardo's Last Supper
(Seurat broke free from Leonardo, and i should from Seurat)

both of these paintings are concerned with the revelation of a mystery:
•Leonardo: the mystery of Christian sacrifice as it coincides with a lucid apprehension of infinite extension
•Seurat: the “mystery” of the disenchanted and quantitative order of capitalist exchange (and its overturning of homogeneity and legibility of space)

witness to:
-holy communion -Leonardo
-rituals intrinsic to modernity -Seurat

in terms of orthogonal illustrated in Leonardo is precisely what Seurat dismantles in Parade de Cirque

the question of value
movement of abstract quantities
(transactional dimensions of Seurat's work)

lost transparency:
how the use of money within modernity transformed the soci[...]

[...]n and resistance of anonymity and distance)
[the problem that all artists have with money --Simmel-->] *a priori equivalence of price (for all commodities) ==> eliminate:
•deliberations and examinations of the buyer
•effects and elucidations of the seller
==> quick and indifferent economic transaction

“selling tickets”: accumulated social experience of separation = *depersonalized exchange* (--> that which many artists are dealing with as a problem)
--Gouz--> [*]capitalism: *disaffection of value* (the libidinal, the intersubjective, the semantic are completely divorced from the economic relation ==> economic sector =/= semantic affective investment)

Seurat's meditation on the emptiness of a modern relation of display and consumption

cost of admission at two different rates:
-Leonardo: head of Jesus at the vanishing point of the window opening onto infinite celestial space (--> regime of signs that possess intrinsic value =/=)
-Seurat: price tag, grid space (--> regime of signs that are symbols of value)


[*]scenic: determined by the position of an (depicted) observer


ubiquity of the subjective experience of “shopping” & its construction as spectacle

‘price tag’: (one of the vanishing points of modernity,) the draining away of the illusion of reference or stability

Poe's stranger itinerary, a paradigmatic articulation of modern loneliness
“at no moment did he see that i watched him. he entered shop after shop, priced nothing, spoke no word, and look at the object with a vacant stare.”

process of circulation and convertibility
simulation inherent in the literal spectacle inseparable from the “semblance”(~ price tag)

(Marx:) ‘price tag’: the symbol of itself
“only fleeting, a reality destined constantly to disappear, to be suspended, not to be count as a definitive realization but always only as an intermediate, mediating realization. [...] it exists, therefore, in so far as it remains in this constant movement [...] its reality is not that it is the price but that it represents it, is its representative--the materially present representative of the price, this of itself, and as such, of the exchange value of commodities.”


(we should ask the question of “symbolism” at each age again and differently)


(Brian Rotman:) an isomorphism (emerged in renaissance) between:
•vanishing point in visual representation
•use of zero in computation
•abstract money in economic exchange

[*]vanishing point: a figure of the coincidence of the transcendent & the empirical
[Panofsky: perspective as symbolic form: perspective in transforming the ‘ousia’ (reality) into ‘phainomenon’ (appearance), seams to reduce the divine to a mere subject matter for human consciousness[...]