[...]sity.

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

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

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

[modes of existence]

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

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

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

[Avital]

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


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


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

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

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

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

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



theory-minded academics have rigorously repudiated----or forgotten poetry. ----> poetic deprogrammmg

cohabitation of two sovereign linguistic attitudes----the grammars and behaviors that we associate with figures of literary performance and philosophical positing

18th century
rise of increasingly more mathematical and symbolic logics
more literary types of discursive formations,


Wordsworth, Rilke, and Keats disavowing Paul de Man?!
Freud without Goethe or Schiller?!
Benjamin off Baudelaire?!
Derrida deprived of Mallarme, Ponge, or Celan?!
Heidegger abandoned by Trakl or Holderlin?!


increasing technicization of critical language


colloquy, soliloquy
they are called to witness distinct regions of being [...]

[...]inist movement, traces in Xiri) --> being alert to how hierarchy shut people up that one don't acknowledge the hierarchies that emerge out of that *{alarm ==> hierarchy}*
•in apass i am trying to remember what my peers are doing, and when i see things i think of them, and they are in my citation network (they are all over ajayeb.net) and i am aware of what they have told me. words they are inventing are in my vocabulary too (that is why i am so energetic calling in Xiri's category change for example “generous suspicion”)
•collective research environment works by networks* (--> a problem with apass)


[*]epistemology = stories knowledges tell


sometimes practices demand:
•exclusive expertise (~ focus)
•extensive scholarship ==> linking and speculating
•attaching unexpected agencies and territories to each other


(better) understanding the mechanisms and affects of inclusion and exclusion in communities of practice
for example in apass (we are dealing with):
•suffer <== mutual incomprehensions
•pain <== heterogeneous knowledge worlds
•anger <== unevenly distributed power
•fatigue <== exposure to intensity
•tension <== different styles of knowing

unacknowledged suffering --(in past and present)@Hoda--> as well as pleasures


(what do you make out of reading your gender material?)


Greek brainwomb


feminism  ~/= feminist theory-->{highly diverse, located in many domains of practices in and out of the university, and understood to be this highly diverse activity}


the talks i have been giving are done by someone with a kind of mind and soul that just makes connections fast. i work orally. the lectures are heavily prepared (and some important ways unprepared in the manner of its performance: all those connections happening during the talk not knowing them beforehand, they happen by the encounter*) and full of cue (سخن رهنما، ايماء، اشارت) and quirk (تزئينات، تناقض گويى، تغيير ناگهانى فکر). my notes and scripting are invisible to my audience, but they are there at work. and it gets people excited. and that's the point. i work with confusion and excitement. i have not been good at laying out groundwork of skills, going to next level and so on. i am working with that feeling of “i am not sure what i am getting, by i think i am getting it”. i also always come back, loop again through the same material, go back to the question we were raising before and ***“watch what is happening to the language”***(Haraway). these are the ways my connections work. artistic and scholarly work works by **modes of attention** [--remember--> your mode of attention (= your mode of abstraction) is doing the foregrounding and the world is not actually built that way. so you mak[...]

[...] --> make us better readers

my excessive use of footnote --> the most decisive indication of the concerns of a text are to be found in its margins & no ‘proper’ starting/ending point for reading

each of my performances/projects reflect on their own status as examples of reading/misreading =/= achieving correct reading

literature: the problem of misreading (=/= the language it uses)
[with De Man]

i have become sensitive to the systematic avoidance of the problem of reading, of the interpretative or hermeneutic moment, in literary analysis and art

all language-use is tropological (~ rhetorical)


catachresis (the misuse of a word) <--fluid--> metaphor (the non-literal application of a word) <--fluid--> metonymy (in which the name of one thing is put for that of another related to it)

readability: the possibility of producing an essential/definitive reading --> closure =/= further interpretation

a language which would perfectly fit my multiple identity--persian consciousness
emboding (belonging to) two bordering cultures: western university and persian tradition of subjectivity
•mixture of English and Farsi
•spontaneous shift of style
•
•


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

learning from academia: committed to excessive rigor + sriousness of purpose

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

(Erikson's) developmental stages characterized by a psychosocial crisis of two conflicting forces: (each stage that came before and that follows has its own ‘crisis’)
[conflictual psychosocial crisis --> virtue ~-> (answers to) existential questions]

-(0-18 months) Trust / Mistrust --> Hope
[Can I trust the world?]
==> what constitutes dangerous situations (in life)
world is undependable, unpredictable, and possibly a dangerous place
[*]trust: syntonic quotient
[*]mistrust: diatonic quotient
--> oral stage

-(2-4 years) Autonomy / Shame-Doubt --> Will
[Is it okay to be me?]
venture out to assert their will ==> learning about environment
lack/excess/ridiculed restriction ==> shame --> doubt (in dealing with, handling problems)
--> anal stage

-(4-5 years) Initiative / Guilt --> Purpose
[Is it okay for me to do, move, and act?]
autonomy + mastery (--> artists who stay at their own autonomy and mastery are fixated at this age)
discourage the pursuit of independent activities ==> guilt about needs and desires
--> phallic stage

---till here we were in the realm of play---

to master trust, autonomy, and industrious skills
(i have mastered ‘trust,’ failed at ‘autonomy,’ and overdosing ‘industrious skills’)

-(5-12 years) Industry / Inferiority --> Competence
[Can I make it in the[...]

[...]the case of lonliness)

[title]
thousend and one questions

dark answers

why aesthetics of cooking and feeding new in art doesn't work in iran?



negah dogane نگاه دوگانه
[duality] dual perspective: if it is not X then it is Y (=/= X)

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

savad سواد = list, siahe, سیاهه, marginal note

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

being ambivalent (disinterest): (masking anxiety and insecuruty,) gaurding oneself against disapointment, defensive alufeness

ethos of “resistence” --> moral authority --> moral supeiority movement

narcissism (of the artist) as part of a process (of building something creative)
•interiorizing things [is part of narcissism]
•thinking about things and self's problems --> writer's memoir
low self esteem ==> building up

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

“nothing is more important in the world than the old ones” [?!]


liberation =/= freedom
•when it comes to liberation (those liberating actions that someone does, ex: women scarf in Iran, etc.), as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else, you just support it
liberation has to do a lot with style, or changing of style
•freesom is totally another thing, much more complicated, sometimes is in the opposite direction of liberation
(i think i might be committed to the freedom of Iranians, not their liberation...)



takhlie ehsas (feelings) =/= takhlie hayajan (emotions ~-> behaiviour)


تعميم
generalization ta'mim --> sign of depression
or --Borges--> a way of abstracttion by forgeting (certain) differences = thinking


the fable of “alem-e bi amal = zanbur-e bi asal” عالم بی عمل، زنبور بی‌عسل
-this kind of علم ‘knowing’ or knowledge refer to a more personal or subjective understanding of a given problem برداشت
-has nothing to do with scientific knowledge


rubah-palangi-e falak روبه پلنگی فلک
trick-rage of nature
farib (فریب deep in the view of Nezami regarding nature and his own work)
hendu (هندو most used insult word in Nezami)

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

•*neurotic: makes a house, doesn't show it to anyone, lives in it alone happy [--> disability to adapt to reality; (neurosis is a descriptive term for ‘hidden psychological mechanisms’ =/= behavior); a form of dissociation: anxiety, hysteria, phobia, repetition, fantasizing, negativity, cynicism, perfectionism,]
◦compulsive need =/= genuine interest in the world
◦neurotic caretaker ==> child develops basic anxiety ==> (imagined) idealized self-image; solution of basic conflict:
◾تسليم compliance --> goodness, love
◾سلطه aggressiveness --> strength[...]

[...]ctively existing taxonomies (+ ‘data’ manually gathered from individuals to ‘fit’ those categories) and thus summon [a term with magical implications purposefully employed here] a population into being
-McClanahan

census ==> statistics: factish object: hybrid and unstable (possibly inaccurate) yet fetishised and faith-based technologies that possess the ability to transform (the individual parts of social and cultural groups into a sacred somatic whole [~ people/nation])--> biopolitics
-can art succeed in transforming such a ‘whole’ into free and autonomous individual beings?

references to panopticon society
(?which camera angles suggest) naturalization of surveillance culture



[title]
*observational aesthetic* <== convergences of contemporary art and anthropology

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

[ajayeb -->] concept or theory --> (a training in) absorption + attention + framing =/= truth effect

[title]
Whatever Professor

[why apass asked me to do their website's] indexing: (a shrewd and thoughtful creativity in) the first interpretation of a content's body =/= presuming a standard taxonomic form
==>
•surprises
•styles of critical thought generates power in twists of voice and craft
•
allows one please to demonstrate the wonder
“We ask our readers to perform the jamb when language overruns the mental breathing that reading entails.” (Lepselter)
•or, nothing disappears --> You breathe the air you're given. (“I felt ripples from a rape in the seventeenth century, behind a barn somewhere in Romania, where generations later my bitter grandmother disparaged her children without knowing why.”)
•or, words sediment next to something laid low
•or, (index as in) to point sideways --> shifter's only meaning is the object it happens to point to
•drawing figures, hooks hooks, asterisks
•or, placing what's structural, technical, transferential, pulped, leaking, intense
{things: an integrated thin layer to epitomize and abstract in new ways how people are hooked up with their technologies; parsing and criss-crossing some of the built-in categories and new needs of the people who are using it;}


things that do the reading, editing, assembling

*every edit ==> (set off a cascade of:)
•word falls
•Rubik's Cubes
•tropes
•infrastructures
•genres
•rhymes
•off-rhymes
•tonal flips
•half-steps

[compositional listening]
one reads aloud + the others *listening compositionally*

#writing exercise:
following out the impact of things (words, thoughts, people, objects, ideas, worlds) in hundred-word units

theoretical reflections get folded into the analytic, observational, and transfere[...]

[...] stoicism: “detachment ==> clear thinking”
psychological independence <== *stoicism* (<~~)--> causality =/= anxiety

philosophy shows many ‘theories about causality = ways to reduce anxiety’ --Despret--> our experience sometimes require us *to go farther than the instrumental (causal)* and to discover a place where disorder may be reestablished in the movement and contradiction

*anecdotic causality*
([in apass we constantly do] the practice of using) [*]anecdote: expressive causalities*
anecdote: the intersection between the artist (patient) and feedback (therapist) --> circular causality --> (helps the feedbacker or therapist) *to understand and create another way of thinking about disorder and confusion*


stoic distinction: event which are dependent on one's *will* =/= events which are in the realm of one's *desires* (one which one has no control)
--> closely related to the (Seligman's) *causal attribution: a theory of contingent causality affecting the subject in her or his interpretation*

•نسبت دادن attribution =/= explanation (behavior assigned to its cause) =/= inference (quality/attribute assigned to the agent's observed behavior)
◦can we do without *explanatory style*? (a person's causal dimensions of stability and globality) --> past dealing (optimism, pessimism, etc.)
◦can we do without *locus of control*? (a person's locus conceptualized as internal) --> future dealing (fate, hope, etc.)

stoic philosophy ==resulting==> therapy
([Holakouee's] stoic conception of) ****therapy: it is not the events which make people suffer but rather the perception they have of the events****


Aristotle ==> totality of causal explanation of the event
his theory of four causes [material, efficient, formal, final] is limited by the eternal relation between the subject (the creator) and the object (the created)r /> •[(let's say) Aristotle is creating an] anecdotic causality: the search for a remote event, apparently insignificant, which has as much impact as the material event which is efficient, formal, or final

Antique law --> effort to reduce the event to an equation ==permit==> determination of the responsibility: the primary cause ==> to reduce the overwhelming richness of reality in movement
--> in obsessional perspective of scientific research: reduce the quantity of information to make the reality clearer (more coherent) --> (a series of signs in hermeneutical perspective ==permit==>) “the image (the event) =/= the background (the sum of the events)”

(anecdote ~=) myth: an illustrative and contradictory example --> the defense against anxiety (in reality's confusion) : the categorizing of opposites in order to establish orderliness in the world of a search for causes [<-- which is a fable]
==> *the event (at the absence of significance of[...]

[...]a verse interpolated into a liturgical text عبادات to embellish or amplify its meaning

language --> material-semiotic flesh

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

oneiros
oneiric


technical axis  |__
                        /   mythical axis
    textual axis


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

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

(metaphysical fatigue)

***patience =/= passivity***

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

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


(Haraway's three webs of discourse:)
1. cultural studies: a set of discourses about the (irreducible specificity of) apparatus of bodily/cultural production (=/= comparative culture studies)
2. feminist theory/project: view from the marked bodies (in stories, discourses, practices), where *the description of the situation is never self-evident* + need for an elsewhere
3. science studies: technologies for establishing matters of facts, ‘technoscience =/= science and technology’, artifacts with politics, science as practice + culture


can't cradle
one person can build up a large repertoire of string figures on a single pair of hands --> the figures can be passed back and forth on the hands of several players
--> *embodied analytical skils* [<-- my goal im apass]
--> makin[...]

[...]enabled) disappearance of long-distance what happens to the ‘elsewhere’ calling to the schizobody?

how our pretechnological ears were (trained) before the telephone?

the “call” comes from me and from beyond and over me.

Telephonics coils itself around a concept of “being there” supported by the recognition that contact has been broken. Still, the break is never clean, just as contact was never continuous. The entire metaphysics of identity, presence and locality is scrambled, bringing with it a certain historical mutation in the relationship of the “self’ to other, to the irreducible precedence, as Derrida puts it in ‘Memoires,’ of the other. The other calls; you answer. But “you” have not yet been constituted, gathered or pulled together prior to the call.

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

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

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

modeling different styles of irony

(what are we) telehearing (?)


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


“We are hypnotized things suffering from positive and from negative hallucinations, that is, we see what is not there and often w[...]

