[...] 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 research. it is about the passing of obligations from something ghost-like. i am sure we have other modes of response available to us other than how Hamlet takes in what is inherited to him, other ways of responding to the ghostly beings that talk to us from death. (inheritance ~= inhabiting spirit [they cannot be possess as a piece of property], reading inflaming flashes of remote spirits [--> is this hear from one another looks like? is technology placed at the source of this reflection?--technology itsel[...]
(1)[...notes/midday review.txt]%0.2[...] 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 research. it is about the passing of obligations from something ghost-like. i am sure we have other modes of response available to us other than how Hamlet takes in what is inherited to him, other ways of responding to the ghostly beings that talk to us from death. (inheritance ~= inhabiting spirit [they cannot be possess as a piece of property], reading inflaming flashes of remote spirits [--> is this hear from one another looks like? is technology placed at the source of this reflection?--technology itself answers the call--(Avital)]) could we work with Ophelia's kind of #Wortsalad instead? (Salad-e Kalame, khoresht-e kalame; same thing happens to Shirin of in Khosro Shirin, but unlike Shakespeare, Nezami allows another poetic drift;) Heidegger's “die Sprache spricht” : language is monologue --?--> schizophrenia and schizophrenic discourse --?--> structure of speaking]
[speaking asserts a certain temporal priority which we must undermine]
-listening *before* speaking
-“We hear language speaking” (Heidegger); a non-organic speaking; language is not equipped with organs of speech? (Avital)
serious joking / joking seriousness [Haraway]
joke/jest/gesture
a space of play --> where ideas come in to being
(story of ‘or’. is it where the original joker came? using or instead of and)
(there is no ‘or’ in nature!? what are the earlier forms of or that we can trace in cave paintings or tool makings?)
**if you don't take my idea seriously i will be utterly incomprehensible**
crafts-person for the building of lures of propositions --> ‘abstractions’
(abstraction is fragile and can hold worlds together)
where Europe comes from? (woher kommst du? i am born in, i am born in, ...)
what animates us rather than what civilizes us
(to Shabnam:) to ‘mourn with’ rather than ‘mourn about’
(-about =/= -with)
(structure of mourning)
to break in the philosophical and biological headquarters (and steal their st[...]
(7)[...notes/midday review.txt]%0.2[...]es, playing bodies, sensuous bodies
(feminism:) you can't get freedom outside of mortality
-theology, the negative way of knowing, the necessary discipline of positive affirmation in order to know what is not knowable, is a very helpful tradition
when it comes to language we, humans, will always win over the animals.
we will always be the ones who control the law, the database.
(all is bad news both for the charismatic endangered Bangali tiger and the individual chicken in the food industry.)
fight the divisions and differences
we are in a very bad place for animals and woman
can we do without instrumentalization?
categories of killable--the question of how we kill
the question of one's-own-old-hat
regarding what you are against: we might find ourselves properly addressing a particular issue but having no ability to make political connection, to think beyond the categories
*thinking: a materialist practice with other thinkers--done best as storytelling
for me politics is that to be able to locate ways of life that deserves work, that which deserve opposition, that which deserve our curiosity
disembodiment is a technologically produced effect--many people are very skillful in creating that effect --> effects that are also affect/affectional
(Haraway on writing the cyborg manifesto) SK
the physiological state of neutrality is an affective state
(the notion that violent and passion counts as affect and neutrality is without affect is chemically bizarre) -- neuro-chemistry of a certain kind of self-collection
refusing the division between material and immaterial
to call information-world immaterial is wrong
(this is the base of my work related to Haraway)
in the case of vision: the material and the semiotic always implode [the apparatus and the flesh] --> the effect of *disembodiment is a technologically produced effect* (that is also always affectional) (we have to get good at producing it)
[...so she was among (1983 Marxist) feminists (and the figure of cyborg is already in circulation for her--about the questions of reproduction technologies related to the situation of women) without biological education--not only that, many of her feminist allies thought of biology as the enemy [--> antinatural rejection of the sciences in feminist the agreement “that ‘nature’ is our enemy and that we must control our ‘natural’ bodies --> escalating logic of counterdomination] so her manifesto is all about that. biology is (a rich fabulous practice and) never innocent, and it is something that ‘we mean’. in the sense of ‘what do you mean?!'] [we are always telling knowledge stories that we need --> noninnocent]
(something is) boring =?=> (something is) wrong
why do i joke? it has to do with storytelling.<[...]
(9)[...notes/midday review.txt]%0.4[...]uestion of how we kill
the question of one's-own-old-hat
regarding what you are against: we might find ourselves properly addressing a particular issue but having no ability to make political connection, to think beyond the categories
*thinking: a materialist practice with other thinkers--done best as storytelling
for me politics is that to be able to locate ways of life that deserves work, that which deserve opposition, that which deserve our curiosity
disembodiment is a technologically produced effect--many people are very skillful in creating that effect --> effects that are also affect/affectional
(Haraway on writing the cyborg manifesto) SK
the physiological state of neutrality is an affective state
(the notion that violent and passion counts as affect and neutrality is without affect is chemically bizarre) -- neuro-chemistry of a certain kind of self-collection
refusing the division between material and immaterial
to call information-world immaterial is wrong
(this is the base of my work related to Haraway)
in the case of vision: the material and the semiotic always implode [the apparatus and the flesh] --> the effect of *disembodiment is a technologically produced effect* (that is also always affectional) (we have to get good at producing it)
[...so she was among (1983 Marxist) feminists (and the figure of cyborg is already in circulation for her--about the questions of reproduction technologies related to the situation of women) without biological education--not only that, many of her feminist allies thought of biology as the enemy [--> antinatural rejection of the sciences in feminist the agreement “that ‘nature’ is our enemy and that we must control our ‘natural’ bodies --> escalating logic of counterdomination] so her manifesto is all about that. biology is (a rich fabulous practice and) never innocent, and it is something that ‘we mean’. in the sense of ‘what do you mean?!'] [we are always telling knowledge 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 argument[...]
(10)[...notes/midday review.txt]%0.4[...]roducing it)
[...so she was among (1983 Marxist) feminists (and the figure of cyborg is already in circulation for her--about the questions of reproduction technologies related to the situation of women) without biological education--not only that, many of her feminist allies thought of biology as the enemy [--> antinatural rejection of the sciences in feminist the agreement “that ‘nature’ is our enemy and that we must control our ‘natural’ bodies --> escalating logic of counterdomination] so her manifesto is all about that. biology is (a rich fabulous practice and) never innocent, and it is something that ‘we mean’. in the sense of ‘what do you mean?!'] [we are always telling knowledge 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[...]
(12)[...notes/midday review.txt]%0.5[...] kabutar ba kabutar baz ba baz کبوتر با کبوتر باز با باز]
**killing is not something mortal beings can avoid** (us or them)
*the human beings have regularly and in complex ways produced other living entities as killable*
[category of killable: a killing that doesn't quite count as killing]
killing your pet when she is too sick = a judgment in responsive relationship that is not equal
to say that “meat culture everywhere and always are acts of violation” is wrong
“post-”, the notion of ‘surpassing’ that is inevitability built into the “post-”, is in our way politically
the project of critique : finding that point of violation where you can say “got you!”, ‘I nailed you’ --> the practice of critique = to define what we are against }==> develop political movement that are fairly self-certain about what we are against ==> you will find yourself (perhaps) property addressing a particular issue but having no ability *to make political connection* (~= to think beyond the category) --> you find yourself crippled
posthumanist think of themselves as “better than”, more in possession of a “real” understanding of the nature of contemporary world, beyond the critique of technology
the politics of it all...
[we have never been -->] human : being on the side of the one who developed technology to realize intention of their mind in the matter [= The Iron Man]
=/= what it is to be people
we don't need fancy epistemological justification (such as posthumanism), people know the world in ordinary ways and we can learn from eachother, in all the (cultural, historical, power, wealth) differences among us [@Leo] --> ***partial translations happen all the time***
to take the risk of making a mistake --[the only way you can]--> affirm something positive : the positive knowledge pins on the possibility of mistake --(@Setareh; Goda wants to avoid mistakes?)
(learning from Foucault:) power = actual arrangement of the world (and not something ‘out there’)
(learning from Derrida:) responsibility is about the excess of it all (and not the irony of it all [*irony: incongruity of expectation and occurrence])
(learning from biology about:) differences organize themselves by ecologies (and not by binaries) --> ecologies have many scales (of temporality and physicality)***
scientific research + artistic research + contemporary philosophical critical inquiry ==> *topographies of difference* [--> important for Goda's use of the term “privilege” flattening differences]
(“+” are exchange zones, i am learning their differences of idioms)
[apass = partners locked into mimesis]
(my problem with the idea of) privilege: a special right, advantage, or immunity granted to a particular group or individual --assume--> the only way for a particular[...]
(13)[...notes/midday review.txt]%0.6[...]e transformation
-which “affective economies” animate our own bodies as artist and as people?
-what feelings inform our works?
staying with linguistic differences (in each of our stories or praxiography) is a way of investigating the ontological commitments embedded in language.
ontological --> worlding --> how language participates in shaping our lived worlds in some ways and not others.*** “it is not common for speakers of a language to examine what type of material objects their language commits them to.” (Verran)
solidity of found objects, in my case, the graphs and images i am making about ajayeb --> the graphs now reiterate for me as rituals in my research microworld.
with these graphs i am trying different ways of arranging space, time and matter when speaking a *sentence*. ...each language figures space, time, and matter into different kinds of objects. in my writing tools with ajayeb, what type of material objects my language, or Hemedani or Qazwini's language, commits us to? my graphs are “spatiotemporal particulars” and “sortal particulars”. trying to talk about ontological assumptions embedded in the English (and any other) language. the diagrams are *rigs*. i am using rigging instead of framework. --> clever technological rigs, are provisional constructions, setup for a specific myth and dismantled after. sometimes old rigs are reused or repurposed for new rigs.
-resist peaceful naturalization
-uncomfortable software
-building/creating technologies as one way to do ontological politics (in postcolonial context)
-my experiments with ajayeb:
-(the danger in using) computer software to archive ajayeb's or ajib knowledge =/= lively collective memory tool
-the software that is slick and seamless runs the risk of the digital media appear as *self-sufficient representations* (<--✕--> living context)
-archived and frozen in time
-sorting operations
(if i continue with digital tech in reading ajayeb i have to ask) how the digitized ajib knowledge can resist appropriation and translation into an idiom that will not sustain its metaphysics****
◦powerful relational work that numbers (also? = =/= --> => etc.) perform -> “numbers are a particularly smooth and manipulable meaning-making tools. they hide their seams well. they are slick and trustworthy” (Porter) --> they are “materialized relations” (how can we tell a story of relations that for example numbers/math materialize?)
◦highlighting parts of ajayeb: as part of a material reading practice --> “highlighting” could easily be understood as metaphor of disembodied vision; highlighting is not about making things clear but about scribbling (bad-khat بدخط) as a mode of attention =/= (Descartes’) “natural light of reason”
%report on fables of objects #workshop (22.02.2017 HWD apass): attention to the sense and feeling of[...]
(15)[...notes/midday review.txt]%1.5[...]
***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 work” and the mundane everyday of ‘getting on together’ --> interrupting one's own framework)
...................................
#workshop, on question, feedback method, to improve the questions we ask each other
-what are the questions (i could ask) that make you the most articulate?
-the question that asks what are the good questions that offer an interesting becoming for those to whom the question is addressed
-to ask: does this apparatus has stakes in docility or availability?
-more interesting questions ==enable==> more articulated answers ==> more articulated identities
-asking (questions) (is not abo[...]
(18)[...notes/midday review.txt]%1.7[...] to know,’) is about constructing interest ==> chance of interesting answers
-asking about the differential productions, “=/=” or “=” or “==>” in each other practices. these assessments are propositional and poetic remarks, guessing the artificialities that we live with, not finding of matters of fact
◦asking about particularizations (تخصیص) and generalizations (تعمیم)
**literature begins, Blanchot writes, “at the moment when literature becomes a question”** (this is completely different than asking or question-marking in literature) [...] this question “is posed to language by language that has become literature” (the question that the meaning of the text asks is the question asked by literature; [of course at the moment of reading]) [then what is a text before becoming a question? complaining? revolution?]--%(negation wishes to realize itself.)
--> Rorty's critique of Descartes's way of asking questions
we have to be careful with our practice of questioning, because we often end up privileging a group of people by attributing it to “higher” levels cognition and of being “critically” in the world (=/= animal, nonpeople, other people with other ways of being in/with the apperceptive world that don't use the technology of questioning, as it is crafted historically and naturalized in the west for the univerasal method of ‘knowing more’)
...................................
#workshop, reading group
•reading as passionate betrayal. (hunting for precious empirical details, refigurative, reparative, poaching, reading can be a betrayal of textual authority and an act of survival)
•addressing /present* differences, not already pre-figured differences
•(condition of friendship, staying close to the text) staying close as a reader, as someone who could hold the text of the Other, receiving it in the withdrawal / Entzug (drug rehabilitation)
•i am in no position of ‘understanding’ or being clear about the text
•(i understand now that) it is not up to me to tell you how to read
•what makes you write or scratch a text?
(aaaakh... our alphabetico-logical cultures...!)
•if everything is not fundamentally unreadable (snafu) we wouldn't be reading
•it is about to situate the place of a (un)learning
•throwing access to each other (not only in terms of transferential intensity #sss)
•which appetites and tastes are required to fulfill the *ethics and erotics of curiosity* (that I am cultivating and depending on)? flourishing (of my ajayeb) depends on a reading that is more like “mutual partial digestion” (Katie King, Haraway) [=/= “eating well"] the text
•“every time i read X, something new shows up”
my practice of ‘rhetorical reading’ (=/= ‘close reading’; or more like close reading and letting go. “close” is itself a metaphor, a rhetoric of reading;) doesn't work with the idea [...]
(20)[...notes/midday review.txt]%1.8[...]od:
•“mapping into knowledge” : co-fabrication between the researcher and the diverse others engaged in the process --> (problem of) ‘positionality ==> data’ (the idea that the researcher produces knowledge or “facts”)
◦positionality ==?==> politically correct jargon in artistic research environment [has positionality backfired into a language of trying to change a public opinion in your favour?]
‘fantasy of the unproblematic mode’
...................................
regarding biographical work according to Pierre, ok i am working even on the border of solipsism
what i am doing is not autopoiesis (self-making, making a poem out of yourself) rather sympoiesis (with-making, with people from different worlds and pasts)
trying to contain every available mode of interpretation in my work
(collecting all the modes of interpretation)
(for the psychoanalyst as writer,) the *unconscious functions as a *trope
unconscious ~=? trope
*my actual interest is in “the place of study”
which is embodied by its participants, is shared and full of stories that hold foster curiosity and learning. a place where hybrid agents of interpretation are alive and at work, partly technological partly human partly animal shared knowing processes.
-one of our strongest ethical obligations is curiosity
...................................
[Nietzsche]
(in writing) if i could choose i would promote something that comes close to the texture of the softening that opens and glides, allowing for sudden shocks and slippages.
the personality needs to be able to flow in order to move past anything that establishes itself firmly
Submitted to constant critique and revision
(Nietzsche) “We can destroy only as creators--But let us not forget this either: it is enough to create new names and estimations and probabilities in order to create in the long run new ‘things’”
invention's power over new things
work on aphorism and irony
radical critique of reason and truth
will to X ---- feeling of power, primitive form of the will (=/=? play)
arguing that knowledge is contingent and conditional
Nietzsche's campaign against morality :
(contrast between good and evil -->) *master-morality : charity, submission to the other, selflessness, etc. --> you hate yourself
(denying the inherent inequality -->) *slave-morality --> weakness is a matter of choice ==> nihilism
*transvaluation
(Nietzsche hated christianity for its non-affirmation of life. for him sex was a fundamental affirmation of life, christianity's elevation of chastity (including, for example, the story of Mary's virginal pregnancy) is counter to the natural instincts of humanity, and [...]
(21)[...notes/midday review.txt]%2[...]cters
•jurassic park --> ajayeb al makhlughat عجایب المخلوقات (horror, sublime, shivering water)
•nonapocalyptic stories and the otherworldly hauntingly familiar in the lost faces of forest (called Tehran?)
(accourding to Egyptian 1550 BCE,) book: a loose collection of magic spells intended to assist a dead person's journey through underworld, and into the afterlife and written by many priests
-are lists the origin of writing? (...way before the installation of the modern scriptural apparatus)
theory-minded academics have rigorously repudiated----or forgotten poetry. ----> poetic deprogrammmg
cohabitation of two sovereign linguistic attitudes----the grammars and behaviors that we associate with figures of literary performance and philosophical positing
18th century
rise of increasingly more mathematical and symbolic logics
more literary types of discursive formations,
Wordsworth, Rilke, and Keats disavowing Paul de Man?!
Freud without Goethe or Schiller?!
Benjamin off Baudelaire?!
Derrida deprived of Mallarme, Ponge, or Celan?!
Heidegger abandoned by Trakl or Holderlin?!
increasing technicization of critical language
colloquy, soliloquy
they are called to witness distinct regions of being ==> assuming the destiny of difference
% denken und dichten is at stake in the *theory of mourning
...................................
[Stengers]
the storyteller : “some people love to divide and classify, while others are bridge-makers--weaving relations that **turn a divide into a living contrast**, one whose power is to affect, to produce thinking and feeling”
(regarding my footnote fetish) ... because writing such footnotes implies *feeling the text* as an *animating power*
philosophy =? a form of textual animation {--> approaching the work of ajayeb}
to turn the [ajayeb] (animist) modes of experience (existence), awareness, and knowledge into living contrasts (intensely powerful bridge-making tools)
can we reappropriate without reanimate? ----> i think if we deconstructively talk about the reappropriations of meaning we might allow animation to constitute itself.
-how to train yourself in spotting relevant questions and unilaterally [einseitig] imposed questions? (their differences) [~? mofti مفتی, fatva فتوا =/= khotbe خطبه]
(to put the ‘question’ at risk)
*milieu-thinking* (to think by the milieu) :
1. no reference to the ground
2. never separating from milieu
(Virgin Mary requires a milieu [of symbolic efficacy, categories of belief, etc.])
what is the milieu of ajayeb? (ghalamrov قلمرو, mohite ejtemayi محیط اجتمایی, its[...]
(22)[...notes/midday review.txt]%2.3[...]hink if we deconstructively talk about the reappropriations of meaning we might allow animation to constitute itself.
-how to train yourself in spotting relevant questions and unilaterally [einseitig] imposed questions? (their differences) [~? mofti مفتی, fatva فتوا =/= khotbe خطبه]
(to put the ‘question’ at risk)
*milieu-thinking* (to think by the milieu) :
1. no reference to the ground
2. never separating from milieu
(Virgin Mary requires a milieu [of symbolic efficacy, categories of belief, etc.])
what is the milieu of ajayeb? (ghalamrov قلمرو, mohite ejtemayi محیط اجتمایی, its ecology)
“natural”: that which science will eventually explain ==> nature =/= “natural”
“nature”: that larger, older, and wiser configuration that gets credit for ingenuity (instead of the creature's bodily know-how) by the call of the scientist
عجایب ajayeb's relations to the world, rhizomatic connections to other practices that likewise explore a metamorphic (rather than representational) relation
Earth =/= cradle
Surrealists’ automatism to cultivate lucid trances is missing the techniques of imagination developed by Ibn Arabi, (or by Sohrevardi, and others)
(Breton's subjectivity is still hopelessly European)
=?=> to recuperate our physical force (old good Tasavof-?)
‘ideas’ --> to “animate” humans ~= erotically lure the human soul**
(Plato knew this)
to lure us into relevant metamorphic attention*
(Deleuze and Guattari:) my existence is my very participation in assemblages
in order to determine what is “really” responsible for what [= agency?].
-an agency that doesn't belong to us (who is ‘us’ in Stengers?)
the efficacy of assemblages (in ajayeb)
(assemblage --> landscape [in farsi: چشم انداز cheshm-andaz, is related not to the land but to the eyes, literally meaning the projection of gaze])
(the point is) to play a referential game that puts one at risk (instead of protecting via quote)
(let's immediately turn off that) monotonous little critical or reflexive voice whispering that (the only defense we have against fanaticism and the rule of illusions is that) we should not accept being mystified
commenting =/= touching
(lams kardan لمس کردن =/= ezhare nazar kardan اظهار نظر کردن) --> an issue in art criticism in Iran ایران
[@Foad]
**our senses are not for detached cognition but for participation**(David Abram)
-“The ways the senses themselves have, of throwing themselves beyond what is immediately given, in order to make tentative contact with the other sides of things that we do not sense directly, [...]
(23)[...notes/midday review.txt]%2.4[...] />
(capital gains concentrated in the) self-production of identity
subject occupied full time in itself
the logic of “do it yourself”
obliged to make countless small decisions in all areas
subject mixed up with the incessant movement of its own alienation
*hyperactive life --> poverty of experience*
the banality of “i Like”
(maybe interesting for Laura:) *fatigue* is the instant of stopping and pausing [of exercise and beautification] (after which a diversity might be possible)
[*]fatigue: capable tiredness --> politicizes discomfort
[#we are in the domain of passivity, disappearance and inaction]
Peran suggests a position of fatigue where (some time ago) was occupied by melancholy
“is this not a mere “don't like” that re-enters the spiral of our mobilization?”
“we are left with just the option of making an index, a collection of trails and marks [...]”
sunday: “empty time that forces us to fill it through apparently free decisions that, if they are resolved properly, please us and re-constitute us” (Peran)
*freedom of action for self-realization* --> unstoppable egocentric machine
space of perpetual connection (@ERG's website)
(pseudo) communicative action by way of technological devices --> camouflaged alienation
“The promise of self-realization and the demand for visibility organize the mobilization of desire, turning it into work.”
do we need to formulize and formalize our uncomfortable concerns and experiences?
@apass, artist research
i want to *give connections*
...................................
#semester/seminar on destruction
-care, suffer, fubar,
[fubar: “fucked up beyond all recognition"--a term from veterans returning to the United States in 1960s]
#semester on Hojum
(surge,) on performance, media, sculpture, and surplus
Hojum has to do with the hojum (~=? ‘bodies’) of people to get in front 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[...]
(24)[...notes/midday review.txt]%3[...]solved properly, please us and re-constitute us” (Peran)
*freedom of action for self-realization* --> unstoppable egocentric machine
space of perpetual connection (@ERG's website)
(pseudo) communicative action by way of technological devices --> camouflaged alienation
“The promise of self-realization and the demand for visibility organize the mobilization of desire, turning it into work.”
do we need to formulize and formalize our uncomfortable concerns and experiences?
@apass, artist research
i want to *give connections*
...................................
#semester/seminar on destruction
-care, suffer, fubar,
[fubar: “fucked up beyond all recognition"--a term from veterans returning to the United States in 1960s]
#semester on Hojum
(surge,) on performance, media, sculpture, and surplus
Hojum has to do with the hojum (~=? ‘bodies’) of people to get in front 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 t[...]
(25)[...notes/midday review.txt]%3[...]ational 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 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, militarize[...]
(26)[...notes/midday review.txt]%3.1[...]ical 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 vision that has produced ‘techno-monsters’ (what does she mean by that?)
--> second birthing? transcendence?
[the frankenstein's techno-monsters, is modeled after who? and who is modeled after it? wondrously, murderously walking around...]
(‘second-birthing’: one of the deadly stories of killing: in the first-birthing we have merely birth to the earthly soil from the woman, and then the achievement o[...]
(27)[...notes/midday review.txt]%3.1[...]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 vision that has produced ‘techno-monsters’ (what does she mean by that?)
--> second birthing? transcendence?
[the frankenstein's techno-monsters, is modeled after who? and who is modeled after it? wondrously, murderously walking around...]
(‘second-birthing’: one of the deadly stories of killing: in the first-birthing we have merely birth to the earthly soil from the woman, and then the achievement of the tragically self-realized purpose of tragic consiousness, concretized and distilled by Sartre) “dire myths of self-birthing”... --> we must resist the stories of guilt laden knowledge and consciousness
unrestricted vision
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. “equ[...]
(30)[...notes/midday review.txt]%3.2[...]
==> 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*** --> ‘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” sh[...]
(33)[...notes/midday review.txt]%3.3[...] 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*** --> ‘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 --> t[...]
(34)[...notes/midday review.txt]%3.3[...] 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
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 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[...]
(35)[...notes/midday review.txt]%3.4[...]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 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 to a “real world” (no matter how mediated for us and no matter how complex and contradictory these worlds may be)
Sex is “resourced” for its representation as gender, which “we” can control
Situated knowledges[...]
(36)[...notes/midday review.txt]%3.4[...]ulnerability ~~> (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 to a “real world” (no matter how mediated for us and no matter how complex and contradictory these worlds may be)
Sex is “resourced” for its representation as gender, which “we” can control
Situated knowledges require that the object of knowledge be pictured as an actor and agent
-which version of “realism” is she argueing for?
“[...] we are not in charge of the world. We just live here and try to strike up noninnocent conversations by means of our prosthetic devices, including our visualization technologies.”
in the rich feminist practice in science (more than anywhere else) passive categories of objects of knowledge are “activated”
The biological female peopling : When female “sex” has been so thoroughly retheorized and revisualized that it emerges as practically indistinguishable from “mind,” --> the ‘difference’ is theorized biologically as situational, not intrinsic, (at every level from gene to foraging pattern, thereby fundamentally changing the biological politics of the body.)
-(example: Emily Martin)
points in SK:
1-finite partial perspectives
2-split and contradictory self
3-objectivity (--> positioned rationality, object of knowledge as an actor, mutual and usually *unequal* structuring, it is about taking risks)
how and why Haraway as a feminist fights for a better Primatology?
(Barad on) Situated Knowledges: are not merely about knowing/seeing from somewhere (as in having a perspective) but about taking account of how the specific prosthetic embodiment of the technologically enhanced visualizing apparatus matters to practices of knowing
-(Haraway's) move from *optics* [a politics of positioning, in Situated Knowledges] to *diffraction* [an optical metaphor for the effort to make a difference in the world, in Modest_Witness]
Katie King: “apparatus of literary production”: a matrix from which “literature” is born.
...the “facticity” of biological discourse that is absent from literary discourse and its knowledge claims. ----> Are biological bodies “produced” or “generated” in the same strong s[...]
(37)[...notes/midday review.txt]%3.5[...] />
“[...] we are not in charge of the world. We just live here and try to strike up noninnocent conversations by means of our prosthetic devices, including our visualization technologies.”
in the rich feminist practice in science (more than anywhere else) passive categories of objects of knowledge are “activated”
The biological female peopling : When female “sex” has been so thoroughly retheorized and revisualized that it emerges as practically indistinguishable from “mind,” --> the ‘difference’ is theorized biologically as situational, not intrinsic, (at every level from gene to foraging pattern, thereby fundamentally changing the biological politics of the body.)
-(example: Emily Martin)
points in SK:
1-finite partial perspectives
2-split and contradictory self
3-objectivity (--> positioned rationality, object of knowledge as an actor, mutual and usually *unequal* structuring, it is about taking risks)
how and why Haraway as a feminist fights for a better Primatology?
(Barad on) Situated Knowledges: are not merely about knowing/seeing from somewhere (as in having a perspective) but about taking account of how the specific prosthetic embodiment of the technologically enhanced visualizing apparatus matters to practices of knowing
-(Haraway's) move from *optics* [a politics of positioning, in Situated Knowledges] to *diffraction* [an optical metaphor for the effort to make a difference in the world, in Modest_Witness]
Katie King: “apparatus of literary production”: a matrix from which “literature” is born.
...the “facticity” of biological discourse that is absent from literary discourse and its knowledge claims. ----> Are biological bodies “produced” or “generated” in the same strong sense as poems? (biological body ~= poem)
“material-semiotic actor”: the object of knowledge as an active, meaning-generating part of apparatus of bodily production
bodies as objects of knowledge are material-semiotic generative nodes.
“objects” do not preexist as such --> Their boundaries materialize in social interaction. Boundaries are drawn by mapping practices.
world =/= mother/matter/mutter
world ~= coyote (a figure of the always problematic, always potent tie between meaning and bodies. world as coding trickster.)
(feminism) movement rooted in specification and articulation (of [different kinds of] ‘elsewhere’) =/= (assumption of the right or ability to) identities and representation (of identities)
#workshop reading SK (for apass)
Which version of “realism” are you talking about? Recollecting truth and objectivity are activated whenever a ‘point of view’ is produced among other metaphors that we use in our practice and thinking in techno-scientific societies. In this group reading session we are go[...]
(38)[...notes/midday review.txt]%3.5[...]roduction”: a matrix from which “literature” is born.
...the “facticity” of biological discourse that is absent from literary discourse and its knowledge claims. ----> Are biological bodies “produced” or “generated” in the same strong sense as poems? (biological body ~= poem)
“material-semiotic actor”: the object of knowledge as an active, meaning-generating part of apparatus of bodily production
bodies as objects of knowledge are material-semiotic generative nodes.
“objects” do not preexist as such --> Their boundaries materialize in social interaction. Boundaries are drawn by mapping practices.
world =/= mother/matter/mutter
world ~= coyote (a figure of the always problematic, always potent tie between meaning and bodies. world as coding trickster.)
(feminism) movement rooted in specification and articulation (of [different kinds of] ‘elsewhere’) =/= (assumption of the right or ability to) identities and representation (of identities)
#workshop reading SK (for apass)
Which version of “realism” are you talking about? Recollecting truth and objectivity are activated whenever a ‘point of view’ is produced among other metaphors that we use in our practice and thinking in techno-scientific societies. In this group reading session we are going to study one of the most stubborn and pervasive phantasms in art and sciences, the figure of objectivity, with the Donna Haraway's 1988 essay ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’. This reading focuses on politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating in our power-sensitive conversations, and what does it mean to become accountable and responsible for one's own noninnocent translations. We begin with her essay on the 2nd of February and talk about each of our practices in particular continuing on the 9th.
she wants to re-figure, not disavow, objectivity
“story-tellers exploring what it means to be embodied in high-tech worlds” =/= technophobia
technophilia is narcissistic : the notion that man invented himself and that man is involved in some kind of narrative of technological escalation whereby the objectification of human intentionality in the world has finally surpassed itself, and man has achieved self-objectification in a machine that will finally name him obsolescence as he is and destroy him in a technological apocalypse figured by the computer. (Haraway) [we need better dog stories =/= (Iron Man:) man, made in the image of a vanished god, takes on superpowers in his secular-sacred ascent, only to end tragic]
“...man making himself (by realizing his intentions in his tools) yet again in the Greatest Story Ever Told.” (your artwork doesn't need to be this kind of story!)
or the Darwinist tale of “Mitochondrial Eve in a neocolonial Out of Africa”
we[...]
(39)[...notes/midday review.txt]%3.6[...]ding trickster.)
(feminism) movement rooted in specification and articulation (of [different kinds of] ‘elsewhere’) =/= (assumption of the right or ability to) identities and representation (of identities)
#workshop reading SK (for apass)
Which version of “realism” are you talking about? Recollecting truth and objectivity are activated whenever a ‘point of view’ is produced among other metaphors that we use in our practice and thinking in techno-scientific societies. In this group reading session we are going to study one of the most stubborn and pervasive phantasms in art and sciences, the figure of objectivity, with the Donna Haraway's 1988 essay ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’. This reading focuses on politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating in our power-sensitive conversations, and what does it mean to become accountable and responsible for one's own noninnocent translations. We begin with her essay on the 2nd of February and talk about each of our practices in particular continuing on the 9th.
she wants to re-figure, not disavow, objectivity
“story-tellers exploring what it means to be embodied in high-tech worlds” =/= technophobia
technophilia is narcissistic : the notion that man invented himself and that man is involved in some kind of narrative of technological escalation whereby the objectification of human intentionality in the world has finally surpassed itself, and man has achieved self-objectification in a machine that will finally name him obsolescence as he is and destroy him in a technological apocalypse figured by the computer. (Haraway) [we need better dog stories =/= (Iron Man:) man, made in the image of a vanished god, takes on superpowers in his secular-sacred ascent, only to end tragic]
“...man making himself (by realizing his intentions in his tools) yet again in the Greatest Story Ever Told.” (your artwork doesn't need to be this kind of story!)
or the Darwinist tale of “Mitochondrial Eve in a neocolonial Out of Africa”
we need stories of companion species, the “very mundane and ongoing sort of tale, one full of misunderstandings, achievements, crimes, and renewable hopes.” (Haraway, La Guin, Tessa Farmer,)
...................................
[Haraway on Ihde]
...technologies are not mediations--that is, something in between us and another bit of the world--rather, technologies are organs, full partners, in what Merleau-Ponty called “infoldings of the flesh.”
infolding =/= interface
•“What happens in the folds is what is important.”
•Interfaces are made out of interacting grappling devices.
•the infolding of others to each other is what makes up the knots we call beings or, perhaps better, following Bruno Latour, things.
“Technologies are always c[...]
(40)[...notes/midday review.txt]%3.6[...]
she wants to re-figure, not disavow, objectivity
“story-tellers exploring what it means to be embodied in high-tech worlds” =/= technophobia
technophilia is narcissistic : the notion that man invented himself and that man is involved in some kind of narrative of technological escalation whereby the objectification of human intentionality in the world has finally surpassed itself, and man has achieved self-objectification in a machine that will finally name him obsolescence as he is and destroy him in a technological apocalypse figured by the computer. (Haraway) [we need better dog stories =/= (Iron Man:) man, made in the image of a vanished god, takes on superpowers in his secular-sacred ascent, only to end tragic]
“...man making himself (by realizing his intentions in his tools) yet again in the Greatest Story Ever Told.” (your artwork doesn't need to be this kind of story!)
or the Darwinist tale of “Mitochondrial Eve in a neocolonial Out of Africa”
we need stories of companion species, the “very mundane and ongoing sort of tale, one full of misunderstandings, achievements, crimes, and renewable hopes.” (Haraway, La Guin, Tessa Farmer,)
...................................
[Haraway on Ihde]
...technologies are not mediations--that is, something in between us and another bit of the world--rather, technologies are organs, full partners, in what Merleau-Ponty called “infoldings of the flesh.”
infolding =/= interface
•“What happens in the folds is what is important.”
•Interfaces are made out of interacting grappling devices.
•the infolding of others to each other is what makes up the knots we call beings or, perhaps better, following Bruno Latour, things.
“Technologies are always compound. They are composed of diverse agents of interpretation, agents of recording, and agents for directing and multiplying relational action. These agents can be human beings or parts of human beings, other organisms in part or whole, machines of many kinds, or other sorts of entrained things made to work in the technological compound of conjoined forces.”
*animal (in zoological terminology) : a composite of individual organisms, an enclosure of zoons, a company of critters infolded into a one.
compound = composite + enclosure
camera: the technological eye --> philosophical pretension and self-certainty (=/= Christian's camera)
-- camera as a black-box with which to register pictures of the outside world in a representational, mentalist semiotic economy
...................................
Vinciane Despret, Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour, ”_how they make their subjects interesting,_“
to tell the story of their work of “translation,” of invention.
refuse all loyalty to my homeland and its values
*heuristic: mental [...]
(45)[...notes/midday review.txt]%3.6[...]eatest Story Ever Told.” (your artwork doesn't need to be this kind of story!)
or the Darwinist tale of “Mitochondrial Eve in a neocolonial Out of Africa”
we need stories of companion species, the “very mundane and ongoing sort of tale, one full of misunderstandings, achievements, crimes, and renewable hopes.” (Haraway, La Guin, Tessa Farmer,)
...................................
[Haraway on Ihde]
...technologies are not mediations--that is, something in between us and another bit of the world--rather, technologies are organs, full partners, in what Merleau-Ponty called “infoldings of the flesh.”
infolding =/= interface
•“What happens in the folds is what is important.”
•Interfaces are made out of interacting grappling devices.
•the infolding of others to each other is what makes up the knots we call beings or, perhaps better, following Bruno Latour, things.
“Technologies are always compound. They are composed of diverse agents of interpretation, agents of recording, and agents for directing and multiplying relational action. These agents can be human beings or parts of human beings, other organisms in part or whole, machines of many kinds, or other sorts of entrained things made to work in the technological compound of conjoined forces.”
*animal (in zoological terminology) : a composite of individual organisms, an enclosure of zoons, a company of critters infolded into a one.
compound = composite + enclosure
camera: the technological eye --> philosophical pretension and self-certainty (=/= Christian's camera)
-- camera as a black-box with which to register pictures of the outside world in a representational, mentalist semiotic economy
...................................
