[...]----lock is another word for lure, a key and lock seducing each other, we can check its mechanics
three interesting objects from apass’ environment:
-opposite
-omen
-alarm
in the beginning there was the ... rather than the word ‘or’
(or is about joke, alternatives, and maybes)
a mouthful: as much as a mouth will hold. : a word, name, or phrase that is very long or difficult to say. : something said that has a lot of meaning or importance.
interdisciplinary exploration of
is “what is your project about again?” the question we want to ask in apass? does this question really helps the other? or is it just for you, the questioner?
-how to resist the interference of double click?
...................................
(in the direction of my research; hastily opening the ontological envelope that saves a heart full of “list of specifications”...)
the visit will be to the ‘European Committee for Standardization’ (CEN, French: Comité Européen de Normalization), one of the EU fostered nonprofit public institutions of the cutting-edge development regarding ambitious notion of ‘data,’ ‘systematic knowledge,’ and ‘specifications’. the excursion will be oriented towards a meeting between the participants of advanced performance and scenography studies and the representatives of CEN, and encourages a run between the ontological demands of international economy and contemporary art, their disastrous split, and where their formations meet and intersect.
KEYWORDS: cosmology, experimentation, existence, specification, future, knowledge, irrationality, permanence and substance, technological acts--of naming, a path of becoming--on the grid of technological dominion, suspicious partnership of “advanced democracies” and “high technology"--what allows their mutuality?, standard-testing--which sectors of existence it is traversing?, pre-technological traces of cognitive normalization, the very little difference between specification and “the real thing,” THE origin of the demand for rigorous specification, migration of questions out of the areas of instrumental fitness, human relation to the surrounding world, impoverished zoologies--under techno-epistemo-anthropocentric values, squeezing prehistoric modes of weakening subjectival normativity--a field that today gets heavily technologized,
...................................
to bring our needs and lures towards each other
bring my lure to the table (that thing which i can't stop following)
who/what are you pregnant with?
(that is what you are proposing)
(that is to play with the ‘histories of body and mind’ [Haraway] you inherit --> for me is to play with the pre-subjective singularities)
[inheritance is of great importance for our re[...]
(1)[...notes/midday review.txt]%0.1[...]dge stories that we need --> noninnocent]
(something is) boring =?=> (something is) wrong
why do i joke? it has to do with storytelling.
anything anybody tells me i tend to believe--what i learn from whores
working within an apparatus of thinking in order to get somewhere in a sustained way and not to drift into associations as fast as... -->
i can't finish the sentence until i can pay attention to what interrupts it. and if i syntactically require to come to the end of sentence, syntactically commits me to a position i don't hold. the technical requirement of clarity (and coherence--must learn how to do it). my storytelling is about how not to reach the end of sentence. (that Peter noted as suspension)
['thinking pushed into syntax’ --> my work lecture-performances are about a thinking excessing out of syntax. not all argumentation is made in syntax(= how a sentence must end), and turn it into a skill of nonsyntactical pragmatic language craft tradition, advocating the *exceedingly agential* world ~= there is always ‘a whole lot is going on']
the iterative and fractal quality of sentences
partial connections (of distinct entities) ~= analogy
analogy allows one part contaminate systematically another part and vice versa
(Haraway on feminism)
feminist theory is especially good in getting at in particular ways doctrines of nature's work to enforce ways of life on women, on people of color, on the enslaved, on those who do not possess the qualities of mind and self-possession, on those who are on the marked categories to the unmarked. the feminist have been particularly good at getting how genre works. gender, in this regard. [...] --> that female by nature is committed to the species and the male by nature committed to transcendence.
[our inherited binaries -->] formulations of nature: executive/non-executive organs, immanence/transcendence, maintenance/novelty, catabolic(foru-sakht فرو ساخت, sukht سوخت)/anabolic(tarkib-saz ترکیب ساز) functions, ,,
-in Darwin's writing, non-theological account of diversity on earth, we find both interrupters and continuers of these particular notions of nature
the question of model, what is the model for what, what is similar to what?
****how do we do comparative thinking? comparative thinking depends on similarity judgment and difference judgment, and depends on good-enough models, and depends on a certain kind of rhetorical work of *crafting tropes*
--> figures of similarity/difference:
by similarity, or
by contiguity, or
by part-whole, or
...
(this is ‘building’ *among* us)
(how do i decide to compare two things? Shirin and Ophelia, etc)
models are built rhetorics
history of models
the power of models is that they are not the ‘same as’
c[...]
(2)[...notes/midday review.txt]%0.5[...]w your object in three generations, its child and grandchild
•[for the second day or warm-up first day?] constraint based writing: (Kenney > Christian Bök's “literary genetics” poetics of encryption of data; poetic vectors, to “infect” the language;) describe/story your object (or an operative “verb” within your discourse) with univocalics: without using “e” or only using a single vowel. or, first write with 3, then 2, then 1 vowel.
-the workshop is about: what other stories (of your object) are possible?
-in the workshop (I take a temporary position to) challenge others to re-tell the story of their ((epistemological) found) objects
-a ‘generative constraint’ might help opening up paths before you, away from our habits of storytelling
-it is about getting a feeling for the resistances and potentials of language in our (sometimes mundane) descriptive practices, “strange richness of missing the letters we need” (Kenney)
the metaphors are dormant in our routines of talking and noticing each other. how then, by traversing the routine, our “knowledge” and “community” took on new meaning, as they get a chance of being rearticulated in different languages (or differenlty infected literature)
~-?==> changing the system of classification (of thought)
-in a way the workshop is about an *approach* to knowledge generation (and not necessarily a rigorous critique nor directly evaluating the production of our knowledges)
***nothing is never merely a metaphor***
[some fables from science studies:]
•Emily Martin's egg/sperm story --> stories of atomism, distribution of agency, ----[The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles]
•Hayward's microscope --> tropes of natural history docu, ----[Enfolded Vision: Refracting The Love Life of the Octopus]
•Kenney/Haraway's origin/nature fable --> the omnipotence of the “origin” story in our descriptions and interactions with the natural world
•Scott Gilbert's immunological “bouncer” story =/= immune systems as inclusive agents of symbiosis
•Lynn Margulis: life (made possible) by “combat” [the survival fable that TV series “The 100” and “Kelile Demne” for instance is based on] --✕--> life by networking
•Haraway: the tale of “organism = a system of division of labor with executive functions” (==> extraction of wealth among us)
•Morton's causality-story
•brain/body story --> where the “move” came from?
•Sina's “standing on the shoulders of giants” --> knowledge/continuity, role of authority and humility in science ----[http://www.sinaseifee.com/giants.html]
•Sina's 3 little pigs --> architecture/tech/ echics of encounter --> story of the center and periphery ----[http://www.sinaseifee.com/pigs.html]
•“weapon fathered man” --> Kubrick's african genesis, techno[...]
(3)[...notes/midday review.txt]%1.6[...](sometimes mundane) descriptive practices, “strange richness of missing the letters we need” (Kenney)
the metaphors are dormant in our routines of talking and noticing each other. how then, by traversing the routine, our “knowledge” and “community” took on new meaning, as they get a chance of being rearticulated in different languages (or differenlty infected literature)
~-?==> changing the system of classification (of thought)
-in a way the workshop is about an *approach* to knowledge generation (and not necessarily a rigorous critique nor directly evaluating the production of our knowledges)
***nothing is never merely a metaphor***
[some fables from science studies:]
•Emily Martin's egg/sperm story --> stories of atomism, distribution of agency, ----[The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles]
•Hayward's microscope --> tropes of natural history docu, ----[Enfolded Vision: Refracting The Love Life of the Octopus]
•Kenney/Haraway's origin/nature fable --> the omnipotence of the “origin” story in our descriptions and interactions with the natural world
•Scott Gilbert's immunological “bouncer” story =/= immune systems as inclusive agents of symbiosis
•Lynn Margulis: life (made possible) by “combat” [the survival fable that TV series “The 100” and “Kelile Demne” for instance is based on] --✕--> life by networking
•Haraway: the tale of “organism = a system of division of labor with executive functions” (==> extraction of wealth among us)
•Morton's causality-story
•brain/body story --> where the “move” came from?
•Sina's “standing on the shoulders of giants” --> knowledge/continuity, role of authority and humility in science ----[http://www.sinaseifee.com/giants.html]
•Sina's 3 little pigs --> architecture/tech/ echics of encounter --> story of the center and periphery ----[http://www.sinaseifee.com/pigs.html]
•“weapon fathered man” --> Kubrick's african genesis, technology + prehistory (in postwar period) “tool ==> man”
•
fables popular in apass:
•“a work [of art] should speak for itself”
•“the very last stage of the creative process is purely intuitive” --> when people say they stop “reading” or “knowing” when they want to create artwork
•“look really hard inside yourself for what you really want”
•“you are an agent of change” that means art or thinking or being ought to be operative, active, transformative, (even destructive) and that is “political” [--> this fable in found in language; ---> go to Barthes’ fable of the woodcutter]
•
no need for “conflict” nor “hero”
(in the way we give feedback, relate, narrate, story, and tell eachother our matters of care and concern, and where we create zones of attachment; both in your “art[...]
(4)[...notes/midday review.txt]%1.6[...]
my point in animals without narrative is that the apparatus that is working for Attar in his representation of birds is the same as the narrative tool in the so-called wildlife documentary series which produces nature----a sy.
transcend is about traveling from trope to truth (obur az majaz be haghighat عبور از مجاز به حقیقت,) from virtual to concret. but that is too easily reversible. my point is to stop this transference and interrogate the trope itself. my work in amazon book is about this ‘majaz’ (مجاز), an interface that we are inhabiting.
...................................
the main (and only?) question in my work/performance/lecture is ‘when’ the gift will/have pass(ed) on.
--> holding on to, preparing, strategizing, spontaneity, and so on
-my texture aversion and preference in soft/hard fabric of language and material tonality? --> the “inanimate affections” (that give us pleasure in life) --> we often give each other soft gifts as a way to care for one another (@Janina)
*radical affection does not require intentional politics* (Chen)
[Shepard 2004] Stanner (W. E. H. Stanner, White Man Got No Dreaming) describes how the universe became a moral system and consists of three elements: marvels, species diversity, and institutions. Marvels refer to that presence of the unexpected that one always encounters sooner or later in nature, particularly when the terrain reflects something about the mind that implies a common structure. His second element, species diversity, coincides with one of the major moral issues of our time--the extinction of species and reduction of biodiversity.
-“marvels of affinity” is the key to reality, revealing how things are, what is known, and how to behave.
cosmogony (keyhan-zayi کیهان زایی)--how the universe became a moral system
...................................
[modes of existence]
science studies --> science
what was science before science studies? it was engaged in a sort of stupefaction that prevented meaningful study.
we do not take the fight against X (religion, fetish, etc.) for the truth about X.
...................................
[Avital]
i am adding “mama's boy” (bache-nane بچه ننه) to my short bio (nothing is added by “me,” everything is told to me.)
thanks to all the people who have given me their ‘sides’ (didn't necessorily confronted me)
(book, ketabat کتابت)
to do something to resignify and breakup the serenity and the serene closure of the book, as the universiy values it and seals it
-what deals does it seal?
-the commitment to breaking up the book and its metaphysically laden pitch for closural sovereignty.
-linguistic pollutants
-dirty talks
#as a mode of writing, m[...]
(6)[...notes/midday review.txt]%2.1[...]
the main (and only?) question in my work/performance/lecture is ‘when’ the gift will/have pass(ed) on.
--> holding on to, preparing, strategizing, spontaneity, and so on
-my texture aversion and preference in soft/hard fabric of language and material tonality? --> the “inanimate affections” (that give us pleasure in life) --> we often give each other soft gifts as a way to care for one another (@Janina)
*radical affection does not require intentional politics* (Chen)
[Shepard 2004] Stanner (W. E. H. Stanner, White Man Got No Dreaming) describes how the universe became a moral system and consists of three elements: marvels, species diversity, and institutions. Marvels refer to that presence of the unexpected that one always encounters sooner or later in nature, particularly when the terrain reflects something about the mind that implies a common structure. His second element, species diversity, coincides with one of the major moral issues of our time--the extinction of species and reduction of biodiversity.
-“marvels of affinity” is the key to reality, revealing how things are, what is known, and how to behave.
cosmogony (keyhan-zayi کیهان زایی)--how the universe became a moral system
...................................
[modes of existence]
science studies --> science
what was science before science studies? it was engaged in a sort of stupefaction that prevented meaningful study.
we do not take the fight against X (religion, fetish, etc.) for the truth about X.
...................................
[Avital]
i am adding “mama's boy” (bache-nane بچه ننه) to my short bio (nothing is added by “me,” everything is told to me.)
thanks to all the people who have given me their ‘sides’ (didn't necessorily confronted me)
(book, ketabat کتابت)
to do something to resignify and breakup the serenity and the serene closure of the book, as the universiy values it and seals it
-what deals does it seal?
-the commitment to breaking up the book and its metaphysically laden pitch for closural sovereignty.
-linguistic pollutants
-dirty talks
#as a mode of writing, make a folding (fractal) book, style of children books, for ajayeb
(what would this structure mean? and how is that expandable?)
#making a cheap horror short-film from one of the ajayebs
#write a X-man short story in Tehran context with iranian everyday characters
•jurassic park --> ajayeb al makhlughat عجایب المخلوقات (horror, sublime, shivering water)
•nonapocalyptic stories and the otherworldly hauntingly familiar in the lost faces of forest (called Tehran?)
(accourding to Egyptian 1550 BCE,) book: a loose collection of magic spells intended to assist a dead person[...]
(7)[...notes/midday review.txt]%2.1[...]hetorical event of a comparison
#[the theater of example]
the threat of example's excess
fables of responsibility ==securing==> *the morality of the subject who means* (who can they finally be submitted to the logic of an *evaluative destination*)
(Derrida's) mode of enunciation and the literary vehicle entrusted with its exemplification :
*[...]it is sufficient to introduce, into the fold of speech acts, a few wolves of the type (“undecidability” or “unconscious”) for the shepherd to lose track of his sheep: one is no longer certain where to find the identity of the “speaker” or the “hearer,” ... where to find the identity of an intention.*
--?--> wolf in sheep's clothing [--> also the problem/fantasy of the “integration” project (as the space of ethics and politics)~~>(“Appearances are deceptive” ==> exclusion of the parasite + identification of subjects as the task of responsibility); -what would mean for the German shepherd to lose track of his sheeps? (to go from) the fable of *the oriented sheepfold* --to--> the fable of *losing count*]
-the vexed relation between sheep and wolf, slave and master
(my work is all about: can we please look at) some *other* “interior of the system”
(system never has only one interior [=/= conspiracy: system's singular interiority])
•literature's (ir)responsibility to philosophy
•art's (ir)responsibility to journalism
Xanthus the philosopher decides to buy a slave, goes with his students to the slave market, and encounters the disfigured Phrygian Aesop (recently granted the power of speech after assisting a priestess of Isis and hence become too difficult for his previous master to handle). Their first exchange is exemplary, as the philosopher interrogates the slave in order to determine whether “he knows anything,” receives equivocal replies, and finishes by asking, “Do you want me to buy you?”
(Life of Aesop)
thinking fable as language : ‘Fabula’ (narration or account), derived as it is from the Latin root ‘fari’ (to speak) and linked to the Greek ‘phanai’ (to speak or to say), finally implies nothing other than language as such
Mythos and logos, the one is not more true (or more false, deceptive, fictive, etc.) than the other
(to open to the) alterity of an ungoverned figuration
hero: the adventure of an identification that can only occur in the comparison that a fable demands
Horace's dictum: “with a change of names, the fable is told about you” (a trans-subjective movement, a tropological system =/= metaphor or metonymy, )
(for Nietzsche) responsibility: the ability to make and keep one's promises = being (able to be) held accountable (not simply by another but) already in advance by and for oneself : to answer to onese[...]
(8)[...notes/midday review.txt]%2.5[...]ponsibility to philosophy
•art's (ir)responsibility to journalism
Xanthus the philosopher decides to buy a slave, goes with his students to the slave market, and encounters the disfigured Phrygian Aesop (recently granted the power of speech after assisting a priestess of Isis and hence become too difficult for his previous master to handle). Their first exchange is exemplary, as the philosopher interrogates the slave in order to determine whether “he knows anything,” receives equivocal replies, and finishes by asking, “Do you want me to buy you?”
(Life of Aesop)
thinking fable as language : ‘Fabula’ (narration or account), derived as it is from the Latin root ‘fari’ (to speak) and linked to the Greek ‘phanai’ (to speak or to say), finally implies nothing other than language as such
Mythos and logos, the one is not more true (or more false, deceptive, fictive, etc.) than the other
(to open to the) alterity of an ungoverned figuration
hero: the adventure of an identification that can only occur in the comparison that a fable demands
Horace's dictum: “with a change of names, the fable is told about you” (a trans-subjective movement, a tropological system =/= metaphor or metonymy, )
(for Nietzsche) responsibility: the ability to make and keep one's promises = being (able to be) held accountable (not simply by another but) already in advance by and for oneself : to answer to oneself in the place of the other
•Nietzsche's fable of morality: lamb & bird of prey (“eagle is evil ==> lambs are good”)--> [the fable enacts the victory:] the lambs triumph in gaining the ability (and then the right) to hold the birds of prey responsible for doing what they do, for being what they are --claim--> the strong man is fee to be weak, the bird of prey free to be a lamb ==gain==> the right to make the bird of prey accountable for being a bird of prey
◦morality: a fabulous narrative about language and how it gets turned (with animals playing its roles) into an ethical and epistemological system --> the medium of the exploitation (*putting to use or the abuse of a linguistic possibility*)
◦the interpretation or institution of the birds as subjeets (choosing, willing
agents) depends on a fiction, a fable: the doer is merely a fiction added to the deed
==Nietzsche==>
•*responsibility: an exploitation of a verbal possibility*
•*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 h[...]
(11)[...notes/midday review.txt]%2.6[...]nd logos, the one is not more true (or more false, deceptive, fictive, etc.) than the other
(to open to the) alterity of an ungoverned figuration
hero: the adventure of an identification that can only occur in the comparison that a fable demands
Horace's dictum: “with a change of names, the fable is told about you” (a trans-subjective movement, a tropological system =/= metaphor or metonymy, )
(for Nietzsche) responsibility: the ability to make and keep one's promises = being (able to be) held accountable (not simply by another but) already in advance by and for oneself : to answer to oneself in the place of the other
•Nietzsche's fable of morality: lamb & bird of prey (“eagle is evil ==> lambs are good”)--> [the fable enacts the victory:] the lambs triumph in gaining the ability (and then the right) to hold the birds of prey responsible for doing what they do, for being what they are --claim--> the strong man is fee to be weak, the bird of prey free to be a lamb ==gain==> the right to make the bird of prey accountable for being a bird of prey
◦morality: a fabulous narrative about language and how it gets turned (with animals playing its roles) into an ethical and epistemological system --> the medium of the exploitation (*putting to use or the abuse of a linguistic possibility*)
◦the interpretation or institution of the birds as subjeets (choosing, willing
agents) depends on a fiction, a fable: the doer is merely a fiction added to the deed
==Nietzsche==>
•*responsibility: an exploitation of a verbal possibility*
•*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 kno[...]
(12)[...notes/midday review.txt]%2.6[...] to the deed
==Nietzsche==>
•*responsibility: an exploitation of a verbal possibility*
•*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 (Ae[...]
(13)[...notes/midday review.txt]%2.7[...]n 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. Putting on a sheep skin to trick the shepherd, he joined the flock at grass without being discovered. At nightfall the shepherd shut him with the sheep in the fold and made fast all round by blocking the entrance. Then, feeling hungry, he picked up his knife and slaughtered an animal for his supper. It happened to be the wolf.
--> a character that does not belong to one can involve one in serious trouble
[*]fable: (name of the) *literary thing* that aime to *teach responsibility* --Keenan--> [...]
(14)[...notes/midday review.txt]%2.7[...]of the line, the hojum of enemy, of friend, of information, also includes the plural form of ‘hajm’ (حجم)
#seminar on the history of translation
archaeology, interpretation, spaces of difficult translation, reading out of time, technology and transformational studies, semiotics, poetry, writing,
...................................
#on Situated Knowledges
-approach the text by creating intensity and my own partial perspective
-the elephant parable (against it)
-objectivity (disembodied view from nowhere)
-neutrality (biologically insane)
-marked people (my own story)
-situatedness of the situated
-The cyborg is a figure in which situatedness makes possible adventures with the beyond.
-globalization-as-situatedness: global is precisely space/place/time/situation
-the figure of the so-called scientist gathered around certain metaphors since the begining of the 17th cebtury, namely ‘objectivity’ and all its related adjectives: neutrality, perspective, universality, disembodiment (for certain race and sex), etc.
-metaphors create perspectives [the view that looks at blind men looking at the elephant]
-situatedness is different than ‘positionality’: a way of systematic error correction
-(resolving) specificity of vision --> scientific objectivity (is achievable)
-Haraway expresses her informed dissatisfaction with (the metaphysical substrate that supports) ‘social constrctivism’ and ‘traditional realism’ --> representationalist belief in the power of the words to mirror preexisting phenomena. they both believe that scientific knowledge (in its representational formats: theoretical concepts, graphs, particle tracks, photographic images, etc.) mediates our access to the material world, whether it represents “nature” or “objects” of science both groups are subscribed to representationalism.
focus on the nature and production of scientific knowledge --(shift to science studies)--> dynamics of the actual practice of science }--> on ongoing pattern of situated activity
-(disembodied scietific) objectivity: that only certain people are allowed to have no body (Gender, race, etc.) and that high science in practice is not acting on textbook objectivity at all.
absent referents, deferred signifieds, split subjects, and the endless play of signifier
Haraway is feeling nervous with two views on objectivity:
(1)the ‘social constructionist’ view on this: getting to know the world ‘effectively’ by practicing the sciences --> knowledge is knowledge-game (on an agonistic power field) ==> science is rhetoric : artifacts and facts are parts of the powerful art of rhetoric ~= practice is persuasion. {this view will use the nasty tools of semiology and deconstruction to insist on the rhetorical nature of truth.} --> Haraway calls this ‘The imagery of force fields’ (also an ima[...]
(15)[...notes/midday review.txt]%3.2[...]hetoric ~= practice is persuasion. {this view will use the nasty tools of semiology and deconstruction to insist on the rhetorical nature of truth.} --> Haraway calls this ‘The imagery of force fields’ (also an imagery of high-tech military fields and of automated academic battlefields) {will to power} (for Luiza)
epistemological electroshock therapy
(feminists protecting their) sense of collective historical subjectivity and agency and our “embodied” accounts of the truth --> these are just excuse not to learn
(2)Humanistic Marxism (structuring theory about the domination of nature in the self-construction of man) ([young Marx, influenced by Feuerbach =/= Hegelian idealism, saying that:] man's essential nature is that of a free producer, freely reproducing their own conditions of life [--however--> under capitalism individuals are alienated from their productive activity, etc.])
--> “chance for life”
science: Global System, universal knowledge --> translation, convertibility, mobility
of meanings, and universality
money in capitalism ~= reductionism in science
...when we are talking about genes, social classes, elementary particles, genders, races, or texts
*vision: a sensory system that has been used leap out of the marked body ==> a gaze from nowhere
-“Vision is always a question of the power to see--and perhaps of the violence implicit in our visualizing practices”
-also, the visual metaphor allows one to go beyond fixed appearances, which are only the end products. The metaphor invites us to investigate the varied apparatuses of visual production (including: the prosthetic technologies interfaced with our biological eyes and brains.)
unmarked body: the power to see and not be seen
objectivity in scientific and technological, late-industrial, militarized, racist, and male-dominant societies
(she asks for:)
“So, I think my problem, and “our” problem, is how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own “semiotic technologies” for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a “real” world, one that can be partially shared and that is friendly to earthwide projects of finite freedom, adequate material abundance, modest meaning in suffering, and limited happiness.”
Haraway asks for an embodied objectivity that is able of accommodating *paradoxes* --> ‘situated knowledges’
-what does she mean when she says “All components of the desire are paradoxical and dangerous, and their combination is both contradictory and necessary.”
(instruments of visualization in multinationalist, postmodernist culture:) disembodiment : to distance to know
the visualizing technologies (--> my amazon project)
a perverse [...]
(16)[...notes/midday review.txt]%3.3[...]
presented as utterly transparent
***particularity and embodiment (of all vision) [not necessarily organic]
usable and not innocent
“We need to learn in our bodies, endowed with primate color and stereoscopic vision, how to attach the objective to our theoretical and political scanners in order to name where we are and are not, in dimensions of mental and physical space we hardly know how to name.”
‘partial perspective’ (what does she mean?)
==> become answerable for what we learn how to see. (Helen Verran: accountability; Isabelle Stengers: milieu thinking; Latour: ground;)
(partial way of organizing world)
unlocatable =? irresponsible (knowledge claims)
partial --> possibility of webs of connections: solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology
-to unfold the problem of relativism: ‘the elephant parable’ promisses seeing equally and fully. “equality” of positioning: relativism (another “god trick”) (!=/= single-vision, totalization) =/= partial locatable] [mythic cartoon of pluralism] [myth of exact knowledges, dream of perfectly known, and politics of closure] --> positioning is at stake here
“all eyes, including our own organic ones, are active perceptual systems, building on translations and specific ways of seeing”
how to see ‘faithfully’... (what does she mean by that?)
appropriating the vision of the less powerful:
to see from the peripheries
to see from the depths
...this not unproblemat (why she uses double negation so often?)
“But how to see from below is a problem requiring at least as much skill with bodies and language, with the mediations of vision, as the ‘highest’ technoscientific visualizations.”
“Science has been utopian and visionary from the start; that is one reason “we” need it.” (what does she mean?)
(“utopian,” “visionary,” other old metaphors in science)
“Passionate detachment” requires more than ‘acknowledged and self-critical’ partiality. (being acknowledged and self-critical is not enough!!! how deos she mean?)
-‘perspective’ can never be known in advance --> knowledge potent for constructing worlds less organized by axes/axis of domination
-One cannot “be” either a cell or molecule--or a woman, colonized person, laborer, and so on. ‘passionate detachment’ is about the impossibility of entertaining innocent “identity” politics : seeing from their perspective in order to see well.
-problem with “positionality”: {testimony from the position of ‘oneself'} We are not immediately present to ourselves and the self is assumed finished and whole simply there and original and its (grounding) knowledge is organized around the imagery of vision --✕--> Self-knowledge requires a semiotic-material technology to link meanings and bodies. ***Self-identity is a bad visual system*** --> ‘p[...]
(17)[...notes/midday review.txt]%3.4[...]a problem requiring at least as much skill with bodies and language, with the mediations of vision, as the ‘highest’ technoscientific visualizations.”
“Science has been utopian and visionary from the start; that is one reason “we” need it.” (what does she mean?)
(“utopian,” “visionary,” other old metaphors in science)
“Passionate detachment” requires more than ‘acknowledged and self-critical’ partiality. (being acknowledged and self-critical is not enough!!! how deos she mean?)
-‘perspective’ can never be known in advance --> knowledge potent for constructing worlds less organized by axes/axis of domination
-One cannot “be” either a cell or molecule--or a woman, colonized person, laborer, and so on. ‘passionate detachment’ is about the impossibility of entertaining innocent “identity” politics : seeing from their perspective in order to see well.
-problem with “positionality”: {testimony from the position of ‘oneself'} We are not immediately present to ourselves and the self is assumed finished and whole simply there and original and its (grounding) knowledge is organized around the imagery of vision --✕--> Self-knowledge requires a semiotic-material technology to link meanings and bodies. ***Self-identity is a bad visual system*** --> ‘positionality’ (meaning: ‘acknowledged and self-critical’ partiality) [at best showing in which ways one is not unmarked] is therefore insufficient. {Identity, including self-identity, does not produce science!}
-instead we need a *split and contradictory self* (one who can interrogate positionings and be accountable) [~~/?-> shath شطح (=/= shar’ شرع, or even sharh شرح?), shathiat (شطحیات) in Tasavof (تصوف), rend رند, rendane رندانه]
-so, instead of “being” she proposes “splitting”: heterogeneous multiplicities that are simultaneously salient and incapable of being squashed into isomorphic slots or cumulative lists. --> The knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, never whole, stitched together imperfectly [that is what she means by ‘split'] ==> join with another (without claiming to ‘be’ another) {if i am allowed i can map Haraway's “partiality” onto Deleuze's “schizophrenia” --> Greek for “split brain” (Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception, p.38) According to Beuler, “The selectivity which normal attention exercises among the sensory impressions can be reduced to zero, so that almost anything is recorded that reaches the senses.” One reason for the admiration which Deleuze and Guattari professed for the schizophrenic must lie in this complete lack of inhibition (khod-dari خودداری).} (a confusion of voice and sight, rather than clear and distinct ideas) ([to discriminate message types:] *to confuse literal and metaphorical*, the schizophrenic either does not know his responses are metaphorical or cannot say so --> the breakdown of his metacommunicative system : does not know what kind o[...]
(18)[...notes/midday review.txt]%3.5[...]har’ شرع, or even sharh شرح?), shathiat (شطحیات) in Tasavof (تصوف), rend رند, rendane رندانه]
-so, instead of “being” she proposes “splitting”: heterogeneous multiplicities that are simultaneously salient and incapable of being squashed into isomorphic slots or cumulative lists. --> The knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, never whole, stitched together imperfectly [that is what she means by ‘split'] ==> join with another (without claiming to ‘be’ another) {if i am allowed i can map Haraway's “partiality” onto Deleuze's “schizophrenia” --> Greek for “split brain” (Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception, p.38) According to Beuler, “The selectivity which normal attention exercises among the sensory impressions can be reduced to zero, so that almost anything is recorded that reaches the senses.” One reason for the admiration which Deleuze and Guattari professed for the schizophrenic must lie in this complete lack of inhibition (khod-dari خودداری).} (a confusion of voice and sight, rather than clear and distinct ideas) ([to discriminate message types:] *to confuse literal and metaphorical*, the schizophrenic either does not know his responses are metaphorical or cannot say so --> the breakdown of his metacommunicative system : does not know what kind of message a message is --> the schizophrenic looks for hidden meanings everywhere (assuming everything is metaphorical) or tend to accept every message as literal) (Lacan: schizophrenia: breakdown in the signifying chain of language ==> experience of pure material signifiers [<-- personal identity is the effect of the temporal unification of past and future with one's present, and that such an active temporal unification is itself a function of language.])
subjectivity is multidimensional ==> vision is multidimensional
(an instruments of vision:) optics : politics of positioning --> one example of optical illusion: rationality (projected from nowhere comprehensivel)
(some perspective are more guilty : master point of view)
No one ever accused the God of monotheism of objectivity, only of indifference. The god trick is self-identical, and we have mistaken that for creativity and knowledge, omniscience even. (self-identical [having self identity] =/=! creativity/knowledge)
Technology: skilled practices. (How to see? Where to see from? and so on.)
@Sana, ‘observation’ and ‘technologies of positioning’
how to see?
the science question in military
the science question in colonialism
the science question in capitalism
the science question in feminism
...
master theory =/= webbed accounts
(what does she mean when she dichotomises theory and account?)
instead of (creating and mastering) ‘theory’ she proposes webbing ‘accounts’***
-‘webs’ can have the property of being systematic
[...]
(19)[...notes/midday review.txt]%3.5[...]future with one's present, and that such an active temporal unification is itself a function of language.])
subjectivity is multidimensional ==> vision is multidimensional
(an instruments of vision:) optics : politics of positioning --> one example of optical illusion: rationality (projected from nowhere comprehensivel)
(some perspective are more guilty : master point of view)
No one ever accused the God of monotheism of objectivity, only of indifference. The god trick is self-identical, and we have mistaken that for creativity and knowledge, omniscience even. (self-identical [having self identity] =/=! creativity/knowledge)
Technology: skilled practices. (How to see? Where to see from? and so on.)
@Sana, ‘observation’ and ‘technologies of positioning’
how to see?
the science question in military
the science question in colonialism
the science question in capitalism
the science question in feminism
...
master theory =/= webbed accounts
(what does she mean when she dichotomises theory and account?)
instead of (creating and mastering) ‘theory’ she proposes webbing ‘accounts’***
-‘webs’ can have the property of being systematic
systematic: deep filaments and tenacious tendrils into time, space, and consciousness. systems are dimensions of world history.
she suggests to be accountable for (the intricacies of) visualization technologies in which we are embedded that we will find metaphors and means for understanding
and intervening in the *patterns of objectification* in the world.
--> politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating
partiality =/= universality
*partiality: view from a body, always a complex, contradictory, *structuring, and structured body* (what does she mean by ‘structuring and structured body’?)
--the scthe sciences and politics of interpretation, translation, stuttering, and the partly understood.
*Feminism: critical vision ==(consequent upon)==> a critical positioning in unhomogeneous gendered social space.
location --> vulnerability ~~> (full of limits and contradictions)
“rational” knowledge : to be free from interpretation, to be free from being represented : to be fully self-contained (~ fully formalizable)
-no! let's make Rational Knowledge a process of ongoing critical interpretation among “fields” of interpreters and decoders --> a power-sensitive conversation
-accountability and responsibility for translations
. Situated knowledges are about communities, not about isolated individuals
(pinocchio and geppetto parable)
objectivity = positioned rationality
=/= images of escape and transcendence of limits (filled in Hollywood and sci)
faithfulness of our accounts[...]
(20)[...notes/midday review.txt]%3.6[...]o 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 akhh[...]
(23)[...notes/midday review.txt]%4.2[...]oir 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 really counts [that is the incalculable] and cannot be satisfied by mere knowledge available to them. nor can they keep themselves to the restricted zone of knowability.) so Lili saying “it's too much!” is a hysteric wish for ‘more’?
(Freudian joke, the hysteric says: “is that all there is!?” while the neurotic says: “this is too much!” to the same object)
*it was Goethe who invented the super-ego, Freud named it following him.
the all-or-nothing view: i know everything or i don't know anything, problem of scale, problem of ‘circumstance = reality’
kloAQsvRkFY
the figure of the ‘accuser’ and the ‘straight talk’ for Lili
...that people would speak literally
going from proof to proof, from necessity to necessity --> displacement (=/= detour)
...................................
@Ekaterina; some other characters:
the jealous, the impassioned, the persecutive, the erotomaniacal,
complainer,
noble trader,
Ekaterina, asking for a fabulation? her totem making
Deleuzian fabulation: a fiction made up by people in their process of becoming
making up stories
=/= fiction (on its own; it doesn't have that relation with becoming)
in which c[...]
(24)[...notes/midday review.txt]%4.2[...]something in the field of complaint? (--> Luiza, Lili; certain forms of protest dominates their utterances)
--different morphs of civic grief--
(why am i concerned with complaint of my friends? this is about checking my own infrastructural concerns about zones of encounter and redirecting oversized libidinal aggressions, [and pain-relief? {is my work all about (philosophical/artistic) pain-relief?}])
complaint =/= staying within the boundaries of coded gracefulness
(...credit reserved for non-complainers) ,,, ((minor scales of)) protest and breaking rhymes (of master discourse?) (@Sana, perturbed by manners of injustice; her libido [zist-maye زیست مایه, shur-e hayat شور حیات] is at stake)
--when complaint takes over and you don't even know if there is an injury anymore at the root of it.
(we are traveling behind its possible meaning-fields)
de-shamanization and translation /(non-transparency should rule?!)
/>
are we trapped in a grid of grievance?
different forms of ‘maybe’ (i am trying to install?)
how complaint is then situated in ‘becoming’?
[...] complaint haunts our era of desperate justice (Xiri, Sana, Varinia)
. a calling-system? a GPS that has lost its signal?
maternal super-ego
political passion emerging as a defensive strategy
(@Xiri, is she trying to add-on the super-ego for her concern of social justice?)
so, does complaint prevent the arrival of change or make way for new forms of sociality?
“I can't complain.” --> (a blockbuster;) those in stubborn destitution ----that there is no address in the era of the becoming anonymous of God. ‘Who would pick up your call?’
however, “the friend, whether ghostly, futural, or closely bound in time, receives the brunt of the complaint” --friends structurally listens to disappointed expectation, disappointed woted worldliness
what-should-have-been
On what approved contingencies, contractual loopholes, or transferential coordinates could I possibly befriend another?
metaphysical heritage of friendship (... reconfigured personhood)
(how can I do things without being a psycho about it?)
(How do I know by which politics of friendship, grid or writing practice I am being called up?)
a vocabulary existed to designate, approximate certain routines
R_dzvJYDZXM
CrGJIS3quYY
(30.03.2017) Rabih Mroue and Hito Steyerl duo: concern for injustice and conservative justice call disguised under an elaborated and augmented complaint (in the aesthetic terms of contemporary art market), non-researchers of their subjects and topics, they have no ‘topic’ only ‘resource’ (in the making of their own myth of the figure of artist,) [=/= when something becomes a topic for you, it bounds[...]
(25)[...notes/midday review.txt]%4.7[...]c relation of equipment or tools as ready-to-hand. the ideology of a knowledge relation: magic (as tool) is present-at-hand --> ontological relationship to the world (----the characters want to go and have an icecream when they are finished with all the magical fights.)
this notion of magic as tool (=/= epistemological object) in use achieves (what Don Ihde calls) *instrumental transparency* --> It “withdraws” when in use, but becomes conspicuous again when broken or missing [--> this is precisely the standard account of technology in high-techno-scientific capitalist sunny societies] --> the idea that magicians can “forget” (or “lose”) their magic suggests a guarantor of instrumental transparency of magic (or knowledge).
-the popular vision of magic hinges around the desire for total transparency**
-this instrumental rationality is the heart of the modernizing project (which characterizes capitalism) --> the value-free calculable efficiency of administrative processes (--> a project of domination and denial of dependence) (=?=> Auschwitz)
(how to make The Magician's bounded utilitarian individualism unthinkable?)
(Frankfurt School:) technology ~= instrumental reason ~= reification (madiat, jesmiat) as reason
(Habermas:) systems rationality, economic and bureaucratic rationality (==> patterns of meaning rendered functional) =/= communicative processes that sustain the lifeworld
the same Platonic tradition produces: {theory =/= practice} ==> {mind =/= body} ==> {"conceptual” =/= “material"} (and privileging one over the other)
(for the Frankfurt School) truth = "a moment of correct praxis”
what is at stake is the way ‘The Magician’ heroes’ way of non-relating to an entire environment and with it to an implicit “world” that they inhabit.
...that science is an ‘account’ of reality not a ‘tool’ for coping with it
...when the world and the instrument interact
descriptions of the affordances of indissoluble instrument / world complexes are at stake
then how can we think magic/knowledge/science without instrumentalization (‘something in order to’)?
the notion of ‘world’ and ‘worlding’ in other Hollywood sci-fi franchises, and the way a world (for example survival in Mars in ‘The Martian,’ surviving “outer space” in ‘Gravity,’ “pure wonder” and “abyssal unknown” in many Icarusian space exploration moves and movies, the deprived Earth in ‘Interstellar,’ and so on) is rendered dead or dangerous or prosperous, ideologies of anthropocentric extensionalism.
(this directly concerns my ajayeb apass research about the past, because hollywood constantly making science fictions about the past.)
[as much as Matt Damon is schizo-constructing a social environment (on “dead” Mars trying to contact “home”), Cinderella's schizo-affective relation with the talking animals is doing the same:[...]
(26)[...notes/midday review.txt]%5[...] ‘ghostly landscape’? (matter of a confrontation with Tehran? exteriority of my subjecthood is at stake? ~->!? the arbitrary position of “genius loci” : that from a genius position one can see for good. -how to make myself nonarbitrary--not subject to individual determination--in relation to Tehran? --> towards ‘situated knowledge’)
•what kind of material-discursive practices thinking with “landscape” committed me to? [to explore and feel this commitment (and its consequences) is ‘staying with the trouble’ for me]
it felt like Alice believes that people, we, have control over our metaphors, but in the course of the workshop there were many occasions that was not the case:
Sina, landscape --> optics
Esta, building/house --> geometry --> security
Agnes, supermarket --> exchange
Juan, crime --> arrest
Zoumana, garden (~-> fecundity) --> immunity
Eszter, electronic device --> closed
Ekaterina, zoo --> objects of care (~-> animal ~= diseased .--> objectifying or babying them)
* landscape ==>? optic -->? way of disembodied seeing
[artificial perspective {--> (objects are in) proportional variations in a seamless continuum}, gaze of the spectator, exterior space, homogeneous, infinite, systematic,] --> (this is all) *symbolic form*
[(tele/micro)scope <==] landscape <== perspective <-- arbitrary point of the observer
(Descola:) such “objectification of the subjective” ==>
(1) a distance between man and the world
(2) systematizes and stabilizes the external universe
***factuality is not intrinsic, it is rhetoric (that we live with)
history of the idea of nature
‘ajayeb's architects of a naturalistic cosmology who establish hierarchies and discontinuities among them =/= cosmogenesis of modernity's subjectivity's illusions of continuity
[Descola's “configurations of continuity"]
(ajayeb creates) hierarchical order according to the levels of the exchange of information that is reputed to be possible.
-which parties are set on the same level of reality (in ajayeb)?
(what are the human and nonhuman) proliferation of forms in ajayeb (?)
who are the “mothers of games” there? snake, Div, etc. (spirits that protect the game)
technical know-how to create intersubjective ambience/ambivalence --> regulated relations between one person and another }--these are--> cultivated plots
how can i, starting with apass, learn to create theaters of a subtle sociability (in which beings with different forms of language and physical aspect are ontologically indistinguishable)?
the category of “persons”: variations in the modes of communication that are made possible by an apprehension of perceived qualities that are unequally distributed
whose dialects are mutually intelligible?
[...]
(27)[...notes/midday review.txt]%5.5[...] perceived qualities that are unequally distributed
whose dialects are mutually intelligible?
human narcissism : that if a being possess a soul is only then capable of recognizing humans
---then let's give everyone souls!
...................................
(Massumi > Deleuze's) critique ~= modulation --> actively modulated from within the situation, immanent to it {
-augmenting* (taking a certain tendency to the limit)
-diverting* (deflecting it into a different tendency)
-transmutational* (interacting with other tendencies in a way that invents a whole new direction as a kind of surplus value of interaction)
-or, it can lead to a clash that stops the process
asking people “to be true to what they represent” ==> having them “encapsulated in already arrived-at opinion and judgment” ==> blockage
war of “disqualification” ~ Stengersian non-event
being (represented and) legitimated in proxy war
...................................
@Zoumana; “decadent gardener” that connot keep distinction between kin and pest, nature and culture
what is a garden full of indirections, snakes?
...................................
#my trope-findings, (bilingual nonsystematic comparative thinking for storytelling) (work with Avital?):
•پیر Pir / sujet supposé savoir (--✕-->? پیر فلک Pir-e falak in Hafez)
•غر Ghor / complaint (--> shekayat شکایت, and then, khamush خموش in Hafez)
•تعارف Tarof / greeting
•transcend <--> darajat درجات (-> Attar)
•super-ego <--> Div-mardom دیو مردم (-> Nezami)
•NatureZolmat (ظلمت --> ajayeb)
•آبرو Aberu / economy of value
•طیالارض tey-ol-arz / body scale, intensity and excess
•نگرانی negarani <--> practices of care
on Aberu, I became interested due to my lack of Aberu in presentationl quality and its abundance in other area's of my psychosomatic becoming.
Aberu traverses, calls itself in, animates, and exists for later visits.
-when you are devalued by the marked of bi-aberu, you are less tied to the strictures of shame, and ‘your behavior’ becomes performance material
...................................
agency =? boresh برش, jahd جهد (in Farsi), “agential cut enacts a local causal structure” (Barad)
agency of ‘hemat’ همّت
hemate shahi همّت شاهی, lavazeme hemat لوازم همّت --> apparatus
sufi's hemat ~= magic
...................................
@Seba after accelerate manifesto reading: (what is and how can we not pivot on our work) the measure of the meaningfulness of action. (Seba's notion of losing hope is because he put himself unconsciously in a cost-benefit analysis? “what is the effect of my actions?”) [in practice it is difficult t[...]
(29)[...notes/midday review.txt]%5.6[...]e to self: not to throw away the contaminated concept that we have, (for example ‘human intentionality,’ ‘human rights,’ etc) *but to hold on (while knowing how contaminated it is) to any concept (which are always unsettled) until it gets a particular (situated) job done
(which job i am try to get done with my good and bad concepts?)
where are we headed with our syntax?
“-scene” : the ‘now’ of the species [--> pleistocene image] also, a sharp change in the graph/diagram [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Extinction_intensity.svg]
Sa'di, thinking not with the capital T, rather with the flower, with the cut tail of the animaux
competency + competency (of different animal, human, machine, pigeon, etc) [=/= subtraction, taboo, obligation --> deficiency*]
(additive competencies)
“excess” is the name of the world
there is always more that we don't know; what yet has to come; the world is constantly doing stuff; (--✕--> accelerate manifesto, apocalyptic narratives)
(i am drawn to and by excess, and i am engaged in it: in my lectures, talkings, writings, and I take it up also visually in my drawings. my ajayeb hypertext search is contingent and opportunistic, and its searches are non-systematic)
in apass what my project is all about: *loving to tell you about what i am reading* (why it seams too difficult, complicated and impossible to understand!?)
-“to provides a feast of reading pleasures”
holding each other's unasked-for patterns (@Luisa)
taking up each other patterns [which are sometimes obvious, sometimes cryptic]
(what is the other name of the practices of “string figures” in Iran? -->[stars, facts, fabulations, “far”s, patternings,]--> all cosmopolitical, composes the “we”)
•a “we” compositional
•an “ajayeb” compositional
•
anthropocene system thinking
•feedback loops
•thermodynamics & 18th century mathematics (=/= hyperbolic mathematics in ‘crochet’ --> excess of surface, --> story of interface)
•comparative interpretive thinking (a dominant western model of knowledge production--which i am using!)
•modern synthesis: restrictive system theories within evolutionary theories
•systems idea
•
*“The global scale takes precedence--because it is the scale of the model.”* Tsing
[title]
Bilingual Stories for Ajayeb NatureCultures
(...stories ‘for’ =/= ...stories ‘of’)
does Brexit and Trumplandia changes the landscape of English use as a language?
the image of pedagogy : semiotic apparatus (& technological) (--> the ritual of Simpson strangling Bart)
(why am i cultivating the) *non-inventive imagination* (and its antimetabole [or chiasmus, chiastic patterns of antithesis]: non-imaginitive invention)
often we find our[...]
(30)[...notes/midday review.txt]%5.9[...]l of the animaux
competency + competency (of different animal, human, machine, pigeon, etc) [=/= subtraction, taboo, obligation --> deficiency*]
(additive competencies)
“excess” is the name of the world
there is always more that we don't know; what yet has to come; the world is constantly doing stuff; (--✕--> accelerate manifesto, apocalyptic narratives)
(i am drawn to and by excess, and i am engaged in it: in my lectures, talkings, writings, and I take it up also visually in my drawings. my ajayeb hypertext search is contingent and opportunistic, and its searches are non-systematic)
in apass what my project is all about: *loving to tell you about what i am reading* (why it seams too difficult, complicated and impossible to understand!?)
-“to provides a feast of reading pleasures”
holding each other's unasked-for patterns (@Luisa)
taking up each other patterns [which are sometimes obvious, sometimes cryptic]
(what is the other name of the practices of “string figures” in Iran? -->[stars, facts, fabulations, “far”s, patternings,]--> all cosmopolitical, composes the “we”)
•a “we” compositional
•an “ajayeb” compositional
•
anthropocene system thinking
•feedback loops
•thermodynamics & 18th century mathematics (=/= hyperbolic mathematics in ‘crochet’ --> excess of surface, --> story of interface)
•comparative interpretive thinking (a dominant western model of knowledge production--which i am using!)
•modern synthesis: restrictive system theories within evolutionary theories
•systems idea
•
*“The global scale takes precedence--because it is the scale of the model.”* Tsing
[title]
Bilingual Stories for Ajayeb NatureCultures
(...stories ‘for’ =/= ...stories ‘of’)
does Brexit and Trumplandia changes the landscape of English use as a language?
the image of pedagogy : semiotic apparatus (& technological) (--> the ritual of Simpson strangling Bart)
(why am i cultivating the) *non-inventive imagination* (and its antimetabole [or chiasmus, chiastic patterns of antithesis]: non-imaginitive invention)
often we find ourselves inventing everything (in political animation) =/= to figure out what are we attached to
(inheriting something =/=? being heir to something)
the scientist inside me begs me to narrow my temporal scale, choose an epoch, let's say middle ages, choose a century let's say 15th, choose a year, choose a day, a moment, a micro-second slice of the cake of the milieu that you are interested in, the instance in the bazar with Halaj in the sun and so on.
(my old school) obligatory knowledge <-- salon of scietific entertainment
}-> (is about creating) proper witness***
the tropes i am building in my cu[...]
(31)[...notes/midday review.txt]%5.9[...]invaded by inappropriate others [in histories of Iranian modes of intersubjectivity: ‘being invaded by the appropriate other’ ~=? being of Tasavof, #slave manifesto, let me know if you want me to kill your master.]
(in the 1999 film Matrix we see the image of the ‘strengthening the will’ of the human community in the face of the nunhuman machine others: Matrix ==> “us”)
(Matrix's) narative logic of an internal strength being posited as responsible for recovery, survival, and moving forward of the human race. (@Maarten, displacements of weakness and strength)
values that garantee survival
technologies that garantee survival
--> they become moral
those who____
speak (against) the “truth” of the world, cause the “ruin” of the world
...................................
say your name before talking
it's a Q and A, a lecture
--> it is a violent day
asking for your name is intrusive enough, even before asking where you come from [--> #estizah]
(learning from Heidegger:) abbreviation is already an effect of technology
case of Germany specially
and persian san'at (صنعت techniques and technologies) of subject-making
•‘is’ --> information system
•‘ich’ --> intangible cultural heritage
[#contract, concerning modalities of being-with:] anxiety, Sorge, (~ care?) is *disclosive*, for Heidegger, is an ontologically fundamental mood that opens you up to the possibility of understanding, anxiety is the leading mood that allows understanding
(in Heidegger) anxiety ==> understanding
(in Farsi) negarani نگرانی --> vision بینندگی --> basirat بصیرت ==> ta'amol تأمل (modalities of meditation and speculation)
(in psychoanalysis) anxiety =/= fear
(in capitalism) anxiety --> boredom ==> capital
(in settler white colonialism) anxiety ==> safty
(in Ahmed) anxiety --> approach to objects
(in Ahmed) fear/anxiety ==> effect of “that which I am not”
(ghol قول, gharar قرار, gharardad قرارداد [~ that which is promised by the ghol], ghovate ghalb قوت قلب) contracts also come to reassure, otherwise we might be in the radically open space of psychosis.
***contracts, they disambiguate the space***
{+} (pointed out by Derrida:) “contract” is less terrorizing than assuming that there is something natural that binds us... (@Luisa) contract is a non-natural conventional object. (the textual nature of contracts allows it to be read, written, rewritten, reformatted and rearranged.)%-->{ontic & ontologic}
•what kinds of violations does the contract capaciously includes in itself?
•there is nothing natural about here and us being here. (spatiotemporally clock tells us not only what time it is, but also where and who we are: how “time-teller” is spatially architecturally phallica[...]
(34)[...notes/midday review.txt]%6.7[...]
•his ‘climate of creativity'~~~_[what does ‘criticism’ mean for him?]
•when he says “gesture,” is he accessing ‘gesture’ having an uncalculable semiotic value =/= ‘performance’ that can be measured in economical terms? [but, what kind of consequential work is gesture doing?]
(Nicolas's order of inquiry and discovery)
(--> what is at stake is how do you locate the effects of your work. for Nicolas it is locate at the “sides” [which is already problematically prepositioned outside of him] --Ahmed--> ab object can be affective by virtue of its own *location* [...] and the *timing* of its appearence)
[the ‘image of the rigid’ in his presentation]
Kristien's chart:
questions <--> symptoms
answers <--> openings
past <--> diary
for Lilia: apparatus = score
for Eszter: apparatus = preparation {--?--> everything depends on the ways we prepare}
for Sina: apparatus = (chaotic/strange) attractor
/>
for Hoda: apparatus = negative feelings
for
for
(other non-Agambenian notions of apparatus: Katie King's, Barad's, Wark's)
[Agamben still thinks of structure in Euclidian terms, pre-chaos theory and fractal geometry of (non)equilibrium. thermal chaos and dynamic system theory has changed the ways we think about global/local stabilities, discontinuities and noise. sympoiesis is another one.]
-with ‘apparatus’ what is at stake: flow of energy, order, waste, transformation,
Vladimir's tether on disambiguity
Elen, adding her own wheels to the flow(s)
and putting a stick/spoke in a rolling wheel (of others?) [her saboteur trends, چوب لای چرخ (=/=? kharab-kari خراب کاری), what is chub lay-e charkh for her? vandalizing the discourse of others]
-the famous vandal of wikipedia with the recursive name “-on wheels” (Willy on Wheels, adding “on wheels” to the title of every single page, using the move move function of Wikipedia: renaming the existing title ==> moved to another namespace, without changing the base title)
-like myself, her saboteurs are critically not symbolic nor ontic, rather sometimes epistemic, or better, ontologic: they don't vandalize the “thing” itself, but the “nature of the properties” that constructs that thing for us
-rocket sculture (what does it mean for her?)
...................................
[the question of inevitability of anthropical view]
there is no final answer to a kind of question but a lot of answers
through inhabiting a figure you are crafting you find yourself addressing a set of problems
agency: liveliness of artifacts (?). there is some kind of liveliness that is both human and nonhuman
the kind of sociality that joins two categorically separate mode of agencies, is a sociality that constitutes both --> the interaction of humans and machines produced both =/= unilateral action
([...]
(35)[...notes/midday review.txt]%6.9[...]atic thought is true
http://static1.squarespace.com/static/521a7b2ee4b0ee587906d191/t/5774531e03596e22f1d2c844/1467241246388/CBT+Case+Conference+Handouts-1.pdf
(a deep problem with behavior analysis is that it comes from the study of animal learning in the 20th century... observing cats trying to escape from home-made puzzle boxes, and things like that)
(for Eszter:) complex ~= coherent (=/= *contradictory*)
Eszter could benefit from learning about collective behavior sociology
/individual behavior is completely unpredictable
/collective behavior is to a large extent predictable
contagion =/= convergence
(Kelile Demne: evil is convergent)
*contagion: crowds exert a hypnotic influence over their members
*convergent: people who want to act in a certain way come together --> crowd diffuse responsibility but the behavior itself is claimed to originate within the individuals
*emergent-norm: people find themselves in a vague, ambiguous, confusing situation ==> new norms “emerge” on the spot, which may be at odds with normal social behavior
*value-added: release valve سوپاپ for built-up tension within community
*complex adaptive systems: autopoiesis or self-creation of patterns and new entities
...................................
(footnote on) personality disorder
deviating from ‘orders’ accepted by the individual's culture
-your distinguished and enduring behavioral and mental traits that differ from social norms and expectations
it is in relation to others --> cognition, emotiveness, interpersonal functioning, impulse control ==> personal, social, occupational disruption
egosyntonic personality disorders are most difficult to treat (such as: narcissistic personality disorder, anorexia, gambling problem)
*egosyntonic: in harmony with the needs and goals of the ego [--> defences ==> maladaptive coping skills ~=> anxiety, distress, depression]
*egodystonic: in conflict with the needs and goals of the ego, in conflict with a person's ideal self-image
obsessive-compulsive disorder --> egodystonic
obsessive-compulsive personality disorder --> egosyntonic
Freud: psychic conflict arising when the original lagging instincts come into conflict with the ego (or egosyntonic instincts) [such as: erection problem ==> egodystonic]
...................................
[*]personality disorder: (a type of psychological disorder generally defined by) the lack of insight into the disorder
borderline personality disorder =/= shades of gray
(a view that sees) significances as unfair and uncaring (devaluation) or flawless (idealization)
(a standardized criteria of diagnosis since 1980) a certain class of neurotics who, when in crisis, appeared to straddle the borderli[...]
(36)[...notes/midday review.txt]%7.3[...] tools the best we have? or maybe, structurally we can't give workshop in apass HWDs or endweeks, because participants are not there by free will that is usually mobilising them to look for and join a workshop that they are interested in.
%(am I?) ‘coming back with advices’ in my work [[#Esta]]
is it interesting for me or my research to think about how we moved that plant around in the 4th floor?
*moving plants* is risky
as backdrop for human activity
passively vegetating
making local and global connections: which local or global connections was made (by Sina, Xiri and Esta moving the plant)? (how the plant was repositioned in our) making of public common spaces
-practices of concern
(attentive to the plant that was a) shared “thing” between us
what was mediated, navigated and articulated with that plant in apass 4th floor?
(with this i am trying to ask about the) kinds of imaginative world-making at work
gathering forces
-
the mice, and the pattern of rice, how did we become the reader of mice's text? --> reader is always always constructed.
the mice disconnected us from global digital networks and wrote something on the floor...
(which objects of our systems design supporting some and not others) leaving out what are locally perceived as “nonpeople” can mean nonworking system. (biologists not seeing their secretaries as doing real science, artists in apass not seeing the mice doing real work, etc.)
--> *(Leigh Star's) “ethnography of infrastructure”* -infrastructure is both relational and ecological, both transparent and opaque. it is part of the balance of action, tools, and the built environment. [*]infrastructure: a dense interwoven fabric of shared visions of possible and acceptable dreams (of the inovative, as techniques, knowledge, know-how, and the institutions).
...................................
my previous lectures have been communicating something I don't quite understand to an audience that doesn't want to know. but still somehow they became not indifferent to my madness and we managed to establish lines of interest and interference (=/= restoring the phalus to its proper place, or getting a membership)
i am building another wit =/= you know when you are on some kind of auto-respond, those smart fast answers. my wits take ages to come through. in a way i have been slowing down certain kinds of wit. that's also why it is so easy to silence me.
i have been also busy with the timing of understanding. how to keep understanding open and ongoing? there is this standard general sense that becomes very upset when things are not immediately understood (#double-click democratization of communication,) my workings have been perhaps invested in keeping my own (not-fully-)understood alive for a while. if things were instantly understandable we wouldn't be here.
[...]
(37)[...notes/midday review.txt]%7.5[...]en 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 ontology
•Avital Ronnel: (lectures and articles) --> learning ab[...]
(39)[...notes/midday review.txt]%7.9[...]you don't want to inherit)
(Islam, shyness, kindness, ajayeb, Iran, stuttering, being all too ready to find complexities, )
•to become relaxed about predigested version of ‘this is what ajayeb is about’ (or Tasavof, etc.) --> ‘what is going on there’ (in ajayeb) is so built-in to ideologies of many kinds (of progress, deep ecology, of history, and so on)
•to build a little taxonomy (in apass)
•working to give up the series of self-certainties around secularism ==> giving ways to talk to the religious ones : getting to grasp what the world looks like in faith-based communities (=/= check-list of dogma)
•category thinking: get into differential liveliness (with all sorts of inequalities:) *who gets parsed how* [#archive, #articulation, #storytelling] (and thinking about what it means to take up these relationships in cultures saturated with science and technology)
Xiri was doing her research with categories of victim and opressor, and now they suddenly disappeared from her work. that category change or vocabulary change was suspiciously effortless
*remembering is an extremely creative practice (-note to Hoda-)
memories are like ecotone کناربوم (transition area between two adjacent ecosystems)
#(very important concept partly shaped by practices of Darwin into our lives:) “collect” --> lies (necessary?)
the frenzy of the 1700 of surveying nature and collecting speciment ==> bioinfomatic
‘collect’ promises nontransformation
--> metaphors of archive, information-intense ways of thinking about life on earth
*“demonstration” coined by science
...................................
(with Scout Calvert) the ways the digital apparatuses are working, and the kinds of tensions and creativities between the cyber infrastructures and the other kinds informational management discourses displace other book discourses *** --> categories explode in library practice
[Calvert donig brilliant discourse analysis of library sciences --> has direct impact on practices of reading#, different kinds of knowers]
techno-biblio-capital: techno-capital and library practices embedded in each other -->{ [*]technology: assemblages of people, computers, software, discourses, techniques and workarounds that make them function; [*]capital: a social arrangement in which buyers of labor power are entitled to profits and the sellers of labor power to wages and all the effects entailed in that arrangement; [*]techno-capital: techniques, discourse and technologies used to naturalize and derive capital from information and information technologies}
*curiosity = a small and local kind of *freedom[= agency within constrain ==enabling==> skillful meanings], curiosity resists control and has the power to defeat one's favourite self-certainties, can also be commodified for consumer culture specializing in providing private[...]
(40)[...notes/midday review.txt]%8.5[...] affect, surging toward an actualization, passionate connection of the subject who goes with the flow in an intoxicated moment (=/= sober distance)
(Hoda's impact of) shocked subjectivity (--> the real understood as traumatic) --> conjure up memories of death --?--> communal grieving
{referential vs. simulacral readings @Hoda, Marialena (‘referential object for’ / ‘empathetic object in’ /or ‘criticality of’ [<-- i don't agree with these clear cuts of ”/"]; what is “the reality of suffering and death” (or “reality and suffering of death”) for Hoda? (Xiri's interest in her) object's “total integration” into the political economy}
(Stewart's) signs of the senses
satisfaction in the making of sign-shrine
(question of satisfaction at Hoda:) satisfaction as a force, and end, in itself spoken through the bright, blunt, sensate aesthetics of the sign
-something slashes [= a wound made by cutting] at itself and spits at the world (/ politics of slashing --> poetics of slashing / the young girls who “cut” themselves so they can feel alive or, literally “come to their senses”) -- dramas of surge and arrest --> They do not ask for interpretation or construct the subject who would assign them a meaning, [they refuse] reference to “underlying systems” of signification that make them readable as texts
-something refuses to disappear
-(Hoda's land is) the land of sheer circulations --> (the question of) equilibriums --> how can she with her audience (let's say “we”) enter the unnatural calm of another form of arrest? to feel the scene resist synaesthesia
a state of the senses making contact with pen and paper (and matches)
(my enduring love of watching images, my) optical eye
“[...] young embodiments of a modern middle-ground-in-the-making came face-to-face with an otherness that compelled a closer look” --> violently affective contact
surged toward the scene of their confident excitement
impact ==> the social
#storytelling, compelled to repeat the event as the sentience of it still reverberated in their senses
a grounded writing, that sends people bouncing, takes place as a threshold, hits the senses as a set of provocations, or presents as *a problematic sensed in circuits of reaction already set in motion* @apass
(working with Stewart) writing affect #workshop
a practice of writing ourselves into our worlds as *emergent and disparate ensembles* --> we need the speculative concept of worlding (a term that wins philosophy, criticism, digital studies, and cultural study) in Tehran urgently
-the workshop offers a process of sharing, hearing, questioning, and proposing--for oneself and for the sake of others ==> to start to think through a project or concept by working with words
-we will learning how to read closely and to give feedback that is mos[...]
(41)[...notes/midday review.txt]%9.1[...]ting and understanding
cosmoecology: multiple beings (gods, jinns, animals, humans, living, dead, etc.) each bearing the consequences of the others’ ways (of living and dying)
‘the ecological question’ is about the needs that ought to be met in the ongoing creation of rapports and connections --> the questions are how does this being achieve the task of holding onto its existence =/= “does this being really exist, or is it not a representation”
==> (Despret:) *we may never know (safely and reliably, either ahead of time or a posteriori) which beings will bear/enjoy the consequences of the concrete attention we give to them*
...................................
on Kate Rich work
feral --> before or without a political state --?--> state of nature [a lot of moral political philosophers of the state asking “What was life like before civil society?"]--> in feral there are only freedoms ==> contracts (}--> what cultural anthropology has to say about that?)
she is in the Rousseauian tradition of *how to establish a ‘political community’ in the face of the problems of ‘commercial society’* (---> go to Rousseau's The Social Contract & Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men)
fighting the system --> feral tropes --> arsenal of the Enlightenment (Kant's motto: “Dare to think for yourself!” ~= “I don't follow orders!”), application of Reason in the public sphere of human affairs
with her work we are in the Age of Enlightenment, Age of Reason, resourcing authority and legitimacy, ideals of individual liberty and progress --> Kate's thinking founded on philosophical fictions of the 18th century (--Foucault--> problematic legacy of the Enlightenment)
•the legecy of 20th century: (Kate's dialectical negativity) to define and work in negative way, an ‘exit,’ a ‘way out’ --> transcendental [---> go to Singh, Khan,]
•question of contemporary reality --> Kate does a totalizing elevation (like many other artists)
•the realm of obedience --> artists’ childish attitude of never accepting someone else's authority (#fighting the system; should we fight the system systematically? @Nicolas)
...................................
basically everything i do is related to the question of reading --> make us better readers
my excessive use of footnote --> the most decisive indication of the concerns of a text are to be found in its margins & no ‘proper’ starting/ending point for reading
each of my performances/projects reflect on their own status as examples of reading/misreading =/= achieving correct reading
literature: the problem of misreading (=/= the language it uses)
[with De Man]
i have become sensitive to the systematic avoidance of the problem of reading, of the interpretative or hermeneutic moment, in literary analysis and art
all language-use i[...]
(42)[...notes/midday review.txt]%9.6[...]state asking “What was life like before civil society?"]--> in feral there are only freedoms ==> contracts (}--> what cultural anthropology has to say about that?)
she is in the Rousseauian tradition of *how to establish a ‘political community’ in the face of the problems of ‘commercial society’* (---> go to Rousseau's The Social Contract & Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men)
fighting the system --> feral tropes --> arsenal of the Enlightenment (Kant's motto: “Dare to think for yourself!” ~= “I don't follow orders!”), application of Reason in the public sphere of human affairs
with her work we are in the Age of Enlightenment, Age of Reason, resourcing authority and legitimacy, ideals of individual liberty and progress --> Kate's thinking founded on philosophical fictions of the 18th century (--Foucault--> problematic legacy of the Enlightenment)
•the legecy of 20th century: (Kate's dialectical negativity) to define and work in negative way, an ‘exit,’ a ‘way out’ --> transcendental [---> go to Singh, Khan,]
•question of contemporary reality --> Kate does a totalizing elevation (like many other artists)
•the realm of obedience --> artists’ childish attitude of never accepting someone else's authority (#fighting the system; should we fight the system systematically? @Nicolas)
...................................
basically everything i do is related to the question of reading --> make us better readers
my excessive use of footnote --> the most decisive indication of the concerns of a text are to be found in its margins & no ‘proper’ starting/ending point for reading
each of my performances/projects reflect on their own status as examples of reading/misreading =/= achieving correct reading
literature: the problem of misreading (=/= the language it uses)
[with De Man]
i have become sensitive to the systematic avoidance of the problem of reading, of the interpretative or hermeneutic moment, in literary analysis and art
all language-use is tropological (~ rhetorical)
catachresis (the misuse of a word) <--fluid--> metaphor (the non-literal application of a word) <--fluid--> metonymy (in which the name of one thing is put for that of another related to it)
readability: the possibility of producing an essential/definitive reading --> closure =/= further interpretation
a language which would perfectly fit my multiple identity--persian consciousness
emboding (belonging to) two bordering cultures: western university and persian tradition of subjectivity
•mixture of English and Farsi
•spontaneous shift of style
•
•
...................................
learning from academia: committed to excessive rigor + sriousness of purpose
...................................
(Erikson's) develop[...]
(43)[...notes/midday review.txt]%9.7[...] Age of Reason, resourcing authority and legitimacy, ideals of individual liberty and progress --> Kate's thinking founded on philosophical fictions of the 18th century (--Foucault--> problematic legacy of the Enlightenment)
•the legecy of 20th century: (Kate's dialectical negativity) to define and work in negative way, an ‘exit,’ a ‘way out’ --> transcendental [---> go to Singh, Khan,]
•question of contemporary reality --> Kate does a totalizing elevation (like many other artists)
•the realm of obedience --> artists’ childish attitude of never accepting someone else's authority (#fighting the system; should we fight the system systematically? @Nicolas)
...................................
basically everything i do is related to the question of reading --> make us better readers
my excessive use of footnote --> the most decisive indication of the concerns of a text are to be found in its margins & no ‘proper’ starting/ending point for reading
each of my performances/projects reflect on their own status as examples of reading/misreading =/= achieving correct reading
literature: the problem of misreading (=/= the language it uses)
[with De Man]
i have become sensitive to the systematic avoidance of the problem of reading, of the interpretative or hermeneutic moment, in literary analysis and art
all language-use is tropological (~ rhetorical)
catachresis (the misuse of a word) <--fluid--> metaphor (the non-literal application of a word) <--fluid--> metonymy (in which the name of one thing is put for that of another related to it)
readability: the possibility of producing an essential/definitive reading --> closure =/= further interpretation
a language which would perfectly fit my multiple identity--persian consciousness
emboding (belonging to) two bordering cultures: western university and persian tradition of subjectivity
•mixture of English and Farsi
•spontaneous shift of style
•
•
...................................
learning from academia: committed to excessive rigor + sriousness of purpose
...................................
(Erikson's) developmental stages characterized by a psychosocial crisis of two conflicting forces: (each stage that came before and that follows has its own ‘crisis’)
[conflictual psychosocial crisis --> virtue ~-> (answers to) existential questions]
-(0-18 months) Trust / Mistrust --> Hope
[Can I trust the world?]
==> what constitutes dangerous situations (in life)
world is undependable, unpredictable, and possibly a dangerous place
[*]trust: syntonic quotient
[*]mistrust: diatonic quotient
--> oral stage
-(2-4 years) Autonomy / Shame-Doubt --> Will
[Is it okay to be me?]
venture out to assert [...]
(46)[...notes/midday review.txt]%9.7[...]ning, I was wrong, ...
once when i was wrong...
thank you for that kind (of an) introduction
i like to make decorations for other people's work
...................................
Instructions of Shuruppak
“In those days, in those far remote times, in those nights, in those faraway nights, in those years, in those far remote years.”
daftare bimani دفتر بیمعنی
hezar nokte هزار نکته
i can only stutter and telegraph you mutilated message
also i offer the hermeneutic of frustration so that we don't feel we have mastered or understood necessarily
janebe hagh ra gereftan جانب حق را گرفتن ==> hagh-be-janebi حقبهجانبی
safineye nadan سفینه نادن
safineye nadani سفینه نادانی
...................................
Bettina's self almost entirely to be construed within the order of the will
(Hillman:) Eros is always curiously weaker than the problem it must deal with. --> logos is biger than its problem
1. revolution: changing/disturbing the value system
2. reform: changing/disturbing the social norm (hanjar هنجار) --> eslahat اصلاحات
3. invention/noavari: changing/disturbing the system/institution/sazman
4. coup d'état: changing/disturbing the people/apparatus
(amal bar asase:) sonat: gozashte, diruz, anja, anha
گذشته
دیروز
phd: طرح مساله tarh-e masale --> everything depends on the ways you pattern a niche, a site of strings that you and your collieges are cought long enough
•using texture, form, color
•using embodiments
•using optics (in knowing) --> some sort of distance, disembodied seeing --> abstraction, figure,
...................................
carnal intellectuality
(intellectual carnality)
...................................
locating ‘shur’ شور del-shur دل شوره (also shuridegi شوریدگی) to the place of the unkown other
so when one has fearful fantacies about others in foreign lands they are in ‘shur’ for them
(psychologically tethered phantasy of the “independent person”:)
**oral fixation [everything depends on the duration of breast-feeding during the development of libido]:
in Iranians: over-fed (more than 12 months) ==> dependency, needing stimulant
in Balkan: insufficiently fed ==> طلبکار و ناراضی talabkar narazi dissatisfied and manipulative (in need of oral stimulant for example sarcasm) [*narazi <~~--> tavagho’ توقع*]
(--> early experiences of love bound up with various kinds of suffering, and later in adulthood one will look for fa[...]
(47)[...notes/midday review.txt]%9.9[...]jectivity is porous, flow of thoughts without a thinker, self is unnecessary
‘self’ is such an unnecessary metaphor for the process of awareness and knowing
the question of “who/what am I?” is utterly boring
[title]
might suffer
Freud's penis
ignoria
aghsa اقصا
far, farther, to send far, everywhere places, earth
(+ aknaf) [virtual locality]
--?--> maghsad مقصد (when aghsa overlapse the here and now)
tamrin تمرین üben/training (bazi-e khatarnak) =/=
tajrobe تجربه Erfahrung/experience (experience in accident =/=> getting better at driving; or
failure =/=> science)
--> zehniate shakhshi mobtani bar bardashthaye mobtani bar tajribe ذهنیت شخصی مبتنی بر برداشتهای مبتنی بر تجربه experiential subjectivity
•experience ==> personal perception
◦train ==> skill
taghirat va tahavolat-e donya ra az birun ba az bala negah kardan (<-- we need more. [by “we” i mean iranians])
Lili's use of preposition or a conjunction “and” “or” ==> discourse marker
regarding the system, to resist is much more interesting than to complain
i am worried (as adult) about X's death, because earlier (as child) i have wished X's death
neurotic anxiety <== controlling the child (bokon nakon بکن نکن) ~~> fear of punishment
neurotic anxiety: unconscious fear that the *libidinal impulses of the id* will take control (at an inopportune inappropriate time)
شخصیت واقع بین shakhsiat vaghe bin: objectivity montabegh bar subjectivity ==> truth (in science) + commitment based on (accepted) reality [ta'ahod cannot be based on or created by mogheyiat, that means situatedness cannot make us feel/care/hate/commitcommit]
شخصیت موقع بین shakhsiat moghe’ bin: situated subjectivity [--Haraway--> situated objectivity --> commitment based on care]
موقعیت mogheyiat (situtation, circumstance, condition) =/= واقعیت vagheyiat (reality)
(?one should) to live by vagheyiat, not mogheyiat
[i am educated to base research and knowledge both on mogheyiat and on vagheyiat --> crisis of situated knowledge in interpersonal relations: to feel about others based on mogheyiat/situation is a bad idea(?)]
@Hoda: turning mogheyiat into vagheyiat
(verb <--> adjective)
do the right thing (or take the right side) جانب حق را گرفتن [a form of closing off distance =/= disembodied seeing] <--> righteous حق به جانب [a form of embodiment, zero distanciation]
“your joke is the right of the other person”
you are hurt ==> “the other was bad” (is not the conclusi[...]
(49)[...notes/midday review.txt]%10.1[...]story” emerged in 16th century (<== describing and classifying plants, animals, minerals) which is becoming more about popular audiences]
•deductive reasoning: X ==> Y (is valid or invalid) --> کل به جزء (applying reductively general rules that hold over a closed domain of discourse)
•[artist's most used process of reasoning:] صغرى کبرى syllogistic reasoning (قیاس): X =/= Y ==> Z (or: some A are B, some B are C ==> some A are C [which is often wrong], nesbat dadan chizi az yek nafar be deigari نسبت دادن چیزی به دیگری) --> premise's pattern of distribution is the key (~ case)
•abductive conclusions: finding the simplest or most likely explanation for the observations [--> many forms of conclusions are due to the lack of time in the process of reasoning. when we give feedback (‘fast diagnosis’ [--> is that why Lacan is useful?]) in apass we have initially 2 minutes to make conclusions from observations, which later is deepened in the duration of block --> کلی گویی = making sense of what is going here in order to guess what is going on elsewhere]
•
(?am i learning about and moving my art into) formal sciences: language tools concerned with characterizing abstract structures described by sign systems ==> providing information/knowledge about the structures used to describe the world
-a formal logical system with its content targeted at the real things
-all their statements are analytic
=/= synthetic statements (propositions are true by how their meaning relates to the world)
‘natural sciences’ using tools from formal sciences and validated by ‘peer review' = refereeing = *the process of subjecting somebody else's work*
issues with artistic feedback that i have directly encountered:
•our abilities for observation are questionable (--> apprehend what you notice)
•our abilities for induction are questionable (--> movement from observation)
•our abilities for inference are questionable (--> connecting with something other and elsewhere)
•our abilities for questioning are questionable (--> risking what you know + constructing interest)
}--> feedbacks are performative, perspectival, descriptive, discoursive, affective, fabulous, rhetorical, allegorical, experimental, speculative, agonistic, antagonist, sadistic, funny, rude, brute, masochistic, direct, sympathetic,
[two (organic?) ways of learning:]
**learing through networked syntax: meaning emerges as network, something new must be interconnected to others, cognition works in the network: a subject matter must be linked to dozen other things in order to be congnized ==> something disconnected from their network is something meaningless موضوعها به صورت ارتباطات ذهنی مرتبط با هم [--?--> mental intelligence: cannot learn something random]
=/=
**learin[...]
(50)[...notes/midday review.txt]%10.4[...]behavioral neuroscience, psychology soon will have been a myth
the move to the “hard” and biologically inspired science about consciousness-related processes {constitutive reductionism: ‘brain activity ==> mental processes'} =? end of psychology (and therefore: end of art? -because both always create *speculative molds*) --> which discipline will install an *understanding the psyche*
economically--> neuroscience will grow while psychology shrinks
[everything will depend on which reductionism you ascribe to them]
...................................
ideology: wrong questions
[parable of two side of a coin] tolerance = other side of harassment
(--Zizek--> the pseudo concept of) tolerance actually means “don't harassment me”
when you lack concrete politics ==> moralizations
we are no longer interpolated or addressed by power
politics of self-realization --> anti-bureaucratic creativity of artist --> postmodern capitalism: ([pretends to be] no longer hierarchical bureaucratic but) creative interactive autopoetic
(@Leo:) ethics =/= morals
*ethics --> my consistency with myself, fidelity to my own desires (which is transvaluated as external and part of social system)
*moral --> the symmetry of my relation to other humans (which is transvaluated as individual and internal, “don't do to me what you don't want me do to you”)
being immoral out of principle, to act in a certain way as part of a fundamental existential choice.
being immoral (destroying men's lives) while being truly ethical (faithfull to her chosen path)
(Nietzsche, the philosopher of) *immoral ethics* (=/= unethical morality)
...................................
[*]death drive (inerested in fucking, cannot being-with): *to lead organic life back into the inanimate state*, to return to an inorganic state (-we are talking symbolically not biologically) [=/= eros (interested in love, life, sex, and being-with, the world is very vivid to eros)]
-->{image of the eskimo piercing through the ice and snow}--> *Destruction as the Cause of Coming Into Being* (for the subject for whom the world is prosaic matter-of-fact =/= vivid)
-(we live in a society that we are no longer interpellated -->) does death drive and archive drive have to do with one another? destruction and archiving...
-girl with the red dancing shoes, undeadness of Laurent, wanting to see himself in the image of that which cannot be destroyed (!!), his unbearable *nostalgia for a lost harmony* [followed by Hoda and Arjang] (-is that why they negate love? because they cannot love but still want to be alive: [the drive] to remain alive after they are dead)
(their relation to the city night:) they drive, Trieb, [in a Lacanian sense: all drives are partial to the death drive (because:)
1- every drive pursues its own extinction
2- every d[...]
(52)[...notes/midday review.txt]%10.5[...]r soviet countries --> tajrobeye doganegi تجربه دوگانگی (they lived through contradictory experience) =/=> settle down or grounded subejctivity ثبات sabat
“I like to travel” [~= escape from one's self گریز از خود goriz az khod : need to be everywhere but here]
•zamineye sargardani بیقراری restlessness (~=> escape) --sold--> nomadic
•zamineye narezayati نارضایتی dissatisfaction --sold--> critical
•zamineye konjkavi کنجکاوی curiosity --sold--> knowledge
•zamineye majarajuyi ماجراجویی adventure --sold--> wonder
(a [not always wanted?] form of relatedness in interpersonal relationships)
mentor ~= rahnama راهنما
(when someone is) angry = anxiety + depressed + obsessive–compulsive vasvasi + pessimist bad-bin + negative + offender motejavez
direct speech رک صریح بی پرده rok sarih bi-parde harf zadan = saying the real and truth in the right place that is necessary and almost an obligation =/= parde-dari provocation
...................................
note on the workshop of anarchive in Zsenne apass summer 2018
(my issues with Manning's presentation of) process philosophy --> a system-builder mode of thinking --> *saying something (right) about every single thing at once*
-process philosophy puts forward the will and desire for “change,” therefore it developes a resistant to change (?)
-it tend to be a metaphysics without physics [?!] (when a metaphysics provoke less interest for ‘-physics’ and more for the ‘meta-’ /and why is that a problem?) [==> Barad is much more useful for me now]
-the real question of the workshop remained “how to define what i like (such as ‘anarchive’) that it remains open at all time to the ‘more’ and ‘multi’?” <-- and they provide an elusive non-definition of the term, impossible to pin down. because accourding to Manning when you pin down an idea/practice by its definition it becomes “fixed,” and fixity is categorically bad at all times <-- there is a desire to create a hygienic concept immune to corruption and hierarchy. Manning is alert to certain hierarchies ==> not acknowledging other hierarchies that precisely emerge out of that (--> preserve the ‘health’ of the idea of anarchive. [<-- maybe we need to let concepts rot? --> decompose])
Manning's elusiveness: (i have become hyper-conscious about qualities that endow infinite freedom of thought to human subjects...)
•elusive thought طفره (=/= volatile فرار) --> Spiderman's mode of freedom (-you can never catch him + infinite flexibility + ) (the effect of Spiderman on himself is that his moves are “amazing”)
•elusive thought ~->? mystical
•elusive thought =/= modest thought limited by curiosity
•
“hierarchy as the bad object” ==>
•to escape thinking about your own agency (for example w[...]
(53)[...notes/midday review.txt]%10.7[...] (learning from Verran:) how their equipments are crafted [by processual metaphysics? ==commit==> infinity]
•(learning from Stewart:) how their rigor is built [by conceptual description? ==commit==> non-habituality]
(because of her immense intelligence she cannot be normal, but that doesn't mean she can prescribe normativity, and issue a command [in terms of the “de-” or “anti-“] or order a claim of reality [in terms of “an-” or “ab-“])
-Manning's “philosophy of event” (=/= multispecies ethnography, i prefer working with the animal idea, because there is no way you can make philosophy out of animal, they always relentlessly contingent and historically materially specific)
-Manning's notion of impersonality ==> ‘people are exchangble’ + ‘the work is what is important and not “you”’ [--> *techniques of impersonality* has being used in sufism and iranian mysticism. i have seen how the special effects of impersonality is used in political projects, making of soldiers, master-disciple relationship, and so on
-look at the cool impersonality of the scientific language (depriving them of their own ideological status)
-early 19th century modern public space was reinventing and operating with impersonality: individuals are systematically habituated not to return the gaze of the other.
=/= i am actually very much attracted to persons. i am interested in their personality. the “you” is what i fall in love with, not the ‘abstract link'--> (Manning's) peripheral perceptivity =/= (i am trying to learn) to describe what is in front of me (which is never easy)]
-Manning's notion of “the problem gives the question to be asked of it” =/= the question problematizes
-focus on “sedimentation” (--> where is the coexistence of contrasts for them?)
“decontextualization”: their technique of concept-making (==> claims of reality, of nunhuman, etc.)
[decontextualization is a very dangerous way of crafting concepts. there are other ways, committed to the contingencies of the historical material world of multispecies. rigor of conceptualization that i am learning from Stewart is about the *quality of an access to part of a world* =/= decontextualization]--so--> i say we need ‘concepts’ and not ‘philosophy’:
*philosophy (as practiced by M&M and Alex): claiming the nature of reality
*concept: a figure you make in order to do a limited situated work
“conceptualization = fortification” استحکامات
(to fortify one's own work with concepts ==> settlement)
Manning's affinity with infinitly, more, and multi --> what is their rigor is doing for them? commits them to the nonhabitual. (resisting to name their habits, depriving them of thier habitual labors) [=/= my work on descriptive practices]
-i want to know about their empirical tools that make translation-work visible (==> decomposition), [...]
(54)[...notes/midday review.txt]%10.8[...]labor, and the creative investment that was embodied within [the object that you make]
[you might start with] requiring a catalogue containing critical essays to institutionally ‘legitimate’ your exhibition --yet--> sophisticated, playful and interesting ways to comment on and engage
*numerous ways in which cultural forms (in this case contemporary art) are simultaneously entangled in a number of spheres of meaning, value and mediation* ==> activate ongoing dialogue
[*]capitalist marketplace:
•people in both established and emerging ‘global’ economies forced to fulfill their everyday needs
•‘the market’ is naturalised and reified within social relations in ways we don't necessarily always recognise or acknowledge --> suffused and sublimated within creative production, our lexicon and gestures
(19th century anthropology's) the idea of [*]alterity: understanding how ‘other,’ ‘primitive’ societies operated ‘outside’ of modernity --assumption--> ‘small scale’ societies exchange (barter, gift exchange, and so on) would always, with evolution, give way to more ‘sophisticated’ means of trade
•Malinowski (study of the Kula ring) --> form of producing and reifying power relations
•Mauss (gift economies) --> gifts as stand alone systems + other kinds of economic structures
•Strathern (Melanesian gift exchange) --> how personhood is a malleable concept that is both implicated in, and created by, conceptions of individuality (tripartite views of people as constituted of a mind, body and spirit), or dividuality (persons as constituted from multiple essences and social relations, including the giving and receiving of gifts) + how gender is both studied and understood in the acts leading up to the performance of gift exchange
•Appadurai () --> ‘things’ have ‘social lives'that can be studied in relation to the different spheres of use
•
}--> (our understanding of) the human capacity for unlimited modes of developing creative forms of exchange and economic systems
...................................
https://mapmagazine.co.uk/notes-contemporary-art-and-anthropology
operations of statecraft:
•queuing in social security offices
•filling in tax forms
•circulation and arrival of letters demanding council tax payments
•census taking
-
}--> social organization that seems so habitual (mundane and ordinary) ==> unreflexively experienced
state's ordinariness --> irresistible enchantment --> overwhelming power ~~> supernatural trance-like experiences state seem to engender in populations =/= state as a rational entity
*capitalist market is a faith-based system* <== concealed practices of divination and the ‘conjuring’ of value and capital from what in many cases are immaterial voids
unmasking of its practices (~= faith + skepticism) ==> state power
mutant forms of [...]
(55)[...notes/midday review.txt]%11.7[...]uffused and sublimated within creative production, our lexicon and gestures
(19th century anthropology's) the idea of [*]alterity: understanding how ‘other,’ ‘primitive’ societies operated ‘outside’ of modernity --assumption--> ‘small scale’ societies exchange (barter, gift exchange, and so on) would always, with evolution, give way to more ‘sophisticated’ means of trade
•Malinowski (study of the Kula ring) --> form of producing and reifying power relations
•Mauss (gift economies) --> gifts as stand alone systems + other kinds of economic structures
•Strathern (Melanesian gift exchange) --> how personhood is a malleable concept that is both implicated in, and created by, conceptions of individuality (tripartite views of people as constituted of a mind, body and spirit), or dividuality (persons as constituted from multiple essences and social relations, including the giving and receiving of gifts) + how gender is both studied and understood in the acts leading up to the performance of gift exchange
•Appadurai () --> ‘things’ have ‘social lives'that can be studied in relation to the different spheres of use
•
}--> (our understanding of) the human capacity for unlimited modes of developing creative forms of exchange and economic systems
...................................
https://mapmagazine.co.uk/notes-contemporary-art-and-anthropology
operations of statecraft:
•queuing in social security offices
•filling in tax forms
•circulation and arrival of letters demanding council tax payments
•census taking
-
}--> social organization that seems so habitual (mundane and ordinary) ==> unreflexively experienced
state's ordinariness --> irresistible enchantment --> overwhelming power ~~> supernatural trance-like experiences state seem to engender in populations =/= state as a rational entity
*capitalist market is a faith-based system* <== concealed practices of divination and the ‘conjuring’ of value and capital from what in many cases are immaterial voids
unmasking of its practices (~= faith + skepticism) ==> state power
mutant forms of technological self-subjugation
(Weber's) magic: coercive proceduralism --> managerial practices that characterise biopolitics
[*]census taking: pre-determined categories (like race, nationality, gender and political persuasion) are set out as objectively existing taxonomies (+ ‘data’ manually gathered from individuals to ‘fit’ those categories) and thus summon [a term with magical implications purposefully employed here] a population into being
-McClanahan
census ==> statistics: factish object: hybrid and unstable (possibly inaccurate) yet fetishised and faith-based technologies that possess the ability to transform (the individual parts of social and cultural groups into a sacred somatic whole [~ people/[...]
(56)[...notes/midday review.txt]%11.7[...]n, and created by, conceptions of individuality (tripartite views of people as constituted of a mind, body and spirit), or dividuality (persons as constituted from multiple essences and social relations, including the giving and receiving of gifts) + how gender is both studied and understood in the acts leading up to the performance of gift exchange
•Appadurai () --> ‘things’ have ‘social lives'that can be studied in relation to the different spheres of use
•
}--> (our understanding of) the human capacity for unlimited modes of developing creative forms of exchange and economic systems
...................................
https://mapmagazine.co.uk/notes-contemporary-art-and-anthropology
operations of statecraft:
•queuing in social security offices
•filling in tax forms
•circulation and arrival of letters demanding council tax payments
•census taking
-
}--> social organization that seems so habitual (mundane and ordinary) ==> unreflexively experienced
state's ordinariness --> irresistible enchantment --> overwhelming power ~~> supernatural trance-like experiences state seem to engender in populations =/= state as a rational entity
*capitalist market is a faith-based system* <== concealed practices of divination and the ‘conjuring’ of value and capital from what in many cases are immaterial voids
unmasking of its practices (~= faith + skepticism) ==> state power
mutant forms of technological self-subjugation
(Weber's) magic: coercive proceduralism --> managerial practices that characterise biopolitics
[*]census taking: pre-determined categories (like race, nationality, gender and political persuasion) are set out as objectively existing taxonomies (+ ‘data’ manually gathered from individuals to ‘fit’ those categories) and thus summon [a term with magical implications purposefully employed here] a population into being
-McClanahan
census ==> statistics: factish object: hybrid and unstable (possibly inaccurate) yet fetishised and faith-based technologies that possess the ability to transform (the individual parts of social and cultural groups into a sacred somatic whole [~ people/nation])--> biopolitics
-can art succeed in transforming such a ‘whole’ into free and autonomous individual beings?
references to panopticon society
(?which camera angles suggest) naturalization of surveillance culture
[title]
*observational aesthetic* <== convergences of contemporary art and anthropology
...................................
[ajayeb -->] concept or theory --> (a training in) absorption + attention + framing =/= truth effect
[title]
Whatever Professor
[why apass asked me to do their website's] indexing: (a shrewd and thoughtful creativity in) the f[...]
(57)[...notes/midday review.txt]%11.7[...]den epistemic newness]
(Avital:) *language = the house of being*
(not to think emancipatory -->) we live in language, we are structured and destructed by language
we can struggle, move, shift meanings, but never can erase or repress meanings
(Freud showed) that if you think you can be oblivious with things and do away with things and have erasure without remanence, it will go in the state of latency (underground) just to blow up in your face later (the ‘return’ of the repressed has ballistic velocities) --Derrida--> you have to work through with meaning and language (otherwise the old meanings always come back, you are never responsible enough with old meanings)
a word, becomes a thorn in our collective thigh
(what i am learning *rigor* from Avital > Derrida) something looks wrong, (instead of jumping on it and tagging it out,) first say why it is right, what necessitated and motivated it, why it had to be there = rigor: locate the problem zone + say why it had to be there (why it rhymes with what)
(mistake or glitch =/=) error: an exemplary error that teaches you, that had to be made to get where you are going, you had to get into this zone (and as traumatic as it might be) it was neccesory and necessitated by the system that was pushing you forward, it pushed you toward a place of error and blindness and forgetting
...................................
practice of *worldly thinking* with Stewart
vivid pragmatics
weird robust realism of deobjectified deliteralized things =/= ajayeb
to correspond with #telegram media
constitutive differings
teenage: self-division between the move to surge out in a risky worlding and the labor of return alone and weighted
festering + sheltering
“When everything else has gone from my brain—the President’s name, the state capitals, the neighborhoods where I lived, and then my own name and what it was on earth I sought, and then at length the faces of my friends, and finally the faces of my family—when all of this has dissolved, what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that.” Dillard > Stewart
rock-solid otherness
sitting on the granite curb... --Stewart--> sitting on a threshold of expressivity
(Stewart's) intercorporeal intermundane world =/= dull naturalism
(dead matter =/=) the capacity to correspond with a multiplicity of continuous worldings that are both plastic and dense --> grounds us
indeterminate lines of force ripple across the phenomena of a field --> materiality ==> ‘our thought: multidimensional contingent overdetermined’
**we remember in stories of accidents, sledding, and labors**
emerging in circulations (or)
resting in stone (or)
the facades of strip malls
[...]
(58)[...notes/midday review.txt]%11.9[...]--> in obsessional perspective of scientific research: reduce the quantity of information to make the reality clearer (more coherent) --> (a series of signs in hermeneutical perspective ==permit==>) “the image (the event) =/= the background (the sum of the events)”
(anecdote ~=) myth: an illustrative and contradictory example --> the defense against anxiety (in reality's confusion) : the categorizing of opposites in order to establish orderliness in the world of a search for causes [<-- which is a fable]
==> *the event (at the absence of significance of the signs) would justify the present reality* (==>? integration)
==therapy==> arrange the reality categorically & chronologically + enlarge on the reality by adding information
myth brings into play a purely expressive modality (expressed in an interpretative manner) [=/= explaining] }--> (stoic) perverted causality
[Deleuze:] when the causality relation one of the two elements (cause or effect) differs in nature from the other (one is corporeal, physical and the other is incorporeal) --> [they foster a relationship of] quasi-causality =/= relationship of expression
‘necessity’ belongs to an official order called *destiny: a sort of teleology of the system of causes*, a unity of the correspondent quasi-causality (=/= relation between cause and effect)
--> independence is installed in the presence of necessity
[Leibniz:] *causality = con-possibility*
the event is in a monadic world were everything is signs (analogies significant at several levels) --> a fish pond in which each fish is itself a fish pond
Leibniz's world is created and destroyed by harmonic or discordant correlations
“anxiety as cause”
[Holakouee's manner of interpreting reality -->] best therapy or remedy for anxieties:
•causality
•system: a group of necessary laws and rules
}--> no victim, no bully [~= opening the field of knowledge ~=>? erasing the sense of responsibility]
{Despret}--✕--> our experiences sometimes require us (to go farther that Holakouee's instrumentalism) ****to discover a place where disorder may be reestablished in the movement and contradiction**** [that i believe is urgently needed in Iran today =/= enlightening]
a space regulated by laws of stoic causality is the space where multiplicity can be reestablished --> *notional quasi-causality* [notional: gedanklich, تصور، انديشه]
[an stoic anecdote:]
“When, each evening, the guru sat down to proceed with the evening prayer the ashram's cat was in the way and distracted the monks so, he ordered that the cat should be attached during the evening prayers. A long time after the guru's death the cat continued to be attached during the evening prayer. Then, when the cat finished by dying, another cat was brought to the as[...]
(59)[...notes/midday review.txt]%12.2[...]therapy==> arrange the reality categorically & chronologically + enlarge on the reality by adding information
myth brings into play a purely expressive modality (expressed in an interpretative manner) [=/= explaining] }--> (stoic) perverted causality
[Deleuze:] when the causality relation one of the two elements (cause or effect) differs in nature from the other (one is corporeal, physical and the other is incorporeal) --> [they foster a relationship of] quasi-causality =/= relationship of expression
‘necessity’ belongs to an official order called *destiny: a sort of teleology of the system of causes*, a unity of the correspondent quasi-causality (=/= relation between cause and effect)
--> independence is installed in the presence of necessity
[Leibniz:] *causality = con-possibility*
the event is in a monadic world were everything is signs (analogies significant at several levels) --> a fish pond in which each fish is itself a fish pond
Leibniz's world is created and destroyed by harmonic or discordant correlations
“anxiety as cause”
[Holakouee's manner of interpreting reality -->] best therapy or remedy for anxieties:
•causality
•system: a group of necessary laws and rules
}--> no victim, no bully [~= opening the field of knowledge ~=>? erasing the sense of responsibility]
{Despret}--✕--> our experiences sometimes require us (to go farther that Holakouee's instrumentalism) ****to discover a place where disorder may be reestablished in the movement and contradiction**** [that i believe is urgently needed in Iran today =/= enlightening]
a space regulated by laws of stoic causality is the space where multiplicity can be reestablished --> *notional quasi-causality* [notional: gedanklich, تصور، انديشه]
[an stoic anecdote:]
“When, each evening, the guru sat down to proceed with the evening prayer the ashram's cat was in the way and distracted the monks so, he ordered that the cat should be attached during the evening prayers. A long time after the guru's death the cat continued to be attached during the evening prayer. Then, when the cat finished by dying, another cat was brought to the ashram so that it could be duly attached during the evening prayers. Centuries later the guru's disciples wrote wise treatises on the essential role of the cat in the good order of all prayers.” (DeMerlo)
--(in practice)--> the anecdote becomes the essential element in a chain of expressive causalities. it is the intersection point between several stories united for a time: *familial/familiar time & therapeutic time*
...you retreat behind a rampart which protects you
...the exterior scrutiny and criticism makes your failures heavier
...you refuse *scholastic integration* [you choose a complete rejection [...]
(60)[...notes/midday review.txt]%12.2[...]tial role of the cat in the good order of all prayers.” (DeMerlo)
--(in practice)--> the anecdote becomes the essential element in a chain of expressive causalities. it is the intersection point between several stories united for a time: *familial/familiar time & therapeutic time*
...you retreat behind a rampart which protects you
...the exterior scrutiny and criticism makes your failures heavier
...you refuse *scholastic integration* [you choose a complete rejection of the values suggested by the school, rules, or demands for success] ==> you increase the attention paid to you by the institution concerned with your sort of malfunctioning
...consultation dramatizes the contradition and rigidity of your role assignments
...if an intervenor approaches your problem, you play your idiot role
}--> a *merry-go-round of circular causality* --> the intervenor [looks for the ticket which would allow him to clim on and go around:]
•observe the causal chains
•giving the causal chains a different accent علامت، با تکیه بر صدا نه معنی
•create a global field of observation from which he is necessarily excluded
•
}--help--> anecdotic implication (=/= therapeutic system's theory):
•anecdote becomes the frame of the conversation
•risk of becoming involved in the anecdote's ridiculous fleeting liveliness
•
the anecdote, which dramatized the dead end where the intervenor's capacities are reduced to non-existence --> can also revitalize the relaional process (if introduced in a new quasi-causal chair)
[anecdote's] circular causal hypothesis which reduce the anxiety create a more accessible reality --> constructing a myth = [*]story: lies which tell the truth**
•anecdote takes it place in a causality chain where it lives for a fleeting moment carrying a *parasitical* or a *paratherapeutic* significance
==> construction of a specific restricting environment in which the parties [family and intervenor, artist and feedbacker] are trapped
--Despret--> ***the reduction [of anecdote] becomes the starting point for a new release of the energy it liberates***(!?)
...................................
Zoological Vandalism: Chimeric Pragmatism in Animal-Filled Media
Zolmat and the Black Box as Media Beyond
Primordial House and Suffering Landscape
Changing Inside”, a multi-media performance and intervention with Mia Habib and Jassem Hindi
Four Oriental Cartography of the East
About Dense Properties
...................................
shift in our idea of nature not any more a source of *fecundity: how we relate abundance in nature to the way we live ourselves
we have to fight to keep things democratic (itself a privileged idea) and not autocratic when it comes to climate change
[...]
(61)[...notes/midday review.txt]%12.3[...]gardener ~= good (feeling, caring) imperialist
-enlightenment approach to captivity --> new sense of civilization (what is proper)
-removing any visible explicit means of captivity (animals appear move freeling, as if they wish to be there) <-- affective engagement
animal ~= border figure allowing institution to move between human world and animal world
science for empire --> mobilization of wonder (human capacity for curiosity that makes us human are mobilized in the service of questionable political goals)
...................................
[*]democracy: ‘farmandahi (commanding) = farmanbari (obeying)’
...................................
...thoughts expire on contact with words as quickly as words expire on contact with thoughts
(Pavic's Khazars)
two examples of metamarketing
1. Pleasantville (1998)
2. The Devil Wears Prada (2006)
(my flourishing in the scholl was always highly) teacher-dependent --?--> being social [=/= genius]
...................................
government (counting heads) =/= complexity (how to make mixity work)
morality --> ‘good =/= bad’ (incarnated in different things) [--> philosophical =/= value system ترجیحات --> sociological]
ethics --> assemblages
...................................
#cat's cradle
nature = figures + stories + images (~= topos, commonplace)
paying attention to nature like a child <-- Haraway
[*]trope: a verse interpolated into a liturgical text عبادات to embellish or amplify its meaning
language --> material-semiotic flesh
liturgical possibilities of nature
•Christian liturgical year
•Zaratusztrian nowruz
•star wars --?--> practice of turning tropes into worlds [--> war of imagess]
•war of words
•
(agonistic fields:)
military combat
sexual domination
security maintenance
market strategy
technical environmental design )<-- does all sorts of boundary crossing)
culturally specific apparatuses of bodily production (--> clean and dirt --> forms of embodiment)
writing: to create metaphors [= reconstitue what counts as knowledge] --> materially implode (~ art, this is what we were practicing in my fable workshop)
technology: a form of life
language: a form of life
create a critique
create a difference (however small, partial, modest, without narrative, without guarantee)
oneiros
oneiric
technical axis |__
/ mythical axis
textual axis
a cosmos furnished in _ian style
•Aristotelian style: actors are self-moving modular single-substance subjects with adherin[...]
(62)[...notes/midday review.txt]%12.7[...]process of sedimentation (the slow gathering and sorting of the pebbles that are the component parts of the rock). Then it is articulated a second time as the accumulated sediment is glued together by a process of cementation. They use Hjemslev's terms “content” and “expression” as the names for the two articulations, but this is not meant to suggest that the articulations are in any way linguistic in origin. On the contrary: the sounds, words, and grammatical patterns of a language are materials that accumulate or sediment historically, then they are consolidated by another process, like the standardization of a dialect by a Royal Academy and its official dictionaries, grammars, and rules of pronunciation.
(synthetic =/=? analytic; [a problematic distinction!] the logical particle “un-” in “no unmarried man is married”) (analytic =/=? contingent)
(Kantian?!) ‘a priori and synthetic’ ==> ‘a posteriori analytic’
[singular entities:]
The question of the “individuation of trajectories” is about mathematical models (which to me are the secret of the success of science) but you are correct that it goes beyond that. All entities synthesized historically are individual entities: individual plants and animals; individual species and ecosystems; individual mountains, planets, solar systems, et cetera. Here “individual” means simply “singular or unique,” that is, not a particular member of a general category, but a unique entity that may compose larger individual entities through a relation of part-to-whole, like individual pebbles composing a larger individual rock. A materialist ontology of individual entities is implicit in Deleuze and Guattari and Braudel, so we must give them credit for that, then move on and invent the rest.
..rethinking of the disciplinary boundaries (without using labels such as interdisciplinarity, etc.)
we must take in mind that materialism is good to be enriched, but, materialism is not an ‘a priori’!
in my research in apass on ajayeb عجایب, can be theoretical yet anti-methodological?
...Marx is his interest in the oppressed, that is, his anti-Aristotlianism that allows us to conceptualize the self-organizing power of “matter” without the “meaning” that should overcode it.
