[...]
(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 invoke the social, affective, sensorial response-abilities of becoming and eating [<-- Hayward's affirmative poetics of trans- --✕--> Stewart's much more complex pattern of description]

-my art work has been more about intensity + techne (= baroque?), than aesthetics ==> ([{when i make images} sharing] our) subjugation to sensation


( sensibility [ ... ) sensuousness ]
                 |
affect <--  sensation --> affect
   affect          affect
          affect affect   affect
        affect      ::{~body~}::


sensation --distribute--> affects & percepts (across bodies)

excitation (unleashes bodily organization at the site of contact) = zone of an *expressed threshold* =/= zone of contact


multispecies materialities --Grosz--> life folds over itself to embrace its contact with materiality


rabbit mammalizes light
glow: a dynamizing force ==> making matter more


Hayward: through [Alba's] glow, her artfulness, we are reminded that species are not just relationships, nor are species ever directly in relationship with other species, we are resonances and dissonances of intensification, energetic cadences of one another--a sensorial ensemble [<-- what marketing would say about this?]


space between scientific experimentation (biocultural) & domestic cohabitation (composition #Cinderella, pet) --evoke--> invisible labour of jellyfish, research on the proliferation and patterns of cancer cells and the sensation of somalumenality [Hayward's Alba]


(Anker > Hayward:) the chimera must be understood in a social context: these beasts have always reflected the social, scientific and religious circumstances <-- my project in zoological vandalism


(Hayward's neologism --> posthumanist repositioning of visuality) carnophallogocentric visual appetite
...glow (intensifying vision) drifts through the bodies of consumers

eating (ingesting and killing of) jellyfish usually takes the form of dried crisps sprinkled into salads and Chinese food



Cinderella's techne --> companion
Crusoe's techne --> human

-fictional kitchen where Cinderella works (and is not a master of)

[learning from] Cinderella (her room has been undone and remade by cohabitation with birds, mice, evil mother --> changing the self and adapting) ==> ontology: a practice of co-constitutive awareness


Alba --engineered--> to glow
pig --engineered--> to become sausage

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

Seymour
bad affect
(bad environmentalism's) respond to mainstream environmentalism + questioning its broader ideals of nature
=/= conventional environmental affect

both identify & respond to the aforementioned absurdities and ironies, through absurdity and irony + related affects and sensibilities:
•irreverence بى ادبى
•ambivalence
•camp
•frivolity هرزه
•indecorum بى نزاکتى
•awkwardness
•sardonicism زهر خنده
•perversity
•playfulness
•glee شاد شاد

affects and sensibilities typically associated with environmentalism:
•gloom
•doom
•guilt
•shame
•didacticism
•prescriptiveness
•sentimentality احساساتى
•reverence حرمت
•seriousness
•sincerity
•earnestness
•sanctimony تقدس
•self-righteousness
•wonder

assumptions:
•that reverence is required for ethical relations to the nonhuman
•that knowledge is key to fighting problems like climate change


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

__al __ : __ affects and matter of __
(sensational X : Y affects and the matter of Z)

ocularcentric selves

(Hayward's) jellyfish: prismatically, their kinesthetic bling is registered visually and haptically, which draws our attention to the construction of their enclosure

expressively dense
rendered literal and material
light is of this world

to think diffractively = to apprehend a critical difference within

(the formation of a word from a sound associated with what is named -->) onomatopoetic: designed around the sensation of water

Hayward is drawn (to the Monterey Bay aquarium) ==> trying to sort out the poetics of their display
[they] furnish a simulation of the real thing, soliciting the sensation of unmediated encounter with marine worlds, they *act as sites of ecological hope* --Acampora--> *zooscopic: a totalizing view that conceals meaningful human-animal encounters at the price of reinvigorating anthropocentrism {=/=? zoological vandalism --> what would be an animal social media?}
[in zooscopic experience:] the very structure of the human-animal encounter is disrupted, and the interaction that is sought (encountering the animal) becomes impossibility as the “real” animals disappear and the conditions for seeings are undermined [<-- how telegram does that? if telegram animal media is zooscopic, then i say that is good for Tehran, for the “real” encounters are violent. the idea of “truely seeing animal” is metaphysics]

