[...]rmances are about a thinking excessing out of syntax. not all argumentation is made in syntax(= how a sentence must end), and turn it into a skill of nonsyntactical pragmatic language craft tradition, advocating the *exceedingly agential* world ~= there is always ‘a whole lot is going on']

the iterative and fractal quality of sentences
partial connections (of distinct entities) ~= analogy
analogy allows one part contaminate systematically another part and vice versa

(Haraway on feminism)
feminist theory is especially good in getting at in particular ways doctrines of nature's work to enforce ways of life on women, on people of color, on the enslaved, on those who do not possess the qualities of mind and self-possession, on those who are on the marked categories to the unmarked. the feminist have been particularly good at getting how genre works. gender, in this regard. [...] --> that female by nature is committed to the species and the male by nature committed to transcendence.
[our inherited binaries -->] formulations of nature: executive/non-executive organs, immanence/transcendence, maintenance/novelty, catabolic(foru-sakht فرو ساخت, sukht سوخت)/anabolic(tarkib-saz ترکیب ساز) functions, ,,
-in Darwin's writing, non-theological account of diversity on earth, we find both interrupters and continuers of these particular notions of nature

the question of model, what is the model for what, what is similar to what?
****how do we do comparative thinking? comparative thinking depends on similarity  judgment and difference judgment, and depends on good-enough models, and depends on a certain kind of rhetorical work of *crafting tropes*
 --> figures of similarity/difference:
  by similarity, or
  by contiguity, or
  by part-whole, or
  ...
(this is ‘building’ *among* us)
(how do i decide to compare two things? Shirin and Ophelia, etc)

models are built rhetorics
history of models
the power of models is that they are not the ‘same as’

circuits of meaning and power that flow through (materials and bodies)

mondial ~? situated knowledge
the idiom ‘situated’ makes people think ‘local’ (instead of global)
by situated she means the ‘knot’ which always means some place and somewhere, but that someplace/somewhere could be in materiality a distributed digital network. the situated is always open. the point is that it is not nowhere and no place.


epidemic friendly

the flow of disease are major international research matter

eco-feminism, veganism is for Haraway is genocidal position, a position that advocates violence, a position dedicated to the destruction of ways of life and living beings including animals, [a position that] *concise all working animals to being nothing but evidence of the des[...]

[...]ocuses on politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating in our power-sensitive conversations, and what does it mean to become accountable and responsible for one's own noninnocent translations. We begin with her essay on the 2nd of February and talk about each of our practices in particular continuing on the 9th.


she wants to re-figure, not disavow, objectivity

“story-tellers exploring what it means to be embodied in high-tech worlds” =/= technophobia

technophilia is narcissistic : the notion that man invented himself and that man is involved in some kind of narrative of technological escalation whereby the objectification of human intentionality in the world has finally surpassed itself, and man has achieved self-objectification in a machine that will finally name him obsolescence as he is and destroy him in a technological apocalypse figured by the computer. (Haraway) [we need better dog stories =/= (Iron Man:) man, made in the image of a vanished god, takes on superpowers in his secular-sacred ascent, only to end tragic]
“...man making himself (by realizing his intentions in his tools) yet again in the Greatest Story Ever Told.” (your artwork doesn't need to be this kind of story!)
or the Darwinist tale of “Mitochondrial Eve in a neocolonial Out of Africa”
we need stories of companion species, the “very mundane and ongoing sort of tale, one full of misunderstandings, achievements, crimes, and renewable hopes.” (Haraway, La Guin, Tessa Farmer,)

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

[Haraway on Ihde]

...technologies are not mediations--that is, something in between us and another bit of the world--rather, technologies are organs, full partners, in what Merleau-Ponty called “infoldings of the flesh.”

infolding =/= interface
•“What happens in the folds is what is important.”
•Interfaces are made out of interacting grappling devices.
•the infolding of others to each other is what makes up the knots we call beings or, perhaps better, following Bruno Latour, things.

“Technologies are always compound. They are composed of diverse agents of interpretation, agents of recording, and agents for directing and multiplying relational action. These agents can be human beings or parts of human beings, other organisms in part or whole, machines of many kinds, or other sorts of entrained things made to work in the technological compound of conjoined forces.”

*animal (in zoological terminology) : a composite of individual organisms, an enclosure of zoons, a company of critters infolded into a one.

compound = composite + enclosure
camera: the technological eye --> philosophical pretension and self-certainty (=/= Christian's camera)
-- camera as a black-box with which to register pictures of the outside world in a representational, mentalist semiotic economy
[...]

[...]being all too ready to find complexities, )
•to become relaxed about predigested version of ‘this is what ajayeb is about’ (or Tasavof, etc.) --> ‘what is going on there’ (in ajayeb) is so built-in to ideologies of many kinds (of progress, deep ecology, of history, and so on)
•to build a little taxonomy (in apass)
•working to give up the series of self-certainties around secularism ==> giving ways to talk to the religious ones : getting to grasp what the world looks like in faith-based communities (=/= check-list of dogma)
•category thinking: get into differential liveliness (with all sorts of inequalities:) *who gets parsed how* [#archive, #articulation, #storytelling] (and thinking about what it means to take up these relationships in cultures saturated with science and technology)


Xiri was doing her research with categories of victim and opressor, and now they suddenly disappeared from her work. that category change or vocabulary change was suspiciously effortless


*remembering is an extremely creative practice (-note to Hoda-)
memories are like ecotone کناربوم (transition area between two adjacent ecosystems)


#(very important concept partly shaped by practices of Darwin into our lives:) “collect” --> lies (necessary?)
the frenzy of the 1700 of surveying nature and collecting speciment ==> bioinfomatic
‘collect’ promises nontransformation
--> metaphors of archive, information-intense ways of thinking about life on earth

*“demonstration” coined by science

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

(with Scout Calvert) the ways the digital apparatuses are working, and the kinds of tensions and creativities between the cyber infrastructures and the other kinds informational management discourses displace other book discourses *** --> categories explode in library practice
[Calvert donig brilliant discourse analysis of library sciences --> has direct impact on practices of reading#, different kinds of knowers]
techno-biblio-capital: techno-capital and library practices embedded in each other -->{ [*]technology: assemblages of people, computers, software, discourses, techniques and workarounds that make them function; [*]capital: a social arrangement in which buyers of labor power are entitled to profits and the sellers of labor power to wages and all the effects entailed in that arrangement; [*]techno-capital: techniques, discourse and technologies used to naturalize and derive capital from information and information technologies}
*curiosity = a small and local kind of *freedom[= agency within constrain ==enabling==> skillful meanings], curiosity resists control and has the power to defeat one's favourite self-certainties, can also be commodified for consumer culture specializing in providing private pleasure,
techno-capital objectivism: (neutrality of) collection developemnt and f[...]

[...]e and Kant) that there is some kind of dotted line somewhere on a thing, saying “cut here” --so he concludes: “things are themselves, but we can't point to them directly.” =/= nonrepresentational theory, Stewart is much more useful. we can see Morton's taste for (a masculine) sublime in modeling his hyperobjects

flat ontology: there is hardly any difference between a person and a pincushion. and relationships between them, including causal ones, must be vicarious (نيابتى) and hence aesthetic in nature


(no) realism that only bases its findings on “ontic” data

scientific discoveries are necessarily based on a decision about what real things are

*disaster [ontologic] taking place against a stable background [ontic]*

causality after Hume and Kant : causality as a feature of phenomena, rather than things in themselves ==> humans are not totally in charge of assigning significance and value to events that can be statistically measured
entities that become visible through post-Humean and post-Kantian statistical causality --> anthropogenic global warming

causal factoid


humiliators [there is no center and we don't inhabit it]:
•Copernicus
•Darwin
•Freud (displacing the human from the very center of psychic activity)
•Marx (displacing human social life with economic organization)
•Heidegger
•Derrida (displacing the human from the center of meaning-making)
•Nietzsche
•Deleuze and Guattari
•
~= there is no edge =/= (film Lucy or Neil Tyson series suggesting that) there is an edge (of time to see everything perfectly), in some (privilaged) transcendental sphere of pure freedom, Lucy's chair literally sitting a VIP box beyond the edge --> anthropocentrism: the idea of a privilaged transcendental sphere
Kant --> (although we are limited in finitude) our transcendental faculties are at least metaphorically floating in space beyond the edge of the universe --> #milieu #tasavof #sufism


...هزار و یک hezaro yek
universe of trillions of finitudes


[*]thing: a rift between what it is and how it appears


(Morton > Herman:) human consciousness wants *to preserve knowledge as a special kind of relation to the world quite different from the relations that raindrops and lizards have to the world* (<-- so dangerous and so difficult to resist [<-- next level of situated knowledges] -->) also want to claim that the very status of [his] utterance is somehow special <== (human) ‘thought’ is given a unique ability to negate and transcend immediate experience
(claims that the human doesn't exist ==>) elevating the strucure of human ‘thought’ to the ontological pinnacle سرمنزل

everything (such as modernity) banks on a certain forms of ontology and epistemology to[...]

