This week’s readings made me reflect a lot about different strategies of resistance and the smaller actions that can serve to intervene upon what often seem to be impossibly complex and oppressive systems of power. I was struck by the account of the “geographies of power” and the concept of disturbance spaces featured in Jill Lane and Ricardo Dominguez’s essay “Digital Zapatistas”. They discuss the Critical Art Ensemble’s reversal of “the familiar Deluzian figuration which sees the nomad as the site of the Other” and its insistence that “it is now power which is nomadic, rendering our social condition ‘liquesce’” (134). Certainly nomadic power would demand different strategies than those familiar images of past Revolutions. The symbolic figure of Subcomandante Marcos, “dead, not dead, not not dead” (Taylor), as well as the stories of Mayan technologies and the action of “bombarding” military bases with paper planes give resistance and revolution a new poetic logic.
The lineage of hacktivist interventions, and its inspiration on Zapatista strategies, seems like an important point of reflection in this contemporary moment. Thinking of the recent shutdown by the Iranian state of all internet connectivity, it is impossible to discount the significant force of traditional (relatively) immobile state power despite networked frameworks and transnational model of the internet. The readings on the Zapatistas this week seem like a great place to start (and, in some cases, continue) to think through how to challenge the particular kind of power which brutally governs today.