[...] 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 governed by values immanent to tendencies, separate out qualified objects and situate them in relation to each other and all of them in relation to himself (---> go to Barthes's discussion on the notion of operative language/tool)
--> that is why we need a different language to relate to environment


the inhuman environment =/=? ajayeb

kinds of “recognitions” that were established by disqualification of all specific subjectively centered environment [such as ajayeb], including that of man, as vital illusions or errors
*ajayeb = (one of many past) *centers of organization, adaptation, and invention* (now dissolved by science: to dissolve living beings in the anonymity of the mechanical, physical, and chemical environment[...]