July 28, 2019
Still from RED! 2013

The Generic Unmasked:
Reproducibility & Profanation

Walter Benjamin’s oft-quoted 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” advances the claim that, for the first time in history, the “function” of the work of art is political, as evidenced by cinema. For Benjamin, film is the “first art form whose artistic character is entirely determined by its reproducibility” (1936, 109) and Giorgio Agamben, a contemporary Benjaminian philosopher, further elucidates this “function,” positing that cinema essentially ranks with ethics and politics, not solely with aesthetics, and, consequently, is proximate to philosophy itself. Whereas Deleuze’s Cinema books posed cinema as enacting time in a pure state, Agamben, in his “Notes on Gesture” (1992), breaches from Deleuze’s spatial and cartographic theory of cinema (Conley 2007, 9), drawing on Guy Debord’s “détournement via montage” (2003, 29), Simone Weil’s “decreation” (1947, 32) and, perhaps most implicitly, from Benjamin. Agamben’s political theory of cinema, motivated by cinema’s “stoppage and repetition of time” (1977), is directly informed by Benjamin’s: “optical unconscious” (1931), appropriation of Brecht’s “social Gestus” (1973), and the relationship between technological reproducibility and aura (1946). Agamben’s “gesture” fastens cinema’s aesthetics not only to ethics and politics, but to the “ontological consistency of human experience,” or to a way of being (2014, 23).

While many film theorists declare Agamben as, in equal part, a Deleuzian film theorist, I pose that, through this Benjaminian lens, we can parse distinctive cinematic questions that Agamben exclusively pursues—in particular, cinema’s potential as a repurposive counter-dispositif to combat dominant forms via critique. This is not to suggest that parallels do not exist between Agamben and Deleuze’s approaches: as Meillassoux has noted, Deleuze’s logic of representation veers toward a (correlationist) “image of thought that attempts to overcome the binary separation” between matter and spirit, or mind and body (2008, 5). Furthermore, Agamben is unequivocally astricted to the Bergson-bound Deleuzian tradition of “untimeliness,” whereby cinema extricates “the fallacious psychological distinction between image as psychic reality and movement as physical reality” (2000, 55). Agamben and Deleuze are also committed to a notion of “cinema-thought,” as Jean-Luc Nancy terms it (1996, 10), or haecceities of Oneness—a commitment to cinema-as-immanence, or indexing thought, rather than mediating it via hermetic historicism. However, Agamben’s concept of gesture, as a prelinguistic mode of communication, suspends the symbolic, replacing taxonomy and, therefore, offers a sublime breach: “[g]esture is the communication of a potential to be communicated” (1993, 156). In other words, Agamben’s gesture is something of an “enigmatic signifier” (Leplanche 1987, 126), as it is impregnated with a primitive and unconscious meaning.

Thus, drawing from cinema’s social capacity by way of Benjamin, I implore a central question: what does (post)cinema look like when it enacts philosophy? If Walter Benjamin upheld that cinema was political insofar as it held a revolutionary social function, Deleuze reified cinema’s pedagogical value by emphasizing that, as an art of time, cinema, which offers time in the “form of perception”, is caught between creation (potential) and resistance (impotential). Badiou, for whom cinema is also a condition of thought, has suggested that cinema’s greatness—conveyed in movement, passage, and the infected vagaries of memory—doesn’t lie in reproducing Bergson’s division between constructed time and pure duration; it lies, instead, in showing us that a synthesis between the two is possible. Thus, for Badiou cinema is political because it is social—as a “mass art” it amends, frames, and comments on the ideological content of everyday life; therefore, it is the “plus-one” of the arts. Alas, is cinema still a condition for thought, or is cognizing cinematically—that is, “object-oriented” and hierarchical stratification—simply a kind of algorithmic extrapolation, rendered universal?

