dear nettimers, Like the conflict in Ukraine, the recent flood of commentaries and analyses on nettime (and elsewhere) has been overwhelming, and given this it seemed so far difficult to add anything more astute and articulate than what has passed here so far. Speaking as I assume for many, first of all my gratitude for seeing a discussion here, which seems to lack sufficient depth elsewhere. Obviously I have very little to add to these analyses.
One thing that very much annoyed me in the early stages of the invasion, though, was a superficial resurgence of the notion of ‘tactical media’ in various online and offline exclamations. Predictable in a situation of immediate crisis, and understandable as an innate impulse, but it felt out of place. My own feeling about that at the time (having dealt with the notion of tactical media quite a bit over the years, although I did not coin the term nor named the associated practices as such) tactical media seemed to have failed or missed its place and time of action at the very moment the rockets started to hit targets and tanks rolled over the Ukrainian border - or rather when an 8 year regional war escalated into a full scale military invasion and nation-wide war in the country. Intuitively it felt tactical media had a role to play exactly to prevent such armed conflict, prevent the legitimisation of large scale (military) violence as a means of politics, and enhance the kind of checks and balances, distribution of powers, establish counter-hegemonial mechanisms, support open governance structures all aimed at avoiding (the possibility of) these forms of armed conflict. Thus, when this violent conflict then nonetheless erupted it seemed to me that tactical media had failed (along with all other counter-hegemonial practices), and that it had little if no role to play in the immediacy of the conflict. In private conversation David Garcia, however, reminded me of the fact that my idea of tactical media here was too narrow in this take on current events. Too narrow in the sense of being too narrowly aligned with an emancipatory ideal of progressive politics - one could phrase it more Latourian as too narrowly focussed on the ‘progressive composition of the good common world’ (his political ideal from The Politics of Nature onwards, which includes of course non-human politics, but is certainly contradicted by this regressive conduct of war). Instead we would need to acknowledge that tactical media has been very much alive and productive, but in the service of reactionary and to some extent hyper-violent politics and regressive forms of popular mobilisation. In which we also include the strategic operationalisation of the tactical in media by the well-known Russian troll-farms and other strategic initiatives, as much as populist political movements in Europe, the US and elsewhere - that whole story is well known. So then what has failed is a ‘progressive’ counter-hegemonial understanding of tactical media. The qualities of the nomadic, the temporary interventions, the tactical operations on the terrains of strategic power, the ephemeral character of tactical media, hit and run tactics, quick and dirty interventions and aesthetics – all this seems powerless and utterly impotent vis-a-vis the violent brutality of this unleashed military machine. Thinking this through a bit further, it seemed that the temporal scale or scales of tactical media is where one of its main problems lie and where the ‘classic’ notion of tactical media seems to fail current conditions. A better way to think this is first to assume that it is both too late and too early for tactical media to play any significant role in the Ukraine conflict. Of course the witness reports keep flowing from countless citizen’s camera’s, and this is highly significant. But as Felix Stalder already concluded many years ago - a huge number of people have become involved in something which could be labeled as tactical media, but those people would overwhelmingly not think of tactical media as they are doing it. The vast majority will simply never have heard the term and thus be unaware of any of its previous experiences and the critical discussions they evoked. It is, however, not besides the point to think this through and try to connect our current experiences to those made earlier. Not just to understand the current conditions and dynamics (which the discussions on nettime f.i. do brilliantly) but especially to consider how to engage these conditions and dynamics – right now. The temporality of tactical media, its focus on the immediacy of the event, its inextricable origins within the event in question (’tactical media never report, they always participate’ - Lovink & Garcia - The ABC of Tactical Media, 1997), is simultaneously its greatest strength and its greatest limitation. What a conscious and critical articulation of this problem can do is help us formulate better possible engagements that transcend this temporal logic of immediacy. Beyond the tactical in media / beyond the temporal logic of immediacy So then the main question I’m trying to articulate (and this is of course entirely preliminary and sketchy / up for debate) is at what temporal scale the tactical practices of media as identified by the idea of tactical media can become meaningful for a counter-hegemonial politics and a productive engagement of atrocities that are being perpetrated in Ukraine right now? Perhaps the most obvious and immediate thing to recognise is that what Ukraine is going through right now is not that