[...]ities 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 path” nor that of the meaning of the wall


artifactual: the situation where the being who is interrogated responds to a different question than the one the scientist poses to her

hypothesis of the existence of an artifact ==> the possibility of taking into account the fact that the animal would have a point of view on the situation


(to take measure of) what one's anxiety prompts (in the course of research):
•expanding the imagination
•paralyzing the imagination ==> injection of more control


sciences that mobilize the beings that respond to it

each experiment indicates not only the manner in which the animals generally experience the procedures --but--> the way in which each of the animals lives them as a function of the perception that it has of them, as a function of what it expects

(Despret affirming that) there is no *artifact* unless there is *generalization*

*the time of the experimental dispositive* is not the same since it is set within a provisional and short time (five days if testing, corresponding to the work week) while *the time of the farm* is a time of accumulated memories and experience
-the memory of the food eaten before
#Cinderella

it expects something else <== what one gives it is not the sole cause involved


animals certainly respond to a question, but it is not the one we pose to them
*the researchers compartmentalize the research; the animals to not stop prompting them to decompartmentalize it* ♥

(always) the artifact --constitutes--> the object of critique


animals do not judge an *abstract situation*, but a situation offered to them *as it is offered* to them

(Cinderella's) reciprocal habituation --> animal itself actively takes the questions and the presence of the researcher into consideration
to negate the condition of research --> exchange judgment and opinions (+ mutually affect one another)

why is ‘interest’ a bad motive, in this frame?
-because the animal must be interested in other things besides the human being, it must continue to live its life as a goat or a sheep --✕--> “the good animal: the animal responds to her observer”


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

Singh + Dave --> ordinary affects of killing (animal) --> anthropology of ethics =/= Agamben's killablity (linked with sovereignty): routinized emotionally indifferent production of bare life (capacity to decide which bodies can be killed, without the killing counting either as homicide or as a sacrifice)

normative moral claims

(Laidlaw, Foucault) ethical life: reflexive practice of freedom --humanistic-->
•traditions of virtuous conduct
•changing practices of self-fashioning
•affective dispositions: compassion, devotion
•(altruistic question of) how ought to one live?
=/=
what is the mode of a killing?
what is the mood accompanying that killing?
+ ethical repercussions (if any) there of, even of they are not prescribed or proscribed in state or in customary law


*to write nonmorally about [*]ethics: a mode of relatedness, even if the relation is as ephemeral as a mood that may escape measure or description, lying somewhere between mourning and indifference
[=/= to have an a priori moral code based on which we might justify (or predict ahead) our emotional responses to particular killing ~= what constitutes a good life or death]

(mourning =/= indifference)

concept + reality of animals + anthropology of India

everyday affects (while witnessing or executing the death of animals)
doubts and pleasures
cruelties and indifferences
chicken shops
decimated forests of central India


moods:
•ambivalence
•cruelty and pleasure
•senses of devastation

modes and moods of specific commercial and ritual occurrences (in Tehran)

--> ***how does (and does not) killability shade into vitality?***

what does it mean for animals to be alive in a severely depleted habitat?

(what it means to be alive in contemporary Tehran?)

profane: a routine, ritual, process that does not in itself invoke a sacred purpose or value

-how would we measure the distance between the poles of the profane and sacred in terms of the mood and intention surrounding the ritual of killing?
-what is the mood sounding the sacrificial death? (veneration?)

animal sacrifice has a long history in textual and oral forms of Hinduism (as do arguments against it)

آرامش قصاب
butcher's easy hospitality
slow time of sadism

#story
tribe of bonded laborer decide not to sacrifice animals. “what is the use of someone's untimely death causing another?” (and because goats are expensive nowadays). one summer all the brothers get together and call the deity. he possessed my father's brother's son. we said: “baba, we won't give you a goat. eat us if you must.” the spirit began to get angry. he said if i accept this for you, then others will do the same. (after negotiation) he accepted only from one person and not others. the issue is still unresolved.

religiously infused conscience
banality of secular cruelty
long-standing intimacy between violence and the sacred

#story
Nitin is jinn and no jinn wants to marry their daughter to someone who sells chicken for a living. Nitin has debilitating nightmares about dying chickens.
•poultry industry
•cage-free farming


