[...]ris Philo and Chris Wilbert]

‘natural’:
-scientist's site of fieldwork
-naturalist's site of biological conservation
-entrepreneur's site of capital accumulation
-poacher's site of prey
-soldier's site of refuge
--> geographies of human struggle, politics, colonialism, capitalism, intervention,

what is shapping in these sites (science labors, natural parks, pig and chicken farms, mobile phones, etc.) human-animal relations (in their widely divergent kinds)?
(technology, ethics, welfare and politics in Tehran)

the ways my mother thinks about the diffission of animals’ bodily wastes beyond the bounds of their immediately present: dog's poop, etc. --> spatial externality of animals (--"they contaminate!”)

in the case of mobile phone animal meme, the human-animal relation does not operates solely through the physical proximity of humans and animals, but rather a wider geography, and networks the interiority of Tehran domestic environments.
-as the house becomes cleaner, the public domain becomes more feral, and the animal more contagious, and the proximity more virtual, and the cross-species relationships and pictural,
-questions of the vital, the dangerous, and the wild (in tehran)

“[...]animals, especially dead ones, enter centrally into what humans can themselves be and do in the world.” (Cockburn)

i am trying to establish an anthropological, sociological and psychological investigations in this matter, calling for a ‘cultural animal geography’ that focuses on the complex entanglings of human-animal relations with space, place, location, environment and landscape. ~-> topology(s) {it means that spaces and places involved make a difference to the very constitution of the relations in play}
[Tehran: wilderness ~ public ~ non-domesticity]

...differing peoples in differing periods and worldly contexts***

societies in a host of settlements, fields, farms, factories, imaginary, literary, psychological and virtual spaces (--> and how animalhuman is socially defined)

technologies of human orderings : telegram? [encountering all kinds of inventiveness that go on cross-species (human, animal, story, image, media), the kind of semiotic work]

*Space* (de Certeau) : A place (lieu) is the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence. It thus excludes the possibility of two things being in the same location (place.) The law of the ‘proper’ rules in the place: the elements taken into consideration are beside one another, each situated in its own ‘proper’ and distinct location, a location it defines. A place is thus an instantaneous configuration of positions. It implies an indication of stability.
--> space as the ‘scheme of things’ --> species-identifying
=/= imaginal space, animal space, memory, dream, etc.

‘species-identifying’ (classification) in:
•pre-Neolithic totemic societies (Shepard 1993)
•biblical classifications of the different beasts (Leviticus: Sibley 1995)
•ancient and medieval ‘great chain of being’ thinking (Lovejoy 1936)
•Linneaus's Systema naturae
•tabular representations of the natural world (Frangsmyr 1983; Spary 1996)
•...

understandings of what comprises an animal is different in each case.
what should be interested?

“(elaborating on Shepard,) Ingold (1994) suggests that hunter-gatherers generally view the distinction between humans and animals as permeable and easily crossed, unlike what is taken as read in much Western science and philosophy.”

when/how you are persuaded to portray yourself as the relevant ‘expert’ in whatever field?

who are the legitimate spokespersons for animals? once Attar, and now biology sci.
(‘the modern constitution’ is as guilty as mysticism's literacy)

...and that strong human sense of the proper place of animals (which they should occupy physically) --> material-conceptual (double) placement ...(‘scheme of things’ [ajayeb] --> animals supposed to be found in the non-discursive spaces and places of the world) (or on the television)
-Said: ‘imaginative geography’, geographical ‘othering’
-overlappings that we find in telegram social media tehran --> what kinds of ‘animal’ (which animalities) are at stake there in the mobile phone's interface?

