[...]r

eco-feminism, veganism is for Haraway is genocidal position, a position that advocates violence, a position dedicated to the destruction of ways of life and living beings including animals, [a position that] *concise all working animals to being nothing but evidence of the destructive and violating imposition of human will on natural stuff*, and “that domestic animals of all kinds are victims and demonstrations of human hubris گستاخى, and they have been made into tools” ~= an extreme developemnt of liberal theory --> the (work) animals are not self-defining subjects, are violations and victims, and should not exisit, except as:
•heritage-animals
•rescue-animals
•wards of guardianship
(my work on ajayeb and question of heritage has been exactly against that position)

the radical anti-food-industry position is a radical liberal theory turns all working animals into (at best) *heritage-animals* ~= animal to be preserved as much as possible separate from human use --> “all human use is bad”
(--✕--> we know that the question of use and instrumentalism cannot for mortal finite beings rid out of liberation theory and practice)
[for example the disposition of the film How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, where at the end dragons are better off their human partners ~ kabutar ba kabutar baz ba baz کبوتر با کبوتر باز با باز]

**killing is not something mortal beings can avoid** (us or them)

*the human beings have regularly and in complex ways produced other living entities as killable*
[category of killable: a killing that doesn't quite count as killing]

killing your pet when she is too sick = a judgment in responsive relationship that is not equal

to say that “meat culture everywhere and always are acts of violation” is wrong

“post-”, the notion of ‘surpassing’ that is inevitability built into the “post-”, is in our way politically
the project of critique : finding that point of violation where you can say “got you!”, ‘I nailed you’ --> the practice of critique = to define what we are against }==> develop political movement that are fairly self-certain about what we are against ==> you will find yourself (perhaps) property addressing a particular issue but having no ability *to make political connection* (~= to think beyond the category) --> you find yourself crippled

posthumanist think of themselves as “better than”, more in possession of a “real” understanding of the nature of contemporary world, beyond the critique of technology

the politics of it all...

[we have never been -->] human : being on the side of the one who developed technology to realize intention of their mind in the matter [= The Iron Man]
=/= what it is to be people
we don't need fancy epistemological justification (such as posthumanism), [...]

[...] rework decompose redefine its root-metaphors, must give extensive equipment list, must trace its social connections in a wider ecology of practices, must include a critique of technology,
•moments of composition: a scene animated by some quality, or... taking place as accidents (or not)

key literature, magic wands:
1st stage:
•Richard Sennett: Flesh and Stonne --> learning about body image
•Manuel Delanda: A 1000 Years of Nonlinear History --> learning about material histories
•Eduardo Kohn: How Forests Thinks --> learning about semiotics
•Timothy Morton: Sublime Objects --> learning about ontology
•Avital Ronnel: (lectures and articles) --> learning about poetics
•Donna Haraway: (lectures and articles) --> learning about rhetorics
2nd stage:
•Martha Kenney: Fables of Attention --> *rationality: mixture of the highly rational and the highly fantastic
•Karen Barad: Posthumanist Performativity, Invertebrate Visions --> learning about apparatus
•Eva Hayward: visualizing apparatuses --> her interest in optics, in the optics in which marine invertebrates and people come together through visualizing apparatuses
•Vinciane Despret: The Becomings of Subjectivity in Animal Worlds --> learning about anthropo-zoo-genetics
•Kathleen Stewart: nonrepresentational theory --> other ways of description
•Katie King: technologies of writing --> a better thinking of locals and globals
•

(curiosity ==>) having to figure out how to do something that i don't already know how to do:
•ongoingness of collective practices of knowledge and concern
•talking about (what is going on with) ajayeb
•paying attention to differential ontologies
•the stuff that happens through face-to-face colleagueship
•to be in productive alliance
•


unalianated critical work = art



Seifee wants to say something
something wants to say Seifee?


i like us to be skilled at
•objective perception
•5 minute perception
•rigorously passionate perception
•rhetorical perception
•sacred perception
•devilish perception
•queer non-perception
•having a taste for iranian stuff perception
•
--> polyskilled web of friends



#Bambi's mother studies:
•other stories possibility, past and history, performative approach to film
•politics of memory, and affect
•patterns of remembrance =/= event recall
•

three childhood memories, stories, from elementary school:
•the mime of “you think (too much)”
•the weird pro hit on the coming ball
•peeping into the toilet
•

my childhood recognizing:
•filaments (hypha, hyphae, تار) of spider webs[...]

