1 00:00:05,730 --> 00:00:13,770 Sally. Welcome to this podcast hosted by the Middle East Centre Centre. 2 00:00:13,770 --> 00:00:16,930 Miss College Oxford. My name is Dave G. 3 00:00:16,930 --> 00:00:26,470 And today I will be speaking about a book by Aaron to conduct called The Idols of ISIS from Syria to the Internet. 4 00:00:26,470 --> 00:00:34,710 And I will be joined by the author who teaches at Bard College Berlin, as well as by Joshua Crays, 5 00:00:34,710 --> 00:00:42,550 who is a writer and artist in residence at the Embassy Foreign Artists in Geneva. 6 00:00:42,550 --> 00:00:50,080 So welcome, Aaron and Joshua. Aaron, perhaps we can start off by having you say something about your book. 7 00:00:50,080 --> 00:01:01,030 Sure. And thank you all for having me here. So my book started off with an experience on February 26, 2015. 8 00:01:01,030 --> 00:01:07,630 I was at a lecture in New York and I saw the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. 9 00:01:07,630 --> 00:01:14,050 It was a lecture being given by Zeyno Baran, a wonderful art historian at Columbia. 10 00:01:14,050 --> 00:01:19,840 She was talking about ancient Mesopotamian art and artistic modernism. 11 00:01:19,840 --> 00:01:25,600 And at the end of the lecture, during the Q&A, somebody asked. 12 00:01:25,600 --> 00:01:31,540 What should be done? That there is some type of disaster had happened and what what did Zaynab think should be done? 13 00:01:31,540 --> 00:01:34,720 And I was very confused. I didn't know what she was talking about. 14 00:01:34,720 --> 00:01:41,950 I'd actually been spending the whole day with some former students of mine from Munich who were visiting in New York that day. 15 00:01:41,950 --> 00:01:45,370 And so as a result, I hadn't been on Facebook at all. 16 00:01:45,370 --> 00:01:48,100 And so therefore, I didn't know what was going on in the world. 17 00:01:48,100 --> 00:01:56,620 And so I walked over to the corner of the room and I looked on my phone and there it was on my feed. 18 00:01:56,620 --> 00:02:01,840 This video that ISIS had posted onto the Internet. 19 00:02:01,840 --> 00:02:10,230 I saw it repeatedly, a video of people smashing sculptures in the museum in Mosul in northern Iraq. 20 00:02:10,230 --> 00:02:17,040 When I saw, you know, over and over again this video of smashing of antiquities in Mosul museum. 21 00:02:17,040 --> 00:02:27,870 And after I got over the initial shock and anger of seeing a video like this, I noticed that one of the scenes in particular, 22 00:02:27,870 --> 00:02:33,660 which showed three men with sledgehammers smashing the sculpture of a king laying horizontally on the floor, 23 00:02:33,660 --> 00:02:44,640 resembled almost exactly I mean, incredibly, this ancient Assyrian relief sculpture that I that I knew of from start on the Seconds Palace, 24 00:02:44,640 --> 00:02:49,320 which also showed three men with sledgehammers smashing the sculpture of a king. 25 00:02:49,320 --> 00:02:56,130 And this relief was from two thousand five hundred year with two thousand five hundred years older than the video. 26 00:02:56,130 --> 00:03:00,390 And yet it showed the same thing. And it was produced only twenty five kilometres away. 27 00:03:00,390 --> 00:03:09,390 Also, what's now northern Iraq. And so that got me thinking about the relationship between these two images, this uncanny resemblance. 28 00:03:09,390 --> 00:03:17,280 The nature of iconoclasm, smashing of images, why we do it, why we make images of that destruction, 29 00:03:17,280 --> 00:03:22,440 and suddenly I felt like I needed to write a book because here was a topic that 30 00:03:22,440 --> 00:03:26,310 brought together a whole bunch of the subjects that I had been studying for years. 31 00:03:26,310 --> 00:03:30,930 But most people thought were the result of the fact that I couldn't choose what to study. 32 00:03:30,930 --> 00:03:36,450 And so I I'd studied art history and political theory and history of religion and theology. 