To the general enrichment of leftist theory-heads, both Society of the Spectacle and Empire use the form of manifesto to convey their ideas on power and vision/communication respectively. However, both seem to focus on the macro level of analysis and would be greatly enriched through engaging the "micro-physics of power." Is this a problem of the manifesto in general or just these texts?

After thinking this issue over I came to several questions I would like to answer in my final paper.

How does the manifesto fit into the contemporary regime of publicity and surveillance?
How does the manifesto address/produce subjects and objects?
How does "publicity" address/produce objects and subjects in Debord? In Hardt and Negri?
Are then manifesto's a form of publicity?
Are Manifesto's utopian counters to regimes of discipline and control, or surveillance and information?
How do discipline and control operate in the society of the spectacle? In Empire? What are the micro-physics of power in these configurations?
What would an effective contemporary manifesto, countering regimes of domination, be like?

texts to be used
Hardt and Negri. Empire
Debord. Society of the Spectacle
Lyon. Against Dystopia, Distance, Division
Agre, Surveillance and Capture
Rhiengold. Smart Mobs
posted by chr15 at 1:54 AM

“The representation of actual death is also a form of obscenity—not a moral obscenity, as in the case of the sexual act, but a metaphysical obscenity. One cannot die twice. In this respect, photography lacks the power of film: a photograph can depict a person in the throes of death or a corpse, but not the elusive transition from one to the other… Before film, we knew only desecrated corpses and violated graves. Thanks to film, we can now violate, and expose at will, our only inalienable temporal possession. Those who are condemned to die eternally on film are truly without rest.”
- Andre Bazin, “Death Every Afternoon”

---

In Thomas Keenan’s “Windows: of Vulnerability,” Keenan forms an understanding of the public as being constituted by an unavoidable “interruption” or “intrusion” experienced by the individual human subject. “Publicity,” Keenan argues, is what “tears us from our selves, exposes us to and involves us with others, denies us the security of that window behind which we might install ourselves to gaze” (The Phantom Public Sphere, 133-4). Continuing, Keenan marks this exposure as the precondition to communication, describing it as “a violence that in turn makes possible the violence or the love we experience as intersubjectivity” (ibid, 134). “We would have no relation to others,” Keenan writes, “no terror and no peace, certainly no politics, without this (de)constitutive interruption” (ibid, 134).

In positing this relationship between communication and violence, Keenan demonstrates an affinity with Paul Virilio’s discussion of the deadly, Gorgon-like force of both the inquisitive public gaze invented in the wake of the French Revolution, and the dispossessing immobility he associates with visual media. Drawing from Jean-Pierre Vernant, Virilio reveals his fascination with the paralyzing interruption offered by the Gorgon: “‘you must look into her eyes and when your eyes meet, you cease being yourself, cease living and become, like her, a power of death.’ The Medusa is a kind of integrated circuit of vision that would seem to bode a future of awesome communication” (The Vision Machine, 38).

Despite theoretical differences, both Keenan and Virilio's concepts of publicity and communication are dependent on a type of metaphorical violence - be it a recognition of alterity, or a loss of volition. But, metaphors aside, the relationship that seems to be more pressing in our current examination of “that hazy thing called the public” (“Publicity and Indifference,” 107) – and the question that both of these authors investigate – is based, precisely, on the reversal of this dependency: that is, on the necessary role communication, or more accurately, visual communication technology, plays in very real acts of violence.

In “Publicity and Indifference,” for instance, Keenan, referring to the recorded shooting of a young man by a sniper in a “particularly dangerous Sarajevo crossroads,” discusses the transformative role the camera plays in the recording of such acts of terror, writing: “The corollary of the cameraman’s being there is that, in a way, we are too. The camera metaphorizes the becoming public of the event, because we who watch and listen are also caught in the intersection of the sniper’s and the cameraman’s viewfinders—not as potential victims exactly but as targets of those vectors…” (107). But what happens when those two viewfinders – the sniper’s and the cameraman’s – coincide? How is our position altered?

While both Keenan and Virilio have discussed the role of video journalism and “real-time” imagery in the Western perception/reception of mediated representations of genocide, warfare and terrorism, what I would like to focus my paper on is a more temporally “unreal” - what Bazin would call cinematically perverse - type of imagery: the growing proliferation and circulation of web-based Iraqi insurgent videos that allow one to access, at will, the wounding and apparent murder of various US and ‘coalition’ soldiers. My question, then: how are we to understand the communicative aspect of this “savage documentary genre” (The Vision Machine, 56), and how are we to understand our role within this discourse? If these videos and the acts of violence they depict can be seen, as Keenan has suggested in a recent lecture, as a sort of attempt to "transform the boundaries and definition of the political or public space, which is to say, to change the definsition of who speaks and what counts as speaking within it," what sort of message is being sent ("Where are human rights...?)?

In exploring these questions, I would like to focus on a series of videos, radio segments, news articles and blog entries revolving around the almost mythical Baghdad sniper known as “Juba,” who is thought to have been responsible for the murder and wounding of an unverifiable number (ranging from 2 to 143) of US service members in shootings that occurred throughout 2005. Noted for her/his skill, precision, and ability to elude capture – visible in the videos attributed to her/his name (all of which are shown from the sniper’s perspective and intended for public release) – “Juba” became a constant, almost ghostly, threat to US soldiers, and a celebrity to supporters of the insurgency in Iraq because of the very “palatable” nature of her/his approach. In reading these videos, and the discourse surrounding them, I will draw heavily on the work of Keenan and Virilio, while also touching on Dienst and Foucault.

A set of links, and a brief explanation of “Juba” can be found on her/his very own wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juba_%28sniper%29
posted by josh_g at 9:56 PM