[...]h gathering and hunting ways of life produced genders and citizens.)
•tool-weapon equation in masculinist scientific narratives


as careful scrutiny of wonders and marvels becomes a mainstay in European intellectual life, 17th century natural philosophers began to understand *wonder, *curiosity, and *attention as cloesly aligned and mutually defining.

epistemological beast fable

unnatural history

knowledge-making practices of other times and places

tracing the web of horror and delight

Serres reminds us the beast fable tradition is as much about biomimicry as anthropomorphizing.

finding ways of “going-on together” (Verran)

“by experience and by affinity, some of us begin not with Pasteur, but with the monster, the outcast” (S. Leigh Star)

(ajayeb's) (politics of) administering discrete objects ----(number sys)

(why should we engage in refiguration?)
(there are always a) multitude of agencies unfolding as the world is continuously reconfigured (=/= to explain away: when multiple objects are collapsed into one.)
-“Within this dynamic world it is impossible to imagine that one single story or one narrative style can capture all of the liveliness and exuberance; ***we need to deploy multiple stories about agency. Some meticulously empirical, some imaginative. Some on the quantum scale, some on the people scale. Different agential narratives enable different ways of responding and relating.” (Kenney)

postcolonial moments: “occasions for theorizing, for telling differences and samenesses in new ways” (Verran)


#to create ‘aerating’ (tahviyeh تهویه) in ajayeb, this includes:
/ crafting translations with ontological traction (enghebaz انقباض)
/ building empirical tools that make ajayeb's translation-work visible {#pop-up book}
/ translation --> *reconfigure sameness and difference*
/ staying with linguistic differences (in ajayeb) is a way of investigating the ontological commitments embedded in language.
◽ontological --> worlding --> how language participates in shaping our lived worlds in some ways and not others.*** “it is not common for speakers of a language to examine what type of material objects their language commits them to. [this also my question in iranian mystic mix,] rather the difference will be to notice as difficulty in translation.” (Verran)

(for me working on ajayeb is) **lingering in the space of difficult translations**
==> making recourse (motevasel shodan be متوسل شدن به) to a *world of common referents* (space, time, and matter)

[to continue thinking with Verran] on *durations*, *extensions*, and *resistances* (in ajayeb's case)
these three foundation objects need not to be saddled with the history of Western metaphy[...]

[...]Attention - Wonder in Feminist Theory and Scientific Practice 2013)

(Margulis's) holobiont: multicellular eukaryotes plus their colonies of persistent symbionts


ajayeb's craft and undisciplined tradition can be called empirical, it is an example of an archival research (done by historian.) i wan to highlight the aesthetic quality of this activity.
*aesthetics: how elements are arranged together, how they are composed, how they are brought into relation in the space of a text (Kenney > Latour, Stengers, Bellacasa) (--> La Guin's bag, bundle) }--> rigs
**aesthetics are political because they do consequential relational work**

novels, poetry, feminist theory, speculative fiction, bestiary list categories--these genres of composition *gather together* and *stage* their “matters of care” in ways that perform relations between things and teach their readers to inhabit sometimes unfamiliar, agential world. they are practices of sf worlding.

fiction ==> attitude --> holds things

(emphasis on) worlds that come together through dispersal (vofur وفور), induction (makesh مکش), volatility (farar فرّار), toxicity, drift,

the power that comes with ‘other’ (time/place of) styles of composing

(*bestiary is agential world*, that's why it is so interesting when you are available to it as a child. i am drawn to it --> agency bestiary sets to betray the anthropocentric binary: “active human =/= passive nature”)
(how to tell?) faithful and fantastic stories ==> better companion species

*a shift in humanities scholarship
(feminist science studies, the post humanities, the ecological humanities, animal studies, queer theory,) humanities scholars have represented their matters of care with an aesthetic (and therefore political) commitment to narrating stories with an emphasis on the relationality among agencies, forces, phenomena, and entities usually kept separate, in the background, or out of the story altogether (lde a Bellacasa)
--> redistribution of agencies
political stake ==> aesthetic tactics

poet laureates of queer animacies
“malek-o-sho'ara-e atefiate mahsus-e edrakat-e zende” (ملک الشعرا عاطفیات محسوس ادراکات زنده)

(animacy: Usually, animacy has to do with how alive or how sentient a noun is. In general, personal pronouns have the highest animacy, the first-person being the highest among them. Other humans follow them, and animals, plants, natural forces such as winds, concrete things, and abstract things follow in this order; however, according to the spiritual beliefs of the people whose language possesses an animacy hierarchy, deities, spirits, or certain types of animal or plant may be ranked very highly in the hierarchy.)

**animacy stories --> multitude of agencies
(what are the contemporar[...]

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

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

technologies of the literal

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

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

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


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

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


ajayeb: writing technologies of the 12th century Iran

plain style

soing naked as a sign

dress and address

ecology of writing technologies


(Katie King:) writing technologies: ideologies layered in time and space * under which writing has been divided [also cannot be divided] from other generations of cultural meaning

myriad hybrid forms, commingling in material and ideological proliferations
(with Katie King's interest in women's writing technologies)

“presentist”: a practice of classification and categorization to access pasts

continuities and local discontinuities --> is ‘continuity’ (always) a universal abstraction?**

<br /> relative universalization

prescrptions for speech and silence


what is gained and what is lost when “tidying up the archive”? (a german problem)

prescriptions for speech and silence

“politeness phenomena”

‘plain speech’ for Quakers: rejection of ‘idle’ speech. preaching was another version of sacrificing seld-will, and was appropriate speech.
public preaching in particular was also a challenge to social relations and interaction --> a challenge to gender, speaking public was a cultural humiliation for individual women --> the Quaker women practiced preaching as a personal humiliation instrumental to their own salvation [! in a weird way i also did this to my self] #becoming woman-->{a liquefying aspect: “womanhood” was used metaphorically to identify those who could not preach, the surrender of (male) authority to God by men was “female”
•inhibiting woman's prophetic agencies
[...]

[...]ence


what is gained and what is lost when “tidying up the archive”? (a german problem)

prescriptions for speech and silence

“politeness phenomena”

‘plain speech’ for Quakers: rejection of ‘idle’ speech. preaching was another version of sacrificing seld-will, and was appropriate speech.
public preaching in particular was also a challenge to social relations and interaction --> a challenge to gender, speaking public was a cultural humiliation for individual women --> the Quaker women practiced preaching as a personal humiliation instrumental to their own salvation [! in a weird way i also did this to my self] #becoming woman-->{a liquefying aspect: “womanhood” was used metaphorically to identify those who could not preach, the surrender of (male) authority to God by men was “female”
•inhibiting woman's prophetic agencies
•“lack of discipline” becomes discipline --!--> forms of discipline that appear “undisciplined” or out of control

(Katie King > Mack:) “Quakers not only bathed in a sea of polymorphous sipritual nature and eroticism; they occasionally wrote as if they had succeeded in floating above gender altogether”

“going naked as a sign” (and Quaker's “plain style”) --> Tasavof, ajayeb, and communication strategies of the so-called new science of the same time (of Quakers)
‘nakedness’ was simultaneously literally his own, a figure of the world, an example of many others, the abstract principle, and the essential truth of the one addressed
-simplicity, economy, and plainness; to reject all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style


preferring language of artisans, countrymen, merchants, of wits and scholars


How sin is strengthened 1657
Milk for babes 1661
A message from the spirit of truth 1658


realized eschatology

انا الحق, an-al-hagh
(Damrosch:) the performance of the sign thus entailed a doubly negative aspect: in the person exhibiting it, a conviction of fulfilling a divine mandate in opposition to personal self-interest; and in those who witnessed it, an offense to ordinary social standards that actually served to authenticate it.
*the function of the sign was to bear prophetic witness rather than to get practical results; it fulfilled its purpose simply by being performed*
#shath, shathiat ==> tazkirat, --->{ what the saints of Tasavof (reported by Attar-{his “virtual witnessing” of “awliya” اولیا as a “realized"}, Quakers [as illegal nonconformist sect]) put together was their own writing technology infrastructure** ==> **routinization of charisma** <-- organizational structure ["advices and queries” نفحات الانس nafahat ~-> rationalized systematic intellectualizations]}

pattern of suffering that the believer literally and personally relive[...]

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


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

oratory

tension between dedication and prevarication (zaban bazi زبان بازی)

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


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


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

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


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

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

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

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

(what are the) stickiness of ajayeb's being (?) or, in which affective economy they are ‘passed around’? [social goods, accumulating affects, contagious مسرى? it tends to pick up whatever comes ne[...]

[...] is delightful

(often with animals) the affective differentiation ==(basis of)==> (an essentially) moral economy


cheerfulness is the most communicative of emotions (♥ Ahmed)

(Ahmed's take on) loving (happily): knowing the peculiarity of a loved other's likes and dislikes, an intimacy with what the other likes and is given --> on conditions that such likes do not take us outside a *shared horizon*


***who/what introduces what feelings to whom?***

‘question of power' = do you go along with it?

sometimes the Iranian orientation is toward maximal comfort of the others
(maintaining) ‘comfort' = (your or some) bodies “go along with it”


bond-->{ affect ==> we search for an object }


...certain objects already circulate as socila goods before we “happen” upon them --> we do not just find happy objects anywhere (--> how happy objects are found in Tasavof? located, lost, transported, sold, advertised, criticized, etc.) *happy objects point us somewhere, a “where” from which we expect so much (--> happy objects of Tasavof [or HOT] {Qur'an, khezr, woman, poetry, .../ قرآن / خضر / زن / شعر}-->their sense of values, practice, styles, and aspirations; where do they point Iranians? beyond, Zolmat, animal, shadow, everyday objects, etc. what are the feelings involving the “points” of alignment wuth these objects?) ~~--> relocation of expectations:
•from beyond to earth
•from global to local
•from future to now
•

in situations where feelings are shared or are in common (which is usually the case in the environments that I am involved with,) how do I usually play a role? ==> (re)location of responsibility

self-exclusion

to make Iran or India or Germany happy “in bed”

(@Sina) *what ever there is in the hear and now, it does not mean you do not have to rebel or not get into trouble.

idiosyncratic likes (or dislikes) =/= jouissance

Ahmed reading many narratives of freedom, in which an indifference is “directed” as the apparent gift of freedom (, father becomes indifferent to what her daughter does as long as it makes her happy) --> the unhappy objects of difference

fantasies of proximity (in sense8 TV series) --> if only we could be closer, we would be as one
the happiness of the characters of sense8 is the promise of “the one”

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

how to learn to read the discursive practices of being of ajayeb? the ways each being proposes its own (or another's) changing geometry and topology, their boundary-drawing practices, their differential productions, and how each being makes sense of its world
-(the authors and beings of ajayeb,) what are their capacity to discern the reality of their (relational) nature?
-[...]

[...]intermediaty positions between so-calles reading and writing --> string records --> numerical accounts or maps or... ==> histories and narratives

my research on ajayeb in apass as a practice is about *disassembling and reordering classifications we use to access pasts*


the excursion i did in Vladmir's block was somehow about examining sites of implicitly or explicitly knowledge production in commercialized forms
museum, TV documentry as a metaphor {a richly contaminated set of crafty metaphors and realities} and narrative frame, a momentary melding of pastpresents in imaginative reenactment --> economic globalization figuring in artistic/academic capitalism
(--> ajayeb is also of this kind,) *site of heritage* culture as promoting particular versions of history, nation, science, art, and religion*** --> (the excursion made me) with ajayeb to be careful with ‘the commerce with global knowledge production’ --(what is at stake)--> structure of pasts, peoples, and sensation
*heritage culture ==(impress)==> public histories* --> appropriation of national and personal identities; today (specially in university) no one is “immune from governing pressures of heritage culture or the impression of corporate management assumptions, styles, funding requirements, and money-making imperatives in enterprise culture” (Katie King > Morley & Robins) [i can imagine apass is struggling with this specially in Brussels]
(@Vera's position as a museum tour guide, exploitations of the interpreter/reenactors, who are promised semiprofessional recognition within social historical practice but instead end up as engineers of a “feel good” atmosphere for tourism)
(Katie King > Slaughter & Leslie) *global market:
•fields “close to the market” --(reguire)--> proucts
•fields “peripheral to the market” --(are pushed to)--> pedagogy and public service
(sometimes virtually indistinguishable:) impulse to democratize ~=? commodify knowledge
-they model for museum goers as:
◦reenactors
◦shadows
◦witnesses
◦a play at being “there”:
◾on set
◾on site
◾in that past
◾in a past:
◽mentally enacting
◽reenacting
◽experimenting
◽speculating
◽trying to find evidence for various pastpresents


TV camera: like a historical source, arbitrarily selects what it chooses to show, never lies and never understands (Kopkins)

TV documentry's “distributed agencies”: neither [director and screenwriter] can claim priority without wraping a description of these productive processes, and neither can make the TV product without the essential interaction of many people's hands, minds, tools, skills, tasks, objects, and infrastructures --> these distributed agencies (with problems and possibilities) are also necessary in art research ([Katie King:] and [...]

[...]n(?)--> embodying the dilemma and work of the witness


...wheels of thinking turn slowly for some of us


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

*invocation = directly addressing the thing creates a sense of immediacy and of connection
*thou, with its suggestion of[...]

[...]>

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

with Jassem and Mia

Norway ~= (a breakable) illusion --> that somebody is living it
green competition and technopositivist hubris

question of topology (in dream)
(topology: those qualities that remain invariant after transformation --> persistent forms)

fantastic peasant

a piece of hanging cloth that suggests horrors to receptacle receiving eyes


•landscape --> sounds
•poems
•divisions in Norway (<== second world war)
•sami cultural disappearance
◦domestic violence
◦racism
◦refugee geopolitics
•seagull, fish, salmon farming
•interviews
•doom --> delirium, murder, hallucination, whispering,
•ruin (of signs)
•entropy (=/=? emergence)
•

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

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

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



--performance--
rotating styles of: folkloric ballads, existential meditation, doomsday rant, elegiac oration, children lullabies --into--> a singular blast of an account of a devastated space --mobilizing--> legend, omen, song, myth, fairy tale, mutated war cry
[these potent signs are sneaking in the work “stranger within,” it is not just a historical dreamscape]
-the masked actors on stage have taken a venom (becoming faceless engravers) to cross into the next level of temporal experience --> ???
-muted rage and ecstasy indeterminacy positioned as creeping towards the midnight of moving & no longer moving... (as human? --> conflicting ways of being human; to acknowledge human & violence;)
<br />
--travel--
visiting an alchemy of domestic proclamations (homes) with its own lethal consortiums of drives (conversations); visiting sites of pure participation, the most savage, the most modern, creating a respond characterized as both ultra-alertness and insomnia of anticipation (acts by which the future can be nailed down) ==> becoming a *faceless engraver* (to remain fugitive and errant --> a course of action supposing a discontinuity that must be overcome in order to define a trajectory)
(Jassem and Mia are capable of being) bodies fully engaged in perspectival communication and battles of will, provided with affect and capacities, capable of knowing different things, types of relations they entered into =/=? poltergeist



--research--

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

•unstable space
•process ~= performance ~= meeting -->{
◦dinner --> *transaction* (what did you learn from [...]

