August 27 2014_blogpost_140711_Digital Commons_re-visited and revised
Unsave the world. Touch, relief, (fatigue), Dear my Reader, drop in, take a minute or two to accept my sincere apology for my complaining in my last article and leave you without consolence over the period of an intensive summer in which we had experienced many obstacles, many changes in altitude and weather conditions, just to name a few.
Picking up the pieces.
Let me recollect.
In these four years we have seen unprecedented political and social upheaval flare up globally and in the Middle East, Tahrir Square and Place de 14.Janvier in 2011 for Egypt and Tunisia. From Occupy Wall Street at Zucchotti Park New York and Syntagma Square in Athens, Greece in 2012, to Gezi Park a year later in 2013, or more recently the Maidan in the Ukraine in early 2014. What has and what hasn’t change perhaps, or more illustratively put, when these days then – as is common of strong-hold Europe, the mainland is looking evincingly towards civil-war ridden and economically depleted multiethnic Bosnian Capital City of Sarajevo for commemorating one hundred years of it’s own history of the outbreak of World War One, the question is not, whether Gavrilo Principe was a terrorist or acting in the Nationalist Interest of the Independence of the Serbian State against the Austria-Hungarian Empire. From a mid-European perspective, the logic that is still in place, despite all of the awareness raising, and that governs our attitude towards the Balcan region to this day – is best exemplified in the mode of production of one of the great minds of the 20th Century, the inventor Victor Tesla and to ask ourselves whether or not he was Croatian, Bosnian or Kosovarian for instance.
The 2012 Documenta participatory collective called „Critical Art Ensemble“, stated in the official publication of Documenta 13, the 100 Notes – 100 Toughts, by the curator Christov-Bakargiev, might give a general descritption of what criticality should be trying to get at, maybe. One of the articles many subtitles reads something like this:
„Health is not the absence of sickness“.
The paragraph I am reading, reconsiders political activism in light of retaliatory measures of besieged governments against it’s citizenry in the Middle East and North Africa. It says,
„The rhetoric of the cure is no less pleasant. The model established by the medical industry in global economy parallels the one used to cure the ills of the social order: Arrest the symptoms and ignore the cause. If the rioting, burning and looting are absent, then all is well-even if the underlying problem still remains. Remission is a perfectly acceptable, if not desirable outcome. To investigate why a person lacks investment in the social order, or to research why the means to fulfill basic human need are absent in a time of massive wealth, is anathema to the powerful.“
I don’t know this word: Remission.
Another kind of recollection. Still wary of absentmindedness.
In June 2014 four years ago, I was staying in Tunis, Tunesia, and a situation not unlike today’s protests in the streets of Brazil before the FIFA World Soccer Championship, eventually subsided coverage through the Media, in the Arab World post financial collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 and the entire Stock Market in shambles with faulty housing credits from Orange County to Long Beach, Compton, Bay Area California by Swiss Banks- and the pre-arab or more specifically, the Tunisian Uprising in January of 2011. In June 2010 however, a veritable media outrage over an international crisis shook the Arab World all the way from Abu Dhabi to Al-Dschazzeera, like today the resurgent conflict in Gaza has us bolted, when a then Israelian Storm Troop, captured a Humanitarian Aid Ship with International Volunteers aboard, Norwegian for instance, amongst other European Nations destined to deliver important Medical and Humanitarian Aid to the Palestinian Gaza Strip. On the arrest of the ships entire crew and passengers involved at the break of dawn by the Israelian Paramilitary forces, over a dozen civil and unarmed activists where wounded or killed in the attempt to seize control over the ship that had left harbor and was sailing from Turkey and was known by the name of Bateau du Liberté.
The critical Art Ensemble states:
„Evil has gone out of the world and sickness has come into it.“
„Modern medicine has made its way far from battling bacterial or viral pathogens; it has managed to find the means to arrest unwanted feelings and behaviors. The medical industry would have us believe that our natural tendency as humans is toward neutrality and acceptance. If a natural cause must be found, the answer is always in the individual character (defective genes, chemical imbalance, etc.) never in the environment enveloping a person.