[...]
Adrian Johns in The Nature of The Book: particular booksellers could indeed use their *stewardship* of such heterogeneous spaces to further political ideals and interests. behind the scenes and up the stairs, an interested London bookseller became a significant actor in cultural events.

nominal agency
actual person
principle architect


systems move in space, time, and process
some archaeological structures (that one uncover) are stable, some in motion, some evolving, some decaying --> *“there is no way of ever getting access to the past except through classification systems of one sort or another”* (at best) the past could be reordered to better reflect multiple constituencies now and then. (Bowker + Leigh Star)


(my ajayeb research: “epistemic virtues” [or powers] of the 12th century encyclopedic wonder-books,) “epistemological decorum” --> (to capture) “truth-making practices in action” (Shapin)
==> (my commitment to ajayeb:) engendering reflection on the nature of and function of categorization itself

a wonderful bit of meta-language


The Exhausted Receiver


Margaret Cavendish description of a new world, called the Blazing World, her own brand of natural philosophy under the guise of a romance... science for ladies{
1- enthusiasm ==> new science
2- study of natural philosophy ==> cardinal virtues of ladies, modesty and religious reverence
3- leisure activity, appropriate pasttime
*she participated in discussions central to her life and times* (am i participating in discussions central to my life and times?!)
Cavendish self-consciously produced herself as a fantastic and singular... (--> is that what i wish to produce?)
-Cavendish strangely shared with Quaker women an experimental life of proliferating genders, of dress, of personhood, og agency, of writing, of personae, but not of this *enabling collectivity*

hermaphroditical view of things: partly artificial, partly natural

status of clothing as a signifier of identity [<-- not always]
crossdressing (#my sticker period)


[modest witness] (--> Haraway's literal and figurative queering of categories)
the rhetoric of the modest witness --> the naked way of writing, undorned, factual, compelling: “naked writing” [crafted in the context of being virtually present at a demonstration, the ‘practice of credible witnessing’ (==> “truth”) in technoscience] was a proper reference point for feminist examination of objectivity and its relationship to a science founded in exclusion of women. the new man of science had to be chaste, modest, heterosexual man who desires yet eschews a sexually dangerous yet chaste and modest woman --> *female modesty was of the body; the new masculine virtue had to be of the mind* [women's presence turns out to disrupt th[...]

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

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


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

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

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


finite essence of friendship

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



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

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

the national geography documentary crew and the editors fabulating a nature story which comes to hang around in my family's lunch table culture. the iranian mother and eating your children story of the lions. the multi species contingencies. my family culturenaturally hanged on the story of the wild nature, wildness. what does it mean for my family in their specific temporal location in tehran history? the disappearance of Gonjecshk [Sparrows being replaced by Starlings], parks [numerous stories of devastation], and the anthropocentric state logic [co[...]

[...]o close these relationships up in a *single schema* of ownership and exploitation


to inherit: (not merely receptive,) implies a task, a pragmatic act = appropriation

**one's heritage is something constructed, and it is constantly transforming itself retroactively** بازگشتی --> it makes us capable of responding and that we in fact respond to our heritage =/= simply carrying on a tradition

***things are inherited, but we become ourselves in carrying out the gesture of inheriting***

(Harawayian) re-member: enact the past, collect and compose ~/= (Despretian) to inherit: giving oneself an account of a certain task, which is more than just remembering
[storymaking] *to make a story = to reconstruct, to fabulate, to offer other presents and futures to the past* [~/= Sina: to fabulate = to give other pasts to the present and future]


how to ask the question of work properly?
you have to consider animals as other than victims, natural and cultural idiots that *need to be liberated* despite themselves --> ‘liberating the world of animals' = 'freeing the human world of the presence of animals’ [---> go to fabulation of animal human in the movie How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World]
=/= telegram's animals

*humans and animals must (not just considered together but) always be imagined together*

ceasing to consider “animal = victim” ==> (?how in telegram media) animals involve themselves (since they are not natural and cultural idiots), just as human (breeders) are not “exploiting,” but giving, receiving, exchanging, raising, and growing with, their animals


when Despret is putting the question of “do animals work?” to breeders, it is a real experiment : to explore the researcher's propositions with the breeders --> to make them hesitate (~ is about *what does it mean to speculate in such a way?*) [=/= means of knowing through information (to gather data or opinions) : “what do breeders think of X?"]