[...]n? --> conflicting ways of being human; to acknowledge human & violence;)


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



--research--

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

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


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


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


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


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

(not to make the performance mimetic)?
(but make it mnemonic --> designed to aid the memory)?
(but not anticipatory ==> omen)



for Jassem and Mia:
•what is the sign of danger?
•what is the sign of death?
•what is the sign of transformation of perspective (=/= change of perspective)?
•


chronically unstable bodies (--> mesopotamian)
anthropomorphism manifest in distorted corporeal forms and appendages ضميمه

a world conceived of inherently volatile (bodies?) --> site of subjectivity

intentional activation (?) --> affective capacities (in...?)

trap --> operate along scale

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

entropy <--> atrophy
•entropy: energy no longer available for doing mechanical work (--> random ~=? violence)
•atrophy: the material, sensory labor of attending to loss, ***labor of looking at damage***
wasting away; withering; decrease in size caused by disuse
the feeling of being in the middle of something dirty, inevi[...]

[...]ury to imagine) *the embrace of life that the devil urges in binary opposition to that of the good*
--> Devil interfering with the most intimate communications with the Divine
-how does one really know who is speaking when prayer is returned?

[for] the demonologists of the 15th and 16th century --> “God must exist because Satan is right in front of me!” : reality of witches ==> Satan
Institoris, Sprenger, Johannes Nider,
the name of the witch ~=> sacrilegious and inhuman deeds (subject to verification)

*inquisitors believed that what was reported to them was possible* (still they desired proof) <== interweaving of learned demonology into the fabric of a dominant theology (<-- sovereignty of God ratified primarily through the worldly evidence of Satan) + invisibility of the spiritual world was expressed as an essential given

{for the inquisitor (witch hunter) it was never enough to simply “believe” <==> a narrative must be produced that at least partially satisfied the demands of evidence}--> *interrogation under torture = an experimental form of knowing in crisis*

truth value of a nonsensical confession made sensible --> human belief, action, and social practices

ethnographic style of early French ethnographers --> **learning truth from lie** was essential to representing the “primitive” reality in order to interpret it in its true picture
-Marcel Griaule's approach to fieldwork: “The crime is the fact, the guilty party the interlocutor, and accomplices are all the members of this society. [...]the abundance of pieces of evidence serving to convict appear to facilitate the inquest, but in reality they guide it into labyrinths--labyrinths that are often organized. [...]The inquest must be treated like a strategic operation.”
--> nonsense to be mastered had shifted from the demonic, incredible forces at play for the inquisitor to the misguided tall tales of the native interlocutor [--> same mistake that Federici does in her book Caliban and the Witch. Federici, in search of the manifestations of misogyny, aggressively frames the scene of a feminist encounter with witch-hunt as a kind of antagonistic trial of social organization of the Middle Ages in transition to early capitalism... a mode of attention that is equally didactic and forensic as the witch inquisitors]

recognition of the struggle that lay at the heart of raising testimony to the status of the “really real” --Avital--> Griaule aggressively frames the scene of ethnographic encounter itself as a kind of antagonistic trial (whereby the ghosts and gods of the natives are forced out of the shadows and made concretely apparent to the senses of the anthropologist)
*fieldwork ==> knowledge of hauntings that is itself haunted*

imaginative result of “I-witnessing”

*paradoxical necessity of an expressive element within an objective t[...]

[...]he 16h century
dreamtime of the witch


•Durer, Baldung, Cranach, artists at the dawn of the Reformation sought to represent the void as a figure
•strategies by which Expressionist painting sought to externalize states of mind

(Baxstrom + Meyers emphasizing) how Häxan *corresponds with a variety of traditions* without seeking to assimilate the film fully within one over another



stillness and fixity of tableau-like shot composition (Dreyer, Murnau, Christensen) ==> (the affect of) suffocating organization

Deleuze summary of Expressionism: play of light and darkness, with the mixture of the two producing an effect that suggests either falling into the black hole or ascending towards the light <-- *face* makes this affective power mobile

•(in Murnau) tableau --> frees the viewer for introspection regarding nature in a kind of emotional, spiritual release =/= close-up (disruptive pathos)
•(in Häxan) tableau --> grounds the uncontrollable forces at work on the faces of those confronted by the power of the witch (constituting a shot that is intensive =/= introspective)


Häxan film --> progressive unfolding of the material world through the style of a lecture
-exploration of the wonders and “errors” of the past (with near-messianic belief in the perfectibility of man)
magnified form of realist cinema + rooted in a naturalist impulse --> Christensen's witch is not only here now, it has always been here: “witch = a figure of nature”
-Häxan begins with woodcuts, drawings, and paintings that originate from *an act of touch* ==> haptic vision ==> to present figurative cliched givens ==> establish the ground
-seizes (the audience) and is seized (by the witch)
-seeing and touching *virtual beings* (such as devils)
--> rigorously logical structure + expressing the tangible singularity of the power of the witch

*(from) tales --to--> theology --to--> diagnosis*


“advancement” of natural knowledge <--> demonology


witch: a viral character


witch hunters's trial by water *is not a “trial” but rather an experiment* (to identify evidence of evil's presence---in the absence of direct unmotivated proof) --operating--> though a form of non-knowledge <-- mastery of nonsense
= ***a deep appreciation of (that might seem misguided to us):
•cause-and-effect relations
•forces at work in the natural world
(=/= indifference to the truth, retreat into superstition)
~
[these] cases suggestive of and empirically linked to general laws. the case said something about the world, and once a case was established, it would spread like a contagion (=/= proof of misogy or genocide as Federici asserts)



Flaherty ==> a certain truth regarding the total so[...]

[...]the question of empirical certainty and reenactment haunts the status of the film as evidence

*acting the ideal type breathes life into the emptied, cliched figure* :
•Christensenrelying on the fact that the truth of the witch will take its most visible form by acting her out mimetically (~= Christensen chooses to “play” satan using his idiom to breathe life into his witch)
•Flaherty knew that the visceral force of Nanook of the North depended on the felicity of his Inuit interlocutors reenacting themselves




Christensen seems to be offering a cure for the *secularized christian blindness* at the heart of *positivist human science* --> his audience is pulled in “through a lens of science =/= as misguided inquisitors”


working with *figurative givens of witches and demons* --formulate--> visual thesis (about uncanny, mobile power)

etchings into a material
carving outlines into the image of figures that have been hiding in plain sight


beautifully composed tableau of the torture chamber
static plane of the tableau =/= sense depth signify an open or free space

totality of (depicted) violence <--> composed alterity of the scene's stylistic correspondence between accused and inquisitor

(Christensen's method of) oscillating rhythm between tableau and face
-suppressing perspective and depth of field in favor of a continuous affective movement as expressed in the face
--Baxstrom--> Häxan is not grounded in a setting here; it is grounded in the forms of life present in the shot

sense of corporeal alienation from herself --> inhabit a script not her own --> critical to the “success” of witchcraft confessions

witch stereotype:
•Wild Ride
•pact with the Devil solemnized through sexual intercourse-
•cannibalism
•دیگ cauldron as the locus of the rite
•*massed, coordinated, female nature of witchcraft*


judicial machinery of a witch trial required evidence of criminal acts that (by definition) could not be witnessed


in Häxan
-the power of cinema to witness exceeds that of the witch hunter
-what it does is “worse” than rigging the truth --> it aligns itself (not with a concept of truth or the real but) with the power of the witch


(Häxan and many criminal story films) works through instruments of knowing rooted in the *dynamics of the confession*
#ajayeb storytelling

...clumsily rendered, the wriggling demons reflect an interesting set of variations to the witch stereotype, both ontologically and visually
(Maria giving birth to demon children)


Thomas Aquinas's theorization of the *virtual bodies* (of angels)
-angels do not need bodies for their sake but for ours --> unnatu[...]

[...]theology (in a world where the trappings of belief are everywhere but there is no incontrovertibly visible evidence of god's...)


demonologists of the 15th and 16th century were not sure about:
god
man
witch: the abyss between god and man = a kind of proof, a reassurance that the evil of the world can be explained (through the various iterations of satan's power)

demonologist --> “God must exist because Satan is right in front ot me!”


***desire to believe =/= (simple) belief***
•['desire to believe’ and ‘belief'] were not the same during the time of the witch craze
•were not the same in the fast-evolving discourses of the human sciences of the 19th century and early 20th century
•are not the same today


@apass:
1. the general tendency to remain an artist ~ a myth, an effect, a warrior
2. to make anomaly the law عمومیت استثنا


hearing the name of the witch --> subject to stict verification
demonologists and inquisitors at this time desired proof <-- viral proliferation of the witch came to provide that proof

***interrogation under torture = an experimental form of knowing in crisis*** [#styles of knowing]
confession -->{ *status of witnessing = a form of truth* }~-> Boyle's New Experiments 1660 revolutionized practical experimental procedures in the laboratory (for gernerations to come...)
•experiments such as the trial by water demonstrates a deep (if not misguided) *appreciation of cause-and-effect relations* relative to the invisible forces at work in the natural world (=/= indifference to the truth, retreat into superstition) ~=> rendering of such procedures in expressive works of *art* (indispensable to nascent protoscience --today--> an essential element of science's ability to express truth)


_+***'`~~/!=-~>

***the logic of gc of gathering evidence***
(fundamental assumption of anthropology:)
[asserted by Levy-Bruhl:] ontological difference between the nonsensical world of “primitives” and the science of Western research ==> *“natives” could not (or would not) produce a “proper” explanation of the forces around them or their own beliefs and motivations in relation to these forces* (==> testimony + experience became essential tools for ethnographers)
--> ***encounter between researcher and subject*** [was never that of good faith intercultural sharing] ==constituted==> a series of severe tests (by which the researcher could gather necessary empirical evidence in order to make a felicitous truth statement regarding what was “really” at play)
}--> the nonsense to be mastered shifted from the demonic (~ incredible forces at play for the inquisitor ديوى) --to--> ديوانه the misguided tall tales fo the native
---->{this is relevant for artistic research environment, en[...]

[...] retreat into superstition) ~=> rendering of such procedures in expressive works of *art* (indispensable to nascent protoscience --today--> an essential element of science's ability to express truth)


_+***'`~~/!=-~>

***the logic of gathering evidence***
(fundamental assumption of anthropology:)
[asserted by Levy-Bruhl:] ontological difference between the nonsensical world of “primitives” and the science of Western research ==> *“natives” could not (or would not) produce a “proper” explanation of the forces around them or their own beliefs and motivations in relation to these forces* (==> testimony + experience became essential tools for ethnographers)
--> ***encounter between researcher and subject*** [was never that of good faith intercultural sharing] ==constituted==> a series of severe tests (by which the researcher could gather necessary empirical evidence in order to make a felicitous truth statement regarding what was “really” at play)
}--> the nonsense to be mastered shifted from the demonic (~ incredible forces at play for the inquisitor ديوى) --to--> ديوانه the misguided tall tales fo the native
---->{this is relevant for artistic research environment, encounter/friction between different styles of knowing
#feedback: mastering the nonsense of the other artist-researcher
@apass, research presentation: misguided tall tales artists tell themselves}

[#feedback as passion]
Avital --> a passion or experience without mastery, without subjectivity, testimony, as passion, always renders itself vulnerable to doubt
([?can we think of] artistic feedback as a) *scene of ethnographic encounter* --> a kind of *antagonistic trial* (whereby the ghosts and gods of the natives are forced out of the shadows and made concretely apparent to the senses of the ethnographer)
--> (in this context) fieldwork ==> knowledge of hauntings + other nonsense that is itself haunted ~-> what gives testimony its power of fact {--Derrida--> if testimony truly resolves as certainty or mere information, it would lose its function as testimony --> testimony must allow itself to be haunted}--> [*]testimony: visualization of what cannot normally be seen

[my misunderstanding of ethnography ==> my approach to giving and receiving feedback --> the workshop i gave ‘little fables of practice'] *(your) ‘fact’ must allow itself to be parasitized by precisely what it excludes from its inner depths, of being a fable*

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

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

[...]s and involvement of human-animal in multiple agencies, normal stories of becoming human, ]
-which animals are regarded as transgressive and ambiguous in Tehran? and which aren't?
-resisting any openness to the idea of feral animal that was expressed in my family, a meaningful discomfort, actually entails the fear of finding that we are not so different from animals, within the violent landscape of contemporary tehran.
-dust. fixation on clearing the dust out

this is one pattern of exchange.

(another interference:)
*In Pinocchio we have the excellent cooperation between the cat and the fox, who are forming a cunning and successful participatory alliance to trick Pinocchio: the hybrid-robot who doesn't understand his own potentialities and wants to be so-called human, the animal-betrayer. the fact that he can be tricked by the cat/fox is what making him human.
•and Geppetto, oh my god, (he is Yunnos/Jonah?) working on a project inside the fish, colloquial activity and asceticism registered with the fish interiority. Geppetto-pop is refound or saved? by the non-truth seeking robot! --> breaking his self-surveillance as a characterization of pictorial objectivism, a form of moral self-control of natural-philosophical style.
•i rather go with the animal style, the con of Gorb-e nar-e & Rubah-e makar گربه نره و روباه مکار they are opaque and transparent at the same time
•the signifying animal, machine, and human in Pinocchio story is ridiculous!
•towards responding to “opacity” (opacity is complicated philosophical ethical issue regarding animality and humanity) --> refraction. with opacity what is at stake is our “material understanding of our connection with other animals” (Marks, touch 39)


(we are talking about) Fables of Animal Subjectivity [Kenney]

apparatuses of subject formation

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

THE prey and THE visible (both are categories of forest life survival stories. also have high stakes in iranian culture, thought, and philosophy)
--> what is important for a living self?

(bab-e) hekayat-e dusti-e kabutar o zagh o mush o bakhe o aahu o ...
بابِ / حکایت دوستی کبوتر و زاغ و موش و باخه و آهو و ...
[everyone?]
[the story of the friendship of these animals; the quality, properties, and pitfalls of relation]
•what is (re)activating the *imaginary friend*? (is it really fully on shut-down?) ---> trap to abstract thought? ---> this ‘abstract thought’ is dangerous for “sadness” to get lost in it, but it is amazing for “joy”
•how much we need sadness?

why jackal is so persistent and play-full (full of “plays”) in Kelile o Demne's bestiary?


bird people
,
fox people

,


arbab-e اربابِ --> dar bab-e در[...]