„Manic Depression, chronic depression, general anxiety disorder, paranoid schizophrenia, attention deficit disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, conversion disorder (that’s today’s rebranding of the term of Hysteria), or panic attack, chronic fatigue syndrome.“
The political crisis of Bateau du Liberté, who had Turkey’s then already Prime Minister Erdogan, send stern diplomatic warnings at the address of Israel – bringing Turkey to the brink of waging war against Israel – from one day to the next, was effectively subdued – wiped off and cleared from tous media channels daily agendas, by the moment the first official game of Soccer was launched with the FIFA World Championship in South Africa.
Was ist Dringend? What would I like to answer while my body is slowly drowning and sinking to the ground like pummeled and greased up slobs of oil?
What are the questions? What do we need to ask ourselves?
Go to pieces and get stuck in the mud?
or how to be the mud?
A bleak examination of the current unfolding of the repercussions of the old guards and the re-establishment of a Military Regime in Egypt with the popularity of it’s former Military Leader Abdel Fattah al-Sisi inaugurated as the new strong man president of Egypt, a regime that quenches any sign of Opposition, by launching „Schauprozesse“ „mock trials“ in which it spells out death penalties against the former government, members and sympathizers of the Muslim brotherhood in the hundreds in court orders, like others would emphatically read the winning numbers of some horse race, or swat flies, to the bequeathing of any oppositional groups or activities like for instance the youth movement „April 6“, by effectively rendering them to be illegal „terroristic organizations“ by law.
In the relatively short reign of al-Sisi, an estimated but nevertheless abhorrent number of more than 3000 civilians have been murdered by the Regime for political reasons, more than another 20’000 have been incarcerated.
In other words,
What do the invisible to the naked eye, chemically dissipated micro-drops of the oil spill off the coast of Louisiana and the thousands of shriveled up dead bodies at the bottom of the mediterranean have in common?
It is not a joke. We and by that I mean, I myself included, have to learn to anticipate better of how to take serious our own involvement in all of this. To learn to listen better and learn to distinguish between anxiety and intuition maybe. That both exist in the meantime, how to acknowledge and not render invisible to turn to a cynical reproach on our own predicament.
What these numbers above all signify to us, as Mohammad R. Salama, scholar in modern Arabic Literature and author of „Islam, Orientalism and Intellectual History“, subtitled „Modernity and the Politics of Exclusion since Ibn Khaldun“, has already confoundedly answered before, in an attempt to unveil and expose some of it’s atrocious inner logics – is the staging of barbarity in a theater of violence in which the executioners and the condemned are it’s actors while the families become its audience as the military regime creates a new post-colonial, post-nationalist theater of terror and oppression.
In a sense then, from the streets of Brasil to he shores of Calabria Italy, Sicily and Malta, where day after day, boat people arrive from Syria in their tiny nutshells with over-heated motors, to say that „I’m aware that my focus itself doesn’t probably even start to yet evince the numerous sites globally speaking, where the manifold dilemmas and lack of alternatives lead to a baffled, stunned and altogether disoriented affair of liberal democracy that renders any human notion as irreverent and meaningless in facing the paramount crisis of global Capitalism today.“ It is statements like these that make it irretrievably difficult to deal, if not to say cynical the nature of our predicament. Needless to say, if we are taking for instance the example of latest developments in the Near East, as the prime site of the hegemonial reign of the conflict of Security issues, or the „Police“ as Ranciere defines it, the Reality that is constantly displayed, or is on view in the public realm then, is exactly nothing but a symptom of and to the deeper inner crisis of the collective.
Care to know your inner landscapes better.
In a way then let us all be the moth stuck to the mud and rising.
To decide between Fear and Intuition. Let’s be creature.