Benjamin’s 1936 text is in coalition with his publication on Max Weber titled “Capitalism as Religion” (1921), whereby Benjamin enjoins the logic of religion with the cultic “logic of capitalism.” Agamben, carrying the Benjaminian torch, proclaims that capitalism as a “pure cult religion” can solely be countered via “profanation” (Agamben 2005). For Agamben, profanation is the return of objects of social praxis to “free use,” or a messianic ideal of the generic, non-exclusive community (2007, 58). Agamben, in associating cinema with the uniquely “gestural” prowess to enact political “profanation,” does not proffer cinema with destructive capability but, in his Heideggerrean reading, offers cinema-as-pharmakon: Agamben inculcates cinema with the means to both expose the emptiness of the apparatus, “capturing life,” and, simultaneously, with converting it into spectacle, thereby “hacking spectacle” by pulling the “emergency brake on the religion of late capitalism” (Baumbach 2018, 131).

With the decay of Benjaminian aura via cinema’s reproducibility, ever-exacerbated in the so-called “digital turn,” and the era of “post-cinema,” it is critical that we conceive of Agamben’s gesture, diacritically opposed to auratic terms, as a practice that can “de-auraticize,” or, in this instance, “make cinema profane” by dispelling it of its cult value. While Adorno and Horkhemier decried the culture industry for exacerbating the auratic terms of mass art (a distinct, newfound aura of detachment), Benjamin neutralized such romantic concepts associated with aura. Thus, a conflict is born—”the weapon of the star,” or spectacle, which seeks to restore aura to a means of expression (in this case cinema) is, “in some sense, contrary to it” (158). The solution to Agamben’s “cinematic paradox” that I hereby propose is that of a truly “profane” cinema, or an immanent “cinema of the anonymous,” which is a political cinema both infinitely reproducible and, simultaneously, liquidated of the “star.” Thus, in order to examine this politically profane potentiality—transgressions that appeal to the “elective genealogy of law, operating at a level of community more basic than the social order” (Land 2011, 257)—we need to look at specific gestures/operations, meaning that we must turn to a case study.

In reviewing Agamben’s methodological lexicon, the terms of hacktivism reappear in convergence with cinematic logic. Agamben’s “making profane,” or denaturalizing mystifications, is akin to whistleblowing and leaking of classified and potentially obstreperous information. The messianic charge of Agamben’s “pure gesture,” as articulated in his “The Six Most Beautiful Minutes in the History of Cinema,” works within the spectacle that it seeks to “reveal […] to be empty and unfulfilled” (2005, 93-94). Any hacktivist worth their salt is armed with an arsenal of attacks—from the DDOS attack to dictionary and brute force attacks—that all share in common the possibility of achieving a time-space tradeoff by pre-computing a series of hashes, in turn inverting or flooding the database against its own logic. Agamben’s “decreation,” a borrowed term from Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace, seeks “to make something created pass into the uncreated” (Weil 1947, 35) and allots for the capacity for images and signs to be invested with newfound potential. A “hacktivist cinema” of anonymity—whereby the instrumental hack is made immanent (and, consequently, political) and the subject, hacker, or, in Agamben’s terms, the “star” is made anonymous—imbues hacking with imagistic reproducibility and retrieval; through post-cinema, the enacted hack can be galvanized anew (the utility of the commons).

Thus, I would like to examine an instance of filmic hacktivism by way of RedHack. Established in 1997, RedHack is the world’s oldest hacktivist group, drawing from a systematized Marxist-Leninist organizational history. While infamous for inspiring Anonymous’ politically-motivated efforts (such as Operation Tunisia in 2011), at home in Turkey, RedHack is quietly lauded for audacious whistleblowing efforts, dispelling disinformation campaigns shepherded by President Erdogan, and illuminating the AK Party’s authoritarian domestic policies. In a political zeitgeist of paranoia, blanketed by censorship and the ubiquitous potential of imprisonment for dissenters, RedHack’s critical efforts require clandestine methods. In 2012, RedHack breached the Ankara Police Directorate’s website, leaking documents from the Gendarmerie Intelligence Department about the state’s foreknowledge of the 2013 Reyhanli car bombings. Later that year, RedHack hacked the Turkish Power Distribution System to delete over $650,000 of debt.

