[...]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[...]

[...]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[...]

[...]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[...]

[...]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[...]

[...]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[...]

[...]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)

[...]

[...]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[...]

[...]>

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

[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[...]

[...]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[...]

[...]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[...]

[...]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[...]

[...]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 the hierarchy of the herd, is found in the middle of the herd)

a theme in animal technicians
paying attention to animals = being able to feel the limits that animals ask us to take into account (more than questions of well-being)


[many times] *work often leaves no evidence behind* (=/= publishing)
@apass


ethology ==teaches==> certain questions cannot be answered unless one constructs concrete conditions beforehand --> those that allow the questions to be asked + those that render those who ask capable of discerning the answer, capable of grasping it when it emerges

peace-maintaining gestures of the cows

why the work of the cows was invisible?
*because work only becomes perceptible when the cows resist* (when they place limit on what can happen) --shows--> when everything goes correctly it is because of an active investment on the part of the cows
***when everything happens as it should, we don't see the work*** (=/= notion of work in art)
@apass

(when they do what has to be done in response to an order, cow's) obedience looks “mechanical” (~/=? Cinderella's obedience [?not in a mechanical age])
[=/= art's work <== conflict that disturb this order of things]

(the fieldwork of Despret helping me to realize that) *the moments without conflict* are not something merely natural, self-evident, or mechanical --> they require from the cows (or someone whose work is invisible) the activity of pacification, in which they make compromises (groom each other, exchange gestures of politeness, etc.)
•dogs and horses who are asked to serve as therapeutic assistants for humans: these animals often have a passive air an[...]

[...] material as well, not as counterparts, rather as its play-mate.

(fire suppressing) an older ecology of reflection (namely the stone)

the telling stone is the same as spirit stone(?)---non-animal container (@Karin)
(stone is related to the spirits of the ground. the prisoner who throw a pebble into the pit, the pebble's sound is going to tell about the depths and darknesses that the human, on death sentence, does not have a long enough rope to carry too. so the rope is never enough, the linear connection, the closed chain of links, but the throwing stone can risk a disjunction between that mother->king->prisoner->darkness)
--> sending a guy into the pit is not typical for the cultures of Pleistocene: (using linear connection, darkness ~= unkown, and so on)
[Shepard] Prehistoric humans were autochthonous, that is, “native to their place.” (related to the earthly stone =/= fire that perpetually evacuates) (it is not that of the introvert stone and the extrovert fire, but the opposite, stone was social and fire allied interiority, it sent/banished the subject to the land of the mediated, ‘from now on you are coming from mediation.’ (Where the subject comes from? it comes from the mediation.) --> use me --> industrialize with me --> technologize with me --> stone-tech are 1.5 million years earlier than fire-tech --> with stone you can't reach the sky but by controlling combustion you can go up ==> alienation as the touchstone of humankind --> then comes the “reflective consciousness” of humankind --> and later the invention of the very strange object: the mirror [---> go to amazon#2DifficultForests] ==> a change in the “structure of existence” --> then the idea of “selftranscendence” by monotheist religions --> adventures of power and ideology --> then a very bad idea called “history” was introduced---an active, psychological force that separates humankind from the rest of nature because of its disregard for the deep connections to the past.[Shepard 2004] --- Lévi-Strauss points out, historical thought is analytical and concerned with continuity and “closing gaps and dissolving differences” to the point that it “transcends original discontinuity.”)
[in east mirror was never used as mean to self reflect, rather it was weaponized agains evil, although this evil was female and men used mirror to defeat it. unlike the western thought since the greeks in the Narcissus story where mirror is the foundation of self-absorbance and knowledge and madness, the easterns since they did not posses the same brand of selfhood they found mirror strange and uttelized it in curious ways, another optical problem ---> go to mirror and the laughing snake - mar-e ghahghahezan, img]
...through the speaking fire, events “on earth” were finished except for a final judgment by fire --> invention of sin, spiritual existence : selftranscendence. anthropoce separating themselves from earth and its processes
-‘essen[...]

[...] we can articulate these forms? What are the operations that connect the form-embedded self to the others?

4 billion years ago, the gravitational force of a mass of hydrogen atoms accumulated into a dense point of critical state. As a result of this formation new fusions released many sip-offs of different energies and materials which we perceive today in our bodies and in the light that reaches our eyeballs from the time immemorial of that hydrogen cloud. This fossil of materiality implies the existence of traces of an ancient reality before the existence of the familiar--the terrestrial life. While these traces are gauged in theoretical experiments in which radioactive ratios of nuclides inform us of such ancestral events, in Amerindian cosmogonies not so differently steered hypothesis are explored. Yawanawa, the origin myth of the people of Pano from the western Amazon, imagines the anterior of the world where nothing existed, yet there only people existed--everything was made of people. Before the diversification and classification of kinds there was a primordial human, as the only substance of which everything eventually fabricated.

Like Yawanawa, Hayula (Persian: هیولا) literally in today's usage with the meaning of unformed monster, is a technical term in Iranian-Islamic cosmology indicating the first principle of everything material of which all other constitutive layers of beings are molded--minerals, plants, animals, etc. Hayula in one hand locates the lowest of the lowest, the bottom of the scalar existence where God resides at the very top, and on the other hand possesses a great anatomical plasticity, a persistent pre-cosmological being that undermines the second law of thermodynamic. First were the object then came the subject--to give away to the results of the stabilization of the infinite potential for transformation contained in Hayula, as universal substance, a matter out of which the world could have come to be formed.

