The Media Studies Blog

I went to my first political convention last weekend. The NDP Leadership Convention, to be exact.  I felt a bit like an imposter: I didn’t wear a partisan t-shirt or wave a sign. Instead, I scribbled in my little notebook, took loads of photos and eavesdropped incessantly. I could have been Lois Lane.

I had been offered blogger’s media accreditation through my friends at rabble.ca. I jumped at the opportunity to do some academic research on affect.

I’m very interested in the ways technology and affect work together to create embodied national feelings  – feeling with a sense of touch. In a previous post, I wrote about Jack Layton’s death and funeral and the contagious affects that surrounded that moment. Despite Layton’s call to “change the world”, I wondered at the time if this particular kind of collective, contagious affect that circulates around public figures is antithetical to grassroots organizing.

I walked into the halfway point of candidates’ speeches. “I like how clean it is,” said one conventioneer, referring to the collegial behaviour of the candidates. I was struck by how scripted the entire event was. Thomas Mulcair walked through the hall like a king, with a marching band leading the way. Among all the screens was a giant teleprompter, so you could read along to every single word being said. The only unscripted moment I witnessed was when candidate Peggy Nash’s script was speeded-up (she had taken up too much time), so she ad-libbed without missing a beat. For some reason, she defaulted to lgbt rights – it wasn’t in her script but I didn’t mind. It was the only reference to lgbt anything that I heard the whole time I was there.

In the evening I attended the tribute to Jack Layton. More scripted speechifying, and a succession of straight white men lauding Jack in the video tribute. But I could feel the waves of feeling rolling through the all -ages audience, especially during an upbeat speech by Olivia Chow. The screens were given over to panning shots of the City Hall chalk memorial, that rich Babylon of citizens’ voices, reminding me what the affects of activism could be, and contrasting with the exceedingly conventional affects at this convention.

As the convention dragged to its seemingly inevitable conclusion – the election of centrist Thomas Mulcair as leader -, I attended a party comprised mostly of  queer women NDP-ers, several of whom had been to the convention. I spoke with my filmmaker colleague Gerry Rogers, currently provincial MP for St John’s Centre, and the first openly queer politican elected to Newfoundland and Labrador House of Assembly.

At the convention, when the race narrowed down to three leading male candidates, Gerri had helped to convene a meeting of a women’s caucus. The caucus invited each candidate to speak to them, querying them on their positions on choice, among other things. They were then able to announce to national media that all of the candidates, including Mulcair, had declared a pro-choice position. That was one of the smartest moves I’d seen all weekend.

The women at the party were veterans of savvy feminist political organizing . The mood was muted (though the drinking was not!). Disappointment in Mulcair’s ascendance was palpable. But there was joy and pleasure and high humour, too, and that was certainly contagious. It reminded me of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s notion of ethical possibility, which, she argued, ” is founded on and coextensive with the subject’s movement toward what Foucault calls ‘care of the self’, the often very fragile concern to provide the self with pleasure and nourishment in an environment that is perceived as not particularly offering them.”

To produce ethical possibilities, long-term progressive political organizing requires a circuit of affects. A one-note tune of positivity seems merely to be the melody of the status quo. The recent Ontario and federal budgets and their brutal attacks on poor people, seniors and youth will demand much, much more than that.

“Mic check”…”Mic check”…”Mic check”…

The Occupy Toronto-ers have received their eviction notice. Reporters have swarmed the park. An Emergency General Assembly has been called. Random supporters like myself stand around, shy guests at a proletariat cocktail party, conspicuous with our leather gloves or our digital cameras.

Where once has reigned peace and affability is now sizzling tension. Nonetheless, the young women running the Emergency General Assembly demonstrates an astonishing sweetness. Everyone. Take. A. Deep. Breath. she says, after someone with obvious mental health issues takes over the podium for several minutes. That. Didn’t. Take. Up. So. Much. Time. she says. Everyone repeats (it’s The Peoples’ Mic, after all): That. Didn’t. Take. Up. So. Much. Time.