Delanda: The political economy of Marx is entirely a priori.
[--Laclau--> essentialist conception of both society and social agency in Marxism <== holistic approache : a “founding totality” (expressed at the surface of social life) which presents itself as an intelligible object of ‘knowledge’ (in Marxism notion of ‘ideology’) =/= {relational character of any (social) identity + infinite play of differences}= discourse --> ‘the social’ always exceeds the limits of the attempts to constitute ‘society’;
& (in advanced capitalist societies:) identity = the unstable articulation of[...]
(63)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%12.9[...]anging positionalities, ‘social agent = decentered subject’ --> how can we, then, say the subjects misrecognize themselves in this kaleidoscopic movement of differences? =/= (Marxism's notion of) ‘false consciousness’; can we do without (the concept of) ‘misrecognition’?
--> (Laclau suggests) the ideological* (~=? will to totality):
•misrecognition of a positive essence = ultimate suture (بخيه bakhie)
•nonrecognition of any positivity =/= ultimate suture
(society institutes itself <==) closure: nonrecognition of the infinite play of differences }--> ‘ideological ==> social’ ~(the social is impossible without some fixation of meaning) : “utopia is the essence of any communication and social practice” --!,]
[--Delanda--> (the mode of ‘downward thinking’ when we think in terms of) ideology (~ the established relations of a particular society constitutes people's identities) ~= intrinsic: the identity is created by relations {the fantasy of ‘seamless totality'} =/= (Deleuzian) extrinsic: the relations are real but don't determine identities]
what are artists (particular <-=> general) propositions (Angebot)?
•proposition: a declarative that can be right or wrong =/= a sentence, grammatical entities
•exposition: a systematic interpretation/explanation of a specific topic
•disposition: an affective orientation, knowledge attitude
[Marx's ruthlessness: criticism must not be afraid of its own conclusions]
what are the sources of “value” in ajayeb?
(sun, photosynthetic, micro-organisms, etc.)
fermentation, photosynthesis, respiration
ajayeb is the (shared, individual, or experienced) “memory” of which organizational layer or process of which communities of practice?
rethinking “invisible hand”
(dynamic between supply and demand. “planning system”?)
... against ... the dualisms that have been transmitted to us in the history of philosophy (matter vs. meaning, micro vs. macro, inorganic vs. organic vs. social, realism vs. social constructivism, etcetera.) and argue in favor of a new ontology according to which “mechanisms are largely causal, but they do not necessarily involve linear causality”
Neo-Materialism =/= Creationism: matter is an inert receptacle for forms that come from the outside imposed by an exterior psychic agency: “Let there be light!”
--> matter has morphogenetic capacities of its own and does not need to be commanded into generating form.
one of the idealisms that have been generated by postmodernism: that we know already how all past discourses have been generated, that we have the secret of all past conceptual systems, and that we can therefore engage in meta-theorizing based on that knowledge
Delanda: I am not convinced that avoiding dualities is the key to a new way o[...]
(65)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%13[...]is impossible without some fixation of meaning) : “utopia is the essence of any communication and social practice” --!,]
[--Delanda--> (the mode of ‘downward thinking’ when we think in terms of) ideology (~ the established relations of a particular society constitutes people's identities) ~= intrinsic: the identity is created by relations {the fantasy of ‘seamless totality'} =/= (Deleuzian) extrinsic: the relations are real but don't determine identities]
what are artists (particular <-=> general) propositions (Angebot)?
•proposition: a declarative that can be right or wrong =/= a sentence, grammatical entities
•exposition: a systematic interpretation/explanation of a specific topic
•disposition: an affective orientation, knowledge attitude
[Marx's ruthlessness: criticism must not be afraid of its own conclusions]
what are the sources of “value” in ajayeb?
(sun, photosynthetic, micro-organisms, etc.)
fermentation, photosynthesis, respiration
ajayeb is the (shared, individual, or experienced) “memory” of which organizational layer or process of which communities of practice?
rethinking “invisible hand”
(dynamic between supply and demand. “planning system”?)
... against ... the dualisms that have been transmitted to us in the history of philosophy (matter vs. meaning, micro vs. macro, inorganic vs. organic vs. social, realism vs. social constructivism, etcetera.) and argue in favor of a new ontology according to which “mechanisms are largely causal, but they do not necessarily involve linear causality”
Neo-Materialism =/= Creationism: matter is an inert receptacle for forms that come from the outside imposed by an exterior psychic agency: “Let there be light!”
--> matter has morphogenetic capacities of its own and does not need to be commanded into generating form.
one
one of the idealisms that have been generated by postmodernism: that we know already how all past discourses have been generated, that we have the secret of all past conceptual systems, and that we can therefore engage in meta-theorizing based on that knowledge
Delanda: I am not convinced that avoiding dualities is the key to a new way of thinking (particularly if one simply adds new ones: modernism-postmodernism, rhizome-tree, power-resistance).
reified generalities that do not really exist: The Market, The State, and The People.
The duality emerges when one ignores the zone of overlap and reifies the averages.
...................................
[in ajayebnameh عجایب نامه...] to map the morphogenetic changes of the real
... bewildering heterogeneity of registers in ajayebnameh عجایب نامه
... treating entities trafficking in the futures
[...]
(66)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%13.1[...]/>
what are the sources of “value” in ajayeb?
(sun, photosynthetic, micro-organisms, etc.)
fermentation, photosynthesis, respiration
ajayeb is the (shared, individual, or experienced) “memory” of which organizational layer or process of which communities of practice?
rethinking “invisible hand”
(dynamic between supply and demand. “planning system”?)
... against ... the dualisms that have been transmitted to us in the history of philosophy (matter vs. meaning, micro vs. macro, inorganic vs. organic vs. social, realism vs. social constructivism, etcetera.) and argue in favor of a new ontology according to which “mechanisms are largely causal, but they do not necessarily involve linear causality”
Neo-Materialism =/= Creationism: matter is an inert receptacle for forms that come from the outside imposed by an exterior psychic agency: “Let there be light!”
--> matter has morphogenetic capacities of its own and does not need to be commanded into generating form.
one of the idealisms that have been generated by postmodernism: that we know already how all past discourses have been generated, that we have the secret of all past conceptual systems, and that we can therefore engage in meta-theorizing based on that knowledge
Delanda: I am not convinced that avoiding dualities is the key to a new way of thinking (particularly if one simply adds new ones: modernism-postmodernism, rhizome-tree, power-resistance).
reified generalities that do not really exist: The Market, The State, and The People.
The duality emerges when one ignores the zone of overlap and reifies the averages.
...................................
[in ajayebnameh عجایب نامه...] to map the morphogenetic changes of the real
... bewildering heterogeneity of registers in ajayebnameh عجایب نامه
... treating entities trafficking in the futures
active capacities of description
this is not a project of repopulating the social sciences with nonhuman beings
the symbolic function of language is about detecting salient features of the world that can be organized in contrastive sets
(can we think not in contrasts?)
this is not about trying to think like X, that would be transposition of a relational experience at another scale
(non-religious semiotic model)
bodily disposition ==(produces)==> perspective ==(produces)==> self
the beings in ajayeb (عجایب) are ‘alive’ because of their ability to ‘do things’ in the ways they come to represent and interpret through me
recruiting scores of new actants so as to render the theater of worldly interactions more complex and interesting
[...]
(67)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%13.1[...]pecialties
-seniority and extension of metamorphosical beings (of elaborations carried out by all groups in met)
{that which addresses the “me,” the “ego” =/=? that which allows one to resist the forces of metamorphosis}
the iconoclastic episode we are in now, which we must work to make it as short as possible
(to specify) dualisms that make it extraordinarily difficult to maintain ontological pluralism
it is the moderns quasi-subjects (‘person’) who feel themselves to be **directly addressed,** (redressed and saved) --> to exist
(what art suffers now, that i should directly address the modern subject, and other mode of subjectivity or other kinds of addressee and addressing is brutally criticized and irrelativized)
-(love's type of address:) addressed to us ==> make us exist --> a person
(existing as person is the only way? no no no!) -- the emergence of persons is a local and historical phenomenon that we simply cannot extend to all collectives
(how to extricate ourselves properly from the) notions of Nature, Matter, Object, and Subject
to get around two major *obstacles: (the prevailing notions of) Society and (especially of) Economy (=/=? modes of existence's system of coordinates)
the same beings that made the author of ajayeb speak, got my/our ancestors excited,
*technology: that which we emphasize whenever we pay attention to the unexpected detours {the hiatus of the detour, the zigzag of invention, ruse, trajectory obtained by a certain type of discontinuity} by which existents have to pass in order to subsist. (=/= technological domain technical objects, material world, socio-technical networks,) (~ technically)
-fictional beings adds additional variety to technical beings --> aestheticization of techniques: obsolescence, ruin, adjustment, efficiency
-we must extend ‘fictional beings’ far beyond the narrow domain of art and culture, is to give a whole new meaning to the expression “material culture.”
-1- Technique's zigzagging motion assumes a know-how, a judgment, a constantly reprised evaluation of formidably demanding specifications;
-2- Technical beings leave behind them complex frameworks and combinations of associations which appear difficult to understand once left to themselves, without the folding motion and the detours 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)--> ano[...]
(68)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%13.3[...]to the irreducible precedence, as Derrida puts it in ‘Memoires,’ of the other. The other calls; you answer. But “you” have not yet been constituted, gathered or pulled together prior to the call.
Wortsalad ---- Opheilia's kind of mouth that shoots poesy, one has the feeling that no one is there.
/ precisely when ophelia is about to become the poet Shakespeare strangles her in water to make place for hamlet's tragic autopoiesis /
it is (generally) very difficult to know “who” is talking --> “whom” is being addressed
endure the agony of the being called (a being-on-call, an answering device)
modeling different styles of irony
(what are we) telehearing (?)
language is the history of index finger (“...even when it is placed on the mouth to silence a speaking. The teacher points, the God and the schizophrenic speak through or to the spiritual forefinger [sababe سبابه, angoshte shahadat انگشت شهادت].”)
-Heidegger traces the route of saying from rumor to the spiritualized digitals. The semiotically invested finger comes to manipulate the alphabetico-numerical ordering of ‘Geschick.’ (Avital)
-The spiritual forefinger presses towards schizophrenic partial systematizing.
-Also, it is the bewitching finger, which makes it rude to point or to press red buttons, for the power of pointing used to be associated with *magical arrests* (thus in Jewish Orthodox marriage ceremonies the wedding ring is said to be placed on this spiritual finger of the woman, to block her potency).
-making the marionette come alive
-history of index finger points to the essential being of language, which is “Saying as Showing.” (Avital reading Heidegger)
-Heidegger shows, “Speaking must have speakers” (not merely in the same way as an effect must have a cause)
(...what must remain unspoken in the sense that it is beyond the reach of speaking)
...decisive disconnectedness in all language tracings.
schizophrenogenic understanding of language (and of anything)
[this is related to the story of the fox and sound, accidental essencing of the index...]
“We are hypnotized things suffering from positive and from negative hallucinations, that is, we see what is not there and often we do not see what is there. In the first place because what it is to be there has no clarity of being. It is as if we cannot see a thing.” (Avital)
(focus the lense on being)
the mode of awesomeness and dissolvement with awe is the prescriptive utterance in the case of ajayeb, the ‘wonders of...’ translated from “ajayeb-e...” triggering the verb “ta'ajob” تعجب
(using Avital's words) But if we were to remain in this mood, then, despite appearances, we would not be awestruck, or even struck, by the [text]: we would have missed the encounter with it. In fact, our[...]
(69)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%14.8[...] ajayeb, what is cosmic, what is terran, what is cursed, *?
in ajayeb:
•what are the figures of finitude, destruction, astralized hearing, enactments of generation, the figures that take action, take heart?
•what are the chthonic entities? {the finite complex material systems that can break down =/= stories that personify (Mother Earth) are *misplaced concreteness*. [(i am against) personified =/= figurative (which i love. figures can be tentacular, patterns, processes, stories.) what Foad would say?]}
•what are the gorgeous, luring, dangerous precarities (of the terra)?
•what are (its specific) art science worldings?
*those creatures across taxa (taxon, categorical classification, taxonomic group)
taxonomic conveniences
[with Haraway]
what is the optics of ajayeb?
[that is entertaining being reductive for a moment, but that is productive]
(to help with that, the optics of the anthropocene is the image of the earth from space, Gaia?)
-a cybernetic, systems-theoretic entity, studied in different scales
-various reports (on the state, fictioning the state of the earth?)
-a global kind of system knowledge
-a giant database ----> do i need to formulate my project into a technological practice?
what is the smallest unit of interest in the ajayeb cosmology?
the practices of relocating germplasms, including people in form of slaves, all over the earth in order to produce surplus that is transported elsewhere for capital accumulation... (Haraway)
industrial agriculture and plantation
to be storied and studied
the holobiont: host plus of all its microbial symbionts that form ecological units
-recasting the individual as a holobiont; the collective genomes
(Lynn Margulis)
holobionts: “multicellular eukaryotes plus their colonies[...]
(70)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%15.2[...]> (ethnographic accounts of) global interconnection
(some metaphors:) metabolisms, articulations, coproductions (*? of ajayeb's histories)
relational, sympoietic, consequential,
in ajayeb, what is cosmic, what is terran, what is cursed, *?
in ajayeb:
•what are the figures of finitude, destruction, astralized hearing, enactments of generation, the figures that take action, take heart?
•what are the chthonic entities? {the finite complex material systems that can break down =/= stories that personify (Mother Earth) are *misplaced concreteness*. [(i am against) personified =/= figurative (which i love. figures can be tentacular, patterns, processes, stories.) what Foad would say?]}
•what are the gorgeous, luring, dangerous precarities (of the terra)?
•what are (its specific) art science worldings?
*those creatures across taxa (taxon, categorical classification, taxonomic group)
taxonomic conveniences
[with Haraway]
what is the optics of ajayeb?
[that is entertaining being reductive for a moment, but that is productive]
(to help with that, the optics of the anthropocene is the image of the earth from space, Gaia?)
-a cybernetic, systems-theoretic entity, studied in different scales
-various reports (on the state, fictioning the state of the earth?)
-a global kind of system knowledge
-a giant database ----> do i need to formulate my project into a technological practice?
what is the smallest unit of interest in the ajayeb cosmology?
the practices of relocating germplasms, including people in form of slaves, all over the earth in order to produce surplus that is transported elsewhere for capital accumulation... (Haraway)
industrial agriculture and plantation
to be storied and studied
the holobiont: host plus of all its microbial symbionts that form ecological units
-recasting the individual as a holobiont; the collective genomes
(Lynn Margulis)
holobionts: “multicellular eukaryotes plus their colonies of persistent symbionts”
(Gilbert, Sapp, and Tauber 326; cited by Kenney)
(thinking with holobionts) the immune system is re-cast not as “defensive weaponry” but as a “socializing and unifying force” [via Kenney] --> “to obey the immune system is to become a citizen of the holobiont”
[this new developement of biological individuality (entangled identities at the heart of life mechanisms) in biological sciences of 21st century requires a new imaginative framework and new forms of curiosity equally relevant to natural sciences and artists]
(ajayeb-e gaz) عجایب گاز
co-existence of gasses
planet =/= terrestrial planet
(ajayeb-e graphs) psychotic tree-structure of giant databases, [...]
(71)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%15.3[...]araway]
what is the optics of ajayeb?
[that is entertaining being reductive for a moment, but that is productive]
(to help with that, the optics of the anthropocene is the image of the earth from space, Gaia?)
-a cybernetic, systems-theoretic entity, studied in different scales
-various reports (on the state, fictioning the state of the earth?)
-a global kind of system knowledge
-a giant database ----> do i need to formulate my project into a technological practice?
what is the smallest unit of interest in the ajayeb cosmology?
the practices of relocating germplasms, including people in form of slaves, all over the earth in order to produce surplus that is transported elsewhere for capital accumulation... (Haraway)
industrial agriculture and plantation
to be storied and studied
the holobiont: host plus of all its microbial symbionts that form ecological units
-recasting the individual as a holobiont; the collective genomes
(Lynn Margulis)
holobionts: “multicellular eukaryotes plus their colonies of persistent symbionts”
(Gilbert, Sapp, and Tauber 326; cited by Kenney)
(thinking with holobionts) the immune system is re-cast not as “defensive weaponry” but as a “socializing and unifying force” [via Kenney] --> “to obey the immune system is to become a citizen of the holobiont”
[this new developement of biological individuality (entangled identities at the heart of life mechanisms) in biological sciences of 21st century requires a new imaginative framework and new forms of curiosity equally relevant to natural sciences and artists]
(ajayeb-e gaz) عجایب گاز
co-existence of gasses
planet =/= terrestrial planet
(ajayeb-e graphs) psychotic tree-structure of giant databases, in trans-ing and lines of trans-affecting
-my ajayeb art is going to be the kind that depend on the machine----competent digital
-exploring the iterative and fractal quality of sentences in my digital graph-makings
-attending to the interruptions of syntactical commitments
partial connections (of distinct entities) ~= analogy [analogy allows one part contaminate systematically another part, and vice versa]
-coerced belief
the question of binaries: how we are who we are in relentless relationalities with other entities. in shaping and being shaped by objects, and subject/object is only convenient partial-good-enough for the moment --> **sorting operations** (kPRA0W1kECg), but they are not good descriptions beyond that.
#on Companion Manifesto
(Haraway's) *cyborg*: the “lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and [...]
(73)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%15.3[...]ont; the collective genomes
(Lynn Margulis)
holobionts: “multicellular eukaryotes plus their colonies of persistent symbionts”
(Gilbert, Sapp, and Tauber 326; cited by Kenney)
(thinking with holobionts) the immune system is re-cast not as “defensive weaponry” but as a “socializing and unifying force” [via Kenney] --> “to obey the immune system is to become a citizen of the holobiont”
[this new developement of biological individuality (entangled identities at the heart of life mechanisms) in biological sciences of 21st century requires a new imaginative framework and new forms of curiosity equally relevant to natural sciences and artists]
(ajayeb-e gaz) عجایب گاز
co-existence of gasses
planet =/= terrestrial planet
(ajayeb-e graphs) psychotic tree-structure of giant databases, in trans-ing and lines of trans-affecting
-my ajayeb art is going to be the kind that depend on the machine----competent digital
-exploring the iterative and fractal quality of sentences in my digital graph-makings
-attending to the interruptions of syntactical commitments
partial connections (of distinct entities) ~= analogy [analogy allows one part contaminate systematically another part, and vice versa]
-coerced belief
the question of binaries: how we are who we are in relentless relationalities with other entities. in shaping and being shaped by objects, and subject/object is only convenient partial-good-enough for the moment --> **sorting operations** (kPRA0W1kECg), but they are not good descriptions beyond that.
#on Companion Manifesto
(Haraway's) *cyborg*: the “lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.” --to--> a much bigger queer family of *companion species* : becoming-with --> the co-constitutive interpenetration of humans and their others (machines, animals, and the environment).
-Haraway is going from ‘rage’ to ‘love’
“historically challenged people” (Schimpfwort? فحش)
half-trained arguments
embodied cross-species sociality
I am trying to inhabit ajayeb critically; neither in celebration nor condemnation (like my sister asked)
what is my context? isis, tech-sci, art, world-wars, stories, terror,
the figures of ajayeb that i am cultivating, do they “more fruitfully inform livable politics and ontologies in current life worlds”?
ajayeb's species bring together human and nonhuman, organic and technological, history and myth, freedom and structure, state and subject, ...
*concrete:
◦a concrescence (growth by assimilation, nemov moshtarek نمو مشترک) of prehensions (seizing, perception but not necessarily cog[...]
(75)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%15.3[...], figures of speech
(the dogmatic and bizzar idea of) “trope-free communication”
*metaplasm, remodeling, remolding,,, inverting meanings, transposing the body of communication,
(in my graphs, or rigs, what a substitution in a string might change the meaning?)
what is the “troping that makes a fleshly difference”?
origin story (~=> establishing origin) ~=> sober scientific report ~=> scales of intelligence ~=> human as master
the “mere” village dog:
-canine Eves surviving in their mitochondrial DNA
-canine Adam through his Y-chromosome legacies
which metaplasmic, remodeled versions of ‘name’ could give ajayeb's being
(in apass I have been against the “what do I want as an artist?” question:)
pay attention to significant otherness =/= reflection of one's intentions
what is the name of the game? complexity, flexibility, opportunism, (finite worlds called:) domestic, wild, feral,
[who is naming the world what?
•accelerationism: “game-over”
•capitalism: “resource”
•technophobia: “obsolescence”
•technophilia: “information”
•monotheism: “transition”
•science: “taxa”
•multinationalism: “system”
•modernism: “globe"]
immune systems (in natureculture) determine where organisms, including people, can live and with whom.
“There is no time or place at which genetics ends and environment begins” [...]
(Haraway > Gilbert)
“All stages of the life histories of evolving animals had to adapt to eager bacteria colonizing them inside and out.”
To be animal is to become-with bacteria
to inhabit an inter-subjective world, to love is about meeting the other in all the fleshly detail of a mortal relationship (to wit, first, somehow to learn what this other needs and desires)---permanent search for knowledge of the intimate other, with inevitable comic and tragic mistakes in that quest
thinking about animals as “other worlds” in a science fictional sense
scientifically informed, empirically grounded practice
theory ...still a limited discourse and a rough instrument
“who is at home?” --> ask in respect for all of time who and what are emerging in relationship --> (the obligation to ask) who are present and who are emergent? ***
(what are our) categorical labor
labor of training --> somehow all the participants of training are remodeled by it
labor of scale-making
(these are world-making practices, storytellings)
significant otherness-in-connection =/= intention-ascribing idioms of literalist anthropomorphism that sees furry humans in animal bodies and measures their worth in scales of similarity to the rights-bearing, humanist subjects of Western philosophy and [...]
(76)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%15.6[...] rid of the earlier species. (In the Welträtsel, Haeckel [1899] would also proclaim that the more evolved humans [i.e., the Aryans] would out-compete and eliminate the more primitive races.) To Haeckel, the evolution of the animal kingdom was the same as individual development not only because the laws behind each were the same but also because the entire animal kingdom was an individual. Here, he was harking back to the views of the Naturphilosophen of the previous century. In other words, the development of advanced species was seen to pass through stages represented by adult organisms of more primitive species.’ (The morphogenesis of evolutionary developmental biology)
inter-cellular digestion
•the evolution of new features was based on changes in developmental stages, not in adult astages (--> that's why the developmental stage is so important, because mutations happen --> work with children)
Ontogeny or morphogenesis: organism's developmental lifespan
Phylogeny: evolutionary historical heritable traits
ontogeny ==> phylogeny
“ontogeny does not recapitulate phylogeny: it creates it” (Garstang, 1922; p. 724)
evolution was not so much a branched chain as a ladder
molecular systematics
evo-devo (evolutionary developmental biology)
each discipline has:
-its own rules of evidence
-its own professors
-its own journals
-its own vocabulary
small genetic changes was not sufficient to generate evolutionary novel structures such as teeth, feathers, cnidocysts or mollusk shells (Goldschmidt, 1940) (--> lizards had birdness in it --> potentiality)
(new species originate as) ***hopeful monsters***
that result from mutations in developmentally important loci (-macromutations)
Goldschmidt: the gene wasn't a locus or an allele. Rather, it was a unit of development
“to convince evolutionists that evolution is not only a statistical genetical problem but also one of the developmental potentialities of organism”
(Waddington 1953 claimed:) ...in conventional studies of evolution, the animal is considered either as genotype (and studied by geneticists) or as phenotype [Erscheingungsbild ] (and is studied by taxonomists)
(Waddington then kaunched into a) critique of the notion of “random mutation,” noting that there are developmental constraints placed on what changes are possible.
•“we think of development as a cybernetic process, involving stablization through feed-back and other mechanisms.”
(Francois Jacob) “Evolution by tinkering” (sare-ham-bandi سرهم بندی)
(Leigh van Valen 1973) “evolution is the control of development by ecology”
phenotypic plasticity
developmental plasticity
organism: an epigenetic material[...]
(78)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%15.8[...]شناسی, naghes-al-khelghe-shenasi ناقص الخلقه شناسی)
...................................
rewriting technique criteria (of the gene) [from new biological headquarters]
retro-transposon: a DNA sequence that can change its position within a genome, sometimes creating or reversing mutations and altering the cell's genetic identity and genome size
(we have uterus because of bacterial transposons)
intestinal
enzyme, macromolecular biological catalysts, accelerating chemical reaction
using hallucinogenic to cure autism (!?)
bacterial --> social
“individual" = an island to be colonized (by bacteria), [we are] a niche (upon niche (upon niche)) for bacteria
immunall agencise are not (has never been) defensive, they selectively inclusive, they facilitate symbiosis, allowing the possibility of microbes become part of the body
co-metabolism
host-diet
four major symbiosis (symbiotic things) that ruled the planet:
1. rhizobacteria/legumes for nitrogen fixation
2. mycorrhizal interaction with plant roots and seeds
3. endophytic fungal protection against dessication
4. coral reefs and tidal seagrass ecosystems sustain oceanic biodiversity
}--containing--> smaller symbiotic webs we call “organism” <==[product of]== (ancient symbiosis we call) “cells + (ancient symbiosis we call) “genomes”
ritual defense of a dissertation, matter of opponent
a medical theater of dissection, laid out on table with the working-class barber-surgeons laying bare structures for the disquisition (tafahos تفحص) of the professor --> (the ways we are in this) *multi-imaginative theater* (~ congnitive emotional apparatus) --> infectious joy, the situatedness of the joy is infectious
we (should always) work in the context of joy
lost for details (for the fleshiness of ‘this’), not as a general principal or an example for something else
*the tale of detail* --> a small detail that wrenches the self into something that was not before
(the tale of understanding)
Gilbert's bio-sym-poetic joy --> knowledge-making
(Gilbert's) genomic fragment in the picture of mutual-benefit life --?--> metropolitan life insurance company
[--> *apparatuses of thinking* have thick trading zones between ecology and economics up to and including today, that is the mutal adaptation in real world, producing problems for us]
(how we go?) from one life-table to another life-table
(for example from mathematics of life insurance to population biology ~=> co-developement of disciplines; 19th century laboratories + practices of political economy;)
[matters of historical, economical, manegerial, capital, ]
(protestants that were never burnt enough)<[...]
(79)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%15.9[...]hing new was required to account for change; the logic informed a kind of paternal creation myth [........] unchanging “matrix” for the generative principle of change. (In Zihlman's story logic, both gathering and hunting emerged as repatternings, not opposites, in changed conditions of constraint and opportunity. Narratives of both gathering and hunting ways of life produced genders and citizens.)
•tool-weapon equation in masculinist scientific narratives
as careful scrutiny of wonders and marvels becomes a mainstay in European intellectual life, 17th century natural philosophers began to understand *wonder, *curiosity, and *attention as cloesly aligned and mutually defining.
epistemological beast fable
unnatural history
knowledge-making practices of other times and places
tracing the web of horror and delight
Serres reminds us the beast fable tradition is as much about biomimicry as anthropomorphizing.
finding ways of “going-on together” (Verran)
“by experience and by affinity, some of us begin not with Pasteur, but with the monster, the outcast” (S. Leigh Star)
(ajayeb's) (politics of) administering discrete objects ----(number sys)
(why should we engage in refiguration?)
(there are always a) multitude of agencies unfolding as the world is continuously reconfigured (=/= to explain away: when multiple objects are collapsed into one.)
-“Within this dynamic world it is impossible to imagine that one single story or one narrative style can capture all of the liveliness and exuberance; ***we need to deploy multiple stories about agency. Some meticulously empirical, some imaginative. Some on the quantum scale, some on the people scale. Different agential narratives enable different ways of responding and relating.” (Kenney)
postcolonial moments: “occasions for theorizing, for telling differences and samenesses in new ways” (Verran)
#to create ‘aerating’ (tahviyeh تهویه) in ajayeb, this includes:
/ crafting translations with ontological traction (enghebaz انقباض)
/ building empirical tools that make ajayeb's translation-work visible {#pop-up book}
/ translation --> *reconfigure sameness and difference*
/ staying with linguistic differences (in ajayeb) is a way of investigating the ontological commitments embedded in language.
◽ontological --> worlding --> how language participates in shaping our lived worlds in some ways and not others.*** “it is not common for speakers of a language to examine what type of material objects their language commits them to. [this also my question in iranian mystic mix,] rather the difference will be to notice as difficulty in translation.” (Verran)
(for me working on ajayeb is) **lingering in the space of difficult translations**
==>[...]
(80)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%16.2[...]
-not as a voyeur or anthropologist, but breathe in the density and composition of their atmospheres
(people = worlds)
ontic (hasti mojud-shenakhti هستی موجود شناختی): “factual” existence as =/= metaphysical ontologic existence)
[ontological interferences in ontic--{regular existence, difference in little beings} for example, ontic is when we ask what time it is, and the answer is on the clock. (snafu is ontic, aporia ontological*) when the ontic is disrupted ==> you have a “day off,” all sort of things can invade and open up, demons come out, there is a suspension of ontic time, a (Heideggerian) holiday]
(Verran) [number are] “always ready to actively re-exist when we do the right actions and say the right words.” (can i do that with ajayeb's objects? how?)
“The moon rose above the river” (en) <--> “upward behind the onstreaming it mooned” (Tlon, a language by Borges with no nouns, only verbs)
(in old Iran, there is a measurement of time based on sa'd سعد and nahs نحس, the time of benevolent spirits and so on. the sensuous time, measurement is affect)
knowledge industry or “scientific factory”
how academic labor was implicated in capitalist systems and contemporary forms of knowledge/power
“ruse” (hile حیله, makr مکر, neyrang نیرنگ) --> my tool in work on ajayeb? -//-[مکر زنان ,گربه نره و روباه مکار, minorities associated with this accent: women, animals, machines,] [ruse in Kelile Demne کلیله و دمنه]
ruse: a set of small, mostly unconscious tactics by which workers resist capitalist systems (writing love letters on company's time, factory workers who takes a scrap of fabric home for his children to play with, etc.)
-“[h]ow to subvert the laws of the “scientific factory” through gift-giving, solidarity, and free exchange even when bosses and colleagues will not t not turn a blind eye” (de Certeau)
(how to?) collectively crafting critiques, commitments, stories, and actions (in the density and composition of ajayeb's atmospheres)
-feeling out their “rhythms, valences, moods, sensations, tempos” (Stewart)
-“real and virtual worlds, future and past worlds, fictional and theoretical worlds, always happening and happening and happening” (Kenney)
talking is also thinking
speculative valences (zarfiat ظرفیت) of wonder --> (through wonder, which) response-abilities are activated (?)
ajayeb is crafted responsive stories about life --> question of responsibility --> what kind of responsibilities are activated in the SF worlding (including reading it now) of ajayeb?
(work on ajayeb is about a practice of [writing] history as) *worlding the past*, to take the alterity of the past seriously and to be moved by textual encounter
-how c[...]
(81)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%16.4[...]stinguish a response from a reaction.”
the mistake of forgetting the ecologies of all mortal beings, who live in and through the use of one another's bodies
[this is against ] The naturalistic fallacy is the mirror-image misstep to transcendental humanism.
multispecies contingency
In the idiom of labor, animals are working subjects, not just worked objects.
the capacity to respond and to recognize response
We can never do without technique, without calculation, without reasons, but these practices will never take us into that kind of open where multispecies responsibility is at stake.
Engage them [the dogs] as mindful bodies, in relationships of response?
the practical labor of nonmimetic sharing(?)
[we make ‘knowing’. knowing is always a practice of making, and always embodied. the idea that thinking involves disembodiment of the knowing organ is just insane.]
“articulating bodies to other bodies” ----> disarticulating bodies to rearticulate other bodies
entangled assemblages of relatings knotted at many scales and times with other assemblages, organic and not
...................................
ajayeb is system imagination
...................................
[Naveeda Khan]
Perhaps the question could be posed as, how do we come to grips with the universal, the supra-historical, or even the cosmos within our global present, imagining a local that lays claims upon all three?
is there a Muslim environmental imaginary?
‘Islamic ecology and environmental ethics’ --> the need to center a vibrant materiality or the liveliness of things in the anthropology of Islam (that has been to date largely preoccupied with Muslim polities and subjectivities.)
It should come as no surprise that my own efforts at centering materiality comes through studying how these predominantly Muslim farmers interact with and come to acknowledge nonhuman forms of life (including the figure of Khidr خضر, dogs, river waters, silt, and lightning, to name a few). Finally, I remain concerned to explore how the singularities of these lives, both human and nonhuman, come to be hitched to the global. This research will culminate in a book tentatively titled Ensouling the Anthropocene: Riverine Life and Climate Change in Bangladesh, in which “ensouling” treats the problem of scaling up singularity to the global, intensifying efforts that began with “Of Children and Jinn.” [source: https://culanth.org/curated_collections/19-everyday-islam/discussions/20-interview-with-naveeda-khan-about-of-children-and-jinn]
...................................
(what i am reading in ajayeb)_with Naveeda: “Muslim cosmology and eschatology hold promoise of ecological thought, providing an unexpectedly materialist perspective on our creaturely inte[...]
(83)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%17.3[...]--> adopting perspectives (--> <--) judge intentions }--> ‘response’
[*]intersubjectivity: accepting the proposal of subjectivity; becoming what the other suggests; acting in the manner in which the other addresses you [--> my apass bow and arrow, was about this suggestivity]
the apparatus of question (that you suggest,) activates some modes of existence rather than others
...shared perspectives, shared intelligences and intentions, resemblances, inversions and exchanges of properties (between humans and animals)
...................................
my practice and work on ajayeb is grounded in the history and materiality of scientific practices
...................................
(ajayeb's) particular and exceptional nature
...................................
(Despret)
“anthropo-zoo-genetic” : a practice that constructs animals and human
(how can i design an apparatus for ajayeb) to perform availability?
(build) questions that construe and construct signs that ‘make a world’ for the animal (entity of the ajayeb)
-how can i offer possible interesting becoming to the animals of ajayeb, in offering a way for them to articulate the system, (not to make a system that articulates them)
(in experimenting with ajayeb) how can i involve my body, involve my knowledge, involve my responsibility, involve my future?
-how to let them adopt me?
-to produce an ajayeb body to allow a ajayeb world to affect me
the world of ajayeb is a richly articulated world =/= a world of enthusiastic automata (one who is only moved by itself) observing strange and mute creatures
...................................
[Mersad al-ebad] tabaye-i طبایعی (materialist)
historical specificity(s) of animal-human relationship
(worst-)translated science
...................................
[Haraway, Queering the non/human]
‘companion’ [she starts by showing the danger of the term like any other term]
reducing type is among other things at the heart of racism
types: colonised, enslaved, non-citizen, animal, refugee, [etc.], typological female reduced to her reproductive function,
secular semiotics (never nourished us?)
queering: the job of undoing ‘normal’ categories, [sorting operations]
...patterning, consequences, and the possibility of response.
queer, off-category, sf worlding
(what are the SF worldings of ajayeb?--SF as building alternative ontologies. finding absent but possible presents--whether presented as elsewheres or other times. “[...]an elsewhere from which different [...] articulations of naturecultures and alterity could be explored.”)
“The one who would be normal, in a category of his own” --> ends ba[...]
(84)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%18.1[...]n of effect to its cause, nature ontologically distinct from culture
(that there is no preexistent nature)
(Aela's interest in?) spatiality: (characteristics of enclosures <-- concerned with shapes and sizes) ‘geometry’ =/= ‘topology’ (investigates questions of *connectivity* and *boundaries*)
***it is the very existence of ‘finitude’ that gets defined as ‘matter’
narcissistic bedtime stories... (positioning of materiality as either a given or a mere effect of human agency)
(*)matter: substance in its intra-active becoming
(*)performativity: iterative intra-activity
“I'm trying to complicate the locatability of human identity as a here and now, as an enclosed and finished product[/project]” ~ “perspective essentialism”
...nature performs itself differently
(Kirby)
[Barad:] **onto-epistem-ology**: the study of practices of knowing in being
“epistemology =/= ontology” is a reverberation of a metaphysics that assumes (inherent differences:) “human =/= nonhuman,” “subject =/= object,” “mind =/= body,” “matter =/= discourse”...
...................................
what kind of alphabetico-numerical forefinger can i build that can press a schizophrenic partial systematizing of ajayeb?
...................................
so much (in Iran's literature) still awaits reflection and comprehension (-without comprehensiveness please!)
...................................
...archeology of dying in our civilization
(archeology of our dying civilization)
...................................
Aristotle's narrative: catharsis of emotions --> first arousing pity and fear and then clearing them away
theories of narrative:
•formalist theories (Russian)
•dialogical theories (Bakhtinian)
•New Critical theories
•Chicago school, or neo-Aristotlian theories
•psychoanalytic theories (Freud, Kenneth Burke, Lacan, N. Abraham)
•hermeneutic and phenomenological theories
•structuralist, semiotic, and tropological theories
•Marxist and sociological theories
•reader-response theories
•poststructuralist and deconstructionist theories (Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man)
•feminist theories (Martha Kenney, Haraway, Stengers, Hayward)
•
•
structuralist: that there are typical formal elements or “deep structures” to narratives --> complex performative dimension between the telling of stories and what is told in them
(Paul de Man:) “The paradigm for all texts consists of a figure (or a system of figures) and its deconstruction. But since this model cannot be closed off by a final reading, it engenders, in its turn, a supplementary figural superposition which narrates the unreadability of the prior narration.”
the analytic experience has a narrative character? psychoanalytic dialogue ‘uncovers’ a [...]
(86)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%18.7[...](in Iran's literature) still awaits reflection and comprehension (-without comprehensiveness please!)
...................................
...archeology of dying in our civilization
(archeology of our dying civilization)
...................................
Aristotle's narrative: catharsis of emotions --> first arousing pity and fear and then clearing them away
theories of narrative:
•formalist theories (Russian)
•dialogical theories (Bakhtinian)
•New Critical theories
•Chicago school, or neo-Aristotlian theories
•psychoanalytic theories (Freud, Kenneth Burke, Lacan, N. Abraham)
•hermeneutic and phenomenological theories
•structuralist, semiotic, and tropological theories
•Marxist and sociological theories
•reader-response theories
•poststructuralist and deconstructionist theories (Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man)
•feminist theories (Martha Kenney, Haraway, Stengers, Hayward)
/>
•
•
structuralist: that there are typical formal elements or “deep structures” to narratives --> complex performative dimension between the telling of stories and what is told in them
(Paul de Man:) “The paradigm for all texts consists of a figure (or a system of figures) and its deconstruction. But since this model cannot be closed off by a final reading, it engenders, in its turn, a supplementary figural superposition which narrates the unreadability of the prior narration.”
the analytic experience has a narrative character? psychoanalytic dialogue ‘uncovers’ a certain kind of narrative discontinuity maintained in the analysand's efforts
--> meaningful narrative sequences,
and, recaptured memory : a rhetorical product
...................................
-the dominance of the narrative ‘The Origin’ [Ursprung] when we tell nature story, when we call in nature
-the dominance of the narrative ‘The Zoom’ when we tn we tell nature story, (‘The Reveal’ story)
-
ok, it is 06.03.2017, i need to set up a track of commentary, a monogamous relation with ajayeb
and unload the myth that i am going to do something new:
1st: send super-ego away and cleared out --> no judgment
2nd: call the unengaged secretary to just write
3rd: throw some sort of sequencing on the page
4th: call the clean-up agent
5th: at some point super-ego comes and checks it out
6th: negotiation with the super-ego
(Avital,) start modest and small, listening to my passion, collects some texts or passages that hold this or that motif that i like or am concerned with, go in there and do a rhetorical reading, see what is going on in the language, allow myself be instructed and taught.
7th: wrap around the work, something of an *infomercial,* there i can get a little ego in there, bring myself to the table an[...]
(87)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%18.8[...]
-stories that focus on composition rather than intrusion
-stories that focus on ongoingness rather than game-over
(Haraway > Stengers > Latour > Margulis) Gaia, to name complex nonlinear couplings between processes that compose and sustain entwined but nonadditive subsystems as a partially cohering systemic whole
planet-transforming, historically situated, new-enough, worlding relations
(systematic stories are linked) metabolisms, articulations, coproductions
(they must also be) relational, sympoietic, consequential
myth-systems (are set-ups)
(a deadly one: “Man + Tool ==> history”)
names =/= faces (~ morphs of the same)
a thousand names of something else
(what Haraway is naming with) compound-eyed insectile and many-armed optics
winged domains
bird-bodies
(Haraway's spider and) my ajayeb's snake: tasks of thinking, figuring, and storytelling
--✕--> heady facial representation; [Luisa also dislikes this]
•figure of snake (circular serpent) is ajayeb Persian sf worlding, has ties with the Greek Chthonis (“of the earth,”) is at the same time the image of the continuity of life and the abyssal moral (eating your end, no gag reflex)-->{Gildas Hamel: “the abyssal and elemental forces before they were astralized by chief gods and their tame committees"}
“many critters acoss taxa” (juju جوجو + rade رده)
(I dispute Haraway's notion of “sacred.” popular religion is at many times populated by earthly figures alongside many astralized destructive finitudes.)
Haraway's urgently needed Chthulucene story
[Miyazaki's] biodiverse terra [God flips out] into something very slimy, like any overstressed complex adaptive system at the end of its abilities to absorb insult after insult. (Haraway's wording)
[...]
(88)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%19.3[...]br />
myth-systems (are set-ups)
(a deadly one: “Man + Tool ==> history”)
names =/= faces (~ morphs of the same)
a thousand names of something else
(what Haraway is naming with) compound-eyed insectile and many-armed optics
winged domains
bird-bodies
(Haraway's spider and) my ajayeb's snake: tasks of thinking, figuring, and storytelling
--✕--> heady facial representation; [Luisa also dislikes this]
•figure of snake (circular serpent) is ajayeb Persian sf worlding, has ties with the Greek Chthonis (“of the earth,”) is at the same time the image of the continuity of life and the abyssal moral (eating your end, no gag reflex)-->{Gildas Hamel: “the abyssal and elemental forces before they were astralized by chief gods and their tame committees"}
“many critters acoss taxa” (juju جوجو + rade رده)
(I dispute Haraway's notion of “sacred.” popular religion is at many times populated by earthly figures alongside many astralized destructive finitudes.)
Haraway's urgently needed Chthulucene story
[Miyazaki's] biodiverse terra [God flips out] into something very slimy, like any overstressed complex adaptive system at the end of its abilities to absorb insult after insult. (Haraway's wording)
(yes yes we are all ultimately connected to one another,) but the specificity and proximity of connections matters
(Haraway + Latour's) ‘things’ are:
1- collection of entities
2- hard to classify, unsortable, (and probably with bad smell)
Anthropos =/= rich generative home of a multispecies Earth
“looks up at what he sees.”
...................................
ʿAjā'ib al-makhlūqāt wa gharā'ib al-mawjūdāt
Ajayeb al-makhlughat wa gharayeb al-mojudat (عجائب المخلوقات ,عجایب المخلوقات) in short: Ajayeb, is a suggestive cognitive work, full of strange linguistic pollutants, interesting agencies and animations, and like most of the medieval sciences and knowledge systems that were busy with the transformation of agencies it collapses “lists” and “narratives.” In Ajayeb each animal is a consensual hallucination device (~ each animal is a way of knowing the world); some pre-organic, inter-corporal species, with trans-ontological intentionalities.
...................................
infrastructure: piled-upon assemblages within which there are many discontinuities but also connections, some deliberative, some inadvertent. (Katie King)
--> “flexible knowledges”
...................................
آب حیوان {how could I know that Vladimir (in his performance for Lilia's apass score) was not (in)sourcing the Holy Waters, abe heyvan or vozu? his sweat was the ooze of a modern and secular labor. he was using a profane water?}
حیوان خ[...]
(92)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%19.4[...]critters acoss taxa” (juju جوجو + rade رده)
(I dispute Haraway's notion of “sacred.” popular religion is at many times populated by earthly figures alongside many astralized destructive finitudes.)
Haraway's urgently needed Chthulucene story
[Miyazaki's] biodiverse terra [God flips out] into something very slimy, like any overstressed complex adaptive system at the end of its abilities to absorb insult after insult. (Haraway's wording)
(yes yes we are all ultimately connected to one another,) but the specificity and proximity of connections matters
(Haraway + Latour's) ‘things’ are:
1- collection of entities
2- hard to classify, unsortable, (and probably with bad smell)
Anthropos =/= rich generative home of a multispecies Earth
“looks up at what he sees.”
...................................
ʿAjā'ib al-makhlūqāt wa gharā'ib al-mawjūdāt
Ajayeb al-makhlughat wa gharayeb al-mojudat (عجائب المخلوقات ,عجایب المخلوقات) in short: Ajayeb, is a suggestive cognitive work, full of strange linguistic pollutants, interesting agencies and animations, and like most of the medieval sciences and knowledge systems that were busy with the transformation of agencies it collapses “lists” and “narratives.” In Ajayeb each animal is a consensual hallucination device (~ each animal is a way of knowing the world); some pre-organic, inter-corporal species, with trans-ontological intentionalities.
...................................
infrastructure: piled-upon assemblages within which there are many discontinuities but also connections, some deliberative, some inadvertent. (Katie King)
--> “flexible knowledges”
...................................
آب حیوان {how could I know that Vladimir (in his performance for Lilia's apass score) was not (in)sourcing the Holy Waters, abe heyvan or vor vozu? his sweat was the ooze of a modern and secular labor. he was using a profane water?}
حیوان خوران جهان heyvan khorane jahan
زیرکان کهن kohan zirak
حجابی که ظلمات شد نام او روان آب حیوان از آرام او (Zolmat & abe heyvan)
...................................
#my work in apass is about:
•bestiary: archaeological anthropology of human-animal practices
•rhetoric: scaling, modeling, figuring out fields of practices
•ontology: circumscribe, address, or deal with the processes of ontological transformations
•storytelling: mobilizing different kinds of mental resources and literacies
•performance: what it would be to know together
•sociality: that which joins categorically separate mode of agencies
•
#my findings/questions, so far:
•animal subjectivity ~=? human imagination
•bestiary ~=? affect + episteme
[...]
(93)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%19.4[...]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 project which eventually hopes to have something to say about that hybrid “thing”*** ...with some despised members of a particular time period (--> switching those who count as major or minor characters), promises to make it possible to build in *a range of genders (not just t[...]
(94)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%19.9[...]ne addressed
-simplicity, economy, and plainness; to reject all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style
preferring language of artisans, countrymen, merchants, of wits and scholars
How sin is strengthened 1657
Milk for babes 1661
A message from the spirit of truth 1658
realized eschatology
انا الحق, an-al-hagh
(Damrosch:) the performance of the sign thus entailed a doubly negative aspect: in the person exhibiting it, a conviction of fulfilling a divine mandate in opposition to personal self-interest; and in those who witnessed it, an offense to ordinary social standards that actually served to authenticate it.
*the function of the sign was to bear prophetic witness rather than to get practical results; it fulfilled its purpose simply by being performed*
#shath, shathiat ==> tazkirat, --->{ what the saints of Tasavof (reported by Attar-{his “virtual witnessing” of “awliya” اولیا as a “realized"}, Quakers [as illegal nonconformist sect]) put together was their own writing technology infrastructure** ==> **routinization of charisma** <-- organizational structure ["advices and queries” نفحات الانس nafahat ~-> rationalized systematic intellectualizations]}
pattern of suffering that the believer literally and personally relives
(is Tasavof developed Christian modality of sacrifice? is *passivity imported from elsewhere in Islam*?)
a protagonist, like San'an, like an actor in a mystery play, enacting in a deliberately challenging form, internalized and lived as a potent sign
(Bechwith:) rendered performance of religious materials both practically impossible and conceptually unthinkable
+ exercises their discipline of the senses and the imagination
*undisciplined loss of control in enthusiasm and in this extravagant example*
(stories of) a small group of powerful and vocal actors
***to attend to the local practices of inclusion and exclusion through which some speak and others are spoken for, some act and others are acted upon***
(#ontology)
gentlemanly practices --> (ask) what that legitimacy consisted in and how far it extended?
(wellborn connoisseurs of the new science)
leave the work tacit, and it fades into the wallpaper
•(Leigh Star's) ethnography of infrastructure
•(Bowker's) infra-structural inversion
•(Katie King's) ecology of writing technologies: massive, large-scale infrastructure in dynamic motion, bits changing at differential rates across time, made up of layered sub-systems complexity interconnected and animated by distributed agencies, including people, skills, devices and social powers.
the translation between ([my] deliberately) presentist (meta-)language (of cybernetic systems) and various loc[...]
(95)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20.1[...]odality of sacrifice? is *passivity imported from elsewhere in Islam*?)
a protagonist, like San'an, like an actor in a mystery play, enacting in a deliberately challenging form, internalized and lived as a potent sign
(Bechwith:) rendered performance of religious materials both practically impossible and conceptually unthinkable
+ exercises their discipline of the senses and the imagination
*undisciplined loss of control in enthusiasm and in this extravagant example*
(stories of) a small group of powerful and vocal actors
***to attend to the local practices of inclusion and exclusion through which some speak and others are spoken for, some act and others are acted upon***
(#ontology)
gentlemanly practices --> (ask) what that legitimacy consisted in and how far it extended?
(wellborn connoisseurs of the new science)
leave the work tacit, and it fades into the wallpaper
>
•(Leigh Star's) ethnography of infrastructure
•(Bowker's) infra-structural inversion
•(Katie King's) ecology of writing technologies: massive, large-scale infrastructure in dynamic motion, bits changing at differential rates across time, made up of layered sub-systems complexity interconnected and animated by distributed agencies, including people, skills, devices and social powers.
the translation between ([my] deliberately) presentist (meta-)language (of cybernetic systems) and various local languages helps *to rescale particular objects of study*
(my research: “social studies of”) studying animal subjectivity --(changes the way)--> studying infrastructures --requires--> one to think (explicitly) about scale and range --> boundaries/connections between one system and another --(what counts as)--> working sub-systems and various essential forms of “black-boxing” (that describe and use these infrastructures)
-Katie King's accounts of bs of black-boxing (that might matter in conversations about) 17th century writing technologies:
◦reification: strategic metonymic reduction, kenaye کنایه
◦enthusiasm: essentializing identities or ideas
◦members (of Royal Society): naturalizing ranges of inclusion and exclusion
◦*witnessing* rescales the infrastructure. the “work of witnessing” asserts that rhetoic as an element of witnessing is not a thing, not even a performance, but already itself a complex set of infrastructural systems with animating practices and agencies
...readers might submit to the illusion of having effectively witnessed an experiment themselves
*virtual witnessing realized an “enactment” in words*
black-boxing is totally neccessary to use/study infrastructures, they produce the “artifactual richness” [= a kind of archaeological layering of artifacts acquired in bits and pieces over time--(Lucy Suchman)] of systems
*black-bo[...]
(96)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20.2[...]s changing at differential rates across time, made up of layered sub-systems complexity interconnected and animated by distributed agencies, including people, skills, devices and social powers.
the translation between ([my] deliberately) presentist (meta-)language (of cybernetic systems) and various local languages helps *to rescale particular objects of study*
(my research: “social studies of”) studying animal subjectivity --(changes the way)--> studying infrastructures --requires--> one to think (explicitly) about scale and range --> boundaries/connections between one system and another --(what counts as)--> working sub-systems and various essential forms of “black-boxing” (that describe and use these infrastructures)
-Katie King's accounts of black-boxing (that might matter in conversations about) 17th century writing technologies:
◦reification: strategic metonymic reduction, kenaye کنایه
◦enthusiasm: essentializing identities or ideas
◾members (of Royal Society): naturalizing ranges of inclusion and exclusion
◦*witnessing* rescales the infrastructure. the “work of witnessing” asserts that rhetoic as an element of witnessing is not a thing, not even a performance, but already itself a complex set of infrastructural systems with animating practices and agencies
...readers might submit to the illusion of having effectively witnessed an experiment themselves
*virtual witnessing realized an “enactment” in words*
black-boxing is totally neccessary to use/study infrastructures, they produce the “artifactual richness” [= a kind of archaeological layering of artifacts acquired in bits and pieces over time--(Lucy Suchman)] of systems
*black-boxing makes elegant some elements of the system/s differentially*
each author does it:
•Shapin black-boxing his range of systems to its complexity and elegance
•Haraway appropriating the idea of modest witness for h for her own feminist purpose
•
three technologies for fact-making (that Shapin and Schaffer name):
1. material
2. literary
3. social
Adrian Johns in The Nature of The Book: particular booksellers could indeed use their *stewardship* of such heterogeneous spaces to further political ideals and interests. behind the scenes and up the stairs, an interested London bookseller became a significant actor in cultural events.
nominal agency
actual person
principle architect
systems move in space, time, and process
some archaeological structures (that one uncover) are stable, some in motion, some evolving, some decaying --> *“there is no way of ever getting access to the past except through classification systems of one sort or another”* (at best) the past could be reordered to better reflect multiple constituencies now and then. (Bowker + Leigh Star)
(my[...]
(100)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20.2[...]nfrastructural systems with animating practices and agencies
...readers might submit to the illusion of having effectively witnessed an experiment themselves
*virtual witnessing realized an “enactment” in words*
black-boxing is totally neccessary to use/study infrastructures, they produce the “artifactual richness” [= a kind of archaeological layering of artifacts acquired in bits and pieces over time--(Lucy Suchman)] of systems
*black-boxing makes elegant some elements of the system/s differentially*
each author does it:
•Shapin black-boxing his range of systems to its complexity and elegance
•Haraway appropriating the idea of modest witness for her own feminist purpose
•
three technologies for fact-making (that Shapin and Schaffer name):
1. material
2. literary
3. social
Adrian Johns in The Nature of The Book: particular booksellers could indeed use their *stewardship* of such heterogeneous spaces to further political ideals and interests. behind the scenes and up the stairs, an interested London bookseller became a significant actor in cultural events.
nominal agency
actual person
principle architect
systems move in space, time, and process
some archaeological structures (that one uncover) are stable, some in motion, some evolving, some decaying --> *“there is no way of ever getting access to the past except through classification systems of one sort or another”* (at best) the past could be reordered to better reflect multiple constituencies now and then. (Bowker + Leigh Star)
(my ajayeb research: “epistemic virtues” [or powers] of the 12th century encyclopedic wonder-books,) “epistemological decorum” --> (to capture) “truth-making practices in action” (Shapin)
==> (my commitment to ajayeb:) engendering reflection on the nature of and function of categorization itself
a wonderful bit of meta-language
The Exhausted Receiver
Margaret Cavendish description of a new world, called the Blazing World, her own brand of natural philosophy under the guise of a romance... science for ladies{
1- enthusiasm ==> new science
2- study of natural philosophy ==> cardinal virtues of ladies, modesty and religious reverence
3- leisure activity, appropriate pasttime
*she participated in discussions central to her life and times* (am i participating in discussions central to my life and times?!)
Cavendish self-consciously produced herself as a fantastic and singular... (--> is that what i wish to produce?)
-Cavendish strangely shared with Quaker women an experimental life of proliferating genders, of dress, of personhood, og agency, of writing, of personae, but not of this *enabling collectivity*
hermaphroditical view of things: partly arti[...]
(104)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20.3[...]e differential materializations
perhaps that arm that got detached from you, could have a chance of not becoming a jettison phantom limb forever haunting the missing amputated ‘you,’ rather, a part of “companion species being helping out”? --> *connectivity does not require physical contiguity* (@Luisa's string “theory”)
[*phantom limb* (a concept every theorist/artist should take seriously), in Descartes: used as an illustration of the deception to which the inner senses are prone.
“fossil images,” persistence of pathological excitation to the peripheral nerves. (the condition of ‘amputees’ for the one who re-members and builds archives for his phantasmatically lost limb) *imaginary loss of a penis* --> a “tool” for a recovery of what was “always already” missing --> Freud: libidinal memorial to the lost limb (@Elen's kind of mourning for preoedipal (~= precastrated) body, and her (erroneous) localization of it on the motorbike)
Grosz: “It is only through controlled use of the phantom that the artificial limb can (gradually) take the place of the lost limb”
#body image]
ecologies of reflection and diffraction --> resolution of nature
[*]diffraction: an effect that limits the ability of a lens (or a system of lenses) *to resolve an image*
•(to evolve a creative tension,) a trade-off, between the resolution of detail and diffraction effects, between geometrical and physical optics
ajayeb's ecologies mixed (less of) reflection and (much more of) diffraction, are taken from a yet not detachments of the experience of phenomena and the apparatuses of its description, of percepts and affects
#my findings of composites of ajayeb:
•animals varying number of legs --?--> animal + movement
•fantastic creatures --?--> animal + environment + affect
•fable poetics --?--> animal + apparatus of description
•tentative citationality [other name of “rumor”?] --?--> nonhuman + human relational histories
•remembering is an extremely creative (& imaginative) practice
•
--> ongoing, open-ended articulation of the world (<-- my work on ajayeb)
--> these are the diffraction patterns in ajayeb that are (artistically, politically, ethnically) significant for me (?)
--> these are instances of resistance against biomimesis in ajayeb (?) [biomimesis is involved with mirroring, imitation, or reflection, and other tropes of “sameness"] =/= trans-materialities of the creatures of the world, they transgress the sacrosanct divides between techne and episteme
(many creatures of our shared world have) evolved in intra-action with their environment, and old bestiaries, such as ajayeb, critically inhabit a mode of description and affect situated within the intra-activity of technologies of writing and perception
•the creatures of the mud know better not to get caught up in a “geometrical [...]
(106)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20.8[...]ures of the mud know better not to get caught up in a “geometrical optics of knowing”
we are seeking a different genus of knowing =/= mediating machine, inscription devices, lenses, panopticons, and various other epistemological tools that many science studies and cultural studies scholars fancy. (is that also what Marialena fancies? her list of tools)
[*]intelligibility: an ontological performance of the world in its ongoing articulation
not a specifically human capacity, intelligibility does not require an (usually human) inttelective agent
the problem with design is that designers (as well as scientists and engineers) are busy with building ‘enhanced communication networks’ and principles of ‘usefulness’, in the way they relate to the “forms” of nature
*connections and commitments (come together)*
the copyright symbol © should be a sign not of the right to copy but, if anything, of the responsibilities entailed in producing differential materialization (for whom and at what costs?)*
Barad ♥
(brittlestar, the plant in my room, ajayeb's creatures,) ...their being is a flexible distributed growing and regenerating multi-oriented shape-shifting topologically variant dynamical system of diffraction gratings
(rhetoric of) re-veiling, which provokes the seeming need for a revealing of nature
entanglement --> inseparability --> spatially separated particles in an entangled state do not have separate identities
there is no epmirical evidence of such a disjunction ontologies at a particular scale, “micro-world” and “macro-world”
who insists on “quarantining quantum queerness”?
quarantining scale and time
quarantining Sadra to “his” time, or ajayeb to an older another temporality, and therefore irrelevant for us “today”
[*]scale: intra-actively (re)configured in the ongoing intra-active becoming on space-time-mattering
...................................
Khezr and San'an, the most repeated points of reference in tasavof
like you, Hafez, full of struggle, sensation, love,
our resistance and breakdance
(Mehran Rad:) Hafez preferences on Farsi over Arabic:
Deir دیر / Some'e صومعه
Pir پیر / Sheikh شیخ
Parsa پارسا / Zahed زاهد
Parishan پریشان / Tafraghe تفرقه
moshtaghe bandegi مشتاق بندگی
(~? the advanced level of) ‘wannabe slave’
...................................
the dangerous suffixial worlders, prehensile adjective-builder, natural-inhabitant-makers of “-ian” or “-i” or “-isch” to the name of a nation/country ==> Iranian, Afgani, etc. --> makes subjects
in the case of the podcast https://soundcloud.com/norient/afghanistan-sucht-seine-musikalische-identitat-podcast listen to the way th[...]
(107)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20.9[...]ts that were) a thing sensed with certainty (yet made up of a shifting, edgy composite)
[a sentient shadow called jinn, God, darkness of a pit, a cycle, etc.]
--or--> made scenic *as a site of a world's potential* (= ajayeb)
--the scene of a thing's demise
an edgy irruptive event
rules and edges are OK when separate, but together, a bad combination
(Karin + Sina + Hanno) we were humans together
--we adjust ourselves to the done deal that things happen--
(we find ourselve being) “from here” in a world made intimate through forgiveness, denial, detachment flowing in after a surge of something bad--a close call [Stewart]
*what are ajayeb's turns (and turn backs) to the inarticulate real?
hallucinogenically down-to-earth (Aela)
what are ajayeb's state of emergent expressivity [today]? (that tries to guess and describe ‘what is happening’) **** things that happen are incitements to form ****
--> intensities become expressive --> an خونسرد impassive corporeality --> intensities pass from body to body --{
•human bodies
•animal bodies
•machine bodies
•bodies of thought
•ecosystems
•visceralities and noumena [a thing in itself, as distinguished from a phenomenon] spread out across a vast atmospheric field
sediments of ajayeb:
•obvious
•much remarked
•cryptic --> favored
•situationally precise
how ajayeb is an improvisatory conceptuality?
does ajayeb-writing takes place in singularity? (because every worlding is singular and precise ==> the pleasure of its recognition)
#my project in apass has been a practice of writing that is an experiment in attuning to ajayeb's tune
ajayeb reports of:
•affect that has become native***, attaching to bodies and socialities, to an ethos***
with ajayeb (with Stewart) i am learning:
•to approach the tactile compositionality of things
•de-dramatization of academic thought
•to approach the thing that throws itself together *slowly and enigmatically*--> #andakhtan, andaze
•a descriptive detour (with Latour)
•a lyrical evocation (with Stewart)
•a method of awkwardly approaching an object by attuning to it as a thing of *promise and contact* (with Berlant)
•
concept: that which attunes itself to things coming into form; is both abstract & concrete; actual & unfolding
highly fractured stone of a collective intensity (--> Iran, and most other places)
______________
ajayeb was/is very much committed to the concrete: that means committed to speculation and curiosity (and not the demystification and uncovering truths that support a well-known picture of the world) (it was o[...]
(108)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%21.6[...]y the) past --endures-in--> assemblage
interpretive endeavors <--characterize-- extension of the meaning of the social
•ontology as a new interpretive tool
•additive (=/= reconstructive)
Alberti's approach (in ontological equivalence of bodies and pots in anthropomorphic ceramics from northwest Argentina...):
social ontology --> reconstruct the ontologies of past societies [<~~ my work on ajayeb]
ontological archaeology's background in feminism, queer, and phenomenological
approaches ==> interest in the body
influence of the animal turn in archaeology
nonanthropocentric zoological studies
(nomenological explorations of animal representations in Attar and tasavof)
what kinds of beings existed within the social universe of pre-Columbian Andean peoples
(renovated concept of) animism: ethnographic meta-analogy for past ontologies --> models of relationality for archaeologists to interpret material patterning in the archaeological record
investigations of personhood
(building toward a) taxonomy of past ontologies --✕--> ontological critique
(Alberti >) Viveiros de Castro's project: to systemize amerindian thought into a metaphysics such that it can have a reciprocal effect on anthropological thought and “naturalist” or Western metaphysics
ontological realism ==>{
new language attempt to imagine the complex topology of relational realities:
•Latour --> network: things exists as a consequence of the strength of their articulation
•Ingold --> meshwork =/= Aristotelian hylomorphism
•Barad --> entanglement = Quantum physics + queer theory ==> properties belong to the phenomena in question =/= inherent to things
•DeLanda --> assemblage: how humans + nonhumans produced communities that changed in composition and through time in neolithic and bronze age
assemblage --replace--> context
assemblage = phenomena --> temporary, contingent, unbounded
Latourian critique of categories =/= beyond human correlationalism
pluralizing ontology ==> charges of relativism <-- ‘objective knowledge =/= contingent foundations’ }--> nonrepresentational approach =/= over interpretation, abstraction
archeology operates by seeking strong and effective articulations between theories, apparatuses, material remains
ontological realism (=/= naturalism, constructivist) --> objectivity and truth are contingent, but also demonstrable and robust
@Chloe
material record: an expression of **how past gathers in the present** (=/= fragmentary evidence of history <-- forensic approach)
past continuously unfolding and therefore changing
Alberi --> (social) o[...]
(109)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.2[...]pretation, abstraction
archeology operates by seeking strong and effective articulations between theories, apparatuses, material remains
ontological realism (=/= naturalism, constructivist) --> objectivity and truth are contingent, but also demonstrable and robust
@Chloe
material record: an expression of **how past gathers in the present** (=/= fragmentary evidence of history <-- forensic approach)
past continuously unfolding and therefore changing
Alberi --> (social) ontology: a new interpretive tool
additive work (=/= reconstructive)
archeological accounts of other's ontologies
animal turn in archeology --> nonanthropocentric zoological studies
Willerselv
Viveiros de Castro
Amazona --> animism (more than any other anthropological material) has provided modes of relationality to archeologists to interpret material patterning in archeological records --> [*]animism: an ethnographic meta-analogy for past ontologies
•blurring between nature and culture
•relationship with other-than-human agencies (animal, spirit, artifact)
==✕==> ontological critique
Viveiros de Castro --> systemize amerindian thought into a metaphysics ==> to have an reciprocal effect on anthropological thought (western naturalist metaphysics)
reference to a “common world”
new animism ==> ontology becomes another name for culture
Alebrti outlining:
•anthropological project that considers ontology as a critical question productive of conceptual engagement
•work of archeologists who theorize and practice archeology on the basis of indigenous theories
}--> where new animists turn to animism for a source of analogies, critical ontology turns to animism for a source of theory
perspectivism: multiple natures (worlds) + singular culture (way of knowing those worlds) [~ working from *commonality* rather than *alterity*] --> a theoretical bomb =/= analogies based on ethnographic content
spirits experienced as diminutive yet brilliantly decorated or huge and grotesque
the more intense ==> the more body it is
(the promise of thinking through) [*]thing: a nonspecified ontological category that can be “filled” through ethnographic observation that is designed to allow ontological alterity to inform its content
recursive anthropology --> alterity: a function of the divergence between ethnographic materials and the assumptions the analyst brings to them
(if) ontology: what is ==> alterity: part of what others say ‘what is’ that does not make sense to us
(the danger of) a new metaontological orthodoxy becoming a immutable metaphysic
archeological alterity: things that do not make sense o[...]
(110)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.2[...]nsequence of sleight of hand
•he is dibbling at, performing being an archeologist
•‘play at’ archeology
=/= Simon Callery
Alberti > Russell
transform archeology from metaphor to allegory --play--> archeology-as-aesthetics through performance [--> risk of undermining and reinforcing art as a subjective practice concerned with only aesthetics and affective]
craft: a model for careful practices and knowing the world =/= artwork: a model for how to break out of disciplinary frames and how to think of the ontology of archeological things [--> what Sennett calls epistemic breaking]
questions for the art:
•what effect is produced?
•how does this effect wrench from its materiality what has not been perceived or sensed before?
--> for archeology same question, from the material that remain from the past in the present
(the traditional task of art:)
•defamiliarization: to estrange our common consciousness and sensations of the world
•place of immanence: to project the coming of something materially new that is latent in our current reality. to *treat facts as events* that are about to come into being
•art is non-conceptual : impacting the nervous system without conceptual mediation --> sensations are monumentalized in the artwork for the future
•
...to treat the material of the past as anticipating something new
(my research and work on bestiary:)
•how can we produce new works that challenge us to think and experience archeological things (ajayeb) in new ways without resort to explanation or interpretation through a process of disarticulation, repurposing, and disruption of archeological artworks with a political intent in mind? (interpretive framework)
•how to allow ajayeb to continue to operate effectively on us?
both affective and historical force (of ajayeb)
art engenders material becomings (classical definition)
art engenders imaginative becomings
learning from archeology: to be pre-conceptual : the process of craft, to grasp how concepts make their way into things
undisciplinary space (instead of transdisciplinary)
disarticulation: repurposing and disruption of archeological artworks with a political intent in mind
--> cannot escape the anecdotal when it comes to interpretation --> artifacts (for example a neolithic Balkon clay figurine) become symbols for social position ~= allegorizing (=/= speculation)
historical energy (force) of things = something of the past that endures in them
(old and unhelpful definition of) art: impacting nervous system without conceptual mediation (directly impact living bodies) --engender--> material becomings ["art = giving birth"]
--Alberti--> art (and anthropology) need[...]
(111)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.5[...]work on bestiary:)
•how can we produce new works that challenge us to think and experience archeological things (ajayeb) in new ways without resort to explanation or interpretation through a process of disarticulation, repurposing, and disruption of archeological artworks with a political intent in mind? (interpretive framework)
•how to allow ajayeb to continue to operate effectively on us?
both affective and historical force (of ajayeb)
art engenders material becomings (classical definition)
art engenders imaginative becomings
learning from archeology: to be pre-conceptual : the process of craft, to grasp how concepts make their way into things
undisciplinary space (instead of transdisciplinary)
disarticulation: repurposing and disruption of archeological artworks with a political intent in mind
--> cannot escape the anecdotal when it comes to interpretation --> artifacts (for example a neolithic Balkon clay figurine) become symbols for social position ~= allegorizing (=/= speculation)
historical energy (force) of things = something of the past that endures in them
(old and unhelpful definition of) art: impacting nervous system without conceptual mediation (directly impact living bodies) --engender--> material becomings ["art = giving birth"]
--Alberti--> art (and anthropology) need the pre-conceptual: the process of craft (to grasp how concepts make their way into things)
[*]concept: fragment of past world
maker + material ==emerge==> concept
-in artistic research @apass are we dealing with the simulacra of knowledge?
understanding the potters (and artists) who made the ceramics as crafters = understanding them as *intimately connected with a particular world* <-- knowledge of which came through skilled material practice
#feedback
-how does it apply to digital relations?
•practiced caressing of hand over clay forms (~ handling, nurturance) ==> zoomorphic, anthropomorphic bodies (Ingold call it anthropogenic)
•digital interface CG ==> ?
•
-how to read or confront ajayeb bestiary artifacts and think of them as *taking on something of the pre-conceptual labour that went into them*? --> (?how can it) provoke an art-like response [<=~ sleepwalking: no ontological difference between then and now ==> you are confronted with a raw material of affect and concept =/= past artifacts as vehicle for complex belief systems] }==drive==>
•new sensorial experience
•new conceptual work
---> go to description, Stewart
coalescing of language & concept & ...
[*]drawing: (the effect of being) harassed by reality
to be harassed by ajayeb past people animals (struggling in th[...]
(112)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.6[...]s) --engender--> material becomings ["art = giving birth"]
--Alberti--> art (and anthropology) need the pre-conceptual: the process of craft (to grasp how concepts make their way into things)
[*]concept: fragment of past world
maker + material ==emerge==> concept
-in artistic research @apass are we dealing with the simulacra of knowledge?
understanding the potters (and artists) who made the ceramics as crafters = understanding them as *intimately connected with a particular world* <-- knowledge of which came through skilled material practice
#feedback
-how does it apply to digital relations?
•practiced caressing of hand over clay forms (~ handling, nurturance) ==> zoomorphic, anthropomorphic bodies (Ingold call it anthropogenic)
•digital interface CG ==> ?
•
-how to read or confront ajayeb bestiary artifacts and think of them as *taking on something of the pre-conceptual labour that went into them*? --> (?how can it) provoke an art-like response [<=~ sleepwalking: no ontological difference between then and now ==> you are confronted with a raw material of affect and concept =/= past artifacts as vehicle for complex belief systems] }==drive==>
•new sensorial experience
•new conceptual work
---> go to description, Stewart
coalescing of language & concept & ...
[*]drawing: (the effect of being) harassed by reality
to be harassed by ajayeb past people animals (struggling in their reality)
---> go to haunted, possession
[*]art: risk of something new
archeology --> intimate knowledge of materials (--> appealing to art, crafter attune to their material)
my lecture-performances = exploring how to make my knowledge present (to myself so it has a chance to be reconsidered) and how things (ajayeb past bestiary telegram animal) affect me and to *allow them to engender their own concepts and meanings*
...................................
(modern western) human: composed of cultural clothing that hides and controls an essentially animal nature =/= (amazonian) animals have a human sociocultural inner aspect that is “disguised” by an ostensibly bestial bodily form -->{ [subjective particularity of spirit and meaning ==>]*multinatural =/= multicultural*[<== objective universality of body and substance] }
-Viveiros de Castro's dichotomous argument leaves out other modes of knowing, those that i care and haunt for (and i am claimed by them) in specific mystic muslim theology and eastern bestiary (---> go to Marks)
Amerindian “people” : spiritual unity and a corporeal diversity
possessing a soul ==> having a point of view ==> being a subject
==> event = action
(action =/= ex[...]
(113)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.6[...]ferences (seen as natural, given, inescapable ==>) as *moral*
the ‘content’ as well as the soicla function of science --> renderd utopian: (that means) we leave this central, legitimating body of skill and knowledge to undermine our efforts
[we must fight with all our power against utopian(~= dystopian) stories of science ~-> accepting that there are natural objects (bodies) separate from social relations] --> (we must refuse) the damaging distinction between pure and applied science & double ideology of firm scientific objectivity and mere personal subjectivity
we have granted science the role of a *fetish*: an object human beings make only to forget their role in creating it
...agreeing that “nature” is our enemy and that we must control our “natural” bodies (by techniques given us by biomedical science) at all costs to enter the hallowed kingdom of the cultural body politic as defined by liberal (and radical) theories of political economy
[a traditional reduction of the body:] Freud --> (a theory of body politics:) “culture in the cost of sex” [<-- no!] : human social developement = progressive domination of nature (particularly of human sexual energies) --> *sex as danger and as nature* are central to Freud's system
*** Freud (, Brown, and Firestone) are useful tools in a dissection of the theories of the political and physiological organs of the body politic because they all begin their explanations with sexuality, add a dynamic of culturla repression, and then attempt to liberate again the personal and collective body
civilization = body politic
(in iran:)
personal body =/= social body }--> both not natural
(a fundamental human condition:) through labor, we make ourselves individually and collectively in a constant interaction with all that has not yet been humanized ♥
[animal body politic]
[the science of animal]
animal sociology (in fables since millennia [--> Kelile Demne stories of natural basis of cultural cooperation and competition]):
•construction of oppressive theories of the body political
•science of animal groups
•a tool in the reproduction of world
•enhancing material power
*animals* (played an importan role in)
•the project of human engineering: the project of design and management of human material for efficient, rational functioning in a scientifically ordered society (or in belief communities)
--> animals were/are:
1- plastic raw material of knowledge (subject to exact laboratory discipline)
2- having special status as natural objects that can show people their origin [--> Attenborough's civilizer films], and therefore their prerational, premanagement, precultural essence
***animal societies have been extensively employed in rationalization and naturalization of the oppressive orders [...]
(114)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%24.3[...] racila, and individual qualities were fundamentally tied to the central index of intelligence
#merchant
*entrepreneur in primate studies* --> (merchant seeing himself) working to foster a rational society based on science and preserved from old ignorance
[transformation of human sex into a scientific problem]
-trading sex for “privilege”:
primate intelligence --allowed--> sexual states --stimulate--> the beginnings of human concepts of social right and privilege
physiology <--economic--> politics }--> scientifically confirmed to life at the organic base of civilization
sex-linked differences,
the primacy of sex in organic and social processes,
scientific managers over women's lives
monkey and apes as:
•natural objects
•unobscured by culture
•organic base in relation to which culture emerged
--> *human engineering*
(Haraway naming those) scientific networks crucially determined who did science and what science was considered good
(#sohrevardi)
Darwinian conception of natural political economy of population
(in Attar, Kelile Demne, Ajayeb, i am hunting for) *** early systems theory *** --> providing the technical base for (different claims such as:) the claim to scientific maturity of the social sciences based on concepts of culture and social group
“he removed the putative head from the collective animal body.” --> animal body politic
--> society was derived from complex interactions of pairs of individuals, understood and measured by psychological techniques, which constituted the social field space. one looked for axes of dominance as organizing principles on both the physiological and psychological levels
--> the theory of the function of male dominance nicely joins the political economy aspect of the study of animal behavior and evolution:
•competition
•division of labor
•resources allocation model
with the social integration aspect:
•cooperative coordination through leadership and social position
with the purely physiological understanding of reproductive and embryological phenomena
*Garden of Industry*
dominance as a natural property (with a physical-chemical base)
a cross ideological exercise (is not possible): science cannot be reclaimed for liberating purposes by simply reinterpreting observations or changing terminology --> (Princess Bubblegum) denying a dialectical interaction with the animals in the project of self-creation through scientific labor
(let's switch to a deeper look at primates, not as models of human beings, rather:) how they live and relate to their environment in ways that may have little to do with us [this is so helpful for everyone and is why i am intereste[...]
(115)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%24.4[...]amalian bias:
•predetermined body shape and size
•run toward death (pre-programmed death =/= history) ==> makes us think in terms of set-life courses
}==> allow us to imagine a standard individual outside of history
(Tsing's) history: overlapping tracks and traces and many trajectories of world-making, human and not human
irreversible time ==> indeterminacy (of history) --> new alliances --> the ability of assemblages to produce historical changes in our common world
what needs to be stated
what needs to be produced
context-dependent --?--> the way things are
architecture of podium <--✕--> labor-process of the actual speaker
how talks are *actually* produced
in your material practices
hybrid in digital manual tactile operations of speaking
noticing ants, spiders, little traps, species cohabiting, mutual coproduction of economics, ecology, labor-studies, house-hold studies, ajayeb-studies, and understanding of the orders of the natural and human world
(Gordon allowing) *algorithms to become stories*
(the technological enablement of some) *disciplines of attention*
“we are al lichen”: we are all ecosystem composite critters
ants, combining two kinds of noise, half-hazard patterns of interaction
half-hazard contact
half-hazard context
}==> it works (=/= perfection, precision/efficiency of clockwork)
#some Baradian models of intra-action in popular cinema:
•(intra-action received and wielded through discipleship and pre-programmed talent:) The Force in Starwars. [the story don't allow any other story of The Force and its contingencies other that good and evil tool-use of it]
•(intra-action resisted by individual subjectification:) the shadowy monster from the Upside Down in The Stranger Things, possessing the character. [the story is based on non-intra-active models and mode of being in the world of multispecies in multi-dimensions, it wants clear boundried subjects encapsulated by psychological ego and self-possession persons, ideas of identity and power --> life insurance system]
•(intra-action resisted by the political modern concrete individualism:) relationship with the phantom of state in The Handmaid's Tale. [overlapping a flat image of totalitarian society into religion]
...................................
technosphere: (conceptualized as) an unintended muddle of multispecies relationships emerging from contaminated landscapes, dumps
--reconsider-with-> feral technologies: novel and weedy capacities for materially significant change
invasive artificial intelligence
anthropocene: a multidimensional puzzle structured around complexities and ruptures --> when ways of being & ways of belonging can no longer be studied exclusively<[...]
(116)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%25.5[...]onomics, ecology, labor-studies, house-hold studies, ajayeb-studies, and understanding of the orders of the natural and human world
(Gordon allowing) *algorithms to become stories*
(the technological enablement of some) *disciplines of attention*
“we are al lichen”: we are all ecosystem composite critters
ants, combining two kinds of noise, half-hazard patterns of interaction
half-hazard contact
half-hazard context
}==> it works (=/= perfection, precision/efficiency of clockwork)
#some Baradian models of intra-action in popular cinema:
•(intra-action received and wielded through discipleship and pre-programmed talent:) The Force in Starwars. [the story don't allow any other story of The Force and its contingencies other that good and evil tool-use of it]
•(intra-action resisted by individual subjectification:) the shadowy monster from the Upside Down in The Stranger Things, possessing the character. [the story is based on non-intra-active models and mode of being in the world of multispecies in multi-dimensions, it wants clear boundried subjects encapsulated by psychological ego and self-possession persons, ideas of identity and power --> life insurance system]
•(intra-action resisted by the political modern concrete individualism:) relationship with the phantom of state in The Handmaid's Tale. [overlapping a flat image of totalitarian society into religion]
...................................
technosphere: (conceptualized as) an unintended muddle of multispecies relationships emerging from contaminated landscapes, dumps
--reconsider-with-> feral technologies: novel and weedy capacities for materially significant change
invasive artificial intelligence
anthropocene: a multidimensional puzzle structured around complexities and ruptures --> when ways of being & ways of belonging can no longer be studied exclusively
(human-nonhuman-machine)
•who orders the technosphere?
•who inhabits the technosphere?
•
...................................
“unmediated experience” --(signals a danger)--> naive realism (+ its polar opposite: naive subjectivism)
soup operatic
operatic (--> opera)
aporetic (--> aporia)
operative (--> secret agent)
...................................
‘learning’ in biology: (how to overcome X that) its ancestors would have not met
--> stories of ‘trial-and-error’ in animals
the idea of having ‘varying technique’ (closer to human) in regard to biological stasis
how the idea of ‘intelligence’ in animals is construted according to venture capitalism predatory preferences
...................................
mileu --> part of the history of the idea of animal
the living being and its environment, Cangu[...]
(117)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%25.5[...]ying a neologism --> “the fluid in which a body is immersed” (--confirming--> the mechanical origin of the notion,) “the total set of external circumstances necessary for the existence of every organism” [=/= Barad's intra-active model of explanation]
==> (rhetoric of) *dialectical conception of the relations between the organism and the environment* --instances such as “suited/adapted organism” and “favorable environment” [=/=? affordance theory]
Comte seeking a guarantee of his dialectical connection in the Newtonian principal of action and reaction:
organism --> variable
environment --> function
theory of the environment in Comte: (strictly mechanistic meaning of the word...) world --to--> man
Comte --> Lamarck: “milieu = circumstances = surrounding environment” ==suggest==> intuition of a *centered or focused formation* --> circle, sphere
***circumstances and surroundings still preserve a symbolic value, but milieu forgoes reference to any other relation other than that of a position forever denied by exteriority --?-->
چو پرگار میشدم...
چو نقطه...
گرد...
now refers to befor, here to its beyond, and so on without cease***
(in iranian poetry) environment: a pure system of relations without supports
*}==> environment: a universal instrument for dissolving *individualized organic synthesis* in the anonymity of universal elements and movements
(for example) metamerism of fish: “fish do not lead their lives themselves, the river has made them lead it, they are *persons without personality* (<== strictly mechanistic use of the notion of environment [<-- Descartes beast machine])
Lamarck: the environment dominates and control the evolution of living beings through the intermediary of *need*(= a subjective notion entailing reference to a positive pole of vital values)
(for Lamarck:) life and environment (which is unaware of it ~(Lamarckian *vitalism*:) ‘there is an originality of life of which the environment takes no account’) are two series of asynchronous events ==>
[*]adaptation: life's renewed effort to “stick” to an indifferent environment
[*]being: the effect of an effort [--?--> striving]
(--> this asynchronicity ==> “us” and “place”)
==> environment does nothing for life --Bichat--> “life: set of functions that resist death” (~-> tales of survival in America sci-fi TV series)
life resists solely by changing its shape in order to survive
Darwin explaining the ‘appearance of new forms’ conjunction of two mechanisms:
1- mechanism of the production of differences ~ variation
2- mechanism of the reduction and criticism of these produced differences ~ vital competition and natural selection
(for Darwin the fundamental biological relationship:) the relationship of the living being to other living beings --> precedence over [...]
(118)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%25.7[...] [complementary] biologists to whom) life appears as a datum which they seek to describe without being too concerned about accounting for it analytically [--> not accouting for the analyticallity of their objects?]
Lamarck --> (thinks of life in terms of) *duration*
Darwin --> (thinks of life in terms of) *interdependence*
Darwin's biogeographical environment =/=? Lamarck's environment
Humboldt (and Ritter) --> (19th century) geography: a science conscious of its method and its dignity
(naturalist traveler -->) *Humboldt's “Kosmos” [~ synthesis of knowledge, not aiming to be encyclopedic, but strives ***to arrive at an intuition of the universe***] combining:
•(“oikoumene” tradition of Greek geography:) *the science of the entire human world* [--> ajayeb]
•(“mathematical geography” founded by Eratosthenes, Hipparchus, Ptolemy:) *the science of coordination of human space in relation with the celectial configuration and movements* [--> Olearius]
}==> Earth [considered as a whole]: (stable support for the) *فراز و نشيب vicissitude of history* --> ‘terrestrial space + its configurations’ : object of geographical, geological, sociological, biological knowledge
(Humboldt) applied a whole system of barometric, thermometric in his investigation. *division of plants* according to different climates ==> “botanical geography” & “zoological geography”
history of the Weltanschauung
*****how Humboldt (and Ritter, [even Simondon does that too]) apply the *category of totality* to their object --> the relations between historical man and the environment ==> *determination of historical relationships*
the relations between the geographical environment and man ==> a spirit
(-->) *doing history*: reading a map, understanding by map the representation of a set of metrical, geodesic, geological, climatological, and descriptive biogeographical data
Loeb + Watson (phototropism in animals):
every movement of the organism in the environment = a movement into which the environment forces the organism ==> **animal = reflex** <-->{Darwinism + Cartesianism ==> behaviorist psychology*}
(Watson:) [*]psychology: program of the analytical investigation of the ‘stimulus-response couple'[= conditions of the living being's adaptation to the environment through the experimental production of relations between stimulation and response] (<-- one of physical determinism) ==> consciousness nullified as illusory
(the living being's situation:) “its being = a conditioning” (--> as artists we still have to deal with this idea or image, it is about the reality the artist receives and what they make of it)
process of reduction:
(ajayeb --to-->) biology --to--> behavior --to--> neurology --to--> energetics (--to--> electronics)
the perfect work of behaviorist [...]
(119)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%25.8[...] objects and situate them in relation to each other and all of them in relation to himself (---> go to Barthes's discussion on the notion of operative language/tool)
--> that is why we need a different language to relate to environment
the inhuman environment =/=? ajayeb
kinds of “recognitions” that were established by disqualification of all specific subjectively centered environment [such as ajayeb], including that of man, as vital illusions or errors
*ajayeb = (one of many past) *centers of organization, adaptation, and invention* (now dissolved by science: to dissolve living beings in the anonymity of the mechanical, physical, and chemical environment ==> encompass the man)
(ajayeb's hesitate or) bold undertaking for life
[*]ajayeb's science (using Canguilhem's words): the work of a humanity rooted in life before being enlighted by knowledge, (if) it is a fact in the world at the same time as *a vision of the world* ==> it sustains a permanent and necessary relation with perception [--> Barad] & “a living being is not reducible to a meeting point of influences” [--> Kenney]
(a meaning from the biological and physiological point of view:) *need*: an irreducible and thereby absolute system of reference (for the living being who experiences it)
how to do *reconsideration of meaning* in biological sciences?
...................................
i am torn apart between describing the challenges of life within the ruins created by modernization's vast “improvements” and my own country's revolutionary consciousness to emerge fanatically from those ruins
catachresis استعمال غلط کلمه
a figure of speech in which words are misused from their conventional usages
***to use language out of place*** [~~--> oxymoron]
•Marianne Lien's “homeless salmon”
•Hokkaido's “frontier spirit"<br />
•
(i constantly use catachresis in my own language, the abuse of language in describing things. did the mice “speak,” “wrote”? “The choices we make [of words] matter. Words make worlds.” [creatures] are enacted in the semiotic and material practices we weave through them ==opening==> new grounds for conversation)
world's misplacements
catachresis helps Tsing as she grope for language to describe an impossible program: a program dedicated to confusing disciplinary boundaries and to describing the challenges of life within the ruins created by modernization’ vast “improvements” --requires--> a crisis in language
Tsing's non-threatening descriptive biology
multiple rendering of salmon
U.S. and Japanese frontier technologies
(human and nonhuman) enactments of the mixed-up
*landscape*: a lens that refuses the abstraction of human-nonhuman relations in a vacuum
[...]
(120)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%26.2[...]hran? (--> data, stories that stick)
a dichotomy of analysis:
•species found inside human body --> discourse of cohabitation and interdependency
•species found outside human body --> discourse of human impact, management, and control
Engels's just-so story of private property: origin of property was in herds ==> male control of reproduction in human families
cereal domesticated human
in the near east a shift towards gathering multiple small-grain grasses is associated with the 10000 years before domestication
focus on landscape --to--> focus on crops
across Eurasia the rise of state (and their specialised civilization) is associated with the spread of intensive cereal agriculture
(Tsing > Connor)
a political configuration:
states encouraged sedentary, stable farms, family-based households, and guaranteed the forms of family property and inheritance (that drew lines within and between families) ==> both women and grain confined and managed to maximise fertility
--Engels--> interspecies love affair
it was in the 19th century that standardization became itself the “modern standard”
[*]plantation: ordered cropping systems worked by non-owners and arranged for expansion
==>
•deepen domestication
•reintensifying plant dependencies
•forcing fertility
superaboundance of a single crop (without the ‘love’ [connector romance of people, plant, place] that was key in state-endorsed cereal agriculture)
(in plantation) the plants were exotic and labor was coerced slavery
only with **hierarchy and managed antagonism** in place enormous profits (+ complementary poverty) could be produced
plantation produced the wealth and the modus operandi that allowed Europeans to take over the world
(not technologies and resources, rather) *plantation system made the navies, science, and industrialization possible*
taking the alienation of people (from their crops) for granted
==> human subspecies were formulated and enforced : biology came to signify the difference between free “owner” and coerced “labor” --> racial divisions were produced and reproduced in each dowered marriage and inheritance
-poor families needed more labor, particularly where child labor kept many adults alive
-privileged families were charged with the advancements of the race, women must bear its heirs --> late 19th century discourse of scientific hygiene and eugenics اصلاح نژاد informed white women's species segregation
{ boundaries of home = boundaries of love }--> fetishization of the home as the space of purity and interdependence ==> extra-domestic intimacies (within/between species) =
•archaic fantasies (the community, small farmer, etc.)
•passin[...]
(121)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%26.4[...]on) is associated with the spread of intensive cereal agriculture
(Tsing > Connor)
a political configuration:
states encouraged sedentary, stable farms, family-based households, and guaranteed the forms of family property and inheritance (that drew lines within and between families) ==> both women and grain confined and managed to maximise fertility
--Engels--> interspecies love affair
it was in the 19th century that standardization became itself the “modern standard”
[*]plantation: ordered cropping systems worked by non-owners and arranged for expansion
==>
•deepen domestication
•reintensifying plant dependencies
•forcing fertility
superaboundance of a single crop (without the ‘love’ [connector romance of people, plant, place] that was key in state-endorsed cereal agriculture)
(in plantation) the plants were exotic and labor was coerced slavery
only with **hierarchy and managed antagonism** in place enormous profits (+ complementary poverty) could be produced
plantation produced the wealth and the modus operandi that allowed Europeans to take over the world
(not technologies and resources, rather) *plantation system made the navies, science, and industrialization possible*
taking the alienation of people (from their crops) for granted
==> human subspecies were formulated and enforced : biology came to signify the difference between free “owner” and coerced “labor” --> racial divisions were produced and reproduced in each dowered marriage and inheritance
-poor families needed more labor, particularly where child labor kept many adults alive
-privileged families were charged with the advancements of the race, women must bear its heirs --> late 19th century discourse of scientific hygiene and eugenics اصلاح نژاد informed white women's species segregation
{ boundaries of home = boundaries of love }--> fetishization of the home as the space of purity and interdependence ==> extra-domestic intimacies (within/between species) =
•archaic fantasies (the community, small farmer, etc.)
•passing affairs (feminism, animal rights, etc. )
+
outside the home = domain of economic rationality and conflicting individual interests
--> mid 20th century allowed other species accepted: pets are models for family devotion. but the model of the loving and the beloved pet does not spread love; it holds tight inside the family (-Tsing)
[biosocial plan:] other people & other species are judged by their ability to live up to one standard of domestic intimacy (USA or iran):
they love their children and pets ==> imagine themselves as compassionate and moral --> makes them ‘good people’ ==> equip them to make decisions for the whole world ==> moral hierarchy (~ your good[...]
(122)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%26.5[...]
future-making cards:
icons of historical agency
they represent the world through stereotypes and symbols
used as an ideology about X (=/= as the real thing)
eternal essences as natural objects or cultural codes prevent theories to require things to change =/= Global Futures conceptualization of time and change --> ***forms of human and nonhuman possibility imagined within current discussions of politics and culture***
*world power =/= world time*
time --> evolutionary ladder --> progressive --> supportive trellises of flowering liberalism + critical charts of intensifying capitalism
coercive international development
civilizational paternalism
free-market bullying
...................................
#my theory (=/= reductionist, or psychological identification) on specification of:
spider =/= linear temporality
whale =/= distinction of organism and environment
(?) =/= “single point of view ==> subjective phenomena”
Nagel: the fact that an organism has conscious experience = there is something it is like to be that organism {--> subjective character of experience}--✕--> analyzable in terms of any explanatory system of functional states, or intentional states
Blade Runner's notion of “soul”: ascribed to robots or automata that behave like people though they experience nothing
physicalism: phenomenological features must themselves be given a physical account
...if one travels too far down the phylogenetic tree, people gradually shed their faith that there is experience at all
anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat
anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited whale
anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited snake
anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited jinn
--> knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life
Nagel asking: we must consider whether any method will permit us to extrapolate استقراء to the inner life of the bat from our own case, and if not, what alternative methods there may be for understanding the notion
“our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited” --> Nagel's view remains secular and in the bounds of his disciplinary field. (religious studies, theology, animal subjectivity studies, art of description, they can be helpful to describe things not in terms of the impressions they make on our senses)
-Nagel is trying with the wrong language at bats: “does it make sense to ask what my experiences are ‘really’ like as opposed to how they appear to me? [...] objective processes can have a subjective nature.”
what it would be like for me to behave as[...]
(123)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%26.7[...]shing down the watching post
-(disclosures and) promises of frontier technology
-
ghosts of the project:
/poltergeist --> not really capable of knowing different things and different types of relations they are entered into, bad at perspectival communication
/Hamlet's father --> wanting you to remember ~= revenge
/Cinderella --> doesn't show any psychological symptoms (she has no psychology?), she is not the master of anything, not even her name
/ruin --> place of unsettled identities
questions of:
•doom [=/= adjustment, management]: “contamination = end”
•subject surging to bear an affect, subject who goes with the flow in an intoxicated moment
•traumatic realism
•(endangered ==>) survival: fighting for “your right against others”
•less-than ideal livable collaborations
•
•constructing interest (not that ‘you want to know’ --> historically crafted and naturalized modalities of “knowing more”)
•contingent (~ lure, abstraction, fragile [--> they create interested bodies]) =/=? analytical [--> they create disembodied subjects]
[poem can do all of these:]
/proposition --> right/wrong declaratives
/exposition --> systematic explanation
/disposition --> affective orientation ~~> attitude ==> perspectives ==> selves
poet [=/= archivist] can be responsible for the ‘remainders’ --> good at greeting =/= traumatic realism
(1) traumatic realism
(real understood as traumatic:) “shock ==> subject”
a way of figuring that fails to bring the inflicting force (of real) into the symbolic order ==> mime, miming: you bring it into the present literally over and over (re-present)
|
(2) atmospheric attunement
a way of being in the noise
labor-intensive process that stretches across imaginaries [such as travel, house, haunt] --> responding to ” “
actual affects of modes of living brought into being
intimacy with a world [visiting families in Alta]
|
(3) phantom arm
“social = present-absent” (=/= Star Trek's interculturalism) (=/= Lacan's subject: proper sense of absence and loss)
connectivity does not require physical contiguity
-force of piled-up phantom limps
-hum of the palce, dormant noise --> worlding of a place [<-- material and sensory labor of attending to it]
-hauntology =/= Archimedean certainty of presence --> a knowing consciousnes
-so, that lost arm/limb (original part of you) could have a chance of becoming companion species, and not a discarded phantom limb forever haunting the amputated you
|
(4) troubled stories
=/= clear-cut good stories about troubles
stories difficult to like:
•dirty, guilty, survivalist udyr? the evil horse? (we need more description of the evil horse)
Cinderella --> ([...]
(124)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%27.7[...]blem of life ~= empty seashell (shell in which there might or might not be an occupant, provides the de-sexualized figure for doubt that saturates the consciousness of those who inhabit the world of witchcraft, an internally split subject)
anthropology of witchcraft
--✕--> charges of residual exoticism by reading witchcraft phenomena as sites at which the transformations of modernity are mediated and made available for resignification
-to displace (witchcraft) into the domain of representation --> capacity to resignify the historical real
lethal violence at Marikana (South Africa, August 2012) --> muti magic was a not matter of resurgent tradition (for the black South African analysts), rather, magic was a visceral, strategically instrumentalizable, and absolutely lethal power. the kind that enables people to go to war, the kind that operates at the point where language fails (--?--> the use of poetic mystical enchantment in Iran-Iraq war for sending young soldiers to the battle fields)
witchcraft only becomes visible in the moment of accusation, as a retrospective effect of oracular diagnosis (Evans-Pritchard)
(...no one is sure that he has indeed heard a witch)--Bubandt--> witchcraft: a condition of doubt (=/= a system of belief)
--✕--> Morris questions: doubt =/=? belief
Morris asks --> doubt:
•whether illness is caused by witchcraft?
•whether one's neighbor is a witch?
•*whether one is oneself a witch?*
in Buli (=/= The Magicians TV series, Harry Potter film version of magic):
•witchcraft does not explain the world
•witchcraft is not an alternative mode of reasoning
•witchcraft does not permit anyone to control the forces (that assault and wound human being)
•witchcraft provides neither certitude nor escape from the anxieties that death bears for the living
(the interiority of the other is unknown and unknowable ==>)
[*]witchcraft ==provides==>
•an idiom in which the world's very immunity to explanation is affirmed (often with violent and terrifying consequence)
•figures and narrative forms in which to address (also reproduce) the opacity and ambivalence of sociality
[context:]
the other (like the empty seashell) is unknowable, though we must engage others and seek recognition from them to escape solitude and death [...] in forms of giving and reciprocation that demand generosity but that are also likely to provoke avarice --emerge--> witchcraft: a relentless question about appearances and the problem of knowing what they disclose
doubling of genitalia and mouth in Buli dream imagery
(marriage: to manage witchcraft)
tradition “establishes the ideal format for conviviality” ==ensuring==> sexuality and consumption are made the basis of sociality =/= witchcraft (as a perversion of marriage)
[...]
(125)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%28.4[...]iro) to explain body's relation to the world --> ancillary process of being a living body as:
•becoming sensitive
•embodying atmospheres
•somatically judging environments
•becoming corporeal aware of nonhumans
•protracted low-level encounter with domestic chemicals --accumulate--> *chemical sublime* <== (indistinct and distributed harm of) late industrial material ecologies (=/= enlightenment sublime: spectacle material threat with transcendence of immaterial reason)
silent and invisible microemissions accrue within the envelope of the home --> residents reckon with how their homes are decomposing into them as they decompose in their homes
somatic work of the chemically concerned is enmeshed with an *apprehension of their own bodies that is simultaneously sensuous and epistemological* (~ “bodily knowledge” situated within a process of “bodily reasoning” that tempers not just what one knows but what one becomes with or is estranged from [=/= forensic architecture notion of knowledge])
‘sustained bodily reasoning ==> chemical sublime’
Shapiro + Kim Fortune --> call for ways to differently know and reimagine our ongoing late industrial present, which is marked by deteriorating sociotechnical systems and economic, climate, and infrastructural instability
**somatic susceptibility and epistemic capacity** common to human life --(informed by nonhuman life)--> molecular and relational appreciation --Shapiro--> domestically exposed (the ‘chemically wounded’ attuning to their own effects and affects ~ discerning the barely perceptible constituents of their environment [=/= “deviant agents,” diagnosed, resistors]
toxic = potency --implicate--> vulnerability of a living body
years of exposure --> biochemically magnified effects --> semiotically enflamed
somatic cognizance
(Shapiro on affect and phenomenological studies of environmental exposure -->) formaldehyde indicators and agents of social abandonment and precarity
(growing literature on) the body as existential, pedagogical, and ethical grounds of (cultures of) science
Shapiro: “how can expanding the avenues and temporality of sensing yield an appreciation of what many of us are abbreviating from our own sense of the world?”
Shapiro ethnographically elucidates the *somatic mode of attention*
--> bodies are sites for both actively absorbing the world and being put into motion by its constituent medley of humans and nonhumans
-becoming with (Haraway)
-orienting toward (Ahmed)
-bodily reasoning (Shapiro): the dynamic process through which knowledge of individual spaces of chronic exposure is somatically attained
women's accounts of self-monitoring for bodily dysfunctions (--> feminization of body care)
[Shapiro discovered] men's[...]
(126)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%28.9[...]ofundity and density of widespread, private, indistinct, chronic, and fragmented phenomena*
chemical sublime = انباشت استدلالهای جسمانی accrual of bodily reasoning
irritations --> agitations ==> attenuate the effects of vast toxic infrastructure
(masco nuclear) sublime ==translate==> resounding ethical call
chemical sublime ==> ?
...industry's mobilization of law, science, capital
Shapiro: we must look at how the sublime has brokered relations between exposure and the status quo since at least down of the enlightenment
(quintessential of enlightenment project) Kant's sublime: the immensity/might first overwhelms our imaginative capacity (or indicating the fragility of human body yielding a sense of helplessness and distress) then this feeling is countered and ultimately overcome by reassuring one's self of power of the mind ==> reason sets humanity apart and above the physical world
[*]sublime: *internal turmoil and sensuous displeasure is elevated into the delight and superiority of reason* --> humanity's continued progressing
(Shapiro + Gene Ray: ideological function of the aesthetic category of the) sublime within Kant's critical system is anxiously bound up with deep *metaphysical optimism*
formulation of sublime:
•form (space, time, and intensity) of exposure
•the relation between the supersensible (mind) and the sensible (matter)
•orientational movement (from without to within or vice versa)
•political reckoning
*bodily reasoning =/= object (of sublime) held at a distance
*sublimation of toxicity =/= mental mastery (over perceived threats)
*amplify =/= extinguish (the tensions, agitations, dissident potentiality of large-scale hazards)
*coalescing of underrecognized disturbances =/= compensation
*beginning of a confrontation =/= resolution
foil of human triumph: “transforming the worst into the best” <-- not possible anymore
...~->? potentiality of living otherwise (---> go to Tsing's contaminated diversity, Chen's queer toxicity)
...in these spaces where *enduring and knowing* are coterminous, the feeling of a living dead seeped into the margins of life for those with even minimal symptoms
(chemical phenomenology)
molecular cohabitants who physically hold our world together also encourage our unravelling*** [Shapiro] becoming a pupil of the air [Sloterdijk] is to attune to the aerostolized material culture and more-than-human semiotics [Kohn] within which one is immersed
***
chemical sublime (does not merely refigure a form of sublime in philosophical discourse but) poses an alternative **schema of eventfulness** (or call to action)
...................................
[title]
kulturgeist
<[...]
(127)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.1[...]ry has to say about that? --Irigaray--> is not the body without organs women's own historical condition?
...the machinic, the inorganic, as well as the notions of loss of self, dispersion, and fluidity are all too familiar to women
(and to non-western subjects, i would say. Tasavof has been advocating body without organ within the context of mysticism in Iran)
are Deleuze and Guattari “cyberpunks, constructing fictions of terminal identity in the nearly familiar language of a techno-surrealism”? ~-> (to dissolve the body ==>) will to regain the world <~~--> [death of the auratic object ==> subject: a condemned and useless vestige alongside the simulacra that precede and envelope it]
...................................
