07. Cinema Worlds, Polyicony and the Multiplicity of Realism

A human sensory apparatus is constituted in ways that let it perceive only parts of the world. Other sentient beings with differently composed bodies have different limits and capacities. We all in effect perceive something else, with the overlap between what some animals sense and what humans do being minimal.<fnref n="46" /> Some things have to be slowed down, before they can become generative of thought. So-called reality is one of them, and cinema is such a wonderful technology when it comes to making things graspable that otherwise wouldn't even appear. Both as a material tool for certain entities to appear in thought (and become manipulable) and as a conceptual means drawing on material technology in order to think in new ways. Meanwhile, if there is one line that connects the various strands of what has come to be named the ontological turn in anthropology, it is the adage of "taking different worlds seriously." (Pickering 2017) While this has been fairly worked through conceptually within general anthropology, what I aim to do here is connect it to questions raised by the status of the image in/as cinema and grasp ontological problematics with cinematic tools. In many ways, an ethnography can be conceived as a slowing down of a scene (composed from a variety of elements), entering it and exploring it, much like one does when analyzing a film. Such exchange between almost analogous methods and conceptualizations of objects of inquiry will happen throughout, and is not limited to this part. There is evidently no simple, independent reality out there, and doing away with body as a mediator co-constitutive of what appears as reality is one of the catastrophic foundational acts for and of thought. Neither is it very fruitful to take thinking about bodies as an end-point – they too are parts of complex, generative interdependencies. And as not all bodies, even among humans, sense the same, for bodies are formed in environments and develop different skills, what comes to be reality is anything but straightforward nor is it universal.<fnref n="47" />

Documentary more so than fiction or experimental film offers a conceptual problem for this mode of inquiry: by virtue of its supposed more direct (be it constituted merely habitually) connection to an assumed 'real,' natural world (preexisting the human and immediately accessible without having

<footnote n="46">⁴⁶ The intersection of anthropology and ethology is an increasingly explored field, coalescing around the multispecies ethnography. (For recent overviews, see Schroer 2019, Hartigan Jr. 2021.) What I employ here draws on the work of von Uexküll with a heavily Deleuzo-guattarian inflection. (Cf. Buchanan 2008, Cimatti 2019)</footnote>

<footnote n="47">⁴⁷ Thailand is famous for a super-abundance of what Moderns would consider supernatural beings and the sensing of ghosts and other such entities does not fit the categories (or skills) of occidental Moderns: "In our Thai narratives, a full two-thirds of those who had experienced the supernatural (66 percent; 50 out of 76) felt this energy directly on their skin. Almost all of them (92 percent; 70 out of 76) said that they sensed this presence directly even in the absence of physical sensation." (Cassaniti & Luhrmann 2011, 42)</footnote>
been affected by the new images made), the tradition of categorizing something as documentary and
what is made within it naturalizes the world of the Moderns thereby reducing the status of a wide
variety of entities in the world to the status of illusion. What is excluded from the real, are all the
entities commonly classified as supernatural and therefore objectively unreal or, its flipside, merely
subjectively real. For all its valorization of the individual, in the end such a body can be but an anchor
of personal illusions but not real reality. The entities excluded need not be supernatural in a strong
sense, since after all, concepts with minimal material reality such as society, power, reality, the so-
called human or, say, kamma, none of which are simply universal (Tsing 2005), can also only be
expressed through film form and nothing in the image itself, much less any reality outside. When
entities not already taken for granted by Moderns appear in cinema, they are habitually assumed to lack
a reality beyond the image. Images point to images, to a history of images of supernatural entities, but
not ‘outside.’ There is haunting going on in the problematic status of entities not easily perceptible
through the sensory makeup of (post-)humans, as they are present yet absent at the same time. Modern
science, or rather scientism, follows in the footsteps of a Christian tradition that has thrown out all
entities beside God and that which we consider self-evidently existing, even if much of this existence is
mediated not just by the sensory composition of human bodies (which is itself historical) but also by
extensive technological apparatuses without which the entities would not appear in ways graspable by
the human sensory and conceptual apparatus (as in the case of bacteria or viruses) in the first place. The
structuring principle here is the figural fulfillment of the past through the Christian salvation narrative,
and, as a by-product of such teleology, everything gets streamlined into one world without any real
difference.<fnref n="48" /> Donna Haraway (1997) termed this type of worlding Christian realism, pointing out how
narratives of progress reiterate this in the guise of technoscientific salvation. A seemingly real Nature
that operates out-there serves to ground reality and select images (Culture) as either real or unreal.
Researchers, anthropologists among them, have increasingly produced evidence for alternative ways of
practicing reality (into reality). Stephen Muecke (2009) for example pointed out that cultural studies in
general continue to be structured by the nature-culture dichotomy, leaving the real untouched, as
something to be settled by the natural sciences, whereby any engagement with other cultures, however
conceived, leaves the reality-making capacities as mere epistemological variants of the real ontological

<footnote n="48">⁴⁸ The same operation is active in the common Darwinism, indoctrinated as scientific at schools, that constructs the past and its species always in light of what exists today, that is as an idealist reduction, a projection of what is as necessary, while evolution if anything would operate arbitrarily (as seen from any historical position), ateleologically and keep opening up the world with new species – environment constellations. Evolution and natural selection have complex, evolving relations, what is a relatively stable environment for one set of bodies, can be very fluid for others as it keeps changing due to the effects bodies have. (See e.g. Pearson et al. 2010, Grosz 2011)</footnote>
work done by Western sciences. The frame of reference here is multiple and includes, among others, a
nature-cultural habit (realism) and academic discussions of the topic (which according to Muecke
commonly share the same ontological framework). What I try to operationalize here specifically, is the
possibility of retaining the concept of ‘realism’ while tying it to more than one world. That is: realism
does not have to be associated with Christian realism qua some kind of mimetic representation of visual
as if unmediated givenness, grounded in the stable One of a Nature with unchanging essence.
Figurations don't have to be reduced to a binary of real/unreal based on whether they can be fulfilled in
modern imaginations of Nature. Furthermore, Christian realism here operates on at least two levels. On
the one hand it is a way of choosing and organizing images when making films, and it is also a
culturally habitualized that is onto-epistemological approach to films and the world in general. It
operates in the making and viewing of films alike. This makes its operations much harder to
disentangle, make apparent and dislocate. Thus, I do not move within apparatus theory to make the
viewer into a fully passive receptor of ideology. (Anderson & Anderson 1993) It is rather the repeated,
ritualized coming together of certain cinematic forms and historical habits that support the largely
preconscious convention of Christian realism constitutive of Euro-colonial modernity. It is the making
of dominant forms of imaging and thinking part of the ‘natural environment’ we move in – wherever
one turns an element is there that confirms the simple distinction between documentary and fiction,
objectivity and subjectivity, fact and fantasy. In fact, the very convention of independent facts
participates in this and thus cannot be easily used as arbitrator, but rather it has to be complexified so as
to remain scientifically productive. Such habitual constitution does not preclude any conceptual
grasping of other realist possibilities, however much it is impossible for me to ‘actually experience’ a
different kind of image of the same image for now. It is only through one body (as constituted through
techno-historical conditions) that one can experience. While ‘my’ world is perpetually changing it is
thereby also historical and impossible to simply be left behind by some metaphysical trick of escaping
situatedness. The worlds I write with here are conceptual, their efficacy tied to an opening of thought.
(Skafish & Viveiros de Castro 2016) A body can however learn to attune to perceiving changes and
thus become aware of the intricacies of reality construction – as will be explored later, this is an
important part of Buddhist meditation techniques.

“Different worlds – the fact that other social groups understand and act in the world differently
from ‘us’ – have been with us for as long as there has been contact between cultures.” (Pickering 2017,
134) Such anthropological practice relates directly to the more technological question: “Can film show the invisible?” (Suhr & Willerslev 2012) When dealing with other worlds, one soon learns that Christian realism has its specific history and the worlds elsewhere are composed of other elements that do not easily fit with any straightforwardly ‘real’ world. Entities populating such other worlds are generally classified as supernatural by willfully naive, imperial, reductive realism. Nonetheless, as anthropologists continue to demonstrate, such entities are, or at the very least can be, very real. There is, unsurprisingly, less unanimity among the various methodological traditions as to what exactly makes something real. For now, it should suffice to assume that real is that which has effects. (Mol 2002, 2010) In other worlds relations between things are constituted differently; a creativity which is much easier composed and extended within fictional than documentary codes. And, perhaps most importantly for the present discussion, images themselves are understood to be and to act differently. In order to proceed, I will engage a Hong Kong scholar's engagement with the topic of different realisms, which will enact an opening for thought fertile for cultivation with the anthropological and cinematic tools at disposal. She chooses certain scenes that are good to think with, at least when it comes to making it possible to think different conceptions of realism and image. This will then be refocused through the operations enabled by *Krabi, 2562* (2019) a recent Thai-British collaboration that reconfigures the image-reality relation in a multiplicity of ways. Indeed, a film which, as I will demonstrate, makes it a film that thinks ontologically in the sense used above. What is being done here, in good Deleuzian fashion, is to relate cinema and the problems and possibilities it poses to the nominally extra-cinematic, so as to be able to think what is otherwise unthinkable. Instead of reducing cinema to some existing conventions of a world, one can enhance the conventions of the world by provocations to thought enacted by films.

## Toward Polyicony

Rey Chow presents the different ideas of reality/image relation Michelangelo Antonioni encountered after filming *Chung Kuo-Cina* (1972) upon invitation by the Chinese government: “We could be looking at the same images, but the ways that we talked about them were usually different, or presumed to be different by both sides.” (Chow 2014, 16) While the Italian film-maker thought he was filming life ‘as it is,’ in the small, unguarded moments, beyond what was for him considered conventionally important, the Chinese side was not concerned with such bourgeois European ‘authenticity.’ The
making of an image in China at that time was considered a chance to present an idealized version of
oneself.<fnref n="49" /> Which, as a side note, makes sense in worlds where there is no stable self preceding the
world as it has come to be in Christian-Secular, liberal realities. Private authenticity would be just
another performance, for after all, the realm of images is always a sort of falsification and hence a
source of creation. The images captured and put together by Antonioni were considered an
embarrassment, attempts at presenting China to the world as backward. This is to be expected, as the
long shadow of colonialism is still today felt in image-making practices where the so-called ‘West’
continues to wield more power in depicting its putative ‘Others.’ Since Chung Kuo-Cina was
specifically commissioned to present China to the world through the creativity of a leftist master film-
maker, there is little wonder that when he filmed laborers picking noses this met with little
appreciation.

Nevertheless, Western commentators of course had to classify Chinese practices as retrograde,
and not as alternative and valid ways of developing with technology. (Chow 2014, 19) Chow goes on to
quote Susan Sontag: “In China, ‘taking pictures is always a ritual; it always involves posing and,
necessarily, consent.’ If one follows people around and shoots their picture while they are unaware of
one’s intention to do so, one is depriving people of ‘their right to pose, in order to look their best.’”
(Ibid., 20) While today, in the so-called West, a liberal formulation of consent is all the rage, at that
time this Chinese habit was apparently not met with much understanding by cosmopolitan whites. To
be clear, I write ‘at that time’ as the example discussed here ought not represent any real, much less
unchangeable China out there, but rather is a source of introducing a specific difference into my very
much located thought to enable an opening, all the while maintaining a tentative, but real historical link
through which these events entered academic discourse. Perhaps ironically, the times discussed in the
article appear to be long gone given the surveillance state of the CCP. Importantly Chow goes on, that a
first step is to “not treat the photographic image – perhaps the image in general – as natural or free.”
(Ibid.)

“The act and the art of striking a pose in a dignified manner may be residual practices from
earlier times, but they are also eminently modern, indeed contemporary, as many of us can tell from our

<footnote n="49">⁴⁹ I feel compelled to add, that, according to Liu (2014) Chinese audiences watching the documentary today are apparently bemused by the now otherworldly commitment to socialism many of the people shown in the film demonstrate. However, within citing Chow's work, he points out the same issues raised by her a year earlier.</footnote>
own personal experiences with photography.” (Ibid.)<fnref n="50" /> Chow then elaborates that photography for Chinese (at the time) was about social space and how it is/can be negotiated with its surroundings. This is then a different world from the realist naturalism of neutral ground assumed as neutral by Antonioni and Western commentators. She goes on to compare the belief in photographic realism to a kind of religion alluding to a transformation of God's gaze to a machinic gaze. These are by no means accidental parallels to Haraway's concept of God trick, which she uses to describe the ideological move of positing contingently produced scientific knowledge as universal and pre-existing the production of knowledge. (Haraway 1990) Rey Chow thus implicitly points out that the camera, far from being an objective, disappearing medium for the depiction of the real, is an actively technological intervention into the constitution of realities. The Chinese here appear to be those who are more aware of the technosphere as productive than the cosmopolitan Christian realists. And the images reproduced are already constituted by and constitutive of cultural ideals.<fnref n="51" />

The conceptual problem is laid out directly: “[if] the documentary is driven conceptually by the principle and agenda of producing a record,” (Chow 2014, 26) then what exactly is the referent once it becomes apparent that there is nothing that is self-evidently real. Now, Rey Chow goes on to discuss how the famed Chinese film-maker Jia Zhangke tackles the issue. The case of Jia is used as a conceptual operator (linked to Chinese worlds) and not as a stand-in for China in general. While he too is at times criticized for creating ungainly views of China (for the ‘external’ world), his style is ambiguous insofar as his films look like documentaries but are composed with self-consciously fictional elements. Either mode of image-making doesn’t take precedence, acknowledging, to my eyes, that documentary is always-already fictional: by way of deciding on a topic, on a focus, a way of organizing images, the intertextual connectivity of each frame, gaining meaning through the difference with other frames as well as the repetition of pre-existing clichés to make it recognizable in the first place, and then, when gathering materials, deciding what to film, from what angle, and which sounds to make audible, the way toward the creation of the first documentary image is already a path of fictionalization. And indeed, this parallels the work of ethnographers, who, in the field, also necessarily select what will and will not be noted in a notebook to later base written research on. Historically, film-making, photography, and ethnography were closely tied in the early days, only to be eventually

<footnote n="50">⁵⁰ Social media such as Instagram have thoroughly transformed practices in this regard, though dominant discourse appears to still draw on notions of authenticity and other oppressive fantasies.</footnote>

<footnote n="51">⁵¹ For a discussion of how the notion of a stable subject is being constructed/performed in/through Western photography, see Gad (2013).</footnote>
institutionally separated. (Grimshaw 2001) And even today, anthropology (like most scientific discourses) remains dominantly textual and that textuality more often than not realist in it's literary style, with images being treated as secondary support. The society of the Moderns, while inundated in images and image-making technologies, is for all practical purposes a textual one, another Biblical echo. Abilities that would pertain to communicating, whether critically or not, with any other medium, such as images, bodily movements, non-linguistic sounds, are not even considered as legitimate options – humans are thus shaped as passive receptors in all but words.<fnref n="52" /> The anthropological image operating in the over-developed world is one that is decidedly confined.

I will call the concept to deal with work such as Jia Zhangke's *polyicony*. Polyphony is commonly taken to consist of two or more lines of melody, so I take polyicony as a type of audio-visual texture consisting of more than one simultaneous series of reality-images. Or, to put it in more anthropological words: it is cinema as a more than one-world world.<fnref n="53" /> The concept is further related to Haraway's cyborg: "my complaint about socialist/Marxian standpoints is their unintended erasure of polyvocal, unassimilable, radical difference made visible in anti-colonial discourse and practice." (Haraway 1990, 159) The point being precisely to not reduce (cinematic) reality to one common, pre-critical grounding. Furthermore, polyicons are images that insist on referring to more than one thing, as is the case with the infamous rabbit/duck image. Among the points being that while both are 'there' and can conceptually be grasped as such, it's impossible to perceive them simultaneously (and hence any God's eye view or final synthesis is unfeasible).<fnref n="54" /> They are a favored source for thinking multiplicities after the ontological turn and the anthropologist Mario Blaser (2016) employs them to show that caribou and atiku (indigenously conceived caribou) are and are not the same animal. There are significant overlaps without either subsuming the other. As such each image connecting to multiple worlds will always be more than itself, undoing any notion of easy reference. It opens up toward the outside, the beyond the frame in cinema toward change.