As expounded by Bülay Dogan in “Contextualizing Hacktivism: The Criminalization of Redhack” (2018), Turkish journalists, academics, and authors publish under a nation-wide moratorium that censures discussing or mentioning RedHack in publications, propelling RedHack into further marginalization. This is exemplified by the recent indictment of six dissenting journalists who reported on RedHack’s leaked emails in 2016, whereby the accused were charged by the Turkish government with being members of ” a terrorist organization” and “committing a crime in the name of the organization” (Diken 2018). As Dogan evinces, the discourse of the State has fabricated and bolstered a “folk devil” falsehood in characterizing RedHack while imbricating journalists or sympathetic parties under the terrorist rhetoric.

Working under relative adumbration in their documentary production, RedHack has instrumentalized the archaeological-reproducibility impulse of the “post-cinema” terrain in all its migratory relocation and community responsiveness. Post-cinema calls to recognition a Benjaminian “Trasuerspiel” of authenticity that corresponds not to an archetypal model of history but, rather, to the conditions in which it reappears and the “destiny towards which it is directed,” emphasizing the act of discovery of that which is unrecognizable (Benjamin 1977). Therefore, it is both original and authentic—what appears derived and secondary are mutually bound together, ultimately emerging together; pre-history and post-history fixed in bondage, or a “vortex” created around a “constant becoming” (Cassetti et al. 2016, 596-597).

In 2012, the composer Suavi wrote a march for RedHack, quickly published on the RedHack YouTube channel (Tatar et. al 2015, 64). This was shortly followed by the publication of the RedHack Documentary RED! (2013), which was translated into English and circulated online, bolstered by artists, politicians, and academics (Harber 2013). The documentary voiced first-hand testimonials and articulated RedHack’s political aims and activities—shrouding their identities, these on-screen RedHack members’ shared rhetoric underscored the development of a “hacktivist commons,” which they would use the moving image to distribute.

This “commons”—an open-source hacktivist archive—sought to universalize hacktivism and the documentary quickly spread, reposted on varied YouTube channels while garnering laudation from artists, politicians, and academics beyond Turkey’s physical bounds (Haber 2013). Unraveling the enveloping vectors of nation-state borderlines, RedHack reterritorialized the ethos of “hacktivist-subjectivity” while retaining an anonymous guise. With RED! there appeared the unique case of a purely immanent hacktivist film, one that abrogates the “star,” or “divo” (Agamben 1992, 22), untangling individual practice from its genus, positing an aura without presence. This generic veil uniquely separates RED! from Citizenfour (2014), marked by the cult of Snowden, The Hacker Wars (2014), colored by Anonymous “spokesperson” Barrett Brown, and The Internet’s Own Boy (2014), which focuses almost exclusively on information activist Aaron Swartz.

In “For an Ethics of Cinema,” Agamben’s critique of metaphysical and cinematic personhood discerns the genealogical development toward divo by bifurcating its terms of “individualized emergence” from persona, tied to the “mask” (or masked theatrical actor) (1992, 21). In detailing the commedia dell’arte tradition of “Harlequin, Punchinello, Pantalone, and Beltrame,” Agamben recounts encounters whereby the mask no longer provides a “vehicle of a higher realm” (21), but, via anonymity and immanence, allots a contamination between real life and the theatrical scene. In fact, in popular culture’s hackerly imagination, the Harlequin is but the mischief motif par excellence—consider Anonymous’ Guy Fawkes mask and its correlation with the gesticulating, pantomime-clown. In fact, we can locate such an instance of historical synthesis in the nineteenth century Christmas production of “Harlequin and Guy Fawkes, or, the 5th of November: a Comic Pantomime” (Covent Garden 1935, 64).

Perhaps, we ought to remark on RedHack’s separate history qua Anonymous. Anonymous drew from jocular 4chan beginnings, culling the puckish ethos of what Gabriella Coleman dubs “lulz.” This was vividly exemplified in Anonymous’ puerile 2006 “Habbo Hotel Raid” and the group’s “Project Chanology” 2008 hacks against The Church of Scientology. In contrast, RedHack draws from a markedly Marxist-Leninist history—RedHack’s anonymizing mask is appropriately a simple red scarf stamped with an axe and sickle. Agamben describes the role of the mask as that “which unites the real name with that of the mask” (21), or a modular coupling between the actor and the actor (recalling Benjamin’s “Author as Producer”). RED!, in its sans-divo circulation, poses a way to navigate Agamben’s cinematic paradox by engendering the ability to don an analog relation where “twoness is dissolved or deterritorialized into a continuous or generic identity” (69). The mask, lifted from the virtual plane, saw its physical appropriation in Turkey during the 2013 May Day protests and Gezi Park riots, where crimson scarf-donned marchers mounted remonstrance.