I sit down on a park bench. A demurely-dressed woman in a purple coat and black skirt sits next to me. She’s from Serbia, she knows something about oppressions, and uprisings. She comes to the camp whenever she can. I talk to the young man sitting next to her,  who’s been illegally evicted. After trying several legal avenues, he’s homeless. The camp has given him refuge and, more than that, a way to make sense of his anguish, to give political support.

We’ve all been debating the occupation, it’s the topic of dinner party conversations and classroom discussions. I’ve had my doubts, still do. The Poet, who was part of a huge student resistance in Mexico, is unimpressed. Why. Aren’t. They Blockading. Bay. Street. she says. The University Administrator says their discourse is ahistorical, and reminds them of other occupations that preceded theirs.

But back at the occupation, they are organizing themselves into groups – those who will resist, those who won’t. A man tells everyone he’s got cars organized, to help people take their gear to wherever they’re going next.

As I leave, a motion to change the name of Nathan Phillips Square to Jack Layton Square has been passed – but not without a great deal of slow-motion discussion via the Peoples’ Mic.

Neither the mayor, nor the cops, nor the media can stop this conversation

There is a kind of hysteria brewing in Canadian media these days. The Occupy Movement has been going on for three weeks in Toronto, for several months in New York, and it’s driving some conservative Canadian media pundits, like Andrew Coyne of Maclean’s magazine, crazy. In a recent article, he declared that the Occupy Movement was a “phony class war.” He quotesd statistics on dishwashers and microwaves, proudly declaring that 90% of Canadian homes have the ability to nuke their food.  Writes Nick Fillmore of  Vancouver Observer: “Nowhere in the article does Coyne address many of the key issues Canadian Occupy supporters are angry about, such as the cost of student education, a lack of employment for young people, a real unemployment rate of some 13 per cent, high household debt, a lack of savings, and the undermining of our pension system”.

But it’s always interesting to compare different national media. In UK’s the Guardian, an article by Karen McVeigh wonders what the next step is for the occupation in New York’s Zucotti Park. The article begins with a hard-hitting video featuring interviews with some very articulate activists. One guy compares the movement to an octopus. The head of the octopus gives people permission to dream, he says. The octopus opens up the social and political space that gives the body of the octopus the will to obtain justice.

McVeigh writes, in her article: “In a tacit admission that the protests will be difficult to sustain over the winter, organisers are now focusing their efforts on planning a “spring offensive” with fresh targets.”

And in Canada? “Few tears being shed for the crumbling Occupy movement, ” trumpets the Globe and Mail. On the other hand, David Olive, Business columnist (!) for the Toronto Star argues that the Occupy Movement is not the real threat to civil society; gross inequality is.  CBC radio, meanwhile, throws out hourly pronouncements about the danger lurking in every Occupy encampment across the land.

A few days ago, I went to St James Park, home of Occupy Toronto, to donate some sleeping bags. What I saw was anything but dangerous, or crumbling.

A robust little town has spring up in this leafy enclave, looking from afar like a medieval fair. A lovely woman, we’ll call her Jane, greets me casually as I enter the grounds and says, “Let’s see if we can get those donations to the women – they really need them right now.” Apparently there’s a need for a stash of items earmarked just for women (they especially need yoga mats, she says, for ground cover). So we go to the Donations office and create a special women’s donation carton. The Jane shows me around the camp.

There’s a gentle, I would say even peaceful , even joyous energy to the place. There is a library inside of a yurt. There are dreamcatchers hanging from trees, a man reading a book in the open air.

But trouble is brewing. “The cops keep bringing in people with drug problems. We’re not sure why.” says Jane. “We don’t have enough trained people to keep them safe.” In this scenario, junkies are the wedge the police have been looking for to get their boots and billy clubs into the camp.