<footnote n="52">⁵² This is not to deny the primacy of the visual for Moderns, which has been attested time and again – the focus on developing skills of seeing is a different manner than presupposing vision as the main and most reliable of senses.</footnote>

<footnote n="53">⁵³ This does not mean that there is another world beyond this one, but that this world is multiple.</footnote>

<footnote n="54">⁵⁴ Similar games with perspective, seeing and impossibility have been played by painters, perhaps most famously in Hans Holbein's *The Ambassadors*. A skull is painted into the image in an anamorphic manner so that it can only be seen from a different angle than the main painting – a play on recognizing either death or life, but not both concurrently. (Mersch 2006)</footnote>
Derealizing Film: From Reflection to Diffraction

The thought organizing naturalist realism (God having structurally transformed into Nature that is beyond history/culture) can be grasped as one of reflection. Donna Haraway puts the issues with this model of thought succinctly: “Reflexivity has been much recommended as a critical practice, but my suspicion is that reflexivity, like reflection, only displaces the same elsewhere, setting up the worries about copy and original and the search for the authentic and really real. Reflexivity is a bad trope for escaping the false choice between realism and relativism in thinking about strong objectivity and situated knowledges in technoscientific knowledge.” (Haraway 1997, 16) While her concerns lie with scientific research specifically, the words can be adapted to fit discussions around cinema/image. Once the camera apparatus is not thought as taking images as reflections of the real, new lines of thinking the cinema/world relation open up. Haraway suggests another optical metaphor, that of *diffraction* instead. Importantly, for creating the metaphor, she does not reach to some othered outside of Western tradition. She merely searches her ‘own’ history in order to actualize something in a new context, with that something even remaining an optical metaphor, thus displacing the original ever so slightly, yet to radical consequences.<fnref n="55" /> Indeed, optics played a major role in the activities and the conditioning of Early Modernity and Early Modern philosophy embroiling it especially through Galileo and Spinoza with the development of scientific methods. (Maull 1986, Vermij 2013)

Haraway (1997, 268) writes, “[d]iffraction is the production of difference patterns in the world.” And what technology is there that produces more difference patterns in the world than cinema? Each image taken already differs from that which it is an image of. And then images are edited together to create patterns of similarity and difference, of presence and absence, of figures and forms, of shadows and lights. Montage might be the most radical aesthetic capacity unique to (pre-digital) cinema. Chung Kuo-Cina then is not an image of how China really is, neither are autochthonous or state-driven projects of ‘representing’ China any more or less real. Each act of cinema diffracts patterns in a world toward different worlds. It always points to the future, or rather to many futures, as it opens up reality toward becoming other. This does not mean that all diffracting worlds act the same. Antonioni’s documentary epic does different work than any of Jia Zhangke’s creations, it engenders other possibilities. Diffraction traverses genres and conventions. Documentary and fiction become thus

<footnote n="55">⁵⁵ For a more thorough discussion, see Barad (2007, 71–98).</footnote>
distinct not in their truth claims (which have to be taken at least as partly performative anyhow), but in
the codes they employ and the habitualized expectations they mobilize.<fnref n="56" /> Hence the issue remains: most
cinema-goers over here appear to be used to documentaries being true in the realist representational
sense of the word, while fiction is not, albeit the truth claim of photographic imagery operates in
fictional pieces too and it doesn't appear to be uncommon for people taking self-evidently fictional
depictions of other societies and humans to be real – how else could we, when there are no other
images to construct the other. This is exactly where filmmakers such as Jia and the objects unleashed
through them onto the world enter – by systematically mixing codes, their activity destabilizes either
convention and makes away with any simply preexisting, precultural reality. As such, they do the work
of anthropological theory and can help to think through issues of other worlds in ways common
anthropological (or cinema studies) work doesn't make possible.<fnref n="57" />

A New Image: For a More Than One-World World

From here on now, my own compositional practice will focus on an even more curiously slippery film
than those of the internationally recognized Chinese master, one that I consider to be more
straightforwardly anthropological than Jia's for at least two reasons: it was made by an intercultural
team and, one of the directors, Ben Rivers, is mostly known as an avant-garde ethnographer (of
possible futures and deep strata), while the other, Anocha Suwichakornpong, often combines
documentary realism with cosmological excursions. Both seek out the edges of any easy sense of
realism that visual ethnographies<fnref n="58" /> continue to hold on to much like documentaries in general as
cosmological questions are rarely tackled. When an 'I' encounters other worlds, donning the cloak of
an anthropologist, much labor awaits in order to be able to articulate say, a world with cosmic Buddhas,
in the linguistic and imageric conventions of Western academia with its implicit Christian realism/one-
world naturalism. Even a cursory glance at most visual ethnographic work betrays its reliance on a
conventional realism of a world where deities, celestials, chthonic powers, spirits and the like have no
substantial reality. The anthropocenic work of Ben Rivers retains certain elements from these

<footnote n="56">⁵⁶ One might want to point out that once images become personal memory, it is impossible to disentangle where they came from: an image of a Chinese person in a fiction and documentary film becomes indistinguishable.</footnote>

<footnote n="57">⁵⁷ Chaos, cosmogony, cosmology, and the habit of seeking a single order – in short a large part of the apparatus of one-world metaphysics developed in the Western philosophical doctrines of classical antiquity – are more or less alien to classical and perhaps contemporary Chinese metaphysics. Indeed, it can be argued that the latter does without a single universe. (Hall & Ames 1995)</footnote>

<footnote n="58">⁵⁸ Even the works of the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, while non-anthropocentric, enact a one-world world model.</footnote>
conventions such as topics, choice of words and at times choice of shots, but combines them with SF
imaginaries and a focus on the irreverent all within a decidedly post-humanist world – thus it brakes
any easy certainty of what really exists and opens the world to new futures. Meanwhile Anocha
Suwichakornpong is mostly known as a Thai art film-maker in the shadow of Apichatpong
Weerasethakul, whose output also charts the edges of the conventionally real. (Cf. Ingawanij &
MacDonald 2006, Jeong 2013) Her work is engaged in extending and articulating a specifically
Buddhist cosmology cinematically, i.e. how to articulate kamma or Buddhist conceptions of time by
cinematic means. Both also offer ways of making and connecting images that point toward an outside
of any easy Realism.

Before moving on to a more intricate engagement with the many worlds in *Krabi, 2562*, the title employing the Thai calendar enacts a destabilization of temporal certainty for Westerners who generally only live the one temporality of secularized Christian time, it seems necessary to elaborate on the issue of many worlds as it relates to cinema.<fnref n="59" /> Hopefully it was evident from the discussion of Antonioni's film that not all worlds are equally powerful in sustaining themselves creatively through time. More often than not, they are destroyed by the capitalist-imperialist machine or even when managing to transform into something compatible with it, are still treated as lesser by those living in the worlds that control most resources. (See Bear et al. 2015) Part of what takes away the ability of other worlds to survive, is the scientific endeavor itself, at least in its descriptive aspirations: once Western science, in this case the classifying representational humanities, describes something it is caught in time, habitually projected as what ‘it really is.’ A China or Thailand are described many times, different schools different intellectuals different politicians or commoners argue about what it really is, without as it seems acknowledging that it isn’t anything, but many things, including whatever one has just claimed in relation to that entity. Thus, each new cinematic form that can be related to China or Thailand or Buddhist practices adds to whatever these may be, and often in the impermanence of the world, some forms and ideas disappear into the past, perhaps to one day be actualized again by archaeological work. The iconic French film scholar Nicole Brenez (2014, 64) writes the following: “Whether in fiction or documentary, essay or scientific, cinema is an art of description. And description, being first and foremost a literary form, finds forms of fulfillment, or even

<footnote n="59">⁵⁹ Amusingly, the Cinema Scope review mentions Antonioni. (Koehler 2019) The creation of ambivalent mystery, of destabilizing the reality of the real (via strange disappearances) is after all very Antonionian – the classic auteur seems to have merely ‘forgotten’ about these techniques when dealing with China.</footnote>
accomplishment, thanks to silver print. ‘Description is a figure of thought by development, which
instead of simply pointing out an object, makes it somehow visible, with the vivid and animated
exhibition of its most interesting aspects and circumstances’” Furthermore, she discerns that two
preconceptions “born of literary disciplines continue to reign over cinema” (ibid.): accuracy in
describing the world and the technical recording by the cinematic apparatus is taken within the
framework of identification or definition. This is something that all kinds of film-making must struggle
against. Once one takes cinema as a description that does not simply point out, but makes visible, then
it becomes an ontological operator drawing contours of possible worlds. The conventional expectation
of cinema pointing toward a reality outside of it becomes but a subset of its figural capacities in relating
worlds – cinema is always already engaged in ontological politics.<fnref n="60" /> And, as for description in general,
however treated, is that not one of the central operations of ethnography? The question however is and
always will be: what exactly is being described, as well as how will a redescription differ? And, it is
also this: which elements from any situation or world are being extracted and stabilized through a
description, made more ‘real,’ and which ones disappear? Once we do away with the notion of a
preexisting reality ready to be represented, it becomes self-evident that any description is a creative act
that brings together existing forms and conventions (accessible to the body doing the describing) and
whatever was encountered. This counts for any world, including the one doing unacknowledged self-
perpetuation when compartmentalizing other possibilities through research into things past without the
power to co-create futures.<fnref n="61" />

In a related field of research, the STS scholar Christopher Gad writes the following on the topic:
“[...] the dynamic relations between people and materialities create emergent worlds, giving rise to
new forms of politics, technology, and cosmology in continuously unfolding processes.” (Gad et al.
2015, 75) Ontological politics then is about varied emergent realities that are connected but not

<footnote n="60">⁶⁰ Isabelle Stengers (2018, 85) expands on ontological politics in the following manner: “My point is not to extend the passions of philosophical ontology to political epistemology, but to claim that in order to accommodate ‘ontology’ with ontological politics we need to disentangle it from epistemological presuppositions implying a mute reality available for many worlding and wording ontologies. The problem with ontology is not knowledge or representation, but engagement with and for a world … Speculation here is defined against the power given to the definition of a state of affairs that logically leads to war. It implies the trust that this definition might not be the last word. Ontological politics, however, implies another kind of speculation, more akin to what physicists call a ‘thought experiment.’ There is, indeed, one powerful protagonist that cannot be trusted because it is not equipped for agreeing about peace as a possibility. It is what I would call, among other denominations, the global West.”</footnote>

<footnote n="61">⁶¹ The irony is of course, that this cosmo-practice of Moderns makes it impossible for most to recognize that these others, most of all China, actually continue shaping the world and future, and by being unable to grasp any of this, the image most of those in the West have of the world and the world keep drifting apart until eventually they will probably have to break.</footnote>
identical, and it “demands that we take seriously the existence and power of other-than-human beings.” (Stengers 2018, 100) This is not a classical perspectivism with different views on one world, each perspective being judged based on its accuracy in describing the allegedly inaccessible world. We are thus not in a realm of beliefs which can be true or false, or just tolerated or respected within a liberal multiculturalism. The scholar John Law (2015, 127) summarizes it in the following words: “If we are liberal then we will respect the differences and we will not try to impose our own version of the world on those who see it differently. But even so, and however nice we are, we have not abandoned our basic commitment to the idea of a single all-encompassing reality. Neither have we really stopped assuming that Aboriginal people have got it wrong. Their idea, the idea that the world is a set of differently woven, specific, and heterogeneous creating practices, is a story, but it is not the way things actually are.” It becomes a question of which elements of realities carry into other worlds (with Western universals carrying well due to the infrastructure build up over centuries of colonialism and capitalist extraction). But also, for those of us who learned to be mindful and perceptive of the complexities of the material constitution of the world, it is evident that the liberal order is not neutral as material transformation of reality: it is imperial at its very center, seeking to restructure whatever is into dependent and extractive relation to the so-called West. The very creation and maintenance of unified measurements, infrastructures, communications is not neutral and what more is ecologically devastating, as regions of the world very actively differ in what types of architecture or urban design can be accommodated. The one-world world has been a distinctly Christian fantasy from the start, made real through imperial force, but the world resists, for it is always more complex and unruly than any projection can account for.

John Law reminds the reader that the overdeveloped ‘North’ itself is also composed of different worlds. There is and never was a radical separation between ‘our’ world and ‘theirs,’ all are built as localizing heterogeneity. He calls it a *fractiverse*, “[t]he idea that reality is a set of contingent, enacted, and more or less intersecting worlds in the plural.” (Ibid.) What is important for my engagement is that cinema as a figurative machine that, following Brenez, renders visible new capacities already virtually inherent in the world is a very special actant (to also be appreciated as such), as the worlds composed in local conditions can travel easily (most commonly as a digital file nowadays) and connect with other practices. One might say, a redescription of what cinema can do is necessary for its continued existence and relevance in the future. “There is no ‘overarching.’ Instead there are contingent, more or less local
and practical engagements.” (Ibid., 128) At least if those coming into contact haven't already settled
what there is in the world. Not that the figurative capacities really mind, as they fit very well the
Latourian hybrids which proliferate among those who have never been modern.

So here, Law's dictum is taken to be of central importance: “But even in the North we do have a
choice. If we do not opt for a one-world metaphysics, then this opens up a whole field of intellectual
inquiry that is at the same time a field of political intervention.” (Ibid.) It is all related to the problem of
difference: do we take films to be difference engines or identitarian representational machines? Here
thinking with Haraway's most famous concept, the cyborg, proves useful. As STS researchers point out
about it: “[...] one central aspect of the cyborg figure is precisely that everything, from metaphysical
concepts to coffee makers, insofar as they act and thus exist, are relational, semiotic and material
entities – all at once.” (Gad et al. 2015, 75) A film then acts, that is insists as a material-semiotic entity.
Following a distinction made by Brenez (2006), many industrial films, to differentiate them from an
avant-garde that tends to reconfigure all it relates, are still woven so that they won't shatter the one-
world metaphysics presumably shared by the makers, so the way they relate appears pre-given and
merely confirmational of existing attitudes. Though as Chow (2014) concernedly writes, there are
many films composed in non-Western societies the idiosyncrasies and worldings of which are
translated away by the Western viewer or critic such as Susan Sontag – the self-appointed ultimate
arbiters of the Real. Following ontological turn scholars, difference is expected in the realm of culture
and identity in the realm of nature, and cinema straddles both: world cinema is expected to be different,
exotic, but its claims to reality are taken as mere fantasies unless coded in familiar ways. It is on this
terrain that Jia Zhangke and the *Krabi* film play. These polyiconic tapestries use montage to put
different worlds side-by-side without clearly grounding in one or the other. Readers might recognize
here the Deleuzian time-image and its fundamental undecidability, rendering the actual virtual and thus
open to change, the emergence of the new. What then constitutes a polyiconic film? That the succession
of images cannot be easily reduced to a one-world world, whereby it enacts an ontological politics –
whereas most films may express different worlds, but they don't as a rule enact a differentiation in
worlds; at least not as individual ‘objects.’ “Furthermore, practical ontology offers a vantage point from
which to consider the fraught issue of incommensurability between worlds. Nothing allows us to claim,
in principle, that worlds are either commensurable or incommensurable. There may well be worlds that
are mutually incompatible, whereas others can be compared or related with little problem. Indeed,
many worlds are continuously related and compared.” (Gad et al. 2015, 76) Movies as relational objects that open up (to) other worlds are then perfect for enacting relations or comparisons with other, possible worlds.

What does this specific film generate in the me who is partly formed through Buddhist traditions, so that I can share this world? That is, how can I show the structuring presence of another possible ontology to those unfamiliar with any such perspective? After all, Western perspectives travel much easier than those of others. Western arts and narratives have for centuries influenced or at least provoked reactions all around the world, while those of others have been contained or denied instead of giving the opportunity to influence, provoke, actively transform and enrich the so-called West and the exclusionary canons it projects, all the while acknowledging these connections.<fnref n="62" /> I in many ways diffract as much as the film – thus: “[T]hat’s the whole point of diffraction. Not everyone yearns to know about the same things.” (Smith 2012, 333) *Krabi* relates different worlds, and one of these, as I will strain to demonstrate is a specifically Buddhist one, not so much in the iconography employed but in the more ephemeral composition of audio-visual montage.

## Krabi, 2562

There seems to exist a perpetual magic hour in the world of *Krabi*. When one enters the film, children, framed at distance, are reciting the hymn to Thai royalty. Traffic passes in the background as the costumed youngsters perform as multitude, linked by an imperative but their habits not yet being able to perfectly synchronize. Not yet made same by decades of conformity coding. Some, perhaps, will reappear later, on the back of a *songthaew* (literally: two-row) when talking to one of the many uncertain protagonists who wander the image-worlds of *Krabi*. Among these, even later, one will learn there are those who are linked to even other figures one encounters. These relations are only ever established visually, one's memory has to do the work of association. Yet, there is a link, a connection to be made, however fleeting, be it among the singularities of each student or the generality of their age group.

Looking back, one notices such patterns, but when living *Krabi* linearly, the way life today is

<footnote n="62">⁶² The internet is changing much here, as for individuals it becomes easier or even normal to have sustained encounters with the productions of non-Western (but still capitalist or socialist) societies.</footnote>
commonly experienced, at least when reared in Christian realist societies, the flow appears to be but a
succession of almost incidental images connected by form, place and the convention of having feature
films. As any diligent student of Buddhist teachings will know, untangling the complex webs of
relations that bring about the world is no small task that any mere mortal can hope to achieve without
the guidance of correct teachings. Mistaking surface effects as experienced in immediate daily life for
all of the causality of the world is not just a category mistake made by Western common sense
causality.<fnref n="63" />

Within this universe, there doesn't appear to be any systematic privileging of one life form over
another. Myth and 'our' conventional reality are not clearly isolated. School children, a young local
guide, a Thai actor, a European director, a film crew, the night, a hotel employee, a cave, a *naga*
(serpentine water deity), a wat, a projectionist, a projector, landmarks, an archaeological site with a
skeleton, spirits and spirithouses, boats, kayaks, a woman of uncertain goals and existence, streets and
roads, trees, palms, beekeepers and bees, futuristic scientists in white pandemic suits with blue gloves
looking for an uncertain something, an ex-boxer sitting in the liminal space of a door, sunlight, black
and white insert of a girl finding gold bars and making a golden conch,<fnref n="64" /> a neanderthal couple, the
beach, a shaman, mudskippers, American tourists, the camera becoming a view through a microscope,
a buffalo, a cock, an old cinema and horror movie posters, a flock of birds, restaurants and a karaoke
bar, rain, 2562/2019, Krabi. The list, as many a Latourian litany, could go on. (Bogost 2009) How to
make an inventory of images and things? Reality can never be exhausted. An anthropologist writes the
following words on Thai Buddhist worldings: "This is not a Linnaean-style classification system, not a
hierarchical logic scheme in which lower-order components nest under higher-order categories. The
possible combinations of component parts (i.e. of possible mind states) are functionally infinite –
contingent on particular circumstances." (Aulino 2020, 31)

According to scholar Christine Gray (1995, 226) “[i]mages are regarded as language in that
Buddhism, like Hinduism, often privileges visual over verbal media in the communication of truth or
dhamma.” With Buddhist *dhamma* being the cosmic order and the teachings of the Buddha, and in
some schools of thought phenomena, this central concept (in a sense *dhamma* is ‘reality’) is already

<footnote n="63">⁶³ Which itself has been elegantly dismantled by Nietzsche following Hume. For a concise discussion, see Culler (1982, 86–88).</footnote>

<footnote n="64">⁶⁴ The conch mobilizes knowledge of the Thai literary classic *Sangthong* (The Golden Conch) composed by King Rama II (r. 1809–1824) and based on Thai/Lao folk narratives.</footnote>
multiple. Here there is not merely ‘doing things with words,’ but doing things with (and as) images. If indeed one might perceive a slight tilt toward human vantage points, one might also think about how geological structures form part of the images in Krabi. It is not merely the repeated, conscious presence of landscapes and elements that act as both background and connective tissue between scenes. They, most especially the cave, are things that link temporalities, stories and activities. In one take, a cave might go from enjoying resplendent sunlight to being entered by a small human figure, thus rendering it for our habitualized perception into a background to anthropocentric activities. In Thai worlds, caves take on important roles and mythological activities. Here too, it is made explicit. A spectator hears, told by a young girl, who is by all appearances a travel guide for both *farang* and other Thais, the myth about how the cave came to be.

The camera slowly pans across the walls of the cave. Voices as if disembodied but lingering from two figures met in the previous scene:

- There was an old couple who wanted to have a child. So they proposed to a *naga* – a sea serpent – that if they were granted a daughter, she'd marry the *naga*.

- And if they had a son? (Notice: the Thai woman visiting Krabi for reasons that are, much like her physical existence, never stabilized, goes along with the story. She asks a question from within the narrative logic, not from a disbelief without.)

- Maybe Phra Nang Cave wouldn't exist now (laughter). However, it didn't turn out as they'd agreed. When their daughter grew up, she decided to marry someone else. The *naga* found out and got very angry. He turned into a human and stormed the wedding.

At the cave entrance, a beach, the camera eye shows dozens of people including climbers mounting the rock.

- There was a shaman living in the cave nearby. He tried to stop the fight, but to no avail, so he turned everything to stone. The bride and groom's house was turned into Phra Nang Cave.

