[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.’
>> _______________________________________________
>> List mailing list
>> List at movingforest.net
>> http://lists.movingforest.net/mailman/listinfo/list
>>
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> List mailing list
> List at movingforest.net
> http://lists.movingforest.net/mailman/listinfo/list
>