A critique of surveillance

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A critique of surveillance Presentation Paul Ghils

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Cosmopolis welcomes Philippe-Joseph Salazar as a guest editor of this special issue, devoted to the theme of “surveillance” in its varying forms and perceptions across the world. The current upsurge of surveillance policies and, to a minor extent, of defensive movements to limit their expansion, appears to parallel escalating and overlapping conflicts in a shrinking world. Thousands of state agencies across the world, as well as private associations, lobbies, research bodies and observatories capture data, procedures, policies, issues and developments in their respective fields of interest to exert power or protect privacy, guarantee secrecy or expose abuses, defend corporate interests or work for the public good, extend or limit rights, regulate or deregulate, destroy or preserve the social fabric, control or build firewalls. Far from being a feature of today’s mediatized world and its cyberspace, this phenomenon can be seen as deeply rooted in human beings’ age-old attitudes and interactions, in a complex network of “interveillance” that blurs the lines between trust and distrust, empathy and dispathy among individuals and communities. One resulting paradox is that, while the rule of law is entrusted to governments, parliaments and civil society, intrusions into privacy and espionnage may come from both public agencies and civil society, considering that commercial lobbies, hackers or terrorists are as often components of civil society, uncivil though these may be. Where a borderless online world and communities jealous of their borders intersect, an old question is posed in new terms, to which succesful responses will depend on a proper balance between autonomy and control, and on setting standards to meet the differing needs of digitalized forms of globalization, traditional behaviours, collective security and basic civil rights.

Cosmopolis 2015/2

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Guest Editor’s Note This Special Issue brings together nine scholars who, from different regions and Humanities disciplines, put under their crossfire a new dimension of cosmopolitics: the modern complexity of surveillance, control and strategic communication. Contributions range from China to Argentina, Egypt to South Africa, the United States to the new Caliphate. They cut across disciplinary boundaries. They fall into four broad sections: theory of surveillance, strategic communication and globalized control (Salazar, Ornatowski, Ghils), state strategic communication (Liu, Styszynski), military and police intelligence (Doxtader, Vitale), gender and higher education control (Saleh, Glenn). The Guest Editor wishes to thank Paul Ghils, Editor in Chief of Cosmopolis, for welcoming this Special Issue. Some support from the National Research Foundation of South Africa is recognized (grant 81695 Any opinion, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and therefore the NRF does not accept any liability in regard thereto). Ph.-J. Salazar.

A Critique of Surveillance

SURVEILLANCE IN THE ELECTRONIC AGE: A RHETORICAL CRITIQUE Philippe-Joseph Salazar Centre for Rhetoric Studies University of Cape Town South Africa Abstract: This paper offers a new frame of analysis for surveillance studies, recasting surveillance as a field for rhetoric (i.e. strategic persuasion) and critical communication. In dealing with surveillance as a persuasive structure, the author proposes five points of entry (or prolegomena): the triage of secrecy, the archaic paradox of surveillance, the fallacy of individualization, the public as noise and attunement, and the public’s power of abstraction in persuasive communication. In conclusion he questions surveillance agencies’ archaic misconception of communication in the electronic page. Keywords: biopolitics, intelligence, panopticon, rhetoric, secrecy, Stimmung, surveillance, WikiLeaks INTRODUCTION My approach to surveillance studies (and strategic communication; Salazar, 2014c) is that of a philosopher of rhetoric (Surveillance/Rhetoric, 2012). This angle of attack pays tribute to the initial gesture of Aristotle (1991, 2003) who, seizing up the lack of theory and reflective practice in public address, public debate, and public discourse in the declining years of Athens’s imperial democracy, directed his strictures both at public affairs practitioners who used “limited technical manuals;” and to decision-makers engaged in public life who acted successfully, but “by chance or by trial and error” (Aristote, 2003, 1354 a11 and a9). These words open his Rhetoric, a discipline conceived by him as the practical study of politics that is to say, how to be an effective agent in a self-organized society under a commonly acceptable rule of law, or constitution (politeia; Aristotle, 1952, III, 7, 1279a 25-39). Aristotle knew of democracy, and of surveillance. In Ancient Greek the word “theory” refers to “observation,” and specifically a “théōros” was an observer sent abroad overtly (as an ambassador), or covertly to observe how rival cities functioned (Joly, 1992, p. 50). Political “theory” was born of this comparative study of foreign polities, gathered through intelligence, in order to enable Athens to understand better her commercial adversaries (hence, “intelligence”), to respond swiftly to military challenges, and to develop rhetorical tools for strategic communication as a corollary to military action (Canfora, 2013) – this is the unspoken core of the Rhetoric, as I will show in my forthcoming book on terror and the Caliphate (Salazar, 2015). Aristotle’s approach is valid for the study of surveillance today. First, with regard to strategic communication we observe today a similar inability to lift practice out of hastily put together technologies of influence, notably set up by NATO or the United States communication agencies, civilian or military, firstly in the aftermath of the bombing campaign of March-June 1999 against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, de facto Serbia, followed by the creation of the Kosovo protectorate; and secondly (as from 2001) in Afghanistan in regard of ISAF communicational and propaganda strategy (Salazar, 2013b). Both strategies appear to have been developed at random, under pressure, and be made to respond to policy shifts decided by political leadership, often in disregard for their own intelligence. The effectiveness of these strategies of influence, especially ISAF (Salazar, 2013c), is not dependent upon proven theories and tested methods, but are dependent upon the savviness of whoever is ultimately in charge on the contested ground, often right on the battle field, and the “hands-on” experience of the chief communication officer in charge. In an Aristotelian perspective such techniques work by chance, or by trial and error. They are preconceptual. They bear a signal responsibility for the counter-insurgency’s strategic failure to “win hearts and minds” (CDEF, 2011), and for the deep and wide “radicalization” of opponents we currently witness across the Middle East theatre of operations, aptly described as “an inflexible hostile world” (Jacquier, 2014). The media-propagated buzzword of “radicalization,” a crux for surveillance theory in that context, remains aporetic in spite of cautious attempts to conceptualize it (Horgan, 2014). “Extremism” has received better attention, but it is side-lined (Backes, 2007). Second, in regard of surveillance, the recent history of state security (or financial and corporate) leaks, from Julian Assange to Edward Snowden, evinces the same stochastic attempt by agencies caught unprepared to “deal with it.” This knee-jerk response is echoed in the unpreparedness of major institutions, such as the European Union, to respond to surveillance challenges. Their response

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is dogmatic, and consists mainly in a roll call of legal and regulatory documents (European Parliament, 2014). No attempt is made to theorize why it happens, how to make it not happen again, and whether it should be opportune to let it happen in a controlled way. Again, intelligence agencies, together with their upstream (state level) and downstream (medias, social networks), act at random, or by trial and error. They “plug” a leak. They do not reflect on reasons why techniques of “plugging,” as it were, are limited, and do not provide for an understanding of their predicament. They remain descriptive or prescriptive (Erwin & Liu, 2013). There exists, of course, a growing literature concerning the ethics of statal or corporate surveillance, or data collection and analysis vis à vis privacy (Goldman, 2006; Leonard, 2014, on “deidentification”), in addition to a debate regarding the sovereign right and duty of a democratic state to protect its citizens against terrorism risks and massive threats (ACLU & HRW, 2014; Kuner et al, 2014). The case is also being made for human rights monitors to develop a “comprehensive reporting” tantamount, in my view, to counter-surveillance (Alston and Gillespie, 2012). Either way, there exists a multifarious threat to the traditional, Kantian, and democratic concept of the public nature of information, or Öffentlichkeit (Brüggemann, 2005). These contrarian sets of positions regarding surveillance are dialectical, if not systematically adversarial, and they help little in theorizing the field. They add to literature, and enrich practices, but they detract from theory building. In this paper, I will step back from the prolixity of surveillance, intelligence, and strategic communication studies, in all shapes and sizes. I will recast the issue as a “general rhetoric of surveillance,” in five points or prolegomena. By “rhetoric” I understand the study of the persuasive structure of any given public phenomenon. This analysis pertains only to democratic societies, where universal suffrage, fundamental freedoms, representative and civilian institutions, regularly elected and accountable officials, an independent judiciary, and the sovereignty of the rule of law are guaranteed and effective and sustained over a reasonable length of time. Surveillance in non/pseudo-democratic societies is of necessity a different subject, and requires a different treatment. PROLEGOMENA Prolegomenon 1: The rhetorical structure of secrecy. Surveillance is an integral part of life in a highly technological society. To quote a European Parliament report: “Surveillance of population groups is not a new phenomenon in liberal regimes and the series of scandals surrounding the surveillance programmes of the USA’s NSA and UK’s GHCQ … uncover a reconfiguration of surveillance that enables access to a much larger scale of data than telecommunication surveillance of the past ” (European Parliament, 2013). Surveillance is both omnipresent (from CCTV cameras to “cookies”) and “unpresent,” that is to say, their presence is covert: processes and technologies, such as “upstreaming,” of which we are not aware (see their nomenclature in the above-mentioned European Parliament report); or the retention of communications data as opposed, or in addition to that of content (Intelligence and Security Committee, 2013). Clearly, the irksome part of surveillance’s “unpresence,” which propels a host of irrational reactions and strong affects into public debate, is its secrecy. But, why does secrecy bother us? Or: What is secrecy? At face value, “secrecy” does not seem to articulate a complex set of notions: “dissimulation” is a standard in the history of European culture and politics (Snyder, 2009). Current studies of secrecy, by surveillance specialists, are mostly historical or descriptive (Moran, 2013; Cormac, 2014). They do not clarify the ontology of secrecy. However, in his work on words as mental institutions in the Indo-European sphere, the great linguist E. Benveniste outlines how “secrecy” came into existence as a mental category, a “representation” as he puts it (1969). Secrecy is the result of a process that sets into motion a number of legal-political-religious-economic instruments. Anthropologically speaking, secrecy did not appear because one wanted to hide something. It appeared within a set of social actions. Secrecy belongs to a mental and social structure. Benveniste points out that secretum refers to the result of an agricultural action (cernere), using a sieve to separate the wheat from the chaff. This practical gesture provides, in Benveniste’s terminology, a “representation,” that is to say, an action translated into a mental structure

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which shapes further social actions, detached from their agricultural origin: what is kept for public usage is declared so, via a decretum (the anthropological source of the Law); what is rejected as useless is named an excretum (the source of modes of exclusion, and discrimination); and what is kept, but withdrawn and concealed from public usage (and set aside for a use different from the obvious, public one) becomes a secretum (the source of government). Secrecy is the result of a triage, and can only be understood within this rhetorical structure: what is declared legitimate, what is excluded, what is reserved. This triage reveals a structural, strategic process that sustains public life as controlled by agents of government: they sort out information and, from what has been set aside they decide what is to be made public; what is to be made secret; what is to be held as redundant, or excluded. Let us remind ourselves how the English word “riddle” means both a sieve and an enigma: in intelligence analysis it is quite often the case that, in order to resolve an enigma, the analyst has to separate elements of information, to separate them in a sieve, and to solve the riddle with the riddle. This triage also accounts for the general functioning of state secrecy (Salazar, 2014b): to collect, to sort, to release, to archive (archiving is a form of excretion as destruction is rare, unless accidental), in sum to “classify” (Moran, 2013). Surveillance today is a hyper-technological form of such a strategic triage. When public debate concerning surveillance is centered around “The state/the corporations/the networks are prying into our privacy,” that is our own secrecy, it refuses to confront the actual nature of surveillance – a triage of information upon which political life is naturally constructed, and is delimited by what is supposedly “inherently governmental” (Chesterman, 2008). Indeed, a rhetorical drive, and an intended effect of surveillance strategies, and strategic communication applications, is to propagate the political belief that societies, which are both democratic and technological, are more “open,” hence naturally more “at risk” than traditional ones, hence inherently more subject to surveillance. This is hardly ever articulated in such a brutal way, and an effect of triage is to set aside precisely such an explicit argument. It would defeat the triage itself by exposing its rhetoric, and uncovering a paradox concerning biopolitics in a postmodern, surveillance society. The triage process is a rhetorical construction, and any case study should begin by examining it, and how each set of decretum/excretum/secretum is developed into public arguments. It is counterproductive to tackle a particular surveillance phenomenon head-on. Disassembling the triage and its rhetorical construct should be the first analytical manoeuvre. Prolegomenon 2: The archaic paradox of surveillance. However, the public perceives that democratic surveillance is paradoxical: the more advanced we are in terms of freedoms, the more protected we must be; or: the more adult politically, the more infantile too. The public reacts to the perception of this paradox with anger or indignation, or sullen acceptance of a de facto triage that has some every day practicality. For instance, the dupe’s quid pro quo of personal access to easy and limitless storing, or searches in exchange, tacit or otherwise, for commercial data collecting by providers. Yet to move from perceiving the paradox to conceiving it requires more than an affective or utilitarian response. This is where Foucault’s concept of biopolitics comes into play (Foucault, 1978). Postmodern, democratic societies are supposed to have moved away from archaism. The shift is supposed to have occurred with the rise of the idea and practice of the state as “governmentality” which, glossing on Foucault’s genial mapping (devalued by policy agencies as “governance”), was marked by the following features (Foucault 1978, Lesson 9): the state as endowed with rationality; the invention of a secular society; the invention of economics to measure, and to manage its resources; the invention of public security (an enabler for secular links, once religious bonding has been removed, and an enabler for stable trade and financial flows); finally the invention of freedoms that ensure identification with the state, identification with communal values, identification with free fluxes of labour (under the disguise of free fluxes of people, Marxists would argue plausibly). A new political nature was born that cast aside what Foucault called a “pastoral power.” It refers explicitly to a “ministry,” a religious ministry (a notion lost in the English translation). In Foucault’s archaeology of governmentality the phase preceding the State, and its security apparatus, was a “ministry” endowed with three main features or “economies:” rulers minister to their

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subjects, not to assert power in our common sense of “power politics,” but with a view to help the latter secure their salvation after death. Living together in this world is of lapsarian necessity. Living politically has no meaning per se. Living together is to respond to an “economy of salvation.” Secondly, rulers and ruled are expected to decipher signs of the divine, and to respond to them through rituals. Natural events out of the ordinary (earthquakes, plagues) are signs to be interpreted, with lessons deduced to obey. Again, living together has no political meaning beyond a communal observance of rites whose signified is life after death, outside this world. Thirdly, entailed by this duty of interpretation, the world is regarded like a book at once wide open and closed – open to interpretation but closed unless one masters techniques of interpretation. Foucault calls it an “economy of truth,” whose functionaries ensured the coherence of the whole system through technologies of interpretation. Such was, before the advent of the state, the natural state of living together, which could not be defined as “politics” as we know it. This was archaism. What is then the postmodern paradox of surveillance? Clearly, with surveillance we witness a return to “pastoral power.” In this instance I make use of “pastoral power” inasmuch as a democratic, surveillance society is not merely a come back to what Foucault analysed as pastorat/pastoral ministry, but an augmented return that takes into account, and factors in that which was in between pastorat and us, i.e. modern biopolitics – the state and its rationality. Indeed the three aspects of pastoral biopolitics are active in surveillance society; but each one is given a particular twist, or declension I would rather call it, by the massive presence of statal biopolitics. For instance the economy of salvation has undergone a declension: saving citizens of Western democracies from being “radicalized,” as if free citizens, sovereign citizens, could not exert a power of choice, and were simply malleable subjects. This idiom of “salvation” has been propagated by security agencies, and slavishly relayed by the medias since the Boston massacre in 2013 (Salazar, 2013d). It implies that surveillance, as complete as the law allows, or provides leeway for, will save normal citizens from falling prey to “radicalization,” in a perverse scenario whereby the potential agent is also a victim who must be “saved.” In sum, surveillance is a ministry: the world outside the borders of democracy is evil, and one has to be saved from it, against one’s own will. The fact radicalization is a form of idealism or, as I have suggested, “heroism” (2013d) is never mentioned, as it would challenge both the salvatory function of the process, and statal powers of interpretation and decipherment of bewildering, violent events that rupture the natural order of things. Indeed, in keeping with the second feature of pastoral biopolitics, postmodern world politics has assumed a sheen of constant extraordinariness, near-magical events which, on the one hand, are elevated to repetitive, “critical” crises, and, on the other hand, require the intervention of experts, specialists, professionals whose function is interpretative. Future institutes, rating agencies (Salazar, 2014a), global reports consultancies (Salazar, 2013a) are all endowed with that function, while being in effect and in purpose surveillance agencies. The second and third economies of pastoral biopolitics find their declension as public security alerts in all shapes and forms, and controls of social movements, labour, people and capital fluxes (material and immaterial), all in the name of restoring normality in the world – an idiom often phrased as “making the world safer for our children.” Surveillance society (in a democracy) is therefore pastoral and statal, archaic and modern. Such is the paradox, and it goes a long way to explain the rhetoric used by governments, and internalized by citizens, of a compromise between restricting liberties in order to live “normally.” The public perceives this collapsing together of archaic and modern biopolitics, when surveillance interrupts the assumed autonomy of one’s privacy, when it enters the subject’s inner sanctum. The usual response is then indignation or outrage. However, if affects cannot pose a lasting challenge to surveillance in a democratic society, they form a powerful, and irrepressible background noise (as I will show later in this essay). Affects are an un-mediated form of moral response. However, to question surveillance on moral, or affective grounds without questioning its “unpresence,” that is to say, without having a concept that goes beyond either its technology or its legality, is limited. This limitation is best defined by what philosopher Lyotard described as “differend” (1988). In short, those who criticize surveillance, or revolt against its perceived immorality in the name of democracy or privacy, speak and appui themselves the language of surveillance as codified by

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surveillance agencies. Protesters name the “tort” (that their privacy is treated like a merchandise, for instance), and may engage in “litigation” against prying agencies (statal or corporate), or simply express indignation on online fora. But they remain caught within the rhetoric of surveillance itself, and the protection it says it affords. The differend is not declared. It is striking that many in the public are willing to accept restrictions of liberties, and find it insufferable that agencies are monitoring communications data. They do not step outside the language set by surveillance. They do not declare a differend. At best, they litigate. This non-recognition of the differend, and of its archaic substratum, is an enduring aspect of the rhetoric of protest against surveillance in democratic societies. Prolegomenon 3: The fulcrum of de-individualization. However this disconnect leads, or explains, a further, remarkable disconnect between the reality of postmodern surveillance and its popular representations. Surveillance technologies are naturally expert, focused technologies. They target. They home in. They use algorithms. They cross-reference. They classify. They memorize. They retro-survey through data activism (Tealium, 2013). To use two Aristotelian logical categories: they turn quantity into quality. And, quite often, intelligence operators are some of the best minds (in American parlance “leverage people/talent,” National Commission, 2013)). The popular idea of surveillance is that of a panopticon, the Benthamian model (Foucault, 1975), whereby everyone and every action are observable, and observed from one single point of observation in the system. This model has been replaced by a multiplicity of points of observation, multiple in space, and multiple in time. The panopticon observer is nowadays polyvalent and depersonalized, unlike the unique watchman in his Benthamian tower. Popular films continue to propagate the archaic scenario of “big brother.” In doing so they are cultivating an archaic fallacy, the Benthamian model: someone behind a screen, a camera, a system, a matrix – whatever the device chosen by the filmmaker – is observing the victim, soon turned hero. The actantial model of most surveillance movies follows therefore a Greimasian structural narrative: it is formulaic (an event, a object, a subject, an addressor, an addressee, an opponent, adjunct actants), and patterns for action are limited (Greimas 1984). In surveillance-themed movies the enunciation of agency makes it necessary to meet the horizon of expectations of a given audience: the audience wants to be re-assured that someone they can see, identify, blame and engage with, is there watching and controlling, and be defeated ultimately. Media narratives concerning anti-surveillance individuals such as Assange, Manning or Snowden reinforce this subliminal reasoning: if one person can uncover such massive surveillance, the next step is to assign responsibility to a single agency. Or: It only takes one courageous person to do the work for all of us. This hyper-individualization is a rhetorical fallacy. Postmodern surveillance is essential depersonalized, but popular culture cannot think in terms of de-individualization. It demands individualization of events, identification, and individuation. Surveillance agencies are well served by the archaic, popular representation of surveillance as a Benthamian panopticon, and its sophistic propagation by the media. This tension is a fulcrum of postmodern “rhetoric culture,” so far overlooked, and it requires careful attention from scholars engaged in the field (Strecker & Tyler, 2009). An entire field for anthropological and rhetorical research remains largely unexplored - in the same manner as science production remained stuck in popular representations of “the great discoverer,” a personalized view of science, until the work done by Latour (Latour & Woolgar, 1986) – with one notable exception (see Furtado & Ercolani, 2013). Postmodern surveillance is multifocal, disseminated, and depersonalized, which makes it all the more autonomous and, literally, “unconceivable” by the public who remains stuck in romantic notions of heroic individualism. Prolegomenon 4: Public noise and Stimmung. Nonetheless, the dialectical tension between the multi-focality of depersonalized surveillance, and fallacious popular representations regarding surveillance underscores the massive presence of the public, just as massive as surveillance’s “unpresence.” A key notion put forward by Michel Serres in

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his radical philosophy of communication, Hermes, can help conceptualize the public’s presence. According to Serres, “Communication is a sort of game played by two interlocutors considered as united against the phenomena of interference and noise, or against individuals with some stake in interrupting communication” (p.66). The key notion is “noise” (noise as in “interference”), the public as noise. For instance, at an everyday level, comments posted by readers on a forum, typically below a story run by an online media, when they step out of the single post, and engage in a conversation, often adopt the shape of (habitual) commentators’ vying with one another. Dialogists often home on preferred partners, with whom they are acquainted already; they often give short shrift to others, or newcomers – all this in a search for what online media cannot provide in reality: a face to face conversation. In other words online exchanges wish to eliminate the public as noise, on the one hand by pretending comments are not public in relation to moderating or monitoring agents (to the point of ignoring rules, and being suddenly reminded of their invisible and censorial presence); on the other, in relation to interlocutors, by selecting target interlocutors. This practice is the basic structure of online fora, a “pathetic” simulacrum of dialogue against a massive, self-perpetuating background noise generated by the public. Another example, at a institutional level, is the unending debate regarding the “dumping” of information by WikiLeaks in relation to journalism, and free flow of information. The most perceptive, and yet self-defeating view, is that expressed by Slavoj Žižek: “ The aim of the WikiLeaks revelations was not just to embarrass those in power but to lead us to mobilise ourselves to bring about a different functioning of power that might reach beyond the limits of representative democracy” (2011). Perceptive, insofar as it gives readers the possibility to have access to classified documents. Selfdefeating, because to read US diplomatic dispatches, for instance, is premised on a precise knowledge of the State Department coding protocols (accessible if one has a researcher’s training). Individuals’ driven leaks, and “crowdsourcing” (Schilis-Gallego, 2014) have not altered our relation to power, they have added merely to the noise against which we wish to have dialogic exchanges, while they create a simulacrum of communication that is now potentially limitless. They have intensified our desire to eliminate what Serres names “the third man.” Serres borrows the expression from the famous noir movie by the same name (1949), in which a third man is seen removing a dead man, who is in fact not dead as both are probably the same, and whose ultimate death at the end of the movie is left to the public’s imagination. The “third man” symbolizes our relationship to the cyber ecology of surveillance, at once pervasive, invasive, and utterly desirable as it allows us to partake in a limitless game of relationships. In this process we want the noise (the third man) to die and to exist at the same time, as it guarantees our communicational existence. Serres adds: “ In a certain sense, (communicators engaged in a dialogue) struggle together against the demon” (p. 67). Democratic, popular culture will call state or corporate surveillance “evil,” that is, demonic, and some commentators elaborate on this immediate perception by calling it a “pathology” (Dedefensa, 2013). Both qualifications are valid, but there is a need to probe them further. Regarding “evil,” popular culture perceives what it fails to conceive: the philosophical sense of daímōn. A daímōn is an intermediary between human agents, who impels them to interact (for instance, in love, Eros) (Balaudé 2004). Indeed what most online commentators forget, caught as they become in the simulacrum of a personal dialogue, and caught in the limitless pleasure of playing the game, is the fact they use always an intermediary – and this intermediary is the game itself, the network, and linked to it, the web. “Noise,” whether covert or overt, is the system. The public replicates surveillance in entering the great game of the internet and is being played by the third man, Surveillance proper, who is never dead – to use the movie’s analogy. A Facebook page is a form of surveillance, however amicable or gentle or casual it may look. Put differently, surveillance is the other name for cyber communication. Regarding “pathology,” one way to explain the spell cast by surveillance on the public, concurrent to the public’s deployment of desire to dialogue against and as noise, is to refer to Heidegger’s concept of Stimmung: “ Understanding is always attuned” (Verstehen ist immer gestimmtes) (Heidegger, 1996, paragraph 31). Stimmung or attunement (paragraph 29) matters for the

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subject under surveillance. Postmodern public who plays the game of the Internet and is always in search of someone else with whom to measure oneself, thus creating noise in order to dispel it while agreeing to the silent presence of surveillance, “understands” its situation in the ecology of the Internet: it is “attuned” to it. This “attunement” by the public to surveillance is at once i) the communicators’ understanding of their “standing under” cyber-processes that allow them to exchange information, ii) the implicit accord (or mutual understanding) between communicators that they are “standing under” surveillance, and iii) their further understanding that they are vying with the noise. This attunement to surveillance allows the subject to project “the thrownness of this being into its there” (an apt definition of how we behave in Internet communication) and, at the same time, to enact what Heidegger names “the facticity” of this projection (paragraph 29). In Internet communication we project ourselves as facts; we project Being not to face the dread of nothingness. However, Heidegger stresses that Stimmung is a dis-position, a positioning, ruled by “pathos,” enabling an “affective situation” (from the French translation authorized by Heidegger for German Befindlichkeit, 1951, p. 31). Now, if “attunement” of the subject to Being has its source in the “dread” (Angst) of no-thing” (Heidegger, nd, p. 63-67), what is pathological in cyber communication is not merely the public’s (and especially new generation’s) addiction to facticity of projection, and intelligence agencies’ reliance on it, on a scale never seen before, but the affective, irrational relation that binds public to cyber-communication. This “affective situation” draws its energy from cancelling out the dread of surveillance, while enabling each communicator to replicate surveillance, and to behave like a small-time surveillance agency. The public is indeed attuned to surveillance practices; while at the same time everyone it faces the dread of it. At once “attunement” positions the subject in the world; it makes it exists factually; and it makes it enjoy doxa, the limitless exchange of information. In such a perspective, being a cyber communicator is staring joyfully into nothingness – possibly the best ontic definition of social networks. This raises a further and last issue, that of the community of communicators. Prolegomenon 5: The public as power of abstraction. Instinctively we would ascribe scientificity to surveillance technologies and affective facticity in which individual communicators. Put differently, surveillance technologies are seen, or unveiled, as massively scientific, while individuals’ cyber-communications would both stand in the midst of the noise of empirical actions (photos, clips, sms, posts, emails), and take a stand against it by trying to shut it out, and to create relationships. However, Serres proposes a different option. Dealing with the invention of dialogic communication, in Ancient Greece, at the time rhetoric was born, and with it debate, Serres establishes a correlation between the invention of dialogue and the invention of geometry. He describes an isomorphic relationship between shutting out noise by creating dialogue, and mathematicians’ shutting out the empirical noise (a line in the sand, a circle in the dirt), and inventing abstract figures. Thus, dialogue is not on the side of the empirical, but it is isomorphic to geometry. Dialogic procedures are an attempt to create abstractions, and to format a given, empirical exchange into a reproducible, abstract pattern – namely the invention of systematic, enthymematic and topical reasoning in/by the Rhetoric. If we now transpose Serres’s argument to the public in the age of cyber-surveillance and “generalized monitoring” of personal data (Kuner et al., 2014), Serres’s concept implies the following: in spite of its scientific apparatuses, material and immaterial, technologies and processes, surveillance is confronted, again and again, with the human instinctive, natural drive toward abstraction. It is an interesting phenomenon that individuals imitate surveillance by using tools analogous to surveillance agencies’. Individuals and agencies are a noise to each other – agencies have to develop complex triage systems to isolate key indicators of threats or buying behaviours patterns, as the case may be, that is, to sort out noise created by individual communications. Conversely, individuals have the ability, being humans and not machines or animals, to invent bypasses, to find ways out, to play with surveillance, in short to abstract themselves from the empirical mess where agencies trawl, and sift information, and for which they have developed mathematical models for extraction of relevant information.