In recent years zoos have reinvented themselves as ‘arks’


animals categorically embodied ‘meaty beings,’ and how they are usually “out of place” in the the immediate locality made in Tehran

animals are very good at forging their own beastly places, ‘other’ spaces of that of the human
(this is not about ‘territory’)


who “can” think and act in the world?
who has the “ability” to prompt change?
[my apass research project is in a sence *contemplating the agency* and speculating *relocating qualities* ~-> (re)configuration of the world]

cultural cross-codings has always been constructed between ‘some’ humans and ‘some’ animals

*the “source” of agency, coined in Europe(?) from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries onwards: self-awareness, intention, thought and language --> properties of “consciousness”
(--> History of Consciousness department in the Humanities Division of the University of California, Santa Cruz. #entities that started to make decision deep in the ocean)
(--> ‘actor-network theory’ ANT; Callon, Law, Latour, Serres. #the key difference here lies in the historical uses and mediations of objects, for humans objects are employed to solidify social bond. ANT sees agency emerging as an effect generated
and performed in configurations of different materials. Latour's work to relocate qualities.)
(--> New Materialism; radical constructionism, all world is a poem)
(--> nonrepresentational theory; Anderson, Harrison, Stewart; critique become vitalist: to watch grass grow, or curious and experimental to face an overbundance of things to be described or imagined; concepts are lived; the subject is present as witness to the moment in which some worlding is about to disclose itself in some form or event. the result is a subject attached to worlds throwing together in a sensory refrain, a literally unbelievable image, or a muscle of sociality or belief. theory: drawn through writing into the ways that people and things venture out into reals. a world in the present tense is always other than its representation [<-- another argument for #excess]. nonrepresentational writing : *a phenomenal method of attending and composing* =/= epiphenomenal: an expression of knowledge already garnered انبار from scholarship. to spin out of critical thinking's bad habits: the prizing of prefabricated good objects over bad objects.)
(--> Singh, Anand; agency as a threshold of life with its own immanent forms of movement and flux, studying spirits and shifts in intensity)
(--> )
(--> )


(the dangerous and bizzar idea of) a pure ‘human’ society


‘anthropomorphism’ actually ‘underestimates our humanity,’ in that the ‘anthropos’ and the ‘morphos’ together mean both that which has human shape and that which gives shape to humans (Philo + Wilbert > Latour)
technomorphism, zoomorphism, ...

anthropocentrism of the standard anthropomorphism critique --> human-referenced starting-point


trophies, stuffed parts, drawings
urine, faeces and other dirts

feral =/= wild =/= tame =/= feral

in-between animal-findings and animals finding

appropriate places of animals: in zoo or animations

(the 2016 film Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is about proper zoology and not animal epistemology. here what comes after “Find Them” is crucial.)
(the developement moral identities and psychological interiorities for Pixar's human teller in anthropomorphist films such as Ratatouille.)
-we need to imagine a new animal geography

*territory: “...sites of a completed cycle of parentage and exchanges [...] spaces of insurmountable reciprocity.” (Baudrillard)
(is Baudrillard sentimentalizing animal territoriality? and giving them ‘psychic life’?)

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[Michael Woods]
...through representation an entity becomes ‘immutable mobiles’ (Latour) that allow political debate to take place by presenting to decision-makers convincing representations of things which they have not directly experienced. (--> Hollywood)

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[Avital]
the maternally contacting child is menaced
it is the mother who call(ed) first
mother and child, each the absolute hostage of the Other

to face the immense, faceless Someone

the nature of our encounter is on a timer
ask for subtitle if I go foreign for you. (i might go foreign for you)
in nerves sense, i am pushed and persecuted by the need to quickly tell you everything that I know ---> the pedagogical instant -----> i don't think one can proceed slowly enough and pull the break in the age of rapid and fast food and acceleration.


our verbal velocities could reach no one in a way that would truly mark or unhinge the brutal protocols of lived reality... ?

...who took no prisoners (...who can truly say that?)

(I also? take pleasure in) the injurious effects of language : words are bodies that can be hurled at the other, they can land in psyche or soma --> manifesto

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(as a reader) friend is a partner in crime

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Sa'di's scene of writing, saying goodbye:
ای ساربان آهسته رو کآرام جانم می‌رود وآن دل که با خود داشتم با دلستانم می‌رود
سرو سیمینا به صحرا می‌روی نیک بدعهدی که بی ما می‌روی
بگذار تا بگرییم چون ابر در بهاران کز سنگ ناله خیزد روز وداع یاران
(iranian culture and its relationship to farewell and khoda-hafezi, expanding it. why we find it so difficult to say goodbye, or even can't say goodbye. --- resume work with Mona?)

