[*]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

do we need to stop celebrating the illegal traveler?

*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]

popular and learned interest in monsters
(in the 16th century & 17th century Baconian scientific program: ) treatments of nature and natural history must have included (with rigorous selection) monsters (~ aberrations in the natural order: new, rare, and unusual nature, both exotic & domestic)
[*]nature: an ingenious craftsman ——> [*]monster: nature’s most artful work (——> they bridged the natural & the artificial)
—— corresponded to the activities of nature =/= types of subject matter, methods of investigation
—— interest in irregularities (=/= end of 17th century interest in nature’s uniformity and order)

(Daston –> a case study of) the changing relationship between popular & learned culture

…monsters began to lose their religious resonance
(from) fear ——to——> delight
(from) prodigy ——to——> wonder
(from) sermon ——to——> table-talk
(from) horrible, terrible, effrayable, espouventable ——to——> strange, wonderful, merveilleux (marvellous جالب)
(from) final cause ——to——> proximate cause (physical explanations and the natural order)
==> nature began to assume the role of an autonomous entity with a will (and sense of humour of her own) ~~> natural wonder

The Scripture sayth, before the ende
Of all thinges shall appeare,
God will wounders straunge thinges send,
As some is sene this yeare.
The selye infantes, voyde of shape,
The calues and pygges so straunge,
With other mo of suche mishape,
Declareth this worldes chaunge.

(monsters ——> shift from) signs of God’s wrat ——to——> signs of nature’s fertility
(by the end of 17th century) ——to——> comparative anatomy and embryology (teratology)
(from) اعجوبه prodigy ——to——> examples of medical pathology

earlier tradition of interest in monster:

(corrupt or) *bad animal* <== damaged relations / nature suddenly gone unfamiliar
[monster: bodies tumbled into bodies Tsing]
<== existential cultural atrophy + social entropy (destabilizing effects of non-meaning)

cybernetic teratology

corrupt animal ~= wonders of bad symbioses, trans-species precarious entanglements across bodies (that are not always even constructive, and can be ugly) [=/= Cinderella: who doesn’t experience atrophy after insult upon insult]

(an ecological) monstrous consciousness

hopeful monsters
the *outcast* (in the evolving collective sensibility of naturalists)

monsters flourish in the absence of definitive sources ==> passionate crafts of imagination (omnivorous, unorthodox, compelling, , ,)

monstrous consciousness

category-crossing (=/= neat categories) –> wonder ==> fortified textures of scientific experience ==mixed==> evil, beauty, complexity, forces of liberation, etc.

(monster)
emblematizes the history and philosophy of the biological sciences + their relation to difference & different bodies
==>{ science = de-monstrate ~= credible witnessing ==> truth }

[Mohaghegh]
(the outcast {the exile, shadow, animal, contagion, machine,,,}) has no anxiety of ontological authenticity ——> they are impersonal nameless metamorphosing creatures
their game: riddle (new gambles) ~= confrontation with the unnambale ——Derrida——> means of thinking otherwise, “monster: species of nonspecies” [interest in sites of otherworldliness] ——> ‘more’ & ‘other’ [=/= ‘with’ & ‘of’]

monster
part of the techno-fantasy (since 19th century)
1- techno-monster ——> tragic consciousness [self-realizing itself ~= 2nd-birthing to something ‘more’ and ‘other’]; everything is code to be cracked; techne =/= episteme ——> (Ihde: ) *instrumental transparency* (= denial dependency)
2- Frankensteinian ——> technology is that no one is or can stay behind the wheel
3- Ghost in the Shell ——> fantasy of leaving the body behind + desire for perfect knowledge

“techne =/= episteme”: technology or tool is thought apart from (has an alterity relation) its context of involvement & referentiality

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)

encyclopedia ==> quality of monstrosity does not affect any real body (=/= lurk)

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)

*expanding relations parasite engenders through its properties in particular locations* [=/= (a philosophy of) parasite as a overgeneralized model for relationality or sociality by shifting conceptual scales via its agentive or affective capacities through (human) reflexivity]

how parasite means?

[how?] parasite can bring our conceptual life along with it from local to global concerns (about hospitality, social integration, exclusion, Other, etc.)

how to go beyond qualities (or agentive capacities) of parasite that express some timeless properties?

