A.

A curious sight in Chicago: a revolving door, center outfitted with a glassed-in display of carefully arranged products, none related to the other — POM, NIKE, DIOR. That one is predisposed to a mock-circumambulation in entering and exiting testifies to the contemporary unification of market and urban spaces — that is, the introduction of immersive advertising to the most routine of urban technologies: revolving doors, elevators, escalators, public transport. The most banal is transfigured into an agent of  a consorted carnival.

B.

A scene from the London Underground: animated advertisements, played in loop across a series of LCD screens, follow thousands daily up and down the tube's escalators. An induced claustrophobia mimics that of the hustle and bustle which comes in droves. A cartoon character runs up along side the commuters, grazing their shoulders. The eye is given the false luxury of constant stimulation.

C.

In New York City, steam creeps out from a manhole outfitted to look like a coffee mug. "Hey City That Never Sleeps," the ad by FOLGERS reads. "Wake up."

D.

In Los Angeles, as is being developed in New York City, the interior of subway tunnels have become spaces open for advertising. As the train passes down the rail, panels, functioning much like a flip book, light up, leaving in their wake the all-too-real illusion of the animated commercial spectacle — running 15 seconds in length at 70 miles per hour.

I.

The cold everydayness of the billboard, television commercial, and internet advertisement, has been incorporated into the capillaries of urban minutiae, as the above scenes attest. Unified urban and market spaces have become as inseparable as they are ever-present. The logic behind this is precisely its own excuse. "Advertising," as Adorno elucidated, has become "art and nothing else...: l’art pour l’art, advertising for its own sake, a pure representation of social power."

II.

"It is as if one were trapped in a theater and had to follow the
events on the stage..." — Walter Benjamin

These "ambient media" spectacles are laid out in the model of the digital pop-up ad: like e-mail spam or a weed nestled between the crack of a sidewalk, they appear to have been embedded, almost as if on their own accord, into the most novel and frequently trafficked of structures. The 'viral' trope is to be taken literally. But unlike the digital pop-up ad, the physical spectacle has a potentially infinite reach: its reality cannot be nullified, blocked, closed, nor can its limited array of "free" choices be easily evaded, for in the most radical case, just by simply taking, for example, the lift, escalator, or train, one has already played a part in its theater of desire-consumption.

III.

"The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation
between people that is mediated by images." — Guy Debord

What is developing is an urban Gesamtkunstwerk, a total art of advertisement which utilisies the body, senses, and urban space for self-multiplication. Life is transformed into continual successions of transacted gazes, living commercials. The radical routinization of this process can be anticipated, along with the integration and synchronization of its productions. The seamless colonization of everyday life by affiliates and competitors logically follows as a climax, as does the culmination of the urban space into but a background for dynamic 3D billboards and signs, demanding not only the exchange of gazes, but also the full experience of being plugged into its circuitry.

IV.

Ambient media's development into a natural urban fixture signifies not the necessary proliferation of mass passivity, but the proliferation of mass involvement, for what it signals is a complex dispersion of power relations mediated by new urban spectacles, whose flows, though seemingly unavoidable, can be blocked, rearticulated, reasserted, just as well as they can be inwardly absorbed.

V.

Resistance here demands an unforeseen creativity guided by a particular will to become, for while Banksy's revolution was facilitated by the spectacle it fought out-rightly, so was its reversion to its antithesis.

**

Note: Upon learning that what I thought was a coinage on my part (Urban Spam) was in fact a term already used by a small community of bloggers, I felt compelled to share the individuals' work on the matter, here, here, here, and particularly here.