33 00:03:36,450 --> 00:03:41,940 And now suddenly all of these things converged in this video. And I wanted to make sense of it. 34 00:03:41,940 --> 00:03:50,080 So I embarked on this book. And if I may take one more minute, just to share another sort of angle for myself. 35 00:03:50,080 --> 00:03:55,920 There's also a personal angle from the book. So my family on my mother's side, they come from Iraq. 36 00:03:55,920 --> 00:04:02,670 They're Baghdadi Jews who had lived in Iraq, probably as far back as the Babylonian exile. 37 00:04:02,670 --> 00:04:07,410 My grandfather was born in Baghdad by the Tigris around 1910. 38 00:04:07,410 --> 00:04:12,870 We don't know exactly what year he was born. It was the nature of being born around that time. 39 00:04:12,870 --> 00:04:19,800 And he grew up in this new country of Iraq, which was at the time an incredibly cosmopolitan place, 40 00:04:19,800 --> 00:04:25,560 very, very mixed with Jews and Muslims, Sunni and Shia and other minority groups. 41 00:04:25,560 --> 00:04:33,960 And this was the Iraqi Brooklyn. But at the same time, it was the Iraq that he had to flee after the Farhood the programme against Jews in 1941, 42 00:04:33,960 --> 00:04:40,740 which then led him to leave first to Tehran and then to Tel Aviv and then eventually to New York, which is where I was born. 43 00:04:40,740 --> 00:04:44,280 And so the other story of this book. Right. 44 00:04:44,280 --> 00:04:54,510 So there's this one line which is about iconoclasm. The other line is about the nature of politics as the possibility of different people living 45 00:04:54,510 --> 00:05:01,590 together rather than the need for homogenisation or the sort of tendency towards homogenisation. 46 00:05:01,590 --> 00:05:04,860 And that tendency, of course, just continued. 47 00:05:04,860 --> 00:05:15,180 It didn't end with the Jews leaving Iraq, but continued as a result of separations between Sunni and Shia, as in the aftermath of the US led invasion. 48 00:05:15,180 --> 00:05:23,040 And then at the time that I started the book, the events that were happening in northern Iraq as a result of ISIS is rampaged through those areas. 49 00:05:23,040 --> 00:05:26,880 Right. And the terrorising of minority communities. 50 00:05:26,880 --> 00:05:32,970 And so this was the other issue that I wanted to think about, why this tendency towards homogenisation? 51 00:05:32,970 --> 00:05:36,780 How might we actually live pluralistic lives? Right. 52 00:05:36,780 --> 00:05:45,180 And then bringing those two together, what is the role that images play in achieving some kind of life together? 53 00:05:45,180 --> 00:05:54,780 Thanks very much, Aaron. I found it fascinating how you make this argument about the image and the possibility of politics. 54 00:05:54,780 --> 00:05:56,760 And I have a number of questions about that myself. 55 00:05:56,760 --> 00:06:08,120 But perhaps we can move to Joshua to start off with this fascinating relationship that Aaron draws between those two things. 56 00:06:08,120 --> 00:06:13,860 Thanks, Feisal. And thank you, Erin, for your book. And I thought one of the really interesting things about as a mouth, 57 00:06:13,860 --> 00:06:23,980 this argument that says that not only is there is a destructive urge in ISIS destruction of icons and a course, but it's self-defeating. 58 00:06:23,980 --> 00:06:26,340 That is a dream here, which is a world without images, 59 00:06:26,340 --> 00:06:32,930 which you have this unmediated politics which reflects truth to the believer and to look every time there's a destruction of an image. 60 00:06:32,930 --> 00:06:37,400 Does that produce? It just produces more images. 61 00:06:37,400 --> 00:06:43,430 And within that sort of process in which there's simply sort of this where we're forced to live with the ambiguity of images, 62 00:06:43,430 --> 00:06:47,840 the uncertainty of images you oppose towards the ends of the book. 63 00:06:47,840 --> 00:06:51,440 The figure of destruction to this figure of tapping. 