[...]an be established


contrasts:
*reference chain*
*reproduction*

(Latour use of the term) *contrast* = mode of existence

immutable mobiles: to reach something far away through long arrays of instruments, you need to make sure that *necessities and constants are transported* with as little transformation as possible ==> to “reach” those entities

geometry, mathematical entities, inscriptions of all sorts ==> carry heavy-duty immutable mobiles

(Hoda's immutable mobiles are: [?])

[*]matter = highly elaborated, historically dated, and anthropologically situated hybrids***
(=/= ‘transportation of indisputable necessities through chains of cause and effect’ <-- a category mistake)

(for physicist:) “the ways we know the world = the ways in which the world behaves”
(less for chemist)
(not at all for engineer)


([in a way my work has been about investigating vectors and] *directions*) from knower to what is to be known

the beings of ajayeb face lots of causes and lots of effects


metaphysical consequences of evolutionary theory


***(Latour's positive veiw on) to be a Darwinian: you have to abandon the notion that all of those ‘organisms’ rest in ‘nature’ --> [*]organim: a hybrid production of representation & reference


*the widespread ideology of the *blind watch maker* : a blind cause acting from behind and reaching the optimum haphazardly
(has substituted the ‘mere transportation of indisputable necessities’ for *the risks taken by individual organisms to perpetuate, sustain, and reproduce themselves*)
&
*the widespread ideology of the *intelligent designer* :an intelligence dragging organisms towards the optimum by some predefined plans
}--> both are grounded in the *ideology of making and mechanism* ==>
•organisms are erased as individual actors
•organisms are transformed into the carriers if indisputable necessities
--> both tried to save individual organims from their apparent meaninglessness by adding to them an overarching narrative recited by an otherworldly divinity

(‘necessities’ are often imported)


(Assmans's) *mosaic division*
(=/= a sort of relaxed attitude towards truth)
divisions ahad never beed asked before whether or not they were the “true” ones. they could be added to one another, translated into one another, piled on top of one another for additional safety --✕--> *contesting the claims to existence of all divinities but one*
==> a connection between the question (irrelevant until then) of worship and a question of an absolute (=/= relative) difference between true and false

[*]iconoclast: “if they are made, then they cannot be real”

monotheism ==allowed=[...]

[...]ary time (at the level of the planet earth) --> naturalcultural species
2. face-to-face time (at the scale of individual lifetimes) --> mortal bodies
3. historical time (at the scale of decades, populations, nations)

to tell (detailed love and training) stories at these levels

this is about distributed agencies in “layers of locals and globals,”

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

my interests lies really with the ecological cosmologies in my neighborhood (iran, old, middle east, far east, past, present,)
that is why i was interested in the birds of Attar, pig of san'an, wolf of the pigs, crow of the partridge, and so on.
so things take positions in our bigger semiotic material world, there is never just a life animal on the plate, the chicken has become killable first through linguistic interpretive representation network of semiotic relations. so my question in the birds performance was that how the excess of meaning is related in actuality to the removal of corporeality in Attar's non-birdness Simurgh (سیمرغ) till the chicken in khoresh-e morgh (خورشت مرغ).

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

[Scott Gilbert]

(all organic beings have been formed on two general laws, according to Darwin:)
(1) unity of type and (2) conditions of existence --> inorganic? fire?
natural selection --> adaptation --> conditions of existence
embryonic homologies --> unity of type
==> “descent with modification” (or decent modifications)
[(embryology =/=) ‘fire’ could transform matters, “change” their class, their type and its unity --> “parvaneh sho!” (پروانه شو) Rumi مولوی wants embryology undermined?]

construct phylogenies
(phylogeny : branching out evolutionarily)


‘Haeckel claimed that Darwin's ideas included the progressive development of species. “Development and progress” was what characterized evolution. The explicit association of evolution with particular political, religious, and racial views became the hallmark of Haeckel's career. Haeckel proposed a causal parallelism between the embryological development and phylogeny. His “Biogenetic Law” that “Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny” was based on the idea that the successive (and to him, progressive) origin of new species was based on the same laws as the successive and progressive origin of new embryonic structures. Just as the earlier stages of human development developed into the later stages, so earlier species evolved into the later ones. Natural selection would eventually get rid of the earlier species. (In the Welträtsel, Haeckel [1899] would also proclaim that the more evolved humans [i.e., the Aryans] would out-compete and eliminate the more primitive races.) To Haeckel, the evolution of the animal kingdom was the same as individual development not only because the laws behind each were the same but also because the [...]

[...]sted in the birds of Attar, pig of san'an, wolf of the pigs, crow of the partridge, and so on.
so things take positions in our bigger semiotic material world, there is never just a life animal on the plate, the chicken has become killable first through linguistic interpretive representation network of semiotic relations. so my question in the birds performance was that how the excess of meaning is related in actuality to the removal of corporeality in Attar's non-birdness Simurgh (سیمرغ) till the chicken in khoresh-e morgh (خورشت مرغ).

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

[Scott Gilbert]

(all organic beings have been formed on two general laws, according to Darwin:)
(1) unity of type and (2) conditions of existence --> inorganic? fire?
natural selection --> adaptation --> conditions of existence
embryonic homologies --> unity of type
==> “descent with modification” (or decent modifications)
[(embryology =/=) ‘fire’ could transform matters, “change” their class, their type and its unity --> “parvaneh sho!” (پروانه شو) Rumi مولوی wants embryology undermined?]

construct phylogenies
(phylogeny : branching out evolutionarily)


‘Haeckel claimed that Darwin's ideas included the progressive development of species. “Development and progress” was what characterized evolution. The explicit association of evolution with particular political, religious, and racial views became the hallmark of Haeckel's career. Haeckel proposed a causal parallelism between the embryological development and phylogeny. His “Biogenetic Law” that “Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny” was based on the idea that the successive (and to him, progressive) origin of new species was based on the same laws as the successive and progressive origin of new embryonic structures. Just as the earlier stages of human development developed into the later stages, so earlier species evolved into the later ones. Natural selection would eventually get rid of the earlier species. (In the Welträtsel, Haeckel [1899] would also proclaim that the more evolved humans [i.e., the Aryans] would out-compete and eliminate the more primitive races.) To Haeckel, the evolution of the animal kingdom was the same as individual development not only because the laws behind each were the same but also because the entire animal kingdom was an individual. Here, he was harking back to the views of the Naturphilosophen of the previous century. In other words, the development of advanced species was seen to pass through stages represented by adult organisms of more primitive species.’ (The morphogenesis of evolutionary developmental biology)

inter-cellular digestion
•the evolution of new features was based on changes in developmental stages, not in adult astages (--> that's why the developmental stage is so important, because mutations happen --> work with children)
[...]

[...] is ?) relevant knowledge


[Stengers] (wonder has everything to do with stories,) wonder incites storytelling
1 --> importance of narratives in our knowledge-making practices
2 --> politically robust narratives (that world us differently)


can the ontological be addressed without the ethical?
(feminism's answer is ‘no’) --> a materialism that is immediately ontological, epistemological, and ethical (=/=? Delanda's materialism)

ajayeb (+ my work on it ?) is a pragmatic project to fabricate a different kind of knowledge assemblage (Stengers > Kenney > Sina)
=/= (21st century) logics of capitalism
=/= toxic categories of modernity


i need (to learn) an inviting rhetoric


(Roughgarden)
([focus narrowly on] sexual selection =/=) social selection : “...selection for, and in the context of, the social infrastructure of a species within which offspring are produced and reared”

co-parenting, animal friendships, same-sex sex, non-reproductive sex, and other reproductive social behaviors

*physio-semiotics: physical traits that have social functions, that communicate to other members of the social group

(Darwin sexual selection : claims that in humans, men are more jealous about sexual infidelity of their partners, whereas woman are more jealous of emotional infidelity. their theories based on a sexual conflict model, is that this is an evolutionary adaptation that helps males ensure that they raise their own offspring and helps females ensure that the males will stick around to provide for their children.) --> is there another story? (this is a speculative + empirical question) --> multiple evolutionary stories are possible

(Roughgarden demands) a more rigorous relationship between narrative and evidence (=/= prevalence of studies where the “[raw] data are mined to effect an appearance of the confirmation of [a single] hypothesis”) ----she returns to the most potent fables of sexual selection and re-tells them --> these new stories make real species-shaping difference by contributing to the social infrastructure within which offspring are produced and reared

***how many plots can the data hold?*** --> pragmatic---the answer is many not infinite [Strathern: “more than one but less than many"]
-practices of *doing accuracy* --> storytellers
relationships between story and evidence --> an invitation to invent new forms of accuracy that might be unfamiliar or awkward but could be epistemologically narrativelly politically generative (Kenney)
(sometimes: story ==> data) the work to craft just one good story from the chaos of the data is (not only political challenge @Jassem, but also) an epistemological challenge



(Lynn Margulis)
*endosymbiosis: the theory that eukaryotic cells evolved by incorp[...]