*on Levinas
Levinas’s concept of otherness ——> its theoretical production is articulated from the ditch of the historical self in modernity (part of the Western philosophical tradition) […] entrenched within an enlightenment discourse that cannot conceive of a self without mediation through a formulated Other =/= *otherless subjectivity*
-Levinas’s principle goal is to repair the totalitarian self and not to explore the otherworldly powers of the Other ——proving——> ***something that might fix the master***
==> self is to be redeemed by otherness, made well by otherness, made sane by otherness ==Mohaghegh==> the Other is never entitled to just walk away and seek its own external dominion
the Other possesses (the talent of) infinity ==> the Other’s responsibility is to dispense that infinity ==> ethics (not permitting the Other leaving the situation)

***why is the Other never allowed the right to isolation, solitude, hermeticism, anticommunalism, or misanthropy?***

Levinas’s ‘an atheism that is not humanist’: the exaltation of an obedience and a faithfulness that are not obedience or faithfulness to anyone

(like Mohaghegh) it has become frustrating for me to chase these sublime phantoms (of the impossible, the unthinkable, the unknowable ~= the parasite) drifting into incessant negative theologies… ——?——> self always sees itself as that which it is not =/= (ontological differential of) the earthly dehumanized Eastern subject, the one with a staunch existential verifiability, the one whose trachea or fingertips might be severed by five bullets around the corner, the one who plays with mortal stakes and states of emergency on daily basis, the one of famine, war, or occupation

[about demand: Lacan argues that “demand constitutes the Other as already possessing the ‘privilege’ of satisfying needs,” and that indeed the child’s biological needs are themselves altered by “the condition that is imposed on him by the existence of the discourse, to make his need pass through the defiles of the signifier.” … The subject has never done anything other than demand (since infancy!)]

{liberalism: humanism, and idealism had become moral and political expectations of the secular education projects}——> [*]humanism: what could reach, reveal, and cultivate the *proper and ethical* humanum of man ==> [*]man: irreducible, perfectible bearer and guarantor of dignity, equality, and freedom

(Freud Levinas)
not yet guilty, an almost predisposition, an almost inclination toward being guilty, an openness to being guilty (——>? Seba’s notion of ‘Schuld’ [~= debt, the obligation to pay or do something]) ~-> super-egoic formation (~=? that which we call “raising awareness”)
Trauma is structuring***
(to be noted that the concern of super-egoic formation rests on the structuring of ‘demand,’ which is not the being of ‘question’ that it wants to be. question is risky and consequential of new articulation)

[with Avital]
*modalities of dealing-with:
-parasitism
-(under the spell) drugs =/= struggle (according to Marxian protocol: one is drugged and disabled [Date-rape-drug as an incapacitating agent] and neutralized by state apparatus, drugs are administrated and spend in all sorts of insidious ways.)
on the discourse of stupidity: Marx (in writing to Engels says that he) believed that proletariat are stupid. Marx’s insight to replace the other drugs that have put so many into a stupor. people with Religion are not around, they are praying somewhere to some hallucination [this is Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, and others in 20th century] ——> ideological stuporous drugs, ‘everyone is stoned on something’ =/= alert and lucid. [highly problematic!]
-this is about a body recognizing its ‘enemy’ (the figure of enemy for every and each of us and the way we “recognize” it, as historical bodies and minds inheriting the boys of 20th century.) ——- the state of the struggle depends on certain metaphorologies on ‘clean’ that are problematic and phantasmatic and on the loose. ——> [the issue is that there is no “clean body”.] how to do dirty work? (——> for ‘morality’ and ‘clean’ go to Freud on the origin on morality: morality began as we stopped sniffing our asses and stood erect, nose in the air, away from the dirt [that we are] ——> morality’s phobic appropriations and designations, [Lacan: from the genital order to the sublime; az kun be fayakon از کون به فیکون %——> #ouroboros #serpent], [so when we stood up, stood erect, our genitals became center, exposing ourselves to the other, sexually centered exposure], [], [],)
-Marxian: language/tool/art as a virus that infiltrates ideological structures
-Lacoue-Labarthe: in 20th century there are three fundamental modalities of “dealing-with,” three modes of relatedness to our concerns, our anxieties, our worries, our work, our projects [three major motifs for the thinkers that continue to provoke our thoughts]: (1) *struggle* that would be the Marxian motor, the modality in terms of concern for social justice. [Delanda on Marx ——> a model of synthesis: a conflict of opposites] (2) *mission* as introduced and lunched by Heidegger, who was on a mission: we have a mission, we have a mission of transmission, we have a mission to inscribe things——not from God but from what has happened to us and been left to us after the death of God (as Nietzsche has announced.) {yes, without a proper address, a state of epistemic alert, and so on} and (3) *task* associated with Benjamin. the Aufgabe is that which inscribes in itself ‘giving up,’ the Aufgabe, it means it is impossible, we take it on as a kind of ethical, political obligation, but in the word Aufgabe is also ‘Gabe’ meaning ‘gift’ in German, it is gift and giving-up. [Derrida beautifully asks to negotiate endlessly with the ‘given,’ even if the Gift that is given is poisonous.] ——>{ we can see how operate but also how they contaminate (and leak into each other.) we might have a sense of three of them}
-ontology of “struggling” a way out of aporia [denotes, in philosophy, a philosophical puzzle or state of puzzlement] ——> we can’t! ——> we must try to work to locate modalities of stagnancy (rokud رکود) without necessarily seeing the exit. how do we live with these catastrophic markers that mark us?