[...] with entanglements and consequences; a form both of “to face” and “to perceive”

aesthetic conceptions of beauty and/or ambiguity coupled with biological epistemology and phenomenology of the organisms --in--> in Jean Painleve, Genevieve Hamon, Leni Riefenstahl, David Powell ==construct==> a host of hybridized and enmeshed “encounters”

biosemiotics
zoosemiotics
-humanist fascist aesthetic --> desires to memorialize “beautiful and unpolluted” coral communities
-promise of immediate and luminous experience of “jellyfish otherness”
-systems (of power?) that constitutively produce animal and human actors



human-animal + nonhuman-animal + apparatuses --> co-constitutive in the process of trying to know something about whale ecology

(Hayward > Whitehead:) concrescence: “we” (con prefix) ere- (create) scence (sense, or the “scene,” that which is seen), the present is given by a consense of subjective forms. We are multiple individuals, but there are also multiple individual agents of consciousness operant in the construction of the given.
-literal materialization of a dynamic produced

photograph (only one part, a kind of lively limb, of the relay):
(ajayeb style -->) a bumptious and lively event of the processes of whale studies and whales themselves =/= a still record of a whale “that had been there”

the image: a kind of connective tissue, soliciting one's senses

solar light --> brushed up against, even touched, the whale --> translated through the camera --> into film --> into chemical bathes --> into photo-paper --> through my eye as a research assistant

}==> ‘photograph: material, immanent, interconnected’ ==> somatic intelligibility (embodiment) to my own somatic intelligence ~ enacted an encounter between the senses (subjective feelings) and their sense (objective knowledges)

a mutual embodiment <-- shared in the event of the photographic space

experience of these photographs [whale or telegram animal video]: an instance of *sensuous knowledge* --> way we are in some carnal modality able to touch and be touched by the substance of images (to feel a visual atmosphere envelop us)

(Grosz's) [*]perception: flesh's reversibility ~ the flesh touching, seeing, perceiving itself, one fold (provisionally) catching the other in its own self­embrace

human/animal and technological sensorium


-Hayward asking how coral communities create representational ruptures in photographs
-Sina asking how telegram virtual communities create representational ruptures in the real of human-animal of Tehran, how the enfleshed animal mobile phone photograph touch us
}--> liveliness of humananimal encounters [the way in which my aesthetic and ethical senses merge with animals in the flesh]
-how people get [...]

[...]
a mutual embodiment <-- shared in the event of the photographic space

experience of these photographs [whale or telegram animal video]: an instance of *sensuous knowledge* --> way we are in some carnal modality able to touch and be touched by the substance of images (to feel a visual atmosphere envelop us)

(Grosz's) [*]perception: flesh's reversibility ~ the flesh touching, seeing, perceiving itself, one fold (provisionally) catching the other in its own self­embrace

human/animal and technological sensorium


-Hayward asking how coral communities create representational ruptures in photographs
-Sina asking how telegram virtual communities create representational ruptures in the real of human-animal of Tehran, how the enfleshed animal mobile phone photograph touch us
}--> liveliness of humananimal encounters [the way in which my aesthetic and ethical senses merge with animals in the flesh]
-how people get along in concrete, metamorphic, phantasmatic ways
**sensible and sensual ensembles of materialized capacities and activities that literally and metaphorically make sense of, and to, ourselves and other animals**


(Ihde >) [*]phenomenology: a philosophical style that emphasizes a certain interpretation of human experience and that, in particular, concerns perception and bodily activity --Hayward--> a theoretical practice grounded on the carnal, fleshy, material foundations of subjectivity as it engages and is transformed by and in the world

we attend to: content + form + context


invertebrates, product of displacement and comparison, a ruinous verb turned noun turned classification --Hayward--> foregrounding and rethinking the syntax, optics, and heterogeneity of vertebrate and invertebrate relationality

accountability and responsibility in the enmeshment of knowing, doing, seeing, and being

(we need less philosophizing and more) *envisioning: an enactment of dynamic en-figurings that imperil boundaries that clearly differentiate self and other without the loss of historical, cultural, and species specificity*

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

☾
light has illuminated western stories
•God said, let there be light: and there was light
•solar radiance --> refracted planetary atmosphere --> earth's watery matter --> lively forms

•life shaped by ice (Meloy)
•life shaped by dark (Mohaghegh)
•life shaped by animal (Sina)
•life shaped by light (Hayward) --> the invisible medium that makes a knowable world visible; *seeing light: a trope for making visible in a comprehensive form (such that they are real)*

1. *philosophy is photology* : language of philosophy is constituted by metaphors of light
2. sunlight metaphorizes into transcendent light : a heavenly light promising lib[...]

[...]ceed in) reducing the reactivity of the animal to the researcher =/= wildboyz
}--> ‘not having a body' = a mean to preclude (to prevent or to avoid) **the always possible reciprocity of the encounter** [--> aliens are watching us!]
}--> ‘having a body’ discloses and renders perceptible (it is the actual condition of) the very existence of reciprocity of the encounter


how scientists (and artists) construe their presence in the field
*the will to be there without being there*

the problematic “animals react =/= animal don't react”

(also in art -->) ***the regime of distrust of influence*** [--> fable of ‘artist's original interiority']


-*- what does ‘meaningful’ means? -*-

scientists aim to find new methods to focus on those behaviors that are most meaningful to the animals themselves
•Shirly Strum --> I tried to let the baboons themselves “tell” me what was ‘important’ (-how a tree can tell you what is important to them?) -with the baboonss: nothing made them believe that she could be a baboon, so she decided after a while that she could try to urinate while staying among the baboons ==> surprise (=/= trying not to disturb the baboons with her body) --> her body (style, gender, smell, look, anime, etc.) made her enter into relationships with the animals in a new mode, **as a living person (like them) she creates with them an embodied proximity** (==> embodied affinities) [<-- Jassem is very good at it. this happens as well in apass research environment between artists]
  ---> go to Cinderella taking shower with her birds in the attic {urine, noise, surprise}
•Mark Bekoff --> empathy: possibility of sharing feelings involves mirror neurons (“I can feel the animals”) ~= (an experiment to incorporate) *to embody literally*
+ (Burghardt's) use of *critical anthropomorphism* (=/= Walt Disney) use of various forms of information (natural history, perception, behavioral description, autism, Cinderella, etc.)
•Temple Grandin (expert in factory plants for slaughter systems) --> *empathy without pathos* (for her and the animals) [*]world: a swirling mass of tiny details ~ [animal: autistic savant ~= special form of genius]--> a little plastic water bottle lying harmlessly, a shiny reflection, a yellow jacket hanging on a fence, all those turn out to be in their world *wrong details* (“I think the way animals think”) --> ****animals are visual thinkers**** {*you have to see in details*_ <-- how my work changed visually from abstract to baroque while working on the heritage of zoology. #Cinderella: which part of me animals give new powers and meanings? that part is of other beings}
-{Grandin actively transforms mindless animals into meaningful geniuses ==> gives them new powers ==> changes her}--> *animals (or your ghosts, your subjects) are invited to other modes of being, other relationships, new ways to inha[...]

[...]br />

i feld that i, because of my specific superiority as a member of Homo sapiens, together with my intensive technical training, was entitled to *pride of place* =/= being under observation

Mowat's humour =/= Derrida not laughing at his own worries (concerned with: what distinguish animals from man is their “being naked without knowing it”)
•naked body is a pretext, a pre-text for more philosophy
•Derrida is talking to his colleagues (the very people who are **seeking grandiose difference** <-- also artists) =/= a difference that happens to him
•(my problem with the old tiring trend in philosophy [after encounter with Manning]:) looking for locus of things [a generality] : talk about ‘the figure of the cat' = the allegory for all the cats on the earth (~ the felines that traverses our myths and religions, literature and fables)

***what the cat might actually be doing***
(this is my relation to description, what is the world, that cat, the demon, the mice up to? and use my best imaginative crafts and precise descriptive acts, the answers are many. that is not about definition or defining ‘what is’ the cat that visits me or the spider in my room. i only try to well define concepts and not subjects. my style of presenting my research on ajayeb bestiary: narrating the contingency of the differences that happened and mattered to me in particular =/= philosophy)


wolves (=/= nomadic roamer) have strong feelings of property rights and they ritually and regularly mark their boundaries


what am i allowed to do with my body when i am with animals?

(Despret + Strum + Mowat) using one's body to make the animal respond (--> does this make sense with humans? in apass for example --?--> use your body to make them respond =/= react)
--Haraway--> a “good” (actually bad) scientist = learning to be invisible, like a rock to be unavailable, as if data-collecting humankind were not present, seeing the scene of nature close up through a peep-hole, remove from the subject animals’ social environment
•(ignoring animal social cues) imagining the baboons as seeing somebody off-category, not something --> to be a *nonentity* (tolerated but unobtrusive!!)
--> [*]distance: a cognitive and relational perspective {what kind of distance, aesop fables, Kelile Demne, or ajayeb takes or keeps?}
--> learn to be [*]polite: (in the ethical, political, and epistemological senses of the word) to respond, to acknowledge, to look back, and *to greet*

****politeness ==> transforms you --> in the way of those you are being polite to**** (<--?-- Cinderella's politeness)


companion story --> wich who we share food {=/= with who we cook together <-- generated protocols ==> host, guest, house, power}



[(Annemarie's) praxiographic enquiry into the] (Despret's) embodi[...]

[...]nd a bit cliche)] transfigurations: (cascading provocations) suggesting questions without answering them, to break from an interpretive paradigm that demands solution-making over and against problem-generating


native
a zoological term

Derrida's blackness (skin color): unsovereign and stateless, criminal and beast

(promise of love -->) relinquishing the body to [*]flesh: pre-discoursive material, a zone of non-personhood, a state of anjection (<-- according to Hayward)
anatomo-political)

soma-politics of the body (of the racial-colonial category of the human)

carno-political question of flesh (under the regime of racial capitalism) --> human/animal divide
•animals in the afterlife of slavery are rendered as flesh (under the regime carno-political regimes of racial capitalist valuation) [<-- Hayward's misrecognition of contemporary society as “regime"]

genre of animal
>
Gossett + Hayward's argument --> the psychic life of zoophobia and zoophilia are tied up with negrophobia and negrophilia ~= species divides (human/animal) are technologies of race (human/black)


maroon: escaped cattle


typography: domain of style, of appearance, of aesthetic

glyph “*”
asterisk
a diminutive star
limb-y reach
a grasping
erring on the side of over-population, over-use, excessiveness
“*” can denote a database search or censorship
designate multiplication
a disclaimer
mark genetic identity
pseudonyms that have been changed
* --> *the star of life*

xenogenesis --> proliferating difference (genesis) built through pessimism (xeno)

Sun Ra (in Space is the Place ~= earth is “nowhere,” no longer a place [+ Octavia, Delany]) signaled the failed projects of planetary humanist and earthly liberalism, inviting black blacks living in Oakland to leave the gratuitous violence of the world
afro-futurism is about the impossible, the unbearable, the failure of the world <--> afro-pessimism (blackness as loss, as nothingness)
(mode of imagination:) “anti-black racism ==> radical politics of abolition”
==> “being (white) is made possible thourgh and with black bodies cannibalized by a racial capitalism and its scientific jaws” [<-- Hayward's politically correct and simple fantasy about good and bad]

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

*body* --> sociohistorical construct & constrain
=/=
*embodiment* --> sense of being bodily (pain, ...) [<-- my focus has been on this one more than the other] --> **never embody ironically!** (<-- maybe irony is OK in visual or written medium?)
•embodiment goes beyond body (my body is still my body but also not)

•to pose
•to transpose

in my work, i transpose: walk through r[...]

[...]re, where attention should be paid. [far, origins of our tropes, metaphysics? abstraction? =/=? motionless hunters invented motionless meditative worship]
-(kinfolk in) swamps, brush, and forest (in terms of discerning the *relationships between clues*)
-(indirect) dealing with the escapable (=?=> tracking strategies + symbolic thought)

a central theme: (a banquet/feast at which) the participants--eater and eaten--risk the improvements of mind against the certainty of occasional poor decisions, (faulty memory, carelessness, errors of judgment, and the decrepitude of age and disease.)
-Those who fled had to understand [the limits of distance, the intentions of the others, and] (the ability to control) the abyssal terror that itself would engulf them if they submitted to panic. ==> mind
-“self” emerged as the consequence of “participation,” a calculative and organizational relatoin of the individual within the group? (and perceiving the so-called “inanimate” entities) --- shaped by the game -- a participant amidst other participants oriented by the action
(David Abraham: Perception is Participation, in an animistic logic)

mind, memory, --> cognition and communication --> reference --> imitating the animal's calls ==> stylized performances ==> (a repertoire of) symbolized references (sign language?) ==> accumulation of synonims (--> we are already consuming symbolic ambition) --> early metaphores --> narratives get out of hand (--> “concrete” is invented) --> [...] (--> narration of past is invented which is always about the future) --> codification of world without tense or causality in language ----> tense & causality ----> pervasive truths
-this diagram is about the future for the subject whom is using the signs, telling the others where the game animal is and will be. in this text i am trying to pantomime a mimicked reference (of where the [game] animal is), sharing the idea of a thing that is syntaxically there, so we can run it. every utterance is about where i have last seen the “animal,” and how fat or far it is. [running had “magical ends” - Peter Nabokov, ‘Indian Running’ (Santa Barbara: Capra, 1981)]

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

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

(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 accomp[...]

[...]inearity, collapsing discovery and jurisdiction (a judiciary not a branch of any map of governance)

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

(Haraway on Burning Man:) Fire in the North American West has a complicated multispecies history; fire is an essential element for ongoing, as well as an agent of double death, te killing of ongoingness. The material semiotics of fire is our times are at stake.
[]three icons (suggestions by Haraway, three “-cene” tuned tor the touch of its critters):
1- ‘missing ice’ of the Capitalocene
2- ‘flame’ of the Anthropocene
3- ‘red clay pottery’ of the Cthulucene




(Conley >) Rosolato treats perspective in terms of the origins of sensuous affect:
infant's projective activity + infant closes its eyes to fend off menace, hence negotiating with the real in a space and time prior to the mirror stage

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

The artful sandwich of Rostam-rock-div provides a thinking mode of who-caries-who: whose being is dependent on whose existence. The earth that the Rostam is laying on, is sacred, on the hands of an ancient creature, who has a very delicate way of “wounding” very much different than Rostam’s quick hit-man style.[23] The div does not “end” Rostam as efficiently as the protagonist might have done it, but introduces the intermediate being of the lithic and the riddle. The div engages in a game. Rostam wants to kill. Finish a job.

