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poetic historiography
(historiography: the study of the writing of history and of written histories)

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to begin writing about ajayeb with the citational, ‘avardeand ke...’ (...آورده‌اند که)
citation, an important characteristic of fables, is about relational histories.
absence of definitive source (in my old childhood favorite radio show, by bring an endless list of fantastic source and bodies of lures) allows monsters to flourish and me the full range of my passionate crafts. ajayeb's compelling mystery demands (from me) an unorthodox and omnivorous approach (hame-chiz-khar همه چیز خوار).

اما راویان اخبار و ناقلان آثار و طوطیان شکرشکن شیرین گفتار و خوشه چینان خرمن سخن دانی و صرافان سر بازار معانی و چابک سواران میدان دانش توسن خوش خرام سخن را بدینگونه به جولان در آورده اند که ...

•Mirabile dictu... (miraculous to say...)

towards Despret's talking parrots
parrots (shekar-shekan) (and philosophers) really like to control the exchange, to keep control of a conversation : their refusal to let another individual choose the topic of conversation
***(parrots have) a pragmatic rather than a referential conception of language
[am i also referential (=/= pragmatic) in my conception of language?]--> to teach a being to speak presupposes not only a tolerance of but also *a profound interest in misunderstanding* (this ‘profound interest in misunderstanding’ is precisely both cognitive and political aspect of what I am trying to bring forth) ~-> (how language-learning with animals can help us learn) restating and inverting the question of control

*exchange can only be achieved when there is “a continous reprisal of translations and betrayals of meaning”* ==> understanding itself is compromised
[*]ajayeb: a non-stop betrayal of translations (of perspectives) and continuous redressal of meanings (of things)

“as if” has to do with misunderstanding

“meanings are constructed in a constant movement of ‘attunement,’ which makes them emerge.”
(Despret, animal breeding practices)

(my work on ajayeb is also much about) *language-learning* [...]in its pragmatic function: it is an effective means of acting and of making others act


keep your end up


[*]type: identifying language use with modes of existence [Wittgenstein's mistake] (maybe useful to reanimate the question of ‘becoming’ for Marialena)
the mode of existence of lions is subordinated to that of an essence “lioness,” guaranteed by the identity of the species and the stability of its repertoire of behaviour ==> a burdensome conception of the naturalness of animals
***the question is not what ‘is’ a lion, but “how does one become a lion,” not only in lion community and species, but also in the work of scientists, constructing what it is to be a lion.
--> this is about becoming: of that of which the animal is rendered capable by the apparatuses that interrogate it

how can what I say about lions or baboons (or oceans or jinns) be authorized by them?


[*]we: constituted by the assemblage of different (animal-, nonhuman-, machine-, human-)beings equipped with an apparatus aimed at making them talk well --{by taking an interest in what constitutes the appropriateness of a material apparatus that transforms those it interrogates}--> fully agreeing to situate oneself in a regime of transformations and accomplishments =={that mingle with and give form to}==> *desires*
-researcher's desire is one the modes of their efficacity
-“our” problems are not a priori

a “we”:
+ “know full well”
+ “are different”
+ “who work”

rhetorics of pronouns, acts of crude generalizations: something is being specified and something generalized. [@Xiri's “I am the one who... your...” the specificity and generality of “I” and of “you” in her text. how the difference of “you” and “I” was envisaged in her poem?-->{I, the effected by =/= you, the haver} how can this I/you impose itself not as the effect of a strong-arm tactic? =/=? I want to find out how to live together; refuse to deepen the contrast between “us” and “them"] [in Xiri's poem: who/what makes her pronouns?] [to address people ‘as’ refugees, subjugated, poor, or victim, to recognize them by these identities, only repeats the process of exclusion(?) could be experienced as disabling.]


