[...]osition + influence

“i am rubied by your attention”
(ruby: yaghute sorkh یاقوت سرخ) ~-> to describe the effect of an encounter between two

...shifting verbs to nouns and nouns to verb }--> practical

*relational properties of language:
•viscosity (chasbandegi چسبند‌گی)
•conductivity
•velocity
(=/= daunting)
 -collective
 -exploratory
 -supportive


(what to do with) the unavoidable childishness (and girlish) of wonder and of fables
-does wonder need to grow up?

there is a risk that that which awakens our epistemological appetite will ultimately be unfriendly, unseemly, unsophisticated, unsuitable
•wonder goes beyond what is suitable (Irigaray,) even threatens our status as “serious, adult thinkers” (Stengers)
hoax ==> compels us to do work that is sober and bound closer to reality

the bifurcation of childhood and adulthood gets in the way of thinking
-the child/adult divide as an “achievement” of the Vicorian Era

the context of my ajayeb:
“The Science War”
epistemological differences between sciences

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

[Lorraine J. Daston]

the evolving collective sensibility of naturalists

objective order and subjective sensibility

...celestial apparitions, monsters,

how wonder and wonders fortified princely power, rewove the texture of scientific experience, and shaped the sensibility of intellectuals

(webs of cultural significance, material practices, and theoretical derivations)

(cultivate a distinctive scientific self wherein knowing and knower converge) Galison

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

*passion maintains a path between (--corporal impressions and movements toward an object):
philosophers <----> physicists
metaphysical research <----> cosmological research
transcendental <----> empirical

architecture of ideality : (sociofamilial) stratification of desire --> ideal ego ==> religiosity, slogans, publicity, terror, --✕--> roots {vegetal, earthly, ideal, heavenly,)
[Irigaray]

(@Ali , what is the source of movement? what is the motivating force behind mobility if not wonder?---in all dimensions)
(both active & passive) wonder ==> move

the “man” (in Nietzsche and Heidegger) thinks he is at the end of his growth, has completed a cycle

“can we look at, contemplate, wonder at the machine from a place where it does not see us?” *** --> the issue is how to be able to wonder at the face of something/somebody that is looking (back) at us. ,,,(@Lili)

surprise: not yet assimilated or disassimilated to known

energy tied to the dimension of the story =/= mobilization of new energies -->[...]

[...]/> }=/= romanticism: the belief that “feeling for another” belongs to some sort of naive state of nature


(#feedback: ways of showing the artists how they actively create the perspective that allows them to “see” --> ‘giving artistic feedback = being an anthropologist on Mars’)

Despret anticipate finding some references to the body (beyond simple “presence”) in the work of scientists --> the question of meaning + (its corollary) the question of perspective

tick's perception = world
(we know from Uexküll) one may indeed construct a perspective without involving the body - the perspective may be drawn partially from a mental process
•*animals only perceive things that have meaning for them*
•*animals construe meanings in acting*
Umwelt theory: a scientist may make an inventory of what makes the animal act and react --> collecting ‘meanings’ the scientist rebuilds the world as each animal perceives it + seeks for which meaning all these things take for it (=/= adopt the perspective of animal)

the scientist aims not just to understand what something merely ‘means’ for another being, but also how something ‘matters’ for it (~ the most meaningful)

language of perspective --Daston--> what does it mean to understand other minds
*sympathetic projection* [--> **perspective: apotheosis of subjectivity as the essence of mind] <-- a cultural shift:
•habit of interior observation cultivated by certain forms of piety
•increasingly refined language of individual subjectivity (developed in the 18th and 19th century novel)
•equation drawn between ‘sensory experience = self’ by sensationalist psychology
•economic (and political) individualism
•cult of sympathy

perspective ~= sympathy (with science + animals) --> an inappropriate form of subjectivity
1. adopting animal's perspective involves a dangerous flirtation with [*]anthropomorphism: one putting himself in the animal's shoe ~=? one actually put the animal in human shoes
2. perspective ==imperil==> necessary distance (or ‘sanitary cordon’ between the observer and the observed)
}==>
•anthropomorphism =/= science
•anecdote =/= legitimate date
•nonhuman =/= beliefs (--> you can't attribute belief to animals)


(old dualism of) “Science =/= non-science” ~= “imaginative (autobiographical, emotional) =/= factual (neutral)” ~= “body =/= mind”

(reconstruction of)
what is most meaningful for animal
what is the perspective of animal

*most meaningful: affected perspective* (Despret) =/= (Uexküll) semiological perspective (of the tick)

(looking for or) focus on affected perspective ==Despret==> (reveals) scientists’ bodies in their practice --> what having a body means (for scientists)
+
(Haraway ==>) *bodies are “made[...]

[...]hat being is interested in

very bottom of the ladder of choices...

for Tehran:
1. memory studies
2. kalagh shenasi (raven studies) کلاغ شناسی

ravens, evidently, do not want to obey any of the rules that make research possible: the incivility that excommunicated them from the laboratoies of the behaviorists having already been stigmatized from the time of the Flood (in Noah's ark)

ravens are by all account unreliable <-- calling into question the intelligence of their researchers, the pertinence of their models, and the solidity of their dispositives
---> go to Kelile Demne

*the ravens literally recruit their researcher*
to [*]recruit: they will reveal to him the resolution of an enigma the difficulty and the interest of which would be in accord with what makes them impossible to study

