[...]'s Atlas, 2006
•Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du cinema, 1988
•Christensen's Häxan
•Warburg’ Mnemosyne (presentation of a series of visual cliches and stereotypes, fragments which were most likely already familiar to the viewer ~ figurative givens ==> empirical evidence + media to conjure with)
•Bataille's journal ‘Documents’ 1929–30 --> seizes cliched objects and then systematically empties them out in the course of its own expressions. Bataille and his contributors sought to defamiliarize the cliches, disturbing the placidly deceptive surface of the mundane in their fragmentary, juxtaposing methods of critique and presentation =/= Warburg + Christensen collecting mythological, figurative givens seemingly quite distant from the “really” real
}--> unsettling distances between myth and the everyday
-weave together episodic fragments in order to draw parallels (across domains of sense that cut across time) and correspondences across situations and characters
-Häxan deploys the techniques associated with Warburg's Mnemosyne and Bataille's Documents for purposes of affectively emphasizing the dark, chaotic forces that lurk under the smooth surface of the everyday
(Häxan's episodic structure ==>)
•characters seemingly out of a dead past to live again
•draw the phenomenology of the hysteric
•draw the work's own contemporary time to the surface


promiscuous: neither wholly artistic nor scientific =/=? hybrid artistic and scientific

traverse steep slope between past and future in the form of an event =/= plot


inability to automatically categorize Häxan (or any work of art) <== ***formal strategy rooted in an epistemic virtue***


***(in later Middle Ages) practices such as persecuting witchcraft to meditating on Christ = techniques (of sorting operation) to draw distinctions among visual phenomena, differentiating, say, physical objects from fantasies, dreams, and diabolical or artful deceptions
<--artist-- image-makers specialized in manipulating one thing (their materials) in order that a viewer should see something else ~ *to make something invisible visible* [<-- this is always ideological, and is very common in art]
(#testing) the objective knowledge possessed by the uncanny (in witch's pathological language of diabolic proofs) ==> witch must be experienced in her own milieu, a satanic biome, her state in nature

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

typical in 17th century: tacit mutuality of word & image
-artists habitually gave their paintings titles, mottoes, tags and quotations, and their works abound in literary allusions
-explicit interleaving of the verbal and visual


cat feces and dove hearts boiled in the moonlight

stereotype of a debased and corrupted priest
object of the customer's affections


Protestant discourse against the Catholic Church in the 16th century --> artists of the period extended the instrumentalization of slander through the production of proto-pornographic images of bishops, priests, and the pope engaged in myriad obscene acts --depicting--> the emotional states and desires of the clergy

magical salves (considered particularly powerful and troubling by demonologists)

Häxan self-positioning as a scientific investigation + constantly pull back from the dramatic outcomes of what Häxan depicts

Häxan's demonstration of the power of the witch =/= paranoid delusions of witch- crazed villagers


widely held set of beliefs regarding the “nature” or “essence” of women
Christina Larner's assertion that witch trials were gender-related (but not by definition gender-specific)
--Baxstrom--> *women often came under suspicion of being witches because they were understood to be particularly susceptible to lust, avarice, and jealousy by their very nature [~ 16th century: **women “naturally” susceptible to witchcraft*** + women were presumed to possess elements of the nature more than men] =/= Federici's understanding of witch-hunt as straight-forward instance of misogyny*
--Roper--> *one cannot approach witchcraft or possession from a vantage point in the present without granting some legitimate status to the ways in which the Devil and witches were not only asserted to be real but were experienced as such*


(debates over) politics and evil
satan's malefic presence (in Dreyer's Leaves)
*a density of parallelisms*
Dreyer figures Satan as a problem of the present
“Bolsheviks violently engaged in revolutionary struggle = manifestation of a transcendental demonic power”

question of theodicy --> God's seeming absence from the world

sleep-walking --> enticing a nude female somnambulist out of her home into the forest, where she eventually kneels before a demon who embraces her

proving sexual relations with the devil ==> empirical evidence for satan's existence