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In this regard, surveillance leaks by Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, and Edward Snowden are moral abstractions: they represent a conscious effort to correlate sets of values with sets of actions. In short, they are abstract processes that aim at creating between citizens, and between citizens and representative governments a dialogue, away from interference and noise, that is: abstracted from empirical noise, and abstracted from what surveillance agencies are willing to excrete. Governments’ agencies response to this form of people’s abstraction is two-fold: either they try and reduce agents to “people with personal problems, with an axe to grind, a history of work grievances,” whatever the case may be; or they feed the media, directly or indirectly, with stockphrases (“radicalization, escalation”) (Salazar, 2014d). In this respect media discourse remains formulaic and indigent (Reinke de Buitrago, 2013), even when journalists are not bought or complicit (Ulfkotte, 2014), an expected positioning since biopolitics apparatuses struggle to conceive politics by individuals other than inordinate forms of the empirical. They cannot conceive that individuals hold a power of abstraction. This failing of surveillance practitioners, and of their media observers, goes back to my initial point, the lack of a theory of their practice. Manuals and guidelines are not a theory. They are empirical beliefs turned into processes. In a manner of speaking, surveillance is the empirical. For that reason and because of this disregard for the abstracting drive of individuals, there is a dimension surveillance experts do not take cognizance of: How reading/writing has changed. CONCLUSION : THE POSTMODERN, COSMOPOLITAN COMMUNITY OF COMMUNICATORS When the PRISM operation was revealed in June 2013, public opinion in Western democracies expressed a perceived injury: “ ‘They’ are reading my emails!” Agencies’ (USA’s NSA, British GCHQ) response was that they were not reading the general public’s emails, unless judicially authorized, but communications data (CD), and proceeding to a triage. The public’s affective and anecdotal reaction, “How dare ‘they’ read my emails?” raises a larger issue – how do we behave as cyber-readers, and cyber-authors? And how do surveillance agencies take it into account? Surveillance agencies, whether governmental or corporate (Amicelle, 2011), hold an archaic view of readership and authorship. However embedded agencies are in electronic technologies, and actively leveraging bright, young graduates who are supposedly attuned to social networks, and to their peculiar form of reading and writing and communicating, agencies’ understanding of reading and authoring is archaic. It seems that the Internet epistemic revolution has impacted agencies solely in terms of technologies and, lately, of the legal or constitutional components of surveillance. Wider implications for the status of audience engagement seem to be lost on them. However, those implications were foreseen and framed by Foucault in his epochal lecture, “What is an author?” (1969). Pre-dating the Internet age, Foucault’s four-points brief (absent from the English translation) remains the best approach to the nature of readership and authorship in what fellow philosopher Lyotard would term the postmodern condition, ten years later (1979,1984). One: it is impossible to name the author of a given text. Two: an author does not own and is not responsible for texts produced. Three: the social attribution of texts to an author involves complex processes. Four: an author is more than the sum of the texts produced. In other words, Foucault describes a situation which is typical of the age of mass cyber surveillance – a few months after the 1968 upheaval which ushered in a new epoch in Western democracies, he was projecting an analysis into the future, with that sort of intellectual premonition, or prudence some philosophers have of things to come whenever they trend practice toward theory. He did not know the Internet but had understood how, and in which direction mass communication practices were developing. Indeed writing and reading online form a complex of private manipulations that include, from minor to major : publicizing or capturing identities, posting lies or anonymous comments, creating multiple blogs, using a variety of aliases, playing with IP addresses, setting up privacy filters, resorting to random or encrypted pathways to prevent traffic analysis (as in the Tor project). The range for what I have called “abstraction,” beyond a straightforward use of the Internet (if there is such a thing), is limitless – in a democratic environment, of course. By just comparing this gamut of untrammelled operations with the four points of Foucault’s brief, it becomes clear that he provides an apt description of post-modern and electronic age readership and authorship.

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Readership and authorship have become, to quote Foucault, “functions.” They no longer are personalized – the rampant narcissism of Facebook is a smokescreen for depersonalization. Still, surveillance agencies believe firmly in traceability, while they enact their archaic “best possible world,” as Leibniz put it, a world of communication where authors and readers are fixed, enunciated, stable, and identifiable beings with enunciated attributes. This is no longer the case. The functions described by Foucault have resulted in the dilution of authorial and “readerly” sources. As defined by historian of the book Chartier (1994), a “community of readers,” as opposed to private readers in the pre-modern era, expects specific authorial behaviours from authors, and enforces them through the marketplace. The Internet has exacerbated exponentially what was true for the book in the consumer age. Internet audiences have developed moods and behaviours that have begun altering the way in which we used to assess an author, a text, and a corpus. By contrast, surveillance agencies, those avid readers and trackers of authorships and readerships, remain subservient to a bourgeois, and book era, belief both in authorship (based, on the author’s side, on legalistic definitions of ownership), and (on the reader’s side) in legal frameworks for censorship, whose aim is not only to prevent publishing but also to channel reading. This postmodern condition of reading and authoring has not gone unnoticed by online providers such as Google, who have emulated Foucault’s four-fold analysis in their assault against copyright and, ultimately, personal authorship, in the name of a postmodern “community of readers.” Surveillance agencies have remained deaf to it. In sum, surveillance agencies labour under an haphazard or archaic conception of what is, today, a cosmopolitan “community of communicators:” they have not fully realized that audiences and producers of texts are no longer individuals, but points of application of a system, or functions that alter, untrammelled, sources themselves. Surveillance agencies live in a disconnect between massive technological and information advances, and archaic and instinctual (non)understanding of human communication in the postmodern age. They apprehend the world of postmodern cyber-communication from a technological angle, made artificially more complex at every turn by the mere addition of procedures and processes. They do not take cognizance of their own archaism, and of the cosmopolitan complexity of what I have attempted to describe, a “community of communicators” playing with noise, affects, subterfuge, evasion, legalities, and the sudden ability to claim a differend from the dated idiom of surveillance. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This essay is based upon research supported by the National Research Foundation of South Africa (grant 81695). Any opinion, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and therefore the NRF does not accept any liability in regard thereto. In addition, the author is grateful to the following: Dr Eric Denécé, Director, Centre français de recherche sur le renseignement, Paris; General Eric de La Maisonneuve, Société de Stratégie, Paris; Mr Robert W. Grupp, Director, National Summit on Strategic Communications, Washington, DC; Mr Romain Mielcarek, Guerres et Influences, Paris; Professor Erik Doxtader, University of South Carolina; Dr Dominique de Courcelles, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Paris; Dr Paul Ghils, Haute Ecole de Bruxelles/Cosmopolis, Belgium; Professor Reingard Nethersole, University of Richmond and University of Pretoria; Professor Romain Laufer, HEC-International, Paris; the Cryptos Society at the Reform Club, St James’s, London; as well as the National Press Club of Washington, DC; the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, Hong Kong; and the Frontline Club, London. I thank also my former graduate assistant Mr Klaus Kotzé, now a researcher at the F.W. de Klerk Foundation; and those who have preferred to remain anonymous. Address correspondence to: [email protected] REFERENCES ACLU & HRW. (2014). With Liberty to Monitor All. How Large-Scale US Surveillance is Harming Journalism, Law, and American Democracy. Washington DC: Human Rights Watch. Retrieved August 6, 2014 from http://www.hrw.org/reports/2014/07/28/liberty-monitor-all-0

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Alston, P., & Gillespie, C. (2012). Global human rights monitoring, new technologies and the politics of information. The European Journal of International Law, 23 (4), 1089-1123. DOI: 10.1093/ejil/chs073 Amicelle, A. (2011). Towards a ‘new’ political anatomy of financial surveillance. Security Dialogue, 42 (2), 161–178 Aristotle. (1952). Politics. Translated by B. Jowett. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Aristotle. (1991). On Rhetoric. New York: Oxford University Press. Aristote. (2003). Rhétorique. Paris : Les Belles Lettres. Backes, U. (2007). Meaning and forms of political extremism in past and present. Central European Political Studies Review, 9 (4), 242-262. Retrieved March 7, 2014 from http://www.cepsr.com/clanek.php?ID=316 Baulaudé, J.-F. (2004). Daimôn. In B. Cassin (Ed.), Vocabulaire européen des philosophies (pp. 279280). Paris: Robert/Seuil. Also: (2014) in B. Cassin, Dictionary of Untranslatables. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press (source not utilized). Benveniste, E. (1969). Le Vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes. Paris: Minuit. Brüggemann, M. (2005). How the EU constructs the European public sphere : Seven strategies of information policy. Javnost-The Public, 12 (2), 57-74. Canfora, L. (2013). Thucydide. Le dialogue des Méliens et des Athéniens, précédé de Thucydide et l’Empire. Paris : Editions de l’éclat. CDEF. (2011). Winning hearts and minds. Historical origins of the concept and its current implementation in Afghanistan. Paris : French Army, Centre de Doctrine d’Emploi des Forces. Chartier, R. (1994). The Order of Books. Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press. Chesterman, S. (2008). ‘We can’t spy … If we can’t buy!’: The privatization of intelligence and the limits of outsourcing ‘inherently governmental functions’. The European Journal of International Law, 19 (5), 1055-1074. Cormac, R. (2014). Secret intelligence and economic security. Intelligence and National Security, 29 (1), 99-121. Dedefensa.org. Notes sur les pathologies de la modernité. (October 10, 2013). Retrieved November 1, 2013 from http://www.dedefensa.org/articlenotes_sur_les_pathologies_de_la_modernit__28_10_2013.html Erwin, C. M., & Liu, E. C. (2013). NSA Surveillance Leaks: Background and Issues for Congress. Congressional Research Services. Retrieved July 10, 2013 from http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB436/docs/EBB-093.pdf European Parliament. (2013). National programmes for mass surveillance of personal data in EU Member States and their compatibility with EU law. Retrieved November 13, 2013 from http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/etudes/join/2013/493032/IPOLLIBE_ET(2013)493032_EN.pdf European Parliament. (2014). Rapport sur le programme de surveillance de la NSA, les organismes de surveillance dans divers Etats membres. Retrieved September 22, 2014 from http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//NONSGML+AMD+A7-20140139+012-025+DOC+PDF+V0//FR Foucault, M. (1969). Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur ? Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie, 63 (3), 73-104. Foucault, M. (1975). Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison. New York: Random House.

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Foucault, M. (1978). Cours de 1977-1978 Sécurité, territoire, population. Retrieved September 4, 2014 from http://michel-foucault-archives.org/?Sujet-securite-territoire-et Foucault, M. (1984). In M. Foucault, The Foucault Reader (pp. 101-120). New York: Pantheon. It is a truncated version of the French original (Foucault, 1969). Furtado, F. A., & Ercolani, G. (Eds.). (2013). Anthropology and Security Studies. Murcia: Editum Ediciones de la Universidad de Murcia. Goldman, J. (Ed.). (2006). Ethics of spying. A reader for the intelligence professional. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press. Greimas, A. J. (1984). Structural Semantics. Lincoln, NE : University of Nebraska Press. Heidegger, M. (1996). Being and time. Translated by J. Stambaugh. Albany, NY : State University of New York Press. Heidegger, M. (no date). What is metaphysics? Translated by M. Groth. Available at http://www.scribd.com/doc/148498487/Martin-Heidegger-What-is-Metaphysics (I use the French edition listed immediately below). Heidegger, M. (1951). Qu’est-ce que la métaphysique? Translated by H. Corbin, authorized by M. Heidegger. Paris: Gallimard. Horgan, J. (2009). Deradicalization or disengagement? A process in need of clarity and a counterterrorism initiative in need of evaluation. Revista de Psicología Social: International Journal of Social Psychology, 24 (2), 291-298, DOI: 10.1174/021347409788041408 Intelligence and Security Committee. (2013). Access to communications data by the intelligence and security Agencies. Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. Retrieved February 13, 2013 from https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/225120/iscaccess-communications.pdf Jacquier, J. D. (2014). An operational code of terrorism : the political psychology of Ayman alZawahiri. Behavioral Sciences of Terrorism and Political Aggression, 6 (1), 19-40, DOI: 0.1080/19434472.2012.754781 Joly, H. (1992). Etudes platoniciennes. La question des étrangers. Paris : Vrin. Kuner, Chr., Cate, F. H., Millard, Chr., & Svantesson, D. J. B. (2014). Systematic government access to private-sector data redux. International Data Privacy Law, 4 (1), 1-3, DOI : 10.1093/idpl/ipt039 Latour, B., & Woolgar, S. (1986). Laboratory life. The Construction of scientific facts. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Leonard, P. (2014). Doing ‘Big Data’ business : evolving business models and privacy regulation. International Data Privacy Law, 4 (1), 53-68, DOI:10.1093/idpl/ipt032 Lyotard, J.-F. (1984; French original 1979). The Postmodern Condition. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Lyotard, J.-F. (1988). The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Moran, C. (2013). Classified. Secrecy and the State in Modern Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. National Commission for the Review of the research and development programs of the United States Intelligence community. (2013). Report. Retrieved December 20, 2013 from http://www.intelligence.senate.gov/107149.pdf

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Reinke de Buitrago, S. (2013). Media discourse on Jihadist terrorism in Europe. Journal of Terrorism Research, 4 (2), 3-13. Salazar, Ph.-J. (2013a). Considérations inactuelles sur la rhétorique de la prospective stratégique. AGIR, 52, 69-82. Salazar, Ph.-J. (2013b, May 8). Communications stratégiques. Actu Défense. Retrieved September 6, 2014 from http://www.actudefense.com/salazar-stratcomm-chef-veut-pas-communiquernarrative/ Salazar, Ph.-J. (2013c, April 29). ‘Stratcomm’ militaire ou De la stratégie d’influence. Les Influences. Retrieved September 22, 2014 from http://www.lesinfluences.fr/Stratcomm-militaire-ou-Dela.html Salazar, Ph.-J. (2013d, April 22). L’héroïsme de Djokhar Tsarnaev ? Les Influences. Retrieved September 22, 2014 from http://www.lesinfluences.fr/L-heroisme-de-Djokhar-Tsarnaev.html Salazar, Ph.-J. (2014a). La vigilancia y la retórica del control: El caso de las agencias de calificación. Rétor, 4 (1), 84-91. Salazar, Ph.-J. (2014b). De l’éthique du renseignement. In G. Arboit (Ed.), Pour une école française du renseignement (pp. 115-122). Paris: Ellipses. Salazar, Ph.-J. (2014c). Strategic Communications: A New Field for Rhetoric. Journal of International Rhetoric Studies, 3, 29-34. Salazar, Ph.-J. (2014d, May 6). Poutine ou le maître de la parole. Les Influences. Retrieved September 6, 2014 from http://www.lesinfluences.fr/Poutine-ou-le-Maitre-de-la-Parole.html Salazar, Ph.-J. (2015, forthcoming). Paroles armées. Paris: Lemieux Editeur. Schilis-Gallego, C. (2014). People power: Lone wolves turn to citizen masses for data help. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. Retrieved September 25, 2014 from http://www.icij.org/blog/2014/09/people-power-lone-wolves-turn-citizen-masses-data-help Serres, M. (1983). Hermes. Baltimore, MD & London, United Kingdom: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Snyder, J. (2009). Dissimulation and the culture of secrecy in Early Modern Europe. Oakland, CA : University of California Press. Strecker, I., & Tyler, S. (Eds.). (2009). Culture and Rhetoric. New York: Berghahn. Surveillance/Rhetoric. (2012). African Yearbook of Rhetoric, 3 (1). Contributions by A. Negri, C. M. Ornatowski, A. Pottathil, E. Denécé, G. Arboit, A. Kirkpatrick, S-S. Maftei, D. de Courcelles, R. Ivekovic, S. Alloggio R. Nethersole, K. Kotzé. Access at http://www.africanrhetoric.org/book5.asp Tealium. (2013). The rise of data activism. Retrieved January 10, 2014 from http://offers.tealium.com/data-activism.html The Third Man. (1949). Movie directed by Carol Reed, screenplay by Graham Greene. United Kingdom. Ulfkotte, Udo. (2014). Gekaufte Journalisten. Kopp Verlag: Rottenburg am Neckar. Žižek, S. (2011). Good Manners in the Age of WikiLeaks. London Review of Books, 33 (2), 9-10. Retrieved February 10, 2011 from http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n02/slavoj-zizek/good-mannersin-the-age-of-wikileaks

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FROM MINDWAR TO ENGAGEMENT: STRATEGIC COMMUNICATION AS GEOPOLITICS Cezar M. Ornatowski San Diego State University United States of America

Abstract: Strategic Communication involves high-level coordination of national policies and principles and their advancement through synchronized messaging and action from the diplomatic to the tactical level. While the concept of Strategic Communication represents a long-term and deliberate move toward increased use of “soft power,” recent interest in it has been motivated by a growing realization that victory in the current conflict depends on influence and perception management rather than kinetic force. As a rhetorical techne, Strategic Communication continues the “missionary” tradition in American foreign policy of casting policy principles in terms of universal values, while becoming, at the tactical level, a dynamic intercultural interface where such principles are rendered into culturally appropriate terms and uptake as feedback up the chain of command. In this way, Strategic Communication makes the capacity to absorb and adapt the discourses and resources of other cultures a necessary function of the strategic projection of “soft power” in the effort to shape the values of the emerging global community. Keywords: strategic communication, soft power, rhetoric, influence, warfare, hegemony “The greatest effect is achieved . . . by being what we wish to seem.” (Cicero. On Duties, Book II, 44). INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND: WHAT IS STRATEGIC COMMUNICATION? In his influential 2004 book Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics, Joseph Nye observed that “political leaders have spent little time thinking about how the nature of power has changed [with globalization and the spread of global communication technologies] and, more specifically, about how to incorporate the soft dimensions into their strategies for wielding power” (1). Nye defined “power” as “the ability to influence the behavior of others to get the outcomes one wants” (2), while “soft power” as “”getting others to want the outcomes that you want” (5). Soft power “co-opts people rather than coerces them” and “rests on the ability to shape the preferences of others” (5). In an increasingly informationdriven and networked world, Nye argued, politics “becomes in part a competition for attractiveness, legitimacy, and credibility,” with a corresponding increase in the importance of soft power (31). These, in fact, are the basic assumptions behind Strategic Communication (SC). SC is based on the realization that “the ‘soft’ power of persuasion and influence is as central to [the] achievement of national goals as any ‘kinetic’ effort” (Cornish et al 8). SC represents the next step in America’s “strategic recognition that power [is] inherent in competitive persuasive activities,” to echo Craig Hayden’s characterization of the reason for the post-World War 2 move by the U.S. into international communication (230), an expression of what Amir Dia has called the “growing interlink between ‘information’ and ‘power’” in a world characterized by the 24-hour news cycle and saturated with electronic media (382). The recent interest in SC has been fuelled by the experiences of the “war on terror” and the “asymmetrical warfare,” which challenge traditional conceptions of armed conflict. Since under such conditions it is no longer possible to contain conflict geographically or win it by military means alone; conflicts need to be contained politically (Kaldor). “In modern warfare,” the Commander’s Handbook for Strategic Communication declares, “all activities are communication activities” (P-7). Already in February 2006, the U.S. Defense Department’s Quadrennial Defense Review report to Congress concluded that



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“victory in the long war ultimately depends on strategic communication by the United States and its international partners.” Rather than a standing doctrine, SC at this point represents a dynamic and still evolving framework for deliberate and coordinated integration of considerations of symbolic meaning into the four dimensions of national power: diplomacy, information, military, and economic (DIME). The U.S. Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms defines SC as “[f]ocused United States Government efforts to understand and engage key audiences to create, strengthen, or preserve conditions favorable for the advancement of United States Government interests, policies, and objectives through the use of coordinated programs, plans, themes, messages, and products synchronized with the actions of all instruments of national power” (24). Although it is one of many definitions of SC that have been advanced, it captures the essential elements that most of them have in common: high-level coordination of national policies and principles and their advancement through synchronized messaging and action from the diplomatic to the tactical level. The purpose of the present discussion is to examine SC as a fundamentally rhetorical enterprise (although “rhetoric” is not mentioned among the many sources of inspiration for SC, nor are rhetoric scholars as such mentioned among the experts consulted). I regard SC as a rhetorical techne: a coherent system (at least in theory) for what in effect amounts to the rhetorical canons of invention, arrangement, articulation, and delivery of national policy. At the “high” level of policy principles, SC continues the Wilsonian, missionary tradition in American foreign policy of casting policy principles in terms of (putatively) universal values. Although in its overall cast SC appears hegemonic, at the tactical level it becomes a dynamic intercultural interface where policy principles and operational themes are rendered into culturally appropriate terms and uptake as feedback up the chain of command. In this way, SC has been developing the capacity to absorb and adapt the discourses and resources of other cultures in its efforts to shape the values of the emerging global community. I end by suggesting that under the conditions of increasing global interconnectivity and mobility, “soft power,” to be effective, needs to be adaptable and responsive to the needs, traditions, and discourses of—in effect to successfully absorb—other cultures (understanding that “culture” is itself a dynamic rhetorical achievement). DISCUSSION What is “Strategic” about Strategic Communication? SC is “strategic” in three senses. In the first sense, it is based on “a synoptic regard seeing each part relative to the whole” (Lawrence 163). As such, SC aims at developing and articulating an “internally coherent strategy” (Kahl and Lynch 50). SC is also “strategic” in that it regards communication as “interest-guided action,” utilitarian, “purposive-rational” action “oriented to the actor’s success” (Habermas 41). Finally, SC is “strategic” in representing a “calculus (or the manipulation) of relations of force which becomes possible whenever a subject of will and power (a business enterprise, an army, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated” (De Certeau 5). Strategic Communication as Rhetorical Techne SC is both a process (not unlike quality assurance) and a capability (Paul). At the top level, policy is formulated through interagency consensus and embodied in a set of high-level declarative principles. The principles are in turn rendered, through a process referred to as “nesting,” into “themes” and “messages” at, respectively, operational and tactical levels, with the return loop closed through surveillance, intelligence, interviews with local informants, and other forms of information gathering and “feedback” (as the Department of Defense 2009 Strategic Communication Joint Integrating Concept document puts it, SC “involves listening as well as transmitting,” 2). SC works through a process that resembles the rhetorical canons of invention (of appropriate policy principles), arrangement (strategic “composition” of the communication effort for a given purpose or in a given theater of operation), articulation or “style” (expression in culturally appropriate forms and idioms), and delivery (provision of information “products”



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delivered through a variety of media). In this manner, SC produces and constantly refines a “grand vision” underpinning foreign policy and renders it into “messages” (verbal and visual) and (symbolic) actions “on the ground” (including, if necessary, kinetic actions). At the highest level, policy principles are articulated in terms of “general principles applicable to all mankind” (Kissinger 447), such as “security,” “prosperity,” “liberty,” “justice” or “respect for human rights,” In this, SC continues what Henry Kissinger calls the “missionary” tendency in American foreign policy. SC renders policy expressed in such terms into “messages” (verbal, visual, or action) at the tactical level. The Commander’s Handbook for Strategic Communication defines “Communication Strategy” as “[a] joint force commander’s strategy for coordinating and synchronizing themes, messages, images, and actions to support national level strategic communication- related objectives and ensure the integrity and consistency of themes and messages to the lowest tactical level” (39). Seen in such terms, SC may be regarded is a techne (in a rhetorical sense) for the generation and projection of power in a globalizing world increasingly dependent on information and saturated with information technologies (both broadcasting and surveillance). Techne here means (to adapt Aristotle) a systematic application of principles derived from experience and observation (including, in SC’s case, various forms of surveillance) in order to achieve desired (symbolic) effects. Although in its “strategic” aspects and as a techne SC has an Aristotelian cast (Michel De Certeau considers Aristotle’s Rhetoric itself “strategic”) SC is “Platonic” in terms of regarding symbolic/rhetorical action as but one of the tools for advancing broader political (“philosophical”) ends--the other tools including (as in Plato’s Republic) deception (Macdonald), psychological manipulation (Forest), and the use of force. To avoid the temptation to dismiss SC as simply another manifestation of “empire,” one must bear in mind that the U.S. and its allies are not the only ones developing doctrines of global strategic influence through “soft” power. SC has thus to be seen in the larger context of competing visions for the “hearts and minds” of the emerging global community. China, for example, has a long tradition of influence warfare, dating back at least to Sun Tzu. Similarly to Anglo-American SC, the Chinese assume that in the near future “the main form of psychological warfare will be contests for public opinion” (Thomas 5). Chinese conceptions also integrate the dimension of “influence” into all instruments of national power, as well as blur the distinctions between strategic, operational, and tactical levels. For the Chinese, “[t]he highest strategic objective in psychological warfare is achieved by changing a country’s fundamental social concepts and its society’s sense of values” (Thomas 5), which makes one wonder about any the room for “dialog” with other cultures. And unlike U.S. and British versions of SC, Chinese PSYWAR is not explicitly declared as being waged in the interests of “democracy,” “freedom,” or “universal values” (the good faith and ultimate “truth” of such declarations is another matter, but words do matter, if only because one may be held responsible for them, which certainly is the case with American SC). In addition, as Timothy Thomas notes based on theses advanced explicitly by Chinese authors, Marxist theory opposes peaceful evolution (Thomas 6). Hegemony, as Raymond Williams has argued, “is always a process. It is not, except analytically, a system or structure. It is a realized complex of experiences, relationships, and activities, with specific and changing pressures and limits. In practice, that is, hegemony can never be singular. (…) Moreover … it does not just passively exist as a form of dominance. It has continually to be renewed, re-created, defended, and modified. It is also continually resisted, limited, altered, challenged by pressures not at all its own. We have then to add to the concept of hegemony the concepts of counter-hegemony and alternative hegemony, which are real and persistent elements of practice.” (112-3) If SC is hegemonic, it is also dynamic. To be effective at the “lowest tactical level,” “messages” must consider local cultural, historical, and linguistic context. At this level, where failure to “communicate” or understand what is being conveyed or implied may be a matter of life or death, “strategic” communication turns personal, with “audience” as “partner” and with emphasis on relationship building,



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“engagement,“ “truth,” “trust,” “credibility,” and matching “words and deeds” (see, for example, Mullen). “We need to understand the people and see things through their eyes,” declared General Stanley McChystal.” “It is their fears, frustrations, and expectations that we must address” (quoted in the Commander’s Handbook, III-20). The U.S. Army in fact uses the term “strategic communication” at the strategic level, “commander’s communication strategy” at the operational level, and “information engagement” at the tactical level (Commander’s Handbook). While it is easy to see “engagement” a mere cover for hegemony, at the level of tactics “influence”—regardless of the original intent--shades into what is in effect intercultural dialogue and intercultural learning conducted, perhaps paradoxically but not without a certain historical logic, along the “edges” of war (since history proceeds dialectically and dialectic is implicit in conflict). The fact that this kind of “dialog” influences even the higher, operational and even policy, levels is shown by the evolution over time of the United States “narrative” of the current conflict, from the “war on terror” to “Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism” and, more recently, to “Struggle for Global Security and Progress” (Ornatowski). CONCLUSION: STRATEGIC RHETORIC AS GEOPOLITICS In the wake of the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, a military white paper entitled “From PSYOP to MindWar: The Psychology of Victory” (originally written in 1980 and revived in 2003 with an introduction by the original author), suggested that the Vietnam war had been lost not by the U.S. militarily but psychologically on the home front. To forestall such a situation in the future, the paper proposed the concept of “MindWar”: “a type of war which is fought . . . in the minds of the national populations involved” (Valley 4-5). The “main effort” in any conflict, the paper suggested, “must originate at the national level. It must strengthen our national will to victory and it must attack and ultimately destroy that of the enemy.” MindWar is “deliberate in that it is a planned, systematic, and comprehensive effort involving all levels of activity from the strategic to the tactical” (5). “In its strategic context, MindWar must reach out to friends, enemies, and neutrals alike across the globe … through the media possessed by the United States which have the capabilities to reach virtually all people on the face of the Earth” (7). These media “are, of course, electronic media—television and radio” (7, emphasis in the original). Furthermore, “it must be axiomatic of MindWar that it always speaks the truth. It power lies in its ability to focus recipients’ attention on the truth of the future as well as that of the present. MindWar thus involves the stated promise of the truth that the United States has resolved to make real if it is not already so” (7). The concept of MindWar bears striking resemblances to SC. However, the distance between MindWar and SC can be measured by the distance between the means of delivery of the former, television and radio, and the diffuse, decentered, networked global media that constitute the world of the latter. The real question is perhaps not whether SC is or is not “hegemonic,” but what kind of rhetoric, connected to what values, is going to shape the emerging global community? In her review of the influence and spread of Greek rhetoric in Rome, Joy Connoly suggests that after the territorial expansion of the Republic, “rhetoric offered Roman culture the discursive resources to meet the challenge of empire.” Rhetoric became “a discipline for the new world order” defined by the expansion of Roman civilization (141). It may be argued that SC also represents a “discipline” (understood in a Foucauldian sense) for a new world order defined by the global expansion of both Western, postEnlightenment conceptions of democracy (with the political and cultural pressures this creates) and information technologies that enhance the ability of groups, networks, movements, and individuals to influence the course of affairs. Strategy, according to De Certeau, “postulates a place susceptible of being circumscribed as a propre and of being the base from where relations can be administered with an exteriority of targets or threats (clients or competitors, enemies, the countryside surrounding the city, the objectives and objects of research, etc.)” (5). “All ‘strategic’ rationalization,” De Certeau suggests, “begins by distinguishing its ‘appropriate’ place from an ‘environment,’ that is, the place of its own power and will” (5). De Certeau



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suggests that the establishment of an “autonomous” place represents a ”victory of place over time” and permits a “transformation of strange forces into objects which one can observe and measure,” thus control, in a gesture by which seeing becomes also foreseeing (5). Such knowledge is tantamount to the “capacity to transform the uncertainties of history into readable spaces” (5). The “precondition of this knowledge,” however, De Certeau suggests, is power (6). SC transforms potential uncertainties into readable spaces by articulating them according to an overarching “vision,” at once “seeing” and “foreseeing,” controlling its objects and delivering them, when necessary, to more kinetic forces. In SC’s case, power is both a precondition (as military power) and a result (as political power) of such knowledge. Seen from this perspective, SC emerges as a dunamis: a dynamic fulfillment of a potentiality implicit in both global military and economic power (of the United States) and the interconnectivity and penetration of communication technologies. As the U.S. has been learning over the last decade, this “soft” power of SC critically depends, however, on successful absorption, appropriation, and integration of the discursive and symbolic resources of other cultures. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to acknowledge the many contributions to my thinking of the students in my graduate seminar “Ideology, Discourse, and Conflict” in the Master of Science Program in Homeland Security at San Diego State University. Special thanks go also to my colleague Dr. Jeffrey McIllwain for his invaluable contributions to my knowledge (scant for an expert but fair for a rhetoric scholar) of the history and theory of warfare. Address correspondence to: [email protected] REFERENCES Cicero. (1991). On duties. Cambridge texts in the history of political thought. M. T., Griffin and E. M. Atkins (Eds.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Commander’s Handbook for Strategic Communication and Communication Strategy, version 3.0. (June 24, 2010). US Joint Forces Command and Joint Warfighting Center. Connoly, J. (2007). The new world order: Greek rhetoric in Rome. In I. Worthington (Ed.), A companion to Greek rhetoric (pp. 139-165). Malden, MA: Blackwell. De Certeau, M. (1980). On the oppositional practices of everyday life. Social Text 3, 3-43. Dia, A. (2006). The information age and diplomacy: An emerging strategic vision in world affairs. Boca Raton, FL: Dissertation.com. Forest, J. F. (2009). Influence warfare: How terrorists and governments fight to shape perceptions in a war of ideas. Westport, CT: Praeger Security International. Habermas, J. (1979). Communication and the evolution of society. Boston: Beacon. Hayden, C. (2012). The rhetoric of soft power: Public diplomacy in global contexts. Lanham, MA: Lexington. Kahl, C. H., & Lynch, M. (2013). U.S. strategy after the Arab uprisings: Toward progressive engagement. The Washington Quarterly 36, 2, 39-60.