(from) season --to--> season
(from) enigma --to--> findings
(from) hypothesis --to--> tests
suspense and sudden turns ==> transform all that we know about ravens

the ravens present a behavior that has no sense from the point of view of evolution

the “guilty” of the story are given from the beginning

---> go to [Daston's] historian of science (always knew how the story ended): imagine you are the kind of a person who cheats when reading mystery novels, and you read the last page first to know who did it, and then when you read the rest of mystery story, you know everything is building towards this climax, you read it in a very different way than the person who has to retrace all that have been implanted in your way by the author to throw you off the scent of the real villain {==> you lose the past in the image of the present}
+ scientist (who wish to have a) story about *why we believe what we believe now and why it is right* [knowing that everything we know now will be overturned if not now later]--> pathos and progress of science {==> negates science's enormous creativity and capacity for renovation}
-*Foucault showed how many more objects [sexuality, etc.] have histories (that we thought they don't, that they are constant for all humanity for all time for all cultures)


ravens are capable of being silent when they don't care to be noticed

(the raven inviting the others to share in the party, when food is difficult to find + they are experts in hiding food items) eyes of an ethologist --> why do ravens do that which the logic of evolution should prohibit them from doing? --Despret--> this motive will be not only a matter of discovering but also of inscribing in the regime of proof

hierarchical ladder =/= great economy of conflicts

one-upmanship

(raven's) acts that appear to be useless, pertain at once to both the game and to the affirmation of skill

**reciprocity of exc[...]

[...]r /> arrogance and authoritarianism are intrinsic in both Greek rationalist and mystical thoughts:
•Socrates --> worshipped reason and was an arrogant and obnoxious man who enjoyed ridiculing ordinary folks
•Buddah --> worshipped nature and produced a totally authoritarian system of thought (as have most philosophers in western history who have appealed to nature for ethics)

new postmodernism's value:
•ecological wisdom
•grassroots democracy
•personal and social responsibility
•non-violence
•decentralization
•community-based economics
•postpatriarchal values
•respect for diversity
•global responsibility
•future focus


*modernity is based on a fundamental value-idea --> secularism (a value whose opposite cannot be chosen as value)*

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

importance of scale
archive --> scale of the infinite

/>



*history of knowledge [in my work on ajayeb] = dream of knowledge (present in the mind) of the people who are not anglophone =/= history of science*

inside and outide the mental map of the historian (of science)

SDzVaBj492s
Daston on *disciplinary neurosis* of the history of science

all timelines are maps (are chronologies, are provincial)
most drawings are maps (are charming)


[Sina:] ****can we have (imagine) science without modernity (not coming right after it)??**** <-- my research question (to separate the bond between science and modernity? to flow the curiosity in that direction)


{ the idea of “science created the modern world + western global dominance” (=/= everyone else) }==> “understanding of modernity = understanding history of science”
(one of rare moments that) european middle ages is conflated with the whole of middle east civilizationzation, as pre-Newtonian (in the eyes of W. Rostow)
--> cold war (maneuvering for the alliances of the newly decolonized nations)
--> all the ways of knowing that were not included in the current Anglophone and Francophone definition of “science = the natural sciences in English only in mid 19th century” =/= elm علم, Wissenschaft

**there is no culture without (its own implicit systematics of) knowledge**
•epistemological hierarchy (even without the display or existence of *epistemic culture* [dedicated to the persue of knoweldge] --> yet put pressure on communities of learning ==> ideas & practices, for example alchemy was court science par excellence)
•social hierarchy
•rational who can practice them why

(Daston:) the stuck of hands-on knowledge shoots up and then metaphysics plump it --> persue of knowledge becomes collective (with different pressure points)

for many cultures [including Persian]:[...]

[...]
[Sina:] ****can we have (imagine) science without modernity (not coming right after it)??**** <-- my research question (to separate the bond between science and modernity? to flow the curiosity in that direction)


{ the idea of “science created the modern world + western global dominance” (=/= everyone else) }==> “understanding of modernity = understanding history of science”
(one of rare moments that) european middle ages is conflated with the whole of middle east civilization, as pre-Newtonian (in the eyes of W. Rostow)
--> cold war (maneuvering for the alliances of the newly decolonized nations)
--> all the ways of knowing that were not included in the current Anglophone and Francophone definition of “science = the natural sciences in English only in mid 19th century” =/= elm علم, Wissenschaft

**there is no culture without (its own implicit systematics of) knowledge**
•epistemological hierarchy (even without the display or existence of *epistemic culture* [dedicated to the persue of knoweldge] --> yet put pressure on communities of learning ==> ideas & practices, for example alchemy was court science par excellence)
•social hierarchy
•rational who can practice them why

(Daston:) the stuck of hands-on knowledge shoots up and then metaphysics plump it --> persue of knowledge becomes collective (with different pressure points)

for many cultures [including Persian]:
•the philology (grammer) is the queen of the sciences
•the stricing prevalence of *dispute: intellectual discourse staged as agonistic duel --> (most of our) ***intellectual life is conducted as polemic***


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

the more you study an environment the less your inheritiability of that environment will be (?)

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

history: study of past as it it commemorate in traces (textual, physical, etc.) =/= [ajayeb studies =] memory studies: subjective commemoration of the past, collective forms of commemorations (for example the name of streets, or monuments, or unconscious way of navigating in Tajrish square, etc.) --> present in oral interviews
•how the past has been enlisted emotionally, politically, communally,,, (in various causes: construction of autobiography to the construction of national myth) [==> objectivity does not make sense in memory studies]
•it includes (not only that which cab be documented, it rather) includes an element of the subjective : how people feel about what happened in the past, how they reconstruct events of the past but also narratives =/= what happened in the past --Daston--> objectivity (among histories:)
◦cross-checking of sources
◦(19th century technique of) “reading against the grain”: try to discover, from the surviving sources, from what perspective they were written (what historical con[...]