(Benjamin > Christensen's art sets out) to conquer meaning


...so it is no stretch to suggest that...

subject and subtext



dreamtime of the 16h century
dreamtime of the witch


•Durer, Baldung, Cranach, artists at the dawn of the Reformation sought to represent the void as a figure
•strategies by which Expressionist painting sought to externalize states of mind

(Baxstrom + Meyers emphasizing) how Häxan *corresponds with a variety of traditions* without seeking to assimilate the film fully within one over another



stillness and fixity of tableau-like shot composition (Dreyer, Murnau, Christensen) ==> (the affect of) suffocating organization

Deleuze summary of Expressionism: play of light and darkness, with the mixture of the two producing an effect that suggests either falling into the black hole or ascending towards the light <-- *face* makes this affective power mobile

•(in Murnau) tableau --> frees the viewer for introspection regarding nature in a kind of emotional, spiritual release =/= close-up (disruptive pathos)
•(in Häxan) tableau --> grounds the uncontrollable forces at work on the faces of those confronted by the power of the witch (constituting a shot that is intensive =/= introspective)


Häxan film --> progressive unfolding of the material world through the style of a lecture
-exploration of the wonders and “errors” of the past (with near-messianic belief in the perfectibility of man)
magnified form of realist cinema + rooted in a naturalist impulse --> Christensen's witch is not only here now, it has always been here: “witch = a figure of nature”
-Häxan begins with woodcuts, drawings, and paintings that originate from *an act of touch* ==> haptic vision ==> to present figurative cliched givens ==> establish the ground
-seizes (the audience) and is seized (by the witch)
-seeing and touching *virtual beings* (such as devils)
--> rigorously logical structure + expressing the tangible singularity of the power of the witch

*(from) tales --to--> theology --to--> diagnosis*


“advancement” of natural knowledge <--> demonology


witch: a viral character


witch hunters's trial by water *is not a “trial” but rather an experiment* (to identify evidence of evil's presence---in the absence of direct unmotivated proof) --operating--> though a form of non-knowledge <-- mastery of nonsense
= ***a deep appreciation of (that might seem misguided to us):
•cause-and-effect relations
•forces at work in the natural world
(=/= indifference to the truth, retreat into superstition)
~
[these] cases suggestive of and empirically linked to general laws. the case said something about the world, and once a case was established, it would spread like a contagion (=/= proof of misogy or genocide as Federici asserts)



Flaherty ==> a certain truth regarding the total social environment : force of Nanook's life not only provides empirical evidence as to his mode of living but also allows for a refl ection on “nature”, “humanness”, “modernity” rooted in the haptic qualities of Flaherty's images

maleficium (of the witch --> palpable: destructive weather magic, assault of farm animals, sickness, unexplained death, etc.)

saturn's mythological violence <--> satan
the idea that saturn serves as patron to social outliers: the poor, elderly, disabled, criminals, jews, cannibals, magicians, witches

(early modern period -->) **satan = the principal authority of the natural world**, “master of the knowledge of natural properties and the techniques of their instrumentalization” =/= techniques of the healer =/= empirical instruments

(de Certeau observed that) every exercise of trained judgment is authorized through the [*]dark: ratifying force of theology
**dark forces --ratify--> all forms of natural expertise**

mastery of nonsense --driving--> confirming the suspicion of witchcraft = a form of non-knowledge ==opens==> a gap in knowing (specifically, ‘who’)


line of accusation that was quite common in the early modern period --> “the desperate search for the cause of what was other wise an unexplained illness or misfortune was frequently the catalyst for specific witchcraft accusations between friends, acquaintances, and often between family members themselves”
16th century --> this violence now bore the sanction of both secular and religious institutions (<== peasant complaints of maleficium زيان <== human beings have been suffering misfortune, illness, and death long before the power of the witch was felt during this time)

Dominican order --> aggressively promoting the cult of the virgin, to the status of the “perfect” woman {elevating the status of sexual neurosis to a virtue} =/= lustful credulous nature of common women (who were often associated with the temptations of Eve)


