[mf2012] building towards a network insurgency

[rachelbaker at irational.org]

Dear Josie

Thankyou so much for this Tiqqun nugget, it definitely tickled me and
resonates with my own incentives to join the Moving Forest and underlines
some key principles that I find important:-

1. 'developing a transgressive social communication as a way to create an
invisible, becoming progressively visible, revolt'.
This suggests an ongoing process and for me the process is generally more
interesting then the end product, especially if the end product is more
spectacle. I hope the project expands, generating workshops, discussion
groups, experiments and explorations of network forest insurgency with all
the rich, underlying (Shakespearean) themes, metaphors and motifs this
forest comes from and which are available to us. What lines of
arrow-flight to people want to follow?

2. 'the networks and circuits that transmit the sanctioned hallucination'
The uber spectre/castle in the city of spectres/castles is ofcourse the
Olympics and an attempt at creating a Macbethian counter-narrative to this
sanctioned hallucination and its associated speech acts is something I am
interested to encourage, through a multiplicity of channels, either
constructed or parasited

3. 'semiotic bombardment that sustains the scraps of official ideology'
To an extent 2 dimensional inscriptions such as graffiti have lost their
semiotic potency – I think transmission, audio, movement and 3d structures
still remain unsaturated as languages to hand. Certainly as Olympian
semiotic bombardment increases and the structural fortifications for
shopping and surveillance are in place it invites uncanny, poetic and
antagonistic acts of communication and these could be conjured quite
easily from all sorts of different, surprising places.


4. 'the computerized metropolis appears as a vast, barely disguised penal
colony the schema of a predictable universe'
Question: Can we move beyond mapped representations of the City as CPU and
'take to the stage to wreck the fetishistic performance' in an
'unauthorised, illegitimate production'?


Rachel



> 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.’
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