The Revolution Will be Uploaded

Vernacular Video and the Arab Spring (Peter Snowdon, 2014)

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Vernacular online videos from Arab revolutions form a unique yet problematic historical source for understanding the subjective experience of ordinary revolutionaries. Understanding "the people" as a performative event instead of a pre-existing entity means a performative and allegorical approach to writing about revolution is implied, but the right response to these videos is emulating their radically egalitarian practices, not just adding theory or criticism.

• The Arab revolutions of 2010 onwards have given rise to an unmatched exercise in popular self-documentation. For the first time since cinema began, people—not just experts—are filming their own revolutionary activities as a crucial part of their efforts to overthrow oppression.
  • These videos are dynamic, transmitting affective energy through online-offline ecosystems. They are not primarily videos but vehicles for self-mobilization and potential revolutionary social change. (Aouragh & Alexander 2011). They produce an exceptional effect on the viewer, even if they are unfamiliar, uninformed or have no prior emotional connection with the content.
  • They are both vast unanalyzable mass phenomenon and as singular, context-dependent events. Snowdon proposes seeing them in the "vernacular" practice, inspired by Ivan Illich's early 1980s work (contentious, performative claim to territory rather than a settled condition).
• !!!! Following Rancière, their aesthetics is inseparable from their politics: understanding the politics they invoke requires attending to their formal and sensory aspects.
  • By redefining the aesthetic dimension of these videos as integral to their political significance, they are seen not as representations of a pre-existing political reality, but as a "redistribution of the sensible" that prefigures new political possibilities, an aesthetic revolution in the way online video is precieved and used.
  • It's precisely through these video's aesthetic features that one can understand the politics they anticipate

The People as Performance

The "people" in revolutionary moments are not pre-formed entities, but performative events: stating "the people want…" creates the sense of a collective actor (Judith Butler 2013). Physical assembly, as Butler (following Arendt) argues, is integral: bodies coming together (online or offline) themselves enact "the people." (Butler 2011, 2013).

• Seeing "the people" as an ongoing performative event instead of a pre-existing entity frees us from treating "the Arab revolution(s)" or "Arab revolution videos" as coherent wholes; instead, they are accumulations of unique experiences, paths, and traces that never fully align or totalize.
• Gregson (2011) suggests these experiences exceed conceptual boundaries, requiring attention to their specific, embodied, sensory dimensions.
  • Through ekphrasis and multiple viewpoints (cameraperson, martyr, crowd, viewers) to respect both the conceptual and non-conceptual aspects, resisting reduction to a fixed "theory" of revolutionary subjectivity.
  • The video and textual re-enactment function as an allegory (in John Law's sense): an aesthetic form fusing conceptual meaning with irreducibly sensory experience (Law 2004: 96-113).
• :::: behind this ontological politics lies the (straightforward) politics. In the aftermath of the revolutions, video-making becomes a radically egalitarian practice that explores the poetic possibilities of the present, beyond mere personal creativity or collective strategy.

Defining the Vernacular: YouTube

• Vernacular commonly describes non-professional, user-generated content, but this article redefines it politically (following Ivan Illich's ideas) to explore grassroots media practices under power constraints.
  • Illich's "vernacular" involves subsistence ethics, emphasizing autonomy through collective reciprocity over individualism.
  • Subsistence ethics (Illich in Gender, 1982) affirms the right of individuals to limit personal desires for the group's benefit, prioritizing those in need (closely related to E.P. Thompson's "moral economy") in ways incompatible with an atomistic and possessive vision of social rationality.
  • Many personal/individualistic uses of online video ("broadcasting yourself") should be considered shadow work as they fail to sustain collective reciprocity, critical for autonomy.
  • The vernacular is inherently performative, rooted in bodily gesture and action, and must be approached through metaphor and poetry, not purely abstract analysis.
• Vernacular space contrasts with classical Western science: it is particular, embodied, ambiguous, and alive, rather than universal, abstract, or inert. (Illich 1982: 105-118) it is inherently ambiguous and asymmetrical because it is rooted in Piaget's infralogical human experience.
  • Researching this domain requires embracing its enigmatic nature and avoiding scientific reductionism. Human sciences must be disciplined yet poetic, balancing incompatible dimensions through analogy and metaphor: "only poetry can show us ways to hold together the incompatible yet complementary dimensions which just are the nature of vernacular experience."
  • Illich draws parallels between the rise of vernacular video and the Gutenberg press, initially used to spread politically subversive, non-standardized vernacular languages, but standardized language was later also imposed to enable state surveillance and control over communication, highlighting vernacular forms as resistant to power centralization (like 1492 Castilian Spanish, a language which at the time no one spoke, and which Elio Antonio de Nebrija set out to invent).
    • Initially, the printing press spread diverse vernacular languages and subversive texts. In 1492, Nebrija proposed a standardized Spanish to Queen Isabella to facilitate state control and surveillance. The term "mother tongue" signified the state's attempt to replace the Church's role in people's lives. Isabella approved Nebrija's plan to suppress vernaculars hindering imperial oversight. Today, similar dynamics arise as accessible technology enables self-expression and challenges political repression, highlighting vernacular culture's role in identity.
• Vernacular videos of the Arab revolutions should then indeed be called vernacular: they defy commercialization and professionalism, enacting "the people" as the subject of history, while being rooted in collective action as anonymous and common property, aligning with older forms of vernacular art.
  • These videos extend informal, homemade practices into the public realm, creating accounts of political life more comprehensive than institutional media.
  • They challenge the division of public/private space, a foundation of current power structures (Butler 2011; cf. Illich 1983), by enacting the physical presence of the filming body in defiance of state control.
  • They redistribute political power by amplifying collective voices and challenge mass media's aesthetical limitations on what people can imagine and experience, prefiguring political change (Rancière 1983/2007: vi).
  • Vernacular video exemplifies an emerging practice where the image is not representation but the physical trace of participation, marking the invention of Internet video as genuinely vernacular.

