<nettime> What about Communication Guerrilla?

["autonome a.f.r.i.k.a.-gruppe" <afrika@contrast.org>]

autonome a.f.r.i.k.a.-gruppe, Luther Blissettt and Sonja Bruenzels

What about Communication Guerrilla?

A message about guerilla communication out of the deeper german backwoods
Version 2.0

(all rights dispersed)

[Keywords: Guerilla communication - Counter-Information - Nethype -
Outdated media]

This message is directed to those who are fed up with repressive politics
at their doorsteps, who are not frustrated enough to give up a critical
position and a perspective of political intervention, and who also refuse
to believe that radical politics need to be straight, mostly boring and
always very very serious. It also addresses those who are interested in
artistic expression, using all kinds of materials and techniques such as
wallpainting, woodcarving or the internet to bend the rules of normality. 

It is sent by some provincial communication guerrillas as an invitation to
participate, criticise, renew and develop a way of doing politics which
expresses the bloody seriousness of reality in a form that doesn't send
the more hedonistic parts of ourselves immediately to sleep. Of course,
this is a contradiction in itself: How can you be witty in a situation of
increasing racism, state-control and decline of the welfare state, to name
only a few. On the other hand, even Karl Marx didn't postulate boredom as
revolutionary. 

The starting point for our reflections around guerrilla communication was
a trivial insight from our own politics: information and political
education are completely useless if nobody is interested. After years of
distributing leaflets and brochures about all kinds of disgraces, of
organising informative talks and publishing texts, we have come to
question the common radical belief in the strength and glory of
information. Does it really make sense to take on the attitude of a
primary school-teacher while the kids have become skinheads, slackers or
joined the rat race? 

Traditional radical politics strongly rely on the persuasive power of the
rational argument. The confidence that the simple presentation of
information represents an effective form of political action is almost
unshakeable. Critical content and the unimpeded spread of 'truth' are
supposed to be sufficient to tear up the network of manipulating messages,
with which the media influence the consciousness of the masses. Well,
since the declaration of Postmodernism it has become a bit involved to
insist on The One And Only Truth. But the main problem with traditional
concepts of radical political communication is the acceptance of the idea:
'whomsoever possesses the senders can control the thoughts of humans'.
This hypothesis comes from a very simple communication model which only
focuses on the 'sender' (in case of mass communication usually centrally
and industrially organised), the 'channel' which transports the
information, and the 'receiver'. The euphoria around information society
as well as its pessimistic opposition - which worries about information
overkill - do not face the crucial problem of citizens' representational
democracies: facts and information, even if they become commonplace, do
not trigger any consequences. Face it, even if stories of disasters,
injustice, social and ecological scandals are being published, it has
almost no consequences. 

Everybody knows that the Ozone belt is fading away. Everybody knows that
the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer... . To us,
who believe in Communism, it is hard to understand why such knowledge
doesn't lead to revolution and fundamental change - but it definitely
doesn't ;-) 

Reflections on the interrelations between the reception of information,
knowledge and the options to act within a social context have tackled how
information becomes meaningful and how it then becomes socially relevant. 
Information by itself has neither meaning nor consequences - both are
created only through the active reception and through the scope of action
of the audience. But this basic banality has far too rarely been taken
into consideration within the framework of radical politics. 

Guerrilla communication doesn't focus on arguments and facts like most
leaflets, brochures, slogans or banners. In it's own way, it inhabits a
militant political position, it is direct action in the space of social
communication. But different from other militant positions (stone meets
shop window), it doesn't aim to destroy the codes and signs of power and
control, but to distort and disfigure their meanings as a means of
counteracting the omnipotent prattling of power. Communication guerrillas
do not intend to occupy, interrupt or destroy the dominant channels of
communication, but to detourn and subvert the messages transported. 

