[...]/> stories of:
1. mosque in an upscale shopping center
2. sexually predictory mulla
}--> (speaks of:)
1. the perception that there were places in Pakistan where vise was allowed to grow unchecked
2. the menace the ulama introduced into everyday life
}==> (the effect of:)
•keeping public attention upon possible sites and agents of corruption
•putting the everyday life into question (as to whether it was what it appeared to be)


political cartoons --imply-->
•Pakistanis are caught in someone else's game
•growing unfamiliarity of Pakistan


(charges of)
sinfulness
sexual voraciousness
cunning
gluttony
political ambition
worthlessness
corruption
self-destruction
--> continuous efforts to set the mulla outside of oneself (=/= everyday familiarity with the ulama)

***negative stories and cartoons --express--> various degrees of skeptical orientation to the world***
jokes --(descriptive density)--> full expression to skepticism
--{also in Iran}--> making (mulla) grotesquely other ==> inconcevable to imagine any points of relatedness (to mulla)



•scatological jokes
•reworking of official rhetoric for ludic effect
•exaggerated performance of power
}--Mbembe--> “relationship of conviviality with the realm of official power”

vulgarity ==long-term==> *zombification of official figures* (robbed of their humanity --> they cannot be apprehended except through their caricatures)

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


to loosen some terms carefully: memory, form, order,


[The arts of memory- Comparative perspectives on a mental artifact. Revised and updated by the author Carlo Severi. Translated by Matthew Carey - Severi - HAU- Journal of Ethnographic Theory]


memory as a domain of social life

archive
“order” constitutes a principle to engender other forms of knowledge

totem poles, simply records the different circumstances that marked a particular social group, were comprised of organized series
occupied with the transmission of ‘names’, but necessarily, paralleled by a form of logical power, implies sequential ordering of different forms of knowledge.

the “art of memory” applies different types of relationships or archival techniques that are not limited to mere numerical calculation: mnemonic, iconographic, and logical techniques.

provide a convincing account of the complex process of ordering

in a measured rigorous way...

what characterizes the system

development of taxonomic principle
system endowed with a high degree of logical power

the idea of pure quantity, based on decimal numbers applicable to wide range of categories: people, objects, units of time or space, etc.

an “art of memory” possessed of rudimentary form of visual salience and an extremely complex ordering of representable knowledge

what matters are system's logical implications and not its visual manifestations

salience
(colors, shapes of knots, folds)

the qualitative categories (meant to be named)

(finding) the organizing principles

precisely calibrated
oriented space
(geometrically?)

what constitutes the logical poles of the vast spectrum of the projects in the archive (people, objects, units of time or space, etc.)

(concerning the archive) we can negotiate two types of knowledge: lists and narratives

to identify a series of key elements that allow us to rethink a wider chronology

textual archaeology - evaluates and decrypts, layer by layer

discovering (evidential) mnemonically oriented means of organizing traditional knowledge

(Montesinos's book:) “list of one hundred kings”

should we abandon the conventional terms of “narrative”
the term narrative used to describe mnemonically oriented lists of names..
narrative was just one of several different means of organizing knowledge..

graphical representation, capable of developing further degrees of complexity

“form”
recreate the ‘form’ (form : ‘state of organization of matter’)

within (this/a) variable system

“text” as sequences of cords

memorization (the creation of mnemonic relation) necessarily implies the modular organization of the knowledge it represents


constitutive dualism in many forms of the art of memory:
•order (Anordnung) and salience (Hervorspringen)
•expressivity (and power)
•encoding (Verschlüsselung) and evocation (Herbeirufen)

possible course between the twin rocks of writing: “social” and “arbitrary”

at the end it is the mental operation
(techniques of thought)

the image plays a central role in the construction of relations between (visual) themes and particularity of words, which in turn help organize narratives

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

these all were technical or formal questions so far


memory is a way consistency maintains itself


civil society is afraid of personal recollections and perverse databases, digital collections

is khm’s archive a state sponsored memorialization, monuments of a consistent history? (that assumes a sublime ending?)


the immemorial (in memorial)


have a strong philosophy of technology with this project
there is never merely a technological question, always already ontological

who wants to remember, solidify, and memorialize?
and for whom?
building a technological temple of memory, khm aesthetic narrative of its own history?
(first there is one big account of property that all these fragmented histories of numerous people who worked in khm are singed under one signature, of khm)

should we disavow any notion of “spirit” in khm?
we must agree that khm's render of its own history is pure aesthetic what so ever.


we must remain committed to the experimental, when dealing with archival domains in the school of media art where experimentation was in its original conception and foundational roots (as Zielinski expresses in one interview: “+25 KHM: Siegfried Zielinski” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3JQ3aTwu2s)

arte
DAS KURZFILM-MAGAZIN
KURZSCHLUSS
Siegfried Zielinski im Interview
http://cinema.arte.tv/de/artikel/siegfried-zielinski-im-interview



hybrid objects?
is the logistic characteristic of digital data inconsistent with the hybrid objects of art?



Forms of thought, from what Lévi-Strauss called the “systematization [of] what is immediately presented to the senses,”


(Jakobson)
transmutation: cognition involved by the form of translation

data ontology



what is the point of view of rationality in this for us?
(what is the point of view in witchcraft? knowledge is a performative recipe)
what is the point in point of view?

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

(Jorge Luis Borges - ‘Funes the Memorious’ in ‘Labyrinths: selected stories & other writings’ 1964)
in Borges story, Funes, the character unable to forget is incapable of the concept of ‘general’
solitary and lucid spectator of [...] an intolerably precise world
not capable of thought
in order to sleep, he had to imagine a direction he would turn his face, made of homogeneous darkness
“To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions.”

Borges ‘homogeneous darkness’ is what we as forgetful immortals afraid of to turn to?
maybe the directions we sleep into, orientation to the cosmos?!

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

is archive naturally and necessarily generated (out of regular form of activity)?

a (technologically implemented) beyond


the drive to animate and mobilize; and the drive to conserve, to fix, and so forth, are mutually constitutive for modern imagery and media (from museum to archive)
archive performs a strange dialectics


to see the archive as a technological rational question, and engineering assignment, is to naively avoid the thinking about you[...]