dissimilar to other recent experiences in other countries that have faced large scale military and violent conflict, and / or still do while this conflict is raging on. For me the most immediate parallel that comes to mind is the hyper-violent conflict in Syria, which is far from over or settled. Also in Syria we see many of the same actors active in the space of that war, various Nato countries, the Russian army, proxy fighters (Hezbollah and others), etc etc.. The role of tactical media in the Syrian conflict has at first been mostly limited to the media operations of islamic state, which produced some of the most effective tactical media operations in decades - drawing in supporters from many other regions into the hyper-violent conflict there. Also in Syria citizen reports have played an important role in getting information in and out of the conflict areas, and more organised media initiatives approximated similar formats to what we saw in the 1990s during the break up of Yugoslavia - I’m thinking here f.i. about the Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently project and others. However, as important as all these initiatives may be the project to come out of that horrible conflict that seems to offer something of a different temporal scope and with that a different efficacy as a counter-hegemonial force might be the Syrian Archive ( https://syrianarchive.org/en/about <https://syrianarchive.org/en/about> ). The archive exists to collect citizen reports and other forms of ‘forensic’ evidence to build material proof for future legal proceedings against the perpetrators of the worst atrocities in Syria. There is a long and critical debate to be had about how the project is structured, its funding structure, embeddedness in international NGO networks, its attachment to the notion of ‘human rights’ which gives it the possibility to connect to transnational legal frameworks, etc etc For the moment this is not the dimension of the project I want to focus on. What I find interesting and possibly productive also for the conflict in Ukraine is the expanded temporal scope of the Syrian Archive. During our 2017 Tactical Media Connections event in Amsterdam we spoke to two of the originators of the Syrian Archive and they presented the project at Eye Film Museum at the time - see: http://www.tacticalmediafiles.net/events/39710 <http://www.tacticalmediafiles.net/events/39710> and the video recording of that discussion: http://www.tacticalmediafiles.net/videos/45066/ <http://www.tacticalmediafiles.net/videos/45066/> At that point very little actual materials had as yet been collected and verified for inclusion into the archive - but the aims of the project were clear. At the time I also thought it was a really worthwhile idea, but I had little confidence that this initiative would actually succeed in collecting and verifying sufficient material from the Syrian conflict, let alone ‘prosecute’ on the basis of this material in which ever legal framework. However, over time the archive has steadily grown and has broadened its mission to “positively contribute to post-conflict reconstruction and stability”. The idea is also to develop open source tools and “providing a transparent and replicable methodology for collecting, preserving, verifying and investigating visual documentation in conflict areas.”, which is an on-going process. The most important thing right now in Ukraine is that the fighting should stop, and it should stop immediately. Realistically that will not immediately happen, and as long as fighting and associated atrocities and tragedies continue, it might make a lot of sense to build on other experiences and already now think in timeframes that exceed the immediacy of current events. Documentation and verification, going through ‘due process’, all these things that require so much time - time that we all feel we do not have while the fighting continues and people massively suffer, not just in Ukraine, but also in Syria and unfortunately many other places, might nonetheless help us to counter the barrage of strategically operated tactical media in the service of reactionary political agendas, hegemonial power and hyper-violence, and the epistemological crisis that we have been thrown in as a result of massive disinformation strategies. So, whatever media activity is happening on the ground right now in Ukraine, which we could label as ’tactical’, ‘participatory’ (rather than observing from the outside), coming from within the ‘operational terrain’, can start to play a role on more extended timescales. The Syrian Archive offers a model for that, plus tools and methods, but of course there can be others, and new ones can and probably must be invented. All this requires to expand the critical time frame, the temporal scope of our analyses - not just to ask where did this conflict come from (geopolitics etc..), but primarily what kind of possible future trajectories can be engaged with. Next to this we need to think through and begin the painfully slow process opf building appropriate political structures that avoid the type of conflicts we are now horrified by. In other words we need urgently get back to the progressive composition of the good common world, and free ourselves from being trapped in the immediacy of these horrific events. That requires a much expanded temporal scale to think and act on - as painful and difficult that may be while the hypersonic rockets strike ever father to the west…. Stay safe, Eric
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