Vinciane Despret, Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour, ”_how they make their subjects interesting,_“
to tell the story of their work of “translation,” of invention.
refuse all loyalty to my homeland and its values
*heuristic: mental shortcuts that ease the cognitive load of making a problem solvable
-trading optimality, completeness, accuracy, or precision for speed
it may *approximate* the exact solution for the problem
-enabling discover or learn something for themselves. (a ‘hands-on’ or interactive heuristic approach to learning)
[(in computing:) proceeding to a solution by trial and error or by rules that are only loosely defined.]
-from Greek heuriskein ‘find’
*contingent: using it with ‘historical’ always produces interesting ways --> contingency relates to a nonteleological [a doctrine explaining phenomena by their ends or purpose] and nonhierarchical multiplicity [when i say ‘dud’ and ‘cauphing’ and interupting ‘tracing’ i am asking for contingent modes of relating and thinking. conceptualizing in terms of the origin of the[...]
(47)[...notes/midday review.txt]%3.7[...] be untrue
--possible propositions
never use contingency alone in a sentence --> historical contingency
never use understanding stand alon in a sentence --> better understanding {'better’ opens situatedness, for who and how “better,” etc.}
Rhetoric <--(has to do with)--> Contingent
Aristotle (in his work on rhetoric) was against contingency. He believed that the “unavoidable and potentially unmanageable presence of multiple possibilities” or the complex nature of decisions creates and invites rhetoric. (=/= Plato saw rhetoric as pure deceit [gul] and positioned it in politics. [you can see he is terrified by the death of his teacher and mentor Socrates by civility.])
rhetoric --> contigent --> epistemic: individuals make meaning through language and determine what constitutes truth
*ontology is death-dealing <--** terrible violence is directed to the non-existing, the never having existed
---> go to the root of exist --> which modes of existence deserve our curiosity?
...................................
(i found a word for it,) my register of @Lili's scream: i see it as ‘nonlaughter’(?)
(*proposal: there is a number when we dial we can listen to her scream on the phone.) (--> stream, technology, tele-, telephone, called,)
(for her) thinking =? knowing (sending =/= receiving)
(an SF scenario:) imagine and describe an alien world where its populace don't practice ‘knowing.’
**scream ==makes==> witnesses**
(fighting ==makes==> coordination)
از طلبکار به طلبه (az talabkar be talabe)
///the (symbolic?) structuration of ‘demand’ in Lili's presentation:
the ‘sujet supposé savoir’ #sss [~= Pir, (پیر always a paternal metaphor?) that Other whom you ‘call’ who holds (your) deepest truth ---> go to the metaphorology of “depth” =/= “skimming the surface"] (installed by Lacan) is a subject who is in a functional position and one presumes that this subject knows or retains or holds the knowledge (even vital and secret knowledge [this is knowledge-talabkar طلبکار]) that you want. this subject is functionally established. one of the laws of our encounter is that puts the speaker/writer/analyst/text/etc in the (even architectural) center: the subject-supposed-to-know in Lacan the analyst who sits there as a tower of knowledge that mostly withholds what s/he knows --> transferencial energy directed towards him/her --> drama of identification (--> break-out of narcissism for Freud)
-it is one of the (negative?) binding transferential contracts in relation to “the one who speaks”
[*anthropology of exchange* --> Transference: (for Lacan) Each time a man speaks to another in an authentic and full manner, there is, in the true sense, transference, symbolic transference--something which takes place which changes the nature of the two beings present. Later Lacan articulates the transfer[...]
(49)[...notes/midday review.txt]%3.8[...] the University* : (systematic) “knowledge” replaces the nonsensical master signifier in the dominant commanding position; in this case the sujet supposé savoir dependent upon the related knowledge of the Other, or the source of “the field” (journals, textbooks, etc.) ==> (arbiter of) truth --> *to transmit knowledge that is already given*
[account of knowledge as a symbolic and social network, master signifier, subject positions,]
in placing the ‘text’ in the position of a knowing expert who has the answers Lili (unconsciously) idealizes her texts, and of course when her ‘texts’ fail to satisfy that desire she demands ‘knowing’ from them in terms of cynicism: the feeling or state of being annoyed and irritated by them. this is a structural space of ‘demand’ in her. for me what is at stake is the complex nature of encounter between Lili and text which takes place in an artificial space--a symbolic space--that is at the same time the place of real investments of her desires.
@Lili; is she (like the rest of us humans) looking for an active, predatory art?--> if non-communicative non-predatory non-kinetic [a common issue with the students of choreography and dance in general] art exists on this planet, then we kave to learn “a whole new set of techniques.” [La Guin])
--the meter of ‘time,’ that essential element, matrix and measure of all kown human-animal art. what if there are other metric systems? art not as an action, but a reaction? not a communication, but a reception? {---> go to my master studies Diploma on passivity in performance art}
registers of ‘complaining’ in Lili's discourse. she is a bit like Faust groaning, habe nun akhhhhh Philosophie and so on. [Ach of Sprache] (that they have done all the work, they know everything, yet know not enough of what 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[...]
(50)[...notes/midday review.txt]%4[...]a source of pleasure to the child =/= hysteric)])
-when we write do we need to demonstrate a far-ranging grasp of the political consequences of every possible metaphysical move?
...prime mover or suspects such as Plato, Heidegger, Derrida
*acceleration: that we are result-oriented, business-oriented, under the gun of gains, and subject to the push towards scientific objectification =/= i try to work with different degrees of attention: slowing down for checkpoints, allusive clusters and dense indicators, that are also problematic and short-circuited (in my lectures) ==> to get to the *notational space* that we can calmly observe, examine and explore together.
-to be lucid about your own part taking in narcissistic economy
*mimesis*: those things we are still stuck in in very covert and unavowed ways ~-> ‘destiny’ (a term i use when i mean mimesis for us [-a disease that shows symptoms characteristic of another disease])
(i am not pessimistic at all) i have just a catastrophic intuition that informs my grammar =/= mimetic hell
...................................
*complaint (blocks ‘becoming’?)
-so if i am used to complaint in all sorts and forms and shapes, what do i do if not complaining? that means i need to start learning new techniques of being in the world.
-complain, forms of protest, grievance, <--(contamination)--> lament (sug سوگ, zaje ضجه)
-dispositions of Beschwerde
-which minorities are associated with bitching and moaning? (naleh va shekayat ناله و شکایت, ghor غرولند, غر) (a feminine accent?!)
-it is often said that “children should stop complaining”
“stop complaining” ?!! [~~> pointed to or relevant for Lili also]
***complaint : the disenfranchised (az hagh mahrum shodeh از حق محروم شده) language of muted rage***
what is (let's) bitching together?
is religion one long complaint? (--'reformation’ as a cover-up)
the “i prefer,” non-need, non-preference
*forms of relatedness--in certain societies the opening self of sociality consists in complaining. (starter-utterances; social encounter involves nagging about your friends, parents, lovers, etc.) --making friends is via complaining. (this is about the conditions of Mitsein, being-with) {non-affirmation ~/=? complaint; we mistake so easily non-affirmation with complaining. (is this Lili's take? her complaints about the insufficiencies of being.)} --> is complaint parasitized by calls for retribution?
Klage (complaint) --to--> Anklage (accusation)
*complaint remains a repetitive fixation that feeds rather than exhausting its course (/Avital, aw9Cv_wQ4CQ) -- it does not finish itself off, or move up the ladder of transformation [important for Sana], actually increases pain --> so, (according to the analyst:) complain is jacking up one's suffering (the Analytiker can't take it anymore)
Avital ☞ Kittler: the Ach [...]
(51)[...notes/midday review.txt]%4.4[...]n --> so, (according to the analyst:) complain is jacking up one's suffering (the Analytiker can't take it anymore)
Avital ☞ Kittler: the Ach of Sprache, (in our historical language usage:) literature or language as complaint. sigh in literature (also pointed out by Lili)
--the modern techo-monster Faust opens with the complain
**what is then a proper address?
...the wish for more
@Luiza; (one of sub-phenomenon of utterance) *blush* registers a complaint(?)
(--> to be noted that certain white skin-colors considered racistly “capable” of displaying moral anxiety.)
-a level of affect and meaning that remains at the loss of words, between shame and excitement, confession and disavow. blush speaks for her at moment when she cannot stand up for herself?
-or it betrays her with a sudden spread of skin-mapping releasing a secret or indexing a moral blemish (lakedar لکه دار), a pigmentation... (how to read it?)
-blush manages to register a complaint and it signs off [concludes] at an unspoken accusation...
-blossoming of senses, cultural significance, who is capable of blushing? --> (decency's) *outrage* (--> libidinally charged, prompting a political arousal --> still a vitality stirs in the complaint--*the complaint can bring movement*) [Luiza's climate of resistance and her integrated modality of ‘struggle'] --> **inner life of morality**
-flush?
[complaint,] is it issued from a place of impotence or does it have the potential to move mountains? (Avital--Sina's emergency supply of meaning)
can it arrive at any destination whatsoever?
‘complain’ and ‘explain’ relationships
(laughter as a form of complaining)
‘complain’ and ‘politeness’ relationships
what complaint has to do with our anger-management programs?
complaint ~/= lament (complaint won't shut up but lament desires its ending)
lament is fined to mourning a[...]
(52)[...notes/midday review.txt]%4.4[...]r what is the relationship between ‘information’ and ‘infinite’? (infinite as the universe of all possible images)
...................................
*Pierre's ‘rights of nerves’ --> “talking to everybody”
[rights of nerves: you are promted to do what you do out of disgust, outrage, fear, or driven by anxiety, you don't know why, you are compelled towards an object or project or thing or unthing]
*Seba: for him “narrative =/= complex” (the question of “complexity's situatedness”) for him: “multiple perspectives ==> coherency (=/= bi-rabt بی ربط, na-ham-dusti ناهمدوستی ?)” (is his idea of “coherency” leads to ‘friendship’? is for Seba ‘amity’ [ravabet-e hasane روابط حسنه] at stake? )
Seba's epistemological object(?): ‘evidence’ (=/?=>! cordial dispositions)
(complexity is the name of our game. Haraway)
...................................
my current work and interest involves the investigation of individualized subject formation (tajarode nafs تجرد نفس ?); interrogating the production of language; and tracing the divisible distinguishing limits between categories of human, animal, and monstrous.
#subjects of interest: The translator, language, the sublime, animals/animality, technicity/mechanicity, the divine/sacred,
...................................
the myth of Poros, Penia, and Eros for Aela:
(in Plato's Symposium;) Penia, the “child of poverty,” decides to forcefully impregnate herself with the inebriated Poros, “the personification of plenty,” who is always in opposition with aporia, (~ snafu before aporia,) “puzzlement, which breaks with the logic of identity,” and thus defining aporia. The result of this union is Eros...
poverty + {plenitude × aporia} ==> eros : {agency of passivity + resourcefulness}
1-metaphysical inquiry begins from ‘aporia’
2-rationalist inquiry begins from ‘a priori’
3-empiricist inquiry begins from ‘tabula rasa’ (hakim's beginning)
/
/
4-mystical inquiry begins from ‘affective a posteriori’ (effect, wonder, heyrat, tahayor)
...................................
sci-fi is imagining the elsewhere inside mortality. (==> feminism stakes in SF)
...................................
*make a series of studio photos with white clear backs, two different genders iranians having a physical/verbal fight or some sort of aggressive encounter
*the idea is to write a script for a movie or short series, combining the historical 14th century Iran with the 14th century imaginal beast fables from the ajayeb. the camera creats a non-exotic continuation between the two
...................................
[with Kenney]
-how to let emerge a seriousness as collective matters of care?
-how to stimulate pragmatic questions about how to craft relevant knowledge?
speculation is all about pragmatism
[...]
(53)[...notes/midday review.txt]%4.7[...]-offs or costly dead ends [=/= (Stengers's notion of speculative) *being at risk with ones claims* =/= received notions of authority or rationality]
(an abstract challenge:) to bring specificity and imaginative traction
*speculation is a more feral practice
(wild) speculation [always improper] =/= proper science : rational production of univerasal knowledge
-speculation is not about what there is but what there might be
-speculation is on the side of the possible =/= probable (--> Stengers)
speculative operations (quietly) insist that *another world is here* (--> my ajayeb) =/= the smooth operation of business-as-usual (,, interrupting it)
for my ajayeb, how can i carve out a space to nurture my idea? --> nest-building --position/place--> digging out a bit of earth
*speculative empiricism : scientific + narrative
working with ajayeb so that it might stimulate a specualtive empiricism for composing more livable worlds --> ajayeb's storied biospheres
...................................
the notion of ‘magic’ in popular TV series, such as ‘Harry Potter’ franchise and ‘The Magicians’ among many others, and instrumentalization. magic as information technology that is completely instrumentalized. the capitalist ideology of ‘tool’ and ‘usefulness’ are insinuated heavily in the hipster figures of ‘The Magicians’ in the way that they interupt history and knowledge-burdened living. “stop the history lessen! tell me how do we kill the beast with it?” (the stupidity of the hipster hero moving through the matrix of merely teleological phenomena, stripping pleasure off thinking...)
(utopian?)
what a magic spell is good for if it is not a leverage?
[title]
The Magicians and The Absolute Freedom and Terror
(‘The Magicians’:) magic: instrumentalizing the logos
knowledge is literal --> magic spells are literal {the result of magic spell is predetermined}. in this case, the magic is both an instrument of power and renunciation of knowledge
(Heideggerian) techne of the Western project is an instrumentality that takes over, arrests, or enframes what it desires to manipulate or contain. (Christian Hubert's notes)
=/= poiesis, a bringing-forth (in Heidegger: blooming of the blossom) (also Greek)
“[(for the techno-monster-magicians) everything is] code to be cracked”
a kind of fantasies that Don Ihde calls techno-fantasy, which have been part of the transhumanism since 19th century
the toxic distinction between techne from episteme (since Homer). ‘The Magician’ suggests magic as a technology or tool apart from its context of involvements and referentialities : a hermeneutic or alterity relation =/= (Heidegger:) the tool is an embodiment relation
(one of the characters even states that humans without magic in[...]
(54)[...notes/midday review.txt]%4.8[...]tive empiricism : scientific + narrative
working with ajayeb so that it might stimulate a specualtive empiricism for composing more livable worlds --> ajayeb's storied biospheres
...................................
the notion of ‘magic’ in popular TV series, such as ‘Harry Potter’ franchise and ‘The Magicians’ among many others, and instrumentalization. magic as information technology that is completely instrumentalized. the capitalist ideology of ‘tool’ and ‘usefulness’ are insinuated heavily in the hipster figures of ‘The Magicians’ in the way that they interupt history and knowledge-burdened living. “stop the history lessen! tell me how do we kill the beast with it?” (the stupidity of the hipster hero moving through the matrix of merely teleological phenomena, stripping pleasure off thinking...)
(utopian?)
what a magic spell is good for if it is not a leverage?
[title]
The Magicians and The Absolute Freedom and Terror
(‘The Magicians’:) magic: instrumentalizing the logos
knowledge is literal --> magic spells are literal {the result of magic spell is predetermined}. in this case, the magic is both an instrument of power and renunciation of knowledge
(Heideggerian) techne of the Western project is an instrumentality that takes over, arrests, or enframes what it desires to manipulate or contain. (Christian Hubert's notes)
=/= poiesis, a bringing-forth (in Heidegger: blooming of the blossom) (also Greek)
“[(for the techno-monster-magicians) everything is] code to be cracked”
a kind of fantasies that Don Ihde calls techno-fantasy, which have been part of the transhumanism since 19th century
the toxic distinction between techne from episteme (since Homer). ‘The Magician’ suggests magic as a technology or tool apart from its context of involvements and referentialities : a hermeneutic or alterity relation =/= (Heidegger:) the tool is an embodiment relation
(one of the characters even states that humans without magic invented computers as replacement)
‘The Magician’ dismisses the generation of knowledge in the praxis of tool-use. science/magic is pragmatic 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 k[...]
(55)[...notes/midday review.txt]%4.8[...] blooming of the blossom) (also Greek)
“[(for the techno-monster-magicians) everything is] code to be cracked”
a kind of fantasies that Don Ihde calls techno-fantasy, which have been part of the transhumanism since 19th century
the toxic distinction between techne from episteme (since Homer). ‘The Magician’ suggests magic as a technology or tool apart from its context of involvements and referentialities : a hermeneutic or alterity relation =/= (Heidegger:) the tool is an embodiment relation
(one of the characters even states that humans without magic invented computers as replacement)
‘The Magician’ dismisses the generation of knowledge in the praxis of tool-use. science/magic is pragmatic 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 [...]
(60)[...notes/midday review.txt]%4.9[...]cian’ dismisses the generation of knowledge in the praxis of tool-use. science/magic is pragmatic 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 cont[...]
(62)[...notes/midday review.txt]%4.9[...]? what kind of sublimation is the culture-building power of Eros?
in Derrida, narcissism is the passage to the Other, and not necessarily merely a collapse into oneself.
auto-erotic solipsism
باطل کردن طلسم ضمیر the ego appears [displaced elsewhere in the world as an effect] as the result of primary narcissism?
(batel kardan-e telesm-e zamir) dispulsion of ego
*ego forms in the world* (Lippit)
auto-erotic economy
the ego in the island, finding footprints of the others
(Freudian protocols of existence:) there is no world, there is only islands. --> multiplicity of isolations ~-> individuation
“In narcissism the ego disappears from the world and reappears in the imaginary realm of invisible interiority.” (Lippit)
{the erotic attachment to outside objects}<--pervert =/= narcissist-->{withdraw, calls it “instinct for self preservation"} (a shortcut: my way of undering my own narcissistic tendencies has been through perversity.)
[for Juan:] (artistic) narcissism =/=? fossilization (~->? mimesis)
*mimesis* is not about form
in order to represent the character of the supposed ‘word’ of another
mimesis + techne ~= copy (@Juan)
diegesis =/=? mimesis
(telling) -- (showing)
(recounted) -- (enacted)
}--> poiesis _////(actually a useful and necessary difference, synthesized by the Greeks--Plato and Aristotle)
(...and what about the question of the medium?)
*Juan's relationship with the (in)dependency of the individuated self of the artist--in this case himself--by means of mimetic techne is to overcome the visual artist's narcissism?
(Pierre:) being alone --> mimesis --> through mimetic intra-acting with the other
(Sina: there is no “being alone” only ‘feeling lonely’ which is itself a form of intra-acting : internalizing an external phenomena. “loneliness” is a belief that one has.)
...................................
narcissism as a mimetic and performative mode
transindividual narcissism --Maitra--> movement of the subject beyond ethnicity (ethnic formations that the bio-political processes of interpellation demand of the subject)
remediation of ethnic narcissism
[Maitra's queer diasporic reading practice of] (in diaspora media theory) performing an identity (that is “Iranian” for example)
*intermedia* (=/= multimedia: fuse disparate media)
frictions between different media
conceptual interplay between media
space of alchemical transformation
(at the level of) conflict of interpretations
radical understanding of interdisciplinarity
diaspora: no longer having a clear answer to “where are you from?”
what might we learn from narcissism (from mimesis)?
mediate and fracture the writing o[...]
(63)[...notes/midday review.txt]%5.1[...] 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?
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?
<[...]
(65)[...notes/midday review.txt]%5.4[...]icated 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-imaginative 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 current research, do they help build a better Iran? and how?
interms of:
•an ongoingness
•a commitment to a recent future thinking
‘homo-’: stuff of the soil, that figures of bright and sunny image of the same
#rigs and syms*
•games
•technological designs
•plots
•mechanisms
•sfs
•jokes
•jests
•
[title]
critical bestiaries
critique-bestiary
belonging = achievement (dastavard دستاورد) + violence (khoshunat خشونت)
...the ways we renounce the world through the use of the word “real” and “really”
(Stengers:) weaving: not secular nor religious, not traditional nor modern, is[...]
(66)[...notes/midday review.txt]%5.8[...]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-imaginative 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 current research, do they help build a better Iran? and how?
interms of:
•an ongoingness
•a commitment to a recent future thinking
‘homo-’: stuff of the soil, that figures of bright and sunny image of the same
#rigs and syms*
•games
•technological designs
•plots
•mechanisms
•sfs
•jokes
•jests
•
[title]
critical bestiaries
critique-bestiary
belonging = achievement (dastavard دستاورد) + violence (khoshunat خشونت)
...the ways we renounce the world through the use of the word “real” and “really”
(Stengers:) weaving: not secular nor religious, not traditional nor modern, is sensuous
#[nodes and notes]
the emptyland, terrestrial life, ‘per-’ instead of ‘her’ or ‘his’
-the way i started with Haraway was through the way i read her notion of ‘critter,’ juju (جوجو) in Farsi, jako junevar (جک جونور), little life animators often easy and ok to kill, a term in farsi for kids that worlds for them in particular ways
bio (“qualified life”) =/= zoe, juju, “bare life” (Agamben): that which is killable --?!--> that which must be transformed
[stories of originary exclusion and composition of body]
...................................
the form and function are having too tight fit. no no no!
(cities) being inclusive but not integrative
(setar different technique of vibrato and measure for instance in Saba and Ghavami, which part of the finger or body, one works in certain way for one and not for the other musician --> the explicit unpacking of the activity : what was formerly tacit [zemni, khamush, =/= habit] becomes dredged into explicit [=/= expressive] consciousness, precisely because there is a resistance, that there is something not right for the musician ==> reconsidering[...]
(67)[...notes/midday review.txt]%5.8[...]yms*
•games
•technological designs
•plots
•mechanisms
•sfs
•jokes
•jests
•
[title]
critical bestiaries
critique-bestiary
belonging = achievement (dastavard دستاورد) + violence (khoshunat خشونت)
...the ways we renounce the world through the use of the word “real” and “really”
(Stengers:) weaving: not secular nor religious, not traditional nor modern, is sensuous
#[nodes and notes]
the emptyland, terrestrial life, ‘per-’ instead of ‘her’ or ‘his’
-the way i started with Haraway was through the way i read her notion of ‘critter,’ juju (جوجو) in Farsi, jako junevar (جک جونور), little life animators often easy and ok to kill, a term in farsi for kids that worlds for them in particular ways
bio (“qualified life”) =/= zoe, juju, “bare life” (Agamben): that which is killable --?!--> that which must be transformed
[stories of originary exclusion and composition of body]
...................................
the form and function are having too tight fit. no no no!
(cities) being inclusive but not integrative
(setar different technique of vibrato and measure for instance in Saba and Ghavami, which part of the finger or body, one works in certain way for one and not for the other musician --> the explicit unpacking of the activity : what was formerly tacit [zemni, khamush, =/= habit] becomes dredged into explicit [=/= expressive] consciousness, precisely because there is a resistance, that there is something not right for the musician ==> reconsidering, reexploring --> the technique then again disappears into the tacit realm --> technique becomes variegated)
**tacit --> explicit (~= that which becomes available for reconsideration)**
when one masters a skill it is about being equipped to address a whole new set of problems
{expertise/mastery: problem solving}=/={craft: problem finding}--> when other things become problematic---the condition (in the craft work) that when you learn how to do one thing you see other things that need to be explored [-> question for Eunkyung's drawing skills and practice]
*craft is more important than art(?) (Sennett)
...the notion that the work art breaks the conventions of practice, that it is something that makes an epistemic break. --> emphasis on innovation (something new)--that is a reflection of sort of 19th century bourgeois ideas of about making art.
•privileging the creative act over the craftsman act
•in innovation the “innovator” is separated from the “mass” =/= craftsmanship is collective and additive --> (in craftsmanship) the performance is myself
•creativity being a form of individuation or separation (@the exploratory shift in Eunkyung's work that Pierre highlighted)
[...]
(68)[...notes/midday review.txt]%5.9[...]telling you what i read
•giving you what i don't fully understand =/= gift from above
•(in lecture) to allow language greet the unverbalized
(it is about) organizing my memory
(it is about) that which comes to (my) mind, and “things” coming to minds
(it is about) the things I am told
__[these are perhaps other names of cognition, affect, memory, semiotics, history, inheritance, figuration, interface, thing-relations, huntology,]
__in our shared space where we let eachother in the effect of our languages, I want to practice what comes to mind when I stand in front of you and your work, ask myself ‘what else’ comes to mind? in a sense, my project on ajayeb is that kind of training
also in apass i want “to catch you in your acts”
it is my privilege to recognize you (as...)
asking:
1- what do I know?
2- what am I told?
3- (how getting good at to) explain what somebody else said
1- the first question has no clear answer, what i know is not placed somewhere in me, it is always an articulated matter of ‘with’ or in interaction with, it is a sym, changes before i can grasp, knowing is done always with a figure or a thing, it includes all sorts of optics and technologies, (affect theory, media theory, epistemology,)
2- the response to the second question is also not clear, i am not sure what i am told, i don't remember or hear, what i am told is infolded in what i know, (when i started with my islam lecture series i was testing the waters of these two questions and the possibility of staying with them without freaking out of ambiguity or ploting an answer)
3--> #cat's cradle
#on hypertext note:
i am becoming skilled at looking at my notes:
{(1) what are the *skills necessary* [=/= tabula rasa (of the reader, of the audience) of the communo-capitalism's standard of “user-interface"--the strange idea that the interaction and reading doesn't need or must not need learned-efforts or skills, that it should be “easy” and “effortless” --> fallacy of the unskilled listener.] to engage, interact, and get involved with the interface, data-set, grammar, and literacy of (my) reservoir? }--> ** let's ask that question with every apparatus that engages us into desire, movement, articulation, ...
skills --> to become ‘literate’ in this particular way --> situated knowledge includes this situated literacy and skills of reading particular to the object of “text” (in that case how do i address my interest in the pervert reader? the skills of the unlearning*)
the skills necessary for my work to work comes with time, attention, and desire ~-=>? #harem (=/= ladies room)
--> (2) this skills of (my) reservoir, what set of questions or problems equip me to address?
varzidan, varz, varzide, ورزیده
Sennett's love for his subjects is extraordinary (=[...]
(71)[...notes/midday review.txt]%6[...] />
[*]psychoanalysis: a theory of the subject as lacking positive residence
(this ‘lack’ is commonly articulated as the “unconscious”: in Freudian terms, where an affective impulse is perceived but misconstructed, and which becomes attached to another idea. [can i say that my work in ajayeb, which i named it as ‘organizing my memory, and also, that which comes to mind’ is all about this reconstruction of cognizeds and percepts? is that why i am having less and less unconsciousness in my daily life?!])
-cognizant agah آگاه
-in Freud's model of unconsciousness, the affect itself is not repressed, rather, what is repressed is the idea to which the affect was attached --> displacement
(Lacan's) subject: proper scene of absence and loss*
a theory of the subject that the locus of the signifier settles --> constitution of the subject as “settlement”
([what is?] Eszter's right and will to keep looking for signs of difference. --when she was talking about idiosyncrasies of her countries)
*[with Eszter's “the nation has suffered enough!"] --Lezra--> politics in a sense is precisely concerned with what is or is not *enough*
“it's enough!” --> #demand something or before which I make a claim. it is practical (even technical) or is dealing with being practical
the haunting modifier of “enough”
the *amount* of something (-of suffering in this case) <-- “That's enough coffee”
-we are dealing with materiality and measure
{has that anything to do with the enough of Ekaterina's “good-enough mothers”?}--> true enough-ness for an effect to be achieved
model of emotion ==> materialization of bodies
(emotions construct) bodies as ‘enveloped’
in standard psychological model, fear ‘has’ an object
*(Ahmed's) fear: “passing by” (=/= arriving) of the object, impossibility of containment of object
anxiety is an approach to objects =/= fear is an object's approach
in Freud: self is made by the fear of father
Ahmed's model of ‘impact of fear’
fear does not leat to containment but an expansion --> his/her embrace of the world
•being sealed into a body that takes up less space!
**fear works to restrict some bodies through the movement or expansion of others** (interesting for Mona's work)
[structural possibility:] proximity of fear-object --is--> possibility of future injury
impressions of coherence, “sticking together”
(that is perhaps why dictionaries and bestiaries are interesting: because their elements do not “stick together” in the sense of an affective economy [of inquiry and narrative] #lists)
ontology of insecurity --> (naratives of) crisis ==> “return” (to values) --> fetish
-production of crisis is crucial for insecurity
-declaration/announcement of *crisis* reads the fact/figu[...]
(72)[...notes/midday review.txt]%6.4[...][of inquiry and narrative] #lists)
ontology of insecurity --> (naratives of) crisis ==> “return” (to values) --> fetish
-production of crisis is crucial for insecurity
-declaration/announcement of *crisis* reads the fact/figure/event and transforms is into a fetish object that then acquires a life of its own
-it must be presumed that things are not secure, in and of themselves, in order to justify the imperative to make things secure (again)-->(the word “again” in the rhetoric of safty becomes itself the fetish object with its own life)
[security is bound up with “the not (me/us)"]
being 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.[...]
(73)[...notes/midday review.txt]%6.5[...]gain” in the rhetoric of safty becomes itself the fetish object with its own life)
[security is bound up with “the not (me/us)"]
being 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 b[...]
(74)[...notes/midday review.txt]%6.5[...] 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
(my whole point or joke, with the bow and arrow was that the arrow of index finger does not move in one way.)
[=/= another mode that comes to mind is when your intimacy making leads always to yourself, getting laid, literally. that is when your concern becomes only you and someone, sexually interested --> economically, and you don't concern the sociality of your people with each other. #techno-capital singular subjectivity @--> this is super relevant for Sven, maybe: how one becomes interested, invested, and skillful in provoking interesting socialities for friends and peers--and not only for oneself? creating, inciting zones of connectivity]
-[it was not accidental that the rhetoric of drugs came up with Lilia when I suggested the attention to anthropos --> what figures human and otherwise was for her the subject of drug-induced rhetoric of mind-alteration; (this is the anthropos of the Enlightenment Europeans and classical Greece talking:) “in order to get rid of me you must take drugs!” #fable/_ --> being sober(?!), anthropos becoming, human nature, common sense, empiricism and interpretation are at stake here]
-[another thing was the label of “animal” that was passed around as a form of mock, instead of provocations for more conversation, I was stupefied. --how can we go on together and not render each other commitments nonsense?]
“point of view” is an important metaphor
#in my work in apass i am working on descriptive practices [poetics of animal description, histories of nonhuman inscription, etc.] to learn to name latent (and therefore emergent) ontologies, to name ‘what we are doing in new ways,’ which are hard to name. (also refusing not to name the violences of others and yourself. to reckon the nature and scope of the erasures we do in our works.) % why do you think that is important?
#and my shift of attention to peer's works is about that: our domain of practices must make claim on each other <== we inhabit differences together (--> attention and work on:) ‘local category abstrac[...]
(77)[...notes/midday review.txt]%6.8[...]r />
@Eszter: is there a notion of ‘natural’ embeded in her ‘compelled’? there is nothing natural about us being here, there is nothing natural about here
•cognitivism: (when talking of representation) a psychology of doing which emphasizes human cognition endowment enabling man to develop intellectually ==> classifications (are easy seen) as properties of mind =/= classifications as materials or materially textured --> “a common way to hear people's experience of this materiality is through metaphors. So the generation of metaphors is closely linked with the shift to texture.” (Bowker)
•behaviorism: a theory of doing that focuses on objectively observable behaviors and discounts independent activities of the minds involved in the doing
-->? behavioral intervention
(footnote on) behavior therapy --> breaking one's loops (of: reverie [mind fleeing across secluded planes], reaction to stimuli [overwhelmed by the speech of the others ~ neurosis], distorted thinking [overstressed emotional reasoning], , ,)
[*]behavior therapy: treatment of neurotic symptoms by training the patient's reactions to stimuli --> *cognitive restructuring* could help Eszter in her artwork? (to reestablish the relationships between stimuli and responses)
(techniques:)
•counterconditioning
•punishment (operant conditioning)
•habituation
•functional analysis
•*behaviour intervention plans*
•automatic thought record
•
i can only guess (with cognitive therapy) at the interior landscape of her reverie, her internal reality (~= psyche) [--> i am reminded by this again that knowing anyone's psyche is impossible, as in psychology is an impossible science]
[*]cognitive therapy: identifying and changing unhelpful or inaccurate thinking, problematic behavior, and *distressing emotional responses*
--> learning to monitor thoughts (in three layers:)
1. core belief [deepest level of our thinking, underlying self-values and perceptions of the world, have an absolute quality: “I am worthless.” “I am inadequate.” “if I fail, I am worthless.” “I am unsafe in the world.” etc.]
2. intermediate beliefs [expectations and assumptions, guidelines we follow, maintaining our anxiety and depression: “Always look for danger and expect it to be there.” “If I don't understand something perfectly, then I'm dumb.” etc.]
3. automatic thoughts [immediate thoughts that go through our mind in response to a situation, usually negative and unquestioned: “She thinks I'm weird.” “I won't pass that test.” “This is too hard. I'll never understand this.” etc.]
types of automatic thoughts:
•evaluation (evaluative thoughts)
•coping strategies
•avoidance
•
[cognitive distortions]
typical mistakes in thinking:
•*all or nothing* / all-or-none thinking (“If I'm not a total success, I'm a failu[...]
(78)[...notes/midday review.txt]%7.1[...] 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.
...................................
question at Hoda
how to make her interested in metaphysics? in queer studies and practices
physics is the river of phenomena
meta: above, among, beyond
ontological commitment to:
sense of wonder
sense of sadness
sense of madness
what (else) literature can be if not elegy?
sonic level of sign-making and significance in her act
soft-spoken adjectives
“sigh”: poetry's start-up engine, aaaahh
somewher[...]
(79)[...notes/midday review.txt]%7.4[...]>
when and how did you learn to sigh?
sigh is from the family of the specialized languages of complaining?
temporal climate of your remembrance (as mourning) --> related to the past?
mourning and memory are sojourn for her
incorporating the object of (her) loss
(holding onto) the unhappy objects of difference
anger, pain, misery, ...
which (good or bad) feelings saturates her poem?
question of saturation
which feelings modified by which poetics sutures which wounds? زخمبندی
or to be more psychoanalytically correct: where is the wound?
my own affirmative exposure of the unhappy effects of her poetry
what is the image of the ‘better life’ in her poetry?
somehow in the literary habitus she is moving, the origin of descriptive/inscriptive saying is made by an initial violation
Hoda's poem, which energies does it unleash in her?
sokhan-e ranj سخن رنج
شعر غنایی Lyric poetry, a formal type of poetry which is defined by or dedicated to expressing so-called personal emotions or feelings.
the Lyre, a string instrument in Greek classical antiquity, is tuning the technicality of this ‘form’
historical contingencies of “personal feelings”
?what is more singular than your “personal” highs, trips, crashes, “feelings” ==> a text telling about itself (its ownmost experience of something that is radically singular)
-rhetoric of singularity
-(my point is that the expression of your) innermost experience (is often signed by someone else)
--> “distributed biographies,” thinking about sociality of perception
her poem is her textual body (<--> sexual body)
ecstasy
is subjectivity (permanently for Hoda) ecstatic?
this is the question of ‘where is the subject’? according to different practices with ecstasy we are outside ourselves. (in religion that is precisely where the ‘inside’ is located)
-permanent or structural ecstasy is clearly political
-ecstasy is disruptive
how much should I be invested or interested as a friend for your happiness and wellbeing?
•fellow-feeling
•sympathy (is expressed by:) returning feeling with like feeling
Sina: if a thinking makes you sad, that thinking is probably wrong?
within the rhetoric of integration a usual terrifying point is in which the duty of the migrant is to attach to a different, happier object
the future of reattachment --> Hoda
-in this integrative narrative, I have to be careful with assumptions that good feelings are open and bad feelings are closed
bad feelings are seen as orientated toward the past =/= my work on past
she said “here is the English-one” meaning the English translation o[...]
(80)[...notes/midday review.txt]%7.5[...] “Does Writing Have a Future” (chapter: Supertext, 6 pages)
•Bolter / “Writing Space” (chapter 3 Writing as Technology, 13 pages)
...................................
