[...] fantastic narratives}
[Bergson > Lim > Tolentino:] horror --> heterogeneous temporality, heteroglossia: multiple tongues, to disengage in certain (nation) formations
horrific real
translation of historical terror in filmic horror
historical real + filmic mobilization --render--> real as porous & artificial
horror --Tolentino--> transhistorical (transgressional) continuity of the project of desire & pleasure
--> masochistic viewing experience + trajectory of critique
(during Marcos order in Philippines -->) horror genre talks about the popular dialectics of the known & unknown, moral & immoral, inclusion & exclusion, defeat & triumph, struggle & redemption, normal & abnormal, reality & alternative realities, religious & secular
•horror provides a cultural trope for the imagination of the nation
anxious state in horror films --represent--> anxious state in ... (nation-formation, citizenship, etc.) --> irony: (the anxious state) it is not what it is
----> [*]viewing: a sadomasochistic act [you know it is frightful (or garbage) yet enjoy viewing (in KHM we called it hate-watching)] --> pervers pleasure ==> individual and social categories to remain constantly in a flux
intensification of anxiety ~=> carnavalesque moment of drawing pleasure
(in the film) history of a chosen local
logic of absence --> prohibitive history of violence + excess
ritual of horrific foregrounding
scene + coherence of meaning
*horror is performative : it needs to be restaged in order to be evocative of meaning*
sexualization of women integral to the genre of horror [aimed at its male audience, similar to Charmed]:
•sexy female leading role (in love triangle)
•man --> representing evil and underworld
•man --> representing true love (engaged in a battle for love + choice of the young woman, sexualized in the male contest)
•female viacera sucker --> female creatures need to show hidden skin [popular sex-oriented star --to--> female monstrous figure --allow--> display of prohibited body parts + heteronormative desire]
(female star rendered both strong and weak)
1. exposing and defying the horror figure (first)
2. embodying the horrific abject subject (second)
in the narrative of horror
•the moral forthrightness that makes the female subject survive, endure, move on
•they are punished but never totally obliterated into the horror scene
internalization of fear ==>? domestication =? maintaining the status quo in community fronts --Foucault--> docile ==> productive for state formation
(the survivor never fully survives and triumphs over the adversaries of the) horror scene --> open-endedness of the closure = of knowing + of being abjected
(libidinal drive in) citizenship claims in nation-formations ~= (libidinal drive in) continuing performative of the horror subject
}--> one is constitutes through but never thoroughly in power relations
white sexy female star + horror + social melodrama (= Charmed)
orally told tales of female violence
miscegenation
desire for liminal female sexuality
necrophilia
female haunting
heterosexual desire
nostalgia for truth
==provide==> template for cultural idiomatic imagination
historical experience --> futile & enunciated through the orality of retelling (+ being capable of retelling)
historical justice has not been served in actual social reality ==> the horror scene bears the constant threat and possibility of repeating itself on the future
...................................
#idea
namaz gestures as alchemical ruse to open portals, kill enemies, transmute objects, and other specs
...................................
Naveeda chapter 1 mosque
mosque =/= shell for prayers
•monumental structures built by the state
old mosque: part of complex devoted to
•learning
•dispensing justice
•channeling charity
oft repeated statement: Pakistan is a mosque [~= one has to learn to inhabit this place, aquire the right etiquette in sharing it] (--> what it means to be Muslim in Pakistan)
•a place of assembly?
•a sacred place?
qabza, ghabze قبضه, violent seizure, forcible possession
(depending on who you ask -->) Pakistan under ghabze by:
•the state
•venal religious figures
•unscrupulous lay muslims
•sectarian groups
•
“narratives of loss --> investment on self-betterment* (+ bettering of one's community) ~= striving
emergence of new independent mosques --> new property arrangements (+ admin + funding) --> growth of civil institutions
city bureaucracy of Islamabad ==Hull==> *uncivil politics* (سیاست غیرمدنی =/= civil society)
(like Tehran) Lahore = urban fabric palimpsest of:
•different eras of history
•political leadership
•social composition
•aesthetic styles
•modalities of social engineering
=/= dissolving the past into hypermodern
*postcolonial ~=> sectarian politics*
local mosque-related politics
سیاست محلی مسجدی
demographic change + population growth + strengthening of sectarian politics = ?