But only for awhile. This movement is strong, stronger than anyone expected. “”We never intended to rely on the mainstream media to put out our message., ” says an Occupy Wall Street activist. “In two months we have established hundreds of media centres, 24/7 live streaming, and traditional print media in the form of Occupy Wall Street Journal. People are becoming citizen journalists. In the reporting of the movement, we are making the mainstream media irrelevant right now”.

Some say they’ll go home for the winter, “to dream” of a new spring offensive. Adbusters, who initiated the movement, are contemplating declaring victory before the cops sweep in. “We’ve captured the imagination of the world,” says Kalle Lasn of Adbusters, quoted in The Guardian.  “Now we need to have a winter brainstorming and we’ll come up with a myriad projects.”

I leave St James Park regretfully. There is a sweet sense of purpose there, that sustains me for the rest of the afternoon.

Last week, I went to the first day of Occupy Toronto.

I felt peacableness, and nervousness (would the police raid the encampment that night?) and anger, and joy. Affect is a circuit of contagious, transformative feeling. It’s about how we feel in and with the world. As a longtime activist I have to admit that skepticism was what I brought to the event. I was there more out of duty than out of hope. But the stolid persistence of Occupy Toronto and all the Occupy actions around the globe has moved me, and it has shifted my affect.

It’s also got me reading Marx again. For as it turns out, this is no freakish dreadlocked drum-circley one-off-thing. Marx did the math 160 years ago.

It is part of the cycle of capitalism. What Marx described in 1848 in the Communist Manifesto has uncanny relevance for these times. For just as standard media (and even some of my students) decry the presence of the middle class in this protest with their cellphones and their (underpaid) jobs, Marx declared that “the proletariat is drawn from all classes of the population [...] small tradespeople, shopkeepers, retired tradesmen, handicraftsmen and peasants.” In other words, small business owners gone bankrupt; retirees whose pensions have gone belly-up; artists living on almost nothing; students with crippling debt loads; homeless people.

“With the development of industry the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it becomes more aware of that strength.” Keep laying off workers? Keep stealing peoples’ investments?  Keep throwing in them in jail or depriving them of the right to strike? The 99% aka the proletariat “continually re-emerges, stronger, firmer, mightier.”

And as for their Iphones, their wireless encampments, their Facebook pages? Marx got the irony of it: “This union [of the proletariat] is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another.” And as for Canada being too great, too just, too nice, to need an Occupy Movement? Whatever. The 99% is no longer national; it is global.

The 1%, according to Marx, are watching late capitalism as they have known it, in its most extreme and profligate manifestation, crumble.

“What the bourgoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own gravediggers.”

No cohesive message? No ultimate goal, according to standard media? I’d say the goal is so obvious it’s too scary for CNN or even the CBC to repeat. It’s nothing less than the overthrow of capitalism. But the real victory, according to Marx, “lies not in immediate result, but in the ever-expanding union” of the 99%.

According to Pressenza International Press Agency, there are now 1,257 Occupy communities around the world. And counting.

I was in my mother’s kitchen when I heard the news on the radio: Jack Layton has lost his battle with cancer.

I was juicing vegetables for my mother. She is a survivor of laryngeal cancer who can eat no solid foods. I was shocked, but I wasn’t surprised: I’d seen Layton’s July press conference, his face already a death mask. I stopped what I was doing, steadied myself against the kitchen counter and just felt terribly, terribly sad.But I didn’t want to upset my ma, so I steeled myself to finish making the pineapple-watermelon-ginger juice I’d started.

But my mother heard, of course, and got upset, and we mourned together, in our own way. As a hot prairie wind blew against the windows of her condo, I reading Layton’s “Letter to Canadians” to her. We both got choked up. I’d never in my life grieved a politician’s or a celebrity’s death: not Diana, not even Pierre.But I knew that our mourning was mixed with other losses: for my dad (cancer) and my brother (heart attack & poverty); for her friends who had recently passed.