#workshop little fables of practice, second day storytelling
(proposed initially to Lili:) #imagine and describe an alien world where its populace don't practice ‘knowing’
with this practice we get into questions of (--without directly addressing/announcing them we will provoke a better understanding of what we might think of them:)
•knowing --> (the inseparability of) knowing, being, and doing
•the ‘suppos’ of the supposed to know
•rhetorics, and intrinsicality (“on the inside”)
•response --> (‘knowing’ =) differential accountability =/= differential responsiveness
•environment
•description (discursive significance)
•world, and sense-making
•geometry (and -metry)
•(intelligibility and) materiality enacted --> question of discourse
•epistemology
•conceptions of space and time
•reflection (as a pervasive trope of knowing) [mirroring, imitation, reflection, tropes of “sameness"]
•material discursive evolving
•mattering; matter and intelligibility, episteme and techne, macro and micro,
•
the workshop is in a way about the trope of knowing, ontology of knowing
(ways of) knowing entangled with mode of being
(with which creature?) matter's dynamism is intrinsic to its biodynamic way of being (--Barad--> for brittlestar everything is intrinsic)
(creatures that) constantly changing its geometry and its topology --> ongoing reworking of bodily boundaries
(our, and an alien critter's “it”’s) discoursive practices: boundary-drawing practices by which it differentiates between “itself” and the “environment” ==> making sense of its world [--> that is why i am interested in the (better?) articulation of "differences” (= boundary-making practices, our “differential productions”) that we are making, as a way of getting into eachother discourses ~~and--> (its) ongoing materialization --> *differential materialization* (is discursive; Barad)]
•patterns of difference
•I am against the ‘frictionless narrative space’ (in the absence of the dominant story) where “everything” (therefore nothing) is possible
(the workshop engages in thinking) intertwined practices of knowing and being
[this practice of storytelling might be relevant for those invested in questions of: knowledge production, speculative theory, situated bodies critique, situated knowledges critique, being ‘of’ the world,]
-to think creatures/beings that have evolved in intra-action with their environment
-to question and examine the ontological issues: the locus of knowledge is presumed never to be too far removed from the human. in the workshop we reimagine the locus of knowled[...]
(81)[...notes/midday review.txt]%7.7[...]ean 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 about poetics
•Donna Haraway: (lectures and articles) --> learning about rhetorics
2nd stage:
•Martha Kenney: Fables of Attention --> *rationality: mixture of the highly rational and the highly fantastic
•Karen Barad: Posthumanist Performativity, Invertebrate Visions --> learning about apparatus
•Eva Hayward: visualizing apparatuses --> her interest in optics, in the optics in which marine invertebrates and people come together through visualizing apparatuses
•Vinciane Despret: The Becomings of Subjectivity in Animal Worlds --> learning about anthropo-zoo-genetics
•Kathleen Stewart: nonrepresentational theory --> other ways of description
•Katie King: technologies of writing --> a better thinking of locals and globals
•
(curiosity ==>) having to figure out how to do something that i don't already know how to do:
•ongoingness of collective practices of knowledge and concern
•talking about (what is going on with) ajayeb
•paying attention to differential ontologies
•the stuff that happens through face-to-face colleaguesh[...]
(82)[...notes/midday review.txt]%7.8[...]t 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 about poetics
•Donna Haraway: (lectures and articles) --> learning about rhetorics
2nd stage:
•Martha Kenney: Fables of Attention --> *rationality: mixture of the highly rational and the highly fantastic
•Karen Barad: Posthumanist Performativity, Invertebrate Visions --> learning about apparatus
•Eva Hayward: visualizing apparatuses --> her interest in optics, in the optics in which marine invertebrates and people come together through visualizing apparatuses
•Vinciane Despret: The Becomings of Subjectivity in Animal Worlds --> learning about anthropo-zoo-genetics
•Kathleen Stewart: nonrepresentational theory --> other ways of description
•Katie King: technologies of writing --> a better thinking of locals and globals
•
(curiosity ==>) having to figure out how to do something that i don't already know how to do:
•ongoingness of collective practices of knowledge and concern
•talking about (what is going on with) ajayeb
•paying attention to differential ontologies
•the stuff that happens through face-to-face colleagueship
•to be in productive alliance
•
unalianated critical work = art
Seifee wants to say something
something wants to say Seifee?
i like us to be skilled at
•objective perception
•5 minute perception
•rigorously passionate perception
•rhetorical perception
•sacred perception
•devilish perception
•queer non-perception
•having a taste for iranian stuff perception
•
--> polyskilled web of friends
#Bambi's mother studies:
•other stories possibility, past and history, performative approach to film
•politics of memory, and affect
•patterns of remembrance =/= event recall
•
three childhood memories, stories, from elementary school:
•the mime of “you think (too much)”
•the weird pro hit on the coming ball
•peeping into the toilet
•
my childhood recognizing:
•filaments (hypha, hyphae, تار) of spider webs
•patterns of ants
•motion color blurings --> that present is “physical if the eye is quick enough” (Stevens)
•
the wa[...]
(83)[...notes/midday review.txt]%7.9[...]
(in political movement:) working to a kind of clarity of ideological position ==> to do certain kinds of things (that are harder to do if you don't have them [those ideological positions] in the world) --> they are used as *tools* to produce what got called *political correctness* --> always producing those who count and those who don't count*
=/=? feminist movement = ***a kind of vulnerability to not being who you thought you were*** : openness to risk, less of a defensiveness, less of an attack mentality, not shaping each other up into vanguards پيشقراول --> (towards thinking) differential/oppositional consciousness (=/= father, single kind of creators)
“you can know if you are wrong in rather interesting, situated ways”
@Leo
@Maarten
[*]"was”: (so important for iranians [#past]) a geographical place, a place:
•of pain
•of fantasy
•of hope
•of possibility
◦of defeat
•of breaking and building
(--> a borderland)
metaphors that are also real places
figurings that are also (always unequally) lived in the flesh
to think “contact zone” instead of “binary shape”
ways of living and technologies, ways of doing the world forcibly brought together in relations of serious inequality, but which do not take the simple shape of dominator and dominated
*“abstractions are precious and they take a huge amount of work to know how to build them well”*
(?how do i know when in working with ajayeb) sometimes you are required (at the same time!):
•to be dead literal
•to be precise
•to be analytically good
•to be unforgivingly technically right
•to be flaming imaginative
•
*breakdown*: where the normalizing fails ==> something else emerges
*every collective needs people who feel:
•(a grace given to you by the structure of your cells, you don't know where it comes from:) “root sense that the world is not dead” --> a sense that things are moving and alive and future-full
•its people who feel despair (...emphasize the futurelessness of it all)
*!!!--> we (also) need sensibilities that are angrey at each other
(aligned with Haraway) my position has been that: we don't choose our sensibilities, we wake up and figure out what they are
(Haraway take on the ways we) may enginner as a species now (tech, syntax, etc.)
to refuse the story of the apocalypse + (still) recognizing the depth of the trouble
--> Freud's thanatos غريزه مرگ, a death instinct, (it is a deep, instinctual lure:) *a perverse pleasure in believing in inevitable failure*
*transference is descriptively very apt for what goes on in artistic moves [<-- to b[...]
(84)[...notes/midday review.txt]%8.3[...]less of an attack mentality, not shaping each other up into vanguards پيشقراول --> (towards thinking) differential/oppositional consciousness (=/= father, single kind of creators)
“you can know if you are wrong in rather interesting, situated ways”
@Leo
@Maarten
[*]"was”: (so important for iranians [#past]) a geographical place, a place:
•of pain
•of fantasy
•of hope
•of possibility
•of defeat
•of breaking and building
(--> a borderland)
metaphors that are also real places
figurings that are also (always unequally) lived in the flesh
to think “contact zone” instead of “binary shape”
ways of living and technologies, ways of doing the world forcibly brought together in relations of serious inequality, but which do not take the simple shape of dominator and dominated
*“abstractions are precious and they take a huge amount of work to know how to build them well”*
(?how do i know when in working with ajayeb) sometimes you are required (at the same time!):
•to be dead literal
•to be precise
•to be analytically good
•to be unforgivingly technically right
•to be flaming imaginative
•
*breakdown*: where the normalizing fails ==> something else emerges
*every collective needs people who feel:
•(a grace given to you by the structure of your cells, you don't know where it comes from:) “root sense that the world is not dead” --> a sense that things are moving and alive and future-full
•its people who feel despair (...emphasize the futurelessness of it all)
*!!!--> we (also) need sensibilities that are angrey at each other
(aligned with Haraway) my position has been that: we don't choose our sensibilities, we wake up and figure out what they are
(Haraway take on the ways we) may enginner as a species now (tech, syntax, etc.)
to refuse the story of the apocalypse + (still) recognizing the depth of the trouble
--> Freud's thanatos غريزه مرگ, a death instinct, (it is a deep, instinctual lure:) *a perverse pleasure in believing in inevitable failure*
*transference is descriptively very apt for what goes on in artistic moves [<-- to be careful of]
**to risk a feeling of (despair, of...)
the ways some of us risk things intellectually and emotionally different than each other
prima donna: doing whatever one does without any particular effort to nuance anything
*multiple impossibilities
learning from religion, the ways of which the name of God has become an impossible category. both catholics and muslim shia (#islam) are wellprepared for feeling[...]
(85)[...notes/midday review.txt]%8.3[...] ways of doing the world forcibly brought together in relations of serious inequality, but which do not take the simple shape of dominator and dominated
*“abstractions are precious and they take a huge amount of work to know how to build them well”*
(?how do i know when in working with ajayeb) sometimes you are required (at the same time!):
•to be dead literal
•to be precise
•to be analytically good
•to be unforgivingly technically right
•to be flaming imaginative
•
*breakdown*: where the normalizing fails ==> something else emerges
*every collective needs people who feel:
•(a grace given to you by the structure of your cells, you don't know where it comes from:) “root sense that the world is not dead” --> a sense that things are moving and alive and future-full
•its people who feel despair (...emphasize the futurelessness of it all)
*!!!--> we (also) need sensibilities that are angrey at each other
(aligned with Haraway) my position has been that: we don't choose our sensibilities, we wake up and figure out what they are
(Haraway take on the ways we) may enginner as a species now (tech, syntax, etc.)
to refuse the story of the apocalypse + (still) recognizing the depth of the trouble
--> Freud's thanatos غريزه مرگ, a death instinct, (it is a deep, instinctual lure:) *a perverse pleasure in believing in inevitable failure*
*transference is descriptively very apt for what goes on in artistic moves [<-- to be careful of]
**to risk a feeling of (despair, of...)
the ways some of us risk things intellectually and emotionally different than each other
prima donna: doing whatever one does without any particular effort to nuance anything
*multiple impossibilities
learning from religion, the ways of which the name of God has become an impossible category. both catholics and muslim shia (#islam) are wellprepared for feeling this way, some kind of recognition of impossible thing. let's take that “being good at recognizing and affirming impossible things” and bring it to the name of women. that means as soon as you name what you mean by ‘women,’ you have told some kind of really impossible lie.
(how my muslim trained sensibilities are working and mattering in my ajayeb research? ways to respond to *the deadliness and the irreplaceable liveliness of religion* [کشندگی و سرزندگی یکتای مذهب], a semiotics with implosion of sign and flesh)--> (i am so happy that) i cannot not know what it is like to be in a believing community (a faith-based community)***
...out of your own particular little historical traditions
*because my research is about ajay[...]
(86)[...notes/midday review.txt]%8.3[...]ttention to women in the world ==(shapes)==> your mode of attention to:
•the way databases get set up
•the ways interdisciplinarities get crafted
•how you think about tools and genomics
my main point of my project has been about getting better at how to inherit your histories without trashing them*** (even figuring out how to inherit a history that you don't want to inherit)
(Islam, shyness, kindness, ajayeb, Iran, stuttering, being all too ready to find complexities, )
•to become relaxed about predigested version of ‘this is what ajayeb is about’ (or Tasavof, etc.) --> ‘what is going on there’ (in ajayeb) is so built-in to ideologies of many kinds (of progress, deep ecology, of history, and so on)
•to build a little taxonomy (in apass)
•working to give up the series of self-certainties around secularism ==> giving ways to talk to the religious ones : getting to grasp what the world looks like in faith-based communities (=/= check-list of dogma)
•category thinking: get into differential liveliness (with all sorts of inequalities:) *who gets parsed how* [#archive, #articulation, #storytelling] (and thinking about what it means to take up these relationships in cultures saturated with science and technology)
Xiri was doing her research with categories of victim and opressor, and now they suddenly disappeared from her work. that category change or vocabulary change was suspiciously effortless
*remembering is an extremely creative practice (-note to Hoda-)
memories are like ecotone کناربوم (transition area between two adjacent ecosystems)
#(very important concept partly shaped by practices of Darwin into our lives:) “collect” --> lies (necessary?)
the frenzy of the 1700 of surveying nature and collecting speciment ==> bioinfomatic
‘collect’ promises nontransformation
--> metaphors of archive, information-intense ways of thinking about life on earth
*“demonstration” coined by science
...................................
(with Scout Calvert) the ways the digital apparatuses are working, and the kinds of tensions and creativities between the cyber infrastructures and the other kinds informational management discourses displace other book discourses *** --> categories explode in library practice
[Calvert donig brilliant discourse analysis of library sciences --> has direct impact on practices of reading#, different kinds of knowers]
techno-biblio-capital: techno-capital and library practices embedded in each other -->{ [*]technology: assemblages of people, computers, software, discourses, techniques and workarounds that make them function; [*]capital: a 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: techniqu[...]
(87)[...notes/midday review.txt]%8.4[...]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 pleasure,
techno-capital objectivism: (neutrality of) collection developemnt and format choices --> power-sensitive judgments
“we will engineer ourselves out of that” --> naive technological optimism; *the technological question is cruicial to questions of power and knowledge*
-library science tends to position library as power-neutral spaces
-(Foucault: resistence to power is always present)
“freedom to” is always disciplinary (because there is always a particular subject enjoying that) [citizen of liberal democracy who exercises the freedom of representative government, so much as a consumer who exercises freedom of choice of commodities]
patrons as constituent مولفه (==> new knowledge + themselves as knowers) =/= seamless information consumer discursively produced as an unmarked singular independent self-contained stable univers[...]
(88)[...notes/midday review.txt]%8.5[...]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 pleasure,
techno-capital objectivism: (neutrality of) collection developemnt and format choices --> power-sensitive judgments
“we will engineer ourselves out of that” --> naive technological optimism; *the technological question is cruicial to questions of power and knowledge*
-library science tends to position library as power-neutral spaces
-(Foucault: resistence to power is always present)
“freedom to” is always disciplinary (because there is always a particular subject enjoying that) [citizen of liberal democracy who exercises the freedom of representative government, so much as a consumer who exercises freedom of choice of commodities]
patrons as constituent مولفه (==> new knowledge + themselves as knowers) =/= seamless information consumer discursively produced as an unmarked singular independent self-contained stable universal white male heteronormative technophilic subject [<-- this donesn't realy exisit as a person, rather as discoursive productions]
(now) our electronic recreation is work: our every click is surveilled, generating data about our desires and curiosities that feeds back into our formation as techno-capital subjects (@Sven's enthusiasm with social media--how can Sven has a real chance of producing resistance knowledge?) --> this is not freedom! (-an account of freedom for one entails reciprocal unfreedom for others) --> mixtures of work and play in this new economy, (Calvert ☞ Bateson) the meta-communicative nature of *play[= strict rules with genuine freedom, the dual essence of play: curiosity and relationality];
(Calvert arguing for) “knowledge-makers” who engages in creation of situated knowledges by activity adapting, processing and sharing knowledge within the ecology of library ~= *bibliographic apparatus*
(Calvert's heuristic device to imagine what library practices might emerge:) imperfectly literate constituent seekers
-a double consciousness of play, where cognitive sensation amid multiple affectivities are continually teased between assertion and rejection
-a doubled unconscious connoisseurship of realist conventions pressured at new horizons
[Katie King]
...................................
(women's) mini-encounters with god --> kind of materiality of god that don't fit any of the available categories
now-but-not-then quality of continuities
Haraway's deep commitment to the ties of science and competence, pleasure, empowerment, ([*]science:) this craft where you did this incredibly fragile, importan[...]
(99)[...notes/midday review.txt]%8.5[...]new horizons
[Katie King]
...................................
(women's) mini-encounters with god --> kind of materiality of god that don't fit any of the available categories
now-but-not-then quality of continuities
Haraway's deep commitment to the ties of science and competence, pleasure, empowerment, ([*]science:) this craft where you did this incredibly fragile, important, hard work of asking questions of the world in such a way that you might have half a chance of knowing if you are wrong***
you get it “there” ==> (you have a chance of) figuring out something else*
(sustainable life ways that involve) breeds =/= factory farming
Haraway's problem with veganism's moral, wholistic, complex claim that they make on us (also a necessary kind of contemporary witness): that people's practices with animals as food and fiber and work animals, turning into nothing but museum pieces at best. vegans deadly imagination sometimes don't get what they kill: most kinds of animals that have long histories in close association with people.
there is no relationship to this world that does not involve extensive killig (Haraway)
up-to-the-minute technologies
complicated issues around security apparatuses and different national struggles
histories of dispossession and genocide
“do you believe?" = "do you believe in a list of dogma?”
totally wrong question: do you believe in God?
[should i go to Berlin after apass?] a parochial person دهاتی (in the pressure of the seriously elite places): you could be here, you could succeed here, but never belong here
Haraway's ‘literal’ makings:
•“companion” is about whom you are at table literally*
•to be homo sapiens is to be in multispecies interdependencies literally*
my issue with the image of the free floating meaning network popular in artists’ thinking: yes meanings foreground and background. they swirl, but they don't swirl at random
...................................
MOU (memorandum of understanding)-->{@Esta + Zoumana + Hoda
*memorandum: memo, reminder, note, تذکره --?--> passport : آنچه موجب یادآوری شود --> آنچه موجب دخول شود
a legal document describing an agreement between parties less formal than a contract
[1994 U.S.-North Korea nuclear pact, the MOU between Bush and Kerry for 2004 debates,]
...................................
batlagh باتلاق
it is (perhaps the most) important to help transform (your or my) ‘wounded-child’ to ‘wonder-child’ (--> @Hoda)
[the image of the wonder-child in all my workings]***
...................................
•accumulative: g[...]
(101)[...notes/midday review.txt]%8.6[...]br />
(that which escapes/exceeds enclosure) --> it can be put into words[?] --> to become a figure of vitality and even freedom[?]*** @Iranians
[i welcome the reprieve (rokhsat, رخصت, a temporary relief) from] symbolic gridlock
“affect gathers its force to make image touch matter” --> image's power is the power of synaesthesia =/= collection of named “feelings” (invented in discourses of morals, ideals, and known subjectivities)
(let's study how [in Iran] raw materials are formed and exceeded -- sudden and lingering intensity of things) (which darvaze/دروازه/gate we can't and which سوراخ سوزن / surakh-e suzan / hole of needle we pass through)
[i am having always multiple books open, at least two, is that how connection occur for me? #simultaneity]
(Stewart) “I remember childhood as a collection of arresting images”
that hinge on sensory details and open onto luminous scenes of affect [--> Feherlofia/Fehérlófia 1981, Son of the White Horse film. (we must resist calling this film “psychedelic”)
“[...]family as a viscerality through screen images of”
...sudden, repetitive eruption of images of alcoholism, accidents, violence, cancers
*technologies of family, church, law, and nation* (lay confident claim to affect as a capturable content of known and expected “feelings,” but affect itself--that which surges into view along the jumpy border of the actual and the virtual--is their raw material and their only renewable resource. Stewart)
(a sidestep? what) brings an uncanny, alien presence into the field of vision
*an object insists on being seen* (through the tricks of trauma, through the seductions of compulsive beauty,, , ) ~~--> aesthetic event of the senses [@Hoda]
spectacular graphics of disaster
watching: inhabiting the power of the tuned-in spectator; becoming an active participant in [TV's] logic of image (production and) recognition
--✕--> catharsis of mean-spirited
--✕--> festering (cherkin چرکین) alienation
--*--> vitality of the game itself
the image on the screen <--(game)--> the walking simulacrum of social life
the loop of the citizen as consumer
***Mimesis in a State of Shock*** @Hoda
-the link between shock and a cushioned recluse is direct, seductive, and mimetic
“When affect makes its jump between the visible thing, the idea, and the social sensibility, it can leave in its wake uncanny connections between otherwise disparate states of arrest, like shock and recluse گوشه نشينی” (Stewart)
@Hoda: affect jumps into view as the shock of an unassimilated trauma
cocoon room
holing up in your living room ==> “out there” ==> search for the arresting presence
spectrality and[...]
(102)[...notes/midday review.txt]%8.7[...]n unassimilated trauma
cocoon room
holing up in your living room ==> “out there” ==> search for the arresting presence
spectrality and concrete substance
(?when am i) “relaxing” the jumpy move of affect
*Stewart's “jump of affect”
tactile image --(satisfies)--> move of affect --(actualizes)--> something tempting/haunting
-affecting presence at rest
-[in glamour magazines] models frozen in time and space stare back at you in a scene that stages the jump from fantasy to actual body/image and back
-jump from ideal to matter to ideal
-what to wear as the magic of affect itself
copy ~= contact
movies, ads, malls, car phones, daydreams,
modernity's mimetic machine
(“middle class” [or what people thinking as “Iranians"] is not just a “norm” it is a) *womblike space of affect* (where sentimentality and interiority becomes tactile, where ideals and materiality grow to excess,) (imploding under the weight of its own literal embodiment,,,)
-(it is an affective space) where the hegemonic claim *to channel trauma into beauty* is actualized:
•sensible, solid accumulation, family values, colorful decor, techno-gadgets, daily lottery,
•constant stimulation of the senses (--> synaesthetic images, sounds, touches, and smells)
•circuitry of circulation itself
تأثر ta'asor, نتیجهی عواطف natije-y avatef
affect (~= vitality/hope) ~/= (nightmare image of) soical entropy
the big, beautiful, basic, intensely sensate commodity-to-live-in
in Iran:
•(the ‘public space’ or) “outside” ==> a “wilding” scene of crime, chaos, drug-addled monsters, danger, disease, and decay
•“inside” --overflowing-with--> scenes of aesthetic connection
}--> anxiety is the ground over which they (both) march
(modernist) image-affect of the new and clean and up-to-date
the feeling of being in the middle of something big and inevitable, watching it unfold
#my dreams
the labor of looking
“Movies made for women imagine a picture--perfect scene of an Inside--a Home filled with tangible objects that Mean or a Self filled with the intricate dramas of dreams launched, wounded, and finally satisfied or left behind. Affect itself is laid out on the carpet like a beautiful fetish that it is okay to love.”
(the #telegram is littered with image-written signs of personal/public disaster)
the surge of affect toward the scene of abjection --> abjection itself is felt as a contagion --> Navid's comments turned into stickers
-fascination of catastrophe
-something pleads to be touched
-the act of looking at the telegram's forward: my desire is your desire and we are all together in the mas[...]
(103)[...notes/midday review.txt]%8.8[...]
high-dimrnsional phase space
invisible to humans for stretches of time
[*]hypocrisy <== the conditions of the impossibility of a [*]metalanguage= account for things while remaining uncontaminated by them, (~= an “outside”)
--> (Lacanian truth:) “there is no metalanguage” =/= postmodernism's “everything is a metaphor” =/= some metaphors are better than others ~= *there is nowhere to stand outside of things*
the time of hyperobjects is a time of hypocrisy =/= cynicism
[*]weakness <== the gap between phenomenon and thing
[*]lameness <== the fact that all entities are fragile
imagination as:
•Hume: a bundling of associations
•Kant: the possibility for synthetic judgments a priori
•object-oriented ontology: immanence of thinking to the physical, radically displacing the human by insisting that my being is not everything it is cracked up to be--the being of a paper cup is as profound as mine
which hyperobject you are caught in?
image of writing --> shy, retiring octopuses that squirt out a dissembling (mask, cloak, vortäuschen) ink as they withdraw into the ontological shadow
figure of *mill* (the characters and technologies and ideas of the ages mill around in a state of a mild, semiblissful confusion) =/= Eszter's vortex
my intimate impressions “personal" = footprints of hyperobjects, distorted as they always must be by the entity in which they make their mark
situatedness is now a very uncanny place to be, like being the protagonist of a Wordsworth poem of a character in Blade Runner
*cool impersonality of the scientific language* (now is deprived of its ideological status)
the concept of the ‘world’ is no longer operational
can we think environmentally without the idea of ‘the end of the world’?
(Morton asking for) a geophilosophy that doesn't think simply in terms of human events and human significance
Morton: global warming =/= climate change
if one takes the ‘climate change’ as a substitute for ‘global warming’ is like “cultural change” as a substitute for Renaissance, or “change in living conditions” as a substitute for Holocaust
acronyms, abbreviations:
dialoc دیالوک --> decrease in appropriate levels of concern
tomas توماس --> terrain of media and the sociopolitical realm
cohhatg کوهاج --> coincidence of human history and terrestrial geology
hhatg حج --> human history and terrestrial geology
pb پی بی --> philosophy's bandwidth
sdwa صدوا --> substances decorated with accidents -->
ldwa لدوا --> lumps decorated with accidents --> featureless lumps, and those things have accidental properties, like cupcakes decorated with colo[...]
(104)[...notes/midday review.txt]%9.1[...]
sim سیم --> small island of meaning
etimom اتیموم --> everything is made of mind
hhbn هبن --> hand-holding benevolent narrator (-which is vanished)
(auto) cad کد --> (automatic) comforting aesthetic distances
iockat --> intentional objects commonly known as thoughts
atot آتو --> (you only ever perceive your particular) anthropomorphic translations of things
ejich جیش --> exhilarating jump into cognitive hyperspace --> displacement that Copernicus or Derrida does
foe --> fantasies of embeddedness [<-- phenomenology <== grounding of Kant (begining in 1900)]
avaa اوا --> a vertiginous antiliteral abyss
iwen --> intimacy with existing nonhumans
mok --> mathematization of knowing (--> Descartes, Newton) ==> hiding philosophical and ideological decisions made in acts of knowing =/= ontology (as a vital and contested political terrain)
i.c.a.d. --> ideology of “the consumer” and its “demands” (that capital then “meets”) --> adventure of modernity
fvod --> from the viewpoint of “objective” description (a bad way of explicating the objects that are already here)
toc --> troops of critique
towwk توک --> ‘technology of what we know’ (techniques that decide the differences between ‘what we know’ and ‘what is’. Morton's hyperobject is a towwk)
usoc --> uncanny strangeness of existence (work of Heidegger)
lawot --> (something is) ‘laying around in the workshop of thinking’ (let's reuse what appears to be broken lawot)
visist = visit + resist
correlationism: the notion that philosophy can only talk within a narrow bandwidth, restricted to the human-world correlate : meaning is only possible between a human mind and ‘what it thinks' = its “objects” (flimsy شل و ول and tenuous رفيق as they are) ~-> the light on in the fridge when you close the door
-Heidegger (towering through) is a correlationist who asserts that without Dasein, it makes no sense whatsoever to talk of the truth of things, which for him implies their very existence--for him idealism, not realism, holds the key to philosophy. (Heidegger's tool-analysis: when equipment--which for all intents and purposes could be anything at all--is functioning, or “executing” [Vollzug], it withdraws from access [Entzug]; that it is only when a tool is broken that it seems to become present-at-hand [vorhanden] --> is this what Femke is proposing to apass?)
Descartes uncritically importing the very scholasticism his work undermined
[*]epistemology:
•how can i know what there are (or are not) real things?
•what gives me (or denies me) access to the real?
•what defines the possibility of access?
•what defines the possibility of possibility?
•Einstein discovered a ripp[...]
(105)[...notes/midday review.txt]%9.2[...]s a correlationist who asserts that without Dasein, it makes no sense whatsoever to talk of the truth of things, which for him implies their very existence--for him idealism, not realism, holds the key to philosophy. (Heidegger's tool-analysis: when equipment--which for all intents and purposes could be anything at all--is functioning, or “executing” [Vollzug], it withdraws from access [Entzug]; that it is only when a tool is broken that it seems to become present-at-hand [vorhanden] --> is this what Femke is proposing to apass?)
Descartes uncritically importing the very scholasticism his work undermined
[*]epistemology:
•how can i know what there are (or are not) real things?
•what gives me (or denies me) access to the real?
•what defines the possibility of access?
•what defines the possibility of possibility?
•Einstein discovered a rippling, flowing spacetime
•Tarkovsky discovered the ‘sensuous material of film stock’ --> ssoci
•Husserl discovered something strange about the objects: no matter how many times you turned around a coin, you never saw the other side as the other side --> the #coin had a dark side that was seemingly irreducible
Morton's (technology of what we know) hyperobject is his sense of an asymmetry between the infinite powers of cognition and the infinite bening of things, yet he doesn't evoke descriptive practices, which could be helpfull--he is missing something, here: “the gap between phenomenon and thing yawns open, disturbing my sense of presence and being in the world.”
“[...] i cannot locate the gap between phenomenon and thing anywhere in my given, phenomenal, experiential, or indeed scientific space” --> Xiri's problem
he disagrees with: (from Plato up until Hume and Kant) that there is some kind of dotted line somewhere on a thing, saying “cut here” --so he concludes: “things are themselves, but we can't point to them directly.” =/= nonrepresentational theory, Stewart is much more useful. we can see Morton's taste for (a masculine) sublime in modeling his hyperobjects
flat ontology: there is hardly any difference between a person and a pincushion. and relationships between them, including causal ones, must be vicarious (نيابتى) and hence aesthetic in nature
(no) realism that only bases its findings on “ontic” data
scientific discoveries are necessarily based on a decision about what real things are
*disaster [ontologic] taking place against a stable background [ontic]*
causality after Hume and Kant : causality as a feature of phenomena, rather than things in themselves ==> humans are not totally in charge of assigning significance and value to events that can be statistically measured
entities that become visible through post-Humean and post-Kantian statistical causality --> anthropog[...]
(107)[...notes/midday review.txt]%9.3[...]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 what your name and reputation does? what are the precise responsible consequences of your particular position? your position involves not only the book you write or the argument you make, it involves also your name and reputation, the currency of your gender, your mode of charisma and authority, your affective techniques, your network enacted, and so on.)
•to escape naming the engineering talents and skills that are necessary to assemble (for example the senseLab website)
•to escape epistemological commitment (the question of: **how is my vocabulary crafted for whom?**)
•
it is not clear (but i can maybe guess about it, Manning's commitments are):
•(learning from Haraway:) what they have witnessed [hierarchies? ==commit==> anti-archive]
•(learning from Despret:) which bodies they care for [the autists? ==commit==> elusive creativity]
•(learning from Kenney:) where are their alliances پیوستگیها [with multiculturalism? ==commit==> democracy's logos of difference]
•(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 i[...]
(108)[...notes/midday review.txt]%10.7[...]◦
it is not clear (but i can maybe guess about it, Manning's commitments are):
•(learning from Haraway:) what they have witnessed [hierarchies? ==commit==> anti-archive]
•(learning from Despret:) which bodies they care for [the autists? ==commit==> elusive creativity]
•(learning from Kenney:) where are their alliances پیوستگیها [with multiculturalism? ==commit==> democracy's logos of difference]
•(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 percepti[...]
(109)[...notes/midday review.txt]%10.8[...]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), not their conceptual descriptions [=/= textured description with thick details <== i really think the devil is in the details!! }--> art of noticing things]
-i want to know how Manning is compromised into desiring what she is doing. [compromise: being exposed or made liable to danger, suspicion, or disrepute. --the way she told the story of her practice had a difficult sense of success in it, of being cool and correct at every turn, uncompromised. (<-- why is this a turn-off for me?)]
for aesthetic, political, ethical reasons i want Manning to address in their work:
-[...]
(110)[...notes/midday review.txt]%10.8[...]its 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), not their conceptual descriptions [=/= textured description with thick details <== i really think the devil is in the details!! }--> art of noticing things]
-i want to know how Manning is compromised into desiring what she is doing. [compromise: being exposed or made liable to danger, suspicion, or disrepute. --the way she told the story of her practice had a difficult sense of success in it, of being cool and correct at every turn, uncompromised. (<-- why is this a turn-off for me?)]
for aesthetic, political, ethical reasons i want Manning to address in their work:
•the question of apparatus --> working within an apparatus of thinking in order to get somewhere in a sustained way. i want them to name their apparatus of literary production. how they engage with the interface, data-set, grammar, and literacy of their reservoir.
•the question of infrastructure --> how they balance the possible and the acceptable, the balance of action, tools, and the built environment
•the question of technology --> how they take apart the tool from its context of involvements and referentialities
•the question of political orientation --> how they have accepted the democratization of knowledge and multiculturalism (the idea of “knowledge for everyone” [--> there is a very thin line between the impulse to democratize and commodify knowledge]; --could multiculturalism be radical capitalism in action?! ...faking diversity to build more diverse companies <-- “lip service”: to just say something but not actually do it)
[--> the hegemony and horror of “different experience” of the so-called different cultures (a form of racism?)]
[multiculturalism =/= trans-species]
[multiculturalism =/= eurasia]
[--> the hegemony and horror of “the completely different” (==>? deskilled society)]
Manning: “in senseLab we work with the people who don't use language, don't write, etc.” (<-- what does that legitimates, conceals, or smuggles? what sorts of hierarchies and ideologies of status emerge out of that?)
-as the philosopher of nonintentionality how did she responded (paranoically?) to our intents when questions where asked?
-as the philosopher of discord how did she responded to disagreement?
(?how do you tell the tale of) *your adventures سلوک and achievements کرامت* (karamat va soluk)
(why self-promoting is such a turn-off? it makes the listener into someone to convince or win over into the Förderung of the speaker. [with Campbell:] self-marketing creates a ‘perverse knowledge’ about the work of the speaker, that means you give information about ‘healthy’ parts of your practic[...]
(111)[...notes/midday review.txt]%10.9[...]6 of “Pink Slime Caesar Shift” (2018)
“there is much more to you that meet the eye.” the motto of transformation in secular capitalism, sang by Jane Fonda and Transformer Optimus Prime
...................................
researcher's questions
in your obscure (elaborate and awkward) meditations, (?can we ask:) what is sacrificed, what is recooked, canibalized, chewed over, and eventually buried? in which economy of pleasure and pain is this mobilized? which harmful (or hedonistic) sensualism is deployed? which hallucinating enfant is writing? which raw material is being transformed into the gold of humanity?
-the question of will: which world is murdered and repopulated by the act of (your) will alone?
a research method of starting a conversation, for apass
*take me to you reader* --> bring me to the subject who you think is reading you, receiving your work in some sort,
...................................
few things (that i hate hysterically) that i think i urgently need (and any artist) to have a very good grasp of (within modern capital economy):
•marketing (--> integrated storytelling)
•fashion (--> manipulative regimes of time and place)
•journalism (explanatory technologies of news and opinion, vox, kurzgesagt, corporate media, immersive journalism, forensic aesthetics)
•politics (=/= political science): achieving and exercising positions of governance that have control over communities
•hollywood/comics (*corporate-produced fiction* --> business-decisions connecting cross-overs; ideas of: customer and merchandise)
i can't shake off the idea that behind every marketing strategy there i a predatory behaviour concealed
***there is nothing quite so humiliating and disempowering as trying to prove the truth***
‘trying to prove the truth’ is the worst position you can find yourself in and it means you are fucked. because you are doing it to empower yourself in the face of a biger power that lies and claims you. the conditions that had let that happen are the question, not the truth of the matter --> that is why i find journalism most of the time useless
impossibility of having an interview with iranians (myself included): [<==? chaotic subjectivity]
deflection --> dodging: not giving meaningful answers : gradations of non-answers you are receiving
taking a keyword, repeating it, sounds like answering the question, introducing a nonsequitur to trip up the host
==> more confused & less informed
...................................
#project Puchberg landscape Austria
shifting baseline syndrome: reshaping the landscape and forgetting what was before ==>{ (new) reality = shaped and ruined landscapes
(Emirates was for me such reality of shaped ruin)
admiring one landscape and its biological ent[...]
(112)[...notes/midday review.txt]%11.2[...]our struggles together (not our so-called cultural differences)
refusal to integration is problematic as integration (into host's pleasure principle)
authentic imperialism has always been multicultural
...................................
on affect
affective character practice of retrospection: a bit pensive and passive, a bit slow and solemn?
