Syrian Visual Media and Filming Against Man: From Authorized Spectator to Coalitional Futurism (Copy)
Syrian Visual Media and Filming Against Man:
From Authorized Spectator to Coalitional Futurism
Visionary Syrian documentary filmmaker Omar Amiralay ends his 1974 film Everyday Life in a Syrian Village with a piercing repudiation, and a harsh call to action. After an hour and 20 minutes of footage depicting the debilitating conditions of the Syrian peasantry, Amiralay refuses to let the film go to black without having the last word. Before the final credits, a subtitle reads: “We must involve ourselves in the struggle for our common liberation. There are no clean hands, no innocents, no spectators. We must all plunge our hands into the soil of our land. Every spectator is a coward, or a traitor.” In the context of the Ba’athist military coup and takeover of the Syrian nation-state, where the figure of the “peasant” lends to state legitimacy, Amiralay’s words come across as an uncompromising call to action. Yet, interestingly enough, Amiralay’s militant call finds a rather curious culprit: the spectator.
Watching Amiralay’s film from the present moment of global Syrian dispersal and dispossession expands the temporal and geographical reaches of accusing the spectator. Today, humanitarian representations of Syrian victimhood have risen and fallen as an overdetermined image. The neoliberal political economy of humanitarian spectatorship inevitably takes up and abandons the Syrian cause, rendering Amiralay’s words achingly prescient. From this juncture, Amiralay’s repudiation of the spectator forces an unpacking of “the human” taken for granted in “humanitarianism,” opening up room to think of the broader colonial history of Man as spectator. Critiquing Man as Spectator from the sites of decolonial theory and Black studies, with specific attention to Sylvia Wynter, fundamentally alters the terms of narrating the future of Syria by forcing an engagement with a politics of coalition, what Trinh T. Minh-ha calls the project of “speaking nearby.” Against the urge to narrate the past, present and future of Syria for the legibility of the spectator, interrogating Wynter’s Man2 as the colonial spectator through the Syrian context disrupts the binary between authorized and unauthorized spectator, charting a possibility for Syrian filmmaking as a planetary coalitional project.
SECTION I: Syria and the Colonial Spectator
The past and present of global Syrian dispossession mark the time and space through which approaching the question of the colonial spectator gains its contextual urgency. Gradual French and British political and economic control of Ottoman territories throughout the 19th century resulted in the ill-fated mandates, which drew Syria’s remnant colonial borders, further defined the contours of its state bourgeoisie, and installed an Israeli settler-colony in neighboring Palestine. After a series of coup d’etats and unfulfilled radical promises, Syria’s military wing of the Ba’ath Party, an avowedly Arab nationalist socialist party championing the peasantry, came into power in 1963 and has stayed in power since. Particularly after the 1970s, the Ba’ath Party increasingly followed neoliberal economic policies, entrenched through a network of state technocrats, an expanding private sector benefitting the old bourgeoisie, and an ever-omnipresent secret police and carceral system. Furthermore, contrary to championing the cause against Israeli settler-colonialism, Ba’athist presidents Hafez Al-Asad and Bashar Al-Asad pursued a range of policies aimed strictly at self-preservation, including numerous betrayals of Palestinian armed struggle, Lebanese occupation, and a notorious massacre of thousands of civilians in the city of Hamah. By 2011, Syrians headed the calls of uprisings across the region’s colonial borders with damning critiques of a global political economy of dispossession that implicated the increasingly wealthier, more powerful, and more chic Ba’athist elite. The Ba’ath’s violent crackdown on protestors coincided with the imposition of various violent geopolitical agendas on Syria, from US imperialism, to Gulf capitalism, to Russian and Iranian proxy involvement. The crossfires between geopolitical allies and enemies displaced millions of Syrians internally and externally, resulting in an ongoing refugee crisis at a global scale. Syria, between colonial past and present, immediately presents itself as a global problem with global ramifications, extending beyond the time and space of the nation-state.