The voices become reembodied. The woman ‘probably from central Thailand,’ as is much later inferred by a female police chief, and the young local female guide walk on the beach. Their bodies, their faces,
the pace of their steps. The wavy (ir)regularity of seawater on sand makes for a third of the frame.

- What about the groom?

- He probably turned into one of the islands (laughter).

A sailboat softly rocking on the water, islands in the background. The soothing sounds of water inundate the atmosphere (cut). The two young female characters almost in close-up. Such images are rare in Krabi. The guide pays respects. The visitor, always in a light blue shirt takes a glance and imitates her. It's just a fast, half-hearted paying of respects. Perhaps it doesn't matter in a Buddhist world where intentions are just a subset of actions. Doubling makes the difference visible. One may notice the praying beads around the younger girl's wrists, as the one in blue attentively checks out how the off-screen shrine looks. One can follow the movement of her eyes, waiting if as a spectator one will get to see the shrine.

- This shrine is popular with women who want children. Women from all over the world come here to ask for children.

- Well, I really don't want any children (the younger one laughs at this and smiles).

Finally, the shrine. Many colored penises phallicizing from the ground up. The backs in medium shot. As locals and anthropologists know, there are many fertility shrines in Thailand, even at least one in Bangkok.

- Shall we go to the next place?

As the laconic statement disappears into the past, the camera lingers on the shrine.

The story will be repeated when the guide talks to the American tourist couple. She, the beach and the shrine are the only clear link between them and the rest of the figures encountered. Such doubling is a common strategy here. Starting with the fact that the film has two directors – a parallax view. Or a diffraction perhaps. The woman in blue is doubling herself, as a ghost maybe, or an alternative version. The projectionist relates a story about how a woman he conversed with suddenly
disappeared. Later, we see her who presents herself to different people as having different reasons for
visiting Krabi descending from the cinema's rooftop, never to be seen again. The former projectionist
and her had a talk before, continued on the rooftop. – It's beautiful up here. – Yes, it is. ... What's that?
(she points to the left of her, to the right of the image). – Kaew Temple, the official temple of Krabi. –
There's a shrine up here? – It's a shrine for the guardian spirit of the cinema. It used to be next to the
well behind the cinema. But sometimes, people saw the spirit climbing up here so we moved the shrine.

The Thai actor we met standing in the water dressed in prehistoric garb, apparently filming a
commercial and being the one who makes contact with the male neanderthal, also doubles her. They are
shown to be in the same hotel room, one might presume at different times. I write presume, because
like with many events, no stable grounding is ever achieved. The past in the present. The cinema
lingers on through time. Cinema is after all a place where past, present and future meet. They
destabilize the real. (Lim 2009) Both cinema as an image producing apparatus and the space of
screening and losing oneself. This is masterfully shown Ming-Liang Tsai's 2003 film *Goodbye, Dragon
Inn*. The Malay-Taiwanese director is obsessed with the melancholy of time passing as it reverberates
through the problematic posed by the fleeting stability of the cinematic image. Once one begins to
notice doubles, they become endless. Little wonder in that a camera is the technology of doubles,
doppelgängers and hauntings. This has been picked up on and thought through by the earliest
filmmakers. (Kittler 1999) As the play of doubles becomes infinite, the (un)grounding issue of
ethnographic writing returns: reality is infinite and whatever analytical framework is employed,
complexity is not reduced, it proliferates. The list of doubles would be endless and anybody
approaching Krabi intent on doubling would encounter new ones. Hence another reason for the move to
partial connections and diffraction. And, as Marilyn Strathern (2013, 157) puts it “images *contain*
events.” Though she argues this for Papua New Guinea realities, given what researchers such as Gray
attest for Buddhist traditions, it would hold there too. And anyways, what we ‘do’ in research is
applying concepts and theories sourced from one place to another. Strathern elsewhere demonstrates
how what is figure, that which is interpreted and not taken as simple ‘reality,’ and ground. That which
is presupposed as self-evident (not only in images in a narrow sense), differs between a Western and
differentiated Papua New Guinea people and is (for certain images at least) differentiated for Moderns
as well. (Strathern 2002) In short, proliferating cinemas of *polyicony*.
Felicity Aulino (2020, 30ff.) argues that Thai Buddhists operate with an image of the mind and the world that she terms *kaleidoscopic*, unlike Thai converted Christians, who while keeping some Thai ways generally transform into less permeable modes, firmly grounded in God as a one-world world.<fnref n="65" /> It seems to me that it's like habits are sedimentations, layers of preconscious action and thought that persist. Aulino notes that while Thai usually think about what to do for a spirit whenever they encounter them, that is they think about what the spirit could want from them, for Christianized spirits native to the region (even those of relatives) are always coded as demons and as such evil within a binarized world. There are hard lines that ought not to be trespassed. She writes that the reality of spirits “would not be of primary concern” (ibid., 37). It is not so much that these converted Christians question the existence of spirits – after all, they just appear, so why question their existence – it's that they lead to a “disavowal of any potentially positive, constitutive relationships with them.” (Ibid.) As for the Buddhist mind and the related ways of world-making, she writes: “Like a turning kaleidoscope, the ‘mind’ here is understood to draw together component elements in an endless array of richly textured combinations. Of course, certain patterns arise with greater frequency, and the ever-changing unfolding of existence is in turn shrouded by a powerful illusion of continuity.” (Ibid., 32)

Precisely this image of mind can be discerned as an organizational principle of *Krabi*. The film clearly does not perform any Christian realist sense of ontological unity, but one of multiplicity and its concomitant uncertainty. *Krabi* is multiple, it holds two worlds at once. Certain figures traverse the spaces in *Krabi*, and such continuities can often be only construed retroactively. As the film unfolds, since it uses uncommon conventions in editing, it's impossible to tell or predict how a new image relates to a previous one. The way figures are framed, or the way speech is often not linked to any clear source on screen, and further contemplates the existence of ghosts, leads to the necessity of thought, by which here I mean (following Deleuze-Bergson) actively reaching into memory to find an adequate image to the one presented. It would be impossible to create these thoughts if not for technologies of slowing down, playing on repeat, or frame-by-frame, of easily accessing a film in order to do this. The film differs from itself and makes different thinking possible, has different effects, depending on the

<footnote n="65">⁶⁵ It is important to note the complexity at play here in how conversion is described: humans and the social environments co-constituted are complex and transform at different speeds. This is a way of acknowledging some specifically Christian effects (conversion) without reproducing Christian cosmology, one that is obviously naive in its projection of immediate and total transformation. One might thus notice how enormously persistent Christian conventions are in imagining how the world works, again a reminder that Western secularism remains a variant of the Christian tradition, and will remain so unless seculars begin acknowledging a world of continuous transformations instead of radical breaks.</footnote>
techno-cultural constitution of the viewing situation.<fnref n="66" />

Ghosts, they are ubiquitous in Thailand and it's production in popular and art cinema. I myself, during my fieldwork, have not had any encounters with ghosts I was aware of, though their presence was implied through various material artifacts and some conversations. Being a *farang*, the people I met (generally educated middle-class) were vary of relying to me any ghost stories except after significant trust was established. And even then, the topic rarely came up. In *Krabi*, and one might presume not only in this cinematic version, ghosts are ubiquitous. Not as appearances through literally visualizing special effects. They are there as recurring topics in interviews and through montage. Film can after all show the invisible. Ghosts in *Krabi* are talked about, narrated, edited through sudden absence, but never directly shown. After all, that is what makes them ghostly, haunting and not shocking. It matters how the invisible is shown.

## Beyond the Limitations of One Reality

The reason I situate the question of reality of the real and of images within the anthropological is because ethnographic writing and cinema encounter a problem that is specific to their mode of inquiry. Documentary work of those creators formed within hegemonic forms of realism noticeably does not have to contend with the possibility of other worlds. The Antonioni example starkly demonstrates that even ‘radical’ white filmmakers, when it comes to the issue of the real, can remain resolutely stuck within Christian realist worlding. Earlier, I added: paradoxically, as the Italian auteur's fiction films are heavily invested in taking apart (neo)realism and have had a deep influence on, ironically, Chinese cinemas. (Pollacchi 2014) In her reflections on ethnographic film and experimental cinema, Catherine Russell (1999, 10) expands on the “inherently contradictory mode of film practice” that the former is. Due to its (all too often continued) scientific commitment to objectivity, film was often taken as merely being there to provide empirical evidence. However, stabilizing rules have never been successfully established. Partly, this would have to do with the contentious history of how image-making and

<footnote n="66">⁶⁶ One of the most fundamental limitations of film studies continues to be the unquestioned operation of an assumed existence of a film as an entity onto itself, disconnected from projecting/viewing conditions it comes to have an effect in. Film critics and researchers appear to (implicitly) think these conditions do not co-constitute what they can make of a film, and with this continue perpetuating a hierarchy between critical and common film-viewers. Whenever science and (higher) schooling fails to acknowledge material conditions that make the production of (critical) knowledge possible, only to fall back onto (liberal) humanism, it projects hierarchy and self-importance onto a world where otherwise only variety in combinations would be discernible. Humanism and its projection (but not analysis) of primary equality is hierarchy. It matters how and where knowledge attained is disseminated.</footnote>
writing science relate within the field of anthropology. (Grimshaw 2001) This lead to the infamous
anthropological iconophobia, described by Lucien Taylor. He summarizes how a variety of
anthropologists continue(d) to denigrate images, for their “detachment of words and things” (Taylor
1996, 67), as if that were not also the general condition of writing. They consider the cinematic to be at
the same time too literal, that is closed, and too open for it, and unlike text, the image is said to provide
no real context. What they don't see is how the play of signifiers in texts cannot ever provide full
context either, not to mention that language is always contaminated by image. (Mitchell 2005) Much of
this has to do with anthropology remaining caught within Christian realism, and with it its colonial
history, and taking cinema to be a representation of the (uncontaminated) Real. Funny how images
made, words written somehow are as excluded from being real as supernatural entities of others, or in
the past even other humans. Yet all of them continue to change the world(s).

The history of anthropology has continually contended with this issue, precisely because the
anthropological unconscious (by which I mean that of the anthropologist, not any general human
condition) emerges within the tensions of the coming together of different worlds. One might then
claim that it is precisely the fear of losing the power over defining the Real that motivates many of
these skeptical attitudes toward cinema. For once it is accepted that there is no unambiguous self-
positing reality to ground scientific inquiry, a new world opens up and all that was solid melts into air.
“Here science is fiction.” (Lyotard 1993, 253) According to Catherine Russell (1999, 10), the “history
of ethnographic film is thus a history of the production of Otherness.” And once one stops
domesticating this co-produced Otherness by imposing a definite context (as has been done by the
relational/ontological turn in anthropological theory), ethnography becomes “liberated from its bond
with the real, and from its assumptions about truth and meaning.” (Ibid., 11). What has to be left behind
is, as Russell notes, reflexivity, as it is tied to the real. Which is why I introduced diffraction. This then,
is the other part, to the ‘partly’ I mentioned above: visual ethnography has continually contended with
questions of the multiplying real not merely due to a possibly arbitrary intertwining of cine-
photographic technology and anthropological knowledge production, it is because the enmeshed
difference between word and image, and with it, a multiplicity of worlds, is the very condition of the
relational practice of this scientific field. The importance of Deleuziana here is that it is a tradition of
thought that enables to theorize and artistically tackle this problematic.
Image and thought are in a profound kinship: “We start off neither with the image nor with thought, but in the middle, where each melts with the other one into a common plane, the plane of immanence.” (Martin 2000, 61) What is real, image, thought, is always a combination and thus open to manipulation as fabulation (in a positive sense, once admitted) and change. It is in this that affinities with Buddhist worldings, where speech and image are both language-qua-communication, arise. If then, we take images to be something all sentient beings necessarily produce by living (images as picture being a mere subset of this, that is images stabilized into something that can be detached in space-time), the focus on renunciation and undisciplined chatter (Gray 1995, 227) regains a new significance entirely missed by Christine Gray (and, as far as I know, by all Buddhological research): the ascetic ideal is one where the kammic production of images-qua-actions with effects on the world is minimized. When images are speech, and many Buddhist texts remind of dangers of excessive speech, the only logical conclusion is that excessive living is subject to the same effects. Now, what I am attempting to do here is not to promote the attainment of *nibbana*, but a specific kind of science as conscious, regulated and attentive intervention into the world, so as to have some kind of control over the direction future worlds might take. To gain some sense of control over ever-changing reality, it is necessary to rethink the image-word-reality triad, and how we insert ourselves into it: “The image is born in the middle, between the two, in the crucible of being and thought, as a new reality, an entity that comes to live an autonomous life that is impossible to place in me or outside of me. Images are floating souls, souls of the world that science knows precisely nothing about.” (Martin 2000, 81) If in the future science were to fall back onto the one-world world most academics continue to pretend to live in, it will be impossible to deal with whatever the contemporary future throws at the present. To reiterate a definition of Christian realism: it's a reductive activity that takes contemporary forms as fulfillment of the past, all organized around the One, whether it be God, Jesus, the Bible or the more recent transformation into Nature. It ties the new to the old, making it seem as if the world was as is forever, cutting off the exciting and productive connections to have been and will be made (or at least not acknowledging them). Past forms can be taken as being fulfilled in future ones in worlds conducive to the emergence of new forms, without a centralizing, unifying thrust. Rather, endlessly diffracting and transforming, as it would appear in Buddhist realities where forms proliferate. One might just take a look at the immensity and acentrality of the Buddhist canon and compare it to the Bible. The task is not only to find or create new forms and acknowledge them, but also to find or create new infrastructure to connect the forms. As in cinema, where images are connected through editing, the latter being
technically invisible, but definitely there. Dissimulating multiplicity is the defining characteristic of Christian realism: worlds created through histories of images/figures, which are thus always in the process of becoming and never simply real independently of newly produced images, become a reality simply out there, as if the reality of seemingly natural entities where not co-produced through images. No wonder the world always seems one step ahead. I hope to have shown that both Buddhist post-realism (as thought) and the film *Krabi, 2562* (as image), can offer fruitful paths for shaping whatever reality might come (without implying that linking Buddhist practices with science does not create new worlds, only partly related to historically existing Buddhist ones). *Krabi* then opens onto new worlds because its texture offers no final grounding reality – it is a polyiconic cinematic machine that can operationalize the change envisioned. It certainly has done so to the author composing these wor(l)ds. But now, let us turn our attention onto ethnographically sourced materials, and the role of creativity with particular attention to that which tends to disappear. The scene composed will be polyiconic too, it's multiplicity irreducible to one, which was at times keenly felt by this body as it remembers being present there. In future chapters, as scenes and images are developed, stabilized and connected in a variety of ways, it's assumed that polyiconicity is operational.
08. Mediating Anthropologists, Relating Relations, Creating Worlds

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." The opening of Gibson's *Neuromancer* (1984) is an iconic example of how technology or more precisely a specific new kind of noise has seeped into the description of so-called nature. Such is the power of language: it creates, it does not represent.<fnref n="67" /> Much like the countless tongues of this world will co-create worlds differently, will write the same 'scene' differently, conceptually tying it to varied cosmic frameworks, extracting different senses, associations, potentialities. Anthropological writing all too often hangs on to 19th century humanist notions of realism, constantly drawing on language and metaphors created when much effort was built into separating nature from culture and pretending that technology is something entirely outside, and the (neatly separated, in an all too Christian fashion) human is the central organizing principle of writing a world. In other words, realism in writing is treated as necessary, natural(ized) and thus remains underexamined, unwittingly making it work against some of the innovations anthropology manages to bring about in theory, where awareness of the limits of humanism, as well as its racist and sexist consequences, has been very much present for decades. One of the motivations for drawing on the work of Roy Wagner here is that he manages to make the creative activity of the anthropologist graspable, thinkable, he opens the position of the anthropologist in-between two worlds up to generative analysis, which is one of the reasons his classic book on the invention of culture remains potent and unique. It offers a way to deal with the concept of culture as historically created and not simply existing out there, without having to deny its existence altogether (as it happens in deconstructive critiques, which inadvertently keep reaffirming it in their more hidden operations). He managed to make generative his encounters with some of the most other anthropologists have engaged. That nothing is self-evident, given or otherwise eternal, becomes discernible in encounters that destabilize new parts of what once seemed so necessary as to not even appear as a problem, and the cracks that thus materialize can act as sources of potential freedom from the tyranny of unrecognized habit cloaked in the undergarments of necessity and, crucially a tyranny enforced onto others. Such meetings are composed of myriads of parts, among which is the one doing the encountering (themselves multiple) as well as later translations into textual production for research purposes with none of them being identical to another. How to write them in a way to contain this difference is an almost entirely other, yet indelibly related matter. How to let worlds of others and other

<footnote n="67">⁶⁷ Taking it as representational is not inherent in language, but a way some human societies came to treat it.</footnote>
worlds contaminated and transform one's conventions as they swirl and contract around the final
textual product, pulling it here and there, establishing new connections and cutting off one's too
outdated conventions. How to let other humans and other-than-humans speak. The low hum of clouds
and light pollution that tirelessly hang over the capital could be translated into words in countless ways,
yet *Neuromancer*'s opening sentence describes all too accurately the night sky over Bangkok, a city
where old televisions glowing their noisy light over street food stalls can still be encountered. They
signal the inextricable complexities of multiple temporalities.

The figure of the anthropologist is invariably one that is in-between and as such it is one that relates at its very core. In the middle of that which brought it forth, the so-called home, and that where research is being done, the so-called field. This medium position appears through the situation one is brought into and the encounters that make things appear. Now, for anthropology and in keeping with its Greek nomenclature, encounters and the habits of noticing have been organized around the human. This does not mean that related topics have not appeared in the field itself (see e.g. Ingold 1997, Bateson 2000, Leroi-Gourhan 1993, Mumford 1934, Kirksey 2014), but if one were to open almost any ethnography that is not explicitly situated in the field of STS and the key organizing principles for better or worse are the human and something called ‘culture,’ hierarchically separated from technology and mediation: “The basic anthropological implication consists in the retrojection backwards into the dawn of species developments: what we call the human is always already an emergent product arising from the processual interaction of domains that in time are all too neatly divided up into the technical and the human, with the former relegated to a secondary, supplementary status.” (Winthrop-Young 2013, 10) The challenge for writing the world in an anthropological mode and as a significant transformation of this continuing humanist tradition, of making the creative leap into an other kind of writing, one that experiments with any kind of encounter, condition and point of view, is to do it in a way that will neither end up as media theory nor as philosophy of technology. Both regularly write their varied versions of the world, but such where the human is fully decentered, disappeared even, frequently focusing on infrastructures or assemblages that are highly material, can at least to some degree be cognitively grasped but not sensorially represented, and that at the same time can only ever be partially experienced via interfaces. (Galloway 2012) Now, from Yuk Hui (2016) and other scholars, we know that technology, media, but also any other assemblages that make up the world, including humans, are anything but simple self-identities, but will differ with different cosmics, and in turn shape
further cosmics. There is no independent technology or discourse on technics, whatever their material constitution, (technical) things and their relation to ‘culture’/cosmological frameworks is not determined nor determinative. In other words, elements are cosmogenerative. Concurrently, cosmotechnics, which for Hui is the unification of the moral and cosmic order through technological activities, or varied ontologies (how worlds are and could be) aren’t anything that we might take in directly through the human sensory apparatus. They are not out there to be encountered like a bird or a Buddha, like a birdsong or chanting. They are ways of connecting parts that are encountered through senses such as texts, speech, images, but all kinds of things including entities to be sensed through other means than the visual, at least if they are trained. They are habitualized and never fully coherent background against which things appear, which organizes human bodies and senses along trajectories to develop in certain ways. They are embedded in the world, in the things that make up a world, including thoughts and writings, but each of the elements can become part of a different such framework and shift slightly as a result. They are shifting and as other cosmological frameworks can be partially conceptualized (at least with tools developed in the fields engaged here), they can be somewhat consciously modulated, as if against the resistances of one’s immediate surroundings.