captivity ==> animal against themselves, “animal = qualified noun, adjectival” [=/= *ajayeb's wilderness* was articulated in a time before the modern zoo]
--Acampora--> zone of species contact mediated by an interruption that voids actual encounter
--✕--> Sina: there has never been an “actual encounter”
--✕--> Hayward: does face-to-face “seeing” matter for organisms of a radically different scale and for whom “eyes” are light receptors rather than picture makers?

-how can we see mediation as a dynamic of encounter, even an ethical one?
(captivity is always mediated)


captivity diffracted


*(telegram's) [*]encounter: sensuous rapport or energetic cadence*


aquariums engage a story of looking + deep roots in imperialism and the process of nation building --> aquarium: a stage of an unspoiled garden in nature, بوته hearth for learning human self from animal other + (clarification of) ontological and epistemological disorders of nature and culture [=/= Tsing's contaminated landscapes]
-18th century: the ocean was taboo, a place of great fear, a cursed world full of monsters lurking in shadowy fathoms, (waters: low and deep =/= air: domain of morality and aspiration, closer to heaven)
-19th century europe victorian glass *aqua vivarium* --> windows that interfaced between human sight and subaqueous scenes (the unknown provoked feelings of bot curiosity and apprehension)--Stott--> for the naturalist the marine or freshwater aquarium provided a constantly changing, glass-fronted theater of bizarre and exotic bodies, moving, metamorphosing, interacting and breeding in sensational ways
-aquariums became sacred spaces where cohabited forces of godliness and nature were contained, compartmentalized, and studied --> animal = metonymic of particularly nonhuman environments --> victorian sensibilities

(Darwinan trope...) monstrously minute, potent and parasitic, characterized by missing body parts

efforts to know, classify, and conquer the oceanic (--> capture for visual pleasure) ==> counter-conquest of the home by monsters and sexual deviants

the most prized organisms were “exotics” from non-european environments that fueled ongoing colonialism in the mode of animal husbandry


Hayward:
differences in display technologies
variations in viewer experience and perception
alterations in cross-species encounters
aquarium's promise of immediacy(?)

the rhetoric of animal domination is not the only discourse at work (in aquarium display, telegram, in ajayeb, in zoo, etc.)

Hayward's attention to the expressiveness of sensation, display technologies, and the animals themselves =/=? my attention to telegram animal media

(modern) aquarium: turning toward the monstrous oceanic but updated for a technoscientific postmodernity and anticipating a sci-fi futurity


exhibits as idealizations
the aquarium visitor is entertained into caring about environmental ethics and marine biology. enacting a moral imperative to protect local ecosystems, the aquarium is a savoir --> the parochial becomes the new cosmopolitan

technology + artistry + biology

playing with scale, volume, space
refractive technology:
•produces the visceral and optical experience of immersion...
•makes us profoundly aware of our bodies in space
•producing a disorienting visuality
*refracted vision = textured light*

refraction = corporal جسمى + carnal (جسمانى marked by the appetites and passions of the body) ==> effective stimulation


osmotic space
amniotic
eroded
bad boundaries
concretions
immersive medusa or jellies transducingly
snaky tresses of the mythical gorgon
more-ness of sensation
destroyed, transformed, conserved

jelly scatters
diffracting cilia and fluible mesoglea
metamorphosing diffraction patterns


multiple sensory registers temper the apparatus of seeing: sound, tactility, movement, proximity

immersion ==convey==> the experience of being totally inside a world, a state of mind, cultural and historical forms, and intellectual rumination =/= unreality or reality
==> cohabitation =/= representation

tactile visuality
fingery eyes
relies on textured proximity rather than objective distance
the visual apparatus is the touching body

