After recounting Thai (mytho-)history, Tachard writes that he considers it necessary to know it in order to understand the history of “*Sommonakhodom* (so the *Siamese* call the God whom at present they adore).” (Ibid., 289) Buddha used to be referred to as *Sommonakhodom* in early European writings on this being, but few are aware of that today.<fnref n="185" /> In order to account for the locals' disinterest or occasionally even strong aversion to Christian teachings and imagery, Tachard retells Thai cosmology in his own words. This retelling appears as a localized cosmology that combines a wide variety of elements, which I do not want to disentangle since it is precisely these local, ever-evolving versions of Buddhist tradition that are, well, Buddhist. These early travelers and missionaries had noticed certain similarities between teachings and practices in the wider Asian region, but the occidental construction of Buddhism as one religion needed a much more stable infrastructure for travelers and scientists to be put in place.

Tachard recounts what a Buddhist monk told the Jesuits while they were visiting a temple. The explicitly Buddhist narrative that enters into this is the schism between Buddha and his brother (or in Indian contexts usually cousin and brother-in-law) *Thevathat* today commonly spelled Devadatta. “Being a person of much wit and address, he found the way to make a new Sect, wherein he engaged several Kings and much People, who embraced his Doctrine and imitated his examples. That was the Original of a Schism which divided the world into two parts, and gave a beginning to two Religions, whereas before that all Mankind had but one.” (Ibid., 293) The two had been tied kammically for many rebirths, with Thevathat having killed his brother when they were monkeys or apes. In their rebirth as humans, when the schism happened, the younger brother gathered support of many princes through his ‘evil’ words, even though he could not compare to the miracle working power of *Sommonakhodom*. “Ambition made him desire to be God, but not being really so, he was ignorant of a great many things, which his Brother perfectly knew, and because his haughtiness would not suffer him to listen to *Sommonakhodom* he did not learn of him what was done in Hell and Paradise, nor the Doctrine of the Transmigration of Souls, nor yet the changes that had been and were to be in all ages, from whence they conclude that it is not to be wondred at, if we who are his Disciples find nothing of all those things in the Books he hath left us; if our Scriptures be full of obscurities and doubts, and that if being wholly ignorant of Divinity, we have so great a mind to reason and dispute with them. For since *Thevathat* our Master knew nothing of that himself, he could not instruct us therein.” (Ibid., 293–4) Tachard continues

<footnote n="185">¹⁸⁵ At times in these writings *Sommonakhodom* becomes *Sommonokhodom*. Apparently, it is a creolization of *samaña Gotama*. (Skilling 2014)</footnote>
to focus on how what Thevathat did was ignorant of secrets of curing men, but also of making or discovering precious metals. For the locals believe that precious metals are hid in unknown places, and only lack of virtue makes common humans unable to see them, even if they were right before one's eyes. Here knowledge gained is about bodies and about the earth, much like humans and animals are closer. Buddha as opposed to Devadatta knows how to cure and how to find precious metals. Wellness and scientific extraction are situated on the same plane.

Now, some Portuguese Jesuits had produced an inverted image more than a hundred years earlier, which contrasts nicely with what the monk tells in Tachard's account. They were convinced that Christianity had reached the region earlier and considered the Buddhist institutions as corrupted versions of their own creed. These views of Jesuits are also reported by Simon de la Loubère (1693). The reasons for why what they encountered was different was ascribed to the influence of the Devil. It was up to the missionaries to change these teachings and practices to make them correct again. (Alberts 2013) The differences to be noted are the focus on monasticism here, whereas the inverted images of the Buddhist monk are on a cosmological level, and the fact that, of course, Christians discussed everything in terms of making others same.

As if out of nowhere, Tachard (1688, 294) continues: "They also object to us that we cannot work many prodigies, which they pretend they can do, and are the Essence of Magick, because *Thevathat* having as little skill that way as in all the rest, he could not teach us. But tho *Thevathat* was not God, and that by consequence he had neither the agility nor subtilty of Body, nor the other perfections of Divinity, yet he excelled in several Sciences, especially in the Mathematicks and Geometry. Now as it is of him, if we'll take their word for it, that we have received these knowledges, it is no wonder if we be good Geometricians, and be perfectly well skilled in other arts." Thevathat and Christ are seen as the same figure, and Christianity is but an imperfect Buddhist teaching, while Occidentals have sciences too, but only some, those that the Buddha's brother excelled in. While in the mathematician's writing the lack of interest in scientific thought in Siam takes on an almost obsessive character, Tachard presents an account wherein the West is said to be less scientific than the East, which would explain the lack of interest on the basis of cosmology.<fnref n="186" /> Whatever the image European-

<footnote n="186">¹⁸⁶ This has come to be established as a common orientalist trope. (Hart 1999) The question of technology in Asia, especially China, but also globally has increasingly come to be approached with an image of the world that bypasses the immediate ideological positing of science as exclusively of Western descent – tracing the histories of knowledge-production is a messy affair. (Elshakry 2010, Fan 2012)</footnote>
descended societies came to create of what they projected as the non-scientific Other, worlds are composed of cultural techniques that at the very least operate analogously to sciences and engineering, otherwise their material realities wouldn't have looked the way they did and do. (Hui & Lemmens 2021) Difficulties in discerning systematic discourse on science and technology does not imply the absence of sophisticated techniques of how to intervene into the material composition of surroundings.

The monk figure in Tachard's story said: "In the new Doctrine which he published he foisted in a great many things, which he had taken out of his Brothers Religion: and that hath rendred both Laws so like one another in several points" and "[t]hey differ however, in that *Thevathats* Law is far less severe than that of *Sommonokhodom*; for it allows Men a great liberty of killing and eating Animals, tho the use of them be unlawful and criminal." (Ibid., 295) Dharma, the Law. Christianity is cast into Buddhist world-making: a law discovered and created by a sentient being which can accord with the universal law. Would a Christian talk about their 'religion' as a law? Indeed, the human-animal relation has been repeatedly addressed by Tachard. Earlier, he mentioned that, of course, Buddha and others have been and can be reborn as animals. And, while describing a sort of Siamese Ragnarok, end of worlds, he recounts: "Moreover these great Changes shall be observed in Beasts as well as men, and they shall degenerate by little and little. Nay, they have already lost the use of Speech, which, whilst God lived upon the Earth, was granted them through his Merits." (Ibid., 287) Animals here, and this is unknown in Buddhism as constructed by Western Buddhology, were once humans.<fnref n="187" /> Tachard doesn't expand on what came before humans had become so by being rewarded for their merits. What is evident, is that different cosmologies are mingling here (if we take that at least some of this isn't purely Tachard's invention) and that they need not be experienced as a mix of various cosmological frameworks by those living them.

The monk as main interlocutor proceeds to chastise Christians for it “enjoyns not Men to comfort and assist Beasts in their necessities.” (Ibid., 292) As is commonly known from Jātakas, the tales of Buddha's countless other rebirths (which point toward Buddha definitely not being all the time everywhere all at once) and suttas, Buddha offered himself or parts of himself repeatedly to animals to save them or their little ones. “They differ however, in that *Thevathats* Law is far less severe than that

<footnote n="187">¹⁸⁷ How this gradual, yet necessary decline fits in with the rebirth system, where one can become human and then animal and then human, is beyond me. It may be related to the notions of the gradual and necessary decline of dharma, the Three Ages of Dharma, known from Sino-Japanese medieval worlds. (Marra 1988)</footnote>
of *Sommonokhodom*; for it allows Men a great liberty of killing and eating Animals, tho the use of them be unlawful and criminal.” (Ibid., 295) Occidentals have until recently had much less qualms eating meat in general (however limited the access to lower classes) as animals were made by God for humanity. After the Siamese world's end recounted in the account, “[m]oreover these great Changes shall be observed in Beasts as well as men, and they shall degenerate by little and little. Nay, they have already lost the use of Speech, which, whilst God lived upon the Earth, was granted them through his Merits.” (Ibid., 287) Once again men and animals appear on the same level of existence. And “[t]hey gave liberty to Beasts, thinking them capable of good and evil, and worthy of punishment and reward.” (Ibid.) This seems a very Christian, yet still different way of thinking natureculture. Commonly, in a kammic system whatever happens to an animal is the result of past acts, not a question of free will in the here and now. Whatever the case, actually practiced human-animal relations or their conceptualizations form a part of the dispute, and are assigned to the incomplete teachings of Devadatta.

The locals are rather apathetic: “So when we would explain to them the Articles of our Faith; they take us always up short, saying that they do not need our Instructions, and that they know already better than we do, what we have a mind to tell them.” (Ibid., 297) It is however not just teachings as discourse that create this situation, but also imagery. And probably the most forceful image is when the issue of Christ on the cross is discussed. “That which most confirms them in their prejudice, is that we adore the Image of our Crucified Saviour, which plainly represents the punishment of *Thevathat*.” (Ibid., 297–8) Christ on the cross appears through the image of Thevathat. Not just that, the issue is that if someone is punished by dying on the cross, it means, that such a being cannot have been good: “They look upon these last as Rogues, whose Crimes make them deserve all kinds of Disasters. And thence proceeds the Horror which the *Siamese* have for the Cross of Christ. For, in short, do they answer when one speaks to them about that, if he had been a just man, his Justice and good Works would have saved him from the shameful punishment he suffered, and protected him from the fury of his Enemies.” (Ibid., 281) A short stop to think about this image, for it offers a ‘reverse anthropology’ of Christianity and the conception of sin. In the world we have here, a world where none have fallen but are reproduced in cycles of rebirth and entanglement with other beings, one man cannot make a sacrifice for all of humanity (thereby bringing forth a very specific concept of humanity). It is impossible to conceptualize. In all his rebirths, whenever the Buddha offers his life, it is in concrete
acts of kindness in delineated situations. Jesus on the cross has no clearly discernible cause for his extreme suffering, so he cannot have been but an evil-doer. Punishment inflicted by an authority is seen as legitimate, an earthly convention, for why would somebody who does good be punished so cruelly unless that sentient being, by virtue of being awakened and thus understanding the laws of kamma, chooses to undergo it to save another being. But only specific beings or groups, not the entirety of humankind through the ages before and after. Effects are always localized even as they resonate throughout the webs of interconnections. There is no universality from above. Buddha, through his own efforts conditioned by past lives, achieved an understanding of kammic laws, which did not fundamentally alter the shape of the universe, at least not in the singular yet universal way Christ did, but introduced teachings that will help others.

As for immanence, Tachard also grapples with a different understanding of heavens. “Angels are corporal, and as there are different Sexes amongst them, so they may beget Sons and Daughters. These Angels are never sanctified nor deified. It is their part only to take continual care of the Preservation of Men, and of the Government of the Universe.” (Ibid., 283) What is called angels here are no messengers of God (with uncertain ontological status). They are merely beings peopling a different, but not entirely separate realm. The life of angels or deities in Buddhist traditions is much more pleasant than that of humans and precisely because it is so pleasant, it makes it harder to perceive the truths about the world, especially the truth of suffering. This in turn makes it unlikely to turn into a situation wherein a being will reach a state conducive to awakening. “They acknowledg no other Devils but the Souls of the wicked, which coming out of hell where they were detained, for a certain time roam about the World, and do men all the mischief they can.” (Ibid.) This immanence puts the Devil into crisis too. Where does evil come from, when there is no Manichean devil or one merely secondary to the unqualified goodness of God?

Tachard further notes that the world is not created: “They reckon the Heaven and Earth to be uncreated and eternal, and cannot conceive how the World could ever have a beginning, or that it should have an end.” (Ibid.) All stars and planets are inhabited by particular angels. There is nothing outside of a materially conceived cosmos. However what constitutes matter can be rather different, although some sort of connection to sensory perception is necessary. Unexpectedly, this cosmology, at least as recounted by Tachard, is not of a round globe, but flat. In this flatness, water returns. It is all
around. Not everything in ancient texts can be made to speak to a contemporary audience.

## Connections

To come full, flat circle after countless detours, even if in the times I write about whites had not yet crossed the Pacific, the Jesuit company's representatives encountered otherness at all ends of the network. The encounters in the farthest reaches of the West have, through the works of Viveiros de Castro, become a *cause célèbre* beyond the confines of the field of anthropology in recent years. They have acquired a force of their own and are something to think with in manifold contexts. In many ways the immanent conception of the cosmos here bears resemblance to these Amerindian cosmologies encountered by whites around the same time. The Brazilian anthropologist mentions that “[h]umans and gods were consubstantial and commensurable” and that “humanity was a condition, not a nature.” (Viveiros de Castro 2011a, 30) Here, neither transcendence nor bad conscience (another of those tropes Judeo-Christians, especially psychologists, like to project onto the general human) was possible. And it is reminiscent of Asian worlds where humans, ghosts, deities, animals and all the other myriads of beings are not separated by an ontological gulf. He further writes, “[t]he Tupi could not conceive of the arrogance of a chosen people, or the compulsion to reduce the other to one’s own image.” (Ibid.) While Europeans saw the indigenous as animal-like labor power or potential Christians, the Tupi “desired the Europeans in their full alterity.” (Ibid.) Which here meant an anthropophagous relationality. Except of course, that Europeans in Siam would have been at best conceived as stranger-kings, or merely as one of the many trading contacts, and not the alter to be digested.<fnref n="188" /> They are, in the cosmology recounted by Tachard, not really other. They are already part of the cosmos, by virtue of being *Devadatta's* followers, even if one may wonder when this cosmology, detailed as it is, was created and how non-whites figure in it. “So relational affinity, not substantial identity, was the value to be affirmed. Let us recall that the ‘theology’ of some Tupian peoples gets formulated quite directly in the terms of a

<footnote n="188">¹⁸⁸ The relationship with the other however is incomparable to the Amerindian situation: “These were the central motor and main motif of the society, responsible for its centrifugal tendency. Mortal war to enemies and enthusiastic hospitality to Europeans, cannibal vengeance and ideological voracity – all expressed the same propensity and the same desire: to absorb the other and, in the process, to change oneself. (Therefore it was as much the case that the Tupinamba ‘wanted to turn White’ as it was that they wanted the Whites to turn Tupinamba. The Jesuit letters abound with complaints about bad Christians going native, entering into polygamous marriages with Indian women, killing enemies in the central square, taking ceremonial names, and even eating people.) Gods, enemies, and Europeans were figures of potential affinity, different transforms of an alterity that attracted and that needed to be attracted – an alterity without which the world would sink into indifference and paralysis.” (Viveiros de Castro 2011a, 31–2) No desire to absorb the other seems to be working in the region, rather to connect and make the best of it.</footnote>
sociology of exchange: the difference between gods and humans is explained in the language of a
marriage alliance, the same language that the Tupinamba employed to think about and incorporate their
enemies." (Ibid., 31) He also mentions the "refusal of personal mortality" (ibid., 32) which is
something that resonates in kammic worlds.

Bruno Latour mentions that one of the most baffling, or idiosyncratic aspects of the still very
Christian European atheist tradition is their “belief in belief,” something he argues is a category
mistake. (Latour 2005b, 33) It is indeed something the awareness of which arises in dealing with
literature on Asian traditions, not only in relation to Christianity as is Latour's concern. Researchers
insist that their objects of study ‘believe’ in Buddhas, bodhisattvas or ghosts, whereas people just live
in a world where they are present, much like other entities such as animals or bacteria, though perhaps
in different modes. Just because one has been socialized in a certain world doesn't make that one the
only reality. And in dealing with the world, senses play crucial roles. As indeed sense perception and
belief are something discussed by the Jesuits in Brazil: “I am far from thinking that the Arawete ‘do not
believe what they do not see;’ but they take great care to distinguish what they have seen from what
they have heard, and this distinction is especially marked in the case of cosmological information that
they give or request. I do not doubt that they believe in their shamans, but in a way that Vieira would
probably describe with the phrase, ‘even after they have come to believe, they are unbelieving.’ For it
certainly has no similarity to a revealed truth, and the notion of dogma is completely foreign to them.”
(Viveiros de Castro 2011a, 41) Similarly, the issue of seeing and not-seeing is important in Tachard's
account of what the monk told him – since *Thevathat* does not have all the teachings, his followers
cannot see what the Buddha can see. This is the general condition of the non-awakened, however, for
whites, the condition is doubled, since the source of their teaching can never reach correct perception.
In the Buddhist complex interplay of seeing/not seeing or absence/presence any concept of a ‘revealed
dogma’ makes little sense. The tradition is built on practices that help achieve something, and these
practices can, in theory at least, be discovered by anybody.

Viveiros de Castro writes that where there are no true believers, there can be no heretics. There
is no orthodoxy, just many different shamans. There's an analogy to be found in Buddhist and Hindu-
Buddhist world-making: Buddhist teachings are not organized around any kind of orthodoxy, but for
reasons of convenience around orthopraxy in the sangha, the community of monks. This regularization
is said to have practical origins, as say going on almsrounds at different times would be immediately detrimental for alms gathering. As for the formerly numerous forest monks, the situation was such that they were very different among themselves and charisma plus creativity play a large role in becoming a successful monk. (Tiyavanich 1997) To this a misconception by whites is related, one that has been ghosting at the edges of this text from the beginning: Jesuits operate with an image of power where if the king converts, the rest will follow. But given the ‘religious’ multiplicity and ritualist focus, this image and the worlds encountered were somewhat at odds, something that history confirmed. No significant circuits between them could be established, power or no power. Not all transformations or effects are possible at any given time. Conditions must be right. As has probably become apparent by now, no Westphalian *cuius regio, eius religio* makes sense here. As Portuguese missionaries noted about Siamese rulers, although he is second only to God (whatever God might refer to here), he is not the lord of souls, but only of bodies, and hence doesn't force any tradition onto the populace. (Alberts 2013) A ruler might introduce new rites, techniques and symbols that seem powerful and useful to him, though not at the expense of all that was before. One might presume that if something new is introduced by the powerful and prestigious, it will travel easier and spread among the populace; unless it is prohibited in order to create class-difference, then it might travel as parodic variants. The making the other same is never total (as secular Christians would have it in their projective habits) in Buddhist or other such teachings. Otherness is a matter of establishing connections and with it new tools to deal with this world. Accordingly, Siam was and continues to be a place of confluence of influences. (Siani 2018) The thought experiments of Tachard and the mathematician, however much they appear to sincerely draw on local knowledge, are necessarily enmeshed with their own conventions. Yet, this is why their reading today is so generative, the encounters clearly rendered their own reality in a new light, making evident that some things taken for granted can be very different. This is what makes it legitimate to treat the two as proto-anthropologists, which in turn generates interesting resonances with other encounters with difference.

