[...]r routines of talking and noticing each other. how then, by traversing the routine, our “knowledge” and “community” took on new meaning, as they get a chance of being rearticulated in different languages (or differenlty infected literature)
~-?==> changing the system of classification (of thought)

-in a way the workshop is about an *approach* to knowledge generation (and not necessarily a rigorous critique nor directly evaluating the production of our knowledges)


***nothing is never merely a metaphor***

[some fables from science studies:]
•Emily Martin's egg/sperm story --> stories of atomism, distribution of agency, ----[The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles]
•Hayward's microscope --> tropes of natural history docu, ----[Enfolded Vision: Refracting The Love Life of the Octopus]
•Kenney/Haraway's origin/nature fable --> the omnipotence of the “origin” story in our descriptions and interactions with the natural world
•Scott Gilbert's immunological “bouncer” story =/= immune systems as inclusive agents of symbiosis
•Lynn Margulis: life (made possible) by “combat” [the survival fable that TV series “The 100” and “Kelile Demne” for instance is based on] --✕--> life by networking
•Haraway: the tale of “organism = a system of division of labor with executive functions” (==> extraction of wealth among us)
•Morton's causality-story
•brain/body story --> where the “move” came from?
•Sina's “standing on the shoulders of giants” --> knowledge/continuity, role of authority and humility in science ----[http://www.sinaseifee.com/giants.html]
•Sina's 3 little pigs --> architecture/tech/ echics of encounter --> story of the center and periphery ----[http://www.sinaseifee.com/pigs.html]
•“weapon fathered man” --> Kubrick's african genesis, technology + prehistory (in postwar period) “tool ==> man”
•
fables popular in apass:
•“a work [of art] should speak for itself”
•“the very last stage of the creative process is purely intuitive” --> when people say they stop “reading” or “knowing” when they want to create artwork
•“look really hard inside yourself for what you really want”
•“you are an agent of change” that means art or thinking or being ought to be operative, active, transformative, (even destructive) and that is “political” [--> this fable in found in language; ---> go to Barthes’ fable of the woodcutter]
•




no need for “conflict” nor “hero”
(in the way we give feedback, relate, narrate, story, and tell eachother our matters of care and concern, and where we create zones of attachment; both in your “art work” and the mundane everyday of ‘getting on together’ --> interrupting one's own framework)

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

#workshop, on que[...]

[...] do my best.”)
•*tunnel vision* [cyclopean view] (“My son's teacher can't do anything right. He's critical and insensitive and lousy at teaching.”)


what is the most central belief about herself?
which experiences contributed to the development and maintenance of the her belief?
which positive assumption helped her cope with the core belief?
what is the negative counterpart to this assumption?
which behaviors help her cope with the belief?

*basically there is often no evidence that the automatic thought is true

http://static1.squarespace.com/static/521a7b2ee4b0ee587906d191/t/5774531e03596e22f1d2c844/1467241246388/CBT+Case+Conference+Handouts-1.pdf


(a deep problem with behavior analysis is that it comes from the study of animal learning in the 20th century... observing cats trying to escape from home-made puzzle boxes, and things like that)


(for Eszter:) complex ~= coherent (=/= *contradictory*)

Eszter could benefit from learning about collective behavior sociology
/individual behavior is completely unpredictable
/collective behavior is to a large extent predictable

contagion =/= convergence
(Kelile Demne: evil is convergent)

*contagion: crowds exert a hypnotic influence over their members
*convergent: people who want to act in a certain way come together --> crowd diffuse responsibility but the behavior itself is claimed to originate within the individuals
*emergent-norm: people find themselves in a vague, ambiguous, confusing situation ==> new norms “emerge” on the spot, which may be at odds with normal social behavior
*value-added: release valve سوپاپ for built-up tension within community
*complex adaptive systems: autopoiesis or self-creation of patterns and new entities

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

(footnote on) personality disorder
deviating from ‘orders’ accepted by the individual's culture
-your distinguished and enduring behavioral and mental traits that differ from social norms and expectations
it is in relation to others --> cognition, emotiveness, interpersonal functioning, impulse control ==> personal, social, occupational disruption

egosyntonic personality disorders are most difficult to treat (such as: narcissistic personality disorder, anorexia, gambling problem)

*egosyntonic: in harmony with the needs and goals of the ego [--> defences ==> maladaptive coping skills ~=> anxiety, distress, depression]
*egodystonic: in conflict with the needs and goals of the ego, in conflict with a person's ideal self-image

obsessive-compulsive disorder --> egodystonic
obsessive-compulsive personality disorder --> egosyntonic

Freud: psychic conflict arising when the original lagging instincts come into confl[...]