(Stengers) connecting materialism with struggle ——> (in apass) we are descendants of this trope

paleonymics: a certain operation according to which one continues to put old words to work. The use of a pre-existing word in a new context. —— we are stuck with old pomping meanings.

(Derrida’s) mode of enunciation and the literary vehicle entrusted with its exemplification:
*[…]it is sufficient to introduce, into the fold of speech acts, a few wolves of the type (“undecidability” or “unconscious”) for the shepherd to lose track of his sheep: one is no longer certain where to find the identity of the “speaker” or the “hearer,” … where to find the identity of an intention.*

what would mean for the German shepherd to lose track of his sheeps? (to go from) the fable of *the oriented sheepfold* ——to——> the fable of *losing count*]

the vexed relation between sheep and wolf, slave and master

wolf in sheep’s clothing [——> also the problem/fantasy of the “integration” project (as the space of ethics and politics)~~>(“Appearances are deceptive” ==> exclusion of the parasite + identification of subjects as the task of responsibility)

In the legacy of 19th century philosophy of social progress, the parasite was defined outside the law of competition. Parasite, as one of our ways of dealing-with problems, now is completely transvaluated, as one of the heritage of deconstruction. Grounded in a research on medieval bestiaries, this lecture performance questions the logic of interference, as a practice of tuning in noise, and it shares some ideas about the emerging monsters in contemporary thought. What does it mean to put the thought in direct relation with forces of the outside, as Deleuze and Guattari would suggest? What kind of other dormant, inert, ambient sonic layers are offering themselves, or ‘coughing in’ our structures of obligation? The significance of monsters, as potent and parasitic, characterized by missing transhumanist body parts, can it allow us to consider where we speak from? This lecture peruses those questions, and not so much looking for novelty in something that is impossible to systematize, nor to promise getting off the leash of controlled names.

now our relationship to knowledge is to be more extravagant and parasitic =/= economic and fast

..penetrative grasp of a text, discovery and recreative apprehension of it life-forms, is impossible to paraphrase or systematize.

what are the sources of “value” in 'ajayeb?
(sun, photosynthetic, micro-organisms, etc.)
fermentation, photosynthesis, respiration

…Marx is his interest in the oppressed, that is, his anti-Aristotelianism that allows us to conceptualize the self-organizing power of “matter” without the “meaning” that should overcode it.

DeLanda: The political economy of Marx is entirely a priori.

we must take in mind that materialism is good to be enriched, but, materialism is not an ‘a priori’!

in my reseach on 'ajayeb, can be theoretical yet anti-methodological?

