[...]
*animality: sensuous materialities, composites of affects and percepts, specificities but remain thresholds of emergence, individuation that prompt sensuous intra- and interchange ==> provocations
(Weaver, Kelley, Weinstein, Hayward, Kier, Franklin:) animal difference announces a radically singular Other marked by sexual differences
“trans-infused apprehensions and engagements with the expansive world of possibility opened up by non-anthropocentric perspectives.”
trans* + animal --> (alternative ways of envisioning) futures of:
•embodiment
•aesthetics
•biopolitics
•climates
•ethics
we have to negotiate the [contaminated concept of] human --(to deal with)--> the persistence of humanism in structures of thought
critical animal studies has(?) the transformative power to interrupt humanism and its sexually differentiated legacy by challenging the boundaries between, and existence of, differentiated, essential kinds.
robust, nondualistic theories of human/animal
Critical Life Studies
•*species panic* (<-- the concept of the homosexual panic defense) {androids: species + trans embodiment}--> **genuine animals** transitivity: “shifting positions on a series of spectrums, where human, animal, and machine bleed into one another” [Huebert]--{"it”: exclusive right of gendered pronouns--"it” ascribed to artificial animals and androids --> the distinction between “genuine” and “inauthentic”; “it” leaves us in a perpetual species panic}
•*animal symbolic* --> origin of the construction of the human located in sexual difference [Nurka]
it seems with ‘human’ one always spring inexorably back to sex --> sexual difference and its origins in the problematic of difference
-individuating difference ==>? prepositional singularities--the potentialities to differ that are not yet stabilized into the categories of an individual
[Nurka > Colebrook] concept of “transitive indifference” transforms the self/other pairing beyond the demands of recognition and relation --> (all-too-often) animal difference serves to secure human sameness [=/= ouroboros abyssal beastliness] --> ontological difference serves only to erect man as the being for whom “the world is nothing more than the arena whereby he recognizes his proper difference,”
•*animal techne* ~~--> Jackass & Wildboyz : animality is viscerally, painfully, and transformatively encountered or enacted by the human body [Seymour], sliding down the animacy hierarchy [Chen], gesturing toward various interconnected trans-(species) corporalities performed in (Critical Life Studies texts and) Wildboyz (=/= elite status of human) --> (Barad's) ethics of mattering : connections of human and nonhuman life always already taking place on bodies*****
transdisciplinarity: a self-adaptive complexity [...] foreground[ing] the transduction of knowledge as it passes across and between the interpretive and methodological planes of composing knowledge. (Katie King)
“distributed being and cognition”
...attendant mammalian attachment
individuating indifference
(anthropocene's iteration of the) expansionist logic of manifest destiny
-situated knowledges (Haraway)
-trans-knowledges (Hayward)
[*]trans- : *promise of moving across without holding tightly to the locations that it is moving from*, crossing of spacetime, a movement within relationship [~/=? inheritance, the experience of being tied to a long string that is stretching and is connected to somewhere]
coalitional thinking = trans-knowledge --Hayward--> (~= my work: heuristic + trans-) a thought here, then a reflection, perhaps a question that prompts another story, and probably a walk full of pointing and talking, walking on scales [on burdens and atrocities of abundance] (--> I use:) translation, transfiguration, transformation, trans-differentiation, transcription
-what happens to knowing when it is crossing, trans- materializes that process of movements, *marks the where-ness of with-ness*
my stories of getting to know one another and recognizing affinities in apass
environmental injustices always play themselves on bodies of knowledges and histories as well
-how does my lectures, a heuristic way of knowing through trans-, could or should “provide insights” into injustices and inequalities?
-how i have, as an iranian or foreigner, differently marked body and history entry points into understanding and acting on problems?
neritic
oceanic
benthic
minute biota
micro-viruses, bacteria, and endless cycles of decay and regeneration
...the water formed nearly three billion years ago
pulsing temporalities...
(you and things are) surprise =/= accident
dispossessions. dislocations. disease. greed. racism.
the always-limited, limiting promise of prosperity
[*]racism: an environmental catastrophe, toxic by-product of the industry called racial thinking and un-thinking (the fantasy attached to what race is thought to be), a deadly ambivalence or refusal to see how race is at work in our lives
-humanness not yet available to all humans
[*]posthumanism (and its tools of “becoming animal” as effects of power writing about itself): privilege of having been human --> a racing, sexing, and classing ethos that cannot see itself as such
= a pretense of not already understanding humanness as a trans-, re-, and decomposing
(Hayward asking:) how can we talk about posthumanism (in 2014) *it is not that we have made humanness a more available category in sixty years, but that those whose humanness was already certain (say, white, able-bodied, men) are in the luxurious position of sloughing off their humanity* (-fuck!)
}=/= trans-differentiations, de-composings[~ marks the loss of composure, of control ==> exposes the composite shape of life. to de-compose is the promise we must keep -Hayward]
racialization of ecological crises (?)
(pollutions felt by who? -the poor, the birds,)
the old tradition of seeing yourself that unwelcomed alienated guest on the earth (آمدنم بهر چه بود)
planetary accountability
(@artists, when and how you are) moved to a closer look**
horrified, disgusted, and drawn in
Hayward: what would an ardently materialist eco-critical race politics look like?
[=/= toward materiality: bumptious liveliness of matter ==> to deracinate life, to depoliticize worldliness]
to host a guest: an ethics of care, a willingness to remain open to a guest without anticipation or expectation
(hospital =) alter the equation of hostile to hostel. Is this what is meant by hospitality?
Leo's angry and productive underbelly
Leo's take on honesty: real and raw
(gardens are full of) grotesqueness and splendor, death and life, delicacy and treachery, softness and sting
transgenerational
regenerations
liminal: a threshold without a value, a doorway without assurance
that false divide between life and death (somebody animating it)
(Eszter's lace-like interiors)
loss ==shapes==> our relationship to the living (@Jassem)
(*ambivalence of loss and remembering* in the) melancholic calculus of the archive: “what is lost can become what is preserved as part of the self”
-as an environment sickens and dies we harbor the loss
(hope =/= salvation)
...learning a new grammar of animacy (with Hayward)
“[...]memories of excess and delight, freaks, fright, and exploitations. Too much sugar. Surprise. And disappointment. Larger than life. Grotesque. Alluring. Captivating. Calling. Their juxtaposition in this contradictory scape of sea, desert, and mountains--surreal”
(the mer-creature) a living condensation and displacement of what people imagined as real
...how little is needed to prompt the imagination: paint, wheels, and wood.
(US/Mexico or land/ocean borders...) a space about who and what cannot move, of who and what falls apart, or of who and what is lost
...................................
(the inter- and trans-action of) learning, playing and thought
in ajayeb what are the:
•animacy hierarchies (--Chen)
•exposed and transparent conditions of possibility (--Hayward) ==> becom[...]