[...]ntological interferences in ontic--{regular existence, difference in little beings} for example, ontic is when we ask what time it is, and the answer is on the clock. (snafu is ontic, aporia ontological*) when the ontic is disrupted ==> you have a “day off,” all sort of things can invade and open up, demons come out, there is a suspension of ontic time, a (Heideggerian) holiday]

(Verran) [number are] “always ready to actively re-exist when we do the right actions and say the right words.” (can i do that with ajayeb's objects? how?)
“The moon rose above the river” (en) <--> “upward behind the onstreaming it mooned” (Tlon, a language by Borges with no nouns, only verbs)

(in old Iran, there is a measurement of time based on sa'd سعد and nahs نحس, the time of benevolent spirits and so on. the sensuous time, measurement is affect)


knowledge industry or “scientific factory”

how academic labor was implicated in capitalist systems and contemporary forms of knowledge/power

“ruse” (hile حیله, makr مکر, neyrang نیرنگ) --> my tool in work on ajayeb? -//-[مکر زنان ,گربه نره و روباه مکار, minorities associated with this accent: women, animals, machines,] [ruse in Kelile Demne کلیله و دمنه]
ruse: a set of small, mostly unconscious tactics by which workers resist capitalist systems (writing love letters on company's time, factory workers who takes a scrap of fabric home for his children to play with, etc.)
-“[h]ow to subvert the laws of the “scientific factory” through gift-giving, solidarity, and free exchange even when bosses and colleagues will not turn a blind eye” (de Certeau)

(how to?) collectively crafting critiques, commitments, stories, and actions (in the density and composition of ajayeb's atmospheres)
-feeling out their “rhythms, valences, moods, sensations, tempos” (Stewart)
-“real and virtual worlds, future and past worlds, fictional and theoretical worlds, always happening and happening and happening” (Kenney)


talking is also thinking


speculative valences (zarfiat ظرفیت) of wonder --> (through wonder, which) response-abilities are activated (?)

ajayeb is crafted responsive stories about life --> question of responsibility --> what kind of responsibilities are activated in the SF worlding (including reading it now) of ajayeb?


(work on ajayeb is about a practice of [writing] history as) *worlding the past*, to take the alterity of the past seriously and to be moved by textual encounter
-how can we not be subsumed by the sameness of the here-and-now? (collapsing of difference into sameness)
(my work on ajayeb is about) learning to tell better stories about the past*
*writing ~= (wonder:) a careful attention to differences in the practice of worlding the past. (demand[...]

[...]s our enemy and that we must control our “natural” bodies (by techniques given us by biomedical science) at all costs to enter the hallowed kingdom of the cultural body politic as defined by liberal (and radical) theories of political economy

[a traditional reduction of the body:] Freud --> (a theory of body politics:) “culture in the cost of sex” [<-- no!] : human social developement = progressive domination of nature (particularly of human sexual energies) --> *sex as danger and as nature* are central to Freud's system
*** Freud (, Brown, and Firestone) are useful tools in a dissection of the theories of the political and physiological organs of the body politic because they all begin their explanations with sexuality, add a dynamic of culturla repression, and then attempt to liberate again the personal and collective body

civilization = body politic

(in iran:)
personal body =/= social body }--> both not natural

(a fundamental human condition:) through labor, we make ourselves individually and collectively in a constant interaction with all that has not yet been humanized ♥


[animal body politic]
[the science of animal]
animal sociology (in fables since millennia [--> Kelile Demne stories of natural basis of cultural cooperation and competition]):
•construction of oppressive theories of the body political
•science of animal groups
•a tool in the reproduction of world
•enhancing material power

*animals* (played an importan role in)
•the project of human engineering: the project of design and management of human material for efficient, rational functioning in a scientifically ordered society (or in belief communities)
--> animals were/are:
1- plastic raw material of knowledge (subject to exact laboratory discipline)
2- having special status as natural objects that can show people their origin [--> Attenborough's civilizer films], and therefore their prerational, premanagement, precultural essence
***animal societies have been extensively employed in rationalization and naturalization of the oppressive orders of domination in the human body politic***
3- naturalization of patriarchal division of authority in the body politic and in reduction of the body politic to sexual physiology [--> Tehran's mice cannibalistic libido]

--> animal science of the body [<-- is important for everyone]
we might free nature in freeing ourselves

become aware of “fallacies of the claim to objectivity” and not to “permit facile (باسانى قابل اجرا) rejection of scientific discipline”

we cannot dismiss the layers of domination in the science of animal groups as a film of unfortunate bias or ideology that can be peeled off the healthobjective strata of knowledge below



if you are not free[...]

[...]tive 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:) how they live and relate to their environment in ways that may have little to do with us [this is so[...]

