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 assimilation 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 repetitive reproduction of capital, commodities, 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 not a religious project, but firstly and foremost a state project that is in constant negotiation with the mutations introduced to our social body by the technological reformations of labour, subjectivity, and language. My question is then, how.

Labour as a act 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film, a highly secured wall separates Mexico from the United States, and all unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. have been replaced by robots.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 cables and sensors “plugged" into their bodies. As they activate the robots working in U.S. territories, in sectors ranging from construction work to domestic care, the labourers’ bodies are transformed into a function of writing. Like a piece of code, or a line in a program, their gestures are inscriptions of a series of commands and controls that need to traverse endless interfaces and interact with endless other gestures and inscriptions. Their bodies are an act of language. They do not act. They perform action.

Subjectivation and Utterance

performatory utterance (J.L. Austin) and the production of the subject-addressee (J.L. Austin) through “asignifying semiotics” (Lazzarato and digital subjectivation) Code | Speech | Speech-in-code | Action-in-speech | Power-in-code-speech-action | Sovereignty

The Promise

(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)

Last summer, I 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.

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