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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*
[...]