The techno-sci-story of the bacteria producing the air, earth and mitochondria,[24] is the one I like to delink-with the Rostam of Shahnameh from its chain of meanings and relations to the div that he must kill. The Rostam-stone-div compilation is about the abyssal div’s death-forming and life-forming powers. Rostam, himself coming from certain transvaluative body-buildings, is taking a nap on a billion-years-old stromatolite. Is the div’s self a form of fossilization story of the now? “Do you want to go to the mountain or ocean?” An old form of preying. He introduces an intimate perspective into the geological time-continuum. The thousands-years-old div as geological phenomena (in Ferdowsi + Mu'in diagram:) structure and morphology of a landscape made by bacteria, [“...pay attention to your ‘place’ in] the bedrock I am carrying you on.”

The div Akvan, coming from Akoman and Aka Manah, in Avestan relates more or less to “noxious thinking.” Divs are old and skillful ancient biotic entities with disagreeable characteristics. Their definition is yet open and subject to interpretation. But always disobedient to the sovereign’s project and abyssal in nature, divs promoted another kind of order, other than the old Gods. Their project was always to disillusionize the ideas of divine nondestruction and nontechnological purity. They are on the side of destruction, technology and death. When Rostam captures [...]

[...]ing subject? how to show their co-existence without resorting to determinism?

now everyone is busy and talking about *relationality* than about *meaning* (=/= my work has alwayes been about both, how to take risks in meaning, my lecture-performances = adventures of meaning)
-we cannot mearly talk about relationality {quasi-universal experience of properties ==> commonalities of meanings across time and culture}, the question of meaning remains --Alberti--> how are we to think about non-arbitrary categories, meanings and values without recourse to universal properties? how different meanings can adhere to the same substances?

materials (water, parasite, etc.) lend themselves to conceptual innovation

often things are willed away (not by a more agentive segment of the population [<-- paranoiac understanding], but) due to the attraction of other kinds of work elsewhere

(how not to) think of the entire phenomenon as one in which properties become determinate (~ scheme transfer) --✕--> properties are imminent in embodied human engagement with that world [~ Baradian: there is no such thing as a property that belongs to an independent object]
•body may be the first tool
•properties (or potentials [ajayeb style?]) cannot be listed

X as agent presents us, as shadow shows...

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

winds
روح ruh, spirit =/= wind: thermal expansion of air ~ air’s tendency to rarefy and expand under the influence of heat
(recognition of) thermal expansion of air ==> motor of global atmospheric circulation

explaining winds --Borrelli-->
•how rational thought could grasp
•how divine power descended to earth

pneumatic machines
gears, weights, levers, pulleys

****premodern natural phenomena
--more--> exploring and classifying *varieties* of things =/=
--less--> common *causes* of things

varieties =/= causes


cause ==>? highly complex phenomena
  |           |  
[-O-] ==> {t|/?#$^%V!~)&^} <-- premodern science and art today stays here (---> go to Stewart’s attunement to phenomena)


[*]navigation: negotiation between the direction one ‘witches’ to travel & the direction that is ‘possible’ to travel --> wind sense:
temperature
humidity
intensity
regularity
smell
knowledge of astronomy + geography


wind rose --> (connection between:) celestial + astronomical order + terrestrial variety (of land + living creature)

estimate the speed of the ship
throw a log with a rope attached to it overboard, and measure how much rope went overboard within a given period of time

Pliny the Elder --> historia naturalis

Seneca --> naturales quaestiones<[...]

[...]re not necessarily intended to mean something
-what was the pragmatic conditions that define the kind of ‘language game’ Ali was playing?

[*]formalization: reduction of combinatory and creative possibilities of language by the use of formulas, archaic vocabulary, syntactic and stylistic patterns {--> distancing the
discourse from its semantic content ==> attention to its context and performance ==> effects}

ritual action --Severi--> reflexivity: definition of its own meaning and effectiveness within the context of ritual communication

(@apass's) performative and poetic structure
[Guerreiro -->] chief = consanguine kin ابى & potentially dangerous enemy [---> go to transference]
(chief's fellows's both as children & prey)

ritual speech ==> ***complex enunciator*** [~= #feedback]
ambiguity of duality of gestural and verbal [==> exchange of perspectives (=/= exchange of words)] --?--> paradoxical construction of identities
+
chimerical representation --> presence of counterparts (of percepted fragmentary signs) to its audience


beautiful and strong body
serene and generous behavior
linguistic abilities (“made to discourse”)
(we are living with) mythical, aesthetic, and ritual elaboration
guiding them with “good speech”
pleasing them by sponsoring rituals
welcome messengers (“made in order to greet messengers”)

relational and possessive

(possessed form of) asymmetrical relationship between a denominated (individualized) person and an undifferentiated collective

agglutinate
enunciated in the same tone with no pauses to breath
+
expletive ah
+
set of particles
+
deictic ige (evidential [devaluating?] particle that indicates proximity, presence, or existence, fixed to the copula --> piece of advice?)

[...]

[...]pressions] abiding in you when they have passed."2 The impress is registered as the present now. We register the abiding impression left in the mind as the remembered now. If, however, we break the tie between presence and the world, we have to say that the impress is the result of our own activity. The impression that results in the now comes, in other words, not from the world, but from ourselves. It is a result of our affecting ourselves. In Derrida’s words, its origin is “the auto-affection” of consciousness.

--> ‘consciousness’ Since it involves the self-awareness that demands self-presence, the question of language expands once again. In answering it, we must inquire into the nature of consciousness.  

--> ‘veil’ unveiled. a sign of difference, a kind of timidity? is shyness same as veil? is it a sheer projection? are we (am i) subdued?

--> ‘exhibitionist ambitions’ and idealized structures. the exhibitionist ambitions of these artists forswear all objective orientation. Their own uniqueness and grandiosity is taken for granted. it is not open to debate and need not be founded in a structured manner that is accessible and comprehensible to one's powers of appraisal and judgment. the representatives of postmodernism adopt the stylistic forms, themes and visual material of their art from the boundless treasure trove of art history so readily accessible today. dependence on what has already been formulated. the underlying tone of this art serves to flaunt an unparalleled sense of superiority and grandiose self-confidence. seen in many performance in this time too. (in my painting i have a rational point of view.) i don't want to orient myself towards ambitions, injected by libidinal energy, of my grandiose self-artist. of those, whose prime concern is to show their uniqueness find themselves faced with the question: “what is to be done?”. I too, choose to refuse to pander to the demands of innovation, style and integrity, but at the same time not to work myself up to grandiose self-image of artistic omnipotence.

look at the theory of intelligence for language and other kind of ‘enjoying’ the nature, art or other structures.

how is the philosophy of the sublime (quality of greatness) related to the format of my talks? if my work is not an endeavor on the philosophy of the sublime then what is it?

in this writing i am not going to work in the forms of claims as stages in a logical argument. my approach would we unsubstantial to break free from the process of offering philosophical evidence...

mobilizing forces
scoring system

opposition to shamanism in performance art, points in The Art of Modernism - Sandro Bocola, for critique on Beuys and Abramovich.
Faced with objects and performances by Joseph Beuys, viewers are as baffled as they are by Marcel Duchamp's Bottle Rack. They do not know what is going on, are una[...]

[...] must inquire into the nature of consciousness.  

--> ‘veil’ unveiled. a sign of difference, a kind of timidity? is shyness same as veil? is it a sheer projection? are we (am i) subdued?

--> ‘exhibitionist ambitions’ and idealized structures. the exhibitionist ambitions of these artists forswear all objective orientation. Their own uniqueness and grandiosity is taken for granted. it is not open to debate and need not be founded in a structured manner that is accessible and comprehensible to one's powers of appraisal and judgment. the representatives of postmodernism adopt the stylistic forms, themes and visual material of their art from the boundless treasure trove of art history so readily accessible today. dependence on what has already been formulated. the underlying tone of this art serves to flaunt an unparalleled sense of superiority and grandiose self-confidence. seen in many performance in this time too. (in my painting i have a rational point of view.) i don't want to orient myself towards ambitions, injected by libidinal energy, of my grandiose self-artist. of those, whose prime concern is to show their uniqueness find themselves faced with the question: “what is to be done?”. I too, choose to refuse to pander to the demands of innovation, style and integrity, but at the same time not to work myself up to grandiose self-image of artistic omnipotence.

look at the theory of intelligence for language and other kind of ‘enjoying’ the nature, art or other structures.

how is the philosophy of the sublime (quality of greatness) related to the format of my talks? if my work is not an endeavor on the philosophy of the sublime then what is it?

in this writing i am not going to work in the forms of claims as stages in a logical argument. my approach would we unsubstantial to break free from the process of offering philosophical evidence...

mobilizing forces
scoring system

opposition to shamanism in performance art, points in The Art of Modernism - Sandro Bocola, for critique on Beuys and Abramovich.
Faced with objects and performances by Joseph Beuys, viewers are as baffled as they are by Marcel Duchamp's Bottle Rack. They do not know what is going on, are unable to relate what they see to any known system and are left entirely to their own devices, i.e. to their own emotional responses, for all the good that does them. They feel affected, and have a vague and almost unwilling sense of being touched at a certain emotional depth, but are unable to interpret these feelings (isn't that the case with most art performances?). Beuys celebrates complex and incomprehensible rituals before an astonished audience. He subjects his person to difficult tasks and appears to be making some kind of sacrifice in doing so. Beuys, after all, wishes to heal. To judge by his statements, he wishes to redeem the German people and indeed all of humanki[...]

[...]homogenous things]
}=/= Campbell's *posthuman relationism*: another form that better understands the abyssal point between the non-human and the human


(2007 conference) speculative realism {antipathy to “human-centred” intellectual traditions} ~=> object-oriented ontology

(objectivity =/= obliqtivity)
Harman's immaterialism: realism without materialism : objects can only ever be captured obliquely

object-oriented ontology's development:
•characterised by a consistent lament for how post-Kantian philosophy in general (Continental philosophy in particular) has abandoned hope of describing objects as objects
•the real: absolute autonomy of objects (withdraw from subjects)
◦objects: sleeping giants holding their forces in reserve
•prefer the excess of the aesthetic over the reduction by the scientific (materialism's tendency to reduce objects to a primary substratum ==> rendering them susceptible to mathematical capture) --Campbell--> *aesthetic foundationalism* [==engender==> an attitudinal response to objects] (@apass, this is also a problem in artistic research):
◦aesthetic appreciation above the reduction of the phenomenon achieved by science --> “art (art criticism) is a style that gets us closer to the nature of objects” (+ bad example of Clement Greenberg)
◦(to make the invisible deep conditions of objects perceivable) prioritize *allusive style* above *literal description*
•claims to post-phenomenological sovereignty
•over-mining approach to knowledge production =/= objects's surplus of reality
◦methodological approach which encounters objects as objects (=/= actor network theory's manner of focusing upon an object's effects) [+ bad example of Dutch East India Company]--Campbell--> object-oriented social theory produces a rudimentary narrative with no discernible innovation on the level of:
◾objects --> the actors are recognisable companies, personalities, infrastructures
◾relations --> the major symbiotic moments are legal contracts, infrastructure and formative moments in a human's life
◾time --> there is standard chronology from birth to death, with emphasis on human-centric causes and effects
•“social theory = a mode of knowledge production” (=/= a decontextualised reflection of the world) ==> withdrawal: a psychological alibi, an aesthetic (=/= cognitive concept) ==stimulate==> an attitudinal response: humility [+ passivity?] in the face of overwhelming non-human existence [~ appeal ==produce==> a paternalistic-arrogant-instrumentalist attitude to the nonhuman =/= *appeal ==foster==> responsibility* (a norrnativity that withdrawal cannot) ---> go to Haraway + Campbell]

}=/= posthuman relationism: realists who draw on contemporary advances in disciplines like geology, biology, mathematics and neurology to make the case that non-human reality is not a [...]

[...]ance of the environment
an experience of an observer that is not a property of the observer, it is invariant and relational.
that is, it acknowledges that objective information about an environmental system can be obtained both in spite and because of perceptual change. in this respect an indigenous knowledge is not simply an order of cultural perspective, they are rather a form of objective testimony, by the people who are attuned to the environment's invariant structure. they are not simply a traditional or local “point of view.”

in this sense what kind of info is the image of Kinect about the environment? it is not objective info nor culture, what is it? personal testimony? descriptions of a technological reading?!

affordance, as a concept, allows complexity and refusal to reduce environments, objects, and actions to the basic function they may have to the perceiver in her/his/its world -- it permits a level (horizon) of consciousness of the world beyond function.

how a beetle may rest on the retina of bird's eye like pieces of puzzle fitting together

facts of environment

to what extent can an ecological perception become virtualized, represented, and returned to vision as a condition, or style of being? that is how to take conscientious of the ecological beings that we are in any project? -- that is attuning vision to an ecological reality

E. h. Gombrich understood the perception of art as a process of cultivating the visual skills of recognition in the eye itself
historical ways of seeing
any skill we have in spite of environmental variances, is operating from visual schema that are geared to trigger pattern recognition, (art?)

visuality vs vision
the caricaturist does not teach us how to see, but rather instantiates a new code of recognition. a visuality is nested into vision; vision is reciprocally primed to recognize a visuality ***

visuality involves more than pattern recognition

perception is not the tool by which we experience art, but its very content and substance. john Onians concludes that “each painting forms its own ‘eye’.”

what kind of eye the art (of my Kinect) cultivates? (a techno-aesthetic eye?) (the diagrammatic eye?) (referring to the diagram project “sadistic statistics”)

the ways we see ...ly (historically, ecologically, evolutionary, technologically,) more part and parcel of the visuality of the anthropocene

the neuro-aesthetic eye

to “read” environment in terms of info pick-up and accommodation
to simply perceive as we do
but to parlay (double up) our perceptual system into a modality of processing, response, and responsiveness
(the aesthetics of) the visual brain is the contact (not contract) between the individual and the ecosystem

modulation of ethos in land[...]

[...]t in’ people
‘plantation in a pure soile’ (founding a colony)

once we see colonialism as the literal planting and displanting of peoples, animals, and plants--as inscribing a domination into blood and soil founded in the fantasy of molding ecosystems with godlike arrogance--it becomes clear how colonialism ushered in the anthropocene

native plants, by implication, were uncultivated. in the imperial imaginary this distinction between cultivated and native plants was isomorphic with people as well.

