[...]f 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 ==> encompass the man)

(ajayeb's hesitate or) bold undertaking for life

[*]ajayeb's science (using Canguilhem's words): the work of a humanity rooted in life before being enlighted by knowledge, (if) it is a fact in the world at the same time as *a vision of the world* ==> it sustains a permanent and necessary relation with perception [--> Barad] & “a living being is not reducible to a meeting point of influences” [--> Kenney]

(a meaning from the biological and physiological point of view:) *need*: an irreducible and thereby absolute system of reference (for the living being who experiences it)

how to do *reconsideration of meaning* in biological sciences?

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

i am torn apart between describing the challenges of life within the ruins created by modernization's vast “improvements” and my own country's revolutionary consciousness to emerge fanatically from those ruins

catachresis استعمال غلط کلمه
a figure of speech in which words are misused from their conventional usages
***to use language out of place*** [~~--> oxymoron]
•Marianne Lien's “homeless salmon”
•Hokkaido's “frontier spirit”
•
(i constantly use catachresis in my own language, the abuse of language in describing things. did the mice “speak,” “wrote”? “The choices we make [of words] matter. Words make worlds.” [creatures] are enacted in the semiotic and material practices we weave through them ==opening==> new grounds for conversation)

world's misplacements

catachresis helps Tsing as she grope for language to describe an impossible program: a program dedicated to confusing disciplinary boundaries and to describing the challenges of life within the ruins created by modernization’ vast “improvements” --requires--> a crisis in language

Tsing's non-threatening descriptive biology

multiple rendering of salmon

U.S. and Japanese frontier technologies

(human and nonhuman) enactments of the mixed-up

*landscape*: a lens that refuses the abstraction of human-nonhuman relations in a vacuum

talking fish
acting landscapes

the still-living (~ still-kicking) as a series of misplacements

world produces its own catachresis

Tsing asks “so why is anything still alive?” (in the time of massive human disturbance)

your willingness + my dreaming


•social scientists tried to be more “scientific”: by counting and putting things into boxes (missing the interesting stuff in the sciences, including our relations with other species)
•scientists tried to be more like humanities: decoration (missing the important insights of these fields, such as the fact that ethics is useless as long as the categories it assesses are already set in place)

[*]curiosity: alighting on common excitement to learn about the world and its goings on
[*]imagination: staying with (our) observations until we find frames for thinking about pattern and trajectory

to create new genres of translation (==> play)

(the problem of) *unintentional design*

(what i am learning with ajayeb is the art of) paying **close descriptive attention** (to human interactions with other species)
-to re-learn the arts of description, that the art of 20th century is so deprived of

“population genetics and neoclassical economics each made description unnecessary through a calculus in which self-contained individuals could be posited without attention to social relations and histories” (Tsing)

sciences that are designed specifically not to tackle problems of living together


#project on Tehran trees, on anthropogenic landscapes of Tehran
-descriptive methods for the study of social relation and histories
-learning (directly) about worldly objects of Tehran ==> take part in the kinds of creative play that are the hallmark of the research --> draws readers outside common-sense assumptions

using:
•anthropology --> its expertise in ethnographic methods
•history --> its turn to environmental narration
•biology --> (ecological evolutionary-developmental trends) that have shown how species come into being with each other
•science studies --> its lively juxtaposition of technological and philosophical methods


Tsing: there is no reason that anthropologists cannot study nonhumans using some of the very same methods we use to study humans--or close parallels to them

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

walking is the speed of bodily pleasure
the speed for looking for mushrooms

mushrooms jump into your hands with all three pleasures of the unasked for
*they are not the product of your labor* <-- we should be able to work and depend on those things

Tsing saying ‘bismillah’ in her writing

delight ==make==> impression

*noticing* and *coming back* to familiar places is the beginning of appreciation for multispecies interactions

Tehran expansive and overlapping geographies resist common models (which divide the world into “them” and “us”)

lichen: an association of a fungus and an alga or cyanobacteria, where the non-fungal partner fuels lichen metabolism through photosynthesis

assumptions of human constancy --> autocratic military ideology =/= historically webbed interspecies dependence -=> a different cultural research trajectory

(to understand more about) domestication: web of entanglements
=/= neoliberal hard-line [human =/= wild] understanding of “domestication = human control” (ignoring that such relations might change humans too, ignoring the complex relations of interdependency) <== ideological commitment to human mastery (--> Sana's political commitment to liberalism) }==> (fantasies of) *the wild species self-making* =/= fantasies of control
==> life imprisonment and genetic standardization of domestic animals, wild species are ‘preserved’ in gene banks while their multispecies landscape are destroyed

i want Sana to become a researcher able to know something more about the cultural construction of gender, species, and binds--rather than “freeing” women from their gender, dogs from humans, slaves from masters--which will lead only to the constitution of autocratic liberalism made in the image of human free will and guardianship, another master program...
!?how can i say “let's stay in the prison and study” ...well, maybe i can't
#harem, the question of women confinement (usually at the center of a beautiful dream of order and plenty)

