Tag: Mediterranean

What a sideway map of the Mediterranean reveals

“Mediterranean Without Borders” Sabine Réthoré, 2011 (Arabic).

The “Mediterranean Without Borders” map was produced, in the political euphoria of 2011, by Paris-based artist Sabine Réthoré. Its profound simple 90-degree rotation not only underwrites an artistic streak, but can also largely impact one’s perspective. The end result is that the question is no longer about north-south as much as it is about parity and closeness. In the context of Mediterranean geopolitics, refugees crossing and drowning, fortress Europe, colonial history, skewed markets, condescending north to south (top to bottom) attitudes, post-colonial stagnation and so forth, means the simple rotation of the map is a big political statement with humanizing tendencies that make transnational ties look more intimate. That is an artistic statement in itself. This does not mean it will work for all maps, but it does so with the Mediterranean basin given the weight of its contemporary politics and long rich history.

“Mediterranean Without Borders” Sabine Réthoré, 2011 (French).

The map was shown at an event in Brussels in November 2019, where I was invited to speak to EU and MENA youth, the opening was made by Marseille-based writer Mary Fitzgerald who presented this curious map of the Mediterranean rotated 90 degrees to the right. Fitzgerald provoked a lively discussion and the audience related more to the alternative map than its standard appearance. When I shared the image with others, it elicited various responses from it looking like a fantasy map to the humorous old woman trying to avoid stepping into the mud. Intimacy was a key response to the map. When I posted it to Twitter, geographer Joshua S. Campbell responded “Amazing how rotating a map changes your perspective. Maps tend to ossify spatial relationships in your mind…tweak the map, break the pattern. Also why spatial thinkers are useful, they possess the ability to rotate spatial relationships in their mind.”

What Réthoré’s artwork also does is furnish a metaphysical canopy to Gianluca Solera’s idea of transnational Mediterranean citizenship and breathes life into the dying political imagination. Solera argues

“the Mediterranean could become again a cradle of a new Renaissance if conditions were put in place for a project of transnational citizenship. A shared political initiative, putting together the various experiences of resistance, protest and popular alternatives, and building a Mediterranean platform for a new social contract, so urgent in times of profound crisis both in Europe and in the Mediterranean” (Solera, 2017).

Indeed, it may appear that we are a long way from this, but the grim reality of securitization, refugee crisis, and a pandemic overturning the world as we know it, can eclipse the years that saw thousands of initiatives taking place, stories, theorizing, training, in what Solera has deemed a Mediterranean “Shadow government.” Moreover, the region is moving towards a thinking in which the social contract will require rewriting as it faces the pressures of epidemiological threats, climate change, alarm at the dominance of big tech, to the receding of the long-haul flight in favor of local and regional travel, a travel bubble in some cases.

This is crucial if civil society, social movements, and transnational Mediterranean responsibility is to take on meaningful qualities towards how the digital order and terrestrial order are to be negotiated. Italian sociologist Franco Cassano noted:

“Unbridled technology does not signify the abandonment of earthy grittiness, but its perfecting it through the will to power. Mediterranean man, instead, lives always between land and sea; he restrains one through the other; and, in his technological delay, in his vices, there is also a moderation that others have lost. The unbridled development of technology is not tied to the crossing of land and sea, but to the oceanic lack of moderation, the chasing of the sunset by the sun, the absolutization of the West.” (Cassano, 2011).

In other words, the Mediterranean world is a philosophical gateway to deconstruct fundamentalisms as it has the “capacity to transform our limitations in a common benefit, a tragic memory in the fight against all forms of fundamentalism” (Cassano, 2011). Be it techno-fundamentalism or else.

The above is a short modified extract from my paper, “Re-envisioning Civil Society and Social Movements in the Mediterranean in an Era of Techno-Fundamentalism,” published in the European Institute of the Mediterranean (Barcelona). The journal article is open access.

What is Techno-Fundamentalism?

This is a short extract from the paper “Re-envisioning Civil Society and Social Movements in the Mediterranean in an Era of Techno-Fundamentalism,” published in the European Institute of the Mediterranean (Barcelona). The article is open access.

Techno-fundamentalism is the belief that technology is “not only the means and will to triumph over adversity through gadgets and schemes, but the sense that invention is the best of all possible methods of confronting problems” (Vaidhyanathan, 2006). At its essence, techno-fundamentalism sidesteps politics in favor of taking on social problems and translating them into technical solutions. When technological thinking becomes central to political thought, it draws high risks to civil society and social movements that now become “arranged around platforms and abstractions” while weakening the link between politically-aware citizens and “locally rooted action” (Bartlett, 2018).