1970s and 1980s anthropology of emotion: how feelings variously fix and stick through different compositions of language and discourse =/= anthropology of affect: how some feelings slip, evade, and overflow capture ==> *creative methods to collect evidence of environments making and shaping bodies in ways more complex than and ontologically distinct from the poetics on hand to describe it*
**poetics may quite possibly be all that we have, it certainly isn't all that we are**
[*]politics: permutations of evolving power relations and our reflexive attempts to negotiate and manage them
*affect theory: an effect of the world as much as a frame for viewing it
industry working also on affect, push confidently ahead, operationalizing their own idiosyncratic theories of affect toward the manufacturing of new regimes of technological knowledge on how bodies feel (Apple buying Emotient, SoftBank's emotional robot, collective AI cloud)
spread of populist anti-establishment sentiments
feelings increasingly become the primary field for strategizing, measuring, and experiencing politics with global precarity
•anger on the right
•fear on the left
•anxiety at large
affect: nonconscious intensities variously activating and deactivating bodies
emotion: those feelings that fix into place through a variety of discursive practices
methods of mining feeling
projects of knowing become projects of power : narratives seeking to close the affect-emotion gap
The Flash TV series character's motivation are more experienced as a story, for example, a goal, a personal pep talk, a collective call to arms--and not as momentum and force --> affect's sheer momentum
...effect as affect's long history breaking on a shore
countervailing forces of sense and story
to inspire a sense of critical urgency
affect ==> theory is of the world it so describes
...................................
contemporary tendencies in participatory art:
•**ongoing struggle to find artistic equivalents for political positions**
•tensions between quality and equality, singular and collective authorship
•sub-themes of education and therapy
***invention of a popular mass audience (in Italian Futurist serate 1910 onwards)
the gaps between: theory, practice, cultural policy, audience [...]
(113)[...notes/midday review.txt]%11.3[...]ts) + 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 first interpretation of a content's body =/= presuming a standard taxonomic form
==>
•surprises
•styles of critical thought generates power in twists of voice and craft
•
allows one please to demonstrate the w[...]
(114)[...notes/midday review.txt]%11.7[...]f 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 first interpretation of a content's body =/= presuming a standard taxonomic form
==>
•surprises
•styles of critical thought generates power in twists of voice and craft
•
allows one please to demonstrate the wonder
“We ask our readers to perform the jamb when language overruns the mental breathing that reading entails.” (Lepselter)
•or, nothing disappears --> You breathe the air you're given. (“I felt ripples from a rape in the seventeenth century, behind a barn somewhere in Romania, where generations later my bitter grandmother disparaged her children without knowing why.”)
•or, words sediment next to something laid low
•or, (index as in) to point sideways --> shifter's only meaning is the object it happens to point to
•drawing figures, hooks, asterisks
•or, placing what's st[...]
(115)[...notes/midday review.txt]%11.7[...]r />
[title]
*observational aesthetic* <== convergences of contemporary art and anthropology
...................................
[ajayeb -->] concept or theory --> (a training in) absorption + attention + framing =/= truth effect
[title]
Whatever Professor
[why apass asked me to do their website's] indexing: (a shrewd and thoughtful creativity in) the first interpretation of a content's body =/= presuming a standard taxonomic form
==>
•surprises
•styles of critical thought generates power in twists of voice and craft
•
allows one please to demonstrate the wonder
“We ask our readers to perform the jamb when language overruns the mental breathing that reading entails.” (Lepselter)
•or, nothing disappears --> You breathe the air you're given. (“I felt ripples from a rape in the seventeenth century, behind a barn somewhere in Romania, where generations later my bitter grandmother disparaged her children without knowing why.”)
•or, words sediment next to something laid low
•or, (index as in) to point sideways --> shifter's only meaning is the object it happens to point to
•drawing figures, hooks, asterisks
•or, placing what's structural, technical, transferential, pulped, leaking, intense
{things: an integrated thin layer to epitomize and abstract in new ways how people are hooked up with their technologies; parsing and criss-crossing some of the built-in categories and new needs of the people who are using it;}
things that do the reading, editing, assembling
*every edit ==> (set off a cascade of:)
•word falls
•Rubik's Cubes
•tropes
•infrastructures
•genres
•rhymes
•off-rhymes
•tonal flips
•half-steps
[compositional listening]
one reads aloud + the others *listening compositionally*
<br />
#writing exercise:
following out the impact of things (words, thoughts, people, objects, ideas, worlds) in hundred-word units
theoretical reflections get folded into the analytic, observational, and transferential ways we move
(Stewart + Berlant)
aftershocks of a shock you can't point out
(we shouldn't always ask) “where does the misery come from?”
designers imagined a still life, not a lifeworld where we show up to build things out
evaluative critique =? (mental habit of) demagnetizing things (for the sake of clarity)
proliferation of little worlds...
story = relay, weiterleiten, رله
...................................
in fact i have never been working on the notion of nature, my topic of research, rather have been all along zoology
score: creating disorder out of order
@Lilia
<[...]
(116)[...notes/midday review.txt]%11.8[...]ible 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
in Frozen II animated movie, Elsa build her way out of climate (magic = technology)
to make a debate point =/= trying to answer your question
(Hegel) negative values are much more clearer than affirmative values
the dangerous and dominant belief that whatever problems we face in this society the misfits (particular exceptional individual) can change it all
...................................
(from being an artist to artist researcher)
to articulate and demonstrate with brilliance ‘what you know’ --to--> to be able to exquisitely explain ‘how you know what you know’ [--?--> *metacognition: thinking about one's own thinking = reflection (thinking about
what we know) + self-regulation (managing how we go about learning)]
-metacognitives kills: to get good at recognizing flaws or gaps in one's own thinking + articulate thought processes + revise efforts
*classroom = mirror* (process of stepping back to see what you are doing)
(useful for artists) sciences of understanding:
•anthropology
•psychology
my whole work is about two things now:
•to think cumulatively (=/= epistemic breaks) --> more you know more your are interested in
•to think by layering (=/= singleness of partisan meaning) --> what you do is based on previous work
my research in storytelling:(from premodern) *describe the world* [bestiaries] --to--> (modern necessity to) *calculate the world* [recognizing a calculated world --how--> *secularization of interest* (in monsters, religious iconography, etc.)
adventure time tv series
educational model for chil[...]
(118)[...notes/midday review.txt]%12.3[...]ffinities with unknowing and we are comfortable with misunderstanding and partial comprehensions --then--> let's use that to direct our readerly activities to texts that are difficult and different to us --> this is why I don't accept it when artists in research environment withdraw from reading certain positions by saying “this text is too academic.”
what is the state of art after Goya?
sites where political meaning is produced (the impulse to resist or correct inequality, injustice, lack, damage, tension, etc.) =/= attachment site (languages charged with power, inequality)
(i am interested in women) not because of gender [= identity politics, political correctness], but because of their practice and the question they pursue
-the horrific and dangerous idea that I hear under “I am now reading only women authors”
two visualized increases in the industry, science, and popular culture:
ار نه سر
revisit sanaat tashbih simile
tashbih not as alude but as description (literal)
مار نه سر mar-e noh-sar ~/= world
mar-e noh-sar is not a simile for the world (of the reader) but it describes a particular world that is in the image of mar-e noh-sar
haft modaber هفت مدبر
jealousy as affect --underlying--> Farsi ghazal
ابومعشر بلخی Abu Ma'shar Balkhi
الهی - فلک نور
اثیری - ۸ فلک آسمانی
هیولانی - جزء زیر قمر
...................................
***don't read (or make) theory as a means of empowerment*** (a tool to fight or flight oppression)
...................................
[title]
king real
...................................
my problem with
•conceptual art: jumping (transcending) from material to meaning
•viscerality: every expression matters as long as it affects the viewer[...]
(119)[...notes/midday review.txt]%12.4[...] 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)--> another world (a world which has the particularity of not being able to be detached in any way from the materials [from which it appears to detach its[...]
(120)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%13.3[...]revailing 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)--> another world (a world which has the particularity of not being able to be detached in any way from the materials [from which it appears to detach itself.])
*fictional beings:
-they extract materials from forms, figures or small worlds that can neither be detached from these materials nor reduced to them.
-khosh-yomn خوش یمن and shoom شوم (felicity and infelicity) --> pretense (vanemud وانمود); they depend on the always fragile maintenance of the relation between material and form
-*specifications* of “fictional beings” (that leaves in its wake) ==> worlds (unlike fic all other modes fold for their own use by managing to extract from materials)
All continuations of a “course of action” suppose a discontinuity that must be overcome in order to define a trajectory. ==> gap, break
the mini-transcendence required for any definition of the being-as-other
(haven't we managed?) to allow several modes of existence to run, flow, pass, each one appearing indeed to possess its own conditions of truth and falsity and its own mode of subsistence
‘libido sciendi’: to recognize the branching that allows us to[...]
(127)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%13.3[...]o difficult to enunciate something religiously because of *the ease with which it is accounted for by other types of explanation* (especially social explanation)
in apass we need to practice saying: “I don't want to take that or this contrast into account any more” (because you want to do something else for a moment)
--> you return to a project --and--> i have been fighting so that (myself and) you **don't become modernist again** (~ that means you engage in the conflict of values that has characterized modernist history)
(with work on ajayeb) i am engaged in the project of ***disentangling the entire set of values that constitutes my rightful inheritance***
(the question of) “what treasure have we inherited? how can we claim it?” --> it is so dangerous to answer those questions alone, without each other ==> selfish identities and origins
(eurocentrism, or the former ‘others’ answering it for everyone, without you)
>
ecologizing
ecological consciousness =? your entire way of life must be modified or else you will disappear as a civilization
(not being the heir of) emancipatory tradition
(if) modernism is Promethean, then green bio economy and clean technology is Promethean even more
(the bad idea of and hype of) technological solution to ecological crises
*renewing everything here and now* is first of all a religious passion
?@Leo
-what modernism did to science is worse than what it did to religion
it deprived it of its energy, restricting it, to *mere furniture of the soul* [--> Iron Man's idea of technology-human relation]
modernism's politicization of science
speaking of science scientifically ==> a scientific ‘worldview’ is deployed
speaking of religion religiously ==> a vague assemblage of pious moral vacuities is taken as an ‘alternative worldview’
}--> they both accept an* unscientific science* and an *irreligious religion*
Latour (quickly dissolving nonsense that accrues as one opposes ‘knowledge’ and ‘belief’):
•science = reference chain (what allow access to the far away) [nothing is out of the reach of reference chain]
•religion = presence (what allow access to the near)
science ~/= concrete, worldly, matter-of-fact, present-at-hand, domain of knowledge (<-- political activism has to work with that kind of knowledge)
what use is it to save your soul, if you forfeit the world? --> sci-fi's real frontier & Noah's project
the transcendence and transubstantiation of science
when nature enters, religion has to leave. in two equally fatal exit strategies:
•to limit itself to the inner sanctum of the soul
•to flee into the supernatural --> that relibion will try [...]
(129)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%13.6[...] reflected image)
-alame khiali عالم خیالی: imaginaire/Hollywood
-khiale khallagh خیال خلاق (--> alame mesal عالم مثال =/= alame ajsad عالم اجساد) :
1-khiale mottasel خیال متصل: imagining inherent in human
2-khiale monfasel خیال منفصل: imaginal apart from human
-alame hess عالم حسس: molk ملک --> universe of forgetfulness
Tonekaboni, is against: “mojudate moghayade vahmi faghede tagharor mibashand.” (موجودات مقید وهمی فاقد تقرر میباشند)
--> vahdate vojud وحدت وجود =/= vahdate mojud وحدت موجود
*danger: tarde amre mesali طرد امر مثالی ==> ma'ad dar amre khiali معاد در امر خیالی
death, life, past, and future are not properties of objects, rather of subjects (anha sefate nafs hastand آنها صفات نفس هستند) [Corbin]
and you bestow them to objects that you think they are “dead,” “alive,” “from past,” or “of future”
“khorre” or “khorne” according to zaratustra: a light originated from the essence of the divine being and because of that some apparitions have gained hierarchy, and each human capable of a certain techne.
the idea of a divine presence in *heikal* هیکل
according to Socrates: bodies are frames and tools of the selves (nofus نفوس)
according to Plato, what the self (nafs نفس) does not had essentially that it had to descend into the material world? what the senses told the self that itself could not say?
an islamic-iranian cosmology:
-jabarut جبروت (alame oghule karubi عالم اقول کروبی) (Nous)
-malakut ملکوت (alame nofus عالم نفوس) (Psyche) --organ--> khiale fa'al خیال فعال (= jesme latife nafs جسم لطیف نفس. niruye khial نیروی خیال is trainded still in middle east. this inter-monde is where mater --> immaterial & immater --> material; jesm ruhani جسم روحانی & ruh jesmani روح جسمانی ==> constant happenings of historic nature ==> Ma'ad معاد) --> amre mesali امر مثالی
-molk ملک (omure mshhud امور مشهود) (Sarx)
[Ashtiani, 2nd vol, p44, footnote]
ensane okhravie daraye badan (انسان اخروی دارای بدن) --> nash'eye jesmanie alame akherat (نشئه جسمانی عالم آخرت)
(baghaye) badane okhravie alame made (بقای بدن اخروی عالم ماده) --> hades zamanie (حادث زمانی)
لطیف latif ~= immaterial
actual/real ~= a dream between earth and sky
asemanhaye napeydaye nojumi آسمانهای ناپیدای نجومی (celectial skies invisible)
dadehaye vahyi دادههای وحی (data of revelation)
Avicenn[...]
(132)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%14.1[...]ts material-removing (dematerialising?) abstraction (tajarode made-zoda تجرد مادهزدا) constantly transcends, beyond any other abstraction. ==> first light is originated from it: anvare ghahere انوار قاهره (~= anvare fereshtegani انوار فرشتگانی) ~= first maleke mogharab ملک مقرب (or Bahman بهمن, Vahumane وهومنه, first of Zoroastrian Amshaspandan امشاسپندان) ==> (due to their interactions:) second light, second maleke mogharab is created ==> eshragh اشراق ==> eshragh ==> eshragh ==> ...
جسمیتشناسی jesmiat-shenasi?
رب النوع rab-ol-no ~=? God of type, of abstract examples, (Plato's universals? type, general concept --> is always beyond the horizon, the reality of the type lies beyond a related one that it sustains (‘token’) ["Beyond the horizon there lies a Lion, a Lion more Lion than any more lion. And beyond saying ‘lion,’ which calls forth that Lion, lies yet another, who might just look back. And beyond this eyeing one, lies an undying one, one we call ‘Lion’ because she is a kind.” (Kohn, 2009)] --> apply this idea to the fire)
ارباب الانواع arbab-ol-anva ~=? angelology (iranians loved angels and were good at angelologic thinking, it was a technical term in knowledge production regarding *categories and types*) --> Platonic + Zoroastrian + (shiite) Islamicate [via Sohrevardi] cosmologies
-the angel/type that both emerges from and sustains the many lives of its many tokens (~= tashasho تشعشع).
according to ancient iranians, rab-ol-no or the type-God decided its own destination (calculation of its own destiny), but there was no correlation between the ‘type’ and its ‘token,’ there is no whole being created, there is no individuality being created. this general type has its own intellect/sense/reason (sho'ur شعور.) their relationship is of rage and love (ghahr قهر and mohebat محبت,) according to Sohrevardi.
-what question is posed from somewhere (slightly) beyond? a question includes the likeness of its answer (Kohn, 2009)
-the angel of type is all about ‘being in futuro,’ which captures the logic of life's continuity --> “over the horizon” houses this “living future”
-What is the relationship between this angelic world beyond us and the sociocultural worlds we construct?
-“mosol” مثل : the realm of objective “stuff” that exists out there beyond us, on the other.
*Barzakh برزخ =/= anvare pak انوار پاک (pure lights)
Barzakh = seperation, obstacle, pardeh پرده, veil, (shadow? mediation?)
-everything material that can be addressed sensually, an evil negation.
-Barzakh is dark (that is a different kind of Barzakh than what i talked about with Mi? not really, there it is theorized as *shadow* and inter-mediation)
-projections happen in Barzakh
[from MOP w[...]
(133)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%14.2[...]"over the horizon” houses this “living future”
-What is the relationship between this angelic world beyond us and the sociocultural worlds we construct?
-“mosol” مثل : the realm of objective “stuff” that exists out there beyond us, on the other.
*Barzakh برزخ =/= anvare pak انوار پاک (pure lights)
Barzakh = seperation, obstacle, pardeh پرده, veil, (shadow? mediation?)
-everything material that can be addressed sensually, an evil negation.
-Barzakh is dark (that is a different kind of Barzakh than what i talked about with Mi? not really, there it is theorized as *shadow* and inter-mediation)
-projections happen in Barzakh
[from MOP with Mi]
We both take interests in morphology of historical forces and intensive thinking under the influence of materiality. To traffic in the tropics of an isthmus between the sensible world and the divine that was brought into our discussion, was proposed in my last letter those marvelous creatures living in the logic of precariousness, those who live in another temporality that is eyewitnessed in distanced pasts.
...
We are here on this site in a landscape of memory, in a progressive user-friendliness and a technology that signals our arrival in an Alam-e Barzakh (عالم برزخ), an ontological intermediate realm of images and forms, the creatures that populate this world have the incorporeality of “images,” much like the cyberspace we are born into and populate.
...
Not to remediate Barzakh (برزخ) but to propose a media theory, sketch it, and archive it for later. And there will be things that have to remain impossible to verify by us and in those records, the general-purpose language of the technologies that we choose to archive ourselves with, on the side of forgetting, the site of externalized memories, will not verify histories of presence tattooed under the ear of the elephant of our story, as you whispered somewhere in the dark.
[...]
Yes, vocal works that informed and influenced Qahveh-Khanehe (قهوه خانه) still can be found in some places of tea or cafe houses in Iran. They are called pardeh-Khani (پرده خوانی), here someone who is a pardeh-Dar پردهدر (“-Dar” meaning that who tears apart the pardeh پرده, and pardeh meaning screen or veil--the concept of pardeh always contains “a perpetually hidden message”), ‘Khandan’ (خواندن) meaning in Farsi ‘to read’ or to sing-off a plain of signifiers, is also the verb ‘Darridan,’ (دریدن) [#Derridean acting] meaning to rip apart.
...
I am sorry; I am just entangled in the topologically impossible pardeh, as an interfacial space where the body and instrument of music meet. I am touching with my fingers the ‘first three’ pardehs of Setar ستار, and thinking about to jack into the vague differences between another two magical canvases / magnet[...]
(134)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%14.3[...]>
-Barzakh is dark (that is a different kind of Barzakh than what i talked about with Mi? not really, there it is theorized as *shadow* and inter-mediation)
-projections happen in Barzakh
[from MOP with Mi]
We both take interests in morphology of historical forces and intensive thinking under the influence of materiality. To traffic in the tropics of an isthmus between the sensible world and the divine that was brought into our discussion, was proposed in my last letter those marvelous creatures living in the logic of precariousness, those who live in another temporality that is eyewitnessed in distanced pasts.
...
We are here on this site in a landscape of memory, in a progressive user-friendliness and a technology that signals our arrival in an Alam-e Barzakh (عالم برزخ), an ontological intermediate realm of images and forms, the creatures that populate this world have the incorporeality of “images,” much like the cyberspace we are born into and populate.
...
Not to remediate Barzakh (برزخ) but to propose a media theory, sketch it, and archive it for later. And there will be things that have to remain impossible to verify by us and in those records, the general-purpose language of the technologies that we choose to archive ourselves with, on the side of forgetting, the site of externalized memories, will not verify histories of presence tattooed under the ear of the elephant of our story, as you whispered somewhere in the dark.
[...]
Yes, vocal works that informed and influenced Qahveh-Khanehe (قهوه خانه) still can be found in some places of tea or cafe houses in Iran. They are called pardeh-Khani (پرده خوانی), here someone who is a pardeh-Dar پردهدر (“-Dar” meaning that who tears apart the pardeh پرده, and pardeh meaning screen or veil--the concept of pardeh always contains “a perpetually hidden message”), ‘Khandan’ (خواندن) meaning in Farsi ‘to read’ or to sing-off a plain of signifiers, is also the verb ‘Darridan,’ (دریدن) [#Derridean acting] meaning to rip apart.
...
I am sorry; I am just entangled in the topologically impossible pardeh, as an interfacial space where the body and instrument of music meet. I am touching with my fingers the ‘first three’ pardehs of Setar ستار, and thinking about to jack into the vague differences between another two magical canvases / magnetic disks: Plane of Destiny (lohe mahfuz لوح محفوظ) and Plane of Memory (lohe hafez لوح حافظ), while listening to the virtual narratives of Ghahveh-Khane theater. Which creatures have you encountered, in your travels, that bypass human installations (of memory)?
...................................
a Zoroastrian data: pre-existential ~ azali ازلی, sabegh-ol-vojud سابق الوجود
atefiate mahsus [عاطفیت محسوس] (queer? a queerness not familiar with mysticism?)
[...]
(135)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%14.3[...]ls of experience, measuring, probing, determining the “what is” of the lived world.
i marvel at...
wonders of...
marvels of...
unheards of...
mazhar ol-ajayeb مظهر العجایب
Motehayeran-e متحیران, Tahayor تحیر ~=? to wonder
dar ahval-e... در احوال
dar khavas-e... در خواص
navader-e... نوادر
sefat-e... صفات
ta'ajob تعجب =/=? heyrat حیرت
the mode of attention in ajayebnameh is tuned by ta'ajob (wonder) away from Iranian mystic preferences over transfixation and rapture (heyrat)
which literary or (not)knowing positions are installed in these two (observational?) stations?
the subject of ta'ajob is moved otherwise
تعجب در باب امر قدسی ta'ajob dar bab-e amr-e ghodsi, wonder in the matters of divine
...................................
Heidegger: die Wissenschaft denkt nicht
Derrida: links science to mourning and memory
Lacan: science is always there, ready to erupt, amaze or blow you away.
Husserl was perhaps the one most freaked out by the historical split (between science and philosophy--and art?)
...a matter of technological selfunderstanding,
...nor do I insist on sustaining the pathos that propels the images...
ethical and political issues are increasingly seem to have more to do with testing than questioning, hesitation, certainty
There is a test ... it claims and so it stands. There is the other test that crashes against walls, collapses certitudes, and lives by failure-lives by dying or, at least destroying.
The one register of testing offers results-certitudes-by which to calculate and count on the *other.*
the culture of Versuch, test or trial
(farhange kushesh, ghasd, sue ghasd, va emtehan)
(measuring and) testing that support, among so many others, political, religious, and educational institutions
testing has everything to do with the way the policing of political sites and bodies takes place, in modernity and with our experience of reality in general.
testing ~=/?==><--> the real
(elliptical circuit established between test & real)
Freud was working on to tests which are lost now: Aktualitätsprüfung to distinguish between reality and immediacy
Lacan has linked testing to the subject's creation of a first “outside"----a space that is no longer the same as “reality”
the way the state takes possession of the body presumptively on drugs.
-in this way, drugs are seen as eccentric: what is outside, or moves outside the center, can center it, they are animated by an outside already inside
-how drugs are isolating or how they establish community (of those who are somehow t[...]
(136)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%14.6[...]r
drug: Dionysian frenzy, aspirin, religion, dirty language,
-I am sorry I have no drugs to offer you today!
-not everyone in civic societies has the privilege of getting high and mind-altering (that which supposedly suggests vulnerability,) running arround drunk staggering and out-of-it, they will be beaten the hell out of it, they have to be sober, on alert and self-protective
your pee belongs to the state----new civic readability
{four bodies don't belong to themselves: children, addicts, outlaws, and ghosts, are all busted by the state or certain legislated majority}
destructive (and artistic) modes of production.
test, does it have an essence? Is it pure relationality?
Avital's “speculative telephonics”
Heidegger: sign = cutting edge, Zeichen --Holderlin--> “we're cutting out” =/= (Avital:) schizo knows how to disconnect, how to depart, how to cut the shit
the place where a call can break into a body[=? orificial openings of a subject]
emergency verification: we are still trying to cut into the emergency line (that we are on) after the crashing down of the transcendental signifier
in the (technologically enabled) disappearance of long-distance what happens to the ‘elsewhere’ calling to the schizobody?
how our pretechnological ears were (trained) before the telephone?
the “call” comes from me and from beyond and over me.
Telephonics coils itself around a concept of “being there” supported by the recognition that contact has been broken. Still, the break is never clean, just as contact was never continuous. The entire metaphysics of identity, presence and locality is scrambled, bringing with it a certain historical mutation in the relationship of the “self’ to other, 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 say[...]
(137)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%14.8[...]e of China is made of India is made of Afghanistan is made of Iraq is made of Greece is made of ...
(can I say that my work has been all about Iran-centrism?)
gaps in cultural space that epistemology has not filled
hermeneutics =/=? epistemology
history of truth
*making an ecological landscape of ajayeb cosmology, that means making visible the connection between beings and contact zones among animate and inanimate and nonhuman:
diamond <--> snake
fire <--> speech
fire <--> animals
wind <--> future
cow <--> angel
water <--> light
darvishi درویشی <--> Div دیو
earth <--> Bahman بهمن
mars <--> wolf, pig
moon <--> effect of Gabriel's wings
earth <--> woman/enmity/illusio
mountain <--> ganj گنج
jinn جن <--> climate
Div <--> stone
climate <--> ghiamat قیامت
khidr خضر <--> life/death giving
(ajayeb-e chah) عجایب چاه
wonders of pits --> wonders of moon (Moghana مقنع, bringing a moon out of a pit, mah-e nakhshab ماه نخشب) [Moghana's work on mirror], [neiranjat نیرنجات and telesmat طلسمات (of Moghana’) ~=? ruse, tech],
[signifier of wonder:] mahi (ماهی fish) [reflection of the moon in water] --> mah (ماه moon) --> pointing at helal-e mah (هلال ماه half-moon) --> mouth of the beloved (یار yar) [registered in poetry of Sa'di سعدی] --> wonder finger on the open mouth
-also, Galileo's new telescope pointing at the moon (and sun-spots 900 years later than the chinese did,) and his pervasive approach to the knowledge milieu that he lived in, set the secular registers of truth
گفتم اگر از تو در خواهم شکافته شوی چه کنی؟ گفت شکافته شوم. بدو اشارت کرد و ماه به دو پاره شد
(ajayeb-e aeb-e aab) عجایب آب
آشنا ashena (=/= stranger) in Farsi comes from the relationship with water and swimming, somehow knowing the water
cognition (in Greek cogn, ‘having learned’), in Farsi shenakht (شناخت) is rooted in water, ashena: shenavar dar bahr budan شناور در بهر بودن, floating body, -shenasi شناسی-
(ajayeb-e donya) عجایب دنیا
wonders of earth(?) --> ghul (غول), serial killer, house full of bones (horror story)
(after donya/earth comes immidiatly, ghiamat قیامت)
donya: the temporal world (~=? cthulu) (--?--> material-semiotic time-space of donya)
-search ‘donya’ and its semiotic network in Ferdosi and others
-search ‘alam’ (in Nezami: dar alam alam afaridan در عالم عالم آفریدن)
-‘zamin’ or zamini (زمین، زمینی), what is meant when we say one thinks zamini in ajayeb? which zamin?
(ajayeb-e mardom) عجایب مرد[...]
(139)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%15.1[...]erran, 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, 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
-attendi[...]
(140)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%15.3[...]nts
partial connections (of distinct entities) ~= analogy [analogy allows one part contaminate systematically another part, and vice versa]
-coerced belief
the question of binaries: how we are who we are in relentless relationalities with other entities. in shaping and being shaped by objects, and subject/object is only convenient partial-good-enough for the moment --> **sorting operations** (kPRA0W1kECg), but they are not good descriptions beyond that.
#on Companion Manifesto
(Haraway's) *cyborg*: the “lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.” --to--> a much bigger queer family of *companion species* : becoming-with --> the co-constitutive interpenetration of humans and their others (machines, animals, and the environment).
-Haraway is going from ‘rage’ to 'love’
“historically challenged people” (Schimpfwort? فحش)
half-trained arguments
embodied cross-species sociality
I am trying to inhabit ajayeb critically; neither in celebration nor condemnation (like my sister asked)
what is my context? isis, tech-sci, art, world-wars, stories, terror,
the figures of ajayeb that i am cultivating, do they “more fruitfully inform livable politics and ontologies in current life worlds”?
ajayeb's species bring together human and nonhuman, organic and technological, history and myth, freedom and structure, state and subject, ...
*concrete:
◦a concrescence (growth by assimilation, nemov moshtarek نمو مشترک) of prehensions (seizing, perception but not necessarily cognition) of prehensions (graspings, chang zadan چنگ زدن)
◦an actual occasion
=> beings do not preexist their relatings
the verb of reality is full of nouns with appendages
nature/culture: *local category abstractions* (=/= universal: misplaced concreteness)
subject/object: *potent consequences* (=/= preexisting foundations)
foundation is always contingent (Haraway ☞ Butler)
•scale is contingent
•mutability is contingent
bestiary of agencies
kinds of relatings
in my work on ajayeb i am trying to carefully approach the notions of:
emergence, process, historicity, difference, specificity
-and by that teach myself an artful practice rich with:
co-habitation, co-constitution, contingency
on-the-ground work:
-Verran # Nigeria Yoruba --> “emergent ontologies,” “get on together” (...how can *general* knowledge be nurtured in postcolonial worlds committed to taking *difference* seriously?”)
-Thompson # Kenya --> “ontological choreographies” (...bodies, human and nonhuman, are taken apart and put together in proces[...]
(141)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%15.4[...]egory abstractions* (=/= universal: misplaced concreteness)
subject/object: *potent consequences* (=/= preexisting foundations)
foundation is always contingent (Haraway ☞ Butler)
•scale is contingent
•mutability is contingent
bestiary of agencies
kinds of relatings
in my work on ajayeb i am trying to carefully approach the notions of:
emergence, process, historicity, difference, specificity
-and by that teach myself an artful practice rich with:
co-habitation, co-constitution, contingency
on-the-ground work:
-Verran # Nigeria Yoruba --> “emergent ontologies,” “get on together” (...how can *general* knowledge be nurtured in postcolonial worlds committed to taking *difference* seriously?”)
-Thompson # Kenya --> “ontological choreographies” (...bodies, human and nonhuman, are taken apart and put together in processes)
-Strathern # Papua New Guinean --> “partial connections” (...patterns within which the players are neither wholes nor parts ... necessary counter-intuitive geometries and incongruent translations)
what kind of refigurations i need for the tropic work that feel is required for the for ontological choreography of ajayeb (in technoscience or elsewhere? other societies with liberal or non-liberal individual or state, with other techno-monsters, automated warriors, terrorists, and all the waste, cruelty, indifference, ignorance, and loss that comes with, as well as joy, play, labor, and invention--)?
-how do i narrate this (ajayeb and non-ajayeb, the wondrous and the mundane) co-history?
-how do i embody an art of relating (as is never done once and for all)?
*species : biological kind of reality + scientific expertise necessary to that kind of reality
(what would or could trouble ‘biological kind,’ ‘categories of organism’?)
{ machinic + textual + organic ~-=> species }--> causality-story, origin-story, Real-Presence-story (~transubstantiated signs of the flesh),
•species is about defining difference, rooted in polyvocal fugues of **doctrines of cause**
•one thinks of species as logical category, logical type, visual impression, members of a category that have the same characteristics. but you also say “be specific!” you want the opposite. you want a list of relentless particularities.
•(for Haraway species is about) a particular kind of semiotics where sign and flesh are tangled
Marx and Freud in shit and gold, primitive scat and civilized metal, in specie
[title]
**ajayeb's technologies of (Persian) subject/object-making**
nature and culture implode into one another (in the relentlessly historically specific ways)
(Haraway ☞ Althusser) **interpellation** (estizah استیضاح) ==> concrete individuals (in the modern state)
*the ideologically loaded narra[...]
(143)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%15.5[...]al or state, with other techno-monsters, automated warriors, terrorists, and all the waste, cruelty, indifference, ignorance, and loss that comes with, as well as joy, play, labor, and invention--)?
-how do i narrate this (ajayeb and non-ajayeb, the wondrous and the mundane) co-history?
-how do i embody an art of relating (as is never done once and for all)?
*species : biological kind of reality + scientific expertise necessary to that kind of reality
(what would or could trouble ‘biological kind,’ ‘categories of organism’?)
{ machinic + textual + organic ~-=> species }--> causality-story, origin-story, Real-Presence-story (~transubstantiated signs of the flesh),
•species is about defining difference, rooted in polyvocal fugues of **doctrines of cause**
•one thinks of species as logical category, logical type, visual impression, members of a category that have the same characteristics. but you also say “be specific!” you want the opposite. you want a list of relentless particularities.
•(for Haraway species is about) a particular kind of semiotics where sign and flesh are tangled
Marx and Freud in shit and gold, primitive scat and civilized metal, in specie
[title]
**ajayeb's technologies of (Persian) subject/object-making**
nature and culture implode into one another (in the relentlessly historically specific ways)
(Haraway ☞ Althusser) **interpellation** (estizah استیضاح) ==> concrete individuals (in the modern state)
*the ideologically loaded narratives ==> life and death, health and illness, longevity and extinction, etc.
{how not to do estizah (our objects, peers)? latent individualization in apass's requirement of ‘intentionality’ from its participants: “no sleep-walking!” [--> art as “explicit intentional act.” Merleau-Ponty's account the body-schema.] [estizah is the site of encounter with the ‘man of law’ in which one becomes a man of law: by asking what is your “name and business,” demanding “proof” of me. one way of responding to that demand of name is to give your name as a performance in an amerindian mode: “three were dead before they knew.” that's my name.] The material ritual practice of ‘recognition’ : “Who is there?” and “It's me!” of the everyday life ==> makes us concrete subject (in the ideology in democracy and law) --> independent agents with self-produced identities. (in capitalist societies) **subject: a self-conscious “responsible” agent whose actions can be explained by his or her beliefs and thoughts.** subject formation defines the limits of each individual; values, desires, and preferences. ---- in a way that I realize that a ‘hailing’ was addressed at me, thinking ‘that means me,’ and the answer is what transforms me into a subject : a “mis-recognition” [--> we can open a dossier on prophet and ‘answering’ the call]; [~-> what Tarof hails?] ---- for Althusser being a[...]
(145)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%15.5[...] more potent the tropes, the truer the story***
(without being distracted by scandals and meta-stories?!)
stories traffic in tropes, 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[...]
(146)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%15.6[...] (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 materialism****** (Hertwig 1894)
(Hertwig concludes: it has been shown [...] that much of what Weismann would explain by) determinants within the egg must have cause outside the egg.
[***egg and its outside]
[the causality drama is not that which came first, the chicken or the egg, but what inside the egg that has cause outside the egg]
context-dependent sex
genetic assimilation
life history strategies
teratology (kaj-rikht-shenasi کج ریخت 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* (~ congn[...]
(148)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%15.9[...]ation, remains a man. What would he make of Patthar Baba, the stone turned to saint? (Anand)
(our sense of) our own ecological peril and fragility--our shared fate with our neighbors.
[The ajayeb's beings and their neighbors]
...................................
[instead of the struggle against sin (~=? christianity) or the struggle against suffering (~=? Buddhism),] the struggle between (different) sins
...................................
(the reading of ajayeb portraits) the global [and therefore *ethical] consciousness (at the end of 12th century middle-south asia, “the east”)
...................................
[Martha Kenney]
(how not) render ‘wonder’ a strictly historical object(?)
[as basis for building a contemporary ethics]
(wonder is ajib عجیب)
just-so story
in science and philosophy, a just-so story, also called an ad hoc fallacy, is an unverifiable and unfalsifiable narrative explanation for a cultural practice, a biological trait, or behavior of humans or other animals. (wikipedia)
etiological myths
etiology: the study of causation, or origination
the politics technology and the politics of storytelling.
[...] Narratives, along with literary devices, tropes, figures, images and the aesthetics of language, inhabit and inform even our most reliable knowledge-making practices.
storytelling as one of the consequential material practices
[storytelling is material practice]
[where there is a situated perspectives there is storytelling]
it is “practicing generous reading”
and “technique of refiguration” --> create alternative forms of knowledge
[figuration ~ storytelling apparatuses]
(Haraway, Primate Vision)
•“Attention to narrative is not instead of attention to science, ...”
•[there is no way that we can] escape the particular pleasures and dangers embedded in the story-laden sciences.
•[what are the things that] could only be explained by cultural, not scientific, genealogies [?] --> ideological apparition[s]
•Something 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 cloe[...]
(149)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%16.2[...]>
(the reading of ajayeb portraits) the global [and therefore *ethical] consciousness (at the end of 12th century middle-south asia, “the east”)
...................................
