[...]orrectly 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 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 (~ the felines that traverses our myths and religions, literature and fables)

***what the cat might actually be doing***
(this is my relation to description, what is the world, that cat, the demon, the mice up to? and use my best imaginative crafts and precise descriptive acts, the answers are many. that is not about definition or defining ‘what is’ the cat that visits me or the spider in my room. i only try to well define concepts and not subjects. my style of presenting my research on ajayeb bestiary: narrating the contingency of the differences that happened and mattered to me in particular =/= philosophy)


wolves (=/= nomadic roamer) have strong feelings of property rights and they ritually and regularly mark their boundaries


what am i allowed to do with my body when i am with animals?

(Despret + Strum + Mowat) using one's body to make the animal respond (--> does this make sense with humans? in apass for example --?--> use your body to make them respond =/= react)
--Haraway--> a “good” (actually bad) scientist = learning to be invisible, like a rock to be unavailable, as if data-collecting humankind were not present, seeing the scene of nature close up through a peep-hole, remove from the subject animals’ social environment
•(ignoring animal social cues) imagining the baboons as seeing somebody off-category, not something --> to be a *nonentity* (tolerated but unobtrusive!!)
--> [*]distance: a cognitive and relational perspective {what kind of distance, aesop fables, Kelile Demne, or ajayeb takes or keeps?}
--> learn to be [*]polite: (in the ethical, political, and epistemological senses of the word) to respond, to acknowledge, to look back, and *to greet*

****politeness ==> transforms you --> in the way of those you are being polite to**** (<--?-- Cinderella's politeness)


companion story --> wich who we share food {=/= with who we cook together <-- generated protocols ==> host, guest, house, power}



[(Annemarie's) praxiographic enquiry into the] (Despret's) embodied practices of knowing [of (Sina's) Cinderella]

**bodies enact =/= perform**
@Chloe, Mette --> (ironic) performing a protocol =/= embodied choreography
(contemporary choreography =/= embodiment)

(scientists and animals are fleshy creatures which are) enacted and enacting through their *embodied choreography* (<-- epistemological, political, ontological)

scientist work [observing, collecting events, meeting them, writing about, inscribing them into theories --> explain why they do what they do] ==> *makes their animals more real*
--Despret--> a praxiographic account [~= feedback] (paying attention to the way scientists embody their work) ==> *make scientists more real*


(for apass) we need praxiography =/= philosophy or theory [of artistic research]
Sina's note taking in apass --> how *practices at some point become words*
#feedback in apass ==make==> artists and their work more real
feedback ==> interpretive version --> coexistence of the various versions of a multiple object (<-- this is localized or *situated* : it happens “there” and nowhere else)
work of observation in apass:
•conceptualizations of short-term social exchanges
•conceptualizations of agency-structure dynamics
•getting closer to the everyday activities of those speaking
•(context driven?) forms of analysis
•methodological repertoire
•note: composites of linguistic repertoires that are embedded in meanings (is part of what happens in apass, not after what happens.) --> a form of digestion***
*praxiography: forms of analysis produced by practice researchers, a type of ethnographic method that converses with multiplicity (--> following a trail, walking a path =/= map out a field ~= philosophy of artistic research), doctors [analyst] and patients [analysand, artist] ascribe meaning in different ways --Annemarie--> yet they perform or enact reality together --> they *do the reality of a disease [problem, artwork]*
++{Annemarie uses the term “enact” to show that objects (such as body and disease) exist as articulations of the practices that produce them (~= Butler's performance), enacting (not explained by what went before, present remains unstable, patterns and routines and surprises) =/= making (‘causes’ lie when ‘making’ happened)}
[*]theory: conversations about the realities our words help to explore (=/= seeking to fix concepts)
in knowledge practice realities are various brought into being (+ limits of that adaptability) --> *ontology:
--anthropology--> people order “reality” seriously differently
--biomedical--> why, when, where is this truth realized? what does it depend on? what are its alternatives? --> *ontology does not precede knowledge practices* (various practices are closely linked ==> ontologies are linked [for example a patient who talks to a doctor in a consulting room may receive a clinical diagnosis, while laboratory measurements ‘do’ her disease in a different way. or in artistic research environments such as apass.])