[*]art: sensual movement of perceptual information (across media and bodies)

transduction:
(at an energetic transduction site: one form of organized energy asymmetrically converted into another kind of energy)
•transmission of messages through various media and the ways those messages become mis/translated into sense and sensation
•transmitted information reformatted and transformed through devices, forces, and processes, and then broadcast to other sensorial subjects... (---> go to my ajayeb-e pit story)


#telegram's zoological corruption =/= State, science


matter owes a debt to its own means of revelation: light

(Hayward's) [*]captivation: extraction of rhythm, pulse, color, texture ==> resonate for alternative purposes buth within the conditions of the frame

the (zoo's or aquarium's) display: motabolizes, creates, releases sensation into the world ==> environment of intense involvement --> familiar orderings are affectively transposed, altered, refigured

jellies --> surrealist white shapes

i am not sure -->
(Desmond's) identification: the beautification of ‘drifters'[spending most of their time motionless with their tentacles extended over ten feet, netting the waters for food] makes cross-species identification impossible --> [*]identification: seeing familiarity in other organisms = a map for empathy and critical engagement* (=/= objectification of radically different organisms) : “transmutation of non-identification into aestheticization” ==> observer gawks بى خيال نگاه کردن and marvels at dissimilarity ==> making difference a marketable feature [--> ajayeb stuff]
=/= Hayward --> [*]identification: misalignment of empathy with the possibility of familiarity --relying-on--> extending empathy across similarity to dissimilarity : *the organism can only receive the benefits of empathy if we can identify with it* (=/= Seymour's wildboyz)

politics of erasure =/= empathy

telegram ajayeb channel =/= idealized visual pathways (save, preserve, conserve vanishing wildlife, while ignoring the idealization of nature)

aquarium (as boundary object) ==> borders of nature and culture (that functions as public spectacle, public enlightenment, and conquest) =/= telegram

-if not the ‘oppressed other’ then what kind of actor is ‘you,’ ‘them,’ or ‘me’?

Ponyo --> low-oxygen environment in which fish die but jellies thrive


distracting --> diffracted ethics --Haraway--> (as a metaphor to talk about) history of interaction, interference, reinforcement, difference =/= reflection or reflexivity: displacing the same elsewhere (in traditions of representation, searching for the authentic really real)
*diffraction: (depending on the phase differences and the amplitude of the light waves) elements of composite light (white light) are reinforced, weakened, or eliminated by each other alternately*
•scales of butterfly wings and fishes...
•modification of the form of a word to express the different grammatical relations into which it may enter
•to put concerns, entities, relationships, and actions into process [-to put your found object into process of interference]
•[*]diffraction: mapping of interference ==Haraway==> where the *effects of* differences appear =/= differences appear

meaning + matter + action (always live together)

telegram animal carousel: nonhuman-animal-machine

my room/bedroom (~-> Cinderella's attic, architecture of containment)
overlapping perceptual worlds
synaesthetic force of perceiving and feeling, processing and mattering --> transposing of senses
immersion
kinesthesia
numerous haptic registers
we are transsensual

[*]sensation: the vibratory force in all organisms that seduces, sexulizes, entices, and mesmerizes the body

vibrate
oscillate
wave

aquarium ==> new sensations: deep-sea drifting and shimmering for upright opaque hominids --> that are sent further adrift through experience in yet unknown expressions


[*]ecology: ambivalent powerful elusive ways of composing through histories of interation, relationality, interconnection, and materiality

relational matter =/= matter of who has agency

Hayward's [and my] attention and sensuous reach are solicited by the ctenophores in the display, a display that instrumentalizes the jellies diffracting cilia and solicits my senses

-jellies participation in worldhood (further becomings)?
immersed in deep marine technoscience worlds...

