User:Sara/proposal: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 21:17, 9 January 2017

Capture

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”.

In this text, I will refrain from recounting the shocking and brutal details of Al-Kasasbeh’s death.

I will, however, try to read the video of his execution through a different set of violent encounters with their different guises and reproductions. And I will start from the moment Al-Kasasebeh’s body is digitally captured and distributed online.

Familiarity

Around June 2014, the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS) released the very first video online claiming a Muslim Caliphate. They had decided to drop the words Iraq and Sham (the Levant) from their official name and transform into an all embracing Islamic State.

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.

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 Goverenment 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.

Interface

In an english translation of Pakistani Islamic scholar Abou A’la Al Maudoudi

The Letter

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.

Essence

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 continuaiton 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.

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

Abstraction

Acts of Language

@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
+'''Capture'''
-==Introduction==
+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.
-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 Islamic State had already realized itself as a de facto sovereignty, performing its statehood in a simple matter of fact. Despite international outrage, and with the absence of any recognition or support from intergovernmental organizations, the Islamic State perfromed its sovereignty, transgressesing the borders of national institutions, and taking the universal citizen, separated from community, nation or history, as its subject. A new form of state emerged. But what is this new state? and how did its de facto sovereignty consitute itself?
+The execution scene appears in the last few seconds of a 22min slick video entitled “The Healing of Believers’ Chests”.
-The horrifying images that surfaced on the Internet 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 economy of what Saidiya Hartman calls hypervisibilty, problematizes this precariousness of empathy obscuring a rather routinized violent quotidian embedded in the brutal familiarity of the everyday ritual. Hartman’s fundamental work animates within the context of slavery and the history of blackness. However, her determination to defamiliarize the familiar, through opening up a space for a critical awareness of the anavoidably reproducible and reproductive performance of violent subjection, inspires me. In other words, her methodology helps me ask: how is the subject (of the new state) constituted? How is this subjection reproduced and performed? And how can we defamiliarize it?
+In this text, I will refrain from recounting the shocking and brutal details of Al-Kasasbeh’s death.
-In my attempt to study the conditions through which ISIL operates as a sovereign state, I feel the need to unpack the terms subjection, reproduction, and performance. And 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, it would be impossible to unpack those topics independently from the networked technologies that operate our social body today.
+I will, however, try to read the video of his execution through a different set of violent encounters with their different guises and reproductions. And I will start from the moment Al-Kasasebeh’s body is digitally captured and distributed online.
-==Reproduction==
+'''Familiarity'''
-Just a few years before the emergence of the Islamic State on the open web, Boris Groys wrote an elaborate essay on religion in the age of digital reproduction (e-flux, Journal #4, March 2009). The purpose of the essay was to navigate through contemporary phenomena of extremist thought and to analyze their dissemination within today’s information market. His main concern was the rise of religious attitudes in mainstream digital culture. Accordingly, Groys mainly attributes the success of contemporary religious assimilation to the "media channels that are ... products of the extension and secularization of traditional religious practices*”. In other words, he argues that behind the ritualistic and repetitive reproduction of capital, commodities, technology and art lies an essentially religious attribute to western secular democratized societies.
+Around June 2014, the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS) released the very first video online claiming a Muslim Caliphate. They had decided to drop the words Iraq and Sham (the Levant) from their official name and transform into an all embracing Islamic State.
-(… to be continued)
+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.
-==Performance==
+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.
-- Code | Speech | Speech-act | Action-in-speech | Power-in-code-speech-action | Sovereignty
-- The failure of the voice | Refusing to execute the command (Mladen Dolar | Judith Bulter)
-- Speech as far more distributed and networked than emanating from a single body (Geoff Cox)
-- The bodiless subject looking for a body | isis as the radical search | isis as a refusal of the future
-==Subjection==
+'''Entertainment'''
-- Subjugation and subjectivation through debt and the promise (to honour one’s debt) | promise as utterance as speech act as a failure | kafka and the inscription of the promise on the body itself | shakespeare and the venetian creditor | code as an inscription of a futurity | the failure of the voice and code as a refusal of the future
-- the constituion of the subject-addressee (J.L. Austin)
+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.
-- “asignifying semiotics” (Lazzarato and digital subjectivation)
+As they requested an estimate of $4 billion of funds from the Federal Goverenment 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.
+'''Interface'''
+In an english translation of Pakistani Islamic scholar Abou A’la Al Maudoudi
+'''The Letter'''
+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.
+'''Essence'''
+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 continuaiton 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.
+'''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'''
+'''Abstraction'''
+'''Acts of Language'''