LISA WEDEEN: I really
appreciate being here,
and everyone who has
hosted me, in fact.
Can you hear me, everybody?
OK.
Great.
I'll just put this up here.
Nominally democratic
nation states
seem to be moving towards
the kind of polities
normally associated
with authoritarianism.
And this transformation may be
especially visible in relation
to fake news.
Doctored images, rumors,
conspiracy theories,
and the divisive testimony
of eyewitnesses, staples
of autocratic
conditions adumbrate
what is fast-becoming a
generalized global atmospherics
of doubt.
Now, in the war-torn
dictatorship of Syria
these dynamics appear
in bold relief.
We see the media's demand for
sensational content driving
regime supporters and
well-meaning citizen
journalists alike to
massage, if not fabricate,
evidence including
video footage, leading
both Syrian citizens
and global observers
to doubt the validity
of news reports
and the claims of
fact-finding missions.
These conditions
have tended to enable
the frayed Syrian state's
counter-insurgency campaign,
which works not so much
by maintaining credibility
in itself as by casting
doubt on all reporting,
thereby seizing advantage in
an over-saturated, high-speed
information environment.
So the argument I'm going
to make today is threefold.
First-- and this is a lesson
Syrian citizen activists
learned at tremendous cost.
Too much information
may actually
generate the very
uncertainty that putting it
into circulation is
intended to allay.
Over the course of the uprising
the Syrian state's ideological
apparatus, no longer able to
brand the regime as a kinder,
gentler version of autocracy,
learned how to exploit
conditions of fear and
insecurity to counter human
rights activists and citizen
journalists' attempts
to document the truth.
By disseminating its own
claims and counterclaims
and by taking advantage of an
inexperienced, conflict-ridden
opposition, the
regime has not always
been able to establish its
own authority over the facts,
but it has been successful
in raising doubts
about the nature of
evidence and the credibility
of oppositional narratives.
Second, information overload and
the potential for uncertainty
it generates, and scholars
of American politics
have long pointed out, may
induce people to seek out
opinions reaffirming their own.
And this is something
I've been talking
to a number of colleagues
about here as well.
This tendency
towards balkanization
can lead to polarization.
Internet users, to take
an oft-used example,
tend to gravitate
towards sites that
function like echo chambers
where people relish
the sound of the stories they're
telling themselves anyway,
and the stories
they tell themselves
about the stories
they tell themselves.
This gravitation
toward a comfort zone,
in which believing
is seeing or hearing,
may have little to
do with actual facts,
even on the assumption that the
latter are ultimately knowable.
The atmosphere of
uncertainty cultivated
by an excess of
information can create
what I call siloed publics,
where debates take place
within narrow communities
of argument that
allow interlocutor's to take
pleasure in encountering views
that confirm their own.
Third, the very
condition of uncertainty
provides some with
an alibi to avoid
committing to judgment at all.
And I think this is
the most novel argument
I'm going to make today.
In conditions of
information over-saturation,
and perhaps especially when
feelings of present danger
extrude a surplus remainder
of threat potential--
to borrow Brian
Massumi's formulation--
uncertainty can provide a
potent-seeming rationale
for inaction in a context
where action might otherwise
have seemed morally incumbent.
In the current context of
massively-intensified violence,
reasons for hunkering down
and staying safe overwhelm.
But in the first
years of the uprising
this recourse to
non-judgment mattered.
A self-satisfied ambivalence
was nurtured by an atmosphere
of doubt that justified
political paralysis
and withdrawal--
particularly among the
professional managerial elite,
including cultural producers.
Their silence helped the
regime navigate the changing
circumstances of its rule.
So in contrast to stereotypes
of autocratic rule
in which it's the withholding
of information that
enables domination,
the Syrian case
lays bare a set of mechanisms by
which an excess of information
can be exploited
for political gain.
But the Syrian example
does more than that.
It invites renewed
exploration of
the general,
consistently-fragile relation
between truth and politics
while exposing the specific ways
in which the specter
of imminent danger
works when dangers have,
in fact, become immediate.
So by way of getting at these
dimensions of uncertainty
in conditions of what I call
"high-speed eventfulness,"
I want to unpack two
exemplary moments.
The first is the controversy
surrounding the mystery
of who might have murdered
a well-known singer
and left his mutilated body
on a riverbank as a warning
to activists, if indeed
he was killed at all.
