[...] special appeal to an emotionally available female or feminine consumer --> television: the mass medium of the socialist period --pose--> the danger of a passive mindless consumption of formulaic narratives (a danger that has been ascribed to women’s inferior psychosocial needs and tastes =/= cerebral modernist masculinity of art) ---> go to Baxstrom's realizing the witch


Western European cultural nationalisms

the notion of nostalgic and premodern postsocialist population ==> Western Europe as the epicentre of progressive scientific modernity


West’s fanning of East European nostalgia --> a post-imperial symptom = (expression of a growing Western European awareness that) modernity is plurinodal rather than centred in European metropolitan headquarters


(postimperial European dimension of) *cultural nationalism <~÷+-> nostalgia*
...utopian national rebirth scenarios for a united Germany --> (promoted by intellectual artists) the bad idea that suppression of German nationalism ==open==> influx of American audio-visual culture (that muat be resisted in order to preserve and nourish German culture in its purest literary manifestation)
= logocentric return to the ethos of German Romanticism [Kulturnation --> certain cultural identity --> cliche-ridden elitist racist implications] + new nationalism =/= results of Western integration over the last forty years


aspirational narrative (of nation...)

postimperial power dynamic:
•western researcher --> has the political capital to afford studying popular media
•eastern researcher --> has to faithfully fulfill the role to represent their national culture (elite achievement)


(Bourdon >Imre) the most obvious European commonality --> **a focus on high culture**


national specificities of memory systems developed around television


nostalgia machine
•Putin --> TV programming to a literary Soviet heritage
•Hungarian FIDESZ --> children’s channel of socialist children’s programmes
•showcase oeuvre of popular performers from the past
•rerunning vintage highbrow content: old films, television series and documentaries
•popular music's capacity to call up depoliticized affective memories
•commercials (--trigger--> postsocialist nostalgia)
•
}--> depoliticized reminiscences ==> an image of (socialist) sociality as a natural connecting glue among citizens gathered around the warm glow of their favourite singers and cabaret actors

FIDESZ = alarming racism + anti-Semitism + drastic neoliberal economic restructuring --> television = interfaces of official state nationalism + commercial purposes of a nostalgia industry


(ghost of dictators in) humorous commercial context:
•Tito in post-Yugoslav republic commercials (as anti-capitalist and anti-commercialist hero)
•Ceausescu in commercials in Romania (old footage of him walking his dog in car tires ads)
•
}--Imre--> (blending) *top-down history lessons* + the work of *popular memory* ==> punctuate contemporary continuities with the communist regime that are taboo in official narratives but prevalent in popular perceptions of history
(==Georgescu==> counter-memory <-- does it assist coming to terms with the past, processing the paralyzing past and the humiliating present of globalization coupled with reactionary state control)

socialist advertising (--> promoted products and services that had not competition in the absence of a real market) ==now==> a sense of awkwardness (absurdity of an era) --> an oxymoron ==> (the ads’) appeal ==guarantee==> the authenticity of remembering + mutual recognition (among members of the nostalgic community) ----> *longing for a bond specific to an elusive era*


(for late socialism --Imre-->) [*]nostalgia: a popular and essential compensatory gesture to make up for the loss of a contradictory temporality
+
a mode of continuity with an era that was already nostalgic for the unrealized transformative potential (of real socialism)


(Yurchak's) *frozen present* = the time of nostalgia
}<== late socialist culture itself lived in a nostalgic mode, at a certain ironic, knowing distance from what it was supposed to be according to the memories of the heroic 40s-50s and the remnants of socialist propaganda --> *a familiar ironic mode of experiencing history vicariously* (in a way that is experienced in the imagination through the actions of another person)


(looking at televisual nostalgia -->) late socialism ==> an affect & epistemology that can only access the “authentic” through contradiction ambivalence self-reflective irony
<--Holdsworth-- expression of present anxieties about history and memory in general

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

___[notes Tehran 2023]___

semiotics: study of the differnce between “what you say ~/= what they understand”

(my fundamentals:)
*sharing =/= communicating*


آشپز دیو سپید
it is said that the White Div had a cook --> exploring the cosmology of Div (in Shahnameh) with food, hunting for eating, bestiary, cooking technology, taste
(inspired by anime JYfdfDU9JUY)
#short story: narrartor describes the story after the defeat of the White Div (Div-e Sefid) by Rostam. “rather than worring about the kingsmen X, he was more interested in what is for dinner...”. there is another being. a baby hayula (non-formity)... what other beings Div hunts for meat? (list, bestiary) “he would think about the next hunt X and get excited about the kabab of X...”  “immediately asked for more”

dungeons and dragons --> a non-cartographic space, there are no maps and one only learns by dying many times
dungeon has nothing to do with the medieval prison, it is a deterritorialized habitat, defined precisely by not having a map (or guide) --> are we in a dungeon?

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

journalism: professional discursive pursuit (of truth, of propaganda, etc.)
=/= journalism: proximity to the event + the risks that that entails

(Ghazzi's notion of) *affective proximity* : (a mode of consideration, a way) to make sense of local media practitioners’ reporting and witnessing of suffering in their country
--> a media practitioner =/= the event they are representing and participating in
affective proximity : what locals navigate to reconcile their emotional and embodied entanglement within events in their country =/= discursive

*emotional labour* of media practices of local reporters and witnesses

what the word “revolution” mediates (in Syria, Iran, etc.) [~/?= civil war]
1. an indication of commitment to a desired goal
2. an identity marker based on a past-oriented lament over what was sought but not achieved

study of affect and emotion in global news --(contextualized within)--> unequal power relations (==> journalistic roles & modes ofrepresentaiton)

user-generated-content
political economy of global war reporting
living with violence

journalism <--?---> affect

affective proximity
==shape==> the boundaries of journ0alism and activism
--> captures the feeling of being close to violence:
•fear for one's life and that of others
•having to deal emotionally logistically with deaths of loved ones (escape, exile) [--> that is why we need an *anthropology of the exile*]
}--> living-in-violence =/= encounter, exposure

(Ghazzi is too fast in favoring “affective proximity =/= western rationalism”, as an iranian I am more exposed to an *affective jurnalism* [~= activism: politically motivated and highly emotive role] =/= journalism as a modernist and rationalist institution)
“activism ~= jurnalism” ~=> they need to:
1. project authenticity and emotion onto news narratives
2. act as objective witnesses able to produce truthful accounts

(more and more i feel the iranians need for ‘activism =/= jurnalism’ --> what one wants to happen =/= understanding what is happening)--> epistemology [the question of how one makes sense of one's practices --> in the case of Syria (also Iran): *affective proximity to violence* ==> sense]

...negotiating the distance of mediation when viewers and producers in the Global North are witnessing the suffering of others

(in Iran) activism + art = the human body as tool, medium, symbol, metaphor

[*]affect: circula[...]