The expanding *nomos* of the West continued to have troubles convincing anybody of its imagined essential superiority. An open, inquisitive attitude toward Western teachings and technologies appears to have existed, and indeed Buddhist tradition specifically is said to stress that one ought to experiment to verify what works and what doesn't. The in many ways fundamental incompatibility of approaches was remarked upon by others:
The *talapoints* never dispute with anybody about religion. Talk to them of the Christian or any other religion, they approve whatever you say of it. But when a man offers to find fault with their religion, they answer coldly: "I have been so complaisant to approve of your religion, why do you then not approve of mine?" This was written in the *Memoirs of the count de Forbin*, who was also part of diplomatic missions to Siam in the late 17th century. About two hundred years later, the ambassador to King Mongkut Sir John Bowring noted other Siamese objections: "If God be the father of us all, why did he not reveal His will to Eastern as well as Western nations? ... If miracles were worked out to convert your forefathers, why do you not work miracles to convert us? ... How are we to know that your books are true? You tell us so, and we tell you our books are true; and why do you not believe us, if you expect us to believe you?" (van der Cruysse 2002, 141)

Bowring was told that in different countries spring different religions, and one cannot tell which is right or wrong, but it would be nice to pray for blessing to all or at least your respective gods. This is a logic of the ‘and’ – it is better to add deities than to subtract. An unknown Jesuit of the 17th century expressed his irritation at the locals in less than pleasant words:

> Each person gives his own reasons for this extraordinary inflexibility of the Siamese, but all agree that the extreme stupidity of these people and the beliefs they hold from the priests of their idols are the two principle causes. The desire to learn, so natural in man, seems entirely extinguished in the souls of these barbarians. They have no taste for painting; they are without curiosity for the mysteries of mathematics; they set little value on watches and those kinds of jewels which are the passion of all other nations in the Indies and which provided the first entry for all the missionaries of the Gospel to all the kings of the Orient. (Ibid.)

One can but wonder who it is here that is without curiosity and perhaps fold this wonder back onto one's own research practice. I merely hope that this text has offered an account of a very different cosmos, one that explains part of the radical difference between these two worlds that had been in indirect and direct contact for quite some time. Tachard is here, to me, a 'true' anthropologist in
Wagner's sense for he, unlike countless others, attempted to understand difference as difference and thanks to that he created concepts, images, and narratives which show his own Christian tradition in an entirely different light. They are transformative. These encounters, as those in the very south of Latin America, or those in Chinese cities or on the shores of the Caribbean, were not symmetric, as each participating side understood the other somewhat differently. After all, and I paraphrase Viveiros de Castro (2014) here, the other of the Other is never exactly the same as the other of the Same. On the one hand a cosmos which has to make everything the same, on the other one where difference, change and variety is the stuff of life. And everybody seemingly, albeit differently wanting a piece of the economic pie. In the midst a Jesuit who creates a partial mirror in which there is a world, where his own tradition is but a subset of the teachings of the *Talapoins*.

As the research on the past has drawn almost exclusively on texts, written at that by people not particularly aware of technologies, media and other non-human conditionings, the nexus of media and Wagnerian culture has become a distant variant. It will now return as the focal point turns toward the speculative present and future.
Future Is Now
18. Karmanetics: A Media Theoretical Recoding of Buddhist Ontogenesis

This is an experimental act of reframing and redescribing.<fnref n="189" /> Instead of the common practice where a researcher or lay enthusiast points out that this or that doesn't make sense, is or isn't compatible with (a monolithic conception of) science or doesn't fulfill the criteria of Western feminism and morality, these pages are built on precisely those moments where logic seems to break down. This is where thought happens and what such fragmentation enables is to put into question the common Western framework within which Buddhism is created. What is kept as stable as possible is the prospect of a Buddhist worlding and what is exchanged is the modern Western ontological framework typically projected as inevitable. Instead a framework constructed from media theory and other fields that enable non-representational operativity is generated. A central challenge when dealing with Buddhist potentialities as put into words has always been that words seem to project a stable world, while Buddhist teachings affirm primary change. Habitually, this meant that Buddhist truths are ultimately ungraspable by language. However with new conceptual tools at disposal a more fluid world can be written. What connects many critical theories and Buddhist thought is the challenge of putting into words and concepts something that eludes such stabilization. This is what makes certain philosophies so challenging to engage. Thought occurs where certainty and habit break down and the entire infrastructure and imaginary have to be reconstructed. Practitioners of classical Buddhist studies and their unconscious ontological projections might find themselves bewildered. Countless elements of worlds are brought into contact with Buddhist thought that are outside of what is typically taken for granted. This leads to a transformation of the entire infrastructure of Buddhist worlding or Buddhaverse, as well as the one derived from the contemporary theories that are actualized. Any reception, any thought occurs in specific historical conditions of complexity that make it possible as well as limit it. Complexity is such that things don't line up neatly and can't be fully grasped – the illusion thereof arises from the practice that just assumes primary coherence which precludes any efforts to actually trace the conditions from which one thinks and acts. Once the position of a thinker is included in thought, once the conditions of research become part of research, all becomes dynamic. The world (in general and as a body's affordances) is changing continuously, multitudes of new objects and concepts and possibilities have appeared and made it into scientific imagination – few of them have

<footnote n="189">¹⁸⁹ The development of the chapter has been heavily conditioned by the media theorist Christopher Vitale's blog *Networkologies*, particularly the posts on all things Buddhist. It is the first time, countless years ago, I encountered an engagement with Buddhist tradition outside of the dominant individualist, humanist framework.</footnote>
made it into the worlds that engage Buddhadharma. The writing here is a correction thereof and came
as a necessity as the impossibilities and limitations inbuilt into the ontological presuppositions
disclosed themselves as irreformable face to face with how Buddhadharma as well as other worldings
developed. As with many fields, once they are firmly established feedback circuits are closed off or
minimized. As institutions and definitions are mostly settled, once fluid and emerging categories and
objects of thought become heavy with world, they become real and appear as given or simply existing
by themselves (in some parts of the world). Most research that remains based in disciplinary divisions
turns to be surface play of signifiers, scholastic debates that can't touch the reality of things, critique of
categories that can run on endlessly, for critique produces itself, without leading to any material-
semiotic reorganization of matters: critical approaches (not just in Buddhist and religious studies)
demonstrate the contingency of foundational categories and finish at that. In other words, they remain
idealist in practice even if they are based in materialist analyses. And even within the general scheme of
being only as thought, as contemplation, the encounters with otherness that are staged don't impinge on
the infrastructure of thought, on the basic constituents of the Moderns such as projective universalism,
a neutral ground or the human as individual preexisting any other reality. Critiques point out that such
entities are not universal, but in order to actually change anything, it is necessary to work out
alternatives.<fnref n="190" /> The following pages are a speculative discursive materialization of such a project. The
point is to reorient thought in such a way so as to cut habitual ties to what is taken to exist
(representational thought based in identity) and instead attempt to let future possibilities actively enter
into what is being put together. The former, the reality as is, those categories that are already
established enter anyways, they have been made part of the world, their weight, their reality exhibits a
pull on any speculation that arises from thorough engagement with what is – speculation that emerges
from frictions and fractions, speculation propelled by resistances, speculation that is materialist in the
sense that materials (however composed) are confronted in ways that makes new
connections/combinations arise. A democratic research practice in that it doesn't try to hide its own
operations, its own propagation of some things in the world as given and others as subject to change.<fnref n="191" />

<footnote n="190">¹⁹⁰ For example by taking the Buddha and some Buddhist propositions for thought as given (such as dhamma, Thai ghosts, bidhikamma), as existing, instead of inquiring into their reality (i.e. historizicing, relativizing them), I can build an alternative to the practice of taking the categories of Moderns as given (including entities such as society, culture, morality, universalism, nature vs. culture, the self-congratulatory image of scientificity and rationality, many of which are clearly Christianity-derived) thereby destabilizing their naturalization. In this I follow scholars such as Viveiros de Castro (2014).</footnote>

<footnote n="191">¹⁹¹ This is precisely what decolonial framings lay bare: the modern constitution silently propagates itself through engagements with its others. On the surface it pretends to be open while the actual operations remain closed to the Other.</footnote>
Preliminaries

*Karma* has no equivalent in contemporary languages formed in the Greco-Christian tradition.<fnref n="192" /> Indo-European onomastics is obviously not everything. There is more to languages and worlds. Productive limitations all too often unacknowledged. Translations transform it into action and its effect. Or possibly also work or deed and consequence. Already connections are multiplying. Continue pretending words of different worlds neatly map onto each other and cut off the networks of associations and philosophical uses they have. Other research practices are possible. Buddhist teachings add one more element into the mix, it's action-effect driven by *cetanā*, intention. Karma accumulates to yield fruits, that is have effects. Accumulative effects of internal causes (*hetu*) come to be expressed under according conditions, or rather external causes (*pratyaya*).

The word cybernetics is composed of two parts, with unsurprisingly attic linguistic origins, drawn from Platonic dialogues, of parts that have had little influence on so-called Western thought until recently. *Kybernētikē* meaning all that pertains to governing, navigating, steering. Ancient Greeks were of course famous (for everyone but philosophers) for their seafaring capabilities and as merchants, and hence kept establishing transformative connections with others. However much that is ignored by the majoritarian edifice of philosophy and the image of Ancient Athens in favor of some culturally monolithic fantasy of patriarchal exclusionary democracy that still remains dominant in society at large.<fnref n="193" /> The science studies scholar Andrew Pickering (2011) points out how there were immediate connections in early cybernetics and cyberneticists’ ideas of/influence by so-called ‘Eastern traditions.’ Research as active philosophical engagement of similarities and differences, connections and crosspollinations meanwhile has been rather meager (Varela et al. 1991; Macy 1991; Varela & Poerksen 2006; Garland 2007; Shen & Midlgey 2007a, 2007b, 2007c; Moussavi 2010; also Pickering 2017 gestures in this direction) – as expected given the division of labor infrastructured by the separation and consolidation of disciplines. This here is a speculative writing of connections between karmic operators and cybernetics, mediated by the concept of *pratītyasamutpāda*. What is shared is a conception of the world that is generated through connections, where humans are a mere subset, and what we see is

<footnote n="192">¹⁹² As this chapter is thought to speak most decidedly to a general discourse on things Buddhist, I will use the Sanskrit derived versions of words as they are commonized, while in other chapters, as mentioned in the preliminaries, I employ Pali derived versions so as to stress the connection to the Thai fields I have been intellectually cultivating.</footnote>

<footnote n="193">¹⁹³ For an alternative framing of the Ancient Greek world, one that is organized around openness and based on the Ionian coasts and islands of Anatolia, see Karatani (2017).</footnote>
brought about via a generative matrix of experience. With *karmanetics*, Buddhadharma additionally actualizes in the crucial problematic of what a body perceives and how reliable sense impressions are. In the ever-changing matrix of emergence, nothing is and isn't entirely ever what is seems, as it is a result of complex webs of causes and conditions, temporarily appearing as stable to the body that experiences it. Another crucial distinction is that with *karmanetics*, karmic processes take the function of navigator, and they don't tend toward centralization.

What is operationalized here is a way of composing a text and the thought it makes possible that is rather distant from the cultural techniques of Buddhist tradition.<fnref n="194" /> There thought happens through sūtras and oral preaching, as well as non-discursive imagery, architecture and practices.<fnref n="195" /> The way modern writing and thinking operate is very different. An almost necessary ontologization happens, as the aim is for a coherent and consistent rendering of how the world works, albeit perhaps only in a small subset of the world. Buddhist teachings tend to be integrated in such a way to not destabilize basic unquestioned tenets, which shows among other things in the way research is written. New avenues must be sought instead. This here is one such possibility, a proposition say. As will be demonstrated, full coherence is impossible, and so the text itself cannot add up to any whole. But then, what does, once a sentient leaves behind the cultural presupposition of preexisting wholes. The Buddha was wary of those practices that betray a craving for certainty such as logical proofs. Hence the proclivity for paradox, even by the great Buddhist so-called logicians who demonstrate the impossibility of ultimate stability.

Buddhist thought is organized around practice and achieving effects, so in general not written/shared 'ontologically' as in being composed in a way toward coherence of an integrated system, clear descriptions of a world external to the words put together. Habit is what ties bodies to cycles of rebirth, even matter can be conceptualized as habit of energy. At one time habits were innovations, it is their success in a world that makes them coalesce into something that appears as a necessity. The tools developed by the various Buddhist traditions aim to introduce breaks in habits. This is eminently practical, regardless of the conceptual and imageric complexities achieved. What 'we' Western

<footnote n="194">¹⁹⁴ Buddhist tradition uses the term *saṅkhāra/saṃskāra* translated as formations, or ‘that which has been put together’ and ‘that which puts together.’ It refers both to conditioned things (that is all aggregates in the world) and more specifically to mental formations based on past conditions creating future ones, and as such relates to karma and dependent origination. There are countless alternative translations of the term. (Waldron 2003, 102–12) In short, composition, formation, fabrication and related concepts are integral to the tradition.</footnote>

<footnote n="195">¹⁹⁵ And presumably everyday dialogues, which remain inaccessible for scientific appropriation.</footnote>
Buddhist researchers (and practitioners arguably) do, is transform a tradition into the mediatic coding of a different kind of thought-practice, while most keep pretending (the obedient bourgeois idealists they are) that the way a thought is written, stored and passed on has no impact on that thought for matter and thought are considered a priori separate. What operates here is the assumption that words represent the world and more or less perfectly map onto it, and that translating from other languages and other forms does not lead to any significant transformation or difference (otherwise philology and linguistics would have moved on to a generative or connective model of translation or non-representational linguistic models). Not only the world is untouched by words, ideas are conceived as stable entities represented by words, and as is the world, they too are unchanged by translation into a different language and the cosmology it actualizes. It is commonly pretended that writing Buddhist teachings organized around entirely different principles of putting arguments together, more often than not vacating the thought of as much imagery as possible (the modern Puritans with their imperial illusions of a neutral language!) somehow does not constitute a major recoding on innumerable levels.<fnref n="196" /> This text too is a recoding, albeit one that acknowledges this process and the creativity inherent in translating worlds. It is an affirmation of the force of different traditions of thought and the possibilities that connecting them open up, hopefully on equal grounds and not as has been customary in the Modern constitution, as a one-way street. Connection is transformation.

## An Improper Manifesto

1. The world is never finished. Karma begets karma. Act(ion) begets act(ion). There is no clear division between objective world out there and subjective one in here. Imaging and imagining are and are not the same.<fnref n="197" /> Karma is always at work. The world has always existed. When all is connected nothing just

<footnote n="196">¹⁹⁶ This is a tradition, a thought suffused with mandalas, parables, colors, beings and architectures, a thought in which even a unit of measurement begets a story, all intimately connecting to material practices. A profoundly material manner of constructing time: *kalpa* as a measurement of time is defined by a monk walking in circles around a boulder, his coat swiping the boulder every once in a while because of a rare breeze; when the stone erodes to dust completely by nothing but those occasional gentle sweeps, a single *kalpa* has passed. It is pregnant with this potential, as not all is actual in all variations of the endlessly developing tradition. These potentialities can be discerned retroactively as new things appeared and patterns that keep repeating demonstrate the dormant powers in the more straightforwardly pragmatic versions.</footnote>

<footnote n="197">¹⁹⁷ “On a day-to-day basis, we, as human beings, often consider imaging as an operation of the consciousness, a process in which vision – our neurological system’s bare cognition of a field of photons – is turned into recognition. Thus, the resulting image out there confirms our knowledge of reality, sense-certainty and subjectivity. The image, and the sentient body that images, are also believed to have their own existential values. Meanwhile, imagining is considered a mental process that relies on memories of previous perceptions and recognitions, seemingly without the aid of any external sensorial stimulations. The resulting imagination, or even the imagining mind, appears to be ungraspable, transient and non-existent. However, what makes us so certain that those sense data that we claim as being external to our body, which</footnote>
begins and ends.

2. There is a speculative potential to be accessed in the way Buddhist dependent arising would describe the world. Propose a description of the world. Think with an ephemerally acentral networking continuously transforming imagination that offers no ultimate ground. One from which the One is not even thinkable, as all is immediately many. No tower of Babel in sight and neither the image of tracing the language-ethnicity complex to a single origin which so persistently keeps organizing much of modernity.<fnref n="198" /> One where localities are intensified interdependence enmeshed.<fnref n="199" /> One where perception is the effect of such ties of the past composing into the present future. The common mistranslation when reworking the Buddhist cosmos is automatically filling in an image of reality as given and preexisting the human as a general, substantive category. All the while, the two truths (dvasatya/dvasacca) state clearly that what is seen by a human body composed of the six senses is a karmic construction. Imagining and imaging are distinct and inseparable operators. A generative tension in Buddhist worlding as practical conundrum: one shouldn't cling, but only something relatively stable will enact the difference for controlled transformation. And, in a variation, how to use conventional pointers without making them into/treating them as independently stable ground. Change is relative to the position of a body. Absolute change, pure transformation, cannot be grasped by a common body. (Deleuze & Guattari 1994)

3. There are two truths.<fnref n="200" /> What is commonly described is what is seen, that is the conventional truth. Here, countless sentient beings reborn as humans make category mistakes: they project their own conditioned perception as a general one, the same for all the world (naive realism). They think: what I see is reality independent of my bodily constitution. Body, self and world are treated as disconnected. The second truth, called ultimate, says all reality is empty of inherent characteristics. In other words, it

<footnote>constitute the difference between imaging and imagining, are not part of our imagination?” (Fan 2020, 364)</footnote>

<footnote n="198">¹⁹⁸ By now, multiple origins, but the principle remains as well as the orientation of attention toward past linguistic commonality to the detriment of continuing creativity and interaction. Nowhere is this more strongly felt than in Indo-European linguistics. What world could be if linguistics and philology would start building their theories and implicit assumptions on indigenous languages of the Americas or Africa?</footnote>

<footnote n="199">¹⁹⁹ The complexity of interdependence in a node (body+location/internal+external cause) of pratītyasamutpāda, if viewed from there, increases (at least before the recent technological transformations of the world). While a body as karmacode in a distant location might be connected through pasts, bodies surrounding each other in the present necessarily co-create shared karma to much larger degrees than more distant ones.</footnote>

<footnote n="200">²⁰⁰ A distinction is made between the conventional, common sense language (*saṃvṛti/saṃmuti*) and ‘ultimate’ language (*paramārtha/paramattha*). Common language employs metaphors and doesn't directly express higher truths. One might be aware of related uses of linguistic distinction in the uses of common language and philosophical or generally research conventions, as well as the unfortunate convention of many, even among researchers, mistaking the one for the other.</footnote>
is non-perceptible, for perception by common sentient beings reifies and makes appear as stable, what
is actually changing. Bodies are conditions and limits. As for what the Awakened perceive, it's hard to
access for the common body. So this here is a speculative proposition, a redescription of the world
where all that appears conventionally takes on different operations when put in relation to dependent
arising networks. Phenomena that appear to a perceiving body are not the ultimate reality.<fnref n="201" /> "However,
Buddhists acknowledge that, because the 'right' view needs to be locally defined, different views of
rightness will exist. Therefore, overcoming ignorance is an ongoing process requiring dialogue, not an
end state that can be achieved once and for all." (Shen & Midgley 2007a, 179) Thus there is more (or
less), there are no entities/objects/things/concepts in general, all are local occurrences secondarily
subsumed into categories for practical reasons, namely communication.<fnref n="202" />