Despret’ amazing rigour --> the only place that the question (considering whether animals do work) can be brought forward is the place where only the meaning associated with exploitation can matter (in places where both humans and animals are greatly mistreated)
-place where the evidence of such work is found, are places where animals are industrially “produced” --> their behaviours appear very definitely as belonging to a work relationship


director of animal resources --> (in such frame) animal: occupy the place of an obscure underclass, malleable, serviceable, and disposable in the end

moder feeder operations --Porcher--> animals sometimes wanted to help

asking the breeders: could you help us learn how to ask our question so that it has a chance of making sense to other people? ==> they also could explore the *ma[...]

[...] fiery celestial influences on earth providing health and wellbeing fir living creatures

Telesion (1509-1588)
soul and spirit identified with each other as a very subtle material substance pervading all bodies and making them capable of sensing and reacting to rach other with pleasure or pain
*(man’s) immortal soul did not play any role in determining natural phenomena*

innate heat of living bodies

wind: humid vapours flowing through the air
thinness of wind vapours


16th century
expiration and inspiration of the lungs
Holy Spirit is expressed in the nature of winds
interest in wind and weather was kindled by reports reaching Europe from the East and West Indies about hitherto unknown meteorological phenomena عجایب


orderly majesty of God ==> encyclopedism about the universe + an analogue of a memory system

Jean Bodin
firm believer in and opponent of demonic magic
theater of the whole nature universe naturae theatrum
reason of wind (ratio ventorum):
•sun
•impulse (impulsus) of the angels or demons


sphere of sacrobosco
De sphaera mundi
(On the Sphere of the World, pre-Copernican astronomy)


...our sublunar world

gunpowder theory of thunder ⛈
compact earthly matter from underground whose expansion with expansion so fast that it moves large masses of air, like “salniter in fire or gunpowder which has caught fire”


visualization
making air visible
inverted glass experiment
linking thermal expansion & contraction of pure air to wind formation (Cardano)

(under the influence of) celestial fire ==> air (could become alive and active) acquiring motive force

on the transmutations of air

(typical of 16th century) steering the religious significance of the study of nature
spirit: a cosmic subtle substance, both recipient + vehicle of celestial influences ==allow==> elements to transmute into each other (+ meteorological phenomena)
(Drebbel’s favourite cosmic spirit:) fire = clearest of all elements ad top of the hierarchical order of elements (fire, air, water, earth), clarifying the other elements [such as Siavash]

(for Della Porta:) meteorological phenomena = transmutations of the air (in literal sense)
air becoming thinner or thicker ==rise==> winds, thunder, clouds, rain, snow, linking heaven + earth + bringing life to all animated creatures

(Della Porta conceived of) wind in vitalistic terms
...winds rising up from the mouth of the retort (boiling water)
how heat endowed air with motive force


(Drebbel presenting to the public) perpetuum mobile : expansion and contraction of air (which he claimed) demonstrated the fo[...]

[...]ions is feared and programmed in the modalities of material talisman and culturally protective performances for the subject from meeting the other’s gaze. But the evil eye is precisely so powerful and real because of its ability to name the uncanny event of encounter. “Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic.”[12]


[Serres]

does experimentation, in art science, excludes subjectivity? More the importance of experiment on self. Returning the aim back to knowledge, instead of the division of knowledge. Our subjectivity is not an illusion to be overcomed, but that is another part of reality.

Displacement on the space of myth. Myth informs science.

To know is to navigate between local fragments of space , to reject techniques of classification and separation, to implement a philosophy of transport to counter the dogmatism of united and systematic knowledge.

...the itinerary traces the transmission, transformation, and multiplication of messages through diverse spaces of communication.

The spatial language of the writing of the world, geography, language of paths, movements, marks the moment of passage towards a new epistemology.

World is the space of your inscription, scientists. To read and to journey are the one and same act.

Fantastic flow of myth. The sacred and the religious words are spoken at the same time and in the same breath as those of science and of journeys.

Two speakers, united against the phenomenon of interference and confusion. Who's stake is in interrupting communication? The above interlocutors are on the same side, far from the dialogical game.

Demin includes himself in the circuit, blurs the message, renders it unintelligible, and exactly by that assures transmission. Parasite produces by the way of disorder a more complex order.

..penetrative grasp of a text, discovery and recreative apprehension of it life-forms, is impossible to paraphrase or systematize.