(there is no “irreducible” ontological gap, disjuncture of temporality, ontological untranslatability, between:)
time of history/capital ~= time of the gods/ritual

both ritual and capital --involve--> exchange relations ==> unpredictable forms of movement (across domains)

•(show of being halal) recitation of kalma with the first bird and the last, assuming comprehensive coverage for the ones who fall between
•Skylard slaughterhouse building hospitals and temples
--> emotional, ritual, commercial traffic across sacred and profane

consumption of neighboring species


*cruelty as play*
(a less cultivated form of pleaser?)

deadended bird
ceased-but-not-killed mouse
not dead, not killed, but not quite a being either

the power to turn animals into things, as of they were never anything else

recognition of playful actually --Singh--> ethics of immanent obligation

([*]collaboration: interrupt each other's train of thought)


(dramatization of) agonistic intimacy : a relationship of proximity and violence between neighboring social groups (the body of neighboring species)
--Taussig--> ritual violence (the most stunning prop is the human: the all too profane body with its various appendages, fluids, undulating surfaces, folds, exists, entrances)
--Veena--> sacrificial violence : dramatization of one's own inevitable death (there is a certain anxiety around violence that is integral to *the imagination of an ethical life* in Hindu texts and practices)
--Sina--> gamer video of zoo

condition of viscerality
a condition of being ransomed to death

Venna --> a major theological transformation (a critique of violence) in a nonmessianic nonsoteriological sense رستگاری شناختی in South Asia took place with the Mahabharata

*cruelty =/= violence*

•the feeling of noncruilty expressed in the unpredictable attachments, at times across species (companionship) in the Mahabharata (Veena) [in Attar? in Kelile and Demne?]
•companionable thinking (Cavell)
•commission species (Haraway)
--✕--> Singh's agonistic intimacy:
1. companionship may also involve forms of mutual violence
2. violence inevitability (in affinity or animus) does not remove a consideration of the mode of violence from the sphere of the ethical --> we must make space for the consideration of:
◦cruelty
◦differential vulnerability
3. certain forms of companionable noncruilty may also breed accompanying forms of cruelty
4. within conditions of death and cruelty *it is not always clear what noncruilty might be*


a bird cursing (presently taking root that will someday come to fruition) a human who is stubbornly injuring when need not, or تو نیکی می‌کن و در دجله انداز
(myth) asks us to think about cycles of violence
how an act never exists in isolation
chaos theory, the effect might come later

informal epic subplots narrated in improvised forms


which ritual laments are available for massive ecological shifts
...the death of others
...scene of loss (~/= milieu)
}<--Singh-- virtue, piety, self-fashioning do not help to work through this (@apass)


devastation ==> cohabitation (of species that were apart before)


Kelile and Demne --> agonistics can be comic (even if repercussions of tragic) --> mood of violence


“everything has to die”
question of routinized ritual or commercial production of killable bodies and of things ceasing to matter

animals don't die in villages, they could only be killed

anthropology of ethics
what is to kill?
what is to kill well?
what is to ber killed?
what is to be killable?

can we speak of a quality of death?

(Veena, Cavell, Harraway's) ‘companion’ is not a resolution to ethical quandaries of human-animal relations


culpability of homicide <--> veneration of sacrifice

life =/= zoo =/= bios

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

retro: (a postmodern sensibility firmly rooted in the present) appropriating [use + exploit, pick + mix] the aesthetics (aspects) of the past while not longing for its return =/= nostalgia: a mode of resistance against the present

retro: a mode of reading, an attitude towards the past without emotional attachment

ironic consumption...


