The Aura of Kony Island

 

What is our present? What is the present field of possible experiences? This is not an analytics of truth; it will concern what might be called an ontology of the present, an ontology of ourselves, and it seems to me that the philosophical choice confronting us today is this: one may opt for a critical philosophy that will present itself as an analytic philosophy of truth in general, or one may opt for a critical thought that will take the form of an ontology of ourselves, an ontology of the present…

                                                                        -Michel Foucault, The Art of Telling the Truth

At the risk of responding heedlessly, I venture that our present is defined by the humanitarian pleasure principle. We live in an age of drone aesthetics – every grain of geographic space, every gesture of lived reality, every click of pleasurable association records and cites a historicized datum of our contemporary mode of existence. The mediated flow of images flourishes while the world passes away.

Consequently, those who resist or rebel against a form of power cannot merely be content to denounce violence or criticize an institution. Nor is it enough to cast the blame on reason in general. What has to be questioned is the form of rationality at stake…The question is: how are such relations of power rationalized? Asking it is the only way to avoid other institutions, with the same objectives and the same effects, from taking their stead.

-Michel Foucault, Politics and Reason

We sit idly trapped in the muddied trenches of an uncanny valley – a horizon of existence bereft of the eternal gloss of the nation state, the species, religion and republic. The variegated spectrum of forms by which political associations and ethical commitments take place has outstripped the potentiality for the taxonomic nodes to retain their positions as meaningful referents. When politics is reduced down to a distracted display of public affiliation, the capacity for change becomes impotent.

New Media, New Masses?

The Kony 2012 Campaign which has recently gone viral offers a keen case study evincing the means by which the politics of humanitarianism short circuits the perceived necessity of, the capacity to, and the desire for a reflexively engaged ethico-political constitution of the global citizen.

Right now there are more people on Facebook, than there were on the planet 200 years ago. Humanity’s greatest desire is to belong and connect. And now we see each other, we hear each other…we share what we love and it reminds us what we all have in common… (Kony2012)

The video begins with a self-conscious introduction of its place within the interconnections of a globalized world. There are literally thousands of videos out there which make appeals to ethical causes and which comment on the opportunities for new social movements – why did this one succeed?

It can’ t merely be that more people simply believe in or agree about this cause. It seems to me that it is definitively rooted in the aesthetics of the campaign. Yet it also reminds me of Walter Benjamin’s observation that the aura’s present decay is linked to “the increasing significance of the masses in contemporary life” (255).

Benjamin continues in  Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility:

The desire of the present-day masses to “get closer” to things spatially and humanly, and their equally passionate concern for overcoming each thing’s uniqueness by assimilating it as a reproduction….The stripping of the veil from the object, the destruction of the aura, is the signature of a perception whose “sense for sameness in the world” has so increased that, by means of reproduction, it extracts sameness from what is unique (255-6).

The introduction’s statement that, “Humanity’s greatest desire is to belong and connect" performs, analyzes and describes the process by which the increasing significance of the masses is linked to the desire to overcome uniqueness. To reproduce the work of art through the youtube film means to merely share it; the work’s reproduction coincides with its consumption. Thus the dynamics of the artwork’s aura have reinvigorated their original ritualistic association.

As Benjamin writes:

The unique value of the “authentic” work of art has its basis in ritual, the source of its original use value.

 Markers of the viral-ity of the video, the display of the statistics of views, analytics, data etc…express the thoroughness of “the interpenetration of art and science” in the age of technological reproducibility. The ritual is disclosed through the knowledge of the commonality of viewership which simultaneously endows a video with a cult like magic, while depressing any semblance of uniqueness inherent in the act of consumption.

The video then proceeds to show a scene of a person who ‘hears’ for the first time as the result of a cochlear implant. In seeing another person learn to hear, we learn to see hearing differently, and hear different things than were previously possible. The film discloses a world of scenes and gestures contained within our everyday movements that were previously unknown. Film calls for our attention and analysis because it more precisely documents the gestures of the body, through slow motion time is extended, through the juxtaposition of images new associations emerge, through the procession of angles new viewpoints and understandings of positionality are created and so on.