Cosmologies, ontologies, cosmotechnics, they all must be (re)constructed and then experimentally brought together with other data, in order to find a pattern in the sensory phenomena combined for research purposes. The same appears necessary for what one actualizes habitually in one's own common practice, for that too is one among many. That is, one must and can show, that the world actually works differently in different places. Everything always happens in the middle of things – the world is already happening.<fnref n="68" /> Furthermore, showing different workings of worlds is something to do from the middle as in ‘in-between,’ being fully part of neither, as otherwise these possibilities would not even appear – the world would look self-evident on the surface (though even the surface changes

<footnote n="68">⁶⁸ What is meant here, is that since language, concepts, images, representations, habits, institutions, etc. all co-constitute the world, the world actually differs. It’s not different representations of the world, as in the one nature multiple cultures ontopractice of Moderns, because the different so-called cultures are as productive as said supposed nature. This means that the activities of those working on where (radically) different worlds meet are less about showing others what really is happening (say with diseases), but more about trying to conceptualize where misunderstandings appear and what things to create so as to mediate between differences without reducing the one to the other. Scientific, mediating practice then includes constant critical reconceptualizing of one’s own activities with this field of forces, as the relate different entities, interests and implicit onto-epistemologies. In other words, I am formulating here a radically practice oriented cosmopolitics (Latour 2004) that includes media, infrastructures, technologies. Related conceptions of what it is that an anthropologist does in face of the ontological turn, can be found in e.g. Jensen (2012), de la Cadena & Lien (2015), Blaser (2016).</footnote>
once you attune to difference). Meaning not the Deleuzian milieu<fnref n="69" /> as middle, or being always already
in something and not an independent point of departure, and caught in movement, that too of course,
but the middle between two distinct somethings that make breaks and rifts appear. The middle, the
medium, all already multiplies. The illusion of representational linguistic precision, of one word for
one thing, fractures. Entities overlap. Thus, it becomes very much about framing and change, and in
this sense, inherently cinematic. In cinema too, that invisible in between is important: cutting and
pasting images make things appear that otherwise wouldn't be possible to grasp. Which has been
adapted to anthropological thinking at its borders. (Suhr & Willerslev 2013, Taylor 1996) Change,
difference is central: it is not the same world that is perpetuated, rather new combinations arise from
the various pressures, tensions, possibilities. As for framings, even within one assumed cosmology, as I
will further elaborate, they are varied. More than one and less than many. Whatever one comes across
in the role of scientist will too be affected and changed by the very same encounter. As time forks in
events, one path among the many possible ones will come to be. These are some of the pertinent, yet
general conditions of anthropological encounters and the subsequent transformations into
communicable objects such as texts following conventionalized rules and media materialities for
simplified and unified legibility. The figure of the anthropologist appears in the middle of this:

An anthropologist experiences, in one way or another, the subject of his study; he does so
through the world of his own meanings, and then uses this meaningful experience to
communicate an understanding to those of his own culture. He can only communicate
this understanding if his account makes sense in the terms of his culture. And yet if these
theories and discoveries represent uncontrolled fantasies, like many of the anecdotes of
Herodotus, or the travelers' tales of the Middle Ages, we can scarcely speak of a proper
relating of cultures. An 'anthropology' which never leaves the boundaries of its own
conventions, which disdains to invest its imagination in a world of experience, must
always remain more an ideology than a science. (Wagner 1981, 13)

This is no armchair fantasizing, one must put oneself in the middle, both physically for and as
experience (assembled as it is from different parts too) and conceptually (to be built off past conceptual

<footnote n="69">⁶⁹ “The middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where things pick up speed. Between things does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away, a stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle.” (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, 28)</footnote>
and imageric infrastructures but developing in a controlled way through encounters). What role do Herodotus or medieval tales play? They serve as a contrast for an anthropology that uses the ‘other’ as a control, and through that movement leaves the boundaries of its own conventions. Such old tales, and in a further chapter I will elaborate on this topic, today appear as nothing but projections (inquisitive, creative and possibly even in good faith) of own conventions onto an other, composed only tangentially from sensory, material experience with it. As an analogy, in our own times, all the orientalizing, othering, xenophobia, but also research paradigms that don’t explicitly include feedback loops to ensure that change is integral to them, and not merely an uncontrollable occurrence that comes from the outside, and thus can project themselves as a simple and eternal truth. In short, Orientalism. All of these may be composed of different parts, and on the surface level appear unrelated (we know that Herodotus fantasized these creatures! How naive of him, we are so rational now!), but in the way they make the world and relate to an otherness (other of itself, not the so-called essentially Other) are the same (are orientalizing stereotypes all that different from monsters? Is Orientalism not intent on making monsters of the other merely in the guise of forms commonly recognized as ‘natural’ and not ‘monstrous’?). Concurrently, even a mostly projected other, in other words one the construction of which includes little empirical interaction, but a lot filling in with speculation, can act creatively within the conventions one is working. As Rey Chow points out, Jacques Derrida's understanding of the workings of the Chinese script and language is entirely misconceived (based on popular imaginations), yet still it enabled him to enact a deconstruction of his own conventions of phonetic writing: “without the cliché of Chinese as an ideographic language, as a writing made up of silent little pictures, the radical epistemic rupture known as deconstruction could perhaps not have come into being in the manner it did.” (Chow 2002, 63) Derrida taking on the cloak of anthropology didn’t stop at claiming this or that prejudice about others, but used a cliché to counter-invent own conventions.

And so, about two months after the initial displacements in the Kanchanaburi mountains, after I had already spent some time in Bangkok, I set out, one evening of particular anthropological-minded preparedness, ready for experiences that would make it necessary to leave boundaries of my own conventions. To go out and act ‘as if there were culture,’ or maybe even find out a new concept instead of culture ‘to act as if,’ to mediate qua translate whatever I might encounter and make it pass through the frameworks we take for granted (such as religion, ritual, technology), and then perhaps, something new might come of it. The descriptions are composed based on fieldnotes and videos taken that
evening, bits and pieces of data stored in media technological support infrastructures that introduce another differentiation by becoming memories to draw on, and co-compose with more directly somato-cognitive ones.

Our paths join at the southeastern end of the BTS from there on moving in each other's company for the rest of the evening. The line that continues already exists in the signs of the Bangkok Mass Transit System. The actual train ends here for now. Temporalities meet. The skytrain always has an air of the future. Here, it is somewhat eerie, finished but unopened. Hovering over you, unlit emerging from darkness, bringing darkness, unlike the already functioning parts. A skeleton close to coming alive. Where I usually live, you don't see structures like this. The roads, the streets are less busy, less overwhelming, in terms of people and all other things that move and grow, and shuffle about. I came here, at the end of the old line, to meet Pot, a director, and his scholarly boyfriend Pol. They invited me to visit a temple fair, งานวัด or ngaanwat at the วัดพระสมุทรเจดีย์ or Wat Phra Samut Chedi in the Samut Prakan province just outside of the capital. Of course I arrive early, excited about the opportunity and not yet familiar enough with the public transport to intuitively arrive on time. The sky is turning to ever darker blues enlightened by the luminescent noise from the millions of lights that make up the sprawl of Bangkok, a reddish aurora that is also white. If you frame it right with these dark clouds, almost pure noise. We meet and chat a bit, not knowing each other well apart from an intense discussion on cinema we had at a Bangkok-wide art event a few weeks back. They know I present myself as an anthropologist and, having both studied at university with Nawa<fnref n="70" /> even being at CalArts, have an idea of what that brings with. They tell me that in times past this province, the one we are heading to, was like an entry fort for foreigners, since all ships had to pass through it to get to this City of Angels. For Bangkok is officially transcribed as Krung Thep Maha Nakhon, composed of Pali and Sanskrit roots, with Thep being a derivation of deva that is deity, here often translated as angels. Perhaps because the deities here travel between realms like angels are said to do, except they are not defined as those that deliver messages from God as angels, the arch mediators, are. Thep are invisible to the human eye, perceptible only to those who have opened their divine eye. The divyacakṣus/dibbacakkhu by which a Buddha or advanced practitioner who has gained insight into dhamma can perceive all arising and passing away in various worlds. If these celestial kammic beings intervene in human affairs it tends to be through advice. Perhaps this is a place on earth where

<footnote n="70">⁷⁰ Personal names have been changed.</footnote>
Buddhist celestials walk among us in larger numbers, but the body that I am for now is definitely not yet capable of discerning their energies. The capital's full name is City of angels, great city of immortals, magnificent city of the nine gems, seat of the king, city of royal palaces, home of gods incarnate, erected by Vishvakarman at Indra's behest." The name of the province meanwhile derives from Sanskrit/Pali; samudra translating as 'ocean' or 'sea' and prākāra as 'fortress.' Everything here is composed of so many parts that extend elsewhere. We grab a small bus – the two have been at the temple fair before and know very well how to get to there. Nawa tells me the inauguration of the new BTS line will be on the king's birthday December 5th, 2019, even though it has been a some time since construction was completed.<fnref n="71" /> He says in Thailand events such as this always wait until an official date comes up, often related to a king, to inaugurate. I see there are more temporalities than I am accustomed to, and they shape the material environment and the possibilities of movement for human bodies. This unfinished finished construction in the sky between tall buildings, street lights, and dark trees keeps the fact that the city is always in differentiated processes of change very clearly present.

> But here the question arises of how much experience is necessary. Must the anthropologist be adopted into a tribe, get on familiar terms with chiefs and kings, or marry into an average family? Need he only view slides, study maps, and interview captives? Optimally, of course, one would want to know as much as possible about one's subjects, but in practice the answer to this question depends upon how much time and money are available, and on the scope and intentions of the undertaking. (Wagner 1981, 13)

Optimally, of course, but how could this optimal even be achieved in time, in history? Much of the conceptual infrastructure developed by anthropology was done so in small scale societies (however much the entities engaged today as matters of concern might differ) and it shows in the whole problematic surrounding the etic/emic distinction (continuing to secretly operate in variations, esp. whenever an authentic, uncorrupted outside to research is posited through research). Wagner is evidently riffing on these expectations in his slightly exaggerated framings of when sufficient conditions for an anthropologist to get the real experience would appear. And yet, immediately, he includes capitalist media artifacts and modern research techniques, and the question of finances so

<footnote n="71">⁷¹ The official date now is December 4th, 2019.</footnote>
obviously playing a role when you look at where anthropologists are typically from and what networks
must be in place for the anthropological generation of knowledge to occur (in the implicit image this
field carries). Anthropological inquiry, like any other, is composed of many elements and, as Wagner
will further elaborate, it would be a mistake to think research as being differentiated by more or less
well representing a real reality to be found out there. Just by entering a world, a new element, the
anthropologist body with its history, is added (even if otherwise such a world were generally assumed
to be a closed set) and by all accounts one (the anthropologist), to paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari of
the opening sentence of *A Thousand Plateaus*, is always already many. Each situation is composed of
an infinity of elements. As Marilyn Strathern remarks, however one frames it and whatever might be
the level of analysis (object, society, discourse, technology, Buddha), complexity is not reduced: "The
amount of realisable information does not itself increase or decrease, then; the proliferation or
differentiation of detail simply increases one's perception of it." (Strathern 1991, xxii-xxiii) All
connects horizontally and wherever a cut is made, a new reality appears, as new connections emerge
and others disappear. Such productive limitation pressed itself vehemently on my experience, as I was
intensely made aware of being in Bangkok without an already established infrastructure of existing
connections made by previous generations of (un)intentionally imperial anthropologists: all I will ever
do will be partial. And that is good. I just have to rethink the relation between knowledge production
and its putative outside. Not one of more or less adequate representation of a real, but reality
composing 'as if' itself.

Reality not as something relatively stable out there to be inferred from the text, instead reality as
that which is composing here and now where the text enacts operations on bodies, including the body
multiple of each reader. An operation combining different elements to produce something new the
effects of which are to be related to certain conventions, so that the object produced will become and
for a while remain intelligible or just generally perceptible at least within the (intellectual) space in is
aimed at. To adapt Viveiros de Castro's discussion of Zeno's arrow, the reader never sees where it was
shot from (the fieldwork site), she only ever perceives its arrival: "if there is one place, therefore, at
which 'we Western intellectuals' have to start – because we never manage to leave it – it is at this
'vision' of Zeno's immobile arrow, floating in a supranumerary dimension equidistant between the two
poles of meaning and nonsense, subject and object, language and being, self and other, the near and the
far side of experience." (Viveiros de Castro 2011b, 142) The middle here that might disappear if
communication is successful. The middle is also those more material media that are almost certain to vanish from conscious presence, like the technologies that make reading and writing easy, or those infrastructures that brought this writing body to the field and back. It is the one that makes sure that certain connections will be able to be made wherever the arrow keeps arriving. The anthropologist must have arrows "that connect disjunct worlds like the earth and the sky, or the two banks of a wide river of meaning. She must have arrows that serve to make ladders or bridges between where we are now and wherever we must be." (Ibid., 143) Note, that in the text the Brazilian speculative ontographer operationalizes the image of a quiver, of a variety of arrows, introducing multiplicity and different transformations. The quiver and the arrow are the middle: "[t]he archetypal mediator of action at a distance and one of the most ubiquitous images of effective intentionality in folklore the world over [...]" (Ibid., 141) To twist it slightly into Buddhist terms: the arrow that is shot both is and isn't the one that arrives.

It is dark already, early November that has nothing of the November I know as it occurs in temperate Mitteleuropa. The black skies here reflect a little less of the urban lights than in the main city, or maybe there is no big difference, only reflecting clouds disappearing in the meddle of the many colors of the dark illuminating the fair. We pass overstuffed streets, the type well known from ordinary events in Thailand full of food, people, small attractions and all kinds of stalls, and above all full of neon lights or rather uncovered elongated tubes of white light hanging like decommissioned laser swords in their afterlife. The main part of the fair awaits us on the other side of the river, and as we are carried over the dark waters, our motor droning out all other sounds, I can't really hear the stories Nawa tells me about visits to fairs in his youth. He will repeat them many hours later, when we sit in a quieter place, a restaurant, them having invited me to dinner, as appears to be typical of Thais. It will be the first time in my life that I enjoy the flavors of one hundred year eggs. We glide among much larger ships on the Chao Phraya, a dreamlike reality, they seem like whales floating on water, soundless, almost motionless. Compared to us, I have to remind myself, as the intellect can grasp things the senses cannot, and vice versa. The river bank on the other side promises excitement. The cloudy skies all fuzzy from the distant capital. The chedi and other structures are decorated with lights, expounding their presence at night (otherwise hard to be seen, except on full moon days). In all the years of engaging academic texts on Buddhist teachings, I have never read about such sights. Or at least I never noticed it, given one tends to read and see what one is taught, what one already thinks (the
conservatism of convention). Readers will be aware not just of the commonly orientalist image of Buddhism constructed in the West, as well as the techno-orientalism (Roh et al. 2015) shaping the imagination of East Asia, but generally not that of Southeast Asia. A region mostly constructed as a spiritual fantasy for the Western seeker, and spirituality remains dominantly coded as a sort of anti-technological asceticism. As fellow researchers raised in the overdeveloped world with Christian legacies also shared, seeing orange robed monks walking around shopping malls with smartphones in their hands, and similar all too common imagery comes as a shock. The images of Buddhism constructed are those of renunciation, even luddite in their relation to technology. Of course, conversations about monks and their use of smartphones or other pleasantries are frequent among locals, as was also noticeable in interviews I will later conduct. To make it clear: to do research that opens up the world, one must learn to see the new and unlearn to keep projecting some sort of idealist convention of what it is that is out there. Image comes before discourse here, and the ways to combine the two are manifold. Curiously perhaps, the image of Buddhism and that of techno-orientalism seem to almost exclude each other, even though if anything Mahāyāna Asian Buddhist practices very heavily innovate the intersection of human/machine. (Travagnin 2020, Baffelli 2021, Cheong 2021, Rambelli 2018, Gould & Waters 2020, Tarocco 2017, Shin 2016) Displacing to Thailand, I expected to find similar new combinations of Buddhist ontopractice and technologies or technological worlds. Having to face the fact that the enmeshment of such worlds was much more minimal, and as interviewees confirmed, rather uncommon, since according to them Thai Theravāda practice is much more conservative (in the relation to technology and general experimentation) than Mahāyāna worlds, was one of the factors driving the intellectual endeavor of this research. I did to not want to give up the cosmotechnical framing and instead searched for ways to look at the data differently. And in the process all elements came to be transformed. This difference between Buddhist worlds goes far back, for at least in Japan some ancient doctrines held that even the inanimate or nonsentient can achieve nibbana. (Rambelli 2001) Retrospectively, it is impossible to tell what influences, imaginaries, and speculations came to form that me that moved to this country where one is reminded of one's corporeality through the heat and dust and nigh incessant noise. The amount of readings one wades through exceeds any mnemonic certainty. Ideas and images come from everywhere and nowhere. This extends to the challenges I kept facing situated intellectually as I used to and often continue to think from within a Mahāyāna milieu.
"The only way in which a researcher could possibly go about the job of creating a relation between such entities would be to simultaneously know both of them, to realize the relative character of his own culture through the concrete formulation of another. Thus gradually, in the course of fieldwork, he himself becomes the link between cultures through his living in both of them, and it is this 'knowledge' and competence that he draws upon in describing and explaining the subject culture. 'Culture' in this sense draws an invisible equal sign between the knower (who comes to know himself) and the known (who are a community of knowers)." (Wagner 1981, 13)