..temporal and local settings of one's text. (to master it?)

to read X, is literally, to ‘prepare’ to read X

in certain civilizations there comes epochs in which syntax stiffens...
Changing landscape of fact
unexamined smiles
worn tropes
words, the guardians of meanings, are not immortal.
Metaphysical scandal
note on history: past is a language construct, that the past tense of the verb is the sole guarantor of history.
Dialectics as a method of intellectual chase.
Who first told a joke?
Certain languages are inhospitable to new metaphors.
Language-act
to read: is to restore all that one can of the immediacies of value and intent in which speech actually occurs.

my original repetition
we re-enact in our educated consciousness[...]

[...]br /> •uncreative dynastic rulers
(=/= organized human energy and action)

cultural arrogance

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

paranoia (=/= schizophrenia), an instinct (for the original hostility of the world, name of the world is ‘conflict’ =/= instinctual needs for acceptance and for the assignment of a place)
para + nous (~ out of mind, beside the mind) --> part of the everyday life : when you think you are “somebody” or you have “agency” you are on a small dose of paranoid delusion. {do we always need some dose of paranoia to form critical relations with our current condition?
according to Lacan: *Knowledge (connaissance) itself is paranoiac* --> psychoanalytic treatment = inducing controlled paranoia into the human subject***
*preconditions of all human knowledge is the “paranoiac alienation of the ego”* (ego: a [paranoiac] construction formed by identification with the specular image in the mirror stage)}
==> high thoughts and abstract thinkers, especially when they believe “nobody understands them”
==> also promotes you to go to forbidden zones, attack sacrosanctities, breaking taboos, take the side of the miserable and the marginalized, that there is something wrong about The World
==> always dissatisfied with the ‘current situation,’ impulse to correct the current situation (... our condition, our situation), and assuming a defensive stance, (in worse case) with a sense of mission, with deep feelings of powerlessness (and depression, sometimes victimization)
}<==> their own psychological security (~ defense against failure and loss; a fact of relevance for obligation)

it is all about ['having’ or owning a] *perception of reality* (==> belief)
to recognize the intentional in the accidental/coincidental
(a paranoid response to intentionality?)
==> imaginary friend or imaginary enemy
#complain

sisyphus phenomena --> the idea that one is condemned (by the “system”) to do senseless absurd meaningless labor

(Maze Runner film opening sign:) “we are running out of time. you have seen what is happening out there.” ==> insurgent

four types of paranoia:
1. erotic شهوانى (--> what the opposite sex wants from them)
2. persecutory توبیخی (--> under intensive evaluative scrutiny)
3. litigious دعوایی (--> conspiracy)
4. exalted متعالی (--> grandeur)

*attribution error: social perceivers has to overattribute lack of trustworthiness to others
*overperception of causal linking: paranoid perceiver has to interpret others’ action in a disproportional self-referential way ==> they are the target of others’ thoughts and actions
*conspiracy: paranoid perceiver has to overattribute social coherence and coordination to others’ actions

from dysphoric to euphoric self-consciousnes[...]

[...] />
(politically correcting the popular understanding of race =/=) to show the unsettled and ongoing nature of the debate. [asking readers] to track the rise and permutation of various features of the argument
[asking Captain America --anatomical-->] “in what larger political, economic, and social contexts might ears, noses, index fingers, or brains hemispheres attract attention as reliable signs of racial difference?”


some wrong ideas:
•adaptation to new environments signals evolution (~= degenerating groups would eventually cease to exist)
•high mortality rates could signal problems in work and living condition
•sexual dimorphism thought to be a component of degeneration
•“more often than not, the views of society have shaped science rather than the other way around. in this instance, it may be time for science to reshape the views of society.” [<-- scary!]
•


to start with political agenda (good or bad) and fit evidence to that
political correctness (~ a social interest)
dogged persue of truth

*science's power to beguile اغفال imagination* (for example genomics testing to discover and reveal “truths” about unknown ancestry)
}--> (a post World War II and post-holocaust aspiratoin:) *the allure here is to finally prove we are all the same under the skin, or at least that we have more in common than we had liked to admit* <-- another project for making race matter, but differently

(Quinsy urgently need to learn) how not to be conversation stopper


Bland + Doan's Sexology Uncensored

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

scope of information science --> [*]document: organized physical evidence

new digital technologies renews old questions and also old confusions between medium, message, and meaning

document
ordniary information storage and retrieval system?

bibliography:
•collecting
•preserving
•organizing (arranging)
•representing (describing)
•selecting (retrieving)
•reproducing (copying)
•disseminating
•
(of documents)

early 20th century --> documentation adopted (in europe) instead of bibliography

[*]documentation: a set of techniques developed to mange significant (or potentially significant) [*]document: any expression of human thought (beyond written texts)
~-> *novel form of signifying objects*

objects bearing traces of...
*if you are informed by observation of it, you are looking at a document*

document: any material basis for extending our knowledge which is available for study or comparison
*capable of being used for:
•*reference*
•*study*
•*authority*

1951
document: evidence in support of[...]

