[...]x nature of *sensual explorations of the flesh* through masochism and exorcism

demonic influence
genres of transfiguration and metamorphosis

Christensen shows how those who were once identified as witches are now the objects of medical and social concern in modern life --> shows the potency of her various forms over time


--> Baxstrom + Meyers
(my work on ajayeb is based on that) [there is a largely] unacknowledged historical tendency and predisposition within the human sciences with roots in much older practices of:
•defining social facts
•discovery, interpretation, production of the real itself
[such as bestiary]

method that allows the researcher to sense
interpret and master forces that appear to be nonsensical (yet held to be present: held to be essential to the reality of everyday social life) --> an epistemological concern

privileged space of the irrational in medical discourses in 19th century: (Jonathan Strauss -->) irrationality (nonsense) was a legitimizing force for medicine in that the very incomprehensibility of the mad created a mysterious and extra-social language that the rising medical profession could adapt to its own purposes

“nonsense” of “the native” [--> my start-up engine in Islam lecture series, a privileged site of mysterious incomprehensibility allowed me to to form the methodological basis for a fieldwork for unknown forces of irrational life in distant societies...]

*anthropology: (a distinct human science from the desire to credibly) master nonsense*
(Baxstrom + Meyers)

anthropologists claiming to have assumed the “point of view” of another (~ fieldworker must achieve the cultivated sensed point of view of another) --> distillation of method & disposition (?) <-- when confronted with the question “who are you?” and “what do you do?”
(according to Malinowski: this) privileged relation to the unknown must emerge through the ability to test what is asserted to be real --> a series of subjective trials subsumed within the rubric of “fieldwork”
*presumptions:
•experiential disposition of the analyst ==> understanding of a phenomenon other wise held to be imaginary and fictional
•witnessing and testimony ==> evidence as to the reality beyond the direct experience of the researcher

([Malinowski updated and secularized a much older epistemology of] Luther:) faith = a commitment to the representation of a truth --> Western Christianity's own efforts to discern truth and the nature of the world


proliferation of witches in 15th century Europe

reassuring relief for the pious believer: force Satan (and his followers) from the shadows through an interpretive expertise over the concrete secondary manifestations of God's reality --✕--> (most had no luxury to imagine) *the embrace of life that the devil urges in binary opposition to that of the good*
--> Devil interfering with the most intimate communications with the Divine
-how does one really know who is speaking when prayer is returned?

[for] the demonologists of the 15th and 16th century --> “God must exist because Satan is right in front of me!” : reality of witches ==> Satan
Institoris, Sprenger, Johannes Nider,
the name of the witch ~=> sacrilegious and inhuman deeds (subject to verification)

*inquisitors believed that what was reported to them was possible* (still they desired proof) <== interweaving of learned demonology into the fabric of a dominant theology (<-- sovereignty of God ratified primarily through the worldly evidence of Satan) + invisibility of the spiritual world was expressed as an essential given

{for the inquisitor (witch hunter) it was never enough to simply “believe” <==> a narrative must be produced that at least partially satisfied the demands of evidence}--> *interrogation under torture = an experimental form of knowing in crisis*

truth value of a nonsensical confession made sensible --> human belief, action, and social practices

ethnographic style of early French ethnographers --> **learning truth from lie** was essential to representing the “primitive” reality in order to interpret it in its true picture
-Marcel Griaule's approach to fieldwork: “The crime is the fact, the guilty party the interlocutor, and accomplices are all the members of this society. [...]the abundance of pieces of evidence serving to convict appear to facilitate the inquest, but in reality they guide it into labyrinths--labyrinths that are often organized. [...]The inquest must be treated like a strategic operation.”
--> nonsense to be mastered had shifted from the demonic, incredible forces at play for the inquisitor to the misguided tall tales of the native interlocutor [--> same mistake that Federici does in her book Caliban and the Witch. Federici, in search of the manifestations of misogyny, aggressively frames the scene of a feminist encounter with witch-hunt as a kind of antagonistic trial of social organization of the Middle Ages in transition to early capitalism... a mode of attention that is equally didactic and forensic as the witch inquisitors]

recognition of the struggle that lay at the heart of raising testimony to the status of the “really real” --Avital--> Griaule aggressively frames the scene of ethnographic encounter itself as a kind of antagonistic trial (whereby the ghosts and gods of the natives are forced out of the shadows and made concretely apparent to the senses of the anthropologist)
*fieldwork ==> knowledge of hauntings that is itself haunted*

imaginative result of “I-witnessing”