‘nature’, like the uncultivated native, was to be dominated by ‘culture’. such ‘government of nature’ found its metropolitan manifestation in botanic gardens. (species collected for scientific reasons, for aesthetic and ideological benefit)

government of nature

invasive animals

the real issue is that we still live in a colonial environment. we live with the legacy of botanical colonization without even knowing it. this legacy is not mere background to social and political life.


Nazis’ attempted eradication of Impatiens parviflora from their own native forests (Gröning and Wolschke-Bulmahn, 1992)


the idea of “borrowing freely from all the world's styles and floras” erases the violent colonial encounter of displacing by replacing it with the figure of the undocumented immigrant

..charging native plant enthusiasts and invasion biologists and managers with xenophobia...


(Davis et al, 2011 article published in journal Nature, title:) “Don't judge species on their origins”, is a misleading phrase; at issue is judging species not on their origins, but on their emplacement.

(Yanagisako and Delaney, 1995) “people think and act in the intersections of discourses”
but not every domain intersects in every instance, and the character of an ‘intersection’ is historically specific. it is a truism to claim that ‘like humans, plants and animal travel’ (Raffles, 2011, page 12). What Raffles fails to address is crucial: how, exactly, do those plants travel? to treat the ‘remaking’ of surroundings as a neutral, benign category, served from the colonial history of globalization, is problematic at best.


treating plants metaphorically only as immigrants, but never as settlers, paradoxically divides human from nature. it elides the forms of displanting--of botanical colonization--that were part and parcel of the colonial encounter.

Myths of the ‘noble eco-savage’ and the ‘ecological Indian’ have been shown to be inaccurate (Krech, 1999; Whelan, 1999)

(the notion of the Anthropocene implies) an ecology in which humans are immanent to the natural world

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

(eyes are) visual possibilities
“eyes” (are always) made available [...] with a wonderfully detailed, active, partial way of organizing[...]

[...]ivity

the Zen pupil, often a wanderer, listens differently, stilling herself to consider the sonic eventfulness of growing grass

...understanding no longer crowns the end of a labored process of appropriation =/= Western narratives of testing



going after the grail or attempting to reach a metaphysically-laden Castle

...cannot be properly located or possessed

the inaction hero


(?are we accustomed) to viewing the test as a way of mobilizing courage

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

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

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


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


An extended concept of cursing enters visuality in the gaze of the evil eye.[11] The malevolent glare who stamps upon by staring at an accidental moment of encounter in the evil eye, brings together the narrative of [...]

[...]s as a method of intellectual chase.
Who first told a joke?
Certain languages are inhospitable to new metaphors.
Language-act
to read: is to restore all that one can of the immediacies of value and intent in which speech actually occurs.

my original repetition
we re-enact in our educated consciousness

in what sense does unperformed music exist?

The same ground, when using the ‘speculative instruments’, the critic, editor, actor, and reader stand on.

When we read or hear any language statement from the past, we translate.

Encode and decode “message”, misleading operative models of translation between different languages and even within a single language.

One treason in translation: words rarely show any outward mark of altered meaning, they body forth their history only in a fully established context.

What material reality has history out of language? --the tasavof verbal linguistic tradition

silence knows no history...?

...to remind you that everything is the condition of madness.

“Tense Past”

..the landscape composed by the past tense, the semantic organization of remembrance... is styled and coded differently by cultures. --miniature illustrating San'an?

The verbal icon made up of all successive translations of Greek literature and philosophy has oriented fundamental movements in Islamic feelings --Farabi, Mirdamad, etc.

My translation of classics is not out of a vital compulsion for immediacy or precise echo. I am not trying to build my own resonant past. Myth of the ‘true past’...  different perspectives can co-exist and blur

the metaphysics of the insult, in San'an story

i am interested in the conventions in which texts can be read, in which a semantic statement can be carried over into someone's own idiom. I am teaching how to reread texts of Attar and so forth.

We have civilization because (we have learned) ‘to translate out of time’

übertragen,
handing down thought narrative,
something that also depends on transfer of meaning in space.

Languages conceal and internalize more, perhaps, than they convey outwardly.

Speech-act is most expressive of status and power--when a peer is in earshot. (something that i have been trying to undermine in my lectures)

...calculated to guard some coherence of inner life (while wounding outward)

(motions of) menace and non-information (in top down dialogues)
monosyllables of the oppressed and polysemy of the upper class (the capacity of the same word to mean different things, such differences characterises the language of ideology.)

fracture of words and the maltreatment of grammatical norms, by children, they are a exploited and re[...]

[...]ld wives’ tales***

The Old Wives’ Tales

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

recapitulation
appropriation
=/= fabrication
creation

what are the ‘forces in motion’ in Ajayeb? What are:
Instruments of leverage,
machines,
producers of forces,
for packing,
for transporting,
as source,
as origine,


the applied geometry of our relation to the world

tools are dominated by form

virtual velocities
objective world
geometric reasoning

industrial revolution, a revolution operating on matter
one takes force or produces it

matter transformed by fire
Turner saw  the introduction of fiery matter into culture

an axis of (roaring) fire

matter is no longer left in the prison of diagram, fire desolves it, makes it vibrant, tremble, oscillate, makes it explode into clouds.

New matter ==> new world

fire delivers one from the ice***

steam engine triumphs over forced immobility, inertia

the cut of the reference

product of furnace, the cold product of fusion

old-style riddle

navigate between two pronouns

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

properly formed cluster (of letters) = standardization

standard compromises the non-essential, or inessential, those without meaning

what is a logician interested in?
Form --> pathology

misguided sciences

if static is accidental, background noise is essential to communication

pathology
spocken: stammering, mispronounciation, regiomil accents, dysphonia, cacophony
technical: background noise, jamming, static, cut-off, hyteresis, various interruptions

to communicate oraly (in performance work with Ali ) is to risk losing meaning in noise.

A successful communication is the exclusion of the third man, the demon, the interference.

Mathematics has triumphed so well over noise

the (un)logical beginning of logic

to render a form independent of its empirical realization --> universal
drawing a square on sand, i evoke an idea, i eliminate the empirical, dematerialise reasoning
(what is rematerialised reasoning? aesthetic form..?)

the inevitable fact of the historical existence of mathematics
(math's historicity)

(a different word for every yesterday)

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

... one had a discourse which often concluded either with the cosmos in general or with the organic life in particular.
19th century

negentropic islands in entropic sea, pockets of order in rising entropy, cryst[...]

[...]is compared, modeled, simulated:
•flood
•fires
•celestial fire
•catastrophes
•violence of the elements
•


ajayeb: doxographies (, legends and allegories) composed in natural language (?)
=/= (the problem of) how to duplicate the cube ---,{thematized object of the complete intersubjective relation}
~=? alogon =/= logos: proportion, measured relation, discourse;
alogon prohibits speaking

crisis and recast, questions of archive


Luisa, Foad
(the space of the relation between) experience & abstract --> between sense & purity
(an inquiry line for Luisa: try to figure out the status of pure [which is impure? when history changes])

my allegorical covers

meaning of:
•non-disproportion
•nonviolence

Socrates: you are in crisis because you are ignorant of geometry

even: same
> odd: other

برهان خلف borhane kholf, irrationality of the absurd

the irrational is mimetic


=======================


“before-after” temporality narrative

Serres's fabulous work on the effects of the style in science
--> styles profile from (a sort of) stability *** -they inspire disciplines and furtilize fields of research, they seizes what is at stake in sciences

who believes that the passage from local to global is always possible?!
Lucretius answer is immediately “no”

in apass each of us is somehow busy with the critique of unidimensional platitude characteristics of our milieus. / Is that the global notion in our researches?

I want to take it up, maybe fulfill, and modify the project sketched out in ajayeb al makhlughat 10 centuries ago.

#my reading act with ajayeb is like the practice of pencil monoprint on paper on a relief surface. The patterns of reading emerge as the pencil moves gently across the paper, pressing down or not. The paper, pencil, pressure, movement, the object behind, the touch of three elements, interactive interfacial patterns of readingwriting with ajayeb's textual corpus*


” [...] the industrialized world is frequently condemned to considering the concrete universe as its representation.”
Stengers + Prigogine

(?what do we have that helps us give up the idea of a) rational nature of the real
observation ==> generalization
measurement ==> precision

which precisions can be achieved by other than measurement?

How not to travel through the universe like free and self-determined gods? (#magicians)

Stengers > Leibniz @Luisa: “movement is produced within a full world, an interdependent world in which nothing can happen that has not been made possible by the state of the set [...]

[...]oncern--> what is overlooked
5. innovative (productive) --promote--> non-traditional ways of reading (of interpretting, of finding meaning)


intellectual climate in 1960s ==>
•Derrida's deconstruction --> bringing Saussure's own work to its own radical paradoxical conclusion
•Foucault's archeological approach [question the idea that human is an a priori --> how humans have been diagnosed in psychiatry and (ab)normalized in criminal and sexual *discourses* ==produce==> reality effects at the level of body]
•Barthes's semiology =/= the idea that the author is the single and authoritative source of meaning


Derrida's list of concepts:
differance
retrait
revenant
dissemination
deconstruction
hymen
invagination
archiécriture
supplement
khora
pharmakon
scrypt
parergon
subjectile
}--> levers applying torque گشتاور and displacement in the textual machinery


deconstruction
==> counter-intuitive analyses
--> presupposes a detailed knowledge of construction (one must become intimate with the ways something is assembled) [=/= cart blanche for meaning]
--> (Jassem's style of) reading otherwise: passing the classical discipline (=/= abandon, jettison it) to explore what it omits, forgets, excludes, expels, marginalizes, dismisses, ignores, scorns, slights, takes too lightly, waves off, not serious enough

•anthropcentric truth: a truth that appears to human beings
•instrumental truth: a truth aimed at getting things done (making things work)
•teleological truth: a truth which closes debate and fastens meaning


[*]visual = a form of control (<--Campbell-- this aspect makes it central to organizational analyses) <==
1. *visual organizes reality by claiming status as the preeminent form of representation* (vision on* (vision is the dominant tyrannical phenomenology of the contemporary world ==> all forms of knowledge can be presented visually)
2. *conflation of the ‘seen = known’* : “vision = ways of knowing = experiencing the world” (<-- imagined inseparable) ==> the idea that depiction/picturing/seeing are ubiquitous features of the process by which most human beings come to know the world as it really is for them
3. *visual organizes the worldview of the seer* --> visual is at its most powerful when it is most invisble (for example scientific diagrams, mapping @apass)

***instances of visual control:
•uniforms
•packaging
•computer software packages
•brand logos
•buildings
•websites @apass
•management reports
•staff
•servicescapes [an environment where the first/primary perceived aspect is service]
•


harmful, deficient, deformed, secondary =/= superman, supergirl[...]

[...]fantasy
•denial
•reaction formation: responses to internal threats and anxieties, anxiety is mastered by exaggeration of the directly opposing tendency. phobia is always reaction formation: the person wants what he fears. [solicitude (may be a reaction formation) against cruelty, pacifism against sadism, etc.] when *instincts (and their derivatives) are arranged as pairs of opposites* (life/death, construction/destruction, action/passivity, dominance/submission); techniques: exaggeration, compulsiveness, inflexibility: “reactive love protests too much.” “the lady doth protest too much, methinks.” (it cannot adapt itself to changing circumstances as genuine emotions do)
◦intellectualization {memory of event --> intellectualization ==> conscious analysis of non-anxiety provoking information about an event}
◦dissociation
◦displacement: means of dream-distortion, ego relocates anxiety somewhere else, transference of emotions/wishes
◾sublimation والایش [a form of displacement]: long-term conversion of the initial (negative) impulse, (alchymical in Jung) transformation of shit into gold. [in Freud: ‘sublimation = plasticity of the sexual instincts’ ~/= in Lacan: ‘sublimation = (usually cosmic?) process of creation in ex nihilo style’ : an object (manufactured or not) defined in relation to the emptiness of Das Ding (empty canvas) --> sublimation ~ dismissal/Verwerfung: obsessional relational behaviour attributed to the avoidance of the primordial emptiness (of Das Ding) ==>? religion/art...
**penis sublimates into seriousness**, adolescence into poetry, emotions into mystical art into dominance,,,]
◦repression/suppression: subduing in the unconscious (under the influence of the superego?)
•withdrawal
•regression: a way of relating to the world that was formerly effective (to recapture some childhood satisfaction)
•

•pathological defense mechanism: delusional projection, denial, distortion, extreme projection, splitting
•immature defense mechanism: acting out, fantasy, idealization, passive-aggression, projection, projective identification, somatization
•neurotic defense mechanism: displacement, dissociation, hypochondriasis, isolation, rationalization, reaction formation, regression, repression, undoing
•mature defense mechanism: altruism, anticipation, humour, identification, intellectualization, introjection, sublimation, suppression
•other defensive mechanisms: compartmentalization, defensive pessimism, exaggeration, minimisation, postponement of affect

*it is job of defense mechanism to distort, transform, or falsify the perceived reality* --> to help deal with the id or superego, reducing anxiety


ego: part of our psyche that is reality based



[title]
methinks

...the absence of mercy

complain =~ elegy =~[...]

[...]


[Michel Serres]


...temporal and local settings of one's text. (to master it?)


to read X, is literally, to ‘prepare’ to read X


in certain civilizations there comes epochs in which syntax stiffens...
Changing landscape of fact


words, the guardians of meanings, are not immortal.


note on history: past is a language construct, that the past tense of the verb is the sole guarantor of history.


to read: is to restore all that one can of the immediacies of value and intent in which speech actually occurs.


What material reality has history out of language? --the Tasawwuf/Tasavof verbal linguistic tradition

...to remind you that everything is the condition of madness.


(protest against “was” ---> go to Attar's relation with biographies in Tazkirat al-Awliya---he mobilizes 'personalities’ in the index of his mystic-ontological demand---what would the lack of personality take revenge of Attar?)
we are at a tense past and a past tense---prison tense


..the landscape composed by the past tense, the semantic organization of remembrance... is styled and coded differently by cultures. --miniature illustrating San'an?


The verbal icon made up of all successive translations of Greek literature and philosophy has oriented fundamental movements in Islamic feelings --Farabi, Mirdamad, etc.


