Re: <nettime> The Tactics of Camping

[Helge Peters <helge@udk-berlin.de>]

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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