categorized as a kind of broader land-use/land-cover set, as a subset of a vegetation index (NDVI), as a resource for fuel wood or food, as a pixel of particular colour and size, as an ecological construction project, as an invasive species, as shelter for other species, as shade, etc.” (Schienke 2009, 169)

Now that movement is somewhat stabilized, the scene can be reentered. Of course, it is not the same as being there. Rather, a retroactive co-construction of a model through which to think. Much like when (re)entering a filmic space to think and rethink and overthink. Evidently, whatever was seen, was polyiconic. But that would be too fast, first we must consider how an image comes to be an image. Without a frame there is no image. A frame marks an inside and outside. A frame does something. And is something once we start thinking borders. Then the frame expands, as one zooms in on it, to become a topic itself. Which is not the concern for now, so the focus shifts back onto that which is enframed. But out there in the world there are no frames! some naive realists will clamor. Yes and no. Always in the middle. “All framing determines an out-of-field.” (Deleuze 1986, 16) Keep in mind that amid the flux, frames are zones of indiscernibility, as images transform into other images, they are clearly distinct but only analytically separable. My perception already enacts a framing, gathers some elements, while leaving others out. Hence, accounts of a situation come to be so different. It doesn't begin with the translation into words, perception, what one is affected by, already differs. So let's leap back into the scene that is somewhat coherently slowed down here and transformed into an object of sorts to explore. Remember, objects appear as such due to their relative speed of change to perception. Now on to situating in an anthropological body.

The world is always in excess of what a body perceives, and this sensing extends to all faculties: “The living thing has an exterior milieu of materials, an interior milieu of composing elements and composed substances, an intermediary milieu of membranes and limits, and an annexed milieu of energy sources and actions-perceptions.” (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, 313) So bodies perceive that which enhances their life, as “perception is subtractive and selective, since it is a function of the interests of the subject.” (Angelucci 2014, 319) By way of memory, of habit, to perceive the world in terms of bodily interests becomes determined by the past, and what was acquired there, does not necessarily correlate easily with new situations encountered. As such, there is more to this assemblage. Bodies connecting via nervous systems are plastic and have histories, are histories. Whatever has been repeated often enough, sediments, in other words slows down comparatively to the surroundings.
Secondary difference appears. Bodies come to be points of resistance compared to the multiple flux of the world, moving at different speeds. “Thus the living thing has an exterior milieu of materials, an interior milieu of composing elements and composed substances, an intermediary milieu of membranes and limits, and an annexed milieu of energy sources and actions-perceptions. Every milieu is coded, a code being defined by periodic repetition; but each code is in a perpetual state of transcoding or transduction.” (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, 335) Internal images of blood, of sound, of image, of, to follow Buddhist distinctions, any sense that accords their respective stimuli, are actualized when coming into contact with external images. These common images, or clichés in Deleuzian terms, that are “only what we are interested in perceiving.” (Deleuze 1989, 20) What bodies have been taught to perceive. Agents of sameness and misapprehension.

Here then, as everywhere, there are cuts. Not that images need fit seamlessly. They must be similar enough in order for ‘sense’/information to be formed. A repetition of some elements must occur in the following image, so that a temporary stability of form will be reached, all of which (in perception of a body) connects to the habitualized forms acquired before. This is much like when in cinema a cut separates/connects two images and only through adding the other one will information from the previous appear. Bodies frame by separating what is not of (habitualized) interest for them from what is. That is a sort of (media) infrastructure that makes appear, or rather, so as to not fall into a simple phenomenological account of perception (i.e. one that starts with the subject), enables some connections to be made while disabling others. A cut qua enframing then. One that separates and connects, gathers and disperses. Any pretense to that which seemingly neutrally appears to a human being a reality simply and directly out there crumbles. It is already co-constituted through: 1. human bodily constitution (as per Buddhist teachings too) that keeps changing through time as it is plastic (even if perhaps less so as age/entropy of each singular body proceeds) 2. memories that through association make intelligible and through these new encounters change. The difference is given in the specificity of bodies.

So what one sees, is a question of habit and milieu. So how one sees, is too. We don't know yet what a body can do. And much of what bodies do is ‘externalized’ into material systems that are used without a body needing to know how: “There is a growing divide between ‘knowing how’ and ‘knowing that’; skill and knowledge are going their separate ways. The daily use of operative signs
removes the burden and complexities of interpretation. Calculus is always already a kind of
'mechanism of forgetting.' In order to calculate correctly, we don't need to be able to provide an
answer to the question, 'What is a zero?' Calculating correctly does not require a theory of numbers or
algorithms, and for that very reason ushers in an unforeseen explosion of mathematical competence in
daily life." (Krämer & Bredekamp 2013, 26) The same goes for reciting suttas correctly, or generating
merit. If one frames what is seen merely as focused on the anthropos, much of what is happening is
missed. That is how the humanist mis-apprehension of world as culture appears. And culture as
something internal to humans, somehow magical and outside of actual contingent practices. A
secondary creation by the Western modern, the 'as if' explored in the previous chapter.

Each body composes of different sources, and especially today, when US hegemonic artifacts
above all circulate freely on the mostly one-way infrastructures, built as a very material
(neo)colonialism, that aim to extract materials from the world, and in parallel on other networks impose
imaginaries, there will be much overlap between bodies (in terms of accessible memories) of different
worlds transformed by capital. Even if their habits, that which shapes corporeal infrastructures
continues to differ. Here, we do not want to fall into the apprehension of the same, of worlds through
the framework of culture that enacts a random cut between a so-called natural organic human body and
the forces that bring it forth. Haraway (1990) reminds us of this: Christianity strikes again! This is not
to say that symbolic systems, whether naturalized as Nature (as among Western Moderns) or not (as
among many others), have no role here: "On their own, concepts, bodies, filmstrips, and politics are
techniques; but as components of an integrated symbolic system, they become a cultural technology.
Although such symbolic systems may be integrated into a single technology or dispositif, such
arrangements are at best temporary consolidations until emergent practices and technologies displace
and rearrange the constituent parts." (Geoghegan 2013, 72) Concepts such as culture, implicit images
such as a Cartesian delineated body – they do things. Regardless of their truth content as conceived in a
representational metaphysics, whether or not they are verifiable, whether or not verifiability is
verifiable. That is why some bodies come to perceive and live the world naturalized by Euro-colonial
modernity. Such a world is there, is real, it's just not the only one, even within the spaces most directly
materially composed as these modern conventions. Regardless of what sense-impressions might lead
one to believe, what is perceived is neither independently given nor immediate. The argument here is
for a specific kind of sensory realism – what is sensed has connected, but it is a process of construction
and not a reality simply out there, neutrally correlative of senses.

Moving about at the temple fair, in that overflow of light and sounds and movements, an inexperienced *farang* body can hardly stop and refocus. Pushed from assemblage to assemblage, parts of other parts larger parts connected parts and maybe partial wholes, fields of experience with zones of indiscernibility interpenetrating, an open series, never fully defined. The world as memory precedes the subject. “Memory is not inside the individual mind, but each mind is inside memory, like a fish in the ocean.” (Bogue 2003, 119) Yet, there is feedback from the individual mind to the memory, as new presents pass into the past. At the fair, caught tightly in the automatic movement of the world, it is not dissimilar to ritual assemblages, where personal consciousness recedes and the experience of voluntary choice is minimized: one comes to feel that one is conditioned, free of any illusion of simple liberty. An experience that can be folded back critically onto the experience of free will so commonalized by Moderns, in order to analyze under which conditions such liberation might be possible. At the fair, always caught and propelled by different assemblages with perception barely consistent enough to create continuous sense impressions. Looking back, it becomes clear that the experience introduced a distinction into the corporeal memory, one that can now be mobilized for different thought experiments. Once sense impressions get synthesized, metastable images come to be graspable, connectable on a partly conscious level emerging from the flux through randomized habitually conferred cuts. An example: three bodies meet, two of them composed so that they can be classified as human. The third element is seen by the two others. Both are what their memories are. Both see the third body, yet what each perceives, differs slightly based on what is being synthesized from all that was seen by this or that body before. Each subjective view enacts a slightly different subtraction, is affected in a somewhat different manner by the third term. The images (as subjectivized from each of the two bodies) will significantly overlap, each integrated into the series convalescing around the living-images coming into contact, without ever becoming identical. A low-key variation on the rabbit-duck picture, where one image is different entities depending on how it is viewed. This is the *polyicony* elaborated upon earlier: images consisting of more than one reality-series, so each body will perceive and be affected differently. And image, if and when separated and stabilized, contains more than one world which flowers upon connection with other bodies. Interior associations mingle with the exterior.

Made in between dominant tendencies, in between worlds, the body of an anthropologist. A
specific center of indetermination. Each anthropologist body is different (from others) and differs (becoming). Take the one through which this writing passes, one that is significantly conditioned by its copious and continuing encounters with (East) Asian cinemas, literatures and arts in general, as well as Buddhist studies, among other elements which made it so that now, it has gotten accustomed to seeing Buddhist and other elements in the world immediately, notices references to so-called imaginary worlds that circulate in the wider region, in ways that demonstrate the thoroughgoing sedimentation of Asian worlds as part of its formation. Without the media infrastructures such as the internet that, while requiring significant effort in finding and normalizing, nevertheless make it comparatively easy to access (certain) products from other parts of the world, this formation couldn't have happened in the way it did. Now, as a body in an anthropological role, not only can it engage in pop culture conversations in Thailand about Asian films and music, but sees the local world with eyes already imbued with many conventions implicitly contained in the materiality. And, as an anthropologist body, it is affected differently in this world than those of the other participants. It brings together other parts of what is there and a different set of effects is produced therewith. Action-reaction differentiates. Action-perception-affection-action. In the in-between of indetermination the past enters, the sheets of memory composed of a variety of elements. Here is where anthropologists among themselves will start to be differentiated even more strongly. Different habits of perception and attention. Different images and concepts through which things come to appear. So this body that writes is shaped not just by an idiosyncratic anthropological unconscious, but came to also be molded by distinctively cinephilic affections and Buddhist studies imaginaries. Among others. A singular ever-evolving living-image assembles, enters this loud and bright world, collides and reframes. Many of these potencies are larval, virtual. A body is not always aware. Images stored as and transformed into memories are made through encounters. They always come from the past as much as from the future. Preformed through attentive education and habit, actualized in a concrete situation, when stabilized (differently than the common ways of framing here or there or everywhere) they come to clearly point to different futures. Always there latently.

"However, if the framing necessarily determines though its process of constitution an out-of-field (*hors-champ*) – which is not only an extension of the scene, a 'relative elsewhere', but also and most importantly a 'radical Elsewhere', a 'dimension of the spirit' – then the duration of the film is also an opening to the absolute." (Angelucci 2014, 317) The anthropologist, inventing the (immaterial)
framework of culture. The post-anthropologist, inventing any framework they can without losing the human body as the perspective from which world becomes. From cosmology to cosmogenesis. Much like the pro-filmic construction of an event captured, stabilized, slowed down by the technology as (conventional) image comes to travel the world independently of the original point of assemblage and create future worlds by being plugged into concrete situations and concepts. The cosmos is always, anyways generated through combinations of elements, it doesn't simply preexist as a framework or ground. The two levels are articulated simultaneously. And differently, in that people practicing a world (in the field, in the world, one encounters actors doing things, not articulated cosmologies or statements) and researchers practicing their framing of other worlds are not the same types of cosmology. The stabilization of a cosmological frame within (scientific) discourse is another thing than whatever people do, and again another than the objects where parts of it are expressed, contained, transformed. They are not identical, neither are they wholly separate. The reconstruction of the cosmos is an experimental research proposition and necessarily happens within the frame of the modern conventions and assumptions of the academic's world. In other words to phrase or to read cosmological propositions from other worlds, be they Thai, Buddhist, animist or something else entirely, is to do so from within different conventions than were those of the people conceiving them. Frames within frames within frames, overlapping differently, even skipping over micro and macro distinctions, assembling the sensory and conceptual.

It is of importance not to mistake propositions of what is sourced from written words with the world. Empirical research is such work that operates an awareness of the irreducible complexity of world and the variety of ways that objects can be connected so as to create meaning. Those research practices that take written sources as something to extrapolate worlds from, as something to be decoded so as to construct a culture or religion, could profit from applying such methods to their own immediate surroundings and explore how they relate to the complexity of life. Such practices switch an image for the world, extrapolations filled with conventions of one's surroundings are made to stand in for other worlds with other conventions and affordances. In order for a research construction to significantly overlap with the world it proposes to be sourced from, heterogeneous and even discordant sources have to be accrued so as to pull the inherent speculative dimension of such endeavors as much as possible away from the self-confirming certainties of projective habits. Complexity increases with the variety of connections established, that is not any absolute amount of sources. Complexity increases with the
awareness of how and what things could be different based on engaging with research from other fields of research and other regions of the world.

Empirical research includes significant conceptual, imageric and material displacements of bodies. Meanwhile engagements that base their research exclusively in the textual comparatively fill in much more of what they construct through extrapolation from own conventions, easily sliding into Orientalism. Even if at the time that some piece of information was actually gathered and somewhat corresponded to some element of a world encountered, because of the lack of interaction with the world that changes, such information becomes little other than a cliché eventually. In other words, the difference from the Herodotian type of knowledge-making becomes negligible, a difference lying only in the figures mobilized therein, for what is considered realistic has changed. The more (materially) disparate elements inform research, the more perspectives, and with that the more objective will it become (in the sense used above). More importantly even, the more varied the elements engaged, the more apparent the need to think about how they relate. How does a statement relate to its outside? How does a text exist in this or that situation? How can it connect to other parts? How do the anthropologist and her methods enter the scene? The more varied the elements, the further is the researcher forced out of her habitual world and forced to find, trace, construct new frames for what has been encountered. Precisely because the more varied the elements are, the bigger the challenge of establishing a pattern which can then be communicated as knowledge, and the more challenging such encounters are, the more intense the shock to a body, the more it is forced to think and look for solutions in unexpected places. Such an in-between position can be a veritably metaphorical Procrustean bed at times, but one must, if possible, not cut off that which doesn't fit in order to remain in the safe haven of already established theoretical conventions, for that is a downhill road straight into the projection of cultural clichés. Besides, the out-of-field will not disappear by being ignored, it will only become more unruly. Yet, the out-of-field is twofold: one that is not yet seen, but can become part of a new closed set, and one that “does not belong to the order of the visible” (Deleuze 1986, 17), one that opens up a closed system to duration, in other words one that makes so that no set can be ever fully closed. No planetary or cosmic set of sets is possible.

When translated from cosmic to anthropologically epistemic problematics, the out-of-field generates further thoughts. It is not exactly an imaginary space in relation to the concrete space within,
for that already integrates that other into what is (a projection say as in Orientalism). The unknown that
is coded as an unknown is but a particular version of the known, a projection of fears and hopes more
often than not, but not an unknown. For an out-of-field that is actually unknown, cannot be predicted
based on projecting from past experience. Prediction here is preconscious sensorimotor automation,
one that must be shocked by a new image (hitherto out-of-field) in order to think. The unknown then
appears as something that does not fit already existing patterns and categorizations, because it wouldn't
have been possible to project as any sort of combination of what is actual (by a subject). Such an
encounter would be an event, something that renders the separation between the actual and virtual, real
and imaginary, objective and subjective indiscernible. "A zone of recollections, dreams, or thoughts
corresponds to a particular aspect of the thing: each time it is a plane or a circuit, so that the thing
passes through an infinite number of planes or circuits that corresponds to its own 'layers' or its
aspects. A different, virtual mental image would correspond to a different description, and vice versa: a
different circuit." (Deleuze 1989, 44) For each body, based on where and how it becomes, what can
produce such shock will differ, and so will the capacity to establish new, functional circuits. Those
formed in sites fully dominated by an other, might even end up caught in constant instability and shock,
unable to react, to fall back into reconstituted sensorimotor automatism. The anthropologist body, like
those of merchants or travelers of old (unsupported by the massive colonial infrastructure ensuring
stability of Western bodies), is one trained specifically to be able to reestablish circuits in face of lack
of comprehension. Of course, it helps that most anthropologist bodies squarely belong into those
categories that travel easily. Still, the planes accessible are not the same for all, and so different
descriptions and circuits are established. What is seen is (the objective thing ensures some
convergence) and is not the same (the effects and descriptions can differ, radically, especially for things
of which the semiotic dimension is significant). As with the duck/rabbit image. To remind the reader,
what is being operationalized here, is thinking enabled by the emergence of cinema, just in other
contexts, for it makes possible to conceptually grasp, make thinkable something new, something that is
there, virtually, but to be made actual requires specific tools.

So this particular assembled body can actualize compositions sourced from Buddhist studies,
anthropology from all over the world, as well as Asian cinephilia and literature, where many Buddhist
conventions are actualized in a variety of ways. Such knowledge, especially when it came to films
made in Hong Kong, was repeatedly a way to connect with Thais. This body can experiment with
associating frameworks. It is not a simple reality out there that is encountered. This body, by training, learned to see differently. It is searching for anything that would appear out of the ordinary. The ordinary being the conventions of representation for Thai Buddhist things. First it must be able to slow down in the frenzy. As it happened high on that *chedi*. Then it comes into contact with that installation of *sai sin* and garish colors in the background of orange-robed monks. The body composes different sources, including localized perceptions and stored memories of Buddhist worlds. Images combine. Perception happens. Thought arises in gaps. Part of this amalgam is translated into notes. That is discourse and concepts. A certain style of writing, with it's own conventions. And then onto these pages. Perhaps a few steps in between.

The composition of these pages here seeks to produce a couple of different yet related effects. A sense of becoming through being there, drawing on the affects making for that particular situation. And then, based on the thought induced there, on those gaps encountered in the field (which includes textual research) explicate in precision how it is possible that different people see different things in the seemingly same world and how other anthropologists, given a different memory, would have been prone to miss certain things. So the frameworks actualized, at different times in different places, at times intersecting, at other times separate, through this ethnographer body combine anthropology, philosophical questions, cinephilia, and film/media theory, as well as Buddhist studies and some engagements with other East and Southeast Asian cosmogenetic possibilities, all passing through the spaces cleared by the ontological turn. It is important to note that not all of these can serve the same function, as many theories are dominantly formal while research such as that in anthropology, film or Buddhist studies, also generates (othering) content. In its ideality this remains an analytic separation, and it is precisely the combination of a variety of research fields that makes some of the rifts and overlaps appear, including the now quite obvious fact that even the most so-called abstract thought combines with ready-made images of the world, it's alleged outside, when becoming through bodies. A reality constantly assembling without any center. The task of any inquiry is to add other points of view, to make it more objective, like film, closer to the flux of the world without mistaking itself for the world. To transformatively engage other worlds on immaterial and material dimensions. Or perhaps 'just' propositions of other worlds. To think in such ways that those immaterialities as concepts or cosmological frameworks one takes as a simple given in Euro-modernity, such as individual or society, or politics and biology, or religion and ritual, or (nature-culture or any other) dichotomizing, appear as
the contingencies they are. As entities formed and transforming. As having an effect on the world.
Ultimately, all is empty (of self-being).