*paradoxical necessity of an expressive element within an objective test in relation to what would other wise be nonsense* is evident in many of the examples of 16th century visual culture --> ajayeb bestiary


trial by ordeal
(illustrated in Eduard Fuchs)
the case: if the woman floats she is clearly able to contravene the nature and is therefore a witch or heretic; if she sinks, she has made no such pact with Satan
-procedural expertise --> trial by water here functions as *experiment as much as a punishment* designed to reveal an other wise invisible truth

testimony + experimental results + expert inquisitorial interpretation ==> early version of the ‘case study’ (synthesized as evidence in service of accounting for variation that exceeded general laws regarding relations and phenomenon in the world)
Baxstrom + Meyers

(ajayeb's) individual cases: an effective strategy in providing analytic (and empirical) purchase for phenomenon that were other wise invisible to even the discerning eye of the expert <-- **to move away from a reliance on metaphysics**


**medicalization of the invisible**

possession
set the stage for the explicit medicalization of the mobile invisible forces that experts had been struggling to master, explain, and take measures against --> a new mode that was equally *didactic and forensic* (as the theological frameworks deployed by inquisitors and the exorcise of demons by Church)

witchcraft, faith healing, and demonic possession
Bibliotheque diabolique --> case studies to demonstrate the precariousness of misrepresentation and the consequences of ignorance ~= investigations collected by Charcot and his students in their studies of hysteria
•clarifying the link between witchcraft and hysteria

*witch hunting and the exorcism of spirits in the 16th century (--> antiquated forms of inquiry) ~=?! clinical studies of nervous illness in the 19th century --> conceptual scaffolding of the emergent science*:
•fascination with the secondary visible effects of primary invisible forces
•long-term labor of social interpretation that required the mutation of old categories and the creation of new ones

==> “witch = misdiagnosed”

epilepsy, the sacred disease, erroneously perceived as resulting from hostile magic
=/= hysteria (hold a special place in the moral imaginary)

the special susceptibility of women to witchcraft mirrored the “feminine weakness” associated with the hysteric, exacerbated by low social status
-in countless accounts of possession, we find descriptions of demons speaking through the mouths of girls
[Baxstrom + Meyers =/= Federici's flat analysis of witch hunt as the tool of subjugation of the local population or of woman by men]

tableau vivant --into--> tableau clinique --into--> tableau critique

hysterical reliving of the original symptom --> reframed trauma: an attempt to suspend the two temporalities (real and reimagined) in the same image
@Hoda

one element of fascination with hysteria was its “look” --> hysteria's aesthetic link to forms of possession

possession --> aneasthesias, amnesias, subconscious acts, somnambulisms, fixed ideas

a scaffolding: conceptually arranged chasm between outer and inner states ==>
•exorcists building on the techniques of inquisitors and witch hunters --> possession acts as the bridge across this chasm
•neurologists and psychologists construct the same
--✕--> (Malinowski's) anthropologists: fieldworkers as truth-tellers returning from the dark corners of the real (the witches are no longer explicitly the target of the inquiry)

Häxan's real object: the specter of sheer nonsense

hunt (even in objective scientific mastery) --> fueled by a desire operationalized in a method of being close enough to something to sense it

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

(?every time we have to) show how *the word (that we are using) relates to meaning*

Christensen makes every effort to craft a witch that is real to us : ontological fluidity of a cinematic image ==> “Häxan = word + image + thing”

metoposcopy: the expression of reasoning was to be found on the face, (dating back to Girolamo Cardano and the Renaissance) the operation of reason as the weaving together of images in the mind --> a proto-cinematic theory of the relation between image and thought if ever there was one

•respectable scholar indexes himself through his sources
•authoritarian first-person tenor --> instrumentally impersonal tenor
•establishing the X as a chapter within a much longer constellation of practices, discourses, traditions, and institutions

Kieckhefer --> how the long history of practical natural magic was enfolded into the specificity of European witchcraft in the late Middle Ages

Christ in Limbo --> Christensen's parallel editing ==> moving representation of a terra-centered universe <~~ elaborate wonders found in baroque wunderkammer (meticulously assembled by the German elite)


Renaissance Hermeticism:
writings of Hermes Trimesgistus ~=> foundation for:
•Ficino's relatively mild natural magic
•Pico della Mirandola's Christian Cabalist
•Agrippa's Christian magus
•Tommaso Campanella's (1568–1639) utopian City of the Sun
•Bruno's full-blown Hermetic–Cabalist (through the power of astrology and magic to bypass the Church altogether)
•

...rippling effects of the Hermetic–Cabalist tradition -->
•scrupulously mathematical astrology of Girolamo Cardano
•the rigorously empirical studies of the natural world demanded by Bruno's attempts to operate as a magus
}==> (paved the way for) science of Newton and Copernicus --> a new metaphysics to emerge

attacks on Renaissance magic and the Hermetic–Cabalist tradition (that authorized witch) ==> anti-witch treatises