[Martha Kenney]
(how not) render ‘wonder’ a strictly historical object(?)
[as basis for building a contemporary ethics]
(wonder is ajib عجیب)
just-so story
in science and philosophy, a just-so story, also called an ad hoc fallacy, is an unverifiable and unfalsifiable narrative explanation for a cultural practice, a biological trait, or behavior of humans or other animals. (wikipedia)
etiological myths
etiology: the study of causation, or origination
the politics technology and the politics of storytelling.
[...] Narratives, along with literary devices, tropes, figures, images and the aesthetics of language, inhabit and inform even our most reliable knowledge-making practices.
storytelling as one of the consequential material practices
[storytelling is material practice]
[where there is a situated perspectives there is storytelling]
it is “practicing generous reading”
and “technique of refiguration” --> create alternative forms of knowledge
[figuration ~ storytelling apparatuses]
(Haraway, Primate Vision)
•“Attention to narrative is not instead of attention to science, ...”
•[there is no way that we can] escape the particular pleasures and dangers embedded in the story-laden sciences.
•[what are the things that] could only be explained by cultural, not scientific, genealogies [?] --> ideological apparition[s]
•Something 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, th[...]
(150)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%16.2[...]
art: “ontological theater” (=/=? ‘linguistic turn’ {--> Marialena's remark on The Pillow Book, that the film don't care about what is being written. she is a child of the linguistic turn?})
(=/= “return to reality” : “the ontological turn”)
(=/= language as “a necessary evil,” aesthetics characterized as the main instrument of ideological mystification)
~ learn to trust objects figured in unfamiliar ways* (, my bow and arrow?)
[both Haraway (“material-semiotic”) and Barad (“material-discursive”) are working against this kind of split between language and reality, both in the level of analysis (of one's object) and composition (of one's book)]
**where do our power come from if not from evidence?** (@Seba)
--> the *specter of deception* (it happened when i used aesthetics in my questions in my excursion at Vladimir's block, my peers thinking “what if we are beguiled?” --> the suspicious refrains of “trust no one”) =/= “attentive wondering care” (Bynum)
*** to tell enchanted stories --> <== we must struggle against the fear of being tricked ***
-this fear of being tricked ==> Descartes’ beast-machine hypothesis (against nonhuman agency) : the clockwork animal and gods; a site where animality and technicity were collapsed and both were rendered as deceptive.
-Descartes’ beast-machine anxieties are still with us. (being duped by the) trickster agencies of animal-like automata--animals, spirits, and technologies have dubious agencies.
(my work on ajayeb hopefully,) is about cultivating wild facts, to be at risk with our craft, creating beautiful objects that give charismatic form to their matters of care
i don't know in advance, how stories and words will flow through us --> i have to learn pragmatic experimentation with magic, words and ideas: [#ppp]
•poetry --> to do with the art of language
•poiesis --> process of creation
•poetics --> questions of composition and form
}--(attention to)--> form + composition + influence
“i am rubied by your attention”
(ruby: yaghute sorkh یاقوت سرخ) ~-> to describe the effect of an encounter between two
...shifting verbs to nouns and nouns to verb }--> practical
*relational properties of language:
•viscosity (chasbandegi چسبندگی)
•conductivity
•velocity
(=/= daunting)
-collective
-exploratory
-supportive
(what to do with) the unavoidable childishness (and girlish) of wonder and of fables
-does wonder need to grow up?
there is a risk that that which awakens our epistemological appetite will ultimately be unfriendly, unseemly, unsophisticated, unsuitable
•wonder goes beyond what is suitable (Irigaray,) even threatens our status as “serious, adult thinkers” (Stengers)
[...]
(151)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%17.1[...]t metaphysical)
wonder:
•passion (of already born) --✕--> reenveloped in love
•touched and moves toward and within the attraction --✕--> nostalgia for the first dwelling
•passion of first encounter --✕--> repetition
[Haraway reading Derrida: on killing,]
(Derrida understood that this structure, this) logic of sacrifice and this exclusive possession of the capacity for response, is what produces the Animal
the death-defying arrogance of ascribing such wondrous positivities to the Human
(Derrida)"The question of the said animal in its entirety comes down to knowing not whether the animal speaks but whether one can know what ‘respond’ means. And how to distinguish 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[...]
(153)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%17.3[...] (through refraction)
--> “empirical perspective” : the *altered scale* also allows the object to reveal its specificity, its particularity; boundaries are rendered indeterminate and exist only to the extent that they are continually enacted.
(Hayward ☞ Barad:)
Phenomena do not merely mark the epistemological inseparability of “observer” and “observed”; rather, phenomena are the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting ‘components.’ That is, phenomena are ontologically primitive relations--relations without preexisting relata. [*relatum: one of the objects between which a relation is said to hold. *relata: would-be antecedent (tabar تبار) components of relations.]
reverie of reflectivity =/= refraction (--> makes explicit transforms the tendency of the image to orient representation, foregrounding the threaded visual space between the image and the spectator.)
***dynamic (re)configurings of the world, specific agential practices/intra-actions/performances through which specific exclusionary boundaries are enacted***
(Kaja Silverman, the subject of semiotics)
spectatorships =/=! representations =/=! referents
(ontological distinction: “=/=!”)
the surreal technoscientific look --?--> allowing wondrous but material extensions into the ajayeb domain
in creating a “look” for ajayeb: whether or not a used/user interaction can have ethical dimensions?
refraction is not framework, but a pathway. it engages patterns of interference and exchange
the xeno-sensual in the ajayeb
different differences that are sensed and mediated
...................................
poetic historiography
(historiography: the study of the writing of history and of written histories)
...................................
to begin writing about ajayeb with the citational, ‘avardeand ke...’ (...آوردهاند که)
citation, an important characteristic of fables, is about relational histories.
absence of definitive source (in my old childhood favorite radio show, by bring an endless list of fantastic source and bodies of lures) allows monsters to flourish and me the full range of my passionate crafts. ajayeb's compelling mystery demands (from me) an unorthodox and omnivorous approach (hame-chiz-khar همه چیز خوار).
اما راویان اخبار و ناقلان آثار و طوطیان شکرشکن شیرین گفتار و خوشه چینان خرمن سخن دانی و صرافان سر بازار معانی و چابک سواران میدان دانش توسن خوش خرام سخن را بدینگونه به جولان در آورده اند که ...
•Mirabile dictu... (miraculous to say...)
towards Despret's talking parrots
parrots (shekar-shekan) (and philosophers) really like to co[...]
(154)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%17.9[...]nd implies a suffixial (pasvandi پسوندی) space of attachment that is simultaneously generalizable and abstract yet its function can be enacted only when taken up by particular objects (Hayward & Weinstein)
trans* (prepositionally oriented) “is the process through which thingness and beingness are constituted” [...] “marking the ‘with,’ ‘through,’ ‘of,’ ‘in,’ and ‘across’ that make life possible”
•materializes prepositional movements
the ‘human on board’ no longer possesses critical purchase, it no longer “delineates a normative standard of legibility,” “the elite status of being considered fully human” (how is it in ajayeb?)
(biopolitics of) de-, in-, non-, trans-
a ‘turn’ (= a cause to move, a difference in position ==> a change in nature) enables creatures to migrate from the margins to the center of theoretical interrogatives
Haraway prefering (the energetic expressive capacity of) ‘with’ over ‘and’
-syntactical problem of ‘and’ raised to the power of n
-she puts the emphasis on with-ness --> to reinvigorate (tajdide niru تجدید نیرو) attention to materiality but also matter's contingent force --> intersectional demands of assemblage
“and...and...and”
trans, speciating technology, the drive for suffixial endpoints
(prepositional operations on suffixiated) assemblages of spacetimematterings
**** terrible violence is directed to the non-existing, the never having existed
‘*’ (the asterisk) is paratactic (faghede ravabet فاقد روابط) (=/= conjunction,) it designates multiplication, it repurposes, displaces, renames, replicates, and intensifies terms, adding yet more texture, increased vitalization
-it is a sensuous node
-making (my points) a composite of affects and percepts --> speciation is always a cultivated response ***
*trap: “means also mouth, or mode of utterance; it is the “O” curve of lips and throat that makes sounds phonic and names the apprehension of becoming bodily. A trap, in weaving, is also a break in the threads, an unraveling, loosening, unwinding that opens up space. When we think of spider webs, trap is a silk net, a sticky mesh that registers sensation. For the spider, its trap is its nearby-ness, its where-ness, its with-ness. [--> lure;] (Hayward & Weinstein)
-how, then, might we hear the phrase “trapped in the wrong body” as less about authenticity (fixity and normativity) than about *textures of spacetime* (prefixial movements)?
[harkate johari حرکت جوهری ~/=? harkate pishvandi حرکت پیشوندی]._/'--> Sadra
(Susan Stryker warns) that transsexuals, in their capacity to be monstrous, arise, like Frankenstein's creature, from the operating tables of their (re)birth as “something more, and something other” than their medical service providers may have inte[...]
(155)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%19[...]r />
•*species panic* (<-- the concept of the homosexual panic defense) {androids: species + trans embodiment}--> **genuine animals** transitivity: “shifting positions on a series of spectrums, where human, animal, and machine bleed into one another” [Huebert]--{"it”: exclusive right of gendered pronouns--"it” ascribed to artificial animals and androids --> the distinction between “genuine” and “inauthentic”; “it” leaves us in a perpetual species panic}
•*animal symbolic* --> origin of the construction of the human located in sexual difference [Nurka]
it seems with ‘human’ one always spring inexorably back to sex --> sexual difference and its origins in the problematic of difference
-individuating difference ==>? prepositional singularities--the potentialities to differ that are not yet stabilized into the categories of an individual
[Nurka ☞ Colebrook] concept of “transitive indifference” transforms the self/other pairing beyond the demands of recognition and relation --> (all-too-often) animal difference serves to secure human sameness [=/= ouroboros abyssal beastliness] --> ontological difference serves only to erect man as the being for whom “the world is nothing more than the arena whereby he recognizes his proper difference,”
•*animal techne* ~~--> Jackass & Wildboyz : animality is viscerally, painfully, and transformatively encountered or enacted by the human body [Seymour], sliding down the animacy hierarchy [Chen], gesturing toward various interconnected trans-(species) corporalities performed in (Critical Life Studies texts and) Wildboyz (=/= elite status of human) --> (Barad's) ethics of mattering : connections of human and nonhuman life always already taking place on bodies*****
transdisciplinarity: a self-adaptive complexity [...] foreground[ing] the transduction of knowledge as it passes across and between the interpretive and methodological planes of composing knowledge. (Katie King)
“distributed being and cognition”
...attendant mammalian attachment
individuating indifference
(anthropocene's iteration of the) expansionist logic of manifest destiny
-situated knowledges (Haraway)
-trans-knowledges (Hayward)
[*]trans- : *promise of moving across without holding tightly to the locations that it is moving from*, crossing of spacetime, a movement within relationship [~/=? inheritance, the experience of being tied to a long string that is stretching and is connected to somewhere]
coalitional thinking = trans-knowledge --Hayward--> (~= my work: heuristic + trans-) a thought here, then a reflection, perhaps a question that prompts another story, and probably a walk full of pointing and talking, walking on scales [on burdens and atrocities of abundance] (--> I use:) translation, transfiguration, transformation, trans-differentiation, transcription
-what [...]
(156)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%19.1[...]/
Hafez: کنون که در چمن آمد گل از عدم به وجود بنفشه در قدم او نهاد سر به سجود http://ganjoor.net/hafez/ghazal/sh219/
=/= durdastha دوردستها, beyonds
donya دنیا <--> gozar گذر
-->? materialist
Nezami:
بهاری داری ازوی بر خور امروز که هر فصلی نخواهد بود نوروز
گلی کو را نبوید آدمی زاد چو هنگام خزان آید برد باد
(ruse, san'at صنعت -->) hile حیله =/= sho'bade شعبده (shab-bazi شب بازی, neyrang نیرنگ,)
lahn-haye jahan
لحنهای جهان
...................................
(feral?) table of contents
how we know that contents are tabled at all? --> inheritances of taxonomy, natural philosophies aesthetics: tamed facts
#Rigs, my ajayeb diagrams
...................................
ajayeb's histories (~ ajayeb's historically situated relational worldings) =/= societies of individuals in human-only histories (~ Euclidean figures and stories of Man)
(which network is?) a netbag for collecting up what is crucial for ongoing
ajayeb's technotheocratic geoengineering [, it “fixes” some common imaginations the “affairs of life,” and not specifically the “afterlife,” (within the {terminology ~} figural-conceptual powers of syms and material-semiotic time-space of the Indo-Greco-Arab-Turko-Persian terra taxa)]
•periods of time
•“known” life
•abode (budgah بودگاه, Wohnplatz)
•donya دنيا
-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[...]
(157)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%19.4[...]against Alex's notion of “destablizing stabilities as the task of artistic research.” I choose to refuse to put what is in flux against what is stable or attempting to stabilize. (I am in alignment with Katie King sharpening for me that) we constantly share our stage, settings, performances, sensoria, reenactments among agencies and species, creating varying stabilities, some fragile, some robust]
*account--synonymous with: description, information, list, reason, record, statement, story, sum, tale
-a contractual relationship
-giving an itemized account of recent transactions and resulting balance (of your metaphors = material-discursive apparatuses that are materializing your found empirical objects)
-accountability is always also about remaking those relations that produced your objects
-detailed explanation of money held in trust, to count, enumerate* -->{telling =? enumerating}
counting your senses
*accountability is about your ‘import’ functions (like in a programming language when you import a library of functions)
--> count: an agent of sorting that separates units or groups of a collection --> list, listed --> to have importance and worth ~-> country ---{? unexpected countries}
--0--> ‘count’ is also a word technologically tethered, origin of computing
(Kirksey ☞ Leigh Star) to begin with the question, ‘cui bono?’ (for whose benefit?) =/= to begin with a celebration of the fact of human/nonhuman mingling
...................................
my Rigs diagrams are ‘swarms’? -a multitude of different creative agents
ajayeb.net (how can it be:) not a website but a “para-site”
•am i creating an ego (for ajayeb) in my ajayeb.net? if yes, that would be interesting how?
topos/topic of hypertext, spatial character of electronic writing
topic [from Greek ‘topos’: a place, in ancient rhetoric used to refer to commonplaces, conventional units, or methods of thought] exist in a writing space that is not only a visual surface but also a data structure in the computer --> Hypertext: “is not the writing of a place, but rather a writing with places, spatially realized topics.” (Bolter ☜ Hubert)
-in my hypertext, which writing materials, cognitive mappings, itineraries of reading, textual stability, loops and reductions are addressed?
•in ajayeb.net the so-called url address or location bar, is itself a control panel, a graphical user interface widget; how did i come to use “?q=” : rhetorics of technologized inquiry in place before i even could think about how do I allow my objects constituted by “?”, “q” and “=” of the language and grammar of internet
•(when i uploaded my hypertext i faced immediately the big data:) google webmasters tools is my first readership, it communicates its reading with me; (did i have a desire to make the hypertext for a machine?) who/what is doing the reading (in the world of[...]
(158)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%19.7[...]ount’ is also a word technologically tethered, origin of computing
(Kirksey ☞ Leigh Star) to begin with the question, ‘cui bono?’ (for whose benefit?) =/= to begin with a celebration of the fact of human/nonhuman mingling
...................................
my Rigs diagrams are ‘swarms’? -a multitude of different creative agents
ajayeb.net (how can it be:) not a website but a “para-site”
•am i creating an ego (for ajayeb) in my ajayeb.net? if yes, that would be interesting how?
topos/topic of hypertext, spatial character of electronic writing
topic [from Greek ‘topos’: a place, in ancient rhetoric used to refer to commonplaces, conventional units, or methods of thought] exist in a writing space that is not only a visual surface but also a data structure in the computer --> Hypertext: “is not the writing of a place, but rather a writing with places, spatially realized topics.” (Bolter ☜ Hubert)
-in my hypertext, whi[...]
(159)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%19.7[...]rison?*** --Latour--> if they are so intelligent, how did they get the ‘chance’ to become so ‘well equipped’?
(in this question can be raised an unexpected animal)
[(how) the makhlughat/مخلوقات/creatures/beings of ajayeb were well equipped (with agency, will, intention,)]
sheep, ‘the epitome of the silly animal’
(همگون دوستی hamgune-dusti, khod-no dusti خود نوع دوستی) altruism, in birds (and humans)
Zahavi calling his birds, ‘refugees,’ non-territorial individuals
quest for social ‘status’ and prestige in Babblers
(birds know that) signals for prestige are costly
inclusive fitness
porousness of the (semiotic) demarcation [wild/domesticated --> quasi-wild/quasi-domesticated] --> (successively and recursively) unstable and living tropes* --> we should probably redefine our (creaturely) subjects in correspondence to (Leibnizian) ‘quasi-causes'[...]
(160)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%19.7[...]pected animal)
[(how) the makhlughat/مخلوقات/creatures/beings of ajayeb were well equipped (with agency, will, intention,)]
sheep, ‘the epitome of the silly animal’
(همگون دوستی hamgune-dusti, khod-no dusti خود نوع دوستی) altruism, in birds (and humans)
Zahavi calling his birds, ‘refugees,’ non-territorial individuals
quest for social ‘status’ and prestige in Babblers
(birds know that) signals for prestige are costly
inclusive fitness
porousness of the (semiotic) demarcation [wild/domesticated --> quasi-wild/quasi-domesticated] --> (successively and recursively) unstable and living tropes* --> we should probably redefine our (creaturely) subjects in correspondence to (Leibnizian) ‘quasi-causes’
quasi-feral
the ‘unexpected’ often unfolds in an unexpected way. (Despert ☞ Leibniz)
anthropomorphism is always someone's anthropomorphism
anthropomorphism is always someone's common sense
{(becoming interested in) individual (detailed nuances of) difference =/= when “model” becomes the goal}--> standard model (of natural science) --> a presupposed specific idea of “science” --> use a technical, highly theoretical language ==> epistemological objectification of animals (--> representation of animals as natural objects) ~= desubjectified animals
(safeguards of) authorship and meaning (won't allow Attar) ==ask==> |X| what is your “subject” interested in? what matters to them?
(Attar never looked for varieties--in anecdotes, in little stories, in individual bird biographies -->{these are the materials that I am collecting from my family telegram group posted animal videos})
thinking with the bird
looking with it (=/= looking at it) --and--> and knowing its intentions
both humans and nonhumans create narratives, rather than just telling them. (there are socialities in which) they both create/disclose new scripts ~~--> inhabiting an existential world ~-> full of actors and living adventures, that give them:
•a history
•a bibliography
•a personality
•
(and) a full repertoire of:
•will
•intention
•agency
•
to recreate similarities between scientific and mundane practices (<-- neccesory for making companionship)
*agency is an equipment
*(greeting) rituals ~=perform==> social links* --> assess reliability
--> I am interested in ritual in its mundane sense =/= performance-art ritual {*}--> who are they in the (becoming in) ritual? (--> who is “Evamaria” in her performance-art ritual?) --> which meaning you embody?
the difference between response and reaction (not so clear [as I thought]) #passive reacting beings...
(this difference) structure[...]
(161)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%19.8[...]e habituating the performer / scientists habituating their animals*], --> scientists are getting it, why the artists and their audience don't get it!? }--(ontological risk)--> ***the performer is a social subject*** : (category changes in everyday life)
•when I am by myself: I am an orangutan, sometimes snake, I am ‘something’
•when I am with others: I turn to human
•when I am “objective”: I am off-category, I am not ‘something’ (-super strange!)
}==> the ‘Other’ [not only the police officer,] always estizah (interpellation استيضاح) you(?)
it is very interesting the way Despret is working (on the field) with Haraway's (intuitive genius) analysis
scientist's will to be ‘no-one’ that would prevent any interaction
(Despret's constructivist and non-relativist translation of ‘the ways animals act are the consequences of the observer's gaze’:) *animal actions are responsible consequences*
[(*)performance: the responsible consequence of a (no less) responsible gaze]
...................................
Verran, knowledge economy
knowledger always authored
cross-cultural knowledge practices
-physis, “I bring forth”, “I produce”, “I make to grow” (=/= “techne” in Aristotlian sense)
X-physis: a process which sticks out in the direction X --> how this morpheme has come to mean (since mid-15th century) “form” and “nature”? (this is about thinking of making)
“physis” requires the different perspectives of the four causes (aitia):
•material --> source of matter
•efficient --> power/motion
•formal --> containing its form
•final --> end
zoopoiesis --> zoopoetics, explorations of how animals (zoo) shape the making of text, study of ‘the literary animal’
...................................
Katie King
“flexible knowledges” on the edge of validity ♥ (--> almost invalid*)
fantasy of education
culture wars
intellectual enterpreneurs
upheavals and connectivities of globalization
changing patterns of interaction
(aren't we here to) change the patterns of interaction
(aren't we here to) change the faith of letters and love stories
reenactments (are fantasy practices and realities) =/= simple, accessible, and democratized (knowledge)
“layers of locals and globals”
[somehow I couldn't feel in his long term project what is Kobe's relation to] (processes and their product that require) developing and learning new skills, pleasures, and communities
-at the end many of us (are busy with or) want to (or inhabit the “will to”) modelling reality
this is also what ajayeb was busy with
***we are always doing both “purification” and “hybridization”
[]we direct our attention simultaneously to the wo[...]
(162)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%19.9[...] I couldn't feel in his long term project what is Kobe's relation to] (processes and their product that require) developing and learning new skills, pleasures, and communities
-at the end many of us (are busy with or) want to (or inhabit the “will to”) modelling reality
this is also what ajayeb was busy with
***we are always doing both “purification” and “hybridization”
[]we direct our attention simultaneously to the work of purification and the work of hybridization ==> we immediately stop being wholly modern --> *our future begins to change* / *our past begins to change*
[my work on ajayeb (“hybrids down below” {Latour}) is precisely about (this kind of) transformation of pasts and futures] ==> meeting companion species {if my work on ajayeb doesn't teach me how to meet the dog in my street, the pigeon on my window, the juju on the edge of my paper, what is it good for then?!}
(*)companion species: assemblages of living and non-living ‘species’***
(Janina is all along engaged with companion species)
(an strategy:) allocation of responsibility for grasping information
assemblage at various levels and sublevels characterizes *explanations* and *practices*
technoscientific tsunami that will obliterate prior practices and cultures...
(learning to) see old and new forms of confusions, docility, subjectivity, morality, agency, empowerment (when we are together)
(to recognize and make) new sites of negotiation
Alberti: bodies of Minoan figurines “wear” the appropriate gender for a specific ritual practice, they don't “bear” gender (as their essential feature) ==> gender salience is always in question, not a propor presupposition
“sex has emerged as a salient attribute of the pot's character as a pot”
when zoomorphic figures are present...
ajayeb's zoomorphic figures with[...]
(163)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20[...]acter as a pot”
when zoomorphic figures are present...
ajayeb's zoomorphic figures with their salient attributes are not “purposed” necessarily being to encode their belief-system onto objects that we may read today--like story-board--but rather to make interventions into the world of human-nonhuman relations. to either assist or resist such transformations
[terms sharpened with Alberti + Katie King]
museum studies
(Hayward:) freedom --> initiative in shaping a narrative, a visible body, where one is able to engage and resist [@Xiri] --> contradicts itself because one is really not free from the policing of the physical body --> coming into a [...] body (==> reality and disillusion in public spaces) -->{ narrative, flesh, is filled with memory, emotions, and complexity [@Hoda]
*crafting a space for existence may involve:
•unfolding history
•mapping normative processes
•immersing a “body” in vulnerability (*)
deploy =/= unveiling
sort out =/= debunking هدايت
glocalizing
Katie King reading Hayward: [...] assembling apparatuses for enfolding visions of instrumental, subjective and cognitive technologies among ciliated (مودار, ریشهدار) bodies
...................................
technologies of the literal
grain of analysis, timescale, noting/creating hybrid objects of study
[comparing the incomparable --> lumping --then--> splitting]
***starting off a research project which eventually hopes to have something to say about that hybrid “thing”*** ...with some despised members of a particular time period (--> switching those who count as major or minor characters), promises to make it possible to build in *a range of genders (not just two), a range of writing technologies, a range of self-effacing acts, and a range of publics*, while working from a particular place and time
***there are many different interests creating the pasts***, the possible worlds...
(Leigh Star ☞ Katie King ☞ Sina) “comparing the incomparable”
here i am trying an outline of my interrelated research practices in a preliminary character, the intersection of which I am just at the beginning to understand
ajayeb: writing technologies of the 12th century Iran
plain style
soing naked as a sign
dress and address
ecology of writing technologies
(Katie King:) writing technologies: ideologies layered in time and space * under which writing has been divided [also cannot be divided] from other generations of cultural meaning
myriad hybrid forms, commingling in material and ideological proliferations
(with Katie King's interest in women's writing technologies)
[...]
(164)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20.1[...]tradicts itself because one is really not free from the policing of the physical body --> coming into a [...] body (==> reality and disillusion in public spaces) -->{ narrative, flesh, is filled with memory, emotions, and complexity [@Hoda]
*crafting a space for existence may involve:
•unfolding history
•mapping normative processes
•immersing a “body” in vulnerability (*)
deploy =/= unveiling
sort out =/= debunking هدايت
glocalizing
Katie King reading Hayward: [...] assembling apparatuses for enfolding visions of instrumental, subjective and cognitive technologies among ciliated (مودار, ریشهدار) bodies
...................................
technologies of the literal
grain of analysis, timescale, noting/creating hybrid objects of study
[comparing the incomparable --> lumping --then--> splitting]
***starting off a research project which eventually hopes to have something to say about that hybrid “thing”*** ...with some despised members of a particular time period (--> switching those who count as major or minor characters), promises to make it possible to build in *a range of genders (not just two), a range of writing technologies, a range of self-effacing acts, and a range of publics*, while working from a particular place and time
***there are many different interests creating the pasts***, the possible worlds...
(Leigh Star ☞ Katie King ☞ Sina) “comparing the incomparable”
here i am trying an outline of my interrelated research practices in a preliminary character, the intersection of which I am just at the beginning to understand
ajayeb: writing technologies of the 12th century Iran
plain style
soing naked as a sign
dress and address
ecology of writing technologies
(Katie King:) writing technologies: ideologies layered in time and space * under which writing has been divided [also cannot be divided] from other generations of cultural meaning
myriad hybrid forms, commingling in material and ideological proliferations
(with Katie King's interest in women's writing technologies)
“presentist”: a practice of classification and categorization to access pasts
continuities and local discontinuities --> is ‘continuity’ (always) a universal abstraction?**
relative universalization
prescrptions for speech and silence
what is gained and what is lost when “tidying up the archive”? (a german problem)
prescriptions for speech and silence
“politeness phenomena”
‘plain speech’ for Quakers: rejection of ‘idle’ speech. preaching was another version of sacrificing seld-will, and was appropriate[...]
(166)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20.1[...]ocalizing
Katie King reading Hayward: [...] assembling apparatuses for enfolding visions of instrumental, subjective and cognitive technologies among ciliated (مودار, ریشهدار) bodies
...................................
technologies of the literal
grain of analysis, timescale, noting/creating hybrid objects of study
[comparing the incomparable --> lumping --then--> splitting]
***starting off a research project which eventually hopes to have something to say about that hybrid “thing”*** ...with some despised members of a particular time period (--> switching those who count as major or minor characters), promises to make it possible to build in *a range of genders (not just two), a range of writing technologies, a range of self-effacing acts, and a range of publics*, while working from a particular place and time
***there are many different interests creating the pasts***, the possible worlds...
/>
(Leigh Star ☞ Katie King ☞ Sina) “comparing the incomparable”
here i am trying an outline of my interrelated research practices in a preliminary character, the intersection of which I am just at the beginning to understand
ajayeb: writing technologies of the 12th century Iran
plain style
soing naked as a sign
dress and address
ecology of writing technologies
(Katie King:) writing technologies: ideologies layered in time and space * under which writing has been divided [also cannot be divided] from other generations of cultural meaning
myriad hybrid forms, commingling in material and ideological proliferations
(with Katie King's interest in women's writing technologies)
“presentist”: a practice of classification and categorization to access pasts
continuities and local discontinuities --> is ‘continuity'nuity’ (always) a universal abstraction?**
relative universalization
prescrptions for speech and silence
what is gained and what is lost when “tidying up the archive”? (a german problem)
prescriptions for speech and silence
“politeness phenomena”
‘plain speech’ for Quakers: rejection of ‘idle’ speech. preaching was another version of sacrificing seld-will, and was appropriate speech.
public preaching in particular was also a challenge to social relations and interaction --> a challenge to gender, speaking public was a cultural humiliation for individual women --> the Quaker women practiced preaching as a personal humiliation instrumental to their own salvation [! in a weird way i also did this to my self] #becoming woman-->{a liquefying aspect: “womanhood” was used metaphorically to identify those who could not preach, the surrender of (male) authority to God by men was “fem[...]
(167)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20.1[...] />
‘nakedness’ was simultaneously literally his own, a figure of the world, an example of many others, the abstract principle, and the essential truth of the one addressed
-simplicity, economy, and plainness; to reject all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style
preferring language of artisans, countrymen, merchants, of wits and scholars
How sin is strengthened 1657
Milk for babes 1661
A message from the spirit of truth 1658
realized eschatology
انا الحق, an-al-hagh
(Damrosch:) the performance of the sign thus entailed a doubly negative aspect: in the person exhibiting it, a conviction of fulfilling a divine mandate in opposition to personal self-interest; and in those who witnessed it, an offense to ordinary social standards that actually served to authenticate it.
*the function of the sign was to bear prophetic witness rather than to get practical results; it fulfilled its purpose simply by being performed*
#shath, shathiat ==> tazkirat, --->{ what the saints of Tasavof (reported by Attar-{his “virtual witnessing” of “awliya” اولیا as a “realized"}, Quakers [as illegal nonconformist sect]) put together was their own writing technology infrastructure** ==> **routinization of charisma** <-- organizational structure ["advices and queries” نفحات الانس nafahat ~-> rationalized systematic intellectualizations]}
pattern of suffering that the believer literally and personally 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 [...]
(171)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20.2[...]ualizations]}
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 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 ri[...]
(172)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20.3[...]lemanly 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 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 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 archit[...]
(173)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20.3[...] 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 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 pasttim[...]
(174)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20.4[...] Blazing World, her own brand of natural philosophy under the guise of a romance... science for ladies{
1- enthusiasm ==> new science
2- study of natural philosophy ==> cardinal virtues of ladies, modesty and religious reverence
3- leisure activity, appropriate pasttime
*she participated in discussions central to her life and times* (am i participating in discussions central to my life and times?!)
Cavendish self-consciously produced herself as a fantastic and singular... (--> is that what i wish to produce?)
-Cavendish strangely shared with Quaker women an experimental life of proliferating genders, of dress, of personhood, og agency, of writing, of personae, but not of this *enabling collectivity*
hermaphroditical view of things: partly artificial, partly natural
status of clothing as a signifier of identity [<-- not always]
crossdressing (#my sticker period)
[modest witness] (--> Haraway's literal and figurative queering of categories)
the rhetoric of the modest witness --> the naked way of writing, undorned, factual, compelling: “naked writing” [crafted in the context of being virtually present at a demonstration, the ‘practice of credible witnessing’ (==> “truth”) in technoscience] was a proper reference point for feminist examination of objectivity and its relationship to a science founded in exclusion of women. the new man of science had to be chaste, modest, heterosexual man who desires yet eschews a sexually dangerous yet chaste and modest woman --> *female modesty was of the body; the new masculine virtue had to be of the mind* [women's presence turns out to disrupt the experiment (of the scientist or sufi) altogether] (“[...]best of women, pious, chaste, modest, and compassionate, are rendered unfit for science by the very qualities that make them the best of women”)
(Haraway, why credible witnessing is still at stake:) “this is the culture within which contingent facts [= the real case about the world, the object world] can be established with all the authority, but none of the considerable problems, of transcendental truth. this self-invisibility is the specifically modern, European, masculine, scientific form of the virtue of modesty. this is the form of modesty that pays off its practitioners in the coin of epistemological and social power. *this kind of modesty is one of the founding virtues of what we call modernity.* [...] and so he is endowed with the remarkable power to establish the facts.”
-“he [the civic man of reason] bears witness”: he is objective, he guarantees the clarity and purity of objects, as contestable representations, or as construced documents in their potent capacity to define the facts =/= queering confidence: enable a more corporal, inflected, and optically dense, if less elegant, kind of witness (to the matters of fact to emerge in the worlds of technoscience) [--> this is why i was trying[...]
(175)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20.4[...]of the mind* [women's presence turns out to disrupt the experiment (of the scientist or sufi) altogether] (“[...]best of women, pious, chaste, modest, and compassionate, are rendered unfit for science by the very qualities that make them the best of women”)
(Haraway, why credible witnessing is still at stake:) “this is the culture within which contingent facts [= the real case about the world, the object world] can be established with all the authority, but none of the considerable problems, of transcendental truth. this self-invisibility is the specifically modern, European, masculine, scientific form of the virtue of modesty. this is the form of modesty that pays off its practitioners in the coin of epistemological and social power. *this kind of modesty is one of the founding virtues of what we call modernity.* [...] and so he is endowed with the remarkable power to establish the facts.”
-“he [the civic man of reason] bears witness”: he is objective, he guarantees the clarity and purity of objects, as contestable representations, or as construced documents in their potent capacity to define the facts =/= queering confidence: enable a more corporal, inflected, and optically dense, if less elegant, kind of witness (to the matters of fact to emerge in the worlds of technoscience) [--> this is why i was trying to enable that kind of “optically dense” and “less elegant” kind of corporeality in our work on Olearius#]
(Haraway + Potter + Shapin + Schaffer:) elaboration on the idea of modest witness in which “modesty” might flip between either two sides:
1- historically masking a masculine solipsism as a preciously unmarked category: modest witness =/= haec vir : God forbid that the experimental way of life have queer foundations
2- (working across partialities) to create “a more adequate, self-critical technoscience committed to situated knowledges”
a nameless sin about which, without describing, he sought counsel
oratory
tension between dedication and prevarication (zaban bazi زبان بازی)
([let's not] being a member of) a “class” of those whose truth-telling was privileged
in certain sorts of people credibility was embodied
ajayeb.net's style of writing =/= a style of writing driven by the needs of readers who are relatively unskilled (in practical divinity, casuistry, or theology, and so on)
*** what kind of classification work, work of historical representation, is necessary now to show over time with greater clarity, in cooperation with more and more communities of practice, that in the best of all possible worlds, at any given moment, the past could be reordered to better reflect multiple constituencies now and then? ***
(Katie King + Bowker + Leigh Star)
[my ajayeb-making is about] partial connections (across time) ==> communities
([my poi[...]
(176)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20.5[...]ically modern, European, masculine, scientific form of the virtue of modesty. this is the form of modesty that pays off its practitioners in the coin of epistemological and social power. *this kind of modesty is one of the founding virtues of what we call modernity.* [...] and so he is endowed with the remarkable power to establish the facts.”
-“he [the civic man of reason] bears witness”: he is objective, he guarantees the clarity and purity of objects, as contestable representations, or as construced documents in their potent capacity to define the facts =/= queering confidence: enable a more corporal, inflected, and optically dense, if less elegant, kind of witness (to the matters of fact to emerge in the worlds of technoscience) [--> this is why i was trying to enable that kind of “optically dense” and “less elegant” kind of corporeality in our work on Olearius#]
(Haraway + Potter + Shapin + Schaffer:) elaboration on the idea of modest witness in which “modesty” might flip between either two sides:
1- historically masking a masculine solipsism as a preciously unmarked category: modest witness =/= haec vir : God forbid that the experimental way of life have queer foundations
2- (working across partialities) to create “a more adequate, self-critical technoscience committed to situated knowledges”
a nameless sin about which, without describing, he sought counsel
oratory
tension between dedication and prevarication (zaban bazi زبان بازی)
([let's not] being a member of) a “class” of those whose truth-telling was privileged
in certain sorts of people credibility was embodied
ajayeb.net's style of writing =/= a style of writing driven by the needs of readers who are relatively unskilled (in practical divinity, casuistry, or theology, and so on)
*** what kind of classification work, work of historical representation, is necessary now to show over time with greater clarity, in cooperation with more and more communities of practice, that in the best of all possible worlds, at any given moment, the past could be reordered to better reflect multiple constituencies now and then? ***
(Katie King + Bowker + Leigh Star)
[my ajayeb-making is about] partial connections (across time) ==> communities
([my point in work on ajayeb:] we need) the possbility of competing and shifting claims on individuals (=/= self-making individual), rather persons with partial connections (across time) and queer relations with pastpresent ==> negotiating forms of evidence ==> units of analysis ==> past reordered
[with the help of Katie King's figure of writing technologies:] i am interested in and interested to help make historical representations of nonhuman iranians in writing technological ecologies (which are inevitably products of new social movements, new research a[...]