The narratives of the time before form, an era of pre-cosmological beings, primordial people with unlimited and unbound corporeality, is the story of the originality of Hayula's virtual potential for being. Hayula, not fully human, tasting beyond morality (destruction, anthropophagy, etc.), becomes the subjects of other interventions and morphs into spheres and features of the world--of biological aspects, celestial bodies, humanoid zones, etc.

The realm of Hayula comes to interpret, and thus permit and strain, who and how an I can be, at the same time that it provides the vessel for the continuity, the survival, of that I. Here the I is the continuity of an inhabitation of a point of view. It marks a relative position within a hierarchical logic that spans the cosmos, a hierarchy that ranges from the nonhuman to the human realm and from the demons to the realm of the formless. Following the classic joke, that one goes to a place in order to discover t[...]

[...]al-semiotic flesh

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

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

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


(techniques of the observer - september 9, 2012)
•What is the relation between the dematerialized digital imagery of the present and the so-called age of mechanical reproduction?
•ongoing abstraction of vision - Problems of vision
•transformation in the makeup of vision
•history of art <-> history of perception?
•onlooker (Zuschauer)
•historically important functions of the human eye ==> medical, military, and police hierarchies
•Most of the historically important functions of the human eye are being supplanted by practices in which visual images no longer have any reference to the position of an observer in a “real,” optically perceived world.
•where abstract visual and linguistic elements coincide
•avoid mystifying it by recourse to technological explanations (this was my mistake!)
•an observer is more importantly one who sees within a prescribed set of possibilities, one who is embedded in a system of conventions and limitations.
•measurable in terms of objects and signs
•newly constituted human sciences in regulating and modifying the behavior of individuals.
•it was through these disciplines that the subject in a sense became visible
•passage from the geometrical optics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to physiological optics
•to expose the idiosyncrasies of the “normal” eye
•Retinal afterimages, peripheral vision, binocular vision, and thresholds of attention
•outcome of a complex remaking of the individual as observer into something calculable-and regularizable and of human vision into something measurable and thus, exchangeable.
•standardization of visual imagery
•in the amphitheatre / on the stage / in the Panoptic machine
•dissociation of touch from sight ==> “separation of the senses” and industrial remapping of the body in the nineteenth century
•unloosening of the eye from the network of referentiality incarnated in tactility ==> fitted for the tasks of “spectacular” consumption
•Perception for Benjamin was acutely temporal and kinetic;
•a mobile consumer of a ceaseless succession of illusory commodity-like Images.
•Machines are social before being technical
•desiring machines
•The paintings of J-B. Chardin are lodged within these same questions of knowledge and perception His still lifes, especially, are a last great presentation of the classic[...]

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


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

bad visual systems

narcissism as a cultural practice (that also moti[...]

[...]ke to talk about reality

imagery of moves in the fully textualized and coded world
high tech (military) field

recognizing our own ‘semiotic technologies’ for making meanings,
life is semiotic as well as technology

(commitment?) to faithful accounts of a ‘real’ world

Haraway writes: All components of the desire are paradoxical and dangerous, and their combination is both contradictory and necessary.

We need the power of modern critical theories of how meanings and bodies get made, not in order to deny meaning and bodies, but in order to live in meanings and bodies that have a chance for a future. (reductionism?)

insist on the embodied nature of all vision, and so reclaim the sensory system that has been used to signify a leap out of the marked body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere. (how the exhibition can make visible my positing in the work? ground me in an embodied vision? my situation. to situate me. not necessarily organic embodiment? what have i need to learn in my bodies?)

perverse capacity of the eye

culture disembodies. (nature embodies?)
to distance the knowing subject from everybody and everything

visualizing technologies are without (apparent) limit?

linked to:
-artificial graphic manipulation systems
-computer aided scanners
-colour enhancement techniques

mapping is at stake. what kind of mapping the Kinect image provides? that is opposite to the zeiss lens?

how to go there with the technology and not fuck the world? carefully not give birth to mythical ideological seeing or promising transcendence

Kinect's generative, but not devouring vision

the perversion of the zeiss lens is in that it tries to let the viewer ‘experience’ the moment of discovery in immediate vision of the ‘object’

the exhibition is about a writing of the body that metaphorically emphasizes vision
= and commit to deconstruction and passionate construction.
= and passionate detachment, which is dependent on the impossibility of innocent ‘identity’ politics and epistemologies as strategies for seeing from (any) standpoints, in order to see well. (refer to lecture-performance Standing on the Shoulders of Giants - Sina Seifee 2015, on a critical epistemology of seeing-from-far)
= whom to see with?

Haraway: only partial perspective promises objective vision. This is an objective vision that initiates, rather than closes off, the problem of responsibility for the generativity of all visual practices.

The ‘eyes’ made available in modern technological sciences shatter any idea of passive vision? these prosthetic devices show us that all eyes, including our own organic ones, are active perceptual systems, building in translations and specific ways of seeing, [...]

