Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

Weld of possibility, where artists, alongside other social groups, can regain
the use of political freedom.
A few questions, to close. Can the tactics of the early counterglobalization
movements be thoroughly discredited and repressed by the
abusive equation of direct-action practices and terrorism? This has been
attempted, in both the United States and Europe; but the repression itself
has made the fundamentally political nature of the informational economy
crystal clear; and the outcome may still depend on the ability to combine
the communicative value of humor, invention, and surprise with the force
of ethical conviction that comes from putting one’s body on the line. Can the
Internet be normalized, to become a consumer marketplace and a medium
of passive reception or carefully channeled “interactivity”? It’s an important
public space to protect, through unbridled use and free exchange as well as
better legislation; and the chances for entirely muzzling it, and thereby totally
voiding the First Amendment and similar constitutional rights to free expression,
look relatively slim. Do events like the Mayday parades, with their
focus on urban living and working conditions, represent a fallback from
the early ambitions of the counterglobalization protests—a retreat from the
utopias of do-it-yourself geopolitics? The fundamental issue seems to be Wnding
concrete political demands that don’t block the transversal movement
of struggles across an unevenly developed world. The work of cartography,
on both the spatial and subjective levels, may contribute to a continuing
extension of the new experiential territories, in search of a deeper and broader
process of resymbolization and political recomposition, able to link the scattered
actors and construct the situations of social change. It’s hard to think
there could be any other meaning to the word “collectivism.”
NOTES
Do-It-Yourself Geopolitics 291
1. From a cover of the early punk fanzine SnifWn’ Glue (1976–77), reissued in the
anthology edited by Mark Perry, SnifWn’ Glue: The Essential Punk Accessory (London:
Sanctuary Publishing, 2000).
2. From “DeWnitions,” by the Situationist International (1958), available online
at Ken Knabb’s excellent Bureau of Public Secrets Web site: http://www.bopsecrets.
org/SI/1.deWnitions.htm; translation slightly modiWed.
3. See Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).
4. On punk appropriation politics, see Dan Graham, “Punk as Propaganda,” in
Rock My Religion (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 96–113.
5. For the Art Strike and Plagiarist movements, see the books and sites by Stewart
Home, particularly Neoism, Plagiarism & Praxis (Edinburgh: AK Press, 1995) and
Mind Invaders (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1997). For the Luther Blissett Project, see
http://www.lutherblissett.net, or a collectively written novel like Q (Arrow, 2004).