User:Sara/proposal
Abstract
When 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, Lebanon had just entered the first month of what would later turn into a two-and-a-half-year-long presidential gap. With no president in sight, with constitutional conflicts and wars along the borders, a new form of state came to being.
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. As Groys’ essay credits the success of contemporary religious assimilations to the "media channels that are, from the outset, products of the extension and secularization of traditional religious practices”, the formation of the Islamic State as a sovereign body in 2014 reversed the order through which the assumption is made; that behind the ritualistic and repetetive reproduction of capital, commodoties, technology and art lies an essentially religious attribute to western secular democratized societies. In my thesis, I would like to start from the assumption that the Islamic State is in fact in constant negotiation with the mutations introduced to our social body by the technological reformations of territoriality, subjectivity, and language. My question is then, how.
Labour as a Function of Language
“This is the American dream. We give the [united states] what they’ve always wanted; all the work - without the workers"
Set in a dystopian future, the film Sleep Dealer (2008) decribes a militarized world marked by {closed borders, virtual labour, and a globalised digital network that joins minds and experiences.} In the film, a highly secured wall separates Mexico from the United States, and all unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. have been replaced by robots. Across the borders, Mexican workers, exploited and controlled, remotely operate the robots by means of high-tech cables and sensors. Across the borders, they can be virtual construction workers or domestic carers
Mexican workers, exploited and controlled, operate the robots from across the closed national borders by means of cables and sensors attached to their bodies.
As they activate robots working in the U.S. in sectors ranging from construction to domestic care, they are transformed into possessing demons; their subjectivity is defined by its possession of itself as a demonic possession and of its object of possession not only alienated by means of virtuality from their productive activity, but they are also alienated from the paradigm of labour itself. Their bodies do not act. Their bodies perform action. Their bodies are somehow transformed into a function of writing, like a piece of code or a demon: its subjectivity lies in its possession of itslef and its object yet it is
Subjectivation and Utterance
During the past couple of months, I have organised a group of reading sessions, in Athens and in Beirut, that were inspired by Franco Berardi’s book The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance (2012). The reading sessions were aimed at discussing and exploring, collectively, the different processes through which today’s techno-linguistic machine shapes and operates our social body. Concerned with financial abstraction, language automation, and written code as means of inscribing pragmatic futurities, the selected texts navigated through the complications of contemporary crises, from financial collapses to border-nation failures and cyber warfare.
My interest in these writings have stemmed from my desire to decipher the conditions of one particular contemporary crisis
Navigating through the concept of debt as not only an economic obligation but as an infrastructure of power relations to subjectivation and subjugation of the social body, the question of sovereignty under neoliberal conditions seems have shifted. Based on the concept of insolvency, described by Berardi as not only a a refusal to pay the costs of economic crisis, but also as a rejection of the symbolic debt embodied in the cultural and psychic normalisation of daily life, I would like to try to read the current shift as an act of language.