The story marks
an important turn
in the uprising when
it became apparent
that activist expressions
of cross-country solidarity,
outrage, and creativity
could lead to overreach.
In other words, to exaggeration,
a rush to judgment,
a conflation of a clear
political position with murky
facts.
The second event is the
seemingly-incommensurable
example of the chemical weapons
attack in eastern al-Ghouta
in August of 2013, a devastating
event the evidence of which
has pointed in
different directions,
animated a global community
of politicians, activists,
and scientists, and in terms of
ultimate accountability served
to polarize those with
already-firm positions
even while regenerating
uncertainty for others
less sure of their commitments.
Bringing these two
examples together
allows us to see, in events
local and world-historical,
the production and reproduction
of an epistemic and affective
insecurity whose speculative
practices conduced
to favor the beleaguered
Assad regime's
counterinsurgency project,
or at least its survival.
Now, throughout the
talk is informed
by the thinking of Hannah
Arendt and Ludwig Wittgenstein,
and in the closing pages
I put Syrian artists whose
current work unsettles
the conventions
of documentary representation
into conversation
with these two
theorists, drawing out
mutual points of relevance
for understanding
of politics and
the local Syrian,
as well as more global--
including Indian-- present.
So in the early days of the
uprising and anti-Assad song
emerged that became a political
phenomenon in its own right,
recorded on cellphones,
uploaded on YouTube,
with simple rhyming
lyrics and a catchy rhythm
in joining Syria's president
to step down and leave
the country.
The song had a catchy chorus,
"go on, leave, oh Bashar.
[ARABIC],, Bashar," which
came at the beginning and end
of stanzas invoking
familiar conditions
of first-family corruption.
The song also responded to
current and changing events,
reproduced slogans from
various parts of the country,
conjured up historical
references of regime betrayal,
and offered rejoinders to
the president's own speeches.
Exhilarating in its irreverence,
with crude insults leveled
directly at Bashar, his
notoriously brutal brother,
and his venal cousin, the song
was at once angry and joyful,
challenging the
self-evidence of tyranny
while paying homage
to lives lost.
Performing a new-found
sense of solidarity,
the lyrics invited
popular participation
which came in the form of
extemporaneous add-ons,
expanding and adapting
the song, giving license
to each singer,
author, and listener
to act in concert
in the acoustics
of revolutionary change.
Avoiding the
abstractions of earlier,
more elitist political
songs, the added stanzas
not only perpetuated
defiance, but worked
to air publicly what had
hitherto been predominantly
private grievances.
The proliferating stanzas
also beckoned diverse areas
of the country to
furnish new details,
alerting others to
specific injustices,
and making them
common knowledge.
The repeated recourse
to the straightforward
imperative, "go on, leave,"
and to the proper nouns
of failed leadership,
moreover, summoned
into being cross-class
identifications,
a soundscape of
national solidarity,
untethered to the regime's
official discourses,
giving voice literally to the
protesting crowds potentiality.
Now, at first it
was widely thought
that the singer of the song had
been one Ibrahim Qashoush who
worked at a fire station
in Hama and supposedly
occasionally performed with
another local, Abdul Rahman
Forhood or, as he was more
popularly known, Rahmani.
And, I should say, Hama, is the
fourth largest city in Syria.
And this is a picture of
what the largest uprising,
actually-- crowds,
in uprising terms--
proportionately, anyway.
On July 4, 2011, Qashoush
reportedly turned up dead,
his corpse left on the riverbank
with its larynx carved out.
Now, many understandably
interpreted the murder
as an act of crude symbolism,
presumed at the time
to be the work of regime
thugs bent on punishing
the subversive singer in the
most graphic way possible.
In these assumptions
people were probably wrong.
First of all the
singer of the song
was likely Rahmani,
not Qashoush.
And Qashoush, far from
being a subversive singer,
may have been a
police informant.
Many offered homage to the
departed, if wrongly honored,
Qashoush.
Yet, in likely being
mistaken about who Qashoush
was and the role he played
in the events in question,
many on Facebook
posts and creatives
songs and videos
made after his death
ended up paying tribute to a
possible informant whose body
it may or may not
have been that was
found missing its larynx
by the side of the river.
Moreover, when
Qashoush turned out
to be suspected of
traitorous complicity,
whether responsibility
for the mutilated corpse
lay with regime thugs
became doubtful--
at least to some.
