[...]nd 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* ==> the models are now commensurate متناسب with their unpredictability
@apass

Heinrish becomes their expert and their reliable spokesperson ==> (like Pierre) he could now convince and interest his colleagues in terms that count for them (==> enroll other researchers to pose other questions) ==> he could bear witness for them
=/= Hitchcock's the birds --> nature turned to horror, based on in Germany in mid-1990s fifty ravens invaded the idyllie Swabian Alps region... ==> their killing would be necessary
(chain of recruitment:) the German ravens had in thier turn succeeded in recruiting the representative of the american ravens, and Heinrish was able to recruit ecologists, who in their turn mobilized experts and politicians, who themselves modified the habits of the owners of the cows and sheep... [---> go to Tsing's coalescence]

***amazing interspecific recruitment***


Sina --telegram--> visual animal --inventing--> hallucinating --spoiled--> dissociated
Goda --Boicic--> wounded dog --saving--> mothering --> traumatized (left alone)


wolf observers
Heinrish's colleagues who study wolves in Yellowstone Natural Park
the peaceful cohabitation between the wolves and ravens
in Yellowstone when the ravens are in the presence of wolves, do not demonstrate any timidity and do not hesitate a second before eating --> the wolves allow ravens to conquer their fear --> wolves changed the constrains that hold sway over the habits of the ravens
the ravens of much more alert and vigilant than the wolves (the birds serve the wolves as extra eyes and ears)


the prophecy translated in terms of recruitment --Despret--> who could have thought, if not no doubt a descendant of La Fontaine, that it is the ravens who protect the wolves and permit then to eat with their eyes closed? ♥

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

[title]
the old taghalob (تقلب cheat)
history of enumeration in the Iran (measurement, weight, scale)
the history of our non-mathematical practices

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

time travel (in TV series or literature) --> (regardless if they are dystopian or not) essential for creating sensations of historical continuity

Marzolph on premodern middle eastern narrative culture
seafaring merchant...
sailor's yarns

tales documented in persian literature of the muslim period appear to be offshoots of earlier versions in either indian or arabic literature --> arabic as the lingua franca of the day

Kitab ajayeb al Hind, wonders of india, 10th century by iranian captain Bozorg ibn Sahriyar of Ramhormoz

(Marzolph holisitic assessment [=/= Beyzai's parochial claims of iranianness] of) middle-eastern narrative traditions = arabic + persian + otaman turkish + jewish + christian (+ several other) narrative traditions related to each other and none of which may claim an exclusive position

city of Brass
the Golden City is a legendary city built in africa by Tawil, the brother of the giant Ug, both of whom were born from the incestuous relation between Cain and his sister Anaq. having been deserted for more than a thousand years, the Golden City was later conquered by Egyptians and became the source of their fabulous wealth.

agahi آگاهی knowledge
na javan mard ناجوانمرد impudent one
farz فرض rite
sonat سنت manner
mardi مردی manly combat

[Sina, Ehsan -->] in the manner of *narrative men* --> typical for the thousand and one nights--whose protagonists of merchants (often thrift sons of rich merchants, who embark on travel after they have wasted their fortune with false friends)
•save himself by his inventiveness, strong determination, physical strength
•there is no single predestined future but a variety of options whose eventual practical course depends on the protagonist's active intervention
•(Sinbad left behind on an island where) the Ruhh has laid its eggs (spirit's eggs تخم های روح 🥚🥚🥚)
•althought most of them kill other people in order to survive, their action is spontaneously motivated by the needs of the moment
•

با هزار زحمت with a thousand efforts


customary formal “hearing is obeying”


pitfalls
“[...]When I returned home, my wife had died. They lifted her up, took me along, and brought us to that cave. With a rope they let me down and blocked the entrance of the cave. After they had lowered the [body of my dead] wife and the [bundle of] clothes and I had regained my senses, I got up and saw a tremendously large cave. I installed the wick and lit the lamp, chose a place by the side, cleaned it and made a bedstead. And when every two days they threw somebody down there alive, I killed that person with my knife and took the supplies of three days bread and water, until one day they deposited in that cave my former wife’s sister alive, together with her dead husband. When she saw me, she recognized me and consented to marry me. I slept with her and had several children with her. Some time later I started to dig the ground in a corner of the cave with my knife until I had made a [large] hole to the side of the sea. Every day I would sit there, until I finally saw a ship. I attached a piece of cloth to a stick and waved it, until the ship came close and took me and my children aboard. They also asked me the same question [i. e. why my children had heads like horses], I told them my story, and they delivered me to my country. I had many more children with that woman. This is the story of my children and their ancestry.”


moral obligation of contemporary society
...the king would use the slave girl as muslim men would do = for entertainment of all kinds (including sexual intercourse, but not eating them)


relief after hardship فرج بعد از شدت

urdu romance bagh o bahar باغ و بهار

(the considerably older) misogynous motif of the unfaithful wife
husband and sife being buried together

--> part and parcel of the **narrative stock** talented storytellers would exploit to construct their tales

intertextual references
•cannibal black men
•the one-eyed person whose one eye had been picked out by a bird (a well-known narrative from premodern arabic and persian tradition, a one-eyed character is taken as an ill omen, whereas here he figures as a friendly advisor and helper)
•
--> ***stock characters*** of premodern middle eastern literature

Marzolph --> concider texts as artful creations composed by a talented narrator =/= taking texts as the products of an anonymous popular “fold” tradition that would indiscriminately غيرمشخص lump together all kinds of material ==> belittling the creative act of a single individual

