Equipped with wireless connections, we often fall under the illusion that the Internet is everywhere. Yet the global network has its limits; it is by no means a universal blessing bestowed upon all humanity. In this text, I wish to examine precisely the geographic and social boundaries of virtual presence. Furthermore, I will examine the interactions between what fits within the virtual and the virtual-less world. The people who inhabit that world have at their disposal only the ‘bare body,’ deprived of any digital extension. This body without an interface is condemned to a peculiar inversion of the virtual avatar’s omnipresence: to an exclusively local existence, confined within a narrow ‘here.’ The presence of the ‘bare body’ appears all the weaker and more effectively deprived of voice, the greater the role that digitally multiplied forms of presence play in the contemporary world. The drama of a human being situated in such a condition—deprived of agency in history, of the ability to influence events and shape the reality in which they remain immersed—results in radical attempts to break through the localised powerlessness of the ‘bare body.’
The events of the Arab Spring in 2011, especially with regard to Egypt, were proclaimed a virtual revolution, emphasising—perhaps overestimating—the role of Facebook in the mobilisation that led to the revolutionary uprising. But are revolutions in the contemporary world really made by clicking? Scepticism arises already from a glance at the maps showing the intensity of Internet traffic in particular regions of the globe; they indicate that the countries affected by the events of the Arab Spring belong to weakly digitalised societies. In A Convergence of Civilisations (2011), Courbage and Todd draw attention to the consequences of crossing the modernity threshold which they define as the alphabetisation of half the population—an important observation, for literacy is such an obvious condition of any virtual presence that we often forget both its significance and the existence of people who still remain beyond the horizon established by this basic competence. On the other hand, literacy is the first, but not the only condition of virtual existence. The effectiveness of cybernetic intervention requires not merely a much higher level of competence but also a material instrumentarium that people pushed to the margins of history—and removed from the possibility of influencing its course—do not possess.
When observed more closely, the Tunisian genesis of the Arab Spring begins not with virtual events but with terrifyingly real ones, such as instances of self-immolation—occurring far from cameras, somewhere in small towns on the steppe-like southern edge bordering the Sahara. A good starting point for examining this issue is Printemps de Tunis. Les métamorphoses de l’Histoire by the Tunisian intellectual teaching in Paris, Abdelwahab Meddeb. It contains observations and reflections on the events of January 2011, written with minimal temporal distance (the book appeared only a few weeks later). Already in these reflections composed in the heat of the moment, Meddeb attempts to grasp the interplay between the real and virtual components of the events. His aim is not so much to assess their relative weight as to capture the dynamics that lead from a single incident to the production of a far-reaching historical effect. Using this ad hoc material created by Meddeb as an immediate response to the events, I attempt to take the next step toward a theory that speaks of the relations between a sudden, ephemeral occurrence and its fixed, digitally multiplicable derivatives such as the written record or the photographic image. It is precisely the combination and interplay of both these factors that leads to their joint effectiveness in transforming reality.
What concerns me in particular is the relationship between the strictly local dimension of the body (of what happens to the body, or what can be done with the body—including self-immolation) and the non-locality (virtual ubicity) of text and digital image. On one hand, there emerges the tragic “one-time-only” nature of the human body; on the other, the possibility of infinite replication, and thus multiplied impact. My ultimate aim here is thus not merely to assess the weight of cyberactivism in the course of events of the Arab Spring, but something else: to draw attention to the consequences of the absence of a complementary element that might be called (cyber)artistry. By this I mean the problem of lacking access to symbolic means of expression that allow one to grasp and harmonise political contradictions, to build up and foster a narration of one’s own. In other words, behind the historical events emerges the tragedy of the human being without art—who, precisely because of this fundamental lack, cannot attain the desired state of transformative effectiveness vis-à-vis history, cannot shape historical circumstances according to their own measure. They remain in a marginalised position because they remain localised: chained to a place and to unsatisfactory circumstances beyond which they are unable to step.
