Dark Matter Archives

34 Dark matterin great or immediate peril, those who for the moment find themselves in a lessprecarious life situation, understand that there is an unavoidable lesson in suchhorrors: raw and merciless is the fate awaiting those who fail, there is no one, noinstitution, no net to stop your fall. It is a decidedly powerful disciplinary warningthat the global media constantly reiterates, from Katrina to the Middle East, tothe next global catastrophe. Nevertheless, within this precarious new world, adelicate latticework of barely specifiable social being stirs, thriving it seems onits own insecurity.Zombie CultureLacking any distinct, political identity these bits and pieces of generalized dissentresist easy visualization, forming instead a murky submarine world of affects,ideas, histories, and technologies that shift in and out of visibility like a halfsubmergedreef. Post-’68 theorist Michel De Certeau compares the survival tacticsof this everyday dissident with the primordial “simulations, tricks, and disguisescertain fishes or plants execute.” 28 He insists this cryptic mimicry is an “art ofthe weak.” 29 As opposed to the committed radical of early decades who rejectedcapitalism tout court, De Certeau’s rebel consumer uses the power of the marketagainst itself. With the defeat of radical movements in the 1960s and 1970sbehind him, and the neoliberal dismantling of the social welfare state just aboutto fully commence, De Certeau’s Situationist-inspired emphasis on flexible tacticsprobably comes closest to grasping the outermost limits of political dissent at thestart of the 1980s, at least as this potential existed within Western, developednations. Nevertheless, this raises another seeming paradox: how is it that, in spiteof the ruined social landscape neoliberal globalization leaves behind, informalnon-parliamentary organizations seem today to be more, not less abundant? Thisbook applies that question to the area of the visual arts, but holds out the hopethat any serious investigation will also have implications for other areas of culturalresearch. For instance, one answer to how politics works in a privatized, precarioussociety dates from the early 1990s when a group of media activists grafted DeCerteau’s tenuous sedition onto the electronic flow of emerging communicationtechnologies. According to media activist Geert Lovink, De Certeau’s archaictrickster has been reanimated as Tactical Media (TM): “a short-term concept,aware of its temporality, born out of a disgust for ideology ... [TM] surfing onthe waves of events, enjoying the opening up of scenes and borders, on the lookout for new alliances.” 30 De Certeau’s “everyday” rebel had apparently gainedaccess to a sophisticated, digital expressivity thanks to the growing accessibilityof cellular and digital technologies. Patently anti-ideological and decentralizedto the point of sheer dispersal, the apparently indefinite politics of this “tacticalresistance” leads some theorists to conclude that an entirely new form of activism