Photographic records begin to be evidence in the historical trial. This constitutes their hidden political significance. They demand a specific kind of reception. Free-floating contemplation is no longer appropriate to them. They unsettle the viewer; he feels challenged to find a particular way to approach them.

Watching the cursor click share leads to an instinctive, mimetic desire to also share the video, perceptions and understandings of the video are changed in the act of consumption itself. 

“The world is changing…the rules of the game have changed…the next 27 minutes are an experiment, but in order for it to work you have to pay attention" (Kony 2012)

“[T]he audience is an examiner, but a distracted one” (Benjamin).

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Uncanny Associations

From the U of Chicago Media Glossary: 

Thus, a medium becomes uncanny not when it “comes  

to life,” but when it becomes apparent that it was alive

all along. All media are potentially uncanny and, as

Mitchell reflects, we may some day be forced to

consider the possibility that behind it all there exists 

only “‘ourselves,’ and our obscure objects of desire.”

Demos as Media Ecology

  

‘… unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudorealities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their  motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power:  that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the  same thing. … However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes that do  fall apart.’ 

        —Philip K. Dick (1995: 262)

Person(a) of the Year

Although the selection of a persona or group based identification rather than a specific individual is not a new development for TIME; this year's selection of "The Protester" points toward intriguing new developments in the dynamics of global publics. TIME Magazine’s selection criterion is rather simple; the award goes to that person, group, or concept which most influenced the news, for better or for worse.

Why “The Protester”? Why not the singular Tunisian fruit vendor; the spark that spurred a fire that would rapidly proceed to engulf the globe; from the favelas of the south to the arctic blasted Russian metropolises, and the most developed countries in the world? Why not choose even a specific group of protesters, “The Arab Spring” or the #OWS movements?

Here’s portion of TIME Magazine’s defense of their selection: 

Everywhere this year, people have complained about the failure of traditional leadership and the fecklessness of institutions. Politicians cannot look beyond the next election, and they refuse to make hard choices. That's one reason we did not select an individual this year. But leadership has come from the bottom of the pyramid, not the top. For capturing and highlighting a global sense of restless promise, for upending   governments and conventional wisdom,  for combining the oldest of techniques with the newest of technologies to shine a light on human dignity and, finally, for steering the planet on a more democratic though sometimes more dangerous path for the 21st century, the Protester is TIME's 2011 Person of the Year.

News by definition is generated from controversy. News is a form of protest against the status quo; it pokes holes in the previously seamless fabric of the present. In re-presenting the facts of what has occurred the news defies expectations of what we thought was occurring. But news is also analysis, opinion, and commentary on how we should relate ourselves to new developments; as they emerge in real-time. News even offers analysis on the news. And other media offer analysis on the analysis of the analysis. Entertainment, factual presentation, commentary and opinion become ever blurred in the era of Meta-news. Yet the news has also donned the mask of the figure of the “The Protester” in response to the “The Protester” itself, in its myriad forms.

The Person of the Year is not decided based on extracting data from algorithms or trends from complex metrics. TIME’s award is an analysis by the media of the media, but while it claims to be simply representing the facts of the case, should this award not be the most obvious of decisions? Shouldn’t the answer be staring us straight in the face? TIME doesn’t seem to even feign some sort of claim to objectivity or very rigorously stress the differences between the runner-up’s and the winner. The selection process is based on perceptions, and like all perceptions, from the very beginning it is an act of valuation.

Developments in Cognitive Psychology and Neurophilosophy have demonstrably proven the inability to maintain a distinction between fact and value. At the most basic level of the visual cortex (V1), before one is even conscious of a visual sense perception, feedback loops of higher order thinking processes have already influenced the act of perception. Sober, rational deliberation that’s freed from all extraneous influence vanishes, always trailing in the wake of precognitive, emotional valences.