64 00:06:51,440 --> 00:06:56,510 And you use nature and you say, look, rather than trying to destroy images, we need to learn to live with them. 65 00:06:56,510 --> 00:07:04,430 And what I've been trying to do in this book, I'm paraphrasing, Aaron, is to tap the images, to see the resonances between them. 66 00:07:04,430 --> 00:07:10,940 And I thought that was really powerful image. And I wanted to both ask you a bit more about what tapping involves. 67 00:07:10,940 --> 00:07:19,480 But I also wanted to sort of give a provocation in a way which is that what makes destruction not a form of tapping. 68 00:07:19,480 --> 00:07:22,840 Because actually, one of the things I think you do really well in the book is you say, 69 00:07:22,840 --> 00:07:27,910 look, there's a real problem with our defence of heritage, right? 70 00:07:27,910 --> 00:07:33,040 With our attempt to sort of depoliticise images. Depoliticised statues are in museums. 71 00:07:33,040 --> 00:07:37,530 These are, as you beautifully show, parts of very explicit political nationals' projects. 72 00:07:37,530 --> 00:07:42,970 And I have been since the inception of the museum and the sort of defence that we shouldn't destroy things because they're not political. 73 00:07:42,970 --> 00:07:47,440 They're part of some political humanity that is not convincing. 74 00:07:47,440 --> 00:07:54,970 These images are always going to be political. And what sort of struck me relative to what ISIS was doing was a line from Walter Benjamin 75 00:07:54,970 --> 00:08:01,810 where he says the consecration of things can destroy them even more than destruction. 76 00:08:01,810 --> 00:08:09,190 And what I take him to mean there is that there's something about what ISIS is doing which activates images 77 00:08:09,190 --> 00:08:13,510 and activates them as part of a political discussion such that we're now forced to pose the question, 78 00:08:13,510 --> 00:08:20,530 well, what is our relationship to Syria, to a Mesopotamian heritage of to humanity? 79 00:08:20,530 --> 00:08:27,610 And as you show, it's not like ISIS destruction has the final word right there immediately. 80 00:08:27,610 --> 00:08:30,580 As you show a series of artists who immediately take up that video footage, 81 00:08:30,580 --> 00:08:35,620 that ISIS show the images of their own iconoclasm and make even further images. 82 00:08:35,620 --> 00:08:42,660 So I finished this book knowing that Aaron is a a someone who takes images to find their resonances 83 00:08:42,660 --> 00:08:47,870 but actually isn't ISIS and isn't the beginning of the book to come to the end of the book, 84 00:08:47,870 --> 00:08:55,470 the beginning of the book, again, the person who tapped you or the group that tapped used that enabled the writing of this book. 85 00:08:55,470 --> 00:08:59,170 Thank you, Axel. Absolutely. I think that that's mean. I think that that's very rich. 86 00:08:59,170 --> 00:09:07,590 I think we could we should be trying to nuance it. But your comment makes me remember a comment that I make towards the end of the second chapter, 87 00:09:07,590 --> 00:09:11,460 which is this chapter on museums and this chapter on ice, as you referred to, 88 00:09:11,460 --> 00:09:17,910 write this chapter that makes us recognise that these objects in museums that we'd like to call heritage and are 89 00:09:17,910 --> 00:09:24,300 embedded within a kind of binary between civilisation and barbarism that I think needs very much to be tapped. 90 00:09:24,300 --> 00:09:30,570 That dichotomy and I say and here I'll just quote Nobody who is viewed the Mosul 91 00:09:30,570 --> 00:09:35,430 Museum video can experience ancient Mesopotamian sculpture in quite the same way. 92 00:09:35,430 --> 00:09:45,660 Again, if avant garde art is meant to disrupt conventional ways of seeing the world, then the Islamic State's video is, quote, good work. 93 00:09:45,660 --> 00:09:48,630 And I think that that's to the point of what you're saying. Right. 