[...]ition 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[...]