*/ generalization is constructed bit by bit

(that which constitutes) an expression of the parrot's opinion in relevance to what it is asked, the fact that it engages with, accepts and activly transforms what becomes a part of its world, translates an extension of this world and therefore an extension of its subjectivity as “parrot-with-human”


-when an animal escapes me, in fact it is making a form of the “judgement of relation” that animals make about humans


[*]anonymity: (a certain manners of presenting oneself,) that unquestioned condition of research that translates a certain type of relationship and a certain manner of defining those whom one addresses

I am against “feel free to say what you want” because it means actually what you say will have no consequences ==> (radical) asymmetry of expertises:
•researcher-author --> knows better
•social actor --> interchangeable holders of opinions


“scientist”: that who “knows better”
(if the fish cannot become a scientist, then I also don't want to --> let's change how one becomes a “fish” or a “scientist”)


(Laleh) could ask her subjects: “so, in your opinion, ‘as a child,’ how do you think I should construct my question so that it has a chance of being understood and of being interesting?”
•the question, that was my responsibility, that of difference, formulated in different ways
•“they” [your “subjects"] might unproot your question, displace it, modify its ambit (hoze حوزه), and when they find the right way of formulating it, they answer*

[*]asking ~= constructing interest ~=> (a chance of) interesting answers
•ask your subjects to construct interest
•the appropriateness of question
•problems are only interesting if they interest (?)
•(all) apparatuses create subjectivities


to attend to animal “paying attention” --> good translators of intentions
(how did I become interested in this?)


in farms, “talk is incessant. And because there is talk, there is talking back.”

talking back and forth --> exchange judgments about intentions --> adjusting the intentionalities (between human and animal; relevant also for Varinia's dog relation [--> ‘I know that you know what I intend to do']--)--> language as a mean for creating an overlapping awareness between two speakers (Despret, Hearne, Sennett) =/= language “populates” each of the beings present with perspectival propositions, which are so many propositions of intentionality:
•one makes say (@Sven)
•one makes ask
•one puts oneself ‘in’ the place of
•one doesn't interpret
•one experiments
•
--> these are perhaps non-immediate form of knowledge
--> these practices inscribe the animal and human in the world of “speaking” [@Marialena]
--> these are “perspectives” that “populate” our world

(each) [*]perspective is made up of translation of intentions*
(animal breeders are perspectivists)


situations of the exchange ~= situations of subjectivity --> adopting perspectives (--> <--) judge intentions }--> ‘response’

[*]intersubjectivity: accepting the proposal of subjectivity; becoming what the other suggests; acting in the manner in which the other addresses you [--> my apass bow and arrow, was about this suggestivity]

the apparatus of question (that you suggest,) activates some modes of existence rather than others

...shared perspectives, shared intelligences and intentions, resemblances, inversions and exchanges of properties (between humans and animals)

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my practice and work on ajayeb is grounded in the history and materiality of scientific practices

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(ajayeb's) particular and exceptional nature

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(Despret)

“anthropo-zoo-genetic” : a practice that constructs animals and human

(how can i design an apparatus for ajayeb) to perform availability?
(build) questions that construe and construct signs that ‘make a world’ for the animal (entity of the ajayeb)
-how can i offer possible interesting becoming to the animals of ajayeb, in offering a way for them to articulate the system, (not to make a system that articulates them)

(in experimenting with ajayeb) how can i involve my body, involve my knowledge, involve my responsibility, involve my future?
-how to let them adopt me?
-to produce an ajayeb body to allow a ajayeb world to affect me

the world of ajayeb is a richly articulated world =/= a world of enthusiastic automata (one who is only moved by itself) observing strange and mute creatures

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[Mersad al-ebad] tabaye-i طبایعی (materialist)


historical specificity(s) of animal-human relationship



(worst-)translated science

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[Haraway, Queering the non/human]

‘companion’ [she starts by showing the danger of the term like any other term]

reducing type is among other things at the heart of racism
types: colonised, enslaved, non-citizen, animal, refugee, [etc.], typological female reduced to her reproductive function,

secular semiotics (never nourished us?)

queering: the job of undoing ‘normal’ categories, [sorting operations]

...patterning, consequences, and the possibility of response.
queer, off-category, sf worlding
(what are the SF worldings of ajayeb?--SF as building alternative ontologies. finding absent but possible presents--whether presented as elsewheres or other times. “[...]an elsewhere from which different [...] articulations of naturecultures and alterity could be explored.”)