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

Marx: human begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence ==> they produce their actual material life
--Haraway--> Marx understood relational sensuousness, and he thought deeply about the metabolism between human beings and the rest of the world enacted in living labor --> the humanist teleology of that labor: making of man himself

horses
oxen
police dogs
rescue dogs
messenger pigeons

Despret > Ridout

(theological critical roots of theater:) before tragedy is its infancy [infans: the condition of those who are without language]
the division of labor, the death of god, the establishment of human dominion over the animals, the birth of tragedy may all be seen as simultaneous(?)
--> animals off stage in western theatre, to hide its origins in these moments of *inaugural violence* + the institution of division of labor

what was the animal doing on stage before the birth of tragedy?

mythical origin ==create==> stories (fabulous, fabulating): [storytelling: seeking for] means of making a vanished experience available again in the contemporary world (~ storytelling) ~/= *storymaking: creation of memories, the construction of a history that renders the present and the future richer in possibilities* [not just for your self and your kind, as Hollywood or the brands do it: personalize experiences at scale]

animals do not appear to work, in the referential framework that emerges from the division of labor / exclusion from labor [the idea of animals have been transformed into “potential instruments of satisfaction"] --> it is held that what animals do, they do it “naturally” : as if answering our needs is the same thing as *acting according to nature* [---> go to cooking manga anime Shokugeki no Soma, the nature of serving]
--Despret--> division of labor: a matter of dividing: those who explicitly really work =/= those who are only following a bent in their nature (a necessity of a biological rather than a historical sort)


Baratay --> possibility of writing a history from the animal's point of view
+ epistemic, conceptual, ideological obstacles

when the animals start paying attention to what humans are offering ir demanding, and then either accept, play for time, resist, refuse... stories in which they exhibit unusual skills or behaviours = acculturation: acceptance from the animal (not just humans imposing their will), dialogue between the two, influence of the animal upon the human


(thinking about animals that we raise in order to kill and eat them)
asking breeders: could one in any way way that their animals collaborate with them and work with them?
•the immediate general response is: no --✕--> yet you hear many stories about animals who did in fact participate in the work of those who were raising them : they acted in deliberate ways of their own volition

-do animals work?
the answer to this question will change something --> (Despret's pragmatism) *pragmatic position = involving a question whose answer turns out to have consequences*


(Porcher > Tapper:) relationships between human and nonhuman animals (judging that this relationship must have followed a historical progression similar to that undergone by the relations of production between different groups of men):
1. hunting societies --> communitarian, animals are part of the same world as humans
2. domestication --> slavery
3. pastoralism --> contractual forms of the feudal type
4. industrial societies --> relationships based on means of production and capitalist relationships

Tapper (and Castelluci) raise the possibility that animals may indeed work, they also close these relationships up in a *single schema* of ownership and exploitation


to inherit: (not merely receptive,) implies a task, a pragmatic act = appropriation

**one's heritage is something constructed, and it is constantly transforming itself retroactively** بازگشتی --> it makes us capable of responding and that we in fact respond to our heritage =/= simply carrying on a tradition

***things are inherited, but we become ourselves in carrying out the gesture of inheriting***

(Harawayian) re-member: enact the past, collect and compose ~/= (Despretian) to inherit: giving oneself an account of a certain task, which is more than just remembering
[storymaking] *to make a story = to reconstruct, to fabulate, to offer other presents and futures to the past* [~/= Sina: to fabulate = to give other pasts to the present and future]


how to ask the question of work properly?
you have to consider animals as other than victims, natural and cultural idiots that *need to be liberated* despite themselves --> ‘liberating the world of animals' = 'freeing the human world of the presence of animals’ [---> go to fabulation of animal human in the movie How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World]
=/= telegram's animals

*humans and animals must (not just considered together but) always be imagined together*

ceasing to consider “animal = victim” ==> (?how in telegram media) animals involve themselves (since they are not natural and cultural idiots), just as human (breeders) are not “exploiting,” but giving, receiving, exchanging, raising, and growing with, their animals


when Despret is putting the question of “do animals work?” to breeders, it is a real experiment : to explore the researcher's propositions with the breeders --> to make them hesitate (~ is about *what does it mean to speculate in such a way?*) [=/= means of knowing through information (to gather data or opinions) : “what do breeders think of X?"]