[...]greeting ritual, Tarof at once performs and tests the reliability of social links
-Tarof has everything to do with the poetic act
-i like to open another trackline of research: does Tarof appropriates the Other? (its relations to violence?)
-Tarof-greeting establishes a relationality between... texts and historicity?
-can we understand Tarof that it originates the relation between man and the divine? ---"infinity after you!” (unendlich nach dir!)--intense intimacy of infinite belonging.
-merger of the sacred with terrestrial destinies. you are made a demigod at the moment of Tarof
-a temporary co-belonging, in possession of the Other
-in which sense Tarof offers trace of a relation to an ungraspable alterity?
-between what and how it holds separation? (Tarof's very task is to hold together the separation)
-its relations to the sacred?
-what kind of encounter takes place under the sway of the Tarof?
-repeatability of the Tarof is built into its singular occurrence
-Tarof, a *reciprocal promise* that aims to correspond to the most essential level of the other.
-the greeted is first and newly returned to his essence
-Tarof corrupts greeting
-the story of turtle and two storks in Kelile Demne (کلیله و دمنه): friedship due to adjacency and terms of nearness or farness to the other. (Tarof is activated by and sustains adjacency) --- delicate trajectories of greeting
-how do we greet a dog. the submission necessary in greeting. we submit to it when we greet the dog. hi dog. what would a practical Tarof with dog look like? do we have Tarof with animals? The Tarof's affection itself cannot be separated from a desire to dominate.

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

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

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

[...]g body with no home base--has become the exemplary locus for any possible cosmopolitan ethics

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


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

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

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


finite essence of friendship

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



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

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

the national geography documentary crew and the editors fabulating a nature story which comes to hang around in my family's lunch table culture. the iranian mother and eating your children story of the lions. the multi species contingencies. my family culturenaturally hanged on the story of the wild nature, wildness. what does it mean for my family in their specific temporal location in tehran history? the disappearance of Gonjecshk [Sparrows being replaced by Starlings], parks [numerous stories of devastation], and the anthropocentric state logic [condition of the zoos, hostility towards domestic dogs, etc.]?
-and as is the case with my family, they are so good at changing the subject, and all i have perhaps tried to performe is the ways we can stay with the subject of discussion around our lunch tables, to stay with [...]

[...]e lunch between my family members. an object that captured the dialectic of desire and disgust in my human family's response to the animal.]--> this is what I call cosmology: beings that depends on their placing within a particular cosmology. cosmology is very much alive --- [animals fitting in the visual rhetoric of web-based digital media is itself to be investigated... social relations, social animal, contemporary cosmology]
-the minimum relationship with feral cats, and rats, and pigeons (and their material environment.) and ambiguity towards them. evoking responses of affection, disgust, fear, and indifference.
-relationships between people, animals and place**** [a place as complex as Tehran's urban environment with its politics, televised operations, its ‘wilderness,’ and technologically mediated stories and rumors that populate its landscape.] --> are we having a Historical change? in epistemic principles --> what is inside and what is outside [keep in mind the historical moment in iran's political isolation. is this reflecting the exclusion of feral animals of everyday life?]
-my family was able to talk differently and find other expressions about violence in the landscape of tehran by applying the animal story (to the head and heart.) [this is also Kelile o Demneh.] the video was a heart-breaker. it had a healing moment, and their resistance to its originality as a tale of friendship is meaningful, the violence is solid and a-priori to companionship, and it supported the story of kinship instead of friendship. This story also promoted the Descartes’ beast-machine hypothesis, that the wild-being is devoid of intentions and is like a timepiece with regular motions, that the animal is object and not subject, beast-machine.
-my mother's relationship to the lions eating their offspring, octopus eating their mate, or cats licking their genitals and dogs filth scavenging--polluters of domestic space, cockroaches “belonging” to an stratum below civilized life, the “out of place” and abject owl, species sexual dispositions and different coupling, suggest difficulty in an anthropocentric expectation of alterity. animals simultaneously despised and admired --- the idea of eating your (so-called) “loved-one” (not a suitable object for affection) refutes cross-species identification according to anthropocentric standards. [windows of opportunity for cross-species bonding, domestic-wanna-be-feral story, myth of mental intention and animal flesh, irreducible heterogeneous ontologies and involvement of human-animal in multiple agencies, normal stories of becoming human, ]
-which animals are regarded as transgressive and ambiguous in Tehran? and which aren't?
-resisting any openness to the idea of feral animal that was expressed in my family, a meaningful discomfort, actually entails the fear of finding that we are not so different from animals, within the violent landscape of contemporary tehran.
-dust. fixati[...]

