Helge Peters on Tue, 21 Jun 2011 19:04:50 +0200 (CEST)


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Re: <nettime> The Tactics of Camping


Dear Eric,

thank you for your text, it's a fascinating read and I especially enjoyed remembering the Strasbourg camp.

Just some thoughts of mine. Writing about Syria, you state that

"Visibility here means not just empowerment, but also vulnerability, becoming a discrete, identified, and localised target."

But isn't this also true in Europe? Isn't the problem you describe here relevant to almost all media activism, or mediatized activism for that matter?

I believe it was Knowbotic Research who recently said that today visibility increasingly means administrative availability. Increasing the visibility of a given cause and the people associated with it feeds back into the cybernetic loop that allows the governmental machine to identify, classify and react accordingly in order to perpetuate itself, be it with soft or hard power. I think that this is also the problem that Tiqqun tentatively tried to address with their concept of zones of offensive opacity and that Deleuze talked about in an interview with Toni Negri roughly two decades ago, where he wondered if resistance today might have to take the form of creating vacuoles of non-communication.

In other words, what happens now between the people in the camps in Spain and Greece, their experimenting with alternative social relations, their unlearning of representative politics through slow and painful discussion facilitation processes, might just be more important than what happens on the net, or even the public statements that will inevitably come out of this. At least if one is interested not in the next hectic mobilization for this or that cause, but in the long term goal of envisioning a world beyond Empire. This may sound a bit luddite-ish, but in an age of ubiquitous media apparatuses we might as well have to learn how to tactically abandon them. Not just in oppressive regimes, but everywhere.

Also, my first post on nettime. Hi all!

Helge


Am 20.06.2011 um 16:09 schrieb Eric Kluitenberg:

dear nettimers,

I just posted this short text on the newTactical Media Files blog, a > first attempt to reflect on the remarkable street protests (the 'movement of the squares') from Tahrir to Puerta del Sol, from Tunis > to Athens and beyond. It seems slowly possible to start taking this > discussion a bit further than the necessary mobilisation statements > witnessed so far.
<...>


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