[P2P-F] Fwd: achieving resonance for social change

Tue Apr 5 07:56:06 CEST 2011

I'm publishing this excerpt on the 13th,

see for original essay
http://greekleftreview.wordpress.com/2011/03/18/resonance-and-the-egyptian-revolution/

publishable comments are very welcome,

Michel

Material vs. immaterial resonance in spreading social
change<http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=15220>
[image: photo of Michel Bauwens]
Michel Bauwens
13th April 2011

 The emancipatory potential of the internet does not mean that Facebook,
Google, and Twitter are the main weapons of the 21st century democratic
rebellions, as the media often simplistically claims. These are important
channels, crucial at points, for the dissemination of resonances produced in
the streets by bodies that for the most part do not tweet. The main weapon
of democratic, non-violent rebellions still is, and will always be, bodies
in the streets producing resonance. And the trends of global unrest that
preceded Egypt seem to indicate we are entering a wave of transcontinental
anti-elite resonances that are encountering receptive bodies across
disparate geographies. This wave began in Europe in 2010, is spreading like
wildfire into North Africa and the Middle-East, and is now ricocheting back
into Europe.

The following is from a long and rather difficult essay on ‘resonance’, i.e.
how people are being affected by dreams of change which they see occuring
elswhere, and are then willing to put their own lives at state to effect
similar change in their own locale. For the author, resonance is NOT a
metaphor, but a real physical process.

The following is
excerpted<http://greekleftreview.wordpress.com/2011/03/18/resonance-and-the-egyptian-revolution/>from
the part where the author discuss immaterial resonance. In my opinion,
while I agree that the physical is primary (to the degree one can indeed
separate ‘material’ from ‘immaterial’, which is indeed a problematic
distinction), I disagree that it necessarily needs to originate there. In
other words, resonance can be create first in the immaterial spaces of
communication, before it is actualized on the streets.

*Gaston Gordillo: *

*“The resonance expanding from Egypt is being channeled through a planetary
network of instant communications that has reached a density, spatial reach,
speed, and sophistication unparalleled in world history. Karl Marx’s utopian
vision of a wave of emancipatory energies interconnected across the nations
of the world is only materially possible today. Yet this internationalism
will continue being a utopian projection if reactionary resonances based on
fear prevail. This is why current struggles for global democracy are over
the smoothing out and striation of the primary space that facilitates
resonance expansion, the internet. State and corporate power are rapidly
joining forces to police the web. The recent attempts by the Obama
administration to demonize and shut down Wikileaks express that the United
States and Chinese government are not that different in this regard, for
both fear the power of uncoded, anti-state resonances travelling globally
through unrestricted, unpoliced channels.*

*The emancipatory potential of the internet does not mean that Facebook,
Google, and Twitter are the main weapons of the 21st century democratic
rebellions, as the media often simplistically claims. These are important
channels, crucial at points, for the dissemination of resonances produced in
the streets by bodies that for the most part do not tweet. The main weapon
of democratic, non-violent rebellions still is, and will always be, bodies
in the streets producing resonance. And the trends of global unrest that
preceded Egypt seem to indicate we are entering a wave of transcontinental
anti-elite resonances that are encountering receptive bodies across
disparate geographies. This wave began in Europe in 2010, is spreading like
wildfire into North Africa and the Middle-East, and is now ricocheting back
into Europe, as illustrated by the protests and potential court actions for
human rights violations that have just forced George W. Bush to cancel a
trip to Switzerland.*

*Meanwhile, the material resonances created in central Cairo continue
expanding toward the world. I began writing this essay the day the Egyptian
Revolution began, and these pages’ tone, layout, and configurations have
mutated and evolved in parallel with the effect that that those equally
evolving resonances coming from the margins of the Nile, and that I was
trying to understand with words, had on my body. The images and voices of
those determined bodies in the streets of Cairo, Alexandria, or Suez
resonated with my own embodied memories of having been raised under one of
the many dictatorships that the United States sponsored, trained, and funded
in Latin America to destroy the revolutionary resonances of the 1960s and
1970s. Those riveting images created an affective empathy with their plight
as fellow human bodies determined to put an end to their oppression.*