The (con)temporary I, the now passed into the past, this I that is also a he, the medium,
composes and translates. Reality differs. The world doesn't head anywhere. Once this sinks in,
practicing certain rites to get a feeling of control in a world that is inherently unstable starts making a
bit more sense. The creation of stability through repetition, localized and networked. Not simply
immediately universal as in the Christian-Secular realism. All this composing, or rather part of it,
translated that is transformed into writings to which others connect, whose gaps are filled with other
images and imaginaries. The text doing different things in different spaces, never the same. Suttas,
especially in Mahāyāna worlds, are at times even self-consciously performative and through that
exceed the analytic reduction Buddhist studies like to indulge in. (Greene 2004) Doing things, not just
meaning things, including the presentation of discursive imaginaries on which local materializations
draw combining sensory sources that are never centrally organized.

There remains a power to descriptive ethnography, in its difference to anthropology: the
translation of other worlds into writing. As Tim Ingold (2008) makes clear, anthropology is not
ethnography. Yet in the surrounding discussions the power of description, the power of composing
words and experimenting with the frameworks to gather various elements gets undersold. (Ingold 2017,
Rees 2018) With feminist technoscience and media theoretical interventions informing the writing of
worlds new pathways open up. Perhaps less as ethnographies than cosmographies. Descriptive texts,
aware of how language works, become something between science and literature. Both create. As
literature that is, the composition would have to mobilize the affects in a situation but assembled of
different materials/flows. This is especially challenging when actualizing manners of thought
introduced by the ontological turn, where cosmography is sidelined in favor of philosophy. Research
focusing rather on conceptual experiments, on translating what was encountered into thought and
enacting conceptual differentiation in ‘our’ world, at the expense of engaging the sensory, the material
in a descriptively generative way. What is attempted here throughout is to not forgo the
problematization of sensory ‘reality’ while engaging in conceptual experimentation, to face the
challenge of writing reality after the invaluable lessons of the ontological turn. It treats cosmography as
the ‘disappearing middle’ in an anthropology caught between fieldwork and conceptual
experimentation, all too often leaving reality to the naive realists.

On another level, this means to experiment with cuts, dividing and gathering the ‘field’ in arrangements other than the still prevalent humanism of anthropology.<fnref n="87" /> When so-called reality is divided in ways that simply confirm (liberal) humanism, affirming modern research categories (as transhistorical, i.e. metaphysical), cuts in the world are made even before anything is engaged, so that other connections, those perhaps enacted and enabled by local worlds, don’t even appear. They are precluded by the misconceived arrogance of the modern. Not all cosmologies map alike, and for the individualist connections between past lives, or other beings, or with Buddhas and gods will not be there, they will only ever be add-ons to what is taken as neutral ground of an already finished reality. While for those for whom sentient beings emerge from myriads of connections, the individual will be the add-on, the illusion. Or say, as I will write later, the figure of Christ becomes something else to what expansionist Christians desired, intended, expected. The same ‘thing’ already differs. The eternal tension mediated by Jesuits and anthropologists alike: how to make oneself understood, how to keep ‘truth,’ while adapting. Series of translations – the big difference being between how much of it is a one-way street. How much conscious self-transformation is allowed for. How terribly the tyranny of the One is allowed to rage and eliminate awareness of internal difference.

So this is a description. Partial. A description is always a translation. And a production. Of reality as imagined out there and of reality as effectuated around the reader. A description of part of what was happening. And also an attempt to grapple with that which was happening, given the constraints of what this body brought there and which problems were thus encountered. One can think of all that remains outside the description as the out-of-field, which includes all of the frameworks and materially present things that typically get ignored in humanist focus. “The out-of-field refers to what is neither seen nor understood, but is nevertheless perfectly present.” (Deleuze 1986, 16)

Images, there and those habitually from the past brought there with a living-image, connect to produce that which is conventionally termed experience and perception. A body such as the cosmographer's creates a temporarily closed set (all of the elements that come to make what is

<footnote n="87">⁸⁷ I.e. the ‘human’ is taken as pre-existing, as given and only secondarily modified by culture. Instead what is explored here, is the ways (post-)humans come to be differently in the first place. The ‘post-’ refers to a world where the concept of the human is no longer simply taken as given, and not to the biological assemblages categorized as human.</footnote>
recognized/perceived) through cuts. What is thus made always comes from the past and points to a future, the other images to connect to. And, when transformed into research, a text, they come to be separated from this situation, they are constructed and stabilized across media (with variations) and can travel the world more freely (on the various media networks in place) to act onto emergent futures elsewhere. Which is what ethnographers have been doing – constructing objects that enact heterogeneous differences. While much of this research seeks to confine the power of difference and ultimately translate away many of the most incompossible bodies and images, they continue to linger. As is well-known from the work of E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1937) – a ‘logical’ dismissal of the full reality of Azande witches and their containment to an imaginary other-space (of Africa and/or anthropological literature) nevertheless keeps performing a certain version of them. They, through a series of relays and transformations, in fact come into existence for the readers of anthropological literature and will continue to exist so long as these texts (and what they influenced) will continue to be engaged. The variants in which they exist might perhaps not ever recognize each other. After all, an anthropologist must ask herself: would I recognize myself in the descriptions/depressions of the other? Commonly, they come to be connected with modern, patriarchal imagination of witches and dismissed or ridiculed on other levels (regardless of what the anthropologist set out to achieve). Concurrently, in their very existence as entities in anthropological literature, there will always be the potential of enacting radical change at least on those bodies not entirely claimed by Western self-delusions. Different concepts and different images plug in and make worlds. The more a human body will be able to actualize a wide variety of memories that make possible to grasp new elements in the world, the more capable will it be, as it can deal with a world that is always changing. To be able to draw from extensive archives qua memories is a sign of increased plasticity, adaptability, ability to deal with the unexpected – whether as an organic or socio-technical body.

To conclude, a return to the anthropologist body in between and how it connects to the conception of the brain in Deleuze's cinema thought. “For Deleuze, the ‘brain is a screen’ that emerges in the world of images, and although this formula will prove crucial in the cinema books, it is not specific to the cinema. In essence, the screen constitutes the development of the plane of immanence: ‘the brain is a screen’ in the sense that it is a filter that extracts itself from chaos. This screen is a form of relation, of interchange, of mutual synthesis between the brain and the universe; as Deleuze explains, ‘if the world is in the subject, the subject is no less for the world.’” (Flaxman 2000, 16) All this
operates in a world conceived materially, as connections, hence Deleuze's preference for neuro-biology
as a way to model how thought and bodies work and the connections to cybernetics it enables. (Gray
2022) When all is connected and affects each other, organs tie in or limit certain elements, assembling
into larger organisms. Thus borders appear and with that entities that can appear to be strictly separate
to the untrained eye, even as connections remain. What is a brain here, is the interval between action
and reaction to stimuli, to affects. "This difference in degree is not spatial so much as it is temporal or
'interval,' for life is simply a moment's delay or cut (écart) introduced into the image-flux: from the
earliest protozoa, which constitute barely any interval, the course of evolution introduces ever-larger
synaptic gaps, images in which the flood of the world is captured. The human brain constitutes the
largest of these gaps, like a kind of photographic plate on which convolutions of light are momentarily
'prehended.'" (Flaxman 2000, 16)

In the end then, why not take the anthropologist body literally as the ‘brain’ or the interval
which enlarges the space between ‘automatic recognition’ and the sensorimotor schema? If only for the
fact that such a body enters situations where it doesn’t know what to do on account of coming from
elsewhere and not sharing immediate recognition. The gap between received and executed movement,
the middle. And the memory to draw from is one that is expanded, or worked upon in research, in other
words includes what is nominally external to the body, by reading science beyond any disciplinary
boundaries, but also engaging arts, everyday objects, local practices, and any other source of possible
innovation linked to the problem that opened the gap in recognition in the first place. It is the searching
in memory that concretizes frames, makes clear synthesis of cosmos and perception. While each body
already sees something different, multiplicity, the hardening into different worlds happens through
practices of discursivation, or the so-called ‘culture.’ Meanwhile techno-culture of cultural techniques
as conceptual technics participate in this issue, but to a lesser extent. They are more open to the outside
(the whole is the open). Why? Because it is ever so clear that the frame employed in the analysis selects
but parts of the situation and could always be different, and as such they become consciously
performative. There is no closed system (set). It certainly isn’t culture in the common sense. “In my
new working images/stories, worlds emerge all of a piece. The imaginary refuses a priori separation of
the symbolic and the material, although it recognizes that such category separation might be achieved.”
(Verran 2001, 37) What emerges are different assemblages, of which words or symbols are but
changing parts. There is no reality to which a neutral anthropocentric description would correlate. This
is a category mistake by the typical post-Kantian modern, who takes their contingent tools and perceptions as simply objective. Correlating acquired clichés with an alleged world out there, cutting off any feedback loops of said world. There are ways out of Christian realist one world colonialism based on exclusion, or at least disavowal of historically very real external influence, which continues in much research that makes a distinction between theory and the empirical that can only be bridged by theory, which is always projected as only occidental. We need to put bodies in situations where immediate action is impossible, and thought as creation is forced and the conditions for widening and experimental feedback circuits are in place. A thought that while conceptual here, can also be somatic or technological, or anything. There are no transcendental limits to combinations, reminds the cyborg. It might be prudent to consider analogically the movement of thought (is there even a difference?) whereby the ontological turn is all about introducing a gap, not falling into the automation of one-world realism. The larger the conceptual and imageric toolkit of the researcher, the larger this 'brain,' the more occasions to split off into other possible futures. What will be the there to the there?
Ritual & Cosmological Experiments
10. Of Strings and Other Felicities

“The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation.” (Haraway 1990, 150) The works of the famous technofeminist researcher offer tools to think (the human body) as a site where imaginaries and materiality contract, neither necessarily taking precedence, neither existing in itself or accessible independently. In the habitualized mode of automatic perception imaginaries would tend to overcode the surrounding materiality as mediated by the senses, so long as the forms more or less fit, but this can break down. Imaginaries are by no means immaterial, just more elusive, more difficult to stabilize, slow down, grasp and productively work with than more heavily material elements. There has to always be some body, however dispersed, however disappearing in the process of making them appear, to carry them. And with materiality come resistances, dissonances and adaptations. It depends on what is framed and how. Bodies composing as material imaginaries, humans complexified with/as circuitries between actual and virtual. Is it the interplay of variously imagined bodies (not always actual) that is gathered through a frame, or perhaps one body as it contracts a set of figures? As movement-images, materiality and (dominant) imagery contract in such ways that they overlap almost entirely, creating the condition for the emergence of the mistaken attribution of a ‘natural’ perception, and its extrapolation onto the world in general. ‘As movement-images’ combines two possibilities: bodies as ‘movement-images’ as world, bodies ‘conceived as movement-images’ in a conceptual experiment of a body doing the thinking. A body might even retain very close and complex ties after the split into these two trajectories, but it’s not the same. The image of an integrated human body, self-sufficient, disconnected from the world at large, operates so that the actual materialities that constitute and sustain a human body (not just) today disappear from direct sight. One has to train to see the cyborgian, like with anything else. One has to train to notice how forms feed into what one sees, how it is anything but neutral and immediate to ‘see a human as human.’ One has to train to see how what is seen is already co-constituted by hegemonic ideological interests in control of mass media imaginings. Once perception is becoming recoded with other imaginaries, material connections to technological (support) systems come to be seen. Not as ultimate ground, true reality, for such an operation would once again cut away the productive role of imaginaries and present a world unconditioned by them. Rather, as a way of seeing that makes other connections, perhaps ones more expedient for our times, easier to establish (or notice). Noticing too is making connections and it matters which connections get made
and unmade. New imaginaries appear, not all of them necessarily based in empirical research, and connect with materialities, affecting each other. In a world where anything that affects and can be affected is a body, Haraway's cyborg isn't reducible only to human bodies now coded as cyborgs, for they are always connected, without ultimate essence and ones where outside becomes inside, open to the environment. The cyborg is a way to learn to see the arbitrariness of cuts and connections enacted through perception as bio-techno-historical formation. “I learned early that the imaginary and the real figure each other in concrete fact, and so I take the actual and the figural seriously as constitutive of lived material-semiotic worlds.” (Haraway 1997, 2) Learning this makes one sensitive to the implicit naturalizing operations of research and the languages it employs. It raises awareness of what words do and how a word, a concept or a figure in one context written for one audience might do one thing, but when quoted somewhere else, do something different. Some words hide more than they reveal, for they stave off inquisitiveness through labeling something as not worthy of attention because either too common or too unreal. In concrete fact, it always matters what connections are made and unmade.

Now, the world as cyborg; expansions and contractions of circuits between actual and virtual, acentred, ateleological process. Worlds as combinations of various imaginaries that make for their differences, overlaps and transformations. Temporary meta-stabilizations, material and imageric composition mixing, assembling – becoming graspable and tractable with technologies of reproduction. Change directed, mapped but not controlled, for there will always be too many unknown variables. Imaginaries made image. Even when slowed down and reproducible by a machine, condensed, sensible, complexity remains unreduced, images composed of other images, partial connections, crisscrossed by figures.<fnref n="88" /> A dance of new materialities becoming apprehensible for perception. The perceiver's memory is always to some degree part of the perceived, though only rarely will such a misalignment occur that the certainty of imageric habit will crack.

Such entities captured (images) are reproducible within techno-social assemblages that

<footnote n="88">⁸⁸ Figures are those shapes that gather as similar forms constructed in media of different material composition, i.e. a Buddha figure is something emergent in the act of perception that ties together dispersed materials such as wall painting, a statue, a character in a film, etc. Each figure, if analytically separated, is supported by very different material assemblages, each with their own figurative capacities combined with local techniques, conventions of depiction and skillsets. As a play of similarity and difference, new shapes that come into contact with the perceptive process can become part of the ‘figure,’ if they are close enough as a variation of past shapes gathered, thereby transforming it. There are no figures independently of perception and local conventions, and as such, any figure is always already different from itself and can come to be something very other, such as when when Jesus came to be confronted with (Southeast) Asian traditions, which will be explored later.</footnote>
necessarily differ materially but customarily produce the impression of identity of the images projected.
Since the advent of home video and subsequently video editing software, the capability to modify,
replay, examine moving images has become widespread. One can take the data collected in all its
variety (inside and outside of the body as integrated yet open biological entity) as analogous to the
apparatus that reproduces a projection of once captured information so that it can be explored in varied
ways. This would be unthinkable before, both in the sense of impossible in the world at large, and in
that a conception of research as zooming in, reframing, montaging speeding up parts and slowing down
others, would not be available as a way to think thinking. And the next pages will be built on this
capacity to explore a set of arranged images, reframings and partial overlaps, in order to see what
happens to research when the location of the object examined within the dataset changes. A variation
on: "I am kino-eye, I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, show you the world as only I can see it. Now
and forever, I free myself from human immobility, I am in constant motion, I draw near, then away
from objects, I crawl under, I climb onto them [...] Now I, a camera, fling myself along their resultant,
maneuvering in the chaos of movement, recording movement, starting with movements composed of
the most complex combinations [...] My path leads to the creation of a fresh perception of the world. I
decipher in a new way a world unknown to you." (Vertov 1985, 17–18) It matters which cuts are made
and where, for other connections are enabled. In this case, I will examine *sai sin* in order to experiment
with what changes if its position in the field of relations is moved around. *Sai sin* is commonly
translated as white cotton thread, sometimes with the inappropriately Christian derived epithet 'holy.' It
will be examined in order to experiment with what changes if the position of the string in the field of
relations is moved around. Crucially, not the position of the string in the scene encountered at some
time in the past, but in the focus within the construction enabled by the gathered data. The
experimentation with the establishing of circuits is made possible through the relative slowing down of
the movement-image (my body) through which connections happen, condensed images of imagination
and materiality. And with that, a certain *sai sin* contraption came into view that appears to have been
hitherto unnoticed.

# 1. Anthropocentrism

There is always more to what you see. Come along, reenter that merry scene at the fair. What do we
see? Some human bodies. The frame is distant. We observe them kneeling, reciting, monks facing
laypeople. Zooming in, it appears that something is connecting them. Why are the people there? They are producing merit through chanting. Of course. What else would people be doing in a space with monks. A fair is fun and you can make merit. Always make merit, unless your body has been significantly caught in Western worlds and merit appears ineffective. Still, you can go. There are many varied activities, most in some way generative of merit. How do you make merit, *tham bun*? Well, you go to places where you can make merit. It's common sense, isn't it? It's easy, just do what you were taught growing up. You don't even have to think. It's better to do it where there are fields of merit, that is where there are monks. Buddha images can also be fields of merit. (Skilling 2005) A field of merit or *punyakṣetra* in the ancient tongue is intensified based on the meritoriousness of the entity producing it, cultivating it: kamma was often linked to agrarian metaphors, linked to cultivation and the planting of seeds. (Salguero 2013)

An ideal Theravadin society (*pativēda sāsana*) envisions social life to be replete with
countless sources of merit like monks who ideally embody enlightenment, kings who rule
justly in accordance with the Buddha's teachings, and ordinary people who live
prosperous lives free from danger, calamity, war, and misfortune. Such acts of sharing the
benefits of ethical performance with others create a field of merit where multiple sources
of merit are present. Such conceptions account for a hierarchy of place where some
locations are deemed more auspicious and powerful than others. These sensibilities about
the presence of sources of merit explain why one finds small pagodas erected in
seemingly out-of-the-way places, such as the edge of a rice field or along a forest path
where people find refuge and seek to make merit by reciting incantations or practice
meditation. (Schober 2022, 119)

While merit-making practices are intertwined with and productive of social hierarchies, they are also chaotic, as fields of merit overlap, and various bodies, even those considered inanimate in Christian-Secular worlds, can be productive of merit and hence attract practitioners seeking to multiply theirs. The action of merit-making is never identical, context as local reality matters. So why go to the temple fair? There's something ineffable there, at least for those untrained in perceiving fields of merit, something to ensure that *tham bun* will be more than ‘itself.’ In silence a reader might think to themselves: as if there was an itself there in the first place!
So, efficiency and amplification have been part of these worlds where space is never self-same, and locales combined with the bodies that dwell there can produce forces impossible elsewhere. It's nothing that would show from the surfaces an untrained body perceives, except perhaps through the numbers of laypeople that indicate particularly meritorious fields. The same with *sai sin*, สายสัญจน์, white cotton thread used in rituals, just looking at it, classifying it as a subset of strings in general, one wouldn't see what is there to see and make of it a different thing that the locals. This body has moved through temple space<sup>89</sup> on the cusp of being overrun by laypeople, and even earlier, as monks and some helpers were preparing the open territory surrounded by walking galleries and other buildings for utmost efficiency. Maybe a tad over two meters up in the air, above that open space where people usually stroll at different speeds, the cord is woven from one side to the other, and then turned by ninety degrees to do the same and create a pattern without beginning or end. Chairs are needed, for the humans here are not tall enough to set it up without some elevation. One walks under this. At other temples it can be observed that the networked pattern of *sai sin* up in the air crosses from inside a wat to the outside, touching any object that can be connected, including the large flat screen TVs set up so that those outside are audio-visually connected to the inside. This is a way to connect *sai sin* with other instances of it, in order to construct a general category with specific qualities of that string.