[the identity of objects: ]

Manuel DeLanda: any materialist philosophy must take as its point of departure the existence of a material world that is independent of our minds. But then it confronts the problem of the origin of the enduring identity of the inhabitants of that world: if the mind is not what gives identity to mountains and rivers, plants and animals, then what does? An old answer is “essences,” the answer given by Aristotle. But if one rejects essentialism then there is no choice but to answer the question like this: all objective entities are products of a historical process, that is, their identity is synthesized or produced as part of cosmological, geological, biological, or social history. This need for a concept of “synthesis” or of “production” is what attracted Marx to Hegelian dialectics since it provided him with a model of synthesis: a conflict of opposites or the negation of the negation. Deleuze and Guattari, on the other hand, replace that model of synthesis with what they call a “double articulation”: first, the raw materials that will make up a new entity must be selected and pre-processed; second, they must be consolidated into a whole with properties of its own. A rock like limestone or sandstone, for example, is first articulated though a process of sedimentation (the slow gathering and sorting of the pebbles that are the component parts of the rock). Then it is articulated a second time as the accumulated sediment is glued together by a process of cementation. They use Hjemslev’s terms “content” and “expression” as the names for the two articulations, but this is not meant to suggest that the articulations are in any way linguistic in origin. On the contrary: the sounds, words, and grammatical patterns of a language are materials that accumulate or sediment historically, then they are consolidated by another process, like the standardization of a dialect by a Royal Academy and its official dictionaries, grammars, and rules of pronunciation.

..rethinking of the disciplinary boundaries (without using labels such as interdisciplinary, etc.)

[singular entities: ] The question of the “individuation of trajectories” is about mathematical models (which to me are the secret of the success of science) but you are correct that it goes beyond that. All entities synthesized historically are individual entities: individual plants and animals; individual species and ecosystems; individual mountains, planets, solar systems, et cetera. Here “individual” means simply “singular or unique,” that is, not a particular member of a general category, but a unique entity that may compose larger individual entities through a relation of part-to-whole, like individual pebbles composing a larger individual rock. A materialist ontology of individual entities is implicit in Deleuze & Guattari and Braudel, so we must give them credit for that, then move on and invent the rest.

the same beings that made the author of 'ajayeb speak, got my/our ancestors excited,

to get around two major *obstacles: (the prevailing notions of) Society and (especially of) Economy (=/=? modes of existence’s system of coordinates)

(how to extricate ourselves properly from the) notions of Nature, Matter, Object, and Subject

it is the moderns quasi-subjects (‘person’) who feel themselves to be **directly addressed,** (redressed and saved) ——> to exist
(what art suffers now, that i should directly address the modern subject, and other mode of subjectivity or other kinds of addressee and addressing is brutally criticized and irrelativized)
-(love’s type of address: ) addressed to us ==> make us exist ——> a person
(existing as person is the only way? no no no!) —— the emergence of persons is a local and historical phenomenon that we simply cannot extend to all collectives

the iconoclastic episode we are in now, which we must work to make it as short as possible

(to specify) dualisms that make it extraordinarily difficult to maintain ontological pluralism

*metamorphosis (a mode of existence first detected in psychogenesis?) what we encounter whenever we address the manner in which existents are transformed or transform in order to subsist (zist زیست)
-defined by a certain kind of continuity and obtained by a certain type of discontinuity
-‘metamorphosis’ is about crisis, possession, alienation,
-‘metamorphosis’ sharply contrasts *cure* (~= ritual)
-allowing for installing unconscious (states,) crush, posses, bewitch, kill,
-beings with specific properties that are invisible, changeable, powerful, favorable, unfavorable
-exploration of transformations
-cosmological especialities
-seniority and extension of metamorphosical beings (of elaborations carried out by all groups in ‘metamorphosis’)

that which addresses the “me”, the “ego” =/=? that which allows one to resist the forces of metamorphosis

(the aim is) deploying the network (of 'ajayeb)
it is about grasping 'ajayeb’s beings not as substances but as *trajectories*——and give them a more precise *direction.*

**other beings necessary for its existence**
(my personal/public question, what other beings are necessary for my existence? and therefor for your existence as well.) ——> the heterogeneity of the actors needed for the pursuit of any course of action

(specifications of the type of beings that the mode leaves in its wake)

what is important in working these modes what kinds of possibilities are “afforded” to the investigator, myself. what kind of actor am i?