4. All is determined that is conditioned and hence empty of own-being (svabhāva/sabhāva):
"For Buddhist scholars, all forms are initiated and extinguished, from one moment to another, from a
layout of interdependent relationships. Hence, forms are by definition empty of existential values. The
substrate-form divide is therefore a logical violation of this axiom." (Fan 2022, 7) The general law of
dependent co-arising (pratītyasamutpāda) lays out a pure relationality as all emerges in an
interconnected process of becoming. Causality here is complex and non-linear. Common sense
causality, even in societies that operationalize karmic knowledge, is but a simplification of this
complexity. Alternative translations of pratītyasamutpāda include interdependent origination or
interbeing. Because everything arises interdependently, all that is depends on other parts and as such is
impermanent (anicca, anitya). A mental experiment: if only one thing changes, as all is connected,
indirectly all others will change as well. All things then are empty of essence or intrinsic nature
(asvabhāva). Dharma is both "universal cosmic law [...] and corrective process [...] both the source of
cosmic order and a means of liberation from the world." (Olson 2006, 80) Dharma as teaching is the
corrective process, and when thought in this way, it becomes evident that Buddhadharma is about
intervening into the constitution of the cosmos as well as employing an accurate description of some of
its processes, so as to increase the intervention's effectivity. Meanwhile karma can be taken as a subset
of the general law of causality and dependent arising. It is the one where cetanā or

<footnote n="201">201 Anātman/anattā commonly rendered as the doctrine of no-self or more precisely without self-existent essence, relates to all bodies, not just the human subject. An indicator, if anything, of an an-anthropocentric conception of the world. Any focus on subjectivity has practical reasons, as it is the position from which a common sentient being necessarily experiences world.</footnote>

<footnote n="202">202 Innovators such as Nāgārjuna excelled at playing games with categories/concepts, at using language against itself, demonstrating their emptiness and their arbitrary relation to an outside of discourse. (Waldo 1975)</footnote>
intention/volition/directionality combines with causes. Directionality is a potent image to think with. As acts including intentions appear continuously – a world on auto-pilot producing this complex connective tissue that binds – but only when the directions match, when there is an overlap, is karma specifically generated, otherwise it's just the regular entanglement in dependent arising. Here, the singular mind-body enters the scene. Causality is expanded by an element and at the same time somewhat reduced as intention must combine with a given action. If anything, it is an intra-action.<fnref n="203" /> One must be cautious to not immediately insert the concept of a subject or individual, for this remains a world built on discrete but relational units of actions or acts combining in different ways, making the subject experience an effect. The experiment here is to reframe in such a way that the common experience of subjectivity will disappear. Karma as a sort of memory of the universe, as well as a personal trail, that is subset of the cosmic karma. An externalization or coding of what remains of acts (past) that condition new acts (present/future).<fnref n="204" /> In short, *karmacode*.

5. All is determined and not determined. The anthropologist Alan Klima (2002) paints a picture, a differentiation between humans and animals. Sentient beings share an a priori connection by virtue of karmic operations. This does not have to be thought as primary connection and secondary (bodily) difference – if multiplicity is applied, then it becomes possible to conceive sentients as at the same time sharing a connection and being different. Commonly, humans remain determined by passions, yet there are those enacting correct practices to eventually escape that determination. In other words, enact a break with habit. So, first, the composed, composing, decomposing entity (always changing) that is a body with the emerging self-image (based on the interaction of the five senses and mind) has to be mostly determined (*saṃsāra*), otherwise what good is all that which the Buddha discovered? One would find oneself in a world where the concept of the subject is self-positing as in Euro-modernity. But no, Buddhist teachings show the relationality of all. *Pratītyasamutpāda*. Nets or webs that link past action to present in various degrees of complexity, indirectness and delay.<fnref n="205" /> Which is one of the many

<footnote n="203">203 Unlike ‘interaction’ which postulates bodies existing before participation in mutual action and with that action as an inherent property of a body to be exercised, ‘intra-action’ conceives of agency as a dynamism of forces where all entities are constantly diffracting, mutually causing and inseparably operating. (Barad 2007, 141)</footnote>

<footnote n="204">204 This can be famously modulated and further entangled with contemporary practices such as merit generation and merit transference. It's like hacking into a local memory carrier (hard disk) connected to the vast and growing world wide web to change the information, which leads to a transformation of the whole web. Said hacking of course being conditioned by the web in the first place.</footnote>

<footnote n="205">205 In Japanese Buddhist worldings, *pratyaya*, external causes, are translated as *En*, and explicitly employ the imagery of webs: “More broadly, en connotes ties or relations (*enishi*), invisible orders beyond human knowledge, which form webs around all things in the universe. One can neither predict nor comprehend the design and work of en. However, though usually invisible, the threads that connect humans and nonhumans may be brought to attention through unexpected</footnote>
places doctrinal disputes set in. “The actions we do, with our feet and hands as well as with our mouths and meanings, indeed, even with our thoughts and intentions, leave traces on the spirit, leave their imprints in the heart, and echo long after in the mind. Most people have some awareness of this causative relationship.” (Klima 2002, 270) The anthropologist draws on a scene an orange-robed monk once used to explain the operation. In this text it is recoded into a different kind of language than used in the reference and refracted, splitting into more versions as each thing is a multiplicity. It is here that different worlds are created, in the scenes that are used for thought and become common in a society's imaginary. It must be pointed out: which Greco-Abrahamic entity has ever thought with an example composed in this way? It is the scenes to think with, to do ‘empirical philosophy’ with that come to form different worlds, and the intuitive manners thought composes will differ. (Mol 2002, 2021) A further unspecified human kicks a dog. This splits into two possibilities, two futures. The human feels bad, has some (refined) sense of consequences. Doesn't feel bad, goes on kicking, over time becomes increasingly less sensitive to suffering (that which Buddhist teachings want to eliminate), unpleasant feelings stop arising when causing suffering to others, this insensitivity making it less likely to notice what is being done to the mind, eventually if enough repetitions occur one's character becomes changed in this direction and more and more such acts will be committed leading further down the insensitivity path and so on and so on.<fnref n="206" /> Acts beget acts and give rise to feelings and perceptions, all conditioned by the past. The past as actions already done coded according to the laws of karma, driven into the future. Acts of futures past. A different human feels bad about kicking the dog. Insight arises and next time the human and the dog meet, perhaps no such direct suffering is perpetuated as self-control is enacted. Other solutions to the annoyance of a barking dog sought. Which eventually accumulates to different habits and a different set of past actions comes coded as that which this human has come to be.<fnref n="207" /> “In the Buddhist reckoning of kamma, thoughts piled one atop the other eventually spill over and become intentions. Intentions piled up become actions. Actions accumulated become habits; habits amassed become character, and a character sustained becomes a destiny. In this model, significantly, generosity is skillful: it gives you beneficial thoughts, beneficial intentions, and leads to beneficial actions, habits,

<footnote>meetings. Actualized through chance and coincidence, en forms the reason (*kotowari*) behind all things in the universe.” (Jensen et al. 2016, 160) Though there has been no systematic study of cosmic net/web imagery in Buddhist traditions, there have appeared very popular image-concepts such as Indra's net already in the Indic tradition.</footnote>

<footnote n="206">²⁰⁶ This is a principle that works regardless of how any individual act is classified.</footnote>

<footnote n="207">²⁰⁷ “Habituation is when thoughts and actions become ingrained and automatic, while de-habituation involves the interruption and removal or replacement of habituated behaviors. Habituating forces come from action (karma) and its residues (*vasana*; *samskara*) while de-habituating forces come from analytical insight (*vipasyana*). Liberation comes from removing cognitive, perceptual and emotional limitations, which can be achieved by a process of contemplative exercises, including meditations.” (Shen & Midgley 2007a, 172)</footnote>
to a beneficial character and, eventually, to a destiny.” (Klima 2002, 270–1) These are ideal-type cases
at each end of the spectrum of possibilities. In the flux of life, all kinds of action mix, and often
whether it is wanted or not a habit will undermine good intentions. Karma is habit in a sense, though
conceptualized more broadly than just pertaining to bodies. And the dog? A slight reframing of the
focus in the scene yields a complex answer: *karmacodes* entangle, hitting and being hit connect (to)
two different bodies. The canine too comes to be different by being hit, by which past bad actions are
undone. The boundary between (non)self and other is muddled, as in complex feedback loops actions
on others beget actions on future selves. It matters which scenes are used to think with. It matters which
parts of the scene are used to think with.

Non-human animals here have less options than humans, as they are more intuitive meaning
directly influenced by stimuli, by their immediate surroundings. One could say, more in line with
contemporary science and in a variation on von Uexküll and Bergson, that the higher the complexity of
a sentient being, the more of a potential gap is there between input and output of action. This is the
‘center of indetermination’ articulated by Deleuze (1986, 62). “Free or indeterminate actions are ones
delay re-action, meaning that action is no longer restricted to a present one that is always beginning
again.” (Pearson 2005, 1116) It is in this spacing that the transformation usually coded as learning
occurs.<fnref n="208" /> A dog learns too, even if different breeds learn differently, and might stop perpetrating the
action that led to her being hit. An action, viewed from the middle, from within the action is not so
clear. On its one end, it might be karmically bad, on the other good, as it is negating past bad karma.
Media theoretical shifts in perspective, explorations of a scene, enable new thought, such that is not
contained in the Buddhist canon, yet remains Buddhist insofar as it explores manifestly Buddhist
scenes, connections and concepts.

6. So there is determination, via repetition/accumulation as *karmacode*, but also something in outside of it, a sort of disengagement from karmic cycles. Where is such indeterminacy located? “And no one could survive very long without some ability to detach from cycles of kamma. They would just

<footnote n="208">²⁰⁸ Spacing here occurs as spacetime relative minimization of direct causation of some elements. It has nothing to do with an empty space of nothingness as conceived in Occidental tradition. It is however consistent with emptiness of Buddhist teachings as emptiness points to a dynamic made possible by everything having no essence, thereby being continuous change and the making and unmaking of connections. The conditions of such spacing can be thought as overdetermination, in the sense that because karma is so complex, there will necessarily be internal causes that in certain external causes contra-act each other, thereby enabling almost imperceptible changes that can eventually add up into a systematic redirecting.</footnote>
follow their first impulse and, who knows – splat – be hit by a car because they saw an ice cream stand across the road.” (Klima 2002, 270) Animals and humans under the spell of their immediate desires and whims, or alcohol and other substances that take away the distance to surrounding conditions (social conventions can be included here) afforded by a body as sense-mediation, will be more tightly bound by these cycles and with it immediate reactions to stimuli. The indeterminacy however is stochastic, it can appear anywhere – the difference would be in whether or not constantly appearing indeterminacies will eventually accumulate into a divergent path. Spacing between action (external) and reaction (internal). Generally local conditions and personal *karmacode*. All is entangled. The Buddha found ways out of this determination. These are encoded into the world as Buddhist teachings. As technically, part of the dharma is beyond language (for language reifies and cannot fully communicate the dharma, and as such, cannot ever be fully representational), all manner of practice is necessary.

7. As there is indetermination, paths are multiple. This much is obvious in the path of the Buddha and the different ways to achieving nirvana by humans, the *pratyekabuddha/paccekabuddha*, ‘a buddha on their own,’ being particularly intriguing to think with. Those that inadvertently walk the path of this ‘solitary Buddha’ or *pratyekabuddhayāna*, achieve liberation from the cycles of karma on their own without a teacher. Insight can be achieved because that is the way of the world, though this insight might be accidental (from the position of the practitioner) compared to doing so following Buddhadharma and connecting to the institutions that ought to support its transmission. There is something in the world that makes it unpredictable. *Pratyekabuddhas* have a crucial limitation – they cannot teach the dharma and usually are considered to appear only once the teachings have been lost. Only those that attained the omniscience and supreme compassion through complete awakening (*samyaksaṃbodhi/sammā-sambodhi*) may do so. Attaining nirvana by oneself doesn’t generate supreme insight into the workings of the world in ways that can be shared. Correct dharmic knowledge, the one attained by the Buddha, increases certainty<fnref n="209" /> and enhances the personal path far beyond the borders of the incessantly composing individual *karmacoded* body.

8. In a Buddhist world where all occurrences/events have a cause, condition and effect, the

<footnote n="209">²⁰⁹ Even when guided, much more so when without a teacher, practices such as meditation (even more common ones) are dangerous for the body, after all, they aim at radical restructuration of all elements: “As I have explained in the incident of the crazed monk, I have witnessed people go into nervous breakdowns, for lack of better words, during the practice of Buddhist corpse meditation, including what clinicians might identify as psychotic hallucinations and fantasies. At the temple there is a short but significant history of the meditators whose ‘minds cracked’ (*sati taeg*), as they term it, at the sight of meditation imagery; most of them never recovered.” (Klima 2002, 203)</footnote>
problem of how to relate these, especially given that past karmic conditions or *pratītyasamutpāda* networks aren't immediately cognitively accessible. (Shih 2000) A body must practice attention and attunement through repetition and thereby transform so as to improve the understanding of world and change one's relation to these known and unknown determinations. A localized body (only Buddhas and bodhisattvas achieve delocalization through omniscience and universal compassion) needs to constantly update their image of the world of causes past, present and future, and the relation between all elements. Karma may be produced and work automatically, but gathering indeterminacies into a larger effect is anything but. “Cause is the ‘inner’ (or immediate) requirement, while conditions are the ‘outer’ (or contextual) requirements for the effect. Therefore, in Buddhism, the cause is primary and the condition is the secondary requirement leading to the effect.” (Shen & Midgley 2007a, 177)

The two truths are always a messy affair from the position of the unawakened. Cause, condition, effect, while distinct, relate directly and are hence inseparable. In their daily lives humans perceive the limited causes afforded by conventional tradition and remain reluctant to explore further, to unearth greater complexities, including their own actively contributing position within the configuration. Tacitly separating one's own actions from an external situation, as if they were not connected, is all too common. The ‘self’ position remaining unmarked, conceptualized as neutral, invisible. Misapprehending the complexities of interbeing tends to shorten the time-spans within which the world is conceptualized, with only that which appears as most direct causes and conditions of the past are taken into account and projected onto the future. The arbitrary cuts a tradition or culture enacts between the elements that can be related in the world and those posited as outside of reach, as eternal, ahistorical, Natural, Other or simply too insignificant to heed (within a naturalist framework) are what guides attention and leads to illusory projections of what the world is like. In itself this is the condition of *samsara* and not an unsurmountable hurdle. It becomes a problem when it comes to be mistaken for the entire world that is reified, to use a popular critical term. When what a singular human perceives in the world is swapped for the world itself, when the ego projects its particular condition onto universality.

9. Actions make deliberate things happen when cause and condition are favorable. “If the cause and conditions are not propitious, no matter how hard one tries, nothing will happen through the simple exercise of choosing a particular path. It must be emphasized, however, that Buddhist thinking does not
accept the idea of ‘destiny,’ because if all has been decided by destiny, nothing would exist that has not
been foreordained, and there would be no purpose in evaluating actions as right or wrong.” (Shen &
Midgley 2007a, 180) If all were destined, there would be no indeterminacy. If all were destined the
slow accumulation of a different path through small repetitions guided by correct teachings would be
unfeasible. Indeterminacy is possible, because the world is not finite, not a closed set, and not
happening in one timeline, but rather time as myriad rivers of whirls, rapids, forkings and
reconnections. The future would be closed, or at the very least if these were the teachings, sentient
beings wouldn’t be motivated to improve. Past actions have been completed and their effects will
eventually come to fruition. The future however is ever so slightly open, with the relational conditions
of the webs that bring about reality in general and a subject’s in particular. All that is caused is itself
cause. All that is caused is impermanent. Reality is an effect of past actions and perpetually
transforming.

10. Reality in the Buddhism of Western worlds is often associated with illusion. Yet, not all illusions are made the same or of the same stuff. Different cosmologies bring with them varied conceptions of illusion. Different worlds compose of varied elements and different mixtures of material and immaterial parts. The illusion here is not one created by a demi-urge to mislead humans on their road to God, operating a binary: all I perceive is either entirely true or entirely false. (Aulino 2020) It is no world of idealist solipsism that starts with the human disconnected from the wider world and in the end arrives at nothing for it has already taken away all the creative powers of the earth and of the body, or rather the ability to perceive at least some of them in the making of one's body and reality. Once the a priori assumption of radical separation of self and world as infrastructured into the Christian realism of the Occident is learned to bracket, another Buddhist illusion-reality connection emerges. The world as such is not an illusion, rather what is experienced as immediate sense-impressions is. Or rather, mistaking the world as experienced, the one mediated by the senses, for the ultimate world is the illusion. As in the *Matrix* sequels (The Wachowskis 2003), what is seen by a human is a simulation, only not produced by malicious robots, but by the complex networks of causation. Whatever happens in the simulation, continues to have effects, is connected to the ‘real’ world of the anthropo-robotic war. It merely isn’t the ultimate reality, and, as what happens in the simulation has impact on what happens outside of it, neither is the other. Though it may be composed in more heavily material ways. What different, but similarly composed bodies perceive in one location is for each conditioned by personal
karmic history, yet will overlap as local conditions also enter the process. None of this denies the
reality of the illusion itself. So-called illusions though they may be, they still have effects, such as tying
a body into *samsaric* cycles, but also in more simple everyday effects as bodies always do things. If
one body perceives a ghost and the other doesn't, a difference is introduced between the two, as one is
affected by the encounter and the other isn't. Both are effects of different but overlapping networks of
effects. The reality of neither is truer, however much it will seem to each to be so. Disputes about what
is or isn't more real in general are futile, more about the ego attachment and only cause division. The
only 'neutral' ground is the non-action of achieving nirvana and the body naturally disappearing
without producing further attachments, ceasing to have effects in the networks of causation. So,
adapted to a scientific framework without Buddhist soteriology, there is no neutral, disconnected
position. There are however techniques (and accompanying discourse) that create experiences that feed
back into common life in a way that bodies and their realities radically transform. A regular sentient
being in a Theravāda world can, through the practice of meditation, learn that what is perceived is
constructed, learn to swap different images of the outside which naturally implies that what is seen, is
constructed and can be changed. (Klima 2002) Such are the achievements possible if a body follows
the legitimate teachings in appropriate places. Inappropriate practices remain a necessary option.
Experiments with thought are as possible as those involving complex corporeal techniques: Replace the
'reality' image with an 'emergent webs' image. Reality as seen by an individual body is conditioned,
can be different, and should not be extrapolated as a stable thing out there. Each body moves through
and as spacetime. What is seen is in a constant process of being composed through the activities of the
world as described above.

