[...]ons


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, a reassurance that the evil of the world can be explained (through the various iterations of satan's power)

demonologist --> “God must exist because Satan is right in front ot me!”


***desire to believe =/= (simple) belief***
•['desire to believe’ and ‘belief'] were not the same during the time of the witch craze
•were not the same in the fast-evolving discourses of the human sciences of the 19th century and early 20th century
•are not the same today


@apass:
1. the general tendency to remain an artist ~ a myth, an effect, a warrior
2. to make anomaly the law عمومیت استثنا


hearing the name of the witch --> subject to stict verification
demonologists and inquisitors at this time desired proof <-- viral proliferation of the witch came to provide that proof

***interrogation under torture = an experimental form of knowing in crisis*** [#styles of knowing]
confession -->{ *status of witnessing = a form of truth* }~-> Boyle's New Experiments 1660 revolutionized practical experimental procedures in the laboratory (for gernerations to come...)
•experiments such as the trial by water demonstrates a deep (if not misguided) *appreciation of cause-and-effect relations* relative to the invisible forces at work in the natural world (=/= indifference to the truth, retreat into superstition) ~=> rendering of such procedures in expressive works of *art* (indispensable to nascent protoscience --today--> an essential element of science's ability to express truth)


_+***'`~~/!=-~>

***the logic of gathering evidence***
(fundamental assumption of anthropology:)
[asserted by Levy-Bruhl:] ontological difference between the nonsensical world of “primitives” and the science of Western research ==> *“natives” could not (or would not) produce a “proper” explanation of the forces around them or their own beliefs and motivations in relation to these forces* (==> testimony + experience became essential tools for ethnographers)
--> ***encounter between researcher and subject*** [was never that of good faith intercultural sharing] ==constituted==> a series of severe tests (by which the researcher could gather necessary empirical evidence in order to make a felicitous truth statement regarding what was “really” at play)
}--> the nonsense to be mastered shifted from the demonic (~ incredible forces at play for the inquisitor ديوى) --to--> ديوانه the misguided tall tales fo the native
---->{this is relevant for artistic research environment, encounter/friction between different styles of knowing
#feedback: mastering the nonsense of the other artist-researcher
@apass, research presentation: misguided tall tales artists tell themselves}

[#feedback as passion]
Avital --> a passion or experience without mastery, without subjectivity, testimony, as passion, always renders itself vulnerable to doubt
([?can we think of] artistic feedback as a) *scene of ethnographic encounter* --> 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 ethnographer)
--> (in this context) fieldwork ==> knowledge of hauntings + other nonsense that is itself haunted ~-> what gives testimony its power of fact {--Derrida--> if testimony truly resolves as certainty or mere information, it would lose its function as testimony --> testimony must allow itself to be haunted}--> [*]testimony: visualization of what cannot normally be seen

[my misunderstanding of ethnography ==> my approach to giving and receiving feedback --> the workshop i gave ‘little fables of practice'] *(your) ‘fact’ must allow itself to be parasitized by precisely what it excludes from its inner depths, of being a fable*

the picture of researcher's humanity (@Sana):
•researcher = detective, examining magistrate دادرس
•crime = fact
•guilty = interlocutor (in reality they guide you into [often organized] labyrinths)
•inquest = strategic operation

**the imaginative results of “I witnessing”**
@apass [what we do mainly is] witnessing eachother's works and mode of existence
+ paradoxical necessity of an expressive element


testimony + experimental results + expert inquisitorial interpretation ==> (an early versoin of) ‘case study’ ==> formation of ‘general law’

*inquisitorial strategies* (developed in the human sciences from the 19th century onward): جزء به کل ”(close analysis of) salient individual cases ==> hidden tendencies visible” [--> and is abused in storytelling]

[in both science and art] seeking to move away from *reliance on metaphysics* to a *reliance on verifiable details* (in their own expressions)


acknowledging satan's unquestioned power <--doubt--> truth-value of statements made by unlearned witnesses


*possession* (confessions of another sort)
confessions that were not ‘procured’ [ritualized torture of the witch trial to generate evidence] but rather ‘volunteered’ and ‘enacted’ (without the aid of inquisitor)
<== individual turmoil (=/= juridical manipulation)
==> medicalization (of the invisible forces) --> (a new mode) *didactic & forensic*

17th century --> a shift in the empirical approach to invisible forces


clinical hysteria --> fascination with a power that (by definition) destabilizes binaries such as inner/outer

@Pierre, apass? #feedback
****symptomology: discovering without learning****
--> physicians in relation to haunted nun, mobilized by attention, considers the deployment of a knowledge in the new and visible form of an appearing [of the other's nonsenses (~ artwork --> the object of feedback: an inconsistent invisible object of inquiry renamed and reimagined by the feedback)]


Charcot [in his storied career of the father of modern neurology] dealing with relations between religious ecstasy, magic, witchcraft, and “nervous disease” <-- great doctor's decision to compile <-- discernible

•weyer --> appealed to people's better nature and reason
•Bourneville --> appealed to an appraisal of history in service of a project on modernity
}--> to demonstrate the precariousness of interpretation & the consequences of ignorance
}--> (errors of) demonologists and exorcists rooted in (what was characterized as) the mistaken conceptualization of their object of investigation

now antiquated *forms of inquiry* --> 16th century's witch-hunting and exorcism of spirits ~/= 19th century's clinical studies of nervous illness <-- conceptual scaffolding of the emergent science (by Charcot and his students) --> *visible effects of primary invisible forces* involved a *long term labor of social interpretation* that required the mutation of old categories and the creation of new ones...
}==> (19th century's new definition of the) witch: misdiagnosed hysterics of the middle ages <--{ susceptibility of women to witchcraft <== “feminine weakness” }

physical signs of witchcraft recorded centuries earlier --> detailed indexing of symptoms such as:
•religious ferver and stigmatization
•psychosomatic indicators such as blue edema or swelling with local cyanosis and hypothermia and autographic skin (that would appear intensely red after touch)


primitive practices ==> the word “medicine” (derived from the name Medea: the mother of witchcraft)

•epilepsy --> the sacred disease ([perceived] to result from hostile magic --rethought--> to result in terms of individual physiological disorder)
•hysteria [from the greek “uterus"] --> hold a special place in the moral imaginary

indigent madwoman: in the 17th century nearly 10000 women (destitute women, the insane, “idiots,” epileptics, and Parisian society's “least favored classes” [---> go to Foucault]) were kept in La Force prison, a second Bastille, in Paris
=/= the nuns and devoted female members of the church, who raised special concern when they were “possessed” by unexplained forces of demonic or neurologic origin


***(Ulrich Baer > Baxstrom:) Charcot =[...]