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"Whence the love of ruin. And the fact that the scopic pulsion, voyeurism itself, is always on the lookout for the originary ruin. A narcissistic melancholy, a memory—in mourning—of love itself. How to love anything other than the possibility of ruin? Than an impossible totality?"— Jacques Derrida

“What impressive moments we’ve lived tonight! Rise up, Simón, as it’s not time to die! Immediately I remembered that Bolívar lives!” — Hugo Chávez

The exhumation of Simón Bolívar by Hugo Chávez's regime is a strategic forensics of history, the exposing of a history totally imprinted by the body. Though an unusual event, no doubt, its been made clear that, since a few weeks ago, when the sarcophagus was opened under the silent gaze of television cameras and stage lights, that this whole project was aimed at rectifying time itself, that it sought and still seeks to clear up a myth long plaguing Bolivarianólogos: that Bolívar was felled by an assassination plot implicating not only Colombian aristocrats, but also Spain and the United States. But what has not been made clear is the utility of such knowledge for Chávez and his regime. Indeed, if it is found that there is arsenic in the bones of Bolívar, and that these bones are truly his, then what we have is not the end of a myth of conspiracy, but the proliferation of a multiplicity of new ones, the multiplication of terrific possibilities: the figure of the Colombian as aristocratic patsy for imperialist interests can be revived anew, molded into something more threatening that could further strain already stagnant relations; la revolución bolivariana can be reimagined as a force truly threatened since its dawning by an existential enemy; and Chávez, who functions under the living spectre of Bolívar, can fully realise himself as Bolívar's double, as he, armed with the revolutionary's spirit, finds himself implicated in a conspiracy exposed by Bolívar himself, be it real or imagined. Therefore, for Chávez, to find poison in Bolívar's bones is to find first and foremost Bolívar in himself, and therefore prospects of poison in life — that is, potential assassination at the hands of Colombia and imperialist powers, as the New York Times hinted — and then, too, a notion of glory in poison, and in this glory a poisonous antidote: the petty rectification of history for an imagined rectification of the present. In the body of Bolívar there is truth, certainly, but in arsenic there is no antidote, just ruin and ruins; indeed, if the detritic portrait of Bolívar is the self-portrait of Chávez, then this it is and this is all the future can be: ruin and ruins,"a narcissistic melancholy, a memory—in mourning—of love itself."

لتارن و ريم —The ethical dilemma raised by an Israeli court's decision to sentence a Palestinian man eighteen months in prison for "rape by deception" after he lied to a Jewish woman about his race and had consensual sex with her is not one over rights or equality, but over the legitimacy of race as a signifier of 'sanctity.' This fact is made clear by Tzvi Segal, one of three judges presiding over the case: "the court is obliged to protect the public interest from sophisticated, smooth-tongued criminals who can deceive innocent victims at an unbearable price — the sanctity of their bodies and souls." We have not in Israel, then, an explicit juridical implementation of apartheid justice as we did in Jim Crow South or South Africa, but the extension of a colonial-minded justice that, from inside the law and outside in culture, has as its chief concern the problem of sameness amidst so much difference — the problem that those people that are supposed to be so different can be the same: the woman, after all, did not know, nor could even tell that the man was Arab, and had no qualms with the affair until she learned he was. That the struggle Israel has for so long pursued within its borders is impossible now becomes clear: it has constructed a hierarchy in which the only obvious physical signifiers of racial affiliation are ones that are necessarily not so outward — ones that are heavily dependent on rituals of exclusion that ensure and make possible the aggravating control and management of 'profane' populations, e.g. IDs marked for race, constant identity checks, narrow marriage privileges, etc. On this basis, the crux of the court's decision laid in destroying what it simultaneously constructed: the essence of the Palestinian that profanely challenged with its potential for sameness the sanctity of Israeli difference. Hence, Kashur was disciplined and punished not because he lied about his difference, but because he played off being the same: his exclusion doubled as a rectifying purification and his 'profanity' provided the basis for the Jewish woman's docility and innocence. The problem was a biological one intertwined with morality: a problem over maintaining the 'sanctity' of bodies, as Segal alluded — the 'sanctity' of a regime of sameness, and all those disciplinary apparatuses that amplify and safeguard it. But besides setting a dangerous precedent which, in a way, trivializes both notions of rape and consent, what this case also does, as I have been driving at, is provide a summary of the whole of Israel's political problem vis-a-vis its Arab-Israeli population: how to implement a future that presupposes the non-future of an ever-growing and excluded Palestinian population, which is to say in light of Foucault, how to implement a positive relationship between the right to exclude the Other and the assurance of the life of the Same. With prospects of a Palestinian majority in a land which has for so long been declared to be not only empty, but ordained for one people, and one people alone, the problem of this conservative logic's necessary renunciation in light of sheer demographic facts will be the State of Israel's hallmark internal issue in the next few decades, and the deciding factor of both its legitimacy and hegemony.

