[...]he spirits of those who have been killed
political vengeance

(wherever there is) violence in Southeast Asia (even if this violence is merely the
force that possesses machinery) ==> ghosts
~=
(wherever there is) force that would oppose life (even and perhaps especially by resembling it) ==> ghosts

[the doxa of] {(no preparation) premature death / banished by disbelief ==> unhappy ghost, vindictive melancholy}[= *effect of context*]--in-->
•pulp novels
•secular humanist elite literature
•rumor
•folklore
•

(Morris points that) such specters are densest in the places where the accidents of modernity are most like to occur

*the death that is caused by another death*

technologization of life and death, movement and war --> *making one vulnerable to death* <== (often) a function of technology (technologization of life and death, movement and war, etc.)

*ghostliness (in Southeast Asia): an idiom with which to address issues about the difficult delineation of a boundary between the living and the dead* (=/= matter of improper burial)

if the dead cannot join the living, the living can die and thereby mingle with the already deceased ~-> fright

the location (where ghostliness arises) is not spatial but temporal (“something happened”)--> in a strange way, for the “occurrence” has no place in time ==> stop time and to displace other narratives (--> it has the structure of trace)
[@Marialena's summoning to life =/= (living) beings who can be summoned to death]
}~~?--> (Freud's) death drive (<== traumatic neuroses) + (Kantian conception of)
accident


(for Freud:) [*]consciousness: the form of a resistance to the world

unconscious is “timeless” : incapable of discerning order (in a Kantian sense)

trauma (=/= anxiety) ==> disables the pleasure principle but not the compulsion to repeat (which is typically a source of pleasure)
[*]trauma as precisely such a disturbance of time and of causal sequentiality

{earlier philosopher's analogy: substance (essentially unchanging) =/= accident (the name of that which metamorphoses over time) }=/={ Kant's analogy: accidents = the “particular ways” in which substance is determined to exist}
--Morris--> causality: a concept that responds to and covers over a gap in the human capacity to inhabit a world of accident
--Freud--> sudden, unexpected event incapacitates the psyche (and its maturation) to such an extent that it will relate to the world only as accidentally existing --> [*]accident/trauma: the experience of the occurrence as having no reason [--causality as a principle of understanding]

accident ~=&==>
•trauma
•condition of possibility of a political opening to the future (one whose form is not determined a priori)
•condition of possibility of en ethical opening to the future (without guarantee)
•
}--Morris--> *accident: the name of a certain kind of freedom*

(it is initially tempting to suggest:) ghosts: symptoms of trauma, particular form of a repetition compulsion, externalized and made public, (untimeliness of an event that robs it of the structure of causality within which it could be more properly interpreted), a form of neurosis =/= Morris's reading of Southeast Asia ghosts

•recognition does not stave off fear
•anxiety does not stave off trauma

reflective interpretation
narrativized interpretation
abstract interpretation

dissociation (in spirit possession) ==> (allows other individuals to witness) the loss of consciousness ==> memory traces of history become legible

(change the focus in trauma studies, a reorientation of perspective:)
missed encounter (~ wound) --to--> poorly anticipated encounter (~ accident)

(Caruth's argument:) **[*]trauma: a discourse that opens up ethical possibilities with its demand for a recognition of the need for historicization (of the relationship between destruction and survival)**

****(Morris as an anthropologist call for analysis of the accidental -->) to better comprehend *how history exceeds individual intentions* + how particular conceptions of history may enable more consequential action on the part of historical agents****
==> (to move from) affective symptoms of an overwhelming experience [@Hoda] --to--> the question of effectivity beyond representation
--> to construe an ethical relation to history--in terms of open relation to futurity [=/= an (impossible) mastery of the past]

every artist researcher should investigate:
•how anxiety is informing you
•how trauma is informing you

the question of the political understood as: (@Femke, OSP)
•the question of contingent factors
•the question of unexpected exposures
•the question of (relatively) unconscious processes
(and not of control)

