[...]ectivity* is made of such detail (of all the ways in which the world impresses itself upon us --> knowing through our scaffoldings of concerns, the tones and shadings of our moods) ~~--> we are in a sort of *readerly alliance*


[time]
#practice: try to describe what subjective time feels like --> to find variety of verbs to describe less readily chartable motions
(the time of interiority) pools, cibstricts, tunbles, speeds
-we live in a felt narrative progression, through which experience is transformed into memory
*memory edits*
what is memory but a story about how we have lived?
-timelessness: the interior landscape of reverie


lyric state of mind : seized by a moment that suddenly seems edgeless, unbounded
-wholly giving oneself over to experiencing an object
-unpointed awareness
-perfectly useless concentration
-entirely occupied
lyric moment is isolate =/= (parts of a) narrative are contiguous
(according to the lyric -->) consciousness or immortality is without date(?)

moment dilates as it is described
creating an alternate sense of duration


the surface of language
the complexity and interest of the surface

thickness means we have to *labor to enunciate* them -- is a way of mirroring the physicality of the world

seamlessness ==> our attention is suspended

(a poem/writing) shift time ==> put us inside a scene

...slip the confines of the body

poem's leap toward transcendence

people slip out of the story they are living all the time (@iranians)
(daily life is full of small moments of:)
•rupture
•disappearance
•interiority

because of her [Bishop's poem The Fish] act of description ==> her encounter with otherness restructures her sense of the world ***
(for Bishop) animal presence engenders an experience of joy
(the animal presence provokes, engenders what in Attar?)


-our speech rushes in where there are no words

ajayebnameh --> our acts of description --> bridges to animal life and evidence of our distance from them


descriptions (actually?) describe the consciousness
various and lusterous enough (to reflect back the complexities of the) self that is doing the looking

description: a mode of thinking
=/= that would make a claim about what reality is }--> that is why i can't read theoretical philosophy about the “real” or “being” anymore (of Simondon for instance), the lack of *description of the speaker's world* in his work [--✕--> every leaf is made up of a complex interaction of shades] --> (is this because i studied drawing?): people who have studied drawing know that *you have little idea what is in front of you* (in the visual landscape)
***what philosophy does to your mode of perception?

‘chain of definitions,’ a catalog of names --?--> a mode of *litany* [مناجات وعبادت تهليل دار (تحلیل دار), colloquy with God (--> #prayer, modes of consciousness and rhetorics used to commune with the divine =/=? “building a tower in order to thunder back at the old thunderer” -Doty)] (--> this has been my mode of consciousness in my lectures)--> a way of accumulating terms of praise (can also easily grow numbing)
*accumulation of descriptive phrases*: a dynamic, forward-moving thing, one that includes evidence of struggle -->[*connection lies behind the “catalog of inadequate terms”*]
(one effect of my quirky talks is as if we have) climbed a ladder of phrases
...struggle to reconcile the delights of earth with the demands of heaven* [_i am keeping in touch with a way of talking (doubling phrases,,,) in performances which intensifies the audience's sense of the speaker's character, his enthusiasm, his giddy متزلزل pleasure in being overcome by what is (for him) the *sensory evidence* (of the divine, or an excessive described world)]
(in my performances) through description, twining strands of meaning, braiding together elements of [my] thinking and perception to make an image both elusive and unforgettable, unparaphrasable نقل بيان نشدنی
*density* ==> melds perception with thinking and feeling ==> making a new generative reality
(the speed of my talking has to do with the quick and compressed that) operates on us before we have even had time to think about what is happening ~=> a world that is both immediate and immense, a moment out of context, a pouring stream of being (on the way so somewhere else) [a viscerality that Vanja reported after experiencing my performance; my #routines]
-when you look at my performances there is a feeling of it is not quite figured out how he is yet, there is no settled mastery on its way, rather, there is a restless experimentation, a trying on of different densities (of meanings, letters, spoken energies, etc.), various surfaces, degrees of busyness and calm --> how to look at this kind of work?
(we don't need anymore art like this: as if they have been made on secret, and *their radicalism lends them a sort of urgency* [<-- no no!], a perpetual quality of surprise)
-my imaginal portals: to invoke an inviting world of associations, a scented cool, ~ an indirect way of naming (=/= to program language : reducing language to a debasing perceptual shorthand)
-proposing ‘it is’ by placing another beside it, cultivating opposition and tension


“something understood” --> left open, undefined, ...