[...]t least) the historical professional

1180-1320
a great increase in stories of marvels, monsters, miracles, ghosts
medieval europe awash in wonders


*the circumstances under which medieval men and women felt wonder*
•wonder-talk
•wonder-behavior [==>? empowering them]
•the *web of actual horror & delight* we can decipher in medieval texts (and on instagram, telegram, whatsapp) (=/= the idea of “knowing = appropriating” ==> knowing is impossible)

medieval theorist [& my bestiary research] --Bynum--> wonder: (admiratio) cognitive, nonappropriative, perspectival, particular, (not merely a) physiological response
[*]wonder: recognition of the singularity and significance of the thing encountered

‘thing =/= knower’ (in a context + from a particular point of view) ==trigger==> wonder

telegram bestiary --> capacity to be shocked by the singularity of the event (==Sina==> search for significance ~/= cause, explanation)


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

[...]trying **to build a shared politics** [Mehdi is angry at the sculpture community because they embody that failure])
•(to adopt) a radical form of epistemology that denies the possibility of access to a real world and an objective standpoint
•noninvasive knowing (such as Sa'di) and prediction and control (#Olearius)
•(authority and power, as Beyzai is after,) to name/give the world a new identity, a new story
•accurate rendering of an idiosyncratic process of sensory overlap and association
•
•


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

biologizing


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

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


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

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


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

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

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


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


phallic language


sociobiologica reasoning (<-- so dominant)

Star Trek --> sociobiology promises more than knowledge of the self; it also promises, like all humanisms, human unity, a real togetherness of nature beneath the merely verbal icing of culture
in the (rhetoric of persuasion by) patriline [/ patrilineal naming] of sociobiology --> [the “ultimate message” of sociobiology in] (Planet of The Apes, Terminator,) Star Trek:
•a doctrine of necessary bi[...]

[...]=) effectivity: abilities that determines what one could do and the interactions that could take place

‘perceived affordance’: perception of an object's utility =/= object's itself

affordance <--?--> mental representations (models, schemata, etc.)

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

#idea for a performance for ghorbat gharbia
one performer eyes closed in a room or laboratory research lab speaking the text while engaging through touch (throwing, fixing, putting, dropping) with the different optics and technologies, objects and positioned tools in the room (color, catapult, optical systems, laser, array of transparencies and opacities, etc.)
performer: Sina
director: Foad

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

(prehistoric)
your mother: violence
your father: tool
==> human

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

Geroulanos on emergence of an atheism disengaged from humanism during the second quarter of the 20th century

1925 to 1950

...in nonsecular horizon of existence and thought
conceptual reorganization of human in atheism

(19th century was marked by) “death of god” = man after the era of catastrophe : the age of World War I, the rise of Nazism, Stalinism, World War II, and the immediate postwar period

(philosophical and political) centrality of man = a conception dating to Descartes and proceeding through the tradition of natural law, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and nineteenth-century liberalism and Marxism

rejection of central premises of post-Enlightenment, liberal, and socialist European thought

(how?) approach anew the codes addressing human life and significance

new nonhumanist atheism came to be expressed at different times in existentialist, hyper-ethical, or cynical terms, in nondoctrinaire socialist, reactionary, ultramodernist, or even downright antipolitical principles

(shift away from classical atheism and humanism <==) three movements:
1. an *atheism that would not be humanist* : an atheism mistrustful of secular دنيوى, egalitarian تساوى, and transformative commitments
2. a *negative philosophical anthropology*
3. *critiques of humanism*


(1)
(traditionally) atheism = secularism + humanism
absence of god in 19th century thinkers Feuerbach, Comte, Marx, Proudhon:
--> possibility of a good life and proper society
•Feuerbach's anthropotheism: “god = projection of human nature onto the heavens,” nothing more than man's representation of his own essence --> the task of the modern era was the realization and humanization of god : (transformation and dissolution of) theology --into--> anthropology
•Comte: positivist project for science and knowledge --> religion of humanity, explicitly religious atheis[...]

