[...]n, sensing his impending death, called to his side his three sons, to share with them the little he still owned. He said to them: my sons, I have eleven camels. I bequeath half of them to the oldest, a quarter to the second son, and to you, my youngest, I give a sixth. Upon the father's death, the sons found themselves quite perplexed: how to divide their inheritance? A war over the division of goods seemed inevitable. With no apparent solution, the sons went to a neighbouring village to seek advice from an old sage. The old man thought awhile and then shook his head: I cannot resolve this problem. The only thing I can do for you is to give you my old camel. He is not very obedient and often does as he pleases. I don't know if you can use him but I think he may help you divide your inheritance. The sons brought the old camel back with them and divided up the inheritance: the first then received six camels, the second three and the youngest two. This then left the camel of the old sage, which they could return to his owner.

        ,     ,
‘'’ ‘'’   ‘'’   ‘’

this parable reveals particular and essential dimension of all forms of inheritance:
•[Despret:] they place us in a position of obligation --> to work out
•[Sina:] they had to go to the foreign to figure out their inheritance


the sons have to work out the *position of obligation*

*****inheritance (passed on as something that appears impossible) as such requires you to *start from* [=/= about, concerning, with] this inheritance
•“start from” implies precisely the fact of remaining obligated to that *from* which we speak, think, or act [~ learn from & create from events]
•“being obligated” implies learning to do, speak, act, decide, not about these events, not concerning them, not facing or against them, but from them
==> you are bound : *you honor the terms of the problem* (such as it is posed along with its contradictions ~ fubar)
==> (help you to) resist the common sense (or less common sense) solutions


[*]inheriting: an act that demands thought and commitment, an act that calls for our transformation by the very gift of inheriting --> my work on ajayeb, you start from ajayeb (better than “coughing”?)


Despert in reading Derrida through Haraway --> studying the way in which scientists were beginning to respond to their animals & becoming attentive to the animals’ responses in trun

[Sina + Despret + Haraway] ***to inherit is an act that demands a transformation on the part of the inheritor***

the importance of transforming that which is transmitted to us


thinking from animals
(Despret working on) the meaning of ”(starting) from” [a partir de]
•for philosophers: to depart from animals, to leave them as quickly as possible and never to return ==> “animal = text & pretext” : its function is to provide a reason for going (partir) elsewhere [<-- i have done this]


getting involved --to--> martyrdom


author-turned-ethologist --> classic genres of ethological literature

(a matter of) *performing through narration the passing obligation that is now mine*

(Latourian) *amateur: a person who likes and cultivates her tastes and does her best to cultivate a kind of becoming-sensitive to the world*

in ethology (and in animal sciences) monologues make terrible narratives

[@Femke, @Pierre, ?can we do without] the philosophical tradition of: **searching for traces of ideological and political contamination** in the work of scientific naturalist (or whatever other field) --> you (often) find a perfect target for this sort of critique
•(pay attention to) what makes a perfect target for your sort of critique (@Laura's Jane Fonda, etc.)

[zoological bird:] sociobiological literature prepares you to accept a certain kind of fact about this bird =/= Zahavi's babblers however do (altruism & cooperation) in a remarkably more inventive and diversified way and for entirely different reasons that sociobiological birds

anthropocentrism (credit birds with complex intentions, and [why?] complex intentions always seem human)
to see birds as “dancing” and for fairly complex reasons could only have been a result of the fact that the observers projected onto the animals their own frameworks and experiences


Despret observing the birds + their ethologist --> the birds made Zahavi interesting

(Despret discovering that) any theory of representation was at once partial and totalizing, because it proposed to elucidate the complex work of relations and encounters from the sole standpoint of the human

(how Despret became) interested in actual practices (with Stengers and Latour), in the way they articulated questions and responded to questions

****stories that scientists [and Disney or Hollywood] develop about animals are also our stories**** --> these stories transform humans and their animals
--Stengers--> sciences (of the contemporaneity) for which: **production of knowledge = production of a way of being** ==> (they do not reveal what animals are, rather) they follow and accompany an act of becoming together : *an act of becoming with the stories that we construct concerning them* (good or bad)
•birds will have been far more interesting starting from the moment that Zahavi proposed to connect their stories to others [~-> how Cinderella became interesting for me when her stories became connected to other stories =/= restructure her story to make her fit my contemporary political correctness]
•sheep will have been far more sophisticated starting from the moment that Thelma Rowell asked them interesting questions

**to ask interesting question: to create conditions in which sheep [beings, your subject] are able to demonstrate an interest in these questions

**interesting research: looking at the conditions that allow beings to become interesting


{ how scientists made their animals agents = how scientists created the conditions for certain responses with respect to what was being asked of the animals }--Despret--> how these changing animals *became real* by way of the very *test of transformation* that had been proposed to them (~ how they were involved in the “process of verification”) --> *to understand the system of truth that was ay the heart of these tests* (=/= to produce an umpteenth critical analysis of “representation” @Pierre)
==> you are under the same constraints as those in whom you had placed your confidence

@Sina: do not construct knowledge about your mother behind her back! --> getting to know what matters (to them, to her) ==> allows transformations to occur
-i usually did both (as mentor in apass), construct knowledge behind people's back [psychosis] & getting to know what matters to them [paranoia]

(Despret discovered) one (unignorable) thing that mattered to scientists was: how animals take an active part in the knowledge that is produced about them


(why working on ajayeb bestiary involves becoming interested in sciences:) you work on animals --immediately--> you are marking on scientists

i remember the way i anticipated where a pigeon, a cat, spider, or ants, would make a home, a niche, in my childhood house...
the difference between ‘what i imagined’ & ‘where the nest actually appeared’ ==> made the world far more interesting
--> looking at the perception of animals (when you are child)


inventive and remarkable birds
happiness of sheep
sadness of captive wolves in a park in the Lorraine --> *not because they were captive but because captivity had transformed them into stupid and cruel beings*

[it is good to be able to say that] certain scientists not only do “bad science” (which remains a way of keeping distance) but that they do “science badly”


creatures that happened to be animals
creatures that happened to be ghosts
creatures that happened to be ...


