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TRANSCENDING THE ELEMENTS OF

CIRCUMSTANCE

Nick Axel

Let us reflect on the past few years, and recall the stories we have come into

contact with and have affected us the most. WikiLeaks, the Arab Spring,

15M, #OWS, Anonymous; just these will suffice. Some of the most heavily

publicized aspects of these specific events are the constitutive processes of

their becoming: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, hacking, public assembly, and

the list goes on, ad infinitum. It is captivating to recount the story of how

Egyptian protestors effectively networked themselves throughout the city to

unite in protest in Tahrir Square while thwarting police efforts of

suppression. Or, the vital role of personal media-journalism that spread the

#OWS movement like wildfire, West across the great plains to encompass

virtually all of American society. What else in recent memory has been able

to do such a feat? To unite, to reveal a common spirit of such a diverse and

separated group of people is perhaps the most important historical event to

take place in America in (at least) the past 30 years.

It happened. Let's not look over this fact too quickly with dismissive

remarks such as "well what is it doing now?" or "what did it really change?".

In the end, particularly within the asymptotic curve of technological

deployment coupled with cultural progress, what is most remarkable, the

most essential thing about all of these events is that they happened. Not who,

not what, not when, not where, not why, not how, but that. While I do not

mean to dismiss the means by which these events were able to come into

existence, these tools must be critically reframed in respect to the fidelity

they have already engendered, lest their critical efficacy become obsolete, or

even worse, subsumed.

In order to tell a story now, we must reframe the means by which the story of

now has been told thus far. So then, where are we? What is the story of the

present? We can begin in a negative manner, in relation to what was, and

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what brought us here. The #OWS movement has been crippled with the

dissolution of its body; it merely exists as loose organs and flailing

apendages. 15M met largely the same fate. The Arab Spring, following a

more traditional and explicit form of revolution is still in turmoil, with the

transition of Egyptian power still in flux, threatening to plunge the country

back into the former structure oppression. In the meantime, WikiLeaks and

Anonymous continue their offensive while the sentiments of Fascism have

started to surface throughout Europe once again.

While this notion itself has been haunting these social movements from their

very inception, it is at the moment, more than ever, imperative to articulate

the world we are striving for. What if the greatest obstacle we face is not the

actualization of our dreams, but their enunciation? What if just by saying

something exists makes it exist? The neoliberal-consensus machine has

effectively engendered a universal language that embodies Orwellian

Newspeak. It is revealing, the name Orwell gave this concept, "Newspeak".

The five (six) notions I previously mentioned, also called the "elements of

circumstance" (who, what, when, where, why, and how) originated as a

concept from the Ancient Greeks, and was adopted in modern times as a

journalistic and police formula for proper investigative reporting and

information extraction1.

The horizons for speech have been retarded. As what often occured when

participants were asked about the 15M and #OWS movements, their

questions were met with silence. The events which took place transcended

this basic epistemological framework, revealing it as the limit of our

language and our understanding. But you can easily ask any person who

participated in these events: the inability to communicate it in no way means

nothing was understood, or nothing was said2. A new form of content

emerged, a new metric of value, which subsequently demands novel

techniques of its representation and communication.

This fidelity of a possible future engenders an ethical responsibility to

continue its progression and development3. For this future to continue

becoming, we should focus not on the technique, not the representational