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Manufacturing Dissent, Creating Complicity
Alan Toner
"Language... is the danger of all dangers, because it is that which begins by creating the possibility of a danger." — Holderlin
What role remains for the 'media-activist' when computing, telecommunications devices and cameras have become socially ubiquitous? Media and creative intervention cease to be the privilege of 'specialist' activists and professionals, and this is positive. So how does the relationship between communications and agitation mutate? This piece concentrates on communication's function as interface between the protagonists of social conflict and diffuse social discontent. I argue that the key lies in evolving communication-focussed rather than media-driven strategies, developing shared infrastructure, and creating collective narratives.
After a little caricature chronicling historical patterns, I focus on struggles fashioning new methods of disruption. The situations described highlight communication as a central strategy rather than a propagandaistic accessory. Although these cases are quite exceptional, they offer a useful standard for comparison with other practices. The emphasis on work-related situations occurs at the price of neglecting comparable innovations around migration, gender and sexuality, or those used to create new identities such as "precariat" or "cognitariat" as exemplified by the EuroMayday and icons like San Precario. Today the workplace is not the privileged site for development of rupture and conflict arises diffusely in all areas of social life.
Some Historical Caricatures
(i)"Counter-information"
In 1968 the state monopolized broadcasting in Europe. Oppositional groups produced communiques and held press briefings but had a basically hostile relationship with the media, which was viewed as an agent of censorship and distortion, complicit in repression and exploitation. The theory was ''the bourgeois press lies'' and the practice was ''counter-information''. Alternative newspapers were established to counter this bias, but those that survived would later normalize. The first portable video cameras/recorders (Portapak) hit the market and film collectives appeared with a mission to document actions that otherwise risked invisibility due to mainstream neglect. In Milan, for example, film-makers associated with Lotta Continua shot actions, strikes and pickets around the city daily. A myriad of similar groups emerged in the US. Equipment prices remained prohibitive but nonetheless activist collectives began training people. A little later offset print machinery facilitated the rapid production of printed agitational materials, reduced constraints on design and minimised the technical competence required.
(ii)Spectacular Opposition
By the early '70s some groups began devising actions in ways designed to seduce the mainstream media. Greenpeace's spectacular interventions epitomize this and their model has been widely replicated. These stunts are intended to raise public awareness and focus campaign targets and were usually performed by small specialized groups - climbers. divers etc. The theory was that change could occur only through education and clarity of agenda; spectacular actions brought visibility, clout with parts of the political class and membership fees from an admiring audience. A sort of "pressure politics on steroids''. Focussing on the production of an event for broadcast consumption repelled those for whom participation, process and the building of social relations are defining elements of direct action. Competing for broadcasters attention is also a risky approach to campaigning. Once the circus moves on the dynamic dies, and the jettisoning of grassroots social agitation and the construction of a tissue of relations means that it leaves little trace.
(iii)Mediactivism
Prices of the tools of media production continued to fall with computers and camcorders reaching the mass market by the late-eighties. Video-activist compilations started circulating at the turn of that decade. Digitalization and the growth in personal computing power enabled the first desktop publishing, graphics and video-editing systems (Pagemaker, Photoshop, Premiere) leading to a proliferation of video-activism and subvertising. Synchronic with the birth of the web, and the lowering of distribution barriers that this entailed, this period sees the advent of radical news sites such as A-Infos and Infoshop.org, and from 1999 the dawn and rapid multiplication of Indymedia. In Spain and Italy especially the DIY attitude was extended to the technology itself through the Hacklab movement, built round creating public access spaces, free software programming and criticism of intellectual property laws. The theory was ''be the media'' and activism, for many, became the media-production.
These three waves have not substituted one another, but have been cumulative. In the meantime the cultural landscape has mutated in parallel to that set of economic transformations known as postfordism, reshaping the spaces available and needs to be addressed.
The Private sector digs your subjectivity!
By the 80s private broadcasters emerged to challenge the state monopolies and there was a shift in content: programming was tailored towards capitalizing on the new markets created by the social and cultural convulsions of the 1970s: teen-culture, music videos, sexually transgressive presenters and edgy advertising. Nowadays no subject is taboo for a mainstream media in furious competition for viewers and advertising revenues. Demonstrations, actions and controversy receive coverage if they provide provide cheap broadcast-entertainment. Camera operators working for the main networks can be found transmitting live in the midst of street riots. Counter-information rarely has impact when the root of power resides in the control over context rather than distortion or censorship (1). The mass media monolith has not crumbled in the face of the net, but hybridized, as scraps from the 'margins' permeate the broadcast citadels.
Reorganization of Territory and Erosion of Meaning
A message's impact is affected by the social context of the recipient as much as it results from the words/images themselves. In the industrial era when social revolts (strikes, riots) occurred they touched large numbers of people directly, either as participants or through proximity to those who were its protagonists. Where a neighborhood's residents remained fixed, shared a similar class background, frequented the same shops, schools, places of sociality and entertainment, all of these social bonds could coalesce into a sense of class identity if not consciousness (often at the price of suppressing difference). Local factories, common facilities and social services could count on widespread support if attacked. As society becomes more complex, individualistic and fragmented, the political cultures that once organized the interpretation of events decompose. Physical communities and the continuity of the workplace are dismembered by 'capital's orgies'. The need for communion with others finds other outlets (youth culture, football hysteria, identity politics, net-addiction, moral panics).