Souq Al-Jumaa, 25 February 2011: Towards a Political Aesthetics of the Libyan Uprising

The Libyan uprising broke out in Benghazi on Feb 15 2011, and the Day of Rage (Feb 17) saw protests spread to many other cities, including the capital, Tripoli. Tajura's march (Feb 25) followed a failed week-long crackdown by security forces, diminishing residents' hopes of seeing Gaddhafi depart as quickly as Ben Ali and Mubarak before him. A video from an anonymous cameraman in Souk Al-Jumaa, a working-class neighborhood of Tripoli, uploaded 27 February 2011, captures collective defiance during the Libyan uprising after weeks of repression and fading hopes for quick victory.

• These videos explore what revolutions invoke and refuse, the actions they inspire, and the outcomes they reject, imagining society as a vernacular domain where every action shapes shared meanings.
• A critical moment captured is the decision to fight and risk death for dignity, central to the vernacular moral economy of the people.
  • The decision to film not when something happens, but when it might happen, highlights the anticipatory, affective nature of these moments, embodying collective truth through unexpected formal innovations. They offer an irreplaceable sense of "what it was like to be there," placing the viewer in a specific time, space, and perspective.
  • → it's not about the moment when something happens, it's about the moment when one begins to think that something might be about to happen. (!)
• :::: The camera's chaotic, gestural style dissolves traditional spatial and temporal norms and inscribes filmers' embodied experiences into the scene.
  • The group is depicted not as individuals, but as a collective, moving intuitively in response to the unseen enemy, creating a subjectivity irreducible to individual or collective alone.
  • this creates a visceral connection to the filmer's embodied experience, capturing trance-like states, and generally achieving a remarkable convergence between unexpected formal procedures and the complexity of shared collective truth.
  • The camera is ∴ not merely an optical device but a physical tool for action, extending the filmer's arm into public space (Figurt 2009; Campanelli 2013).
• link to video w/english subs
• The filmer's shadow across a blood trail symbolizes the dissolution of self, projecting an anonymous silhouette that represents the community rather than an individual identity. This gesture acknowledges death and embodies collective unity.
  • The originality lies in the refusal of individual authorship, emphasizing communal identity and the shared invention of new forms and experiences.
  • It contributes to a new collective audiovisual language, asserting the vernacular's aesthetic and intellectual complexity as independent of, equal if not superior to, institutionally-recognized artistic practice, however radical or "experimental".
• online videos produced by the Arab revolutions testify, if not to the revolutionary nature of these events, then at least to the kinds of capacity for radical change that are implicit in them.
  • !!!! Many videos go beyond replicating revolutionary figures or slogans, inventing new forms akin to songs, poetry, and art, celebrating liberated spaces for what people were made for: celebration.

Revolution and the Poetic Imperative

Videos from the Arab revolutions embody Rancière's "redistribution of the sensible", initiating political change from the bottom up, outside existing discourse. Youtube becomes then a genuinely vernacular space.

• These videos are best understood as allegories, not examples, respecting the performative nature of revolutions and avoiding reduction of the specific to the general.
  • this is because allegory not only enables a consciously performative approach to critical method; it also respects the non-inductive logic of events such as revolutions, which are themselves inherently performative and thus not answerable to any pre-defined conceptual framework.
  • Writing about such videos must preserve their textural and figural particularity, resisting the simplifications imposed by social sciences.
• Syrian poet Adonis critiques these uprisings for lacking systemic change in the political, economic and social (Adonis 2001), while Mohammed Bamyeh (2011) describes them as anarchist in method but liberal in intent (seems like a contradiction). Jacques Ellul argues revolutions should be defined by how they are experienced: if people call them revolutions, they are (Ellul 1969/2008, smart guy).
  • Embracing these revolutions as revolutions is ∴ itself a performative and prefigurative act, shaping future theory, society, and artistic participation.

Revolutions are recognizable when everyday life becomes indistinguishable from poetry, and videos like this Libyan one capture that essence: inventing new ways of being and experiencing, judged in the memory of those who lived through them.