(Annemarie's) praxiography --> asking what are the techniques that make things (their empirical, epistemological found objects) visible, audible, tangible, knowable (for this artist in front of me #feedback @apass)**


‘empathy’ is a word that is often recruited when bodies are involved --> resonances with troublesome romantic meanings (magic, fold knowledge)
embodied empathy shifts its meaning from one situation to another --> different meanings ==> different outcomes
[*]empathy: the process by which one delegates to one's body a question, or a problem, that matters and that involves other beings’ bodies --> bodies are articulating and become articulated in the asking and in its responses
= making the body available for the response of another being (=/= feeling what the other feels)
==create==> possibility of an embodied communication (=/= experiencing with one's body what the other experiences)
---> go to Cinderella's empathy: make one think with & with the body
--Despret--> *empathy becomes a scientific tool* that need to be shaped, forged, refined, embodied, a tool that attunes bodies

[*]care: it matters for them that it matters for their animals (***what matters for the other person becomes your matters***)

how to act in a polite manner in a baboon's world? (or in an artist's world, when we give feedbacks)
{seeing like a baboon =/= acting like a baboon = corresponding with a baboon}--> *they transform themselves in order to create partial connections* (James’ “acting as if”) =/= performative
•to act with the baboons (learn how a tree gives you dirty looks, how it resists the proposition of your presence)
•Lorenz's “becoming with”
•Despret's “the miracle of the attunement”

embodied communication --> responsible relation --> constructing the possibility of engagement

[*]responsible: the one who constructs him/herself in order to be available to a respond

--Despret--> (to imagine that we can actually) correspond through the choreographic language of our bodies

“traying to get knowledge" = knowing for the sake of knowing }<-- 19th century adventure hunter archeologist imperialism

***(for James) [*]emotion: what makes us feel (=/= what is felt), an experience of making available ==> an occasion for others : ****emotions ==> dispose our bodies**** (+ our bodies dispose our emotions) @Chloe
-if we want to feel an emotion, we can dispose our body to produce it (<-- this was my method in my early performances in 2014)

Lorenz, Strum, Smuts, Despret
learn to become what it becames when it acts ‘as if’ --> *stakes of reliable knowledge : to thing with*

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

Baxstrom --> anthropology of the anthropologist
Despret --> ethology of the ethologist

اشعیا Isaiah provides a vivid imaginary of multispecies bonds and flourishing: the wold will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them

*nonhuman animals are as much subjects of history as humans are*

-why do we listen to prohpets?

quasi-theological and anthropocentric notions such as that of the great chain of being

(the importance of) changing ourselves as humans ==> change animals
•how changing human habits also gives other animals a chance to change theirs?
[*]ethology: a practice of habits involving distance, knowing activity, politeness, milieu, alliance

(i am interested in women) not because of gender [= identity politics, political correctness], but because of *their practice and the question they pursue*

what parrots talk about
talking birds and primates as subjective interlocutors who can become persons in the exchanges allowed by language


*they never posed the question of knowing what a raven could, through this somewhat maniacal behavior, teach them about what interested it*
-(curious) being always teach you what that being is interested in

very bottom of the ladder of choices...

for Tehran:
1. memory studies
2. kalagh shenasi (raven studies) کلاغ شناسی

ravens, evidently, do not want to obey any of the rules that make research possible: the incivility that excommunicated them from the laboratoies of the behaviorists having already been stigmatized from the time of the Flood (in Noah's ark)

ravens are by all account unreliable <-- calling into question the intelligence of their researchers, the pertinence of their models, and the solidity of their dispositives
---> go to Kelile Demne

*the ravens literally recruit their researcher*
to [*]recruit: they will reveal to him the resolution of an enigma the difficulty and the interest of which would be in accord with what makes them impossible to study

(from) season --to--> season
(from) enigma --to--> findings
(from) hypothesis --to--> tests
suspense and sudden turns ==> transform all that we know about ravens

the ravens present a behavior that has no sense from the point of view of evolution

the “guilty” of the story are given from the beginning

---> go to [Daston's] historian of science (always knew how the story ended): imagine you are the kind of a person who cheats when reading mystery novels, and you read the last page first to know who did it, and then when you read the rest of mystery story, you know everything is building towards this climax, you read it in a very different way than the person who has to retrace all that have been implanted in your way by the author to throw you off the scent of the real villain {==> you lose the past in the image of the present}
+ scientist (who wish to have a) story about *why we believe what we believe now and why it is right* [knowing that everything we know now will be overturned if not now later]--> pathos and progress of science {==> negates science's enormous creativity and capacity for renovation}
-*Foucault showed how many more objects [sexuality, etc.] have histories (that we thought they don't, that they are constant for all humanity for all time for all cultures)


