[...] 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

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

eternal turtle

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

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 ma[...]