jim submits:
"Rhizomatic Radio and the Great Stampede"
Ron Sakolsky
Let us conjure up a vision of a Wild Radio Stampede
disrupting the territorialized lines of Authority
artificially drawn in the air surrounding Mother
Earth. The seismic flows of land, sea, and air waves
reconceptualized as rhizomatic possibilities. Let the
leaden segmentary lines imposed by capitofeudalism
explode into detached shimmering lines of flight.
Rampaging sound wave tubers where each stem is itself
a rootstock emitting new roots everywhere along its
sonic path. Unstoppable drifting planetary waves of
radio sound laughing in the sedentary face of the
dominant mediacracy's uniformity. Immersion then
becomes a metaphor not for entrapment, but for escape
as receiver and producer become one in an oceanic roar
sounding in its composite signal like a combination of
Hiroshi Yokoi's 24 hour FM radio transmissions in
Japan programmed according to tidal patterns and
Tetsuo Kogawa's micropower radio broadcasts, inspired
by the radio experiments in "direct speech" of the
Italian Autonomists. The Autonomist trick of The
Serpent of Desire Eating Its Own Tail as performed by
Felix Guattari and the Schizzes, a "molecular
revolution" on a mixtape.Kogawa and Guattari, entwined in the worldwide free
radio rhizomes proliferating not underground but in
the air; the technician and the theorist both inspired
by the heady days of the Italian Autonomia (Autonomy)
movement of the late Seventies. Using a hard-won 1975
Italian Constitutional Court's ruling declaring that
the state monopoly of the airwaves was illegal, the
Autonomia movement remained highly visible in the
hundreds of diverse and unregulated miniaturized
stations that engaged daily in a guerrilla warfare of
the airwaves, such as Radio Alice in Bologna, the
station whose programming was chronicled by Guattari
himself.
Unlike conventional radio (which in a U.S. context
means commercial, public or, increasingly, community),
what Guattari called "popular free radio" does not
seek to impose programming on targeted segments of a
mass audience using marketing criteria. Instead, it
aims at changing the professionally-mediated
relationship between listener and speaker, and even
challenging the listener/speaker dichotomy itself. In
one sense, then, it is an expansion upon Bertolt
Brecht's 1927 proposal for democratization of radio
which called for the apparatus of radio to be changed
over from distribution to communication, making it
possible to transmit as well as receive. From an
Autonomist perspective, Italian radio would be opened
up to non-professionals and the hierarchical one way
flow of messages would be replaced with egalitarian
multiple flows. This new arrangement stood in marked
contrast to the authoritarian approach to radio as a
vehicle for the shaping of opinion either by the
dominant culture or by an oppositional political
party. In the latter case, Guattari was going beyond
Brecht in concerning himself with the potentialities
of radio for creating new spaces for freedom,
self-management (autogestion) and the immediate
fulfillment of desire rather than merely disseminating
the party line and/or mobilizing supporters in the
traditional leftist manner.
What better way to accomplish this immediacy goal than
the phone-in! In fact, what we today refer to as "talk
radio" owes an unacknowledged and probably unknown
debt to the Autonomists. Typically, the potentially
radical phone-in vehicle is drained of its potency
within the contemporary authoritarian radio context of
pre-screening, censorship, and the use of such control
technology as delay devices by swarmy radio windbags
like Rush Limbaugh. Yet phone-ins to Autonomist radio
collectives in the Italian context took the form of
people reading their poetry, singing their songs,
playing their instruments, or shouting their
manifestoes into the air. They called from their
squats to deride their would-be landlords, their
housework to skewer their husbands, their workplaces
or picket lines to attack their bosses, or from their
beds to denounce work itself. Unmediated communiqus,
expressed in a popular language that was lively,
direct and often ribald. As one caller to Radio Alice
put it in defense of charges of obscenity against the
station, "Desire is given a voice, and for them, it is
obscene" (Lotringer and Marazzi, p. 131).