Benjamin’s 1934 “Author as Producer” uncovers a path that leads from Plato’s dialogues to epic theater in Benjamin’s efforts to navigate the Platonic dyad between the ideal and its instantiation, between essence and instance. In his disquisitions on Brecht, Benjamin seeks to rescue the artist, whom Plato both feared and admonished while constricting the philosopher’s ideal Forms to materialist aesthetics. However, rather than that Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt (“distancing effect”) aesthetic operation of theatrical spectatorship, which produces real immediacy through estrangement from the spectacle, the theatrical mask is without differentiation or identification—it is real “in itself” and, thereby, precedes scission, separation, or rupture. It is, in fact, the aesthetics of politics that opposes the equation of spectacle and power, which Benjamin noted as the affective dimension of fascism (1936, 42).

The mask is also generic. Donning the mask irradiates Laurellean irreflective immanence, or a “simple identity without identification” (Laurelle 2016, 45), for it prevents the Kantian transcendental system of the universal and scattered multiplicity, which Deleuze tried to tie together in mating immanence with difference. For Laruelle, this is pure contradiction: Kantian metaphysics bifurcates—the analytic a priori is the realm of transcendentals and the synthetic a posteriori is the realm of the real or the empirical. Laruellean immanence, unlike Deleuze’s, superimposes the analytic a priori as the real. Thus, whereas Mladen Dolar points to theater’s coup de force as separating the spirit from the body—lifting the curtain and allowing the voice to obtain a surplus-meaning originally disjunct in everyday life (2006, 69)—the theatrical mask, imagistically circulated in a political bal masqué, superimposes identity or “clones the One.” Devoid of “aura,” the politically-networked mask of immanence becomes pure profanity.

Hence, I propose that RED!, as both a networked “post-cinema” media-object and as “non-cinematic” film, provides a viable way to navigate Agamben’s aforementioned “cinematic paradox” by transfiguring the documentary mode and enacting something a-cinematic: displacing divo and circulating the mask, melding the traditionally riven bifurcation of the virtual vector (of “communication and transport”) and posing a free alliance between the “technical or cultural,” conjoining the “objective” with “subjective.” Thereby, the “hacker class produces itself as itself, but not for itself” (Wark 2004, 48; 349). By universalizing the shrouded face of the “common hacktivist,” masked in the anonymizing red scarf, RedHack visually proclaims the masked face of “generic humanity,” sans-identity and, thus, not codifiable by the State (Agamben 2007, 58).

Through this uniquely inter-mechanical process of reproduction and repetition, we see the actualization of Benjamin’s “Author as Producer” (1934), whereby the intellectual merges with the mode of production, directly fused with mankind and, in the most general sense, de-individuated (Galloway 2014, 179). This is how I would like to bridge Agamben’s generic being with François Laurelle’s Marxian project of immanence and theory of identities. Here, we have retained the Marxist idea of “species-being” but done away with the metaphysical, disrobing dialectic synthesis. Such is a Marxism of passage rather than an exchange, of immanence (rather than transcendence) vis-a-vis the real.

RED!, as YouTube-networked (social) media object, runs contrary to traditional cinema—this is partially why I believe it may profane the “unprofanable,” an endeavor Agamben tasks the “coming generation” (2005, 92). As Nico Baumbach notes, Agamben explicitly terms that cinema may no longer be “emblematic of our situation” (167). Furthermore, as Benjamin identified, a seminal shift re: the work of art in the age of technological reproducibility includes a shift from cult value to exhibition value, whereby the latter is associated with the social act of mass viewership. Agamben’s emphasis on gestural repetition and stoppage is most evidently bolstered by the avant-garde cinema of Jean-Luc Godard and Guy Debord but, perhaps, a non-cinematic media ecology that exploits the terms of immanent reproducibility may better counter the “new condition of objects and even of the human body in the era of fulfilled capitalism” (Agamben 2005, 92). That is, such networked artifacts more sufficiently reproduce the commons.

