Nancy Mauro-Flude on Mon, 21 Mar 2022 19:48:45 +0100 (CET)


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Re: <nettime> Beyond the tactical in media - new temporal scales for the war in Ukraine 

Hi
Adding to the convergence of multiple perspectives in regard to Eric's point on "...how to engage these conditions and dynamics – right now...a conscious and critical articulation of this problem can do is help us formulate better possible engagements that transcend this temporal logic of immediacy."
I suggest 'Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth' (2021) Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman build upon the tenets of tactical media to provide a current episteme for how a "process of investigation might itself establish a social contract that includes all the participants in this assemblage of truth production and dissemination...". Especially when "the communicative situation resembles a civil war as much as a public sphere, the production of facts can catalyse social production: the production of the most precious meta-political condition, that the reality around them in which they are formed. …Facts are indeed produced in conjunction with powers, those of capacities of sensing and sense-making, but also of politics."
In the light of these considered conversations on <nettime>considering the new temporal scales for the war in Ukraine I was driven to reread the book and made these issues even more salient.
Also thanks for that link Thomas - it's really helpful right now for those of us in the never nevers (many with kinship ties to Ukraine) are listening to broadcast feeds as we awaken in the midnight hour on tenterhooks. 

Warmly from the far south of the planet.

Nancy


On 21/03/2022 23:50, Thomas Keenan wrote:

https://ukraine.bellingcat.com/

On Mon, Mar 21, 2022 at 8:18 AM Eric Kluitenberg <epk@xs4all.nl>
wrote:


dear nettimers,

Like the conflict in Ukraine, the recent flood of commentaries and
analyses on nettime (and elsewhere) has been overwhelming, and given
this it seemed so far difficult to add anything more astute and
articulate than what has passed here so far. Speaking as I assume
for many, first of all my gratitude for seeing a discussion here,
which seems to lack sufficient depth elsewhere. Obviously I have
very little to add to these analyses.

One thing that very much annoyed me in the early stages of the
invasion, though, was a superficial resurgence of the notion of
‘tactical media’ in various online and offline exclamations.
Predictable in a situation of immediate crisis, and understandable
as an innate impulse, but it felt out of place. My own feeling about
that at the time (having dealt with the notion of tactical media
quite a bit over the years, although I did not coin the term nor
named the associated practices as such) tactical media seemed to
have failed or missed its place and time of action at the very
moment the rockets started to hit targets and tanks rolled over the
Ukrainian border - or rather when an 8 year regional war escalated
into a full scale military invasion and nation-wide war in the
country.

Intuitively it felt tactical media had a role to play exactly to
prevent such armed conflict, prevent the legitimisation of large
scale (military) violence as a means of politics, and enhance the
kind of checks and balances, distribution of powers, establish
counter-hegemonial mechanisms, support open governance structures
all aimed at avoiding (the possibility of) these forms of armed
conflict. Thus, when this violent conflict then nonetheless erupted
it seemed to me that tactical media had failed (along with all other
counter-hegemonial practices), and that it had little if no role to
play in the immediacy of the conflict.

In private conversation David Garcia, however, reminded me of the
fact that my idea of tactical media here was too narrow in this take
on current events. Too narrow in the sense of being too narrowly
aligned with an emancipatory ideal of progressive politics  - one
could phrase it more Latourian as too narrowly focussed on the
‘progressive composition of the good common world’ (his
political ideal from The Politics of Nature onwards, which includes
of course non-human politics, but is certainly contradicted by this
regressive conduct of war). Instead we would need to acknowledge
that tactical media has been very much alive and productive, but in
the service of reactionary and to some extent hyper-violent politics
and regressive forms of popular mobilisation. In which we also
include the strategic operationalisation of the tactical in media by
the well-known Russian troll-farms and other strategic initiatives,
as much as populist political movements in Europe, the US and
elsewhere - that whole story is well known.

So then what has failed is a ‘progressive’ counter-hegemonial
understanding of tactical media. The qualities of the nomadic, the
temporary interventions, the tactical operations on the terrains of
strategic power, the ephemeral character of tactical media, hit and
run tactics, quick and dirty interventions and aesthetics – all
this seems powerless and utterly impotent vis-a-vis the violent
brutality of this unleashed military machine.

Thinking this through a bit further, it seemed that the temporal
scale or scales of tactical media is where one of its main problems
lie and where the ‘classic’ notion of tactical media seems to
fail current conditions. A better way to think this is first to
assume that it is both too late and too early for tactical media to
play any significant role in the Ukraine conflict. Of course the
witness reports keep flowing from countless citizen’s camera’s,
and this is highly significant. But as Felix Stalder already
concluded many years ago  - a huge number of people have become
involved in something which could be labeled as tactical media, but
those people would overwhelmingly not think of tactical media as
they are doing it. The vast majority will simply never have heard
the term and thus be unaware of any of its previous experiences and
the critical discussions they evoked.

