[...] *fable: turning the merely grammatical subject into the fiction of the acting* <== zoomorphism (=/= anthropomorphism)


fable of the eagle and the raven
the story of the raven that, having once watched with envy as an eagle snatched a lamb from the flock and carried it off, later attempts a similar feat. But a raven is not an eagle, and his claws get stuck in the fleece of a wether (not a lamb): his prey becomes his trap. He is captured by the shepherd, his wings are broken and taken from him, and he is given to the shepherd's children as a plaything
•identity check
•the bird begins the fable without (knowing) its name
•establishment of the raven as an (ir)responsible agent, one that can be called to respond for itself <-- an “I” has a name and a choice about its action, because it could have done otherwise
•raven's errancy consists precisely in wandering away from its name <-- in the past =/= now (now I know well that i am a rauen) we can act responsibly
•act in accord with the fate prescribed for you by your name --> restore the proper name ==> establishment of the responsible agent
•critical system of “error --> correction --> I = name” ==fix==> the link between the order of cognition (whether false supposition or true knowledge) & that of action (take a lamb / as
the eagle did)
•don't compare yourself with what you are not --> reader is you are asked to compare yourself with the raven (follow its example)
}--> fable of responsibility = a story about language and its danger (raven may be like an eagle, but it is not an eagle) --> “know your name + do what it say” --> *responsibility: the response to the name by which one is called* --> the idea that *supposing & knowing* belong to one and the same homogeneous system*

(the art of) supposition: disguise, false knowledge (guess, surmise, premise)
--or--> ungovernable and unrecoverable force of *positing* (position or imposition)

(generation of the pure name in fable of the eagle and the raven:)
non-symmetrical movement from nameless bird --to--> birdless name (a wingless not-eagle)


why fables are important? <-- others and their traces are always working within us already, in a space and time that cannot be reduced to that of consciousness (or self-presence)
•profound linguistic or rhetorical complexity of the call and response

the raven resounds (it does not just start talking) <-- it starts with the others: eagle, wether, shepherd

Lacoue­ Labarthe --> identification (the self-becoming of the Self) has always been thought as a matter of examples (+ their appropriation) --raven--> (paradoxical impera­tive) “imitate me in order to be what you are”

wolf in sheep's clothing (Aesop's “A Case of Mistaken Identity”)
a wolf thought that by disguising himself he could get plenty to eat.[...]

[...]eable presence of multiple possibilities” or the complex nature of decisions creates and invites rhetoric. (=/= Plato saw rhetoric as pure deceit [gul] and positioned it in politics. [you can see he is terrified by the death of his teacher and mentor Socrates by civility.])
rhetoric --> contigent --> epistemic: individuals make meaning through language and determine what constitutes truth


*ontology is death-dealing <--** terrible violence is directed to the non-existing, the never having existed
---> go to the root of exist --> which modes of existence deserve our curiosity?

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

(i found a word for it,) my register of @Lili's scream: i see it as ‘nonlaughter’(?)
(*proposal: there is a number when we dial we can listen to her scream on the phone.) (--> stream, technology, tele-, telephone, called,)
(for her) thinking =? knowing (sending =/= receiving)
(an SF scenario:) imagine and describe an alien world where its populace don't practice ‘knowing.’
**scream ==makes==> witnesses**
(fighting ==makes==> coordination)

از طلبکار به طلبه (az talabkar be talabe)
///the (symbolic?) structuration of ‘demand’ in Lili's presentation:
the ‘sujet supposé savoir’ #sss [~= Pir, (پیر always a paternal metaphor?) that Other whom you ‘call’ who holds (your) deepest truth ---> go to the metaphorology of “depth” =/= “skimming the surface"] (installed by Lacan) is a subject who is in a functional position and one presumes that this subject knows or retains or holds the knowledge (even vital and secret knowledge [this is knowledge-talabkar طلبکار]) that you want. this subject is functionally established. one of the laws of our encounter is that puts the speaker/writer/analyst/text/etc in the (even architectural) center: the subject-supposed-to-know in Lacan the analyst who sits there as a tower of knowledge that mostly withholds what s/he knows --> transferencial energy directed towards him/her --> drama of identification (--> break-out of narcissism for Freud)
-it is one of the (negative?) binding transferential contracts in relation to “the one who speaks”
[*anthropology of exchange* --> Transference: (for Lacan) Each time a man speaks to another in an authentic and full manner, there is, in the true sense, transference, symbolic transference--something which takes place which changes the nature of the two beings present. Later Lacan articulates the transference in sujet supposé savoir: transference is the attribution of knowledge to the Other, the supposition that the Other is a subject who knows. “As soon as the subject who is supposed to know exists *somewhere* ... there is transference.” (Seminar II, p. 232)] [keep in mind that the (post?-)Lacanian theory is about the *constitutive function of the signifier in relation to the subject.* ... for Lacan, What constitutes the person and its identity can[...]

[...]serve our curiosity?

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

(i found a word for it,) my register of @Lili's scream: i see it as ‘nonlaughter’(?)
(*proposal: there is a number when we dial we can listen to her scream on the phone.) (--> stream, technology, tele-, telephone, called,)
(for her) thinking =? knowing (sending =/= receiving)
(an SF scenario:) imagine and describe an alien world where its populace don't practice ‘knowing.’
**scream ==makes==> witnesses**
(fighting ==makes==> coordination)

از طلبکار به طلبه (az talabkar be talabe)
///the (symbolic?) structuration of ‘demand’ in Lili's presentation:
the ‘sujet supposé savoir’ #sss [~= Pir, (پیر always a paternal metaphor?) that Other whom you ‘call’ who holds (your) deepest truth ---> go to the metaphorology of “depth” =/= “skimming the surface"] (installed by Lacan) is a subject who is in a functional position and one presumes that this subject knows or retains or holds the knowledge (even vital and secret knowledge [this is knowledge-talabkar طلبکار]) that you want. this subject is functionally established. one of the laws of our encounter is that puts the speaker/writer/analyst/text/etc in the (even architectural) center: the subject-supposed-to-know in Lacan the analyst who sits there as a tower of knowledge that mostly withholds what s/he knows --> transferencial energy directed towards him/her --> drama of identification (--> break-out of narcissism for Freud)
-it is one of the (negative?) binding transferential contracts in relation to “the one who speaks”
[*anthropology of exchange* --> Transference: (for Lacan) Each time a man speaks to another in an authentic and full manner, there is, in the true sense, transference, symbolic transference--something which takes place which changes the nature of the two beings present. Later Lacan articulates the transference in sujet supposé savoir: transference is the attribution of knowledge to the Other, the supposition that the Other is a subject who knows. “As soon as the subject who is supposed to know exists *somewhere* ... there is transference.” (Seminar II, p. 232)] [keep in mind that the (post?-)Lacanian theory is about the *constitutive function of the signifier in relation to the subject.* ... for Lacan, What constitutes the person and its identity can now be read as a text, and the author is not the subject, but the trajectory of the signifiers that represent the desire of those who occupy the place of the Other for the subject.]
[about demand: Lacan argues that “demand constitutes the Other as already possessing the ‘privilege’ of satisfying needs,” and that indeed the child's biological needs are themselves altered by “the condition that is imposed on him by the existence of the discourse, to make his need pass through the defiles of the signifier.” ... The subject has never done anything other than demand (since infancy!)] *{q[...]

[...]s presentation:
the ‘sujet supposé savoir’ #sss [~= Pir, (پیر always a paternal metaphor?) that Other whom you ‘call’ who holds (your) deepest truth ---> go to the metaphorology of “depth” =/= “skimming the surface"] (installed by Lacan) is a subject who is in a functional position and one presumes that this subject knows or retains or holds the knowledge (even vital and secret knowledge [this is knowledge-talabkar طلبکار]) that you want. this subject is functionally established. one of the laws of our encounter is that puts the speaker/writer/analyst/text/etc in the (even architectural) center: the subject-supposed-to-know in Lacan the analyst who sits there as a tower of knowledge that mostly withholds what s/he knows --> transferencial energy directed towards him/her --> drama of identification (--> break-out of narcissism for Freud)
-it is one of the (negative?) binding transferential contracts in relation to “the one who speaks”
[*anthropology of exchange* --> Transference: (for Lacan) Each time a man speaks to another in an authentic and full manner, there is, in the true sense, transference, symbolic transference--something which takes place which changes the nature of the two beings present. Later Lacan articulates the transference in sujet supposé savoir: transference is the attribution of knowledge to the Other, the supposition that the Other is a subject who knows. “As soon as the subject who is supposed to know exists *somewhere* ... there is transference.” (Seminar II, p. 232)] [keep in mind that the (post?-)Lacanian theory is about the *constitutive function of the signifier in relation to the subject.* ... for Lacan, What constitutes the person and its identity can now be read as a text, and the author is not the subject, but the trajectory of the signifiers that represent the desire of those who occupy the place of the Other for the subject.]
[about demand: Lacan argues that “demand constitutes the Other as already possessing the ‘privilege’ of satisfying needs,” and that indeed the child's biological needs are themselves altered by “the condition that is imposed on him by the existence of the discourse, to make his need pass through the defiles of the signifier.” ... The subject has never done anything other than demand (since infancy!)] *{question =/= demand}*--> Nancy
[the use of ‘transference’ is a way to account for the relationship between readers and texts. the emphasis in Lacan is on the ‘supposed’ and not on the ‘know’. reader assume that the text ‘knows’. --> What Lacan's understanding of the transference points to is the fact that we must see the meaning of any given text not within the text itself but as a reconstruction between reader and text.] [in other words, transference is ‘a representation of the past’ (childhood and etc.) to the present ]
a pedagogical problem: rapid transferencial turn-over: going from one subject-supposed-to-know to the other (=/= reading)
[...]

[...]h changes the nature of the two beings present. Later Lacan articulates the transference in sujet supposé savoir: transference is the attribution of knowledge to the Other, the supposition that the Other is a subject who knows. “As soon as the subject who is supposed to know exists *somewhere* ... there is transference.” (Seminar II, p. 232)] [keep in mind that the (post?-)Lacanian theory is about the *constitutive function of the signifier in relation to the subject.* ... for Lacan, What constitutes the person and its identity can now be read as a text, and the author is not the subject, but the trajectory of the signifiers that represent the desire of those who occupy the place of the Other for the subject.]
[about demand: Lacan argues that “demand constitutes the Other as already possessing the ‘privilege’ of satisfying needs,” and that indeed the child's biological needs are themselves altered by “the condition that is imposed on him by the existence of the discourse, to make his need pass through the defiles of the signifier.” ... The subject has never done anything other than demand (since infancy!)] *{question =/= demand}*--> Nancy
[the use of ‘transference’ is a way to account for the relationship between readers and texts. the emphasis in Lacan is on the ‘supposed’ and not on the ‘know’. reader assume that the text ‘knows’. --> What Lacan's understanding of the transference points to is the fact that we must see the meaning of any given text not within the text itself but as a reconstruction between reader and text.] [in other words, transference is ‘a representation of the past’ (childhood and etc.) to the present ]
a pedagogical problem: rapid transferencial turn-over: going from one subject-supposed-to-know to the other (=/= reading)
#the kind of ‘reading’ [encountering a text, artwork, speech, ourselves, etc.] that i am talking about is not about this transferencial energy directed towards the sujet supposé savoir. this practice of reading is about to read together and to read ourselves reading, to an atentiveness to the way we are reading or not-reading or aberating from something and be attentive to that disjunctive movement. what is noncomprehension? what is the experience of nonunderstanding? and so on.
*so, the sujet supposé savoir is the one who is structurally is in a place of knowledge which doesn't mean that subject is filled with or capable of offering power and knowledge but that is projected onto that functional space* --> sujet supposé savoir is merely a spatial determination? (is this related to my interventive lectures in outdoor spaces in order to sabotage ‘what is meant to signify’ of the spatial subject-supposed-to-know?)
*sss is one of the effects of subjectivity -- a scenography of transferential intensity : we credit that being with having knowledge to transmit, and then we might also resist it.
---let's get out of this space!!?
--%--in the context of pedagogy[...]