[...]ts)

for many cultures [including Persian]:
•the philology (grammer) is the queen of the sciences
•the stricing prevalence of *dispute: intellectual discourse staged as agonistic duel --> (most of our) ***intellectual life is conducted as polemic***


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

the more you study an environment the less your inheritiability of that environment will be (?)

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

history: study of past as it it commemorate in traces (textual, physical, etc.) =/= [ajayeb studies =] memory studies: subjective commemoration of the past, collective forms of commemorations (for example the name of streets, or monuments, or unconscious way of navigating in Tajrish square, etc.) --> present in oral interviews
•how the past has been enlisted emotionally, politically, communally,,, (in various causes: construction of autobiography to the construction of national myth) [==> objectivity does not make sense in memory studies]
•it includes (not only that which cab be documented, it rather) includes an element of the subjective : how people feel about what happened in the past, how they reconstruct events of the past but also narratives =/= what happened in the past --Daston--> objectivity (among histories:)
◦cross-checking of sources
◦(19th century technique of) “reading against the grain”: try to discover, from the surviving sources, from what perspective they were written (what historical context they were embedded in) = “critical reading” from the stand point of all of one might say “the illusions of memory” which might cloud an objective impartial records of events (not accepting the narrative that place value in the source) [=/= my work on ajayeb]
◦securing evidence (---> go to archive) : intersection of objectivity with study of history

(since 17th century) memory has been essential to our conceptualization of what does it mean to have a self --> why we are so concerned with memory damage ceases (alzheimer, etc.)

husod3oqLds


many time when we define (say “what X is”), what we are doing is to how to make a term more precise, to make something *artificially operational*

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

*sciences of the archive*
depend on longed lived collections

(since 16th century, as we know it) modern science's epistemic goal: *predictive accuracy* =/= *to elevate certainty* (the case in medieval Latin Europe)

books (past discoveries) & instruments (future discoveries) interspersed --when--> they both belong to the same practice ==> library



(Goethe:) search nothing beyond the phenomena

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

Morris
movement of commerce's subject (=/= walking of the Parisian flaneur)
plaque's morbid s[...]

[...]subordinated

Timur who constructed a fantastic war machine turned back against the nomads, but who, by that very fact, was obliged to erect a State apparatus all the heavier and more unproductive since it existed only as the empty form of appropriation of that machine


the peace of terror or survival
-the postfascist figure that takes peace as its object directly
-we have seen war machine assign its objective a peace still more terrifying than fascist death
*the unspecified enemy* we have seen it put its counterguerrilla elements into place


two poles of war machine:
1. it takes war for its object and forms a line of destruction prolongable to the limits of the universe
2. when it, with infinitely lower qualities, has as its object not war but the drawing of a *creative line of flight* (the composition of a smooth space and of the movement of people in that space)

an ideological, scientific, or artistic movement can be a potential war machine, to the precise extent to which it draws, in relation to aphylum, a plane of consistency, a creative line of flight, a smooth space of displacement

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

0.99993

Daston history of reason
Daston asking: how reason became rationality?

rationality (~= universal calculus of) =/= reasoning

•(a more) ancient ideal --> reasoning [with recourse to the faculty of judgement]
•modern ideal --> (cold war) rationality: a finite well-defined set of rules that can be applied unambiguously in specified settings without recourse to the faculty of judgement

cold war: crystalline + generality + conclusivess could cope with a world on the brink
--> algorithmic rules as the core of rationality
--> sacrifice of [precious to philosophers] ‘insight’ and ‘understanding’ ascpects of reason
--> automatic: you don't need to understand them to execute them

*the posiblity of a mechanical mind*

Turing's [*]programming: constructing instruction tables

(1794 early French revolution) universal school for future French citizen with arithmetic [3 + 4 = 7] at its core --teach-> “exactitude of the mind” --> children are going to learn:
•the meaning of self evidence [of arithmetic propositions]
•the meaning of justified belief
•formation of ideas
•judgement
•reasoning
}--foundation--> quanitative science of a human realm

first reliable calculator --> 1850

rationality عقلانيت
•history of ever more sophisticated mechanical computers
•how rules themselves became increasingly identified with algorithms
•how algorithms became increasingly identified with mindlessness

Kant --> science as mechanical skill that can be mastered by diligen[...]

[...]--teach-> “exactitude of the mind” --> children are going to learn:
•the meaning of self evidence [of arithmetic propositions]
•the meaning of justified belief
•formation of ideas
•judgement
•reasoning
}--foundation--> quanitative science of a human realm

first reliable calculator --> 1850

rationality عقلانيت
•history of ever more sophisticated mechanical computers
•how rules themselves became increasingly identified with algorithms
•how algorithms became increasingly identified with mindlessness

Kant --> science as mechanical skill that can be mastered by diligence and determinate rules
tacit knowledge: a manul labor [styles of knowing] that cannot be captured by algorithms

---> go to Encyclopedie (Diderot)...

deskilling calculation ==> economic rationality (economic rationalization): you take the task, decompose it into simplest possible steps, you divide the labor, you hire the least skilled and cheapest labor possible ==Babbage==> increase the efficiency and the costs

•game theory
•rational choice theory


(memory + understanding + judgement + imagination)
*judgement (Daston) and imagination (Sina) are integral to the exercise of reason*

reason in rationality: algorithmic rule governed =/=
•passions اشتياق تعصب
•fantasy وسواس
•sloppy thinking درهم وبرهم
•ignorance بى خبرى
•superstition خرافه
•self-deception خود فريبى


the human factor
there is something about human that has always been in odds with reason