It is indeed the most common procedure, as evidenced in Terwiel (2012), even though what has been observed in 21st century Bangkok differs from a much smaller-scale set-up studied by the anthropologist decades ago. A scene that furthermore does not seem to include any modern technological objects, nor achieve the expansive networking witnessed in the capital. Not only in research, one must necessarily trust that work has been done in good faith (for the event of collecting is singular and not repeatable), even when doubts set in about whether the researcher body actually could've seen all there would've been to be seen for a different body. It is noted that, “[it] is believed that beneficial, protective power is emitted by the monks as they chant the Pali texts and that this travels through the cotton thread.” (Ibid., 212) Connection to a Buddha image strengthens that power. Here, against the screaming blue background of the poster mounted behind the monks as an improvisational wall, the cords hang from the pattern up above, and when you follow the white cotton

<footnote n="89">89 So as not to overload the text with Buddhist architectural specifics, in general I refrain from using Buddhist terms or discussing architecture. Meanwhile an implicit image of temples keeps operating, based on my experience, and an academically articulated version of a temple was used for research. (Cf. Nongmar et al. 2013)</footnote>
with your eyes, you will see it connected to statues and monks' clasped palms, passing between index
finger and thumb. Pali chants resound, making it through the aural noise as one approaches. In what
can be considered a typical situation, *sai sin* is laid out at the end of a ceremony, woven between
participants in the/a snakelike shape, from front to back, connecting bodies, ends remain free. The
string is then cut into smaller pieces and taken by participants as good luck charms in the form of
bracelets. The string as a mediator, in between the bodies that produce merit and those that need it. By
virtue of connections established, the merit is multiplied.

Observing the scene, you see people in rows, not stacked very deep, just three or four, so they
fit under the ad hoc built open air stalls. Lit from above by white neon lamps, and replaying the
audiovisual materials gathered suddenly Buddhist flags, yellow with a red center, spring out at you,
they were lost in memory, unnoticed by perception at the time of neuro-mnemonic inscription. Oh, and
small altars are also there, of course! It's almost as if the background burned out the foreground. All
those posters in garish blue with yellow! Writing on them making up for the walls of the stalls hurt the
eye and create so much visual noise that it almost drowns out the human figures. The monks, in orange
robes, sitting, slouching, hunched over. Other bodies pass apace, horizontally to those kneeling, as if to
not disturb the view, though laypeople with strings on their heads are busy reciting with eyes firmly
closed. Displace by a few steps and you might not even hear the chanting anymore. Some hang around
waiting to be the next ones to chant. Not all of the monks are active, some are idling about in sight
seen, fiddling with their smartphones.

So there it is, the white cotton string, one element among many. With skepticism appropriate to
the Moderns, its less naturalistic properties can be evoked, but only with the requisite distance the word
'belief' operationalizes. Other *sine qua non* yet foreign to Western common sense elements at the scene
are mentioned to, at times with minimal exploration of their connections, but rarely if ever as attempts
to engage the variety of them relationally, that is in the ways they would mutually condition and
transform each other. Things appear mostly as self-same entities the naming of which through words is
transparent. All the while it remains tacitly understood that it is humans who are the sole movers of the
world. Much like going to the temple for generating merit, it is something you do, simply because you
do.
Sometimes what is done simply because it has always been, breaks down. Cracks appear, they always do. Often, practitioners haphazardly slap some liquid cement on the fracture, waiting for it to dry and leaving the nooks and crannies do their hypogeous work. Through the cracks, other worlds are peering in. They don't just go away when human sentients stop thinking about them. If one were to carry with one thing from urbanized tropics, it's that no amount or combination of modern materials will withstand the buoyancy of a seed carried into a nook or cranny, unnoticeable even to the untrained human eye. Reality is written habitually (how many methods of ethnographic writing books to tackle style and realism are there?), yet underneath the straightforward surface connections and imagery operate of their own accord, not always presencing into a subject's conscious-coded awareness. Reality, patched up or not, has to be taken care of, attended to, so it doesn't dissipate due to entropy. Much like buildings and other material things that especially in temperate regions at first seem self-sufficiently durable have to be constantly taken care of. If a detour is allowed, in the old Ship of Theseus experiment some crucial activities tend to be missed. Whether or not it is or isn't the same ship (as the thinker trained in Buddhist thought practices immediately knows: it's both!), the material as well as the conceptual constituents have to be cultivated, tended to, otherwise both the ship and concept (were it not reiterated through the materiality of neuro-corporeality and mediators such as writing and sound) would disappear. Those who saw the ship seemed almost a little too focused on the most idealist parts of the questions it could pose, to the detriment of so much else in the world doing its silent work pushed outside of the commonly upheld fields of attention. Transformatively translating what is perceived and surveyed at a place into fitting discourse includes doing so for the connections you are trained to notice. Focus intently on the human and see what is around. You observe monks' and laypeople's bodies, linked by white cotton thread, and weave connections outside of the directly apprehended: to the general category called ‘chanting,’ to all of the other instances of chanting you witnessed or even participated in. This being a particular example of a distinctly human-centered activity. There are some paraphernalia of course, at the edges of the frame. Buddha statues and carpets, water bottles and smartphones, gaudily colored banners, and of course *sai sin*, that ubiquitous white string weaving itself through this chapter. All these and many more that went unnoticed are translated into words, that hang out in the text, mentioned but not systematically inquired into, not given any weight, any resistance in a cosmology of the doings of humankind (even if no human is mentioned in dedicated passages).
Translating is never a straightforward task, whether between experiences and words or different language worlds. Pretending to linguistic innocence in research betrays political commitments. Relying on a neutral language model leaves out all that is challenging. For a common realist, it is obviously but a piece of cloth with some Buddhist meaning projected onto it. So a few examples to fill in the imagination of the reader might be in order, something to connect words with: “‘Soul-calling ceremonies’ bring in monks and other respected elders to ‘call’ the *khwan*, which then regroup in the individual, symbolized in white string bracelets (*sai sin*) worn around the wrist. *Sai sin*, intended as protection and help in keeping one’s spirits together, are often given before someone goes on a trip or engages in other potentially dangerous or uncertain activity.” (Cassaniti & Luhrman 2011, 41) Narrated within the common realist framework, one cannot help but take away that they are in fact just pieces of string onto which meaning is projected. “Like it was in 1995, the open area in front of the statue is at present also ‘cordoned off [...] by white sacred strings, or *sai sin*, commonly used to mark ceremonial territory in both Buddhist and black magic rituals.’” (Cohen 2009, 51) Oh, Erik Cohen, you liberal individualist so manipulatively using fantastic language (by referring a newspaper article written by a Thai journalist for an English speaking audience) to tacitly denounce Thai worlds. At times, it borders on outright propaganda, as when discussing the treatment of animals, where again an implicit goodness of the liberal order is simply assumed as ground. (Cohen 2013) Black magic rituals and white cotton string connections. Are you sure you weren’t aware what effect using ‘black magic’ as a further unexplored combination of words would have on a reader without education in this field? Just because something is a naturalized translation of certain practices doesn’t make it neutral or not othering. A good rule to follow: if translating is too smooth, if words used for uncommon practices are ready-made, if research doesn’t include slowing down automated thought processes, maybe we are not really paying enough attention to the intricacies of worlds, those of others and our own. (Stengers 2018) Attention though, a crack appears: not all can be easily domesticated into realist writing, and coding it as superstitious doesn’t make it go away. Not for a thoroughgoing materialist research it doesn’t. This beauty, from the Routledge Handbook of Religions in Asia, pries open the daubed construction with a swift yank: “Criss-crossing the large enclosed building is sacred unspun white thread (*sai sin*) linking the various images to alters, which in turn drain their potent ‘charge’ into ritual containers for collection, like some bizarre sacred chemistry laboratory. The sacred ‘charge’ is usually transmitted by monks’ chanting ‘protective’ *Paritta* verses.” (Taylor 2007, 225) While the inverted commas often signify the so-called, here they also enact another operation: how to translate a concept and an activity
that has no equivalent in English? One option is to delve into fields that operate analogously, in this case, that of electricity, for a cable and a string seem not too distant as images to think with in terms of what they connect, and the power that courses through these inorganic veins is by all accounts imperceptible to the eye. What more, the author injects a dose of imagery from another scientific field of research, chemistry: the sacred space as a lab. All the while distancing himself through the word ‘bizarre,’ as if afraid what a thoroughgoing comparison between the two scenes might yield. The image operationalized as connective tissue so as to bring the otherness closer to the assumed audience of the academic text might have been intended in the best of ways, and yet one feels a certain denigration – it cannot be like a chemistry lab, but it must be ‘bizarre’ and ‘sacred.’ An immediate operation pushing *sai sin* and the operations of merit into the realm of the fantastic, all the while keeping the habit of treating concepts such as ‘sacred’ as part of a social scientific world merely pointing toward something else out there but not really there. The problem is that the overlap of such imagery is not really explored, filled in, contrasted and compared. If it is like a chemistry lab, why not investigate such a scene, and how these imageries and their mutually enriching possibilities connect and transform? Connections established and immediately cut short, so as not to have to deal with the apparent reality of the power of chanting *paritta* verses has to others. Still, an excess remains absently present.

What is pried open here is the space between translations. How to make other concepts, whether language or experience based, enter into a world different to them? An activity that is always and necessarily open ended, and that can be reset each time. Or at least each time a mediating figure, say the anthropologist, begins to feel that the sets of tools and conventions offered in a language, academic or not, are too compromised, too much of a Procrustean bed, too afraid of the challenge of radical destabilization of reality sense and reference. Which images to conjure so as to walk the fine line between making sense/ible without full-scale reduction and keeping otherness without producing dismissal or orientalist projection? A field so ripe with tensions even professional writers might break into a tropics-sized sweat. Tweaking W. Somerset Maugham's words compiled in his record of Southeast Asian journeying for other ends: “The crisis came. The sweat poured from me so that soon my bed was soaking, as though I had had a bath in it, and well-being descended upon me. I could breathe easily. My head ached no longer.” (1935, XXXI) I, the ethnographer body, have let go of the pressure of a myriad possibilities of composing the never-ending process of translation and am letting the words stand as they were put on the digital page.
Imageries linked, associated, montaged, transforming. The nexus between materiality of things and their discursive appearance fragmenting in face of resistant encounters. It is not that things entirely disappear whenever the focus of inquiry retains anthropocentric conditioning, it's that they never fully appear in manners that would afford complexity and think itself into a position of challenge to the simple naturalist givenness of them. The *sai sin* can thus never be but a culturalist add-on to the universally valid and constant existence of white cotton string. White is white, cotton is cotton, string is string. Meanwhile, with fields of merit and other such occurrences, a Buddhist world is anything but one where there would be a universally valid neutral disappearing ground. As long as a one-world world universal reality is assumed as a ground for the follies of human activity, the ethnographic mannerism is the following: comment on the existence of a special object but don't wonder about its exact (speculative) operation, then add some details that are assumed to be cultural projections onto an otherwise self-explanatory object. And why would you, the content anthropocentrist, labor more on this case? After all, locals generally take its efficacy as self-evident, so why should you inquire more? Things are passive, dead, anyways. Little does it matter with matter what it makes humans do, what becomes possible and impossible. And all that these things that don't easily fit into your world are said to do by locals, it's all superstition anyways, even if today you aren't allowed to write it outright anymore. It's still there in the way reality is written. For those who have been sensing the cracking of simple reality assumptions, Latour (1992, 229) is meanwhile as apposite as ever: "As a more general descriptive rule, every time you want to know what a nonhuman does, simply imagine what other humans or other nonhumans would have to do were this character not present. This imaginary substitution exactly sizes up the role, or function, of this little character."

Such slipshod translations are happening all over Thailand and beyond. The more cohesion and givenness are presumed, the more spatial or temporal change and that of the things themselves must remain outside any conceptualization. As well as any agentivity individuating materiality or a media archaeology formulating the relations of cotton (strings) with wider formations might have. A string is just something there, within the frame, but not really. Just strings in general, instantiated here in particular, with its *sai sin* qualities being nothing but empty symbolism. Only humans merit attention. Framing obscures and reveals. It is generative of connections with the outside. The cyborg meanwhile rumbles: all that is are condensed images of imaginations and material realities. Sometimes you do things just because you don't even know they could be done differently. At other times you do things
differently and don't even realize that is what is happening. It's called living.

The focus here is squarely on images as pictures, the visual sense, with tentative awareness that further senses play large(r) roles outside of the realities of Moderns, constructed as they are over centuries.<fnref n="90" /> Notes have not been taken on smells or other elements, neither have recording technologies been developed or made accessible and the less of my corporeal memory of senses outside the visual said the better. It goes to show however that the (protective) operations of *sai sin* can be felt by bodies trained to sense, for better or worse, what mine cannot. It is like not seeing something while staring straight at it. One senses disquiet, as if missing something crucial. Was I, the reader, not teased with an exploration of a particular kind of white cotton string configuration?

## 2. Sivocentrism

Reentering as a minor perspectival displacement. An experiment in becoming-thread. What makes for *sai sin*? A white thread that is a connector between human and other bodies. A previous in-between now reframed as the center. With human bodies at its ends. In a play on Latour's reminder, reenter and explore the agency of a thing we already know humans in this type of ritual situation couldn't do without. Not as 'if I were a horse fallacy' armchair speculation, but as systematic construction based on material engagements. What if I were a string? I am nine-stranded, white cotton cord. Regularly, I am *dai*, a simple thread, one that "means something that made by webs such as spun cotton or silk and then brought it to spin as a thread for sewing weaving etc." (Choosukhserm et al. 2020, 62) Contact with specific arrangements transforms me: "in auspicious activities and funeral rites of Buddhism, it is called *Sai-siñcana* or *Sai-sin*."" (Ibid.) In funerary rites, I even become *sai-yong*. I am a conduit for power. With other objects classified as sacred by some humans and activities such as chanting, we mutually reinforce power. (Terwiel 2012; Scott 2020) I become many things. I am manifold. Once I become I cannot unbecome. I will be "placed in a special container reserved for storage of such sacred objects." (Salguero 2017, 310) I can do more. Controlling spirits and energies, delineating protected spaces, binding beneficial influences to patient's bodies, trapping and removing evil influences. Am I not powerful? Sometimes, I even split into smaller parts, to be tied around a human's wrist, as a

<footnote n="90">⁹⁰ This is also central to apprehending entities that don't fit squarely into modernist naturalism: “Local orders of knowledge are not as ocularcentric as naturalist common sense and the eyes are therefore not the primary sensory organs to apprehend these numeral presences.” (Baumann 2022, 140) For a general review of the research on sensory differences between societies as done in the anthropology of the senses, see Pink (2010).</footnote>
portable blessing. In some places, I even multiply into colors. “Somewhere, the monks use 5 colors of thread and silk to knit as the rope and then recite an incantation over the thread with mantras. After that, they contributed holy threads to their followers. Some monks did not use only bare thread but they also bind the Takrud. Some monks used *Sai-siñcana* to bind or knit it with colorful stones to be the holy amulets.” (Choosukhserm et al. 2020, 63)

There are three important ways by which I am made. (Ibid., 63ff.)
1) The three characteristics of existence (*tilakkhaṇa*) – impermanence (*anicca*), suffering (*dukkha*), and non-self (*anattā*) – are twisted in the form of three threads into a rope.
2) The seven latent tendencies<fnref n="91" /> (*anusaya*) – sensual craving (*kamaraganusaya*), aversion (*patighanusaya*), conceit (*mananusaya*), fallacy (*ditthanusaya*), scepticism (*vicikicchanusaya*), craving for existence (*bhavaraganusaya*), ignorance (*avijjanusaya*) – in the form of seven threads.
3) The nine supermundane states or nine-fold *lokuttaradhamma*<fnref n="92" /> in the form of nine threads. I am a string, I will not go further into the details of the *abhidhamma* and the pleasures of endless classification and numbering. I imagine the regular lay user too will have little additional information to fill in these classifications with further details. As a thread or *dai*, I connect to the Sanskrit *sūtra*, the Pali *sutta*. Its root, based on philological inquiries, is *siv* (the root of the title of this subsection) and in English connects to sewing, weaving, knitting. *Suttas* played roles in the practices of the Indian Ancients but connected differently than in those developing as Buddhist worlds: “The holy thread combined with 3 threads or webs which meant the high gods of Hinduism namely: The Brahma, Visnu, and Shiva, or it means knowledge, Karma, and devotion. This thread indicates that the children are responsible for their parents, society and knowledge pursuit.” (Ibid., 64) Meanwhile, in “Thai society in the past until the present, thread or *Dai* is used in a variety of activities such as fabric weaving, making clothes by the time of tendency of each region. Moreover, the thread is also applied to the ritual.” (Ibid.) Although different in most ways, there is a commonality: “Thailand and India use the threads like a media to connect belief and the way of life together to create morale and unity in the family’s member and society.” (Ibid., 83) I connect, transform, and empower. I am in the middle and all around. I can be hung from the ceiling, spun and woven over all temple grounds at special occasions. Without me, no merit would be transferred, shared or intensified. Monks and engaged laypeople

<footnote n="91">⁹¹ “The term ‘anusaya’ is seemed comparable to the Freudian id-forces. The PTS’s PaliEnglish Dictionary defines ‘anusaya’ as: ‘bent, bias, proclivity, the persistence of a dormant or latent disposition, predisposition, and tendency. Always in bad sense.’” (Tan 2018, 332)</footnote>

<footnote n="92">⁹² “Finally, there are the eight kinds of world-transcending (*lokuttara*) consciousness; these types of consciousness have *nibbana* as their object, and are experienced only at the time of attaining one of the eight paths and fruits of stream-attainment (*sotdpatti*), onceretum (*sakaddgamita*), non-return (*anagdmitd*), and arahant-ship.” (Gethin 200, 163)</footnote>
prepare spaces for future visitors, weaving across the emptiness between walls, the space where rows upon rows of human bodies will connect with me. For hours on end, I just hang there waiting for that which is to be connected. You can look at me and see the hanging ends writhing like snakes or used condoms of the nāga, or any other visual association, really. I have minimal control over what you, human reader will associate me with, see me through. Mostly however, I am as inconspicuous as white cotton string can be. When you look at me, you wouldn't notice all the power I have. Thoughts arise: Was the author teasing? We still haven't found our way to the promised string machine. What delays in gratification!