*conflicted status of women*
•in Häxan --through--> sternly patrilineal visual motifs (condescension + bemusement --> frail + hysterical)
•in ajayeb bestiary -->


(Häxan's) witch hunters act in accordance with their own procedures for investigating truth and falsehood and not simply out of malice, fear, or stupidity

the inquisitor priest/friar (within the realm of their own assumptions about the world) were dedicated to investigating and verifying the claims [of the accused witch) =/= (mainstream depiction of inquisitors as) gullible, fanatical, overtly misogynistic

(during the witch craze) **desire to believe =/= simple belief**
despite the unbelievable scope of demonic power, the inquisitors must believe that what the young maiden is reporting is possible


****important changes in the legal systems in europe well into the 14th century: proffering a formal indictment against another individual required the plaintiff to submit to an accusatory form of criminal procedure. (derived from Roman law) this procedure presumed such offenses as *matters between the accused and accuser* ==> the idea that “crime” was a matter between society and the accused did not exist (--> the presentday distinction between criminal and civil complaints meaningless)
raising a formal complaint required:
•the accuser to furnish proof of the allegation
•to submit to severe penalties agreed in advance if the judge was unconvinced of the complaint's merit
*it was complex, expensive, and very risky to enter into this formal framework in order to address disputes or everyday injustices* ==> most ordinary people did not do so, choosing instead to pursue local and less formal modes of redress

15th and 16th century --> this procedure changed dramatically (with the emergence of the witch in europe)
•witch was understood as an agent of satan
•responsibility of civil and religious authorities to protect pious christians (from a power that would overwhelm the faithful regardless of their individual acts, intentions, or beliefs)

inchoate suspicion (of the fearful, the resentful, the spiteful) --> reporting --> inquisitors (positioned as experts) --> take this suspicion forward administratively --> *impersonal sociological sense* (<-- an example of Weberian rationalization)

to suspect someone of maleficium was not new --✕--> (in witch accusations) authorities were now eager to act on suspicions in dependently


unresolved sexual desires + such passion would be redirected in pathological, perverse manner ==Häxan==> witch accusations

the film emphasizes the crucial role sex played in discerning what constituted witchcraft and its status as a knowable category of (malefic) human practice


a great deal of demonological thinking was devoted to justifying the fact that civil and Church officials, despite their fears, by and large were not bewitched


following satan's idiom...

Häxan's tortured relation to “the truth”
the question of empirical certainty and reenactment haunts the status of the film as evidence

*acting the ideal type breathes life into the emptied, cliched figure* :
•Christensenrelying on the fact that the truth of the witch will take its most visible form by acting her out mimetically (~= Christensen chooses to “play” satan using his idiom to breathe life into his witch)
•Flaherty knew that the visceral force of Nanook of the North depended on the felicity of his Inuit interlocutors reenacting themselves




Christensen seems to be offering a cure for the *secularized christian blindness* at the heart of *positivist human science* --> his audience is pulled in “through a lens of science =/= as misguided inquisitors”


working with *figurative givens of witches and demons* --formulate--> visual thesis (about uncanny, mobile power)

etchings into a material
carving outlines into the image of figures that have been hiding in plain sight


beautifully composed tableau of the torture chamber
static plane of the tableau =/= sense depth signify an open or free space

totality of (depicted) violence <--> composed alterity of the scene's stylistic correspondence between accused and inquisitor

(Christensen's method of) oscillating rhythm between tableau and face
-suppressing perspective and depth of field in favor of a continuous affective movement as expressed in the face
--Baxstrom--> Häxan is not grounded in a setting here; it is grounded in the forms of life present in the shot

sense of corporeal alienation from herself --> inhabit a script not her own --> critical to the “success” of witchcraft confessions

witch stereotype:
•Wild Ride
•pact with the Devil solemnized through sexual intercourse-
•cannibalism
•دیگ cauldron as the locus of the rite
•*massed, coordinated, female nature of witchcraft*


judicial machinery of a witch trial required evidence of criminal acts that (by definition) could not be witnessed


in Häxan
-the power of cinema to witness exceeds that of the witch hunter
-what it does is “worse” than rigging the truth --> it aligns itself (not with a concept of truth or the real but) with the power of the witch