Despret’ amazing rigour --> 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 and seem to simply be letting things happen --> *their cooperation is based on a remarkable ability to hold themselves back* [<-- i saw this, in a theater piece for blind, i was sitting next to two assistant dogs, and could feel strongly their efforts to sit motionless in the dark within the crowds] ~~--> but non of this is perceived...

only by observing the many ways that cows can resist the breeders, doing something other than what is expected of them ==> the researcher could see how they are actively invested in the work : when the cows show that they are unwilling to do what is wanted ==> their “good will” appeared (the effect of their willingness)
•this is an interested problem @apass, the notion of asking participants to participate in an “active” way =/= animal work }--> “working well for an artist = violating normative organization (recommendations, regulations, procedures, codes, specifications)" = تمرد tamarod recalcitrance: practical or collective intelligence appearing when intentional mistakes are made, or when feigned misunderstanding leads to active disobedience*****


Vicki Hearne + Despret
why dogs often drop the stick they fetch a couple of feet in front of you. it is a way for the dog to give to the human a sense of the limits to the authority that she is ready to concede, with an almost mathematical precision, reminding us that not everything goes without saying ♥


‘communication with animals = being together engaged in work’ :
•learning patience in regard to them
•respecting them as they are ==imply==> you know them & recognise them
•

@Leo

we are required to think about people and animals as **connected in a single experience** (in which they jointly constitute their identities) #chimera
==> (obligates us to consider) the manner in which they keep faith with each other --> they respond to each other through the consequences of their action & their responses are part of the consequences (=/= act based on shared assumptions)

{being a victim ==imply==> passivity + all its consequences}--> *animal is not a victim* [because:]
•saying “animal = victim” =/= (Despret's) mode of being engaged in question
•(don't forget that) ***تقصیرپذیری culpability is easier to tolerate than responsiblity مسئولیتپذیری*** (because responsibility prevents the question from being closed)
•***a victim does not invite curiosity*** <-- curiosity is essential in relations in which two beings learn to look and to look back (Despret + Haraway)

victim =/= (Despret’ animal, Sina's Cinderella) more alive, more present, they invite more question --> they get the chance to become interesting
•a Cinderella who does her job engages us in a totally different manner than a Cinderella who is the victim of the authority of her evil mother and wicked sisters


(from a clinical standpoint + in human terms) [*]work: gestures, know-how, the involvement of the body and the intelligence, the ability to analyze, interpret and react to situations:
•work transforms the world
•work objectifies intelligence
•work produces subjectivity

work, not only has to do with economic rationality, but participate in other forms of rationality, in relation to:
•identities
•in relationship to God
•obligation and cures
•obedience to Nature or mastering it
•moral rationality --> (Marx's) work: definitve form of expressing their life (a mode of life, Dejours: assertion of their existence)

‘work = a source of recognition’ ==> work =
•a source of pleasure
•a practice in the construction of our identities
•a judgment about beauty (of something being well done that *relies upon the recognition of one's peers* --> this is something i realized in apass) ==> judgment about *bond* (that concerns) the means of the work's doing [and places where humans and animals share things, achieve things together, accomplish themselves] (=/= the work as accomplished): a **reciprocal judgment (of bond & beauty)** [bond: judgment about the conditions of a life lived together ***even in situations that are radically asymmetrical***] through which the breeder and his animal [also participants in apass] may recognize each other

(Haraway's) work: a process that crafts capabilites to answer for + answer to

Despret's notion of ‘judgment of the bond at the center of all relations’ =/= Wittgenestein (famous and meaningless observation: “if animals could speak we would get shouted at every day” : highly anthropocentric notion of animal as victim)


(Porcher's radical idea of) we work with animals in order to be able to live with them, not the other way round

[Tehran's need of] speculative fabulation: stories that whets our appetite for possibilites, that open imagination =/= idyllic story of a golden age

(Despret, Porcher, Haraway) work: locus of unexpected encounter, the possibility of our communication