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Kaldor, M. (2007). New and old wars: Organized violence in the global era. 2nd ed. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kissinger, H. (1994). Diplomacy. New York: Simon and Shuster. Lawrence, T.E. (1938). Seven pillars of wisdom. Garden City, NY: International Collectors Library. Macdonald, S. (2007). Propaganda and information warfare in the twenty-first century: Altered images and deception operations. London: Routledge. Mullen, M. G. (2009). From the chairman. Strategic communication: Getting back to basics. Joint Forces Quarterly 55, 2-4. Nye, J. (2004). Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. New York: Public Affairs. Ornatowski, Cezar M. (2012). Rhetoric goes to war: The evolution of the United States of America’s narrative of the ‘war on terror. African Yearbook of Rhetoric 3, 65-74. Thomas, T. L. (2003). New developments in Chinese strategic psychological warfare. Special Warfare. Retrieved Sept. 14, 2014 from www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/fmso/chinesepsyop.pdf. U.S. Department of Defense. Quadrennial Defense Review, February 6, 2006. U.S. Department of Defense 2009 Strategic Communication Joint Integrating Concept. U. S. Department of Defense. Joint Publication 1-02, Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms. Retrieved Sept. 26, 2014 from http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/doddict/data/s/05185.html. Valley, Paul E. (1980/2003). From PSYOP to mind war: The psychology of victory. Presidio of San Francisco: 7th Psychological Operations Group, U.S. Army Reserve. Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and literature. New York: Oxford University Press.



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GLOBAL KNOWLEDGE IN THE GLOBAL CITY ACCORDING TO PAUL OTLET’S TWIN UTOPIAS Paul Ghils Director, Cosmopolis Haute Ecole de Bruxelles Belgium Abstract : This paper discusses some of the philosophical tenets underlying Paul Otlet’s work before and after World War I. A Belgian internationalist and documentalist, he anticipated the hyperlinked structure of today’s world wide web and designed a universal documentation system to integrate all branches of knowlege. This comprehensive structure was meant to be the central focus to rule a world city representing a new world polity, which would in turn order international relations around a « scientific goverment ». Keywords: City, cosmopolitan, global science, utopia « L’utopie de nos jours devient scientifique » (Utopia today has gone scientific) Paul Otlet, Monde, 1935 UNIVERSAL V. PARTICULAR Paul Otlet’s ambition is undoubtedly impressive, but the means to achieve the twin objectives of his project are equally impressive: building the world city on the first hand, and grounding the knowledge of the world and human societies on the other. Three components were defined to this end. The first was a comprehensive coverage and classification of collected data, and their translation into the diverse forms of a universal scientific language to reflect the order of things and beings. Next comes the second, consisting in globalizing human societies as a consequence of globalized knowledge, to eventually generate a kind of « collective brain » which would enshrine science as well as and the feeling, will and memory of the world. The third system poses that the natural order of things is dominated by a supernatural, overhanging order. As there is obviously no question of examining or commenting upon this project in a few pages, we will deal with better known aspects of Otlet’s two axes only: building the world city and systematizing knowledge through a documentary and classifying method. These are the first two components synthetically expressed in Monde, his opus magnum published in 1935. THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT Whether considered from a purely international or taxonomic perspective, Otlet’s work may appear to be anachronistic, especially when presented out of its historical and scientific context. It also reflects a utopian vision which can be explained in part as a rational response to a peculiar phase of what he considers to be a new world in the making, a form of international democracy or, to take a less ambiguous approach, a cosmopolitical ordering in which political institutions allow citizens to act, express opinions and be represented in the international field regardless of their geographical location (Archibugi 1995). However, the inter-war period does not provide « black and white » answers, being as it is a transitional phase fraught with tensions clearly appearing in Otlet’s work when referring to the status of science and the political representation of social actors. On the first point, in contrast with Edmond Husserl’s observation that a sense of distrust of the role of science goes back to 1935 (Lecourt 1990), Otlet was still inspired by scientist views from the previous period: « … it is the entirety of human sciences that lead to knowing the Universe as a whole. » (Otlet 1935, VII, my translation) Second, the idealist version of conventional philosophical liberalism retakes the claims, of such diverse thinkers as Kant, Locke, Hume or Rousseau, that after the First World war a peaceful world could be rebuilt, designed as an international society based on multilateral institutions guaranteeing solidarity, civil liberties and democracy. The legal pacifism enshrined in international courts is quickly superseded by a utopian current targeted at a genuine international government. Leonard Woolf (Virginia’s husband) is asked by the Fabian Society to write a report, released in 1916 under the heading International Government (Woolf 1916), one year

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after Otlet’s publication of his own Constitution mondiale de la Société des nations (« World Constitution of the League of Nations », with the subtitle Le nouveau droit des gens (« the New Law of Nations ») in 1917. Beyond any possible mutual influence, what is relevant here is the wide public and intellectual debate about the idea of international democracy surrounding the creation of the League of Nations as the first attempt to establish a world polity in the wake of World War I. In a way, this idea was a novelty in so far as democracy among equal states was far from being achieved even within states. Indeed, Utopia was for the first time stated in normative terms, predicating international democracy beyond the mere addition of national democracies and considering the very nature of international relations. Generally, Otlet oscillates between the two ideal poles, political and scientific, with the World City being grounded on the scientific enterprise and vice versa, at least to some extent. In a way, his view diverged from Max Weber, who held in the same period that traditional knowledge legitimation processes (theological and cosmological) were receding to the full rationalization and intellectualization of social life, which in turn led to the « disenchantment of the world », a Schillerian notion (Weltentzaüberung) now associated with Max Weber’s name (Weber 1919). Whereas Weber was wise enough not to integrate social science into a social physics, Otlet insists that new prediction and planning means are available to improve social order, in line with the epistemological model of physics: « The recent rise of the so-called « technocracy » gives sociological forecasting the opportunity to develop its full potential. » (Otlet, 1935, V) Fully indeed, in so far as the « sociological equation » considered by Otlet embraces all interactions between existing factors, to be integrated into a « world equation ». Logically, the basic reference is Adolphe Quételet (1796-1874, a Belgian mathematician, astronomer, naturalist and statistician), who composed a « social physics » along principles laid down by the Physiocrats, where the natural environment and the notion of homme moyen (« average man ») can be translated into statistical terms. In the same way as historical and economic cycles, the sociological equation can consequently account for constraints limiting human freedom and evolving from social contract to social legislation. The final destination of society and human creativity becomes determined, albeit in relative and statistical terms, within a constructed order. In practical terms, Otlet’s initiatives focus on documentation and the building of one or more world cities. In 1901, Franz Kemeny had already supported the idea of a world academy to gather « all cultural movements » covering sciences, literature and the arts, and a world centre for education (Grossi 2002). This led to the creation in 1909 of an international Bureau for Educational Documentation in Oostende, the first comparative institute of this kind (Speeckaert 1980). With the same universalist and educational aim in mind, he created with Nobel Peace Prize Henri La Fontaine the International Institute of Bibliography (IIB) in 1895, which sponsored the first World Congress of Universal Documentation, held in Paris in 1937, and was the parent organization of the Union of International Associations (UIA) created in Brussels in 1907 and was responsible for the development of the widely-used Universal Decimal Classification (UDC). The globalization of intellectual life was significantly supported by proliferating international nongovernmental organisations, which were to coordinate and unify related bodies so as to gather in one single global system all data collected so far. (Mattelart 1999) Similar congresses were held in Brussels in 1910 and 1913, and an international museum, a collective library and a universal bibliographical repertory containing 11 million cards classified by field and author were created. The ultimate goal of such initiatives was, as Otlet said, « to unify the civilised world as a whole in a common action with a view to achieving given aims of universal interest which individual states could not achieve, offering human kind the instruments it needed to gain greater power collectively, placing human activities under optimal conditions to develop fully. International organisations are meant to be linked with progress in human achievements and civilisation. Next to national civilisations and superimposed on these, there must be a world civilisation based on what the former share, so as to generate the spirit of a polycivilisation ». (UAI 1912) With this in mind, they proposed in 1920 a plan for an international intellectual labour organisation, a part of which led to the creation of the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation located in Paris, which provided a permanent secretariat for the League of Nations International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation. Its aim was to promote international cultural/intellectual exchange between scientists, researchers, teachers, artists and other intellectuals. The systematic collection and processing of data produced by the various analytical and mathematical tools available to researchers makes it possible to create a documentation system which could support sociological forecast: « In doing so, we can find natural resources to be used in forecast analyses. To this aim, a precondition is to posess all data. These data in the sociological area should consequently be registered in a more and more complete, detailed, and fast way. » Otlet’s continuing commitment, however, was to collect all data

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needed for global forecast, not only in the social field, but also in weather forecast, astronomy, geology, all the sciences which could « … bring examples of powerful inventories capable of inspiring and supporting social research. » (Otlet 1935, 425-426) The mechanical, systematized operations that announce the development of robotics allow him to think about sociological forecast and to ask : « Is it forbidden to imagine that society will have a set of adaptive institutions capable of carrying out balancing functions similar to automatic pilots in aircrafts? » (Otlet 1935, 429) The influences that can be detected here, among others, are those of Saint-Simon, Fourier, the Fabian Society (Woolf 1916) and more schools which combine scientist and cosmopolitan approaches to what was presented as the establishment of a new world order. From a scientific and philosophical point of view, Otlet’s work is characterized by a number of conceptions which recall Kant’s rationalism, Leibniz's quest for the philosophical basis of a universal human language – rather than Diderot’s Encyclopédie - and Novalis’s romantic project to integrate the whole of human knowledge. In Kantian style, Otlet’s method was aimed at grounding knowledge on immediate evidences, the careful and systematic review of available data referring to the various branches of knowledge. On the other hand, it shares with Kant’s humanism the progressive impetus that proclaims faith in reason and freedom and is committed to engage in a way of instructing the whole of mankind, inviting it to get free of this « minority condition », of that « inability to use its own understanding without being controlled by another. » (Kant 1795) Reason, will and sensitivity as faculties that belong to man according to Kant can be found in Otlet’s writings, mutatis mutandi, as knowledge, action and feeling. Furthermore, he defines his method in the same way as Kant, halfway between a dogmatic rationalism à la Christian Wolff and an empirical scepticism à la Hume. However, the three systems that Otlet sees as the original conception of the world – positive analysis, the synthesis of the laws of thought and intuition, and a supernatural order, recall Wolff’s dogmatic rationalism, especially with the tripartition of metaphysics into psychology (science of the soul), cosmology (science of the world) and theology (science of the divine). THE SCIENTIFIC UTOPIA Rational knowledge, as a prime component of a modern science that excludes any other dimension of thinking, goes back to the ideal model of Greek philosophy freed from contextual and cultural determinants to the point of severing universal science from its object, and represented by the « deified » thinker in Aristotle’s cosmology, immune from doxa, myths and religion, where each type of substance from humans to primal elements has its own individual telos. The history of sciences has nevertheless shown that such a dichotomy has typically turned out to be deceptive, even more so as the cultural environment constantly biases the structuring of knowledge. In turn, science itself has never ceased to generate myths which often express a degree of mistrust of it (the Fall of Icarus, Faust, Frankenstein…). Thomas Kuhn would say here that conventional science can succeed in making progress only if there is a strong commitment by the relevant scientific community to their shared theoretical beliefs, values, instruments and techniques, and even metaphysics. Such biases imply that human means are finite, that there is no question of making scientists into preachers of truth. In the platonic tradition, this category of myths and representations speaks about the world through discursive and iconographical registers which have a multiplier effect. It is contemplative (zoon logon echon, living being endowed with speech and reason) rather than active, teaches rather than transforms the world (homo faber). It is the perfect language that Umberto Eco (1994) or Maurice Olender (1989) have admirably described, showing that scientific research in language continued to be impregnated with mythical elements until the early twentieth century, particularly with the myth of human origins. In contrast with these primal myths, a second category appears, which resolutely engages with science, technology and what finally gives birth to contemporary technoscience. The universal science promoted by Otlet strongly interferes with technical inputs, with a science prone to becoming subordinated to technology, opening the way to mechanisation and automation, where humankind is bound to become an organic whole of peaceful and fruitful relationships between its units (Gon). (Otlet 1935, XI) Documentation or encyclopaedia? Otlet’s ambition requires certain conditions to be fulfilled, one of them being the need to transcend cultural diversity, for which his approach to some extent goes beyond interdisciplinary inquiries to make transdisciplinary moves: « It is remarkable today that the primary source of new ideas and scientific breakthroughs does not come from traditionally recognized sciences, but from overlapping areas, a kind of scientific no-man’s land. » (Otlet 1935, 360). It therefore requires a unified science of society, whose many

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contradictions could be solved by an integration of knowledge and the establishment of an expected « scientific governement » able to compensate for the global « hyperseparatism » he deplores, because documentation, he says, is the best means to establish the conditions under which stable and benevolent relationships between human beings can be fostered. (Otlet 1935, 388 and 400) The underlying principles of these proposals refer to mixed traditions inspired by encyclopaedism, from Leibniz to Diderot and Novalis. Such approaches, like Diderot and d’Alembert’s encyclopaedia, presupposed an overview of human questions, whereas Leibniz aimed for a universal communication system predicated on universal knowledge and Novalis aimed for the interdisciplinary interconnection of various realms of knowledge. To start with, Leibniz’s view is particularly illuminating to understand universalisation in the field of knowledge, but also to conceive of communication beyond sociocultural contexts as well as scientists’subjectivity, not to mention his stance as a diplomat and a senior counselor at the Mainz and Hanover courts and, relatedly, his interest in peace building among European nations. Even though the universal science he grounded in the thesis that there is no mind-body interaction as such, but only a non-causal relationship of pre-established harmony or correspondence between mind and body, and his plan for a universal, artificial language to express concepts or ideas were doomed to fail, Leibniz’s insight may look more plausible with hindsight, if we look at the the rise of computer science in the twentieth century. Utopian as it were, the Leibnizian vision actually ignored the arbitrary side of any classification – what Jorge Luis Borges would illustrate with his Chinese classification of animals (Borges 1993), which no Chinese encyclopaedia has ever described ((In which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) etc.) However, it also responded to a practical need, leading to the proposed infinitesimal calculus to solve political and moral issues, or to reduce any discourse to a mere calculus on the condition that it is reformed so as to adopt a strict mathematical structure to adequately match concepts through the « universal characteristic » of language. Otlet will retake the Leibnizian idea of a universal symbolic notation to this end. The Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC), or Dewey Decimal System (1873) adopted by the International Bibliographical Institute created in Brussels in 1895 to cover intellectual production in the whole word meets the same needs. The most relevant feauture for this discussion, however, is the ability to bring together all elements in a single interconnected whole with varying ways (orders) to proceed to each others, i.e. to create a genuine network structure, which departs from the deductive, linear sequence used by Descartes to describe the order of reasons. Cryptography, mapping, communication and documentation systems are all tools used to constitute a system of signs viewed by Marcelo Dascal (1978) as a genuine semiotic system, that is, what the Mundaneum was defined by Otlet: an idea, a method, a network, an institution and a « Sommary of the whole, symbol of all symbols, prototype of all relevant things ordered and connected, classification of classifications, documentation of documentations, focus of focuses, university of universities. » (Otlet 1935, 453) The method applies a Leibnizian combinatorial view of concepts, based on an analysis into primitives, to which symbols or « characters » are then assigned, from which characters are formed for derivative concepts by means of combinations of the symbols. The bibliographical notation is a translation of it, with syntax and semantics. Relations are ruled by the Aritotelian logic, also rehabilitated by Leibniz as an infallible model for language rectitude to be emulated all along the seventeenth century (Kulstad & Carlin 2013). This feature of universalism, which drew the attention of Henri Lafontaine more than Otlet’s, is closely related to the social and scientific sides of theit cooperation. Not surprisingly, the universal language is introduced as a logical and expected complement of railways, electrical telegraph, big exhibitions illustrating all scientific discoveries and industrial achievements of the time. (Auroux 1997, 378) What distinguishes the two internationalists is only that Otlet was more concerned with a language (langage) able to convey the concepts laid down as universal, while La Fontaine was rather aware of the pragmatic dimension of communication, regardless of linguistic diversity, and the need for an international language (langue). Not surprinsigly either, linguistic universalism appeared at the same time as Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof’s humanism in 1906, which created hillelism as the foundation for a universal religion taking account of all cultural traits and included the mystical Esperanto initiative. However, it was particularly at the beginning of the last century that this particular universalism took its unique shape, as an ontology perfectly consistent with the ideas so expressed (Auroux 1997, 380-382), was to be replaced with an auxiliary international language better suited to practical uses. Even though the esperantist project initially supported by Otlet and La Fontaine – the latter was rapporteur of a delegation of eleven countries which submitted a draft resolution to the League of Nations’ first Assembly in that same year - is still supported by some, the concept of universal language only survives in formal and computerised systems. (Mundaneum 2002)

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The romantic imprint One of the most highly innovative among romanticist works is Novalis’s Romantic Encyclopaedia, which fully embodies the author’s « Magical Idealism », a personal philosophy containing meditations on mankind and nature, the possible future development of our faculties of reason, imagination, and the senses, and the unification of the different sciences. One salient topics of romanticism is an ever-changing world torn apart by multiple contradictions, and this encyclopaedic project undoubtedly opens up new avenues into German romanticism and idealism in a post-Kantian perspective. In what he called his unfinished notes for a universal science (Das Allgemeine Brouillon) conceived in 1798-1799, Novalis reflects on numerous aspects of human culture, including philosophy, poetry, the natural sciences, the fine arts, mathematics, mineralogy, history and religion, and brings them all together into a « Romantic Encyclopaedia » or « Scientific Bible. » In it, he intends to gather « the members long separated of total science. » What should be noted here is, rather than Diderot and d’Alembert’s « empirical agreggate » (d’Alembert 1991, 101 and 335), Novalis envisages a systematic project to deal with the oppositions unsolved by critical thought between subject and object, the ideal and real worlds. From philosophy to literature and science, he thinks of a system which unites knowledge, religion and aesthetics into a relative, plural universalism whose extreme modernity is a reflection on a universe which is both mobile and inexhaustible, characterised by both identity and contradiction, in an interdisciplinary perspective. As a whole, his system appears as an increased complexity of Leibniz’s combinatorial model, inviting to think in several directions, to follow a mathematical sequence or a series of problems without any originating point. (Schefer 2000, 15) It is a genuine opening to a dynamic and decentered universe, free from the Platonic ontology and Leibniz’s pre-established harmony, which seems to foreshadow Deleuze’s « nomad thinking » and the networking philosophy of which some aspects can also be found in Otlet’s work. Equally romantic is the reference to a cycle defined by a ternary structure, where the third term (art, religion or philosophy) is to synthesize and balance the first two terms (the real and the ideal, even if Otlet falls short of Novalis, who suggests, from another viewpoint, that this closed structure should be overcome to reach an open model without any reference point, « chaotic », « energized by a philosophy of the infinity » (Novalis 2000, 325). On the contrary, Otlet designs a kind of panopticon, « a single point wherefrom all world events could be observed, all individuals could realize that his conscience, his will, his feeling are but aspects of the great whole, the aspect suited to the synthesis of his own being, his personal case. » (Otlet 1935, 385-386) The political utopia Considering that Otlet appears to be Leibnizian with a touch of romanticism in the sphere of knowledge and its dissemination, the question is whether a similar approach applies to his view of international relations. At first sight, his idea of a comprehensive restructuring to save humans from the scourge of what was a « total » war, not only military, economic and cultural, but waged also against civil populations, may be compared to Leibniz’s comments in the decades that followed the Thirty Years War (1618–1648), before the Peace of Westphalia was signed with a view to allowing European peoples to better communicate and stemming the devastating power of conflicting theologies that had divided the continent. However, the comparison stops there, because Leibniz was never a pacifist and did not endorse the idea of a « perpetual peace », which first came up during 18th century when abbé de Saint-Pierre was working as the negotiator for the Treaty of Utrecht, while Otlet remained a utopian in the international field as he was in his view of science. Even if it necessarily presupposes a rational, if not mathematical foundation, the Leibnizian « best of all possible worlds » quite suggests a Realpolitik (Leibiniz 1715, 328-336), where the « world constitution » conceived by Otlet and Lafontaine is overtly cosmopolitical. Additionally, the associated social model impresses with its platonic overtones, with a « scientific government » (Otlet 1935, 329) whose purpose and substance are not too different from the aristocratic government embodied in Plato’s regime ruled by a philosopher king, and whose contemporary figure may be the oligarchy of scientific and technocratic experts present in various fields of governmental decision making. So, the conception of a « total prediction » and « world equation » was to logically lead to this other side of Otlet’s utopia, the concept of world city which fulfilled the vision of a total centralization of international power and knowledge. He tried to reconciliate this with the assumption that human freedom and creativity laid in controlling correlations between diverse activities. Despite these apparently conflicting assumptions, both approaches - social forecast and building a world city – were greatly stimulated by the many actions and reflections that supported endeavours toward world peace, the status of science and, as an increasingly pressing need, the architectonic design of societies in the most literal sense, notably of town and cities and the communication networks supplying every place. In this regard, Otlet’s admired the inventive genius of Le

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Corbusier (Courtiau 2003), who illustrated in his mind the concepts of what was unpredictable and unexpected, these « continuing, sudden outbursts of modern events, the powerful disruption in life, the disarray triggered by psychics such as inventors. » (Otlet 1935, 418) The kind of city that resulted from their cooperation may seem filled with a sense of totality, present in similar utopias, opposed to any degree of freedom and creativeness. The progressive momentum – understood as the new avenues opened by science and social and societal advances – that prevails in urban planning in during the first half of the 20th century until 1960 gave rise to the International Congress for Modern Architecture (Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne, CIAM), an influential association of modern architects and city planners united in a search for solutions to the problems of urban areas. Founded in 1928 by Le Corbusier and Sigfried Giedion, CIAM served for several decades as the organizational centre of the modern movement in architecture and its alliance with technoscience. In their minds, the world city is one example of a paradoxical utopia combining imagination and social, political and economic issues, in a transition period involving critical reflection, reform projects or even revolutionary ideas. (Courtiau 1987) In this context, the spatial model designed for a similar purpose by Otlet and Le Corbusier reminds us of the Renaissance upheavals, when Thomas More published the founding text of Utopia (1516) which criticized the society of that time, designed that « nowhere land », the anti-society opposed to the former. The reference to topoi, as mentioned by Aristotle, is in fact one function of imagination to cristallise memory (Wunenburger 1997) is often made by Otlet to link sensory impressions through an artificially visualise them in space in order to control the process. More’s utopia had admittedly no practical end, but Otlet’s is meant to be a practical achievement justified by the horrorr of WWI. This practical aim may explain the absolute, almost mythical character of model cities promoted in the Athens Charter (Charte d'Athènes), and consequently the charges of scientific terrorism brought against them by their opponents, who exposed the dogmatism displayed by some architects claiming, as argued by Le Corbusier, that « Experimental evidence is available, everything is being tested in scientific experiments. » (Choay 2001) The political side of this movement is in some ways a natural outgrowth of utopian developments, a recurring pattern since ancient Greece first linked myths to religious narrations providing collective truth in socalled pre-rational or traditional societies to later grant them their autonomy, so that myth became « a meaningful vector, without imposing a single truth, only if it is contemporaneous with a logos, a hermeneutic reason which will interpret in an unhindered, open way, according to a form of questioning. » (Wunenburger 2002) Western politics has been gradually nourished by such defeated myths, from the newly-gained autonomy of Greek cities up to the late development of modern democracies. Whether ingenuous or overoptimistic, Otlet’s plan is only a revival of this story. As early as the second half of the 18th century, Jacques Tenon (1788) endeavoured to incorporate the hospital into modern technology. Locating this institution within the cosmopolitan, humanist culture of his time, he saw it as a cumulative, collaborative, supranational effort of scientists, physicians, learned societies, governments, and even ordinary citizens. He referred to the medical institution as a « measure of the civilization of a people » and undertook the transition from the medieval to the modern hospital. Another example, from a more punitive point of view expressing the shared principles and scientific creed of utopians, is Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, a penitentiary based upon an idea of his younger brother, who while working in Russia for Prince Potemkin, hit upon the « central inspection principle » which would facilitate the training and supervision of unskilled workers by experienced craftsmen. Bentham came to adapt this principle for his proposed prison, a circular building with the prisoners' cells arranged around the outer wall and the central point dominated by an inspection tower. From this building, the prison's inspector could look into the cells at any time and even speak with them, though the inmates themselves would never be able to see the inspector himself. The communication/information challenge In the early 19th century, a variety of critical models thrived, global and no longer fragmentary, from Owen’s New Harmony city in Indiana to Etienne Cabet’s French-based icarian colonies established as egalitarian communes in several American states, to Hygeia, a City of Health, by Benjamin Ward Richardson in England, and all those Karl Marx called the « utopian socialists » (Owen, Fourier, Cabet and their followers). Otlet’s global plan would combine various aspects of them, from the hygienist component to the communication utopia. A common feature that appears in them, whether cognitive, global or focused on communication, is a trend to aggregate individual data within a centralized, if not totalitarian pattern, which threatens individual creativity and freedom in human communities. Followers of the Platonic city have consistently resorted to expressions of dogmatic knowledge, a monopoly of political power, censorship of human expression in its diversity, or for a significant part of it set them down on the side of digitization. However, the historical context of human representations has also held that The Republic and Laws present model cities more closely related to fairness in mystical communities than the standardization of minds in totalitarian states. Plato’city would be situated, as suggested by Jean-Jacques Wunenburger, as « … between the ideal of Pythagorian brotherhoods and