(Häxan and many criminal story films) works through instruments of knowing rooted in the *dynamics of the confession*
#ajayeb storytelling

...clumsily rendered, the wriggling demons reflect an interesting set of variations to the witch stereotype, both ontologically and visually
(Maria giving birth to demon children)


Thomas Aquinas's theorization of the *virtual bodies* (of angels)
-angels do not need bodies for their sake but for ours --> unnatural couplings could produce children, but that the bodily essence of devils would rule out the possibility that these children would themselves be demons


16th century author primarily concern with Satan's ability to manipulate and pervert language (including erotic language)


wild flowing hair of the women --> a common visual metaphor for sexual promiscuity and disorder


images of cannibalistic night witches were explicitly a demonological variation on long-standing popular conceptions

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

xxxxxx



persistence of witchcraft
how witchcraft might still exist as more than just one of many choices available on a personal empowerment “menu”
-how rituals pertaining to magic came to be understood as a problem of knowledge

*magic binds forces that would otherwise overflow life*
a great subterranean need to “bind” forces that would otherwise exert themselves with impunity and without any greater explanation or meaning
--> enacting a dehistorification of a form of life that would otherwise be overwhelmed by the brutal timeliness of historical being
Baxstrom > de Martino, Janet

making the precarity of our presence an object of knowledge

(firm unquestioning belief =/=) local doubt --sustins--> witchcraft (in Buli -Bubandt)
...face off with a persistent, seemingly eternal, spectral threat

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

Rolley

an anatomical (not geographical knowledge, diabolical atlas) demonological understanding

Renessancian world encounters ==> geo
[*]Renaissance: the age of demonology, the age of cosmographic revolution (--> nature of causality)
-presence of the devil in geographical space
-composite and cross-disciplinary network of nonhuman causality and transmedia writing [demonologists + cosmographers + travellers]
•demonology: identifiable shared discursive field ---> go to Baxstrom
•demon --> gunpowder (according to Rabelais and others) is the diabolical element amongst the classic tricolon: gunpowder, the nautical compass, and the printing press

emergence of a Christian science of the devil (in the medieval West) --> liberation of demons (from supralunar to sublunar --> into earthly realms)

Sabbat: an outpost of hell very much belonging to this world

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

*finding ghost is what we are all here for*

...nagging mischief they cause can turn deadly
violently jerks the body of the medium around
occasionally threatening or attacking onlookers

“keep filming” one of the old women whispers behind me --> i do what i am told = i do exactly what i want to do

anthropologist = i cannot directly “see” the demon or the spirit [~ what i am told to see, @apass #feedback], but i am convinced that they are there


(ajayeb --?-->) older practices of defining social facts and the discovery, interpretation, and definition of the read ==> (roots of the predisposition of research:) to sense, interpret, and eventually master forces that appear to be nonsensical and yet are held to be essential to the reality of everyday social life

[mad:] the notion of *irrational* as a privileged space in medical discourses (in France in the 19th century) ==> a mysterious and extra-social language that the rising medical profession could adapt to its own purposes

“nonsense” of the “native”

(Baxstrom's work on witch craze [in 16th century] --arguing-->) the problem of establishing proof in reference to the invisible forces has durably shaped our modes of investigating human social and cultural life

[ajayebnameh =/=]
social or cultural anthropology in the 21st century = (human sciences’ contemporary equivalent of the) *old efforts to master the invisible* -->{test ==> felicitous information as to the “true” nature of obscure forces and their operations within empirical real-world contexts}

[ajayeb: (part of the histories of)] systematic, empirical investigation of strange events, singularities, miracles, and other types of staple phenomena ~~--> scientific method and the forms of knowledge that emerged as the foundation of an ensemble of *sciences proper to humans* --> yet has been unable to expel (the unprovable forces) considering the origins and forms of human diversity