(Elen's “je suis” [Ich bin] in her images and...)


(with the help of Janina, we are) madly in love with the surface of the world

@Marialena; transmembering power of the sea, nautical daryayi دريايي، مربوط به دریانوردی، ملوانی



saying what ‘you’ see & saying why you ‘see’

the more accurate and sensory the apparent evocation of things, the more we have the sense of someone there doing the looking (<-- USA spectacle knows this)


X in Y's translation


“a fish never makes an aesthetic mistake” --> it sends us hurrying to every visual image of fish we can think of, to see if it could be true*

(a good) description: an evocation of the sensory world also suggests the limitations of such evoking, maintaining a sort of open space
in which meaning isn't closed or completed, but remains instead generative


a title sometimes does the useful work of placing us specifically, so that the body of the poem can turn its attention to the heart of the matter

(it is surprising how strongly the) naming of particulars ==(bring color into)==> poem's (or text's) perceptual web


distortion's power to suggest but not define linkage
•the use of ‘like’ --> would draw a firm line between the two elements
•not using ‘like’ --> no firm gesture of equivalence ==> we confront a metaphor that is far more alive in its associations, far more ambiguous, and more crucial --> both an evocation of alienation and a recognition of communality --tonally--> composed of *equal portions of sorrow and wonder* --> forcing us *to remain in the position of interpreter* of something that is perpetually open =/= direct statement


Blake (and Attar?) wouldn't be the great poet he is if he could allow his bloom to be entirely symbol
--> a bloom attached to the speaker, a memeber of Lord Death's troops, an assistant to the disruptive powers of the night
=/= transcendence

crucible بوته اهنگرى, this nere-archaic word with its connotations of flame and molten metal, magical heat and transformation


sunflower: the cry of the determined survivor**

(differently depicted) sunflower gain power from resisting the flower's conventional associations

the poetic =/= reinscribing the already known

“it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” (George Eliot > Doty) ♥



description = giving us the world + the inner life of the witness

evoking texture of experience --> beauty = accuracy

“whatever ‘what is’ is is what i want.” tosif توصیف
(Galway Kinnel)


“the deeds and sufferings of light.” -Goethe @Foad

into the reader's internal eye

Foad's paintings: ...two textures have now been added to the color, and in “rough” there is even a suggestion of place--it doesn't sound domestic, or urban--and of age


(coming close to an) impossible, longed-for accomplishment


the art of description = *the art of perception* }--> what do you require to say what you see?

to be better at description, we have to work at attentiveness

#training / do contour drawing just with your eyes


your erotic inflects and charges is your way of interacting with the world
...you basically just make love to the whole world
...and all the stories you tell yourself about your encounter with the cake


[*]economy =/= it is too much, excess
no one would want Proust to have less to say
fulsome discourse works only when perception itself is the subject --> Proust's novel is a huge inquiry into the nature of consciousness : a magnificently nuanced evocation of what it is to see and sense --> which is usually *too much*


here is one of those stories everyone swears is true,...


(an appetizer called) “smoked language”

the absolute centrality of figurative speech

(Susan Morrow:) how the scuttle of crab claws on sand influenced the hieroglyph for “writing”

we breathe metaphor, swim in metaphor, traffic in metaphor

(becoming poet = becoming the) handler of the figurative speech : employing language's tendency to connect like and disparate things to the richest possible effects
(in talk:) figurative is at its most sophisticated: condensed, alive with meaning, pointing in multiple directions at once
(Hollywood's ways) to make meaning seem more attractive =/= figurative speech itself means, and *means intensely*