neoliberal economic logics --> image of massness (=/= consciousness of one's collective interests) ==> condition the possibility of social action (movements characterized by a schema in which exposure to events leads to politicization) <-- an older genre of politicization narrative [~ individuals describe their encounter with social injustice, extreme poverty, or excessive violence and then recount a growing consciousness of the structures that produced them, #Robin Hood]

inadvertent and even accidental convergences ==?==> political movements in Southeast Asia (throughout the late 1980s and 1990s) --> (students who participated in antigovernment protests in Rangoon/Yangon in the late 1980) described their entry into the political sphere (less exposed to the object of social injustice, not in terms of an originally shared project, not a shared analysis, but rather) as the result of a situational convergence (from which an ideological project had yet to be fabricated)

(to understand) your relationship to the political as *subjection to force* (and hence) ~=> *the violation of subjectivity* (=/= acceding to a fuller subjectivity)

they were just there (summoned to events the nature of which they did not know in advance) --> *ephemeral mobilization*:
•by anonymous calls (precipitated objectless gatherings by cell phone messaging, an anonymous call of an ideologically vacant sort)
•ephemeral rumors
•without ideological commitment
•by curiosity (gathered only to find out why others were gathered)
•attraction to spectacle
•to consume, pornographically, the visceral images of police and military violence
•
--> the idea of participation loses its meaning

formation of a crowd
materialization of the state's force

ephemeral mobilization (which later sets the stage for politicization) is a familiar instrument of power

the group:
•(has a) monopoly on violence
•manifestation of a will to democracy (for example the way Iranian movements were read by international bodies)

ahistoricism of conspiratorial orientation --> “powerful but secret instrumentalities ==> temporary formations” --misses--> the transformations of social consciousness and political possibility

(to open to the thought of a world beyond you)

narratives of accidental politicization (~ movements emerging from crowds without ever becoming masses or classes)
--✕--> from the state
--✕--> from the transnational media + whose circuits the images of these convergences travel
--> an experience of immediacy (as the origin of politics =/= encounter with representations of the world), sudden activation of an immediate presence in the public sphere --> political conceived as itself being contingent

to resignify and reorient the problem of the political in terms of civilizational difference (rather than ideological, and hence economic, difference)


the so-called nocturnal sudden death syndrome

rapacious female specter
in the fear of being killed by this nearly limitless desire for female dead, men (Thai constructor workers in Singapore) started to paint their nails, attired themselves as women before going to sleep
[seek to accomplish in advance what is feared, emasculation]--> **mimesis of a crisis foretold**

(khwan)
a thread of unspun cotton tied about the wrist --to--> prevent the dissipation of one's vital essence

(mostly men's) satisfaction of commodity desire --entails--> absence from home

woman's work in technology and textile manufacturing and in the tourism sector (whether as service worker or prostitute) --> is deemed lamentable, even contemptible, but still tolerable

anxiety over lost male potency ==?==> widow ghost

the queen had a dream (that all the men in Thailand had vanished)
--> anxiety expressed as *extreme anticipation* (and not as an opposition to the feared object)
-the phenomena materializes what they seek to differ and mime (the force thday the want to stave off)

collective spirit possession

periods of commodification --> waves of witchcraft (traversed Thailand in 1905)

•episodes of disruption
•social crisis
•economic transformation
•attended reordering of social relations (including those of class and gender)
•

(khwan) rite: a try to evade loss by soliciting misrecognition (on the part of the ghost), but they cannot cover over the fact of an already existent loss

working as a repetition compulsion --> the widow ghost (بختک bakhtak?) as an example of death drive
(waking up nightly having felt themselves robbed of breath and speech)
--Mills+Morris--> capital (not war) as the source of this trauma

trauma that arises in war ~/= injury that is the function of insertion into new and painful economic structures

mastering the wounds produced by capital, depend on:
•not the production of cathartic discharge through aberration or historisization through narrative
•on some kind of socialization or collectivization through which the source of injury can be addressed

(تقدم anteriority =/= causality عليت)