Omar Amiralay’s Everyday Life in a Syrian Village critiques the Ba’athist project in the 1970s in an unconventional manner by naming a consumptive, complicit form of spectatorship. Produced a few years after the Ba’ath’s “corrective coup” of 1970, Amiralay’s film takes particular aim at the Ba’ath Party for abandoning the peasantry it had claimed to triumph. Before filming Everyday Life, Omar Amiralay had finished his directorial debut documentary Film Essay on the Euphrates Dam, in which he championed the Ba’ath Party for the Tabqa Dam, a major modernization project and source of national pride. Soon after, Amiralay realized his praise of the Dam had been a huge mistake, and decided to make a second film about the living conditions of disenfranchised rural Syrians in relation to a ruling party that uses their suffering to form its legitimacy. After juxtaposing the poor living conditions of the peasantry with state rhetoric, Amiralay ends his film by accusing all “spectators” of colluding with the injustice he captured in the film. His scathing words imply that, if the spectator just remained a spectator, any consumer of these images of suffering would be a traitor to those filmed.
Crucially, Amiralay’s spectator was overdetermined far before Amiralay could name him—the film could only be seen by Western observers due to nation-state censorship and a wider political economy of film distribution. After expecting another film akin to Film Essay on the Euphrates Dam, the Ba’ath Party’s National Film Organization quickly banned Everyday Life in a Syrian Village from screening within Syria, allowing it to be screened internationally in film festival circuits instead. The resulting bitter irony remained with Amiralay and his comrades at the Damascus Cinema Club: despite making films whose stakes most intimately concerned Syrians in Syria, their films could only be seen in private screenings or outside of Syria due to the state’s censorship regime and its distribution networks. In other words, instead of shaking Syrians out of their complicity with rural suffering, Amiralay’s militant call fell on the deaf ears of ambivalent Western art film audiences. As such, Amiralay’s film presciently critiqued a Western colonial gaze, a consuming spectator pre-determined by broader global distribution networks implicated in a neoliberal political economy.
Critiquing Amiralay’s spectator takes on a particular urgency in the post-2011 context, as global spectatorship of Syrian suffering has taken the form of a flurry of humanitarian documentary films on the ongoing refugee crisis that take the spectator for granted. Protestors and filmmakers called the earliest phases of filmmaking in 2011 “emergency cinema,” taken in the moment on phone cameras for the sake of personal documentation of protestors’ activities and of police atrocities. Yet, very quickly, images of Syrian suffering began to oversaturate news networks, NGO advertisements, and social media timelines. In Western popular consciousness, the image of Syrian child Alan Kurdi washed up on the Mediterranean shores became one such devastatingly iconic image of Syrian death. Operating on the logic of gaining international sympathy, films such as Ussama Mohammed’s controversial Silvered Water collaged together large numbers of graphic images and videos from emergency cinema. In response to such trends, many Syrian filmmakers and activists, such as film collective Abounaddara, quickly began to complain about the “undignified image” of Syrian suffering. These images belonged not to Syrians, but to the voyeuristic observer who could donate to an NGO and absolve themselves of guilt. In Susan Sontag’s words, “The Other, even when not an enemy, is regarded only as someone to be seen, not someone who also sees.” Particularly in the post-2011 context, Syrian Others are constantly only seen by Amiralay’s guilty spectators, never seeing.
In order to articulate a different possibility for film representation and distribution, I argue for a deeper interrogation of Amiralay’s spectator, necessarily refusing the spatio-temporal boundaries of Middle Eastern Studies to delve into a broader global colonial history. Amiralay’s accusation towards the guilty spectator resonates deeply across peripheries of colonial violence—surely, Syrians are far from the only objectified “victims” to be relentlessly seen by the colonial spectator. Moreover, the lineage of the colonial spectator stretches back more deeply into history than the British and French political and economic control of Ottoman territories beginning in the eighteenth century. Rather than restricting the boundaries of studying unequal looking relations to the Middle Eastern (itself a colonial category of space), I insist on following the spectator through a colonial lineage—bringing me from contemporary Syria to Columbus and the conquest of the Americas.