ravens are capable of being silent when they don't care to be noticed

(the raven inviting the others to share in the party, when food is difficult to find + they are experts in hiding food items) eyes of an ethologist --> why do ravens do that which the logic of evolution should prohibit them from doing? --Despret--> this motive will be not only a matter of discovering but also of inscribing in the regime of proof

hierarchical ladder =/= great economy of conflicts

one-upmanship

(raven's) acts that appear to be useless, pertain at once to both the game and to the affirmation of skill

**reciprocity of exchanges of good conduct**
•you are interested in the differences
•you are interested in unexpected strategies
•you take into account the fact that the animal does not cease to transgress the rules and models + that it is unpredictable in its choices (<-- ravens demand this) ==> you adopt other ***criteria of achievement*** [--> in giving #feedback to artists: understanding their ‘criteria of achievement’ (has nothing of an ambitious program about it, but) leaves their program totally open in regards to its realization]
◦for example (Heinrish explains) raven's criteria of achievement: the raven can ****procure resources from the environment and convert them to a little more of itself**** (<-- @apass this is also what artists do, *converting the environment into a little more of itself*)
=/= theory of sociobiology {raven = an umpteenth example of the “all purpose” model of the theory of the “selfish gene” --> altruistic behaviors ==> transmit the greatest possible number of its genes to the population --> ravens who are altruistic recruiters (sharing rare resources), costly from the individual point of view, can reap benefits in regard to evolution ~= *the animal simply obeys a relatively inflexible rule: help your relatives, ignore others, and you will multiply the copies of yourself* --> *your animal will be similar to others and all the variations be nothing but details of the same motive* [=/= Cinderella]}

how does the motive make the “crime” an achievement for the raven?
how (to accord) this achievement (with that which) translate to (the raven's everyday) survival?

(register of) negotiations of interest and stakes ~/= (politeness of) “getting to know” by posing the question, in terms of achievement, what it is that interests the raven
--> to elucidate (not just what and how, but) why the raven does what it does
•the ravens will not show you straightforwardly what counts for them --> you have to create situations that permit the ravens to help you decide (among all the contesting fictions) the right fiction [#artistic feedback as fictioning]

dance of hesitation


(a cadaver لاشه, once a preditor, waiting for an imprudent raven) to reverse the situation: to convert the bird into a little more of itself
==> salutary egoism: it would be better to be with many others in the case of this type of error

organization
cooperation
i find, you open

*work of the researcher = leading the ravens to take a position in relation to his fictions and hypothesis* (resisting those that don't explain, clarifying those that do) --Despret--> **the researcher must create a dispositive that confers on the ravens “the power not to submit to his interpretations”** <-- politeness of “getting to know” {"getting to know you” does not necessarily turn on an attentive benevolence but on the art of finding the forces, and exchanging them, in an exercise of [*]rivalry: (constituted by) a clever mixture of complicity & opposition}

test of the intelligence and cunning (of each other)

(in the case of ravens [and #feedback in art])
theoretically --> we understand nothing
practically --> we have to learn their tricks to be able to approach them

**a matter of finding the procedures that attest to the pertinence of explanations** (=/= a matter of explaining/understanding them)


enigma --{(like good detective stories) inscribes the protagonists in a relation of}--> rivalry هم اورى : if you want to understand them you must try to be as smart and cunning than they are (not letting oneself be duped by appearances)

politeness --> suspicion ~= respect (‘re-spectare’ to look twice)
•confidence without verification offers little guarantee as to its robustness

we want to witness in a reliable manner = we want that which we learn from the ravens is to be treated with confidence = we want to define ourselves as authorized by them to speak in their names = we want to (required to) offer them the opportunity to show what they can do (with the *great flexibility of our interpretation*)