### 3. Machinocentrism

Shut the eyes again, and reopen – what appears now? A white cotton thread installed with an entire contraption connecting bodies. A merit-producing infrastructure put in place so that vast amounts of human bodies can pass through. Now, bodies connected to a machine operating in silence, transmitting energy imperceptible to the regular sentient being. Efficient. Rotating bodies. A string, a noose. Kneel and put it on. Around the forehead. Recite. Next. All prepared well in advance. *Sai sin* strung around whole temples, in lines, to create a web, weaving to and fro, up above the humans and from each, in regular intervals one of these nooses hanging, waiting to be activated. Constructed for human use, the human decentered. Merit production intensified. Suffused in the low hum of chanting. Or the cacophonic pleasure of a temple fair drowning out chanting's distinctly calming aural comforts. A string organized by a contraption becomes something else, no longer can its parts be simply detached for each practitioner before a new group readies itself, as I observed much later at other temples. A cotton string is never just a cotton string. *Sai sin* is also an image that affects other images. It does different things and an image of it can be detached and made part of the complex compositions of a researcher's experimentation with context and contact. The string, without a shadow of doubt, generates effects. The reaction it effectuates in this anthropologist body differs from those getting in touch with it for merit-making. Caught in the string's doing, my thought was transformed.

A machine can be characterized as “a performative object that generates an effect based on its internal relations.” (Morita 2013, 229) One that passes through different spheres, connects heterogeneous entities, be they technical objects, changing temple infrastructures, Buddhist operators,
merit-making bodies and the backgrounds that condition perception. Analogously, a machine is a performative device that “transform existing concepts.” (Ibid.) Such as those explored in different arrangements of perceptive connections and the depth of a thing. “Reimagining an alternative means of contextualization is crucial for this experiment because an analyst’s own conceptualization of the nature of connections impinge upon how s/he constructs context, that is, connections among things encountered in the field, in order to make sense of them. Thus contextualization plays a pivotal role in mediating the conceptual and the empirical in ethnography.” (Ibid., 230) The machinic infrastructure introduced to make merit-making in especially potent spaces more efficient when dealing with the pressures of demographics and, what I assume is safe to presume, the intensified temporalities under capitalism, also brings with other types of resistances between the bodies of sentient beings and those of the string. Operations such as cutting off a part of the string to carry its power home become impossible, and perhaps new innovations will appear, or already have but went unnoticed by this researcher-body. New habits had to be acquired by the bodies that put the string on their head. How to move efficiently and discreetly, and the directions where to move, so that the new batch of merit-makers can enter the field under the *sai sin*. Space has to be organized, ways to enter and leave without bodies becoming too much of cogs in the flow must be devised in and around temple architecture constructed ages ago. Time moved at a comparatively different pace then, people were fewer and distances by all accounts experienced as larger. Time is not a container, time is a central transformation.

It matters where a cut is made, and which imaginations and materialities coalesce. Perception for Haraway (1988) is always cyborgian, embedded in technical as much as organic devices, as well as situated. Thus there is nothing simply universal, unchanging as it moves. One cannot even discount that bodies formed in different worlds can sense what to others is unsensible, such as all that merit-supporting energy concentrating at a temple space. The cyborgian condensed image of imaginations and materials will, as explored with Deleuze, be a different image depending on the image-body doing the perceiving, or, in other words, the imaginations to connect with materials are co-constitutive and changing. There is no thing to precede the phenomenon, and no thing appears alike to another, yet material basis is not foregone. One might say that what has been operationalized here is an exploration of surfaces, of that which pertains to perception, in other words aesthetics in an experimental, relational and cinematic mode in a world of contractions and expansions.
# 11. Fracturing Realities: Fiction is the Landscape or How to Pluralize Ways of Seeing

## Part I: Framing Examples

So, framing as the way of the world, the way of the body. Practically unseen borders separating and gathering, unless materially articulated in artworks where the borders are very much seen, become problems themselves. Which is why all kinds of arts can come to be so useful resources in thinking worlds. Here, as before, the generative possibilities of the cinematic are mobilized. The capacity to disconnect ‘images,’ snapshots from what a body frames as common surroundings. Of course, it helps to be trained through photography or videography, to have actual practical experience with these technologies – not all graphies are alike. Those only used to reading privately (as established in Enlightenment practice), only passively consuming images see differently than those trained to make images actively, whether through practicing some types of meditation or the creation of images as 20th century technologies. Perception and technology melt and mingle, as fictionalization keeps operating silently, patching the gaps opening up as worlds, perceptions and things transform at different speeds. Every reframing contains a speculative dimension, a gathering of elements that to an ever so slight degree must be treated as a fiction compared to the previous one, for new elements enter as old ones leave, elements that not necessarily in smooth continuation of the before. With the formation of cameras and editing, perception is freed with the technology, as Vertov (1985) so forcefully showed over a century ago. It becomes evident that all is empty, all is constructed, all is assembled, a question of habits that can be changed, hacked. Metastable entities to connect other metastable entities to produce new perceptions and thoughts, temporary worlds. And with changing worlds new concepts are needed. What the practice of an anthropologist thus at times entails is “to invent concepts to make visible what is emerging.” (Rabinow et al. 2008, 64)

Similarly, the body composed to be a source for the illusion of my self might not immediately experience the world as one formed in and as Thai Buddhist practices, but it can nonetheless experiment with perceiving differently, a sort of controlled, aware transformation, unlike the changes we regularly undergo without even noticing. In other words, doing random cuts and entering new assemblages, slowing down the immediate pressures of surroundings (and kamma), inserting new images into established series. Remixing the world. (Boon 2010) Ways of seeing (Berger 1972),
radicalized. A (one world) realist may ask: is this legitimate? The retort: Well, at the very least it is
possible, so why not explore? We are looking into a future, not the past. Furthermore, as Lawrence
Chua (2021) painstakingly demonstrates: contemporary Bangkok is assembled out of a bottomless
variety of cosmologics and cosmograms<fnref n="93" /> materializing and dematerializing as architecture and
landscapes. It is never a simple unified Christian realist world, where things are unproblematically
themselves, stabilized into eternity or until God or Nature gets finally too annoyed with the
selfcenteredness of the modern human. And, as Chua lays out, parts of this palimpsestic metropolis or
*mahanakorn* in Thai (skrt. *mahanagar*) were directly built as if to instantiate Buddhist felicities.<fnref n="94" />
Worlds other than our common one. Levels of the Buddhist cosmos mix, scramble, cannot be easily
disentangled. With so-called modernization, “Buddhist cosmography wasn’t dismantled but reworked
and refined so that it could coexist with other constructions of reality.” (Chua 2021, 23) Spectralities
keep proliferating, as do feedback loops with Euro-American cultural objects that systematically make
it into the region's imaginaries. It's almost as if (urban) modernity weren't as self-consistent nor
universal as it (pro)poses itself to be. (Klima 2006; Ancuta 2008, 2014; McDaniel 2011a, 2021;
Johnson 2013, 2015; MacDonald 2017; Baumann 2018) Reality fractures. Cosmologics cosmologic.

The interest here is how elements come together to create perception, how to understand
different bodies seeing differently, even different things, and how to connect this to the creation of
common (as in shared), but not identical worlds? Common sense realism reiterated: to an eye formed in
the ontology of the Moderns (which includes concepts, practices, materialities and more to guide and
train senses), there is just one ‘neutral, natural’ world out there. As research keeps demonstrating again
and again and again, it can be other, multiple; and I want to construct a principle that makes
comparison across secular/sacred and other randomized modernist distinctions viable. To do away with
the habitual crutch of passing through a reality a pre-philosophical common sense out there and shared
by everyone, and if not, labeling that world as not worth taking seriously. (Viveiros de Castro 2011b,
132) It's easier after all to exclude what doesn't fit easily than to adapt one's theoretical framework,
even more so when it comes to a general outlook of how life works and how one's body is inextricably
implicated in the complexities of worlds. *Buddhadharma* is good to think and act with, as it is very

<footnote n="93">⁹³ “[...] starting from the fact that people do represent the universe as a whole to themselves and to others in objects – in concrete, visible artifacts. [...] human groups have always created external depictions of the elements of the cosmos and the connections among them. These are cosmograms.” (Tresch 2007, 92)</footnote>

<footnote n="94">⁹⁴ “The discourse of felicity as a whole is a form of ideological power, in Foucault's terms saying ‘yes’ as well as ‘no,’ running through the social body (of the elite) inducing pleasure and forming knowledge – materially and imaginatively – of both non-ascetic and ascetic kinds.” (Collins 1998, 19)</footnote>
much concerned with how bodies constitute and are constituted, and how differing bodies proliferate.
All of this is of course partly speculative (fiction). Experimenting too, is the key, whether in an
armchair or a less stabilized environment. What happens when different images collide? What follows
is the staging of three very different kinds of temples in succession and an exploration of what the
arrangement of such multiplicitous images renders possible to appear. A way of learning to see what is
inaccessible to the senses formed in disparate traditions. Possibilities that open when thinking
landscape, urban architecture and sense-impressions via a meeting between Buddhist thought, media
theory and cosmotechnics.

An Exploration in Three Scenes

Wat Prayun

Inside *Wat Prayun*, accessible to the eye directly from the sidewalk, but surrounded by a fence, *Mount Mo* or *Khao Mo* is an immediately arresting composition. It is a replica mountain with temples surrounded by a large pond with turtles. The mountain is a sort of rock garden, made of fake rocks and on them miniature *stūpas* and *chedis*, a pavilion and plants. There is even a cave-like part with Thai style painted Buddhas on red background, while the other constructions are both in Thai and Chinese styles. I will not consider the complexity of local architectural histories, merely attend to obvious surface associations.<fnref n="95" /> The mount, however much it has changed, has been around for almost two centuries. The word *Khao Mo* derives from the Khmer word *t'mor* meaning rock and was created to represent Mount Meru.<fnref n="96" /> “Stone mountains or *khao more* are formed by piling or cementing rocks together to represent Mount Meru. They are often interspersed with a pool or small statues. Adopted from China, *khao more* were built in Wat Pho and other temples in Bangkok and palaces constructed during the 19th century.” (Boonjub 2009, 48) It is said to be the largest and oldest replica mountain in Thailand. “In the past, the Khao Mo was the reproduction of a natural mountain and of a place believed to be the abode of divine figures. This means that the Khao Mo was the replica of an actual physical

<footnote n="95">⁹⁵ “Chinese culture has had a strong and recurrent influence on Thailand's architecture from the beginnings of Thai history thanks to trade, diplomatic exchange and immigration. It is easily seen in the ornament of religious and royal architecture: lacquer painting, mother-of-pearl inlay and decorative motifs.” (Sthapitanonda & Mertens 2012, 214)</footnote>

<footnote n="96">⁹⁶ Mount Meru is a five peaked mountain considered to be the center of all universes. At times the prefix su- is added, meaning excellent Meru, from which the Thai *เขาพระสุเมรุ* *Khao Phra Sumen* (Hill Venerable Sumeru) derives. The location of Sumeru within temple and village grounds has been subject to change. (Sthapitanonda & Mertens 2012, 104)</footnote>
form and, at the same time, it also portrayed the belief in a physical form.” (Pradittasnee 2016, 48)

The location multiplies: The mount is also known as *Khao Tao*, turtle mountain, or the whole temple as *Wat Khao Tao*, turtle mountain temple, because the pools around it are full of turtles. Some of the other entities to encounter: flamingo statues, Chinese sages (outside a small cave), a life sized boat (that barely fits into the pond), Chinese style decorated bowls with water and lotuses (found in most temples I visited), Bonsai (a rather rare sight). Naturally, there are also turtle statues. Also, a Chinese and very colorful shrine with a deity inside is there on that mountain, right above the pond. It is a veritable microcosm around Mount Mo that also kind of is Mount Meru. Some claim that “[t]he Indians and Chinese shared a belief that the tall mountains and deep forests were sacred lands, the dwelling place of angels and gods [...] The further one goes up Sumeru mountain, the more one finds oneself in the territory of those who are without suffering.” (Ibid., 46) Whether the either statement can be substantiated or not, the latter does bring to mind the observation that the nature-culture distinction in the region is not dualist, but a continuum, or even a series of overlapping continua – the further away from a center of power, the more nature it becomes. And in this kind of nature, entities are prone to unstable becomings. (Langford 2013) All the while this being a continuum from order to disorder, and as is unsurprising, order can be made from disorder: “we speak here about the Thai idea of *thammachaat* (ธรรมชาติ, literally order of what is)—a nature that is not mentally constructed in contrast to culture, but to disorder. Nature is a world in itself, where everybody has to find their place so that everything, every phenomenon is in order … or not. The construction of Thainess (*khwaam pen thai*, ความเป็นไทย) or other regional identity like Lanna, is thus articulated with a distinctive way of building one’s relationship with their own environment, be it cultural, natural, or whatsoever.” (Rennesson 2019, 10) A similar operation with regards to distances from a center is contained in the famous mandala galactic polities as outlined by Stanley Tambiah (2013). The more nature qua disorder, the more transformations occur and stability is lost, appearances become deceptive. And, of course, there are numerous centers of power. And, as elaborated on previously, fields of merit also act in decentering/recentering of power across space: the more renowned, charismatic, powerful a monk, the stronger the field of merit. And monks are countless in these lands, so statistically even powerful ones must be a few. *Thammachaat* meanwhile is obviously not static, it changes as locals from different backgrounds and classes come to be influenced by other worlds, not in the least when studying in Western countries. (Stott 1991) And, even *thammachaat* (*thamma/dhamma + chaat/rebirth*) is
considered a relatively recent creation, as there is no traditional word for ‘nature’ in any of the Thai dialects. (Davis 1984) The new word seems to be used in a way that *pa hu’an* was used earlier, that is for wild forest. (Stott 1991) “The forest, on the edge of the social and religious domain of the muang and the ruler’s influence, was the world of wild, dangerous and unpredictable beings, including tigers, bears, gods, spirits and non-Tai hill peoples.” (Darlington 2003, 131) With the terraforming of Thai landscapes and general transformation of the world with new technologies, changes in concepts and their employment are to be expected.

Into these overlapping fields, variants of a mountain enter. A mountain of immense importance in those Asias that partly came to be through Indic traditions. “Thus, *Abhidharma-kośa*, the founding text of Buddhist cosmology, describes a world centred on the holy Sumeru Mountain, which is surrounded by seven ranges of mountains forming concentric squares (later often represented as concentric circles) and seven seas between the ranges. Outside the seventh range, a vast ocean is encircled by a circular iron mountain range that prevents the ocean from flowing off the world. There are four continents in this ocean; on one, Jumbudvipa, people live. Taking the form of a concentric mandala, this world is called ‘one Sumeru world.’” (Morita 2017, 234) The indefinitely forested Southeast Asia of old, with communications between large and small settlements being mostly carried out via watery worlds of rivers and seas, was one where countless such centers overlapped, and new ones kept springing up. This so-called center has always already been an ‘imaginary’ place, a simulacrum without a direct original. For even if there at some point were some original mountain in the Pamirs (as some researchers today propose), few for whom Sumeru plays a role would’ve experienced it, less so even without first experiencing the copies springing up like mushrooms after the rain over large swathes of land. The same would go for Vulture Peak, *Gridhakūta*, the Buddha’s favorite retreat and actually localized, even if until rather recently, very few travelers would’ve made it there. Fewer even, I imagine, would’ve been interested in triangulating the peak of their imaginations, the various architecturally designed peaks of their commonly lived surroundings, and the peak as a geographical location in the narrowest sense.

The connections operating here are complex, some structural, some aesthetic: “As part of the [general] wat’s cosmological ground plan, cloisters represent one of the layers of mountains or oceans around Mount Meru, which is symbolized by encircled buildings. In the Ayutthaya-era temple layouts,
the chedi or prang was the main temple structure. During the Rattanakosin period [late 18th century of Christian-secular calendar until abolishment of kingdom in 1932], the ordination hall or the assembly hall became the prime structure surrounded by cloisters. In both periods, the importance of the building was determined by the significance of the relics or the Buddha image that were housed within the structure." (Boonjub 2009, 68) The place under examination then is composed of a wide variety of elements. That a wat assembles a range of lineages is obvious even to the scantly trained eye-memory combination of this researcher with very moderate education in Siamese and Chinese art history, and all that is brought back through activities such as that gazing at photographs while preparing to write this chapter. As for the elements connecting the Sinosphere, they might be somewhat less commonplace, but not entirely unheard of. "It is also obvious in elements such as temple and palace roofs built in Chinese style, and in courtyard elements such as Thai bonsai and stone mountains. Chinese-style imagery appears in many Thai murals, and the use of the colour red to decorate temple interiors is probably a result of Chinese influence." (Sthapitanonda & Mertens 2012, 214)

Each wat is singular. There are reportedly around 40'000 temples in the boundaries of the country today. There is no central planning or church structure or even centralized state support. This is a statement about organization not about ideological commitments of large parts of the *sangha*.<fnref n="97" /> Each has to innovate, to differentiate itself to make laypeople come and give donations. This doesn't have to happen through theme parks (Anderson 2012, McDaniel 2015), virtual reality or light shows,<fnref n="98" /> or other such technology related innovations, as mentioned charismatic monks or just reliable ones, or those very good at chanting also work, not to mention kids' attractions, pop culture integration (most obviously in the famous *Wat Pariwat* decorated with American and Japanese pop culture figures as well as Greek and other deities), famous spirit shrines or creative ways of feeding animals. What is rarely seen is this obviousness of an assemblage such as it happens to be at *Wat Prayun*, where Ancient Northern India with its immense mountain ranges and peaks, or rather its imaginary version mixes with

<footnote n="97">⁹⁷ The efforts to reorganize temples and communities of monks based on Christian-colonial models to control them and integrate so-called Buddhism into a national project were extensive, as earlier commitments were mostly local. This process of 'rationalization' also sought to purify of endless hybridization and establish certain texts as central. (Kirsch 1977) It is easy to notice that such activities are the coming together of very distinct cosmologies, one dominantly centripetal, the other centrifugal. This combination seems to prevent the easy formalization of state control. For a detailed examination of this and related issues, see e.g. Harrison & Jackson (2010).</footnote>

<footnote n="98">⁹⁸ Only by chance did I find out about *Bodhi Theater*, tagged as Buddhist prayer re-told, at the *Wat Suthi Wararam*, when I walked by one hot humid day, too late to be able to attend. It's an attempt to bring people back to temples, not through force or obligation but attraction. (Kamolvattanavith 2019) Meanwhile, famous tourist temples today can be explored as virtual worlds from home.</footnote>
Chinese imaginaries, with nature recreations – some more ‘natural,’ some less, as well as seemingly random elements such as the flamingos. This also shows in the different sizes of the elements, with the birds being about half or the third a size of the building replicas, with the live turtles of course and the boat being regular sized. What is found then is a combination of very disparate elements, some ‘copies of real’ some fully ‘imaginary,’ random mixing of sizes. There is no original source, no original plan, nothing to be straightforwardly copied. It is hyperreal, as a sum, a free mix of parts that conventionally considered (in a world of essences at least) would belong to different regimes of signs, but here are found next to each other, with a necessary ground. Variations of this can be found at many a temple, though perhaps variations is unfitting, as there is no unified model or original. (Oh the conventional constrictions of language and their implicit metaphysics!) Even the ground plans (suggesting Mount Meru and oceans) are easily forgone to fit the space. The inquisitive reader can indulge in more examples from pre-modern cosmologies a wat can actualize in a multitudinous ways, so as to fit the surrounding material conditions:

The southern *wihan* housed a Buddha image in the pose of subduing Mara with five disciples, called Phra Phutthajao Thesna Thammajak (Buddha preaching the sermon on the wheel of *thamma*), and had murals on the theme of the sermon on the wheel and the sermon at Tavatimsa. The western *wihan* housed a Buddha seated under a naga with the rear in the design of a *jik*, or Indian oak tree, and had murals on the theme of the Buddha's hair relic. The northern *wihan* housed a *Parileyya* (Palelai) Buddha, newly cast (the only image cast at Wat Pho), with statues of an elephant offering a water pot and a monkey offering a honeycomb in front of the image, and had murals on the Three Worlds cosmology including depictions of Mount Meru, the seven mountain ranges, four continents, five rivers, Himavanta (Himaphan) Forest, and Anotatta (Anodat) Lake.
(Prakitnonthakan 2014, 4)

What structures and ground plans point to, is not an abstract elsewhere or a transcendence (for such things technically do not exist in Buddhist cosmology), but other worlds in space/time. Buddhists heavens, worlds, are part of the same plane – one can be reborn there, the entities can and do interact (in some stories), they are just composed as different karmic bodies. Now, for somebody raised in Christian realism, I still have to conceive it as an imaginative practice constituted by bodies that share
my world. This doesn't take away from the differential construction of the webs of relations and mimetics. Different elements, some more abstracted like the wheel of dhamma, some less such as nāgas and trees and Buddhas, some almost entirely experiential, conducive to atmosphere, combine. What I am gesturing at is less the conditions of hyperreality, than the always already extremely varied (to the point of fragmentation, at least to an Occidental) elements that make up a wat. With the more glaringly contemporary incursions not being a manifestation of a new reality in general, as much as a process that has been ongoing, only now there are new elements to be include and through which to change. And the accumulative effects such combinations have, for it might be easy to forget that what I am writing here is a world organized around effects rather than essences.