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the blueprints for society as imagined by Christian utopias of the Renaissance. » (Wunenburger 2002, 90) Later utopias, from Thomas More to today’s contemporary varieties, are pre-arranged, closed communities in the fields of property, religion or sexual life which have little to do with current cosmopolitan projects. In this sense, Otlet’s world city ultimately remains paradoxically trapped in a social ideology which, despite its progressive, modern ambition, reflects the basic concepts of its time closer to philosophical and political conservatism. In some ways, today’s political projects have lost good part of their original substance and initial impetus, to the point that even democracy has reached the point where it is threatened by all kinds of dogmatism, religious and economic as well as scientific and, on the other hand, by an implosion which could become, as suggested by Emmanuel Todd with reference to Plato, an olilgarchy of the powerful and the experts Todd 2002). True, other dimensions seem to figure on the horizon, emerging or projected from the collective brain and cyberculture, global civil society and universal jurisdiction, namely what is left in the end of a utopian imagination: building a global order based on more democratic international relations, a new world-wide covenant on man and the biosphere, or universal access to knowledge and information. If Otlet foresees the emergence of Teilhard de Chardin’ omega point seen as node of ultimate synthesis and consciousness, Joël de Rosnay’s global brain as the worldwide network formed by all individuals together with the information and communication technologies, it usually keeps a partial, if not biased or litteral, platonism or neo-platonism, Leibniz’s caracteristica universalis of the educational legacy of encyclopaedism. Documentation would allow science to gradually be severed from human mind and materialize the world of ideas, man would ultimately and instantaneously contemplate every side of the Universe through his technological tools (Otlet 1935, 390-391), which would reflect the Idea, this « ideal model of which the artist will make a copy in the physical world. » (Wunenburger 1997, 117) This mimetic gesture is still present in a number of cyberworlds, sometimes in radicalized versions not significantly different from ideas implicit or explicit in Otlet’s writings, pointing to a dynamic and hierarchical pattern toward a « collective brain » which would raise man to that « omniscient being, equivalent to God himself. » (Otlet 1935, 358 and 390-391) CONCLUSION Like all utopias, the world city and the Mundaneum draw from history, while taking into account hopes for the future and occasionally carrying out effective projects. Plato, Leibniz, Kant and other thinkers unsurprisingly leave indelible marks, while contemporary intellectual schools celebrate the all-powerful science and embrace the illusion that they would lay down the rational foundation for a brave new communication world mounted into a cosmopolitical framework whose early signs had appeared in the first decades of the 19th century. Among its representations, the metaphor of a sphere (Otlet 1935, 385, 452 and XXV) is particularly revealing, when it solves in a few concepts the presence to the real world in all its breadth from a central point realises the full potential of being, a panepticon of sort which however contradicts the networking assumption usually ascribed to Otlet. Indeed, even as it was known in the 1920s and 1930s networking was a complex web of heterogeneous elements between chaos and hyperstructuring, order and disorder, which was rather reluctant to submit to a single regulator. As Umberto Eco (1972, 368-370) said some time ago, there is communication because we cannot see everything at a glance, or better still because the whole cannot possibly be seen at a glance. Networks are the setting for the confrontation between centering and decentering, the obliged passage rather than a heuristic instrument. Cyberworld experts say nothing other than that when they see communication tools as an empty place, a crossing point for the future, and not the foundation for a new social structure (Musso 2000, Sfez 1992). The social and political aspects of his views appear equally paradoxical, in so far as their aims are socially progressive and scientifically ambitious, the underlying concepts and implicit outline make them philosophically conservative. From Comte’s “social physics” to Durkheim’s essentialism, French views in social science focus their efforts mainly on improving social prediction and restoring community relationships and social order through the development and implementation of authorities which would reach more certainty, control moral behaviours and in fact postpone social change. Similar views can be found with Tönnies, who opposes close personal relationships in « communities » and impersonal relationships in «societies », or with Weber, who deplores the consequences of the increasing rationalisation of social life and the resulting « disenchantment of the world », and particularly the weakening community ties characteristic of modernity. (Bottomore 1964) These features culminate in a « taxonomic vertigo » with Otlet, a striking example of the classification reason fully consistent with Leibniz and the encyclopaedist aim, the idea of a deus ex machina, the illumination under a mechanical system, which conserve the preconceived harmony of the Platonic ontology. In the spirit of Leibniz’s interest in Chinese ideograms, he looked for a universal, conceptual language which could become

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effectively international, sought a documentation synthesis which would generate an « intellectual machine », a kind of duplication of human and social bodies covering varying figurative modes informed by concepts, mathematics and images, to ultimately reach a maximum abstraction accounting for knowledge, national democracies and global governance. Assuming that Otlet’s visionary project marks the dawning of contemporary communication technologies, its organicist bias cannot be considered as revolutionary; it also differs from the systemic and network thinking as conceived by Novalis, namely an open-ended, ever-changing universe with no single point of reference. The question remains as to whether modern societies can avoid this shifting nature, either expanding to a multicentric, deterritorialized space or withdrawing into an identitarian closure, the very thing we call premodern. Address correspondence to: [email protected] REFERENCES Archibugi, D. (1995). Cosmopolitan Democracy. An Agenda for a New World Order. Cambridge: Polity. Auroux, S. (1997). Histoire des idées linguistiques, tome 3, Liège, Belgium: Mardaga. Auroux, S. (1997). Histoire des idées linguistiques, tome 3. Liège, Belgium: Mardaga. Borges, J. L. (1993). Other inquisitions 1937-1952. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bottomore, T. B. (1964) Elites and Society. London: Watts and C°. Centassi, R. and Masson, H. (2001). L’homme qui a défié Babel. Paris: L’Harmattan. Choay, F. (2001). Urbanisme – théorie et réalisations. Encyclopédie Universalis. Courtiau, C. (1987). Le Corbusier à Genève 1922-1982. Paris: Payot. Courtiau, C. (2003). Les relations entre Otlet et Genève. Transnational Associations, 60-71. d’Alembert, J. (1991). In Diderot, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 17; Éléments. Paris: Hermann. Dascal, M. (1978). La sémiologie de Leibniz, Paris: Aubier Montaigne. Eco, U. (1972). La structure absente. Introduction à la recherche sémiotique. Paris: Mercure de France. Eco, U. (1994). La recherche de la langue parfaite dans la culture européenne, Paris: Seuil. Fabian Essays in Socialism, edited by Shaw, followed in 1952 by New Fabian Essays, edited by Richard H.S. Crossman. Ghils, P. (1992). Standardized Terminologies and Cultural Diversity. Zeitschrift für allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie/Journal for General Philosophy of Science, 23/1). Ghils, P. (2003). Fonder le monde, fonder le savoir du monde, ou la double utopie de Paul Otlet. Transnational Associations, 1-2, 36-48. Grossi, V. Utopie et réalité d’une culture de la paix. Retrieved December 2002 from http://www.eipcifedhop.org/publications/thematique8/grossinotes.html#12. Kant, E. (1795). Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (Zum ewigen Frieden. Ein philosophischer Entwurf). Kulstad, M. and Carlin, L. (2013). Leibniz's Philosophy of Mind. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved December 2002 from http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2013/entries/leibniz-mind/. Lecourt, D. (1990). Contre la peur. Followed by Critique de l’appel de Heidelberg, Paris : Hachette. Leibniz, G.W. (1715). Observations sur le projet d’une paix perpétuelle de M. l’abbé de Saint-Pierre. In Oeuvres complètes, tome IV. Paris: Firmin Didot, 328-336. Mattelart, A. (1999). L’histoire de l’utopie planétaire de la cité prophétique à la société globale, Paris: La Découverte. Musso, P. (2000). Le cyberespace, figure de l’utopie technologique réticulaire. Sociologie et sociétés, XXXII. Retrieved December 2002 from http://www.erudit.org/revue/socsoc/2000/v32/n2/001521ar.pdf. Novalis. (2000). Le brouillon général. Paris: Editions Allia. Olender, M. (1989). Les langues du Paradis, Paris: Seuil.

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Otlet, P. (1935). Monde. Brussels: Editions du Mundaneum. Schefer, O. (2000). Introduction to Novalis. Le brouillon général. Preceded by Encyclopédie et combinatoire. Paris : Editions Allia. Sfez, L. (1992). Critique de la communication, Paris: PUF. Speeckaert, G. (1980). Le premier siècle de la coopération internationale, 1815-1914, Brussels: Union of International Associations. Tenon, J. (1788). Mémoires sur les hôpitaux de Paris, 1. Retrieved September 2014 from http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k567231 Todd, E. (2002). La fin de l’empire. Essai sur la décomposition du système américain, Paris: Gallimard. UIA (Union of International Associations) (1912). Constitution du Centre international. Congrès mondial. Office central. Musée international. Documentation universelle. Brussels: Office des Associations internationales. Weber, M. Politics as a Vocation (1919). The Vocation Lectures. Indianapolis: Hackett Company. Woolf, L. (1916). International Government: Two Reports by L. S. Woolf Prepared for the Fabian Research Department, Together with a Project by a Fabian Committee for a Supernational Authority That Will Prevent War. London: The Fabian Society and George Allen and Unwin. Wunenburger, J.-J. (1997). Philosophie des images. Paris: PUF. Wunenburger, J.-J. (2002). Une utopie de la raison. Essai sur la politique moderne. Paris: La Table Ronde.

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CHINA’S FUTURE AND ITS VISUAL STRATEGIC COMMUNICATION Lu Liu Associate Professor Department of English Peking University People’s Republic of China Abstract: This essay presents a brief descriptive analysis of part of the ongoing media campaign in P.R. China to publicize and educate the public about “Chinese core socialist values” in order to pave the way for better understanding of state strategic visual communication of China’s future. The newly publicized core socialist values are considered by President Xi as fundamental to the realization of the Chinese dream. Visual Explanation of the core socialist values in Beibei Jingjing cartoons by the Beijing municipal government is included, described, and analyzed. The twenty-four characters which make up the core socialist core values per se are also explained and analyzed for an accurate understanding of these terms describing these core values.

Keywords: strategic communication, visual communication, rhetoric, Chinese Dream, Chinese culture INTRODUCTION Walking in the streets and parks of Beijing and other cities in China nowadays, one sees posters on newly set up signposts or murals on walls next to sidewalks of main streets relevant to Chinese “core socialist values.” This campaign of publicity was started in early 2014, when President Xi Jinping urged for “deep understanding and comprehensive implementation of the moral doctrine nationwide” (cctv.com, 2014) According to CCTV, Xi required that authorities make use of various opportunities and occasions to facilitate cultivation of these values, and "make them all-pervasive, just like the air." I These values were put forward in Hu Jintao’s report at the 18th Party Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in late 2012. In a section titled Strengthen Core Socialist Values, core socialist values are compared to “the soul of the Chinese nation and serve as the guide for building socialism with Chinese characteristics. We should carry out thorough study of and education in these values and use them to guide social trends of thought and forge public consensus. … We should vigorously foster China's national character and promote the underlying trend of the times, intensify education in patriotism, collectivism and socialism, and enrich people's cultural life and enhance their moral strength. We should promote prosperity, democracy, civility, and harmony, uphold freedom, equality, justice and the rule of law and advocate patriotism, dedication, integrity, and friendship, so as to cultivate and observe core socialist values. We should maintain leadership and initiative in theoretical work, provide correct guidance, enhance our ability to guide public opinion, and strengthen the influence of the underlying trend of thought in our country” (ChinaDaily.com.cn, 2012). Actually preceding Xi’s call

in December 2013, The Communist Party of China issued guidelines

“bolstering core socialist values and pooling positive energy to realize the Chinese dream of national rejuvenation” (Xinhua, 2013A) Issued by the General Office of the CPC Central Committee these

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guidelines call for the inclusion of core socialist values in the overall national education plan. In February 2014, addressing a meeting of ministerial-level officials, "Core socialist values are the soul of cultural soft power," Xi said. "Basically, the soft power of a nation depends on the vitality, cohesive force and charisma of its core values" (cctv.com, 2014) Therefore he urged that the principles should be introduced in textbooks, classes and schools and should be publicized in cultural and art works. As the new leader for the nation, Xi has popularized the term the Chinese dream as a blueprint for China’s rejuvenation (xinhuanet.com, 2012) and made an explicit connection between it and the core socialist values. By calling these values the soul of cultural soft power, he seems to consider these core values as a premise to the realization of the Chinese dream. This new term was met with different voices. According to a report released in 2013 based on information in the language database of the National Language Resource Monitoring and Research Center, which contained 1 billion words from 1.2 million pieces of writing from domestic media and websites, “Chinese dream” was one of the most frequently used terms in media reports and textbooks in Mainland China in 2012(Xinhua, 2013B). Scholars pointed out that Chinese dream is different from American dream, with the former being more collectivistic and the latter individualistic (Shi, 2013). As some voices suggested that the Chinese dream has a nationalist color, a Chinese government official wrote an article in response to argue that the Chinese dream is not a chauvinist goal because it enriches a universal dream of people all over the world with the core socialist values (Kong, 2013). Probably to dispel misunderstanding of the concept of the Chinese Dream, the Chinese government has launched a nation-wide campaign to publicize and educate the public about Chinese socialist core values, which are fundamental to the realization of the Chinese dream. Due to the limited scope, this paper presents a brief descriptive analysis of part of the media campaign, Visual Explanation of the Core Socialist Values by Beibei and Jingjing, and explains the twenty-four characters in detail to pave the way for better understanding for state strategic visual communication of China’s future. VISUAL EXPLANATION OF THE CORE SOCIALIST VALUES BY BEIBEI AND JINGJING In the summer of 2014, the office in charge of publicity of civility, Beijing municipal government designed and released a series of cartoon pictures (Beijing Civility Net 2014) promoting the core socialist values with youngsters as the target audience. What follows is an overview of these pictures with detailed description (when necessary) and brief analysis by the author. The pictures are numbered from left to right. The two-character core values appear on the right-hand coroner of each of the pictures in white against a red background.

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Picture 1 Prosperity: in the Chinese spaceship Tiangong 1, Beibei and Jingjing are conducting scientific experiments. Descriptive analysis: The two kids are floating in the spaceship, with Jingjing holding the national flag and Beibei operating the scientific instruments, surrounded by other instruments in the spaceship. The spaceship symbolizes China’s prosperity because it is a result of national wealth and power. Picture 2 Democracy: Beibei and Jingjing are voting at the Great Hall of the People’s Congress. Descriptive analysis: Both kids, each holding a red envelope, are taking their turns in putting their votes in the voting box. Other kids sitting in the chairs in the hall are raising one of their hands, seemingly voting or cheering. Everyone in the picture is enjoying their rights to have a say in national affairs, exemplifying the practice of democracy. Picture 3 Civility

At the zebra crossing, Beibei and Jingjing are crossing the road with their

classmates in an orderly manner. Descriptive analysis: Every child in the picture epitomizes good etiquette, hence promoting the value of civility. Picture 4 Harmony Beibei and Jingjing are dancing and singing with children of nationalities in China. Descriptive analysis: Beibei and Jingjing, presumably kids of Han nationality, have fun with children wearing custumes of minority groups in China, with the background featuring Temple of Heaven, Bird’s Nest and the water cube (The Beijing National Aquatics Center ) (the latter two are the most important buildings at 2008 Beijing Olympics. This picture epitomizes a relationship of a harmonious nature.

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Picture 5 Freedom on the Great Wall led by their teacher, Beibei and Jingjing are letting free of wild birds. Descriptive analysis: By having the kids set birds free, the picture advocates freedom as an important value. Picture 6 Equality : Beibei and Jingjing are getting the awards for a piano playing contest with a disabled child. Analysis: Since the disabled child receives awards on the same stage as the two kids, the picture sends the message that kids, despite their physical health, are equally treated. Picture 7 Justice: On a football playground, the player Beibei is sweating and playing wholeheartedly while the judge Jingjing is carrying out her duties seriously. Analysis: The picture demonstrates that in a game, justice is ensured by the judge. Picture 8 The rule of law: Beibei and Jingjing are listening attentively to a police officer who is talking about values and knowledge relevant to the rule of law. Analysis: This value is quite abstract, so the idea is repeated on the sign in the picture says “community publicity campaign on the rule of law”.

Picture 9 Patriotism: Beibei and Jingjing are painting the Chinese national flag with other children at Tian’anmen Square.

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Analysis: Painting the national flag shows the children’s patriotism. Picture 10 dedication: Beibei and Jingjing interview workers who work hard repairing subway trains. Analysis: Words such as “word hard” suggests the workers dedication to his job. Picture 11 Integrity: In a self-service newspaper stand, Beibei, Jingjing, and their neighbors take away a newspaper and leave the money in the money box as usual. Analysis: Those who buy the news papers are quite honest and pay for the newspapers even if nobody is monitoring the cash box. Picture 12 Friendship: At the school gate, Beibei and Jingjing smile at each other saying good morning. Analysis: This picture advocates friendship because these two kids are friends greeting each other. THE CHARACTERS THEMSELVES AS VISUAL STRATEGIC COMMUNICATION Although the Beibei and Jingjing cartoon pictures are the most detailed visual communication of the core values, what appears most are the twenty-four characters per se which make up the core values. These twenty-four Chinese characters, as part of the oldest language system still in use today, stand for a kind of Chinese uniqueness and work well for promoting “Chinese core socialist values”. Below is a brief descriptive analysis of these characters, which are mostly ideograms and pictograms. In all the visual presentations, the characters are most likely to appear in a hierarchy, with the top four values for the state, the middle four for the society, and the lowest layer of values for individuals. The following explanation also presents these characters in such an order. Four values for the state:

prosperity

The cover on the top means home and the lower part means a container full of things. Hence the Character means a home with a lot of things, meaning rich. (Dou & Dou, 2005, p.215)

A kind of insect which can bite into rice. A small insect which can get into the hard-textured rice is considered to be powerful. (Dou & Dou, 2005, p. 61).

democracy means people. In the old form of the this word, the upper part means a roof made of hay, and the lower part means a pole, hence the character means thatched cottage, with the people who live in the cottage as the extended meaning. (Dou & Dou,

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2005,p. 263)

is like the fire in a lamp with a stand, which is the center. A lamp is the important thing (main) at night. So the extended meaning of this word is host, being a host. (Dou & Dou, 2005, p. 90) civility is strokes which cross each other The old form of the word had a cross in the middle, like a cross-shaped tattoo on a person’s chest. Since the tattoo is added to the human body by human beings themselves, it symbolizes culture. (Dou & Dou, 2005, p. 454)

is composed of the sun on the left and the moon on the right, meaning light.(Dou & Dou, 2005,p. 277) harmony

to echo, with the radical meaning “mouth” on the left and “ ” (meaning grains) on the right. Having grains and mouth enables human beings to function well, hence the meaning of harmony and peace. (Dou & Dou, 2005, p. 121) with the radical meaning language on the left and right radical means soldiers who live and have meals together. The character as a whole means the words between soldiers who live and eat together, hence meaning harmony. (Dou & Dou, 2005, p.42) Four Values for the Society:

freedom

self, when one refers to oneself, one points to one’s nose

. (Dou & Dou,

2005, p.20)

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is the sign form for the old form

. In the old form of the word, the two hands hold the flesh (the

lower part in the middle ) which is the descendent of ancesters (the upper part in the middle). Hence the character means to own and to follow. (Dou & Dou 2005 p. 456)

equality meaning level. The original old form of the word is made up of means circle,

and

,

means to separate. To separate a circle results in the inner part and

outer part of it, which are both on a surface, hence the meaning of being level. (Dou & Dou, 2005, p. 224)

means having layers. the upper part means bamboo, with the lower part meaning places where government officials work, with the extended meaning of standards, hence the whole character means to cut bamboo into pieces of the same length. (Dou & Dou, 2005, p. 308) justice

The upper

means to get separated, the lower part is like a basket made from

willow wigs, which means to use natural materials to achieve one’s purpose, hence to do something according to one’s own will. with the whole character meaning the opposite of one’s own, hence meaning the antonym of private, which is public. (Dou & Dou, 2005, p. 160)

The word form is

a circle on the top meaning the destination and the

lower part is foot meaning to go to the destination, hence right. (Dou & Dou, 2005, p.210) the rule by the law

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whose old form is

.

is a kind of deer which eats a certain kind of grass only, meaning to

behave according to rules, the left radical means water, meaning all water goes down (to lower places) and the lowest part

means to leave home and engage in activities in the society, hence the whole

character means social rules which apply to everyone.(Dou & Dou, 2005, p. 342) The left radical means water, and the right part means a place where one can make arrangements on one’s own. The character as a whole means to manage water with one’s own will, hence the meaning of rule. (Dou & Dou, 2005, p. 162)

Four Values for Citizens: patriotism

The top and bottom is each the image of a foot, meaning to walk and move. The middle is a heart which is surrounded meaning inner heart, meaning the moves one wants to take in one’s heart. Hence the character means to like and love. (Dou & Dou, 2005, p.10) meaning country. and the

refer to an area. As to the middle part,

means to guard,

is like the walls of an ancient Chinese city, the middle part

means to

take a weapon and patrol around a city wall. Hence the character as a whole means an area which requires armies to guard, a country. (Dou & Dou, 2005, p.326) devotion

means to respect the left radical means to listen to what someone says earnestly (the ears of the person prop up, meaning all ears), the character means to urge someone to listen earnestly to what others say, hence meaning being respectful. (Dou & Dou, 2005, p. 348) The upper part is like poles for building houses, a big tree, and the word which is like a mace, symbolizing power, The character means the authorities order to cut trees to build a house, hence the sense of industry and cause. (Dou & Dou, 2005, p.246)

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integrity to tell the truth. The left radical meaning words, the right radical, with the image like a big ax going down word means to get blood to say oaths, hence the character means the words one says when making oaths. (Dou & Dou, 2005, p.395)

The what

a

left

radical means people, the right means words, the character means

person

says, emphasizing that what a person says should count and one

should do what he/she promises (Dou & Dou, 2005, p.2)

friendship

Two hands coordinate meaning being friends (Dou & Dou, 2005, p.5).

the word is made up of and

(mutton) in a hand (the part immediately under

)

mouth below. The character therefore means words one says when one is

handed mutton, as mutton is valued in ancient China, the words are supposed to be good. (Dou & Dou, 2005, p. 270)

Today these twenty-four characters appear in various forms, some with more traditional forms with traditional Chinese images as the background. Contrary to the Beibei Jingjing cartoon pictures where they serve as topics for each picture, in other pictures such as the one below used nationwide retrieved from news.xxnet.com.cn, which is one of the many websites using it. These characters are foregrounded. It is perhaps the aesthetic nature of Chinese characters which lends to this popular design because they work well as both text and images.

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CONCLUSION With China’s national campaign to promote Chinese socialist core values in full swing, state visual communication strategies are just starting to unfold. The Beibei Jingjing pictures are among the first batch of instructional materials to educate the young about these core values

but these abstract values

requires probably multi-media supporting instructional materials. Because many of the twenty-four Chinese characters stand for images/ideas themselves, they have also been utilized creatively in the publicity campaign. Understanding these characters in their original sense, helpfully, will contribute to better understanding of the values and strategic communication displaying these characters in their different aesthetic forms. Address correspondence to: [email protected] REFERENCES [Beijing Civility Net] (2014). explaining

Socialist

core

values].

[Beibei Jingjing Retrieved

September

6,

2014

from

http://zt.bjwmb.gov.cn/2014/hxjzg/cctv.com (2014). Xi stresses core socialist values. Retrieved September 15, 2014 from htp://english.cntv.cn/20140226/100588.shtml ChinaDaily.com.cn. (2012) Full Chinese-English bilingual text of Hu's report at 18th Party Congress. Retrieved

September

20,

from

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/language_tips/news/2012-11/19/content_15941774_7.htm . (2005).

.

. [Dou, W. & Dou, Y.

(2005). Origins of Chinese Characters: Contemporary New Shuowenjiezi. Changchun: Jili Publishing House of Humanities.]

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[ Kong, G.](2013) international

audience].

“

”

[Interpreting the Chinese dream for an

Retrieved

September

16,

2014

from

http://www.zgdsw.org.cn/n/2013/0624/c218999-21948279.html

[Shi,Y.]. (2013).

[Seven characteristics which differentiates

the Chinese Dream from the American Dream]. Retrieved September 23, 2014 from http://opinion.huanqiu.com/opinion_world/2013-05/3973351.html Xinhua. (2013A). China promotes core socialist values. Retrieved September 18, 2014 from http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90785/8493298.html

Xinhuanet.com. (2012).