Neo-liberalism defeated the bastions of the union movement in the 1980s. There would now be limited leverage for the residual social blocks to negotiate with the state as their electoral power and strategic industrial importance declined. Corporatist demands benefitting narrow groups became easily cast as selfish and retrograde (or isolated and recuperated). Today such corporatism is impossible, doomed. The only way to reverse the balance of forces is to seek support, complicity, solidarity across all of social life.
(iv) Fightsharing: Creating Complicity(2)
"Strange faces can know as friends only by their deeds."
Any struggle with hopes of victory must find a language that can appeal beyond its own specificity, and tools of agitation that give the visibility necessary to connect to a diffuse, but autistic, social radicality. This means becoming both the pole of attraction for the 'scream' - the gesture of refusal - and source of provocations that illustrate that vulgarization of life under capital is not natural after all - there are choices.
At a moment where no political structure - unions, parties - constitutes a force capable of stemming the tide of wholesale privatization, the sharing of struggles relies increasingly upon communication to create common spaces virally. Several stories over the last year exemplify this practice.
(a) In summer 2003 transport workers in Dublin decided upon industrial action in response to a government plan to initiate privatization. Anticipating a hostile media reaction to a strike ("they are holding the public to ransom"), they simply declared that on the chosen day they would not charge passengers for using the service, but instead distribute information about the government's plan and its consequences for prices, service and working conditions. This successfully preempted the standard anti-striker hysteria and the action generated great public support (obviously!)
(b) Last autumn, workers in RAI News 24 in Rome decided to act against the failure to comply with limitations on the use of short-term contracts. Ten of the 70 workers had been in such precarious condition for many years. With the support of their colleagues - and even the channels' director - they seized control over the programming schedule. Rather than withdrawing their labour, they instead appropriated control over the broadcast apparatus and transmitted 24 hours of programming around the theme of precarity and the wretched conditions of the modern labour market.
(c) The struggle of intermittent workers of the french entertainment industry have been a vital reference point for many over the last year. In June 2003 an agreement signed between government, Unions and the employers confederation removed tens of thousands from a social security system originally designed to accommodate the sporadic and short-term nature of cultural labour.
Working by contact, there was no single site to denounce. So they embarked on an ongoing campaign of disruption. Targets are chosen for their function as public spectacles, symbolic effect and prestige. They have seized the stage of movie premieres, interrupted national television broadcasts of the news and popular music programs, intervened at the Georges Pompidou and blockaded the showpieces of french cultural from Avignon to Cannes. In each case they have sought to consolidate preexisting political discontent and collaborated with the unemployed, casualized and all those about to lose the minimal protections of a post-war social contract now in irrevocable decay. Constituencies that can easily identify with why one would occupy government buildings and blitz the employers' association MEDEF.
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Fragmentation and Communicability of Struggles
In each case the protagonists made their struggle communicable such that it dissolved the divide with the 'public'. Disruptive actions of this type reorganize the fault-lines of conflict; users and producers are shown to have shared interests against the state and a private sector dedicated to enclosure and the market. Media analysis and narrative sensibility(3) can help bridge the distance between singular situations and common interests, establishing space for dialogue and complicity.
Shared infrastructure and Reappropriation
Structures and tools enabling self-representation must be assembled. This means building a shared infrastructure as a common transmission mechanism, - bandwidth pooling, community wireless networks, RSS syndication - and providing a repository both for raw materials (movies, music) and 'finished works' (like New Global Vision). Such channels can allow collaboration without suppressing differences: one backbone, many applications; one platform, many voices. These projects converge with vital forms of wildcat reappropriation which themselves generate conflict. The fights over P2P today underline this today. Pay TV-hacking and shared broadband via wireless may repeat this tomorrow.
Tell me a Story__An Arsenal of Cultural Grammar
Rather than counter-information, we lack collective narratives that recreate a shared imagination of our condition both in resistance and in liberation - to reforge an interpretive community. This means jettisoning the activist fascination with simple images of conflict (fire! smoke! riot police!) and hijacking the icons and stories of popular culture - the Simpsons, the fairytale - for reengineering. Skills acquired in the symbolic and digital universes over the last thirty years need to be reterritorialized, sharpened, refashioned, made a threat on the street - tools for everyday 'reality hacking'. (4)
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(1) Although the counter-inquiry into the G8 in Genoa demonstrates that counter-info isn't finished yet. url for genoa campaign
http://italy.indymedia.org/controinchiesta.php
(2) See the two DVD's "P2P Fightsharing" published in conjunction with this issue and the previous edition, and their accompanying readers, available on the web at http://www.geneva03.net/moin.cgi/RomaMateriali. See in particular the editorial in number 2, "The media(n) subject".
(3) The reflections and provocations enacted and documented during the 1990s by the Luther Blissett project, Communications Guerrilla Manual and others remain a resource whose elaboration remains incomplete.
(4) The phrase is Reload's, http://reload.realityhacking.org/
Thanks to Joshua, Patrice Riemens and Blicero, P2P Fightsharing, Know Future, Boot Labbers + Incontrotempo for their comments and unwitting contributions.
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