(?we need) political metamorphosis
the tensions between:
[*]artist's “special task” (to oppose intellectual divisions) {(art of) forming, inventing, fabricating concepts (<== Deleuze and Guattari), (a “task” that) proceeds with a plane of immanence (or consistency) ~= self-referential (=/= referential) --> syntagmatic (word associations)}
and: [*]the increasing difficulty to ask questions (as a result of the constant increase in the specialization of the knowledges --> science) {propositions in discursive systems, (a “task” that) proceeds with a plane of reference --> paradigmatic (a worldview) ==>? to *confront chaos* ~= to provide chaos with reference points [<-- artists need to learn this]}****
(my work in lecture-performance: to provide chaos with reference points)
Barad, Stengers, <== stable foundations of physics had broken up and it is time for science to become philosophical
science becomes philosophical philosophy becomes artistic art becomes anthropological anthropology becomes poetic poetry becomes biological biology becomes archaeological archaeology becomes speculative speculation becomes scientific science becomes aesthetic aesthetics becomes adventurous adventure becomes rigorous rigor becomes Iranian Iran becomes German Germany becomes Arabic Arab becomes Egyptian Egypt becomes animalistic animal becomes fabulous fable becomes political politics becomes...
...................................
(Baxstrom + Meyers highlight a productive gap between intent & outcome in) Christensen making a case of witchcraft (in his pioneering, bizarre, and lavish project of Häxan):
•misidentified nervous disease
•incompatibility of superstition and religious fanaticism with modernity and science
•bringing “errors of belief” in the 15th and 16th centuries into our view
living cinematic tableau, Häxan's excess =/= socially constrained thinking, discursive mode of analysis
Christensen's thesis concerned/gripped with abnormalities, events, and causes ==provide==> diagnosis
(like Favret-Saada) he was an un-witcher at once caught & catching
witch[...]
(128)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.2[...]plastic medium to which all figures are reduced before being arranged in the space of a panel. In this way, the viewer participates in two successive transformations of the original material: different types of objects (paintings, reliefs, drawings, architecture, living beings) *are unified through photography* before being arranged on the panel stretched with black cloth. The panel is in turn *rephotographed in order to create a unique image*, which will be inserted into a series intended to take the form of a book. The atlas, then, does not limit itself to describing the migrations of images through the history of representation: it reproduces them. In this sense, it is based on a cinematic mode of thought, one that, by using figures, aims at not articulating meaning but at producing effects.”
transgressive approach to the archive:
•Gerhard Richter's Atlas, 2006
•Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du cinema, 1988
•Christensen's Häxan
•Warburg’ Mnemosyne (presentation of a series of visual cliches and stereotypes, fragments which were most likely already familiar to the viewer ~ figurative givens ==> empirical evidence + media to conjure with)
•Bataille's journal ‘Documents’ 1929–30 --> seizes cliched objects and then systematically empties them out in the course of its own expressions. Bataille and his contributors sought to defamiliarize the cliches, disturbing the placidly deceptive surface of the mundane in their fragmentary, juxtaposing methods of critique and presentation =/= Warburg + Christensen collecting mythological, figurative givens seemingly quite distant from the “really” real
}--> unsettling distances between myth and the everyday
-weave together episodic fragments in order to draw parallels (across domains of sense that cut across time) and correspondences across situations and characters
-Häxan deploys the techniques associated with Warburg's Mnemosyne and Bataille's Documents for purposes of affectively emphasizing the dark, chaotic forces that lurk under the smooth surface of the everyday
(Häxan's episodic structure ==>)
•characters seemingly out of a dead past to live again
•draw the phenomenology of the hysteric
•draw the work's own contemporary time to the surface
promiscuous: neither wholly artistic nor scientific =/=? hybrid artistic and scientific
traverse steep slope between past and future in the form of an event =/= plot
inability to automatically categorize Häxan (or any work of art) <== ***formal strategy rooted in an epistemic virtue***
***(in later Middle Ages) practices such as persecuting witchcraft to meditating on Christ = techniques (of sorting operation) to draw distinctions among visual phenomena, differentiating, say, physical objects from fantasies, dreams, and diabolical or artful deceptions
<--artist-[...]
(129)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%30[...]fering misfortune, illness, and death long before the power of the witch was felt during this time)
Dominican order --> aggressively promoting the cult of the virgin, to the status of the “perfect” woman {elevating the status of sexual neurosis to a virtue} =/= lustful credulous nature of common women (who were often associated with the temptations of Eve)
*conflicted status of women*
•in Häxan --through--> sternly patrilineal visual motifs (condescension + bemusement --> frail + hysterical)
•in ajayeb bestiary -->
(Häxan's) witch hunters act in accordance with their own procedures for investigating truth and falsehood and not simply out of malice, fear, or stupidity
the inquisitor priest/friar (within the realm of their own assumptions about the world) were dedicated to investigating and verifying the claims [of the accused witch) =/= (mainstream depiction of inquisitors as) gullible, fanatical, overtly misogynistic
(during the witch craze) **desire to believe =/= simple belief**
despite the unbelievable scope of demonic power, the inquisitors must believe that what the young maiden is reporting is possible
****important changes in the legal systems in europe well into the 14th century: proffering a formal indictment against another individual required the plaintiff to submit to an accusatory form of criminal procedure. (derived from Roman law) this procedure presumed such offenses as *matters between the accused and accuser* ==> the idea that “crime” was a matter between society and the accused did not exist (--> the presentday distinction between criminal and civil complaints meaningless)
raising a formal complaint required:
•the accuser to furnish proof of the allegation
•to submit to severe penalties agreed in advance if the judge was unconvinced of the complaint's merit
*it was complex, expensive, and very risky to enter into this formal framework in order to address disputes or everyday injustices* ==> most ordinary people did not do so, choosing instead to pursue local and less formal modes of redress
15th and 16th century --> this procedure changed dramatically (with the emergence of the witch in europe)
•witch was understood as an agent of satan
•responsibility of civil and religious authorities to protect pious christians (from a power that would overwhelm the faithful regardless of their individual acts, intentions, or beliefs)
inchoate suspicion (of the fearful, the resentful, the spiteful) --> reporting --> inquisitors (positioned as experts) --> take this suspicion forward administratively --> *impersonal sociological sense* (<-- an example of Weberian rationalization)
to suspect someone of maleficium was not new --✕--> (in witch accusations) authorities were now eager to act on suspicions in dependently
[...]
(130)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%30.3[...] [~ what i am told to see, @apass #feedback], but i am convinced that they are there
(ajayeb --?-->) older practices of defining social facts and the discovery, interpretation, and definition of the read ==> (roots of the predisposition of research:) to sense, interpret, and eventually master forces that appear to be nonsensical and yet are held to be essential to the reality of everyday social life
[mad:] the notion of *irrational* as a privileged space in medical discourses (in France in the 19th century) ==> a mysterious and extra-social language that the rising medical profession could adapt to its own purposes
“nonsense” of the “native”
(Baxstrom's work on witch craze [in 16th century] --arguing-->) the problem of establishing proof in reference to the invisible forces has durably shaped our modes of investigating human social and cultural life
[ajayebnameh =/=]
social or cultural anthropology in the 21st century = (human sciences’ contemporary equivalent of the) *old efforts to master the invisible* -->{test ==> felicitous information as to the “true” nature of obscure forces and their operations within empirical real-world contexts}
[ajayeb: (part of the histories of)] systematic, empirical investigation of strange events, singularities, miracles, and other types of staple phenomena ~~--> scientific method and the forms of knowledge that emerged as the foundation of an ensemble of *sciences proper to humans* --> yet has been unable to expel (the unprovable forces) considering the origins and forms of human diversity
[*]anthropology: the desire to credibly master nonsense
[with ajayeb studies i am learing to be] able to argue for a world below the threshold of perception (of medicine, biology, physics --> defined their relation to the nonsensical via a *visibility to come* ==> [embodied in new technologies:] photograph, microscope, telescope)
Deleuze --> when writing of communication between heterogeneous systems --> [we must pay attention to] what is this agent, this force which ensures communication? (<-- role of difference and resemblance)
forensic anthropology
[title]
imaging and imagining technologies
the confusion of the empirical (knowledge traversed by our everyday observations, sensations, passions) and the transcendental (construction of an ideal knower, now it is the queer) in apass
figure of man foundational to the human sciences [did not exist in classical thought ~ ajayeb] --move-to--> empirically institute the experience, witnessing, and testimony of an individual human subject = *the central linking relay between evidence, judgement, and the real* --> the ability of a human being alone to serve as the sole source of evidence in an investigation of “the real” (#feedback) [=/= Gilgamesh]
(in Qazwini's [...]
(131)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%30.6[...]f establishing proof in reference to the invisible forces has durably shaped our modes of investigating human social and cultural life
[ajayebnameh =/=]
social or cultural anthropology in the 21st century = (human sciences’ contemporary equivalent of the) *old efforts to master the invisible* -->{test ==> felicitous information as to the “true” nature of obscure forces and their operations within empirical real-world contexts}
[ajayeb: (part of the histories of)] systematic, empirical investigation of strange events, singularities, miracles, and other types of staple phenomena ~~--> scientific method and the forms of knowledge that emerged as the foundation of an ensemble of *sciences proper to humans* --> yet has been unable to expel (the unprovable forces) considering the origins and forms of human diversity
[*]anthropology: the desire to credibly master nonsense
[with ajayeb studies i am learing to be] able to argue for a world below the threshold of perception (of medicine, biology, physics --> defined their relation to the nonsensical via a *visibility to come* ==> [embodied in new technologies:] photograph, microscope, telescope)
Deleuze --> when writing of communication between heterogeneous systems --> [we must pay attention to] what is this agent, this force which ensures communication? (<-- role of difference and resemblance)
forensic anthropology
[title]
imaging and imagining technologies
the confusion of the empirical (knowledge traversed by our everyday observations, sensations, passions) and the transcendental (construction of an ideal knower, now it is the queer) in apass
figure of man foundational to the human sciences [did not exist in classical thought ~ ajayeb] --move-to--> empirically institute the experience, witnessing, and testimony of an individual human subject = *the central linking relay between evidence, judgement, and the real* --> the ability of a human being alone to serve as the sole source of evidence in an investigation of “the real” (#feedback) [=/= Gilgamesh]
(in Qazwini's ajayebnameh the testimony of an individual human subject is ambiguous)
(Baxstrom + Foucault) *insist on rooting our form of knowledge in the figure of the human being and the human being alone --yet--> our gaze is continually drawn to a host of beings and phenomena (the witch, the spirit, the shaman, etc.) that cannot properly be enfolded back within this figure*
fabled definition (@apass relationship with defining)
fable of anthropology (a disposition with regard of the interlocutor other as truly “other”) -->
“This goal is, briefly, to grasp the native's point of view, his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world. We have to study man, and we must study what concerns him most intimately, that is, the hold which [...]
(132)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%30.7[...]arker history of human sciences: an embarrassing historical curiosity... *an unsunstainable position* --Baxstrom--> Levy-Bruhl lost his position in th canon because the logic of his arguments regarding the forces that shaped the life-worlds of non-western people denied the possibility of a field researcher's being able to assume the *point of view* of the native in the bold manner that Malinowski declared was not only possible but actually the highest aspiration for anthropology [--> also the aspiration for critical feedback?]
(counterepistemological) Levy-Bruhl =/= Malinowski --> ([*]feedback: an art of engagement informed by critical relatedness and) **anthropological expertise grounded in the careful cultivation of a *sympathetic knowledge of the other* as a way of empirically knowing that other** : *method of sympathetic association*
in apass --> the laboratory of the times located in the person of the researcher himself
grounded Levy-Bruhl's science in the real <== he rejected a focus on a knowable singular subject in favor of a science based on the ability to detect and interpret the invisible forces that worked to produce a particular “mentality” [of the artist in the case of bad feedback]
(Levy-Bruhl's mistake:) systematic interrogation and illumination of mobile invisible forces that produced beings wholly unlike us =/={ method of sympathetic association --> participant observation: the felicity of evidence produced through the qualitative experiential methodological instruments [--> comes to define the modes of critical relatedness in apass]
(since 15th century) investigators ==> staking one's claim to the real on the mastery of those forces that relentlessly elude a plain direct visibility or sensibility ~~--> human sciences
*we still hunt ghosts, fueled by a desire operationalized in a method of being close enough to something to sense it, because our form of mastery demands a closeness to things unseen, unprovable, indeed ‘nonsensical,’ yet unquestionably ‘there’* -Baxstrom
...................................
Despret on Derrida's animal
the act of being seen by an animal ==> Derrida groups together on the end hand “scientists and philosophers =/= prophets and poets”
{ Bateson, Goodall, Bekoff, Smuts, and many others have met the gaze of the living diverse animals and in response undone an redone themselves & their sciences =/= Derrida }--Haraway--> why did Derrida leave unexamined the practices of communication outside the writing technologies he did know how talk about? ==> philosopher (speak in the absence of animal) =/= theoreticians (speak face to face with the animal) =/= scientists
•Derrida's original positioning: to speak (starting) from [~ a partir de] a real animal and not about animality [being animal] : to speak in the animal's presence and not in its absenc[...]
(133)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%31.2[...]f being** ==> (they do not reveal what animals are, rather) they follow and accompany an act of becoming together : *an act of becoming with the stories that we construct concerning them* (good or bad)
•birds will have been far more interesting starting from the moment that Zahavi proposed to connect their stories to others [~-> how Cinderella became interesting for me when her stories became connected to other stories =/= restructure her story to make her fit my contemporary political correctness]
•sheep will have been far more sophisticated starting from the moment that Thelma Rowell asked them interesting questions
**to ask interesting question: to create conditions in which sheep [beings, your subject] are able to demonstrate an interest in these questions
**interesting research: looking at the conditions that allow beings to become interesting
{ how scientists made their animals agents = how scientists created the conditions for certain responses with respect to what was being asked of the animals }--Despret--> how these changing animals *became real* by way of the very *test of transformation* that had been proposed to them (~ how they were involved in the “process of verification”) --> *to understand the system of truth that was ay the heart of these tests* (=/= to produce an umpteenth critical analysis of “representation” @Pierre)
==> you are under the same constraints as those in whom you had placed your confidence
@Sina: do not construct knowledge about your mother behind her back! --> getting to know what matters (to them, to her) ==> allows transformations to occur
-i usually did both (as mentor in apass), construct knowledge behind people's back [psychosis] & getting to know what matters to them [paranoia]
(Despret discovered) one (unignorable) thing that mattered to scientists was: how animals take an active part in the knowledge that is produced about them
(why working on ajayeb bestiary involves becoming interested in sciences:) you work on animals --immediately--> you are marking on scientists
i remember the way i anticipated where a pigeon, a cat, spider, or ants, would make a home, a niche, in my childhood house...
the difference between ‘what i imagined’ & ‘where the nest actually appeared’ ==> made the world far more interesting
--> looking at the perception of animals (when you are child)
inventive and remarkable birds
happiness of sheep
sadness of captive wolves in a park in the Lorraine --> *not because they were captive but because captivity had transformed them into stupid and cruel beings*
[it is good to be able to say that] certain scientists not only do “bad science” (which remains a way of keeping distance) but that they do “science badly”
creatures that happened to be animals
[...]
(134)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%31.5[...]=/= fallen from nature)
story of modernity:
•humankind's emancipation from nature
•***progress (forward movement of the arrow of time) = indifference to the past*** ==> “past: an archaic and dangerous confusion”
•the confidence of being able to differentiate clearly what in the past was still mixed up: facts & values
green politics ==> gloomy asceticism, a terror for trespassing nature, and diffidence toward industry, innovation, technology, and science
my work has been against the notion of “nature = a hierarchical totality”
emancipation =/= attachment =/= intimacy
*environment: what appeared when unwanted consequences came back to haunt the originators of collective modernizing actions
*environmentalism: when the unwanted consequences are suddenly considered to be a monstrosity (#apocalyptic) ==> abstain & repent --> Leo:
environmentalist logic: “precaution = abstention”
‘global warming’ is an unintended consequence (like anything in earth) <-- narrative of attachment =/= an scandal, end of the world (<-- apocalyptic narrative of emancipation, modernist myth of mastery)
pristine nature =/= our nature ~= national park: a rural ecosystem complete with post offices, well-tended roads, highly subsidized cows, and handsome villages
(Latour giving the example of theology:) ‘mastery ==> attachment’ : “the christian God gets folded into, involved with, implicated with, and incarnated into his creation.” =/= a master who is freed from dependents
}--Latour--> dominion means attachment
...................................
Mi You
modernization process of European societies ==> secularity ==> “religion = only one option among other ways of self-fulfilment and human flourishing”
*self-sufficient humanism has never existed on the same scale before in European societies before the Enlightenment*
...................................
#writing for mini-series bestiaries
inspired by the https://www.instagram.com/ajayebedidani/
1. https://www.instagram.com/p/CPYnbZnH2w3/ short episode at night in country X there is a talking apple that speeks in unknown language. character acting, location garden, animation, play with mixed CG architecture
2.
...................................
borderline animals --in--> medieval bestiary
...................................
*alegorical world* --> eastern fables + easter & western animal lore + christian Physiologus [not ancient sciences?!] ~=> bestiary
Physiologus, bestiary --> popular source for sermon writers [<-- relevance for lecture performance]
[email to Mona]
bebin man ye chizi cherto pert sareham kardam. in gharare bere tu catalog alan
*working title for the lect[...]
(135)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%31.9[...] essential level of the other.
-the greeted is first and newly returned to his essence
-Tarof corrupts greeting
-the story of turtle and two storks in Kelile Demne (کلیله و دمنه): friedship due to adjacency and terms of nearness or farness to the other. (Tarof is activated by and sustains adjacency) --- delicate trajectories of greeting
-how do we greet a dog. the submission necessary in greeting. we submit to it when we greet the dog. hi dog. what would a practical Tarof with dog look like? do we have Tarof with animals? The Tarof's affection itself cannot be separated from a desire to dominate.
Levinas narrates a greeting, when he was in a concentration camp in germany, they call them dog. then a stray dog shows up and they call him Bobi. when they came back from the dehumanizing labor of the camp, Bobi would run to them every day and greet them. and that was what rehumanize them.
tarof and complaint
(is tarof capable of forming a protest?)
using tropes of traffic in different cultures with relation to tropes of technology, mobility and constitution of freedom. in Germany talking about ‘rail’ and ‘track’, changing tracks, shifting tracks and so on, meaning there is a predefined trajectory systematically mobilizing the individual in plain of possibilities. in US people more use cars and car can go anywhere, park or decide when and in which speed to move on, including complete autonomy on the direction and velocity of movement, accompanying the North-American notion of freedom and relation to destiny. in Iran the movement is also based on personal cars but everyone is stuck in traffic, so there is a freedom of choice implied and is initially available but then on the plain of possibilities there are all sorts of technologically situated block-roads that traffic in and hinder motility. this is also a condition of Tarof. “shoma befarmayid!” (after you!)
*Tarof might be as well a mode of resistance in order not to enter the economy of the other (--> at the mercy of the other), when they say “it's on me.”
•رودربایستی <--> ? a [در رودربایستی گیر کردن] (a --?--> حیا)
shah: one who sits while others stand --> tarof as king's behavior (tarof is adab-e salatin?) ~~--> tasavof's tarof: takalof (=/= javan-mardi: ‘self = guest’)
Khhv0M9n5_g
...................................
every call to speak involves some violation and over-joy, putting oneself in a persecutory way on the line, what Sa'di calls in “Dar Favaede Khamushi” in 4th chapter of his Golestan ‘on the disadvantages of speaking’ or “On the Advantages of Silence” (Written in 1258 CE)
literate or obliterate
infinitely less violent --> that there is never absolutely nonviolent, a value infinitely small but never zero; infinidecimals
degree of vio[...]
(136)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%32.3[...]et in existence --> nature of future friendship. (is he keeping the friend necessarily remote? out of political reach? Avital's asking, accusing Holderlin of singularization)
-Graeco-Roman model of friendship
-(is there a specific Iranian model of friendship? --?--> Tarof)
-political model of friendship (based on reciprocity)
Greco-Roman --> Mediterranean World
-the “swimming-pool and spa” of the Greeks and Romans?
-wherein the cultural preferences, ideas and sensitivities of these peoples were dominant
-their urbanites and cosmopolitan elites
-mutual knowledge
politics of friendship in Kelileo Demne:
undiscovered treasures...
constantly warning of fall on the asymmetry
nonreciprocity
Kelile-o Demne is about communal forms of fragile human existence
a project of (asserted) nonalienation
-destinal velocities (the Turtle, the storks, etc.)
fictioning totality of nature, therefore, state
States of security, nature of illusion,
finite essence of friendship
(is muslim paradice and general idea of akherat in the way of finitude of friendship? what would friendship for a mojud-e okhravi mean?)
octo-paradisic systems
animal husbandry
[husband: conserve, husband, economize, economise, spouse, mate,]
[husbandry: the practice of cultivating the land or raising stock]
...................................
the national geography documentary crew and the editors fabulating a nature story which comes to hang around in my family's lunch table culture. the iranian mother and eating your children story of the lions. the multi species contingencies. my family culturenaturally hanged on the story of the wild nature, wildness. what does it mean for my family in their specific temporal location in tehran history? the disappearance of Gonjecshk [Sparrows being replaced by Starlings], parks [numerous stories of devastation], and the anthropocentric state logic [condition of the zoos, hostility towards domestic dogs, etc.]?
-and as is the case with my family, they are so good at changing the subject, and all i have perhaps tried to performe is the ways we can stay with the subject of discussion around our lunch tables, to stay with this particular story and not that. (althought i have been changing the subject constantly myself...)
-the absence (minimum presence) of animal in my family, and the ways the animal story circulate and live there. what is the animal holding in my family?
-stories or fables that permit wonder, or allow perhaps to approach crows or cats as creatures who could be capable of contingent cooperation or multispecies companionship. [i am referring to the video of the wild animal taking care of the baby pet, the popular video in social media that triggered the discussion about wild and domesticity during the lun[...]
(137)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%32.4[...]at thou become to Satan a friend.”
(evil and friend coming adjoint more than once)
[25:28] Alas for me! Ah, would that I had never taken such an one for friend!
...................................
(mode-identifying signs falsified)--(unconsciously?)
manipulative simulation of friendliness
\\
(in Germany) we need ‘detours’ and taking detours =/= having end-goals
we are not built to handle peace --> existence is perhaps ok, but coexistence is a real problem
coexistence includes all sorts of aggressions
burdened with a bird name
(birds of Attar)
20 minutes to propose some itineraries
all the different ways we come to life. (some even through violation, being shaken awake, libidinal surge, thrill, etc.) --> the delusion to desiring nonviolence (whenever there is desire there is violence)
wanting, desire <--> violence
(نیاز niaz <--> azar آزار)
which organs of peacefulness are we resisting?
{punishment, wanting to be punished}
delivery (not ‘from’ but) ‘of’ punishment
(for Varinia: what about the people feeling guilting and destructive who rush to the judge or the penal system confessing and begging for punishment? --where is the figure of persecutor located at her practice? if at all addressed.)
(@Sana: how do i deal with helplessness? the Hilflosigkeit is primal, [the start-up engine of psychoanalysis, powerlessness and power-failure.] --> (then let's ask) where does it hurt? in the eyes? ears? --for Varinia it hurts on the neck)
-and despair
-and distress
when I punish you...
i cannot say if our encounter is specifically Levinasian
...................................
[Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert]
‘natural’:
-scientist's site of fieldwork
-naturalist's site of biological conservation
-entrepreneur's site of capital accumulation
-poacher's site of prey
-soldier's site of refuge
--> geographies of human struggle, politics, colonialism, capitalism, intervention,
what is shapping in these sites (science labors, natural parks, pig and chicken farms, mobile phones, etc.) human-animal relations (in their widely divergent kinds)?
(technology, ethics, welfare and politics in Tehran)
the ways my mother thinks about the diffission of animals’ bodily wastes beyond the bounds of their immediately present: dog's poop, etc. --> spatial externality of animals (--"they contaminate!”)
in the case of mobile phone animal meme, the human-animal relation does not operates solely through the physical proximity of humans and animals, but rather a wider geography, and networks the interiority of Tehran domestic environments.
-as the house becomes cleaner, the pu[...]
(138)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%33[...]/>
...................................
Hayward on the role of embodiment in visual cultures + meaning of animals in representation
*to envision animal* = to visualize, to experience, to figure, to image, kinds of species, discourses, representations, institutions, histories, epistemologies + to “imagine possible” a set of material and ethical relationships between species
envisioning:
•a mode of seeing and embodying, of immersing and inhabiting, and of storytelling and theorizing in a techno-scientific world of “eye machine”
•a range of practices for situating the “self” (that tender thing in postmodernity) in places and spaces grown thick with entanglements and consequences; a form both of “to face” and “to perceive”
aesthetic conceptions of beauty and/or ambiguity coupled with biological epistemology and phenomenology of the organisms --in--> in Jean Painleve, Genevieve Hamon, Leni Riefenstahl, David Powell ==construct==> a host of hybridized and enmeshed “encounters”
biosemiotics
zoosemiotics
-humanist fascist aesthetic --> desires to memorialize “beautiful and unpolluted” coral communities
-promise of immediate and luminous experience of “jellyfish otherness”
-systems (of power?) that constitutively produce animal and human actors
human-animal + nonhuman-animal + apparatuses --> co-constitutive in the process of trying to know something about whale ecology
(Hayward > Whitehead:) concrescence: “we” (con prefix) ere- (create) scence (sense, or the “scene,” that which is seen), the present is given by a consense of subjective forms. We are multiple individuals, but there are also multiple individual agents of consciousness operant in the construction of the given.
-literal materialization of a dynamic produced
photograph (only one part, a kind of lively limb, of the relay):
(ajayeb style -->) a bumptious and lively event of the processes of whale studies and whales themselves =/= a still record of a whale “that had been there”
the image: a kind of connective tissue, soliciting one's senses
solar light --> brushed up against, even touched, the whale --> translated through the camera --> into film --> into chemical bathes --> into photo-paper --> through my eye as a research assistant
}==> ‘photograph: material, immanent, interconnected’ ==> somatic intelligibility (embodiment) to my own somatic intelligence ~ enacted an encounter between the senses (subjective feelings) and their sense (objective knowledges)
a mutual embodiment <-- shared in the event of the photographic space
experience of these photographs [whale or telegram animal video]: an instance of *sensuous knowledge* --> way we are in some carnal modality able to touch and be touched by the substance of images (to feel a visual[...]
(139)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%35[...]morrhaging [flow of blood from a ruptured blood vessels], excising, amputating” [& killing(?)]
breaking fast with glowing light
Kac's GFP bunny: (chimera of) rabbit + jellyfish + human + technology
making bodies materially luminal --Hayward--> تابش effulgence bound to meatier substance =/= extraterrestrial force of more heavenly bodies
(-what about the moon?)
sexual planktonic medusa
دو شکلی dimorphic life history
جانور دریایی pelagic drifters
[*]drift: to be carried slowly by a current of air or water :
•move passively, aimlessly or involuntarily into a certain situation or condition
•a steady movement or developement from one thing toward another
•*your body is an index of its environment* (= jellyfish: when provoked give off a green glow... *glowing in response to provocation*)
•to be sent adrift as mutation
•the general intention of an argument (--> in writing: *technique of drifting*)
◦poetic joints
◦mixing ontologies into larger organizations
◦
blend of tissue
reorder not only life but also light
-(Sagan -->) life: how matter interacts with interconnected systems that include organisms in their distinct perceiving worlds
-(Uexküll -->) Umwelt: perceptual bubbles (of the most unidentifiable animals: ticks, spiders, inverts) ==> ‘organs of animals are counterparts of lived environments’ : ***animal body: inverted map of its environment*** (mediated by its capacity to interpret habitat through bodily sensation) [Uexküll using music to define the laws of nature: “life = musical response,” effects of *animal capitalism*]
to travel through stages of evolution of the consumer product ~=> becoming a new harmony (<-- using jellyfish as advertising in posthuman consumerism)
-(Lingis -->) [*]sensation: ملقمه amalgamations made of movements and affects that shape the energetic relay between subjects and objects,, an intensity --that--> pressures us --feel--> our cohabitation --in--> a sensible environment --that--> opens outward (=/= simulation of our sensorys or nervous systems) ==> subject is *involved* into the sensuousness of being : *excitation of affect and desire within a sensuous environment ==generate==> substance of self*
•percepts oringinating in environmental harmonization
tranimals invoke the social, affective, sensorial response-abilities of becoming and eating [<-- Hayward's affirmative poetics of trans- --✕--> Stewart's much more complex pattern of description]
-my art work has been more about intensity + techne (= baroque?), than aesthetics ==> ([{when i make images} sharing] our) subjugation to sensation
( sensibility [ ... ) sensuousness ]
|
affect <-- sensation --> affe[...]
(140)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%35.3[...]r />
•the general intention of an argument (--> in writing: *technique of drifting*)
◦poetic joints
◦mixing ontologies into larger organizations
◦
blend of tissue
reorder not only life but also light
-(Sagan -->) life: how matter interacts with interconnected systems that include organisms in their distinct perceiving worlds
-(Uexküll -->) Umwelt: perceptual bubbles (of the most unidentifiable animals: ticks, spiders, inverts) ==> ‘organs of animals are counterparts of lived environments’ : ***animal body: inverted map of its environment*** (mediated by its capacity to interpret habitat through bodily sensation) [Uexküll using music to define the laws of nature: “life = musical response,” effects of *animal capitalism*]
to travel through stages of evolution of the consumer product ~=> becoming a new harmony (<-- using jellyfish as advertising in posthuman consumerism)
-(Lingis -->) [*]sensation: ملقمه amalgamations made of movements and affects that shape the energetic relay between subjects and objects,, an intensity --that--> pressures us --feel--> our cohabitation --in--> a sensible environment --that--> opens outward (=/= simulation of our sensorys or nervous systems) ==> subject is *involved* into the sensuousness of being : *excitation of affect and desire within a sensuous environment ==generate==> substance of self*
•percepts oringinating in environmental harmonization
tranimals invoke the social, affective, sensorial response-abilities of becoming and eating [<-- Hayward's affirmative poetics of trans- --✕--> Stewart's much more complex pattern of description]
-my art work has been more about intensity + techne (= baroque?), than aesthetics ==> ([{when i make images} sharing] our) subjugation to sensation
( sensibility [ ... ) sensuousness ]
|
affect <-• sensation --> affect
affect affect
affect affect affect
affect ::{~body~}::
sensation --distribute--> affects & percepts (across bodies)
excitation (unleashes bodily organization at the site of contact) = zone of an *expressed threshold* =/= zone of contact
multispecies materialities --Grosz--> life folds over itself to embrace its contact with materiality
rabbit mammalizes light
glow: a dynamizing force ==> making matter more
Hayward: through [Alba's] glow, her artfulness, we are reminded that species are not just relationships, nor are species ever directly in relationship with other species, we are resonances and dissonances of intensification, energetic cadences of one another--a sensorial ensemble [<-- what marketing would say about this?]
space between scientific experimentation (biocu[...]
(141)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%35.3[...]>
(Darwinan trope...) monstrously minute, potent and parasitic, characterized by missing body parts
efforts to know, classify, and conquer the oceanic (--> capture for visual pleasure) ==> counter-conquest of the home by monsters and sexual deviants
the most prized organisms were “exotics” from non-european environments that fueled ongoing colonialism in the mode of animal husbandry
Hayward:
differences in display technologies
variations in viewer experience and perception
alterations in cross-species encounters
aquarium's promise of immediacy(?)
the rhetoric of animal domination is not the only discourse at work (in aquarium display, telegram, in ajayeb, in zoo, etc.)
Hayward's attention to the expressiveness of sensation, display technologies, and the animals themselves =/=? my attention to telegram animal media
(modern) aquarium: turning toward the monstrous oceanic but updated for a technoscientific postmodernity and anticipating a sci-fi futurity
exhibits as idealizations
the aquarium visitor is entertained into caring about environmental ethics and marine biology. enacting a moral imperative to protect local ecosystems, the aquarium is a savoir --> the parochial becomes the new cosmopolitan
technology + artistry + biology
playing with scale, volume, space
refractive technology:
•produces the visceral and optical experience of immersion...
•makes us profoundly aware of our bodies in space
•producing a disorienting visuality
*refracted vision = textured light*
refraction = corporal جسمى + carnal (جسمانى marked by the appetites and passions of the body) ==> effective stimulation
osmotic space
amniotic
eroded
bad boundaries
concretions
immersive medusa or jellies transducingly
snaky tresses of the mythical gorgon
more-ness of sensation
destroyed, transformed, conserved
jelly scatters
diffracting cilia and fluible mesoglea
metamorphosing diffraction patterns
multiple sensory registers temper the apparatus of seeing: sound, tactility, movement, proximity
immersion ==convey==> the experience of being totally inside a world, a state of mind, cultural and historical forms, and intellectual rumination =/= unreality or reality
==> cohabitation =/= representation
tactile visuality
fingery eyes
relies on textured proximity rather than objective distance
the visual apparatus is the touching body
[*]art: sensual movement of perceptual information (across media and bodies)
transduction:
(at an energetic transduction site: one form of organized energy asymmetrically converted into ano[...]
(142)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%35.6[...]-psychic projection of a Big Other that stands in for the presence of the ontologically non-existent group narrative] ==> moral grounds for living
(?) reverting back to your material status (as private individuals) =/= looking after ideological stability and economy
thins that don't work with when talking to partisan mentality:
•factual argumentation
•punching them
•Kantian argument for the intrinsic value of all human lives
(what generally don't work:) reminding one's political rivals of facts --✕--> (Levinasian) the trace of the other
(?why i need or not need) intellectual adversarie [=/= caricatures for shooting practice]
(the banal and continuous hyper-polarized political partisanship of) right-wing populism =/= Social justice activism
(our agreement on) moral and methodological priority of the individual
...................................
https://merionwest.com/2018/07/31/purity-politics-is-ruining-progressivism/
prison: mechanism available to remove people from society
[my problem with: political philosophy (of) authentic radical politics -->] (academic or artistic) critical scholarship [critical race theory, post-colonial theory, gender studies, etc. -->{busy with **systemic grievances** (white supremacy, colonialism, racism, etc,)} + left-wing identity politics --> *leftist purity politics*] universalizing a kind of moral complicity ==> a reductionist social ontology of guilt and victimization -->{
•bad idea of the whole (liberalism) is historically associated with, for example, colonialism ==> all of its parts (people, ideas, etc.) are equally associated with colonialism
•the idea of modernity + the rise of the individual ==> (a sense of) loss of community
==>
•participation
•horizontalism
•institutional distrust
•ad hoc organizations
forensic architecture: purifying itself of (and overcome) injustice =/= meaningful progressive change
(Occupy movement, protest mentality --> how left-wing purity politics missed the) consequences electoral capacity, electoral politics
(not knowing how to use) liberal institutions
•(thinking with Bruzzone -->) we need more *impure politics* : (reform & compromise mentality)
◦how to transform knowledge into *electoral mobilization* (=/= Pierre's interest in fiction, Leo's interest in a morally pure collective future)
◦how to form alliances with groups whom you have grave doubts
•we don't need *hoard of like-minded people sharing collective anger and disgust at injustice*
postmodern conservatism: empirical / ideological
neoliberal societies: hierarchies tolerated by citizens so long as the economy continues to prosper
something happens ==> together --> social group
entitative: the quality of [...]
(143)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%36.3[...]those behaviors that are most meaningful to the animals themselves
•Shirly Strum --> I tried to let the baboons themselves “tell” me what was ‘important’ (-how a tree can tell you what is important to them?) -with the baboonss: nothing made them believe that she could be a baboon, so she decided after a while that she could try to urinate while staying among the baboons ==> surprise (=/= trying not to disturb the baboons with her body) --> her body (style, gender, smell, look, anime, etc.) made her enter into relationships with the animals in a new mode, **as a living person (like them) she creates with them an embodied proximity** (==> embodied affinities) [<-- Jassem is very good at it. this happens as well in apass research environment between artists]
---> go to Cinderella taking shower with her birds in the attic {urine, noise, surprise}
•Mark Bekoff --> empathy: possibility of sharing feelings involves mirror neurons (“I can feel the animals”) ~= (an experiment to incorporate) *to embody literally*
+ (Burghardt's) use of *critical anthropomorphism* (=/= Walt Disney) use of various forms of information (natural history, perception, behavioral description, autism, Cinderella, etc.)
•Temple Grandin (expert in factory plants for slaughter systems) --> *empathy without pathos* (for her and the animals) [*]world: a swirling mass of tiny details ~ [animal: autistic savant ~= special form of genius]--> a little plastic water bottle lying harmlessly, a shiny reflection, a yellow jacket hanging on a fence, all those turn out to be in their world *wrong details* (“I think the way animals think”) --> ****animals are visual thinkers**** {*you have to see in details*_ <-- how my work changed visually from abstract to baroque while working on the heritage of zoology. #Cinderella: which part of me animals give new powers and meanings? that part is of other beings}
-{Grandin actively transforms mindless animals into meaningful geniuses ==> gives them new powers ==> changes her}--> *animals (or your ghosts, your subjects) are invited to other modes of being, other relationships, new ways to inhabit the human world + to force human beings to address them differently : **disclosing unexpected affinities ==create==> new identities** (=/= empathy: tourism of the soul) --> identities do not pre-exist identification : *****previous construction of affinities ==> identity (is the outcome, the achievement)*****
(Grandin:) *marginal essence --transform--> partial perspective ==> affinities: (Haraway's) just-barely-connections*
}=/= romanticism: the belief that “feeling for another” belongs to some sort of naive state of nature
(#feedback: ways of showing the artists how they actively create the perspective that allows them to “see” --> ‘giving artistic feedback = being an anthropologist on Mars’)
Despret anticipate finding some references to the body (beyond simple [...]
(144)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%36.5[...]g buried together
--> part and parcel of the **narrative stock** talented storytellers would exploit to construct their tales
intertextual references
•cannibal black men
•the one-eyed person whose one eye had been picked out by a bird (a well-known narrative from premodern arabic and persian tradition, a one-eyed character is taken as an ill omen, whereas here he figures as a friendly advisor and helper)
•
--> ***stock characters*** of premodern middle eastern literature
Marzolph --> concider texts as artful creations composed by a talented narrator =/= taking texts as the products of an anonymous popular “fold” tradition that would indiscriminately غيرمشخص lump together all kinds of material ==> belittling the creative act of a single individual
*intertextual allusions (to themes, motifs, concepts familiar to the audience) : a highly effective narative technique for linking new and unknown tales to a web of tradition the audience shares*
...................................
*~._
all the familiar landmarks of your thoughts that you find in somebody else's
عجایب نامه ajayeb (doing it here in europe): the exotic charm of another system of thought (~= its limitation)
[*]zoo: terrible grounds that the child [= us] enjoys = primal scene of conquest (of nation building, of state power) --carceral--> scene of sadistic pleasure, where bodies become “flesh” [<-- telegram is all of this]
(Hayward + Borges)
[*]child: a primal scene = the promise of the social, the human, and the future --> ***child is necessary for the ongoingness of colonialism*** [---> go to the children in The 100 TV series <-- *white child: an explorer of terrible grounds*]
•conscripted labor
•enslavement
•necropolitical economy
•
--elaborating-proliferating--> productive engines of empire
}--Hayward--> how might the effects of colonialism always find children enjoying terrible places?
the subtending (entgegensetzend) logic of the zoo
sadism: the trouble of enjoying terribleness
(Lacanian) imaginary --desires--> coherence (=/= fragmentation) ==generates==> a compromise : an idealization of the self as whole, between the unbearability of interiority and exteriority
*imaginary is unavoidable, the obligatory state of existence (for speaking subjects) ==constitutes==> real effects
•Borges --> imaginary --> a world in pieces (monstrous fragmentation), impossible world of ‘that’
•Lacan --> imaginary --> tentatively precariously constitutes a sense of self through alienation
(Hayward > Borgesian) ****zoo --constitutes--> a primal scene of colonial violence though which fantasy and imagination, dragons and unicorns, are articulated, organized, rendered as “els[...]
(145)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%37.8[...]here/then not, sill/in motion, unsettling/reassuring (seems to trap only dust)
*lived-web = optic skin, a resounding connective tissue
(spider's capacities to) create, syncopate, improvise
(spider and me in the appartment) we resonate in relation to our different movements and processes
[*]trap: a mouth, a mode of utterance, the “O” curve of lips and throat that sounds out and names the apprehension of being embodied
--> ***positionality ~/= situatedness = to be trapped*** (to speak and receive ranges of sensuous input from one's environment) --> *our bodies are not endlessly available to intentionality*
[*]articulation: speaking oneself into culture and history, but also creating a site, a gap, making room in cultural and political fabrications, and finding a tempo, a beat
•utopic inclusion (sexual, national, racial)
•*sexuality imagined as political promise* (radical force of nonnormative sexuality) [=/= (for Freud) sex is regressive]
•trans: energetic and fantastic space between objects
(racial, economic) **divisions = dependencies**
(Lyotard: we must) construct the anatomy of polymorphous perversion, unfold the immense membrane of libidinal body =/= system of parts
irreverent intimacies
thresholding: an intensity that must be exceeded for reaction to occur
“here is my home, i am freshly aware that my body is a threshold, an entry between rooms”
limits (of my body) = energized zones
sadomasochism stitches
*carnal improvisation* <-- paradigm of performance art in europe (---> go to karaoke in KHM, role of my body as medium in the circuit of transmissions, poetically imagine the shape of a new pattern)
pastpresent: an always present past in the present
*patterns longer than lived experience*
[*]history: libidinal tracings, erotogenic intensities, psychical cartographies
{ porosity = poiesis }--> collapse the boundary between the embodied self + its world + others ==> consitute a specific place
•puberty = the fantasy that this disfiguration will make me more myself
•teenager = you spend hours before the refracting reflection of your transmutating *body = your most intimate other* --> enact boundaries, sometimes lovingly, but also brutally
(senses are) reactive to the sensual abundance of the world but limited by affected perceptual milieus
[*]texture: residue of unmetabolized and metabolized sensations of animate forces --> emergence of bodiliness (<-- Hayward's rhetoric)
transitional body = textural body
architecture: the most binding part of the communal rhythm
appearance ~= metonymic
appearance allows her to em[...]
(146)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%38.1[...]estic life rhythms
•cheerleading docufictions
•educational quiz shows
•uplifting entertainment such as theatrical broadcasts of Russian and European classics
•doctored news
•limited advertising
•domestically produced dramatic series focused firmly on the romanticized historical past
{projective ideals =/= actual experiential realities of socialism}==> layer of ironic distance between [media (television) and its viewers]
(1990s following the Soviet empire's disintegration -->) ironic overidentification ==> nostalgia
--Imre--> evasion of television allows for nostalgia to be misframed and misappropriated as a sentiment that marks the end of socialism [temporally and clearly demarcates backward-looking postsocialist populations from forward-looking (Western) observers]
----> takes into account television's (and internet social media) relevance to collective memory
post-X nostalgia: a near-visceral yearning for the false sense of safety derived from the memory of X (fetishistically attached to public personas or consumer products of the past)
nostalgia: an interpretive framework }<-- **sense of intimate sociality disrupted by the collapse of a centralized system of governance and the influx of globalization**
nostalgia is a discourse (that is not specific to Eastern Europe) populations disappointed with and unequipped to deal with the advent of market democracy
there are more than one way of (content of) longing
television: a medium whose chief mode of operation is in reruns, recombinations, circulating formats and generic adaptations that constantly interweave national, regional and global scales ~= digital social media
(Imre > Boyer) to trace nostalgia back to the intellectual origins of European cultural nationalisms
...diverse and contradictory sentiments that make us see European cultures conjoined in mutual relationships of dependence, rather than separation
(Imre -->) *nostalgia as something by definition national at its core*
nostalgia --foreground--> coexistence of different temporalities in the present
postsocialist nostalgia in Romania is similar in structure to late socialist nostalgia of the 1980s in Hungary
manage feelings of dislocation ==> longing for national homes
~~--> preference for literature and high art as expressions of what has been identified as cultural nationalism (“national tradition = tradition invested in high art”) + perceived illegitimacy of popular cultural production and consumption (concealed by the allegedly rebellious “dissident” status of intellectuals) ==organize==> the contents of collective memory
Imre --> racialized underpinnings of allegedly “pure” aesthetic judgments
inherently no[...]
(147)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%39[...] a post-imperial symptom = (expression of a growing Western European awareness that) modernity is plurinodal rather than centred in European metropolitan headquarters
(postimperial European dimension of) *cultural nationalism <~÷+-> nostalgia*
...utopian national rebirth scenarios for a united Germany --> (promoted by intellectual artists) the bad idea that suppression of German nationalism ==open==> influx of American audio-visual culture (that muat be resisted in order to preserve and nourish German culture in its purest literary manifestation)
= logocentric return to the ethos of German Romanticism [Kulturnation --> certain cultural identity --> cliche-ridden elitist racist implications] + new nationalism =/= results of Western integration over the last forty years
aspirational narrative (of nation...)
postimperial power dynamic:
•western researcher --> has the political capital to afford studying popular media
•eastern researcher --> has to faithfully fulfill the role to represent their national culture (elite achievement)
(Bourdon >Imre) the most obvious European commonality --> **a focus on high culture**
national specificities of memory systems developed around television
nostalgia machine
•Putin --> TV programming to a literary Soviet heritage
•Hungarian FIDESZ --> children’s channel of socialist children’s programmes
•showcase oeuvre of popular performers from the past
•rerunning vintage highbrow content: old films, television series and documentaries
•popular music's capacity to call up depoliticized affective memories
•commercials (--trigger--> postsocialist nostalgia)
•
}--> depoliticized reminiscences ==> an image of (socialist) sociality as a natural connecting glue among citizens gathered around the warm glow of their favourite singers and cabaret actors
FIDESZ = alarming racism + anti-Semitism + drastic neoliberal economic restructuring --> television = interfaces of official state nationalism + commercial purposes of a nostalgia industry
(ghost of dictators in) humorous commercial context:
•Tito in post-Yugoslav republic commercials (as anti-capitalist and anti-commercialist hero)
•Ceausescu in commercials in Romania (old footage of him walking his dog in car tires ads)
•
}--Imre--> (blending) *top-down 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 (--> [...]
(148)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%39.1[...]
•Hindu nationalism --> reformulated history from a focus on colonialism and postcolonial nation-building into a narrative of victimhood that blames historic Muslim invasions for the decline of Hindu civilisation and nationhood
•China --> reformulated its school history textbooks to stress victimhood and humiliation through the idea of China's “100 years of humiliation” in reference to Western and Japanese invasions
•United States --> nationalism often takes the shape of antipathy to government that is enmeshed with an ideology of liberal individualism
•
}--> ***logic of empowerment*** (--permeate--> economies of visibility)
***memory narrative***
iran --> shohada شهدا martyrs of iran-iraq war --> after the war became the picture of collective victimhood (“heroes = us”)
Erdogan's speech
“we have been tested by fire” (--?--> Siavash's fire trial is populist?)
~= “we have been tested by enemy”
~= “evil forces”
(from) populism --to--> neofascism
(from) generic rhetoric of an unidentified enemy --to--> articulation of an identifiable foe (who is met with political violence)
authoritarian state apparatus [= political system + culture + institutions + ?] --allow--> smoother way of operationalisation of narratives (about the dangers of adversaries)
-exactly what kind of state apparatus we have in iran?
historical victimhood --> resurgent populist discourse
•people have been enduring victimhood for too long
•fateful junctures throughout history
•authentic great path
•urgency of message
•
animating rhetoric with self-victimhood ==produce==> divisions (men =/= women, us =/= enemy, etc.)
exclusionary politics <-- homogeneous community (=/= alien intrusion, outside forces, immigrants, minorities, etc.)
...................................
Kundera
is humor modern?
*humor is not ancient* (?!)
“whatever humor touches it ambiguites”
humor = ambiguitor
...................................
globalization =/= cold war
globalization =/= enlightenment (“universal humanism + rationalized tech ==> freedom for all”)
cold war = a meaningfull relation between ideology & power [==give==> orientation + identity --> normative approach to global phenomena]
geopolitc + ideologic borders
=/=
globalization --> completly different political behaivor (definitions of national goals, friend and enemy, etc.) --> pluralist democracy (differences + contrasts) =/= social democracy (erasing differences)
globalization = attitude حالت =/= meaning
[cold war: “world ~= (a sort of) problem” --> behaviors had] meaning ==> (base for) power
cold war[...]
(149)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%39.6[...]
ecology of the Jinn
(Qur'an)
raging fire
scorched by burning fire
striking sparks of fire
and roasting at hell-fire
the fire of Allah, kindled
...
bringing together of two homogeneous blocks of material in a given, already-inhabited space
as if we knew what space and time mean
“the desert bighorn is an animal shaped by ice. [...] the design of wild sheep is very much an expression of arctic cold.” (Meloy)
(what the design of fire is as expression of? what shaped fire? ice?)
(we are shaped also by fire)
how you go from lizard to bird?
it must have been through the behavior of lizard that ‘birdness’ has come to be possible. a certain trait of behavior have allowed the lizard find itself in the air.
ice age
story of fire, story of grass, ...
after the establishment of a land-based flora (Middle Ordovician period, 470 million years ago) and permitting the accumulation of oxygen in the atmosphere it permitted the possibility of wildfire.
Fire also became more abundant when grasses radiated and became the dominant component of many ecosystems, around 6 to 7 million years ago;
...................................
electrical fire
conflict between the “junk” and the “text” that seemed to fascinate
...................................
how to write cold with fire? the medium of fire is incompatible with that of the paper. paper burns fire off! the combustion emerging elements energized by their contact fuels a sudden blow of increase in their excited entropy. flame. action is the breeze that death digs. foam knows no halt. the focus is noised and seeds location. place penetrates in shattery nozzles originating from thousands of nowheres. inferno's insurance is about aggression of hot.
...................................
A) Accident, Action, Adrenaline, Aggressive, Aid, Aircraft, Alarm, Alert, Ambulance, Apprehension, Arson, Ash, Assess, Assist
B) Bad, Barricades, Battle, Blacken, Blame, Blanket, Blast, Blaze, Blister, Blow out, Breeze, Burning, Burns, Bystander
C) Car, Careless, Catastrophe, Caution, Challenge, Char, Chimney, Choice, Claim, Conflagration, Consume, Consumption, Contain, Control, Coordination, Crackle, Crash
D) Damage, Death, Destruction, Detect, Dig, Direction, Dirty, Dispatch, Drama
E) Electrical, Embers, Emergency, EMT, Engulf, Experience, Explode, Extinguish
F) Facts, Failure, Fared, Fascination, Fell, Fierce, Fire-break, Firefighter, Fireplace, Flames, Flammable, Flash, Foam, Focus, Fright, Fuel
G)
H) Halt, Happening, Holocaust, Home, Hose, Hot, Hot spot, House, Hydrant
I) Inaccessible, Inferno, Injury, Insurance, Interfere, Investigation
J) Judgment, Jurisdiction
[...]
(150)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%39.8[...], Caution, Challenge, Char, Chimney, Choice, Claim, Conflagration, Consume, Consumption, Contain, Control, Coordination, Crackle, Crash
D) Damage, Death, Destruction, Detect, Dig, Direction, Dirty, Dispatch, Drama
E) Electrical, Embers, Emergency, EMT, Engulf, Experience, Explode, Extinguish
F) Facts, Failure, Fared, Fascination, Fell, Fierce, Fire-break, Firefighter, Fireplace, Flames, Flammable, Flash, Foam, Focus, Fright, Fuel
G)
H) Halt, Happening, Holocaust, Home, Hose, Hot, Hot spot, House, Hydrant
I) Inaccessible, Inferno, Injury, Insurance, Interfere, Investigation
J) Judgment, Jurisdiction
K) Kindle, Knowledge
L) Laboring, Life-threatening, Lightening strike, Limitations, Lives, Location, Losses, Luck
M) Malfunction, Matches, Mechanical, Medical attention, Memory, Mesmerize, Misery
N) Needs, Nine-one-one, Noise, Nozzle
O) Observe, Odor, Ordeal, Origin
P) Paramedic, Penetration, Place, Police, Potency, Potential, Prevention, Progress, Prone, Pumps
Q) Quench, Quick
R) Reaction, Repellent, Requirement, Residue, Risk
S) Safety, Scenario, Set, Shatter, Shelter, Siren fire truck, Situation, Smell, Smoke, Smoke jumper, Smokey the Bear, Smoldering, Smother, Sprinkler system, Statement, Stop, Strategy, Strength, Stressful, Stretcher, Suffering, Susceptible, Swath
T) Tactic, Target, Terror, Thick, Threaten, Trailer, Training, Trees, Trench
U) Uncontrolled, Urgent
V) Victim, Vigilant, Volunteers
W) Watch, Water, Weakness, Weather, Wilderness, Wind, Worse
X) X-ray
Y) Yelling
Z) Zone
(Ajayeb)
Know! That I saw in fire many benefits, insomuch benefits that ‘he’ set in fire, the intellects of India and Greece erred and prostrated this fire-thing and this betrayal stayed in magus [Zoroastrians] and they became fire-worshiper until it became certain that the God's guidance offers and just with reason alone work cannot be done fully and if they worship fire of its benefits then in mud there is more benefits than that and in water more benefits than there is in fire and if The Creator wants to make wanderers of a folk he infects them with a substance as he infected the Indians with worshiping cow and Christians with worshiping the hoof of Christ's donkey and the pagans with worshiping idol and matter
and we shall mention the attributes of fire and its properties:
Know! That fire has taken the whole world of universe and no stone and no wood is not uncharged with fire. If a fool takes a piece of wood and asks “where is fire?” I say the way of everything is in manifestation as when two woods strike together made of Margh and Afar,[1] fire will appear or hit stone to metal
[1] According to Jashn-e Sadeh recalls the importance of light, fire and energy; light which comes from God is found in the hearts of his creatures. --> Hushang and the[...]
(151)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%39.9[...]species and nunhumans.
-ontogenetic agenda --- (The agenda is a given; the support depends on a social readiness to nurture, itself a product of successful ontogeny of an older generation.)
-many myths correspond to the ontogenesis. in Ontogeny, timing is everything---narrative.
-aspect of the ontogenetic self---(the modern world has lost the ways to guide the) new person emerging at each stage
[from kinfolk complexity and elderhood to medically sustained old age] -- i myself have turned to old folk to do storytelling, as necessity(!?)
one emerging in Pleistocene, is about perceiving one's place in the scheme of things (and not sending people down the pit into darknesses)
WE NOT ONLY LOOKED ‘AT’ ANIMALS, WE ALSO LOOKED ‘INSIDE’ THEM, realizing that they were more kin than indicated by our exteriors. (it wasn't Aristotle first who was performing such procedures)
attaching sounds to things/animals/species when they were not visible
(“Never ignore a sound!”)
inheritance (DNA, etc.) calls upon human society and imagination to invent its exact expressions.
human species’ “theme” is Paleolithic
(those who are “better” live in a natural environment and a cultural system that are closer to) meeting the “expectations” of the genes
Children at age six are typically anthropomorphic
trees structure space
**imagining the possibilities of something else being in there.
(how we were doing it? before fire)
“A meditative stillness that is good for the human soul, suggests poet Gary Snyder, was invented by motionless hunters. That moment of silent reverence comes also at the final death stroke when one succumbs to the cycle of life.” (Shepard)
[from predation to hunting (there is a huge epistemological shift) (matter of representation and interpretation)]
mammalian ecology
[(let's) risk everything (instead of risk-reducing) --- issues of representation and agency in thinking ‘with’ animals. textual, metaphor animal in Attar line of thinking]
a distant call in known terrain says it is the there, not the here, where attention should be paid. [far, origins of our tropes, metaphysics? abstraction? =/=? motionless hunters invented motionless meditative worship]
-(kinfolk in) swamps, brush, and forest (in terms of discerning the *relationships between clues*)
-(indirect) dealing with the escapable (=?=> tracking strategies + symbolic thought)
a central theme: (a banquet/feast at which) the participants--eater and eaten--risk the improvements of mind against the certainty of occasional poor decisions, (faulty memory, carelessness, errors of judgment, and the decrepitude of age and disease.)
-Those who fled had to understand [the limits of distance, the intentions of the others, and] (the abilit[...]
(152)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%40.3[...]s Zal az far as he plays the classic male role model in stealing her?]
[there is a moment in Shahname when it conjoins women and [disgust?], enmeshing them] [and why am i taking upon myself to defend woman? interrupting the abyssal enjoyment of the poem in punishing Sudabeh?]----of Ferdosi not allowing a feminine drift and deviation, from the Law. ***it's Father Time.
--> am i reclaiming otherness by enforcement? (recover her? =/=? understand her) why zoom in her? why teaching myself how to trust and desire her? (allowing myself being lured by her. why it is imperative to let ourselvse to be lured by the “her-idea”?) (is Ferdosi mobilizing forces in iranian hearts? militarize them? “jang-avari”) (the point is not to take critical power in disclaming the fire that valorized Siyavash and then take Sudabeh's side. rather the point is to energize the experiences of metamorphic transformation that animated fire of the fire-temple in the mind of Ferdosi. by participating in Sudabeh's case, her assemblage, i am also recovering my own capacity to care for Ferdosi's fire too and accept being mystified by its telling flames. [end of Sudabeh part])
in a world where humans were increasingly rendered particularly lively (than the creatures without nervous systems ~= objects) with intense awarenesses, fire seemed to be even more lively, with an access to a/its/the beyond
(from stone as a fellow being to the fire the authority figure---by the end of Pleistocene)
(Jesus) will baptize you with fire. (the Old Believers)
moses in fire: stop the representation! stop the constant demonstration! show me body! show me a flesh i can feel! put your hand in the fire moses! i am that which is not burning your hand. i am what that lies beyond. you are my creation, you are of mediation. if your body was my creation, your hand would burn.
it is told that Zaratustra had a fire that was everlasting and would not burn.
باور ‘bavar’ ba+var (var = tested ~= just or fairly judged)
Ibrahim's case is a *warm var
water trial, drowning women to examine if they are witches
water+fire trial -- azmun-e ab-o-atash آزمون آب و آتش
The Paleozoic was a time of dramatic geological, climatic, and evolutionary change. The Cambrian Period witnessed the most rapid and widespread diversification of life in Earth's history, known as the Cambrian explosion, in which most modern phyla first appeared. Fish, arthropods, amphibians, anapsida, synapsida, euryapsida and diapsida all evolved during the Paleozoic. Life began in the ocean but eventually transitioned onto land, and by the late Paleozoic, it was dominated by various forms of organisms. Great forests of primitive plants covered the continents, many of which formed the coal beds of Europe and eastern North America. Towards the end of the era, large, sophisticated diapsida an[...]
(153)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%40.8[...]5-2.45 Ga): Practically no O2 in the atmosphere. The oceans were also largely anoxic with the possible exception of O2 gases in the shallow oceans.
Stage 2 (2.45-1.85 Ga): O2 produced, and rose to values of 0.02 and 0.04 atm, but absorbed in oceans and seabed rock.
Stage 3 (1.85-0.85 Ga): O2 starts to gas out of the oceans, but is absorbed by land surfaces. There was no significant change in terms of oxygen level.
Stages 4 and 5 (0.85-present): O2 sinks filled and the gas accumulates.[1]
[1] Holland, Heinrich D. “The oxygenation of the atmosphere and oceans”. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences. Vol. 361. 2006. pp. 903-915.
metazoan phyla : animal
history of life is tight to hisory of oxygen --> fire
Aerobic metabolism is more efficient than anaerobic pathways
Abiogenesis: the natural process of life arising from non-living matter, how pre-life chemical reactions gave rise to life on Earth
•self-replicating molecules
•RNA world --> catalyze peptide ligation or amino acid polymerization --> protains, specialized biocatalysis --> RNA + iron ==> DNA : data storage
•synthesized from inorganic compounds
•catalysis in chemical systems =?=> molecules necessary for self-replication
•this is a protain writing
*water
Study of zircons has found that liquid water must have existed as long ago as 4.4 Ga, very soon after the formation of Earth [...] water with similar deuterium-to-hydrogen ratio was already available at the time of Earth's formation, as evidenced in ancient “eucrites” meteorites originating from the asteroid Vesta. (wikipedia)
(four elements temporal hierarchy)
earth > water > oxygen(air) > fire
...................................
[with Guy Debord]
fire media theoretic
‘image’ detached into a stream, percieved as generality --> an inversion of life (“visible” negation of life - that has invented a visual form for itself)
(its social practices)
fire, not subordinate, as spectacle comes as means of unification, locus of illusion, generalized apparition --> seperation
(its general truth) fire untouched by evolution and form binding constrains, is a universal mater, the spectacle of burning flame manifests itself as a positivity out of reach and beyond. the case of fire is different than Deobord spectalcle who speaks: “Everything that appears is good; whatever is good will appear.”
therefore fire specatle is not image, rather social relationship between subjects that are mediated by it
thus the function and phenomenon of separation mediated by fire becomes part and parcel of the unity of the world, from now on
-a new form of the sacred emerged with the discovery of fire's image
-produced new worshi[...]
(154)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%41.3[...]l it
(similar to human dwelling) ***house = temple = the place where the owner could be found (or felt)***
--> that god (the owner) was present and available
the god's retainers --> because the temple was god's home, was not only near and approachable, he was involved with the fortunes of the community and commited ti maintaining it --> *mesopotamian temple was profoundly awesome* (it carried awesome aura, awesome or angry nimbus هاله)
-the temple was covered with loveliness
-the god's private apartment shrouded in darkness : the dark room (no eye is to see)
--> specific closeness of essence + the power inhabiting it
authoritative revelation
know what was “the proper thing”
house mountain
house rising sun
house causing light
he who issues forth from the thriving...
ancient =? ancient to us ~=? ancient to them
there is no living cultural tradition that connects us with mesopotamia
immediate unanalyzed total reactions (?)
false meanings jar, stop, and lead no further
older elements (seemingly unchanged) come to mean something quite different, have been interpreted to fit into a new system of meanings
religious metaphors:
•spiritual core in phenomena
•rulers
•parents
[and then later] dark age closed down on mesopotamia
many divine wills to the willful whim of a single despot
*major gods became natural gods* (identified with narrow national political aspirations)
--> barbarization of the idea of divinity
...................................
(how to take seriously) water's materiality --> how to think with water (or *how water means*):
•water can bring human conceptual life along with it from local to global concerns
•[can help us to] go beyond qualities that express some timeless properties
(my point: the experience of fire is as inseparable from that of stone)
[Alberti suggests] *to think in terms of the properties of the phenomenon ‘rock/water’ as engendered by specific, embodied practices in this place* (=/= grappling with the question of the agentive capacities or properties of the rock or water)
***there are many waters (fires, jinns, divs, stones, shadows), not only many meanings of water (fires, jinns, divs, stones, shadows)***
}--> Alberti's brilliant response to Strang's bad idea of universal notions of properties (which is a very common tendency towards relationality among artists --> Strang: “common material properties of things, and the shared cognitive and phenomenological processes through which people interact with them, generate recurrent ideas and patterns of engagement in diverse cultural and historical contexts”)
to bear on the form and c[...]
(155)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%42.1[...]erboard, and measure how much rope went overboard within a given period of time
Pliny the Elder --> historia naturalis
Seneca --> naturales quaestiones
air has a natural power of moving itself [==> agency باد]
}<== Seneca’s stoic worldview: conceived the cosmic principle of all life and movement (pneuma) as a subtle substance pervading everything and giving rise, among other things, to all weather phenomena
air = expression of pneuma (alive & live-giving)
all weather = manifestations as transmutations of air
(late medieval encyclopedia -->) *weather = a kind of alchemy of air*
(late medieval wind diagrams -->) wind: cosmic divine powers blowing from the celestial sphere onto earth
Aristotle + Albertus Magnus ==> explanation of the nature and origin of winds in Renaissance meteorological works
air and were then dragged along by the circular movement of the celestial spheres so that they ended up moving horizontally
hot and dry exhalations
aeolipila: a hollow metal sphere (shaped like the face of Aeolus) with a single tiny hole in it
air possessed a force (“vis”) that heat could awaken
16th century --increase--> interest in systematic explanation of meteorological phenomena
#workshop on wind poetry
epic battle, systems moving air, agency,
feature of Renaissance thought --> the idea of *a middle instance (neither fully corporal nor fully incorporeal) intervening between matter and soul* [+ fire as intermediator] ~ spiritus, pneum, quintessence ~ fire or air
...in schematic abstract structure of body-spirit-soul, spirit is somewhere in between
spirit: air-like substance
air: preferred vehicle of spirit (conveyed the breath if life + *used by demonic spirits as a means to produce material effects*)
*spirit: celestial origin to the “innate heat” (calidum innatum) of living creatures
effects of solar heat on air : act of vitalization
pneuma of the stoics + astral body of Neoplatonic philosophy + medical spirits of Galenic medicine }==>
•Renaissance
•(christian notion of) Holy Ghost
•the idea of close connection between wind and divine power (in Bible)
(in alchemical view) spirits were somehow connected ti air <== quintessences were often separated from raw substances in the form of vapours
ajayebnameh ~= natural magic
*kinds of natural motions*
1. avoidance of avacum: from the form of a portion of air, when it does not want to be either expanded further or separated (from other matter). horror vacui --kinetic--> motion was regarded as due to a property of a specific part of the machine
2. resistance to excessive compression: the form of basic matter should not become less t[...]
(156)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%42.3[...]rces
elaborated pneumatic machines
mechanical clocks
tension of strings
*wind ==> celestial influences*
(Cardano regarded) expansion and contraction of air as symmetrical phenomena, both consisting a source of motive forces
-in the universe the element air had the function of receiving and conveying fiery celestial influences on earth providing health and wellbeing fir living creatures
Telesion (1509-1588)
soul and spirit identified with each other as a very subtle material substance pervading all bodies and making them capable of sensing and reacting to rach other with pleasure or pain
*(man’s) immortal soul did not play any role in determining natural phenomena*
innate heat of living bodies
wind: humid vapours flowing through the air
thinness of wind vapours
16th century
expiration and inspiration of the lungs
Holy Spirit is expressed in the nature of winds
interest in wind and weather was kindled by reports reaching Europe from the East and West Indies about hitherto unknown meteorological phenomena عجایب
orderly majesty of God ==> encyclopedism about the universe + an analogue of a memory system
Jean Bodin
firm believer in and opponent of demonic magic
theater of the whole nature universe naturae theatrum
reason of wind (ratio ventorum):
•sun
•impulse (impulsus) of the angels or demons
sphere of sacrobosco
De sphaera mundi
(On the Sphere of the World, pre-Copernican astronomy)
...our sublunar world
gunpowder theory of thunder ⛈
compact earthly matter from underground whose expansion with expansion so fast that it moves large masses of air, like “salniter in fire or gunpowder which has caught fire”
visualization
making air visible
inverted glass experiment
linking thermal expansion & contraction of pure air to wind formation (Cardano)
(under the influence of) celestial fire ==> air (could become alive and active) acquiring motive force
on the transmutations of air
(typical of 16th century) steering the religious significance of the study of nature
spirit: a cosmic subtle substance, both recipient + vehicle of celestial influences ==allow==> elements to transmute into each other (+ meteorological phenomena)
(Drebbel’s favourite cosmic spirit:) fire = clearest of all elements ad top of the hierarchical order of elements (fire, air, water, earth), clarifying the other elements [such as Siavash]
(for Della Porta:) meteorological phenomena = transmutations of the air (in literal sense)
air becoming thinner or thicker ==rise==> winds, thunder, clouds, rain, snow, linking heaven + earth + bringing life to all[...]
(158)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%42.4[...]t soldiers put on the back and legs
چارآینه
جفای فلک آینه گون ==> self (of the poet)
فلک falak --> ayene-gun --> jafa
دل del --> sang --> transforms stone to blood
آینه اسکندری ayene eskandari (was it a telescope? to inform/spy)
ارسطو به فسون و اعداد آن را از قعر دریا برآورد
•math اعداد, tricks فسون
mirror trap دام آینه
at any moment هرآینه
قبله مساز زآینه
mirror =/= qibla
آینه گردان
mirror-stepper = sun
•seven mirrors هفت آینه = planets
a short essay on matter mythology
[...]
Hayula---literally meaning ‘unformed monster’ tells the histories of nonhuman material and mythologies of matter-energy flow in the eye of different cultural convertors
[...]
Hayula (Persian: هیولا) (in classical islamic philosophy) mythologically refers to a pre-cosmological ‘form’ of energy---literally meaning ‘unformed monster'---from which eventually the ‘universe’ and ‘persons’ where created, and systematically provokes a meshwork of meanings that interrelate notions of energy, form, and selfhood in a premodern intercultural cosmology
[...]
parasitically seeking a host for Hayula nun-human histories
[...]
Memory is not the only and privileged way of connecting the past to the present. One of many crucial and important ways that past comes to effect the present is made over form. Form, with its strange logic and efficiency, has the capacity to freeze time. Life as we know it lies in the results of the processes that future forms come to effect the present. Any being's very survival depends on its ability to access the zones of continuity and possibility in these processes. How we can articulate these forms? What are the operations that connect the form-embedded self to the others?
4 billion years ago, the gravitational force of a mass of hydrogen atoms accumulated into a dense point of critical state. As a result of this formation new fusions released many sip-offs of different energies and materials which we perceive today in our bodies and in the light that reaches our eyeballs from the time immemorial of that hydrogen cloud. This fossil of materiality implies the existence of traces of an ancient reality before the existence of the familiar--the terrestrial life. While these traces are gauged in theoretical experiments in which radioactive ratios of nuclides inform us of such ancestral events, in Amerindian cosmogonies not so differently steered hypothesis are explored. Yawanawa, the origin myth of the people of Pano from the western Amazon, imagines the anterior of the world[...]
(159)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%42.8[...]
intensification,
reinforcements,
injection,
nucleation events,
dislocations,
endogenous,
endogenous stable states,
chemical clocks,
aggregate,
consistency,
elementary atoms,
stratified structures,
interlocking (matching temporally),
species --> (gene pool of a ...) = an organic stratified structure
stratifies structures involve simple form of causal relations---one arrow from cause to effect [we can see this modality in the creation of institutions]
coal is the product of one of several types of mineralization that organic matter can undergo, and submitted by “civilizations” to deposit intensive exploitation --> flow of nonhuman energy ==> fuel its industrial revolution
industrial age = the crossing of a bifurcation where previous autocatalytic dynamics come to form a self-sustaining autocatalytic loop.
(both) industrial revolution and biological evolution, they lack [rpgressive direction nor consistent drive toward complexification---some species complexity while others simplify
cities as real transformers of matter and energy
cities are open or dissipative (esraf اسراف) systems, with matter-energy flowing in and out continuously
(in autocatalytic loops) the trigger-flow interactions: interlocks a series of separately reproductive systems into a single interactive reproductive system
antimarket ---money--> mining regions ==> intensified coa extraction ==> iron production ---> [steam] mechanical energy ---> cotton textiles ---> flow of profits ===money==> experimentation with coal, iron, steam
skill / know-how = catalytic info
(info capable of bringing together and amplifying flow of energy and materials)
economies of agglomeration (anbashtegi انباشتگی)
the law of diminishing returns (bazdeh nozuli بازده نزولی)
a point at which the level of profits or benefits gained is less than the amount of money or energy invested. (image)
illumination --> coal gas
motorization --> steam
knowledge is an input of production which exacts high transaction costs. only where patents are perfectly enforceable will information be allowed to flow through markets, else antimarkets will prefer to internalize it into their hierarchies. one way a corporate hierarchy may internalize knowledge is by funding a research laboratory.
at some point urban societies would have reached a point of saturation, and the intensification would have ceased. but electricity simultaneously increased the flow of energy and the potential uses of that energy.
automated formal systems ==> victory of analytical over embodied knowledge (the self-taught inventor of the 19th [...]
(160)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%43.5[...]tensified coa extraction ==> iron production ---> [steam] mechanical energy ---> cotton textiles ---> flow of profits ===money==> experimentation with coal, iron, steam
skill / know-how = catalytic info
(info capable of bringing together and amplifying flow of energy and materials)
economies of agglomeration (anbashtegi انباشتگی)
the law of diminishing returns (bazdeh nozuli بازده نزولی)
a point at which the level of profits or benefits gained is less than the amount of money or energy invested. (image)
illumination --> coal gas
motorization --> steam
knowledge is an input of production which exacts high transaction costs. only where patents are perfectly enforceable will information be allowed to flow through markets, else antimarkets will prefer to internalize it into their hierarchies. one way a corporate hierarchy may internalize knowledge is by funding a research laboratory.
at some point urban societies would have reached a point of saturation, and the intensification would have ceased. but electricity simultaneously increased the flow of energy and the potential uses of that energy.
automated formal systems ==> victory of analytical over embodied knowledge (the self-taught inventor of the 19th century)
--> unbalance of power between informal and formal knowledge
(factory = planned autocatalytic loop)
the science of centralization
-powerful computers allow the centralized control of geographically dispersed activities---coordinate and monitor compliance with central plans ==> internalization of antimarket institutions
the fully coexistence of the autocatalytic loops:
the digital / the energetic / the material
==> accumulation of hierarchical structures
are computers evolving in the direction of routinization?
-eroding the combinatorial richness of knowledge and making flows of information ever more sterile?
future turns out to belong to hierarchies?
-human history is a narrative of contingencies, not necessities, of missed opportunities to follow different routes of development, not of a nonlinear succession of ways to convert energy, matter, and information into cultural products.
[...]
...................................
the gene tells the flesh: “you are a human” or “you are a...”
**the flesh does not know any organs, continues pulsing to its own rhythms
(how to understand) activities of processes in other spheres of reality
living creatures and their inorganic counterparts
(G. Simmons:) “the flow of energy and mineral nutrients through an ecosystem manifest themselves as actual animals and plants of a particular species.[...]
(163)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%43.5[...]e centralized control of geographically dispersed activities---coordinate and monitor compliance with central plans ==> internalization of antimarket institutions
the fully coexistence of the autocatalytic loops:
the digital / the energetic / the material
==> accumulation of hierarchical structures
are computers evolving in the direction of routinization?
-eroding the combinatorial richness of knowledge and making flows of information ever more sterile?
future turns out to belong to hierarchies?
-human history is a narrative of contingencies, not necessities, of missed opportunities to follow different routes of development, not of a nonlinear succession of ways to convert energy, matter, and information into cultural products.
[...]
...................................
the gene tells the flesh: “you are a human” or “you are a...”
**the flesh does not know any organs, continues pulsing to its own rhythms
(how to understand) activities of processes in other spheres of reality
living creatures and their inorganic counterparts
(G. Simmons:) “the flow of energy and mineral nutrients through an ecosystem manifest themselves as actual animals and plants of a particular species.”
biomass = circulation of flesh
plants biting into the system of solar radiation---capturing its sugars
in a sense “higher” animals are just fancy decorations in an ecosystem
(decorative large predators)
ecosystem = succession of plant assemblages ==> stable states ==> climax
ecosystem = a blind groping from stable state to stable state in which each plant assemblage creates the conditions that stabilize the next one.
continental forest <--- stability {the capacity to maintain a state with relatively minor internal fluctuations}
islands <--- resilience {the capacity to absorb major external and internal fluctuations by switching between several alternative stable states}
cities interaction with microorganisms
medieval cities ---islands--> {-concentration of energies -low degree of species heterogeneity (mainly humans)}
medieval European towns ----> isolated islands {/heat /food-web /cultural}
cattle as storage devices
process of shortening and redirecting food chains
biomass ["natural” state] ---> cooked biomass ---> processed through the “civilizing” power of fire*
{raw =/= cooked} ==> legend/myth
--> the cultural materials that accumulated unconsciously, sorted out by the pressure of the parasites themselves---germs and humans formed a meshwork
food ~ flow of flesh
culture is not a completely separate sphere of reality, but instead mixe[...]
(164)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%43.6[...]mblage creates the conditions that stabilize the next one.
continental forest <--- stability {the capacity to maintain a state with relatively minor internal fluctuations}
islands <--- resilience {the capacity to absorb major external and internal fluctuations by switching between several alternative stable states}
cities interaction with microorganisms
medieval cities ---islands--> {-concentration of energies -low degree of species heterogeneity (mainly humans)}
medieval European towns ----> isolated islands {/heat /food-web /cultural}
cattle as storage devices
process of shortening and redirecting food chains
biomass ["natural” state] ---> cooked biomass ---> processed through the “civilizing” power of fire*
{raw =/= cooked} ==> legend/myth
--> the cultural materials that accumulated unconsciously, sorted out by the pressure of the parasites themselves---germs and humans formed a meshwork
food ~ flow of flesh
culture is not a completely separate sphere of reality, but instead mixes and blends with flows of organic (and even mineral) materials.
flow of genetic materials
gene / ecosystem
| \
homogeneous =/= heterogeneous
*genes tease out a form out of an active flesh
(genes ~) replicators began not only merely to exist, but to construct for themselves containers, vehicles for their continues existence.
-how these “replicators” created constructs out of flesh and bone ---> then how did ‘self’ emerged in this?
(layers)
genotype .../.../.../.../... phenotype
| | |
info coded | self organizing | adaptive traits
into genes | processes (stable) | of a plant / animal
human gene is variable du to: {1-ecosystem 2-taboos}
(ancient) migrations : vehicle for the mechanism of evolution that today is producing the greatest evolutionary effect, allowing the incorporation of new genes into established gene pools, enhancing intrapopulation and reducing interpopulation variability.
[leas normative and binding] to other cultures <-- culture --> to the same culture [central to society]
strata = reproductive niche
(niche : adjusted timing and quality)
hierarchy building = {-homogenization (by a sorting process) -consolidation (through coding into legal, religious, and other formal regulations)}
limits of bounded rationality (عقل معاش aghle ma'ash?)
(Bounded rationality is the idea that in decision-making, rationality of individuals is limited by the information they have, the cognitive limitations of their minds, and the finite amount of time they h[...]
(169)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%43.6[...]chains
biomass ["natural” state] ---> cooked biomass ---> processed through the “civilizing” power of fire*
{raw =/= cooked} ==> legend/myth
--> the cultural materials that accumulated unconsciously, sorted out by the pressure of the parasites themselves---germs and humans formed a meshwork
food ~ flow of flesh
culture is not a completely separate sphere of reality, but instead mixes and blends with flows of organic (and even mineral) materials.
flow of genetic materials
gene / ecosystem
| \
homogeneous =/= heterogeneous
*genes tease out a form out of an active flesh
(genes ~) replicators began not only merely to exist, but to construct for themselves containers, vehicles for their continues existence.
-how these “replicators” created constructs out of flesh and bone ---> then how did ‘self’ emerged in this?
(layers)
genotype .../.../.../.../... phenotype
| | |
info coded | self organizing | adaptive traits
into genes | processes (stable) | of a plant / animal
human gene is variable du to: {1-ecosystem 2-taboos}
(ancient) migrations : vehicle for the mechanism of evolution that today is producing the greatest evolutionary effect, allowing the incorporation of new genes into established gene pools, enhancing intrapopulation and reducing interpopulation variability.
[leas normative and binding] to other cultures <-- culture --> to the same culture [central to society]
strata = reproductive niche
(niche : adjusted timing and quality)
hierarchy building = {-homogenization (by a sorting process) -consolidation (through coding into legal, religious, and other formal regulations)}
limits of bounded rationality (عقل معاش aghle ma'ash?)
(Bounded rationality is the idea that in decision-making, rationality of individuals is limited by the information they have, the cognitive limitations of their minds, and the finite amount of time they have to make a decision.)
--> for example soil loss, due to careless exploitation of the forests’ resources has been a constant threat to urban centers throughout history. most urban civilization were able to pass their genes for only seventy generations before they ran out of soil ---> although some material and energy flows can be “socialized” (submitted to cultural control), in practice many are not.
(my interest and work on hayula is about:) the creative morphologies that have always resided outside the (west versus east) homoestatic text of the self and other
...................................
contemporary US film bestiary <==
[...]
(170)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%43.7[...]ria are the descendants of bacteria that had be come lodged within the cells of animals and plants
bacteria ==> eukaryotic cell
(the fable of) [Spencer's] animal world as a “gladiator's show” --> evidence for parasitism and competition (~ social progress in 19th century)
the grass-green photosynthetic organelles of all plants may be the descendants of a single, wildly successful bacterium, now shackled, albeit gently, in its cytoplasmic prison
-Sagan
*all cells with nuclei (a unicellular amoeba or amultibillion-cell anaconda) <== orgiastic encounters (eating, infecting, engulfing, feeding on, having sex with and so on) among quite different types of bacteria*
(plant cell) chimera = protective anaerobic host cell + internally multiplying photosynthetic bacterium + respiring bacteria
metabolic waste product of the mutation ==> atmospheric oxygen --> catastrophic --> energetic catalyst --> ...
fermenting bacteria (like trolls or elves in a cosmic fairy tale) dwelling underground --> stromatolite
army of mutants that evolved in the aftermath of the oxygen infusion (the greatest pollution crisis the earth) ==> human beings
chimerical eukaryotic system:
*spirochete* [...] at the edge of larger cell, sites of leakage supplying a constant flow of food [...] renounced their former freedom of movement in order to permanently attach ==> a means of locomotion and food acquisition
•spirochete and mad talent, lyrical drive, (tubercle patients were orators or grandios liars)
[*]human body: an architectonic compilation of millions of agencies of chimerical cells
eukaryotic cells leveling cytoplasmic calcium concentrations ==> [our] calcium phosphate of bone (mineral infrastructure of our bodies):
because seawater concentrations of calcium are often four orders of magnitude higher than [one in ten million], ocean-dwelling cells must exude calcium to avoid poisoning. in the full-fathomed sea did the bones of our ancestors and the shells of their eukaryote relatives evolve. skeletons dramatize an ancient waste, whispering a ghostly testimony to the useful internalization of hazardous waste sites. this givesa good indication of how life within the general economy evolves to deactivate, sacrifice and eventually incorporate the dangerous excesses that accrue from its solar growth. -Sagan
--> the body is multiple (even if orchestrated by vicissitudes and the need for harmony over evolutionary time
--> *nature is chimerical through and through*
intraorganismic genetic transfers
*health = matter of maintaining an ecology =/= matter of defending a unity*
[*]body: ornately elaborated mosaic of microbes in various states of symbiosis
the fiction of the self
**self is not only corporal but corporate**
[...]
(171)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%43.8[...]tically open, that the very concept of species falsjfies their character as a unique life form
Sagan
this zoological “I” [is open to radical revision?]
model of zoocentrism: encased self
(?what are ajayeb) bestiary's aesthetic model of a difference (=/=? zoocentric model)
--Burgess--> interference patterns generated by a series of symbiotically living form ==> artist
as an organism's connections to the external envimnment grow, that environment becomes its body [=/= Sina]
snail
snail whose house is carried on his back, the “case” of the “self” has been moved, through an incorporation of what once would have been called inanimate matters--organically worked and reworked
-subjective identities always already und ergoing active (de)composition
-(relations of) physiological identity and psychological subjectivity link up
Sagan trying to relativize that zoocentric bedrock of “self”
...................................
political chimeras
chiefs’ talk
fluent in a verbal genre
formalized speeches directed either to leaders of other groups (Southern Amazon in multiethnic and multilingual system of Upper Xingu) or to their own people, depending on the context in which they are delivered
--Guerreiro--> both the chief and his audience are symbolically constructed as “paradoxical” subjects characterized by contradictory predicates
•*how uncertainty can enact an exchange of perspectives* (through which the identities of the group and the chief are produced)
(from a gift-theory perspective) chief: donator of goods and words, and a receiver of spouses <-- unilateral direction ==> “chieftaincy کدخدايى: a place of nonexchange” [~ signs are deprived of their circulation value + reciprocity is denied under the demand that society make visible the foundations of power, maintaining them under the control of the collective body] --> ‘creditor position of chief’ would imprison power and assume control of the place where it could emerge =/= society of the state
ritual polity
public rituals are the main motor of collective life / @apass
chieftaincy <--> ritual
ritual condensation: the simultaneous enactment of nominally contrary modes of relationship:
•affirmations of identity are at the same time testimonies of difference
•displays of authority are also demonstrations of subordination
•the presence of persons or other beings is at once corroborated and denied
•secrets are simultaneously dissimulated and revealed
•
==> combination of contradictions ==> distinctive context of communication
ritual efficacy of images and objects
ritual relation to mnemonic technologies
relations between images and words
--Sev[...]
(172)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%44[...]ure trove of art history so readily accessible today. dependence on what has already been formulated. the underlying tone of this art serves to flaunt an unparalleled sense of superiority and grandiose self-confidence. seen in many performance in this time too. (in my painting i have a rational point of view.) i don't want to orient myself towards ambitions, injected by libidinal energy, of my grandiose self-artist. of those, whose prime concern is to show their uniqueness find themselves faced with the question: “what is to be done?”. I too, choose to refuse to pander to the demands of innovation, style and integrity, but at the same time not to work myself up to grandiose self-image of artistic omnipotence.
look at the theory of intelligence for language and other kind of ‘enjoying’ the nature, art or other structures.
how is the philosophy of the sublime (quality of greatness) related to the format of my talks? if my work is not an endeavor on the philosophy of the sublime then what is it?
in this writing i am not going to work in the forms of claims as stages in a logical argument. my approach would we unsubstantial to break free from the process of offering philosophical evidence...
mobilizing forces
scoring system
opposition to shamanism in performance art, points in The Art of Modernism - Sandro Bocola, for critique on Beuys and Abramovich.
Faced with objects and performances by Joseph Beuys, viewers are as baffled as they are by Marcel Duchamp's Bottle Rack. They do not know what is going on, are unable to relate what they see to any known system and are left entirely to their own devices, i.e. to their own emotional responses, for all the good that does them. They feel affected, and have a vague and almost unwilling sense of being touched at a certain emotional depth, but are unable to interpret these feelings (isn't that the case with most art performances?). Beuys celebrates complex and incomprehensible rituals before an astonished audience. He subjects his person to difficult tasks and appears to be making some kind of sacrifice in doing so. Beuys, after all, wishes to heal. To judge by his statements, he wishes to redeem the German people and indeed all of humankind from their social evils, their petrifaction and impotence. In this sense, he transcends the role of the artist. He sees his audience not, in the traditional sense, as a free counterpart to whom he presents a work (as form and expression of his own self), but as a material to be formed. He appears as the people's tribune, as teacher, seer, healer and prophet, transforming the role of the artist into that of the shaman. Kohut stresses that the effect of messianic and charismatic personalities is not necessarily detrimental under all circumstances. At times of severe crisis, it is not the modestly self-doubting type of personality that is needed (who generally makes up the leading stratum [...]
(173)[...notes/notes Personen.txt]%44.9[...]listener, is the later container of ethical stake?
not audience attention, but audience imagination. not their reaction, but their response. Usually a response is a reply to a query not the result of a stimulus. Stimulus is an urgent vital process that acts to arouse action in shortest time. that time that is the price for thinking.
shakespear, the Everest of acting. Why performance/theater is not related to thinking and is always setup for acting and action? need for drama.
the event has happened off stage, now we talk about it. Macbeth, unlike tarantino!
violence is symbolized in many good old art. karaoke, etc.
violence is art-performance is exhibited...
the power of voice in islam, taboo of body.
no one is beheaded in the history of islam. (read tarikhe sakhtkoshi) contrast to French revolution.
i am not going to critique islam, i don't know what it is, just let me perform it.
who performs? someone doing something?
what is the cure for shyness.
‘performing for the other’
silent coming and going of the feminine, (form of shyness?)
when we send the shyest as an ambassador to represent us.
It is a self-defining system of signs referring to signs.
a quiet listener. we have yet no idea what is speak. how taking transforms the mind that talks. conditions of thinking in relation to talking, before or after the mouth that talks. thinking in other languages. if intimacy is saying before thinking, how fits the acts of maulwurfe?
work on shyness, I have to start (slowly) with what i (kind of) know.
“...Nudged on the scene as a kind of shivering being, anxious and shy,..” (kafka, test)
There is the suggestion here, as in Holderlin, that timidity might be a dialect of stupidity. (Finding no way of testing out of these subtle complicities, one falls asleep, eeep, exhausted by the distress of proving one's most minimal merit.) (Avital Ronell, The Veils of Servility)
According to Silvan Tomkins, “shame operates only after interest or enjoyment has been activated.”
as Sedgwick has argued, for some people, and most often queer subjects, “shame is simply the first, and remains a permanent, structuring fact of identity: one that ... has its own, powerfully productive and powerfully social metaphoric possibilities.
the idea is that the performance that avows its performanceness acknowledges the difficulty of fitting into roles, finding identities, and managing a self, especially a self vulnerable to the effects of stigma.
is there a queerness in me and my performance? is shyness, they way i do it, queer?
turn the spectator to the reader.
does shame intertwines with queer?
this affect and mode of performance (which normative euro American culture would[...]
(175)[...notes/notes Personen.txt]%45.1[...]ies and perform philosophy. he doesn't hold back, he intrudes, tattooing the body of the other, questioning.
the problem of his project?
i am not shy in the work that i am trying to present publicly (?)
where am i shy?
posture of position or gesture
the moment you stand in front of the audience you stop being authentic.
when we listen to something very carefully and allow ourselves to be moved we can tune in ti=o the art work and absorb its methods. i have found myself moved when i allowed it, by the most childish and stupid works of arts.
open minded and eager to make connections
(jane jacob,) (1) community is spontaneous, the tissues of community are not something that can be planed, that they happen spontaneously. (2) and this only happens when you are at the local scale. so in this sense, design is suspect, because design is set to be post spontaneity.
find a way to think locally, and thinking about the city as a product of spontaneous interaction between people who are different. but the design can also make something that has a social character.
we perform an experiment to prove or disprove a hypothesis, we are working within a framework of a closed system, the original proposition governs our procedures and observations, at arriving at yes or no. but when performing the experiment we come across something unforeseen, or prompted by evidence to jump tracks and think about a different issue. then we are working within the framework of an open system. we move beyond yes or no to exploring something emergent, something whose elements was there but whose form was unknown to us. a fancy and careful way of saying “something new”, because it is new to our understanding.
William Empson
art results from overcrowding(?)
when one is responsive rather than assertive one can't imagine where one will end Up: thinking. this responsiveness is different than the state of being active or passive. a passivity that motivates and mobilizes the subject into places that are yet unknown to her/him.
Thinking, as Heidegger says, may be much the same as wandering. my lectures are like wandering.
someone who studies paradoxes, poetry and philosophy
(keeping what you know away from society, history and away from art, not to acknowledge what you have learn)
incompatibility between a particular love and a particular social arrangement for love.
when you play with others, not try to shine and not try to shy. (shyness is dangerous to society)
it is like being lynched by kukluksklan.
curios about somebody else rather than identifying with them.
i really learned how to work with people by learning how to keep people from killing each other in street.
if we are very sympathetic, saying “i know how you feel” is privileging solidarity:[...]
(176)[...notes/notes Personen.txt]%45.3[...]context of verbal recognition and placement, before they assume real presence.
...................................
(notes - december 15, 2011)
•Robots making Robots
•what a robot wants (and how it wants it)
•cataloging computer generated stones smoke
•digital to digital convertor
•physical interaction (between a user and a media object, pressing a button, choosing a link, moving the body) versus psychological interaction (the psychological processes of filling-in, hypothesis forming, recall and identification, which are required for us to comprehend any text or image at all)
•Mechanical Monsters
•blown away roof
•Technology: the new nature
•-error and - horror(-terror)
•edge of the earth
•gold and dream, gold price and power law
•the story of the viewer
•fact and perspective (elucidation)
•love at first sight (digital)
•continual production of the new is what allows things to stay the same, (logic of the same)
•noise story
•the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium (McLuhan)
•The mediation of religion through buildings
•start with metaphor and end with algebra
•a “model” is a system of objects (any kind of objects) that make all of the sentences in a theory true , where a “theory” is a list of sentences in a language.
•metaphors somehow mobilize the difference between the two domains
•arena of alienation
•Cut the Noise
•mirrors with (/without) memories
•substitutability
•optical appearances (mind ~ eye)
•Dioptrics (science of refraction), catoptrics (reflection),
•that could not be spoken of or represented, because it was empty of discourse and thus of meaning.
•innocence of the eye
•Poor Unfortunate Souls
•being useful, like a prison guard
•autopoetic (complex self-referential systems)
•to take up the motives from the external world
•will-less perception, “the pure eye of genius”
•bringing from the artificial world to the art world
•object oriented programming / subject oriented
•Observer, system and environment
•a system (designed) with a purpose of itself
•magnifying or light-collecting optical device
•social selfish
•un-computational
•gray area
•self-identity is bad visual system
•Vision requires instruments of vision; an optics is a politics of positioning. Instruments of vision mediate standpoints;
•Identity, including self-identity, does not produce science; critical positioning does, that is, objectivity
•docile body
•technological visioning (vector of secret texts, books within books, ancient curses, digital dreams, and medieval cyber-art)
•empty space left by theory and philosophy
•technical visioning
[...]
(178)[...notes/notes Personen.txt]%45.7[...]f
•Technology: the new nature
•-error and - horror(-terror)
•edge of the earth
•gold and dream, gold price and power law
•the story of the viewer
•fact and perspective (elucidation)
•love at first sight (digital)
•continual production of the new is what allows things to stay the same, (logic of the same)
•noise story
•the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium (McLuhan)
•The mediation of religion through buildings
•start with metaphor and end with algebra
•a “model” is a system of objects (any kind of objects) that make all of the sentences in a theory true , where a “theory” is a list of sentences in a language.
•metaphors somehow mobilize the difference between the two domains
•arena of alienation
•Cut the Noise
•mirrors with (/without) memories
•substitutability
•optical appearances (mind ~ eye)
•Dioptrics (science of refraction), catoptrics (reflection),
•that could not be spoken of or represented, because it was empty of discourse and thus of meaning.
•innocence of the eye
•Poor Unfortunate Souls
•being useful, like a prison guard
•autopoetic (complex self-referential systems)
•to take up the motives from the external world
•will-less perception, “the pure eye of genius”
•bringing from the artificial world to the art world
•object oriented programming / subject oriented
•Observer, system and environment
•a system (designed) with a purpose of itself
•magnifying or light-collecting optical device
•social selfish
•un-computational
•gray area
•self-identity is bad visual system
•Vision requires instruments of vision; an optics is a politics of positioning. Instruments of vision mediate standpoints;
•Identity, including self-identity, does not produce science; critical positioning does, that is, objectivity
•docile body
•technological visioning (vector of secret texts, books within books, ancient curses, digital dreams, and medieval cyber-art)
•empty space left by theory and philosophy
•technical visioning
•Technology is never merely “used,” never merely instrumental. It is always ” incorporated” and “lived.”
•In his last paintings, such as the Bride of 1912, Duchamp both elaborated an iconography that combined mechanical and visceral forms and began to move away from any procedures that revealed the artist's hand to create “retinal” or “anecdotal” art.
lemon grass plant, marigold
Saeed 0012063108222
Tehran Wi Fi: 88 57 27 92
newer medium may be ‘nested’ inside of an older medium (or vice versa)
mental life (memory, imagination, fantasy, dreaming, perception, cognition) is mediated and is embodied in the whole range [...]
(179)[...notes/notes Personen.txt]%45.7[...]knowledge the importance of traditional *social theory* in identifying gross inequalities + advocate a posthuman relationism that moves *from critique to production* ==> *new and surprising connections between modes of existence* (for example)
•did the typical American diet play any role in engendering the widespread susceptibility to the propaganda leading up to the invasion of Iraq?
•do sand storms make a difference to the spread of socalled sectarian violence?
•does mercury help enact autism?
•what if serious adoption practices for and by the elderly became common?
•what if nations that are worried about low birth rates (Denmark, Germany, Japan, Russia, white America, more) acknowledged that fear of immigrants is a big problem, and that racial purity projects and fantasies drive resurgent pronatalism?
posthuman: a mode of listening for the nonhuman + simultaneously acknowledging the impossibility of fully hearing it --> impossible position ==expand==> our range of socialities, causalities, temporalities and ethics because it contains the **stubborn anthropomorphic residual** within any ‘new’ theory of society
--> (not infinite) co-constitution of the social + the extra-social (vaccines & markets, planetary systems & telescopes, catastrophes & laws, etc.)
feminist science studies *demand a normative responsibility* towards ontological inclusivity and humility
(now that there is no objective -->) interrogatives are object-makers
*strangeness (of nonhuman life) [acts as a guide] --> mobilising new prepositions of connection ==> to think differently about the social ==> new conceptions of society (as planetmate, messmate, natureculture, mindbody, thing-power, odd kin, etc.)
parallels drawn between theories of evolution & theories of social change:
•Gould --> concept of punctuated equilibrium
•Serres --> ontology of the social as parasitism
•Hayles --> translation of epigenesis and technogenesis
•
{phenomenon of serial endosymbiosis theory <-- social theorists deploy this in the search for accounts of how change and creativity originate}--> (bio-econornic context) *symbiosis* has long been recognised as a theory which demonstrates the co-constitution of the social and the biological
=/= Darwinian story of: small variations, random mutation, long time scales, natural selection, fitness and incremental development:
•complexity derived by brute mechanical climbing from the base already built by the efforts of earlier climbing
•unit of change: the gene, or individual organism, the zoocentric, ‘big like us’ epistemic culture of both science and social science (=/= weird worldings of protists, archea, eukaryotes [Wertheim])
bacteriology ==> new organisms were often stemmed from profound and prolonged symbiotic relationships that have pro[...]
(183)[...otes on kinect performance.txt]%46.4[...]ology of the social as parasitism
•Hayles --> translation of epigenesis and technogenesis
•
{phenomenon of serial endosymbiosis theory <-- social theorists deploy this in the search for accounts of how change and creativity originate}--> (bio-econornic context) *symbiosis* has long been recognised as a theory which demonstrates the co-constitution of the social and the biological
=/= Darwinian story of: small variations, random mutation, long time scales, natural selection, fitness and incremental development:
•complexity derived by brute mechanical climbing from the base already built by the efforts of earlier climbing
•unit of change: the gene, or individual organism, the zoocentric, ‘big like us’ epistemic culture of both science and social science (=/= weird worldings of protists, archea, eukaryotes [Wertheim])
bacteriology ==> new organisms were often stemmed from profound and prolonged symbiotic relationships that have proven difficult to analyse =/= discrete
•traits are inherited outside of sexual dissemination (digestion, infection, donation, other complex forms of partnerning) --> consortia: amorphous symbiotic complexes (metabolic energetic networks) =/= organism: anatomically bounded objects (systems of information and exchange)
}==Margulis==> focus on how perceptual, political, social and scientific conditions precede objects: *objects = boundary-work*
--> differential speeds of change (sudden and unlikely mixes + slow and causal)
--> deconstruction of individuality
(co-constitutive bio-econornic-political-social context:)
**ideological contest between individualism and collectivism in political economy <==> intellectual development of symbiosis theory**
•socialist and anarchist concept of mutuellisme in the mid 1800
•Hobbesian-Malthusian-Darwinian bio-economic concept of struggle for existence in zero-sum games of all-against-all
•Kropotkin's symbiosis as evidence for the benefit of global cooperation towards the common good, the division of labour, protection of elements and interdependent organisation
•evolutionary theory used to champion individualism and the social policies of laissez faire
Campbell --> what Harman misses is the elementary starting point for sociologies of science: *that social science translates science* just as science translates “reality”
serial endosymbiosis theory ==>
1. no theory of social change is going to be value-free (endosymbiosis is a process that is always already highly charged with rich metaphor, entailing a ‘host’ that is in an ‘exchange,’ ‘relation’ or ‘merger’ with a ‘guest’ --> a form of ‘living together’ that becomes ‘close’ over time)
2. extraordinary range and nature of these relations can act as strategies for other worldings (other ways of being with each other) --> important normative function [at [...]
(184)[...otes on kinect performance.txt]%46.5[...]n capability (more than ecological crisis or human inequality, more than the threat of terrorism or nuclear proliferation)
2. to sustain: to extend, strengthen --> the idea that if we are not here then nothing on the planet has worth; if humans ado not exists, then the earth does not exists ==> our efforts of ecological sustainability are intrinsically human-centered [--(implicit attitude)--> prolonging humanness]==> ecological problem = crisis: an intense, short-lived episode in human history + it will be solved by high-technology solutions
technology has co-evolved with being throughout billions of years --Hayles--> (myriad profound subtle ways) to make nature
--paradox--> *it is “human nature” to use technology + technology changes “human nature”*
--Campbell--> ***while not everything is technical, everything is technological***
*posthuman stance (strategically oriented towards deep future, pays attention to the lives of nonhuman others) gets ontological with technology*
...................................
McQuire
defining the technological --activate--> the border between nature & culture = (the heart of) what it means to be human
...................................
[title]
system attic
...................................
(in my work with apass digital designs, i have been trying to negotiate with the notion of)
*technological gaze*
what new modes of subjectivity are filtered through technological gaze?
(?how) high-tech images are cultural artifacts
technological gaze's method to put its meaning together:
1. impossible subject-positioning
2. codification of flesh
3. visualization of scientific narrative
4. aestheticization of information
(Maturana + Varela) everything said is said by an observer =/= philosopher
marketing communication theory
[*]gaze: (a technical term for) the ways we visually consume images of people and places + the ways images are constructed to entertain & encourage certain ways of seeing
•(using psychoanalysis) Mulvey's gaze: the way in which the camera acts as the eyes and ears of the spectator, presenting ways of framing the world (power-laden + not neutral position) ==> certain understanding of the world is assumed
•Shroeder --> gaze signifies a psychological relationship of power --> the gazer is superior to the object of the gaze [---> go to zoo]
how “human” ways of experiencing the world are gradually being integrated with non-human, technological ways of perceiving and understanding reality:
•Baudrillard --> virtual gaze
•Virilio --> automation of perception (war weaponry --> the idea that in west we have technologies so advanced we achieve absolute vision)
•Balsamo --> cosmetic surgery (~=[...]
(185)[...otes on kinect performance.txt]%47[...]intellectual and artist upheaval ==> new and surprising modes of imagining the human
1950s concept of cybernetics constituted a fundamental change in thinking about control, communication, information, life itself (+ new language of feedback, autopoiesis, cellular automata, neural net)
1990s
computers + information --> cybernetic theory: (stressed that) information patterns are more important in understanding organisms than materiality
*cybernetic view of the world --> information coded in pattern & randomness =/= material absence & presence*
•(both) human and technological = informational entities
•human = cyborg: (human conceived as) cybernetic organism
[?how] discourses (narratives + metaphors + symbols) of science and technology --Campbell--> use in advertisement to create meaning
**technological imagination --seize--> social imagination**
always reinforcing the *awesome power of technology to capture reality* (objectively + without any agenda)
•movie Fantastic Voyage 1966 <--Dijck-- fascination with envisioning the body from a different perspective
•status of foetus (float in black and white) <--Haraway-- meanings whose legitimacy comes from technological systems of perception
•[computer-generated images =/=?] camera-generated images <--Cartwright-- (paradox of) camera's role in capturing the real + camera's capacity to evoke emotion and present a sense of the unattainable ~= (to appear to be at once) both *magical* & *truthful* ==introduce==> new subjectivities into marketplace
mediation of visual phenomena through the eye of technology ~=> new sets of truths (about the body, environment, etc.) --often--> a **disembodied technological gaze looks at the body**
advertisement becomes more highly finished, excessively produced, artificialized --> a technological gaze is found in the discourse of advertising --> scientized & technologized images celebrate a particular view of ***life as information***
...................................
nature = figures + stories + images (~= topos, commonplace)
paying attention to nature like a child <-- Haraway
[*]trope: a verse interpolated into a liturgical text عبادات to embellish or amplify its meaning
language --> material-semiotic flesh
liturgical possibilities of nature
•Christian liturgical year
•Zaratusztrian nowruz
•star wars --?--> practice of turning tropes into worlds [--> war of imagess]
•war of words
•
(agonistic fields:)
military combat
sexual domination
security maintenance
market strategy
...................................