But what's new about all this? After all, there have been the Berlin
Dadaists, the Italian Indiani Metropolitani, the Situationists. The roots
of Communication Guerrilla can be traced back to legendary characters like
the Hapsburgian soldier Svejk and Till Eulenspiegel, the wise fool.
Walking in the footsteps of the avantgardes of earlier times, we do not
attempt to boast about the invention of a new politics or the foundation
of a new movement. Rather, guerrilla communication is an incessant
exploration of the jungle of communication processes, of the devoured and
unclear paths of senders, codes and recipients. The method of this
exploration is to look not just at what's being said, but to focus on how
it is being said. The aim is a practical, material critique of the very
structures of communication as bases of power and rule. 

The bourgeois system takes it's strength - beyond other things - from the
ability to include critique. A government needs an opposition, every
opinion needs to be balanced with another one, the concept of
representative democracy relies on the fiction of equal exchange. Every
criticism which doesn't fundamentally shatter the legitimacy of the ruling
system, tends to become part of it. Guerilla communication is an attempt
to intervene without getting absorbed by the dominant discourse. We are
looking for ways to get involved in situations and at the same time to
refuse any constructive participation. 

Power relations have a tendency to appear normal, even natural and
certainly inevitable. They are inscribed into the rules of everyday life. 
Communication guerrillas want to create those short and shimmering moments
of confusion and distortion, moments that tell us that everything could be
completely different: a fragmented utopia as a seed of change. Against a
symbolic order of western capitalist societies which is built around
discourses of rationality and rational conduct, guerrilla communication
relies on the powerful possibility of expressing a fundamental critique
through the non-verbal, paradoxical, mythical. 

To be quite clear: guerrilla communication isn't meant to replace a
rational critique of dominant politics and hegemonic culture. It doesn't
substitute counter-information, but creates additional possibilities for
intervention. But also, it shouldn't be misunderstood as the topping on
the cake, a mere addition to the hard work of 'real' politics and direct,
material action. 

In its search for seeds of subversion, guerrilla communication tries to
take up contradictions which are hidden in seemingly normal, everyday
situations. It attempts to distort normality by addressing those unspoken
desires that are usually silenced by omnipresent rules of conduct, rules
that define the socially acceptable modes of behaviour as well as the
'normal' ways of communication and interpretation. To give just a simple
example: Most people will say that it is not okay to dodge paying the
fare, even if there is a widespread feeling that public transport is
over-expensive. If, however, some communication guerrillas at the occasion
of an important public event like the funeral of Lady Di manage to
distribute fake announcements announcing that for the purpose of
participating, public transport will be free, the possibility of reducing
today's expenses may tempt even those who doubt the authenticity of the
announcement. 

Communication guerrillas attack the power-relations that are inscribed
into the social organisation of space and time, into rules and manners,
into the order of public conduct and discourse. Everywhere in this
'Cultural Grammar' of a society there are legitimations and
naturalisations of economic, political and cultural power and inequality.
Communication guerrillas use the knowledge of 'Cultural Grammar'
accessible to everybody in order to cause irritations by distorting the
rules of normality: It is precisely this kind of irritations that put into
question seemingly natural aspects of social life by making the hidden
power relations visible and offering the possibility to deconstruct them.
Using a term coined by Pierre Bourdieu, one might say that guerrilla
communication aims at a temporary expropriation of Cultural Capital, at a
disturbance of the symbolic economy of social relations. 


Go Internet, experience the Future!  Many communication guerrillas feel
strange affection towards living in the backwoods of late capitalist
society. In the field of communication, this causes an inclination towards
the use and abuse of Outdated Media, such as billboards, printed books and
newspapers, face-to-face, messages-in-a-bottle, official announcements,
etc. (Even the fabulous Hakim Bey has recently advocated the use of
Outdated Media as media of subversion: Hakim Bey, Outdated Media, In:
Running Idle, New York 1995 (?).  Unfortunately, there is no German
translation yet, while the English original is difficult to get. As
reference, we have only an Italian edition: A Ruota Libera, Castelvecchi,
Rome 1996.) Thus it is hardly astonishing that communication guerrillas
are sceptical towards the many hypes in and around the internet. 