به طور قانونی غیرقانونی
legally illegal mosques
(illegal structures on land legally put aside for this purpose)
presence of bureaucrats within mosques in south Asia (since 19th century)
creating an ideal state by means of the mosque
loud zekr ذکر
mosque: (bearing) traces of the changing fortunes of its worshippers
qabza =/= voice: an individual's singular words and gestures arising from her embodiment *of hey maslak مسلک*
...civil servents
cultivating a modernist
cosmopolitan air
and their educated well-traveled
nuclear families
congregation (جماعت =/=? collective, community)
communal exchange
learning
contemplation
mosque employee hierarchy:
1. khatib خطیب the person who gives sermons during Friday prayers
2. imam امام the person who leads the give obligatory prayers during the day expect Friday
3. ghari قاری the person who had received enough training to render a pepper recitation of the quran
4. moazen موذن there person who gives the call to prayers, also responsible for cleaning the mosque
ghabze of mosque = expression of ambition (to found religious space) to forge the model Muslim community (beyond daily needs of worship)
***legal exercices & bureaucratic forms = a mode of experimentation*** (in being good [Muslim, intrinsic to Pakistan])
--> to enable civil relation (learning from Naveeda and Femke)
Islam is only one element of a complex weave of politics (involving local leadership, emergent communities of dissent and activism against an indifferent state)
flagging a social problem =/= filling a complaint
jahalat جهالت (=/= common sense + education + good breading)
resentment of uneducated
not class-coded?
--> character (determined by)
•nobility of birth =/= lowly birth
•enlightenment of education =/= ignorant
--Naveeda--> ‘maslak differences ~= grist for the art of war’
rumored
engineered
unfolding
sectarian geography of the city
mobilized in the form of bored policemen
prophet's era intermingled with Pakistan present
masjed zarar
gabze (mosque seizure قبضه مسجد) --explicit--> desire to stake a claim on a new nation-state (Pakistan) = expression of striving:
•tie religious/moral development to the nation-state development
•tie religious/moral development to the imagination of an earlier era of Islam
*expression of striving* in art: opening an art space, studio, school, or an institute (=/= create an institution as a conceptual gesture)
--> tie your development to the nation-state development and to an imagination (of change?)
•anything could be believed about a certain imam
•when someone (or group) attack you, they transform from human to animal
--> skeptical turn towards the world
neighborhood = ties + tensions
...................................
Naveeda chapter 2 Iqbal
Naveeda's ethnographic example of a scene of aspiration:
•librarians sit around a table (in a public library) engaged in a heated religious argument that threatens to spill into accusations of blasphemy
•Lahoris resolve to build mosques for their neighborhoods only to preside over the dissolution of their communities in their fights over the mosques
<-- sites of dissonance + aspiration
aspiration --> efforts at being Muslim (in the ways one knows or attached to) marked by a striving to an as-yet-unattained self without presuming that this next self is the final one
<-- tendency (=/= social program)
(=/= see these examples as the lack of consensus in Islam)
Iqbal --Naveeda--> theory of creative workings of time
Naveeda constructing a Pakistani Iqbal
Iqbal presence within:
•everyday acts of striving to be Muslim
•state exertion (official rhetoric)
•public culture of Lahore
**synthetic mode of thought**
--> how South Asian intellectuals created zones of thought by assimilating the work of thinkers from different times and parts of the world to their own ==> (develop and sustain a) *cosmopolitanism* [that exceed the limits places on imagination by colonialism, nationalism]
(--in--> both locatedness and translocal ambitions --understand-->) *the openness and connectivity that characterizes the socal*
Iqbal's mode of self-experimentation: he put himself in relation to dynamic individuals and emergent movements and institutions to see how they sat with him and he with them
--Naveeda--> *experimentation does not require the creation of the new* but rather new ways of inhabiting the fundamentals (of religion in Iqbal's case) --toward--> producing the readiness for change
-attitudes of toleration comes with belief in dogma
Mohammad
the prophet's return is creative : insert himself into the sweep of time with a view to control the forces of history ==> create a new world of ideals
*prophetic consciousness: a mode of economizing individual thought and choice by providing readymade judgment, choices, ways of action