Speaking truth to power in terms of desire not only
targeted capitalists, but, as in Bologna, where the
Communist Party held public office and yet promoted
policies of law and order and austerity; it was the
authoritarian left itself which was challenged. In its
own words, "Radio Alice will give a voice to anyone
who loves mimosa and believes in paradise; hates
violence but strikes the wicked; believes they're
Napoleon but knows they could just be aftershave; who
laughs like the flowers to smokers and drinkers,
jugglers and musketeers, the absent and the mad"
(Lumley, 1990, p 305). As to the youth revolt
component of Autonomia, in some ways, 1977's
"Generation of Year Nine" (as they called themselves
in mock reference to the year 1968 in the Jacobin
calendar) sought to connect with and update the
libertarian impulses of the Sixties that had been
reterritorialized in later years. This quest then was
not a search for roots, but what Guattari has called
rhizomatic links that would deterritorialize the
airwaves and offer a way out of the oh so manageable
bureaucratic box constructed for radio. Beyond Italy,
the resulting free radio movement surfaced not only in
Japan as previously noted, but was in evidence
throughout Europe in the Seventies and Eighties
playing itself out on the airwaves in a plethora of
pirate radio stations that erupted in the Netherlands
(e.g. Vrije Keizer Radio), West Germany (e.g. Radio
Dreyeckland), Spain (e.g. Radio Luna), Denmark (e.g.
Radio Sokkeland), France (e.g. Radio Libertaire),
Belgium (e.g. Radio Air Libre), and the United Kingdom
(e.g. Radio Arthur). Today, some of these pirate
stations continue to exist, while others have been
legalized and hence restratified, still others have
disappeared. Yet new ones have been born all across
the planet in the flames of the Nineties. Circling
somewhere in the aether remains the vision of nomadic
radio pirates whose transmitters navigate the air
waves liberating them on behalf of the voiceless,
marginalized and downtrodden and viewing those waves
as treasures in themselves which have unjustly been
confiscated and debased by the rich and mighty; a
touchstone image for current free radio activists
throughout the world.
This analogy, of course, brings up the controversy
that surrounds the term "pirate" in micropower radio
circles. Personally, I have never objected to the term
pirate. When they asked Willie Sutton why he robbed
banks, his reply was, "That's where the money is."
Wobbly folksinger Utah Phillips says his mother used
to call bank robbers "class heroes," and Queen Latifah
seems to agree. Now since I do not believe that the
money that has been privately accumulated by banks is
any more the result of an equitable distribution of
wealth than that the oligopoly over the airwaves that
presently reigns is a fair distribution of a public
resource, I would contend that the term radio pirate
as it is commonly used is a positive poetic metaphor
relating to the redistribution of resources between
the haves and have nots. Sure, the naive vision of
piracy is often simplistically based on an image of
heroic swashbuckling romanticism, but the history of
piracy is itself very complex. Those called pirates
have ranged from despicable slave traders and imperial
guns-for-hire to radical adventurers and utopian
visionaries.
In fact, Gabriel Kuhn (Klausmann, 1997) makes a
convincing argument that the former were not really
pirates at all, but simply sea robbers and
fillibusters rather than the embodiment of his
Dionysian pirate ideal -- the Stirnerite ego operating
on a life-affirming active energy and driven by a
Nietzschean will to power that excluded the reactive
energy of those linked to statist and mercantile
systems of domination. As Kuhn points out, many
pirates were themselves escaped slaves and some pirate
captains -- like Mission -- would immediately liberate
all the slaves on the ships which they commandeered.
Others, like Charles Bellamy, considered themselves
libertarian socialists, and all lived by the anarchist
code of mutual aid even if not acknowledged as such.
It is, of course, the latter type of pirate with which
most free radio advocates, including myself, identify.
