[...]ge (shamanic, ritual, genealogical) to generate different kinds of affects
1947 Partition of India (marked by massive intercommunal killing, rape, and abduction of women) ==/==> victim
==> refugees, evacuee property, abducted persons
his fictionalized account of my responses to his questions inspired me to think
(your fictionalized account of my response to your question inspires me to think)
[to] rake the fallen leaves of language and literature to recreate experiences...
(usually) “treason” ==> massacres and violation of human rights by governmental forces
(one is forced to see events in other countiries in the light of issues pertaining to) transitional justice and the global form of truth
unknown dead imagined as hungry and thirsty ghosts
*the living cannot offer the dead solace because the unknown dead cannot be placed within the grid of genealogical knowledge necessary to make them into benign ancestors*
-the difference between kin and strangers, ancestors and ghosts
**hospitality being offered to the stranger could also become a way of reincorporating the estranged kin**(? -iranian hospitality?)
the intertwined nature of bureaucratic power and ritual action
the dead are haphazardly buried that have to be then contained or transformed through shamanic knowledge and ritual manipulations? -Veena
modern bureaucratic procedures ==> tear apart the continuity of generational connections <-~ the work of ritual to restore connections is engaged
the different ways we come to know something =/= the experience of ‘carrying’ a knowledge
...unknown dead in a milieu in which ancestors and ghosts are not simply distant and abstract concepts but are felt with every sinew of the body, who come to haunt the descendants through dreams and apparitions =/= Ta'zieh: ancestors in contexts in which the relation to the dead is commemorated primarily through national rituals
(in the Jeju uprising/massacre case that Veena studies) ‘victim’: the qualifying condition for genealogical connections to be maintained in imagining kinship as constitutive of the relations between the living and the dead [=/= victim: an appeal to the authority of subjective experience, or the knowledge produced by the State about the dead as victim or traitor]
bureaucrats (victim or traitor?) and shaman (ancestor or ghost?) --> entanglement of different ways of knowing and classifying
(for the survivorss of Jeju after 70 years) inordinate character of knowledge appears in this world as the unbearable burden of not being able to convert your dead kin into ancestors consigning them to a ghostly existence
--> so that the ancestors can rest peacefully in death and less in terms of the discourse of transnational justice or human rights
reputation of a woman --> the marriage prospects of girls --> ideas of purity and honor --Veena--> “poisonous knowledge” secreted by the large-scale abduction of women (in India-Pakistan Partition)
-cultural understanding of sex as especially polluting for a woman
disclosure or a coming to know that a close relative had a hidden history tied to large historical event --> announcing an “otherness” to a close relative with whom one had inhabited a life.
Partition ==> distortion of everyday language itself and its bodying forth
bodily nature of language
poetry suffused with exquisite portraits of grief
the sense that kinship relations themselves have become lethal
(journalism's) trap of knowledge/ignorance (ruth/falsity) binary [asking for formal solutions to problems of indeterminacy because of the finitude of knowing subjects or veiling of objects] =/= (Veena trying to) attend to regions of knowledge that can turn us to change the questions we ask
(inordinate) knowledge is contended with locally, diurnally, repeatedly
Veena asking how is this knowledge [catastrophic event secrete knowledge in the everyday] endured or contested; concealed or revealed; and what are *rhythms* of these movements?
*inordinate knowledge*
-as citizens, how do we deal with the knowledge that torture is regularly practiced as part of the security apparatus of many democracies?
-what responsibility do we bear for these practices that are before our eyes--that we cannot but help know?
-As relational beings how do we reveal the extent of sexual violence or violent histories of our families to our children and to our grandchildren?
(?to make) responses in terms of the cultural repertoire of one's own society relating to the care of the dead
the necessity of embracing a mismatch between harm and healing, between not knowing and shading your eyes from what you cannot but help know [-acceptance of a certain degree of ignorance as essential for life]
...................................
Ahmed, Sedgwick+Frank @apass
installation of an automatic “anti-” (for example antibiologism, as the unshifting tenet of ‘theory’ --> *routinized antiessentialism*) ==> loss of conceptual access to an entire thought-realm***
immersed in a precritical understanding of the body
the idea of biological construction having been rendered either unintelligible or naive (in feminism --> an avowed interest in the body + a persistent distaste for biological detail)
interested in antiracism and politics of globalization --✕--> crucial dimension of research: body <== “the precarious, accidental, contingent, expedient, striving, dynamic status of life in a messy, complicated, resistant, brute world of materiality, a world regulated by the exigencies, the forces, of space and time” + the conditions under which bodies are encultured, psychologized, given identity, historical location, and agency
*(you can) speak (back) to postmodernism (or democracy etc.), rather than simply speak on (your relationship to) it*
...................................
