[...]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


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

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 utterances [**increasing performance of untranslatability, glossolalia غريبه گفتارى --> contemporary spirit possession performances ==> the truth of the spirits in the mass-mediatized world is not referential and certainly not universal --✕--> the truth of the spirits centers on questions about the difference between noise and information]
mediums embrace technology
mediumship proliferates
mediums and the media provide each other with metaphors
(mediums seek to escape the relationship altogether) in forms of ecstatic nonrepresentation or absolute renunciation


Chuchad cutting his tongue --> disavow disavowal
“[...]he rendered himself voiceless, and the only sounds he could make were those of exhalation and inhalation: sounds of the body as machine”
...the crowd gasped and then repeated --> confused awe & automatism

[a fable:] “Chuchad placed the tongue on a piece of white paper, and the blood quickly diffused into the fibers. For a moment it appeared as though the tongue was writing a blunt, indecipherable hieroglyph. Chuchad then held the paper to his mouth so it was covering his face and pressed the tongue back into its original place. This time, he seemed to be rewriting, or rather, writing in reverse, and the glyph was inscribed on the tongue as though the tongue had been transformed into paper and the paper into pen. Thus did writ- ing make speech possible. The medium pulled the paper away, folded it carefully, and then, with only a little blood reddening his lips, began speaking.” (Morris)
•tongue excision = performative repudiation of mediumship
•voice = the vehicle of a simple exteriorization
•[*]fable: staged risk in the form of a bad example ==> “object of transmission = the truth”
•[*]confession: a mode of accession or conformity to the message


in Buddhism of premodern cosmologies --> a domain of natural signification where there is *a pure identity between signifier and signified*

auxiliary hell جهنم کمکی

[a fable:] scrutiny ==> (meritorious beings:) people in question become miraculously equipped with memory

recorded on luminous jewel-encrusted gold tablets

quaint traditions عجیب و جالب
(i am learning from Morris how not to) reject the cosmology as a symptom of superstition or a relic of bygone times

ubiquity alone is inadequate to demonstrate relevance

(in the story of Yama) in the evildoer's case, speech is not the mere instrument of truth: it is both a symptom and a cause of sin

where the law rules ==>
•there is no difference between *object* and *sign*
•there is no difference between *speech* and *voice*

the language of truth (personified in the speechless child) =/= corruptions of human utterance : {truth's silent ideality =/= sin's “over-naming"}

mediumship's representational function: transmission of a referential truth + repeated registration of the mere technique of its transmission

(Chuchad's) instrumental “writing”
(like Ch[...]