“

” [President Xi Jinping affectionately

explains the Chinese Dream], Retrieved September 20, 2014 from http://news.xinhuanet.com/politics/2012-11/30/c_124026690.htm Xinhua. (2013B). 'Chinese dream' among top media buzzwords: report . Retrieved September 10, 2014 from http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90782/8272712.html

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THE ISLAMIC STATE’S USE OF MUSLIM RHETORIC FOR COMMUNICATION Dr Marcin Styszynski Assistant Professor Faculty of Arabic and Islamic Studies Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan Poland Abstract: The present essay concerns analysis of communication and propaganda strategies of ISIS organization that enable to expand influences of the organization in the Middle East and Africa and encourage different militants in the world to join the new caliphate. The research demonstrates that jihadist propaganda relies on particular stylistic devices based on concepts of the liturgical sermon (ar. khutba) and the Arabic rhetoric (ar. balagha). The analysis also shows that effective indoctrination campaign increases terrorist threats in the region and affects the worldwide stability. Keywords: ISIS, Islam, jihadism, rhetoric, communication INTRODUCTION Growing threats and worldwide influences of the organization Ad-Dawla al-Islamiyya fi al-Iraq wa ashSham (the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant – ISIS) rely on two major factors: failures of Al-Qaeda’s activities and effective propaganda and communication strategy headed by ISIS’s leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. After the death of Osama bin Laden and other Al-Qaida’s leaders like Anwar Awlaqi or Abu Yahia alLibi the new commander Ayman al-Zawahiri tried to consolidate all insurgents and sympathized with the Arab Spring that defined new challenges for the jihadist movement. However, failures of the transition process in post-revolutionary countries and overthrew of Islamist representatives by secular and military forces deepened the crisis among jihadists who expected other results and goals. ISIS responded to insurgents’ hopes and offered new concept of jihad and implementation of extremist ideas as well as establishment of the historic caliphate. Successful military combats, support of Sunni minorities as well as terror campaign and brutal executions as well as control of large parts of Syria and Iraq reinforced the position of ISIS and defined new forms of jihad in the Middle East. Moreover, political activities of other jihadist groups affiliated with Al-Qaeda have decreased because Al-Zawahiri’s militants could not boast of similar actions. The spokesman of ISIS Abu Mohammad al-Adnani issued the manifesto Ma kana hada manhajuna wa lan yakuna (It was not our way and it won’t be), which criticizes Al-Qaida Central and defines final separation between old jihadists and ISIS fighters (Nasr 2014). AlAdnani states that the leader betrayed insurgents, who fight every day in battlefields of Iraq or Syria. Furthermore, Al-Zawahiri distorted basic ideas of jihad, which gathered different militants in the world. The message also glorifies jihad heroes like Osama bin Laden or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and condemns the current leader of cooperation with infidels and secularists. Al-Adnani also declares that Al-Zawahiri resigned from jihad and implementation of sharia law. He tries to involve the organization in current political and social processes in the Arab and Muslim world by creation of wide Umma based on different religious and social trends, including secular forces. ISIS encourages its supporters to continue the fight and return to the roots of jihad. Furthermore, the success of Al-Baghdadi’s policy was confronted with appropriate communication and propaganda methods that reinforced ideological and operational capacities of the organization and weakened the rival jihadist groups. The communication strategy reflects application of liturgical sermons (ar. khutba) and Arabic rhetoric (ar. balagha) in media presentations and ideological manifestos. DISCUSSION 1. Traditional Muslim rhetoric as communication. Khutba is one of the oldest narrative and oratory forms in the Arab and Muslim world. It is presented in mosques during Friday’s prayer or on special occasions of feasts and holidays. Furthermore, the basic patterns of the sermon are a short prayer, some verses of the Quran or religious invocations. Afterwards, the orator called khatib goes to the a podium (ar. minbar) to welcome the congregation. (Horannisian & Sabagh, 1999). His oration composed of two fragments. The first usually refers to religious invocations and religious citations such as bismi-Allahi ar-rahmani ar-rahim (In the name of God the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful), as-salatu wa as-salamu ala an-nabiyyi (Prayer and peace be upon the Prophet), also “Peace be upon those who follow the

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right way,” or “I seek protection in Allah from the accursed Satan.” The first passage also includes the introduction of the main subjects elaborated in the speech. The religious invocations are always followed by the expression: wa ba´d (and then; afterwards), which indicates separation between passages in the speech. The second part is delivered after a short break and it usually concerns religious, moral and social questions based on four main sources such as the Quran, hadiths (stories, statements and report attributed to the Prophet Mohammad) as well as fragments of classic poetry or citations of noble personalities from the history of Muslim empires (Mahdi 2008; Gafney, 1994). The concept of khutba also regards some rhetorical features. Muslim scholars underline that balagha is very important in the sermon but they usually focus on general ideas concerning sophisticated style and precise words without further studies on the subject. However, Jones (2012) suggests that derivative noun khitaba identifies public address delivered in pure classic Arabic that involves advanced stylistic and linguistic techniques included in balagha. In fact, khutab also served as an important linguistic field in the studies of classic philologists such as Al-Jahiz (d. 869), Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani (d. 1078), As-Sakkaki (d. 1229) or Ibn alAthir (d. 1239). The particular rhetorical concepts were based on examples of sermons presented by dignified religious personalities in Arab-Muslim Empire. (Hinkel, 2002). The Arabic rhetoric includes three main categories such as ilm al-ma’ani (study of meaning- semantics), bayan (beautiful lucid expression) and badi (good style, ornamental expressions). The first category ilm alma’ani plays an important role in sermons because it concerns different forms of narration and compositions. For instance, ijaz (concision) reflects briefness and condensation of words and sentences in order to express and precise the main ideas presented in orations. Itnab is an opposite term regarding application of additional descriptions and evidences of the main subject. Ilm al-ma’ani also includes khabar (informative and affirmative utterances) and insha (performative emotional utterances) based on imperative, prohibition or interrogative and vocative sentences. Al-Ma´ani also focuses on clear, lucid words and sentences, which express different semantic features of particular meanings. The use of tropes (metaphor, repetition, antithese), as in the Aristotelian tradition is pervasive, but one feature stands out: iqtibas, which concerns appeal to Quranic verses and application of religious style in the discourse different in order to diversify the style and authenticate message of the speech (Abdul-Raof, 2006). It should be pointed out that religious discourse was often politicized in the history of Muslim empires although advices of Muslim scholars who reminded that orations should focus on theological and social messages regarding moral values such as piety, dignity, justice or good behavior. Ethical principals should be confronted with opposite meanings that prevent believers of sinful life and bad behavior. Theologians also stated that sermons should refer to religious obligations, ceremonies, commemorations and holidays that need deep explanations and active teaching campaign (Rashdi, 2014; Jones, 2012). Unfortunately, different religious leaders ignored the principals and combined them with political slogans, demands and goals. They usually applied opposite images regarding glorification of particular organizations or parties and damnation of political opponents (Lewis, 1988). The same strategy is implemented by modern Islamist movements, including jihadist groups like Al-Qaeda and ISIS. They often use the structure of khutba or balagha and present political messages in the second part of the speech. However, the following examples show that Al-Baghdadi’s orations have wider and stronger influences on the present jihadist scene. Besides, the organization disposes of various communication channels such as controlled mosques, regular sermons, journals, Internet websites, video services or official forums and social media like Facebook or Twitter. 2. The Islamic State’s use of traditional muslim rhetoric Domination of ISIS in the region was finally determined after the announcement of the caliphate by AlBaghdadi, who delivered a symbolic sermon in the main mosque in Mosul, Iraq during the Ramadan 2014. AlBaghdadi respects all conventions and etiquettes regarding non-verbal and narration concepts of khutba. Contrary to previous jihadist leaders, the sermon is presented in the mosque in liturgical podium above the auditorium. The khatib wears sacral clothes and stands up at the first step of speech and then sits down during other parts of the discourse. He also avoids loud voices, chaotic gestures or reactions and he uses sometimes index fingers to precise or underlines some questions. Moreover, the audience is composed of wide audience living in the region (Jones, 2012). Apart from personal skills, the orator follows strict narration and stylistic devices of khutba and balagha. He starts his speech with religious invocations and citations and after a short break he refers to main subjects. Al-Baghdadi preserves liturgical style of the sermon and reigns from direct, impudent political slogans and statements. For example, he focuses on Ramadan ceremonies and spiritual values of the holy month, which absolves from all sins and rehabilitates human souls. His opinions are followed by application of the rhetorical iqtibas based on appropriate argumentations from the Quran or hadiths. Furthermore, Ramadan is confronted with specific concept of jihad described by Al-Baghdadi as scarified efforts facilitating defeat of enemies and implementation of Islam values. ISIS leader compares jihad to the quranic vision of the paradise that includes

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cool rivers, flower gardens or orchards. The rhetorical comparison tashbih is combined with ma’ani including meanings popularized in the Muslim philosophy and regular debate. It concerns positive epithets like izz (honor), karama (dignity) or salwan (solace) attributed to jihad activities. Al-Bagdadi also refers to the current issues regarding the caliphate, which is the result of Allah’s will and plans. He applies once again iqtibas and appeals to the aya (fragment) 33 from surat An-Nur in the Quran: “Allah has promised those who have believed among you and done righteous deeds that He will surely grant them succession [to authority] upon the earth just as He granted it to those before them (…)’’ (AsSadi, 2012; Ali, 2007). The ISIS leader states that he listens and obeys Allah’s orders. He expects the same allegiance from his followers. Al-Baghdadi also stresses: “The Book (The Quran) calms down and the sword conquers. Your mujahideen brothers have been rewarded the victory and the conquest. After long years of jihad and patience Allah The Almighty enabled to establish a caliphate and appoint its Imam.’’ (Mortada, 2014). The metaphorical sense of the phrase: ,,The Book (The Quran) calms down and the sword conquers’’ describes the policy of the caliphate that requires peaceful and preaching activities based on the Quran as well as violent fights with opponents relying on the symbolic sword. The fragment also contains of ma’ani reflecting particular words: manna (to reward), nasr (victory), fath (conquest) or sabr (patience). They conserve quranic and archaic character and can be replaced by modern, more popular equivalents. However, Al-Baghdadi expresses theological and noble style of the speech that enable to emphasis the contemporary message concerning ISIS philosophy. The narration of the speech and the rhetorical devices justify ISIS policy in the region, authorize and glorify the new Islamic state and they emerge its influences and power in the region. The liturgical style also enables to cover political messages, violent implementation of Sharia laws or terrorist campaign conducted in controlled regions. The high quality of Al-Baghdadi’s discourse is evident in confrontation with other jihadist movements like Boko Haram, which deformed regulations of the liturgical discourse. The organization usually emphasizes violent gestures and brutal behaviors of insurgents. The manifestos include casual speeches in local dialects as well as English sentences underlining political and social questions condemning Western influences in the region. The declarations are also delivered in ironic and chaotic style, sometimes making fun of the West and local authorities. For example, Abubakar Shekau refers to the kidnapping of Nigerian schoolgirls and he states with laughing voice that he will sell them in local market. (Thorin, 2014: 28-29). Al-Baghdadi’s followers also started massive media campaign that targets a young, Western audience and encourages foreign volunteers to join the Islamic State in the Middle East or to carry out terrorist attacks in their own countries. ISIS publishes an English version of magazine called Dabiq1. The name refers to the historic Battle of Marj Dabiq near Aleppo in Syria. In 1516 the Ottoman army conquered most of the Middle East, which encompassed the entire region of Syria and built the new Empire. Dabiq became an important communication and motivational platform for Islamist extremists around the world. Instead of long theological and political discussions, the magazine contains short messages based on suggestive graphics and provocative pictures similar to the tabloid press or comics.

Cover and one of the pages from Dabiq magazine presenting main headlines elaborated in the

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publication, including policy and strategy of the new caliphate. The magazine usually includes photos illustrating ISIS successful offensives and campaigns in Syria and Iraq, images of wounded Iraqi soldiers among fires and explosions as well as victorious parades of militants in controlled cities or harvest campaign and distribution of food and water. Other pictures show brutal executions of Shia prisoners, representatives of Christian and Yazidi communities or some colorful and sophisticated graphics showing destroyed shrines. The pictures are followed by symbolic sentences such as: Khalifa declared, A new era has arrived or: It’s either the Islamic state of the flood. ISIS also applies some euphemistic words and sentences already known in radical Islamist propaganda. For example, different opponents are usually called salibiyyun (crusaders), taghut (a devil, a Satan) or kuffar (sinners) and murtaddun (apostates). The style of the magazine was adopted by Western militants sympathizing with the Islamic State. They created various forums and profiles in social medias and started to present sophisticated photos and graphics illustrating their support to Al-Baghdadi. In fact, ISIS massive campaign decreased propaganda capacities of rival jihadist groups like An-Nusra Front. The indoctrination is usually limited to traditional jihadist websites such as Shabakat al-Jihad al-Alam (Worldwide Jihad Network- www.shabakataljahad.com) or Shabakat Ansar al-Mujahidin (Mujahideen Followers Network- www.as-ansar.com). However, the websites are often blocked or suspended and they do not target wide audience like You-tube channels, English publications or Twitter and Facebook profiles coordinated by ISIS militants. CONCLUSION The research demonstrates that communication and propaganda techniques of ISIS rely on sermon’s structure and some rhetorical devices. They justify ISIS policy in the region, glorify the new Islamic state and emerge its influences and power in the region. However, the propaganda methods also regard two channels of communication: traditional, liturgical speeches addressed to the local audience as well as modern forms of communication such as Internet forums or sophisticated journals that affect Western audience attracted by emotional photos, graphics and slogans. Address correspondence to: [email protected] REFERENCES Ali, Y. (2007). The Holy Qur’an. Text and translation. Kuala Lumpur: Islamic Book Trust. As-Sadi, Abu. (2012). Taysir al-Karim ar-Rahman fi tafsir kalam al-mannan. Beirouth: Shabakat Abna Sharif al-Ansari. Abdul-Raof, H. (2006). Arabic rhetoric, a pragmatic analysis. New York: Taylor and Francis Group. Gaffney, P. (1994). The Prophet’s pulpit. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hinkel, E. (2002). Second language writer’s text. Linguistic and rhetorical features. New Jersey: Routledge. Horannisian, G., Sabagh, G. (Eds). (1999). Religion and culture in medieval Islam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jones, L. (2012). The Power of oratory in the medieval Muslim world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lewis, B. (1988). The Political language of islam. Chicago: University of Chicago. Mortada, R. (2014, July 7). Zuhur al-khalifa fi al-Musil. Al-Akhbar, retrieved October 15, 2014, from http://www.ipv6.al-akhbar.com/node/210037 Mahdi, Abd al-Hamid. (2008). Khutab al-juma. Al-Jazair: Dar al-amal. Nasr, W. (2014, May 12). An-Natiq ar-rasmi bi-smi ad-dawla al-islamiyya yaruddu ala amir tanzim al-Qa’ida. Al-Warka, retrieved October 5, 2014, from http://www.alwarkaa.com/‫ي‬-‫اﻹﺳﻼﻣﯿﺔ‬-‫اﻟﺪوﻟﺔ‬-‫ﺑﺎﺳﻢ‬-‫اﻟﺮﺳﻤﻲ‬-‫اﻟﻨﺎطﻖ‬/ Rashdi, R. (2014, January 29). Al-Fajr, retrieved October 5, 2014, from http://www.new.elfagr/dailyPortal_Print_News_Details.aspx?nwsId=513306&secid=1 Valérie T. (2014). Boko Haram fait sa loi. Afrique-Asie, Juin, 28-29. NOTE 1. The PDF version of the Dabiq magazine is available in some jihadist websites and forums that indicate achieve materials including different manifestos, journals and books. See: https://ia802500.us.archive.org/24/items/dbq01_desktop_en/dbq01_desktop_en.pdf (accessed 16.07.2014).

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HARMONIZING DRONES Erik Doxtader Professor of Rhetoric University of South Carolina United States of America Senior Research Fellow Institute for Justice and Reconciliation Cape Town South Africa Abstract: What is the sound of a “sound” drone policy? Through a consideration of recent American declaratory policy, this essay traces the U.S. government’s evolving case for the use of unmanned aerial vehicles to conduct surveillance and war-fighting operations. It contends that policy arguments about the necessity and legitimacy of unmanned aerial vehicle deployments, including their role in locating and targeting so-called immanent threats, are predicated on the need to both produce and eliminate a drone, the recurring sound of a (counter) insurgent plot. Keywords: declaratory policy, drones, law of war, surveillance, targeted strikes, unmanned aerial vehicle

“The exigencies of a strict prosody are the artifice which endows our natural speech with the qualities of a refractory material, foreign to the soul and, as it were, deaf to our desires…We have to pursue words that do not always exist; chimerical coincidences; we must keep on in our impotence trying to unite sound and sense, creating in broad daylight one of those nightmares that exhaust the dreamer as he tries endlessly to align two phantoms whose outlines are as unstable as himself. Today, free of all compulsion and false necessity, the old inflexible laws have no other virtue than that of defining, quite simply, an absolute world of expression.” Paul Valéry, With Reference to Adonis The sound of the drone holds a question of (dis)harmony. The drone’s first note sounds without beginning. Without a referent needed to establish meaning, the drone sounds the possibility of an indefinite and perhaps infinite duration, a moment that pauses time, or stretches it vertically, in a way that may disclose or foreclose a harmonic center – the possibility of striking a chord. With the sustained (or maniacal) repetition of a single note or a simultaneous (or cacophonous) deployment of every note on the scale (the difference, for instance, between Terry Riley’s In C and Tony Conrad’s Four Violins), there is no precise way to tell whether the pulse or crash of the drone’s intonation will give way to a fitting order, a “gathering together of several sounds which are agreeable to the ear” (Rameau 1971, xlv). There is no way to tell precisely because there is not yet a telling; there is not an arrangement or constellation in which to discern or gather a grammar of expression. For La Monte Young, a pioneer of the modern drone genre, this absence was a gateway to trance, a “drone state of mind” whose “vertical hearing” refuses “developmental form” in the name of “remaining aloft” (Young 1992). Others hear this lack very differently, not least as alienating, lazy, and a debasement of music into (electronic) functionalism; the drone drones; its relentless noise degrades composition and evacuates the possibility of its meaning; at its worst, the drone’s hum fills and animates the order of the hive’s unthinking expenditure. An opening to an enlightening trance? So much “furniture music”? A form of subjection? The drone’s sound (e)scape holds the question of its (non)relationship to harmony, whether and how it joins the disparate into a pleasing order, a concord in which to move with the possibility of meaning.

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The drone is a sound of surveillance, a noise that shifts seamlessly between background and foreground in the name of accumulating and producing counter-intelligence, that which endeavors to resist, negate, and remake given forms of (dis)harmony. Such sound has long echoed from the fold of American “public diplomacy,” whether in the carefully calibrated monotony of VOA and Radio Free somewhere or another, or in the biblically-punctuated hymn-hum of government-sponsored and uniformly-dressed teenage troupes boarding planes that will take them to their “bridge-building” singing engagements in faraway lands (when encircled by these groups, one cannot help but recall Adorno’s reflections on jazz and his sense of how the latter’s improvisation is anything but improvised). The African (conceived monolithically in most cases, i.e. as country) trip is a popular destination. And its popularity is growing. Founded in 2007 and based in Stuttgart, Germany, the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) has championed and adopted the easy listening sound of such public diplomacy, a counter-intelligence mission that it has described as “not being about creating a ‘Brand America’” but which “is about harmonizing our actions with our words to generate an alignment among key stakeholders—an alignment of their perceptions with our policy goals and objectives” (quoted in Stein and Weil 2008). As it requires a common tone and the elimination of wrong (false) notes, this harmonic alignment begins with the sound of the drone, not least but not only in the form of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) that AFRICOM provides to an increasing number of African governments and which it is now deploying over greater and greater stretches of the African terrain, all for the purpose of gathering and making intelligence that by no means excludes the option of “kinetic military action.” With the latter, a euphemism for targeted bombing popularized by the George W. Bush administration, there is more than a little evidence to suggest that the American military has internalized philosophy’s longstanding claim that the possibility of death is a way of creating intelligence that deters its own insurgency. The ambient sound-figure of the drone fades in and out, which is to say, as Brain Eno put it, that the drone’s expression is “as ignorable as it is interesting”. This flux is altogether relevant today, as the question of the drone is increasingly obscured by the sound of “scandal”, the din and wail over Edward Snowden’s disclosures about the designs and reach of the U.S. National Security Agency. While this shift in attention is understandable, my wager here is that the sound of the drone may be worth a second listen, particularly if the noise generated by American declaratory policy regarding the use and value of the UAV sheds light on the question of its violence. By noise, it should be clear from the outset, I do not mean so much propaganda or so much mere rhetoric from institutions that are frequently assumed to be incapable of making an open case for their actions and hence not able to generate arguments that merit listening. This view is dim, one borne of both misconceptions about the meaning of Wikileaks and too many poor readings of Chomsky’s already conspiratorial account of American militarism, all of which proclaim the need for transparency, accountability, and representation at the same time that they foreclose access to the institutional referents for such goods and their critique. Here, working in the other direction, my aim is to move from a brief account of the contemporary controversy over the use of UAVs to an admittedly abbreviated reading of arguments from four U.S. officials that appeared between 2010 and 2013 and which build a public case for the value of drone-based intelligence-gathering and warfare, a declaratory policy that is far less piped Muzak than a drone that seeks to rationalize the elimination of those who would sound the drone of what declaratory policy deems a threatening plot. A classic “dead drop”. Wave upon wave of soldiers landing at Normandy. B-52 bombers flying set circuits every moment of every day of the cold war. Computers programmed to sift emails and phone calls for keywords. The automatic or automaton-like qualities of conflict suggest that the figure and function of the drone may well be an intrinsic element of intelligence gathering and war-fighting. To limited success, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles were used in World War I. Tens of thousands of radio-controlled target drones were built in World War II, along with assault drones that were used as either guided missiles or as platforms for launching bombs (Zaloga 2008). Today, the UAV is perhaps the most prominent by-product of the so-called “revolution in military affairs” (RMA), an ongoing attempt to integrate information and computing technologies into the fabric of surveillance,

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counter-insurgency, and outright war-fighting.1 Tasked variously to plot terrain, track the movements of troops, machinery, and refugees, and scout targets, the modern UAV is now a staple of “intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance” (ISR) operations for the U.S. military (Gregory 2011, 193). With the capacity to gather unprecedented amounts of real-time information in nearly incomprehensible detail, the UAV has provoked more than a few to wonder whether and how this weapons technology has endowed the military with a kind of “hypervisibility”, a “Gorgon stare” that has “abolished distinctions between ‘permission and prohibition, presence and absence’” (Gordon quoted in Gregory, 193). In practical terms, this means that certain UAVs are capable of conducting surveillance for targeted strikes that they themselves are able to carry out. Such units, including the pterodactyl-like Predator and Reaper, are currently being used in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Latin and South America, and Africa. While quantitative records are difficult to amass and contested, organizations such as the Bureau of Investigative Journalism maintain that outside of “recognized” war zones (i.e. Iraq and Afghanistan), the United States conducted nearly 400 targeted strikes in Pakistan between 2004-2014 and at least 75 in Yemen between 2002-2014.2 It is now held that the US uses a number of airfields in Central and Northern Africa to conduct its UAV operations on the continent, including in Yemen, Somalia, Uganda, and Mali (Axe 2012).3 Heard before it is seen, the cycling low-pitched hum of the drone is now ubiquitous in some parts of the world, a noise that is described as “zannana” in Gaza and captured in several popular songs in Pakistan. It is a sound that marks and provokes a controversy composed of several basic fault lines.4 The first is a debate over whether and how UAVs contribute to the growth of surveillance culture, a logic of constant, real-time observation that denigrates privacy rights, encourages “categorical suspicion”, and furthers the reach of a biopolitics predicated on the need to “amass data about risk probabilities and then manage populations” (Wall and Monahan 2011, 240). Following directly, second, both policy-makers and commentators disagree over the relationship between UAV passive surveillance operations and active military engagement. For some, the issue circles around the risk of embracing automated warfare that may prevent American casualties at the cost of oversight, public consent, and diplomacy (Sluka 2011; Ignatius 2012). Others vie over the domestic and international legality of UAV operations (Brunstetter 2012; Vogel 2010; Strawser 2010). Critics contend that the use of drones to conduct “targeted strikes” amounts to a violation of just war doctrine and works to degrade the “humanizing” rules of law that govern warfare, all the more so to the extent that UAV strikes may legitimize pre-emptive war-fighting doctrines and amount to extra-judicial assassinations, including the killing of American citizens, that blur the difference between status and conduct-based targeting (Singer 2009; Friedman 2012). To this, critics add that the significant civilian casualties inflicted by such strikes violate norms of proportional warfare and confound the goals of counter-insurgency operations, a charge that is refuted by advocates, who maintain that the value if not the duty to undertake UAV strikes lies in their ability to lessen military-civilian tensions, reduce troop casualties, and cut through the fog of war, a dense mist which opponents claim is rendered all the denser to the extent that UAV operations are conducted remotely – many from trailers in Nevada – such that soldiers let alone commanders are relieved of accountability insofar as they are removed “geographically and chronologically” from combat operations (Singer 2010, 3; Brooks 2012). This dynamic leads quickly to the question of secrecy and whether the US is in fact conducting “secret wars” against undeclared enemies, a charge that has much to do with the legality of the decision to hand over many UAV operations to the American CIA (Brunstetter). In a recent Congressional hearing, Martha McSalley, a former Chief of Operations for AFRICOM, countered this charge, citing the possibility that criticism of UAVs, not least with respect to their accuracy and clandestine use, may reflect an attempt by anti-American groups to manipulate public opinion and divert attention from their own human rights violations (Gosztola 2013). Much of the ongoing debate over the use of American UAVs turns on intertwined questions of secrecy and legality. Precisely when and where are drones being used for surveillance, reconnaissance, and lethal action? Do such actions comport with domestic and international norms regarding the prosecution of armed conflict? While it took some time, persistent interest in these issues forced something of the Obama Administration’s hand, particularly as they were set in relation to controversy over the indefinite detention of individuals at Guantanamo

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Bay and the President’s May 2009 address at the National Archive, a speech that took pains to rebuke the previous administration and its policy-making logic in the wake of the 2001 attacks in New York City and Washington DC: Unfortunately, faced with an uncertain threat, our government made a series of hasty decisions. I believe that many of these decisions were motivated by a sincere desire to protect the American people. But I also believe that all too often our government made decisions based on fear rather than foresight; that all too often our government trimmed facts and evidence to fit ideological predispositions. Instead of strategically applying our power and our principles, too often we set those principles aside as luxuries that we could no longer afford. And during this season of fear, too many of us -- Democrats and Republicans, politicians, journalists, and citizens – fell silent (Obama 2009). In this light and faced with growing concern over the civilian casualties caused by UAV strikes, administration officials began to publicly acknowledge the larger debate and to articulate a specific case for the deployment and use of drones. Evolving over time, this position is reflected in three specific statements, the sum of which amounts to a declaratory policy, that is, a public line of argument given to defining the value of UAVs and the conditions of their use. In other words, these statements endeavor to articulate something of a strategy – as opposed to tactics – insofar as they speak to the goals and instruments of military policy and the precise relation between such ends and means.5 Concerned then with the definitions, norms, and warrants for military action, the administration’s position marks an explicit attempt to demonstrate the soundness of American UAV policy. The first piece of the puzzle appears in a March 2010 speech by Harold Koh, the legal advisor for the U.S. Department of State (Koh 2010). Addressed to a meeting of the American Society of International Law, Koh’s statement both sets the larger stage of the UAV debate and makes a case for the legal grounds that may justify and govern their use. It begins by delineating the terms of the “emerging Obama-Clinton [Hillary] doctrine”, an approach to international law rooted in the “notion that Living Our Values Makes us Stronger and Safer, by Following Rules of Domestic and International Law; and Following Universal Standards, Not Double Standards” and a sense of “‘smart power’ – a blend of ‘principle and pragmatism’ that makes ‘intelligent use of all means at our disposal,’ including promotion of democracy, development, technology, and human rights and international law to place diplomacy at the vanguard of our foreign policy” (2-3; emphases in original). Alongside this expansive vision, one that is never given clear form, Koh sets an argument about the current state of international law and the United States’ commitment to what he explicitly calls “the law of 9/11.” Two lines of argument follow, although it is evident that these lines intersect at an odd angle. First, Koh maintains that justice for crimes of aggression that amount to casus belli is threatened by the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) attempt to usurp the prerogative of the UN Security Council to “determine when aggression has taken place”, a power grab that has upset the stability of international law and which threatens to supplant the “universality” of its justice with a political agenda (5). Next to this, second, Koh declares the “law of 9/11”, a concept that while perhaps intuitive to those familiar with the culture of the Patriot Act is neither explained or grounded in a body of law. Prefaced by a claim about the legitimacy of indefinite detention, the argument is actually less about the nature or terms of a particular “law” than an attempt to codify the basis of a “war of self-defense against an enemy that attacked us on September 11, 2001”, a war whose legitimacy can be demonstrated, according to Koh, on the grounds of international law and in terms of the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AMUF). Setting aside, for the moment, the implications of Koh’s claim about the implications of the ICC’s actions and that the AMUF was passed during an announced state of exception, the case for the legal authority to fight a war against a “difficult-to-identify terrorist enemy” that, in the form of Al-Qaeda, has “not abandoned its intent to attack the United States”, presupposes what Koh himself holds to be untrue, that is, that the nature and designs of the “enemy” fall within the ambit of “traditional conflicts among states” (7). If wed to the rule of law, whether domestic or international, the question of what violence is “necessary and appropriate” can be answered, according to Koh, only as “the AMUF requires some ‘translation,’ or analogizing principles from the law of war governing