[...]ith)-->? contract; (for example, making peace treaty after war)
[]

{*strategy, “art of generals,” from French stratégie, from Greek strategia “office or command of a general,” from strategos “general,” from stratos “multitude, army, expedition,” literally “that which is spread out” (--> “structure”) + agos “leader,” from agein “to lead” (--> “act”).}

(strategy/contract/...)

***science is conditioned but unconditional***
(Serres:) science is conditioned by postulates or by decisions that are generally social, cultural, or historical in nature, which form it and orient it
--(nevertheless)--> sci is universal and free from contract #science-story
“I can't think of a mountain, a border, or a date which makes the agreement of scientists and everyone else relative on these points.”
-they say sci is conditioned but not determined


conditions that do not determine the contents of what they condition
(mathematics?)
but they determine the map of what they condition : the schema of its relations --> the topology of science; the clay remains the same but the shape changes

Fluid Mechanics can be a basis for biology (--> constitution of living being) or for a technology of the inert (--> theory of ship building).
...crazy!

Education is conducted by duce

method ~=? path

strategy is not only a form of dynamics or energetics but first of all a topology*

the master pays no attention to the content

murder (increases) along the chain


...if one is the master of justice
freed from violence, he goes forward unnamed
-against the mechanisms of Mars (or moon) , we now let things to come to being as objects, outside the mechanisms that regulate our unregulated violence
-sacred forms a field of knowledge --of-->{intersubjective & polemical relationship}

first, sacred is located elsewhere, placed outside the world, then Nature is born objectively --> in the new contract, the exact word can be spoken
...but a new crisis make it start over again
-the sacred is formed by (this) catastrophic and repetitive dynamic

ruse (kalak کلک, che kalake khubi چه کلک خوبی): the “laws” of nature a projection of a (usually political) constitution on the world; to give a status of a natural necessity to arbitrary power
ruse ~ reason---the dominance of the here and now

no one is better endowed by nature for trickery than a Greek. These masters invented dichotomy, separation, and partition. ... They invented the theory of the specificity of various realms (~ cosmology?)

their divisions and clarifications ==> “we today have the weak and awkward fancy to read the world as polysemic and out of sync”, polytomy {from Greek: πολυ-, poly-, “many"[...]

[...]r (---> desire to future)
(elegy assumes that there is something in the information that makes a difference and not in the receiver of info.)

(question to an Iranian friend:) “why must we fasten our gaze to the objects of damage and derangement?” “why light lanterns to behold the corpse?” “or extend our focus on them?” (I am using Mohaghegh's words,) the extremist (or other aesthetic-philosophical strands of extremisms) would tell us not to look away, for the thought and expression have taken the shape of a ‘meteorological device,’ forecasting seasons (of storm)...

(you take the mithridatic venom to) cross into the next level of temporal experience

he makes “engravings of the atrocity”
(حکاکی از) سبعیت

a fanatical response to the storm


a charismatic authority undertakes a poetic articulation
or a poetic articulation becomes committed to an ideological program
[Iran Iraq war]


mysticism, a protocol of extremity, geared towards the immensification of narrow vision
gigantic singularity
itself the house of many paradoxes: that of wisdom and rage, that of boundlessness and confinement, that of precision and enormity, nature and technology (apprentices to a lesser artisan-metallurgist god interested only in functional architecture and instrumentalized objects), betrayal and devotion,
mysticism is one of postmodern ‘mask,’ there are many others (the chaos-mask / face?, etc.)
one of many existential prototypes, subjectivity constellations, etc.

sliding between hostile and relaxed patterns of ...

with a sixth sense for disappearance
gained attunement to nothing
what are the athleticism of this stillness?

the turn in the thought of the mystic to externalize that same meditative daze!
what if an enthusiasm took hold to transfer this personal, self-contained oblivion onto a universal plane?
a single mood-shift: interiority feels the need to stretch out into exteriority.
without the logic of judgment


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



where is absolutism in San'an?

own descent (Abstieg) into paranoia

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

...lending cryptic terminologies and cosmic ideas

to become an echo of a profound legacy


we ask again: which ph[...]

[...]ne's owb footprints --> identitatian technologies

@Shervin commission the wanderer: a nameless eyeless character sitting on the outskirts of a wasteland in conversation with his own shadow --> (beyond time and space) as a gesture toward discarded worlds without clocks or maps --> *the will to aimlessness*
(Hedayat in The Blind Owl) “I had no idea in what direction I was going [...] I did not care whether or not I ever arrived at any palce”

Mikhail Bakhtin --> art for iranian artists = (carnivalesque) a site that grants the right to understand, the right to confuse, to tease, to hyperbolize life; the right to parody others while talking; *the right to not be taken literally*, not ‘to be oneself’ [...] the right to rip off masks, the right to rage at others with a primeval (almost cultic) rage--and finally, the right to betray to the public a personal life, down to its most private and prurient little secrets

Baudrillard: the real is no longer possible ==> illusion is no longer possible ==>{impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level = impossibility of staging illusion}--> hollows the inability of existence to escape its own fictive composition (=/= epistemologies of repair, reading, weaving, etc.)