[...]manities, animal studies, queer theory,) humanities scholars have represented their matters of care with an aesthetic (and therefore political) commitment to narrating stories with an emphasis on the relationality among agencies, forces, phenomena, and entities usually kept separate, in the background, or out of the story altogether (lde a Bellacasa)
--> redistribution of agencies
political stake ==> aesthetic tactics

poet laureates of queer animacies
“malek-o-sho'ara-e atefiate mahsus-e edrakat-e zende” (ملک الشعرا عاطفیات محسوس ادراکات زنده)

(animacy: Usually, animacy has to do with how alive or how sentient a noun is. In general, personal pronouns have the highest animacy, the first-person being the highest among them. Other humans follow them, and animals, plants, natural forces such as winds, concrete things, and abstract things follow in this order; however, according to the spiritual beliefs of the people whose language possesses an animacy hierarchy, deities, spirits, or certain types of animal or plant may be ranked very highly in the hierarchy.)

**animacy stories --> multitude of agencies
(what are the contemporary ajayeb animacy stories?


(neo-Darwinian's) standard evolutionary accounts of encounter between species (in terms of “sexual deception”) ==> individuation, competition, efficiency --> capitalist and military values (, economic tropes)
==> disenchanted “ecologies, populated by blind, reactive automations”

evolutionary stories =/= involutionary stories --> organisms become *involved* with one another's lives

(involution, pich-dar پیچدار, act or an instance of enfolding or entangling, an inward curvature or penetration; a function, transformation, or operator that is equal to its inverse, i.e. which gives the identity when applied to itself.)

“mimetic relations among plants and animals take shape in the thickness of the space between bodies, where affect and sensations are *transduced* through *excitable* tissues” (Myers & Hustak)--> affective ecologies, intimate encounters, articulate orchids


(on ajayeb,) ***creating sticky new attachment sites for thinking (human/nonhuman relations)***
###learning multiple writing tactics:
•thick description
•refiguring
•reading against the grain
•citational poaching (shekar-e gheir-mojaz شکار غیر مجاز) (also, i am trying to quote Muhammad, Sa'di, ajayeb, the bird sometimes, and something is called in)
•speculative fiction
•
==> to move/draw myself and my reader into my matter of care


project of *narrative remediation*, to re-story, to stage matters of care differently

(biological) ‘resilience’ is a tricky thing to narrate in ‘relational worlds’ (=/= military world) abounding with transf[...]

[...]ing with others
•characterized by great cautious and wariness
•reluctant to give information owing to caution or suspicion

بو
-treating smell as indicating an unsettled situation
-inadvertent stench of dead bodies disrupts the composed mental image of the ideal corpse within [...] funereal practices
*odors introduce terror or the terror of the uncontained within the social* (Neveeda > Siegel 1983)


double-edgeed prospect

common curse

“in the riparian contextm land forms and breaks with regular irregularity” [--> #entropy]
shifting its course, the river inducts new affectees into how to live (this way)
-there is a manner in which life proceeds--instead of feeling in step with it one begins to feel out of sync***

#start a geographic learning, riparian thought; thinking by rivers (& not countries)

_->{.\_,;,_/;-=,/


rural cosmology
cosmology of modern science

human conception: flirtation with the failure to arrive


#two moveis:
•Exodus: Riddly Scott + Creation Bible + Big Bang + extinction theory + fluid animation research
•Noah: Nolan + Creation Bible + Darwin + motion graphic research
--> solving a problem proposed by _?_ }--> “the dream catcher” !!!
(in these cinematic examples we see the society imposed to the same spatiotemporal representational framework that science “discovers” in nature)


the insistent entanglements of physicality with the metaphysical

soil: earth rendered in the scientific register

“The alluvial sediments that come in the waters of the Jamuna river either become deposited as silt across floodplains or fall in the river to become ‘chars’” (Naveeda Khan 2014)

...the time of the arrival of clay is not assured
the inability to perpetuate human life*

the materialist metaphysics of Creation in non-elite belief

“you should not let a dog lick you.”
or “pigeon feather containing 40 different microbial diseases.” #clean
or “they are very dirty and will pass their germs to you.”

cross-species fraternity to the assertion of superiority over all animals

pragmatic + theological spoke:
1- divine privileging of humans
2- human right to transcend the ordinary (--> to aspire to God's position)

...lush growth of eucalyptus trees at the edge of the market
--> yesssss things that grow on the edges <-- my life-long attention (the cat who entered the house, the ants, the plants in Tehran, ...) [<== because of my own marginalized being?]


being fated (together)

...although the earth breaks, it reconstitutes
people find themselves in diminished form, or occupying a lesser form of life, or[...]

[...] for him intelligence is the perfect expression of evolutionary position ==> experimental comparative psychology --> intelligence test --> species, racila, and individual qualities were fundamentally tied to the central index of intelligence

#merchant
*entrepreneur in primate studies* --> (merchant seeing himself) working to foster a rational society based on science and preserved from old ignorance


[transformation of human sex into a scientific problem]
-trading sex for “privilege”:
primate intelligence --allowed--> sexual states --stimulate--> the beginnings of human concepts of social right and privilege

physiology <--economic--> politics }--> scientifically confirmed to life at the organic base of civilization

sex-linked differences,
the primacy of sex in organic and social processes,
scientific managers over women's lives


monkey and apes as:
•natural objects
•unobscured by culture
•organic base in relation to which culture emerged
--> *human engineering*

(Haraway naming those) scientific networks crucially determined who did science and what science was considered good
(#sohrevardi)

Darwinian conception of natural political economy of population


(in Attar, Kelile Demne, Ajayeb, i am hunting for) *** early systems theory *** --> providing the technical base for (different claims such as:) the claim to scientific maturity of the social sciences based on concepts of culture and social group


“he removed the putative head from the collective animal body.” --> animal body politic
--> society was derived from complex interactions of pairs of individuals, understood and measured by psychological techniques, which constituted the social field space. one looked for axes of dominance as organizing principles on both the physiological and psychological levels
--> the theory of the function of male dominance nicely joins the political economy aspect of the study of animal behavior and evolution:
•competition
•division of labor
•resources allocation model
with the social integration aspect:
•cooperative coordination through leadership and social position
with the purely physiological understanding of reproductive and embryological phenomena


*Garden of Industry*

dominance as a natural property (with a physical-chemical base)

a cross ideological exercise (is not possible): science cannot be reclaimed for liberating purposes by simply reinterpreting observations or changing terminology --> (Princess Bubblegum) denying a dialectical interaction with the animals in the project of self-creation through scientific labor

(let's switch to a deeper look at primates, not as models of human beings, rather:) ho[...]

[...]pure system of relations without supports

*}==> environment: a universal instrument for dissolving *individualized organic synthesis* in the anonymity of universal elements and movements
(for example) metamerism of fish: “fish do not lead their lives themselves, the river has made them lead it, they are *persons without personality* (<== strictly mechanistic use of the notion of environment [<-- Descartes beast machine])
Lamarck: the environment dominates and control the evolution of living beings through the intermediary of *need*(= a subjective notion entailing reference to a positive pole of vital values)
(for Lamarck:) life and environment (which is unaware of it ~(Lamarckian *vitalism*:) ‘there is an originality of life of which the environment takes no account’) are two series of asynchronous events ==>
[*]adaptation: life's renewed effort to “stick” to an indifferent environment
[*]being: the effect of an effort [--?--> striving]
(--> this asynchronicity ==> “us” and “place”)
==> environment does nothing for life --Bichat--> “life: set of functions that resist death” (~-> tales of survival in America sci-fi TV series)
life resists solely by changing its shape in order to survive


Darwin explaining the ‘appearance of new forms’ conjunction of two mechanisms:
1- mechanism of the production of differences ~ variation
2- mechanism of the reduction and criticism of these produced differences ~ vital competition and natural selection
(for Darwin the fundamental biological relationship:) the relationship of the living being to other living beings --> precedence over environment conceived as a set of physical forces
-competition of forces
-accidental morphological variation
(for Darwin:) ‘to live' = to submit an individual difference to the judgment of the set of living beings ~= *die or be part of the jury*
monstrosity: the rule
originality: provisional ordinariness


finalism --Darwin--> selection
***both Lamarck and Darwin denounce finalism and celebrate mechanism
(both, [complementary] biologists to whom) life appears as a datum which they seek to describe without being too concerned about accounting for it analytically [--> not accouting for the analyticallity of their objects?]
Lamarck --> (thinks of life in terms of) *duration*
Darwin --> (thinks of life in terms of) *interdependence*

Darwin's biogeographical environment =/=? Lamarck's environment


Humboldt (and Ritter) --> (19th century) geography: a science conscious of its method and its dignity
(naturalist traveler -->) *Humboldt's “Kosmos” [~ synthesis of knowledge, not aiming to be encyclopedic, but strives ***to arrive at an intuition of the universe***] combining:
•(“oikoumene” tradition of Greek geography:) *the science of the entire hu[...]