Embodied feeling – lumps in throats, watering eyes – was evident all day, with me and my mom, and among my friends, but also on TV. Hardened broadcasters who had never in their careers expressed sympathy for social democracy or  the left got hoarse of throat, or flushed of face as they tried, and failed, to remain impassive. I watched friends or relatives who had never really been interested in Layton as a person or as a politician, expressing an ineffable grief. The affects of sadness, grief, embarrassment, pride became contagious: they mingled and transformed one another in the contact zones of kitchens, city squares, and even taxi cabs.

For me, as someone who studies affect – embodied feeling within culture – the televised funeral of a government leader or monarch provides a fascinating opportunity to study contagious feelings and contact zones. In my recent book, Feeling Canadian: Television, Nationalism and Affect(WLU Press 2011), I devoted a chapter to the October 2000 state funeral of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. I wrote about how, since Princess Diana’s funeral, or perhaps even since the funeral of JFK, televised celebrity funerals make people cry for someone they’ve never met in part because they meet a need to “see oneself as fully human and of this world, and therefore, affected” (113).

On Aug 27th I attended the People’s March to accompany Layton’s coffin to his funeral at Roy Thompson Hall in Toronto with my friend The Poet. Was I doing research, or participating in a collective experience of mourning? I know that I wanted to experience the event without the extreme mediation of television, internet and media (though of course my perceptions had already been impacted by them).  More and more, I’m finding I want more proximity to those ideas, events or figures I theorize. But I also just wanted to be there, for reasons I didn’t fully understand.

I teared up when I saw people slowly walking towards City Hall in orange t-shirts or the black clothes of mourning. This was such a strange, dignified, hybrid event: part funeral, part political gathering, part festival.

I felt embarrassment as I joined the crowds trying to get a glimpse of the coffin. When The Poet told me why she was there, I felt interest, and a flicker of shame at my own skepticism. I was a political refugee, she said, and a victim of torture in my country. I came here with nothing. Three years passed as I tried to get refugee status. I asked Jack Layton and Olivia Chow to write a letter. I finally had my hearing: it took three minutes and my application was accepted. They phoned the day after to make sure it had gone OK. In the last election, I voted for the first time as a Canadian citizen. Yeah, I’m critical of the system too, but I voted because of Jack.

We watched Layton’s wife, Olivia Chow, lead the procession, walking alone: so stately, so regal, so masculine, somehow,  in the way she took up that space. We walked with random folks, and more specific ones: sad Quebecois clowns; immigrants; trade unionists; a postal worker in uniform (the NDP staunchly supported their last strike); many members of the Chinese community (Olivia is Chinese-Canadian, and Layton had learned to speak Cantonese).

As political as Layton’s final letter was, the march itself seemed muted. I wondered why I only saw one sign protesting our current far right government. Despite Layton’s call to “change the world”, I wondered if this particular kind of collective, contagious affect that circulates around public figures is antithetical to grassroots organizing.

Later, I watched the funeral at home, alone, on TV. It was here, outside of the contact zone of the street, that I found myself most deeply affected: by the aboriginal blessing by Shawn Atelo, leader of the Assembly of First Nations; by Stephen Lewis’s very fine, very pointed, and very activist eulogy. I also noticed how, with every such outspoken moment, there would be a gesture of containment, whether by the minister Brent Hawkes’s seeming attempts at watering down Layton’s message, or by the TV camera’s framing, with several closeups of Prime Minister Harper or former Liberal Prime Ministers, which seemed to want to ‘balance’ the closeups of Olivia Chow and her family.

I had closely observed the rather conventional, contagious affects of the Trudeau funeral. But this event was different in several ways. Here, the left and the marginalized were now in the centre of things (at least outside Roy Thompson Hall). Queerness had operated at the Trudeau funeral week like a shadow, or a trace ; a rumour; subliminal references to Trudeau’s sexuality. Here, queerness was front and centre: queer pastor, lesbian singer. But it was a normalized queerness that operated that day. Hawkes with his Order of Canada medal, his insider references. People of colour, immigrants, refugees, trans folk – they were all outside the church, standing in a square in the hot sun.

