do we need to stop celebrating the illegal traveler?
popular and learned interest in monsters
(in the 16th century & 17th century Baconian scientific program: ) treatments of nature and natural history must have included (with rigorous selection) monsters (~ aberrations in the natural order: new, rare, and unusual nature, both exotic & domestic)
[*]nature: an ingenious craftsman ——> [*]monster: nature’s most artful work (——> they bridged the natural & the artificial)
—— corresponded to the activities of nature =/= types of subject matter, methods of investigation
—— interest in irregularities (=/= end of 17th century interest in nature’s uniformity and order)
(Daston –> a case study of) the changing relationship between popular & learned culture
…monsters began to lose their religious resonance
(from) fear ——to——> delight
(from) prodigy ——to——> wonder
(from) sermon ——to——> table-talk
(from) horrible, terrible, effrayable, espouventable ——to——> strange, wonderful, merveilleux (marvellous جالب)
(from) final cause ——to——> proximate cause (physical explanations and the natural order)
==> nature began to assume the role of an autonomous entity with a will (and sense of humour of her own) ~~> natural wonder
The Scripture sayth, before the ende
Of all thinges shall appeare,
God will wounders straunge thinges send,
As some is sene this yeare.
The selye infantes, voyde of shape,
The calues and pygges so straunge,
With other mo of suche mishape,
Declareth this worldes chaunge.
(monsters ——> shift from) signs of God’s wrat ——to——> signs of nature’s fertility
(by the end of 17th century) ——to——> comparative anatomy and embryology (teratology)
(from) اعجوبه prodigy ——to——> examples of medical pathology
earlier tradition of interest in monster:
(corrupt or) *bad animal* <== damaged relations / nature suddenly gone unfamiliar
[monster: bodies tumbled into bodies Tsing]
<== existential cultural atrophy + social entropy (destabilizing effects of non-meaning)
cybernetic teratology
corrupt animal ~= wonders of bad symbioses, trans-species precarious entanglements across bodies (that are not always even constructive, and can be ugly) [=/= Cinderella: who doesn’t experience atrophy after insult upon insult]
(an ecological) monstrous consciousness
hopeful monsters
the *outcast* (in the evolving collective sensibility of naturalists)
monsters flourish in the absence of definitive sources ==> passionate crafts of imagination (omnivorous, unorthodox, compelling, , ,)
monstrous consciousness
category-crossing (=/= neat categories) –> wonder ==> fortified textures of scientific experience ==mixed==> evil, beauty, complexity, forces of liberation, etc.
(monster)
emblematizes the history and philosophy of the biological sciences + their relation to difference & different bodies
==>{ science = de-monstrate ~= credible witnessing ==> truth }
[Mohaghegh]
(the outcast {the exile, shadow, animal, contagion, machine,,,}) has no anxiety of ontological authenticity ——> they are impersonal nameless metamorphosing creatures
their game: riddle (new gambles) ~= confrontation with the unnambale ——Derrida——> means of thinking otherwise, “monster: species of nonspecies” [interest in sites of otherworldliness] ——> ‘more’ & ‘other’ [=/= ‘with’ & ‘of’]
[Martha Kenney]
(how not) render ‘wonder’ a strictly historical object(?)
[as basis for building a contemporary ethics]
Just-so story
In science and philosophy, a just-so story, also called an ad hoc fallacy, is an unverifiable and unfalsifiable narrative explanation for a cultural practice, a biological trait, or behavior of humans or other animals. (wikipedia)
etiological myths
Etiology: the study of causation, or origination
as careful scrutiny of wonders and marvels becomes a mainstay in European intellectual life, 17th century natural philosophers began to understand *wonder, *curiosity, and *attention as cloesly aligned and mutually defining.
(why should we engage in refiguration?)
(there are always a) multitude of agencies unfolding as the world is continuously reconfigured (=/= to explain away: when multiple objects are collapsed into one.)