baznegari-e sanaye adabi (بازنگری صنایع ادبی‌):
1. to say *what we see* = to speak figuratively (first project of simile tashbih تشبیه and metaphor esteare استعاره is to describe, to say what something's like ~~?--> measurement, we can't do so without comparison[?])
2. figures work together ==(to form)==> *networks of sense* (enjoying a metaphoric game, modes of appreciation)
3. figuration = a form of *self-portraiture* (intense involvement in rich, descriptive speech ==> perceptual signature : a destillation/condensation of the way one person knows herself/himself in time and in place)
4. metaphor ==introduces==> *tension* and *polarity* to language (figurative ==> enexpected language into text, shifting the elements of vocabulary)
5. metaphor's distancing aspect ==(allows)==> (us) to speak more freely (to explore a heated, charged experience, “I need more veil” ♥, a delight in a thin disuise; the way a good veil works [according to Doty]: you can see the veil itself, if you choose to. but if you want to, or you know how, you can read what lies beneath)
6. ***metaphor = an act of inquiry*** =/= an expression of what we already know (“i can't prove this [...] but i can feel the power of the result.” unmistakable quality of discovery [of metaphoric figures]: the sort of energy generated when an idea [and a concomitant set of emotions] unfolds before the write [<-- Sven is missing this?]. in this way: metaphor = (a kind of) *argument*= a “thinking through” of what is implied, [oh i have made something] complicated = full of feeling and tension, #excess; investigation of erotic energy, thrilling sonic structures you build,,,)


to become a rhetorical reader of our *gesture drawing*
moments of rebelion, when you have just enough of the strictures of the composed still life the teacher had assigned, you whip out...


description is fueled by ***hunger for the world***, the need to taste, to name, to claim what is seen, to bring it --> the resurrection of the world within the perceiver
*it is very often true that what we are compelled to describe is terrible, or oppressive, or heartbreaking. language is hungry for that, too [...] to eat everything. even the falling and fading world, even misery* (Doty)
-they speak to our hunger for a vocabulary for the whole range of feeling, even the awful parts (--> destruction of speech is dangerous, having no language for what we do good or bad)

desctiption is made both more moving and more exact when it is acknowledged that is is inevitably incomplete


(in the strictest sense) one could say that nothing unintelligible is a meaning =/= *there is always meaning*
-the perception of meaning [such as goose sound] that cannot be translated into any other form of speech --> chasm barzakh between the incomprehensible and the making of meaning --> (how?) to build a construct of language that acknowledges the “meanings” that live outside of words (a ‘description’ that builds an argument about the nature of real) [--> ajayeb's concern; part of a function of the humility of the speaker]
([ajayeb is full of?] similes that produce) juxtaposition of the natural and the artificial, [the vegetal and the made, the tiny and the immense] : (unexpected) collision of elements (in the framing field of thinking) ==means==> to bring energy into language [--> #adjacencies: bringing things, objects, stories, arguments next to each other --> interrupting stories with stories]


ritual of flirtation


sky's deep machinery


“poor girls make themselves fabulous”
“white girl make herself black, at least while she is pretending to be a supreme”


reprofessor

(my work and interest since 2012:) attention and allegiance to a *process of knowing*

(ajayeb.net has interest in reworking the conventions of syntax and of the sentence)
•the experience of ajayeb.net is like watching something leap; scrambled elements, something clicks into place; a stubborn suspension, not quite parsable
•the experience of ajayeb (mode of description) is like *a sudden event happening so quickly we don't have a name for what we see, cannot identify the motion* (==> animals in ajayeb have many legs and arms)--> [*]motion: the patterning life of energy ~~--> world of forms

(Doty > Cummings:) “rearrangingly” + “become" = rea(be)rran(com)gi(e)ngly

ajayeb = "how everything happens” (based on the ebb and flow of percept + episteme)
(an index finger that) points to the world's ways of happening (in energetic and enigmatic waves of world's coming into [& going out of] being)
*ajayeb moves concepts in like of: the world doesn't necessarily want to be ordered into the linearity and forwardness of text

طلسم‌های ایرانی‌
nefrin نفرین : representative of the (intricacy of) *larger actions of the world*
nefrin-nevisi نفرین نویسی --> (made by the) technologies of their moment

postmodernism's familiar hesitation on the inadequacy of language ==> giving up referentiality =/= my ajayeb

(taking up on moon, for me is about) not going in fear of that which has been looked at again and again. #moon is “deeply compelling and we probably won't ever get done with it”


...somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred years later


morality of description(?)--> embodying the dilemma and work of the witness


...wheels of thinking turn slowly for some of us


adabiat tosifi ادبیات توصیفی
divisive consciousness (with a certain) degree of removal from the world =/= (we want) *more* language (<-- more we name what we see and do)==?==> a larger and more valuable world
(Roethke:) “when is description mere? never!”
-->
[*]صنعت تضاد san'at-e tazad, polarity: the pull of forces in opposition ==makes==> writing feel alive
[*]projection: that psychological mechanism by which we turn the world, or other people, or deer (into versions of ourselves) --> it is not a sin; it is our method of operating, our modus operandi (--> “pathetic fallacy”: inevitable perceptual work of the human; “if you are miserable, then the trees look miserable to you”)
[*]qualifiers sefat صفت gheyd (adjectives and adverbs) intended to lend a host of sensory qualities to the sentence; (sometimes too much) adjectival or adverbial flavoring. [#training: remove every adjective and adverb, and see what you have got left --> **there is always a more exact term waiting to be employed**] (Foad's severe economy of means; Janina's allusive, shimmery surfaces delight) ([*]style: a simple way of saying complex things. -Cocteau)
[*]نظم nazm: musicality of poetry, poem's body of sound is its specific particular flesh, sonic texture --> **making the language more markedly like the world** [a trail, pathway through a wood of sounds, an unmistakably specific landscape, loyal to the local]
[*]synesthesia: occasion of excitement, a skein of complicated perception, (sort of a literary technique,) something like a snapshot of the image-making mind at work --> superimposition of both events and of senses (and of scenes?) ==> a consciousness
(aim of many artists:) “to form the sensorium, the sphere of perception in which we dwell” @Hoda =/= (Doty suggests:) it is work to sort them out (what sorts out senses? question @Hoda, she must learn: an accurate rendering of an idiosyncratic process of sensory overlap and association)
[*]لحن tone: special effects, evoking a ‘moment of’ ... intense statement of feeling ==> a concretely descriptive feeling
[*]questions are always a little more trustworty than answers (?) -- sometimes things said do not take the *rhetorical form of a question* [--> in apass i was training to be able to capture those kind of ummarkedly questions] --> something said (described) with room for indeterminacy ///*convex mirror* (Doty's refractive thinking)
[*]فعل verb, the descriptive force of the right (hardworking) verb, a kind of muscular concreteness. sometimes verbs gain descriptive force when other parts of speech are newly cast in active roles

*invocation = directly addressing the thing creates a sense of immediacy and of connection
*thou, with its suggestion of divinity or beloved --> prayer
*hectic: uncomfortable alliance, inharmonious, something that might set the teeth on edge
*destroy --> a death-steeped perception that reads the wind as a “destroyer”
*world of fused duality


‘and’ --> the signature element of a place, of a landscape, the conjoined body : the animate and the inorganic as one thing


*the project of being alive* (is little understood)

([my project is perhaps] to become) a person whom the ancient world is remarkably vivid*** ♥
to have gossiped about figures of ancient Persia

to believe that the *world is queer* (=/= Mobed, Foad, Reza)
(we need -->) a window of doupt through which all creative possbility comes into being

(Forster:) “[...] standing absolutly motionless at a sight angle to the universe”

(queer =?) an oblique مورب position in relation to the real (=/= buisiness as usual)
queer to be interested in what can't be packaged or sold in the marketplace
queer to enjoy the fundamentally useless, contemplative pleasure of (poetry, ajayeb, etc.)


description --> *providing the particular evidence of specificity*
not everything can/need to be described --> **the choice of what to evoke**, to make any scene seem ‘real’ vagheyi. look at USA film industry and all the efforts put in scenic description of the WWII, vampire stories, teenage life, nation; or in iran in Iran-Iraq war (Iranq)


lush, sensuous, flowering

parallel text to the creature


“you are gorgeous and i am coming” ♥

an approximation, unstoppable as an approachoig sound of approaching organism


testing and smelling
insight and sound --> Lili


an aphrodisiac and a chastening reminder: getting sidetracked by grief


“my portion this time”

*art is a house that tries to be haunted* ♥ (Doty > Dickinson)

قافیه به تنگ آمد ghafie tang, (when a choice is) driven more by sonic than by logic


what kind of game is the sea? @Marialena
lap and drag. crag and gleam
(monosyllables --> are we reading nouns or verbs? tough, playful ocean)

syntactical ambiguity disorients


(Khayam's) desire to die into the world (~ to surrender into the life of things)

[title]
*describer's art*


autumn
a kind of logarithn of decay and rekindling


to describe description
a work of advocacy
to go description-hunting in ajayeb
evocation of sense perception (--> a technique that Adventure Times TV series uses)