[...] students regards their teachers as sujet supposé savoir, that they should know something. “it is the students’ supposition of an art teacher who knows, who have something more than they have in themselves, that initiates the teaching and learning process rather than the art knowledge actually possessed by the teacher” (Hetrick). (is it the architectural gesture--the center--that produces the recognition of the teacher situated as “teacher”?) *“the spell of transference.” / at some point some gesture is taken by the student as a sign of hidden knowledge and intention ==> transference establishing itself; (how education [and love?] without transference looks like? --> Julia Scher, ‘post-Lacanian’ means that you don't ‘transfer’ to the art-work nor artist?) #harem
parent --> teacher }==> what the student may desire to become (be recognized as)

according to Lacan there is no Pir (~ [often iconoclast] leader, guide, mentor, expert, knowing-hero, enlightener, rescuer knowing more, knowledgeable pedagogue/leader “helping students find themselves,” [--> my failed transference with Saeed])

-->? Discourse of the University* : (systematic) “knowledge” replaces the nonsensical master signifier in the dominant commanding position; in this case the sujet supposé savoir dependent upon the related knowledge of the Other, or the source of “the field” (journals, textbooks, etc.) ==> (arbiter of) truth --> *to transmit knowledge that is already given*
[account of knowledge as a symbolic and social network, master signifier, subject positions,]

in placing the ‘text’ in the position of a knowing expert who has the answers Lili (unconsciously) idealizes her texts, and of course when her ‘texts’ fail to satisfy that desire she demands ‘knowing’ from them in terms of cynicism: the feeling or state of being annoyed and irritated by them. this is a structural space of ‘demand’ in her. for me what is at stake is the complex nature of encounter between Lili and text which takes place in an artificial space--a symbolic space--that is at the same time the place of real investments of her desires.

@Lili; is she (like the rest of us humans) looking for an active, predatory art?--> if non-communicative non-predatory non-kinetic [a common issue with the students of choreography and dance in general] art exists on this planet, then we kave to learn “a whole new set of techniques.” [La Guin])
--the meter of ‘time,’ that essential element, matrix and measure of all kown human-animal art. what if there are other metric systems? art not as an action, but a reaction? not a communication, but a reception? {---> go to my master studies Diploma on passivity in performance art}

registers of ‘complaining’ in Lili's discourse. she is a bit like Faust groaning, habe nun akhhhhh Philosophie and so on. [Ach of Sprache] (that they have done all the work, they know everything, yet know not enough of what [...]

[...]istic libido)
why Eros is so powerful? what kind of sublimation is the culture-building power of Eros?

in Derrida, narcissism is the passage to the Other, and not necessarily merely a collapse into oneself.

auto-erotic solipsism

باطل کردن طلسم ضمیر the ego appears [displaced elsewhere in the world as an effect] as the result of primary narcissism?
(batel kardan-e telesm-e zamir) dispulsion of ego
*ego forms in the world* (Lippit)

auto-erotic economy

the ego in the island, finding footprints of the others
(Freudian protocols of existence:) there is no world, there is only islands. --> multiplicity of isolations ~-> individuation

“In narcissism the ego disappears from the world and reappears in the imaginary realm of invisible interiority.” (Lippit)

{the erotic attachment to outside objects}<--pervert =/= narcissist-->{withdraw, calls it “instinct for self preservation"} (a shortcut: my way of undering my own narcissistic tendencies has been through perversity.)

[for Juan:] (artistic) narcissism =/=? fossilization (~->? mimesis)

*mimesis* is not about form
in order to represent the character of the supposed ‘word’ of another
mimesis + techne ~= copy (@Juan)

diegesis =/=? mimesis
(telling) -- (showing)
(recounted) -- (enacted)
}--> poiesis _////(actually a useful and necessary difference, synthesized by the Greeks--Plato and Aristotle)
(...and what about the question of the medium?)

*Juan's relationship with the (in)dependency of the individuated self of the artist--in this case himself--by means of mimetic techne is to overcome the visual artist's narcissism?

(Pierre:) being alone --> mimesis --> through mimetic intra-acting with the other
(Sina: there is no “being alone” only ‘feeling lonely’ which is itself a form of intra-acting : internalizing an external phenomena. “loneliness” is a belief that one has.)

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

narcissism as a mimetic and performative mode
transindividual narcissism --Maitra--> movement of the subject beyond ethnicity (ethnic formations that the bio-political processes of interpellation demand of the subject)
remediation of ethnic narcissism

[Maitra's queer diasporic reading practice of] (in diaspora media theory) performing an identity (that is “Iranian” for example)

*intermedia* (=/= multimedia: fuse disparate media)
frictions between different media
conceptual interplay between media
space of alchemical transformation
(at the level of) conflict of interpretations
radical understanding of interdisciplinarity

diaspora: no longer having a clear answer to “where are you from?”

what might we learn from narcissism (from mimesis)?[...]

[...]lligible?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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


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

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

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

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

@Seba after accelerate manifesto reading: (what is and how can we not pivot on our work) the measure of the meaningfulness of action. (Seba's notion of losing hope is because he put himself unconsciously in a cost-benefit analysis? “what is the effect of my actions?”) [in practice it is difficult to embody speculative thinking. we are still in the space of thinking in terms of the probable.]
[...]

[...]plasticity, her interest in relation between form, materiality and meaning) / “Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing” (28 pages)

[week 4] 20th century sciences and philosophies, the notion of fabrication of concepts:
•Xin Wei --> Whitehead / “Whitehead's Poetical Mathematics” (19 pages)

[week 5] on articulation:
•Deleuze and Guattari / “A Thousand Plateaus” (chapter 3: Double Articulation, 32 pages)

[week 6] feminist and women studies, scene of writing:
•aesthetic tentacularity: Lindsay Kelley & Eva Hayward / “Carnal Light”

[week 7] digital media:
•Flusser on hypertext / “Does Writing Have a Future” (chapter: Supertext, 6 pages)
•Bolter / “Writing Space” (chapter 3 Writing as Technology, 13 pages)


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

#workshop little fables of practice, second day storytelling
(proposed initially to Lili:) #imagine and describe an alien world where its populace don't practice ‘knowing’
with this practice we get into questions of (--without directly addressing/announcing them we will provoke a better understanding of what we might think of them:)
•knowing --> (the inseparability of) knowing, being, and doing
•the ‘suppos’ of the supposed to know
•rhetorics, and intrinsicality (“on the inside”)
•response --> (‘knowing’ =) differential accountability =/= differential responsiveness
•environment
•description (discursive significance)
•world, and sense-making
•geometry (and -metry)
•(intelligibility and) materiality enacted --> question of discourse
•epistemology
•conceptions of space and time
•reflection (as a pervasive trope of knowing) [mirroring, imitation, reflection, tropes of “sameness"]
•material discursive evolving
•mattering; matter and intelligibility, episteme and techne, macro and micro,
•

the workshop is in a way about the trope of knowing, ontology of knowing

(ways of) knowing entangled with mode of being
(with which creature?) matter's dynamism is intrinsic to its biodynamic way of being (--Barad--> for brittlestar everything is intrinsic)
(creatures that) constantly changing its geometry and its topology --> ongoing reworking of bodily boundaries
(our, and an alien critter's “it”’s) discoursive practices: boundary-drawing practices by which it differentiates between “itself” and the “environment” ==> making sense of its world [--> that is why i am interested in the (better?) articulation of “differences” (= boundary-making practices, our “differential productions”) that we are making, as a way of getting into eachother discourses ~~and--> (its) ongoing materialization --> *differential materialization* (is discursive; Barad)]
•patterns of difference
•I am against the ‘frictionless narrative space’ (in the [...]

[...]is a distributed practice that includes the larger material arrangement [then isn't the practice of writing insufficient?]


after the first round we can ask: what do you need (un)know to write/think that story? or, what do you need to forget/unlearn in order to be able to think/imagine that world?

another round of the workshop could be: #imagine and describe an alien world where there is no ‘mediation’ or activities that are not ‘mediated’

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

because of working on ajayeb, i am becoming a “definitionist,” or “definitionologist” (not in the classical sense of concept theory)
a definition i give is a local abstraction, even when it is making boundaries for a dispersed or global concept, it is still a situated knowledge. that means it might be categorical but not applicable outside this particulare niche of space and time, whether it is in a bar in a conversation with Eszter or when accessed in my hypertext

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

committed to the imperative of the Rig, things not to do in the pop-up book:
•use as ironic: incongruity in expectations of what is ment and what it will mean in advance
•use to symbolize: as a way of not dealing with sujet supposé savoir
•use of anamorphic gaze: a non-diffractive optical system
--> to be careful (or keep in check) with sequential palindromic notion of pop-up book, to deal with the parsable seesaw motif inherit in the pop-up book Blickmaschin
•use hylomorphic: assumes form is inscribed onto passive matter (by an agent with a design in mind)
•

(relevance should be worked) non-ironic non-symbolic non-anamorphic non-palindromic non-hylomorphic (?)

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

towards writing the end of apass dossier
•practices: workshops, (bow and arrow,) ajayeb.net, rigs --> pop-up book, notes, routines, excess,
•trajectory: bibliography, wonder, ongoingness, ontology,
•productions: study as artwork, reading as artwork, bottom-top approach to writing,
•findings: every research practice: must include “body image”, must include “the image of creativity” especially if you are iranian, must employ ontological attention to differential productions, must rework decompose redefine its root-metaphors, must give extensive equipment list, must trace its social connections in a wider ecology of practices, must include a critique of technology,
•moments of composition: a scene animated by some quality, or... taking place as accidents (or not)

key literature, magic wands:
1st stage:
•Richard Sennett: Flesh and Stonne --> learning about body image
•Manuel Delanda: A 1000 Years of Nonlinear History --> learning about material histories
•Eduardo Kohn: How Forests Thinks --> learning about semiotics
•Timothy Morton: Sublime Objects --> learning about [...]

[...]ours which enabled them;
-3- relative fragility of technical beings: it establishes combinations and bridges between completely heterogeneous types of beings

*fiction: ...beings be grasped according to a particular relationship between materials and figures which cannot be detached without those two layers losing their specific form of objectivity. {fictionally : materials <--> figures}
fiction objects: everything that folds technical beings --> to derive from them a new type of *alteration* --(generates)--> another world (a world which has the particularity of not being able to be detached in any way from the materials [from which it appears to detach itself.])
*fictional beings:
 -they extract materials from forms, figures or small worlds that can neither be detached from these materials nor reduced to them.
 -khosh-yomn خوش یمن and shoom شوم (felicity and infelicity) --> pretense (vanemud وانمود); they depend on the always fragile maintenance of the relation between material and form
 -*specifications* of “fictional beings” (that leaves in its wake) ==> worlds (unlike fic all other modes fold for their own use by managing to extract from materials)

All continuations of a “course of action” suppose a discontinuity that must be overcome in order to define a trajectory. ==> gap, break

the mini-transcendence required for any definition of the being-as-other

(haven't we managed?) to allow several modes of existence to run, flow, pass, each one appearing indeed to possess its own conditions of truth and falsity and its own mode of subsistence

‘libido sciendi’: to recognize the branching that allows us to stop confusing the chains of reference it has to establish in order to ensure knowledge with the leaps that things have to make to maintain themselves in existence

*“beings of law,” : those beings that wake a judge up at night and force him to ask himself “Did I make the right decision?”


(feeling smashed by) ‘the task of mimicking the world’


*articulation* is an ontological property of the universe; a being is articulated (rather than being a silent presence, made immediate, persistent, given duration without existence).
-It is the articulation of beings that enables us to talk about them and to judge, that is to say, to monitor the risks they take in being “permitted by” and “promised to”. (modes of existence)
translation, discrepancy, displacement, interpolation,
(problem with “statement” [=/=? articulation] is that it must correspond to a ‘state of affairs’ [~=? politics])
==> to free science from: completeness, comprehensiveness, formality, expressibility, inscriptibility. (Vollständigkeit, Verständlichkeit, Formalität, Ausdrücklichkeit, Unbeschreiblichkeit.) [what is a science that is not describable? ~-> Sohrevardi {forms of e[...]