[...]science of coordination of human space in relation with the celectial configuration and movements* [--> Olearius]
}==> Earth [considered as a whole]: (stable support for the) *فراز و نشيب vicissitude of history* --> ‘terrestrial space + its configurations’ : object of geographical, geological, sociological, biological knowledge
(Humboldt) applied a whole system of barometric, thermometric in his investigation. *division of plants* according to different climates ==> “botanical geography” & “zoological geography”

history of the Weltanschauung

*****how Humboldt (and Ritter, [even Simondon does that too]) apply the *category of totality* to their object --> the relations between historical man and the environment ==> *determination of historical relationships*

the relations between the geographical environment and man ==> a spirit
(-->) *doing history*: reading a map, understanding by map the representation of a set of metrical, geodesic, geological, climatological, and descriptive biogeographical data


Loeb + Watson (phototropism in animals):
every movement of the organism in the environment = a movement into which the environment forces the organism ==> **animal = reflex** <-->{Darwinism + Cartesianism ==> behaviorist psychology*}
(Watson:) [*]psychology: program of the analytical investigation of the ‘stimulus-response couple'[= conditions of the living being's adaptation to the environment through the experimental production of relations between stimulation and response] (<-- one of physical determinism) ==> consciousness nullified as illusory
(the living being's situation:) “its being = a conditioning” (--> as artists we still have to deal with this idea or image, it is about the reality the artist receives and what they make of it)


process of reduction:
(ajayeb --to-->) biology --to--> behavior --to--> neurology --to--> energetics (--to--> electronics)

the perfect work of behaviorist psychology: construct man as a machine reacting to machines

Condillac's fable of the statue: in the rose's perfume, the statue is the rose's perfume ==> living organism = respond to sensory stimulation (the physical mileu, light and heat, carbon and oxygen, calcium and gravity)

(Canguilhem asking) where is the living being? <-- Kohn

==> subjects “taking action” =/= objects “in movement”

we see individuals --but--> these are objects
we see centers --but--> these are environments
we see machinists --but--> these are machines

environment of behavior --coincides-with--> geographical environment --coincides-with--> physical environment


“in a human environment, man is obviously subject to a form of determinism, but it is the determinism of artificial creations in which the spirit of invention which calls t[...]

[...] ==> living organism = respond to sensory stimulation (the physical mileu, light and heat, carbon and oxygen, calcium and gravity)

(Canguilhem asking) where is the living being? <-- Kohn

==> subjects “taking action” =/= objects “in movement”

we see individuals --but--> these are objects
we see centers --but--> these are environments
we see machinists --but--> these are machines

environment of behavior --coincides-with--> geographical environment --coincides-with--> physical environment


“in a human environment, man is obviously subject to a form of determinism, but it is the determinism of artificial creations in which the spirit of invention which calls them into existence is alienated.”

*psycho-technique of engineers*

...to grasp the presence in man of his own originality --> @Maarten, Mobed
as an irreducible center of resistance

“man, even when subordinated to the machine, never manages to grasp himself as a machine. his efficiency is greater the more he is aware of his central situation with regard to the mechanisms intended to serve him” [<-- *a bad story (of The Terminator, The 100, The Magicians, etc.)]


(Darwin, Laeb's) pragmatism: generalization of the notion of adaptation to the theory of knowledge

reference of organis movement to the organims itself as essential

(prepared by Kantor, Tolmann's) teleological behaviorism: recognizing the sense and intention of animal movement


(where, for whom, the individuality of the living organism stops?)
•at its ectodermic borders
•at the cell
•

cell: an environment of infra-cellular elements, it lives in an internal environment which sometimes has the dimensions of an *organ* and sometimes of the *organism*


Uexküll --> Umwelt =/= Umgebung =/= Welt
•*Umwelt* distinguishes the environment of behavior specific to an organism
•*Umgebung*: the ordinary geographical environment
•*Welt*: the universe of science

Umwelt ~ the specific environment of behavior (for the living being): a set of excitations

to be effective it must be anticipated by an attitude of the subject ~ ‘if the living being is not seeking, it won't receive anything’

Buffon & Lamarck --> time and favorable circumstances gradually constitute the living
=/= Uexküll --> time and favorable circumstances are relative to such and such living beings

==> Umwelt: an elective sample in the Umgebung }--> milieu
environment: “man's Umwelt” ~ the ordinary world of his perspective and pragmatic experience

*human suject: creator of techniques and values
==> animal's Umwelt: a centered environment/milieu relative to this living being as essentially a subject of vi[...]

[...]r />
*(telegram's) [*]encounter: sensuous rapport or energetic cadence*


aquariums engage a story of looking + deep roots in imperialism and the process of nation building --> aquarium: a stage of an unspoiled garden in nature, بوته hearth for learning human self from animal other + (clarification of) ontological and epistemological disorders of nature and culture [=/= Tsing's contaminated landscapes]
-18th century: the ocean was taboo, a place of great fear, a cursed world full of monsters lurking in shadowy fathoms, (waters: low and deep =/= air: domain of morality and aspiration, closer to heaven)
-19th century europe victorian glass *aqua vivarium* --> windows that interfaced between human sight and subaqueous scenes (the unknown provoked feelings of bot curiosity and apprehension)--Stott--> for the naturalist the marine or freshwater aquarium provided a constantly changing, glass-fronted theater of bizarre and exotic bodies, moving, metamorphosing, interacting and breeding in sensational ways
-aquariums became sacred spaces where cohabited forces of godliness and nature were contained, compartmentalized, and studied --> animal = metonymic of particularly nonhuman environments --> victorian sensibilities

(Darwinan trope...) monstrously minute, potent and parasitic, characterized by missing body parts

efforts to know, classify, and conquer the oceanic (--> capture for visual pleasure) ==> counter-conquest of the home by monsters and sexual deviants

the most prized organisms were “exotics” from non-european environments that fueled ongoing colonialism in the mode of animal husbandry


Hayward:
differences in display technologies
variations in viewer experience and perception
alterations in cross-species encounters
aquarium's promise of immediacy(?)

the rhetoric of animal domination is not the only discourse at work (in aquarium display, telegram, in ajayeb, in zoo, etc.)

Hayward's attention to the expressiveness of sensation, display technologies, and the animals themselves =/=? my attention to telegram animal media

(modern) aquarium: turning toward the monstrous oceanic but updated for a technoscientific postmodernity and anticipating a sci-fi futurity


exhibits as idealizations
the aquarium visitor is entertained into caring about environmental ethics and marine biology. enacting a moral imperative to protect local ecosystems, the aquarium is a savoir --> the parochial becomes the new cosmopolitan

technology + artistry + biology

playing with scale, volume, space
refractive technology:
•produces the visceral and optical experience of immersion...
•makes us profoundly aware of our bodies in space
•producing a disorienting visuality
*refracted vision = textured li[...]

[...]rception of material life, philosophizing ‘reality’ to ‘beyond nature’ : *alienated thought* (due to the alienated power of fire) --- immaterial specatle of the afterlife, the world-beyond rendering life dead

abounding in metaphysical subtleties
-metaphysical abundance

...allegiance to the frozen

(Rumi's calling) “You must burn!” - this is very selfish
[to Siyavash?]

still today in sci-fi we are talking to a technoilogized light (as the messenger of beyond)

fire, transforms the world, not in terms of changing manifest matriality, rather the mind and thinking

fire in its temporal animation renders space fixated, giving the illusion that (visual) animation = life {~= spectacle}


the fire spectacle colonizing our participation with the beyond, colonizing the way our flux of senses make tentative contact with the other sides,
(what a stone suggests? the senses that never stop participating, never stop throwing themselves beyond the immediatly visible)

every phase of existence

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

[Scott Gilbert]

(all organic beings have been formed on two general laws, according to Darwin:)
(1) unity of type and (2) conditions of existence --> inorganic? fire?
natural selection --> adaptation --> conditions of existence
embryonic homologies --> unity of type
==> “descent with modification” (or decent modifications)
[(embryology =/=) ‘fire’ could transform matters, “change” their class, their type and its unity --> “parvaneh sho!” Rumi wants embryology undermined?]

construct phylogenies
(phylogeny : branching out evolutionarily)


small genetic changes was not sufficient to generate evolutionary novel structures such as teeth, feathers, cnidocysts or mullusk shells (Goldschmidt, 1940) (--> lizards had birdness in it --> potentiality [~-> mutation is not random])

(Waddington then launched into a) critique of the notion of “random mutation,” noting that there are developmental constraints placed on what changes are possible.

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

...a perceptual game of risking linearity, collapsing discovery and jurisdiction (a judiciary not a branch of any map of governance)

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

(Haraway on Burning Man:) Fire in the North American West has a complicated multispecies history; fire is an essential element for ongoing, as well as an agent of double death, te killing of ongoingness. The material semiotics of fire is our times are at stake.
[]three icons (suggestions by Haraway, three “-cene” tuned tor the touch of its critters):
1- ‘missing ice’ of the Capitalocene
2- ‘flame’ of the Anthropocene
3- ‘red clay pottery’ of the Cthulucene




(Conley [...]