Stories then quickly emerged
about vigilante activists
having executed Qashoush,
or someone else,
for collaboration.
Finally, as if scripted,
sightings of Qashoush surfaced
in 2013 accompanied by articles
and Facebook photos attesting
to his continued
well-being in exile,
culminating in a GQ article--
Gentlemen's Quarterly--
article of 2016.
This piece reported a few
days later in Arabic--
so, first in English,
then in Arabic--
claimed to break the story
that the real singer was not
Qashoush but Rahmani.
The latter was alive
and well in Spain.
But Qashoush had, in fact,
died by the Orontes River--
a guard, not a fireman
at the station,
who did not sing revolutionary
songs or, for that matter,
any songs at all.
The article discusses
the circulation
of rumors, sins of omission
by both Rahmani and opposition
outlets, an effort to report
the truth by the late Anthony
Shadid of the New York
Times and, importantly,
the failure of
that story to stick
in an avalanche of
new media propaganda.
The Qashoush story
thus becomes exemplary
of a conflict in which
truth claims, rather
than accumulating a collection
of established facts,
recall something
more like a shifting
kaleidoscope of
possible alternatives,
registering both the
uprisings complexities
and the multiple efforts
to paper over them.
The regime not only helped
produce these conditions
of uncertainty by borrowing
professional journalists
from entering the country but
also repeatedly capitalized
on them, seizing on
moments of exaggeration
and misrepresentation to
discredit opposition positions,
polarize communities
of argument,
and disorient worlds in
which truth claims might
lead to action.
The regimes advantage
lay not in its exercise
of strict control over, say,
an ideological state apparatus,
but in not having
to be believable
in order to be powerful.
From the inception
of the uprising
the burden of
obligation was always
on activists who had
the moral high ground
in calling for an end
to tyranny, dignity,
and a civil state.
Citizen journalists
had the onus of being
the symbolic corrective
to autocratic dissembling.
Now, the philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein teaches us,
quote, "that the truth of
certain empirical propositions
belongs to our
frames of reference."
Continuing, quote,
"when we first
begin to believe
anything, what we believe
is not a single
proposition, it's
a whole system of propositions.
It's not a single
axiom that strikes
me as obvious it's a system
in which consequences
and premises give one another
mutual support," unquote.
What we're seeing in Syria,
and arguably elsewhere-- true--
is the collapse of these
frames of reference,
and with it the annihilation of
truth in Wittgenstein's sense.
Not the truth of philosophical
a priori principles,
but the political truth
of empirical propositions,
by which I mean what
counts for purposes
of politics and political
discourse as matters of fact.
Wittgenstein's
insistence that what
allows our beliefs
to make sense is
the relational system in
which they are embedded,
points to the
difficulty involved
in judging evidence
or ascertaining
the nature of truth
claims circulating
in Syria's so-called "media
wars" since the uprising
began in March 2011.
In this respect, the
story of Qashoush
is more than an isolated
incident of mistaken identity.
The mystery about who might have
murdered the well-known singer,
or indeed whether he
was killed at all,
his contradictory deployment
as a symbol of oppositional
courage and regime brutality and
then later of regime cooptation
and the opposition's revenge--
all this is but a single
example contributing
to an entire economy
of uncertainty, which
works to dilute moral outrage
among addresses who otherwise
might be available for
political activation and call
standards of political judgment
to come unmoored from the very
conceptual systems in
which they're situated.
In this context the curious
lack of followup articles
and interest by opposition
activists so invested
in the song and in the purported
singer's purported murder,
could be read ungenerously
as indicating a cover-up
of journalistic failings.
Or it could be seen as
symptomatic of reading
and writing habits
cultivated in conditions
of high-speed eventfulness
and information overload.
But this silence,
relative to the commotion
caused by the initial discovery
of a corpse by the river,
also speaks to a collective
disappointment born out
of the uprising's ongoing-ness,
the forms of depredation that
have squelched
revolutionary exhilaration
and make people tired.
The song had originally
beckoned ordinary people
to take part in
something momentous,
to participate in events
charged with the embrace
of political responsibility,
to sing what they mean.
The revolutionary
idea of Qashoush
had already been assassinated,
as one activist put it,
taken down not only in
conditions of uncertainty
but, I want to argue,
in part by them.
The second example is the
chemical weapons attack.