Hayward on the role of embodiment in visual cultures + meaning of animals in representation
*to envision animal* = to visualize, to experience, to figure, to image, kinds of species, discourses, representations, institutions, histories, epistemologies + to “imagine possible” a set of material and ethical relationships between species
envisioning:
•a mode of seeing and embodying, of immersing and inhabiting, and of storytelling and theorizing in a techno-scientific world of “eye machine”
•a range of practices for situating the “self” (that tender thing in postmodernity) in places and spaces grown thick with entanglements and consequences; a form both of “to face” and “to perceive”
aesthetic conceptions of beauty and/or ambiguity coupled with biological epistemology and phenomenology of the organisms --in--> in Jean Painleve, Genevieve Hamon, Leni Riefenstahl, David Powell ==construct==> a host of hybridized and enmeshed “encounters”
biosemiotics
zoosemiotics
-humanist fascist aesthetic --> desires to memorialize “beautiful and unpolluted” coral communities
-promise of immediate and luminous experience of “jellyfish otherness”
-systems (of power?) that constitutively produce animal and human actors
human-animal + nonhuman-animal + apparatuses --> co-constitutive in the process of trying to know something about whale ecology
(Hayward > Whitehead:) concrescence: “we” (con prefix) ere- (create) scence (sense, or the “scene,” that which is seen), the present is given by a consense of subjective forms. We are multiple individuals, but there are also multiple individual agents of consciousness operant in the construction of the given.
-literal materialization of a dynamic produced
photograph (only one part, a kind of lively limb, of the relay):
(ajayeb style -->) a bumptious and lively event of the processes of whale studies and whales themselves =/= a still record of a whale “that had been there”
the image: a kind of connective tissue, soliciting one's senses
solar light --> brushed up against, even touched, the whale --> translated through the camera --> into film --> into chemical bathes --> into photo-paper --> through my eye as a research assistant
}==> ‘photograph: material, immanent, interconnected’ ==> somatic intelligibility (embodiment) to my own somatic intelligence ~ enacted an encounter between the senses (subjective feelings) and their sense (objective knowledges)
a mutual embodiment <-- shared in the event of the photographic space
experience of these photographs [whale or telegram animal video]: an instance of *sensuous knowledge* --> way we are in some carnal modality able to touch and be touched by the substance of images (to feel a visual atmosphere envelop us)
(Grosz's) [*]perception: flesh's reversibility ~ the flesh touching, seeing, perceiving itself, one fold (provisionally) catching the other in its own selfembrace
human/animal and technological sensorium
-Hayward asking how coral communities create representational ruptures in photographs
-Sina asking how telegram virtual communities create representational ruptures in the real of human-animal of Tehran, how the enfleshed animal mobile phone photograph touch us
}--> liveliness of humananimal encounters [the way in which my aesthetic and ethical senses merge with animals in the flesh]
-how people get along in concrete, metamorphic, phantasmatic ways
**sensible and sensual ensembles of materialized capacities and activities that literally and metaphorically make sense of, and to, ourselves and other animals**
(Ihde >) [*]phenomenology: a philosophical style that emphasizes a certain interpretation of human experience and that, in particular, concerns perception and bodily activity --Hayward--> a theoretical practice grounded on the carnal, fleshy, material foundations of subjectivity as it engages and is transformed by and in the world
we attend to: content + form + context
invertebrates, product of displacement and comparison, a ruinous verb turned noun turned classification --Hayward--> foregrounding and rethinking the syntax, optics, and heterogeneity of vertebrate and invertebrate relationality
accountability and responsibility in the enmeshment of knowing, doing, seeing, and being
(we need less philosophizing and more) *envisioning: an enactment of dynamic en-figurings that imperil boundaries that clearly differentiate self and other without the loss of historical, cultural, and species specificity*
...................................