Nozick (~ Terminator) --> the rules of procedures that constitute rationality would be valid, would be efficacious, but algorithmic. executed by machine, but opaque to human understanding
~ Wittgenstein --> to follow a rule: a practice taught by example =/= precept
}--> *to understand rules in an algorithmic sense* =/= model, maxim, tacit knowledge


Daston --> there is no simple way, in which historical context determines the form and content of the thinkable. but (as in the case of algorithmic rules and cold war rationality) historical circumstances do light up some parts of the intellectual landscape and darken others

our current understanding of what it means to be rational owes a great deal to the power of place and time
•for Kant: judgement = highest faculties =/= for modern (us) judgement is problematic


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

[the horror of the contemporary German art:] to deliberate: کنکاش سنجیده و عمدی =/= Janina
(art of [ironic] deliberation =/= chaotic venture, Sina's lecture-performances)
deliberation: thinking then doing it =/= doing then thinking about what you h[...]

[...]illing calculation ==> economic rationality (economic rationalization): you take the task, decompose it into simplest possible steps, you divide the labor, you hire the least skilled and cheapest labor possible ==Babbage==> increase the efficiency and the costs

•game theory
•rational choice theory


(memory + understanding + judgement + imagination)
*judgement (Daston) and imagination (Sina) are integral to the exercise of reason*

reason in rationality: algorithmic rule governed =/=
•passions اشتياق تعصب
•fantasy وسواس
•sloppy thinking درهم وبرهم
•ignorance بى خبرى
•superstition خرافه
•self-deception خود فريبى


the human factor
there is something about human that has always been in odds with reason

Nozick (~ Terminator) --> the rules of procedures that constitute rationality would be valid, would be efficacious, but algorithmic. executed by machine, but opaque to human understanding
~ Wittgenstein --> to follow a rule: a practice taught by example =/= precept
}--> *to understand rules in an algorithmic sense* =/= model, maxim, tacit knowledge


Daston --> there is no simple way, in which historical context determines the form and content of the thinkable. but (as in the case of algorithmic rules and cold war rationality) historical circumstances do light up some parts of the intellectual landscape and darken others

our current understanding of what it means to be rational owes a great deal to the power of place and time
•for Kant: judgement = highest faculties =/= for modern (us) judgement is problematic


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

[the horror of the contemporary German art:] to deliberate: کنکاش سنجیده و عمدی =/= Janina
(art of [ironic] deliberation =/= chaotic venture, Sina's lecture-performances)
deliberation: thinking then doing it =/= doing then thinking about what you have done (~= communication, intimacy)

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

metaphysics of natural law

Daston's rigor: trying to understand why is it so persistant (almost irresistible) that we **extract social and moral norms from nature** (rather than jumping up saying that it is a doomed idea)
[--> got to fable; ikhvano safa court of animals; panchatantra Kelile Demne]
•to merge natural and social orders together
•to make nature meaningful
•to invoke nature to buttress human values of: true, good, beautiful
•

devil = collective human imagination of chaos

formless and lawless
land of no promises
past is no guide to the future
at the mercy of chance

the axiom of modern thought: society =/= nature [of which trespassings are rife]

[...]

[...]rocedures that constitute rationality would be valid, would be efficacious, but algorithmic. executed by machine, but opaque to human understanding
~ Wittgenstein --> to follow a rule: a practice taught by example =/= precept
}--> *to understand rules in an algorithmic sense* =/= model, maxim, tacit knowledge


Daston --> there is no simple way, in which historical context determines the form and content of the thinkable. but (as in the case of algorithmic rules and cold war rationality) historical circumstances do light up some parts of the intellectual landscape and darken others

our current understanding of what it means to be rational owes a great deal to the power of place and time
•for Kant: judgement = highest faculties =/= for modern (us) judgement is problematic


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

[the horror of the contemporary German art:] to deliberate: کنکاش سنجیده و عمدی =/= Janina
(art of [ironic] deliberation =/= chaotic venture, Sina's lecture-performances)
deliberation: thinking then doing it =/= doing then thinking about what you have done (~= communication, intimacy)

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

metaphysics of natural law

Daston's rigor: trying to understand why is it so persistant (almost irresistible) that we **extract social and moral norms from nature** (rather than jumping up saying that it is a doomed idea)
[--> got to fable; ikhvano safa court of animals; panchatantra Kelile Demne]
•to merge natural and social orders together
•to make nature meaningful
•to invoke nature to buttress human values of: true, good, beautiful
•

devil = collective human imagination of chaos

formless and lawless
land of no promises
past is no guide to the future
at the mercy of chance

the axiom of modern thought: society =/= nature [of which trespassings are rife]

[#fable]
to extract some sort of politics from:
•beehive
•physics of liver
•evolutionary theory
•organic specialization [--Aristotle--> slavery]
•

1. how conceptions of natural order sustains specific norms & the model of any kind of norm <-- historical + empirical
2. appeal to nature capture something profound about values in general regardless of their specific context <-- philosophical

(the human) impulse to *make nature meaningful* --> psychological + epistemological + ethical necessity


(1)
(specific) [*]nature: the ontological identity card : that which makes a particular thing what it is (what makes skwerl a skwerl)
the idea of ***fixed natural kind ==inspire==> the ideal of justice***
--> the idea of organic specialization [organ: ‘tool’ in greek; for Aristotle: “injustice = violation of specialization"[...]