And in a sense, TIME Magazine is all too aware of this phenomenon. In the penultimate statement defending their decision, TIME reflects on the affective capacities that “The Protester” generated:

For capturing and highlighting a global sense of restless promise

The criterion for selection is fundamentally based on the influence a person/group/concept has had on the media. The reason “The Protester” was so influential was because it fostered the conditions of possibility that connected, created and fed unpredictable desires. There was something else at work in the figure of “The Protester” this year. The figure itself always already was a figure that embodied influence. In a sense every TIME Magazine Person of the Year recipient embodies the figure of “The Protester” in one-way or another.

In the immediate wake of the revolts experts, theorists and scholars scrambled to try and explain why predictive models and theoretical frames failed so miserably to foresee such a drastic upheaval. The events that we are witnessing can only be traced to one sort of cause, the final cause, in an Aristotelian sense. The TIME article relates the figure of “The Protester” to the etymological origin of democracy or demos. All of these movements are ‘caused’ in the sense that they fulfill the meaning and strive to satisfy the end of the demos.

But there are also very specific figures that are emblematic of “The Protester.” There is the Tunisian Fruit Vendor, the romanticized figure of self-sacrifice and ineffable defiance of conventional wisdom. There are the #OWS protesters, the leaderless and organic network of protesters, but a more contentious figure, admired, mockupied and demonized all at once. Within the Occupy Wall ST. Movement the most famous representatives are the victims; the NW Grandma and UC Students Pepper-sprayed, the Iraqi War Veteran whose skull was fractured by Oakland Policy with a tear gas canister, or countless others who were subjected to police brutality.

I posted during the first few months of the #OWS protests about the statistical connection between acts of police repression and media coverage of the protests. There was a significant positive correlation between instances of state violence and the amount of media traffic consumed by global publics; thus its no surprise that the most well known figures are the victims.

    
    Yet TIME Magazine repeatedly insists on the fact that this revolution was not linearly caused by advances in technology:

Technology mattered, but this was not a technological revolution. Social networks did not cause these movements, but they kept them alive and connected. Technology allowed us to watch, and it spread the virus of protest, but this was not a wired revolution; it was a human one, of hearts and minds, the oldest technology of all.

But perhaps the human heart itself has changed. What if our affective sensibilities have grown drastically? The article explicitly asks the question:

Is there a global tipping point for frustration?

To me the more interesting question is not whether there is a tipping point or brink in terms of the numbers of people that have to be frustrated before general sentiment translates into action; or whether there is a brink in terms of how pissed people have to get before an emotion becomes an occupation.  Instead, what if technological prosthesis expands our collective affective horizon of possibility? Or if there were a brink, what if it were not fixed or timeless? What if we could actively work on finding ways to lower or raise its threshold? Or return to a more ancient education of the sense? In so many ways (that need not be repeated here) the sources and levels of frustration within the varying contexts (from #OWS to the Arab Spring, to Russia and Greece) differed dramatically, yet tactics by the different groups were remarkably similar. This movement emerged from and continues to generate a social imaginary; an envisioning that feeds forwards and backwards through the public , other movements and the prefigured present; like an electric charge. The bonds of solidarity sedimented through millions of bytes in the bucket spurred passionate attachments to the trajectories of other protesters and movements. The interconnectedness of the movements provided an infrastructural base that would outpace its wildest dreams.

The movements combine:

the oldest of techniques with the newest of technologies to shine a light on human dignity

What if the newest of technologies is really just as ancient of principle? Are the technologies, as they disclose themselves in their many-sided mystery not the tools enabling one to take to the task of generating an ethos? Can we not think of ethos as a technique as well as a technology?

A technique of the self;

A prosthetically enhanced capacity to respond;

An augmented duty to own up to one’s ownmost potentiality for respons(e)ibility. 