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

Foucault [_bestiary of the imagination]
...precisely because it puts them into categories of their own, the Chinese encyclopedia localizes their [fantastic entities, fabulous animals, polymorphous and demoniacal faces, creatures breathing fire,,] powers of contagion

encyclopedia ==> quality of monstrosity does not affect any real body (=/= lurk)

animals in the non-place of language, meeting in the immaterial sound of the voice pronouncing their enumeration

“Absurdity destroys the ‘and’ of the enumeration by making impossible the ‘in’ where the things enumerated would be divided up.”

the ‘operating table’
a table --> a tabula, “that enables thought to operate upon the entities of our world, to put them in order, to divide them into classes, to group them according to names that designate their similarities and their differences--the table upon which, since the beginning of time, language has intersected space.” (Foucault, The Order of Things)

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

*questionable interpretations

#attention
([art/]aesthetics of noticing)--> appreciation of multispecies landscape, making living ecologies

which sectors/fields of art require artist to go out and notice things?
(engage with which) details of the world --> breaking common sense

our mamalian bias:
•predetermined body shape and size
•run toward death (pre-programmed death =/= history) ==> makes us think in terms of set-life courses
}==> allow us to imagine a standard individual outside of history

(Tsing's) history: overlapping tracks and traces and many trajectories of world-making, human and not human

irreversible time ==> indeterminacy (of history) --> new alliances --> the ability of assemblages to produce historical changes in our common world

what needs to be stated
what needs to be produced

context-dependent --?--> the way things are

architecture of podium <--✕--> labor-process of the actual speaker
how talks are *actually* produced
in your material practices
hybrid in digital manual tactile operations of speaking

noticing ants, spiders, little traps, species cohabiting, mutual coproduction of economics, ecology, labor-studies, house-hold studies, ajayeb-studies, and understanding of the orders of the natural and human world

(Gordon allowing) *algorithms to become stories*

(the technological enablement of some) *disciplines of attention*

“we are al lichen”: we are all ecosystem composite critters


ants, combining two kinds of noise, half-hazard patterns of interaction
half-hazard contact
half-hazard context
}==> it works (=/= perfection, precision/efficiency of clockwork)


#some Baradian models of intra-action in popular cinema:
•(intra-action received and wielded through discipleship and pre-programmed talent:) The Force in Starwars. [the story don't allow any other story of The Force and its contingencies other that good and evil tool-use of it]
•(intra-action resisted by individual subjectification:) the shadowy monster from the Upside Down in The Stranger Things, possessing the character. [the story is based on non-intra-active models and mode of being in the world of multispecies in multi-dimensions, it wants clear boundried subjects encapsulated by psychological ego and self-possession persons, ideas of identity and power --> life insurance system]
•(intra-action resisted by the political modern concrete individualism:) relationship with the phantom of state in The Handmaid's Tale. [overlapping a flat image of totalitarian society into religion]


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

technosphere: (conceptualized as) an unintended muddle of multispecies relationships emerging from contaminated landscapes, dumps
--reconsider-with-> feral technologies: novel and weedy capacities for materially significant change

invasive artificial intelligence

anthropocene: a multidimensional puzzle structured around complexities and ruptures --> when ways of being & ways of belonging can no longer be studied exclusively
(human-nonhuman-machine)

•who orders the technosphere?
•who inhabits the technosphere?
•


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

“unmediated experience” --(signals a danger)--> naive realism (+ its polar opposite: naive subjectivism)


soup operatic
operatic (--> opera)
aporetic (--> aporia)
operative (--> secret agent)

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

‘learning’ in biology: (how to overcome X that) its ancestors would have not met
--> stories of ‘trial-and-error’ in animals
the idea of having ‘varying technique’ (closer to human) in regard to biological stasis
how the idea of ‘intelligence’ in animals is construted according to venture capitalism predatory preferences

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

mileu --> part of the history of the idea of animal
the living being and its environment, Canguilhem

[mileu: in French “middle,” in the midst of, medium, between, ... set, circle]

(the notion of) *environment* [relentlessly universal and required] --for--> capturing both the experience and existence of living beings