11. This can be conceptualized as a surface/depth relation. The surface is conventional perception, as well as immediate reactions to stimuli taken. The depth is the past actions begetting today's, the complex causal networks. The world is depth and surface. Sentient beings are depth and surface, yet commonly mistake the surface for totality. For depth to feed back into surface consciousness takes work. Depth is complexity, connectivity and uncertainty; or at least awareness thereof, for a sentient can never grasp all of karmic causality: absolute depth is the lack of artificial cuts, relative depth (accessible to the unawakened) is the awareness of enacted cuts. Depth produces surface. Surface feeds into depth. Arising indeterminacies ripple through both. For all is connected. When all is connected, all is real. What is real, changes.
12. Buddhist teachings and practices (as if they were separable!) ensure that the most can be achieved of indeterminacies in the complex karmic causality.<fnref n="210" /> These are Buddhist bodily techniques and the non-sentient infrastructures that support and enhance them. In a conventional framework this can be rendered as systematizing instructions for leaving the determinations of the past into futures alternative than the ones projected through accumulated past actions. Indeterminacies in and of themselves don't add up to different paths. After all, they are random. Buddhadharma, the teaching of the Buddha here becomes a tool that spaces out these (non)spaces that randomly appear between causes and effects. Being reborn as a human creates optimal conditions, as humans have a constitution that makes a relatively stronger unlinking of environmental cause and bodily action possible.<fnref n="211" /> Gradually the tradition came to form other, more material spacings. The ancient *samgha* for example, a formation that carries the teachings and around which varied technologies were developed in order to store the teachings outside personal human memory (among them the community of monks itself and the rules and innovations to prevent strife and separation), as well as architectural knowledges that include implicit information that bodies can transfer by working next to each other but can't exactly be put into words, plans or manuals. And all the connected bodies that carry with the implicit knowledges of human/technological practices and techniques that enhance conditions for bodies to be open to teachings and temples, the small objects, gestures, intonations that create conducive atmospheres, that support the propagation of Buddhist virtues such as compassion and equanimity.<fnref n="212" /> They are conditioning surface spacings that enhance human activities in transforming stochastic indeterminacy into different paths, new *karmacoding*, and eventually perhaps nirvana.<fnref n="213" /> Small changes must be

<footnote n="210">210 The relevant framework the ‘most’ refers to here is leaving the cycles of rebirth and helping others to achieve the same. Directly through teaching, or indirectly through all other kinds of support.</footnote>

<footnote n="211">²¹¹ Deities and other celestial beings live in worse conditions in relation to awakening, as their environment tends to be pleasant and thus the desire to leave the cycles is reduced. Bodies and environments evidently relate, even as bodies can be displaced into other environments and carry certain conditions with them (see above, point 9). Internal and external causes are never entirely separable – a ‘good’ rebirth relates to a correct body as much as environment.</footnote>

<footnote n="212">²¹² Virtues always combine with acts, one does not want to reduce Buddhist worlding to a kind of contemplative virtue ethics focused at what is good at the expense of how to achieve a world where more beings will act accordingly to what is considered good. To paraphrase a typical attitude of the Buddha: one can debate what is and isn't good for all eternity without doing one act that would actually enhance goodness in the world. From such a Buddhist position with its ontological base in acts (*karmology*), talking and contemplating the ‘good’ in the end appears to be more about ego projection/protection than anything else.</footnote>

<footnote n="213">²¹³ For the inorganic is not karmically or otherwise conditioned for most of the Buddhadharmas that evolved on this earth for now. Only in medieval Japan did teachings appear, where everything in the world is karmic, dependent on arising. (Rambelli 2001) Meanwhile, plants have always been considered borderline in Buddhist worldings. (Findly 2009) This is to point out that the relative dearth, or general lack of awareness that Buddhist thought has tackled such problems, has more to do with Modern Western humanism/Christian realism than with anything integral to Buddhist teachings. Sharf (2013) analyzes how the always uncertain borders between sentience and insentience have been an issue for Chinese</footnote>
sustained so as to systematize into larger ones, especially in an impermanent world this requires effort
and complexity.<fnref n="214" /> Material networks in the conventional sense must be established so that bodies
transforming through spacetime (it itself transforming) can do so in support systems that stabilize the
gains, that reiterate the openings afforded by indeterminacy. In other words, Buddhist teachings,
practices, temples introduce spaces into networking determinacies or stops into these flows. Networks
are at the same time processes, are as constant motion. As continuous change, any thing is always more
and less than one thing. Any act is always more than one act, as it connects different karmic pasts by
embroiling more than one sentient being. All these Buddhist cultural techniques and paraphernalia are
performative and impermanent. They perform the spacing, enhance conditions for accumulating
indeterminacies into a new path. They are temporary spaces where change can be effected. An
infrastructure through which bodies (in the most extensive sense) are connected, mixed, slowed down,
sped up, reoriented. Temple spaces, meditation practices as experimental laboratories where other
realities and corpotentialities are touched, learned, found, outside of conventional life. As all is effect,
practices alone can even in less propitious conditions lead to large transformations, yet they work best
when combining with the conditions created by temples. Their constitution being honed and fine-tuned
through centuries of adaptation.

13. When all is impermanent, all is subjected to determined differentiation. There are various kinds of beings with more or less intensive affordances which can reshuffle the configurations within flowing networks. The Buddha is beyond these categories and all of them at once. But that body is not of concern here, as the aim is to construct connections with scientific practices by articulating Buddhist worldings as ontological discourse.

14. An important difference is made. There are karmic entities (organic entities with cetanā) and non-karmic entities. Sentient beings produce *karmacode* that is stored and conditions the future of this ever-changing composition of karma and six sense-organs constituted through acts. Non-karmic entities, roughly analogous to the non-organic, influence the *karmacode* of sentients but don't produce any that would constitute their own. They have no 'internal' cause, they are all condition. Yet, the two

<footnote>translators. Apparently unlike for translations into Western worlds, where the issue in general is sidelined. There is no neutral ground for translation and understanding.</footnote>

<footnote n="214">²¹⁴ Locals, at least in Thailand, give many reasons for attending temples, or bringing parts of temple conditions through meditation apps. They attend temples to feel better, to be more determined in achieving goals, to calm the mind (playing games before sleeping seems to also do the trick for some), etc. Some for whom the Buddhist world is more present, there is also the possibility of more ‘magical’ activities to help with careers and lovelives.</footnote>
mix in the webs of *pratītyasamutpāda* as all entities are effects. This is implicit in all teachings and made explicit in *Mahāyāna*: "That is, because all human (and non-human) actions are mutually influencing, we are connected in an 'intricate web' of karma, which is constantly changing. Recognizing this causes us to overcome a narrow, isolated view of the self and to then 'engage meaningfully with others and pursue collective happiness.'" (Clayton 2021, 107) So to a certain extent *karmacodes* contain traces of asentients, most notably those of temples and ceremonial paraphernalia. Teachings and practices hover directly at the edges between sentients and asentients. Sentient beings differentiate through the complexity of karmic determinations or the affordances of indeterminacy. The world changes, new non-sentients appear, partly by mixing human things with non-human ones. Buddhist teachings and insights feed into the material-mediatic constitution of the world. Realities untouched by Buddhist teachings have different conditions. Realities touched by Buddhist teachings conceived idealistically, that is without them mingling with infrastructure, architecture, spatial and other organization, also differ, and in all but the smallest differences will in this regard be the same as the untouched ones. Nowhere is ever fully Buddhist, as these are teachings of connection and transformation. And yet there are degrees of intensity. Buddha-fields one might say, reconceptualized onto things.

15. Insight arises from analysis, by applying 'correct' teachings. Insight transforms that entity composed of six senses and a mostly coherent *karmacode*. Insight, an action, conditioned by *karmacode* enacts changes that feed back into the code, as the path seemingly laid out for the future changes. Actions made possible by the spacings in determination and sustained by Buddhist technological infrastructure create circuits with the past/memory as *karmacode*.<fnref n="215" /> These circuits are non-linear and span times too vast for a common being to perceive. An individual life (as conventionally conceived) is but that what is between two cuts of a karmic life/stream in a world without beginning. A karmic life is one of which rebirth as different sentient beings are just instances or rather continual variations. A common life of an individuated body, the experience of the world from birth to death is the phase between two edits of a vastly more expansive stream. Rebirth is a cycle of expansion and contraction, the material parts dispersing (radical transformation), the karmic carrying on as less radical transformation, until they combine again, as a new mixture at the birth of a new body. Rebirth is often explained with the famous image of a flame and two candles. The flame from the first

<footnote n="215">215 *Karmacode* here is used to make distinctions easier, as in Buddhist tradition proper, this is just called karma.</footnote>
lights the second, it is and is not the same flame. Causes, conditions, and effects. Karma affects the next life, but disappears once the effect is caused. *Karmacode* is an infinite swarm of karmas happening. The flame carries over the energy, like an effect, but is not the same flame, it just appears to be so. It is an effect of previous versions of the flame. *Karma/code* metamorphs continuously.<fnref n="216" />

16. For Theravāda world-making, the way senses compose one's experience is through alternation too quick to be perceived without appropriate training so that it produces a continuous experience.<fnref n="217" /> “According to Buddhist meditation theory, the magic of being operates by the fast succession of sensory occurrences, making it possible for one to cling to a singular self-identity, in this case as a ‘knower’ of phenomena, when in fact all that has happened is that phenomena were there.” (Klima 2002, 213) Translated into the language operationalized here: there are spacings between sense-impressions. Alan Klima uses the imagery of an electric fan rotating so fast as to appear a continuous swoosh. It is unclear whether this is his example or shared by one of the monk interlocutors. It is through memory as habit that these gaps are being bridged to make for continuity out of fragments. “It may seem to be seamless when we inattentively reflect on our *memory* of ‘experience’ in life as it is lived, with relatively low awareness. But when one pays careful attention, under appropriate circumstances such as reclusive meditation, practitioners report that it is not too difficult to see, for instance, that phenomena change from seeing, hearing, touching, and thinking, back and forth in a most fragmentary and startling way.” (Ibid.) Fragmentarity is primary, notably not a whole broken into parts to be reconstituted again into a whole that preceded. Rather, bits and pieces ever-changing and composing into the experience of reality as experienced/perceived by a body composed of the parts that make for a human, a process at once active and passive. This is why Klima mobilizes the analogy of cinema, a seamless motion created as a succession of images too fast for common human perception to notice. It is not just analogical, but ontological. The primary sensory constitution of the world as succession of fragments drawn from different senses experienced as continuity. This is not so much a statement about a fragmentary world but about body-world interaction. The technological dispositif of the projection system as a condition for extended cognition. Where sentients and non-sentients mix.

<footnote n="216">216 The candle/flame image here operates analogously to film projection and even digital formats: what is experienced is the continuity of form via perception, yet underneath, that which carries and produces the form experienced continues to change. The form can travel so as to be carried by other material substrates made of the same components. The cinematic image or the computer interface are and are not the same. And there is always the subject that perceives all of this, that habitually creates continuity or mistakes one thing for the other.</footnote>

<footnote n="217">217 There is more to this than written here, with especially the concept of viññāņa playing an important role. However, a variation of it was discussed in an earlier chapter, so the focus is on the parts most straightforwardly pertinent.</footnote>
Meditation is a form of hacking the *karmacode* via material-habitual transformation. Training to make the world flexible. Teachings/practices mingle with bodies. Experience as well as dharma can never fully be put into words. Words used to describe meditation can be seen as more of a pointing toward the limits of everything, where disentangling from the endless cycles occurs. A common technique is the focus on breathing, where the borders of a body are traversed, on that activity, that mingling of elements that sustains life. Victor Fan, with a particular proclivity for the word ‘gradually,’ puts it this way:

> When I pay attention to my breathing, I am gradually focusing on my biological mechanism of self-sustenance, thus allowing me to disengage myself from the immediate assemblage of causes and conditions that constitutes my state of anger. Gradually, the karmic impulses that initiate my process of becoming no longer operate on autopilot. Instead, I gradually engage myself in and know clearly the karmic impulses that are responsible for my consciousness's initiation and extinction from one moment to another. By engaging myself in and knowing the generation and extinction of these impulses, I gradually become mindful of how each awareness functions as an assemblage of causes and conditions, which will inevitably produce consequences. I can then begin to take agency to ensure that these causes and conditions are initiated out of mindfulness, instead of letting my impulses run on autopilot. I can then make microperceptual choices between causes and conditions that would produce further mindful awarenesses and causes and conditions that would produce afflictions. (Fan 2022, 248)

The interplay of dependent co-arising, karma and indeterminacy as continuously discontinuous operation, its expedience differentiated according to conditions without a universal projective-descriptive rule. Whether in a (temple) space, deep dark caves, the presence of a Buddha, different parts of the body or in *Mahāyāna* worlds, on the internet and with robotic sentients.

The speculations proposed here are and are not Buddhist teachings. Unlike in a Buddhist cosmology, there are no soteriological aims, even though they cannot entirely be left out of consideration, as they are what conditions Buddhist knowledge-production. Some things, generally those in the furthest past countless kalpas ago, as the Buddha well knew, are impossible to know. The
same goes for conceptual work. Some starting point has to be chosen and affirmed, but not reified, essentialized. The speculations here aim at actualizing Buddhist principles into contemporary research. To lay out in some way that it is at least possible, and definitely generative, to engage other traditions in a way that the grounds for a two-sided communication with science are constructed. New worlds, new futures open up when classic disciplinary divisions are not merely disregarded, but actively reshaped in those conventions that seem so self-evidently necessary that often they don't even appear at all. This becomes possible the more implicit assumptions of a tradition come to appear for consciousness to grasp, which happens at the equal meeting of worlds, at least conceptually, whether they be coded as 'cultural' (in anthropology) or more material (in media theory, science studies), philosophical (in Buddhist studies) or at the rarest occasions, imageric (in anthropology, Buddhist and film studies). The goal of much recent research in posthumanities and related fields is to open the future to becoming different than the determinations we seem to be stuck in now. Which this text hopes to do by adding certain unexpected things and thinking them through as systematically as possible, as well as some propositions for writing different realities. To make the topic crystal clear, here at the very end, a paraphrasing of the endlessly inspiring and generative work of the feminist techno-science scholar Donna Haraway (2016, 176) offers itself: What if Western conceptions of reality had been developed from the start within Buddhist Connective instead of Christian Realist ways of worlding?
# 19. Generative Comparisons: Meditation and Cinema

## 1. Configuring Spacings

Whatever the level of analysis, neither complexity nor possible connections decrease. (Strathern 1991) Now, to reframing the analysis onto a spacing, where body (in a narrow sense) and environment enmesh to delay immediate action-reaction circuits so that new ones might be established. Where body affects and is affected, and, crucially, an incremental recoding of affect can be achieved. Affect is the capacity to form relations, which in turn are virtual links with other bodies that don't have to be actualized. Buddhist teachings and practices such as meditation are about reaching into the ways of the world and shifting, ever so slightly, what before appeared necessary, unchangeable.<fnref n="218" /> Not so much representations of the world as tools or hacks. They come to be also countless other things. So, zoomed into one such spacing of the continually developing net of nets. A sentient body, a sensorimotor body, a center of indetermination as an expandable spacing in the fortuitous alignment of internal and external conditions conditions. A non-sentient infrastructure built so as to enhance rupture in the action-reaction circuits of sensorimotor immediacy and intensify virtual-actual circuits. All to increase indetermination: “Free or indeterminate actions are ones that delay re-action, meaning that action is no longer restricted to a present one that is always beginning.” (Ansell-Pearson 2005, 1116) Here, the Deleuzian and the Buddhist conception intertwine, as distinct cosmic frameworks chaosmotically inseparable. It is an affirmation of the necessary interconnection of thought worlds, of the articulation of the other through a known, of mutual transformation and entanglement. No pretense toward direct, unmitigated access to some eternally unaffected ‘-ism’ outside of history and material entanglements or other kinds of magical thought so prevalent in the statically imagined worlds of Moderns.

The media theorist Mark Hansen constructs a complex figure out of the intertwining of spacing, image, affect and milieu. He writes: “[A]ffectivity is precisely that mode of bodily experience which mediates between the individual and the preindividual, the body and its ‘virtual’ milieu: whereas perception appeals to structures already constituted in the interior of the individuated being [...]” (Hansen 2004, 8) There is some degree of heterogeneity in relation to individualized reality. A being is

<footnote n="218">²¹⁸ Prayer and other forms of Christian meditation are notably oriented toward and around God, as such are oriented away from body and experience as immanent process. Thus they have little in common with Buddhist meditation, especially once the actual practices and effects, as well as cosmological and ethical assumptions are analyzed.</footnote>
never complete, never a closed set. “As the mode of experience in which the embodied being lives its
own excess, affectivity introduces the power of creativity into the sensorimotor body.” (Ibid.) All
framing, in a reversal of Deleuze's movement from body to frame, “reflects the demands of embodied
perception, or more exactly, a historically contingent negotiation between technical capacities and the
ongoing ‘evolution’ of embodied (human) perception.” (Ibid.) The sentient body as center of
indetermination already is a framing function. Plugging Hansen's elaboration into the thought
developed here, one might want to add a reminder: where there is framing, there is reframing. Centers
of indetermination can be expanded with supporting infrastructure that reframes and with it modulates
the virtual milieu from which individuation occurs. Immediate socio-environmental pressures to keep
short-circuiting the virtual-actual relays of the sensorimotor scheme onto already stabilized and verified
patterns are delayed in ritual sites. New circuits can be explored and stabilized, carried as transformed
bodies outside of the ritual space. The preindividual milieu changes with the milieu in general. The
outside becoming inside is never the same, and some spaces are built so as to enhance this possibility,
so as to open bodies more than they are habitually. Cinema, however conceived, is also one of these
spaces. Shared imagery leaks into so-called private ones, whether or not actively acknowledged – only
there was never an entirely private individual-constituting memory to begin with. Most experience is
shared for it emerges from shared spaces, though each sensorimotor body-image contracts what is
around singularly.

Indubitably, bodies must come to be formed in environments that foster openness, so not just
any sentient being from any society at any time will have the capacity for transformation. Especially
those that came to be in societies of definite boundaries with fixed identities assumed to begin with
might experience confusion or indeed nothing much at all. Open living is practice. Reading processual,
decolonial, experimental research is practice. Everything is practice. Thus, even living as the illusion of
being a fixed entity is practice. Meanwhile, praxis can here be defined as the active, conscious, aware
bringing together of thinking and doing in a transformative way: a performing into existence of new
combinations with awareness coded as feedback loops. Certain assemblages, here defined as ritual
spaces, bring about conditions for praxis to emerge, that is practice that includes awareness, in
combination with discourse composed of such concepts that makes it possible to stabilize such
distinctions in each transforming body. These skills can be carried over to living through other
situations, at least if conditions of direct heteronomy are reduced, if spacing between immediate
causation can appear. Once one habitualizes to open living, it becomes practice, with openness being an attitude and atmosphere, but not always an actively transformative learning. Following Tsing (2005, 1) it resides in the “sticky materiality of practical encounters,” which include practices and infrastructures and media. It is where things happen. Bodies habitualized to not noticing incremental change, to transforming any small difference into already established sameness, until a large one hits them and they go into reactive shock, will not be able to learn and change and live.