[...]al institutions

testing has everything to do with the way the policing of political sites and bodies takes place, in modernity and with our experience of reality in general.

testing ~=/?==><--> the real
(elliptical circuit established between test & real)


Freud was working on to tests which are lost now: Aktualitätsprüfung to distinguish between reality and immediacy

Lacan has linked testing to the subject's creation of a first “outside"----a space that is no longer the same as “reality”

the way the state takes possession of the body presumptively on drugs.
-in this way, drugs are seen as eccentric: what is outside, or moves outside the center, can center it, they are animated by an outside already inside
-how drugs are isolating or how they establish community (of those who are somehow together or with nonpresence.) anything that refigures individuality or collectivity that brings you together with the other and absolutly keeps you apart from the other
drug: Dionysian frenzy, aspirin, religion, dirty language,
-I am sorry I have no drugs to offer you today!
-not everyone in civic societies has the privilege of getting high and mind-altering (that which supposedly suggests vulnerability,) running arround drunk staggering and out-of-it, they will be beaten the hell out of it, they have to be sober, on alert and self-protective

your pee belongs to the state----new civic readability

{four bodies don't belong to themselves: children, addicts, outlaws, and ghosts, are all busted by the state or certain legislated majority}


destructive (and artistic) modes of production.

test, does it have an essence? Is it pure relationality?



Avital's “speculative telephonics”

Heidegger: sign = cutting edge, Zeichen --Holderlin--> “we're cutting out” =/= (Avital:) schizo knows how to disconnect, how to depart, how to cut the shit

the place where a call can break into a body[=? orificial openings of a subject]

emergency verification: we are still trying to cut into the emergency line (that we are on) after the crashing down of the transcendental signifier


in the (technologically 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, t[...]

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

اما راویان اخبار و ناقلان آثار و طوطیان شکرشکن شیرین گفتار و خوشه چینان خرمن سخن دانی و صرافان سر بازار معانی و چابک سواران میدان دانش توسن خوش خرام سخن را بدینگونه به جولان در آورده اند که ...

•Mirabile dictu... (miraculous to say...)

towards Despret's talking parrots
parrots (shekar-shekan) (and philosophers) really like to control the exchange, to keep control of a conversation : their refusal to let another individual choose the topic of conversation
***(parrots have) a pragmatic rather than a referential conception of language
[am i also referential (=/= pragmatic) in my conception of language?]--> to teach a being to speak presupposes not only a tolerance of but also *a profound interest in misunderstanding* (this ‘profound interest in misunderstanding’ is precisely both cognitive and political aspect of what I am trying to bring forth) ~-> (how language-learning with animals can help us learn) restating and inverting the question of control

*exchange can only be achieved when there is “a continous reprisal of translations and betrayals of meaning”* ==> understanding itself is compromised
[*]ajayeb: a non-stop betrayal of translations (of perspectives) and continuous redressal of meanings (of things)

“as if” has to do with misunderstanding

“meanings are constructed in a constant movement of ‘attunement,’ which makes them emerge.”
(Despret, animal breeding practices)

(my work on ajayeb is also much about) *language-learning* [...]in its pragmatic function: it is an effective means of acting and of making others act


keep your end up


[*]type: identifying language use with modes of existence [Wittgenstein's mistake] (maybe useful to reanimate the question of ‘becoming’ for Marialena)
the mode of existence of lions is subordinated to that of an essence “lioness,” guaranteed by the identity of the species and the stability of its repertoire of behaviour ==> a burdensome conception of the naturalness of animals
***the question is not what ‘is’ a lion, but “how does one become a lion,” not only in lion community and species, but also in the work of scientists, constructing what it is to be a lion.
--> this is about becoming: of that of which the animal is rendered capa[...]

[...]br /> (in this question can be raised an unexpected animal)
[(how) the makhlughat/مخلوقات/creatures/beings of ajayeb were well equipped (with agency, will, intention,)]


sheep, ‘the epitome of the silly animal’

(همگون دوستی hamgune-dusti, khod-no dusti خود نوع دوستی) altruism, in birds (and humans)

Zahavi calling his birds, ‘refugees,’ non-territorial individuals

quest for social ‘status’ and prestige in Babblers
(birds know that) signals for prestige are costly

inclusive fitness

porousness of the (semiotic) demarcation [wild/domesticated --> quasi-wild/quasi-domesticated] --> (successively and recursively) unstable and living tropes* --> we should probably redefine our (creaturely) subjects in correspondence to (Leibnizian) ‘quasi-causes’
quasi-feral

the ‘unexpected’ often unfolds in an unexpected way. (Despert > Leibniz)

anthropomorphism is always someone's anthropomorphism
anthropomorphism is always someone's common sense


{(becoming interested in) individual (detailed nuances of) difference =/= when “model” becomes the goal}--> standard model (of natural science) --> a presupposed specific idea of “science” --> use a technical, highly theoretical language ==> epistemological objectification of animals (--> representation of animals as natural objects) ~= desubjectified animals


(safeguards of) authorship and meaning (won't allow Attar) ==ask==> |X| what is your “subject” interested in? what matters to them?
(Attar never looked for varieties--in anecdotes, in little stories, in individual bird biographies -->{these are the materials that I am collecting from my family telegram group posted animal videos})

thinking with the bird
looking with it (=/= looking at it) --and--> and knowing its intentions

both humth humans and nonhumans create narratives, rather than just telling them. (there are socialities in which) they both create/disclose new scripts ~~--> inhabiting an existential world ~-> full of actors and living adventures, that give them:
•a history
•a bibliography
•a personality
•
(and) a full repertoire of:
•will
•intention
•agency
•


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

*agency is an equipment

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


the difference between response and reaction (not so clear [as I thought]) #passive reacting [...]

[...]tion ==> we immediately stop being wholly modern --> *our future begins to change* / *our past begins to change*
[my work on ajayeb (“hybrids down below” {Latour}) is precisely about (this kind of) transformation of pasts and futures] ==> meeting companion species {if my work on ajayeb doesn't teach me how to meet the dog in my street, the pigeon on my window, the juju on the edge of my paper, what is it good for then?!}

(*)companion species: assemblages of living and non-living ‘species’***
(Janina is all along engaged with companion species)


(an strategy:) allocation of responsibility for grasping information

assemblage at various levels and sublevels characterizes *explanations* and *practices*

technoscientific tsunami that will obliterate prior practices and cultures...

(learning to) see old and new forms of confusions, docility, subjectivity, morality, agency, empowerment (when we are together)
(to recognize and make) new sites of negotiation


Alberti: bodies of Minoan figurines “wear” the appropriate gender for a specific ritual practice, they don't “bear” gender (as their essential feature) ==> gender salience is always in question, not a propor presupposition
“sex has emerged as a salient attribute of the pot's character as a pot”

when zoomorphic figures are present...

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


museum studies


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


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


glocalizing


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

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

technologies of the literal

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

***starting off a research p[...]

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

evil eye --> دیو چشم زخم --> غش --> اغشی<br />

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

باغ plethora of old and new humanities, selves - with Sardar: There are plants that provide various colors of foliage, or hedges and borders, or climb up fences, or play architectural roles (=/= presumption that we must have a identity & supposition that we discover our identity & the Socratic “know thyself” as a fundamental human urge) we exist with multiple identities invoked differently in different context. subscribed to an imagined “heritage” ready to kill and be killed to save some “essence” (=/= San'an)
sake of the difference, scum and finest of men
(for example “black”: to be confused: once excluded, now technically empowered, a dominant group in the rainbow, but still practically marginalised by the history that created and continues to operate practical exclusion.)
@Iranians: how much of the Other is actually located within me?
“a perfectly permissible aspiration” --into--> “an instrument of war” (Maalouf)
Brwar” (Maalouf)
British identity is based on an assumption of authority that makes the world a familiar place, a proper theatre in which to continue being British. #Olearius
exclude the (unsavoury) foreigners <==> romanticised history and frozen tradition
*history as a deliberate human creation ==> acknowledgement of a common past ==> (a difference called) identity [= “our” similarity against “their” difference,] (submerging, barbarising and differentiating itself from another identity) [for example ancient Greece + Rome + Christianity = Europe] ==> monolith ==> conflict and death
•my (jub جوب) gutter photos =/= Tehran's Americanization of the high street.
•my photos of Rima =/= her selfie's merchandised model of individualism
a deep desire for association
various and diverse traditions ==> identity: “the means to synthesise similarity through difference and to see difference as discrete means of expressing basic similarity” (Sardar[...]

[...]e nature.”

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


schematic conceptions of Eszter


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


the things apprehended from a particular point of view (particular visual phenomenology) are not connected to that point


Neobeobachtungen
moshahedat مشاهدت
نگاه جدید


*essence of the internal world* --> who is busy with this? (this will define the fate of animal subjectivity)


*view from nowhere*: that their particular viewpoint is not part of the common reality (--✕--> sociology of science)


X is Y
“is”: converge, a technique of modeling (~~> sync)
X, Y: two referential paths
we know how X is supposed to be true


people are no told at an early age that *all matter is really energy* (--> capitalist physicalism. then what you say abnout ‘energy’ is saying something about the nature of reality)
physicalism: the hypothesis that a mental event is a physical event


someone with instinct metamorphosis


(my feedbacks in apass does not only apply to intentional mental events of each other)

(Nagel asking for:) to devise a method of expressing in objective terms much more than we can at present [but he is stuck in the idea of] “a phenomenology that is objective*

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

<br />



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

[...]

[...]ster, (rootless existence)

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



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


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



--research--

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

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


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


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


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


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

(not to make the performance 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)?
•
[...]

[...] closeness of different subjects is catastrophic [--> proper differences between kinds and subjects.] Sa'di is writing golestan گلستان and bustan بوستان at the time of the Mongols threat---it is the news of the Mongols coming and we know about the velocities of news can penetrate within the thick walls of any city. Sa'di is theorizing proximity based on “mohabat” (محبت love, Liebe and kindness), he assembles a setting of ‘garden’ for the coming of Mongols army. Kelileo Demne's project is pessimist pragmatism, mobilizing ethics in a milieu of violence and power.



---> the story of birds entrapped escape away with the cage
---> the story of cat and mouse project
---> bat and owl
---> scorpion and..


Shakespearean villain <== nature [<-- i prefer Ursula, evil corporally located]
modern villain <== power struggle


کلیله و دمنه Kelile Demne is full of disastrous laws of encounter and encounters of law
a sort of a metaphysics of presence (imposing and projecting to and with animals) that regulates the possibility of a pedagogical encounter
•no mediated forms of presence and so on
•nobody breaking the semiotic rules
•what subject-supposed-to-know
•what blocks cordial disposition and animal amity?
•what genital lickings are welcomed or unwelcomed and discouraged or abandoned? and so on


to read Kelile Demne not as something that works as legitimator

reading and greeting


to form (an) intention


all that anthropomorphism performs and withholds on and with animality

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

[Rickels]
(my) animal-findings and fairy-tale associations

if dogs communicate through their trainability cats redirect lines of communication through play. the dog waits and watches, the cat looks and looks, which when is your turn to be looked at, can be therapeutic or unnerving.

meeting the cat half-way

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

[Avital]

the greeting ‘hello’, the initiatory and inaugural moment of our encounter

the gift sabotaging the freedom of the subject to receive greeting or offering greeting
a gift that becomes a curse for the person,

who has the civic stability to refuse a greeting?
the finantialy challenged and the greeting



explore friendship as a crucial modeling of justice?

configuration of encounter

It doesn't always have to be science fiction, risking the wrong blend and watching the uncontrollable spill of consequences --> hook up friends

friendship, as Avital practices it, should often involve triangulation and the drama of departure?

I found myself (also) tempted [...]

[...]and hope toward? retrieving a mythic place of origin [that cannot be rebuilt]?
•*the harem girls my ancestors* --> Cinderella

=/= longstanding tradition of seeing the female experience as ‘inherently’ painful (as in the pathos of The Handmaids Tale TV series)

(#harem Manifesto)?