On the night of August
21, 2013, videos
began to circulate online of
civilians gasping, convulsing,
and foaming at the mouth
in the eastern Damascus
suburb of al-Ghouta,
showing every sign
of having been poisoned.
Doctors Without Borders
confirmed three days later
that staff had observed
at least 355 deaths
from neurotoxic symptoms
at three medical centers
in the neighborhood.
Regime forces agreed to a
ceasefire in the Ghouta area
on August 25 to allow
UN inspectors to conduct
on-site investigations,
which took place
during a series of
five-hour cease-fire periods
from August 26 to 29.
It was during this time that
Secretary of State John Kerry
issued a statement
appearing to commit
the US to some form of
direct military intervention
against the regime, which
in Kerry's narrative
was known to have been the
perpetrator of the atrocity.
Well before the UN
investigation was concluded
he described his certainty about
the regime's responsibility as,
quote, "grounded in facts
but informed by conscience
and guided by common
sense," unquote.
He also alluded to
secret information
that would settle the
matter once and for all,
and which he promised would
be revealed in due time.
Four different
kinds of warrants.
The factual, the moral,
the census communus,
and the classified converge
to produce what Kerry claimed
was undeniable evidence.
But as time wore
on, Kerry's failure
to produce decisive proof
generated the very conditions
of deniability that his
assertions of incontrovertibly
sought to discount.
Now, despite Kerry's
initial insistence
on certainty, or perhaps in
some instances because of it,
what was supposedly
"already clear
to the world," in his terms,
namely that the Syrian regime
was behind the attack,
became increasingly
difficult to discern amid
the inundation of claims
and counterclaims prompted
by the Secretary of State's
statement.
And the more information
that emerged,
the more uncertainty
it seemed to generate,
both in and outside
of Syria-- and I
should say that this
project is the product of 24
years of fieldwork in
Syria back and forth,
but I was there when
the uprising took place
so I had connections both
in and outside of Syria.
Some reports basically
confirmed Kerry's allegations
using eyewitness
accounts, relying
on the circulation of
information and images
on social media
sites, and producing
a plethora of articles
translated from Arabic
to English and vise versa.
But as early as a week
later, a counter-narrative
began to emerge, one that
placed ultimate accountability
with the opposition.
Although these early
dissenting reports
appeared to lack the
authority or credibility,
they nevertheless
became increasingly
susceptible to uptake.
Less a way of anchoring
an alternative certainty
than questioning the empirical
propositions on which existing
frames of reference relied.
In chat rooms and
online publications
rumors began circulating about
the Saudi intelligence chief
having supplied the weapons to
a Saudi militant, allegations
that instantly generated their
own confusions, including
whether a named author
in one prominent report
had been involved in
writing the piece at all.
The story of the attack
took a technical turn
with a publication
by the New York Times
of an article that drew upon
a study by Richard M. Lloyd,
an expert in warhead design, and
Theodore A. Postol, a professor
of physics at MIT.
The study promised a
scientific resolution
of the accountability
question by addressing
a previously un-noted problem at
the heart of the investigation.
How could what were
initially thought
to be rockets with
minimal carrying capacity
deliver enough gas to
kill so many people
over such a large area?
Lloyd and Postol subsequently
published a second report
casting doubt on UN
and US calculations
of rocket trajectories,
further generating
skepticism about the Syrian
regime's responsibility
for the attack.
Memorable among the
participants in what
became a high-stakes bout
of discursive jostling
with Western intervention and
presumably regime survival
hanging in the balance
with Syrian presidential
spokesperson Buthaina Shaaban.
In a statement given
as early as September,
Shaaban held the opposition
responsible for the attack.
And I quote, "they
kidnapped children and men
from the villages of
[? Latakia," ?] she reported,
"and they brought them
here, put them in one place,
and used chemical
weapons against them.
That's the story that the
villagers in these villages
know."
Unquote.
In this narrative
the victims were,
by implication, members
of the Alawi sect
from areas supportive of the
regime and not supporters
of the opposition.
Despite the outrageousness
of this account,
Shaaban thereby
accounted for what
would seem to be the central
problem the regime had
in telling its
version of the story,
namely why opposition
forces would victimize
civilians loyal to them.
Especially interesting,
however, is
how Shaaban, who
had just offered
as definitive
evidence for her claim
that the villagers in
these villages know,
concluded, "but why don't you
leave it to the UN commission
to investigate, to analyze?"