(177)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20.5[...]n dedication and prevarication (zaban bazi زبان بازی)
([let's not] being a member of) a “class” of those whose truth-telling was privileged
in certain sorts of people credibility was embodied
ajayeb.net's style of writing =/= a style of writing driven by the needs of readers who are relatively unskilled (in practical divinity, casuistry, or theology, and so on)
*** what kind of classification work, work of historical representation, is necessary now to show over time with greater clarity, in cooperation with more and more communities of practice, that in the best of all possible worlds, at any given moment, the past could be reordered to better reflect multiple constituencies now and then? ***
(Katie King + Bowker + Leigh Star)
[my ajayeb-making is about] partial connections (across time) ==> communities
([my point in work on ajayeb:] we need) the possbility of competing and shifting claims on individuals (=/= self-making individual), rather persons with partial connections (across time) and queer relations with pastpresent ==> negotiating forms of evidence ==> units of analysis ==> past reordered
[with the help of Katie King's figure of writing technologies:] i am interested in and interested to help make historical representations of nonhuman iranians in writing technological ecologies (which are inevitably products of new social movements, new research agendas, new publics of interest, and new contests for historical meaning)
with ajayeb this became immediately my concern: *infrastructures of historical representation*
...................................
(what are the) stickiness of ajayeb's being (?) or, in which affective economy they are ‘passed around’? [social goods, accumulating affects, contagious مسرى? it tends to pick up whatever comes near, or gives us a certain kind of angle on what comes near*]
•wonder
•cause ==> ?
•
}--> social bond is always rather sensational*
(Ahmed suggests) thinking through affect as “sticky”: affect is what sticks, or what sustains or preserves the connection between ideas, values, and objects
{ affects as contagious =/= (inside/outside) “outside in” model of emotions (for axample, when we say: atmosphere “getting into the individual”)-->[part of the intellectual history of (crowd) psychology and the sociology of emotions] }--> affect becomes an object only given the contingency of how we are affected
“what we will receive as an impression will depend on our affective situation” --> Julia's post-Lacanian feedback: bodies never arrive neutral
*everything depends on the angle of our arrival* (<-- my point in lecture-performances) ~-> **pedagogic encounter is full of angles** (--> is that why i am becoming increasingly pedagogic?)
(by distinguishing between “did/h[...]
(178)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20.6[...]
fantasies of proximity (in sense8 TV series) --> if only we could be closer, we would be as one
the happiness of the characters of sense8 is the promise of “the one”
...................................
how to learn to read the discursive practices of being of ajayeb? the ways each being proposes its own (or another's) changing geometry and topology, their boundary-drawing practices, their differential productions, and how each being makes sense of its world
-(the authors and beings of ajayeb,) what are their capacity to discern the reality of their (relational) nature?
-how their determinate position (in their relational nature) is or may be (usefully) (con)figured as *specific connectivity*? [the question of specific connectivites of ajayeb]--> this requires from me poetics: diffractive descriptive acts
-what are the ajayeb's beings and mine intertwined practices of knowing and being?
the agential cut of the brittlestar is a survival kit: the arm is “cut” and becomes part of the other (predator)
Barad is reading the brittlestar to rework (challenge conventional conceptions of) her discipline's ontologies and boundaries =/= scientist's usual frame of application and amusement of “discovery” that feeds technological advancement, “the excitement and romantic overtones that inevitably accompany the story of the scientist as explorer breaking into new frontiers” (Barad)
(embodiment-->) *bodies are not situated in the world. They are ‘of’ the world (in its dynamic specificity)* (Barad) (@Femke)
[*]objectivity
=/= occupying a determinate position in a given environment
=/= occupying a particular coordinates in space and time, in culture, and in history
=/= seeing from somewhere [=/= “objectivism” (view from nowhere) or “everywhere” (relativism)]
=/=
(like Barad's brittlestars) which ajayeb's being's bodily dynamism resists (or constructs) the familiar notion that space is preexisting container:
•space: a stage on which actors take their place
•time: the mere uniform ticking of clock
(how ajayeb's worlding is similar or different than the familiar notion of Shakespeare's “world is a stage...”?)
[Barad, poet of matter, time and space:] “Matter does not move in space and time. Matter materializes and dynamically enfolds different spatialities and temporalities.”*
*there is only exteriority within*
--?--> models that position representation as the lens that mediates between the object world and the mind of the knowing subject --> (an optics that reflects) a geometry of absolute exteriority between ontologically and epistemologically distinct kinds =/= ajayeb's diffractive differential materializations
perhaps that arm that got detached from you, could have a chance of not becoming a jettison phantom limb forever haunting [...]
(180)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20.9[...]e 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 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 seemi[...]
(181)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%21[...]and death, that are not always harmonious to popular narratives of nonviolence
...................................
ajayeb: mythoepic literature in translation from a Middle Persian corpus
-when i say ‘Middle Persian corpus’ what i actually mean is a shared world of ritual, religion, and mythology between Iranian, Urdu, Turkish, Zoroastrianism in Iran and Vedic Hinduism in India, Indo-European inheritance in ancient Iranian culture, South-Southeast Asian literatures, translations and transcreations (and transliteration) of stories (prose, poetry, drama, epic, jokes, parables, figures [that are not always part of the canon], the irreverent بى ادب, ) in Indian and Southeast Asian contexts,
my project is about learning the ‘how’ of cultivating the ability to fruitfully approach texts from different cultures and pasts
-(to study) the radical poetic force of the Persian texts--in ajayeb
-to become enhanced and enchanted in skills of reading wider ranges of linguistic registers
-to open up an approach to a dauntingly complex region of islamicated thought (not the ideological enterprise of “Islam”, which is usually badly politicized in the historical memory of the West. we could get interested in the economics of corruption and technologies of rule, the evolution of government bureaucracies and classificatory schemes, anti-colonial critique,)
ajayeb is on the side of counter-classical traditions of standard Muslem-ness, and its less elite histories and cultural forms,
(intellectual identity:)
cross-dresser of the order
autodidact odds
sufis, merchants, nomads, poets, pilgrims, smugglers, laborers,
religious identity, religious knowledge, religious violence,
medieval persian mysticism:
•oral, temporal nature of speech
•speaking I to the unknown and unknowable Other
•the discourse of love
•apophatic discourse -->? politically subversive
•linguistic fragmentation, edges of meaning
•
...................................
dense and textured stories
(generativity is fueled by) densely felt textures
worlding of the place:
•the material, sensory labor of attending to an emergent and enduring hum
•the force of things amassed of phantom limbs
•actual residue of people “making something of things”
direct materiality of people's shared sense = attending to what is happening
a racist violence in the dark
a space of condensed displacement
watching things arrive in the company of others
*nameable clarities:
•family
•friendship
•love
•collapse
•laughing
•telling stories
•violence
•place
•
--> all atmospherics*** : forms of attending to what's happening, sensing out, accreting atta[...]
(183)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%21.2[...]d, some buttom line humanity (called Ungeschicktheit) that depends on giving up competence*** (and often finding oursevels orienting with that rainbow caterpillar disoriented on your forehand)
---our shared ‘should-have-been-obvious'es with Janina
---Janina's misshapen forces*** --somehow--> reach a plane of expressivity (for me--because i love her?)
---the event, its affective structure, is familiar from childhood and strangely satisfying, like a loop i had to make, *an emotive-agentive place i had to check in with* --?--> Janina + Sina forms of belonging
(sometimes that place is a fully-invested connection and weighted, like home)
***forms of belonging: tactile + full of force + tentative + risky /--{"+” : are, and, yet}
--> an ecology of paths that matter by means of the things that happen in a present in which we are *lost yet attuned*
--> all the ways that people and things venture out into reals [my mother, Sina, Janina, ...]
[*]town: currents of difference, affiliation, history, ordinary dullness and comforts, characters and their stories
psyching out ethnicity
(my old attunement:) the fear of cockroaches
the miracle mile of computer technology
the elitism of the historical societies
localness nests in:
•tastes
•bodies
•neigborhoods
•a valley
•a state
•a geographical region
“in each scene of the production of history there are events that are storied or otherwise pulled into play” (Stewart)
Stewart on salem witch trials
the accusations spiraled through families, catching people up like magnetic strips
“wicked little sorceries” -->{jumpy moments that suddenly lay the charge of a half-known intensity onto ordinary people and roads, regionality becomes a wicked little sorcery. a vortex that pulls possible forms into life into a moment's alignment}, {the adjective ‘wicked’ marking *excess* of all kinds}
astrology
fortune-telling
*an attunement to specters*
-a farmer admitted getting into ‘the snare of the devil’ because he had a large family and ‘the world went hard with him.’
robustness in cold weather
[title]
making of edges and scenes in ajayeb
character or texture of an edge
(ajayeb is made of elements 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
[...]
(184)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%21.6[...]posite transformations of artefacts from the time of myth* [for example] Wari pay much attention to human bodies to ensure proper growth, which is regarded as a collective responsibility: they are moulded and shaped by kin from foetus through to adult. actions carried out on the body, such as massage, painting and piercing [and negarani of iranian mother] are seen to have profound and lasting effects
•each being is stabilized through acts of care --> what are babies for iranians (and iranian mothers)? {[*]affect: dispositions or capacities which render the body of every species unique: what it eats, how it moves, how it communicates, where it lives, whether it is gregarious دسته اى or solitary ==(such practices ensure that)==> **individuals act and see in the same ways as their kin** }--> is this what mother does? (has to do with the ability or threat of transformation? -->) *#practices of care and نگرانی negarani are the production of a distinctly human body ~ naturally human ~=> different bodily constitutions of the subject ==> different worlds
a process that crucially entailed inconstancy: a continuous creative response to the exigencies of somatic uncertainty and ontological risk =/= intentional image into a realized product (a bad story of technology)
let's resist:
•the vessel metaphor
•the body's dual character as biological and cultural
archaeologists’ understanding of what bodies and artefacts are ==> a model (based on analogy) ==> “pot =/= body”
****sex and aging, defined as the real “physical characteristics” of the body that underpin human experiences --> usually remains unaltered
(for instance check the TV series Six Feet Under, how David's gay-ness is an intrinsic absolute fact of his body that underpins all his experiences)
we “wear”:
•sex
•aging
•personal feelings
•Iranian, or German, (basically being anything)
•
(basically in all Hollywood imaginings and standard archaeology) artefacts are only assigned secondary agency --> animacy is not considered as inherent attribute of the artefactual *** (Gell)
--✕--> pots as living organisms subject to processes of growth
(Ingold's) ecology of materials is characteristic of work that focuses on the inherent vitality of things (Barad)
*production: an ongoing process that produces both maker and object
(Alberti proposes) a change in focus: (from) *stopped up objects* --(to)--> *leaky things*
in his writing Alberti finishes 3 or 4 times his paragraphs with the same characterization of his field: “chronic instability of a world constantly at risk of transformation”
“if everything can be human, then nothing is human in a clear and distinct way.”
Viveiros de Castro
[...]
(185)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.1[...]nceptualize ontology: as a people's “beliefs about” reality / as people's actual ontological commitments (~ people's reality)
Latour's modes of existence: ontological tendencies that exist more or less precariously under the assault of modernization
conversion of ontological questions into epistemological questions ==> deontologizing other peoples’ *ontological commitments* [--> that Goda mistook for ideology]
*problem with pluralizing “reality” is that it might appear to be a form of cultural relativism, (demotion of) “ontology ~= culture (~ cultural beliefs about reality =/= reality)” ==back==> cultural construction
anti-Cartesian, relational, and antiontological exceptionalism
[a] Heideggerian idea: *the world we encounter is preinterpretive*
posthuman ~ nonrepresentational ~ realist ~ new materialism
(realism: an ontological approach)
•Latour's network
•Ingold's meshwork (commonality of processes across the ‘life =/= not life’) --> processes ~ becoming ~ growth ~ decay
•Barad's entanglement (relations are primary and relata are a consequence of relating ==dynamics==> intra-action {phenomenon = experiment + measuring device + techician + previous results + setting + ...})
•DeLanda's assemblage (how humans and nonhumans produced communities that changed in composition and through time... =/= linguistic model of context)
•
**relational ontology : stronger your “allies” are, the more reality you can claim** [= (Latour's notion of) truth]
[critique of human exceptionalism ==>] open ontology --> contingent categories: phenomena and assemblages are temporary, contingent, and unbounded
flat ontology: one made exclusively of unique, singular individuals, differing in spatio-temporal scale but not in ontological status --symmetry--> *to get at differences without determining what they are in advance* (<-- useful for ajayeb studies)
•archaeological types/objects: reified sets of relations
•job of the archaeologists: establish alternative taxonomies of being
ruin memories
nonrepresentational =/={"world of ideas =/= world of things” ~= the ideas must correspond to a truth demonstrable in the world of things}
(Lucas's) materialization: we can still say things about the past with great certainty
theories + apparatuses + material remains
ontological realism --claim--> objectivity and truth may be contingent but are nonetheless demonstrable and robust
archaeologist ontological approach: working on “material pasts in the present” ~= ‘how past actually gathers in the present’ =/= “material record = fragmentary evidence of history”
•(material's temporary sensitivity ==>) [*]residue: the idea of memory objects, material entities in which the mem[...]
(186)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.2[...]estions of representation --to--> questions of ontology
simplification of ontology (--> objects pacified and silenced) ==> complication of epistemology (--> subjects proliferate and chatter) [--> “discursive practices” and “politics of knowledge” are results of that pacification?]
***someone must be wrong, something has to be explained*** (<--?-- we have never been modern, they has ever been primitive)
(Viveiros de Castro)
formerly, savages mistook (their) representations for (our) reality; now, we mistake (our) representations for (other people's) reality. rumor has it we have even be mistaking (our) representations for (our) reality when we “occidentalize”
*culturalism, relativism, textualism --> reduces reality to representation
*cognitivism, sociobiology, evolutionary psychology --> reduces representation to reality
it has been obvious (for more than seventy-five years) that at the heart of the matter, there is no stuff; only form, only relation
...................................
“ajayeb” a term i use inclusively to examine a living and nonliving ‘historical site’ / ‘heritage web’ in order to learn/talk/speculate about what counts as writing ~= writing technologies ==> production of knowledges
(Katie King's) bits of pastpresent, a tool for scale making
~(Weston's) time claims
[*pastpresent: decline epistemologically charged purifications that devout complaints of “presentism” mandate]
-in my research (willing and required to become a beginner) i am asking: why past and present are so easy to separate?
(~~--> how our vision of past and future creates our present?)
==> directions, spinning dynamics,
in a sense my work on ajayeb is a critique of “presentism"[= overvaluing historically and culturally local constructions of the meaning and importance of a particular set of stories and their conditions of production (of “ours”). (for example the “future” story)]
-->? speculative presentisms (Dinshaw's queer historiography)
*globalization: “that travelogue of distributed, heterogeneous, linked, sociotechnical circulations that craft the world as a net called the global” (Haraway)
~= processes responsible for the power and mobility of media, money, politics, sexualities, and knowledge practices*** --> these meanings and powers can be “glocalized”: altered, filled in, indigenized, and reunderstood *within local agencies*(: people, art forms, practices of everyday life)
(globalization processes) ==> academically uncomfortable and sometimes politically reprehensible سزاوار سرزنش forms of hybrid histories
(Katie King's flexible knowledges:) layers of locals and globals
my aim in my research is creating *struggle for understanding* [= many communities involved in reading, writing, interp[...]
(187)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%24.1[...]n seventy-five years) that at the heart of the matter, there is no stuff; only form, only relation
...................................
“ajayeb” a term i use inclusively to examine a living and nonliving ‘historical site’ / ‘heritage web’ in order to learn/talk/speculate about what counts as writing ~= writing technologies ==> production of knowledges
(Katie King's) bits of pastpresent, a tool for scale making
~(Weston's) time claims
[*pastpresent: decline epistemologically charged purifications that devout complaints of “presentism” mandate]
-in my research (willing and required to become a beginner) i am asking: why past and present are so easy to separate?
(~~--> how our vision of past and future creates our present?)
==> directions, spinning dynamics,
in a sense my work on ajayeb is a critique of “presentism"[= overvaluing historically and culturally local constructions of the meaning and importance of a particular set of stories and their conditions of production (of “ours”). (for example the “future” story)]
-->? speculative presentisms (Dinshaw's queer historiography)
*globalization: “that travelogue of distributed, heterogeneous, linked, sociotechnical circulations that craft the world as a net called the global” (Haraway)
~= processes responsible for the power and mobility of media, money, politics, sexualities, and knowledge practices*** --> these meanings and powers can be “glocalized”: altered, filled in, indigenized, and reunderstood *within local agencies*(: people, art forms, practices of everyday life)
(globalization processes) ==> academically uncomfortable and sometimes politically reprehensible سزاوار سرزنش forms of hybrid histories
(Katie King's flexible knowledges:) layers of locals and globals
my aim in my research is creating *struggle for understanding* [= many communities involved in reading, writing, interpreting,] --> ***we are all members in these communities struggling for understanding***
Urton paying attention to decompiling intermediaty positions between so-calles reading and writing --> string records --> numerical accounts or maps or... ==> histories and narratives
my research on ajayeb in apass as a practice is about *disassembling and reordering classifications we use to access pasts*
the excursion i did in Vladmir's block was somehow about examining sites of implicitly or explicitly knowledge production in commercialized forms
museum, TV documentry as a metaphor {a richly contaminated set of crafty metaphors and realities} and narrative frame, a momentary melding of pastpresents in imaginative reenactment --> economic globalization figuring in artistic/academic capitalism
(--> ajayeb is also of this kind,) *site of heritage* culture as promoting particular versions [...]
(188)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%24.1[...]ith problems and possibilities) are also necessary in art research ([Katie King:] and in scholarly knowledge production), (building, creating, constructing, laboring means to learn how to become sensative to the contrary requirements, to the exigencies اقتضا, to the pressures of conflicting agencies where none of them is really in command; Latour)
‘industrial model of distributed production’ <--> ‘a version of the responsibilities and pleasures of professional and intellectual autonomy’
-TV shows are animated with folks from our time who invite audience identification as “us”: we are the viewers mentally enacting [~ playing at, reenacting, experimenting, speculating, trying to provide evidence for] various understandings of the so-called past***
melodramas of reenactment and experimentation ==> professional knowledges are elevated, while their bondaries threatend
in the production of an ‘object’ things (and meanings) get lost, they might be registered in “interference”
*anachronism, anachronistic --> #sleep-walking
“slippages in time” within the past as well as between “us” and the past
desire for tales of progress, with some particular “us” on top ~ chronology as essential origin {what we see often in technology tales such as Lucy (2014) or X-Men opening scenes}=/= to mix up who counts as “us” {what i have been trying to do, mixing up with Iran, Germany, etc.} to offer different timescales
•local details that animate generalizations
•archival labors dramatized and experienced as immediacy
•transparency of the material limitations of selection
spectacle of production
critique of the living-history ethos
giving science war pep talks... [TED]
(don't!)
[*]witnessing: “root of the experimental life”
[*]science: important and witnessable
freestanding photo-figures of scientists that work to situate and create scales of importance
commenting and making alliances across space-time with other figures
_[audience and markets]_
audience polyphony
audience and markets shift and converge in [flexible knowledges] complex address of multiple audiences, in that contradictory nest of niche political and epistemological “markets”
(**the story of the ‘interactive’:) “rich contradictory nestings permit an require visitors to select among possible salient narratives by animating differently layers of locals and globals”
to call oneself in and out of allience and its classifications, that *momentary universalism* shades into other ranges of affiliation and disaffiliation (*)
[...] --> [ ? ] --> salience --> tangible --> literal --> experimental
...................................
conceptualize the intensities of form and force
affect studie[...]
(189)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%24.3[...]all oneself in and out of allience and its classifications, that *momentary universalism* shades into other ranges of affiliation and disaffiliation (*)
[...] --> [ ? ] --> salience --> tangible --> literal --> experimental
...................................
conceptualize the intensities of form and force
affect studies has made me feel less alone because before it
...................................
There are [always] other epic and epochal forces in our midst.
...................................
evil eye --> دیو چشم زخم --> غش --> اغشی
...................................
باغ plethora of old and new humanities, selves - with Sardar: There are plants that provide various colors of foliage, or hedges and borders, or climb up fences, or play architectural roles (=/= presumption that we must have a identity & supposition that we discover our identity & the Socratic “know thyself” as a fundamental human urge) we exist with multiple identities invoked differently in different context. subscribed to an imagined “heritage” ready to kill and be killed to save some “essence” (=/= San'an)
sake of the difference, scum and finest of men
(for example “black”: to be confused: once excluded, now technically empowered, a dominant group in the rainbow, but still practically marginalised by the history that created and continues to operate practical exclusion.)
@Iranians: how much of the Other is actually located within me?
“a perfectly permissible aspiration” --into--> “an instrument of war” (Maalouf)
British identity is based on an assumption of authority that makes the world a familiar place, a proper theatre in which to continue being British. #Olearius
exclude the (unsavoury) foreigners <==> romanticised history and frozen tradition
*history as a deliberate human creation ==> acknowledgement of a common past ==> (a difference called) identity [= “our” similarity against “their” difference,] (submerging, barbarising and differentiating itself from another identity) [for example ancient Greece + Rome + Christianity = Europe] ==> monolith ==> conflict and death
•my (jub جوب) gutter photos =/= Tehran's Americanization of the high street.
•my photos of Rima =/= her selfie's merchandised model of individualism
a deep desire for association
various and diverse traditions ==> identity: “the means to synthesise similarity through difference and to see difference as discrete means of expressing basic similarity” (Sardar)
“balance of similarities and differences as a way of locating what it is that makes life worth living and what connects us with the rest of the changing world”
*...continuation of the Enlightenment project of progress through instrumental science. One source of Truth, and one Civilization, continues in its trajectory
garden =/= {North America's arrogance in cosmological[...]
(190)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%24.4[...]>
...................................
[body politics]
Greeks --> body politics --> elaborated images for human society ==> citizen, city
(Haraway on) the junction of natural forces and economic progress in the formative years of capitalist industrialism
(Haraway's emphasize and telling stories about the) union of the political and the physiological
ancient and modern justifications --> differences (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 scientifical[...]
(191)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%24.5[...]e 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 interested in animal body politics] and that wi[...]
(192)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%24.6[...]ork and interest since 2012:) attention and allegiance to a *process of knowing*
(ajayeb.net has interest in reworking the conventions of syntax and of the sentence)
•the experience of ajayeb.net is like watching something leap; scrambled elements, something clicks into place; a stubborn suspension, not quite parsable
•the experience of ajayeb (mode of description) is like *a sudden event happening so quickly we don't have a name for what we see, cannot identify the motion* (==> animals in ajayeb have many legs and arms)--> [*]motion: the patterning life of energy ~~--> world of forms
(Doty ☞ Cummings:) “rearrangingly” + “become" = rea(be)rran(com)gi(e)ngly
ajayeb = "how everything happens” (based on the ebb and flow of percept + episteme)
(an index finger that) points to the world's ways of happening (in energetic and enigmatic waves of world's coming into [& going out of] being)
*ajayeb moves concepts in like of: the world doesn't necessarily want to be ordered into the linearity and forwardness of text
طلسمهای ایرانی
nefrin نفرین : representative of the (intricacy of) *larger actions of the world*
nefrin-nevisi نفرین نویسی --> (made by the) technologies of their moment
postmodernism's familiar hesitation on the inadequacy of language ==> giving up referentiality =/= my ajayeb
(taking up on moon, for me is about) not going in fear of that which has been looked at again and again. #moon is “deeply compelling and we probably won't ever get done with it”
...somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred years later
morality of description(?)--> embodying the dilemma and work of the witness
...wheels of thinking turn slowly for some of us
adabiat tosifi ادبیات توصیفی
divisive consciousness (with a certain) degree of removal from the world =/= (we want) *more* language (<-- more we name what we see and do)==?==> a larger and more valuable world
(Roethke:) “when is description mere? never!”
-->
[*]صنعت تضاد san'at-e tazad, polarity: the pull of forces in opposition ==makes==> writing feel alive
[*]projection: that psychological mechanism by which we turn the world, or other people, or deer (into versions of ourselves) --> it is not a sin; it is our method of operating, our modus operandi (--> “pathetic fallacy”: inevitable perceptual work of the human; “if you are miserable, then the trees look miserable to you”)
[*]qualifiers sefat صفت gheyd (adjectives and adverbs) intended to lend a host of sensory qualities to the sentence; (sometimes too much) adjectival or adverbial flavoring. [#training: remove every adjective and adverb, and see what you have got left --> **there is always a more exact term waiting to be employed**] (Foad's severe [...]
(194)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%25.4[...]
-->
[*]صنعت تضاد san'at-e tazad, polarity: the pull of forces in opposition ==makes==> writing feel alive
[*]projection: that psychological mechanism by which we turn the world, or other people, or deer (into versions of ourselves) --> it is not a sin; it is our method of operating, our modus operandi (--> “pathetic fallacy”: inevitable perceptual work of the human; “if you are miserable, then the trees look miserable to you”)
[*]qualifiers sefat صفت gheyd (adjectives and adverbs) intended to lend a host of sensory qualities to the sentence; (sometimes too much) adjectival or adverbial flavoring. [#training: remove every adjective and adverb, and see what you have got left --> **there is always a more exact term waiting to be employed**] (Foad's severe economy of means; Janina's allusive, shimmery surfaces delight) ([*]style: a simple way of saying complex things. -Cocteau)
[*]نظم nazm: musicality of poetry, poem's body of sound is its specific particular flesh, sonic texture --> **making the language more markedly like the world** [a trail, pathway through a wood of sounds, an unmistakably specific landscape, loyal to the local]
[*]synesthesia: occasion of excitement, a skein of complicated perception, (sort of a literary technique,) something like a snapshot of the image-making mind at work --> superimposition of both events and of senses (and of scenes?) ==> a consciousness
(aim of many artists:) “to form the sensorium, the sphere of perception in which we dwell” @Hoda =/= (Doty suggests:) it is work to sort them out (what sorts out senses? question @Hoda, she must learn: an accurate rendering of an idiosyncratic process of sensory overlap and association)
[*]لحن tone: special effects, evoking a ‘moment of’ ... intense statement of feeling ==> a concretely descriptive feeling
[*]questions are always a little more trustworty than answers (?) -- sometimes things said do not take the *rhetorical form of a question* [--> in apass i was training to be able to capture those kind of ummarkedly questions] --> something said (described) with room for indeterminacy ///*convex mirror* (Doty's refractive thinking)
[*]فعل verb, the descriptive force of the right (hardworking) verb, a kind of muscular concreteness. sometimes verbs gain descriptive force when other parts of speech are newly cast in active roles
*invocation = directly addressing the thing creates a sense of immediacy and of connection
*thou, with its suggestion of divinity or beloved --> prayer
*hectic: uncomfortable alliance, inharmonious, something that might set the teeth on edge
*destroy --> a death-steeped perception that reads the wind as a “destroyer”
*world of fused duality
‘and’ --> the signature element of a place, of a landscape, the conjoined body : the animate and the inorganic as one thing
*the project of[...]
(195)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%25.5[...] Iran-Iraq war (Iranq)
lush, sensuous, flowering
parallel text to the creature
“you are gorgeous and i am coming” ♥
an approximation, unstoppable as an approachoig sound of approaching organism
testing and smelling
insight and sound --> Lili
an aphrodisiac and a chastening reminder: getting sidetracked by grief
“my portion this time”
*art is a house that tries to be haunted* ♥ (Doty ☞ Dickinson)
قافیه به تنگ آمد ghafie tang, (when a choice is) driven more by sonic than by logic
what kind of game is the sea? @Marialena
lap and drag. crag and gleam
(monosyllables --> are we reading nouns or verbs? tough, playful ocean)
syntactical ambiguity disorients
(Khayam's) desire to die into the world (~ to surrender into the life of things)
[title]
*describer's art*
autumn
a kind of logarithn of decay and rekindling
to describe description
a work of advocacy
to go description-hunting in ajayeb
evocation of sense perception (--> a technique that Adventure Times TV series uses)
...................................
Foucault [_bestiary of the imagination]
...precisely because it puts them into categories of their own, the Chinese encyclopedia localizes their [fantastic entities, fabulous animals, polymorphous and demoniacal faces, creatures breathing fire,,] powers of contagion
encyclopedia ==> quality of monstrosity does not affect any real body (=/= lurk)
animals in the non-place of language, meeting in the immaterial sound of the voice pronouncing their enumeration
“Absurdity destroys the ‘and’ of the enumeration by making impossible the ‘in’ where the things enumerated would be divided up.”
the ‘operating table’
a table --> a tabula, “that enables thought to operate upon the entities of our world, to put them in order, to divide them into classes, to group them according to names that designate their similarities and their differences--the table upon which, since the beginning of time, language has intersected space.” (Foucault, The Order of Things)
...................................
*questionable interpretations
#attention
([art/]aesthetics of noticing)--> appreciation of multispecies landscape, making living ecologies
which sectors/fields of art require artist to go out and notice things?
(engage with which) details of the world --> breaking common sense
our mamalian bias:
•predetermined body shape and size
•run toward death (pre-programmed death =/= history) ==> makes us think in terms of set-life courses[...]
(196)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%25.6[...] notice things?
(engage with which) details of the world --> breaking common sense
our mamalian 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 arou[...]
(197)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%25.7[...]f 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, Canguilhem
[mileu: in French “middle,” in the midst of, medium, between, ... set, circle]
(the notion of) *environment* [relentlessly universal and required] --for--> capturing both the experience and existence of living beings
[...]
(198)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%25.8[...]ete 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, Canguilhem
[mileu: in French “middle,” in the midst of, medium, between, ... set, circle]
(the notion of) *environment* [relentlessly universal and required] --for--> capturing both the experience and existence of living beings
Canguilhem going through the historical stages of the formation of the concept of milieu/environmentr />
-imported into biology in the second half of 18th century from (mechanocal notion) Newton by Lamarck
-later they [1870s Giard, Le Dantec, Houssay, Roule, etc.] take the idea from Lamarck, but they get the word, as an abstract universal term, from Taine
18th century French mechanics ‘milieu’ what Newton understood by ‘fluid’
problem of mechanics:
•(Newtonian:) problem of mechanics: *action at a distance of distinct physical individuals ==> *ether*: fluid medium of action at a distance [--> moon, lunar], continous in air
physics of central forces ==> “environment: a between two centers”
•(Descartes:) collision: the only mode of physical action (‘environment’ has no place in Cartesian physics)
*individuals occupying distinct points in space* --> they cannot act without joing their action [”?!” --> i am very conscious (and suspicious) about that which i feel that i don't understand --> what kind of nununderstander is at work [...]
(202)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%25.8[...]ts 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 psychology: construct man as a machine reacting to machines
Condillac's fable of the statue: in the rose's perfume, the statue is the rose's perfume ==> living organism = respond to sensory stimulation (the physical mileu, light and heat, carbon and oxygen, calcium and gravity)
(Canguilhem asking) where is the living being? <-- Kohn
==> subjects “taking action” =/= objects “in movement”
we see individuals --but--> these are objects
we see centers --but--> these are environments
we see machinists --but--> these are machines
environment of behavior --coincides-with--> geographical environment --coincides-with--> physical environment
“in a human environment, man is obviously subject to a form of determinism, but it is the determinism of artificial creations in which the spirit of invention which calls them into existence is alienated.”
*psycho-technique of engineers*
...to grasp the presence in man of his own originality --> @Maarten, Mobed
as an irreducible center of resistance
“man, even when subordinated to the machine, never manages to grasp himself as a machine. his efficiency is greater the more he is aware of his central situation with regard to the mechanisms intended to serve him” [<-- *a bad story (of The Terminator, The 100, The Magicians, etc.)]
(Darwin, Laeb's) pragmatism: generalization of the notion of adaptation to the theory of knowledge
reference of organis movement to the organims itself as essential
(prepared by Kantor, Tolmann's) teleological behaviorism: recognizing the sense and intention of animal movement
(where, for whom, the individuality of the living organism stops?)
•at its ectodermic borders
•at the cell
•
cell: an environment of infra-cellular elements, it lives in an internal environment which sometimes has the dimensions of an *organ* and sometimes of the *organism*
Uexküll --> Umwelt =/= Umgebung =/= Welt
•*Umwelt* distinguishes the environment of behavior specific to an organism
•*Umgebung*: the ordinary geographical environment
•*Welt*: the universe of science
Umwelt ~ the specific environment of behavior (for the living being): a set of excitations
to be effective it must be anticipated by an attitude of the subject ~ ‘if the living being is not seeking, it won't receive anything’
Buffon & Lamarck --> time and favorable circumstances gra[...]
(203)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%26.1[...]e sense and intention of animal movement
(where, for whom, the individuality of the living organism stops?)
•at its ectodermic borders
•at the cell
•
cell: an environment of infra-cellular elements, it lives in an internal environment which sometimes has the dimensions of an *organ* and sometimes of the *organism*
Uexküll --> Umwelt =/= Umgebung =/= Welt
•*Umwelt* distinguishes the environment of behavior specific to an organism
•*Umgebung*: the ordinary geographical environment
•*Welt*: the universe of science
Umwelt ~ the specific environment of behavior (for the living being): a set of excitations
to be effective it must be anticipated by an attitude of the subject ~ ‘if the living being is not seeking, it won't receive anything’
Buffon & Lamarck --> time and favorable circumstances gradually constitute the living
=/= Uexküll --> time and favorable circumstances are relative to such and such living beings
==> Umwelt: an elective sample in the Umgebung }--> milieu
environment: “man's Umwelt” ~ the ordinary world of his perspective and pragmatic experience
*human suject: creator of techniques and values
==> animal's Umwelt: a centered environment/milieu relative to this living being as essentially a subject of vital values
a subjectivity at the root of this organization --> شپش shepesh tick
Uexküll story of the tick --> *mechanical theory of the reflex*
...the animal may remain completely indifferent and insensitive for a considerable length of time to all the excitations of an environment like a forest, and that the only excitation that is capable of triggering its movement, to the exclusion of any other, is the odor of rancid butter.
--> *an organism is therefore never equal to the theoretical totality of its possibilitilities
organism =/= preferential behavior
reversal of organism-environment relationship:
•“the meaning of an organism is its being” (Goldstein)
•“the living being's acquisition of its form” (Mendel)
•“the environment is not an agent of formation strictly speaking, but rather of realization” (Brachet)
•
(Soviet) ambition of complete domination of nature and limit the possibilities of an intentional alteration of living species
*which stories of life and why emphasize the separation of the organism from the environment (and make this separation intuitive and ready-to-hand)? [--> ajayeb]
(Lamarck focused on the point where) life coincides with its own meaning, where through sensibility the living being is positively or negatively *situated absolutly in existence* --> ***the indivisible totality of organism and environment*** [<-- Barad has to say a lot about that]
for Lamarck:[...]
(204)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%26.2[...]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”
•
(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
talking fish
acting landscapes
the still-living (~ still-kicking) as a series of misplacements
world produces its own catachresis
Tsing asks “so why is anything still alive?” (in the time of massive human disturbance)
your willingness + my dreaming
•social scientists tried to be more “scientific”: by counting and putting things into boxes (missing the interesting stuff in the sciences, including our relations with other species)
•scientists tried to be more like humanities: decoration (missing the important insights of these fields, such as the fact that ethics is useless as long as the categories it assesses are already set in place)
[*]curiosity: alighting on common excitement to learn about the world and its goings on
[*]imagination: staying with (our) observations until we find frames for thinking about pattern and trajectory
to create new genres of translation (==> play)
(the problem of) *unintentional design*
(what i am learning with ajayeb is the art of) paying **close descriptive attention** (to human interactions with other species)
-to re-learn the arts of description, that the art of 20th century is so deprived of
“population genetics and neoclassical economics each made description unnecessary through a calculus in which self-contained individuals could be posited without attention to soc[...]