(the influence of) Anglo-Saxon animal studies [on me]


(in Despretian way) learning to think from love


(the bad) fable of coming out of the closet
there is no closet. there are transformations.
falling from a horse, on a path that no longer leads to Damascus

(the story of) Saul does not answer God; he politely asks him to wait two minutes while he comforts his horse. let God wait; other things matter <--Despret-- this is where true conversation takes place

(a philosophy, or thought) one of: obligation =/= distance
(Stengers:) obligation =/= requirements -->{*a distinction that is to be made*, to be created, to be invented, not acknowledged as already manifest in the state of things}
obligation (is much more demanding than) =/= right
(Sina:) obligation =/= commitment
[*]being obligatet = agreeing to expose oneself to failure, refusing to construct the words of order that would protect oneself from the requirements of the activity
{not all activities arise from obligations = not all activities put themselves at risk, not all activities make an effort to present themselves politically}


Haraway's writing technique: a remedy for indifference and contempt --> *becoming attached to the multiple threads that make up the fabric of the world*

(Despret obligated to hear) the blackbird sang as if the world itself depended on its song --and-->
*the importance of things came to dwell in its voice*
*the blackbird made importance exist in another way*
*importance became incorporated in the world*

and this importance rises like a question [a question that comes after “what matters for..."] --Despret--> how can i now write in such a way as to be worthy of what matters, with a similar insistence, for another being? (my question in Cinderella diaries)

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

my history (of continuous interest, or what created the next “-->”):
iran / visual arts --> germany / lecture and performance --> research / heritage study --> case / ajayeb bestiary --> epistemology / animal --> science / anthropology

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

home funerals put into practice an important dimensino of the lives lived by the deceased --> participates actiively in the instauration of their existence
-instauration: [re-storying] restoring, participating in a transformation that leads to a certain existence = to more existence, in the case of the deceased: both a biographical supplement and the accomplishment of an existence in another realm of reality ==Souriau==> brilliance of reality (of the dead): regards of the existence of the deceased, provided we agree on the right regime of reality that can be granted to them --> (envisioning definition of the mode of existence)==enable==> to account for what the deceased do and what they have others do ==> describe how they interfere in the lives of the living --✕--> (we avoid the trap of) the tradition that captures and generally freezes the problem, separating the ways of being into two categories: “physical existence =/= psychological existence” ==> the deceased = non-existence, fantasy, belief, hallucinations... (<-- bad for ajayeb)

vigil
the deceased retain thier full relatinoal capacity
the midwives stress that it is important to carry on talking to them, with love, soflty, carefully choosing one's words...
death --> passage --> a medico-scientifice time frame in which the living have work to do (=/= the work of mourning)
body remains vibrant matter <== communication remains possible

taking care of events through their affects

(Despret asks) what do we know about what the body continues to feel and causes the person to feel once it has stopped breathing?


death midwives
share the conviction that death is not a matter of all or nothing
[people] can still talk to those who remain through memories or thoughts that arise in their presence
signs --> remain open to the possibility of being understood differently

death affects the face muscles in such a way that it produces a post-mortem smile (لبخند شهید) --> *smile (that comforts) ==> ‘deceased: a particularly robust being’ that unifies two ways of being:
1. he becomes an expressive relational being
2. his body becomes matter for expressions

midwife ==> a possibility in the sense of “or else, also” (=/= “either or”), in the valuable grammatical register of conjuctions: and, and, and...


these expressive modes that require *only recipients*, [=/= explanation: to give the phenomenon its scientific imprimatur] they just call for one to take into account
-this is tricky if you are in Iran's shia martyrdom culture or in the presense of Western authoritative sensual teacher. can there be a deliberate coexistence [an additive epistemological engagement --> *affirmation of the possibility that multiple and contradictory versions coexist*] of (the current enchanted version:) لبخند شهید and (the comming disenchanted version:) secular imprimatur in present iran?]

the dead body is both *biological & sacred*, object & subject, disenchanted & enchanted

disjunctive and controversial (یا “or else”) --(replaced by)--> “and” that challenge medical epistemology (each version “adds” to the current versoin rather than erase it)
•the fact that a smile can be a “natural” phenomenon does not prevent him from having wanted to comfort his family
•the “and” introduces a non-polemical challenge (an *open challenge* that opens up to other narratives) in terms of “there is always something else" = a commitment (that transforms ways of thinking and ways of feeling) [=/= Holakouee's روشنگری enlightened secularism]

the deceased:
•they invite themselves into dreams
•****they make presence of presence felt**** --> through stratagem (ruse of genre, skill in devising plans or schemes)
•they play on coincidences --> (as far as they are connected) anything can be used to make a sign <== **they are opportunists of enigma**
•they thwart all attempts to give meaning to the action
•they do have regularity ==> (it is possible to constitute) *a science of the deceased* [that fits them, one that describe them, that can interpret in the sense of guiding a reply to what they want or request] --> the deceased have:
◦an ecology: milieu is a cruicial issue for them (we sometimes witness real extinction in highly unfavorable niches)
◦an [*]ethology: (a practical science of) ***what beings do and get others to do*** = (a practical science of) **what they are capable of doing** (==> the facts that it describes should only be described using the infinitve) [Despret > Deleuze > Spinoza =/= classical ethology = behavioral biology: studies primarily specific instincts and invariants]