Of course, we appreciate ideas like the absolute absence of state control,
no-copyright, the free production of ideas and goods, the free flow of
information and people across all borders, as they have ben expressed by
the Californian net-ideology of freedom-and-adventure: Liberalism leading
us directly into hyperspace. But we also know that real neo-liberalism is
not exactly like this, but rather: freedom for the markets, control for
the rest. It has become obvious that also the internet is no virtual space
of freedom beyond state and corporate control. We are afraid that the
still existing opportunities of free interchange, the lines of information
transmission beyond police control, and the corners of the Net which are
governed by potlach economy and not by commercialism, will fade away. The
aesthetics of the internet will not be dictated by cyberpunks but by
corporate self-presentation with a background of myriads of middle-class
wankers exhibiting on corporate-sponsored homepages their
home-sweet-homes, their sweet-little-darlings and garden gnomes. 

The structures and problems of communication in the Net do not differ
fundamentally from those encountered elsewhere, at least not as much as
the Net hype wants to make believe. A product of Net thought like Michael
Halberstedt's "Economy of Attention" starts out from a quite trivial
point:  The potential recipients are free to filter and discard messages.
(They may do even much more with them!). And they do this not mainly
according to content, but using criteria which may be conceived in terms
of Cultural Grammar and Cultural Capital. This is completely evident to
anybody (except SWP militants) who has ever distributed leaflets to people
in the street  though media hacks seem to have discovered this fact only
since the Net offers everybody the possibility to widely distribute all
kinds of information. In simple words: the basic problems of communication
are just the same on both sides of the electronic frontier. 

Focusing on the influence of the social and cultural settings on the
communication process, communication guerrillas are sceptical towards
versions of Net politics and Net criticism which hold an uncritical belief
in the strength and glory of information. 'Access for all', 'Bandwidth for
all': these are legitimate demands if the Net is to be more than an
elitist playground of the middle classes. In the future, access to
adequate means of communication may even become a vital necessity of
everyday life. But information and communication are not ends in
themselves; first of all, they constitute an increasingly important
terrain of social, political and cultural struggle. Inside and outside the
Net, communication guerrillas seek to attack power relations inscribed
into the structure of communication processes. In the dawn of
informational capitalism, such attacks become more than just a method,
more than merely a technology of political activism: When informations
become commodities and Cultural Capital a most important asset, the
distortion and devaluation of both is a direct attack against the
capitalist system. Say it the swanky way: This is Class War. 

Increasing attempts to police the net, to establish state and corporate
control will, paradoxically, increase its attractivity as a field of
operation of communication guerrillas: Possibly, even those of us who
until now not even own a PC will get Wired then. Fakes and false rumours
inside and outside the Net may help to counteract commodification and
state control - after all, the internet is an ideal area for producing
rumours and fakes. And, of course, where technological knowledge is
available there are innumerable opportunities to fake or hijack domains
and homepages, to spoil and distort the flux of information. Guerrilla
communication relies upon the hypertextual nature of communication
processes. (Also a newspaper or a traffic sign has plenty of cross-links
to other fragments of 'social text'; a medium transporting plain text and
nothing else cannot exist.)  Communication guerrillas consciously distort
such cross-links with the aim of re-contextualising, criticizing or
disfiguring the original messages. In the Net, hypertextual aspects of
communication have for the first time come to the foreground, and the Net
hypertext offers fascinating possibilities for all kinds of pranks.
(Imagine a Hacker leaving on a homepage of, say, the CIA not a blunt
'Central Stupidity Agency ' (see http://www.2600.com/cia/p_2.html) but
simply modifying some of the links while leaving everything else as
before. There are terrible things one could do in this manner...) 