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eternal turtle

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new zoonotic infectious diseases ==> new human-animal relationship
vast silent reservoir in aquatic birds
confinement, deprivation, stress
global biodiversity crisis --> there is no monopoly on animal cruelty
mass-production of animal suffering
unsanitary practices
(we make) mad cow disease: herbivores --into--> carnivores --into--> cannibals

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

*discussion across ideologies*
partisan mindset [--> social belonging]: ideology provides an ostensive set of tools (sometimes unconsciously) for analyzing a complex social world = orientation
•partisan operative mentality یک نوع ذهن عملی
•normal is ontologically privileged over abnormalities (or vice versa)
•left-wing identity politics: reductive us-versus-them mentality + moral panic
i am influenced by the demand of the other [= (Lacanian) socio-psychic projection of a Big Other that stands in for the presence of the ontologically non-existent group narrative] ==> moral grounds for living
(?) reverting back to your material status (as private individuals) =/= looking after ideological stability and economy
thins that don't work with when talking to partisan mentality:
•factual argumentation
•punching them
•Kantian argument for the intrinsic value of all human lives
(what generally don't work:) reminding one's political rivals of facts --✕--> (Levinasian) the trace of the other


(?why i need or not need) intellectual adversarie [=/= caricatures for shooting practice]
(the banal and continuous hyper-polarized political partisanship of) right-wing populism =/= Social justice activism
(our agreement on) moral and methodological priority of the individual

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

https://merionwest.com/2018/07/31/purity-politics-is-ruining-progressivism/
prison: mechanism available to remove people from society

[my problem with: political philosophy (of) authentic radical politics -->] (academic or artistic) critical scholarship [critical race theory, post-colonial theory, gender studies, etc. -->{busy with **systemic grievances** (white supremacy, colonialism, racism, etc,)} + left-wing identity politics --> *leftist purity politics*] universalizing a kind of moral complicity ==> a reductionist social ontology of guilt and victimization -->{
•bad idea of the whole (liberalism) is historically associated with, for example, colonialism ==> all of its parts (people, ideas, etc.) are equally associated with colonialism
•the idea of modernity + the rise of the individual ==> (a sense of) loss of community
==>
•participation
•horizontalism
•institutional distrust
•ad hoc organizations

forensic architecture: purifying itself of (and overcome) injustice =/= meaningful progressive change

(Occupy movement, protest mentality --> how left-wing purity politics missed the) consequences electoral capacity, electoral politics
(not knowing how to use) liberal institutions

•(thinking with Bruzzone -->) we need more *impure politics* : (reform & compromise mentality)
◦how to transform knowledge into *electoral mobilization* (=/= Pierre's interest in fiction, Leo's interest in a morally pure collective future)
◦how to form alliances with groups whom you have grave doubts
•we don't need *hoard of like-minded people sharing collective anger and disgust at injustice*



postmodern conservatism: empirical / ideological
neoliberal societies: hierarchies tolerated by citizens so long as the economy continues to prosper



something happens ==> together --> social group

entitative: the quality of groupiness, a perception that the people together are a group : *perception of similarity*

interaction based on interdependence ==> social group

[*]group: experience of social identity

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

[*]embody: empathetically experience situations ‘from outside’
(Despret raising the question) *what can we do or what are we allowed to do with our bodies when we are with our animals?*

[*]empathy: bodies that undo and redo each other (reciprocally though not symmetrically) [=/= experiencing with one's own body what the other experiences]
==> possibilites of an embodied communication

feeling & emotions are not alone in making up what life is all about

(Despret researching) ways in which scientists’ bodies are actively being involved while they are observing animals
--Sina--> becoming describable as a body [that moves, walks, bears, diffuses, smells, makes noise, follows, ...]