(205)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%26.5[...]r />
(the problem of) *unintentional design*
(what i am learning with ajayeb is the art of) paying **close descriptive attention** (to human interactions with other species)
-to re-learn the arts of description, that the art of 20th century is so deprived of
“population genetics and neoclassical economics each made description unnecessary through a calculus in which self-contained individuals could be posited without attention to social relations and histories” (Tsing)
sciences that are designed specifically not to tackle problems of living together
#project 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
using:
◦anthropology --> its expertise in ethnographic methods
•history --> its turn to environmental narration
•biology --> (ecological evolutionary-developmental trends) that have shown how species come into being with each other
•science studies --> its lively juxtaposition of technological and philosophical methods
Tsing: there is no reason that anthropologists cannot study nonhumans using some of the very same methods we use to study humans--or close parallels to them
...................................
walking is the speed of bodily pleasure
the speed for looking for mushrooms
mushrooms jump into your hands with all three pleasures of the unasked for
*they are not the product of your labor* <-- we should be able to work and depend on those things
Tsing saying ‘bismillah’ in her writing
delight ==make==> impression
*noticing* and *coming back* to familiar places is the beginning of appreciation for multispecies interactions
Tehran expansive and overlapping geographies resist common models (which divide the world into “them” and “us”)
lichen: an association of a fungus and an alga or cyanobacteria, where the non-fungal partner fuels lichen metabolism through photosynthesis
assumptions of human constancy --> autocratic military ideology =/= historically webbed interspecies dependence -=> a different cultural research trajectory
(to understand more about) domestication: web of entanglements
=/= neoliberal hard-line [human =/= wild] understanding of “domestication = human control” (ignoring that such relations might change humans too, ignoring the complex relations of interdependency) <== ideological commitment to human mastery (--> Sana's political commitment to liberalism) }==> (fantasies of) *the wild species self-making* =/= fantasies of control
==> life impr[...]
(206)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%26.5[...] 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.)
•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 [...]
(207)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%26.7[...]n'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 goodness is qualification for global goodness) ==> other people & other species are judged --> project to improve the world ==> *collateral damage is unfortunate but not inhumane*
urban jungle
jumble of diversity + imperial planners
excessive teams
technique of unmapping, for separating paired projects and effects and places and things. (for example unmap state and capital from diversity places)
•spread obscurity
•to know something from disordered edges (=/= ptoductive edges)
•what grows in the seam (to begin with)
•pleasure of variety beyond the domestic
•how places are differentiated and specific
...................................
Global Futures
(a game of) possibilities of contingent connections
a game that develops our ideas of the productivity--for better or worse--of contingency
a game to appreciate contingent connections [=/= stale and dangerous predictions (==> mithridatism)]
futures of all sorts are forged in the contingencies of strange connections
•foreclosed in the narrow channels of corporate expansion
•clashing state and popular terrorisms
•our best hopes (as well as our inchoate terrors)
*Tsing: “Contingency surrounds us, but we ignore its power to shape the future.”
**europe's secular prophecy's formulaic tropes for encapsulating time**
•most powerful future-making stories have told of the fulfillment of principles of progress and rationality
•driving force of technology will transform society
•ideal of democracy will be progressively encoded in law
=/=
**anti-progress prophecy's formulaic tropes for encapsulating time**
•national genius of a chosen people will blossom
•human nature will reestablish historic gender roles and racial hierarchies
•the essence of ancient civilizations will ris[...]
(208)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%26.8[...]ping, for separating paired projects and effects and places and things. (for example unmap state and capital from diversity places)
•spread obscurity
•to know something from disordered edges (=/= ptoductive edges)
•what grows in the seam (to begin with)
•pleasure of variety beyond the domestic
•how places are differentiated and specific
...................................
Global Futures
(a game of) possibilities of contingent connections
a game that develops our ideas of the productivity--for better or worse--of contingency
a game to appreciate contingent connections [=/= stale and dangerous predictions (==> mithridatism)]
futures of all sorts are forged in the contingencies of strange connections
•foreclosed in the narrow channels of corporate expansion
•clashing state and popular terrorisms
•our best hopes (as well as our inchoate terrors)
*Tsing: “Contingency surrounds us, but we ignore its power to shape the future.”
**europe's secular prophecy's formulaic tropes for encapsulating time**
•most powerful future-making stories have told of the fulfillment of principles of progress and rationality
•driving force of technology will transform society
•ideal of democracy will be progressively encoded in law
=/=
**anti-progress prophecy's formulaic tropes for encapsulating time**
•national genius of a chosen people will blossom
•human nature will reestablish historic gender roles and racial hierarchies
•the essence of ancient civilizations will rise again to vie and clash
}--> There is no room for contingent connections in any of these predictions
(most important story of our time:) *the story of globalization*:
•the world is entering a global era without political or economic rifts
•nation-states and cultures are increasingly irrelevant
•a global menu of consumerdesires and entrepreneurial standards frames identity and sets individual and collective goals
--> since the end of the Cold War:
•global expansion of a few giant corporations
•the great flows of people from one continent to another
•forging of transnational standards for economics and politics
•development of widely spread audiences for once parochial forms of popular culture
--> Global capitalism is not seamless:
•leapfrogging financial crises
•“antiglobalization” politics springing up
•deflating policymakers’ hopes for a smooth transition to corporate empire
ultimate fantasy of an *era without politics*
ultimate fantasy of a *more complex evolutionary plan*
=/= contingency & interconnection
principles of (Tsing and Pollman's) Global Futures game:
you tell the story[...]
(209)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%26.8[...]ly’ 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 a bat behaves =/= what it is like for a bat to be a bat
schematic conceptions of Eszter
(old model of understanding:)
* --> stimulus (things sparkling) --> perception (hiting the senses) --> apprehension (mind aware without judgement) --> comprehension (psychological judgement about the manner of situation) --> knowing ==> world of doing, in which “action” is: expected (mother attending the child, free liberating the prisoners), commanded (soldier's hierarchy, job's duty), solved (engineer puzzling out a problem)
the things apprehended from a particular point of view (particular visual phenomenology) are not connected to that point
Neobeobachtungen
moshahedat مشاهدت
نگاه جدید
*essence of the internal world* --> who is busy with this? (this will define the fate of animal subjectivity)
*view from nowhere*: that their particular viewpoint is not part of the common reality (--✕--> sociology of science)
X is Y
“is”: converge, a technique of modeling (~~> sync)
X, Y: two referential paths
we know how X is supposed to be true
people are no told at an early age that *all matter is really energy* (--> capitalist physicalism. then what you say abnout ‘energy’ is saying something about the nature of reality)
physicalism: the hypothesis that a mental event is a physical event
someone with instinct metamorphosis
(my feedbacks in apass does not only apply to intentional mental events of each other)
(Nagel asking for:) to devise a method of expressing in objective terms much more than we can at present [but he is stuck in the idea of] “a phenomenology that is objective*
...................................
with Jassem and Mia
Norway ~= (a breakable) illusion --> that somebody is living it
green competition and technopositivist hubris
question of topology (in dream)
(topology: those qualities that remain invariant after transformation --> persistent forms)
fantastic peasant
a piece of hanging cloth that suggests horrors to receptacle receiving eyes
•landscape --> sounds
•poems
•divisions in Norway (<== second world war)
•sami cultural disappearance
◦domestic violence
◦racism
◦refugee geopolitics
•seagull, fish, salmon farming
•interviews
•doom --> delirium, murder, hallucination, whispering,
•ruin (of signs)
•entropy (=/=? emergence)
•
*affliction l[...]
(210)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%27.1[...]دید
*essence of the internal world* --> who is busy with this? (this will define the fate of animal subjectivity)
*view from nowhere*: that their particular viewpoint is not part of the common reality (--✕--> sociology of science)
X is Y
“is”: converge, a technique of modeling (~~> sync)
X, Y: two referential paths
we know how X is supposed to be true
people are no told at an early age that *all matter is really energy* (--> capitalist physicalism. then what you say abnout ‘energy’ is saying something about the nature of reality)
physicalism: the hypothesis that a mental event is a physical event
someone with instinct metamorphosis
(my feedbacks in apass does not only apply to intentional mental events of each other)
(Nagel asking for:) to devise a method of expressing in objective terms much more than we can at present [but he is stuck in the idea of] “a phenomenology that is objective*
...................................
with Jassem and Mia
Norway ~= (a breakable) illusion --> that somebody is living it
green competition and technopositivist hubris
question of topology (in dream)
(topology: those qualities that remain invariant after transformation --> persistent forms)
fantastic peasant
a piece of hanging cloth that suggests horrors to receptacle receiving eyes
•landscape --> sounds
•poems
•divisions in Norway (<== second world war)
•sami cultural disappearance
◦domestic violence
◦racism
◦refugee geopolitics
•seagull, fish, salmon farming
•interviews
•doom --> delirium, murder, hallucination, whispering,
•ruin (of signs)
•entropy (=/=? emergence)
•
*affliction landscapes* --> Leid: existence thriving in the wound --> anticipation of oblivion
doom, ruin, entropy --> udyr (in norwegian u-: non- or bad, dyr: animal) bad or corrupted animal, nonanimal, monster, (rootless existence)
udyr (gate keepers creepers) <--?--> div (defeated)
--performance--
rotating styles of: folkloric ballads, existential meditation, doomsday rant, elegiac oration, children lullabies --into--> a singular blast of an account of a devastated space --mobilizing--> legend, omen, song, myth, fairy tale, mutated war cry
[these potent signs are sneaking in the work “stranger within,” it is not just a historical dreamscape]
-the masked actors on stage have taken a venom (becoming faceless engravers) to cross into the next level of temporal experience --> ???
-muted rage and ecstasy indeterminacy positioned as creeping towards the midnight of moving & [...]
(211)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%27.1[...]ng the world: decay, emergent, atrophy, new identities, crisis in language, confusing boundaries, challenges of life,,,]
(origins of bad feeling -->) looking at:
•damaged bodies
•damaged subjectivities
•damaged communities
•damaged relations ==> Udyr monster
•damaged ecologies
•damaged histories ==> insomnia
•
(@Jassem and Mia) is there (only) death at the end of entropy?
sequence of events from the point of view of plague narrative
extermination + determination, laws of identity, repetition
the material despair of a colonial capital modern condition leading in high speed to the entropy of cultural-individual ethics, under the overwhelming weight of tangible misery --(Jassem and Mia)--> cognize the immediate material urgency of the endangered subjectivity
--faceless--
nonanimal --> nonhuman + nonanimal ==> destabilizing effects
with their flexible plasticity, has an issue with appearance --> subjectivity's disassociation from the world
[in no (or which) calculus of assurance are they moving?]
ruined main body (of the performance)
ruin is (a fictional being) adding additional variety to technical being (frontier technologies) of Norway
-obsolescence (and why not adjustment? =/= extremist position ==> to emerge fanatically from the ruins)--(can we use our imagination not for world scale future speculation, and rather for small adjustment of this space?)
-give expression and meaning to the material culture
--landscape--
using it in the performance: a lens that refuses the abstraction of elements relation in a vacuum (as its optics, not a Blickmaschin)
show us: big stories take their form from seemingly minor contingencies, asymmetrical encounters, and moments of indeterminacy
(with “stranger within” [=? ‘desire within']) are we at the space of complain? <-- dispositions of Beschwerde
a form of protest --> (disenfranchized language of) *mutated rage* --> always innocent ==> agent of delivery
(protest part of) the proud and brutal history of break-out syntax of civic responsibility (=/= adjustment)
rage & ecstasy
ruin --> doom --> rage --> innocence --> delivery: performance
--ruin--
we can and should ***navigate the ruin***
(navigate =/= asset-production)
-capitalist (owning the rhetoric of progress) telling us / teach us to ignore ruins (in the making)
-is there life in ruin? --Tsing--> place of unsettled identities, *in it each of us become ourselves with the help of a less-than ideal collaboration*
bring your curiosity
contaminated diversity [=/= doom: a form of missing that which is contaminated, (an affect typical of Tehran,) one has lost the pulse of the world[...]
(212)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%27.3[...] pure)
-homesick
-seasick
-sickened in home
چیقزستن
شخصیت توصیفی --> descriptive? (drift in describing)
شخصیت حاشیهای --> digressive نامربوط پرت, excursions superficial relevances, off the subject [=/= انحرافی]
شخصیت خود محور --> rotating along the axis of ego, tangled subjective schemas with objective reality, talking regardless of the listener [egoist: vampire without self-reflection =/= narcissistic personality]
شخصیت مقایسهای --> comparing?
}=/= (always asking) how do you make a subject of conversation out of what you are concerned with --> make ‘your subjects’ into ‘subjects of conversation’ with others --> موضوع
•غیر قابل حل کردن =/=
•تفکیک کردن
(مطرح کردن به صورت که تکه تکه کرد)
[*]research: problem of entering a culture from outside
points of the lecture:
-a nano-expose
-of kicking off this...
-not dramatically pitched at you
-cartography of collapse and sublime
-coming down or crushing 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 pr[...]
(214)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%27.9[...]ilty, survivalist udyr? the evil horse? (we need more description of the evil horse)
Cinderella --> (not) the master of your house, of your name, of you
-sometimes it is not you who makes you
...................................
--Morris--> ghost problem --✕--> possbility of a politcal form
contingent politicization and the accidental in the Southeast Asia
theatrical acts of civil disobedience
democracy protestors
conjure the spirits of those who have been killed
political vengeance
(wherever there is) violence in Southeast Asia (even if this violence is merely the
force that possesses machinery) ==> ghosts
~=
(wherever there is) force that would oppose life (even and perhaps especially by resembling it) ==> ghosts
[the doxa of] {(no preparation) premature death / banished by disbelief ==> unhappy ghost, vindictive melancholy}[= *effect of context*]--in-->
•pulp novels
•secular humanist elite literature
•rumor
•folklore
•
(Morris points that) such specters are densest in the places where the accidents of modernity are most like to occur
*the death that is caused by another death*
technologization of life and death, movement and war --> *making one vulnerable to death* <== (often) a function of technology (technologization of life and death, movement and war, etc.)
*ghostliness (in Southeast Asia): an idiom with which to address issues about the difficult delineation of a boundary between the living and the dead* (=/= matter of improper burial)
if the dead cannot join the living, the living can die and thereby mingle with the already deceased ~-> fright
the location (where ghostliness arises) is not spatial but temporal (“something happened”)--> in a strange way, for the “occurrence” has no place in time ==> stop time and to displace other narratives (--> it has the structure of trace)
[@Marialena's summoning to life =/= (living) beings who can be summoned to death]
}~~?--> (Freud's) death drive (<== traumatic neuroses) + (Kantian conception of)
accident
(for Freud:) [*]consciousness: the form of a resistance to the world
unconscious is “timeless” : incapable of discerning order (in a Kantian sense)
trauma (=/= anxiety) ==> disables the pleasure principle but not the compulsion to repeat (which is typically a source of pleasure)
[*]trauma as precisely such a disturbance of time and of causal sequentiality
{earlier philosopher's analogy: substance (essentially unchanging) =/= accident (the name of that which metamorphoses over time) }=/={ Kant's analogy: accidents = the “particular ways” in which substance is determined to exist}
--Morris--> causality: a concept that responds to and covers over a gap in the [...]
(215)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%28.1[...]dental politicization (~ movements emerging from crowds without ever becoming masses or classes)
--✕--> from the state
--✕--> from the transnational media + whose circuits the images of these convergences travel
--> an experience of immediacy (as the origin of politics =/= encounter with representations of the world), sudden activation of an immediate presence in the public sphere --> political conceived as itself being contingent
to resignify and reorient the problem of the political in terms of civilizational difference (rather than ideological, and hence economic, difference)
the so-called nocturnal sudden death syndrome
rapacious female specter
in the fear of being killed by this nearly limitless desire for female dead, men (Thai constructor workers in Singapore) started to paint their nails, attired themselves as women before going to sleep
[seek to accomplish in advance what is feared, emasculation]--> **mimesis of a crisis foretold**
(khwan)
a thread of unspun cotton tied about the wrist --to--> prevent the dissipation of one's vital essence
(mostly men's) satisfaction of commodity desire --entails--> absence from home
woman's work in technology and textile manufacturing and in the tourism sector (whether as service worker or prostitute) --> is deemed lamentable, even contemptible, but still tolerable
anxiety over lost male potency ==?==> widow ghost
the queen had a dream (that all the men in Thailand had vanished)
--> anxiety expressed as *extreme anticipation* (and not as an opposition to the feared object)
-the phenomena materializes what they seek to differ and mime (the force thday the want to stave off)
collective spirit possession
periods of commodification --> waves of witchcraft (traversed Thailand in 1905)
•episodes of disruption
•social crisis
•economic transformation
•attended reordering of social relations (including those of class and gender)
•
(khwan) rite: a try to evade loss by soliciting misrecognition (on the part of the ghost), but they cannot cover over the fact of an already existent loss
working as a repetition compulsion --> the widow ghost (بختک bakhtak?) as an example of death drive
(waking up nightly having felt themselves robbed of breath and speech)
--Mills+Morris--> capital (not war) as the source of this trauma
trauma that arises in war ~/= injury that is the function of insertion into new and painful economic structures
mastering the wounds produced by capital, depend on:
•not the production of cathartic discharge through aberration or historisization through narrative
•on some kind of socialization or collectivization through which the source of injury can be ad[...]
(218)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%28.3[...]iving
(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)
in Buli (against mistranslation or misrecognition of the foreign modern):
•Christian missionization (19th and early 20th century, and again in the 1930s)
•modernist developmentalism and statism under Suharto
•technologization associated with natural resource-based capitalism
}--scenario--> effort to become modern ==> enter an order of truth and knowledge (=/= dissimulation and doubt)
valorization of reciprocity (in Halmahera)
Morris asks: is not the coimbrication of doubt/belief precisely what the discourses of the Enlightenment science, namely knowledge through revelation of what is, promised to replace?
(Bubandt's assumptions in Kant/Morris terms:)
•doubt <== anxiety, fear, suspicion, rage (--> affective dimension)
•doubt <== an incapacity to transcend the aporia that defines the relation between the empirical and the transcendental (--> epistemological dimension)
“I have never seen a cannibal witch” --> anthropology's epistemological conundrum (an a priori postulate) --Kant--> an irreducible impasse between the empirical and the transcendental, of the incapacity of sensory experience (intuition) to provide the basis of absolute knowledge (=/= merely general knowledge)
Foucault --> intuition cannot ground knowledge of the absolute ~=> knowledge of individual human beings and their empirical histories cannot provide knowledge of “the human”
Evans-Pritchard --> witchcraft satisfies the demands for an explanation of the singular event: this death, of this individual, in this moment (not death in general)
~-> for Bubandt, witchcraft: reproduction and valorization of this aporia (between the transcendental and the empirical)
James Siegel naming the witch (not only a political history but an investigation into the entire history of anthropological disc[...]
(219)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%28.7[...]anthropological discourse on witchcraft and sorcery)
-he links the crisis of recognition brought on by the collapse of an authoritarian state that *had appropriated for itself the function of recognition*, to the rise of witchcraft accusations, to efforts to name a witch --> witches and not witchcraft were seen to proliferate after the fall of Suharto
•how the labor to designate the source of a menace that exceeds the empirical and that fails to explain the singular is inevitably failed
•the misrecognizing belief that eliminating witches could eliminate witchcraft
discern death drive in the very place that there is an effort to escape death
{ radical empiricism = close reading }==> attentive listening
...................................
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/689012
(two competing conceptions and aspirations,) two paradigms of communication:
•an ideal public sphere that recognizes the task of mediation but also requires its effacement
•to bypass mediation through apparently immediate forms of speech that range from visual slogans to messianic utterances that can be heard even by the dead (--> frustrated by deferral)
Morris: the social scene is technologically heterogeneous ==> epochal and ontological schemata of mediatic displacement must thus be rethought
structure: an eruption of the mediaticity of the medium onto the horizon of reflexive consciousness (Kittler)
(in still decolonizing nations) the function of mediation has implicitly emerged as an agonistic exchange about the very possibility of exchange (not of deliberation) --> possibility of political representationalism
..stranded in its imaginary between the twin phantasms of the mining town in postapartheid South Africa
aspiring to a radical openness and threatened by it...
limits and the contradictions of democratic consciousness
environment as a monstrous hybrid of statistical hysteria and narrative compulsion as well as real violence (that takes its shape under conditions of largely racialized economic inequality)
[i have been working and listening to that which] call our attention to ***other spaces, identities, and structures of obligation*** (=/= defensive strategies)
cell phones
•technological mediums of absent voices
•lighting up, buzzing, or ringing
•ciphers of a profane immanence
•fetishes in which are concealed the histories of mining and labor elsewhere
•promise contact with elsewhere + obstacles to the desire for full presence and the performative power of words ==> frustrated desire
a public whose membership cannot be known in advance--even when exclusionary limits are constitutive of its domain --> [*]public sphere: social formations enabled by technomedia phenomena (=/= spaces[...]
(220)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%28.8[...] range from visual slogans to messianic utterances that can be heard even by the dead (--> frustrated by deferral)
Morris: the social scene is technologically heterogeneous ==> epochal and ontological schemata of mediatic displacement must thus be rethought
structure: an eruption of the mediaticity of the medium onto the horizon of reflexive consciousness (Kittler)
(in still decolonizing nations) the function of mediation has implicitly emerged as an agonistic exchange about the very possibility of exchange (not of deliberation) --> possibility of political representationalism
..stranded in its imaginary between the twin phantasms of the mining town in postapartheid South Africa
aspiring to a radical openness and threatened by it...
limits and the contradictions of democratic consciousness
environment as a monstrous hybrid of statistical hysteria and narrative compulsion as well as real violence (that takes its shape under conditions of largely racialized economic inequality)
[i have been working and listening to that which] call our attention to ***other spaces, identities, and structures of obligation*** (=/= defensive strategies)
cell phones
•technological mediums of absent voices
•lighting up, buzzing, or ringing
•ciphers of a profane immanence
•fetishes in which are concealed the histories of mining and labor elsewhere
•promise contact with elsewhere + obstacles to the desire for full presence and the performative power of words ==> frustrated desire
a public whose membership cannot be known in advance--even when exclusionary limits are constitutive of its domain --> [*]public sphere: social formations enabled by technomedia phenomena (=/= spaces of rational deliberation and consensus making--as in liberal political theory, public sphere characterized by deliberative processes)
*scenes of overhearing* --> public speaking makes that overhearing its goal
“migrant pirates of deindustrialization” (speak only to threaten) --> liberal opposition between language and violence ~~--> the rhetorical grace appropriate to leadership (inauguration speech of Obama, his charisma emanated from his identification with a righteous struggle --> *his being more than himself* [<-- young artist selflessness syndrome in aspiration with the right politcal cause])
zamazamas’ illiteracy, not eligible for a public sphere that depends on literacy. for without literacy, they cannot submit to the law. *defined in its essence by legality* (sustained by a desired opposition between language and violence)
a signature (sign your own name): a form of writing recognizable across all (mainly romanized) languages and is the ideal condition of possibility of recognition from within its constitutional order
mimic the address of someone wit charism[...]
(221)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%28.9[...]very possibility of exchange (not of deliberation) --> possibility of political representationalism
..stranded in its imaginary between the twin phantasms of the mining town in postapartheid South Africa
aspiring to a radical openness and threatened by it...
limits and the contradictions of democratic consciousness
environment as a monstrous hybrid of statistical hysteria and narrative compulsion as well as real violence (that takes its shape under conditions of largely racialized economic inequality)
[i have been working and listening to that which] call our attention to ***other spaces, identities, and structures of obligation*** (=/= defensive strategies)
cell phones
•technological mediums of absent voices
•lighting up, buzzing, or ringing
•ciphers of a profane immanence
•fetishes in which are concealed the histories of mining and labor elsewhere
•promise contact with elsewhere + obstacles to the desire for full presence and the performative power of words ==> frustrated desire
a public whose membership cannot be known in advance--even when exclusionary limits are constitutive of its domain --> [*]public sphere: social formations enabled by technomedia phenomena (=/= spaces of rational deliberation and consensus making--as in liberal political theory, public sphere characterized by deliberative processes)
*scenes of overhearing* --> public speaking makes that overhearing its goal
“migrant pirates of deindustrialization” (speak only to threaten) --> liberal opposition between language and violence ~~--> the rhetorical grace appropriate to leadership (inauguration speech of Obama, his charisma emanated from his identification with a righteous struggle --> *his being more than himself* [<-- young artist selflessness syndrome in aspiration with the right politcal cause])
zamazamas’ illiteracy, not eligible for a public sphere that depends on literacy. for without literacy, they cannot submit to the law. *defined in its essence by legality* (sustained by a desired opposition between language and violence)
a signature (sign your own name): a form of writing recognizable across all (mainly romanized) languages and is the ideal condition of possibility of recognition from within its constitutional order
mimic the address of someone wit charisma (~= authority)
(Morris on) mediaticity of speech (and not merely of media technologies)
Morris reading of a scene (of quotidian exchange) in HIV/AIDS NGO office: a metonym and a metaphor for a kind of South African public sphere that aspires to inclusiveness but is terrorized by its incapacity to know what that opens it up to
•arms itself against potentially aggressive others
•narratives of violence work *to reinforce the sense of necessity* (for a general securitizati[...]
(222)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%28.9[...]ial formations enabled by technomedia phenomena (=/= spaces of rational deliberation and consensus making--as in liberal political theory, public sphere characterized by deliberative processes)
*scenes of overhearing* --> public speaking makes that overhearing its goal
“migrant pirates of deindustrialization” (speak only to threaten) --> liberal opposition between language and violence ~~--> the rhetorical grace appropriate to leadership (inauguration speech of Obama, his charisma emanated from his identification with a righteous struggle --> *his being more than himself* [<-- young artist selflessness syndrome in aspiration with the right politcal cause])
zamazamas’ illiteracy, not eligible for a public sphere that depends on literacy. for without literacy, they cannot submit to the law. *defined in its essence by legality* (sustained by a desired opposition between language and violence)
a signature (sign your own name): a form of writing recognizable across all (mainly romanized) languages and is the ideal condition of possibility of recognition from within its constitutional order
mimic the address of someone wit charisma (~= authority)
(Morris on) mediaticity of speech (and not merely of media technologies)
Morris reading of a scene (of quotidian exchange) in HIV/AIDS NGO office: a metonym and a metaphor for a kind of South African public sphere that aspires to inclusiveness but is terrorized by its incapacity to know what that opens it up to
•arms itself against potentially aggressive others
•narratives of violence work *to reinforce the sense of necessity* (for a general securitization)
•work in the mode of a **negative meritocracy** (= those who would violate the rights of others are to be excluded, but no others --but--> how to know in advance who has perpetrated or intends to perpetrate such a violation?)
...in the shadow of communicational technology's fashion industry
...bountiful banality of the technologies and artifacts of mass reproducibility
[...] --> lithography --(superseded by)--> photography --(gives way to)--> cinema --(transformed by)--> sound technology --(displaced by)--> integrated and multiplatform digital media --> [...]
(teleological fantasy:) ontologized in epochal schema (these sequences become something more and different) --> analog media are said to be displaced by digital media ==> logic of representation gives way to that of information
=/= (Morris questioning) the conflation of media with mediation, which is itself symptomatic of both a technological determinism and an effort to ontologize technology --> a crises of mediation (not media): the communicative aspiration and the presumptive unity of medium and message in language are brought to their limit (--> media technologies play a role in this drama, but they do not explain it. @OSP & Femke)[...]
(223)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%28.9[...]t eligible for a public sphere that depends on literacy. for without literacy, they cannot submit to the law. *defined in its essence by legality* (sustained by a desired opposition between language and violence)
a signature (sign your own name): a form of writing recognizable across all (mainly romanized) languages and is the ideal condition of possibility of recognition from within its constitutional order
mimic the address of someone wit charisma (~= authority)
(Morris on) mediaticity of speech (and not merely of media technologies)
Morris reading of a scene (of quotidian exchange) in HIV/AIDS NGO office: a metonym and a metaphor for a kind of South African public sphere that aspires to inclusiveness but is terrorized by its incapacity to know what that opens it up to
•arms itself against potentially aggressive others
•narratives of violence work *to reinforce the sense of necessity* (for a general securitization)
•work in the mode of a **negative meritocracy** (= those who would violate the rights of others are to be excluded, but no others --but--> how to know in advance who has perpetrated or intends to perpetrate such a violation?)
...in the shadow of communicational technology's fashion industry
...bountiful banality of the technologies and artifacts of mass reproducibility
[...] --> lithography --(superseded by)--> photography --(gives way to)--> cinema --(transformed by)--> sound technology --(displaced by)--> integrated and multiplatform digital media --> [...]
(teleological fantasy:) ontologized in epochal schema (these sequences become something more and different) --> analog media are said to be displaced by digital media ==> logic of representation gives way to that of information
=/= (Morris questioning) the conflation of media with mediation, which is itself symptomatic of both a technological determinism and an effort to ontologize technology --> a crises of mediation (not media): the communicative aspiration and the presumptive unity of medium and message in language are brought to their limit (--> media technologies play a role in this drama, but they do not explain it. @OSP & Femke)
-women's understanding of improper English of Zuma's speech: a communicational fail that (from their perspective) is associated with illegality, corruption, and violence
(not to embrace) the kind of logocentric historiography that imagines literacy to constitute a secondary mediation of a primal and autoaffective orality
witches: *technicians of a speech* in which the identity between word and world reaches its maximal extent, when the mere utterance of a spell (even when that utterance is nonverbal) is thought to cause things to happen
zamazama's literacy: the means for communication across difference ==> the mastery of mediation and thus its effaceme[...]
(224)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%28.9[...]wart, Shapiro) to explain body's relation to the world --> ancillary process of being a living body as:
•becoming sensitive
•embodying atmospheres
•somatically judging environments
•becoming corporeal aware of nonhumans
•protracted low-level encounter with domestic chemicals --accumulate--> *chemical sublime* <== (indistinct and distributed harm of) late industrial material ecologies (=/= enlightenment sublime: spectacle material threat with transcendence of immaterial reason)
silent and invisible microemissions accrue within the envelope of the home --> residents reckon with how their homes are decomposing into them as they decompose in their homes
somatic work of the chemically concerned is enmeshed with an *apprehension of their own bodies that is simultaneously sensuous and epistemological* (~ “bodily knowledge” situated within a process of “bodily reasoning” that tempers not just what one knows but what one becomes with or is estranged from [=/= forensic architecture notion of knowledge])
‘sustained bodily reasoning ==> chemical sublime’
Shapiro + Kim Fortune --> call for ways to differently know and reimagine our ongoing late industrial present, which is marked by deteriorating sociotechnical systems and economic, climate, and infrastructural instability
**somatic susceptibility and epistemic capacity** common to human life --(informed by nonhuman life)--> molecular and relational appreciation --Shapiro--> domestically exposed (the ‘chemically wounded’ attuning to their own effects and affects ~ discerning the barely perceptible constituents of their environment [=/= “deviant agents,” diagnosed, resistors]
toxic = potency --implicate--> vulnerability of a living body
years of exposure --> biochemically magnified effects --> semiotically enflamed
somatic cognizance
(Shapiro on affect and phenomenological studies of environmental exposure -->) formaldehyde indicators and agents of social abandonment and precarity
(growing 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 discover[...]
(231)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.2[...]constant as regards either function or position) =/= (male fantasies of) armored body
(Deleuze and Guattari suggest) dismantling of the organism (~ molar organic body) ==>
•hypochondriac body (suffering from imaginary symptoms)
•paranoid body
•schizo body
•drugged body
•masochist body <-- my favourite
•
}--> these are all about the body from the point of view of its *potential* [=/=? method]
}--> we are at (an anthropological / psychoanalytic discourse of) excess and transgression --Artaud-->{ organs: functional articulations forced on the body }==> separation, determination, representation
body without organ =/= body image http://ajayeb.net/?q=body+image
-what feminist theory 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 polit[...]
(232)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.5[...]uired the mutation of old categories and the creation of new ones
==> “witch = misdiagnosed”
epilepsy, the sacred disease, erroneously perceived as resulting from hostile magic
=/= hysteria (hold a special place in the moral imaginary)
the special susceptibility of women to witchcraft mirrored the “feminine weakness” associated with the hysteric, exacerbated by low social status
-in countless accounts of possession, we find descriptions of demons speaking through the mouths of girls
[Baxstrom + Meyers =/= Federici's flat analysis of witch hunt as the tool of subjugation of the local population or of woman by men]
tableau vivant --into--> tableau clinique --into--> tableau critique
hysterical reliving of the original symptom --> reframed trauma: an attempt to suspend the two temporalities (real and reimagined) in the same image
@Hoda
one element of fascination with hysteria was its “look” --> hysteria's aesthetic link to forms of possession
possession --> aneasthesias, amnesias, subconscious acts, somnambulisms, fixed ideas
a scaffolding: conceptually arranged chasm between outer and inner states ==>
•exorcists building on the techniques of inquisitors and witch hunters --> possession acts as the bridge across this chasm
•neurologists and psychologists construct the same
--✕--> (Malinowski's) anthropologists: fieldworkers as truth-tellers returning from the dark corners of the real (the witches are no longer explicitly the target of the inquiry)
Häxan's real object: the specter of sheer nonsense
hunt (even in objective scientific mastery) --> fueled by a desire operationalized in a method of being close enough to something to sense it
...................................
(?every time we have to) show how *the word (that we are using) relates to meaning*
Christensen makes every effort to craft a witch that is real to us : ontological fluidity of a cinematic image ==> “Häxan = word + image + thing”
metoposcopy: the expression of reasoning was to be found on the face, (dating back to Girolamo Cardano and the Renaissance) the operation of reason as the weaving together of images in the mind --> a proto-cinematic theory of the relation between image and thought if ever there was one
•respectable scholar indexes himself through his sources
•authoritarian first-person tenor --> instrumentally impersonal tenor
•establishing the X as a chapter within a much longer constellation of practices, discourses, traditions, and institutions
Kieckhefer --> how the long history of practical natural magic was enfolded into the specificity of European witchcraft in the late Middle Ages
Christ in Limbo --> Christensen's parallel editing ==> moving representation of a terra-centered [...]
(233)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.9[...]th Our Heroes at the Somme (Bei unseren Helden an der Somme, 1917)
(Baxstrom + Meyers) question of mimesis
-what is the relation between a fragmentary visual artifact drawn “from life” and the truth value of any such fragments?
-what sorts of filmmaking practices can felicitously mimic life as such?
[for example in Curtis's In the Land of the War Canoes] status of reenactment ==> prevailing standards of expressing the real
--later --> crypto-structuralist origin myth that falsely represented what “documentary” meant to pre-Griersonian filmmakers ==> “realist” Lumiere =/= the “fanciful” Melies
}--> *gap between witnessing and the real* in Europe (this question of evidence occupied inquisitors and theologians long before the invention of cinema)
preparing viewers for the “diegetic absorption”
(telling of a story by a narrator) diegesis =/= mimesis
the strategy of “reimaging” is methodological and intentional (in the opening minutes of the film Häxan) --> (in European terms, for a very long time:) “knowledge = recitations of the known”
+ creation of new images --> constituting its own evidence for what is at stake
(Christensen designating) **techniques of presentation rather than simple content**
****the “truth” gained by the reproduction of archival images**** <==through== their mobility in the context of their new use
--> (similar to Farocki) Christensen empties out such visual artifacts, expressing through their preestablished frame a meaning that was hidden and resisted
(Baxstrom + Meyers carefully treating the) methodological element of Christensen's image-making practices --in--> Häxan's depiction of the violent moral disorder of the Wild Ride of the witches to their Sabbats
(16th century) Wild Ride: a standard element of both demonological and popular literary accounts of the activities of witches, folding:
•older legends of wild hunters
•restless travels of the dead at night
•tales of the Furious Horde (a super natural band that was not originally associated with witchcraft)
•twisted chaos of the deep forest
Canon Episcopi regarding the power of demonic illusion to deceive women into imagining that they could travel great distances at night, often in the company of the goddess Diana
}--> conjoining of witch image to demonological discourse [<-- an empirically verifiable invention in the late medieval period and the Renaissance]
*the oscillating value of the non-fictive* (of its discrete artifacts)
hybrid human–animal creatures with each “natural” species being traceable within the complete appearance of the demonic creature
(coming into contemporary performance art -->) figures from antiquity:
•Saturn @Ale
•Circe @Bryana [...]
