[...]tuck of hands-on knowledge shoots up and then metaphysics plump it --> persue of knowledge becomes collective (with different pressure points)

for many cultures [including Persian]:
•the philology (grammer) is the queen of the sciences
•the stricing prevalence of *dispute: intellectual discourse staged as agonistic duel --> (most of our) ***intellectual life is conducted as polemic***


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the more you study an environment the less your inheritiability of that environment will be (?)

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history: study of past as it it commemorate in traces (textual, physical, etc.) =/= [ajayeb studies =] memory studies: subjective commemoration of the past, collective forms of commemorations (for example the name of streets, or monuments, or unconscious way of navigating in Tajrish square, etc.) --> present in oral interviews
•how the past has been enlisted emotionally, politically, communally,,, (in various causes: construction of autobiography to the construction of national myth) [==> objectivity does not make sense in memory studies]
•it includes (not only that which cab be documented, it rather) includes an element of the subjective : how people feel about what happened in the past, how they reconstruct events of the past but also narratives =/= what happened in the past --Daston--> objectivity (among histories:)
◦cross-checking of sources
◦(19th century technique of) “reading against the grain”: try to discover, from the surviving sources, from what perspective they were written (what historical context they were embedded in) = “critical reading” from the stand point of all of one might say “the illusions of memory” which might cloud an objective impartial records of events (not accepting the narrative that place value in the source) [=/= my work on ajayeb]
◦securing evidence (---> go to archive) : intersection of objectivity with study of history

(since 17th century) memory has been essential to our conceptualization of what does it mean to have a self --> why we are so concerned with memory damage ceases (alzheimer, etc.)

husod3oqLds


many time when we define (say “what X is”), what we are doing is to how to make a term more precise, to make something *artificially operational*

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*sciences of the archive*
depend on longed lived collections

(since 16th century, as we know it) modern science's epistemic goal: *predictive accuracy* =/= *to elevate certainty* (the case in medieval Latin Europe)

books (past discoveries) & instruments (future discoveries) interspersed --when--> they both belong to the same practice ==> library



(Goethe:) search nothing beyond the phenomena

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Morris
movement of commerce's subject (=/= walking of the Parisian flaneur)
plaque's morbid sentimen --> evades the reduction of signs to mere reference

[*]public art: the art of a world bifurcated by capital --tending--> *monumentality: an exaggerated literality + excess of scale (incapable of irony)

(of image -->) textuality: something lurking off that bids us engage the ambiguity

metonym

critique: (analogy of) a movement toward the outside

a grammatical negative can never efface what it attempts to contradict
a call for judgment hides in the defensive gesture


criminality: departure from (or failure) to recognize a law

new violence
•violence against the sovereignty of local subjects
•violence against an internationalized regime that increasingly claimed exclusive sovereignty for itself


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ethnography of capitalist crisis (a project on:)
•the politics of [*]transparency: the ideological pointing stick by which the market has appropriated for itself the function of regulating the state (where it was the function of the state to regulate the market)
•how capitalism ([Morris] in Thailand) disguises itself as mere monetization
•how money's total and totalizing meditations have come to be experienced in the contrary idioms of immediacy and eternal present-being
•

([i am] learning with Morris) ethnography of crisis
-how capitalism in Thailand disguises itself as mere monetization
-how money's (total and totalizing) mediations have come to be experienced in the contrary idioms of immediacy (and eternal present-being)
-rhetorics of transparency and visibility (conceived in aesthetic domains)

(narcissistic act of) teletechnic encompassment


*spirit mediumship*
[auratic threshold of representation]
(the nationally renowned spirit medium) Chuchad, flamboyant media savvy
daguerreotypy: a demonic receiving device that had the capacity to retain and thereby diminish the photographed subject's substance
(in Thai) kaan thaay [taking, wasting] ruup [picture]
•Thai word for photography
•concomitant transformation and discharge
--✕--> spirit practices were brought into conversation with the mass media
•conceptualized largely in terms of atavism and/or residue (repressed orgiastic impulse buried)
•(located on the periphery of) the *nation's geo-body* [=/= state's formed public]


(from the perspective of rationalist Buddhist orthodoxy [and in the case of iranian superstitions, Holakouee خرافه khorafe] -->) mediumship: (imagined as) a temporal interruption of the nation's modernity

communist occult practices
emasculating magic

phantasmatic triad of nation, religion, monarch

mediums = state's other


[today]
•identification between the  local and the global (facilitated by transnational communication systems) compete with those of the nationalism
•*market-based discourses of civic politics in the anticipation of being seen from afar by a multinational media audience*
•

mediumship reborn as...
•circulating along with its own images
•part of an endlessly proliferating series (=/= double of a lost original) in which it merely seeks to be legible as an image of its displaced self


[a figure many artists today want to be: spirit] *medium* (profession of epiphanic discovery) --transmitting--> paranoiac messages --prophesying--> boundary penetration (originated with the state)

(revolution reduced to) the status of mise-en-scene
bourgeois democracy
market-based discourses of civic politics

simulacral space of the new mediascape

(Chuchad's promise of authenticity -->) violent authenticity of an exposure in which mediumship's representations would be renounced --> *techniques of the performance themselves become the object of performative inscription*

history of religious legitimacies
populist conservative monk --> religious sermon in the format of emphatically dialogic, using vernacular forms and local dialects to disseminate [--> content remaines deeply orthodox in its valorization of the foundational texts + its ritualist inscription]
+
medium's anti-ontological discovery
~=>
either there is nothing to transmit or there is no means of transmission = silence or white noise

Phra Phyom --> embodiment of fame itself, a bastardized auratic presence that is always arriving (~ imminent without specification)

-what drew these people to this performance?
(seeking the) ambivalent pleasure (not without violence) of having a secret unmasked

acolyte
to ensure a line of vision between the medium and his audience

broadcasting device = recording device

authorship --(displaced by)--> a logic of *tracking of traces without a subject* (<-- reduction of representation and inscription)

modern mediumship ~= [*]automatic writing: (most associated with surrealism, in Western contexts) the writer seeks to merely transmit his or her unconscious thoughts and, in the process, to disavow the notion of authorial agency... [it marks a more general transitional moment in the history of representation --Morris-->] ***the production of meaning ceases to be a function of writing --> actuality or facticity becomes the primary object of inscription***)


confessional performances
denunciation of possession performance
untranslatable uttera[...]