## Wat Saket

Over a year and a half prior to visiting Wat Prayun, in 2563 of the Thai solar calendar, a previous composition of this body that is writing entered Wat Saket, one of the most touristically renowned temples, with another body composed among other things of friendly inclination. This other body was a young university educated Bangkokian who had been introducing the ethnographer to her customs, ideas, tastes and conceptual as well as aesthetic associations for some time. Wat Saket, the Golden Mountain, full name Wat Saket Ratchawora Mahaviharn, another of the countless Sumerus in Bangkok. Before heading up that imposing hill that is all temple and 318 steps, as all tourists do for the panoramic view of the estuary city, we strolled around the circle formed around the hill filled with many a wonder I am not inclined to list here. One moment we entered a hall, one I recalled sitting in front of on a bench years earlier in the form of a naive tourist, and drinking water in the afternoon heat. Again it was sweltering and we were wiping sweat off our foreheads. Stepping in was like entering another world – cool, calm and full of synthetic colors. Tourists and other farang bodies don't seem to ever enter (as I observed on other days), and even local seeming bodies were few and far between at this time of day.

It was the first time I saw what I saw, or at least became aware of it. Not only was the decoration and the objects around the Buddha statues even more positively baroque than is frequent in its fantastically golden hued intricacy, under the Buddhas and behind them, pastel neon lights kept blinking and changing. Blue green red orange violet. On the wall, painted blue like the sky with devas
and other beings, a large Buddha sitting on a blinking mountain, another mountain with a palace on top painted around him. In front, a much smaller *stūpa* and then an even smaller Buddha on another blinking mountain, at a faster rhythm. Red green red green red green. The floor a red carpet swallowing sounds. Many more objects are found around this 'altar' of course, but I have to bracket them here, put them outside the frame, for they are variants of what appears commonly and if one were to minutely focus on listing every single thing at a Thai Buddhist altar, one would end up investigating something different: in these worlds, offerings are personalized, each serving to connect donors to the Buddha, which makes for something else and serves to remind of the irreducible multiplicity of things. (McDaniel 2011b) The floor, a red carpet that swallows sounds. Keeps out distractions. Helps organize the focus of a mind-body that enters.

Enticed and bewildered, a whisper: – What is this? Why do they do this? And my female companion, after a few pensive beats, with an answer: – It's to create the atmosphere of heaven, which makes it easier to meditate. It was the first time in life as lived or academic literature as imagined that I remember encountering such an explicit statement of (ambiance) performativity. Technologies, or combinations of them, are used in order to create specific effects. It would come to reorganize my perception of other spaces, more obviously fitting imageric preconceptions of what a Buddhist temple or meditation hall ought to look like, ought to be made of. A slightly alien yet soothing atmosphere. Is it heavenly enough for you?

One learns, on some level, wading through literature on Buddhist worlds and thoughts that there are no essences. And yet, almost all of these possibilities seem discursively bound, rarely if ever with an engagement of more material planes of composition and how such worlding would world itself. And yet, when doing research in lands strongly shaped by Buddhist forces, encounters such as these become habitualized – it is not so difficult to notice that the world works differently here than in Europe, however much its modernist ontologies have co-shaped what is perceived. Lawrence Chua (2021) mentions repeatedly how structures, cities even, were built to copy heavens or other Buddhist so-called holy spaces. Here, one finds a very compact example. In the next room, a painting on the wall, again in the bluest of blues, combines imagery drawn from space exploration of our solar system with devas and other sentient beings flying in between. Images then that I never thought I would encounter outside of anime, where (for occidental conventions) entities also mix and transform rather freely.
Two similar, but not identical questions arise: 1. Do (Buddhist) heavens change too as technology evolves and radical cosmic reorientations<fnref n="99" /> occur? (I visited the Bangkok Planetarium with a group of monks and their Filipino English teacher, and the story of the universe told therein through a variety of exhibitions has a defiantly Buddhist slant.) 2. Do people really only/dominantly perceive things as effects without projecting this world's characteristics onto heaven (i.e. how to construct the complex causations between other worlds and this one)? By the time these questions emerge, I am far away working through fieldnotes, writing a thesis. A pandemic is raging. The world has changed.

## Bang Khae Mall Waterfall

Cut. Jump in time. One can do these experiments in life that has passed. A few days after the turtle mountain, I was to meet an acquaintance at the Bang Khae Mall in the farthest southeastern reaches of Bangkok. That is the Thonburi side. It is where the Skytrain ends. No plans for extension yet. A very different there than the South where I had continued to the temple fair at another time. Bangkok is a city of far reaching displacements. Only this time, I was just about to explore an unknown area and a temple of a different kind – a temple of consumerism. Ever since exploring some during my first research stay (unlike when visiting as a tourist, when I never entered a mall) I came to value these concrete giants with, at least around Central, fluid facades. It's cool and pleasant, the music in stores is much less loud than in Europe. The same holds for scents, which I usually experience as aggressively entering my body and driving me out of shops. Here, any break from the melting heat and dust and noise is welcome. Bodies are semi-permeable entities. Many of the varied malls I had been to tended to feature unique architectural elements and some included art exhibitions, ice rinks and other activities. No wonder I was told by young locals that they like to go hang out at malls as a free time activity.

Never before had I witnessed a scene in this *mahanakorn* (skrt. for megalopolis) that would forcefully recall my time in the Kanchanaburi mountains, in that settlement at the end of the train line with those refreshingly damp waterfalls and pools. Except inside and with masks to prevent the spread of disease. At the center of the mall, all the way to the top, there is a waterfall. Under it, there are a few

<footnote n="99">⁹⁹ The fractures that appear where space exploration, astronomy, critical theories and different cosmopractices meet, has increasingly become a field in its own right. (Cf. Battaglia 2012; Praet & Salazar 2017; Valentine 2017; for Thailand specifically, Reid 2023a, 2023b, 2024)</footnote>
pools with different kinds of fish. Small bridges cross over them. People sit, chat, stand, relax. An unthinkable world in a concrete jungle, in areas so hot that air-conditioning became associated with civilization in the world-saving missions of European orientalists. (Chua 2019, 118ff.) The atmosphere is very much one of relaxation, water bubbling, an employee feeding the fish. I can't believe how many fish there are and marvel at their size. Me and my acquaintance stuff our Korean sandwiches into our eager hungry mouths.

It is impossible to say where the so-called real ends and the allegedly fake begins. This rings a bell. Above all, it doesn't matter. At least as long as we remain unconcerned with ecological paradoxes. These abound immediately on the surface, much as with the Buddhist practice of setting animals free for merit, where animals first have to be caught so as to be set free by others. Such considerations I leave out of frame. As with temples, mimesis doesn't seem to be the concern, rather the intensity and effects of shapes and colors. When put next the two previous images, cases to enter, this mall waterfall becomes an example of Buddhist cosmopractice – one that transforms landscape (outside and in) as a free mixture of elements, some imagined, some replicated, some conventionally real. Buddhist hyperreality.

It is this possibility to put seemingly disparate elements next to each other that makes the ‘unseen’ appear, and the world become estranged. One's habitualized conventions of perception and naturalized assumptions becoming destabilized. If one were to put another image next to these, one say sourced from Central Europe, perhaps the series would make an even different invisible regularity appear. That is not my concern for now, as Europe whether real or imaginary, is not a Buddhist space in any sense, as the material and imageric composition has not for now been significantly shaped by Buddhist cosmopractices. There are no enormous golden Buddhas whenever you turn around a bend in the mountains, there is little of the free mixing of very disparate elements even in the most capitalist of spaces. But, who knows what the future will bring? This experience, the ability to perceive the unseen in the seen, is made possible through a specific composition of a body in-between, such as that of the mediating anthropologist. One that has learned to see more than there is, as well as less (unlearn seeing its own conventions). In other words, to open up a space of speculation based on problematics encountered. A differential experience. One that, as an extension of Viveiros de Castro's argument (2019) makes it possible to populate the imaginaries of those projecting their own very reduced
versions of the cosmos with the innumerable beings actually found in natureculture. The montage of these three examples, fragmenting as it may be, opens up the following question: what makes for a Buddhist material reality? Here, not in the sense of: how to see as a Buddhist (i.e. techniques materialized through a sentient body)? Though this is necessarily part of the conceptualization. But: how do Buddhist principles and imaginaries materialize (i.e. techniques materialized as non-sentient bodies)?

## Part II: Buddhist Cosmotechnics

"It is not a strict ecological determinism that is solely responsible for the variations within human technical environments [...] Technics in general, i.e., the human tendency to exteriorisation in the inorganic, and cosmotechnics, in the sense of different, culturally related understandings of this exteriorisation, should be more precisely distinguished." (Pavanini 2020, 31) For now, let's keep the primal cut that Yuk Hui (2016) makes in his thought, where we commence in the idea and remain unconcerned with the material conditions for ideas to emerge, travel, communicate and remain stable. And then proceed to where there are already different worlds composed as different cosmotechnics. The challenge I am tackling is how to think the encounter between worlds through bodies that might not at first appear to be different. In the scenes above, the aim was to write a reality that is there but only actualizes for bodies shaped in different world-making habits. To shatter the one-world world with a simplified and binarized sacred-secular distinction in landscape and architecture. One that takes away worldmaking powers for non-Western cosmologies (or minoritarian ones within the so-called Occident) even when they are directly observable.<fnref n="100" /> The compartmentalization of Buddhadharma into religion (i.e. something private, a question of belief) so eagerly practiced by large sections of religious studies and most of academia, not to mention popular practices (in general historically rooted in academic inquiry), is precisely an operation aimed at taking away the forces of other traditions in shaping material worlds and in the same movement hiding its own world-shaping activities. Of course, Buddhadharma is just one among many wordlings stripped to make fit. The ultimate aim of (white European) Christianity, with modern Western secularism being the epitome, is to make everything the

<footnote n="100">¹⁰⁰ A reminder for the curious reader: the Occident is very much a fantasy, an ideological construction, one that posits itself as originary, continuous, autochthonous, disavowing the multitudinous connections that sustained and keep sustaining it, not just directly materialist (trade, colonial exploitation; technological, architectural innovations from all over), but also conceptual (the Greek lineage only via Islam, the generative role for modern philosophy and statecraft and mathematics through the reception of Chinese and Indian, but also much smaller traditions like that of the Iroquois confederacy).</footnote>
same, to spread everywhere, by enforced love<fnref n="101" />, by sword and fire and exploitation, those that see
themselves as representatives of this order always projecting themselves as good no matter what they
cause. (Bouteldja 2016) It is an immediately and forcefully universalist project, projecting unity and
salvation in the same manner for everybody. Today, it transformed into capital, another religion of
salvation with priests and all that, always positing something transcendent as timeless universal
principle, except with a much more sophisticated material-semiotic infrastructure. One thing that can
be learned from Benjamin (1996) is not be swayed by surface classifications and discourse, and instead
analyze functions and how capitalism and science organize the actual world so as to see similarities
with Christian constructions of the world. Recognizing the lineage of the one, of the making of all into
the (identity based) one is necessary. Conceptually, or intellectually, I can entertain a possibility of
another world, even if, at least for now, I cannot immediately live it. It's a process. So as research, I
want to offer and as I hope partly already have an alternative account of what is perceived. Of the one
being not so much one. Now I will connect some common modern assumptions about the functioning
of the world to larger Buddhist cosmogenetic assumptions. They differ from Judaeo-Christian
possibilities in that the genetic part of the cosmos is never done, there is no single act (or even multiple)
of creation, and then the thing runs by itself. Cosmogenesis is a process. Karmic principles run and
produce reality. The assumptions connected to here are so general as to be present in all Buddhist
schools and it would seem present in everyday practice. So again it comes to be about framing and
fictioning: how to create a conceptual-imageric cosmoframe against which the examples can be unified
more complexly to offer an experimental alternative to a simple: temple vs. mall distinction. In the
sensory, the conceptual also combines and co-produces.

"They perform the unification of the symbolic dimension with the technical, bodily and material components of a culture; as symbolic machines, they enable the exteriorisation of cognitive processes on technical media; in doing so, they allow the one performing them to abstract from the empirical referents of these processes, opening up a symbolic, yet technically embodied, domain; they build up an episteme, since their performance always falls in the background, constituting the implicit common frame which renders possible single intentional cognitive operations." (Pavanini 2020, 36) Such activities are obviously practiced at temples, both when they are being built and when all kinds of

<footnote n="101">¹⁰¹ We love you therefore we must save you from going to hell. We love you and love is always good, therefore what we do is good. Taking Christian love as self-evidently good is already being biased in favor of Christianity, instead it must be studied how Christian love is practiced, how it manages to deal with leaving others be other.</footnote>
activities come to be performed there. The same goes for malls, these temples of consumerism, and other ‘secular’ entities, even if the activities and the spaces differ, and only overlap in certain domains (such as relaxation, atmosphere and hyperreality). They do something, they are ‘technical media’ that effectuate change (that if you are attuned enough can be perceived).

## Buddhist Media-Cosmics

I will forgo a focus on those Buddhist tenets that organize it around a (human/sentient) body, its limitations and conditions, and the problem of ending suffering. Somatic (un)grounding is explored through many other combinations all around. Here, I am interested in describing a cosmic structuration or map or ground, in comparison with which (implicitly) modern secularism will emerge as a thoroughly Christian figuration. Against which the aforementioned examples will emerge as easily connected figures. It is also a retrojective construction made possible by the practice of contemporary anthropological and media theoretical science – it is not something just found out there in a Buddhist world, because until recently, the tools employed did not exist and there were no worlds interested in creating and employing them, at least not in the manner done here. Science, if it’s to be worthy of its professed ideals, is always active at the edges of worlds, whether human or inhuman. It has certain rules of productive engagement through which new entities emerge. Only, for most of the time, this activity is hidden, naturalized, presented as a black box<fnref n="102" /> – becomes an ideological, Western supremacist operation. The point is to open this black box, stop pretending it’s a natural and uncomposed activity, and let other possibilities enter its composition.

Suttas and wall paintings with their dark shades, in large wats even the very architecture itself and the distant reaches of the murals, perform one essentially cosmological operation: they decenter the human body. Kalpas (aeons) and multiplying worlds and bodily beings. Endless rebirths. Even the Buddha went through cycles. There are multiple Buddhas. One can be reborn in other worlds and as other entities, and one can come back to this one in eventual rebirths. There are innumerable tales of the Buddha's previous lives, commonly collected as the Jātakas, ‘birth stories,’ while the Thai word for it is translated as allegory or fable into English. They bolster “the utility of the Abhidhammic theory of

<footnote n="102">102 Blackboxing is “the way scientific and technical work is made invisible by its own success. When a machine runs efficiently, when a matter of fact is settled, one need focus only on its inputs and outputs and not on its internal complexity. Thus, paradoxically, the more science and technology succeed, the more opaque and obscure they become.” (Latour 1999, 304)</footnote>
mind for understanding the common sense logics by which people navigate their worlds and care for
one another [...] this tradition encourages appreciation of what emerges from a cast of characters. Like
the contingency of the component parts of the mind itself, the variability of any given situation requires
a subtle discernment of karmic cause and effect or the guidance of a trustworthy other.” (Aulino 2020b,
7) There is no center, no world-historical event to define all that came before and that will come. No
One (Jesus reverberating) to organize all previous figures as precursors of the new one.<fnref n="103" />

All is impermanent (anicca) and empty (suññatā). Emptiness meaning having no essence,
nothing that would be left over after change, regardless of how things appear. While conventional or
provisional experience creates a world of mostly stable entities, on another level all dhammas
(phenomena, mental states, physical states) exist depending on others, all arises interdependently
paṭiccasamuppāda.<fnref n="104" /> It should not be forgotten that this does not cancel the operations of the
conventional truth, after all that is the one integrating singular becomings into the general saṃsāric
process.<fnref n="105" /> This conceptual infrastructure offers an elegant way to think this world as immediately
appearing materially stable (unless a body learns to see based on Buddhist practice) and at the same
time as changing (accessible through meditation, i.e. practical-conceptual application of Buddhist
teachings as will be explored in a later chapter), all the while remaining compatible with constructivist
materialisms.<fnref n="106" /> Suññatā is an expression beyond good and evil, an ontological proposition to explain
why immediately graspable objects seem stable, but when experienced in longer time spans, are not. As

<footnote n="103">103 Auerbach (1953) explored figures as they are read through others, which unsurprisingly became a generative manner to engage cinematic figures. “His work is a historical endeavour: to understand and elaborate a culturally and artistically powerful, very coherent system of interpretation – in particular, interpretation of the events recorded in the Judaeo-Christian Bible – and to trace its evolution from philosophy and theology through to literature and other art forms. Auerbach’s special genius was to discern this specific system, this category of thought.” (Martin 2012, 12)</footnote>

<footnote n="104">104 All this must be understood perfomatively: “... [w]atching (anupassati) dhammas as dhammas originally signified contemplating (as anupassati is often rendered) or thinking about the teachings of the Buddha.” (Gethin 2004, 529) The article meanwhile is a great example of the essential and naive realism (separation of thought and world) of countless Buddhist studies scholars, unable to connect elements so that thought, speech, conceptual application is co-constitutive of world.</footnote>

<footnote n="105">105 Again, when following research and general literature on this topic, it seems impossible for most thinkers, in true Christian fashion, to accept and operationalize that two truths work at the same time, even as their effects differ or even counteract each other.</footnote>

<footnote n="106">106 Whether dhammas or things or bodies, all of these are not entities as instantiations of a general type, as they are commonly taken in Euro-modern reality practice. After all, the whole Plato-Aristotle line of thought has not come to shape these regions until recently. Funnily enough, in contrast to hylomorphism (which to my knowledge never came to be formed in Buddhist Asia), there appeared at least at certain times of Buddhist development of thought an entirely different way of thinking the clay/maker imagery: “For example, if clay is considered the substance, and the form it assumes (jar, etc.) its characteristics or states, then clay itself would be taken as the cause, while the potter, and the potter’s wheel, etc., which give clay its shape, would be only subsidiary conditions. Thus, all evidence, textual as well as doctrinal, proves that the Sarvastivadins were the first to make a distinction between a cause (hetu, yin) and condition (pratyaya, yuan).” (Kalupahan 1975, 63)</footnote>
such it is intimately related to impermanence. And with it comes discontent or unsatisfactoriness (*dukhha*)<fnref n="107" /> which I will leave out of the frame now, as it has minimal import on what I do here, even as it has extreme import on what temples and teachings and monks are supposed to do. Framing gathers, framing separates, framing hides, framing makes appear. Framing makes thought possible in a world that is excess.