Or again, quote, "Western
countries are always
very scientific.
They go by the law.
They investigate.
Why, when it comes to something
concerning our countries
they say it is believed that the
Syrian government used chemical
weapons?
Why don't you wait for the
specific scientific results
of a neutral UN committee
that is investigating?"
Unquote.
The incoherence of her appeals
and the sheer outlandishness
of the story nevertheless
produced its own rejoinders,
including reports noting
that the regime's kidnapping
scenario would require
a five-hour trip
by a large caravan
of buses passing
unhindered and unnoticed
through numerous checkpoints.
In other words, the story
could be simultaneously
dismissed and addressed.
Efforts which themselves
registered anxieties
about the work
uncertainty can do
in turning ethical,
political judgments
into confusion with implications
for global actors as well.
One more aspect of Shaaban's
preposterous statement
is worthy of note, namely
her appeal to science.
And here, too,
science worked less
to establish truth or falsify
fallacious claims than
to convert what might have
been consensual knowledge
into political opinion,
including the view that we
can never know what happened.
The scientific
democratization of expression,
personified by
opposition-identified and very
impressive amateur
analysts who argue
that only the regime could
have launched such an attack
could not override the views of
experts like Lloyd and Postol.
But nor could these
MIT-authorized scientists
do more than
produce speculations
in a world saturated
by claims already
at work, resubstantiating
communities of agreement
in place.
These were not conspiracy
theories of the caliber
that Shaaban and others
brought to the fore,
but their very existence
as disagreements
made it possible for those
whose minds had been made up
in advance of circulating
evidence, which was itself
confusing to stay that way.
US President Barack
Obama's prime-time speech
on September 10, and Russian
president Vladimir Putin's New
York Times op-ed the following
day, looked like a throwback
to a Cold War politics in which
political posturing trumped
all curiosity.
Facts, already
hard to adjudicate,
became pared down to an
acknowledgment that something
bad had happened--
a chemical attack--
while attributions
of responsibility
broke down on classical
political fault lines,
with Obama assuring the American
people that the regime was
behind the attack,
and Putin recommending
caution by placing
blame on the opposition.
The UN's own authority
as a fact-finding team
and its careful
language regarding
what it could and
could not ascertain
was undercut by its
own past mistakes.
Its reputation as a partial
international body rather than
an objective arbiter
of truth claims
produced doubts about
its conclusions,
as tenuous and as
carefully-worded as they were.
The appearance of an
investigative report
by the well-known journalist
Seymour Hersh in the London
review of books,
entitled "Who's Sarin,"
raised additional doubts.
In counteracting American
administration claims,
Hersh contended that Obama
failed to acknowledge something
known to the US
intelligence community,
"that the Syrian army is not
the only party in the country's
civil war with access to
sarin, the nerve agent
that a UN study concluded
without assessing
responsibility, had been
used in the rocket attack."
That's a quote from Hersh.
Faulting various studies
circulating online
and through conventional
news channels,
Hersh maintained
that it was known
that Jabhat al-Nusra, the
al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria,
also had access to the necessary
ingredients to make sarin
and had demonstrated
interest in using it.
In a follow up piece
published in April 2014
Hersh went further, suggesting
that Turkey was in fact
behind the Ghouta attacks.
These claims then showed up--
so note the circulation--
in Arabic language media,
becoming the majority of what
a reader still got in 2017
if she googled in Arabic "who
is responsible for the Ghouta
chemical weapons attack,"
both with an IP
address in Chicago
and an IP address in Beirut.
This still-popular question
and so many others like it,
"who was responsible for
the chemical weapons attack"
in Arabic, is made to order
for conspiracy theories.
Now, conspiracy
theorists view what
might be regarded as disparate
happenings as connected,
products of an overwhelming
logic or intentional force
whose interests are ultimately
served by and organized
through another's
victimization or ruin.
And they're not always wrong.
Hersh's investigation was
potent because it was plausible.
Structuring arguments in
terms of what some scholars
have termed pejoratively
a "paranoid functionalism"
that posits effects as
the product of purpose,
the question "who was
responsible for the chemical
weapons attack" could be
harnessed to a familiar regime
narrative of national
vulnerability and threat
in which the
national became once
again coterminous
with regime-oriented.
