“The capitalistic economy of the present day is an immense cosmos into which the individual is born, and which presents itself to him, at least as an individual, as an unalterable order of things in which he must live. It forces the individual, in so far as he is involved in the system of market relationships, to conform to capitalistic rules of action. The manufacturer who in the long run acts counter to these norms, will just as inevitably be eliminated from the economic scene as the worker who cannot or will not adapt himself to them will be thrown into the streets without a job.”

Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic.

“Not very many kinds of other-than-human critters have convinced human skeptics that the animals recognize themselves in a mirror—a talent made known to scientists by such actions as picking at paint spots or other marks on one’s body that are visible only in a mirror. Pigeons share this capacity with, at least, human children over two years old, rhesus macaques, chimpanzees, magpies, dolphins, and elephants […] Pigeons passed their first mirror tests in the laboratories of B. F. Skinner in 1981. In 2008, Science News reported that Keio University researchers showed that, even with five- to seven-second time delays, pigeons did better at self-recognition tests with both mirrors and live video images of themselves than three-year-old human children. Pigeons pick out different people in photographs very well too, and in Professor Shigeru Watanabe’s Laboratory of Comparative Cognitive Neuroscience at Keio University, pigeons could tell the difference between paintings by Monet or Picasso, and even generalize to discriminate unfamiliar paintings from different styles and schools by various painters.”

Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

William James on will (in Varieties of Religious Experience):

“When we drop abstractions and take what we call our will in the act, we see that it is a very complex function. It involves both stimulations and inhibitions; it follows generalized habits; it is escorted by reflective criticisms; and it leaves a good or a bad taste of itself behind, according to the manner of the performance. The result is that, quite apart from the immediate pleasure which any sensible experience may give us, our own general moral attitude in procuring or undergoing the experience brings with it a secondary satisfaction or distaste. Some men and women, indeed, there are who can live on smiles and the word “yes” forever. But for others (indeed for most), this is too tepid and relaxed a moral climate. Passive happiness is slack and insipid, and soon grows mawkish and intolerable. Some austerity and wintry negativity, some roughness, danger, stringency, and effort, some “no! no!” must be mixed in, to produce the sense of an existence with character and texture and power. The range of individual differences in this respect is enormous; but whatever the mixture of yeses and noes may be, the person is infallibly aware when he has struck it in the right proportion FOR HIM. This, he feels, is my proper vocation, this is the OPTIMUM, the law, the life for me to live. Here I find the degree of equilibrium, safety, calm, and leisure which I need, or here I find the challenge, passion, fight, and hardship without which my soul’s energy expires.”

Ṣilat al-Raḥim : Kinship, Birth and the Pursuit of Worldliness in a Palestinian refugee community (SAR) builds on a paradox that binds birth, kinship and worldliness for long-term refugees. Obligations between kin can and are often reflexively interpreted as reverberations of the gift and debt of an individual’s birth or appearance into the world. The thisness of kinship ties, in this basic sense, presupposes the prior presence, and amenability, of a world into which to be born and dwell. Refugees, however, come into being with arts of governmentality that disjoin birth from the world. Citizenship laws typically minimize their share of the ordinary modes of practical involvement by way of which worldly reality, and worldly selves, are made to appear for full subjects of the state. SAR traces everyday events by way of which kinship ties acquire shape, substance and force as refractions of birth for Palestinian men and women divested, by law, of much of a world into which to appear, and it explores the paradoxical figurations of worldliness that such events and relations entail.