(techniques of the observer - september 9, 2012)
•What is the relation between the [...]
(186)[...otes on kinect performance.txt]%47.1[...]turning tropes into worlds [--> war of imagess]
•war of words
•
(agonistic fields:)
military combat
sexual domination
security maintenance
market strategy
...................................
(techniques of the observer - september 9, 2012)
•What is the relation between the dematerialized digital imagery of the present and the so-called age of mechanical reproduction?
•ongoing abstraction of vision - Problems of vision
•transformation in the makeup of vision
•history of art <-> history of perception?
•onlooker (Zuschauer)
•historically important functions of the human eye ==> medical, military, and police hierarchies
•Most of the historically important functions of the human eye are being supplanted by practices in which visual images no longer have any reference to the position of an observer in a “real,” optically perceived world.
•where abstract visual and linguistic elements coincide
•avoid mystifying it by recourse to technological explanations (this was my mistake!)
•an observer is more importantly one who sees within a prescribed set of possibilities, one who is embedded in a system of conventions and limitations.
•measurable in terms of objects and signs
•newly constituted human sciences in regulating and modifying the behavior of individuals.
•it was through these disciplines that the subject in a sense became visible
•passage from the geometrical optics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to physiological optics
•to expose the idiosyncrasies of the “normal” eye
•Retinal afterimages, peripheral vision, binocular vision, and thresholds of attention
•outcome of a complex remaking of the individual as observer into something calculable-and regularizable and of human vision into something measurable and thus, exchangeable.
•standardization of visual imagery
•in the amphitheatre / on the stage / in the Panoptic machine
•dissociation of touch from sight ==> “separation of the senses” and industrial remapping of the body in the nineteenth century
•unloosening of the eye from the network of referentiality incarnated in tactility ==> fitted for the tasks of “spectacular” consumption
•Perception for Benjamin was acutely temporal and kinetic;
•a mobile consumer of a ceaseless succession of illusory commodity-like Images.
•Machines are social before being technical
•desiring machines
•The paintings of J-B. Chardin are lodged within these same questions of knowledge and perception His still lifes, especially, are a last great presentation of the classical object in all its plenitude, before it is sundered irrevocably into exchangeable and ungrounded signifiers or into the painterly traces of an autonomous vision.
[...]
(187)[...notes/notes.txt]%47.2[...] measurable and thus, exchangeable.
•standardization of visual imagery
•in the amphitheatre / on the stage / in the Panoptic machine
•dissociation of touch from sight ==> “separation of the senses” and industrial remapping of the body in the nineteenth century
•unloosening of the eye from the network of referentiality incarnated in tactility ==> fitted for the tasks of “spectacular” consumption
•Perception for Benjamin was acutely temporal and kinetic;
•a mobile consumer of a ceaseless succession of illusory commodity-like Images.
•Machines are social before being technical
•desiring machines
•The paintings of J-B. Chardin are lodged within these same questions of knowledge and perception His still lifes, especially, are a last great presentation of the classical object in all its plenitude, before it is sundered irrevocably into exchangeable and ungrounded signifiers or into the painterly traces of an autonomous vision.
•that the very process of becoming tired was in fact perception. “When the eye fixes itself on a single color...
•the clear eye of the world
•The more Schopenhauer involved himself in the new collective knowledge of a fragmented body composed of separate organic systems, subject to the opacity of the sensory organs and dominated by involuntary reflex activity, the more intensely he sought to establish a visuality that escaped the demands of that body.
•the physiological makeup of the subject as the site on which the formation of representations occurs.
•Of these only the cerebrum, together with the sensory nerves attached to it, and the posterior spinal nerve fascicles are intended to take up the motives from the external world. All the other parts, on the other hand, are intended only to transmit the motives to the muscles in which the will directly manifests itself. (Schopenhauer)
•It is knowledge that Simultaneously provided techniques for the external control and domination of the human subject and was the emancipating ground for notions of subjective vision within modernist art theory and experimentation.
...................................
bad visual systems
narcissism as a cultural practice (that also motivates and steers technological inventions)
accelerationism
(Accelerationism may also refer more broadly, and usually pejoratively, to support for the deepening of capitalism in the belief that this will hasten its self-destructive tendencies and ultimately eventuate its collapse.)
Selfie
seems to me the perfect example for this submission of the unconscious to the globalized machine
latest theoretical buzzwords
control over the interpretation of the world
circulation of the global image machine
tree-made paper
who are (not) allowed (no[...]
(188)[...notes/notes.txt]%47.3[...]o the painterly traces of an autonomous vision.
•that the very process of becoming tired was in fact perception. “When the eye fixes itself on a single color...
•the clear eye of the world
•The more Schopenhauer involved himself in the new collective knowledge of a fragmented body composed of separate organic systems, subject to the opacity of the sensory organs and dominated by involuntary reflex activity, the more intensely he sought to establish a visuality that escaped the demands of that body.
•the physiological makeup of the subject as the site on which the formation of representations occurs.
•Of these only the cerebrum, together with the sensory nerves attached to it, and the posterior spinal nerve fascicles are intended to take up the motives from the external world. All the other parts, on the other hand, are intended only to transmit the motives to the muscles in which the will directly manifests itself. (Schopenhauer)
•It is knowledge that Simultaneously provided techniques for the external control and domination of the human subject and was the emancipating ground for notions of subjective vision within modernist art theory and experimentation.
...................................
bad visual systems
narcissism as a cultural practice (that also motivates and steers technological inventions)
accelerationism
(Accelerationism may also refer more broadly, and usually pejoratively, to support for the deepening of capitalism in the belief that this will hasten its self-destructive tendencies and ultimately eventuate its collapse.)
Selfie
seems to me the perfect example for this submission of the unconscious to the globalized machine
latest theoretical buzzwords
control over the interpretation of the world
circulation of the global image machine
tree-made paper
who are (not) allowed (not) to have a body?
all forms of knowledge claims,
acting on the ideological doctrines of disembodied scientific (cinematic) objectivity
all seem just effects of delayed render algorithms in the play of signifiers in a virtual force field
space of simulations
not giving up to the paranoid science fiction
getting to know the world effectively by practising the sciences
tools of semiology
rhetorical nature of truth
not Romantic nor modernist objects:
1. infective vectors (microbes)
2. elementary particles (quarks)
3. biomolecular codes (genes)
view of the relationship of body and language (the problem of metaphor)
those of us who would still like to talk about reality
imagery of moves in the fully textualized and coded world
high tech (militar[...]
(189)[...notes/notes.txt]%47.3[...]/>
not giving up to the paranoid science fiction
getting to know the world effectively by practising the sciences
tools of semiology
rhetorical nature of truth
not Romantic nor modernist objects:
1. infective vectors (microbes)
2. elementary particles (quarks)
3. biomolecular codes (genes)
view of the relationship of body and language (the problem of metaphor)
those of us who would still like to talk about reality
imagery of moves in the fully textualized and coded world
high tech (military) field
recognizing our own ‘semiotic technologies’ for making meanings,
life is semiotic as well as technology
(commitment?) to faithful accounts of a ‘real’ world
Haraway writes: All components of the desire are paradoxical and dangerous, and their combination is both contradictory and necessary.
We need the power of modern critical theories of how meanings and bodies get made, not in order to deny meaning and bodies, but in order to live in meanings and bodies that have a chance for a future. (reductionism?)
insist on the embodied nature of all vision, and so reclaim the sensory system that has been used to signify a leap out of the marked body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere. (how the exhibition can make visible my positing in the work? ground me in an embodied vision? my situation. to situate me. not necessarily organic embodiment? what have i need to learn in my bodies?)
perverse capacity of the eye
culture disembodies. (nature embodies?)
to distance the knowing subject from everybody and everything
visualizing technologies are without (apparent) limit?
linked to:
-artificial graphic manipulation systems
-computer aided scanners
-colour enhancement techniques
mapping is at stake. what kind of mapping the Kinect image provides? that is opposite to the zeiss lens?
how to go there with the technology and not fuck the world? carefully not give birth to mythical ideological seeing or promising transcendence
Kinect's generative, but not devouring vision
the perversion of the zeiss lens is in that it tries to let the viewer ‘experience’ the moment of discovery in immediate vision of the ‘object’
the exhibition is about a writing of the body that metaphorically emphasizes vision
= and commit to deconstruction and passionate construction.
= and passionate detachment, which is dependent on the impossibility of innocent ‘identity’ politics and epistemologies as strategies for seeing from (any) standpoints, in order to see well. (refer to lecture-performance Standing on the Shoulders of Giants - Sina Seifee 2015, on a critical epistemology of seeing-from-far)
= wh[...]
(190)[...notes/notes.txt]%47.4[...] tech (military) field
recognizing our own ‘semiotic technologies’ for making meanings,
life is semiotic as well as technology
(commitment?) to faithful accounts of a ‘real’ world
Haraway writes: All components of the desire are paradoxical and dangerous, and their combination is both contradictory and necessary.
We need the power of modern critical theories of how meanings and bodies get made, not in order to deny meaning and bodies, but in order to live in meanings and bodies that have a chance for a future. (reductionism?)
insist on the embodied nature of all vision, and so reclaim the sensory system that has been used to signify a leap out of the marked body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere. (how the exhibition can make visible my positing in the work? ground me in an embodied vision? my situation. to situate me. not necessarily organic embodiment? what have i need to learn in my bodies?)
perverse capacity of the eye
culture disembodies. (nature embodies?)
to distance the knowing subject from everybody and everything
visualizing technologies are without (apparent) limit?
linked to:
-artificial graphic manipulation systems
-computer aided scanners
-colour enhancement techniques
mapping is at stake. what kind of mapping the Kinect image provides? that is opposite to the zeiss lens?
how to go there with the technology and not fuck the world? carefully not give birth to mythical ideological seeing or promising transcendence
Kinect's generative, but not devouring vision
the perversion of the zeiss lens is in that it tries to let the viewer ‘experience’ the moment of discovery in immediate vision of the ‘object’
the exhibition is about a writing of the body that metaphorically emphasizes vision
= and commit to deconstruction and passionate construction.
= and passionate detachment, which is dependent on the impossibility of innocent ‘identity’ politics and epistemologies as strategies for seeing from (any) standpoints, in order to see well. (refer to lecture-performance Standing on the Shoulders of Giants - Sina Seifee 2015, on a critical epistemology of seeing-from-far)
= whom to see with?
Haraway: only partial perspective promises objective vision. This is an objective vision that initiates, rather than closes off, the problem of responsibility for the generativity of all visual practices.
The ‘eyes’ made available in modern technological sciences shatter any idea of passive vision? these prosthetic devices show us that all eyes, including our own organic ones, are active perceptual systems, building in translations and specific ways of seeing, that is, ways of life.
partial way of organizing worlds
is unlocatable[...]
(191)[...notes/notes.txt]%47.4[...]h the technology and not fuck the world? carefully not give birth to mythical ideological seeing or promising transcendence
Kinect's generative, but not devouring vision
the perversion of the zeiss lens is in that it tries to let the viewer ‘experience’ the moment of discovery in immediate vision of the ‘object’
the exhibition is about a writing of the body that metaphorically emphasizes vision
= and commit to deconstruction and passionate construction.
= and passionate detachment, which is dependent on the impossibility of innocent ‘identity’ politics and epistemologies as strategies for seeing from (any) standpoints, in order to see well. (refer to lecture-performance Standing on the Shoulders of Giants - Sina Seifee 2015, on a critical epistemology of seeing-from-far)
= whom to see with?
Haraway: only partial perspective promises objective vision. This is an objective vision that initiates, rather than closes off, the problem of responsibility for the generativity of all visual practices.
The ‘eyes’ made available in modern technological sciences shatter any idea of passive vision? these prosthetic devices show us that all eyes, including our own organic ones, are active perceptual systems, building in translations and specific ways of seeing, that is, ways of life.
partial way of organizing worlds
is unlocatable irresponsible?
is my visual exhibition a knowledge claim?
To see from below (or the perspective of the mathematics, Kinect, hacker?) is neither easily learned nor unproblematic
ways of being nowhere while claiming to see comprehensively (i did not claim any of these - i didn't try even. i was there traveling with relation to my co-travelers and a technology relation) my issue with the images is their generality and perhaps that is their unlocatablilty. but to situate my knowledge and myself i am not solely depending on the image rhetoric. i was committed to mobile positioning, and that is critical.
mediate vision
knowledge potent for constructing worlds
trying to be less organized by axes of domination
Science has been utopian and visionary from the start? that is one reason ‘we’ need it.
my eye were crafted by the blood of mosquitoes...
translations and exchanges, material and semiotic
what has the property of systematicity in my Amazon?
orientations and responsibility in material semiotic fields of meaning.
is Here, Kinect's vision not immediately a very powerful metaphor or technology (for political epistemological clarification)?
The visual metaphor invites us to investigate the varied apparatuses of visual production, including the prosthetic technologies interfaced with our biological eyes and brains.
should i have an[...]
(192)[...notes/notes.txt]%47.5[...]that all eyes, including our own organic ones, are active perceptual systems, building in translations and specific ways of seeing, that is, ways of life.
partial way of organizing worlds
is unlocatable irresponsible?
is my visual exhibition a knowledge claim?
To see from below (or the perspective of the mathematics, Kinect, hacker?) is neither easily learned nor unproblematic
ways of being nowhere while claiming to see comprehensively (i did not claim any of these - i didn't try even. i was there traveling with relation to my co-travelers and a technology relation) my issue with the images is their generality and perhaps that is their unlocatablilty. but to situate my knowledge and myself i am not solely depending on the image rhetoric. i was committed to mobile positioning, and that is critical.
mediate vision
knowledge potent for constructing worlds
trying to be less organized by axes of domination
Science has been utopian and visionary from the start? that is one reason ‘we’ need it.
my eye were crafted by the blood of mosquitoes...
translations and exchanges, material and semiotic
what has the property of systematicity in my Amazon?
orientations and responsibility in material semiotic fields of meaning.
is Here, Kinect's vision not immediately a very powerful metaphor or technology (for political epistemological clarification)?
The visual metaphor invites us to investigate the varied apparatuses of visual production, including the prosthetic technologies interfaced with our biological eyes and brains.
should i have an argue for (politics and) epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating?
view from a structuring and structured body
we love stuttering, and the partly understood
Translation is always interpretative, critical, and partial
Amazon (location) resists (the politics of) closure
logic of culture (nature made flexible)
science coded body
black coded body
colonised coded body
coded as self sufficient (when?)
the project and me are not boundary object (i am not tarzan)
suppress the lost text of aristotle on the rhetoric of humor
how can something work and not work?!
mathematical competition
what is the other story (of forest, journey, etc.) that i want urgently tell?
or the rhythm of what story i want to change?
...................................
In 1905 the French neurologists G. Deny and P. Camus recounted the case of Madame I who had lost body awareness. She described her “general insensi[...]
(193)[...notes/notes.txt]%47.5[...]ectatorial movement that is evolving further in Selfie. that is the emergence of such sequential virtues motion capturing that comes to inhibit the train of thought = interconnection in the sequence of ideas expressed during a connected discourse and how this sequence leads from one idea to another (modernity).
(i don't do filmic voyage)
...................................
By Consequence, or train of thoughts, I understand that succession of one thought to another which is called, to distinguish it from discourse in words, mental discourse.
“When a man thinketh on anything whatsoever, his next thought after is not altogether so casual as it seems to be. Not every thought to every thought succeeds indifferently.” (— Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, The First Part: Of Man, Chapter III: Of the Consequence or Train of Imagination)
...................................
the current forms of biotic forests is due to the spreading of seed-dispersing plants millions years ago (what about abiotic? Kinect)
one of issues related with rate/speed is synchronicity
the effects of biotechnically / bioculturaly situated people
Amazon's nature in opposition to slave gardens (slave plantation systems with factory machine) (along with imperial botanical gardens)
for travel and propagation of...
moving material semiotic
part-time organisms
when visuality is looked at in a haptic modality (the tentacular face for example), vision can be figured as touch, not distance. negatively curving in loops and frills, not surveying(/surviving) from above.
...................................
when a depiction (poetic, visual, etc.) is dangerously ambiguous?
are we really immersed in data realities? and that really means we are losing the sight on experiences fetched by our bodies?
co-existing and contradictory incomplete models that ground us in our critically limited existence. what does beyond the (techno-cartographic-episto-cogno-histo-) map's horizon means for this situated “us”?
...................................
(Amanda Boezkes)
the ontological purification apparatus
we are now on an idea of the earth in so to calibrate our sensorial systems to adjust to human-born unpredictabilities that override and neutralize long-standing histories of local knowledge.
how an ecological perspective can be incorporated into vision -- become a visuality? -- mobilization of visuality
how an artwork may account for the ways ecological change registers in vision?
geo-aesthetics
information is not energy-specific (Gibson)
theory of affordance : information pick-up process --> threshold between the sense-system of organism and the invariance of the environment
an experienc[...]
(194)[...notes/notes.txt]%47.7[...]of issues related with rate/speed is synchronicity
the effects of biotechnically / bioculturaly situated people
Amazon's nature in opposition to slave gardens (slave plantation systems with factory machine) (along with imperial botanical gardens)
for travel and propagation of...
moving material semiotic
part-time organisms
when visuality is looked at in a haptic modality (the tentacular face for example), vision can be figured as touch, not distance. negatively curving in loops and frills, not surveying(/surviving) from above.
...................................
when a depiction (poetic, visual, etc.) is dangerously ambiguous?
are we really immersed in data realities? and that really means we are losing the sight on experiences fetched by our bodies?
co-existing and contradictory incomplete models that ground us in our critically limited existence. what does beyond the (techno-cartographic-episto-cogno-histo-) map's horizon means for this situated “us”?
...................................
(Amanda Boezkes)
the ontological purification apparatus
we are now on an idea of the earth in so to calibrate our sensorial systems to adjust to human-born unpredictabilities that override and neutralize long-standing histories of local knowledge.
how an ecological perspective can be incorporated into vision -- become a visuality? -- mobilization of visuality
how an artwork may account for the ways ecological change registers in vision?
geo-aesthetics
information is not energy-specific (Gibson)
theory of affordance : information pick-up process --> threshold between the sense-system of organism and the invariance of the environment
an experience of an observer that is not a property of the observer, it is invariant and relational.
that is, it acknowledges that objective information about an environmental system can be obtained both in spite and because of perceptual change. in this respect an indigenous knowledge is not simply an order of cultural perspective, they are rather a form of objective testimony, by the people who are attuned to the environment's invariant structure. they are not simply a traditional or local “point of view.”
in this sense what kind of info is the image of Kinect about the environment? it is not objective info nor culture, what is it? personal testimony? descriptions of a technological reading?!
affordance, as a concept, allows complexity and refusal to reduce environments, objects, and actions to the basic function they may have to the perceiver in her/his/its world -- it permits a level (horizon) of consciousness of the world beyond function.
how a beetle may rest on the retina of bird's eye like pieces of puzzle fitting together[...]
(195)[...notes/notes.txt]%47.8[...]ively curving in loops and frills, not surveying(/surviving) from above.
...................................
when a depiction (poetic, visual, etc.) is dangerously ambiguous?
are we really immersed in data realities? and that really means we are losing the sight on experiences fetched by our bodies?
co-existing and contradictory incomplete models that ground us in our critically limited existence. what does beyond the (techno-cartographic-episto-cogno-histo-) map's horizon means for this situated “us”?
...................................
(Amanda Boezkes)
the ontological purification apparatus
we are now on an idea of the earth in so to calibrate our sensorial systems to adjust to human-born unpredictabilities that override and neutralize long-standing histories of local knowledge.
how an ecological perspective can be incorporated into vision -- become a visuality? -- mobilization of visuality
how an artwork may account for the ways ecological change registers in vision?
geo-aesthetics
information is not energy-specific (Gibson)
theory of affordance : information pick-up process --> threshold between the sense-system of organism and the invariance of the environment
an experience of an observer that is not a property of the observer, it is invariant and relational.
that is, it acknowledges that objective information about an environmental system can be obtained both in spite and because of perceptual change. in this respect an indigenous knowledge is not simply an order of cultural perspective, they are rather a form of objective testimony, by the people who are attuned to the environment's invariant structure. they are not simply a traditional or local “point of view.”
in this sense what kind of info is the image of Kinect about the environment? it is not objective info nor culture, what is it? personal testimony? descriptions of a technological reading?!
affordance, as a concept, allows complexity and refusal to reduce environments, objects, and actions to the basic function they may have to the perceiver in her/his/its world -- it permits a level (horizon) of consciousness of the world beyond function.
how a beetle may rest on the retina of bird's eye like pieces of puzzle fitting together
facts of environment
to what extent can an ecological perception become virtualized, represented, and returned to vision as a condition, or style of being? that is how to take conscientious of the ecological beings that we are in any project? -- that is attuning vision to an ecological reality
E. h. Gombrich understood the perception of art as a process of cultivating the visual skills of recognition in the eye itself
historical ways of seeing
any skill we have in spite of env[...]
(196)[...notes/notes.txt]%47.8[...]rich understood the perception of art as a process of cultivating the visual skills of recognition in the eye itself
historical ways of seeing
any skill we have in spite of environmental variances, is operating from visual schema that are geared to trigger pattern recognition, (art?)
visuality vs vision
the caricaturist does not teach us how to see, but rather instantiates a new code of recognition. a visuality is nested into vision; vision is reciprocally primed to recognize a visuality ***
visuality involves more than pattern recognition
perception is not the tool by which we experience art, but its very content and substance. john Onians concludes that “each painting forms its own ‘eye’.”
what kind of eye the art (of my Kinect) cultivates? (a techno-aesthetic eye?) (the diagrammatic eye?) (referring to the diagram project “sadistic statistics”)
the ways we see ...ly (historically, ecologically, evolutionary, technologically,) more part and parcel of the visuality of the anthropocene
the neuro-aesthetic eye
to “read” environment in terms of info pick-up and accommodation
to simply perceive as we do
but to parlay (double up) our perceptual system into a modality of processing, response, and responsiveness
(the aesthetics of) the visual brain is the contact (not contract) between the individual and the ecosystem
modulation of ethos in landscape?
Kinect is not bringing a knowledge that is neurobiologically imperceptible to the naked eye nor is it technologically making a worldview accessible.
“it is low tech”, its images are born of partial recognition, attunement, and attention
low-tech works may be critical for developing a visuality that is not yet integral to or explicit within new media, visualising the specifically neurological dimension of ecologicity and mobilizing vision as a perceiving organ to cultivate this self-awareness.
...................................
(McKenzie Wark)
climate science, a key science of our time, rests on an apparatus of very powerful computers and communication vectors, which overcome the “friction”, as Paul Edwards calls it, between data and communication. it brings together global data according to global standards, mathematical models of physics of climate drawn from fluid dynamics, and massive computational power. the model and data coproduce each other in a way, as the data sets are all partial, and many data points have to be interpolated to make the models work. and then all of that has to be mediated back to human awareness via tables, graphs, computer simulations, and so forth.
...................................
(Irmgard Emmelhainz)
(anthropocene) change in the conditions of visuality
transformatio[...]
(198)[...notes/notes.txt]%47.9[...]different rhythms and textures of change in the event of weather
methodological impulse to draw on descriptive practices of natural history
attuning to particulate differences that compose change
the temporal dimension of human “umwelt” is tuned into a limited set of rhythms and durations. therefore many of the temporalities that are relevant for developing a politics of time (such as longe duration of geological time) may not be directly available to human sensorium.
not just something that it is difficult to sense, but temporality as a compound entity of other variables. (temperature, etc.)
binding times together
an alternative perspective on (anthropocene) temporality involves developing a poetics of description as a mode of affective and aesthetic amplification
=> developing an experimental poetics of technology as a mode of aesthetic amplification towards a less perspectival visuality -- the writing tends to operate in a more tentacular mode of perception --> sweating on every negative space
+++ sweating again was crucial in our sensorial (and therefore cognitive) relation when we were in Amazon. Kinect and sweating both propose modes of perception other than perspectival shadow casting system of vision.
(organic or inorganic/technological?) processes that constitute the planet/plant
=> intimacy with the organic/inorganic/technological processes that constitute the planet
(my work is to create or find out) poetics and the methodologies that register the bite and indexes its significance
(+ bite of the critter on my skins)
(Chakrabarty in The climate of history:) “man's environment did change but changed so slowly as to make the history of man's relation to his environment almost timeless and thus not a subject of historiography at all”
the collapse of this age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history
plant writing
formulate transitional categories that would be responsive to differentiated modes of activity attuned to the difficulties of depicting natural phenomena that are continuously in flux.
reader of the meteorological registers
envision the temporal flux
the shifting edges (of the Kinect building generics)
(Kinect image) as architectural form composed of different (transitional) materially instantiated temporalities
transposition of qualities
within grammatical and figurative textures (of poetic)
between the material and the metaphorical
modes of materiality
...................................
(W.A.G.E. working artists and greater economy)
for artists who don't have secondary jobs, their mobility--despite being underwritten in many cases by class privilege[...]
(200)[...notes/notes.txt]%48.1[...]co) principles of “walking the world into being” (as locus of thought and practice to decolonize posthumanist geographies)
(for Juanita Sundberg) the zapatista movement theorizes walking as an important practice in building the pluriversale, a world in which many worlds fit. [...] as we humans move, work, play, and narrate with multiplicity of beings in place, we enact historically contingent and radically distinct worlds/ontologies.
the epistemic violence inherent both in academic treatment and dance (they both bring things to life?) (is dance controlled form of violence? does violence always bring things to life contrary to the belief that it kills life?)
(i don't want to) trivialize (Amazon and my Amazon trip) as case-study and neutralize its indigenous ontologies
(John Hartingan:) Anthropocene as “charismatic mega-category”
(of the white intellectual space of the Euro-Western academy)
(which sweeps many competing narratives under its roof?)
(indigenous artists, Rebecca Belmore & Jolene Rickard:) material might act as a bridge, instead of a mirror
(narcissistic obsession of Western civilization/art with material-as-mirror)
(Dwayne Donald:) place-based cultures and knowledge systems
colonialism is basicly “disconnection”, denial of relation
(in its heart is written “we are not related”)
(so few indigenous bodies are present in sites where academic discourse are being forged and practiced) when they are present, they are often dismissed as biased, overly emotional, or unable to maintain objectivity over the issues they present. (can i say the same treat is with iranians? and in which scene or context? -- iranians are “not” famous for exhaustive discursive unemotional and unopinionated maintenances)
(around me / around here) => importances and pleasures of going from “around me” to “around here”
(how can we stop in art to) recreate exploitative patterns from the past (?)
ecological imagination is a turn towards reciprocity and relationship
in Kinect the path of a journey is refracted, mirroring a critical site of refraction, as a practice. walking with Hanno in the Amazon forest is a joyful and critical engagement through a form of practice that resists universalizing tendencies.
...................................
tree is never tree-like (filial, Arborescent, versus rhizomatic)
vertical vs. lateral
Arborescent vs. reticulated (like the patterns on a giraffe or spots on the python)
stake at “relationships”
how can we problematize narcissism? what if it is the wrong word describing a certain property of life? Narcissus is recognizing himself in his environment and he dissolves himself in that image. the main thing about this story is that he is most alive via the story, Narcissus is basicall[...]
(201)[...notes/notes.txt]%48.3[...] do without it, it is always necessary to come back to intuition to bridge the abyss which separates symbol from reality.”
...................................
(Dipesh Chakrabarty)
(history of nature?) the nature of history as a form of knowledge
(Croce essay 1893 history subsumed under the concept of art) Croce drew on the writings of Ernst Mach and Henri Poincare to argue that “the concepts of the natural sciences are human constructs elaborated for human purposes.” “when we peer into nature, we find only ourselves” we do not “understand ourselves best as part of the natural world” (is that not the image of Narcissus who looks into the nature and can only see himself--nature observation as mirror stage)
so as Roberts puts it “Croce proclaimed that there is no world but the human world, then took over the central doctrine of Vico that we can know the human world because we have made it.”
Croce's idealism “does not mean that rocks, for example, ‘don't exist’ without human beings to think about them. apart from human concern and language, they neither exist nor do not exist, since ‘exist’ is a human concept that has meaning only within a context of human concerns and purposes” (not saying human symbolic system of thought)
man environment did change but changed so slowly as to make the history of man's relation to his environment almost timeless and thus not a subject of historiography at all. ***
the history of man's relationship to the environment was so slow as to be almost timeless
but now scholars are writing significantly different: destroying the artificial but time-honored distinction between natural and human histories, climate scientists posit that the human beings has become something much larger than the simple biological agent that he or she always has been.
vision of man “as a prisoner of climate” and not of man as the maker of it
is the Anthropocene a critique of the narratives of freedom?
price we pay for the pursuit of freedom
politics: the most common shape that freedom takes in human societies.
politics has never been based on reason alone. (it seems politics is something that is out of control)
(Maslin, Global warming) [Global warming] requires nations and regions to plan for the next 50 years, something that most societies are unable to do because of the very short-term nature of politics.
Anthropocene was neither an ancient nor an inevitable happening
the crisis of climate change calls for thinking simultaneously on both registers, to mix together the immiscible chronologies of capital and species history.
as Gadamer pointed out, Dilthey saw “the individual's private world of experience as the starting point for an expansion that, in a living transposition, fills out the narrowness and fortuitousness[...]
(202)[...notes/notes.txt]%48.5[...] exactly betrays? or what does it make accurate?)
average (is truth to nature?)
asceticism of noninterventionist objectivity
“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
<[...]
(203)[...notes/notes.txt]%48.7[...]rompe 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
in contrast to drawings, photograms were tarnished by the crudeness imposed by the limited palette of the color raster. Given the choice, the author clearly favored the crude but mechanical photographic process. Accuracy had to be sacrificed on the altar of objectivity. (is Kinect pure mechanical? why i have been insisting to remove my hands?! why i was craving for objectivity?)
=> to leave imperfections in the photograph as a literal mark of objectivity
testimony to objectivity
rejection of subjective temptation
sophistication could corrupt an individual? (you can be accurate but not sophisticated) (not cleaning up the image of plates)
The moral narrative surrounding this mechanical construction of pictorial objectivity took many forms. As we have argued, pictures (properly constructed) served as talismanic guards against frauds and system builders, aesthetes and idealizers.
extending the mystique of the visual to the dense symbolic presentation of functions and graphs
inscription instruments
(Marey, method grafique) “the graphical method translates all these changes in the activity of forces into an arresting form that one could call the language of the phenomena themselves, as it is superior to all other modes of expression.”
graphical representation could cut across the artificial boundaries of natural language to reveal nature to all people,
they were the words of nature itself
the search for this rendition of objective representation was a moral as much as technical, quest.
morality of self-restraint
(for the scientific atlas makers of the later nineteenth century,) the machine aided where the will failed. (at once a powerful and polyvalent symbol,) the machine was fundamental to the very idea of mechanical objectivity.
the machine, in the form of new scientific instruments, embodied a positive ideal of the observer: patient, indefatigable, ever alert, probing beyond the limits of the human senses. (what other relationships exist with the machine? other than this self-disciplined observer)
(rhetoric of) wonder-working machine
the machine, (now in the form of techniques of mechanical reproduction,) held out the promise of images uncontaminated by interpretation.
...the scientists’ continuing claim to such judgment-free representation is testimony to the intensity of their longing for the perfect ‘[...]
(204)[...notes/notes.txt]%48.8[...]werful and polyvalent symbol,) the machine was fundamental to the very idea of mechanical objectivity.
the machine, in the form of new scientific instruments, embodied a positive ideal of the observer: patient, indefatigable, ever alert, probing beyond the limits of the human senses. (what other relationships exist with the machine? other than this self-disciplined observer)
(rhetoric of) wonder-working machine
the machine, (now in the form of techniques of mechanical reproduction,) held out the promise of images uncontaminated by interpretation.
...the scientists’ continuing claim to such judgment-free representation is testimony to the intensity of their longing for the perfect ‘pure’ image. in this context the machine stood for authenticity: it was at once an observer and an artist, miraculously free from the inner temptation to theorize, anthropomorphize, beautify, or otherwise interpret nature.
one type of mechanical image, the photograph, became the emblem for all aspects of noninterventionist objectivity ... not because the photograph was necessarily truer to nature than hand-made images--but rather because the camera apparently eliminated human agency
(what is the difference between systematic image and mechanical image? same? -glitch..)
(mechanical) images that could be touted as nature's self-portrait
aura of stoic nobility
painstaking, humble, laborious (work)
moral virtuosity never exists without an appreciative audience
by ringing the changes on the resonant cultural themes of self-purification through self-abnegation, scientists persuaded themselves and others of their worthiness to assume priestly functions in an ever more secularized society.
humanity and self-restraint, the one imposed from without and the other from within, thus define the pride-breaking morality of the scientists.<br />
objectivity is a morality of prohibitions rather than exhortations
subspecies of interpretation: projection, anthropomorphism, insertion of hope/fear into images/facts of nature,
varieties of objectivity:
A. mechanical objectivity
B. the metaphysical element that makes objectivity synonymous with truth
C. aperspectival element that identifies objectivity with the escape from and all perspectives
it is tempting to collapse all of objectivity into the view from nowhere. this temptation to simplify by conflation should be resisted, for the highest expressions of objectivity in one mode may seem worthless when judged by the standards of another mode.
(as humans we must deal with our personal, idiosyncratic, perspectival perception)
photo: accurate rendering of sensory appearances
objectivity is a multifarious, mutable thing, capable of new meanings and new symbols: [...]
(205)[...notes/notes.txt]%48.9[...]ed a new image of objectivity
...................................
we must consider the paths people and trees have taken
entangled networks of matter and meaning
“i don't mind being ‘close to nature.’ but i know what they mean when they say that, and it's not what i mean.”
--Linda Noel, Koyungkawi poet and acorn mush maker
oaks were travelers and mixers
...................................
(Tomaz Mastnak)
Botanical decolonization
planting and displanting of humans and plants are elements of the same multispecies colonial endeavor
native plants as a discursive field
complex and unmarked ways that plants have been sorted out as ‘native’ or ‘nonnative’
(as a measure of perfection and ‘civility’) gardening was also the key to the survival of colonies
(for Bacon) ‘plantation’ meant in the first place to ‘Plant in’ people
‘plantation in a pure soile’ (founding a colony)
once we see colonialism as the literal planting and displanting of peoples, animals, and plants--as inscribing a domination into blood and soil founded in the fantasy of molding ecosystems with godlike arrogance--it becomes clear how colonialism ushered in the anthropocene
native plants, by implication, were uncultivated. in the imperial imaginary this distinction between cultivated and native plants was isomorphic with people as well.
‘nature’, like the uncultivated native, was to be dominated by ‘culture’. such ‘government of nature’ found its metropolitan manifestation in botanic gardens. (species collected for scientific reasons, for aesthetic and ideological benefit)
government of nature
invasive animals
the real issue is that we still live in a colonial environment. we live with the legacy of botanical colonization without even knowing it. this legacy is not mere background to social and political life.
Nazis’ attempted eradication of Impatiens parviflora from their own native forests (Gröning and Wolschke-Bulmahn, 1992)
the idea of “borrowing freely from all the world's styles and floras” erases the violent colonial encounter of displacing by replacing it with the figure of the undocumented immigrant
..charging native plant enthusiasts and invasion biologists and managers with xenophobia...
(Davis et al, 2011 article published in journal Nature, title:) “Don't judge species on their origins”, is a misleading phrase; at issue is judging species not on their origins, but on their emplacement.
(Yanagisako and Delaney, 1995) “people think and act in the intersections of discourses”
but not every domain intersects in every instance, and the character of an ‘intersection’ [...]
(206)[...notes/notes.txt]%49[...]x of the riddle: la Sphinx dissolves when the young man offers the correct answer.
=/= koan
...................................
My performance here is maybe a form of prayer or invocation[8] not simply to be read as a mere theoretical and discursive statement, and is intended to be a table of digital curses. To reopen the agency of curse in a cultural style that I have come to encounter, it might produce a different but not necessarily better speculative difficulty in discussing about the virtual. A curse[9] (according to Iranian-Islamic mixture of traditions in the milieus of promising and swearing,) is basically a networking function with both mechanical and interventionist properties that translate desire into performance—an intersubjective textual momentum that run virtually into the real world and it may (or may not) run down its target. Much like rumor, curse is contagious and reproductive but unlike the publicity of rumorous velocities, curse insists on secrecy at the same time harvesting its powers for revealing. The reality of the ‘curse’ is ‘assumed’ mostly and that is the virtual nature of this relation (with the materialities of the world that curse inscribes on) that I am interested in.
Curse systematically works with names, to be more accurate, with the notion of the “proper name”[10] invested in the idea of an automatic function that shifts ‘name’ to ‘agency’, virtual to concrete. That is if one knows the proper name, one could raise all actual agencies that act with real consequences—slogans in politics may rely on this typical power of cursing. In the Amazon I was not looking for the proper name of nature, neither theological nor analytical nor the supposed accidental. That means (looking for ways) critically not to be real.
An extended concept of cursing enters visuality in the gaze of the evil eye.[11] The malevolent glare who stamps upon by staring at an accidental moment of encounter in the evil eye, brings together the narrative of 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 know[...]
(207)[...notes/notes.txt]%49.2[...]ler 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 transmission, transformation, and multiplication of messages through diverse spaces of communication.
The spatial language of the writing of the world, geography, language of paths, movements, marks the moment of passage towards a new epistemology.
World is the space of your inscription, scientists. To read and to journey are the one and same act.
Fantastic flow of myth. The sacred and the religious words are spoken at the same time and in the same breath as those of science and of journeys.
Two speakers, united against the phenomenon of interference and confusion. Who's stake is in interrupting communication? The above interlocutors are on the same side, far from the dialogical game.
Demin includes himself in the circuit, blurs the message, renders it unintelligible, and exactly by that assures transmission. Parasite produces by the way of disorder a more complex order.
..penetrative grasp of a text, discovery and recreative apprehension of it life-forms, is impossible to paraphrase or systematize.
..temporal and local settings of one's text. (to master it?)
to read X, is literally, to ‘prepare’ to read X
in certain civilizations there comes epochs in which syntax stiffens...
Changing landscape of fact
unexamined smiles
worn tropes
words, the guardians of meanings, are not immortal.
Metaphysical scandal
note on history: past is a language construct, that the past tense of the verb is the sole guarantor of history.
Dialectics as a[...]
(208)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%49.3[...]f 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 transmission, transformation, and multiplication of messages through diverse spaces of communication.
The spatial language of the writing of the world, geography, language of paths, movements, marks the moment of passage towards a new epistemology.
World is the space of your inscription, scientists. To read and to journey are the one and same act.
Fantastic flow of myth. The sacred and the religious words are spoken at the same time and in the same breath as those of science and of journeys.
Two speakers, united against the phenomenon of interference and confusion. Who's stake is in interrupting communication? The above interlocutors are on the same side, far from the dialogical game.
Demin includes himself in the circuit, blurs the message, renders it unintelligible, and exactly by that assures transmission. Parasite produces by the way of disorder a more complex order.
..penetrative grasp of a text, discovery and recreative apprehension of it life-forms, is impossible to paraphrase or systematize.
..temporal and local settings of one's text. (to master it?)
to read X, is literally, to ‘prepare’ to read X
in certain civilizations there comes epochs in which syntax stiffens...
Changing landscape of fact
unexamined smiles
worn tropes
words, the guardians of meanings, are not immortal.
Metaphysical scandal
note on history: past is a language construct, that the past tense of the verb is the sole guarantor of history.
Dialectics as a method of intellectual chase.
Who first told a joke?
Certain languages are inhospitable to new metaphors.
Language-act
to read: is to restore all that one can of the immediacies of value and intent in which speech actually occurs.
my original repetition
we re-enact in our educated consciousness
in what sense does unperformed music exist?
The same ground, when using the ‘speculative instruments’, the critic, editor, actor, and reader stand on.
When we read or hear any language statement from the past, we translate.
Encode and decode “message”, misleading operative models of translation between different languages and even within a single language.
One treason in translation: words rarely show any outward mark of altered meaning, they body forth their history only in a fully established context.
What material reality has history out of language? --the tasavof verbal linguistic tradition
silence knows no history...?
...to remind you that everything is the condition of madnes[...]
(209)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%49.3[...]g untouched.
What is the female speech in San'an?
By far the greater proportion of art and historical record has been left by men. The process of ‘sexual translation’ or of the breakdown of linguistic exchange (is seen, almost invariably, from a male focus.)
-the breakdowns and translations in San'an story.
-The sexual translation and breakdown of linguistic exchange in San'an story.
How, when, and who can see or render the genius of women's speech and see the crisis of imperfect or abandoned translations (from both sides)?
...having an ‘ear’ for contrasting pressures of sexual discourse or identity
in San'an, man and woman, each respective experience of eros and language had set them desperately apart.
In whose idiom, male or female, one can grasp (only) falsehood or menace?
...as declaimer of my own stifled, tongue
any model if communication is a model of translation, of transfer of significance. No two localities use words and syntax to signify exactly the same things, to send identical signals (of valuation and inference).
[the matrix space tries to create that assurance of identical signals, the electronic, digital space, grid, systematic, node based-- but linguistic storytelling is not]
In performance, corresponding to my level of literacy, and a private thesaurus, part of my subconscious and personal memories, and using the singular and irreducibly specific ensemble of somatic and psychological identity.
Getting out of one's own dictionary of private remembrance, in old age.
A study of translation is a study of language
the ideal of a totally personal voice, of a unique ‘fit’ between an individual's expressive means and his world-image, perused by the poets.
Only when we reflect on it, when we lift the facts from the misleading context of the obvious, that the possible strangeness, the possible ‘unnaturalness’ of the human linguistic order strikes us.
I am interested in this pluralist framework we are living in since the inception of recorded history.
...
It is not a formal hard-edged linguistic relegation, rather a metaphysical speculation
(making a ‘language atlas’?)
constructs of universals / transformational grammars: that have nothing of substance to say about the prodigality of language atlas
my interest in the ajayeb is due to the traces it provides into verbal literacy, a living vulgar language, rather than a dead structure such as mantegh al teir Attar (Mantiq-ut-Tayr).
..vanishing languages and people, their history and morphological structures uncharted, dim into the oblivion, each takes with it a storehouse of consciousness.
An image of man as a language animal of implausible variety and waste.
Culture[...]
(210)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%49.5[...]>
organism = meaning + direction
organism combines memory, invariance, plan, message, loss, redundancy, etc
it is old, mortal, and transmiter of new cycle
تو نیکی میکن و در دجله انداز
to niki mikono dar dejle andaz...
(organism?) is a quasi stable turbulence that a flow produces, the eddy closed upon itself for an instance, which finds its balance in the middle of the current and appears to move upstream, but is in fact undone by the flow and re-formed else where.
Man is one at high temperatures
from the information point of view there is a tremendous background noise
the noise of a complex to which a receptor is linked
this unconsciousness
(no one can call that) information is fortunate
there must be noise in pleasure and information in pain (?!)
---hmmm we can't know this properly?
Find in ajayeb, operating functions:
transformations,
fixations,
energy displacements,
movements of observer,
ambiguity functions,
freudian slip,
exploits of signs,
exploits of energy,
(ajayeb is defined by its resistance to metaphors in a system of language)
یک کلاغ چهل کلاغ yek kalagh chel kalagh is precisely noise in a transmission system along a given circuit from one element to another. From a point of view outside the system ambiguity must be added to increase the system's complexity
theory of change (in sign)
what are the unconsciousnesses of integration?
(many) interlocking (black) boxes
obstacles do organise, noise becomes dialect
they come crashing at our feet
in the forms of eros and death
like surf at the edge of the beach
unconscious is the last black observer of chance
aging, is a process we understand as the drifting of information into background noise
عجایب المخلوقات ajayeb al makhlughat, anamnesis, memory, and everything imaginable
body creates language from information and noise
one who utters language, is the receiver at the end chain, the final observer. But the initial dispatcher is (always) unknown.
Ajayeb, make? a chance-program couple
to perform both:
•i am submerged in (its) signal exchanges
•i observe its global set of exchanges
introspection veers off into experience
as Freud, who started from energy models of thermodynamics, has intuited, everything occurs by a dynamic of language, the subsequent development of thermodynamics into information theory.
Knowledge is always linked to an observer
we are drifting towards noise and black depths of the universe...
knowledge is at most the rev[...]
(211)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%50.3[...]arallel consequences, trains of reason rain down in torrent:
•contact space travel, doctor strange kick trip, lucy time travel, matrix clock scene
what is the analogy with the concrete model? In each case
what is the order of the world that is explained by visible phenomenon in each of these cinematic scenes?
The beginning of vortex
causality
perspective
body
(what are?) models in ajayeb:
concretes, quasi-concretes, laws, equations,
vortices, turbulent clouds,
random dispersions,
flows, disequilibrias,
packs, alliances, conventions,
struggles with nature, alliances,
downhills, slopes,
content, norms, results,
the model and theory are both necessitarians
(how can this be explained materially?)
(what is the opposite of ‘people’?)
“physics”: the global contract (=/= global conflict; promise of physics), the general scheme of things (that scientists agree on)
flow did not follow (the general theorem of mechanics)
[@Sana] (why is it important) to describe flow in all its concrete complexity (--> Freud describes psychological flow in his work on libido)
----> formation of living systems
#the mindful stochastic knowledge of phenomenas#
Sohrevardi's work on the soul out of the tangible realm
(if your house or town is on an ocean the chosen model is a fluid one =/= polyhedron crystal) --> how would Sohrevardi choose a model? What would he think of fluid systems? [--> The Solids of...]
what are his rigorous bodies?
in Sohrevardi the *order* is of the ...[?] {of the world? Of the street? Of the code? Laboratory? Of the operative? Civil? Logical? Social? Scholastic?
more phenomenological ~=?(&?) less measured
(the river of phenomena is physics)
they put (ajayeb's) nature outside nature, (placing it in the subject, and so on)
which facts “are” the foundation of materialism?
-(the idea they says) classical knowledge deserves classical philosophy
(#?%$@x*!!!---->) if there are monsters here, go elsewhere(!)
what? / how? --> by contract or by strategy?
the ‘question’ is always consequential, never naive or frivolous
we need? workers (=/= generals)
we need? contracts (=/= strategy)
(how can i understand my “strategies” and my “contracts” ?! contractual agreements that i use or depend on or produce in my research and work with ajayeb, and in relation to the others in my performances--{my vocabulary, thinking with me, (un)learning with me, etc}--and even prior to the event of our encouter, the binding transferential contract in relation to the one who speaks) ~~--> (and issuing its) betrayal
strategy --(always? [should?] ends with)-->? contract; (for example, making peace tr[...]
(215)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%50.7[...]efinition, reappears metaphorically
the small amount of linkage between events
(with translation we might ask: with/by what are you translating? --> input and output of the translation cannot be known in advance)
ataraxia: the absence of trouble, peace of the garden (=/= soul made of atoms, unstable) a moral state ==> a physical state
(=/= aporia)
•not perturbed,
•the term was also used to describe the ideal mental state for soldiers entering battle. [-->? the image of the ideal soldier: Keanu Reeves kind of coolness in The Matrix film, (the machines are made in the image of the emotional ones.) at the end of the first film, we have an aesthetics (of indifferent and silent:) transcendence + perfect warrior], [another theory is that the freedom from emotional attachment was developed since early middle ages for merchants in order to (in a meddieval sense) *trade* =/= melancholic introspective contemplative efforts of faith]
------[apatheia: eradicating the tendency to react emotionally or egotistically to external events, ~ equanimity, =/= indifference*@Sven; (metriopatheia: men between the excess and deficiency of emotions;) a form of response to the world? ]
@Sven:
•interdifference [open systems between or among (in)differences?] --> interindifference --> entering differences, enter in diff
•intradifference [closed system inside or within (in)differences?]
Nature is rivers and whirl winds
streaming of mortality
Greek preference of ‘fall’ over ‘transition’:
things arrive and occur and only crumble and disintegrate for a unique figurative case*
symptom, a natural object, materialism
{the intersection of independent causal chains ==> river rise of chance occurrence}
@Seba's new planet story workshop & @Sana: what generate things, spinning the wheel, streaming flow, cascades (global fluidity of local solids,) *principles of heat* (that make worlds and bodies,) the *state of disequilibrium* (of the world [for Seba] & of the soul [for Sana])
***what is the name of disturbance?
(i have been proposing Sana to mix physics and psychology)
what are moral mortals linked to?
anguish and anxiety (in the absence of God, after the death of God)
#archive
thermodynamic time:
“...we have to mark irreversible time on the clock. It ticks away. Irreversibly, marking degradation. The things that were formed in the hollows of the vortices lose their atoms little by little in the downstream flow. [...] time of heat, weight and flow.” (Serres)
(Greek idea of) history is only the translation or transposition of this material principle.
--> (thermodynamic principle of) archive: hollow man up to the erosion of irreversible time
-vector of the progressive civilization going up strea[...]
(217)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%51.1[...]w planet story workshop & @Sana: what generate things, spinning the wheel, streaming flow, cascades (global fluidity of local solids,) *principles of heat* (that make worlds and bodies,) the *state of disequilibrium* (of the world [for Seba] & of the soul [for Sana])
***what is the name of disturbance?
(i have been proposing Sana to mix physics and psychology)
what are moral mortals linked to?
anguish and anxiety (in the absence of God, after the death of God)
#archive
thermodynamic time:
“...we have to mark irreversible time on the clock. It ticks away. Irreversibly, marking degradation. The things that were formed in the hollows of the vortices lose their atoms little by little in the downstream flow. [...] time of heat, weight and flow.” (Serres)
(Greek idea of) history is only the translation or transposition of this material principle.
--> (thermodynamic principle of) archive: hollow man up to the erosion of irreversible time
-vector of the progressive civilization going up stream (in the tropic river)
in archive invariability is global =/= irreversibility & chance
([i am more interested in the] obstacles in front of the) well-founded “conjoined world”
system statue
that which can be touched and tested
constant general random invariabilities in primordial path of matter
(**Serres:) morality = physics
(--> the image of physical collision and causality simulation --> morality)
--> what is then the image of the CG artist in the world? The wise man in and of the world, friend of the world, extended to the global universe:
*this is an important moment in Greek Wisdom, man is not an stranger but at home in world, (a disturbance a vortex in turbulent nature,) in contract with Venus =/= (breaking the contract,) man is stranger, fallen from sky, he hates things and fight against them, environment is an enemy --> martial neurosis from Plato to Descartes to Bacon to us
***hatred of objects at the root of knowledge***
messages exchanged:
•I, you, he, we, they,
•this, here, ecce,
•here is the thing itself
man: the one who subordinates every object to relations among subjects.
(the origin of) theater is submerged in animality : “politics and theater are merely mammalian”
-in comedy and tragedy there is only a question of human relations and there is never an object as such
(Hobbes:) “man is wolf to other men" = man is a subject to objects
*the discovery of the object*
(that there is such a thing as) object is an old original political relation tale
-a scientific invention? -->{always ask, what are the objects and subjects of [(pre)historic] science?}
*** “Aphrodite-pleasure is born of the world and the water[...]
(219)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%51.2[...]ief surface. The patterns of reading emerge as the pencil moves gently across the paper, pressing down or not. The paper, pencil, pressure, movement, the object behind, the touch of three elements, interactive interfacial patterns of readingwriting with ajayeb's textual corpus*
” [...] the industrialized world is frequently condemned to considering the concrete universe as its representation.”
Stengers + Prigogine
(?what do we have that helps us give up the idea of a) rational nature of the real
observation ==> generalization
measurement ==> precision
which precisions can be achieved by other than measurement?
How not to travel through the universe like free and self-determined gods? (#magicians)
Stengers > Leibniz @Luisa: “movement is produced within a full world, an interdependent world in which nothing can happen that has not been made possible by the state of the set of bodies according to a harmony that determines and checks at every moment the unfolding of the different movements.”
the full and compact nature, version of ajayeb
my work in apass is on a theory of transformation among languages (not about the best point of view =/=> system integrated =/=> trajectories calculated):
•ajayeb's natural language
•system language of differential logic
•english grammar and syntax
•organic and intersubjective space of my peers
•old farsi
•animal
•
“speak of” science
“speak about” science
“speak” science
“speak” metaphysics
speaking the language of dynamics
what is still at stake in science: the description of a world of processes
...................................
Lezra
In the European imaginary, the public struggle over the “better” word makes the city (the polis) @apass
Derrida calls for patience, take care read on slowly. Kafka: all human errors are impatience. Radical patience, is the necessity to differ, but also to rush in precipitately, one has to make decisions: absolute urgency.
Literature for derrida, reading in my works, is indissociably bound up with questions of politics, democracy and responsibility, religion, nationality and nationalism, identity and law.
E m foster, how can i tell what i think, till i see what i say.
What one finds repeatedly in derrida's work is the uncanny effect by which one is invited to sense the unfolding of all his thinking starting out from anywhere, from any idea, any word, any thought that happen to be at issue. Deconstruction is the name for this?
Derrida proceeds with patience and pleasure, to describe what is going on in a particular text or situation.
Every reading is difficult,[...]
(220)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%51.4[...]nticipation of future power rather than meditative reflections on past moments of insight and harmony. Oriented towards the future.
All i am doing today, like derrida, can be seen as a grafting (ghalameh zadan) or extension, supplement or prosthesis, an outgrowth from somewhere else, earlier on.
I will attach to the story of maulwürfe like the shit on his head.
Recalling and reinventing Shakespeare, the idea is not to bring it from past to present, something that is already disjointed in time towards the future. I push the characters of King Lear to a future. The deconstructive reading of the play has to do with the opening of the future itself. It is utterly important that you do something unpredictable for yourself. If you are in the business of hate, love suddenly, changing tracks brings the unexplainable to the trajectory. Going in discipline is like riding a train on rails, i am not saying to go off the track and crash or stop, but to change track experimentally and to change gear. The tracks are built for us to move in the field of thought, they don't cover the whole surface, by moving along them we can witness the new to emerge from our interdisciplinary run.
Derrida shows, reminds, that we can never do anything systematically.
Monstrosity in the story Yal-o Ejdeha by Shamlu. Monsters of the deep..
my aim was to show the monstrosity of all the characters in King Lear not just Edmond. Edmond is the artist of the self. Shakespeare makes unacceptable characters. King Lear play is intolerable itself, an encounter with the opening of the future itself. Instead of giving in to the normalizing and legitimating representations which identity, recognize, and reduce everything too quickly, why not rather be interested in theoretical monsters, in monstrosities which announce themselves in theoretical reading.
The proper significance is simply and categorically deferred forever, insistent strangeness of the force of deferral, (effecting what derrida has called) the singularity of the here and now.
“explained” is “explained away.”
unreasonable is not concealed necessarily.
Duty to irresponsibility
any phantasmatic organization, whether collective or individual, is the invention of a drug, or of a rhetoric of drugs, be it aphrodisiac or not.
In talk, i respond to the how of a poem or text dictating a kind of addictive reading or desire in the reader.
The project of a text, the project of a theory
according to Freud, when the work of mourning is completed the ego becomes free and uninhabited again. Funeral speeches and related writings, are possibilities that structures the movement of identification. Mourning is the interiorization of the dead other, also its contrary. Politics is figured as first and foremost an organization of the time and space of mourni[...]
(222)[...notes/Derrida old notes.txt]%51.6[...]zational 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 environment where the first/primary perceived aspect is service]
•
harmful, deficient, deformed, secondary =/= superman, supergirl
logocentrism: letting the logic lead the letter --Campbell--> images are logocentric in that they create meaning by appealing to a central apparently undeconstructible system of authoritative truth (appealing to sources of transcendence outside of the image) [--> for example forensic architecture images =/= Derrida's *there is nothing outside of the text*]
•in investigating an image we often posses a logocentric vision, drawing it into convergence, making it coherent and giving it a non-contradictory and singularly authoritative meaning
[title]
ruined coherent heritage
there is no escaping the enclosure of (logocentrism of western tradition of) metaphysics <-- we can critically engage it from within
bricolage
bricoleur --> one is participating in the intellectual heritage one is critiqing
death of man
•Barthes --> death of author
•Strauss --> structuralist approach to human nature
•Foucault --> history of the historical arbitrariness (of the human sciences)
•
}--> antihumanism (of Barthes and Foucault) suggests it might be possible to stand outside the humanist legacy (and analyse from a position outside) ==Derrida==> (escaping from human constitutes) a very human tendency that has been at work in the cultural and social imaginary since antiquity for example Foucault's archaeology: (to understand) *how reason determined madness in different eras by looking at how reason evolved historically* ==> puts the analyst outside the humanist legacy of reason ==restore==> the metaphysical illusion of mastery and control
=/= Derrida
(my problem with making alternative *archives, gardens, and maps* in art:)
•metaphysical complicity (with archive and garden) + critique we direct again[...]
(223)[...notes/Derrida old notes.txt]%51.8[...]scued by the human (face)
(in advertisement -->) **the ways in which knowledge & reality are marshalled into collective visual consensus**
visual deconstruction --> rigor towards the idiosyncrasy and singularity of any text
restricted economy of the text ==> particular meaning =/= Derrida: moveing from a restricted --to--> general economy of the text
...................................
metaphysics: enterprise of returning (strategically, ideally) to an origin (a priority) thought to be simple, intact, normal, pure, standard, self-identical [=/= to think in terms of derivation, complication, deterioration, accident]
<--Derrida-- (the most constant profound potent metaphysical gesture in Western philosophy:) conceiving simple before the complex, essential before the accidental
}--> logocentric thought: thought which does not adequately attend to the contradictions inherent in its own medium ==> [logocentrism:] (fable) faith in the status of language as a lucid carrier of meaning (=/= attentiveness to the materiality of communication and the implications of such a project)
pecific languages make communication material, and exploring the interplay of terms within a linguistic system (-->? baroque) =/= Enlightenment = Age of Reason (logos)
...................................
Beauty and the Beast
or, blast of the clean slate
(goddamn it)
The picture of a relatively undifferentiated and continuous topological space undergoing discontinuous transitions and progressively acquiring detail until it condenses into the measurable and divisible metric space which we inhabit, is a powerful metaphor for the cosmic genesis of spatial structure. (Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy)
baroque Trauerspiel, classical synthesis, ...
synthesis: synthetic thinking (the combination of ideas into a complex whole)
this is not a reasoning exercise (deducing particularity, etc.)
imagine you find a head. how do you search for the body? (research project)
graduating from ... and approaching ...
(from fairy tale ---> approach myth)
--> http://www.sinaseifee.com/DifficultForests.html
becoming Amazon as the fear of the male.
(Amazon as male hunter symbol)
(symbol for) masculine gender principle
(to disavow sexual difference)
I am not bringing the text to you, or you to the text.
as you have already guessed we have to destroy both the notion of text and you, to some extent, in order to permit a reading to constitutes itself.
is San'an a prince charming?
(let's examine)
the spiritually established death-birth (death of birth and birth of death) at the end of story
Miyaz[...]
(224)[...notes/Derrida old notes.txt]%52.1[...]nsists not in an argument, but in the ecstatic elaboration of a metaphor, a web of interconnected concepts, the development of a new vocabulary without a pause for explanation or so much as a simple definition.
“...a mapping rather than a tracing”
“What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious”
“It fosters connections between fields, the removal of blockages... “
(removing some blockages of meaning-lock in San'an)
my lecture, emphasizes the rhizomatic to foster imaginative work that challenges typical critical forms.
not to overlook the working of matters, and the exteriority of their relations.
(in a book, a lecture, etc.) there are lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification.
(what are Attar's Sheikh's actual authority as a teacher?)
(George Makdisi: “Madrasa and University in the Middle Ages”)
[...] “Perhaps the most fundamental difference between the two systems is embodied in their systems of certification; namely, in medieval Europe, the licentia docendi, or license to teach; in medieval Islam, the ijazah, or authorization. In Europe, the license to teach was a license to teach a certain field of knowledge. It was conferred by the licensed masters acting as a corporation, with the consent of a Church authority, in Paris, by the Chancellor of the Cathedral Chapter... Certification in the Muslim East remained a personal matter between the master and the student. The master conferred it on an individual for a particular work, or works.” [...]
feeling cool and correct
(in) a parasitical golden age
what is “education” in a mystical world (or actually a mystical world-view)
how can be undermined or rewired, (“teaching” without education)
magical idealism
from Delphi-magiscism to the San'an
(does San'an actually wants to go to Greece?! but went to Italy?)
اقصای روم
the space we are founding ourselves in is not neutral, not innocent, not un-signed
it is paid for, has a certain architecture, (phallic work)
the intellectual mask...
semiotic of learning and thinking
(Maulwurf,) shit on your head, shit is the origin of all gifts, when a child offers his first donation, “look what I have produced!” I honor you with this Kacke.
--> http://www.sinaseifee.com/VomkleinenMaulwurf.html
how can we bring the variety of animals into the singular butterfly metaphor? (Attar's bird's butterfly effect)
Schmetter[...]
(225)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%52.3[...]w, the monster, the machine, the thing, the contagion --> carries none of the anxiety of ontological authenticity
رسوایی - using treachery for the sake of vitality
(‘Verrat'--betraying the student, in order to produce truth-event)
going into vicious levels of self-consciousness
between all the lines of statement that Attar constructs, what is being suggested in his music or words?
San'an, taken by otherworldly crafts that signal him to become (gracefully) transfixed
‘naaareh’ - نعره
far cry from the mystic's encounter with divinity
disavowal of (an explicit) narrative (trajectory)
[sunken tranquility, relaxed self-annihilation, ascetic renunciation of material] *mystic* =/= or? =~ *postmodern* [obsession with speed, with narcissistic technologies, hyper-materialistic]
is there in postmodernism then an alternative version of mystical experience?
...
feeling like a foreign body, until you find a job?! (Attari as a job)
let's jam on this
this story is prior to psychoanalysis (?)
positionality, placements, displacements
a system that doesn't have access to its own knowledge
historical struggle for the definition of the real
I can't keep clean boundaries
rituals (of promise and contract), (things that) must address anxiety --?--> a religious stamp
what is the San'an text promising the Other? (like every text does, every utterance)
what it cannot *not do?
my childish playful inventiveness and its relationship to weakness.
so I come up week, saying ‘let us do this or that,’ but that is a will to power (?)
we are here to understand the appropriation of meaning.
what does or does not belong to the protocols of reading, etc.
(think in terms of de-appropriation, which entails a form of rigorous hesitation when assuming responsibility for the work or thought of another) is that what I am practicing encountering the work of Attar? as an ally or ancestor or an unknown sidetrack of writing
different modalities of love and loving
I guess what I wanted to ask you is your love
I have been teaching Islam to you?! in a shattered and transgressive way
of course this not teach-according-to-definition
of course every demand is the demand for love
the SM-inserts in San'an story
he is asked to perform some serious Sado-Masochist interactions with nonhuman animals, his favorite book, and Tarsaa as stage-manager
we are left with the task of reading the enigma of something that no longer is. if things ‘were’ we wouldn't need to[...]
(227)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%53[...]'an to worship is the confirmation of what sheikh has already done.)
-what is the secret of the vitality of the image that bewitches San'an? why dream/images, works of metaphors have lives of their own and cannot be explained as epistemological windows onto reality?
-San'an is first captive of apparition (صورت), then captive of meaning (معنی)
-originality of the site is abolished by technological register of the ‘sent,’ (the telephonic cyber-space) of the eidolon =?=> displacement (-how San'an loses a sense of place first in order to move)
[in the 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 ser[...]
(228)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%53.2[...]ious 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-finder* machine
we are looking for mutations of San'an's work
after he dreams...
the event (‘vaghee’ واقعه) has (already) happened, he travels to ‘understand’ the “event” and not to ‘find out’ --- (we can also critique ‘event’ or ‘vaghee’ as a violent and omnipotent sublime or a happening-art, versus the fragmented phenomena---associated with femininity)
“tafaroj” (تفرّج) or wondering around in Rome, very different than Sohrevardi's order --> http://sinaseifee.com/sorkh.html
[San'an with a damaged GPS system--why he goes to Ita[...]
(229)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%53.2[...]ally?
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-finder* machine
we are looking for mutations of San'an's work
after he dreams...
the event (‘vaghee’ واقعه) has (already) happened, he travels to ‘understand’ the “event” and not to ‘find out’ --- (we can also critique ‘event' or ‘vaghee’ as a violent and omnipotent sublime or a happening-art, versus the fragmented phenomena---associated with femininity)
“tafaroj” (تفرّج) or wondering around 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) [somethi[...]
(230)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%53.3[...]ual self-respect---woman always representing the matter and the material
a comparative literary note on Tarsaa's framework and other female protagonist/antagonists -->
in: Nezami: Khosro-o-Shirin and Leili-o-Majnun (woman is there for the man, to elevate him); Jami: Salaman-o-Absal and Yusof-o-Zoleikha (woman is body and to be avoided); Gorgani: Vis-o-Ramin (woman is autonomous and for herself in the plot of the story)
*this time, he stammers in a situation articulated by her
preserving the ‘good object’
who is doing it and what is the good object for?
(the missing good object, forever)
Tarsaa demands him to drink and not to get drunk
سوی خوکان شتافت
San'an's pig-phobia
introducing the pig in a bird's story
(Hoopoe convincing the Nightingale, Nightingale convincing the ...)
the way of the pig
how earthly we are, we, creatures of earth, how metaphysics forecloses us
Attar keep throwing similies of horizontal and vertical
(simile صنعت تشبيه, شبيه صنع)
scanning through the scandalous moments in San'an...
I want to be German everyday
de-system or to desist, nondialectical negativity
‘Integrieren’ is transitive verb, has a virtual object or project
I am in Ausländerbehörde, the opposite of hospitality?
I have to stop talking opposite rhetoric. but this was not an antithesist opposite, it was a logical opposite
violences of the encounter
San'an's love-story, ist nicht das Tristan und Isolde
‘watch your back’ is the origin of surveillance {?}
I hope I am not interrupting here!
killing it and loving it completely
so we are working (fine-tuning) on phantom noises, parasite emissions, we have a sound-track here
we want to be aware of where we speak from, what kind of other sonic layers are somehow offering themselves, or coughing in (‘sorfe’ سرفه)
to point out the static, dormant, inert, ambient
...................................
and I like to hand myself over
how flowers make sense
(in Iranian metaphysics)
(---> go to Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal)
the rhetoric of desire in San'an, how is it (technologically{?}) determined?
how are things turned on or turned off in San'an? etc.
right at the moment that he is allegedly at an emission of a dream/call, we are dealing (or working) with (the essence of) technology, there is a mitten, trans-mitten, transmitting, emission, etc.
[he is welcoming a call---it was Heidegger who linked thinking with welcoming---to arrive] --- [to San'an, ‘what (t[...]
(231)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%53.4[...] of a more primal truth? the girl)
[if San'an was medium-reflective he would pose himself with the call/dream and never set foot out or act or take an ego-suicidal mission---but that is also a problem;
*footnote: Hafez trying to travel (to India, invited kindly with Reisef?rderung (travel grants) from Sultan Ghias al-din himself, singing شکرشکن شوند همه طوطیان هند زین قند پارسی که به بنگاله میرود, he is going to shake India and so on.) but returning by -and because of a language-turn, when he is standing in front of the stormed sea, he turns back to Shiraz via a trope: چه آسان مینمود اول غم دریا به بوی سود غلط کردم که این طوفان به صد گوهر نمیارزد it is so interesting how scholars and other poets are trying to map out his itineraries and travel-logs from his poesies/poiesis. the nagging and complaining Hafez, always annoyed by weather or something, and can't stop saying how much he misses his friends in Shiraz and so on]
(Hafez takes on San'an because he also fucks up the travel, he falls with face down in the mud. for him also travel is traumatic, disruptive, and unpleasant; so they both demand another kind of trans-portation system)
This essence of technology, however, has nothing to do with technology. [this is Heideggerian] --> technology is a means of revealing the truth
[it is not the machines that we are at the age of technology]
technology is always sent to us
in the story we are shifting to ‘send’, this doesn't mean that there is a sovereign subject or some sort of powerful ‘self’ responsible or at the origin of the productive behavior (or accomplishment) of San'an.
(Heidegger collects:)
destiny, destination, schicken, Schicksal, etc.
[ungeschickt =? destinal failure, existential clumsiness]
[~= technical error in destiny. what is the future of error?]
•according to Heidegger, nobody (that also means everybody) can take at the wheel and make certain determinations and destinations
[this is his notion of ‘techne']
•Tarsaa's technical intervention in San'an's destiny
that is another kind of relatedness
you can no longer talk about the subject or object
is one in full possession of oneself? one doesn't belong to oneself or anybody else---that would be a post-Lacanian critique, which is the self-sabotage of the mystic is not necessarily attached to a inevitable devouring authority, “I don't belong to myself or anybody else.” nor God, nor teacher, etc. ==> the self is not necessarily devourable. [what are the certain components of the self of San'an that will remain unavailable, those that underlay a pervasive sense of not-belonging?---> longing (‘vermissen’) the girl/Tarsaa, ‘to-be-longing']
(why) am I including in my speech a rhetoric of faltering[...]
(232)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%53.5[...]r not over the material and his boner direction or erection is towards which psychoanalytically accessible phallus?
His students are following him backward!?
“Authentic disciple of four hundred men, were regressed (zurückschreiten) on a journey with him.” [why Attar is insisting on the authenticity of the disciple and apprenticeship?]
we should always ask where this text comes from.
I try not to pre-program what is going to happen. [here now]
--> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9SIL38hkgw
in the Shams Group music video, the soldiers in the video are having the little-Rumi-packet in their backpacks, along with other suicides. (other soldiers having Holderlin or Nietzsche in their backpacks)
metaphysical strongholds
to keep partnership with the self, so that there can be interlocution
(is this a possible ethics? --> “can I live with myself?”)
what one does to be in consonant with what one is capable of.
(then what is vowel?) vowel switches tracks and resonations
...penetrative grasp of a text, discovery and recreative apprehension of it life-forms, is impossible to paraphrase or systematize.
[Michel Serres]
...temporal and local settings of one's text. (to master it?)
to read X, is literally, to ‘prepare’ to read X
in certain civilizations there comes epochs in which syntax stiffens...
Changing landscape of fact
words, the guardians of meanings, are not immortal.
note on history: past is a language construct, that the past tense of the verb is the sole guarantor of history.
to read: is to restore all that one can of the immediacies of value and intent in which speech actually occurs.
What material reality has history out of language? --the Tasawwuf/Tasavof verbal linguistic tradition
...to remind you that everything is the condition of madness.
(protest against “was” ---> go to Attar's relation with biographies in Tazkirat al-Awliya---he mobilizes ‘personalities’ in the index of his mystic-ontological demand---what would the lack of personality take revenge of Attar?)
we are at a tense past and a past tense---prison tense
..the landscape composed by the past tense, the semantic organization of remembrance... is styled and coded differently by cultures. --miniature illustrating San'an?
The verbal icon made up of all successive translations of Greek literature and philosophy has oriented fundamental movements in Islamic feelings --Farabi, Mirdamad, etc.
My translation of classics is not out of a vital compulsion for immediacy or precise echo. I am[...]
(233)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%53.8[...]experimental thinker, different constellations of desire
***mithridatism مهردارو mehr-daru: *internalization of toxicity* (the gradual ingestion of lethal substances so as to gain immunity) --> an archaic protective tactic, an ancient model of defense, (subterranean practice of pirates, alchemists, cult leaders, shamans, guerrilla columns, spies, paranoid kings's *logic of encounter*)
(poetic extremism -->) mithridatic: dispensing fragmented verses, aphorisms, and engravings of the atrocity; invitation and unleashing of the malevolence itself, to seduce obliteration;
-affliction, existence thriving in the wound
(assumptions of) inevitability + anticipation + projection ==> mithridatic remedy (in ideological & literary apparatuses): “swallowing partial glances of the extinction of society, actuality, and being itself” (Mohaghegh) [a form of training? for continuation?]--> the poet asking us to fasten our reeling gazes to the objects of damage and derangement (@Ali ) ==> (extremist:) thought and expression have taken the shape of a *meteorological device*, forecasting seasons of pestilence and mutilation [<-- my whole work has been against that]
fanatical responses to the evolving storm [=/= the fool (the one whose cognitive defend-system is down), the joker (figure of the always problematic, with its speculative sense for potent tie between meaning and bodies), the cheerleader (porpoising socially deviant, corrupting forerunner), the sleep-walker (moving in anachronistic temporality, in non-explicit non-intentional acting), the eros (weaker than the problem it tries to solve), the queer (optically dense and less elegant kind of corporality in our encounters), the rabbit-chaser (detouring off the ontological anxiety of humanity's enigmatic destination)]
cyclopean protocols of extremity --> narrowest vision (immensified)
the cyclopean organ (of doing/thinking) ==> ‘oracle = explosive device’
|
--> wisdom + rage
--> boundless confined
--> precision + enormity
--> nature + technology
--> betrayal + devotion
|
....three brothers سه برادر
----[they were said to have primordial understanding, having monitored the building of creation itself--yet this brings no consolation تسلى, no spiritual composure ارامش, only chronic infuriation, such that they remain at once eternal and impatient]
----[they are gargantuan, immortal, and among the rarest exceptions to be released from the underworld after the great defeat of the chthonic orders, and yet brought back to the surface to dwell among/away from men and the new gods in hard labor on a faraway island, discharged from one hell only to find another imprisonment]
----[they alone can swing the hammers that form mountains, bedrock, ocean floors, tectonic plates, seisamic, yet there is such insane detail even within their most jagged stroke[...]
(234)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%55.5[...]~=?! hegemonic will to mastery]
•poetic imagination (--> an art that ventures and wins chaos)
•insurgent mind-set (--> that every man is surrounded, oppressed, and penetrated by chaos --> Heidegger wants to live =/= insurgent's reflex in middle eastern anticontext, *eastern revolutionary ethos*, “thinking of struggle = dialectical”, no revolutionary intersubjectivity [~= otherless subjectivity])
Apollonian hyper-rational retreat from the void
Ascetic immensified retreat from the world
self-willed experience of the edge allowed to guide forward
(Nietzsche's Zarathustra's chaotic temperament:) “one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”
“chaos" = what (western) modernity has left (in east)
(that is why terminologies of “nomadism” can hardly be appropriated in middle east--they are chaotic, not nomadic)
[idioms of resistance] ~~--> intoxicating sense of power
(anti-,) “being-against”:
•in modernity: a direct/dialectical opposition of forces
•in postmodernity: an oblique/diagonal stance
•today: “alternatives within" = an imperial device that works well ‘in itself’ but not ‘for itself’ --> trans-systemic reality
...to believe in an outsider subjectivity capable of ahistorical imagination
(inflated dispositions of) triumphalism and alarmist nightmare
communist (Marxist silhouette) and liberatory combatants of the 20th century, intellectuals persecuted and exiled in the course of anti-fascist struggles, freedom-fighters of the anti-colonial/anti-imperialist wars --> nostalgic portrait of the contemporary militant
(Nietzsche, Kafka, Bataille, Foucault, Artaud, Baudrillard, Serres, D+G, etc.) continental thinkers architects of masks:
•the overhuman (--> Nietzsche)
•the supplicant
•the deviant (or barbarian --> Foucault)
•the body-without-organs (--> D+G)
•the criminal
•the schizoid
•the headless monstrosity (--> Bataille)
[(an exilic) postcolonial intelligentsia]
---{Nietzsche and Artaud's familiar persuasive authority, similar exuberant phraseology, and motifs in extremis --> ‘cruelty,’ Artaud wanted to “reject form and incite chaos.” antipsychological violent physical determination (a cruel yet necessary act upon the spectator) to shatter the false reality (theatre/art as a place where the spectator/actor is *exposed* [=/= “protected"]) =/= (aesthetic) distance (---> go to ‘distance matters’); this is the paradigm in iran's theatre and performance scene, where the audience are to be engulfed and physically affected by the show, ‘to be trapped and powerless’ as a theatrical value is an Artaudian tradition.
-delirium: he wanted to deliberately become/stay mad [--> Jassem, Sana's methodology, the state of horrible en[...]
(235)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%55.9[...]narrative of some diorama شهر فرنگ of good and evil)
the insurgent does not fall victim to:
•collective mythologies of nation, language, and culture
•elusive rhetoric of ethics and justice ==> provide power with a convincing smokescreen
the third world insurgents are anarchists of a higher order of *aneurysmal consciousness and affect*
(gaze of the aneurysmal:) an uncompromising gaze that sees what power tries so hard to mask--that there is nothing there to see
*practice of irregular warfare ==> irregular subject of war*
(weeds of) modernity:
•as ideology --> power
•as institutional mechanism --> society
•as phenomenology --> perception
•as ontology --> being/death
•as cultural emergence --> spectacle
•as temporal orchestration --> time
•as configuration --> body/space
•as political economy --> capital
•as epistemological framework --> knowledge
•as discursive apparatus --> language/meaning
•as epoch --> history
immediacy =/=? alienation
brutal =/=? idealistic
retrograde =/=? futuristic
esoteric =/=? banal
technological =/=? carnal
genesis =/=? apocalypse
system =/=? chaos
...................................
iran: transition from a semi-colonial to postcolonial space --> anticolonial islamic front
the self-other construct
***islamic revolutionary thought borrows heavily from Marxist theory (at the same time equating them with colonial mastery)
}==> forge a specific revolutionary mind-set out of its own historical realities/myths (=/= “ill-trafficked remedies of an outsider ideology”, a *second-hand personality* [<-- this is OK!])
cartographies of entrapment
Al Ahmad binary reasoning in his Westoxification
-the “eternal” struggle of east and west --> a rhetoric of transcendental struggle
-to perceive the “west” as merely an *epistemic fabrication* and not a civilizational reality <-- the enemy is authenticated
(-he makes a very bad move: relocate the structural site of resistance to somewhere outside the walls of the university)
*Al Ahmad's orchestration of degrees of cultural estrangement --into--> a tone of nationalist triumphalism ==> ***vanished premodern subjectivity to be restored*** (<-- i have to be careful with this)
-[that] the colonized intellectuals and political officials participate together in the eradication of third world heritage
-agents of foreign ministries: orientalists, ambassadors, advisors, who write hideous scrolls when they have finished their assignments that say “yes, you have the head of a lion and the tail of an elephant” (--> is this also close to my account of Olearius?!) ==> *devitalization* ==> *damaged subjectivity* + an *alternative historic consciousness* }==> hostile tena[...]
(236)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%56.5[...]*Al Ahmad's orchestration of degrees of cultural estrangement --into--> a tone of nationalist triumphalism ==> ***vanished premodern subjectivity to be restored*** (<-- i have to be careful with this)
-[that] the colonized intellectuals and political officials participate together in the eradication of third world heritage
-agents of foreign ministries: orientalists, ambassadors, advisors, who write hideous scrolls when they have finished their assignments that say “yes, you have the head of a lion and the tail of an elephant” (--> is this also close to my account of Olearius?!) ==> *devitalization* ==> *damaged subjectivity* + an *alternative historic consciousness* }==> hostile tenant of the before-this [=/= i work on an alternative queer]
(cyclopean view) Al Ahmad's dismissal of media: he is unable to see it as anything but a promoter of infinite pacification --> media =/= local
(a civilizational dichotomy ==>) portray media as abusive of islamic tradition
**rhetoric of endangered cultural subjectivity**
disappearance or extinction of one's own rightful place within the world (<--~~ will to hegemonic mastery)
*(Al Ahmad deduces Chomsky on a global-imperial scale -->) the operation of the media can not be divorced from objective systemic violence : media = instrument of bourgeois valuation
Shariati: existentialism + leftism + islamism
[islamic anticolonialism + neomarxist critical theory (of Frankfurt School)]
(presumed) deterioration of global consciousness + industrialization onto the stage of world history
-homogenized mass --> emergence of automation : an objectified and self-activating process wherein the subject becomes an instrument
“impersonation of the machine” <--Adorno--{totalitarian seizure of consciousness + devastating effects of instrumental reason}
Shariati's writing:
•the third world subject embraces the false consciousness
•self-inflicted cultural betrayal
•predatory-parasitic operation of the colonized imagination }-->
*defilement of the “what once was”
*the elevation of the indigenous as representative of an authentic return
==> ***past as antithesis to the present*** <-- transcendental signified of a precolonial subjectivity [<-- how not to do that while visiting heritage sites such as ajayeb?]
Shariati's defense of the non-western world --> manufacturing an exaggerated imagery of its *now lost grandeur* ==> (its former) essential identity-status
-->{what would Lacan's mirror stage say about this? [--> ‘sudden realization of a complete (specular) image of self =/= infant's primordial sense of her fragmented body’ before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other
[*]subjectivity: spatial relations (--> self-other construct)
[*]the imaginary: the space in which the relation between the ego and its images is developed]
(Mohaghegh[...]
(237)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%56.6[...]bration of the “we"--the one who becomes many)
*evil: a force of liberation, beauty, complexity
Ali's microhostilities (on me, the way he tells)
*guided by dislike*
(*terminal Intimacy*: definite concept of friendship:) “they will all die for one another" = "they will all kill one another”
“the sect occasionally allows the opening of the closed circle, reforming as a stright line that penetrates the world of others” --> (a phantom) *imperative to entirity*
sectarian language: the author cages the reader (in each verse)
sectarian animism ==> paranoiac dialogues:
•language of things (communication with the inanimate)
•concert with sacred beasts (oracle, snakes, animal spirits, etc. **the uncooperative figures of nature**)
•warnings of extraterrestriality (those of faraway sentience)
•murmurings of superstition (man, fate, chance, fifth column[= the group who undermine a larger group from within])
hiding as mission --> dissimulation & hollowing
sectarian lives by code, but cannot be deciphered or analyzed* --methodological--> leaves one undetected (--> assassins who are inflexible, precise, and systematic to the highest degree, and traceless for this very reason)
...they remind of the ungovered body, the accidental, and death
xxxxx 280
...................................
(Mohaghegh's work on the middle east in his book) it is ***a theory that does not speak for ‘the East’(= a construction) but rather *an East*(= a radical illusion)***
-it offers careful insight into singular, distinctive episodes of thought and writing in the Middle East (and to explore their relevance across the topology of world thought at large)
-the fractal nature of his four separate subject-positions point to the *exceptional diversity and heterogeneous makeup of Middle Eastern cultural imaginaries*
...the insurgent carries a hundred masks within one, the poet a hundred more, the mystic a hundred more, and the sectarian a thousand
(@Geert)
[*]modernity: a self-naming historical epoch that redefines/fuses the exercise of power and knowledge and for which the enlightenment, capitalism, colonialism, technology, humanism, ideology, simulation, and the domination of instrumental reason become the main pillars of subjectivity
Mohaghegh offers a list of secondary literature that forms the relevant archive from which his manuscript borrows, and **marks its axis of engagement with preexisting interventions**
#bibliography
Nietzsche's conception of chaos
“nature and mask determine phenomenal being, the phenomenon in its being, as chaos”
(Deleuze interprets Nietzsche's chaos as:) a philosophical overture toward “the[...]
(238)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%58.2[...]r />
transition from theory --to--> theft
transition from (the profession of the) reader --to--> smuggler
(strands of thought ranging:)
from cruelty --to--> fatality
from alchemy --to--> piracy
chaos --> anarchic potential, disquieting worlds
(Mohaghegh asking:)
*is chaos an affirmative or nihilistic experience of the world?
*is chaos primarily creative or destructive?
*is the expressive act (aesthetic or philosophical) a chaotic state?
*(east's) horizon fastened to the exteriority of Western thought*
experiential elsewhere
the so-called [*]cultural difference: an old game of declaring the world's disjointment
==> many people (including myself) ***to perceive their intellectual and poetic exercises as in partial alignment with the creative possibilities of their culture***
*partial cultural alignment* --> german discourse on integration
[chaos] manifesting and fading within countless spheres of speculation:
•Benjamin's temporal arabesque
•schizoid desire-production of Deleuzian nomadology
•Artaud's hysterical demand (-demand is always hysteric)
•fable of “chaos outside the system” (Schlegel's concept)
•active presence of an inhuman turn in Camus
•Serres's ‘genesis’ a quasi-mystical force of an immemorial nature
•Mohaghegh's ‘chaotic’ marks (no resurrection of a primitive world but rather) an extravagant departure from the history of being, an expressive wire being shaped as we speak
[*topologies of imagination / mode of consciousness / their specific poetic-philosophical mind:]
Europe/West --> possessive (when it is colonialist)
Europe/West --> schizophrenic
Sout East --> nomadic
Middle East --> chaotic
*chaotic writing*
(artistic research writing as it is practiced in apass [--> *closure of a whole system*] =/=) a *writing-toward-chaos* (--> Hoda =/= closure ~? catharsis تزکیه غیر روحانی)
the protocols of understanding are challenged and not left standing
no dynamics of meaning-formation solidified
no acculturation (~ integration) of the reader is embarked upon
no (de)codification successful
all techniques of truth-telling must fail
--> refusing the closure (of a whole [subject/person])
its own raw self-refracting (textual event) --> *forever refracting itself* (--> is refractive writing/thinking really useful for iranians today?)
-transparently nebulous vision of darkened vantages
[Reza, Setareh, Ehsan, Foad, Hoda's conceptual register and incorporating themes:]
annihilation, rage, ecstasy, madness, deception, apocalypse, desertion, contagion, eternity, the shadow
imperative to restlessness
writing-act as inherently antagonist[...]
(239)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%58.5[...]e world's disjointment
==> many people (including myself) ***to perceive their intellectual and poetic exercises as in partial alignment with the creative possibilities of their culture***
*partial cultural alignment* --> german discourse on integration
[chaos] manifesting and fading within countless spheres of speculation:
•Benjamin's temporal arabesque
•schizoid desire-production of Deleuzian nomadology
•Artaud's hysterical demand (-demand is always hysteric)
•fable of “chaos outside the system” (Schlegel's concept)
•active presence of an inhuman turn in Camus
•Serres's ‘genesis’ a quasi-mystical force of an immemorial nature
•Mohaghegh's ‘chaotic’ marks (no resurrection of a primitive world but rather) an extravagant departure from the history of being, an expressive wire being shaped as we speak
[*topologies of imagination / mode of consciousness / their specific poetic-philosophical mind:]
Europe/West --> possessive (when it is colonialist)
Europe/West --> schizophrenic
Sout East --> nomadic
Middle East --> chaotic
*chaotic writing*
(artistic research writing as it is practiced in apass [--> *closure of a whole system*] =/=) a *writing-toward-chaos* (--> Hoda =/= closure ~? catharsis تزکیه غیر روحانی)
the protocols of understanding are challenged and not left standing
no dynamics of meaning-formation solidified
no acculturation (~ integration) of the reader is embarked upon
no (de)codification successful
all techniques of truth-telling must fail
--> refusing the closure (of a whole [subject/person])
its own raw self-refracting (textual event) --> *forever refracting itself* (--> is refractive writing/thinking really useful for iranians today?)
-transparently nebulous vision of darkened vantages
[Reza, Setareh, Ehsan, Foad, Hoda's conceptual register and incorporating themes:]
annihilation, rage, ecstasy, madness, deception, apocalypse, desertion, contagion, eternity, the shadow
imperative to restlessness
writing-act as inherently antagonistic
borders of subjectivity:
•dominant ideologies of history
•conspiracies of identity
Foad's poem “farar”
textual experience as a prism of subversion, innovation, and becoming
•hardened instinct for ruin kharabat خرابات
•fusion of:
◦appearance & disappearance
◦tragedy & delirium
◦creation & destruction
•(unsteady condition of the writing-act [unpacks itself without origin] where) *nothingness & excess* tangle
bluring of possibility and impossibility
to compose an affective universe without recourse to the myth of origin (*?) ~= to express a singular voice without access to a name
[...]
(240)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%58.5[...]/>
the text becomes existence itself (--> the monsterous consciousness of Hedayat's narrator in The Blind Owl)
every object, event, or image, is synthesized back into the empire of the narrator's own account***** [=/= my work, my storytelling]
...fastened itself to...
(...currents of)
chaos**~~
annihilation**~~
rage**~~
*shadow*
--> **to elicit the transfiguration toward an emergent literature of the inhuman**
•Hedayat's shadow
•Nietzsche use of the shadow as a guarantor of the overman: “how his shadow stands even now behind everyone” , “now light, now shadow of that which must come” , “i will complete it: for a shadow came to me--the most silent, the lightest of all things came to me! the beauty of the superman came to me as a shadow: what are the gods to me now”
tilted destiny
beyond the need for being
chaos experienced as a *deception*
Ali motioning to chaotic discord, his rhetoric of video editing: phantasmatic lawlessness --> surrender the text to a certain sorcery(!), schemes of a textual unreality
=/= restrictive epistemologies of truth
=/= technologies of regulation
convulsive discontinuity (=/= systematicity)
carries the will to execute fantasia
(yet transpiring morphologies that carve in) authoritarian injunctions of being-in-the-world [=/= experimentation]
--> (Ali's mirage:) suffocated prism of reality --> rebellion becomes instinctive
-narrating graphic instances of sociopolitical violence --view--> modernity as a state of permanent collapse
(for Ali :) literature/art = espionage عمل خرابکارانه در مواضع دشمن (=/= bribery)
(in order to say no to being) “passive witness to an overconstructed world” =/=
•Beckett: absurdism (with minimalist penteration)
•Nietzsche: intoxication (Dionysian assault against surface/depth binary)
•Adorno: fantasy (is the real act of knowledge)
[*]text:
•mimetic transposition of the ideal
•reflexive treatment of the world
the invention of transparent**
[who invented transparency?]
deception --?--> suggestion of the world as unreal [==>?! pragmatism]
lucid interchange of untruths
existential distortion
San'an + moridan (مریدان) --> authority of authenticity
annihilated consciousness of the disciple (morid)
(volatility of) lived dreamscapes <-- (always) staged imaginary
(illusions go on unarrested)
Hoda's visual techniques (in video) ~ her special effects (--> launches what?):
*unreality of the emergent world* (+ production of emergent illusion)
•hazing of self and world
•curved mirroring
•shape-shifting
•aerial, apparit[...]
(241)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%58.7[...]erer
•rogue thought
influx
disintegration
fever
velocity
the deserter mind is made to synchronize the internalization of waste and unrest and to ravage itself
spatiality of the the nowhere
intentionally sets out to become lost
vagrant: drifter در به در
اوباش
self that personified the dejected
self-eclipsing vagrant that becomes the outside itself
arc of necessity
the super-power of holding objects suspending in the air --> an intruder topology where everything is held suspend...
{ false subjectivity = hiding place }<-- chaotic imagination overruns it
...................................
Glissant
constrictions of the ‘forced poetics’ of writing (in plastic arts)
grandiose concept of the writer (of writing as an ordering process)
world meant as raw material for a book
Glissant's thoroughgoing exploration of models of disorder/chaos --> (his subversive epitome of) *opacite/opacity* --> realm of the intuitive and indeterminate as a corrective response to the systematizing pressures of assimilation and deculturation
==> to create a more immediate, oral, corporeal language
-inadequate process of attempting to note down, chronicle or relate the experience of opacity
chaos + opacity + resistance (in Glissant)
primordial act of defiance lajbazi
negation = heroic (=/= pedestrian)
Glissant's anonymous and pedestrian form of resistance --> knowledge of camouflaged reality
“The one with whom the poet is enchanted, that he names with each breath. But for whom words are inadequate.”
...in the unexpected expanse of global relating
“a poetics not of the tree but of vegetation”
[poetics of the decentered subject]
epitomise (pure) revolt (--> tree grows to reveal human configurations, fierce and solitary revolt against the plantation system)
modest forms of resistance
fragmentation of fiction --to--> polyphonic quiltwork of stories
[system of imagery]
(Glissant's) insistence on marine symbolism
transforming, restorative power of water
harsh bitter truth of the sea <--> inscrutable, ambiguous nature of the experience
preoccupation with the need to create a literary language --> specificity of lived experience
*narrateur enfant*
narrator distorting and simplifying my experience
“burning with a silent and stubborn multitude”
...................................
Mishra
[the evidence of Europe's advantages -->] an expression of europe in terms of[...]
(242)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%58.9[...]s of the ‘forced poetics’ of writing (in plastic arts)
grandiose concept of the writer (of writing as an ordering process)
world meant as raw material for a book
Glissant's thoroughgoing exploration of models of disorder/chaos --> (his subversive epitome of) *opacite/opacity* --> realm of the intuitive and indeterminate as a corrective response to the systematizing pressures of assimilation and deculturation
==> to create a more immediate, oral, corporeal language
-inadequate process of attempting to note down, chronicle or relate the experience of opacity
chaos + opacity + resistance (in Glissant)
primordial act of defiance lajbazi
negation = heroic (=/= pedestrian)
Glissant's anonymous and pedestrian form of resistance --> knowledge of camouflaged reality
“The one with whom the poet is enchanted, that he names with each breath. But for whom words are inadequate.”
...in the unexpected expanse of global relating
“a poetics not of the tree but of vegetation”
[poetics of the decentered subject]
epitomise (pure) revolt (--> tree grows to reveal human configurations, fierce and solitary revolt against the plantation system)
modest forms of resistance
fragmentation of fiction --to--> polyphonic quiltwork of stories
[system of imagery]
(Glissant's) insistence on marine symbolism
transforming, restorative power of water
harsh bitter truth of the sea <--> inscrutable, ambiguous nature of the experience
preoccupation with the need to create a literary language --> specificity of lived experience
*narrateur enfant*
narrator distorting and simplifying my experience
“burning with a silent and stubborn multitude”
...................................
Mishrar />
[the evidence of Europe's advantages -->] an expression of europe in terms of a 19th century progress, which has been be increasingly hard to refute:
place of West in the avant-garde of progress <== manifold achievements of technology, constitutional government, secular state and modern administration <== (a separate and
distinct ‘nation-state’ <==) American and French revolutions
}--> unable to assess by Muslims? ~~?--> the tale of the bewildered Asian:
•dast-e gheyb دست غیب divinely ordained dispensation
•dast-e taghdir دست تقدیر mysterious workings of fate
•charkh-e ruzegar چرخ روزگار cyclical rise and fall of political fortune
•uncreative dynastic rulers
(=/= organized human energy and action)
cultural arrogance
...................................
paranoia (=/= schizophrenia), an instinct (for the original hostility of the world,[...]
(243)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%59[...]nducing controlled paranoia into the human subject***
*preconditions of all human knowledge is the “paranoiac alienation of the ego”* (ego: a [paranoiac] construction formed by identification with the specular image in the mirror stage)}
==> high thoughts and abstract thinkers, especially when they believe “nobody understands them”
==> also promotes you to go to forbidden zones, attack sacrosanctities, breaking taboos, take the side of the miserable and the marginalized, that there is something wrong about The World
==> always dissatisfied with the ‘current situation,’ impulse to correct the current situation (... our condition, our situation), and assuming a defensive stance, (in worse case) with a sense of mission, with deep feelings of powerlessness (and depression, sometimes victimization)
}<==> their own psychological security (~ defense against failure and loss; a fact of relevance for obligation)
it is all about ['having’ or owning a] *perception of reality* (==> belief)
to recognize the intentional in the accidental/coincidental
(a paranoid response to intentionality?)
==> imaginary friend or imaginary enemy
#complain
sisyphus phenomena --> the idea that one is condemned (by the “system”) to do senseless absurd meaningless labor
(Maze Runner film opening sign:) “we are running out of time. you have seen what is happening out there.” ==> insurgent
four types of paranoia:
1. erotic شهوانى (--> what the opposite sex wants from them)
2. persecutory توبیخی (--> under intensive evaluative scrutiny)
3. litigious دعوایی (--> conspiracy)
4. exalted متعالی (--> grandeur)
*attribution error: social perceivers has to overattribute lack of trustworthiness to others
*overperception of causal linking: paranoid perceiver has to interpret others’ action in a disproportional self-referential way ==> they are the target of others’ thoughts and actions
*conspiracy: paranoid perceiver has to overattribute social coherence and coordination to others’ actions
from dysphoric to euphoric self-consciousness
the direct link(?) between socioeconomic status and development of paranoia
(physically:) high blood pressure & hardening of the arterial walls (& drug abuse) ==> decline in brain circulation ==> paranoid reaction
still paranoia has a better prognosis (تشخيص قبلى) than schizophrenia
(paranoia is a limited schizophrenia --> we should open up our paranoiac relating onto the schizophrenic, which is much more interesting)
state of deafness --> paranoia
•in Freud: paranoia --> patient's infantile relation to his father
•for Cameron: one cannot take the role assigned to him by the society ==> hypothetical relationships with other --> paranoia
•Bose:[...]
(245)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%59.1[...]sive-compulsive type of basic personality structure (is made very common among artists, people who are busy one way or another with analysis and psyche of the other) ==> **reaction formation** (which is one of the major defense mechanisms of the obsessive-compulsive) ~= long-repressed desires **to dismember the personality-structure of other persons**
[obsessive-compulsive personality type is very common in expertise societies: tavahosh-e takhasos, clean (+ “contaminated” things), one is deeply immersed in research, mental control, not wasting time, adherence to routines/rituals, washers, checkers, impairment in formulating an organizational strategy, etc. ==> cognitive inhibition, or violent disinhibition]
wishes to foster personality-disintegration in other persons + genuine and powerful interests in helping them <-- how is this possible?!
-Searles suggests that the desires to drive the other person crazy are a part of (the limitlessly varied personality-constellation of) emotionally healthy human beings
feelings of infantile satisfaction & omnipotent-mother fantasies
recrudescence of symbiotic techniques
the [same] sensation of being driven utterly mad by the impossible object [patient, economy, system, self, world, love object, etc.] --> symbiotic relatedness (development of symbiotic reciprocal dependency)
(@apass, the tale we say in artistic research environment:) critical feedback = 'making ill’ of one another, is an effective forms of opening up anxieties which can be interpreted and worked through ==> to become independent (integration) and to leave
}=/={ to acknowlede our highly immature and ‘sick’ but deeply gratifying symbiotic mode of relatedness with the other (disintegration) (in Searles's terms: our efforts in keeping the other person crazy)
*how can we develop *untherapeutic techniques* of critical relatedness?
*how can we face our own conflict between desires to help (the student to become better integrated, that is more mature and healthy) and desires to destroy (the student in the state of poor integration)? --> schizophrenic conditions of artistic feedback
...................................
مماس
schizophrenia: (a general understanding of all) content-thought disorder (=/= form of thought)
*the disease of cognitive abnormality : abnormal sequential thinking*
*tangential thinking*
•disorganised thinking ==> disorganised speech
•mood disorders
•dementia
•mania
•clanging (situationally inappropriate association of words based upon sound rather than concepts)
•echolalia (unsolicited repetition of vocalizations made by another person)
•[*]tangentiality: deviation from relevancy; wandering train of thought, lack of focus, never returning to the initial topic --> *topic maintenance*
◦self-centered social responses
[...]
(246)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%59.7[...]br />
heal
you can't grasp your body once and for all --> one can only bear witness and offer testimony (<--Avital-- this is why writing is so often bound up with illness, “writer = invalid”)
cultural phantasms of bodily mutation
the body never stays put long enough to form self-identity --(this is why)--> our ancestors used to fast-forward and just lose it [transcending the body]
in Dostoevsky
body is variously insulted and humiliated --> subjected to injury (an injury capable of language and disclosure)
--> idiocy offered a delicate conflagration of soma + psyche
illness: the stealth master (the teacher whose lesson is unremittingly opaque yet purposeful)
(when you get hurt -->) body: “Honey, I’m home, I am your home.”
your body fighting for you
healing without cure
illness --Avital--> essentially related to the experience of injustice ~= your Geworfenheit
• illness visits you at will and does what it wants to your body (stinging surfaces you didn’t know you had)
•illness gives access to the devotional mode of surrender (abandoning to itself something other than the self)
•illness brings with it an alternative system of ecstasy and meaning
•*illness: an inescapable condition of being*
-
(Dostoevsky's Myshkin) suffers a sacred illness
[your?] heritage -->
backed up by literature
backed up by philosophy
claimed by mythology
*epilepsy* (has a place in the history of thought) --> the Idiot's illness
•between psyche & soma
•between the *theory of trauma* (which focuses the history of the subject) & the *theory of fantasy* (which refers to transference and countertransference)
•the only illness to have its own mythological figure -->
•madness
•visionary excess
herald of epilepsy: Hercules, Buddha, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoléon, Lord Byron, Pascal, Van Gogh, Dostoevsky, etc.
foolishness
drunkards
maniacs
the pathologically resentful
the envious
a rapist
a crowd of 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[...]
(247)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%60.8[...]dia.net)
imagine children -->
•nature of emotions
•relationship to religion
•relationship to society
◦articulation of attitude towards society
•constructing concept of:
◦individual
◦community
◦nation
◦gender
◦age
Elias's notion of emotion --> a broad category to index concepts of morally, ethics, politics, aspirational acts,
(everything depends on the ways we remember our [emotional experience of] childhood)
(memory = salad of) fragments of memory + emotions from our experience + emotions experienced by others + what we have been told by others about our childhood
common theory --> age between two and eleven children are most sensitive to external factors ==> most vulnerable to advertising
*age seven*
children are increasingly controlled by symbolic relationships and images (+ make judgment about things)
*under five*
{human characters ~?/= animated characters}--> belief in imaginary characters and monsters, management of emotions
*age two*
(end of) two --> children begin pretending (until age of five)
*over four*
idiosyncratic system of thinking about causality (extraordinary plays larger role than adults)
create and identify emotions in visual images
fantasizing =/= fantastical thinking
(for children) wishing = mental + magical + it exists in relatio to skill [---> go to Cinderella, waiting]
Elias's study of children images (visual material featuring children) in Persianate cultures (turkey, pakistan, iran) --> (role of) ***childhood/children = location of enacted emotion***
childhood + religion + visual culture <-- implementation of ideology in society
turkey, pakistan, iran:
•strongly ideological (like other states)
•multiethnic
•shaped by encounter with colonial empire
•strategic (=/= cultural) engagement with (west) global powers
•belief in the existence of charismatic religious authority
•belief in barkat برکت
Iran special relation to *religious visual art*
(Elias's) aesthetic: social imagination, creating reaction without words (= showing)
=/= telling
=/= nonutilitarian form of contemplation of art
=/= cognitive
Western mid 18th century philosophy ==> “aesthetics”
lower cognitive faculties
experience of sensate body
how the world strikes the body
emotional and affective response
modern aesthetics --> contemplation of beauty (superior to idleness and boredom <-- some sort of failure of moral vigilance)
“art = description of beauty”
==> Kant: aesthetics = sublime beauty (=/= quotidien)
}--> (fable of) [...]
