In a previous post, I wondered how we could approach Azoulay’s civil contract of photography through the digital era. After reading this week’s texts, perhaps Poster’s in particular, I realize that the question can and should be rethought on the basis that citizenship can no longer be formulated within the confines of the nation-state due to the deterritorializing force of globalization, and the contingent nature of the digital landscape. Poster questions the situatedness of the concept of “citizenship” in today’s world (both as conceptualized alongside the nation-state, and the claim of universality present in Balibar, even as it moves beyond the nation-state paradigm), aligning himself with critical discourse that “locates an antagonism between globalization and citizenship,” that “globalizing processes strips the citizen of power,” erasing borders and “rendering problematic the figure of the citizen as a member of a limited national community” (71). Critical here is also his observation that Western concepts and political principles “may not provide an adequate basis of critique in our current, increasingly global, condition” (72). Poster sees, here, a potential for a new form of power and association (71).
After all, the breakdown of borders does not only have to do with physical territory, but also with the previous separation of political activity from arenas such as consumption, either of media or not. Edwards’ article on Trump and the “Selfie-Determination of Nations” makes it abundantly clear, through the example of the Trump presidency, that pop culture is now a hallmark of American politics. Edwards proposes that digital technologies have created the “selfie” social form, a “digitally mediated, imagined community in which individual citizens, bots, and trolls exist side by side” (39). Edwards highlights the role of circulation, specifically the circulation of information, in this process, and how Trump has capitalized on it in the creation of his audience. The texts this week in general share a preoccupation for form, following the impulse in social theory to examine the often obscured construction of modern social practices. Drawing upon Dilip Gaonkar and Elizabeth Povinelli’s privileging of form to content, Edwards argues for a focus on “what it is about the Trumpian Tweet itself––or the reality television format––that propels his message across the circulatory matrix…to understand how the form intersects with the rise of a new relationship of individuals to politics in the digital age” (30, emphasis mine). Like last week’s readings that pointed to the failure of merely attacking the content of Trump’s speech as lies, Edwards urges us to analyze how Trump strategizes circulation in order to understand the mechanisms driving his “success,” such as direct contact with his audience, or the calling into being of social groups based on social capital, competition, and temporary alliances (38). Edwards rightly observes that in the political transformation of the age of Trump, there is a “battle over the media themselves” (40). I would like to add that this does not just materialize upon the grounds of Trump’s denunciation of “fake news,” but also pertains to other shadowed and global players such as Russia and their influence on the U.S. elections, which predominantly played out in the digital sphere. Indeed, it is interesting to consider, within the intersections of globalization, capitalism, and imperialism, a “war of images that isn’t visible.”
Poster asks if in the contemporary situation, the media has the ability to create new subjects. These important questions are raised:
Can the new media promote the construction of new political forms not tied to historical, territorial powers?
What are the characteristics of new media that promote new political relations and new political subjects?
How can these be furthered or enhanced by political action?
(Poster 78).
Poster’s concept of the “netizen” is based upon the web’s decentralizing features that can escape the control of the nation-state due to its deterritorializing and contingent, unpredictable nature, one based on open exchange: “any point may establish exchanges with any other point or points” (78), although here it is important to note that in certain countries this “free exchange” is heavily policed and censored. However, I did find Poster’s examples of how media can supersede existing political structures (women mingling with men freely in chat rooms in the Arabic world, gay individuals socializing and organizing on the Internet in Singapore) to be compelling (82).
The Critical Art Ensemble’s piece on recombinant theatre gives us some other apertures to answering the questions posed by Poster. I found the idea of recombination as cosmology interesting: “a new way of understanding, ordering, valuing, and performing in the world” (151). The Ensemble discusses its view on street theatre as performances that “invent ephemeral, autonomous situations from which temporary public relationships emerge whereby the participants can engage in critical dialogue on a given issue” (157); again, there is an emphasis on the contingent nature of these gatherings as ephemeral, autonomous, and temporary, and the creation of a “loose-knit ephemeral public” (159). The conventions of recombinant theatre, based upon “participation, process, pedagogy, and experimentation” (158) and eliminating privileged positions such as that of the director, have to do with horizontalization, what CAE proposes as a digital move because the analogic is grounded in “one voice [that] speaks for the ‘betterment’ of all” (158). Interesting is how CAE suggests that strategies and tactics “will not come from the university or cultural industry centers; rather, it will emerge from the minor sectors and nomadic vectors” (157). As Deleuze and Guattari have noted, the planetary machine is paradoxical (mutational) in that it is precisely that which creates micro-assemblages; “Following André Gorz’s formula, the only remaining element of work left under world capitalism is the molecular, or molecularized, individual…a macropolitics of society by and for a micropolitics of insecurity” (215-6). Here, we may also consider how Trump has developed an anti-globalization rhetoric as a tempering of this insecurity.
Like Poster, the Ensemble locates the radical nature of its model within its potentiality and the creation of new possibilities within the mutational possibilities of today, although here there is a more concrete practice of the work, which occurs around the axis of invention and unpredictability. While failure can be a real result, so can “the possibility of an emergent discourse of liberation” (159), as seen in such interventions as The International Campaign for Free Alcohol and Tobacco for the Unemployed (1998), which materialized the possibility of open exchange in a space reserved exclusively for consumption (159). Globalization also figures as a problematic in this text, as the Ensemble acknowledges that due to it, “a new theatre that bursts the boundaries of the theatre of everyday life” has been created (161). From here, CAE suggests the use of technology, the “emerging theatre of information” (161), as a tool, an “information organizer” (163). Perhaps Poster enters here when he suggests that even the borders between the natural and science and technology have dissolved: “The conditions of globalization are not only capitalism and imperialism: they include the coupling of human and machine” (72). In arguing for the building of a new political structure outside the nation-state, Poster posits that this will only be possible through the “coupling of human and machine…the new ‘community’…will be mediated by information machines” (72). Similarly, I think the observation from CAE that information and communication technology (ICT) will mediate but is “not going to provide community, democracy, expanded consciousness, or interactive theatre” (163) is a smart demarcation; too often the discourse on technology and its “progressive” potential endows it with a utopian promise. Technology can act as a facilitator, such as in the case of Flesh Machine (1997), but we still need to put the responsibility for the work and process, thinking and doing, on ourselves.