In his analysis of the events, Meddeb begins precisely with emphasising the marginal position of the initial epicentre. It is the desert-steppe borderland, areas far from the coast and its urban centres. The self-immolation occurs in Sidi Bouzid, a place characterised by the intellectual—who is, after all, well acquainted with local conditions—as belonging to a kind of tribal space of nomads. In presenting it, Meddeb goes back into the past, invoking the Banu Hilal nomads and the opposition introduced by Ibn Khaldun between the “state-administered” space (bilād al-makhzan) and the anarchic, fiscally unregulated territory of dissidence, the “land that does not submit to rule” (bilād al-sība). Even the ethnonym Banu Hilal is not a neutral term in Arab history, but a word charged with various connotations as a synonym of the desert’s turbulent element, often seen as the opposite of civilisation--ḥaḍāra—identified with settled life. We are almost at the very source of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s opposition between the city and the nomadic war machine, between the closed Oedipal triangle and the free Schizo, between the bright, closed, finite singularity of the City-State and the multiplicity / indeterminacy of the Desert (1972). The dynamising element of discontent that triggers a cascade of events comes from this transgeographical and transhistorical Desert. Undoubtedly, an energy is released. Yet this energy is shapeless, inarticulate, devoid of artistry—the quality of what is clear, expressed, communicative, functioning as a vehicle of meaning, transformative.
Two subjects interact in recent Tunisian history: on one hand, we are dealing with the intellectual, a man of writing, communicating freely with civilisational heritage in all its complexity; on the other, with a subject condemned to their locality—the so-called ‘simple man,’ perhaps an illiterate, someone standing at the margins of both civilisation (understood as the sedentary ḥaḍāra) and the virtual world (of word and image). The latter is the heir to a nomadic world, unable to step beyond the present without transmitted legacies and beyond the ‘cyclical locality’ of the successively visited places in which the nomads leave merely a fleeting trace of their presence. Despite their dynamism, they lack the capacity to transcend the narrow limits of ‘existing here and now.’ One might say that as a subject of history the nomad possesses only the ‘bare body,’ unlike all those who have at their disposal a pen, a camera, a photo lens—extensions of the body anchoring it in a virtual dimension that transcends locality. Yet the intellectual turns out to be, in a sense, a hybrid being, deliberately crossing previous distinctions and oppositions. He is simultaneously a civilised (sedentary) and a nomadic subject, torn from settled life by displacement (inasmuch as a professor holding a post at a foreign university can be considered an intellectual outcast consciously constructing his own project of exile) and in solidarity with the aspiration for dissidence and freedom emanating from bilād al-sība.
At a certain point, two paths and two kinds of potential converge and mutually reinforce one another. On one hand, there is the capacity for writing and for operating with recorded images—their durability and delocalised transmissibility; on the other, performativity: the possibility of turning oneself into an ephemeral spectacle—not even an image capable of circulating in virtual space, but a one-time act eluding registration. Meddeb enters into a potentially interesting, though highly risky, reflection on the effectiveness of such acts that escape recording—because they are unexpected, sudden performative acts—juxtaposing self-immolation and terrorism. As an example of the latter phenomenon, however, he does not cite the most notorious events directed against the distant Western world, but an attack on neighbours (the event commented on by Meddeb is the explosion caused by a suicide bomber in front of the Church of the Two Saints in Alexandria). The perpetrators of such acts, in a sense, appropriate the bodies of other people within their own performative act. Rebelling against the powerlessness of their ‘bare body,’ they find no better path than appropriating the bodies of others. Meanwhile, Mohamed Bouazizi, in carrying out self-immolation, “sacrifices only that which he owns and which he can dispose of within his personal freedom” (Meddeb 2011, 20). Without further entering into the ethical or political consequences of such a juxtaposition, I prefer to reflect on suddenness as a way of breaking invisibility and silence of the human being who possesses only the ‘bare body.’ Self-immolation is a specific kind of emergent phenomenon, initiating a process whose consequences lie on a higher level of complexity and unfold, as it were, in a geometry of more capacious topological properties than the act that set them in motion.