"They may call it the 'Land of the Pure,' but Pakistan turns out to be anything but," says Fox News correspondent Kelli Morgan in her article on Pakistan, the "world's leader," she claims, "in online searches for pornographic material." Now, this idea is far from new: such discourse is but an accent to the common tale that the east is repressed, but at the same time, gross in its excess; no different than any orientalist painting like, say, Death of Sardanapalus, or Le Bain Turc.

"Death of Sardanapalus," by Eugène Delacroix, 1827.

"Le Bain Turc," (Turkish Bath) by J.A.D. Ingres, 1862.

Cinema can have love and often at first sight. But justice is something cinema cannot frame. It is always outside the frame. Cinema is inept also in that it cannot keep up with the devaluation of time and the shrinking of space. The very industrial revolution that gave rise to cinema is destroying both. The camera was born as a tool for war, but it could never be used as a gun in the way the revolutionaries intended it to. Poetic resistance, it advances but in circular motion, unsynchronised with the present, with no immediacy. I have faith that cinema is with ‘us’ but only in the long run. — Elia Suleiman, The Postponed Drama for Return

The sketches in Elia Suleiman's The Time That Remains — a film that explores the absurdities of Palestinian life post-'48 from the point of view of Suleiman's family — are composed like a memory, which is to say like a dream: the reality of the past and of the passing moment is portrayed as being blurry in certainty, certain in blurriness; every scene, every moment is perfect, sharp, defined, symmetrical, recollected in every sense of the word; everything is misplaced however perfectly in place, brightened by the whimsical magic of déjà vu and the comedic mystique of surreal hyperbole.

Saleh Bakri plays Fuad, Suleiman's father, whose private diaries informed and inspired most of the film's recollections.

It is through these hyper-aesthetic recollections that the film, despite its sparse dialogue, constructs a unique form of political resistance that speaks not in the language of polemics, manifestos, or violent utterances, but in the critical language of silence: the language of the muted gaze and wordless gesture that speaks not to critique, but critiques simply by speaking. One scene in particular captures this language in action as it carries on an aesthetic dialogue with the viewer. From behind a hedge in occupied Ramallah, we look on as Suleiman watches a young Palestinian man exit his home to take out the trash. An Israeli tank, meanwhile, ominously parked out front, points its turret at the man and proceeds to follow his every move towards the bin. Buster Keaton meets The Marx Brothers meets The Looney Toons when the man persists to, despite the creak and clank of the tank turret following him, answer his cell phone and carry on a conversation with a friend about an upcoming party. The man's non-reaction, his nonchalant demeanor towards danger, equalizes, just for a moment, tank and residential minutiae, relaying the message that what is for the viewer a massive instrument of death has become for the Palestinian an everyday fixture, something akin to a petty garden gnome or tacky pink flamingo (with teeth).

Fuad deals with the death of Nasr, a critical event in the Arab World.

Other more personal scenes depicting Suleiman's family's life and history, meanwhile, speak just as poignantly and with the same effective restraint and refusal to politicize (or exploit) traumatic memories and history. In one particularly memorable scene, Suleiman and his mother share a powerful moment backdropped by fireworks; a moment, like many other 'auto-biographical' ones in the film, that seems, perhaps, either too beautiful, too real, to be true, or too real, too true, to be so beautiful. This ambiguity, which taunts true and false and puts reality to the test, proves to define the kernel of the film's critical philosophy of history, which, as Suleiman reiterated in a Q&A I recently attended on the day of the film's London premiere, is neither auto-biographical, documentary, nor fictional, but a mixture of all three: Suleiman's signature mode of film that aims to challenge time itself to show that the present, the only "time that remains," is just as much in question as the past(s) that ushered it in.

Elia Suleiman, director of The Time That Remains.