“The one who would be normal, in a category of his own” --> ends badly

(human scientist's) deadly one-way test: unable to recognize the presence of the trapped one --> (for him) no one is at home in the categorically Other


[Seed Bag]

...the problem of destruction and wounded flourishing--not simply survival--in exile, diaspora, abduction, and transportation--the earthly gift-burden of the descendents of slaves, refugees, immigrants, travelers, and of the indigenous too.

(In the feminist SF mode,) matter is never “mere” medium to the “informing” seed;

Homebody / traveler

...disruptive details of good stories that don't know how to finish

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[Barad]

[...] remembering is not a replay of a string of moments, but an enlivening and reconfiguring of past and future that is larger than any individual. [...] The past is never finished. It cannot be wrapped up like a package, or a scrapbook, or an acknowledgment; we never leave it and it never leaves us behind.

Barad's mother's question: “what good is there in offering recognition that can't be recognized?”

[...] there is only the ongoing practice of being open and *alive to each(other)* meeting

“How to disrupt patterns of thinking that see the past as finished and the future as not ours or only ours?”



*measurement
** the nature of nature depends on the apparatus that measure it
***--> which measurements are at use in ajayeb?
(what constitutes a measurement for what?)

the strangest idea: that we have access to cultural representations and their content (that we lack toward the things represented) (=/= “agential realist ontology” barad-posthumanist.pdf) [Foucault's “words and things” is the name of the game] [--> @Aela, perhaps we can begin with a different starting point, other than the old idea of “humanity's own captivity within language--the starting place of the metaphysics of representation,” perhaps it would be better to begin with a different metaphysics... -->{the term ‘metaphysics’ (far from being the deep origin of high philosophy) actually comes originally from (the writings of) Aristotle on physics, rearranged three centuries after his death by Andronicus of Rhodes}]

materiality itself is always already figured within a linguistic domain as its condition of possibility(?(!))
[ (?(!)) : a contingent question pregnant with wonder]
[my starting point in my lecture/performance is with the concern (warned by Nietzsche) that language is being granted too much power, tendency to take grammar too seriously : allowing linguistic structure to shape or determine our understanding {--> rigs}
believing that ‘subject’ + ‘predicate structure of language’ (~ grammatical categories) --reflects--> (a prior ontological reality of) substance and attribute (~ underlying structure of the world) (=/= *contingency *rhetoric);, --> still in the 16th century europe (pointed by Foucault) language was simply “one of the figurations of the world” =/= “language as medium"]

*performativity (the way i am understanding it using Barad's words) =/= the excessive power granted to language to determine what is real
-a contestation of the unexamined habits of mind that grant language and other forms of representation more power in determining our ontologies
-questions of correspondence between description and reality --> questions of ontology, materiality, and agency. (the things i am busy with in apass)
-(discursive dimensions include) questions of meaning, intelligibility, significance, identity formation, and power
% Austin's speech acts, relationships between saying and doing --> Derrida's poststructuralist amendments --> Butler (with Foucault's understanding of the productive effects of regulatory power) in theorizing the notion of identity performativity {@Xiri, we understand gender not as a thing or a set of free-floating attributes, not as an essence--but rather as a “doing”: “gender is itself a kind of becoming or activity ... gender ought not to be conceived as a noun or a substantial thing or a static cultural marker, but rather as an incessant and repeated action of some sort” --> with this regard what questions should Xiri ask her subjects?}

{ practice of representation =/= represented entity }--> this “=/=” is ontological ==> question of accuracy (of representation) --> scientific knowledge objectivity

focus on the nature & production of scientific knowledge (--> mediates our access to the material world) --(science-studies)--> dynamics of the actual practice of science }--> ongoing patterns of situated activity

-*origins of “appearance”*-
...with Democritus's atomic theory emerges the possibility of a gap between representation and presented. (the idea that something “appears”)
-Democritus:
•atomism (-->? cornerstone of modern science)
•democracy (-->? cornerstone of modern politics)
}--> the idea that the world is composed of individuals with separately attributable properties**** (==> Newtonian physics of independent objects, @Heike)