}<--Deleuze-- [ajayebnameh عجایب نامه:] *a practical science of the manners of being* interested in what the thing or the animal can do --> (the bestiary ajayeb's authors) made a kind of register of the powers of the animal (powers of the world) : an *alimentary regime* that is about the modes of existence (including inanimate things: the diamond, what can it do? what tests is it capable? what does it support? we define things by what they can do ==> it opens up forms of experimentation = my ajayeb, Cinderella diaries, Telegram bestiary, Despret's ethology) [=/= interested in what is called the animal classification, one will define the animal above all, whenever possible, by its essence (by what it is)]
--Latour--> reinstituting nature, *one does not learn from beings turned into zombies* (deanimated) ==> (ethology is required to) address an animal defined as non-indifferent: an animal for which the way it is addressed matters
--Despret--> [*]ethology: a practical science of the modes of interrogating and experimenting with ways of being = ****a practical science of the modes of attention**** (that are required by the ways of being of those it aims to study)

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

working on:
•[with Despret and Katie] How my “special things” belong also to others, and how in this belonging i can unlearn something about my things, call it heritage
•in my own performances, the proposal that “story” and “medium” do not need to fit... is also why my lectures don't produce similar joinings (for the audience)


every phenomena is at the same time experienced, resisted, measured, enunciated, performed, narrated

politics, poetics and affects of finitude

fossil nihilism

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

Frankenstein: an all-purpose modifier to denote technological crimes against nature--a criminal only after being left alone by his horrified creator
--Latour--> we have failed to care for our own creations : Frankenstein as a parable for political ecology

to be coextensive with...
to become compositionist: one that sees the process of human development as a process of becoming ever-more attached to nonhuman natures (=/= fallen from nature)

story of modernity:
•humankind's emancipation from nature
•***progress (forward movement of the arrow of time) = indifference to the past*** ==> “past: an archaic and dangerous confusion”
•the confidence of being able to differentiate clearly what in the past was still mixed up: facts & values

green politics ==> gloomy asceticism, a terror for trespassing nature, and diffidence toward industry, innovation, technology, and science

my work has been against the notion of “nature = a hierarchical totality”

emancipation =/= attachment =/= intimacy

*environment: what appeared when unwanted consequences came back to haunt the originators of collective modernizing actions
*environmentalism: when the unwanted consequences are suddenly considered to be a monstrosity (#apocalyptic) ==> abstain & repent --> Leo:

environmentalist logic: “precaution = abstention”

‘global warming’ is an unintended consequence (like anything in earth) <-- narrative of attachment =/= an scandal, end of the world (<-- apocalyptic narrative of emancipation, modernist myth of mastery)

pristine nature =/= our nature ~= national park: a rural ecosystem complete with post offices, well-tended roads, highly subsidized cows, and handsome villages

(Latour giving the example of theology:) ‘mastery ==> attachment’ : “the christian God gets folded into, involved with, implicated with, and incarnated into his creation.” =/= a master who is freed from dependents
}--Latour--> dominion means attachment

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

Mi You

modernization process of European societies ==> secularity ==> “religion = only one option among other ways of self-fulfilment and human flourishing”

*self-sufficient humanism has never existed on the same scale before in European societies before the Enlightenment*

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

#writing for mini-series bestiaries
inspired by the https://www.instagram.com/ajayebedidani/
1. https://www.instagram.com/p/CPYnbZnH2w3/ short episode at night in country X there is a talking apple that speeks in unknown language. character acting, location garden, animation, play with mixed CG architecture
2.


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borderline animals --in--> medieval bestiary

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

*alegorical world* --> eastern fables + easter & western animal lore + christian Physiologus [not ancient sciences?!] ~=> bestiary

Physiologus, bestiary --> popular source for sermon writers [<-- relevance for lecture performance]



[email to Mona]
bebin man ye chizi cherto pert sareham kardam. in gharare bere tu catalog alan
*working title for the lecture at Mona's project “Rat Race”:
The Pray and The Visible -- An animal escape case
*short description:
the lecture-performance approaches the idea of the animals’ “friendship” in a historical and speculative look at the anthropomorphic geography of fables from middle-south Asian bestiary till pettube.com uploads.

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

...political satire
Obeyd Zakani - mush o gorbe



some of us are woman, child, animal
(coded as a girl)

(man up! woman up! child up! animal up! etc.)


the world that is claiming me, recruiting me, ...

if you are an iranian child you would know some violences...
endangered being, endangered animal, if you are then you know what is a violent care.
*leaving unprotected*


becoming attached, making friends, putting together a family

like other anxious creatures, I can exhibit friendliness (=/= keeping my stubborn alterity intact. how much space for the utter strangeness we are allowed or able to hold?)

an iranian default position


داستانِ dastan-e


according to Heidegger:
thinking <---> thanking
complaining <---> explaining
(to explain =/=? to thank)
(to complain =/=? to think)
[explain : from Latin explain? ?(“I flatten, spread out, make plain or clear, explain”), from ex- ?(“out”) + plan? ?(“I flatten, make level”), from planus ?(“level, plain”); see plain and plane.]


afformations

sexual arousal, and its presence in freindship,
normalcy codes, and institutionalizations of friendship (--> friendship insures the modeling of all sorts of vital ethical and political dispositions)
(#harem)

pro-ject, intro-ject, and ob-ject
the things we introject,

fb

good example, bad example, etc.

if you “understand” someone you are off friendship
understanding presuposses distance and difference
friendship must include disidentification
empathy replacing understanding? (do we really want an “empathic non-understanding”? to enfold the spectator with..)
[empathic non-understanding: a relationship that gives up the self's need for constant affirmation (Laura Marks) --> pulls us instead into a “meterial understanding” of our connection with other animals] ==> challenging the ontological primacy of centers (in general and not only human center stage)
“you are thrown off by this narcisistic extension that the other appropriated by your identification has become” (Avital)
-disproportion is always present and operating



i am not sure if there is an iranian pop song we can agree to like (or to hit ‘like’)



symbolic language
attaching sounds to things/animals/species when they were not visible
(“Never ignore a sound!”)