Things get more complicated, once awareness arises that neither of the two entities simply preexist research. As I've been trying to elaborate, to know both of them is an activity preconditioned by implicit knowledge of each. The entity I relate to as well as the one I relate from, as well as me as an operator of relations are inexorably linked. What appears as an object of knowledge does so on this ground constituted before thought and perception. As highlighted by Wagner, the I here becomes part of that 'culture,' as it is only through this operation of relating that culture appears. It's the 'as if,' and it will differ based on the implicit knowledge (and its implicit separation between here and there) carried along. Employing the concept of culture will enact different cuts, than if one were to employ cultural technique, or cosmotechnics, or media – and so different relateds will appear and in this process transform the relatee. The activity of the anthropologist is indeed also a 'culture' or rather the 'culture of culture' (though difficult to grasp through the concept), a practical ontology (enacting a certain version of the world, inclusions, exclusions) or cultural technique. The latter category might perhaps be the most generative way to grasp this activity, as it explicitly includes techniques with culture, and with it stresses the operation of 'culture': "Let's recapitulate the outlines of the cultural-technical perspective: cultural techniques are (a) operative processes that enable work with things and symbols; [...] (f) [it] opens up new exploratory spaces for perception, communication, and cognition; and (g) these exploratory spaces come into view where disciplinary boundaries become permeable and lay bare phenomena and relationships whose profile precisely does not coincide with the boundaries of specific disciplines." (Krämer & Bredekamp 2013, 27) Whatever concept will be operationalized, it remains important to not exclude that activity from the process of creating the object of study, or else the illusion of a simple out there as if unrelated to the activity of the researcher will inadvertently creep back.
It is a night of excess. Of senses, impressions, lights, movements, ideas – information. Overload. I walk, we walk, they tell me things, I barely hear, communication is drowned out, bodies are caught and dragged by the crowd's incessant movement. And lights, lights everywhere. Colored lights, lights of different shapes, lights of different movements. From far away, the night sky looks lit, like static. In the middle of all this electricity, the sky looks dark, a flat ground against which life happens waiting to overwhelm it all. Perspective, the position one takes, changes what is seen. I am on the edge. I feel physically ill and disoriented when too many movements external to mine flow around me, push me, bump and turn. For a while, I lose the two. Soon, their sight and later presence are regained. A play is performed on a stage. With neon lights of course, and a lot of pastel. Sensory overload. Very unlike the ascetic, world-renouncing image of Buddhism one has internalized in Europe, whether as popularized aesthetics or the discourse of Buddhist studies. That Protestant Buddhism stripped of all the excesses so as to fit the aesthetic sensibilities of the Modern Occidental craving absolution and peace. Even anthropological research on realities informed by Buddhist world-making didn't decenter such preformed often preconscious images and expectations. This is a different kind of experience. When one reads, one always adds shreds of other sensory realities. What one reads differs radically from technology to techno-culture. (Oh, the challenges of falling back onto usage of 'culture' in a non-representational way! The power of convention is all but too strong, for it was inbuilt into language, into reality as Modernity.) It's not merely the cosmic frame, but also the images (sounds, affects) words are habitually connected to. Text travels easily, but also transforms easily. It is, to spin it in a variation of the words of Annemarie Mol and John Law (2001), a mutable mobile: texts are mobile, they travel effortlessly (compared to unrecorded speech), and while their materiality remains mostly immutable, that is stable, their content is highly mutable, as it enters other contexts and new so-called meanings (qua effects) arise.<fnref n="72" />

When experiencing otherness, one transforms too – unless a system is put into place to ensure bodies retain their similarity to their place of origins more than local worlds, i.e. colonialism<fnref n="73" /> – and

<footnote n="72">⁷² I should note, that what they explore is the mutability of the materiality of the traveling object and not its hermeneutic potentialities. In any case, their framing is an efficient way to articulate the constant mutability of sense.</footnote>

<footnote n="73">⁷³ Jean Gelman Taylor (1983) in a classic study explored the challenges the Dutch Empire faced before figuring out how to ensure that the Dutch living in Batavia (today called Jakarta) will not go local and create new ‘cultures,’ how to bind Dutch bodies to their ‘homeland’ so that this link will remain stable, and Dutch bodies won’t rapidly become Batavia-Dutch through interactions with locals, whether by marriage or other means (it was achieved via enforcing white wives and not letting these leave Europe). The anthropologist is similarly stabilized by that link to a ‘home’ that ensures her difference in the local context, which makes certain that the productivity of the displaced body will in the end mostly act</footnote>
begins filling these gaps (in discourse) with other images, many of them sourced from cinema or ads or
any other image-composing technology. Researchers dealing with the world, not just anthropologists
and not just those that engage something conventionally considered other, who do not include the
images, popular stories and other artifacts produced by societies will end as nothing but the medieval
storytellers of our time, the Orientalists that fantasize sensory composition, overestimating the
relevance of the word. Those that put an ideal-type entity over enmeshed realities and enact the cut to
secure the integrity of this ideal-type even before any actual engagement with any other, anything that
might provoke a shock and lead to thought occurs. Mere reiterations of what has already been
established as true and existing and cleanly separated from what it is not. Most Occidental Seculars are
after all very excessively Christian in this, the purification of things. Most of the scientific
infrastructure, whether material or immaterial, actually continues to construct such a world. (Haraway
1990) Or more precisely, an image of the world with clear separations, while worlds continue happily
occurring in much higher complexity. (Latour 1996) The practicing into existence of a world of neat
separations preexisting complexity includes all those debating (phallo)logocentrism, deconstructing it,
but never moving outside. The Heideggerian end of metaphysics indeed cannot happen, so long as
philosophers and researchers will continue making the category mistake of taking writing as
representational (thus eliminating the many middle steps to arrive there, including the material
constitution of the very privilege and calmness needed to be able to spend years of our lives sitting,
thinking, reading, writing). Such logocentrism is commonly projected onto Buddhist traditions, with
the Occidental focus on philosophy as thought, even with the oh so obvious practicality and becoming
in and through the senses of Buddhadharma. Not to mention the immense imageric wealth of this
varied tradition, in materiality, forms and thought.<fnref n="74" /> At times, when writing, the same block from
overstimulation appears as when I stand in the unregulated flows of people, sounds, smells and winds
attacking, transposing me from all sides at once. How does one translate excess into discourse? What
are the conditions of noise becoming signal? How many different signals can form out of noise? Where
does that excess remain once part of it is domesticated for research purposes?

to enhance that far away place, where it is to produce scientific knowledge for academic audiences, and makes sure to
keep that body from going entirely local as a new combination of elements with little contact to where it came from. It
remains of central importance to pay attention to the material organization of the world that makes for nationalism and
identities seeming real and eternal in order to not fall into the essentialist trap that necessarily occurs when taking culture
or individual as a point of departure.

<footnote n="74">⁷⁴ This translation of other world-making traditions into nothing but representation, and hence belief and questions of right and wrong (representation of the real world), with the unarticulated Western position always being right, and foundational and definitely not a belief, is of course a cornerstone of colonialism.</footnote>
We might actually say that an anthropologist “invents” the culture he believes himself to be studying, that the relation is more “real” for being his particular acts and experiences than the things it “relates.” Yet this explanation is only justified if we understand the invention to take place objectively, along the lines of observing and learning, and not as a kind of free fantasy. [...] In experiencing a new culture, the fieldworker comes to realize new potentialities and possibilities for the living of life, and may in fact undergo a personality change himself. The subject culture becomes “visible,” and then “believable” to him, he apprehends it first as a distinct entity, a way of doing things, and then secondly as a way in which he could be doing things. Thus he comprehends for the first time, through the intimacy of his own mistakes and triumphs, what anthropologists speak of when they use the word “culture.” (Wagner 1981, 13–14)

Or doing technics, worlds, realities, one might add. Why limit these potentialities to so-called culture? With Wagner, whatever practice guidelines his research might offer, one seems to remain in too vast generalities. Apprehending ways of doing things, and a new way of doing own things. What disappears here, if this joke is allowed, is any notion of the thing in itself. What of these different things, or even same things doing different things? We cannot speak of culture anymore, as it is not solely on the human side that things happen. As this chapter goes on, I will suggest a way that combines the anthropological way of relating with a thinking of and through things. To some degree, as the activity of the researcher, it is an analogous process, for one “apprehends it first as a distinct entity,” that is, as mentioned above, something is being separated from the interconnected flow of all so as to be stabilized and connected to the conceptual things in research. But the thing also changes, as the focus on humans doing things, shifts toward things doing things with humans.

*The temple fair is held at the anniversary of its founding during the time of Rama II (1767–1824 of the Christian secular calendar). Here, in Bangkok, this would appear to be rather ancient. I have no sense of age with the buildings encountered in these parts. I was not raised, not dominantly formed here. Anything non-modern could be any age. Instinctively, even though consciously I know it to be wrong, I filter it all through Central European conventions and immediately make it all out to be much more ancient than the actual historical construction. Nawa tells me his boyfriend never visited the fair before and Nawa wants to show it to him, on account of having been raised here. Earlier, when we were*
on the bus to the fair, he showed me some images made at other temples when he was scouting locations. One of them had a machine for making offerings. It was electrically powered and consisted of many bowls (each assigned a function, such as for good fortune, luck or prosperity) and it was turning in a circle. I've never seen or read about anything like it. I think to myself: this must be very effective in dealing with crowds of laypeople wanting to improve kamma for luck or rebirth. The director tells me that when he was small, he used to visit with his parents and there were many more attractions, including movie screenings. But today people can enjoy the many things capitalism has to offer elsewhere and temple fairs have mostly become markets. History moves on.

The fieldworker's belief that the new situation he is dealing with is a concrete entity, a "thing" that has rules, "works" in a certain way, and can be learned, will help and encourage him in his attempts to come to grips with it. (Wagner 1981, 16)

I have long given up on this belief, not because there are no rules, but because there are too many and my very entering rearranges the whole situation to make other rules. Life (here) is too complex. There are feedback loops, let us not kid ourselves. Let's not dissimulate our effect in the world, pretending to do disconnectedly objective work as if removed from reality. History too is overwhelming. All is excess; such a Buddhist way to put things. I think I should focus on finding something surprising and use that to conceptually innovate, disregarding any status of a thing that works in a certain way. The way will be different from whatever I construct anyhow. If not today, then tomorrow. History moves fast as capitalism does.

Culture is made visible by culture-shock, by subjecting oneself to situations beyond one's normal interpersonal competence and objectifying the discrepancy as an entity; it is delineated through an inventive realization of that entity following the initial experience. (Wagner 1981, 17)

Sometimes I need a time out, so I recall how I got here. We meet at 6 p.m., the time the sun sets, so by the time we get to the fair, it is dark. Nawa tells me the temple is on the other side of the river and that we will go there too. After pushing through the streets past stalls selling all kinds of imaginable and unimaginable foods and produce through the neon-lit, we finally make it to the boats. The night
ride is very cinematic, all movement, shadows, the boat's wake, distant shapes gliding, dark shores and the illuminated night sky. My director friend, like me, commits many pictures and videos to digital memory. On the far side of the river the temple's chedi is glowing bright from all the lights its wrapped in. In seeming silence (our boats motor drowned out any sounds) huge shipping boats are making their way up or down the river, eerily. Toward the north one can glimpse the lights of the southern reaches of Bangkok. And, when I look back, I see the neon colors of the riverbank we just left. Ahead, in the dark of the night, gradually lights of the other river bank emerge. It is much less lit and seems calmer than the first bank. Will we get to a more relaxing space?

The flood of sense impressions drowns me. And I have to keep up the new flow of information coming from my new acquaintances 'as if' in the role of informants. All becomes a blur, the world moves too fast for me to be able to grasp it. Everything becomes nothing. Will anything stabilizing ever occur? An ethnographic moment say, that will keep its differential force all through the process of composing a research text. But I am not there yet. I am getting ahead of myself writing in the future of what I am describing. Writing and thinking tends to collapse time, creates the conditions for all that research proposing itself and the world as atemporal, eternal, unchanging, always already fully given. I don't want that. That is the basis of modern domination and the condition for lies (in the moral and not extra-moral sense). For clinging onto false images of the world afraid of actually confronting it as it changes, as one becomes. Persuasive fictions. When do they lose their persuasion? When do they become persuasive?

[H]e is a professional stranger, a person who holds himself aloof from their lives in order to gain perspective. This “strangeness” and the “in-between” character of the anthropologist has been the cause of many misunderstandings and exaggerations on the part of those he comes into contact with [...] Insofar as he functions as a “bridge” or point of relation between two ways of life, he creates for himself an illusion of transcending them. This point accounts for much of the power anthropology has over its converts, its evangelistic message: it draws people who want to emancipate themselves from their culture. (Wagner 1981, 17)

A bridge, another middle that makes something appear. A point of relation. The media theorist
Bernhard Siegert explores the operations of doors and bridges, as they relate two sides: “What Martin Heidegger, drawing on Georg Simmel, suggests about the bridge also counts for the door: ‘the bridge does not just connect banks that are already there. The banks emerge as banks only as the bridge crosses the stream. The bridge designedly causes them to lie across from each other.’” (Siegert 2012, 8) A bridge is a relatively stable intervention into space and is continuous. Much like the banks emerging, two cultures emerge in the crossing of the anthropologist, a body interested in differences. It is at once relating and separating. Were one to go ‘fully’ local, this production of two cultures would not occur. Rather a gradual mixing eventually becoming almost entirely part of the new, transformed situation. I do not aim at going local, I remain rather stably linked to the institutions I came from, even as I come out changed by encounters, adapting and adopting a variety of techniques and concepts into my daily life. Writing as an anthropologist however, there is always a tension between two worlds, created by this activity, and one of them is dominant, as it is the conditioning one. The one that is written, the one the techniques of which commonly disappear as the ground (that includes form and style of writing) for the creation of the other within academic writing.

The original impression is confirmed when we arrive. Initially that is. We head toward the temple. At first there are only a few people, but gradually one can sense the ruckus in the distance. Once we approach the temple, which I doubt I would've managed by myself, as I admire the ability of my companions to find their way through the crowds, the heavy air's drone is gradually intensifying. All kinds of attractions are playing at their loudest, or so it seems. Pol shares that he has forgotten how loud these fairs were. Apart from ferry wheels and ghost houses, a theater troupe is performing a Thai play. Boys and girls are playing. Pol tells me it was a well known bit, one about romance on the rice field. Silent parts are traded in for loud singing and music, with countless players of traditional instruments at the back of the stage. Only when one approaches the stage does the performance come to somewhat drown out all the other sounds. Right by the stage a troupe of young girls, around 10 years old, made up in traditional Thai dress and fake hair are waiting for their chance to shine. I enjoy the sound of this performance a lot, but we press on through the crowds to the temple. This is where it gets loudest. I walk on, lose them for a while. Stop, swirl, turn, movement everywhere. Blinding lights.

Roy Wagner's illuminating writing on the invention of culture is astute when it comes to working through the problem of encounters with and in and as the world. “A context is a part of
experience – and also something that our experience constructs; it is an environment within which symbolic elements relate to one another; one that is formed by the act of relating them.” (Wagner 1981, 35) I use framework here as an analogy to context, thereby enabling to tie the function of the concept to frames in cinematic thought, whether in Deleuze or others. What more, “[t]here are no perceptible limits to the amount or the extent of the contexts that can exist in a given culture. Some contexts include others, and make them a part of their articulation; others may be interrelated in ways that do not involve total inclusion or exclusion. Some seem so traditional as to be almost permanent and unchanging, and yet new ones are created all the time in the production of statements and situations that is everyday life.” (Ibid.) To the perceptive, all that appeared simple comes to be seen as more than just a little complex, and without adding the problem the ethnographer assembles: bringing in even more contexts within this varied, multiple world of many frameworks. Analogously in cinema, as perhaps gleaned from the previous chapter, frames contain other frames and many elements, and they may be interrelated in various ways, all within total inclusion or exclusion.

Sometimes it is apposite to reiterate, and take another, marginally divergent fork in the path, just to experiment and see what happens when ingredients alter slightly. What is seen, changes based on what is looked for. The same goes for films, and it is here that alternative film-making practices can shock the viewer into awareness of habits of perception and transform the whole body in such a way that perception becomes more open, playful and attentive even when not watching any moving images. Funnily, this will eventually connect to Buddhist conceptions of corporeal perception and the possibilities of recoding bodies and thought through guided repetition, that is learning as transformation. A pedagogy that conceives of body-minds, and by extension makes it easier to think of infrastructure and materiality as part of teaching, in order to get away from the idealist conception of pedagogy of minds and morals that (conceptually) cuts off all that actually renders it possible (making it impossible to include it in thought). What is the ground against which figures appear? Is it religion, ritual, electricity, infrastructure, Thainess, capitalism? Whatever I try to consciously choose (and much remains preconscious), what is important is to unground the ground, not keep it as the universal given (as modern European thought practice so often does). In other words, modern conventions of doing worlds act as the medium, the disappearing middle, as they are treated as so self-evident as to not just be out there in the world, but be the world. They act as the necessary, yet unperceived ground against which images (including all that is ‘other’) appear. In controlled environments, tied to a chair, body
slowed down so that the energies can go into other explorations, one can experiment with other worlds, shift grounds until the metaphorical earthquakes and real infrastructures of thought crumble to make way for alternatives. Even an object (conceptualized) might become the ground and an ontology the figure. What if I were to reframe the past scene slightly, what other directions might thought be carried towards?

We press on through endless crowds, patches of free space, the ancient stone buildings looming above. Not too tall, kind of spread out, yet centered. Like what some would call cosmic trees, except that any such association appears to be mostly in the conditions in which some occidental minds came to be formed. A play is performed, all movement and lights, and my friends tell me what it is about. I can't wrap my head around all the impressions. Information overload, it almost all becomes noise. One thing is as clear as the illumination emanating from all around – without electricity, this scene wouldn't be the same. I wonder how temple fairs might look like without electric lights, indeed, it seems improbable for them to be taking place after sunset. And yet, without the labor of research, it is impossible for me to reconceptualize the scene taking electricity, its production sites, networks and effects on the organization of space and human activity as the ground. I am too accustomed to see more commonly anthropological elements, and to see different requires time and work on habits of perception and connection.

Hui (2016) conceives of cosmotechnics as the unification of the cosmos and the moral order (the latter left undefined) through technical activities. What is implied, is that technics come to be worlded in different cosmics. In other words, to bring this closer to the topic at hand, different frames of reference come to be different worlds. A cosmos is not alone. Materiality is not in itself. It overlaps in immaterial frameworks. It is multiple. Multiplicity, following Deleuze and Guattari (1987), is the intensity of relations that make up a thing. These are not simply accessible through sensory make-up – that is extensive. Much like cosmological frameworks, to be intelligible, i.e. perceptible for a subject, they have to be made accessible. Each fieldworker actualizes her own frameworks, overlapping and multiple, idiosyncratic attunements through which sensory data passes, as what is seen is already filtered before it reaches consciousness, where again further filters do their work. The world is there and not there. Heterogenesis. As time, the whole is the open, as the Bergsonian Deleuze of the Cinema (1986, 1989) books put it. In other words, continuous variation. Attention is organized long before the
thinking subject emerges. Without feedback loops relating the internal and external, we would turn around in circles, like cultural realists, I mean idealists. Putting theory above the empirical does just that. Putting the empirical above theory obfuscates the theory that makes the empirical. Real change in the (re)presentational only occurs when it is tied to its outside.