Love. Hope. Optimism. These were the keywords of the week, drawn from the conclusion of Layton’s letter. In that sense, positive affect was at the heart of things, but this was, perhaps the affect of elites , of the elect. It reminded some of us of Obama’s hope/change mantra. It made us think of Sarah Palin at a Tea Party convention, nastily addressing Obama in the throes of his comedown from popularity: How’s that hopey-changey thing workin out for ya?

Perhaps it is, necessarily,  the job of politicians to be hopeful and optimistic – but should a homeless person, a person with AIDS, a woman dying with breast cancer, feel hope and optimism?I remember how angry my friend France Queyras, an artist who died of breast cancer, was: at the environment, at the Cancer Society that spends millions on advertising, on overhead, on looking good and feeling better, and that couldn’t even cover the cost of her vitamin supplements, let alone on research into the environmental causes of this horrible epidemic. My mother, now on her third bout of cancer, is certainly not feeling optimistic. I’m not feeling the love for a far right government that has cut everything that I believe in, from childcare to women’s groups, to arts funding. Along with most Canadians, I was outraged when, under Chretien and then Harper, we joined the wasteful deadly war in Afghanistan, and then the bombing in Libya (sadly, the NDP supported the latter). I believe it is the job of activists to feel the anger along with the hope that our solidarity and our activism might manifest.

After the march and the funeral, I can say that I felt excited. Uplifted, perhaps. But it was an odd, uneasy feeling, like the kind of thrill I get at spotting a celebrity on the street during TIFF. It doesn’t last; it won’t last.

What has lasted, what has stayed with me,  is the chalk memorial at City Hall.

On Monday, two days after the funeral, I went there after work. The chalk inscriptions had spread, like something wonderfully viral and contagious,  from the concrete floor and walls of the square to the walls and doors of City Hall itself.

People were still chalking their comments where they could. A girl knelt quietly in front of the makeshift memorial full of orange flowers, orange crush cans, handwritten condolence notes. City workers, moms with strollers, walked around solemnly, reading the inscriptions.

It was a silent, yet voluble Babylon of languages, where the specificity of Layton’s activist history – purposefully censored out, I believe, in standard media accounts of the man before his death – were brought back to life. Thank you for attending Pride. Thank you for helping to bring my grandparents to Canada. And on and on.

This was an unofficial memorial, more visceral, more affective than any book of condolences. Unbearably ephemeral, it will be gone by the next rainfall. There was grief there, and love , and humour, and interest – the deep abiding interest and love of citizens, – in their city, in their bike lanes , their solidarity movements, their trade unions and their protests. It wasn’t just about Jack anymore, and while it did have that strange sense of people joining in just to be part of something, it had so many other affects, too.

Jack Layton’s death became mapped across an incredibly diverse and polyphonic social body. Cancer survivors like my mom. Refugees like my friend. Queers, and socialists and environmentalists and Quebecois. In some ways the outpouring of feeling may have had less to do with Jack, and more to do with us, as citizens of a city and a nation, whose feelings and voices managed, in that ragtag, DIY memorial, to move beyond the limits of electoral politics and nationalism.

That gives me hope, that rare, tempting and elusive affect. Such a multi-ethnic and multi-issue coalition may indeed change the world – or, at least, bring down Harper.

The other night, I went to a screening of “Who Took the Bompf”  a fabulous doc about the feminist/queer/electroclash band Le Tigre and its demise in 2005, which in some ways marks the end of the feminist-queer-rriot girl era. It was an archive of sorts, of 3rd wave feminism, of rage channelled into poetry, sampling, performance art, music, and great costumes.

It seems like feminists, scholars and queers are turning to history these days, to help make sense of the present.