*The main intention of this essay is to partly contribute to spreading the
inspiring resonance created in the streets of Egypt. The obstacles to the
expansion of resonance are clear within the territory of the United States,
a space in which a powerful propaganda machine has been effective in
repelling or neutralizing resonances coming from elsewhere. This repulsion,
which was only eroded by the American multitude in the late 1960s and early
1970s, is crucial in the ongoing reproduction of the United States as the
central node of imperial machinery and can only be undermined by further
resonances produced in American streets. This is why, as Slavoj Zizek
observed in The Guardian, it is important that liberals in the US (and
across the world) stop fearing the Egyptian revolutionary spirit.*

*The shifting resonances that this essay has tried to outline are, as I hope
it is by now clearer, both patently solid and elusive in their patterns of
dispersion. Yet we are socialized to assume that passions on the streets are
sheer elusiveness devoid of materiality, and that the shock waves,
contagions, and domino effects are just metaphors to refer to something
else. Yet these words dance around the potent and bodily political
materiality of resonance, which we should be able to see clearly if we
looked at the streets of Egypt with a slightly different sensibility.”*

The Speed of Current Revolutionary Resonance after Egypt and Tunisia

Gaston Gordillo:

"The current wave of revolutionary insurrections seems to be the fastest in
history. Revolutions always come in waves, but insurgent shockwaves that
once expanded across continents over years or months are now making states
crumble, one after another, in a matter of weeks. As the revolutions in
Tunisia and Egypt are rapidly followed by widespread rebellions in Libya,
Bahrain, Yemen, and now Oman, it is clear that these are not just events but
nodes of acceleration, which shoot out high-speed resonances in all
directions and make millions of bodies fight oppression in myriad places at
the same time. This political whirlwind is a distance-dissolving machine. It
is also an evolving constellation that shifts its form and pulsation because
of the striated nature of the global terrain, one day creating moments of
joyful exhilaration on Tahrir Square and a few days later facing
unrestrained state violence in Libya. In these mutating territories, we seem
to be witnessing an epochal clash between new revolutionary velocities and
the old, increasingly eroded supremacy of the state in controlling means of
speed-creation.

In Egypt, the Mubarak regime was overwhelmed by a revolutionary resonance
that, while emanating from its node in Tahrir Square, became a high-speed
deterritorializing force that saturated the space of the nation with
millions of bodies on the streets. This insurgent deterritorialization was
fueled by a fast-paced rhizomic synergy between bodies in the streets and
instant forms of communication that outmaneuvered the state and disseminated
images with high affective impact (passionate bodies and bodies killed by
the state) that resonated with even more bodies, outpacing the state
modulation of fear through TV and radio and inspiring further action on the
streets. These are rhizomic, leaderless, affirmative velocities that follow
multiple lines of expansion independent from each other yet empowered and
made resilient by their interconnectedness (an amazing, real-time
visualization by André Panisson, shown here, illustrates the rhizomic
velocities of tweets about the Egyptian Revolution, and the spatial
interconnections they generate, during key moments of the uprising).

The state, in turn, has responded throughout the region with an arsenal of
velocities of its own: arboreal patterns of speed that respond to
centralized nodes of command, with vast means of destruction at its
disposal, and with nodes of resonance modulation with few entry points under
its tight control (the TV, radio). This mobile, powerful, but heavy
machinery has unleashed violence to prevent the formation of multitudes
producing resonance in the streets and has tried to shut down multi-entry
nodes of resonance expansion like the internet and phone systems. These are
reactive velocities, which follow the tempo and initiative of revolutionary
resonances on the streets. These are also murderous velocities, which can
indeed slow down or disrupt these resonances by killing the bodies producing
them.

In Libya, the Gaddafi regime withstood the deterritorializing charge of the
initial uprising by acting fast and with ferocity. In contrast to Egypt,
high-speed state terror in Tripoli territorialized the revolution. And the
relative weakness of an internet-savvy youth in comparison to Egypt has
limited the synergy between the unrest on the streets and the speed allowed
by rhizomic social networks. Because of this widespread violence, the Libyan
Revolution is now a territorial insurrection, solidifying its control of
cities like Tobruk and Benghazi and confronting a regime entrenched in
Tripoli. Gaddafi’s swift and violent response, in other words, created the
battlefronts favored by states, which allow them to move troops and
high-speed weapons systems outwards from the safe node of its arboreal
structure. And while it is likely that this strategy will run its course the
way it did in Egypt, the Libyan case reminds us of the power of state
velocities and, more importantly, that revolutions are decided in bodily
confrontations in actual spatial terrains.

...