(248)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%61.4[...]ation of enacted emotion***
childhood + religion + visual culture <-- implementation of ideology in society
turkey, pakistan, iran:
•strongly ideological (like other states)
•multiethnic
•shaped by encounter with colonial empire
•strategic (=/= cultural) engagement with (west) global powers
•belief in the existence of charismatic religious authority
•belief in barkat برکت
Iran special relation to *religious visual art*
(Elias's) aesthetic: social imagination, creating reaction without words (= showing)
=/= telling
=/= nonutilitarian form of contemplation of art
=/= cognitive
Western mid 18th century philosophy ==> “aesthetics”
lower cognitive faculties
experience of sensate body
how the world strikes the body
emotional and affective response
modern aesthetics --> contemplation of beauty (superior to idleness and boredom <-- some sort of failure of moral vigilance)
“art = description of beauty”
==> Kant: aesthetics = sublime beauty (=/= quotidien)
}--> (fable of) the idea that **beauty engenders virtue** --> the beauty must be formal
(social system --> people) interacting with visual objects
making consumer choices [--(is not always)-->] interacting with visual objects in ways that further ideological formations
*religious reaction to sensory inputs are aesthetic* <-- they anticipate knowledge to be revealed in the future =/= rest contemplatively in the present
*religious gaze = apocalyptic glance*
=/= Kantian aesthetics (noninstrumental form of enjoyment)
Plato + Aristoteles ==> premodern islamic thinkers --> “beauty = virtue” (harmony of physical and moral)
(problem with) philosophical aesthetics of disinterested contemplations --Elias-->
•ignores majority of human experience
•(favors) apophatic (transcendent + ineffable غیر قابل توصیف) =/= cataphatic (immanent + experiential)
unstable & somatic ways we respond to (and seek out) everyday images
evocative & powerful (<--Sina-- nonartisitic images)
(art or not art) ***aesthetic response***
[*]children's media: aesthetic social imagination
(moral components of:)
cruelty, hurt, disgust, disdain
kindness, happiness, admiration, love
physical, material, somatic relation to the ethereal, metaphysical, intellectual
(?how can we) confidently treat “images = sources of socioculturel information”
(from) Islamic culture --to--> cultures associated with isalm
strong opposition to representational religious art <-- modern Islamic societies --> unproblematic accepting of representational religious materi[...]
(249)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%61.5[...] media: aesthetic social imagination
(moral components of:)
cruelty, hurt, disgust, disdain
kindness, happiness, admiration, love
physical, material, somatic relation to the ethereal, metaphysical, intellectual
(?how can we) confidently treat “images = sources of socioculturel information”
(from) Islamic culture --to--> cultures associated with isalm
strong opposition to representational religious art <-- modern Islamic societies --> unproblematic accepting of representational religious materials intended for children
didactic islamic visual media:
•(Kuwait) the 99 --> heroes for each name of the God
•(Pakistan, India, Afghanistan) burqa avenger --> burqa clad superhero against a corrupt view of traditional religion, using veil as costume
•(Pakistan) Ferozsons publisher
•Uysal press
•Timas press (Cem Kiziltug)
•
age-graded sequences of children's religious books --> progressively decreasing use of images
questions (> Elias:)
•are there culturally specific ways of seeing --answer--> yes
•does religion requires its own categories for understanding visuality and sensory systems? --> *religion is a problematic category* <== inherently unstable {religion referring simultaneously to systematic ideological systems, atomized and multivalent beliefs, range of individual and cultural practices}--> constant flux + relative to each other =/= religion: discrete phenomena
•scholars who argue for a transcendental quality to religion
•Durkheim + Weber --> religious = behavioral
•Otto --> location of religion: a fascinating incomprehensible force outside of the human person
•Eliade --> essential unity of the religious (~= commensurate human behavior)
•Elias --> manifestation of belief and ideology in visual written emotive forms --functionalist--> [*]religion = visual art
visual material --serve-->
•aesthetic
•generator of meaning
•generator of affirmation شعاری
•icon
•talisman
•objects imbued with religious function
•token of aspiration
•instrument of aspiration (or other emotions)
•explicit reminder (of good behavior)
•gesture towards a better future : wish images
•
seeing = embodied act (---> go to Gossip Girl)
•(individuals make complicated interpretive choices concerning) what to look at & what they have seen
•*we feel through, about, from the visual* ~= visuality is embodied ~= visuality is multisensory + emotional
•Merleau-Ponty --> prereflective bodily consciousness: ‘body = instrument of comprehension’ (all material and other objects are woven into the body's fabric) --example--> blind man's stick
•[Groz --> phantom limb]<[...]
(250)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%61.5[...]ional
•Merleau-Ponty --> prereflective bodily consciousness: ‘body = instrument of comprehension’ (all material and other objects are woven into the body's fabric) --example--> blind man's stick
•[Groz --> phantom limb]
(Asad > Elias) power of things is their ability to act within a network enabling conditions (physical + mental --> feeling, remembering, hoping) -->{capacity of objects ==> society and politics become vitally material}
(the idea of power:) objects have agency in the complex web of interactions that joins them to other [--> object having itinerary] =/= objects have abilities or sentience that they use autonomously [--> object having life]
}--Elias--> critique of the idea of scopic regime
Elias furnishing the minimum information necessary to create an informed context (to frame of discussion) =/= give comprehensive history (about iran, pakistan, or turkey)
>
objects --> *affecting presence* (objects elicit affects)
[*]object: location of emotion, happiness pointer (---> go to index finger)
visual object: signifier of individual and collective emotion and aspiration
index
we do not have access to reliable system of deductible reasoning that assures us of an accurate interpretation of one value to the index --> lack of precise causative relationship between *observed phenomena* and their *affective consequences* (manifested on individuals and human societies)
}<-- this plagues visial material cultural studies
(Gell's notion of) abduction: a form of reasoning to abduce a possible (=/= actual) agent or effect
abductive reasoning (=/= deduction, communication, translation)
--> ***to analyze and experiment in the lack of data or causal relationships*** (which happens most of the time)
(i have been using the term speculation as synonym for abduction)ion)
abduction = informed abduction : you need as much contextually relevant information as possible
(learning from Elias)
•specificity of emotions and affects <-- much more interesting
•specificity of objects or people
[*]emotion: object of (unintentional) human manufacture ==> location of human meaning & motivation
...................................
childhood Elias chap2
philosophical notions of selfhood in late antiquity (= islam + europe) ==> study of emotions & feelings
Platonic + Aristotelian : “emotion = ambivalent urges need to be disciplined and harnessed through some process of education” ==> islamic ideas of body & mind
favorite emotion (~ religious expression + motivator) in islam [+ sufism]: love & virtue [--✕--> my interest in hate & monster]
it was only one and half a century ago that William James argued that human mental states were incapable in[...]
(253)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%61.6[...]vides no rubric through which one can engage in comparative analysis (or informed discussion)
(Brennan) affect: physiological in effect, social in origin
(Grossberg) affect: to locate human beings in their environment (why ideology is only effective some of the time? quotidien = pleasure + ideology) *it is in the affect (affective life) that people struggle to care about something, find the energy to survive, enact their projects and possibilities*
ideology -->
•affective intensities
•affective investments
(Hennessey) *affect-culture: transmission of sensation and cognitive emotion through cultural practices* (materially shaped by social networks, circulating of natives, they work with & against structured relationships, can operate intuitively or oblique)
[*]sense: obvious knowledge [--> awareness of right & wrong] (=/= cognitive or learned knowledge) --> ***meaning-making through sense ~= ideology***
(Reddy) emotion: range of loosely connected thought material --> when activated it exceeds attention's capacity to translate it to action/talk
(emotive:) emotional regime: how public emotional acts and *emotional standards* [go to --> soup opera integrating emotional ecosystem] help to shape the lives of individuals
affect: explain (historical) events that elude (political, economical) explanation
*emotion exists in its expression and description* (spoken, written, bodily enacted, visually represented, etc.)
...emotion of “i am scared” in an early modern persian miniature painting
in premodern texts
emotion is more prescriptive: how it should be enacted and experienced (=/= descriptive) emotion are evoked:
1. through teleologically constructed sensory regime
2. through reflective/contemplative practices
•kindi --> how colors and combinations could elicit specific emotions
•haytham --> visual factors that make up beauty
•farabi --> impact of musical notes on human mood
•button Christian texts --> specific ways in which a worshipper was expected to react upon seeing an icon of relic (crying, rolling on the ground, rubbing, caressing, etc.)
◦biruni --> if uneducated Muslims were presented with a picture of prophet or ka'ba, their not in looking at the thing would bring them to kiss the picture or rub their cheeks against it and to roll themselves in the first before it
Leys's shame =/= guilt
guilt:
1. mimetic: victim identifies with the aggressor + accepts the situation by not distinguishing belief =/= behavior }--> *guilt*
2. antimimetic: victim identifies with fellow victims + might imitate the aggressor only as a survival mechanism ==> preserve a sense of self + keep the atrocities external to herself ==> ‘victim =/= perpetrator’ that can be held in me[...]
(254)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%62.1[...]ood ==>) *shame*
Leys --> (problem of shift from guilt to) shame: deprives one from agency and responsibility
=/= muslim-majority society (use of shame in critical ways)
**performative ~=/& constructed nature of emotions**
-in my youth in iran (middle class) the context of singing together آواز in small gatherings was a context of expressing emotions within groups (a form of *networked living*) that give voice to specific emotion (grief, sadness, love, heartache, etc.)
[i always felt outside of it]
public expression of feelings --associate--> weakness & sexuality
==> everyday life denial of emotions (of jealousy, desire, heartache)
(sociologically)
*something is performed = something cannot be addressed informally* }<-- for example emotions
sharm
sharmamdegi
haya
aberu
gheirat
nang
namus
--> emotion words for honor and shame (shared between pakistan and iran, used with meanings that overlap and inconsistent)
honor selfsubsistent male
honor related to women
notions of virtue
notions of shyness
gheirat غیرت : an emotional alarm system [for one's personal image (aberu آبرو), family, religion, country]
gheirat specifies one's appropriate reactions to the particular acts of the other --> in the form of emotions: anger, hatred, jealousy
(Elias’ problematic and useful definition of) [*]affect: perceivable measurable describable effect of emotional events and experiences, what is felt + what is emoted at an individual and collective level, (enacted + perceived) ‘happening’ of the human experience (=/= undefined protoevent)
affect: a way in which one knows an experience is occurring + a way in which one reacts to an experience ==shape==> future human experience
1. enactment (performativity) of emotion is inseparable from its experience
2. emotions, enjoying words, emotion events cannot be comprehended apart from the sociopolitical context in which they occur (emotion act ~/?= emotion evoked)
somatic activity (crying) ==make==> emotions (sadness)
(in islam) happiness <--> virtue
(robust genre of literature) marvels and bestiary --> wonder at natural & manufactured wonders of the world (pyramids ~= mortality) “==encourage==>” contemplation of God's creative powers
(in sufism) tension between good and bad feelings (ugly, outlaw emotions...) ==> progress (spiritual advancement)
--> (sufi) scandalous behavior: performative form of cultivating negative emotions in oneself and others
emotional regime
ecological phenomenology
emotional habitus
habitus = [*]mood: collective feeling --Bourdieu--> *making and using moods have to be integral part of (th[...]
(255)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%62.2[...]xample [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 non-unilateral and non-static) *picture of aspiration* (in a world like Tehran; #proposal to research on ‘the image of growth’ رشد roshd, slow growth, [roshd-e bi-raviye رشد بی رویه of toxins and species, and so on] in the context of contemporary Tehran)
-imitations of forms
(i am activating a rhizomatic mode of perception [learning from Anand learning from Deleuze and Guattari])--> how one aspect of life leads to another =/= paritioning of the milieu
anthropology of the state : how one engages the state in an every day level
*historically one crucial exit point from the system of ruler-relation was to become ascetic (زهد): disregard for sovereign authority (حاکم hakem, hakemiat) --> a different form of power that one let's to lead to self-rule
[bare life =? life without a way of life --✕--> there is no life without a way of life]
(Singh:) someone's life cut off from their source of vitality
a local body of thought (jinn, etc.)
...................................
(Anand asking) what does it means to live in a city of jinns?
the jinn:
•serves as witnesses of times long gone
•figures of authority whose shrine blesses remembered forms of urban religious life
•forgotten by the amnesia of the postcolonial state
•rendered unislamic by the selective amnesia of revivalist tradition
jinn --> revive that old orientalist trope, constituted not only by bazzar, mosque, and hammam, but also of the antinomian potentials that have long been part of the Islamic tradition
...................................
vita
lives of saints
تذکرة الاولیا Tazkirat al-Awliya
concerned with canonization, education, and collective recollection of contemplative life
(vita as a biological genre recounting the lives of holly men and women in several religious traditions: Bhaktamala, Theravada buddhism, Therigata, etc.)
Singh asking: how would we narrate a scholarly life? (and i add to that: who could be oulia اولیا Arahant [further ones] today? queer or nonhuman)
*participated in the world historical “isms” (--> ajayeb)
--Singh--> narrating a conceptual lif[...]
(256)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%63.3[...]l-Awliya)
singularity of trajectory of Attar's saints =/= my random sampling of themes
anthropology: to write about anything that exists or imagined
can we talk affirmatively of a postmodern ethnography of ajayeb? =/= “totalizing vision” of culture
recovery of a human voice as a moral imperative (--> Hoda)
(?your history as a) telos of increasingly self-awareness
-Derrida's philosophical style tending to negative transcendence (différance: an absence that transcends ‘a’ and ‘not a’)
-Deleuze's tradition of affirmative immanence
(Singh > Deleuze > Strauss:) structure is composed of “pre-individual singularities” ~ nomadic distribution of potential --immanent--> contradictions, accidents, mutations
pure/impure
suspicious/inauspicious
life/death
heretic --> reorder and obliterate the partitioning of categories that compose the structural order of religion [--> Veena on Sikhism and Hinduism: symbolism of Sikhism understood in relation to Hinduism structural order, annihilating the categorical prioritise (intellectual and social) of the medieval world. Sikhism rejecting the opposition between categories of: the rulers, the caste system, and the orders of renunciation --> investment of the virtues of all three *in a single body of faith* and conduct]
heterodox sects
rebellious thinkers
--> negation of the organizing conceptual order
(social and) ritual order generates its own forms of instability
...ambivalences of key concepts ==bring==> “play” to the structure, for good and ill ~ liminality
(Veena's) liminial situation: a form of instability where the individual experiences his social world as separated from the cosmic --> death: disarticulation --> must be undone by inhabiting the liminality : ritually rejoining the flow of life
similarities of ritual mourner and ascetic: transcending the categories of the social and the cosmic
incorporation of the liminal undead (preta) with ritually incorporated ancestors (pitri) [job of the mourner]
(crucial task of the) ritual: conveying the dead from the threshold of liminality into an ancestral flow of life
emphasis on the system is (always?) at the cost of the event
(eternal investment of the artists in foregrounding of the event rather than the structure --> rapture with structure as caste, tradition, state, norm, system, etc. at the cost of missing the practical kinship transcribed into the social contract, leadership, and laws of encounter)
***modernity is composed (neither by continuities nor rupture then, but) by transfigurations***
(Singh + Veena)
critical event
critical structure
[*]event: institute a new modality of historical action which is not inscri[...]
(257)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%63.4[...]od in relation to Hinduism structural order, annihilating the categorical prioritise (intellectual and social) of the medieval world. Sikhism rejecting the opposition between categories of: the rulers, the caste system, and the orders of renunciation --> investment of the virtues of all three *in a single body of faith* and conduct]
heterodox sects
rebellious thinkers
--> negation of the organizing conceptual order
(social and) ritual order generates its own forms of instability
...ambivalences of key concepts ==bring==> “play” to the structure, for good and ill ~ liminality
(Veena's) liminial situation: a form of instability where the individual experiences his social world as separated from the cosmic --> death: disarticulation --> must be undone by inhabiting the liminality : ritually rejoining the flow of life
similarities of ritual mourner and ascetic: transcending the categories of the social and the cosmic
incorporation of the liminal undead (preta) with ritually incorporated ancestors (pitri) [job of the mourner]
(crucial task of the) ritual: conveying the dead from the threshold of liminality into an ancestral flow of life
emphasis on the system is (always?) at the cost of the event
(eternal investment of the artists in foregrounding of the event rather than the structure --> rapture with structure as caste, tradition, state, norm, system, etc. at the cost of missing the practical kinship transcribed into the social contract, leadership, and laws of encounter)
***modernity is composed (neither by continuities nor rupture then, but) by transfigurations***
(Singh + Veena)
critical event
critical structure
[*]event: institute a new modality of historical action which is not inscribed in the inventory of that situation
(for Furet: French revolution is an event par excellence) --Veena--> event: moments when new modes of action come into being which which redefines traditional categories (such as: codes of purity and honor, the meaning of martyrdom, construction of a heroic life, etc.)
foregrounding the event as analytic category (without disappearing the question of structure):
-sati of Roop Kanvar
-Sikh militancy
-collective violence during the partition of India and Pakistan
not only the state (tries to institutionalize collective memory), but also minor communities (in the process of their emergence) try to control and fix memory in much the same manner [not total of course] (--> something i am learning in north of Norway with the sami)
there is always *ambiguity* in the way even the most passionate public presentations of militant nationalist discourse is framed (--> there is ***noise in reference to violence*** @Mona)
event ==> shift the configuration of ana[...]
(258)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%63.5[...]ght to dissolve the concrete and existential reality of suffering victims
in the case of such-large suffering event coordinations gradually come to be defined around it --> question of structure
(**modernity is an event**)
pain and suffering are not simply individual experiences ... they may also be experiences which are created and distributed by the social order
Veena's *anthropology of pain*
how institutions (in the domain of religion, and modern: bureaucracy, law, medicine) maintain and signal their legitimacy in the face of massive human suffering?
-manufacture of pain
-theology of suffering
the discovery of the event, as a question for anthropology, is precisely that: *event exceeds structure*
(exess ==> reimagining the networks that compose our lives)
Veena --> Bhopal industrial disaster: neither social relations nor locally available knowledge were sufficient to apprehend the event. it is at this point that people had to actively search for new knowledge, for new kinds of social actors that might help them address the question of what was happening to their bodies --> they had to reconstruct social relations to include the existence of international legal systems and governmental bureaucracies in their image of society***
toxic potency (==> difference, collective violence [such as the partition of India and Pakistan =/=], stable violence [such as a village caste dispute],,,)
poles of life and death that separates different kinds of collective violence --> the sexual and reproductive violence witnessed in the Partition connot be understood by taking social relations as model
(Veena)
...distance that arises out of forms of proximity
Veena 3 books:
•Structure and Cognition --> illuminates certain recurring patterns
•Critical Event --> paints a kind of national lanscape
•Life and Words --> turn to an art of an anthropological portraiture
...healing properties of the everyday
...everyday life generates its own forms of toxicity
(Singh's) art of portraiture
of individuals, of milieu,
*singularity (of a portraiture) may express something both local and global*
Veena --> how would we conceptualize the moments of potentially violent uncertainty?
-Benjamin: invocations of the uncanny
-Derrida: the spectral
-Veena: eventedness of the everyday (--> skepticism)
Cavell (on Hollywood cinema and other sites where the drama of separation and union is played out) --> how philosophers have typically focused on skepticism [longstanding western philosophical question and doubt about existence] with respect to material objects and the external world
...existence of the finite neighbour (seemingly known other) --> may become unknowable
<[...]
(260)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%63.6[...]g patterns
•Critical Event --> paints a kind of national lanscape
•Life and Words --> turn to an art of an anthropological portraiture
...healing properties of the everyday
...everyday life generates its own forms of toxicity
(Singh's) art of portraiture
of individuals, of milieu,
*singularity (of a portraiture) may express something both local and global*
Veena --> how would we conceptualize the moments of potentially violent uncertainty?
-Benjamin: invocations of the uncanny
-Derrida: the spectral
-Veena: eventedness of the everyday (--> skepticism)
Cavell (on Hollywood cinema and other sites where the drama of separation and union is played out) --> how philosophers have typically focused on skepticism [longstanding western philosophical question and doubt about existence] with respect to material objects and the external world
...existence of the finite neighbour (seemingly known other) --> may become unknowable
--> *Veena discovers the concept of skepticism for anthropology (as a discipline centrally concerned with the varying conditions of human relatedness and otherness)*
[i have been trying dicover skepticism unsystematically in artistic practices those that have strong concerns of social justice and suffering, but i never named it as such. @Hoda, Xiri's emphasis on the threatening nature of liminality (demand for equality or freedom) =/= **to take the possibility of unsettlement or chaos as founding concern**]
--> skepticism (may) suggests a differnt route of inquiry
(Veena -2007:) “the intimacy between skepticism and the ordinary is revealed in the present work on several sites, as in the panic rumors that circulate and produce the picture of the other as phantasmal from whom all human subjectivity has been evacuated, or when violence in the register of literary is seen as transfiguring life into something else, call it a form of death, or of making oneself, as it were, into a ghost”
[violence ==> ghosts]
skeptical problematic --> shifting potency of words : energies that words may gather, and the ways these energies may give or deny life
speech =/= voice
==> ***silence is not necessarily life-denying or that it necessarily indicates a lack or an inability to mourn***
[victims of violence telling stories]
words imbued with spectral quality (yet animated by some other voice)
there is a deep moral energy in the *refusal to represent some violations of the human body* [=/= forensic architecture project's imperative of detailed representation of violation, explicit acknowledging traumatic memory]
--> ***living with poisonous knowledge*** (a different acknowledgement of traumatic memory) --> absorption exercises of remaking a world
--{on ‘forensic archit[...]
(261)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%63.6[...] is contested or reformulated in iran?
the figure of the abducted and rescued woman --> sign of authority --> sign of state
having a politics =/=? do politics ~ political act
*agonistic impulse of politics* (often, if not prophetic, a heroic mode of action in terms of escaping the ordinary rather than descend into it [--> Marx]. such as: Antigone's spectacular defiant voice celebrated in philosophical and political thought, stable locus of redemption. usually a rebellion in some sort, craving a socially progressive agonistics --> French Revolution)
--or--> (=/= possibility of an ethnographic) integrity: *attempt to attain a proximity to the vagaries of life* ~~> ordinary works of repair in a life, such as Asha
--or--> *reparative impulse of politics* (=/= agonistic), Shahrzad's non-agonistic socially progressive politics of working under “terror” animated by the question of how we might continue to live together, how the social fabric holds together
--or-->
(it is our/my imperative today) ***to give each other a more open-ended picture of [our] bad objects (caste, capital, state, modernity, etc.)***
exchange, resettlement, fission, mythological replacement (~ friction and movement within the system) ==> repartitioning of categories ==> rearrangement of hierarchies ==> opposing and heretical sects and religions
-art's (ethnographic?) proximity to life
-political postures and stands
(nobody has, neither state nor communities) monopoly on ethical pronouncement [~ declaration of good and evil]
(political) postures are not unimportant, they allow us to take a stand --> perspective
--or--> evocatively ambiguous formulation on... =/= [*]politic: spirit of resentment on behalf of the victim (Setareh, Hoda, Ali ; also @Sina not to deny the possibility of victimhood) --> *how possibilities of life close down and where other possibilities open up under the weight of patriarchal norms*
question at Hoda:
-how dose she involve a relocation of her protagonists (the sorrowful women) within the domestic, even if the domestic shifts?
-how an understanding of power after Foucault (that power does not come from above, that power is not something that has to be identified) influences her mode of thinking about the condition of her women? [the boundaries of patriarchy are not clear]
sometimes recovery from violence does not come from national imaginary and public rituals of mourning and reparation, Veena shows how a certain kind of silence, the refusal to let toxicity circulate, involves everyday spiritual exercises in *digesting the poison in the acts of attending to the ordinary* --> survivors affirming the possibility of life by removing it from the circulation of words gone wild... (--Hoda's lullabies songs of private injuries?)
-silence is never simply a silence
-[...]
(262)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%63.9[...]wn from the everyday, and must return to it
Singh: progress of ethnographic knowledge --> a sort of movement that include the ***emergence of new answers to earlier questions*** ~= new routes of inquiry
[=/= progress in the sense of a telos of increasing self-awareness]
intellectual vita (can't be all heroic and saintly, tales of adventures and achievements, as in the way Manning presented herself,) rather it can gather up it share of victories and wounds
...................................
everyday life: a life lived on the level of:
•surging affects
•impacts suffered or barely avoided
spawns a series of little somethings dreamed up in the course of things
(Stewart:) “ideologies happen. power snaps into place. structures grow entrenched. identities take place. ways of knowing become habitual at the drop of a hat. but it's ordinary affects that give things the quality of a something to inhabit and animate”
*ordinary registers intensity* (regularly, intermittently, urgently, as a slight shudder)
(one can be) ***confused but attuned***
“we dream of getting by, getting on track, getting away from it all, getting real, having an edge, beating the system, being ourselves, checking out” -Stewart
(socialities, identities, dream worlds, bodily states, public feelings are not simply “good” pr “bad” but always) both powerful and mixed
the talk, once set in motion, expands into a بیشه thicket of stories and social maneuverings
(a scene in a restaurant becomes) maze of inspirations and experiments ♥
-“her brother's stories are shell-shocked and they have no endings. they leave you hanging”
singularity of the event ==> a “we” of all sorts opens in the room
chance event ==>
•a layer of conflict
•a daydream to things
...tuned in to some little something somewhere
“in a video that blankly records an arresting image, young embodiments of a mainstream in the making come face to face with an otherness that compels a closer look. the order of representation gives way to a more violently affective contact”
Stewart
force of things --> what counts as an event
a politics of being/feeling conected
a politics of ways of watching
a politics of waiting for something to happen
a politics of difference (of habit and dull routine)
childhood coming back [to you] as shocks of beauty
graphic stories prompted by the seemingly simple work of remembering:
•kinship ties
•married names
•stories of alcoholism
•stories of accidents
•stories of violence
•stories of cancers
[*]potential: fleeting and amorphous, it lives as a residue or resonance in an e[...]
(263)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%64[...]the room
chance event ==>
•a layer of conflict
•a daydream to things
...tuned in to some little something somewhere
“in a video that blankly records an arresting image, young embodiments of a mainstream in the making come face to face with an otherness that compels a closer look. the order of representation gives way to a more violently affective contact”
Stewart
force of things --> what counts as an event
a politics of being/feeling conected
a politics of ways of watching
a politics of waiting for something to happen
a politics of difference (of habit and dull routine)
childhood coming back [to you] as shocks of beauty
graphic stories prompted by the seemingly simple work of remembering:
•kinship ties
•married names
•stories of alcoholism
•stories of accidents
•stories of violence
•stories of cancers
[*]potential: fleeting and amorphous, it lives as a residue or resonance in an emergent assemblage of disparate forms and realms of life; a thing immanent to fragments of sensory experience and dreams of presence --engenders--> attachments or system of investment...
(people are) collecting found objects snatched off the literal or metaphorical side of the road
...................................
Yazid: the archetypal tyrant of islamic memory
...a shift from thinking of Urdu as exclusively Muslim to thinking of Muslims as the custodians of a shared heritage that Hindus have forgotten, but have the potential to reclaim
-Anand --> how do we understand the islamicness of urdu poetry?
spread of [...] poetry far beyond the bounds of exclusively muslim identity
sufism as an everyday mode of speaking of and speaking to the self (not as an esoteric practice, or as institutionally bounded)
-it gives you a language to explore their interiority
-(traditions of self-scrutiny and self-reflection,) a poetry of self-knowledge + rebellion against social convention [+ frenzied violence (vahshat) --> Majnun: an intellectual articulation, literary elaboration, and social proliferation of the “mazhab of love” a dominant strand of sufi theology, ethics, and political thought in the Balkans to Bengal complex]
earlier mode of understanding X as irreligious
discourses that recognize X as islamic
Anand --> *indic nature of islam*
-islam is indexed within the lives of non-Muslim Indians through a form of stranger hospitality
many, besides muslims, have ongoing relations to islamic sacred objects
•embrace of the divine
•efflorescence of relations with nonhumans (snakes and cats)
(Naveeda on) Anand's mournful tone --> forces of restoration[...]
(264)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%64[...]full of ruptures, disagreements, and reworkings ranging across an array of texts and conversations from contemporary to colonial records to hadith to eighteenth-century poetry
question of coherence = question of finding a grammar
difficult intellectual commitment to both contingency and coherence
(you can witnessed in Tehran a lot of anti-patriarchal, anti-hierarchical, and anti-identitarian)
[our challenge:] *to make ourselves literate* able to read what is currently illegible to us
Kant's notion of hospitality = translation of the sanskrit upanishads into persian by the mughal prince and philosopher Dara Shukoh (1615-1659)
--Ganeri--> hospitality towards texts and ideas?
*for an intellectual tradition to have the ability to show hospitality to an intellectual stranger*
-Shakry
what does it mean to think through psychoanalysis and islam together, not as a “problem,” but as a creative encounter of ethical engagement?
-how arabic intellectual world showed profound hospitality to Freudian thought
-how iranians showed profound hospitality to western philosophies --witness--> self-confident and enriching ethical encounter with a foreign system of knowledge
گورکانی pre-colonial mughal empire, inheritor of long and unbroken traditions of islamic and indic thought, (from a place of power, privilege, integration) welcomed the upanishads into dialogue with the conceptual world of tasavof
economic, military, and discursive powers of European imperialism ==> epistemological and ontological havoc they wreak on muslim forms of life
•to move back and forth between al-Ghazali (1058-1111) and Freud (1856-1939) <-- without any sense of swimming against the *gushing streams of empty homogeneous time*
•bringing the upanishads, from several hundred years BCE, into conversation with the Quran <-- unconstrained by the *teleology of linear historical time*
--> (my lecture-performances: being) inhabited a world of multiple temporalities {=/= teleology ==> linear time of progress, moving ever forward--teleology of time is central to modernity & question of the self}
many post-colonial projects shares that sense of a break from the past, which must now be recovered --✕--> sense of rupture and alienation was not (and is not) the only way in which the colonized responded to the colonizer
Shakry --> *plenitude of time and the persistence of traditions* + productive conceptual dialogue (~= ajayeb studies)
•to engage with the ethico-philosophical questions
intellectual and religious elite across the colonial Middle East and South Asia lived within a plenitude of time in which Freud and Ibn Arabi, separated by centuries, could productively speak to each other unconstrained by the borders of “tradition” and “modernit[...]
(265)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%64.2[...], or having shaken itself free of, the liberal thought and practice of the modern west
jargon of authenticity: (a form of thinking, to understand crisis in terms of) loss and attempted recuperation of past social and cultural forms
emergent postsecular common sense ==>{islamist practices = an expression of religious consciousness =/= the inroads of secularism ~= Western imperialism}
(?what is made to disappear from view altogether in) conceptualizing the interaction of secular and religious imaginations and spaces in modern Muslim societies
[*]enlightenment: an encompassing logic of bourgeois modernity, within and against which different social groups struggle in widely different ways (it is not something to be selected or rejected at the great salad bar of modern life)
*dialectical perception* --> revivalist claims (of whatever) are products of the very cultural logics they disavow and disown
==Mufti==> *islamist thought and practice cannot sustain their claim to be uncontaminated by the modern imperial process*
precolonial poetic traditions in the persianate sphere (influenced by persian)
...................................
systematic observation of the moon and its light ==drive==> development of science
studying soft moonlight =/= short-lived and blinding sensation of a flash of lightning
moon:
boundary of the terrestrial domain
bediator between this world and the next
moonlight ==>
•reflections about the interstellar order of space
•boundaries of terrestrial captivity زندان تن
•*semi-clear blurred shadows that suggest a strange and nonhuman world*
moon changes constantly --> mood changes to the moon [luna in Latin --> laune in german: launisch moody = to be ruled by changeable moods, lunatism = a form of sleep-walking by moonlight or possessed by demon]
reddish
orange
gold
yellow
white
the moon changes its course frequently because it is not able to master the cold
when moon light...
upon moon lands...
out of reach moon was an object of pure observation =/= Moghana’s moon
scorching missiles of Helios
allurement
cheerfulness
harmlessness
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 c[...]
(266)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%64.3[...]cial figures* (robbed of their humanity --> they cannot be apprehended except through their caricatures)
...................................
to loosen some terms carefully: memory, form, order,
[The arts of memory- Comparative perspectives on a mental artifact. Revised and updated by the author Carlo Severi. Translated by Matthew Carey - Severi - HAU- Journal of Ethnographic Theory]
memory as a domain of social life
archive
“order” constitutes a principle to engender other forms of knowledge
totem poles, simply records the different circumstances that marked a particular social group, were comprised of organized series
occupied with the transmission of ‘names’, but necessarily, paralleled by a form of logical power, implies sequential ordering of different forms of knowledge.
the “art of memory” applies different types of relationships or archival techniques that are not limited to mere numerical calculation: mnemonic, iconographic, and logical techniques.
provide a convincing account of the complex process of ordering
in a measured rigorous way...
what characterizes the system
development of taxonomic principle
system endowed with a high degree of logical power
the idea of pure quantity, based on decimal numbers applicable to wide range of categories: people, objects, units of time or space, etc.
an “art of memory” possessed of rudimentary form of visual salience and an extremely complex ordering of representable knowledge
what matters are system's logical implications and not its visual manifestations
salience
(colors, shapes of knots, folds)
the qualitative categories (meant to be named)
(finding) the organizing principles
precisely calibrated
oriented space
(geometrically?)
what constitutes the logical poles of the vast spectrum of the projects in the archive (people, objects, units of time or space, etc.)
(concerning the archive) we can negotiate two types of knowledge: lists and narratives
to identify a series of key elements that allow us to rethink a wider chronology
textual archaeology - evaluates and decrypts, layer by layer
discovering (evidential) mnemonically oriented means of organizing traditional knowledge
(Montesinos's book:) “list of one hundred kings”
should we abandon the conventional terms of “narrative”
the term narrative used to describe mnemonically oriented lists of names..
narrative was just one of several different means of organizing knowledge..
graphical representation, capable of developing further degrees of complexity
[...]
(267)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%66[...]
salience
(colors, shapes of knots, folds)
the qualitative categories (meant to be named)
(finding) the organizing principles
precisely calibrated
oriented space
(geometrically?)
what constitutes the logical poles of the vast spectrum of the projects in the archive (people, objects, units of time or space, etc.)
(concerning the archive) we can negotiate two types of knowledge: lists and narratives
to identify a series of key elements that allow us to rethink a wider chronology
textual archaeology - evaluates and decrypts, layer by layer
discovering (evidential) mnemonically oriented means of organizing traditional knowledge
(Montesinos's book:) “list of one hundred kings”
should we abandon the conventional terms of “narrative”
the term narrative used to describe mnemonically oriented lists of names..
narrative was just one of several different means of organizing knowledge..
graphical representation, capable of developing further degrees of complexity
“form”
recreate the ‘form’ (form : ‘state of organization of matter’)
within (this/a) variable system
“text” as sequences of cords
memorization (the creation of mnemonic relation) necessarily implies the modular organization of the knowledge it represents
constitutive dualism in many forms of the art of memory:
•order (Anordnung) and salience (Hervorspringen)
•expressivity (and power)
•encoding (Verschlüsselung) and evocation (Herbeirufen)
possible course between the twin rocks of writing: “social” and “arbitrary”
at the end it is the mental operation
(techniques of thought)
the image plays a central role in the construction of relations between (visual) themes and particularity of words, which in turn help organize narratives
...................................
these all were technical or formal questions so far
memory is a way consistency maintains itself
civil society is afraid of personal recollections and perverse databases, digital collections
is khm’s archive a state sponsored memorialization, monuments of a consistent history? (that assumes a sublime ending?)
the immemorial (in memorial)
have a strong philosophy of technology with this project
there is never merely a technological question, always already ontological
who wants to remember, solidify, and memorialize?
and for whom?
building a technological temple of memory, khm aesthetic narrative of its own history?
(first there is one big account of property that all these fragmented histories of numerous people who worked in khm [...]
(270)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%66.1[...]ver merely a technological question, always already ontological
who wants to remember, solidify, and memorialize?
and for whom?
building a technological temple of memory, khm aesthetic narrative of its own history?
(first there is one big account of property that all these fragmented histories of numerous people who worked in khm are singed under one signature, of khm)
should we disavow any notion of “spirit” in khm?
we must agree that khm's render of its own history is pure aesthetic what so ever.
we must remain committed to the experimental, when dealing with archival domains in the school of media art where experimentation was in its original conception and foundational roots (as Zielinski expresses in one interview: “+25 KHM: Siegfried Zielinski” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3JQ3aTwu2s)
arte
DAS KURZFILM-MAGAZIN
KURZSCHLUSS
Siegfried Zielinski im Interview
http://cinema.arte.tv/de/artikel/siegfried-zielinski-im-interview
hybrid objects?
is the logistic characteristic of digital data inconsistent with the hybrid objects of art?
Forms of thought, from what Lévi-Strauss called the “systematization [of] what is immediately presented to the senses,”
(Jakobson)
transmutation: cognition involved by the form of translation
data ontology
what is the point of view of rationality in this for us?
(what is the point of view in witchcraft? knowledge is a performative recipe)
what is the point in point of view?
...................................
(Jorge Luis Borges - ‘Funes the Memorious’ in ‘Labyrinths: selected stories & other writings’ 1964)
in Borges story, Funes, the character unable to forget is incapable of the concept of ‘general’
solitary and lucid spectator of [...] an intolerably precise world
not capable of thought
in order to sleep, he had to imagine a direction he would turn his face, made of homogeneous darkness
“To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions.”
Borges ‘homogeneous darkness’ is what we as forgetful immortals afraid of to turn to?
maybe the directions we sleep into, orientation to the cosmos?!
...................................
is archive naturally and necessarily generated (out of regular form of activity)?
a (technologically implemented) beyond
the drive to animate and mobilize; and the drive to conserve, to fix, and so forth, are mutually constitutive for modern imagery and media (from museum to archive)
archive performs a strange dialectics
to see the archive as a technological rational question, and engineering assignment, is to naively avoid the thinking about your own activity as a[...]
(271)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%66.2[...]st Emperor collected up and got rid of the Songs, the Documents, and the sayings of the hundred schools in order to make the people stupid and ensure that in all under Heaven there should be no rejection of the present by using the past. The clarification of laws and regulations and the settling of statutes and ordinances all stared with the First Emperor. He standardized documents.
(to think of) memory as a construction of the present
analyzing organizational memory
organizing analytical memory
memorizing organizational analysis
--> multifaceted stories open to interpretation =/= true/false facts
****remembering: an activity which carries with it its own context****
work on ajayeb and my ongoing commentary on archive and memory is part and parcel of the organizational theory
not to forget that:
•rediscovery is easier than remembering
•statistics --as--> filtering mechanism --as--> proactive forgetting
•forgetting ==> change of identity ['clean slate’ is very well known state to mysticism, --> clearance(=? is to take away useless theory) and origins in geometry - #Serres]
organizational forgetting --producing/maintaining--> classification systems ==> move from heterogeneous forms of memory operating within multiple frameworks [like ajayeb bestiaries] to the privileging of a form of memory (potential memory) operating within a well-defined information infrastructure subtended by classification systems. (Bowker)
if your work is an intermediary profession invisible and removed at the earliest opportunity from the official record, create a “[name of your practice]-ing interventions classification” (?!) --> a fascinating system that creates a standardized language for describing what is it that your practice does in different or difficult ways
other systems (to organize and critique your accumulation of experience):
•sensitive outcomes classification scheme
•diagnosis scheme
*sometimes what you do does not need to leave a trace, like nursing (in which your duty is to remember for others) [a professions without form ~~> nothing can be preserved, coding past knowledge and linking it to current practice---in the context of the hospital's sociotechnical system], or cleaning [doing everything that nobody else does], or storytelling [you have to go to a new country every day, going to a foreign zones], or certain kinds of performances [@Arianna --> the intensity, focus, and complexity of care], [going from being expert to novice], and many times not codable into discrete units of work practice to be carried out on specific occasions
in my hypertext writing, am i trying to enable myself to talk about my work in a language that computers could understand?
(do we need?) to get at (and maintain?) the deep structure of the one's situation
--> t[...]
(272)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%66.5[...]linking it to current practice---in the context of the hospital's sociotechnical system], or cleaning [doing everything that nobody else does], or storytelling [you have to go to a new country every day, going to a foreign zones], or certain kinds of performances [@Arianna --> the intensity, focus, and complexity of care], [going from being expert to novice], and many times not codable into discrete units of work practice to be carried out on specific occasions
in my hypertext writing, am i trying to enable myself to talk about my work in a language that computers could understand?
(do we need?) to get at (and maintain?) the deep structure of the one's situation
--> transformational grammar
--> bring intuitive decision-making to a conscious level
# the issue of the validity or not of ajayeb's knowledge is entirely orthogonal to my purpose. I am producing an anatomy of what it has meant in the case of bestiary writing to create such a science
(my issue with) [*]strategy: a way of managing a past that threatens to grow out of control
(in working with bestiaries my research question:) what could provide for a good ordering of memory?
-(which professions act as) distributed memory system (for who?)
-(what blocks between) internal memory and external memory --> the time needed to work complex representations
(we are trying to) situate our activity visibly within an informational[?*] world ==> to be factored
*in an informational world: accountability = measurable, finite, packaged, <--✕--> (other modes of) invisible and articulation work
...when technicians/artists seeking new ways of writing (scientific/poetic) papers so that their work gets acknowledged ==(and yet)==> the nature of their (scientific/artistic) truth is not impeached***
--> and sometimes we restructure our work so that (organizational, informational or truth-related) challenges will not be necessary ----> (at the end of the day there will be [always?] an) information infrastructure for the kind of work which contains an account of your activity ==> “informational panoptica” (Bowker)
the classification systems we are giving to embed in the tools and reports we give in apass
(in apass problematically we are asked to) copy the transparency of our activity from one representational space (internal memory, nomenclature, past events, paper) to another (computerized record, giving a talk, time-framing) (=/= contingency) ==> an ecology of attention : ***what can be forgotten and what should be remembered*** ==> development of (information) infrastructure
what is remembered in the formal information systems ==> ontology of that system
...recorded on a form; and forms necessarily impose/naturalize classification systems (through the form's speed, rhythm, dimension, and how its specifications are[...]
(277)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%66.6[...] of bestiary writing to create such a science
(my issue with) [*]strategy: a way of managing a past that threatens to grow out of control
(in working with bestiaries my research question:) what could provide for a good ordering of memory?
-(which professions act as) distributed memory system (for who?)
-(what blocks between) internal memory and external memory --> the time needed to work complex representations
(we are trying to) situate our activity visibly within an informational[?*] world ==> to be factored
*in an informational world: accountability = measurable, finite, packaged, <--✕--> (other modes of) invisible and articulation work
...when technicians/artists seeking new ways of writing (scientific/poetic) papers so that their work gets acknowledged ==(and yet)==> the nature of their (scientific/artistic) truth is not impeached***
--> and sometimes we restructure our work so that (organizational, informational or truth-related) challenges will not be necessary ----> (at the end of the day there will be [always?] an) information infrastructure for the kind of work which contains an account of your activity ==> “informational panoptica” (Bowker)
the classification systems we are giving to embed in the tools and reports we give in apass
(in apass problematically we are asked to) copy the transparency of our activity from one representational space (internal memory, nomenclature, past events, paper) to another (computerized record, giving a talk, time-framing) (=/= contingency) ==> an ecology of attention : ***what can be forgotten and what should be remembered*** ==> development of (information) infrastructure
what is remembered in the formal information systems ==> ontology of that system
...recorded on a form; and forms necessarily impose/naturalize classification systems (through the form's speed, rhythm, dimension, and how its specifications are implemented) ***
(how am i working this in my pop-up book and hypertex? --> classification scheme of relevant events for my research)
*informational space is (sufficiently well) pre-structured ==> some things/details can be assumed or are dropped out of the representational space
-in my pop-up book i am encoding a kind of memory in an organizational file ==>? “potential memory” (~= possible future reconstructions) <-- rejecting the ways in which memory is structured in the organization named Iran, or Middle East, or Germany, or Europe,
needed for development of potential memory:
•(forms of) erasure of local context --> to some degree this is always done
•(forms of) classification system --> computerized, affectual, or materially textured categories
* construction is always reconstruction *
artificial memory (characteristic of the 16th century:) “a search for the perfectly proportio[...]
(278)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%66.6[...] visibly within an informational[?*] world ==> to be factored
*in an informational world: accountability = measurable, finite, packaged, <--✕--> (other modes of) invisible and articulation work
...when technicians/artists seeking new ways of writing (scientific/poetic) papers so that their work gets acknowledged ==(and yet)==> the nature of their (scientific/artistic) truth is not impeached***
--> and sometimes we restructure our work so that (organizational, informational or truth-related) challenges will not be necessary ----> (at the end of the day there will be [always?] an) information infrastructure for the kind of work which contains an account of your activity ==> “informational panoptica” (Bowker)
the classification systems we are giving to embed in the tools and reports we give in apass
(in apass problematically we are asked to) copy the transparency of our activity from one representational space (internal memory, nomenclature, past events, paper) to another (computerized record, giving a talk, time-framing) (=/= contingency) ==> an ecology of attention : ***what can be forgotten and what should be remembered*** ==> development of (information) infrastructure
what is remembered in the formal information systems ==> ontology of that system
...recorded on a form; and forms necessarily impose/naturalize classification systems (through the form's speed, rhythm, dimension, and how its specifications are implemented) ***
(how am i working this in my pop-up book and hypertex? --> classification scheme of relevant events for my research)
*informational space is (sufficiently well) pre-structured ==> some things/details can be assumed or are dropped out of the representational space
-in my pop-up book i am encoding a kind of memory in an organizational file ==>? “potential memory” (~= possible future reconstructions) <-- rejecting the ways in which memory is structured in the organization named Iran, or Middle East, or Germany, or Europe,
needed for development of potential memory:
•(forms of) erasure of local context --> to some degree this is always done
•(forms of) classification system --> computerized, affectual, or materially textured categories
* construction is always reconstruction *
artificial memory (characteristic of the 16th century:) “a search for the perfectly proportioned image containing the ‘soul’ of the knowledge to be remembered” --to--> discovery of the right logical category ==> classifying the memorization the world scientifically
classification system ==> filter --> encoding (of information about the environment) ==> coherent framework = memory (Schachter, 1996)
Bowker > Matsuda > Edouard Claparede's experiment (1907) of having a stranger rush into the classroom, do something outrageous, and then have students describe what happened --> “that[...]
(279)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%66.7[...] from one representational space (internal memory, nomenclature, past events, paper) to another (computerized record, giving a talk, time-framing) (=/= contingency) ==> an ecology of attention : ***what can be forgotten and what should be remembered*** ==> development of (information) infrastructure
what is remembered in the formal information systems ==> ontology of that system
...recorded on a form; and forms necessarily impose/naturalize classification systems (through the form's speed, rhythm, dimension, and how its specifications are implemented) ***
(how am i working this in my pop-up book and hypertex? --> classification scheme of relevant events for my research)
*informational space is (sufficiently well) pre-structured ==> some things/details can be assumed or are dropped out of the representational space
-in my pop-up book i am encoding a kind of memory in an organizational file ==>? “potential memory” (~= possible future reconstructions) <-- rejecting the ways in which memory is structured in the organization named Iran, or Middle East, or Germany, or Europe,
needed for development of potential memory:
•(forms of) erasure of local context --> to some degree this is always done
•(forms of) classification system --> computerized, affectual, or materially textured categories
* construction is always reconstruction *
artificial memory (characteristic of the 16th century:) “a search for the perfectly proportioned image containing the ‘soul’ of the knowledge to be remembered” --to--> discovery of the right logical category ==> classifying the memorization the world scientifically
classification system ==> filter --> encoding (of information about the environment) ==> coherent framework = memory (Schachter, 1996)
Bowker > Matsuda > Edouard Claparede's experiment (1907) of having a stranger rush into the classroom, do something outrageous, and then have students describe what happened --> “that the past--even of a simple event--was less a record than a sort of taxonomy. Not perceptions, but categorization of familiar types was the major function of memory”
#bambi
pigeonholing of facts
how apass as an organizations is coding for artistic research within the framework of their memory systems?
“There is no room on the [filling] form to write an essay on race identity politics.”
do we need to develop and standardize my discipline-specific nomenclature (in our research microworld) in order to name without ambiguity? --> redefinition of disciplinary boundaries --> shaping of your work so that its future practice converges on potential memory
we murder, they note
they draw from their secret[s]
infrastructure-thinking: Ajayeb Network-Making Minimum Data Set
in ajayeb's literature the very information infrastructure itsel[...]
(282)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%66.7[...]n, or Middle East, or Germany, or Europe,
needed for development of potential memory:
•(forms of) erasure of local context --> to some degree this is always done
•(forms of) classification system --> computerized, affectual, or materially textured categories
* construction is always reconstruction *
artificial memory (characteristic of the 16th century:) “a search for the perfectly proportioned image containing the ‘soul’ of the knowledge to be remembered” --to--> discovery of the right logical category ==> classifying the memorization the world scientifically
classification system ==> filter --> encoding (of information about the environment) ==> coherent framework = memory (Schachter, 1996)
Bowker > Matsuda > Edouard Claparede's experiment (1907) of having a stranger rush into the classroom, do something outrageous, and then have students describe what happened --> “that the past--even of a simple event--was less a record than a sort of taxonomy. Not perceptions, but categorization of familiar types was the major function of memory”
#bambi
pigeonholing of facts
how apass as an organizations is coding for artistic research within the framework of their memory systems?
“There is no room on the [filling] form to write an essay on race identity politics.”
do we need to develop and standardize my discipline-specific nomenclature (in our research microworld) in order to name without ambiguity? --> redefinition of disciplinary boundaries --> shaping of your work so that its future practice converges on potential memory
we murder, they note
they draw from their secret[s]
infrastructure-thinking: Ajayeb Network-Making Minimum Data Set
in ajayeb's literature the very information infrastructure itself (should let be or) is in flux ==> discourses make strange connections between themselves
-in ajayeb the infrastructure assumes the position of every node --> reworked in my #Rigs
“...we are afloat in a sea of multiple, fractured causalities each demanding their own classification systems--and their own apparatus of record collection.” (Bowker)
classification (systems): a warrant and a tool for forgetting, and operating the distribution of this forgetting (in space of scientific memory.)
it tells you what to forget (for example the religious and metaphysical,) and how to forget it
[the formation (training) of artists covers up the formation (production) of artistic knowledge]
-the social story of science is excluded from the organization of the sciences, and held outside of it =/= situated knowledge
-a natural hierarchy of sciences is offered: every discipline needs to remember only a given set of facts --> each type of memory which has been distributed in space will also be sequenced in time (http:[...]
(284)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%66.7[...]n have students describe what happened --> “that the past--even of a simple event--was less a record than a sort of taxonomy. Not perceptions, but categorization of familiar types was the major function of memory”
#bambi
pigeonholing of facts
how apass as an organizations is coding for artistic research within the framework of their memory systems?
“There is no room on the [filling] form to write an essay on race identity politics.”
do we need to develop and standardize my discipline-specific nomenclature (in our research microworld) in order to name without ambiguity? --> redefinition of disciplinary boundaries --> shaping of your work so that its future practice converges on potential memory
we murder, they note
they draw from their secret[s]
infrastructure-thinking: Ajayeb Network-Making Minimum Data Set
in ajayeb's literature the very information infrastructure itself (should let be or) is in flux ==> discourses make strange connections between themselves
-in ajayeb the infrastructure assumes the position of every node --> reworked in my #Rigs
“...we are afloat in a sea of multiple, fractured causalities each demanding their own classification systems--and their own apparatus of record collection.” (Bowker)
classification (systems): a warrant and a tool for forgetting, and operating the distribution of this forgetting (in space of scientific memory.)
it tells you what to forget (for example the religious and metaphysical,) and how to forget it
[the formation (training) of artists covers up the formation (production) of artistic knowledge]
-the social story of science is excluded from the organization of the sciences, and held outside of it =/= situated knowledge
-a natural hierarchy of sciences is offered: every discipline needs to remember only a given set of facts --> each type of memory which has been distributed in space will also be sequenced in time (http://ajayeb.net/?q=imperative+of+knowing) [for example mathematics --> physics --> chemistry --> biology --> sociology] ==> formal memory system
the problem of the detective is that for him only those facts are relevant that hand him the solution of crime (~-> goal-oriented individual disposition) =/= chasing rabbits
-the detective (has to) classify away traces: the systematic and deliberate forgetting of some actions in order to better remember others
-what makes a difference?
-in sorting animals which past knowledges (--> ajayeb) are deliberatly forgotten in order to remember them as incorporated into an information infrastructure called ‘species’? -->! the classified are remembered (in the technoscience world)
(what is the) complex ecology of memory practices (particular within apass?)
•Hoda --> politics of remembrance
•Zoumana --> situated[...]
(285)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%66.7[...] Set
in ajayeb's literature the very information infrastructure itself (should let be or) is in flux ==> discourses make strange connections between themselves
-in ajayeb the infrastructure assumes the position of every node --> reworked in my #Rigs
“...we are afloat in a sea of multiple, fractured causalities each demanding their own classification systems--and their own apparatus of record collection.” (Bowker)
classification (systems): a warrant and a tool for forgetting, and operating the distribution of this forgetting (in space of scientific memory.)
it tells you what to forget (for example the religious and metaphysical,) and how to forget it
[the formation (training) of artists covers up the formation (production) of artistic knowledge]
-the social story of science is excluded from the organization of the sciences, and held outside of it =/= situated knowledge
-a natural hierarchy of sciences is offered: every discipline needs to remember only a given set of facts --> each type of memory which has been distributed in space will also be sequenced in time (http://ajayeb.net/?q=imperative+of+knowing) [for example mathematics --> physics --> chemistry --> biology --> sociology] ==> formal memory system
the problem of the detective is that for him only those facts are relevant that hand him the solution of crime (~-> goal-oriented individual disposition) =/= chasing rabbits
-the detective (has to) classify away traces: the systematic and deliberate forgetting of some actions in order to better remember others
-what makes a difference?
-in sorting animals which past knowledges (--> ajayeb) are deliberatly forgotten in order to remember them as incorporated into an information infrastructure called ‘species’? -->! the classified are remembered (in the technoscience world)
(what is the) complex ecology of memory practices (particular within apass?)
•Hoda --> politics of remembrance
•Zoumana --> situated perspective
•Sina --> narratable past
•Marialena --> type of language
•S
today, 18.07.2017, the ajayeb's knowledge can be stored and expressed in a quite restricted range of genres called myth, ancient, imaginary,
______________
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~gbowker/records.html
we have learned from Foucault that different (medical) records, different practices of reading and writing are intertwined with the production of different patient's bodies, body politic, and bodies of knowledge
@Olga
record is the story of the organizational infrastructure [@Marialena, Olga]
[Foucault on knowing in the practice of medicine:] cascade of inscriptions --> writing [--> totality of observers/observations ==> “true knowledge"] --> modern clinical gaze ==> pathological processes of individual bodie[...]
(287)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%66.8[...] can see, i am not at all throwing it out)
•omnivorous approach
•
wild facts amenable (تابع) to formal representation (formal modeling)
routine: practically enacted, having no existence outside its performance, embedded in the configuration of material resources that enable practical work
[#workshop fables] how, by traversing the routine, “knowledge” and “community” took on new meaning, as they were rearticulated in the different languages
uncertain activities of knowledge
(what i am learning in apass is that) modeling ontologies involves articulating knowledge in ways that sometimes appears alien to that domain community
[asking with Bowker:] for my ontology-building to appear representative, does my community itself have to learn the goals and language of my knowledge modeling? (the question i asked Sven, telling others ‘this or that is the language i am using.’) (i am using a language that is Harawayian, Ronellian, Sadrian)
______________
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~gbowker/actnet.html
...it is easy to get lost in Baudrillard's cool memories of simulacra (1990)
at stake: day to day work of building classification system
things to learnd from actor-network approach: (Latour, Callon > Bowker)
•regimes of delegation
•centrality of mediation
•the position that nature and society are not causes but consequences of human scientific and tachnical work
--> “technoscientific societies are powerful precisely because they are so good at delegating and distributing; and that actor-network theory is well position to track and describe the work of delegation and distribution.”
fact is a consequence
(Dewey)
(in a way, my work and interest in ajayeb is about histories of standards in knowledge production, which, i argue, is key to all sorts of other productions) (& the politics of remembrance : the politics and philosophy of classifying certain textual/material activities such that they have a chance of being part of the cultural *potential* memory)-->{Olga, Hoda, Sana}
artists are using a lot of standards (of representations or materials)
(out of) control standards
-there is a huge amount of standards i am depending on in my hypertext
-international diplomacy depends on manufacturing and enforcement of standard vocabulary --> how much are we really in diplomatic businesses?
Google: “To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful”
standards are often:
•making things work together
•enforced by legal bodies
•have their own (significant) inertia --> hard to change, and is not about the technically superior standards winning [DOS, VHS, A4, etc.]
standards --> *aspect of acting in the world* ==> clas[...]
(289)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%67[...]biquity and webbed saturation of classifying and standardizing
•materially textured (layered, tangled)
•their negotiated nature
*distribution of memory (and distribution of representation):
X --> historical contingencies --> a narrative --> practical politics --> standard narrative --> universal category --> erases its own narratological past, (employed internally+externally) deletion of modalities in the development of (scientific) texts; [a modality can be deleted in a number of different ways: [*] it might be distributed (held in another part of the organization than in that which produces the text), [*] built into the infrastructure (the work environment is changed such that the modality is never encountered), etc. =/= #accountability] ==> fact (+ single articulation, only one plot of data) --> mobilizing a set of black-boxes-->{Xiri's “queers,” Eszter's “participants,”: what goes inside these black-boxes and how they look like, is seen as irrelevant for them. [--> translating from the context of storage to the present situation (one might store a fact for reason X but recall it for reason Y) Latour + Bowker]}
X --> indeterminacy & multiplicity --> conflict --> negotiations --> standard
where to make the cuts in the system, for example, down to what level of detail one specifies a description of work, of an illness, of a setting, [of an animal, of a queerness, of a subjectivity, and so on.]
residual categories {rest, others, miscellaneous,} are ubiquitous
what are the mismatches between subsystems in ajayeb and Qur'an?
--> “cumulative mess trajectory” (Strauss) --> when the trajectories become so tangled that you can't return and the interactions multiply
we are riding on metaphores to move in a densely classified world
“There is no way of ever getting access to the past except through classification systems of one sort or another - formal or informal, hierarchical or not” Bowker
•“in the 14th century” --> segmentation of time, system of calendar
•“Iranian” --> discourse of national genius only arose in the 19th century
•“revolution” --> our current conception of ‘revolution’ is marked by the historiographical work of Karl Marx
•(historiographical traditions)
compare first lines of Halaj's biography in Attar and Wikipedia:
•آن فی الله فی سبیل الله آن شیر بیشه تحقیق آن شجاع صفدر صدیق آن غرقه دریای مواج حسین منصور حلاج رحمةالله علیه کار او کاری عجب بود و واقعات غرایب که خاص او را بود که هم در غایت سوز و اشتیاق بود و در شدت لهب و فراق مست و بیقرار و شوریده روزگار بود و عاشق صادق و پاک باز و جد وجهدی عظیم داشت و ریاضتی و کرامتی عجب و [...]
(290)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%67.1[...]◦“Iranian” --> discourse of national genius only arose in the 19th century
•“revolution” --> our current conception of ‘revolution’ is marked by the historiographical work of Karl Marx
•(historiographical traditions)
compare first lines of Halaj's biography in Attar and Wikipedia:
•آن فی الله فی سبیل الله آن شیر بیشه تحقیق آن شجاع صفدر صدیق آن غرقه دریای مواج حسین منصور حلاج رحمةالله علیه کار او کاری عجب بود و واقعات غرایب که خاص او را بود که هم در غایت سوز و اشتیاق بود و در شدت لهب و فراق مست و بیقرار و شوریده روزگار بود و عاشق صادق و پاک باز و جد وجهدی عظیم داشت و ریاضتی و کرامتی عجب و عالی همت و رفیع قدر بود او را تصانیف بسیار است [...]
•Mansur al-Hallaj (Arabic: Abū ‘l-Muġīṭ Al-Ḥusayn bin Manṣūr al-Ḥallāğ; Persian: Mansūr-e Ḥallāj) (c. 858 – 26 March 922) (Hijri c. 244 AH – 309 AH) was a Persian mystic, poet and teacher of Sufism [...]
(at the end it is the colonialism that) decides what a disease is [=/= other system/culture (fragile networks) for classifying diseases of the body and spirit, such as ajayeb. (for example see how schizophrenia is classified and understood)]
--> practical ontology
representation of the past
sequencing of the present
==> making it appear that science describes nature --> social power
(at the end you see only those actants who are strong enough, and shaped in the right way, to impact)
“[...] the loosest classification of work is accorded to those with the most power and discretion, who are able to set their own terms.” Bowker 1996
lingua franca of the medical insurance companies
ac
actor network theory: looking in detail at the role of (relatively) black-boxed hybrids [what scientists are actually manufacturing] in creating the discourse of pure science (as endpoint)
science's objective account of natural order:
•trials of strength
•enrolling of allies
•cascades of inscriptions
•operation of immutable mobiles
--> development of standards
‘Janus face’ of science
[Janus, in ancient Roman is the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, and endings. a god of transitions. having two faces, he looks to the future and to the past. (Greeks had no equivalent to Janus.)]
when your work (artistic/scientific) can be seen as a direct translation of the quest for Iranian/French honor after defeat in the battlefield --> the actors don't see what is excluded: they construct a world in which that exclusion could occur
(Latour --> according t[...]
(294)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%67.2[...]>
actor network theory: looking in detail at the role of (relatively) black-boxed hybrids [what scientists are actually manufacturing] in creating the discourse of pure science (as endpoint)
science's objective account of natural order:
•trials of strength
•enrolling of allies
•cascades of inscriptions
•operation of immutable mobiles
--> development of standards
‘Janus face’ of science
[Janus, in ancient Roman is the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, and endings. a god of transitions. having two faces, he looks to the future and to the past. (Greeks had no equivalent to Janus.)]
when your work (artistic/scientific) can be seen as a direct translation of the quest for Iranian/French honor after defeat in the battlefield --> the actors don't see what is excluded: they construct a world in which that exclusion could occur
(Latour --> according to American pragmatist strongholds:) reality = 'that which resists’
common language ~= standard language
(we can't talk about the commons without sorting out our understanding of our standard-saturated world)
(my hypertext is not data-driven [= a system with focus on the acquisition, management, processing, and presentation of ‘atomic-level’ data] nor a process-driven (or process-sensitive system, for example delivering a care), what is it then?) (also not systematically storing [my] “knowledge” for later access, storage of information in such long-term memory, no no no)
-is it a support for my various tasks and practices outside the computer? --> excess-driven storytellings =/= minimum data set
-a non-data-driven systems in this society are named secretive and mysterious in the name of transparency
#in a way i am building an adequate mode of encounter with the “Iranian scientist”
they draw from their secret[s]
a technical issue (for example about how to code process) is also a an organizational theory
social embeddedness of scientific truth
(authors of ajayeb approached nature not in a way to sketch the boundaries of a discrete animal event, therefore, a unit of analysis, (which is very natural at 21st century;) rather an infrastructure itself in flux, providing an unnatural hierarchy)--> this is my rhetorical reading of ajayeb
as long as you/God pays attention to them, they will continue to exist
‘uninventing X’: changing society and technology in such a way that the X becomes an impossibility. (Donald Mackenzie)
development and maintenance of technical standards is a site of political decisions and struggle
______________
against the idea that “past is a different country, they do things differently there”
***how we are creating different kinds o[...]
(295)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%67.2[...]r />
[*]milieu
a powerful concept with genealogy across a range of disciplines [physics, biology, geography, literature --> orienting our use of it]
•18th century: the fluid or ether in which physical bodies are immersed ==(that enable their)==> inter-dependence (#shena, shenavar?) --> milieu becomes universal
•19th century: as producing circumstances that changes needs [Lamarck] --> for Darwin milieu only produced change (at the level of the organism's phenotype)
•milieu rendered as complexes of elements whose actions mutually limit each other and in which the effects of causes become causes in turn, modifying the causes that gave rise to them. (Canguilhem)
umwelt: organisms privilege certain stimuli and response, thus, suggesting to Canguilhem that it isn't merely ‘need’ mediating between organism and milieu (as in Lamarck's formulation) but a prior sense of values that evaluates certain signals as worthy of response over others
/>
--> *the animal finds it simpler to do what it privileges* (Canguilhem 2008)
[*]sense: (from the biological and psychological point of view:) an appreciation of values in relation to a [*]need: (for the one who experuences and lives it:) an irreducible ==(thereby)==> absolute, system of reference
Naveeda's notion of river's point of view:
“...” while the inorganic, such as a river, lacks the building blocks of life in being produced through the action of geological forces, it too has norms and values that take statistical form or are found (in both sense of the word: discovered and originating) in moments of spontaneous action (---> go to Delanda#)
...village and kinship structures being flexible, there is a high value places on sexual normativity
absence of water --> human suffering --> the death of the river --> emergence of land as property
Naveeda examines 3 films:
ms:
•focus on corruption, melodramatic specificities of the film-scale, subtext of pain --> Titash Ekti Nodir Naam
•focus on entropy within the Padma river, *ambivalent expression over the necessity for migration that will undoubtedly be one of the strategies of adaptation for an ocean-facing country such as Bangladesh* --> Padma Nodir Majhi
•(film's anticipation of) how rumors and bad news come to unsettle existence, the rumor of climate change may do more to re-organize a social milieu than its actual binding reality --> Chitra Nodir Parey
*there is a “systematic undervaluation of involuntary loss of places and cultures [which] disguises real, experienced but subjective limits to adaptation [and integration*]” (Naveeda > Adger)
(people in interrelation to the Jamuns river...) what may be coming up or downstream or even overhead or below ground, that they are also involved in displacements in situ either because of [...]
(299)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%67.5[...] of reference
Naveeda's notion of river's point of view:
“...” while the inorganic, such as a river, lacks the building blocks of life in being produced through the action of geological forces, it too has norms and values that take statistical form or are found (in both sense of the word: discovered and originating) in moments of spontaneous action (---> go to Delanda#)
...village and kinship structures being flexible, there is a high value places on sexual normativity
absence of water --> human suffering --> the death of the river --> emergence of land as property
Naveeda examines 3 films:
•focus on corruption, melodramatic specificities of the film-scale, subtext of pain --> Titash Ekti Nodir Naam
•focus on entropy within the Padma river, *ambivalent expression over the necessity for migration that will undoubtedly be one of the strategies of adaptation for an ocean-facing country such as Bangladesh* --> Padma Nodir Majhi
•(film's anticipation of) how rumors and bad news come to unsettle existence, the rumor of climate change may do more to re-organize a social milieu than its actual binding reality --> Chitra Nodir Parey
*there is a “systematic undervaluation of involuntary loss of places and cultures [which] disguises real, experienced but subjective limits to adaptation [and integration*]” (Naveeda > Adger)
(people in interrelation to the Jamuns river...) what may be coming up or downstream or even overhead or below ground, that they are also involved in displacements in situ either because of floods or erosion --> continual throwing up of constitutive elements of social life into the air and their constant re-organization when they return to ground
the erosive tendencies of the river --> the slow movement in place or lateral shifts that lead people to just drop off the scene<br />
(Naveeda: we are in a) landscape not just erosive of relations but also *productive of forgetting* --> adaptation in the present entails an ongoing corruption of memory [--> #Bowker, forms of erasure]***
(#stories of integration in Germany)
...................................
[pre-notes with Delanda's A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History]
what are word-forming resources in farsi?
(not to increase their prestige, rather, to problematize) reservoirs of expressive resources in ajayeb and tehran --> to challenge which international standard?
what are the definitive historical process that create uniform set of linguistic norms in iran?
in my work on ajayeb, also, perhaps i am offering a grammar to the empire---learning system thinking
dictionary --> formal codification of language
regarding my ajayeb hypertext
--✕-->? certain spelling ru[...]
(300)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%67.5[...]...) what may be coming up or downstream or even overhead or below ground, that they are also involved in displacements in situ either because of floods or erosion --> continual throwing up of constitutive elements of social life into the air and their constant re-organization when they return to ground
the erosive tendencies of the river --> the slow movement in place or lateral shifts that lead people to just drop off the scene
(Naveeda: we are in a) landscape not just erosive of relations but also *productive of forgetting* --> adaptation in the present entails an ongoing corruption of memory [--> #Bowker, forms of erasure]***
(#stories of integration in Germany)
...................................
[pre-notes with Delanda's A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History]
what are word-forming resources in farsi?
(not to increase their prestige, rather, to problematize) reservoirs of expressive resources in ajayeb and tehran --> to challenge which international standard?
what are the definitive historical process that create uniform set of linguistic norms in iran?
in my work on ajayeb, also, perhaps i am offering a grammar to the empire---learning system thinking
dictionary --> formal codification of language
regarding my ajayeb hypertext
--✕-->? certain spelling rules, grapheme نويسه [characters A, B, ...], morpheme واژک [smallest meaningful language unit]
--✕--> what are my articulatory shortcuts? (least effort needed)
-how internet press is aiding which minor languages in their struggle against majors?
-and which standards are rising there?
-and what are the hegemonizing effect of my ajayeb hypertext on language and energy? its conservative pressures (on literary imagination) --> my concern with farsi linguistic evolution and its contaminations with other languages
what are my ajayeb hypertext contact situations?
(in my ajayeb) “?q=” =/=? searching device abstract probe head
==>? sorted into homogeneous sets
-->? abstract automata -->{ ajayeb.net ~= a valid-enough mean of transferring the *combinatorial productivity* of automaton [by different (social) dynamics] }-->? #bottom-top approach to writing
my Rigs are about:
•processes responsible for the generation of phrases and sentences
•to produce new strings =/= checking them for validity
(you cannot be not connected to) *collective assemblage* (of enunciations)
(what is my -or-) do i need an abstract machine that connects my language to the semantic and pragmatic contents of statements, to the collective assemblage?
my ajayeb: a throng (هجوم) of (neo-English-Farsi) dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized languages
my Rigs.[...]
(301)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%67.6[...]n <-- what intensified them? --> ? tech, colonialism, schooling,
what i am trying to do with ajayeb, in making this hypertext, is to connect its syntactical constructions to fresh reservoirs of linguistic resources ***
with ajayeb.net i am learning to resist the hierarchical weight of “received pronunciations” and official criteria of correctness of “ajayeb”
my Rigs, equipped with “knobs”: controlling parameters whose intensity defines the dynamical state of the structure-generating process
my work on ajayeb is an inquiry (or critique) in the ways we represent the world to ourselves [--> organizing objective referents and label-concepts] <--> a homogenizing social critique?
...................................
what is gained and what is lost when “tidying up the archive” ?
...................................
[Yates]
in the ages before printing a trained memory was vitally important; and the manipulation of images in memory must always to some extent involve the psyche as a whole
** mnemotechnical side of the art is always present **
Mnemosyne, said the Greeks, is the mother of the Muses
occult memory systems <== Renaissance Hermetic tradition --?--> lullism (lullaby? Hoda) <--✕-- rhetoric tradition
the history of memory
the problems of the mental image, of the activation of images, of the grasp of reality through images
...................................
the horror of no longer remembering the reason for forgetting, or, “when the times comes for our battle, the memories'll be the armour”
Thyrza Goodeve
...................................
knowledge infrastructure
how do changes in knowledge infrastructures reinforce or redistributes authority, influence, and power? --> new ways of thinking and acting
create + share + dispute knowledge
(Facebook, Google, etc.:) vast stores of anonymized data to analysis and exploitation, engaging users and publics in new ways
axes of change: [fundamental transformations challenging our understanding of the ways knowledge is processed:]
1- technical systems and standards
2- new modes of analyzing social (re)organization that exploit the extensive traces left behind by users of information
including:
•education
•libraries: changing structures, services, and physical spaces
•publishing industry
•intellectual property
•global flow
•knowledge politics: filter bubble, counter-expertise,
•
unpaind individuals
“sticky” processes and routines --> *most knowledge workers’ salaries are still paid by bricks-and-mortar organizations with hierarchical structures, established insitutional cultures, [...]
(302)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%67.8[...] images in memory must always to some extent involve the psyche as a whole
** mnemotechnical side of the art is always present **
Mnemosyne, said the Greeks, is the mother of the Muses
occult memory systems <== Renaissance Hermetic tradition --?--> lullism (lullaby? Hoda) <--✕-- rhetoric tradition
the history of memory
the problems of the mental image, of the activation of images, of the grasp of reality through images
...................................
the horror of no longer remembering the reason for forgetting, or, “when the times comes for our battle, the memories'll be the armour”
Thyrza Goodeve
...................................
knowledge infrastructure
how do changes in knowledge infrastructures reinforce or redistributes authority, influence, and power? --> new ways of thinking and acting
create + share + dispute knowledge
(Facebook, Google, etc.:) vast stores of anonymized data to analysis and exploitation, engaging users and publics in new ways
axes of change: [fundamental transformations challenging our understanding of the ways knowledge is processed:]
1- technical systems and standards
2- new modes of analyzing social (re)organization that exploit the extensive traces left behind by users of information
including:
•education
•libraries: changing structures, services, and physical spaces
•publishing industry
•intellectual property
•global flow
•knowledge politics: filter bubble, counter-expertise,
•
unpaind individuals
“sticky” processes and routines --> *most knowledge workers’ salaries are still paid by bricks-and-mortar organizations with hierarchical structures, established insitutional cultures, systems of credit and compensation/
eventual rise of a scientific culture of “extreme openness”
(forms that are) human-readable & machine-readable <-- the move i made from my notebook to ajayeb.net
infrastructure =/= system
infrastructure perspective:
•modular
•multi-layered, multi-scaled (layered nature of infrastructure, navigating among different scales)
•rough-cut character
•ecologies/complex adaptive systems
-->** infrastructures consist of numerous systems, each with unique *origins and *goals, which are made to interoperate by means of *standards, socket layers [: a bony hollow into which a structure fits], social norms, and individual behaviors that smooth out connections among them
=/=
system perspective:
•fully coherent
•deliberately engineered
•end-to-end process
(Weinberger's notion of) *stoping point*
“knowledge as a series of stopping points"
[...]
(303)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%67.8[...]imes comes for our battle, the memories'll be the armour”
Thyrza Goodeve
...................................
knowledge infrastructure
how do changes in knowledge infrastructures reinforce or redistributes authority, influence, and power? --> new ways of thinking and acting
create + share + dispute knowledge
(Facebook, Google, etc.:) vast stores of anonymized data to analysis and exploitation, engaging users and publics in new ways
axes of change: [fundamental transformations challenging our understanding of the ways knowledge is processed:]
1- technical systems and standards
2- new modes of analyzing social (re)organization that exploit the extensive traces left behind by users of information
including:
•education
•libraries: changing structures, services, and physical spaces
•publishing industry
•intellectual property
•global flow
>
•knowledge politics: filter bubble, counter-expertise,
•
unpaind individuals
“sticky” processes and routines --> *most knowledge workers’ salaries are still paid by bricks-and-mortar organizations with hierarchical structures, established insitutional cultures, systems of credit and compensation/
eventual rise of a scientific culture of “extreme openness”
(forms that are) human-readable & machine-readable <-- the move i made from my notebook to ajayeb.net
infrastructure =/= system
infrastructure perspective:
•modular
•multi-layered, multi-scaled (layered nature of infrastructure, navigating among different scales)
•rough-cut character
•ecologies/complex adaptive systems
-->** infrastructures consist of numerous systems, each with unique *origins and *goals, which are made to interoperate by means of *standards, socket layers [: a bony hollow inlow into which a structure fits], social norms, and individual behaviors that smooth out connections among them
=/=
system perspective:
•fully coherent
•deliberately engineered
•end-to-end process
(Weinberger's notion of) *stoping point*
“knowledge as a series of stopping points”
•printed journal articles
•books
•textbooks
•(other fixed products)
--[changing to]--> a world where knowledge is perceptually in motion }--> in a way ajayeb.net is part of this transition
we face a world of abundant information, hyperlinked ideas, permission-free resources, highly public interaction, and massive, unresolved disagreement. (Weinberger)
individual expertise is (many argue) being replaced by the wisdom of crowds: noisy and endlessly contentious, but also rich, diverse, and multi-skilled [=/= fantasies of Black Mirror TV series]
wikis of all sorts
<[...]
(304)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%67.8[...]versity as a *rite of passage* (گذار از بلوغ) and a *lifestyle*
=/= learning
*professors are no longer seen as infallible experts, but as resources whose facts can be checked in real time
(question of) standard / ontology --> (desire for) universality / (need for) change
knowledge of past climates
@apass
(through my love and study for ajayeb --> infrastructure -->) questions for apass:
-what new forms of organization and community are emerging? what power relations do they rely on, create, or destroy? who wins and who loses as knowledge infrastructure change? (questions proposed by a knowledge infrastructure workshop 2012)
-(ways to) encode and reinforce existing interests and relations of power
-(we need) a design community versed in these literatures:
•different social worlds
•conflicting conceptual frameworks
•sociology of science and technology
◾sociology of standards (--> standardizing data has proven to be a crucial activity in *scaling up* the sciences) #lens
•boundary objects
•trading zones
•actor networks
•how sharing works in practice
•agreements on shared norms, practices, and technical systems (problematized by Femke, she focuses my attention on how software developers are too quick to construct “ontologies”)
•
==> to scale up the generally lower-level focus of design thinking [--> how my ajayeb.net addresses this?]
--> to co-design new infrastructures
--> to look beyond the scale of a field and timeframe of a career
(we need) meaningful access to digital media (not an exciting add-on investment)
--> new forms of knowledge infrastructure may disadvantage and devalue older forms of knowledge production:
•new sensor network replacing ecological fieldwork -->? my #amazon
•“instrumenting ocean” supplanting tradi traditions of the oceanographic cruise [in the last 20 years new sensor grids have come to cover the oceans, land, sky and space] -->? my #ajayeb's is concerned with thinking “beyond the *instrumental languages of utility and function*, which tend to cast knowledge infrastructures as *neutral instruments* whose positive and negative effects lie solely in the way they are operationalized and used”
*consequences of change are rarely socially, culturally, or economically neutral*
collectives
assemblages
configurations
try to tell yourself a “technology only” or “social only” story of knowledge infrastructure (and you will find it impossible)
(Brunton's) spam --> co-evolution of technical systems, communities, and social norms
knowledge infrastructures ==carry==> significant distributional consequences --> advancing the interests of some and actively damaging the prospects of others
(wa[...]
(309)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%67.9[...] lower-level focus of design thinking [--> how my ajayeb.net addresses this?]
--> to co-design new infrastructures
--> to look beyond the scale of a field and timeframe of a career
(we need) meaningful access to digital media (not an exciting add-on investment)
--> new forms of knowledge infrastructure may disadvantage and devalue older forms of knowledge production:
•new sensor network replacing ecological fieldwork -->? my #amazon
•“instrumenting ocean” supplanting traditions of the oceanographic cruise [in the last 20 years new sensor grids have come to cover the oceans, land, sky and space] -->? my #ajayeb's is concerned with thinking “beyond the *instrumental languages of utility and function*, which tend to cast knowledge infrastructures as *neutral instruments* whose positive and negative effects lie solely in the way they are operationalized and used”
*consequences of change are rarely socially, culturally, or economically neutral*
collectives
assemblages
configurations
try to tell yourself a “technology only” or “social only” story of knowledge infrastructure (and you will find it impossible)
(Brunton's) spam --> co-evolution of technical systems, communities, and social norms
knowledge infrastructures ==carry==> significant distributional consequences --> advancing the interests of some and actively damaging the prospects of others
(ways of producing “raw” date) davulated by “data sharing”:
•*labor-intensive* collecting practices
•site-specific expertise required
}--> long-standing craft traditions
once-vast secretarial ranks (of large organizations) [a British nostalgia for bureaucratic hierarchy fantasized and franchized by Harry Potter]
ajayeb's 13th century's “technologies” for “virtual” witnessing
--imbalance in the structure and distribution of our knowledge--
overrepresentation of research on “charismatic megafauna” (cuddly pandas, expenssive human-like chimps, tigers, hallucinogenic plants, etc.)
*dark continent fallacy*: ignorance (~ non-knowledge) = absence of knowledge : a site, phenomenon, or set of questions that we haven't yet been able or thought to investigate, as: ‘darkness = absence of light’ (--> Star Trek idea of frontier) --@!%--> the relationship between knowledge and non-knowledge may not be as simple or innocent as that
new (forms of) knowledge infrastructures (--> new ways of knowing) ==>
•new questions thinkable --> whole classes of questions, phenomena and forms of knowledge may be lost or rendered unthinkable
•new maps to known territories --> reshape the geography itself
•rework existing (stocks of) knowledge
•reorder our sense of value and structure in the world
•*write new ontologie[...]
(310)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%68[...]n, or set of questions that we haven't yet been able or thought to investigate, as: ‘darkness = absence of light’ (--> Star Trek idea of frontier) --@!%--> the relationship between knowledge and non-knowledge may not be as simple or innocent as that
new (forms of) knowledge infrastructures (--> new ways of knowing) ==>
•new questions thinkable --> whole classes of questions, phenomena and forms of knowledge may be lost or rendered unthinkable
•new maps to known territories --> reshape the geography itself
•rework existing (stocks of) knowledge
•reorder our sense of value and structure in the world
•*write new ontologies over old ones* (--> my interest in working with ajayeb)
•embed social norms
knowledge infrastructure ~= sociology of knowledge
= robust internetworks of people, artifacts, and institutions* (--> to attend kno.infs. as wholes, rather than focusing only on their most rapidly evolving elements; #ontology. and attending to the social relations both created and broken) [#to attend to Tehran's new digitally mediated social norms of negative ditributional consequences of change]
any effective sociology of knowledge ought to provide some account of its opposite: the accidental and systematic --> means by which non-knowledge is produced and maintained
**(Robert Proctor's) agnotology: the systematic study of ignorance** [+ Irvin Schick: unknowledge =/= ignorance --> socially constructed lack of knowledge : a conscious absence of socially pertinent knowledge, for example ‘terra incognita --> Western political and economic attention --> enabling colonialism...]
institutional elements of knowledge infrastructure:
•universities
•libraries
•scientific societies
}--> they all have typically conservative, slow-changing forms* -- because when they change, authority, influence, and power are redistributed; (changes takes decades rather than years) --> a long-time-scale, historically informed framework to situate our thinking --> sustainable, accumulative, and shareable qualitative databases
internet-supported citizen science
the 19th century's Darwin favored ‘genetic form’ --> massive and global shift in modes of classification
standard --> *preserving the meaning of data is a human affair, requiring continuous curation
#knowledge zoom lens --> “the long now” (Bowker)
(it took 200 years for printed book's) *intellectual armature* (that now we consider intuitive:)
(in ajayeb.net i am responding and working all of them)
•index
•table of contents
•bibliography
•footnotes
•generally agreed rules on plagiarism
•page numbers (--> =^77988.1.6$shathiat)
***qualitative science*** : detailed, indepth, and meaning-oriented investigations[...]
(311)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%68.1[...] (changes takes decades rather than years) --> a long-time-scale, historically informed framework to situate our thinking --> sustainable, accumulative, and shareable qualitative databases
internet-supported citizen science
the 19th century's Darwin favored ‘genetic form’ --> massive and global shift in modes of classification
standard --> *preserving the meaning of data is a human affair, requiring continuous curation
#knowledge zoom lens --> “the long now” (Bowker)
(it took 200 years for printed book's) *intellectual armature* (that now we consider intuitive:)
(in ajayeb.net i am responding and working all of them)
•index
•table of contents
•bibliography
•footnotes
•generally agreed rules on plagiarism
•page numbers (--> =^77988.1.6$shathiat)
***qualitative science*** : detailed, indepth, and meaning-oriented investigations --> analysis, statistical (for example the social network analysis strengths of scope and summation in Braudel's study)
(question of my “writing”:) how to nourish mechanisms for large-scale, long-term research?
-we need to go beyond one-off projects to develope systems and standards for collecting, curating (my knowledge, ajayeb's knowledge) while simultaneously protecting subject's identities and interests /***
=/= short-term, project-by-project work
-(constantvzw is doing this:) build collaborative sciences
sociotechnical phenomena do not rest within the domain of a single discipline
-comparative analysis techniques
comparison across cases (--> how Kobe in his case-based work produces a critically comparative data?)
creation of compatable data [: properly documented --> facilitate sharing] (--> how for my ajayeb?)
(in your work and research -->) encouraging the identification of crucial similarities and differences
-sustainable and sharable data archives, collected over multiple investigative projects --> ajayeb.net = knowledge/thoughts/notes of multiple projects (--> is this my “data”?)
cyberscholarship
#lens, to scale up qualitative social science <--> deploy data storage, visualization, hypertext, and collective-creation possibilities of the web and social media, *new tools for textual analysis*
...................................
[which] cultures (or stories) permit a graceful listening forth to our seeing[?]
(metaphorical economy of) *mnemonic deep*:
•past is a thing that you escape at all costs, our past explains who we are,
•as palimpsest, The infinite faces of the past can be read off the present face ==> narrative ideal presen
•
the time that the institution of the sciences create:
1- the time of the experiment[...]
(313)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%68.1[...]e projects --> ajayeb.net = knowledge/thoughts/notes of multiple projects (--> is this my “data”?)
cyberscholarship
#lens, to scale up qualitative social science <--> deploy data storage, visualization, hypertext, and collective-creation possibilities of the web and social media, *new tools for textual analysis*
...................................
[which] cultures (or stories) permit a graceful listening forth to our seeing[?]
(metaphorical economy of) *mnemonic deep*:
•past is a thing that you escape at all costs, our past explains who we are,
•as palimpsest, The infinite faces of the past can be read off the present face ==> narrative ideal presen
•
the time that the institution of the sciences create:
1- the time of the experiment/field study: going back billions of years, quantum units of time, tree rings; peat mosses; fossil seeds;
2- the time of the scientific enterprise, historiographical stances shared among sets of disciplines
3- the law of nature: the past which scientists create can be read as an eternal present
(total recall:) memory as a metaphor needed by a ‘handicapped’ observer who cannot see a complete system
(same technique was used in Gulf War, Ali's production of consensus by flat) encephalogram
Ehsan's transmission sub rosa of information: stories and practices from his wild, discontinuous, ever-changing past
(Lyell's geology of earth:) working from the position that there was no sign of the origin of the earth, nor any portent of its end--what we have access to is a set of records in the landscape which leave the impression of massive upheaval and discontinuity in the past
tools to think past =/=? tools of (our own) archive
“most groups [...] engrave their form in some way upon the soil and retrieve their collective remembrances within the spatial framework thus defined” (Halbwachs 1968 > Bowker)
built: we often don't think of such [reworked natural landscapes] trails in memory terms, because it is not our own personal memory that is being engraved--it is the collective memory of our culture
(my favorite) specialized archival technology (~= memory practice): list*
synchronization in the 14th century, where information provided the ‘coin’ which allowed multiple endeavors--social and natural, along a (different) material substrate
...................................
idio + sync
-idio- (“private,” “one's own,” not capable of engaging in the public sphere, for Athenians: concerned exclusively with private (--> a natural state of ignorance that all persons are born into) (private soldier with no skills?) [~=? mast مست] =/= “polites” ~ police [~=? mohtaseb محتسب (--from--> ا[...]
(314)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%68.2[...]
hile + karam
سجده شوریده
خام کن پخته تدبیرها
اول او اول بی ابتداست
آخر او آخر بیانتهاست
کار فلک بود گره در گره
(expelled from the temple of science) the collector and the classifier --> to grosser objects that we can taste, touch, accumulate
the master of ceremonies to a cage of tigers
Bowker on Charles Lyell
Buckland: (generally speaking) all things on earth can be seen at once objects and archives:
•as objects: they function in the world
•as archives: they maintain traces of their own past
a rock:
•object of lithosphere
•document of its history (striation: past glaciation; strata: complex stories of deposition + radioactive isotopes; journy through the mantle; etc.)
earth: a variable legible palimpsest
/>
(office procedures & computer programs are both) designed as *abstract machines*
-for ajayeb i designed an abstract machine called ajayeb.net to realize a seamless interchangeability between my artist/research procedures and computer programs
bootstrap: a simple system activating a more complicated system
(i have become hypersensitive to:) progressivist telling of the history of the earth =/= strangely synchronic world where there is no effective arrow of time
[*]synchronization: the work that it takes to bring the various bits of the world into a single archival framework*** (with their metaphors and strategies) ==permit==> cohabitation of discipliness --> **synchronization of the social and natural worlds to the same temporality**
(synchronization is always at work and is technologically determined)
--> conjuring of the social and natural world into forms that render themselves amenable to recording ==> (imperialperial records) archiving changes the world & creates a record of it --Derrida--> sequential & jussive (imperative)
+ scientific work epitomized the developement and rigorous application of these procedures (---> go to Serres's origin of geometry and greek empire)
***synchronization brings material forms (commodity flow, train travel) together and when geological and historical time are mapped into the same time --> metaphorical & ideological & material interact (==> emerging powerful possibilities) [--> in art we also do a lot of syncing and synchronization (<-- this is perhaps what Pierre meant by saying that researchers are creating their own science)]
time management, a central issue in industrialization
Babbage: clock = regulator of time
industrial world-knowledge ==> importance of the division of the history of the earth into equal periods of time
information drive (a drive *to save as little information as [...]
(315)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%68.3[...]Graham Burnett > Fontaine Maury)
}==> imposing a **temporally mediated qualitative difference between the creator and created** (instantiated on the factory floor and in nature) --> creators stood outside regular space and time (=/= situated knowledges)
(19th century) scientific work = imposition of a representative framework of regular space and time on social and natural time
(science was and still is) making society confirm to the same spatiotemporal representational framework it was/is “discovering” in nature (---> go to the #scientification of christian genesis in Nolan's Noah film)
*imposition of a regular spatiotemporal representational framework* = (Bowker's) [*]convergence (a key aspect of synchronization): a cosmology (inspired by factory production) of nature and humanity--to make science, art and politics converge more and more towards the same goal, to introduce to them the notion of change, progress, succession, continuity, life, submit them to the same law (of constancy and uniformity)
•in astronomy: (1836) “the return of the comet of Halley at its predicted time has been remarked with intense curiosity and satisfaction by astronomers, and by the public. this has now become a regular and well ordered member of our system” (=/= ajayeb)
*representational framework of temporal regularity* ==> one can read backward into the past and forward into the future (--> # sequential palindromic time)
--> tale of the real archive : tale of stasis [==> “violent care”: preservation of current species and the imposition of stasis] : single law : (the fable of:) “perturbations and oscillations providing noise that true understanding would filter out”
fable of industry:
•how humanity had gone from being initially weak to currently king of nature : “industry = second nature”
•art submits to science
•industry recognizes science for its regulator
chaotic spacelike, lacking direction and granularity
working of childhood marked by staccato syncopation (=/= regular rhythms)
machine regularizes “man”: processes synchronizing him to industrial time
mechanical uniformity became the “natural” state of affairs
Facebook within the spirit of industry --> “under the [spirit of industry's] influence, people will begin by grouping themselves more naturally [...] people will come closer together, mass according to their real analogies and according to their real interests [...] the same ideas will circulate in all countries [...] uniformity of costumes [...] the same needs, a similar civilization, will develope everywhere [...] without confusion or violence, relations both as complex and as easy, as peaceful and as profitable as may be” -Charles Dunoyer
ufs (unidentified flying subject)
ufo
arguments about[...]
(317)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%68.4[...]world (regularizing it) providing both a ***material and metaphorical implusion*** (to order its forms of inquiry/activity)
@apass monday reading
means of new infrastructural technobody ==> technoscientific representations ==> (dual process of) commodification (railway) + representation (abstract space-time)
--> “you need to be able to represent the world in a *coherent and standard* form [~ databases] in order to run railways [or program language operation] and deal in commodities
increasingly less well-defined boundaries --Serres--> we need analytic categories that allow us to account for the unified representational time and space applied to both bureaucratic and scientific work --(Sohn-Rethel)--> (relationship between) **commodity form and the process of intellectual abstraction** [-abstractness governs the whole orbit of commodity form]. when commodity is up for sale, it is by definition not to be used; it exists in a kind of “frozen time” outside the normal flow of time. it moves in an abstract spatiotemporal world (~= “second nature"[==> cognitive faculty of conceptual things] =/= concrete world of “first nature”)
*import* the ideal abstraction basic to greek philosophy and to modern science
systematizers
nested series of regions
synchronic extension --> “trace” back records in past: indian empire preceded edgyptian preceded persian preceded western. a second world, Europe, is contained within larger world (~= european union) --> (fable of the “step by step”:) man has step by step, broken with this natural asian world, and constructed, through industry and trial a world informated by liberty [--> my german orientation course, “that is why refugees are coming here"]
fable: history as the tale of struggle (~ liberty against fatality)
(glorious) race into the future
temps
•time
•weather
(i have been working against:) “the irrelevance of the past for a purified real present (which Bowker underlines in Lyell's work)
syllogism صغرى کبرى
soghra kobra
senility kohulat
**database
(replacing syllogism) principle of the *division of labor* --> simultaneity of groups (of people) --> “the succession of acts of which a single act is composed, is the same thing as the succession of diverse works necessary to arrive at a result which is nevertheless single.” (this) succession ==> division of labor
“there is not context only text” --> when you get to Paris, upbringing and race are irrelevant to a person's actions. contemporary humanity would move completely outside the flow of narrative time
1830s geology
history: a science of singularity and secular change
earth: records of catastrophic events that affected the body t[...]
(318)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%68.6[...]to a timeless present and an anisotropic flow of time***
*anisotropic: having a physical property which has a different value when measured in different directions. (wood is stronger along the grain than across it, or anisotropic filtering in computer graphic rendering at oblique viewing angles)
-varying in magnitude according to the direction of measurement. (electron scattering is anisotropic) ~-> palindromic time
*isotropic: having a physical property which has the same value when measured in different directions. not varying in magnitude according to the direction of measurement
(my project:) **picture of earth sciences**
(--> stories of macrocosm in Olearius)
picture of earth in 1830s:
earth itself as a kind of large information storage device not a very efficient one, but still remarkable -->> the inefficiencies of the storage device could be mitigated (as Beaumont and Lyell pointed out) by redundencies in the recording process -->> these redundencies could be perceived through efficient use of the new transport infrastructure (steamboat, train, etc.) -->> then geology would converge with astronomy in calling forth a historical time as regular and perfect as that of the clockwork solar system (hymned as an accurate clock)
}-->
“archival process ~= a natural technology” --> from natural to ideal: archive being mediated by technology marked by clockwork regularity
==> “earth = clock” (associated with the triumph of industrial society, because it ran like clockwork [---> go to german pünktlich punctuality]) --> industrial time writen into Lyell's geology: two methods of factory production *the division of labor* and the *parceling up of time into regular units* are both writen into time that Lyell created for the new discipline of geology
--> factory & geology were the precisely the same problem: *organization of time*
census
statistical record-keeping, a central technology for a modern state
statistical thinking
(this is Lyell in Bowker's research on memory practices in sciences:)
through a linguistic metaphor, Lyell endeavored to explain the apparent asymmetry between past and present. this metaphor brings out the peculiar centrality of humanity in Lyell's geology and thus the centrality of human society to his problematic
idea of the ‘book of nature’
(Lyell's logic) --> we humans have access only to a limited and random grammar of the ‘book of nature’ ==> *burden of proof* lies with those with thier set of *past causes* to explain the past
[!!]
Lyell's geology is a kind of bookkeeping device that allows the storage of vast amounts of information by sorting them into a kind of filing cabinet of different kinds of events (=/= ajayeb)
(his work revolving around an understanding of archiv[...]
(319)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%68.8[...]'big history’ by David Christian, fable of printed record and progress of humanity tale]
(Bowker > Babbage:) until the invention of printing, “the mass of mankind were in many respects almost the creatures of instict” --> “flood of light over the darkened intellects of their thankless countrymen”
(the spirit of 19th century embodied in Babbage) making the ***act of making information*** such a key variable:
(print rational/archival memory ==>) new space and time ==> (need for) regular working of the machines of nature and the world : *regularization of time and the distribution of tasks* [--> a mythological operation]<== infrastructural work:
•developement of computing (+ machineries)
•division of labor
Buckland + Babbage ==> complete knowability of the Book of Nature
information and database theory (in genomics --> a core science of our time)
archive ==(is central to ‘thinking about’ & ‘writing down’ of)==> objects being studied
information explosion of the early 19th century + new ways of describing the past
“locality of each geologist will be the terrestrial globe” (--> locality of Olearius)
heroic age --> everyone constructed complete systems (that are thrown up and down in cataclysmic succession [!]) [--> question of artistic research]
...relics of the animate creation of former ages [--> science special effects, museum of continuity,]
[title]
indifinite space as filled with worlds...
colossi
earthquakes
floods
storms
tranquil variations
“second nature”:
•(from) past
•analytical constructs of extended present
[title]
***an irregular past and a totalizing memory***
(‘chaos’ characterized of/for archive ==> human nature)
moral duty as humans [!!**] --> to recognize stasis at the heart of disorder **** (--> an ancient fable, archetype) *apperceive[~ perceive in terms of a past experience, accumulative perception] synchrony in the midst of diachrony[~ look for historical changes/roots in languages]* + to sync ([*]synchronization: to bring social and natural time into a unified form <--through-- production and storage of records)
@Marialena
the metronomic story
the mnemonic story
***spatializing time***
(for humanity) going out in space, to India, to the Orient, or within France to Brittany or the Pyrennees, was going backward in time (~ mapping technique ==> position of “humanity” out there nowhere --> anomalous, moral, short term [--> “impact” of Star Trek crew(~ a cult of people who have unlocked the secret of life and the universe) on the worlds they visit])
==> faceless scientist working in a vast and effective machine (--> Har[...]
(320)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%68.9[...]ine-readable information*
persistence of cited objects (in ajayeb.net)
[*]persistence: a prediction about an archive's commitment and capacity to provide some specific kind of long-term functionality
which objects in ajayeb.net are:
•strictly unchanging
•subject to correction
•subject to significant update
[Calvert naming strategy]--> an approach: to invent a term (a portmanteau word واژه مرکب از دو واژه) or choose an existing word that is unusual enough (rare, archaic) to make the reader hesitate to jump to a conclusion about its meaning *** [i used a farsi word in english: zolmat, pir, tarof,]
nothing is permanent --> we call some things/objects/identifiers naively nuanced “persistent” or “not persistant”
(important -->) ** of course, it is not a thing that resists change, it is the provider of a thing that resists or, more precisely, controls change **
>
“reproducible science needs citations” <-- what is my ajayeb relation to this?
(i am modifying some of Calvert's term:)
[*]identifier: an (always breakable) association
[*]actionable identifier: an identifier that can be acted upon by widely available interpretive systems --?--> [*]queryable: effectively leading to a story
[*]content: abstract substance ‘usually’ found in strings
[*]history: a list of (not always all the) versions, (a human-readable document that describes the change?)
(ajayeb.net must always help users) guage the persistence commitments and abilities of repositories and archives <-- element names, values, and precise semantics are in flux
*content variance* in ajayeb.net
(how did i or didn't perform/stage setting user expectations in my apass representations of ajayeb.net)
--> (question of) *objects that grow*, identifier assignment policy, content moves away (varies) from its originaliginal state
(any) content change ==triggers==> generation of new object identifier
finite, indefinite, lifetime, subinfinite
content in the presence of versions
(Calvert's defining “content” without using the term “meaning”:)
[*]content: abstract substance, found in such strings as writing, speech, images, and music, (=/= form, =/= style)
content that includes an actionalbe id string:
•extraversuioned, offering no direct actionalbe access
•introversioned, version is opaque, shyness?, good for longevity, bad for inferring provenance منشاء
found in the wild
found in ajayeb.net:
•constructed content reference
•scholarly web
•standardized query strings
•the question of landing page --with--> typed links navigable by software
how ajayeb.net performs analysis and prioritization of its own service definition?
how ajayeb.net[...]
(321)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%69.2[...]ary masculinity --> “the enduring force of the identification between technology and manliness is not an inherent biological sex difference. it is instead the result of the historical and cultural construction of gender” (Wajcman)
a big part of the problem is that women's technological labor (=/= ghost busters) is culturally invisible --(Katie King in her research on writing technologies argues)--> (a metonymy:) when technologies are reduced to singular, stable, self-contained devices [~ Star Wars] =/= assemblages
[dichotomy of “enforcement =/= destruction” Star Wars either or: if you are not destroying it you are enforcing it]
problems that cannot be conceptualized in terms of measures and endpoints, or which involve holistic, qualitative solutions, will be at a disadvantage for selection
(Cowan shows) the developement of new household tachnologies did not free women from the domestic shpere. rather, it allowed women to enter the paid labor force while leaving the gendered division of labor in the home untouched.
(makes me throw up -->) large literature of self-determination theory (~ showing people are more creative and happy when their work allows them to be autonomous, related, and competent) + reward systems cultivating competitive environments
[*]autonomy: self-willing, volitional, being an agent in the action =/= being a “pawn”
spheres where processes and outcomes have been the name of the game (in feminized fields of education and librarianship)
labs (such as laser developement) that require collaboration with other labs
trading zones: a metaphor for understanding how cooperation between researchers enables new scientific paradigms --> Galison
*the development of this or that research looks like a continuous trajectory, but the trajectory was actually discontinuous and ruptured. that fact that we have invented or discovered something makes that developement seem inevitable, but things could always have turned out some other way* --> Cowan > Calvert
competition is not a guarantor of innovation, our cultural belief in it can obscure other explanations for innovation --> for example (Wylie showing:) (archaeology's enshrined belief that) male-centered hunting activities dominated prehistoric caloric intakes ==✕==> other hypotheses for the transition to agriculture --✕--> women's leading role in the development of agriculture--arguably the most significant innovation in human history--could finally be detected
[bids for status by denying the feminized and second class aspects of library work] --> ***the labor of care is at the core of library work*** --> *teaching, like technology, is always a relationship, and that relationship is undergrided by the labor of care* (--> affective labor is literally vital to the successful delivery of other kinds of services)***
[...]
(322)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%69.4[...]ons for innovation --> for example (Wylie showing:) (archaeology's enshrined belief that) male-centered hunting activities dominated prehistoric caloric intakes ==✕==> other hypotheses for the transition to agriculture --✕--> women's leading role in the development of agriculture--arguably the most significant innovation in human history--could finally be detected
[bids for status by denying the feminized and second class aspects of library work] --> ***the labor of care is at the core of library work*** --> *teaching, like technology, is always a relationship, and that relationship is undergrided by the labor of care* (--> affective labor is literally vital to the successful delivery of other kinds of services)***
the ways women are called on to manage their and other's feelings <--✕--> technology is positioned in out culture as rational and precise and therefore (masculine and) unemotional [--> look at the film Lucy]
successful education and mentorship depend on this skill, which, like household labor, is difficult to account for in “competitive” economic analysis
**articulation work**
the labor necessary to make technologies fit together seamlessly --> Leigh Star
(my work begins in) information systems may leave gaps in work processes that require real-time adjustments, or ‘articulation work,’ to complete the processes
(my research: through ajayeb i have been busy with learning to “make friends” with both technologies and theories)
every system is an assemblage --> Calvert applying Haraway's insight and think of technologies as significant prostheses ==> [*]librarianship: a work that (primarily) hooks up people with their technologies
librarians articulate technologies --> they help people adapt technologies
librarian's articulation work is both technological and affective =/= competitive
(in techno-capital) supressing labor costs ==> deskilling
deskilling and de-professionalization under the intertwined guises of competitiveness and innovation
an example of deskilling:
-Haraway: “to be feminized means to be made extremely vulnerable; able to be disassembled, reassembled, exploited as a reserve labor force, seen less as workers than as servers; subjected to time arrangements on and off the paid job that make a mockery of a limited work day; leading to an existence that always borders on being obscene, out of place, and reducible to sex. deskilling is an old strategy newly applicable to formerly privileged workers.”
education has been difficult to comodify, and remains labor intensive =/= innovations in online education ==> creating inroads in the deskilling and commodification of teaching labor:
•course curriculum --> course content
•teaching --> delivery
*video technologies + internet ==> face-to-face interpersonal r[...]