Holderlin's intervention/question: we arrive at the truth, Das Wahre emerges, the moment closing in on us, when we have to say goodby

in an Iranian modality the farewell is the loci of truth, (locus: a place or metaphysical locality collecting the center of activity)

(the so-called) poet's radical exposures



is violence in farsi: ‘azar’ آزار? (how would that change instead of ‘khoshunat’ خشونت?)
kam-azari کم آزاری, bi-azari بی‌ آزاری (possible?)

eshgh عشق ~= bi-niazi بی‌ نیازی

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demography of violence and nonviolence

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(Freud <--) *liability* (--> 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)

[disposition: vaz’ وضع, halat حالت, mezaj مزاج, seresht سرشت, khu خو, khim خیم, saz ساز,]
[predisposition: este'dad استعداد, amadegi آمادگی, meyl-e ghabli میل قبلی; a liability or tendency to suffer from a particular condition]

super-ego [that part of you that exercises authority, “I am gonna make you swallow this” --> jouissance] ~=? Div-mardom دیو مردم (paternal correctional voice, “don't drink!” --> Nezami) =/= Div (says “benush!” بنوش)

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(with Haraway;) the relation between what counts as nature and what counts as culture (in Tehran)--judging whether a behavior is the stuff of genes or rearing
the domestic animal is the epoch-changing tool --> (free) wolf/dog (servant) ==> civilization

what are the things we hate in the name of Wilderness (~=> “fall” into culture)

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[lecture at apass, 10.03.2017]

i follow the scribbles of jamming and jam session

welcome to this metaphysical place

like you, i am also sometimes in heaven, sometimes in hell, in no-land, nowhere, elsewhere, in Belgium; also interested deeply in what signals my and our arrival in the metaphysical entity of Belgium. like Christian, as i am fantasizing his excursion that i missed, we went out and walked back into the city, studying what really signals our arrival, when and how and where on the body we feel that we are there. and my guess is that it is always technological. but in an another universe your arrival might be registered by greeting. and in an Iranian sense...

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my lecturing, when it is about going after a term or a metaphor or a subphenomena or a paraconcept, {to arrive at its essential qualities or range, its meaning and historical rootedness, how does it hold things together, what holds it together (in related but different speculative milieu,) its intractable necessity, its ghostly effectiveness, its phenomenological maintenance, in which framework they maneuver, and so on} is a tentative intervention that i reside in the weaker neighborhoods of thought, even vandalizing (authoritative knowledge-)claims of legitimacy and abandoning the controlling of possibilities of comprehension.
-(purposeful?) anarchy of questioning, unfolding my thoughts anarchically

*not to work on X in order to get the point across that one remains susceptible (mosta'ed مستعد, dar khatar در خطر, dar ma'raz در معرض) to and in need of X : what X almost was, or is still about to be
(the character of X, and? the X-ian character)
-rather, ask, in what way X allows an approach?

{Avital on} **authority, violent shores of human governance

what happened to authority after the demotion (tanazol-e rotbe تنزل رتبه) of the “big Other” (death of God, State, Pir, and other mostly masculinist idols)?
a primal impulse in the cuing of group formation; pre-givenness of our way of handling private and public spheres of encounter, domestic and foreign affairs;
-disappearance of authority functions as a figure for democracy in crisis; loss of authority and the loss of the enemy opens up abysses in boundaries that have kept the world recognizable

maternal (runs of) interference (or motherly Wechsel) --?--> still pumping effects of authority

authority of the breast

to slave tyranny

(who? insists in remaining a) non-reader = solid descriptor (sharh-dahande شرح دهنده) ~-> transparent utterance ~  rhetorically uncluttered argument

literature is snafu

how authorship (dead or alive) feeds authority?

