[...]sophers have typically focused on skepticism [longstanding western philosophical question and doubt about existence] with respect to material objects and the external world
...existence of the finite neighbour (seemingly known other) --> may become unknowable

--> *Veena discovers the concept of skepticism for anthropology (as a discipline centrally concerned with the varying conditions of human relatedness and otherness)*

[i have been trying dicover skepticism unsystematically in artistic practices those that have strong concerns of social justice and suffering, but i never named it as such. @Hoda, Xiri's emphasis on the threatening nature of liminality (demand for equality or freedom) =/= **to take the possibility of unsettlement or chaos as founding concern**]
--> skepticism (may) suggests a differnt route of inquiry

(Veena -2007:) “the intimacy between skepticism and the ordinary is revealed in the present work on several sites, as in the panic rumors that circulate and produce the picture of the other as phantasmal from whom all human subjectivity has been evacuated, or when violence in the register of literary is seen as transfiguring life into something else, call it a form of death, or of making oneself, as it were, into a ghost”

[violence ==> ghosts]

skeptical problematic --> shifting potency of words : energies that words may gather, and the ways these energies may give or deny life

speech =/= voice
==> ***silence is not necessarily life-denying or that it necessarily indicates a lack or an inability to mourn***

[victims of violence telling stories]
words imbued with spectral quality (yet animated by some other voice)

there is a deep moral energy in the *refusal to represent some violations of the human body* [=/= forensic architecture project's imperative of detailed representation of violation, explicit acknowledging traumatic memory]
--> ***living with poisonous knowledge*** (a different acknowledgement of traumatic memory) --> absorption exercises of remaking a world

--{on ‘forensic architecture’ (an aesthetics developed by Weizman): Keenan asks: if the excruciating citizon videos (showing police violence for instance) could not convince a jury how can forms of aesthetic critique based on research and visual evidence [= post-conceptual art] be anymore effective on the general poblic? (<== ‘evidence =/= proof’)
-age of testimony (-public truth-)
-citizon photo journalism --> “witnessing ~= action”
-the appearance of nonhuman objects as evidence (in forums and courts) as records of imperssions [sense perception] --> object = sensor (waiting to be interpreted by justice-seekers) ~-> ***proxy for an absent victim***
[*]forensic: process of making claims of what the evidence is “saying” [--> what is made evident remains in dispute]
“forensic production of evidence (in art) ~= radical rejection of representation” --> *adjudication of information* @Ali
(Keenan:) ideological and formal continuities that run from the geometrically precise drawing of human cargo slave ships [==> public delegitimization ==> collapse of slavery], or infrared images of boats carrying humans across the mediterranean today.
(artist's claim of) “the failure to see” (or “how could they not see the injustice”) (==> “I make them see” ~ violence of slowing down brutality videos, zooming, saturating, freeze-framing, obssesing with the visual details, etc.) --✕--> what we “see” is structured by other factors (race, etc.)
-recourse اعاده
(we can always do aggressive) counter reading --> counter forensic: the technical rhetorical work making evidence speek : “voice + image = task of persuasion” --claiming--> public truth and rights
•(Thrall and Keenan:) alternative modes other than using images (visual evidence, fundamentally a peaceful way of wanting ‘change’): using force(?)
•forensic ~ advocacy ~= configuration of claims and evidence --> claiming is always claiming rights [=/= commitments]}

Keenan: rights are something we claim (=/= something we have) --through-->
1. advocacy
2. forensics


(Spivak's question: can the subaltern speak?) --> (Veena suggests forms of attentiveness to) myriad fluctuations between yes and no (=/= Derrida's notion of absence of voice)

we come to recognize the expressiveness of our interlocutor (in its different and difficult forms)
[...working for the expressivity of others, and not yours]

(Veena research in Sultanpuri:) *theatrical performances of violence created a subjectivity that would not be carried forward in time*

-to what extent subjects posses the knowledge they enact? (~ do we know what we do?) --?--> question of structure and cognition (~ the extent to which we know the structures that we are part of, and what vulnerabilities and events this leaves us open to)

(let's stop throwing easy) political and moral posturing about neoliberalism

...there are only particular regions of the past that we potentially or actually have access to. we do not know in advance which regions of the past life might lead us to, or express through us --Veena--> we are not necessarily *cognizant of the structure*, but may still express *fragments of myth* --> ***nonagentive invocation of politics*** @Hoda (Veena example: right after Sultanpuri carnage, women were sitting in front of their burnt houses in a position of stillness letting their body grow dirty, sorrowfully embodying pollution and dirt, like Draupadi in Mahabharata proclaiming her violation through public expression of her pollution. but the women did not device a strategy to carry a tactic of everyday life into the realm of the political. it was as if the past has turned this face towards them--not that they had translated this past story into a present tactic of resistance --> living fragments of a myth)

more like a conceptual signpost =/= extended argument


two signature issues of politics:
•sovereignty --> the state
•associational life --> the social contract

[the state is supposed to be a proxy for people to appropriate power (of death?!), rather than laying absolute claim over it]
-how such claim is contested or reformulated in iran?

the figure of the abducted and rescued woman --> sign of authority --> sign of state

having a politics =/=? do politics ~ political act
*agonistic impulse of politics* (often, if not prophetic, a heroic mode of action in terms of escaping the ordinary rather than descend into it [--> Marx]. such as: Antigone's spectacular defiant voice celebrated in philosophical and political thought, stable locus of redemption. usually a rebellion in some sort, craving a socially progressive agonistics --> French Revolution)
--or--> (=/= possibility of an ethnographic) integrity: *attempt to attain a proximity to the vagaries of life* ~~> ordinary works of repair in a life, such as Asha
--or--> *reparative impulse of politics* (=/= agonistic), Shahrzad's non-agonistic socially progressive politics of working under “terror” animated by the question of how we might continue to live together, how the social fabric holds together
--or-->

(it is our/my imperative today) ***to give each other a more open-ended picture of [our] bad objects (caste, capital, state, modernity, etc.)***

exchange, resettlement, fission, mythological replacement (~ friction and movement within the system) ==> repartitioning of categories ==> rearrangement of hierarchies ==> opposing and heretical sects and religions

-art's (ethnographic?) proximity to life
-political postures and stands

(nobody has, neither state nor communities) monopoly on ethical pronouncement [~ declaration of good and evil]

(political) postures are not unimportant, they allow us to take a stand --> perspective
--or--> evocatively ambiguous formulation on... =/= [*]politic: spirit of resentment on behalf of the victim (Setareh, Hoda, Ali ; also @Sina not to deny the possibility of victimhood) --> *how possibilities of life close down and where other possibilities open up under the weight of patriarchal norms*

question at Hoda:
-how dose she involve a relocation of her protagonists (the sorrowful women) within the domestic, even if the domestic shifts?
-how an understanding of power after Foucault (that power does not come from above, that power is not something that has to be identified) influences her mode of thinking about the condition of her women? [the boundaries of patriarchy are no[...]