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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

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#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 subjectivity)


*view from nowhere*: that their particular viewpoint is not part of the common reality (--✕--> sociology of science)


X is Y
“is”: converge, a technique of modeling (~~> sync)
X, Y: two referential paths
we know how X is supposed to be true


people are no told at an early age that *all matter is really energy* (--> capitalist physicalism. then what you say abnout ‘energ[...]