[...] 1. project authenticity and emotion onto news narratives
2. act as objective witnesses able to produce truthful accounts

(more and more i feel the iranians need for ‘activism =/= jurnalism’ --> what one wants to happen =/= understanding what is happening)--> epistemology [the question of how one makes sense of one's practices --> in the case of Syria (also Iran): *affective proximity to violence* ==> sense]

...negotiating the distance of mediation when viewers and producers in the Global North are witnessing the suffering of others

(in Iran) activism + art = the human body as tool, medium, symbol, metaphor

[*]affect: circulation + stickiness of emotion (onto and between bodies, texts, objects, experiences) (Ahmed)

journalism = represent + narrate

(the ‘trick’ of) relying on the *outsourcing of emotional labour* to non-journalists (by:)
•having them express their emotions
•having the journalist describe them

(Ghazzi conceptualising the emotional field in journalism -->) ***unequal power relations ==> emotioal labor***

proximity (--> what i heard so much when i went back to iran: to ke inja insti nemiduni تو که اینجا نیستی نمیدونی)

*aesthetic of authenticity* in news reports (<-- mobile phones)
political economy of foreign reporting
politics of hope (with an ambition to inspire all Syrians to rebel)
...emotional attachment to political goals


*revolution: the event that changes people's lives and in relation to which they locate themselves politically
•conflict in Syria began as an uprising, it ended up an international war, which in 2020 appears to have mostly concluded in the favour of the regime =/= revolution
•the word “revolution” means something else to activists in Syria (how the meanings projected on the term changed in accordance to circumstances)
◦(most of the time, artists and activists) ****use a word to galvanise their emotions and bodies**** and inspired them to take actions they would not have imagined to pursue [use of words --> what people hope =/= descriptive]
◦word (for example “revolution”): a marker of an *inward-looking description* of belonging to a broad political community defined by opposition
•“the revolution” --> affectively consumed the pursuit of truth
•an identity-marker (based on a political orientation) --> an inward-looking signifier to mark who one is + what political community they belong to [--> a politics of what one had wanted =/= describe what one observes]
•(revolution:) personified and humanised as a well-meaning political agent (that sometimes strays from its goals by committing errors)
•motivating people to get involved in activism
•

(Said's Orientalism -->) subaltern others (are typically considered) living within a constant state of violence <-- much older Western regime of representation perceived them as culturally close to violence

(Ghazzi > Badiou >) some events are felt as historic as they galvanise the energies of political actors who imagine themselves as ‘mounting the stage of history’ --Koselleck--> acts of information dissemination are engulfed by the event and are aimed at bridging the temporal distance between the desired and experienced ==> “journalism ~= activism”

...................................

collective memory --> historical victimhood --> consolidating power
(meta-history -->) a view of history as a series of junctures where good fought evil ==Ghazzi==> historical victimhood

global rise of populist politics ==> tropes of self-victimisation
•revolutionary
•resistance
•nationalism
•populism
•neo-fascism
}--> operationalize victimhood (by whom / against whom)

one is wronged, targeted, injured (by the elite, the media, external enemies)
•self = true underdog --> victim
•opponents = inauthentic adversary --> oppressor
= homogeneous + antagonistic
--Laclau--> chain of equivalence: (from) corruptions =/= origins --to--> traitors =/= patriots --to--> intruders =/= natives --to--> faithless =/= faithful --to--> *submission  =/= heroism* and ...
}= *populism* (political dialectic)

(storytelling)
•the question of *what* a society remembers -->{highly formulaic plot structures --for--> narrating the past}
•the question of *how* a society remembers -->{powerful actors push for particular kinds of story forms that shape the ways they tell all stories}

zigzag structures of a rise and fall and/or fall and rise of the nation
--> future dramatically takes one of two routes: (in the direction of) either a golden age or the dark ages
}--Ghazzi--> forked historical consciousness : (an understanding & speaking of) “history = a series of junctures scattered across time”


(the problem is) ***historical consciousness*** --> orientational
“bestows upon actuality a temporal direction, an orientation that can guide action intentionally by the agency of historical memory” (Rüsen)
1. make specific references to historic events (compare them to the present [==guide==> political action])
2. *making references to “history” at large*

[*]zigzag memory structure: deploy mnemonic spins to reframe historic events
•establish equivalent between the present and the past [--!--> (fundamentally despotic?) technique that i also use in lecture performances]


authoritarian populism


(Hegelian) [*]action: pursue one aspect of history + breaking away from away from another
1. (modern) revolutionary: telling a new story, (--populist--> focus on) *exclusionary politics*, once the leader is in power the objective is to prolong the idea of historic juncture --justify--> continued exclusion

populist --Laclau--> (invocation of)
•people = empty signifier
•leader = embodiment of people's agency

***rhetoric of resentment*** --> victimhood
[*]resentment: an emotional-moral framework --aim--> continuously regenerate the felt intensities --underwrite--> demands for revenge + lamentations (of victimhood)


***nationalism ==> populism***

(many countries) national identity (& militancy) is intertwined with:
•narrative of self-victimization --
•invocation of trauma

victorious victimhood ==fuels==> aggressive militancy
for example --> Israel: nothing counts as evidence as one's own empowerment, one is always under threat, if Israel cannot maintain the omnipotent position that its victory offered (1967) it would be under existential threat

anticolonial nationalism (or postcolonial populism)
•past injury (“We have been oppressed” ==> “re-empower ourselves again”)
•decades after independence --still--> fixated on the anticolonial moment ==> perpetuate a sense of victimhood }--> to mask authoritarianism

victimhood
•Hindu nationalism --> reformulated history from a focus on colonialism and postcolonial nation-building into a narrative of victimhood that blames historic Muslim invasions for the decline of Hindu civilisation and nationhood
•China --> reformulated its school history textbooks to stress victimhood and humiliation through the idea of China's “100 years of humiliation” in reference to Western and Japanese invasions
•United States --> nationalism often takes the shape of antipathy to government that is enmeshed with an ideology of liberal individualism
•
}--> ***logic of empowerment*** (--permeate--> economies of visibility)


***memory narrative***


iran --> shohada شهدا martyrs of iran-iraq war --> after the war became the picture of collective victimhood (“heroes = us”)

Erdogan's speech
“we have been tested by fire” (--?--> Siavash's fire trial is populist?)
~= “we have been tested by enemy”
~= “evil forces”


(from) populism --to--> neofascism
(from) generic rhetoric of an unidentified enemy --to--> articulation of an identifiable foe (who is met with political violence)

authoritarian state apparatus [= political system + culture + institutions + ?] --allow--> smoother way of operationalisation of narratives (about the dangers of adversaries)
-exactly what kind of state apparatus we have in iran?


historical victimhood --> resurgent populist discourse
•people have been enduring victimhood for too long
•fateful junctu[...]