(234)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%30.1[...]ryana (changing men into beasts, games of chance, gambling, tricks, slight of hand, illusion, hybrid animal–human forms of the demons dancing around the “grandmother” with surprisingly young and beautiful appearance --melancholy--> general sense of sexual and societal disorder swirling around a placid, passive female protagonist) + empirical strain of the discourse of the witch
•Sabbat @Jassem
•
-->
pact of the witch
obsessed state of the hysteric
interplay of face and tableau
(Warburg's assertion that) donning a mask constitutes an active attempt “to wrest something magical from nature through the transformation of the person”
[putting on a mask --> transformation of the person --> obtaining omething magical from nature]
Christensen formally constructing “the witch” through a cinematic iteration of metoposcopic naturalism
(metoposcopy: a form of divination in which the diviner predicts personality, character, and destiny, based on the pattern of lines on the subject's forehead.)
(Avital) scientific imperative (the demand in the 19th century for an epistemological reliable inquiry in the nature of things) <-- fascination for the freak and the occult <-- on the way to technology
(Baxstrom + Meyers ☞ Philippe Alain-Michaud on Warburg) “in Mnemosyne, photographic reproduction is not merely illustrative but a general 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 meth[...]
(235)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%30.2[...]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-- image-makers specialized in manipulating one thing (their materials) in order that a viewer should see something else ~ *to make something invisible visible* [<-- this is always ideological, and is very common in art]
(#testing) the objective knowledge possessed by the uncanny (in witch's pathological language of diabolic proofs) ==> witch must be experienced in her own milieu, a satanic biome, her state in nature
...................................
typical in 17th century: tacit mutuality of word & image
-artists habitually gave their paintings titles, mottoes, tags and quotations, and their works abound in litera[...]
(236)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%30.3[...]mentary, 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-- image-makers specialized in manipulating one thing (their materials) in order that a viewer should see something else ~ *to make something invisible visible* [<-- this is always ideological, and is very common in art]
(#testing) the objective knowledge possessed by the uncanny (in witch's pathological language of diabolic proofs) ==> witch must be experienced in her own milieu, a satanic biome, her state in nature
...................................
typical in 17th century: tacit mutuality of word & image
-artists habitually gave their paintings titles, mottoes, tags and quotations, and their works abound in literary allusions
-explicit interleaving of the verbal and visual
cat feces and dove hearts boiled in the moonlight
stereotype of a debased and corrupted priest
object of the customer's affections
Protestant discourse against the Catholic Church in the 16th century --> artists of the period extended the instrumentalization of slander through the production of proto-pornographic images of bishops, priests, and the pope engaged in myriad obscene acts --depicting--> the emotional states and desires of the clergy
magical salves (considered particularly powerful and troubling by demonologists)
Häxan self-positioning as a scientific investigation + constantly pull back from the dramatic outcomes of what Häxan depicts
Häxan's demonstration of th[...]
(237)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%30.3[...]-knowledge <-- mastery of nonsense
= ***a deep appreciation of (that might seem misguided to us):
•cause-and-effect relations
•forces at work in the natural world
(=/= indifference to the truth, retreat into superstition)
~
[these] cases suggestive of and empirically linked to general laws. the case said something about the world, and once a case was established, it would spread like a contagion (=/= proof of misogy or genocide as Federici asserts)
Flaherty ==> a certain truth regarding the total social environment : force of Nanook's life not only provides empirical evidence as to his mode of living but also allows for a refl ection on “nature”, “humanness”, “modernity” rooted in the haptic qualities of Flaherty's images
maleficium (of the witch --> palpable: destructive weather magic, assault of farm animals, sickness, unexplained death, etc.)
saturn's mythological violence <--> satan
the idea that saturn serves as patron to social outliers: the poor, elderly, disabled, criminals, jews, cannibals, magicians, witches
(early modern period -->) **satan = the principal authority of the natural world**, “master of the knowledge of natural properties and the techniques of their instrumentalization” =/= techniques of the healer =/= empirical instruments
(de Certeau observed that) every exercise of trained judgment is authorized through the [*]dark: ratifying force of theology
**dark forces --ratify--> all forms of natural expertise**
mastery of nonsense --driving--> confirming the suspicion of witchcraft = a form of non-knowledge ==opens==> a gap in knowing (specifically, ‘who’)
line of accusation that was quite common in the early modern period --> “the desperate search for the cause of what was other wise an unexplained illness or misfortune was frequently the catalyst for specific witchcraft accusations between friends, acquaintances, and often between family members themselves”
16th century --> this violence now bore the sanction of both secular and religious institutions (<== peasant complaints of maleficium زيان <== human beings have been suffering 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[...]
(238)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%30.6[...]
“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 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[...]
(240)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%31[...] Bastille, in Paris
=/= the nuns and devoted female members of the church, who raised special concern when they were “possessed” by unexplained forces of demonic or neurologic origin
***(Ulrich Baer ☞ Baxstrom:) Charcot ==> transformation of *tableau vivant* --to--> *tableau clinique* : a hysterical reliving of the original symptom and reframed trauma that attempted to suspend the two temporalities (real + imagined) in the same image***
[Sina ==> --to--> *tableau critique* : ??]
--> Freud and Breuer's efforts (in “reliving” with hypnosis) to isolate the mechanisms of hysteria
Acta Sanctorum [---> go to Attar's tazkirat ~ hagiography]
countless early descriptions of entities speaking through the mouths of girls and of the manifestation of “external signs” in the possessed @Bryana
(associated with) possession:
•anesthesias
•amnesias
•subconscious acts
•somnambulisms
◦fixed ideas
•
***conceptually arranged abyss between outer and inner states ==> *literal mastery of nonsense* ==> gaining empirical purchase over forces openly acknowledged to be invisible and insensible in themselves***
•the exorcists (building upon the techniques of inquisitors and witch-hunters) take on possession acted as the *bridge across this abyss*
•the neurologists and psychologists draw unknowable forces out of the inner voids via the *symptom* --Malinowski--> witches, spirits, demons acting as middlemen and guids (=/= explicit target of inquiry) in the field of worker's journey to the dark cornerss of the real
----> (Baxstrom's anthropological insight is useful in artistic feedback, for) in apass: (we use exorcist technique + clinical symptomology) to bridge across the abyss between the artwork and artist (~ the enunciation and enunciator) --Sina--> ‘enunciation is the guide to an enunciator’ #feedback
/>
Levy-Bruhl's haughty binarized “us and them” (his focus on “the primitive” as a category of social analysis and his insistence upon an unbridgeable epistemic gap) --> darker 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 knowin[...]
(242)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%31.5[...] 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 absence --> this [this way of talking about animal is against his philosophical tradition] is not particularly original, it is part of the very game of philosophy: *to fight with ancestors and contemporaries [~=? recalcitrance تمرد tamarod] about great and noble ideas* (to denounce inequality and violence)
maintaining distance is a characteriscteristic of the episteme of the French philosophical tradition
the topic of animal in French tradition:
•the animal can be a topic of philosophy if it is called up as a figure of otherness (or a figure of deprivation) [--> is that why i started to work and think about animal fables after i moved to germany? because i became identifiable as deprived other? and reading about the naming and denunciation of philosophical violence towards the animal became a proxy for philosophical violence towards myself as a foreigner?]
•animal as ancient ancestor (a search for difference with appeal)
•
}--> **as a figure caught up in theoretical and abstract issues** (a philosophical animal) --> animots: paper animals, abstract inexistent animals
=/= Derrida taking up the topic of the animal ==> to oppose a certain humanist hegemony, denouncing philosophical violence towards the animal
•Derrida's rejection of philosophical game par excellence [...]
(244)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%31.6[...]d to be ...
(the influence of) Anglo-Saxon animal studies [on me]
(in Despretian way) learning to think from love
(the bad) fable of coming out of the closet
there is no closet. there are transformations.
falling from a horse, on a path that no longer leads to Damascus
(the story of) Saul does not answer God; he politely asks him to wait two minutes while he comforts his horse. let God wait; other things matter <--Despret-- this is where true conversation takes place
(a philosophy, or thought) one of: obligation =/= distance
(Stengers:) obligation =/= requirements -->{*a distinction that is to be made*, to be created, to be invented, not acknowledged as already manifest in the state of things}
obligation (is much more demanding than) =/= right
(Sina:) obligation =/= commitment
[*]being obligatet = agreeing to expose oneself to failure, refusing to construct the words of order that would protect oneself from the requirements of the activity
{not all activities arise from obligations = not all activities put themselves at risk, not all activities make an effort to present themselves politically}
Haraway's writing technique: a remedy for indifference and contempt --> *becoming attached to the multiple threads that make up the fabric of the world*
(Despret obligated to hear) the blackbird sang as if the world itself depended on its song --and-->
*the importance of things came to dwell in its voice*
*the blackbird made importance exist in another way*
*importance became incorporated in the world*
and this importance rises like a question [a question that comes after “what matters for..."] --Despret--> how can i now write in such a way as to be worthy of what matters, with a similar insistence, for another being? (my question in Cinderella diaries)
r />
...................................
my history (of continuous interest, or what created the next “-->”):
iran / visual arts --> germany / lecture and performance --> research / heritage study --> case / ajayeb bestiary --> epistemology / animal --> science / anthropology
...................................
home funerals put into practice an important dimensino of the lives lived by the deceased --> participates actiively in the instauration of their existence
-instauration: [re-storying] restoring, participating in a transformation that leads to a certain existence = to more existence, in the case of the deceased: both a biographical supplement and the accomplishment of an existence in another realm of reality ==Souriau==> brilliance of reality (of the dead): regards of the existence of the deceased, provided we agree on the right regime of reality that can be granted to them --> (envisioning definition of the mode of existence)==enabl[...]
(245)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%32[...], one will define the animal above all, whenever possible, by its essence (by what it is)]
--Latour--> reinstituting nature, *one does not learn from beings turned into zombies* (deanimated) ==> (ethology is required to) address an animal defined as non-indifferent: an animal for which the way it is addressed matters
--Despret--> [*]ethology: a practical science of the modes of interrogating and experimenting with ways of being = ****a practical science of the modes of attention**** (that are required by the ways of being of those it aims to study)
...................................
working on:
•[with Despret and Katie] How my “special things” belong also to others, and how in this belonging i can unlearn something about my things, call it heritage
•in my own performances, the proposal that “story” and “medium” do not need to fit... is also why my lectures don't produce similar joinings (for the audience)
every phenomena is at the same time experienced, resisted, measured, enunciated, performed, narrated
politics, poetics and affects of finitude
fossil nihilism
...................................
Frankenstein: an all-purpose modifier to denote technological crimes against nature--a criminal only after being left alone by his horrified creator
--Latour--> we have failed to care for our own creations : Frankenstein as a parable for political ecology
to be coextensive with...
to become compositionist: one that sees the process of human development as a process of becoming ever-more attached to nonhuman natures (=/= 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 ecosys[...]
(246)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%32.2[...]eed to fit... is also why my lectures don't produce similar joinings (for the audience)
every phenomena is at the same time experienced, resisted, measured, enunciated, performed, narrated
politics, poetics and affects of finitude
fossil nihilism
...................................
Frankenstein: an all-purpose modifier to denote technological crimes against nature--a criminal only after being left alone by his horrified creator
--Latour--> we have failed to care for our own creations : Frankenstein as a parable for political ecology
to be coextensive with...
to become compositionist: one that sees the process of human development as a process of becoming ever-more attached to nonhuman natures (=/= 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/ajayebedid[...]
(247)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%32.3[...]lace under the sway of the Tarof?
-repeatability of the Tarof is built into its singular occurrence
-Tarof, a *reciprocal promise* that aims to correspond to the most 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 behaviour (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 obliterat[...]
(248)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%32.6[...]e? 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 behaviour (tarof is adab-e salatin?) ~~--> tasavof's tarof: takalof (=/= javan-mardi: ‘self = guest’)
Khhv0M9n5_g
...................................
every call to speak involves some violation and over-joy, putting oneself in a persecutory way on the line, what Sa'di calls in “Dar Favaede Khamushi” in 4th chapter of his Golestan ‘on the disadvantages of speaking’ or “On the Advantages of Silence” (Written in 1258 CE)
literate or obliterate
infinitely less violent --> that there is never absolutely nonviolent, a value infinitely small but never zero; infinidecimals
degree of violence = 1/x {while “true”: x+1}
(Augustine:)
(Because of the arbitrariness of being:) “to love" = "I want you to be”
[we need to be witnessed:]
because “we have not made ourselves,” we “stand in need of confirmation. We are strangers; we stand in need of being welcomed”
*strangers and exchangers (sarraf)
this is an artistic concern with foreign-policy
[Arendt:] (in 20th century) shifts in the terms in which we locate the et[...]
(249)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%32.6[...]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 lunch between my family members. an object that captured the dialectic of desire and disgust in my human family's response to the animal.]--> this is what I call cosmology: beings that depends on their placing within a particular cosmology. cosmology is very much alive --- [animals fitting in the visual rhetoric of web-based digital media is itself to be investigated... social relations, social animal, contemporary cosmology]
-the minimum relationship with feral cats, and rats, and pigeons (and their material environment.) and ambiguity towards them. evoking responses of affection, disgust, fear, and indifference.
-relationships between people, animals and place**** [a place as complex as Tehran's urban environment with its politics, televised operations, its ‘wilderness,’ and technologically mediated stories and rumors that populate its landscape.] --> are we having a Historical change? in epistemic principles --> what is inside and what is outside [keep in mind the historical moment in iran's political isolation. is this reflecting the exclusion of feral animals of everyday life?]
-my family was able to talk differently and find other expressions about violence in the landscape of tehran by applying the animal story (to the head and heart.) [this is also Kelile o Demneh.] the video was a heart-breaker. it had a healing moment, and their resistance to its originality as a tale of friendship is meaningful, the violence is solid and a-priori to companionship, and it supported the story of kinship instead of friendship. This story also promoted the Descartes’ beast-machine hypothesis, that the wild-being is devoid of intentions and is like a timepiece with regular motions, that the animal is object and not subject, beast-machine.
-my mother's relationship to the lions eating their offspring, octopus eating their mate, or cats licking their genitals and dogs filth scavenging--polluters of domestic space, cockroaches “belonging” to an stratum below civilized life, the “out of place” and abject owl, species sexual dispositions and different coupling, suggest difficulty in an anthropocentric expectation of alterity. animals simultaneously despised and admired --- the idea of eating your (so-called) “loved-one” (not a suitable object for affection) refutes cross-species identification according to anthropocentric standards. [windows of opportunity for cross-species bonding, domestic-wanna-be-feral story, myth of mental intention and animal f[...]
(250)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%32.9[...] />
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 public domain becomes more feral, and the animal more contagious, and the proximity more virtual, and the cross-species relationships and pictural,
-questions of the vital, the dangerous, and the wild (in tehran)
“[...]animals, especially dead ones, enter centrally into what humans can themselves be and do in the world.” (Cockburn)
i am trying to establish an anthropological, sociological and psychological investigations in this matter, calling for a ‘cultural animal geography’ that focuses on the complex entanglings of human-animal relations with space, place, location, environment and landscape. ~-> topology(s) {it means that spaces and places involved make a difference to the very constitution of the relations in play}
[Tehran: wilderness ~ public ~ non-domesticity]
...differing peoples in differing periods and worldly contexts***
societies 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? [enc[...]
(251)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%33.4[...]perates 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 public domain becomes more feral, and the animal more contagious, and the proximity more virtual, and the cross-species relationships and pictural,
-questions of the vital, the dangerous, and the wild (in tehran)
“[...]animals, especially dead ones, enter centrally into what humans can themselves be and do in the world.” (Cockburn)
i am trying to establish an anthropological, sociological and psychological investigations in this matter, calling for a ‘cultural animal geography’ that focuses on the complex entanglings of human-animal relations with space, place, location, environment and landscape. ~-> topology(s) {it means that spaces and places involved make a difference to the very constitution of the relations in play}
[Tehran: wilderness ~ public ~ non-domesticity]
...differing peoples in differing periods and worldly contexts***
societies 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 whate[...]
(252)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%33.5[...]ngs to be described or imagined; concepts are lived; the subject is present as witness to the moment in which some worlding is about to disclose itself in some form or event. the result is a subject attached to worlds throwing together in a sensory refrain, a literally unbelievable image, or a muscle of sociality or belief. theory: drawn through writing into the ways that people and things venture out into reals. a world in the present tense is always other than its representation [<-- another argument for #excess]. nonrepresentational writing : *a phenomenal method of attending and composing* =/= epiphenomenal: an expression of knowledge already garnered انبار from scholarship. to spin out of critical thinking's bad habits: the prizing of prefabricated good objects over bad objects.)
(--> Singh, Anand; agency as a threshold of life with its own immanent forms of movement and flux, studying spirits and shifts in intensity)
(--> )
(--> )
(the dangerous and bizzar idea of) a pure ‘human’ society
‘anthropomorphism’ actually ‘underestimates our humanity,’ in that the ‘anthropos’ and the ‘morphos’ together mean both that which has human shape and that which gives shape to humans (Philo + Wilbert ☞ Latour)
technomorphism, zoomorphism, ...
anthropocentrism of the standard anthropomorphism critique --> human-referenced starting-point
trophies, stuffed parts, drawings
urine, faeces and other dirts
feral =/= wild =/= tame =/= feral
in-between animal-findings and animals finding
appropriate places of animals: in zoo or animations
(the 2016 film Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is about proper zoology and not animal epistemology. here what comes after “Find Them” is crucial.)
(the developement moral identities and psychological interiorities for Pixar's human teller in anthropomorphist films such as Ratatouille.)
-we need to imagine a new animal geography
*territory: “...sites of a completed cycle of parentage and exchanges [...] spaces of insurmountable reciprocity.” (Baudrillard)
(is Baudrillard sentimentalizing animal territoriality? and giving them ‘psychic life’?)
...................................
[Michael Woods]
...through representation an entity becomes ‘immutable mobiles’ (Latour) that allow political debate to take place by presenting to decision-makers convincing representations of things which they have not directly experienced. (--> Hollywood)
...................................
[Avital]
the maternally contacting child is menaced
it is the mother who call(ed) first
mother and child, each the absolute hostage of the Other
to face the immense, faceless Someone
the nature of our encounter is on a timer
ask for subtitle if I go foreig[...]
(253)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%33.7[...]
super-ego [that part of you that exercises authority, “I am gonna make you swallow this” --> jouissance] ~=? Div-mardom دیو مردم (paternal correctional voice, “don't drink!” --> Nezami) =/= Div (says “benush!” بنوش)
...................................
(with Haraway;) the relation between what counts as nature and what counts as culture (in Tehran)--judging whether a behavior is the stuff of genes or rearing
the domestic animal is the epoch-changing tool --> (free) wolf/dog (servant) ==> civilization
what are the things we hate in the name of Wilderness (~=> “fall” into culture)
...................................
[lecture at apass, 10.03.2017]
i follow the scribbles of jamming and jam session
welcome to this metaphysical place
like you, i am also sometimes in heaven, sometimes in hell, in no-land, nowhere, elsewhere, in Belgium; also interested deeply in what signals my and our arrival in the metaphysical entity of Belgium. like Christian, as i am fantasizing his excursion that i missed, we went out and walked back into the city, studying what really signals our arrival, when and how and where on the body we feel that we are there. and my guess is that it is always technological. but in an another universe your arrival might be registered by greeting. and in an Iranian sense...
...................................
my lecturing, when it is about going after a term or a metaphor or a subphenomena or a paraconcept, {to arrive at its essential qualities or range, its meaning and historical rootedness, how does it hold things together, what holds it together (in related but different speculative milieu,) its intractable necessity, its ghostly effectiveness, its phenomenological maintenance, in which framework they maneuver, and so on} is a tentative intervention that i reside in the weaker neighborhoods of thought, even vandalizing (authoritative knowledge-)claims of legitimacy and abandoning the controlling of possibilities of comprehension.
-(purposeful?) anarchy of questioning, unfolding my thoughts anarchically
*not to work on X in order to get the point across that one remains susceptible (mosta'ed مستعد, dar khatar در خطر, dar ma'raz در معرض) to and in need of X : what X almost was, or is still about to be
(the character of X, and? the X-ian character)
-rather, ask, in what way X allows an approach?
{Avital on} **authority, violent shores of human governance
what happened to authority after the demotion (tanazol-e rotbe تنزل رتبه) of the “big Other” (death of God, State, Pir, and other mostly masculinist idols)?
a primal impulse in the cuing of group formation; pre-givenness of our way of handling private and public spheres of encounter, domestic and foreign affairs;
-disappearance of authority functions as a figure[...]
(254)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%33.9[...] an implicit contract based on norms and conventions
the sentiment (and performance of Tarof in a weird way, and) of verguenza construct relations of social solidarity, the tie --> to give structure to the relationship to the gods (as well as that between persons) --> *aidos* becomes constitutive of shame civilization (that continues to mutate)
shame, sham, to “cover up” shameful parts
aischune[=/= *aidos* (==> *kleos* “fame”) defines the Homeric hero, aidos precisely identifies the definitive requirement of the hero, his “regard” for his philoi (φίλοι royal friend/advisor of the king) and his genos (γένος, social group claiming common descent)]: to dishonor [=/= beauty, in Plato] }--> to disfigure; tied to the body, and in the case of the female body --> blush, as in the sensitive plant
aidos (~= moderation [provoked by the regard and expectations of the other]) =/= *excess* [--> in my lectures i usually don't respect/regard the expectations of the other]-->? that which separates me from the Homeric hero
(these are all about the regulation of the world)--> in a way also that which Mona demands
Mona need to analyse her question of (caused) violence and calamity:
•disposal the Promethean technai [τέχναι] (when she asks “who gave them the tool to kill?”)
•the logos [λόγος] of the arts and discursivity (when she demands conscience and justice [~ dike, another greek tool])
for Aristotle: aidos ==> clean ethics: pathos (an affection that involves the body)
*the form of fear proper to free men* --> properties proper to truth
from aidos [linked to the Latin videre (to see)], to vergüenza [linked to the Greek horan (to see)], we remain in the space of the *gaze*
...................................
Veena on *how knowledge is secreted in relation to catastrophic events*
‘inordinate knowledge’ --> beyond the act of merely knowing
=/= pale intellectualized distracted archived knowledge --> it is the subject who has
to discover which aspects of knowledge matter to her and where her attachments lie
--Veena--> (with pale or excessive, it is not the form of knowledge, rather) it is the way in which knowledge enters the realms of the social
those who have to endure what they cannot ignore
pale --> bare --> dark --> filled with plenitude
different modes of knowing as means of navigating the catastrophic (=/= simply knowledge about an object)
*reality does not have that frontal character*, (it is rather) like atmosphere, deeply embedded within context
[*]context: the weaver's loom that is discerned within the cloth it weaves
Donatelli --destruction--> small, recurring, repetitive crises that define everyday life itself or are grown within the everyday
*event of tr[...]
(255)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%35[...]ng been rendered either unintelligible or naive (in feminism --> an avowed interest in the body + a persistent distaste for biological detail)
interested in antiracism and politics of globalization --✕--> crucial dimension of research: body <== “the precarious, accidental, contingent, expedient, striving, dynamic status of life in a messy, complicated, resistant, brute world of materiality, a world regulated by the exigencies, the forces, of space and time” + the conditions under which bodies are encultured, psychologized, given identity, historical location, and agency
*(you can) speak (back) to postmodernism (or democracy etc.), rather than simply speak on (your relationship to) it*
...................................
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
[...]
(256)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%35.3[...]nly one part, a kind of lively limb, of the relay):
(ajayeb style -->) a bumptious and lively event of the processes of whale studies and whales themselves =/= a still record of a whale “that had been there”
the image: a kind of connective tissue, soliciting one's senses
solar light --> brushed up against, even touched, the whale --> translated through the camera --> into film --> into chemical bathes --> into photo-paper --> through my eye as a research assistant
}==> ‘photograph: material, immanent, interconnected’ ==> somatic intelligibility (embodiment) to my own somatic intelligence ~ enacted an encounter between the senses (subjective feelings) and their sense (objective knowledges)
a mutual embodiment <-- shared in the event of the photographic space
experience of these photographs [whale or telegram animal video]: an instance of *sensuous knowledge* --> way we are in some carnal modality able to touch and be touched by the substance of images (to feel a visual atmosphere envelop us)
(Grosz's) [*]perception: flesh's reversibility ~ the flesh touching, seeing, perceiving itself, one fold (provisionally) catching the other in its own selfembrace
human/animal and technological sensorium
-Hayward asking how coral communities create representational ruptures in photographs
-Sina asking how telegram virtual communities create representational ruptures in the real of human-animal of Tehran, how the enfleshed animal mobile phone photograph touch us
}--> liveliness of humananimal encounters [the way in which my aesthetic and ethical senses merge with animals in the flesh]
-how people get along in concrete, metamorphic, phantasmatic ways
**sensible and sensual ensembles of materialized capacities and activities that literally and metaphorically make sense of, and to, ourselves and other animals**
(Ihde >) [*]phenomenology: a philosophical style that emphasizes a certain interpretation of human experience and that, in particular, concerns perception and bodily activity --Hayward--> a theoretical practice grounded on the carnal, fleshy, material foundations of subjectivity as it engages and is transformed by and in the world
we attend to: content + form + context
invertebrates, product of displacement and comparison, a ruinous verb turned noun turned classification --Hayward--> foregrounding and rethinking the syntax, optics, and heterogeneity of vertebrate and invertebrate relationality
accountability and responsibility in the enmeshment of knowing, doing, seeing, and being
(we need less philosophizing and more) *envisioning: an enactment of dynamic en-figurings that imperil boundaries that clearly differentiate self and other without the loss of historical, cultural, and species specificity*
[...]
(257)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%35.4[...]classification --Hayward--> foregrounding and rethinking the syntax, optics, and heterogeneity of vertebrate and invertebrate relationality
accountability and responsibility in the enmeshment of knowing, doing, seeing, and being
(we need less philosophizing and more) *envisioning: an enactment of dynamic en-figurings that imperil boundaries that clearly differentiate self and other without the loss of historical, cultural, and species specificity*
...................................
☾
light has illuminated western stories
•God said, let there be light: and there was light
•solar radiance --> refracted planetary atmosphere --> earth's watery matter --> lively forms
•life shaped by ice (Meloy)
•life shaped by dark (Mohaghegh)
•life shaped by animal (Sina)
•life shaped by light (Hayward) --> the invisible medium that makes a knowable world visible; *seeing light: a trope for making visible in a comprehensive form (such that they are real)*
1. *philosophy is photology* : language of philosophy is constituted by metaphors of light
2. sunlight metaphorizes into transcendent light : a heavenly light promising liberation from the flesh
transgenic technologies ==>
jellyfish + GFP (green fluorescent protein)
rhesus monkey
glowing kittens
transgenic pigs
(...animal examples of chimeric and impure)--Hayward--> articulation of carnal interdependence across species boundaries
bacteria, yeast, fungi, plant, fly, human cell
chimeric borderlands of GFP and transgenics
pushing against the perceptual and affective registers of laboratory walls embodied selves, eating practices, living conditions
bio-capitalism
animal industry
(Hayward on) carnality and radiance of naturecultures
(welcoming a) multidisciplinary table of where light is being eaten
visuality as corporality
light = meat
(Latin word) lumen: light, lantern, lamp, clairity, understanding, the central cavity of a hollow structure in an organism or cell
*somalumenal: how might luminosity, effulgence and illumination be about embodiment or corporality? light transubstantiated into flesh and matter (=/= body transcended by the thrills of enlightenment and radiance)*
(my work on telegram bestiary:) *post-animal studies*
[*]tranimal: a synecdochically imagined correspondence written as a portmanteau word --> changes in our understanding of bodily transformation, somatic and sensual synthesis that manifests synecdochically (a figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole or the whole for a part) =/= metaphorically
[Cinderella is synecdochic]
*trans-
ongoing labor of cross-species agents
energetic and material crossings th[...]
(258)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%35.5[...](Haraway + Hayward) metaplasm قلب حروف: a change in a word (by adding, comitting or transposing its letters, syllables or sounds) that can signify a mistake, stumbling, a troping that makes a difference [in joined natureculture --Haraway--> flesh and signifier, bodies and words, stories and worlds]
to inflect tranimals with its tropic kin of antimeria that turns nouns into verbs, that mobilizes, incites, activates persons, animals, places, things and ideas
*i am rubied by your attention* : the relay of energies and forces (not just encounter) ==constitute==> ontology
[*]ontology: what there is + what debts we owe to it --> we owe ‘sensation’ to life's ‘insistencies’ : (Hayward arguing) we must respond to *life's insistencies* through sensation (corporal prehensions)
--(?why to write:)--> **noun = transitional responses to relationships** (=/= direct products of environment)
==?==> percussive distribution of affect
boundary: refracted interfaces of passage, prepositional orientation
sensuous being: unmetabolizable more, the residue of passing
jellyfish sting story
“a jellyfish stings human skin, leaving an empurpled mark that inscribes the boundaries of tentacle and skin (somatic technologies), but the excitation (sensorial transit) of burning and blistering energy remains partly unmetabolizable--this remainder is differentiating and binding. so excitation is not necessarily predicated on positive joins of ever expanding units of life, but emerges between them and therefore can be generated through haemorrhaging [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
[...]
(259)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%35.6[...] and forces (not just encounter) ==constitute==> ontology
[*]ontology: what there is + what debts we owe to it --> we owe ‘sensation’ to life's ‘insistencies’ : (Hayward arguing) we must respond to *life's insistencies* through sensation (corporal prehensions)
--(?why to write:)--> **noun = transitional responses to relationships** (=/= direct products of environment)
==?==> percussive distribution of affect
boundary: refracted interfaces of passage, prepositional orientation
sensuous being: unmetabolizable more, the residue of passing
jellyfish sting story
“a jellyfish stings human skin, leaving an empurpled mark that inscribes the boundaries of tentacle and skin (somatic technologies), but the excitation (sensorial transit) of burning and blistering energy remains partly unmetabolizable--this remainder is differentiating and binding. so excitation is not necessarily predicated on positive joins of ever expanding units of life, but emerges between them and therefore can be generated through haemorrhaging [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 advert[...]
(260)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%35.6[...]and blistering energy remains partly unmetabolizable--this remainder is differentiating and binding. so excitation is not necessarily predicated on positive joins of ever expanding units of life, but emerges between them and therefore can be generated through haemorrhaging [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 ha[...]
(261)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%35.7[...]iders, 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
r />
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 (biocultural) & domestic cohabitation (composition #Cinderella, pet) --evoke--> invisible labour of jellyfish, research on the proliferation and patterns of cancer cells and the sensation of somalumenality [Hayward's Alba]
(Anker ☞ Hayward:) the chimera must be understood in a social context: these beasts have always reflected the social, scientific and religious circumstances <-- my project in zoological vandalism
(Hayward's neologism --> posthumanist r[...]
(262)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%35.7[...]es 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 (biocultural) & domestic cohabitation (composition #Cinderella, pet) --evoke--> invisible labour of jellyfish, research on the proliferation and patterns of cancer cells and the sensation of somalumenality [Hayward's Alba]
(Anker ☞ Hayward:) the chimera must be understood in a social context: these beasts have always reflected the social, scientific and religious circumstances <-- my project in zoological vandalism
(Hayward's neologism --> posthumanist repositioning of visuality) carnophallogocentric visual appetite
...glow (intensifying vision) drifts through the bodies of consumers
eating (ingesting and killing of) jellyfish usually takes the form of dried crisps sprinkled into salads and Chinese food
Cinderella's techne --> companion
Crusoe's techne --> human
-fictional kitchen where Cinderella works (and is not a master of)
[learning from] Cinderella (her room has been undone and remade by cohabitation with birds, mice, evil mother --> changing the self and adapting) ==> ontology: a practice of co-constitutive awareness
Alba --engineered--> to glow
pig --engineered--> to become sausage
...................................
Seymour
bad affect
(bad environmentalism's) respond to mainstream environmentalism + questioning its broader ideals of nature
=/= conventional environmental affect
both identify & respond to the aforementioned absurdities and ironies, through absurdity and irony + related affects and sensibilities:
•irreverence بى ادبى
•ambivalence
•camp
•frivolity هرزه
•indecorum بى نزاکتى
•awkwardness
•sardonicism زهر خنده
•perversity
•playfulness
•glee شاد شاد
affects and sensibilities typically associated with environmentalism:
•gloom
•doom
•guilt
•shame
•didacticism
•prescriptiveness
•sentimentality احساساتى
•reverence حرمت
•seriousness
•sincerity
•earnestness
•sanctimony تقدس
•self-righteousness
•wonder
assumptions:
•that reverence is required for ethical relations to the nonhuman
•that knowledge is key to fighting problems like climate ch[...]
(263)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%35.8[...] taboo, a place of great fear, a cursed world full of monsters lurking in shadowy fathoms, (waters: low and deep =/= air: domain of morality and aspiration, closer to heaven)
-19th century europe victorian glass *aqua vivarium* --> windows that interfaced between human sight and subaqueous scenes (the unknown provoked feelings of bot curiosity and apprehension)--Stott--> for the naturalist the marine or freshwater aquarium provided a constantly changing, glass-fronted theater of bizarre and exotic bodies, moving, metamorphosing, interacting and breeding in sensational ways
-aquariums became sacred spaces where cohabited forces of godliness and nature were contained, compartmentalized, and studied --> animal = metonymic of particularly nonhuman environments --> victorian sensibilities
(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 ci[...]
(265)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%36[...]ction (always live together)
telegram animal carousel: nonhuman-animal-machine
my room/bedroom (~-> Cinderella's attic, architecture of containment)
overlapping perceptual worlds
synaesthetic force of perceiving and feeling, processing and mattering --> transposing of senses
immersion
kinesthesia
numerous haptic registers
we are transsensual
[*]sensation: the vibratory force in all organisms that seduces, sexulizes, entices, and mesmerizes the body
vibrate
oscillate
wave
aquarium ==> new sensations: deep-sea drifting and shimmering for upright opaque hominids --> that are sent further adrift through experience in yet unknown expressions
[*]ecology: ambivalent powerful elusive ways of composing through histories of interation, relationality, interconnection, and materiality
relational matter =/= matter of who has agency
/>
Hayward's [and my] attention and sensuous reach are solicited by the ctenophores in the display, a display that instrumentalizes the jellies diffracting cilia and solicits my senses
-jellies participation in worldhood (further becomings)?
immersed in deep marine technoscience worlds...
...................................
Marx: human begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence ==> they produce their actual material life
--Haraway--> Marx understood relational sensuousness, and he thought deeply about the metabolism between human beings and the rest of the world enacted in living labor --> the humanist teleology of that labor: making of man himself
horses
oxen
police dogs
rescue dogs
messenger pigeons
Despret ☞ Ridout
(theological critical roots of theater:) beforebefore tragedy is its infancy [infans: the condition of those who are without language]
the division of labor, the death of god, the establishment of human dominion over the animals, the birth of tragedy may all be seen as simultaneous(?)
--> animals off stage in western theatre, to hide its origins in these moments of *inaugural violence* + the institution of division of labor
what was the animal doing on stage before the birth of tragedy?
mythical origin ==create==> stories (fabulous, fabulating): [storytelling: seeking for] means of making a vanished experience available again in the contemporary world (~ storytelling) ~/= *storymaking: creation of memories, the construction of a history that renders the present and the future richer in possibilities* [not just for your self and your kind, as Hollywood or the brands do it: personalize experiences at scale]
animals do not appear to work, in the referential framework that emer[...]
(270)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%36.2[...]the only place that the question (considering whether animals do work) can be brought forward is the place where only the meaning associated with exploitation can matter (in places where both humans and animals are greatly mistreated)
-place where the evidence of such work is found, are places where animals are industrially “produced” --> their behaviours appear very definitely as belonging to a work relationship
director of animal resources --> (in such frame) animal: occupy the place of an obscure underclass, malleable, serviceable, and disposable in the end
moder feeder operations --Porcher--> animals sometimes wanted to help
asking the breeders: could you help us learn how to ask our question so that it has a chance of making sense to other people? ==> they also could explore the *manner in which we were obligated to formulate our questions*
(Harawayiean) responsibility: a relationship crafted into intra-action through which entities, subjects, and objects, come into being
lead cow (the one who trusts the breeder, and one the herd trusts, usually is in the front) =/= dominant cow (in th