☾
light has illuminated western stories
•God said, let there be light: and there was light
•solar radiance --> refracted planetary atmosphere --> earth's watery matter --> lively forms
•life shaped by ice (Meloy)
•life shaped by dark (Mohaghegh)
•life shaped by animal (Sina)
•life shaped by light (Hayward) --> the invisible medium that makes a knowable world visible; *seeing light: a trope for making visible in a comprehensive form (such that they are real)*
1. *philosophy is photology* : language of philosophy is constituted by metaphors of light
2. sunlight metaphorizes into transcendent light : a heavenly light promising liberation from the flesh
transgenic technologies ==>
jellyfish + GFP (green fluorescent protein)
rhesus monkey
glowing kittens
transgenic pigs
(...animal examples of chimeric and impure)--Hayward--> articulation of carnal interdependence across species boundaries
bacteria, yeast, fungi, plant, fly, human cell
chimeric borderlands of GFP and transgenics
pushing against the perceptual and affective registers of laboratory walls embodied selves, eating practices, living conditions
bio-capitalism
animal industry
(Hayward on) carnality and radiance of naturecultures
(welcoming a) multidisciplinary table of where light is being eaten
visuality as corporality
light = meat
(Latin word) lumen: light, lantern, lamp, clairity, understanding, the central cavity of a hollow structure in an organism or cell
*somalumenal: how might luminosity, effulgence and illumination be about embodiment or corporality? light transubstantiated into flesh and matter (=/= body transcended by the thrills of enlightenment and radiance)*
(my work on telegram bestiary:) *post-animal studies*
[*]tranimal: a synecdochically imagined correspondence written as a portmanteau word --> changes in our understanding of bodily transformation, somatic and sensual synthesis that manifests synecdochically (a figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole or the whole for a part) =/= metaphorically
[Cinderella is synecdochic]
*trans-
ongoing labor of cross-species agents
energetic and material crossings that disrupt bifurcated categories
(Haraway + Hayward) metaplasm قلب حروف: a change in a word (by adding, comitting or transposing its letters, syllables or sounds) that can signify a mistake, stumbling, a troping that makes a difference [in joined natureculture --Haraway--> flesh and signifier, bodies and words, stories and worlds]
to inflect tranimals with its tropic kin of antimeria that turns nouns into verbs, that mobilizes, incites, activates persons, animals, places, things and ideas
*i am rubied by your attention* : the relay of energies and forces (not just encounter) ==constitute==> ontology
[*]ontology: what there is + what debts we owe to it --> we owe ‘sensation’ to life's ‘insistencies’ : (Hayward arguing) we must respond to *life's insistencies* through sensation (corporal prehensions)
--(?why to write:)--> **noun = transitional responses to relationships** (=/= direct products of environment)
==?==> percussive distribution of affect
boundary: refracted interfaces of passage, prepositional orientation
sensuous being: unmetabolizable more, the residue of passing
jellyfish sting story
“a jellyfish stings human skin, leaving an empurpled mark that inscribes the boundaries of tentacle and skin (somatic technologies), but the excitation (sensorial transit) of burning and blistering energy remains partly unmetabolizable--this remainder is differentiating and binding. so excitation is not necessarily predicated on positive joins of ever expanding units of life, but emerges between them and therefore can be generated through haemorrhaging [flow of blood from a ruptured blood vessels], excising, amputating” [& killing(?)]
breaking fast with glowing light
Kac's GFP bunny: (chimera of) rabbit + jellyfish + human + technology
making bodies materially luminal --Hayward--> تابش effulgence bound to meatier substance =/= extraterrestrial force of more heavenly bodies
(-what about the moon?)
sexual planktonic medusa
دو شکلی dimorphic life history
جانور دریایی pelagic drifters
[*]drift: to be carried slowly by a current of air or water :
•move passively, aimlessly or involuntarily into a certain situation or condition
•a steady movement or developement from one thing toward another
•*your body is an index of its environment* (= jellyfish: when provoked give off a green glow... *glowing in response to provocation*)
•to be sent adrift as mutation
•the general intention of an argument (--> in writing: *technique of drifting*)
◦poetic joints
◦mixing ontologies into larger organizations
◦
blend of tissue
reorder not only life but also light
-(Sagan -->) life: how matter interacts with interconnected systems that include organisms in their distinct perceiving worlds
-(Uexküll -->) Umwelt: perceptual bubbles (of the most unidentifiable animals: ticks, spiders, inverts) ==> ‘organs of animals are counterparts of lived environments’ : ***animal body: inverted map of its environment*** (mediated by its capacity to interpret habitat through bodily sensation) [Uexküll using music to define the laws of nature: “life = musical response,” effects of *animal capitalism*]
to travel through stages of evolution of the consumer product ~=> becoming a new harmony (<-- using jellyfish as advertising in posthuman consumerism)
-(Lingis -->) [*]sensation: ملقمه amalgamations made of movements and affects that shape the energetic relay between subjects and objects,, an intensity --that--> pressures us --feel--> our cohabitation --in--> a sensible environment --that--> opens outward (=/= simulation of our sensorys or nervous systems) ==> subject is *involved* into the sensuousness of being : *excitation of affect and desire within a sensuous environment ==generate==> substance of self*
•percepts oringinating in environmental harmonization
tranimals [...]