[...]occhio story is ridiculous!
•towards responding to “opacity” (opacity is complicated philosophical ethical issue regarding animality and humanity) --> refraction. with opacity what is at stake is our “material understanding of our connection with other animals” (Marks, touch 39)


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

apparatuses of subject formation

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

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

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

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


bird people
,
fox people

,


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



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

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


and in Kelile o Demne,

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


Sa'di is the theoretician of friendship (“mojaverat” مجاورت) and Kelileo Demne is the theoretician of “sherarat” (شرارت villainy, felony) saying that the closeness of different subjects is catastrophic [--> proper differences between kinds and subjects.] Sa'di is writing golestan گلستان and bustan بوستان at the time[...]

[...]zing for “joy”
•how much we need sadness?

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


bird people
,
fox people

,


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



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

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


and in Kelile o Demne,

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


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



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


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


کلیله و دمنه Kelile Demne is full of disastrous laws of encounter and encounters of law
a sort of a metaphysics of presence (imposing and projecting to and with animals) that regulates the possibility of a pedagogical encounter
•no mediated forms of presence and so on
•nobody breaking the semiotic rules
•what subject-supposed-to-know
•what blocks cordial di[...]

[...] anticipating itself as target for violence, becomes meaningful when we approach it in a game-theoretic-semiotic linkage, relating and tying together issues of voyeurism, surveillance, violence, media and mediation, and predation in poetic itineraries.

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


and in Kelile o Demne,

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


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



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


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


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


to read Kelile Demne not as something that works as legitimator

reading and greeting


to form (an) intention


all that anthropomorphism performs and withholds on and with animality

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

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

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

meeting the cat half-way

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

[...]

[...]s the news of the Mongols coming and we know about the velocities of news can penetrate within the thick walls of any city. Sa'di is theorizing proximity based on “mohabat” (محبت love, Liebe and kindness), he assembles a setting of ‘garden’ for the coming of Mongols army. Kelileo Demne's project is pessimist pragmatism, mobilizing ethics in a milieu of violence and power.



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


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


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


to read Kelile Demne not as something that works as legitimator

reading and greeting


to form (an) intention


all that anthropomorphism performs and withholds on and with animality

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

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

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

meeting the cat half-way

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

[Avital]
r /> the greeting ‘hello’, the initiatory and inaugural moment of our encounter

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

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



explore friendship as a crucial modeling of justice?

configuration of encounter

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

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

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

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

invasion with little violation(?)

(In rhetoric:) citation = apostr[...]

[...]the answers are many. that is not about definition or defining ‘what is’ the cat that visits me or the spider in my room. i only try to well define concepts and not subjects. my style of presenting my research on ajayeb bestiary: narrating the contingency of the differences that happened and mattered to me in particular =/= philosophy)


wolves (=/= nomadic roamer) have strong feelings of property rights and they ritually and regularly mark their boundaries


what am i allowed to do with my body when i am with animals?

(Despret + Strum + Mowat) using one's body to make the animal respond (--> does this make sense with humans? in apass for example --?--> use your body to make them respond =/= react)
--Haraway--> a “good” (actually bad) scientist = learning to be invisible, like a rock to be unavailable, as if data-collecting humankind were not present, seeing the scene of nature close up through a peep-hole, remove from the subject animals’ social environment
•(ignoring animal social cues) imagining the baboons as seeing somebody off-category, not something --> to be a *nonentity* (tolerated but unobtrusive!!)
--> [*]distance: a cognitive and relational perspective {what kind of distance, aesop fables, Kelile Demne, or ajayeb takes or keeps?}
--> learn to be [*]polite: (in the ethical, political, and epistemological senses of the word) to respond, to acknowledge, to look back, and *to greet*

****politeness ==> transforms you --> in the way of those you are being polite to**** (<--?-- Cinderella's politeness)


companion story --> wich who we share food {=/= with who we cook together <-- generated protocols ==> host, guest, house, power}



[(Annemarie's) praxiographic enquiry into the] (Despret's) embodied practices of knowing [of (Sina's) Cinderella]

**bodies enact =/= perform**
@Chloe, Mette --> (ironic) performing a protocol =/= embodied choreography
(contemporary choreography =/= embodiment)

(scientists and animals are fleshy creatures which are) enacted and enacting through their *embodied choreography* (<-- epistemological, political, ontological)

scientist work [observing, collecting events, meeting them, writing about, inscribing them into theories --> explain why they do what they do] ==> *makes their animals more real*
--Despret--> a praxiographic account [~= feedback] (paying attention to the way scientists embody their work) ==> *make scientists more real*


(for apass) we need praxiography =/= philosophy or theory [of artistic research]
Sina's note taking in apass --> how *practices at some point become words*
#feedback in apass ==make==> artists and their work more real
feedback ==> interpretive version --> coexistence of the various versions of a multiple object (<-- this is localized [...]