..telos of anything {in apass, my bow and arrow? (=/= a generalized claim) --> it was about knowing the energy of each other and trusting the honesty and coherence of directional postures and responsive movements. [#harem] (*) one's game might be geared to build success according to one's goals, but unless the game engages the other, it is worthless. (* it is about) learning how to wit. (*) my bow and arrow in use, my tropes and abstractions, what are they good for if others don't play/engage with them? to recontextualize ‘method’ and methodology. (*) “incommensurable tacit knowledges of diverse communities of practice” --> “communication” across irreducible difference (where “method” is not what matters most;) (game of) “situated partial connection” ==> subjects
(not always the human language is the medium) two-way conversation =/= naming (~= intention-laden and consciousness-ascribing linguistic practice) --> sometimes not God, logos, or sujet suppose savoir, rather a dog makes you (in whose image?) --> this is about making our categorical labor harder}

it is about a politics disinterested in: self-identity, realization of intention, transcendence, ‘sweet and nice “feminine” worlds and knowledges free of the ravages and productivities of power’ (Haraway 2003), cultural relativism, master-slave discourse,

**mutuality is mutability is contingent is historic** (=/= reciprocity, mo'amele be mesl معامله به مثل)



(things to vandalize:)
•capital claims
•mystical foundations of authorship
•legally protected stores of knowledge
•desire for legitimacy
•control freak of the possibilities of comprehension
•narcissistic comfort of secured sense
•geometrical optics of reflection


(Burroughs:) “steal everything in sight.” (most authors transvaluate theft back into property --> ideologies of “influence”)

narcissistic reappropriation of/as friendship : operate a reduction of the friend to the same or to the friend as other
mystified oneness of the Volk (Germanic trope)
the desired erasure of difference

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

friendship in Qur'an:

[44:41] The day on which a friend shall not avail (his) friend aught, nor shall they be helped, (apocalypse is defined when friendship ends)

[42:9] Or have they chosen protecting friends besides Him? But Allah, He (alone) is the Protecting Friend. He quickeneth the dead, and He is Able to do all things. (God is jealous of friends)

[...]

[...]maginal space, animal space, memory, dream, etc.

‘species-identifying’ (classification) in:
•pre-Neolithic totemic societies (Shepard 1993)
•biblical classifications of the different beasts (Leviticus: Sibley 1995)
•ancient and medieval ‘great chain of being’ thinking (Lovejoy 1936)
•Linneaus's Systema naturae
•tabular representations of the natural world (Frangsmyr 1983; Spary 1996)
•...

understandings of what comprises an animal is different in each case.
what should be interested?

“(elaborating on Shepard,) Ingold (1994) suggests that hunter-gatherers generally view the distinction between humans and animals as permeable and easily crossed, unlike what is taken as read in much Western science and philosophy.”

when/how you are persuaded to portray yourself as the relevant ‘expert’ in whatever field?

who are the legitimate spokespersons for animals? once Attar, and now biology sci.
(‘the modern constitution’ is as guilty as mysticism's literacy)

...and that strong human sense of the proper place of animals (which they should occupy physically) --> material-conceptual (double) placement ...(‘scheme of things’ [ajayeb] --> animals supposed to be found in the non-discursive spaces and places of the world) (or on the television)
-Said: ‘imaginative geography’, geographical ‘othering’
-overlappings that we find in telegram social media tehran --> what kinds of ‘animal’ (which animalities) are at stake there in the mobile phone's interface?

In recent years zoos have reinvented themselves as ‘arks’


animals categorically embodied ‘meaty beings,’ and how they are usually “out of place” in the the immediate locality made in Tehran

animals are very good at forging their own beastly places, ‘other’ spaces of that of the human
(this is not about ‘territory')


who “can” think and act in the world?
who has the “ability” to prompt change?
[my apass research project is in a sence *contemplating the agency* and speculating *relocating qualities* ~-> (re)configuration of the world]

cultural cross-codings has always been constructed between ‘some’ humans and ‘some’ animals

*the “source” of agency, coined in Europe(?) from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries onwards: self-awareness, intention, thought and language --> properties of “consciousness”
(--> History of Consciousness department in the Humanities Division of the University of California, Santa Cruz. #entities that started to make decision deep in the ocean)
(--> ‘actor-network theory’ ANT; Callon, Law, Latour, Serres. #the key difference here lies in the historical uses and mediations of objects, for humans objects are employed to solidify social bond. ANT sees agency emerging as an effect generated
[...]

[...]history lessons* + the work of *popular memory* ==> punctuate contemporary continuities with the communist regime that are taboo in official narratives but prevalent in popular perceptions of history
(==Georgescu==> counter-memory <-- does it assist coming to terms with the past, processing the paralyzing past and the humiliating present of globalization coupled with reactionary state control)

socialist advertising (--> promoted products and services that had not competition in the absence of a real market) ==now==> a sense of awkwardness (absurdity of an era) --> an oxymoron ==> (the ads’) appeal ==guarantee==> the authenticity of remembering + mutual recognition (among members of the nostalgic community) ----> *longing for a bond specific to an elusive era*


(for late socialism --Imre-->) [*]nostalgia: a popular and essential compensatory gesture to make up for the loss of a contradictory temporality
+
a mode of continuity with an era that was already nostalgic for the unrealized transformative potential (of real socialism)


(Yurchak's) *frozen present* = the time of nostalgia
}<== late socialist culture itself lived in a nostalgic mode, at a certain ironic, knowing distance from what it was supposed to be according to the memories of the heroic 40s-50s and the remnants of socialist propaganda --> *a familiar ironic mode of experiencing history vicariously* (in a way that is experienced in the imagination through the actions of another person)


(looking at televisual nostalgia -->) late socialism ==> an affect & epistemology that can only access the “authentic” through contradiction ambivalence self-reflective irony
<--Holdsworth-- expression of present anxieties about history and memory in general

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

___[notes Tehran 2023]___

semiotics: study of the differnce between “what you say ~/= what they understand”

(my fundamentals:)
*sharing =/= communicating*


آشپز دیو سپید
it is said that the White Div had a cook --> exploring the cosmology of Div (in Shahnameh) with food, hunting for eating, bestiary, cooking technology, taste
(inspired by anime JYfdfDU9JUY)
#short story: narrartor describes the story after the defeat of the White Div (Div-e Sefid) by Rostam. “rather than worring about the kingsmen X, he was more interested in what is for dinner...”. there is another being. a baby hayula (non-formity)... what other beings Div hunts for meat? (list, bestiary) “he would think about the next hunt X and get excited about the kabab of X...”  “immediately asked for more”

dungeons and dragons --> a non-cartographic space, there are no maps and one only learns by dying many times
dungeon has nothing to do with the medieval prison, it is a deterritorialized habitat, defined precisely by [...]

[...]life replaced by) a model that:
•classifies species according to DNA
•disregards morphological type (how elements of body appear)
•reveals human to be a tiny subspecies in a mass of absolute diversity


classical philosophy --> scientized for a momden audience (by Descartes 17th century) --> special status of human <-- seen as a totally transparent, secular, scientific, liberal way of thinking about the world


humanism = a belief in progress (implicitly conceived as a technological instrumental profit-oriented) + technological masery over nature + ‘human =/= animal’ + therapeutic approach to scientific inquiry }<-- a 19th century anachronism --> deeply ingrained in contemporary self-consciousness and everyday common sense

human: hero of liberty <-- french in origin, political in purpose

August Comte --> the universe can only e understood when the scientific exploration of phenomena was separated from supernatural superstition =/= ajayeb


Campbell making the case --> humanism needs to be deconstructed (not in a blithe نرم وملایم postmodern discursive way, rather) the definitions of what it means to be human are of life-changing importance --> humanism's supposed universality and transparency masks the fact that it is *an inherited western relatively recent philosophical perspective of the world*


in consumer research --> human: culturally inflected, psychosocial producer of + produced by the market =/= human: a disembodied information-processor with a rationalistic indentity and a computatinoal approach to the market

--Campbell--> how can interpretative consumer research benefit from a perspective which acknowledges this ideology of humanism?


the term posthuman has been used to describe anything which extends human capcity --ironically--> something as ubiquitous banal ancient and human as *tool-use* could itself be described as posthuman (Hayles, Stiegler, Wills) ==> **posthuman is as ancient as the human itself** }--> [*]posthuman: (a radical recognition that) technological = *originary logic* + *ethical sensibility* (= a stepping-out [=/= coming-after] of the enclosure of what is only important and necessary to the human)
•a concept that draws attention to the cracks that have always existed in the water-light descriptions of the human
•the ethical and radical realisation that the human only comes into existence by the work of (organic + technological) nonhuman others

cyborg --> associated with liberatory modes of identity

**technology deconstructs everyday human experience of agency, free will, choice, self** @apass

21st century --> technology is the center of critical thought about culture and nature (--> that is why it became organically part of my ajayeb research)--> *to think about technology in a man[...]

[...] />

“straight photography” is above all a signature of a particular scene, a specific and localized representation only awkwardly adaptable to a mosaic composition from different individuals (Zeiss-lens-camera images)

how scientists deployed mechanical means to police the artist


(for Martin Kusch - objectivity and historiography) truth-to-nature had its rationale in enlightenment sensationalist psychology, with its conception of the self as fragmented, passive, and excessively receptive.
--> to be true to nature was actively to select and interpret sensations and in that way bring them under epistemic control.
--> representation in nanofacture, image is used to actually engineer the whole thing. making and seeing coincide.


eliminating judgment
the device would remove the process of abstraction from the artist's pen

what characterized the creation of late 19th century pictorial objectivity was self-surveillance

(note of Geppetto, Younus, Pinocchio)

personal equation: a systematic error correction


to produce reliable images


While in the early nineteenth century, the burden of representation was supposed to lie in the picture itself, now it fell to the audience. The psychology of pattern recognition in the audience had replaced the metaphysical claims of the author. Mistrusting themselves, they assuaged their fear of subjectivity by transferring the necessity of judgment to the audience.


(Grashey's) police metaphor was entirely appropriate. Not only was the history of late-nineteenth-century photography thoroughly bound up with the history of crime control, the x-ray photography itself was increasingly finding its way into court.

scientific evidence

legal evidence

at issue was, once again, the shifting border between judgment and mechanization, between the possibility (or necessity) of human intervention and the routinized, automatic functioning of the technology.

medico-legal concept of evidence

the image of the x-ray appeared (in court at least) to preempt and displace all other forms of knowledge.

(Allan Poe:) “if we examine a work of ordinary art, by means of a powerful microscope, all traces of resemblance to nature will disappear--but the closest scrutiny of the photographic drawing discloses only a more absolute truth, more perfect identity of aspect with the thing represented.”

trompe l'oeil (new note)

in X-ray, the encryption of information takes place in the technology itself

photographs did not carry a transparent meaning


once so policed, and presumably only then, could the photographic process be elevated to a special epistemic status, putting it in a category of its own
<[...]

[...]etter speculative difficulty in discussing about the virtual. A curse[9] (according to Iranian-Islamic mixture of traditions in the milieus of promising and swearing,) is basically a networking function with both mechanical and interventionist properties that translate desire into performance—an intersubjective textual momentum that run virtually into the real world and it may (or may not) run down its target. Much like rumor, curse is contagious and reproductive but unlike the publicity of rumorous velocities, curse insists on secrecy at the same time harvesting its powers for revealing. The reality of the ‘curse’ is ‘assumed’ mostly and that is the virtual nature of this relation (with the materialities of the world that curse inscribes on) that I am interested in.


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


An extended concept of cursing enters visuality in the gaze of the evil eye.[11] The malevolent glare who stamps upon by staring at an accidental moment of encounter in the evil eye, brings together the narrative of the random traveler who casts a gaze in another world of virtual and visual agency, and emphasises the randomness and hideousness of looking. The transaction between the eyes in the evil eye goes both ways to posses both the beholders. The target of the evil eye is always missed[ar] due to the internal conflict of perception and will. The intersection of visions is feared and programmed in the modalities of material talisman and culturally protective performances for the subject from meeting the other’s gaze. But the evil eye is precisely so powerful and real because of its ability to name the uncanny event of encounter. “Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic.”[12]


[Serres]

does experimentation, in art science, excludes subjectivity? More the importance of experiment on self. Returning the aim back to knowledge, instead of the division of knowledge. Our subjectivity is not an illusion to be overcomed, but that is another part of reality.

Displacement on the space of myth. Myth informs science.