[...]e something profound about values in general regardless of their specific context <-- philosophical

(the human) impulse to *make nature meaningful* --> psychological + epistemological + ethical necessity


(1)
(specific) [*]nature: the ontological identity card : that which makes a particular thing what it is (what makes skwerl a skwerl)
the idea of ***fixed natural kind ==inspire==> the ideal of justice***
--> the idea of organic specialization [organ: ‘tool’ in greek; for Aristotle: “injustice = violation of specialization” (of citizen's tools or honors) <-- an order of nature]

rose wanna be skwerl ---> go to bestiary
“good consist in each being striving to be the best of its kind not the best of all”

(2)
[*]nature: the will of God (~ edict of God) --Augustine--> “sodomy = crime against nature (~ against God: the author of nature)” [--> unnatural =/= sacrilege توهين به مقدسات]
•a Roman custom (and a Roman intuition): when you are in a place you try to adapt to the local ways of doing things <-- (with Augustine) we are preserved in a proverb [#integration] --grant--> nature with supreme authority as God's proxy


seeking norms in nature --Daston-->
•is this (examples) why we should stop it (at best nature authority is borrowed whether overtly from God or covertly from social conventions ==> it is redundent and we don't need it)
•it is a dangerous weapon in the arsenal of the most repressive and aggressive elements of society

content of norms =/= [*]normativity: a justificatoin that gives any and all norms their force : the quality of telling us what should be (=/= describing how things actually are)

“the starry heavens above ~/= the moral law within” --> Kant's awe: the regularity (of both human law and natural law)
حيرت awe [<==evoke== the cosmic: all encompassing order & exquisitelquisitely designed ornament] =/= horror [<==evoke== the unnatural (ajayeb)]

**the recognition of an order** --Daston--> the key to all kinds of norms (--> awe = wonder + fear + respect)


(ancient greek cosmopolitan traverler ethnographer) Herodotus's fable of ‘custom is king of all’ <-- داریوش perian king Darius's anthropological experiment: Greeks won't eat their father's dead body, they burn it =/= Indians won't burn their father's dead body, they eat it

•chaos: nature without order
•anarchy: society without order
}--> past is no guide to present and future : *there are no regularities (of human promises or natural cycles) to support either justice or knowledge*


why duplicate the moral order with an analogical natural order?
why turn to nature for your raw materials (to construct moral order for themselves)?
--> ...

are we now in the position to reclaim norms [...]

[...] will of God (~ edict of God) --Augustine--> “sodomy = crime against nature (~ against God: the author of nature)” [--> unnatural =/= sacrilege توهين به مقدسات]
•a Roman custom (and a Roman intuition): when you are in a place you try to adapt to the local ways of doing things <-- (with Augustine) we are preserved in a proverb [#integration] --grant--> nature with supreme authority as God's proxy


seeking norms in nature --Daston-->
•is this (examples) why we should stop it (at best nature authority is borrowed whether overtly from God or covertly from social conventions ==> it is redundent and we don't need it)
•it is a dangerous weapon in the arsenal of the most repressive and aggressive elements of society

content of norms =/= [*]normativity: a justificatoin that gives any and all norms their force : the quality of telling us what should be (=/= describing how things actually are)

“the starry heavens above ~/= the moral law within” --> Kant's awe: the regularity (of both human law and natural law)
حيرت awe [<==evoke== the cosmic: all encompassing order & exquisitely designed ornament] =/= horror [<==evoke== the unnatural (ajayeb)]

**the recognition of an order** --Daston--> the key to all kinds of norms (--> awe = wonder + fear + respect)


(ancient greek cosmopolitan traverler ethnographer) Herodotus's fable of ‘custom is king of all’ <-- داریوش perian king Darius's anthropological experiment: Greeks won't eat their father's dead body, they burn it =/= Indians won't burn their father's dead body, they eat it

•chaos: nature without order
•anarchy: society without order
}--> past is no guide to present and future : *there are no regularities (of human promises or natural cycles) to support either justice or knowledge*


why duplicate the moral order with an analogical natural order?
why turn to nature for your raw materials (to construct moral order for themselves)?
--> ...

are we now in the position to reclaim norms from nature?
--> yes <== nature exemplifies so many different kinds of order:
•order of the stars and plant =/= order of weather
•order of specific natures =/= order of universal natural laws
•order of local ecologies =/= order of cosmological unities of gravitation
•
which nature? --> any order of nature can be countered with examples of another order equally natural }--Daston--> [*]nature: repository (or wunderkammer) of all imaginable orders****

terror + randomness --> most effective weapon of dictators (you never know when it strikes again)
-horror of Kafka's bureaucracy: negation of regularity, destruction of order, institutionalized anarchy
-one of the most dehumanizing experiences: being completely subject to the will of another (~ slavery[...]

[...]** --Daston--> the key to all kinds of norms (--> awe = wonder + fear + respect)


(ancient greek cosmopolitan traverler ethnographer) Herodotus's fable of ‘custom is king of all’ <-- داریوش perian king Darius's anthropological experiment: Greeks won't eat their father's dead body, they burn it =/= Indians won't burn their father's dead body, they eat it

•chaos: nature without order
•anarchy: society without order
}--> past is no guide to present and future : *there are no regularities (of human promises or natural cycles) to support either justice or knowledge*


why duplicate the moral order with an analogical natural order?
why turn to nature for your raw materials (to construct moral order for themselves)?
--> ...