But the fascination of those possibilities should not lead to a
technocentric narrowing of the field of vision. The mythical figure of the
Hacker represents a guerrilla directed towards the manipulation of
technology - but to which end? The Hacker gets temporary control of a line
of communication - but most hackers are mainly interested in leaving Web
Graffitti or simply 'doing it' (see the Hacker Museum,
http://www.2600.com). Others, however, rediscover guerrilla communication
practices of the ancient: Recently in: <nettime> net-artist Heath Bunting
slated himself in a fake review (Heath Bunting: Wired or Tired? 
http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/), thus re-inventing a method which already
Marx and Engels had used when they faked damning reviews by first-rank
economists to draw attention on 'The Capital'. 

Communication Guerrillas are fascinated by possibilities offered by the
internet also in a quite diferent sense: Beyond its reality, THE NET is an
urban myth, and perhaps the strongest and most vital of all. Social
discourse conceives THE NET as the location where the people, the
pleasures, the sex and the crimes of tomorrow already take place. Go
Internet, learn the Future! Fears and desires are projected onto THE NET: 
this is the mythical place where we can see the future of our society.. 
Paradoxically, the gift of prophecy attributed to the net gives
credibility to any informations circulated there. The "real world"
believes in them because they come from the realm of virtuality, and not
in spite of this. 

In the German backwoods, there has been a long-lasting game called The
Invention of CHAOS Days. It was, in fact, rather simple: Someone put a
note in the Net telling that, on day D, all the punks of Germany would
unite in the town of XY to transform it into a heap of rubble. The
announcement was made, a few leaflets (let's say a dozen) were distributed
to the usual suspects. That very day, processions of media hacks of all
kinds encountered hosts of riot squads from all over Germany on their way
to XY:  Once again the forces of public order were on their way to protect
our civilisation against the powers of the dark. The most astonishing
about this little game is that it worked several times: Obviously for the
guardians of public order and public discourse THE NET is a source of
secret knowledge too fascinating to be ignored. 

We do not mention in detail the innumerable occasions when journalists,
state officials, secret services etc. were taken in by false rumours
circulating in the net - for example, the major german press agency dpa
who fell for the homepage of a fake corporation offering human clones,
including replicas of Claudia Schiffer and Sylvester Stallone. Also this
effect can be reproduced: the next time it was the prank about
'ourfirsttime.com' (http://www.ourfirsttime.com). There is little danger
that media hacks will learn. 

The net is a nice playground for Communication Guerrillas. But we, out
there in the backwoods, are telling those living in the netscapes of
electronic communication: don't forget to walk and talk your way through
the jungle of the streets, to visit the devastated landscapes of outdated
media, to see and feel the space and the power and the rule of capitalism. 
Such that you shall never forget what the hell all prankstering is good
for. 

---------------------------------------------------------------------- PS. 

Take a look on the website of the autonomous a.f.r.i.k.a.-group, where you
can find also the Archive of guerrilla communication (there are also some
texts in English and Dutch). If you want to participate in the building of
the archive, send your stories and examples or your reflections to: 
afrika@contrast.org

More in german about Communication Guerilla:  autonome
a.f.r.i.k.a.-gruppe/Luther Blissett/Sonja Bruenzels:  Handbuch der
Kommunikationsguerilla.  ISBN 3-922611-64-8 Verlag Libertaere
Assoziation/Verlag der Buchlaeden appr. 240 pages, DM 29,80,-/sFr
27,50/219OeS

************************************************************************
"Ist die beste Subversion nicht die, die Codes zu entstellen, statt sie zu
zerstoeren?" (Roland Barthes u.a. im Handbuch der Kommunikationsguerilla) 

contact autonome a.f.r.i.k.a.-gruppe:
					afrika@contrast.org				
					http://www.contrast.org/KG


---
#  distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: majordomo@desk.nl and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
#  URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/  contact: nettime-owner@desk.nl