(323)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%69.4[...]ied
◦etic: within a way to explore the conventions, standards and infrastructures that both constrain and enable their experiences
Leigh Star
•qualitative methods
•lateral thinking
•poetics of infrastructure
•[*]boundary objects: examines assemblages of humans and things, and how things that exist in more than one community of practice are used in performing cooperative work
the role of practical knowledge in organizational life
sensitivity of an ethnomethodological orientation
(apass's) intellectual capital (is not centered in their official document repositories and databases, rather is in the largely undocumented ideas, insights, and know-how of its members: Lilia, Pierre, Nicolas, Joke, Steven, Michele,)
exigencies of work
****much of knowledge often remains embodied in the practice
commonly shared through conversations and stories among small circles of colleagues and work groups --> local vernacular --convert--> other forms ==> other members of the organization can understand & *act upon* together
Sina --> richer comprehension of socially organised work practice into the process of engineering technological systems
Calvert --> her work is about the enduring qualities of the book and how its resistance to commodification enables this thing we call a public library.
she is interested in developing library-appropriate research methods for thinking critically about old and new technologies
-we naturalize the way technological infrastructures make ethical decisions for us =/= producing methods/ethic that allows librarians to mandate characteristics in developing technologies which both preserve librarians’ prerogatives to make (necessary visible) ethical judgment calls <-- Calvert
جعبه--"containers” continue to dictate the name of the game (for the immensely diverse patronage of the public library)
...................................
bilingualism
different languages (farsi and arabic in ajayeb) refers to different value systems and to different lived experience
...................................
[Ahmed]
(complaint ~=) diversity-work = data-collection
we learn about the damage we cause, of how causes are understood as damage
...................................
my old background (in computer sciences):
•www.joelonsoftware.com (Joel Spolsky runs a company which sells bug databases, “FogBugz”)
•wiki.c2.com
•“Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs”
computational process
abstract beings (processes*) manipulate other abstract things (data*)
--> a pattern of rules (program*)
programming: *metalinguistic abstraction* [--> engineering[...]
(325)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%69.6[...]often remains embodied in the practice
commonly shared through conversations and stories among small circles of colleagues and work groups --> local vernacular --convert--> other forms ==> other members of the organization can understand & *act upon* together
Sina --> richer comprehension of socially organised work practice into the process of engineering technological systems
Calvert --> her work is about the enduring qualities of the book and how its resistance to commodification enables this thing we call a public library.
she is interested in developing library-appropriate research methods for thinking critically about old and new technologies
-we naturalize the way technological infrastructures make ethical decisions for us =/= producing methods/ethic that allows librarians to mandate characteristics in developing technologies which both preserve librarians’ prerogatives to make (necessary visible) ethical judgment calls <-- Calvert
جعبه--"containers” continue to dictate the name of the game (for the immensely diverse patronage of the public library)
...................................
bilingualism
different languages (farsi and arabic in ajayeb) refers to different value systems and to different lived experience
...................................
[Ahmed]
(complaint ~=) diversity-work = data-collection
we learn about the damage we cause, of how causes are understood as damage
...................................
my old background (in computer sciences):
•www.joelonsoftware.com (Joel Spolsky runs a company which sells bug databases, “FogBugz”)
•wiki.c2.com
•“Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs”
computational process
abstract beings (processes*) manipulate other abstract things (data*)
--> a pattern of rules (program*)
programming: *metalinguistic abstraction* [--> engineering design] : building a mini-language to express a problem, using a fixed computer programming language (on a given hardware) to construct a new language that enables describing (and hence to think) the problem --> using:
•primitives means of combination
•primitives means of abstraction
--> representation of data and control (<~~ individual bits of storage and primitive machine instructions)
+ using the given hardware to erect systems/utilities for the efficient implementation of resource-limited computations
distinction between “passive” data and “active” processes =/= Lisp
(procedures and data are just abstractions, they are not really distinct) --> programming language should have methods for combining and abstracting procedures and data
means of abstraction: by which compound elements can be named and manipulated as u[...]
(326)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%69.6[...]arabic in ajayeb) refers to different value systems and to different lived experience
...................................
[Ahmed]
(complaint ~=) diversity-work = data-collection
we learn about the damage we cause, of how causes are understood as damage
...................................
my old background (in computer sciences):
•www.joelonsoftware.com (Joel Spolsky runs a company which sells bug databases, “FogBugz”)
•wiki.c2.com
•“Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs”
computational process
abstract beings (processes*) manipulate other abstract things (data*)
--> a pattern of rules (program*)
programming: *metalinguistic abstraction* [--> engineering design] : building a mini-language to express a problem, using a fixed computer programming language (on a given hardware) to construct a new language that enables describing (and hence to think) the problem --> using:
•primitives means of combination
•primitives means of abstraction
--> representation of data and control (<~~ individual bits of storage and primitive machine instructions)
+ using the given hardware to erect systems/utilities for the efficient implementation of resource-limited computations
distinction between “passive” data and “active” processes =/= Lisp
(procedures and data are just abstractions, they are not really distinct) --> programming language should have methods for combining and abstracting procedures and data
means of abstraction: by which compound elements can be named and manipulated as units
modularity --> localized part of the system
<== perception of the system
•objective: viewing a large system as a collection of distinct objects --> concerned with how a computational object can change and yet maintain its identity
•streamous: information that flow in the system --> delayed evaluation
(for example) a bank account: has state in that the answer to the question “Can I withdraw $100?” depends upon the history of deposit and withdrawal transactions
object decomposed into computational objects (each with their own time-varying local state variables) --> model
object programming: model real-world objects with local state by computational objects with local variables --> identify time variation in the real world with time variation in the computer --> implement the time variation of the states of the model objects in the computer with assignments to the local variables of the model objects
--✕--> (how?) model a time function
stream: delayed (infinite) list
stream programming:
•different abstractions such as: map, filter, accumulate,
•transformations of lists
•sequence manip[...]
(327)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%69.6[...])
•wiki.c2.com
•“Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs”
computational process
abstract beings (processes*) manipulate other abstract things (data*)
--> a pattern of rules (program*)
programming: *metalinguistic abstraction* [--> engineering design] : building a mini-language to express a problem, using a fixed computer programming language (on a given hardware) to construct a new language that enables describing (and hence to think) the problem --> using:
•primitives means of combination
•primitives means of abstraction
--> representation of data and control (<~~ individual bits of storage and primitive machine instructions)
+ using the given hardware to erect systems/utilities for the efficient implementation of resource-limited computations
distinction between “passive” data and “active” processes =/= Lisp
(procedures and data are just abstractions, they are not really distinct) --> programming language should have methods for combining and abstracting procedures and data
means of abstraction: by which compound elements can be named and manipulated as units
modularity --> localized part of the system
<== perception of the system
•objective: viewing a large system as a collection of distinct objects --> concerned with how a computational object can change and yet maintain its identity
•streamous: information that flow in the system --> delayed evaluation
(for example) a bank account: has state in that the answer to the question “Can I withdraw $100?” depends upon the history of deposit and withdrawal transactions
object decomposed into computational objects (each with their own time-varying local state variables) --> model
object programming: model real-world objects with local state by computational objects with local variables --> identify time variation in the real world with time variation in the computer --> implement the time variation of the states of the model objects in the computer with assignments to the local variables of the model objects
--✕--> (how?) model a time function
stream: delayed (infinite) list
stream programming:
•different abstractions such as: map, filter, accumulate,
•transformations of lists
•sequence manipulations without incurring the costs of manipulating sequences as lists
•tadriji incremental computation
random: statistical properties of uniform distribution
object-orientation: polymorphic abstract data types =/= relational data model
Building Abstractions with Data
how to use:
•primitive data (numbers)
•primitive operations (arithmetic operations)
building abstractions by c[...]
(328)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%69.7[...]N, hierarchical tree, ‘comments’
skew: verb act, streching, ‘2D field picker’
(slider: marking everything)
semantic in flux + persistence
object repository + identifiers
feedback --> quasi object --> structured knower --> data
#workshop in apass 2018 Summer
...a series of data models that was produced during a three days work session in a.pass May 2018.
The aim was to create a “filter" for the artistic research projects of each participants, in order to train in making meta-linguistic abstractions (on a given computer hardware) to construct a “thing” that enables describing the problem of Building Abstractions with Data, to increase/enhance the expressive/descriptive power of the languages we use. It addresses the question of machine/human readability in the digital imperative of computational world we are inhabiting, with the particular case of a.pass artistic research environments for advanced performance studies.
•interested in computational literacy (including data-collection, librarianship) as part of our *diversity-work* and our *articulation-work*
•interested in different languages (english, computer, non-sign languages, etc.) refers to different value systems and to different lived experience
•interested in the *labor of knowledge-work* (in collective digital flesh life)
•interested in shifts in topology (the ongoing reworking of bodily boundaries of each of our research practices)
•
TERMINOLOGY:
*articulation-work: the labor necessary to make technologies fit together seamlessly
*diversity-work: a kind of work in which we learn about the damage we cause, and of how “causes” are understood as “damage”
*librarianship: a work that hooks up people with their technologies
*data abstraction: a *technique of isolating* (the parts of your mini-language that deal with) how data/info objects are ‘represented’ from (the parts of your mini-language that deal with) how data/info objects are ‘used’ (---> i addressed this in my fable workshop in a totally different epistemology)
*model: your object decomposed into *computational compound objects* (each with their own time-varying local state variables)
(representation of data and control over data:)
*modular: localized part of the system that are produced by the perception of the system
*objective: viewing a large system as a collection of distinct objects. concerned with how a computational object can change and yet maintain its identity
*streamous: information that flow in the system. its evaluation is delayed. infinite list
*metadata: machine-readable persistence statements
*digital interface: discrete object of your “research problem” that refers to something outside the cri (outside the digital [...]
(332)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%70[...]rk*
•interested in different languages (english, computer, non-sign languages, etc.) refers to different value systems and to different lived experience
•interested in the *labor of knowledge-work* (in collective digital flesh life)
•interested in shifts in topology (the ongoing reworking of bodily boundaries of each of our research practices)
•
TERMINOLOGY:
*articulation-work: the labor necessary to make technologies fit together seamlessly
*diversity-work: a kind of work in which we learn about the damage we cause, and of how “causes” are understood as “damage”
*librarianship: a work that hooks up people with their technologies
*data abstraction: a *technique of isolating* (the parts of your mini-language that deal with) how data/info objects are ‘represented’ from (the parts of your mini-language that deal with) how data/info objects are ‘used’ (---> i addressed this in my fable workshop in a totally different epistemology)
*model: your object decomposed into *computational compound objects* (each with their own time-varying local state variables)
(representation of data and control over data:)
*modular: localized part of the system that are produced by the perception of the system
*objective: viewing a large system as a collection of distinct objects. concerned with how a computational object can change and yet maintain its identity
*streamous: information that flow in the system. its evaluation is delayed. infinite list
*metadata: machine-readable persistence statements
*digital interface: discrete object of your “research problem” that refers to something outside the cri (outside the digital model)
*topology: a (proposed) body-plan to investigate questions of *connectivity* and *boundaries*, in order to find out what remains invariant as a result of transformation. this will direct us to propose (well-intended but not tested) *transversal objects*.
to be able to propose: in the culture of each pad+participant+research what connects and joins, what delinks and disconnects.
PRACTICAL:
we want to find out how cri's “filter” translates its politics into metadata
and
what happens in linking the symbolic space of data-model to the (relational, procedural, emotional) qualities of the researches of participants
we will work on the block's opening week feedbacks and process them in this diagram:
feedback --> quasi object --> structured knower --> data
(or technically:)
semantic in flux --> persistence statements --> object repository --> identifiers
(Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are spent on the creation of “quasi objects”)
i propose some (well-intended but not tested) internal categories:
•stickiness
-[...]
(333)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%70[...]rm a zoom
Geert and Michael knowledge zoom-level
Geert's strech-work
which cheats
vulgar: direct, =/= suffisticated, =/= nice(in a classical sense), =/= institutional code [--> a cheat], everyday, good taste, context?!!
suggested topology: skew --changed--> nest (tow branches answering yes and no to: “is he cheating?”)
Leo
stickiness ~ residual (left overs of impression), we couldn't find little objects, litte stickies
zoom is tooooo wide, megacategories, “fermentation” is a different zoom level
cheat --> perception/intention, value of non-doing ?, ‘order is cheat’, ritual ==> heal/cope
vulgar: ritual of popular knowledge, =/= social acceptence, communicating emotional needs, guilt on behalf of the vulgars,
suggested topology: skew (with 4 axioms: negativity, positivity, passivity, ritual)
Caterina
sticky: difiicult to remove categories, dirty, quality of trape, almost negative, like honey as an intermediary sticky for other objects to become sticky
zoom: Latina candition macro, ass rincles micro, herself, change of lens is what matters not the zoom level, the macro of the term culture itself
cheat: against the rule of community/aggreement, always cheating the system, against the game, bad relation to the game, lazy relation, faking?
vulgar: ordinary, insultive, perjurative, of the “people”, (Geert:) a marking always coming from above, what television does: non-actual + spectacle, (Elen:) immoral, not original, not elegant, thinking in terms of the ‘same’, group forming, non-individual, twards mass formation,
suggested topology: nest
Eszter
polarized lense
confusion / being confused is ‘cheating’
stickiness absent
suggested topology: nest (with two branches: naive & political leader)
Goda
nothing sticks anymore therefor we go to swamp to stick to relevant objects
swamp as archive (refuge from the capitalist) =/=? cheat
constructing ‘bad example’ (?) --> role model
zooming in losers of capitalism
X-ray kind of lens into the opacity of swamp
(her) treasures in the swamp [--> epistemological buried objects]
criticizing how capitalism zooms for her irrelevant objects
buffoon --> vulgar
suggested topology: skew (the skew is a plain around the edges, gets deeper in the middle, and a narrow way up in the center: the exit)
Elen
presence of the working of subconscious ==provokes==> etymology
very sticki “hell yea!"s
affirmative, sometimes technical knowledge
something sold (“self”) with something morphic on it (“apparition” or ‘surat’ in farsi)
suggested topology: ramp
Hoda
cheat: sharp radical formation, playing ambiguity
totalizing vision lense (“if then all...”)
“because i asked i could feel”
anti-psychological[...]
(337)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%70.2[...]r />
X-ray kind of lens into the opacity of swamp
(her) treasures in the swamp [--> epistemological buried objects]
criticizing how capitalism zooms for her irrelevant objects
buffoon --> vulgar
suggested topology: skew (the skew is a plain around the edges, gets deeper in the middle, and a narrow way up in the center: the exit)
Elen
presence of the working of subconscious ==provokes==> etymology
very sticki “hell yea!"s
affirmative, sometimes technical knowledge
something sold (“self”) with something morphic on it (“apparition” or ‘surat’ in farsi)
suggested topology: ramp
Hoda
cheat: sharp radical formation, playing ambiguity
totalizing vision lense (“if then all...”)
“because i asked i could feel”
anti-psychological
suggested topology: ramp
Katinka
makeover slider
vulgar: makeover show, e-bay
statements not touching her, something else is sticki object: sympathy?
slider: stack
suggested topology: ramp (makeover)
Nassia
stick: something bodily, heat, sweat, property of objects
zoom is the opposit of body
gaze inside + anatomy
cheating: on people negative / on systems positive
suggested topology: ramp
Laura
osmotic = french kiss
administered (by machine) body
the good example
beauty is invested in...
the (unchanging) core of the cuttle-fish
popular = vulgar
suggested topology: skew (regimented floor plan)
Maurice
cheat --> joker, fool
cute: getting off the leash of institution
bear blurs what...
“but I am just...”
bribe economy --> honest and human
suggested topology: nest
...................................
[title]
archives of open desire
...................................
#drawing exercises in built environment (with Sizek + Mathews https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1542-methods-for-many-anthropocenes-with-andrew-s-mathews)
1. pick a charismatic building/statue/object on your built environment, and draw a form of it, inviting to identify details of the object that reveal aspects of its history or use today
2. compare drawings and use the drawings to tell stories about the object and its use or importance to life in that environment
3. invite to reflect on the ways that drawing infrastructure can reveal processes at multiple temporal and spatial scales
discussion questions/writing response questions:
•Which features of the structure stood out, and what do these suggest about the processes of its creation and use?
•How has its infrastructure changed over time, and how are these changes evidenced in the built form itself?
•How does your structure relate to others in its immediate vicinity, and in what wa[...]
(338)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%70.2[...]orms the subjects of knowledge and knowability --> look at how the judge was talking about art
(question of) the production of subjectivity (of the judge himself as an active knowing agent and the dead-master as the phantasmatic place-holder of meaning)
this is related to: (question of) responsibility and individuality --> influences and efforts of the work. two interesting moments of genesis occurred:
1- in the court “his work” (Beuys) was mysteriously created
2- also when Olga got a phone call from the ministry of culture, “her work” was mysteriously created
--> both the court and the phone call are mystic producers of the subjectivity of the artist dead or alive [#this needs more investigation]
(question of) the production of significance and difference
look at the speech-acts of the judge in the case of Beuys. which nuances of difference are generated, estated, established, and propagated? we can study every syllable of the judge's speech-act. the judge goes from one fable to another: fables of significance, fables of influence, fables of impression, etc.
boundary-making practices in our shared struggling world
the idea that art “starts” and “stops” somewhere
zeroing the artworks ecosystem
when is the moment (or how the moment can be marked) that the judge becomes able to say “OK, I don't know.” or “I am opinionated about this art. Let's bring an expert.”
and beyond that, I am wondering, like that judge, when myself standing in front of an artwork (or any work) how i am able to say “I have an opinion, or, I don't know”, “i need expertise in order to look at this”?
questions of: essence (in art), subjectivity production, protection,
with Vincent
(?what was the) notion of “everything is kept here” in his work
(?why and how) his storytelling was all about design --> his stories of responsibility and factuality
how and why in our artistic practices, production of responsibility and factuality is hold in the terms and services of design and designer that is busy with building enhanced and efficient communication networks historically rooted in the geometries of modernist project?
(?what is the artist's) busy-ness with design --> related to the fathers of correction (?) and proper address
who (and why) wants to look at which past with lenses and geometries of the violent grids of the forefathers of modernist design?
--> ontology of document: an artifact with a specific layout and design
design has to do with the proper address (?) which is (always) about the proper witness (?)
(in the case of Vincent) do you agree with the amerindian know-how that “a good designer is a dead designer”?
(?what was the) proper affect of history (that his work was creating)
through the aesthetic [...]
(339)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%70.4[...]tion is not ‘how can we care more?’ (as predetermined set of affective practices) rather: **what happens to our work when we pay attention to moments where the question of ‘how to care?’ is insistent but not easily answerable** (‘care’ as an analytic or provocation)
-Kenney
...................................
Manoto TV station program “sher yadet nare” شعر یادت نره respond to the questions of translation (from the UK produced program “Don't Forget the Lyrics” into an Iranian contemporary popular media culture) and memory practices (archival memory act performance pop quiz show mixed with consumer culture TV broadcasting)
...................................
*cognitive companions* (--> coordinating multiple agencies characteristically)
-tiny clay token sheep were enclosed in clay envelopes with markings indicating what was inside (*molding and inscribing clay* was the favored sensory technology for making in Mesopotamia 5000 years ago)
•maybe your makings involves “true writing” that companions preferentially with language
•maybe your makings involves spinning plant and animal fiber and feeling, tying, and untying knots
•processual affirmative re-writings
•systeming meditations
•context-sensitive pushback
•operational closure (of a system)
•fluctuation, entrainment, blocked synchrony
•
[Katie King use of a term, how she shifts it from mechanism to affect:] [*]stigmergy: feeling of being in among and as the self-organizing bits that are system-ing (=/= a method of communication in emergent systems, mechanically defined as “indirect coordination” self-organizing termites and ants or flash mobs or political action)
@apass: how do you provide different *undisciplined ways of envisioning* new kinds of environments, artifacts and practices? (entangle design, science, fact and fiction, boundary objects, system-ing, [*]design: ***making things that tell stories*** [=/= telling stories])
(my encounters with) ajayeb's vibrating particularism
[*]website, talksite: play, trial and error, permutation and mistakes (none of it innocent or exemplary @ERG's website) ==> *cognitive reassembly*
-->{relations between developers and users to create and work out a technical interface ==> communicative tangle}
transmedia story (with its origins commercial and suspect, often entangled with social critique and social panic ~= conditions of making knowledge today; we knowingly or without reflection, gather and pin together such stories across media...)
-you can't take *citation pools* for granted
-how we will take what each other says
companion gatherings (do not exactly cohere or consort well) ==sometimes==> violation of standardization (that some believe is more equal)
(companions need to) [*]learn: emergently sensitize and attune among new cognitive[...]
(340)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%70.7[...]ng* new kinds of environments, artifacts and practices? (entangle design, science, fact and fiction, boundary objects, system-ing, [*]design: ***making things that tell stories*** [=/= telling stories])
(my encounters with) ajayeb's vibrating particularism
[*]website, talksite: play, trial and error, permutation and mistakes (none of it innocent or exemplary @ERG's website) ==> *cognitive reassembly*
-->{relations between developers and users to create and work out a technical interface ==> communicative tangle}
transmedia story (with its origins commercial and suspect, often entangled with social critique and social panic ~= conditions of making knowledge today; we knowingly or without reflection, gather and pin together such stories across media...)
-you can't take *citation pools* for granted
-how we will take what each other says
companion gatherings (do not exactly cohere or consort well) ==sometimes==> violation of standardization (that some believe is more equal)
(companions need to) [*]learn: emergently sensitize and attune among new cognitive and political circumstances (in and as their very moments of unknowing, when ethical and moral sortings are properly in flux)
(with) Bateson's negative sensitivities to systems, and with Katies King, I keep discovering just how literal is our many being-ness in multiply embedded sorts of biomic sympoiesis
{[*]lecture: feeling-in-the-mouth system, (the word-as-world inhabited by) alternate and overlapping peoples, memories, attunements, citation pools, histories, communities of practice, knowledges, ocean and freshwater “edges"}
{?can i propose (Katie King and Sandoval's) “oppositional consciousness” instead of (Mouffe's) “agonistic pluralism"}
responses, abilities, infrastructures, distributed embodiments,
[*]traumas: intensities crowded with affiliations, loyalties, essential truths
(Bateson > Leigh Star > Katie King) *transcontextual* (transcontextual circumstances: moving from one context to another, one world to another, one set of knowledges to another) ==> [*]boundary objects: workaround things, concepts, processes, even routines that permit coordination, sometimes collaboration, without consensus (non-conscious and conscious)--local, supralocaling, and global in material topologies in which spacetimenatureculture may be mixed, developmental yet transtemporal, (they don't create boundaries) *they work to keep boundaries from getting in the way of collaboration* [~=? sleep-walking: ignore or even miss that there are boundaries about, or honor boundaries = differences that should be honored without being stuck there]
---[can i suggest ‘enfolding’ instead of ‘sympoiesis’ for artists?]
****ajayeb: my transcontextual habitat**** [--(Katie King)--> sites where people, objects, animals, ecological processes, academic restructurings, and scales of i[...]
(345)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%70.7[...]ld]
‘to feel family and parent memories as our own’ --> a skill that intertwines historical and personal biography (sometimes trauma) as a feature of *memory encoding*
[*]autopoiesis: a notion, a theory of cellular organization, that makes a fold in history --> reformulating an orientation into an ‘experimental epistemology’
*memoir animated word-worlds worm-holed* (~= my lecture-performances, Katie King's talksites --> speculations gathering with stigmergy, recursive paradox, and a sympoiesis of boundary objects)
#my project: redesigning ajayeb's “writings” among dispersed, diffracted, and emergent methods of attention
-to redesign “aboutness” (as nonrepresentational : recursive relational agency of/about reciprocities in worldly processes)
-to redesign fiction of writing (khipu)
-to redesign @apass archive --> records of how things have happened, with whom, when, with what informational needs (instead of abstractions layered up), sometimes as agencies, sometimes as (in Sandoval's terms) oppositional and differential consciousness, (boundary objects) storing and performing our details and affects and memories
punitive parsimonies of explanation:
•over-simplications of complex systems
•pressures for social critique
•to travel as social panic
•retreat to political loyalties (<== confusion overwhelm cognitive schema)
•retreat to political belonging in search of trust
•
(more boundary objects:) many sorting apparatus reframings at varying grains of detail each savoring textures of disciplinary and other precisions amid noncoherent and materializing logics
(constitutive, agential) **cuts are connections**
-to minimize damage and maximize flourishing
differential details --in--> “us” --in--> Bateson's living patterns --in--> starfish's invertebrate radial symmetry --in--> redwood cloning timelines --in--> recursive epigenesis --in--> mechanism and structure in a segmenting egg --in--> human affiliations of power and state and love...
[*]differential consciousness: systems justice sensitive to multiple contexts, *politics of attachment*
@apass's environment (mix of communities of justice and of practice):
belief and disbelief, memberships and belongings, triggered and assembled
****to commit to a well-defined structure of identity for one hour, day, week, month, year**** (=/= Manning)
+ transform that identity according to the requisites of another oppositional ideological tactic (if reading of power's formation require it --> that's how i became more iranian in Europe)
•differential: instantaneous change of one quantity relative to another, a quality that differentiates between similar things (==> derivatives) =/= different
اخرت eschatology
study of end-times [--now--> climate c[...]
(347)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%70.8[...]of how things have happened, with whom, when, with what informational needs (instead of abstractions layered up), sometimes as agencies, sometimes as (in Sandoval's terms) oppositional and differential consciousness, (boundary objects) storing and performing our details and affects and memories
punitive parsimonies of explanation:
•over-simplications of complex systems
•pressures for social critique
•to travel as social panic
•retreat to political loyalties (<== confusion overwhelm cognitive schema)
•retreat to political belonging in search of trust
•
(more boundary objects:) many sorting apparatus reframings at varying grains of detail each savoring textures of disciplinary and other precisions amid noncoherent and materializing logics
(constitutive, agential) **cuts are connections**
-to minimize damage and maximize flourishing
differential details --in--> “us” --in--> Bateson's living patterns --in--> starfish's invertebrate radial symmetry --in--> redwood cloning timelines --in--> recursive epigenesis --in--> mechanism and structure in a segmenting egg --in--> human affiliations of power and state and love...
[*]differential consciousness: systems justice sensitive to multiple contexts, *politics of attachment*
@apass's environment (mix of communities of justice and of practice):
belief and disbelief, memberships and belongings, triggered and assembled
****to commit to a well-defined structure of identity for one hour, day, week, month, year**** (=/= Manning)
+ transform that identity according to the requisites of another oppositional ideological tactic (if reading of power's formation require it --> that's how i became more iranian in Europe)
•differential: instantaneous change of one quantity relative to another, a quality that differentiates between similar things (==> derivatives) =/= different
اخرت eschatology
study of end-times [--now--> climate change, global restructuring, ]
-humans are often precariously enduring on the planet
(Cuban Missile Crisis...)
-when urgencies (become too predictive) ==> less sensitivity to the unanticipated --> (Seba's “save the world” =) all too human desires for control or for moral prescriptions
with Katie King --> *systems justice* requires something much more complicated
•we have to work with our extended being
•find out new things about it
-how can we go beyond human intention and systems of control?
-we need, and there are, many ways to minimize damage and maximize flourishing
(*systems humans participate in and do not control*)
(? am i part of this) “we” and “us” gathers sympoietically these boundary objects storing details and affects
the fable of “if it's about everything it is about nothing” --[...]
(348)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%70.9[...]-> mechanism and structure in a segmenting egg --in--> human affiliations of power and state and love...
[*]differential consciousness: systems justice sensitive to multiple contexts, *politics of attachment*
@apass's environment (mix of communities of justice and of practice):
belief and disbelief, memberships and belongings, triggered and assembled
****to commit to a well-defined structure of identity for one hour, day, week, month, year**** (=/= Manning)
+ transform that identity according to the requisites of another oppositional ideological tactic (if reading of power's formation require it --> that's how i became more iranian in Europe)
•differential: instantaneous change of one quantity relative to another, a quality that differentiates between similar things (==> derivatives) =/= different
اخرت eschatology
study of end-times [--now--> climate change, global restructuring, ]
-humans are often precariously enduring on the planet
(Cuban Missile Crisis...)
-when urgencies (become too predictive) ==> less sensitivity to the unanticipated --> (Seba's “save the world” =) all too human desires for control or for moral prescriptions
with Katie King --> *systems justice* requires something much more complicated
•we have to work with our extended being
•find out new things about it
-how can we go beyond human intention and systems of control?
-we need, and there are, many ways to minimize damage and maximize flourishing
(*systems humans participate in and do not control*)
(? am i part of this) “we” and “us” gathers sympoietically these boundary objects storing details and affects
the fable of “if it's about everything it is about nothing” --> no!
sharpening focus =/= narrowing focus
workshop for thinking
•with objects
◦moved aroundr />
◾in visual play
to take your imaginations along other things
•so their worlds layer and enfold and map out and crochet together
◦so that can be sensed and worked on
(?what are) our helpers in apass:
•companion imaginations = our collective animalities
◦such imaginations have worlds that layer and enfold and map out and crochet together (--> systems humans participate in and do not control)
•our complex personhood
•our distributed being
•objects we take as cognitive companions
•our significant otherness honored in on-going attentions
•new learnings
•new materialities
•
(?what are our) methodology of companioning with things
...................................
what is happening to me: attention to knowledge making practices (in the context of a literary pleasure)
*sharing = making*
*communicating = making*
clues --[...]
(349)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%70.9[...]edictive) ==> less sensitivity to the unanticipated --> (Seba's “save the world” =) all too human desires for control or for moral prescriptions
with Katie King --> *systems justice* requires something much more complicated
•we have to work with our extended being
•find out new things about it
-how can we go beyond human intention and systems of control?
-we need, and there are, many ways to minimize damage and maximize flourishing
(*systems humans participate in and do not control*)
(? am i part of this) “we” and “us” gathers sympoietically these boundary objects storing details and affects
the fable of “if it's about everything it is about nothing” --> no!
sharpening focus =/= narrowing focus
workshop for thinking
•with objects
◦moved around
◾in visual play
to take your imaginations along other things
•so their worlds layer and enfold and map out and crochet together
◦so that can be sensed and worked on
(?what are) our helpers in apass:
•companion imaginations = our collective animalities
◦such imaginations have worlds that layer and enfold and map out and crochet together (--> systems humans participate in and do not control)
•our complex personhood
•our distributed being
•objects we take as cognitive companions
•our significant otherness honored in on-going attentions
•new learnings
•new materialities
•
(?what are our) methodology of companioning with things
...................................
what is happening to me: attention to knowledge making practices (in the context of a literary pleasure)
*sharing = making*
*communicating = making*
clues --for--> contexts --shapes--> how we will take what each other says
(Katie King > Anzaldua:) who and what facilitates such movement among worlds?
home = domination + domestication + love
Katie King:
•why science fiction matters?
•how cultural studies helps us make SF meaningful?
interactive possibilities of media art, commercial production, mass culture
SF = effect of defamiliarization
(problem with Star Trek is that it is over familiar)
Janet, from a lesbian utopian future (death by disease of all the men)
Jeannine, from an alternate present (US never entered WWII)
Jael, where “War Between the Sexes” has become deadly literal
Joanna, the author of the book, Joanna Russ (in a shimmering joking literalization has enfolded into her own story)
my ajayeb studies --> *cultural studies: how cultural products are part of cultural processes* (=/= what makes an art work good) --> getting around the term “art”
-mysteries, romance novels, movies, (bestia[...]
(352)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%70.9[...]nd at the root of a range of social injustices, racism, sexism, homophobia, and others
Star Trek, understood by cultural studies, is complexly contradictory, full of progressive possibilities + structures that shut down such possibility
--study--> cultural sites of struggles for power and for competing visions of justice
Kirk speaks Spock's funeral address and movingly says: “his soul was the most human.” --> “human” simultaneously creates unities across races and nationalities (as a universal term for courage or compassion), just as it also valorizes and makes superior the species “human” ==> new inequality between humans and nonhumans
...................................
wmst601fall10.blogspot.com Katie King
zoo spelled backwards
http://www.ediblegeography.com/cross-species-dining-an-interview-with-natalie-jeremijenko-and-mihir-desai/
Jeremijenko @Sarah
edible lures
bio-amplification that happens through the food web
the New York of...
the Brussels of...
(there is always) the Tehran of X [trees, dogs, rats, moms, thugs, etc.] (=/= the X of The Tehran)
approach: targeted drug delivery --> doing focused interventions =/= treating the whole system
links of how *shared interdependent transsex* [shared rearrangement of sex and re/production] is unfolding
-responding to this rearrangement not through fear of the eco-catastrophic assumptions
*shared interdependent* =/= dependence, independence
prefix -sphere =/= -scape
bioscape --> life and energies (not necessarily “alive”) in relation to an imperfect spherical earth, but also its relations to multiple other possible planes, elements, assemblages, and processes (beyond the biosphere)
(jetscapes, oilscapes, foodscapes, microwavescapes, surveillancescapes, mountainscapes, sunscapes, waterscapes, etc.) -Kier
you could love in a goose's world ==> you are *goosomorphous* (~ producing a goose body & being produced yourself by a new identity --> a not-attributing anthropomorphic love)--> *anthropomorphic: to add new definitions to what it is to be a human being*
[*]anthropo-zoo-genetic practice: practice of domestication, by adding new meanings to X, and new identities that provide these new meanings
“Lorenz is articulated by the setting he created. The setting is articulating new ways of talking, new ways of being human with nonhuman, human with goose, goose with human...” -Despret
de-passion knowledge ==> a world ‘without us’ ==> a world without ‘them’
*impoverished: a world of minds without bodies, of bodies without minds, bodies without hearts, expectations, interests, a world of enthusiastic automata observing strange and mute creatures --Despret--> **a poorly articulated (and poorly articulating) world**
[...]
(353)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%71.1[...]/>
(Guattari's) assemblage: a prepersonal practice, a kind of style, a creative mutation that binds an individual or a group consciously or unconsciously
...................................
*traveling the bibliographic among knowledge worlds*
(Katie making a) multimedia bibliographic essay *with an argument* --> working out a practice of *transdisciplinary inspection*
(@apass, a few index of evaluation for such practice:)
•*how well it learns and models how to be affected or moved*
•*how well it opens up unexpected elements of one's own embodiments in lively and re-sensitizing world*
•(what are) *its possibilities for immersive play among sensations and platforms amid media technologies*
•(what are) *its ways of participating in multispecies learning or self-organization across ecologies
•(what are its capacities for) *mattering without owning the action* [--> play]
transdisciplinary connections have been made on the basis of *play*--between: psychiatry, mathematical, logic, linguistic, histories and evolution of communication, ethology, biophysics, cybernetics, natural history + game industry, fine arts design, education, semiotics, animation, new media, children television, system collaborations
--play--> restructure and intermesh, are recruited in nationalisms, economies, political life
}--Katie--> ***what sorts of politics might allow us to scope and scale among these, to “play” with our own consciousness?***
culture industries
questions
-what does it take to be an intellectual actor across knowledge worlds & a trustworthy member of only some? @Jassem
-[what is] to practice knowledge beyond your control? @Lili
-[what is] to sift among forms of evidence requiring tools you do not have? @Lilia
-[what is] to be required to rank, evaluate, assess results of rules you have not played out (yet)? @Sana
Katie > Bateson's *double bind*
--clue--> meanings and causes of schizophrenia (--> may speak to various conditions of biosocial systems today)
(questions at using the word schizophrenia:)
-what of the sexism of those laying blame on the “schizophrenogenic mother”?
-what of the possiblity of gathering evidence for the effects of expressed emotion in family systems of those with possibly linked to bipolar disorder? (--> that is my problem with Eleanor's stuttering as aesthetics)
double bind: (super confusining) transactions, entire system of layered contradictions mobilized over a range of communication channels
•somthing is prohibited, punished (at one level of meaning or abstraction *within a particular communicating channel*)
•something else is required (at another level) that is impossible to effect if the prohibition is honored
}--> [this] happens over and over again ==until==> suc[...]
(354)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%71.8[...]ogies
•(what are its capacities for) *mattering without owning the action* [--> play]
transdisciplinary connections have been made on the basis of *play*--between: psychiatry, mathematical, logic, linguistic, histories and evolution of communication, ethology, biophysics, cybernetics, natural history + game industry, fine arts design, education, semiotics, animation, new media, children television, system collaborations
--play--> restructure and intermesh, are recruited in nationalisms, economies, political life
}--Katie--> ***what sorts of politics might allow us to scope and scale among these, to “play” with our own consciousness?***
culture industries
questions
-what does it take to be an intellectual actor across knowledge worlds & a trustworthy member of only some? @Jassem
-[what is] to practice knowledge beyond your control? @Lili
-[what is] to sift among forms of evidence requiring tools you do not have? @Lilia
-[what is] to be required to rank, evaluate, assess results of rules you have not played out (yet)? @Sana
Katie > Bateson's *double bind*
--clue--> meanings and causes of schizophrenia (--> may speak to various conditions of biosocial systems today)
(questions at using the word schizophrenia:)
-what of the sexism of those laying blame on the “schizophrenogenic mother”?
-what of the possiblity of gathering evidence for the effects of expressed emotion in family systems of those with possibly linked to bipolar disorder? (--> that is my problem with Eleanor's stuttering as aesthetics)
double bind: (super confusining) transactions, entire system of layered contradictions mobilized over a range of communication channels
•somthing is prohibited, punished (at one level of meaning or abstraction *within a particular communicating channel*)
•something else is required (at another level) that is impossible to effect if the prohibition is honored
}--> [this] happens over and over again ==until==> such *double bind patterning = (becomes experienced as) “reality”*
***they all deal with (some edges of) double bind:
•religious practices
•entertainment
•game design
•learning
•
intolerable conditions ==> creativities
(when crucial context markers distinguishing [one from another] become unrecognizable, contradictory, or fraudulant ==>) “abusive practices ~= challenging practices”
--> (terror & possibility are on the edge in double bind experience =) ***transcontextual confusion*** (<-- requres transcontextual gifts one may or may not have...) @apass #feedback: urgent appropriate response
--Bateson--> double bind patterning = intense:
•contradictory (two order of messages each of which denies the other)
•unvoiced (making explicit checks of context impo[...]
(355)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%71.8[...]l communication *forms of not* : they amuse themselves by performing the communication “this is not it”:
•the puppy nips, but not hard enough to injure --> violence? not. --> the nip actually hurts a bit
•the teen kisses in spin the bottle, but not the person they like the most --> sex? not. --> the kissing blush and stammer
•my body is reacting as if i am in danger, but really i am in front of a computer --> reality? not.
•
}--> double consciousness
(Katie > Bateson) *play creates its own commentary in itself about itself as an intense and pleasurable interactive dynamism* = metacommunication: communicative + neurological + hormonal
***good signaling skills make nonabusive play on the edge of double bind possible***
(skills of) transcontextual movement without falling apart
finding out:
•which bits are active
•which bits are context
•which bits can be made explicit
•which rules are perceptible
•which distributed embodiments, cognitions, and infrastructures are in play
(these are the skills needed for the kind of game we play in apass)
playing/gaming (now covers): gambling, economic game theory, game art, design, learning, role playing, system theory --> *playing with our distributed being* [Katie's accounting for digital]
-what the hell are my hormonal plays? (not always including another person)
(for Haraway [*]wording:) game of cat's cradle (across a range of transmedia) pictured, described, metacommunicated, performed, extended, *relayed*
(my image assemblages: writing:) techno-organic polyglot polymorphic wiring diagrams
to pattern
to relay (passing something along, relaying =/= sharing)
to perceive multiform
rewarded by dopamine
triggered by pleasure, anticipation, yawning fields for memory [--> my ajayeb study], learning and unlearning, tenacious addictive repetitions
tools: drawing, role playing, gaming, writing, critiquing, reviewing, costuming, songwriting, singing, webby community building, techy arts, fans advocating their interests in films
--> shaping environments and contexts for imagination and cognition
*wording: a practice of displaying + crafting worlds, of sharing + enjoying expertise, of noticing tiny details of connection and similarity amid the tweaks and frissons of alternative shadings across many intertextualities of association, history, genre, care*
in interface
what was obvious to one was mystery to another
what was trivial to one was a barrier to another
how do you reply in terms that are alien to you?
@apass
*actual materialities of distributed thinking* <--among-- infrastructures of:
•publication
•media
•conferences
•scholarly communication
•research results and pr[...]
(358)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%72[...] />
odor kit
a device organized in a careful pallete of small differences
learning to be affected --entails--> a dynamic trajectory by which we learn to register and become sensitive to what the world is made of
body parts are progressively acquired --> world counter-parts are being registered in a new way (= my ajayeb studies)
*acquiring a body: a progressive enterprise that produces at once a sensory medium and a sensitive world [---> go to Captain Marvel 2019 film]
what sort of project of multiplicity is transdisciplinarity?
what sort of double consciousness might it array in which political economies?
(Bateson's) distributed being = we don't end at our skin
***what does it mean to say to any particular group of people that we do not end at our skin?!***
what sort of boundary object is this “skin”?
(Keeling > Katie) a book is a wormhole --into--> transdisciplinary universe
*lyricism of surplus*
“the end of the world... work with me”
agencies of valorization (of pricing, of valuing, of mobilizing labor) : political economy of acquiring body parts from the skin's edge
*agencies of capital: worldly processes of economic systems articulating and distributed among, but not reproducing the powers of the state, or of community, family, or nation*
+ other agencies:
•sensory-motor apparatus and affectivities
•thinkings and memory-images distributed across people and media
(sometimes) layered double-bind systems ==> numbing out
queerly valorized --Keeling-->
if Pam Grier is a locus of desire for both heterosexual males and for lesbians such as Lesbian Avengers’ lesbian prtygoers, then her presence on The L Word [TV series] is another way the series seeks to bring these populations together in a shared project of value production
phenomena: topological reconfigurings/entanglements/relationalities/(re)articulations
ongoing reconfis of world ==> = agency =/= attribute
national agendas for innovation and economic positioning
which surplus populations will be enrolled into which kinds of institutions for knowledge work becomes an element of global academic restructuring
restructuring: politicizing funding + ...
intellectual double bind of having:
1. to address many diverging audiences simultaneously under the threat of survival
2. to author knowledges as merely one of multiple agencies with very limited control
==> *posthumanities*
(partial and highly distributed) authorial and receptive agencies --require--> affective labors -->
•sifting among authoritative and alternative knowledges
•clarifying affiliations
•inspiring trust
(Ahmed's material feminism) @apass
whose material[...]
(359)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%72.1[...]he Terminator is finally terminated by a determined woman using rather old-fashioned technology)
absolutely will not stop
inside: hyperalloy combat chassis, microprocessor controlled, fully armoured, very tough
outside: living human tissue, flesh, skin, hair, blood --> controlled by a clinical logic: *it cannot be reasoned with*, it cannot be bargained with
its metal skeleton rises from the ashes and carries on with its mission. the skeleton too is chopped to bits, the individual bits come to life and continue with their goal
(for Sardar) modernity is the conceptual equivalent of the Terminator (incepted in European Enlightenment: modernize traditional cultures and relentlessly lead mankind, screaming and protesting, by the nose towards a progressive utopia)
modernity ~=> (witnessed, if not caused:)
•death and elimination of numerous cultures
•destruction of countless communities and histories
◦disappearance of hundreds of valuable animal and plant species
•transformed arable land into wastelands and deserts
modernity: the official culture of the world
(Nietzsche, Heidegger -->) it is not possible to think our way out of modernity with the philosophical system of thought and language supplied by modernity
--> Vattimo's (bad) philosophy of crisis:
•history
what was traditionally referred to as “history” is now perceived as having broken down into an infinity of “histories” that can no longer be (re)combined into a single narrative governed by a central theme
(today:) history = a kind of writing
•progress: *something qualitatively different from what precedes it* (a forward movement in history) --✕--> [now:] welf established technique (of such masters as Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Lyotard and Baudrillard:) to deconstruct rational metaphysics in order to open it, to rewrite it and thus to lay the foundationdation, in terms of a Marxian-inspired historicism, of new truths for a postmodernist thought
•(Vattimo's use of) nihilism as weapon to attack notions of ‘truth’ and ‘reason’ (in western metaphysics) ==>
◦‘logic = (just another kind of) rhetoric’
◦‘truth = will to power (by those who claim to be seeking truth over those who are being addressed by them)’
◦‘science and technology = dominating metaphysical systems’
--✕--> (eliminated any) possibility of a dialogue with cultures that are truly other as the rational metaphysics of science and technology
(the idea of) plurality of cultures and discourses must become a basic premise of postmodernist thought ==> widespread and widely pluralistic religious revival [+ excessive indulgence in relativism]
(the meaning of) morality and principles of justice in a postmodern world: [democracy's western ethos:]
•recognition of human needs
•courage
-[...]
(361)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%72.4[...]odernity: the official culture of the world
(Nietzsche, Heidegger -->) it is not possible to think our way out of modernity with the philosophical system of thought and language supplied by modernity
--> Vattimo's (bad) philosophy of crisis:
•history
what was traditionally referred to as “history” is now perceived as having broken down into an infinity of “histories” that can no longer be (re)combined into a single narrative governed by a central theme
(today:) history = a kind of writing
•progress: *something qualitatively different from what precedes it* (a forward movement in history) --✕--> [now:] welf established technique (of such masters as Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Lyotard and Baudrillard:) to deconstruct rational metaphysics in order to open it, to rewrite it and thus to lay the foundation, in terms of a Marxian-inspired historicism, of new truths for a postmodernist thought
•(Vattimo's use of) nihilism as weapon to attack notions of ‘truth’ and ‘reason’ (in western metaphysics) ==>
◦‘logic = (just another kind of) rhetoric’
◦‘truth = will to power (by those who claim to be seeking truth over those who are being addressed by them)’
◦‘science and technology = dominating metaphysical systems’
--✕--> (eliminated any) possibility of a dialogue with cultures that are truly other as the rational metaphysics of science and technology
(the idea of) plurality of cultures and discourses must become a basic premise of postmodernist thought ==> widespread and widely pluralistic religious revival [+ excessive indulgence in relativism]
(the meaning of) morality and principles of justice in a postmodern world: [democracy's western ethos:]
•recognition of human needs
•courage
•solidarity
•justice
•prudence
•(virtue of) participating in rational discourse
(Sardar's reading:)
•stating the obvious with a sense of grand discovery is an essential postmodern disease
•what modern science and technology, free market economy and multinational corporations are doing in the name of freedom, justice and fairness
--> despite wonderful sentiments, and all the arguments for justice and equify, we end up with more of the same
(problem of the East with) modernity: a European cultural construct based on specific historical legacy and condition, and its basic goal has always been to shape science, politics, arts, morality and the world according to its own image and inner logic
+
much of postmodernist thought is a sitnilar European construct and continues the old programme in a renewed attempt to justify neomarxism or new brands of liberal humanism
-what is a a genuine, radical departure from postmodernism?
religiosity: that which transcends the world (can be expressed in Fascism, Com[...]
(362)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%72.5[...]•postmodernism acknowledges, appreciates and wants to learn from the wisdom of traditional societies ~= neoconservative religious fundamentalism =/= constructive nihilism
[the strive for a new ‘enchanted science’ (=/= sacred science) that] overcomes the separation between truth and virtue, value and fact, ethics and practical necessity
(Falk's) Disneyland postmodernism:
•abstract affirmation of a holistic harmonious future
•homogenized uniformity (based on a colonizing logic and westernization of the globe)
•reinterpret science and natural reality as confirmatory of a spiritual grounding for human
•holistic possibilities of encompassing conflict
•***postmodernism as an expression of the privileged status of the West***
*greek gnosis is the Terminator in its guise of mystic* (which provided the Enlightenment with its springboard and modernity with its mission to subjugate non-western cultures)
/>
arrogance and authoritarianism are intrinsic in both Greek rationalist and mystical thoughts:
•Socrates --> worshipped reason and was an arrogant and obnoxious man who enjoyed ridiculing ordinary folks
•Buddah --> worshipped nature and produced a totally authoritarian system of thought (as have most philosophers in western history who have appealed to nature for ethics)
new postmodernism's value:
•ecological wisdom
•grassroots democracy
•personal and social responsibility
•non-violence
•decentralization
•community-based economics
•postpatriarchal values
•respect for diversity
•global responsibility
•future focus
*modernity is based on a fundamental value-idea --> secularism (a value whose opposite cannot be chosen as value)*
...................................
importance of scale
archive --> scale of the infinite
< />
...................................
*history of knowledge [in my work on ajayeb] = dream of knowledge (present in the mind) of the people who are not anglophone =/= history of science*
inside and outide the mental map of the historian (of science)
SDzVaBj492s
Daston on *disciplinary neurosis* of the history of science
all timelines are maps (are chronologies, are provincial)
most drawings are maps (are charming)
[Sina:] ****can we have (imagine) science without modernity (not coming right after it)??**** <-- my research question (to separate the bond between science and modernity? to flow the curiosity in that direction)
{ the idea of “science created the modern world + western global dominance” (=/= everyone else) }==> “understanding of modernity = understanding history of science”
(one of rare moments that) european middle ages is conflated with the whole of middle[...]
(363)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%72.6[...]he mind) of the people who are not anglophone =/= history of science*
inside and outide the mental map of the historian (of science)
SDzVaBj492s
Daston on *disciplinary neurosis* of the history of science
all timelines are maps (are chronologies, are provincial)
most drawings are maps (are charming)
[Sina:] ****can we have (imagine) science without modernity (not coming right after it)??**** <-- my research question (to separate the bond between science and modernity? to flow the curiosity in that direction)
{ the idea of “science created the modern world + western global dominance” (=/= everyone else) }==> “understanding of modernity = understanding history of science”
(one of rare moments that) european middle ages is conflated with the whole of middle east civilization, as pre-Newtonian (in the eyes of W. Rostow)
--> cold war (maneuvering for the alliances of the newly decolonized nations)
--> all the ways of knowing that were not included in the current Anglophone and Francophone definition of “science = the natural sciences in English only in mid 19th century” =/= elm علم, Wissenschaft
**there is no culture without (its own implicit systematics of) knowledge**
•epistemological hierarchy (even without the display or existence of *epistemic culture* [dedicated to the persue of knoweldge] --> yet put pressure on communities of learning ==> ideas & practices, for example alchemy was court science par excellence)
•social hierarchy
•rational who can practice them why
(Daston:) the stuck of hands-on knowledge shoots up and then metaphysics plump it --> persue of knowledge becomes collective (with different pressure points)
for many cultures [including Persian]:
•the philology (grammer) is the queen of the sciences
•the stricing prevalence of *dispute: intellectual discourse staged as agonistic duel --> (most of our) ***intellectual life is conducted as polemic***
...................................
the more you study an environment the less your inheritiability of that environment will be (?)
...................................
history: study of past as it it commemorate in traces (textual, physical, etc.) =/= [ajayeb studies =] memory studies: subjective commemoration of the past, collective forms of commemorations (for example the name of streets, or monuments, or unconscious way of navigating in Tajrish square, etc.) --> present in oral interviews
•how the past has been enlisted emotionally, politically, communally,,, (in various causes: construction of autobiography to the construction of national myth) [==> objectivity does not make sense in memory studies]
•it includes (not only that which cab be documented, it rather) includes an element of the subjective : how people feel [...]
(364)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%72.6[...] act of) teletechnic encompassment
*spirit mediumship*
[auratic threshold of representation]
(the nationally renowned spirit medium) Chuchad, flamboyant media savvy
daguerreotypy: a demonic receiving device that had the capacity to retain and thereby diminish the photographed subject's substance
(in Thai) kaan thaay [taking, wasting] ruup [picture]
•Thai word for photography
•concomitant transformation and discharge
--✕--> spirit practices were brought into conversation with the mass media
•conceptualized largely in terms of atavism and/or residue (repressed orgiastic impulse buried)
•(located on the periphery of) the *nation's geo-body* [=/= state's formed public]
(from the perspective of rationalist Buddhist orthodoxy [and in the case of iranian superstitions, Holakouee خرافه khorafe] -->) mediumship: (imagined as) a temporal interruption of the nation's modernity
communist occult practices
emasculating magic
phantasmatic triad of nation, religion, monarch
mediums = state's other
[today]
•identification between the local and the global (facilitated by transnational communication systems) compete with those of the nationalism
•*market-based discourses of civic politics in the anticipation of being seen from afar by a multinational media audience*
•
mediumship reborn as...
•circulating along with its own images
•part of an endlessly proliferating series (=/= double of a lost original) in which it merely seeks to be legible as an image of its displaced self
[a figure many artists today want to be: spirit] *medium* (profession of epiphanic discovery) --transmitting--> paranoiac messages --prophesying--> boundary penetration (originated with the state)
(revolution reduced to) the status of mise-emise-en-scene
bourgeois democracy
market-based discourses of civic politics
simulacral space of the new mediascape
(Chuchad's promise of authenticity -->) violent authenticity of an exposure in which mediumship's representations would be renounced --> *techniques of the performance themselves become the object of performative inscription*
history of religious legitimacies
populist conservative monk --> religious sermon in the format of emphatically dialogic, using vernacular forms and local dialects to disseminate [--> content remaines deeply orthodox in its valorization of the foundational texts + its ritualist inscription]
+
medium's anti-ontological discovery
~=>
either there is nothing to transmit or there is no means of transmission = silence or white noise
Phra Phyom --> embodiment of fame itself, a bastardized auratic presence that is always arriving (~ imminent without s[...]
(365)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%72.8[...]ructed ~= honouring the problem ~= following it up & letting oneself be led by it --> Alice Wonderland chasing rabbits
****questions do not call for explanation or elucidation, questions call for creation**** ~= [*]riddles: the beginnings of stories ==> set those who are summoned by the enigma to work in a particular way: “what manner of living will make it possible to understand these riddless?”
riddle: key + guide
(speaking trope saying senses -->) tropisms =/= meanings
trope = affects that magnetize you
forces that pass through you and steer you
what should i do with ajayeb? = what kind of meaning is requested of me? ****what is my obligation to the meaning i am seeking?**** [=/= Mette's work]
...................................
to bring to BOZAR project with Goda into my interest in geo-feminism
the question of naming, of taxonomy --> a way of being into connectedness
[*]ajayeb studies = **how to inherit natural history otherwise**, how to think about natural history, embracing other (than western) heritages of natural history that enlarges the world for us and the ones we are living with
plantation system:
1. radical simplification, elimination of whole categories of players (in systemic encounters)
2. radical substitution, whole domains (plant life, animal life, human labor system in interaction with animals and plants and microbs) are substituted
==> radical break of connection to place
==> release of numbers : value added processes based on the management of numbers
to look at the planetary shape of some of our problems
-scene = condition of...
scenography --> ‘scene’ is a visual spatial way of thinking about what makes the ‘condition’ of something
...................................
(Calvert on The Nature of Difference book @Quinsy)
rise of population genomics
•efforts like Human Genome project --> refusing to afford a genetic basis for race categories
•tools to identify “deep ancestry” (indicating a geographic origin in prehistory)
postracial politics
recreational genomics --mutating--> “race” out of 19th century concept of “blood quantum” that imperfectly signals complex tribal relatedness and membership
(purchasers of) **genome = book of life** ==> racialized and medicalized subjects
*mutated racial discourses*
renaissance of race categories
science has the authority to establish truth claims that scholars in the humanities must reckon with
humanities scholars may avoid a scientific debate because:
1- they feel out of their depths interpreting scientific data
2- they resist scientific authority in response to well-documented instanc[...]
(366)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%73.6[...]t of degeneration
•“more often than not, the views of society have shaped science rather than the other way around. in this instance, it may be time for science to reshape the views of society.” [<-- scary!]
•
to start with political agenda (good or bad) and fit evidence to that
political correctness (~ a social interest)
dogged persue of truth
*science's power to beguile اغفال imagination* (for example genomics testing to discover and reveal “truths” about unknown ancestry)
}--> (a post World War II and post-holocaust aspiratoin:) *the allure here is to finally prove we are all the same under the skin, or at least that we have more in common than we had liked to admit* <-- another project for making race matter, but differently
(Quinsy urgently need to learn) how not to be conversation stopper
Bland + Doan's Sexology Uncensored
...................................
>
scope of information science --> [*]document: organized physical evidence
new digital technologies renews old questions and also old confusions between medium, message, and meaning
document
ordniary information storage and retrieval system?
bibliography:
•collecting
•preserving
•organizing (arranging)
•representing (describing)
•selecting (retrieving)
•reproducing (copying)
•disseminating
•
(of documents)
early 20th century --> documentation adopted (in europe) instead of bibliography
[*]documentation: a set of techniques developed to mange significant (or potentially significant) [*]document: any expression of human thought (beyond written texts)
~-> *novel form of signifying objects*
objects bearing traces of...
*if you are informed by observation of it, you are looking at a document*ument*
document: any material basis for extending our knowledge which is available for study or comparison
*capable of being used for:
•*reference*
•*study*
•*authority*
1951
document: evidence in support of a fact
any physical or symbiotic sign, preserved or recorded, intended to represent, to reconstruct, or to demonstrate a physical or conceptual phenomenon
--> viewed with access to evidence
=/= (concerned with) text
document =/= ajayeb's text object [--> pop-up book]
(object) (document?)
star in the sky no
photo of star yes
stone in river no
stone in museum yes
animal in wild no
animal in zoo yes
Briet's rules for determining when an object has become a document:
1. there is materiality
2. there is intentionality
3. the objects have to be processed (they have [...]
(369)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%73.7[...]g information to be freely accessed via computers and networks, without the censorious mediation of embodied librarians)
libraries --> techniques for ordering (~-> discourse of standardization)
(shifting) ways the library has operated alongside the state as a disciplinary & ideological apparatus
•18th century --> national library
•19th century --> new techniques for ordering, discourse of standardization and order (in the library) + searching and retrieval external to the mind of the librarian
•19th century --> [emerging understanding of the role of literacy in worker self improvement ==>] public library <==> a project of nation, citizenship, democracy, self-betterment, universal education + concurrent with a serious reconstitution of hierarchies of access to books
•late 19th century --> paternalist financial auspices of Andrew Carnegie (who funded 1689 library buildings) for the explicit objective of the self-education of
>
workers and immigrants --purpose--> acculturation and assimilation
•Paul Otlet --> universal decimal classification 1899
•late 20th century --> dreams of intelligent computers and objectivized information science : (from) library school --to--> school of information management systems
•
}--> *schematization efforts* --> (20th century) library science (continue producing itself) as a cooperative venture of flourishing information [triumphant rationalism]
•standardization
•automation
•propagate
•expand
(in the name of) democratization & civil rights
library ==contribute==> to the civic sphere:
•providing the information
•providing *behaviors* necessary for appropriate citizenship
library ==> classification system (DDC) --> general knowledge organization tool
late 20th century neo-liberal rationality ==intensify==>
•moral directive for self-betterbetterment (as workers)
•reorienting the relation of subjects (toward the state and the social) as one of consumership
+ shift in the definition of knowledge
technobibliocapital --> (new era of) ordering texts & subjects
[*appreciative =/= affirmative* <-- learning from Calvert, we can be appreciative but not affirmative]
[to be critical =] ****not to:
•dismiss X (by thinking of it as) composed entirely of domination [<-- @apass, Pierre] ~= to laud something as a timeless ideal
•evoke a sense of relief that we have X that are free (of power relations, freely available to all, and filled with free-flowing information)
}--> historical + present + future-looking formulations of X
•reverence for libraries of long gone days...
•accolades مراسم اعطای منصب شوالیه for librarians as heroes...
•libraries as the saviors of the people...
•as just another manifestat[...]
(370)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%74[...]
•19th century --> [emerging understanding of the role of literacy in worker self improvement ==>] public library <==> a project of nation, citizenship, democracy, self-betterment, universal education + concurrent with a serious reconstitution of hierarchies of access to books
•late 19th century --> paternalist financial auspices of Andrew Carnegie (who funded 1689 library buildings) for the explicit objective of the self-education of
workers and immigrants --purpose--> acculturation and assimilation
•Paul Otlet --> universal decimal classification 1899
•late 20th century --> dreams of intelligent computers and objectivized information science : (from) library school --to--> school of information management systems
•
}--> *schematization efforts* --> (20th century) library science (continue producing itself) as a cooperative venture of flourishing information [triumphant rationalism]
•standardization
•automation
>
•propagate
•expand
(in the name of) democratization & civil rights
library ==contribute==> to the civic sphere:
•providing the information
•providing *behaviors* necessary for appropriate citizenship
library ==> classification system (DDC) --> general knowledge organization tool
late 20th century neo-liberal rationality ==intensify==>
•moral directive for self-betterment (as workers)
•reorienting the relation of subjects (toward the state and the social) as one of consumership
+ shift in the definition of knowledge
technobibliocapital --> (new era of) ordering texts & subjects
[*appreciative =/= affirmative* <-- learning from Calvert, we can be appreciative but not affirmative]
[to be critical =] ****not to:
•dismiss X (by thinking of it as) composed entirely of domination [<-- @apass, Pierre] ~= to laud something as a timeless idealr />
•evoke a sense of relief that we have X that are free (of power relations, freely available to all, and filled with free-flowing information)
}--> historical + present + future-looking formulations of X
•reverence for libraries of long gone days...
•accolades مراسم اعطای منصب شوالیه for librarians as heroes...
•libraries as the saviors of the people...
•as just another manifestation of government intrusion (paternalism, library: robust civilizing apparatuses, an ideal philanthropic gift)...
--Calvert--> **libraries are potent resources with vast possibilities for creating the worlds we inhabit** -->[*]library: (collectively produced ~ both collectively funded and collected from many sources) vibrant sites of knowledge generation + of power (for those who generate knowledge through libraries in turn diffuse this knowledge through other places and other people)
without a robust definition of p[...]
(371)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%74[...] />
ideology of authenticity (in live music)
at the level of cultural economy --> theatre (live performance) =/= mass media
...................................
[why is contemporary art so reluctant to describe our experience of digitized life? --Bishop-->] digital ~= code (inherently alien to human perception) --> a linguistic model
Guy Debord --> (*physical and the social were pitched against the virtual and the representational* ~ “subjective =/= technological” -->) social relations today are not mediated by monodirectional media imagery ==>
•favor intersubjective exchange and homespun activities (cooking, gardening, conversation) with the aim of reinforcing a social bond fragmented by spectacle
•desire for face-to-face relations against the disembodiment of the Internet
•retro-craftiness
•fiddly collages
•tapestries
--assert--> subjectivity (+ tactility) =/= impregnable surface of the screen
reformatting
transcoding
modulation of preexisting files --> selection strategy ~~> meaningful recontextualization (of existing artifacts)
paranoid will to connect what cannot be connected
subjective rationales
arbitrary systems (=/= established taxonomies)
vernacular forms of aggregation --> everyone with a personal computer today has become a de facto archivist (storing and filing thousands of documents, images, and music files, + porn)
analog in appearance + digital in structure
...................................
eschatos: furthest, last (in Greek)
theological anthropology --> the theory of the person
?how eschatological attitudes changed over time + how they hovered over human experience
millenarian expectation
?how year 1000 was perceived
•preoccupation with the time of Christ second coming
•natural and political disasters and upheavals --sign--> denouncement of sacred history
medieval = fear + passion (+ expectation) ==> eschatological imagination
escapology: significance of immanent (catastrophic) future history
calculations of the end
demand for reform
monastic analysis
discourse against an identifiable moment of apocalypse
•antichrist
•whore of Babylon
•angelic pope
unfolding end of history [humbling of the mighty] + justice for the inarticulate (oppressed) [exhalation of the meek]
apocalyptic speculation about the enclosed unclean people of Gog and Magog
mystical response
spasmodic irrationality
the fate of the individual at the moment of “personal death” --> guilt culture (fear of damnation ==> life = ritual preparations for dying)
d[...]
(372)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%74.3[...]ternal impressions
the importance of attention to the conception of subjective time in Augustine and Husserl
(curiosity triggered by) wonder for Descartes
in 18th century:
-‘unified’ operation of mental life
-force of a sensation
-an effect of an event external to the subject
--✕-->
in 19th century, attention: an essential but fragile imposition of coherence and clarity onto the dispersed content of consciousness
running in the park, a motif of selfhood, of individual freedom, finality of the possibility of soul from the enduring experience of active, willed effort in relation to the body
==> moi: a repository of self-initiated (mental physical) activity and free will
-running in park/city: a priori believe in the self
-your experience is yours
•attention
•judgement
•memory
•perception
•mediation
apperception --> nature of intuition --> (a mobile and dynamic) conception of will --> motor activity
19th century:
attention = will
character = unity
attention ==> mind --{attention is plainly the essential condition of the formation and development of mind}, systematic acquirement of knowledge, for the control of passions and emotions
--> powerful accounts of the nature of human subjectivity
practical or knowledge world of objects (the berlin naturkunde museum)
attention became part of the dense network of institutional discourses/practices around which “the truth of perception was organised and structured”
not part of a “regime of power” rather part of a space in which new conditions of subjectivity were articulated
19th century reconceptualization of attention: inevitable fragmentation of a visual field, an activity of exclusion, of rendering parts of a perceptual field unperceived ==>
1. attention as expression of the conscious will of an autonomous subject, as free choice, part of that subject's self-constituting freedom
2. attention as a function of biologically determined instinct, shaped our lived relation to environment
3. attentive subject could be produced and managed through the knowledge and control of external procedures of stimulation: technologies of attraction [--> formative component of a modernized mass visual culture (in the West): strategies of engaging an attentive spectator: comedians smirking at the camera, gesturing conjurers in magic film --> a cinema that displays its visibility, rupturing a self-enclosed fictional world for a chance to solicit the attention of the spectator; Gunning 1990]
Hegel's understanding of attention as “the beginning of education”
(rationalizing possibilities of) psychometrics
a site of quantification
==> subjective operations of repression an[...]
(373)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%75[...]s of socially determined norms and is part of the formation of a modern technological milieu
1879, Wundt's psychology laboratory in Leipzig, one of the practical and discursive spaces within modernity in which human beings “problematized what they are.” Foucault/
(Wundt's account defined attention [= will] as one of the highest integrative functions [---> go to #integrative in Sennett], its essential role in producing an effective unity of consciousness)
part of the cultural logic of capitalism demands that we accept as natural switching our attention rapidly from one thing to another --> (capitalism as a) regime of reciprocal attentiveness and distraction
conceptualizer of a new economic and social space based on the quantification and distribution of energy:
•Wener von Siemens
•Lord Kelvin: globalization of telegraphic communication and subsequently in the commodification and marketing of electric power (in England) [telegraph: a world of anonymous, decontextualized information; moved history into the background and amplified the instant and simultaneous present/person]
•Edison: transition to centralised corporate capitalism (in late 19th century): his role in the emergence of a new system of quantification and distribution, a system for transmission and reception as abstract processes, ways in which a space of consumption and circulation could be dynamized/activated --> social field of individual subjects could be arranged into increasingly separate and specialized units (of consumption)
“Edison was a holistic conceptualizer and determined solver of the problems associated with the growth of systems” (Crary > Hughes)
Edison is paradigmatic: *the indistinction between information and visual images, and the making of quantifiable and abstract flow into the object of attentive consumption. his grasp of some of the systemic features of capitalism (in 1880s and 1890s) underscores the abstract nature of the products he “invented”. his work is inseparable from the continual manufacturer of new needs and the consequent restructuring of the network of relations in which such products would be consumed* --> other participants in the same historical project of perpetual rationalization and modernization: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Andrew Grove, etc.
(kinetoscope and phonograph logic:) the structuring of perceptual experience in terms of a solitary rather than a collective subject --> today's computer screen as the primary vehicle for the distribution and consumption (of electronic commodities)
(late 20th century) management of attention <-- capacity of an observer to adjust to continual repatterning of the ways in which a sensory world can be consumed
@Hoda
ADD
dubious classification of an attentive deficit disorder --> durability of attention (posed as [implicitly] natural function[...]
(374)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%75.1[...]istribution and consumption (of electronic commodities)
(late 20th century) management of attention <-- capacity of an observer to adjust to continual repatterning of the ways in which a sensory world can be consumed
@Hoda
ADD
dubious classification of an attentive deficit disorder --> durability of attention (posed as [implicitly] natural function) as a normative category of institutional power
-social construction of illness
-now ADD is not linked to any weakness of the will
-in adults: any economic shortcoming or social insecurity is now understandable in terms of a failure to apply oneself attentively to the ideologically determined standards of performance and “achievement”
--> in a culture that is so relentlessly founded on a short attention span, on the logic of the nonsequitur, on perceptual overload, on the generalized ethic of “getting ahead,” on the celebration of aggressiveness, (Crary poses that it is nonsensical to pathologize attention in this culture, a double bind, in which the individual is caught between subjective dislocations of modernization and imperative for institutional discipline and productivity)
(Miller @Zoumana) ...the unconscious as part of a system in which ‘automatic’ behaviour was reciprocally intertwined with the changing needs of conscious activity, including attention. in contrast to the custodial Freudian interpretation, many 19th century psychologists saw the unconscious as “actively generating the processes which are integral to memory, perception, and behaviour. its contents are inaccessible not, as in psychoanalytic theory, because they are held in strenuously preventive detention but, more interestingly, because the effective implementation of cognition and conduct does not actually require comprehensive awareness.
Darwin: a certain kind of reactive attention was believed to be an essential part of human biology, systematic response to novel stimuli (visual, olfactory, or auditory)
-an attentive observer might appear motionless
-an ideo-motor network of forces --> that which immobilizes
(the structural psychology of) associationism (theories of knowledge)
institutional discourse
techniques of the subject
attention (~= will) ~/= consciousness
(noncoincidence of attention with consciousness)
<-- modern shift to semantic and semiotic frameworks of analysis
(from epistemology --to--> hermeneutics : Mallarme, Nietzsche, Peirce, Wittgenstein, Heidegger --> the question of how a subject is provisionally constructed through language and other systems of social meaning and value --> termination of various analysis of consciousness --> epistemological crisis
observer (once understood in terms of the essential subjectivity of vision) ==> attention became constitutive (and de[...]
(378)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%75.2[...]termined standards of performance and “achievement”
--> in a culture that is so relentlessly founded on a short attention span, on the logic of the nonsequitur, on perceptual overload, on the generalized ethic of “getting ahead,” on the celebration of aggressiveness, (Crary poses that it is nonsensical to pathologize attention in this culture, a double bind, in which the individual is caught between subjective dislocations of modernization and imperative for institutional discipline and productivity)
(Miller @Zoumana) ...the unconscious as part of a system in which ‘automatic’ behaviour was reciprocally intertwined with the changing needs of conscious activity, including attention. in contrast to the custodial Freudian interpretation, many 19th century psychologists saw the unconscious as “actively generating the processes which are integral to memory, perception, and behaviour. its contents are inaccessible not, as in psychoanalytic theory, because they are held in strenuously preventive detention but, more interestingly, because the effective implementation of cognition and conduct does not actually require comprehensive awareness.
Darwin: a certain kind of reactive attention was believed to be an essential part of human biology, systematic response to novel stimuli (visual, olfactory, or auditory)
-an attentive observer might appear motionless
-an ideo-motor network of forces --> that which immobilizes
(the structural psychology of) associationism (theories of knowledge)
institutional discourse
techniques of the subject
attention (~= will) ~/= consciousness
(noncoincidence of attention with consciousness)
<-- modern shift to semantic and semiotic frameworks of analysis
(from epistemology --to--> hermeneutics : Mallarme, Nietzsche, Peirce, Wittgenstein, Heidegger --> the question of how a subject is provisionally constructed through language and other systems of social meaning and value --> termination of various analysis of consciousness --> epistemological crisis
observer (once understood in terms of the essential subjectivity of vision) ==> attention became constitutive (and destabilizing) component of perception
unmediated givenness of sense data --✕--> cognition
community of interpretation : a shifting and intervening space of socially articulated psychological functions, institutional imperative, and a wide range of techniques, practices, and discourses relating to the perceptual experience of a subject in time --> forms of exteriority in modernity's account of perception
eschatological dream of 19th century : “to make this knowledge of man exist so that man could be liberated by it from his alienation, liberated from all the determinations of which he was not the master” --> one made of man an object of kno[...]
(379)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%75.2[...]t to the custodial Freudian interpretation, many 19th century psychologists saw the unconscious as “actively generating the processes which are integral to memory, perception, and behaviour. its contents are inaccessible not, as in psychoanalytic theory, because they are held in strenuously preventive detention but, more interestingly, because the effective implementation of cognition and conduct does not actually require comprehensive awareness.
Darwin: a certain kind of reactive attention was believed to be an essential part of human biology, systematic response to novel stimuli (visual, olfactory, or auditory)
-an attentive observer might appear motionless
-an ideo-motor network of forces --> that which immobilizes
(the structural psychology of) associationism (theories of knowledge)
institutional discourse
techniques of the subject
attention (~= will) ~/= consciousness
(noncoincidence of attention with consciousness)
<-- modern shift to semantic and semiotic frameworks of analysis
(from epistemology --to--> hermeneutics : Mallarme, Nietzsche, Peirce, Wittgenstein, Heidegger --> the question of how a subject is provisionally constructed through language and other systems of social meaning and value --> termination of various analysis of consciousness --> epistemological crisis
observer (once understood in terms of the essential subjectivity of vision) ==> attention became constitutive (and destabilizing) component of perception
unmediated givenness of sense data --✕--> cognition
community of interpretation : a shifting and intervening space of socially articulated psychological functions, institutional imperative, and a wide range of techniques, practices, and discourses relating to the perceptual experience of a subject in time --> forms of exteriority in modernity's account of perception
eschatological dream of 19th century : “to make this knowledge of man exist so that man could be liberated by it from his alienation, liberated from all the determinations of which he was not the master” --> one made of man an object of knowledge so that man could become subject of his own liberty and of his own existence
-Foucault
exercise of a sovereign and attentive will [we see this in Olearius] --> claiming subject's self-possession --> conscious organizer of that perceptible world --> master
(Nietzsche:) “i am free” ==> “he must obey” }--> the inward certainty that obedience will be rendered -->{ *exclusively: (the unconditional evaluation that) ‘this and nothing else is necessary now’
co-presence of the world (can never be guaranteed [by scientific psychology])
<== attentiveness is continuous with distraction, reverie, dissociation, trance,
@apass, work on attention is so interesting [...]
(380)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%75.2[...] />
panoptic techniques & attentive imperatives (function reciprocally)
classical power:
•repression
•ideology
•
modern power:
•normalization
•modulation
•modelling
•*information that bear on:
◦language
◦perception
◦desire
◦movement
--> by way of microassemblages
(= *subjectification*)
-the shape of absentmindedness in my performances is skewed by the attentive imperative of modern subjectification? something unfocused, **something folds back against itself** =/= “processing” a stream of heterogeneous stimuli (in film, radio, television, cyberspace)
-my audience felt an uncomfortable sense of their own inattentiveness (in my performances of the experience of dissociation, of temporality incompatible with capitalist patterns of flow). what is they are asking me is to give a stream of heterogeneous stimuli --> ****how temporality is inhabited****
to diffuse (societies of spectacle) into (a single) integrated society of spectacle (==> separate, isolated, but not introspective individuals)
(film and television in competition with) *daydream* --> a domain of resistance internal to any system of coercion [?]-->
(?is capitalism's contemporary arrangement allowing/playing an) oscillation between spectacular attentiveness and the free play of subjective absorption
~ info/telematic systems simulating the possibility of drift ==> modes of sedentarization
--> (Crary asks) how creative modes of trance, inattention, daydream, and fixation can flourish in the interstices of these circuits? @Sven ...amid technological forms of boredom ~ *modern boredom* [--> cognitive and perceptual synthesis. boredom is involved with the intensification of a sense of selfhood? ~~--> romantic (turned inside out?)]
*perception without awareness* (vilified in art and criticism)
--?--> automaticity: performance under conditions of divided attention
...................................
Manet: disengagement of perception from a model of interiority
Manet's painting discloses some of the important reconfigurations of the status of the observer (that had occurred by the middle of 19th century)
my Olearius video figuratively repositions the observing subject outside of the term of which system of vision?
world present to the subject in relations of reflection?
...three observers by the virtue of their unmediated, unobstructed self-presence
=/= *romanticism: (maintained) resistance to externality*
[compare Manet's balcony with Goya's painting Majas on a Balcony]
(Manet's palette corresponding to) the luminous wavelengths of a new technological lifeworld...
Manet dramatizing (but not lamenting) the evaporation of a cohesive world...
[...]
(381)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%75.8[...]uals)
(film and television in competition with) *daydream* --> a domain of resistance internal to any system of coercion [?]-->
(?is capitalism's contemporary arrangement allowing/playing an) oscillation between spectacular attentiveness and the free play of subjective absorption
~ info/telematic systems simulating the possibility of drift ==> modes of sedentarization
--> (Crary asks) how creative modes of trance, inattention, daydream, and fixation can flourish in the interstices of these circuits? @Sven ...amid technological forms of boredom ~ *modern boredom* [--> cognitive and perceptual synthesis. boredom is involved with the intensification of a sense of selfhood? ~~--> romantic (turned inside out?)]
*perception without awareness* (vilified in art and criticism)
--?--> automaticity: performance under conditions of divided attention
...................................
Manet: disengagement of perception from a model of interiority
Manet's painting discloses some of the important reconfigurations of the status of the observer (that had occurred by the middle of 19th century)
my Olearius video figuratively repositions the observing subject outside of the term of which system of vision?
world present to the subject in relations of reflection?
...three observers by the virtue of their unmediated, unobstructed self-presence
=/= *romanticism: (maintained) resistance to externality*
[compare Manet's balcony with Goya's painting Majas on a Balcony]
(Manet's palette corresponding to) the luminous wavelengths of a new technological lifeworld...
Manet dramatizing (but not lamenting) the evaporation of a cohesive world...
(finely assembled) architecture of solitude and separation [...] in a space of a newly modern individual autonomy
modernization of urban space --> (crucial component of the) regime of perceptual adaptability
diagram = optical system --?--> ocular [~ *rationalizable spatial account of vision*] --> vision as reflexive : property of a subject figured as a geometric point (=/= ambiguity and disorganization of intersubjective relations)
diagram --?--> coherence
(vison, it is not a coin with double sides, it is rather a labyrinth --Lacan--> desiring subject =/= point-to-point optical system)
*palpable immediacy of a modernized presence* (--> to grasp and inhabit it, then dissolution into self-absorption)
(?Sven plays with that) *nebulous obscurity of presence*
uncertain content of the interior
(in Manet:) attentive: fluctuating membrane, delicate pattern of folding and unfolding on to the world
--> rhythm of opening and closing (this “social dispersion of modernity” [--> impassive autosufficiency of the individual observer] h[...]
(383)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%75.9[...]awareness* (vilified in art and criticism)
--?--> automaticity: performance under conditions of divided attention
...................................
Manet: disengagement of perception from a model of interiority
Manet's painting discloses some of the important reconfigurations of the status of the observer (that had occurred by the middle of 19th century)
my Olearius video figuratively repositions the observing subject outside of the term of which system of vision?
world present to the subject in relations of reflection?
...three observers by the virtue of their unmediated, unobstructed self-presence
=/= *romanticism: (maintained) resistance to externality*
[compare Manet's balcony with Goya's painting Majas on a Balcony]
(Manet's palette corresponding to) the luminous wavelengths of a new technological lifeworld...
Manet dramatizing (but not lamenting) the evaporation of a cohesive world...
(finely assembled) architecture of solitude and separation [...] in a space of a newly modern individual autonomy
modernization of urban space --> (crucial component of the) regime of perceptual adaptability
diagram = optical system --?--> ocular [~ *rationalizable spatial account of vision*] --> vision as reflexive : property of a subject figured as a geometric point (=/= ambiguity and disorganization of intersubjective relations)
diagram --?--> coherence
(vison, it is not a coin with double sides, it is rather a labyrinth --Lacan--> desiring subject =/= point-to-point optical system)
*palpable immediacy of a modernized presence* (--> to grasp and inhabit it, then dissolution into self-absorption)
(?Sven plays with that) *nebulous obscurity of presence*
uncertain content of the interior
(in Manet:) attentive: fluctuating membrane, delicate pattern of folding and unfolding on to the world
--> rhythm of opening and closing (this “social dispersion of modernity” [--> impassive autosufficiency of the individual observer] has become part of European subjectivity, it is good[?!], and i miss it in middle east postmodernism)
Manet tentative splitting of:
•figural representational facts
•facts of autonomous pictorial substance
(--> now a European tradition)
(a movement towards “formlessness” very different than eastern chaotic imagination)
Manet's confident inattention to the object and its coherence
fastening together and grounding narrative content
[Manet (and many other 1880 painters) -->] problem of [*]realism: a question of tenuous relation between perceptual synthesis and dissociation
=/= question of mimesis
achieving a *reality-effect* ~= to hold something together, to “contain” thin[...]
(384)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%75.9[...]the world in a productive or social way
•rejection of habitual or conventional patterns of organized perceptual information]
-this is part of the phenomenology of knowledge***
desymbolization of perception --> Foad
{for Janet:} attention: power of mental synthesis (~ the power of subject to form new perception, to have memories)
{for Freud:} attention: dynamic activity of repression
“[a] society recognizes itself and its own positivity through the morbid and pathological forms it identifies and invents” (Crary + Foucault)
subjectivity: provisional assembly of mobile and mutable components --> attentiveness:
•conscious/voluntary {task-oriented, higher behaviour}
•automatic/passive {areas of habitual activity, daydreaming, reverie, somnambulant states}
(the state of) the seated woman
[19th century regime of facility]
Clark's “face of fashion” (= Manet's blanks), fashion would keep one's face from any identity (==> ‘the look’: public, outward, blase, impassive, not bored, not tired, not disdainful, not quite focused on anything)
impersonality -->(Benjamin's modernity:) public space in which, for the first time, individuals are systematically habituated not to return the gaze of the other [~-> “chi dadash!?” or “was guckst du?!"]
-for three centuries, the meaning of human face was explained in terms of rhetoric of language. in 19th century suddenly face occupies a precarious position: it is belonging to a human being as a:
•physiological organism
•privatized, socialized individual subject
--Darwin--> split status of face:
•symptom of an organism's anatomical and physiological functioning
•the mark of the success or failure of a process of self-mastery and control (in the social construction of a normative individual)
*face: (sign of a disquieting) continuum between the somatic and the social*
boarded on a trance
(Bachelard:) reverie: irreality function --> keep the psyche on the fringe of all the brutality of a hostile and foreign nonself (!)
--✕--> reality function --> adapt to reality: to manufacture works which are realities
modern flirtation: refusal and the withdrawal of the self are fused with the phenomenon of drawing attention to the self (in one indivisible act)
-Simmel
Poetics of Reverie (by Bachelard) @Eszter
how Sina works
(in my more recent works i play with) [no] enactment of visual mastery
[no] ocular potency
-my storytelling operates in a state of distraction, in which the stability of the story begin to erode ==> breakdown of normative attentive narratives --> the audience finds themselves in a trancelike state ==> condition for mobile and transient synthesis
-i mobilize a set of associative[...]
(386)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%76.1[...] />
disparate optical axes.
into the eclipse mental
the environment grows dim
attentive subject --Ricoeur--> part of the open state of the universe of signs --> juncture of the erotic & the semantic
symbols, in their overloaded semiotic banality, is where the ruse of desire is expressed
(a diagram:) parallel lines --> a principle of nonconvergence --> the binocularity of vision is not united or synthesized on a specific plane or point --> a spliting apart : *unreconciled binocular disparity* (--situates--> difference and nonidentity within the midst of perception)
[=/= convergence (without which a normative attention would be impossible ==> world of focused clarity)]
...as if a single object is seen by two nonreconciled eyes
seamless modulation of normative attention into a dispersed distraction ==?!==> (reassemblage and rebinding into the) *repetitive laws of the unconscious*
...the image of conjugality and adultery simultaneously
-fixed position of limits
Bindung --> figuration of an adulterous liaison
[*]adultery (in the context of modernization): “a cynicism of forms,” merely another effect of a dominant system of exchange (circulation and equivalence)
Tanner
[*]infidelity: capacity to decompose oneself into the plurality of distinctly different essential tendencies, to detach the periphery from the center, and to make interests and activities independent of their integral interconnection [=/=? my work]
Simmel
in Duchampian terminology: (Manet's painting In The Conservatory) blossoming bride and bachelor enmeshed in a verdant anticonjugal machine of perpetual nonfulfilment
cultural corrosion of conjugality <== (one of) larger disintegration of premodern positions (of male and female):
•violent insertion of women into the process of commodity production
*labor and society assume a mass character ==> “women = mass articles” & lose:
•their “natural” qualities (female essence defined by the production of life)
•their poetic aura
traditional positions disrupted by the logic of exchangeability***
greenhouses in 19th century, extended the dwelling and bore witness to the expansion of the private sphere. greenhouse provided a place to stroll in all weathers
--> frozen temporality ~=> memory and history excluded =(congealed present)==> dehistorisized subjectivity
(fundamental) withdrawal of the possibility of *gesture* --Agamben--> part of the particularly modern failure of ethos, of character
[gesture <-->? ethos]
incapacitation: renunciation of *potentia*[~= capacity for being affected, any expansion of practical being <-- Spinoza]
smell of flowers = disintegrated product of their s[...]
(387)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%76.2[...]nhouse provided a place to stroll in all weathers
--> frozen temporality ~=> memory and history excluded =(congealed present)==> dehistorisized subjectivity
(fundamental) withdrawal of the possibility of *gesture* --Agamben--> part of the particularly modern failure of ethos, of character
[gesture <-->? ethos]
incapacitation: renunciation of *potentia*[~= capacity for being affected, any expansion of practical being <-- Spinoza]
smell of flowers = disintegrated product of their sexual metabolism <-- Freud
D+G becoming woman
*man: molar entity par excellence (=/= becomings are molecular), man constitutes the majority, the standard in which the majority is based: white, male, adult, rational ~ the average european, the subject of enunciation
@Leo
(--> problematized by Grosz ---> go to ajayeb.net/?q=Grosz%2BDeleuze%2BGuattari)
the perpetual self-invention of “free subjectivity” --defining--> modernity
cycle of decoding & recoding :
daring innovation --> hyperanxious self-consolidation --> renewed innovation --> ...
Manet =/= Caravaggio:
•intense optical contact
•tactile contact
•a reciprocal system of investment in the transactional nature of the encounter--infused with the interplay of the social, libidinal, and economic difference
hands as:
•expression of individual consciousness (in Caravaggio)
•instrument of active gesture (in Manet)
activity ~=? simulation of gesture
pointing index finger
confirmation of the impossibility of a direct perception, impossibility of an attention that was an immediate possession of its object (--> Sa'di pointing out to the moon and his lover...)--> every point of fixation is deferral
--✕--> (once?) functioned to denote a plane of transcendence
figuration of utopia --> simultaneous mapping out of death, absence, and finitude of historical subjectivity
Peirce's (nonoptical operation of attentive consciousness =/= Descartes) --> impossibility of direct intuition, of interpretive process
**cognition and perception could only occur indirectly**
index: exercising a real physiological force over the attention -- mesmerized into its particular object of sense.
= *everything that focuses the attention*, (everything that startles us into an index)
--> make something conceptually present which is perceptually absent
installed economy of attraction(/distraction) [in European cities, and its deviation in Tehran differences]
fashion works to bind attention onto its own pseudo-unity
against the living, fashion asserts the rights of corpse and the sex appeal of the inorganic
(Benjamin)
--> death drive
[...]
(388)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%76.3[...]n of exchange
•creation of the means of communication and transport
•*eradication of space by time*
instantaneity of vision from which space is deleted
vision compatible with the smooth space of the global marketplace
uprooting of perception from any stable space-time coordination
the history of capitalism is the history of (effective operation of) overcoming obstacles of:
•anything with a permanent stable location (incapable of being inserted into circulation)
•anything that is part of a code (traditional or established pattern of behaviour, resisting deployment in networks of abstract relations)
(images productive of labor usually end up intermingling the representation of that land as a *tranquil earthly paradise*)
an image: self-evident presence of native workers on the coffee plantation; they remain invisible except as abstract components within flow of capital or as “naturalized” elements within an imaginary landscape
an image: workers gathering and packing beans under midday clouds; a fraudulently homogenous and static image of elements (bodies and land) which have become quantified and exchangeable, part of an unstable system *incapable of immobilization*. it discloses the antinomic coexistence of living labor power (with its irreducible existential temporalities) and the tendency of capital to “circulation without circulation time.” the violence and social devastation underlying this all over distribution of human being within the lush vegetation of an apparently premodern landscape...
(my period of abstract digital image glitch: play of machinic objectivity -->) Muybridge's 1870s photograph of The Horse Motion ==> “*to be outside of* a syntactical and semantic organization that supported historical narrative”
-the machinic objectivity in play does not stake out a subjective position from which a “this happened” or a sense of “having been there” could be authenticated’ [=/= my later lecture-performances]. they are instances of *combinatorial logic* in which the individual images, although ostensibly part of a linear sequence and syntax [--> the way Julia noted ‘adjacency’ in the way i was presenting my image series], have a (‘newly’ in 19th century) ***autonomous, floating identity.*** their immobilization and groundlessness and mutable temporality is also the condition of their detachment from any binding continuities or trajectories, in a *decoding of perceptual experience*[--> also relevant for Foad's ahistorical “intuition"]. {this is could be related to a deeper relation with my youth's reality and its perceptions =/= attachment to binding continuities and trajectories are central to my recent work****}
==>
•rationalization and quantification of movement and time (==> mechanization of the body)
•posing plural scattering of attenti[...]
(389)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%76.6[...]/>
early 1890s
the time when western science accepts the notion “that there might be several ways to represent the same fact” [--> elephant parable =/= situated knowledges]
1850s and 1860s
construction of models of the reflex functioning of the human nervous system --> nature of human response to external stimulation
dynamogenesis (~ every state of consciousness tends to realize itself in an appropriate muscular movement)
vision reformed in 19th century: nonoptical modal of attentive subject, not the one who sees, rather, the subject is the one who is susceptible to psychomotor induction
(what was once figured as visual representation are now) the abstract and quantified reactions of the body as a composite set of physical systems
--Fere--> instrumental relocation of vision (from a disembodied and punctual system of images) to an interplay of forces and motor reactions (in which representation is irrelevant)ant)
[this is inseparable from the larger project of scientific amelioration of collective emotional hygiene of the 19th century]
--> *sensation: part of a sequence of events (in which the end point is not an inner state, such as: knowledge, cognition, perception, rather:) it is that which culminates in movement
some of the 1850s rationalizing ambitions (of widespread philosophical and scientific conceptualization of a fundamental relation between sensation and motor behaviour) indirectly informs Seurat's work --proposing-->{ sensory stimuli ==> motor expression (in the perceiver) }--> (the question of) **human response based on bypassing of conscious thought altogether**
(very important for iranian artists: the question of the *rational mind of an observer* and intellectual construction directed to that --> status of a conscious observer)
-producing effects involuntary in the observer
-(Foad and Sina engaging with an) exclusive[...]
(390)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%76.8[...] ... rearranged and made exchangeable
@Laura: *designated bodies* (are never permanent[!!?])
-is she actually busy with destiny and destined bodies? (for Laura:) design = destiny
-is she going to redesignate? how can she not? if she believes that the designated bodies are already on a fixed destiny or destination
[designate: appointed or made clear which place or direction spatially or figuratively. related to *design --> destine*]
early 1890s
the time when western science accepts the notion “that there might be several ways to represent the same fact” [--> elephant parable =/= situated knowledges]
1850s and 1860s
construction of models of the reflex functioning of the human nervous system --> nature of human response to external stimulation
dynamogenesis (~ every state of consciousness tends to realize itself in an appropriate muscular movement)
vision reformed in 19th century: nonoptical modal of attentive subject, not the one who sees, rather, the subject is the one who is susceptible to psychomotor induction
(what was once figured as visual representation are now) the abstract and quantified reactions of the body as a composite set of physical systems
--Fere--> instrumental relocation of vision (from a disembodied and punctual system of images) to an interplay of forces and motor reactions (in which representation is irrelevant)
[this is inseparable from the larger project of scientific amelioration of collective emotional hygiene of the 19th century]
--> *sensation: part of a sequence of events (in which the end point is not an inner state, such as: knowledge, cognition, perception, rather:) it is that which culminates in movement
some of the 1850s rationalizing ambitions (of widespread philosophical and scientific conceptualization of a fundamental relation between sensation and motor behaviour) indirectly informs Seurat's work --proposing-->{ sensory stimuli ==> motor expression (in the perceiver) }--> (the question of) **human response based on bypassing of conscious thought altogether**
(very important for iranian artists: the question of the *rational mind of an observer* and intellectual construction directed to that --> status of a conscious observer)
-producing effects involuntary in the observer
-(Foad and Sina engaging with an) exclusively optical consciousness of the individual human subject [--> can we go beyond that? to which philosophical sensual ethics of bodily awareness Foad and Sina are optically bind to? which anti-optical aesthetic positions are available to us?]
•Foad's neoimpressionist: implication of total organic resonance ==>{ from organic activity of perception --to--> transforming physical existence }
•Sina's Einfuhlung: mode of intense perceptual absorption in which lines and forms are experienced as catal[...]
(391)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%76.8[...]of equilibrium* that i wanted to achieve in the painting not symbolically)
(i prefer *pseudo solidarity*)
emergence of aggregates
manifestations of complexities
(this is happening in)
late 19th century is also the age of attempting to validate a relatively stable and domesticated image of the dynamism and destructiveness of capital
modernity --> state of harmonious equilibrium --> interaction in relation of agreement and mutuality --> new set of moral imperative --> *solidarity*: the duty to become a “social being” (~ to become socialized in relation to a wide range of institutions)
anomie: breakdown of an organized set of connections and adjacencies, deranges a normally regulated flow of communication and feedback (=/= solidarity) }--> thermodynamic framework
anomie (used to be) a celebrated passage is when the individual worker is no longer the living cell moved by continual contact with neighboring cells (=/= now in late liberal capitalism anomie is the mode of labor)
anomie (in thermodynamic framework) describes a statistical distribution of elements in which insufficient contact or adjacency prevents the flow of messages our information within the system as a whole. systemwide increase of local zones of dissociation and disintegration <-- Durkheim
(Durkheim was writing at the time of) crisis of social cohesion within a transitional period ==> a systematic response was being shaped (foreshadowed in several of Seurat's major works) -*-*-*--> the making of a society whose effective unity was founded on the ubiquity of *spectacular consumption through mass media and technologies of illusion*
if *religion* was the key “collective representation” (in Durkheim premodern mechanical solidarity) --> *spectacle* was to become the primary simulation of cohesion and unification within 20th century modernity****r />
--> (Debord:) capitalism's solidarity: unity of subjects in their very separatedness
(Crary >) Seurat's entire visual output: [systematic movement between:]
•large engineered representation of social collectivities (~ crowds)
•images of isolation and separation
“[...]the unity of his optical aggregates was always an ephemeral subjective construction that never objectively modified the abstract and segmented status of his dots, so his assembling of provisional social aggregates never alters the obdurately insular character of their individual human character.”
Seurat stakes out a darker and more skeptical position than Durkheim about the possibility of *positive knowledge of “social reality”* --> his works are determined by a sense of **impalpability and evanescence of the social itself**
(what is my “sociology” in my works?)
{ great social catastrophes of the 19th c[...]
(393)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%77.1[...] framework
anomie (used to be) a celebrated passage is when the individual worker is no longer the living cell moved by continual contact with neighboring cells (=/= now in late liberal capitalism anomie is the mode of labor)
anomie (in thermodynamic framework) describes a statistical distribution of elements in which insufficient contact or adjacency prevents the flow of messages our information within the system as a whole. systemwide increase of local zones of dissociation and disintegration <-- Durkheim
(Durkheim was writing at the time of) crisis of social cohesion within a transitional period ==> a systematic response was being shaped (foreshadowed in several of Seurat's major works) -*-*-*--> the making of a society whose effective unity was founded on the ubiquity of *spectacular consumption through mass media and technologies of illusion*
if *religion* was the key “collective representation” (in Durkheim premodern mechanical solidarity) --> *spectacle* was to become the primary simulation of cohesion and unification within 20th century modernity****
--> (Debord:) capitalism's solidarity: unity of subjects in their very separatedness
(Crary >) Seurat's entire visual output: [systematic movement between:]
•large engineered representation of social collectivities (~ crowds)
•images of isolation and separation
“[...]the unity of his optical aggregates was always an ephemeral subjective construction that never objectively modified the abstract and segmented status of his dots, so his assembling of provisional social aggregates never alters the obdurately insular character of their individual human character.”
Seurat stakes out a darker and more skeptical position than Durkheim about the possibility of *positive knowledge of “social reality”* --> his works are determined by a sense of **impalpability and evanescence of the social itself**
(what is my “sociology” in my works?)
{ great social catastrophes of the 19th century + accumulated bourgeois anxiety over the disorders of revolution (1848 and 1871) }==> (emergence of French 1890s of) “science” of sociology
let's stop mourning about the earlier model of political theater being displaced by by the modernized forms of spectacle (--> my critic on Kurzgesagt is outdated?)
(for Seurat:) *art work = solicitation of attention*
play of attraction and absence (in Sina and Foad's work):
a visual or performative work designed around the cancellation and suspension of what it promises
Seurat --> (Sina and) Foad's obliteration of the scenographic conditions of the work even as he simulates their persistence
Seurat --> my work has always been scenic, positioning its viewers before an apparently stagelike space [without orth[...]
(396)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%77.1[...]hat it is the price but that it represents it, is its representative--the materially present representative of the price, this of itself, and as such, of the exchange value of commodities.”
(we should ask the question of “symbolism” at each age again and differently)
(Brian Rotman:) an isomorphism (emerged in renaissance) between:
•vanishing point in visual representation
•use of zero in computation
•abstract money in economic exchange
[*]vanishing point: a figure of the coincidence of the transcendent & the empirical
[Panofsky: perspective as symbolic form: perspective in transforming the ‘ousia’ (reality) into ‘phainomenon’ (appearance), seams to reduce the divine to a mere subject matter for human consciousness; but for that very reason, conversely, it'd expands human consciousness into a vessel for the divine]
--> an infinity not only prefigured in god, but indeed actually embodied in empirical reality --> ****in Last Supper the miraculous becomes the direct experience of the beholder, in that the supernatural events in a sense erupt into his own, apparently natural visual space****
effects of vanishing point
(in all my image assemblages there is a system of fluid relations in which subjectivity is imagined [not in terms of coincidence with a quantifiable point of view])--> in every image and diagram subjectivity (~ identity and reference) is imagined in a system of relations @Eszter's binding order
zero
primal image of nothingness
•kabbalah
•the egg
•oroboros
•
my issue with contemporary ritual practices in the arts is that they are based the symbolic privileging of the معنوی noumenal =/= phenomenal
(rituals that artists practice today, Leonardo's Last Supper:) symbolic opening to a noumenal world =/= facade of appearance and semblance
(=/=? coalescence, knowledge and diversity work, etc.)
i can't insist enough (learning from Seurat) that the foreclosure of the noumenal world (the true world) is inseparable from the fragility and insubstantiality of the apparent world
(shabah az sanaat joda nist شبه و صنع)
a residue of an earlier social world (in which the sacred, the occult, and artmaking were much more closely tied together)
...Egyptian priest, medieval magus, Babylonian snake charmer, headsman or executioner,
suggestion of magician --> emblematic of a modernized order of spectacle --> mass management of attentiveness + its commodification : *rationalized magic of a technology of attraction* (that conceals its synthetic construction)
opposition of charismatic and bureaucratic domination
Weber's “routinizatiom" = castration of charisma (==> permanent institutional structures)
prophetic/oracular individual (has seen the extincti[...]
(397)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%77.4[...]ms of rationalization that eradicated aura in the first place --> appearance is privileged over essence, and technological rationality is deployed in the service of appearance
negotiating rapture
(ajayeb ~/=?) to produce a dialectic image: to criticize modernity (~ foregrounding of the aura) through an act of memory, and at the same time, to criticize archaism (~ nostalgia for the aura) through an act of essentially modern invention (substitution and designification)
color...
how forms of ‘synthesis’ (optical mixture, purely additive and accumulative functions of industrialized procedures) produce ‘qualitative’ change (pre-bourgeois non-quantitative connection to nature, for which color did not exist as an autonomous experience or as a separate and specialized science)
Seurat: surface fascinations consequences of a disappointment at the impossibility of immediacy and the historical inaccessibility of the dream of the ritual/magical practice of art --> Seurat's work's exhaustive denial of presence ==> (another kind of immediacy:) the ***fusing of image and eye*** @Foad
=/= art as a medium for disclosing essential truths
=/= redemptive optimism
...................................
a desiring system dependent on operations of rebinding and immobilization
the problem of *contrapposto* [and *chiaroscuro* (contrast of colors)]:
a Renaissance ideal, invoking a metaphysical dualism that found expression in rhetorical devices of contrast and antithesis --sumbsumed--> within the *larger ideal of opposition*
contrapposto could be decorative or structural, justified by its vividness, the clarity with which art could bring opposites into harmony
classical image (of the body) as an expression of a self-determining balance of internal forces
“authentic images” seem capable of action, seem to posses dynamis (supernatural power)
Universal Exposition of 1889 + international congresses of hypnosis:
•rationalizing ideological imperatives (concertized in the actual organization and layout of the Exposition --> rooted in the enlightenment's faith in man's limitless potential for mastery of his environment)
•hypnosis optimistically as the most effective entry into (previously inaccessible) territories and processes of human psychic life (and hopefully mastering this terrain)
•extensive presentation of colonial people and lifestyle as objects of spectacle in the 1889 Exposition (simulated villages inhabited by Congolese, Javanese, New Caledonians, Senegalese, and others) --> became contents of an imaginary immortal space, contents that were seemingly assimilable into the rationalizing taxonomy of the exposition's organizational schema [=/= Steven's schema in apass]
*both hypnosis (with its profoundly indecipherable trance states) & material [...]
