[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> the language of tactical media

["Michael Benson" <michael.benson@pristop.si>]

Joanne:

Reading your text on tactical media reminds me of the experience of seeing a
group of Ljubljana skinheads aggressively singing the words to the Slovenian
national anthem the other day. One would think that the effect would be
nationalistic, which is what they intended, but the lyrics kept on tripping
them up -- only they themselves didn't know it. (The words call for equality
and peace among nations) So in the skinhead's case, there was a kind of
inadvertent monkeywrenching or Adbuster-style action, but one where the
subversion which crept into the mix was there to begin with: it was only the
context of the racist nationalists singing it that gave it a nice reversal
only apparent to an outside observer. And so what was meant to be menacing
was actually funny, its racist/nationalist delivery subverted not by its
subtext but by its text. It was the song that detourned the singers.

In your case, what was meant to read as incisive analysis, couched in a
hard-edged, dispassionate variant of the academese everyone's familiar with,
is a kind of fog concealing exactly what you inaccurately accuse Godard of:
it has "nothing to say" -- beyond its citations. If there's any kind of
revelation in this post it's in your uneasy fascination with Godard's film
about the Palestinian cause. (Right -- the same one I got to refamiliarize
myself with because you lent me a tape of it when you were in Ljubljana. For
the record.) "Here & Elsewhere" doesn't have nothing to say -- rather it's
the only film document I know of that accurately conveys the complexity of
the Palestinian/Israeli disaster, for which there are exactly no easy
answers, and maybe no answers at all. But when I accuse you of having
nothing to say it's also not quite right, because there's something
fascinating about the coexistence of your ambivalent observations about his
film with your other observations, all of which lead to a conclusion in
which fellow travelers are advised to drop the metaphors of warfare,
something (we're told) that's not a cop-out but instead shows "the vigilance
of continuing to think, beyond the obvious..." Are we beyond the obvious
here? Didn't "Here & Elsewhere" already signpost an alternative to what you
call the apocalyptic vs. utopian "sense" of the media, 30 years ago? Isn't
that, more than approximately, the very voice of Godard's film I detect,
rising like a stale but at least believable truth in your conclusion? I
detect "nothing to say" in your post beyond what you inherited from those
you'd accuse of the same.

Regards, MB


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