My translation of classics is not out of a vital compulsion for immediacy or precise echo. I am not trying to build my own resonant past. Myth of the ‘true past’...  different perspectives can co-exist and blur


the metaphysics of the insult, in San'an story


I am interested in the conventions in which texts can be read, in which a semantic statement can be carried over into someone's own idiom. I am teaching how to reread texts of Attar and so forth.
I think we have civilization because (we have learned) ‘to translate out of time’



übertragen,
handing down thought narrative,
something that also depends on transfer of meaning in *space*



San'an's sudden interest in the woman/child (Tarsaa could also be a young boy) reminds us the uniquely vulnerable and creative condition of the childhood

privileged inferiority (of both child and woman)

we are dealing with both intercourse and discourse


how his voice will change after San'an actually gets the girl?


...communication like breathing is subject to obstruction and homicidal breakdowns, under stress of hatred, of boredom, or of sudden panic, great gaps open ...that their previous understanding had been based on a trivial pidgin which had left the h[...]

[...]lf, more comprehensive and timeless than any who makes use of it...


discourse (die Rede) would not be muffled by the ground---we walk erect [Serres]



jede Sprache ist ein Versuch---*trial
(Humboldt)
different languages penetrate to different depths
--> (every try is a) starting over with *accuracy
ok, we are starting with language from scratch, here


Literaturhaus, house has always been a metaphor for consciousness


how Attar can become interested in other lives other that San'an's that are worth living?

although we see again and again in Islamic social order the hierarchical structured relationships, I like to show the otherwise in mystic stances, and argue that the model doesn't remain static normative from the master-disciple to the authority and dependence lock, that the master-disciple relationship doesn't affirm the divine order.
and San'an is also against the notion that Sufi man is without the need of a feminine principle.
we are presented with will of the Tarsaa, the destination of San'an, and the poetic representation is feminine. the female image is strong. although at the end it has to give up -- she converts to his style. the will of the disciple is not replaced by the will of the guide, the master himself doesn't have a will.


The Tarsaa is supervising San'an's diet, sleep, and speech


[I have become more interested in the term ‘tradition'---and more suspicious of preoccupations such as ‘invention’ as modernized and capitalist terms.]
tradition: an act of memory based on a salience-effect of shared knowledge
(ein Akt der Erinnerung basiert auf einer Hervorspringen-Effekt der gemeinsamen Kenntnisse)
-there is a sequence (where is the individual terms within it?)
-my storytelling is about: describing relations of inversion, extension, inclusion, analogy, etc. between mythical, lyrical, or even scientific ‘beings’ that are (1) *conventional* (recognizable repertoire), and (2) *closed* (refer to certain predefined situations and symbols)
==> I work-with and bypass with these aspects in Attar, Hafez, Ajā'ib al-makhlūqāt, etc.


the performance of ‘stop’ in San'an
sign-functions that cannot be stopped

the master-pupil lock
‘locken’ is also to lure, seduce, etc.


thank you for becoming my students, temporarily
we are not locked, and not necessarily unlocked



what is concealed behind the special effects of the awesome signifier in San'an's story?


concealed =/= canceled



in Rumi every word is pass-word. you don't translate a password! (fallacy of the literal)


•all same-sex relationships are hierarchical and dyadic (of two, ‘paarwei[...]

[...]tion of belief-structures in modernity
otherless individuation
eternal war
killer's freedom
(affective) overreaction


[*]poet:
will to chaos (--a type of consciousness that perceive the catastrophic-apocalyptic hint at each turn)
<== cataclysmic time of modernism (<-- great social disorder: prison, exile, censorship, etc. [==> Hedayat, Shamlu, Forough, Nima's tone of aggression --> a proto-sectarian space: secret societies, iconoclastic trajectories, *the compartmentalized and esoteric iranian avant-garde with aesthetic devices of: unity, isolation, subversion])
fugitive postmodern map of escape from the grasp of the experience of the modernist phenomenon
|
responses to historical events of atrocity and transition
mystical, criminal, mercenary, revolutionary edifice
amorphous, obscure, versatile (thinker/writers)
conceptual axes/archetypes of: power, hostility, banishment, solitude, desire, sacrifice


[*]mystic:
sunken tranquility, relaxed self-annihilation, ascetic renunciation of material (=/= postmodernism's obsession with speed, with narcissistic technologies, hyper-materialism)
neomystial trajectories of new-wave iranian cinema filmic style --> hypnotic effect =/= audition, dialogue, narrative
& exile space


[*]sectarian:
will to extremity
(apocalyptic writing)
breakaway modality
نوچه پروری noche-parvary's effective radars and tactics of attunement, detection, narration
(annihilatic temptation to) convert the text into a closed circle
(sect's threats of) forbidden power, moral ambiguity, collective density(/destiny)

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

[this project works with:]

[]
contributions/responses of:
•radical leaders (Jala Al Ahmad, Ali Shariati, Khomeini) --> ideological suspicion towards models of machinism and cosmopolitanism in the modern age
•intellectual forerunners (--> sectarian)
•literary icons (textual innovations of Hedayat, Shamlu, Akhavan, Baraheni) --> *poetic violence* and its apocalyptic tendencies --> that the declared east is plunged into a catastrophic epoch ==freed==> a “will to chaos”
•artistic visionaries (Naderi, Forough, iranian new-wave cinema neomystical) --> strategies of withdrawal, aims of disappearance, situated in obscure elsewheres of auditory and visual landscape
}--> #ideology #literature #mysticism #sectarianism
(from the middle eastern front) to (the issues of):
◦post-historical instant
◦catastrophic resistance
◦creative imagination
 }--> issues of:
◾technology
◾representation
◾globalization
◾colonialism
  +}--> drastic reinterpretations of:
◽time and being
◽death
◽pain<[...]

[...]re language is forced to howl and curse again, to match the shock treatment and flagellation (شلاق shalagh) ==>
1. to unveil the degradation and depravity of power, to show it as unbeautiful and disgusting in its most bude form
2. to wage some reciprocal hate against power, to maximize the rawness of what is happening

[-]Shamlu's (dead-end) sightings of public execution and secret police night-raids of 1979-81
(Mohaghegh describing islamic state of iran through Shamlu:) a new iteration of revolutionary terror, millenarian clerical establishment that foresees self-congrave a feverish certainty across every corridor of urban reality (=/= conservative disposition of an ordained Shah seeking to keep his domination,) the vengefull return of a long-suppressed counterabsolutism that has been waiting anxiously for its chance to unleash and envelop a national identity in its now-seething ideology
-bringing the celestial abstractions of a faith crashing down into tangible existence --> they must ***sew, lash, and brand their righteous-ecstatic modalities into awesome materiality***
the vocabulary of: the prophetic, the messianic, the inspired, the sacred
}--> *Shamlu's avant-gardism had always led him to experiment with rotating styles of folkloric ballads, rebel anthems, existential meditations, doomsday rants, elegiac oration, children's lullabies --into--> (a singular blast of an) account of a devastated urban space that moves somewhere between legend, omen, song, myth, fairy tale, and war cry [--> Shamlu responding to an islamic revolutionary ideology that had enlisted its own alchemy of proclamation, lethal consortiums of drives that fuse the most savage, the most medieval, the most modern, and the most postmodern]
•being coming completely seized beneath the density of revelatory vision
•the ultra-alertness and insomnia of pure anticipation : a calculus of assurance that ‘they are coming’ --> omenr />

Pasdaran: the unpredictable and insatiate arc of extremity of a paramilitart coalition
=/=
SAVAK: formulaic technocracy of a scientific approach to persecution, extraction, and confession

Pahlavi monarchy: the administrator of urban violence was part amateur, part pseudo-scholar, part civil servant, part serial killer
=/=
Ayatollah theodracy: the administrator of urban violence was part vigilante, part crusader, part cult member, part thug

--> poet must epitomize the last unequivocal administrator of urban violence


does writing have a redemptive (=/=? reparative) function?

the author would necessarily venture to rescue something profound (from the state of dejection)

poet's keyword: *conflagration* حريق, fire --> a middle eastern aesthetics

most iranian writers of the new poetry movement have eviscerated, melted, flooded, iced over, or [...]

[...]ective positioning (=/= hospitality, cosmopolitanism, transindivualism) of the “I” of the iranian poet:

*Akhavan: “It is I, your nightly guest, a forlorn gypsy. It is I, an afflicted stone that has been kicked around. It is I, the lowly insult of creation, an untuned melody.”
منم من، میهمان هر شبت، لولی وش مغموم /  منم من، سنگ تیپاخورده ی رنجور /  منم، دشنام پست آفرینش، نغمه ی ناجور

*Baraheni: “I am the rotten well of history ... Throw your matches down so that I can set the whole world aflame. I am an underground man. My fire alone shall appear on the face of the earth.”

*Shamlu: “It is time that I spit out the entirety of my damnation in an endless uproar / I am the first and last dawn / I am Abel standing on the platform of contempt / I am the honor of the universe, having lashed myself and endured it / Such that the black fire of my agony / shames even Hell for its insignificant holdings.”


--> with the maladjusted eyes if the iranian poet... we are at a far distance from western thought, one that seeks a renovated cosmopolitanism as remedy to the injustices of the cityscape in modernity


Mohaghegh's style of writing [when he talks about Hedayat and iranian avant-garde chaotic atmosphere --> (at once) binds and separates the East-West axis] --he--> abandoning transcendent abstractions and restoring it to the language of annihilative venture

*chaos as mask*
chaos = (one of many) eastern poetic mask

chaotic experience (in the service of a lasting nonstate) =/= essence, Being, structure, historical definitions, temporal-spatial specificity

Mohaghegh puts Hedayat's inventiveness in traction with continental philosophy:
•Schopenhauer: existence = reckless collision of transience and nonsensibility <== *dramatic dissociation of the aesthetic from the historical* (<-- Sana's current stance, for Sana the world is will and representation):
history: will's vicious reign over existence
art: space of escape (from the profanity of history, a rare fleeting opportunity to reimagine existence as it potentially could have been but never will be (~=? fiction --> is that why science fiction for iranians does not have the same signification?) [=/= redemptive corrective to the barbarism of the will, =/= weapon by which one might attempt to overthrew the will]
•Hegel: (paradigm of a) complete collapse of subjectivity with history. reason is sovereign of the world
*Dasein: work within the preconceived framework (barriers) of historical consciousness in order to modify its stance within the world
•Marx: the intention of restoring humanity to its actual historicity, positivism + humanism, epochal advancement, *dialectical materialism*: placing subjectivity in a state of subservience to a larger “histo[...]

[...] all) content-thought disorder (=/= form of thought)
*the disease of cognitive abnormality : abnormal sequential thinking*
*tangential thinking*
•disorganised thinking ==> disorganised speech
•mood disorders
•dementia
•mania
•clanging (situationally inappropriate association of words based upon sound rather than concepts)
•echolalia (unsolicited repetition of vocalizations made by another person)
•[*]tangentiality: deviation from relevancy; wandering train of thought, lack of focus, never returning to the initial topic --> *topic maintenance*
◦self-centered social responses
◦attention to one's own speech is overcome during the occurrence of cognition ==> evasive vocalized content


(language use”)
referential (for the sake of context)
poetic (for the sake of message)
emotive (for the sake of addresser)
conative (for the sake of addressee)
pathic (for the sake of interaction)
metalingual (for the sake of itself)

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

-the concept of “wearing” from Alberti (prehispanic South America)
-the concept of “mask” from Mohaghegh (postmodern Middle East)
-the concept of “style” from Archer (post-industrial Britain)
[these theories are very helpful for me and import-rich for reimagining subjectivity. Alberti committed to anthropology, Mohaghegh to the philosophical, Archer to sociology]

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

slave: a person attached by law and by custom to the identity of another individual --> ‘social death’ of slavery (as legal nonperson ==> alienation) [in academic literature comparative study of slavery], slavery as a substitute for death in war
--shift--> (the concept that) slaves might influence the tastes, the language, the actions, and even the ideas of their masters

acknowledgement of presence =/= significance in relation to history

(A. Lee on) the African dimension of the genesis of the Babi religion
((oral sources for) the recovery of) subaltern histories in Iran [erased from historical memory]
--> deep resentment of “the presence in Iran of an ‘Other’ that does not conform to the imagined Iranian Self”
unblemished national selfhood
purity fetishism of... <== *purity deeply rooted in religion* [?]

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

(issues) politics of liberation:
•that liberal democracy requires common basis for culture and society
•identity politics:
◦“the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else's oppression” (Eisenstein)
◦invites people to stay in, to look inward, to obsess over the body and the self, to surround themselves with a moral forcefield to protect[...]

[...]است تا من بایزید را می طلبم و نام و نشان او را نمی یابم. (id)

describable موصوفی: چیزی که وصفش می توان کرد

بازدید = دیده شدن     /آفتاب صفت
دانستن = اعتقاد داشتن   /زمین شکل
یادداشت = ذکر       /آب نهاد

ماضی استمراری ~~--> ی

فعل متحرک در جمله (بی جایگاهی فعل) ==> خودجوشی و خود انگیختگی اندیشه و کنش کلامی


نوآوری innovation ==> “جهان خود” (your world) [~ آفرینش هنری، سبک خود، etc.]
=/= نحو: پیوند ارگانیک با جهان دیگران
=/= ابداع: poiesis

(we are interested in strange because we are strange ourselves?)
غریب با غریب الف گیرد (؟)
         |      |
      خود   ذکر غریب


شعر -  شرع -  عرش
  |      |     |
؟   قانون  جهان منظم

ajayeb (شگفتی رویداد نامتعارف) ==> تبدیل شدن سوژه به ابژه tabdil shodan-e suje be obje

Kelile Demne (indian style) --> story within story
=/=
Attar's Tazkirat al-Awliya --> list


نوشتم باد، آنچه دید.

...از بهر حق عداوت کرد(ن)

غیب --> غریب --> غرایب --> عجایب --> نامه

نفاق =/=؟ contradiction
   |          |
(در خود)     (split)

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

amoral, amorphous or polymorphous
to reside under the mark of ambiguity
[to be careful with the figure of trickster -->] trickster represents an archetype of transformation (rebirth?) and a symbol of life, [with] humor, irony (and self-irony), as well as the confrontation between the comic and the tragic --> situates the trickster between the *world's balance and unbalance*

(migration or) migrant: (~= fugitive:) individuals who are reborn existentially precisely through the act of the escape, in order to trick their persecutors ==> survive
[=/= the juggler: Nicolas]

Mohaghegh's proposal: *to lie our way into the lie*

-how and where is my unreal located in my work on bestiaries?
past --> forsaken ancients
outside --> time of disappearance

seduction: immersion in style


our guardian: the thief

(learning from Mohaghegh and Cinderella to be/operate for each other) between:
orchestrator (influence, innovation, experimentation --> laboratory)
partner (equivalence, benefit, reciprocity --> alliance)
slave (captivity, labor, devotion, service, worship --> bondage)
--or--> l.a.b. stands for: laboratory[...]

