Eyes Wide Shut: Power and Creative Visual Counter-Conducts in the Battle for Syria

The uprising in Syria beginning in March 2011 gave rise to an outburst of novel visual forms of protest and dissent. Through a plethora of visual technologies such as cartoons, short-films, posters, paintings, street art and flash mob happenings, Syrian artists and activists were directly targeting the regime and carving out novel modes of being seen and visually represented. From the beginning the visual thus took center stage. The graffiti painted by 15 youngsters on a public wall in Dara’a in March (the people want the regime to fall) can itself be seen as a vivid example of the inter-connectedness between counter-conduct and making something visible in public space. Similarly, from early on street protesters in the thousands were filming themselves with cell phones, not only to document how many were actually present at demonstrations- countering the regime’s consistent narrative that they were only few - but also as an act of visual defiance against an authoritarian power, which relentlessly had produced an ever present fear of being seen. The cell phone held high was a visual exclamation. I’m making myself visible as a dissenting political subject!

In this new article in Global Society Helle Malmvig offers a conceptualization of a specific form of resistance in the Syrian uprising and it proposes an analytical framework to study these practices, linking two emerging fields within the social sciences: those of visuality and counter-conduct.