-“Within this dynamic world it is impossible to imagine that one single story or one narrative style can capture all of the liveliness and exuberance; ***we need to deploy multiple stories about agency. Some meticulously empirical, some imaginative. Some on the quantum scale, some on the people scale. Different agential narratives enable different ways of responding and relating.” (Kenney)
to create ‘aerating’ (tahviyeh) in ajayeb, this includes:
/ crafting translations with ontological traction (enghebaz)
/ bilding empirical tools that make ajayeb’s translation-work visible
/ translation ——> *reconfigure sameness and difference*
/ staying with linguistic differences (in 'ajayeb) is a way of investigating the ontological commitments embedded in language.
—— ontological ——> worlding ——> how language participates in shaping our lived worlds in some ways and not others.*** “it is not common for speakers of a language to examine what type of material objects their language commits them to. [this also my question in Iranian mystic mix,] rather the difference will be to notice as difficulty in translation.” (Verran)
[to continue thinking with Verran] on *durations*, *extensions*, and *resistances* (in 'ajayeb’s case)
these three foundation objects need not to be saddled with the history of Western metaphysics and do not require that common ground be located only in Western territory. “Therefore they offer more promise for cross-cultural translation than the more conceptually nimble [tardast, zerang —— like the CEN or google] space, time, and matter. Newborn and awkward to our ears, these strange terms announce themselves as translation tools.” (Kenney)
(thinking with Kenney / Verran: )
workflow on ajayeb:
1- tracing social connections (for which subjects is this useful? which ecology of practices?)
2- making equipment list (materials and methodes, an expanded and complicated version of eq-list, providing accounts of the material-discoursive apparatuses that are materializing my empirical objects, =/= exercise in representation or audit hesab-rasi)
3- narrating the relation (re-materializing my found empirical objects, re-enacting the objects)
(ajayeb’s objects,) “They represent different storytelling practices that contribute to different kinds of worldings.” […] (through my engagement,) “They stimulate more compositions and decompositions——stories that narrate different beings and different doings, none of which can claim final ontological authority, but that each to different (ontic) work” (hopefully!)
-worlding: a choreography that generates ontologies (Thompson) ——&——> there is no self without a world (Carson)
-not as a voyeur or anthropologist, but breathe in the density and composition of their atmospheres
(people = worlds)
(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)
(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)
“ruse” (hileh, makr, neyrang) ——> my tool in work on ajayeb?
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)
(Haraway, Primate Vision)
—— “Attention to narrative is not instead of attention to science, …”
—— [there is no way that we can] escape the particular pleasures and dangers embedded in the story-laden sciences.
—— [what are the things that] could only be explained by cultural, not scientific, genealogies [?] ——> ideological apparition[s]
—— Something new was required to account for change; the logic informed a kind of paternal creation myth [……..] unchanging “matrix” for the generative principle of change. (In Zihlman’s story logic, both gathering and hunting emerged as repatternings, not opposites, in changed conditions of constraint and opportunity. Narratives of both gathering and hunting ways of life produced genders and citizens.)
—— tool-weapon equation in masculinist scientific narratives
how academic labor was implicated in capitalist systems and contemporary forms of knowledge/power
knowledge industry or “scientific factory”
ontic (hasti mojud-shenakhti)
interpretive cosmology
(for me working on ajayeb is) **lingering in the space of difficult translations**
==> making recourse (motevasel shodan be) to a *world of common referents* (space, time, and matter)
postcolonial moments: “occasions for theorizing, for telling differences and samenesses in new ways” (Verran)
(ajayeb’s) (politics of) administering discrete objects ——-(number system)
“by experience and by affinity, some of us begin not with Pasteur, but with the monster, the outcast” (S. Leigh Star)
finding ways of “going-on together” (Verran)
Serres reminds us the beast fable tradition is as much about biomimicry as anthropomorphizing.
tracing the web of horror and delight
knowledge-making practices of other times and places
unnatural history
epistemological beast fable
and “technique of refiguration” ——> create alternative forms of knowledge
it is “practicing generous reading”
[where there is a situated perspectives there is storytelling]
storytelling as one of the consequential material practices
[storytelling is material practice]
[…] Narratives, along with literary devices, tropes, figures, images and the aesthetics of language, inhabit and inform even our most reliable knowledge-making practices.
the politics technology and the politics of storytelling.