In historical terms, piracy often offered seafarers an
alternative to the hierarchical rigidity of naval life
or the exploitative working conditions of the
commercial ships. In fact, pirate ships were often
characterized by a share the wealth ethos and allowed
for a degree of gender equality and sexual freedom
unheard of on both land and sea. Prominent women
pirates took to the high seas in pursuit of liberty
(Stanley, 1995, Klausmann, et al, 1997), and
homosexuality was often an accepted part of shipboard
life. (Burg, 1983). Pirate utopias have existed in the
Bahamas (Nassau), the Caribbean (Hispaniola and
Ranters Bay), Madigascar (Libertalia), and among the
corsairs of North Africa (Republic of Sale).
Peter Lamborn Wilson makes a strong case on behalf of
the idea that because of their anarchic forms of
organization, the Moorish pirates could be considered
our democratic forefathers, both on shipboard and in
their commonwealths and intentional communities on
land. Often "Articles" or "ships constitutions" unlike
those of government man-of-wars or merchant ships
called for the election of officers, including
captains and quartermasters who received as little as
1 1/2 times the share of the booty as received by
crewmen. In spite of the walking the plank Hollywood
trope, corporal punishment was often outlawed and
disagreements resolved at a drumhead court or by duels
on shore. As Wilson puts it, "Pirate ships were true
republics, each ship (or fleet) an independent
floating democracy ... The Buccaneer way of life had
an obvious appeal: interracial harmony, class
solidarity, freedom from government, adventure and
possible glory" (Wilson, 1995, p 191). Making an
earlier case for democracy under the Jolly Roger,
radical historian Marcus Rediker has emphatically
noted, "Pirates constructed a culture of masterless
men. They were as far removed from traditional
authority as any men could be in the early eighteenth
century" (Rediker, 1987, p 286). For Kuhn (Klausmann,
1997) pirate captains were more akin to Pierre
Clastres' "primitive" chief and Deleuze and Guattari's
nomadic guerilla than to authoritarian rulers
interested in disciplinary power and capital
accumulation.
Of course it's certainly true that pirates could be
violent. Yet apart from the privateers employed by the
nation state, the replacement of the outlawed
non-state violence of the pirates with the legally
sanctioned military violence of the sovereign nation
states which banded together to crush piracy as a
threat to their own monopoly on violence in
international affairs, was hardly an improvement
(Thomson, 1994). In the system that has evolved,
pirates are seen as stateless, and so, in terms of
international law, do not exist except as terrorists,
while competing nation-states are seen as legitimate
global actors; albeit within the current context of
multinational shadow governments.
Are radio pirates plundering and hijacking the
airwaves from their rightful state and corporate
owners, or are they better conceived of as state-free
rebels using culture jamming tactics to challenge the
power of the media monopoly and the authority granted
by government's normalizing regulations which have
created a new interlocking system of enclosure, not
merely on land, but in the air itself? Whether called
pirate radio, micropower radio, low watt radio,
liberation radio or free radio; collectively we
constitute a movement that has the capability of
bridging the gap between the social and individualist
strains of anarchist theory and practice, and offering
a libertarian alternative to both corporate and state
controlled radio that has an even broader appeal.
Michel Foucault's strategic advice on "living counter
to all forms of fascism" prizes "mobile arrangements
over systems" (Foucault in Delueze and Guattari, 1983,
p XIII), and brings to mind the image of Stephen
Dunifer beginning his then clandestine broadcasts with
a mobile radio unit in his backpack in the Berkeley
hills or that of Mbanna Kantako defiantly vowing to
run his Springfield, Illinois radio station off of a
bicycle, if necessary, should he be busted by the FCC.
These radio activists have in turn inspired countless
others in their wake so that presently a virtual free
radio stampede is underway as new micropower stations
go on the air every day. A stampede can be envisioned
as mobility called into being by spontaneous action.
"Every animal knows, and humans are no exception, that
when there is a stampede you must join in or get out
of the way. Try to stop it, and you will be crushed."
(Doe, 1996, p 181). Join the Great Radio Stampede!
Fools Paradise, Spring 1997
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(New York: Autonomedia, 1996).
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