(399)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%77.9[...]9th century's interrelations between:
•photography
•hypnosis (both medically and mythically)
•cinema
•psychoanalysis
*strong epistemological configurations* ==> a new place of subject (in western culture) linked to formation of certain images of:
•time
•past
•memory
(for Brown Sequard) collective effect of acts of inhibition and dynamogeny ==> hypnotism ==(Charles Henry)==> demonstrating that perception is fundamentally unconscious (consisting of involuntary responses to stimuli) ==Seurat==> *indistinction between the automatism of a hypnotized subject and the perceptual experience of a so-called normal subject* --Foad--> [reading people in a contemporary social phenomena of suggestion and somnambulism (~ sleep-walking):] a bypassing of intellectual process (such as reason and judgement) in an attentive spectator
-{my discussion with Foad was perhaps about the question of social justice (= sufferings and causes are constant and self-evident, singularized principle of value [social injury] located in a particular product [political processes leading to social injustice]) and/against thinking with assemblages (= contextual relational uncertain concept of the social of things and people as system of objects, in which nothing merely rules itself or others, emphasizing heterogeneity and process)... finally saying that Tehran is a relational heterogeneous uncertain system [Sina] and not a destined coerced programmed doom-object [Foad]. question: can we oppose the ideas of suffering and injustice and their expressions as essential qualities in the context of Tehran? what conceptual hybrids or precarious collectives are ethically available or necessary to think with? can injustice and suffering as target of analysis be investigated not as concrete evident necessities [stable essences, as something to defend or fight against] but as distributed changing and changeable always in process, in the contemporary Tehran (specially if you are the one who is suffering)?
-my family dining table: space of arrangement of practices of objects of...
-this discussion for me was about the categories and classifications that we rely on to investigate the world.}
--> Bergson: “in the processes of art we shall find, in a weakened form, a refined and in some measures spiritualized version of the processes commonly used to induce the state of hypnosis [...] an effect of the same kind by the fixity which they suddenly impose upon life, and which a physical contagion carries over to the attention of the spectator.”
1880s and 1890s is exactly the time where many different discourses considered the ways in which external forces and procedures could influence or control both individual and collective subject
-common in French sociological thinkers (Durkheim, Tarde, Le Bon): the primal fact of social life is some system of control or [...]
(400)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%78.1[...]at conceptual hybrids or precarious collectives are ethically available or necessary to think with? can injustice and suffering as target of analysis be investigated not as concrete evident necessities [stable essences, as something to defend or fight against] but as distributed changing and changeable always in process, in the contemporary Tehran (specially if you are the one who is suffering)?
-my family dining table: space of arrangement of practices of objects of...
-this discussion for me was about the categories and classifications that we rely on to investigate the world.}
--> Bergson: “in the processes of art we shall find, in a weakened form, a refined and in some measures spiritualized version of the processes commonly used to induce the state of hypnosis [...] an effect of the same kind by the fixity which they suddenly impose upon life, and which a physical contagion carries over to the attention of the spectator.”
1880s and 1890s is exactly the time where many different discourses considered the ways in which external forces and procedures could influence or control both individual and collective subject
-common in French sociological thinkers (Durkheim, Tarde, Le Bon): the primal fact of social life is some system of control or coercion that is imposed on the individual {for example Tarde: “stupefied and feverish beings [in] magical charm of their environment [...] it is always more fatiguing to think for oneself [...] man lives in an animated environment [...] he gradually refrains from all intellectual efforts [...] his mind becomes stultified and more and more excited [= somnambulistic] characteristic of many city dwellers [...]"}
the audience in many artworks still today has the sign of the distracted crowd (جمعیت خواب)
(“man without qualities” =) de-individualized = suggestible, hypnotizable
(Fried:)
anti-rococo French painting: a painting had to first attract (call to someone) and then to arrest (bring him to a halt in front of itself) and finally to enthral (hold him there as if spellbound) = the modernizing instrumentality that is fulfilled in cinema today
for Tarde:
“social existence = somnambulism"[= heightened receptivity to suggestion, individuals apt to imitate one another] ==> “social = (a form of) dream”
--> hypnotic aspect of the life of crowds
•“intercerebration”: one brain fascinates the other
•“fashion's suggestibility”: half-conscious observation and mere physical proximity produce a functional social homogeneity
•“fascination”: a genuine neurosis, a kind of polarization of love and faith --> effects of obedience and imitation
•“attention”: transformation of sensation by effort and desire --> the desire for an increase in personal believe
•“plateau”: a flexible figure for natural, social, and statistical processes and events (in[...]
(402)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%78.1[...]pervasiveness of *distracted modes of cultural consumption* ==> “higher (deeply attentive --advocated--> purified and ethically superior perceptual engagement) =/= lower (distracted)” forms of listening
-his dissatisfaction with traditional theatre that had allowed or encouraged audiences to look at each other at the diverse social texture of the theatre
an attentive, absorbed public (unthinkable in the 18th century ---> go to Sennett)
(still we are suffering -->) [to have] *control over the attentiveness of an audience* to subordinate it to the will of the artist ==> generate a *collective state of reception* (worthy of an art with such social aspiration @Hoda, Ali , Sina, --to which extent my mysticism in art was about my ideas about spectators incapacity for attention in contemporary Tehran?)
19th century theatre --(transform into)--> ***construction of visibility*** (structure the spectators perceptual experience)
“collective act of seeing ==> semblance of a community”
(phantasmagoric character of his work) Wagner:
•eliminating lateral views ==> frontal engagement
•near-complete darkness ==> preventing peripheral distraction
•lowering the orchestra out of sight
--> systematic concealing and mystification of the process of production
--> (Wagner stands for) will to mastery over all aspects of the spectacle ==allow==> calculated production of states of regression, fascination, dream (synchronized sound --> cinema's attentiveness half a century later)
-control over emotional response
-remaking of spectator experience
-production of dreamlike clairvoyant
(-can theater stage be a place of distraction? again)
intelligible relation of distance between viewer and illusory scene
--> the way diorama commanded visual attention
in my stage design drawings from 2009:
•standardized perspectival expectations
•metric relations
•position of spectator
•luminous detached rectangle
-
Wagner's Ring cycle: the last expression of a 19th century fantasy of the recuperation of tragedy and myth ~ the dream that culture could make whole what capitalism has broken --Crary+Lacoue-Labarthe--> [disturbing conviction/dream:] in an age where transcendence is undone, (the vacations of) art can recover an ancient destination and establish the type of mythological figure (in which humanity or a people could recognize itself)
-verisimilitude: the quality of seeming to be true, gloss, semblance
composite imaginary of the 19th century
______________
crowd
theater
phantasmagoria
Crary --> Seurat's Parade de Cirque = disclosure of *the absence at the heart of modern spectacle and perception*
vivid opening into a ligh[...]
(403)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%78.3[...]ermutations*
(Cezanne reexamining the composition of the visual world ==>)
fanatical attentiveness to the data of sense ==> dissolution of unity, destabilization of objects onto flux, dispersion, displaced the body to the world, into a stream of change, of time, *undoing the immediacy of the world* [<-- my reexamination of the composition of the epistemological world of fables in West Asia, my work's relationship with knowledge is like that. to gain control of myself in the midst of moving concepts, the circulation of concerns, jumble of paths and knots, whirlpool of velocities, and recourse to my capacity for forgetting...]
perceptual consistency is a phantom
(Lucretius:) [*]world: infinite Cascades of self-differentiation
-the question is: how to make aesthetic constructions [the task of the artist] (if the world is so fragile)?
-how to go back and forth between attention and reverie?
>
perplexity of the eye (related to a deeper and metaphysical perplexity)
an imageless vision
...a mind for which no visible form is visible enough
the fixed and monocular eye has been posed (in recent theatrical writing) as the formative element of classical system of representation **functioning to arrest duration and change in order to achieve a conceptual matey mastery of phenomena** {==> zoocentric animal anatomy =/= ajayeb}
--✕--> (Crary's suggestion that) ***the fixed immobile eye is what annihilates the “naturalness” of the world*** (disclosing the provisional and fluid nature of visual experience) =/= mobile glancing eye is what preserves the preconstructed character of the world
•moving eye --> habitually familiarly caresses objects (extracting previously established relations among them)
•fixed eye --> (immobile eye triggers a ferment of activity ==>) trance and perceptual disintegration --> dissolving the physiognomy of the everyday world [~=>? bestiary's perceptual uncanniness]
fixed truth-taking stare ==> perceptual uncanniness
the idea of un undistorted original perception ==> objects in some accessable state available for objective comparison and evaluation
fixation sets the world in motion
visual field begin vibration and oscillating
chromatic instability
the physiological apparatus (our bodies) incapable of stability =/= the aim of stabilizing the world to look at it analytically
perceptualism: the idea that (artists, cultures, etc.) expressions in varying degrees involves the transcription of the world “as it appears” to them
Cezanne ==> 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) formles[...]
(404)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%79[...]he 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 consumption
*machinic interface is the body* ==> related temporal shaping of everyday life
computer ==> psychic field of expectant attentiveness <--within-- one inevitably trains one self to maximize the speed of response to specific commands and functions (and derive at least one satisfaction from these habitual operations of mechanical facility)
}<--Crary-- epistemic shift in 20th century to theorise of subjective vision
instantaneity: unproblematic presentness of vision
Helmholtz (discovery of slow speed of nerve transmission) ==> “present state” of perception is deployed within a temporally extended physiological set of events
19th century --Foucault--> the essence of human life ceased to be something representable in the tabular space of classical representation =/= human life understood in terms of it's existence in time, of functions and energies that unfolded and developed outside the **immediacy of classical visibility**
*the conditioned reflex*
a chimerical notion of the western imagination in the 20th century
reflex (central cerebral process, onset of stimulus ==> p[...]
(405)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%79.1[...]an immediacy: a vision of matter both immediate and instantaneous
---> go to Lucy movie primordial and fundamental act of perception
Bergson (+ Dewey's ideal of coordination)
(the role of the) *body: reproduce in action the life of the mind*
(the role of the) *mind: hindering the thought from being lost in dream, an organ of ‘attention to life’
--> how memory and perception interpret each other
*memory coincides (diverge, intersect) with the “present” perception*
{ [*]determine: the more habitual and repetitive one's perceptual response to one's environment ==> the less autonomy and freedom characterize that individual experience }--> creativity = (zone of) indetermination
--again--> Bergson (disturbed by new arrangement of spectacular consumption posed as novelty within a mass society ==> redundancy and habit + decay of traditional forms of collective memory) his work is a response to:
•general standardization of experience
•automation of perceptual response
(<--Sina-- typical problem of life-philosophers lebensphilosophie at the turn of the century reaction to the “intrusion of the mechanical”)
*preconditions of a free and autonomous subject* + *endangered (coherent) system of meaning*
(weak evolutionary assumptions of Bergson's elaboration of) human subject (= the most developed organism) = potential (for indetermination) = escape from a relationship of constraint and necessity in one's lived milieu [=/= animal]
Helmholtz (research on physiological optics) ==> غیر واقعی nonveridical status of vision (and perception) ~= there is no direct correspondence between sense experience and objects in the world ==>
•uprooting: rationalization and instrumentalization of senses (--> technical prostheses)
•displacing: reterritorializing of perception
Helmholtz (~/= Bergson) committed to expanding and optimizing the productive functioning of socioeconomic world (of imperial Germany) --> vision of capitalist industrialization (exchangeability, convertibility, etc.)
Helmholtz's ontology --> physics
Helmholtz's epistemology --> semiotics: representational and quasilogical order of signs
(Helmholtz +) Bergson's attention:
1. condition of relative motor arrest (Ribot)
2. gives up the useful effect of present perception
3. backward movement of the mind
Bergson's attention: a binding together of reality to ward off both perceptual and psychic disintegration
endosmosis: process of remaking an object of perception
Deleuze's attention: gives back to duration its true characteristic... a very special coexistence (=/= succession), a simultaneity of fluxes, in which the body was always implicated --> “freedom = awareness of that coexistence”,
[...]
(406)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%79.3[...](Cezanne and Sina's attraction to) rock motifs
various splintering and dispersal of rocks
intermingled with ruins of man-made stone structure
(rock's) precarious status as object
rock = (incarnated) resistance to drift and entropy :
forces of gravity
geological erosion
inexorable disintegration of substance
...
(?like many artists i am looking for incarnations too, for) procedures of binding : transformed representational logic
*operation of fixing, of fastening, within a world in which position no longer has its former meanings*
interpretation of tentatively scenic spaces
(BOZAR Tehran tree project)
•flickering screen of sky and trees
•one stone lies nested or wedged within the embrace of another element
--> (logic of the [phantom]) limbs
eroticized enclosure (seek to grasp and be grasped) --becomes--> diagram of perception (seek to envelope and be enveloped)
Cezanne's discovery: any attempt to stabilize perception ==> disintegration and transformation
•Cezanne --> dispersed perceptual processes
•Freud --> dispersed psychic processes {perception = interface of the nervous system with the world <=~ interface between consciousness and the stored stimuli of wishes, memories, anticipations}
(mid 1890s) Bergson + Freud ==> sustained and original consideration of the anti-optical functioning of subjectivity perceptual experience as a nondirectional, acentric, multitemporal event
--> empathic decentering of the observer
+ (widespread) practical and discursive remaking of the observer as subject, vision is no longer a distinct and isolable phenomenon
Freud --> psyche = a perpetually available innocence + infinite reserve of traces
*perception arouse interest on the account of their possible connection with the object wished for* : ‘perception = question of internal excitation’
Cezanne --(in Pineapple and Rocks)--> coexistence (continuity) of:
•an attentiveness that is bound (cathected) onto established (facilitated) patterns [= one's own history + its fixation]
•a perception of animality and novelty [= relaxation of grip, musical, (Deleuze and Guattari's) *antimemory* =/= atemporal forgetting]
vertigo: auto-movement of chaos
“Cezanne's work = model of a nonhuman perception” : (reading of Cezanne as) austere project of formal rigor, performed on some remote plane of aesthetic production; an enterprise tragically detached from an engagement with the social contradiction of his time =/= (Crary's reading of) Cezanne coinciding historically with new perceptual technologies --> new metaphoric possibilities
accumulated experience --basis--> radical depersonalization --intuit--> creative forces of chaos (in yo[...]
(407)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%79.5[...]inert
Precambrian
deterritorializing processes of capitalism (+ its imperatives of perpetual renovation) --> (its compatible) uprooted nonorientable subject
nature experienced as vibrations, animations, chromatic reverberation (+ seeking a “logic” to clarify its unfolding)
hideous sign of progress (for Cezanne: electric light, cinema, )
artistic modernism <==Adorno== (the fact that) the most advanced procedures of material production and organization are not limited to the sphere in which they originate (---> go to incarnation)
demotivated subjectivity
wants something that is neither optical nor mechanical nor intellectual ==> substitute a mode of consciousness that is predominantly intuitive : the awareness of touch
historical adjacency (<-- Crary's knowledge zoom)
*late work of Cezanne (in spite of apparent social isolation of its production) = a site where modernization of subject occurs (of late 19th century)* --> dynamization of perception (occurring in many different domains around the year 1900 --introducing--> new techniques of vision)
Cezanne =/= contemplative distance
Cezanne =/= perceptual autonomy
Cezanne = nervous system interfacing with (a continually transforming) external environment
Cezanne = an example of a contemporary conceptualization of reality (as a dynamic aggregate of sensations)
--> emerging industries of spectacle
(fundamentally distinct) machinic visual technologies --Deleuze--> cinema =/= previous historical forms of simulation (some continuous western mode of representation, with its origins in Renaissance), represent the world
cinema --constitutes--> *an autonomous world* made up of breaks and disproportions, deprived of all centers, addressing itself as such to viewers who are in themselves no longer the center of their own perception
percipiens
percipi
nonselectivity of cinema eye =/= texture of human attentiveness
cinema = fusion = dream of the functional integrity of the world
film = validation of the authenticity of the perceptual disorientation
}--✕--> Crary's analysis of Edison's train robbery scene : serial reconfiguration of a kinesthetic constellation of moving forces (+ additional system of movements and forces: bodies, bullets, explosion) =/= question of mobile point of view
Cezanne <--> cinema camera --Dziga-->
i am a mechanical eye
i, a machine, show you the world as only i can see it
now and forever, i free myself from human immobility
i am in constant motion, i draw near, then far away objects, i crawl under, i climb onto them... i plug and soar together with plunging and soaring bodies
now, i, a camera, fling myself along their resultant maneuvering in the chaos[...]
(408)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%79.6[...]-> new techniques of vision)
Cezanne =/= contemplative distance
Cezanne =/= perceptual autonomy
Cezanne = nervous system interfacing with (a continually transforming) external environment
Cezanne = an example of a contemporary conceptualization of reality (as a dynamic aggregate of sensations)
--> emerging industries of spectacle
(fundamentally distinct) machinic visual technologies --Deleuze--> cinema =/= previous historical forms of simulation (some continuous western mode of representation, with its origins in Renaissance), represent the world
cinema --constitutes--> *an autonomous world* made up of breaks and disproportions, deprived of all centers, addressing itself as such to viewers who are in themselves no longer the center of their own perception
percipiens
percipi
nonselectivity of cinema eye =/= texture of human attentiveness
cinema = fusion = dream of the functional integrity of the world
film = validation of the authenticity of the perceptual disorientation
}--✕--> Crary's analysis of Edison's train robbery scene : serial reconfiguration of a kinesthetic constellation of moving forces (+ additional system of movements and forces: bodies, bullets, explosion) =/= question of mobile point of view
Cezanne <--> cinema camera --Dziga-->
i am a mechanical eye
i, a machine, show you the world as only i can see it
now and forever, i free myself from human immobility
i am in constant motion, i draw near, then far away objects, i crawl under, i climb onto them... i plug and soar together with plunging and soaring bodies
now, i, a camera, fling myself along their resultant maneuvering in the chaos of movement, recording movement, starting with movement of the most complex combinations
Sherrington --> stimuli in the external world are selected and fashioned by the organism
=/= Pavlov: stimuli = alien shocks encountered and responded to
=/= Cartesian res extensa, res cogitans
“the great physical process of attention”
inhibition: an active process
anticipatory behavior
exploratory locomotor behavior
“integrative function” of nervous system ==> binding
(integrative: incorporation of the exterior world)
“human perception = possibility of motor activity”
...................................
Cezanne sitting in nature and studying motif, tilting his head ~-> intensity unfolding chromatically before him (a mode of physical being) --> *time of the body* [<-- this is typical of today art in european] = indefinite scalar time + intensity is experienced outside representation
•river stands for his engagement with a more primal flux
•sustained condition of vibrating instability
•apprehension of multiplicity
•world = turn of [...]
(409)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%79.6[...]r />
film = validation of the authenticity of the perceptual disorientation
}--✕--> Crary's analysis of Edison's train robbery scene : serial reconfiguration of a kinesthetic constellation of moving forces (+ additional system of movements and forces: bodies, bullets, explosion) =/= question of mobile point of view
Cezanne <--> cinema camera --Dziga-->
i am a mechanical eye
i, a machine, show you the world as only i can see it
now and forever, i free myself from human immobility
i am in constant motion, i draw near, then far away objects, i crawl under, i climb onto them... i plug and soar together with plunging and soaring bodies
now, i, a camera, fling myself along their resultant maneuvering in the chaos of movement, recording movement, starting with movement of the most complex combinations
Sherrington --> stimuli in the external world are selected and fashioned by the organism
=/= Pavlov: stimuli = alien shocks encountered and responded to
=/= Cartesian res extensa, res cogitans
“the great physical process of attention”
inhibition: an active process
anticipatory behavior
exploratory locomotor behavior
“integrative function” of nervous system ==> binding
(integrative: incorporation of the exterior world)
“human perception = possibility of motor activity”
...................................
Cezanne sitting in nature and studying motif, tilting his head ~-> intensity unfolding chromatically before him (a mode of physical being) --> *time of the body* [<-- this is typical of today art in european] = indefinite scalar time + intensity is experienced outside representation
•river stands for his engagement with a more primal flux
•sustained condition of vibrating instability
•apprehension of multiplicity
•world = turn of a kaleidoscope (prismatic)
•(when you look at a) landscape has its own weird anima, it changes like a living animal under our gaze (---> go to machine dreaming image learning 2020)
•to make yourself into a responsible productive organ
--> **incarnation of a contradictory enterprise of self-transformation, self-renewal** <-- (Cezanne's retrospective fulfilment of a tradition from which he could not fully acknowledge his own decisive departure)
...your intuition on the edge of the river
Cezanne = reformulation of natural world + broken hope of community (~= intimacy --> Rousseau's mode of attention contemplation: “thought =/= reverie” : the more sensitive the soul of the observer, the greater the ecstasy aroused in him. deep and delightful reverie : a state of blissful self-abandonment)
--> novelty of a smooth unorganized perceptual space
--Crary--> example of the nonsynchronous character of modernism (~ coexistence of realities from radically different moments of history) [...]
(410)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%79.6[...]aze (---> go to machine dreaming image learning 2020)
•to make yourself into a responsible productive organ
--> **incarnation of a contradictory enterprise of self-transformation, self-renewal** <-- (Cezanne's retrospective fulfilment of a tradition from which he could not fully acknowledge his own decisive departure)
...your intuition on the edge of the river
Cezanne = reformulation of natural world + broken hope of community (~= intimacy --> Rousseau's mode of attention contemplation: “thought =/= reverie” : the more sensitive the soul of the observer, the greater the ecstasy aroused in him. deep and delightful reverie : a state of blissful self-abandonment)
--> novelty of a smooth unorganized perceptual space
--Crary--> example of the nonsynchronous character of modernism (~ coexistence of realities from radically different moments of history) [<-- is my bestiary research on the same plural historical positioning?]
•termination of a romantic visionary tradition
(in the West) [*]image: decentered chrono-iconography, automatic self-movement
rise of cinema: body-machine assemblage --Deleuze--> new paradigm of *psycho-mechanics* ~ cinema is capable of touching the cerebral system directly ==>
•experimental forms of life = freedom (affirmative model of automatic behavior --> thought functions at a higher level with an arsenal of syntactic perceptual conceptual tools)
•management of attention (model of passive automatism)
(from) dreamer --to--> somnambulist --to--> hypnosis --to--> suggestion --to--> hallucination --to--> obsession
Deleuze + Benjamin + Virilio
the idea of *art of automatic movement coincide with fascism*
@Pierre, pass, Foad
scopophilia: a forced ecstatic abjection before the image
=/= mastery
[*]spectacle: (spectacular culture) attention would be made attentive to everything but itself
...................................
“my experience is what i aggree to attend to” (James) ~= affirmation of an autonomous self-choosing world-creating subject liberated from the receptive status of a subject for whom experience was “the mere presence to the senses of an outward order”) --Crary--> historical crisis in the nature of experience: *attention = simulation of + compensation for a chimerical real experience*
(in my text rigging demons --> reconciliation of:)
•individual attentiveness to the fringes, transitions, pulses of one's own particular “pure experience”
•“experience” as immersion in the tangled density of a shared mutually inhabited world
James's conception of selfhood: private property (--in--> Tasavof: the most radical of all possible alienation and disconnection) --Lentricchia--> deployed to preserve a human space of freedom interiorized from the vicissitudes and coercions of the m[...]
(411)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%79.7[...]ought becomes pathos (=/= logos =/= mythos)
(a lot of poetry today is like this:)
(an antidialogue between brother and sister:) one *speaks before knowing* while the other *relays before having understood*
--> the necessity of not having control over language ~ (Chloe:) the necessity of being a foreigner in one's own tongue
--> “bring something incomprehensible into the world” --> in the form of exteriority
--> the becoming woman of the thinker ~ the becoming thought of the woman
--> (Chloe =) the Gemüt [feeling, heart, soul, mind] that refuses to be controlled ==forms==> a war machine : a thought grappling with exterior forces instead of being gathered up in an interior form
--> operating by relay =/= forming an image @Rob--> a thought that appeals to government ministry
--> event-thought =/= subject-thought
--> problem-thought =/= essence-thought, theorem
striating of mental space =/= Sina's textures and lectures
@Pierre: is horizon a striation?
Deleuze and Guattari: a horizonless milieu --> smooth space
the true name of race: bastard, mixed-blood
-a race is defined not by its purity but rather by the impurity conferred upon it by a system of domination
[(aspects of) war machine or] machine:
•spatiogeographic
•arithmatic
•affective
principle =/= consequence
-in nomads life what is a principle and what is only a consequence?
{migrant --> goes principally}=/={nomad --> goes as a consequence}
{(sedentary) road --> parcel out a closed space to people}=/={(nomadic) trajectory --> distributes people or animals in an open space, indifinite and noncommunicating}
(space) in the manner of a vortex
migrant leaves behind a milieu that has become amorphous or hostile
forest and house --> both striatetriated?
pigs --> pragmatism or expertise
-the pigs story might not predict the coming of the nomad wolf, but it constitutes the principles of architecture for which an incoming is striated. striated space is the result of the pigs story
عرفان همیشه بیابانی است؟
does mysticism always requires deprivation of life? mysticism ~=? symbolism
[*]godzilla: dramatization of where the mountain recedes, of the earth deterritorializing itself ==> providing the nomad with a territory
*vectors of deterritorialization and local operations* that:
•wolf adds to the forest
•godzilla adds to Tokio
•
#video concept
in tiktok comedy style, a group of iranians (talking Farsi, all acted by one person?) are personifying a govermental response to a godzilla who is roaming in the city.
localized =/= delimited
[the spot where the forest recedes] or th[...]
(412)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%80.3[...] abolition of the State
the empires of the orient, africa, america run against wide-open smooth spaces that penetrate them and maintain gaps between their component (*the nomos does not become countryside*, the countryside does not communicate with the town, large-scale animal raising is the affair of the nomads, etc.) =/= Black Panther's fantasy of the african State
psychoanalysis of the dream of the State ? and its relation to its reality
(to establish) a zone of rights over an entire exterior --> rage & innocence
Neon Genesis Evangelion anime series --> war machine striated final merged in a cyber-flux with its human counterpart --> nature dominated (battle to occupy the smooth space)
[what now people want in Iran: not the smooth space a deterritorializing State, rather:]
capture of flows
(need for) fixed paths
well-defined directions --> restrict speed, regulate circulation, relativized movement
--> polics = management of the public ways =/= fluidity of messages and masses
silk road...
Iran State = smooth + striated
State translates: “moving bodies” --to--> “moved bodies”
” ” --> ” “
Star Trek transportation system
sedentary kind of tey-ol-arz طی الارض
what homeless/drunk people do in cities --> reconstitution of a smooth space = a manner of being in space as though it were smooth
***rebellious space is always smooth space***
virtual space is neither striated nor smooth space
multiplication of relative movements ==> smooth space --> the sea becomes the place of the ‘fleet in being’ --> nomadism accompanying a worldwide war machine
@Jassem's rebellious nature =/= Pierre's staying with the striated space (with the trouble, with the institution, )
decimal grouping --> comes from the nomads
three major types of organization:
1. lineal
2. territorial
3. numerical
number ==> lineage
spatium (differentiated space with depth and levels) =/= extensio (immanent center, divisible homologous parts, and symmetrical and reversible relations)
[title]
numbering of numbers
census
taxation
election
(Deleuze and Guattari are wrong about numbers serving to gain mastery over matter --✕--> Verran's work on number in Africa)
State = a teritorial principle (of deterritorialization that links the number to metric magnitudes) --D+G--> “we don't believe that the conditions of independence or autonomy of the number can be found in the State (--> Deleuze and Guattari leftist tendency to purity the State)
(operating war machine -->) numbering number : autonomous arithmetic organization
*numbers appear as soon as one distribute somet[...]
(413)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%80.5[...]ssars, diplomats, spies, strategists, logisticians) cannot be explained away as a “whim of the sultan”
special numerical body
slave-infidel-foreigner is the one who becomes a soldier and believer while remaining deterritorialized in relation to the lineages and the State --> نظامالملک سیاستنامه
*nomads have no history, they only have geometry*
Iron Man's technological definition: “weapon (destroying people) =/= tool (producing goods)”
weapon --> projection, anything that throws or is thrown
@Pierre *the notion of “problem” is related to the war machine*
introjective: preparing a matter from a distance, in order to bring it to a state of equilibrium or to appropriate it for a form of interiority
(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
[...]
(414)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%80.6[...]liff-hanger structure
maintaining an (absolute) aesthetic continuity
{time: liquid realm =/= history: fixed realm}<--Dark-- protagonists must face when looking for their own identity
new German Cinema (Berlin School) --> ghostliness, constant travel, national division, alienation, rootlessness, inbetween-identity of the protagonists, stuckness in time =/= Heimat: the idea of stable secured community
...................................
labyrinth is architecture at it's best?
space as a limit and space as an environment
the relation of ornament to void space (background)
entering the space (pointing, direction) versus filling the space
in purely perceptual terms, all that is seen is the surface, but as an idea the building involves the whole of its inner, hidden structure; hence not only what is seen, but what alse is known appears.
concept of transparency: is a charachteristic feature of intellectual realism. in a drawing, transparency means the demonstration of knowledge about -or disclosure of- that which is inside, behind and under visible surfaces. (stimulant to the imagination of grave robbers)
is labyrinth or architecture a visual system (window etc.) or a spatial construction (direction, distinction etc.)? when we look at it in this text with the object of cloud...
labyrinth ~=? architecture's ornamental activity
[*]ornament: epression of an excessive force of form, the blossoming of a force that has nothing more to achieve --> fecundity
-ornament shifts among different planes at different speeds ==illusion==> movement and depth
labyrinth --(Deleuze and Guattari)--> “smooth space” [can be explored only by legwork]
labyrinth --> immersion & navigation [--> descriptions of technology]
labyrinth --> texture field (a form of emerging visuality)
Jassem + Sina's labyrinthine polychromic activities (==> underlying artistic creation) --> interpret form symbolically through the visual residues of the technical operations
fetish: unnatural participation with things
*field theory*
behaviour of a dynamic system that is extended in space
all fields in nature are quantum fields
•[*]matter: energy bound within fields
•[=/= classical magic --> action at a distance]
•system --> a relation-concept [=/= additive whole]
--> ability to exhibit gradients, or lines of force
self-organization: (the capacity of a field) to generate patterns spontaneously
topological reading is a christian tradition, theory, and practice of interpreting the figurative meaning of the Bible. It is part of Biblical exegesis.
According to ideas developed by the Church Fathers, the literal meaning, or God-intended m[...]
(417)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%82.8[...] is a charachteristic feature of intellectual realism. in a drawing, transparency means the demonstration of knowledge about -or disclosure of- that which is inside, behind and under visible surfaces. (stimulant to the imagination of grave robbers)
is labyrinth or architecture a visual system (window etc.) or a spatial construction (direction, distinction etc.)? when we look at it in this text with the object of cloud...
labyrinth ~=? architecture's ornamental activity
[*]ornament: epression of an excessive force of form, the blossoming of a force that has nothing more to achieve --> fecundity
-ornament shifts among different planes at different speeds ==illusion==> movement and depth
labyrinth --(Deleuze and Guattari)--> “smooth space” [can be explored only by legwork]
labyrinth --> immersion & navigation [--> descriptions of technology]
labyrinth --> texture field (a form of emerging visuality)
>
Jassem + Sina's labyrinthine polychromic activities (==> underlying artistic creation) --> interpret form symbolically through the visual residues of the technical operations
fetish: unnatural participation with things
*field theory*
behaviour of a dynamic system that is extended in space
all fields in nature are quantum fields
•[*]matter: energy bound within fields
•[=/= classical magic --> action at a distance]
•system --> a relation-concept [=/= additive whole]
--> ability to exhibit gradients, or lines of force
self-organization: (the capacity of a field) to generate patterns spontaneously
topological reading is a christian tradition, theory, and practice of interpreting the figurative meaning of the Bible. It is part of Biblical exegesis.
According to ideas developed by the Church Fathers, the literal meaning, or God-intended meani meaning of the words of the Bible, may be either figurative or non-figurative; for instance, in the Song of Songs (also called Canticles or Song of Solomon), the inspired meaning is always figurative. The typical meaning is the inspired meaning of words referring to persons, things, and actions of the Old Testament which are inspired types of persons, things, and actions of the New Testament.
The early uses of allegory and topology were very close. Later a clearer distinction was made between the allegorical mystical, and tropological moral, styles of interpretation
...................................
(Mitchell:) vision has played the role of the sovereign sense since God looked at his own creation and saw it was good, or perhaps even earlier when he began the act of creation with the division of light from the darkness.
...................................
(Corbin)
Platonic archetypes in terms of Zoroastrian angelology
psalms and invo[...]
(418)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%82.8[...] hierarchical Intelligences.
Intimated beyond the heaven of the Fixed Stars of Peripatetic or Ptolemaic astrology lie innumerable marvelous universes.
In opposition to what was to happen in the West, where the development of astronomy eliminated angelology, here it is angelology which takes astronomy beyond the classical schema within which it was confined.
...there proceeds eternally the universe of the Primordial Ruling Lights
... which marks the boundary between the celestial world and the material world of becoming. It is the Heaven of the Fixed Stars which now symbolizes the boundary between the angelic universe of Light and Spirit (Ruh-abad روح آباد) and the dark, material universe of the ‘barzakh’ (برزخ).
The characteristic term barzakh, when used in eschatology, means the intermediate, and when used in cosmology, it means the inter-world {the ‘mundus imaginalis’). In Sohrevardi's philosophy of the Ishraq it assumes a more general meaning: it designates in general everything that is body, everything that is a ‘screen’ and an ‘interval’, and which of itself is Night and Darkness.
That concept, therefore, that the word barzakh connotes is fundamental to Sohrevardi's system of physics. The barzakh is pure Darkness; it could exist as such even if the Light were to withdraw. Thus, it is not even a potential light, a virtuality in the Aristotlian sense; in relation to Light it is pure negativity, Ahrimanian (اهریمنی) negativity as Sohrevardi understood it. It would be a mistake, then, to attempt to base the causal explanation of a positive fact on this negativity. Every species is an ‘icon’ of its Angel, a theurgy effected by this Angel in the barzakh which in itself is death and absolute night.
the schema of Mazdean cosmology, in which the universe of being is divided into menuk {celestial, subtle) and getik {terrestrial, dense);
{سهروردی}--{*} In Sohrevardi, the perception of the world includes, in structural terms, a metaphysics of essences; existence is simply a way of regarding {e'tebar اعتبار) essence or quiddity--it does not add anything to it in concrete.
The schema of the universe, then, is arranged according to a fourfold plan:
... (4) There is the mundus imaginalis (alame mesal عالم مثال). This is the world which is intermediary between the intelligible world of the beings of pure Light and the sensible world; and the perceiving organ proper to it is the active Imagination. It is the world not of Platonic ideas (muthuli flatunlyah مثل افلاطونی?), but of Forms and Images ‘in suspension’ (muthul mu'allaqah مثل معلق). This term means that such forms are not imminent in a material sub-stratum, as the colour red, for example, is imminent in a red body; they possess ‘epiphanic places’ (mazahir مظاهر) where they manife[...]
(420)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%83[...] multiplicity or infinity --> unfolding: {directional (vector) & performative} --[D+G]--> (aesthetics of aniconism:) ‘abstract line’ & ‘haptic space’ ==> embodied perception ~=>? permeable, phenomenological, “nomadic,” contemplative subjectivity
“networks are the haptic space of our age”
qualities of latency
(in secular contexts) calligraphy, letters and words start to look like bodies
(Shii's favorite:) image latent in text --> foliated Kufic, shekaste nasta'ligh (شکسته نستعلیق), etc.
--> relationships are hidden, latent, and interpretable [--> veil]
•figures arise from text-based, nonfigurative works
•textuality and figurality
...................................
*relevance is hylomorphic, it imposes meaning from the outside
•to represent the nation / to critique the nation
•to self-orientalize / to critique orientalism
•to tell stories that everyone can relate to
•to be expressive / to be conceptual
•
hylomorphic nature
in which ‘matter’ and ‘form’ meld physically in myriad ways yet remain distinct linguistic categories
anamorphic: pertaining to a kind of distorting optical system, anamorphic lense, anamorphic gaze
(تغيير شکل دهنده) a notion of knowledge inquiry
...................................
Marks’ take on Sadra's triadic ontology of sensible, imaginal عالم خیال, and intelligible realms
+cognitive trinity of:
•mental intuition
•bodily knowledge
•spiritual knowledge
------> different human faculties perceive each real:
•sense perception --> external particulars: the sensible world of matter
•imagination --> internal particulars: the imaginal
•intellect --> universals: the intelligible
}--> with Avital i am learning technically (in language) to stay in a state of contamination (and their rewiring) of these faculties --> not to disavow the eching lines of my inherited tradition (“-->” + “~~>”)
◦sense perception ~~> universals
◦imagination ~~> external particulars
◦intellect ~~> internal particulars
◦...
*the islamic imaginal realm is (an audiovisual intangible) supra-individual and more real than matter*
Sadra argues that the imaginal realm subsists in the soul, mediating between the senses and the intelligence; it explains how extrapersonal, supra-sensory realities present themselves to imaginative perception --> نجمالدین کبری Najmuddin Kubra expert on visual metaphysics
تجربه شهودی
خيال و شهود
مراتب تجلّی
[*]imaginal realm: a radically pro-image concept
=/= Platonic denunciation of images (as misleading and false)
=/= Byzantine iconoclasm
=/= islamic aniconism[...]
(421)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%83.6[...]lakouee promotes for “modern” iranian]) (--> to avoid the problem of epistemological anarchism: an epistemology that justifies not taking a stand on the nature of things is of little use to women trying **to build a shared politics** [Mehdi is angry at the sculpture community because they embody that failure])
•(to adopt) a radical form of epistemology that denies the possibility of access to a real world and an objective standpoint
•noninvasive knowing (such as Sa'di) and prediction and control (#Olearius)
•(authority and power, as Beyzai is after,) to name/give the world a new identity, a new story
•accurate rendering of an idiosyncratic process of sensory overlap and association
•
•
[*]biology: modern origin story
biology tell tales about origins, about genesis, and about nature
biologizing
[what is the word made of, what is the flesh made of]
***(Haraway highlights) an inherited knowledge through the paternal line: the *word* was Aristotle's Galileo's Bacon's Newton's Linnaeus's Darwin's; the *flesh* was woman's --> and the word was made flesh, naturally
(in Europe, from 15th to 18th century, transformations of [both] metaphors [and social systems]:) female nature --from--> nurturing mother --to--> patient-resournce
--> capitalist forms of patriarchy: *merchant تاجر seeing dialectic of apocalypse* (TV series such as West World, etc.)
[the book of nature]
nature is authored (by somebody)
(power +) autorship ==(fabricates)==> reality
Milton's justification of the ways of God, [to tell stories]
*(how many times we[?] are) forced to read a book in a language that signifies our lack, our difference*
two rhetorical strategies for contesting (جنگیدن برای) a voice (-to set the terms of speech that define good knowledge):
1- reinterpreted the origin story to get it right the second time
2- rebelliously proclaimed a totally new story
(Olearius does the same with iran and his european audience,) [Haraway on] Barash “reveal to the popular audience the inner voice of biology, the cake of nature under the icing of culture, the biogrammer of genes structuring the message of the organism--all that modern people structuring the message of the organism--all so that modern people might come to know themselves and fulfill their potential. Barash maintains that biology is the most powerful tool in the humanist project to know and achieve the self.”
phallic language
sociobiologica reasoning (<-- so dominant)
Star Trek --> sociobiology promises more than knowledge of the self; it also promises, like all humanisms, human unity, a real togetherness of nature beneath the merely verbal icing of culture
in the (rhetor[...]
(422)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%84.2[...] چه گفت؟
2- how to sustain a discussion --> چطور بحث را عوض نکردن؟
...................................
*bad geography: insult, tohin, similar to trauma, they don't have an concret external object (yet they create them), it is a register of an event, affectual implosion of a percept
insult dones't exist out there, (tohin kardan vojud khareji nadarad), it is in the inside --> is that why tasavof works and labors with insult?
...................................
(also in apass, dancers and choreographers, are the children of modernism art of De Kooning) reaching inward to find within the body that sublime thing (Deleuze calls) the *figural* [=/= (iranian miniature's) sublimity of the infinite (<-- Aela testing this, under ‘mysticism'~-> state of constant openness ==> transformative relation between self and other)]
we can trace the (seductive power of) fana فنا in contemporary media art (Hoda's sublime digital-rhythmic embodiments? --> transcendental desires remain questionable)
doctrine of the minimal: smallest unit is the atom or point =/=
doctrine of Zaher/Baten: smallest unit is the fold*** ==> zoomorphic writing, infinitesimal
(mysticism:) a system of measurement based (not on the point, rather) on the fold
Star Trek --> extensive universe of the infinite =/=
tasavof --> intensive universe of the infinitesimal
apotropaic, turning away evil ~=
memory sticks, ward off the fear of data loss
...the letter ceases to be a *figure* and becomes a *field*
...................................
#comparative reading of Hedayat's The Benedictions (Afringan آفرینگان) and Sohrevardi's ghorbat gharbia (رساله غربةالغربیة)
...................................
@Ali's knowledge is like ‘face recognition’ (~ cannot say how he cognizes a “know” yet he does)
Ali: daneshe hozuri + politics (which is a secular knowedge, Sachlich, based on scales, measures, and divisions)
*intellect (? can never be merely:)
non-propositional knowledge ~= daneshe hozuri دانش حضوری
~-> the idea of non-mediation and direct awareness ~-> internal memory (~->? belief)
=/= descriptive knowledge, propositional knowledge, knowledge of propositions (“know-that”) ~-> explicit knowing <-- why am i practicing this? (i say things like “this is this...”) and yet not transfering without the ‘knowing subject’ (depending on close interaction, shared understanding, trust, and even love. in combination with my performances that are like that, thinking on the fly =/= storage and retrieval of conceptual knowledge) [in ajayeb.net i pretend i am coding articulated knowledge in explicit aggregation and appropriable without the ‘knowing subject’ but it is not. it is also part of something personal, distributive, and con[...]
(423)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%84.4[...]not say how he cognizes a “know” yet he does)
Ali: daneshe hozuri + politics (which is a secular knowedge, Sachlich, based on scales, measures, and divisions)
*intellect (? can never be merely:)
non-propositional knowledge ~= daneshe hozuri دانش حضوری
~-> the idea of non-mediation and direct awareness ~-> internal memory (~->? belief)
=/= descriptive knowledge, propositional knowledge, knowledge of propositions (“know-that”) ~-> explicit knowing <-- why am i practicing this? (i say things like “this is this...”) and yet not transfering without the ‘knowing subject’ (depending on close interaction, shared understanding, trust, and even love. in combination with my performances that are like that, thinking on the fly =/= storage and retrieval of conceptual knowledge) [in ajayeb.net i pretend i am coding articulated knowledge in explicit aggregation and appropriable without the ‘knowing subject’ but it is not. it is also part of something personal, distributive, and contextual], [my education in setar was tacit and cognitive apprenticeship, situated cognition,]
=/= “know-how”, procedural knowledge, tacit --> embodied characteristic of the expert who acts without explicitly reflecting on conditions of its involvement (body's nervous system + endocrine system دستگاه درونریز)
“know-who” (knowledge of networks)
(Gibson's) affordance --> relational account of perception (=/= encoding of environmental features into the perceiver's mind), preconditions for activity
(effects =/=) effectivity: abilities that determines what one could do and the interactions that could take place
‘perceived affordance’: perception of an object's utility =/= object's itself
affordance <--?--> mental representations (models, schemata, etc.)
...................................
#idea for a performance for ghorbat gharbia
one performer eyes closed in a room or laboratory research lab speaking the text while engaging through touch (throwing, fixing, putting, dropping) with the different optics and technologies, objects and positioned tools in the room (color, catapult, optical systems, laser, array of transparencies and opacities, etc.)
performer: Sina
director: Foad
...................................
(prehistoric)
your mother: violence
your father: tool
==> human
...................................
Geroulanos on emergence of an atheism disengaged from humanism during the second quarter of the 20th century
1925 to 1950
...in nonsecular horizon of existence and thought
conceptual reorganization of human in atheism
(19th century was marked by) “death of god” = man after the era of catastrophe : the age of World War I, the rise of Nazism, Stalinism, World War II, and the immediate postwar period
<[...]
(424)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%84.5[...]ng subject’ but it is not. it is also part of something personal, distributive, and contextual], [my education in setar was tacit and cognitive apprenticeship, situated cognition,]
=/= “know-how”, procedural knowledge, tacit --> embodied characteristic of the expert who acts without explicitly reflecting on conditions of its involvement (body's nervous system + endocrine system دستگاه درونریز)
“know-who” (knowledge of networks)
(Gibson's) affordance --> relational account of perception (=/= encoding of environmental features into the perceiver's mind), preconditions for activity
(effects =/=) effectivity: abilities that determines what one could do and the interactions that could take place
‘perceived affordance’: perception of an object's utility =/= object's itself
affordance <--?--> mental representations (models, schemata, etc.)
...................................
#idea for a performance for ghorbat gharbia
one performer eyes closed in a room or laboratory research lab speaking the text while engaging through touch (throwing, fixing, putting, dropping) with the different optics and technologies, objects and positioned tools in the room (color, catapult, optical systems, laser, array of transparencies and opacities, etc.)
performer: Sina
director: Foad
...................................
(prehistoric)
your mother: violence
your father: tool
==> human
...................................
Geroulanos on emergence of an atheism disengaged from humanism during the second quarter of the 20th century
1925 to 1950
...in nonsecular horizon of existence and thought
conceptual reorganization of human in atheism
(19th century was marked by) “death of god” = man after the era of catastrophe : the age of World War I, the rise of Nazism, Stalinism, World War II, and the immediate postwar period
(philosophical and political) centrality of man = a conception dating to Descartes and proceeding through the tradition of natural law, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and nineteenth-century liberalism and Marxism
rejection of central premises of post-Enlightenment, liberal, and socialist European thought
(how?) approach anew the codes addressing human life and significance
new nonhumanist atheism came to be expressed at different times in existentialist, hyper-ethical, or cynical terms, in nondoctrinaire socialist, reactionary, ultramodernist, or even downright antipolitical principles
(shift away from classical atheism and humanism <==) three movements:
1. an *atheism that would not be humanist* : an atheism mistrustful of secular دنيوى, egalitarian تساوى, and transformative commitments
2. a *negative philosophical anthropo[...]
(426)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%84.5[...]rs Feuerbach, Comte, Marx, Proudhon:
--> possibility of a good life and proper society
•Feuerbach's anthropotheism: “god = projection of human nature onto the heavens,” nothing more than man's representation of his own essence --> the task of the modern era was the realization and humanization of god : (transformation and dissolution of) theology --into--> anthropology
•Comte: positivist project for science and knowledge --> religion of humanity, explicitly religious atheism
•Proudhon: humanisme
{liberalism: humanism, and idealism had become moral and political expectations of the secular education projects}--> [*]humanism: what could reach, reveal, and cultivate the *proper and ethical* humanum of man ==> [*]man: irreducible, perfectible bearer and guarantor of dignity, equality, and freedom
Levinas's ‘an atheism that is not humanist’: the exaltation of an obedience and a faithfulness that are not obedience or faithfulness to anyone
opening up an apocalyptic imagination
destroying the cultural optimism that had marked the turn of the twentieth century
ground for ethics, knowledge, and hope
(Kojeve, Bataille, reconceiving) atheism: a way out of any and all ideological systems
theological questions + mistrust of political hopes
to replace god with a political messianism, nation or state,
“disenchantment of the world = death knell for man” (?)
nonhumanist atheism: determined opposition to foundational concepts of man, knowledge, and truth (=/= critically rethinking problems of anthropotheism, of transcendence, of finitude)
critique of idealism = critique of transcendence
1920s: atheist humanism = idealist arguments about the capacity of the human mind (to transcend and objectively pattern the things that compose the world around it)
might and violence of ideologies relied on definitions of humanity (that made this violence not only plausible and rational, but almost necessary --> communism and colonialism)
Sartre's postwar minimal humanist commitment --> “existentialism = humanism”
-call or claim to failure of foundations and of man's status in the universe ultimately called up a new ethical command --> call for man to decide and to commit politically (--> atheism + political humanisms + old metaphysical commitment)
atheist political theology
Kojeve, Bataille, Sartre, Koyre, Heidegger, Adorno
mysticism of progress, self-perfection, and history
their anti-utopian and antiprogressivist claims and that found expression in: Blanchot (The Most High), Bataille (Summa Atheologica), Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus), Beckett (Endgame)
figuration of finitude
critique of dreams of transparency
replace transcendence with excess or escape (<-- mystical background...)
=/= un-self-conscious humanist mys[...]
(427)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%84.6[...]commit politically (--> atheism + political humanisms + old metaphysical commitment)
atheist political theology
Kojeve, Bataille, Sartre, Koyre, Heidegger, Adorno
mysticism of progress, self-perfection, and history
their anti-utopian and antiprogressivist claims and that found expression in: Blanchot (The Most High), Bataille (Summa Atheologica), Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus), Beckett (Endgame)
figuration of finitude
critique of dreams of transparency
replace transcendence with excess or escape (<-- mystical background...)
=/= un-self-conscious humanist mysticism
secular interwar Europe's raising the human subject to all-powerful status ==> techno-scientific apocalypse --> waste of hope in the self and in the rhetoric of equality and humanism
(2)
philosophical antihumanism
human in suspension and deny that it owns or controls his own specificity and particularity
>
--> negative theology
denial to man of positive knowledge of divine nature
withdrawal from the possibility of first defining what is specifically human
=/= world deemed anthropocentric and subjectivist
•*reformulates the question of man, locating him in conceptual systems led by notions, such as Being, reality, society, or language* (--> to define him “negatively”)
•problematization of human subjectivity
--> modern determinations of “the human”
(Diderot in Encyclopedie:) “man: a sensing, reflecting, thinking being, which freely traverses the surface of the earth, which appears at the head of all other animals over which it reigns, which lives in society, which has invented the sciences and the arts, which has its own notions of good and evil, which gives itself masters, which makes its own laws, etc.”
•anthropocentrism of modern thought (Diderot --> “why do we not introduce man into our work the way he is placed in the unihe universe? why do we not make him a common center?”)
•(18th and 19th century) offering a hierarchy and linking the human to a privileged one among them--to reason, understanding, sensation, the passions, consciousness, the intellect
he can no longer claim to be capable of scientifically understanding the entire world
(Kant in Logic, @apass, three core questions guiding his critical project:)
•what do i know?
•what may i hope for?
•what ought i do?
•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
[...]
(428)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%84.7[...]”
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 (in 19th century Germany)
•Enlightenment humanism (from Montesquieu through Rousseau and Condorcet)
•19th century liberal humanism (frequently based on natural law, autonomy over one's own body and mind, and human rights)
•socialist humanisms (with its commitment to contractarian social theory)
Encyclopedie's attack on theological knowledge
19th century construction of modern humanism (sociopolitical goals of a “human nature”) --> left[...]
(429)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%84.8[...]ral-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 (in 19th century Germany)
•Enlightenment humanism (from Montesquieu through Rousseau and Condorcet)
•19th century liberal humanism (frequently based on natural law, autonomy over one's own body and mind, and human rights)
•socialist humanisms (with its commitment to contractarian social theory)
Encyclopedie's attack on theological knowledge
19th century construction of modern humanism (sociopolitical goals of a “human nature”) --> left-leaning, often democratic, (but certainly) utopian sociopolitical mentality
[*]ideology: a thinking that does not critique, nor even think its provenance from and proper relation to reality --Nancy--> humanism = the machine par excellence through which a community produces meaning for itself, “the system that produces meaning” ==> “we” (community's raison d'etre)
--> [humanism is] arbitrary, auto-productive, and all but tautological
{every political/philosophical movement:
1. rejected bourgeois humanism as insufficient, egotistical, and corrupt
2. claimed for itself a privileged access to the dignity of man
}--Geroulanos--> structure of a *rejection of mainstream thought and policy* for not taking into account (and hence devaluing) the goals of one's anthropo-theologico-political commitment
wreckage of WWII ==> man could not find meaning either in faith or in his own knowledge and construction of the world
_...dive into the depths of human solitude and suffering
(like existentialism and the Western Marxist tradition,) human rights came to operate as a “humanism from below” =/= generic and top-down humanisms (~ monopoly of violence that states held over their individual subjects)
(Geroulanos not arguing that antihumanism was the driving force or the secret heart of intellectual movements and philosophies, nor claiming that it was a single movement, concept, idea, or trend; rather) antihumanism is what emerged from, shaped, and configured a major matrix of concerns
problem with secular humanist utopias --> forging of a ‘new man’ through the mobilization of a specific a priori definition of man required (both):
•man's divinization خداسازى
•man's purge پاکسازى
essentialist definitions of man ==> biologistic, scientistic, political, religious, moralist projects ==>
•lay claim on un[...]
(431)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%84.8[...](--> #lived-body)
Neither the living body as an entity nor the Mind as an entity had a name.
for Aristotle, ‘thinking’ part of the soul, had an existence from any connection to the body.
“to experience the world is the very nature of body inside out.” (Christian Hubert > John Schumacher)
a community whose members are aware of each others’ passive presence is different forms
(active =/= present)
these are issues of social subject in a technically mediated world
to look at CG embodiment relations:
•fold (Ihde)
•skill (Merleau-Ponty)
•theory of affordance (Gibson)
•intra-action (Barad)
•detour (Latour)
(Merleau-Ponty's) ‘body schema’ : space of the body = 'space of situation,’ orientation towards possible (not only existing) tasks ==> aspects of the external/virtual world
body understood in terms of their ability to enter into one's projects =/= spatial location
[what is the body schema of the hacker in CG? (an external world where there is no near or far.) what is experienced as their Gestalt? which grasp is automatically localized? what are their phantom limbs? ==> body immediately known to self]
(body as the) system of possible actions, a virtual body with its phenomenal “place” defined by its task and situation. “My body is wherever there is something to be done.”
kinaestheses, proprioception,
...................................
what ‘play’ does to ‘ego’?
...................................
([is for Lilia (? like Wittgenstein) all ‘certainties'] grounded in the) certainty of the body
{pain <--> certainty}--> trauma + memory
...................................
(Christian Hubert > ) Rudofsky “unfashionable human body” (#veil)
Thomas Friedman “The Golden Straitjacket”
•political-economic garment of globalization era --> Straitjacket
(Cold War era:)
•Mao --> suit
•Nehru --> jacket
•Russian --> fur
•
•Islam --> hejab
(Tasavof-->{for which the body does not remain concrete and material, and soul is ambiguous and polymorphic}, Pythagorean:) veli: soul can clothe itself in different bodies =/= (Aristotle:) soul is the form of a particular living body { soul = organization of the body }--> “..there seems to be no case in which the soul can act or be acted on without involving the body” =/= (Descartes:) soul = enlightened machine (~=? proper organization of the brain)
***The body is a special image --> body image
body, the priveleged image, the world of consiousness (through self-reference), the brain's primary frame of reference [-constructed with libidinal intensity? --> a map of narcissistic investment] (=/= body without organs)
•condition of the subject's access to spatiality (of the [numero-comput[...]
(432)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%85.4[...]mates,,,]
“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 intensities: *pure simulacra without originals*
erotogenic zones, sexuality, Freud, auto-erotic internalization, clinamen
(the formally female cyborg / techno-monster of the Ghost in the Shell:) the (masculinist) fantasy of leaving the body behind and reconstituting it as a a technical object under human control as both a desire for perfect knowledge and total power and at the same time as a way of escape... [Christian Hubert] #Haraway
•the question of the “soul” is read as the question of (certain technology of) power over bodiess
(traits of) cyborg:
1. boundary transgression
2. the recognition and re-scripting of myth
[...]
(433)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%85.5[...]mason, the surveyor, or the architect. [...] My body lives in as many spaces as the society, the group, or the collectivity have formed: the Euclidean house, the street and its network, the open and closed garden, the church or the enclosed spaces of the sacred, the school and its spatial varieties containing fixed points, and the complex ensemble of flow-charts, those of language, of the factory, of the family, of the political party, and so forth. Consequently my body is not plunged into one space but into the intersection or the junctions of this multiplicity.” (Hermes, pp 44-45) (@Aela)
...................................
(feminist open-source --✕-->?) I am actually coming from a masculinist closed-source culture-thing, that is to say, my background is in masculinist black-boxed concepts of being and beyond, that means i have a different relationship with interference and parasitism
•how and when a concept becomes black-boxed? by which processes?
@Sven: what matters is the input/output, stimulus/response [--> “black-box of the beyond” (#zolmat writing)] --> transfer characteristics, data-flow, the ontology of the “internal working” : “open” exchanges inforamtion about its interactions }--> open-source is part of the tradition of anthropocene system thinking: network synthesis, system engineering, theory of the organism, evolutionary theory, thermodynamics, and world system perspective
...................................
what are the nodes of energy in interdigitalities intra-actions in human-machine relations?
***we are belonging to a set of cultures that regularly believes in the idiom of: organism =/= technology
--> this little ontological dichotomous device is doing serious worldings, making and destroying worlds
technologies of descriptive practices
technology is descriptive practice
technology: anything describable as a technology --> idiom اصطلاح
[title]
age of stone, and stories for computers
...................................
(#workshop in Stuttgart 11.04.2017 with Femke http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/possiblebodies.rigging)
provisional sketch for a workshop on “Rigging,” notes and nodes
on the notion and practice of Rig in CG
(CG as in “computational gesture”)
[title]
on Rigging and skinning: stories for cultivating creation and creatures of the industrial empire.
a practice in: rhetoric of technical reasoning in inorganic skeletal animacies.
•I begin with the position that believes in the essential ambiguity of technology
•let's look at some terms and notions and the ways they are enacted, practiced, and embodied, and to practice some hermeneutic fluency in phenomenological conditions in what we call character animation
KEYWORDS: soft bodies[...]
(434)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%85.6[...]/>
--> a dangerous knowledge zoom lens tool, a vertiginous antirealist/antiliteral abyss (=/=? irony device ==> presenting us with intimacy with existing nonhumans)
...................................
#veil
@Janina
@Ale
Nicole Archer: ‘textile’: a material formed at the intersections of desire and modern politics
•textile's ‘textility' = texture
•textile's ‘textuality' = readability
to be prepared to address relations consistencies ==> (hope to) meaningfully reform them
*(Archer lingering in the textile's volatile gum) to develop forms of critique that can account for the peculiar textiles ‘we’ are currently wrapped-up in* [globalized economies, militarized laboratories, etc. (BioSteel and so on)]
text +/& textile
•in metaphor: the social fabric, the Internet, the Fold, etc.
•in myth: Arachne's textiles, or Penelope's epic loom
>
}--✕-->? to account for neo-liberal and transgenic subjects
(traditionally:) textile (racialized and gendered, as “woman's work”) “=/=” text
*fabric conditions and binds our desires and bodies ---@Janina
(Archer >) Gernreich exposed how the fashion system instrumentalized the body's desire to move” while inscribing it within the time-signatures of modern capitalism
uniform = contemporary fashion's other
digi-camo (redesigned and digitally remixed camouflage fatigues worn by the US military)
desire for “freedom” and for alternative temporalities + desire for discipline and physical restraint
}--> *tight spaces our desires are prone to work themselves into*
textures and taxonomies of fashion and uniformity
Abu Ghraib --> (in the pursuit of a) perverse desire for justice (a desire that many feel is best met in the violent erasure of certain subjects)
< />
(let's) stop pretending that “we” weren't already caught-up in the messy circuits of desire
“[...]Freud's figure of the woman who has nothing better to do than but braid her pubic hair into a futile simulation of the phallus, and who (interestingly enough) accidentally invents weaving as an outcome of this inherently fetishistic gesture” (Archer > Barthes > Freud)
Gernreich working with “the future” as a medium and not as a destination***
-he was keen to work with fashion as a ‘time-based medium’(~ deliver us onto alternative temporalities)
[*]fashion: a distinctly modern clothing regime engineered to materially manipulate “the past” so it may serve as a springboard into “the time to come”, an attempt to create the perfect tension between “right now” and “back then” ==> (fashion serving as one of modern culture's main engines catapults the wearers) towards a time and place where present-day problems can no[...]
(437)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%86.4[...]r />
it-girl
Beatlesque escape
new paths that young people are charting requires clothes
(Archer is making me interested in fashion by helping me go through the) economic and scopophilic grains of the fashion industry
the idea of the ‘new look’ absolutely dominating the fashion scene during the mid 21st century
‘new look’ fashion strictly obeying the laws and divisions of optically delineated Cartesian space, and its attending epistemo-ontologies and political economies (-Archer: the proportions of Dior's famous silhouette absolutely required that one always take a well-heeled “step-back” in order to comprehend themselves in a mirror, a camera lens, or even a street window) --> (offering consumers new manners in which) to dress, but also **to see and to understand themselves and their potentiality**
[myself, like many critical artists of my generation, we glean (harvest خوشه چينى) the occurrence of ideological violence]
relaxed clothing shapes
affordable
easy-to-care-for
mix-and-match fabrics
hyper-modern color combinations and patterns
couture خياط زنانه
animosity, bad blood, animus's system, the system is made
perennial enfant terrible
(the naked constant prince)
social change <== **fashion must (and will) go out of fashion**
Gernreich's economic critique of the fashion system --?-->{ disregard of the wearer's comfort which is an obvious feature of all civilized woman's apparel ==> conspicuously figured the middle-class woman caught-up in the middle of the fashion system as being utterly passive and woefully unimaginative -->
•seeing woman's fashionable transfiguration only in terms of what it properly signified within the bounds of a patriarchal civil society and a capitalist economy
•failing to appreciate the pleasures that fashionable styles offer their wearers in spite of the physical and social restrictions they impose
}--> parochial economic critique (operating in a wholly rational realm) =/= (Elizabeth Wilson:) how these ‘transforming actions’ might do violence to these orders --Archer--> **how the powerful and highly volatile work of desire unfolds within the fashion system**
***oppression =/= passivity***
Gernreich --> fashion ‘works’ not simply by way of its significant expense, but rather at *the expense of signification*
{ fashion = fantasy }==> fashion offers our desires a medium through which:
•to formally manipulate the discourse of the body
•to violently threaten the rational ordering of its meaning
•to from which to produce pleasures that exceed satisfaction or sense
•to operate on the text/ile in ways that are non-linguistic (within waking life)
Lyotard's “the dream-work d[...]
(438)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%86.7[...]s
affordable
easy-to-care-for
mix-and-match fabrics
hyper-modern color combinations and patterns
couture خياط زنانه
animosity, bad blood, animus's system, the system is made
perennial enfant terrible
(the naked constant prince)
social change <== **fashion must (and will) go out of fashion**
Gernreich's economic critique of the fashion system --?-->{ disregard of the wearer's comfort which is an obvious feature of all civilized woman's apparel ==> conspicuously figured the middle-class woman caught-up in the middle of the fashion system as being utterly passive and woefully unimaginative -->
•seeing woman's fashionable transfiguration only in terms of what it properly signified within the bounds of a patriarchal civil society and a capitalist economy
•failing to appreciate the pleasures that fashionable styles offer their wearers in spite of the physical and social restrictions they impose
}--> parochial economic critique (operating in a wholly rational realm) =/= (Elizabeth Wilson:) how these ‘transforming actions’ might do violence to these orders --Archer--> **how the powerful and highly volatile work of desire unfolds within the fashion system**
***oppression =/= passivity***
Gernreich --> fashion ‘works’ not simply by way of its significant expense, but rather at *the expense of signification*
{ fashion = fantasy }==> fashion offers our desires a medium through which:
•to formally manipulate the discourse of the body
•to violently threaten the rational ordering of its meaning
•to from which to produce pleasures that exceed satisfaction or sense
•to operate on the text/ile in ways that are non-linguistic (within waking life)
Lyotard's “the dream-work does not think, but ‘manhandles’ the text and operates on the text as if it were a material” =/= Lacan's “the unconscious is structured like a language”
Lyotard on Freud's assumption and insistence that the textures of a text affect its meaning --> Lacan's failure (as analyst and philosopher) in not being able to appreciate how fantasy (~ the forms of desire ~? fashion) pits the materiality of signifiers against what they try to signify
“if desire is the mobile element (here the wind, elsewhere water) that crumples the text, can it also be the fixative which keeps certain parts of it readable? I know of only one notion which can satisfy these conflicting demands: the notion of form, of fantasy”
(my struggle with my colleagues) not to confuse fashion [or any object] for “an object that the subject imagines and aims at” instead of recognizing fashion as “a sequence in which the subject has their own part to play and in which permutations of roles and attributions are possible”
@Hoda, Pierre, Ali
(Z[...]
(442)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%86.7[...]tic critique* =/= parochial critique (usually rational economic)
[unpossessed persons are the ones who usually talking about magic, and transformative potentlies]
people who don't care about *dressing up* are situating dress reform (fashion) in a type of neutered and disembodied utilitarianism (--Janina--> ignorant to fashion's textures and to the ways that fashion's formal dimensions could motivate the body to move beyond the pleasure principle)
politics and feelings of pleasure and displeasure --Gernreich--> absolutely central to any critical understanding or experience of the world
@Jassem: desires (always, even in the most strict desire regimes) could lead us astray
(the radical moment) when my body pursues its own ideas (~/= the ideas that i do)
post-structuralist textiles (a different form of political activity) =/= radical politics (such as movements and so on)
that is why i cannot simply critique existing forms for their morality nor simply offer humanist solutions to the problems (of capitalism, Iran, etc.) like Gernreich, i am recognizing that by reinforcing or relaxing shapes and materials of the there-is, i could direct the ways our desires became caught-up in the system's works, or that certain materials only worked in certain ways
affordable (double)knit fabrics: made of variable columns of inter-looping yarns, [they] are made to stretch in a variety of directions =/= non-elasticated woven fabrics
--> texture of the night, (use it) to drape oneself over the arm of a couch, or to run after someone leaving a party a little too early
paths and forms of pleasure that Gernreich hoped to see all young people exploring
[...] Meanwhile ‘Man’ is temporarily bereaved. But they will find a new way. ***And the new way will have important consequences for clothes*** -Gernreich
capitalize: transformation of unexpected --into--> simple --into--> expectable --into--> convention/style
images of hyper-sexualized damsels laid amidst tall grasses (most controversial 19th or 20th century figurations of women) --> [that is not enough--it falls short in showing] the way that these suits clearly encourage their wearers to close their eyes and explore the kinky pleasure found specifically in the way PVC peels from your flesh in one long slurp
plastics don't have the same ‘memory’ as textiles
they don't hold onto the past
they won't stay obediently folded like a cotton calico
vinyl swimsuit
*these designs proliferated a multi-faceted understanding of one's own skin*
-exposed skin feels so starkly and qualitatively different than a torso left to sweat it out under a nearly non-porous plasticine cloth
xxxx
...................................
(we are in) styl[...]
(443)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%86.8[...] letter ==expose==> language of gendered oppression's limits
find a way of articulating oneself beyond pronoun's strict logics (--> alternative subject position) =/= Calderwood --> *contingency of seeing* : “manipulating the intensity of certain optical patterns in order to scramble--or dazzle--those fields of vision that the ‘apparatus of the pattern’ is traditionally tasked with managing”
[*]gender: semiotic apparatus; representation of a relation (that of belonging to a class, a group, a category -de Lauretis), gender assigns to one entity (an individual) a position within a class ==> a position vis-a-vis other preconstituted classes
flooding the visual field ==> refuse to lend themselves to the task of figuring things out ‘what is this?’
(let's suspend) act of perceiving oneselffrom a particular, fixed place in order to open up onto a sense of imagination [<-- identity, identification, positionality]
*discourse of desir* --Lyotard--> desire does not speak; it does violence to the order of the utterance
(?am i using the queer strategy of) **pattern-jamming** ==> nonbinary variance =/= proliferation of tick-boxes (identity politics)
•modes of ornamentation
•systems of organization
patterns --> repetitions ==> naturalize the appearances of certain recurrences in life ==> stabilize (our notions)
[*]pattern: an essential forecasting tool, (through pattern's) rhythms we come to place bets on our future [like the sun's cycle], maps of those terrains where belief most directly meets desire, where aesthetics meets significance
stripes --> capacity to serve as “a tool for setting things in order” (--Pastoureau--> between the lines a tangle of uncanny specters lurk)
-stripe's ability (not simply to signify but) to formalize or figure the abnormal within medieval visual and material culture [a culture accustomed to transmitting visual messages along very different frequencies: an image was created by superimposing successive levels, and, to read it well, it was necessary to begin with the bottom level and, passing through all the intermediary layers, end with the top on] (-what is noise for medieval visual culture?)
-with the stripe: the structure is the figure ==> force certain bodies into genuine non-place --> fields of actual nonsense
-(modern stripe's clarity is a case of) how ideologically saturated, or unnatural, the act of looking is
-(genealogy of stripe --> historical processes:) *yesterday's noise --into--> today's signal*
***power is formally established and formally critiqued through the adaption or the obliteration of patterns*** ==> *pattern manipulation* so strategically necessary [@Laura, Elen] --> (Archer's) call to:
•to take advantage of those aesthetic practices that can direct attention away from a pattern's typical symbolic function (*or [...]
(444)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%87.5[...]tor, Vladimir's settlement's ‘order of thing,’ the institution, etc.) or to critically gesture toward and theorize the possibility of “another way”
the *genital panic* (forever lodged within the heart of discourses on sexual or gendered difference...)
(to examine) the varied ways that pattern is used to put one in one's place
Nicki Green, Yayoi Kusama, Adriana Varejao, Yinka Shonibare, Craig Calderwood
spaces that lie between the patterned (behaviors...)
[@Leo, heard so many times:] clear (but melancholic) call for the rearticulation of our desires outside capitalist logics of (re)production
using the trope of pattern to deconstruct the politics of desire
“conflict” is something that is desired(?)
queer desires might make something different of conflict(?)
...................................
phantom limb Grosz
(Nietzsche: entire evolution of) spirit = a question of the body (developement of a higher body) --> *the organic rising to yet higher levels*
body image:
(psychoanalytic conception of subjectivity -->) ‘mind’ & ‘body’ & ‘body image’
--> physical systems to the subject's access to bodily mobility
•cortical homunculus --> Freud
•imaginary anatomy --> Lacan
}--> genesis and functioning of the ego
[are my image assemblages about changing the body image?]
==> biology and neurophysiology are dependent on *physical processes* of transcription and signification
Grosz on the status of the body as a problematic and uncontainable term in biology and psychology
•(Egyptian) “ka" = soul: a copy of the human body (that is more ethereal and less dense than the physical body)
•Cartesian notion of soul (or mind): a ghostlike icon of the subject
•Aristotle's pneuma: finer or more subtle body than the coarsely material/materialistic body
•Christian notion of soul: the possibility of resurrection ==> privileged and formative link between *morphology of the soul* & *morphology of the body*
(Ambroise Pare:) mortification: ***continuity and consentiment of the dead parts with the living ones*** ==> phantasm limb
[*]body image: the absence of the knowledge of the position of limbs when the patient's eyes are closed (Weir Mitchell) --> faculty of language localized in the whole body (and not in the left hemisphere)
= *spatiotemporally structured and structuring model of the subject*, a “schema” that mediates between the subject's position and its behavior, synesthetically (visual or tactile) organized and represented
postural schema وضعى
postural model (of the body): a three-dimensional image that both registers and organizes the information provided by the [...]
(445)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%87.6[...]lso experienced as flat and disinvested از خود بی خود / فنا؟)
depersonalization: a kind of psychical mimicry of the organic structure of dizziness --> narcissistic decathexis [withdrawal of psychic energy] of the subject's own inclination to voyeurism (<-- disinvestment in the processes of self-observation) ==> seeing has no longer any value : the subject now seen or sees itself with no libidinal investment in looking (or being looked at) @Sina, Foad
_*hysteria --> transformation of body image (of the meaning of the sexual zones to other organs which are not usually associated with genitality)
_*hypochondria --> transposition of libido (displacement, from one organ to another, from the genital to other parts of the body)
_*depersonalization --> withdrawal of libido from privileged zones (often from the whole body)
}==> ****تغيير پذيرى lability of meaning for bodily organs**** : any zone of the bady can (under certain circumstances) take on the meaning of any other zone
[stabil =/= labil: transient, apt to slip]
neurosis & psychosis: subject's sexual life is transposed from its socially expected locations, aims, and onjects to elsewhere
-life history of the subject: the systems of psychical meaning and the events rendered meaningful
-body: the history of the subject's explorations and practices + its various accidents and illnesses
(@Sina) breathing difficulties --> (hysterical symptoms for) significance of the public/private division ~ inside/outside division
•visible disorders --> some kind of message *to others* is being transmittes
•invisible disorders --> some kind of message *to another signifier* is being transmittes #Lacan
hypochondria + depersonalization + hysteria ==[through the mediation of body image]==> *the biological or organic body is open to psychical meanings* ~ psychic processes rely on various organic connections (it takes them as its raw material, as its model of expression)
disease (<==)transforms==> body image (<==)affects==> subject's psychological state
body image: mediating position between the organic and the psychical : it is by affecting, modifying, transforming the body image that each (organic & psychical) is able to effect transformation in the other
***Freud's prediction: man would become a prosthetic god*** [~= Iron Man]
body image = (function of) psychology + sociohistorical context + anatomy
the body image is extremely fluid and dynamic : its borders, edges, and contours are osmotic (تراوش کننده), they have the remarkable power of incorporating and expelling outside and inside in an ongoing interchange --> *social*
Schilder's “zones of sensitivity”: bodily orifices + its sensation experienced about one centimeter from the opening (-for example how[...]
(446)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%88[...]ues experts --> (fit into various) applied ethics contexts
Ihde rejecting a normativity that is predetermined by a dystopian/utopian cast
“let the things speak for themselves” (after they have been critically interrogated)
...................................
Galison
(employing) kinesthetic-tactile body experiences in Einstein's Gedanken-experimenten --> notions of the equivalence of gravity and acceleration
perceptual experience in relative train movement
clock watching in different space-time particularities
“On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”
Einstein's special relativity --> begins with basic assumptions about the behavior of clocks, rulers, and bodies in force-free motion
Einstein's rethinking of *distant simultaneity* (part philosophy & part physics)
-judgment of simultaneous event: “that train arrives here at 7 o'clock" = "the pointing of the small hand of my watch to 7 and the arrival of the train are simultaneous events”
electrodynamics always depended on a view about kinematics : how clocks and rulers behaved in the absence of force
1891 Germany Leipzig was the site of one of the first electrically distributed time systems (to bind distant clocks to a single central clock) --> railroad lines
piecemeal ruin of time
•an inconvenience for the traveler
•actual difficulty of vital importance for the railway business and military
means of consistent calibration
🕓 coordinated time --> material-economic necessity + cultural imaginary
==> 1900 blossoming of chronometric patents: on remote alarms, remote regulation of pendula, telephonic, even wireless-transmission of time
}--> pass through the Swiss patent office in Bern & Einstein's desk --> Einstein's expertise on electromechanical devices (1902)
electromagnetic clock coordination : transforming small electrical currents into high-precision rotatory movements
}--> “time is money” --Galison--> no old-fashioned mechanical, hydraulic, or pneumatic system would do--electricity was the key to the future (a future that would only come about properly if humankind broke with its mechanical clock past riven by anarchy, incoherence, and routinization)
distant simultaneity --> political, profitable, pragmatic =/= anarcho-clockism
#title
international bureau of measurement
Einstein agonizing over the nature of moving bodies and electrodynamics
=/= ether: the centerpiece of nineteenth-century physical theories
kinematics: geometry of motion, behavior of matter in the absence of force
metaphysics of Einstein's relativity theory --Galison--> underlined through some of the most symbolized mechanisms of modernity ~ determining train arrival times using electromagnet[...]
(447)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%88.7[...]udgment of simultaneous event: “that train arrives here at 7 o'clock" = "the pointing of the small hand of my watch to 7 and the arrival of the train are simultaneous events”
electrodynamics always depended on a view about kinematics : how clocks and rulers behaved in the absence of force
1891 Germany Leipzig was the site of one of the first electrically distributed time systems (to bind distant clocks to a single central clock) --> railroad lines
piecemeal ruin of time
•an inconvenience for the traveler
•actual difficulty of vital importance for the railway business and military
means of consistent calibration
🕓 coordinated time --> material-economic necessity + cultural imaginary
==> 1900 blossoming of chronometric patents: on remote alarms, remote regulation of pendula, telephonic, even wireless-transmission of time
}--> pass through the Swiss patent office in Bern & Einstein's desk --> Einstein's expertise on electromechanical devices (1902)
electromagnetic clock coordination : transforming small electrical currents into high-precision rotatory movements
}--> “time is money” --Galison--> no old-fashioned mechanical, hydraulic, or pneumatic system would do--electricity was the key to the future (a future that would only come about properly if humankind broke with its mechanical clock past riven by anarchy, incoherence, and routinization)
distant simultaneity --> political, profitable, pragmatic =/= anarcho-clockism
#title
international bureau of measurement
Einstein agonizing over the nature of moving bodies and electrodynamics
=/= ether: the centerpiece of nineteenth-century physical theories
kinematics: geometry of motion, behavior of matter in the absence of force
metaphysics of Einstein's relativity theory --Galison--> underlined through some of the most symbolized mechanisms of modernity ~ determining train arrival times using electromagnetically coordinated clocks (was precisely the technological issue that had been racking Europe 1902) : symbol of the interconnected sped-up world of modernity
*centralized time* distribution was the temporal-physical glory of the unified German empire
turn-of-the-century Euro-American world --> overlapping networks of coordination: webs of train tracks, telegraph lines, meteorological networks, longitude surveys under the watchful, increasingly universal, clock system
--> Einstein's special theory of relativity was (an imaginative) machine <-- Galison's technological reading of (Einstein's) most theoretical paper
Einstein had opened the zone of unification (but in the process:)
•he removed Berlin as the Zeitzentrum
•designed a machine that upended the very category of metaphysical centrality
post world [...]
(448)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%88.8[...]stem would do--electricity was the key to the future (a future that would only come about properly if humankind broke with its mechanical clock past riven by anarchy, incoherence, and routinization)
distant simultaneity --> political, profitable, pragmatic =/= anarcho-clockism
#title
international bureau of measurement
Einstein agonizing over the nature of moving bodies and electrodynamics
=/= ether: the centerpiece of nineteenth-century physical theories
kinematics: geometry of motion, behavior of matter in the absence of force
metaphysics of Einstein's relativity theory --Galison--> underlined through some of the most symbolized mechanisms of modernity ~ determining train arrival times using electromagnetically coordinated clocks (was precisely the technological issue that had been racking Europe 1902) : symbol of the interconnected sped-up world of modernity
*centralized time* distribution was the temporal-physical glory of the unified German empire
turn-of-the-century Euro-American world --> overlapping networks of coordination: webs of train tracks, telegraph lines, meteorological networks, longitude surveys under the watchful, increasingly universal, clock system
--> Einstein's special theory of relativity was (an imaginative) machine <-- Galison's technological reading of (Einstein's) most theoretical paper
Einstein had opened the zone of unification (but in the process:)
•he removed Berlin as the Zeitzentrum
•designed a machine that upended the very category of metaphysical centrality
post world war I
all the activities of man, whether conscious or unconscious (sleeping, eating, meditating, playing) take place in time; without order, without specified plans, we risk falling into anarchy (physical, intellectual and moral misery)
--Favarger--> the remedy: the precise measurement and determination of time with the rigor of an astronomical observatory
(to) democratize time : time rigor must be distributed electrically
(=/= gears and magnets)
Galison's exploring the material culture of clock coordination is to set Einstein's place in a universe of meaning --avoid--> two problematic positions (*on the relation of things to thoughts*):
1. materialism or empiricism: inductive, observation-centered account of scientific development (~ that ideas emerge causally and univalently from the disposition of objects and the impressions they make upon us) ==> “theory = provisional addition”
2. antipositivist movement of the 1960s and 1970s (that programmes, paradigms, and conceptual schemes came first ==reshape==> experiments and instruments all the way down) “thoughts fully structured things”
1902 --> triumph of the *electrical over the mechanical* was already symbolically wired to dreams of modernity
*electrica[...]
(449)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%88.8[...]s made to broadcast one story over another
testing --> calculative logics of anticipation and preemption --shape--> the contingency of the event
the actual practices of riggers (technical animator)
animation industry
the ways in which affect can be actively manipulated for commercial and economic ends in the design and production of consumer services and good
***technologies are affectively engineered*** <--Thrift--Ash-- microbiopolitics of the subliminal: doing without thinking, practices of anticipatory manipulation ==> position consumers of media as passive dupes (<-- زیرپوستی *hypodermic model of media power*)
--✕--> Ash: affective manipulation is necessarily a fragile achievement that is prone to failure and always reliant upon being continually reworked in the creative responses users develop in relation to the designed environments with which they interact [---> go to fandom and fan culture]
animation design (videogame): is a complex, problematic, and ongoing struggle between:
•the openness and performative play of contingency & chance (which emerge through the techniques and intelligences that users develop as they become skilled at these games)
•the mechanical systems and calculative rationalities through which these environments are designed
affective properties of contingency ==> commercially and critically successful
rig: assemblage of human and nonhuman actor
staging, managing, and controlling event [movement] within the limited computational architecture
(asking with Ash) how agency is distributed in the assemblages of various human and technical actors that make up rigging?
rig =/= architecture
shaping corporeal dispositions
(entertainment industry does work) to maintain and guard the contingent as a positive force
contingency: the unexpected, the random, the singular, the unrepeatable, or the surprising (that which cannot be pinned down by any process that attempts to pin it down) =/= boring
(Dastur, Dewsbury, Delanda)
--> you need *open skill: contingent tactically oriented understanding* (contextually-appropriate responsiveness, context-dependent ways, regulated improvisation) <-- hacker's talent
(Deleuzian) [*]affect: the outcome of an encounter between two or more bodies (which can be human or inhuman, organic or inorganic), which either increases or decreases a body's capacity for action
captivation --> the specificity of the ecological relationship between user and (image) environment
(game) design
cultivation of the right kinds of affects through quantitative variables in the game's database ~= (Latour's) laboratories: theatres of proof (through a process of decontextualization, the scientific experiment which isolates the factors it wants to study, [...]
(450)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%89[...]e of modern technology
~/=
games involve the development of techniques for interacting with them that subsist over longer periods of time within the body
•(gamer's) body <==shaped== through the creative responses generated by users in relation to the images they experience
•(game's) responses ==bring==> into being different bodily capacities and modes of attunement, which cannot be intentionally determined (by those who produce the images through the processes of design)
correct mixture of contingency and structure
...................................
prosthesis + castration complex --> “cyberspace: having your everything amputated”
prosthetic skill ~= mastery of the phantom limb
--> rigging
prosthetic --> vivid illustration of the human-technology relations in terms of the body [=/=? hyperobjects]
(set of) architectural metaphors --provide--> foundation of the university
-(in the case of rigging) mechanical metaphors --provide--> foundation of moving bodies
prosthetic technology (like the *magic lantern*)
***technology of theory***
rigging and the question of morphological correspondence (homology: systematic similarity) --> isomorphic systems of relations
•isomorphic: 1-1 mapping, structure-preserving mapping --✕--> breakable objects
homology: principle of rigging, essentially the same (parts might have different shapes and be employed for different purposes) --> geometrical similarity --> ‘abstraction: materials of organization’ [position + structure] (Geoffroy > Hubert)
~~✕--> Deleuze and Guattari's body without organs [anatomical: pure plane of immanence (~ *rig = abstract animal*)]
--> (thinkers of) *organic folding* + *comparative biological intuition* --> *science of form*
•analogue: a part or organ in one animal that has the same function as another part or organ in a different animal (--> rig is the analogue of the animal's body)
•homotypy (homotype: serially repeated parts) --> Goethe
homology: a morphological correspondence determined primarily by relative position and connection ~= rigging
--Darwin--> material ancestors (replaced metaphysical archetypes)
philosophical anatomy <~~?--> rigging
•dialectics is the search for rational laws which are active in nature
•discontent with merely empiricism
•transcendental (philosopher) ==> morphologist
rigging: (step away form ordinary perception and) building internal homologies (=/= external ressemblance)
==> comprehensible order (--> systematic animation)
~=> complexities and accidents (are also part of it)
--> rational morphology
--> mathematization of space [--> analytic geometry (not necessarily Euclidean or rigid bodies, but also curved spaces, n-dimensiona[...]
(451)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%89.1[...]cts
homology: principle of rigging, essentially the same (parts might have different shapes and be employed for different purposes) --> geometrical similarity --> ‘abstraction: materials of organization’ [position + structure] (Geoffroy > Hubert)
~~✕--> Deleuze and Guattari's body without organs [anatomical: pure plane of immanence (~ *rig = abstract animal*)]
--> (thinkers of) *organic folding* + *comparative biological intuition* --> *science of form*
•analogue: a part or organ in one animal that has the same function as another part or organ in a different animal (--> rig is the analogue of the animal's body)
•homotypy (homotype: serially repeated parts) --> Goethe
homology: a morphological correspondence determined primarily by relative position and connection ~= rigging
--Darwin--> material ancestors (replaced metaphysical archetypes)
philosophical anatomy <~~?--> rigging
•dialectics is the search for rational laws which are active in nature
•discontent with merely empiricism
•transcendental (philosopher) ==> morphologist
rigging: (step away form ordinary perception and) building internal homologies (=/= external ressemblance)
==> comprehensible order (--> systematic animation)
~=> complexities and accidents (are also part of it)
--> rational morphology
--> mathematization of space [--> analytic geometry (not necessarily Euclidean or rigid bodies, but also curved spaces, n-dimensional spaces, particle spaces, volumetric space, phase space, etc.) (looking at the animal) ==> abstract, proliferation of types --> rig] {--Lefebvre--> social critique of abstract space --> rigged}
-the way i learned 3D animation, the space of the software was a n-dimensional spaces (X, Y, Z, time, texture, audio, constraining, etc.)
automaton
a bit of machinery exhibiting somewhat complex behavior --rigging--> programming movement ==produce==> a working simulacrum of a living organism
•(in the days of magic) “name of god” was the rig for golem [?]
•(in the time of Newton) automaton: clockwork music box
•(in 19th century) automaton: glorified heat engine
•(in 20th century) intelligent building [~= rig]
•(perhaps rigging is our age's) desire to produce and study automata [~= computational mechanization, kinematic model]
(abstractly) automaton: a set of physically unspecified states, input, output, and operational rules
Galileo --> geometrical concept of space (=/= differentiated qualitatively)
principles
1. rigging --> a form of understanding =/= form of sensibility
2. in animation (physics) the choice of geometry is pragmatic (=/= analytic, a priori) ---> go to visualization: empiricist conception of geometry
(rigging --> transformations are applied to) geomet[...]
(453)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%89.2[...]ains
•some becomings and assemblages might refuse these refrains and *demand ontological primacy*
Leigh Star
for some kinds of tasks we (humans) are highly distributed --> remembering: ***much of our memories are in other people*** (libraries and homes)
part of our selves extend beyond the skin in every imaginable way <--phantom limb
--Katie--> embodiments (and beings) are distributed among memories, capacities, corporealities
demon dematerialization --> body dissolve (vanquish) --> relinquish --> networking materializing forces --> this text
the state of cut in manga series Attack on Titan
•affective wounds
•affective formations that break the skin
•restructuring
•chaotic and unpredictable nature
•your avatar (your monster): sensuously augmented elements of self
•territory registers
•materially real scales of involvement
•
play = double consciousness --> being in both states (is & is not, assertion & rejection) --creates--> its own commentary in itself about itself <-- intense and pleasurable interactive dynamism <-- meta communications performed by embodied selves at multiple levels (of organic and social systems)
commercial entertainment drawing on understandings of mammalian-affective structure : transmedia + mammalian animalities + AI agents (~= rigging)
Disney = interactive dramas of mammalian behavior of psychological bonding
3D application: interactive microworld of augmented assemblage of objects and beings and tools and zoons, visualization of mulistable cognition
= a form of globally restructuring knowledge work + embodied learning + economies
exosome explosive demons, as significant other?
we love to create worlds (that is why we make and watch soap operas)
careful negotiation of meaning and tools (in apass, not careful always)
...................................
(Katie -->) [*]web: a material example of a then counter-intuitive convergence and recombination, one across forms of inscription and meaning making devices[...]in that fictional everywhere of “everyone's” lives
emerging posthumanities: humans are only some of the agencies self-organizing in altering systems of things + people + worldly processes --Katie--> being inside and moved around literally by the very material and conceptual structures you are analyzing and writing about -->
•transdisciplinary consciousness: telescoping out to engage infrastructures in their layered accretions رشد
•witing (saying what counts) [has to] diverge perpendicularly across the normative --> performative = demonstration + simulation
•knowledge workings --embed--> within culture industries + transnational educational restructuring projects
wri[...]
(454)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%89.4[...]tary in itself about itself <-- intense and pleasurable interactive dynamism <-- meta communications performed by embodied selves at multiple levels (of organic and social systems)
commercial entertainment drawing on understandings of mammalian-affective structure : transmedia + mammalian animalities + AI agents (~= rigging)
Disney = interactive dramas of mammalian behavior of psychological bonding
3D application: interactive microworld of augmented assemblage of objects and beings and tools and zoons, visualization of mulistable cognition
= a form of globally restructuring knowledge work + embodied learning + economies
exosome explosive demons, as significant other?
we love to create worlds (that is why we make and watch soap operas)
careful negotiation of meaning and tools (in apass, not careful always)
...................................
(Katie -->) [*]web: a material example of a then counter-intuitive convergence and recombination, one across forms of inscription and meaning making devices[...]in that fictional everywhere of “everyone's” lives
emerging posthumanities: humans are only some of the agencies self-organizing in altering systems of things + people + worldly processes --Katie--> being inside and moved around literally by the very material and conceptual structures you are analyzing and writing about -->
•transdisciplinary consciousness: telescoping out to engage infrastructures in their layered accretions رشد
•witing (saying what counts) [has to] diverge perpendicularly across the normative --> performative = demonstration + simulation
•knowledge workings --embed--> within culture industries + transnational educational restructuring projects
writing technologie (~= activities + skills + devices in layered assemblages + material + conceptual inscription) --literalize--> tensions in grammatology:
•between writing's many possible referent/sign relationships in historical progression <-- Ignace Gelb
•call to account of assumptions about writing's derivations from speech built into the assertion of these relationships <-- Derrida
my writing on Charmed and rigging --> a mime of writing, mime understanding [#simulacra of knowledge], (using Katie's word) a literalizing attempt to work/write in the middle of writing technologies
...................................
lord of the rings (and similar movies) ~= new forms of evangelization
---> go to propaganda
temporality, time, day & night:
in ajayeb:
گویند که در حدود مغرب حیوانی است. چون آفتاب برآید، حالی بچّه بزاید و بچّه را در آفتاب نهد. به یک روز بزرگ گردد. چون آفتاب فرو رود، ب[...]
(455)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%89.4[...]ریا
دانستن to know = توانستن to be able to
خسته شدن getting tired = مجروح شدن getting injured
سرشتن to create = مخلوط کردن to mix, compose
راه بردن = شناختن، بلد بودن
raftan = eshal gerftan
dashtan = motevaghef kardan
afzudan = toghyan kardan
TRAVEL*
-Adam Olearius (ambassador, translator, Russian+Persian)
-Sa'di (poet, traveler, theorist of love and friendship, )
-Sana+Sina (artist, researcher, translator, )
world? what is late today? trans-late: beyond being late --> travel and arriving late
travel, trans, transportation, poetry, disruption in travel, traumatic travel, log,
traumatic travel:
poetic source/act
related to refuging
voyage
exploration
investigate poetry and travel in the 12th century and 16th century and 21st century encounter
translational worlding between German Iranian cross-cultural speculative narratives that we fabulate with artistic and research methodologies
trajectory, destined beings, translations, transportation, routs, paths, maps,
transportation system
translation system
error in destination(?) [ontology of ‘error’ in 12th, 16th, 21st]
mutation in the garden(?)
technological system of destiny -?-> Sa'di
the flow of energy and material : dejle-biaban continuity
which agential force or travel agency Sa'di or Olearius or Sana or Sina is enrolled or registered in, that it sends them off to far distances?
pure political plays?
the question of ambassadorship
ambassadorial activities of Sana and Sina
the question of diplomacy
ambassador: storytelling, acting,
comparative thinking, comparative research, comparative translational methodology : *self in world* tech., lit., dis.,
which technologies (of composing, of writing, of figuring) are installed for Sa'di in the 12th century and for Adam Olearius in the 16th century that allows them to imagine and engage in/with what we call today *mondial*?
(Sa'di + Olearius:)
chance encounter, failures, writing, making figures, loving, making friends, their acts of worlding (?), composing worlds, (de-compose?)
technicity: armillary sphere, Globe of Gottorf, Golestan, drawings, star constellations with astrological and mythological symbols, inside-outside model of the cosmos,
--> they both have concerns of *global consciousness* --> and their differences: two (or more) different world knowledges
GPS: global system position, concern of both Sa'di and Olearius
an excuse to read and investigate their worldings? translations between worlds, and sewing, tearings, and so on during the Safaviten and the Russian Tsar 16th [...]
(456)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%89.8[...] -?-> Sa'di
the flow of energy and material : dejle-biaban continuity
which agential force or travel agency Sa'di or Olearius or Sana or Sina is enrolled or registered in, that it sends them off to far distances?
pure political plays?
the question of ambassadorship
ambassadorial activities of Sana and Sina
the question of diplomacy
ambassador: storytelling, acting,
comparative thinking, comparative research, comparative translational methodology : *self in world* tech., lit., dis.,
which technologies (of composing, of writing, of figuring) are installed for Sa'di in the 12th century and for Adam Olearius in the 16th century that allows them to imagine and engage in/with what we call today *mondial*?
(Sa'di + Olearius:)
chance encounter, failures, writing, making figures, loving, making friends, their acts of worlding (?), composing worlds, (de-compose?)
technicity: armillary sphere, Globe of Gottorf, Golestan, drawings, star constellations with astrological and mythological symbols, inside-outside model of the cosmos,
--> they both have concerns of *global consciousness* --> and their differences: two (or more) different world knowledges
GPS: global system position, concern of both Sa'di and Olearius
an excuse to read and investigate their worldings? translations between worlds, and sewing, tearings, and so on during the Safaviten and the Russian Tsar 16th century cosmology and models of reciprocity
(Translation is always interpretive, critical, and partial.)
intersection of multiple hierarchies:
-the Safaviten order (Isfahan architecture)
-the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp order (family architecture, court and mathematic)
-Tsar order (urban)
-literature of reciprocity***
Sana keywords: distortion, displacement, distance, alternation, collage, blur (noun), noise, voice-over, subtle changes, micro-macro, micro-politic, rhythm, turbulence, fragmentation, metaphor, persistence, repetition, disturbance,
(unexpected)
--> separation ??? =/=? compose
media/mediums: new narratives (script, score, etc.), image archive, garden (material and semiotic site), performance poetry, land-art, video
why video: using performative materials, enactments and staging of speculative narratives, experimental film making, editing, cheap visual effects, animation and drawing. by using the local geography and landscape of Eckernförde, employment of fragmented scores and modest embodiment, experimental acting and storytelling, the video as a generous medium holds and hosts all our gathered materials, and enables a linear but expansive experience. we will write short scripts based on stories from Olearius's travel logs in Iran and Sa'di's Golestan in order to put them into tests after 8 and 3 centuries, and produce intensi[...]
(459)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%89.8[...]gress of space
early modern: a growth of a composite writing that moves between diagrammatical and discursive inspiration ~=> creation of self
(i have a relation with ajayeb, or any ‘old’ text, in that of “the pleasure these works afford is due the ways that they allow us to invent imaginary realms of space through our illusion of having ‘first-hand’ contact with them” -->? creation of my “self”)
in a world in which we discover our heritage as gratuitous beings --> a partial and universal history of ourselves
we are products of individual and collective histories
geographic literature
the sudden birth and growth of mapping (between 15th and 17th century):
•in Renaissance admiration for antiquity Ptolemy esteemed as the world's founding geographer
•in growth of scientific revolution quantification and measurement was stressed, the human body and the geographic landscape of the natural world became topics of interest
•plotting and perspective: in representation art a “saturated reality” began to animate paintings + the invention of artificial perspective ==> new ways of gridding and plotting the world
•political unification, or nation building, to use maps to construct systems of defense
•*emerging self and to the self's relation to the idea of national space
new modes of surveying and plotting the world influence representation of the private and public domains of the individual writer
theatricalization of the self --> a consciousness of its autonomy (through modes of positioning [in gridded and textual reality])
--> a new cartographic impulse:
•changing conditions of information
•new taxonomies
•new relations that individuals hold with space
•emerging sense of national identity
the self would acquire its identity through the creation of a space that bears the presence (or the reminder) of the mapping of its signature
its “foundational fantasy” depends on (an alliance with) a strongly marked geographic consciousness
mimes the construction (of a world)
contemporary politics of statecraft
...to locate a mobile site of anguish to project the portrait (of epic and lyrical scope) of a national subject?
...between experience and fantasy for the sake of producing imaginary conquests in the shape of self-aggrandizement?
ingenieur du moi
medium engineers
imaginary space, nation, selfhood
*** the self-possessed individual ***
(Conley calls) writing “cartographic” insofar as tensions of space and of figuration inhere in fields of printed discourse
(although his understanding of writing as ‘effects of recorded speech’ is not interesting)
(and he ties to fast cartography to expansion and conquest, allegorical propag[...]
(460)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%90.3[...]your (anthropological) objects have to “be walked around,” “approached from precise angles,” and seen as “states of being,” emergent, or suspended in potentiality, or collapsing, or residual, roosting on live matter. *culture ~= [*]the cultural: “a resonant and magnetizing field that registered in people and things living through events and conditions.” we try to describe sensibilities hitting people and traversing [...] things:
◦bodies of thought
◦assemblages of infrastructures and institutions
◦new ecologies
◦the rhythms of a daily living
◦the strangely connective tissue (produced by handheld devices and social media)
}--> to compose a register of the lived affects of the things that took place in a social-aesthetic-material-political worlding [=/= “to track the predetermined effects of abstractable logics and structures."] ***singularities*** take place as a series of precisions (across sociality, materiality, infrastructure, etc.) they are “events of,” emerged in the lived problematics of a present ==> they could be brought to bear, deployed, maneuvered, suffered, or played with. [*]affects: “registering of life as an assemblage of elements thrown, in the course of events, into a contact aesthetic” [=/= the side effects of systems, codes, or imaginaries (located in an elsewhere)]
•return (anthropology) to sense and sensation (<== affect) (Olearius missed this, the “world” is proposed to him anchored in the consciousness of [his] humanist subject or its categories of thought. he misses Iran as a world charged with affect, which is a prolific, mixed-use contact zone in an ongoing state of transition that leaves [Iranian] people “improvising with already-felts” [~=? Golestan Sa'di]) -- affect added an affirmative critique that registers surprise at what and how things happen.
[*]affective subject: “a person who waits in the company of others for things to arrive, one who learns to sense out what's coming and what forms it might take, one who aims to notice what crystallizes and how things ricochet and rebound in a social-natural-aesthetic ecology of compositions and thresholds of expressivity.” --> “For the affective subject, there is always the weight of the world in what can be hoped for and what must be feared, in what flourishes and what matters.”
[*]Life: “an experiment of being in a world, of finding ways to be in circuits of force and form, an aspiration to get something out of the alchemical transmogrifications of things that twist off on trajectories far beyond humanist models of suffering or the usual hyperlegible registers of normativity and the state.” --> “[Life] takes place in the inhuman gestures of demons and angels, in the struggles of addicts and the rage of racists, in the endurance of the unbelievably injured or the oddly still curious.” (Stewart)
•a world deliteralized (with no endemic divide between a naturalized given order and the exceptionali[...]
(461)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%91[...]its; they seldom keep to what they promise unless it is to their advantage” --> a laconic (mojez موجز) group of people who are frugal (sarfeju صرفه جو) in their habits, rarely keep their word unless it is to their advantage and are also oversexed ==> they are indeed different from the Europeans
discourse of analogy
cartographic evidence
a book of others
the ways it fashions received information
“Ortelius's innovation in the science of cartography is that he attends less to the “big picture” of the world than to putting together an illustrated summery of possibly infinite number of fragmentary parts (Conley)
--> “segmentable” units of an infinite possibility of scale and focus (#Goolge maps)
[]
Blue Map of Persia
influence of Ptolemy on the early islamic cartographers, in the time of Ma'mun
the notion of the inhabitable world being divided into seven horizontal bands called ‘climata’ or agalim/aghalim/ اقلیم(a geographical model derived probably from Persia)
*encircling ocean* surrounded the known world, and that usually have south at the top, probably to emphasize the importance of Mecca
system of Climes
(book of) notification: tanbih تنبیه
...pioneer on the road toward a (geographically) correct picture of Persia
_Persienbild_
...................................
“drawn from life”
the imagery and allegorical figures found on the frontispiece are learned signifiers belonging to a visual world that reflects and prefigures the verbal description that forms the body of the work
Olearius designs a brilliant visual program
visual table of contents
his nascent (dar tavalod درحال تولد) nationalist feelings
he translates both:
•the literature of the Persian poet
◾the visual code of the land (he has visited)
traces of the author within the map
signs of the hidden power relation
depiction of the exotic “other” --> represented visually and typologically categorized, be it within the map itself, or in the boundary areas, in the margins of the representational space**
--?--> Timuri jiz
patronage
naming
“es gab eine lustige perspective”
of note in this scene [shah Safi's banquet for the Hostein embassy] is the woman alongside the right wall, who seems to be flirting coquettishly with a German looking in her direction, thus establishing a kind of contact between the two cultures
the monarch's true nature is laid bare
“you see me from the outside, as a pleasant young man in years, but on the murderous interior i am a tyrant.”
the scene of Eastern opulence and decadence corresponds to a 17th century (or[...]
(462)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%92.2[...]naming of) normative iconography of technological innovation
assumptions of technological innovation:
•physics as fundamental knowledge (--> the translation of kinetic energy to electrical energy and the variables that influence the efficiency of that translation) [--(this is)--> knowledge relating to environmental and social contextualization of the techniques described by physics ==> constitution of environmental robustness ==achieving==> social acceptability] --> the rhetoric of a diagram embeding that assumption:
◦‘additive’ : that knowledge becomes relevant at ‘later’ stages in the life of the model asserted by the diagram. the purview of the ‘additive’ diagram : negotiation and strategy reside in the realm of subjectivity, therefore cannot be represented }==> subjects, those who do the organizing and the giverbing, do not belonge to the ‘core’ that the diagram claims to represent : [subject]--[emptiness]--[dieagram]
--> rendering innovation as a ‘general event’ of an ‘unspecifiable future’ that is progressed towards + idealizing sites [= times and places (of these affairs)] [not allowing the questioning of these sites as obligatory passage points (for innovation)]
--> claiming for itself a capacity to realistically map a stable system
(diagram of technological innovation: a cartography of stable entities and stable relations) =/= a complex and emergent system embedding ambiguity and contradiction
--> promoting an organizational regime that proceeds by conforming to standards of non-contradiction and non-equivocation in its rhetoric =/= baroque baldachin (arshe عرشه) (with other than representation capacities) explicitly recognizing complexity, openness, and emergence --offering--> [enabling graphics to offer] pilotage خلبانى
***every tool should pose not only technically complicated questions rather fundamental ones***
branched tree diagram: saying that knowledge of the ‘branches’ includes a conception of the truck, suggesting: to understand is to understand how the truck generates the branches, and that is what is learnt and transmitted by specialists (Stengers, @Eszter)
Verran > Stengers working on the “gods and demons that populate physics”
[...] rejection and enclosure within the domain of ‘nonscientific’ or ‘simply subjective’ (of anything that cannot be reduced to the canon of the ‘simple’ model)
[Stengers]
(Verran on) the capacities of numbers to interpellate (رسما سوال کردن، استيضاح کردن) their users
diptych قاب دو لوحى
model of meaning-making that diagrams initiate (spatially + linguistically)
articulated sets of relations
a particularly efficacious form of certainty-generating rhetoric by ancient Greek mathematicians (appropriated by thier politicians), [...]