[*]trap
(enigma of the apparently inexplicable behavior) --> *how to ask the ravens, with the same politeness, to take a position in relations to all the possible conjectures of the investigation?* how to ask them to teach us the good explanation, the right motive? ==> the researcher will have to learn the ***art of the trap and the net*** = the art of the lure and the trick = ***the art of learning from those whose enigma you are trying to solve*** (and have no intention of helping you) --> ‘how that which counts can count for them’
•*the art of metis / cunning intelligence* : the particular form of intelligence that the greeks (learning from hunters and fishermen) cultivated = intuition شهود + cunning مکر + perspicacity فراست + dissimulation فریب + improvisation بدیهه + vigilant attention هوشيار + sense of timeliness بجا (<-- this type of “getting to know” was constituted exaclty to be found in a domain where human intelligence is constantly at grips with the land or sea animals in an are where humans saw their intelligence and techniques transform in learning from animals**** [-how to prolong the possibility of this transformation?]) <-- *it is the only way of getting to know that can hope to address intelligent highly flexible* (Despret > Heinrish) = ravens who require of those who want to know them the same flexibility and the same intelligence
}-->[reading ajayeb bestiary as enigma; Bambi's mother studies; little mermaid; (using Despret's ethological research to think about) art of feedback ~= getting to know you =/= audience engagement]


strange politeness
art of cunning (lures + manipulation) --> enticing ravens
*seeing without being seen*
obliging them : luring them to actualize the choices : ***creating situations as if they were natural*** (so as to let the birds do the talking)
(it is a matter of) rendering them more robust [giving them the occasion to resists, of giving them *the power to send the researcher/storyteller to work* =/= to disarticulate (what Ferdosi does in Shahnameh to the Div)]


to find an enticement that interests them ~= to let himself be recruited by them
[from Latin “cresc-” grow, rise ==> crescent, crew, decrease, crescendo, recruit]

to trust them = to act like them
@apass feedback (differential knowledge that is created because of not trusting)


the lure could be used to respond to this question: the ravens fall for the trick
...not only do the ravens not respond to questions but they pose new ones

-how could we ask them (the ravens, trees, etc.) to verify our hypothesis (about them)?

*he has no answers =/= he has nine hypothesis*


biological detective stories

curiosity (for the things you discover that you don't know) <== the more you know

more cunning
more imagination
more activities
--to--> obligate ravens to choose between hypothesis

{ Heinrish: “It is still dark, and I'm already being awakened by raven calls! Several birds are flying over Kaflunk making short, high-pitched calls that are unlike the usual quorks. These calls convey excitement. The birds are flying to a kill! I feel it. Even I can understand, and I too am recruited” }--Despret--> ***if this recruitment by nonhumans was able to acquire such an efficacy, it is because the human was transformed by those whose enigma he was trying to understand*** [=/= animal rights activist ==> evidence arrive in the form of a weakened raven that has to be saved]

***letting himself be drawn into their enigma = converting the environment into a little more of himself ==> he learned to become sensitive to what makes the ravens sensitive*** (Cinderella's mice learned that about her)

Heinrish --> I, as a mammal for whom they are not intended, can feel [...] I also feel I can detect a raven's surprise, happiness, bravado, and self-aggrandizement


(recognizing one another ==>) to go by way of what the ravens demand --Cinderella--> *progress often depends more on how well one follows the situation than on how well one controls* (especially when control is difficult)
•one must learn to ask them to give evidence differently and to try to understand *how a raven ponders a question*


and now, when everything is suddenly new, this bird acts as if nothing is out of the ordinary! [...] I can only guess that they see it not as an absolute but as departures from the accepted. when everything is different, then comparisons cease, and almost anything can be accepted -Heinrish
(--> integration)


tame
questions that the other ones do not allow to be asked
tamed and be tamed to better find out what matters from a raven's point of view
gain the trust to respond to the demands of the politeness of *getting to know*
•the dispositive of taming then proves to be a privileged access of “getting to know” : it actualizes competences that have less chance of occuring in usual conditions (those of the birds and those of the researcher) ==> transforms habits (those of the birds and those of the one who investigate them)

aviary مرغدانی

the most adventurous & the most curious ==> the most attached to the researcher (to Cinderella) ==> hierarchy takes shape as a function of bravery [=/= bravery of adventure in the shape of radical detachment and fluidity]

(when) *investigator becomes biographer* (==> the story changes)

(how when why) the fact of recruiting must be linked to demonstrations of bravery

position in the hierarchy
manner of recruiting


shyness: dancing a little dance of hesitation


(Despret's account of how Heinrish succeeded in) recruiting the ravens around his problem <~~~~> *he sufficiently recruited himself to invent pertinent ways of addressing them* ==> [...]