Islam is strongly informed by *teleology: final causes and ends
•(a tradition of) biding worshippers to act in this world with the knowledge of brevity of earthly existence (and the certainty that they will meet their maker)
--> perception of time
Bergson --> enabling change in the human perception of time so that humans could see how their present was charged with open-ended potential
(1934:)
•duration: reality of time as a dynamic continuity
•intuition: imaginative means by which humans could perceive duration
(picture of) life = vital impulse through matter
--> (positive account of) evolution: continual discharge of creative ideas (and tendencies) moving through a world of matter
[*]metaphysics: a technique to avoid “false problems”
Bergson's understanding of intellect: denying humans the experience of time as duration ==> Iqbal
how Iqbal rendered (Bergson's) vitalist philosophy (which denied teleology) acceptable to Islam (which strongly is based on teleology):
the idea of a forward-looking aspect to the intelligence permeanting life --> for a Muslim an “ought to be” stands in the forefront inflecting the present well before any final end
human-God copartnership --imply--> advancement of the self as the object of striving {the self arcs towards God and partners with God in order to advance}==> change in the world
“the finite ego must be distinct, though not isolated, from the infinite”
(Iqbal)
Iqbal's striving:
•the end of one's striving is one's *next self*
•nonprogressive: one's next self could lay ahead, alongside of one, or in one's past
•not to part with their finitude too quickly (no fana dar hagh)
Iqbal's pholosophy -->? aesthetics of the self (~ creation of personality)
--(preoccupied with)--> *muslims crafting and tethering their subjectivity to the commentary world*
Iqbal's self-seeking individuals : actualize qualities attribited to God [(impersonal qualities:) majesty, beauty, grace] (to the best of one's ability) --Naveeda--> (individual impersonality) ***individuality marked by a certain impersonality*** : the more impersonal the qualify that is manifested the more unique one is
=/= [*]modern identity : right-bearing citizen in nation-state, a subject distinguished by the peculiarities of his or her own way of life or point of view or a specific interiority
#integration
=/= Cinderella's (aim and process of) individuation --Sina--> impersonal individuality
[Cinderella's shekayat شکایت]
Iqbal's nonintuitive pairings (=/= contradictions):
•experimentation / convection
•fidelity to one's past / seeking one's future
•prophetic guidance / human freedom
•reason / revelation
•teleology / open future
•duration / transcendence
•freedom / finitude
•individuality / impersonality
<-- elements are drawn to each other, mutual attraction (that does not detract from the plenitude of each)
(Sir Sayyid:) “religion = revelation + reason” --Iqbal--> affirmative picture of existence after revelation had ceased
Muslim thinking in need of biological renewal ==Iqbal==> revolutionary Muslim thinking
}--> a theory of human perception + intelligence + their place within the larger picture of natural evolution
-in order ot make islam political they have to reject the supernatural (miracles, keramat, etc.) ---> go to Corbin's critique
*striving to overcome the (so-called) sickness of modernity* --> (now in Europe artists want to become -->) *physician of moral community* (hakim al umat)
habits of Allah
•miracle
•
Iqbal --> the question is not of evidence (whether miracles did not did not happen), rather: whether belief in miracles is usefully to a community : miracles ==> intensify sense of supernatural ==> hold together --> society with *ideal nationality* (not territorial nationality)
}--Naveeda--> (Iqbal is saying that) just as Muslims needed to understand the capaciousness of nature (to be able to engage and value human striving), so too did they need to accord existence to the supernatural <-- quality of striving
Maududi's picture of aspiration
modern Muslim citizenry <--Maududi-- should be created by the state (the idea that state must mould every aspect of human life on consonance with its moral norms and program of social reform ==> *true Islam =/= muslim Islam*
~= Islam is perfect, muslims not
•Asad --> muslim self-transformation (self-directed changed) ==> perfect form of islam
•Maududi --> (Muslims who know themselves to be weak by constitution -->) one erect a state to install change in oneself ==> perfect form of islam
•Iqbal --> striving: individuation without individuality ~= potentiel without concrete ~= experimentation on self
producing the concrete environment within something to make it available to X : enabling =/= entailing
...................................
