Abstract
This chapter focuses on Rabih Mroué’s The Pixelated Revolution (2012), a lecture performance about the documentation of the Syrian Revolution in 2011, filmed by the protesters themselves with their mobile phones, some of them recording their own assassination. Mroué questions the way in which we receive and translate testimonies and information appearing in the public sphere of cyberspace, not only in ‘limit situations’ but also in everyday life, following broader communication patterns, predominant media strategies, and orders of truth. Rather than analysing the complex political situation in the on-going Syrian war, the author analyses how this explosion of digital platforms in a period of historical change and socio-political urgency interacts with the transformative power of the cyberworld in the cultural landscape.
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Notes
- 1.
As Mark Westmoreland remarks the so-called ‘post-war era’ in Lebanon does not mean the end of violence. It rather describes a permanent state of emergency. The ‘experimental historiographies’ of the Lebanese artists explore the unresolved trauma of the Lebanese civil war which prefigure the political turmoil that has been unfolding since the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in 2005 and the 2006 Israeli invasion (Westmoreland 2010, 176–178).
- 2.
On the post-war generation of Lebanese artists see Wilson-Goldie (2006, 81–89) and Muller (2009, 12–25) . Mroué’s analysis gives an insight into the reasons for the rise of the lecture performance in Lebanon after the end of the war in 1990: ‘How to be independent from the institutions and the market but still being able to create and present your work and your ideas? It started little by little. These lecture and presentations took place everywhere, in small and big theatres, in a garden of a house, or even in our private apartments. There are no specific technological requirements. I remember when friends could not attend a performance, I invited them to my apartment and I performed it for them’ (Mroué 2017, n.p.).
- 3.
Mroué argues that after 1990 he started to ask questions like: ‘How do we represent our bodies that were imprinted by the civil war?,’ ‘Why should I pretend that I am Hamlet? … If I have something to say that comes out of Hamlet, an idea about today, let me say it as if I were writing an essay or an article. Let me represent myself thinking about Hamlet, and bring it on stage’ (Mroué 2017, n.p.).
- 4.
More on the lecture performance Make Me Stop Smoking in Ilić (2012, 209–217).
- 5.
The official SANA News Agency is the country’s only news agency since its establishment in 1965. As the military and political response to the uprising became violent and fully militarized, the regime closed its borders to the foreign press, permitting only news organizations from its allies Russia and Iran to report on the conflict (Alassad 2014, 112–113).
- 6.
Mroué refers here to the first months of the Syrian Revolution, when ordinary people started to take photos and videotape what was happening on the streets. Because of the media blackout imposed by the regime, people wanted to make sure their struggle for change and basic human rights was being communicated. It was a spontaneous act of non-violent civil disobedience. By that time, the quality of videos was mediocre as they were recorded on old phones, back-loaded cameras and so forth. Slowly they started to work collectively, creating the country’s citizen-journalist movement which challenged regime propaganda while reflecting the country’s long history of censorship and misinformation (on Syrian citizen-journalist movement see Halasa 2014, 104–111).
- 7.
Muller points out that in the realm of social media, embodiment is defined by the profile and voice of the user. ‘The self—or the presented image of the self—is continuously performed’ (Muller 2014, 87).
- 8.
Enwezor analyses the mass dissemination and manipulation of the duplicatable image in the digital era, whether a still picture of a moving image, and its ideological implications, especially with regard to forms of propaganda and social control (Enwezor 2008, 12).
- 9.
Mroué often uses the term of ‘non-academic lecture’ in order to emphasize that it doesn’t question the space in which it is performed. See Mroué (2012c).
- 10.
Agamben characterizes as an integral witness the ‘limit figure of a special kind’ in Auschwitz, a walking dead who ‘have really seen with his own eyes’ and ‘in whom not only humanity and non-humanity , but also vegetative existence and relation, physiology and ethics, medicine and politics, and life and death continuously pass through each other’ (Agamben 1999, 48 and 63).
- 11.
It is interesting to remark that even when the alternative (new and old) media in Syria started to be better organized, they have generally been marked by low professionalism (Alassad 2014, 117).
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Arfara, K. (2018). The Politics of the Digital Public Sphere: On Rabih Mroué’s The Pixelated Revolution. In: Arfara, K., Mancewicz, A., Remshardt, R. (eds) Intermedial Performance and Politics in the Public Sphere. Avant-Gardes in Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75343-0_12
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