Eyes Wide Shut: Power and Creative Visual Counter-Conducts in the Battle for Syria, 2011-2014

This article offers a conceptualization of a specific form of resistance in the Syrian uprising that it calls creative visual counter-conducts, and it proposes an analytical framework to study these practices, linking two emerging fields within the social sciences: those of visuality and counter-conduct. Engaging with the literature on image politics in the Arab World and in Syria in particular, it argues that there is a tendency to assume that imagery can function as an emancipatory Tool, which can be readily appropriated to resist and break free from dominant relations of power. Drawing on and further developing Foucault's concept of counter-conduct, the article instead proposes a conceptualization of creative visual counter-conducts as practices that produce alternative modes of being seen and imply an ethos of dangerousssness, novelty and subtleness, and yet also partly rely upon, and are implicated iwthin, those very relations of power they seek to oppose. On the basis of this analytical framework, the article embarks on a diachronic analysis of visual resistance in the battle for Syria, showing how practices of visual counter-conducts changed over time from 2011 to 2014.