[lbo-talk] Jacobin Blog: Tactical Media, A-L's 1/2 Wit Step-Parent

dndlllio at aol.com dndlllio at aol.com
Sun Oct 2 16:49:23 PDT 2011


The Jacobin article repeats, with less overall engagement, older criticisms of tactical media found here:

http://five.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-029-dawn-of-the-organised-networks/

On 10/2/11 3:13 PM, Charles Turner wrote:
> <http://jacobinmag.com/blog/?p=1701#more-1701>
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> Don't know why I always think to respond to the Jacobin Blog posts here at LBO-talk; not even sure that Cyrus Lewis is a list member. In any event, there seems to be an issue with the Disqus.com comments feature there for the last few days (Mr. Sunkara?)
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> My takeaway from reading this post is that it's an attempt to relate a set of operational beliefs (Anarcho-liberalism: AL), to a manifestation of culture (Tactical Media: TM). I'd expect you could even say that Tactical Media quite often shows itself as a "thing," that what we derive from Tactical Media often comes from the specific configuration of an object. Also, "Tactical Media" is a broad category, embracing (as the post points out) the quite different world views of _Mondo 2000_ (which I might categorize as Extropian), Adbusters (which always makes me think of Ralph Nader) and the Critical Art Ensemble (which went unmentioned in the post):
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> <http://www.critical-art.net/TacticalMedia.html>
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> To establish the relation between AL and TM, Lewis seems to avoid dealing with the tricky issues of objecthood and culture by making an appeal to Certeau's _Practice of Everyday Life_ as a sort of "TM handbook." With that move, TM acquires a set of operational beliefs, and can enter into some sort of comparison with AL, for better or worse.
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> This all seems a little quick for my taste. Culture's relationship to ideology and political economy seems to me far from clear, and the added difficulty of interpreting cultural objects to establish any connection seems doubly hard. I'm left with the impression that Lewis wants a TM billboard, performance, or packaged CD to have unambiguous meaning regardless of the culture in which these works find themselves.
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> As an illustration, take for example the Soviet artists El Lissitsky and Kasimir Malevich, and the "utopian" (for lack of a better word) Dutch artists Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian. There's considerable formal similarity between Lissitsky and van Doesburg, and between Malevich and Mondrian, who were all rough contemporaries. But what formal properties of any of these artists' work can be categorized as unambiguously "socialist" or "utopian"? I think the task is very difficult.
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> Of course it's possible to say that Lissitsky and Malevich weren't socialist artists, which leads the way to arguments supporting socialist realism. Barring that argument, I'd go so far to say that had Mondrian and van Doesburg been working in Russia, we'd today consider their art as soviet as Malevich's and Lissitsky's. So I'd argue that cultural objects and cultural forms are often quite dependent on the society in which they're made, and that similar forms can have different meanings in those societal contexts. The existing products of Tactical Media then, might have very different meanings under actually-existing socialism, or in a revolutionary epoch, than they have had in our neoliberal society.
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> The prefect demonstration of this contextuality might be synchronic comparisons of the form and contents of graffiti in various countries. Although executed by persons from widely different class backgrounds and national histories, I'd wager that we'd find far less divergence in both form and content of their respective graffitis. One might even make the argument that Tactical Media is simply the overwrought graffiti of highly-educated knowledge workers.
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> I like Lewis' perspective on Tactical Media. I think Brian Holmes shouldn't be the only "Left critique" of Tactical Media we have. But without sharper detail, Lewis' critique sounds like a scolding. As Lewis remarks, these TM practitioners wanted "nothing of the bulky, party-based structures of the old left." But as I remember, the Left parties of the early 1980s had not much to offer beyond socialist realism, so if you didn't want to make posters of Cambodian peasants, you had to look elsewhere. So perhaps there was as much stick as carrot in the development of Tactical Media? Certainly there should be socialist realism, but it doesn't have to be the only idea of culture. Certainly Tactical Media is an educated white-guy obsession, but are those tactics without value on the road to Communism?
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> Best wishes, Charles
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