[...]the **stubborn anthropomorphic residual** within any ‘new’ theory of society
--> (not infinite) co-constitution of the social + the extra-social (vaccines & markets, planetary systems & telescopes, catastrophes & laws, etc.)

feminist science studies *demand a normative responsibility* towards ontological inclusivity and humility

(now that there is no objective -->) interrogatives are object-makers

*strangeness (of nonhuman life) [acts as a guide] --> mobilising new prepositions of connection ==> to think differently about the social ==> new conceptions of society (as planetmate, messmate, natureculture, mindbody, thing-power, odd kin, etc.)


parallels drawn between theories of evolution & theories of social change:
•Gould --> concept of punctuated equilibrium
•Serres --> ontology of the social as parasitism
•Hayles --> translation of epigenesis and technogenesis
•

{phenomenon of serial endosymbiosis theory <-- social theorists deploy this in the search for accounts of how change and creativity originate}--> (bio-econornic context) *symbiosis* has long been recognised as a theory which demonstrates the co-constitution of the social and the biological
=/= Darwinian story of: small variations, random mutation, long time scales, natural selection, fitness and incremental development:
•complexity derived by brute mechanical climbing from the base already built by the efforts of earlier climbing
•unit of change: the gene, or individual organism, the zoocentric, ‘big like us’ epistemic culture of both science and social science (=/= weird worldings of protists, archea, eukaryotes [Wertheim])

bacteriology ==> new organisms were often stemmed from profound and prolonged symbiotic relationships that have proven difficult to analyse =/= discrete
•traits are inherited outside of sexual dissemination (digestion, infection, donation, other complex forms of partnerning) --> consortia: amorphous symbiotic complexes (metabolic energetic networks) =/= organism: anatomically bounded objects (systems of information and exchange)
}==Margulis==> focus on how perceptual, political, social and scientific conditions precede objects: *objects = boundary-work*
--> differential speeds of change (sudden and unlikely mixes + slow and causal)
--> deconstruction of individuality

(co-constitutive bio-econornic-political-social context:)
**ideological contest between individualism and collectivism in political economy <==> intellectual development of symbiosis theory**
•socialist and anarchist concept of mutuellisme in the mid 1800
•Hobbesian-Malthusian-Darwinian bio-economic concept of struggle for existence in zero-sum games of all-against-all
•Kropotkin's symbiosis as evidence for the benefit of global cooperation towards the common good, the division o[...]

[...]he base already built by the efforts of earlier climbing
•unit of change: the gene, or individual organism, the zoocentric, ‘big like us’ epistemic culture of both science and social science (=/= weird worldings of protists, archea, eukaryotes [Wertheim])

bacteriology ==> new organisms were often stemmed from profound and prolonged symbiotic relationships that have proven difficult to analyse =/= discrete
•traits are inherited outside of sexual dissemination (digestion, infection, donation, other complex forms of partnerning) --> consortia: amorphous symbiotic complexes (metabolic energetic networks) =/= organism: anatomically bounded objects (systems of information and exchange)
}==Margulis==> focus on how perceptual, political, social and scientific conditions precede objects: *objects = boundary-work*
--> differential speeds of change (sudden and unlikely mixes + slow and causal)
--> deconstruction of individuality

(co-constitutive bio-econornic-political-social context:)
**ideological contest between individualism and collectivism in political economy <==> intellectual development of symbiosis theory**
•socialist and anarchist concept of mutuellisme in the mid 1800
•Hobbesian-Malthusian-Darwinian bio-economic concept of struggle for existence in zero-sum games of all-against-all
•Kropotkin's symbiosis as evidence for the benefit of global cooperation towards the common good, the division of labour, protection of elements and interdependent organisation
•evolutionary theory used to champion individualism and the social policies of laissez faire

Campbell --> what Harman misses is the elementary starting point for sociologies of science: *that social science translates science* just as science translates “reality”

serial endosymbiosis theory ==>
1. no theory of social change is going to be value-free (endosymbiosis is a process that is always already highly charged with rich metaphor, entailing a ‘host’ that is in an ‘exchange,’ ‘relation’ or ‘merger’ with a ‘guest’ --> a form of ‘living together’ that becomes ‘close’ over time)
2. extraordinary range and nature of these relations can act as strategies for other worldings (other ways of being with each other) --> important normative function [at the cataclysmic endings =/= catastrophic ending]
3. a way to think about temporalities (when a bacterium nestled into a simple cell, creating an intimacy that has lasted four billion years)
4. a template for unlikely intimacies

Harman's philosophical monologue on social theoretical practice (which might yet be remedied by actual dialogue with social theorists) ==> performative fallacy (<-- common in artist writing)

@apass****
(Campbell asking) why has object-oriented ontology become such a popular force in other disciplines?
<== complex interplay between s[...]

[...]
emotion and its affects
•emotion --> medicated and sustained
•affect (a very recent idea) --> ephemeral instantaneously rises and dissipates (leaving residual effects)
}<-- a heuristic device (difference) to highlight different kinds of experiences, their perception and impact

affect is under inquiry in understand:
•customer culture
•entertainment industry
•
•(individual located in larger communities)

[*]affect: embodied thought : culturally and corporealy informed cognition = thoughts + apprehension “i am involved”
[emotion = i am involved]

(Elias) arguments in favor of affect (affect-culture):
1. (help us to understand) relationship between *(human) bodies, nature, action*
2. explains cooperative living, sacrifice, generosity, attachment, affection (better than theories that focus on economics, politics, power)
3. critical apparatus for gaining knowledge from human interaction and social movements --understand--> future
(concept of) affect --> productive way of understanding human attitude and behavior

_____________
affect theory
•(Spinoza ==>) Deleuze's ethnology of bodily capacities ==> Massumi
•(Darwin --?-->) Tomkins's psychobiology and differential affect ==> Sedgwick

Tomkins
basic affect transcend culture
durable and socially meaningful

Deleuze
[*]affect = innateness + external stimuli, “entire, vital modulating field of myriad becomings across human and nonhuman”

Spinoza
“no one has yet determined what the body can do”
1. the body's capacity is not determined by the body alone but that it is amplified and assisted by its external context
2. even though we might not understand the videos nature, we can comprehend how a specific body functions in a particular social context
•affectus --> the force of an affecting body =/=
•affectio --> impact of an affecting body on the one affected (==generate==> bodily capacities)
[*]affect: a relational phenomena that draws that draws together: a body + sentient aspects of the human being inhabiting it + social context within which that person is embedded

Massumi
(--> self-professed affect theorists)
[*]affect: essentially bodily, pre-social (=/= asocial), filled with motion, vibratory motion, resonation, a nonconscious (never-to-be-conscious) automatic remainder
visceral perception
precognitive visceral moment (=/= physical reaction)
--> think of affect in virtual terms {virtual: sphere of potential + emergent + indeterminate tendencies}
***conscious perception = narration of affect*** [to perceive = to narrate your affects ---> go to #feedback of artwork: actualization of the affective event (?can it include the excess of affect, the virtual?), feedback: narration o[...]

[...]ke the river to convey local, embodied knowledge within the longer temporalities and emergent horizons (associated with climate change,) (new global urgencies produced by climate thinking)

a sufficient sense of the river

(Cavell < Naveeda's) there-ness of the river: “the rivers are a distinctive and significant locale at which human beings, though not only human beings, find their dwelling place.” Cavell responds thus, “The river poetizes the human being because, in providing *the unity of locality and journeying* it conceals and reveals Dasein's being and becoming ‘homely,’ homelike, I might say, homebound.”


in an analytical approach to examine separately [that is ‘to model']: narative actions and [-ian] images


Marks’ understanding of film as conveying the corporeality of objects


[*]milieu
a powerful concept with genealogy across a range of disciplines [physics, biology, geography, literature --> orienting our use of it]
•18th century: the fluid or ether in which physical bodies are immersed ==(that enable their)==> inter-dependence (#shena, shenavar?) --> milieu becomes universal
•19th century: as producing circumstances that changes needs [Lamarck] --> for Darwin milieu only produced change (at the level of the organism's phenotype)
•milieu rendered as complexes of elements whose actions mutually limit each other and in which the effects of causes become causes in turn, modifying the causes that gave rise to them. (Canguilhem)

umwelt: organisms privilege certain stimuli and response, thus, suggesting to Canguilhem that it isn't merely ‘need’ mediating between organism and milieu (as in Lamarck's formulation) but a prior sense of values that evaluates certain signals as worthy of response over others
--> *the animal finds it simpler to do what it privileges* (Canguilhem 2008)

[*]sense: (from the biological and psychological point of view:) an appreciation of values in relation to a [*]need: (for the one who experuences and lives it:) an irreducible ==(thereby)==> absolute, system of reference


Naveeda's notion of river's point of view:
“...” while the inorganic, such as a river, lacks the building blocks of life in being produced through the action of geological forces, it too has norms and values that take statistical form or are found (in both sense of the word: discovered and originating) in moments of spontaneous action (---> go to Delanda#)


...village and kinship structures being flexible, there is a high value places on sexual normativity


absence of water --> human suffering --> the death of the river --> emergence of land as property


Naveeda examines 3 films:
•focus on corruption, melodramatic specificities of the film-scale, subtext of pain --> Titash Ekti Nodir Naam
-[...]