(Hedayat's) techniques of stealing from the reader the most basic hermeneutic device of distinguishing between imaginary and the actual --> Hoda, Ali

***annihilation: ontological death ==> death of ontology***

زنده به گور buried alive, an unmediated experiential sensitivity to the randomness of existence

***chaotic imaginary =/= tyranny of historicity***
--> ahistorical figure, having traversed the borders of language, humanity, time, space, and reality --> Foad's poem (--> world as endless becoming or nightmaze) =/= historicized existential experience (folloing only two distinct path, of subject and object)

*philosophy = learnign how to kill* (=/= Socratic-Platonic versoin of “philosophy = learning how to die”)

Hedayat straying beyond signification, mortality, and ontological or phenomenological framing =/= my work with ajayeb

([why?] many artists do that) ***to make oneself unrecognizable***

consciousness: only a host of many someones

Nietzsche's transvaluation of historical limitations --> experience would no longer find itself entrapped by apparitions of objectivity and cohesion and could theretofore invite chance, risk, and endless experimentation
will to power --> a premediated calculable claim to mastery

Nietzsche: art as an active competitive exchange =/= Schopenhauer's mystical retreat: art to lure aside from the great road of suffering of humanity those who are wretched, exhausted, and sick, and to offer them a brief lustful moment--a little intoxication and madness (--> a view that many artists today hold)

[...]

[...]en of the sciences
•the stricing prevalence of *dispute: intellectual discourse staged as agonistic duel --> (most of our) ***intellectual life is conducted as polemic***


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

the more you study an environment the less your inheritiability of that environment will be (?)

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

history: study of past as it it commemorate in traces (textual, physical, etc.) =/= [ajayeb studies =] memory studies: subjective commemoration of the past, collective forms of commemorations (for example the name of streets, or monuments, or unconscious way of navigating in Tajrish square, etc.) --> present in oral interviews
•how the past has been enlisted emotionally, politically, communally,,, (in various causes: construction of autobiography to the construction of national myth) [==> objectivity does not make sense in memory studies]
•it includes (not only that which cab be documented, it rather) includes an element of the subjective : how people feel about what happened in the past, how they reconstruct events of the past but also narratives =/= what happened in the past --Daston--> objectivity (among histories:)
◦cross-checking of sources
◦(19th century technique of) “reading against the grain”: try to discover, from the surviving sources, from what perspective they were written (what historical context they were embedded in) = “critical reading” from the stand point of all of one might say “the illusions of memory” which might cloud an objective impartial records of events (not accepting the narrative that place value in the source) [=/= my work on ajayeb]
◦securing evidence (---> go to archive) : intersection of objectivity with study of history

(since 17th century) memory has been essential to our conceptualization of what does it mean to have a self --> why we are so concerned with memory damage ceases (alzheimer, etc.)

husod3oqLds


many time when we define (say “what X is”), what we are doing is to how to make a term more precise, to make something *artificially operational*

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

*sciences of the archive*
depend on longed lived collections

(since 16th century, as we know it) modern science's epistemic goal: *predictive accuracy* =/= *to elevate certainty* (the case in medieval Latin Europe)

books (past discoveries) & instruments (future discoveries) interspersed --when--> they both belong to the same practice ==> library



(Goethe:) search nothing beyond the phenomena

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

Morris
movement of commerce's subject (=/= walking of the Parisian flaneur)
plaque's morbid sentimen --> evades the reduction of signs to mere reference

[*]public art: the art o[...]

[...] numerals


[signs have to be treated a something invented]
*social construction of meaning* ==> viewer's perception of the significance and evidential مدرکى character of documents ==> “relevance” is now considered to be situational and ascribed by the viewer (in digital)
}<== the property of being a sign is not a natural property <== ***property is given to objects***


Wikipedia: all signifying objects (points to) ~~> forensic aesthetic: all evidence = signifying فوری (easy + immediate) =/= aesthetic object فرار (volatile)

object in evidence --> offer it as evidence by the way it is arranged, indexed, presented
its manner --> in arranging material so that someone may be able to make use of it as new evidence for some purpose (=/= finding material that already is in evidence)

what is a digital document?
--Buckland--> becomes more problematic, unless we remember the path of reasoning underlying the largely forgotten discussions of Otlet's objects and Briet's antelope


**documenting the antelope** =/= ajayeb
antelope: Ethiopian word for the elusive unicorn

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

Calvert
technobibliocapital

librarians cannot hope to really change how people seek knowledge in libraries (they are not *information awareness office* ~= news agency)

will to knowledge --manifest--> in a massive electronic data processing project

[*]library science: a set of practices for producing knowledge in subjects --> *producing subjects through knowledge production*

patron: certain kinds of subjects (=/= citizen), consumers with an abiding market rationality and an interest in individualist private space

enmeshed in practices of classification, circulation, collection

technology + libraries + capital
◦capital: social, political, economic, and other relationships crystallized in things, including books and libraries
•biblio: libraries, books, knowledge
•techno: technologies (both silicon-based and not) that make producing, storing, and reproducing knowledge possible and efficient

technology and capital shaping library practices [and animation of animal practices? --> emphasize animal geography]

(legacy of bibliography and book collecting) 1930 --> library practice centered on the development of bibliographic standards emphasizing procedures for identifying and indexing authors and tides

(21st century) democracy of texts, collaboration with autodidacticism and public education, is now giving itself over to the *circulation of commodities*

**the subjects produced through 21st century librarianship are customers and consumers** (who seeks content =/= knowledge)

new librarian --> new freedom of [...]