If you look to God or ideas or Truth or whatever might be there up above the skies, without even triangulating with immediate surroundings, you end up dualized: either your version of the world or the world. Bodies habitualized to some circuits to the exclusion of others. There are (ritual) spaces, such as the modern schooling system that operationalizes precisely this version of the world only to efface its own constitutive activity and posit the individual as primary, that enhance the turning away from the world toward an image of the world. There is nothing necessary about taking a random representation of what should be over constantly emerging versions of what is and could be. In order to achieve this, all varied experiences have to be cut off, designated as illusions, not in the active sense but as a developed and techno-culturally stabilized habit. With Buddhist(-derived) practical teachings bodies can learn to notice the emergence and dis/continuity of reality as experience. The relation between perception as already constituted structures and affect as occurrence from preindividual milieu comes to be experienced. The spacing and associated practices operate on a variety of distinct levels and have crucial effects: “Buddhist meditation could be very close to what Deleuze means with ‘radical empiricism’; it is a way to express openness towards the world (‘mindfulness’) as a first step in the dissolution of the subject (because, Buddhism and Deleuze agree, the subject, as representational, is an illusion). Whereas Western philosophy often exclusively relies on reason to gain knowledge of and insight into reality, thought, for Deleuze, has little or nothing to do with rational argumentation. He calls his thinking ‘intuition’ and ‘creation,’ leading to an openness that is, both in Deleuze and Buddhism, not the goal or the result of the practice of meditation or thinking, but rather an effect of it.”
(Justaert 2017, 375)

Back now from general conditions of entering (ritual) spaces to the specifically Buddhist-cinematic configurations of the spacing entered here. Taking as a scene to think with one where cinema and meditation are said by a Thai Buddhist monk to operationalize analogously. Karmic spacings can
be enlarged as appropriate infrastructures based on centuries of experience and knowledge are built. Centers of indetermination made more indeterminate as the sensorimotor scheme receives a break from the immediate pressures of re/action. While ritualization as reiterative stabilization in principle operates continuously, these marked mediatic frames can be conceived of as ritual spacings where the virtual can actualize as variation in a more stable form. As Kapferer (2004) points out, ritual is a suspension of ordinary reality, and what is learned there can be used to pragmatically intervene outside of the ritual situation. A body enters, it is a nexus/interface in both cinema viewing/making and meditation/Buddhist ontogenesis. What happens here can be conceptualized by treating karmacoding or cinematic becoming as comparatively stable and overlapping ground: the Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul mentioned in an interview that a Buddhist monk once told him that meditation was like filmmaking. And that meditation makes film redundant. (Quandt 2009, 184) How to make sense of this? When conceived through Theravāda onto-genesis – one of its basic propositions being discontinuity between experiential instants – cinema and extra-cinematic reality show themselves to work based on overlapping principles, and in such a world cinema can operate as meditation. Cinema here refers to the situation and material organization of film viewing with the minimization of corporeal movement being crucial, whereby it obviously also plays a role which film is being screened. As for Buddhist teachings, here meditation specifically will be detailed. This will serve as a basis for the generative analysis of the operations of one of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's short films, *Ashes* (2012), as wells as variations of this analysis with more industrially produced cinema. Through these it will be elucidated how a specific film can enact the *dhamma*. While each situation is singular in its composition of interacting elements and as such no film (whether or not considered as part of a situation) is self-same, the knowledge that can be constructed based on a coming together of elements (such as the use of unexpected theories) can be made to travel, that is disentangled to some degree from the situation of production, and subsequently aid in making certain possibilities in other film-going situations more stable, that is more real. This is an exploration of how the two grounds – cinema and meditation – while held separately for analytical purposes nonetheless enmesh. An articulation of a series of contrasting comparisons.

Cinema can be transformative. A body learns to see anew. Senses are reconfigured, if conditions are fortuitous. The same goes for meditation: “[...] meditation works. Now to a qualification that makes things more complicated: what it means for meditation to work – the work meditation does – is
different, sometimes radically different, in diverse contexts.” (McMahan 2017, 21) They work both metaphorically, as in being effective, and literally, as in materially laboring to achieve a certain effect, one that locally transforms reality for engaged bodies. In both situations the interest lies in the production of subjectivity. Meditation seeks to performatively cut habits of perceiving and mistaking what is seen for simply real, stable and given. Meditation works to undo the karmic ties that bind to *samsāra*, the cycles of rebirth, the continuous automatic production of causality. This is not directly accessible to common sentient bodies, only the effects on the constitution of experience as composition of perceptions are, which come to be the foci of meditation practices. *Karmacode* is the medium, the disappearing middle not appearing to consciousness, yet active and transformable nonetheless. In the Buddhist world of effects, the borders that separate a cinematic image and a common perception become indistinct, as all images act on the sentient body in one way or another. Reality is an effect of what a body, memory (past heteronomy) and the environment (present heteronomy) do in co-producing experience. For the images created in and as cinema to take effect, in general, sentient bodies must enter spaces where they are slowed down and kept stable, so as to free perceptive faculties and attention to be organized around that which is screened. A spectator becomes part of the cinematic economy of a film, its rhythms, forms, relations and transformations. A body is memory-habit and it is against and through such ground that new images connect and gain effect. There is an infrastructure made for enabling the cultivation of new feedback circuits of bodies entering and the virtual as past expanding with the images experienced, it persists through time. A sentient being (as memory-habit) and a concrete artwork are plugged in, the latter comes to be part of the image-body as memory. Regardless of where cinematic objects are produced, their effects always constitute via the body-memory coming into contact with them, in conventional modern words: they are dependent on culture. Because they enter into different worlds, they become different themselves. More than one and less than many – a connection of course is retained, which is why later in a different situation, a discussion for example can take place, as an actualization of a shared, but never identical memory. The act of thinking and of understanding through thinking is fundamentally different from the act of experiencing. Their effects differ.

Subjectivity individuates from surroundings, especially in situations built so as to make the borders between body and outside more permeable. Bodies, depending on where they are shaped, come to be permeable to different degrees and reactive to different stimuli. (Aulino 2020a) The cinema
assemblage is one of particularly desubjectifying powers, as anyone absorbed in a tensely constructed succession of images and information will be able to remember. The body is a nexus or interface in both cinema viewing/making and meditation/Buddhist ontogenesis. It is the position from which all this is accessible for a sentient being, unaware as it may be of preindividual milieu from which individualization occurs – the boundary ignoring affect. Two types of cinematic co-production can be proposed, reconfigurations of the action-image and the time-image. The *classical construction* found in industrial, narrative film-making is one of absorption, of becoming part of the cinematic economy of processual metamorphosis (of one discontinuous image into another) that conscious subjectivity disappears. It is a somewhat paradoxical experience as for the duration of absorption, a subject is by definition not aware of itself, and only when distance is gained, when for whatever cause the preindividual field regrounds itself more stably around the spectator's body and borders become refortified, can conscious awareness of any process arise. Hence, if as is habitual projecting this conscious experience onto experience in general, it is easy to misconstrue or ignore what was happening. When one begins with assumptions of Buddhist meditation techniques which focus on taking apart the flow of experience so as to notice glitches and discontinuities, such processes are easier to take note of. The *experimental construction* meanwhile is one that organizes attention on surfaces and rhythms. Its visuality can be said to be straightforwardly haptic. (Marks 2000) It's as if the surface of an outside stood directly against the surface of the inside, at the borders of the body qua integrated sensory system. And with that, sensing arises as something not simply given, but as something that develops, changes, something capable of learning. Immediate links between surrounding and perception are cut, open to aesthetic reconfiguration. Cinematic artifacts in general are composed of both, though one or the other will dominate as an effect, at least for untrained bodies. In the experimental pleasures of interacting surfaces, subjectivity qua consciousness can disappear too, as its focal point shifts toward the borders between inside and outside. Indeed, there is something meditative (in the common modern Western sense) in the effects of experiencing these types of cinema.

The cinematic apparatus as assembled singularly with each projection (which includes the film shown, seating arrangements, lights, atmosphere, what any human or non-human spectator brings with, etc.) produces a spectator position, a preindividual milieu, a virtual field which (temporally and conceptually) precedes any actual experiences of a spectator's body entering the assemblage. It operates a cut between experience outside and within. In other words, it enframes. What effects will or will not
succeed, are, in a Buddhist world, modulated by *karmacode*. Meditation aims at cutting the immediate ties to the surrounding from which experience emerges as an effect. A sentient body might be only composed in a way to become conscious of its effects, but that doesn't take away from the operativity on the preindividual. As for cinema, phrased by Richard Rushton (2009, 48), “there are only subjectivities formed by the cinema, by the act of going to the cinema and experiencing a film.” He names this a fusion between the spectator and the screen, implying an undoing of any clear separation between inside and outside, self and non-self. Such processes are challenging to grasp discursively, as the articulation occurs on levels of perception that are usually taken not just as self-evidently given and transparent, but are also (at) the very limits of perception. Something, that in good Buddhadharmic fashion has to be applied and experimented with by each body itself, to be verified and learned the usefulness of.<fnref n="219" />

## 2. Traveling Technologies

World is transformation, immanent non-teleological evolution. Stability is relative resistance, not fixity or essence. New things material and immaterial form as various configurations, and some have widespread impact both desired and undesired, intended and unintended. Before cinema and after is a world of difference. Cinema as a general concept and technology and each film in particular relate always singularly to their outside. Indeed the gradual spread of cinematic media technology is one of the constitutive moments of modernity, recasting ontology and anthropology in a new light. (Kittler 1999, 115–83) It too happened through negotiations, human and non-human, and exertions of political and infrastructural power in the sticky materiality of practical encounters. It enacts new modes of becoming, perhaps also because of the uncertain ontological status of cinematic images, which in turn, in a fortuitously Buddhist manner, renders the realness of extra-cinematic reality unstable (Fan 2015, 193). A film as technology can exist by itself (the question is in what ways) and engenders a different reality effect than there would have been before (LaMarre 2009), which further differs with developing image technologies such as video. (Denson 2016) “Film historian Sophia Siddique Harvey has used the term ‘sensuous citizenship formation’ to describe the ways that cinematic effects like sound and

<footnote n="219">²¹⁹ “People may also not talk about their experience meditating because they feel that talking about one’s own experiences is to express a kind of hubris in focusing on one’s self excessively. They may also feel that part of the purpose and training of meditation is to decrease discursive thought and speech. Yet even with these shared tendencies away from narrative elaboration, understanding what mindfulness is like in meditation, and not just in social lives, is important, because it is through meditation that people train to develop and improve mindfulness, and it is through meditation that many of the lessons of mindfulness can be shared with others.” (Cassaniti 2018, 63)</footnote>
experimental narrative reconfigure an audience's way of perceiving the world around them [...] As film reconceptualizes the audience member's sensory systems by opening up new ways of seeing, hearing, and feeling, the audience member leaves the cinema with a transformed sense of the city as a place.” (Chua 2021, 106) Modes of perception and consciousness change, they can turn to day-dreaming, drifting off, of breathing spaces in worlds of constant pressure. Some of it specifically due to the material-atmospheric environs of cinemas. (Hanich 2019) It is the complexity and unexpected innovations arising from frictions of practical encounters of which cultural techniques form a part that resist any technological or other determinism present in so many theories unconcerned with the actual ways of worlds. Cinema and spaces related to it, co-produced by it can take on many functions and compositions, including commonly “invisible infrastructural interventions” (Chua 2021, 106) as they travel, translate, transform. Often techniques and signifiers of modernity and modernization, in Siam for example the fact that they were air-conditioned and could be public meeting places for heterogeneous audiences had important effects on the formation of what came to be. Ingawanij (2018) describes the emergence of itinerant makeshift cinemas, especially active in the northeastern and southern borderlands that connected anti-communist propaganda, spirit offerings and other activities. Films can also be made and projected specifically for spirits and at the same time create a space for underclasses to relax and watch films for free. (MacDonald 2017) Indeed the many forms that arose in the meetings of practices and challenges in Thailand can almost be said to be a subgenre of ethnography at the nexus of art and anthropology. Technocultural affordances will often remain invisible and unpredictable from on high and far, until they happen and are investigated on the ground by bodies trained in noticing the new without reducing it to the old. Worlds and things and bodies and everything changes when new elements are plugged in. As per the Humean Deleuze, relations are external to their terms, nothing is determined by the context it was formed in. (Baugh 1993, 20ff.) Yet, any thing, whatever it is composed of, brings with itself resistances, so neither will it be entirely determined by the new context. Some things are more mutable than others while still retaining significant consistency, others might appear to be the same, but when thoroughly analyzed, turn out to have changed irrevocably. Thus, just because some thing, however immaterial it may be, appears the same to some, its operations and environment have to become part of any engagement. When technological objects, highly complex entities with very often high resistances, travel, they change to some degree, and what elements exactly can transform or connect differently for an object (which includes the ways it relates to the environment including habits and conventions), will only come to
materialize through the frictions and resistances to where it has come to be displaced.<fnref n="220" /> Here, the interaction with specifically Buddhist elements of worlds return as the focus. How does a thing like cinema (which includes the technology, aesthetics, thought, imagination directly related to it) change, come to operate differently after touching Buddhist world-making? To construct conceptual infrastructures that relate to the material ones already put into place while honing the arts of noticing (difference) is the challenge.

The formation of various Buddhist world-making projects and philosophies obviously predates modernity as well as many nowadays common technological innovations. Even though many influential technical apparatuses draw on inventions from Buddhist or Buddhist-related traditions (such as printing, reproductive technology, cotton/celluloid, ...), the way they have come to be was dominantly articulated in the context of an emerging Occident as it is assumed to straightforwardly exist today. Technologies continue to travel, they are not exclusive in their attachments and allegiances. They enter into different assemblages, active arrangements of heterogeneous elements that continually produce reality. They are some of the many interacting constituents of worlds, always differing with place and time. While composed in (and transformative of) a Christian-Secular milieu, the specific assemblage of technologies, practices and imaginaries that came to form cinema, once stabilized, can leave and connect with other worldings to achieve other effects. In some areas of the world things like a self-contained individual, mind-body dualism, the concept of belief or a (seemingly) clear distinction between reality and representation simply exist, orient and do their work (varied as it may be). In others kamma, open bodies and shifting boundaries between what is and isn't real operate dominantly, while also changing. What Buddhist meditation techniques are or do in the first of these worlds is not the same as in the second. There may not even be significant overlap especially in the neoliberal appropriation of some of these techniques to enhance productivity. (Purser 2019) It cannot be overemphasized that kamma and related concepts are not beliefs, but as the anthropologist Julia Cassaniti (2015) phrases it, they are organizing principles of life. Much like liberal individualism or the belief in belief operates elsewhere. It is said that kamma is “both part of the self and part of nature.” (Cassaniti 2012, 304) As compounds of kammic causalities (beings) come to interact, effects never fully align. It is in these gaps that meditation comes to be practiced. Worlds where Buddhist traditions have been significantly stabilized and made present in their creative powers thus differ wildly from the

<footnote n="220">²²⁰ Resistance here means, it's not easy to make them work, often many other connected things are required, they are much more directly affected by environment than organic entities or thoughts.</footnote>
Christian-Secular. Naturecultures, as per Haraway (2003), operate locally and differentially, not universally, and mix and develop. And cinema produces new modes of perception, which can enter unexpected contexts and become distinctly other. Bodies come to see different, and some bodies that honed their perceptive skills especially diligently through cinema can become attentive to the whispers and rhythms of the world that others might not ever learn to sense.

Spacing here is also a play of self-modulation and abandonment. Whatever the dominant composition of bodies and concepts in a place might look like, meditation techniques (especially those perfected and handed down body to body for centuries) work to undo conventional borders between inside and outside, between control and abandonment in one way or other. When conceived as corporeal techniques, meditation and shamanic practices come to be directly comparable and contrastable: “The shamanic techniques described by Kopenawa are better seen as technologies of abandonment, followed by a restabilization of the self in the world of the *xapiri*.” (Pickering 2017, n. 15) Conceptions of body and world make it into these techniques, Buddhist meditation (of whatever kind for there are many) makes Buddhist teachings real wherever it is applied, real at least to some extent. They also depend on where any continuously forming self can be stabilized enough for awareness to emerge from flux so that knowledge can be articulated and carried over to other realms and communicated to other bodies. Most Buddhist techniques as compared to shamanic practices from the Amazon don’t seek to communicate with spirits but to undo the ties that bind past and future through the emerging present.<fnref n="221" /> In experiencing a film, one is also carried into a multi-sensory realm other than what is generally taken as immediate surroundings – the environment disappears, becomes a medium. Techniques and technologies travel, plug in, transform and are transformed. Much of what happens does so outside of the realm seemingly easily grasped by language, and as experiences or rather memories thereof are translated into linguistic communication, it matters substantially whether this is done in a world where language is considered primarily fixed and separate, or one with awareness of linguistic creativity as well as potential limits of current grammatical structures.

<footnote n="221">²²¹ Shamanic practices are very much present in the region. (Brac de la Perrière & Jackson 2022) It can tentatively be stated that since Buddhas, bodhisattvas, and devas can travel between realms, similar techniques must not be entirely foreign to Buddhadharma.</footnote>
### 3. Body as Nexus

The arts of noticing alteration between experience and articulation can be perfected. But first the common, idealist image of subjectivity as a separate interior experience with no distinction between senses, thoughts, words and experience is made, has to be swapped for a more open and less mysterious or mysteriously authentic concept of self. Employing Buddhist techniques without this occurrence certainly won't have radically transformative effects, only temporary soothings for productivity's sake. Subjectivity must not only settle in the body and gradually in the different meeting points of inside and outside, it must also grapple with the functions and compositions of words. Once a body learns to be in such a way that the space between world and word becomes part of everyday perception, with it operations of the body will also open up as anything but self-evidently happening. Body might be habitually framed as entirely separate from the surroundings and tautologically experienced as such, yet it is always connected, affected. The body nexus between subjectivity and environment co-constitutes both, is border that filters what is unnecessary for survival otherwise the system would overload and break down. Some environments and techniques make it possible to experiment with such limits, or experiment themselves and make it possible for this occurrences to arise to consciousness. Change is what is registered, so a body running in its habitualized ways through known spaces will hardly come to be shocked into awareness of processual minutae. Spaces for such and other experimentation must also be experienced as secure and comfortable, so as for the body be somewhat freed from other automatic responses that enable its persistence.

Cinema is one such assemblage that significantly reconfigures the relating of body and environment, and with it the preindividual milieu from which subjectivity actualizes. Boundaries between self and outside shift. And so do the ways of past connecting with present, as other memories come to be actualized when experiencing a film than are sitting in a chair or walking. The Buddhist techniques thought with here, focused as they are on a body and its boundaries, also reconfigure the relations between body and environment, however they come as part of the body (the outside already become inside). Shamanic practices are also of the body, yet aim to leave the body and require a lot of another world to come with, the one to be restabilized in, wherever that may be sourced. What will be experienced and how, what remembered and what put into words, is conditioned by the world one lives in (far outframing awareness of it) and how it has come to be as memory to be actualized. The body-
subjectivity-environment-imagining complex can take on very different combinations and effects.

