Maybe it’s because I wrote about this for the last paper, but a lot of this reminded me of the discussion of representation and evocation that Strathern gives in Partial Connections. In dealing with images, both in the public sphere w/ the massacres and funeral markets, and in the private sphere w/ Buddhist meditation on the dead, Klima relies on evocation, particularly “the evocative power of violence and corpses” (5). It could be the appeal of violent/horrific stories, but thus far, this is the ethnography I like best. I think it’s because he succeeds in connecting with me as a reader. Maybe there is something valuable in the use of evocation for his particular topic. Since he’s looking at images and representations already, discussing them through further representation seems a little off – studying representation through representation.
Something else that struck me about this is the placement, or not, of the author in the text. While reading the first few chapters I needed to return to the introduction to check the years that Klima conducted fieldwork. The way he offers the stories of Oct 14 and Bloody October gave me the impression that he was there. For example when talking about the student protests of Bloody October he says “it was an eerie image. its aura crept over the university field for most of the day” (77). While Klima doesn’t explicitly place himself at these events (like he does for Black May) I felt like he was there. What does this kind of narrative achieve? I know he wasn’t there, yet I don’t mind that he presents it as such.
It is interesting that as ‘theory’ is generally thought to be that which is ‘applied’ to ethnographic material, most of the authors we’ve read claim/try to do the opposite. As with Strathern and Yurchak (I’m not sure about Tsing, but definitely not Derlugian), Klima also uses ethnography material as “a method of analysis; it is not so much illuminated by theory as it is itself a commentary on theory” (17-18). I feel of all the authors we’ve read, Klima is most successful in this. His accounts are very contextualized; we are given holistic picture of the historical events he writes about, yet at the same time we are never far from his theoretical grounding. Unlike Derlugian he takes nothing for granted and is self-consciously critical. For example, I appreciated that his critique of civil society (as it is necessarily premised on exclusions) is not “a nihilistic repudiation of the political conditions that make criticism possible in the first place”, but rather “a call to recognized the conflictive openings that make activism possible” (16). Or in another example, he does not take for granted the power of public images and shows how the power of [images of] corpses backfired on students and sparked the October 6th massacre, yet also where the battlefield is turned into a market place, the power of images quickly displaced the military junta. Like Tsing, Klima writes about global processes as engaged within a particular context (the two are in constant relation with each other – the discussion of the bootleg images of the 1992 revolt highlights this well, with images traveling from Bangkok traveling abroad, to return ‘home’ as a coveted commodity). However, Klima comes off as more theoretically critical and therefore (to me) more interesting/useful. His writing style (and placement within the text) lends to an incredibly engaging and evocative text.
As Benjamin’s angel of history flies through the text, Klima evokes what is left behind in her wake. A neoliberal economy, the stakes of the Thai national image, an exchange of cadavers, wealth, and death imagery, all in the name of democracy that even when won, defeated the people. Klima places himself at the confluence of this exchange, enlightened by Benjamin’s Illuminations, Thai Buddhists, and quite obviously, the style and works of Michael Taussig. However unconfused by the obvious epistemic murk that lurks in the charnel grounds of rural Thailand, the mass reproduction of images shot into outer space that reverberate back to the country in a post-massacre frenzy radically transform the making of history into the terrifying practice of forgetting. Cyclical time, disappearing cadavers, soldiers that stand with the people and sing praise to their king and then rip fire onto an innocent crowd in the morning hours, each paint a complicated picture that is reproduced ad nasuem and then exchanged for a government that fails to correct the mistakes of the last regime. The battlefields are turned in to markets, cadavers into tokens of a promised future that never materializes, while nuns are accused of cannibalism when simply trying to reach state of total acceptance of human mortality.
The question remains however, what are we, as readers to take from this account? Is this truly a classic example of anthropological theory can encase a phenomenon into terms and explain it philosophically? Is this truly a theory of death, written in ethnographic form? Is he filling in the gap identified by Derrida and actually writing about the ghosts that have not been identified within philosophic discourse? Is this a view of neoliberalism and democracy that takes into account the true human casualties that have been made in order to accomplish a new westernized world? Perhaps he is successfully achieving his goal of writing the gift into history, which entails clarifying a system far more complex than Malinoski’s Kula.
Klima talks about the return of the (repetitive) trauma, and how this "return" being used by political means (through "necromactic power").
But does the "death images" still have their power after repetitivenss? Or it just lead to numbness or indifference? Or the image just becomes signs, as in Baudrillard's sense? Can the death image still refer to the death?
He claims, “attention to Buddhist visualization may help redeem mechanical reproduction from a metaphysics of presence that can cloak the powerful and radical potential of image-copying technologies” (198). Here, he tries to use Buddhist idea to "save" or (resurrect?) the meaning of images. But this stand is slippery. He suggest that the Buddhist idea on images is no presence of the prescence. Then where are the meanings of the political message come from? Or is he alluding to what Zizek calls "the loss for the loss"? For that sense, then the subject not not there for an absolute sense, but postponed, delayed, or just coming "too late"!