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international conflicts” (7). No such translation occurs. And what follows, as Koh turns to the question of UAV targeting, is an argument that begs the question of the entailments of translation: “U.S. targeting practices, including lethal operations conducted with the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, comply with all applicable law, including the laws of war” (8). Citing principles of distinction and proportionality that have long figured in the ideal of a just war, Koh then elaborates by noting that “whether a particular individual will be targeted in a particular location will depend upon considerations specific to each case, including those related to the imminence of the threat, the sovereignty of the other states involved, and the willingness and ability of those states to suppress the threat the target poses” (8). Looking across this argument, Koh’s justification for the deployment and use of UAVs is rooted entirely in legal terms, a rule of law that governs the ability of sovereign states to employ force and claim a right to selfdefense. And yet, the argument presupposes the applicability of this rule – in detailing and defending the principled nature of U.S. actions, it is a speech act that acts as if the rule remains intact (timelessly) – at the same time that it concedes both that the international form of the rule is not stable and that the declared enemy of the United States does not operate within the framework of enmity that international and domestic laws of war seek to regulate. In a sense, the argument thus tacks between three claims: US actions follow from and thus do not threaten the rule of law; targeted UAV strikes counter threats to the rule of law; and politics constitutes a threat to the rule of law. Seen together, these positions defer the question on which the entire situation is admittedly based, that is, whether the norm of asymmetric conflict, a clash between state and non-state actors, creates a need to revise or refashion the rule of recognition on which law’s rule rests. The elision of this concern for the relative (in)congruence between the limit of legal violence (that the law itself cannot define) and mechanisms whereby such violence is enacted is altogether evident in Koh’s case for how the US recognizes a legitimate target. Moving between “intent”, “planning”, and the discernment of an “immanent threat”, the argument legitimizes perpetual surveillance (which appears in Koh’s case to fall outside the concern of the rule of law) in order to discover that which is outside the law but which the law can (en)circle and perhaps negate in the name of “proving” the validity of its rule. This dynamic, when coupled to the question of what counts as a “legitimate” target, sits at the center of the second important declaratory statement on the use of UAVs, a speech by Attorney General Eric Holder to the Northwestern School of Law in March 2012. Delivered six months after a CIA controlled UAV was used to target and kill Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen and suspected Al-Qaeda leader in Yemen, Holder’s address devotes significant attention to the nature of the government’s authority “to defend the United States through the appropriate and lawful use of lethal force”, the oversight procedures used by the Department of Justice in “authorizing surveillance to investigate suspected terrorists”, and the norms that govern the kinds and levels of force that are brought to bear against a “a stateless enemy, prone to shifting operations from country to country” (Holder 2012, 2, 5, 7). While a fair bit of this argumentation is an unremarkable extension of Koh’s position, the speech is significant for the way in which it expands the potential reach of targeted UAV strikes – “neither Congress nor our federal courts has limited the geographic scope of our ability to use force to the current conflict in Afghanistan” – and then contends that these operations do not contravene standing prohibitions against “assassinations” insofar as such “unlawful killing” can be readily differentiated from the government’s legitimate “use of legal force in self-defense against a leader of al-Qaeda or an associated force who presents an imminent threat of violent attack…” (5). Without naming al-Awlaki, Holder then turns to the question of the criteria that govern the decision to “use lethal force against a United States citizen”, a choice that Holder deems “the gravest that government leaders can face” and which requires balancing the competing and “extraordinarily weighty” terms of individual and government interest. In this light, Holder contends that: [A]n operation using lethal force in a foreign country, targeted against a U.S. citizen operational leader of al-Qaeda or associated forces, and who is actively engaged in Americans, would be lawful at least in the following circumstances: First, the U.S. determined, after a thorough and careful review, that the individual poses an imminent

who is a senior planning to kill government has threat of violent

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attack against the United States; second, capture is not feasible; and third, the operation would be conducted in a manner consistent with applicable law of war principles. (6) What’s curious about this position is that if the targeting of a U.S. citizen is an extraordinary action that turns on an exceptional government interest, Holder’s underlying and altogether explicit argument is that this exception is now something of the norm. Indeed, the Attorney General’s entire speech is pegged to the claims that “there are people currently plotting to murder Americans” and “our nation today confronts grave national security threats that demand our constant attention and steadfast commitment. It is clear that, once again, we have reached an ‘hour of danger’” (1). As defined by Holder, this hour is a permanent condition. It is a perpetual and endless threat that justifies lethal military action which, as Holder invokes Barack Obama’s speech at the National Archives, is both guided by and dedicated to protecting “the rule of law and our founding ideals” (1). Perhaps such argumentation is familiar. It is, in fact, a drone, a precise and measured repetition of the logic and form of the cold war declaratory policy that appeared in the mid-1960s and early 1970s. To hear Holder is to recall more than a bit of the argumentation that was offered by the likes of Robert McNamara and James Schlesinger as they made their cases for the existence of permanent and yet always evolving threats to the security and integrity of the nation, an always imminent danger that warranted constant surveillance and legitimized the value of pre-emptive military action against a lawless enemy whose defeat requires an indefinite sacrifice that will ultimately serve the ends of law and democracy. Is the sound of this drone evidence of sound policy? This is the precise question taken up in a third articulation of policy, an April 2012 speech by John Brennan, then Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism and now Director of the CIA. Far less shrill than Holder’s account of threats to the U.S., Brennan’s widely covered address at the Woodrow Wilson International Center begins with the claim that “the United States is more secure and the American people are safer” one year after U.S. Special Forces shot and killed Usama Bin Laden (Brennan 2012, 1). With this “delivered” justice, Brennan then delineates the rising threat of an “intent to attack the United States, one that follows from the spread of Al-Qaeda’s fragmented but nevertheless “murderous cause” to Northern and Central Africa (1-2). Explicitly citing both Koh’s claim about the importance of gathering the manifold elements of American power and Holder’s legal justification for targeted military action, Brennan thus expands the theater in which the U.S. can claim authority to conduct targeted military operations, including strikes by UAVs. Against this backdrop, Brennan takes pains to elaborate the purpose of his address. Acknowledging that “the United States Government conducts targeted strikes against specific al-Qa’ida terrorists, sometimes using remotely piloted aircraft, often referred to publicly as drones”, Brennan reports that “President Obama has instructed us to be more open with the American people about these efforts” and then quotes, with approval, the claim of a former assistant Attorney General in the Bush administration: “The government needs a way to credibly convey to the public that its decisions about who is being targeted — especially when the target is a U.S. citizen — are sound…” (3). Pledged to this end, Brennan takes up the respective “legality”, “ethics”, and “wisdom” of targeted strikes. The first two concerns draw largely from the cases made by Koh and Holder, particularly with respect to the ways in which the use of UAVs comport with the terms of just war theory. In the name of the third, however, Brennan goes a bit further, arguing that UAVs may enhance public diplomacy initiatives that are confounded by the presence of American troops at the same time that they “dramatically reduce the danger to U.S. personnel” and civilians to the extent that their technology affords strikes the quality of “surgical precision—the ability, with laserlike focus, to eliminate the cancerous tumor called an al-Qa’ida terrorist…” (4). At the time of Brennan’s speech, these arguments were familiar and contested (BBC 2012). The more interesting concern, however, is Brennan’s extended explanation of the administration’s targeting criteria, the conditions under which UAV strikes are authorized. First, the individual in question must be a “legitimate target”, which means, in light of the 2001 AMUF, that they must be individuals who belong to “al-Qa’ida, the Taliban, and associated forces”. The qualities of such association are not explained, an ambiguity that allows Brennan to claim that as it cannot and should not pursue all potentially legitimate targets, the administration is set into a position

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where “we have to be strategic. Even if it is lawful to pursue a specific member of al-Qa’ida, we ask ourselves whether that individual’s activities rise to a certain threshold for action, and whether taking action will, in fact, enhance our security” (4). What is this threshold for action, an action that Brennan deems “exceptional”? While lengthy, it is worth pausing over Brennan’s full reply: For example, when considering lethal force we ask ourselves whether the individual poses a significant threat to U.S. interests. This is absolutely critical, and it goes to the very essence of why we take this kind of exceptional action. We do not engage in lethal action in order to eliminate every single member of alQa’ida in the world. Most times, and as we have done for more than a decade, we rely on cooperation with other countries that are also interested in removing these terrorists with their own capabilities and within their own laws. Nor is lethal action about punishing terrorists for past crimes; we are not seeking vengeance. Rather, we conduct targeted strikes because they are necessary to mitigate an actual ongoing threat – to stop plots, prevent future attacks, and save American lives. And what do we mean by a significant threat? I am not referring to some hypothetical threat – the mere possibility that a member of al-Qa’ida might try to attack us at some point in the future. A significant threat might be posed by an individual who is an operational leader of al-Qa’ida or one of its associated forces. Or perhaps the individual is himself an operative – in the midst of actually training for or planning to carry out attacks against U.S. interests. Or perhaps the individual possesses unique operational skills that are being leveraged in a planned attack. The purpose of a strike against a particular individual is to stop him before he can carry out his attack and kill innocents. The purpose is to disrupt his plots and plans before they come to fruition. (4) Plots and plans. There are number of ways to approach this argument, a number of threads that can be pulled, all a bit too easily and all such that the fabric unravels; consider, for instance, the calculated ambiguity or simply outright confusion of the argument’s modal terms – actuality, necessity, possibility, and potentiality – and how they simultaneously delineate and cover the question of a threshold, the (un)decidability of the decision to kill. While such critique is tempting, it may be more important and more useful to step back and listen. Looking across the declarations made by Koh, Holder, and Brennan, what is the sound of a sound drone policy? To what sounds is the sound of the drone addressed, directed, and targeted? Initially, it is important to reflect on an evident silence, the silence that surrounds the contemporary UAVs astonishing capacity for surveillance. About this power, declaratory policy recognizes no question. It is simply and wholly taken for granted, which is to say that declaratory policy constitutes a limitless warrant for drone-based surveillance – the claimed existence of a “perpetual threat” is held out as cause for continuous surveillance that needs no legal justification insofar as it given only to discerning the threats that justify legal violence. The logic is a tidy and self-perpetuating circle. Its cost may be less the interest of privacy, at least as it’s conventionally conceived, than a form of aggression, a violence that does more than “chill” expression. To fill the sky with the sound of the drone, to render its “zannana” ubiquitous is to undertake a form of surveillance whose noise seeks to both drown out the speech of those who are being watched and impede their hearing. More than a form of deterrence, although it is that, such surveillance is a kind of preemptive violence. Taking place before (and thus “outside”) the rules of the actual war, it is aggression whereby the watching drone’s sound resonates as an attempt to produce the same; the drone strives to reduce the being of its “object” to the status of a drone, a form of life that lacks the capacity for creative and meaningful expression that would render it more than a functionary. In their unlimited capacity for surveillance, whether they are actually watching or not, the sound of the UAV-drone oversees an attempt to enforce a way of being that lacks a capacity to plot, a power for speech-action that constitutes the very definition of a “legitimate” target. The sound of the drone’s surveillance is an expression of total war against the capacity to plot. And yet, according to Brennan, this capacity remains – the plot is a threat that may (re)emerge at any moment, which means that the surveillance function of the drone only tells a portion of the story. The remainder appears as Brennan relies

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on the concept of a “plot” to the question of targeting criteria. It’s an odd move, not least as the term is not traditionally found in military declaratory policy.6 Contrasted with conspiracy, a term that resonates far more with policy’s announced concern for the rule of law, plot is looser, with a speculative if not fictive dimension, an imagining of how one might tell the way in which what happens happens – and why it happens, the necessity of a movement from beginning to middle to end. To condone a targeted strike against an enemy on the grounds that it will, in Brennan’s terms, “disrupt his plot,” is thus to undertake the elimination of those who constitute an “immanent threat” to the degree that they show a potential commitment to a progressive and cumulative action, a path from which there can be no deviation. If such emplotment is enacted by declaratory policy itself, it is also a way to hear the claim that “sound” drone policy is that which targets those who exceed the status of drone and yet remain as much; the figure that embodies an “imminent threat” is the figure that displays the capacity to plot and thus the possibility of refusing to deviate from its “cause.” The sound of the drone is targeted against the human being turned drone, a turn that is deemed to take place through and within the capacity to plot. The (feedback) loop is obvious: the surveillance function of drones endeavors to create drones which then constitute retroactive proof of a threat – the existence of a capacity to plot – that warrants lethal drone strikes. Reducing strategy to raw tactics, through a kind of logomachia, declaratory policy shifts and blurs the difference between two forms of life, both of which amount to being-as-drone. Where one of these forms is an (induced) inability to create a plot such that one only drones (harmlessly), the other is the imminent threat, the drone-being that can undertake emplotment and follow its course. In the space between these forms, declaratory policy sounds the call of Koh’s “smart power”, the voice of public diplomacy and counterinsurgency initiatives which begin from the premise that, “It is essential that the influence campaign is in tune with the strategic narrative, resonates with the relevant audiences, is based on genuine resolve by the affected government and that physical actions match” (Bureau of Political-Military Affairs 2009, 3). There is a remarkable attunement between this claim, as it appears in the U.S. Government Counterinsurgency Guide and in public diplomacy campaigns such as the 2012 effort undertaken by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Africa, and announced UAV policy.7 The sound of the drone aims at the drone of the plot(less) in a way that prepares the ground for a call to the law’s narrative, the story of the priority of its rule, a norm that sings of converting hard hearts and creating like-minded minds. And thus, in several senses, one kind of drone replaces another, which is partly to say that the tune may be yet another cover of that tired pop song so favored by the troupes of public diplomacy, a ditty with a chorus heard far and wide – “oh yes, we are here to make the world safe for our persuasion”. Perhaps the song remains the same. Certainly, the declaratory policy addressed to the use of UAVs draws from a long line of institutional argumentation that relies on appeals to “flexibility” and “balance” to legitimize preemptive attacks on perpetual threats. Today, however, the repetition of this logic, as it is embodied in the sound of a drone, echoes with a certain lament, a sense of loss that can be heard in Barack Obama’s 2013 claims that “the use of force must be seen as part of a larger discussion we need to have about a comprehensive counterterrorism strategy” and that “in the absence of a strategy that reduces the wellspring of extremism, a perpetual war – through drones or Special Forces or troop deployments – will prove self-defeating, and alter our country in troubling ways” (2013a, 5). Here, Obama performs and speaks to a tremendous and compound ambivalence: the allegedly necessary repetition of the drone does not give way to harmony; the “law of 9/11”, as declared by the likes of Koh, codifies a rule whereby an unknown form of war must yet be treated as if it were just, as if it belongs to a known order, one that is now very much missed and which may drive a certain melancholy; the logic of proportionality that justifies targeted strikes against those who would plot cannot fully mask how such kinetic action echoes with a carefully calibrated desire for revenge, one whose form is exemplified by the sound of the drone and enacted by the quality of its flight. Together, these are the ambient questions of declaratory policy, the sounds yet to be heard, the noise to which few care to listen, the (un)settling (of a) score in which the drone of the UAV stands for (un)articulated violence. Address correspondence to: [email protected]

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REFERENCES Axe, David. (2013). Hidden History: America’s Secret Drone War in Africa. Wired, 12 August. Retrieved May 10, 2014, from . BBC. (2012). White House in first detailed comments on drone strikes. Retrieved May 10, 2014, from . Brennan, John. (2012). The Ethics and Efficacy of the President’s Counterterrorism Strategy. Washington DC, 30 April. Retrieved December 16, 2014, from . Brooks, Rosa. (2012). Take Two Drones and Call me in the Morning. Foreign Policy. 12 September Retrieved May 1, 2014, from . Brunstetter, Daniel. (2012). Can We Wage a Just Drone War?” The Atlantic. Retrieved March 18, 2014, from . Bureau of Political-Military Affairs. (2009). U.S. Government Counterinsurgency Guide. Washington DC: GPO. Clinton, Hillary. (2012).Remarks on Building Sustainable Partnerships in Africa. 1 August. Retrieved November 12, 2013, from . Doxtader, Erik. (1997). Total War and Public Life: A Critical Theory of American Nuclear Deterrence Policy. 2 Vols. PhD dissertation, Northwestern University. Dunigan, James. (1996). Digital Soldiers: The Evolution of High-Tech Weaponry and Tomorrow’s Brave New Battlefield. New York: St. Martins. Eno, Brian. (1978). Music for Airports liner notes. .

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Friedman, Uri. (2012). Targeted Killings: A Short History. Foreign Policy. Sept/Oct. Retrieved April 3, 2014, from < http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/08/13/targeted_killings>. Gordon, A. (2008). Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gosztola, Kevin. (2013). Former AFRICOM Chief at Senate Hearing: Using Word ‘Drone’ Fuels Al- Qaeda Propaganda. 23 April. Retrieved March 20, 2014, from . Gregory, Derek. (2011). From a View to a Kill: Drones and Late Modern War. Theory, Culture, Society, 28, 188215. Holder, Eric. (2012). Attorney General Eric Holder Speaks at Northwestern University School of Law, Chicago, 5 March. Retrieved March 20, 2014, from .

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Ignatius, David. (2012). An Embassy Asks, Drones or Diplomacy. Washington Post, 20 June. Retrieved March 20, 2014, from . Kellner, Douglas. (ND). “The Ideology of High Tech/PostModern War vs. The Reality of Messy Wars”. Retrived March 12, 2014, from . Koh, Harold. (2010). The Obama Administration and International Law. Washington DC, 25 March. Retrieved March 10, 2014, from < http://www.state.gov/s/l/releases/remarks/139119.htm>. Obama, Barack. (2009). Remarks by the President on National Security. National Archives, Washington, D.C. May 21. Retrieved March 29, 2014, from . ___. (2013a). Remarks by the President at the National Defense University. Fort McNair, Washington, D.C. 23 May. Retrieved March 23, 2014, from . ___. (2013b). Fact Sheet: U.S. Policy Standards and Procedures for the Use of Force in Counterterrorism Operations Outside the United States and Areas of Active Hostilities. 13 May. Retrieved 23 March, 2014, from . Rameau, Jean-Philippe (1971). Treatise on Harmony. New York: Dover. Singer, P.W. (2009). Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the Twenty-first Century. New York: Penguin Press. Singer, P.W. (2010). Statement for the US House of Representatives, Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs. Retrieved April 10, 2014, from . Sluka, Jeffrey. (2011). UAVs and Losing Hearts and Minds. Military Review, May-June, 70-76. Stein, Philip and Carol Weil. (2008). AFRICOM, the American Military and Public Diplomacy in Africa. USC Annenberg Policy Briefing. March. Strawser, Bradley. (2010). Moral Predators: The Duty to Employ Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles. Journal of Military Ethics, 9(4), 342-68. Vogel, Ryan. (2010). Drone Warfare and the Law of Armed Conflict. Denver Journal of International Law and Policy, 39(1), 101-138. Wall, Tyler and Monahan, Torin. (2011). Surveillance and Violence from Afar: The Politics of Drones and Liminal Security-scrapes. Theoretical Criminology, 15, 239-254. Young, Lamont (1992). La Monte Young & Marian Zazeela: an interview by Ian Nagoski. [Excerpted]. Retrieved November 10, 2013, from . Zaloga, Steven. (2008). Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: Robotic Warfare 1917-2007. Oxford: Osprey Publishing.

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NOTES

1

For an early account of the RMA, see Dunigan (1996). For one of the better contemporary accounts, see Singer (2009).

For a full account of the numbers, including suspected civilian casualties, . 2

3

see

BIJ’s

website:

See < https://publicintelligence.net/us-drones-in-africa/>.

For an ongoing analysis of the debate over UAV, see inter alia the online project being run by the Solomon Asch Center for the Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict. . 4

The defining characteristics of declaratory policy, not least in terms of its strategic functions, are the subject of a substantial literature, much of which I have discussed elsewhere (Doxtader 1997). 5

The term recurs in Brennan’s position and appears again in Barack Obama’s 2013 speech on “the future of warfare”, an address in which he announced “Presidential Policy Guidance” for targeted strikes (Obama 2013a; 2013b). The “policy guidance” largely codifies the position articulated by Brennan, though it was not issued as an Executive Order. 6

With respect to the latter, the 2009 Counterinsurgency Guide contends, “The influence strategy must cascade down from a set of strategic narratives from which all messages and actions should be derived. The narratives of the affected government and supporting nations will be different but complimentary. Messages and actions must address ideological, social, cultural, political, and religious motivations that influence or engender a sense of common interest and identity among the affected population and international stakeholders. They should also counter insurgents’ ideology in order to undermine their motivation and deny them popular support and sanctuary (both physical and virtual). In doing so, counterinsurgents should seek to expose the tensions in motivation (between different ideologies or between ideology and self-interest) that exist across insurgent networks” (20). Some of this bears a striking resemblance to remarks offered in several African countries by then Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton (2012). 7

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THE RHETORIC OF SURVEILLANCE IN THE ARCHIVE OF THE INTELLIGENCE DIRECTORATE OF THE POLICE OF THE PROVINCE OF BUENOS AIRES Maria Alejandra Vitale University of Buenos Aires Argentine

Abstract: This essay paper addresses, from an interdisciplinary perspective, the rhetorical dimension of surveillance exercised by a specific Repressive State Apparatus, the Intelligence Directorate of the Police of the Province of Buenos Aires (DIPBA), Argentine. This agency was created in 1956 and closed in 1998. I analyze documents that were not declassified until 2003, such as the Institution's Internal Regulations, the Internal Regulations of the Intelligence School and a Handbook of Intelligence and Counterintelligence. I am interested in the relevance of the notion of discourse community in understanding the central role of discourse in shaping this group of spies and their intelligence practices Keywords: Argentine, discourse community, police, secrecy, surveillance. INTRODUCTION In this essay, I will use an interdisciplinary perspective to focus on the rhetorical dimension of a type of Intelligence practice belonging to what Louis Althusser (1971) calls the Repressive State Apparatus. I will refer specifically to the case of the Intelligence Directorate of the Police of the Province of Buenos Aires (known in Spanish as the DIPBA). The DIPBA was created in 1956, shortly after President Juan Perón was overthrown by a military and civilian uprising in 1955. Both Perón and the Peronist Party suffered a proscription that lasted until Perón's return in 1973. During this time, the role of the Argentine security forces was redefined within the context of the Cold War, especially after the Cuban Revolution turned to socialism (Funes, 2007). Nevertheless, the DIPBA also inherited files from earlier agencies of “social and political order” dating back to 1932. The DIPBA was dissolved in 1998 by León Carlos Arslanián, the Minister of Security and Justice of the Province of Buenos Aires, under the governorship of Eduardo Duhalde (1991-1999). Arslanián was a judge during the presidential administration of Raúl Alfonsín and in 1985 he had had sentenced members of the de facto military government that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983 in the so-called Trial of the Juntas. The building which had housed the DIPBA was transferred together with its files to the Provincial Memory Commission in 2000 and in 2003 these records were made available to the public. The building and its archive are thus, to use Pierre Nora’s (1989) term, a “lieu de mémoire.” The Archive of the DIPBA is an extensive and detailed record of the criminalization of ideas. The Archive consists of approximately four million pages, more than 300,000 police files, 750 VHS video cassettes with police footage and recordings of television programs and 160 audio cassettes with recordings of events. The DIPBA Archive is the only comprehensive documentary collection that allows us to reconstruct the reasoning and methods underlying political and ideological espionage in Argentina. After the overthrow of Perón in 1955, Argentina was marked by a succession of coups led by the Armed Forces, culminating in systematic state terrorism under a military dictatorship (1976-1983) calling itself the “National Reorganization Process.” State terrorism included murder, forced disappearances, and imprisonment and torture in secret detention centers as well as the abduction of children of parents subjected to enforced disappearance. The Archive of the DIPBA was an important part of the “bureaucracy of evil.” Indeed, the intelligence services were part of the machinery of terror in a “century of barbarism” and genocide. All the DIPBA records are the result of surveillance and the infiltration of assemblies, meetings (public or private), demonstrations and protests, conferences, lectures and talks. The DIPBA was

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headquartered in the city of La Plata, the capital of the Province of Buenos Aires but received information from branches all over the province. Also, DIPBA files contain records produced by other national intelligence agencies of the Argentine State. Intelligence reports are accompanied by a thorough survey of press coverage (local, provincial and national) of each major political event and each organization the DIPBA spied upon. Sometimes, the source of these reports is an analysis of the partisan press. The press cuttings are usually attached, with militants’ names or events chosen for further investigation underlined. Recovering, declassifying and opening the DIPBA files to the public is in keeping with the ongoing process of opening files associated with repression in Latin America, such as the National Police archive in Guatemala, the State Department of Social and Political Order (DEOPS) in Brazil, the documents of the political police from the Stroessner period in Paraguay and documents of the Catholic Church during Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile (Jelin 2003). The DIBPA file is currently being used to draft reparation policies for victims of state terrorism and as evidence in court cases for crimes against humanity. It is also used as a source document by historians, sociologists and social anthropologists researching Argentina’s recent past - including the perpetrators’ mindset (Flier, 2006) - and to construct a historical memory of the last military dictatorship. So far, interest in the DIPBA Archive has focused on the dictatorship and has not included its rhetorical features. To explore these aspects in a meaningful fashion, I believe we need to view the DIPBA files as the product of a discourse community and, additionally, to investigate how the Archive functioned after Argentina’s return to democracy in 1983. To this end, I have taken three key institutional documents as primary sources: the DIPBA’s own Internal Regulations, which remained in force from 1983 until they were revised in 1993; an Intelligence and Counterintelligence Handbook dated 1992; and the Internal Regulations of the School of Intelligence, introduced in 1983. I will focus here on three dimensions of the DIPBA discourse community: discourse genres, the identity of ‘us’ as opposed to ‘them’, and disciplinary procedures applied to the bodies of those who formed the community of spies. GENRES, ‘US’ AND BODY The DIPBA group can be seen as a discourse community. For Dominique Maingueneau (1999), this means a group or network of groups producing discourses that are inseparable from the group’s modes of organization, practices and, indeed, its very existence. In this sense, espionage and intelligence work carried out by those who worked for the DIPBA were inseparable from the texts themselves. Each text was molded by the discourse genres that intelligence officers necessarily produced as part of their work. The notion of discourse genre is essential for addressing the rhetorical dimension of intelligence practices and for conceptualizing the group that carried them out as a discourse community. As Jean-Claude Beacco (2004) points out, discourse genres help to give coherence to the discourse community that produces, circulates and receives them. In the DIPBA, these genres can be described – to use Dominique Maingueneau’s term - as “institutionalized” because they have become highly conventionalized for socio-historical reasons, especially regarding purpose, status of legitimate participants and textual organization. They are highly resistant to change and construct a community with a hierarchical structure. The Intelligence and Counterintelligence Handbook explains that Intelligence is a cycle consisting of four stages. Each stage involves the use of specific discourse genres. The first stage, called the ‘Procedure for Procurement of Information,’ deals with the need for Intelligence. This stage corresponds to a genre used only by police and political leaders called the Procurement Plan, which must contain the questions to be answered. In the jargon of the Intelligence Services, these are known as EEI (Essential Elements of Intelligence) and ORI (Other Intelligence Elements). The second stage is called Information Gathering and includes the search for information by an agent who may or may not belong to the DIPBA (e.g. through phone tapping, infiltration or interrogation). The third stage is seen as the most important in the cycle and involves the process whereby intelligence is produced, in other words, the conversion of “raw” information into a finished product. This third stage is carried out by specialized personnel and is broken down into several steps. The

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first step is to register information using a genre called the Information Logbook, including date and time of entry of the information into the DIBPA, a summary of the information, its source and its intended final recipients. The second step is the evaluation of information. Sources are ranked on a scale from "reliable" to "unreliable" or "cannot be assessed" and the value and the degree of accuracy of the information are also assessed on a scale from "certain" to "improbable" or "cannot be assessed.” The last step is interpretation, which draws conclusions from the hypothesis that guided the research. The fourth and final stage of the cycle is called Information Dissemination, in other words, its distribution to the authority or body that needs to make a decision. In this way, the entire intelligence cycle is legitimized as a necessary means for an authority to make a decision. In this last stage we find the genre known as Intelligence Report, which allows the DIPBA community to communicate with other communities, such as politicians. Interestingly, both the DIPBA’s Internal Regulations and Handbook of Intelligence and Counterintelligence presuppose that a good intelligence agent is a good writer; hence these documents gave priority to the rules that should govern the writing of intelligence reports. It is also worth pointing out that those who drew up these recommendations were clearly competent teachers of composition and rhetoric, judging by the documents themselves. The Regulations place writing in a communicative circuit in which the agent must consider the purpose of the report, the readers and the need for brevity. Referring to the distinction has between Inventio and Elocutio, the Regulations state sententiously: "First the thought, then the word". As for what we could consider the Dispositio, the Regulations set out the three types of pyramid used in narrative (normal, inverted and combined), advising writers always to give the most important information first, while laying down specific rules on sentence length and explaining the use of paragraphs. The ideal that underlies the two documents is that of a transparent language which should tell the facts as accurately as possible. The subjective opinions of the agent-writer are seen as dangerous because they produce inaccuracies or distort the information. Hence the explicit order to writers separate and distinguish the facts from their own assessments. Both the Regulations and the Handbook demand the eloquent virtue of clarity and reject ambiguity as dangerous. Another stylistic trait that was required of intelligence officers was what Bakhtin (1968) calls ‘monologism.’ This means that writers were expected to use citations in order to clearly separate the words of each person under surveillance, while the agent's opinion was to be as muted as possible unless explicitly signaled as such in the evaluation section of the report. But intelligence officers were not just required to be good writers but also good listeners, and for this reason the DIPBA Regulations explicitly recommend “distancing oneself sufficiently from the orator or speaker (source) and not necessarily accepting his or her views at face value.” Intelligence officers are instructed to look closely at the techniques used by the speaker, breaking them down into their component parts and retaining only what is relevant to the information requested by their superiors. The professional identity of intelligence officers was predicated on their ability to write and to listen since they needed these skills to do their job properly. In particular those involved in the third stage of the intelligence cycle, the production of intelligence itself, are given the valued identity of highly trained specialists using analytical methods, logical processes and inductive and deductive reasoning. In this way, the meaning of the word intelligence as an intellectual faculty is activated by syllepsis. In the same vein, the Handbook of Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence legitimates Intelligence as a scientific practice used by anyone handling large amounts of data. In a democratic context, spying and intelligence practices are not legitimized, as they were in the documents of the dictatorship, by concerns about national security or military values, but through expert and scientific discourse. Hence, the documents also refer to what they call the "discipline of secrecy," whereby agents are trained not to divulge information and to obey orders to the letter. Here, the word ‘discipline’ is also a