we are seeking to redefine the paths of beings that are unique to 'ajayeb without giving them substance and without jumping immediately into transcendence. (using Latour words) [transcendence IS NEVER gradual, in the places i come from, it is always a shock, happening, a truth-event]
-each word (God, angel, jinn, fog, etc.) brought into its own network,
-what are contrasts and of category mistakes particular to each
-and their crossings——and what is the vocabulary specific to each crossing

explanatory rage (tavahoshe roshangari توحش روشنگری) —✕—> networks necessary for religious meaning

the network of associations necessary for the exercise of religion without bracketing off its ontological requirements.

نسبت دادن attribution =/= explanation (behavior assigned to its cause) =/= inference (quality/attribute assigned to the agent’s observed behavior)
-can we do without *explanatory style*? (a person’s causal dimensions of stability and globality) ——> past dealing (optimism, pessimism, etc.)
-can we do without *locus of control*? (a person’s locus conceptualized as internal) ——> future dealing (fate, hope, etc.)

'ajayeb is a ‘network’ more than anything else, in it “God” has no special privilege, is not located in addition to or beyond other beings

(to distinguish types of)
incompatible truths

“truth”——is the expression of an encounter with forms of existence

to understand the others in the absence of a description of ourselves
(what is realistic?)

to direct attention towards the beings about which humans are interrogating themselves

[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.

The div Akvan, coming from Akoman and Aka Manah, in Avestan relates more or less to “noxious thinking.” Divs are old and skillful ancient biotic entities with disagreeable characteristics. Their definition is yet open and subject to interpretation. But always disobedient to the sovereign’s project and abyssal in nature, divs promoted another kind of order, other than the old Gods. Their project was always to disillusionize the ideas of divine nondestruction and nontechnological purity. They are on the side of destruction, technology and death. Rostam eventually captures the great White-Div——Div-e Sepid (دیو سفید), a nasty metamorphosical sentient master in “unsympathetic magic” and an expert in the crafts of necromancy [ارتباط با مردگان ——> he works with form, apparition and spirit, “dead bodies,” his knowledge-cosmos includes textures of mineral assemblage and recrystallization, {#White Div once destroys the army of Kay Kavus by conjuring a dark storm of hail.}] his blood is eventually instrumentalized in bringing back the lost eye-sights and unearthing the captured ones.

there was a time (12th century——my favorite) when Avicenna was translated into Latin (in Toledo,) a moment when our cultures in east and west corresponded to the same type, a moment when the concept of science was inseparable from its spiritual context. ——> think of the alchemists for whom the operation undertaken in the laboratory only attained its end if it was accompanied by an interior transmutation of the man——that is to say only if it effected the interior birth (of spiritual man)

(for Corbin) Modern / Western venture = application of the intelligence to the scientific investigation of a nature that has been desacralized, which must be violated in order to find out its laws (and to subject its forces to the human will)

Alcemist’s chemistry
Nicolas Oresme’s geometry
[out of history]
Descartes’ geometry is also out of history, discontinious

Mullah Sadra (ملاصدرا) revolutionized the metaphysics of being, in reversing the order of priority of essence (mahiat ماهیت). he gives priority to existence (vojud وجود): that means, it is the act and mode of existing that determine the nature of essence. the act of existing is in effect capable of multitude of degrees of intensification or of degradation.

Mullah Sadra is the philosopher of metamorphoses and palingeneses (estehaleh-ha & rastakhiz-ha [استحاله ها و رستاخیزها])
*phenomenology of the act of existing*

it is so dangerous to say any thinker, writer, artist, or philosopher ‘was of his/her own time.’ nobody has ever been in their own time, never. we are constantly out of time.

