Where am I able to look

Black Instagram and division by #blackouttuesday

3 June, 2020

Nearly 30 million posts were shared yesterday with #blackoutthuesday on Instagram accounts. The protest of silence and the symbolic movement of abstention from publications caused division in the internet community and we now wonder about the real power and effect of a post.

The Blackout Tuesday movement began as a symbol of participation in the fight against police brutality and racial racism. Issues that were sparked by the recent assassination of George Floyd in Minnesota in the United States. This incident is rightfully reminiscent of the assassination of Eric Garner almost 6 years ago and has raised concerns that this is not an isolated collateral loss in coercive policing. On the contrary, it is a violation of human rights and questioning morality in the name of authoritarian supremacy which, unfortunately, is still manifested by police authorities.

We hold the “still” part for a bit, and recall Robert F. Kennedy’s speech at the announcement of the death of Martin Luther King—half a century ago—in which he notes, “Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.”55

According to the movement’s organizers, yesterday’s Tuesday should have been “ … a day to disconnect from work and reconnect with our community … “, through, “ … an urgent step of action to provoke accountability and change”. Many, of course, have questioned the extent of this change, and we add that the “White Savior” pattern continues to reanimate the privileged members of society with pride, while departing us from the real goal. However, being thousands of miles away from the core of violence, where the scale of the protests is growing and leading to aggressive uprisings, participation—any type of participation—seems to be a relief, albeit admittedly unproductive, and a momentary decongestion of the multifaceted turmoil that 2020 has brought. Questions about the manifestation of moral duty to take a stand in the long-term fight against inequality, racism, and violence remain open.

Instead of an epilogue, it is worth making a small note about the second confusion caused by the “Blackout Tuesday”. An already existing movement, the “Black Lives Matter”, which started as a simple hashtag and evolved into a protest movement, has been reporting on anti-racism actions since 2013 through the use of #blacklivesmatters. Many Blackout Tuesday posts made additional use of #blacklivesmatters, degrading the content of the first movement. According to which the mission is “to eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes. By combating and countering acts of violence, creating space for Black imagination and innovation, and centering Black joy, we are winning immediate improvements in our lives.”

For closing, we choose the recent tweet of the rapper Awate, “ … we should find a way to unionise and innovate methods of supporting the struggles of our people under attack. Capitalism got us here. Let’s try a collective approach.”56

We let you ponder for a while, with an authentic piece of soul music.57

50 Hugo Fetting, ed., “Max Reinhardt über Schauspielkunst, Material zum Theater”, Material Zum Theater 32, Reihe Schauspiel, issue 11 (Berlin: Verband der Theaterschaffenden der DDR, 1993, 61), as quoted by Erika Fischer-Licht in “The Latent Political: Max Reinhardt’s Mass Spectacles and their Aftermath”, in Aesthetics of Standstill, ed. Reinhold Gorling, Barbara Gronai, and Ludger Schwarte (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2019), 48. 51 Blackout Tuesday was a collective action to protest racism and police brutality. The action, originally organized within the music industry in response to the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, took place on June 2, 2020. 52 Samuel Beckett, Three Novels: Molly, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 285. 53 Beater.gr, “Black Instagram and division by #blackouttuesday”, June 3, 2020. (Original title: «Το μαύρο instagram και ο διχασμός του #blackouttuesday»), https://beater.gr/blackout-tuesdayinstagram-movement/. 54 François Lyotard, Instructions Païennes (Paris: Galilée, 1977), 17-18, as quoted by Geoffrey Bennington in Writing the Event (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 111. 55 Excerpt from Robert Kennedy’s improvised speech in Indianapolis, Indiana on April 4, 1968, announcing to the gathered crowd that Martin Luther King had been assassinated. 56 Awate, published post on twitter, June 1, 2020. https:// twitter.com/AWATEMUSIC/status/1267534042330812421. 57 Prequel, “Saints feat. Cazeaux O.S.L.O”, album “Freedom Jazz Dance”, (London: Rhythm Section International, 19 August 2016) https://prequel.bandcamp.com/album/freedom-jazz-dance. 58 Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft, “Thinking in Public: Strauss, Levinas, Arendt”, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2016), 243.

Silent Read in stable pace and calm breathing. Phrase no.7

(Long pause)

Exit.

XII

XIII

As if you stopped blinking, only to start blinking differently. Like opening a crack or entering a rapture. (II>) Blinking differently is not a call to action, but a call for

a thoughtful process of being within. You need to give up bits of yourself to retain your integrity, like sacrificing your Iphigenia to act upon the winds, to create or retrieve nascent possibilities for references

to frame and respond

to what it all could be. (/II>) — — The poem reads, “… ah, the wind blows not over motionless islands, but over the terror of non-being, the divine wind that does not heal, but indeed makes one sicker and sicker; … and there’s never a day, an hour, a moment when the effort might cease; you grab onto anything you can and it makes one want to kiss you.”xi and I start wavering until I make myself leveled.

(>>) Words are the raw material to build the conditions and move from the generalization of the universe to the transcendentalized perception of everyday events. But to go beyond, I need to understand a lot to reach just a bit further. (/>>) Past the dramatization of happenings, to the substance of moments. As I know, since I started noticing, that the everyday contains great drama but also great substance. But I need to understand a lot to reach just a bit further. If not, it is futile.—I need to go on, panting though I may be, I need to say things, so they can be invalidated later on and try again, to keep me speaking.