94 00:09:48,630 --> 00:10:02,760 I agree that if we take the video as a as a kind of tapping right and tapping the assumptions underlying museums and all that museums can contend for, 95 00:10:02,760 --> 00:10:11,550 I think that that's very much the point. And I think too connected, though, to the alternative between tapping end and smashing them. 96 00:10:11,550 --> 00:10:20,120 Right. Would be, well, what is underlying the desire to achieve some kind of purity? 97 00:10:20,120 --> 00:10:26,670 Right. And so, I mean, I'm hesitant here because I wonder whether it's necessary to think about think about this in terms of intention. 98 00:10:26,670 --> 00:10:30,960 But we can we can talk about that. But if we do introduce the notion of intention, right. 99 00:10:30,960 --> 00:10:37,650 We could say, well, that there certainly it's certainly the case. The video can perform a certain tapping function. 100 00:10:37,650 --> 00:10:46,620 Right. That makes people think about things differently and sees the limitations of things that they might might not have before. 101 00:10:46,620 --> 00:10:54,390 So I think that that is one part of the story. The other part of the story is the desire to escape that ambiguity. 102 00:10:54,390 --> 00:11:03,450 And in a sense, here, I'm using ISIS as a place holder for what I take to be a much wider human tendency, 103 00:11:03,450 --> 00:11:12,210 a perennial human tendency to escape the ambiguity of images, to escape the fact that, as I say elsewhere, that if our politics requires images. 104 00:11:12,210 --> 00:11:16,230 Right, and yet our images are necessarily partial, 105 00:11:16,230 --> 00:11:24,550 they necessarily only tell a half of the truth and therefore they have these false elements and that they're also part of our production. 106 00:11:24,550 --> 00:11:28,980 Right. The things that we have made. There's a desire to try and escape that, too, 107 00:11:28,980 --> 00:11:39,780 to put some kind of some kind of veil or deny the fact that we have that we can do no better than to live in that state of imperfection or ambiguity. 108 00:11:39,780 --> 00:11:42,180 And so the other thing that I'm tracking in the book, right, 109 00:11:42,180 --> 00:11:49,550 and then I'm using ISIS in a way is just a place holder for is that impulse to break free of that human. 110 00:11:49,550 --> 00:11:52,860 What I take to be a human necessity, I don't believe we can break free of it. Right. 111 00:11:52,860 --> 00:11:57,240 I can say really what you end up getting instead are these new images. Right. 112 00:11:57,240 --> 00:12:01,500 But nevertheless, the impulse to break free of images is there. 113 00:12:01,500 --> 00:12:08,820 And so maybe the best thing I can say to wrap up a response to your question is how I hope that the book can try and help us see both sides of this. 114 00:12:08,820 --> 00:12:14,220 Right. Both the desire to escape images and what's involved in that, 115 00:12:14,220 --> 00:12:19,620 whether it's in the case of these specific figures who are smashing the sculpture in Mosul museum or more generally, 116 00:12:19,620 --> 00:12:22,530 just the art human tendencies to desire this escape. 117 00:12:22,530 --> 00:12:32,010 On the one hand, and the fact, as you say very rightly, that images, at least images of destruction can certainly play the form of tapping. 118 00:12:32,010 --> 00:12:38,090 You know, just to add to Joshua's question comment. And from what you just said, you know, 119 00:12:38,090 --> 00:12:49,260 if you consider the relationship between idolatry and iconoclasm as that between perhaps imminence and transcendence. 120 00:12:49,260 --> 00:12:56,960 Two factors which are often found together and which are involved and often in some kind of struggle, 121 00:12:56,960 --> 00:13:05,020 you know, perhaps you see in ISIS, in the iconoclasm of ISIS, an effort. 