My writing has taken an archival turn, too. On June 1st, a graphic memoir serial, The Femme Monologues, written by me, with graphics by visual artist Terri Roberton, will debut will in the pages of Xtra! It will appear once a month for the next three months (and we hope it will continue after that, too).

Femme Monologues features short vignettes from a queer/femme/feminist archive. The first story, “On Becoming A Dissident Writer” (Part 1 appears June 1st) takes us back to the 1970′s, and the funky era of feminist culture, when women’s newspapers, record companies, publishers, and hey, even garages sprung up for the first time in Canada. It’s about the very first time I got published, in a feminist newspaper and the ripple effect that had on my family…and on me. Hairline cracks in the surface of my life anticipated an earthquake of consciousness that was to change the world.

Media was an essential component of that change. The feminist press in Canada – Upstream, Broadside, Kinesis, Herizons linked us in a variety of subversive, practical, abstract, physical, and affective ways. Whether it was finding out how other feminists across the country were organizing for abortion rights, scamming a pass to TIFF (then the Festival of Festivals) based on your Broadside press pass, or hooking up as you pasted up copy long into the night, feminist and queer media provided us with with different ways of being, feeling and connecting.

I became a feminist activist at the start of the Mulroney-Reagan-Thatcher era. Censorship! Raids on abortion clinics! Cutbacks! Millions were being cut from aboriginal and women’s programs. Feminist group after feminist group was eliminated.It seemed the nation had abjected us, people of conscience, people outside of normal, and that was still novel enough that we felt it, deeply and viscerally and contagiously. The act of documentation, publication, and artistic creation would be a place to situate our anger and dismay at the ways in which the right was gaining power in the post-Trudeau era.

Much of this has, as I’ve pointed out in other work, remained undocumented, but not forgotten. Indeed, there is now an archival turn – in cultural studies, in gender studies and, even, I think, in a new generation of feminists longing for history

Other archives: Lynn Hershman’s soon-to-be-released film, Feminist Art Revolution that documents the beginnings and the fierce endurance of a feminist art movement.

And then there’s Lesbians on Ecstasy, a band that takes up where Le Tigre left off, with its remixed homages to 70′s and 80′s women’s music.

Terri and I want to document a femme history that doesn’t follow any kind of linear trajectory (and femme, for those of you who don’t travel in the circles I do, is the term for a queer woman who takes on, ironizes and/or reinterprets the feminine). We want to depict femmes as central – masculinity is an essential but peripheral counterpoint to this particular story. Terri’s beautiful drawings lovingly depict an awkward, ethnicized, (often quite clued-out !) femme and feminist-in-the-making, and the slow transformation of innocence into irony, anger, passion, pleasure, danger, and creative power.

Watch for it, in Xtra (you can get it online, too), June 1st, and if you like it, let Xtra know, so they’ll keep publishing our stories…

Recently, I went to the Tenth Anniversary celebration of Rabble, a progressive e-journal I’ve written for a few  times.

Ten years is an extraordinarily long time for a non-profit publication that survives on funding from individual and organization donors. They now  get over 100,000 visitors month. A story published in Rabble, like the one I wrote several years ago , “Afghanistan: Not In My Name” goes everywhere. People emailed me about it, talked to me on the street. Rabble is the very model of a public sphere.

But the feel of the birthday party was an odd combination of celebratory and grim. People seemed relieved, as survivors do, but also pessimistic (and maybe that’s a survivor thing too). Folks are terrified of the possibility of another 5 years of the Harper regime, and suspicious of Sun News, the new conservative news channel.  Sun News is a subsidiary of Quebecor Inc., controlled by Erik and Pierre Karl Peladeau, who are worth $670 million. As Rabble’s Donald Gutstein writes,

“Quebecor also distributes the free 24 Hours papers in major urban centres. And it has a line-up of free community dailies and weeklies in small towns across the country. In Ontario alone, Quebecor owns 26 dailies and weeklies, such as the Barrie Examiner and Niagara Falls Review. These papers circulate in southern Ontario electoral ridings where Harper has made great inroads into the former Liberal heartland.”