[...] [*]ethology: a practice of habits involving distance, knowing activity, politeness, milieu, alliance

(i am interested in women) not because of gender [= identity politics, political correctness], but because of *their practice and the question they pursue*

what parrots talk about
talking birds and primates as subjective interlocutors who can become persons in the exchanges allowed by language


*they never posed the question of knowing what a raven could, through this somewhat maniacal behavior, teach them about what interested it*
-(curious) being always teach you what that 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 d[...]

[...]hey were never anything else

recognition of playful actually --Singh--> ethics of immanent obligation

([*]collaboration: interrupt each other's train of thought)


(dramatization of) agonistic intimacy : a relationship of proximity and violence between neighboring social groups (the body of neighboring species)
--Taussig--> ritual violence (the most stunning prop is the human: the all too profane body with its various appendages, fluids, undulating surfaces, folds, exists, entrances)
--Veena--> sacrificial violence : dramatization of one's own inevitable death (there is a certain anxiety around violence that is integral to *the imagination of an ethical life* in Hindu texts and practices)
--Sina--> gamer video of zoo

condition of viscerality
a condition of being ransomed to death

Venna --> a major theological transformation (a critique of violence) in a nonmessianic nonsoteriological sense رستگاری شناختی in South Asia took place with the Mahabharata

*cruelty =/= violence*

•the feeling of noncruilty expressed in the unpredictable attachments, at times across species (companionship) in the Mahabharata (Veena) [in Attar? in Kelile and Demne?]
•companionable thinking (Cavell)
•commission species (Haraway)
--✕--> Singh's agonistic intimacy:
1. companionship may also involve forms of mutual violence
2. violence inevitability (in affinity or animus) does not remove a consideration of the mode of violence from the sphere of the ethical --> we must make space for the consideration of:
◦cruelty
◦differential vulnerability
3. certain forms of companionable noncruilty may also breed accompanying forms of cruelty
4. within conditions of death and cruelty *it is not always clear what noncruilty might be*


a bird cursing (presently taking root that will someday come to fruition) a human who is stubbornly injuring when need not, or تو نیکی می‌کن و در دجله انداز
(myth) asks us to think about cycles of violence
how an act never exists in isolation
chaos theory, the effect might come later

informal epic subplots narrated in improvised forms


which ritual laments are available for massive ecological shifts
...the death of others
...scene of loss (~/= milieu)
}<--Singh-- virtue, piety, self-fashioning do not help to work through this (@apass)


devastation ==> cohabitation (of species that were apart before)


Kelile and Demne --> agonistics can be comic (even if repercussions of tragic) --> mood of violence


“everything has to die”
question of routinized ritual or commercial production of killable bodies and of things ceasing to matter
[...]

[...]y:
1. companionship may also involve forms of mutual violence
2. violence inevitability (in affinity or animus) does not remove a consideration of the mode of violence from the sphere of the ethical --> we must make space for the consideration of:
◦cruelty
◦differential vulnerability
3. certain forms of companionable noncruilty may also breed accompanying forms of cruelty
4. within conditions of death and cruelty *it is not always clear what noncruilty might be*


a bird cursing (presently taking root that will someday come to fruition) a human who is stubbornly injuring when need not, or تو نیکی می‌کن و در دجله انداز
(myth) asks us to think about cycles of violence
how an act never exists in isolation
chaos theory, the effect might come later

informal epic subplots narrated in improvised forms


which ritual laments are available for massive ecological shifts
...the death of others
...scene of loss (~/= milieu)
}<--Singh-- virtue, piety, self-fashioning do not help to work through this (@apass)


devastation ==> cohabitation (of species that were apart before)


Kelile and Demne --> agonistics can be comic (even if repercussions of tragic) --> mood of violence


“everything has to die”
question of routinized ritual or commercial production of killable bodies and of things ceasing to matter

animals don't die in villages, they could only be killed

anthropology of ethics
what is to kill?
what is to kill well?
what is to ber killed?
what is to be killable?

can we speak of a quality of death?

(Veena, Cavell, Harraway's) ‘companion’ is not a resolution to ethical quandaries of human-animal relations


culpability of homicide <--> veneration of sacrifice

life =/= zoo =/= bios

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

retro: (a postmodern sensibility firmly rooted in the present) appropriating [use + exploit, pick + mix] the aesthetics (aspects) of the past while not longing for its return =/= nostalgia: a mode of resistance against the present

retro: a mode of reading, an attitude towards the past without emotional attachment

ironic consumption...


... =/= how adults might perceive the political context

dissident discourse
(audience looking for) counter regime messages

*nostalgia + nationalism within a postcolonial Europe*
Europe's repressed imperial history --> longing for the divided Europe of the Cold War --> postsocialist nostalgia (in television [--> cultural memory])

past: retro comedy

comedy: retrospective representation

[...]

