[microsound] (no subject)

[Stephen Hastings-King]

what i took from the clark/nicholson-smith piece as a more generally
important statement---which conditions the repackaging of debord et al into
a kind of situationism-lite--is the disastrous consequences of the
appropriation of the history of the left--and the french left in
particular--by that strange cluster of "theory" based university programs,
which have reduced its history to a set of background memes against which
the normal science of close readings could be positioned in order to make
them appear as something they fundamentally are not---radical political
actions.

this is symptomatic of a more general shearing off of the history of the
left.  if you want a nice, 3-hour confrontation with the degree to which
this shearing-off has happened, try to find chris marker's film "le fond de
l'air est rouge" and watch it.  where did that history go?  what happened to
it?  how did it get erased?  behind that, another erasure--of groups like
socialisme ou barbarie behind the rise of the new left.  i spent way too
long working on the history of s ou b and ran into exactly the limits clark
and nicholson-smith are talking about, (which are purely sociological
matters.)

you can't really think in terms of radical politics unless you know the
past, even though at this point knowing the tradition functions mostly to
situate arguments for closure (in a decon sense)...

btw i think the art/politics thing is obviously a false choice.  early on,
the simple fact of the matter is that debord had a trust fund and was
interested in layout and intermedia experiments and so had both the interest
and the means to combine the two.  most of the other, smaller left
organizations of the time were using mimeograph machines to copy typescripts
for tracts and such, and defaulted into relatively traditional looks for
their more polished outputs--socialisme ou barbarie is probably the most
important radical political journal to have happened since world war 2, but
it's nothing particularly interesting as an object to look at.   the
situationist journal was quite otherwise, and that attention to look was as
important as what the situ were saying in many cases in attracting folk to
them.  when i interviewed many of the old barbares, particularly among the
folk who came into the group after 1956 and who were involved with debord et
al, the importance of this was pointed out to me again and again.

a newer radical politics should have a new look, but one that extends to the
organization of information itself, which is performed via layout.

=================

>
>
> but in any case the idea of culture-jamming has been raised here in
> the past
> witness the microsound drop-lifting project
> maybe time to dust it off and infuse it with some new ideas?
>


during the revolt/"riots" in greece a few weeks ago, a group of students
took over an athens television station for a short time.  they held up signs
that said things like "stop watching and go out onto the streets".

this made me wonder how plausible it would be to jam television network
satellite feeds by superimposing occaisonal unauthorized streams of
images/audio....i have no idea about what this might require, but it amuses
me to think that it's possible-----and what it might mean to simply disrupt
the top-down structure of the main ideological relay system from time to
time.

just a thought.

stephen

stephen
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