Buddhist meditation often organizes around attention and awareness, and the work it does is not
only that which it would say so on the surface: “According to this participant, the body anchors the
mind, i.e. it rescues participants from mind-wandering, the unending flow of thoughts that characterizes
non-meditative subjectivities. But, according to interviewees, meditation goes beyond coming back the
body; in fact, a new version of the body is enacted, illustrating the ontological capacity of meditation.
While focusing on the body, practitioners report that it starts displaying new properties, often described
as pins and needles, tingling, vibrations and warmth.” (Carvalho 2021, 10) And, further: “They became
aware of patterns – and sensations – beyond their individual selfhood, often mentioning ancestors and
family members, suggesting that meditative affect challenges ‘strict boundaries and separations
between the historical and the personal, the psychological and the social and the material and
immaterial.’” (Ibid., 11) Other effects reported by very dedicated Western practitioners include
becoming “more receptive to vulnerability, extending [...] awareness to the fact that reality is
impermanent and that there are no fixed boundaries between self and non-self.” (Ibid., 12) There is no
doubt that meditation does something. There is no doubt that the language one lives in, has access to,
will co-constitute the stabilization of its effects. Perhaps even the experience itself, but that is
impossible to access and verify.

Buddhist techniques of self turn to body and process, fragmenting a seeming whole, and in
doing so transform bodies. The insights into impermanence effectuated come with states of absorption,
of ego dissolution, shifting borders. Subjectivity as formed by combination of body and environment,
autonomy (i.e. heteronomy linked through time to previous environments, outside having become
inside) and immediate heteronomy, internal and external cause, with meditation focusing on those
mediating spaces, the borders to gain insight into constitution of the world as impermanence that is
continuous change. From modulated shifts in attention arises awareness of the instability of self, and
hence awareness of self not being the ultimate ground of anything. When watching a film, especially
those of a dominantly classical construction, conscious subjectivity disappears as the environment from
which it is formed expands. Experience produced from an environment more extensive than a body's
conventional borders, which disappear in the process only to eventually (or periodically during the
experience) reappear as borders (however porous). There and back again, but changed of course, as
nothing stays the same. As consciousness of self is generally the condition for thinking and experiencing the self, a habitual tendency to project that state into the past and future as always present appears. It takes work and appropriate tools to notice the alterations between different configurations of subjectivity. Importantly, different configurations of a separation/borders from the complex connective webs of causality enable the appearance of varied new elements. And it matters how these come to be linked back to the wider complex webs of social lives and imaginations.

With the tools Buddhist teachings offer, one can analyze what was before a black box of the experience of watching an absorbing film, and with that, cut some of the ties that bind. Experimental film with its orientation of attention to surfaces, another kind of absorption, one that highlights the production of new sensations and the borders between bodies like the most wide-spread kinds of Buddhist meditation operationalizes cuts more directly with less of a Buddhist framework necessary for awareness of such processes to arise. All continues to be a play of mediation – one remembers: a medium is the relational disappearing middle that shifts with attention. A body, a self, a technique, a technology, a world all can come to function as mediators and temporarily disappear. Nothing can ever be simply present in and of itself. What all of the scenes related here share, through the making and unmaking of connections, are glimpses of other worlds and with a destabilization of the necessity of what can appear as a given world. They can be framed as practices of speculation.

## 4. Details of Meditation

To experience a film is impossible without a body, no matter how much the conscious experience of a body disappears into the background with the classical construction, while experimental, haptic configurations of cinema surface a body's functionings to awareness. In any case, experiencing cinema is a continuously alternating double movement, one of identification and of separation. A film is a series of perspectives. Not perspectives on a world, but perspectives as world. Becoming part of a cinematic image economy is a unique type of continuous metamorphosis for bodies that become part of this assemblage. The world is always in the making, any ontology is always ontogenesis. Coming to realize that one's experience is a continuous process of production, a very material fictionalization, comes easier with the surface discontinuities of cinematic editing. When co-articulated with Buddhist tenets, worlds emerge where the shift from clear separations between reality and representation to
unclear distinction between the two makes it possible to analyze complexities in the interplay of
realiting and fictioning in the material-semiotic compositing through one's body.

The overlap between cinema and Buddhist ontogenesis is not a necessary constituent, rather it
makes for a possible world, as others where cosmological fictionings combine in varied ways with
emergent materialities. No world is necessary. Theravāda Buddhist ontogenesis in particular is
experimented with here, explored based on the body nexus as operating in meditation. According to the
*Buddhasāsana* or Buddhist teaching, the human body is that which may serve as a way out of saṃsāra,
the cycle of rebirths. It is that which links lokīya, the conventional worldly realm continuing saṃsāra,
and lokuttara, the ‘supramundane’ states, that is the dhamma way.<fnref n="222" /> Two frameworks for bodies to
become within, nothing ever has to be what it seems. It is only through and as a body that conventional
perception and with it karmic production might be altered. The effects of such practices transform
bodies in everyday life: “By crafting calm and coolhearted emotions, one is able to more easily let go
of affective attachments.” (Cassaniti 2015, 31) The conception of heart here differs significantly from
English. ediเย็น, jai yen, yen meaning cool and jai heart in the mostly Buddhist sense, that is heart-mind,
i.e. emotional and cognitive states. The body is thus the nexus to link two worlds, two perceptions.
Buddhist virtues such as equanimity are part and parcel of the techniques engendered: “care is
considered in Buddhism to be an engagement with benevolence, compassion, empathy, and equanimity.
In meditation, a practitioner can train themself by scanning the life of an enemy or a loved one, and by
engaging their consciousnesses in this person’s life from the moment of their birth until the present.
The practitioner is not to think and analyze the experience. Rather, the practitioner is to be mindful of
the subtle affective changes that in-form this experience. Usually, the practitioner would experience
benevolence, as they perceive and conceptualize what they scan as the experience of the other.” (Fan
2022, 171) Meditating loops back into everyday life. One does not immediately attain nirvana. This
may be the ultimate aim, but partial steps effectuate changes in bodies.

<footnote n="222">²²² “In many works in Buddhist and Southeast Asian studies, these two terms have been interpreted as expressing a dichotomy between ‘secular’ or ‘this-worldly’ versus ‘sacred’ or ‘other-worldly’, and have been applied to differentiate the world-renouncing path of the monk from the this-worldly path of the laypeople. Yet, quite problematically, this translation and interpretation of *lokiya* and *lokuttara* itself discloses a secular framework. In a more careful analysis of the terminology, by contrast, *loka*, the noun on which the adjective *lokiya* is based, means ‘this world’ but also includes other realms of existence in the whirl of *samsara*, the endless cycle of Buddhist rebirth, such as different heavens and hells. *Lokiya* might thus rather be translated as a ‘customary mode’ of traditional practice that contrasts with a mode of existence that has already gone beyond (*uttara*) this cycle – *lokuttara*. With both terms part of the same cosmology, *lokiya* describes a conditioned attachment to this world that has been left behind by those present in *lokuttara*.”
(Streicher 2021, 19)</footnote>
Meditation is a time consuming practice, each step may take hours or even weeks. (Klima 2002)
It is a practice handed down through generations as time-tested bodily practices. Early steps involve
cultivating the basic ability to concentrate on an object of mental attention. *Samadhi* (concentration) is
the enactment of concentration on a sensation, most commonly on the point where breath passes the
nostrils, until one is able to hold this one point easily without the need for the sensation to be present.
(McMahan 2017) In other words direct sense-contact is being replaced with a memory of it strong and
stable enough to persist. “Being mindful of our breathing enables the consciousnesses to be mindful of
the most fundamental karmic impulse that keeps one alive: the impulse to breathe.” (Fan 2022, 134) A
body's immediate ties to the environment are being severed, at least at that one spot. “The point,
however, is not to reject these impulses. Rather, in the exercise, we are to embrace them and accept
them as the way it is. By being mindful of every act of inhalation and exhalation, we come to realize
that we exist neither in the past nor in the future, as the consciousness of the past is ungraspable and the
consciousness of the future is ungraspable. If so, the consciousness of the present, the here and now of
our existence, is fundamentally empty.” (Ibid.) Cassaniti (2015, 57–8) writes about how people in the
village she did fieldwork in most commonly attend a *wat* to cultivate detachment or ‘coolheartedness,’
and this they do “by practicing and repeating certain kinds of bodily and affective comportment.”
Repetition is the key, a body and dispositions don’t change just like that. This is a world where the body
is considered to be composed of six sense organs, the mind or thought organ being one of them, and
“people who follow Buddhism in Southeast Asia see the mind as an intentional agent that, through
training, changes what it encounters.” (Cassaniti 2018, 19) Each sense organ is conditioned by its own
history of interaction with sense-data.<fnref n="223" /> Reacting on the other sense organs, the mind is material like
them but has as its objects “the appearance of any phenomena which do not have material contact as a
condition of their immediate possibility.” (Klima 2002, 563) Among them count thoughts, intentions
and thus implicitly memories. The word ‘immediate’ is crucial, as it reminds that in chains of
(re)activity thought organ phenomena are related to the presence of material sensations. Moreover each
of these emerges from *paṭiccasamuppāda*. This means that any eventuation is caused and causing at the
same time, all the time. Conventional existence meanwhile is based on the perception of a continuum
of experience, but this is not an ultimate perception, as it does not take note of the being-
constructedness based on successive sense-perceptions of thereness, thereby leading to activities that
reproduce *saṃsāric* becoming. (Klima 2002) Indeed, they reproduce *saṃsāra*, since in Buddhist

<footnote n="223">²²³ For a more detailed discussion, see e.g. Boisvert (1995) and Anacker (2005).</footnote>
ontogenesis the cycle of transmigration is at once the cause of transmigration and produced by
transmigrating. An always-embodied subjectivity or subjectivation emerges from interconnected webs
of causation, of elements/images ‘bumping’ into other images, whereby both are transformed. This
‘bumping’ is what is called viññāṇa, commonly translated as consciousness or life force, but perhaps
best translated as thereness (ibid.), it is something without which sense-perception and thus subjectivity
cannot occur.<fnref n="224" /> The soteriological goal of course being for it to cede occurring thereby reaching
nibbana. And in meditation, one's body learns to interrupt this causality of sense-emergence, or rather
displace viññāṇa from sense-immediacy to memory-viññāṇa. This operation is analogous to cinema,
where images of the immediate environment are replaced by images of the projected film, which come
into contact with the senses as the rest recedes. Sense-perception is a process of construction, which
works by itself in immediate reaction to karma-environment interaction, but can be incrementally
transformed in practicing meditation. And in no small part do arts of indirection operate here, as virtues
such as equanimity come to be formed through breathing exercises.

In meditation, the goal is not to realize emptiness in a substantivist manner, since that is
obviously impossible. Suññatā or emptiness is something in between. One of the meanings of
emptiness refers to the condition of the world, in that there can be no thing that has an essential being,
everything and anything is empty of essence, because everything changes. Attaining this state is one of
the aims of meditation. Thus, in some kinds of meditation, one has to learn to switch between various
constructed bodies/perceptions. (Klima 2002) This activity is evident in the infamous Buddhist
meditation practice called asubha kammaṭṭhāna, where one meditates over decaying bodies. There one
has to first learn to see one's own body as decomposing. Meditators, if they are successful and don't
‘crack’ eventually see all bodies as decomposed. Memory-images partly overcode direct sensations
from the environment. The imagery of decaying bodies has become part of the body from which
perception is constructed. This reconstruction of perception becomes reality, the sensorimotor scheme
breaks down and is reconstructed differently. In later stages of practice, the goal is to reconstruct the
previous, conventional view of the body. And then, to learn to alternate between views, thereby
performing emptiness and with it the constructedness of experiential categories, of that which
conventionally appears to be most immediately real.

<footnote n="224">²²⁴ In Thai traditions, oftentimes the word citta is used instead of viññāṇa, since vinyan is taken to be that which transmigrates, or if it fails to migrate, that which becomes a vengeful ghost.</footnote>
If at one time Theravāda sourced propositions of how the world works seem fictional, by virtue of being applied, passing through bodily practices, they become real. The distinctions proposed in theory are applied, and at the very least it can be said that material reality does not contradict or resist the Theravāda proposition of fundamental discontinuity: “The mind perceives a series of still film-frames, fluttered too rapidly for anyone to be mindful of their change from one to another, and so the mind experiences a life-like movement and seamless reality in film. In fact it is life-like and above all because we already are cinema, because in life we also let sensory contacts pass by too rapidly to observe how they arise, linger, and pass away.” (Ibid., 574) A body, the becoming of bodies constructed through sense-perception presence is cinematic, it is a series of images, with intervals between these parts, where the future one is articulated through the anterior one, whereby past, present and future are continually being reconstructed. Cinematic images act upon bodies, edits shake the immediacy of the given and show possible alternatives. The viewing body follows the at times rapidly changing perspectives organized by editing. (Gonçalves 2015) Such sensory overload or shock (Benjamin 2008) can give insight into how sensory contacts arise, linger, pass away. “Brian Massumi points out that both Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call such a sensual shock a ‘microperception’: not smaller perception, it’s a perception of a qualitatively different kind. It’s something that is felt without registering consciously. It registers only its effects. According to this notion of shock, there is always a commotion under way, a ‘something doing’ cutting in, interrupting whatever continuities are in progress.” (Fan 2022, 140) Meanwhile, meditation operates slower speeds<fnref n="225" /> compared to most cinema: “In this process of becoming over the course of a day, the guests slowly become mindful of the almost undetectable transformations between boredom, exhaustion, invigoration, pleasure, displeasure, anxieties, and peace.” (Ibid., 136)

What migrates between different supporting infrastructures are figures. In *asubha kammaṭṭhāna*, now that it is forbidden to meditate over actually rotting corpses, images of the dead are used as a source for reconstructing vision. A deceased organic body's figuration moved to a photograph and from there onto a living organic body's sensory capacities that co-constitute what is seen. Cinema meanwhile

<footnote n="225">²²⁵ Apichatpong Weerasethakul combined the various elements discussed here explicitly for *Sleepcinemahotel*: “In this process of becoming over the course of a day, the guests slowly become mindful of the almost undetectable transformations between boredom, exhaustion, invigoration, pleasure, displeasure, anxieties, and peace. The guests become mindful of the initiation and endurance of each thought, speech, and action that triggers these subtle changes: ‘I know I am sleeping; I know I am eating; I know I am brushing my teeth; I know every part of my body is engaged in this anthropotechnical milieu.’ In this state of mindfulness, the anthropotechnical body endures in chronometric time as a perpetual initiation-extinction of circuits between recollections and anticipations. Yet, posited at the here and now, the consciousness is mindful of its own technicity and the overall process of interbecomings.” (Fan 2022, 136–7)</footnote>
can be conceived of “as a figuring machine, that is a machine which receives, treats, and produces a figure.” (Game 2014, 47) It opens up new possibilities for “bodies without support,” recontextualizing the common reductive operation of treating only the organic body as a carrier of figuration. (Brenez 1998, 32) Furthermore, in meditation, practices where one imagines oneself through other bodies, or even the image of the Buddha are not uncommon. (Sharf 2005) One’s sense-perception is effectively reterritorialized on and with fictive bodies, making these subjectively real and ontologically actual. Cinema enables to think corporality without a primary integrated organism, much like it has come to be formulated in most Buddhist teachings and experimented with experientially in appropriate spacings. And with that it becomes evident that the bodies one perceives are always already enmeshed in surrounding aesthetic practices. In other words: “‘man is not the end of the body’, which means one fundamental thing: the body is not given, it is to be built.” (Game 2014, 49) By extension, what the body perceives as and through body, is to be built. The (cinematic) body for film theorist Nicole Brenez (1998) is fragmented and can be reconstructed – like the actualizing Buddhist body. Figures are never just self-enclosed figures. Bodies as they appear to senses are never self-sufficient bodies untouched by figures around. All could be different, all becomes different, nothing is closed and fundamentally separate. At the confluence of worlds explored here, fundamental instability and hence openness of world appears – dangerous and hopeful.

## 5. Operationalizing Ruptures

An exploration of a film composed in the experimental framework can demonstrate more thoroughly how the thematized effects come to be. One enters the space of a projected film, the rest disappears as mediating environment. Apichatpong Weerasethakul is not just the most internationally recognized Thai film-maker, he is also somebody to actively and expressly experiment with a variety of cinematic assemblages and effects, especially dreaming and sleeping, and frame these activities with Buddhist connections. (Malaina 2022) Evidently, for him, cinema is never just cinema. His affirmatively experimental short film *Ashes* (2012) operationalizes a complex set of media potentialities specific to analog film-making technologies, both historical and contemporary. It was made as a part of an initiative by the company *Lomo* (famous for it's retro stylings of photography and camera technology), where the filmmaker was challenged to create a piece with the hand-cranked *LomoKino* camera. The media-specificity of the hand-cranking technology in particular makes some
aspects of media performativity found in the director's work more readily apparent. *Ashes* serves as an optimal entry point into *lokuttara*, the 'supra-mundane,' as an elucidation of how a film as a medium can be understood as enacting Buddhist concepts (thereby enacting them) and as an entry point into learning to see not just Weerasethakul's films working in Buddhist ways. It does this through three strategies that act as materializations of *Theravāda* Buddhist ontogenesis.<fnref n="226" /> Projected images as surfaces composing here consciously bypass symbolic readings.<fnref n="227" /> These are actualizations of Buddhist ontogenesis in the inter-subjective experience-space of cinema. All of the works signed to his name and the crew he works with “engender reality of a performative nature.” (Ingawanij 2013, 91) Three elements make the constructedness of cinematic perception of *Ashes* co-present with its reality effect.

I. The co-presence of different moving images in one frame, that is a quasi-split screen that renders both actual parts of the image concurrently virtual. If meditation's goal is to cultivate the ability to alternate perceptions, this is the filmic equivalent. Putting two perspectives in one frame is necessary (spatial), since cinema itself is already an alternation of perspectives (temporal) most humans have become used to. Moreover, the two shots are usually from the same pro-filmic event, and neither discloses information that would produce narrative surplus, as e.g. in films where the split-screen is a form of parallel editing or a double subjective take where the two POV's will collide (famously in the Hitchcockian split-screen work of Brian de Palma). What Weerasethakul does here is to present two half-related perspectives on one diegetic event, where the temporal relationship between the images remains undefined. And this uncertainty is played out mostly in the dimension of space.