Certainly, the launching of a media site crawling with Harperites two weeks before a federal election is a bad omen for democracy (media and otherwise).

Nonetheless, I thought I’d end the semester with comments from students in my News and Current Affairs course, who are anything but pessimistic. They are excited about the alternative news sources they’ve discovered, and about the rise of citizen journalism. Reading comments from their blog entries and final assignments gives me a strange sense of hope, even in these challenging times.

One student wrote, “We live in a society wherein the spread and control of information is filtered and twisted by a few individuals behind the most powerful media outlets in the Western world [but] the recent surge of citizen and independent journalism and the exposure of false accusations by these same news corporations has led to the global popularity of Al Jazeera and several other independently operated and reliable news sources”.

Another student commented on the impact  of citizen journalism during the tsunami in Japan: “I began to realize the importance of considering what the average citizen has to say rather than only acknowledging our “trusty news agencies” during a time of crisis. Robinson wrote that the incident of the last tsunami’s events “gave opportunity for shifting practises of citizen journalism to take place outside of the west” (86). Once again, we are being made witness to how this type of journalism in a foreign country [Japan] is shaping the way we receive news, even within our own western-dominant culture.”

And finally, this student thinks it’s possible for alternative news to change the world. “I think that news can bring about social change, and right now, that social change is a shift in citizens’ attitude, and a need for objective, hard-hitting journalism. North American citizens are turning to sources such as blogs and Al Jazeera English because they can get news that does not follow the profit motives of other outlets.”

Sun News won’t fool these kids.

Now, if they’d only go out and vote!

I have to admit, I didn’t see it coming.

In all the giddy pleasure of witnessing The Arab Spring, many of us did not anticipate the ways in which the West would take over the reins of this populist revolution. And  standard media have, predictably, fallen in behind the sickening call to war.

Because yes, I hate to have to tell you, but that’s essentially what the euphemistic term “no fly zone” means: The U.S., Canada, UK and France are in a U.S.-led war with Libya. By last Monday, the US had already fired 122 Tomahawk missiles.

Guardian reporter Abdel al-Bari Atwan warns that western military intervention plays right into Kadhafi’s hands,potentially remaking his image into that of heroic Arab underdog: “the victim of post-colonialist interference in pursuit of oil.” Atwan also asks: why didn’t the US encourage neighbouring Arab countries to intervene, instead of sending its own troops yet again?

Most alternative news sources agree that this is no humanitarian effort. This is an attempt by western powers to take control of the Arab revolutions. It’s also another battle for oil. An editorial from the investigative online paper Black Star points out: “While France and the U.K. may preach “humanitarian needs” their silence in the face of the regimes’ brutal reactions to civilian protests in Yemen and Bahrain exposes their hypocrisy. Both countries are eyeing the richest oil fields in all of Africa; right there in Libya”.

But you won’t hear about any of this from CBC, the Globe and Mail, or from senior editor of Toronto’s alternative weekly, NOW. Ellie Kirzner writes, with tortured prose: “It’s a time, I think, to be forgiving of those who can’t get a clear sense of how they feel about those cruise missiles streaking through the Libyan ether.”

Even the usually anti-militarist NDP voted for Canada’s involvement in the Libyan intervention.

Safely contained in an online piece, NOW writer Enzo de Matteo was a little more critical, writing: “The days of the west rendering judgment from on-high at the UN in New York and with jet fighters in the sky every time some tin pot dictator begins sabre rattling, is a strategy that has backfired before.”

I’m giving Jon Stewart, in the March 21 episode of the Daily Show, the last word:

“We’re at war??? A-GAIN??? I don’t wanna be a pain in the ass, but don’t we already have two wars? Y’know wars aren’t kids, where you don’t have to pay attention to the youngest one cuz the older two will take care of it. It’s not a baby war [...] And also, aren’t we out of money?

