culture, subculture and counterculture - Facultatea de Litere

FREDERIK STIERNSTEDT, LINUS ANDERSSON
The 1970s thus produced a pirate radio that, because of a clearer radio
legislation, was more politically aware than what the pioneers of the 60s had
been. Here the factual power expressed through the monopoly of radio
broadcasting became a target in itself. Still symbolic challenges where produced
through the experimentations with disk-jockeying but radio pirates more and
more expressed a critique of the present radio law.
With the community radio act, the symbolic battlefield finally
disappeared. As the new legislation allowed for radio programming by
enthusiasts (within a given juridical framework) all that was left to fight for the
radio activist would be the ban on commercial radio itself. For this contest radio
activist teamed up with those whom had political (and commercial) interest in
changed radio legislation, which in the end brought forward that change.
5. Creating alternatives
Just as the pirates described in this paper created themselves and their
radio in opposition against dominant modes of production, so have also we
formulated our text against a body of work describing some modes of production
as alternative.
The historical perspective in the text above tries to outline a life-cycle of
Swedish pirate radio, a life cycle that seem to be prevalent in much human
activity and naturally in the developments, eruptions and processes that makes
up the media. Nicholas Jankowski calls such an historical attitude the cynical
approach to alternative media (2006: 11). Perhaps this is the case, at least if
cynical is seen as a non-pejorative term. If one sees alternative media in this way
its historical role becomes not as much a revolutionary one bringing
enlightenment to a duped public, in short: not as idealistic. Instead alternative
media could be understood more as processes within ‘the system’, bringing on
renewal and rejuvenation, and functioning as a platform for socialization of new
groups into the media institutions. These two positions are of course not
mutually excluding. The will to resist seems to be a constant and resistance is
something existing within the media system as such. Media activists are not
outside idealists but a part of the power complex that is the media.
Does cynical mean without hope? We don’t think so. The cynical turn is
needed since idealist notions of alternative media don’t take us very far in
understanding the workings of the alternative. But instead of de-politicizing the
concept or draining it from its subversive potential it is quite the opposite: if this
case shows anything, it is that resistance always exists as a play of contexts and
hence is immanent to the media system itself. Therefore, this case exemplifies
the notion of media power as existing in a multitude of shapes and combinations.
Our case then points towards the fluidity of power and the constant negotiating
between different actors on and in relation to a media landscape. The bi-polar
notion of the dominant and the dominated is in our case not just theoretically
deconstructed. The Swedish radio pirates serve as an empirical example of this
deconstruction. And that is truly hopeful (regardless of what we think of the
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