Naveeda chapter 3 law
Naveeda:
•mosque = site of striving
•law = state's efforts at striving (and inflecting muslim aspiration) [=/= law: site of colonial codification and ossification]
Foucault --> (when the state asks you for) registration: disinterested bureaucratic procedure = state's securing its authority
~/= Derrida --> law = a horizon of aspiration through a register of justice
munir report
semitic theory of state (Jewish, Christian, or Islamic): the object of human life is to prepare ourselves for the next life --> strive for human conduct which ensure for a person better status in the next world
*state --> act upon Muslim bodies to secure their afterlife* (by means of prayers and good work)
}--> define a Muslim:
1. identify the material body upon which am Islamic state is compelled to act (to ensure its afterlife)
2. to protect non-Muslims from the state
3. to protect the state from non-Muslims (kofar)
(for me there is a big difference between:)
•islam: achievement of the Arabian nomads (that make the musulman of today live in the past)
•islam: a tradition of intellectual imagination of those who were conquered
Pakistan 1972 constitution --(for the purpose of the constitution of the law)--> non-muslim: a person who does not believe in the absolute and unqualified finality of prophethood of Muhammad, the last of the prophets or claims to be a prophet, in any sense of the word or of any description whatsoever, after Muhammad or recognizes such a claimant as a prophet or a religious reformer
something akin to copyright (trademark law) --> disable non-Muslims from encroaching upon Muslim rights over their tradition (undertaking muslim modes of worship: use of honorific titles and modes of address specific to the prophetic community, building mosques, calling azan, citing from Quran or hadis, etc.)
khatam anbia --> khatm: seal --> aspects of Islam as sealed off and exclusive to muslims
(Pakistan supprim court's affective legal feedback loop) copyrighting islam = affirmation of Muslim nature <--Naveeda-- *a horizon of striving*
}<-- an example of (Iqbalian) reason + revelation
institutionalizing blindness
Iqbal on ahmadies:
•Tipu sultan collapse by the British 1799 = mark of political and psychological subjugation of Muslims --Iqbal--> Ahmadiyya messianic movement = subjugated people explaining to themselves their state of decline (negative enlightenment)
•tolerance = indifference
striving =/= progress
...................................
Naveeda chapter 4 jinn
strident --> engaging speech with vivid imagery
differential --> differing knowledge to proper authority
lack of consensus on what X is (among its varient constituents) ==> (problem of) loss of tolerance
(for example Pakistan:)
contradictions between commitments to:
•existing hierarchies
•tribal ties
•universalistic religion (whose version of community transcends those ties)
(Naveeda) thinking of the potential lines of movement among entrenched differences, cited texts, and possible positions generated by selves encountering others in the world
intensities that burn within you + openness to conversation
attention to time --Naveeda--> draw a consistent picture of an Islam with open future
disputation = a form of experimentation: doing and undoing of known forms (in the spirit of striving) [=/= experimentation: innovation in self-making, or social arrangements]
@apass
disputation: a form of interaction (with risks and ill effects [risk of alienation, estrangement of others])
--> [*]becoming: coming to terms with the trajectories and crystalization of tendencies within the transcriptions of the state and in public culture --> **excavating the resources (that this way of being Muslim) give to itself to reflect upon and evaluate (--> renew its inheritance of Islam)
•approaching history from the perspective of plenitude
•approaching history from the perspective of lack
(upsurge of excitement accompanying the creation of Pakistan --Smith--> a tendency [=/= social movement for example reform or piety with identifiable advocacies and trajectories] called) [*]aspiration: sustaining the striving towards an ideal final form (a state, society, self, etc.) =/= achieving
the aspiration of making Pakistan --> to aspire an islamic state ~~Smith--> muslim way of saying that Pakistan should build for itself a good society
--Naveeda--> demand for a state = demand for a society ~= demand for a self
how to read Pakistan's historical records shaped by the *aspiration to strive as Muslims*?
