<br><div class="gmail_quote"><br>I'm publishing this excerpt on the 13th,<br><br>see for original essay <a href="http://greekleftreview.wordpress.com/2011/03/18/resonance-and-the-egyptian-revolution/" target="_blank">http://greekleftreview.wordpress.com/2011/03/18/resonance-and-the-egyptian-revolution/</a><br>
<br>publishable comments are very welcome,<br><br>Michel<br><br><br><p><a href="http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=15220" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to Material vs. immaterial
resonance in spreading social change" target="_blank">Material vs. immaterial resonance
in spreading social change</a></p>
<img src="http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/wp-content/uploads/avatars/Michel%20Bauwens.jpg" alt="photo of Michel Bauwens" align="left"><div>Michel
Bauwens</div>
<div>13th April 2011</div>
<br>
<div>
<blockquote><p>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.</p></blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The following is <a href="http://greekleftreview.wordpress.com/2011/03/18/resonance-and-the-egyptian-revolution/" target="_blank">excerpted</a>
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.</p>
<p><b>Gaston Gordillo: </b></p>
<p><i>�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.</i></p>
<p><i>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.</i></p>
<p><i>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.</i></p>
<p><i>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.</i></p>
<p><i>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.�</i></p>
<p><span></span></p>
</div><br><h2><span class="mw-headline" id="The_Speed_of_Current_Revolutionary_Resonance_after_Egypt_and_Tunisia">The
Speed of Current Revolutionary Resonance after Egypt and Tunisia</span></h2>
<p>Gaston Gordillo:
</p><p>"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.
</p><p>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 Andr� 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).
</p><p>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.
</p><p>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.
</p><p>...
</p><p>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.
</p><p>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.
</p><p>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.
</p><p>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.
</p><p>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.
</p><p>...
</p><p>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.
</p><p>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.
</p><p>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.
</p><p>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.
</p><p>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."
(<a href="http://greekleftreview.wordpress.com/2011/03/18/the-speed-of-revolutionary-resonance/" class="external free">http://greekleftreview.wordpress.com/2011/03/18/the-speed-of-revolutionary-resonance/</a>)
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