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syllepsis, since it acquires the sense of knowledge and obedience. With reference to the causes that may drive agents to be indiscreet and disclose information, the passions of hatred and enthusiasm are perceived among the most dangerous. The so-called "intelligent man" is one who exercises self-control. The Handbook and Regulations implicitly build an ‘us’ opposed to ‘them’, the latter being "criminals or opponents" who are the objects of surveillance. About this ‘them’, the Handbook states: It is necessary to know, in a society, the different ways in which people behave, especially conflict or deviant behavior, as this generates instability, disorientation and demoralization, and is closely linked to all criminal activities. The ‘us’ is implicitly associated with an absence of conflict, respect for rules, stability, guidance and morality. The ‘other’ in relation to the DIPBA is also termed an "undesirable element," a phrase-cliché whose inanimate nucleus "element" dehumanizes the offender. The metaphorization of opponents as inert matter is indicative of a discursive memory of the military dictatorship which, although residual during the democratic era, continued to direct repressive actions against the bodies of political adversaries and criminals without the precautions normally afforded to living persons. The ‘other’ also appears in the guise of "stranger" against which the ‘us’ is drawn implicitly as familiar, known, normal and ordinary. The interesting thing is that the documents do not explicitly state what is strange and therefore refer to a naturalized perception shared by the community. Criminals or opponents were classified on a grid made up of social, political, trade unionist, educational, economic, religious and police "factors," as they were known in the jargon. How, then, were offenders or opponents constructed? The social factor included information about foreigners, illegal settlements and the inhabitants of shanty town; the educational factor included high school dropout rates and illiteracy; the trade unionist factor included unemployment rates. The political factor, however, does not mention political movements. This seems to indicate that offenders or antagonists are discursively constructed as social activists in shanty towns, poor immigrants, protesters, and the unemployed. This approach, rooted in the incipient neoliberal policies that would later characterize the 1990s, was quite different from the figure of ‘the subversive’ - the ‘other’ that had haunted the DIPBA during the military dictatorship. Bearing in mind that the ‘other’ of the DIPBA community is constructed as a foreigner, it is worth recalling that the only two occurrences of personal deixis in the Handbook are in the expression "our country." The collective identity providing a strong bond is "Argentine" since the ‘us’ reference is to “we the Argentine people." The structural metaphor “escalón” (Spanish, ‘step’, ‘stair’) used to denote an agent gives the DIPBA community a hierarchical character, while enabling semantic connotations of abusive practices, such as a superior “treading” on a lower rung of the ladder. Finally, I will refer briefly to the way the bodies of DIPBA agents are constructed, controlled and disciplined in the Internal Regulations of the School of Intelligence. First, as Foucault (1987) points out, discipline is first and foremost about consigning individuals to a particular place. In this way, students of the School of Intelligence are distributed in classrooms by the so-called "Head of the student body," a name in which the literal meaning of "body" hints at the discipline to which the students’ physical bodies are subjected. In the dining room, each student’s place is predetermined; each table has a ‘head’ and students must "make way for their superiors" as they enter and leave. Rules on personal hygiene, dress and personal belongings in dormitories are intended to produce a clean and orderly body. Power required the body to exhibit certain signs, including clothing, such as the uniform to be used by students during class. While they may enter and leave the Institute in civilian clothes, the regulations stipulate that they “must be soberly and correctly dressed." The word "correctly" again refers to an unspecified norm – an assumption shared and naturalized by the community. The word ‘control’ is repeated time and again in the regulations, including control of the way

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students should dress, delivery of original notes by teachers, control of class topics, and the movement of books. As we have seen, Intelligence work is a practice with own rhetoric. It presents itself as subordinate to the police and political power of current democratic systems it; but it makes ‘intelligent’ decisions that, in all probability, promote crime rather than fighting it. This rhetoric regulates the use of language and the body, establishing legitimate genres and styles in terms of what, to use Bourdieu’s term, could be called the accepted hexis. “em-bodied, turned into a permanent disposition, a durable manner of standing, speaking, and thereby of feeling and thinking” (Bourdieu 1997: 94). The regulations define an ‘us’ that is distinguished from ‘them’ – referred to as offenders or opponents, with the latter term legitimizing the surveillance of anyone who thinks differently or actively opposes the government. The practice of Intelligence is legitimized by a disciplinary normalization in which the ‘us’ functions as an implicit model for separating the normal from the abnormal, the familiar from the strange (Foucault 2009) and friend from foe. CONCLUSIONS To conclude, I would like to emphasize that the notion of discourse community allows us not only to integrate the social and the textual, but also to study genre, identity construction and bodies. Accordingly, it provides a very useful approach to the rhetorical dimension of intelligence practices such as those carried out by the DIPBA group. The study provides insight into the performative role of discourse in shaping intelligence practices. Indeed, intelligence is built on a network of discourses that comprise procedures for inclusion and exclusion, principles for classification and comment, and "rituals of speaking." In this sense, the documents analyzed carried the DIPBA conceive intelligence as a specific order of discourse (Foucault, 1981). Finally, I wish to stress that the analysis of the DIPBA documents helps us understand how this network of discourses shapes the subjectivity of the intelligence agents, without which intelligence work would not be possible. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This work is based on the results of UBACyT Project 20020120200039, funded by the University of Buenos Aires. Invitational support by the National Research Foundation of South Africa (NRF) is also recognized (grant 81695). Any opinion, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and therefore the NRF does not accept any liability in regard thereto. Address correspondence to: [email protected] REFERENCES Althusser, L. (1971). Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. In L. Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays (pp. 121–176). New York: Monthly Review Press. Bakhtin, M. M. (1968). Rabelais and His World. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Bourdieu, P (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beacco, J.-C. (2004). Trois perspectives linguistiques sur la notion de genre discursif Langages 153, 109119. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish. New York: Pantheon.

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Foucault, M. (1981) The Order of Discourse. In R. Young (Ed.), Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader (pp. 51-78). Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Foucault, M. (2009). Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-1978. New York: First Picador Edition. Funes, P. (2007) ‘Engineers of the soul’ reports from the Argentine military dictatorship’s intelligence services on Latin American popular song, essays, and the social sciences Varia historia 23 (38), 418-437. Jelin, E. (2003). State Repression and the Labors of Memory. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Maingueneau, D. (1999) Analyzing self-constituting discourses, Discourse studies, 1 (2), 183-199. Nora, P. (1989). Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire, Representations 26, 7-24.

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FROM STATE SECURITY TO HUMAN SECURITY: A CASE OF ARCHIPELAGO OF GENDER JUSTICE IN EGYPT Ibrahim Saleh Centre for Film and Media Studies University of Cape Town South Africa Abstract: The prevailing system of state or national security is incompatible with and is the foremost obstacle to both human security and planetary security. If human security is to be achieved, patriarchy has to be replaced with gender equality and a new thinking about power, because patriarchy privileges a minority of men who rationalize the harm they cause to those over whom they have power. This research attempts to investigate contemporary feminist thinking and practice in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The research offers a hands-on experience with the aim of understanding, critiquing, as well as comparatively analyze the politics of gender in the MENA region. Media miss stories that address the factors that hinder women’s effective participation as citizens in governance and decision-making processes, and in politics that make media genderblind. Mainstream media are a site of potential challenge to patriarchal discourse that normalizes gender hierarchy. News accounts of women frequently invite their audiences to blame victims by including details that can suggest that women provoke such as harassment with their clothing choices, drug or alcohol consumption, or decisions to leave the confines of the home. The research covers current debates on the status of women, and closely examines the processes by which the private/public lives of women are gendered. It addresses women's visibility in society and the mediatisation of women's and feminist movements. The research follows an interdisciplinary and uses feminist pedagogy to challenge orientalist, monolithic, and Eurocentric notions of studying the region and particularly the status of women. It gives equal weight to theory and practice and draws on writings by local and global activists and theorists. Key Words: Egypt, Gender security, State Oppression, biopolitics, genre mainstreaming, patriarchal norms, 'masculinist restoration', human-security State INTRODUCTION The essence of human security, wellbeing made possible through the elimination of all forms of violence, assured by institutions designed specifically to achieve and maintain well-being; in short, demilitarizing national security and bringing an end to patriarchy (Reardon & Hans, 2010). The recent history of Internet use in the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA) includes examples of women starting women-centered news sites, heading women’s rights and human rights organizations, creating films that highlight women’s lives blogging about their social movements, and using text, Twitter, and cell phone videos to engage in revolutionary action. It is evident that communication technologies are powerful tools to change the position of MENA women. However, government repercussions, global economic concerns, and challenges as to how many and what types of women have access to these technologies must be noted (Newsom, Cassara, & Lengel, 2011). These debates reflect a larger issue surrounding local constructions of and reactions to women’s knowledge and values in response to a global push toward Gender Mainstreaming (GM)1. This concept is worthy of careful analysis in the MENA, where the status of women is challenged by cultural juxtapositions, traditional narratives, diverse value systems, and contemporary power structures (Bayat, 2010). Local perspectives are constantly changing, though the status of women in MENA is rooted in the clash between local and global value systems. The discourse of GM is itself part of the problem. GM discourse is a reflection of global development policy discourse, which has often been cited by postcolonial theorists and grassroots organizers as biased against the local cultures and the values and ideals of women in those cultures (Mohanty, 2003; Ong, 1988; Said, 1978). Additionally, the discourses surrounding technology are critiqued as reinforcing patterns of colonial privilege by valuing Western-style technology and industry over local or cottage industry, technologies, and expertise (Gajjala & Mamidipudi, 1999; Harding, 2010). The research argues that they provide an illustration of the complexity and dynamism of security. To serve this goal, the researcher here examines security through the notion of societal security as understood by Ole Wæver, and use identity as a 'door' to a broader understanding and use of the concept of security. The focus 1

Gender Mainstreaming, an attempt to get more women involved in the development process on a global level is a concept constructed and supported by the United Nations (UN) as part of global development policy. In the information technology sector, this process involves encouraging corporations and governments to increasingly hire women and to incorporate women’s issues into technology production, work, and play.

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of the research is gender identity during the current political transitions as an integral perspective of security (Weaver, 2010). In conjunction with elite-defined state interests, identity articulates the security interests of 'significant groups', supporting the articulation of security needs by individuals and communities. Gender is identified as a 'significant group' relevant to the security dynamic. Using gender identity to understand security requires breaking down rigid and fundamental structures that have been built around traditional notions of security, allowing for articulations of security as it is understood by individuals in general and by women in particular (Hoogensen & Rottem, 2004). But how is gender related to revolutions? What is the connection between "gender" and women or, for that matter, between gender and women and men? If gender is generally understood to be the social construction of sexual difference, what explains the differences in gendered identities across cultures or over time? These questions were posed in dramatic fashion by the political and social changes in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) were initiated with the "Arab revolutions" starting in the spring of 2011. Women were involved in the Arab revolutions, in all their aspects, and women’s rights as a feature of citizens’ rights have been central to the democratic mobilizations against corrupt and autocratic regimes (Moruzzi, 2013). Yet all too often the gendered aspects of political struggles in the region have been reduced to the volatile symbolism of "the veil" and the question, "How do they treat their women?" "every state regime, no matter where it sits on a authoritarian-democratic spectrum, cannot be reliably understood until it has been thoroughly subjected to a serious gender analysis. Berlusconi’s Italian, Pinochet’s Chilean, Qaddafi’s Libyan, Assad’s Syrian, Sarkozy’s French and the now-wobbly Japanese regimes – all of them need feminist-informed gender dissection" (Enloe, 2013). This research aims to unpack the gaps in the study of neoliberalism and biopolitics, by identifying and explaining the powerful new police practices, religious politics, sexuality identifications, and gender normativities that have travelled across an archipelago, which is a metaphorical island chain of what the coercive states in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) face on daily bases that have developed into a governance model of "human-security state" (Amar, 2013a). The need for radical social change is pressing and the desire for it widespread. The current global scene witness an increasing gender aware politics that struggles to actively pursue goals of social justice, equality, deeper democracy, a social and environmentally sustainable economy and a demilitarised politics are politically active without being members of political parties. Progressive social movements radicalise public consciousness. Generally, however, they are unable to give these shifts in consciousness a wider political coherence (Wainwright, 2008). The purpose of this research is to assert that gender is a relevant category when analysing politics in any country. Hence, using security as an example urges us to consider a number of areas in which a feminist perspective can contribute to discussion and a deeper understanding of the political transition in Egypt. In the words of J. Ann Tickner, security "has been central to the discipline of international relations since its inception in the early twentieth century" and "is also an important issue for feminists who write about international relations" (Tickner 1997). The research aims to unveil how a redefinition of security in feminist terms could help uncover uncomfortable truths about the world in which we live; how the 'myth of protection' is a lie used to legitimize war; and finally how discourse in international politics is constructed of dichotomies and how their deconstruction could lead to benefits for the human race. Mainstream International Relations (IR) theorists; consider security solely in terms of state security, though most wars since 1945 have been fought within states and not across international boundaries (Tickner and Sjoberg 2010, p.203). IR feminists define security more broadly, as the diminution of all forms of violence that includes domestic violence, rape, poverty, gender subordination, economic, and ecological destruction (Tickner and Sjoberg 2010). One of the alternative ways of considering insecurity using a gender-sensitive approach is considering economic security. Women are disproportionately located at the bottom of the socio-economic scale in all societies due to the gendered division of labour. Women are paid a lower wage due to the assumption that their wage is supplementary, while in actual fact about a third of all households are headed by women (Moylan, 2013). "Structural violence has four basic components: exploitation which is focused on the division of labor with the benefits being asymmetrically distributed, penetration which necessitates the control by the exploiters over the consciousness of the exploited thus resulting in the acquiescence of the oppressed, fragmentation which means that the exploited are separated from each other, and

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marginalization with the exploiters as a privileged class with their own rules and form of interaction"(Caprioli 2005, p.164). According to feminist literature, the world is made up of dichotomies, and these dichotomies are gendered. For example, masculinity has positive characteristics in international politics, such as rational, strong, dominant, militarized, and public, while feminists have negative connotations that are emotional, weak, subordinate, peaceful, and private. "Gender equality might have a dual impact in hindering the ability of groups to mobilize the masses in support of insurrection through the use of gendered language and stereotypes and in reducing societal tolerance for violence" (Caprioli 2005, p. 162). Feminist theorists have called for a reconceptualization of power from what has been labelled the traditional sense of 'power over' or 'power as dominance'(Salla 2001). This traditional sense of power is what leads to situations such as the security dilemma, which encourages understanding and joint action. The spectre of the Iranian revolution haunted the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt whether in the form of threats from Mubarak that Egypt would suffer an Islamic takeover like Iran, or assurances from the Muslim Brotherhood, activists and scholars that these threats were empty. There seemed to be a consensus across the board that the Iranian Revolution was synonymous with the theocratic and authoritarian state it ushered in. In a strange coincidence, the Iranian and Egyptian revolutions occurred exactly 32 years apart to the day; they were each born of different eras, different histories, yet they expressed similar popular sentiments despite the fact that those aspirations were articulated through very different frameworks. There are far too many oversimplified accounts of what happened and lest these accounts be continually used to discredit or police the idea of revolution, it is worth going back and recuperating a more complicated understanding of those historic months. This is necessary to counter the revisionism of dominant regional, Western and official Iranian state narratives (Nasrabadi, 2011). January 2011 Egyptian people took to the streets demanding the fall of a corrupt and authoritarian regime. A revolutionary movement including women and men from different generations, social backgrounds, and diverse political and religious affiliations joined forces to ask for freedom, dignity and social justice. More than three years on from this epochal moment, what are the main challenges that face the politicians, civil society, and the international community? Has the experience of the revolution changed the perception of the relationship between the people and political power in the Arab world? And lastly, what have been the impact of the revolution in the cultural and the intellectual sphere of the Arabic speaking world. Rather than celebrating the anniversary of its revolution, Egypt is facing great political divisions, aggravated by moves from the ruling party to control the State institutions and restrict basic civil liberties. Despite playing a significant role in the 2011 Arab Spring protests, demanding greater rights and freedom, women are increasingly being side-lined in transition processes and women activists face safety and security concerns including being harassed and beaten (Saleh, 2013b). Women from all classes, some veiled, some not took to the streets. "We didn’t make a revolution to go backwards," they chanted (Nasrabadi, 2011). Egyptian women, a new phase of struggle against new state forms of patriarchy began at the very moment when the struggle for national liberation was over. Hence, women were betrayed by the revolution they helped to make (Saleh, 2013a). They were marginalized and even excluded from the emerging power structures and the national political rhetoric (Middleton-Detzner et. al, 2011). This is an in-depth critical analysis of the feminist role in the public opinion dynamics and the political rhetoric in the fight for the costly delays. It also examined the internal diversity of these feminist movements (Lewis, 2010). The basic relationship between gender and politics is important to remember because analysts so often segregate “women’s issues” from others and consider gender dynamics irrelevant to local conditions and social change. Political participation of women has been always dtermined by the entrenched social and cultural barriers imposed by the patriarchal society, which was later reinforced by the wave of Islamic fundamentalism that swept across the Arab world since the 1980s. Muslim Brotherhood denounced2 and slamed the UN document because it contradicts principles of Islam and destroys family life and entire society, though in fact it denies the right of Egyptian women to be safe from violence, the right to fight for their rights, indeed the right to be equal as humans. By 2012, the newly parliament then wrapped in the cloak of religious conservatism and fewer women are represented (Equitas, 2012). The irony lies in the despair looms of how religious fundamentalists pushed laws to silence women’s voices as they deemed "awra" (sinful) (Allam, 2013). According to the Gender Gap Report issued by the World Economic Forum 2012,3 Egypt was ranked 125 out of 133 in the world; and the rank dropped further after the revolution since 2011 to 128. And the new 2

http://www.ikhwanweb.com/article.php?id=30731

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breed of women under the relgioius groups stated that it is enough to have one woman in the parliament!" (Sholkamy, 2012). TRAPPED INSIDE POLITICS: EGYPTIAN WOMEN AND LAWS The 1994 United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Report helped solidify the concept of human security, although recognition of people’s security independent of state security is nothing new (Axworthy, 2001). Within the UNDP report, human security is defined as ‘freedom from fear, freedom from want’, seen as consisting of four characteristics: universal, interdependent, easier to ensure through early prevention and people-centred (UNDP 1994: 23–24). The UNDP report additionally identified seven primary categories: economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community and political security (Axworthy, 2001). Local knowledge, as described by Geertz (1983), refers to the social, historical, and cultural experience of individuals within a distinct culture or locality. Local knowledge differs from "Western" or "scientific" knowledge in "the ways it explains and establishes knowledge claims. Previous scientific assessments have been based on a particular Western epistemology, one that often excludes local knowledges, ignores cultural values, and disregards the needs of local communities" (Salas, 2005, p. 5). The local experiences, identities, and definitions of women and gender that are not tied to essentialized, global categories need to be encouraged and empowered. In some fields such as agriculture, reliance on local knowledge has been seen as a necessary ingredient to truly sustainable development (Feldman & Welsh, 1995). Perhaps especially in MENA, there is a well-established tradition of authoritarian governments incorporating women as equal political subjects through state-sponsored policies of secular modernization, but no one as participatory political citizens (Totten, 2012). Patriarchal norms, often legally enforced, have frequently been invoked by liberal capitalism to maintain social order alongside the unregulated freedoms of the market. The ideology of unfettered economic freedom has provoked a corollary ideology of desirable social controls; despite possible libertarian experiments, modern capitalist social orders have mostly privileged the family as an idealized site of naturalized obligation for all concerned. But patriarchy also involves the domination of men; it is a system of hierarchical order for everyone, gendered but also aged, classed and raced. Status is inflected by position relative to the familial model of the singular patriarch, and although patriarchy provides rigidly limited social identities, the position of any individual within the hierarchical structure is essentially dynamic. One is not born but becomes a patriarch (Moruzzi, 2013). It was only in the nineteenth century that veiling became such a contested symbol of Islam as a religion and a culture. At the nexus of imperialism and nationalism, the veil became variously the representation of women, culture, oppression, liberation, piety, tradition and fanaticism. Though contradictory, these understandings of veiling cast its meaning as fixed and absolute. Research has consistently shown, however, that both the form and the meaning of veiling as a practice change over time and place (Ahmed, 2012). Women in fragile and conflict-affected states face a unique set of issues and challenges, and these are reflected in UN Security Council Resolution 1325 and subsequent resolutions. Gender dynamics often play a part in what is driving conflict, and can also provide pathways to peace. This means that taking a gender perspective is important to fully understand a conflict and to be able to design programmes that can effectively address it. It is important to refer to the issuance of the Constitution 1956 gave women the rights of political practice within the six major principles in order to establish social justice among gender (Saleh, 2013b). It was crystallized with their participation in the 1957 parliament with two seats (McGrath, 2009). In November 17, 1962, the law on the formation of the Preparatory Committee of the National Conference of People's Power recommended the represnetation of at least (5%) and in September 7, 1975 a socialist union decision of women organization was issued, and its 242 committees comprised of 249862 members nationwide (Morgan, 2011). Presidential Decree of Law No. 21 of 1979 allocated at least 30 seats for women, with the possibility of the nomination of women to win any other seats, which was then followed by Law No. 114 of 1983 of the People's Assembly issued to increase the number of seats allocated to women one seat. But in 1986, Law No. 188 of 1986 was provided for the cancellation of this allocation. Presidential Decree No. 20 of 2000 established the National Council for Women to promote human rights and freedom. Later in 2009, the law of the People's Assembly was amneded and allocated sixty-four-seats for only two legislative periods to support the role of women's parliamentary participation and political actors, reflecting their positive role in all areas (Morgan, 2011). 3

http://www.weforum.org/reports/global-gender-gap-report-2012

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Female parliamentary representation declined since 1984, when women occupied 36 of the 458 seats in the People's Assembly, the lower house of Egypt's parliament. Women secured just nine of 454 seats in the last legislative election in 2005. Only four women were elected, the rest were appointed by the president. Women's representation in the parliament remained minimal and insignificant with the exception of the periods that have adopted Quota systems for women and the Proportional list system in 1979, 1984, and 2010 (Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, 2013). The representation has further declined from (12.5 %) in 2010 to (2%) in 2011. In 2010, the World Economic Forum Gender Gap Report ranked Egypt 125th out of 136 countries in terms of the disparity in rights between men and women (Hausmann, Tyson & Zahidi, 2010). In three of the four categories Egypt ranked in the bottom (20%) of countries assessed, based on the level of education of women, the number of women in the labour force and women holding political positions (McKellogg, 2011). A poll by the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies established casuality between social challenges and the role of women. Before the revolution, (76%) said they felt safe walking alone in the streets at night, and after the revolution, only (57%) feel that way, while (37%) who said they felt safe walking emphasized that they are not reluctant to express freely their views (Aziz, 2012). On the economic levels, unemployment among women continued to rise in 2012, to (24.7 %), compared with (23.6%) in 2011 and (22.76%) before the revolution. In addition, (84%) of women feel less financially secure now than before the revolution and (39%) believe that women's employment opportunities have decreased (Solovieva, 2013). Women were not mobilized around women's issues but rather as citizens seeking to oust a corrupt regime (Henderson, & Jeydel, 2007). Alluding to the marginalization of women, Carla Power writes, "Women are good for revolutions, but historically revolutions haven't been so good for women" (Xan Riee, 2010). GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN REVOLUTION: POLITICS AND POWER IN EGYPT The main question in this section is how is gender related to revolutions? If gender is the social construction of sexual difference, experienced through daily practices and conventions as well as institutional enforcement, then the relationship between gender and politics is fundamental. The new political expressions and rebel formations can only be understood by taking account variables that the culturally-oriented theories and pedagogies that dominated Middle East studies have neglected. Given the diverse historical trajectories and current developments, it is crucial to look more closely at specific contexts, rather than engage in sweeping generalisations about gender and revolutions in the Middle East. For example, the situation in Syria, with the largely militarised uprising and an incredibly violent crack-down by the regime, is dramatically different from processes in Egypt and Tunisia. Bahrain, Yemen or Libya is also radically distinct political, economic and social contexts (Al-Ali, 2014). Neither gender nor politics is exclusive of the other, nor absolutely determinative. Gender saturates political relationships and the subjective identities of all political actors; collective political change shifts the possibilities for individual experience, including gendered expectations and realities (Nadim Centre, 2013). Particularly during periods of revolutionary upheaval, gender norms become unstable. If the state itself is under threat, so is the family order sponsored by that state, as was posited as far back as Aristotle. In describing the origin of the polis (the self-governed city-state), the Greek philosopher argued that the first human social relationships were based on reproduction and kinship. With regard to politics, however, “the state is by nature clearly prior to the family and to the individual, since the whole is of necessity prior to the part. Women’s motivations for joining feminist groups are under researched (Lewis 2004). Perhaps the explanation is the society’s resentment is an appropriation of religious symbols and rhetoric for legitimacy among politicians and activists alike, works against secularization theory (Smith 1987). Masculinities and femininities are constantly in crisis, which emphasize a continuous state of contestation, polarisation and struggle over that are closely linked to the political economies. In the Egyptian context, the impact of structural adjustment and neo-liberal policies cannot be overstated. As Pratt (2013: 2–3) expressed that the intensification of neo-liberal economic reforms has been largely dismantled "ideal" gender relations for working and lower middle class families, but at the expense of the sustainability of social reproduction, thereby creating nostalgia for "traditional" gender relations’, in addition to ‘the securitization of authoritarian regimes often provoking feelings of emasculation among the victims of security forces (Pratt, 2003). When talking to Egyptian men and women of low income and middle classes, the nostalgia for a glorified past in which men could be 'real men' and women could be 'real women' often becomes apparent. Besides, there is an overall shift towards more conservative gender norms and relations that are driven not only by Islamist political constituencies but many ordinary people as well.