Canguilhem going through the historical stages of the formation of the concept of milieu/environment
-imported into biology in the second half of 18th century from (mechanocal notion) Newton by Lamarck
-later they [1870s Giard, Le Dantec, Houssay, Roule, etc.] take the idea from Lamarck, but they get the word, as an abstract universal term, from Taine

18th century French mechanics ‘milieu’ what Newton understood by ‘fluid’
problem of mechanics:
•(Newtonian:) problem of mechanics: *action at a distance of distinct physical individuals ==> *ether*: fluid medium of action at a distance [--> moon, lunar], continous in air
physics of central forces ==> “environment: a between two centers”
•(Descartes:) collision: the only mode of physical action (‘environment’ has no place in Cartesian physics)
*individuals occupying distinct points in space* --> they cannot act without joing their action [”?!” --> i am very conscious (and suspicious) about that which i feel that i don't understand --> what kind of nununderstander is at work here?]

Newton imported “milieu” into biology

action of an environment

[material racism -->?] (a fluid) strictly defined by its physical properties

•(Lamarck [taking from Newton the *physico-mathematical model of explanation*]:) environment/milieu: set of actions exerted on the living being from outside, “influencing circumstances”

physico-mathematical model of explanation (of living/dead beings) =/=? psycho-material model of explanation

(what would Machiavelli think of mileu?)

animal ethology, habits of animals describable as distinctive and specific characteristics

epistemology: **historical psychology of knowledge**

[*]historicity: should the fact that two or several leading ideas are combined at a given moment in a single theory be interpreted as the sign that (although they may seem to be quite different when subject of analysis) they ultimately have a common origin whose meaning and often even existence are forgotten when they are considered separately?
(Canguilhem beautifully brings the question of epistemology into his terms)

the *origin* ==commands==> the *meaning* ==commands==> the *use*

Comte's general biological theory of the environment
Comte employing a neologism --> “the fluid in which a body is immersed” (--confirming--> the mechanical origin of the notion,) “the total set of external circumstances necessary for the existence of every organism” [=/= Barad's intra-active model of explanation]
==> (rhetoric of) *dialectical conception of the relations between the organism and the environment* --instances such as “suited/adapted organism” and “favorable environment” [=/=? affordance theory]
Comte seeking a guarantee of his dialectical connection in the Newtonian principal of action and reaction:
organism --> variable
environment --> function
theory of the environment in Comte: (strictly mechanistic meaning of the word...) world --to--> man

Comte --> Lamarck: “milieu = circumstances = surrounding environment” ==suggest==> intuition of a *centered or focused formation* --> circle, sphere
***circumstances and surroundings still preserve a symbolic value, but milieu forgoes reference to any other relation other than that of a position forever denied by exteriority --?-->
چو پرگار می‌شدم...
چو نقطه...
گرد...
now refers to befor, here to its beyond, and so on without cease***
(in iranian poetry) environment: a pure system of relations without supports

*}==> environment: a universal instrument for dissolving *individualized organic synthesis* in the anonymity of universal elements and movements
(for example) metamerism of fish: “fish do not lead their lives themselves, the river has made them lead it, they are *persons without personality* (<== strictly mechanistic use of the notion of environment [<-- Descartes beast machine])
Lamarck: the environment dominates and control the evolution of living beings through the intermediary of *need*(= a subjective notion entailing reference to a positive pole of vital values)
(for Lamarck:) life and environment (which is unaware of it ~(Lamarckian *vitalism*:) ‘there is an originality of life of which the environment takes no account’) are two series of asynchronous events ==>
[*]adaptation: life's renewed effort to “stick” to an indifferent environment
[*]being: the effect of an effort [--?--> striving]
(--> this asynchronicity ==> “us” and “place”)
==> environment does nothing for life --Bichat--> “life: set of functions that resist death” (~-> tales of survival in America sci-fi TV series)
life resists solely by changing its shape in order to survive


Darwin explaining the ‘appearance of new forms’ conjunction of two mechanisms:
1- mechanism of the production of differences ~ variation
2- mechanism of the reduction and criticism of these produced differences ~ vital competition and natural selection
(for Darwin the fundamental biological relationship:) the relationship of the living being to other living beings --> precedence over environment conceived as a set of physical forces
-competition of forces
-accidental morphological variation
(for Darwin:) ‘to live' = to submit an individual difference to the judgment of the set of living beings ~= *die or be part of the jury*
monstrosity: the rule
originality: provisional ordinariness


finalism --Darwin--> selection
***both Lamarck and Darwin denounce finalism and celebrate mechanism
(both, [complementary] biologists to whom) life appears as a datum which they seek to describe without being too concerned about accounting for it analytically [--> not accouting for the analyticallity of their objects?]
Lamarck --> (thinks of life in terms of) *duration*
Darwin --> (thinks of life in terms of) *interdependence*