things occur in Malakut (ملکوت), not in the time of this world.
it is a matter of interior history" class="highlight">history, exoteric in the etymological sense of the word, subtle history" class="highlight">history whose events do not take place in the exterior world of objects, but in the subtle world of lived states, events in the Malakut, in the world of the ‘Soul,’ in the ‘Heaven’ or the ‘Hell’ which man carries within himself.
(and this is precisely what is “changing someone’s story” is about. “let me change the rhythm of your story ——> let me change your history" class="highlight">history.” ~= storytelling)
this history" class="highlight">history——interior wild facts——intermingles with his wills, and objectives itself in the web of exterior facts. these are events of 'ajayebnameh, Shahnameh, Qur'an, Grail Cycle and so on, the events of this history" class="highlight">history (inspire parables? and) make up sacred history" class="highlight">history (tarikh-e ghodsi [تاریخ قدسی]) =/= empirical historicity
*the question always remains:
-what *is of this world?
-what is the organ of perception?
-does oneself need to ‘belong’ to this sacred history" class="highlight">history in order to come to pass (in the Malakut)? (being born in it, etc.)

platonic ideals, periodisation of sacred history" class="highlight">history

[what was your fetish again? what was your Qibla (قبله)? what would be…]

every call to speak involves some violation and over-joy, putting oneself in a persecutory way on the line, what Sa'di calls in “Dar Favaede Khamushi” (در فواید خاموشی) in 4th chapter of his Golestan ‘on the disadvantages of speaking’ or “On the Advantages of Silence” (Written in 1258 CE)

Sa'di is the theoretician of friendship——“mojaverat” (مجاورت)——and kelileh-o demneh is the theoretician of “sherarat” (شرارت, villainy, felony) saying that the closeness of different subjects is catastrophic. Sa'di is writing golestan and bustan at the time of the Mongols threat——it is the news of the Mongols coming and we know about the velocities of news can penetrate within the thick walls of any city. Sa'di is theorizing proximity based on “mohabat” (محبت), he assembles a setting of ‘garden’ for the coming of Mongols army. kelileh-o demneh’s project is pessimist pragmatism, mobilizing ethics in a milieu of violence and power.

literate and obliterate

*making an ecological landscape of 'ajayeb cosmology, that means making visible the connection between beings and contact zones among animate and inanimate and nonhuman:
diamond <——> snake
fire <——> speach
fire <——> animals
wind <——> sound
cow <——> angel
water <——> light
darvishi <——> div
earth <——> Bahman
mars <——> wolf, pig
moon <——> effect of Gabriel’s wings
earth <——> woman/enmity/illusio
mountain <——> ganj
jinn <——> climate
div <——> stone
climate <——> ghiamat

(ajayebe kuh)
om-ol-jebal, ghaf: mother of mountains, all mountains link to her, earth
ecologically significant ——> holders of water and Ganj, nailed the earth, they are your cradles

(ajayebe gur)
graves —— material and ecological deaths, earth related passings
main actor: Malek al-mot (Angel of death)
ashabe kahf, ashabe raghim ——> immortality

(ajayebe khasf)
ecological disasters
——> page 150, Haman story, fire not burning Haman’s heart, an example that God has no special privilege, is not located in addition to or beyond other beings

(Mehran Rad)
andakhtan ——> andaze ——> hendese ——> mohandes =/= engineer (in English from engine)
andakhtan: to throw two things close to each other (two lovers in the bed)
=/= manjenigh ~ mechanic [two different ontologies of geometry]

(ajayebe mardom)
look at the word ‘mardom’ in Shahname and how it (dis)articles div, animal, demon, dad, janevar, etc.
‘mardom o janevar’ (——> Shahname)

(ajayebe donya)
wonders of earth(?) ——> ghul (غول), serial killer, house full of bones (horror story)
(after donya/earth [دنیا] comes immediately, ghiamat [قیامت])
donya (دنیا): the temporal world (~=? cthulhu) (-?-> material-semiotic time-space of chthulucene)
-search ‘donya’ and its semiotic network in Ferdosi and others

(ajayebe chah)
wonders of pits ——> wonders of moon (Ibn Moghafa, bringing a moon out of a pit)

work in 'ajayeb is about the phenomenon of understanding that is to be found in modes of experience that lie outside the universal claims of modern scientific method (——the experiences of art, of philosophy, and of history itself.)

history of truth

hermeneutics =/=? epistemology

gaps in cultural space that epistemology has not filled

in the hermeneutic universe i am building, Iran is made of China is made of India is made of Afghanistan is made of Iraq is made of Greece is made of…

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