SECTION II: Tracing the Colonial Spectator’s Lineage through Sylvia Wynter
The global dimensions of both the Syrian question and its accompanying image-making industry necessitate an interrogation of the colonial spectator’s deeper genealogy: Columbus’s conquest of the Americas in 1492. Diana Taylor writes about the “authorized and unauthorized spectators” constructed through Columbus’s theatrical scenario of discovery:
“The performance is attended by the witnesses who will write about it, "recorded at great length in the evidence there set down in writing. "Those others who look on-the "many people of the island gathered there" and whom Columbus refers to as "Indians" in his first letter-are the unauthorized spectators. The show is and is not for them. The legitimating audience of Europeans and those who will write the testimonies stand on one side. Offstage but centrally important, the King and Queen of Spain are the addressees and beneficiaries of the act, receiving the transfer of possession. And God, viewing the scene from above, is the ultimate spectator... The authorized spectators validated the transfer; the unauthorized spectators were reduced to transferable objects. The King and Queen were praised; God thanked; the transfer accomplished.”
For Taylor, looking relations of colonial spectatorship are key to understanding the scenario of discovery and conquest. The transfer of indigenous and Black “unauthorized spectators” could not be possible without the proprietary gaze of conquistador witnesses, the King and Queen of Spain, and God. Mirroring Columbus’s act of discovery, the address of the humanitarian documentary also constructs both an authorized (humanitarian) and unauthorized (Syrian) spectator. However, rather than drawing a flattening analogy between conquest in the Americas and humanitarianism in Syria, I am invested in thinking about the lineage of the authorized colonial spectator, between 1492 and 2021.
Sylvia Wynter provides a framework for tracing the humanitarian spectator back to 1492 through her conceptualization of Man1, a precursor to the overrepresented Man2. For Wynter, humanity can only be understood as simultaneous ontogeny and sociogeny—in other words, inevitably tangled up in a “descriptive statement.” To elaborate on the descriptive statement of what Wynter calls Man1, she traces Columbus’s transatlantic journey to the Americas, from “the habitable areas of the earth (which were within the redemptive grace of the Scholastics’ God and His only partial providence for mankind) to the uninhabitable areas of the earth, which were beyond his grace.” Through this move “beyond the reason of his time,” Columbus inaugurates Man1, whose descriptive statement remains theocentric yet decidedly rational. Crucially, Man1’s material and imaginative conquest of the Americas constructs the “mass-enslaved ‘irrational’ because ‘savage’ Indians, and subrational’ Negroes,” crucially also enemies of Christ. Putting Taylor in dialogue with Wynter, Black and indigenous peoples become the “unauthorized spectators” of conquest, “reduced to transferable objects” and thus fulfilling Man1’s commercial and socioreligious descriptive statement. The authorized spectators named by Taylor (conquistador witnesses, Isabel and Ferdinand, and God) are all arranged around the figure of a colonizing Man1, the explorer-conquistador.
Wynter then breaks down the transformations that occur between Man1 and Man2, the post-Enlightenment imperialist Man who becomes “overrepresented” as natural, biological and universal human spectator. Man2, the imperialist political bio-economic subject of the Enlightenment, emerges in the eighteenth century sequentially from the history of colonial conquest inaugurated by Man1. Of utmost concern to Wynter is Man2’s particular claims of universality. Man2, or Man, now identified biologically and purely secularly, naturalizes the racial inferiority of Black and indigenous “enemies of Christ” through “a new biocentric logic that systematized ‘differential/hierarchical degrees of rationality.’” Wynter maintains that Man, “the Western bourgeois” conception of the human whose descriptive statement remains ongoing, “overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself.” In other words, “the human” becomes naturalized as “Man,” allowing for no other possibilities of being human beyond the dominion of Man.
