User:Sara/proposal

Introduction

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 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 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.

Reproduction

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.

(… to be continued)

Performance

Subjection

- 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) - “asignifying semiotics” (Lazzarato and digital subjectivation)