to effect experimentation <==
•disputation (jadal)
•argument (bahs)
•disputation (monazereh)
•debate + polemic
•building mosques
•
tradition and ethics of debate and disputation
Carl Schmitt --> political theology
*politics discovers its modernity by repressing the theological foundations of its concept and practice*
theology was always about worldly politics <--> religious transcendence }==> run analysis both ways:
•transcendental coming into play (in some instances)
•worldly life coming into play (in some instances) [immanent quality]
--Singh--> self-making & self-perfecting
}--Naveeda--> religious argumentation : expressive of ongoing striving
**one works on oneself by revisiting and reinhabiting theological conundrums (through words and practice)** [same in artists as well?]
perceived eagerness for debate among lay muslims --> (anxiety over) disputation ==>
•indulgence in abstract thinking
•undermine the tenacity of individual faith
•reduce the hold of the daily obligations of ritual worship
•lead to a diminishing attachment to worldly life or stakes in the social
Veena, Cavell > skepticism:
•philosophical efforts at securing one's knowledge of the world unmediated by sense experience (<-- classical)
•human disappointment with our earthly condition of being distinct and separate from others (<-- social)
•efforts to secure unmediated knowledge of others (<-- social)
•
[Veena (giving historicity and ethnigraphic precision)-->] skepticism ==>
•renders other vulnerable to suspicion
•unsettle social relations
•produce the conditions of possibility for suffering and violence
skepticism <--> aspiration
aspiration =/= clear vision of ends
Pakistan:
•idemtifies itself as an ideological state (Islam) [==Naveeda==> (the possibility of) some experimentation within its apparatus : ***articulation and dispersal of ideology is not linear or cumulative*** it flows in directions other than from the top down]
•inherits the colonial administrative structure + imperatives of government (postcolonial state)
(Sina -->) to be ideological about X : driven to ascertain and adjudicate the others relation to X
(certainly as an achievement)
in islamic ideological states (like Pakistan and Iran) you are allowed to experiment on what is it to be a Muslim
(+ skepticism with respect to those who strive)
•skepticism transforms into an *impersonal force* (that can emerge anywhere and strike anyone) [<-- disembodied aspect of skepticism]
discourse of spiritual diagnosis
(takes place through an evaluation of one's physiology)
Deleuze's symptomatology: a creative act bringing about a change in health + affirmation of a way of life
•striving --> good health
Iqbal --> attentiveness to thr physiological as a means to gauge whether one's spirituality is on the right track
•with Bergson --> concern for the futurity of Islam
•with Nietzsche --> concern for the spiritual health
◦Nietzsche: physician of culture, (understood as political act) “striving and self-diagnosis ==> implicates the individual in the world ==> produce charges in the world”
Naveeda's ethnography method of interviewing:
1. locate traces of X in (context:)
◦everyday life
◦public culture
◦
3. see how this tendency crystallizes
◦at particular points
◦within particular persons
◦within particular texts
◦
5. study this crystallization
◦comes to be overlaid
◦expressed through lived experiences
◦be productive of
◾further movements of the tendency
◾countertendencies
◾its dissipation
◦
jinn <--> striving
Naveeda shiwsyin her research a single worshiper's choice of striving: relay upon a jinn for guidance on better ways to be a Muslim
*striving --> put collectivity (for example family) in jeopardy*
*@apass
...................................
(state pronouncements of) correct way to [?how to] *attach to the prophet*
becoming a knowledgeable religious disputant
Naveeda > Iqbal > the weary self that could not be roused to piety by religious zeal strikes a posture as much of resignation to sin by a nonpracticing Muslim as of a certain pride of withholding oneself from conformism.
--> of one goes to prayer in a mosque it is by one's own choice
...to dismiss differences = the political expression of the peti[...]