Therefore, it can be said that The Time That Remains' relation to history is not one fixated on truth, but one based on a fusion of aesthetics and critique, one that capitalises on and deploys as resistance the linguistic ambiguity of the Arabic word hakaiyah (حكاية), which, besides meaning 'tale,' 'anecdote,' and 'narration,' also means 'history. Having said that, we are apt to recall as a conclusion a recent article in which Suleiman voices his faithfulness to the ambiguous power of el-hakaiyah and its comic toying with truth and exaggeration. "I refuse linear histories" he says. "I depart from a certain grounding of truth into an aesthetic dimension. [1]" And in the end, it is in this refusal and this departure that we hear the murmurings of a unique language of resistance that challenges the boom of the gun and its totality of history with the silent word, the suggestive gesture, and the bright youthful memories of The Bee Gees' Stayin' Alive playing on (or against) those nostalgic gray days.

The spectacles of shame in Ki-Yong Park's Camel(s) (2002) and Satyajit Ray's Charulata (1964) are majestically constructed, animated by an aesthetic quality of restraint that deploys as its artistic technology negative space—that is, the interval between, or what the Japanese call ma (間) and Eastern philosophy understands more broadly as śūnyatā. On this basis, shame in these films (among other emotions) is captured not in the revealing movement proper, but between the negative temporal spaces separating individual, asymmetrical subtleties: the frontward gaze from the eye's subtle downward turn, the hidden smirk from the revealing sigh, silence from speaking, slurping and chewing from eating and swallowing, et cetera. The banality behind such exchanges of gazes and words, behind eating, be it spicy noodles as it was in Camel(s), or paan as it was in Charulata, gains in these films a negative sexual subtext of guilt, the disciplinary child of shame, for between every exchange and blink, every utterance and silence, every slurp and every swallow, is the specter of the characters' infidelity, the ghosts of jouissance relaying that within all of this infidelitous pleasure is the overwhelming pain of too much pleasure. And it is there, in this space of painful ecstasy, that the murmuring pain of shame can be found showcasing its happy-sadness from a somewhere in-between, a somewhere void outside text, "half-way between," as Artaud would put it, the explosions of "gesture and thought." In this sense, with Camel(s) and Charulata, Park and Ray not only bring shame and other fleeting emotions into the realm of representation, but also Artaud to the East; — two aesthetic achievements worthy of praise.

"This dream is upon you. The tiger can only devour you; the octopus, what horror, breathes you in! It draws you toward itself and into itself, and, bound, stuck, powerless, you slowly feel yourself emptied out within that horrendous sack, that monster. Beyond the terror of being eaten alive is the ineffability of being drunk alive." — Victor Hugo, Les travailleurs de la mer

The Octopus as enemy in propagandic discourse — pervasive in the archive, I learned, upon visiting a small propaganda exhibit in the British Museum — channels the fear not of being devoured, but of being absorbed, defiled, converted into energy by a boneless, bloodless monstrosity with an insurmountable reach. The fact that the terror is over a meddling parasitism, the slandering of an imagined purity, and not plain old domination, suffices to foreshadow the imperial/capitalist/fascist symbol's semi-culmination in the caricature of the Jew: the ultimate schematized Enemy figure, who, from behind the veil of camouflage and oily ink, unites all imaginary units of slander (imperialism, capitalism, rape) with its conceptual linking of race to conspiracy, Medusa to man, viscosity to will. But the common depiction of the metaphysical Jew as octopus, now even deployed by contemporary Arab propaganda artists, should not be understood as the be-all, end-all development of this kind of trope, for the octopus' symbolic presence in propaganda evokes not just the figure of the Jew, but, more broadly, an older historic fear to which the Jew has over time become inextricably woven: the biopolitical nightmare of deviant mixings and contacts. And now, given such reflection, we are apt to conjure, but this time as a conclusion, Hugo's monstrous imagery: "[The Octopus] is a pneumatic machine that attacks you. You are dealing with a footed void. Neither claw thrusts nor tooth bites, but an unspeakable scarification. A bite is formidable, but less so than such suction. The claw is nothing compared to the sucker. The claw, that’s the beast that enters your flesh; the sucker, that’s you yourself who enters into the beast. Your muscles swell, your fibers twist, your skin bursts beneath this unworldly force, your blood spurts and frightfully mixes with the mollusk’s lymph. The beast is superimposed upon you by its thousand vile mouths; the hydra is incorporated in the man; the man is amalgamated with the hydra. The two make one."