[...] /> •cabalistic number mysticism
•old testament motifs
}==> emblematics became a kind of a language, that scholars and then readers of the vulgar tongue deciphered in books and then applied to a number of fields in daily life

spiritual symbols of allegory and myth + factual/fractal world --common--> visual art
}--> ‘title page’ : interplay of symbol & reality <-- interaction of different spheres of imagery:
•historical characters
•living people
•stuff of geography
•stuff of astronomy
•architectural views
•(in the 14th century scholars began to collect) ancient coins (and medals) [one side: great events, historic individuals -and- the reverse: depicted allegorical subjects, gods or the *fates*, allegorical personifications inherited from the middle ages [arts and vices]] ~--> *moralizing nature of (someone's) ‘specifications’* [--> frontispiece: personifications as simulated sculptures in niches flanking the archway]

Sa'di =/= author's portrait updated ~ Olearius



Olearius had three printing presses installed in his house, and required that the engravers live and work there, under his direct supervision

“Concerning the Changeability of Worldy Things, and the Wonder and Praise of Virtue”

‘flaming hearts’ symbolizing “their” union

symbolism (of the frontispiece tries to) contain the subject matter (of the text that follows)


the triumph of death (but with a happy end for the deceased) # Adventure Time

“that which i wish for is not mortal” (Duke's motto)
“virtue lives on after the funeral rites”

his home, name, heraldry, figure, allows the viewer to grasp the entire span of the deceased's life (and death) *at a single glance*

horn of plenty

cupid is astride (with a leg on each side of)
astrilized

*winged sphere*
winged fame trumpets the deceased's accomplishments

christian mastery over the infidel--who is blinded to the true faith

a group of international admirers


**methods used in Europe to disseminate information about foreign people** during the early modern era:
•Flugblatt (broad-sheet or broadside, 14th century), a medium directed at the illiterate classes (that needed visual cue) [included: news about battles, astrological prediction, sighting of comet, birth of a monstrous creature (animal or human), execution of a famous criminal, tales of witches, devils, religious or political propaganda]
Flugblatt counterparts:
◦Flugshrift (flying writ, flying pamphlet), popularized by Martin Luther, four pages with woodcut gracing, for audience with ability and leisure to read longer tracts
•illustrated costume book. with Mannerist strapwork, grotesque, garlands, allegorical personi[...]

[...]society] }--> “Among other things, they demonstrate that ‘Islam'--whether as a basis for individual/national identity, as a religious and cultural system, or as a set of injunctions encoded in theological and juridical textual sources--is always/already an internally contested discourse rather than a monolithic and internally coherent thing.”
(--> understanding of) the ways in which ‘the law’ itself is constructed and operationalized; delightful colonial legacy called the “Family Laws” (part of the penal codes of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh);
•zina (zena, illicit sex, adultery, premarital sex) --> far from being an expression of religious piety at the familial or state level, the zina law is wielded as a potent weapon of control and extortion by families of ‘disobedient’ women + the rights that the moral authority of Islam grants the women against their families }=/= the manner in which the mainstream media in the West constructs the role of Islam in the lives of Muslim women (~ everything to do with Muslims is explained by ‘Islam’) =/= Khan's research on incarcerated women leads her to conclude that poverty is an important causal factor in the imprisonment of women under the charge of zina in Pakistan (structural adjustment policies imposed on Pakistan by the World Bank and IMF from the 1980s on) --> larger global political and economic processes
•a transgender couple charged with perjury under the Pakistan Penal Code, and not under ‘Islamic law.’ Supreme Court would rule in their favor, the judgment drew on the presence of the figure of Hermaphrodite in Ancient Greece to Islam + discussed with sympathy by mainstream media + well-organized and politically savvy hijra community in Pakista
}--> @Hoda, since she is interested in women's status under purportedly Islamic regimes
}==> Islam is not the overarching motor within purportedly Muslim societies that mainstream discourse would have us believe

(Rastegar > Toor:) "it is typical of much human rights discourse in the Third World to focus on [...] practices of regulating women's bodies, especially those identified with Islamic law, while ignoring socioeconomic concern.” @Hoda

Toor's two distinctions [=/= collapsing all forms of ‘Islamization’ resulting in a serious misunderstanding of the social processes at work]:
•‘Islamization from below’ : rise of (voluntary) public piety among Muslims, adoption of particular styles of facial hair by men and of various forms of hijab by women
•‘Islamization from above’ : the ways in which structures of power—from families to states—deploy ‘Islam’ in order to control women (and men)

(Toor:) Shah's cogent critique of the fetishization of the ‘community’ in ethnographic literature


a society defined by ‘a history of’
•dictatorial regimes (with support of the U.S.)
•(under siege from joint pressures of) a corrupt ruling class[...]