Gesturing towards a future beyond the dominion of Man2’s false universals, Wynter argues for an understanding of “being human as praxis” through a new descriptive statement of the human. For Wynter, unsettling the overrepresented Man necessitates a new understanding of being human:
“One cannot “unsettle” the “coloniality of power” without a redescription of the human outside the terms of our present descriptive statement of the human, Man, and its overrepresentation (outside the terms of the “natural organism” answer that we give to the question of the who and the what we are).”
For Wynter, the “redescription of the human” is possible precisely because of the hybridity of the human as both ontogeny and sociogeny, because “humans are storytellers… who now storytellingly invent themselves as being purely biological.” In order for such a redescription to take place, a struggle must be waged against “our present biocentric ethnoclass genre of the human, of which our present techno-industrial, capitalist mode of production is an indispensable and irreplaceable,” the structures that reinforce Man as the only genre of being human. Such a struggle, taking cues from the 1960s movements that deeply inspire Wynter’s work, necessarily takes on planetary dimensions.
Operating within the fold of Wynter’s project of redefining the human storytellingly, I am invested in disrupting the binary of dominant colonial looking relations, between authorized and unauthorized spectator, to think of the future of Syrian filmmaking as filming in coalition with a plurality of unauthorized spectators. Following Wynter’s genealogy, Amiralay’s guilty spectator can be understood as the authorized and universal Man overrepresented as “human” in “humanitarian.” Wynter’s Man, and Amiralay’s spectator, are both reinforced as the only possible spectator, the only genre of being human, through the overarching political and economic structure of global neoliberalism. In response to the overrepresented spectator, many Syrian filmmakers have progressively moved to emphasize ownership over the image to reclaim them from Man. Such interventions, while crucial, nevertheless keep the authorized/unauthorized spectator binary unchallenged. My own intervention as a Syrian filmmaker seeks to upend the binary by troubling the singular form “spectator” in relation to the unauthorized. Rather than understanding Syrians as the only unauthorized spectator, a filming-in-coalition among unauthorized spectator(s) recognizes the immediacy of Wynter’s project of unsettling Man on a global scale.
SECTION III: The Unauthorized Spectators as Coalition through “Speaking Nearby”
For the global majority of unauthorized spectators living in colonial peripheries, writing, struggling, and filming against Man retains a particular urgency as a political project of coalition. In her crucial work Decolonizing Methodologies, Linda Tuhiwai Smith urges for a practice of “writing back” against imperialism, a project undertaken by naming the unauthorized spectators: “indigenous peoples as an international group.” Smith invokes a “we” and an “us” throughout her text, recognizing the existence of a collective global majority on the underside of Wynter’s imperialist Man2 and his reinforcing political and economic structures. In Smith’s own words:
“Our colonial experience traps us in the project of modernity. There can be no ‘postmodern’ for us until we have settled some business of the modern… [This] means that there is unfinished business, that we are still being colonized (and know it), and that we are still searching for justice.”
Locating a “we” across disparate geographic locations on the underside of modernity necessitates a process of transnational coalition-building. Following Smith’s use of the form “we” and articulating “settling the business of the modern” as a project for an international indigenous grouping, the unauthorized spectator begins to take the plural form “unauthorized spectators.”
However, along with identifying the grounds and stakes of coalition, there must be a careful practice of refusing the violent, flattening logic of analogy in drawing connections between struggles. Within the region, Smith’s writings (and indigenous studies more broadly) have taken a particular resonance in relation to the Palestinian struggle due to the structures of ongoing Israeli settler-colonialism. However, Palestinian scholars and activists have carefully treaded the line between coalition and violent analogy. Recognizing the differential cosmologies and geographies, along with the differential positionalities and relationships to power within colonial peripheries, Palestinian scholars and activists have largely rejected language that conflates the Palestinian struggle with other global struggles. Demonstrably, Smith’s indigenous “we” ought to be carefully used, especially given its relationship to earlier forms of global solidarity that essentialize a singular subaltern position in drawing connections between struggles. To carefully invoke Smith’s we is to intentionally invoke practices of care as a practice of coalition. Drawing connections between struggles necessarily means rejecting the logic of proprietary relationships with one another, against the global organizing logic of Man’s political and economic systems.