To know is to navigate between local fragments of space , to reject techniques of classification and separation, to implement a philosophy of transport to counter the dogmatism of united and systematic knowledge.

...the itinerary traces the transmis[...]

[...]ex ensemble of flow charts, those of language, of factory of family, of political party, and so forth.

..my body is plunged in the intersection of this multiplicity

culture : constructing precise and particular connections between such spatial varieties --> “original intersection”

topology; culture connects and joints, art delinks and disconnects
(the law of incest prohibition connects the disconnected)

pure --> untainted --> separated, enclosed

the discourse of rationality replacing the mythical text --> art becomes science --- the realization of a project is left to reason

siyavosh/sohrab is one of the descendants of disseminated spaces, of catastrophic separation of the continuous

when Rostam recognises the mark of his son, Ferdosi giving a version of recognition scene, connects --> Oedipus
the son, the mother
-we can recognise a typological space: the same and the other: the separated
-the space of the world is described requiring connection
-family tree
-parts are to be joined
-rostam and sohrab, siyavosh and sudabeh, cannot be composed to form a single homogeneous space. (rostam and siyavosh do that)

the presuppose that before discourse there existed a mutual policy of unrelated spaces ~ chaos
-the object or the target of (cultural) discourse is to connect
-to transform a chaos of separate spatial varieties into a space of communication
-scatered members, re-membered
-incoherent chaos, reformulated in the common space of transport when it is reconstructed

Kelileh
...she is the signatory of the discourse
...she mimes the progress and delays of Demneh

ajayeb, a time when transport and itinerary were only myth


transport ~/=? transfer
-transport is a unitary space where transfer is *always possible (like money)
-transfer is only a possibility

so, we must find the word or construct a conditional logos that *already works to connect the crevices which run across the spatial chaos of disconnect varieties, the *proto-worker of space*, the weaver in the topology of nodes

separations by sudden stoppage
•is this a myth?

a worker of the single space
(we are not)

euclidian space of every possible displace
(what are the displaces and displacements in Ajayeb? Be specific)

(proliferating multiplicities of) unlinked morphologies

(fire text)
to practice dichotomy (and its connected paths) one must know that its clefts follow and overlap the ancient mythical narrative (in which worlds are torn ...)


when geometry is born myth falls silent

(the ancient journey) from islands to catastrophes, from passage to fault, from bridge to well, from r[...]

[...]radical --interest--> roots of meaning-making activity
3. liberatory --seek--> evoke justice (forcing an image to account for itself)
4. ethical --concern--> 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 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 e[...]

[...]beginning of Miyazaki's 2013 The Wind Rises 風立ちぬ, a boy, vivid dreaming, meets an Italian aerospace engineer, who is shocked when he hears that the boy thinks he is dreaming. then he deceivingly says to the boy: “yesssss yes you are in a dream, boy” and saying to himself “how naive the boy is."]
-how is it naive to think that you are dreaming? that what you are seeing and hearing is not ‘real’? ----San'an is not naive in that sense. he knows that the dream is not just a projection of his subjectivity. he is not Freudian, or he knows his own subconscious too well.
San'an going to Italy (Vatican?)

a mapping is going on

his cognitive defend system is down (=/= ‘rend’ رند)
رند =? idiot [~=? the one who cannot be tricked]
[rend: the paragon of indifference; an iconoclast; an informal trickster; prone to drunkenness, sin, and heresy; he is forever scorned but *shows no sign of injury*(?!); he is without shame or conformism; he is vivid, energetic, guiltless]

and the question of technology?
how technology breaks up and breaks into all sorts of metaphysical premises

San'an is at a primal scene of aggression?
provoking hostility
there is no sweet device that should supposed to suspend hostility, there is no magic flute in San'an story
why am I taking so many detours? whether this is describable at all

discursive formations

the teacher vs. trainer
the teacher that asks for your interiority**** (love?) any kind of transfers of emotional funds. or other economies of approval

Attar, the great and complicated poet

also my own attachments to certain formations


what kinds of poetic bodies Attar sacrifices?
what cognitive back-up system he uses?
and so on
(the students) cannot cognize (San'an's program)

forecloser, foreclosing you
توقيف

distribution of value, action, and non-action in San'an


to discover San'an where it dwells, what kinds of figures and disfigurations it is responsible for, and what else does it mask culturally?

we also add on cultural anthropological tracks to see which cultures or groups-psychologies practice San'an's teachings and in the service of what--what kind of will to power. because rarely something is practiced and it is not in service of some sort of buffing off a self or something.

(does San'an practice the will to obedience and to listening?)
what (the hell) does he want (from Tarsaa, from her Being)?!!!

to let the other go

I am talking about Attar so we can properly lose him (this is not about finding)
I have to exhaust, frustrate, and abuse my own mystic or non-mystic tendencies and preferences in this
this is kind of a *synonym-[...]

[...] in Rome, very different than Sohrevardi's order --> http://sinaseifee.com/sorkh.html
[San'an with a damaged GPS system--why he goes to Italy?]
he is walking the walk,
how does he get through the borders!?
was it a ‘Road to Canossa’?
(Humiliation of Canossa, refers to the trek by Emperor Henry IV from Speyer to Canossa Castle in Emilia-Romagna to obtain the revocation of the excommunication imposed on him by the Pope Gregory VII. He was forced to humiliate himself on his knees waiting for three days and three nights before the entrance gate of the castle, while a blizzard raged in January 1077.)

San'an's event could be that he must encounter the alterity (~= absence of the same) --> he needs the absence of his students and the absence of himself and the absence of his God.

*****Tarsaa takes away San'an's human ID, his masterhood, his members [his parts: his pupils, pencils, penises], (that's why he must remember? his ‘members’ returning to him? what is he composed of anyways?!) [memory is a way consistency maintain itself---are we having a disjunction?] [he makes contact, and contact is the medium of language --> and this is his performance]
in this story *the human ID = master*
(self-possession is supposed a primordial property)
-the question is how let yourself be invested with alterity, without becoming a seed of transcendence? (San'an let himself but then fails in the second part) by ‘seed of transcendence’ I mean making a symbol that is of a symbol (the basis of power---state?) ---> is this how San'an's symbolism can be recruited by Iranian war lords?
San'an in the story is shamanistically de-subjectified (by becoming the pig, etc.) instead of becoming hyper-subjectified (game-animal) [something that Abu-Saeed Abu-Al-Kheir almost achieve it?] **a game-animal is for example when dogs go after a dear in the forest, the dear is in this case a game-animal. the San'an's pigsty is not that, he doesn't become wolf or dear or Jinn for that matter!

if I where Tarsaa I would ask San'an to become the Jinn instead of pig.

(Tarsaa is sighted by him initially on her balcony)
balcony's architectural register
San'an might have been fallen in love with the balcony, not the girl!
(we see proof of this later when he goes “down” on her)
“hu hu I found a torture device” says San'an when he sees the girl-balcony assemblage

Tarsaa's morphology--different in every aesthetic moment, a dynamic entity
[person of flesh, thing of illusio, category of mechanism,
ترسا or ترسنده =~ child-being, نصرانی =~ the-other]

Tarsaa is a defferent kind of mediatized body, not that of woman on the television, which produces a wasted body in front of the TV

what kind of hostility is she performing -or making available?

she doesn't accept his marriage p[...]

[...]of this)
Baudrillard's society of simulation does not allow for such distinctions ... simulation, after all, may simply be the latest version of the ideology of the end of ideology
}--> part of the theoretical apparatus of *anticolonial ideology*
one immediate danger of this approach is that it recklessly dismisses anything associated with the other side of the binary (of West/East, self/other, first-world/third-world, modern/premodern, etc.) ==> overlook the subversive utility and democratic accessibility of certain technological innovation --> evident in Shariati's ultra-atavistic endorsement for an aesthetic tradition: “intrusion of the machine into the humna-half may go so far as to paralyze man; it destroys creativity. imagine a type-written page that can be imposed upon millions of people, while before the advent of the typewriter everyone was free to use his creativity to the utmost in calligraphy” --Mohaghegh--> it is not reflecting on the historical reality that the exercise of calligraphy was always linked to a feudalist class structure, and often exclusively to the confines of the palace court, whereas the printed word open to a more widespread audience independent of material status
--> anticolonial ideology ==>
•carries out the presupposed will of modernity by homogenizing its very own constituency, diminishing any possibility for individual initiative or insubordination
•precludes the advent of outsider radicalism independent of some religio-civilizational confrontation with modernity
--> “there can be only one diagnosis ==> only one elixir” ==> produce an antidote that is equally colossal in scope, shape, and execution

}==> ***the local is no longer accepted by anticolonial ideology as a worthwhile site of contestation***

}--> (Sa'edi + Akhavan + ...) ~=> *messianic defender* of the national history : the sole harbinger جلودار of a *return to the real* ☠ [=/= cheerleader]

            _,-+-._
         .-’       ‘’-._
        /               \
       ‘        ~.       \
      /    ~`’    ) .=” , )
     |           I (   ~ (
     \        ‘"”   `='  +
      `.,_   `”;:L0Ve’   *’
          `~'~.’  )_Y_0_U!\


*disease becomes temporary cure* (--> practiced by Al Ahmad, Shariati, artists [as irony and with the always problematic conception of the “masses” توده مردم mardom]:)
“[let's] re-employ the same reactionary elements in order to stir the masses, to restore awareness, and to fight superstition”
[still very common within critically-minded humanist social science schollar artists is the tendency to use critical theory (as diverse as it is) *to interrogate reality*
for us ([left inheritance] as postcolonialist, feminist, or biopolitician) the modus operandi of critical theory is to derealize, is to say: “this is an expression of paar[...]

[...] cheaters
classic neurotics
subjects of delusional rantings
subjects of criminal intent


conscious =/= unconscious =/= drive

contract to his illness
manipulations of care

the sick often find someone who is even sicker to take care of (<-- the case with the Prince)


(according to Nancy -->) literature has always tried to produce the body (which philosophy suppresses)

any discussion of the body risks engaging a double bind (a psychosis):
•failure to produce a discourse on the body
•failure not to produce discourse on the body
--Nancy--> *the sick body* (in a frenzied state of belated, compensatory awakening) --demands--> a reading (interpretive and diagnostic strategies) that often culminate in *an excess of discourse* ==> opens up the space of necessary obscurity by which our bodies come to us

Nancy --> The body does not know; but it is not ignorant either. Quite simply, it is elsewhere. It is from elsewhere, another place, another regime, another register [not an “obscure” knowledge, or a “pre-conceptual” knowledge, or a “global,” “immanent,” or “immediate” knowledge]
•philosophy calls “body” presupposes the determination of something like an
authority of “immediate knowledge,” a contradiction in terms, which inevitably becomes “mediated” (as “sensation,” “perception,” synaesthesia, and as immense reconstitutions of a presupposed “representation”)

the site of nonknowledge that the body traverses --Nancy--> *is related to thought* <-- the body thinks (in a sense) beyond giving or making sense
==> *thought is itself a body*

-Heidegger was the one who unhitched “thought” from philosophical operations and gave it weighs in as body ==> Nancy

in Dostoevsky --> the body commended by *illness* bears a memory trace of the *sacred* (+ finitude of all bodies)

“God is dead = God no longer has a body” ==Nancy==> bodies (bereft of trickle-down symbolicity) will have to be:
•pumped up
•prosthetically amplified
•steroid-enhanced
•“built”
•buffed
•bionically ensured
•drugged
•“medicated”
•cloned
•remade
==> the technobody or replicant will be made to substitute for the lost body of the divine trait

last night he dreamed of (apocalypse technological dominion:) spread of the railroad and the distribution of connectors installed by new technologies as instigators of the unsacrificeable...

(in literature) apocalypse = vehicle (a technological momentum)

the unnamed God has vanished together with this unnameable thing...

Myshkin’s illness still binds him to the sacred --> this body retains and persists in making sense, the illness continues to p[...]