[...]tyle) --> story within story
=/=
Attar's Tazkirat al-Awliya --> list


نوشتم باد، آنچه دید.

...از بهر حق عداوت کرد(ن)

غیب --> غریب --> غرایب --> عجایب --> نامه

نفاق =/=؟ contradiction
   |          |
(در خود)     (split)

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

amoral, amorphous or polymorphous
to reside under the mark of ambiguity
[to be careful with the figure of trickster -->] trickster represents an archetype of transformation (rebirth?) and a symbol of life, [with] humor, irony (and self-irony), as well as the confrontation between the comic and the tragic --> situates the trickster between the *world's balance and unbalance*

(migration or) migrant: (~= fugitive:) individuals who are reborn existentially precisely through the act of the escape, in order to trick their persecutors ==> survive
[=/= the juggler: Nicolas]

Mohaghegh's proposal: *to lie our way into the lie*

-how and where is my unreal located in my work on bestiaries?
past --> forsaken ancients
outside --> time of disappearance

seduction: immersion in style


our guardian: the thief

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

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

object of event or journey (expedition, venture,)

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

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

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

intelligence: diabolical perception

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

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

[...]+ Nietzsche --> an ethical imperative to examine the kinds of life forces we affirm. negation is not expelled --(Singh reading D+G+N's ethnographic intuition)--> what ‘is’ may be richer than any ideal ‘ought’ ==> anthropology and philosophy, then, are two distinct but related ways in which life may be examined

to think affirmativelt ==> our negations become sharper


my recent knee-jerk reaction (for example to Olearius) would be to invoke Eurocentrism
(resist: “west” and “non-west”, built on entirely negative images of Europe, from which perspective postcolonial settings appear with double negativity from which they can never recover)


thoughtful moments among friends but scholastic and conversational traditions (--> Greek) =/= “sage”, part of a larger conversational contest culture (not always between “friends” but is an agon -->? Kelile-o Demne)
-other conceptual-conversational traditions (in Iran,,,?) [for example: “taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous”, producing an anthropologically oriented Deleuze, a reading of ___ that produces a ___ically oriented ___]
*** it is not a question of negating dialectices but of setting out a different style of thought and examining the ethnographic and political consequences that follow ***


“when you asked him the question about deities, you began a type of conversation called gyan-charcha --> knowledge-talk technique (<-- my favorite mode of reading of literature, and basically everything, is like that)


?which concept(s) you use to think through these things:
•bonded and legitimate labor
•power relations
•marriage
•sacrifice
•kinship
•intimacy
•buying
•selling
•
}--> the fabric of human relatedness depends on it


*[lunar enlightenment]*
(Singh's beautiful lunar reterritorialization of “enlighting”:) what kind of light do we assume as our image of plenitude?
عجایب ماه #moon's inflow-ence, waxing and waning intensities, fluctuating thresholds, the rise and fall of gods, tutelage of moon, a lunar rather than a solar sense of enlightenment, blemished and inconstant, the moon is nondialectical, *neighbors lunacy*


Derridean moment of negative transcendence

waxing and waning plenitude of that flux

Singh:
•varying thresholds and intensities
•logics of a/not-a
•ethics and energetics @Sana
•
•

*** a shift of even a degree (say, a different mode of contract or force) could be the difference between social life and death, happiness and despair, or exploitation and freedom ***
(Singh teaching me to think about Tehranians)

دروغ بد را با دروغ بهتر جایگزین کنیم نه[...]

[...]s that have long been part of the Islamic tradition

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

vita
lives of saints
تذکرة الاولیا Tazkirat al-Awliya
concerned with canonization, education, and collective recollection of contemplative life
(vita as a biological genre recounting the lives of holly men and women in several religious traditions: Bhaktamala, Theravada buddhism, Therigata, etc.)

Singh asking: how would we narrate a scholarly life? (and i add to that: who could be oulia اولیا Arahant [further ones] today? queer or nonhuman)
*participated in the world historical “isms” (--> ajayeb)
--Singh--> narrating a conceptual life, vita

*uncertainties of reception* (in Attar's Tazkirat al-Awliya)

singularity of trajectory of Attar's saints =/= my random sampling of themes

anthropology: to write about anything that exists or imagined

can we talk affirmatively of a postmodern ethnography of ajayeb? =/= “totalizing vision” of culture

recovery of a human voice as a moral imperative (--> Hoda)

(?your history as a) telos of increasingly self-awareness

-Derrida's philosophical style tending to negative transcendence (différance: an absence that transcends ‘a’ and ‘not a’)
-Deleuze's tradition of affirmative immanence

(Singh > Deleuze > Strauss:) structure is composed of “pre-individual singularities” ~ nomadic distribution of potential --immanent--> contradictions, accidents, mutations

pure/impure
suspicious/inauspicious
life/death

heretic --> reorder and obliterate the partitioning of categories that compose the structural order of religion [--> Veena on Sikhism and Hinduism: symbolism of Sikhism understood in relation to Hinduism structural order, annihilating the categorical prioritise (intellectual and l and social) of the medieval world. Sikhism rejecting the opposition between categories of: the rulers, the caste system, and the orders of renunciation --> investment of the virtues of all three *in a single body of faith* and conduct]

heterodox sects
rebellious thinkers
--> negation of the organizing conceptual order

(social and) ritual order generates its own forms of instability

...ambivalences of key concepts ==bring==> “play” to the structure, for good and ill ~ liminality

(Veena's) liminial situation: a form of instability where the individual experiences his social world as separated from the cosmic --> death: disarticulation --> must be undone by inhabiting the liminality : ritually rejoining the flow of life

similarities of ritual mourner and ascetic: transcending the categories of the social and the cosmic

incorporation of the liminal undead (preta) with ritually incorpor[...]

[...]r 1 mosque

mosque =/= shell for prayers
•monumental structures built by the state

old mosque: part of complex devoted to
•learning
•dispensing justice
•channeling charity

oft repeated statement: Pakistan is a mosque [~= one has to learn to inhabit this place, aquire the right etiquette in sharing it]  (--> what it means to be Muslim in Pakistan)
•a place of assembly?
•a sacred place?

qabza, ghabze قبضه, violent seizure, forcible  possession
(depending on who you ask -->) Pakistan under ghabze by:
•the state
•venal religious figures
•unscrupulous lay muslims
•sectarian groups
•

“narratives of loss --> investment on self-betterment* (+ bettering of one's community) ~= striving

emergence of new independent mosques --> new property arrangements (+ admin + funding) --> growth of civil institutions

city bureaucracy of Islamabad ==Hull==> *uncivil politics* (سیاست غیرمدنی =/= civil society)


(like Tehran) Lahore = urban fabric palimpsest of:
•different eras of history
•political leadership
•social composition
•aesthetic styles
•modalities of social engineering
=/= dissolving the past into hypermodern

*postcolonial ~=> sectarian politics*

local mosque-related politics
سیاست محلی مسجدی


demographic change + population growth + strengthening of sectarian politics = ?


به طور قانونی غیرقانونی
legally illegal mosques
(illegal structures on land legally put aside for this purpose)

presence of bureaucrats within mosques in south Asia (since 19th century)

creating an ideal state by means of the mosque


loud zekr ذکر

mosque: (bearing) traces of the changing fortunes of its worshippers

qabza =/= voice: an individual's singular words and gestures arising from her embodiment *of hey maslak مسلک*


...civil servents
cultivating a modernist
cosmopolitan air
and their educated well-traveled
nuclear families


congregation (جماعت =/=? collective, community)
communal exchange
learning
contemplation

mosque employee hierarchy:
1. khatib خطیب the person who gives sermons during Friday prayers
2. imam امام the person who leads the give obligatory prayers during the day expect Friday
3. ghari قاری the person who had received enough training to render a pepper recitation of the quran
4. moazen موذن there person who gives the call to prayers, also responsible for cleaning the mosque


ghabze of mosque = expression[...]

[...]r />
the eternal flame file type/format

the psychoanalyst of Tintin

active archiving is about the framing of the present, and not about the future record

*commemoration is behind a lot of the ways in which we create memories and histories (on the web): that there will be someone who has the time to go back and recognize the values we have created --> recognize ourselves as monuments in the world

(thinking with Bowker fL94LVYjhQQ) as new entities will come to being in the world, instead of creating access to what is reconfiguring of the past we lock ourselves into single unitary visions of the past totally unnecessary --> that is exactly what i am trying to do, providing and creating a kind of approach to what would be an access to a reconfiguring of the past, ajayeb as the case in a Farsi speaking world


on way or another, databases are structured objects, they constraint the forms of narrative you can take ==> a restrict set of stories --> when we are dealing with database we don't have an infinite sets of narrative space

i am taking a theological alterity discourse from pre-enlightenment (islamicated cosmology) and puting it in [...?]*** (Latour is putting it in scientific style of faith)
•artistic research practices/discourses
•modern Iran
•modern culture
•

non-contemplative intelligence basing the database in our time (=/= older traditions of sequencing)

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

*deterioration of the immanent (eco-, politico-,) ==> corruption of social relations ==> corruption of memory*** (of a shared existence, of coexistence with [Div, jinn, shadow, birds, Hindus, Arabs, ]) !!!--✕--> issues of historical injustice
-or-
corruption of a river : the entropy and deterioration immanent to it ==> conditions of possibility for corruption of intimate relations and of memory }--([this] experience of corruption)--> takes the nature of being defrauded (روزگار فريبکار) of one's own form of life, one's family or one's inheritance***


(Naveeda Khan talking about river's point of view in Bangladesh, but her keywords are all relevant for Iran's landscape as well)

***the muslim responses to entropy*** ==?==> eschatology
}--> muslim majority regions are more embeded in the world that what we know from islam

سازش
limits of “adaptation”

a rapport ~ ربط تقریباً همگام
or orientation جهتگيرى

a looming future


“[how] politics and policies of climate change stand to shortchange the present and the past”


Naveeda Khan exploring the perception of climate change within everyday life


those who live on such formations --[powerful river waters, eroding, accre[...]

[...]ansition
we face a world of abundant information, hyperlinked ideas, permission-free resources, highly public interaction, and massive, unresolved disagreement. (Weinberger)
individual expertise is (many argue) being replaced by the wisdom of crowds: noisy and endlessly contentious, but also rich, diverse, and multi-skilled [=/= fantasies of Black Mirror TV series]


wikis of all sorts

(?is my ajayeb.net a) citizen science

vigor and growing utility

“distance matters”
(Olson)


commodification of data : the presentation of datasets as complete, interchangeable products in readily exchanged formats


data-driven science
problem of evaluation
--> ***Do we know things if we cannot explain why they are true?*** (Anderson)

hierachically organized forms of credentialing

in Julia's seminar we were trying to examine: commodified data analysis tools and widely available software skills ==> (larger number of participants to) analyze data and run models

(*a problem with university students:) [students who do appear] more motivated by the university as a *rite of passage* (گذار از بلوغ) and a *lifestyle*
=/= learning
*professors are no longer seen as infallible experts, but as resources whose facts can be checked in real time

(question of) standard / ontology --> (desire for) universality / (need for) change


knowledge of past climates


@apass
(through my love and study for ajayeb --> infrastructure -->) questions for apass:
-what new forms of organization and community are emerging? what power relations do they rely on, create, or destroy? who wins and who loses as knowledge infrastructure change? (questions proposed by a knowledge infrastructure workshop 2012)
-(ways to) encode and reinforce existing interests and relations of power
-(we need) a design community versed in these literatures:
•different social worlds
•conflicting conceptual frameworks
•sociology of science and technology
•sociology of standards (--> standardizing data has proven to be a crucial activity in *scaling up* the sciences) #lens
•boundary objects
•trading zones
•actor networks
•how sharing works in practice
•agreements on shared norms, practices, and technical systems (problematized by Femke, she focuses my attention on how software developers are too quick to construct “ontologies”)
•
==> to scale up the generally lower-level focus of design thinking [--> how my ajayeb.net addresses this?]
--> to co-design new infrastructures
--> to look beyond the scale of a field and timeframe of a career


(we need) meaningful access to digital media (not an exciting add-on investment)<[...]

[...]>
(i am modifying some of Calvert's term:)
[*]identifier: an (always breakable) association
[*]actionable identifier: an identifier that can be acted upon by widely available interpretive systems --?--> [*]queryable: effectively leading to a story
[*]content: abstract substance ‘usually’ found in strings
[*]history: a list of (not always all the) versions, (a human-readable document that describes the change?)

(ajayeb.net must always help users) guage the persistence commitments and abilities of repositories and archives <-- element names, values, and precise semantics are in flux

*content variance* in ajayeb.net
(how did i or didn't perform/stage setting user expectations in my apass representations of ajayeb.net)
--> (question of) *objects that grow*, identifier assignment policy, content moves away (varies) from its original state
(any) content change ==triggers==> generation of new object identifier

finite, indefinite, lifetime, subinfinite

content in the presence of versions
(Calvert's defining “content” without using the term “meaning”:)
[*]content: abstract substance, found in such strings as writing, speech, images, and music, (=/= form, =/= style)
content that includes an actionalbe id string:
•extraversuioned, offering no direct actionalbe access
•introversioned, version is opaque, shyness?, good for longevity, bad for inferring provenance منشاء


found in the wild

found in ajayeb.net:
•constructed content reference
•scholarly web
•standardized query strings
•the question of landing page --with--> typed links navigable by software

how ajayeb.net performs analysis and prioritization of its own service definition?
how ajayeb.net translates its politics into metadata[~= machine-readable persistence statements]?
which “well-intentioned but untested” set of terms are used and addressed in ajayeb.not?

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

[(gendered, racialized, politicized, colonial,,,) narratives of innovation]

(i tended to this field with ajayeb [عجایب المخلوقات: a context of pedagogy and librarianship] -->) library and information science : technologically intensive profession (<-- also many other professions)
علوم بايگانی <--> علوم  کتابداری
(my performance and literary interest:) *librarianship and teaching are both professions that resist commodification because they rely on embodied labor and personal interaction*

*people-centric work* (like library science and education)

quantitative =/= qualitative
measurable =/= descriptive
(objective concepts)
--> (Calvert reading) the ostensibly qualitative, measurable, and hence objective con[...]