[*]anthropology: the desire to credibly master nonsense

[with ajayeb studies i am learing to be] able to argue for a world below the threshold of perception (of medicine, biology, physics --> defined their relation to the nonsensical via a *visibility to come* ==> [embodied in new technologies:] photograph, microscope, telescope)

Deleuze --> when writing of communication between heterogeneous systems --> [we must pay attention to] what is this agent, this force which ensures communication? (<-- role of difference and resemblance)

forensic anthropology

[title]
imaging and imagining technologies


the confusion of the empirical (knowledge traversed by our everyday observations, sensations, passions) and the transcendental (construction of an ideal knower, now it is the queer) in apass

figure of man foundational to the human sciences [did not exist in classical thought ~ ajayeb] --move-to--> empirically institute the experience, witnessing, and testimony of an individual human subject = *the central linking relay between evidence, judgement, and the real* --> the ability of a human being alone to serve as the sole source of evidence in an investigation of “the real” (#feedback) [=/= Gilgamesh]
(in Qazwini's ajayebnameh the testimony of an individual human subject is ambiguous)

(Baxstrom + Foucault) *insist on rooting our form of knowledge in the figure of the human being and the human being alone --yet--> our gaze is continually drawn to a host of beings and phenomena (the witch, the spirit, the shaman, etc.) that cannot properly be enfolded back within this figure*


fabled definition (@apass relationship with defining)

fable of anthropology (a disposition with regard of the interlocutor other as truly “other”) -->
“This goal is, briefly, to grasp the native's point of view, his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world. We have to study man, and we must study what concerns him most intimately, that is, the hold which life has on him. In each culture, the values are slightly different; people aspire after different aims, follow different impulses, yearn after a different form of happiness. In each culture, we find different institutions in which man pursues his life-interest, different customs by which he satisfies his aspirations, different codes of law and morality which reward his virtues or punish his defections. To study the institutions, customs, and codes or to study the behaviour and mentality without the subjective desire of feeling by what these people live, of realising the substance of their happiness—is, in my opinion, to miss the greatest reward which we can hope to obtain from the study of man.” -George Stocking


...the field-worker must, under the signature of science, achieve the cultivated, sensed point of view of the other
@apass #feedback (a privileged relation with the unknown [of the other artist to whom one gives feedback])


(Baxstrom:) witch hunt = experiential engagement with nonsense

Malinowski --> how can the invisible be forced into visibility or sensibility? ==>
•connect the study of diverse human social practices to the seemingly nonsensical worlds of gods, spirits, and witches that were offered as explanations
•countering hierarchical and polygenetic theories of diversity
•appropriate empirical tests in the face of the doubled, impossible object of knowledge

*method = cultivated ability to craft experience and testimony into a “sensible” explanation of what otherwise would simply be ruled out as “nonsense”

15th century Europe ecclesiastical crisis:
•demons going viral (the viral proliferation of demonic power beyond the grasp of human intuition and thought)
•proliferation of witches (within the general population)
}==> growing power of Satan on earth --> (sign of impending) apocalypse
==> growing fear and great doubt [--> like today!]

Malleus Maleficarum (on witchcraft, a revolution in early middle ages) -->
1. local relation between investigative procedures
2. constitution of evidence
3. assertion of a fact
--> expertise in matters real but invisible

16th century notions of the positive element of seeing witches, sorcerers, and Satan himself

God's apparent absence *in times of great change and strife* --> an *interpretive expertise* over the concrete, secondary manifestation of God's reality (was reassuring) ==> a relief to the pious believer : “God's embrace of life =/= devil's embrace of life” =/= Heretics managed God's absence without that opposition (a luxury to imagine such a world was denied to most of the people in that period, also denied to the modern subject of the secular present)

how does one know who is really hearing the prayers [of the faithful]?
devil overhearing and interfering with even the most intimate communications


inquisitor <-- 16th century questions of theology (in a world where the trappings of belief are everywhere but there is no incontrovertibly visible evidence of god's...)


demonologists of the 15th and 16th century were not sure about:
god
man
witch: the abyss between god and man = a kind of proof, [...]