*discernment of cause is precisely the domain of political analysis*
|
in a history that is experienced as the space of contingency, or accident, symptoms are likely to be recognized as cause (<== the order of anteriority is no longer distinguished from causality)
|
older patriarchal orders might reassert their values

young people being possessed by crowds and then escaping that possession --> the labor to discern other possibilities in relation to the accidental...


accidental encounter as the basis of politicization --reiterates-transforms--> narrative of ghostly encounters ~=reveals==> *a fundamental but ultimately inexplicable antithesis exists* (between the way things exists and the possibility that they might be otherwise)

the “accident” makes visible the contingencies of everyday existence

[*]ghost: materialization of the spectral possibility of being absolutely otherwise (we give it a name “death” or “fiction”) and negates it by assuming a material form

...the ethical impulse constantly:
•risks disappearing into a mere chance affair
•risks disappearing in a rule

(Morris -->) spirit possession ==> *an individual learns to contain the effects of lost consciousness* (hence a certain kind of death)--by regularizing it and by surrendering her to his body to a voice that comes from without, almost always in the form of a commandment
*a mode of absolute comformity* --expresses--> desire =/= interest [Marx diagnosis: (how) the ‘interest’ of power appears as the ‘desire’ of the ones who are disenfranchised]
--> simulacrum of a dialogue, reciprocal sociality in a theater where the spirits respond to the questions of mortals
[crowds split between a desire to be in the place of power and an interest in its overthrowing]

the medium: always one called to her task, one who cannot refuse the demands made on her by a ghostly power. in her, power becomes visible.
-and is personal (in form of commandment--and not rule of law)
-the medium, in submitting, keeps alive *a memory of power before the bureaucratization of state*

young inmates entering into insurgent movement largely on the basis of contacts with older ideologues (with whom they had contact solely because they were incarcerated in spaces reserved for political prisoners

consciousness as reason --> double sense of being unmoored from explanatory and thus causal logics rooted in the idea of interest and expressed as a faith in the liberatory capacity of knowledge

bearers of popular political agency

mediatized neoliberalizing world

(identification with middle classness [its universal interests] -->) aspiring to classlessness

spirit mediums dressing themselves in the costumes of ancient priests

inadvertent and accidental politicization ~=> an awkward form --> opening to the liberation of the political from historical determination and its various teleologies

the fall of Soviet socialism ==>
•disorientation of structures within which opposition to the injustices of the capitalism could be articulated
•more ethical conception of democracy


(rethinking the conditions of) posibility for political organization (and political forms)

-(let's not) programmatic politics --reverting--> to a parodic reinstantiation of older oligarchic forms
-(let's not) reduction of accidental to trauma [~= incapacity to speak]

crowd: a context in which one can become subject to powers that exceed one --> for which spirit possession offers a normative form

the crowd lends people an instrument by which they can become audible (to the extend that they lose their own particular voice) ~= the medium lends a body to the spirit who can speaks in a voice from elsewhere

[*]crowd: a mode of the (political) sublime : one dies as a subject to be recognized as a citizen(= one who has a voice)

*sorcery: the translation of one fact into the form of another*

an antecedent rendered as cause

when we say something needs retrospection, it means narration (that allows the accidental to appear as that which will recur, not an anxious anticipation, but *a resolute commitment to an ethics of the event) =/= retrospection structured only by the question of origin (--> an approach to *curing trauma*)

(sustainable forms of) social good and distributive justice

ghosts ~= signs of reason's failure
•failure =/= absence of rational faculties
•[*]reason: that which arises to transcend a kind of being that would live only in the mode of the accidental

Morris's ‘giving up ghosts’ --> ***an acknowledgment of the accidental ground on which reason enacts the enabling violence of its regulative ideals***
-*enabling violence* --{trauma =/= accident}--> accidental events (such as the convergence of a crowd in a street in Bangkok) can precisely be rendered as the “ground” of socially transformative politics and institutional interventions (without original motivations)

(?what is at stake in elaborating the relationship between [Derrida's]:)
•grounding --> gesture of rational calculation and decision making
•running ground --> moment of accident when the boat touches bottom and is immobilized