the old rule of “human bodies shouldn't interfere in a properly scientific research process =/= Lorenz:
...feed his jackdaw with worms
...attempted to teach him to fly
...swam with the geese
--Despret--> Lorenz aimed at elucidating ‘meaning’ in and through the relationships he sustained with the animals he was studying ==>
•he understood for a little goose what mother is/means by letting his own body be caught in that meaning of mother
•he achieved what ‘companionship’ is/means for a jackdaw through being fed and playing with, and flying lessons
•
--> ***what matters in the animal's world = what bears meaning from their point of view***


presence
*if the scientists body is evoked, it is never for itself nor is it named as such --> when seeking the body, we are offered a surprisingly abstract concept: “presence” (under the guise of “presence of the observer”) =/= body
-the presence has no skin, it does not sweat, nor does it eat, sleep, dream, fear --> [*]presence: the perceived body which never acknowledges itself as a body (there is no presence that could be unperceived in one way or in an other) = disembodied body <== *science: the cognitive activity par excellence*
•obliterates the actual presence of the observer --understood--> (in terms of a) convenient and non-problematized split “presence =/= absence”
•(?if these attempts succeed in) reducing the reactivity of the animal to the researcher =/= wildboyz
}--> ‘not having a body' = a mean to preclude (to prevent or to avoid) **the always possible reciprocity of the encounter** [--> aliens are watching us!]
}--> ‘having a body’ discloses and renders perceptible (it is the actual condition of) the very existence of reciprocity of the encounter


how scientists (and artists) construe their presence in the field
*the will to be there without being there*

the problematic “animals react =/= animal don't react”

(also in art -->) ***the regime of distrust of influence*** [--> fable of ‘artist's original interiority']


-*- what does ‘meaningful’ means? -*-

scientists aim to find new methods to focus on those behaviors that are most meaningful to the animals themselves
•Shirly Strum --> I tried to let the baboons themselves “tell” me what was ‘important’ (-how a tree can tell you what is important to them?) -with the baboonss: nothing made them believe that she could be a baboon, so she decided after a while that she could try to urinate while staying among the baboons ==> surprise (=/= trying not to disturb the baboons with her body) --> her body (style, gender, smell, look, anime, etc.) made her enter into relationships with the animals in a new mode, **as a living person (like them) she creates with them an embodied proximity** (==> embodied affinities) [<-- Jassem is very good at it. this happens as well in apass research environment between artists]
  ---> go to Cinderella taking shower with her birds in the attic {urine, noise, surprise}
•Mark Bekoff --> empathy: possibility of sharing feelings involves mirror neurons (“I can feel the animals”) ~= (an experiment to incorporate) *to embody literally*
+ (Burghardt's) use of *critical anthropomorphism* (=/= Walt Disney) use of various forms of information (natural history, perception, behavioural description, autism, Cinderella, etc.)
•Temple Grandin (expert in factory plants for slaughter systems) --> *empathy without pathos* (for her and the animals) [*]world: a swirling mass of tiny details ~ [animal: autistic savant ~= special form of genius]--> a little plastic water bottle lying harmlessly, a shiny reflection, a yellow jacket hanging on a fence, all those turn out to be in their world *wrong details* (“I think the way animals think”) --> ****animals are visual thinkers**** {*you have to see in details*_ <-- how my work changed visually from abstract to baroque while working on the heritage of zoology. #Cinderella: which part of me animals give new powers and meanings? that part is of other beings}
-{Grandin actively transforms mindless animals into meaningful geniuses ==> gives them new powers ==> changes her}--> *animals (or your ghosts, your subjects) are invited to other modes of being, other relationships, new ways to inhabit the human world + to force human beings to address them differently : **disclosing unexpected affinities ==create==> new identities** (=/= empathy: tourism of the soul) --> identities do not pre-exist identification : *****previous construction of affinities ==> identity (is the outcome, the achievement)*****
(Grandin:) *marginal essence --transform--> partial perspective ==> affinities: (Haraway's) just-barely-connections*

}=/= romanticism: the belief that “feeling for another” belongs to some sort of naive state of nature


(#feedback: ways of showing the artists how they actively create the perspective that allows them to “see” --> ‘giving artistic feedback = being an anthropologist on Mars’)