Impermanence, in other words, can be coded as entropy. And the *sangha* (the community of monks) ought to operate to slow down, if not reverse dissipation. Dhamma as cosmic truth discovered by Buddha, coded as teachings and practices, would in and of themselves disappear from the world, because after all, the world changes.<fnref n="108" /> Suttas, practices, temple spaces and all that serve to uphold the operations of dhamma as teaching. Emptiness connects well with the concept of simulacra – there are no originals, no essences, no ideas in a world beyond. Furthermore, reality as experienced is produced, conditioned. Which includes both stability as experienced by a regular body and impermanence as perceived by the trained ones. Kamma is a two-fold operation: action and the production of consequences. Understood in media theoretical terms then, we have the production of information. Something to communicate outside of its originary appearance, an abstraction, a material decoupling from immediacy. And because of this, it is immediately operational. Conditionedness is a co-production of reality through webs of influences, often expressed through the image of Indra's net. All is connected. And only the awakened body would perceive it, a mere sentient being, however powered up it may be as a deity, will only ever perceive part of the influences. Kammic history that produced what this body is doing today is given, but actions today create future *kamma* so there is constant change – interaction between past, present and what will be. This can be hacked through merit-making and merit-transfers which will be addressed later.

Because all is empty, connected and about actions/effects, there is no easy original/copy distinction, as was confirmed by interlocutors. It even shows in almost cryptic passages written by

<footnote n="107">¹⁰⁷ Much like with the common Christianization of emptiness as nihilism, a translation of *dukkha* as suffering (how eminently Christian a concept!) is commonplace, creating a version of Buddhist worlding that appears essentially negative and pain obsessed, while unease, discomfort, difficulty also offer themselves and create a very different image of these traditions. Translation is anything but innocent. Translation is connecting and it matters which connections are enabled and which aren't. Again, a matter of framing.</footnote>

<footnote n="108">¹⁰⁸ The danger of corruption of teachings that increases with time has been a continuous concern for the varied traditions, and more often than not intimately linked with sexism. According to tradition, those opposing the ordination of women, starting with Buddha's aunt Pajapati, expressed fears that such an opening would shorten the time-span of dhamma on earth.</footnote>
modern researchers on the practice of building *stūpas*: “the copy had to *be* like the original, not necessarily to *look* like it.” (Griswold 1960, 37) This kind of likeness is ensured by literal contact or touch. (Peleggi 2011, Irwin 2022) The play of resemblance and appearance we know from Platonist simulacra is displaced. It does not come to be a question of sensing correctly or being duped by a simulacrum that does not carry the truth or its copy. Similarity and authenticity are not necessarily linked. As such, from the vantage point of simulacra, all is hyperreality. The distinguishing operator is a/the direct contact or the actual integration of part of the original. The latter being a mere relation in terms of temporal precedence. Compared to looking like, being like leaves many more options. As explored by the anthropologist Michael Taussig (1991), this is a copy/contact world, rather than one of figurative fidelity and mimetic representation. Which does not deny the operativity of figures or similarities. A continuity through history, but not one that is easy to be traced by common sense(s), much like karmic webs. Again, any immediate sense impressions and one-world perceptions are decentered. What is seen can be other. The connection can come from any part.<fnref n="109" />

Engaging research on Thai Buddhist architectures, notably *stūpas*, a pattern emerges: previous cosmologics come to act as ground. In other words in material history, Buddhist principles were and are materializing. *Stūpas* are said to ‘represent’ Mount Meru, but what does this word do here? To what degree does the meaning operationalized overlap with common use? “In their solid construction they retain the original concept of the burial or memorial mound.” (Byrne 1995, 269) Further elements combine: “A *stupa*, whether or not it has been built on the site of a *phi* [local spirit] shrine, is thus an empowered object in its own right, partly through having been ritually sacralized at the time of its consecration but mainly by virtue of this chain of symbolic connection.” (Ibid., 271) Different elements must come together for a *stūpa* to become an empowered object, not to mention that in order to appear so to a sentient being, the latter must be entangled in such processes to feel their power. To ensure entropy won’t do its steady work, different times require different effort. In olden times, where landscapes and technologies looked different, time was much vaster than in today’s world of accelerated material connectivity. I imagine what it would take to uphold series of replicas of the same complex structure and ensure that visitors notice entangled relations whether through somewhat obvious visual similarities or less obviously aesthetic or narrative connections. For a minute I think

<footnote n="109">¹⁰⁹ To acknowledge, on some level, there stability was, whether actively or not, conceived: dhamma itself is ‘timeless”(Pl.: *akaliko*) and somehow ontologically shown to be situated beyond history as mundane temporality but linked to tradition. Still, the following question has not been systematically posed: does dhamma change (i.e. is there a feedback mechanism, is it ‘empty’)?</footnote>
about what technological innovation it might require, not to mention material-energetic investment, so unless this is of central importance for a tradition, it would not occur. It matters which images are taken to think pasts and presents with. This is not so much a question of mimetic correctness, but of not even making all the varied and complex conditions of life in a given space part of research in the first place. “Fragments were also taken by local people as objects of veneration, a custom widespread in the north-east.” (Ibid.) Practices then that ensure enduring connectivity through fragmentation of an ‘original’ object.

Phrased differently: any part can become disconnected and active elsewhere, if the conditions are right.<fnref n="110" /> No centrality, no essential meaning – just transformation through effect, effect through transformation. “Next to the circulation of relics and images, the erection of stupas marked the landscape as having been brought into the Buddhist domain at the same time that it memorialised such an accomplishment.” (Peleggi 2011, 58) It also makes for a stabilization of a Buddhist imaginary (however non-exclusive it may be) in a landscape. Other worlds come to be in this one, and the more infrastructure is constructed, the more complex and extended the network of *stūpas*, the more stable the presence of Buddhadharma. This is also described for other, faraway regions: “What could not be directly moved across large distances, such as temples or large icons, was transferred from one place to another through images, architectural plans, and narratives, which in turn became the templates for a vast number of ‘copies,’ more or less accurate. Thus, many locations throughout Buddhist Asia claim to be reproductions of the Jetavana Grove or the Vulture Peak in India where the Buddha spoke some of his most remarkable *sutras*.” (Rambelli 2017, 4) How to bring incessant variation back together without forgetting that any framing gathers and excludes in one motion?

It must be restated that in pre-modern times, there was no Buddhism as such. This is meant in a very material, sensory sense: the shapes as which Buddhist practice came to be were by all accounts not easily comparable or even noticeable. The Buddhist world shared an idea and (vague) cosmological imagination related to what is now called India as the place where Buddhist teachings came from and where Buddha Gautama lived, though without modern scientific, cartographic and reproductive

<footnote n="110">¹¹⁰ A thing draws power comes from two sources: “Aura is thus a feature of both the authentic – that which was part of, or in contact with, the Buddha’s body (including the *Udhayana* icon), and the replica – copies of that first icon that are ‘enlivened’, or endowed with aura,” (Peleggi 2011, 60) Farther East Fabio Rambelli observes: “if a distinctive Buddhist way to deal with objects exists at all, it is a double tendency toward what can be called a metonymic use, that is, treating objects as directly related to what they represent [...] and a nonhermeneutical use [...]” (Rambelli 2017, 5)</footnote>
technologies there was little to hold the varied imaginaries together. The world has changed. New objects and concepts were created that proliferate, having been spread along (more often than not one-way) infrastructures of colonial powers. Today, we live in a world with many object-networks to make countless similarities apparent, to bring some entities closer and entrench gulfs between others. All the while even the things that already were, change with surroundings. All is empty, we should stop positing entities as simply preexisting other entities, contexts, diffractions. Such worlds are the result of centuries of work, labor even, of material-symbolic creation. It is a different world than before Europeans started colonizing Asia and creating religions and essences. If the cosmologic described here is followed, this comes as no surprise – forms are easily mutable, what connects spaces is the creation of atmosphere and soteriological goals. Buddhist world-making is famously mightily morphable when in contact with local traditions.

This process is paralleled when we return to the creation of Buddhism through objects that make some connections appear and others disappear. Some travelers, especially from China with its strong literary traditions, undertook the activity of establishing connections between sites, making materially real (for them) what they until then only new from stories and imaginations (as their readers would continue, albeit transformed by new information). Furthermore, there had always been long-distance trade routes and it can be presumed that some of the information on other Buddhist spaces traveled along these, much like Buddhist teachings did. However, this had never been stabilized in a way that happened with the modern conception of Buddhism and all that pertains not just to academic engagement, but the spread of hegemonic culture that makes it comparatively easy to access its products in far flung areas. The objects that came to be through these travels, such as Faxian's, Yijing's or Xuanzang's travelogues, were of a similar kind to *suttas*, in that they were texts (only without the performative, recitative qualities), but not infrastructure (to be maintained) or anything to sustain constant contact and exchange between areas shaped heavily by Buddhadharma. They did also bring Buddhist texts with them, and with that too changed what was possible in the regions they connected. When engaging such topics, it is not enough to just trace that some humans practicing Buddhist rites and teachings, such as merchants and sailors, had contact. It requires focused and sustained labor to create stable connections between how (universalizing) traditions, especially those without any clear centers to continuously reorient developments toward some sort of sameness, as they spread, transform, appear and disappear.
Breaking small pieces off of *chedis*, bringing partial news from Buddhist areas. A dispersion as literal parts are taken elsewhere without anything resembling central planning or even attempts to control. Copy and contact in contemporary theory as developed by Michael Taussig (1993) via a combination of material collected in Colombia and Frankfurt School Marxism, operating as partialities, not any (easily presupposed) wholes. Structures arising in jungles. Structures being swallowed by jungles. When a Buddhist cosmology is already established, there is a human motivation for such activity: “[T]he great majority of *stupas* in Thailand have been built by pious Buddhists intent upon acquiring the considerable store of merit (*bun*) to be gained from such acts, the acquisition of merit being essential in ensuring a better reincarnation. One cannot alter the karma one inherits but one's actions in the here-and-now will be what determine one's karma later in this life and in the lives which follow.” (Byrne 1995, 271) Meanwhile a contrasting motion contained in the same process, an ‘active’ entropy as carried out by human bodies: “It might almost be said that merit making is a practice which ushers old stupas into a state of ruin. Ruin, however, is preceded by abandonment, and abandonment is the outcome of a complex social process. The state of a temple's merit is determined by a dynamic relationship between the stupa, the monks, and the community.” (Ibid., 272) Not just the jungle taking back constructions, time swallowing memories of teachings, but humans motivated by dhammic habits at once supporting and dispersing Buddhist infrastructures.

Similar dynamics persist today (even if conditions changed drastically), insofar as temples so as to be effective have to attract large crowds. Without visitors, no funding. Without funding, no longevity. The busier a place, the more wear and tear. The more attendants to ceremonies, the more *sai sin* is necessary, as pieces get carried away as lucky charms. *Wats* are economics activities, constant inflow and outflow of entities has to be organized. Here, royal support or any strong connection to wealthy donors goes a long way. Concurrently, temple grounds are treated as exempt from regular capitalist workings and privatization, are accessible to all, and for now continue to be treated that way. A sort of transformation of flows into a Buddhist commons (Boonjubun et al. 2021). A place to relax and perhaps enjoy a cultural activity without having to spend money (MacDonald 2017), not entirely dissimilar to hanging out at a mall. Buddhist worldmaking (with its central awareness of impermanence) as a constant vying between unbecoming and stabilizing. Even in the modernizing/Westernizing updating of ancient activities, any simple mimesis or copying didn't apply: “Mongkut carried through a classic act
of Thai restoration, namely a restoration of the idea and prestige of the original stupa rather than of the
physical form of the ‘original.’ He produced a copy of the original by a process [where] the act does not
require precision [...]” (Byrne 1995, 274) Indeed, as the author points out, precision decreases with
scale. King Mongkut, titled Rama IV, ruled 1851 to 1868, in times where increasing pressures from
Western colonial expansion were felt in the kingdom, and many technologies, not in the least in
statecraft and cosmology, were (transformatively) adopted. (Morita 2017)

Worlds are mixing. “Nirvana (P. nibbāna) and other Buddhist felicities were often imagined as
cities that could be measured in finite distances like the yojana. Even before the Chakri monarchs
established their capital in Bangkok, Southeast Asian kings – informed by Pali textual culture – lived in
palaces and cities modeled on representations of those in the heavens. The centers of dynastic power in
early Buddhist and Hindu Southeast Asia were fashioned as models of the central cosmos.” (Chua
2021, 2) And these, in good galactic polity fashion, overlap and multiply. The elsewhere is imagined
through the here, all the while some otherness is contained in the here through histories of technopraxis
and the shapes that emerge, come to be codified, and sometimes decoded. Buddhist landscapes
multiplying across Southeast Asia so as to bring practitioners closer to the geographies lived by the
Buddha, as researchers point out. (Duncan 1990; Blackburn 2007, 2010; Peleggi 2017) Such
transformations of (not just urban) landscapes and reiterative uses of texts, imagery, ritual techniques
act as stabilizations of Buddhist lineage and a society's understanding of itself as continuing it. They
also bring such other worlds closer to the conventionally living. Actualizing such Buddhist worlds,
perhaps especially as landscapes and architectures, points not just to the past and faraway places but
also the future, a Buddhist world that could be.

The chedi/stūpa thought with here is but an example of how a landscape becomes Buddhist
through the building of nodes in networks, the nodes being able to expand and contract, often free
transform in ways that non-Buddhists might not even notice, used as say we Christian-Seculars are to
mimetic/representational copying of a general shape as the only basis for similarities. It appears, also,
that you have entire parks simulating hell, or sculpture gardens on wat grounds and other such theme-
park-like landscapes (McDaniel 2015, Anderson 2012), and as with the *Bang Khae Mall* example,
Buddhist cosmotechnics can and does shape what to the untrained eye appears entirely non-Buddhist or
autonomously secular. It is with this cosmology that it appears unsurprising that any kind of technology
(in the conventional sense) can be employed to have certain effects. Anything is allowed (in the grand scheme of things), even as historically the practices surrounding temple construction were specialized and required specific rituals. Different rites keep being practiced, at times as with the delayed inauguration of a new Skytrain line at great financial cost.

## Part III: Perception Beyond Perception

As with the three examples in the opening section, what is seen is anything but straightforward. Nothing is simply there, giving itself unmediated to the fully formed senses of the modern observer and carrier of the ultimate truth of what is and isn't. Bodies combine in worlds composed of the perceptible (by senses) and imperceptible (by senses), the latter nevertheless co-constitutes experience through perception. As a research opening futures (instead of closing down worlds), data can be gathered and combined in ways to demonstrate that even the seemingly immediately unmediated and self-evidently given is never so, and in fact alternative accounts, other organizations, multiple connectivities of sensory data can be presented. As a body, or more specifically anthropologist body becoming between worlds, even as one can sense perception/connections changing through complex interactions with what was once other, the world will not be the same as that perceived by bodies formed in other techno-imaginaries.

In Buddhist teachings, (human) bodies are composed of six senses (and their object-fields), the sixth being the mind, the faculty that senses and combines the sense-impressions of the other five. (Gethin 2004) They are articulated via body parts and what they sense: eye/visibility, ear/sound, nose/smell, tongue/taste, body/touch, mind/mental objects. Engaging worlds in this way, the Buddhist conception of senses makes, so to say, a lot of sense, especially in its unexpected radical materialism of bodies taken apart into smaller units, not a priori treated as a black box to be opened secondarily. As well as offering a way to take apart the less material things such as thoughts, feelings, perceptions, sense impressions that constitute the objects of mind, or sense-media, as it is also called. This a highly connective, almost neurological conception, far away from solipsistic mind-body dualism. And while Buddhist ways of thinking have in assorted ways grappled with how the past conditions the present (including perception), especially with regards to rebirths which is often thought via the imagery of a candle/flame, the element that is a constant is that memory (past habits/perceptions) conditions the
perceptions of today.<fnref n="111" />

So what one has, as in many traditions albeit articulated through other techniques and concepts, are bodies that transform, that are not simply given. And with said transformations other worlds emerge – through practice new things can be seen, elements otherwise imperceptible (but no less real for that). Transformation is supported by technology conceived as exteriorization (of cognitive processes), then folded back onto these neuro-metric bodies. Cosmo-practice involves space, architecture, images, landscapes, other organic bodies, all interacting to produce and stabilize certain lines of change. When all is empty, and efficacy comes to be important, one comes to ask: what effect does a building, practice or infra/structure have? Any technology (in the common sense), any combination of objects, can be conducive. And if it's not, as many researchers point out, *chedis* and *wats* and other places fall into disrepair, because they don't fulfill their promises. Perhaps this could also be a way to think about humans, especially figures such as the politician, party member or a *cakkavatti* (Wheel-turning Sacred King).