(we can never) guarantee its own effectivity
(cannot know that if it is effect or cause)

([can we ever?] resist) melancholy eschatology


(?) the gesture of politicization must be made repeatedly---often in situations that arise as though accidentally

...how the experience of the political as accidental (in popular mobilization during the 1990s) was also (at least partly) written into the interior of another discourse about the impossibility of change [~ neoliberalism's triumph and the end of history]

binarism of the war on terror resignifies older more disparate conflicts, and cultivates subjects who conceive of the political in these narrow oppositional terms --> to define the political as opposition between friends and enemies

***power always works by claiming that the future is already determined by a past narrated from its perspective*** (<-- that is why my work is about the past) --> [my work:] *learning to think otherwise about both the past and the future*

(the failure of political imagination in only speculating about the future)

*(the basis of) the political: transcendence of the accidental*

Morris shows how the potential force of the political depends on the recognition that it is not merely that which can be relegated to the past

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

(Bubandt > Morris > in Buli, North Maluku in Indonesia) witchcraft: ambivalent aporia, the interminable problem of life ~= empty seashell (shell in which there might or might not be an occupant, provides the de-sexualized figure for doubt that saturates the consciousness of those who inhabit the world of witchcraft, an internally split subject)

anthropology of witchcraft
--✕--> charges of residual exoticism by reading witchcraft phenomena as sites at which the transformations of modernity are mediated and made available for resignification
-to displace (witchcraft) into the domain of representation --> capacity to resignify the historical real

lethal violence at Marikana (South Africa, August 2012) --> muti magic was a not matter of resurgent tradition (for the black South African analysts), rather, magic was a visceral, strategically instrumentalizable, and absolutely lethal power. the kind that enables people to go to war, the kind that operates at the point where language fails (--?--> the use of poetic mystical enchantment in Iran-Iraq war for sending young soldiers to the battle fields)

witchcraft only becomes visible in the moment of accusation, as a retrospective effect of oracular diagnosis (Evans-Pritchard)
(...no one is sure that he has indeed heard a witch)--Bubandt--> witchcraft: a condition of doubt (=/= a system of belief)
--✕--> Morris questions: doubt =/=? belief

Morris asks --> doubt:
•whether illness is caused by witchcraft?
•whether one's neighbor is a witch?
•*whether one is oneself a witch?*

in Buli (=/= The Magicians TV series, Harry Potter film version of magic):
•witchcraft does not explain the world
•witchcraft is not an alternative mode of reasoning
•witchcraft does not permit anyone to control the forces (that assault and wound human being)
•witchcraft provides neither certitude nor escape from the anxieties that death bears for the living

(the interiority of the other is unknown and unknowable ==>)
[*]witchcraft ==provides==>
•an idiom in which the world's very immunity to explanation is affirmed (often with violent and terrifying consequence)
•figures and narrative forms in which to address (also reproduce) the opacity and ambivalence of sociality

[context:]
the other (like the empty seashell) is unknowable, though we must engage others and seek recognition from them to escape solitude and death [...] in forms of giving and reciprocation that demand generosity but that are also likely to provoke avarice --emerge--> witchcraft: a relentless question about appearances and the problem of knowing what they disclose

doubling of genitalia and mouth in Buli dream imagery

(marriage: to manage witchcraft)
tradition “establishes the ideal format for conviviality” ==ensuring==> sexuality and consumption are made the basis of sociality =/= witchcraft (as a perversion of marriage)

in Buli (against mistranslation or misrecognition of the foreign modern):
•Christian missionization (19th and early 20th century, and again in the 1930s)
•modernist developmentalism and statism under Suharto
•technologization associated with natural resource-based capitalism
}--scenario--> effort to become modern ==> enter an order of truth and knowledge (=/= dissimulation and doubt)

valorization of reciprocity (in Halmahera)

Morris asks: is not the coimbrication of doubt/belief precisely what the discourses of the Enlightenment science, namely knowledge through revelation of what is, promised to replace?

