[*]visual = a form of control
1- visual organizes reality by claiming status as the preeminent form of representation
2- conflation of the ‘seen = known’: “vision = ways of knowing = experiencing the world”
3- visual organizes the worldview of the seer

——> visual is at its most powerful when it is most invisible (for example scientific diagrams, mapping @apass)

( the idea that depiction / picturing / seeing are ubiquitous features of the process by which most human beings come to know the world as it really is for them

vision is the dominant tyrannical phenomenology of the contemporary world ==> all forms of knowledge can be presented visually

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

(عجایب المخلوقات / عجایب نامه) [*]’ajayeb: a once percepted thing on the threshold of sense in the prisma of social poesis producing a cartography of what might be happening in a world as an object of composition

in ‘ajayeb bestiary:
—— what are the figures of finitude, destruction, astralized hearing, enactments of generation, the figures that take action, take heart?
—— what are the chthonic entities? {the finite complex material systems that can break down =/= stories that personify (Mother Earth) are *misplaced concreteness*. [(i am against) personified =/= figurative (which i love. figures can be tentacular, patterns, processes, stories.)]}
—— what are the gorgeous, luring, dangerous precarities (of the terra)?
—— what are (its specific) art science worldings?

workflow on ‘ajayeb bestiary:
1- tracing social connections (for which subjects is this useful? which ecology of practices?)
2- making equipment list (materials and methods, an expanded and complicated version of equipment-list, providing accounts of the material-discursive apparatuses that are materializing my empirical objects, =/= exercise in representation or audit hesab-rasi حساب رسی)
3- narrating the relation (re-materializing my found empirical objects, re-enacting the objects)

‘ajayeb bestiary:
—— archaeological anthropology of human-animal practices
—— a host of material-discursive forces
—— writing technologies of the 12th century Iran
[ajayeb: (part of the histories of)] systematic, empirical investigation of strange events, singularities, miracles, and other types of staple phenomena ~~——> scientific method and the forms of knowledge that emerged as the foundation of an ensemble of *sciences proper to humans* ——> yet has been unable to expel (the unprovable forces) considering the origins and forms of human diversity

[*]’ajayeb bestiary science (using Canguilhem’s words): the work of a humanity rooted in life before being enlightened by knowledge, (if) it is a fact in the world at the same time as *a vision of the world* ==> it sustains a permanent and necessary relation with perception [——> Barad] & “a living being is not reducible to a meeting point of influences” [——> Kenney]

[Martha Kenney]

(how not) render ‘wonder’ a strictly historical object(?)
[as basis for building a contemporary ethics]

Just-so story
In science and philosophy, a just-so story, also called an ad hoc fallacy, is an unverifiable and unfalsifiable narrative explanation for a cultural practice, a biological trait, or behavior of humans or other animals. (wikipedia)
etiological myths
Etiology: the study of causation, or origination

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

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

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

[to continue thinking with Verran] on *durations*, *extensions*, and *resistances* (in 'ajayeb’s case)
these three foundation objects need not to be saddled with the history of Western metaphysics and do not require that common ground be located only in Western territory. “Therefore they offer more promise for cross-cultural translation than the more conceptually nimble [tardast, zerang —— like the CEN or google] space, time, and matter. Newborn and awkward to our ears, these strange terms announce themselves as translation tools.” (Kenney)

(thinking with Kenney / Verran: )
workflow on ajayeb:
1- tracing social connections (for which subjects is this useful? which ecology of practices?)
2- making equipment list (materials and methodes, an expanded and complicated version of eq-list, providing accounts of the material-discoursive apparatuses that are materializing my empirical objects, =/= exercise in representation or audit hesab-rasi)
3- narrating the relation (re-materializing my found empirical objects, re-enacting the objects)

(ajayeb’s objects,) “They represent different storytelling practices that contribute to different kinds of worldings.” […] (through my engagement,) “They stimulate more compositions and decompositions——stories that narrate different beings and different doings, none of which can claim final ontological authority, but that each to different (ontic) work” (hopefully!)
-worlding: a choreography that generates ontologies (Thompson) ——&——> there is no self without a world (Carson)
-not as a voyeur or anthropologist, but breathe in the density and composition of their atmospheres
(people = worlds)

(how to?) collectively crafting critiques, commitments, stories, and actions (in the density and composition of ajayeb’s atmospheres)
-feeling out their “rhythms, valences, moods, sensations, tempos” (Stewart)
-“real and virtual worlds, future and past worlds, fictional and theoretical worlds, always happening and happening and happening” (Kenney)

(Verran) [number are] “always ready to actively re-exist when we do the right actions and say the right words.” (can i do that with ajayeb’s objects? how?)
“The moon rose above the river” (en) “upward behind the onstreaming it mooned” (Tlon, a language by Borges with no nouns, only verbs)

“ruse” (hileh, makr, neyrang) ——> my tool in work on ajayeb?
ruse: a set of small, mostly unconscious tactics by which workers resist capitalist systems (writing love letters on company’s time, factory workers who takes a scrap of fabric home for his children to play with, etc.)
-“[h]ow to subvert the laws of the “scientific factory” through gift-giving, solidarity, and free exchange even when bosses and colleagues will not turn a blind eye” (de Certeau)

(Haraway, Primate Vision)
—— “Attention to narrative is not instead of attention to science, …”
—— [there is no way that we can] escape the particular pleasures and dangers embedded in the story-laden sciences.
—— [what are the things that] could only be explained by cultural, not scientific, genealogies [?] ——> ideological apparition[s]
—— Something new was required to account for change; the logic informed a kind of paternal creation myth [……..] unchanging “matrix” for the generative principle of change. (In Zihlman’s story logic, both gathering and hunting emerged as repatternings, not opposites, in changed conditions of constraint and opportunity. Narratives of both gathering and hunting ways of life produced genders and citizens.)
—— tool-weapon equation in masculinist scientific narratives

how academic labor was implicated in capitalist systems and contemporary forms of knowledge/power

knowledge industry or “scientific factory”

ontic (hasti mojud-shenakhti)

interpretive cosmology

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

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

(ajayeb’s) (politics of) administering discrete objects ——-(number system)

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

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

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

tracing the web of horror and delight

knowledge-making practices of other times and places

unnatural history

epistemological beast fable

and “technique of refiguration” ——> create alternative forms of knowledge

it is “practicing generous reading”

[where there is a situated perspectives there is storytelling]

storytelling as one of the consequential material practices
[storytelling is material practice]

[…] Narratives, along with literary devices, tropes, figures, images and the aesthetics of language, inhabit and inform even our most reliable knowledge-making practices.

the politics technology and the politics of storytelling.