In such a world, as I am writing this, it becomes a question whether the concept of simulacra makes sense in the first place. Based as it is on a distinction from the original/copy distinction. It would appear that in a Buddhist world there the distinction is not made to begin with. With that, perhaps a new world can be entered. As demonstrated repeatedly throughout this text, in such a world it appears that the interplay between resemblance and identity, between true and false perception, does not operate as a binary. Daniel W. Smith (2006) summarized Deleuze's engagement with (the Christian manner of) simulacra, specifically how they found a way into a very particular anthropology. In the Buddhist path, human bodies while special are just one among all manner of sentient beings and are karmically connected to those other shapes and figures. The way one appears to the common senses (whether visually or more complex) is not the ground for resemblances. Rather, it's merely another element in

<footnote n="111">¹¹¹ “Buddhagosa maintains: Just as the flame of a burning lamp, without leaving the area of the wick, breaks up then and there and when it burns or flickers in succession throughout the night it is called a lamp, even so, taking the succession [of states] this body is presented as enduring for a long time.” (Kalupahana 1975, 83) Noticeably, it matters what parts of a candle are being used to think with (how images are framed and montaged), as Descartes famously also proposes “that interventive experiments testing hypotheses about actual structures can demonstrate things about wax candles and their flames that direct observation never will.” (Kelly 2014, 265) Wax impressions, wax seals, as sort of copies, meanwhile operated in Ancient Greek philosophies of (not just) perception. (Caston 2015) Complex interactions with the surrounding world co-constitute thinking, and two people might see very different things in the same scene, unless they work on specifying their application of words. The ‘outside’ world has always already operated on the ‘inside’ and ensured the endless, open-ended variety of and for thought. This also become clear when thought-worlds meet: even the most dematerially phrased philosophy and the most innocuously quotidian language carry traces of how it was formed.</footnote>
the endless complexity of causation and relation. In Christian anthropology, the human form relates to that of God, circling around that one inaccessible center.

This is how the story goes: Man (of course) is an image that lost resemblance. God created man in his image, *imago dei*, so man resembles God, but because of sin, as resemblance ended, the image remained. Resemblance is externalized, all that remains is semblance. The old Platonic simulacrum is operationalized here: the surface makes man appear like God but there is no internal similarity. It's all effect, so to speak. The image, 'purely' aesthetic, on the surface, in comparison to the icon, with its internal resemblance, is demonic. Rephrasing it in a way not found in Smith's Deleuze summary, the connection of man to God after the fall has a reduced complexity. A variation thereof operates today (be aware this does not imply continuity!), God displaced onto Man, in all the talk of authenticity, being true to your self, one being criticized for merely copying others and all that relates. An inside quite obviously accessible only through an outside, in a twist nevertheless posited as primary, authentic, something before enmeshment with an outside, or the aesthetic, the surface. Still something strangely accessible in a way that seems to by-pass the performative surfaces deemed inauthentic. Furthermore, in a way that recalls the non-resembling resemblances of Buddhist world-making, just categorized as (morally) bad: "The simulacrum still simulates the effects of identity and resemblance, but these are now completely external effects (like 'optical effects'), divorced from any internal principle, and produced by completely different means than those at work in the copy." (Smith 2006, 92) Except in the tradition I draw on for thought, signs don't point somewhere beyond, they are complex non-mimetic interconnections, appearing differently to each body. And the morality that operates is one of good or bad actions (in relation to dhamma and kamma) and conducive/non-conducive to the perpetuation of dhamma as teaching. Anything like authenticity is classified according to efficacy and veracity of lineage, not abstract dogma. Indeed, I'd wager, the latter cannot even arise as a concept in such a world (not excluding that phenomena can arise that can be classified as dogmatic).

"If simulacra later became the object of demonology in Christian thought, it is because the simulacrum is not the opposite of the icon, the demonic is not the opposite of the divine, Satan is not the Other, the pole farthest from God, the absolute antithesis, but something much more bewildering and vertiginous: *the Same*, the perfect double, the exact semblance, the *Doppelgänger*, the angel of light whose deception is so complete that it is impossible to tell the imposter (Satan, Lucifer) apart
from the ‘reality’ (God, Christ), just as Plato reaches the point where Socrates and the Sophist are rendered indiscernible.” (Ibid.) Sameness is what operates throughout this God’s world. As the philosopher points out, this is where deception turns into the ‘powers of the false.’ There’s always a way out for those who want to leave behind that paranoia machine (is it or isn’t it true) overhauling all differences into the seemingly same. Satan is only ever secondary to God. This is not “the great antagonism of Good versus Evil, but variants on the complex insinuation of the Same: How does one distinguish a revelation from God from a deception of the devil, or a deception sent by God to tempt men of little faith from a revelation sent by the devil to simulate God’s test (God so closely resembling Satan who imitates God so well [...]).” (Ibid.) I can never be certain. Everything might be a lie, for truth and falsehood cannot be told apart. Whatever this God may desire, the world as it is continually coming to be offers irreducible alternatives for those who care enough to be trained in sensing difference without coding it as entirely the same. Those experiencing excitement and joy from a cosmos that continues to provide new challenges.

A difference of worlds can be explicated. Felicity Aulino (2020a) demonstrated how in Northern Thailand Christian converts experience encounters with ghosts and ancestors as a radical duality, always an attack on their integrity as humans.<fnref n="112" /> The whole world or reality is possibly corrupt, no negotiation is possible. Senses deceive. Only breakdown or full exorcism. While Thai Buddhists (remaining materially in these worlds, not systematically attending church readings of Christian doctrine) interact with such ghosts in a variety of ways. Questions that come up for those not becoming Christian include: how to react? What does that other body want from me? How do I understand that body? Either way, one doesn’t question what appears, because what appears is simultaneously correct (because while sense impressions are constructed/mediating, they are also natural and can be trusted, at least until the body changes) and incorrect (there is always an excess of world to what is perceived, as a different body, one that practices correct teachings and techniques, will ‘see’ differently). Aulino (2022) further shows and explores how the either/or dichotomy does not operate among those she studied, which includes first generation converts. It seems almost as if when the drive to create logical consistence in a timeless world falls away, as all is impermanent and there is no position outside of this world where eternal truth would eternally be true, not everything has to be turned into conflict or contestation, whether resolvable or not.

<footnote n="112">¹¹² As is customary in the region, the existence of ghosts is taken for granted (hardly surprising if one keeps feeling their presence or meeting them directly), only now it becomes impossible for them to be good or to change.</footnote>
Or perhaps another framing, one that relates simulacra, copies, and bodies. The 'truth' of the dhamma is achieved through a transformation of the body as *bodhi*, awakening and achieving perfect knowledge, which tills entirely different semantic fields than the commonly used 'enlightenment.' When such change is achieved (and there are different ways according to different schools), the world experiences changes with it. Somewhat analogously, the practice of anthropology can be conceptualized as one where a body must transform in certain ways to learn to see 'anew,' to see the complexity of the world, the difference in similarity and similarity in difference, and become aware that there will always be more, an outside; that there cannot be a simple representation to account for it all. And with that come different types of anthropological bodies, those, such as mine, steeped in imaginaries of the regions engaged whether classical or contemporary pop-cultural, and imaginations enabled, will come as other anthropological bodies than those still reared in the fantasy of (scientific) discourse being able to ultimately represent it all. Even if this ideal is never to actually be achieved. The cosmopractice of projecting an ideal that can't be achieved or even positively proposed, but nevertheless continues to operate, in other words, a slight transformation of God that is external to history and sense(s), and immediately universal, is hard to shake. It also tends to operate in ways that generate blindness toward the many connections that come to make worlds. To make see societies as only built on so-called humans, excluding other agencies and their myriads of externalized and variously internalized and diffracting activities. (Latour 2005a)

This world seems to fit very well with simulacra based thought. The spread of *chedis* through random displacement of parts, recalls the copy without internal similarity: "The simulacrum, in other words, is constructed on an *internal difference*, a fundamental internal disparity, which is not derived from any prior identity." (Smith 2006, 94) Difference is change, movement as time. The constantly evolving and acentral spread of Buddhist networks through nodes such as *chedis* or *wats* can be grasped very well with such conceptualization. And, much like Lawrence Chua's Bangkok, worlds where perspectives, possibilities, practices overlap, mingle, and separate again. "It is not enough to multiply perspectives in order to establish perspectivism. To every perspective or point of view there must correspond an autonomous work with its own self-sufficient sense." (Deleuze 1994, 69) While representation has intimate ties to the world of One: "Representation has only a single center, a unique and receding perspective, and consequently a false depth [...] Movement for its part implies a plurality
of centers, a superposition of perspectives, a tangle of points of view, a coexistence of moments which essentially distort representation.” (Ibid., 55–6) This early Deleuze so to speak prefigures the later cinematic one employed in earlier chapters: montage in cinema offers such a plurality of centers, as does the employment of montage theory in constructing a scientific narrative. Such an ontology that begins with constant displacement suggests an alternative to common writing practice. There a Thailand continues to appear as if it were simply Buddhist, used as we are in Christian-Secular one-world ontology to ‘religious’ adjectives to represent closed, preformed and delineated identities, and not constantly evolving enmeshed practices and techniques, that in certain moments, through certain cuts, can be described as thoroughly Buddhist (with the caveat that Buddhadharma is a practice of transforming connections) and at others they might not appear like that at all, while still being demonstrably organized on such principles, and at even others with little to no such connection at all. Even in our times of mass schooling where Theravāda is taught in a somewhat unified way as a state religion.

As with the three examples experimented with, hyperreality makes it impossible to clearly distinguish between original and copy. As all is always already mixed. A world where things are not always turned back toward a center, one where proliferation abounds.<fnref n="113" /> Plato, ever obsessed with containing general proliferation, fearing the world, must introduce a moral distinction from outside to enact a random cut to stop his edifice from falling apart: “Imitation takes on a pejorative sense in Plato only when it is applied to the simulacrum, which does not reproduce the *eidos* but merely produces the effect of resemblance in an external and unproductive way, obtained neither through true knowledge (the user) nor right opinion (the craftsman), but by trick, ruse, or subversion, an art of *encounter* that lies outside of knowledge and opinion (the artist or poet).” (Smith 2006, 93) And all too much research continues to be governed by this image of thought. One where thinking itself is inherently posed as closer to truth than to the liberating practice of artists that build new things, new objects for a world, instead of those that are mostly to serve as a conservation and reiterating confirmation of old structures.<fnref n="114" /> A shift toward imagination and fictioning is meanwhile occurring in a variety of fields, not in the least in anthropology. (McLean 2017) The concept of hyperreality itself might insidiously or playfully do some obscuring work here, and replacing reality with fiction could offer new possibilities

<footnote n="113">¹¹³ For Buddhist tradition, in its typical concerns with undoing the ties of *kamma*, the term *papañca* translated as ‘conceptual proliferation’ is a way to grasp part of this process as it operates in thought. (Nānananda 1971)</footnote>

<footnote n="114">¹¹⁴ The function of thought that is disavowed in the conceptualization of thought/language not having a direct impact on world, of them not being part of the world.</footnote>
while covering a similar ground. The late Mark Fisher did invaluable phrasing work on this account: "This, then, is hyperfiction: a process whereby fiction and reality are radically smeared. [...] What is crucial is not the representation of reality, but the feedback between fiction and the Real. [...] Hyperfiction, then, can be defined as fiction which makes itself real. What connects hyperfiction with animism is precisely the escape of agency from the subject. Fiction itself gains an agency, an ability to intervene into the Real." (Fisher 1999, 174)

What I attempt to show, in variations, is that the fiction(ing) is always already there in how bodies operate in environments that in their material and less material compositions enable co-constitute whatever comes to be experienced without being independent and untouched. Of course, there is more to what there is outside of what any single body, however composed or transformed through techno-cultural affordances, can connect with. Through the experimental practice of conscious framing and reframing, of continuous displacements with a practice of awareness toward the ever so slight changes that make things, such fictioning can become partly modulated. To bring this back to a sort of anthropology, one must (re)consider how bodies are composed and how such compositions co-constitute what is perceived, noticed even before anything is written in a notebook, inquired from so-called informants, and other techniques. When (re)framing it is important to experiment with the sensible, the non-sensible (conceptual framework that shows how the materially empirical is multiple) and the body that combines sensible/non-sensible (and is itself change). One is always in the realm of cultural techniques: making distinctions between knowing how (to engage) and knowing that (some operation leads to a certain result without understanding the operation). This makes inquiries based primarily of 'what is there' in the sense of interviews and 'realist' participant observation too 'little,' because much of the insensible is missed, as we often do not even know that we are doing something, much less why. Observation ought to be composed of different sources, including 'media representations,' as a variety of elements neither of which containing the true blueprint of reality. And with this, comes a reconceptualization of such research: it comes to be about generating new ways of how to engage the world, instead of capturing a truth based on a random cut and concomitant reduction of multiplying realities to a simple one out there, immediately to be grasped by the senses.
## 12. Assembling Chanting

A definition:

*uadmon* translated as ‘chanting,’ composed of two words:

*suad* ‘offer a prayer,’ recite; *มนต์ mon* ‘mantra’

You could walk with eyes closed and still immediately feel the change. Thailand is never quiet, and Bangkok doubly so. Either the buzz of modern automata speeding up the rhythms of the world, or the incessant white noise of the jungle. And suddenly, a space of rest, where all sounds seem distant and one can finally breathe with their entire body. “In a situation, things hanging in the air are worth describing,” writes the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart (2011, 447) known for bringing affect theory and anthropology to mutual enrichment. Here, the absence of intense walls of sound hangs in the air, as much as its presence does outside. Only it feels kind of elevating, freeing. One thing is for certain, it is not neutral. There is no neutral place. All is matter, whatever its modes. All affects. When you enter such spaces at given periods, you will be engulfed by other frequencies. A gong announces certain times of the day. Unless you spend a lot of time lounging around temple spaces, it possibly won’t even reverberate through you. It lasts an elongated instant and then disappears. Gongs here are not as loud as Christian church bells that can be heard from far away and are ear bursting when close – I know, because I’ve had the pleasure of living near one for a while. At other times one hears the repetitive, vibratious hum of low monk voices with answers in somewhat higher registers by the laypeople. It can go on for hours, with only slight variations in rhythm and composition. This is not about meaning, as I will show, it cannot even be. The materiality to the shapes of words, their resounding, are the part to be noted. Away from the meaning-obsession of European oh-so protestant so-called secularism of the more dominant strands of not only Buddhist studies. Or with Christianity and Western Secularism in general. (Engelke & Tomlinson 2006) What hermeneutics, a popular technique of engaging so-called other religions through texts, misses, is the entire apparatus that creates the conditions of sustained (re)reading, and that includes techniques of reading, of engaging texts themselves, which will differ over time and space.<fnref n="115" /> The method enacts an image of the world where reality is given and the

<footnote n="115">¹¹⁵ While there continues to be a dearth of research on other sonorities and the impact of European-style modernization, there is a thorough study of the shifts in Theravāda Sri Lanka: “The ethical underpinning of Protestant textuality brought with it transformations in the materiality and ideology of textual artifacts and in the praxis of textual production. These transformations resulted in textual shifts from the poetic to the prosaic, from an aesthetic of the power of sound (*nāta*) to an ethic of denotational rationality (*logos*), from a sonocentric to a logocentric universe.” (Bate 2021, 39) These transformations include the integration of the concept of religion that brings about a shift toward textuality:</footnote>
creativity of the human is interpretation based (how biblical! one text, many interpretations) without actually affecting reality, and meaning is all one can get from a different tradition. This operativity continues the effectuate itself even with traditions that are explicit in their writings about the performative efficacy of their sonic instantiations. And so, entering a temple space at fortuitous times, at least if it is a very frequented *wat*, you will be engulfed by the rhythm of chanting. It too has a distinctly atmospheric effect. The goal here, on these pages, isn't to grasp, make tangible the effervescent ambiance created in Buddhist temple spaces (and elsewhere). Be it that a stated goal of the tradition is to enact realities conducive not just to achieving the cessation of rebirth, but also to create situations in order to enhance receptivity for its teachings. Hence the way Buddhist spaces are built and organized, what atmosphere is created and how it all affects attention and general well-being is of utmost importance. Mental and other immaterial corporeal operations don't function independently of material composition, of concrete assemblages of changing traditions.<fnref n="116" /> I am after something equally intangible here, and will draw on a different Deleuzian conceptual affordance than affect and in addition to assemblage, namely the machinic: "[...] the concept of machine admirably captures the essence of entities as beings that function or operate. To be is to do, to operate, to act." (Bryant 2014, 15) It too precedes any human body that enters its fold, yet draws as much on human bodies as it gives back. Part of the effect of these assemblages is the creation of an engulfing atmosphere. It does not end here, for they operate on the corporeal. It is a cyborg corporeality, a ground without easy separations between body and surrounding, body and technology, a ground against which it is to be traced how figurative bodies appear. In other words, one has to undo the habit of seeing (human) bodies as primary in any assemblage and taking them against the ground of the humanist human body posed as

<footnote>"Contemporary Theravada Buddhism, too, developed as a new understanding of a great many earlier communicative practices. For Theravada Buddhism, the 'game of religion' was played out through a series of public debates beginning in the 1840s and reaching their apogee in the late 1860s and early 1870s. It was also played out in the transformation of the Sinhala *dharmadesana*, these days translated as 'sermon.' But prior to a reformation of sorts [...] in the late nineteenth century, it was basically a highly systematized and ritually elaborate recitation of Pali texts [...] most listeners prior to Dharmapala's time would not have been concerned with the actual denotationality (or semantic coherence) of the texts but rather in the evocational experience of the sheer sound of the text, an aesthetic experience that in itself was generative of merit." (Ibid., 44-5)</footnote>

<footnote n="116">¹¹⁶ To note: "The English word 'assemblage' is the common translation of the French word agencement used by Deleuze and Guattari. This translation has two problems. First, the English word 'assemblage' does not mean the same thing as the French word agencement; in fact, the two come from completely different etymological roots. According to Le Robert Collins dictionary, the French word agencement comes from the verb agencer, 'to arrange, to lay out, to piece together.' The noun agencement thus means 'a construction, an arrangement, or a layout.' On the other hand, the English word 'assemblage,' according to the Oxford English Dictionary, comes from the French word assemblage (a-sahn-blahzh), not the French word agencer. The meaning of the English word 'assemblage' is 'the joining or union of two things' or 'a bringing or coming together.'" (Nail 2017, 22) I, for the sake of convenience, follow the established use of the Anglosphere.</footnote>
preexisting the world, and instead learn to analyze what is encountered on two levels: the body as it appears conditioned conventionally and the corporeal as it comes to be in complex connections to immediate surroundings.