[...]t myself use vows?
The faiths that are sworn (before every exchange or change)

a word for a woman bound by another sacred word --> breaking your oaths---in the age of ... (message to the tribalist, the son)

Don Juan: yesterday you gave me your word to come to dine with me.
A beautiful woman: yes where must i go?
Don Juan: give me your hand.

                         a madman /
outside the law of reason, a dog  /
outside the law of man, a devil /
outside the law of god, a...

The hypocrite pays in appearance

devil dubing/subtitling the society of reasonable men
..mad dogs

law directs the circulation of goods. What does it mean for an object oriented thought?
Law directs the circulation of goods, women, promise; of representations, insults, jests

i, as the text of sina, will show you that...

An ordering relation is irreflexive, antisymmetric, and transitive

sequential to consequential
(the concern of narrative)
order of reason (one order among many other sequences)
reason has immense consequences, so does aesthetics

betterable better : finding a stronger one---Kelileh Demneh
the case is of a maximum
the tree of the “better”
a whole forest hidden by a single tree
‘possibility’ is always the higher point on the tree

if you kill me now, my time freezes and its order disappears.
(said sheep to the wolf)
relative relations and absolute limit; he is the master of future

where do you come from? : this is of your clan : irreversible genealogical tree : complete model of kinship (for the ordered structure)

the idea of non-destruction is strange in nature, as if there is a notion of construction in nature, establishes a responsibility.
Care, claims to have suffer

at the end; you are the cause, i am the effect.

Perfect, is free of the psychologism of hypocrisy
•hypocrisy comes from the word to judge

stable structures and dialectical processes are inseparable
(each choice associated with a location on the tree)

(best) reason always permits a winning game (?)

might into right and obedience into duty, that is transforming force into factual necessity, by the stronger. Obedience into law. This is Rousseau

means to have access to the inaccessible

the exact sciences the optimal relationship from subject to object, conceived since the classical ages

A slave who, while sleeping, dreams that he is free
(put to the order of slave, a slave presenting a project to his master)

leipniz and Descartes, posit a maximum and minimum strategy in an ordered space.

The universal quantifactor : constant re[...]

[...]> (the law of incest prohibition connects the disconnected)

pure --> untainted --> separated, enclosed

the discourse of rationality replacing the mythical text --> art becomes science --- the realization of a project is left to reason

siyavosh/sohrab is one of the descendants of disseminated spaces, of catastrophic separation of the continuous

when Rostam recognises the mark of his son, Ferdosi giving a version of recognition scene, connects --> Oedipus
the son, the mother
-we can recognise a typological space: the same and the other: the separated
-the space of the world is described requiring connection
-family tree
-parts are to be joined
-rostam and sohrab, siyavosh and sudabeh, cannot be composed to form a single homogeneous space. (rostam and siyavosh do that)

the presuppose that before discourse there existed a mutual policy of unrelated spaces ~ chaos
-the object or the target of (cultural) discourse is to connect
-to transform a chaos of separate spatial varieties into a space of communication
-scatered members, re-membered
-incoherent chaos, reformulated in the common space of transport when it is reconstructed

Kelileh
...she is the signatory of the discourse
...she mimes the progress and delays of Demneh

ajayeb, a time when transport and itinerary were only myth


transport ~/=? transfer
-transport is a unitary space where transfer is *always possible (like money)
-transfer is only a possibility

so, we must find the word or construct a conditional logos that *already works to connect the crevices which run across the spatial chaos of disconnect varieties, the *proto-worker of space*, the weaver in the topology of nodes

separations by sudden stoppage
•is this a myth?

a worker of the single space
(we are not)

euclidian space of every possible displace
(what are the displaces and displacements in Ajayeb? Be specific)

(proliferating multiplicities of) unlinked morphologies

(fire text)
to practice dichotomy (and its connected paths) one must know that its clefts follow and overlap the ancient mythical narrative (in which worlds are torn ...)


when geometry is born myth falls silent

(the ancient journey) from islands to catastrophes, from passage to fault, from bridge to well, from relay to labyrinth

the original function

the “new space” is always universal

the space of reason is universal, within it there are no more encounters

one can walk on two or four or three legs ----> how the earth is measured
(before entering the Ajayeb website asking that question?)

(a dangerous) flock of chaotic mor[...]

