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

Thanks Nancy! I will take your recommendation.

The Investigative Aesthetics book has a lot to do with the 'public truth' issues that David Garcia and myself are concerned about.

I think the Ukraine invasion and the larger constellation of events around it have added two crucial points, maybe they already figure in the book or maybe not:

First, social media and the "firehose of information" mentioned by Prem Chandavarkar are not going away, nor is social media a uniformly bad thing. The point, though, is that democracy is failing under its pressures. The failure has been obvious in the US since 2015-16, when Russian information war techniques exacerbated existing divides to produce a situation of extreme polarization. It's not all down to Russia, but their targeted trolling along with the Cambridge Analytica campaigns showed how the psycho-social analysis of a national population can reveal exploitable vulnerabilities. Such interventions have already affected many countries. In his book, The Road to Unfreedom, Timothy Snyder gives a very good philosophical read of all this. War is now a "whole of society" effort and the Western societies were almost decisively weakened by the Russian information war over the last seven or eight years (just imagine if Trump were president now...). But it's not only about the Ukraine war: civil society is prey to manipulation by any powerful actor mobilizing the requisite technical and psychological knowledge, as the climate change denialists have shown. I think what's needed in the cultural and activist worlds are communities of research that can "establish a social contract that includes all the participants in this assemblage of truth production and dissemination" - and those are the perfect words for it. The aim is to help create a new ethos of civil society for the dangerous years ahead.

Second, the Ukrainians have brought an almost forgotten aspect of politics back to the fore, namely values. Instead of the usual consumer routine of critique, complain and collapse into depression, they've stood up to fight for their freedoms, their society and their state. Truth is not just facts, because facts alone can't distinguish between a "special military operation" and a brutal, unjustified invasion. Truth results from a value orientation applied to facts. Indeed, the "facts" themselves are forged by the application of specific values - observability, objectivity and universality are the chief ones in Western societies. But those values are too limited in nature to serve as guides for action. Information war is conducted on facts, but the real weapon is values. In cultural and activist circles, we often avoid the discussion of values altogether, or we foreground very limited sectoral values that can't stand up to pushback from the mainstream media, or even less, from the corporate state. But that's where the actual struggle is. The real shock for old dinosaur "tactical media" geeks is one's own brand-new admiration for people who are fighting for their democracy and their state. And it's worth noting that this is not the first time they have fought for it: because the Maidan protests back in 2013-14 already effected crucial changes in both Ukrainian civil society and the Ukrainian state, whose positive results have been on display throughout the conflict. Personally I never bought into the tactics vs strategy division. In the anti-globalization movement, I wanted to help change the transnational state - not "from the top down" but from my real position in civil society. You can't get a new, more constructive and more shareable ethos without an examination and renewal of values. Communities of "truth production and dissemination" are the right places to start.

Anyway I look forward to reading the book, thanks again,

Brian

On Mon, Mar 21, 2022 at 1:50 PM Nancy Mauro-Flude <sister0@dyne.org> wrote:

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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