One evening I head steadfastly to *Wat Pathum Wanaram* as earlier that day some young monks in the temple compound amid toweringly endless malls had told me to. In my ethnographic naïveté (assuming things I should know not to assume), I don't realize that the chanting which was to start at 6 PM will go on for endless hours, seeing as all that I had attended before were far shorter sessions with an amount of participants you could count on one, barely two hands in the wat in Prague, where I had conducted research years earlier. Actually, it will be about five hours, and then quite a few participants will continue with walking meditation in the temple garden. What I also don't expect is the radical decentralization of perception and self that would occur through the material organization of the whole event. Walking or sitting meditation would require a different analysis, and produce another kind of (related) knowledge, as the way singular bodies come to enter the assemblage is looser than in chanting. And, anyways, the assemblages would not be the same given that this ethnographer body assembled of various elements also connects and thereby changes the whole combination. However much depending on the point of connection, this new element might be unnoticeable, certainly in terms of the overall local effect, it definitely comes to be defining in terms of the effect far outside of its initial occurrence. For it is this atypical part that comes to be the connector between chanting and writing. A notable difference when thought through assemblage theory (DeLanda 2016) comes in terms of the anthropologist's body and memory that enters: compared to most other research on Buddhist chanting in practice (Harvey 1993; Mabbett 1993; Hanh 2002; Chen 2004; Greene et al. 2004) or research on rites in general (Stewart & Strathern 2021), where the latter barely gets more than a mention as part of what happens in temples.<fnref n="117" /> This body, formed by the time it traveled to Bangkok by thought that includes itself in the analysis, was already prepared and open to slowing down thought to better grasp and analytically take apart the hitherto black box of chanting. For, as I have been at pains to show throughout the pages being read here, what is at stake is the very composition of material realities that differ between worldings. Far from being questions of only symbolism or human-based thought, ways of doing the world in fact and in deed exceed and decenter the anthropos qua conscious subjectivity. It must be granted then that what we have come to live in, is in fact a complex process

<footnote n="117">¹¹⁷ It should be noted that DeLanda (2016) doesn't consider the Deleuzoguattarian notion of assemblage a fully fledged theory. Meanwhile Thomas Nail (2017) demonstrates to the contrary.</footnote>
involving many actors and very intensely material constructions that produce and support the
experience (for some) of so-called free actors or individuals.

The discrepancy of freedom when it comes to movements of all kinds appears immediately as a
great difference between an anthropologist at the very least looking the part of a Westerner and any
locals encountered. Freedom as minimization of friction with other bodies in that widest sense of
entities of various powers capable of affecting and being affected. A human body carries with itself
whether it knows it or not certain aspects that under given conditions appear in a way that affects said
body's possibilities. A body classifiable as a *farang*, a Westerner, is afforded privilege, of course, but
also constant attention especially so in spaces where it is not expected. An anthropologist body in how
the discipline has come to be established is expected to become local through spending large amounts
of time, establishing trust, habitual presence, in other words becoming enmeshed to such degrees that
knowledge otherwise unattainable will become possible to be gathered. The field that is cultivated so as
to bear desired fruits thus is composed of the anthropologist body too, although it rarely includes
inquiries into the colonial legacies and ongoing privileges that certain institutions and states and indeed
(white codifiable) bodies continue to hold.<fnref n="118" /> Meanwhile, the image that operates in the background is
one of an ultimately (im)possible attainment of perfectly local knowledge. Meaning, the ideal of long-
term participation binds knowledge production to a potentially full description of the world, thus
privileging extended temporality over say the conceptual and practical toolbox a body brings with to
the field. Different kinds of distinctions can be made, especially once the production of knowledge
ceases to be tied to the (im)possibility of full description, and instead how the coming together of lived
worlds and concepts is productive of critical newness. With that a shift happens, one where a short-term
stay is not merely a worse version of a long-term one, where the field does not start when a body is
displaced, but includes pre- and post-production, and so even the hypothetically identical place
assembles differently with differently pre-produced anthropologist bodies (including the concepts,
images, conventions that constitute them and what they can perceive) entering. Another kind of
freedom has appeared as we return our attention back to the constructed field.

I have been going to *Wat Pathum Wanaram* for a while, trying to establish contact with the

<footnote n="118">¹¹⁸ Research on alternative ways of conceiving the work of ethnography and anthropology is increasingly common, even if to my knowledge never from the position assumed here, be it that these particular strands of anthropology rarely, if ever draw on Deleuze & Guattari's *What Is Philosophy* (1994) which makes this analysis possible. (Cf. Mills 2011, Dumit 2014, McGranahan 2015, Günel et al. 2020.)</footnote>
young monks learning English there. Always undercut by some misunderstanding. “I will meet you in
the temple gardens at this hour.” I am waiting, where are you? I never figure out why it is so difficult to
meet somebody who professes they want to speak to me, or at least make use of me so as to improve
their English language skills. Everyday interactions in the so-called ‘Land of Smiles’ continue to
bewilder me. None of this is exclusive. Each reiterative reinscription of a scene produces new fruits,
new connections, new versions. Elements are connected – words that narrativize and express concepts,
and sensory images that mutate into words to which the reader will connect their own imaginations.
Whatever was perceived is displaced. Transformations abound. This is easy to notice once you let go of
a simple reality out there mediating creation, stabilizing it onto a one-world world – one that is
curiously inaccessible (whether as Ding-an-sich, God) yet definitely foundational. I will explore the
role of repetition and variation in a future chapter, to retain focus on a machinic assemblage here.
Reality keeps splitting, knowledge is always produced partially. A future ritual in the same place would
be composed of much of the same elements, being ensured by a certain template or diagram.<fnref n="119" /> In and
of itself, it is impossible to say when and where and how the rite ends or begins. As the diagram comes
to be transcendentally (in relation to this singularity), but also always transforming, as even if it were to
be somewhere noted down, in whatever way, to make it ‘real,’ other elements are always to be added,
not in the least the human actors each with their own habits and memories, as I will demonstrate. On
some level, participation in this kind of rite or ceremony, the latter being the English word Thai people
typically employ (I never encountered anybody using the word ritual), comes to be experienced as a
contraction or intensification of the regular flow of experience lived.<fnref n="120" /> In the words of the
anthropologist Bruce Kapferer (2004, 48), who researched a Sinhala Buddhist sorcery rite (unknown as
far as I know in Thai practices): “However, through its slowing down and temporary abeyance of
dimensions of ordinary flow, it is an engagement with the compositional structurating dynamics of life
in the very midst of life’s processes.”

A rite, compared to other assemblages bodies pass through, can be defined by relatively low
entropy.<fnref n="121" /> In information theory, high entropy describes a state where there is an equal probability that

<footnote n="119">¹¹⁹ And carried by a variety of heterogeneous actants, not just the monks and laypeople, but the organization of space, etc., that has been coded to enable a specific type of ritualization.</footnote>

<footnote n="120">¹²⁰ “[...] ritual as disrupting ordinary relations with things can be put alongside their observation that a ritual act is a modification of what is ordinarily part of an act, that is, of its intentionality. There are of course divergences as well as echoes here [...] talks of divine worlds as alienating the everyday sense of reality, everyday life is constantly encountering little alienations from it, not least when it itself becomes the subject of representation, analysis, or simply description.” (Strathern 2012, 403–4)</footnote>

<footnote n="121">¹²¹ “Aside from such ethnographic and comparative methods integral to anthropological research, it is specific to this field</footnote>
an element can be encountered anywhere whatsoever in a place, while low entropy describes more constrained states. As Bryant demonstrates through examples: “The case is similar with people milling about in Times Square in New York. This system is highly entropic because there is a high likelihood of a person appearing anywhere in the system. By contrast, a society is a low entropy system because it is stratified into different classes, identities, functions, roles, and so on. Claiming that a society is stratified or differentiated is equivalent to claiming that there is a *low probability* that people will *indiscriminately* appear *anywhere* in the social system.” (Bryant 2014, 94) In Bangkok, depending on the district, entropy tends to be high as in any city.<fnref n="122" /> What people do and don't do, what kind of people you encounter, will be rather chaotic. Coming closer to special places of general significance (i.e. not the very local shrines) certain acts will become more predictable, as many people *wai* (a typical Thai greeting with clasped hands and a slight bow) when passing a wat or a Hindu shrine. At times such as when chanting occurs, gestures and movements will be rather predictable, not just out of acquired habits, but as I am demonstrating here because of the entire composition of the scene. One need not be reminded that entropy in a location held as a stable variable will differ according to the scale or framing – were one to focus on the generative life of microscopic organisms or debris in a temple, the question of entropy would look quite different, even as it remains linked to what a place such as a temple gathers, which includes cleaning activities and conventions. Entropy, like anything else, is relational. Complexity doesn't decrease with scale. Be it as it may, even the most rigid assemblage requires some openness to transformation, in other words randomness, flexibility to accommodate unpredictability (of an outside affecting it), otherwise it will have a hard time to be replicated in any variant: “A degree of entropy within a machine amounts to plasticity. A rigid machine is a machine whose entropy is so low that its selective openness to its environment is more or less fixed – again there are different degrees of rigidity – and that can only operate on inputs in a fixed and mechanical way. As a consequence, such machines are unable to develop new forms of openness to their environment and create new operations for responding to the new and unexpected.” (Ibid., 105)

I arrive at *Wat Pathum Wanaram* ostensibly a tad late. It is dark. It is always dark in Bangkok

<footnote>of study that rituals be understood as public events that – in their own way – follow a particular script and sequential order in the performance of ritual acts and utterances.” (Kreinath 2021, 351)</footnote>

<footnote n="122">¹²² Nick Land (2014) points out that cities also reverse (thermodynamic) entropy, that is the tendency of things to fall apart, to dissipate. As such, they reverse time (understood as entropy), cause things including activities such as habitation mutually stabilize each other, even attract further habitation. A localized reversal of entropy. Just think of an abandoned house and how quickly it falls apart, even in areas outside tropics. Buddhist teachings, as I engage elsewhere in the text, is very much concerned with this kind of entropy, only is it conceptualized as *anicca*, impermanence.</footnote>
after seven. Near the equator days and nights don't have much variation to them in terms of light. Neither do the temperatures. The same cannot be said of the daily amount of rain. Dark of course has its own meaning in an electrifying urban space such as Bangkok. Typically, a chanting hall in Thailand is a rather open space. A roof above and poles to hold it. It is elevated, you take a couple of flat steps to reach it. Mind you, take off shoes first. Easy with flip-flops, somewhat more ritual threshold performing with sneakers. Shoes populate the entrance of any closed space in a temple. At those frequented the most, I at times wonder many pairs inadvertently find new owners. But once inside, despite being open, sensory events from outside appear somewhat muted. There are different combinations, of course. And different parts of a wat offer different degrees of openness. Architecture organizes sensory perception, makes for atmosphere. The chanting hall is maybe 20 meters wide and 40 deep. As always gold Buddhas and other statues stare back at you at different angles, sitting there deep behind the monks in the front you face. You see mats, slightly elevated, for the monks to sit on. Now, as I enter from the back, I only barely notice how many monks there are. Too nervous to pay this kind of attention, I above all don't want to clumsily intrude and behave inappropriately. Later, I notice only very few of the young monks I have met are there. These are seasoned professionals. In the following days, when I inquire about things, I learn a lot about practical issues, including that monks have to learn to chant. And not every monk will be good at it. Indeed, a form of charisma<fnref n="123" /> monks can acquire is built on their chanting skills. All over the country, there are different kinds of monks and different reasons for an average person to visit them, I learn from those I engage with extensively.

People sit on the mats that had been prepared before. Each has one of their own, they are generally white and decked out with even spaces in between. The space is just wide enough to pass easily, and a little tighter than the mats. During chanting, people arrive and leave constantly and discreetly. Arrivals outnumber the departures, the latter are more of a trickle. As one of my frequent interlocutors will later tell me, when I press her on the topic: “Yes, in theory it is easy to leave Buddhist ceremonies, but in practice one does feel the pressure to stay.” Though here various people patently do know each other, and some come in groups, it is as evident that this temple is not built around a local community, but around the working middle-class from all over that comes here to ritualize and

<footnote n="123">¹²³ Charisma is a power of an individual with special skills or talents to hold and influence people and the world, to help people acquire what they want or make them feel empowered. The more projects a monk or temple brings to fruition, the higher the charisma through reputation. It is because such power rests in individuals, places, ghosts and the *samgha/saṅgha*, that even only in unambiguously Buddhist coded spheres many different forces enhance or undermine each other. It appears to be not unrelatable to the ‘Big Man’ concept in anthropology. For an exploration, see Kawanami (2009), for an analysis of *barami* the specifically Buddhist concept often translated as charisma, see Jory (2002).</footnote>
sometimes socialize. (Cf. Vorng 2011) As I arrive, many of the small mats remain unoccupied. Already there are dozens in attendance. A few white clad women, the female monks *mae chii* pass through the rows. Chanting has yet to begin. They are laying two different chanting books [describe what they look like, how they are made] on each mat. I cannot tell how much time passed. Almost all mats are occupied and those who came late stand or sit in the back, in general out of luck, that is without the memory support that chanting books offer. I am wrong to fear embarrassment for want of being able to find the correct pages. However frenetically I turn pages, grasping to hear the sonic forms of the chant, while eyeing the immediately neighboring bodies or even some people farther away and deducing the chant from the layout of the page, I cannot orient myself. One of the ladies sitting next to me smiles, and shows me which page to turn to. Soon I notice that trying to find a footing in the chanting books is what more than half the laypeople are doing in one way or another. Only they are better at reading Thai script than me, even if the words are Pali. Some laypeople leave, new ones keep coming. Furthermore, for me, this is mostly the first time I encounter any of the shapes of words. Repeatedly my eyes pace around the hall, so evenly lit that the night outside comes to look like a wall. A constant flurry of people checking their phones, some near some far, alternating, taking pictures or videos. These seem much calmer than the bodies similar to mine pressed to find the right chant. All of these chanting along. The low hum of the chant suffuses the air and the bodies. Vibrations abound and expand. I find myself fully engulfed. Sometimes the monks switch positions. It is not always the same one to lead. New monks also arrive. Some of the chants take on more of a dialogic relation between monks and laypeople. We all sit on the mats, one next to the other with a space in between. I feel pain in my legs. Other people too change their position. Dear reader, a word of advice: don't wear jeans or other hard materials if you plan on attending.

And, as you are already directly addressed, I'd like to make use of this refocused attention to note that the following paragraph depends heavily on the memory of the earlier chapter on frameworks of perception, for it brings together the discussion of (movement/time) images and machinic thought. A frame gathers indiscriminately, well, as long as that which is there communicates in such a way as to be captured by the sensor. The body that enters the assemblage and is being shaped there. And hence, as the Kapferer (2004) noted, Deleuzian film theory is very useful in articulating dynamics while integrating an entire range of material elements within the scene, a true activation of events as mise-en-scène (what is put into the scene by the movement of the cosmos) and how they come to affect the
body of the perceiver. Assemblage is one thing, another is the specific position for this body that is enabled therein and that affects it. They are connected, yet should not be conflated. If we take humans in their daily life to be movement-images, that is images within a cycle of exchange (action, affect, reaction) with other images, then this rite or ceremony effectuates a caesura to these quotidian dynamics. (Cf. Massumi 1996) One's movement is very much preorganized and any stimuli to provoke further individualized movement, whether material or immaterial, are minimized. Much that is not conducive to chanting is filtered out by the organization of demarcated space. A body entering what is so assembled comes to be caught in the limited possibilities inherent in the situation.<fnref n="124" /> A reminder: Deleuze articulates the time-image as emerging when the sensorimotor schema breaks down, and the body cannot simply act when faced with certain situations but must establish circuits with the virtual to figure out a way to react. Now, one does not fragment, or not necessarily, into the time-image, into expanding circuits between actual and virtual in a quest to find appropriate images to react to a new situation.<fnref n="125" /> What occurs is somewhat different. The sensorimotor schema of everyday habits does not exactly break down, rendering the body unable to react to a situation, but another schema becomes dominant, one where the ‘I’ as the main organizational principle is replaced by a different one. There is a reaction to a situation, and for the new body circuits are established as it seeks to perform actions adequate to the context sourced from the surrounding bodies and memories of previous chanting events. Yet, based on the ceremonial assemblage works the actions to be performed compose the human body so that its subjectivity hangs in abeyance. What is being produced here is not a conscious human in any occidentally conventional sense, and this very fact puts into question any theories about the human that simply take its conscious subjective existence as primary and preceding of wider material connections and conditions. “Rituals like collective enunciation mechanisms produce the body as they manufacture an enunciation. But in one case as in others, it is not a question of anthropomorphic productions.” (Melitopoulos & Lazzarato 2012, 246) This is only possible through the material organization that puts a stop to conventional habits and dynamics, to open the participants to chanting time. After all, in chanting, the participant bodies are mostly static, movement appears on other, less immediate planes. Much like in a (much more complex Sri Lankan) rite described by Kapferer (2013, 33), the participant “is given up to the senses in themselves, to their potentialities relatively freed from their determination and embedding in the interactive engagements and projects of everyday life.” A

<footnote n="124">¹²⁴ The body can doubtlessly be disrespectful and operate in discordant demeanor that increases entropy. Such acts will inescapably remain framed by the ceremonial assemblage as they take on other force or meaning and will lead to other reactions than in less rigid contexts..</footnote>

<footnote n="125">¹²⁵ Which can happen nevertheless happen in other Buddhist rites elsewhere. (Cf. Kapferer 2013)</footnote>
break is enacted with the outside world that cannot be seen, heard or otherwise perceived by the senses (despite the temple being an open space). It is present only in (future) memory once the transformed subject recollects itself. Though perhaps a certain reflexive, inquisitive potential does open up when the common existential movement is channeled into a differently organized corporeal-incorporeal space. That is however not the concern here. “The ritual, like assemblage, is a machine that concomitantly determines the action of the cosmic and molecular fluctuations, of real and virtual forces, of sensible affects and corporeal affects, and of incorporeal entities such as myths and universes of references.” (Melitopoulos & Lazzarato 2012, 247) The parallel employment of assemblage and image points to the material reality of being both at once, and at the impossibility of the conceptual articulation of this, as at least two concepts are operationalized in the analysis. The world of language and concepts has its own particular affordances and one shouldn't mistake its specific conditions for those of reality in general. Regardless of how popular that category mistake might continue being in some circles that take thought and language as representational of it all.

We jump around the two books while chanting goes on for hours. I get lost in time, despite my phone and my sound recorder beside me on the mat. I check both, but don't really notice the time. I am lucky, my mat is next to professionals! The two women next to me, to the right, one directly and one to the front right, always know what page to turn to. They always smile and eagerly help me and others who are lost. Soon, I improve my adeptness at noticing patterns of pages, so it becomes easier to follow chants and participate by adding my timbre. A new arrival behind me taps me on the shoulder to ask which page we are on. I turn and she gasps quietly (first in Thai, then in English): “khothot na kha (sorry [softened by the particle na])!” I look around, a lone *farang* among Thai bodies, I must stick out once my faciality emerges. I definitely and literally stick out once it all ends and we stand up straight.

“‘Machine’ is thus our name for any entity, material or immaterial, corporeal or incorporeal, that exists. ‘Entity,’ ‘object,’ ‘existent,’ ‘substance,’ ‘body,’ and ‘thing,’ are all synonyms of ‘machine.’” (Bryant 2014, 15) It's all operations – material or immaterial. “To be is to do, to operate, to act.” (Ibid.) It is important to not reduce machines to ‘rigid machines’ (machines in the common usage), as there are machines that are capable of learning (on different levels). Neither are there just material machines in any vulgar sense. Objects (can) have incorporeal aspects that may even lie dormant for a long time before beginning to act on others, if the conditions are right. There are further differences in complexity