[...]al modes of resistance’) and Edouard Glissant (on ‘modest modes of resistance’) in order to perform a ‘slider’ between hostile and relaxed patterns of “contact” and “nothingness” that has been rotating throughout the past century in the Middle East. the performance of a knowledge-zoom in the hypnotic effects, nondialogue, nonnarrative, and radical exile spaces that have emerged in eastern postmodernism to reverse and supersede the question of modernity.

by traversing the domains of revolutionary ideology, avant-garde literature, new-wave cinema, extremist thought, and protests from the limitless imaginative reservoir of their political, poetic, spiritual, and aesthetic predecessors--this projects examines a Middle Eastern navigation of identity (via the concept of the ‘mask’) and its particular modest/hostile modes of resistance (via the concept of the ‘text’). visiting sites such as: subversive epitomes of charismatic authority undertaking a poetic articulation, when chaotic imagination makes contact with nothingness, the will to chaos, and inscription of fatality in literature-as-moral-transaction.


[pressure points:]

mobile within a speculative/suggestive milieu, this project is interested in examining literary sites such as Kelile-o Demne's communal forms of fragile human cohabitation (11th century political/bestial fable), Rumi's simulation of nonexistence (13th century production of schizo-darvish), Hafez's engineering metaphor-factory (14th century imaginal faculty of extreme presence), Hedayat's Buf Koor the Shelley's Frankenstein's monster favorate book (20th century forms of renunciation), Amir Naderi and Forough Farrokhzad films (20th century strategies of withdrawal), Jala Al Ahmad and Ali Shariati writings (20th century fatal concepts of the outside), [list to be modified]


[background:]

this form of half-digestive omnivorous work is situated in a larger trajectory of creative investigations, which i have been busy with under “storytelling,” are dealing with the questions of conditions in which non-antagonistic critical encounters between ordered conventions of knowing and chaotic textuality/imagination is possible. to take the mind where it does not belong. to the rogue arsenals of middle eastern reservoir of imagination and its locatable mimicries. to its repetitive scaffoldings, fugitive trajectories, its performances of fatal experience of the text. to unload its corrosive textualities and let them run their acids across one another. this project is interested in both the unleashing and the pleasure of watching the text die.

part of the disposition of this proposal is also the suggestion that the two collaborators of this project, Jassem and Foad, are invested in those notions in their practice. Foad Farahani's poem “farar” enacting contemporary artistic formations and past-compound-mask, and Jassem Hindi transnational poetic[...]

[...] grasp them with his five senses together . . . His whole case is most indefensible; it is narrow, ungrateful to the past, blind to danger, deaf to warnings, a small living eddy in a dead sea of night and forgetfulness. And yet this condition, unhistorical and antihistorical throughout, is the cradle not only of unjust action, but of every just and justifiable action in the world.” --> sounds like one of my masks “the sleep-walker”

in Hedayat
nihilistic absurdist approach to both metaphysics and society
distancing himself from the symbolics of divine authority
forsaking empty promises of metaphysical longing
consciousness rushes to disguise and camouflage its own lack of purpose
حاجی آقا Haji Agha: “my existence is useless [...] hence the greatest and most noble poem in my life will mark the destruction of you and your kind”
--> streamsof betrayal, defilement, seclusion, degradation, anonymous deaths
(subversively, through a series of hallucinogenic contraptions) crash the unchained terrain of neo-fantasia into the claustrophobic region of socalled reality

این همه سودا است to return with fascinated sockets to the world-as-illusion
chaos in حکایت باخه و دو بط in Kelile Demne --> history: the myriad series of spectral constructs by which subjectivity comes to be constituted as an ordered entity

chaotic desire --> a temporary pact with radical aloneness --> Hoda
=/= homogenizing abstraction of “human”
(Foad, Hoda, Sartre's) exilic disposition, always alone, always apart

tranjective frenzy
to come down from the mountain and infest the back-alleys --> wtf!

deterritorialization one's owb footprints --> identitatian technologies

@Shervin commission the wanderer: a nameless eyeless character sitting on the outskirts of a wasteland in conversation with his own shadow --> (beyond time and space) as a gesture toward discarded worlds without clocks or maps --> *the will to aimlessness*
(Hedayat in The Blind Owl) “I had no idea in what direction I was going [...] I did not care whether or not I ever arrived at any palce”

Mikhail Bakhtin --> art for iranian artists = (carnivalesque) a site that grants the right to understand, the right to confuse, to tease, to hyperbolize life; the right to parody others while talking; *the right to not be taken literally*, not ‘to be oneself’ [...] the right to rip off masks, the right to rage at others with a primeval (almost cultic) rage--and finally, the right to betray to the public a personal life, down to its most private and prurient little secrets

Baudrillard: the real is no longer possible ==> illusion is no longer possible ==>{impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level = impossibility of staging illusion}--> hollows the inability of existence to escape its own fictive composition (=[...]