The insurgent velocities flowing through North Africa and the Middle-East,
likewise, are inseparable from the speed of global networks of instant
communication. And this requires a brief overview of the nodal spatiality of
different media technologies: that is, the spatial layout of the nodes that
produce messages and the nodes that receive them. In the twentieth century,
radio and TV opened up and democratized access to nodes of message-reception
but within an arboreal structure originating in a handful, and
tightly-controlled, nodes of message production. The structure of both the
radio and TV is hierarchical and their flows are unidirectional and emanate
from a root that anchors the whole system: a handful of nodes based in a
building somewhere (TV and radio stations) and controlling the messages sent
out to millions of bodies who cannot but listen and watch. That the most
influential TV nodes are controlled by the state or corporations gives these
actors unparalleled power to modulate the reactive, fearful, inward-looking
resonances necessary to reproduce exploitative bodily constellations based
on profound inequalities.

The internet and mobile technologies, in contrast, are built on a
multi-sited and rhizomic physical infrastructure with countless nodes of
message-creation, even if the network has arboreal nodes such as Google or
Facebook (as pointed out by Ian Buchanan). The dense arborescent knots that
exist within wider rhizomic networks can be clearly seen in the picture to
the right. On a daily basis, a complex, multilayered system like this
channels billions of multi-directional flows created by millions of bodies
who can potentially reach wide audiences without the mediation of media
conglomerates. In 2010, Wikileaks brought to light with devastating clarity
why the internet, while coded by state-corporate arboreal forms at multiple
levels, does offer a liberating potential: a small group of bodies can make
classified information about imperial operations accessible, in principle,
to billions of bodies all over the planet. More importantly, they can do it
despite the fierce opposition of the imperial elites. And that Wikileaks
survived myriad cyber-attacks through the rapid creation of rhizomic
networks of solidarity (the Wikileaks mirror sites) reveals that insurgent
velocities on the web can outpace the speed of state censorship. Yet what
recent debates about the political salience of the internet overlook is that
what the web amplifies is the power to mobilize and coordinate bodies in
actual spaces through equally rhizomic forms of speed.

In the Egyptian Revolution, the synergy between the velocities generated on
these networks of instant communication and in the urban terrain was
decisive in allowing the multitude outmaneuver state violence and state
propaganda. The revolution was fought at different yet inseparable
velocities: the speed of swarms of bodies clashing with the police on the
streets and the much-faster speed of the affective resonances generated by
those clashes and amplified over the internet and TV networks not controlled
by the Egyptian state like Al Jazeera. Disembodied and projected instantly
as images, sounds, and text onto countless computers and TV screens, these
resonances became embodied again by affecting the millions of bodies
watching, listening, and reading. Not all bodies were affected the same way.
Yet millions resonated positively, and not just in Egypt.

Nikolai Grozni wrote about the affective impact that the resonance
travelling at instant speed from Egypt had on his body following the news in
Paris. “Ever since the uprising in Egypt began on Jan. 25, I have hardly
moved an inch away from the TV screen. I may be in France, but my spirit is
in Tahrir Square. I’m throwing stones. I’m breathing in tear gas. I’m
lighting up Molotov cocktails. I’m dodging bullets. I’m fighting
thick-headed policemen. I’m cursing every symbol of the regime until my
voice cracks.” Contrary to what he claims, Grozni’s body (not just his
spirit) was affectively and fully in sync with those bodies on Tahrir
Square, to the point that the spatial distance between Egypt and France
seemed to had dissolved. His body resonated, via his TV, together with those
bodies on Tahrir Square. This instantaneous affectation amplified through
global networks was the same that, a few days earlier, had inspired millions
of Egyptian bodies following the news about the uprising in Tunisia to take
to the streets to topple Mubarak.

The synergy between the streets and online social networks was in fact what
triggered the opening salvo of the Egyptian Revolution on January 25. As
analyzed by Charles Hirschkind, in the previous months social networks
became a potent resonance machine amplifying what the Egyptian media made
invisible: bodies terrorized by the state. The affective power was
epitomized by the widespread circulation in June 2010 of the photo of the
disfigured, tortured face of Khalel Said, who had been beaten up to death by
two police officers. The visceral resonance created by the image of the
corpse led to the creation of a Facebook group (We Are All Khalel Said) that
was to have a central role in the organization of the January 25
demonstrations. This image reached myriad computer screens and affected
millions of bodies, as Jon Beasley-Murray would put it, at a non-discursive,
non-ideological level. “That was the turning point,” said Heba Morayef, the
Human Rights Watch advocate in Egypt to The Guardian. “Prior to that,
demonstrations in favour of political reform struck many ordinary Egyptians
as somewhat abstract.” The tortured face of a 28-year-old man dissipated
those abstraction and made many bodies resonate out of empathy with a young
man tortured and murdered by state agents. Activists on Facebook turned that
bodily trace of terror into a deterritorialized weapon of resonance
expansion.