are we now in the position to reclaim norms from nature?
--> yes <== nature exemplifies so many different kinds of order:
•order of the stars and plant =/= order of weather
•order of specific natures =/= order of universal natural laws
•order of local ecologies =/= order of cosmological unities of gravitation
•
which nature? --> any order of nature can be countered with examples of another order equally natural }--Daston--> [*]nature: repository (or wunderkammer) of all imaginable orders****

terror + randomness --> most effective weapon of dictators (you never know when it strikes again)
-horror of Kafka's bureaucracy: negation of regularity, destruction of order, institutionalized anarchy
-one of the most dehumanizing experiences: being completely subject to the will of another (~ slavery) [--> this is the most pleasurable experience in sex and sado masochism]

•nature never insults (its inhumanity)
•nature provides the raw material for meaning <-- *because we are embodied organisms we must incarnate our orders* (~ we must find a way to display them to ourselves)
•animals can feel terror, but only humans can feel horror: the emotion that registers a deep disruption of an order (no matter what kind, a two-headed baby [natural monster] or a mother who kills her two babies [moral monster])


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

[title]
itchy eyes

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

16th and 17th centuries
times of extraordinary religious, economic, and intellectual upheaval (Europe was deluged by novelties of all kinds: birds of paradise, armadillos, anomalies: solar eclipse, comet, narwhal tusk, etc.)
(Daston >) Bacon [standing on an extremely unstable scientific ground] used monsters and marvels (as a sort of intellectual hygiene) to jolt people out of their assumptions about the natural world
=/= Aristotelian natural philosophy
--> anomaly took center stage of scientific explanations ~= art's investment in the exceptional
==> curiosity becomes a virtue =/= vi[...]

[...]: repository (or wunderkammer) of all imaginable orders****

terror + randomness --> most effective weapon of dictators (you never know when it strikes again)
-horror of Kafka's bureaucracy: negation of regularity, destruction of order, institutionalized anarchy
-one of the most dehumanizing experiences: being completely subject to the will of another (~ slavery) [--> this is the most pleasurable experience in sex and sado masochism]

•nature never insults (its inhumanity)
•nature provides the raw material for meaning <-- *because we are embodied organisms we must incarnate our orders* (~ we must find a way to display them to ourselves)
•animals can feel terror, but only humans can feel horror: the emotion that registers a deep disruption of an order (no matter what kind, a two-headed baby [natural monster] or a mother who kills her two babies [moral monster])


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

[title]
itchy eyes

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

16th and 17th centuries
times of extraordinary religious, economic, and intellectual upheaval (Europe was deluged by novelties of all kinds: birds of paradise, armadillos, anomalies: solar eclipse, comet, narwhal tusk, etc.)
(Daston >) Bacon [standing on an extremely unstable scientific ground] used monsters and marvels (as a sort of intellectual hygiene) to jolt people out of their assumptions about the natural world
=/= Aristotelian natural philosophy
--> anomaly took center stage of scientific explanations ~= art's investment in the exceptional
==> curiosity becomes a virtue =/= vice
•nature is allowed to joke
•nature has the freedom to experiment =/= God
--> ended by:
•18th century's *division of labor*
•19th century's *institution of science*

(two-headed cat's) deformations --> terrifying + electrifying
[*]bestiary = Telegram media from God:
•sign of end
•sign of fecundity, creativity, variety of nature

.../horror/wonder/horror/wonder/horror/wonder/...

“everyone was trafficking in marvels in the 17th century”
Daston

... --> premodern sci --> age of wonder --> modern science --> ...

cabinets of curiosity
(Daston's) chambers of wonders
•to overwhelm you
•to impress the ambassador


for Aristotle, philosophy starts with wonder, but you make it disappear as soon as possible (“wonder = sign of ignorance” of the unlettered and illiterate)

genre of natural history involving the marvels of insects --> domesticate the emotion of wonder for things we can explain

Daston =/= (early 20th century) morose and elegiac discourse about the disenchantment of the world

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

pessimism ~= realism
(optimism ~= idealism)


[...]

[...]br />

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

[title]
itchy eyes

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

16th and 17th centuries
times of extraordinary religious, economic, and intellectual upheaval (Europe was deluged by novelties of all kinds: birds of paradise, armadillos, anomalies: solar eclipse, comet, narwhal tusk, etc.)
(Daston >) Bacon [standing on an extremely unstable scientific ground] used monsters and marvels (as a sort of intellectual hygiene) to jolt people out of their assumptions about the natural world
=/= Aristotelian natural philosophy
--> anomaly took center stage of scientific explanations ~= art's investment in the exceptional
==> curiosity becomes a virtue =/= vice
•nature is allowed to joke
•nature has the freedom to experiment =/= God
--> ended by:
•18th century's *division of labor*
•19th century's *institution of science*

(two-headed cat's) deformations --> terrifying + electrifying
[*]bestiary = Telegram media from God:
•sign of end
•sign of fecundity, creativity, variety of nature

.../horror/wonder/horror/wonder/horror/wonder/...

“everyone was trafficking in marvels in the 17th century”
Daston

... --> premodern sci --> age of wonder --> modern science --> ...

cabinets of curiosity
(Daston's) chambers of wonders
•to overwhelm you
•to impress the ambassador


for Aristotle, philosophy starts with wonder, but you make it disappear as soon as possible (“wonder = sign of ignorance” of the unlettered and illiterate)

genre of natural history involving the marvels of insects --> domesticate the emotion of wonder for things we can explain

Daston =/= (early 20th century) morose and elegiac discourse about the disenchantment of the world

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

pessimism ~= realism
(optimism ~= idealism)

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

(to move from) eternal truths --to--> eternal archives
(an aesthetic:) archival monuments

despite computer's hype and undeniable capacity and flexibility of computerize databases, the practices of collecting, inventorying, describing, image-making, collating, and publishing have remaining stable since the monumental projects of 19th century: corpus inscriptionum latinarum, carte du ciel, botanical gardens, etc. --> archival projects

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

popular and learned interest in monsters

(in the 16th century & 17th century Baconian scientific programm:) treatments of nature and natural history must have included (with rigorous selection) monsters (~ aberrations in the natural order: new, rare, and unusual nature, both exotic & domestic)
[*]nature: an ingenious craftsman --> [*]monster: nature's most artful work (--> they br[...]