(463)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%92.4[...] specialists (Stengers, @Eszter)
Verran > Stengers working on the “gods and demons that populate physics”
[...] rejection and enclosure within the domain of ‘nonscientific’ or ‘simply subjective’ (of anything that cannot be reduced to the canon of the ‘simple’ model)
[Stengers]
(Verran on) the capacities of numbers to interpellate (رسما سوال کردن، استيضاح کردن) their users
diptych قاب دو لوحى
model of meaning-making that diagrams initiate (spatially + linguistically)
articulated sets of relations
a particularly efficacious form of certainty-generating rhetoric by ancient Greek mathematicians (appropriated by thier politicians), according to Netz: meaning-making in geometry proceeds in a particular way, a way that generates deductive proof --> (Netz's notion of) oral performance origins of meaning-making with diagrammatic device =/= (Verran's) graphics embedded within flows of words --> relations graphically plotted frame the relations plotted in flows of words (and reversed): diagrams labile ناپايدار in their forms of participation in collectives***
{my research on premodern systematic investigation of strange singularities of the labile phenomena [lability: liable to err and fall, slip, glide, flow] in the middle ages --helps--> how in the absence of authoritative *source of knowledge* in artistic research environments such as apass, *styles of knowing* mime and intertwine in poetics, practice, and politics}
speaking from diagram (offering possibilities of pilotage of the emergent relations) =/= speaking to diagram (a form of presentation, a proposed ‘found’ past in an idealized future, proposing as a realistic map of a given)
@Eszter: the question of recognizing the complexity of manipulating sets of relations expressed graphically --> developing (in my self) a contrast which offers possibilities for rhetorically distinguishing between ‘speaking from’ and ‘speaking to’ ==> shifts that can effect moves in collective meaning-making
wordy texts
(Star Trek's) displaying “our” modern commonplaces out of the place they are coming from --> makes me vomit
-in US sci-fi TV series we face that we are still Aristotlian, in our regulation of speech, we live under the regime of non-contradiction and of non-equivocation (tie up our public life in it) (--> when i say this is not my story, i am talking about another tradition of speech regulation)
proto-Baroque theater
*ambiguous monarchy*
absolutism has never been a feature of Iran monarchies
(who?) put an end to the complex, emergent baroque polity
a baroque sensibility was no longer salient in the Danish monarchical context and the baldachin beca[...]
(465)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%92.5[...]tes strategically select elements from an ideological ‘toolbox’ in their attempt to gain support for the sexual regulation of women.”
Toor showing how impossible it is to think of ‘Islam’ as being the source of Muslim women's problems:
•(an ordinary story) runaway marriage --to--> a battle for the consolidation of class and patriarchal power played on a national stage; a case (of Saima) abounding in the established and familiar postcolonial binaries of East/West, tradition/modernity, public/private, sacred/profane
*class struggle is itself always already a gendered process, both discursively and materially*
clash between different and competing patriarchies or patriarchal arrangements --> the status of women within kin-networks --> the role of marriage in consolidating class power ==hence==> the rhetoric of marriage as something too important to be left to the men and women concerned (in Pakistan: ‘marriages = cementing relations between men’) --> “controlling female sexuality across class lines” [--> a very specific anxiety over female (sexual) agency* + complexities of patriarchy within Pakistani society] }--> “Among other things, they demonstrate that ‘Islam'--whether as a basis for individual/national identity, as a religious and cultural system, or as a set of injunctions encoded in theological and juridical textual sources--is always/already an internally contested discourse rather than a monolithic and internally coherent thing.”
(--> understanding of) the ways in which ‘the law’ itself is constructed and operationalized; delightful colonial legacy called the “Family Laws” (part of the penal codes of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh);
•zina (zena, illicit sex, adultery, premarital sex) --> far from being an expression of religious piety at the familial or state level, the zina law is wielded as a potent weapon of control and extortion by families of ‘disobedient’ women + the rights that the moral authority of Islam grants the women against their families }=/= the manner in which the mainstream media in the West constructs the role of Islam in the lives of Muslim women (~ everything to do with Muslims is explained by ‘Islam’) =/= Khan's research on incarcerated women leads her to conclude that poverty is an important causal factor in the imprisonment of women under the charge of zina in Pakistan (structural adjustment policies imposed on Pakistan by the World Bank and IMF from the 1980s on) --> larger global political and economic processes
•a transgender couple charged with perjury under the Pakistan Penal Code, and not under ‘Islamic law.’ Supreme Court would rule in their favor, the judgment drew on the presence of the figure of Hermaphrodite in Ancient Greece to Islam + discussed with sympathy by mainstream media + well-organized and politically savvy hijra community in Pakista
}--> @Hoda, since she is interested in women's status under purportedly Islamic regimes
}==[...]
(466)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%92.8[...]magnetized to tones of voice and a quality of light
place (=/= immpasive corporeality) : affective charges:
•a mantel of redemption
•a glacier of impatience
•a high desert of anxiety dissected by fault lines of rage
}--performed--> in **little scenes of recognition** (--> “visceral complicity of those laying claim to a composed tactility[...]” =/= naturalized order per se)
(Tehran's?) drawn curtains: physical shadow of a state of hardening, a rotting from the inside out
(...curtained people, they suck the) *gestural sensory attachments of seeing and being seen* (into a world in which things are dark)
precarity ==?==> intimacy (of people in place)
(in winter with T-shirt and sandals) the townie body unfazed by the cold, endearing, a little heroic
an imaginary --> a logic of some sort --> abstracted ==> become a thing in itself
or, a thing simultaneously virtual and concrete
like the road, made not of dreams per se, but of laws, of ordinary practices, military surges, and construction technologies
...intensities pass from body to body:
•human bodies
•animal bodies
•machine bodies
•bodies of thought
•ecosystems
•visceralities and noumena
•histories
•the seamless habitus of supermarkets and credit cards
•
(Stewart's) precarity's form: compositional + decompositional
attachments, temps, materialities, states of being
[*]description: a writing culture lodged in emergence, generativity, potentiality
things that come into form through an assemblage of affects, routes, conditions, sensibilities, habits
what it means to meet the world:
(Stewart) *as a nearing* [=/= raw material for exploitation]
(Heidegger) as the ringing between composing subjects and objects
(McCormack) felt as ways of going on in the world
(Deleuze) as increases and decreases, brightening and darkening
() in a cartography distributed across a field of intensities and durations
[=/= rush to incorporate them into a representational order of political or moral significance]
...................................
[*]epistemology = stories of knowledge from before that somehow we are still living with now (#fable)
Geroulanos -->{ Ardrey --to--> Kubrick's african genesis : “weapon fathered man”
technology + prehistory (in postwar period)
“tool ==> man"}
...................................
knowing images
epistemic image : knowledge-based pictorial gestures (in my work without) --> organization + collecting + demonstrating theories + scientific tools + direct references to natural objects
--> searchable interfaces (+ desire for condensed information)
(**list ==> sea[...]
(467)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%93.1[...]s for intervening
(why i use comparing stories in my lecture performances -->) the act of [*]comparing : a central aspect of seeking to contain the dual logic in one story --> (Strathern > Holbraad & Pedersen > Verran > ) peculiar intensification of the act of fieldwork
good faith analysis : stories that are explicit about the double vision through foregrounding within the story a figure that enables *switching*
•stories that never intervene in a way that was imagined (before the study was carried out)
(Strathern's) [*]partiality = incomplete + committed : a description is always part of a whole, which can never be known as a totality, and it is political (biased)
lecture performance ~= brining the effect of a story to life as generalization --> infra-ontological + epistemological work
...................................
Kwa
[*]holism: the ideal of integrating all the workings of nature into one whole
1950s --> a special relationship between the holism and the computer (the idea that if the assumption of holism is fed into a computer model, the computer faithfully reproduces it)
early 20th century --> notions of the complex unity of (living) systems ==> romantic conceptions of nature
*complexity = romantic holism =/= reductionist*
romantic tradition of complexity : to see an underlying unity in a world of heterogeneous objects and phenomena (Rousseau, Cuvier, last two thousands years, [is religion romantic?])
romantic scientist's moderate version of Kant's Copernican Revolution:
•Rousseau
•Humboldt --> ***to arrange the facts, not successively on the order in which they have presented themselves, but according to the relations which they have between themselves*** [~~> a sort of paranoia]
◦the idea that to see that Humboldt was able to see takes a “sensitive observer”
•Whitehead --> physical systems with endurance as the measure of their stability
•Tansley --> ecosystem ~= superorganism
•
=/= baroque (--Kwa--> neobaroque):
•Leibniz --> every bit of matter can be conceived as a garden full of plants : each drop of its bodily fluid is also such a garden ==> ***it is the direction of looking that matters *** (mode of attention)
•Deleuze
•Whitehead
•Darwin
•Benjamin
•
bestiary = baroque + romantic
*romantic complexity (looks up) =/= baroque complexity (looks down)*
•looking up: integrate individuals (who appear to be a heterogeneous lot) at the phenomenological level to a single entity at a higher level of organization --> (plants and animals, individuals) are*functionality integrated* [<-- my problem with the notion of community]
◦looking up to the world of platonic forms <-- a process of abstraction
•looking down:[...]
(468)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%93.5[...]
lecture performance ~= brining the effect of a story to life as generalization --> infra-ontological + epistemological work
...................................
Kwa
[*]holism: the ideal of integrating all the workings of nature into one whole
1950s --> a special relationship between the holism and the computer (the idea that if the assumption of holism is fed into a computer model, the computer faithfully reproduces it)
early 20th century --> notions of the complex unity of (living) systems ==> romantic conceptions of nature
*complexity = romantic holism =/= reductionist*
romantic tradition of complexity : to see an underlying unity in a world of heterogeneous objects and phenomena (Rousseau, Cuvier, last two thousands years, [is religion romantic?])
romantic scientist's moderate version of Kant's Copernican Revolution:
•Rousseau
•Humboldt --> ***to arrange the facts, not successively on the order in which they have presented themselves, but according to the relations which they have between themselves*** [~~> a sort of paranoia]
◦the idea that to see that Humboldt was able to see takes a “sensitive observer”
•Whitehead --> physical systems with endurance as the measure of their stability
•Tansley --> ecosystem ~= superorganism
•
=/= baroque (--Kwa--> neobaroque):
•Leibniz --> every bit of matter can be conceived as a garden full of plants : each drop of its bodily fluid is also such a garden ==> ***it is the direction of looking that matters *** (mode of attention)
•Deleuze
•Whitehead
•Darwin
•Benjamin
•
bestiary = baroque + romantic
*romantic complexity (looks up) =/= baroque complexity (looks down)*
•looking up: integrate individuals (who appear to be a heterogeneous lot) at the phenomenological level to a single entity at a higher level of organization --> (plants and animals, individuals) are*functionality integrated* [<-- my problem with the notion of community]
◦looking up to the world of platonic forms <-- a process of abstraction
•looking down: a table of companions --> (plants and animals, individuals) are *cooperating*
(romantic conceptions of) society as organism =/= (baroque conception of) organism as society
(historic) baroque
-grand style of 17th century
-(insist on) strong phenomenological realness --> sensuous materiality
-materiality flows out in many directions (=/= confined within) ==> blurring “individual =/= environment”
-inventiveness:
--music--> the ability to produce lots of novel combinations out of a rather limited set of elements
--theater--> (logical development of plot =/=) sequence of monologues and allegories ==> action
Leibniz baroque philosophy[...]
(469)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%93.5[...]/>
bestiary = baroque + romantic
*romantic complexity (looks up) =/= baroque complexity (looks down)*
•looking up: integrate individuals (who appear to be a heterogeneous lot) at the phenomenological level to a single entity at a higher level of organization --> (plants and animals, individuals) are*functionality integrated* [<-- my problem with the notion of community]
◦looking up to the world of platonic forms <-- a process of abstraction
•looking down: a table of companions --> (plants and animals, individuals) are *cooperating*
(romantic conceptions of) society as organism =/= (baroque conception of) organism as society
(historic) baroque
-grand style of 17th century
-(insist on) strong phenomenological realness --> sensuous materiality
-materiality flows out in many directions (=/= confined within) ==> blurring “individual =/= environment”
-inventiveness:
--music--> the ability to produce lots of novel combinations out of a rather limited set of elements
--theater--> (logical development of plot =/=) sequence of monologues and allegories ==> action
Leibniz baroque philosophy --> monad: individuals not linked to form greater systems (they don't even communicate), but they affect each other
--Deleuze--> each monad had its context represented inside itself (as fold) [more important the monad --> richer its world]
metaphors of romanticism:
•organicism
•system --> (in graphical representation) depicted by connecting lives between constituent elements (=/= monad)
•
Whitehead --Deleuze--> a neobaroque philosopher --> possibility of a chaotic side-by-side existence of mutually exclusive realities
(baroque era) harmony: art of counterpoints (bringing together independent voices)
German baroque (Gryphius, Lohenstein) --> nature = [*]ruin: heap of highly significant fragments =/= seamless web (@ERG website)
•fragment: independent individual things with a monadological structure (~/= postmodern understanding of fragment)
•link (between them) = reciprocal reference =/= connection
◦(references remain in their) *allegorical immanence*
•
World War II ~=> systems theories (attempt to explain the structure and behavior of complex objects
Charney + von Neumann
deterministic description of the atmosphere
“long-range forecasting”
computer-based metrology
==> *field* became the essence of atmospheric state (field =/= structure, phenomena such as cyclones, fronts, cyclogenesis, frontogenesis)
<--Lorenz-- a given that the atmosphere is a single whole
romantic & nonromantic Darwin
evolutionary theory
phylogenetic tree
-“war of nature ==> higher animals directly follow"
[...]
(471)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%93.6[...]lements
--theater--> (logical development of plot =/=) sequence of monologues and allegories ==> action
Leibniz baroque philosophy --> monad: individuals not linked to form greater systems (they don't even communicate), but they affect each other
--Deleuze--> each monad had its context represented inside itself (as fold) [more important the monad --> richer its world]
metaphors of romanticism:
•organicism
•system --> (in graphical representation) depicted by connecting lives between constituent elements (=/= monad)
•
Whitehead --Deleuze--> a neobaroque philosopher --> possibility of a chaotic side-by-side existence of mutually exclusive realities
(baroque era) harmony: art of counterpoints (bringing together independent voices)
German baroque (Gryphius, Lohenstein) --> nature = [*]ruin: heap of highly significant fragments =/= seamless web (@ERG website)
◦fragment: independent individual things with a monadological structure (~/= postmodern understanding of fragment)
•link (between them) = reciprocal reference =/= connection
◦(references remain in their) *allegorical immanence*
•
World War II ~=> systems theories (attempt to explain the structure and behavior of complex objects
Charney + von Neumann
deterministic description of the atmosphere
“long-range forecasting”
computer-based metrology
==> *field* became the essence of atmospheric state (field =/= structure, phenomena such as cyclones, fronts, cyclogenesis, frontogenesis)
<--Lorenz-- a given that the atmosphere is a single whole
romantic & nonromantic Darwin
evolutionary theory
phylogenetic tree
-“war of nature ==> higher animals directly follow”
-individual organisms engage in various interactions with each other ==> speciationtion
Tansley (fulfilling a romantic expectation with regard to complex systems) --1926--> maintenance of equilibrium by ecosystem ["life = equilibrium"]
=/= Schrödinger (showed that equilibrium is unfit as a metaphor for life) --> life = islands of low entropy (complex locations) in a sea of high entropy (of decreasing complexity)
Lokta
(evolution of) chemical systems = general systems
Patten
ecosystem ecologist
“ecosystem = natural control system” ~= (single equilibrium simple cybernetic) technical control device <-- the metaphor of *automatic machine* (taken literally)
representing whole ecosystems by (mathematized and fit for simulation on digital computers) models
1960s 70s --> system ecology
--lurck--> (romantic trope of) rigorous functionalism [every little plant or insect had its place as a cog on a giant machinery]
Rene Thom
[...]
(473)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%93.6[...] art of counterpoints (bringing together independent voices)
German baroque (Gryphius, Lohenstein) --> nature = [*]ruin: heap of highly significant fragments =/= seamless web (@ERG website)
•fragment: independent individual things with a monadological structure (~/= postmodern understanding of fragment)
•link (between them) = reciprocal reference =/= connection
◦(references remain in their) *allegorical immanence*
•
World War II ~=> systems theories (attempt to explain the structure and behavior of complex objects
Charney + von Neumann
deterministic description of the atmosphere
“long-range forecasting”
computer-based metrology
==> *field* became the essence of atmospheric state (field =/= structure, phenomena such as cyclones, fronts, cyclogenesis, frontogenesis)
<--Lorenz-- a given that the atmosphere is a single whole
romantic & nonromantic Darwin
evolutionary theory
phylogenetic tree
-“war of nature ==> higher animals directly follow”
-individual organisms engage in various interactions with each other ==> speciation
Tansley (fulfilling a romantic expectation with regard to complex systems) --1926--> maintenance of equilibrium by ecosystem ["life = equilibrium"]
=/= Schrödinger (showed that equilibrium is unfit as a metaphor for life) --> life = islands of low entropy (complex locations) in a sea of high entropy (of decreasing complexity)
Lokta
(evolution of) chemical systems = general systems
Patten
ecosystem ecologist
“ecosystem = natural control system” ~= (single equilibrium simple cybernetic) technical control device <-- the metaphor of *automatic machine* (taken literally)
representing whole ecosystems by (mathematized and fit for simulation on digital computers) models
1960s 70s --> system ecology
--lurck--> (romantic trope of) rigorous functionalism [every little plant or insect had its place as a cog on a giant machinery]
Rene Thom
chemical reaction kinetics
biological morphogenesis
catastrophe theory: slight change in a single variable of a system can give rise to sharp discontinuous change
==> existence of multiple equilibria
Slobodkin
game theory
management of natural systems
Prigogine + Stengers
brusselator device (--> strange attractor) --> behavior and evolution of complex systems --illustrate-->
•discontinuous development
•bifurcation (points at which the system may go in either of two directions --> the system behaves as a whole)
local random fluctuations (around a mean) --> bifurcation point --> the system as a whole evolves to a new order
=/= cybernetic system (control c[...]
(474)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%93.6[...]irit of the unnamed thing they witnessed ==> moved to make a report (something is a little off)
(if there is grounding it is grounding in) world's variegated poesis --> ([*]description:) to make room ([for its] emergence --into--> theory)
A walker with a routine gets used to the little apparitions of something throwing together in his or her vicinity
(questions of points of contact:) what to do with your eyes?
([against?] positionality of) writing from the ground
(memory of a city:) a contact aesthetic of histories and rogue trajectories set in motion by every object encountered
harshly half-formed world
germinal aesthetics
channels of autonomous objects lay down stakes and swerve at points of contact with the itineraries of other things ==create==> a distributed zone of *robust realism*
the real (of X): transversal arrays of qualities or activities (like musical refrains) give order to materials and situations, human bodies and brains included, as actions undertaken act-back to shape muscles and hone senses
(to sharpen) realist attention to things
[*]life: ontological entertainment
unfulfilled systems littered the kitchen
tangent to an elsewhere
gleamingly restored eighteenth-century perfections <-- Cinderella's mansion
...of autonomous objects lying around...
a zone of randomly abandoned X
against the background of nothing
visceral avoidance
pretty and fresh as blueberry pie
townies (how i am not a townie where i live)
•townie: loyalty to the expressivity of things
sociality of a wedding party (filled with roles and dressings)
crazy ricochet..
perfectly ordinary...
...long-ago layered over the wood (necrotic غانقرايايا)
“expressivity sliced through matter, word, and action, locking them together in a harshly half-formed world”
writing Cinderella diaries --> questions of realism
•what kind of real we enter?
•her realism (bring her) --into--> a rough contact with objects human and non-human
•Cinderella does things to and with them (her animals) [and reverse]
*social pressure ==> (people) make descriptive mistake*
a problematic (for example afterlife of a tragedy) --that--> inspires X --to--> speculative interest in forms
•Cinderella stating to noticing things (rumors, gossip, realism)
•gossip: realist attention to things
the world were his secret
loved the smell of the cold
in the night's dark hours
demanded our co-emotional sharpness
the world literally burst into color on the home side --and--> went gray in the instant of passing over the edge
no one knew their names...
...the [...]
(491)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%93.9[...]of dirty
to have a little talk or jam on the notion of “clean” and “clean body”
i have been scribbling on its metaphorology for a while, thinking with it about the 20th century political thinking, institutional thinking, criminology, xenophobia, morality, and many other things. it is a key term for me.
•difference and indifference regarding the foreign body and urbanism
•clean's stakes in architecture, toilet, the primordial element of architecture
•the clean body in Marx and its geneology in the left
•origins of morality in Freud
•xenophobia in crosscultural histories, Islam on hygiene and kofr's dirt
•Nazism and racial cleansing --> aesthetics & politics
•Victorian sanitation, sanitas
•pollution
•anality
•animality --> domestic life (Tehran, Brussels, Cologne,)
•metaphorology of ‘fesad’
•loose analogies of clean/dirt
•pure bodies (being threatened by violation of impurities)
•
readings:
-Koolhaas, toilet
-Sennett, Flesh and Stone
-Ashenburg, Dirt on Clean
-Serres, Malfeasance
-Ahmed, pure bodies
-Vom kleinen Maulwurf
-
in terrestrial ecosystems:
detritus
dead particulate organic material (as opposed to dissolved organic material). It typically includes the bodies or fragments of dead organisms as well as fecal material
typically colonized by communities of microorganisms which act to decompose (or remineralize) the material
...................................
(in clinic)
each method enacts an object of its own =/= approaching a single object in different ways
in 19th century Western philosophy, ontology was coined as a powerful word for the given and fixed collection of what there is
(Annemarie Mol)
ontologies ==> there is no longer a singular “it” to look at from different sides
ontologies are not exclusive, they allow for interferences, partial connections, sharing practices =/= mono-realist singularities
[*]politics: (is not one of otherness,) it is about fights; not between people (a politics of who) but between versions of reality (a politics of what)
the value of “what is,” what western philosophy calls “normativity” and its counterfactuals suggesting “what could be” (--> are different ontologies?)
yet ‘ontologies’ is ill-suited for talking about many things:
•ways in which goods and bads are performed in practices --> Xiri
•conjunction with pleasures, pains, ecstasies, fears, ideals, dreams, passions --> apass
•various shapes that processes may take:
◦causal chains
◦back-and-forth conversations
◦tinkering and caring
•theorizing how fingers taste
•wh[...]
(492)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%94[...]ri, Hoda, to urgently shift from who to what)
(from) ‘who question’ of politics: who gets to talk? (like “do women get a say?”) --to--> ‘what question’: “what is made of women?”
[metaphors of doing]
(neoliberal legacy of) isolated acting objects =/= complex global-local inequalities
historical traces of the acting in the image of the fighting muscular man throwing a spear [~-> Arash kamangir آرش کمانگیر ~/=? my play with the bow and arrow in apass;] =/= digestion, eating (as “doing something” that you cannot control), plants growing, smelling (is not acting?)
...................................
*assemblages*
-continuities require ‘work’ to constitute them as ‘well-formed assemblages’
-the emergence of a stable assemblage requires ‘translations’
-(we should) search out the catalysts, enablers or inhibitors of processes that interest us
-how varied and multiple qualities of agency unfold as effects in assemblages that encompass both human and nonhuman forms, and how these effects subsequently achieve particular outcomes for different parties
(organic food) market <==emerging== ideological desires of embedded entrepreneurs who innovate within dynamic material-semiotic systems
(Foad stressed that assemblages are characterized by the condition of) ‘territory’: contexts that engender more or less conservative orientations of assemblages toward fixity
(Sina emphasized that assemblages are also characterized by the condition of) ‘abstraction’: the unique character of how an assemblage mobilizes new compositions of material and expressive thing
}--> relational territories of heterogeneous stuff territorialized [by value] and abstracted [by price]
can we trace consumption as it unfolds?
-family assemblages are characterized as collections of distinct but related units, things that are never the same twice, but somehow hold together and maintain coherent pathways through time
(Price and Epp)
-(for people who move often) ‘home’: something that needs to be continually recreated by combining all sorts of elements in imaginative ways--home is a hybrid (=/= simply there waiting for them)
an “I love you” --enter--> assemblages in manners that catalyse (or inhibit) ongoing hybrid relations
levels of analysis is always unexpected [=/= purification]
modern separation between ‘believing in unicorns’ and ‘managing environmental disasters’ [~/=? ajayeb] ~ modern separations/boundaries: science/mythology/politics/religion/leisure (<--Latour/Haraway-- this is a problem) ==> ***purify components of our cultures***
‘program of intervention’: a purposeful attempt to construct realities by enlisting various allies : intermediaries establishing alliances between products, institutions, celebrities and consumers in ways that im[...]
(493)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%94.3[...]an intervention in the world
(Bettany)
[*]ethnography: stories that have in them a capacity to represent the world in ways that are generative for the people and practices that the stories are about @constantvzw
(Winthereik and Verran)
in the case of data streaming: what are the people, objects, texts and practices that constitute processes of assembling?
-in our research let's not prioritize either people or things in advance ==> unexpected sources of influence in markets and consumer cultures @Foad
-to map together material/technological as well as linguistic aspects of consumer culture: narratives, phenomenological techniques, etc.
-consumers ‘become’ during consumption
*[?why become interested in] consumption/markets: hybrid networks of narratives, objects, devices and practices (that [it seems] are necessary to create conditions for any ‘human’ action)*
(still use other more old-fashioned research techniques: depth interviews [Xiri], phenomenological methods [], hermeneutic analysis [Sina], etc.)
-(how to account for) tech-mediated flows of information and knowledge that pass through the massive assemblages of the Internet
-majority of interactions are technology-to-technology and system-to-system interactions
this assemblage-thinking is against[?]:
•Virilio's way of ‘questioning technology'--for him: “to be a subject or to be subjected, that is the question.” he sees crisis in the temporal dimensions of the present moment: the lack of a future-oriented longer time-frame connects “real time”, pollution, and economic inequalities. All of them result from a lack of shared responsibility for the future. (<-- noted by Hubert); or: “The now immaterial environment is connected to the “terminal” body of men and women with interactive prostheses who become the virtual equivalent of the well-equipped invalid.”
•Guattari's machinic (=/= simple construction partes extra partes): omnipresent homogenized capitalist exchange value
•Nancy's ecotechnics: critique of globalization and sovereignty
•Avital's narcotics: on Heidegger: the notion of ‘addicted to technology’ --asking--> under what conditions we could arrive at a *free relation to technology*? being ‘fast’ --> on the run ==> dumps understanding along the way. (for Heidegger) freedom depends upon Dasein's openness to anxiety ==diverts==> addiction [a certain type of being-on-drugs] }--> drugs have something to do with technology? @constantvzw
drugs in warfare: taking pills (or tranced by nohe مداحی جنگ) into superior performance, technologizing himself into the war machine (hero on heroin) --> technically calibrated culture
‘chemical prosthesis’ (a technology of the human) has been part of man-machinic hybridizations
-hallucinated exteriority
-stimulant, opening another hallucinogenre in life, at the edge of being
-our [...]
(494)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%94.4[...]dentity who wears them])
}==> *every single person cares about the clothes they wear*
-4- *to re-categorize clothing* (perceptual categories are critical to marketers, for example tourism brands worked hard for decades to change the idea of a holiday abroad from the category of luxury to that of necessity, clothes have moved to the status of a coffee to grab and go) <== equivalencing: degraded quality of the garment allows a decrease in the price [==> powerful psychological effect compounded by the retailscape: shoes in are sold on rails like packets of sweets, T-shirts offered in basins at the check-out, etc.]
***advertising (images) = secular magic***
==inducing==> a powerful desire to indulge in the fantasy of being:
•a solitary and steely-gazed athlete
•a sophisticated and urbane Parisian girl
•
Campbell: “The moment that I say that fashion brands do not affect me is the very moment that they have”
/>
pleasurable daydreaming innate to us all
marketing is often a practice of *breaking taboos* ==guarantees==> brand success
detergent, apparel, car or cosmetics brands ==produce==> the monolithic, repetitive idea of ‘clean flawlessness’ that infiltrates our value systems
clothes = portals to different realities
*enclothed cognition*: the influential way clothes change psychological mood, the way clothes allow us to take up certain social roles more authentically
Alessi: fashion is social (its Latin root ‘factio’: a group of people acting together) =/= Campbell: i use clothes (fashion) as a social grammar to communicate with these others
universal clothing in sci-fi is such a lie, because that would remove one of the primary ways in our culture that we have for expressing ourselves
we need to change the manifestation rather than deny the yearning }--> Campbell proposes: slow fasow fashion, re-categorization of clothing back to investment in long-term, high-quality items
...................................
[title]
nonhuman rationality
(Meillassoux's) speculative realism ==> climate change = a new world (for which we do not have categories)
Meillassoux's concepts { nonhuman + rational --Campbell--> ontologically think about climate change =/= (despondency & passivity) equivocal status of climate change }==> bleak optimism: climate change has already happened + human civilization must learn how to die in a way that is a *creative and just foreclosure of the earth's organizational forms*
organization: an environment-making process
--> drawing of ‘general lines’ in the fabric of the whole ==constitute==> most basic mode of existence
--> making of some sort of cut in the universe to simultaneously create & order an inside from an outside [~ *bracket ‘a’ reality out [...]
(496)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%94.9[...]lity of the moving target
‘climate change’ politically more palatable مطبوع به ذائقه than ‘global warming’ in conservative circles
discursive evolution of climate change:
•1932 --> externality --> economics
•1960 --> wicked problem --> policy studies, public management
•1980 --> threat --> public media
•1988 --> global warming --> physical chemistry
•2000 --> contested debate --> science
•1968 --> tragedy of the commons --> ecological philosophy
◦collective action dilemma, common property dilemma, non-commitment =/= responsibility, transnational commons dilemma, historical versus new emitters, fossil fuel lobby and corporate power }--response-->{ develop techniques for more thorough understanding of ecological interdependencies, manage multi-stakeholder interests, unite common goals in public bad game, transnational issue-spanning, pragmatic incremental gains, address value-action gaps in individual consumption regimes
•1990 --> risk --> mathematics
•1990 --> war --> political economy
•1990 --> crisis --> science
•1990 --> catastrophe --> mathematics (used differently in public imaginary)
◦“dnd of days”, worst-case scenario, complete system collapse, extreme events, irreversible, non-calculative, non-gradual }--response-->{ use catastrophe framing to induce immediate action, fix temporal focus on visualization of the possible aftermath to prevent it Disrupt business-as-usual regimes, use urgency and fear to engage immediate action, emotional re-education, emergency planning
•2007 --> super wicked problem --> policy studies
◦time is running out, those who cause the problem are also seeking to provide a solution, the central authority needed to address it is weak or non-existent, current responses discount the future irrationally, psychological short-termism =/= long-termis }--response-->{ incentivize organizations, create path-dependent organizational interventions, progressive incremental trajectory, consensus-building, small coalitions
•2002 --> anthropocene --> geology
◦human-geological epoch (following holocene), new temporalities and spatialities, re-purposed as capitalocene, necrocene,, chthulucene etc. to incorporate political economy dimension of planetary terraforming, plantation, hyperobject }--response-->{ re-settlement of populations, adaption, repurposing the frame: capitalism to blame, not humans; capitalism surviving through exploitation
•negative externality --> should be internalized
•wicked problem --> climate change as threat
•emotional frame --> focus on values and morality
•debate frame --> balance-as-bias: dedicating half of the frame to counter-evidence of climate change --> fundamental paradox of collective action @Chloe2 --> tragedy of the commons @Nicolas
•risk framing --> forgrounding the e[...]
(497)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%95.2[...]ry, symbolic and transcendental
myth: a way of organizing perceptions of realities
consumer culture theory
{[Mead & Blumer's] symbolic perspective of myth: how symbols are adorned with meaning and that affect social interaction --> symbolic myth research: verbal/nonverbal forms of communication, with an emphasis on how people behave in day-to-day circumstances in the context of socio-historical structure and ideological of their environment ==> “mythology = narrative” }=/= Joseph Campbell: “interaction with the symbolic ==> mythology”
•Freud's use of mythic stories as metaphors in psychoanalysis ==> (early) symbolic perspective
•Jung's archetype: embodiment beliefs/images ==collectively==> myth and religion }==> “mythology = extension of the collective unconscious into society”
•Blumer's social life: construction built up by the actor (=/= relationship of structures directing human life); ability to act toward oneself, ability to internally define themselves as objects [self with goal] as the symbols of their own actions
--McAdams--> personal myth: narrative storyline as a means to organize meaning in their lives --in--> context <==forms== historical, religious and state-influenced belief systems, culturally specific themes and ideology
}--> identity and society --responsible-for--> life story --negotiated--> personal myth as interpretive strategy
}==> concepts of ‘consumption’ and ‘identity’ in consumer culture theory
identity work =/= personal myth
[Velliquette + Murray + Creyer:] example of tattoo culture: private and public burrs physically with the attachment of personal meaning to physical marking of the skin and symbolically through the personal stories attached to public brands --> *individuals attach meaning to consumption* <== negotiating the cultural tensions <==throu== perception of self contrasted with the influence of institutional structures (race, class, gender, age) and ideological pressure }==> “meaning = dialectic of object and consumer”
•(Jung's archetype ==>) Joseph Campbell's monomyth: universally applicable narrative of mythology (like in Hollywood films about the hero's rites of passage --> experience of life in accordance with the phenomena of time)
myths/dreams find expression in symbolic form --> “participating in ritual == engaging myth”
}--> **consumer research as hero's journey** : Consumer Behavior Odyssey's travelling across America in a motorhome to learn about self, the world, and other people [@Jassme and Mia] --> transcendental knowledge of the American consumer ==> academic literature
(consumer Odyssey found that) ‘the journey’ holds a sacred status that transforms knowledge generation into new mythological epistemologies and opens up new doors to understanding (of consumption)
&
‘extraordinary experiences as rites of passage’ [--example[...]
(498)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%95.7[...]n of contradiction [=/= archives of achievements]
--Doja--> mythic structures: generalizable forms (common in all types of societies and universal categories of the human mind) ~ “collective structures ==> superstructures = myth”
Strauss: “myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact”
[for example Mauss's gift: obligation of reciprocation = power-relationship creating a binary of giver and receiver ==reciprocity==> synthesis of the gift]
•Geertz's ‘thick description’ (--> an antidote, symbolic anthropology =/= technocratic, mechanistic means of understanding cultures and settings, exercise of bridging perceived binary oppositions and creating triadic arrays of meaning)
•Derrida's random movement of signifiers (=/= origin as a transcendental anchor to build signification, Strauss's concept of the exemplar model)
Saussure ==>
•Barthes: “myth = manifestation of ideological tendencies of cultures” --> distorts history, depoliticizes speech ==> “language of the bourgeoisie becomes the myth of universal truths, obscuring the power relations and blocking the perspective of power between class, race, gender and other marginalized people” --> perpetuate existing social conditions
=/= Peirce: systems of signification create discourses (~ practices create the meaning behind an individual's interaction with a sign)
}--> ‘advertisers and marketers use signs and symbols to create meaning surrounding their brands. consumers interpret these signs and symbols in different ways’
‘perspective theory’
naturalization of ideological assumptions and how consumers problematize those assumptions 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 soci[...]
(499)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%95.9[...]essed's language and *emancipation*[= demythologising (dominant ideology)] <== Marx's ‘false consciousness’ (for example capitalist ideology conceals and naturalizes managerial power and implicit subordination of workers) --> either side of a power duality can become valorised
•Hegel: “mythology = ideology aesthetically expressed for easy adoption by society” --> “ideology = an imaginary map”; political breakdowns ==> ideologies become apparent (independent of mythology)
-(Murray and Ozanne:) meanings people attribute to social structures change more slowly than the structures themselves --> reality[= the meanings given to social structure and the objective structures] is contradictory <== *inconsistency between subject and object* (~ societies both create reality and are shaped by it)
}--> consumers as the oppressed class in postindustrial society
Thompson: natural health myth (based on ‘cultural creatives’: dominant consumer segment of natural medicine):
•*romantic ideology derived from technologies’ ill effects on humanity and nature --> nature is mythologized as a state of harmony, science and technology as forbidden knowledge
•*gnostic myth emerged from a desire of consumers to bridge technology and spirituality --> “the immune system is metaphorically rendered as a mysterious immaterial force, constituted by intricate mind-body connections and ephemeral energistic forces, which can be brought to practical ends through quasi-magical practices of holistic healing” [Thompson 2004]
}--> advertisers exploit these tensions as conflicting ideologies converge with reality
brand ==> a point of difference + oppositional meanings --> [for example the attraction of the coffee shops that don't personify the Starbucks hegemony ~] anti-hegemonic consumers hold strong preferences for decor that symbolises the counter-culture
(Thompson + Barthes ==> Kristensen, Boye, Askegaard:) how communities develop conceptualizations of right and wrong
*moral systems are inherently ideological* in order to emancipate consumers from these forces critical reflection must occur***
@constant and apass: ***consumers don't escape the market per se but instead reshape collective identity through counter-mythology***
(for example) hipster consumer's attempt to demythologize a consumption ideology in order to protect themselves from mainstream consumers or ‘followers’ (when followers encroach on inside values:) consumers demythologize their consumption practices ==allowing==> new avenues of consumption to occur in an emancipated state
(critical theorists:) **market = arena of domination and power struggle**
==> consumerism can be enslaving and manipulative mythology crafted by the ruling class, can be overcome through resistance and demythologizing ==> ***emancipation = (a form of) new consumption arenas (that hold a favourable power dynamic for consumers)***
[...]
(500)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%96[...]ect* (~ societies both create reality and are shaped by it)
}--> consumers as the oppressed class in postindustrial society
Thompson: natural health myth (based on ‘cultural creatives’: dominant consumer segment of natural medicine):
•*romantic ideology derived from technologies’ ill effects on humanity and nature --> nature is mythologized as a state of harmony, science and technology as forbidden knowledge
•*gnostic myth emerged from a desire of consumers to bridge technology and spirituality --> “the immune system is metaphorically rendered as a mysterious immaterial force, constituted by intricate mind-body connections and ephemeral energistic forces, which can be brought to practical ends through quasi-magical practices of holistic healing” [Thompson 2004]
}--> advertisers exploit these tensions as conflicting ideologies converge with reality
brand ==> a point of difference + oppositional meanings --> [for example the attraction of the coffee shops that don't personify the Starbucks hegemony ~] anti-hegemonic consumers hold strong preferences for decor that symbolises the counter-culture
(Thompson + Barthes ==> Kristensen, Boye, Askegaard:) how communities develop conceptualizations of right and wrong
*moral systems are inherently ideological* in order to emancipate consumers from these forces critical reflection must occur***
@constant and apass: ***consumers don't escape the market per se but instead reshape collective identity through counter-mythology***
(for example) hipster consumer's attempt to demythologize a consumption ideology in order to protect themselves from mainstream consumers or ‘followers’ (when followers encroach on inside values:) consumers demythologize their consumption practices ==allowing==> new avenues of consumption to occur in an emancipated state
(critical theorists:) **market = arena of domination and power struggle**
==> consumerism can be enslaving and manipulative mythology crafted by the ruling class, can be overcome through resistance and demythologizing ==> ***emancipation = (a form of) new consumption arenas (that hold a favourable power dynamic for consumers)***
mythology --> consumer resistance, emancipation and identity projects
neoliberalism:
•community-based meaning of goods
•individuals (able of) attaching meaning to objects in their own self-expressive way
mythology research: shifted from ‘myth as organizational cohesion’ to ‘understanding agency and emancipatory consumption practices in oppressive situations’
...................................
with Ereshefsky
how to do scientific metaphysics?
•conduct piecewise and local metaphysics (not universalist metaphysics, not science fiction)
•balance naturalism and normativity
◦naturalism --> learn about different scientific practices that have [...]
(501)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%96.1[...]al processes distributed in autopoitic (~ self-creating) body] /ERG website
metamorphing
critique of becoming (of consumer)
Cartesian (human logic of a world of fixed entities) =/= posthumanism (polymorphic unfixity, articulating a logic of identity as decentered and in the state of transition)
mutating =/= morphing (universally regarded as positive, apolitical <-- in poststructural theory)--> imagined technological posthumanism which cruises effortlessly and seamlessly through ontologies [like T1000 in Terminator]
digital morphing is a common production device in contemporary visual culture (transformers, X-Men <-- to resist that in our web designs)
morphing =/= ontological fixity
•how technology does not oppose nature, but stimulate it (Nissan pathfinder)
•how the morph causes a radical splintering of consciousness (BBC digital faces)
•how morph is the a visualization not of being, but of becoming
--> *flow, universally coded as positive* (sensibility of process and flux considered liberatory)
--> a logic of quick-change (embedded in entertainment and computer industries)
high-technology embodiments:
•cyborg
•foetus
•ecosystem
•database
•genome
•cellular automata
•insects
•
morphing =/= mutating: the visceral, painful, embodied experience that results from ontological boundary clashes
mutating into otherness =/= morphing into otherness
(pain of the flow -->) ***mutation is a concept that stops the flow***
(utopian:) technological imaginary portraying a simple and painless ascent into a silicon existence
chimera: (a term biotechnological discourse uses to refer to) the evolution of elements that do not belong together
[in greek mythology, a savage beast part lion part goat part snake =/= natural order]
•(Iron Man's definition of) technology: an instrument which accords the human with a gradual ascend towards increasing civilization, linear progress and power over her or his environment
•(Black Mirror's definition of) technology: paradoxical scene, a primal instinctual force
(my ajayeb =/=) technological primitivism: (aesthetic that is produced by) the ways “primitive” icons are used in discourses of high technology
technological merges into the mythological
ancient merges with the modern
•eXistenZ film 1999, a high-tech-primitive blend of amphibian eggs and synthetic DNA
portrayal of a symbolically resonant ancient life-source + form of a technical life-source
(Campbell suggesting) atavism: how supposedly primitive evolutionary traits which had disappeared generations ago reappear in contemporary human or animal life
-traits of a former time but still exist in the pre[...]
(502)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%96.7[...]-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 system, of which the human is merely a psychic system, where the only important unit of analysis is systems (human, cell, society, law)
(Sagan's) metametazoa: a multiple creature afloat in the omnisexuality of bacterial exchange
(Octavia Butler's) xenogenesis: polysexual interspecies reproduction
(Haraway's) differential artifactualism: (~= SF, science fiction) a diffractive interruptive mutative anti-reflective monstrous logic (to a humanist eyes) --> generation of novel forms which need not be imagined in the stodgy bipolar terms of hominids ==make==> ontological room for naturecultures
-mixotricha paradoxa: “a mixed up, paradoxical, microscopic bit of hair [...]they are nested in each other's tissues in a myriad of ways that make words like competition and cooperation, or individual and collective, fall into the trash heap of pallid metaphors and bad ontology”
(Thacker speaks for) extrinsic life: the kinds of life that cannot be contained inside itself (such as: the epidemic) ~ lifelike death ==> depict the strangeness of life in a technological era
(diffraction ==>) myopic: eyesight abnormality resulting from the eye's faulty refractive ability --> posthuman: an essentially ethical precondition of life in high-technology
background of posthuman theory:
•metamorphing --> premised on the liberatory potential of flow : processes objects and living systems are thought to be in a constant state of becoming =/= Campbell: flow is not always a liberatory metaphor -->{ (a politics or logic of) *inertia* =/= contemporary politics[...]
(503)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%96.8[...]Sagan's) metametazoa: a multiple creature afloat in the omnisexuality of bacterial exchange
(Octavia Butler's) xenogenesis: polysexual interspecies reproduction
(Haraway's) differential artifactualism: (~= SF, science fiction) a diffractive interruptive mutative anti-reflective monstrous logic (to a humanist eyes) --> generation of novel forms which need not be imagined in the stodgy bipolar terms of hominids ==make==> ontological room for naturecultures
-mixotricha paradoxa: “a mixed up, paradoxical, microscopic bit of hair [...]they are nested in each other's tissues in a myriad of ways that make words like competition and cooperation, or individual and collective, fall into the trash heap of pallid metaphors and bad ontology”
(Thacker speaks for) extrinsic life: the kinds of life that cannot be contained inside itself (such as: the epidemic) ~ lifelike death ==> depict the strangeness of life in a technological era
(diffraction ==>) myopic: eyesight abnormality resulting from the eye's faulty refractive ability --> posthuman: an essentially ethical precondition of life in high-technology
background of posthuman theory:
•metamorphing --> premised on the liberatory potential of flow : processes objects and living systems are thought to be in a constant state of becoming =/= Campbell: flow is not always a liberatory metaphor -->{ (a politics or logic of) *inertia* =/= contemporary politics of flow }
•primal technology --> technology is not always s progressive civilizing inanimate force, rather it is a destructive-constructive rich-poor lively-inanimate force in the world
•proto-atavism --> modes of living at the edges of humanist life
•posthuman biology ==> *monolith of humanist life is myopic*
in a way, in my research i have been seeking ways to acknowledge the place of posthuman ways of being in the world --through-->
•observing the high-tech (cellular automata, database, bibliographic technologies)
•observing the ancient (medieval bestiaries ajayeb al makhlughat ajayeb technologies)
•
...................................
roots of ‘emancipate ourselves’ --in--> “being critical" = ability to be self-reflexive and to translate criticality into action and expressions of art (Renan)
transform knowledge sites --to--> knowledge scenes --> *communities of concepts* (=/= communities of people)
-(to form an artistic site not into a theme, a subject or a project --> discursive architecture)
how we could actually initiate solidarity through translation? (-->? internationalism) =/= equivalence of contexts
-how strategies of governance can be very sophisticated and can be embedded into what we see as good for instance in health (cleaning, or in providing food)
[*]naming: a way in which we could enter into each other's experiences, a process of conjunction and disju[...]
(507)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%96.8[...]lization, and promoting “indigenous” forms of capitalism, while avoiding the optics of exoticization }==>
•divides and controls localities
•contextual differences are distributed as needs and urgencies
•juridico-engineering structures (symbolized progress)
•cultural globalism with consumption at its core
•regions soused on the liberal democratic fantasy of salvation via harmonious, multilateral exchange
(we don't want dialogues, we need meaningful dialogues)
--Renan--> [to relocate the “struggle for exchange” in] monological circuits across the topographies of power and restitution =/= geographies of guilt and embarrassment
antagonistic knowledges (organise and rally actions and thoughts for resistance) --> changes how you are socialized
Robinson Crusoe
a miniature history of human development according to bourgeois individualism [...] changed into an encyclopedic storytelling of religious virtues
•using European technology, agriculture, economic individualism [<== spiritual autobiography], (rudimentary) political hierarchy, (civilizing effect of) Christianity [--> pursuit of meaningful spiritual engagement]
...as the inertia of the colonial world's knowledge system breaks into the streams of exploratory capital, the relay of fragments crystallizes before seeping through the colonial subject's social ground
http://www.curators-network.eu/blog-entry/lightning-studies-ctcccs-part-1-3 (Renan)
Cinderella's precarity
the question of: how can we translate contexts? (the context of which I bring my precarity differs from here in Brussels)
(the notion of *difficulty* in) Cinderella =/=? Robinson Crusoe
Crusoe's precarity (European) is something that you can overcome
•technology --> I can develop something out of my precarity and survive being struck on an island
•Crusoe's techne --> human =/= Cinderella's techne --> companion
•Crusoe ==> *rise of the ordinary individual in the nation* <== every individual values themselves high enough to consider themselves the proper subject of serious literature
◦modern individual: an ordinary & alone person is able to triumph over physical environment ~ to be able to exploit every situation
using diary format for Cinderella was inspired by respond to Crusoe's epistolary and confessional method of writing
(one of the earliest genre of) realistic fiction
written during the Enlightenment
one of the most widely published books in history
==> castaway narrative: improvise the means of survival from limited resources at hand
•progress through technology
•rebuilding of civilisation (civilisation = a form of triumph)
•unfriendliness of nature
◦he is with a dog, two cats and a parrot but he cannot talk to them =/= Cinderella
◦Crusoe st[...]
(508)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%97[...]
#project index Tehran theory: to think ethnographically about non-unilateral and non-static picture of aspiration in the context of contemporary Tehran eco-techno-culture
•archive question
•contemporary media technology
•data/knowledge organization
•infrastructure
•epistemology
•Tehran techno-culture multispecies ethnography
•mini worlds
•*how people imagine a better life?* --> (to think non-unilateral and non-static) *picture of aspiration* (in the context of contemporary Tehran)
•imitations of forms
•http://ajayeb.net/?q=sensibilities+hitting+people
•start as collaborative online platform for writings/projects about Tehran emerging ecologies:
◦mice موش
◦mobile phones موبایل
◦monsters هیولا
◦heavens مثل
◦
•on Tehran trees:
◦on anthropogenic landscapes of Tehran
◦descriptive methods for the study of social relation and histories
◦learning (directly) about worldly objects of Tehran ==> take part in the kinds of creative play that are the hallmark of the research --> draws readers outside common-sense assumptions
◾(to enable a) technologically-augmented ecosystem
◾(to enable a) translocal exchange
◦{ [?not to] tokenization and verification of natural assets --> augment & utilize --?--> provoking our relation to nature, hybrid ecosystems in the technosphere }<-- question of governance
◾to explore ways for nonhumans as agents to act with the same importance of humans in/with the world via technology
◦resocializing value (less anthropocentric) --> social impact + environmental impact
◦less inalienable circulation of *cultural intelligence* (and value) among less individualized (connected networks of wider) social agents
◦critical questions + cross-pollinate
...................................
(inconsistency of) *physiological chaos* of the World War I --> how physicians and medical researchers (early 20th century medical science) responded to it? --> (a new web of concepts:) *semiotics of injuries and behaviors* (--> that became essential for thinking about integration and collapse in economics, social organization, psychoanalysis, symbolic representation, and international politic)
--> attuned to, to anticipate, to outdo, *specific conditions of the lived body in
states of extreme exertion*:
•in a conceptual-historical and anthropological fashion
•stage thought and experimentation
•to recalibrate their thinking
}--> logic of integration (a problematic systematization) ==> *registers of the individual and the social*
linked to each other:
integration در شکم چيزى جا دادن, collapse, self-preservation, crisis, catastrophe, witnessing, evidence, unknowing<[...]
(509)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%97.2[...]r relation to nature, hybrid ecosystems in the technosphere }<-- question of governance
◾to explore ways for nonhumans as agents to act with the same importance of humans in/with the world via technology
◦resocializing value (less anthropocentric) --> social impact + environmental impact
◦less inalienable circulation of *cultural intelligence* (and value) among less individualized (connected networks of wider) social agents
◦critical questions + cross-pollinate
...................................
(inconsistency of) *physiological chaos* of the World War I --> how physicians and medical researchers (early 20th century medical science) responded to it? --> (a new web of concepts:) *semiotics of injuries and behaviors* (--> that became essential for thinking about integration and collapse in economics, social organization, psychoanalysis, symbolic representation, and international politic)
--> attuned to, to anticipate, to outdo, *specific conditions of the lived body in
states of extreme exertion*:
•in a conceptual-historical and anthropological fashion
•stage thought and experimentation
•to recalibrate their thinking
}--> logic of integration (a problematic systematization) ==> *registers of the individual and the social*
linked to each other:
integration در شکم چيزى جا دادن, collapse, self-preservation, crisis, catastrophe, witnessing, evidence, unknowing
early 20th century medical science ==> شکننده a body that is *brittle because integrated* & *integrated because brittle*
wartime and postwar therapeutics ==> conceptions of the body
Geroulanos and Meyers (=/= Foucauldian) show “how particular kinds of injury emerged during World War I, and how such injuries found their place in the bodies and lifeworlds of wounded soldiers and doctors, and in the thinking and actions of theorists and policy makers.” (ethnography of the interwar period)
=/= proposing a counter-body or counter epistemology or resistance knowledge
“in this world, we do not play chess with eternal figures like the king and the fool; the figures are what the successive configurations of the chessboard make of them.” -Veyne
([*]integration:) taxonomy of disorder ==> administrative ends (an idea of entire system of organic functioning --> homeostasis = "the wisdom of the body” ==> theories of norms, normality, disintegration, catastrophe)
•the idea of a damaged world in need of meticulous care
•the idea of the injured body that seeks to stabilize itself
#integration
the interwoven data recovered from the study of systemic and functional aspects of the broken organism ==> totality ~ establishment of a nonliberal individualism (+ social welfare) ==> **society = an integrated and fragile whole in need[...]
(511)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%97.2[...]ashion
•stage thought and experimentation
•to recalibrate their thinking
}--> logic of integration (a problematic systematization) ==> *registers of the individual and the social*
linked to each other:
integration در شکم چيزى جا دادن, collapse, self-preservation, crisis, catastrophe, witnessing, evidence, unknowing
early 20th century medical science ==> شکننده a body that is *brittle because integrated* & *integrated because brittle*
wartime and postwar therapeutics ==> conceptions of the body
Geroulanos and Meyers (=/= Foucauldian) show “how particular kinds of injury emerged during World War I, and how such injuries found their place in the bodies and lifeworlds of wounded soldiers and doctors, and in the thinking and actions of theorists and policy makers.” (ethnography of the interwar period)
=/= proposing a counter-body or counter epistemology or resistance knowledge
“in this world, we do not play chess with eternal figures like the king and the fool; the figures are what the successive configurations of the chessboard make of them.” -Veyne
([*]integration:) taxonomy of disorder ==> administrative ends (an idea of entire system of organic functioning --> homeostasis = "the wisdom of the body” ==> theories of norms, normality, disintegration, catastrophe)
•the idea of a damaged world in need of meticulous care
•the idea of the injured body that seeks to stabilize itself
#integration
the interwoven data recovered from the study of systemic and functional aspects of the broken organism ==> totality ~ establishment of a nonliberal individualism (+ social welfare) ==> **society = an integrated and fragile whole in need of care**
today's integrative medicine --> conceptualizations of the whole body ==> picture of the patient:
•neoliberal in character
•(always) future tense in orientation
destiny = personalized medicine (a project to anticipate and guide the patient's destiny)
welfare state's widest possible inclusion of its citizens clashes with the realities of the marketplace
to reconcile the individual's cognitive and physical realities with the particular demands of their world
...sociological quest to understand the locus of injury
[title]
duet of integration-crisis (==> whole-body ideals)
(Geroulanos and Meyers argue that) understanding integration and crisis in medicine ==> to wrap our heads around the way later-dominant cybernetic and structuralist theories located the individual in the world
bodily metaphor [in] integrations of domestic societies
the integrated, disintegrating human body:
•a new site of meaning and care
•subject for new analogies of body b[...]
(512)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%97.3[...] />
•therapeutic approach to human behavior
•secular approach to scientific inquiry
*humanism = epistemology: a way of investigating the world that is consonant with our human intuition--understand--> life as comprising essentially animate or inanimate, self or other, human or nonhuman** [=/= set of diverse beliefs]
horror of surgically implanted biomedical enhancement --> (persistence of the) inviolability of the body as the seat of identity <-- a classic humanist assumption
posthumanism
•speculative philosophy + material reality
•abstract philosophy + empirical science
•ancient + futuristic
•exotic + specialized (telesurgery, amorphous computing) + banal + ubiquitous (automobility, eyeglasses)
•
--> apocalyptic era (intelligent machine takeover)
--> ecological ethics (human not the most important form of life on earth)
***attempt to overcome humanness is an age-old human tendency***
what constitutes life
•women --> Schiebinger
•slaves --> Douzinas
•computer viruses --> Parikka
•cellular automata --> Delanda
•bacteria --> Haraway
•swarms -->Thacker
•
*brand = living system* (--> distinguish themselves from environment, exclude from it what is not, feedback communication with environment, self replicate, evolve, ) =/= cultural product
@Femke
(Campbell arguing that) the human and the posthuman are (ways to describe the forces that are) already present in the human condition:
1.
computation of life
mid 19th century weaving technologies ==> logic of computation ==ontology==> “universe = giant computer” : attempting to uncover what life itself is through a better understanding and appreciation of the power and seeming omnipresence of computational logic
•a discourse [~ a way of talking about the world] (and not only a claim that people make)
--> an example of how dominant technologies are not just instruments but models (through which the world is understood)
‘clockwork universe’ was the model for the last four millennia: clockwork-like essence of cosmos + state + body (=/= romanticism, galvanism, mesmerism, quantum mechanics)
}==>
•consumer as computer/computational (consumer as information processor, consumer as automatic subject =/= psychological agent) <== science of cybernetics, automaticity, feedback
•information (a new powerful substance in mid 20th century), “raw data ==> decisions, models, theories”, a specialized value-free term (=/= fact, learning, wisdom, understanding, enlightenment) --> second half of 20th century: information began to assume a deep and proved privileges place (in politics, cultural imaginary), to informationalize consumer objects:
◦jeans as “intelligent denim” --> “vector graphics and pixelation [...]
(514)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%97.6[...] cell engineered meat appears as both identical and radically different from its predecessors) --> postethical consumption models (categorized as vegetarian? how marketing re-enchant food without appeal to a myth of pastoral origin?)
--> commentary consumption acts: organic food market, natural healthcare market
3.
miniaturization of life
“fast, cheap, and out of control”
autonomous (=/= central, god-like)
}==>
•technology is no more locatable within a machine (a consciousness that envelopes the world) --> dispersed: (a logic of) technology as environment [diffused] =/= tool [discrete]
internet of things : digitally enabled objects share and respond to information
1980s --> processing (of information, microprocessor)
1990s --> networking (world wide web)
2000s --> sensing and controlling
“my consumption patterns worth so much that they underwrite my acts of consumption” -Hayles
•*cognition = a product* that emerges between the self and its environment (and does not take place exclusively on the brain) --stages--> cognition as a process
4.
complexification of life
complex (feedback loops, emergence, bifurcation) =/= complicated: accurately analysable system having a large number of component and perform sophisticated tasks
•most of the most valuable products today have virtual components (software, money, etc.) that would be unrecognizable 25 years ago
5.
automation of life
(fundamental legal principle of) ius gentium: all humans are the same in so far as they are rational human beings in possession of free will =/= 21st century neuroscientific research
}--Libet--> “free won't” : the mind exists in a climate which says yes, but it can say no
agency is outsourced to systems that increasingly invisiblize from everyday life (software deciding mortgage, Facebook suggest friend, turning car into a moving computer)
dystopian imaginary of Black Mirror TV series --> these developments are a tyrannical force that undermine an a priori and fundamental humanness
--Campbell--> consumer researcher's results will be powerful counter-balances to the often too blindly utopian and dystopian accounts of the future
...................................
[*]advertising: (ubiquitous and contentious) symptom of organization[= corporate entity and/or common practice]
aesthetic ambassador of the organization
--(a way through which)--> **anyone outside the organization mythologizes an imaginary inside**
(its) media:
•***indirect messages of public relations that are embedded deep in the heart of non-advertising genres***
•bombastic and direct appeal of made-for-cinema advertisement and corporate communication
•
how advertising used to be scorned as a practice and profession --> gained res[...]
(515)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%97.7[...]sed: (a logic of) technology as environment [diffused] =/= tool [discrete]
internet of things : digitally enabled objects share and respond to information
1980s --> processing (of information, microprocessor)
1990s --> networking (world wide web)
2000s --> sensing and controlling
“my consumption patterns worth so much that they underwrite my acts of consumption” -Hayles
•*cognition = a product* that emerges between the self and its environment (and does not take place exclusively on the brain) --stages--> cognition as a process
4.
complexification of life
complex (feedback loops, emergence, bifurcation) =/= complicated: accurately analysable system having a large number of component and perform sophisticated tasks
•most of the most valuable products today have virtual components (software, money, etc.) that would be unrecognizable 25 years ago
5.
automation of life
(fundamental legal principle of) ius gentium: all humans are the same in so far as they are rational human beings in possession of free will =/= 21st century neuroscientific research
}--Libet--> “free won't” : the mind exists in a climate which says yes, but it can say no
agency is outsourced to systems that increasingly invisiblize from everyday life (software deciding mortgage, Facebook suggest friend, turning car into a moving computer)
dystopian imaginary of Black Mirror TV series --> these developments are a tyrannical force that undermine an a priori and fundamental humanness
--Campbell--> consumer researcher's results will be powerful counter-balances to the often too blindly utopian and dystopian accounts of the future
...................................
[*]advertising: (ubiquitous and contentious) symptom of organization[= corporate entity and/or common practice]
aesthetic ambassador of the organization
--(a way through which)--> **anyone outside the organization mythologizes an imaginary inside**
(its) media:
•***indirect messages of public relations that are embedded deep in the heart of non-advertising genres***
•bombastic and direct appeal of made-for-cinema advertisement and corporate communication
•
how advertising used to be scorned as a practice and profession --> gained responsibility in American culture:
-1 advertising became instrumental in enlisting soldiers during world war I ==> lending it a moral force which served more noble purposes besides commerce
-2 it was elevated through its incorporation into education (first in Harvard University 1924)
-3 it becames adept at referencing styles and commissioning work from the realm of high culture
}--now--> advertising does not just produce culture, but ***culture produces advertising***
(one of the central questions of advertising in contemporary ti[...]
(516)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%97.7[...]sing:
1. fascinates us
2. it works
an average person in the western world is exposed to 3000 advertisements per day
everyday, it transforms me from this world to an imaginary one for a moment
(advertising) offers through a *constant stream of visual cameos* برجسته کارى, *implicit standards* of cleanliness, sociality, family life, health, happiness, and a great many other values ==> affect me
****modern advertising works by appearing not to care if it works**** --> when someone utters the immortal phrase “advertising doesn't affect me" = advertising has achieved its ultimate goal --> *****advertising empowers us to feel distant to it*****
Campbell --> advertising: organizs meaning in the most powerful and generic of senses + a symptom of the organization
1920 - 1930
modern advertising's coming of age (creating compelling signs)
(its signs underwent a qualitative shift in) sophistication
personalized testimonials
*participatory tone of voice* [=/= direct imperative command]
consumer goods embodied values (that had normally been attributed to humans and the natural world) [=/= mere economic entities]
(through the system of advertising: *imagining the product as a benefit sought by the consumer* ~ illumination instead of lighting fixtures, prestige instead of automobiles, sex appeal instead of mere soap,,) *products --offer--> mini-solutions to the dilemmas of modernity[= the pace and scale of rationalization, depersonalization and urbanization brought by modern industrial capitalism ==exerted==> هزینه خسارت a toll on the human psyche]
1950 - 1960
(from) public role of sign identification --to--> private and psychological space of one's mind and interior life
rise of *depth men* (--> Mad Men TV series, people in advertising agencies that reportedly used psychological techniques to uncovers the subconscious needs, desires, insecurities, fears of consumers)
*product = unconscious fulfilments, solutions, comforts and fantasies to them*
[Packard's Betty Crocker cake mix and Esso's Tiger in your Tank campaign --> alleged power of small groups of people to organize meaning on a massive and uncontrolled level]
•freezer = a nostalgic site of security in a threatening environment =/= a device for cooling foodstuffs (*giving of food <--~~> love* + insecurity ==> more food than you can eat)
-more sophisticated motivational research and appeals
****advertising: a form of literacy**** (a new and bewildering code)
sign system of advertising is not static
the generations to come will regard contemporary sign systems as rudimentary and easy to decode
ultra-sophisticated images will appear antiquited and perhaps even humorous (@Goda hating contemporary sign system)
-the way in which a[...]
(517)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%97.9[...]ng fixtures, prestige instead of automobiles, sex appeal instead of mere soap,,) *products --offer--> mini-solutions to the dilemmas of modernity[= the pace and scale of rationalization, depersonalization and urbanization brought by modern industrial capitalism ==exerted==> هزینه خسارت a toll on the human psyche]
1950 - 1960
(from) public role of sign identification --to--> private and psychological space of one's mind and interior life
rise of *depth men* (--> Mad Men TV series, people in advertising agencies that reportedly used psychological techniques to uncovers the subconscious needs, desires, insecurities, fears of consumers)
*product = unconscious fulfilments, solutions, comforts and fantasies to them*
[Packard's Betty Crocker cake mix and Esso's Tiger in your Tank campaign --> alleged power of small groups of people to organize meaning on a massive and uncontrolled level]
•freezer = a nostalgic site of security in a threatening environment =/= a device for cooling foodstuffs (*giving of food <--~~> love* + insecurity ==> more food than you can eat)
-more sophisticated motivational research and appeals
****advertising: a form of literacy**** (a new and bewildering code)
sign system of advertising is not static
the generations to come will regard contemporary sign systems as rudimentary and easy to decode
ultra-sophisticated images will appear antiquited and perhaps even humorous (@Goda hating contemporary sign system)
-the way in which advertising today visualizes software, the environment, nanotechnology as seemingly *undeconstructible & transparent* will be staple examples in classroom curricula
(the most obvious and immediate way of conceptualizing) advertising: a system that creates signs with the purpose of communicating meaning =/= Campbell
discipline of marketing --support--> investigation of image consumption
early models of advertising (--> **how we understand the philosophy of what information and communication are**)
•1949 Bell Laboratories --> information: universalized component of any system that communicated =/= “information” as rather poetic and sipritual term (at home in philosophy =/= engineering) --advertising--> hierarchy of effects: cognitive --to--> affective --to--> behavioral [--> informationalize and measure aspects of advertising]
(to understand) *information theory of communication as a reflection of larger scientific and philosophical aims of the time*
***information theory of communication ==>
•providing codified models that predict response
•enframe communication within a logic of relative effectiveness or ineffectiveness
}=/= my lectures
brand memories
brand equity
boundary between advertising and everyday life
[Campbell =/[...]
(518)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%97.9[...]
a priori assumption of “advertising = information communication” (=/= people incorporate advertising so that it functions as a *social glue* within groups)
(vernacular specter of advertising)
spectacular vernacular of social fabric
site of investigation:
1. site of consumption = reception (the field of meaning from a consumer's perspective)
2. site of production = processes involved in making ads (favoured in media studies and ethnographic approaches to advertising)
3. site of the image: analysis of the meaning of the image itself (independent of intention and reception) are the most powerful way to show what images include and exclude (drawing influence primarily from the disciplines of history, philosophy, sociology and linguistics)
how meaning moved from *the world of advertising* --to--> *the world of the consumer* : ways in which advertising is integrated into the life-world of people
****advertising: a powerful translator of the cultural world**** & داور a central arbiter of meaning in consumer worlds (--> this is why advertising concerns me)
Barthes + Saussure + Peirce + Jacobsen --> semiotics can be regarded as one of the most comprehensive studies of sign system ~ advertisement: bundle of signs that formed finely constructed conventions ==> ‘image = text’ (its grammar:)
1. micro-level: tiny units, vectors, colors, forms (within the visual plane)
2. mid-level: human-level characteristics of gender, hairstyle, posture, facial expression, buildings, rhetorical devices in the image (such as metaphor and troping)
3. meta-level: narrative structure, mythic in nature, to see embodied in the properties and dynamics of the image the macro properties and fynamics of social world (<-- business of semiotic)
Barthes --> (new medium of) photographic advertisement = a codified structure =/= a transparent reflection of the world
-*Barthes reading of Citroen DS car
impossible newness
it appears at first sight as a superlative object صفت عالی
object which appear at first sight as completely finished present to us at once a perfection and an absence of origin, closure and a brilliance, *a transformation of life into matter*, a silence that belongs to the realm of fairy tales
*smoothness is not a property of material, but a social value*
-Christ's robe was seamless, science fiction, made of unbroken metal, phenomenology of assembling, hold together by sole virtue of their wondrous shape ==> the idea of benign nature
}--learn--> (to make) lines of connection: visual convention + religious painting, science fiction film, politics of nature (constructed over the past 2000 years of western culture) [<-- to understand this in your own work #feedback @apass]
-*Haraway
neutral images of (high-tech) science --> stock [...]
(523)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%98[...]upra-structure --> new / Star Trek
|
infrastructure --> old / planets they visit
the human body: the most depicted object in advertising
--> research tradition:
humans have more synapses for interprting face
depiction of female body
male body
sex in advertising
racial marked body
(boring questions:)
•whether advertising reflects the world or shape it
•how signs reproduce, create, normalize or subvert the often unequal power structures that exist between male and female bodies
--> **despite potential ambiguity in images we as visual consumers are always presented with a “preferred reading”** @Pierre, Goda --> “image is controlled by discursive limits” (--Sina--> fable of ‘subtlest ideological weapon of advertising’) --Campbell--> paradox of identity construction: the consuming subject chooses among a limited repertoire of “iterated” or preexisting identities provided by marketing and adertising, steering viewers in preferred directions [<-- a fable]
[*]coopt: advertising pretends to acknowledge a competing discourse or ideology, but only pays lip service to it, ignoring its real radical challenge
the idea of advertising: a system that instils (القا، کم کم تزریق کردن) products and services with cultural and social values that are not intrinsic to them [~ magic]
--> highly visible display of ruling-class interests
*advertising = capitalism + aesthetics*
advertising: the pre-eminent way in which the interest of the powerful minority maintain the docility, alienation, or servitude of the majority (--> Goda's understanding of pop culture)
[*]magic: conjure an object from its immediate material rootedness and animate it with a much more potent energy ==> erase human experience of the monotony of consumption with its transient satisfactions and reinvigorate it anew with fresh promise-claims
for example advertisement for mobile phone = *suggestion* (about a certain design aesthetic + a certain tole in professional life + a certain sexual appeal + a certain social network) =/= *announcement* (about a technical device)
(announcement =/= suggestion: the act of advertising)
}--1--> the idea that advertising's signs = carefully constructed highly selective and distortive ways of seeing [=/= simple reflections of the state of the world] ==(Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Klein, Curtis, Jhally, @apass, Pierre)==>
•false consciousness
•commodity fetishism
•docility
•passivity
•manipulation of unconscious desire
•environmental degradation
}--2--> the idea that signs actually achieve their aims (through mortise and framing work, cropping, reification, interpellation, cooption, the gaze, face-ism, individuation) --> [Althusser's] interpellation: process by which we are c[...]
(524)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%98.1[...])--> [*]advertising: species that create media in order to allow it to replicate =/= a thing that we humans create and put in media as an incidental extra to an originary agent of meaning [<-- hylomorphic understanding of advertising]
[in 20th century (task of)] advertising: to render the invisible [qualities, such as: complexity, network, information,,,] into compelling visualities (--into--> public imagination)
•(in organizational discourse) complexity: (--articulate-->) unpredictable, multi-layered, decentered, emergent, globalized (world of Homeland TV series, of apass, of ERG's website: technological + adaptable + multi-layered)
*success <== visualize the complexity of their products* [in the case of ERG: student's knowledge and the institution of university]
(Goldman's landscape of Capital -->) corporate advertising:
•visually depicts the phenomenon of globalization
•affect the cultural imaginary
•shape political sensibilities (with respect to life in high-tech globalism)
amorphous phenomena (that require high-stakes visualization):
•counter-terrorism
•climate change
•
[*]advertising: an institution that organizes meaning, a visual sign system (as powerful as other systems that organize meaning: medicine, law, education,,,) [~/= apass]
--> *a form of literacy* = can be learned + lexicon + grammer (that can be fruitfully investigated)
*advertising = capitalism + aesthetic* ==Campbell==> research in advertising one of the most important research priorities in any discipline today (@apass)
...................................
***marketing = the ultimate social practice of postmodernity***
marketing practices
promotional campaigns
consumption culture
postmodernity: a phenomena specific to the cultural history of western europe and north america --impact--> globe
--Lyotard--> incredulity toward *metanarratives: unified idea systems
--Jameson--> consumer society (marked by:)
◦pastiche: an attitude of a certain detachment (on the part of the individual) where all stylistic expressions of parody, nostalgia, and other illustrated feeling lack emotional depth and commitment
◦schizophrenia: disjointedness and discontinuity of the individual's personal identity and experience in life
--Angus--> infinite delay of *modernity: improving human lives by controlling nature
--Wilson--> expression of incoherence of contemporary urban life
postmodernity =/= authority, unity, continuity, purpose, commitment
= “modernity: era of scientific ideology ==> disillusionment, disintegration, anxiety”
--> hedonism
--> tolerance (recognition) of difference
--> metanarrative = story (that people construct to tell themselves) =Foucault= regimes of truth
[...]
(525)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%98.4[...] of university]
(Goldman's landscape of Capital -->) corporate advertising:
•visually depicts the phenomenon of globalization
•affect the cultural imaginary
•shape political sensibilities (with respect to life in high-tech globalism)
amorphous phenomena (that require high-stakes visualization):
•counter-terrorism
•climate change
•
[*]advertising: an institution that organizes meaning, a visual sign system (as powerful as other systems that organize meaning: medicine, law, education,,,) [~/= apass]
--> *a form of literacy* = can be learned + lexicon + grammer (that can be fruitfully investigated)
*advertising = capitalism + aesthetic* ==Campbell==> research in advertising one of the most important research priorities in any discipline today (@apass)
...................................
***marketing = the ultimate social practice of postmodernity***
marketing practices
promotional campaigns
consumption culture
postmodernity: a phenomena specific to the cultural history of western europe and north america --impact--> globe
--Lyotard--> incredulity toward *metanarratives: unified idea systems
--Jameson--> consumer society (marked by:)
◦pastiche: an attitude of a certain detachment (on the part of the individual) where all stylistic expressions of parody, nostalgia, and other illustrated feeling lack emotional depth and commitment
◦schizophrenia: disjointedness and discontinuity of the individual's personal identity and experience in life
--Angus--> infinite delay of *modernity: improving human lives by controlling nature
--Wilson--> expression of incoherence of contemporary urban life
postmodernity =/= authority, unity, continuity, purpose, commitment
= “modernity: era of scientific ideology ==> disillusionment, disintegration, anxiety”
--> hedonism
--> tolerance (recognition) of difference
--> metanarrative = story (that people construct to tell themselves) =Foucault= regimes of truth
=/= conformity
examples of modern metanarratives:
•bourgeois (capitalist) ideology
•marxism
}--✕--> *market = new metanarrative in postmodernity*
postmodern condition:
1- [*]hyperreality: becoming real of what initially was/is a simulation/hype: simulation of imagined potential or imagined past (signifiers arbitrary linked to their original referent)
marketing: a practice that resignifies (a brand name)
tendency and willingness of the customers to prefer the simulation (for example the theme areas in city centers of an imagined pasts) =/= “real”
postmodernism is a cultural critique (=/= economic, social critique) of modernity
postmoder[...]
(527)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%98.4[...]t is good or bad (sacred or profane) --> filled by marketing (enters --into--> culture)
fragmentation ==require==> use of many different styles and forms
(ideas and movements which already have made) sensational impact --> spectacle --> commodities
(marketing helped in entrenching) artist selebrity setting new trends and values <-- a postmodern phenomena with its roots in 1960s “anti-” movements
•not challenging or endorsing or committing to any one style, but rebelling by doing “one's own thing” (Madonna's rebellion 1991 --> she will continue to find large audiences as long as she represents and combines the postmodern aspects of critique of the metanarrative and the marketable commercial sensationalism of the fragmented spectacle)
paradoxical nature of postmodern culture <-- fragmentation and discontinuity of their experience
not owning a TV (conscious rejection) + driving a car (integrated into mainstream)
merging of education and marketing
*televisual generation*
(in north america and western europe) the education is taking place mostly outside of three classroom
(modern) institutionalized education --> (postmodern) marketing system : the individual of the postmodern encounters the institutionalized education as obligation, drudgery, and the means to achieve positions
(from) a process of reading issues and questions for exploration --to--> a process of persuasively communicating the necessities of knowing (and following efficient ways of doing things) --> literacy: being able to manipulate and construct (recognize and grasp multi-layered multi-faceted multi-media images --> to impress upon all senses) }<-- marketing is best situated to educate this
[-can a true critical deconstruction of postmodernism start from literacy? ---> go to telegram bestiary text]
***the consumer is also a signifier***
(constructed in the images that are culturally signified, for example the female)
(even metaphorically) putting somebody on the pedestal (stage) ==> exposure to voyeuristic gaze ==> objectification ~=> commodification }--Baudrillard-->
•a liberation (the subject is the object which has the powers of seduction as the focus of desire --> in control)
•a loss of freedom (the subject is culturally signified and constructed for fonctions determined outside its own power --> a property of the other)
*decoupling of culturally signified categories (of gender, etc.)* --marketing--> (postmodern stance and trend:) male model/actors who represent emotional, nurturing, and sensitive + female model/actors who represent aggressive, powerful, rational (in American advertisement and TV series)
==> “i shop, therefore i am” becomes applicable to men
==> both men and women become ideal consumers --> flourish of market ex[...]
(528)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%98.8[...], etc.)* --marketing--> (postmodern stance and trend:) male model/actors who represent emotional, nurturing, and sensitive + female model/actors who represent aggressive, powerful, rational (in American advertisement and TV series)
==> “i shop, therefore i am” becomes applicable to men
==> both men and women become ideal consumers --> flourish of market exchange
* * (both male and female) seek authentic self --> (get caught up in) objectification + fragmentation * *
pattern quest: imaging (representing) =/= being, knowing
[image marketing]
*the image does not represent the product, but the product represents the image* -->
•consumers are essentially consumers of symbols
•consumption culture = construction of symbolic environment
}==> tourism as the largest industry in the world (translate your culture images into marketable products ~= consumer fetishes) --> *global culturalism*
[manipulation of symbols]
(from) ethical issue (modern) --to--> stylistic issue (phenomenological, postmodern)
[*]globalization: (create fragmented heterogenized market -->) serve the locals with global universal signs
--> transnational: a highly symbolic communication system that is timeless, contextless, diffused in space, located anonymously, with no known history
marketing is the first institution that adapt to postmodernism
...................................
consumer (--impulse--> “i want”) =/= citizen (“we need”)
Sunstein
consumer sovereignty (matters of personal taste, “are they getting what they want?”, ‘freedom: satisfaction of private preferences’, ) =/= political sovereignty (*government by discussion* + reason-giving in the public domain <-- many/most citizens should have a range of common experiences =/= filtering of information, customizing information to fit)
**unplanned unanticipated encounters <-- central to democracy**
(pseudo-democratic) participation interactivity : invitation to participate in one's own manipulation by providing increasingly detailed information about personal preferences (Andrejevic, noted by Hubert)
...................................
*misattunement:
--Stern--> a parental technique for modifying the behaviour (+ affective experience) of the child
--Ahmed--> being out of synch with a world (“of whiteness” that aims to be in harmony)
*attunement: a technique for occupying space
---> go to #integration {for Ahmed: becoming a citizen (= nationalism) ~= the work of attunement =/= stranger: the body we are not with}
clumsiness: being in the way of yourself (to lack the coordination to coordinate yourself with yourself)
--registers--> as the loss of a possibility
(in art, performed clum[...]
(529)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%98.9[...]ochschild--> ability to preserve the mood of a situation requires working not only on feelings, but drawing on tactic knowledge about how moods are shaped
(bad mood of a shopkeeper in Brussels...)
*histories that linger as mood*
diversity work --involves-->
•the effort to minimize differences so that those who arrive can appear more ‘in tune’ with those who are already here
•
•
--✕--> bodies do not arrive at the same time [---> go to Sina's trans-lateness lecture performance series for Akademie der Künste der Welt 2014: being late is precisely the condition for which translation is needed + critique of universal translator]
...atmospheric qualities of the market
Ahmed's criticism of hopeful performativity [<-- in her text “not in the mood” Ahmed privileges ‘bad mood’ as the emblem of marginality --> emotional misfit]
public mood: prevailing public sentiment as to what constitutes appropriate matters for governmental attention <-- thermostatic understanding of mood
--Ahmed--> fabrication of feeling (& consumer satisfaction)
*to find = to form*
the idea of the national body acquires coherence through a systems of belief ==> separate the nation from race
•“requiring those who embody diversity to give their allegiance to its body” (for example a nation can love diversity whilst demanding that Muslim women unveil)
Marxist model of commodity fetishism --Ahmed--> feelings come to reside (magically) in objects [by cutting those objects off from a wider economy of labour and production. it is then as if fear originates with the arrival of others whose bodies become containers of our fear]
(for Ahmed) happiness: a technique of distraction (a cover-up)
--> for her: potency is in the rage
(Ahmed is too fast to celebrate lesbian ‘affect alien’ =/= heterosexual marriage)
good weather --> (showing) safety and wisdom of prediction
the idea of “your unfeeling masks a disbelief”
...................................
interesting =/= appealling --> most satisfying videos
...................................
elite consumption
country house
...................................
dirt
waste
stink
microbes
Campbell on bacteria and market
tropes that bring bacteria into the symbolic realm:
1. cuteness
2. overpopulation
3. lower classes
4. deviant sex
}--channel--> utterances that (indirectly [political discourse of establishment neoliberalism cannot address such things in direct ways]) express fantasies about:
•purity
•gender
•race
•community
•family
•pollution
•class
•disease
•sexual promiscuity (devia[...]
(530)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%99[...] case: bacteria)
[*]sinthome: why X (symptoms) appear to us as such =/= what X mean
sinthome --> (mode of analysis) aiming to identify ***what fantasies are permitted to be sustained when the symptom take the form of X*** (in this case bacteria) =/= seeking to find what ideology lies hidden beneath the symptom [=/=! problem of artists]
Campbell mode of analysis (with sinthome) =/= a revelatory mode of critique (where our illusions arre laid bare) [<-- artists’ symptom]
advertisements offer striking evidence of *autoimmune tendecies* in contemporary market society : the body politic misrecognizes its own boundaries and attacks parts of itself
@Femke
(Joyce's Bloom) first thing that we see or feel is not in fact ourselves, but bacteria [---> go to body image] --> (his solution:) avoiding one kind of bacteria by embracing another (<-- psychoanalytically effective ***non-solution***)
(in social sciences [Ereshefsky]) *species pluralism : how various biopolitical forces use segmentation strategies in the organic world to produce competing species’ hierarchies and taxa*
thinkers in social theory --> the entities under investigation are:
•so massive --> Gaya regulatory system of planetary scope
•so dispersed --> climate change
•so ancient --Haraway--> bacterial protist Mixotricha paradoxa (“the paradoxical being with mixed-up hairs”)
•so minute جزئی --> new materials engineered through nanotechnology
•so boundless --Sagan--> metametazoa: human as a multiple afloat in the omnisexuality or bacterial exchange
•so relational --thacker--> swarm, pack, flock, epidemic [go to --> ERG website's epidemic nodes --> *the image of the relational*]
•so
}<==motivation==
1. considering the strangeness of life forms act as a template ==to==> think differently about life by mobilizing new ***prepositions of connection*** (with, alongside, between, sym-, etc.) ==provoke==> different theoretical insights into how society might work
2. ethical political drive to promote radical inclusivity and to challenge mindsets that fixate on identity and difference (<-- Harawayian) [--> Isabel, Sara]
3. work of decentering the human as the premier valance of the universe (may in turn) ==cultivate==> an ethics that is ecological, in the sense of global and interspecies (<-- Mortonian) [--> Sina]
4. conceiving of the ‘other’ as planetmate, messmate, natureculture, mind-body, etc. (maybe) ==lead==> new conceptions of camaraderie, community, society, friendship [--> artistic research, apass, Viveiros de Castro]
bacteria [also: mushroom, swamp] --> poster-creatures of the flat ontology movement --> challenging classification
replacing Tree of Life with DNA-based model of life (homo sapiens: a micro-ingredient of an astonishing bacterial soup of prokaryotes, a[...]
(531)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%99.2[...]e with DNA-based model of life (homo sapiens: a micro-ingredient of an astonishing bacterial soup of prokaryotes, archaea, eukaryotes)
*bacteria: the ground zero life forms* -->! ***nearest we can get imagining the Lacanian Real***
we are more bacteria than human
(global) bacterial biome: para-collective (=/= “merely” biological)
*our ways of reacting to bacteria are as political as they are scientific*
...................................
purity & pollution + their deep-seated link with social order and its transgression --Douglas--> {from the idea of poisonous vapours (miasma [unrelated to cleanliness]) --to-->} discovery of pathogenic organisms بيمارى زا ==> modern concept of bacteria
cleansing rituals before the bacteriological age functioned to ward off spirits and restore social order and control (@Elke, @Isabel, the artist as medium)
discovery of germs ==> radical re-conceptualization of dirt (--> it is difficult to think of dirt except in the context of pathogenicity)
if we can abstract pathogenicity and hygiene from our notion of dirt --Douglas--> we are left with the very old definition of [*]dirt: matter out of place
**when we see dirt --> we see a system**
--Campbell--> when we see bacterial images we are seeing something else
***contamination = a violation of some mythical, symbolic, or political system =/= just a physical problem***
bacteria --> symptom of a disturbed system
symptomatic analysis (=/= feedback)
pioneered by Marxist critics, Althusser
symptomatic analysis of X = to open the possibility of there being unspoken, unacknowledged or disavowed content in X
symptomatic analysis --of--> (content of) antibacterial advertisement --laden--> with libidinal intensity or *visual pleasure* (= an image that is visually intense)
**consumption can be read like dreams** (a text that says more than it consciously expresses) --reveal--> repressed material (disavowed fantasies about: purity, gender, race, family, class, disease, displacement, sublimation, etc.)
◦what fantasy is upheld by presenting repressed material as bacteria (or artwork)?
--> reading against the grain of the text (Jamesonian)
--> advertising images can be read like symptoms of repressed libidinal desire
-i did symptomatic reading of Olearius (but not of ajayeb nameh?)
1- accelerating pace of industrial production
2- population growth
}==> first full flourishing of *mass consumption*
*[*]marketing: a sphere of cultural production where image conventions co-evolve with non-marketing imnages as an intertextual constantly reciprocal environment*
1. cuteness
little monsters
infant-like
with freakishly funny features[...]
(532)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%99.3[...]shold of ethical consideration
2. overpopulation
cramming of many life forms into tiny spaces ~= (literally) an uncanny microcosm of the imagined and feared socio-economic order
***new technologies to visualize the world ==produce==> new imaginateis of life itself*** [<-- my research on bestiaries]
microscope (19th century) --> microbial visuality --Latour--> new modes of interacting with and ingesting/consuming the world
bacteriology as a discipline emerged at the same time as the (so-called) transformation “from industrial capitalism --to--> market society”
•overpopulation
•bacterial proliferation
--> a trope in visualizing contemporary bacteria
bacteria live in obscene proximity to each other --> *bacterial intimacy =/= individualizing force of modernity*
the fantasy of there is some sort of “away” which can absorb what we overproduce
removal of excrement (in all its quises) --> demonstrating the urbanites class distinction --> (an apparent) desire to reorganize urban space according to a logic of repugnance مغايرت (--> this is why i am so uncomfortable with “clean” streets)
•the idea that a veritable subterranean system delivering *shit-free cleanliness* ==> citizen's physical, moral, sipritual cleanliness --with--> materila markers of the civilized society: cubicles, toilets, drains, sewers
(Lacan > Morton > Campbell >) the problem of human society : what to do with one's shit
anti-bacterial advertising --> fantasy of awayness
keeping nature at a distance ==Morton==> (act out an imagined preservation -->) dumps on the rest of the world
[sadistic admiration] putting something called nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar (for the environment) ~= what patriarchy does for the figure of the woman
bacteria adhere to each other and to their environment --> *they make any environment cohere as itself* : without bacteria there is no environment
3. lower classes
overweigth
bad skin
bad teech
criminally deviant
griminess سياهى
slick sheen ليز
dinginess چرکى
slouch اويخته
decay
in advertisement:
bacterium suicide bomber
ear-picking homeless man: the incarnation of bacterial cross-infection
**community <--> infection**
(health of the community is theatened by undesirable members)
*bacteria ==> community can come into full self-expression*
bacteria = disruption of social order ~-=> bacteria stabilizes the social order
***bacterial threat = biological model for a political necessity***
(familiar terrain of) hand: a vast and foreign bacterial colony
in a world of microbial resistance [in wh[...]
(535)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%99.4[...]a perverse pleasure in the “mad destruction” of our bodies and minds
}--> examples of critical marketing pursuing emancipatory unveiling procedures
--✕--> sinthome can offer:
1. an *analytic strategy for feeling out* the contours of symptoms
2. directing us to a new *question we may ask of texts of all kinds* --> ***why do they take the form that they do?*** [=/= what ideology is beneath them --> at the level of the latent contents (meaning) of a symptom] --bacteria-->
◦why do fantasies about community, sex, death, deviance take the form of the bacteria?
◦what is it about bacteria that is so compelling that it provides a structure for this array of phenomena? (<-- we can ask that at art/artists use of biology)
***the problem of bacteria for humans = the problem of living with others***
bacteria --think--> the problem of surviving in large, alienating, cross-infecting, co-dependent populations --> *metonymy between immunity & community*
•مجازمرسل metonymy =/= structural similarity تشابه
==reveal==> disciplines of *biology* and that of *political organization* are closely related [--> to understand fundamental concepts such as individuality and agency we need to frame the immune system not as a biological but a politico-psychic-physical phenomena]
*munus: public service, duty
{munus = onus + officium, obligation + office --> root of communitas}
co-munus: to be part of a community = to be a giver and receiver of the munus, which has a kind of coercive connective power
-anyone outside this gifting cycle is described as “immune” (@apass)
-munus: a gift (a contractual obligation that one has with the community) that marks one's entry to social life
the immunity/community dynamic is a negative aporetic dialectic پویایی دیالکتیک آپورتیک منفی (=/= dichotomy دوگانگی) ~= immunity: a process that always involves an open system of self-definition that consistently produces self and other
antibacterial sinthome gives form to this ambivalent position as individuals in market society --> our lives are preoccupied with *identifying and controlling enemies* and *incorporating allies*
•combatting computer viruses
•fighting terrorism
•containing immigration
•controlling pandemics
•choosing consumer objects
}--> *immune mechanisms: identification, location, incorporation, expulsion* (<-- we all do it, Sina, Pierre, etc.)
[*]bacteria: indirect way of talking about the overpopulated, deviant, teeming, dissolutive world we live in --> terror of overwhelming disintegration of our individual being (<-- artists want this?!)
[*]autoimmunity: when the human body + body politic goes into an overactive defense, seeking to strike at the enemy and cause harm to itself
[...]
(536)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%99.6[...]use of biology)
***the problem of bacteria for humans = the problem of living with others***
bacteria --think--> the problem of surviving in large, alienating, cross-infecting, co-dependent populations --> *metonymy between immunity & community*
•مجازمرسل metonymy =/= structural similarity تشابه
==reveal==> disciplines of *biology* and that of *political organization* are closely related [--> to understand fundamental concepts such as individuality and agency we need to frame the immune system not as a biological but a politico-psychic-physical phenomena]
*munus: public service, duty
{munus = onus + officium, obligation + office --> root of communitas}
co-munus: to be part of a community = to be a giver and receiver of the munus, which has a kind of coercive connective power
-anyone outside this gifting cycle is described as “immune” (@apass)
-munus: a gift (a contractual obligation that one has with the community) that marks one's entry to social life
the immunity/community dynamic is a negative aporetic dialectic پویایی دیالکتیک آپورتیک منفی (=/= dichotomy دوگانگی) ~= immunity: a process that always involves an open system of self-definition that consistently produces self and other
antibacterial sinthome gives form to this ambivalent position as individuals in market society --> our lives are preoccupied with *identifying and controlling enemies* and *incorporating allies*
•combatting computer viruses
•fighting terrorism
•containing immigration
•controlling pandemics
•choosing consumer objects
}--> *immune mechanisms: identification, location, incorporation, expulsion* (<-- we all do it, Sina, Pierre, etc.)
[*]bacteria: indirect way of talking about the overpopulated, deviant, teeming, dissolutive world we live in --> terror of overwhelming disintegration of our individual being (<-- artists want this?!)
[*]autoimmunity: when the human body + body politic goes into an overactive defense, seeking to strike at the enemy and cause harm to itself
life has become a complex of protective systems that in turn attack us --Derrida--> democracy: an autoimmune system
how autoimmune systems can be interrupted?
biophilic fantasies of bacteria as *messmates*
*when we worry about bacteria, we worry about others*
*to have contact with society is an unavoidable, necessary, disquisting, all-embracing gift*
(in West and elsewhere) individuals who identify their fellow citizens as undesirable obstacles to their freedom, health, wealth --> antibacterial brands
(in Germany) integration --> overdeveloped sense of our own immunity
...................................
[...]
(537)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%99.7[...]ation that one has with the community) that marks one's entry to social life
the immunity/community dynamic is a negative aporetic dialectic پویایی دیالکتیک آپورتیک منفی (=/= dichotomy دوگانگی) ~= immunity: a process that always involves an open system of self-definition that consistently produces self and other
antibacterial sinthome gives form to this ambivalent position as individuals in market society --> our lives are preoccupied with *identifying and controlling enemies* and *incorporating allies*
•combatting computer viruses
•fighting terrorism
•containing immigration
•controlling pandemics
•choosing consumer objects
}--> *immune mechanisms: identification, location, incorporation, expulsion* (<-- we all do it, Sina, Pierre, etc.)
[*]bacteria: indirect way of talking about the overpopulated, deviant, teeming, dissolutive world we live in --> terror of overwhelming disintegration of our individual being (<-- artists want this?!)
[*]autoimmunity: when the human body + body politic goes into an overactive defense, seeking to strike at the enemy and cause harm to itself
life has become a complex of protective systems that in turn attack us --Derrida--> democracy: an autoimmune system
how autoimmune systems can be interrupted?
biophilic fantasies of bacteria as *messmates*
*when we worry about bacteria, we worry about others*
*to have contact with society is an unavoidable, necessary, disquisting, all-embracing gift*
(in West and elsewhere) individuals who identify their fellow citizens as undesirable obstacles to their freedom, health, wealth --> antibacterial brands
(in Germany) integration --> overdeveloped sense of our own immunity
...................................
[Mary Douglas]
bring bewitched (in Sudan, Azande) ~= finding oneself the victim of embezzlement اختلاس (for modern person)
=/= fear (category of horror)
dirt = disorder
eliminating dirt is a positive effort to organize the environment (--> we are not removing something) --> creative movement
cleaning: to relate form to function, to make unity of experience
~~> part of the project of religion (atonement)
pollution:
1. instrumental --> change someone's behavior
2. expressive --> (a general view of) social order
pollution --> claim & counter-claim to status
sex pollution <--> body pollution
sexual danger --> symbole of relation between parts of society (hierarchy, collaboration, distinctiveness of social units)
expressive oversystematizing --> (sometimes) necessary to interpret beliefs
[...]
(538)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%99.7[...]essary, disquisting, all-embracing gift*
(in West and elsewhere) individuals who identify their fellow citizens as undesirable obstacles to their freedom, health, wealth --> antibacterial brands
(in Germany) integration --> overdeveloped sense of our own immunity
...................................
[Mary Douglas]
bring bewitched (in Sudan, Azande) ~= finding oneself the victim of embezzlement اختلاس (for modern person)
=/= fear (category of horror)
dirt = disorder
eliminating dirt is a positive effort to organize the environment (--> we are not removing something) --> creative movement
cleaning: to relate form to function, to make unity of experience
~~> part of the project of religion (atonement)
pollution:
1. instrumental --> change someone's behavior
2. expressive --> (a general view of) social order
pollution --> claim & counter-claim to status
sex pollution <--> body pollution
sexual danger --> symbole of relation between parts of society (hierarchy, collaboration, distinctiveness of social units)
expressive oversystematizing --> (sometimes) necessary to interpret beliefs
cosmologies with pollution symbol
reflection on dirt = reflection on relation of order to disorder, being to non-being, form to formlessness, life to death
rules of purity ~= comparative religion
(primitive:) sacredness ~= uncleanness
[an idea of] sanctity = (a little more than) prohibition }--> to protect profanity from divinity
hindu --> relative notion of pollution
cow dung is relatively pure to a Brahman priest, impure to a god
*respect <--> pollution*
•khak-e pa خاک پا (feet's dirt)
•dirt/dust as cleansing agent
•
Frazer > Robertson Smith (old testament scholar)
taboo: restriction of man's arbitrary use of natural things + supernatural penalty (--inspire--> fear + precaution) ==> rules of uncleanliness
uncleanliness -->
•supernatural danger
•spiritual state of unworthiness (christianity)
•
i have a savage explanation...
*separation*
clean = set apart = holy
“primitive =/= advanced” :
**hyper attention to the material circumstances of an act** =/= christian (rules of holiness --> motive & disposition of agent is important)
contact with corpse
contact with blood
theology: god man relationship ==> assert (a definition of) nature of human
*most thinking men in the second part of 19th century were amateur anthropologists*
--> confused dialogue between anthropol[...]
(541)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%99.7[...]science” }<-- Hegelian dialectic
}--✕--> wisdom and philosophic depth of primitive cultures
Babylonian + Assyrian --> “sin = material impurity” --> blood: sin-remover
(during Homer) Greek thought --> relatively free of ritual pollution
pollution concepts emerge later (expressed in classical drama)
clean and polluted --> man's destiny
(it seemed always we had a clean future)
the bad idea of *medical approach to symbolism*
comparative religion =/= medical materialism
(for example Jewish and Islamic avoidance of eating pork is explained as due to the dangers of eating pork in hot climate)
*hygienic basis* of (some) ancient rites
Moses's dietary rules ~~✕~~> enlightened public health administrator
Yoruba (cult of smallpox diety)
left hand to handle dirt
right hand to eat
(source of impurity -->) all bodily emissions ~/= eating <-- a person is in the middle state of purity
india --> ground does not act as a conductor
iran --> ground acts as a conductor
ritual pollution
ideas of dirt --Douglas-->(also) express symbolic system
European ideas of defilement:
1. dirt avoidance is a matter of hygiene or aesthetics (not religion)
2. the idea of dirt is dominated by a knowledge of pathogenic organisms (<== 19th century discovery of bacteria)
(context of) pathogemicity
(old definition of) [*]dirt: matter out of place
}==>
1. *where there is dirt there is system* (dirt is not an isolated event) -->{ systemic ordering & clarification of matter ==byproduct==> dirt }--> symbolism (symbolic system of purity)
2.
ominous compendium (a garbage collector)
schema: pattern-making tendency of perception
a filte filtering mechanism which at first only lets in sensations we know how to use
rituals of separation ==> boundaries, margins, internal links --> total structure of thought ==> pollution ideas
book of Leviticus
list of abomination:
•clean: frog,
•dirty: camel, hare, rock badger, some locusts, mouse, hippopotamus,
•?: chameleon, mole, crocodile,
eatable:
any animal with hoof
cloven-footed
chews the cud (partly digested food return to mouth for further chewing)
don't eat:
raven after their kind (in agreement with one's nature)
night hawk after their kind
the little owl, the great owl, the water hen
stork after their kind
hoopoe and bat
all winged insects are unclean for you
all clean winged things you may eat
everything in the water that has not fins and scales is an abomination to you
[...]
(542)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%99.9[...]away is feeling nervous with two views on objectivity:
(1)the ‘social constructionist’ view on this: getting to know the world ‘effectively’ by practicing the sciences --> knowledge is knowledge-game (on an agonistic power field) ==> science is rhetoric : artifacts and facts are parts of the powerful art of rhetoric ~= practice is persuasion. {this view will use the nasty tools of semiology and deconstruction to insist on the rhetorical nature of truth.} --> Haraway calls this ‘The imagery of force fields’ (also an imagery of high-tech military fields and of automated academic battlefields) {will to power} (for Luiza)
epistemological electroshock therapy
(feminists protecting their) sense of collective historical subjectivity and agency and our “embodied” accounts of the truth --> these are just excuse not to learn
(2)Humanistic Marxism (structuring theory about the domination of nature in the self-construction of man) ([young Marx, influenced by Feuerbach =/= Hegelian idealism, saying that:] man's essential nature is that of a free producer, freely reproducing their own conditions of life [--however--> under capitalism individuals are alienated from their productive activity, etc.])
--> “chance for life”
science: Global System, universal knowledge --> translation, convertibility, mobility
of meanings, and universality
money in capitalism ~= reductionism in science
...when we are talking about genes, social classes, elementary particles, genders, races, or texts
*vision: a sensory system that has been used leap out of the marked body ==> a gaze from nowhere
-“Vision is always a question of the power to see--and perhaps of the violence implicit in our visualizing practices”
-also, the visual metaphor allows one to go beyond fixed appearances, which are only the end products. The metaphor invites us to investigate the varied apparatuses of visual productroduction (including: the prosthetic technologies interfaced with our biological eyes and brains.)
unmarked body: the power to see and not be seen
objectivity in scientific and technological, late-industrial, militarized, racist, and male-dominant societies
(she asks for:)
“So, I think my problem, and “our” problem, is how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own “semiotic technologies” for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a “real” world, one that can be partially shared and that is friendly to earthwide projects of finite freedom, adequate material abundance, modest meaning in suffering, and limited happiness.”
Haraway asks for an embodied objectivity that is able of accommodating *paradoxes* --> ‘situated knowledges’
-what does she mean when she says “All components [...]
(546)[...notes/midday review.txt]%3.3[...]es in a host of settlements, fields, farms, factories, imaginary, literary, psychological and virtual spaces (--> and how animalhuman is socially defined)
technologies of human orderings : telegram? [encountering all kinds of inventiveness that go on cross-species (human, animal, story, image, media), the kind of semiotic work]
*Space* (de Certeau) : A place (lieu) is the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence. It thus excludes the possibility of two things being in the same location (place.) The law of the ‘proper’ rules in the place: the elements taken into consideration are beside one another, each situated in its own ‘proper’ and distinct location, a location it defines. A place is thus an instantaneous configuration of positions. It implies an indication of stability.
--> space as the ‘scheme of things’ --> species-identifying
=/= imaginal 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 [...]
(547)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%33.1[...]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 common) artistic address: *struggle over the control and positioning of the body in political and ideological terms* [--> in which stereotype plays a decisive role @Laura]
(?do you want me to be your)
worshiper
citizen
consumer
producer
(for Foad, and for most contemporary artists:) [*]stereotype: an instrument of subjection, to produce ideological subjects that can be smoothly inserted into existing institutions of government, economy, and sexual identity
“stereotype = to disavow agency”
(Owens on Kruger)
images of the nonproductive body
stereotype of action: worker, rebel --emphasising--> body's institutionalization: factory, family
for Laura, in fascist media regime: ‘the body is dismantled as a locus of practice and reassembled as a discontinuous series of gestures and poses --> “body = semiotic field” ==> *body inscribed into the register of discourse*
[artistic common views:]
(stereotype uses) deterrence, [according to Baudrillard:] dissuasion, promoting passivity, receptivity, inactivity, docile bodies [<-- i challenged this in my master thesis on shyness and passivity in performance art]
stereotype replaces *physical violence* with *semiotic coercion* (--> that is why it is often seen in art the use of direct physical contact to counter that idea)
stereotype --> rhetoric of intimidation --> it poses a threat to the artist --> the artist bears witness to the state of affair[...]
(548)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%87.2