“Effective history deals with events in terms of their most unique characteristics, their most acute manifestations. An event, consequently, is not a decision, a treaty, a reign, or a battle, but the reversal of a relationship of forces, the usurpation of power, the appropriation of a vocabulary turned against those who had once used it…” (72).

-Michel Foucault, Truth and Method

I visited my mother in BC recently, and noted with interest how consumed she is by news on various uprisings in the Middle East and Africa. She flips between CNN and BBC, making aghast tsking noises when violence flares.

It’s early spring on Vancouver Island. There is sun, there are flowers. Let’s. Go. For. For. A. Walk. In. The. Marina. I say.

Later. I. Want. To. See. If. Ghaddafi. Will. Leave. she says, not even looking away from the screen.

News is fulfilling many interesting functions for my mother, and for many folks, these days. It’s definitely providing distraction and entertainment, with a wholly unpredictable narrative arc – far more suspense-filled than, say,  CSI. It also works as a form of mediated citizenship. By staying on top of events from the Middle East, (as well as supplying links to news items in our blogs and Facebook news feeds), we may feel we are in some way doing our bit to participate in the electronic public sphere.

We in the West may now feel a new proximity with previously distant sites of knowledge.We may have abandoned the will to truth (our skepticism, our constant transmedia fact-checking), which can create, as Michel Foucault argued, a system of exclusion (the exclusion of alternative views, of the Other).  We may have been moved to favour  an epistemology of activism and hope – what Foucault might have called ‘the will to knowledge.’ In affective terms, the recent news produces a sense of audiences being touched or moved, which can cause us to connect, in empathy, or even in pleasure, with other bodies. (I can’t help but wonder: had the G20 protests in Toronto had occurred after, rather than before the Egyptian Revolution, would have been received differently by media and the general populace?)

The demonstrations on Tahrir Square or in the streets of Tripoli are contact zones, producing other contact zones.  In a contact zone, affect becomes contagious: someone observing an affected person may well start to experience the same, or parallel intensities. Anna Gibbs invokes the useful image of sparks, catching fire: “affect leaps from one body to another, invoking tenderness, inciting shame, igniting rage, exciting fear” (“Contagious Feelings”). One can imagine a chain of affects among the multitudes who inhabited Tahrir Square for days on end: pride, fear, excitement…and later, as stories of molestation of women also emerged: shame and disgust, too.

Our engagement with TV, print and radio news, links on Facebook, and Tweets about these events also creates a contact zone, as we discuss these issues with others, or watch news reports together. There is hope, and curiousity, and cynicism, and weariness, and wonder in the classroom as we compare the reportage of Al Jazeera with that of CBC.

Via these various contact zones, the becoming of various nations (not to mention their relations with the U.S. and with Israel), are in flux. We have the privilege of seeing nations-in-process, citizens who refuse to submit to regulation. This flux is entirely relational: a spark that flew from a man who tragically set himself afire in Tunisia, to young female blogger in Egypt, to a crowd that grew larger and larger in Tahrir Square, to uprisings in Jordan and Bahrain, to a solidarity gathering in Dundas Square in Toronto and across Canada yesterday.

Affect, can speak to an ethical idea of collective belonging – the interconnectedness of body, culture and emotion; the ways in which this assemblage moves across and transforms surfaces of skin and identity.

Can this idea of a culture, and  a nation, in process, be contagious? Will it spread to the West, or will it remain an undesirable virus? The transformation of affect does require a contact zone, the proximity of bodies to one another. Social media creates both connections to and separations between bodies.

Perhaps, as the danger of a majority right-wing government in this country becomes ever more real, we will need to leave our laptops and head out onto the street, abandoning the truth-claims of our own repressive government for the embodied knowledge of one another.