[...]rt of human biology, systematic response to novel stimuli (visual, olfactory, or auditory)
-an attentive observer might appear motionless
-an ideo-motor network of forces --> that which immobilizes


(the structural psychology of) associationism (theories of knowledge)

institutional discourse
techniques of the subject

attention (~= will) ~/= consciousness
(noncoincidence of attention with consciousness)
<-- modern shift to semantic and semiotic frameworks of analysis
(from epistemology --to--> hermeneutics : Mallarme, Nietzsche, Peirce, Wittgenstein, Heidegger --> the question of how a subject is provisionally constructed through language and other systems of social meaning and value --> termination of various analysis of consciousness --> epistemological crisis


observer (once understood in terms of the essential subjectivity of vision) ==> attention became constitutive (and destabilizing) component of perception


unmediated givenness of sense data --✕--> cognition

community of interpretation : a shifting and intervening space of socially articulated psychological functions, institutional imperative, and a wide range of techniques, practices, and discourses relating to the perceptual experience of a subject in time --> forms of exteriority in modernity's account of perception


eschatological dream of 19th century : “to make this knowledge of man exist so that man could be liberated by it from his alienation, liberated from all the determinations of which he was not the master” --> one made of man an object of knowledge so that man could become subject of his own liberty and of his own existence
-Foucault
exercise of a sovereign and attentive will [we see this in Olearius] --> claiming subject's self-possession --> conscious organizer of that perceptible world --> master

(Nietzsche:) “i am free” ==> “he must obey” }--> the inward certainty that obedience will be rendered -->{ *exclusively: (the unconditional evaluation that) ‘this and nothing else is necessary now’

co-presence of the world (can never be guaranteed [by scientific psychology])
<== attentiveness is continuous with distraction, reverie, dissociation, trance,

@apass, work on attention is so interesting because it is part of the history of modality of contemplation about processes and activities of the body


the neo-Kantian legacy of a disinterested aesthetic perception --desire--> to escape bodily time (and its vagaries)
•(Hume's) artist: someone in whom “nature has forgotten to attach their faculty for perception to their faculty for action” (<-- sounds familiar? “free” artistic perception)
•(for Roger Fry:) “imaginative life” is about contemplation disconnected from the possibility of action ([...]

[...]t at another time”
--✕--> *firstness: self-immediacy, absolute presence (before synthesis and differentiation) ~ nonreferenciality (=/= perception, attention consumed/constituted in time ~= continuous quantity = *secondness)


using a more act-oriented term “thought” instead of “consciousness”

dissociation
anaesthesia
hallucination
multiple selves
--James--> temporal model of mind: ‘stream’
(=/= scenic model of mind)
[this was part of a larger institutional field in which scientific psychology generally was abandoning ‘elemental’ conceptions of consciousness in favour of operational or functional models]
==> observer: an artist confronted with the primordial chaos of sensation --> (ethics of) overlapping common choices (made of autonomous subjects [--> you can see James seeking to lessen the shock of recent works in science and psychology for an American middle-class readership])
(William James:) irreducible plurality of experience ==> (think in terms of) fluidity and immobilization



my work is usually unformed and informal: a speaking properly in terms of irradiated strata, an aggregate


emergence of increasingly powerful technologies and institutions that would determine and enforce *externally* the objects of attention for mass population --> history of cinema
•disciplinary framework: it is the aim of the teacher to fix the attention of the pupils --> habit of attention becomes amenable to the will of the teacher



attention was an indispensable component of the “normal” and “rational” subject of the late 19th century industrial society, yet had a disturbing proximity to “pathological” and “irrational” effects.
-Crary

Simondon, mold & modulation
Deleuze, on fold

by the end of 19th century attention became an inadequate simulation of (an Archimedean) point of stability from which consciousness could know the world [rather] it opened to flux and absence (=/= perceptual fixity, certainty of presence) ==> subject-object scattered provisional existence


(extreme model of a) *technology of attention* @Zoumana [spiritism, *action at a distance* --> curse, ,]
hypnosis --> unsettling outlines of of a subject whose makeup could evade both intellectual and institutional mastery + precariousness and malleability of (what had been thought of as) consciousness

hypnosis adjacent to attention?! intense refocusing and narrowing of attention + inhibition of motor responses

focalization: concentrating one's attention on some specific object

sustained looking at a single point (i used to do as a child) ==> dramatic reorganization of consciousness


Crary in his book, Suspension of Perception, shows how high science and periphe[...]