If, as Alexander Galloway proposes in Laruelle: Against the Digital (2014), we consider the digital/”digital thinking” as the constitution of the binarisms of being and other (or self and the world), the digital is the capacity to make distinctions between essence and instance (“the one dividing in two”). Thus, computer language is divided into 1’s and 0’s. The universal mask, subject-bereft, constitutes “the two” coming together as “One,” or an analog relation. The networked mask, no longer rarefied by the terms of the theatrical stage, or nation-borders, produces a relation of non-distinction, or, more specifically, an integration between the moving image and the streets of protest. In probing RedHack’s documentary effort, I am also attempting to contemplate the possibility of a “non-digital cinema,” or, at the risk of professing a paradoxical proposal, a “non-digital digital cinema.” By “non-digital,” what I mean is relation without distinction whereby “digital cinema” is simply a materialist descriptor of media, technological processes, and distribution.

Terminology aside, this is one such strategy to answer Badiou’s 1998 query in Cahiers du Cinema: “[w]hat does cinema think that nothing but it can think?” without appropriating Metz and Baudry’s “grand theories” of 1970’s film studies, Althusserian “knowledge effects,” reifying Comolli and Narboni’s limp claim that “every film is political,” or turning to the cognitivist neoformalist “post-theory” position of Noël Carroll, David Bordwell, and Kristin Thompson. Jacques Aumont, Raymond Bellour, and Francesco Casetti’s position on cinema seem to be in relative agreement that the experience of a film is concentrated and constituted by temporal restraints (despite Casetti is more liberal and welcoming when it comes to the reticulated “post-cinema” experience). Thomas Elsaesser’s post-classical position and theory of “cinema as thought experiment” redefine cinema in relation to the generative feedback of game-spaces and the cultural conditions that frame postmodernity. However, given Agamben’s cinematic paradox, by mapping the Benjaminian conditions/influence while contemplating a Laruellean political film theory of immanence, perhaps, via specific case studies, we can evaluate post-cinema in lieu of how digital cartography burgeons, blossoms, and superimposes the flat and motile filmic experience with the mobile and networked exigence of political protest.

 

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Filmography

CitizenFour (Poitras, Laura. 2014. USA.)

The Hacker Wars (Weisman, Viven L. 2014. USA.)

The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Shwartz (Knappenberger, Brian. 2014. USA.)

RED! (Bagimsiz Sinema Merkezi [Independent Cinema Center]. Turkey. 2013)

 

 

 

 

 

 

More Articles from &&&

Socialism after Socialism, A Response to Conrad Hamilton

In the spirit of dialogue, I am responding to the observations in Conrad Hamilton’s recent expansive review of my book The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism. I will be concentrating on Hamilton’s three main claims, that there is a gap between the form and content of socvialism, invoking Marxist theories of struggle before coming down… Read More »

Biennialese Blues: Review of Whitney Biennial 2026

ARTISTS: Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Kelly Akashi, Kamrooz Aram, Ash Arder, Teresa Baker, Sula Bermudez-Silverman, Zach Blas, Enzo Camacho & Ami Lien, Leo Castañeda, CFGNY, Nanibah Chacon, Maia Chao, Joshua Citarella, Mo Costello, Taína H. Cruz, Carmen de Monteflores, Ali Eyal, Andrea Fraser, Mariah Garnett, Ignacio Gatica, Jonathan González, Emilie Louise Gossiaux, Kainoa Gruspe,… Read More »

No View from Nowhere: On Discourse, Différance & Functorial Semantics of Micro-Communities

This essay argues that natural language semantics admits no global orientation—no ‘view from nowhere’—but only local positions within psychoanalytically and sociologically embedded discourse communities. Drawing on Derrida’s concept of différance, I demonstrate that meaning is constitutively deferred across the differential play of signs, precluding any meta-linguistic standpoint from which all local meanings could be adjudicated.… Read More »

Liberalism Is Dead, Long Live Liberalism!