(Bubandt's assumptions in Kant/Morris terms:)
•doubt <== anxiety, fear, suspicion, rage (--> affective dimension)
•doubt <== an incapacity to transcend the aporia that defines the relation between the empirical and the transcendental (--> epistemological dimension)

“I have never seen a cannibal witch” --> anthropology's epistemological conundrum (an a priori postulate) --Kant--> an irreducible impasse between the empirical and the transcendental, of the incapacity of sensory experience (intuition) to provide the basis of absolute knowledge (=/= merely general knowledge)

Foucault --> intuition cannot ground knowledge of the absolute ~=> knowledge of individual human beings and their empirical histories cannot provide knowledge of “the human”

Evans-Pritchard --> witchcraft satisfies the demands for an explanation of the singular event: this death, of this individual, in this moment (not death in general)
~-> for Bubandt, witchcraft: reproduction and valorization of this aporia (between the transcendental and the empirical)

James Siegel naming the witch (not only a political history but an investigation into the entire history of anthropological discourse on witchcraft and sorcery)
-he links the crisis of recognition brought on by the collapse of an authoritarian state that *had appropriated for itself the function of recognition*, to the rise of witchcraft accusations, to efforts to name a witch --> witches and not witchcraft were seen to proliferate after the fall of Suharto
•how the labor to designate the source of a menace that exceeds the empirical and that fails to explain the singular is inevitably failed
•the misrecognizing belief that eliminating witches could eliminate witchcraft

discern death drive in the very place that there is an effort to escape death

{ radical empiricism = close reading }==> attentive listening

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

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/689012

(two competing conceptions and aspirations,) two paradigms of communication:
•an ideal public sphere that recognizes the task of mediation but also requires its effacement
•to bypass mediation through apparently immediate forms of speech that range from visual slogans to messianic utterances that can be heard even by the dead (--> frustrated by deferral)

Morris: the social scene is technologically heterogeneous ==> epochal and ontological schemata of mediatic displacement must thus be rethought

structure: an eruption of the mediaticity of the medium onto the horizon of reflexive consciousness (Kittler)

(in still decolonizing nations) the function of mediation has implicitly emerged as an agonistic exchange about the very possibility of exchange (not of deliberation) --> possibility of political representationalism

..stranded in its imaginary between the twin phantasms of the mining town in postapartheid South Africa

aspiring to a radical openness and threatened by it...
limits and the contradictions of democratic consciousness

environment as a monstrous hybrid of statistical hysteria and narrative compulsion as well as real violence (that takes its shape under conditions of largely racialized economic inequality)

[i have been working and listening to that which] call our attention to ***other spaces, identities, and structures of obligation*** (=/= defensive strategies)

cell phones
•technological mediums of absent voices
•lighting up, buzzing, or ringing
•ciphers of a profane immanence
•fetishes in which are concealed the histories of mining and labor elsewhere
•promise contact with elsewhere + obstacles to the desire for full presence and the performative power of words ==> frustrated desire

a public whose membership cannot be known in advance--even when exclusionary limits are constitutive of its domain --> [*]public sphere: social formations enabled by technomedia phenomena (=/= spaces of rational deliberation and consensus making--as in liberal political theory, public sphere characterized by deliberative processes)
*scenes of overhearing* --> public speaking makes that overhearing its goal

“migrant pirates of deindustrialization” (speak only to threaten) --> liberal opposition between language and violence ~~--> the rhetorical grace appropriate to leadership (inauguration speech of Obama, his charisma emanated from his identification with a righteous struggle --> *his being more than himself* [<-- young artist selflessness syndrome in aspiration with the right politcal cause])
zamazamas’ illiteracy, not eligible for a public sphere that depends on literacy. for without literacy, they cannot submit to the law. *defined in its essence by legality* (sustained by a desired opposition between language and violence)

a signature (sign your own name): a form of writing recognizable across all (mainly romanized) languages and is the ideal condition of possibility of recognition from within its constitutional order

[...]