[mf2012] building towards a network insurgency

[Josephine Berry Slater]

Hi Shu Lea and Forest Movers,

On the question of building towards a network insurgency.... the 
following extract from 2 Red Brigade splitters is really interesting. I 
picked this up in Tiqqun's This is Not a Program which you can download 
from the web.  The text is from Renato Curcio and Alberto Franceschini’s 
‘Drops of Sun in the City of Specters’, written in the early 80s. They 
seem not only to have fully clocked the securitization of the cybernetic 
city (obviously because they were classed as terrorists themselves), but 
also the capture of communication, its paradoxical splitting from 
speech. They talk about developing a transgressive social communication 
as a way to create an invisible, becoming progressively visible, revolt. 
Anyhow, thought it might tickle something.

x Josie


Tiqqun introduce the excerpt:

‘But we owe the most decisive contribution to the theory of the 
Imaginary Party neither to a French writer nor to a French philosopher 
but rather to the militants of the Red Brigades Renato Curcio and
Alberto Franceschini. In 1982, in a supplement to Corrispondenza 
internazionale, the little volume Gocce di sole nelle cita degli spettri 
[Drops of sun in the city of specters] was published. As disagreements 
between Moretti's Red Brigades and their then-imprisoned "historical 
bosses" turned to open war, Curcio and Franceschini drew up the program 
of the short-lived Guerrilla Party, the third offshoot of the BR to form 
following its implosion, alongside the Walter Alasia Column and the 
BR-Combatant Communist Party. In the wake of the Movement of '77, 
remarking how much they were spoken about in the conventional Third 
International rhetoric of the revolution, they broke with the classical 
paradigm of production, taking the latter out of the factory and 
extending it to the Total Factory of the metropolis where semi­otic 
production, that is, a linguistic paradigm of production, prevailed.

Quote from Drops of Sunshine:

"Rethought as a totalizing system (differentiated into private, 
interdependent, functional subsystems or fields of autonomous 
decision-making and auto-regulating capacity) , that is, as a 
modular-corporate system, the computerized metropolis appears as a vast, 
barely disguised penal colony, in which each social system, just as each 
individual moves in passageways strictly differentiated and regulated by 
the whole. A penal colony made transparent by the computer networks that 
keep it under constant surveillance. In this model, metropolitan social 
space-time mimics the schema of a predictable universe in precarious 
equilibrium, unbothered by its forced tranquility, subdivided into 
modular compartments inside of which each worker labors, encapsulated 
within a specific collective role-like a goldfish in a bowl. A universe 
regulated by apparatuses of selective retroaction dedicated to the 
neutralization of all disruptions to the programs system established by 
the executive. [ ...] Given the absurd and unsustainable communication 
in which everyone is inevitably caught, as if ensnared by the 
paradoxical injunction-that in order to 'speak' one must give up 
'communicating,' that to 'communicate' one must give up speaking!- it 
isn't surprising that antagonistic communication strategies emerge which 
refuse the authorized language of power; it isn't surprising that the 
significations produced through domination are rejected and countered 
with new decentralized productions. Unauthorized, illegitimate 
productions, but organically connected to life, and which consequently 
constellate and constitute the secret underground network of resistance 
and self-defense against the computerized aggression of the insane 
idioms of the state. [ . ] Therein lies the main barrier separating 
social revolution from its enemies: the former takes in isolated 
resisters and schizo-metropolitan flows to a communicational territory 
antagonistic to that which led to their devastation and revolt. [ ...] 
In the ideology of control, an at-risk dividual is already synonymous 
with a 'potential terrorist madman,' with a fragment of high-explosive 
social material. That is why these dividuals are tracked down, spied on, 
and followed with the discretion and tireless rigor of the hunter by the 
great eye and the great ear. For the same reason they are made the 
target of an intense, intimidating semiotic bombardment that sustains 
the scraps of official ideology. [ . . ] This is how the metropolis 
achieves its specificity as a concentration camp which, in order to 
deflect the incessant social antagonism it generates, Simultaneously 
integrates and manipulates the artifices of seduction and fantasies of 
fear. Artifices and fantasies that assume the central function of the 
nervous system of the dominant culture and reconfigure the metropolis 
into an immense psychiatric total institution - a labyrinthine network 
of High Security Quarters, areas of continuous control, loony bins, 
prisoner containers, reserves for volunteer metropolitan slaves, 
bunkered zones for demented fetishes. [. . ] In the metropolis, 
perpetrating violence against the necrotropic fetishes of Capital is 
humanity's greatest possible conscious act because it is through this 
social practice that the proletariat constructs--by appropriating the 
vital productive process - its knowledge and its memory, that is, its 
social power. Destroying the old world through revolutionary 
transgression and bringing forth from this destruction the surprising 
and multiple constellations of new social relations are simultaneous 
processes that ate nonetheless of two distinct kinds. [ . ] Those 
responsible for creating the imaginary world prohibit themselves from 
communicating real life, turning real life into madness; they fabricate 
angels of seduction and little monsters of fear in order to display them 
to the miserable rabble through the networks and circuits that transmit 
the sanctioned hallucination. [ . .] To rise up from the ' registered 
location,' to take to the stage to wreck the fetishistic performance: 
that is what the metropolitan guerrillas of new communication have set 
out to do from the start. [ . . ] Within the complex metropolitan 
revolutionary Lager - the most total Program process, the party cannot 
have an exclusively or eminently political form. [ . ] Nor can the party 
take on an exclusively combative form. The 'power of arms' does not 
imply, as the militarists believe, absolute power, because absolute 
power is the power-knowledge that reunifies social practices. […] A 
guerilla party means: the party of power/party of knowledge. The 
guerrilla party is the agent through which proletarian knowledge-power 
achieves its maximum exteriorization and invisibility. […] This means 
that the greater the party's invisibility, the more it opposes global 
imperialist counterrevolution, the greater its visibility, the more it 
becomes an internal part of the proletariat, that is to say, the more it 
communicates with the proletariat. […] In this way, the guerrilla party 
is the [. . .] party of transgressive social communication.’