[...]r owner, thereby bearing a child
--Lee-> slave woman might, under these circmustances, have a strong incentive to bear a child by her master, in order to move toward the center of her master's household, to protect herself from sale, to free her child and herself, and to inherit part of the master's wealth (through her offspring) <-- the sexual aspects of the relationship were considered incidental ضمنی and carried no moral stigma or social shame [=/= children born to slave fathers were slaves]


gathering of men (were held regularly) as social occasions for business, entertainment, smoke opium, etc.

clandestine conversations were not unusual

shari'a was interpreted and administrated by shii clerics in Yazd, and there was always room for manipulation of the law


Ziba Khanum's situation illustrates the problem of applying western legal categories of “slave” and “free” to the lived experience of enslaved women in iran
(her legal status as a free woman had little consequence <-- she remained dependent of the family and lived in their household)

***limited value of “slave =/= free” --Lee--> when applied to the study of muslim world***
modern state ==> “slave =/= free” (presupposing a secular state that is able to guarantee the lives and properties of individuals who can claim its protection) }<-- societies that are constructed around the ideas of:
rights, citizenship, secular state =/=
   |            |           |
kinship, belonging, religious authority, hierarchies of dependence (<-- middle east)

19th century iran --> there was no ideal within the society of freedom from relationships (of kinship, household, belonging, community solidarity, wealthy patron)--with--> implications of dependence, obedience, obligation
•any such freedom would have left an individual *isolated* and *vulnerable*

****
all enslaved persons (and akk other persons) in 19th century iran necessarily were *embedded in muslim households* and moved along a continuum of whatever situation of power, respect, wealth, independence they might be able to *negotiate*
#Cinderella
****

women --> at the margins of wealth and power --> slave women most especailly (they moved toward the center by:)
1. performed valuable domestic duties
2. became the master's regular sexual partner
3. bore the master child

the goal of most women (slave or not) om 19th century iran --> to negotiate the most respected position (within the family that they found themselves attached to) <-- **the defining factor was gender, rather than slavery**
for example Ziba Khanum's free life after the death of her master was determined by *gender* more than her previous *slave status* or by *perceptions of race*


babi movement in 1844 iran
baha'i teach[...]

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


Derridean moment of negative transcendence

waxing and waning plenitude of that flux

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

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

دروغ بد را با دروغ بهتر جایگزین کنیم نه با حقیقت

Nietzsche's double affirmation, yes yes
Deleuze, “the ass does not know how to say no because he says yes to everything with is no” --> to affirm is “to release, to set free what lives”
--> the idea of “challage your presuppositions” --> this is a dialectical habit of thought: the idea that the signature moment of thinking is a determinate negation (of State, Islam, Europe, etc.) Singh asks: how did this particular mode of reflexivity come to stand in for “true” anthropological thought?



would it have been better to leave things more “fluid” and “complex and contradictory”? @Eszter


ethnographic labor:
1- a form of hunting and gathering impressions
2- sifting الک کردن and cultivating expressions

(my work in apass:) our relation to concepts becomes more explicit, as we turn impressions into considered thoughts



r />



thinking postcolonial urbanism with Anand Taneja

(this is the question of the limitations of imagination:)
how (for a generation of scholars [or artists]) rural (india) [or syria, Iran, or South Korea] has become simply a space of disasters, statistics, and deaths --✕--> Anand's work is a counter-example [i am learning from him to be attentive to my own imagination's stopping-points. to resist stories that render life in those milieus unthinkable] --> that those spaces are not only of abjection but also of imagination and curiosity --> to think about alternative (conceptual) vocabularies to think about those abjected places, religion, and ajayeb [that does not only negate those milieus]
-to think about religion is super usefull and relevant, because it is also about what secularism is

how people (in rural areas) conceive of vitality and advancement?
*how people imagine a better life?* --> (to think[...]

[...] this leaves us open to)

(let's stop throwing easy) political and moral posturing about neoliberalism

...there are only particular regions of the past that we potentially or actually have access to. we do not know in advance which regions of the past life might lead us to, or express through us --Veena--> we are not necessarily *cognizant of the structure*, but may still express *fragments of myth* --> ***nonagentive invocation of politics*** @Hoda (Veena example: right after Sultanpuri carnage, women were sitting in front of their burnt houses in a position of stillness letting their body grow dirty, sorrowfully embodying pollution and dirt, like Draupadi in Mahabharata proclaiming her violation through public expression of her pollution. but the women did not device a strategy to carry a tactic of everyday life into the realm of the political. it was as if the past has turned this face towards them--not that they had translated this past story into a present tactic of resistance --> living fragments of a myth)

more like a conceptual signpost =/= extended argument


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(nobody has, neither state nor communities[...]

[...]
Lucretius on the nature of things
look upward yonder at the bright clear sky
and what it holds
the moon, the radiance of the splendour-sun

moon-dwellers

icaromenippus Lucian’s satire about the moon lamenting the lack of imagination of ancient astronomers

trans-lunar celestial spheres

great intellectual abstraction is necessary to explain the appearances in the sky

Plato creates an image if completely harmonious world structure which makes circular rotating movements by means of spindles


Aristotle’s design gave a mechanical explanation for celestial phenomena (both terrestrial & astral physics)

Copernicus (+ Kepler + Galilei) ==> anthropocentric view of the world (=/= catholics church)


ibn Heisam --> visible light originates only from the moon
moonlight to be studies

ketab al manazir

size of the angle of deflection is so small that moonlight cannot be explained as sunlight

in 1609 Galilei’s telescope had 20x magnification

(moon’s) traces and spots

rough and full cavities and prominences
“let us not thing it an offence to suppose that she is earth and that for this which appears to be her face, just as our earth has certain great guilds, so that earth yawns with great depths and clefs which contain water or murky air, the interior of these the light of the sun doe not plump or even touch but it fails and the reflection which it send back here is discontinuous”

moon and the face of the observer

“there are people who believe that they are seeing a mirror image of the oceans on earth, and others say they are the traces of the mountains and mountain ranges of our earth; there are also people who believe that what they see is a figure that has been cut out of the reflecting rays that fall [...]

[...]t was not about representation but a relation of forces --> for Seurat color was not something accessible as a sign to a sovereign gaze but was an interpretation made by the body

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


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

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

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

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

(in my work) experimenting with:
•the unity of subjective experience (myself performing under influence, mad lectures, excessive synthesis, pathological and disruptive storytelling)
•integrity of social institution and processes (the loci and conditions of us coming together, space of art)
=/= social tranquility --> economic productivity
=/= social fantasy of “solidarity” --> health and functional unity, individuals transformed into “social beings”

in a way most of us artists unconsciously in some way in an utopian projection of a sensory wholeness and fulfillment
(dream of) fabricators [...]

[...]otoreceptors in the human eye are placed at the back of retina, behind the blood vessels (that literally intervene seeing) --Seurat--> inseparable mix of an abstract mathematically constructed & a physiological perception more subjectivity determined, “domain of vision has been integrated Iin the field of desire” (Lacan), “phantasmatic events that occur on the surface of the bodies” (Crary)
=/= older diagram of the eye: the ideal unobstructed functioning of camera obscura --> ‘scene of representation’

‘dream of immediacy’ --to--> (Seurat's refusal of scenography ==> nondisclosure ~) fantasy of a theatre without representation

Rousseau's affirmation of *political self-sovereignty* in the ‘festival’: a stage which presents nothing to the sight --Derrida--> a place where the spectator, presenting himself as spectacle, will no longer be seer or voyeur *** (<-- what i learned from Phill) ==> presence will be full as the intimacy of a self-presence, as the sentiment of self-proximity, of self-sameness


Lyotard: theatrically fold --> a box closed upon itself --> only those to appear on the stage which come from what will be known as the ‘exterior’

*zero: the sign of the empty center, the place where everything is supposed to be visible and intelligible : the place of knowledge --> god, organized body, society, capital, the ego, platonic forms, etc.

Grosz: construction of embodied subjectivity --> mobius strip (a 19th century invention), inflection of mind and body to one another through a kind of twisting or inversion --> rethinking relations of the inside and the outside of the subject psychical interior and corporeal exterior)
-sides of the mobius strip are not fundamental identities, the drift from one to the other side is uncontrollable

currents
and surfaces of this body
is coalescence of energy into phantasms
deceptive semblance
of a theater of representation

Ali's speech (and Jassem): تاثیر گذاشتن (making what one knows into an effect on audience)
=/=
Sina's speech: به صورت موضوع درآوردن
(making what one guesses into a subject of discussion to be rethought)

irreducible composite of properties belonging to the observer

perspective: transforming psychophysiological space into mathematical space ==> sum of all parts of space and its contents are absorbed into a single ‘quantum continuum’
-Panofsky perspective as symbolic


analysis of sensation
“one coherent mass of sensations”
(Mach's legitimate and functional) scientific impressionism

*modernization (and rationalization) of perceptual (and aesthetic) response* <-- preoccupation of Seurat, Eisenstein, Moholy-Nagy, Schoenberg


(Crary > Chastel > Seurat's method was) a research into archetypal forms[...]

[...]e ==> understanding of the world (as processes of becoming) that doesn't possess a *premade integrity* (--> world of ajayeb is full of premade integrities)


reckon & calculate
--✕--> (Nietzsche's) formless unformulable world of the chaos of sensation
--✕--> (Cezanne's) continual emergence and disintegration of constellations (of relationships + self)



production (of other kinds) of fixed vision (amid the increasing awareness of the transitive and unstable nature of perception):
•modern psychology (late 19th century): how to incorporate the vagaries and unpredictability of subjectivity into a set of constants --> quantify subjective perceptual experience [<-- question of artistic feedback: how to perceptually isolate stimuli? how to temporally control one's exposure?]
•tachistoscope (mid 1880s--search for elemental unit of attentive behavior): the idea of instantaneous perception, mechanically producted “presence” --Crary--> fantasy of a descrete quantifiable perception detached from the lives dynamics of the body + the idea that pure nonsense reveals specific aspects of attention that hermeneutics could not conceive {based on naive realism (ignoring the existence of transient iconic memory) presupposing:
1- the subject's visual experience directly mirrors the stimulus pattern
2- the subject's visual experience begins when the pattern is first exposed and terminates when it is turned off
•Muybridge's machine ==> reconstruct appearances through the production of consecutive images
•

tachistoscope (nonconsecutive visual stimuli) --> how within the context of technological modernization, faster mechanical speeds are reciprocally related to new bodily forms of stasis (---> go to Virilio)
•chronometric device: measurement of relation time

}--> the break or interrupting of vision becomes the primary element within perceptual experience, rather than a visual continuum that maintains the cohesiveness of the world

}==> *possibility of pure sensation without perception*


“mental test”
detailed psychometrics of individual performance and behavior --preoccupied--> features of a generalized consciousness

20th century behaviorism --> abandonment of interest in any internal or introspective experience (in favor of data resulted from objective external controlled observation)
 ==Cattel==> application of systematized knowledge to the control of human nature
--Crary--> **accommodation of subjective life to machine operations** (+ speeds, temporalities)



new objective world: decomposed into autonomous and abstract stimuli (+ machine rythmes that differed dramatically from those of the body) ==> repositioning of the perceiver (+ motor readiness) }-->
•new patterns of production
•spectacular con[...]

[...]f attentiveness that surmounts an ***inhibition of the peripheral*** (=/= notion of selection ~=> finding out what one already knows)

****diffuse attention =/= critical attention**** (a faculty in which the observer is led to reject some of the ideas that occur to him after perceiving them)


(at the turn of the century) experience: compulsory consumption of information


(from) the experience of deindividualtion (in piazza) --to--> a more controllable form of loneliness (bedroom)


[this] plural hybrid space of Roman square (Crary on Freud's representation) ~= a spectacle society : a patchwork of fluctuating effects in which individuals and groups continually reconstitute themselves (either creativity or reactively) =/= (Guy Debord's) seamless regime of separation, ominous collective mobilization

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

Deleuze and Guattari's Varuna and Mitra --> lacking a mythology of conflict (=/= Singh's analysis)
forming a milieu of interiority --> double articulation that makes the State apparatus into a stratum

State's operates by:
•seizes (immediate, magical capture)
•binds (preventing all combat --> presupposing a juridical integration of war)

“chess (pieces are coded) = a game of State”
chess: an institutionalized, regulated, coded war, pure strategy =/= Go: pure semiology
(what is game's form of interiority)

nonsubjectified machine assemblage

...returning from the outside with that inconceivable thing, an army

magical-despotic State (@Eszter)


Genghis Khan didn't understand the phenomenon of the city --> war machine: a pure form of exteriority

magic violence
military institution

Deleuze and Guattari: State has no war machine of its own; it can only appropriate one in the form of a military institution

machine: ontology of production

State thinkers:
•Goethe
•Hegel
•Euclid (finding a foundation for the enterprise) --> logos: the law over the nomos (from Proto-Indo-European nem-: distribute)-->{Euclidian space: a sufficient number of dimensions, by which one reintroduces parallelism between two vectors, treating multiplicity as though it were immersed in this homogeneous and striated space of reproduction}
•Archimedes (an operative projective descriptive geometry)
•Durkheim --> to give the republic a secular model of thought
•
•

political differentiation ==> State ~= distinct organs of power (=/= chief رئیس قبیله) ==!?==> economic development

(Laura:) keep the social body from crystallizing =/= (concern of the State:) to conserve

[*]war: a mode of a social state that wards off and prevents the State; that whi[...]