122 00:13:05,020 --> 00:13:09,310 To attain a kind of absolute transcendence without any evidence at all. 123 00:13:09,310 --> 00:13:15,370 And as I take it, what your argument is stating is not simply that that is an impossibility. 124 00:13:15,370 --> 00:13:23,350 And you show that very nicely. Why how even the destruction of images can only occur by the creation of new images. 125 00:13:23,350 --> 00:13:31,930 But you go beyond that paradox to show that images are absolutely crucial for political life because and you, 126 00:13:31,930 --> 00:13:38,960 Marshan, a whole host of really interesting evidence for this, including that I would like to come back to this far. 127 00:13:38,960 --> 00:13:46,630 I'll be the famous philosopher Muslim philosopher on how images make for consent of various kinds. 128 00:13:46,630 --> 00:13:55,780 That what would otherwise be a relationship of pure force. And therefore, in that sense, not really political because it is not self-sustaining. 129 00:13:55,780 --> 00:13:59,710 Right. What the image does by, as it were, 130 00:13:59,710 --> 00:14:07,750 being constituting a kind of almost third party that makes for the agreement of others that represents the agreement, 131 00:14:07,750 --> 00:14:14,470 even if divided of parties A and B, you know, the images the party see that brings them together. 132 00:14:14,470 --> 00:14:21,880 This triangular fashion consent to and participation in politics only is achieved by way of image. 133 00:14:21,880 --> 00:14:30,040 But doesn't that suggest that the efforts of ISIS is therefore anti political by definition, that what we have here is not, 134 00:14:30,040 --> 00:14:36,070 in fact, political Islam, that term that we have come to hear so much about, but the opposite? 135 00:14:36,070 --> 00:14:41,410 Absolutely. I think I like that. It's a it's a. Political Islam. 136 00:14:41,410 --> 00:14:44,800 No, I think that that's great, I suppose to add to that. Right. 137 00:14:44,800 --> 00:14:51,670 Is the intuition that, as you were just describing and as I think at least my reading of all Obbie, 138 00:14:51,670 --> 00:14:55,540 who you know, how hard I.B. help me to understand that I'm not going to claim that I got him right. 139 00:14:55,540 --> 00:15:05,290 But I can say I can claim what I've learnt from him. Right. That politics is therefore necessarily going to be imperfect. 140 00:15:05,290 --> 00:15:08,260 It's not going to be fully satisfying. Right. 141 00:15:08,260 --> 00:15:17,630 And I think that there maybe at the heart of the book is this intuition that there's something deeply connected between the. 142 00:15:17,630 --> 00:15:24,980 Non fully satisfying miss of politics. And yet I would say necessary if we want to actually live together. 143 00:15:24,980 --> 00:15:28,940 I especially want to live together without just resorting to force. Right. 144 00:15:28,940 --> 00:15:35,320 On the one hand, and the necessarily partial or imperfect nature of all images. 145 00:15:35,320 --> 00:15:39,260 Right. And therefore, in that sense, all images are going to be idols. 146 00:15:39,260 --> 00:15:44,840 They're always going to fall short of the truth. That doesn't mean we destroy them. 147 00:15:44,840 --> 00:15:50,240 Because. Because then we would be left with nothing. We would be left in a situation that we couldn't live politically. 148 00:15:50,240 --> 00:15:56,750 But rather, what we need to do is find some way to live with that imperfection. 149 00:15:56,750 --> 00:16:00,140 And in a sense, that's what the book is all about for me. Right. 150 00:16:00,140 --> 00:16:05,850 How how do we come to be able to live with this imperfection rather than. 151 00:16:05,850 --> 00:16:11,110 Right. You know, try and smash it. Try to escape it. He was really hoping. 152 00:16:11,110 --> 00:16:17,170 Yes, go ahead just of you. This is a book about learning to live with the imperfection of images. 