-how can i start and cultivate affection and appreciation for interspecies relations in Tehran today? (--> ways and methods)
-how with my chaotic and extremist iranian freedom-fighter friends we could become allies? (--> network)
-what is my evidences, examples, samples of the lived experience in Tehran? (--> data, stories that stick)

a dichotomy of analysis:
•species found inside human body --> discourse of cohabitation and interdependency
•species found outside human body --> discourse of human impact, management, and control

Engels's just-so story of private property: origin of property was in herds ==> male control of reproduction in human families

cereal domesticated human
in the near east a shift towards gathering multiple small-grain grasses is associated with the 10000 years before domestication
focus on landscape --to--> focus on crops


across Eurasia the rise of state (and their specialised civilization) is associated with the spread of intensive cereal agriculture
(Tsing > Connor)

a political configuration:
states encouraged sedentary, stable farms, family-based households, and guaranteed the forms of family property and inheritance (that drew lines within and between families) ==> both women and grain confined and managed to maximise fertility
--Engels--> interspecies love affair

it was in the 19th century that standardization became itself the “modern standard”


[*]plantation: ordered cropping systems worked by non-owners and arranged for expansion
==>
•deepen domestication
•reintensifying plant dependencies
•forcing fertility

superaboundance of a single crop (without the ‘love’ [connector romance of people, plant, place] that was key in state-endorsed cereal agriculture)
(in plantation) the plants were exotic and labor was coerced slavery

only with **hierarchy and managed antagonism** in place enormous profits (+ complementary poverty) could be produced

plantation produced the wealth and the modus operandi that allowed Europeans to take over the world

(not technologies and resources, rather) *plantation system made the navies, science, and industrialization possible*

taking the alienation of people (from their crops) for granted

==> human subspecies were formulated and enforced : biology came to signify the difference between free “owner” and coerced “labor” --> racial divisions were produced and reproduced in each dowered marriage and inheritance

-poor families needed more labor, particularly where child labor kept many adults alive
-privileged families were charged with the advancements of the race, women must bear its heirs --> late 19th century discourse of scientific hygiene and eugenics اصلاح نژاد informed white women's species segregation

{ boundaries of home = boundaries of love }--> fetishization of the home as the space of purity and interdependence ==> extra-domestic intimacies (within/between species) =
•archaic fantasies (the community, small farmer, etc.)
•passing affairs (feminism, animal rights, etc. )
+
outside the home = domain of economic rationality and conflicting individual interests

--> mid 20th century allowed other species accepted: pets are models for family devotion. but the model of the loving and the beloved pet does not spread love; it holds tight inside the family (-Tsing)

[biosocial plan:] other people & other species are judged by their ability to live up to one standard of domestic intimacy (USA or iran):
they love their children and pets ==> imagine themselves as compassionate and moral --> makes them ‘good people’ ==> equip them to make decisions for the whole world ==> moral hierarchy (~ your goodness is qualification for global goodness) ==> other people & other species are judged --> project to improve the world ==> *collateral damage is unfortunate but not inhumane*

urban jungle
jumble of diversity + imperial planners
excessive teams

technique of unmapping, for separating paired projects and effects and places and things. (for example unmap state and capital from diversity places)
•spread obscurity
•to know something from disordered edges (=/= ptoductive edges)
•what grows in the seam (to begin with)
•pleasure of variety beyond the domestic
•how places are differentiated and specific


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

Global Futures
(a game of) possibilities of contingent connections
a game that develops our ideas of the productivity--for better or worse--of contingency
a game to appreciate contingent connections [=/= stale and dangerous predictions (==> mithridatism)]

futures of all sorts are forged in the contingencies of strange connections
•foreclosed in the narrow channels of corporate expansion
•clashing state and popular terrorisms
•our best hopes (as well as our inchoate terrors)

*Tsing: “Contingency surrounds us, but we ignore its power to shape the future.”