Rumi-nating - Of Mystics and Media

    The poetry of the Sufi Rumi often lends itself to mysticism and serene slippages of the tongue. Rumi represents the tremendous hermeneutic depth inherent in the incessant reinterpretation of Islam and the Quran. As a scholar and headmaster of schools in the Middle East Rumi was exposed to the most modern advances in science and philosophy of his time, which is evident in the topos of his writing He was a firm believer that if you speak a new language you shall have a new world before your eyes; which points to the very modern concept that language is constitutive of our shared reality.  

Confused and distraught
Again I am raging, I am in such a state by your soul that every bond you bind, I break, by your soul. I am like heaven, like the moon, like a candle by your glow; I am all reason, all love, all soul, by your soul. My joy is of your doing, my hangover of your thorn; whatever  side you turn your face, I turn mine, by your soul. I spoke in error; it is not surprising to speak in error in this  state, for this moment I cannot tell cup from wine, by your soul. I am that madman in bonds who binds the "divs"; I, the madman, am a Solomon with the "divs", by your soul. Whatever form other than love raises up its head from my  heart, forthwith I drive it out of the court of my heart, by your soul. Come, you who have departed, for the thing that departs comes back; neither you are that, by my soul, nor I am that, by your soul. Disbeliever, do not conceal disbelief in your soul, for I will recite the secret of your destiny, by your soul. Out of love of Sham-e Tabrizi, through wakefulness or  nightrising, like a spinning mote I am distraught, by your soul.

"Mystical Poems of Rumi 2" A. J. Arberry
The University of Chicago Press, 1991

There are some who try and abstract Rumi out of his historical and cultural context in order to harness the eternal essence of his writing, his poetry has been translated into contemporary American idioms as well. There is an undeniable benefit to making the language of his works more accessible to larger audiences, however its clear there is little value in completely ignoring the origins and influences of his work; i.e. the theological environment from whence it arose.

Rumi’s work has the feel less of a sermon than a dialogue or discourse, a song or a conversation. In the above poem he writes “I, the madman, am a Solomon.” There is an uncanny similarity between his poetry and the Songs of Solomon, odes of love to the divine rather than Jeremiads.

While there is a stark similarity in styles between Solomon and Rumi in their mode of presentation, there are much more poignant cleavages running through the content of the messages themselves. One major difference between the belief systems erected by the different theological traditions is in the understanding of the origin of evil. While Christianity tells a narrative of the Fall of Man and Original Sin, for the Sufi’s it is a question of ‘vic’ or remembrance of a forgotten divine. Humanity is impregnated with a spirit that is both beyond and every bit a part of itself, one gets a glimpse of or tastes a bit of this ethereal yet immanent essence through finite yet particular experiences of love.

For Rumi, the task of living righteously in the world is not a prohibitionist warding off of evil, but rather a hopeful stylistics of existence that seeks to affirm the divine in one’s working on and understanding of the world. It is a mode of being that begins with an ethos of generosity, in its interpretation of Islamic code, in its disposition toward others, and in its cultivation of habits in the daily regimen of life. To live justly is less so the protection of a body from harmful pathogens, than is it a joyful journey in search for the lost ruins of the spirit.

This interpretation of Islam, one that is more commonplace for many Iranians, is one radically opposed to that in the lamestream media. It seems to strike at and shatter the certainty of the American conception of radical Muslims. Moreover, it is an ethos that embraces and actively advocates for a cosmopolitanism in global affairs. Perhaps there are overlooked wooden grains in the carpentry of religion. 

Affective Energetics

Memories of conversations and good laughter pour out of the woodwork of this porch. Each creek and bend in its beams puts a bounce in my step. Each timber teems with a trajectory of what has been and what is promised to come. There are knots that have fallen out, they hold the secret to lost objects, forgotten once and for all. I’m seduced by what may lie beneath this rigid frame. When in times of wind, I care for these columns as if they were my only hope. This porch makes possible the oscillations of my swing. Each movement enchants me, amidst its uncertainty a subtle rhythm emerges, grabs hold of me, and takes flight. An iridescent light of reverence spills out upon me, an entire reservoir overflows the dams of memory’s clogged pores. In a single moment of intensity of the everyday, I finally become free to resonate with the multiple me’s.