Warming up, stretching the hands, shaking them through the air, voice is pouring from the mouth, I must hear it, the jaw sinks right in the chest, the gesture is loud, now look at the shadow, next to the feet, clattering to the earth, it is only the end line, holding the body, holding the shadow, joining other shadows, cast on uneven surfaces, bigger they become, am I scared, now look it is one shadow, is it indeed a shadow, I can’t tell, this thing is leaking, soaking the surface, the surface is soaked, it is soil, it is clear now, it is warm, it is humid, scared I shouldn’t be, it is soft, it is even, and it is only the middle line. The actor is on-stage. 69

Epilogue

“Humanity is never acquired in solitude, and never by giving one’s work to the public. It can be achieved only by one who has thrown his life and his person into the ‘venture into the public realm.’”60

It is about time to dedicate some words to the ethical responsibilities, as I keep drawing circles around them, I say it is now the time to rename them. As I reckon by now that they refer to the softening of human values, followed by possibilities that are enabled by the act of publishing. These possibilities stipulate ways to reconfigure the world, or even better, ways to activate the agency in the “world’s becoming”, to which Barad beautifully adds that “… these changing possibilities entail an ethical obligation … to contest and rework what matters and what is excluded from mattering.”61

Of course, what matters and what is meaning-full lay in the trembling surfaces of their representation, distribution, and reception. The social bodies (mediator and receiver) are potentially at the same time social actors, by a substantial moving. For they are bounded along with acts of agencies to an infinite scrolling. Resonance is in the process of moving; moving on one-way roads. Hereafter, “Everything moves continuously. Immobility does not exist …You are movement and gesture.”62

It is clear by now that the possibilities of moving are propounded by the mediator (journalist) but enabled by the receiver (audience). The act of publishing is primally an act of reflecting on methodologies of understanding. Looking and shifting through information, in hope to see what is behind and what is ahead. The act of publishing here embodies the emergence of the friction between the actors involved. The act of publishing is an act of disseminating, and therefore, it is accountable for its constitutive affective reconfigurations of the world. Since the responsibility is distributed among the social bodies and the social actors, the importance historically and culturally is allocated within this oscillating power relationship. This resonates with Barad’s exquisite division between the term intra-action and interaction; the distinction between acting within the relationship and outside of it and the level of interdependency.63

In a similar vein, emotions (moving) emanate from this power relationship of interdependency. For emotions have no other way to emerge than from inside the relations of interdependency among bodies. In an important sense, sensing and touching are what constitute us, intraindividually and as a whole.64 Through this constitution, we can perceive interiority and exteriority and the lines in between—that is their non-separability. This falls under

the representation of interiority and exteriority, meaning it is dependent from the ways our ourselves towards other selves and our relationships are being defined through representation. These ways of representing others and defining identities are contained in established modes of cultural and artistic production. That are ideologically fragile, and they constantly demand for re-negotiation, to reverify the primordial freedom for all parties in doing, thinking, and feeling.

This freedom comes with terms with a set of judgements on claims made through the act of publishing that are addressing emotions, which inevitably arise upon publication. Similar to the cognitive diversity between us and the internal heterogeneity with others, there is no uniformity in the emotions that stem from published words. As it is absurd to conduct or simplify feelings to aim for universality. Which also means that the ethics of having emotions, or more accurately of being moved, lies on the responsibility of representing ourselves towards other selves, while the responsibility of representation relies in the act of moving, being in touch with the other, and when needed, crossing the lines. A deed that redeems our autonomy in agency and confirms the being part of the reconfigurations of the cultures we reside in.

All of which starts here and now, in this moment, with this act of publishing.

Afterthoughts

There are imperative questions brought up by the above course of thinking and writing that introduce needs for further investigation. What are the long-term implications of the affective facts to the individual? Can they turn from affective into effective? If so, how acts of moving are involved in the felt implications? If there is importance in this latter, then how acts of moving can be situated prolifically between freedom of speech and freedom of silence? How can social media be a fruitful ground for acts of moving? And in an obtuse way, how other forms of publishing can be aligned to the above thinking?

60 Günter Gaus quoting Hanna Arendt on an interview with her (“Zur Person”, Dieser Kanal, 28. October 1964), https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=iZILhvVX_C0&ab_channel=LeonardDietrich. 61 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2007), 178. 62 Barbara Gronau, “Performing Stasis”, in Aesthetics of Standstill, ed. Reinhold Gorling, Barbara Gronai, and Ludger Schwarte (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2019),13. 63 Karen Barad proposed the term “intra-action” over “interaction”. According to her, interaction responds to a situation when two bodies interact but maintain a level of independence, while intraaction refers to the emerged ability to act from within the relationship. [Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2007), 128.]

64 Karen Barad, “On Touching—The Inhuman That Therefore I Am (v1.1)” (diaphanes, Power of Material / Politics of Materiality, eds. Susanne Witzgall and Kerstin Stakemeier, 2014). 7.

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1 Walden. Jonas Mekas. 1968. 2 The Metamorphosis of Birds. Catarina Vasconcelos. 2020. 3 Killer of Sheep. Charles Burnett. 1978. 4 Césarée. Marguerite Duras. 1979. 5 Lessons of Darkness. Werner Herzog. 1995. 6 The Tango of the Widower and its Distorting Mirror. Valeria Sarmuento, Raúl Ruiz. 2020. 7 Sans Soleil. Chris Marker. 1983. 3

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