Now, questions of who
is behind a specific act
need not reduce to a
conspiratorial narrative,
of course.
For others the very
positing of such a question
conveyed a sense of
collaborative unknowability
in which doubt could
modulate affective registers
like outrage and disgust along
with the political judgments
that might ensue.
Phrasing like the
following was typical.
Now, the regime and
opposition groups
could plausibly deny
responsibility, at least
for those who were
open to skepticism.
It was not simply that
camps were polarized
with staunch
loyalists and people
in the ambivalent gray area
following regime-oriented sites
and tracking investigative
reports such as Hersh's
while official
opposition sources called
for US intervention
because the regime clearly
had crossed Obama's red line.
For as young people
identified with the uprising
became increasingly
disillusioned by both regime
and opposition, as the
impossibility of adjudicating
truth claims came to apply to
increasingly continuous acts
of unspeakable
cruelty, some in exile
sought to redefine and
radicalize the terms of debate,
conceding to a
situation in which facts
were especially vulnerable
and everyone might lie.
And so the final part of
my talk, shorter part,
from impasse to bypass,
making openings.
The loss in Syria of what
Arendt calls a "common world"
is dramatized by the relentless,
soul-crushing violence,
but also by an atmospherics of
doubt whose logic has dictated
a familiar recourse to forms
of certainty that polarized
some populations around
what they think they already
know while also providing
others with grounds
for disengagement and
disavowal in that they
know that they do not know.
These situations complicate
profoundly the possibilities
for political judgment.
We see in Syria today
the constellation
of mutually-related
rules, propositions,
experienced techniques of
reasoning everyday practices
and mental images
through which we
are trained to judge,
in Wittgenstein's sense,
having been undermined by a
world in which information
is paradoxically both
incomplete and overwhelming.
A situation in different
form which arguably
also characterized the
recent United States election
and ongoing scandals associated
with the Trump regime.
And I'd be very interested
to hear about parallels
and also contrasts
with what's going on
in the Indian situation.
As Hannah Arendt acknowledges
in her rich essay,
"Truth and Politics," quote,
"the politically most-relevant
truths are factual," unquote.
And they are, as political
theorist Lind Zerilli
underscores, also the most
imperiled, the most vulnerable
to human mendacity
and to the pursuit
of narrow political interests.
Politics is a domain of
pleural contingent opinions,
argues Arendt, where the
understanding of freedom
is rooted in an appreciation of
the human capacity for speech
and other kinds of action.
Wittgenstein shows
us how such a world
is made up of reference frames
that are subject to collapse.
Some Syrian filmmakers
share this appreciation,
showing us the depth
of politics that
occurs when a common
world in formation
has been crushed by
dissimulation and violence.
So I want to show you one
clip of the anonymous film
collective, Abounaddara,
whose work over the course
of the uprising suggests that
when journalistic conventions
are challenged something
creative and out
of the ordinary might
happen in their stead.
For the most part the
collective's short films
hint at prospects that
are left vaguely defined,
gesturing towards
experience of self-assertion
as well as of self-dissolution
and unpredictability.
They offer accounts of
events or situations
in which there may be room
for reclaiming judgment
as a political activity.
So this clip that
I'm going to show you
is number three of a
four-part series that
chronicles the evolution
of a soldier fighting
for the opposition.
His decomposition in
the face of war time's
gruesome intensities and
his attempts in part four
to recalibrate his
relation to the world.
So part one establishes the
soldier's first realization
that he could kill.
He was scared but he
felt he had no choice.
That refrain, that
he had no choice,
provides the central
animating theme
of the first
segment, a testimony
to judgment-suspension
or at least compromise,
to the simultaneous recognition
and evasion of responsibility,
to an emotional catastrophe that
leaves the social fabric torn.
He had to protect his family.
He knows it's wrong to
kill, but he had no choice.
He fears God, but
he had no choice.
The regime left
him with no choice.
Part two describes his
experience of entering a home
and finding children who had
been lying dead for some days.
There's no obvious
cause of death.
The soldiers were looking
for food and water
and just happened
into the dwelling.
Describing a search
through the house,
he bears witness to a
mother's love for the son
she holds against
her, both dead.
He tells us that the buildings
behind the house where
he and others have been fighting
were besieged by the Assad
regime's army,
and he cries as he
recalls the terrifying
experience, part
of a relentless nightmare in
Syria's central city of Homs,
the third largest city.
