TRANSCENDING CIRCUMSTANCE

Nick Axel

THE

ELEMENTS

OF

Let us reflect on the past few years, and recall the stories we have come into contact with and have affected us the most. WikiLeaks, the Arab Spring, 15M, #OWS, Anonymous; just these will suffice. Some of the most heavily publicized aspects of these specific events are the constitutive processes of their becoming: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, hacking, public assembly, and the list goes on, ad infinitum. It is captivating to recount the story of how Egyptian protestors effectively networked themselves throughout the city to unite in protest in Tahrir Square while thwarting police efforts of suppression. Or, the vital role of personal media-journalism that spread the #OWS movement like wildfire, West across the great plains to encompass virtually all of American society. What else in recent memory has been able to do such a feat? To unite, to reveal a common spirit of such a diverse and separated group of people is perhaps the most important historical event to take place in America in (at least) the past 30 years. It happened. Let's not look over this fact too quickly with dismissive remarks such as "well what is it doing now?" or "what did it really change?". In the end, particularly within the asymptotic curve of technological deployment coupled with cultural progress, what is most remarkable, the most essential thing about all of these events is that they happened. Not who, not what, not when, not where, not why, not how, but that. While I do not mean to dismiss the means by which these events were able to come into existence, these tools must be critically reframed in respect to the fidelity they have already engendered, lest their critical efficacy become obsolete, or even worse, subsumed. In order to tell a story now, we must reframe the means by which the story of now has been told thus far. So then, where are we? What is the story of the present? We can begin in a negative manner, in relation to what was, and

what brought us here. The #OWS movement has been crippled with the dissolution of its body; it merely exists as loose organs and flailing apendages. 15M met largely the same fate. The Arab Spring, following a more traditional and explicit form of revolution is still in turmoil, with the transition of Egyptian power still in flux, threatening to plunge the country back into the former structure oppression. In the meantime, WikiLeaks and Anonymous continue their offensive while the sentiments of Fascism have started to surface throughout Europe once again. While this notion itself has been haunting these social movements from their very inception, it is at the moment, more than ever, imperative to articulate the world we are striving for. What if the greatest obstacle we face is not the actualization of our dreams, but their enunciation? What if just by saying something exists makes it exist? The neoliberal-consensus machine has effectively engendered a universal language that embodies Orwellian Newspeak. It is revealing, the name Orwell gave this concept, "Newspeak". The five (six) notions I previously mentioned, also called the "elements of circumstance" (who, what, when, where, why, and how) originated as a concept from the Ancient Greeks, and was adopted in modern times as a journalistic and police formula for proper investigative reporting and information extraction1. The horizons for speech have been retarded. As what often occured when participants were asked about the 15M and #OWS movements, their questions were met with silence. The events which took place transcended this basic epistemological framework, revealing it as the limit of our language and our understanding. But you can easily ask any person who participated in these events: the inability to communicate it in no way means nothing was understood, or nothing was said2. A new form of content emerged, a new metric of value, which subsequently demands novel techniques of its representation and communication. This fidelity of a possible future engenders an ethical responsibility to continue its progression and development3. For this future to continue becoming, we should focus not on the technique, not the representational

capacities of specific tools that revealed its spirit, but the content that can be effectively communicated with whatever tool. It is not that the way stories are told should be ignored, but the fact that stories can and are being told should be venerated to the highest degree. This is the goal, this is what is needed. It is not just to expect a clear statement of intent when the will confronts and surpasses the limits of our epistemology. Only by telling stories can we truly discover the potentials of its communicative devices, but more importantly, the spirit of what is being told. "Everything you can imagine is real" - Pablo Picasso

1. See the historical development of the "Five W's" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Ws ^ 2. The incapacity of speech is the representative element of an absolute truth. See Slavoj Zizek in Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism and Giorgio Agamben in Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. ^ 3. The event as the creation of fidely is that which engenders the possibility of an ethical realm. See Alain Badiou in Ethics, an Essay on the Understanding of Evil. ^