153 00:16:17,170 --> 00:16:25,210 But as much it's a book about people who make images. And I guess just to come back to find the distinction between this is an opposition 154 00:16:25,210 --> 00:16:30,130 between sort of imminence in which one lives in images and transcendence, which takes a life without images. 155 00:16:30,130 --> 00:16:33,450 Actually, the term that came to me when reading the book all the time was the medium term, 156 00:16:33,450 --> 00:16:38,320 just fetishism, which is how does one create and create a life with images? 157 00:16:38,320 --> 00:16:40,120 And both, Aaron, wonderfully in your book. 158 00:16:40,120 --> 00:16:46,870 Also, Feisal, in your writing, you've looked at this urge advised is to live a life on the quote on the surface, 159 00:16:46,870 --> 00:16:52,030 as it were, which attempts to dispense with any ambiguity. That seems to be a very true story about ISIS. 160 00:16:52,030 --> 00:16:57,010 But another story I want to tell is the great image makers. They're huge makers of images. 161 00:16:57,010 --> 00:17:01,060 Right. And you detail some of those in the book. You look at that. You look at the videos. 162 00:17:01,060 --> 00:17:05,110 So I guess my question isn't quite satisfied by your first answer. 163 00:17:05,110 --> 00:17:06,850 Is this one opposition in the book, 164 00:17:06,850 --> 00:17:15,190 which is between the sort of the the self-defeating urge to live a life without images and then how to live with the ambiguities of images. 165 00:17:15,190 --> 00:17:21,430 But then the question that remains for me is which images and which images should we make? 166 00:17:21,430 --> 00:17:28,140 Because it seems to me there's a lot of disagreements in the book about the images that we live with and that the disagreements between makers. 167 00:17:28,140 --> 00:17:36,460 So sort of unfair question to post Jupiter, which are the images that we should live with if we want a politics which can deal with ambiguity. 168 00:17:36,460 --> 00:17:41,340 And what are the sort of images that one might reject or even destroy? 169 00:17:41,340 --> 00:17:45,430 So a key question. Right. And I'm not going be able to answer it satisfactorily. 170 00:17:45,430 --> 00:17:50,020 I tried to deal with it a little bit towards the end of the book by at least 171 00:17:50,020 --> 00:17:55,270 suggesting two ways to get to that point where you can live with the ambiguity. 172 00:17:55,270 --> 00:18:05,950 And I suppose so. One of them is I tried to speak about images that are intentionally ambiguous 173 00:18:05,950 --> 00:18:10,390 rather than ones that try to hide the thing that they're that they're leaving out, 174 00:18:10,390 --> 00:18:16,690 but rather ones that try to get their audience to recognise that ambiguity and get them to think. 175 00:18:16,690 --> 00:18:24,100 And I think that and I use for an example here, a photograph by by the German photographer, strewth. 176 00:18:24,100 --> 00:18:29,260 Of people looking at objects in the museum in Berlin. 177 00:18:29,260 --> 00:18:32,500 And I think that there is something to to explore down that line. 178 00:18:32,500 --> 00:18:40,540 But on the other hand, I said this explicit in the book, I don't think that you could actually build a regime of images that are ambiguous 179 00:18:40,540 --> 00:18:45,850 and constantly forcing kind of forcing people to be philosophical in that way. 180 00:18:45,850 --> 00:18:55,180 I think that one would have to think more about this. But I think at least one problem is that they they will become they'll lose their power. 181 00:18:55,180 --> 00:18:59,800 I think very to do that very quickly, they become domesticated. 182 00:18:59,800 --> 00:19:07,510 And I think also that's probably not an actual life that any of us, even the muscle, soft skill of us, would ever be able to endure. 183 00:19:07,510 --> 00:19:15,280 It's another thing to think about. Right. And so the other is to try to cultivate. 