[...]adership])
(William James:) irreducible plurality of experience ==> (think in terms of) fluidity and immobilization



my work is usually unformed and informal: a speaking properly in terms of irradiated strata, an aggregate


emergence of increasingly powerful technologies and institutions that would determine and enforce *externally* the objects of attention for mass population --> history of cinema
•disciplinary framework: it is the aim of the teacher to fix the attention of the pupils --> habit of attention becomes amenable to the will of the teacher



attention was an indispensable component of the “normal” and “rational” subject of the late 19th century industrial society, yet had a disturbing proximity to “pathological” and “irrational” effects.
-Crary

Simondon, mold & modulation
Deleuze, on fold

by the end of 19th century attention became an inadequate simulation of (an Archimedean) point of stability from which consciousness could know the world [rather] it opened to flux and absence (=/= perceptual fixity, certainty of presence) ==> subject-object scattered provisional existence


(extreme model of a) *technology of attention* @Zoumana [spiritism, *action at a distance* --> curse, ,]
hypnosis --> unsettling outlines of of a subject whose makeup could evade both intellectual and institutional mastery + precariousness and malleability of (what had been thought of as) consciousness

hypnosis adjacent to attention?! intense refocusing and narrowing of attention + inhibition of motor responses

focalization: concentrating one's attention on some specific object

sustained looking at a single point (i used to do as a child) ==> dramatic reorganization of consciousness


Crary in his book, Suspension of Perception, shows how high science and peripheral pseudoscience never had clear-cut distinctions in the 19th century. that there were a complex and shifting relation of mutual exchange between the “luminous” physics with a huge range of other “darker” ideas about ‘action in a distance’ enacted in spiritism
@Zoumana


hypnosis & suggestion --> automatic processes (inferior, more instinctual, continuous with animality), “mental decapitation” =/= ration elicit patient with conscious participating will power [--> Star Wars will of the weaker and less independent, powerful natures exercise over weaker ones, jedi --> strance states (of the weaker ones): being instrument of undisguised power --Stengers--> deviant types of behavioural control]
(hypnosis still being researched on but) ideologically could not be acknowledged as a constitutive part of human sciences
==> (stigmata of critical position [@Ali; follow it in Marxism]:)
volitional human action modified by ex[...]

[...] psychological capacities and functions that might be susceptible to technological management*

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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

panoptic techniques & attentive imperatives (function reciprocally)

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

in a way most of us artists unconsciously in some way in an utopian projection of a sensory wholeness and fulfillment
(dream of) fabricators of powerful imaginary social figurations

Durkheim and Seurat's question of social & sensory: from what viewpoints significant manifestation of organization become appreh[...]

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


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

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

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



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


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

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

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


(what is my “sociology” in my works?)


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


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


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

play of attraction and absence[...]

[...]istent the knowledge about the world is possible + (classical model of vision:) privileged point of view of a perceiving subject from which the objectivity of the world could be apprehended}
issue of cognitive and perceptual synthesis
•to resecure an unconditional basis for logic and science
•to escape from refined habitual patterns of perception inherent in various aspects of rationalization and compassion of experience in 1890s and 1900s (--> dynamic, kinetic, distracted texture of modern sensory life ==> attention: malleable entropic force susceptible to fatigue, distraction, and external management)
•to quest for the logic of meaning ==> primordial oneness of consciousness
----> (for Husserl) attention appears and appertains in the possibility of an *impersonal, preindividual, transcendental sphere free of anything empirical, of anything spatiotemporal* ==> attention: intentional act with an absolute structure, quasi-machine searchlight for an unwavering mode of looking at the act of looking
--Crary--> amid the dynamic dissolution of modernization (a world in which previously stable meanings, signs, social relations were being uprooted, made exchangeable, and put into circulation) Husserl proposes [in a hopeless quest] a monolithe technique of attention (to discern a halo of absolute authenticity around every object or relation) to determine the universal structure of (the authenticity of) subjective lifeworld [unable to go beyond ‘pre-cinematographic conditions’ (~ movement thought only from the anchorage of a static “pose”)]
 --Varela--> Husserl's (+ MerleauPonty) turn towards experience (the “things themselves”) was entirely theatrical : lacked any pragmatic dimension [---> go to Despret, Stewart]

what Cezanne did seek to “suspend” (to forget)?

(sensitivity to) perceptual experiences that had been ignored, marginalized, or incompatible (==> unarticulated)--within--> organization of knowledge about vision
}==> (Cezanne's) “attention to anomalous* --> ***engage a discordant exterior*** (that takes a hold on your recognizable world) [<-- our heritage in art]

Cezanne: “perception = process of its formation” : confronting and inhabiting the instability of perception =/= recording the evanescent appearances of the world

(Cezanne + Manet's discovery:) looking at one thing
=X=> fuller and more inclusive grasp of its presence (~ rich immediacy)
==> perceptual disintegration and loss, breakdown as intelligible form ==> invention and discovery of previously unknown religions and organizations of forces

dissolution inherent in attentiveness ==support==> (Cezanne's) radical desymbolization of the world + perpetually modulating set of relations between the exterior and sensations

Cezanne attentive to:
•activity of the eye
•visual sensation
•myriad intricacies of subjec[...]