> A word or some other symbolic element receives its conventional associations from the part it plays in the articulations of the contexts in which it occurs, and from the relative importance and significance of those contexts. When an element is invoked outside of such a context, we draw upon and make use of the character, reality, and importance of the context as “associations” of the element. In this regard a word or other element can be said to relate all of the contexts in which it appears, and to relate these, directly or indirectly, through any novel usage or “extension.” (Wagner 1981, 36)

The recurring question: what is ground, what is figure? How does anything even appear? There are at least two steps of transformation involved: capture and translation of the excesses of reality into something to be worked with, and then, once back in a materially stable context where one can actually write and think thoroughly, at spatiotemporal distance that also makes for a perceptual and conceptual shift as it is the notes made that are mostly related to, and the field only indirectly, at a remove, the translation of the already slowed down into another form again, partly speeded up (in the conceptual immaterial) but slowed down, shaped even more so that communication with the outside can flow. Ekphrasis. Rewriting reality. Realism. That is one of the trades of anthropologists. Who decides what is real? What to include and to exclude? Why do technologies keep disappearing from ethnographic descriptions as much as that termed supernatural? Always framed as that excess of what the world really is. Why is it so difficult to write reality differently than that drab realism which excludes all kinds of entities from really being, from having an effect in the world? Of course, partly we know and can see why, as Haraway (1990) has shown with her cyborg manifesto and supplied us new tools that introduce fresh differences into the world. Once one manages to see the human figure against the ground of the cyborg, that is switch the common ground of a human bounded body according to modern Western standards, the world changes. Bodies are full of technology, of the outside becoming inside through a variety of transformations and modulations of bodies. Just as an example, glasses would appear as an external tool, and yet, if one were to analyze their effects, it would become evident
that glasses are internalized, as they prevent eyesight deterioration, and oftentimes leave dents on the bridge of the nose. They might even influence bodily comportment so as not to be lost. Where is inside, where is outside? Clear borders cannot be drawn, even with this simple example. When, as rare as it is, one combines the cyborg toolbox with (preconscious, techno-cultural) images, one can begin to actually see a different world, and thereby, as one and one's activities are part of the world, the world changes. This is one of the meanings of the whole is the open. (Deleuze 1989) At each moment a slice of reality could be made, the world is fully formed, and yet it will change, it changes. This is openness. And, one can then experiment, say with indigenous conceptions of the human, and actually, as I will later, work on actively integrating Buddhist conceptions of bodies into generative research. And I stress this in case it was not clear: this is a corporeal experimentation as much as conceptual-imageric, for it is the body that connects it all. Actually, one might say that what I will do here, is to take an element and put it in another context. As Atsuro Morita (2014) explores, things can take part of their original context with. They were formed as solutions to a materially concrete set of problems, and when they travel, part of this set of problems can be different and hence they must be adapted in order to work. Thus, if resistant enough, they come to act as comparisons themselves. What I suggest, as this practice that combines anthropological and media inquiry, is to take an element and invoke it outside its context, at least conceptually.

> It is as if the temple, draped in lights, radiates sound. Sermons, chanting, shaking incense sticks blended with penetrating music and attractions, like the oh so delicious smoothies I drink every night. We cannot enter through the main gate without having to take off our shoes (at which my companions show surprise, since you usually only have to take them off inside). I notice people gluing gold leaves on the Buddhas seated at the entrance. In the distance others can be made out standing in a circle. Nawa informs me they are selling good luck charms and other such trinkets. Walking around, we move on up the radiating chedi. From here you can overlook the whole place. Directly wat adjacent, a small garden, English style, with a swan statue at the center. More humans stand around the rather empty garden. All the turning wheels of light make it difficult to gaze too far into the night. After taking a tour of the chedi, up and down the stairs and around, we descend to the side of the wat. There are two open tent-like stalls set up under which monks sit cross-legged on elevated stages, facing the laypeople lower down. Over the speakers, in a very loud voice, a monk keeps reminding the visitors to take of their shoes and keep an eye on their belongings. As I am writing this, I frequently check the visual materials
*collected that night. It turns out that my camera phone remembers differently than my internal memory.*

Anthropology is the study of man “as if” there were culture. It is brought into being by the invention of culture, both in the general sense, as a concept, and in the specific sense, through the invention of particular cultures. (Wagner 1981, 17)

The ‘as if’ is perhaps the pivotal operator here. The question of whether there really is culture out there, in a realist sense, is suspended. The edifice of anthropology is restructured. Culture can definitely be affirmed to exist, as a concept for a part of the world, and as such it does something. Namely, create the convention that there are simply cultures, as well as culture in general out there, the very creation of said category disappearing in the process. Wagner attempted the impossible, which is to actually follow the relations between entities without making a clear break between material and conceptual (a variation on the nature-culture division), all the way from what he encountered in his fieldwork to the most basic concept of cultural anthropology. Once this black box (of culture as concept and its application) is opened, it also means that one can study man or anything else ‘as if’ there were any new category. For ages now those dominating have acted ‘as if’ an individual simply exists, so why not try something else for once. For example (cosmo)technics. Or kamma. Or Daoist immortals (to take a left-field example). Will that be a different world? One where we study man ‘as if’ retention techniques helped achieve immortality,’ while also working through a Daoist conception (however much that itself differs) of immortality, one that is markedly different from a Christian-Secular one. Immediately, it becomes apparent that even a small otherness introduced links other differences, possibilities, worlds. And the coming together of various language worlds, for obviously English and Chinese and Thai engender other possibilities, the point being made here to be conscious of mutual transformation. Constant conscious open-ended redefinition of words and concepts (as ontological anthropologists suggest). This happens too when new concepts developed within academia are plugged in: what transforms when moving from ‘culture’ to ‘cultural techniques’ to ‘cosmotechnics’? For one, and that is certain, the structuration of attention through which topics for research appear and the possibilities of connections to be made.

Yet, we must be cautious, if we want to remain anthropological. “Anthropological practice would cease if it could not implement in some way or another a working ethic of humanism.”
(Strathern 1987b, 290) Or perhaps it is precisely the point to exit the humanist castle, in order to regain the human out of the post- and pre-human. As I am (re)writing these ethnographic passages, awareness arises of the limits inbuilt into the conception of world from the get go. The way I describe, where I put focus seems to actively prevent a writing of the world where human is just partial. Incoherence between the forces that pull through media theory and Buddhadharma, and those of ethnography so heavily coded through a modern, 19th century derived conception of the human that I only noticed the issue once I began writing. I can point toward the technologies present, and how they render possible whatever is occurring, but that is all. Something resists, I will have to reconceive ethnography if I want to affirm the media theoretical ungrounding of the mediating role of the anthropologist, and of including technology and Buddhist world-making as something generative and not once again secondary to the human. Yet, in keeping with a weak version of Strathern's dictum, I don't want to lose the human entirely.

Under the first tent, monks are holding sermons, and also reading requests. One of the four
monks is taking images with a smartphone. Under the next one, laypeople and monks recite suttas, all
connected through thick white strings formed as a whole structure. Usually, these strings, called sai sin,
are laid out as the rite progresses, they lie on the ground, going from one hand to the other, forming a
snake-like shape if seen from above, from one side to the other, then to the row behind, and so on,
starting from the monks. Here, for the first time, I see a new arrangement – a veritable machine for
producing good merit powered by monks, but decentering them in a way. A media infrastructure that
disappears for participants focused on karmic activity but is very obvious for an observer interested in
media. I wonder why I've never read of it in any research. Even when talking to people here, or when
doing interviews in the future, many seem unaware of this kind of installation. It really is disappearing.
Only when I show a picture awareness arises. It seems so common for locals as to not care to notice.
And for researchers, who knows? Maybe it really is the reframing of the ‘as if’ as something other than
culture that makes this appear as a point of interest, an ethnographic moment. Here, strings are tied
around the heads of laypeople, while three monks and a wax figure of a monk hold them in their hands,
clasped together with microphones. People are also holding bowls with small yellow flags in their
hands. A couple of places are still free, the strings just hanging suspended, touching the floor. Like
nooses. The whole installation seems like a machine for creating good karma (bun), designed for a
world of overwhelming numbers of laypeople. Then come the monks selling charms. Nawa reads the
poster behind them and tells me its charms for basically anything. A couple of monks are also just hanging out, chilling it would seem.

So here it is, an unexpected encounter. On one level, its function is rather obvious: adapt a material infrastructure for the production of good merit (tham bun) to a new situation. In an anthropological mode, I might inquire into what it does for humans and how various locals understand it. I might even go digging in the past to find when such contraptions, such machines might have appeared. But that would perhaps be more of a media archaeology and possibly entirely in vain, given that the moment newness appears is rarely the moment it gets hypertrophied into a more stable memory via mnemotechnical devices such as cameras or writings. And, after all, when inquiring Thais about this thing, only the rarest were even aware what I was talking about in the first place, which itself is interesting. It certainly bespeaks of its mundanity. The appearance here has one clear function within my fieldwork: I begin noticing them in future situations. The form is something that has become part of my world, as an image more than anything else. I do not follow the humans but things, and start thinking about how this reorganization of *sai sin* reconfigures chanting and other situations where it is used. Yet, the goal is not (merely) to describe what is happening, what is being done. It's to conceptually inquire whether this innovation can lead to a new possibility for karmic production (not based on anthropological fieldwork, but rather media theoretical speculation) in comparison to the commonly encountered arrangements. In other words, to see whether this arrangement thinks differently. It's research based on sense impressions that takes into account that sensory materiality is co-produced by the immaterial. Following Strathern, the ethnographic moment is one that can occur both in the field and when going through notes noticing the unexpected. Before fieldwork one can never know what happens, that is, that which one can expect is not interesting, that is merely the replication of (hegemonic/conventional) knowledge already established. Real work can be related to what the media philosopher McKenzie Wark (2021, 13) calls hacking, as an activity constitutive of a new social class: "By hacker class I mean everyone who produces new information out of old information, and not just people who code for a living." Importantly, for intellectual laborers, there is a relation to more material workers: "What we all have in common is producing new information but not owning the means to realize its value. And yet the way we go about this is not quite the same thing as labor, just as being a worker is not quite the same thing as being a farmer." (Ibid., 14) And this immaterial labor produces things that are more easily tradeable and transferable (now that the
infrastructure is in place) than material ones. The capture of this merit-producing infrastructure,
bringing it into contact with other worlds (media theory) and fashioning something stable and effective
already changes the world. When reconceptualizing the activity of an anthropologist through Wark's
concept of hacking, it becomes possible to analyze and think the creation of newness in the process, as
well as the relation of these bits and pieces of information to the situation it emerged from.<fnref n="75" /> Indeed,
Wagner also adroitly describes different stages of creation: “This invention need not take place in the
course of fieldwork; it can be said to occur whenever and wherever some ‘alien’ or ‘foreign’ set of
conventions is brought into relation with one's own. Fieldwork is a particularly instructive example
because it develops the relation out of the field situation and its ensuing personal problems.” (Wagner
1981, 18) The experiment lies herein, bringing into relation different conventions, being the mediating
element in invention. Or rather will, as I will deal with this possibility, as well as another experiment
based on temple encounters, in the next chapter. For now, I have to return to a more directly Wagnerian
topic, namely, how to ensure this work doesn't fall into full on speculation of the Herodotian type. In
other words, how to make speculation creative, with an awareness of co-constitution, instead of
projective.

As the anthropologist uses the notion of culture to control his field experiences, those
experiences will, in turn, come to control his notion of culture. He invents “a culture” for
people, and they invent “culture” for him. [...] And yet the creator cannot be conscious of
this symbolic intent in pursuing the details of his invention, for that would nullify the
guiding effect of his “control,” and thus make his invention self-conscious. A self-
conscious anthropological study or work of art is one that is manipulated by its author to
the point where it says exactly what he wanted it to say, and excludes that kind of
extension or selftransformation that we call “learning” or “expression.” (Wagner 1981,
18)

So it comes to be a question of control, of frame(s) of reference. Within the whole process of
generating knowledge, of immaterializing hacking, there are many steps and each is a forking path. At
each crossroads, one road taken makes the other impossible. Wagner helps analyze, take apart into
more discreet elements, make graspable a process that otherwise would appear as one continuous path

<footnote n="75">⁷⁵ This will be explored in detail in a later chapter.</footnote>
from which one cannot even stray, for it is so straightforward. If this is not in a sense a Buddhist practice (analyzing impressions to take them apart and discover emptiness), I don't know what is. Nevertheless, life, time goes on in a myriad ways. Like there are myriad possibilities in the encounters made during fieldwork and later connections to be made. As there are many ways to experience and describe a field that already constitute forks in the road suffused in unreal light.

We take our shoes off and enter the temple. The room is unexpectedly small and well lit. Some laypeople are just shaking incense sticks to tell their fortune. On the pillars posters are hanging so that you can read your future based on which sticks you got. It's the same system as in China, at least to my layman's eyes. Nawa even informs me that it probably came with Chinese people and that Thais just like to incorporate anything that comes around, not to mention the generally large population of Chinese descent, including innumerable Sino-Thais, as I learn about an hour later easy to spot by their long surnames. What strikes me again, is how loud this incense fortune telling is. While usually, when I walk through a town, I smell incense sticks lit at the small altars all around (very pleasant), here I don't remember smelling anything anywhere except for the food. The loudness and light kind of drown out all other senses.

> Invention is “controlled” by the image of reality and the creator's lack of awareness that he is creating. His imagination, and often his whole management of himself, is compelled to come to grips with a new situation; it is frustrated, as in culture shock, in its initial intention, and so brought to invent a solution [...] A good artist or scientist becomes a detached part of his culture, one that grows in strange new ways, and carries its ideas through transformations that others may never experience. (Wagner 1981, 18–19)

Control happens through lack of awareness that one is creating, otherwise it could all too easily transform into fantasy. Yet, with a media theoretical approach, one comes to be aware that it's also about experimenting with control. That which one is unaware of, the disappearing middle of a relation, is not set. If going to this fair and having all these encounters is controlled by the assemblage of dominantly material things and my conceptual and perceptive habits, then thinking in a later stage is controlled by the assembled philosophical framework against which solutions are invented. There is no simple reality to act as ground, but different images of reality enacting different conditions for new
solutions.

To phrase a clear distinction: a 'good' scientist, occupying the middle between worlds, whether human or not, can carry ideas through transformations impossible for those untrained in the appropriate practices of controlling invention. To carry through here, is to retain some sort of coherent connection or relation to that which was encountered. This doesn't imply identity, but just to keep something that will operationalize a difference in the context into which it was carried. Importantly, it is necessary for something to shake up the conventions of the scientist in order to encounter an idea to be carried through. Actual invention (as a creative integration of a 'new' idea into one's world through which both will change) only happens when the initial intention (qua projection of conventions onto the other) breaks down, is thwarted, otherwise research will remain nothing but projection as that of the medieval creators and contemporary orientalists. Conventions have to crumble, so that real thought can emerge. All of this obviously doesn't mean that every part of the invention is entirely unrelated to schemas and conventions preexisting in the world the researcher translates into. That would be impossible and indeed would constitute a reproduction of an image of the world I am seeking to exit. There is nothing unconnected or neutral. The work here is about the reconfiguration of parts that lead to (in)direct effects on other elements. This is no project universally valid everywhere and anywhere at all times and beyond time. That would be the learned convention that renders noticing of (relational, not essential) newness impossible. It makes one powerless and lost to actually deal with a world that is developing, constantly changing, and partly due to one's own adding of things to the world, while leaving others out, to stay in the past, only retained as indirect effects on today. Perhaps one day to be actualized out of their virtuality to have direct effects again. Research built on the implicit image of one world, one rule, one perfect possible description everywhere makes one as lost as the sensory excesses of the world. And it hides itself, its own effects in the unrecognized middle of one's own activity. Its own contextualization too, naturalizing one's own frame of reference as the real world. Shouldn't this activity be acknowledged in writing itself? After all, if writing texts didn't have an effect on the world, if they were not parts of the world, if the way they were composed did not matter, why would they be composed in the first place.

*Once in a calm restaurant, by now it's drizzling outside where the night skies glimmer and we
are hidden under a makeshift roof, they tell me about legends and fairytales. I hear there are hundreds.*
And they can't agree on whether many were Buddhist or Hindu, or a mix, or any other possibility. I experience such overabundance and proliferation constantly, on all levels. It seems more like a society based on combining and transforming than excluding. They tell me I should look into Three Worlds According to King Ruang, a book of Thai-Buddhist cosmology, even though it's long and they never actually read it. They try to recount stories and in general can't agree on how they go, and sometimes even integrate what I know to be Greek mythology. When one does it, the other criticizes this step, so in dialogue a certain exclusion arises. What most of these tales I couldn't write down or record have in common, is that they feature an incessant becoming different of protagonists. Through rebirth or other means.

Finally, it would make the selection and use of explanatory “models” and analogies from our own culture obvious and understandable as part of the simultaneous extension of our own understanding and penetration of other understandings. We would learn to externalize notions like “natural law,” “logic,” or even “culture” (as Rembrandt did with his own demeanor and character in his self portraits), and, seeing them as we view the concepts of other peoples, come to apprehend our own meanings from a truly relative viewpoint. (Wagner 1981, 21)

I learn many secrets. I extend my own understanding into that of others. I want to transform my own through encounters with others. It is recursive, not a one-way street of legislation. The Marxist innovator Karatani Kōjin (2017) might even call it an actual dialogue, unlike the Socratic monologue so dominant in Euro-modernity. The Japanese philosopher explores the Ionian coast as a meeting place of many kinds of peoples in contrast to the exclusionary Athenian *agora* so fetishized by Moderns. In his research, he conceives of a Ionian isonomia, a system where equality is realized through the freedom to immigrate and participate. This would make for a better model for anthropological encounters for those of us reared so thoroughly in a world where the slave-based female excluding Athenian democracy has been normativized as an ideal by hiding that exclusion and social hierarchy which made it possible in the first place. All too often in research based knowledge creation, those others that also participate in this complex activity that brings together many actors are excluded, if only through the convention of assigning individual names to research results (and the monetary and career gains that might go with it). The slight shift in view of Euro-modern practices and foundational
myths the Japanese position enables, unearths how the arts of dialogue were developed on the Ionian coast, where many different worlds would meet on an equal level, unlike in the Attic one where one image appears to have dominance (as retrofitted through the dominance of Plato's and Aristotle's image of said world).