The jungle is a social space. {biological real, disciplinary boundary making stories}


Children at age six are typically anthropomorphic

...youth “hanging out” in age-specific gangs they are “growing themselves up,” often in a milieu of violence and power

deprivation of (avuncular and) grandparental care =?=> lifelong hostility to one's parents

elderly functions have been lost in disintegration

.

ok. let's put the whip down. the point is just to mention the word whip, and since you are all well trained, it does its job. we are all trained animals, gathered here, calm and curious, want to investigate what or who is training us, whipping our asses, associating our senses with signals he or she or it sends to our bodies, being petted or molested by it...
•strong strangle-holds and deadlines


Tintin and Milou companionship (Milou is the name of Hergé's first girlfriend)
Milou's his internal monologue (addressed to the reader) until Haddock came in the series in The Crab with the Golden Claws.
Hergé always draws Snowy at particular angles
(Tintin in the Land of the Soviets)
[i am relating to my stay at Belgium]

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

which orifices are opening up to which kind of phallus?
(the phallus of confession; I open up to you, you are prior to me, you impregnate me,)

my repetition compultions


what offers me hospitality and shelter?

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

i am sorry to have to perform some iranian Tarof maneuvers in order to move or move on ironically Tarof temporarily blocks the movement
-Tarof belongs to the tropes of (less violently appropriative or even nonappropriative[?]) greeting (in strictly iranian sense,) “Greeting rellects the double movement of approach and withdrawal that issues in a passage tracking the movement in history that defines the conditions of historical existence.” (Avital)
[if you don't greet me i vanish in thin air! i am not kidding! i am also freaked out by those who pretend cool and that their arrival and existence dosn't depend on the other greeting them. or, are the already greeted by some other mechanisms that are not immediately visible to me?]
-postponing the encounter
-as a greeting ritual, Tarof at once performs and tests the reliability of social links
-Tarof has everything to do with the poetic act
-i like to open another trackline of research: does Tarof appropriates the Other? (its relations to violence?)
-Tarof-greeting establishes a relationality between... texts and historicity?
-can we understand Tarof that it originates the relation between man and the divine? ---"infinity after you!” (unendlich nach dir!)--intense intimacy of infinite belonging.
-merger of the sacred with terrestrial destinies. you are made a demigod at the moment of Tarof
-a temporary co-belonging, in possession of the Other
-in which sense Tarof offers trace of a relation to an ungraspable alterity?
-between what and how it holds separation? (Tarof's very task is to hold together the separation)
-its relations to the sacred?
-what kind of encounter takes place under the sway of the Tarof?
-repeatability of the Tarof is built into its singular occurrence
-Tarof, a *reciprocal promise* that aims to correspond to the most essential level of the other.
-the greeted is first and newly returned to his essence
-Tarof corrupts greeting
-the story of turtle and two storks in Kelile Demne (کلیله و دمنه): friedship due to adjacency and terms of nearness or farness to the other. (Tarof is activated by and sustains adjacency) --- delicate trajectories of greeting
-how do we greet a dog. the submission necessary in greeting. we submit to it when we greet the dog. hi dog. what would a practical Tarof with dog look like? do we have Tarof with animals? The Tarof's affection itself cannot be separated from a desire to dominate.

Levinas narrates a greeting, when he was in a concentration camp in germany, they call them dog. then a stray dog shows up and they call him Bobi. when they came back from the dehumanizing labor of the camp, Bobi would run to them every day and greet them. and that was what rehumanize them.

tarof and complaint
(is tarof capable of forming a protest?)

using tropes of traffic in different cultures with relation to tropes of technology, mobility and constitution of freedom. in Germany talking about ‘rail’ and ‘track’, changing tracks, shifting tracks and so on, meaning there is a predefined trajectory systematically mobilizing the individual in plain of possibilities. in US people more use cars and car can go anywhere, park or decide when and in which speed to move on, including complete autonomy on the direction and velocity of movement, accompanying the North-American notion of freedom and relation to destiny. in Iran the movement is also based on personal cars but everyone is stuck in traffic, so there is a freedom of choice implied and is initially available but then on the plain of possibilities there are all sorts of technologically situated block-roads that traffic in and hinder motility. this is also a condition of Tarof. “shoma befarmayid!” (after you!)

*Tarof might be as well a mode of resistance in order not to enter the economy of the other (--> at the mercy of the other), when they say “it's on me.”


•رودربایستی <--> ? a [در رودربایستی گیر کردن] (a --?--> حیا)


shah: one who sits while others stand --> tarof as king's behaviour (tarof is adab-e salatin?) ~~--> tasavof's tarof: takalof (=/= javan-mardi: ‘self = guest’)
Khhv0M9n5_g

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

every call to speak involves some violation and over-joy, putting oneself in a persecutory way on the line, what Sa'di calls in “Dar Favaede Khamushi” in 4th chapter of his Golestan ‘on the disadvantages of speaking’ or “On the Advantages of Silence” (Written in 1258 CE)



literate or obliterate



infinitely less violent --> that there is never absolutely nonviolent, a value infinitely small but never zero; infinidecimals
degree of violence = 1/x {while “true”: x+1}


(Augustine:)
(Because of the arbitrariness of being:) “to love" = "I want you to be”
[we need to be witnessed:]
because “we have not made ourselves,” we “stand in need of confirmation. We are strangers; we stand in need of being welcomed”

*strangers and exchangers (sarraf)


this is an artistic concern with foreign-policy


[Arendt:] (in 20th century) shifts in the terms in which we locate the ethics and values of responsibility
citizen --> refugee
[demand for clear ethical responsiveness]
*citizen: an entity assumed to occupy the secured interior zones of polity (who generates the affect and discourse of care, concern, responsibility, and rights;)
*refugee: foreign and shifting body with no home base--has become the exemplary locus for any possible cosmopolitan ethics

you feel like a foreign body until you finally get a job, love, being greeted,
(you may remain foreign until the other claims your body: the police, the lover, the employer, some microorganism that make you sick, and so on.)