[...]tortion by families of ‘disobedient’ women + the rights that the moral authority of Islam grants the women against their families }=/= the manner in which the mainstream media in the West constructs the role of Islam in the lives of Muslim women (~ everything to do with Muslims is explained by ‘Islam’) =/= Khan's research on incarcerated women leads her to conclude that poverty is an important causal factor in the imprisonment of women under the charge of zina in Pakistan (structural adjustment policies imposed on Pakistan by the World Bank and IMF from the 1980s on) --> larger global political and economic processes
•a transgender couple charged with perjury under the Pakistan Penal Code, and not under ‘Islamic law.’ Supreme Court would rule in their favor, the judgment drew on the presence of the figure of Hermaphrodite in Ancient Greece to Islam + discussed with sympathy by mainstream media + well-organized and politically savvy hijra community in Pakista
}--> @Hoda, since she is interested in women's status under purportedly Islamic regimes
}==> Islam is not the overarching motor within purportedly Muslim societies that mainstream discourse would have us believe

(Rastegar > Toor:) “it is typical of much human rights discourse in the Third World to focus on [...] practices of regulating women's bodies, especially those identified with Islamic law, while ignoring socioeconomic concern.” @Hoda

Toor's two distinctions [=/= collapsing all forms of ‘Islamization’ resulting in a serious misunderstanding of the social processes at work]:
•‘Islamization from below’ : rise of (voluntary) public piety among Muslims, adoption of particular styles of facial hair by men and of various forms of hijab by women
•‘Islamization from above’ : the ways in which structures of power—from families to states—deploy ‘Islam’ in order to control women (and men)

(Toor:) Shah's cogent critique of the fetishization of the ‘community’ in ethnographic literature


a society defined by ‘a history of’
•dictatorial regimes (with support of the U.S.)
•(under siege from joint pressures of) a corrupt ruling class
•a heavy debt burden
•predatory and conspicuous consumption
•ongoing (neo)colonial intervention
==> cultural identity becomes a contentious issue & women's bodies become sites (for these cultural politics and the class struggles they embody)
~=> regulation of women sexuality : the key hegemonic move through which consent across social classes can be secured**

the increasing interconnectedness of different parts of the world at economic, political, and cultural levels (= globalization) ==>  intensification in the dynamics of social change ==> anxiety ==> (greater) regulation of women (in kin-networks as a response to political, social and cultural anxieties under globalization)
[This was just as t[...]

[...] limited set of elements
--theater--> (logical development of plot =/=) sequence of monologues and allegories ==> action


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


metaphors of romanticism:
•organicism
•system --> (in graphical representation) depicted by connecting lives between constituent elements (=/= monad)
•

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


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


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


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

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

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


Lokta
(evolution of) chemical systems = general systems


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


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


[...]

[...]pbell] on marketing theory

bacteria: entities that threaten our secluded sovereign cleanliness

our ideas of bacteria are shaped through the filter of advertisements for antibacterial products


[*]climate change: “[t]he moment I turn the engine of a car and ignite the 165 million-year-old microscopic fossil faunae, connecting me to the 35 billion ancient barrels that are drilled, fracked, refined, and transported every single year. Climate change is in the 100 trillion objects that are in, that are the Earth, traversing the stomach lining of the Burmese python and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, which churns a quarter of the planet’s heat flux. Climate change is the daily operations of simplification, extraction, purification, replication, and acceleration--all of which are needed to create the philosophy of ‘progress’ that is embodied by nearly every human in this world.” -Campbell
= *a context which will last for thousands of years and will be the fundamental starting point of every action, every thought, every expression of organization*
==> irreversible *death of difference* (biodiversity), end of “human project” (--✕--> despondency دلسردى)

creative foreclosure of the old World
preparing for an end without apocalypse @Jassem
(we need to) experiment with (organizational forms of) justice, ethics, politics, reason**

Holocene ==> fundamental modes through which we organize still today:
•births of language and religion
•concept of resources and exchange
•invention of all known technology
•development of agriculture
•development of domestication
•development of urbanization