184 00:19:15,280 --> 00:19:25,240 More sophisticated way of engaging with images such that you are attuned to trying to look for what they leave out to try and find their ambiguities, 185 00:19:25,240 --> 00:19:30,220 even if they're not, if even if the images themselves. Right. Are not trying to be ambiguous. 186 00:19:30,220 --> 00:19:34,600 And that's in a way, the kind of thing that I'm trying to cultivate with the book. 187 00:19:34,600 --> 00:19:40,270 Right. The kind of is a kind of pedagogical move. How do we cultivate that in ourselves? 188 00:19:40,270 --> 00:19:45,070 I'm a committed teacher of the liberal arts and I believe that that's one of the 189 00:19:45,070 --> 00:19:48,880 things that the liberal arts and humanities can can really instil in students. 190 00:19:48,880 --> 00:19:53,320 And so that's probably that's a part of it that's connected to that. 191 00:19:53,320 --> 00:19:58,810 But maybe the other thing to say, Joshua, is I mean, in terms of how do you choose which images. 192 00:19:58,810 --> 00:20:08,220 Right. I can't tell you which images to choose, but I can say that in order to do that, we need to cultivate judgement. 193 00:20:08,220 --> 00:20:11,450 The faculty of judgement. And I think that that's also a key part of the book. Right. 194 00:20:11,450 --> 00:20:19,850 Trying to get us to recognise how there is no automatic way to get the right images. 195 00:20:19,850 --> 00:20:27,590 There's no way that would short circuit human involvement in human political you political judgement in order to get the right images. 196 00:20:27,590 --> 00:20:34,410 And that's why that's why I end the book in the end of the third chapter with a discussion of algorithms and social media. 197 00:20:34,410 --> 00:20:36,950 You talked about who? How do we choose the images? 198 00:20:36,950 --> 00:20:44,900 Well, to offer Obbie, it gives us a picture of of this ideal prophet knows all and is able to choose the right images for the people. 199 00:20:44,900 --> 00:20:50,360 Right. Well, I tried to think about that and adapt it to our more democratic age and think, well, 200 00:20:50,360 --> 00:20:56,930 what what would it mean for us as democratic regimes to choose our images for ourselves? 201 00:20:56,930 --> 00:21:04,010 And how does that work on Facebook? Are these other kinds of social media that we think of as incredibly democratising on the one hand, 202 00:21:04,010 --> 00:21:09,080 where now we're all taking photos and posting them up? Right. So we're taking these we're taking these images. 203 00:21:09,080 --> 00:21:11,780 We're making these images and we're circulating them. 204 00:21:11,780 --> 00:21:20,360 But on the other hand, that circulation is mediated by algorithms that are run by major corporations. 205 00:21:20,360 --> 00:21:28,370 We have to think about that part. On the one hand and then the algorithm, this is where I connected more to other themes in the book. 206 00:21:28,370 --> 00:21:30,920 This false notion that the algorithm is, again, 207 00:21:30,920 --> 00:21:39,410 a kind of escape from the political right that we can just like the Acero played and a ton of the Middle Ages, the the work made without human hands. 208 00:21:39,410 --> 00:21:46,040 Right. That says, well, this is not an idle it's an icon of Christ because it was made without human hands. 209 00:21:46,040 --> 00:21:55,160 Well, I think that the fetishisation of maybe I don't want to use that word the way that we think about the algorithm can link up with that. 210 00:21:55,160 --> 00:22:01,730 And I think that we need to try and fight that tendency. I mean, might we also argue, for instance, 211 00:22:01,730 --> 00:22:14,780 that what kind of relationship ISIS is setting up is in one sense a perverse vision of direct democracy in so far as they want proper dialogue? 