Despret anticipate finding some references to the body (beyond simple “presence”) in the work of scientists --> the question of meaning + (its corollary) the question of perspective

tick's perception = world
(we know from Uexküll) one may indeed construct a perspective without involving the body - the perspective may be drawn partially from a mental process
•*animals only perceive things that have meaning for them*
•*animals construe meanings in acting*
Umwelt theory: a scientist may make an inventory of what makes the animal act and react --> collecting ‘meanings’ the scientist rebuilds the world as each animal perceives it + seeks for which meaning all these things take for it (=/= adopt the perspective of animal)

the scientist aims not just to understand what something merely ‘means’ for another being, but also how something ‘matters’ for it (~ the most meaningful)

language of perspective --Daston--> what does it mean to understand other minds
*sympathetic projection* [--> **perspective: apotheosis of subjectivity as the essence of mind] <-- a cultural shift:
•habit of interior observation cultivated by certain forms of piety
•increasingly refined language of individual subjectivity (developed in the 18th and 19th century novel)
•equation drawn between ‘sensory experience = self’ by sensationalist psychology
•economic (and political) individualism
•cult of sympathy

perspective ~= sympathy (with science + animals) --> an inappropriate form of subjectivity
1. adopting animal's perspective involves a dangerous flirtation with [*]anthropomorphism: one putting himself in the animal's shoe ~=? one actually put the animal in human shoes
2. perspective ==imperil==> necessary distance (or ‘sanitary cordon’ between the observer and the observed)
}==>
•anthropomorphism =/= science
•anecdote =/= legitimate date
•nonhuman =/= beliefs (--> you can't attribute belief to animals)


(old dualism of) “Science =/= non-science” ~= “imaginative (autobiographical, emotional) =/= factual (neutral)” ~= “body =/= mind”

(reconstruction of)
what is most meaningful for animal
what is the perspective of animal

*most meaningful: affected perspective* (Despret) =/= (Uexküll) semiological perspective (of the tick)

(looking for or) focus on affected perspective ==Despret==> (reveals) scientists’ bodies in their practice --> what having a body means (for scientists)
+
(Haraway ==>) *bodies are “made” by scientific practices [<-- that is why the question of science is important for whoever dealing or working with the body]
+
(Annemarie ==>) bobies (that are made) are enacted multiples (in medical practice)
+
(Despret -->) how bodies are undoing and redoing themselves through different scientific practices with animals? = *how are bodies growing multiples in diverse practices?* + (its corollary) *how do each of these practices (+ animals they are addressing) enact each of these bodies?*



Mowat's *modest embodiment* ==Despret==> partial affinities [=/= seeing like a wolf or mouse] ==> feeling or being like a wolf or mouse = ****to be taken in a radically non-psychological sense**** (--> Cinderella's non-psychological relation to her birds and mice =/= contemporary western psychological subjects)
---> go to wildboyz, Cinderella under a mouse regimen
-using his body as an experimental tool --> eating a wolf's diet (=/= empathy, romantic dream of being a wolf)
submit his own body to mouse diet
one uses one's own body to meet the needs of another
Mowat used his own body as a means of generating scientific proof, and turned it into an apparatus for validity [--> how do we apply or misapply our body in artistic environment for generating truth and validity? to be careful with the context of generalization]
([artist's and] scientist's) body: a technical device, the witness
(companion story -->) ***to embody the way other beings solve their survival problems***

“the business of curling up to start with, and spinning around after each nap” (was vital to success with a dozing wolf) --> Cinderella's choreography of the morning greeting ceremony

limits of endurance


i feld that i, because of my specific superiority as a member of Homo sapiens, together with my intensive technical training, was entitled to *pride of place* =/= being under observation

Mowat's humour =/= Derrida not laughing at his own worries (concerned with: what distinguish animals from man is their “being naked without knowing it”)
•naked body is a pretext, a pre-text for more philosophy
•Derrida is talking to his colleagues (the very people who are **seeking grandiose difference** <-- also artists) =/= a difference that happens to him
•(my problem with the old tiring trend in philosophy [after encounter with Manning]:) looking for locus of things [a generality] : talk about ‘the figure of the cat' = the allegory for all the cats on the earth (~ t[...]