... =/= how adults might perceive the political context

dissident discourse
(audience looking for) counter regime messages

*nostalgia + nationalism within a postcolonial Europe*
Europe's repressed imperial history --> longing for the divided Europe of the Cold War --> postsocialist nostalgia (in television [--> cultural memory])

past: retro comedy

comedy: retrospective representation

(comedy does not?) antagonize its audience ~= build a memory conflict
[*]comedy: strive for reconciliation (by focusing on the everyday life of its colorful characters)

the good soldier Svejk --> good-natured side of czech national identity

self-congratulatory narrative <-- (when you think you are always) morally on the right side
@apass

(tv series) forging resistance-based (national or individual) memory


the way in which a society understands its own past --> through culture (not a matter for politicians and legislative measures alone) that particular narratives about the past are kept alive and help to structure understandings of the present

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

strolling: walking in the city --> sense of belonging to the city
walking in 19th century (starting with England) --> something for the lower class
--later--> walking became a middle class pursuit (something you do in your garden ==> parks for walking)
city walking --> claiming step by step parts of the city --> practice of belonging [~ sense of place (in history = nationalism) of certainty + comfort] --> belonging is an individual imperative (something that is created by the individual on the ground) [~/=? a category of exclusion]

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

anger: an expression by which the observer perceives as if something *happened to the person who is angry* (a passive experience, not something that the person did)

intuition = recognition

•memory is really bad at remembering lists
•memory is really good at remembering routes through space
•(humans are good at remembering) agent-thinking =/= abstract notions


*anger ==reveals==> world*

anger ==> makes you ungly ==> prompts action
[the strange connection of: action <--> ugliness]

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

postsocialist nostalgia: relational expression of a heterogeneous set of desires that operate in an intercultural network

Imre

western European longing for the divided Europe of the Cold War --> Europe’s repressed imperial history


two different modes of remembering:
•history --> official, public and professional modes (associated with commemoration and musealization)
•memory --> unofficial, popular and private modes (frequently associated with nostalgia and consumerism)

literary and cinematic texts that foreground some form of preoccupation with the past


-television (amnesiac qualities) has been accused of undermining memory and perpetuating a sense of ephemerality and transience --✕--> *television is also a powerful mnemonic tool*

***television is both amnesiac & mnemonic*** --> tv's propensity to resonate in different temporalities at once

television: a vehicle for the transformation of and a source of information about the quotidian ~ primary generator of collective memory [<-- this is now social media, Instagram TikTok]

historical drama
pseudo documentary
period drama series
--> providing the viewers with a “useable past” that is always related to and relevant to the concerns of the present


in the postsocialist region, the past has especially sensitive nerve endings in the present

national regimes & individual citizens alike have tried to revive usable paradigms of identity from past periods (to clear away or at least cover up the historical debris left behind)

television as a massive archaeological site

polymorphic, undefinable identity with tentacles in several fields that makes television (and popular internet media) so confusing

(to understand who has stakes) in keeping history and memory practices separate and in minimizing the role of television and other popular media


(internet popular media) television's messy status as a medium

communist parties --> mould television to standardize citizens's everyday domestic life rhythms
•cheerleading docufictions
•educational quiz shows
•uplifting entertainment such as theatrical broadcasts of Russian and European classics
•doctored news
•limited advertising
•domestically produced dramatic series focused firmly on the romanticized historical past

{projective ideals =/= actual experiential realities of socialism}==> layer of ironic distance between [media (television) and its viewers]

(1990s following the Soviet empire's disintegration -->) ironic overidentification ==> nostalgia
--Imre--> evasion of television allows for nostalgia to be misframed and misappropriated as a sentiment that marks the end of socialism [temporally and clearly demarcates backward-looking postsocialist populations from forward-looking (Western) observers]
----> takes into account television's (and internet social media) relevance to collective memory

post-X nostalgia: a near-visceral yearning for the false sense of safety derived from the memory of X (fetishistically attached to public personas or consumer products of the past)


nostalgia: an interpretive framework }<-- **sense of intimate sociality disrupted by the collapse of a centralized system of governance and the influx of globalization**

nostalgia is a discourse (that is not specific to Eastern Europe) populations disappointed with and unequipped to deal with the advent of market democracy


there are more than one way of (content of) longing

television: a medium whose chief mode of operation is in reruns, recombinations, circulating formats and generic adaptations that constantly interweave national, regional and global scales ~= digital social media

(Imre > Boyer) to trace nostalgia back to the intellectual origins of European cultural nationalisms

...diverse and contradictory sentiments that make us see European cultures conjoined in mutual relationships of dependence, rather than separation