(case of Giordano Bruno's execution --> Hermetic magic and Cabalism) how in the 16th century: “superstition = crime”


(Christensen attributing) --> Hortus deliciarum, a largely cohesive image of hell to a period when the nature of hell's location and “topography” was a subject of fierce theological debate
-he strategically ignores debates and alternate conceptions of damnation that existed in the 15th and 16th centuries in Europe

[that which you choose] works to amplify affect more than further analysis (--> such as Christensen's attempt to heighten the fiery terror of the scene by billowing smoke ==> عام generic explanation)



...a palpable sexual dimension crepting into Christensen's thesis <-- images of women “sneaking away” to attend Sabbats

Häxan visually grounds itself in citable evidence from the start
•cinema: (as an instrument for “recording reality”) a vehicle for “telling the truth” about the world [in early 1920s]

when documentary was not yet documentary -- fiction wasn't fiction yet either --Chanan-->{
moving pictures = visual tidbits لقمه چرب ونرم
made no demands on literacy (==> spread easily)
whe world on the screen remained anecdotal (and predominantly iconic)
practically inarticulate (in terms of public discourse)}

(1900) visual meaning-making machines that demanded not only attention but belief (by staging as real reenactments) --> mutated the desire to see far-off contemporary events
•--> Attack on a China Mission Station (1900), Hunting Big Game in Africa (1907), and With Captain Scott, R.N., the South Pole (1912), The Battle of the Somme (1916) and With Our Heroes at the Somme (Bei unseren Helden an der Somme, 1917)

(Baxstrom + Meyers) question of mimesis
-what is the relation between a fragmentary visual artifact drawn “from life” and the truth value of any such fragments?
-what sorts of filmmaking practices can felicitously mimic life as such?

[for example in Curtis's In the Land of the War Canoes] status of reenactment ==> prevailing standards of expressing the real

--later --> crypto-structuralist origin myth that falsely represented what “documentary” meant to pre-Griersonian filmmakers ==> “realist” Lumiere =/= the “fanciful” Melies

}--> *gap between witnessing and the real* in Europe (this question of evidence occupied inquisitors and theologians long before the invention of cinema)


preparing viewers for the “diegetic absorption”
(telling of a story by a narrator) diegesis =/= mimesis

the strategy of “reimaging” is methodological and intentional (in the opening minutes of the film Häxan) --> (in European terms, for a very long time:) “knowledge = recitations of the known”

+ creation of new images --> constituting its own evidence for what is at stake
(Christensen designating) **techniques of presentation rather than simple content**

****the “truth” gained by the reproduction of archival images**** <==through== their mobility in the context of their new use
--> (similar to Farocki) Christensen empties out such visual artifacts, expressing through their preestablished frame a meaning that was hidden and resisted



(Baxstrom + Meyers carefully treating the) methodological element of Christensen's image-making practices --in--> Häxan's depiction of the violent moral disorder of the Wild Ride of the witches to their Sabbats

(16th century) Wild Ride: a standard element of both demonological and popular literary accounts of the activities of witches, folding:
•older legends of wild hunters
•restless travels of the dead at night
•tales of the Furious Horde (a super natural band that was not originally associated with witchcraft)
•twisted chaos of the deep forest
Canon Episcopi regarding the power of demonic illusion to deceive women into imagining that they could travel great distances at night, often in the company of the goddess Diana
}--> conjoining of witch image to demonological discourse [<-- an empirically verifiable invention in the late medieval period and the Renaissance]

*the oscillating value of the non-fictive* (of its discrete artifacts)

hybrid human–animal creatures with each “natural” species being traceable within the complete appearance of the demonic creature


(coming into contemporary performance art -->) figures from antiquity:
•Saturn @Ale
•Circe @Bryana (changing men into beasts, games of chance, gambling, tricks, slight of hand, illusion, hybrid animal–human forms of the demons dancing around the “grandmother” with surprisingly young and beautiful appearance --melancholy--> general sense of sexual and societal disorder swirling around a placid, passive female protagonist) + empirical strain of the discourse of the witch
•Sabbat @Jassem
•
-->

pact of the witch
obsessed state of the hysteric
interplay of face and tableau

(Warburg's assertion that) donning a mask constitutes an active attempt “to wrest something magical from nature through the transformation of the person”
[putting on a mask --> transformation of the person --> obtaining omething magical from nature]

Christensen formally constructing “the witch” through a cinematic iteration of metoposcopic naturalism
(metoposcopy: a form of divination in which the diviner predicts pers[...]