Resonance

Discussion

Resonance and Revolution

Gaston Gordillo:

"What has coalesced as a powerful, unstoppable force on the streets of Egypt is resonance: the assertive collective empathy created by multitudes fighting for the control of space. Resonance is an intensely bodily, spatial, political affair, materialized in the masses of bodies coming together in the streets of Egyptian cities in the past thirteen days, clashing with the police, temporarily dispersed by teargas and bullets, and regrouping again like an relentless swarm to reclaim the streets, push the police back, and saturate space with a collective effervescence. Resonance is what gives life to this human rhizome and the source of its power.

This is why the Mubarak regime has desperately tried to shatter it. The state attempts to disrupt the internet, cell phones, Al Jazeera, and the work of the international media are all attempts to disable the technologies through which resonance propagates and expands. When these moves failed, the regime sent paramilitary units to attack the main source of resonance: the bodies of the multitude in Liberation Square in Cairo. The Egyptian Revolution became for several days a pitched battle fought with stones and Molotov cocktails over the control of its main node of resonance. The attacks on this node have been repelled and the resonance continues, embodied in the chanting and the rhythmic hitting of objects that create pulsations engulfing the totality of the square and in fact the whole space of the nation. And while the regime has for now entrenched its position thanks to the support of its global masters, the resonance produced in the streets has profoundly transformed physical and political landscapes at multiple spatial scales.

Everybody feels the resonance reverberating from Egypt and is trying to make sense of it, to name it. But the words seem inadequate, partial, incomplete: enthusiasm, energy, passion, anger, contagion, electrifying, domino effect. These terms name features of resonance but miss its salience as a physical, affective, political force made up of living bodies. Those who know it best, if intuitively, are the bodies that produce it in the streets. A 28-year old protester told a reporter from The Guardian during the first days of clashes with the police, after showing him where the police had broken one of his ribs the day before: “But I don’t care – just look around you. The energy of the Egyptians is amazing. We’re saying no to unemployment, no to police brutality, no to poverty.” Just look around you. You can see that “amazing energy.” Indeed, if you train your senses you can see and feel the materiality of resonance, the physical, bodily power of its presence and its effects (the video clips posted here, here and here exude this materiality). This is a bodily energy that this protester conceptualized as negativity, as a collective “no,” but which is also an affirmation, a striving, what Nietzsche called will-to-power, the will to assert and expand life. Energy made by and through bodies, so unfathomable that seems to defy conceptualization. Resonance has been conceptually invisible for so long because it involves the most immanent, physical, taken-for-granted dimensions of social life: bodies and space, modulated by the same temporal pulsation.

These are bodies and spaces tangled in a vortex of movement, whirlwinds, and flows, for a defining feature of resonance is that it does not stand still. It is mobile and expands, affecting more and more bodies. This is why so many reporters use metaphors of contagion to explain its expansive force. Nicholas Kristof from the New York Times wrote that he felt “intoxicated” by the yearning and hopefulness he felt on Liberation Square. Resonance shakes bodies, even foreign bodies, and makes them act out of empathy. And because it reverberates and is contagious, resonance can travel long distances, spreading outwards from its original node. This is the spatial spread that the media alludes to through references to “domino effects,” a somewhat mechanical and linear metaphor that nonetheless captures the mobility of resonance expansion as well as its physicality: that the expansion of resonance is created by objects affecting other objects that in turn affect other objects. Except that the objects being affected by resonance are conglomerates of human bodies.

Liberation Square is now a node of global resonance, which Kristof aptly called “the most exhilarating place in the world.” This resonance is now ricocheting all over the planet through the infrastructure of instant global communications and impacting on millions of bodies who feel moved by the determination guiding those struggles, so distant yet so close. The Egyptian Revolution was in fact triggered by the arrival on Egyptian space of prior resonances created by the multitude in the streets of Tunisia, which then blended with localized grievances and patterns of unrest. In turn, the resonance that led to the Tunisian uprising can be traced back farther to the wave of massive anti-elite protests and riots that shook Europe in 2010, which created anti-establishment resonances that have now spilled over across the Mediterranean and onto the shores of Africa and the Middle-East.

Resonance, in short, forces us to look at wider, complex, ever shifting and fluid topographies of unrest that connect and affect distant and seemingly disconnected geographies. And the intense expectations, support, and fears that the Egyptian Revolution is awakening all over the world indicate that the streets of Cairo are becoming the last manifestation of a global wave of anti-elite unrest that is reaching transcontinental dimensions, and is beginning to resemble the planetary turnmoil of pivotal years such as 1968 (defined by anti-war and anti-capitalist resonances) and 1989 (marked by resonances that shattered communist bureaucracies). Hence the global significance of the Egyptian Revolution, which unlike the recent mass protests in Europe aims to destroy a whole authoritarian political structure firmly supported by the United States.

Ideology, slogans, and speeches are all part of resonance, but at its most powerful moments resonance is sheer affect: bodies joining forces to control space and voicing their passions through openly gestural expressions (chants, screams, signs) and, as in Cairo, violent confrontations with armed bodies sent by the state. Resonance is collective empathy so overwhelming and bodily that it defies representation. What is most unfathomable about resonance is its power, a power that has fueled all the revolutions of human history. Resonance can erode and destroy the most powerful of states, especially when it affects the bodies of those with orders to shoot. Many revolutions are won this way: when the resonance created by the multitude is so expansive and penetrating that it breaks the will of officers and soldiers to obey orders. And this is why in moments of revolutionary unrest the state unleashes ruthless, unparalleled violence on the source of resonance: human bodies. Massacres of unarmed civilians such as Tiananmen Square and the state terrorism that devastated much of Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s were attempts to physically destroy a resonance that was dangerously threatening the state. And this is why the ghost of these massacres has hovered over Liberation Square, despite the signs that a faction of the Egyptian military seems to lean toward avoiding indiscriminate bloodshed.

Resonance, in case it is not clear by now, is not a metaphor. The power of affectation that these bodies create is as material as the forms of resonance that are studied in physics and travel through air, water, and solids. Understanding political resonances indeed requires developing a physics of politics. Unlike standard physics, which seeks to find predictability in motion, a physics of political resonance involves the shifting patterns of movement by rhizomes of striving bodies coming together and spreading in unpredictable ways. Resonance unfolds in the realm of political contingency yet through well-defined patterns. It spreads at diverse, simultaneous physical levels. The voices, screams, and chants that in traversing space as sound waves reach and affect other bodies are a primary source of resonance. A protester in Cairo captured the affective inscription of chanting on his body when he said to The Guardian, “I’m going to have all of this week’s chants ringing in my ears for ever – down, down Hosni Mubarak.” In faraway places, the instant media transmissions that project images of those bodies on our computer and TV screens also affect us viscerally despite being on the other side of the world.

And back on the streets of Cairo, the violence against the police and pro-Mubarak paramilitary units create resonance through bodies that fight, bleed, and die together on those urban battlefields littered with stones and debris. The images of hundreds of bleeding, bruised, wounded protesters covered with bandages yet at the ready for more street combat reveal both their individual bodily fragility and the determination of their collective will. These resonances are solid in their conduits and effects, as the ravaged landscapes of Cairo illustrate. Yet they are also so elusive and ever fluid that they seem ethereal." (http://greekleftreview.wordpress.com/2011/03/18/resonance-and-the-egyptian-revolution/)