Rejecting the logic of flattening within the coalition of unauthorized spectators brings about an active practice of what Trinh T. Minh-ha calls “speaking nearby.” Vietnamese American filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha has worked and continues to work carefully along coalitionary lines in her filmmaking practice. In the writings that accompanied her earliest films, Reassemblage, Naked Spaces, and Surname Viet, Given Name Nam, Minh-ha coined the term “speaking nearby” to describe her filmmaking praxis. Elaborating on the concept of speaking nearby, Minh-ha explains:
“In other words, a speaking that does not objectify, does not point to an object as if it is distant from the speaking subject or absent from the speaking place. A speaking that reflects on itself and can come very close to a subject without, however, seizing or claiming it. A speaking in brief, whose closures are only moments of transition opening up to other possible moments of transition — these are forms of indirectness well understood by anyone in tune with poetic language.”
Minh-ha’s argument for “speaking nearby” necessarily upends the possessive logic of Man. She rejects making films that “speak about,” a proprietary form of speaking associated with the dominion of universal Man as objectifying spectator. Instead, Minh-ha articulates the need for speaking reflexively and in proximity, a poetic language of care.
Taking cues from Minh-ha, I argue for a possibility of Syrian filmmaking that complicates the binary between authorized and unauthorized spectator by speaking nearby, in coalition with multiple unauthorized spectators. Today, as Syrians make up one of the largest globally displaced populations, the promises of coalitional forms of filmmaking appear vast. My own work as a Syrian filmmaker in diaspora engages with Syrian history and memory as means of articulating a project of future, while insisting that such a project must be articulated in coalition. To articulate in coalition, I echo Trinh T. Minh-ha’s insistence that “speaking nearby” rejects the possessive logic of spectator-object. Such a rejection entails recognizing that global struggles do not neatly map onto each other—that the organizing logic of coalition is careful attunement to power differentials, not possession. In other words, while struggles on colonial peripheries within an indigenous “we” may be incommensurable with one another, the closure of impossibility opens up moments of transition, or improvisation.
Conclusion
Omar Amiralay’s Everyday Life in a Syrian Village names an overdetermined guilty spectator whose presence continues to haunt Syrian cinema and political practice in the post-2011 period. The authorized spectator, a universal and universalizing Man inaugurated by Columbus, emerges from a long history of colonial conquest and slavery, structures that remain intact in the form of a global neoliberal political-economy. On the underside of that political economy are the global majority of colonized subjects, an unstable, dynamic “we” constantly articulating a counter-politics. Locating Syrian filmmaking in this broader counter-politics against “Man,” I argue for a cinematic language of speaking nearby, a speaking that rejects the possessive spectator-object relationship. Such a form of speaking opens up the possibilities of unlikely coalitions on a planetary scale, as filming against Man inevitably also takes on planetary dimensions and stakes.
What remains to be articulated in the work of filming against Man by “speaking nearby” is a simultaneous struggle for different material infrastructures of distribution, and more importantly, of living. By locating Amiralay’s spectator as Wynter’s Man, I am not merely arguing for a project that exists strictly in the realm of poetics or filmmaking. After all, the extractive political economy of Man creates and re-creates the consumptive colonial spectator whose possessive gaze informs my critique. In the Syrian context, Man’s political and economic structures manifest through a neoliberal regime posing as oppositional to US imperialism and Israeli settler-colonialism, all while historically sustaining itself from the overarching political and economic structures that maintain the hegemonies of both. As such, Man as the guilty spectator of Syrian image-making industries cannot be separated from the same Man guilty of ongoing Syrian dispossession and displacement. Believing deeply, like Amiralay, that every (authorized) spectator is a traitor or a coward, I conclude by gesturing towards the urgent work of struggling for different futures—worlds articulated and fought for through disparate, yet devastatingly interconnected, locales of struggle and imagination.
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