Assemblages of Resistance:New media, old technology & the Egyptian

uprising

Our aim is to kill over-simplistic conceptualisations of the social web that lead to unsatisfactory analyses and limit

scope for praxis

We then suggest what this re-conceptualisation tells us about the direction of future research as well as tactics for resistance

Current theories are built predominantly on ‘relations between parts and wholes, wholes that constitute a seamless totality or that

display an organic unity" (DeLanda 2006, 9) represented by platform or technology focused approaches to analysis

Chadwick’s work on ‘digital network repertoires’ and ‘organisational hybridity’ (2005 & 2007) opens new

possibilities for conceptualising the social web’s role in political mobilisation

Organisational hybridity limits a full reconceptualisation of the social web due to it recombination of ”pre-existing forms"

(2005, 2)

Chadwick’s recent work opens up further possibilities by drawing on the concept of assemblages (DeLanda 2006;

Deleuze & Guattari 1987)

Assemblage theory is taken as our conceptual starting point as it enables us to interpret networked activism as ‘a

multiplicity of elements without effacing their heterogeneity or hindering their potential for future rearranging’ (Deleuze

& Guattari 1987)

Networked activism emerging from assemblages built on contingent logic can’t be interpreted by thought alone. We need to empirically capture and study the associative ‘traces’ left behind (Latour 2005)

Following internet cut-off a “pragmatic deconstruction of the social web” (McQuillan 2011)

takes place a re-assembling of activist practices becomes visible

Post cut-off timeline

McQuillan 2011

Components function at different scales and in different forms along a

material <-> expressive axis…

… and territorialising <-> deterritorialising

The emergence of capacities expressed through open-ended combinatory possibilities of material-expressive and territorialising-deterritorialising effects can’t be accounted for a priori.

Thus containment strategies become impossible and the contingent logic of assemblages becomes a tactic of resistance.

(CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) by 3arabawy on Flickr

“We do not know of what the body is capable”