*intertextual allusions (to themes, motifs, concepts familiar to the audience) : a highly effective narative technique for linking new and unknown tales to a web of tradition the audience shares*

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

*~._

all the familiar landmarks of your thoughts that you find in somebody else's


عجایب نامه ajayeb (doing it here in europe): the exotic charm of another system of thought (~= its limitation)

[*]zoo: terrible grounds that the child [= us] enjoys = primal scene of conquest (of nation building, of state power) --carceral--> scene of sadistic pleasure, where bodies become “flesh” [<-- telegram is all of this]
(Hayward + Borges)

[*]child: a primal scene = the promise of the social, the human, and the future --> ***child is necessary for the ongoingness of colonialism*** [---> go to the children in The 100 TV series <-- *white child: an explorer of terrible grounds*]
•conscripted labor
•enslavement
•necropolitical economy
•
--elaborating-proliferating--> productive engines of empire

}--Hayward--> how might the effects of colonialism always find children enjoying terrible places?


the subtending (entgegensetzend) logic of the zoo

sadism: the trouble of enjoying terribleness

(Lacanian) imaginary --desires--> coherence (=/= fragmentation) ==generates==> a compromise : an idealization of the self as whole, between the unbearability of interiority and exteriority
*imaginary is unavoidable, the obligatory state of existence (for speaking subjects) ==constitutes==> real effects

•Borges --> imaginary --> a world in pieces (monstrous fragmentation), impossible world of ‘that’
•Lacan --> imaginary --> tentatively precariously constitutes a sense of self through alienation

(Hayward > Borgesian) ****zoo --constitutes--> a primal scene of colonial violence though which fantasy and imagination, dragons and unicorns, are articulated, organized, rendered as “elsewhere” =/=? ajayeb premodern


zoo
one of the most ancient institutions
transformed by the event horizon of modernity

(Fanon dramatizing) colonialization is animated by zoonomia as phantasy: “when the settler seeks to describe the native fully in exact terms he constantly refers to the bestiary”

*we = sadism's children*

how imaginary beings and *fantastic zoology* always carry a colonial logic

biological essentialism : a dangerous and reactionary basis upon which to build a politic

...racial and colonial violence of slavery

prison: anti-trans necropolitical institution
+ its abolition: a critique of anti-black legal/sovereign violence and for the radical potentiality of social tranformation
(=/= prison in Orange Is the New Black TV series)

[*]trans: an effect of white supremacist thinking that needs incoherent genders to make gender matter at all****
--Hayward--> when trans becomes ‘this’ (an effect of gender) then it can only serve regimes of power


[Hayward's (expected and a bit cliche)] transfigurations: (cascading provocations) suggesting questions without answering them, to break from an interpretive paradigm that demands solution-making over and against problem-generating


native
a zoological term

Derrida's blackness (skin color): unsovereign and stateless, criminal and beast

(promise of love -->) relinquishing the body to [*]flesh: pre-discoursive material, a zone of non-personhood, a state of anjection (<-- according to Hayward)
anatomo-political)

soma-politics of the body (of the racial-colonial category of the human)

carno-political question of flesh (under the regime of racial capitalism) --> human/animal divide
•animals in the afterlife of slavery are rendered as flesh (under the regime carno-political regimes of racial capitalist valuation) [<-- Hayward's misrecognition of contemporary society as “regime"]

genre of animal

Gossett + Hayward's argument --> the psychic life of zoophobia and zoophilia are tied up with negrophobia and negrophilia ~= species divides (human/animal) are technologies of race (human/black)


maroon: escaped cattle


typography: domain of style, of appearance, of aesthetic

glyph “*”
asterisk
a diminutive star
limb-y reach
a grasping
erring on the side of over-population, over-use, excessiveness
“*” can denote a database search or censorship
designate multiplication
a disclaimer
mark genetic identity
pseudonyms that have been changed
* --> *the star of life*

xenogenesis --> proliferating difference (genesis) built through pessimism (xeno)

Sun Ra (in Space is the Place ~= earth is “nowhere,” no longer a place [+ Octavia, Delany]) signaled the failed projects of planetary humanist and earthly liberalism, inviting blacks living in Oakland to leave the gratuitous violence of the world
afro-futurism is about the impossible, the unbearable, the failure of the world <--> afro-pessimism (blackness as loss, as nothingness)
(mode of imagination:) “anti-black racism ==> radical politics of abolition”
==> “being (white) is made possible thourgh and with black bodies cannibalized by a racial capitalism and its scientific jaws” [<-- Hayward's politically correct and simple fantasy about good and bad]

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

*body* --> sociohistorical construct & constrain
=/=
*embodiment* --> sense of being bodily (pain, ...) [<-- my focus has been on this one more than the other] --> **never embody ironically!** (<-- maybe irony is OK in visual or written medium?)
•embodiment goes beyond body (my body is still my body but also not)

•to pose
•to transpose

in my work, i transpose: walk through readings (=/= transform: performative “true” embodiment)
•transposition: a mapping of senses, to change something into another form (+ its foreclosures, refusals, limits) = expressive excitation, provocation of difference that cannot be resolved by penetration or collapsed selves =/= interpenetration

border crossing: forces and excitations of location, of neighborhood

sensation: a composite of affects and percepts

personal =/= individual

Hayward's story is shaped by repression : a wish to be seen as she wants to be seen =/= Sina

story: act of violence and deception

medicalized legacy of[...]