(Nietzsche's view of) the friend as the future***
Holderlin asking “Wo aber sind die Freunde?” (a central complaint of ethical proportions and political consequence), (that they have not come to the place from which the poet is greeting) scattered or not yet in existence --> nature of future friendship. (is he keeping the friend necessarily remote? out of political reach? Avital's asking, accusing Holderlin of singularization)
-Graeco-Roman model of friendship
-(is there a specific Iranian model of friendship? --?--> Tarof)
-political model of friendship (based on reciprocity)

Greco-Roman --> Mediterranean World
-the “swimming-pool and spa” of the Greeks and Romans?
-wherein the cultural preferences, ideas and sensitivities of these peoples were dominant
-their urbanites and cosmopolitan elites
-mutual knowledge

politics of friendship in Kelileo Demne:
undiscovered treasures...
constantly warning of fall on the asymmetry
nonreciprocity
Kelile-o Demne is about communal forms of fragile human existence
a project of (asserted) nonalienation
-destinal velocities (the Turtle, the storks, etc.)
fictioning totality of nature, therefore, state
States of security, nature of illusion,


finite essence of friendship

(is muslim paradice and general idea of akherat in the way of finitude of friendship? what would friendship for a mojud-e okhravi mean?)
octo-paradisic systems



animal husbandry
[husband: conserve, husband, economize, economise, spouse, mate,]
[husbandry: the practice of cultivating the land or raising stock]

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

the national geography documentary crew and the editors fabulating a nature story which comes to hang around in my family's lunch table culture. the iranian mother and eating your children story of the lions. the multi species contingencies. my family culturenaturally hanged on the story of the wild nature, wildness. what does it mean for my family in their specific temporal location in tehran history? the disappearance of Gonjecshk [Sparrows being replaced by Starlings], parks [numerous stories of devastation], and the anthropocentric state logic [condition of the zoos, hostility towards domestic dogs, etc.]?
-and as is the case with my family, they are so good at changing the subject, and all i have perhaps tried to performe is the ways we can stay with the subject of discussion around our lunch tables, to stay with this particular story and not that. (althought i have been changing the subject constantly myself...)
-the absence (minimum presence) of animal in my family, and the ways the animal story circulate and live there. what is the animal holding in my family?
-stories or fables that permit wonder, or allow perhaps to approach crows or cats as creatures who could be capable of contingent cooperation or multispecies companionship. [i am referring to the video of the wild animal taking care of the baby pet, the popular video in social media that triggered the discussion about wild and domesticity during the lunch between my family members. an object that captured the dialectic of desire and disgust in my human family's response to the animal.]--> this is what I call cosmology: beings that depends on their placing within a particular cosmology. cosmology is very much alive --- [animals fitting in the visual rhetoric of web-based digital media is itself to be investigated... social relations, social animal, contemporary cosmology]
-the minimum relationship with feral cats, and rats, and pigeons (and their material environment.) and ambiguity towards them. evoking responses of affection, disgust, fear, and indifference.
-relationships between people, animals and place**** [a place as complex as Tehran's urban environment with its politics, televised operations, its ‘wilderness,’ and technologically mediated stories and rumors that populate its landscape.] --> are we having a Historical change? in epistemic principles --> what is inside and what is outside [keep in mind the historical moment in iran's political isolation. is this reflecting the exclusion of feral animals of everyday life?]
-my family was able to talk differently and find other expressions about violence in the landscape of tehran by applying the animal story (to the head and heart.) [this is also Kelile o Demneh.] the video was a heart-breaker. it had a healing moment, and their resistance to its originality as a tale of friendship is meaningful, the violence is solid and a-priori to companionship, and it supported the story of kinship instead of friendship. This story also promoted the Descartes’ beast-machine hypothesis, that the wild-being is devoid of intentions and is like a timepiece with regular motions, that the animal is object and not subject, beast-machine.
-my mother's relationship to the lions eating their offspring, octopus eating their mate, or cats licking their genitals and dogs filth scavenging--polluters of domestic space, cockroaches “belonging” to an stratum below civilized life, the “out of place” and abject owl, species sexual dispositions and different coupling, suggest difficulty in an anthropocentric expectation of alterity. animals simultaneously despised and admired --- the idea of eating your (so-called) “loved-one” (not a suitable object for affection) refutes cross-species identification according to anthropocentric standards. [windows of opportunity for cross-species bonding, domestic-wanna-be-feral story, myth of mental intention and animal flesh, irreducible heterogeneous ontologies and involvement of human-animal in multiple agencies, normal stories of becoming human, ]
-which animals are regarded as transgressive and ambiguous in Tehran? and which aren't?
-resisting any openness to the idea of feral animal that was expressed in my family, a meaningful discomfort, actually entails the fear of finding that we are not so different from animals, within the violent landscape of contemporary tehran.
-dust. fixation on clearing the dust out

this is one pattern of exchange.

(another interference:)
*In Pinocchio we have the excellent cooperation between the cat and the fox, who are forming a cunning and successful participatory alliance to trick Pinocchio: the hybrid-robot who doesn't understand his own potentialities and wants to be so-called human, the animal-betrayer. the fact that he can be tricked by the cat/fox is what making him human.
•and Geppetto, oh my god, (he is Yunnos/Jonah?) working on a project inside the fish, colloquial activity and asceticism registered with the fish interiority. Geppetto-pop is refound or saved? by the non-truth seeking robot! --> breaking his self-surveillance as a characterization of pictorial objectivism, a form of moral self-control of natural-philosophical style.
•i rather go with the animal style, the con of Gorb-e nar-e & Rubah-e makar, they are opaque and transparent at the same time
•the signifying animal, machine, and human in Pinocchio story is ridiculous!
•towards responding to “opacity” (opacity is complicated philosophical ethical issue regarding animality and humanity) --> refraction. with opacity what is at stake is our “material understanding of our connection with other animals” (Marks, touch 39)


(we are talking about) Fables of Animal Subjectivity [Kenney]

apparatuses of subject formation

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

THE prey and THE visible (both are categories of forest life survival stories. also have high stakes in iranian culture, thought, and philosophy)
--> what is important for a living self?