[...]nly on their most rapidly evolving elements; #ontology. and attending to the social relations both created and broken) [#to attend to Tehran's new digitally mediated social norms of negative ditributional consequences of change]
any effective sociology of knowledge ought to provide some account of its opposite: the accidental and systematic --> means by which non-knowledge is produced and maintained
**(Robert Proctor's) agnotology: the systematic study of ignorance** [+ Irvin Schick: unknowledge =/= ignorance --> socially constructed lack of knowledge : a conscious absence of socially pertinent knowledge, for example ‘terra incognita --> Western political and economic attention --> enabling colonialism...]

institutional elements of knowledge infrastructure:
•universities
•libraries
•scientific societies
}--> they all have typically conservative, slow-changing forms* -- because when they change, authority, influence, and power are redistributed; (changes takes decades rather than years) --> a long-time-scale, historically informed framework to situate our thinking --> sustainable, accumulative, and shareable qualitative databases


internet-supported citizen science

the 19th century's Darwin favored ‘genetic form’ --> massive and global shift in modes of classification


standard --> *preserving the meaning of data is a human affair, requiring continuous curation


#knowledge zoom lens --> “the long now” (Bowker)


(it took 200 years for printed book's) *intellectual armature* (that now we consider intuitive:)
(in ajayeb.net i am responding and working all of them)
•index
•table of contents
•bibliography
•footnotes
•generally agreed rules on plagiarism
•page numbers (--> =^77988.1.6$shathiat)


***qualitative science*** : detailed, indepth, and meaning-oriented investigations --> analysis, statistical (for example the social network analysis strengths of scope and summation in Braudel's study)
(question of my “writing”:) how to nourish mechanisms for large-scale, long-term research?
-we need to go beyond one-off projects to develope systems and standards for collecting, curating (my knowledge, ajayeb's knowledge) while simultaneously protecting subject's identities and interests /***
=/= short-term, project-by-project work

-(constantvzw is doing this:) build collaborative sciences
sociotechnical phenomena do not rest within the domain of a single discipline

-comparative analysis techniques
comparison across cases (--> how Kobe in his case-based work produces a critically comparative data?)
creation of compatable data [: properly documented --> facilitate sharing] (--> how for my ajayeb?)
(in your work and research -->) encouraging the identifi[...]

[...]) the implicit notion that competition and innovation are a natural fit --> the “measure, controlm and automatic” rationality of US-style economic competition

difficult to commodify
difficult to describe

not taking apparent differences (between men and women, human and animal,,) to be timeless, necessary, or inevitable --> descriptive =/= prescriptive (descriptions not intended to be prescriptive) --> *to historicize and denaturalize concepts (of competition, innovation,,)*

Bowker + Leigh Star > Calvert: *things perceived as real are real in their consequences*

market competitiveness has a plethora[~ excess, افراط ,ازدياد] of measures --✕--> profit: the seller-centric proxy measure of consumer interest

“our idealized notion of competition as a generator of innovation black-boxes a host of processes for competition, including unfair practices, externalizing costs, marketing, deception, and deskilling.”

(our idealized notion of:){ competition ==> innovation }--black-boxes--> (a host of) processes for competition:
•unfair practices
•externalizing costs
•marketing
•deception
•deskilling
•

individualistic and social Darwinist overtones

[*]inovation: a form of wishful thinking that aims to bring about the desired transformations without the associated costs in time and human effort (Suchman & Bishop)
(‘labor-intensive artistic work’: noninovative creative work; deepen the density of curiosity;)

capitalism continuously applies new technology designed to fragment and deskill labor, so that labor becomes cheaper and subject to greater control (Wajcman)

(sometimes) obsolescence is created through minor redesigns of consumer commodities

“let's sell more” ~-> undesirable consequences for human rights, global trade in rare metals, and toxic waste disposal

[*]technological determinism and optimism: the belief that the present social arrangements and technologies were the inevitable byproducts of historical developement, and that any problems entailed in our technologies and their production processes can be eliminated with further technological innovations

competetiveness and the technological *savvy* implicit in innovation are themselves markers of contemporary masculinity --> “the enduring force of the identification between technology and manliness is not an inherent biological sex difference. it is instead the result of the historical and cultural construction of gender” (Wajcman)

a big part of the problem is that women's technological labor (=/= ghost busters) is culturally invisible --(Katie King in her research on writing technologies argues)--> (a metonymy:) when technologies are reduced to singular, stable, self-contained devices [~ Star Wars] =/= assemblages
[dichotomy of[...]

[...]ity is now understandable in terms of a failure to apply oneself attentively to the ideologically determined standards of performance and “achievement”
--> in a culture that is so relentlessly founded on a short attention span, on the logic of the nonsequitur, on perceptual overload, on the generalized ethic of “getting ahead,” on the celebration of aggressiveness, (Crary poses that it is nonsensical to pathologize attention in this culture, a double bind, in which the individual is caught between subjective dislocations of modernization and imperative for institutional discipline and productivity)


(Miller @Zoumana) ...the unconscious as part of a system in which ‘automatic’ behaviour was reciprocally intertwined with the changing needs of conscious activity, including attention. in contrast to the custodial Freudian interpretation, many 19th century psychologists saw the unconscious as “actively generating the processes which are integral to memory, perception, and behaviour. its contents are inaccessible not, as in psychoanalytic theory, because they are held in strenuously preventive detention but, more interestingly, because the effective implementation of cognition and conduct does not actually require comprehensive awareness.

Darwin: a certain kind of reactive attention was believed to be an essential part of human biology, systematic response to novel stimuli (visual, olfactory, or auditory)
-an attentive observer might appear motionless
-an ideo-motor network of forces --> that which immobilizes


(the structural psychology of) associationism (theories of knowledge)

institutional discourse
techniques of the subject

attention (~= will) ~/= consciousness
(noncoincidence of attention with consciousness)
<-- modern shift to semantic and semiotic frameworks of analysis
(from epistemology --to--> hermeneutics : Mallarme, Nietzsche, Peirce, Wittgenstein, Heidegger --> the question of how a subject is provisionally constructed through language and other systems of social meaning and value --> termination of various analysis of consciousness --> epistemological crisis


observer (once understood in terms of the essential subjectivity of vision) ==> attention became constitutive (and destabilizing) component of perception


unmediated givenness of sense data --✕--> cognition

community of interpretation : a shifting and intervening space of socially articulated psychological functions, institutional imperative, and a wide range of techniques, practices, and discourses relating to the perceptual experience of a subject in time --> forms of exteriority in modernity's account of perception


eschatological dream of 19th century : “to make this knowledge of man exist so that man could be liberated by it from his alienation, liberated[...]

[...]ynamic activity of repression


“[a] society recognizes itself and its own positivity through the morbid and pathological forms it identifies and invents” (Crary + Foucault)

subjectivity: provisional assembly of mobile and mutable components --> attentiveness:
•conscious/voluntary {task-oriented, higher behaviour}
•automatic/passive {areas of habitual activity, daydreaming, reverie, somnambulant states}


(the state of) the seated woman


[19th century regime of facility]
Clark's “face of fashion” (= Manet's blanks), fashion would keep one's face from any identity (==> ‘the look’: public, outward, blase, impassive, not bored, not tired, not disdainful, not quite focused on anything)
impersonality -->(Benjamin's modernity:) public space in which, for the first time, individuals are systematically habituated not to return the gaze of the other [~-> “chi dadash!?” or “was guckst du?!"]
-for three centuries, the meaning of human face was explained in terms of rhetoric of language. in 19th century suddenly face occupies a precarious position: it is belonging to a human being as a:
•physiological organism
•privatized, socialized individual subject
--Darwin--> split status of face:
•symptom of an organism's anatomical and physiological functioning
•the mark of the success or failure of a process of self-mastery and control (in the social construction of a normative individual)

*face: (sign of a disquieting) continuum between the somatic and the social*


boarded on a trance

(Bachelard:) reverie: irreality function --> keep the psyche on the fringe of all the brutality of a hostile and foreign nonself (!)
--✕--> reality function --> adapt to reality: to manufacture works which are realities

modern flirtation: refusal and the withdrawal of the self are fused with the phenomenon of drawing attention to the self (in one indivisible act)
-Simmel

Poetics of Reverie (by Bachelard) @Eszter


how Sina works
(in my more recent works i play with) [no] enactment of visual mastery
[no] ocular potency
-my storytelling operates in a state of distraction, in which the stability of the story begin to erode ==> breakdown of normative attentive narratives --> the audience finds themselves in a trancelike state ==> condition for mobile and transient synthesis
-i mobilize a set of associative chains that are part of a libidinal economy (that i am part of) --> *exceeding the binding logic of the work*


effectively
cross-eyed figure
sees
if anything at all
(it is a disunified field)
with two
disparate optical axes.
into the eclipse mental
the environment grows dim


attentive subject --Ricoeu[...]

