[...]the most binding part of the communal rhythm

appearance ~= metonymic
appearance allows her to emerge situationally as a woman, a gendered neighbor, a historical subject


(being under the influence of the moon:) enfleshing elements of your (celestial) environment within yourself and expressing parts of yourself back into the (terrestrial social) environment


identification: “i am like you = i know you” ==> resolve the divide of difference

(let's not make that kind of garden again -->) inclusion in Adam's nameable Eden of belonging (=/= Cinderella's transbestiary)

cross-species rejoiners
mended spiderwebs


error is (still a kind of) expression


human: composites of zoo-intensities, animated movements, bio-differentials


(i always felt like this) my perceptions are refracted through psychic forces
anxious
uncertain
paranoid
“is everyone staring at the morphing ‘it’ that is me”


(understanding of art in contemporary european performance -->) art = intensifying bodily substance, to resonate otherwise, to feel different corpo(realities) through zones of transition and intervention, provocation = responses to our *capacities to resonate*


...medicalization, recognition, subjectification, instrumentalization, and responsiveness being with animals

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

what does the maze mean for the rat?
what a maze can mean?

experimental psychology --> subjects conform most often to the expectations of their experimenters [--Despret--> they are *artifactual*]
-*the scientists think that the subject respond to the question that is posed to them, but the subject in fact respond to another question* -->{question that is addressed to them = protocol to which they are submitted}--> they can take a position in relation to what is proposed to them in scientific research [=/= Cinderella's mice subject]

the idea that (the assumption that) their subjects could be influenced by what the scientist was looking for ==> the experimenters tried most often to camouflage the real questions guiding their research
-the assumption that the subjects do not do what they do because the experimenter asked then to do so, but for more abstract and more general reasons ==> “ecological validity”
-*the subjects most of the time not only predict what the experimenter expects of them but they comform to it*
-[they responded to] the way in which they interpreted that which was expected of them (<-- just because they are nice people.) “when the subjects were asked why they did all this [absurd tedious repetitive] work without objecting and without posing other questions, they responded that they had thought that is was a test of endurance. and they obeyed because a scientist asked then to”

difference between hypnotized subjects and “normal” experimental subjects

*the lure utilized to mask the expectations* (in psychology, far from resolving the problem)

organization of the research --> scientist distributes expertise in a very asymmetrical manner


what a maze can mean? --Despret--> **translating what happens to rats in terms of meaning**
(drawing on Uexküll's theory of Umwelt) --> open up for the animal the question of point of view

a concrete or lived Umwelt ==> the animal endowed with sensory organs different from our own, cannot perceive the same world as we do

{**perception: an act of creation =/= a form of reception**}--> the animal **fills its environment with perceptual objects**, it constructs its environment by *peopling* it with perceptual objects (=/= perceive passively)
*the activity of perception = an activity that confers meaning* = only that which has meaning is perceived, only that which can be perceived (~= is important of the organism) is *accorded a meaning* (~= accordance)
•butterfly lives in a world of luminous intensities and of odors
•tick lives in a world of butyric acid released by the sebaceous follicles of mammals
•spider lives in a world of...
•rat lives in a world of...
•

for a spider?
for a rat?
time, space, place, path, way, house, odor, enemy,,, --> each event (in the perceived world) “signified” which is not perceived except in that it signifies ==> ***animal = subject = a “lender” of meaning***

[*]subject: that which accords meaning

the object is constituted in action (the animal never enters into a relation with an object as such) --> meaning does not emerge from the object = objects are not alone in having meaning accorded to them

Umwelt: an environment of relations

no animal can be neutral of another (in the environment) <--if-- it can be seen to be accorded a meaning

***strange lures ==make=possible==> types of research***

Cinderella to the mice : alluring producer of sociality (lure: enticement for meaning) <== *lures are frequently required in order to convey the meanings of an animal*

a human can take on the meaning of *socius* (comrade, friend, ally)
a human can learn what a socius means in the like of a jackdaw (to be taken for a material socius)
--> ‘associating with' = carry out various activities together

you want to be taken by somebody from another species for a material socius (that is also why people have pets) =/= pray


meanings are not fixed once and for all, flowing from elementary needs of the organism: meanings are flexible, can apply to other beings, extend to unforseen situations, change, and even invent and create new relational uses (<-- this is what i experience in translational working with meanings in farsi literate in my lectures)


(Cinderella asking) when observing rats, what can produce the activity of translating their behaviors in terms of meanings?


one confuses the term “examine” with that of “neutralize” --> (Watson, scientist) removed the rat's eyes, olfactory bulb, and whikers, which are essential to the sense of touch in rats, before throwing it into the exploration of the maze...
--Despret--> if the world had probably lost all meaning for this de-sensed rat, the rat itself had lost all meaning for its experimenter (if it ever had one for him)
-this is the goal of the procedure: search out the lowest common denominator, the left-over, the automation, the behavior that from one species to another will render all organisms commensurable تناسب پذير [<-- no!!!!]

the tacit assumption that an animal could ever enter into a relationship with an object is false <--Uexküll-- (to have in mind) to study the most different kinds of animals in their relations to a maze


her attic, Cinderella in the universe of meanings

an epistemological problem --> it is not straightforward to enter into the subjective universe of an animal in interrogating it through an experimental dispositive thought up by a human

[dispositif: referring to machines and devices. as philosophical concept that has been drawn upon by Deleuze, Foucault, Althusser, Agamben, and many others, has been rendered as “apparatus”, social apparatus]

maze --> what this particular experimental dispositive can mean for a rat? how can this *traversing* come to be, from the point of view of the rat (Uexküll calls “familiar path”)? how rats in pretending to respond to the questions of the behaviorists respond in fact to another question?
-behaviorist's question: what is the abstract relation of a being, whatever it may be (that which the behaviorists call an organism) to a natural object?

why do rats always touch the walls as they go along them? --Cinderella-->
•they are haptophiles, they like to touch
•they inscribe the course of their route in their bodies in the form of lines, curves, and turns, or even roughness, textures, sensations of cold or humidity
•letting itself be marked by the space
--Despret--> what do we know about what the body of a rat can sense?

***(from) the why of caused --to--> entering into the regime of meanings***

the rat does not respond to the question of learning, he responds to the question of *an architecture that constitute the world for him*

(how?) the “animal's own world” can (with difficulty) include the human observer as an observer

...the maze can authorize neither the question of the “familiar [...]