Sunday, September 4, 2016

Discourses of Revolution- The Model from Below

Thinking about discourses around encounters of power as they communicate statements of opposition. I decided to use this space to document my observation of discourses of change in the Orange Room dialogue on political change and revolution.  This discussion emerged out of an online debate with  Assaad Thebian  Activist with +You Stink 



"Unfortunately a complete collapse of the system will not result in a secular republic. Secularism needs an intellectual backbone. The collapse you are talking about will be lead by the antithesis of secularism -- the Islamists. Because they are the only ones powerful enough to impose their own will unto others."


@Mighty Goat 

Marcus Rediker in Outlaws of the Atlantic: Sailors, Pirates, and Motley Crews in the Age of Sail, tells us some thing of interest about communication relations around the American Revolution. 

The Motley Crew is a multi-ethnic model of resistance. It had the capacity to transmit the message of resistance through the oral narrations of the sailors spreading the message of violent resistance, consequently leading to the American Revolution.

In this example there is no separation between the Motley Crew and the Intellectuals, and while the force of mobilization base is the Motley Crew, what mobilized the media relations and the communication legitimating the the use of violence were the intellectuals. It was the intellectuals, and journalists then traveling through the ships, talking to sailors and passing such knowledge to Europe that played a fundamental role in the consequent European national revolutions. 

In this example there is no generalized type of equilibrium between the finalized activity of the American Revolution, the relations between the Motley Crew and the capitalist, and transmission of the message of resistance from sailors to intellectuals and journalists. 

The Motley Crew-Intellectuals model established itself in relation to the material operations and conditions surrounding the circulation of power around the revolutionary model being formed. Impressment was the rule contested violently by the Motley Crew. 

In the case of Lebanon a revolutionary model is establishing its own dynamics. In my opinion such a model cannot be engineered from above. The model is being formed from below by the forces of resistance that would mobilize it to redirect power against the force of oppression caused by the National Pact. This model is forming while there is something called the Syrian conflict or probably because of the Syrian conflict.

As to whether one may predict how would this model mobilize and what outcome may come out of it, I doubt that this is as simple as Islamists would take over Lebanon just like that.

Tuesday, August 30, 2016

رسالة ألى السيد حسن نصرالله

رسالة ألى السيد حسن نصرالله: Discuss anything related to Lebanon, Lebanese Politics, Breaking News and Live Updates on Major Events related to Lebanon

Monday, August 29, 2016

The Terrorist in Kristeva's Abject and Foucault's Antagonism Strategies 2016

Abstract:

This paper explores Julia Kristeva’s discourse of the abject through the lens of Foucault’s antagonism strategies being a way of analysis of government techniques and processes of government of the population domestically, and mobilization into war internationally within the actuality of a world set to function in bio-political mode. The antagonism of strategies is a way of analyzing power relations within society by studying the opposite of the thing one wishes to analyze. The opposite is determined by the binaries defined by the actual conflict pinpointed at the points of contestation and consequently the manifestation of and the proliferation of discourse. So when one speaks of the terrorist one also speaks of government and the law. I compare Foucault’s archeology genealogy and the antagonism of strategies as tools of analysis of terrorism with Julia Kristeva’s semiotic psychoanalysis by taking the notions, of discourse, intertextuality and le langage as central points of comparison.
Research Interests: 

Thursday, August 25, 2016

Turkey's Entry into the Syrian Conflict


The Iranian tango with Turkey has produced some unpredictable events with the intrusion of Turkey inside Syria. But I think, it is also the decision of Bashar al Assad that Turkey enters along the side the of the FSA. 

Iran, Syria and Turkey seem to have understood something that makes them have one common interest in this region.

They agree that their survival as states is dependent on the survival of their regimes over the territories they call their states. The two regimes that are struggling with their own legitimacy are the Iranian rule of the Wilayat Al-Faqih and the Muslim Brotherhood governing Sunni Turkey and Shi'a Iran.

The Saudis are already weakened. They lost the public of both sects. The Iranian Turkish unity is against ISIS. Saudi was bankrupt in Yemen and stripped in Syria.

The question that Turkey poses to Iran is called Hezbollah. This is why the Lebanese Hezbollah should leave the war because Iran will dispose of the militant proxy.

The regime will not come out of this war to the same position it occupied two years ago. The death toll, the refugee crisis and the human catastrophe means it is time to get a grip of actuality.

Turkey's entry on the side of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) is designed to give the rebels a strong base to negotiate with the regime. Consequently, reducing the negotiating powers of the regime, and equating him with the rebels.

The picture as it is unfolding is making a spectacle of the players in the civil war between the government and the rebels. The government lost its legitimacy but did not collapse. 

So far, the government invited the Russian, Hezbollah and Iran on its side. Turkey is creating a balance to the disadvantage of the the survival of the government and in the advantage of maintaining the territorial integrity of Syria.

In all this Hezbollah will not be a party to the negotiations. They are simply not Syrian. The question of Hezbollah would become the central question in any Turkish and Iranian alliance.