User:Sara/proposal

Since the beginning of the Syrian uprising in 2011, we have been witnessing a constant stream of gritty mobile phone images that demonstrate the unspeakable scale of terror performed by the Assad regime and other countless small militias against the Syrian people; a kind of terror that can only resonate with some of the most gruesome genocides of the twentieth century. Taken in haste by a running protestor or a paramedic, or timidly shot by an obeserver on a balcony or on a street corner, these images scream with horror. However, within a landsape of violence haunting the region for decades, accentuated by the more recent events of the Syrian war, an Islamic State rapidly turned into a global synonym of brutality. And despite international outrage and with the absence of any apparent recognition or support from intergovernmental organizations, the Islamic State perfromed its de facto sovereignty, transgressesing the borders of nation-states, and taking as its object the universal citizen, separated from community, nation or history. A universal state emerged.

On the 29th of June 2014, the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS) released the very first audio recording online claiming an all-embracing Muslim Caliphate. The general sentiments accompanying this first declaration (at least for us living within the frontiers of the so-called Middle-East) were disbelief, then horror, then a surprising and brutal sense of familiarity. The horrifying images that surfaced online after the declaration of the formation of the state drew my attention to the ease with which such scenes are interated. The shocking casualeness of the image of a ravaged body circulating online turns suffering into a benumbing spectacle. This hypervisibilty, problematizes this precariousness of empathy obscuring a rather routinized violent quotidian embedded in the brutal familiarity of the everyday ritual. In my attempt to study the conditions through which ISIL operates as a sovereign state, I feel the need to read it through the looking glass of late capitalism. Within a political terrain expressed in the transition from the sovereignty of the nation-state to the control society of the open market, and from an industrial economy to an informationalized economy __

Objects and the Digital Image

In his 2003 book In the Break, Fred moten starts by stating that objects can and do resist. But what is an object in the age of digital reproduction? "It may seem obvious”, Mitchel Resnick and Brian Silverman write in their 1996 essay Exploring Emergence while an object composed of four white squares moves on the black canvas of the side screen:

“ … in fact, what appears to be an object is not really an object at all. All that is happenning is that little squares on the screen are turning “on” and “off”, following a set of simple rules. And those rules say nothing at all about objects …"

In this sense, digital images seem more of an act of language than a visual representation of real life. They remind us that objects are a set of abstractions performed by commands and rules that flow in a ritual of endless transformations between the written, the seen, and the spoken:

“ […] A digital image that can be seen cannot be merely exhibited or copied but always only staged or performed. Here, an image begins to function like a piece of music, whose score, as is generally known, is not identical to the piece - the score being not audible, but silent. For the music to resound, it has to be performed. To perform something, however, means to interpret it, betray it, destroy it. Every performance is an interpretation and every interpretation is a misuse. "

__ Boris Groys, Religion in the Age of Digital Reproduction (e-flux, 2009)

Images of Savagery

On one of the early days of January 2015, Jordanian Air Force pilot Muath Safi Yousef Al-Kasasbeh was executed by the militants of the Islamic State. The execution scene appears in the last few seconds of a 22min slick video entitled “The Healing of Believers’ Chests”.

After the crash of Youssef Al-Kasasbeh’s plane in late December 2014 near Rakka, the Islamic State’s de facto capital, IS used twitter to ask its supporters to suggest a way to kill the captured pilot. As people responded to the twitter hashtag, the decision fell on the first part of the verse:

“And if you punish [an enemy, O believers], punish with an equivalent of that with which you were harmed. But it you are patient - it is better for those who are patient.” __ The Quran, 16:126 (Surat An-Nahl)

Al-Kasasbeh was subsequently killed by fire.

While refraining from recounting the shocking and brutal details of Al-Kasasbeh’s death, I will try to read the video of his execution through the complicit relation between fundamentalist thought and the ritual of repetition and formal abstraction at the heart of today’s techno-linguistic automatism.

Defamiliarizing the familiar (methodology)

The economy of what Saidiya Hartman calls hypervisibilty, problematizes the precariousness of empathy: the idea that the only feelings that consume us as either indifference or narcissistic identification with the (humanity) of the other. It obscures a routinized violent quotidian embedded in the brutal familiarity of the everyday ritual.

As I remembered the description I made of the video of the execution of the Jordanian pilot last year, I became aware, through Hartman’s eyes, of the inevitability of the (re)production of the violent account. And as ISIS started to publish their videos online after the break of the Syrian revolution in 2011, it seemed impossible to miss the endless references to western popular aesthetics and the use of networks of social media strategies and user-generated platforms to emphasize their role in the global political imaginary.

Entertainment

Only a few months after the declaration of the formation of the Islamic State, parents and community leaders in Dublin, Ohio met with Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson to voice out their concerns about the seductive techniques IS is performing to lur their youths into religious extremism.

As they requested an estimate of $4 billion of funds from the Federal Government to build a gym and other entertainment facilities at the Noor Islamic Cultural Center, they appeared to understood very well that extremist thought thrives in boredom.

They understood that fundamentalism is the language of repetition.

The Letter

Tens of thousands of Muslims around the world condemned the Islamic State’s savagery. Their message was clear: this is not the true Islam.

The true Islam seemed more of an inner continuation of religious tradition; a sense of authenticity that assumes a true understanding of faith in opposition to a blind adherence to the letter. Such understanding seemed to transgress the ambiguity of ritual and its diverse reproductions. The truth seemed to thrive in a presupposed theological essence as opposed to mere reproduction of the formal exteriority of the ritual.

Repetition

One tweet published by an anonymous man claiming allegiance to ISIS stated shortly after Muath’s execution that every concealer must be punished even if it were one’s own mother or father, claiming that past generations of Muslims have diverged away from the Islam of the Quran and closer to tradition.

Seen from this man’s eyes, the Islamic State is mainly a project of rupture with tradition. It favors the adherance to the letter, to the machinic reproductions of a set of rituals, and to the sacredness of the external form of religious gestures.

The twitter account was later deleted, and its tweets, lost.

Capital

(Walter Benjamin: capitalism is a new kind of religion reduced to ritual and devoid of any theology ...)

Abstraction