[mf2012] building towards a network insurgency

[josie at metamute.net]

Dear Rachel and Shu Lea

Probably every line of this nugget has something that intrigues, troubles
and incites me. In fact, just reading it, I start feeling activated and
terroristic! It's like a self-extracting time-capsule lobbed into the
future, waiting for the temperature to rise just enough so it can be
activated, like the tick that can wait 20 years in the grass, waiting only
for a certain chemical whiff and blood-temperature to wake it up. The
guerrilla ticks of time.

In this sense, Rays of Sun is itself an instance of what Curcio and
Franceschini are talking about. The communicating vessel that moves in and
out of visibility. It grows louder in the ears, mouths and actions of its
readers, then it gets lost again. It gets translated out of the Italian,
and brought back to life because Tiqqun want to reanimate the ghosts of
'autonomy' in a different moment of social war. The 'failed' guerilla
party, and Autonomia, get thrown into the era of full-blown neoliberalism,
when all its desire to get free, to de-subjectify from the tango between
liberal capitalism and the workers' movement, have also become the
classless, flexibilised landscape of our subjection. Neoliberalism and the
70s radical left agree, as Michel Feher says, that the 'personal is
political', that the production of the self is a social production, but to
completely different ends. Neoliberalism wants to 'help us help
ourselves', nudge us towards self-optimisation and the acquisition of
competences, and the guerrilla party wants us to recognise the production
and reproduction of ourselves as the effect of social normalisation which
make the 'abilities-machines' that will produce its market vibrancy with
all our self-interested calculating.

The problem for neoliberalism is that it's been too successful - it's
stamped out the nonmarket spaces, soaked up our spare time into
consumption, and choked off the social solidarity, charity, love, whatever
that once helped bind the ragged stumps of social existence back together
so that we could make it back to work the next day or the next generation
could, in a fit state to start again. Now it wants our sympathy, and we
should be Big about it, and be a Society, despite what Thatcher said. But
it's unitised the fuck out of everything - space/time/self. It's created a
psychic schizophrenia for everyone, just as for us looking for
transgressive, guerilla communication, network insurgency, as for the same
us in our other lives, looking to get some advantage at work so our wedge
grows bigger, working with interns, or in an office which - as we read
today in Gulag GB, may be being cleaned by unpaid benefits recipients
compelled to do workfare!

So, although I am trying to think concretely about networked insurgency
and communications technologies, I think it's good to take a bit of time
to think about the civil war that's in our heads. Does this mean our
transmissions will drift and ghost out into utilitarian calculation and
human self-capitalisation? Of course! And maybe we should work with that.
I need to think this all over some more, but I like process like you
Rachel, and also think the olympian citadel makes for a great target,
logic and stage. Do we want to create a guerilla counter-games, a
transgressive communications triathlon, an energy expenditure spree of
olympian pointlessness, a relay race of relentless transmissions of
subversive messaging, maps of the olympic Lager? Anti-citizenship tests?

Brain-battery running on low capacity - need to watch some TV, intake a
nutrition packet, rest fingers and bones to fight another day. Konk.

x j


> 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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