[...]others (machines, animals, and the environment).
-Haraway is going from ‘rage’ to ‘love’

“historically challenged people” (Schimpfwort? فحش)
half-trained arguments
embodied cross-species sociality

I am trying to inhabit ajayeb critically; neither in celebration nor condemnation (like my sister asked)
what is my context? isis, tech-sci, art, world-wars, stories, terror,
the figures of ajayeb that i am cultivating, do they “more fruitfully inform livable politics and ontologies in current life worlds”?
ajayeb's species bring together human and nonhuman, organic and technological, history and myth, freedom and structure, state and subject, ...

*concrete:
◦a concrescence (growth by assimilation, nemov moshtarek نمو مشترک) of prehensions (seizing, perception but not necessarily cognition) of prehensions (graspings, chang zadan چنگ زدن)
◦an actual occasion
=> beings do not preexist their relatings

the verb of reality is full of nouns with appendages

nature/culture: *local category abstractions* (=/= universal: misplaced concreteness)
subject/object: *potent consequences* (=/= preexisting foundations)

foundation is always contingent (Haraway > Butler)
•scale is contingent
•mutability is contingent

bestiary of agencies
kinds of relatings

in my work on ajayeb i am trying to carefully approach the notions of:
emergence, process, historicity, difference, specificity
-and by that teach myself an artful practice rich with:
co-habitation, co-constitution, contingency

on-the-ground work:
-Verran # Nigeria Yoruba --> “emergent ontologies,” “get on together” (...how can *general* knowledge be nurtured in postcolonial worlds committed to taking *difference* seriously?”)
-Thompson # Kenya --> “ontological choreographies” (...bodies, human and nonhuman, are taken apart and put together in processes)
-Strathern # Papua New Guinean --> “partial connections” (...patterns within which the players are neither wholes nor parts ... necessary counter-intuitive geometries and incongruent translations)

what kind of refigurations i need for the tropic work that feel is required for the for ontological choreography of ajayeb (in technoscience or elsewhere? other societies with liberal or non-liberal individual or state, with other techno-monsters, automated warriors, terrorists, and all the waste, cruelty, indifference, ignorance, and loss that comes with, as well as joy, play, labor, and invention--)?
-how do i narrate this (ajayeb and non-ajayeb, the wondrous and the mundane) co-history?
-how do i embody an art of relating (as is never done once and for all)?

*species : biological kind of reality + scientific expertise necessary to that kind of reality
(what would or could trouble ‘biological kind,’ ‘categories of organism’?)
{ machinic + textual + organic ~-=> species }--> causality-story, origin-story, Real-Presence-story (~transubstantiated signs of the flesh),
•species is about defining difference, rooted in polyvocal fugues of **doctrines of cause**
•one thinks of species as logical category, logical type, visual impression, members of a category that have the same characteristics. but you also say “be specific!” you want the opposite. you want a list of relentless particularities.
•(for Haraway species is about) a particular kind of semiotics where sign and flesh are tangled

Marx and Freud in shit and gold, primitive scat and civilized metal, in specie

[title]
**ajayeb's technologies of (Persian) subject/object-making**

nature and culture implode into one another (in the relentlessly historically specific ways)

(Haraway > Althusser) **interpellation** (estizah استیضاح) ==> concrete individuals (in the modern state)
*the ideologically loaded narratives ==> life and death, health and illness, longevity and extinction, etc.
{how not to do estizah (our objects, peers)? latent individualization in apass's requirement of ‘intentionality’ from its participants: “no sleep-walking!” [--> art as “explicit intentional act.” Merleau-Ponty's account the body-schema.] [estizah is the site of encounter with the ‘man of law’ in which one becomes a man of law: by asking what is your “name and business,” demanding “proof” of me. one way of responding to that demand of name is to give your name as a performance in an amerindian mode: “three were dead before they knew.” that's my name.] The material ritual practice of ‘recognition’ : “Who is there?” and “It's me!” of the everyday life ==> makes us concrete subject (in the ideology in democracy and law) --> independent agents with self-produced identities. (in capitalist societies) **subject: a self-conscious “responsible” agent whose actions can be explained by his or her beliefs and thoughts.** subject formation defines the limits of each individual; values, desires, and preferences. ---- in a way that I realize that a ‘hailing’ was addressed at me, thinking ‘that means me,’ and the answer is what transforms me into a subject : a “mis-recognition” [--> we can open a dossier on prophet and ‘answering’ the call]; [~-> what Tarof hails?] ---- for Althusser being aware of the other is a form of ideology. (how to recognize ourselves outside of ideology?)} (Foucauldian/Althusserian: passively defined by identity ==> mobilizing around these identities --?--> potential for resistance)
(Althusser's) police officer [محتسب mohtaseb?] --hails--> concrete subject
(Foucault's) expert discourses --hails--> sexuality
(Adorno's) mass media --hails--> passive consumer
(Gauntlett's) uncritical consumption --hails--> assumption --> bad worlding
(Mulvey's) cinema --hails--> male protagonist
(Butler's) boy/girl --hails--> gender identity
(Sina's) تعارف Tarof --hails--> divnity ??

***(crafted faithfully?) more potent the tropes, the truer the story***
(without being distracted by scandals and meta-stories?!)

stories traffic in tropes, figures of speech
(the dogmatic and bizzar idea of) “trope-free communication”

*metaplasm, remodeling, remolding,,, inverting meanings, transposing the body of communication,
(in my graphs, or rigs, what a substitution in a string might change the meaning?)

what is the “troping that makes a fleshly difference”?

origin story (~=> establishing origin) ~=> sober scientific report ~=> scales of intelligence ~=> human as master

the “mere” village dog:
-canine Eves surviving in their mitochondrial DNA
-canine Adam through his Y-chromosome legacies

which metaplasmic, remodeled versions of ‘name’ could give ajayeb's being

(in apass I have been against the “what do I want as an artist?” question:)
pay attention to significant otherness =/= reflection of one's intentions

what is the name of the game? complexity, flexibility, opportunism, (finite worlds called:) domestic, wild, feral,
[who is naming the world what?
•accelerationism: “game-over”
•capitalism: “resource”
•technophobia: “obsolescence”
•technophilia: “information”
•monotheism: “transition”
•science: “taxa”
•multinationalism: “system”
•modernism: “globe"]

immune systems (in natureculture) determine where organisms, including people, can live and with whom.

“There is no time or place at which genetics ends and environment begins” [...]
(Haraway > Gilbert)

“All stages of the life histories of evolving animals had to adapt to eager bacteria colonizing them inside and out.”
To be animal is to become-with bacteria


to inhabit an inter-subjective world, to love is about meeting the other in all the fleshly detail of a mortal relationship (to wit, first, somehow to learn what this other needs and desires)---permanent search for knowledge of the intimate other, with inevitable comic and tragic mistakes in that quest


thinking about animals as “other worlds” in a science fictional sense


scientifically informed, empirically grounded practice

theory ...still a limited discourse and a rough instrument

“who is at home?” --> ask in respect for all of time who and what are emerging in relationship --> (the obligation to ask) who are present and who are emergent? ***

(what are our) categorical labor
labor of training --> somehow all the partic[...]