(bab-e) hekayat-e dusti-e kabutar o zagh o mush o bakhe o aahu o ...
بابِ / حکایت دوستی کبوتر و زاغ و موش و باخه و آهو و ...
[everyone?]
[the story of the friendship of these animals; the quality, properties, and pitfalls of relation]
•what is (re)activating the *imaginary friend*? (is it really fully on shut-down?) ---> trap to abstract thought? ---> this ‘abstract thought’ is dangerous for “sadness” to get lost in it, but it is amazing for “joy”
•how much we need sadness?

why jackal is so persistent and play-full (full of “plays”) in Kelile o Demne's bestiary?


bird people
,
fox people

,


arbab-e اربابِ --> dar bab-e در بابِ
(let's do this conversion, we are not “arbab”/master of the story nor ethics or anything else, we like to create “dar bab-e”: doors/openings into different possible path ways)
(it is about teller not fully understanding the story)



‘shekar’ [شکار prey] and ‘ashkar’ [آشکار visible], two entities in play, like the game of stone-paper-scissors, a link in our shared literature that relates the perceptible to the subject of hunt. in a discourse of friendship and enmity, the visible anticipating itself as target for violence, becomes meaningful when we approach it in a game-theoretic-semiotic linkage, relating and tying together issues of voyeurism, surveillance, violence, media and mediation, and predation in poetic itineraries.

[business] friendliness, تعارف Tarof and greetings [and its artificial inseminations] (sometimes) is it covering up or masking really predatory behaviors(?)


and in Kelile o Demne,

کلیله و دمنه Kelile o Demne (i am becoming more convinced that) is (all) about the phenomenology of *friendship and the *contract


Sa'di is the theoretician of friendship (“mojaverat” مجاورت) and Kelileo Demne is the theoretician of “sherarat” (شرارت villainy, felony) saying that the closeness of different subjects is catastrophic [--> proper differences between kinds and subjects.] Sa'di is writing golestan گلستان and bustan بوستان at the time of the Mongols threat---it is the news of the Mongols coming and we know about the velocities of news can penetrate within the thick walls of any city. Sa'di is theorizing proximity based on “mohabat” (محبت love, Liebe and kindness), he assembles a setting of ‘garden’ for the coming of Mongols army. Kelileo Demne's project is pessimist pragmatism, mobilizing ethics in a milieu of violence and power.



---> the story of birds entrapped escape away with the cage
---> the story of cat and mouse project
---> bat and owl
---> scorpion and..


Shakespearean villain <== nature [<-- i prefer Ursula, evil corporally located]
modern villain <== power struggle


کلیله و دمنه Kelile Demne is full of disastrous laws of encounter and encounters of law
a sort of a metaphysics of presence (imposing and projecting to and with animals) that regulates the possibility of a pedagogical encounter
•no mediated forms of presence and so on
•nobody breaking the semiotic rules
•what subject-supposed-to-know
•what blocks cordial disposition and animal amity?
•what genital lickings are welcomed or unwelcomed and discouraged or abandoned? and so on


to read Kelile Demne not as something that works as legitimator

reading and greeting


to form (an) intention


all that anthropomorphism performs and withholds on and with animality

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

[Rickels]
(my) animal-findings and fairy-tale associations

if dogs communicate through their trainability cats redirect lines of communication through play. the dog waits and watches, the cat looks and looks, which when is your turn to be looked at, can be therapeutic or unnerving.

meeting the cat half-way

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

[Avital]

the greeting ‘hello’, the initiatory and inaugural moment of our encounter

the gift sabotaging the freedom of the subject to receive greeting or offering greeting
a gift that becomes a curse for the person,

who has the civic stability to refuse a greeting?
the finantialy challenged and the greeting



explore friendship as a crucial modeling of justice?

configuration of encounter

It doesn't always have to be science fiction, risking the wrong blend and watching the uncontrollable spill of consequences --> hook up friends

friendship, as Avital practices it, should often involve triangulation and the drama of departure?

I found myself (also) tempted to reduce her/him/you to sameness,

“meant to be,” relying on a kind of metaphysical latency.

invasion with little violation(?)

(In rhetoric:) citation = apostrophe [address to an absent or imaginary person, calling to the other]

(i am late. i am transed late. translation and trans-relations has everything to do with latency. )


Avital: For Bataille, friendship is part of the sovereign operation and is linked to reading.

apostrophe (citation) for Derrida is the possibility of postmortem discourse --> memory, acts of bringing back, recalling

can we take out no insurance policies to safeguard thinking or writing or building?

(Lyotard's) différend: a dispute or difference that cannot be resolved by the cognitive or linguistic resources we have at hand --(indicating rather)--> a rupture in the presentation of testimony (~ litigate)

something you could turn your tattooed back on


(#my work on [post-feminist] harem)
(companionship and sexuality and installations of community) --> The Inoperative Community [Bataille, Blanchot, Nancy]
(how to) create community wherever I go?
(establish relationships: humor, kindness, attention, reworking, “re-”, festivity, moderate arousal, silliness, playfulness, support,)
learning making a “fictive kin group in training” (how to learn to notice each other? how to learn to be in the same game?)
to insisted on community without relying on transcendence =/= communion
(community without illusions about itself)
a community that is self-annulling but rigorous (rigorously perverse)
(--the duties of the survivor)
-this is about creating convivial spaces (=/= urban design ideology)
(to set up around) work =/= (bodies of) knowledge
(let's make this an obligation:) to create an atmosphere in which interesting mistakes can get made
let's bring a huge amount of material what we get into trying to digest
--> [an effect of being in Europe ==>] is harem about having a space/time to claim as my own? [it can never be?] an actual space which i can dream of and re-create and hope toward? retrieving a mythic place of origin [that cannot be rebuilt]?
•*the harem girls my ancestors* --> Cinderella

=/= longstanding tradition of seeing the female experience as ‘inherently’ painful (as in the pathos of The Handmaids Tale TV series)

(#harem Manifesto)?