II. The lack of discernible difference between a classical edit and the space in between film frames that makes every edit a potential jump-cut, thus the sensorimotor scheme can in no way anticipate (qua reduction of uncertainty of future) common edits. The uncertainty produced by the editing style reverberates to create new conditions for the entire montage. Indeed, one might even say that it is not so much a question of editing, as it is of the medium (hand-cranked camera) itself. For the hand-cranking just makes the intervals between images perceptible to the human body-mind apparatus, that is, as a monk would say, without the conventionally constructed immediacy which usually integrates different sense-perceptions into one flow. Wherever one might want to situate the causes for

<footnote n="226">²²⁶ It is important to take into account that new ways of film-making are necessary to shock the sensorimotor scheme into uncertainty, since innovations become normalized.</footnote>

<footnote n="227">²²⁷ Which is what makes it more easy to discern the operations explored than in the film-maker's more narrative works.</footnote>
the effects, this again renders the certainty of perception problematic, opening up the conventionality of
image succession to the virtual. Given the formal quality I mentioned before deconstructs spatial
presence, then this one undoes temporal presence. Or as May Adadol Ingawanij (2013, 91) put it, when
writing about a different work by the director: “We perceive non-synchronicity of time and
indeterminacy of space [...].”

III. A palimpsest-like layering of images that more than anything else suggests memory at work, while playing games with visibility and sense-perception. Layering images upon images is another technique that shows actual perception to be limited, to be just one possibility. It is archaeological, in that it plays with the dimension of depth. Archaeology is here understood as the unearthing of layers piled onto each other so that they enmesh and the temporal succession is at times indiscernible. Stacked sheets of the past remind that what one sees or hears is conditioned by the figures one had perceived before, however much it might conventionally be difficult to become aware of. Memory becomes part of a sensorimotor scheme, but that does not mean that the memory that one has at any point is necessary, that is only memory. “[I]n Apichatpong's work, a memory is crafted that troubles an account of recognition. This is not a memory for that which is known, for a past contained. It is a memory of a futurity, a memory of a trace.” (Manning 2017, 14)

As with meditation, the images in *Ashes* enable to hold two or more visions concurrently, assigning neither as the ultimate ground on which reality could be based. It can be tentatively stated: meditation is a materialization through the subjective body as composed of different parts, while cinema is a materialization through inter-subjective technology awaiting embodiment. A further effect that connects meditation and this kind of film-making is obvious. Apichatpong Weerasethakul's films perform and induce a meditative, calm, even sleepy state. (Hassoun & Gilmore 2017) These films as well as installation work like *Sleepcinemahotel* (2018) operate increasingly explicitly on the liminal states between waking and sleeping. Similarly soothing effects are precisely what many meditators stress when they talk about meditation. (Bordeleau 2017) The aforementioned meditation over decaying bodies obviously does not immediately yield calming effects, rather initial steps act to the contrary. This is the case for most bodies that begin meditating, whatever the concrete practice might be. “When I first started meditating it was uncomfortable and not easy, but then I got better at it, and now I find it peaceful.” (Cassaniti 2018, 63) It is after all the almost forceful transformation of bodily
comportment into regularized gestures and postures, an outside becoming inside as a process one is
aware of. Frictions are bound to appear. Sometimes, shocks must be induced so as to undo enforced
conventions – it is crucial to have supportive and communal healing infrastructures in place, be it that
each body has to do the work as itself however much boundaries of outside and inside are
experimented with. As a body and its constituting sense-organs become part of a concrete actualization
of the cinema assemblage, in this case the projection of a piece by Weerasethakul, his films summon
“us to imagine and experience our own bodies as part of a meshwork.” (Stern 2016, 21) Calmed bodies
enmeshed with the wider world, much as it is stated in Buddhist teachings through *paṭiccasamuppāda*.
In this relaxed state, the enmeshed subjectivation becomes open to other modes of seeing. What some
people say about other filmmakers, most typically perhaps the work of Philippe Grandrieux, namely
that “haptic images can give the impression of seeing for the first time” (Marks 2000, 178) also applies
to the images produced by Weerasethakul. There are different ways of unlearning conventional
perception.

Grandrieux's cinema is one of direct sensory excess composed in a way to prevent its easy
absorption into conventionalized modes of seeing. Playing significantly with lack of focus, distances
and rhythms. In an interview the director makes it explicit that the goal is to bypass novelistic
psychology (as in realism), “a bad hangover from the nineteenth century.” (Hainge 2017, 201) One
must keep present in the thought organ that ways of seeing do not precede the world and its
technologies – it is all coproduced. And the establishment of ‘modern’ perception and what it leaves out
was anything but a smooth, linear endeavor. (Morris 2009) Nineteenth century novelistic psychology,
an evident basis for much of modernist individualist ontology, makes real models of the human
unconnected to the wider material world and lived environment. It reduces the creative role of senses
and impressions to at best afterthoughts, turning attention away from complex formational processes to
idealist models. Plugging in a bit of Buddhist meditation is precisely what keeps the powers of other
worlds in check, be they cinema or Buddhadharma. The works of Grandrieux can be experienced as
directly working in ways compatible with Buddhist teachings. Something similar can be discerned in
more straightforward pieces of industrial cinema, especially so in action films – hardly surprising, after
all cinema is literally the writing of movement. Steven Shaviro calls these works *post-continuity*: “In
contrast to both classical and modern cinema, post-continuity filmmaking abandons the ontology of
time and space; it no longer articulates bodies in relation to this. Instead, it sets up rhythms of
immediate stimulation and manipulation. The shots are selected and edited together only on the basis of their immediate visceral effect upon the audience moment to moment. There is no concern for any sort of pattern extending further in space and time." (Shaviro 2010, 225) Here, any concern for continuity is trumped by "a preoccupation with immediate effects." (Ibid., 147) One can notice here that attention shifts from content to surface effectivity of images, sounds, edits and digital manipulation in post-one might call it "intensification of surface." (Martin 2014, 105)

Ramped up, reversed and slowed down. Always moving, never coalescing into simple wholes. Seemingly the opposite of works such as Weerasethakul's, a film critic describes *Domino* (Scott 2005), an industrial genre film, in the following way: "Expressionism, here, has leapt beyond the shooting phase to fully enter the realm of postproduction, of digital editing and pictorial treatments that imbue an overall colour scheme and enforce a clipped rhythm (created from a dizzying number of images) upon any event whatsoever. Scott is never content with using just one stylistic overlay strategy; he piles on his entire bag of tricks almost every time. In that bag: super-saturated colour, variable motion (*speed-ramping*, as it is known), superimposition, rapid editing, editing mismatches, hyper-coverage, and a host of manipulations of sound on every level (dialogue, voice-over narration, music, noises)." (Martin 2014, 103-4) Images here resist integration into a smooth reality flow, only the habits engendered by a society built on the prevention of awareness of complexity and connection ensure that most will sequester from conscience and active work all such operations and merely take away the violent patriarchal poses enacted by the figures (without awareness of the ironies and contradictions the film also lays bare). "When media change, our sensorial experiences also change. Even our bodies are altered - extended or 'amputated' - as we activate new potentialities, and let older ones atrophy." (Shaviro 2016, 368) The aesthetics are disruptive much like meditation ought to be, even if through the opposite of calmness. When placed against the background of a proposed Buddhist cosmology, films that seemed entirely disconnected come to have similarities previously unimaginable. One must only construct the conceptual infrastructure to enact these new worlds in an academic environment and elsewhere.

Losing one's body in cinema, becoming different through cinema, in the darkness of cinema. These images can "stick to the heart" as some Thai people say. (Klima 2005, 569) They can eventuate a sense-reconstruction. Such images do not re-present, even if classical découpage attempts to create such an effect, they organize forces into figures that act on other figures. (San Martin 2008) The
spectator becomes together with them, however the figures may have come to be and however they
may appear. (Ibid., 26) It is “the interpretation of one worldly event through another; the first signifies
the second, the second fulfils (sic) the first.” (Brenez 1998, 66) Deconstructing imagery can be fulfilled
through meditative practice as rooted in bodily unperception. The power of new media has been noted
for long. It was the most classic of all media theorists Marshall McLuhan (1994, 18) who noted how
newly formed media “alter sense ratios or patterns of perception.”

The affective conditioning performed by certain styles of film-making can intensify openness.
There is perpetual double movement, that of figural causation (Aumont 2007) and of material/dhammic
causation. Figures pass into the sensory network of the spectators, as the perception of forms is being
constructed based on sense-data combining with past experience, thereby connecting with previous
figurative habits, and by extension ways of seeing and thinking. Cinema can invent all kinds of figures
that disrupt quotidian *lokiya* certainty, figures that won't easily connect with what a body is used to
seeing. For those attuned to Buddhist worldings this can have ontological effects, in that it enables to
leave the cycle of rebirth or at least effectuate a calm disposition. The disruption caused by certain
images performs the constructedness of sense-perception, which lingers after returning from the shared
film-space. Cinema as a conserver of complex sets of sensory traces from the past, makes present the
impermanence of the world for the future. It presents traces as external memory that introduce a
distinction into the past other than the contingent mnemonic transformations operated by the internal,
personal memory drawing on the archiving capacities of a body. It invites the audience (once
accustomed to being without an independent reality concept) to imagine what was there before. And it
pushes the audience to recognize that which is here now, could and perhaps will be different. Some
films serve as a better entry-point into such reconstitution than others. Much like not all meditation
techniques are fit for any kind of practitioner, and don't have probable but not necessary results.
Conditions and capacities, outside and inside must align for effects to appear. A world where causation
is far too complex to be easily grasped, the causative models one operates with everyday remain but
pale reductions contingent on connective thought practices of where a body was formed.
## 6. Comparative Entanglements

Such ruptures and destabilizations of the certainty of senses and with that the world as experienced occur when bodies become parts of cinema projection assemblages (where the environment disappears in the process), and with the appropriate tools which include discursive articulation, can become parts of bodily habits and capacities. With that, part of what happens to a body as a direct environmental relation can be transformed into something co-constitutive of the body even when the situation it was formed in through experience is left. What occurs in various configurations as both cinema and meditation, is an effective dissolution of the subject and later restabilization as emergent from a body with clear borders, enabled by environments that make its appearance possible in the first place. Awareness of these processes is no easy task, as awareness tends to come with consciousness, self. Buddhist practices here turn toward awareness of processes that make self appear, and subsequently enable experimentation with them. Not as a simple contradiction of self qua non-self, rather as an experiential understanding of impermanence and connection. Becoming aware of emergence, becoming aware of perpetual transformation, becoming aware of ruptures (a specific kind of transformation) leads to awareness of identity (of self) as nothing but a projection through habits that operate in ways that turn attention away from actually ongoing processes and complexities. Habits that make a body a plaything to effects of the immediate environment and past environments as acquired habits. The occasional break enacted by cinema will not be enough to change this (with exceptions), which is why teachings are crucial as connectors and supportive stabilizers for reorienting how a body operates its connection to other environments.

Depending on how it is composed, the supportive infrastructure that enlarges spacing within causal chains of action/reaction (whether or not within a Buddhist cosmogenetic framework) will operate differences that can be later classified together, but must not be collapsed into actual sameness. However, the conceptual and perceptive infrastructure that can be constructed as it has been done here, can feed back into the wider world and effectuate the composition of material infrastructures that will enhance spacings so that incremental redirections might accrue to significantly divergent paths and increasing numbers of sentient beings might connect, modulate, recode. As pointed out, such activities operate not just what is discursively presented, but have also indirect effects. Such a world can never finish, bodies here can never be fulfilled, for there will always occur some things that cannot be
foreseen – whether explained through the excessive complexity of causation or the lack of capacity for a human body to even perceive part of the effects. Experiential insight into impermanence and the current, local limits of what a body can do, can effectuate a future transformation that changes such limits, including to what can and cannot be thought. All without falling back onto the habit of projecting what presently appears as real and given and stable onto eternity and universality. And, if time-tested Buddhist practices are applied, coolhearted emotions and equanimity will be cultivated. Whether paths add up to nibbana or varied divergent futures for bodies and worlds is not of particular concern here. One of central components of the writing is after all to show the possibility of research that draws much of its infrastructure from Buddhist teachings so as to displace some of the continuing influence of Christian infrastructures of thought. Whatever happens as such spacings, in order to not disappear without effect in time, it has to be stabilized and plugged into wider circuits which include ways of thinking and connecting thoughts to everything, whatever the exact manner of its composition, they can be connected to. Everything might be ultimately connected, but some connections to be built yet, especially those composed in very different manners, are resisted more than others, just as some connective tissue has been systematically accumulated (whatever the unintended side effects) to continue resisting other possible directions and circuits. Purposeful transformation never comes easy, that which does come with little effort is precisely that for which the currently dominant illusions of a world are already made for. Only incremental accumulation of overlapping directions can come to be of any larger significance.

Yet, meditation is a solitary endeavor, even as it draws on inter-subjective sources. Cinema is generally a shared project, which influences how these assemblages will come to develop what they affect. (Szymanski 2017) Why cinema is needed, is best said this way: “If only our relation to the world wasn't so distorted and alienated, we wouldn't need any memorial support or external projection organ – in short, we could dispense with the cinematic apparatus.” (Bordeleau 2017, 94) But it is not. Conventionality, even as it is impermanent and ever-changing, more often than not appears to be objective, necessary, and unshakeable. This is one foundational way of a distorted relation to the world. It was already Walter Benjamin, most famously among scholars, who saw the potential in cinema's shock effect to make uncertain again that which appears most conventionally objective. And while any medium's and technique's novelty effect wears off as it becomes conventionalized, the unique material-semiotic conditions that the cinematographic apparatus brings to the ontological figuration of the world
continue to lend cinema a special power in making the world continuously appear anew. As does mediation. And sometimes, at fortuitous and painstakingly constructed situations, with an appropriately trained body as a nexus and the presence of a conceptual apparatus that stabilizes what was experienced after the event, cinema can act as meditation in the strongest sense possible, without ever becoming identical.
20. Redescribing Research in a More-Than-One-World World

This will be a chapter in three scenes, each overlapping partly in time and concept. It is not a
chronology. It is another experiment in reframing, only now the conventions and infrastructures of
research also make it into the frames. No cut and clear separation between these motions is possible.
All fragments fragmenting and reconnecting. Like with any production of knowledge, there is no clear
start nor end, no easy separation between inside and outside. The first scene, one that is composed of
immaterial things, takes place in a moment of knowledge-production located inside academia and is
composed of multiple experiences, all of which are linked by a related problem, namely the persistence
of what Helen Verran (2001) calls foundationism. It takes a sort of macro perspective on the generation
of knowledge. The second, taking on a rather micro perspective, zooming in on something seemingly
easier to grasp, enters a fieldwork situation and will with the help of McKenzie Wark's *A Hacker Manifesto* (2004) entail an articulation of what exactly is occurring in this process doing so in a
different framework than is common in anthropology.<fnref n="228" /> The last takes what is learned in the previous
sections and composes it into an alternative image to think knowledge-production with. All occur in the
space opened by the research that shows that ours is a more-than-one-world world (Law 2015), which
necessitates a rethinking of the Christian derived universalism embedded in the (post-)Enlightenment
academic project.<fnref n="229" /> All parts are re/descriptions of a world that enact different cuts than is tacitly
supposed by realism and relativism alike in order to be able to perceive the randomly imposed
limitations of knowledge-production and articulate alternatives. This has come to be very pressing ever
since the incommensurability of worlds appeared as a research topic. The focus on description after
representation has been a consistent effort throughout the preceding pages – it matters how a world is
described. And here, a more detailed consideration of what goes into even the most innocent seeming
description will be offered. It is also an attempt to formulate an image of academic activities that takes
Deleuze's (1994) critique of the dogmatic image of thought, of the image of thought based on an
implicit good will, seriously.

<footnote n="228">228 Wark's *A Hacker Manifesto* (2004) is organized as a collection of numbered propositions. The quotes here refer to the number of the proposition and not the page.</footnote>

<footnote n="229">²²⁹ Aside from the challenges brought to the one-world model in STS, the ontological turn in anthropology (Holbraad & Pedersen 2017) and the rethinking of technics/technology as being tied to cosmologies in philosophy (Hui 2016) enact a similar opening. They at times intersect as examined in Lemmens (2020).</footnote>
# I

He has been working at the borders of a couple of fields, the differences between as well as the deep dives he has taken into them generating conditions for multiplying perception and awareness thereof. Much appears only through displacement elsewhere – integral to the anthropological tradition if nothing else. A construction as in cinema of subsequent frames, different positions without a preceding assumption of a real to preexist each. Such a shift can occur on many levels, whether physical, conceptual, narrative or imaginary. As constant motion between fields, he came to form a proposition about two kinds of (humanities) research: there are those that continuously create new (partial) images of the world, colloquially considered empirical in one way or another (disregarding the images of thought employed). They tend to minimize thorough engagement with philosophy or theory, treating it as methodology to be applied as hylomorphism continues resounding through spacetime. Then there are those fields that engage thought itself, while generally disregarding that new images, new worlds continue appearing and at times make it into the wider academic imagination. Neither framework, bare occasional exceptions, begins with a world in the making, and as such doesn't take itself as productive. The world is taken as basically finished in its creativity. Reading philosophers as an anthropologist or as a media theorist or somebody steeped in feminisms, he is shocked at what images are tacitly mobilized (and thus upheld). What both types operationalize is an image of thought where thought and world are fundamentally separate. Empirical research that doesn't (consciously) impact theory and philosophy that remains essentially untouched by the world. Thus it remains unnecessary for more empirical minded academia to thoroughly read that which is taken as a source for methods, and for most people who see themselves as theorists to keep up with up-to-date (or even rather outdated but still more current than common sense imagery) research in other fields. Variants of this separation are stacked within different levels of the academic enterprise, whether as shown by Verran (2005) in those approaches that pretend there is an independent world out there or those that consider it to be constructed by humans.

This can be easily discerned in discourses surrounding Orientalism, especially as it became normalized. All critique and no positive work of building/integrating ever new images based on an engagement with the sensory world. Where is the work done by those that engage theory to integrate new images? Always pretending that thought might operate without the sensory. The simplest mind-body dualism reigns supreme in the modern constitution, even if it's operations are more hidden in
some versions (relativism) than in others (realism, universalism). It is important to point out that just by
writing and thinking non-dual theories one does not do a non-dual world. Especially in social
constructivist approaches merely proclaiming I am decolonial, i.e. using this work as a research
category, does not make one's practice decolonial. Saying 'I do posthuman research' while the only
thing one does is looking for posthumanist motifs in easily accessible cultural artifacts such as novels
or films does not make for posthumanist research. What is extended is most of the material conventions
and divisions of the world as they are, with a small surface refocusing occurring to make it look like
more of a paradigm shift than it is. Unless the whole infrastructural edifice of what brings about
research as well as that of thought itself (in how it operates and what it connects) changes, academia
will remain a variant of the modern university developed in the 19th century, bouncing between
nationalism<sup>230</sup> and cosmopolitanism, particularism and universalism,<sup>231</sup> between building a community
being constructed and never-ending critique. (Readings 1996) So long as a separation between the
world and research, and within the edifice of research between theory and data is upheld, little can
change.<sup>232</sup> From a certain position there is no difference between realism and relativism.