[...] truths --to--> eternal archives
(an aesthetic:) archival monuments

despite computer's hype and undeniable capacity and flexibility of computerize databases, the practices of collecting, inventorying, describing, image-making, collating, and publishing have remaining stable since the monumental projects of 19th century: corpus inscriptionum latinarum, carte du ciel, botanical gardens, etc. --> archival projects

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

popular and learned interest in monsters

(in the 16th century & 17th century Baconian scientific programm:) treatments of nature and natural history must have included (with rigorous selection) monsters (~ aberrations in the natural order: new, rare, and unusual nature, both exotic & domestic)
[*]nature: an ingenious craftsman --> [*]monster: nature's most artful work (--> they bridged the natural & the artificial)
•corresponded to the activities of nature =/= types of subject matter, methods of investigation
•interest in irregularities (=/= end of 17th century interest in nature's uniformity and order)
•

Lazarus exhibition, the parasitic twin (the italian conjoined twins who toured freak shows in 17th century europe)

(Daston --> a case study of) the changing relationship between popular & learned culture

legal status of monsters
infanticide in antiquity


earlier tradition of interest in monster:
•Aristotle --> Albertus Magnus
•divine sign --> Cicero, Augustine, Isidore of Sevill
•cosmographical & anthropologic --> Solinus


monsters in a context of a whole natural phenomen (bestiary):
earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions, celestial apparitions, strange rains (of blood), stones, and miscellanea

(monsters --> shift from) signs of God's wrat --to--> signs of nature's fertility
(by the end of 17th century) --to--> comparative anatomy and embryology (teratology)
(from) اعجوبه prodigy --to--> examples of medical pathology

*peasant and professional had participated to a significant extent in a shared culture of intellectual and religious interest* --✕-->{
(literate culture evolved far more rapidly ==> sharpening of social boundaries of)
city dwellers =/= peasants
urban literate elite =/= unlettered day laboure
--> for the educated layman: (religious associations of) monsters = another manifestation of popular ignorance and superstition --fostering--> uncritical wonder =/= sober investigation of natural cause


prodigy --> contrary to nature --> attributable directly to God (divine displeasure)
-the sunne shal suddenly shine againe in the night, and the moone thre times a day. blood shal drop out of the wood, and the stone shal give his voyce [...] There shalbe a confusion in many places, and the f[...]

[...]assume the role of an autonomous entity with a will (and sense of humour of her own) ~~> natural wonder



wonder literature ([lavishly illustrated bestiary, cosmography, travel literature, geological curiosa, herbal and astrological lore,] of later 16th and 17th century Daston) --> secularization of an interest in (monsters as) prodigies
--part-of--> the great body of common culture
--affinity--> popular 16th century genre of diverses lefons (selections from famous authors)

catalogues of strange instances or hidden properties of animals, vegetables and mineral
(middle class culture in elizabethan england)

prodigies denuded of their supernatural aura & (presented) to surprise and entertain the reader =/= to acquaint the reader with imminent apocalypse and judgeme

Certaine Secrete Wonders of Nature

portentous events بد شگون

(crocodiles) to be granted honorary monstrous status by virtue of their rarit

many will reade them [monsters], heare them and haue profit by them, that otherwise whould neuer haue knowen them. For many (I suppose) will buye this Booke for the things whereto they are affectioned, that neuer coulde or would have bought, or looked on the bookes, wherein all they are. -Lupton

common and popular forms of escapist literature: *travel books* and *chivalric romanc*
(--> don Quixote)
monstrous races (men with a single giant foot, or huge ears, or their faces on their chests, giants and dwarfs)

medically oriented monster literature

[Daston:] Pare was forced to eliminate a section on lesbianism, with a graphic description of the female genitals, before including Des monstres in later editions of his collected work


A Helpe to Memorie and Discourse (of Wonders, Foreign and Domestic)
*the passages and occurrences of the world* #ajayeb[...]

[...]r /> --part-of--> the great body of common culture
--affinity--> popular 16th century genre of diverses lefons (selections from famous authors)

catalogues of strange instances or hidden properties of animals, vegetables and mineral
(middle class culture in elizabethan england)

prodigies denuded of their supernatural aura & (presented) to surprise and entertain the reader =/= to acquaint the reader with imminent apocalypse and judgeme

Certaine Secrete Wonders of Nature

portentous events بد شگون

(crocodiles) to be granted honorary monstrous status by virtue of their rarit

many will reade them [monsters], heare them and haue profit by them, that otherwise whould neuer haue knowen them. For many (I suppose) will buye this Booke for the things whereto they are affectioned, that neuer coulde or would have bought, or looked on the bookes, wherein all they are. -Lupton

common and popular forms of escapist literature: *travel books* and *chivalric romanc*
(--> don Quixote)
monstrous races (men with a single giant foot, or huge ears, or their faces on their chests, giants and dwarfs)

medically oriented monster literature

[Daston:] Pare was forced to eliminate a section on lesbianism, with a graphic description of the female genitals, before including Des monstres in later editions of his collected work


A Helpe to Memorie and Discourse (of Wonders, Foreign and Domestic)
*the passages and occurrences of the world* #ajayeb
•the creatures thereof
•the casualties therein

little-known properties of... (wine and water, fish, dogs, cuckolds, hunchbacks and monsters)

popular ignorance
solitary efforts of the professional scholar
culture of the educated layman (lawyer, businessman, government official, and their wives and daughters)

[change in sensibility (&-=>? change in interpretation)]
beginning of the withdrawal of the educated classes from more popular culture
@Goda

monsters (familiar canon of prodigies) became a subject of great fashion and not vulgar

(Daston tracing how) “in the wonder literature, then, monsters--along with the rest of the canon of prodigies--began to cast off their religious associations. this trend was accompanied by a movement to emphasize natural causes over supernatural ones.”