It can be argued that the digital technological realm is generally pursued by civil society and social movements for the securing of freedom for society, through organizing, coordinating, garnering public attention, and evading censorship; while governments often pursue the digital technological realm for securing society from freedom – through control, surveillance, censorship, upholding neoliberal modernity or diversion from civic questions… Techno-fundamentalism produces and thrives in a foggy and spectral environment where real world realities and online abstracts bleed into each other, the latter forming a digital swarm that lacks “internal coherence,” as it is fleeting, unstable, and volatile, and can come across less as a voice than noise (Han, 2017). Thus, when the digital order subverts or skews the terrestrial order, it undermines the abilities of civil society and social movements to give name, shape, and form, to the world they are seeking to make a better place.

This paper explores what drives techno-fundamentalism, arguing that having become a default mode of thinking, more so in the era of the pandemic and likely to hold sway long after, it empties political language of its meaning, disfigures human-technology relationships, expedites the progress fallacy and the mistaken belief that technology is a neutral affair. As a fundamentalism, it has been blind to notice the growing global backlash against technology – an obliviousness that can be observed repeatedly at tech conferences prior to the pandemic. At best, it is considered a sub-point worthy of discussion, such as “the right to disconnect”, as long as it acquiesces to the big progress machine. The literature is awash with the toxins of digital activism, from narcissism to security surveillance. However, this paper will focus on the practical realities of how civil society and social movements are constructively affected by digital technologies, and eventually stumble upon the law of diminishing returns that adversely works against their activism as in the case of scaling and polarization.

The hype of innovation stimulates the onward march of digital technology which has been underpinned by the age-old logical fallacy of argumentum ad novitatem (appeal to novelty), also known as the progress fallacy that says the new or recent is better than what came before it. The new is good without giving substantial analysis of the social and ethical implications of the new technology. The argument is further reinforced by tech protagonists, and everyday society, with a variation of this cliched line: ‘Technology is neutral, it is neither good nor bad, it is how you use it.’ Technology is anything but neutral. The popular line I frequently hear is that a knife can be used to cut vegetables or stab a human being, but this weary trope overlooks the subliminal reality that the mere sight of a knife, let alone holding it, has already altered the moral climate in a room. The knife’s very presence is already biased, the thought of a knife is heavily loaded with potential consequences. Similarly, social media is not neutral in a world of algorithms that push politically charged content and echo chambers that purge pluralistic voices from the discussion. Martin Heidegger would argue the neutrality thesis in technology poses ‘the highest danger’ as it puts us at risk of seeing the world through technological thinking, misleads us to believe that technology is an instrument rather than a worldview, and technology being a human activity rather than a grave matter developing beyond human control (Heidegger, 1977)

The rest of the article can be read here.

Fragments of Cavafy’s Alexandria


It was an honour to be invited to speak at the Cavafy International Symposium which was held at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. The symposium, Cavafy: Polis & Politics; Civitas & Civilization, brought together scholars, intellectuals, writers and poets from Egypt, Greece, the Greek diaspora, and elsewhere to discuss the many ways C. P. Cavafy’s work lives on in the city in which he lived and wrote. “Fragments of Cavafy’s Alexandria,” was my contribution for the Cavafy and Criticism session.

There are two words that I chose to focus on: “implication” and “real” to understand Cafavy’s relationship to Alexandria, and the Alexandria he imagined.

Cavafy came to represent a moment in the city’s life, while, at the same time, his poems brought Alexandria’s past into the present. Like the rare perfect marriage, Cavafy gave the city a new mythology, and Alexandria gave the poet a history and a setting in which he could ground his poems and hear his voice.

A visiting British critic Bonamy Dobree, speaks of Cavafy’s conversation in tones:

“I have met an Alexandrian—with all that implies. Implication, that word is important when thinking of Mr. Cavafy, for his poems are like his conversation, his conversation like Alexandria, and Alexandria is all implication. . . . He may talk of the Alexandrian tram-service, of the Ptolemies, of the use of a certain word in seventeenth-century English: one scarcely knows what it is that one has talked to Mr. Cavafy about . . . both his talk and his poems leave you with a flavour, something you have never quite met before, a sound that remains in the ear. . . .”

“Only the city is real,” said Durrel, “Real,” the only word, as Nabokov has said, that requires quotation marks. While Cavafy’s Alexandria is a mythical land, but it is Alexandria; her landscape and her peoples, the spirit of place, had, perhaps more than any other city of the 20th century, the power to excite mythic visions, and in order to know those visions fully we must examine the spot on which they grew.

One of Cavafy’s achievements went beyond his beautiful poetry. I would dare to say that his unintended achievement was to show how a city can continue to exist, even after so much has disappeared, through what remains implied. He turned his face to the streets and half-forgotten conversations rather than the monuments and cliched grandeur of the city.

That is what interested me in thinking about Cavafy and Alexandria, imagining the city in fragments in a place that unfortunately does not generously yield its archives and records.