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However, it is not a simple matter to limit the explanation as patriarchy and misogyny the honing in on women’s dress codes, their mobility, their sexuality, and their presence during protests, actually the honing in on the fact that they are political actors. The context is radically different, and has been getting there for some time. Hence, it is imperative to introduce the term "masculinist restoration" to signal that when patriarchy as usual no longer feels secure; it requires a higher level of coercion and the deployment of more varied ideological state apparatuses to ensure its reproduction (Kandiyoti, 2013) To my mind, these rather desperate attempts by the state to reinstate more clear-cut gender norms and relations play right into the insecurities, frustrations and anger of men outside of the political elite who feel challenged by women’s aspirations, activism, disobedience and desires. In the meantime, Islamist organizations preached that the women’s place is in the home, by manipulating the interpretation of verses in the Quran to justify discrimination against women (Khalaf, 2012). Gihan Abouzeid, United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), consultant and managing editor of Ikhwan Papers magazine: "We are actually facing two types of challenges. The first is on the policy level because of the conservative religious government and how they understand Islam, and the second is on the cultural level." Since 1981, Egypt became a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), but constraints were mitigated or exacerbated by class position, family culture, and a woman’s relative position in intersecting economies of power and influence (Tucker 1993). Egyptian women still confront daily patriarchy in every sphere of their lives (Abu-Lughod 2001). The patriarchal society limited women’s roles to stereotypical domestic responsibilities, deeming them incapable of holding high office. "Egyptian family law is also biased against women. According to Egyptian writer and women's rights activist Nawal al-Sa'dawi, "the family code in Egypt is one of the worst family codes in the Arab world. ...The husband has absolute control over the family" (Socolovsky, 2011). The "neo-patriarchy" added to the intnsity of the situation is a product of the intersection between the colonial and indigenous domains of state and political processes (Sharabi, 1988). "The higher you go in the political hierarchy and into the decision making levels, the fewer females you’ll find," says Nehad Aboul Komsan, head of the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights (Afifi, 2011). Hidden Histories of Gender and the State in Egypt Most studies of women’s political participation in the Middle East focus on the problem of low levels of female representation in government, and more particularly, in elected parliaments. This line of research considers the structural and cultural conditions that make it difficult for women to be nominated as candidates and to win political office as well as the behaviour of female parliamentarians once in government. Most literature support the argument that it is not about ‘their culture’, but it is about political economies. It is about authoritarian dictatorships and conservative patriarchal interpretations and practices. It is about foreign interventions and invasions. It is thus pertinent to mention intersectionality; that is, that the struggle for women’s rights intersects with the struggle against other inequalities, which might include the struggles against imperialism, authoritarianism and, racism crucially as well, sectarianism (Al-Ali, 2014). The political marginalisation of women and extremely socially conservative attitudes towards women and gender relations need to be analysed by reference to foreign interventions and authoritarian regimes, but surely cannot be reduced to them. This sentiment is not very popular among many progressive academics and activists based in western contexts, but have certainly shaped the way people perceive and react to events unfolding in Egypt. The question of how everyday women respond to the opportunities and incentives presented by parliamentary elections has been largely ignored, however, in favour of studies of the political prospects for female elites. In particular, current studies fail to investigate the extent to which gender considerations impact voter recruitment strategies in competitive parliamentary elections (Blaydes & El Tarouty, 2009). The gender discrepancy suggests tangible criticism of both the local and the colonial patriarchal cultures that clearly labels "women’s ignorance" as the main cause of Egypt backwardness (Al-Ali, 2000). Feminist movements in Egypt are still seen as essentially western and secular in aligns with the current international (western) paradigm of social theory (Zuhur 1999). Ironically, the space of freedom enjoyed by female intellectuals at the dawn of the 19th century is far wider in comparison to that at the disposal of women a century ago (Sorbera, 2013). The first generation of Egyptian feminists adopted a secular liberal ideology, without denying members’ religious background (Abbott, 1942). Feminism was built on Islamic modernist discourse as nationalist liberal elite, which supported women’s social claims, but not their political feminist demands

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(Fenoglio & el Aal, 1988). These aliegnated ideas were agitated by the rising Islamist movement from the 70s and 80s, which monopolized gender discourses, and labelled feminism as anti-Islamic. The rise of second wave was characterized with high educated, international networks and high levels of specialization in the field of social sciences. Yet, it was crushed between two powers: the regime stopped every independent initiative and appropriated "gender issues" under its name on one hand, and the Islamist opposition that succeeded in mobilizing the lower classes on the other hand (Toubia, 1987). As of the 1990s, security police delegitimized them and intimidated them with thugs. Baltagiya4 are identified as terrorist enemies of the security state (Ismail 2006). The Minstry of Interior recruited these same gangs to flood public spaces during times of protest (Tisdall 2006). Thugs were determined to make the female activists look like 'terrorists'; while beating civilians and doing property damage in the area of the protest (ElNadeem 2006). Security police deployed and revived the Islamophobic, gendered and working-class phobic metaphor, by rendering peaceful political movements with an overwhelming public support into hyper-visible. Such hyper-visible para-human subjects were regularized by discourses that cohere around powerful metaphors (Carver & Pikalo 2008) in particular, the 'time-bomb', 'predator' and the 'slum'. Sexual harassment is rampant: A 2008 study by the Egyptian Center for Women's Rights reported that (83%) of women had been harassed, with more than half of the male respondents blamed women for provoking the harassment, an indication of the mindset of many of the perpetrators (Krajeski, 2011). Female protestors were sexualized and their respectability wiped out in public, by arresting them as prostitutes, registering them in court records and press accounts as sex criminals and then raping and sexually torturing them in jail (Tisdall 2006). Between 2003 and 2010, feminist movements advocated anti-harassment projects that demonized working-class youth masculinities as well as 'disreputable' public femininities to intensify the policing of the city and discipline public sociability (Amara, 2011). Women, particularly those visibly marked by class and/or moral bearing as pious and respectable, stood up against the police to subvert it to some extent (El-Nadeem 2006; Al-Dawla 2008). This has eventually made it difficult for the Egyptian police to continue drawing upon class and geopolitical phobias to portray them as terrorists; and the 'thugification' tactic or "baltagi-effect" unravelled (Baron 2007). Gender & Security: From Jan 25, 2011-June 30 2013 Gender is the fundamental construct for how a society understands difference. Regardless of which state we are talking about, tolerance for street harassment, rape, domestic violence, and restrictions on reproductive freedom are among several indicators of gender inequality rooted in such difference. These behaviours correlate to state security in multiple dimensions (Chemaly, 2012). Religious groups clew back rights that women had fought for and gained before the revolution, and attempted to change divorce and custody laws, push FGM (female genital mutilation), and reduce the age of marriage from 18 to nine years old." The process of insurgent popular political transformation has followed rough logic of 'turning the security state inside out' (Prince, 2011). The enthusiasm for freedom and democracy has been jeopardized with the realization of the politics of gendered securitization5 (Amara, 2013). Estimates put women's participation in the protests at up to (50 %) of the total, (Krajeski, 2011) with the aim to be empowered socially and politically to rise up against the patriarchal society to establish a better for future for all in Egypt (Rakhan, 2011). Women's groups were further incensed when the constitutional committee introduced Article 75, a proposed amendment to the constitution that implied that the head of state would be a man, effectively excluding women from Egypt's presidency (Nelson, 2011). A petition was presented to alter the criteria for selecting and forming the panel (Khan, 2011). The United Nations Development Program’s Arab Human Development Report focused its entire volume on ‘The Rise of Women in the Arab World’ (Regional Bureau for Arab States, UNDP 2006). In a study that looked at 23 separate studies over three-quarters (79%) of images of women in Arab media are negative. Most often women are pictured as sexual objects, or as illiterate and dependent on men (Allam, 2008). In contrast, international media reflected a very positive coverage (Huang& Oi Ling, 2011). Many young women in Egypt strive for women’s rights and justice within a religious framework is often passed over (Jassat, 2012) and the Egyptian journalist Mona Eltahawy explains, "These young women

4 The gangs of 'thugs' and networks of violent extortion rackets seen as emanating from the informal settlements surrounding downtown Cairo 5 The use of gender by the Transportation Security Administration reduces security for the nation.Gender is one of the few pieces of biometric information currently in use, and biometric information is seen as the "holy grail" of securitization (Currah & Mulqueen, 2011)

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were saying, 'we will not be scared away. We are standing up for our rights to be active and equal members of Egyptian society" (Martin, 2011). International media have focused on non-popular feminists such as Aliaa Mahdy, the 20-year-old Egyptian blogger who posed naked online as a political statement in November 2011. Aliaa’s name and Twitter hashtag #NudePhotoRevolutionary attracted a lot of attention across social media networks; names of women who have challenged the abuses of women’s rights received minimal attention. THE POLITICS OF INTEGRATING GENDER TO STATE DEVELOPMENT Gender mainstreaming is too often treated as an end in itself rather than as a means to an end. Simply encouraging women to participate in politics does not alter the status of gender in any society, especially the one that still fights violence against women and girls and to bridge feminism and communication rights in the MENA. Many of the local narratives conflict with the feminist ideologies and global values at the core of GM policies. Western assumptions of MENA women’s complicity have been critiqued by MENA feminist scholars for decades (Kandiyoti, 1988; Makdisi, 2009; Muslim Media Watch, 2010) and reinterpreted from local and postcolonial perspectives as using Western standards to interpret something that has to be understood from the "Othered" point of view (Abouzeid, 2008; Abu Lughod, 2001; Mohanty, 1986; Said, 1978). This research examined the mutually influential interactions of gender and the state in Egypt. Locating watershed moments in the processes of gender construction by the organized power of the ruling classes and in the processes, has conditioned state-making, which offered a fresh insight that was lacking in previous studies of state formation. Understanding security through gender identity forces us to re-evaluate traditional security politics, where security and securitization are traditionally understood as the top of the state hierarchy, where securitization is the exclusive domain of extraordinary measures as defined by perceived threats toward the state and where securitization is a negative process that demands emergency action ‘outside the bounds of normal political procedure’ (Buzan, Wæver & de Wilde, 1998). Securitization understood thus means failure: failure to address the issue within ‘normal bounds’ (Buzan, Wæver & de Wilde, 1998). Securitization is a threat–defence sequence that we are told we must avoid. The very best indicator and predictor of a state’s peacefulness is not wealth, military expenditures, or religion; the best predictor is how well its girls and women are treated. But gendered issues are processes of continued negotiation and reformation that continue well after power has officially changed hands and revolutionaries have cleared the streets. "Things have not changed; they are changing," said Mozn Hassan, the executive director of the women's rights research organization Nazra for Feminist Studies (Otterman, 2011). The notion of the 'masculinity games' (Enloe, 2000) constituted the power of the authoritarian security state in undergirding the geopolitics of 'harassment feminism.' It also emphasized that the feminist voices still struggle to be heard amid the current political uncertainty. After the initial euphoria has abated and the reality of rebuilding the government has set in, women are blatantly absent from the constitutional process in the second republic in Egypt. But "there's also a new level of confidence and self-awareness among women as a result of their integral role in the revolution," said Hoda Badran, chair of the Alliance for Arab Women." There is no doubt that elements of the Egyptian authorities are using violence, including sexual violence, that is, harassment and rape, in a targeted manner to intimidate women and assert control. Yet, this form of gender-based violence does not exist in a vacuum and both research and activism need to address the continuum of sexual and wider gender-based violence. Long-term, Egyptian feminists are challenged to intervene in debates and policymaking to address the increase in poverty, the inadequate redistribution of wealth and resources, high unemployment rates and neoliberal economic policies. At the same time the biggest dilemmas is to avoid the extremely unhelpful rhetoric of 'male mob violence' while actively addressing widespread lawlessness, a normalisation of violence, and misogynistic attitudes and practices. Address correspondence to: [email protected] REFERENCES Abbott, N. (1942). Aishah the Beloved of Mohammed. Chicago, USA: University of Chicago Press. Abouzeid, O. (2008). Projects of Arab women empowerment: Current status and future prospects. Cairo, Egypt: Arab Women Organization. Abu Lughod, L. (2001). Orientalism and Middle East feminism, Feminist Studies, 27(1), 101–113.

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ON YOUR MARK…: UNIVERSITY GRADES, PRIVACY, SURVEILLANCE & CONTROL Ian Glenn Centre for Film and Media Studies University of Cape Town South Africa Abstract: This article explores the paradox that, in an age of surveillance, student results and records have become increasingly secret and private. It examines some controversies such as President Obama’s refusal to release his university results and engages with Bauman and Lyon’s argument that Facebook and social media have become forms of voluntary self-surveillance. It argues that Bauman and Lyon neglect ways in which Facebook and social media have become part of a larger move to give the responsibility for self-fashioning to individuals and deny the shaping power of educational achievement and social institutions. Keywords: education, grades, privacy, transparency, university JOSH I really think I'm the best judge of what I mean, you paranoid Berkeley Shiksta feminista! [beat] Whoa. That was way too far. C.J. No, no. Well, I've got a staff meeting to go to and so do you, you elitist, Harvard fascist missed-the-Dean's-listtwo-semesters-in-a-row Yankee jackass! JOSH Feel better getting that off your chest there, C.J.? C.J. I'm a whole new woman. [West Wing, Season one] INTRODUCTION Claims that modern society is under increasing surveillance and that higher education is part of this trend (Brucato 2013, Nocella and Gabbard 2013) ignore a powerful counter-trend: the increasing secrecy surrounding university results and the treatment of such results as a matter of a private contract between student and institution. This paper offers a brief historical account of how individuals’ results have been treated in the past and what has changed, offers a defence of the historical practice, now overturned almost everywhere, of open and public results, and then examines some of the reasons for its demise. The analysis focuses on several revealing controversies: the debate around President Obama’s refusal to release his academic results; a student uproar at the University of Cape Town when one student took to social media to publicise another student’s academic results and make fun of the student. In particular, it examines the paradox, explored by Zygmunt Bauman and David Lyon, among others, (Bauman and Lyon 2013) of how the self-advertising and self-publishing of young people in particular can be seen as part of a surveillance society. Bauman’s critique of social media is that they are a subtle form of social control, but he fails to see how self-branding, particularly by young people, can be reconciled with their pudeur about their academic results. The failure to consider the larger shift from a meritocratic external shaping of esteem, life path and career to the self-fashioning of the Facebook era (something marked in the very advent of Facebook) means that his critique of the era of Surveillance, like many others, neglects ways in which forms of social and symbolic capital are now deployed – both as a result of political correctness and of the politically connected -- so as to avoid what we see as an earlier and more open surveillance. Ironically, Bauman’s own Liquid Moderns are the greatest exemplars of this trend (Bauman 2000). HISTORICAL OUTLINE We are a long way from the world in which the ancient universities published their results in the London Times – a practice which influenced practices of publishing matriculation or school-leaving results in newspapers that still persists in South Africa, though it is increasingly controversial here. In an earlier era, results at Cambridge

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were published in ranked order, giving the lowest pass in Mathematics the title of ‘wooden spoon’ – a practice that stopped in 1909. After that, results were published alphabetically within classes. At Oxford and Cambridge now, the results may still be published on university notice-boards, but students may ask to have their names not appear on the list – a matter of a simple request at Oxford but a request needing some form of psychological or medical backing at Cambridge (Wardrop 2009). In many British and American universities, no results are published on notice-boards and are simply given or sent to students individually. Worldwide, since the passing of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act in the USA in 1974, the trend has been to privacy in academic results, to treat them as something akin to private medical results rather than, say, the outcome of a sporting event, the result of an open and fair competition. The University of Cape Town has been one of the last universities to make student academic records, for all its students, from the earliest available records on line, but this practice changed in 2014 because of student pressure. COMMENTS ON THE CHANGE AND HOW TO EXPLAIN IT There are several reasons to feel that public universities should publish results. If they receive state money to educate a future meritocracy, they should be willing to indicate their rankings or at least results. As the structuralists have taught us, individual marks are, as signs, essentially meaningless. A 76 at the University of Cape Town is a clear first and probably places the student in the top 1% of academic achievers; in a typical North American university, it would be a very mediocre result. Unless one has a list of results or comparisons are available, very little can be deduced. Similarly, publishing grades is a very powerful way of stopping the practice, occurring even in major universities, of rampant grade inflation and classes where As are the norm. Recently Princeton has had to reverse a policy to limit As to only 35% of any class because of student complaints that this disadvantaged them in later life. If students wish to enter careers where entry is, properly, on a competitive basis because of limited student places, then they surely need to accept the logic that they are in competition as surely as if they were in a race, and that the fairest procedure is an open publication of results. The failure to publish results or to have them open and available for scrutiny has several possible dangerous consequences: the temptation for people to invent a university past and claim fake qualifications. In the Internet era, this tendency has proliferated and false claims, faked certificates and meaningless degrees from diploma mill ‘universities’ are all common. The South African government and public officials have regularly been revealed to have exaggerated CVs or falsified claims to academic qualifications – Pallo Jordan being the latest and highest-profile case. An online data-base of validated results for graduates would make fraud far more difficult, particularly in the case of falsified certificates. The rhetorical point, of course, is that anybody gasping in horror at the thought of such public scrutiny is ceding the central argument – that universities have become places where surveillance and public scrutiny do not apply, or not in any meaningful way to individual students. If this were an area where surveillance mattered or was applied, then there would not be such a marked increase in the extent of fraudulent CVs and falsely claimed qualifications. For privacy What made society move from a view of student achievement as something akin to a sporting contest or fair competition to seeing it as something closer to a medical record, something semi-shameful and a sign of a less than full capacity? A post-1968 disillusionment with academic success as a valid criterion for shaping future success may be part of the reason; another force may have been concerns about racial differences and educational achievement that would have been public with the publication of results. In the forty years since the 1974 FERPA act was passed, many European countries have followed the lead of the USA. It seems unlikely now that any university will continue to publish full academic transcripts rather than a list of graduates, possibly including any academic distinctions. In many countries, it may be that the very fact of having attended a particular institution, particularly when entrance criteria are highly competitive, is distinction enough. To have been to a Grande Ecole in France

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or a graduate of a leading German or Chinese University may be more important than the result achieved within the institution. Controversies Does the lack of transparency and movement to privacy in academic results matter in contemporary society? What tensions arise as a result of the privatisation of higher education in the stress on the indivualisation of academic achievement rather than on the social outcomes? Does it matter if we now know far less about the academic performance of, say, political leaders, than we would have known half a century ago? The case of Barack Obama is undoubtedly the most publicised one where political opponents charged that his failure to release his academic records amounted to a lack of necessary surveillance by the American voting public. Obama has insisted on keeping his college records from his time at Columbia College private. When Donald Trump offered $5 million if Obama would reveal his college record and passport applications, Obama made fun of Trump, but he did not reveal the results. Right-wing theories abound (Obama was receiving scholarship money as a foreign student, for example) but, as will be argued below, the explanation may be much simpler and more sociologically revealing. Nor, should it be noted, did George W. Bush before Obama reveal his Yale results, but the New Yorker managed, in its Nov 8, 1999 edition, to find out. The fact that two presidents from very different backgrounds, and probably with very different motives for wishing to keep their records private, resisted publication of their results suggests some of the complexity of accounting for this shift. Bush subsequently managed to make fun of his own poor results in a Commencement speech at Yale University where he joked that C students could, like him, become President of the United States. A much less known case at the University of Cape Town in 2013 may have helped sway student opinion decisively behind a move to keep student results secure from public scrutiny or examination but also opens up the complex relationship between university results and social media. A student, writing under a pseudonym, created a blog, UCT Exposed, in reaction to a Facebook group, UCT Confessions, in which she attacked another student who had posted an entry on the latter site with specific reference to the second student’s poor academic performance, information available online, pointing out how many courses had been failed and that the student was at risk of exclusion from the university. The writer also attacked other students because of their dress sense or on other grounds, but it was the comment on poor grades that seems to have led to the greatest outrage and concerns about ‘cyber-bullying’. (Gaweda 2013, Van der Westhuizen and Gaweda 2013). Here at last we may seem to have a case of surveillance of one student by another, but as the story developed, the rather ominous surveillance became one where computer savvy students decided to track down the anonymous writer by using a set of techniques right out of the surveillance handbooks: “honey traps” to track the computer used to write a response to the original article and thus to discover the identity of the student. This case highlights what seems to be a crucial modern development: the fault line between a right to speak with authority in the public sphere based on professional status or academic authority, against a right to speak because the holder claims some other form of social and symbolic capital. In claiming that the studentemperor had no clothes, in traditional academic terms at least, the writer broke a taboo and a central tenet of the age of social media: we do not suffer surveillance in traditional terms; we create our own being. How are we to explain this paradox and this shift? BAUMAN-LYON ON SURVEILLANCE Zygmunt Bauman in a blog post in 2012, later developed into a book with David Lyon, (Bauman and Lyon 2013) noted a paradox of modern life, where new developments in technology mean that drones the size of beetles can spy on, survey, monitor us, while on the other we rush to reveal details of what would formerly have been regarded as highly intimate and private matters on social sites such as Facebook. Bauman disputes the idea that the internet automatically leads to the death of anonymity: “As for the ‘death of anonymity’ courtesy of the internet, the story is slightly different: we submit our rights to privacy to slaughter on our own will. Or perhaps we just consent to the loss of privacy as a reasonable price for the wonders offered in exchange.” He continues: “Having one’s own complete being, warts and all, registered in

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publicly accessible records seems to be the best prophylactic antidote against the toxicity of exclusion – as well as a potent way to keep the threat of eviction away.” Though Bauman and Lyon’s exchanges on surveillance offer a complex and enlightening meditation, the analysis of the move to Facebook and social media more generally seems psychologically overwrought and to neglect broader social forces driving this change. More reasonably, Bauman and Lyon go on to note that, in social media, users recast themselves as commodities, carrying on the work of branding themselves while simultaneously providing valuable data to Facebook, Google and other surveyors of the online space. This argument needs to be carried further to see the deeper logic and historical development involved here, much of which revolves around the role of social media in higher education. Liquid Capitals Why is there such a blind spot about the issue of publicly available grades, to the extent that a whole book on higher education and political correctness omits it completely? (Lea 2009) Why is it an issue which seems to speak both to George W. Bush as the heir of privilege, and Barack Obama, benefiting from affirmative action? This analysis draws on Bourdieu’s work on the role of universities and grandes écoles in France. On the one hand, Bourdieu points out that while the rhetoric of French education claims that schools provide a level playing field for a meritocratic elite to emerge, other hidden factors of symbolic and cultural capital shape results and the reproduction of a certain class. (Bourdieu and Passeron 1964, Bourdieu and Passeron 1977) In this logic, results are suspect, revealing more about the assumptions of the classifiers than the classified. This logic helps give currency to notions of affirmative action and redress. On the other hand, Bourdieu notes that the wealthy and well-connected have much to lose if their children fail to enter the elite institutions. Their recourse is to invoke, perhaps create, other institutions, schools of commerce, private institutions. (Bourdieu and Collier 1988, Bourdieu 1989, Bourdieu and Glenn 2010) To return to Obama and Bush. My reading is that Obama benefited considerably from affirmative action criteria in his entry to Harvard Law School, including work done between Columbia College and his entry to law school. But to reveal the discrepancy between his grades and the expectations most people would have of what it takes to get into Harvard would have opened wounds -- political, social and personal -something Obama naturally avoided, and avoids. The most revealing version of this is a right-wing blog which argues that Obama can’t be wanting to hide poor-ish grades because one needs excellent grades to get into Harvard. Well, perhaps not if one benefited from affirmative action, but one suspects it would be very difficult for Obama to make this argument without revealing the extent to which he benefited from affirmative action, which might also make him a sociological case rather than the exceptional hero. As for Bush, the logic is impeccably that of Bourdieu’s second position, except that Bush, son of a major state figure, yet to become President, gained entry to a private university in the USA, probably as result of personal connections rather than outstanding school results, but wished to conceal his distance from the meritocratic ideal. When his results did become public, he took the path of making fun of them and his results and his own command of English, but still invoked the ideal of the “Yale man” in his commencement address. From both left and right, then, there are reasons to see the university as a place where different kinds of distinction, to invoke Bourdieu again, rather than academic results, should matter (Bourdieu 1979). We could invoke Bauman and his notion of Liquid Modernity to say that the modern university becomes the breeding ground, par excellence, for Liquid Moderns, mobile, unattached, self-fashioning (Bauman 2000). Or we could invoke Castells who makes the crucial distinction in modern work as being between what he calls ‘selfprogrammable’ labour on the one hand and ‘generic’ labour on the other (Castells 2009). All these accounts help suggest why older roles played by the university and its role in guaranteeing or helping guarantee certain standards and qualifications (surveying who was apt to practise medicine, or law, most obviously) now have to compete with newer forms of self-programming through self-advertising and selfsurveillance. There is also a larger struggle here about the status and role of the professions, with managerial attempts to routinise professions such as pharmacy or accounting, while social media offer the illusion of selfprogramming.

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Social networking and Facebook The exchange between the characters CJ and Josh from The West Wing, prefacing this article, was written by Aaron Sorkin, who also wrote the script of The Social Network, an account of Mark Zuckerberg’s founding of Facebook at Harvard. The exchange between CJ and Josh, bristling colleagues in this episode, shows ways in which, in the USA, social capital and identies circle uneasily around the issue of academic results and prowess – in this case between the leading West and East coast liberal/left-wing universities. If President Bartlett sports his Nobel Prize in Economics as guarantor of his nonpareil status, CJ and Josh turn university achievement into identity politics, in which results, as far as they are publishable (Josh is not on the Dean’s list, his comparative failure marked by subtle absence) play a part, but only a part. In The Social Network, the Zuckerberg character is established as one for whom the normal academic rules have no meaning. He has scored a perfect 1600 on his SATs, he walks out of the supposedly very difficult Operating Systems class, showing by his answer to the lecturer who thinks he is giving up, that he is beyond what the university can teach,at least in a computer science class. Sorkin’s note in the screenplay is of breathless admiration: “This is considered the hardest class at Harvard and MARK is one of the 50 students with their laptops open as the professor takes them through an impossibly difficult lesson.” The real question, from a scientist’s point of view is, surely, but if you are so smart, why not do something really difficult, like mathematics, or physics, and discover something? Computer coding is not scientific discovery. But for Zuckerberg, at least in Sorkin’s analysis of the Jewish insider-outsider, meaning only comes by making a billion dollars through Facebook by providing an alternative to the Final Club to which he aspires and that is the establishment face of WASP power at Harvard (the rowing club, Roosevelt’s participation). In the movie, Zuckerberg founds Facebook as an exclusive Harvard network, perhaps as an antidote to the exclusive Final Clubs, perhaps as a money-making venture. It spreads, at the beginning, to other elite universities, where it serves as a sign of belonging, through its exclusivity, to a world of academic haves, of Liquid Moderns who can transmute their everyday identities and allegiances and exclusions through selection, omission and substitution. The network spreads to other elite universities, in the USA and abroad, and then keeps spreading. Facebook allows the assertion of another identity at Harvard and other universities other than the grades and career openings or the fraternities and clubs. It is thus at once liberatory, a work of self-programming and self-fashioning, but also a work of collective denial about the continuing shaping power of social institutions and the university as gate-keeper and guarantor of professional and academic standards. Liquid Moderns still need degrees to be able to emigrate or work in certain professions; would-be doctors need the right grades and transcripts. As Facebook spreads, the way in which it acted, at the outset, as an adjunct to guaranteed academic and social status, has meant that it risks deluding people, and particularly young people studying, that it is the real work they should be doing. However surveyed we may be as citizens, consumers and netizens, we should understand the ways in which the university has surrendered a role of robust surveillance through competitive standard keeping to take a subservient place in a symbolic economy based on self-advertising and self-programming and on the ideal of endless self-actualisation and self worth. Something, it seems reasonable to argue, has been lost in that process. Address all correspondence to: [email protected] REFERENCES Bauman, Z. (2000). Liquid modernity. Cambridge, Polity Press. Bauman, Z. and D. Lyon (2013). Liquid surveillance : a conversation. Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA, Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. (1979). La distinction : critique sociale du jugement. Paris, âEditions de Minuit. Bourdieu, P. (1989). La Noblesse d'État : grandes écoles et esprit de corps. Paris, Éditions de Minuit. Bourdieu, P. and P. Collier (1988). Homo academicus. Cambridge Stanford, Calif, Polity ; Stanford University Press.

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Bourdieu, P. and I. Glenn (2010). "The lost Bourdieu interview." Critical Arts 24:1: 31-50. Bourdieu, P. and J. C. Passeron (1964). Les Héritiers : les étudiants et la culture. Paris, Éditions de Minuit. Bourdieu, P. and J. C. Passeron (1977). Reproduction in education, society and culture. London, Sage. Brucato, B. (2013). "10 From accountability policy to surveillance practices in higher education." The Surveillance-Industrial Complex: A Political Economy of Surveillance: 158. Castells, M. (2009). Communication Power. Oxford, OUP. Gaweda, K. (2013). "UCT Exposed, Exposed": Behind the Scenes. Varsity: UCT's Official Student Newspaper. Cape Town, Student Representative Council, UCT. Lea, J. (2009). Political Correctness and Higher Education: British and American Perspectives. New York, Routledge. Nocella, A. J. and D. Gabbard (2013). Policing the Campus: Academic Repression, Surveillance, and the Occupy Movement. New York, Peter Lang. Van der Westhuizen, C. and K. Gaweda (2013). Brains Behind "UCT Exposed" Alleged in an Independent Investigation. Varsity: UCT's Official Student Newspaper. Cape Town, SRC, UCT. Wardrop, M. (2009). Cambridge University changes exam results policy over stress fears. The Telegraph. London.

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