In the taxi ride back, Nawa recommends I go to Wat Priwaad, where there are statues of Popeye and Superman and all kinds of other pop culture icons. Later, I will do so and hearing about it does not prepare me in any way for what I will see. He tells me his mother would often spend copious amounts of money on temple donations, hoping to get good merit, instead of investing at least part of it more pragmatically (for him). Apparently, their worlds only partially overlap, while his and mine do so to a definitely larger degree than that of his mother would. She also taught him to say anumathanaa bun, which would produce good merit anywhere without having to attend a temple. Again, something I don't remember encountering in any literature so far. He further narrates, that two weeks after she went to a temple, she would tell her son to put his palms together and say the words, and he would get all that she generated in the temple (it was effectively doubled). Independent of time and place. So we talk about this seemingly boundless production of merit and how it's similar to capitalism. I continue encountering this excess of ideas and stories I don't remember reading about, that could lead to innovating a great many fields. I arrive in my small 8th floor apartment overlooking a bridge taking cars through one of the city centers around 11 p.m., and ponder how to rethink machines and production. It continues to surprise me that there are days, even weeks that pass without anything generative occurring, where all I meet already fits the images I have acquired, and then in just a few hours I come to be overwhelmed, shocked, forced to eventually innovate. I will have to decide which of the threads to pursue. Reading these words, it is already clear.

Here, I have dealt with a few issues that have important methodological consequences. The following questions used to bother me: how many people have to confirm a 'fact' so that it becomes real enough for anthropology? What is the relation between one statement and a fictionalization of a whole society? As I struggled to hack something new out of the transformational ethnographic moments of my fieldwork, these questions disappeared, as the entire way of relating elements changed. I do not use description as representation, but rather description as fictioning and changing of own conventions (Wagnerian invention). So the problem of enough data is moot: the data that produces
thought is important. The ability to put together information in a generative way is a skill to develop. As mentioned earlier, quoted via Wagner, any society in itself will be multiple so no statement will be 'fact' everywhere, as was made clear by all that Nawa and Pol told me, especially in those stories about the former's mother.

To return to the opening query: How to redescribe the world, a performative speculative literary realism, in drawing on 'new' things and 'other' things? Ethnographies displacing the nature-culture distinction based realist foundationalism of old, thereby rendering it just one among many. This shouldn't be a free speculation or fantasizing: "We might actually say that an anthropologist 'invents' the culture he believes himself to be studying, that the relation is more 'real' for being his particular acts and experiences than the things it 'relates.' Yet this explanation is only justified if we understand the invention to take place objectively, along the lines of observing and learning, and not as a kind of free fantasy." (Wagner 1981, 13) It is networks of relations through the anthropologists acts and experiences, that is real material connections with elements 'out there,' things composed in such way that they resist easy appropriation, and through resistance engender cracks or openings in the anthropologist's world. Such things then transformed, translated along relational chains, composed with many others into the objects that come out as research. All this while acknowledging that whatever is composed is always already done so with a speculative edge that fills in the gaps, by convention or, for those where awareness of such activity arises, controlled and experimental invention. The worlds thus encountered and made are interlocking, overlapping, and optimally composed in an obviously polyiconic manner. In other words, that the ability to connect what is written to different cosmological frameworks is part of the text. By frameworks here, I mean even those differences within posthumanist scientific practice, where the bits and pieces encountered and translated can be done so into a technological framework as much as a defiantly human-centered one. The sky above the distant capital might have definitely looked the part of a television tuned to a dead channel (however little this image means to those born after 'dead channels' ceased in their ubiquity), yet it was and will be other images too. Imagery that ties together new, unexpected elements that might one day include digital bodhisattvas traveling on that analog noise. It is of immense importance for researchers to also engage literary, audio-visual and other arts from the worlds engaged in order to learn to see the world anew and integrate singular solutions to the tensions that arise between different worldings, so as to prevent the possibility of projecting a simple one world realism onto scientific and other writing. Or, conversely
treat it all as an uncontrolled fantasy.
## 09. Cosmic Frameworks of Perception

Circling back to that night at the temple fair, dragging with the memory of experiencing a version of it through senses or words. Are the impressions assembled in the past chapter still alive in the reader's memory? The scene is multiplying, each iteration combining singularly. The world is emergent, whether here, where this is being read, or there, where materials for the text were composed. Imagine for now, the situation of 'being there.' What is there to the there?

### I.

When a(n anthropologist) body enters a situation, the whole (situation) changes, body included. The previous chapter explored the there to the there of the whole changing situation and how it connects with its outside(s) through the conceptual generativity of the mediating anthropologist. Here, the focus shifts on the body problematic by way of the anthropologist. Each body<fnref n="76" /> brings with it a past, memories, corporeal and ideational, stabilized through habit. What does habit, repetition, reiteration do in a world conceived as flux? “For those who affirm perpetual change, Heraclitan variation or Bergsonian duration, habit is an anchor, the rock to which the possibilities of personal identity and freedom are tethered, the condition under which learning is possible, the creation of a direction, a ‘second nature,’ an identity.” (Grosz 2013, 219) Habitual memories that shape what is perceived, that render perception, learning, controlled change in the first place. The body in order to perceive, has to subtract information as it passes through the various senses: “To begin with, the brain's extraction tends toward a kind of subtraction, for what is living tends to perceive what interests it and to disregard the rest; in fact, for Deleuze the definition of subjectivity, and its unfavorable connotation, derive principally from this subtraction. By subtracting or ‘framing’ the image, the subject already undertakes an ‘analytic’ preparatory to action: in the interval, the delay, elements are selected and thus made ready for action (or, more properly, re-action); the delay allows the brain to ‘select their elements, to organise them, or to integrate them into a new movement.’” (Flaxman 2000, 16) The body is also a complex and malleable interface, new capacities of which emerge with new technologies, which didn't go unnoticed by Marcel Mauss in his anthropological classic *Techniques of the Body* (1973). This foundational text's

<footnote n="76">⁷⁶ “In the first place, a body, however small it may be, is composed of an infinite number of particles; it is the relations of motion and rest, of speeds and slownesses between particles, that define a body, the individuality of a body. Secondly, a body affects other bodies, or is affected by other bodies; it is this capacity for affecting and being affected that also defines a body in its individuality.” (Deleuze 1988, 123)</footnote>
reception in anthropology betrays the power the foundational figure of the human (posed both as
concept and as biological body, as ontologically prior to any context it may appear in) continues to hold
for this field, for the connections with technology and bodily techniques presented there have been
sidelined for decades. Framing is constrictive and productive, enables some connections while making
others impossible. The image Mauss brought into the sciences remains potent and worthwhile to think
with, as new connections can be productively established to build other futures for the field and
beyond. (Morita 2012, Schlanger 1991) It is one where the new and by then widespread technology of
moving images effectuates a change Mauss observed in nurse's gait. He found himself tied to a sick bed
in New York, his body held immobile, observing the movement of female nurses that sparked an
association, searching in memory, he realized he knows this walk from young women in Paris who had
acquired it from American movies (how many reversals!). A body slowed down comparatively that
makes it possible to notice subtle kinds of difference in the surroundings, is almost ironically apt, for it
is a common condition for both film viewing and ethnographic techniques of observation. To return to
the image Mauss conjures, it's as if habitual conventions of gait from the United States traveled and
shaped those of young women in France: now, to some degree, worlds can travel independently of
human carriers. "There is the fact of a specific technique, walking, which is disseminated and
conditioned by a new technical medium, the cinema. Equally important is that the cinema itself – by
breaking the actions of the human body down into a series of discrete, serial movements – makes
Mauss's concept, techniques of the body, thinkable." (Geoghegan 2013, 71) Taking movement apart,
analyzing it, brings with it new possibilities – as bodies formed by elite sports know well and as has
been discussed by the example of crawl by Marcel Mauss himself, where he also takes note of how
pop-culture, via the first Tarzan Johnny Weissmuller, enters the quotidian unconscious of gestures,
postures and movements. (Cf. Leveratto 2010, 88ff.) Mauss (1973, 71) somewhat unexpectedly
conjures in an almost Benjaminian<fnref n="77" /> manner the steamboat to describe how French men thought of
themselves while learning to swim at the turn of the century, a neat condensation of how technology
and technique, imagery and history are inextricably entangled. Such analytical experiments of
separating and reconstituting movement go back to the beginnings of cinema qua moving image in the
works of Etienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge and were tied to expansionist military projects
(Virilio 1989), industrial regularisation (Brenez 2006), but also directly connected with anthropological

<footnote n="77">⁷⁷ “A child not only plays at being a grocer or a teacher, but also at being a windmill or a train. The question which matters, however, is the following: what does a human being actually gain by this training in mimetic attitudes?” (Benjamin 1979, 65)</footnote>
ones later expanded by the boundary pushing anthropologist film-maker Jean Rouch. (Schüttpelz 2010)

The media philosopher Geoghegan (2013, 71) points out “that these studies were allied with the late-19th-century racist and classist ethnography that sought to inventory types, such as the gait of Africans, Europeans, workers, and soldiers. Through motion photography, movement itself became a symbolic system characterizable by discrete series that could be quoted and recursively modified. These series could articulate difference between cultures (‘European’ and ‘African’) and within a culture (upper and lower classes), and they also refined existing cultural distinctions.” Whatever the uses and influence, the interest here frames at its center the following: through habitualization, the outside becomes the inside, all mediated, transformed, caught and liberated by new technologies, all generated within webs of power(s) or techno-biopolitics.<fnref n="78" /> Long before any kind of conscious<fnref n="79" /> effort on part of any singular body enters the scene. Would Mauss's text have traveled so smoothly across time and space without the scenes so skillfully weaved with theoretical generalizations? Whatever the reader may think, it is certain that the body that was overwhelmed at the temple fair, had also already acquired various skill sets and was supported by various tools, based on previous ethnographic research and countless readings on such practical matters. Indeed, it had already shifted in that awareness had arisen that it is the out-of-the-ordinary that was to be looked for, in other words, based on other readings, ethnographic practices had been coded to include a sensitivity to human-technology assemblages as the center of the frame. But how would it go about recognizing these?

Luckily, there's more elements to play important roles in the whole situation the body found
itself in. With new reproductive technologies, images travel easier, at least in certain directions. Outside
becoming inside, mingling. Above it was about gestures, ways of holding bodies, modulating. Bodies
not centered on (visual) perception or other senses. When refocusing on perception, it becomes clear
that images bring other elements too, not directly related to somatic processes. Not only ‘formal(ized)’
movements travel through cine-imagery, also images more straightforwardly conceivable as content, as
a ground against which new perceptions will appear. Images to act directly as the sensorimotor schema:

<footnote n="78">78 This is how Mauss framed techniques: “Zugleich sagt Mauss, dass diese Techniken, die Körpertechniken, allen anderen Techniken vorausgehen: Sie waren die ersten Techniken. Was das in seiner Konsequenz heißt – ontogenetisch, phylogenetisch, technikhistorisch –, wird von Mauss nur angedeutet. Eine Konsequenz wäre vermutlich folgende: Der Technikbegriff kann nicht durch eine Exteriorisierung körperlicher Organe begründet werden, wenn das erste Objekt und Mittel technischer Tätigkeiten der Körper war und bleibt.” (Schüttpelz 2010, 110)</footnote>

<footnote n="79">⁷⁹ Importantly, (human) consciousness is conceived in a particular way: “Phenomenologists, however, begin their analysis by presuming the existence of consciousness, whereas Bergson makes the startling claim that he commences simply with a universal flow of matter-images and then ‘deduces’ consciousness as a particular kind of image within that flow.”
(Bogue 2003, 29)</footnote>
“A ‘sensorimotor schema’ organizes and coordinates the perceptions, feelings, and actions of each living image, and from that schema issues a particular configuration of the world centered on that given image.” (Bogue 2003, 4) The images that travel via the relays of reproductive technologies act on the images as *centers of indetermination* that perceive them. “Of course, perception is strictly identical to every image, in so far as every image acts and reacts on all the others, on all their sides and in all their parts. But, when they are related to the interval of movement which separates, within one image, a received and an executed movement, they now vary only in relation to this one image, which will be called ‘perceiving’ the movement received, on one of its sides, and ‘carrying out’ the movement executed, on another side or in other parts.” (Deleuze 1989, 31) All the operations enacted here are analytical separations that make it possible to think (a world otherwise too complexly differentiating to be grasped), with the different parts being more of a focusing on a point within an ever-changing continuum. Perception, to be clear, is a way of receiving movements, “an instrument for translating an external movement via the senses into an ensuing motor action.” (Bogue 2003, 30) It takes time, repetition, practice to (un)consciously habitualize other ways of thinking mind-bodies, one-self. Simply reading a text is not how one learns to be Deleuzian. Repetition and experimental application in the everyday world is what will rewire neural systems to achieve directed change. Images of worlds, whether formed through technologies of reproduction or seemingly simply out there, come to be internalized through repetition — they are all around, one isn’t even aware. Images of thought, infrastructures of thought, they too are of this world, but as it’s rather the way that sensory impressions are connected, that is, they are not directly perceivable through the senses, but rather as varied and variable immaterial connections between parts.

It is the more sensorially direct images that are of concern at this moment, and the role they play in new worlds are continuously being co-constructed – worlds outside a singular body and those a body perceives, is affected by. A body becomes in a given milieu and what is seen is shaped by what has been seen given that location, and what a body has learned to perceive (cultures of habit). Bodies do, affect and are affected by differently other bodies based on where they come to be composed. Memories are parts of bodies, muscle memories, emotional memories, sensory memories, visual memories. Following what Deleuze, drawing on Bergson, does in the *Cinema* (1986, 1989) books, all is images and sentient beings are a particularly complex kind of image: “Because they only owe this privilege to the phenomenon of the gap, or interval between a received and an executed movement,
living images will be ‘centres of indetermination,’ which are formed in the acentred universe of movement-images.” (Deleuze 1986, 62) The living image “may be viewed as a system for relaying movements – for receiving movements from outside and generating its own movements from within.” (Bogue 2003, 30) Upon contact, and it must not be forgotten that everything is always in contact with something, a neural impulse is transmitted to the center of the nervous system, where neurons are most concentrated, from where further impulses travel to a complex assemblage of muscles and other parts to execute a usually automated, habitualized movement. All without the necessity of consciousness in the common sense. A slight delay is introduced by the neural system, the living image, between the external movement and the movement generated internally. All of which is necessarily acquired through habit, an outside becoming inside, while being conditioned by the specific assemblage that each body can do.

Contraction around a living image composing as the sensorimotor schema: “[It] provides the commonsense temporal and spatial coordinates of our everyday world, and the signs of the movement-image, which are the signs of the classic cinema, ultimately conform to the coordinates of that commonsense world. In the modern cinema, however, the sensorimotor schema breaks down, and with the collapse of that schema new images appear – time-images – as well as new kinds of signs.” (Ibid., 5) The commonsense world differs, as anybody who has engaged the knowledge produced by anthropologists or has lived in different parts of the world and actively tried to engage the difference therein. Such quotidian entanglements can and do break down, not just in situations when an anthropologist body travels to an elsewhere. There is a limit, when images no longer interrelate according to spatio-temporal conventions of this or that commonsense world. That is, when the immediacy of habitual reaction, of the automatic relay of input (perception) to output (reaction) fails, because what is encountered does not fit any known cliché, which is a sensorimotor image of the thing. Keeping in mind that things are points of view, and me (qua living image/thing) viewed from the position of the thing is a different kind of subtraction than me perceiving the thing. To paraphrase the famous quote on Daribi misunderstandings by Wagner (198): its perception of me is not the same as my perception of it. An automatic preselection occurs before perception as it is ordinarily conceived, with those aspects of things that do not interest a body are being ignored. Hence what appears as a dog's body will be different for a human, another dog or a tick, for each is composed of ‘other’ possibilities of gathering sense-data, coproduced in the interaction of bodies. Entities are more and less than as if ‘in
themselves.’ Perception as subtraction (based on how each body is constituted), but also, in a sense, addition: “We perceive objects through our accumulated experiences of them, through our memories, fears, desires, and plans, loading them with characteristics that extend into complex patterns of association and anticipation.” (Bogue 2003, 110)

It is a specific type of encounter in the world that interests the Deleuzian materialist anthropologist: when objects lose their conventional contexts and associations. Recognition of world is based on habit and what is around a living image. This splits, or doubles – the world (actual) and the memory (virtual), carried with that singular body: “[...] the very real doubling of the present – in perception, which forms part of our ongoing, largely unconscious sensorimotor action (the automaton/actor), and in memory, which is mental, reflective, free from the constraints of action, but also passive (the spectator).” (Ibid., 119) Recognition of an object is an operation that combines the revival of its past memory and its associative resemblance in the present object, something that is commonly automatic and unconscious. Habitually, memory and new perception are linked in webs of action, reaction. Automatic recognition of well known surroundings, say the city I've lived in for years, almost becomes one with its perception. At the temple fair, much of what is there combined rather smoothly with automatic recognition, which doesn't mean that a slowing down of the perceiving body to make attentive recognition possible wouldn't have yielded cracks in the automatism and with that new (scientific) territories to explore. The same can happen in the places we know most, though it may be exceedingly improbable. Automatic recognition executed by a body is, importantly, an action, not a representation. To recognize is to know how to use. It's in attentive recognition that more conscious attention is being paid to an object, so as to summon images from memory to superimpose on what is perceived. Circuits that are minimized in automation extend, and, if a situation, an object are encountered that don't fit any easily present memory, the body comes to a halt and vast expanses of memory must be explored in order to be able to react. Or, of course, any incongruities can be ignored and automation can take over, until perhaps one day, such a discrepancy will appear as to bring an end to the body.

Any reader with the experience of learning a new language, especially if it involves a different script, will be able to actualize from their memory the moment(s) they noticed how much of habitualized reading involves a preconscious projection or anticipation of what will come next. Future
lines not yet appearing as words are already scanned by the eye, years upon years of experience
beginning with childhood, typographies standardized reducing the effort with each new book. This
experience combines probabilities of words that will follow with the material shapes on the pages. It's a
sort of synthesis of past and future that makes for smooth presence. When learning a new language, this
habit doesn't yet exist and will eventually be built only after innumerable reiterations, if at all, for it
takes immense time-spans for activities to become so effortless, a body doesn't even realize they were
learned in the first place. The same process operates in all recognition and action – and some situations
a body is faced with are so unknown that the immediacy of reaction breaks down.