**europe's secular prophecy's formulaic tropes for encapsulating time**
•most powerful future-making stories have told of the fulfillment of principles of progress and rationality
•driving force of technology will transform society
•ideal of democracy will be progressively encoded in law
=/=
**anti-progress prophecy's formulaic tropes for encapsulating time**
•national genius of a chosen people will blossom
•human nature will reestablish historic gender roles and racial hierarchies
•the essence of ancient civilizations will rise again to vie and clash

}--> There is no room for contingent connections in any of these predictions


(most important story of our time:) *the story of globalization*:
•the world is entering a global era without political or economic rifts
•nation-states and cultures are increasingly irrelevant
•a global menu of consumerdesires and entrepreneurial standards frames identity and sets individual and collective goals

--> since the end of the Cold War:
•global expansion of a few giant corporations
•the great flows of people from one continent to another
•forging of transnational standards for economics and politics
•development of widely spread audiences for once parochial forms of popular culture

--> Global capitalism is not seamless:
•leapfrogging financial crises
•“antiglobalization” politics springing up
•deflating policymakers’ hopes for a smooth transition to corporate empire


ultimate fantasy of an *era without politics*
ultimate fantasy of a *more complex evolutionary plan*
=/= contingency & interconnection



principles of (Tsing and Pollman's) Global Futures game:
you tell the story of this coalescence, and if your fellow players accept the story, it makes history: it becomes a part of the world of the game.
the goal is to develop a set of *coalescences* that fulfills a preassigned mission.
whoever tells the best story while completing the mission wins.

you (tell stories in which you) are free to:
•make the world a better place
•hatch a nefarious scheme
•narrate a true story

[*]coalescence: the historical force that arises from a transformative coming together of disparate groups, institutions, or things:
an unexpected connection ==> a “historical force"[= something that might change the world]
(parties might be: groups, institutions, ideas, identities, things, or beings. chili peppers and Thai cuisine; African rice producers and the Carolina coast; astrolabes, compasses, and plane tables)

[contemplative mode of togetherness: (in Europe) coalescence انعقاد =/= (in Middle East) confluence تلاقى }--> transnationalism =/= internationalism }~-> forms of alliance that are possible and needed that can be created differentially with “trans-” =/= “inter-“]--> *coalescence is not meaningful nor possible in Middle East?*

example:
•not coalescence story: to say that a cat and a goldfinch are both animals. or to imagine a pet store that sells both
•coalescence story: a cat-feeding fad that requires that cats eat nothing but goldfinches to give the cats a sleeker coat, while goldfinches become seriously endangered because of the program <-- *both cats and goldfinches are changed in the encounter*

coalescence can be unintentional, seriously damage collaborator and the world

missions could be:
•create a revolution
•corrupt a nation's government
•use a natural resource to create havoc
•revitalize an ancient philosophy
•


future-making cards:
icons of historical agency
they represent the world through stereotypes and symbols
used as an ideology about X (=/= as the real thing)

eternal essences as natural objects or cultural codes prevent theories to require things to change =/= Global Futures conceptualization of time and change --> ***forms of human and nonhuman possibility imagined within current discussions of politics and culture***

*world power =/= world time*

time --> evolutionary ladder --> progressive --> supportive trellises of flowering liberalism + critical charts of intensifying capitalism

coercive international development
civilizational paternalism
free-market bullying

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

#my theory (=/= reductionist, or psychological identification) on specification of:
spider =/= linear temporality
whale =/= distinction of organism and environment
(?) =/= “single point of view ==> subjective phenomena”

Nagel: the fact that an organism has conscious experience = there is something it is like to be that organism {--> subjective character of experience}--✕--> analyzable in terms of any explanatory system of functional states, or intentional states

Blade Runner's notion of “soul”: ascribed to robots or automata that behave like people though they experience nothing

physicalism: phenomenological features must themselves be given a physical account

...if one travels too far down the phylogenetic tree, people gradually shed their faith that there is experience at all

anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat
anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited whale
anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited snake
anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited jinn
--> knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life

Nagel asking: we must consider whether any method will permit us to extrapolate استقراء to the inner life of the bat from our own case, and if not, what alternative methods there may be for understanding the notion

“our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited” --> Nagel's view remains secular and in the bounds of his disciplinary field. (religious studies, theology, animal subjectivity studies, art of description, they can be helpful to describe things not in terms of the impressions they make on our senses)
-Nagel is trying with the wrong language at bats: “does it make sense to ask what my experiences are ‘really’ like as opposed to how they appear to me? [...] objective processes can have a subjective nature.”

what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves =/= what it is like for a bat to be a bat


schematic conceptions of Eszter


(old model of understanding:)
* --> stimulus (things sparkling) --> perception (hiting the senses) --> apprehension (mind aware without judgement) --> comprehension (psychological judgement about the manner of situation) --> knowing ==> world of doing, in which “action” is: expected (mother attending the child, free liberating the prisoners), commanded (soldier's hierarchy, job's duty), solved (engineer puzzling out a problem)


the things apprehended from a particular point of view (particular visual phenomenology) are not connected to that point


Neobeobachtungen
moshahedat مشاهدت
نگاه جدید


*essence of the internal world* --> who is busy with this? (this will define the fate of animal[...]