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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Orator-Communists

In the 2004 article “Rhetoric and Capitalism: Rhetorical Agency as Communicative Labor” [Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 37, No. 3, 2004. ] Ronald Walter Greene outlines a materialist ontology of rhetorical agency. Drawing largely on the works of Hardt and Negri, Greene offers a way out of the forced choice between rhetorical models. Understanding rhetoric as communicative labor affirms “an alternative politics: a common creativity and invention, a productive excess and joy, the material immanence of democracy.” Greene argues that rhetoric is a form of immaterial labor that is productive of value.

Immaterial labor offers an alternative model for rhetorical agency. As a way toward a material ontology of rhetorical agency I would claim that the persuasive, aesthetic, and deliberative characteri stics of communication (elements associated with the information and cultural content of the commodity as well as the social networks of care) reside in the matrix of bio-political production.

The fact that neoliberal governance acts in a totalizing way by focusing on the reproduction of life and knowledge should not make the militant depressed. Greene argues that critical rhetoricians that support more deliberative, political-communicative models burden themselves with a “permanent anxiety over the meaning and potential of rhetorical agency” (188). Rhetoricians become ‘moral entrepreneurs’ (189) scolding each other rather than affirming their common struggle. Instead of constant battle over the proper signification of struggle, eludes this anxiety in favor of the invention of new forms of resistance as a “life-affirming constitutive power that embodies creativity and cooperation.”

Capital’s self-valorization occurs in the process of circulation and the consequent production of surplus-value. Affective energies are the connective tissues that are forge the pathways for creating value. In the essay, “Rhetorical Circulation in Late Capitalism: Neoliberalism and the Overdetermination of Affective Energies” [Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 43, No. 1, 2010], Catherine Chaput describes the relationship between rhetoric and economics.

[R]hetoric: its persuasive power can be seen as deriving from the repetition of values added and exchanged through disparate communicative acts. Indeed, I maintain that the economic and rhetorical circulatory processes work in tandem to sustain the vitality of late capitalism in much the same way that the muscular and skeletal systems work together to animate human motion (14).

Rhetoric’s power resides in its ability to produce value which “derives from its circulation of affect, a material energy exchanged within and among the many instances of a sign’s lifespan” (15). Rhetoric as communicative labor exposes the commons between us that constitute the immanence of lived democracy. There is no need to seek validation for rhetorical agency, it exists everywhere in the power to affect and be affected. The role of ‘orator communist’ is to manipulate power relations, block, redirect, stabilize or utilize them in order to seek a new democratic horizon. Recognition of our shared existence on an affective level lets us move beyond the reductive opposition between reason-emotion.

Chaput argues for a shift in rhetorical scholarship from Bitzer’s situated rhetoric to a model of a rhetorical circulation. She argues that the situated model of rhetoric maintains an affective force through its canonization within rhetoric studies that has made people think of rhetorical agents and audiences as discrete.

I believe that the premise of a rhetorical situation to which language responds, although an extremely valuable disciplinary tool, circulates an affectivity that makes rhetoricians less open to the full range of human interconnectivity primarily because it posits effective communication as a bounded practice. The rhetorical situation, that is, makes rhetoricians comfortable within the disciplinary status quo of rhetorical production understood as transpiring within discrete sociohistorical, political, and cultural situations (18).

Because of her historical analysis of the shifts in production in Neoliberal capitalism, rhetorical models must likewise be flexible and able to account for the multiple exigencies that saturate lived experience. Chaput argues that the theory of situatedness has left too many parts of neoliberal capitalism uninterrogated because the cultural forces that sustain the productive apparatuses of capital do not exist in static, fixed locations but always in movement. “[T]he affective energies maintaining contemporary life do not adhere to the boundedness of rhetorical situations; rather, they move across gaps from situation to situation” (19). The shifts in commodity production in Neoliberal capitalism are increasingly defined by fluctuations in immaterial labor. While capital is able to harness and exploit many of these forces by investing itself in a plurality of networked relations, this increasingly forces people into connective, cooperative working environments. The increased force of affective energies within economies is not something that is socially signified, it exists beyond class determinations. In this way the commonwealth is felt and lived in our social interactions universally.

This rhetorical model is based on a total vision of the way that power operates. Biopolitical production is increasingly unable to capture the creative activities of individuals engaged in immaterial production. This characterization points to a larger overall tendency of life to exceed exploitation that authors like Hardt & Negri and Greene see as central to caesura dividing modernity from post-modernity. The forces of production have shifted such that the society of control is not characterized in a vertical, hierarchical relationship between the bourgeoisie and the factory line worker. Today it is the schoolteacher nestled in the suburban district, the manager, the janitor and the nurse. Sociality is increasingly dispersed within network power relations rather than existing in a distinct center. These changes in the division of labor require us to abandon rhetorical models that maintain a strict distinction between the social and the political. And instead opt for rhetorical models that open cultural theory to the circulation that bleeds through the stratified layers that divide the social.