[...] 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 participants of training are remodeled by it
labor of scale-making
(these are world-making practices, storytellings)

significant otherness-in-connection =/= intention-ascribing idioms of literalist anthropomorphism that sees furry humans in animal bodies and measures their worth in scales of similarity to the rights-bearing, humanist subjects of Western philosophy and political theory ==> assign privileges or guardianship (in place of ownership) in a modernist great chain of being

*action: beautiful, hard, specific, personal;
=/= abstract scales

differential sensibility =?=> situated emergence =?=> more livable worlds ~ ontological choreography

category of “rights” don't just exist (preformed to be uncovered,) rather we enter into a rights relationship with an other (animal or human)--> Hearne's “reciprocal possession”
-morality is a species-specific capacity
~ if i have X, my X has a human (which is me)


off-leash and cliff-enclosed @Varinia


(Haraway:) time-space scales co-constituted by human, animal, and inanimate agencies
1. evolutionary time (at the level of the planet earth) --> naturalcultural species
2. face-to-face time (at the scale of individual lifetimes) --> mortal bodies
3. historical time (at the scale of decades, populations, nations)

to tell (detailed love and training) stories at these levels

this is about distributed agencies in “layers of locals and globals,”

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

my interests lies really with the ecological cosmologies in my neighborhood (iran, old, middle east, far east, past, present,)
that is why i was interested in the birds of Attar, pig of san'an, wolf of the pigs, crow of the partridge, and so on.
so things take positions in our bigger semiotic material world, there is never just a life animal on the plate, the chicken has become killable first through linguistic interpretive representation network of semiotic relations. so my question in the birds performance was that how the excess of meaning is related in actuality to the removal of corporeality in Attar's non-birdness Simurgh (سیمرغ) till the chicken in khoresh-e morgh (خورشت مرغ).

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

[Scott Gilbert]

(all organic beings have been formed on two general laws, according to Darwin:)
(1) unity of type and (2) conditions of existence --> inorganic? fire?
natural selection --> adaptation --> conditions of existence
embryonic homologies --> unity of type
==> “descent with modification” (or decent modifications)
[(embryology =/=) ‘fire’ could transform matters, “change” their class, their type and its unity --> “parvaneh sho!” (پروانه شو) Rumi مولوی wants embryology undermined?]

construct phylogenies
(phylogeny : branching out evolutionarily)


‘Haeckel claimed that Darwin's ideas included the progressive development of species. “Development and progress” was what characterized evolution. The explicit association of evolution with particular political, religious, and racial views became the hallmark of Haeckel's career. Haeckel proposed a causal parallelism between the embryological development and phylogeny. His “Biogenetic Law” that “Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny” was based on the idea that the successive (and to him, progressive) origin of new species was based on the same laws as the successive and progressive origin of new embryonic structures. Just as the earlier stages of human development developed into the later stages, so earlier species evolved into the later ones. Natural selection would eventually get rid of the earlier species. (In the Welträtsel, Haeckel [1899] would also proclaim that the more evolved humans [i.e., the Aryans] would out-compete and eliminate the more primitive races.) To Haeckel, the evolution of the animal kingdom was the same as individual development not only because the laws behind each were the same but also because the entire animal kingdom was an individual. Here, he was harking back to the views of the Naturphilosophen of the previous century. In other words, the development of advanced species was seen to pass through stages represented by adult organisms of more primitive species.’ (The morphogenesis of evolutionary developmental biology)

inter-cellular digestion
•the evolution of new features was based on changes in developmental stages, not in adult astages (--> that's why the developmental stage is so important, because mutations happen --> work with children)

Ontogeny or morphogenesis: organism's developmental lifespan
Phylogeny: evolutionary historical heritable traits

ontogeny ==> phylogeny
“ontogeny does not recapitulate phylogeny: it creates it” (Garstang, 1922; p. 724)


evolution was not so much a branched chain as a ladder

molecular systematics

evo-devo (evolutionary developmental biology)

each discipline has:
-its own rules of evidence
-its own professors
-its own journals
-its own vocabulary


small genetic changes was not sufficient to generate evolutionary novel structures such as teeth, feathers, cnidocysts or mollusk shells (Goldschmidt, 1940) (--> lizards had birdness in it --> potentiality)

(new species originate as) ***hopeful monsters***
that result from mutations in developmentally important loci (-macromutations)

Goldschmidt: the gene wasn't a locus or an allele. Rather, it was a unit of development

“to convince evolutionists that evolution is not only a statistical genetical problem but also one of the developmental potentialities of organism”

(Waddington 1953 claimed:) ...in conventional studies of evolution, the animal is considered either as genotype (and studied by geneticists) or as phenotype [Erscheingungsbild ] (and is studied by taxonomists)<[...]