Matthew McManus’ The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism is a powerful attempt to merge two disparate traditions, parlaying reformist compromise into a coherent political program. It also rests on the assumption that socialism is inherently illiberal, an assumption that deserves to be questioned. While often hailed as the single-minded son of America, perhaps the best… Read More »

Luxury Activism: Art, Fashion & Capital

[This text was previously published by the author in Portuguese on Contemporânea Magazine — Ed.] I don’t want to work with fashion. Beauty must be preserved from capitalism. Fashion favours the escape into personal, private, selected, chosen space, as a form of false self-determination. Fashion reflects the fear of losing’ identity. — Thomas Hirschhorn The purposelessness… Read More »

The Questions Concerning the Ethics of AI

With recent articles in &&& concerning the status of what is or is not Marxism, I took it upon myself to write a piece that I consider firmly placed in that tradition. I am not being paid by the CIA, I promise. Furthermore, despite appearances, my article is not an article in the “ethics of… Read More »

The Best Ever Art Basel Review that Qatar Money Can Buy

During the Art Basel Qatar’s VIP preview of Sweat Variant’s durational performance My Tongue is a Blade on February 4, two special seats up in front of the stage stayed empty for a while.  Empty with intent.  People hovered, looked, and reconsidered occupying them in their head at the last minute like they were about… Read More »

SUPPORT THE IRANIAN REVOLUTION 2026!

SIGN THE STATEMENT HERE The past several weeks have borne witness to a bloodbath in Iran amidst images of systematic massacre and horrific abuses of power by the Iranian government against its own people. As a united front, we stand together to uphold the following convictions: 1- That the Islamic Republic of Iran must come… Read More »

Rhetoric vs Reality: Iranian Regime Is an Imperialist Project Preventing a Free Palestine!

Since its founding, the Islamic Republic of Iran has cultivated legitimacy by embedding itself within global progressive movements—particularly those oriented around anti-imperialism and racial justice. Rhetoric, repeated, obscures reality: the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) is an imperialist project that will not enable a free Palestine. The IRI is built on an expansionist doctrine resembling… Read More »

On State Collapse & Democide in Iran

1. Middle Eastern Islamisms and Islamists are reorganizing in a post-jihadi/takfiri Muslim/Arab world within their national boundaries. First of all, the Taliban’s path back to Afghanistan was facilitated by the USA. Afghan Islamists were swift in adopting a more Afghanistan-focused vision and dismantling any public state capacity, especially in social and women’s affairs, built under… Read More »

How Was This Monster Born? Contemplations on the Ontology of the Iranian Islamic Republic

By Asal Mansouri and Borna Dehghani, writing from Tehran How can survival turn into something shameful? How does breathing itself become a burden – one that a person no longer dares to carry, a weight that grows heavier by the moment, with no path of escape left open? What took place across Iran in January… Read More »

The Human Centipede II: Qatar & the Broker’s Cut

If my first The Human Centipede: A View From the Art World (2013) traced the art world as a closed alimentary circuit, this sequel begins where that circuit was sublimated into brokerage as a state-form with unmistakable political aspirations.[1] The same logic is now in the open for everyone to witness, wearing the grimace of… Read More »

الغای زیر ساخت‌های شیعه اسلام در ایران 

ENGLISH VERSION در لحظه‌ای که این سطور نوشته می‌شود، ایران با زخمی باز زنده است. جامعهٔ ایران یکی از تاریک‌ترین مقاطع تاریخ معاصر خود را از سر می‌گذراند. ده‌ها هزار نفر در خیابان‌ها کشتار شده‌اند؛ معترضانِ زخمی توسط نیروهای امنیتی از بیمارستان‌ها ربوده می‌شوند؛ و اعدام‌ها در زندان‌ها به شکلی صنعتی ادامه دارد. خانواده‌ها آیین‌های… Read More »

Abolition of Infrastructural Shia Islam in Iran

FARSI VERSION As I write this, Iran is an open wound. Iranians are living through one of the darkest moments of their country’s contemporary history. Thousands upon thousands upon thousands have been massacred in the streets; wounded protesters are being removed from hospitals by security forces, and executions are taking place on an industrial scale… Read More »