What has been packaged as terror can be in fact misleading.

authority is the most elusive of terms that inform relations, and yet no politics, no family, no pride of accomplishment can exist without it

for Arendt, authority is an undeletable term, key to any grasp of politics
authority =/= rhetoric of persuasion

Plato's authority of philosophy: in an effort both to memorialize and to exact revenge for the verdict on Socrates. (as if Socrates didn't have any bullying tendencies in his persuasive energies.)
a recovery operation
the ‘need’ for authority
(Arendt:) “It was after Socrates’ death that Plato began to discount persuasion (and argument) as insufficient for the guidance of men and to seek for something liable to compel them without using external means of violence.” ==> a power that renounces power; coercion without violence, (invention of hell, is it nonviolent?! a more earthbound rhetoric of persuasion?!)
(when we are out of master/slave relationship) expert knowledge commands confidence and obtains compliance (without force nor persuasion); soft coercion associated with reason --> Plato's philosopher-king --> **“Authority establishes relationality prior to command, promising compliance in the absence of force or argument”** (Avital)

aspects of the authority that might take in or shake up the other without harm

historical comfort zones ...and ...the ongoing torment of worldlessness

(Avital,) are the mourners of authority masking another loss for which “authority” would be a cover?

Greek way of handling:
domestic affairs --> persuasion
foreign affairs --> force and violence


*authority of the Father
ontological proof of God's existence (Kojeve contends) rests on the metaphysical placement of divine authority as the authority of the Father, who is seen as cause*
--> paternal authority in power and political authority --> as author of a work who exerts authority over the ‘Oeuvre’

father/judge/Pir: the principal figure holding together political and ethical qualities of existence ~ imago (in psychoanalysis is an idealized image of someone--usually a parent--formed in childhood), firm but benevolent caretaking, funding sources of divine authority, hierarchical hold, categorical imperative, a secure ground from which commands can be issued, “Achtung!”,
-authority subsists on borrowed transcendence
-authority produces effects of respectful adherence
-softening the space of committed citizenry (ground for political relatedness)
-is it possible to keep authority separate from respect? what this seclusion assures?

(Pir's authority nearing the) sublime regions of human relatedness

Kojeve > What accounts for the unconditional surrender of human reactivity?
legitimate principle of coercion

God is always the God of our ancestors --> character of “tradition”

where violence begins or what gets counted as violence?

the discourse of effacement (امحاء emha’, self-effacement: withdrawing into the background, making yourself inconspicuous)

is there an authority outside inequality? responsible asymmetry, the egological space, tropes of domination?

%this is anout the quality of asymmetry----(are we still in the realm of the human?)

Levinas tactics is spectacular, he runs down patriarchy and meets the majestic escalade of the absolute other, he doesn't escape internment (toghif توقیف)
[patriarchy: when it is “of course” obvious who is the mother]

(where do we go with helplessness directed by the destruction of the world?)

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[Sennett] on authority, trust and cooperation

...in both a subtle and a coherent social structure

inequality makes a profound difference in the lives of children

“earned authority” manages the everyday experience of inequality


cultures in which the *dramaturgical display of yourself* is foregrounded =/= diplomacy as model for social relationships

facebook, an engineered social network organized for display =/= communication



in capitalism, in firms people at the top has more power but less authority, and that is a problem.
in reverse, Lear loses its power but keeps his authority, his lag on administrative change.

authority is a bound, a volunteriy obidience and care-giving
parent-children: something the child needs desperitly, they need direction, they need people not only as guids but as witnesses of what they are doing.


the destructive charismatic authoiry in politics
tests if he/she can keep himself together

the charisma of the user on facebook (marat, jonathan, etc., but both are also very good at face to face communication)

