[...]stories 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

mimic the address of someone wit charisma (~= authority)


(Morris on) mediaticity of speech (and not merely of media technologies)

Morris reading of a scene (of quotidian exchange) in HIV/AIDS NGO office: a metonym and a metaphor for a kind of South African public sphere that aspires to inclusiveness but is terrorized by its incapacity to know what that opens it up to
•arms itself against potentially aggressive others
•narratives of violence work *to reinforce the sense of necessity* (for a general securitization)
•work in the mode of a **negative meritocracy** (= those who would violate the rights of others are to be excluded, but no others --but--> how to know in advance who has perpetrated or intends to perpetrate such a violation?)

...in the shadow of communicational technology's fashion industry
...bountiful banality of the technologies and artifacts of mass reproducibility

[...] --> lithography --(superseded by)--> photography --(gives way to)--> cinema --(transformed by)--> sound technology --(displaced by)--> integrated and multiplatform digital media --> [...]
(teleological fantasy:) ontologized in epochal schema (these sequences become something more and different) --> analog media are said to be displaced by digital media ==> logic of representation gives way to that of information
=/= (Morris questioning) the conflation of media with mediation, which is itself symptomatic of both a technological determinism and an effort to ontologize technology --> a crises of mediation (not media): the communicative aspiration and the presumptive unity of medium and message in language are brought to their limit (--> media technologies play a role in this drama, but they do not explain it. @OSP & Femke)

-women's understanding of improper English of Zuma's speech: a communicational fail that (from their perspective) is associated with illegality, corruption, and violence

(not to embrace) the kind of logocentric historiography that imagines literacy to constitute a secondary mediation of a primal and autoaffective orality

witches: *technicians of a speech* in which the identity between word and world reaches its maximal extent, when the mere utterance of a spell (even when that utterance is nonverbal) is thought to cause things to happen

zamazama's literacy: the means for communication across difference ==> the mastery of mediation and thus its effacement (=/= signify the secondary mediation of a primary orality)

...a society that is being reconstituted around a commitment to constitutional multilingualism and democratic proceduralism

rituals of governmentality
delay and deferral

fantasy of immediacy -->
•messianic movements
•direct-action politics
•various kinds of violence
•
}==> language
•hollowed out of ambiguity
•pried away from subjectivity
•instrumentalized in slogans and catchphrases (from obsolescent ideological programs)

*violent drive to immediacy* (~= direct-action politics)

(more than) the leakage of affect into a ritually rationalist space

transmission and identification needs and secures the appearance of their exteriority

slogan --> traverse the gap between word and deed, convert the difficult tasks of education and redistribution into the clarion call ~-> pop songs (anyone can utter these words and in so doing find themselves enthralled by the strange sensation of speaking someone else's words and simultaneously experiencing them as one's own)
*slogan: a deeply reified speech (at once vacuous and overfull) at the point were the boundary between language and thing threatens to dissolve -->
•(its communicative function:) *solicitation of identity among speakers*
•(its primary signification:) the fact of *collective utterance* (=/= dialogism)
[*]slogan: literalist response to the mundane crises of mediation (in a political rally) [reduced to the most instrumental dimension]

the awkward trace of dubious literacy (in miners message inscribed on the placard) --> resistance into the communicative process
who/what speaks?
(case of [...]