[...]زید، سی سال است تا من بایزید را می طلبم و نام و نشان او را نمی یابم. (id)

describable موصوفی: چیزی که وصفش می توان کرد

بازدید = دیده شدن     /آفتاب صفت
دانستن = اعتقاد داشتن   /زمین شکل
یادداشت = ذکر       /آب نهاد

ماضی استمراری ~~--> ی

فعل متحرک در جمله (بی جایگاهی فعل) ==> خودجوشی و خود انگیختگی اندیشه و کنش کلامی


نوآوری innovation ==> “جهان خود” (your world) [~ آفرینش هنری، سبک خود، etc.]
=/= نحو: پیوند ارگانیک با جهان دیگران
=/= ابداع: poiesis

(we are interested in strange because we are strange ourselves?)
غریب با غریب الف گیرد (؟)
         |      |
     خود   ذکر غریب


شعر -  شرع -  عرش
  |      |     |
؟   قانون  جهان منظم

ajayeb (شگفتی رویداد نامتعارف) ==> تبدیل شدن سوژه به ابژه tabdil shodan-e suje be obje

Kelile Demne (indian style) --> story within story
=/=
Attar's Tazkirat al-Awliya --> list


نوشتم باد، آنچه دید.

...از بهر حق عداوت کرد(ن)

غیب --> غریب --> غرایب --> عجایب --> نامه

نفاق =/=؟ contradiction
   |          |
(در خود)     (split)

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

amoral, amorphous or polymorphous
to reside under the mark of ambiguity
[to be careful with the figure of trickster -->] trickster represents an archetype of transformation (rebirth?) and a symbol of life, [with] humor, irony (and self-irony), as well as the confrontation between the comic and the tragic --> situates the trickster between the *world's balance and unbalance*

(migration or) migrant: (~= fugitive:) individuals who are reborn existentially precisely through the act of the escape, in order to trick their persecutors ==> survive
[=/= the juggler: Nicolas]

Mohaghegh's proposal: *to lie our way into the lie*

-how and where is my unreal located in my work on bestiaries?
past --> forsaken ancients
outside --> time of disappearance

seduction: immersion in style


our guardian: the thief

(learning from Mohaghegh and Cinderella to be/operate for each other) between:
orchestrator (influence, innovation, experimentation --> laboratory)
partner (equivalence, benefit, reciprocity --> alliance)
slave (captivity, labor, devotion, service, worship --> bondage)
--or--> l.a.b. sta[...]

[...]eeling of having been wronged ***
*agon* can morph into a nobler, more animated form. it (can) come closer to life than to death


**(singular) energetic expression of vital life is not always “individual” **

noble and base --> they name a coordinate within (in excess) of which life forces flow and way and wane

Deleuze + Guattari + Nietzsche --> an ethical imperative to examine the kinds of life forces we affirm. negation is not expelled --(Singh reading D+G+N's ethnographic intuition)--> what ‘is’ may be richer than any ideal ‘ought’ ==> anthropology and philosophy, then, are two distinct but related ways in which life may be examined

to think affirmativelt ==> our negations become sharper


my recent knee-jerk reaction (for example to Olearius) would be to invoke Eurocentrism
(resist: “west” and “non-west”, built on entirely negative images of Europe, from which perspective postcolonial settings appear with double negativity from which they can never recover)


thoughtful moments among friends but scholastic and conversational traditions (--> Greek) =/= “sage”, part of a larger conversational contest culture (not always between “friends” but is an agon -->? Kelile-o Demne)
-other conceptual-conversational traditions (in Iran,,,?) [for example “taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous”, producing an anthropologically oriented Deleuze, a reading of ___ that produces a ___ically oriented ___]
*** it is not a question of negating dialectices but of setting out a different style of thought and examining the ethnographic and political consequences that follow ***


“when you asked him the question about deities, you began a type of conversation called gyan-charcha --> knowledge-talk technique (<-- my favorite mode of reading of literature, and basically everything, is like that)


?which concept(s) you use to think through these things:
•bonded and legitimate labor
•power relations
•marriage
•sacrifice
•kinship
•intimacy
•buying
•selling
•
}--> the fabric of human relatedness depends on it


*[lunar enlightenment]*
(Singh's beautiful lunar reterritorialization of “enlighting”:) what kind of light do we assume as our image of plenitude?
عجایب ماه #moon's inflow-ence, waxing and waning intensities, fluctuating thresholds, the rise and fall of gods, tutelage of moon, a lunar rather than a solar sense of enlightenment, blemished and inconstant, the moon is nondialectical, *neighbors lunacy*


Derridean moment of negative transcendence

waxing and waning plenitude of that flux

Singh:
•varying thresholds and intensities
•logics of a/not-a
[...]

[...] 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” (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 [...]