5 Comments:
At 2:12 PM,
melinda said…
Maybe it’s because I wrote about this for the last paper, but a lot of this reminded me of the discussion of representation and evocation that Strathern gives in Partial Connections. In dealing with images, both in the public sphere w/ the massacres and funeral markets, and in the private sphere w/ Buddhist meditation on the dead, Klima relies on evocation, particularly “the evocative power of violence and corpses” (5). It could be the appeal of violent/horrific stories, but thus far, this is the ethnography I like best. I think it’s because he succeeds in connecting with me as a reader. Maybe there is something valuable in the use of evocation for his particular topic. Since he’s looking at images and representations already, discussing them through further representation seems a little off – studying representation through representation.
Something else that struck me about this is the placement, or not, of the author in the text. While reading the first few chapters I needed to return to the introduction to check the years that Klima conducted fieldwork. The way he offers the stories of Oct 14 and Bloody October gave me the impression that he was there. For example when talking about the student protests of Bloody October he says “it was an eerie image. its aura crept over the university field for most of the day” (77). While Klima doesn’t explicitly place himself at these events (like he does for Black May) I felt like he was there. What does this kind of narrative achieve? I know he wasn’t there, yet I don’t mind that he presents it as such.
At 4:41 PM,
rheabonita said…
It is interesting that as ‘theory’ is generally thought to be that which is ‘applied’ to ethnographic material, most of the authors we’ve read claim/try to do the opposite. As with Strathern and Yurchak (I’m not sure about Tsing, but definitely not Derlugian), Klima also uses ethnography material as “a method of analysis; it is not so much illuminated by theory as it is itself a commentary on theory” (17-18). I feel of all the authors we’ve read, Klima is most successful in this. His accounts are very contextualized; we are given holistic picture of the historical events he writes about, yet at the same time we are never far from his theoretical grounding. Unlike Derlugian he takes nothing for granted and is self-consciously critical. For example, I appreciated that his critique of civil society (as it is necessarily premised on exclusions) is not “a nihilistic repudiation of the political conditions that make criticism possible in the first place”, but rather “a call to recognized the conflictive openings that make activism possible” (16). Or in another example, he does not take for granted the power of public images and shows how the power of [images of] corpses backfired on students and sparked the October 6th massacre, yet also where the battlefield is turned into a market place, the power of images quickly displaced the military junta.
Like Tsing, Klima writes about global processes as engaged within a particular context (the two are in constant relation with each other – the discussion of the bootleg images of the 1992 revolt highlights this well, with images traveling from Bangkok traveling abroad, to return ‘home’ as a coveted commodity). However, Klima comes off as more theoretically critical and therefore (to me) more interesting/useful. His writing style (and placement within the text) lends to an incredibly engaging and evocative text.
At 6:48 PM,
Jenny K. said…
As Benjamin’s angel of history flies through the text, Klima evokes what is left behind in her wake. A neoliberal economy, the stakes of the Thai national image, an exchange of cadavers, wealth, and death imagery, all in the name of democracy that even when won, defeated the people. Klima places himself at the confluence of this exchange, enlightened by Benjamin’s Illuminations, Thai Buddhists, and quite obviously, the style and works of Michael Taussig. However unconfused by the obvious epistemic murk that lurks in the charnel grounds of rural Thailand, the mass reproduction of images shot into outer space that reverberate back to the country in a post-massacre frenzy radically transform the making of history into the terrifying practice of forgetting. Cyclical time, disappearing cadavers, soldiers that stand with the people and sing praise to their king and then rip fire onto an innocent crowd in the morning hours, each paint a complicated picture that is reproduced ad nasuem and then exchanged for a government that fails to correct the mistakes of the last regime. The battlefields are turned in to markets, cadavers into tokens of a promised future that never materializes, while nuns are accused of cannibalism when simply trying to reach state of total acceptance of human mortality.
The question remains however, what are we, as readers to take from this account? Is this truly a classic example of anthropological theory can encase a phenomenon into terms and explain it philosophically? Is this truly a theory of death, written in ethnographic form? Is he filling in the gap identified by Derrida and actually writing about the ghosts that have not been identified within philosophic discourse? Is this a view of neoliberalism and democracy that takes into account the true human casualties that have been made in order to accomplish a new westernized world? Perhaps he is successfully achieving his goal of writing the gift into history, which entails clarifying a system far more complex than Malinoski’s Kula.
At 6:48 PM,
Jenny K. said…
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
At 2:03 PM,
Jason Lau said…
Klima talks about the return of the (repetitive) trauma, and how this "return" being used by political means (through "necromactic power").
But does the "death images" still have their power after repetitivenss? Or it just lead to numbness or indifference? Or the image just becomes signs, as in Baudrillard's sense? Can the death image still refer to the death?
He claims, “attention to Buddhist visualization may help redeem mechanical reproduction from a metaphysics of presence that can cloak the powerful and radical potential of image-copying technologies” (198). Here, he tries to use Buddhist idea to "save" or (resurrect?) the meaning of images. But this stand is slippery. He suggest that the Buddhist idea on images is no presence of the prescence. Then where are the meanings of the political message come from? Or is he alluding to what Zizek calls "the loss for the loss"? For that sense, then the subject not not there for an absolute sense, but postponed, delayed, or just coming "too late"!
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