[...]iority
(projection: appropriate it for a form of exteriority)


#bow and arrow --> hunt (when speed is associated primarily with the hunted animal) =/= war (speed is an independent variable)
prey =/= enemy
prey =/= motor
(#bow and arrow does --> *abstracts the idea of motor and applying it to itself* =/= generalize the idea of prey by applying it to the enemy)

the economy of hunted animal


ecosystem situated at the origin --> garden of eden / heaven
ecosystem situated at the end --> apocalypse / end-time

discovery of a projecting and projectile system ==> war machine

war machine
breeding + training
insitutes an entire economy of violence
--> *a way of making violence durable*



two ideal models motor:
work =/= free action
•(let's) work: tool meets resistance
•free action: operates only upon the mobile body itself, is not consumed in its effect(?), continues from one moment to the next [--> style of artistic research]. the way in which the elements of the body escape gravitation to occupy absolutely a nonpunctuated space

weapon is moving
tool is moved
tool presupposes work, tool does not define work

***the principle behind all technology is to demonstrate that a technical element remains abstract***, remains entirely undetermined --> as long as one does not relate it to an assemblage it presupposes

tool
-one cannot speak of weapons or tools before defining the constituent assemblages they presuppose and enter into @OSP
the tool is essentially tied to a gensis, a displacement, and an expenditure of force (whose laws reside in work) =/= weapon concerns only the exercise or manifestation of force in space and time (in conformity with free action)

when speed added to displacement ==> ?

tools & weapons = consequences ~/=? causes


the morning star and the battle-axes

variable assemblages of human, animal, and thing

*assemblage*: (passional) compositions of desire[=/= natural determination, spontaneous determination] --D+G--> there is no desire, but assembling/assembled desire
assemblage ==(bring into play)==> [*]passion: effectuations of desire that differ according to the assemblage [=/= Germany]
man-animal-weapon
man-horse-bow
assemblage of speed
...

(what Game of Thrones TV series missed:) military of men --> homosexual eros replaces the zoosexual eros of horesman [--> اسب امام حسین]

State ==>{(training of) worker --to--> (apprenticeship of) soldier}

{affect: active discharge of emotion --> projectile ~ weapon}=/={feeling: displaced, retarded, resisting emotion --> introceptive ~ tool}


martial a[...]

[...]rom) final cause --to--> proximate cause (physical explanations and the natural order)
}==> nature began to assume the role of an autonomous entity with a will (and sense of humour of her own) ~~> natural wonder



wonder literature ([lavishly illustrated bestiary, cosmography, travel literature, geological curiosa, herbal and astrological lore,] of later 16th and 17th century Daston) --> secularization of an interest in (monsters as) prodigies
--part-of--> the great body of common culture
--affinity--> popular 16th century genre of diverses lefons (selections from famous authors)

catalogues of strange instances or hidden properties of animals, vegetables and mineral
(middle class culture in elizabethan england)

prodigies denuded of their supernatural aura & (presented) to surprise and entertain the reader =/= to acquaint the reader with imminent apocalypse and judgeme

Certaine Secrete Wonders of Nature

portentous events بد شگون

(crocodiles) to be granted honorary monstrous status by virtue of their rarit

many will reade them [monsters], heare them and haue profit by them, that otherwise whould neuer haue knowen them. For many (I suppose) will buye this Booke for the things whereto they are affectioned, that neuer coulde or would have bought, or looked on the bookes, wherein all they are. -Lupton

common and popular forms of escapist literature: *travel books* and *chivalric romanc*
(--> don Quixote)
monstrous races (men with a single giant foot, or huge ears, or their faces on their chests, giants and dwarfs)

medically oriented monster literature

[Daston:] Pare was forced to eliminate a section on lesbianism, with a graphic description of the female genitals, before including Des monstres in later editions of his collected work


A Helpe to Memorie and Discourse (of Wonders, Foreign and Domestic)
*the passages and occurrences of the world* #ajayeb
•the creatures thereof
•the casualties therein

little-known properties of... (wine and water, fish, dogs, cuckolds, hunchbacks and monsters)

popular ignorance
solitary efforts of the professional scholar
culture of the educated layman (lawyer, businessman, government official, and their wives and daughters)

[change in sensibility (&-=>? change in interpretation)]
beginning of the withdrawal of the educated classes from more popular culture
@Goda

monsters (familiar canon of prodigies) became a subject of great fashion and not vulgar

(Daston tracing how) “in the wonder literature, then, monsters--along with the rest of the canon of prodigies--began to cast off their religious associations. this trend was accompanied by a movement to emphasize natural causes ov[...]

[...] a dreadful quality
(Attar's accounts of saint torture)
Gerald of Wales --> recounting some of the earliest warewold stories to survive in european literature, he glosses the admiratio felt by those inside the story as stupor خرفتی, timor بیم, horror خوف
◦shape-shifting violating nature
◦tales of metamorphoses --> the real change of substance in the eucharist عشاربانى + the terrifying possibility that sexual intercourse between humans and animals might produce monsters


(Bynum asking) what in medieval accounts or artistic representations tends to trigger wonder? *where do the surviving source give us access either to intensely heightened reactions or to events and objects calculated to evoke or stage such reactions?*
--> where wonder is not?


(didactic purposes of) miracle collections
*hovering significance* (of unusual natural events: eclipse, earthquakes, famines) --> sometimes listed as clipped matter-of-fact prose
William Auvergne + Oresme --> natural causes can be found for marvels tend to flatten the language of some accounts of natural world as well
}==> miracles, portents فال بد, oddities are sites and stagings of wonder less often than we might suppose


12th - 14th century --> narrative accounts tell us of objects and events carefully constructed to elicit awe, delight, dread
*rulers (secular + ecclesiastical) --competed--> display of power and splender including tricks and automata --calculated--> to amaze and tantalize:
•(13th century) خانه وحشت 🏰 evidence of a count of Artois who built an elaborate funhouse with distorting mirrors, rooms that simulated thunderstorms, hidden pipes for wetting unsuspecting visitors and covering them with flour
•puppet shows in pastry (sotelties)
•food was often planned as an illusion or trick for the eye (---> go to instagram cake baked in the shape of ordinary objects)
•changes in church architecture in liturgy (آئین نماز) + fabrication of monstrances --> define the moment in the Mass when *the consecrated host (the devine installed in food or flesh or matter) was elevated as a sudden revelation of the unexpected and paradoxical*
◦collection of relics and their **elaborate containers** (reliquaries محفظه عتیقه) [--> similarity and historical connection to wunderkammer of early medieval princes]
•
--> theologians and many of the ordinary faithful continued *to value the supernatural power mediated through bone chips or dust* more than the intricate workmanship or sheer novelty of the container --> *object = a means of access to an other tham as a singularity fascinating in itself*
--> *relic cabinets ~= cabinets of novelties*
}--underlying--> ***impulse to collect***

mirabile visu!
****(12th century) abbot Suger of St. Denis describes th[...]

[...]> •what is man?

}--> [*]humanism: mobilization of a foundationalist concept of man

=/= tradition of identifying man with a certain feature, aspect, or property that embodies or expresses his nature
=/= the Platonic-christian idea that man possesses an eternal soul
=/= Feuerbachian-Marxist approach that sees Man as his own goal
=/= the idea of a human nature that is given, foundational, single, or readily available

“death of man”
Heidegger's Letter on Humanism
Kojeve's second note on “the end of history”
Althusser
Foucault's concluding chapter to The Order of Things
Derrida's The Ends of Man

(existentialist entrapment of man in his world, #alienation)

(in Being and Time) Heidegger's Dasein ==>
•stripping man's shared element down to its being-there
•subsumes and displaces the humanity of man
•rejection of the I as an absolute, independent subject that approaches a world largely separate from it
--> from ontic determination --to--> ontico-ontological determination [of human]
*the humanity of Dasein remains and must be understood as derivative of both its ontic and ontological status

metaphysical presupposition (that he cannot claim to be capable of fully describing or understanding natur) -->
(human approached and understood only in terms of) *results* or *side-effects* (of language, existence, history, phenomena):
•in phenomena: man finds himself thrown in the world of phenomena and life; he is not grounded in some transcendental fashion (Heidegger, Kojeve, Malraux, Sartre, Beaufret)
•in language: he is an interpreter of signs and symbols that form part of greater systems independent of his individual will
•in history: he is constructed and operates within cultural, religious, and philosophical limits imposed on him
•
[and] these systems are not consequences of man's creative activity, desire, or will
they are domains in which he finds himself
}--> *the human in man comes to mean less and less* ==> *we can only know what his approach to others (and other things) can reveal*



emergence of the new nonhumanist atheism + the negative philosophical anthropology --> French antihumanism's assault on:
•contemporary humanisms
•the legacies and utopian hopes of the Enlightenment
•liberal-bourgeois thinking grounded in human rights and individual autonomy
•Marxist humanism with its critique of liberalism and its expectations of a superior
humanity
•(human perfection & social harmony)


(Geroulanos's account of primary constellations of) humanism:
•christian humanism
•Renaissance educational humanism (founded on a return to ancient Greek models)
•Humboldt's reconceptualization of Renaissance humanism (i[...]

[...]dy

-for Bergson: an image that one know from within by affections, rather than from without by perceptions: body }==> “my body” is the center of actions ==births==> representation
-for Whitehead: “self-knowledge of our bodily event” ==> (organic) conception of nature
-masculinity: body subordinate to the mind ~=>{ body: site for feminist critique
-for contemporary feminism (Grosz): body is neither a biological nor a sociological category, but rather a point of overlap between physical, symbolic, and material conditions

the ideological representations of a “real” precultural body
[--> idealized in terms of abstract geometry, rendered primal in primates,,,]

“The theory of the body is already a theory of perception.” Merleau-Ponty

(in his studies on body, Christian Hubert quotes John Schumacher quoting) James Gibson: “The optical information to specify the self, including the head, body, arms, and hands, accompanies the optical information to specify the environment. The two sources of information coexist. The one could not exist without the other. When a man sees the world, he sees his nose at the same time; or rather, the world and his nose are both specified and his awareness can shift....The supposedly separate realms of the subjective and objective are actually only poles of attention.” (The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception)


sensuality is co-making


rituals and technologies are links between bodies and societies
(social) techniques for the inscription of locality into bodies
technology as an exteriorization of the functions of the body?

CG stands for:
•computer graphics
•computer games
•creature generator
•categorial grammar --> “==>”, “=/=”, etc
•conceptual graphs --> graph-based knowledge representation and reasoning model
•computational geometry --> geo-info-sys design
•*computational gesture* --> extracorporeal material culture
•
•(complete governance, chaotic God, commanding general, common ground, center of gravity,)
•

the well-equipped invalid (--> embodiment, Virilio)

(Foucault's radical exploration of:) body = (subject to the effects of) rhetoric of technical reason
techniques of punishment (, a “political technology”) : “an art of unbearable sensations” --to--> “an economy of suspended rights”

Deleuze and Guattari: “We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body...” (what are the affects of the CG bodies?)
-for them the “body” is a discontinuous and non-totalized series of processes, organs, flows, energies, corporeal substances and incorporeal events, intensities and durations, a surface of[...]