[...]rape of the New World seems implicit in wonder at it
(early modern europe) impulse to *collect & explore*:
◦collection of narwal horns and jewels, deformed fetuses and human captives (made by rulers, missionaries, and naturalist)
◦origins of museums in the wunderkammer (wonder cabinet)
◦voyages to the New World with their attendant goals of *conquering & missionizing* (=/= Sinbad)
◦use of inquisitors and questionnaires by government to assemble information for juridical *processings & taxation*
◦Columbus's “desire to know the secrets of the world” (glossed with) Jode de Acosta's praise of proselytizing curiosity
2- Aristotle's Metaphysics: “wonder = ignorance and doubt” { desire to seek causes (it did not understand) ==arose==> wonder (admiratio) ==> replacement by knowledge (scientia or philosophia) }--> miracula (marvel: natural effects we fail to understand) =/= mirabilia (unusual and difficult events [produced by God])
> 3- Descartes’ wonder: (first of all passions) a sudden surprise of the soul ==> tend to consider attentively those objects (which seem to it rare and extraordinary)
◦*begining of the tendency to reduce emotion to physiology*
◦Charles Le Brun's drawings of the passions
◦Darwin's wonder: a reaction ==> making the animal see and breathe better in crisis ==> increased its chances of survival (...raised eyebrows, opened and protruding lips, a hand held up, palm out with fingers open)
◦early modern physiology --> wonder: (~ startled response,) paradigmatic emotion
4- (the horrible) philosophical understanding of wonder: ignorance rationalized or erased by knowledge
a wondering desire that collects and appropriates what it endeavors to know or project its self onto an imagined other --> a passion that reduces to a startle response at the unfamiliar

}=/= historian (and teacher [and performance-lecturer]) vacation (or responsibility) --> (we must aspire to) imagine the kind of nonappropriative perspectival *intensely cognitive* response

middle ages (how they characterize their difference:)
1. theological-philosophical understanding of wonder <== university intellectuals {
◦admiratio =/= scientia ==> knowledge
◦admiratio ~= diversitas (diversity) =/= solitum (the usual, the general)
2. religious discourse about wonder <-- sermons, hagiography, devotional writing, enormously popular genre of *saint's lives* (tazkirat تذکره نویسی) {
◦admiratio =/= imitatio (imitation جعلى) [the readers were urged to wonder at and not immitate the power and extravagant asceticism of holy men and women (in Attar?)]
◾admiratio ~= paradox (coincidence of opposites) [one finds mira (wondrous) again and again in the texts alongside mixta (mixed, composite things, chimera)]
◦admiratio ~/= curiositas (curiosity کنجکاوی)
◦admiratio ~/= dis[...]

[...]ellous singularity* (collection of advice for courtiers and princes) ~ wonder: response to majesty (hidden wisdom, significance) =/= generalizing = moralizing (inductio exemplorum, citing of instructive general causes --> forensic)
•

credible deeply unusual singular event ==> admiratio

[*]perspectival: reaction of a particular “us” to an “other” that is “other” only relative to the particular “us” (<-- this is why ajayebnameh is interesting)
•James of Vitry --> ***cyclopses who all have one eye marvel as much at those who have two eyes as we marvel at them*** (1200)
•Gosswin of Metz & John Mandeville --> turning such perspectivalism into gently ironic comments on themselves
•William of Rubruck --> barefoot travel through harsh terrain and climate required by Franciscan asceticism seems as monstrous a practice in the East as certain Eastern customs appear when reported “back home”
•



**(how? can we simply?) study medieval emotion** =/= wonder stated by historians, travelers, theologians, philosophers, preachers, devotional writers

*traces of emotion* that survive are mediated through texts, pictures, artifacts --Bynum--> we are not entitled either to assume a sort of Darwinian universal emotion, or to think that emotion-behavior is culturally constructed (as to exist only where we find words for it)

***texts may give us access to reactions less through adjectives attached to nouns*** (by calling something “wonderful” or “dreadful” =/= indicating the responses of an implicit reader/viewer)
•a keyword search for “anger” will tend to turn up set pieces on how to control it --> discussions of where it is not
•reactions such as wonder, delight, or terror (do not simply occur) they are *evoked*, sometimes even *staged* --> we can explore what evoked them

finding wonder-words =/= finding wonder (complex semantic field)

wonder-reaction:
•terror
•disgust
•solemn astonishment
•playful delight

in medieval accounts wonder often has:
•a mischievous quality
Bernard of Clairvaux --> spice of stories
11th century --> (naughtily) impish girl saint jokes
Gerald of Wales --> nature's pranks
}--> moralizing bestiary tradition (taking more pleasure in the animal tales than in theology)
analogies between animals and humans are anything but solemn and didactic
•a dreadful quality
(Attar's accounts of saint torture)
Gerald of Wales --> recounting some of the earliest warewold stories to survive in european literature, he glosses the admiratio felt by those inside the story as stupor خرفتی, timor بیم, horror خوف
◦shape-shifting violating nature
◦tales of metamorphoses --> the real change of substance in the eucharist عشاربانى + the terrifying possibility[...]

[...]olution of the 17th century)
•an epistemology (informing our inquiries) be a family member to existing theories (of representation and philosophical-realism [that which Holakouee promotes for “modern” iranian]) (--> to avoid the problem of epistemological anarchism: an epistemology that justifies not taking a stand on the nature of things is of little use to women trying **to build a shared politics** [Mehdi is angry at the sculpture community because they embody that failure])
•(to adopt) a radical form of epistemology that denies the possibility of access to a real world and an objective standpoint
•noninvasive knowing (such as Sa'di) and prediction and control (#Olearius)
•(authority and power, as Beyzai is after,) to name/give the world a new identity, a new story
•accurate rendering of an idiosyncratic process of sensory overlap and association
•
•


[*]biology: modern origin story
biology tell tales about origins, about genesis, and about nature

biologizing


[what is the word made of, what is the flesh made of]
***(Haraway highlights) an inherited knowledge through the paternal line: the *word* was Aristotle's Galileo's Bacon's Newton's Linnaeus's Darwin's; the *flesh* was woman's --> and the word was made flesh, naturally

(in Europe, from 15th to 18th century, transformations of [both] metaphors [and social systems]:) female nature --from--> nurturing mother --to--> patient-resournce
--> capitalist forms of patriarchy: *merchant تاجر seeing dialectic of apocalypse* (TV series such as West World, etc.)


[the book of nature]
nature is authored (by somebody)

(power +) autorship ==(fabricates)==> reality


Milton's justification of the ways of God, [to tell stories]

*(how many times we[?] are) forced to read a book in a language that signifies our lack, our difference*

two rhetorical strategies for contesting (جنگیدن برای) a voice (-to set the terms of speech that define good knowledge):
1- reinterpreted the origin story to get it right the second time
2- rebelliously proclaimed a totally new story


(Olearius does the same with iran and his european audience,) [Haraway on] Barash “reveal to the popular audience the inner voice of biology, the cake of nature under the icing of culture, the biogrammer of genes structuring the message of the organism--all that modern people structuring the message of the organism--all so that modern people might come to know themselves and fulfill their potential. Barash maintains that biology is the most powerful tool in the humanist project to know and achieve the self.”


phallic language


sociobiologica reasoning (<-- so dominant)

Star Trek --> sociobiology promises mo[...]

[...]of the university
-(in the case of rigging) mechanical metaphors --provide--> foundation of moving bodies

prosthetic technology (like the *magic lantern*)
***technology of theory***



rigging and the question of morphological correspondence (homology: systematic similarity) --> isomorphic systems of relations
•isomorphic: 1-1 mapping, structure-preserving mapping --✕--> breakable objects
homology: principle of rigging, essentially the same (parts might have different shapes and be employed for different purposes) --> geometrical similarity --> ‘abstraction: materials of organization’ [position + structure] (Geoffroy > Hubert)
~~✕--> Deleuze and Guattari's body without organs [anatomical: pure plane of immanence (~ *rig = abstract animal*)]
--> (thinkers of) *organic folding* + *comparative biological intuition* --> *science of form*
•analogue: a part or organ in one animal that has the same function as another part or organ in a different animal (--> rig is the analogue of the animal's body)
•homotypy (homotype: serially repeated parts) --> Goethe

homology: a morphological correspondence determined primarily by relative position and connection ~= rigging
--Darwin--> material ancestors (replaced metaphysical archetypes)

philosophical anatomy <~~?--> rigging
•dialectics is the search for rational laws which are active in nature
•discontent with merely empiricism
•transcendental (philosopher) ==> morphologist

rigging: (step away form ordinary perception and) building internal homologies (=/= external ressemblance)
==> comprehensible order (--> systematic animation)
~=> complexities and accidents (are also part of it)

--> rational morphology
--> mathematization of space [--> analytic geometry (not necessarily Euclidean or rigid bodies, but also curved spaces, n-dimensional spaces, particle spaces, volumetric space, phase space, etc.) (looking at the animal) ==> abstract, proliferation of types --> rig] {--Lefebvre--> social critique of abstract space --> rigged}
-the way i learned 3D animation, the space of the software was a n-dimensional spaces (X, Y, Z, time, texture, audio, constraining, etc.)


automaton
a bit of machinery exhibiting somewhat complex behavior --rigging--> programming movement ==produce==> a working simulacrum of a living organism
•(in the days of magic) “name of god” was the rig for golem [?]
•(in the time of Newton) automaton: clockwork music box
•(in 19th century) automaton: glorified heat engine
•(in 20th century) intelligent building [~= rig]
•(perhaps rigging is our age's) desire to produce and study automata [~= computational mechanization, kinematic model]

(abstractly) automaton: a set of physically unspecified states, input, ou[...]