It is a war that is both
disorienting and suffocating.
The remaining inhabitants
of that embattled area
were, quote, "as afraid of us as
they were of the Syrian army,"
he admits, wiping tears from
his eyes and noting, quote,
"how truly frightening it was."
Residents could not open a
window for fear of being shot.
There was literally
and figuratively,
quote, "no breathing
allowed," unquote.
And these two segments
lead us to part three,
in which the soldier has become
self-consciously dissociated
or split.
The word [ARABIC] some
means both in Arabic.
There is no psychoanalytic
distinction.
So dissociated or
split from himself.
Here the soldier
recounts killing someone
by cutting the person's throat.
In the soldier's
retrospective lamentation
he notes that, while his
body slaughtered the victim
his soul was crying.
Now he can scarcely
imagine having done it.
No level of
resentment or revenge
can make that, quote,
"legitimately right."
[BEGIN VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
[END VIDEO PLAYBACK]
The experience of war has
caused the protagonists
to cease to
recognize themselves.
Theirs was initially an ethical
war, a war against tyranny.
But in experiencing it their
hopes have been mangled.
They've become
other to themselves,
having been forced to make
choices their real selves would
never have made.
The promising possibilities
of a common world put forward
in early days of the
uprising have by now
been crushed by violence
and all of its accompanying
distortions.
The broken soldier may also be
reclaiming the human capacity
for politics by
turning to speech
and repudiating violence.
In a situation reminiscent
of Isak Dinesen's memorable
observation repeated
by Hannah Arendt--
with [INAUDIBLE]
reminded me of today--
quote, "all sorrows
can be born if you
can put them into a story
or tell a story about them."
Unquote.
And this quartet seems to
be the soldier's attempt
at restoration, at
making himself whole once
again in a context
in which, quote,
"consequences and
premises have ceased
to give one another
mutual support," unquote,
as Wittgenstein writes.
In such a context
what is to be done?
Abounaddara offers no
answers, but the films
bypass the impasse posed
by fake news and subsidiary
forms of insecurity,
sidestepping
the evidentiary
logic of news stories
and conventional
documentary genres
by occasioning new
possibilities for reflection
in a context in which the
usual grounds for judgment
have been undermined.
In distinction to official
opposition and regime
proponents alike, with their
polarizing answers always
at the ready, the collective
embraces the ambiguity
of the situation,
extending even to questions
of what the national
community might look like
given what that war has done
to what could conceivably
be called Syria.
In doing so Abounaddara
gives up on a certain kind
of knowing without
giving up on judgment
and political
intervention as such.
Whereas both the regime and
the multiple oppositions
demand that people take
sides for or against,
Abounaddara's
commitment to complexity
is not the same as the
frame-breaking uncertainty
that provides an alibi
for non-judgment.
On the contrary, the
recognition of the fragility
of subject positions
allows viewers
to embrace a temporal lag
between perception and action
without giving up on the latter.
In other words, to be humble and
befuddled without being abject.
An invitation to
revitalize judgment
with the full, albeit
paradoxical knowledge,
that nothing is
ever fully known.
So to conclude, what I
call the "temporality
of high-speed eventfulness," or
the sheer velocity with which
information is transmitted
and apprehended
in the internet age,
occasions the forms
of discursive over-saturation
this presentation
has described.
The unceasing whirl
of over-information
makes it easy for people to move
on to something new the instant
a favored narrative fails.
These new conditions pose
conundrums for judgment,
showing how, in the
Syrian regime's case,
media manipulations a shorthand
here for both direct propaganda
efforts and inability to
take advantage of matters
put into circulation
by others, interfered
with activist capacity
to maintain or develop
a revolutionary narrative.
This means that stories
are either easily knit
into the narrative
fabric of stories
people are already
telling themselves,
or that political
exuberance is flattened.
In the latter case, ending
up like Abounaddara's
unknown soldier, mired
in doubt and disillusion.
An atmospherics of
doubt is part of what
Slavoj Zizek, the philosopher,
calls "systemic violence"
which, in the Syrian
case, operates in cahoots
with other forms of
overt regime brutality
to extinguish or
dampen what began
as incendiary
political excitement.
In this context,
artistic efforts
such as Abounaddara's
are like embers,
a trace of light and heat,
a past bearing invitation
to begin anew.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