..telos of anything {in apass, my bow and arrow? (=/= a generalized claim) --> it was about knowing the energy of each other and trusting the honesty and coherence of directional postures and responsive movements. [#harem] (*) one's game might be geared to build success according to one's goals, but unless the game engages the other, it is worthless. (* it is about) learning how to wit. (*) my bow and arrow in use, my tropes and abstractions, what are they good for if others don't play/engage with them? to recontextualize ‘method’ and methodology. (*) “incommensurable tacit knowledges of diverse communities of practice” --> “communication” across irreducible difference (where “method” is not what matters most;) (game of) “situated partial connection” ==> subjects
(not always the human language is the medium) two-way conversation =/= naming (~= intention-laden and consciousness-ascribing linguistic practice) --> sometimes not God, logos, or sujet suppose savoir, rather a dog makes you (in whose image?) --> this is about making our categorical labor harder}

it is about a politics disinterested in: self-identity, realization of intention, transcendence, ‘sweet and nice “feminine” worlds and knowledges free of the ravages and productivities of power’ (Haraway 2003), cultural relativism, master-slave discourse,

**mutuality is mutability is contingent is historic** (=/= reciprocity, mo'amele be mesl معامله به مثل)



(things to vandalize:)
•capital claims
•mystical foundations of authorship
•legally protected stores of knowledge
•desire for legitimacy
•control freak of the possibilities of comprehension
•narcissistic comfort of secured sense
•geometrical optics of reflection


(Burroughs:) “steal everything in sight.” (most authors transvaluate theft back into property --> ideologies of “influence”)

narcissistic reappropriation of/as friendship : operate a reduction of the friend to the same or to the friend as other
mystified oneness of the Volk (Germanic trope)
the desired erasure of difference

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

friendship in Qur'an:

[44:41] The day on which a friend shall not avail (his) friend aught, nor shall they be helped, (apocalypse is defined when friendship ends)

[42:9] Or have they chosen protecting friends besides Him? But Allah, He (alone) is the Protecting Friend. He quickeneth the dead, and He is Able to do all things. (God is jealous of friends)

[70:10]
And no familiar friend will ask a question of his friend
And friend shall not ask of friend

[32:4] ... Ye have not, beside Him, a protecting friend or mediator.
[29:22] & [42:31] Ye cannot escape in the earth, for beside Allah ye have no protecting friend nor any helper. (God has no friends. You only friends with him.)

[22:13] ...evil friend (friendship with the evil)
[57:15] ...your abode is the fire; it is your friend and evil is the resort.
[19:45] “O my father! I fear lest a Penalty afflict thee from (Allah) Most Gracious, so that thou become to Satan a friend.”
(evil and friend coming adjoint more than once)

[25:28] Alas for me! Ah, would that I had never taken such an one for friend!

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

(mode-identifying signs falsified)--(unconsciously?)
manipulative simulation of friendliness
\\



(in Germany) we need ‘detours’ and taking detours =/= having end-goals

we are not built to handle peace --> existence is perhaps ok, but coexistence is a real problem
coexistence includes all sorts of aggressions

burdened with a bird name
(birds of Attar)

20 minutes to propose some itineraries

all the different ways we come to life. (some even through violation, being shaken awake, libidinal surge, thrill, etc.) --> the delusion to desiring nonviolence (whenever there is desire there is violence)
wanting, desire <--> violence
(نیاز niaz <--> azar آزار)

which organs of peacefulness are we resisting?

{punishment, wanting to be punished}
delivery (not ‘from’ but) ‘of’ punishment
(for Varinia: what about the people feeling guilting and destructive who rush to the judge or the penal system confessing and begging for punishment? --where is the figure of persecutor located at her practice? if at all addressed.)
(@Sana: how do i deal with helplessness? the Hilflosigkeit is primal, [the start-up engine of psychoanalysis, powerlessness and power-failure.] --> (then let's ask) where does it hurt? in the eyes? ears? --for Varinia it hurts on the neck)
-and despair
-and distress

when I punish you...

i cannot say if our encounter is specifically Levinasian

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

[Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert]

‘natural’:
-scientist's site of fieldwork
-naturalist's site of biological conservation
-entrepreneur's site of capital accumulation
-poacher's site of prey
-soldier's site of refuge
--> geographies of human struggle, politics, colonialism, capitalism, intervention,

what is shapping in these sites (science labors, natural parks, pig and chicken farms, mobile phones, etc.) human-animal relations (in their widely divergent kinds)?
(technology, ethics, welfare and politics in Tehran)

the ways my mother thinks about the diffission of animals’ bodily wastes beyond the bounds of their immediately present: dog's poop, etc. --> spatial externality of animals (--"they contaminate!”)

in the case of mobile phone animal meme, the human-animal relation does not operates solely through the physical proximity of humans and animals, but rather a wider geography, and networks the interiority of Tehran domestic environments.
-as the house becomes cleaner, the public domain becomes more feral, and the animal more contagious, and the proximity more virtual, and the cross-species relationships and pictural,
-questions of the vital, the dangerous, and the wild (in tehran)

“[...]animals, especially dead ones, enter centrally into what humans can themselves be and do in the world.” (Cockburn)

i am trying to establish an anthropological, sociological and psychological investigations in this matter, calling for a ‘cultural animal geography’ that focuses on the complex entanglings of human-animal relations with space, place, location, environment and landscape. ~-> topology(s) {it means that spaces and places involved make a difference to the very constitution of the relations in play}
[Tehran: wilderness ~ public ~ non-domesticity]

...differing peoples in differing periods and worldly contexts***

societies in a host of settlements, fields, farms, factories, imaginary, literary, psychological and virtual spaces (--> and how animalhuman is socially defined)

technologies of human orderings : telegram? [encountering all kinds of inventiveness that go on cross-species (human, animal, story, image, media), the kind of semiotic work]

*Space* (de Certeau) : A place (lieu) is the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence. It thus excludes the possibility of two things being in the same location (place.) The law of the ‘proper’ rules in the place: the elements taken into consideration are beside one another, each situated in its own ‘proper’ and distinct location, a location it defines. A place is thus an instantaneous configuration of positions. It implies an indication of stability.
--> space as the ‘scheme of things’ --> species-identifying
=/= imaginal space, animal space, memory, dream, etc.