[...]d models [~-> my “art"] (<--)to--> heuristic models [~-> my lectures] ?
•computational models [~-> my CG period] (<--)to--> phenomenological models [~-> my ajayeb] ?
•fantasy models [~-> my ?] (<--)to--> theoretical models ?
•representational models [~= my images?] (<--)to--> epistemological models ?
[*]

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

like the blind man's cane or probe, means through which the environment is perceived and acted on, how is the 3D computer simulations an embodiment relation? what are the (dis)embodied habituations of the hacker? ==> philosophy of action : how 3D work as an (dis)embodied artifact change our relation to the world? or, which world is experienced as perceived through embodied artifact of the 3D?
•representations of the location
•question of orientation
--> epistemological studies of scientific instrumentation

(Feenberg, passivity missing in Ihde)
(my own interest in shyness and the) passive dimensions of body--lived experience of being the object of action***

Feenberg (reflecting on medical situations forward:) we live our body not only as actors in the world, but also as beings who invite action on our bodies by others
dependent body --> highly technologized experience

instrumentalized status of modernism, in which the ‘dependent body’ belongs to childhood
purified “humans” : the subject distinguished from its instrumentalities

sex: construction of the dependent subjectivized bodies
(Sartre & Merleau-Ponty:) person becomes a thing in the world of the other

lived-body =/= body [--> also the concern of Irigaray and Butler]
(this is Husserl's Körper and Leib)
~ machine-infused neuro-physical body
◦kinaesthetic sensations
◦presentational sensations
◦“internal” perception
◦“subject” -body
◦organ of perception / organ of action /
--> (identity of the ego -->) the (existentialist visualist and strange) idea of: “I am my body"--body in terms of “I can” ==> self-movement
(intra-action =/= that sensations are freestanding complexes and internally differentiated entities that can be identified and studied “before” the action)
*perception (is an act:) “animating” the data of sensation (?)

the extended body signifies itself through [=/= acts through] the technical mediation

the impersonal and atomizing (commonplace) associations with the notion of disembodiment --> the idea that in online involvement relations are abridged and trivialized, that there is a lack of commitment and risk, and moral engagement is impossible, and so on.

*what would be a situated account of the (lived-)body in CG?

“the ringing of the cell phone that embarrasses us in the middle of a lecture” --> extended body

plasticity and polymorphism of o[...]

[...]wledge of our bodily event” ==> (organic) conception of nature
-masculinity: body subordinate to the mind ~=>{ body: site for feminist critique
-for contemporary feminism (Grosz): body is neither a biological nor a sociological category, but rather a point of overlap between physical, symbolic, and material conditions

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

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

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


sensuality is co-making


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

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

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

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

Deleuze and Guattari: “We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body...” (what are the affects of the CG bodies?)
-for them the “body” is a discontinuous and non-totalized series of processes, organs, flows, energies, corporeal substances and incorporeal events, intensities and durations, a surface of intensities: *pure simulacra without originals*


erotogenic zones, sexuality, Freud, auto-erotic internalization, clinamen

(the formally female cyborg / techno-monster of the Ghost in the[...]

[...]tra-actions with reality, humans and language are part of the configuaration or ongoing reconfiguring of the world, that is phenomena


we cannot so easily answer where the apparatus “ends”

•(but again, how can I answer) which ontological practices are embodied (or embeded) in (the productive and constraining dimension of regulatory) apparatuses of my ajayeb? (rigs, hypertext, pop-up, etc.)
•(resisting the anti-metaphysics legacy) how can I keep insisting on accountability for the particular exclusions that are enacted in (my) ajayeb and taking up the responsibility to perpetually contest and rework the boundries (of my objectivities)?


(*)effect: marks left on the agencies of observation


enacted =/= having
(agency is the matter of enactment not something that one ‘has’)

(*)disarticulation: the question of who/what gets to be imagined (and in which way)


(Barad's sentences are long in a way for the reader to feel all those particular words in one breath)


(in medical practices) the machine becomes the interface between the objectification of the spacific body under experience (for example the fetus) and subjectivation of the technician, physicianm engineer, and scientist.

...some ontologies:
•classical realist: posit some fixed notion of being that is prior to signification
•Kantian transcendentalism: being completely inaccessible to language
•linguistic monism: being completely of language
•Baradian agential realism: phenomena are constitutive of reality


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

kinetic, energies expressed in variables


integrated definitions:
•movements of an isolated body
•in detachment with the rest of the world
•linear function of time
•all energy is kinetic
•value of “potential energy” is zero

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

metallurgy concerns matter in movement

matter-flow

what about the 3D hacker? what is in flow?

form is ever-emergent =/= pre-determined -->? default


[Alberti on northwest Argentina first millennium ceramic vessels:] potters’ bodies were shaped irrevocably by their skilled practice
objects they made were never complete ==> they were aligned with others’ concerns ==> they were drawn into potters’ social identities --> into the category of potter


*skill and ontoloical risk [--> question at CG artist]
-becoming subject to the processes they are involved in --(this commitment)--> involves them in both the task and its ongoing material consequence

skilled practices situated as the mediator between one realm and the other =/= (in Amazonia) where natural and cultural processes are not distinguished in [...]