[...]of the past, mending of *those thing that seem beyond repair* --> important for Tehran's landscape of affect and aspiration)

Archer: how arrangement of masculinity (~= acts of violence and wounding) might be *styled otherwise*

literal fashion victim of war hero
“every man” will put himself on the line, and earn his masculinity via rituals, narratives, and professions that are predicted on brutality--and that he will do this without grievance or hesitation

to be a man under such conditions, is to enter into a deeply gendered dialectic forged through acts of wounding and care that demand “men” to hurt, and “women” to do the work of mending

...the ways modern gender binaries synthesize sexual difference


business of state violence: accepting the notion that our identities are forged through obligatory acts of barbarism

how each of us work to fix identities

to do the maintenance work that modernity requires each of us

relic enduring centuries --> cultural need to materially substantiate the distance that lies between proper and improper forms of masculinity (dandy and war hero)
*routine and spectacular acts of wounding that gender identities presuppose*
--also--> attest to the critical will to desire different forms of masculinity

(artifacts preserved in climate controlled bubbles survive time to tell many stories)

conspicuous ornaments of legend

masculinities (and femininities) secured through woundings


(the work of) the maintenance of a particular form of gossip


towel
complex figuration of gendered social relations

which relics in contemporary Iran are emblematic of how and why the gender binary is imperative?

...relentless and futile acts of tearing and repairing

*we need to imagine how to restyle the relation between wounding and care so we can start to transform the fabric of our society*
(Archer)

@Sina: deconstructing the work of mending ajayeb


[stitches] pierces the substrate it is repairing, performing a modest violence upon what is to be mended, and reminding each of us of our sensitivity, vulnerability, and mortality
(Mark Newport)

linger in the cut produced by the suture (=/= patch over the proper wound)

(what kind of mending dares us?) to consider different, less clear-cut paths of relation and being (--✕--> masculinity's wounded duty)

Freud's fold of castration anxiety, fetishism, and Oedipus complex unfold in feminized form of labor to stitch and sew, to mark the wounds that “men must suffer” --> fashion material ritual, transforming and ideologically reinforcing femininity

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

(J[...]

[...]thnography/research: readers, informants, the public) can be brought into the process of crafting and meaningfully manipulating research/ethnographic materials

slider --> to “mix” and “remix” (ethnographic) data
to fit their contingencies
to leave open agendas that might be brought to the data
to create an infrastructure that allows to experience first-hand the theoretical constructs one uses in text

https://ethnocharrette.wordpress.com/
#research group workshop reading, charrette method
take Nicholas Shapiro's “Attuning to the Chemosphere”

•to redesign pedagogical practices for training researchers
•collaborative initiatives in which research designs could be analyzed, experimented with, and transformed.


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

“may all your problems be technical” (said by Jim Gray oft-quoted U.S. computer scientist)
=/= understanding what to build, for whom, for what purposes, and how their usage of the technologies will evolve over time

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

many artists today work within the regime of the stereotype, manipulating mass-cultural imagery ==> hidden ideological agendas are exposed [supposedly]
(artist's view:) “stereotype = something arbitrarily imposed upon the social field” therefore something relatively easy to depose [<-- they can't be more wronge]
(artist's self-grandious fantasy is that) “they pose a threat to those in power”

juxtapose
superimpose
interpose
==>
expose
oppose
depose

an artist like Kruger --> gesture (and not action) --Owens--> *stereotype's transformation of action into gesture*

positionality inscribed in language by the personal pronouns ‘I/we’ and ‘you’ --> manifesting the subject positions of partners in a conversation
(the third-person pronoun is a ‘non-person’ designating an objective existence, and not a subject position)

-linguistic class of deixis: here, now, this, that [--> carnal discourse]
-linguistic class of deictic: I, you [--> directly to the addressee: acquires body, weight, gravity]

she addresses ‘me’ ==> double address : oscillate between the personal and the impersonal ~ inclusion & exclusion --> to welcome...

personal pronouns ~-> ‘shifter’ ==allow==> speakers to ***shift from code to message*** (~ from the abstract to the concrete)

(for Barthes:) operation of messages of the mass media: ***to personalize all information, to make every utterance a direct challenge, not directed at the entire mass of readers, but at each reader in particular*** @constantvzw streaming hypothesis
(‘The Fashion System’)

(a too common) artistic strategy: *contradictory construction of the viewing subject by the stereotype*
(a too commo[...]

[...] knowledge’(==> device)
[*]device (symbolum): a combination of a picture and a personal motto. a private adage (امثال و حکم) or clever aphorism --> heraldic image --fusion~=> device: a personal message by means of which a knight would define himself--developed from the chivalric tradition** ==?==> Sa'di's moral devices
-theoretical advice and examples of devices
-a craftsmann, a painter or goldsmith, would then supply the visual form of the idea that the learned scholar created
(moral) device --discuss--> general qualities and characteristics such as courage, nobility, obligation ==> (genre of) [*]emblem: --(pictorial + verbal)-striving--> for *universal applicability*
*emblem <-- the desire to understand the mysteries of antiquity, especially ancient Edgyptian hieroglyphs (in obelisks, sphinxes, lions), which were thought to represent a secret language [original wisdom of early man] (<== concerns of Renaissance [for example Hieroglyphica written in Greek by Horapollo 14th century])
(what are my ‘hieroglyphics’ in ajayeb?) Renaissance humanists wanting to research and understand antiquity, also wiched to *make it come alive*, by using hieroglyphics + Pythogorean symbols (were added, since metaphors and allegories of the ancients supposedly derived from the wisdom of Edgyptian priests)
ancient mythologies and medieval allegories in Renaissance applied hieroglyphic science:
•ancient coins (interpreted as hieroglyphics)
•biblical imagery
•medieval animal
•plant books
•cabalistic number mysticism
•old testament motifs
}==> emblematics became a kind of a language, that scholars and then readers of the vulgar tongue deciphered in books and then applied to a number of fields in daily life

spiritual symbols of allegory and myth + factual/fractal world --common--> visual art
}--> ‘title page’ : interplay of symbol & reality <-- interaction of different spheres of imagery:
•historical characters
•living people
•stuff of geography
•stuff of astronomy
•architectural views
•(in the 14th century scholars began to collect) ancient coins (and medals) [one side: great events, historic individuals -and- the reverse: depicted allegorical subjects, gods or the *fates*, allegorical personifications inherited from the middle ages [arts and vices]] ~--> *moralizing nature of (someone's) ‘specifications’* [--> frontispiece: personifications as simulated sculptures in niches flanking the archway]

Sa'di =/= author's portrait updated ~ Olearius



Olearius had three printing presses installed in his house, and required that the engravers live and work there, under his direct supervision

“Concerning the Changeability of Worldy Things, and the Wonder and Praise of Virtue”

‘flaming hearts’ symbolizing “their” union

[...]

[...]ensions)
ecstasy of intoxication, forgetfulness, mimetic poisoning (of literature [= singular staging of the imaginary]): as sedative, as cure, as escape [= forced decision upon the subject]
-for Baudelaire opium became the transparency upon which one could review the internal conflict of freedom, the cleave of subjectivity where it encounters the abyss of destructive jouissance.
-(Emma Bovary had busted) a logic of reappropriation, collapsing the dreams of restoring a self
@constantvzw's investment in the critique of hallucinated plenitude and pure communication (enabled by digital media) --> transcendental telepathy (being online/connected over distances in a Facebook sense)
-pleasure and liberty values freely exercised upon a coded body
*hallucinator: a creature of simulacrum*
-what is wrong with the social media stream addict? a transport going nowhere; addictive, artificial, and beside oneself; [genuinely clean or drug free ~=? being exposed to existence, placing one's body in the grips of a temporality that pains]; phantasm of lack in abstinence; (like drugs they are) linked to *a mode of departing*, to desocialization, (like the activity of writing) nonproductive and somehow irresponsible, being-in-drugs (being-in-Facebook) supposedly resists the production of real value (incapable of stabilizing the truth of a real world); figure of drifter/dissident: obsessed and entranced, narcissistic, private, unable to achieve transference; movement of the simulacrum without address;
speed: going nowhere fast

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

[Campbell] on marketing theory

bacteria: entities that threaten our secluded sovereign cleanliness

our ideas of bacteria are shaped through the filter of advertisements for antibacterial products


[*]climate change: “[t]he moment I turn the engine of a car and ignite the 165 million-year-old microscopic fossil faunae, connecting me to the 35 billion ancient barrels that are drilled, fracked, refined, and transported every single year. Climate change is in the 100 trillion objects that are in, that are the Earth, traversing the stomach lining of the Burmese python and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, which churns a quarter of the planet’s heat flux. Climate change is the daily operations of simplification, extraction, purification, replication, and acceleration--all of which are needed to create the philosophy of ‘progress’ that is embodied by nearly every human in this world.” -Campbell
= *a context which will last for thousands of years and will be the fundamental starting point of every action, every thought, every expression of organization*
==> irreversible *death of difference* (biodiversity), end of “human project” (--✕--> despondency دلسردى)

creative foreclosure of the old World
preparing for an end without apocalypse @Jassem
(we need[...]

[...]ptions in creating individual identity (shared identity and symbolic significance through consumer narratives)
[Thompson and Haytko]

problematization --highlight--> ideological subtexts --formulate--> binary opposition --naturalization--> constructed consumption meaning

four major imaginaries within stock shows:
1. ‘symbolic freedom and independence of rancher life =/= commercial ranching’ ==> mythically relieve anxiety
2. ‘ove and respect for nature =/= need for food and control over nature’
3. ‘community =/= competitive realities of ranching life’
4. mythologising ‘family unification =/= male domination and female subordination’

[symbolic perspective of mythology ==>] “narrative performance = ideology --> allowing people to act without logic, facts or values through illusion or myth” --> mythology: a storyline crafted by the process of individuals’ incorporation of symbolic resources provided through the marketplace, which then must be negotiated between the cultural contradictions and sphere of the dominant and public viewpoints


functionalism: each part of society is dependent on other parts of society ==> social cohesion
~ “whatever is happening in society is what is supposed to happen” --> “myth: a collective representation that empowers and supports social solidarity”
•Durkheim: “knowledge is socially constructed and the world exists through collected representations”
“personal desire =/= community obligation ==> mythology”

•Eliade: “myth = an account of a creation,” of that which ‘really’ happened --> religion

}--(Belk, Wallendorf, Sherry)--> sacred and profane consumption
•sacred consumption inherent in material objects that embody myth helps to develop social cohesion.
sonsumers resist commodification of cultural resources that in Eliade's view are the embodiment of myth
*consumers’ sacred creation*
[example: temporary consumption community Burning Man: synthesis of community and markets through the exchange of goods and creative acts of art and performance --> community narratives embodying mythological creativity as art and performance ‘construct a temporary cohesiveness']
functionalist perspective of social cohesion: “consumption = means of consumer conformity to culture” --> (cohesion perspective:) ***a positive feeling through the appropriation of creative agency and resistance to challenge the unreflexive consumption at the heart of the marketplace myth***

Barthes ==>
•critical theory: “myth = naturalising socially constructed and historical discourse” ~ dominant societal actors oppress subordinates by normalising markers of segregation and subordination --> the concern is to take the side of the oppressed's language and *emancipation*[= demythologising (dominant ideology)] <== Marx's ‘false consciousness’ (for example capita[...]

[...]ry clashes
mutating into otherness =/= morphing into otherness
(pain of the flow -->) ***mutation is a concept that stops the flow***

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

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


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


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


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


(like animal rumors in old bestiaries ajayeb in a story-starated world) found telegram videos and internet pic used in my image assemblages --> (found images which make it difficult to trace their lineage) in an image-starated world ==construct==> ambivalent visual representations that do not have a signifier in an external “real” world (Baudrillard's rhetoric simulacrum: an object that is a copy of something which does not “exist”)
==Toffoletti==> potentiality: exceeding the bounds of description


(we are living in an) age of **technosubjectivity**
(Margulis theorizes) the symbolic basis of eukaryotic cells
(Dawkins posits) the existence of selfish genes and the extended phenotype
*system theory: human life subsumed radically into an all-encompassing concept of s[...]