‘species-identifying’ (classification) in:
•pre-Neolithic totemic societies (Shepard 1993)
•biblical classifications of the different beasts (Leviticus: Sibley 1995)
•ancient and medieval ‘great chain of being’ thinking (Lovejoy 1936)
•Linneaus's Systema naturae
•tabular representations of the natural world (Frangsmyr 1983; Spary 1996)
•...

understandings of what comprises an animal is different in each case.
what should be interested?

“(elaborating on Shepard,) Ingold (1994) suggests that hunter-gatherers generally view the distinction between humans and animals as permeable and easily crossed, unlike what is taken as read in much Western science and philosophy.”

when/how you are persuaded to portray yourself as the relevant ‘expert’ in whatever field?

who are the legitimate spokespersons for animals? once Attar, and now biology sci.
(‘the modern constitution’ is as guilty as mysticism's literacy)

...and that strong human sense of the proper place of animals (which they should occupy physically) --> material-conceptual (double) placement ...(‘scheme of things’ [ajayeb] --> animals supposed to be found in the non-discursive spaces and places of the world) (or on the television)
-Said: ‘imaginative geography’, geographical ‘othering’
-overlappings that we find in telegram social media tehran --> what kinds of ‘animal’ (which animalities) are at stake there in the mobile phone's interface?

In recent years zoos have reinvented themselves as ‘arks’


animals categorically embodied ‘meaty beings,’ and how they are usually “out of place” in the the immediate locality made in Tehran

animals are very good at forging their own beastly places, ‘other’ spaces of that of the human
(this is not about ‘territory’)


who “can” think and act in the world?
who has the “ability” to prompt change?
[my apass research project is in a sence *contemplating the agency* and speculating *relocating qualities* ~-> (re)configuration of the world]

cultural cross-codings has always been constructed between ‘some’ humans and ‘some’ animals

*the “source” of agency, coined in Europe(?) from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries onwards: self-awareness, intention, thought and language --> properties of “consciousness”
(--> History of Consciousness department in the Humanities Division of the University of California, Santa Cruz. #entities that started to make decision deep in the ocean)
(--> ‘actor-network theory’ ANT; Callon, Law, Latour, Serres. #the key difference here lies in the historical uses and mediations of objects, for humans objects are employed to solidify social bond. ANT sees agency emerging as an effect generated
and performed in configurations of different materials. Latour's work to relocate qualities.)
(--> New Materialism; radical constructionism, all world is a poem)
(--> nonrepresentational theory; Anderson, Harrison, Stewart; critique become vitalist: to watch grass grow, or curious and experimental to face an overbundance of things to be described or imagined; concepts are lived; the subject is present as witness to the moment in which some worlding is about to disclose itself in some form or event. the result is a subject attached to worlds throwing together in a sensory refrain, a literally unbelievable image, or a muscle of sociality or belief. theory: drawn through writing into the ways that people and things venture out into reals. a world in the present tense is always other than its representation [<-- another argument for #excess]. nonrepresentational writing : *a phenomenal method of attending and composing* =/= epiphenomenal: an expression of knowledge already garnered انبار from scholarship. to spin out of critical thinking's bad habits: the prizing of prefabricated good objects over bad objects.)
(--> Singh, Anand; agency as a threshold of life with its own immanent forms of movement and flux, studying spirits and shifts in intensity)
(--> )
(--> )


(the dangerous and bizzar idea of) a pure ‘human’ society


‘anthropomorphism’ actually ‘underestimates our humanity,’ in that the ‘anthropos’ and the ‘morphos’ together mean both that which has human shape and that which gives shape to humans (Philo + Wilbert > Latour)
technomorphism, zoomorphism, ...

anthropocentrism of the standard anthropomorphism critique --> human-referenced starting-point


trophies, stuffed parts, drawings
urine, faeces and other dirts

feral =/= wild =/= tame =/= feral

in-between animal-findings and animals finding

appropriate places of animals: in zoo or animations

(the 2016 film Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is about proper zoology and not animal epistemology. here what comes after “Find Them” is crucial.)
(the developement moral identities and psychological interiorities for Pixar's human teller in anthropomorphist films such as Ratatouille.)
-we need to imagine a new animal geography

*territory: “...sites of a completed cycle of parentage and exchanges [...] spaces of insurmountable reciprocity.” (Baudrillard)
(is Baudrillard sentimentalizing animal territoriality? and giving them ‘psychic life’?)

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

[Michael Woods]
...through representation an entity becomes ‘immutable mobiles’ (Latour) that allow political debate to take place by presenting to decision-makers convincing representations of things which they have not directly experienced. (--> Hollywood)

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

[Avital]
the maternally contacting child is menaced
it is the mother who call(ed) first
mother and child, each the absolute hostage of the Other

to face the immense, faceless Someone

the nature of our encounter is on a timer
ask for subtitle if I go foreign for you. (i might go foreign for you)
in nerves sense, i am pushed and persecuted by the need to quickly tell you everything that I know ---> the pedagogical instant -----> i don't think one can proceed slowly enough and pull the break in the age of rapid and fast food and acceleration.


our verbal velocities could reach no one in a way that would truly mark or unhinge the brutal protocols of lived reality... ?

...who took no prisoners (...who can truly say that?)

(I also? take pleasure in) the injurious effects of language : words are bodies that can be hurled at the other, they can land in psyche or soma --> manifesto

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

(as a reader) friend is a partner in crime

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

Sa'di's scene[...]