[...]brought into the world, a mode of unconcealing reality (hervorbringen) [=/= mere means or instrument]
+ every unconcealment of reality is also by necessity a concealment of another reality
*poiesis: bring hither out of concealment forth into unconcealment* --> techne = tech + art

paleolithic hunters (so-called primitive societies) have been shown to have been affluent and technologically advanced

technological primitivism, as aesthetic in subcultures of high-technology, incorporating into their philosophies icons of: shamanism, esotericism, hermeticism, the occult, mythology
=/= my ajayeb.net


horror in commercial images (Campbell's investigation =/= fear appeals that act to discourage or warn)
horror (like primitive) is a historically specific form =/= an eternal constant (~ whay is horrific today might be completely unhorrific tomorrow --> for example ajayeb's horror)
horror = science fiction + primitivism

liberatory/avant-garde horror
female-as-victim
female-as-horror
--> apparatus of phallogocentrism
--Campbell--> *horror works to produce figures that contain within them an overflow of contradictory signs*


20th century high-tech machines induce horror : depiction of *technology out of control* inducing horror in the humanist consciousness (for example Black Mirror TV series)
(both primitive & technical) borderline figures of contemporary culture: replicants, androgynes, zombies, androids, posthumans, avatars, clones, undead
}--> *almost-not-quite ontologies* <-- displacing the unitary subject of classical humanism <== {new processes and quasi objects} <==create== ***{globalization, questions of history, social change, political movements, collapse of communism, fundamentalism, feminism, post-communist nationalism, global immigration flows, transnational projects such as human genome, digital human}***

•mothers
•machine: the scientific, political and discursive field of technology
•monster: emblematizes the history and philosophy of the biological sciences + their relation to difference and different bodies

enlightenment ==> a comprehensive philosophical and scientific discourse of positioning “people of color, native australians, females, slaves (+ scaipods, cynocephali, tailed men, giants) = nearly-human =/=liberal human subject (white male)
-in the interstices between humans and apes, there was plenty of space to locate speculative or imaginary creatures: *similititudines huminis* (beast-men, monsters with human resemblances, degeneracy)


posthuman
•celebratory declaration of the end of humanity as we know it
•heralding an era of:
◦human being will be superseded by technical being (+ ironically promissing to vouchsafe human being for eternity)
◦(liberatory seeks to) disp[...]

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


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


(we are living in an) age of **technosubjectivity**
(Margulis theorizes) the symbolic basis of eukaryotic cells
(Dawkins posits) the existence of selfish genes and the extended phenotype
*system theory: human life subsumed radically into an all-encompassing concept of system, of which the human is merely a psychic system, where the only important unit of analysis is systems (human, cell, society, law)
(Sagan's) metametazoa: a multiple creature afloat in the omnisexuality of bacterial exchange
(Octavia Butler's) xenogenesis: polysexual interspecies reproduction
(Haraway's) differential artifactualism: (~= SF, science fiction) a diffractive interruptive mutative anti-reflective monstrous logic (to a humanist eyes) --> generation of novel forms which need not be imagined in the stodgy bipolar terms of hominids ==make==> ontological room for naturecultures
-mixotricha paradoxa: “a mixed up, paradoxical, microscopic bit of hair [...]they are nested in each other's tissues in a myriad of ways that make words like competition and cooperation, or individual and collective, fall into the trash heap of pallid metaphors and bad ontology”
(Thacker speaks for) extrinsic life: the kinds of life that cannot be contained inside itself (such as: the epidemic) ~ lifelike death ==> depict the strangeness of life in a technological era

(diffraction ==>) myopic: eyesight abnormality resulting from the eye's faulty refractive ability --> posthuman: an essentially ethical precondition of life in high-technology

background of posthuman theory:
•metamorphing --> premised on the liberatory potential of flow : processes objects and living s[...]

[...]lizations of the whole body ==> picture of the patient:
•neoliberal in character
•(always) future tense in orientation


destiny = personalized medicine (a project to anticipate and guide the patient's destiny)

welfare state's widest possible inclusion of its citizens clashes with the realities of the marketplace

to reconcile the individual's cognitive and physical realities with the particular demands of their world

...sociological quest to understand the locus of injury

[title]
duet of integration-crisis (==> whole-body ideals)


(Geroulanos and Meyers argue that) understanding integration and crisis in medicine ==> to wrap our heads around the way later-dominant cybernetic and structuralist theories located the individual in the world

bodily metaphor [in] integrations of domestic societies

the integrated, disintegrating human body:
•a new site of meaning and care
•subject for new analogies of body biological and body politic
•object of direct experimentation


story of the human body (at once social & biological)

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

question of technology
--locational--> where does the technological take place?
(and when?)

Heidegger --> (latecomers were) addicted to technology
“under what conditions we could arrive at a free relation to technology?”

Heidegger problem with addicted --> *addiction is content with what is merely available* (it never surpasses this limit) =/= anxiety


Avital focus on the *chemical prosthesis*

in war, drugs become another piece of equipment --> taking the pill: technologizing oneself into the war machine

heroin comes from heroisch

technically calibrated culture

drug --> hallucinated exteriority

electronic/drug culture --> (Nancy + Blanchot's) désœuvrement: without an end or program, an unworking that nonetheless occurs


how the *prosthetic subject* is constituted
(Junger's drug, Heidegger's tech, Benjamin's hashish, de Quincey's opium, Duras's alcoholizations:) a saturated text, pushing beyond the materiality of the book though not into any ideality

the right to drugs + the supplementary interiority that they produce

there has never been a war on drugs that is not carried by another type of drug (religion, patriotism, oil, TV)

history of narcotica ~= history of culture

[*]intoxication: (names) a method of mental labor that is responsible for making phantoms appear --> mnemonic apparatus

“you have something in you that must be killed” ==> ambivalent stimulant/tranquilizer

body proper regains its corruptible organic status[...]