*Newtonian framework --> meaphysics of individualism
1- that the world is composed of individual objects with individually determinate boundaries and properties whose well-defined values can be represented by abstract universal concepts that have determinate meanings independent of the specifices of practice (--this is exactly what Marialena should be carefull about: abstract univerality of ‘language,’ and the independency of her ‘recorder’)
2- that measurement involves continuous determinable interactions such as the values of the properties obtained can properly be assigned to the premeasurement properties of objects separate from the agencies of observation

(*)concept: specific material arrangements, concepts are defined by the circumstances required for their measurement

(is Luisa's “wholesomeness” also about a feeling for inseparability?)


deployments of power <--> body--{bodies, functions, physiological processes, sensations, pleasures,}

matter is not an end product, rather an active factor in further materializations
(*** matter materializes ***)
matter's ongoing historicity

precise causal nature of productive practices ==> differential constitutions are marked


ajayeb: a host of material-discursive forces

*for ajayeb i need to rework notions of:
•discursive practices
•materialization
•agency
•causality
*without:
•resorting to the optics of transparency
•the geometric of absolute exteriority or interiority
•theorization of human as either pure cause or pure effect


*any entity's ontology (its cast identity) is always open for future's reworkings* (Barad)


adding a Greek fused syntactical molding to the individual, ‘trans-’ is not enough, we have to make the postulation of individuality unthinkable, and that needs work
{how to make things unthinkable? not available to think with. what should be an “unthinkable” theory of relations?}

(Descartes's epistemology --> representationalist structure of words, knowers, and things)--> transparency of measurement (transparency of language) =/= Bohr's epistemological framework (after his empirical findings of an inherent discontinuity in measurement ----%> wave-particle duality paradox) ~-> Barad's “causal relationship between specific exclusionary practices embodied as specific material configurations of the world [~= discursive practices, (con)figurations rather than “words"] and specific material phenomena [~= relations rather than “things"]”

(*)position (~ specific physical arguments, [=/= well-defined abstract concepts, inherit attribute of independently existing objects]---> go to critique of ‘positionality’)
“position” only has meaning when a rigid apparatus with fixed parts is used (for example a ruler is nailed to a fixed table in the laboratory ==> establishing a fixed frame of reference for specifying “position.”) --> any measurement of “position” using this apparatus cannot be attributed to some abstract independently existing “object” but rather is a property of the ‘phenomenon’ : ***the inseparability of “observed object” and “agencies of observation”***
--> simultaneous indeterminacy of “position” and “momentum” [*momentum*: material arrangement involving movable parts] [--> deconstructing the material exclusion of “position” and “momentum"]

(*)phenomena: primary epistemological unit, the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting “components” (Barad); ontologically primitive relations; relations without preexisting ‘relata’(~= mutual ontological dependencies =/= independent entities)
•(specific) intra-action ==> relata-within-phenomena
•(specific) agential intra-action ==> boundaries and properties of components of phenomena become determinate }~= phenomena
(*)apparatus = phenomena [=/= inscription devices, scientific instruments set in place before the action, machines that mediate the dialectic of resistance and accommodation, neutral probes of natural world, structures that deterministically impose some particular outcome,]
-apparatus: “dynamic (re)configurings of the world, specific agential practices/intra-actions/performances through which specific exclusionary boundaries are enacted”
(perpetually) open to:
•rearrangements
•rearticulations
•(and other) reworkings (--> [in my amazon project:] getting the instrumentation to work in a particular way for a particular purpose)

(boundaries are always ‘enacted,’ not ‘made’)

(*)reality: “things"-in-phenomena, ongoing ebb and flow of agency *****
-shifting boundaries and properties that stabilize and destabilize

(*)world: a dynamic process of intra-activity in the “ongoing reconfiguring of locally determinate causal structures” [~= contingency] with determinate boundaries, properties, meanings, and patterns of marks on bodies *****

(*)universe: agential intra-activity in its becoming

(*)word: material-discursive practices ==> boundaries are constituted (for example the differential constitution of “humans” and “nonhumans”; @Varinia)
==> meaning (=/= ideational, andisheyi اندیشه‌ای‌) --> specific material (re)configuring of the world