[...]d into a computer model, the computer faithfully reproduces it)

early 20th century --> notions of the complex unity of (living) systems ==> romantic conceptions of nature
*complexity = romantic holism =/= reductionist*

romantic tradition of complexity : to see an underlying unity in a world of heterogeneous objects and phenomena (Rousseau, Cuvier, last two thousands years, [is religion romantic?])


romantic scientist's moderate version of Kant's Copernican Revolution:
•Rousseau
•Humboldt --> ***to arrange the facts, not successively on the order in which they have presented themselves, but according to the relations which they have between themselves*** [~~> a sort of paranoia]
◦the idea that to see that Humboldt was able to see takes a “sensitive observer”
•Whitehead --> physical systems with endurance as the measure of their stability
•Tansley --> ecosystem ~= superorganism
•
> =/= baroque (--Kwa--> neobaroque):
•Leibniz --> every bit of matter can be conceived as a garden full of plants : each drop of its bodily fluid is also such a garden ==> ***it is the direction of looking that matters *** (mode of attention)
•Deleuze
•Whitehead
•Darwin
•Benjamin
•

bestiary = baroque + romantic

*romantic complexity (looks up) =/= baroque complexity (looks down)*
•looking up: integrate individuals (who appear to be a heterogeneous lot) at the phenomenological level to a single entity at a higher level of organization --> (plants and animals, individuals) are*functionality integrated* [<-- my problem with the notion of community]
◦looking up to the world of platonic forms <-- a process of abstraction
•looking down: a table of companions --> (plants and animals, individuals) are *cooperating*

(romantic conceptions of) society as organism =/= (baroque conception ofion of) organism as society


(historic) baroque
-grand style of 17th century
-(insist on) strong phenomenological realness --> sensuous materiality
-materiality flows out in many directions (=/= confined within) ==> blurring “individual =/= environment”
-inventiveness:
--music--> the ability to produce lots of novel combinations out of a rather limited set of elements
--theater--> (logical development of plot =/=) sequence of monologues and allegories ==> action


Leibniz baroque philosophy --> monad: individuals not linked to form greater systems (they don't even communicate), but they affect each other
--Deleuze--> each monad had its context represented inside itself (as fold) [more important the monad --> richer its world]


metaphors of romanticism:
•organicism
•system --> (in graphical representation) depicted by connecting lives between constituent el[...]

[...]--> (in graphical representation) depicted by connecting lives between constituent elements (=/= monad)
•

Whitehead --Deleuze--> a neobaroque philosopher --> possibility of a chaotic side-by-side existence of mutually exclusive realities
(baroque era) harmony: art of counterpoints (bringing together independent voices)


German baroque (Gryphius, Lohenstein) --> nature = [*]ruin: heap of highly significant fragments =/= seamless web (@ERG website)
•fragment: independent individual things with a monadological structure (~/= postmodern understanding of fragment)
•link (between them) = reciprocal reference =/= connection
◦(references remain in their) *allegorical immanence*
•


World War II ~=> systems theories (attempt to explain the structure and behavior of complex objects


Charney + von Neumann
deterministic description of the atmosphere
“long-range forecasting”
computer-based metrology
==> *field* became the essence of atmospheric state (field =/= structure, phenomena such as cyclones, fronts, cyclogenesis, frontogenesis)
<--Lorenz-- a given that the atmosphere is a single whole

romantic & nonromantic Darwin
evolutionary theory
phylogenetic tree
-“war of nature ==> higher animals directly follow”
-individual organisms engage in various interactions with each other ==> speciation

Tansley (fulfilling a romantic expectation with regard to complex systems) --1926--> maintenance of equilibrium by ecosystem ["life = equilibrium"]
=/= Schrödinger (showed that equilibrium is unfit as a metaphor for life) --> life = islands of low entropy (complex locations) in a sea of high entropy (of decreasing complexity)


Lokta
(evolution of) chemical systems = general systems


Patten
ecosystem ecologist
“ecosystem = natural control system” ~= (single equilibrium simple cybernetic) technical control device <-- the metaphor of *automatic machine* (taken literally)
representing whole ecosystems by (mathematized and fit for simulation on digital computers) models


1960s 70s --> system ecology
--lurck--> (romantic trope of) rigorous functionalism [every little plant or insect had its place as a cog on a giant machinery]


Rene Thom
chemical reaction kinetics
biological morphogenesis
catastrophe theory: slight change in a single variable of a system can give rise to sharp discontinuous change
==> existence of multiple equilibria


Slobodkin
game theory
management of natural systems


Prigogine + Stengers
brusselator device (--> strange attractor) --> behavior and evolution of complex systems --illustrate-->
•discontinuous develo[...]

[...]◦concerned with deconstruting the human as an ancient concept [~?~> dissatisfied and alienated by nature]

ectogenetic foetus (growth of an organism in an artificial environment)
surrogate mother جایگزین
pregnant man {in the fear-fantasy of miscegenation

(crossing:)
animal
  human
inanimate
   technologies
    }==> horror (accompanying the posthuman)



[title]
monstrous logic of ajayeb

monstrous =/= neat categories

teratology
in a wider context of studies of monsters
written texts (not only physical manifestations) ~ defy canonical categories

[*]gothic: (not only a genre,) any type of text that makes coherent interpretation fail*** <== text suffers from an overload of contradictory meanings which make it literally fall apart at the seams


(Derrida:) monster: *species of the nonspecies* = as-yet unnameable which is proclaiming itself --> make people turn their eyes away
-the figure of the monster embodies a means of thinking otherwise
-event of the Derridean text signalling a rupture with the discourses in which it is gestated
--Campbell--> both Derrida and Darwin were engaged in the *practice of revealing monstrosity to the world*


***contemporary Iran = postmodern gothic***
آخوند‎ akhoond: social imaginary of post-industrial society producing teratological monstrous formations <== their technological character transgresses conventions of taxonomical description --Braidotti--> cyber-teratological (fascinatino with grotesque + technological)
-what are the non-unitary subjectivities in Tehran today? (monster = horror + marvel)

monster =/= demonstrate, de-monstrate <-- vision + monstrosity
*monster: sites of otherworldliness* --used--> teratoscopy

1- Greek and Roman --> race of monsters: ethnic entity horrific & fantastic
2- baroque and enlightenment --> began to produce a scientific, wondrous, fantastic, rare, entertaining --(such as: madmen and dwarfs and other marvels participated in the life of his or her town and enjoys certain privileges [...] jesters and fools can transgress social conventions and do things that “normal” human beings cannot afford -Braidotti)
3- genetic turning point in the post-nuclear era --> cybernetic teratology: effects of toxicity and environmental pollution ==> new monsters [--> Tsing]


experience of the world of high-technology

artifacts of visual culture, (TV advertisements) dealing with the tropes of the primitive, technology, horror:
(these artifacts connote دلالت ضمنى long histories of techno-mytho-political dramas)
•Audi spider; where Audi is likened to a preditor, ensnaring, devouring its rivals; Vorsprung durch Technik written in gothic-style[...]

[...]
(health of the community is theatened by undesirable members)

*bacteria ==> community can come into full self-expression*
bacteria = disruption of social order ~-=> bacteria stabilizes the social order

***bacterial threat = biological model for a political necessity***

(familiar terrain of) hand: a vast and foreign bacterial colony

in a world of microbial resistance [in which common infections and minor injuries can kill <-- real possibility for 21st century and not a apocalyptic fantasy] --> *antibacterials carve out spaces of near-perfect security*

bacteria:
•overwhelm us
•outnumber us
•outclassify us
•exceed us
•pre-date us
}--> concealed by antibacterial discourse

good bacteria exists in the gut: their market-sanctioned place
*good bacteria: fantasy of the efficient worker*



4. deviant sex
bacterial sex

bacteria **propagate in the most ancient way : they have sex by contagion** = endosymbiosis, symbiogenesis --> ‘prolonged symbiotic associations ==> appearance of new organism’ (massive contagion that moves across phyla and lineages across biotic and abiotic spaces ~/= Darwinian natural selection)

1940s --> monomorphism: (in bacteria sex, proposing that) male and female are separate but visually indistinguishable

categories of inside/outside, host/guest, parent/child, original/copy, female/male --> organize civil life =/= bacteria
==> in advertising bacteria propagation appears “deviant” (in non-productive forms) --> antibacterials confer moral righteousness

Karin's germ management ♥

(Karin) “good germ management =/= good parenting”
(Dettol:) “good germ management = good parenting” [when a mother at home protects children from contact with the floor]

(in iran:) contact is contagion

Campbell assuming women tolerate germs more than men --> not in iran

**staging the unbacterial woman**

*body is a closed private property =/= contagion emanates from bodies that are not properly closed or private*

“community = the single biggest source of threat” (our sovereign cleanliness) --> *bacteria as other people* مجاز مرسل metonymically (not just metaphorically)
•degenerate human
•homeless man
•transvestite
•street sweeper
•

(cleanliness is always sovereign)


if ”(deep) ideology =/= (critical) thought” --then--> fantasy =/= ?

‘deviant’ mobilizes deep-seated fears and fantasies ==> images that are visually intense + build exceedingly successful brands

critical analysis can move from thinking about symptoms as indirect expressions of deep ideology (paranoia) --to--> *indirect expressinos of structur[...]