He remembers the first time he encountered the writings of Helen Verran and how the work she
had done made possible other connections than the prevailing alternatives he was surrounded by. She
details her own development from a critical relativism to a generative approach.<sup>233</sup> According to her the
metaphysics shared by both universalists and relativists alike is characterized by the following points:
> “Worlds are physical, knowable orders of matter set against empty spacetime. (Universalists and
> relativists disagree on the origins of that order, the first locating it in the physical, the second in past
> human work.) Knowledge is representation of abstract or ideal categories. Knowing is located in minds
> of removed, judging observers of order(s) in the physical world, who formulate knowledge.” (Verran
> 2005, 34) She terms this foundationism as it prescribes ultimate meanings and it fails to recognize itself
> doing so. What both share is the denial of any real kind of difference, i.e. a one-world world where

<footnote n="230">230 “Readings recalls, in broad strokes, the early theorizations of the modern university carried out by Von Humboldt and Kant, and shows (quite deftly) that the modern university was conceived as a vehicle for the transmission of national culture, a sense of shared Bildung for a nation.” (Nealon 2012, 80)</footnote>

<footnote n="231">231 As the knowledge attained is supposed to be valid everywhere, the universal ‘human’ remains a tacit presupposition, a concept constantly operating (without having to be explained) in an academia still organized around humanism.</footnote>

<footnote n="232">232 “After all, the specificity of the modern University that the German idealists founded was its status as the site of critique. As Fichte put it, the University exists not to teach the information but to inculcate the exercise of critical judgment.” (Readings 1996, 6)</footnote>

<footnote n="233">233 Both the situations studied in the field, as with Verran's concern with the coming together of very different ways of doing numbers in Nigeria, and in the activity of academic practitioners themselves as is the concern here.</footnote>
knowledge, science and art are representational without acting on the world or indeed being part of
world.<fnref n="234" /> While realism denies difference upfront, with the alternative it's more difficult to notice.
“Being unacknowledged, the impulse to legislate uniformity in relativist argument is more difficult to
deal with. Foundationism is a metaphysics that denies it is a metaphysics.” (Ibid., 32) This links
(among others) with the concept of “[u]niversalism, with its image of knowledge as symbolic
representation referring to underlying givens of either the world or experience of it, brings with it a
specific ontology that, with its framing imaginary, enables a particular realness.” (Ibid.) A universalism
then that legislates itself as real in the same way everywhere without recognizing the labor done for it
to appear.

Such an image can be discerned as operating in most anthropological research, in the way it
relies on more-than-human infrastructures for it to become possible, while leaving them out of the
‘proper’ research frame. So, the description: a researcher heads out there, into the world (nature),
moves through spacetime without it being altered and engages bits and pieces that are fundamentally
knowable within the framework of modern science (even as it may be contested as to who and what
profits from such a knowledge, and acknowledged that paradigms change) and all parts will remain
fundamentally unaltered through this engagement. As anthropologists such as those he imagines
himself to be in the vainglorious lineage of keep encountering entities the status of which is not always
certain in this physical world, nor as the results of past human endeavors, tremors of these uncertainties
keep finding their way into the literature composed after these bodies have returned to more stable
shores. The world is always more wondrous than the expectations and tools one has set out with the
recognize. He has taken on different personae over the past pages to explore some of these impossible
worlds as the encounters throw ripples onto the still depths of certainty. Even awareness of these
conditions has not made him evade these patterns and cliches. The metaphysics inbuilt into the whole
enterprise work independently of his personal will – from fieldwork, to writing, to the reception. A
tendency toward universalism, whether affirmed or (officially) denied while still tacitly performed
when assuming that there is only one world, one nature, all throughout time and space.<fnref n="235" /> The same
goes for those that research cinema or literature or other such objects – the fundamental structures of

<footnote n="234">²³⁴ Of course one of the reasons is that studying the effects of artworks or science is methodologically challenging. Still, what I mean here is that research that is basically a critical interpretation of an artwork and focused on meaning remains hegemonic, as tools that Deleuze for example offers rarely, outside of media theory, lead to innovations in terms of how objects and theories can relate to their outside.</footnote>

<footnote n="235">²³⁵ See also the Beck-Latour (Latour 2004a) debate on cosmopolitics, and the recent reexamination by Blok (2020).</footnote>
the world and the beingness of each category, including that of the researcher, remain unaltered. The research is not concerned with its own activity of reframing these objects and the work of these objects in conditioning and orienting research, in co-producing these new things that are changing subjectivities of researchers, published articles or funding and teaching infrastructures.

Another element co-constitutes the stability of foundationism and it operates above all in the 'reception' part of the process. Itself composed of different parts. Whether in articles or other written contributions, at conferences or in classrooms, often it is presupposed that one first has a methodological introduction and then applies it to the data. The main part, the one with data, is expected to be presented in such a way that any interested academic will be able to follow regardless of their philosophical background. Some readers might recall conferences where an eager audience member might be very vocal about criticisms while betraying a fundamental ignorance of an approach that operates differently than said critic is able to grasp. The same goes for blind peer reviews in journals. Now, apart from the before mentioned metaphysics that separates theory from the world, another set of conventions is operational here, namely the Habermasian ideal of speech. (And, importantly, they don't just function in the minds or participants, but are part of the whole material reiterative assemblage.) "Academic discourse follows the regulative idea of the ideal situation of speech, according to which everyone can make claims and criticisms on equal terms, and only the better argument will count – no matter who speaks and what institution he/she belongs to." (Münch 2014, 15) What does this contain? It assumes that different research paradigms or discourses are simply mutually intelligible and commensurable. Further, it assumes that speech is equal regardless of whether one is from elite universities or not, whether or not one is from a minority (or not native), whether one tries to radically innovate conceptual possibilities or just reiterates paths already stabilized.

Yet, as researchers such as Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre (2021a, 2021b) take great pains to demonstrate, once one actually works with so-called poststructuralist and related philosophies, one enters incommensurable worlds. She shows that what philosophers such as Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze and others have done, is not developing methods to be applied to the world so much as ways of opening up the world. (St. Pierre 2021a, 4) And simply “[a]dding a rhizome or an assemblage or a few references to Foucault or Derrida to a qualitative study” (ibid., 5), as is all too often taught in graduate classes and seen at conferences, is not actually working with those philosophies. The fracture enacted
by poststructuralism makes it possible to discern a further concept operating in the regular academic
universalism of (expected) simple intelligibility and sameness.

He argues to himself that perhaps (academic) commons<fnref n="236" /> are an appropriate term for this kind
of knowledge produced under the aegis of easy intelligibility based on representationalist thought
expecting a reality out there somewhere to ground all that research.<fnref n="237" /> Now, conventionally commons in
academia can be understood in the following way: “One can argue that knowledge and skills that are
created and shared at universities are part of the commons. Academic knowledge creation can be
considered as a social process. Academics create knowledge that is based on preceding knowledge of
society, share these outcomes with society so that further knowledge can be created in society, and so
on.” (Allmer 2019, 605) What he is after meanwhile, is a more elusive conceptual operation that would
grasp that expectation of a shared intellectual/cultural space where the encounter with new research
occurs under the assumption of almost immediate intelligibility and conceptual commensurability (at
least once one reaches the higher levels of education with the appropriate diplomas). A commons then
not just as practical and material sharing but also the image of thought most easily associated in the
concept. These commons operate as a *de iure* image, an ideal, while *de facto* academic knowledge-
production is one defined very much by enclosures (such as prohibitive entry costs, both in terms of
accessing the information produced, the spaces it is produced and the investment necessary to gain
cognitive and practical access). In the idea of immediate accessibility of understanding (for the
conventionally educated elites) operates a construction of a particular plane of intelligibility and
general equivalence that projects itself as universal and simply real. On that plane the translation costs
between (supposedly) different kinds of information get reduced, the work done (both by the dead and
the living) in order to achieve this specific encoding is conveniently erased so as to pretend a neutral

<footnote n="236">²³⁶ “A new notion of ‘commons’ will have to emerge on this terrain. Deleuze and Guattari claim in *What Is Philosophy?* that in the contemporary era, and in the context of communicative and interactive production, the construction of concepts is not only an epistemological operation but equally an ontological project. Constructing concepts and what they call ‘common names’ is really an activity that combines the intelligence and the action of the multitude, making them work together. Constructing concepts means making exist in reality a project that is a community. There is no other way to construct concepts but to work in a common way. This commonality is, from the standpoint of the phenomenology of production, from the standpoint of the epistemology of the concept, and from the standpoint of practice, a project in which the multitude is completely invested. The commons is the incarnation, the production, and the liberation of the multitude. Rousseau said that the first person who wanted a piece of nature as his or her own exclusive possession and transformed it into the transcendent form of private property was the one who invented evil. Good, on the contrary, is what is common.” (Hardt & Negri 2000, 302–3)</footnote>

<footnote n="237">²³⁷ Academic commons are notably not as commonly accessible as the name would imply. Only actual open knowledge activists such as Alexandra Elbakyan try to make that promise real, and are punished for it, while academia in general is built on exclusion and privilege. Academic commons, compared to classically understood commons are furthermore dispersed and impossible without global infrastructures for producing, storing, accessing.</footnote>
universality exists. This is rather ironic, as those doing the work (let us pretend for now that it is mainly
academics) thereby make large swathes of their efforts disappear – work is not recognized as work
because it is taken as a natural process occurring as if without human efforts, thus enabling the
projection of the plane onto eternity (that is to assume a world pregiven to research, untouched by the
theories and manners of writing constructed). The labor done to uphold this plane disappears
conveniently (from presence to consciousness) and the current order seems to be simply there,
pristinely guaranteed somewhere somehow by God or Nature or some other centralized foundational
principle. In the meantime, there are obvious advantages, even necessities to such commons: “Ideally
the commons is an open infrastructure that frees us up precisely because it can be assumed. It should be
designed to be taken for granted (at least from moment to moment). Good infrastructure is self-
evidently enjoyed, not noticed. It is simply there, and works. We should not always have to ‘work on
the commons.’” (Lovink 2019, 125) The point here is not to decry the hiding of this labor, this
automation of knowledge into infrastructure, but to open a space where it is not hidden. Comes to be
opened for debate, from which possible alternatives might arises, that then themselves might after
enough labor come to be automated into pre-conscious operations no longer noticeable by the
individual working in a field. Freedom of individual creation and expression will always go against the
freedom enabled by automation. (Bratton 2019) The incessant operationalization of foundationist
metaphysics and naive expectations of academic commons persists, because in the modern world at
least that which makes it possible in the first place, that which reduces friction between different
entities and kinds of information, is hidden for the fantasy of personal freedom (that most central
ideological building block of Euro-Modernity) and uniqueness to be able to persist. But then, if “[a]s
Derrida (1993/1994) explained, deconstruction is not necessarily intentional – it is what ‘happens’ –
and categories like the research process, the interview, the field, data, data collection, and data analysis
simply fell apart,” (St. Pierre 2019a, 5) then comes a world where such research, where each
contribution requires the learning of a new language, of new concepts, problems and solutions. The
learning costs and translation costs (for the individual and the infrastructure) will be much higher than
the automation of today. Indeed, it will require new techno-social imaginaries of what it is that
(humanities) research does, for one thing is certain – it does not simply describe a world out there, the
bits of pieces of which can be added eventually into an integrated image that is at the same time
constructed, but also always already precedes the world (is reality).
All of this has direct impact on methods, before one even begins to apply them. “The concept data collection is itself problematic because it points to an ontology that assumes data are separate from human being and so can be ‘collected.’ [...] It refuses representationalist logic that relies on a twoworld ontology, which assumes there is the real out there and then a representation of the real in a different ontological order.”<sup>238</sup> (Ibid., 6) The entrenchment of this particular metaphysics is so complex, operates on so many levels (parts of the process of knowledge production, all supported through a different set of infrastructures and practices), that it comes as no surprise that theories that offer explicit and complex alternative ways of thinking and doing get recoded into the method/data distinction which takes away the force of the concepts and manners of thought in them. One comes to be so naturally habitualized to the expectation that, because one considers themselves educated, any new text encountered coded as the result of research will already be easily understood, because we all build together toward the common(alized) knowledge of the world.

“In this sense, scientific knowledge is a collective good issuing from collective efforts and advancing the collective of the scientific community further in its search for knowledge.” (Münch 2014, 16) The image of thought of philosophy critiqued by Deleuze continues operating in common scientific practice across different fields, namely that thought simply and self-evidently tends toward truth and the good.<sup>239</sup> How do such commons appear in the first place, he asks himself. And also, is there a way to account complexly for their emergence and continuation? Hardt and Negri (2000, 358) have a possible answer: “Indeed, labor is the productive activity of a general intellect and a general body outside measure. Labor appears simply as the *power to act*, which is at once singular and universal: singular insofar as labor has become the exclusive domain of the brain and body of the multitude; and universal insofar as the desire that the multitude expresses in the movement from the virtual to the possible is constantly constituted as a *common thing*. Only when what is common is formed can production take place and can general productivity rise.” He notes that the framework is basically Marxist (however Deleuzian in parts) in its one world universalism. But then, with all the recent research on different worlds (Lemmens 2020), it becomes clear that Deleuze and Guattari’s *What*

<footnote n="238"><sup>238</sup> Note that here the term two-world is a different concept than the worlds referred to in STS that is otherwise employed in this text.</footnote>

<footnote n="239"><sup>239</sup> For a discussion of Deleuze's image of thought, see Dronsfield (2012). Throughout the text, the concept of ‘image of thought’ is used in a more varied sense, namely any kind of unarticulated ‘common-sense’ image of how thought functions not just its drive toward truth and the good. So, for example, a particular conception of universalism that is pre-philosophical is considered an image of thought, and sought to be displaced. For if anything happens in anthropologically framed encounters, it's the breaking down of common-sense.</footnote>
*Is Philosophy* (1994) traces the one plane of interaction of concepts,<fnref n="240" /> much like capitalism seeks to create one plane of general exchange (while hiding the work done in order to create the conditions for equivalence).<fnref n="241" /> In the quote, general intellect is mentioned, a concept that too pertains to academic knowledge production. “General intellect is a collective, social intelligence created by *accumulated knowledges, techniques, and knowhow*. The value of labor is thus realized by a new universal and concrete labor force through the appropriation and free usage of the new productive forces.” (Ibid., 364, my emphasis) Academia (if he were to separate it from general entanglement through a series of random cuts) also composes of accumulation of knowledges, techniques, and knowhow, all the while not all knowledge produced within makes it into informing the techniques and infrastructures (the conservatism of infrastructure/system). Since words matter, he thinks about the associations something like ‘general intellect’ actualizes. “The danger of the discourse of general intellect is that it risks remaining entirely on the plane of thought, as if the new powers of labor were only intellectual and not also corporeal.” (Ibid.) One should not locate the intellect in minds or thought then. Rather he thinks of it as emergent from infrastructures that connect various very material parts.<fnref n="242" /> The way bodies (as articulated within infrastructures) are composed already predisposes to certain kinds of thought.<fnref n="243" /> One does not simply of one's own accord consider methodology as separate from data, of research as separate from the world. For the obvious position would be to notice that it has an effect in the world, indeed that is what one wants to have and thus cannot be neutral. The world must be built in a certain way so that this nonsense comes to us as common sense. Yet, as all the levels lock in so smoothly and forcefully, it is not at this institutionalized sphere where he finds a way out. One must move elsewhere first, into the world where knowledge is gathered before becoming codified to perhaps build alternatives. A displacement in concerns too, and more anthropological at that for making a cut that enables a centering around human activity, while leaving the infrastructural conditions making the

<footnote n="240">²⁴⁰ Grosz (2017, 9) offers a lean summary: “[It] is the order in which all ideas take place, the ‘place’ where one concept can encounter another, enhance or diminish it, and which other concepts must attain in order to engage in the domain of concepts. This is not a Platonic order, in which ideas exist in their perfection, but an actual order in which the particular, true or false, well-formed or not, concepts and texts—each historically produced work of thought—can function beyond the context of its production.”</footnote>

<footnote n="241">²⁴¹ See Easterling (2014) for an account of what goes into the material creation of infrastructure necessary for capitalism to function somewhat smoothly (the labors of which in general remain hidden), as for example through the unification of conventions.</footnote>

<footnote n="242">²⁴² Immaterial labor, a concept otherwise connected, is severely limited by its very name, the effects of which can be noticed in Lazzarato's and related research, where their attention wanders away from all the material work being done in order for a part of the world to be able to engage in immaterial labor. Wark (2017) offers a related critique. It seems almost as if concepts start working on their own to make some things appear and hide others, and orient the thought of those that employ them.</footnote>

<footnote n="243">²⁴³ One might also think this issue into the direction of ‘knowledge-socialism.’ (Peters & Neilson 2020) However, that approach remains based in a one-world world model.</footnote>
activity itself possible in the background. Alternatives through a description (always ontological in
what it proposes the world is made of) that makes other connections than is common in the
anthropological performance of a world.

II

And he thinks again about the basic anthropological methods such as fieldwork, a going
somewhere in spacetime, a somewhere that is already considered objective and preexisting before it
gets objectified and deconstructed into an article or monograph. A place where the humans living there
will be affected, because he comes as a human among them, and only what is properly human can
affect the human in a tacitly humanist paradigm. And he thinks about all that gets left out in this
framing, all that in the world that makes it possible. He is increasingly queasy about the entire endeavor
since awareness has arisen that knowledge-production is anything but a self-evident process: you go
somewhere, from Euro-America, to study and gain knowledge that you bring back. Sounds mightily
like resource extraction, even if the resource is less material than the more obvious ones. For what? Not
truth anymore, neither hopefully for colonial purposes of organizing subjected peoples for further
exploitation (though that keeps hanging like a dark cloud over all the research considering it can always
be taken as a description of a world out there). What is being done without a doubt is to bring
something out of a differentiating world into a space of mutual intelligibility. He thinks of the Jesuits
and other early intellectual explorers that in a fittingly Christian manner tried to bring all they
encountered onto this one plane of knowledge of the world. A sort of objectification of own practices
into the world at large.<fnref n="244" /> One at that, that keeps enacting cuts to dissociate local actors that help co-
produce the knowledge, whether human or not, from the production process (and hence any kind of
'reward' and 'acknowledgment') only to assign a personal 'name' of the privileged researcher to a
process (a splitting off of a local reality that then travels elsewhere) that materially is made possible
only through the labor of collective action of the (more-than-)human multitudes.

Based on his notes, he makes present a scene a former self of his partook in to think through the
problems gestating in and through him. What am I doing, he asks himself again, going far away to

<footnote n="244">244 Continued through the realism of the camera that takes objects etc. as particular instances of the general, where for some peoples there are no general things, all that is are relations. (Strathern 2002) That is cuts are being operationalized in an entirely different manner and there is no simple materiality/objectivity preexisting perception/concept.</footnote>