(*)discourse: that which constrains and enables what can be said, practices that define what counts as meaningful (statement)***
(learning from Foucault, discursive practices are the local sociohistorical [=/= transcendental, phenomenological, ideational] material conditions that enable and constrain disciplinary knowledge practices) *actual historically situated social conditions:
•speaking
•writing
•thinking
•calculating
•measuring
•filtering
•concentrating
•
--> statements + subjects emerge from a field of possibilities =/= statement as utterance of (originating) consciousness of a unified subject

(*)discursive practices: specific material (re)configurings of the world ==> local determinations of boundaries, properties, and meanings are differentially enacted

(*)meaning: ongoing performance of the world in its differential intelligibility (=/= a property of individual/groups of words)

**local causal structures --> one component {effect} is marked by another component {cause} (in their ‘differential articulation’ [~= intelligibility]) }--> in science this is called “measurement”

(question at Juan's work on clay:) (what could challenge?) the representationalism's construal of matter as a passive blank site awaiting the active inscription of culture (<~=> the relationship between materiality and discourse positioned as one absolute exteriority) ~~--> Butler's incomplete reworking of “causality” ==> her (anthropocentric, ensan ashrafe makhlughat انسان اشرف مخلوقات) theory of materiality is limited to an account of the materialization of human body --> the construction of the contours of the human body
(Butler: performativity understood as iterative citationality)
(intelligibility is not always a human-based affair)

(question of ‘agency’ and ‘causality’ at Sana and Hoda:) what possibilities exist (for agency) for intervening in the world of becoming?
@Hoda: there is no geometrical relation of absolute exteriority between (nor an idealistic collapse of) a “causal apparatus” and a “body effected” ----> ****an ongoing topological dynamics that enfolds the spacetime manifold upon itself**** <== apparatuses of bodily production are also part of the phenomena they produce
}--> **future is radically open at every turn** (Barad) [@Hoda --> her notion of overdetermination (جبر jabr?) --> what if she use “constraint” instead of “determinist”? esrar/ezterar ]--> enactment of a causal structure : particular possibilities for acting exist at every moment
-a term for Hoda: “causally deterministic power structures”

(*)agency: changes in the apparatuses of bodily production***
enactment of iterative changes to particular practices through the dynamics of intra-activity

(*)objectivity: being accountable to marks on bodies (=/= exteriority)
agential separability ==> objectivity
(Barad, Haraway, Kirby, Rouse, Bohr:) there is no such (“knower”) exterior observational point
@Laleh: we are not observers outside the world, not simply located at particular places ‘in’ the world (--> positionality)

(question at Aela:) the geometry of absolute interiority --> reduction of effect to its cause, nature ontologically distinct from culture
(that there is no preexistent nature)
(Aela's interest in?) spatiality: (characteristics of enclosures <-- concerned with shapes and sizes) ‘geometry’ =/= ‘topology’ (investigates questions of *connectivity* and *boundaries*)

***it is the very existence of ‘finitude’ that gets defined as ‘matter’

narcissistic bedtime stories... (positioning of materiality as either a given or a mere effect of human agency)

(*)matter: substance in its intra-active becoming
(*)performativity: iterative intra-activity

“I'm trying to complicate the locatability of human identity as a here and now, as an enclosed and finished product[/project]” ~ “perspective essentialism”
...nature performs itself differently
(Kirby)


[Barad:] **onto-epistem-ology**: the study of practices of knowing in being
“epistemology =/= ontology” is a reverberation of a metaphysics that assumes (inherent differences:) “human =/= nonhuman,” “subject =/= object,” “mind =/= body,” “matter =/= discourse”...

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what kind of alphabetico-numerical forefinger can i build that can press a schizophrenic partial systematizing of ajayeb?

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so much (in Iran's literature) still awaits reflection and comprehension (-without comprehensiveness please!)

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...archeology of dying in our civilization
(archeology of our dying civilization)

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Aristotle's narrative: c[...]