What is described here are closed feedback circuits, where that which is outside (of this loop)
gets habitually misrecognized or ignored in favor of the feedback stability and illusion of integrity,
stability, essence.<fnref n="80" /> Some encounters can effectuate an opening of this circle, at least for those who
acquired the capability for openness, for noticing that which doesn't fit without dismissal. Perception
not as projection, but transformative, partial connection. With cinema, especially those where the
sensorimotor breaks down (from which arises the time-image),<fnref n="81" /> as will be expanded later on, one can
learn to see anew and by acquiring new habits of perception via cinema, and recondition perception
even outside of a directly cinematic assemblage. Most of the scenes I take as sources for thinking here,
are about the recognition of the new, however minute the modulation. Attentive recognition with a
passive body and automatic recognition with an active one differ in the complexity of circuits
established, not qualitatively. “As we pay closer attention to the object, we summon up memory-images
from broader and more distant past.” (Bogue 2003, 112) It is when habitual linkage between memory,
perception, action is most relaxed, that objects can give rise to virtual images, memories, dreams,
thoughts. When the body is held somewhat stable, does not have to react to environmental pressures,
new circuits can appear. The conditions for this had to be constructed too, and within a media
theoretical post-humanist frame, can be taken as an extended milieu of the living image. Constructions,
accumulations of the labors of dead generations to stave off part of the flux and of biological necessity.
For were one to imagine a living image under direct pressure of immediate survival, the option of

<footnote n="80">⁸⁰ Nick Land (2012a) demonstrated how an analogous operation is executed in Kant's philosophy, colonialism and capitalism, where the circuits established by the modern white man actively exclude any feedback from outside, rendering modern thought and expansive practice effectively incestuous.</footnote>

<footnote n="81">⁸¹ “The image had to free itself from sensory-motor links; it had to stop being action-image in order to become a pure optical, sound (and tactile) image. But the latter was not enough: it had to enter into relations with yet other forces, so that it could itself escape from a world of clichés. It had to open up to powerful and direct revelations, those of the time-image, of the readable image and the thinking image.” (Deleuze 1989, 23)</footnote>
slowing down and exploring memory circuits would in all likelihood not make the cut (whatever those
who posit an independent, disconnected individual at the start of everything might fantasize themselves
into). This can happen in a cinema assemblage, or a ritual assemblage, which will be explored later.
There are other situations too, of course. Once infrastructures for technologies of reproduction are in
place (with their radically lowered transmission costs) and systematically upheld (otherwise they would
fall apart, both materially but also as practices for bodies that interact with them) make images circulate
that are far outside of what one would encounter in the ‘immediately’ surrounding world without such
technologies. And with that, memory qua virtual archive is enhanced, there is much more that can
become part of the circuits, once automatic recognition breaks down. Thus the world became one with
a radical potential for cross-pollination and newness, where (some of) what was once considered totally
other can now become part of one even when the body/living image doesn’t travel itself – displacement
is not necessarily physical in the narrow sense of the word. Cinema enhances memory incomparably.
The memory Deleuze and Bergson conceive is not individual consciousness. Rather it is the past that
preserves itself. The present splits into memory/past and the disappearing present. “[A]nd it is we who
are internal to time, not the other way round. That we are in time looks like a commonplace, yet it is the
highest paradox. Time is not the interior in us, but just the opposite, the interiority in which we are, in
which we move, live and change.” (Deleuze 1989, 82)

So, a body finds itself in a situation where sensorimotor automatism breaks down. Answers
must be sought in actualizing virtual memories, in other words “internal sheets of memory and the
external layers of reality.” (Ibid., 209) Cyborg bodies where inside and outside mingle, co-constituted
by the imageries that circulate. All emerging from technological webs of externalized memories far in
excess of the personal that become actualized in and as bodies. Cinemas as ‘cultural’ memory
containing an excess of unintentional information (Taylor 1996), made to be shared and to travel easily
in ways hitherto unimagined. Meanwhile, human bodies are made of specific components, assembled
of organs and sensory possibilities that make them differ from other bodies. And yet, each is singularly
composed, individuated and keeps becoming with the surroundings to perhaps realize entirely new
potentials. With this, I redefine anthropology into ‘the study of the world as a human body,’ in the
potentials that can be achieved, for it is only when the condition of knowing the world as a human body
(keeping in mind that it is singular bodies and not a general one that is my concern) is understood that
any thorough engagement with different techno-cultures can happen.<fnref n="82" /> It is a way to get out of the typical anthropological exclusion of technology as secondary and not co-constitutive of humans, while keeping a distinction from media theory and other such fields that ‘as if’ blend out the human, or understand the human as viewed from the position of machines and infrastructures. “We do not know yet what a body can do.” (Deleuze 1988, 60) And bodies can do different things, when connected to or conditioned by other entities, including technologies, body techniques and imagery. One has to let go of the image of an organic, clearly delineated biological body (constructed under the conditions of modernity) as that what is the essence and limit of body – which is exactly what Haraway suggested to bypass with the cyborg, something as much conceptual as imageric. One has not just to learn to think with the cyborg, but to see.

The world moves, most passes by a body. Is filtered out for not being of interest to the survival of the body. Only what is slowed down, stabilized to speeds and elements perceptible to the body anatomically constituted as human will come to be a source of knowledge for bodies composed in the same manner as humans, perhaps transformatively extended in different ways through a variety of techniques. An awakened one (Buddha or bodhisattva) is a different body and as many a sutta tells us regular sentient beings, perceives far greater amounts of components of this world. So does a monk's body, even if to smaller degrees. Or a local layperson's, as differentiated as all of these are. After all, categories are just ways to organize the things of the world, and never exhaustive of any thing. Classification does something else than the bodies classified. A scented candle on a night table and one lit at a Buddhist altar in Bangkok are both candles, yet are composed of different parts and do different things. Only the idealist habit of taking the word or concept of candle as having precedence over any actual material composition and operation leads to the inability to engage the world as complexity, context and change. Words are but parts of worlds. Worlds are made as bodies. And bodies can be conceived as organisms, or assemblages of various organs, each of which is a solution to a problem.<fnref n="83" />

<footnote n="82">⁸² A different recent (re)definition comes by way of Viveiros de Castro (2004b): comparing comparisons. The two are far from being mutually exclusive, as it is impossible to compare without bodies, and compose bodies without comparing. Both approaches are constructed as alternatives to “the ‘psychic unity of mankind’ or of any other purportedly universal principle.” (Jensen 2011, 7)</footnote>

<footnote n="83">⁸³ “If the organism is a solution, it is at once a solution to its own problem. What is the problem? [...] Deleuze is actually describing two simultaneous accounts of this living thing that we call ‘organism.’ On the one hand, we can call any and all living beings an ‘organism’: I’m an organism, a cat is an organism, you’re an organism, that orchid over there is an organism. This offers a certain solution in that it accounts for the actuality of this or that living being. And yet, it presupposes many – no, a multiplicity, infinite – factors that go into the actualization of any being we call an organism. There is therefore also a problem—namely, how to describe the factors that contribute to the composition of living things. The problem of the organism is, from this perspective, the very question of Deleuze’s ontology; in asking ‘how to</footnote>
(Living) things are composed in an infinity of ways. As the famous example of the tick goes: "For example, the tick, attracted by the light, hoists itself up to the tip of a branch; it is sensitive to the smell of mammals, and lets itself fall when one passes beneath the branch; it digs into its skin, at the least hairy place it can find. Just three affects; the rest of the time the tick sleeps, sometimes for years on end, indifferent to all that goes on in the immense forest." (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, 25) A body, composed as it is, is composed so that it is affected by and affects only some elements of the world, and as such it makes an own world. Thus, worlds here are co-constituted by and as bodies. They are connected but not identical. Those bodies categorizable as human will be composed in such ways, as to be affected by most of the same elements of the world in general, yet the different senses can be trained and change with techno-history. (Benjamin 2008, 23) Co-constitutive worlds emerge continuously, there is no Cartesian primary distinction between body and mind, material and symbolic. "[Strathern] notes that the sorts of ethnographic approaches that take worlds as emergent, refusing the category distinction between the material and the symbolic as a priori, are the sorts of studies for which anthropology is renowned. She insists that they are important for contemporary research in fields far beyond anthropology." (Verran 2001, 39)

How to conceive of a situation where knowledge is created? Deleuze's film books continue to be useful here, based as they are on considerations of movement and time. They are also, unlike what their dominant reception in film studies might suggest, books of (performative) ontology: they propose a theory about how (part of) the world works, and what cinema does in such a world.<fnref n="84" /> It is here, where Deleuze (1986) tweaking Bergson shows cinema not as a false or illusory movement, but the movement of the world. Cinema as a technology offers something no other, even photography, can: it makes it possible to experiment with 'the virtual' but also, implicitly, to think the world as movement, as flux.<fnref n="85" /> The universe as meta-cinema, which can be conceptually integrated with anthropological

<footnote>"make" the body an organism," Deleuze is asking us not to remain complacent with understanding the organism as a contained, stable, and self-same entity, since different factors coalesce into the making of the continual becoming of this thing we identify as an organism. In other words, rather than remaining satisfied with describing the organism as a certain substance of this or that type, with these or those qualities, extended in space and time, Deleuze is instead asking what goes into the genesis of this living process. What makes the body? What can a body do? What relations compose this individual? How does the body articulate itself? This is the problematic posed by the organism. It is both solution and problem." (Buchanan 2008, 152–13)</footnote>

<footnote n="84">⁸⁴ To clarify, it is not an ontology of cinema, as classic film theory tried to define it. (Casetti 1999) These approaches in general just take the world as given, and try to fit cinema into that pre-existing theory of what is, without ever really casting doubt onto how world and reality itself are conceived.</footnote>

<footnote n="85">⁸⁵ As for a difference between cinema and the computer: "If cinema is, in general, an ontology, the computer is, in general, an ethic. The computer instantiates a practice, not a presence. Perhaps a useful way to understand the difference between the two is to draw a distinction between a language and a calculus. A language operates at the level of description and</footnote>
constructs and interests. (Kapferer 2004, 2010, Pandian 2011, Handelman 2013) Before cinema technology came to be in the world, however differentiated it is, the world could not have been cinematic in this or any sense. Thus, to be as clear as possible: what is being done here is not film theory, but thinking the world as it is made possible by cinema. Meanwhile thinking through cinema would be different, it would be making films. Deleuze is clear on that. Cinema thinks itself, human thought is a different process. Deleuze doesn't think about cinema, but translates what cinema does into a different medium, that of thinking with words and written phrases. “Deleuze conceptualizes thinking as machinic, the machinic being defined by its autonomous and automatic nature.” (Huygens 2007) Machines conceived as that which relates, operates, that which connects varied elements (it is conditioned to perceive) to pass on an effect (with little loss) from input to output, in other words a movement as qualitative change. With the advent of cinema, a new complex element is introduced and a new world emerges – one where the automatic and the mobile becomes thinkable in a new way. “It is as if cinema were telling us: with me, with the movement-image, you can't escape the shock which arouses the thinker in you.” (Deleuze 1989, 156) It is important not to enact a cut between human thought and the general material-technological conditions (without proper acknowledgment). It is a world where the material infrastructure of cinema makes for new possibilities in the much less material infrastructure of human thought. Perhaps, this is not all that new, when traditions from all over planet are concerned, as for example Theravāda Buddhist teachings and meditation practices have been about performing the taking apart of the flow of reality into parts (which is also how reality works, according to the teachings), experimenting with them and coming to experience reality as empty, that is, constructed and without essence. (Klima 2002) Even here the emergence of cinema as a new element in the world undoubtedly enables something else, if not for monks then for the researcher. As will be explored later, such teachings enact an active transformation of a body and its affects, in order to cut through the automatic effects of karmic and habitual webs. Automatic thinking is mostly actual, draws on habits and immediate preconscious recognition. When this sensorimotor schema breaks down, a/the ‘real’ thought emerges, that which actualizes a virtual, to find new solutions and with that conditions for different futures. In other words, perception as a fabulation, as that which seems most immediate, the senses, is also constructed and conditioned by worlds around. And an anthropologist's body, always in the middle, is one that gets itself on purpose into situations where given schemata break down, because the worlds encountered are different. This is inbuilt into the profession's practice and as such

reference. To encode the world: this is the primary goal of language. [...] A calculus, on the other hand, operates at the level of computation and process.” (Galloway 2015, 186–87)
has become a cliché, a given, that does not necessarily ensure the advent of real thought. That is, it
cannot be the fieldwork situation alone that gives rise to thought. Luckily, the situation is always more
than merely ‘there.’

Deleuze's film books are also, among other things, a theory of sets and frames.<fnref n="86" /> One that makes it possible to think what is there, and what is not, that is the inside and the outside (out-of-field). “Framing is the art of choosing the parts of all kinds which become part of a set. This set is a closed system, relatively and artificially closed.” (Deleuze 1986, 18) A theory of a world not given, not external to corporeal or mental action, but changing. Always larger than what appears. A world that does not precede human activity, but one that is shaped with activity and changes sentient beings in return. World as movement = transformation: “Movement is a translation in space. Now each time there is a translation of parts in space, there is also a qualitative change in a whole.” (Deleuze 1986, 8) Movement as a qualitative change. “Movement always relates to a change, migration to a seasonal variation. And this is equally true of bodies: the fall of a body presupposes another one which attracts it, and expresses a change in the whole which encompasses them both. If we think of pure atoms, their movements, which testify to a reciprocal action of all the parts of the substance, necessarily express modifications, disturbances, changes of energy in the whole.” (Ibid.) New things are composed, whether beaver dams, the technology of cinema (as varied as it is), a research paper. The material and semiotic mesh, the whole changes. The newly assembled become part of the world which through them becomes different. An alternative to defiantly Christian metaphysics of realism and representation, where the creation of things such as research is not taken to change the world, for how could any human creation challenge that of God? The essence of the world must remain untouched, eternally true and universally valid in the same way. Strange though, isn't it for us alleged seculars, because why else would one be producing research if not to have an effect? Why continue practicing an image of the world that is fundamentally unchangeable, already fully created in all its potential? A world where the whole appears to precede its parts. No matter that this reaches back to Aristotle in its resilience, just because it is ancient doesn't make it right or useful, or able to fulfill its own promises. (Nail 2022)

<footnote n="86">⁸⁶ “The whole and the ‘wholes’ must not be confused with sets. Sets are closed, and everything which is closed is artificially closed. Sets are always sets of parts. But a whole is not closed, it is open; and it has no parts except in a very special sense, since it cannot be divided without changing qualitatively at each stage of the division ... The whole is [...] that which keeps it open somewhere as if by the finest thread which attaches it to the rest of the universe.” (Deleuze 1986: 10)</footnote>
The Deleuze-Bergson alternative operationalized here is so potent precisely because it shows the whole to be what makes closure impossible. It's not just a reversal of terms, but a displacement, a refraction. No final set of sets. The whole is the open – there can be no end. “A description of all relationships, as a whole, can never reach closure itself. It is the ‘whole’ then, which forces open the sets, allowing for relationships between the parts. Even if the relationships between sets are out of the field of the frame of enquiry, the relationship still persist.” (Schienke 2009, 170) As for the world, so for the more limited, framed situation; I can never fully describe a situation in a sense that would close it. The world is fractal, complexity is never reduced, a situation is never exhausted. World(s) are always in the making. With each thing added, that which was there is changed. On a more immediate level, this means that whatever description of a situation is composed, it changes the situation it was composed in, the ones it connects to and the world in general. Actions have ontological effects, they change what is.

## II.

Once a set is established through a frame, as arbitrary as it might be, and these cuts are always contingent, it becomes possible to think, analyze, create: “[F]or knowledge claims to be made and decisions to be actualized, choices are made about a cut, about what to leave out [...]” (Schienke 2009, 168) And circuits of memory that operationalize difference through each body present in a set. The set is already multiplying and neither of the points of view embodied are objective. “[A] subjective perception is one in which the images vary in relation to a central and privileged image; an objective perception is one where, as in things, all the images vary in relation to one another, on all their facets and in all their parts.” (Deleuze 1986, 76, italics in original) Thus a film is more objective than human perception, as it is closer to the objective, indefinitely varying, a central flux of the world, a “see[ing] without boundaries or distances.” (Deleuze 1986, 81) Integrating variety into research, without reducing it to sameness, is also more objective than a simple solipsist organization. What does variety here mean? Isn't this just a baroque way of describing classical research? Neither yes nor no. On some level, this is a necessary way of constructing a field of knowledge. However, when all difference is subsumed under identity, research takes the form of a subjective vision, and hence loses this objectivity gathering as a field. It becomes a subjective centralized perception. Only when the many is not reduced to one is the tendency toward objectivity actively present. Schienke, integrating Deleuze's cinema thought into an STS context, calls this networked perception “where every significant relationship
within the system is connected and measured in relation to every other. In other words, networked
perception is the complete subtraction of the other, or rather, the negation of the subject-object
dichotomy – as there is no observation that exists outside the network.” (Schienke 2009, 172)

So the anthropologist's body, the living image, enters as subjective perception: “[f]rom the point
of view which occupies us for the moment, we go from total, objective perception which is
indistinguishable from the thing, to a subjective perception which is distinguished from it by simple
elimination or subtraction.” (Deleuze 1986, 64) This subjective perception is an effect of colliding
bodies, and is co-constituted by its past that conditions perception, whether automatic, or in case of a
breakdown of the sensorimotor, actualizable memory. The body that enters a set or frame, however
arbitrarily the cut may be made, brings with an outside from the past which conditions what is
perceptible for it. Though perhaps arbitrary is not the most precise word: “The closure of a set is not
arbitrary, but rather is produced or arrived at through a variety of possible contingencies and limits of
description.” (Schienke 2009, 169) The farang anthropologist body enacts a different difference,
different limits and contingencies than a local commonly attending temple fairs, or the so-called
informant, and each will perceive something else and, when stopping to think, to understand, actualize
different sets of sheets of memory to match. Or, in the case of a strong ethnographic moment, realize
there is nothing to fit, to bridge this gap, and later seek to find an adequate response, thereby creating
new research frameworks. Now, this body can't but have subjective centralized perception, but adding
other perceptions, and most importantly, other framings to that which is encountered, experimentally
expands the field through a sort of montage. Positions are to be constructed of other human or non-
human bodies, though of course the methods and techniques that put together the latter seem more
challenging than the former, at least for anthropologists. The technologies and methods that make non-
humans speak, that make their communication translatable have only recently began to be integrated
into the anthropological toolkit. (Hartigan Jr., 2021) Importantly, when gathering these positions, it's
prudent to be mindful of writing so that no one position is simply taken as reality, not even the whole
text as the gathering of multiple positions that it may be. Both the situation (taken as an experimentally
closed set with an outside) and the text (a more clearly defined closed set with an outside) are
assemblages to connect with others. Whatever connects, forms part of a set, it's necessarily but part of
what would be the ‘thing.’ “Categories of classification require that a part can belong to more than one
set. For example, a small stand of trees (as a part to be looked for as a cluster of pixels) could be