User:Sara/GPD

Introduction

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. Despite international outrage, and with the absence of any recognition or support from intergovernmental organizations, the Islamic State managed to reinvent a kind of sovereignty that transgresses the borders of national institutions. In my thesis, I would like to navigate through the conditions within which such sovereignty constitutes itself. (What are the conditions through which the sovereignty of the Islamic State constitutes itself?)

Chapter 1

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.

In this chapter, I would like to challenge Groys’ methods of conflating religion with digital reproduction. I would like to argue that the formation of the Islamic State as a sovereign body in 2014 introduced a different set of causalities than those explained by Boris Groys in 2009: firstly and foremost, how can we look at the Islamic State rather as a state project in the age of digital reproduction and how did this new form of governance come into being?