Virtuality (of writing and image) can be treated as an additional, superimposed spatial dimension, unfolding unexpectedly ‘in depth’ and creating an extra ‘place’ in which the transformative effectiveness observable on a longer time scale takes shape (the first instance of self-immolation preceding Mohamed Bouazizi’s act initially seemed to pass entirely without echo; yet its effects, after months, accumulated into an avalanche of events). A whole series of questions emerges here. What, then, is operative? The act itself, or the emergence unfolding beyond the act? Does the starting point (the act) belong to the emergent process it initiates, or is it separate from it, such that emergence is unpredictable and impossible to reproduce in a controlled manner—with the same effect under the same initial conditions? The paradoxical repeatability of acts of self-immolation (Meddeb evokes the protest of a Buddhist monk during the Vietnam War and the events of the Prague Spring1) does not invalidate either their ‘each-time uniqueness’ or the unpredictable character of their consequences.
I arrive at the conclusion that the act in itself and the emergence of novel symbolic topology it initiates are separate and different in nature, yet mutually conditioned. We must therefore move on to consider the interaction between suddenness and its mediation through writing (report, commentary, analysis) and the images that proliferate post hoc. Ultimately, without one another, both subjects would be powerless in the face of history: both the intellectual and the ‘simple man’ would be condemned, in their respective situations, to invisibility and silence. Without the act’s occurrence, the intellectual and the commentator would have ‘nothing to write about’; their mastery in generating discourses would remain without a point of anchoring. Conversely, the person performing self-immolation would remain powerless if no one wrote about his deed. Analogously, both the sudden performative act—unannounced and eluding registration (unfolding ante hoc in relation to recording)—and the words and images proliferating post hoc, written/recorded and infinitely reproducible, differ qualitatively, yet remain strictly interdependent and mutually conditioning. As Meddeb concludes, the triggering of a “metamorphosis of History” is possible only when there emerges a cooperation of “margins and centre” (2011, 23).
In the final analysis, however, I move toward formulating a hypothesis about the connection between the act that triggers emergence and art. A debate on the artful character of a gesture as tragic as self-immolation may be deemed an intellectual cruelty. Yet the logic I have in mind, however, goes in the opposite direction: every act of art attempts to provoke an emergent phenomenon, while operating on a symbolic plane. However, it is analogous in its fundamental mechanism to the radical destruction of the body that it replaces. A person possessing only the ‘bare body’ is also a person deprived of art understood as the capacity for effective (transformative, change-producing) manipulation of symbols. In attempting to understand the mechanism of the emergent effectiveness of acts in history, one should therefore turn to art in search of models; moreover, it is in art that we should place our hope for increasing the possibility of dignified participation in history for people who so far have possessed only the ‘bare body,’ invisible and unheard beyond the vanishing modesty of their local existence—so easily trampled, bypassed, or ignored. Only on the ground of art, understood broadly as the effective (transformative) manipulation of symbols—and not by placing hope in the development of virtual modalities of political engagement—can we search for ways to transfer revolution into virtual reality, so that in the future no one need ever again pour gasoline over themselves in actuality.




References
​
Courbage, Youssef, and Emmanuel Todd. A Convergence of Civilizations: The Transformation of Muslim Societies. Columbia University Press, 2011.
Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix. Capitalisme et Schizophrénie 1. L'Anti-Œdipe. Les Éditions de Minuit, 1972.
Meddeb, Abdelwahab. Printemps de Tunis. La métamorphose de l’Histoire. Albin Michel, 2011.










1The monk Thich Quang Duc committed self-immolation in Saigon in 1963 in order to protest against the persecution of Buddhism and to denounce the Ngo Dinh Diem regime, supported by the Americans. This sudden event, recorded thanks to a coincidence by Malcolm W. Browne, soon triggered a wave of repetitions; many other Buddhist monks in Vietnam followed in Thich Quang Duc’s footsteps. Jan Palach, a student at Charles University in Prague, committed self-immolation on Wenceslas Square in January 1969. Again, the act was imitated: in the roughly three months following this event, more than twenty people attempted self-immolation, seven of whom died.

*A Polish version of this essay was published in the magazine Fragile, no 2(20), 2013.