It is, however, not besides the point to think this through and try
to connect our current experiences to those made earlier. Not just
to understand the current conditions and dynamics (which the
discussions on nettime f.i. do brilliantly) but especially to
consider how to engage these conditions and dynamics – right now.
The temporality of tactical media, its focus on the immediacy of the
event, its inextricable origins within the event in question
(’tactical media never report, they always participate’ - Lovink
& Garcia - The ABC of Tactical Media, 1997), is simultaneously its
greatest strength and its greatest limitation. What a conscious and
critical articulation of this problem can do is help us formulate
better possible engagements that transcend this temporal logic of
immediacy.

Beyond the tactical in media / beyond the temporal logic of
immediacy

So then the main question I’m trying to articulate (and this is of
course entirely preliminary and sketchy / up for debate) is at what
temporal scale the tactical practices of media as identified by the
idea of tactical media can become meaningful for a
counter-hegemonial politics and a productive engagement of
atrocities that are being perpetrated in Ukraine right now?

Perhaps the most obvious and immediate thing to recognise is that
what Ukraine is going through right now is not that dissimilar to
other recent experiences in other countries that have faced large
scale military and violent conflict, and / or still do while this
conflict is raging on. For me the most immediate parallel that comes
to mind is the hyper-violent conflict in Syria, which is far from
over or settled. Also in Syria we see many of the same actors active
in the space of that war, various Nato countries, the Russian army,
proxy fighters (Hezbollah and others), etc etc.. The role of
tactical media in the Syrian conflict has at first been mostly
limited to the media operations of islamic state, which produced
some of the most effective tactical media operations in decades -
drawing in supporters from many other regions into the hyper-violent
conflict there.

Also in Syria citizen reports have played an important role in
getting information in and out of the conflict areas, and more
organised media initiatives approximated similar formats to what we
saw in the 1990s during the break up of Yugoslavia - I’m thinking
here f.i. about the Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently project and
others. However, as important as all these initiatives may be the
project to come out of that horrible conflict that seems to offer
something of a different temporal scope and with that a different
efficacy as a counter-hegemonial force might be the Syrian Archive (
https://syrianarchive.org/en/about ).

The archive exists to collect citizen reports and other forms of
‘forensic’ evidence to build material proof for future legal
proceedings against the perpetrators of the worst atrocities in
Syria. There is a long and critical debate to be had about how the
project is structured, its funding structure, embeddedness in
international NGO networks, its attachment to the notion of ‘human
rights’ which gives it the possibility to connect to transnational
legal frameworks, etc etc For the moment this is not the dimension
of the project I want to focus on. What I find interesting and
possibly productive also for the conflict in Ukraine is the expanded
temporal scope of the Syrian Archive.

During our 2017 Tactical Media Connections event in Amsterdam we
spoke to two of the originators of the Syrian Archive and they
presented the project at Eye Film Museum at the time - see:
http://www.tacticalmediafiles.net/events/39710 and the video
recording of that discussion:
http://www.tacticalmediafiles.net/videos/45066/

At that point very little actual materials had as yet been collected
and verified for inclusion into the archive - but the aims of the
project were clear. At the time I also thought it was a really
worthwhile idea, but I had little confidence that this initiative
would actually succeed in collecting and verifying sufficient
material from the Syrian conflict, let alone ‘prosecute’ on the
basis of this material in which ever legal framework. However, over
time the archive has steadily grown and has broadened its mission to
“positively contribute to post-conflict reconstruction and
stability”. The idea is also to develop open source tools and
“providing a transparent and replicable methodology for
collecting, preserving, verifying and investigating visual
documentation in conflict areas.”, which is an on-going process.

The most important thing right now in Ukraine is that the fighting
should stop, and it should stop immediately. Realistically that will
not immediately happen, and as long as fighting and associated
atrocities and tragedies continue, it might make a lot of sense to
build on other experiences and already now think in timeframes that
exceed the immediacy of current events.

Documentation and verification, going through ‘due process’, all
these things that require so much time - time that we all feel we do
not have while the fighting continues and people massively suffer,
not just in Ukraine, but also in Syria and unfortunately many other
places, might nonetheless help us to counter the barrage of
strategically operated tactical media in the service of reactionary
political agendas, hegemonial power and hyper-violence, and the
epistemological crisis that we have been thrown in as a result of
massive disinformation strategies.

So, whatever media activity is happening on the ground right now in
Ukraine, which we could label as ’tactical’, ‘participatory’
(rather than observing from the outside), coming from within the
‘operational terrain’, can start to play a role on more extended
timescales. The Syrian Archive offers a model for that, plus tools
and methods, but of course there can be others, and new ones can and
probably must be invented. All this requires to expand the critical
time frame, the temporal scope of our analyses - not just to ask
where did this conflict come from (geopolitics etc..), but primarily
what kind of possible future trajectories can be engaged with.

Next to this we need to think through and begin the painfully slow
process opf building appropriate political structures that avoid the
type of conflicts we are now horrified by. In other words we need
urgently get back to the progressive composition of the good common
world, and free ourselves from being trapped in the immediacy of
these horrific events.  That requires a much expanded temporal scale
to think and act on - as painful and difficult that may be while the
hypersonic rockets strike ever father to the west….

Stay safe,
Eric

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