...

This is why the Mubarak regime tried to shut down rhizomic networks of
instant communication (internet, phone systems) transmitting these
resonances, turning off the famous “internet switch” in key buildings in
Cairo (especially the Telecom Egypt Building) and going after the bodies of
on-line activists. Khalil Said, after all, was killed because he was a
blogger exposing police corruption and Wael Ghonim was captured on the
street and detained for twelve days because of his activism on Facebook.
This is the same state tactic of reterritorialization involved in imperial
attempts to imprison the body of Julian Assange, which shows that state
velocities also seek synergy between their repressive actions on the
networks of communication and on actual bodies in the streets.

Since bodies coming together in space are the main source of revolutionary
resonance, the primary aim of the state in all cases has been to disband
those bodies and take them off the streets. The resulting clash between
arboreal and rhizomic velocities was particularly dramatic in Egypt. In
planning for the January 25 protests, activists decided to take over the
streets through patterns of high mobility and dispersion in order to avoid
being pinned down in space (“kettled”) by the police as it had happened in
previous rallies, a strategy of swarming also adopted by activists in the UK
to challenge kettles. An Egyptian activist told The Guardian, “This time we
were determined to do something different – be multi-polar, fast-moving, and
too mobile for the amin markazi [central security forces].” And they were
indeed too fast, mobile, and multi-polar for the state, stretching riot
police units thin and outmaneuvering them over several days. At one point,
an overwhelmed police gave up and withdrew from the streets of Egypt. In
this urban terrain, as The Invisible Committee would put it, the centrifugal
force of the multitude prevailed over the centripetal force of the police.
The footage of the epic, several–hour battle for the control of the Qasr El
Nile bridge on January 28, shown here, illustrates how amid clouds of
teargas these mobile swarms came together, dispersed when attacked, and
pushed the police back even in a narrow space such as a bridge. The
successful occupation of the bridge anticipated the occupation of Tahrir
Square and, a few days later, the toppling of Mubarak.

Few events embodied the Egyptian Revolution more dramatically than when on
February 11, the day Mubarak fell, a multitude surrounded the building of
the state-run TV in Cairo on the Nile, while determined masses were taking
over the rest of the city and the nation to topple the regime once and for
all. That dangerously resonant bodily saturation encroaching on the root of
the state propaganda machine was powerful enough, despite the protective
ring of soldiers, to make the bodies inside the building change the tone of
the modulation emitted from the arboreal state node. Instead of propagating
fear, the state TV began endorsing the revolutionary resonances emanating
from Tahrir Square. In Egypt, rhizomic speeds prevailed by saturation not
only in the clashes with the police but also in the modulation of resonances
in arboreal networks of mass communication.

These mobilities were politically effective not so much because of the speed
of individual bodies, which for the most part walked or ran, but because of
their multi-polar nature, which was able to saturate the urban terrain and
outpace the state. The systemic speed of this human swarm was enhanced by
its myriad pulsations, widespread spatial dispersion, and bodily density. A
gripping example are the videos (hereand here) quickly posted on YouTube
that show police vans and unmarked vehicles driving at very high speed amid
large crowds without even trying to avoid them. On the one hand, these
vehicles’ lightning speed made them run over and kill several bodies. On the
other hand,this is a desperate velocity of escape from a hostile space
controlled by resonant bodies. And while the videos were posted online to
highlight state brutality, they also signal a rapid retreat by the state
from streets saturated by the multitude.

These rhizomic speeds are constitutive of an insurrection without leaders,
hierarchical organizations, or parties (most of which had been neutralized
or decapitated by the regime). This non-hierarchical bodily form is the
multitude as multiplicity. And as Stathis Gourgouris observed, this
multitude never gestured toward any transcendent or superior authorization.
No leader, no vanguard, no revolutionary party, just resonant bodies on the
streets. The most popular slogan chanted in Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain or Libya
has been and is, “The people want to bring down the regime.” Originated in
signs and on Facebook pages in Tunisia, this chanting by myriad resonant
bodies materializes the constituent, leaderless power of the multitude." (
http://greekleftreview.wordpress.com/2011/03/18/the-speed-of-revolutionary-resonance/)

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