Darwin's biogeographical environment =/=? Lamarck's environment


Humboldt (and Ritter) --> (19th century) geography: a science conscious of its method and its dignity
(naturalist traveler -->) *Humboldt's “Kosmos” [~ synthesis of knowledge, not aiming to be encyclopedic, but strives ***to arrive at an intuition of the universe***] combining:
•(“oikoumene” tradition of Greek geography:) *the science of the entire human world* [--> ajayeb]
•(“mathematical geography” founded by Eratosthenes, Hipparchus, Ptolemy:) *the science of coordination of human space in relation with the celectial configuration and movements* [--> Olearius]
}==> Earth [considered as a whole]: (stable support for the) *فراز و نشيب vicissitude of history* --> ‘terrestrial space + its configurations’ : object of geographical, geological, sociological, biological knowledge
(Humboldt) applied a whole system of barometric, thermometric in his investigation. *division of plants* according to different climates ==> “botanical geography” & “zoological geography”

history of the Weltanschauung

*****how Humboldt (and Ritter, [even Simondon does that too]) apply the *category of totality* to their object --> the relations between historical man and the environment ==> *determination of historical relationships*

the relations between the geographical environment and man ==> a spirit
(-->) *doing history*: reading a map, understanding by map the representation of a set of metrical, geodesic, geological, climatological, and descriptive biogeographical data


Loeb + Watson (phototropism in animals):
every movement of the organism in the environment = a movement into which the environment forces the organism ==> **animal = reflex** <-->{Darwinism + Cartesianism ==> behaviorist psychology*}
(Watson:) [*]psychology: program of the analytical investigation of the ‘stimulus-response couple'[= conditions of the living being's adaptation to the environment through the experimental production of relations between stimulation and response] (<-- one of physical determinism) ==> consciousness nullified as illusory
(the living being's situation:) “its being = a conditioning” (--> as artists we still have to deal with this idea or image, it is about the reality the artist receives and what they make of it)


process of reduction:
(ajayeb --to-->) biology --to--> behavior --to--> neurology --to--> energetics (--to--> electronics)

the perfect work of behaviorist psychology: construct man as a machine reacting to machines

Condillac's fable of the statue: in the rose's perfume, the statue is the rose's perfume ==> living organism = respond to sensory stimulation (the physical mileu, light and heat, carbon and oxygen, calcium and gravity)

(Canguilhem asking) where is the living being? <-- Kohn

==> subjects “taking action” =/= objects “in movement”

we see individuals --but--> these are objects
we see centers --but--> these are environments
we see machinists --but--> these are machines

environment of behavior --coincides-with--> geographical environment --coincides-with--> physical environment


“in a human environment, man is obviously subject to a form of determinism, but it is the determinism of artificial creations in which the spirit of invention which calls them into existence is alienated.”

*psycho-technique of engineers*

...to grasp the presence in man of his own originality --> @Maarten, Mobed
as an irreducible center of resistance

“man, even when subordinated to the machine, never manages to grasp himself as a machine. his efficiency is greater the more he is aware of his central situation with regard to the mechanisms intended to serve him” [<-- *a bad story (of The Terminator, The 100, The Magicians, etc.)]


(Darwin, Laeb's) pragmatism: generalization of the notion of adaptation to the theory of knowledge

reference of organis movement to the organims itself as essential

(prepared by Kantor, Tolmann's) teleological behaviorism: recognizing the sense and intention of animal movement


(where, for whom, the individuality of the living organism stops?)
•at its ectodermic borders
•at the cell
•

cell: an environment of infra-cellular elements, it lives in an internal environment which sometimes has the dimensions of an *organ* and sometimes of the *organism*


Uexküll --> Umwelt =/= Umgebung =/= Welt
•*Umwelt* distinguishes the environment of behavior specific to an organism
•*Umgebung*: the ordinary geographical environment
•*Welt*: the universe of science