212 00:22:14,780 --> 00:22:23,370 There is no image, right. You know, you just have you and me and the third the day. 213 00:22:23,370 --> 00:22:34,320 Is absent. And the day might serve as society or opinion to use a far Obion term or image or representation. 214 00:22:34,320 --> 00:22:39,250 And that all must be destroyed. There is only you and me. 215 00:22:39,250 --> 00:22:40,150 And in a way, 216 00:22:40,150 --> 00:22:50,630 it allows us to think about how democracy in its non-direct form requires the image and the form of representation in both senses of that word, 217 00:22:50,630 --> 00:22:57,850 not just someone representing you. Yeah. Representative democracy in the sense that an image is a representation. 218 00:22:57,850 --> 00:23:01,480 It surely cannot just be the individual voter. Right. 219 00:23:01,480 --> 00:23:05,110 The individual voter's views must be mediated through. 220 00:23:05,110 --> 00:23:11,550 The representative who does something to them is not simply a transparency. 221 00:23:11,550 --> 00:23:18,250 This means walking about two different ways of thinking about politics or of even democracy. 222 00:23:18,250 --> 00:23:23,080 So this makes me think about one of the parts of the book that was the most fun for me to write, 223 00:23:23,080 --> 00:23:29,170 which is the part of the book where I talked about the significance of first person shooter video games, 224 00:23:29,170 --> 00:23:35,440 which had been recognised fairly early on as a kind of aesthetic model for ISIS 225 00:23:35,440 --> 00:23:41,510 videos and usually talked about as means of a kind of recruitment technique. 226 00:23:41,510 --> 00:23:46,240 And as I say, I think that that was OK as far as it goes. 227 00:23:46,240 --> 00:23:54,150 But the more interesting thing that I was trying to do is actually to think about, well, what is actually at stake in terms of this question, 228 00:23:54,150 --> 00:24:03,160 these political questions about wanting to live within a videogame and how there is no. 229 00:24:03,160 --> 00:24:07,720 Politics within a video game. Right. And there is no judgement within a video game. 230 00:24:07,720 --> 00:24:13,450 Right. And it's actually in a sense, it's like just when you're talking about Feisal, just outright. 231 00:24:13,450 --> 00:24:18,570 There's just the individual with so with the rules of the game moving through it. 232 00:24:18,570 --> 00:24:22,330 But there's no there is no space for politics in a video game. 233 00:24:22,330 --> 00:24:27,010 And I think that that's precisely the vision that I'm trying to say. 234 00:24:27,010 --> 00:24:36,880 Well, I think it can be very, very seductive. And ISIS is certainly not the first to be seduced by by that image of what human life can be. 235 00:24:36,880 --> 00:24:38,920 But I think it's also deeply problematic. 236 00:24:38,920 --> 00:24:48,010 And I think that it's like a kind of vision that we should try to hold at bay in order instead to cultivate the imperfect, 237 00:24:48,010 --> 00:24:53,590 but yet, in my opinion, better capacity for living together politically. 238 00:24:53,590 --> 00:24:59,340 Thanks. A Limbaugh concluding remark. Well, I don't really have the last word. 239 00:24:59,340 --> 00:25:05,150 I mean, I just my only last words. I hope you enjoyed the book and I hope you find it thought-Provoking. 240 00:25:05,150 --> 00:25:09,860 I certainly found it thought provoking and I urge our audience to buy this book. 241 00:25:09,860 --> 00:25:12,710 It's published by the University of Chicago Press. 242 00:25:12,710 --> 00:25:21,770 It's a slim volume, but really packed with very interesting thoughts, all of which deal with Mesopotamia, broadly speaking, 243 00:25:21,770 --> 00:25:32,180 at an image in its own right to be found in museums, to be found in the streets of Mosul and to be found in our own works of analysis. 244 00:25:32,180 --> 00:25:36,380 So thank you very much, Aaron. And Joshua, for this conversation. 245 00:25:36,380 --> 00:25:41,668 Thank you, Feisal. Thank you, Joshua. This is wonderful. Thank you.