Pare represented [the causes of monstrous births] an elaboration on the natural explanations offered by Aristotle and writers in the Aristotelian tradition (too much or too little seed, maternal imagination, a narrow womb, a traumatic pregnancy, hereditary disease, bestiality and so on) + a new causal category: artifice (to include fakes and children mutilated by their parents to enhance their take as beggars)

shift in *cau[...]

[...]
common and popular forms of escapist literature: *travel books* and *chivalric romanc*
(--> don Quixote)
monstrous races (men with a single giant foot, or huge ears, or their faces on their chests, giants and dwarfs)

medically oriented monster literature

[Daston:] Pare was forced to eliminate a section on lesbianism, with a graphic description of the female genitals, before including Des monstres in later editions of his collected work


A Helpe to Memorie and Discourse (of Wonders, Foreign and Domestic)
*the passages and occurrences of the world* #ajayeb
•the creatures thereof
•the casualties therein

little-known properties of... (wine and water, fish, dogs, cuckolds, hunchbacks and monsters)

popular ignorance
solitary efforts of the professional scholar
culture of the educated layman (lawyer, businessman, government official, and their wives and daughters)

[change in sensibility (&-=>? change in interpretation)]
beginning of the withdrawal of the educated classes from more popular culture
@Goda

monsters (familiar canon of prodigies) became a subject of great fashion and not vulgar

(Daston tracing how) “in the wonder literature, then, monsters--along with the rest of the canon of prodigies--began to cast off their religious associations. this trend was accompanied by a movement to emphasize natural causes over supernatural ones.”

Pare represented [the causes of monstrous births] an elaboration on the natural explanations offered by Aristotle and writers in the Aristotelian tradition (too much or too little seed, maternal imagination, a narrow womb, a traumatic pregnancy, hereditary disease, bestiality and so on) + a new causal category: artifice (to include fakes and children mutilated by their parents to enhance their take as beggars)

shift in *causal thinking* --> (expanded the power of) maternal imagination covering eventuality ==> a new way of talking about nature
{(from) in the prodigy literature nature was effectively transparent (a veil through which God's purposes could be discerned)}--to--> nature gained a new autonomy ( fertility of invention =/= wrath) --> *nature personified* (the artisan) [Pare: “chambermaid to our great God"], monsters were treated as jokes or “sports” (lusus) of a personified nature

transcorporeal fields of sensoriality =/= boundedness of isolated bodies and things

nonanthropocentric zoological studies



Bacon's (tripartite division of) natural history:
1. *natural: the study of nature “in course”, or natural history
2. *preternatural: the study of nature “erring”, or the “history of marvels” --> a coherent category (=/= miscellaneous collection of phenomen)
3. *artificial: the study of nature “wrought, or the[...]

[...]Bacon--> enrichment of both speculative and operative natural philosophy (=/= books of fabulous experiments and secrets)

**wonder literature sacrificed accuracy to admiration**

corroboration


xxxxxx

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

to take echoing abstractions (reason, nature, etc.) and try to cash them out in concrete practices
(transformation of) extremely abstract --to--> extremely concrete
-why is it so irresistible to reach analogies between the moral and the natural orders?
other orders of nature [**every order of nature sustains a moral order**]:
1. local nature (what happens when we scale up)
2. ontological identity card (what makes a squirrels)
3. universal natural laws
aggregation of these forms of orders ]**each provokes a characteristic cognitive passion** : they involve judgment + emotional reaction to its transgressions]:
1. disequilibria (--> terror: fear saturated by guilt) --> local nature
2. monsters (--> horror) --> specific nature
3. marvels and miracles (--> wonder) --> natural laws

[(a very recently) forceful kind of] argument to anchor moral or political order in a natural foundation

--Daston--> we are species that represent (**we must model our orders** : to make visible & external) --{with an appeal to a natural analog}--> *nature: the richest source of models of all kind of orders

[!!!today task of artist:] ***to give back humanity its childhood*** (that was lost in the age of objectivity) @Sina, Sarah

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

Schutz
social nature of knowledge
how people grasp the consciousness of others while living within their own streams of consciousness

absent friends:
•his brother whom he has described to me
•the professor whose books i have read
•the postal clerk
•the Canadian Parliament
•abstract entities like Canada herself
•the rules of English grammar
•the basic principles of jurisprudence
•
--Schutz--> more one goes into the contemporary world, the more anonymous the contemporary inhabitants become

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

wonder
and its marvels

(Paris wall slogan from the student rebellion of 1968 -->) “every view of things that is not strange (bizarre, foreign) is false” --Bynum--> to jolt her listeners nad readers into encounter with a past that is unexpected and strange

past --> answer questions we haven't asked

-could “wonder” be the special characteristic of the historian?

wonder & marvels --> a medievalist's topic

Bynum represent a rearguard action to claim back from early modernists the irrational and grotesque and to “re-enchant” (if not the world, at least) the historical professional
[...]