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Sennett

we don't know how to use material objects and machines well

craftsmanship: the quest to make physical things well
•how the head and hand are connected
•doing something well for its own sake --> skill (not honoured in modern society)
==> free the craftsman (Sennett)


in many social relations we do not know exactly what we need from others – or what they ought to want from us

cooperation as a craft --> skill of understanding and responding to one another

urban design is a craft in peril (dar khatar)
•too much urban design ==> homogeneous and rigid
•modern built forms ==> only a faint imprint of personal and shared experience

Sennett --> (better understanding of) ‘material craftsmanship + social cooperation’ ==> cities better made

‘homo faber project’: the ancient idea of Man as his or her own maker, man as a maker of life through concrete practices
•limits on desire and will
•the experience of other people's needs (which cannot be reconciled with our own)
+ to recognize and honour what lies beyond us (and before us)

social relations & physical environment

issues of practical skill, tool, meaning, value


***the rebellious child (in me)


United States has become an intensely tribal society
*tribalism* [= adverse to getting along with those who differ, solidarity with others like yourself, & “thinking you know what other people are like without knowing them"], in the form of nationalism, destroyed Europe during the first half of the 20th century
--✕--> complex societies:
•workers flowing across borders
•different ethnicities, races and religions
•diverging ways of sexual and family life

“The ‘self’ is a composite of sentiments, affiliations and behaviours which seldom fit neatly together; any call for tribal unity will reduce this personal complexity.”
-Sennett

(for Aristotle:) city = synoikismos(= coming together of people from diverse family tribes--each *oikos* having its own history, allegiances, property, family gods)
[some my german friends are making us all poor in not recognizing this, that similar people cannot bring a city into existence. city obliges people to think about and deal with others who have different
loyalties to (linguistic differences). Germany, lacking direct experience of others, because of lesser colonial encounters in its history, falls back on fearful fantasies with the new refugees coming. integration, a bad response to the problems of living with difference]


(Robert Putnam:) people who live in homogeneous local communities appear more sociably inclined towards and curious about others in the larger world : first- hand experience does not weaken stereotypes
-the case of Brussels: withdraw from neighbours who differ --> to hibernate

attitudes
actual behaviour

[*]cooperation: an exchange in which the participants benefit from the encounter
can be informal as well as formal: experience of mutual pleasure in a bar exchange gossip
difficult kind of cooperation: join people who:
•have separate or conflicting interests
•do not feel good about each other
•are unequal
•do not understand one another
•(different faith communities)
}==> responsiveness as an ethical disposition

rituals of civility
as small as ‘please’ and ‘thank you,’ put abstract notions of mutual respect into practice

in the spirit of generosity, let's not write off the banker (or the Mullah) as a human being --> instead of “fuck you” how do we respond to our differences in a difficult social environment such as contemporary Iran --> what skills are needed for this hard cooperation? --Sennett--> dialogic

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what remains from christianity after its self-deconstruction? (Nancy)

(what theology doesn't know about itself?) recovered from the repressive power of religion

Nancy's “shattered love” is the stuff of Hafez

#love (and greeting?) doesn't belong to the realm of giveable things
Lacan's definition of love consists in giving what one does not have, (filling emptiness with emptiness) --> to give something i ‘would’ have? --> (giving that which is not a property, not even one's self,) to give behind or beyond any subject, any self? --> *the giving of the fact that i cannot possess myself* ==> ‘to give' = 'to give up’
***love: to share the impossibility of being a self***
----> (Nancy's) ‘body’ (of political thought): not as an organicity, but of community as the living to share precisely an impossibility of being-in-common (=/= ontologize the community, after the death of God, Rousseau: community of mankind as the foundation of politics --> “man” comes from the “contract” and not reverse)
----> “giving” the (Derridean) ‘gift’ cannot succeed if the giver knows about his/her gift; *unpresentable*
--✕--> politics and the political always implies fulfillment, law, closed space, *closure*

(Pir's) heaven of value

(Bergson's) supplementary soul

there is a nihilistic way in which we destroy

“everything is political” =/= everything is directly ontologically political ==> totalitarianism: everything belongs to law --> make law about anything (--> Plato's political theology: thought is founded on something; - @Varinia, “management of justice”)

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