(Imre -->) *nostalgia as something by definition national at its core*

nostalgia --foreground--> coexistence of different temporalities in the present

postsocialist nostalgia in Romania is similar in structure to late socialist nostalgia of the 1980s in Hungary

manage feelings of dislocation ==> longing for national homes
~~--> preference for literature and high art as expressions of what has been identified as cultural nationalism (“national tradition = tradition invested in high art”) + perceived illegitimacy of popular cultural production and consumption (concealed by the allegedly rebellious “dissident” status of intellectuals) ==organize==> the contents of collective memory


Imre --> racialized underpinnings of allegedly “pure” aesthetic judgments


inherently nostalgic and pre-modern postsocialist population <==> Western Europe as the epicentre of progressive scientific modernity


television's capacity for personalization and narrativization

*demiworld of popular culture*
television’s dominant position within the domestic environment and its special appeal to an emotionally available female or feminine consumer --> television: the mass medium of the socialist period --pose--> the danger of a passive mindless consumption of formulaic narratives (a danger that has been ascribed to women’s inferior psychosocial needs and tastes =/= cerebral modernist masculinity of art) ---> go to Baxstrom's realizing the witch


Western European cultural nationalisms

the notion of nostalgic and premodern postsocialist population ==> Western Europe as the epicentre of progressive scientific modernity


West’s fanning of East European nostalgia --> a post-imperial symptom = (expression of a growing Western European awareness that) modernity is plurinodal rather than centred in European metropolitan headquarters


(postimperial European dimension of) *cultural nationalism <~÷+-> nostalgia*
...utopian national rebirth scenarios for a united Germany --> (promoted by intellectual artists) the bad idea that suppression of German nationalism ==open==> influx of American audio-visual culture (that muat be resisted in order to preserve and nourish German culture in its purest literary manifestation)
= logocentric return to the ethos of German Romanticism [Kulturnation --> certain cultural identity --> cliche-ridden elitist racist implications] + new nationalism =/= results of Western integration over the last forty years


aspirational narrative (of nation...)

postimperial power dynamic:
•western researcher --> has the political capital to afford studying popular media
•eastern researcher --> has to faithfully fulfill the role to represent their national culture (elite achievement)


(Bourdon >Imre) the most obvious European commonality --> **a focus on high culture**


national specificities of memory systems developed around television


nostalgia machine
•Putin --> TV programming to a literary Soviet heritage
•Hungarian FIDESZ --> children’s channel of socialist children’s programmes
•showcase oeuvre of popular performers from the past
•rerunning vintage highbrow content: old films, television series and documentaries
•popular music's capacity to call up depoliticized affective memories
•commercials (--trigger--> postsocialist nostalgia)
•
}--> depoliticized reminiscences ==> an image of (socialist) sociality as a natural connecting glue among citizens gathered around the warm glow of their favourite singers and cabaret actors

FIDESZ = alarming racism + anti-Semitism + drastic neoliberal economic restructuring --> television = interfaces of official state nationalism + commercial purposes of a nostalgia industry


(ghost of dictators in) humorous commercial context:
•Tito in post-Yugoslav republic commercials (as anti-capitalist and anti-commercialist hero)
•Ceausescu in commercials in Romania (old footage of him walking his dog in car tires ads)
•
}--Imre--> (blending) *top-down history lessons* + the work of *popular memory* ==> punctuate contemporary continuities with the communist regime that are taboo in official narratives but prevalent in popular perceptions of history
(==Georgescu==> counter-memory <-- does it assist coming to terms with the past, processing the paralyzing past and the humiliating present of globalization coupled with reactionary state control)

socialist advertising (--> promoted products and services that had not competition in the absence of a real market) ==now==> a sense of awkwardness (absurdity of an era) --> an oxymoron ==> (the ads’) appeal ==guarantee==> the authenticity of remembering + mutual recognition (among members of the nostalgic community) ----> *longing for a bond specific to an elusive era*


(for late socialism --Imre-->) [*]nostalgia: a popular and essential compensatory gesture to make up for the loss of a contradictory temporality
+
a mode of continuity with an era that was already nostalgic for the unrealized transformative potential (of real socialism)


(Yurchak's) *frozen present* = the time of nostalgia
}<== late socialist culture itself lived in a nostalgic mode, at a certain ironic, knowing distance from what it was supposed to be according to the memories of the heroic 40s-50s and the remnants of socialist propagand[...]