Umwelt ~ the specific environment of behavior (for the living being): a set of excitations

to be effective it must be anticipated by an attitude of the subject ~ ‘if the living being is not seeking, it won't receive anything’

Buffon & Lamarck --> time and favorable circumstances gradually constitute the living
=/= Uexküll --> time and favorable circumstances are relative to such and such living beings

==> Umwelt: an elective sample in the Umgebung }--> milieu
environment: “man's Umwelt” ~ the ordinary world of his perspective and pragmatic experience

*human suject: creator of techniques and values
==> animal's Umwelt: a centered environment/milieu relative to this living being as essentially a subject of vital values

a subjectivity at the root of this organization --> شپش shepesh tick

Uexküll story of the tick --> *mechanical theory of the reflex*
...the animal may remain completely indifferent and insensitive for a considerable length of time to all the excitations of an environment like a forest, and that the only excitation that is capable of triggering its movement, to the exclusion of any other, is the odor of rancid butter.
--> *an organism is therefore never equal to the theoretical totality of its possibilities
organism =/= preferential behavior

reversal of organism-environment relationship:
•“the meaning of an organism is its being” (Goldstein)
•“the living being's acquisition of its form” (Mendel)
•“the environment is not an agent of formation strictly speaking, but rather of realization” (Brachet)
•

(Soviet) ambition of complete domination of nature and limit the possibilities of an intentional alteration of living species


*which stories of life and why emphasize the separation of the organism from the environment (and make this separation intuitive and ready-to-hand)? [--> ajayeb]
(Lamarck focused on the point where) life coincides with its own meaning, where through sensibility the living being is positively or negatively *situated absolutly in existence* --> ***the indivisible totality of organism and environment*** [<-- Barad has to say a lot about that]

for Lamarck:
“circumstances” and “ambience” spherical, centered arrangement
astrological conceptions ==> “influence” and “influencing circumstances”


(in 18th and start of 19th century:) geographical + astronomical + astrological ==> [*]climate: the changing aspect of the sky + the influence exerted by the sky on the Earth
--> ajayeb-e climate
--> ajayeb-e moon
--> Olearius's anthropogeographical mechanics (<== Newton's celectial mechanics)
[*]geography: (for the Greeks) the projection of the sky on the Earth --establishing--> a correspondence of sky and Earth:
•topographical correspondence --> geometry + cosmography
•hierarchical correspondence --> physics + astrology

(philosophy of the) stoics ==> (Greek) geology ***
[رواقی‌ stoic: deterministic understanding of a universe (overseen by a god and governed by reason), integrity of character (--> walking erect), psychological independence from society, self-control and detachment, indifference to pleasure or pain ==> “clear thinker"]

}---> ***theory of universal sympathy*** [~/=? ajayeb] : vitalist intuition of universal determinism ==> geographical theory of environments (= milieu): biocentric conception of the cosmos (crossed over the Middle Ages to bloom in the Renaissance)


the idea of the cosmos:
(with Copernicus and Kepler:) Earth of living beings and man : the privileged center of reference of the ancient world
**(with Galielo and Descartes -->) two theories:
•a centered qualitative space in which the mi-lieu is a center
•a decentered homogeneous space in which the mi-lieu is an intermediary field

need for expansionist security + requirements of scientific knowledge
Pascal --> we drift over a vast mileu ["we are floating in a medium of vast extent"]

he needs a place to contain him
he needs time to exist --> *durer*

(Pascal's) image of the world as a *finite totality* --> a permanent myth of originally Neo-Platonist mystical thought in which the intuition of the spherical world centered on and by the living being is combined with the already heliocentric cosmology of the Pythagoreans

(Newtonian:)
space --> means of God's omnipresence
ether --> support and medium of forces

*empiricism hides the theological foundations* ==Canguilhem==> the natural philosophy which is the source of the positivist and mechanistic conception of the environment in fact turns out to be supported by the mystical intuition of a sphere of energy whose central action is identically present and effective at every point

a story: the ideal of the objectivity of knowledge requires a *decentring of the view of things* <-- seams normal to any find formed in the mathematical and physical discipline

(Canguilhem > Haldane:) man's specific environment is the world of his perception, that is to say, the field of his pragmatic experience in which his actions, orientated and g[...]