[...]stories ==> voyeurism
•(Fassin & Rechtman:) ubiquity of a trauma narrative substitutes critical engagement with the structural forces of inequality (or discrimination by a psychologizing of experience and of subjectivity)
•
•

category of the victim is not transparent =/= bureaucratic legal forms through which the victim status is produced aligns with very different kinds of knowledge (shamanic, ritual, genealogical) to generate different kinds of affects

1947 Partition of India (marked by massive intercommunal killing, rape, and abduction of women) ==/==> victim
==> refugees, evacuee property, abducted persons

his fictionalized account of my responses to his questions inspired me to think
(your fictionalized account of my response to your question inspires me to think)

[to] rake the fallen leaves of language and literature to recreate experiences...

(usually) “treason” ==> massacres and violation of human rights by governmental forces

(one is forced to see events in other countiries in the light of issues pertaining to)  transitional justice and the global form of truth

unknown dead imagined as hungry and thirsty ghosts
*the living cannot offer the dead solace because the unknown dead cannot be placed within the grid of genealogical knowledge necessary to make them into benign ancestors*
-the difference between kin and strangers, ancestors and ghosts

**hospitality being offered to the stranger could also become a way of reincorporating the estranged kin**(? -iranian hospitality?)

the intertwined nature of bureaucratic power and ritual action

the dead are haphazardly buried that have to be then contained or transformed through shamanic knowledge and ritual manipulations? -Veena

modern bureaucratic procedures ==> tear apart the continuity of generational connections <-~ the work of ritual to restore connections is engaged

the different ways we come to know something =/= the experience of ‘carrying’ a knowledge


...unknown dead in a milieu in which ancestors and ghosts are not simply distant and abstract concepts but are felt with every sinew of the body, who come to haunt the descendants through dreams and apparitions =/= Ta'zieh: ancestors in contexts in which the relation to the dead is commemorated primarily through national rituals

(in the Jeju uprising/massacre case that Veena studies) ‘victim’: the qualifying condition for genealogical connections to be maintained in imagining kinship as constitutive of the relations between the living and the dead [=/= victim: an appeal to the authority of subjective experience, or the knowledge produced by the State about the dead as victim or traitor]

bureaucrats (victim or traitor?) and shaman (ancestor or ghost?) --> entanglement of different ways of knowing and classifying

(for the survivorss of Jeju after 70 years) inordinate character of knowledge appears in this world as the unbearable burden of not being able to convert your dead kin into ancestors consigning them to a ghostly existence

--> so that the ancestors can rest peacefully in death and less in terms of the discourse of transnational justice or human rights


reputation of a woman --> the marriage prospects of girls --> ideas of purity and honor --Veena--> “poisonous knowledge” secreted by the large-scale abduction of women (in India-Pakistan Partition)

-cultural understanding of sex as especially polluting for a woman

disclosure or a coming to know that a close relative had a hidden history tied to large historical event --> announcing an “otherness” to a close relative with whom one had inhabited a life.

Partition ==> distortion of everyday language itself and its bodying forth
bodily nature of language
poetry suffused with exquisite portraits of grief
the sense that kinship relations themselves have become lethal

(journalism's) trap of knowledge/ignorance (ruth/falsity) binary [asking for formal solutions to problems of indeterminacy because of the finitude of knowing subjects or veiling of objects] =/= (Veena trying to) attend to regions of knowledge that can turn us to change the questions we ask

(inordinate) knowledge is contended with locally, diurnally, repeatedly

Veena asking how is this knowledge [catastrophic event secrete knowledge in the everyday] endured or contested; concealed or revealed; and what are *rhythms* of these movements?

*inordinate knowledge*
-as citizens, how do we deal with the knowledge that torture is regularly practiced as part of the security apparatus of many democracies?
-what responsibility do we bear for these practices that are before our eyes--that we cannot but help know?
-As relational beings how do we reveal the extent of sexual violence or violent histories of our families to our children and to our grandchildren?

(?to make) responses in terms of the cultural repertoire of one's own society relating to the care of the dead

the necessity of embracing a mismatch between harm and healing, between not knowing and shading your eyes from what you cannot but help know [-acceptance of a certain degree of ignorance as essential for life]

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

Ahmed, Sedgwick+Frank @apass
installation of an automatic “anti-” (for example antibiologism, as the unshifting tenet of ‘theory’ --> *routinized antiessentialism*) ==> loss of conceptual access to an entire thought-realm***

immersed in a precritical understanding of the body
the idea of biological construction having been rendered either unintelligible or naive (in feminism --> an avowed interest in the body + a persistent distaste for biological detail)

interested in antiracism and politics of globalization --✕--> crucial dimension of research: body <== “the precarious, accidental, contingent, expedient, striving, dynamic status of life in a messy, complicated, resistant, brute world of materiality, a world regulated by the exigencies, the forces, of space and time” + the conditions under which bodies are encultured, psychologized, given identity, historical location, and agency


*(you can) speak (back) to postmodernism (or democracy etc.), rather than simply speak on (your relationship to) it*

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

Hayward on the role of embodiment in visual cultures + meaning of animals in representation

*to envision animal* = to visualize, to experience, to figure, to image, kinds of species, discourses, representations, institutions, histories, epistemologies + to “imagine possible” a set of material and ethical relationships between species

envisioning:
•a mode of seeing and embodying, of immersing and inhabiting, and of storytelling and theorizing in a techno-scientific world of “eye machine”
•a range of practices for situating the “self” (that tender thing in postmodernity) in places and spaces grown thick with entanglements and consequences; a form both of “to face” and “to perceive”

aesthetic conceptions of beauty and/or ambiguity coupled with biological epistemology and phenomenology of the organisms --in--> in Jean Painleve, Genevieve Hamon, Leni Riefenstahl, David Powell ==construct==> a host of hybridized and enmeshed “encounters”

biosemiotics
zoosemiotics
-humanist fascist aesthetic --> desires to memorialize “beautiful and unpolluted” coral communities
-promise of immediate and luminous experience of “jellyfish otherness”
-systems (of power?) that constitutively produce animal and human actors



human-animal + nonhuman-animal + apparatuses --> co-constitutive in the process of trying to know something about whale ecology

(Hayward > Whitehead:) concrescence: “we” (con prefix) ere- (create) scence (sense, or the “scene,” that which is seen), the present is given by a consense of subjective forms. We are multiple individuals, but there are also multiple individual agents of consciousness operant in the construction of the given.
-literal materialization of a dynamic produced

photograph (only one part, a kind of lively limb, of the relay):
(ajayeb style -->) a bumptious and lively event of the processes of whale studies and whales themselves =/= a still record of a whale “that had been there”

the image: a kind of connective tissue, soliciting one's senses<[...]