ایران، بزرگترین دردسر: دربارهٔ سکوتِ مزمنِ بخشی از چپِ معاصر

با چیزی آغاز می‌کنم که در نگاه اول شبیه یک حاشیه‌روی است، یک خاطرهٔ قدیمیِ تلویزیونی که زمانی لبخند روی صورتِ ما می‌آورد. اما همین خاطره، مدلِ فشرده‌ای از یک واکنشِ سیاسی است که مدام در ایران تکرار می‌شود. وقتی جوان‌تر بودم، سریالی بود به نام «روزی روزگاری». یک پدیده شد و واقعاً هم عالی… Read More »

Regarding the Erasure of Iranian Uprising

The most recent state crackdown on Iranian protesters stands among the most violent suppressions of public dissent in Iran’s modern history. Protesters have been killed, blinded, and mass-arrested. As the state imposed a sweeping information blackout and advanced claims blaming foreign agents for the violence, this brutality has nonetheless been met with a striking absence… Read More »

Why Critical Theory Isn’t Marxism & Why Western Vs. Eastern Marxism is an Illusory Dichotomy?

I have almost finished Gabriel Rockhill’s “Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?” (Monthly Review Press, 2025) amidst the uproar among the so-called progressive left academia and publishing. Rockhill has said the quiet truth out loud: the so-called critical theory has in fact nothing to do with Marxism. Its path has been paved by former… Read More »

Applied Collapse in Venezuela

The recent decapitation of the Venezuelan regime by the US military is part of a longer history of induced collapse: from Iraq to Afghanistan to Palestine, the techniques of empire have been wielded to destroy societies. But behind the Maduro extradition may be a kind of new American weakness.As you know, Nicolás Maduro and his… Read More »

Hard Habit to Break: On Political Readings of Art & Marxist Citationalism

I want to talk about a habit in contemporary art writing that I keep running into, especially in Marxist-inflected theory, where interpretation is substituted with citation and judgment is treated as an embarrassment. The pattern is familiar: the artwork becomes an occasion to rehearse a framework, the framework becomes a moral sorting machine, and the… Read More »

Computational Contemplation of
Burg of Babel

To watch a one-minute version of the film, please click here. Burg of Babel (2017-2024) is built on a very simple but unusual structure. On the screen, instead of one large moving image, the viewers see a grid made up of twenty-five rectangles, five across and five down, each playing the same 25-minute film, with… Read More »

Organized Callousness: Gaza & the Sociology of War*

Introduction The ongoing war in Gaza has generated extensive polemic among scholars and the general public.1 Some have described this conflict as a novel form of warfare. The deeply asymmetric character of this war and the vast number of Palestinian civilian casualties have prompted some analysts to described Gaza as a “new urban warfare.”2 Others… Read More »

Postcards from Mitteleuropa: Reviews from Sean Tatol’s European Tour*

Chris Sharp, Los Angeles slop-gallerist extraordinare, once scolded me on Instagram for comparing Raoul de Keyser to Peter Shear, evidently because he thinks it’s wrong to see connections between artists if they’re not from the same generation, which is a novel opinion if I’ve ever heard one. When I asked why that would be a… Read More »

Two Futures

In the brief essay that follows, I consider art as an event that de-privatizes the subject by exposing us to the hyperobjects constituted by the circulation of transgenerational trauma, power, and subjective identities. I also examine the role of contingency in this process and argue for art as a tool of indifferent future production. What… Read More »

9/11 & Televisual Intersubjectivity

The six-channel work I presented at Art In The Age Of…Asymmetrical Warfare exhibition reconstructs from video archives of the September 11th attacks the televisual unfolding of the event on CNN, Fox, NBC, CBS, ABC and BBC news networks. The synchronic and uninterrupted footage which is playing on a continuous loop starts with the networks’ mundane… Read More »

Exotopy, Neo-Orientalism and Postcolonial Curation

After visiting the Ordinary Moments exhibition, curated by Mansour Forouzesh and featuring a collective of Iranian independent photographers at the FUGA Gallery in Budapest, I was once again convinced that the consumption of modern Iranian visual culture in the West is essentially orientalistic. Precisely through the contrast this exhibition provides, one can see more clearly… Read More »