Campbell's posthuman
•computation of life
•laboratorization of life (simple categories of liveness and deadness over the last 30 years)
•miniturization of life
•complexification of life
•automation of life


relation: smallest possible unit of analysis, extremely prosaic and mundane ==> world
theorizing in the way of relation (as in feminist science, actor-network theory, or nonrepresentational theory) ==Haraway==> engendering a more humble, more modest attitude in the human observer --✕--> Meillassoux's non-relational theory

(since Kand) western philosophy has been epistemological [~ investigating human relationship to things =/= ontological]
--> correlations (between thinking and being), we turn things into affordances when we think about them --> correlationism: we only have access to the correlation between thinking (thing-for-us) and being (thing-in-itself) ==> ‘all knowledge is relative’ [=/= realism]

Meillassoux's absolutes:
•there might be something outside thought

lack of a necessary ultimate cause or meaning (facticity) --Meillassoux--> fundarne[...]

[...]able circulation of *cultural intelligence* (and value) among less individualized (connected networks of wider) social agents
◦critical questions + cross-pollinate


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

(inconsistency of) *physiological chaos* of the World War I --> how physicians and medical researchers (early 20th century medical science) responded to it? --> (a new web of concepts:) *semiotics of injuries and behaviors* (--> that became essential for thinking about integration and collapse in economics, social organization, psychoanalysis, symbolic representation, and international politic)
--> attuned to, to anticipate, to outdo, *specific conditions of the lived body in
states of extreme exertion*:
•in a conceptual-historical and anthropological fashion
•stage thought and experimentation
•to recalibrate their thinking
}--> logic of integration (a problematic systematization) ==> *registers of the individual and the social*

linked to each other:
integration در شکم چيزى جا دادن, collapse, self-preservation, crisis, catastrophe, witnessing, evidence, unknowing

early 20th century medical science ==> شکننده a body that is *brittle because integrated* & *integrated because brittle*

wartime and postwar therapeutics ==> conceptions of the body

Geroulanos and Meyers (=/= Foucauldian) show “how particular kinds of injury emerged during World War I, and how such injuries found their place in the bodies and lifeworlds of wounded soldiers and doctors, and in the thinking and actions of theorists and policy makers.” (ethnography of the interwar period)
=/= proposing a counter-body or counter epistemology or resistance knowledge


“in this world, we do not play chess with eternal figures like the king and the fool; the figures are what the successive configurations of the ch[...]

[...]

(inconsistency of) *physiological chaos* of the World War I --> how physicians and medical researchers (early 20th century medical science) responded to it? --> (a new web of concepts:) *semiotics of injuries and behaviors* (--> that became essential for thinking about integration and collapse in economics, social organization, psychoanalysis, symbolic representation, and international politic)
--> attuned to, to anticipate, to outdo, *specific conditions of the lived body in
states of extreme exertion*:
•in a conceptual-historical and anthropological fashion
•stage thought and experimentation
•to recalibrate their thinking
}--> logic of integration (a problematic systematization) ==> *registers of the individual and the social*

linked to each other:
integration در شکم چيزى جا دادن, collapse, self-preservation, crisis, catastrophe, witnessing, evidence, unknowing

early 20th century medical science ==> شکننده a body that is *brittle because integrated* & *integrated because brittle*

wartime and postwar therapeutics ==> conceptions of the body

Geroulanos and Meyers (=/= Foucauldian) show “how particular kinds of injury emerged during World War I, and how such injuries found their place in the bodies and lifeworlds of wounded soldiers and doctors, and in the thinking and actions of theorists and policy makers.” (ethnography of the interwar period)
=/= proposing a counter-body or counter epistemology or resistance knowledge


“in this world, we do not play chess with eternal figures like the king and the fool; the figures are what the successive configurations of the chessboard make of them.” -Veyne

([*]integration:) taxonomy of disorder ==> administrative ends (an idea of entire system of organic functioning --> homeostasis = "the wisdom of the body” ==> theories of norms, normality, disintegration, catastrophe)
•the idea of a damaged world in need of meticulous care
•the idea of the injured body that seeks to stabilize itself

#integration
the interwoven data recovered from the study of systemic and functional aspects of the broken organism ==> totality ~ establishment of a nonliberal individualism (+ social welfare) ==> **society = an integrated and fragile whole in need of care**


today's integrative medicine --> conceptualizations of the whole body ==> picture of the patient:
•neoliberal in character
•(always) future tense in orientation


destiny = personalized medicine (a project to anticipate and guide the patient's destiny)

welfare state's widest possible inclusion of its citizens clashes with the realities of the marketplace

to reconcile the individual's cognitive and physical realities with the particular demands of their world[...]